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Fifteen

    THE DIVINE SPARK
    AMONG THE RICH

   Pretty much ignored by the public relations artists, who usually have more specific fish to fry, some of the American rich at least have individually performed in ways commendable from strictly critical points of view and in ways that at least occasionally draw indulgent, even maudlin, commendation from outside their class. They have by no means, contrary to leftist propaganda, all been grabbers, wastrels and self-aggrandizers. In what ways they have been brushed by the divine and semi-divine afflatus, as far as they are visible to mortal man, it is the purpose of this chapter to indicate.

   Commendations of the rich are by no means rare, especially in the many media subject to their own control or influence. The task, however, is to evaluate them in the light of criteria more widely shared. Results then become somewhat modified.

   The public relations fraternity argues that the founding, building up, assembling, directing and managing of any one of the large corporations or banks represent prima facie an important creative contribution to something called The American Economy, a contribution which in the aggregate is taken as comparable to the genetic labors of the Hebraic Jehovah over six prodigious days. While this may be so in some degree (the element of time to one side) there are a few obstacles to accepting this somewhat florid view--as, for example, whether the economy has been added to or subtracted from, accelerated or delayed. As far as that is concerned, many ingredients happily blended by economists into the potpourri of Gross National Product are pronounced by spoilsports as deleterious: whisky, cigarettes, gaseous industrial fumes, comic books, cheap films, ugly billboards, the traffic complex, misleading advertising, crumbling shelters, shoddy merchandise, slums and industrial wastes conscientiously dumped into natural waterways.

   The public relations wizard points to corporation C and asks one to kowtow at least mentally to founder F for what is palpably a creative achievement, giving employment to X thousands of good and prayerfully parental souls of the Great Society who would, presumably, otherwise be living in trees and eaves. This pretty much accords with the foolish popular view of the corporation: a job-giving, life-sustaining entity. Ordinarily left out of such considerations is the fact that corporation C in its majestic rise, by various ruses (some possibly adjudicated illegal), may have blocked the rise of other laudably life-sustaining entities. Until pressured by a slow-moving government to relinquish its absolute monopoly, Aluminum Company of America, for example, certainly stood in the way of the emergence of aluminum-making jobs now provided by Kaiser Aluminum, Reynolds Metals, Olin Mathieson and various others. Corporate managers have not always or solely been concerned about all-out production and full employment. Right now by means of automation they are eliminating jobs right and left. They have been at least occasionally interested in making money for themselves, at times by restricting production and jobs, at times by nonproductive but profitable manipulation at the top. job creation has been quite incidental to the whole process, really has nothing to do with it.

   The inimitable Beethoven, writing symphonies, did not have agents in the field impeding other symphonic writers, attempting to trip them up or cause them to write down sour notes. Like most creators he did his stuff and allowed others to do theirs. He did not hold patents on all possible combinations of musical notes, ready to direct his lawyers against other note jugglers. Much of corporate achievement, so-called, has involved sheer frustration of others, hardly creative. The sculptor, too, it is sometimes the riposte of nimble pro-corporate dialecticians here, destroys in order to create; he destroys pristine stone, reshaping its contours. But the sculptor does not destroy other sculptors! If he did he would indeed be the greatest living sculptor; but hardly on grounds of his own creativity.

   The merging of companies, too, is usually hailed by the mass media as a stupendous creative act, a titanic generative copulation, which indeed it may in some cases be. It is, however, hardly creative in every single case or even in a majority of cases. What was created when a collection of existing steel companies were merged into the United States Steel Corporation by the elder J. P. Morgan other than a profitable opportunity to issue a vast quantity of watered stock? The constituent companies marched on under the triumphal arch of the new stock issue. The same is true of General Motors and many others.

   While admitting there is creativity on the corporate circuit in peculiarly corporate matters (human creativity being hard to quell), I merely suggest that it should be specifically shown rather than uncritically assumed with respect to the panorama of corporations. Despite public relations puffery there are grounds to doubt there is much creativity in this quarter and instead much sedulous copying and overreaching (as shown by widespread corporate espionage), and I simply want to leave this phase out of consideration as a clear-cut social contribution. Most of what is remarkable about corporations, as I noted earlier, is specifically noncorporate, technological, and derives from science and engineering rather than the business and financial offices. What is alone generally impressive about corporations, despite the glamour of the executive washroom and the keys thereunto pertaining, is their purely engineering aspect.

   It is, therefore, of some interest to notice that when corporations put themselves on display in their best party clothes at world's fairs and in conducted tours of their premises they provide, no doubt in all innocence, only an engineering display. The ordinary visitor innocently thinks, as he is innocently expected to think, "This is a marvel of Big Business. Wall Street is really great." The sophisticated observer, however, thinks, "What a marvelous exhibit of engineering skill! M.I.T. and Cal Tech are certainly great schools." To the latter observer the business side of it all is comparatively dull and uninteresting, heavy-handed and simple-minded.

   In the case of the foundations the situation is much the same. Concrete contributions may indeed have been made by mobilizing funds at strategic points and times, as in the case of the Rockefeller foundations; but far from all foundations have made parallel contributions. Most have as their end financial manipulation behind a sentimental screen.

   Corporations manufacture, distribute and sell lifesaving penicillin, at a profit. But no corporation discovered penicillin. Corporations never discover, invent or create anything--are never any more than tools, as often for ill as for good.

   While public relations virtuosi busily confect their tales to lull the broad public in its belief that everything is for the best in the best of all possible deliriously free worlds, it may be of some interest to take note of the powerful cultural undertow these virtuosi, apparently unaware, are working against.

