[originally posted here at Castalia House]
The Aristocrat by Chan Davis appeared in the October 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. It can be read here at Archive.org.
Someone forgot to remind Brush that Stevan is spelled with an A.
My next issue of Astounding begins promisingly enough with Chan Davis’ The Aristocrat. While it certainly falls into the category of “thinky stories,” this one manages to strike a balance between the actions and the thinks, though it’s front-loaded with the latter and takes a while to get to the former. It also manages to work a decent enough scientific puzzle into its thinks, while highlighting a struggle between rationalism and realism.
Set After the EndTM, The Aristocrat tells the story of Elder Stevan and the village he presides over. After the bombs and radiation, mankind diverged into two groups—the Folk, who were ignorant and savage but immune to the worst effects of the radiation, and the true Men, who were unmutated and retained the keen intellect of those who had lived in the City, but were weakened and sickly in the radioactive wasteland.
The Men set themselves up as curators of the old knowledge; they sought to guide the Folk, who they deemed as inferior but necessary to the survival of the human race, and act as lawgivers and holy men. They are the Elders. The story is told 1st person from the perspective of Elder Stevan, who has the misfortune of being the village elder at the time when the system collapses.
Other features of the issue included a rather dry article on Cybernetics by E.L. Locke and something called “Progress Report”, by John H. Pomeroy, which was a lengthy jargon and BS-filled fake scientific report expanding on Astounding’s (particularly Asimov’s) prolonged trolling about 
