Harvard Business School

In his One Boy’s Boston, Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison — himself the product of a prominent Boston family — described how the Boston Brahmins looked at wealth and obligation:

“When a family had accumulated a certain fortune, instead of trying to build it up still further, to become a Rockefeller or Carnegie or Huntington and then perhaps discharge its debt to society by some great foundation, it would step out of business or finance and try to accomplish something in literature, education, medical research, the arts, or public service. Generally one or two members of the family continued in business, to look after the family securities and enable the creative brothers or cousins to carry on without the handicap of poverty. Of course there were families like that in other cities, but in Boston there were so many of them as to constitute a recognized way of life.”