HOME   SOCIAL CRITICISM LIBRARY   TABLE OF CONTENTS   NEXT CHAPTER   CHAPTER NOTES*

Thirteen

    THE CLEVERNESS OF THE RICH

   There is a lush literature, much of it monographic, on the creation of the modern worlds large fortunes--most of them originated in and still concentrated in the United States, the self-advertised paradise of the common man. Almost always writers flatly claim or imply that the schemes of fortune-builders, legal or illegal, were extraordinarily clever, infinitely complicated and without supplemental support.

   Actually, scrutiny of the way any very large fortune was put together shows that the method was simple, often but not invariably at least partly illegal, usually secret and sooner or later supplemented with the direct or indirect aid of sovereignty or its agents. One can show the creation of singularly few very large fortunes that was not aided by the stealthy support or benign tolerance of government agents. A preponderance of politicians, like flies around garbage, is always on the side where the money is.

   Whatever cleverness was shown invariably lay in the transparent simplicity of the scheme. In the case of no known large fortune was there a complex scheme. Apart from three exceptions by type every large fortune is the consequence of a simple formative pattern, pursued in most cases in secrecy, in all cases with pertinacity and with the direct or indirect aid of sovereign power or its agents.

   The three typical exceptions to the rule of secrecy are: Where the scheme involved a patent, land title or franchise that effectively kept other grabbers off the known valuable terrain. There is also the special case of a lawful operation that got such a head start out of gusher earnings others found it difficult or impossible to raise the capital to overtake it.

   As to patents, themselves often covering complex processes, in virtually all instances the operative patent holders were not the inventors. The MelIons, for example, did not invent the aluminum extraction process although they took the lion's share for financing its beginnings with bank money, "other people's money"--a true case of "nothing down."

   It is noticeable that whenever anyone puts into play a good commercial idea others (such is the widely distributed appetite for easy lucre) instantly copy it. Competitive copying is especially noticeable in the spheres of fashion and novelties although it extends to designs and innovations in almost everything. The person who first develops the idea does not derive full profit from its exploitation owing to the rapid appearance of panting interlopers. He is thus prevented from making a full killing but in theory a wide and infinitely deserving public is catered to at constantly lower prices by many avaricious sellers.

   On the other hand, the man especially protected by the umbrella of sovereignty or its agents and who has a franchise, effective possession of a basic patent, or is working a good thing in secrecy with respect to potential competitors and the public, need not fear being forced to share with others. In the presence of fully established competition no one can build a fortune; competition divides the market, diminishes the share of each operator, impedes or prevents fortune-building.

   But can this be true? the careful reader will ask. Is it not a fact that fortunes are being openly made or monumentally added to all around us today by giant competitive corporations, without benefit of special franchises as in public utilities, of effectively held patents or of operating secrecy?

   The prime money-making factor for nearly all existing large corporations and many smaller ones--not merely legal monopolies like AT&T--is that they are parts of discreet monopolies. They only pretend to be competing. If they had to compete, they would be little better off than a fashion designer whose work is infringed overnight.

   There is no need venturing to show here that the large corporations are monopolistic units within each industry. The job has been done many times. The reader is referred to a long line of analytic literature, much of it monographic and scholarly and dealing with specific monopoly situations, many formally adjudicated as monopolies under the laws and others not so adjudicated either because the purposely imperfect law does not prohibit their monopoly practices or has not been brought to bear owing to lack of zeal in law-enforcement officials. ¹

   Earlier the illegal monopoly conspiracies in the electrical and steel industries were touched upon, each formally and solemnly adjudicated as such under the Great Seal of the United States in federal court. Until the time of exposure (an unfortunate occurrence to all corporate right-thinkers) such frequent conspiracies are secret--meeting one of the prime requirements of fortune-building here laid down. Analogous conspiracies seem to exist at all times in all American industries, although the facts are hard to produce. In Europe such cartel practices are legal, a triumph for candor if not for distributive justice.

   As complicated a money-making scheme as any that led to a large fortune (and it was essentially a simple scheme) was that devised by John D. Rockefeller, the proverbial poor boy who became very rich almost overnight. As the high-pressure methods he diligently employed have been copiously recorded, there is no need to review them in detail. The methods were secret and conspiratorial at every step of the way--so much so that it took nearly forty years to bring even the earliest steps to light. Standard Oil was in its long formative period one of the world's biggest clandestine operations. And always there was assistance from the agents of sovereignty; for Standard Oil infiltrated its well-rewarded henchmen into strategic nooks and crannies of the political system as well as into the ranks of its competitors. It developed one of the earliest systems of industrial espionage, hardly gentlemanly.

   Rockefeller's advantage, which he used to beat down thousands of producers and to force hundreds of rival refiners into his hands, was the consistently lower freight rates he obtained from railroads and pipelines as a large buyer of crude oil and shipper of refined oil. The railroad rebates and drawbacks, secretly granted by common carriers which under law were required to give everyone the same rates, were only one aspect of illegality that saturated Standard Oil up to the final paper dissolution by Supreme Court decision in 1911. But Rockefeller kept his holdings; and the constituent parts of the one-time trust remained intact, loosely united by stockholdings in foundations, trust funds and the hands of family members and partners. By his ability to control transportation rates unfairly with the connivance of railroads fighting each other for huge shipments, Rockefeller could force down the price of crude oil to him at the well-head and could undersell refineries outside his combination until they sold out to him at sacrificial prices or went under. By this process he became what Establishment writers joyously salute as an industrial statesman.

   Rockefeller, after a sketchy education and a brief apprenticeship as a bookkeeper, started in business for himself in 1859 at the age of twenty. By the early 1880's, slightly more than ten years after the Standard Oil Company of Ohio was founded to succeed the firm of Rockefeller, Andrews and Flagler, the company's portion of the national oil business, crude and refined, was rated at 85 per cent and the fledgling company was already extending its spiderweb into California and Texas. As early as 1883 the company took the output of 20,000 wells, held 4,000 miles of pipeline, used 5,000 tank cars and employed 100,000 people. ² It was already an obvious monopoly, alluded to as such on the floor of Congress.

   Apart from some new capital early brought into the coercive combination by investors such as whisky-distiller H. V. Harkness, most of the money for the expansion came from especially favorable secret transportation rates. These were always Rockefeller's hidden ace, his major source of growing capital. ³

   With variations of detail one will find a similar pattern of secrecy in the building of virtually every large fortune.

   The builders of the large fortunes succeeded, then, because the crucial part of their operations was kept secret. When attempts were made to uncover the inelegant facts, they were blocked by Horatio Alger officials under the purchased control or influence of the fortune-builders.

   This last was true, for example, of the Standard Oil Company as of others. From a very early stage its partisans bloomed miraculously in the Ohio legislature and executive branch and in the Congress and the national executive branch. These "representatives of the people" at every turn nipped one attempt after the other at investigation, despite widespread indignation in Congress and among the then free-entrepreneurial newspapers. ⁴

   The question widely asked was: If there is nothing wrong, why will not the friends of Standard Oil permit an investigation?

   When effective investigation finally took place, despite herculean opposition and proclaimed attempts to bribe officials such as the attorney generals of Ohio, there was indeed found much reason for concealment. In his annual report to the governor of Ohio in 1899, Attorney General F. S. Monnett detailed charges of six attempts to bribe his predecessor, David K. Watson, to withdraw a suit filed in 1890 against the Standard Oil Company of Ohio for participating illegally in the Standard Oil Trust. ⁵ Mr. Monnett also charged in court that he had been offered a bribe of $400,000 to quash a later suit to enforce the court decision in the first. ⁶ This and other suits brought by Monnett were abruptly quashed as soon as a successor took office in January, 1900, but not before enough information about the secret operations of Standard Oil had been developed to prepare the way for later federal dissolution suits. ⁷

   "It was a matter of constant comment in Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania that the Standard was active in all elections, and that it 'stood in' with every ambitious young politician, that rarely did an able young lawyer get into office who was not retained by the Standard." ⁸ This practice promoted by Rockefeller prevails among corporations today with their coast-to-coast chains of retained political law firms. As a result, most of our legislators in Washington and the state capitals are bluff and hearty corporation men, yet they speak in public in common accents, as though they were human.

   It is evident, then, that although some elected officials perform their duties as required by law and the expectancies of constituents, a majority do not. For proof, turn to the tax laws. This prospect brings into range for consideration those who elect officials, the people themselves.

   That the public in general through the shallow criteria it brings to bear in selecting its wayward officials makes possible the ostensible cleverness of the rich is, as far as I know, a thesis never before explicitly laid down and forthrightly argued. As we are interested in ascertaining how the lopsided distribution of the world's goods came about in so short a time in the United States and why it is likely to continue for the indefinite future, this phase is germane. For without a public and a system constituted in a certain way it would be impossible for anyone, clever though he might be, to become extremely rich in the ways that have been practiced.

   Nobody, first of all, would be rich if he had not been favored by circumstances. Favoring general circumstances in the United States have been a naturally rich virgin continent, an enlarging widely skilled population, a basic law designed to facilitate private property under earlier purely agrarian-mercantile circumstances, an expanding machine technology that took multiplied advantage of agrarian-mercantile law and a plethora of purchasable officials.

   Had Henry Ford been a Swiss, operating under Swiss law, he could never, no matter how shrewd, have developed the Ford Motor Company. Had Rockefeller been a citizen of England, France, Russia, Germany or China, functioning in any of those countries, he could never, by whatever hook, crook or cleverness, have developed the Standard Oil Company.

   If one nevertheless insists that the fortune-builders were unusually clever men, entitled to their fortunes as a reward for performing vast economic services--and this is the line apologists do take--one cannot go on to argue equal cleverness in their heirs. For the performance of what service, for the display of what cleverness, do they hold their enormous riches and transcendent power? Does their cleverness consist of their pre-selection of ancestors?

   In the case of either the originators or the inheritors the fortune was hardly derived by conspicuous cleverness but a set of fortuitous circumstances, one element of which (still bearing particularly on inheritance) was a body of pre-existing law reasonably designed to fit more modest cases, not designed to apply to huge international estates enjoying the application of machine technology in mass production. In the United States it is now common for heirs (sometimes quite stupid) to come into estates, largely untaxed, that make the inherited dukedoms decried by eighteenth-century republicans and democrats seem microscopic. No grand duchy ever came near the proportions of many American corporations and banks. The United States is the most exaggerated case of plutocracy in all history, eclipsing all others combined.

   A big factor in modern fortune-building, however, was unquestionably the state of popular opinion and understanding. This opinion has never been more than occasionally, in fits of temper, opposed to fortune-building. The common if languid supposition seems to be that everyone may have his fair chance in this inspiring game. As every clean-living, clear-eyed, pure-souled American boy may look forward to being at least president, so every American virgin may marry a millionaire. Those boys who fail to achieve the presidency may quite easily (one gathers in reading the Wall Street Journal, Time and Fortune) as consolation prizes become millionaires or marry an heiress. The films play about a good deal with this popular fantasy of heir-pauper marriage, blissfully passing over the fact that if every nubile scion of wealth each year married someone on the relief rolls there would be hardly more than a hundred such marriages a year. To look for the sociologists' precious Upward Social Mobility by this route is veritably to chase dancing moonbeams.

   To understand fully how fortunes came to grow so profusely in the United States to grotesque, diseased dimensions and how they are so readily maintained in full panoply amid outlandish cries that they are being whittled away by taxation, one must give some attention to the general populace.

   Referring to this populace, the profoundly experienced P. T. Barnum said: "A sucker is born every minute." ⁹

   The late H. L. Mencken referred to the common citizen as a boob and to the collectivity of common citizens, what sociologists now drably refer to as "the mass," as the booboisie, a thesis he tirelessly embellished with copious examples in voluminous brilliant writings over several decades. Mencken never tired of pointing to the obvious chicaneries and obscenities in the spectrum of phenomena which disoriented professors and clear-eyed politicians call democracy.

