It was sunny.
This of course is how “The Last Great American Dynasty” starts, not with Bill, “the heir to the Standard Oil name, and money,” but with Rebekah Semple West Harkness, the giver of charming if a little gauche weddings, dyer of dogs, and of course the chatelaine of Holiday House. If you’re even passingly familiar with Taylor Swift’s Folklore album you’ll know this song. I hate ranking her songs because I appreciate pretty much all of them albeit in different ways but if I have to have a favorite “Last Great American Dynasty” is easily it. For foreshadowing my love of Rhode Island (had no idea I’d be moving here when I fell in love with the song), of course for the sheer musical joy of it (that opening line and melody is irresistible) but also because it hits right at the center of my interests in women’s history and the mythologies and power of family history. I’m still sorry I didn’t go back to the Eras Tour to see the Tortured Poets set, but am so glad that I saw it when she was still performing “Last Great American Dynasty” in the independent Folklore set. (Yes, I realize that last sentence is a bit of a deep cut– not for Swifties, but for anyone not following the ins and outs of the Eras Tour. The Wikipedia entry for the tour explains how the scenes and set list changed in May of 2024.)
This is the second of my planned posts about Taylor Swift and the power of family history and genealogy as foundations and frameworks for American history (and literature and storytelling). Dynasty is a term that Americans have used semi-ironically for a long time. After all, the United States is a democracy; without either an aristocracy or a monarchy the very concept of dynasty should be alien. I could go deep here on the scholarship of dynasty, but suffice to say that passing along wealth does not a dynasty make. And dynasty requires durability if not duration. So the Kennedy political “dynasty,” short-lived as dynasties go, deserves those startle quotes. Still, Americans love the concept of dynasty as a descriptor and even an explainer. Who couldn’t appreciate the 1980s super-campy-soapy television series, one (Dallas) about a Texas guy who became oil rich, and had two sons who battled to be his true heirs (to the money and the power that went with it), and one (Dynasty, actually) about a guy who was rich from oil and his multiple wives and potential heirs. So much drama! Only one generation (okay, they added next generations eventually)! Not really “dynasties” so much as a pretty ordinary inherited family business tussles. With big hair, big houses with big staircases, and a name (South Fork rank and Carrington mansion). And for Dallas, of course a car with longhorns on the bonnet. The sheer volume of American television that pursues this theme of dynasty-family business tussle is itself notable. I’ll just note here The Sopranos and Succession, but also that The Gilded Age is playing with the same themes of extreme wealth and its implications for and about family relationships. There are plenty of popular depictions of less extreme wealth invoking this trope, including McBee Dynasty, a reality series about a farming family in Missouri.
“Last Great American Dynasty” plays with this concept, specifically tethering dynasty to both money and vulnerability: “only so far new money goes,” as she says (sings). Aristocratic dynasties balanced money with structural and cultural power yet were always susceptible to the vagaries of cultural change– and demographics. It was no different for other dynasties, absent the specific kind of structural and cultural power they could access. In the case Swift describes, “middle class divorcee” Rebekah Harkness married Bill, “the heir to the Standard oil name and money.” They bought a fabulous house in Watch Hill, Rhode Island on the Block Island sound; they called it Holiday House but it’s now known as High Watch and Swift has owned it for a decade. Bill died early in their marriage, and the tabloid stories about Rebekah all emphasized her wild spending (on the boys and the ballet– true–card games with the artist Salvadore Dali–true–also the Bitch Pack, true) but were less interested in her longstanding, pre-Bill, devotion to music and dance. Harkness has been written about quite a lot since Swift’s song, and goodness knows there is plenty that is intriguing and tragic in her life. The song turns on Swift’s own connection to Rebekah’s house and story, though I could speculate that dynasty is also word that simply appeals to Swift in the ways that we often see her getting attached to both sound and meaning. (To go full Swiftian on this, I think she only uses it though one other time, in “Castles Crumbling,” a vault song on Speak Now Taylor’s Version. There she described herself as “Once…the great hope for a dynasty.” But the way she attaches “dynasty” to Rebekah’s story is the tell.)
But what’s most compelling to me is the notion of the American dynasty. The Standard Oil fortune wasn’t all that different from the folks at South Fork (it was recent). What sticks for Americans though is that money, especially money generated and then inherited at certain moments, is not fixed but fluid and no matter how aggressively one tries to manage it’s flow–and in the Anglo-American tradition that ideally meant from fathers to sons ad infinitum– it’s pretty easily diverted or disrupted. That ideal can go awry in so many predictable ways. Marriages crumble, or spouses die too soon and partners remarry, or daughters are born and compel their parents’ fortunes. And thus the money could end up with Rebekah, who “blew through the money” on those boys, ballet, and card games. By some accounts the fortune that went to the wind would be valued today at many hundreds of millions.
