Death, Deeds, and Descendents

Inheritance in Modern America

Remi Clignet, Jens Beckert, Brooke Harrington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351523448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Clignet's analysis of inheritance patterns in modern America is the first sustained treatment of the subject by a sociologist. Clignet shows that even today inheritance serves to perpetuate both familial wealth and familial relations. He examines what leads decedents to chose particular legal instruments (wills, trusts, insurance policies, gifts inter vivos) and how, in turn, the instrument chosen helps explain the extent and the form of inequalities in bequests, of a result of the gender or matrimonial status of the beneficiaries. The author's major is to identify and explain the most significant sources of variations in the amount and the direction of transfers of wealth after death in the United States. He uses two kinds of primary data: estate tax returns filed by a sample of male and female beneficiaries to estates in 1920 and 1944, representing two successive generations of estate transfers, and publicly recorded legal instruments such as wills and trusts. In addition, Clignet draws widely on secondary sources in the fields of anthropology, economics, and history. His findings reflect substantive and methodological concerns. The analysis underlines the need to rethink the sociology of generational bonds, as it is informed by age and gender. Death, Deeds, and Descendants underscores the variety of forms of inequality that bequests take and highlights the complexity of interrelations between the cultures of the decedents' nationalities and issues like occupation and gender. Inheritance is viewed as a way of illuminating the subtle tensions between continuity and change in American society. This book is an important contribution to the study of the relationship between sociology of the family and sociology of social stratification.

1

Challenges of a Study of American Inheritance

The myth of Horatio Alger is not only about going from rags to riches. Insofar as the myth is also about progress and the promises of the future, those who believe in it reject as despicable all material and symbolic transfers received from preceding generations, including inheritance.

Contempt for the marks of the symbolic and material continuity of familial groups is more accentuated during certain historical eras and in certain cultures than in others. It was a trademark of the French Revolution. It tends to be a recurrent leitmotiv of the American ethos. The United States is supposed to be the promised land for individuals who have lost a cherished political or religious freedom, or even their economic well-being. American cultural leaders keep inviting new immigrants to exorcize the demons of their pasts by erasing the effects of these losses and worshiping the unfolding of future seasons. When Margaret Mead noted that Americans are immigrants both in space and in time, she was suggesting that her fellow citizens often impute their failures to the traditions and the history of the countries from which they originate. Implicitly at least, a faith in the melting pot, in the shin- ing future, and in the upward mobility that goes with Americanization justifies social amnesia. Implicitly, it calls also for the elimination of intergenerational transfers from the grammar of laudable or acceptable motives. It calls for a society without fathers.¹

In their pragmatism, many American social scientists seek to justify the elimination of the father image from popular culture. More specifically, they try to find scientific reasons to do away with inheritance or— to use more technical jargon—with transfers mortis causa. On the right side of the political continuum, functionalist analysts such as Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore (1945) or Melvin Tumin (1967) assert implicitly that to be the beneficiary of bequests is incompatible with the work ethic and the notion of self-reliance, which are both at the very core of the American exceptionalist ideology These writers believe in the merits of giving but certainly not of receiving. In their eyes, achievement requires delayed gratification, certainly not indulgence in unwarranted windfalls. For them, the success of the American experiment results from the fact that their fellow citizens are self-made persons who are independent of their pasts.

On the left side of the same political continuum, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1986) view the money transferred by inheritance as both a symbol and an instrument of inequality and oppression. In their eyes, however, bequests or estates pertain only to big or old money. But in positing that intergenerational solidarity is only an obsolete leftover of some ancien régime, they eliminate altogether the need for any empirical exploration of the current forms taken by intergenerational solidarity.

Both functionalist and radical analysts concur that resources transferred mortis causa are sinful or illegitimate. The former see them as marking the unfair triumph of ascription over achievement; the latter view them as instruments of the privileges unfairly exerted by undeserving elites. Both would probably consider it desirable to confiscate individual bequests for the benefit of the larger community. Yet, the stress that both sets of analysts place on self-reliance, albeit for opposite reasons, leads them to reject any intervention of the capitalist state. For functionalists, this intervention could not but hinder and hamper individual achievement. For their radical counterparts, its effects would be illusory, since they view existing elites as constantly subverting the authority of the state. In short, the two positions engender a number of internal contradictions. Even though their respective champions see inheritance as socially dysfunctional, they do not believe that anything should be done about it. Indeed, they treat intergenerational relations as a nonproblem.

In contrast, I invite readers to withhold judgment, to assume temporarily that the material and symbolic transfers that constitute inheritance are neither good nor bad, that they are not only about big or old money, and that they are not only about enjoying a windfall, but also about being held liable for the debts incurred by decedents. The death of a relative forces survivors to take a variety of actions to close his or her books and, inter alia, to pay his or her debts. In this sense, inheritance is about the economics of love and hence about the economics of both giving and receiving. In view of the corresponding symbolic properties of inheritance, the purpose of this book is to identify in what sense patterns of the accumulation and distribution of wealth reflect the symbols specific to the decedentsʹ major reference groups, notably, to their age, their gender, their occupation, and their national origin. It is also to ascertain the stability of the ensuing contrasts.