   Expressing the purely operational as distinct from the formal attitude of American society, Texas Guinan, joyously echoed by W. C. Fields, whooped: "Never give a sucker an even break." ¹⁰

   There was hardly any need to give utterance to this thoughtful homily, which appears to have been ventured in gleeful satire at contemplation of the absurd American scene.

   It would be advisable here, or so I suppose, to avoid such epithets born of anguished subjectivity and find some other meaningful term for the masses with reference to their inadequacies of judgment. I propose, therefore, that they be regarded, in varying degrees, as handicapped, crippled, unable to make sound judgments and decisions in their own self-interest. They live blindly in a system that offers wide although not unlimited free choice and they are unable to choose wisely. They are victims of their own choices. Nobody protects them from themselves!

   What qualifies most of the mass for being regarded sympathetically as handicapped people, mental cripples, rather than astringently as willful suckers and boobs is their seemingly inherent infantile gullibility. The masses are handicapped in that they are ready believers in tales and promises of nimbler wits, prone to give credence to the improbable or very doubtful. They believe that some obvious charlatan--a preacher, a politician, a vendor of cheap merchandise--is going to do something very good for them, at only a slight fee or absolutely free. At their most extreme these people are the followers of astrologers, spiritualists, religious dervishes and messiahs of all kinds, very often political messiahs. They believe, for example, that installment selling is something contrived for their special advantage, rarely suspecting that it is elevating already high prices of shoddy goods by 14 to 30 per cent. "Nothing down"--and they buy happily. Furthermore, they tend strongly to resist whatever is objectively the case if it does not harmonize with their delusions. Tell most of them today that Lyndon B. Johnson, or anyone else, has no more serious intention of establishing the Great Society than he has of becoming sheriff of Buncombe County and they will want to report their veracious informant to J. Edgar Hoover as seditious, possibly a full-fledged heterosexual and viviparous.

   Gullibility and muddle-headedness are functions of insufficient intelligence. The intelligent person is prone to make significant distinctions, to analyze, compare, reflect and seek out difficulties in proffered propositions whether flattering or promising to himself or not. Skeptical self-analysis is beyond the powers of the gullible because they already feel insecure, must (as they say) "believe in something" if only in believing. Intimations of any lack in their judgment are resisted. Hence it follows that they believe whatever ethnic, religious or national group to which they belong is inherently superlative. "If I belong it must be good; hence, I'm proud to be a Ruritanian." Having little sense of individual identity, they derive their identity from some extensive tribe--hence White Supremacy, Black Power, etc.

   While all men may have been created equal, whatever that means, what strikes the most casual observer is their disparity of age, circumstance, capability and condition. And, considering people in general with respect to their judgmental powers, what is most unequal about them is their intelligence,

   During World War II the government administered what was known as the General Education Test to nearly ten million men. A score of 100 represented the average. Approximately 50 per cent of all who took the test scored from 86 to 114; 25 per cent were below 86; and 25 per cent above 114. The method of grading was based on earlier inquiries of psychologists into the national distribution of intelligence. Of college graduates who took this test more than 81 per cent scored 115 or higher so that by present standards four out of five persons completing college have the ability suggested by the test score of 115 or higher. An IQ of 110 is the minimum required for admission to standard colleges and universities today, excluding at a stroke 75 per cent. Colleges, however, do not get all the high IQs.

   Testing for IQ, although regularly done by government, universities and corporations in selecting personnel and admitting students, is a scientific practice as widely resisted today, and roundly condemned, as was the assertion by Copernicus and Galileo in the sixteenth century that the earth was spherical and revolved about the sun. IQ testing yields information generally unwanted because, among other things, it strikes at the basis of the democratic dogma: the doctrine of equality and the alleged ability of people to act with equal skill in their own interest.

   Resistance to accepting the idea of an IQ is reinforced by its frequent presentation as something honorific, like having blue blood in the old days. Yet a person of lower IQ will often outachieve one of higher IQ who may, owing to adverse emotional factors, amount to nothing. However, everything else being equal (which it rarely is) the higher IQ will have the edge, and the very low IQs will never get into the running. Nonetheless at most levels IQs can be raised at least a few points--sometimes many points.

   Although widely assailed by radicals as well as democrats as revealing nothing inherent (a doubtful contention) but only skills acquired in a certain cultural milieu, the methods of psychological testing are expertly defended by specialists. Children in the same family, subject to identical cultural influences although to different kinds of stress in the family constellation, often show wide variations in IQ. Cultural deficiency, therefore, although it often plays some role, cannot be designated the sole cause of low ratings. There is more than training in a Heifetz or Einstein. Tests have been devised, as a matter of fact, that bypass cultural influences in testing. They show no uniformity in intelligence. ¹¹

   It is this utterly pathetic low state of IQness in much of the population that points up the observation made some forty years ago by an acute political observer that "Actually the great bulk of the 119,000,000 [citizens] are thoroughly muddy-minded about politics, swayed by feeling rather than reason, really incapable of clear-headed thought or understanding." ¹²

   Open elections, where they take place, are quite correctly cited as one of the hallmarks of a democratic system. But, considering the confused mentality of the mass, the two-party or multi-party electoral system is much like a formally fair duel between a man stricken with palsy (the general public) and a dead-shot duelist (the professional politician) or a chess match between a tyro and a master. Only one outcome is possible: the way of the politician.

   What is the case, then, is that a largely incapable public exercises its judgment in validating the selection of its legislators and officials, with the melancholy results for that same public shown by the history of popular elections since before the Civil War. Voting behavior has been extensively studied. Although many new details have since been brought to light in various studies, nothing essential has been changed since Frank R. Kent made the foregoing observation in 1928.

   Where the voting public goes wrong is in whom it accepts in each jurisdiction as plausible candidates--not men of proven knowledge, ability and purpose but men who appeal to various unexamined prejudices: ethnic, religious, national-origin, occupational, aesthetic, regional, personal and the like. As Plato brought out in his dialogue Gorgias the politician uses rhetoric to flatter and seduce his public and to carry the decision even against the man of knowledge and sound judgment. People in general, it seems, are far more responsive to blandishment than to reason. They love obvious charlatans.

   Although bemusingly capable men are by chance indeed elected occasionally, thereby serving as justification and embellishment for the system, in most cases the public elects flexible men who are prepared to betray it at the first sign of personal profit. Such officials have no more sympathy with the public, itself callous, than have Soviet commissars, possibly less. Each set, Soviet or U.S.-type democratic, is cut out of the same bolt, concerned only with advancing their own small-bore careers.

   The electoral system, then, is the setting for a cat-and-mouse game between the greater part of the demoralized public and the professional politician, who knows what he wants for himself and usually gets it. One of the many outcomes of it all is seen in the tax laws. Here, of course, we find that the rich have indeed managed rather cleverly.

   There has never been an even approximate correlation of level of IQ with voting statistics, but studies in the sociology of political participation show clearly that it is the socially lower and less skilled classes who most abstain from electoral voting. The largest voting turnouts in Europe and the United States are among higher income receivers--the more educated, businessmen, white-collar workers, government employees, commercial-crop farmers, miners, whites, people over age thirty-five, men, industrial workers in western Europe, older residents, married people and members of organizations. Lower voting turnouts are consistently seen among low-income receivers--unskilled workers, servants, service workers, peasants, subsistence farmers, Negroes (often barred), women, persons under age thirty-five, newer residents, industrial workers in the United States, unmarried people and isolated individuals. Voting in general tends to rise in crisis situations, and then the otherwise quiescent lower orders tend to vote more heavily but from authoritarian and anti-democratic points of view. ¹³ In crisis, extremism and strongarm tactics become de rigeur, appealing especially to the lowly, no doubt satisfying feelings of frustrated hostility.

   Just how and why the common man in the United States gets spun off the merry-go-round as he does is most precisely shown by systematic stages.

   When it comes to voting the choice narrows down to two almost indistinguishable men. In Russia there is ludicrously only one man to vote for; but it is hardly more absurd than voting for almost identical political twins like Johnson and Goldwater. Both systems are equally absurd.

   Before an election the choice of candidates has already been made and almost always either one of two men is going to win although both may be absolutely undesirable--as undesirable, indeed, as a Russian might find a candidate on his single slate.

   The crucially important political phase, then, as Frank R. Kent has pinpointed it, is when the candidates are selected. All the sociological analysis of partisan and class voting after this stage, as far as the American two party system is concerned, is politically quite beside the point. The fundamental line has been pre-determined.

   In almost all cases in the United States candidates are selected in primaries or by conventions of delegates themselves elected in primaries. Except in the South the choice of candidates--whether by primaries, caucuses or conventions--is determined wholly by political leaders, bosses, owing to the voluntary abstention of the public from serious political activity.

   In Russia the bosses will not allow anyone else to present candidates. In the United States anybody may present candidates but usually fails to do so. Political bosses in the United States come into being by reason either of the political default of the people or of circumstances such as specialized nonpolitical occupation that keeps people from broad political activity. Politics, democratic or otherwise, is intrinsically a specialty.

   Because in the South there is broader public participation in the primaries, although not very broad, in this respect the South seems more alert politically. But the candidates in the southern primaries usually differ from each other only in contending that each would be more diligent in repressing Negroes. The South, then, has been not only one-party but, stupidly, one-issue.

   Where conventions determine the candidate, the bosses obviously have the determining role. But in the primaries, too, they determine the outcome because the broad public virtually boycotts the process. The participants are almost entirely political jobholders or patronage beneficiaries, informally compelled to vote and to vote in ways that enable them to hold their benefices. If it were not for this compulsory voting by beneficiaries, primaries could not be held in most cases.

   It is the primaries that give the major parties their legal status. This is because the law of most states stipulates, with no broad dissent, that parties shall hold primaries participated in by party voters for nominating party candidates and officers. The only other way a candidate can get on the ballot is by petition, signed by a certain number of voters, and such a candidate does not run under a party label and has no established organization working for him.

   "There could not be a greater mistake" than abstention from primaries, says the able Kent. It is this public abstention that gives the political machine its chance to control the situation, which it does through the precinct executives. "It actually permits the machine to run the country." Here is the veritable foundation for the various legislative Establishments and for legislation biased in favor of the propertied. It rests on pervasive popular ineptitude.

   As there is no other effective way for candidates to get on the ballot, the primary is the political key that unlocks all doors.

   "It ought to be plain, then," says Kent, "that so long as the machine controls the primaries, it is in a position to limit the choice of the voters in the general election to its choice in the primaries. That is the real secret of its power, and, so long as it holds that power, it cannot be put out of business. Defeating its candidates in the general election not only does not break its grip, it often does not make even a dent in it. The only place a machine can be beaten is in the primaries."

   As for the candidate who gets on the ballot by petition, "Nothing short of a political tidal wave or revolution can carry an independent candidate to success," Kent points out. "He may pull sufficient votes from one side or the other to bring about the defeat of one of the regular party nominees, but his own election is a thing so rare as to be almost negligible."

   To the established party the primary, which validates it legally, is far more important than the election, which alone seems important to the public. Even if it loses the election, the party organization remains intact owing to patronage--federal, state, county and (over the long term) judicial--gained in past elections. The party organization can, indeed, survive many election defeats. Remaining organized, it is always a threat and draws some deferential attention from the ascendant party which, in fact, helps it out from time to time with "nonpolitical" and "bi-partisan" appointments. The legal parties have much in common, notably their tender joint concern and realistically proper solicitude for their angels, the propertied classes. There are many informal party intermediaries.

   The Republican Party long survived in the Deep South despite endless election defeats, owing to its nourishment by federal patronage. Although it held primaries, where federal jobholders voted, it never won state elections or sent members to Congress. The party delegates, however, often played a determining role in the choice of presidential and vice presidential candidates at Republican national conventions. They had something to sell--their organizational votes.

