More On Alissa Heinerscheid, The Bud Light Executive Behind Dylan Mulvaney

I noted yesterday that Alissa Heinerscheid comes from a wealthy family, but it's worth pointing out that, at least back in the day, wealthy people used to hire public relations firms to keep them out of the news, not in it. If Elon Musk is any indication, that's no longer the case, and it's certainly not the case with Ms Heinerscheid. I linked yesterday to a story about her in her pre-Bud Light days that ran in the New Yorker in 2021, which was likely placed by either a publicist or by Ms Heiderscheid herself. At the top of her LinkedIn profile is a plug for that piece, with this comment:

Childhood dream of being featured in the New Yorker achieved. Thank you Lizzie Widdicombe!

I've got to say that there must be something wrong with me, as my own childhood dreams were more like being a cowboy or a firefighter. If I'd had childhood dreams of being featured in the New Yorker, maybe things would have turned out differently for me. But whether she placed herself in the New Yorker or hired a publicist to get it done, we learn a great deal about her in that article.

I have a friend, Alissa Heinerscheid, who works in marketing at Anheuser-Busch. This has always been slightly hilarious, because Alissa is one of the last people I picture when I think “beer.” She’s a former teen harpist; in college, she was known for planning her schedule in twenty-minute increments, not shotgunning cold ones.

This takes me back to David Brooks's 2000 Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, in which he describes -- admiringly -- the ability of the Princeton students he interviews to micromanage their own daily schedules. From this, we might infer that Ms Heinerscheid is a grownup version of these same apprentice bobos, which Wikipedia defines:

The word bobo, Brooks' most famously used term, is an abbreviated form of the words bourgeois and bohemian, suggesting a fusion of two distinct social classes (the counter-cultural, hedonistic and artistic bohemian, and the white collar, capitalist bourgeois). The term is used by Brooks to describe the 1990s successors of the yuppies. Often of the corporate upper class, they claim highly tolerant views of others, purchase expensive and exotic items, and believe American society to be meritocratic. The term is also widely used in France.

But this characterization is in fact full of contradictions, both internally and as applied to Ms Heinerscheid. We saw yesterday that she's from a wealthy family and is in fact a Harvard legacy, since her father is also an alumnus. This in itself begins to detract from the idea that American society as the bobos know it is meritocratic, and the Gordon family has apparently been wealthy for several generations; they sold out their share of Gordon Jewelers for about 54% of $311 million.

Let's recall that Jerome Karabel's 2005 The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion is a useful and near-contemporary antidote to Bobos in Paradise. According to the publisher,

Many of Karabel’s findings are astonishing: the admission of blacks into the Ivy League wasn’t an idealistic response to the civil rights movement but a fearful reaction to inner-city riots; Yale and Princeton decided to accept women only after realizing that they were losing men to colleges (such as Harvard and Stanford) that had begun accepting “the second sex”; Harvard had a systematic quota on “intellectuals” until quite recently; and discrimination against Asian Americans in the 1980s mirrored the treatment of Jews earlier in the century.

Beyond that, members of each prospective Ivy entering class are divided into "baskets" that are variously assigned to promising athletes, legacies, the children of influential people, prep school graduates, and the children of major donors. Karabel makes Harvard the chief example of this process. It's not hard to surmise that Ms Heinerscheid, a student from Groton, a legacy, and almost certainly also from a major donor family, was admitted under entirely different criteria from a white Catholic working-class public school kid from a rust-belt town. That kid's SATs would have had to be near-perfect, and he'd have had to have some stellar recommendations to boot. That Ms Heinerscheid's backgound was sorta-kinda Jewish is entirely beside the point.

Let's go back to the New Yorker profile:

She thought about an earlier chapter of her life: more than a decade ago, when she was twenty-five, she’d gotten Stage III melanoma. She’d recovered, and she’d had her three children via surrogacy to avoid risking a cancer recurrence. It had been a lonely, excruciating process, and she’d developed an informal sideline, counselling women who were considering surrogacy or in-vitro fertilization, or who were dealing with cancer, or some combination of the two. She’d had around sixty such conversations over the years, and, when she thought about it, she realized that they were among the most fulfilling things she’d ever done. “Talking to women, helping women,” she said—that’s what she cared about most.

