Free Close to Shore by Michael Capuzzo, Mike Capuzzo

man—a test of the social Darwinist doctrine of the day that “only the fittest survive.”
    The doctor's love for the boy was not immediately apparent. His conversations with his son were formal and distant, fissures in a glacier that bound father and son together yet separated by cold, refracted spaces. A stern patriarch, Dr. Vansant had little patience for the foibles of his oldest child, yet he felt a love for his son he could not express. To read their relationship as distant would be a modern failing, for beyond clubs and sports and masculine rituals, their bond concealed hidden power. It was from father to son that the family inched over the landscape of generations and time.
    In the person of Charles, Dr. Vansant harbored aspirations far greater than his own rise from the merchant class to the bourgeoisie. Being visited late at night by the doctor, in dark suit and black bag, making his rounds by horse and carriage in the nineteenth century, it would have been impossible not to sense his austere determination. Eugene could trace his American lineage back to 1647 and the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Indeed, he was himself a culmination of the line, the best-educated Vansant in the family's long history. But the Vansants were
nouveau arrivé
in Philadelphia, having come in the 1830s. So it was that the doctor possessed a rather time-honored ambition: to establish a distinguished Philadelphia family, an enduring legacy, as permanent a mark as a man could leave in a restless, modernizing country. If it seemed quixotic to modern sensibilities—Americans in 1916 were motoring everywhere on the map, claiming no fixed home, no memory of the past—it was perfectly normal in Philadelphia, an old city with the most deep-rooted of American aristocracies.
    For Dr. Vansant the first step in making a legacy was to introduce Charles, known to family members as “the shining only son,” to the world of men. The doctor invited him after
his twentieth birthday into the retreat of the smoking parlor
at 4038 Spruce, where the men retired for billiards, political discussions, and cigars while the women sipped tea in the parlor. Upstairs was a small exercise room where father and son lifted weights together, following the new and popular regime of German bodybuilding. Father and son took the roadster to the prestigious Cape May Country Club, where amid the endless marshes and scrub pines by the ocean, Eugene taught the boy the recently imported Scottish game of golf.
    Through formal ritual and a thousand unspoken ways, Eugene tried to shape his son's view of being a man, of being a Vansant, from an identity to a calling. After Charles graduated from Penn, Dr. Vansant introduced his son to the prestigious Order of the Founders and Patriots of America, of which the doctor was the national treasurer-general and Pennsylvania governor. Charles, carrying forth the line, would be a member. In addition, the boy was warmly welcomed to the Union League, one of the most elite private clubs in America. The doctor's timely word with Nathan Folwell, whose textile mill was one
of the country's largest, landed Charles his first job in 1914 as a salesman.
    Charles was among the first wave of American men to climb the corporate ladder. He was eager to prove to his father that he was a “go-getter,” a new and popular American phrase. He never suffered the despair of the Lost Generation. A contemporary of Charles Epting Vansant's, Francis Scott Fitzgerald—another young man born to a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant family in the 1890s, a Princeton man to Vansant's Penn—would write in another four years in
This Side of Paradise
of the disenchanted young “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” But not now, not yet, not in this summery interlude before America entered the Great War.
    Charles had grown up in a time of American hubris, iron and steel, certainty and progress. He was excited by his generation's