   Although the party organization can survive a long series of election defeats, it could hardly survive a defeat in the primaries and could absolutely not survive two primary defeats. If twice defeated it would be clear that it had been outwitted by rival organizers or an intelligent public to whom recipients of party patronage would turn for protection. Organizers able to outwit an entrenched machine are men obviously more capable of outwitting the opposing party in the coming election.

   Sometimes factions contend in primaries--the Old Guard, Reformers and independents. Each puts up a slate, for public office and party office. Each is committed to high-flown party principles, and contends that it can best implement those principles and achieve electoral success. On such a question the general voter in effect has the difficult job of a personnel manager for a large corporation. He must know principles and policy and he must pick out the electorally most plausible man. This, obviously, is usually hard to do. Information is lacking--all the men seem superficially good. If one seems better in some ways the others seem better in other ways. Whose side are they really on? What to do? Here the average voter, who isn't versed anyhow in the ins and outs of the situation, throws up his hands. The primary and its ends baffle him and he stays away. Yet here is the very heart of the electoral process and from now on nature takes its course.

   Generally the Old Guard wins owing to its control of patronage. If enough patronage holders are discontented, owing to what the Reformers call poor leadership, they may vote with the Reformers or Independents. In this case party leadership changes, perhaps party policy. What change, actually, has been wrought? Usually it is nothing of broad importance--perhaps only a change from Anglo-Saxon to Irish candidates, from Irish to Italian, from Italian to Puerto Rican. In a changing electoral district the new candidates have more "political sex appeal," are more likely to entice more boobish voters.

   An important feature of party primaries often is that they not only nominate party candidates but also party officials: county and state committeemen who elect chairmen. The party chairmen may or may not hold public office, but they are the main part of the continuing party machinery. They are, legally, the party, and they participate in party decisions, convey party views to officeholders. They are men who have immediate access to executive officials, legislators and judges. What they have to say is always very, very important, not to be lightly disregarded.

   As Kent points out, by not participating in the primaries the general voter loses at least 50 per cent of the effectiveness of his franchise. He thereby assumes his actual political status--a second-class citizen. As few participate in primaries it may seem, by this token, that virtually everybody is a second-class citizen. But this is not so, for there are those, nonvoters in primaries, who recapture the first-class citizenship at a later stage by contributing to political campaign funds. They "buy in." They are politically first class. They are rich people in a plutocracy.

   Nobody has chased the common man away from the primaries. He just does not feel up to participating. His democratic franchise here he finds just too much to handle. He does not, in fact, have anything to contribute; he is politically empty. As a result, the party apparatus and candidates on both tickets belong to professionals, often men never heard of in the community, usually men of limited outlook. They function behind the scenes. They have the party power. They are American versions of Gromyko, Kosygin, Brezhnev et al. ¹⁴

   The party managers must find men ready, able and willing to campaign and at the same time men who will be acceptable to a broad, culturally differentiated, intellectually and emotionally low-grade public--Mencken's boobs, Barnum's suckers, Kipling's "muddied oafs." The party managers are, contrary to common supposition, restricted to a very narrow potential group, with characteristics shared by less than 5 per cent of the population.

   Men selected as candidates must, first, have independent financial means or be in occupations that will permit long leaves of absence. Persons dependent on an assured wage or salary would, even if approached, turn down the offer because they could not take a chance on being out of a job if they lost the election, nor could they take a chance on not winning the next election in two to four years. So, most of the labor force is automatically self-excluded. True, here and there somebody at times takes the long chance; but not many. Again, scientists, physicians, surgeons, scholars, engineers cannot be had because even if they won election they would not be able to keep abreast in their professions; only men willing to abandon their specialized life work might be obtained and they are virtually nonexistent among high-level practitioners. Again, successful corporation executives, unless retired, cannot be induced to run because if they won they would be automatically excluded from the line of corporate promotion and extravagant remuneration and if they lost they would probably be out of any job. They would be "controversial." As it turns out, most of the highly capable men in the country are in sober fact not available to stand as candidates for public office. Either personal economics or professional commitments keep them out. ¹⁵ Yet, the inferior types that predominate in politics seem to satisfy the propertied. One can easily make deals with them. They are purchasable.

   The political manager, then, must go shopping under conditions of extreme scarcity for prospective candidates. He finds most of them among young lawyers, men with partners willing to see them take long leaves of absence and who, if defeated, can return to the practice of law. Thus Matthews found that among Democrats in the Senate, our supreme political body, 63 per cent were lawyers; among Republicans, 45 per cent. Those who defined themselves as businessmen were 17 per cent among the Democrats and 40 per cent among Republicans. Among the Democrats 7 per cent were farmers, 7 per cent professors and 5 per cent other professionals; among the Republicans 8 per cent were farmers, 1 per cent professors and 5 per cent other professionals. ¹⁶

   The up-and-coming men in politics, then, must be lawyers, men of independent means or in some business they can run by remote control as an adjunct to politics. The lawyers chosen are usually not at the top of their profession either as pleaders, brief specialists or jurisconsults but are men seeking to make their way, hopeful that their political participation will bring big retainers to their law firms--and it will! With nice corporate retainers in the office, however, these public officials develop a sound procorporate point of view. While rhetorically they may swing far to the left or right, when it comes to voting and deciding, they must see things as the corporations do. They must then follow the corporate "party line." They are at least corporate fellow travelers.

   People in politics all, contrary to popular supposition, work very hard. It is common for a citizen to walk into some public building and, noticing its rather soiled condition and easygoing atmosphere, make an invidious comparison with the trim premises of a tightly run corporation. Here is mute evidence of the difference, he thinks, between shoddy government enterprise and efficient private enterprise. Bank pens work smoothly, post office pens sputter.

   The rank and file in the political organizations put in long hours and work hard, often at two or three jobs-and most of them put money in the bank every week, usually sufficiently honest money. Many of their tasks are boring. Others would not perform them. But, in some measure, they carry with them a heady something called power.

   In the selection of candidates, however, the political organizer must be careful to select men who will not offend large blocks of voters, As experience has shown, the average mentally handicapped or boobish citizen, his brain in a scramble, attaches vast importance in candidates to religion, race or ethnic grouping, national origin, sex and generally conventional conformist outlook and behavior. He feels grimly punitive toward any sort of deviation from a fixed norm, a stereotype, in his mind. He wants, above all, no independent thinkers--freaks who emit horrible propositions about the importance of intelligence tests, read books--or use three syllable words. ¹⁷

   Politicians oblige. If the voters wanted men who spoke Sanskrit, dressed in kilts or used the language of mathematics, the politicians would procure them.

   Voters, it has been found, are also partial to men against women, married men against bachelors, fathers as against the childless, the personable against the less personable, the fluent and expansive against the reflective the generally reassuring, humorous and blandishing against the fellow who raises odd difficulties. They prefer Gorgias to Socrates. They will not, as politicians know, take anybody who lectures to them or even indirectly appears to be lecturing to them, although this is precisely what they need before anything else. They need hard instruction, prolonged, grueling, on the line.

   The party leaders, to give them credit, do the best they can in selecting candidates. They do the best they can, too, in seeking to detect hidden aberrancies in a new man, such as penchants for reading, concert-going, tennis-playing or a compulsive desire to speak the exact unvarnished truth at all times--all of which in the budding statesman would spell trouble with the booboisie.

   With the organization now functioning smoothly, something else is needed: money. Here is where the affluent regain their first-class citizenship.

   If the organization has not been very successful it must depend on its own resources, mainly "kickbacks" from its successful candidates and appointees. But with victory comes prosperity in the form of campaign contributions, always and almost only from the affluent and well positionedthe wealthy, corporation executives and lawyers, government contractors, brokers, influence-seekers, friends of the candidates, etc. Here and there trade unions are heard from, but for the most part the labor force is now quiescent, not in sight. It is at work, out at the beach or watching television.

   Because it is almost entirely the affluent that put up party campaign funds, knowing that some lucre is going to stick to the fingers of political managers, we see here the reason both the Republican and Democratic Parties are, basically and primarily, the parties of the propertied classes--the corporations, the trade associations, the real estate lobbies, the millionaires, the big rich and the super-rich. This is the simple, nonscandalous fact. Money, big money, rules the roost from now on.

   Leftist agitators have thundered about this thousands of times from soap boxes at gaping hinds, as though this ought not to be and as though it was sinful. This, as it happens, is the way babies are born in politics--or by even rougher methods as under totalitarianism. They are not brought in by the stork.

   The electoral process, owing to the childish nature and behavior of the public, is expensive, and is really paid for by the public in elevated prices. Much is at stake in the public policy that will be made by officeholders--who will pay most of the taxes in an increasingly expensive welfare-warfare state, who will get contracts of $100 million, $500 million, $1 billion, where $200-million roads and dams will go and where they won't go, etc. This is obviously a game (as most participants see it) for big stakes, far from the pitifully petty concerns of the electorate about the religion of the candidates, whether they are divorced and whether they are hetero-, homo-, bi- or a-sexual.

   As the public has the franchise, almost without restriction except for Negroes, if it does not like the way matters are arranged all some eighty million members of the labor force need do is (1) participate intelligently in all primaries and (2) contribute about $5 a year to their party, amounting to about $400 million a year in all. If it did this, the public might have more to say in determining policy--if it knew anything at all about policy.

   This is an easy prescription but hard to apply to an engine with some eighty million separate parts. Not only does the public consist of many parts but many of these parts are mutually and irrationally antagonistic on grounds irrelevant to the welfare of each. Their various ethnic, religious, nationalistic, regional, occupational, class, caste and cultural differences have in most cases nothing to do with their personal and mutual welfare. Yet they enjoy indulging these irrelevant infantile predilections as though they mattered--and politicians are solicitously attentive. Where the constituency would not like a Ruritanian on the ticket there is no Ruritanian. Where a Ruritanian would help, there he is. Is he pro-bono publico? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it is electorally irrelevant. And so with all other types.

   If the voters participated intelligently in the primaries, their spokesmen would need to find truly representative candidates--not too easy to do. Most likely persons would turn them down for more agreeable pastures.

   In any event, the rank-and-file citizen prefers to accept the ready-made pre-financed, pre-fixed parties, in which in most cases he is permanently enrolled as in a religious brotherhood. Most voters ploddingly vote straight tickets, for one party, year after year. They are, as anyone can see, creatures of easy habit with little genuine political discernment. One can count most of their votes in advance. Politicians do.

   But here, as elsewhere, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Although each of the major parties is usually (except when befogged by ideology) alert to whatever may transiently pull the handicapped boobs to their banners, they deliver in major matters, always and invariably, for their main financial supporters. Considering the way everybody performs politically and thinks privately, this is the only way it could possibly be. The idea of democracy first killed itself in ancient Greece. In modern times it did it again in the United States.

   Much is made by such writers as Professor Seymour M. Lipset of Left and Right and of which of the major parties is the friend of the common man and which of Big Business. ¹⁸ In these respects, in fact, there is little to choose. The Democratic Party came by its latter-day reputation as a peculiar friend of the common man because of its purely sensible emphasis since 1932 on federal programs in sagging domestic affairs and on adjusting to some of the dislocations brought about by technological change. Earlier, this one-time party of the southern slave owners had made friends in the North by welcoming the European refugees of the immigration, each of whom had a vote, most of whom were politically snubbed by the well-washed Whigs and Republicans.

   The Republican Party has tended, impolitically, to decry recent Democratic emphases and has consequently lost majority support, which it held from 1860 to 1932, as long as it was able to guarantee low-paid jobs. What money the workers were not paid in those days went, in general, into the sprouting fortunes and for the most part now rests comfortably in trust. The benign Carnegie paid $10 a week for seventy hours and more in the withering heat of the steel mills--a humanist!

