Lord Yank

Debrett's ranks the U.S.

"Aristocrat," as used by Americans about Americans, may be the most abused word in American English. This could be the main dilemma facing the redoubtable chronicler of Britain's titled nobility, Debrett's Peerage, which has set out to publish a ten-volume series on the American aristocracy. Debrett's editor, Martin Stansfeld, an untitled Scot who attended Eton and Oxford and whose family "goes back to the Normans," explains that the series will concentrate on "the glittering star system of America's social leadership."

In the case of the first volume, Debrett's Texas Peerage (Coward-McCann; $24.95), this means pretty much the landed and oiled gentry; there are more than 100 families in this category in Texas with a net worth of $30 million or more each. Debrett's aristocrats are selected by Georgia Author Hugh Best (Red Hot & Blue). The largest landholders of this pride of peers, the King-Kleberg clan, at one point owned 13 million acres around the world, though, as Nelson Bunker Hunt observed, "a billion dollars isn't what it used to be." Among other renowned Texas aristocrats: Fort Worth's Perry Richardson Bass and Son Sid, and Houston's Roy Cullen III, oilmen; and Dallas' William Walter Caruth and Fort Worth's Anne Windfohr Phillips, landowners.

After Texas, to be published in November, will come Debrett's Old South Peerage in spring 1985 and its California Peerage that fall. New York gets its treatment in 1986, to be followed the next year by a volume for Boston and most of the New England area. The entire series is to be completed in 1990, by which time the ranks of American "patricianhood'' (Stansfeld's term) will doubtless have expanded to fit legions of new peers. Judging from the Texas volume", many of those elevated have ancestors of no greater moral ignobility than most of the milords listed in Debrett's (British) Peerage. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.