Επειδή οι σημερινοί Cabots είναι τόσο διασκορπισμένοι και τόσο πολυάριθμοι, λίγες οικογενειακές παραδόσεις επισκέψεων και πάρτι παραμένουν. Μερικά μέλη της οικογένειας, ο Jamie και ο θείος του Edmund, για παράδειγμα, βλέπουν ο ένας τον άλλον περιστασιακά για σκι ή άλλες δραστηριότητες.

Ωστόσο, ως επί το πλείστον, οι Cabots ακολουθούν χωριστούς δρόμους, εκμεταλλευόμενοι τον πλούτο και τις διασυνδέσεις που τους φέρνει το όνομά τους και περιοδικά δυσανασχετώντας με το γεγονός ότι πρέπει να εξηγήσουν για εκατοστή φορά ότι ναι, είναι ένας από τους Cabots  που μιλάει μόνο στον Θεό.

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In the gilded age of Boston’s elite, the Cabot Dynasty stood unchallenged, their wealth, political might, and social sovereignty defining “old money” grandeur in the city’s upper echelons.

Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., a man of considerable ambition and cunning, was captivated by the Cabots’ untouchable status.

Fueled by a mix of admiration and burning jealousy, Kennedy embarked on a relentless quest to dismantle the Cabot stronghold.

He envisioned his sons not just as heirs to his burgeoning fortune but as chess pieces in a grand strategy to usurp the Cabots’ throne.

With each calculated move, the Kennedys began their ascent, challenging the Cabots where they were strongest—on the political battlefield.

Kennedy’s strategic positioning within major industries and the deliberate grooming of his sons for political success laid the groundwork for a formidable family dynasty.

The critical turning point came with John F. Kennedy’s 1952 Senate race against Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

In this contest, JFK leveraged his family’s growing financial and political clout to secure a seat long held under Cabot control.

This victory marked a significant blow to the Cabot’s political stronghold and heralded the rise of the Kennedys to national prominence.

The rivalry between the Cabots and Kennedys was not merely a personal vendetta; it was emblematic of the broader societal shifts of the era.

This contest underscored the dynamic interplay of wealth, power, and emerging social currents, reflecting the changing landscape of American politics.

As newer immigrant groups, like the Irish Catholics represented by the Kennedys, vied for recognition and influence, they clashed with the established Protestant elite, embodied by the Cabots.

Despite their rivalry, both families profoundly shaped Boston’s social and political landscape.

The Cabots continued their philanthropic legacy, heavily investing in the arts, education, and health care, thus nurturing Boston’s cultural and social sectors.

Their ongoing contributions ensured that their influence remained ingrained in the city’s development.

Meanwhile, the Kennedys, through JFK’s presidency and the subsequent political engagements of his brothers, became national symbols of American politics and public service.

The story of these two families illustrates the profound impact that wealth and power can have on community and national policy, marking their indelible imprint on the history of one of America’s oldest cities.

Thus, the storied rivalry between the Cabot and Kennedy dynasties is more than a tale of two families. It is a reflection of the evolution of American society, where old world traditions and new world ambitions converge, forever altering the trajectory of a city and its people.

Speak only to God

BOSTON — The Cabots of Boston, who are so socially impeccable that according to a locally popular verse they speak only to God, sit atop one of New England’s largest inherited fortunes, estimated at more than $200‐million.

By Michael C. Jensen [Νew York Times_March 12, 1972]

The Cabots have lived in New England for 10 generations, but the bulk of their fortune has been piled up in the last 90 years, and from a most unlikely source —soot, or more politely, carbon black.

Every automobile tire requires a generous amount of the stuff, and the Cabot fortunes have risen along with the number of autos on the road.

Besides the carbon‐black Industry, members of the Cabot family in earlier generations traditionally served in such professions as medicine, law, finance, teaching and the Foreign Service.

Many of the younger Cabots have also turned to those fields, but there is evidence that the family Is slowly beginning to change, and at least some of the latest generation may be rebelling.

For example, the 24‐year‐old son of one of Boston’s reigning Cabots scorned the family tradition of attending Harvard College and instead Is leading a quiet, off‐beat life in a fourth‐floor walkup apartment in the city’s rundown South End.

There are three Cabots with important roles in Boston’s business and financial circles, all descended from Samuel Cabot, who started the original fortune in 1812 by marrying Eliza Perkins, the daughter of a rich merchant trader. The three, all distant cousins, are:

¶Louis (pronounced LOUee) W. Cabot, 50, chairman of the Cabot Corporation, the nation’s 387th largest industrial concern. Louis, his wife and children hold more than $8‐million worth of Cabot Corporation stock. Total Cabot family holdings of the company were worth about $140‐million when the stock was at its peak in mid1971 and are now worth about $106‐million.