   But the aims of both political parties, declared and achieved, are to maintain the existing politico-economic system and the same relative distribution of its rewards. This is all Franklin D. Roosevelt ever said he sought to do and all he really did. His main promise was to get the system back in operation and this he did so thoroughly that the 1960's are little different in their externals from the 1920's.

   All this is inevitable, as it must be when given the general low-level, don't-know-where-I'm-going-but-I'm-on-my-way outlook of the common citizen. He's bound to be short-changed.

   Just what the common man gets by voting the prearranged preferences offered him in elections we may see by looking at the case of Negro Congressman William L. Dawson of Chicago.

   Dawson's 90 per cent Negro First Congressional District contains one out of every three Negroes in the state of Illinois. Dawson has ruled it as a private fief for 24 years, and cooperative fellow politicians have continued to change the shape of the district as the Negro population keeps swelling and moving into white neighborhoods. If you are a Negro on the South Side, and you need a job, a favor or a bail bondsman, you see someone from Dawson's organization. His record in Congress is shabby; not a single Chicago journalist can remember a piece of legislation that bears his name. It doesn't matter.

   "This man is not interested in politics as a means of helping his constituents," one political writer said. "What he is interested in is staying in power."

   Dawson in power has obtained for his faithful constituents the worst housing conditions in the city, a soaring crime rate, an increase in heroin addiction and the spread of teenage gangs who flock together in vicious packs, preying on strangers, extorting money from businessmen, and killing each other out of boredom. It is a record so marvellous that it should qualify Dawson for an ambassadorship to Haiti. . . .

   Dawson stays in power at an age when most men are writing memoirs because he commands an organization that makes good old Tammany Hall seem like a congregation of Ethical Culture teachers. Every one of the 446 precincts in the district has its own captain and two assistants, and if possible a worker for every street. There are seven wards in the district, and each ward office is responsible for controlling the precinct captains. The seven wards in turn answer to the people who run Dawson's own Second Ward office.

   Dawson has plenty of what Chicagoans call "clout." He is vice chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee, and Mayor Daley understands perfectly just how important Dawson and his organization are in the general scheme of Chicago politics. In 1963, Daley won reelection by 139,000. Dawson-controlled Negro wards contributed 115,000 of those votes. ¹⁹

   Representative Adam Clayton Powell, the Negro clergyman-sybarite, for more than twenty years ran a similar district in New York City.

   The point here is not to highlight invidiously Negro personalities but to cite two extreme cases as models of what most people more or less get by voting along ethnic, religious, regional and national-origins lines. In almost every case of such widespread voting, it can be shown that the constituents in the home district or state are in some way getting the dirty end of the stick, not perhaps so blatantly as under Dawson and Powell but perceptibly nevertheless. They get it especially in taxes but also in many other ways. Catholics are rooked by Catholics, Protestants by Protestants, Irish by Irish, Negroes by Negroes, and so on, all very democratically.

   In the better-grade suburban, city "silk-stocking," Jewish and advanced farm districts it is different. Only in a diluted sense are the alert constituents there ever let down. For the most part they are served as they intelligently if narrowly understand their interests.

   An inflexible rule can be stated here: The further one moves down the socio-economic-cultural scale the less the sweet-talking political organizations deliver on behalf of the broad constituencies, which is one reason politicians are repeatedly found by pollsters to be in popular ill repute. People realize that, somehow, they are short-changed. But it is defective understanding in most of the people themselves in attempting to utilize the popular franchise that is considerably to blame, although plenty of teachers have offered to instruct them. Boobs will not heed, however. They just do not seem to get the point. They think it's great to be a Ruritanian and a communicant of the Hocus-pocus Church.

   As one out of many thousand instances of widespread boobishness one may cite the abrasively intrusive surveillance by the public over the private life of officials. A senator, photographed at a wedding holding a champagne glass, sought to have the picture suppressed owing to the painful impression it would make on constituents; he would not have minded if it had been a glass of whisky. ²⁰ Deviations from local folkways are not tolerated in politicians by most American constituencies.

   What can be done for a public who insist upon bringing irrelevant criteria to bear in voting for officials and who decline to participate in the basic task of seeking out and supporting suitable candidates?

   Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York is a case very much in point. Professor Lipset as of 1960 thought it more likely "that Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican Governor of New York, will ultimately prove to be the true representative of the revived pattern of direct participation in politics by members of the upper class-participation through their traditional party, the Republican" rather than upper-class people like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, G. Mennen Williams, John F. Kennedy and Averell Harriman in the Democratic Party. At the time all politicians conceded that Rockefeller, had he forced his own nomination as he could have, would have beaten John F. Kennedy hands down.

   Yet Lipset's Republican hope was buried in political ashes for years owing largely to his subsequent divorce and remarriage. By reason of this purely personal action, which could not affect a man's managerial capability, a large section of the small-town Republican Party followership turned against him. As far as the presidency is concerned, Rockefeller was long pronounced dead by politicians but was at least tentatively exhumed as 1968 approached. Now many sophisticated observers such as Walter Lippmann and Gore Vidal began looking upon him as the nation's single hope of escape from Johnsonian realpolitik.

   Wealthy party supporters proceed quite otherwise. If a man votes right in committees, on the legislative floor, makes the big decisions in favor of property, they are behind him no matter what he does privately. They could not care less if he maintained a string of supple mistresses of all colors, shapes, religions and sizes and smoked opium. All that would bother them about this sort of thing in a sound legislator or decision maker would be the danger of the public getting wind of it. But the man's private life, if he was politically on the beam, would be strictly his own business. He could listen to string quartets and detest baseball for all they cared. He could even be civilized!--the ultimate of extreme democratic tolerance.

   The common run of voter, a person nobody pays any attention to most of his life, when it comes to casting his ballot suddenly feels that he has some power: Intolerant of all differences, he intends to use his paltry power to the hilt. As anticipated by the politicians, he looks the candidates over and compares them with a mental cartoon of the perfect philistine and asks himself these questions: Is he baptized? Does he belong to the right Christian sect? Does he go to church regularly? What is his race? Does he show the least sign of being superior, uppity, in any way, such as by seriously using long words? Does he seem to enjoy himself in some unorthodox way?

   Has he at any time stepped out of a petty conventional mold? Does he ever say anything original? The wrong answers to such questions, as politicians know, will usually swing large decisive blocks of votes and will cause ordinary boobs to break party regularity.

   Aside from party regulars, most voters, in the belief of politicians, vote punitively. What they are voting against, furthermore, is not ordinarily some disliked policy but, usually, some personal characteristic of the man. He may, like Adlai Stevenson, be too witty. In this way the boobs, calling upon all other boobs to join with them, work off a good deal of their frustrated hostility. What their vote will do for them taxwise they have no idea. They don't know most of them are already paying 50 to 80 per cent more taxes under Democratic "leftism" than they ought to be paying under an equitable arrangement.

   For some time to come, Negro politicians are going to have an easy task snaring boobish Negro votes. They are, borrowing a leaf from southern white colleagues, simply going to talk tough about the white man. They are not, however, going to overcome the white man. They are going to make deals with him, for their personal benefit, behind the scenes. Their Negro constituents meanwhile are going to continue more or less to eat humble pie in one form or other, like their white fellow-democrats. Adam Clayton Powell and William L. Dawson and the late Oscar De Priest of Chicago are merely precursors of a long line of coming Negro politicians who, under enlarging liberalized attitudes toward Negroes, will have found the road to Upward Social Mobility. They will have money in the bank, possibly a lively white mistress--or two--under the bed.

   As to his ethnicity or national origin a politician cannot usually deceive his public. If he is a Ruritanian he has to admit it and bray loudly that he is inordinately proud of it, thus securing the votes at least of nitwit Ruritanians. On the score of religion, except for sect, it is another matter. Being for the most part intelligent men, most politicians, although conspicuous church-goers, unquestionably have no more conventional religious belief than Lenin, Marx or Robert Ingersoll. True, most of them probably believe also that organized religion is a good thing for keeping the boobs in line, joining here the thought of Plato in his Laws. But it is almost a certainty that, tested under the influence of a truth serum, most politicians would admit they themselves had little or no religious belief. Indeed, every significant action of their lives shows most of them are devoid even of natural piety. Not only do most of them have little genuine respect for people, hesitating not at sending tender youth into trackless jungles on sleeveless errands of death; they clearly show they have no respect even for the universe; they do not hesitate to pollute the atmosphere with lethal dust. They are simply low-grade technicians, in outlook so many plumbers (although it is probably an insult to hardworking plumbers to say so).

   Reasonably sure of most of their men after election, the propertied elements--inheritors, nouveaux riches and their many power-elite agents--unlike the general public do not sit back and wait to see what is brewing in the halls of government. Through lobbyists and other intermediaries they forcefully intervene at any and all times in the legislative and administrative processes, leaving nothing to chance.

   They also prudently keep a close and constant watch at all times on their elected representatives through the medium of the corporate press, trade press and private reporters. Many trade associations and corporations maintain these private reporters in Washington and the state capitals, women as well as men who move about, mingle, socialize, listen, observe and write long regular reports. In distant files dossiers build up on all or on the key men in relation to general or special interests. Into these dossiers goes everything, including gossip, carefully labeled as such. All of this information is useful when it comes to making nominating or appointive recommendations, campaign contributions, "reaching" a man or developing a public offensive against some recalcitrant official. In a very real sense officials are captives of these elements.

   Public office, said Grover Cleveland, is a public trust. But big property owners, having large stakes, do not allow their trust officers, either in finance or politics, to get far out of sight. Heeding Jefferson, they believe in being vigilant and forehanded in defense of their profitable liberties. As to trust officers in finance, although they are carefully selected, thoroughly screened and carefully watched by stages through the years, they are nevertheless heavily bonded. This ultimate precaution makes sense because one can be most thoroughly betrayed only by someone one trusts most implicitly. One can never tell when any man may slip a neuron and dip into the till or cook the books. Strange chemical reactions sometimes take place when a trust officer encounters a nymph or a betting agent.

   Public officers, however, are not ordinarily bonded. They can, though, be carefully watched, monitored, consulted, instructed, advised and personally assisted--in brief, surrounded. This they are, but only with respect to the specific felt interests of the propertied. The ordinary public, members of the labor force, cannot maintain such close vigilance and must depend on newspapers and the occasional reports of large organizations. Most of the electorate, in fact, does not even read these, preferring the sports pages, comics, crime sensations. Roll-call votes do not interest them unless they are about school prayers,

   What the public learns about its representatives is only what appears in the newspapers or hostile pamphlets. It may learn to its dismay that their senator loves "the purr of a Cadillac, the genial clink of ice cubes late at night, the company of lovely ladies. . . ." ²¹ By means of such trivia, which might easily have applied to George Washington (who liked fast horses rather than Cadillacs but was fond of the ladies and a touch of the grape), home sentiment is raised to an angry simmer.

   Any legislator who, perhaps seeking higher office, levels a lance at some large propertied interest, like the late Senator Estes Kefauver, instantly raises against himself formidable under-the-surface forces. And crusades such as Kefauver's against politically protected crime syndicates, high drug prices and monopoly are, beyond doubt, educational, informative and entertaining, and they do produce some temporary modifications. But in the long run matters settle back pretty much as they were, awaiting the appearance of another nine-day giant-killer.

   Most people in politics--organization types--do not aim at being the Number One Man. And most who do, know that the spot is more easily attained deviously than by appearing as a fierce tribune of the people. For this reason crusaders are few and far between. But anyone in politics who feels neglected can always step into the crusading role. For this reason, among others, the propertied interests try to see that nobody feels neglected, everybody instead feels facilitated. "Don't stir up the animals," is the working maxim.

   It should always be remembered that the man in office, even before he is approached by minions of the propertied, does not feel angry at any established interest. He is, usually, already in some degree a man of property himself, perhaps with glowing prospects ahead. While public promises he may rashly have made may be forgotten or disregarded, there being nobody immediately present to hold him to his duty, he is always in contact with those to whom he has made private promises. These must always be kept unless he is "let off the hook" for good reasons he can show.