Herein lies the thrust of the argument: As I seek to undermine the dimensions of intergenerational continuity and to locate inheritance within the texture of American social and cultural fabric, I want to make four contributions to the existing literature. The first one concerns the impact of transfers mortis causa on social stratification and on the rank ordering of distinct families. The second concerns the symbolic quality of such transfers and the extent to which they mirror familial solidarities and hierarchies. The third underlines the role of transfers mortis causa as mechanisms of social and cultural stability, and highlights the need to introduce time dimensions in social analyses. The fourth and final contribution of the book is to explore what the benign neglect of sociologists for transfers mortis causa tells us about the social ambiguities of the discipline.

Inheritance and Social Stratification

The challenge is to ascertain the extent to which transfers mortis causa contribute to recurrent inequalities in the distribution of wealth across social groups. Even when and where this distribution proves to be stable, the origin of this stability remains still problematic: maybe material wealth is passed across generations and maybe some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouths; or maybe parents teach their children, generation after generation, how to seize opportunities and clear hurdles on their way to fortune. In the first case, the origin of the stability of inequalities is material; in the second, it is cultural, rooted either in the differential effectiveness of varying child-rearing practices that are all geared toward the same goal, or in the differential application of the same body of legal rules in favor of some groups at the expense of others.

Should we believe that inheritance is instrumental in perpetuating such inequalities, we need to explain the links between inter- and intra- family differences in wealth (Sheshinsky and Weiss 1982). The stability of the boundaries between social classes, and hence between families, may depend on the extent to which siblings get differing bequests and/or make different use of the corresponding windfalls. Stories of merry widows or prodigal sons who gobble up their shares of the familial war chest and condemn some or all of their dependents to downward mobility abound both in fiction and in the sociological literature.

But insofar as there are inter- and intrafamilial differences in the strat egies concerning investments, what is their origin? The dynamics governing social stratification may be, at least in part, conditioned by the nature of the assets acquired by Americans. In the same way that there is a segmentation of labor markets, there should be a segmentation of various forms of capital. Differing types of assets involve differing risks and differing rewards over differing periods of time. Success in dealing with real estate, bonds, or stocks requires distinct modes of adaptation.

Yet, one can challenge this materialistic assumption by taking a cultural view of human phenomena to argue that differences in the returns to various types of capital or in the bequests generated by such assets are all ideological stories that the owners of distinct forms of capital, or at least the wealthiest of them, elaborate a posteriori in order to justify their investments, and their success.

Inheritance and Familial Bonds

The nature and the direction of transfers mortis causa reveal a great deal about the structure of familial networks and the distributions of loves and hatreds. In a synchronic perspective, the analysis of these transfers says as much about the relative emphasis placed on conjugal ties, or on relations between siblings, as on the stress placed on the bonds between ascendants and descendants. Analyses of the constraints imposed by public authorities on wills should also highlight disparities between formal and informal definitions of the family. Thus, courts intervene to remind spouses and parents of their obligations toward the relatives they no longer like. For instance, the first wives of diplomats who have remarried are entitled to their own share of the pensions to be disbursed to their husbands by the State Department (Weitzman 1985).

In a more diachronic perspective, the analysis also offers a sense of continuities and reversals in the evolution of familial obligations and feelings. For example, despite the American commitment to progress, successive generations of Irish- and German-American farmers still retain the rules of descent followed by their forebears in their countries of origin. But are American farmers exceptional on that score? What traditions are retained by the various national groups present in the United States? And for how long? As another example, despite or perhaps because of rising divorce rates, some maternal grandparents use the additional resources they derive from their newly acquired social security benefits for helping their grandchildren who suffer from their divorced mothersʹ downward mobility. In this sense, the more the outside world changes and becomes threatening, the more one hopes that the family remains a haven in a heartless world. Heirship practices and ideologies tell us a lot about the stability of the boundaries separating familial groups from one another. They tell us as much about the stability of interpersonal loves and hatreds.