   The rich, thanks in major degree to press agentry and the intellectual sinuosities of the mass media, currently appear to enjoy high status in the United States that will not diminish, presumably, as long as there is almost full general employment, the retention of which is a basic aim of national policy. As long as general employment keeps the populace moderately content, only a scattering of deviant and no doubt justly uncelebrated mentalities will be inclined to dissent from the image of the rich as public saviors and heroes. Hardly anyone except an obvious outcast or deviant presumes to venture doubts. From what quarter, if any, do these pathetic nay-sayers get their wrongheaded cues? What warrant have they for their nonadmiring and surely nonadmirable attitude? Have they indeed strayed from a nice, clean, healthy and wholesome disinfected Americanism owing to the insidious lucubrations of a tele-hypnotic, despicably fiendish Karl Marx sending aberrant messages from the documentary depths of the British Museum?

   The simple fact is that the most reflective minds of western civilization, practically from inception, have looked with jaundiced eyes at the rich and the powerful. So to look is quite in harmony with the culture; to think otherwise is to step outside the intellectual boundaries of western civilization. All slick-paper public relations palaver in obeisance to the rich, indeed, is alien to the deepest currents of this civilization and represents nothing other than misbegotten ideological perversity, wrongheadedness of the nth degree.

   Concededly one of the greatest minds of western civilization, teacher of Alexander the Great and still casting a broad shadow over us all, notably in his single-handed invention of logic, was Aristotle (384-322 B.C.). On the subjects of the wealthy and the powerful the great Aristotle resolutely put it into writing as follows (Rhetoric, Book II, Ch. 16, W. D. Ross trans.):

   The type of character produced by wealth lies on the surface for all to see. Wealthy men are insolent and arrogant; their possession of wealth affects their understanding; they feel as if they had every good thing that exists; wealth becomes a sort of standard of value for everything else, and therefore they imagine there is nothing it cannot buy. They are luxurious and ostentatious; luxurious, because of the luxury in which they live and the prosperity which they display; ostentatious and vulgar, because, like other people's, their minds are regularly occupied with the object of their love and admiration, and also because they think that other people's idea of happiness is the same as their own. It is indeed quite natural that they should be affected thus; for if you have money, there are always plenty of people who come begging from you. Hence the saying of Simonides about wise men and rich men, in answer to Hiero's Wife, who asked him whether it was better to grow rich or wise. "Why, rich," he said; "for I see the wise men spending their days at the rich men's doors." Rich men also consider themselves worthy to hold public office; for they consider they already have the things that give a claim to office. In a word, the type of character produced by wealth is that of a prosperous fool.

   There is indeed one difference between the type of the newly-enriched and those who have long been rich: the newly enriched have all the bad qualities mentioned in an exaggerated and worse form--to be newly-enriched means, so to speak, no education in riches. The wrongs they do others are not meant to injure their victims, but spring from insolence or self indulgence, e.g., those that end in assault or in adultery.

   As to Power: here too it may fairly be said that the type of character it produces is mostly obvious enough. Some elements in this type it shares with the wealthy type, others are better. Those in power are more ambitious and more manly in character than the wealthy, because they aspire to do the great deeds that their power permits them to do. Responsibility makes them more serious: they have to keep paying attention to the duties their position involves. They are dignified rather than arrogant, for the respect in which they are held inspires them with dignity and therefore with moderation--dignity being a mild and becoming form of arrogance. If they wrong others, they wrong them not on a small but on a great scale.

   Good fortune in certain of its branches produces the types of character belonging to the conditions just described, since these conditions are in fact more or less the kinds of good fortune that are regarded as most important. It may be added that good fortune leads us to gain all we can in the way of family happiness and bodily advantages. It does indeed make men more supercilious and more reckless; but there is one excellent quality that goes with it--piety, and respect for the divine power, in which they believe because of events which are really the result of chance.

   This account of the types of character that correspond to differences of age or fortune may end here; for to arrive at the opposite types to those described, namely, those of the poor, the unfortunate, and the powerless, we have only to ask what the opposite qualities are.

   Nor is the earnest inquirer given a less severe view if he turns to Plato, the other great cultural legislator whose shadow is imbedded integrally in western civilization. All European philosophy, said Alfred North Whitehead (no radical), is but a footnote to Plato. The "divine Plato" took an extremely dim view of wealthy people and personal wealth. Dipping into the excellent Hamilton-Cairns one-volume edition published by the Bollingen Foundation, a Paul Mellon enterprise, we find the following nuggets:

   "So, when wealth is honored in a state, and the wealthy, virtue and the good are less honored. . . . Thus, finally, from being lovers of victory and lovers of honor they become lovers of gain getting and of money, and they commend and admire the rich man and put him in office but despise the man who is poor." (Republic, 8.551b.)

   As to democracy, "the insatiate lust for wealth and the neglect of everything else for the sake of money-making were the cause of its undoing." (Ibid., 8.562b.)

   The arts and crafts are corrupted by the co-presence of great wealth and poverty. (Ibid., 4.421d.)

   "Wealth and poverty" should be kept out of the good society "since the one brings luxury, idleness, and innovation, and the other illiberality and the evil of bad workmanship. . . ." (Ibid., 4.422a.)

   Those most successful in the pursuit of wealth become the targets of the drones, become "the pastures of the drones." (Ibid., 8.564e.)

   ". . . it is the evil life commonly led by the sons of autocrats and men of extraordinary wealth. Such a training will never, never lead to outstanding goodness in boy, or man, or graybeard." (Laws, 3.695e.)

   "But to be at once exceedingly wealthy and good is impossible, if we mean by the wealthy those who are accounted so by the vulgar, that is, the exceptional few who own property of great pecuniary value--the very thing a bad man would be likely to own. Now since this is so, I can never concede to them that a rich man is truly happy unless he is also a good man, but that one who is exceptionally good should be exceptionally wealthy too is a mere impossibility." (Ibid., 5.742e.)