   The common erroneous assumption of the voters is that anyone of their ethnic or national-origin number, class, fraternal order, religion or region is sympathetically inclined toward them. Such a representative, they believe, "understands" them better. Yet, as the record shows, such voters have pretty consistently been let down in their day-to-day interests all the way down the line. Money cancels all prior obligations.

   It is not necessarily that the politicians intend it this way, which is merely the way the ball bounces, the cookie crumbles, the rainbow disintegrates. It is simply that intelligent pressure and attention directed on them come mainly from the propertied. The nonpropertied are either absent or are interested chiefly in a long line of irrelevant nonsense like school prayers and ritual conformity to shopworn shibboleths. What can one do for people who believe their true friends are characters like the Reverend Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, Archbishop Fulton Sheen and Francis Cardinal Spellman? It costs a politician or his moneyed supporters nothing to declare in favor of school prayers; it may sound commendable to many. But, whether the prayers are held or not, they make no difference as between poverty and affluence.

   It should not be thought, however, that a tight leash is kept on officials by the propertied. For it is not. The watchers are always sensitively aware that officials must play peekaboo with the larger public and must sometimes vote or act in ways that are thoroughly unsound from a propertied point of view. Such grandstand action is seldom resented by the watchers unless it is felt to be gratuitous and avoidable.

   But any elected official who consistently goes against the grain of the propertied interests is quickly tagged "anti-business," tantamount to being labeled an anti-party deviationist in the Soviet Union. The man so labeled has been marked for political destruction, will have to fight to the hilt for his political life. Anti-labor he may be and live, anti-immigrant, anti-farmer, anti-intellectual and even anti-veteran. But if he consistently gives the watchful lobbyists a hard time he must depend strictly on his own resources and ingenuity to gain and hold electoral support. Very few have succeeded at it.

   Most Americans, most of the time, nevertheless live in a state of mild semicontent in the substandard habitations that compose substandard residential areas of the richest industrial country on earth. Where there is positive discontent it is usually not very thoroughgoing and could usually be easily removed. Almost any person questioned, of course, would usually like a better job, perhaps a more lively or varied one; somewhat better pay but not necessarily a great deal more; a somewhat better neighborhood to live in, perhaps less noise, soot and crowding in the region; somewhat better schools for the children but nothing outstanding; a longer vacation; not necessarily shorter hours but perhaps somewhat lower taxes (but not very much lower); possibly somewhat lower prices in general; a new car (possibly a Thunderbird); a color television set or even two; maybe a little fishing shack in the country but nothing fancy; some new or additional electric appliances for the home; possibly less crowded transportation to and from work; some deferred dental work; and the like. There is little among an average American's visualized needs, including medical, that would not be taken care of by just a little more money. As to cultural quality there is little felt need. Culturally, everything is thought to be good enough.

   I am not referring here, of course, to the lower 20 to 25 per cent, too stupefied by its condition to look for anything better or even to complain. Some at this level do remark plaintively, true enough, of rats infesting their scabrous homes or leaks in the roof and seem to hope that somebody will some day come and remove them. Unable to qualify for readily available jobs because of low intelligence, lack of training, psychic depression, uncouth manners or general debility (hereditary or acquired), lack of accurate information and personal neglect, often concentrated in regions to which they have earlier been enticed at temporarily good pay for now-abandoned mining or industrial processes under what economists blithely call Labor Mobility, they listlessly sit and vaguely hope that something new will turn up. What would suit them as well as anything else would be a first-class war for which they could get good wages making ammunition. In the meantime, forehanded fly-by-night, freedom-loving entrepreneurs extract from them whatever they may have in cash, usually public relief money, by means of conscientious overcharges for rent, food, clothing and dispensable gadgets dispensed on the basis of free misrepresentation.

   Little noticed about the habitual poor is the fact that most of them are poorest of all in spirit. Most are from unusually large families in which they have been pointedly depreciated and "put down" by habitually irritated parents or, when such is not the case, they have come to see themselves as an operative cause of the harsh family condition--another troublesome mouth to feed. Contrasting with the low sense of self-esteem among the poor is a correspondingly high sense of quiet self-esteem among the established rich, a reflex to their having usually been catered to by parents and servants and always spoken of as entitled to the best--in clothes, in food, in schools, in marriage, in trips to Europe and the like. The habitual rich do not place a high value upon self merely because they have money (as is often thought) but because in most cases they have been conditioned to being highly valued or overvalued by everybody around them. In many among poor as well as rich there is a noticeable reaction-formation to these basic feelings of value and nonvalue. Many of the poor react by assertively proclaiming their high value (which they do not really feel) and respond approvingly to the assertions of clergy, democratic ideologists and politicians about their superlative value: "God must love the poor because He made so many of them." Some no doubt feel in their bones that it is a fairy tale--but it is a pleasant one. The rich, per contra, react by developing an outward mien of modesty, unassumingness, tentativeness and self-deprecation. Everybody remarks: "What a nice democratic guy! He'll talk with anybody, real friendly. Who'd ever think he was worth $100 million? A real gentleman."

   But, whether overassertive or submissive in attitude, most of the poor feel marked down. From birth onward their entire experience, with only unusual exceptions, has underlined and emphasized their lowliness and dispensability. Here, indeed, is the purely human difference between most of the rich and the poor, which F. Scott Fitzgerald correctly sensed in noting that the rich were different and which Ernest Hemingway failed to register when he observed in response that the only difference was that the rich had more money. Money, indeed, is the least of the differences, man for man and pound for pound, between the rich and the poor, always allowing for exceptional cases on both sides of the fence. The broad difference lies in self-valuation--too low in one case, too high in the other.

   Two things the working American dreads but seldom talks about: loss of his health and loss of his job, which loss of health by itself usually entails. "Thank God for your health," it is commonly said reprovingly to complainers unless they are on their last legs.

   Without the ownership of income-producing property, holding at most some small savings, some life insurance and possibly some equity in a mediocre mortgaged home, 90 per cent of Americans (as we have seen) are completely dependent on wages or salary. Relatively few hold jobs under tenure or long-term contract. If the jobs are removed the jugular vein is severed, not only on the means of livelihood but on self-esteem. Most Americans out of a job, no matter how they got that way, feel beaten. If joblessness continues very long they begin to be looked at askance by family and friends. Are they flat tires in the land of success? They begin to wonder themselves.

   Full-scale employment is a prime basic aim of American public policy, supported by both parties. It has been recognized since the massive layoffs of the 1930's that here, if nowhere else, is a problem that could generate really big political upheaval. Although the labor force has grown with the population, unemployment remains and a number work part time as well as some at two jobs. Those the political managers have not been able to absorb into the labor force they have tried to provide for by (1) prolonged routine schooling, (2) the maintenance of a German-style standing army of more than three million men and (3) paid retirement at ages 62 to 65. Anyone retired, in the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe or in school is obviously not unemployed. Yet approximately one-third cannot qualify for military service for physical or mental reasons; many of the same group plus others cannot absorb available schooling--a problem.

   By way of providing for the inexorably growing labor force, the political parties foster schemes of government-subsidized capital expansion at home-- economic growth"--and investment abroad--"economic imperialism"under military protection.

   There is present, then, especially as population growth has not even been tardily curbed, an obviously explosive situation--what professors are prone to call "a dynamic configuration." This last implies only that almost anything can happen.

   As long as they are employed at fairly reasonable wages Americans, far less politicalized than their European counterparts, are sufficiently content. Only low prices for farmers, low wages or unemployment, as history shows, can put a noticeable number of them into serious political motion and make them start thinking, reading and talking about their plight. Even then their political expression in the form of dissident parties has never amounted to a considerable percentage of the popular vote. As long as there seems any hope simply of bottom-level, hand-to-mouth employment, they remain glued to one of the prefabricated parties. In this they are very much like the diligent Germans who, as history attests, will go any way politically that the jobs lie. Perhaps this is only reasonable.

   Americans, moderately content (except for certain minority blocs in times of crisis), are almost to a man grateful for living in such a marvelous political and economic situation, extending liberty and equal justice to all--the last in part a reflex attitude to propaganda that begins early in the public schools. Those rank-and-file Americans who do not feel grateful tend to feel guilty over their lack of gratitude for such a reputedly fine system.

   The intense gratitude felt by many is well illustrated by a case cited by Drew Pearson: Nick Galinfianakis, a lawyer, Duke University professor and member of the North Carolina state legislature, stood as a candidate for Congress in 1966 against Smith Bagley, young grandson of R. J. Reynolds, the tobacco tycoon. Pearson noted that Galinfianakis got into politics when friends put up $18 to file his name as a candidate for the state legislature. Said Galinfianakis to Pearson:

   "With a name as monstrous as mine I thought it was a joke. I didn't think anyone would vote for a name like mine. However, my father was born in Crete and had a sense of gratitude toward this country. He used to run water out of a spigot and say, 'Look at the clean water we have to drink. We couldn't get that back in Greece!' My father ran a little hot dog stand, and he felt a deep obligation to this country. I feel that in the Legislature I've been discharging his obligation--and mine." ²²

   This is far from an isolated instance but typifies, I have found, a general attitude especially among immigrant groups down to the third generation and among recent refugees from Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism. Second- and third-generation children of immigrant families have in millions of cases been told, when complaining of anything, to "be grateful you have a roof over your head," "be grateful you have something at all to eat." "Be grateful. . . ."

   In most of the immigrant families, and among many of the earlier native frontier families, there remains a family tradition about some sort of distant, life-sapping and perhaps nameless hardship that has been narrowly escaped. The descendants of those who escaped that hardship, whatever it was, are repeatedly told to be grateful for living in a country of so many opportunities, such wide liberties, such bountiful fields, such clean water, such blue skies. The children owe gratitude above all to parents for choosing such a country. Examples of poor boys who have "made good," from Rockefeller and Carnegie to Everett M. Dirksen and Lyndon B. Johnson, are often cited and the mass media can run the list up into the thousands, the ten thousands. But, and here is the dazzling moment of truth, they can't run it up to a million, not to 500,000, not perhaps even to 100,000. There are enough showcase examples of "successes," however, who have made it to become the biggest used-car-lot operator in all history, to overwhelm most dissenters. The unconvinced are merely carpers. Whatever is amiss, it is implied, will soon be rectified, perhaps after the next big election.

   If times are bad or uncertain they will sooner or later improve. In any event, there is no need for anything drastic although many persons would no doubt agree it would be a boon if there were only guaranteed jobs or income, perhaps hereditary jobs.

   In reading their newspapers Americans reinforce their attitudes by making note of wholesale death camps in Germany; concentration camps and secret police in Russia; mass slaughters in India, Turkey, China and Pakistan; famines in Greece and elsewhere; overpopulation; lack of water, and, in general, secret police, executions, a bad situation all over the earth. They little realize that foreign newspapers, with equal truth, regularly feature lynchings and riots in the United States, American unemployment and slums rivaled perhaps only by those of India, floods, soup lines, Hoovervilles, gangsters, periodic American depressions and recessions, McCarthyite cultural vigilantism, widespread American lawlessness, traffic jams, ugly cities, water and air pollution, advertising fakery, and other vile conditions. There is, evidently, widespread editorial selection all over precisely with the idea of fostering in-group feelings of complacency. Actually, things are varyingly bad in most places. All Utopias are bogus.

   Not everybody, of course, has traditional grounds, however tenuous, for feeling grateful. There are, first, the Negroes--10 per cent of the population. Negroes provide clamorous evidence that the American system, whatever it is, is not benign in all its dispensations. Oddly, to those nurtured on myth, it has its Siberias.