Paul C. Cabot, the crusty, 73‐year‐old chairman of the State Street Investment Corporation, whose personal fortune is more than $4.5‐million and who served for 17 years as treasurer of Harvard University.

¶Samuel Cabot, president of Samuel Cabot, Inc., a small paint ‐manufacturing company with annual sales of about $4‐million that was founded by his grandfather in 1877.

Louis Cabot, the grandson of the founder of the Cabot Corporation and the family’s leading businessman, said in an interview that he felt his most important role in what was largely a family enterprise for two generations had been to transform it from a private, to a public company. The concern was listed an

Two Cabots playing important roles In Boston are Louis W., top, 50‐year‐old chairman of Cabot Corporation, and Paul C., the crusty 73‐year‐old chairman of State Street Investment Corporation. But Jamie Cabot, Louis’s son, at 24 has left the traditional Cabot life‐style for a fourthfloor walkup apartment in the South End. the New York Stock Exchange in 1968.

The company is now widely diversified and although carbon black is still its most important product, it also manufactures titania, superalloys, heavy machinery and a variety of other products.

Carbon black is used as a reinforcing agent In tires and also as a pigment in ink, plastics, coatings and paper.

In addition to Louis Cabot, who runs a sort of joint chief executive office with the company’s president, Robert A. Charple, the only other Cabot family member active at present in the concern is John G. L. Cabot, Louis’s first cousin, who is director of European operations for carbon black.

Also carried on the company roster, but inactive, is Thomas D. Cabot, Louis’s father, who is honorary chairman of the board and a director emeritus.

Louis’s total compensation from the company last year was $204,000 and John’s was $48,508. In addition, Louis and his immediate family hold more than 220,000 shares of stock in the concern, worth more than $8‐million, and John holds 119,000 shares, worth $4.5‐million.

The family as a whole holds nearly half the company’s 5.5 million shares. That stock is widely scattered among dozens of descendents of Godfrey Cabot, by far the wealthiest branch of the Cabot clan.

In addition to running the Cabot Corporation, Louis is a director of several other companies such as the New England Telephone Company and the Owens‐Corning Fiberglas Corporation. He also served as a director of the ill‐fated Penn Central Transportation Company, and said he was still fighting law suits that arose out of that company’s bankruptcy.

Like most of his relatives, many of them millionaires, Louis Cabot said he did not consider himself wealthy. In fact, the family has not created the kind of shield around itself that is characteristic of other wealthy families like the Pews of Philadelphia and the Mellons of Pittsburgh.

Nor does it have a family holding company that coordinates its stock holdings, administers its trusts and takes care of family bills.

For the most part, the trusts and inheritances that have been passed from one generation to the next are maintained in a variety of banks and institutions. Furthermore, because the bulk of the fortune is in Cabot Corporation stock and restricted to one branch of the family, there is little need for a family holding company.

The second major Cabot in Boston business circles is Louis’s distant cousin Paul. The two men are descended from sons of Samuel Cabot. Paul, who has become somewhat deaf and reads fine print through a magnifying glass that he keeps handy, is chairman of the State Street Investment Corporation, as well as a partner in the State Street Research and Management Company, which manages it.

A director of State Street since 1924, Paul now owns 92,458 shares of the concern, worth more than $4.5‐million. The corporation is an openend management investment company with net assets of more than $400‐million.

Paul spends much of his time traveling and relaxing, “and I give my partners advice, which they rarely take,” he quipped during a recent interview.

A former director of such companies as Ford and B. F. Goodrich, he still serves as a trustee of Eastern Gas and Fuel, he said.

Perhaps Paul is best known, however, for his 17 years as treasurer of Harvard University. Much of the weight he carried in the Boston area derived from the fact that he was the chief overseer of a portfolio at Harvard that grew from about $200‐million in 1948 to more than $1‐billion in 1965.

The third important business executive among the Cabots, although on a lesser scale, is Samuel, who presides over the paint company that originally supported his grandfather, also named Samuel, and his grandfather’s brother Godfrey, who died in 1962 at the age of 101. Godfrey broke away in 1887 to found the forerunner of what is today the Cabot Corporation, a concern that soon eclipsed the family paint firm.

The major part of the Cabot family fortune is founded quite literally on soot, the dirty black residue from. burning oil.