   "One arises from the passion for wealth which leaves a man not a moment of leisure to attend to anything beyond his personal fortunes. So long as a citizen's whole soul is wrapped up in these, he cannot give a thought to anything but the day's takings. Any study or pursuit which tends to that result everyone sets himself eagerly to learn and practice; all others are laughed to scorn. Here, then, we may say, is one reason in particular why society declines to take this or any other wholly admirable pursuit seriously, though everyone in it is ready enough, in his furious thirst for gold and silver, to stoop to any trade and any shift, honorable or dishonorable, which holds out a prospect of wealth, ready to scruple at no act whatsoever--innocent, sinful, or utterly shameful--so long as it promises to sate him, like some brute beast, with a perfect glut of eating, drinking, and sexual sport." (Ibid., 8.831c,d.)

   A soul stung to savagery by unsatisfied lusts "is chiefly found concerned with that on which most men's longing is most permanently and sharply set--wealth, with the power wealth gets alike from native bias and pernicious wrong education to breed countless cravings for insatiate and unbounded possession of itself. And the source of this perverse education is the credit given to false praise of riches alike by Greek and non-Greek; they promote wealth to the first place among good things, whereas in truth it holds but the third, and thus they deprive not only themselves but their posterity." (Ibid., 9.870a.)

   Plato has a great deal more to say about the wealthy, most of it disparaging. His remarks, indeed, foreshadow the Aristotelian position that the best society is one dominated by a middle class of the moderately affluent, with neither extremely rich nor extremely poor. In both the Platonic and Aristotelian perspectives the United States is a monstrously lopsided entity, a veritable Gorgon, a chamber of horrors.

   What is perhaps of paramount interest is that no subsequent major thinker has departed essentially from the script as laid down by these giant pundits. It may be that thinkers in following Plato and Aristotle here merely felt rivalrous toward those with a claim to power other than intellectual, as Plato indeed unquestionably felt rivalrous toward the poets. Yet intellectuals in general have not felt so uniformly against nonintellectual power rivals like soldiers, politicians, explorers, religious leaders or artists as they have against the rich, a feeling that by no means reached its apogee, as commonly supposed, in the writings of Karl Marx.

   Marx has clearly been topped in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, the stylish French metaphysician, who refers to the wealthy and the respectable in general as salauds (filthy beasts) because he believes they have it in their power to produce alterations for the better but instead work assiduously to perpetuate ancient swindles while professing humane goals.

   Sartre, like Aristotle and Plato, is rather remote from most Americans. Nearer home, a recent expression of the attitude, deeply etched into American radical and dissenting literature, can be sampled in the summary by the Marxist, Herbert Aptheker, of the non-Marxist C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite as "filled also with burning attacks--as passionate but not as muted as that of his mentor Veblen--upon the social and personal immorality of the rich, their coarseness, cruelty, hypocrisy, greed, and lustfulness." ¹

   One could, it is true, assemble examples of the rich from the American scene who apparently fit different items of these characterizations. But, straying outside the circle of the rich, one could unquestionably find proportionately as many cases for each count in the indictment at all except the most refined levels of society. And seeking examples of virtuosic cruelty, one would find it impossible to discover any rival among the American rich to such a Marxist redeemer as Josef Stalin, to say nothing of Lavrenti Beria and a swarm of power-crazed leftist midgets from the lower depths. "Practical" Marxists like Dr. Aptheker, while launching their shafts of criticism, seem blissfully unaware of what their own affiliations and loyalties commit them to defend.

   The Aptheker-Mills indictment of "the rich," as formulated above, is clearly far too broad and obviously loaded. It reveals and perhaps prescribes an attitude rather than describes.

   But if one turns to the influential Alexander Hamilton among the Founding Fathers, one finds, contrary to Plato, Aristotle and almost every other considerable political thinker in western history, that government should belong to "the wealthy, the good and the wise." As to the last two, Plato and Aristotle would have agreed; as to the first, we know what they thought.

   Social thinkers down through the centuries have all had favorite classes, which they took to be the instruments of deliverance. With Plato it was the intellectuals, with Aristotle the middle classes, with Jefferson the small farmers, with Marx the factory workers, with Hamilton the wealthy and so on. In this boxing of the class compass, one contemporary writer, Nelson Algren, has oddly found his favorite social group among what Marx called the lumpenproletariat --thieves, pimps, prostitutes and down-and-outers.

   But, in his admiration of the wealthy, Hamilton, political father of the American plutocracy, virtually represented an historical minority of one among political thinkers.

   Who, in the first place, are "the rich"?

   Included in the designation are trust-fund infants who at the moment of birth are incalculably rich (and presumably no more offensive than any other infants), trust-fund children of various ages, women young and old of mixed capabilities and outlooks and men ranging from inane idlers and wastrels through routine performers to the intensely but not always laudably active. Whatever else one can say about most of the rich, one cannot reasonably say they are especially coarse, cruel, greedy or more than commonly hypocritical or lustful. Money in a special place of high honor to one side, a person of ordinary sensibilities would much prefer to associate with many, perhaps most of them, than with the average run-of-the-mill politician, labor leader, advertising impresario or gospel-monger.

   What Mills focused his attention on was the active rich, particularly the policy setters, and among these one could not deny the presence of the immoral (tax manipulators, for example), the coarse, the cruel, the hypocritical, the greedy and the lustful; but even among these, that all or most are of the order indicated can be easily shown to be fictional.

   What is problematic about the rich is more as follows: The possession of wealth, inherited or acquired, itself informs the possessor that he is special, that he holds winning cards over most people in most social situations. He can, for one thing, finance a greater number of amorous episodes--a big advantage in the estimation of the simple-minded. He holds a social advantage over most others which, unluckily for him, may so turn his head as to give him delusions of inherent superiority, as is often the case in the possession of anything rare and desired. One hugs one's advantages--health, strength, intelligence, learning or wealth--and tends to take them as marks of invidious excellence: snobbism. In some rich families, the Rockefeller notably, the children are carefully reared in as middle class a way as possible to prevent their developing such common delusions; yet the fact cannot be concealed for long that they are special, that they hold a fistful of aces in worldly goods, and that others surely define them as different. They are different; they are rich--in effect, noble--in a society replete with poverty and degradation, Their wealth makes it possible for them to mobilize more effective power than most people at particular points, at times to their own undoing. Money is like a spirited horse in at least this respect: One must know how to ride it, which few really do.

