Success may be in some degree a family affair in caste-ridden England;
is it possible that the past history of the United States should show
the same state of affairs?
Galton found that about half of the great men of England had
distinguished close relatives. If the great men of America have fewer
distinguished close relatives, environment will be able to make out a
plausible case: it will be evident that in this continent of boundless
opportunities the boy with ambition and energy gets to the top, and that
this ambition and energy do not depend on the kind of family he comes
from.
Frederick Adams Woods has made precisely this investigation.[10] The
first step was to find out how many eminent men there are in American
history. Biographical dictionaries list about 3,500, and this number
provides a sufficiently unbiased standard from which to work. Now, Dr.
Woods says, if we suppose the average person to have as many as twenty
close relatives--as near as an uncle or a grandson--then computation
shows that only one person in 500 in the United States has a chance to
be a near relative of one of the 3,500 eminent men--provided it is
purely a matter of chance. As a fact, the 3,500 eminent men listed by
the biographical dictionaries are related to each other not as one in
500, but as one in five.
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