   There are, as a matter of fact, many others who seem to have little ground for gratitude; most of them appear to be of the politically apathetic strata that cannot even bring themselves to vote. As a financial writer for the New York Post, commenting on an analysis in the Social Security Bulletin, puts it:

   The number of "poor" Americans-officially defined as having a yearly income of about $3,100 or less for a non-farm family of four-has been slashed a minimum of 6,000,000 since 1960. In the same period, the number of "near poor" just above this lowest income bracket has jumped at least 1,000,000. In totals today, 34,000,000 are living under the "poverty" line and 16,000,000 Americans are living right above it. These facts . . . are a warning of what even a slight economic recession could mean to 50,000,000 Americans. . . .

   According to the Social Security yardstick, the poor individual today has 70¢ a day to spend on food plus $1.40 for rent, clothes, home maintenance, transportation, everything else. The near poor person has 93¢ a day for food, plus $1.85 for everything else. The fact is that one in four Americans (including 22,000,000 children under 18) now exist at these levels. The fact is that 43 per cent of all Americans over the age of 65 today are either poor or near poor. ²³

   This is about what many smokers spend in a day on cigars.

   Perhaps even most of these feel grateful for something. If they do not, their discontent is not translated into political action. Very possibly most of them are of low IQ, perhaps inordinately low owing to diet deficiencies and self-depreciation.

   But if 25 per cent of Americans live in poverty and near-poverty another 50 per cent can hardly be said, in the light of official income statistics, to be living more than meagerly. Touches of "the affluent society" begin to be encountered only in the lower levels of the economically upper 25 per cent and do not amount to much until one gets into the upper 10 per cent of income receivers. The "affluent society" is really a not too thick veneer, mostly a surcharged installment-credit affair.

   According to the 1960 census, the formal schooling of Americans twenty-five years old and over was as follows: ²⁴

                                         Number            Per Cent 

Total persons in this age range        99,024,000           100.0 
No schooling                            2,251,000             2.3 
One to four years of school             5,997,000             6.0 
Five to seven years of school          13,710,000            13.8 
Eight years of school                  17,397,000            18.0 
One to three years of high school      19,047,000            19.2 
Four years of high school              24,330,000            24.5 
One to three years of college           8,705,000             8.8 
Four years or more of college           7,588,000             7.5

   Impressive when compared with the data for Basutoland, as they sometimes are, these statistics, as educators warn, do not portend what they are taken to portend owing to the general low quality of the American educational system, especially at the elementary and secondary levels and more than half of the college level. Most formal education in the United States is of the once-over-lightly, hit-and-run, masscult, bargain-counter and vocational variety so that even many college graduates have lingering difficulties about spelling, writing plain prose, identifying crucial historical figures, events and ideas or reading beyond the level of Reader's Digest. If one is seeking effectively schooled people one must reduce the high school and college figures of a largely Potemkin-Village system by more than half. ²⁵ No other large country, however, has a better system.

   Education, of course, is not to be confused with mere schooling. Eric Hoffer, lightly schooled longshoreman-author of The True Believer, stands out as a far more thoroughly educated man than, for example, William F. Buckley, Jr., Yale graduate who wrote the grotesque God and Man at Yale, as good a sample as any of the Buckley lucubrations. If one concedes Buckley every one of his points against Yale--and a civilized man would hold them to be positive virtues--one sees that he has unwarrantably built his case about a complex institution on few and untypical cases relating wholly to the minor undergraduate college, ignoring the mountain for the mouse.

   It should not, then, be supposed that I make a cult of schooling and believe that even at its best it necessarily represents education. A cultivated autodidact like Hoffer (and there are others) can, as it so happens, hold his own with swarms of Ph.D.'s. A few topflight professors do not even have a bachelor's degree--Lewis Mumford for one example.

   George Gallup, the poll wizard, every so often makes a popular survey on topics of immediate public interest. Invariably, on whatever is of, trivial interest he finds the public well informed, on whatever is of serious concern the vast majority is abysmally ignorant even though the newspapers have gone overboard on the subject. Few will know what a cyclotron is; nearly everyone will be quite expert on something like the Profumo Affair or miniskirts.

   If one gives credence to the bare school statistics, however, a considerable part of the population is sufficiently educated: 40.8 per cent over twenty-five as of 1960 had graduated from high school, with 7.5 per cent finishing four years or more of college and 8.8 attending college for one to three years, mostly one. There is obviously a weak base here for general intelligent political action. Statistically, the certified laggards outnumber the certified competents. Recalling the figures on the distribution of intelligence, knowing that formal completion of schooling in a loose system is not always indicative of solid knowledge and good judgment, it is evident why the populace is not able to select, elect and retain representatives who will act in their broad interests.

   Educational attainment in the United States, indeed, is generally so low that this complex industrial nation must now increasingly draw much of its highly skilled personnel from abroad, often attracting from needier nations their people of great skill. Just as the United States now processes far more of the raw materials of the world than any other country so it seems well over the threshold of attracting to its shores by offers of higher salaries and better professional facilities most of the brains of the world. The process has been called "the brain drain." Immigration, once confined to the unskilled, now features the highly skilled.

   According to Foreign Affairs on the subject of the "brain drain" to the United States, "the statistics that have been developed on the so-called 'brain drain' present a somber picture. According to one UNESCO report, 43,000 scientists and engineers emigrated to the United States between 1949 and 1961, 'many' of whom came from the less developed countries. Of the 11,200 immigrants from Argentina alone between 1951 and 1963, nearly half were technicians and professional people, 15 percent were high-level administrators and 38 percent skilled workers. In 1964-65, 28 percent of the internships and 26 percent of the residencies in U.S. hospitals were filled by foreign graduates--nearly 11,000 in all--and 80 percent of the foreign interns and 70 percent of the foreign residents were from developing countries. The drain from Asian nations, particularly Taiwan and Korea, is the most serious: it is estimated that over 90 percent of the Asian students who come here to study never return home." ²⁶

   Those who came to the United States as advanced students came under foreign assistance programs; but they remain to fill in gaps of higher personnel that are not filled by the native products of the American school system.

   England, which itself drains the Commonwealth countries of talent, is alarmed at the drain of its own physicians, surgeons and scientists to the United States. It is losing physicians and surgeons in the proportion of one-fifth to one-third of the graduates of its medical schools each year, some of them intensively trained specialists. ²⁷

   While the official unemployment rate hovers a little below 4 per cent and the extreme poverty rate around 25 per cent, the Department of Labor has advised that there are three million high-level jobs more or less permanently vacant in the country--for engineers, scientists, technicians, statisticians, administrators, nurses, physicians, teachers and the like. Neither the populace nor the educational system seems able to supply fully the needs of a technologically advanced system, partly because of native incapacity, partly because of educational shortsightedness and parsimony and partly because of low-level communal goals set by half-literate local community leaders and politicos.

   Corporations, universities and government agencies compete madly with each other for well-schooled personnel. Local communities flounder and sink because men of informed judgment have been drawn away to distant points of the compass, leaving local Chamber of Commerce mentalities in charge.

   These figures, true enough, can be interpreted in various ways. It can be said that technology has advanced so fast that it has left much of the population behind, breathless, which is strictly true. It can also be said that the population and communal institutions have not been adequate to meet rising needs, which is equally true.

   Just as the level of educational attainment is not sufficient to meet the general needs of the time so, it is my argument, the level of educational attainment is not sufficient to meet the political needs of the people in selecting political personnel devoted to the needs of the nation. One gets instead the well-known variety of peanut politician, mainly exemplified at or near the top in streamlined hicks like Lyndon B. Johnson, Everett Dirksen, Orville Faubus and George C. Wallace, to name only a few of the currently most obtrusive and obnoxious. ²⁸

   As politics is the realm productive of public policy, the troubles of the country trace back inevitably to politics. Here we find largely inadequate officeholders chosen by largely inadequate people on the basis of largely irrelevant criteria, always allowing for the fact that a minority of the officeholders and a minority of the people are fully adequate to their responsibilities.

   The democratic system thus comes full circle and in the United States presents a parody of itself on the governmental level. ²⁹ As a consequence the entire land is officially plunged into Madison Avenue nonsense. The system, it turns out, has been infiltrated and subverted by boobocrats.

   While institutional inadequacy is involved it is (contrary to a long line of radicals, liberals and plain democrats) by no means the whole story. Although many Americans above age twenty-five are inadequately educated and schooled, nobody at all is twisting their arms to make them remain that way. The major cities are all heavily supplied with public night schools on every level from the primary grades to university postgraduate levels and anybody may rectify his educational defects very readily, usually free of direct charge. Some do; most don't. Again, most of the major cities have excellent libraries, very lightly patronized.

   Where the interests of the broad public he may be discerned on any weekend when they hit the roads in their cars. While this aimless driving about on superb highways may be cosmically innocent, like praying, it is not done by a populace seriously concerned about its destiny. It is done, in fact, by handicapped boobs.

   What we have before us is an operative and a formal political-legal system. The latter, it should be perfectly understood, is quite well devised to respond in an orderly, systematic way to the collective will of the populace.

   The operative system, the real system--control by corporation--subsidized politicians--quickly came into being and prevailed owing simply to the inability of the electorate to understand and use properly the system offered. This electorate consisted almost entirely of rustic Anglo-Saxon and Scotch-Irish hinds and, in the course of time, largely illiterate continental European immigrants.

   With the spread of the popular franchise after 1830 the system decreasingly elevated characters like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the choices of an educated landed and mercantile enfranchised political elite, and instead pushed up from the soil confused Jacksons, Van Burens, Buchanans, Grants, McKinleys and more recently Hardings, Coolidges, Eisenhowers, Johnsons et al. The trend was even more marked on the lower levels and only exceptionally did men of genuine political grasp make their way upward. Many of this order simply did not make it and turned away from politics.

   The operative system that came into being, then, was a reflex to popular rather than institutional inadequacy, an important distinction. It is the Marxist idea that all social evil is traceable to existing institutions. I deny this although I do not deny that existing institutions are often influences toward evil, especially as these institutions are distorted under usage. Beautiful parks are despoiled by ordinary people misusing them, not by their managers. ³⁰

   In glancing at the market place, it will be observed that what is chiefly criticizable about it is that much of it, as in "democratic" politics, represents a genuine adjustment to the low-level understanding and goals of much of its public, the customers. It is also true, however, that much of this market place simply ignores the customer, the public, and goes about blithely frying its fish in its own way, as in the establishment of monopoly arrangements. In many ways the market and its institutions, as it turns out, pointedly do not exist to serve the public; the public exists to serve the market, to facilitate its operation. ³¹

   The American economist Thorstein Veblen developed the concept of economic surplus, most recently employed by the neo-Marxists Baran and Sweezy in computing it (for the first time) for 1929-63. It was Veblen's contention in The Theory of Business Enterprise and The Theory of the Leisure Class that much, perhaps most, of this surplus was wasted, purposely and conscientiously, so that it could not be used to improve institutions or the life of the people as a whole. The argument was: Capitalism establishes monopolies and uses advanced technology in order to increase surplus to a certain point and then wastes much or most of this surplus in order not to alter the necessary conditions for generating such surplus. Instead of operating to uplift and improve everybody and ameliorate the conditions of life, thus altering institutions, it was held it operated to keep everybody right where he was, which meant that the rich became richer and the poor remained poor or meagerly sustained.

   The economic surplus, specifically, is the difference between what a society produces and the cost of producing it. The larger the surplus the more a society has to dispose of in various ways of its theoretical choice.

   As derived by Baran and Sweezy with the assistance of Joseph D. Phillips from orthodox official data, since 1929 the American surplus has ranged from a low of 40.4 per cent of gross national product in 1934 to a high of 71.6 per cent in 1943; it stood at 56.1 per cent in 1963. It stood at 46.9 per cent in 1929 and has shown a definite tendency to rise over the decades. As estimates are used even in some of the official government figures employed, there is room for error. But even if error went as high as 10 per cent, or even 15 per cent, either way, the computations would be broadly indicative.