   Like anyone else, the rich person may experience frustrations and a sense of being unduly limited; but he does not usually feel it in as many ways nor as frequently or humiliatingly as the nonrich. He feels that he has, in general, more elbow room, a wider range of choice. And he has indeed more elbow room, geographic and psychological.

   As to the active policy-making rich and their agents of the power elite (for these latter are mostly agents): Like nearly all people they are usually heedless of whatever is not before their eyes, either lack sufficient imagination (like reckless motorists) or have their attention fully absorbed (like nearly everyone else) by their personal problems and projects. The doers of the world all have projects, and one is either a doer or nondoer. And doers all derive an intense feeling of satisfaction from any project carried to success, whether it consists of writing a book, leading a revolution, creating or managing a corporation or winning an election. Absorption in one's own project, whether it is building a corporation or writing a poem, leaves one unable to play one's attention over other aspects of reality. Probably the greatest harm in the world comes of the simple fact that nobody is able to pay full attention to everything at once. One really should, yet it is impossible. Although this is so, it does not follow that attention cannot be focused on a wider horizon than immediate, specialized interests--a marked tendency of the rising rich at least. The basic offense of most of the active rich, if it is an offense, is that they usually pursue their own visions, skillfully or crudely, not only to the neglect of the rest of the world (as does the poet) but, at times, because they have power, against or indifferent to the needs and wishes of the rest of the world. Not only do they have power but, like most people, they are thoroughly egocentric.

   Although now woven by means of large enterprises into the warp and woof of all society, the rich, like nearly everyone else, put their own enterprises first in the narrowly reasonable effort to preserve their social advantage, by means fair or seemingly questionable. Without that social advantage they would, like the common people, be at the beck and call of almost any self-appointed messiah presenting himself as the latest in the line of the Apostolic Succession or, perhaps, a spiritual representative of a freely prescribing Karl Marx or even, like Adolf Hitler, as the offspring of Wotan. Being rich is basically defensive in a rough world, although the defensive position has its own hazards.

   What is perhaps most irksome about the rich to the intelligent nonrich, particularly to those with some other vision of how society should be arranged, is not actually what any rich individual may or may not do. True, by behaving outwardly like a gentleman the rich man may temper animosity; but he cannot, even by gentlemanly behavior, mollify persons like Plato, Aristotle, Marx, Sartre and others acutely aware of his necessary role, which is much like that of a character in a Greek drama enacting the capricious will of the gods.

   The rich, the plain fact is, confront the rest of society as a solid, semicorporate phalanx, buttressed by law and public policy. By law they hold their positions legitimately and hence can feel complete rectitude. When the national anthem is being sung they can feel it is being sung in celebration of the legal system that supports them, for the aggrandizement of which every man, the poorer especially, may be called upon to offer his very life simply by presidential order, without any declaration of war by Congress. Beyond this, existing policies under the law favor them; they have been adopted largely by their agents with their corporate permission.

   The existence of this solid phalanx is sharply noticeable only to those who have some proposal to make with a view to adjusting policy in order to accommodate some large number of people who are, in one way or the other, supposedly being unduly inconvenienced by any number of things. Whenever any public proposal is made for any change (however slight), it is bound to encounter opposition. Upon inquiry it turns out that the opposition ordinarily stems from one or more affluent or rich people, usually referred to euphemistically as Interests. While there are indeed many interests in a society, the most assertive is surely the property interest.

   Even a case about a trivial question, adversely affecting only one propertied person, may have wide implications for many or all propertied because it may set a precedent upon which further more extensive similar actions may be taken. The entire phalanx of the propertied becomes agitated and makes its displeasure known to legislators, judges and other officials. After all, one cannot have unsound decisions approved. Again, the entire phalanx of the propertied may be committed by simply one among the propertied, who presses deviously for and obtains some tax concession. This concession thereafter applies to all, whether they asked for it or not.

   Thus it happens that even minor, purely common-sense proposals for reforms often precipitate fierce political dogfights.

   In a relevant case, early in 1966 C. Wright Patman, the powerful chairman of the powerful House Banking and Currency Committee, decided on the basis of a committee vote to investigate the entire question of how trust funds are used in corporate and bank control. When subpoenas began to go out to banks requesting information there was suddenly called on June 7 a meeting by 17 of 33 committee members, who required the recall of many subpoenas; on a showdown, however, the right of the chairman to issue subpoenas was upheld.

   This checking of a committee chairman was a very unusual action, which obviously had its source in some of the entities being investigated. Not many citizens, it is true, are alert to this situation or probably care very much.

   What the final outcome of the investigation will be, whether it will be muted or not, is not yet known. Whether light will be thrown on what Chairman Patman claims are some $215 billion of trust fund holdings one cannot yet tell; all this is terra incognita right now.

   By the end of the year, at any rate, Chairman Patman on the basis of subpoenas already returned was able to announce that three-quarters of the banks of the country had at least 5 per cent of their stock held by other banks through trust funds managed for beneficiaries and that this percentage of stock ownership represented a long step toward control. The very largest banks, he said, operated under this sort of interlocking ownership, were all more or less in the same ownership bed--one big happy incestuous family. ²

   The information needed in this area is as follows: identifications of trust-fund holdings, book values and current market values, nature of trusts and length of time they run, beneficiaries of a multiplicity of trusts (reducing income taxes), cost of operation of trusts, validity of investment selections for trusts, etc. Whether the named beneficiaries or the managers benefit most is an undetermined question.

