James Byron Dean

  General Notes:

by Richard E. Brenneman


Undoubtedly the three greatest icons of popular culture in the 1950s were Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and James Dean. The ancestry of Charles Stanley Gifford, the Rhode Island native who Marilyn Monroe believed was her father, was treated by me in NEXUS 7(1990):64-68; and Elvis Presley's almost certain kinship to former President Jimmy Carter and U.S. Senator Jesse Helms was outlined by John Anderson Brayton in NEXUS 8 (1991):204-6.
The actor James Byron Dean (1931-1955) starred in only three movies - East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant. In the first two, and to some extent the third, he played adolescent rebels at a time in American life when "teenagers" were defining themselves as neither children nor adults, but something special, and specially tortured. Dean's roles, and his early death in an automobile accident, seemed to many of his generation to embody and extend their own life situation and existential trauma. A decade before the Beatles and the counterculture of the 1960s, a half-dozen years before Kennedy and the New Frontier, and shortly before the emergence of rock music and Elvis Presley, Dean symbolized the quest for an authenticity beyond material comfort, the new American suburbs, or the prosperity built by post-war GIs. In his first two roles, Dean seeks fatherly advice but lacks a father he can admire; in Giant he lacks parents altogether. Needing to forgive a father who rejects him and a mother who has abandoned him (East of Eden), compelled to construct a value system himself (Rebel Without a Cause), or forced to forge his own prosperity on a ranch where he's unwelcome (Giant), Dean finds some nurturance in love or friendship but seems finally alone - self-reliant perhaps, but damaged and vulnerable.
To many young people seeking to break away from their parents or construct an individualized but viable identity, Dean became almost a cult figure, and a myth was created somewhat tainted by the suggestion of danger or evil. But his co-workers often found him charming, and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper is said to have enjoyed "mothering" him. Despite the rebel aura, Dean was born and raised in the quiet environment of largely Quaker Fairmount, Indiana, an area redolent of the Hoosier life and mores chronicled by Booth Tarkington, James Whitcomb Riley, and Jessamyn West.
Dean's immediate ancestors were border-South families who migrated to Indiana from Kentucky (Dean, Wilson, Leisure), Pennsylvania or Ohio (Cree, Felton), Maryland/ Delaware (Woollen, Oldfield), Virginia (Smithson), or North Carolina (Williams). Likely eighteenth-century immigrants included English Chamnesses, Scottish Tennells (and possibly Leisures), German Feltons and Eslers, and Irish Mansfields (and possibly Ryans). Since he was raised by his father's sister and her Winslow husband, he is sometimes thought to have Mayflower forebears, but no such descent has been found.
Quaker ancestry is derived through Dean's great-great-grandmother Betty (Williams) Smithson of Highland Co., Ohio, whose parents had moved there from Chatham Co., NC. Belly's mother, Sarah (Hussey) Williams (1795-1834), who also migrated to Indiana, was a great-granddaughter of Christopher Hussey, a Nantucket native (b. 1706) who moved to New Castle Co., Delaware. Hussey's paternal grandparents were Stephen and Martha (Bunker) Hussey of Nantucket; great- or great-great-grandparents included Rev. Stephen Bachelder, the "ur-father" of Hampton, N.H., and Dea. John Hall, "President of the Court" Thomas Roberts, and Hatevil Nutter, all of Dover, N.H. Nantucket Husseys or Bunkers have been noted in previous columns as ancestors of US. Senator Samuel James Ervin, Jr., William Sidney Porter (O. Henry), Mrs. H. L. Hunt of Texas, and Mrs. Lucretia Coffin Mott (NEXUS 3[1986]: 26-27,7 [1990]:157, 159), and of mystery writer Dame Agatha Christie (5[1988]:169-70, 6 [1989]:34). Rev. Stephen Bachelder was an ancestor of Presidents Nixon and Ford. serial killer Herman Webster Mudgett (NEXUS 5:21-22), and western novelist Louis Dearborn L'Amour (7:114-15). John Roberts and Abigail Nutter were great-great-great-grandparents of the poet John Greenleaf Whittier (6205-6). Like many Americans from midwestern or border states, many descendants of Quakers, and many Southerners as well, James Dean was descended from both mid-Atlantic pioneers and Great Migration immigrants to New England.