Mayflower madness:  America’s WASP ruling class loves to embellish origins 

Genealogy is a tricky business, not least because its claims can be compromised by dreams of distinction.

Mysteries linger, even in prominent, public families.

Michael Butler, who died in November 2022, was best known as the producer of the Broadway musical “Hair.”

But something else made him a lead character in my new book, “Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class,” re-telling American history through the lens of the nation’s white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite.

Butler’s family — who founded Butler Paper, Butler Aviation, and the village of Oak Brook, Illinois, the capital of American polo — arrived in America in 1637, three-plus centuries before he became a public figure.

Though it took 200 years for the Butlers to accumulate enviable wealth, their tenure qualified them as American aristocrats. The Butlers weren’t satisfied with their own accomplishments and bloodline.

On a website Michael maintained, he claimed his family had “come over” to England in 1066 with William the Conqueror and were related to the Plantagenet dynasty which produced multiple Kings of England, and, through Anne Boleyn, to the Tudor Queen Elizabeth I.

Pressed on the matter, Butler admitted those claims were apocryphal.

Embroidering a family tree is a tradition older than America. Manufactured relations, claimed often enough, tend to be seen as “facts.”

That some of America’s founding families have grown to astonishing size (one member of the fecund Biddle clan, which also figures prominently in the book, estimates he has about 8,000 living relatives) makes it even more likely there will be imposters at family reunions.

So, in researching “Flight of the WASP,” I found myself climbing dozens of family trees, going backward in time as well as inching out onto the tender young branches of the living, seeking ancestors and descendants of noteworthy individuals.

Each family in the book is introduced through a singular, symbolic individual who embodied a moment in American history.

Early on, I was captivated by the least-known Founding Father, Gouverneur Morris, the libertine who penned the US Constitution.

Just as Michael Butler served as a symbol of the second half of the 20th century — thanks to a life that bridged the jet-set 1950s and the 1960s hippie revolution and its hangover — Gouverneur Morris did the same for the second half of the 18th century; he played a key role in the American Revolution and the creation of our government, the French Revolution and our young nation’s earliest expansion.

One of my first calls was to Alfred “Chappy” Morris, a former man-about-town and, now, a retired investor, who I’d known for years and assumed to be a relative.

When I first spied Chappy’s formidable mother Edna in the 1980s at Mortimer’s, the society bistro on the Upper East Side, and asked who she was, I heard she descended from the Lords of the Manor of Morrisania, a land grant estate established in 1697 and named for its owners, Gouverneur’s ancestor.

It occupied today’s South Bronx, where Gouverneur spent his old age on a promontory with views down the East River.

I was hardly the only person who assumed that Chappy Morris was a son of the American Revolution. The New York Times once reported that his “ancestors settled New York and helped draft the United States Constitution.” When I asked about his lineage, the genial Chappy replied carefully that he’d have to look into it, but I beat him to it and found that more than a century earlier, the Times had discovered that Edna Morris’ forebears “came of grosser stock.”

That said, they were no less fascinating. And unlike some, including Gouverneur Morris, none of Chappy’s ancestors were slave owners, racists, or anti-semites.

Edna and Chappy descended from John A. Morris, child of a noted 19th-century race-horse breeder and the founder and principal owner of the Louisiana Lottery, aka the first “policy” or “numbers” racket.

Morris invented it in the Civil War and it ran for almost 30 years before it was exposed, in the words of one headline, as “the Greatest Incorporated Swindle that Ever Disgraced a State.”

The only legal lottery in the United States at the time was a fountain gushing bribes to public officials and profits to shareholders.

At his death in 1895, Morris, the controlling shareholder, was said to be worth $30,000,000 — $875 million today.

He owned one of the largest racing stables in the country; Morris Park race track in the Bronx; stables in England and Maryland; a 30,000-acre Texas ranch; a hunting retreat in Louisiana, and homes in Throggs Neck, Boston, New Orleans, Bar Harbor (Maine) and Germany.

John Morris’ world eventually intersected with the elite circles around Gouverneur Morris. John’s wife was the daughter of Alfred Hennen, a judge in New Orleans.

Their son Dave Hennen Morris married a granddaughter of William H. Vanderbilt, founded the Automobile Club of America, was named ambassador to Belgium by Franklin Roosevelt, and bred horses that won the Belmont Stakes and the Kentucky Derby.

When their elder daughter married, it was announced that both bride and groom were descendants of Governor William Bradford, a Mayflower passenger and the leader of the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts. When a sister married, it was reported she was from one of the oldest, most prominent families in New York.

This wasn’t true, of course. There were no Mayflower connections.

The stain of John Morris’ numbers fortune was long gone by the time his grandson John A. Morris died at 93 in 1985.

A graduate of Pomfret and Harvard, the descendent worked as a stockbroker and followed his forebears into thoroughbred racing.

His widow, Edna, a major fund-raiser for the Girl Scouts left her place in New York society to her son.

Chappy Morris was gracious and amused when I told him what I’d found about his family. “Thank you so much for finding this and sending it along,” he e-mailed. “I learned a lot about my family. We actually were kinda snazzy in the old days!” A day later, he added: Gouverneur Morris’ descendants “were much snazzier than we were.” 

“Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class” (Atlantic Monthly Press) by Michael Gross is out now.