   The propertied, for one thing, are mostly especially sensitive to anything about taxes--how much shall be the total levy and, more important, how shall the collection be proportioned? In general, the propertied interest in the United States, sheltered behind technician-spokesmen, has been opposed (whatever some individual property owners felt) to government levies for the sake of the domestic comfort, convenience and necessity of the broad public (its own comfort and convenience being apparently assured) but has been generously unstinting in any military or semi-military expenditures that gave government a strong argument abroad in assuring access to markets, raw materials and trade routes. At present, with military and space exploration budgets inflated to record proportions, the cities internally are literally falling apart. It has been estimated by insiders that 75 per cent of the military budget is rationally unjustifiable.

   Beyond the desire to keep down tax totals (hence the fiscally sound objection to "reckless government spending") there is the collective desire of the propertied to shove a disproportionate part of the tax burden over onto the lower labor force which, imbued with patriotic ardor, is presumably happy to support a democratic paradise that freely allows them to go and listen to happy tidings of the afterworld from the likes of Billy Graham and Fulton J. Sheen and to rub elbows with the rich at Coney Island. As we have already seen how deftly this tax burden is shouldered onto the pious, patriotic and not-too-bright lower labor force, the point need engage our fascinated interest no longer.

   Whatever the call may be for social adjustment will either cost tax money or intrude more or less adversely on some propertied interest--that is, upon the revenues of some collection of rich persons. More public housing will tread on the toes of private landlords. And as this call for adjustment is fought by the "interests," some proponents are irked. The purely commonsense proposal, for example, to place effective health warnings on cigarette packages was fought to a standstill and defeated in Congress, with the result that the tobacco industry through intensified advertising is selling more cigarettes than ever before in the teeth of repeated formal government findings that they are a clear menace to health. Similarly there was fought tooth and nail suggested mandatory automobile safety equipment and there have been fights in the state legislatures against attempts to limit in any way the free resale of unroadworthy second-hand cars. One could cite thousands of similar cases.

   To be sure, when it is said that an "industry" opposes something, the source of the opposition is kept sufficiently abstract and remote. An industry is not something subject to sense experience. One cannot see it or feel it. "Industry" here boils down to no more than several boards of directorsperhaps fifty to a hundred men--who represent stockholders, mainly large stockholders--in brief, rich people. These latter are, somewhat poetically, as adversely affected by automobile air pollution as the poor although they can resort to air conditioning or retreat to remote fresh-air estates and ranches.

   It is this consistent opposition to proposals for reasonable as well as unreasonable change that the propertied have offered down through history, opposition more effective than argument, that has caused the rich to be looked upon as problematic ever since Plato. It is not that they are necessarily vicious, as the Marxists often postulate; it is just that they are blandly or uncomprehendingly selfish, and not always very intelligently. The unpropertied person may be just as selfish but he has no telltale instrument such as property with which to reveal his selfishness so completely.

   Like the small band of Greeks in the pass at Thermopylae the selfish rich hold back by their skill of maneuver in an entrenched position (always in the name of sound policy) huge disorganized armies of sansculottes and descamisados (among which, thoughtfully, they have their own friends haranguing on all manner of irrelevancies dear to the same sansculottes and descamisados). It is all much like a disciplined Roman legion against a barbarian rabble.

   Because virtually everything has an economic aspect and because the rich, as we have seen, own and control the foundation and prime stages of the economic system, practically anything that anyone is likely to propose in the way of a new arrangement is going to strike some among the propertied and the rich adversely, and hence lead them to invoke the law defensively or work for a new self-serving public ordinance. Often the mere attempt to reroute traffic by local ordinance causes merchants to spring into tigerish opposition, presumably in defense of property rights.

   Again, many individuals who engage in entrepreneurial action, hoping to become rich, find that the way is barred by persons, propertied or rich, already in established positions. As Henry J. Kaiser discovered, there is no room for another automobile manufacturer. True, there are interstices into which newcomers may insert themselves with success, particularly the area of new technology but, in the main, the road is blocked to all except the very clever--and lucky--among newcomers.

   The rich, then, come to seem to those who have encountered their resistance like part of a single corporate entity, a special class, or, as the Marxists say, a class interest. Because they are each part of this class interest, embalmed like a fly in plastic, there is not much they can do to earn credit in the eyes of critics. Owing to the saying of Jesus in Matthew, XIX, 24, that "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God," there was no way out for a rich man for hundreds of years except to give his property to the church. The result was that in the late medieval period the churchpols in the name of the church held tightly more than half the land of Europe; the latecoming kings were far less gullible than the earlier gentry. In the eyes of the Marxists there is nothing a rich man can do except, like Frederick Engels, devote his wealth to the promotion of Marxism; anything less will fail to gain credit. The rich could, to be sure, turn all their wealth over to the government where it would at the present time fall under the benign jurisdiction of Lyndon B. Johnson, in which circumstances few judicious moralists would see any particular gain for mankind.

   Castigation of the rich, however, arises less from envy, as commonly supposed, than from people who have in some way been blocked or frustrated by the massed class interest of the rich. The rich man may be a really nice guy; but his very interests, indeed his whole being, force him to present himself in a certain stylized way. Most of the critics of the rich have themselves been power claimants, who know the rich and powerful can readily trump their cards. Plato, Aristotle and a long line of independent intellectuals have known that their carefully reasoned arguments are subject to political defeat less by sound counter-arguments than by the power of inertia, money and entrenched position. As any practical politician knows, in going before Congress on any question it is better to be backed by lucre than by a bullet-proof argument. Money will win almost every time on crucial questions, such as intruding from afar into World War I, and the only way apparently to defeat it is by some other brute power. Hence, as the Marxists say, revolution. The proffered cure here, though, except in cases of complete war-induced social collapse as in Russia in 1917 and China in the 1940's, is clearly worse than the disease because serviceable institutional restraints are swept away in the uproar and a clean slate is open to an unrestrained set of new power seekers, not at all squeamish (as history has shown) about how they apply their power. Leninist Communism is clearly a modern receivership in political bankruptcy.

