ABSTRACT
The pathology of modern American life and leadership is most sadly seen in the rapid erosion of privacy, certainly an essential aspect of all high civilization. Lewis Mumford has often stressed the fact that privacy is the creature of civilization and its decline indicative of reversion to barbarism. Cleveland Amory’s Who Killed Society? is an amusing, chatty, namedropping, exhaustive and sometimes suggestive saga of the war between privacy and publicity in America. Amory shows how American society can stand up to, and even surpass aristocratic Europe when it comes to producing a core of aristocratic families. Even in the decade of the 1950s, for example, Mayflower-descended Robert Fiske Bradford was Governor of Massachusetts, Sinclair Weeks Secretary of Commerce, Robert Cutler Assistant to the President, Christian Herter Secretary of State, one Lodge Ambassador to the United Nations and his brother Governor of Connecticut and Ambassador to Spain.