   The major components of the surplus for 1963, for example, were as follows: ³²

Total property income                           $104,618,000,000
   (Corporate and noncorporate income, rents,
   interest, profit component of corporate
   officers, etc.)

Waste in distribution (sales effort, trade
   advertising, etc.)                             29,749,000,000

Nontrade corporate advertising                     7,700,000,000

Surplus employees' compensation                   17,650,000,000
   (Finance, insurance, realty and legal services,
   which last cost only $870 million)

Absorbed by government                           168,008,000,000

Total surplus                                   $327,725,000,000

Percentage of Gross National Product                     56.1

   The direct return to property, then (out of gross national product of $589.2 billions-plus), amounted to more than 17 per cent, which accrued in all to not much more than 10 per cent of the populace by any reckoning and was concentrated most heavily in a thin upper level of this 10 per cent. With respect to the surplus itself, the take of property was nearly 30 per cent.

   The components of waste in the business process shown in the Baran-Sweezy computation consist of expenditures for advertising, market research, expense-account entertaining, maintaining an excessive number of sales outlets, public relations and lobbying, salaries and bonuses of salesmen, maintenance of showy office buildings and business litigation. None of this adds anything to the value or utility of what is produced. ³³

   There would be an element of waste in any system, but the argument here is that the waste under capitalism is institutionally determined in order to maintain capitalism itself rather than a high quality of social life. It does no good to argue with a Moscow-oriented Marxist that there is as much or more waste and irrationality in the Soviet system, because the defensive answer here would be that the Russian system was not an outgrowth of capitalism, as Marx stipulated that socialism should be, but is an originally backward system that must pass through a capitalist phase of labor exploitation and the like in order to establish an industrial base for socialism, which is something that will be ushered into being in due course. Those who believe this, in view of the rise of a Soviet vested political bureaucracy, must draw upon whatever credulity they possess. My own view with respect both to capitalism and to sovietism is: There is no Santa Claus. Under whichever system one has, workers, it seems, will work and administrators will administer, on terms more or less unequal in all cases unless administrators deliberately choose to play fair.

   As to advertising, it is recognized by many economists of repute as an uneconomic aberration, introduced by corporations as a substitute for competitive pricing. The advertisements create the illusion of product differentiation among large varieties of essentially identical products. These essentially identical products are, it is true, differently styled and packaged but in most cases the "talking points" are irrelevant.

   Economists agree that the ultimate consumer pays for the advertising which in turn defeats the ultimate consumer in his search for lower prices, maintains monopoly prices. The worst thing that can happen in the system, in the view of its managers, is price-cutting, which reduces surplus.

   Continual advertising itself, by its overwhelming success, in some cases leads to a virtual monopoly of some products--for example, the Gillette among the wet-shave safety razors.

   As the gilt-edged economist E. H. Chamberlin observed, "selling methods which play upon the buyer's susceptibilities, which use against him [my emphasis] laws of psychology with which he is unfamiliar and therefore against which he cannot defend himself, which frighten or flatter or disarm him--all of these have nothing to do with his knowledge. They are not informative; they are manipulative. They create a new scheme of wants by rearranging his motives." ³⁴

   "Madison Avenue" has come in for a great deal of condemnation. It should be observed, however, that the irrational extravagances of advertising could not be employed if there were not a vast public unable to see through the transparently deceptive devices used. It is public response that sustains advertising.

   It is not that the advertisements are false in general, although false advertisements, advancing direct claims that can be disproven, have been found in abundance by the Federal Trade Commission. But, even though not false, the advertisements are almost invariably grossly misleading. They are vague, ambiguous, irrelevant and often absolutely nonsensical. By freely using improper techniques, advertising effectively subverts the work of the schools in teaching the proper uses of language and clarity in thinking. The multitudes of handicapped are intellectually defenseless when they come to advertising, and the process of absorbing the nonsense of the free-ranging advertisers intensifies their intellectual handicap. Many people talk and think about the world the way Madison Avenue has vividly but zanily taught them. ³⁵

   The logic of Madison Avenue is to employ language and pictures irrationally with a rational view to selling price-fixed goods and making money. It is able to do this because it carefully exploits human weakness--suggestibility and ignorance. In saying this, nothing is said about products or their quality--another story.

   Whatever property owners do not consume or allocate to various self-serving nonprofit purposes they reinvest. Such reinvestment may be in already established areas or in new areas: new industries or foreign lands. Precisely what the propertied element consumes cannot be directly computed. Small property holders probably consume most of their income. In the case of large property holders, income cannot be consumed without resorting to colossal extravagances such as the maintenance of six large homes.

   What is left for consumption and personal reinvestment one may obtain some glimpse of by taking account what is reinvested by corporations. In 1962, as Baran and Sweezy show, expenditures of surplus by nonfinancial corporations for research and development totaled $12 billion and for outlays on plant and equipment $32 billion, of which a fantastic 81.9 per cent was greedily charged as depreciation. Since 1953 the totals for research and development, plant outlays and abnormally exaggerated depreciation had climbed steadily and phenomenally. There was, thus, $48 billion reinvested out of total property income for the year of $99.2 billion, or nearly half.

   There was, furthermore, the item of foreign investment, possibly not more than half of which represented actual flow of capital from the United States. The total of direct foreign investments increased from $11.8 billion in 1950 to $40.6 billion in 1963, an increase of $28.8 billion, according to official figures. Between 1950 and 1956 such investment each year ranged from half to three-quarters billion but thereafter in each year has usually far exceeded $1 billion and in 1957 exceeded $2 billion. It therefore seems safe to say that on the average at least half of property income is usually reinvested, with the proportions of what is reinvested increasing as one moves up the scale of property holders in point of individual magnitude. In general, the invested position of the propertied is steadily improving. Foreign investment is far more lucrative than domestic and the quest for foreign markets is what enables American industry to bypass in so many ways its own population.

   Some of the approximate $50 billion that was left over may also have been reinvested as new personal investments. In any event, the property owners in that year had some $50 billion of unearned income at their personal disposition, roughly equivalent to the sum absorbed by the armed forces.

   Yet, as Baran and Sweezy remark, the monopoly system tends to work at cross purposes with itself.

   It tends to generate ever more surplus, yet it fails to provide the consumption and investment outlets required for the absorption of a rising surplus and hence for the smooth working of the system. Since surplus which cannot be absorbed will not be produced, it follows that the normal state of the monopoly capitalist economy is stagnation. With a given stock of capital and a given cost and price structure, the system's operating rate cannot rise above the point at which the amount of surplus produced can find the necessary outlets. And this means chronic underutilization of available human and material resources. Or, to put the point in slightly different terms, the system must operate at a point low enough on its profitability schedule not to generate more surplus than can be absorbed. ³⁶

   Compensation for surplus or intermediary employees, as Baran and Sweezy admit, would exist in any system; but it is their argument, for which they cite good reasons, that under the American system much of it is excessive and wasteful. The intermediation of brokers and agents adds nothing to the value of products. A real estate or stock broker, for example, may mediate the sale of the same property many times a year, drawing a commission each time. Nothing new has been added.

   The largest absorption of the surplus of the highly productive American system, however, takes place through government. Here, as official data show, absorption of surplus has risen steadily from $10.2 billion in 1929 to the level of $168 billion in 1963. Here is the statistical basis for the cry of statism against the welfare-warfare-subsidy state. From 1929 to 1961 government spending steadily rose from 9.8 per cent to 28.8 per cent of gross national product. ³⁷

   It is common knowledge that some of government expenditure by anybody's standards represents waste, expenditure for socially unnecessary ends. The common notion of the congressional "pork barrel," with respect to which congressmen trade votes in order to get unnecessary expensive projects for their districts, supports the notion. The local folks are pleased but are postoffices in the form of Greek temples and colonial mansions necessary? Are various airfields and army posts necessary? Governmental absorption and spending of surplus, however, whether wasteful or not, "pumps" money back into the economy. The government, thus--local, state and federal--is the biggest customer in the marketplace and, if it considerably reduced or withdrew its patronage, the so-called private enterprise economic system would almost instantly collapse. By running Keynesian deficits it can push the economy ahead. By curtailing expenditures it can depress the whole structure.

   Despite the outcries against statism, it has been mainly for the military establishment that government demands on the economy have been made. Whereas in 1929 less than 1 per cent of gross national product was devoted to military purposes, by 1957 it had risen to more than 10 per cent and accounted for approximately two-thirds of the aggregate expansion of all government spending. Government spending, then, is largely military spending.

   Which government expenditures are socially necessary or sustaining and which are waste of surplus? We know already there is some waste, by common agreement; the question is only to determine how much there is, a difficult if not impossible task.

   Whereas nondefense or civilian expenditures by government increased only from 7.5 per cent of gross national product in 1929 to 9.2 per cent in 1957, the military proportion increased by fifteen times. Transfer payments increased from 1.6 per cent to 5.9 per cent, less than four times. ³⁸ Transfer payments comprise interest on government debt, subsidies minus surpluses of government enterprises, veterans' allowances, old-age pensions, unemployment benefits and the like.

   Although some argue that military spending is not a prop to the economy and contend despite the 1930's that there would not be a depression if military spending were reduced (because with the reduction in military expenses there would presumably be a corresponding reduction in taxes and a compensating rise in private spending or in redundant investment), it seems inescapable that no scattered private spending or investment could replace the massive concentrated military effort which currently takes more than three million men out of the labor force and makes an effective demand for more than 10 per cent of the production of the labor force.

   Instead of military spending, others argue, there could be an increase in socially necessary civilian spending as for hospitals, schools, sanatoria, playgrounds, health resorts, community centers, galleries, museums, lecture halls, libraries, public housing and the like. While such creations would indeed absorb surplus at as great a rate as one liked they would, clearly, be "socialistic." Such a civilian creation by government would in many directions, as in housing, medicine and other areas, conflict with profit enterprises and by supplying libraries, museums, lecture halls, playgrounds and the like would provide alternate uses for the free time of people, to the possible detriment of profit enterprises like TV, movies, automobiles and so on. All this is precisely what is not wanted by the vested interests who exert decisive political leverage. But if there were effective political leadership, overswollen military budgets could be trimmed for these domestic purposes.

   Merely to staff a great expansion in such socially useful facilities would require the diversion of much upper-level personnel from profit-making enterprises.

   Some percentage of the military establishment, by the testimony of all schools of thought, represents waste. Some of it is necessary waste, arising from unavoidable circumstances; some is avoidable waste. There are, again, those who would argue that, humanly speaking, it is all waste; we need not follow this line of thought in a highly imperfect world. Owing to continual technological advance, moreover, there is rapid obsolescence of much military equipment in a situation where it is felt, hysterically, that the nation must be prepared at any moment for a maximum military effort to save its very life.

   Large portions of civilian outlay by government can also readily be interpreted as waste. The federal roadbuilding program, as indicated in Note 28, supra, is considered (I think rightly) a huge example of compounding social waste by Baran and Sweezy, who also interpret slum clearance as in good part a waste of public money. This last item of waste comes about in this way: Instead of utilizing low-cost open spaces, readily available, the slum-clearing programs buy up deteriorated properties at good prices to the owners and then supply contractor-promoters with huge sums and excessive tax rebates to construct new buildings that rent at such prices as to bar slum dwellers. Slum clearance thus becomes indirectly subsidized luxury building, a delight to politicians, many of them participants in the building syndicates.

   Government expenditures for schools and hospitals, health and sanitary measures (water supply, sewage and garbage removal), conservation and recreation, housing and facilitation of commerce, police and fire protection, courts and prisons, legislatures and administrative offices are conceded by these writers to be socially necessary. Presumably they would agree that libraries, post offices, government printing and the maintenance of rivers and harbors are in the same category. But, as they point out, there has been little expansion of such services relative to the expansion of gross national product. Most expansion of governmental spending and allocation of funds has been in areas that are more or less, or entirely, socially and economically wasteful or rationally questionable.