Years ago, right after Folklore came out, I wrote a long social media thread in which I traced some of the families that have variously been described as American dynasties. They didn’t all have money per se, but they all had cultural currency, the kind that could be just as liquid as cash. They included New England’s 17th century Mathers, Virginia’s Randolphs, and New York’s Cortlandts and Rockefellers. A striking feature of each of these is how not only how regularly we see them described as “dynastic” but also how regularly they were situated in that most American dynamic of racism and slavery, and how important women were in developing and sustaining the family’s connections and fortunes. It was Maria Cotton who joined two Puritan families when she married Increase Mather; their son, Cotton Mather was famous for many things including his defense of the trials at Salem for witchcraft. I would argue that his magnum opus, Magnalia Christi Americana can reasonably be read as a genealogical account of New England history. The Randolph descendants were so numerous and varied that they could claim relationship both with Matoaka, also called Pocahontas and Rebecca Rolfe through marriage with her female descendants, as well as Thomas Jefferson through his mother, Jane Randolph.
For Bill Harkness, the “last great” of Swift’s song, again we find that women were key to his family story well before he met and married Rebekah. It’s surely tempting to trace only the male figures and the connection to Standard Oil. But it turns out that piece of the story turns on women, too. Bill Harkness was an “heir” to that fortune because his grandfather had been an early investor in the company. But his grandfather had that opportunity because his mother, Bill Harkness’s great-grandmother Eliza(beth) Morrison Caldwell Harkness Flagler, gave Bill’s grandfather Daniel, who already had a stepbrother from his father’s first marriage, a half-brother when she remarried after Bill’s great-grandfather died. Keeping track? Bill’s grandfather was Daniel Harkness, Daniels’ stepbrother was Stephen Harkness and his half-brother was Henry Morrison Flagler. All three were in various businesses together, and the older brothers helped Flagler get established as an early partner in Standard Oil by investing themselves.
And the rest, as they say is money. So far, so good. Marriages, as we have seen, are crucial connections that can make families and family economies successful. But for Bill Harkness, it wasn’t only his great-grandmother’s marriage and son Henry Flagler that made these connections important, and she wasn’t the first or the last woman in the family to be a key connector. One thing Eliza (Morrison Caldwell Harkness) Flagler did when David Harkness died was to move her family back to her native New York from Ohio. And though her children would head back west to Ohio it was New York where many of the family would continue to prosper.
When Henry Morrison Flagler married, it was to Mary Harkness, a distant cousin of his brothers. The overlapping recognition naming among the Harknesses and Flaglers would continue, with Henry and Mary naming one of the children Harry Harkness Flagler, for example (just as Henry carried his mother’s birth name, Morrison, as his middle name). Confirming and rebraiding their family connections was among other things good for business.
I dug into the deeper Harkness background a bit, following this line in New York and western Massachusetts. But I kept coming back to the woman who made that crucial connection that would shape Rebekah’s experience in the mid-20th century and Taylor Swift’s in the 21st. Bill’s great-grandmother Eliza isn’t easy to locate in many records of her early life (though her grave is), but the details of her husband David Harkness’s will provided some insights. David Harkness’s estate was substantial by any measure, mostly in terms of the debts owed him and as such evidence of his business relationships. But what really caught my attention was the side saddle.
I’m still reading these estate papers (dozens of pages of accounting) so I hope I’ll know more when I finish. I’d also like to be able to better situate this family within their early 19th century Ohio community. The side saddle was listed next to some other fairly modest household goods, a couple of beds including a trundle bed, and linens, and livestock– but also “4 silver table spoons.” A side saddle was presumed to respect women’s modesty, but was fairly straightforwardly about avoiding having women ride astride in ways that impugned their sexuality. It came under pretty intense criticism in the late 19th century. Apologies for no links or citations here, but I read a series of newspapers pieces from the US and the UK froOhio m a variety of perspectives. Feminists, doctors, and veterinarians all criticized side saddles for being unsafe and unhealthy for women and for horses. It seems that in the 1830s a modest or important depending on your vantage update to the side saddle was developed that involved a second pommel and was much safer than the original, but still pretty awkward. There remains a contemporary interest in riding and even competing in side saddle. But in Ohio in 1824 it strikes me as still a fairly distinctive item. Was Eliza(beth) aspiring or had she achieved a status where she felt she could and should ride this way? Certainly tack was (and is) expensive, and anything beyond the basics was an investment. Or perhaps a gift. Or perhaps in inherited object. However it appeared, it suggests that Eliza, who fathered Daniel, who fathered William, who fathered Rebekah’s Bill, was a force. Certainly she had a lasting impact. Dynastic, even?
Thanks for reading. One more post will wrap up this triptych. It’s how I (finally, indirectly) get from Taylor to me.
NB: The cover image is snippet of a 1796 map of Rhode Island from the collections of the John Carter Brown Library. See Watch Hill there on the far left? That’s where Holiday House, in a vintage photo from the Westerly Sun, is located.