Inheritance and Cultural Stability

To argue that inheritance reproduces social arrangements and contributes to the perpetuation of social hierarchies as well as of familial loyalties is to underline the stability of all human organizations. Regardless of the social system studied, the first challenge raised by the argument is to ascertain the speed, the direction, and the intensity of changes in the composition of individual investments, or in the number and the profile of the beneficiaries of bequests or gifts. The second challenge is to identify time lags between changes in the amount and type of wealth accumulated by individuals or by communities, and changes in the personal or collective ideological orientations concerning the definitions of the ideal assets to be acquired, of the timing as well as the amount of the bequests to be made, and of the profile of their beneficiaries (Ogburn 1955). In the United States as in Europe, the persistence of privileged classes may often be explained only by taking into account the slow pace with which ideological changes affect individual or collective practices (Mayer 1980). The final challenge is to determine whether the relationship between ideological and material changes is reversible. Do decedents abandon the heirship practices of their forebears whenever the “going gets rough” and restore them under more favorable circumstances? I will allude several times to the persistence of Irish and German heirship practices in the United States. Is this persistence continuous? Or have these peoples rediscovered their roots, and if so, when and how?

In sum, the purpose of this book is to assess the continuity that governs the links between familial bonds and the relations between social groups. People divorce, mourn their spouses, remarry, disinherit some of their children before forgiving them, and keep riding the merry-go- round of feelings. Analogous tensions between stability and change characterize social stratification. Exclusive reference to the poor or to the rich—the opposite ends of the social hierarchy—is not sufficient to explain disparities in individual socioeconomic trajectories. The fact of the matter is that, regardless of their positions on the social ladder, some people go up and down for reasons that have little to do with their surroundings. Both oppressors and oppressed vary in their abilities to take advantage of new opportunities at the right time or to recognize the seasons that call for saving rather than for spending. For this reason, to view, as I do, the basis of social or cultural reproduction as being as much endogenous as exogenous is to emphasize the need for diachronic studies of both stratification and familial loves or hatreds.

Inheritance and the Sociology of Knowledge

Inheritance triggers extreme reactions. Despite the belief of many Americans in the infinite opportunities that their land offers, many of them would like to believe that wealth is exclusively monopolized by the scions of already rich families, or that poverty breeds poverty.

While the myth of progress allows Americans to condemn the opposite extremes of the wealth continuum, it also enables them to adopt similarly polarized attitudes toward tradition. Many of them denounce the evils of any commitment to the past and equate heirlooms with obsolete rubbish. Others, however, are tempted to endow the past with sacred qualities they would like to purchase, and herein lies the success of genealogie studies in certain quarters, as if it were possible to buy a past that one has already lost.

This brief review of the ambivalence triggered by inheritance underlines the need to explore why the topic remains off limits to many social scientists.² Clearly, some methodological reasons account for the scarcity of studies concerning transfers mortis causa. Some of them pertain to the equivocations attached to the definition of appropriate samples. Should the exploration of inheritance be guided by the representativeness of death cohorts and hence of individuals who died the same year at a particular age? Should this exploration be rather guided by the size of estates? Independently of the difficulties of tracing the successive residences of decedents, should this exploration be guided by geographic considerations, notably by the sense of the differential opportunities and constraints that the legal or economic structures of each state offer to its citizens?

Of course, some of these difficulties also concern the equivocations attached to definitions of testacy For instance, should formal wills and informal intentions reported in interviews carry the same weight in explaining heirship strategies? As another example, is the meaning of a will contingent on the date at which it has been written? And what can be done to interpret in a meaningful way the successive versions of the same will?

But these difficulties are not sufficient to explain the dearth of empirical studies about inheritance, a dearth that also results from the specific ideological orientations of many sociologists. In their eyes, it is socially acceptable to bequeath, but less so to inherit. Nor for them is acceptable the notion of average estate—estates are supposed to be large or trivial. Given these contradictions, the celebrated pragmatism of American culture operates within certain limits. To make wealth equally accessible and at least equally understandable by all would jeopardize the very scarcity that ensures the power and the fame of the “fortunate few.” References to luck and black boxes rather than to inheritance may turn out to be useful instruments of social control. Thus, some analysts claim that Americans prefer the impersonal arbitrariness of lottery to the particularist passions of familial bonds (Green 1973). Indeed, to hide the fate of affluent people behind this mask of irrationality feeds the fantasies of the poor and induces them to try their hand at the wheel of fortune. If the “buck” is really in the hands of luck, nobody can be angry at the whims of the goddess of chance because nobody can do anything rational about them.³ In other words, the perpetuation of the existing social order requires people to believe that this very order is irrational and is thus sheltered from research.⁴

At the psychological level, Americans are particularly prone to fear death. The decay that usually marks the end of life is at odds with the ideology of progress of the larger society The underlying conflict triggers a flurry of contradictory reactions. As far as biological choices are concerned, for instance, some Americans reject any link between inheritance and heredity as being inimical to the ideological project of the country.⁵ In their eyes, all human behaviors can be explained and improved by the immediate environment. Conversely, other Americans overemphasize the weight of the biological past. For instance, some people believe in the merits of negative eugenics and of sterilizing individuals declared socially unacceptable. Others would like to believe that the creation of sperm banks will remove once and for all the weight of history, as if mixing the genes of Nobel Prize and of Oscar winners could produce only beautiful, intelligent, and mor...