   Thus, while socially necessary services are skimped and held down with cries for "economy in government," the sluice gates are wide open for the military in repelling a Leninist communism held to be lapping at distant shores and in underwriting schemes of roadbuilding and urban renewal that not only facilitate huge profit-making enterprises but undermine those that are socially more efficient such as railroads.

   In general, what Baran and Sweezy say here is true. The stake of property is steadily being increased under the camouflage of high depreciation write-offs. Persuasive advertising is wasteful and exploitative of credulity, a substitute for genuine competition. More surplus employees are utilized than is socially necessary, although not more than this kind of system requires. Much of what the government spends is indeed wasteful in various degrees and from various points of view and much of it, as in the approach to housing and the automobile complex, is positively harmful. In this last category we have, not merely social waste for profit, but positive, certifiable social harm for profit. Beyond the harm produced by the approaches of public policy to urban housing and the automobile complex there is the harm induced by misallocation of resources, as in military overspending for Over-Kill.

   The prime virtue of capitalism in theory is that it provides a mechanism--the ostensible free market--for meeting the effective varied demands of people at the best prices. What happens, however, when people are deviously induced to make an effective demand for something they do not need (automobiles instead of houses) or something that will not meet some need (chewing gum instead of psychotherapy) is not embraced in the theory. People must know their need and how to satisfy it. Again, if the market is under monopoly, people cannot make effective demand at the best possible prices even for things they do not need--things that do not cater to necessity, convenience or comfort. Ideas of spurious need are inculcated by playing upon latent fears, such as that other people will ostracize them if they do not use deodorants and a long line of other products. Advertising, seen in this aspect, is obviously a vast booby trap, a legally condoned swindle for profit. ³⁹

   As to the quality of goods in the Consumer Economy, where consumption in and of itself is regarded by many public men as the remedy for all ills, there is a wide range. In order to appeal to the impecunious, much of what is offered is sleazy, saturated with built-in obsolescence. The case made by Ralph Nader about the Detroit automobile could in general be applied to many products, although in the automobile it was more serious than usual owing to the immediate life-and-death aspect. ⁴⁰

   In order that at least the more literate portions of the middle classes may pick their way about among a large variety of substandard, overpriced and absolutely unnecessary products that cater at most to free-floating anxiety and suppressed restiveness, there have emerged successful private enterprises such as Consumer's Union and Consumer's Research. By means of regular reports these organizations, and others, advise subscribers of the results of product analysis and price comparison.

   Strong in the production of capital goods (generally machinery designed for further production), the American productive system in the line of consumer offerings is about as uneven as the American school system. The main consideration all along the line is admittedly the rate of profit. Producers, it must be conceded, are entitled to fair returns for effort, but the object of business enterprise in general and of the American business system in all its parts is to obtain maximum possible return without regard for quality or social necessity, comfort or convenience. Do-nothing products, economic placebos, are quite common. Under the rubric of glorious freedom, if they make a big profit through misleading advertising as in the case of deodorants, they are justified. The vendor has given the customer what he has been frightened or cajoled into wanting and has given employment perhaps to thousands who are raising children to grow into another army of worker-consumers making null or below-par products--all, however, for somebody's profit.

   Many products in the market, especially in pharmaceuticals and foods, are repeatedly found in government laboratories to be positively harmful. This is a long story in itself.

   Just how little fear of authority producers feel under the skull-and-crossbones of freedom we learn from Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, of the Bureau of Ships of the Navy and known as "The Father of the Atomic Submarine," a really competent man. Rickover announced that work on many atomic submarines was being delayed because parts, upon which performance depended, were being delivered that did not follow specifications. He cited "the inability of American industry to meet the exacting demands for quality and reliability posed by modem technology." and charged that industrialists did not know what went on in their plants, which were left to administrators chiefly interested in getting more contracts. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration at the same time voiced similar complaints, which it later smothered in a tribute to the cooperation of industry. Rickover not only held to his position but has many times made it known in the same terms. ⁴¹ The deaths of three astronauts were ascribed to poor equipment.

   Not all officials react disagreeably to treating the government as though it was a rank-and-file customer. The political authorities of Massachusetts, for example, accepted the Massachusetts Turnpike as constructed. Soon after completion the road was already crumbling over long stretches and was being extensively rebuilt. As one who has driven over this road many times and experienced its undulations, seen it pitted with holes and watched repair crews at work over its entire length, I can personally testify to its generally poor condition, especially as contrasted with the New York State Thruway, with which it connects. As soon as one travels on to the New York State road from the Massachusetts road one is aware of a dramatic transition from uncertainty and hazard to a well-engineered, well-built road. The ancient Romans built roads that are still used for heavy-duty purposes.

   A very wide range of consumer goods conforms more to the standards of the Massachusetts Turnpike than to the New York State Thruway, all produced under the pressing motivation of a quest for maximum profits. Cheap goods, perhaps not paradoxically, are often socially expensive goods.

   'The full-blown Marxist will have no difficulty putting his finger on the difficulty. He will say it is capitalism, or monopoly capitalism. With this convenient analytical abstraction, I do not agree.

   Capitalist institutions, being oriented toward private profit in return for the commitment of private capital, no doubt facilitate and reinforce inherent selfish drives in the acquisitive-minded, encourage corner-cutting. It is part of self-serving capitalist theory that the driving self-interest of the entrepreneur indirectly serves society, with an invisible hand conferring benefits out of the process. Up to a point this may be true, or it may once under competitive conditions have come nearer the truth than it is under monopoly conditions. But as the screws are rationally tightened to generate more and more profits, more and more surplus, the gains in the productive sector of the economy are increasingly made at the expense of the consuming sector. And social welfare lies at least as much as or more in the consuming sector than in the producing sector. Production is merely the means, consumption the end. In dominant American thinking, this order is reversed, Again, much of what is termed capitalism has been simple illegality, outside the system.

   If the general public were as rational as the producers and had at its fingertips as much knowledge and insight, and ability to apply knowledge and insight, all would perhaps be well. But a very large section of the public, a majority, is woefully handicapped through the possession of insufficient rationality, knowledge and insight. Its members are as amateur participants in a card game with experts. Not only are the politico-economic adversaries of the broad public highly expert but they are what is known among card players as sharpers, prone to violate the rules. These sharpers play a cooperative game with marked cards. Not only this but to some extent they are mind readers. Armed with a knowledge of psychological laws and backed up by computer technology, the large-scale entrepreneur knows in advance what plays the amateurs in elections and markets are bound to make. The amateurs, in fact, are inherently restricted in the plays they are able to make in their own defense. Even if they were pantologists they would not be able to make better choices than a mass-oriented monopoly market and complex political system offer.

   In the selection and purchase of goods and services, the disorganized public is led in some cases by necessity, in others by the quest for convenience and comfort and, at times, by the attraction of dispensable diversion and luxury. Beyond these ends it may, too, as advertisers well realize, be led by the prospect of purely imaginary and illusory advantages, as that ladies will become intensely amorous at the sight of men who use certain pomades.

   The cleverness of the rich, as I see it, has consisted largely of the fact that the acquisitors among them have been able to operate practically unhindered by law among multitudes of thoroughly confused people, who are readily victimized in politics and economics. The victims have at all times been left externally free to choose in their own way. The rich, whether they knew it or not, could always have been fortified in the thought that the handicapped will usually make the wrong choices under the rule of external freedom.

   Approached from the standpoint either of IQ or formal education, far more than half the population has not had the knowledge, intelligence or ability to make choices in its own interests. It has merely drifted with the tide, trusting to its feelings, while others gathered in the hay. Nobody in most instances twisted the arms of this population to make it perform as it did in the polling booth and the market; on the other hand, rescue parties have been few and have not been understood as such by the victims, who regarded saviors such as Mrs. Sanger as enemies. A whole line of would-be saviors, including socialists such as Norman Thomas, have been rotten-egged for taking the trouble to make known their panaceas to this same population. Left and right, radicals, reformers, liberals and labor organizers have been bustled off to jails, not usually by capitalists or even by capitalist agents, but by the local rank and file of victims and their duly elected officers.

   Underlying the low IQs and faulty education have been deliberately contrived cultural deprivation as in the case of Negroes and spontaneous, self-induced cultural deprivation as in the case of rural and small-town Protestants and urban Catholics. These, it is evident, have been self-designated victims in a game with rules the rank-and-file did not understand.

   What is evidently the case is that a large section of the population is dependent-emotionally, intellectually, economically and politically--and is unable inherently or by conditioning to function in its own behalf under free institutions. A large section of the population, indeed, if it is to be properly served, should be regarded as public wards, ethically subject to rather close highly informed benign guidance in making life dispositions. No doubt much of this dependency arises from its conditioning, from its unreasonably inculcated faith that provision will be made for it, if not by man then by some remote deity. Perhaps a socialist sector of society should be established for it, perhaps true socialism itself is the ultimate answer.

   As to socialism as the answer to social ills: I have never been a socialist simply because socialism has seemed to be a dispensation out of practical reach. As shown by the nonindustrial countries where it has been forced by revolutionary means, installed at a time of total social collapse, it can hardly be attained by force. The consequence is simple totalitarianism, with heavyhanded politicians in the saddle. Nor, as is evident from public indifference to it in the face of persuasive argument by a long line of intelligent men from G. B. Shaw to Bertrand Russell, can it be attained by persuasion. Socialism, which long antedates Karl Marx, who merely gave a distinctive romantic turn to the way of attaining it, is in fact an aristocratic doctrine, originated by a French count-Claude Henri de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), who fought in the American revolution and was imprisoned during the French revolution. Like socialists in general, aristocrats were disdainful of men of business, who believed in turning everything, including all of society, into a profit-making scheme. As Veblen said, "Men whose aim is not an increase in possessions do not go into business." ⁴²

   Not only is the profit-seeking way of the businessman distasteful to aristocrats, who long looked down on "people in trade," but it has been looked at askance by professionals from time immemorial. To the ancient Greeks, Hermes was not only the god of commerce but also of cunning and theft. While traders have perhaps been more influential than any other group in the diffusion of culture-more than the philosopher, theologian or writer--their influence here was no more than an unconscious byproduct of their intrusions into all corners of the world.

   It was basically the existence of this sort of trusting, optimistic, dependent, happy-go-lucky population that made it possible within a single generation for the wealth of the nation to find its way into hands almost as few as in some of the long-established older countries. The cleverness of the American rich comes down to the fact that acquisitors found themselves, like delirious foxes in a chicken farm, turned loose among so many unprotected suckers and boobs--the handicapped. From this situation sprang the rule, the overriding operating principle of American society: Never give a sucker an even break.

   The result was not brought about by capitalism, as the socialists claim, for such an abstraction has no power to do anything whatever. It was brought about by individual capitalists--that is to say, it was brought about by people seeking wealth, using convenient institutions, ideologies and strategies, versus less adroit people.

   Human life, in truth, is less an affair of institutions and systems than of people and an interplay of motivations and abilities.

   What I have said in this chapter, it is evident, reflects on the sagacity of most of the public, the darling of the democratic ideologue, who replaced God with "The People" as an object of veneration and faith. Any critical evaluation of the public usually is rejected as, somehow, unacceptable in the light of democratic dogma. ⁴³

   The objective role of the democratic ideologue is precisely as follows: Out of his own inner need to see humanity liberated from the rule of others be preaches his ideology. Into the network of institutions and policies thereby generated steps the economic entrepreneur and the politician, who convert democratic institutions into something of vast profit-to themselves. It is time, by now, to see that most people are not capable of wielding this instrument of democracy in their own interests. They do not know by what standards to select representatives who will secure the popular interest. Perhaps, even, they do not care.