American Political Families

We know that there have been two Bush family presidents, with a Senator before them. Hillary is running with Bill having been president, and Mitt Romney's father also ran for president. There were two Roosevelt presidents, and FDR's wife (who was also Teddy's niece) and sons were prominent in Democratic politics. There were two Adams presidents, a third Adams ran for president (and the photographer Ansel, and the writer Henry were also from that family). There were also two Harrison (grandfather and grandson) presidents, and the Kennedy family has generated a bunch of national leaders.

In today's Washington Post, William Booth tells us:

A full 45 percent of the members of the first Congress in 1789 had a relative who was also serving, according to Pedro Dal Bó, professor of economics at Brown University and co-author of a study on congressional dynasties. "The number of members with relatives is too high to explain away by the relatively smaller population of the United States at the time," Bó says. Two hundred years later, 10 percent of Congress has a close relative who has also served in the House or Senate. And in case you're wondering, the phenomenon crosses party lines.

The evidence is all around us: the Gores, the Murkowskis, the Rockefellers, the Bakers, the Doles, the Bonos, the Meekses, the Dodds, the Tsongases, the Chafees. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to hold the position, is the daughter of former congressman Thomas D'Alesandro Jr......

Stephen Hess, a historian at the Brookings Institution, first made his name as the author of the 1966 book "America's Political Dynasties," which begins with the fact that there have been 700 families with two or more members of Congress, and they account for 1,700 of the 10,000 men and women who have served in the House and Senate.