   Where those counts in the Aptheker indictment are best sustained is with respect to certain uneducated men of the poorer classes who have by book or crook made themselves rich: the original grabbers. In this country these are the "Robber Barons" of the nineteenth century and later replicas. The record on these is by now fairly well known. While many of the established rich, normally lacking imagination and perhaps sufficient sapience, have been normally heedless, the clear-cut depredations of the rich have in most cases been carried out by founders, newcomers, in panicky flight from poverty. It is the ex-poor among the rich who have been the most active social offenders. This was the crowd Veblen largely wrote about in all their vulgarity.

   All of which is not to say that there is nothing of an overbearingly objectionable nature about the general policies since World War II contrived by Mills's insidiously bland power elite on behalf of remote principals. Those policies have been, on the whole, immediately self-serving, broadly neglectful of visible internal social decay and in that sense actually inimical over the long term to basic upper-class interests. What there really is to the idea of a power elite consists of people--upper-crust lawyers, politicians, officials, journalists, public relations men and idea men--who in various ways recommend themselves to the rich and well positioned by formulating defensive stopgaps for immediate problems. A way to remunerative position in the United States is to get the nod from some one of the wealthy or their adjutants, and those who get this nod are invariably from lower levels of society, usually chimpanzee-bright men who have developed know-how and can-do for poulticing over difficult situations in the interests of established arrangements. This is the level where "urban renewal" and roadbuilding become new ways of generating windfall profits. Nobody, it is pertinent to notice, gets the nod who is in any way seriously opposed to the established order. Indeed, nobody gets the nod who is merely reflectively doubtful and hesitant. Such persons would only generate dissension or uncertainty in high places and impede a smooth-smooth administrative operation.

   As nobody to my knowledge has attempted to pinpoint collectively the possibly laudable achievements of rich people, quite apart from their class interests, I here set myself this heretical task with a view both to rounding out the picture and to seeing concretely just what the achievements may amount to. How undeniably constructive and creative have the wealthy, more particularly the American wealthy, really been?

   In seeking to isolate the achievements of the wealthy, it seems desirable to indicate the broad area within which one looks. Who, shall we say, are the wealthy?

   Fortunately the Federal Reserve Board and Census Bureau, as noticed earlier, have come up with recent figures, the most precise on official record, to the effect that there were an estimated 200,000 nuclear families averaging three persons in the country as of December 31, 1962, in possession of net assets of $500,000 or more. ³ So, for these purposes, we shall take this last as the maximum figure representing a proto-wealthy family, although a person worth a few thousands less could hardly be considered impoverished. Naturally, the indicated small group includes everybody in possession of up to a heady billion dollars by value and beyond.

   But even a group of this reduced size is cumbersome to inquire into and includes more than the definitively wealthy. This group of 200,000 nuclear families can be narrowed down somewhat, however. U.S. News and World Report, October 11, 1965, estimated on the basis of more recent Treasury figures that: "Today there are about 90,000 millionaires," by which it alluded to persons owning assets worth at least $1 million. ⁴ Some of these were in extended family clusters, and some families as we know (Du Ponts, Fords, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts et al. ) contain many millionaires and millionaire nuclear families. Total holdings of the group were estimated in excess of $250 billion. As of 1948, the millionaire group totaled only 13,000 by the reckoning of this same source.

   U.S. News pointed out that this 90,000 indicated that one family in every 625 was in the millionaire class, which meant approximately 1/6 of 1 per cent of families, a fraction of a sliver, had net assets of at least $1 million.

   The sevenfold variation in number of millionaires between 1948 and 1965 stemmed from the fact that most wealth-holders concentrate their holdings in corporation stocks; and in 1948 stock prices were comparatively low, in 1964 and 1965 they were comparatively high. It does not indicate that new asset-nuclei were formed to this extent. Judging by the composition of estates in 1961, Treasury figures showed (as U.S. News and World Report acknowledged), that upper-class wealth was held as follows on the average: Stocks, 65.1 per cent; tax-exempt bonds, 8.5 per cent; real estate, 6.7 per cent; cash, 4.3 per cent; U. S. government bonds, 4.2 per cent; mortgages and notes, 1.8 per cent; insurance, 1.8 per cent; other bonds, .8 per cent; and miscellaneous, 6.8 per cent. Such being the case, any appreciable rise and fall of the stock market will alternately see-saw many suddenly up into the millionaire class or ease them down. The 1948 figure, in my view, is more indicative of the really heavy money than a 1965 figure. Better yet would be a 1932 figure. ⁵ As to the formation of new asset-nuclei, this is a far rarer occurrence than is regularly suggested in Time, Fortune and the Wall Street Journal.

   As far as the achievements of the really wealthy are concerned, then, we may limit ourselves to looking within a contemporary group of very few families.

   Not only will contemporary names be drawn from this property bracket but, at times, a retrospective view will be taken of individual achievers, always leaving out of consideration, for reasons stated, business organizers and managers as such. In order to read of their corporate deeds of derring-do one need merely turn to the pages of Fortune, which publishes a continual celebration of how well men run their own plantations.

   Excluded will be any who have entered the indicated property bracket through achievements in the world of entertainment, sports and the arts--popular playwrights, actors, athletes, opera singers and virtuoso musicians. Those of whom note will be taken will be only those known to be in, around or about this property class prior to their achievement, not those who got into it through recognizable achievement. A financially successful once poor inventor would not be included.

   Anything that passes by worldly standards as achievement other than ambiguous corporate success will be counted as such. The operative phrase here is "by worldly standards," for much not applauded by the world as an achievement represents a great purely personal achievement as in the case of many persons, rich or poor, who daily force themselves up from a bed of pain and painfully perform daily duties or anyone, rich or poor, who becomes fairly civilized, a lamentably rare occurrence.