Godfrey, the grandfather of the present chairman of the Cabot Corporation, discovered during tramps around the oil and gas fields of western Pennsylvania that the industry was plagued with soot, the carbon debris of gas blowoffs and refining. By building or acquiring facilities, he came to control 10 carbon‐black plants and later branched off into natural‐gas production and distribution.

In fact only three days ago the Federal Power Commission authorized the Distrigas Corporation, a subsidiary of the Cabot Corporation, to begin the first long‐term importation of liquefied natural gas into the United States.

In addition to building the Cabot Corporation, Godfrey gave millions to charity and also financed the Maria Moors Cabot prize for the advancement or international friendship in the Western Hemisphere by newspaper editors and writers.

Although the Cabots play down their wealth, there is little question about their social standing in. Boston. One of Godfrey’s favorite verses was a lampoon of the idea that the Cabots and their social peers the Lowells were at the apex of the city’s pecking order. One version of the rhyme goes like this: And this is good old Boston, The home of the bean and the cod,

Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,

And the Cabots talk only to God.

Despite their Boston orientation, not all Cabots live in New England. For example, Francis H. Cabot, a New York member of the clan who

Seafarers and Merchants

The early Cabots, who thrived in Boston In the lath century and early 19th century, were seafarers and mere chants, and, according to the family history furnished more privateeers in the War of 1812 than any other Massachusetts family.

The family also was engaged in the slave trade and later in the opium trade, as were most New England mere chants of that era. In later years the Cabots made large grants to charities and educational institutions such as Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Norwich University, and the Perkins School for the Blind.

Although there is a Cabot foundation, it is not large, and most of the family’s giving has been done through outright grants. For example, about 9 per cent of the Cabot Corporation stock is held by Harvard, M.I.T., Norwich and a charitable trust. takes his genealogy seriously enough to keep a two‐volume history of the family in his home, is a partner in the Park Avenue investment firm of Train, Cabot & Associates.

Francis, too, tends to minimize the family’s wealth and business accomplishments, maintaining that “the Cabots over the years have been interested in two things—one is marrying rich women and the other is group singing.”

Indeed, Godfrey’s son Thomas once commented dryly on the same theme. “The Cabots got their money the hard way,” he noted. “Samuel [his great‐grandfather] went to work for T. H. Perkins, a great merchant trader and ship owner. He married the boss’s daughter.”

What of the younger generation? Samuel 3d is clearly following in the footsteps of his father, grandfather and great‐grandfather as an officer of Samuel Cabot, Inc. Similarly, John G. L., whose father John Moors Cabot spent his career in the Foreign Service, is working for the Cabot Corporation.

Furthermore, one of Louis’s younger brothers, Edmund, is attending Harvard Medical School; his niece is at Radcliffe, and Francis’s son is a senior at Harvard College.

There are exceptions to the pattern, however. Louis’s son James, called Jamie by his family and friends, is living from the income of his inheritance, attending the Orson Welles Film School in Cambridge on a part‐time basis and spending much of his time planning a canoe trip to Canada this spring.

He shares with a roommate a sparsely furnished, $165‐a‐month furnished flat in a run‐down section of Boston, enjoys strumming a guitar, and occasionally greets visitors in his bare feet. A 1970 graduate of Amherst College, he is still searching for a meaning in life and feels that a career in the family business is well outside what he is looking for.

And even for the family members who are hewing close to Cabot traditions, there are changes. Samuel 3d, for example, eschewed Harvard for Dartmouth, served in the Peace Corps in Chile, married a Chilean girl and has named his son, the eighth successive Samuel Cabot in the strain, Samuel Gallardo Cabot.

However, deviations from the family norm are not totally new, either. One family ancestor, Eliot Cabot, who was born in 1899, had a successful but short‐lived career as an actor and ultimately met a tragic end.

After attending Harvard and Cambridge University in Britain, he pursued a career on the Broadway stage and was recommended for parts by Cornelia Otis Skinner, appearing in many plays.

However, in 1938, after a series of nervous breakdowns and attempts to take his life by leaping from windows and embankments, he died, just eight days before his 39th birthday.

Because today’s Cabots are so widely scattered, and so numerous, few family traditions of visiting and partying remain. Some of the clan, Jamie and his uncle Edmund, for example, see each other occasionally for skiing or other activities.

But for the most part, the Cabots go their separate ways, taking advantage of the wealth and connections that their name brings them and periodically resenting the fact that they have to explain for the hundredth time that yes, they are one of the Cabots who talk only to God.