This description tiptoes carefully around the issue of surrogacy, and it suggests she hired surrogates to bear all three of her children for medical reasons, but according to cancer.org,

Often, pregnancy after cancer treatment is safe for both the mother and baby. Pregnancy does not seem to raise the risk of cancer coming back.

Both in vitro fertilization and surrogacy raise similar ethical questions. The Catholic Church, for instance, defines "surrogate mother" in part as this, which likely fits Ms Heinerscheid's case:

the woman who carries in pregnancy an embryo implanted in her uterus and who is genetically a stranger to the embryo because it has been obtained through the union of the gametes of “donors”. She carries the pregnancy with a pledge to surrender the baby once it is born to the party who commissioned or made the agreement for the pregnancy.

These arrangements are typically quite expensive, and they're available primarily to the affluent or the rich. As far as anyone knows, all of Elon Musk's ten children were borne by surrogate mothers. Surrogacy in the US can cost $130,000 and up. That Ms Heinerscheid's New Yorker profile shoud even mention it must be seen as an instance of conspicuous consumption, even if the the profile tries to justify it on medical grounds, or mitigate the ethical issue by claiming she counsels women who are apparently conflicted by it. (We must assume she reassures them it's OK.)

So much for David Brooks's claim that the bobos disdain pretentious display of wealth and privilege. But let's look at another feature of Ms Heinerscheid's lifestyle, the Harvard network. I noted above that she thanks someone named Lizzie Widdicombe for her New Yorker profile. It turns out that Ms Widdicombe is also a Harvard alum, and it's likely that the profile appeared as part of an intricate system of favors and obligations that was already in place among members of Ms Heinerscheid's circle.

Or, for that matter, The Rev John H. Finley IV, who, although an associate priest at a Boston-area Episcopalian parish, presided over her wedding in an affluent San Diego suburb. This can happen if he parties are wealthy enough to fly the priest in for the ceremony. It appears that The Rev Finley IV is another part of Ms Heidenschid's network and an alumnus of both Groton and Harvard. His father, John H Finley III, was also an alumnus of Groton and Harvard, but above all else:

was a family man. Whether bundling the kids into the car for weekends in Waitsfield, VT, at "Toad Hall" or presiding over a house overflowing with friends in York Harbor, ME (where he had an impressive vegetable garden), or expanding a fisherman's shack in Boca Grande, FL, to accommodate visiting children and grandchildren or making time for family trips to special spots from Kenya to Tonga, John did everything for his family.

Again, we're talking about an exclusive, wealthy background. The Rev Finley IV continues a tradition of largesse and service on charitable boards, almnost certainly buttresed by family money:

Reverend John H. Finley IV is the co-founder and head of Epiphany School, a tuition-free independent school for children from economically-disadvantaged families and children who have been abused and neglected. John has also helped launch dozens of other schools inspired by Epiphany’s example and has been involved in starting other initiatives in education including the Nativity Preparatory School in Boston, the NativityMiguel Network, Codman Academy Charter School, Boston Scholars, and Bridge Boston Charter School. He has served as a judge for the Caplow Children’s Prize and is also a trustee of the Stephen Phillips Scholarship Fund, which awards several million dollars a year in college scholarships.

A graduate of Harvard, he remains involved there serving on the boards of the Charity of Edward Hopkins, the Memorial Church, the Open Gate Foundation, and the Signet Society.

His husband, Stan McGee, is a Harvard alumnus (of course), as indeed is Ms Heinerscheid's husband Henry. The cursory seach I made for this investigation suggests she inhabits a close-knit network involving Harvard, Groton, and family money, and she's clearly also a member of David Brooks's bobo class -- certainly as he characterizes it, an American upper class, but there's nothing new about it. In fact, if anything, there are echoes of The Great Gatsby here, something deeply phony.

I'm still not sure how to fight this, but I think it's important to know as much as we can about it. One thing that strikes me is that, unlike the post-Civil War industrialist elite families, Ms Heinerscheid strikes me as deeply insecure -- her childhood dream was to be covered in The New Yorker, and every time she talks about herself, it's Harvard, Harvard, Harvard. From a Jewish family, she somehow felt the need to identify as an Episcopalian. We should at least keep this desperate phoniness in mind when dealing with the current upper class.