   The commonly recognized areas of formal achievement, apart from business (which appears to rate high in popular esteem), are politics, law, the performing and creative arts, the sciences, scholarship, medicine, philosophy, religion, education, engineering, entertainment in the broadest sense, sports and journalism. In considering a sub-division of possibly 90,000 individuals and families we have considerable leeway, a large group to deal with although only a sliver of the population. But this, at least, is the area within which to look.

   Psychologists generally consider 1/2 of 1 per cent of the population to be "gifted" in some way so that if the same ratio were preserved among 200,000 families owning $500,000 or more of property there would be at least 2,000 (two adults) "gifted" upper wealth-holders. Because not all the "gifted" bring their gifts to fruition there would not necessarily be this many outstanding achievers in the group; but there should be on the basis of the general distribution at least 500. Available data, however, do not enable one to assemble such a total, so that outstanding achievers are either proportionately fewer in the heavily propertied group, are somehow concealed from external view or are unpublicized. Yet it is in the nature of outstanding achievement sooner or later to call attention to itself.

   It would be possible to identify all wealthy individuals only if one were provided with statements of net worth, which are not available; there are, however, indications in many cases, as already noticed. Achievement itself is notable and focuses public attention on the achiever and his background in an age of excessive publicity. As far as the very rich are concerned, we know pretty well who they are and can inspect them directly.

   But I shall not, owing to the absence of precise data, be able to spot all, or nearly all, especially down near the lower levels of wealth-holding. There may be a wealthy man of considerable achievement, but if it is not shown on the record that his family has a certain net worth I cannot name him, much as I would like to. However, in the interests of an increase in knowledge, this is a game that others, privy to facts inaccessible to me, can play by supplementing my report. For, owing to the inattention of sociologists, we do not know with any precision the record of personal achievement or nonachievement of all large and largish property holders. The evidence only becomes clear as we ascend into the rarified realm of the known very large property holders, the super rich.

   It is not, first, usually thought possible for a man of wealth to be any sort of achiever. "Inherited wealth is a big handicap to happiness," said William K. Vanderbilt in a press interview in 1905. "It is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to morality." ⁶ As to the attainment of wealth through personal achievement, a universally spread view is summarized in an old Chinese proverb: "A man seldom gets rich without ill-got gain; as a horse does not fatten without feeding in the night." ⁷

   Yet the handicap indicated by Vanderbilt is sometimes overcome.

   As the record shows, law combined with politics has been the area of greatest impact of propertied activists apart from corporate management. Not that legal practice as such, which in general is not extravagantly rewarded, has attracted big propertied people to any conspicuous extent. The rigors of either advocacy or jurisconsultation appear to have had few attractions for the wealthy, although the acquisition of a law degree and admission to the bar I take to be concrete achievements, whatever further steps are necessary to attaining distinction as a lawyer.

   In general, lawyers from heavily propertied families do not enter into general legal practice, civil or criminal. Some members of lower wealth-holding layers do go into the practice of corporate law. As such they are, in general, necessarily defenders of the propertied position. Non-Establishment lawyers are, in general, defending criminal lawyers and plaintiffs' lawyers in civil actions, apart from a few affiliated with nonconformist causes such as constitutional rights. The Establishment, so-called, is usually interested either in prosecuting someone, rarely a member of the Establishment itself, or in defending some part of itself against not always valid individual claims.

   While there may be lawyers from wealthy families who are non-Establishment practitioners, such a fact does not clearly show on the record.

   In politics some of the more prominent of wealthy lawyers have been Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson and members of the Taft family beginning with William Howard Taft, one-time president of the United States. The Tafts, in addition to law, have notably operated in real estate.

   William Howard Taft became chief justice of the Supreme Court but he is one of the very few among latter-day big wealth-holders who have held a judgeship. Taft, of course, was a thoroughgoing Establishment judge. A less well-known but highly distinguished judge was Curtis Bok of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, who died in 1962. A grandson of Cyrus H. K. Curtis, the mass publisher, and Edward M. Bok, Curtis Bok was also a gifted and sensitive author who wrote Star Wormwood, The Backbone of the Herring and I, Too, Nicodemus, all worth reading. Over a long period of years he was an exceptionally fine public servant. There was, too, Judge Thomas Mellon, the founder.

   Judges are quite rare, though, among families of notable wealth. One draws a comparative blank among the big-wealthy on judges although one would unquestionably find a few among some of more modest fortune if the data were available. Judges, of course, are often men of some modest property, acquired through the practice of law, inheritance or marriage except for those few who have made financial killings as members of political syndicates.

   Wealthy men directly in politics are no special novelty in American history. George Washington, the first president, was considered perhaps the wealthiest man of his time in the country, an inheritor. Many of the nation's founders, relative to their time, were quite wealthy, including Thomas Jefferson--at least until his final years. They were nearly all men of property, usually landed, a fact pointedly reflected in the Constitution. But even on a relative scale their wealth did not attain the proportions of the latter-day industrial fortunes.

   After the Civil War there were many, usually self-erected, former poor men, who sat in the United States Senate, there closely guiding their interests in railroads, oil, mining and lumbering; but that these held their seats in consequence of any political achievement or aptitude is open to serious question. Prior to 1913 senators were elected by state legislatures, many of which, staffed by dung-hill democrats, awarded Senate seats simply to the highest bidder. It did not take much in the way of political knowhow to sit in "The Rich Man's Club," as the Senate was commonly called.

   I will not, then, count any of the pre-1913 rich senators as political achievers simply on the ground of their presence in the Senate.

   Although rich and budding rich men were always shuttling about in the shadowy background of both political parties, supplying "campaign funds" and pulling devious strings right and left, they were in the more recent period brought forward and given more direct participation by the Republican Warren G. Harding. A former senator, President Harding was a small-town newspaper publisher of no great wealth. However, he appointed as his secretary of the treasury Andrew W. Mellon, then one of the richest men in the world--an inheritor as well as acquisitor; self-created Herbert C. Hoover as his secretary of commerce; the corporation lawyer Charles Evans Hughes as his secretary of state; and Albert B. Fall, stooge of the oil industry, his secretary of interior. Since Theodore Roosevelt it had become pretty much the custom to install corporation lawyers as secretary of state and attorney general.

   Franklin D. Roosevelt, a minor millionaire himself before becoming a popular tribune, went much further in this respect than either Harding or Hoover, who appointed multi-millionaire Ogden L. Mills to succeed Mellon. Roosevelt, believing that men of wealth and good schooling should serve in government rather than lounge about in their clubs, practically stacked his cabinets with men of wealth, while standpatters, reactionaries and presumed malefactors of great wealth shrieked that he was a Communist and a "traitor to his class," here validating in action a Marxist conception of class consciousness among the rich. He started off with William H. Woodin, head of the American Car and Foundry Company, as secretary of the treasury and replaced him with multi-millionaire Henry Morgenthau, Jr. When the world situation became gravely serious in 1940 he appointed Frank Knox, Republican newspaper tycoon, as secretary of the navy and later James V. Forrestal, partner of Dillon, Read and Company, Wall Street investment bankers. He appointed Edward Stettinius, Jr., son of a Morgan partner, secretary of state. He brought back the able Henry L. Stimson, Republican corporation lawyer and Hoover's secretary of state, as secretary of war. He made Jesse Jones, self-erected Texas Democratic big-league banker-politician, secretary of commerce and Francis Biddle attorney general. Down through the upper ranks of officialdom he drew freely upon men of great wealth, making Nelson A. Rockefeller the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs; W. Averell Harriman, former partner of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., his representative from the beginning in a variety of posts, mainly diplomatic; Joseph P. Kennedy head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and so on. He gave both Harriman and Rockefeller their political starts.

   Roosevelt, it is true, made many appointments from other quarters and, in fact, assembled a mixed bag. But, far from stacking his appointments with radicals or liberals, as recklessly charged, a far stronger case could be made that he drew most of his appointees from Wall Street, Newport, the corporate circuit and the big-city political machines. Scholarly liberals and radicals were brought in mainly as ideological window dressing in a time of great public discontent. Henry Wallace, considered a far-out radical in the bayou country, was himself a very wealthy man, at most a liberal conservative.

   If results are what count, Roosevelt was not hostile to the private-property business system, which he found in self-induced crisis and left some years later revived and reinforced with government support. Remove Rooseveltian government economic subsidy, patronage, guarantee and support today, and the much-vaunted free-enterprise system, beloved of Chamber of Commerce orators, would collapse like a bullet-riddled toy balloon. How many depositors would trust the banks, for a simple example, if it were not for government insurance of deposits? How many would trust the one-time wide-open Stock Exchange if it were not for the SEC?

   The fact that the rich were in politics, then, was nothing new. What is new is that, more recently, taking their cue from Roosevelt, the latter-day rich have increasingly taken a direct part, with some of them at least showing signs of becoming forthright public men. They have themselves stood for election, and have been elected, a favorable development from the point of view that those who own the country should take responsibility openly for running it rather than hiding behind stooges in Uncle Sam and Abraham Lincoln suits.

   Very rich men, inheritors or corporate wizards, have taken to winning elections right and left despite ingrown Populist prejudices. The electorate appears to be growing tired of the old-time "friend of the people," shaggy with folksy duplicity and athirst for franchises or whatever else he can lay furtive patriotic hands on. Winning an election, I take it, may be counted an achievement whereas winning friendly appointment is not particularly. For the latter all one needs is the nod from some Mr. Big.

   By his untypical election as governor of New York in 1928 Franklin D. Roosevelt apparently led wealthy men to believe they too could be elected to that key office, although, as we have noticed, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft and Hoover were, earlier, in the wealthy class. Franklin Roosevelt was succeeded in the governorship by Herbert H. Lehman of the Wall Street banking family, who served from 1932 to 1942 before becoming a United States senator. Except for Thomas E. Dewey's twelve-year tenure after 1942 the governorship of New York has been held by wealthy men since 1928. In 1954, with strong labor support, W. Averell Harriman, later again in the State Department, became the first of the ultra-wealthy of later years to win an important election when he became governor of New York as a Democrat, opening the way psychologically for ultra-wealthy Nelson A. Rockefeller, also supported by labor, to succeed him in 1958 and to win reelection twice to date. As Roosevelt showed on several occasions, the electorate will not shy away from a man because he is wealthy. The voters, presumably, think he is less apt to tap the public till for himself than is an Horatio Alger boy from the grass roots and dung hills.

   Outside of New York, too, wealthy men, some of whom got their political start under Roosevelt appointments, have also taken to winning elections. G. Mennen "Soapy" Williams, shaving soap and talcum powder dual heir, who began as a New Deal appointee in 1936, was the elected labor-supported governor of Michigan from 1949 to 1960 and thereafter was assistant secretary of state for African Affairs;. a lawyer, he is also a doctor of jurisprudence. William W. Scranton, also a lawyer and scion of an old Pennsylvania coal fortune, was first an Eisenhower official, then a member of Congress and in 1963 was elected governor of Pennsylvania.

   The Kennedys, of course, stand out as men of great wealth who have directly participated in politics, although they are really members of an oldline political family like the Lodges, Stevensons and Tafts. John F. Kennedy, a budding journalist and war hero, was first easily elected a member of the House from Massachusetts, then of the Senate. In 1961 he became president. His brother Robert, a lawyer, was first his attorney general and then became senator from New York while brother Edward, also a lawyer, followed John F. to the Senate from Massachusetts.

   Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania, whom we have noticed in his effort to democratize the Senate, is a wealthy as well as extremely able public-spirited man. Barry Goldwater, senator from Arizona before winning the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, inherited a substantial interest in a large department store, never had to work his way up from anywhere. The late Robert Taft, senator from Ohio and presidential aspirant, came of a wealthy family; and the same necessarily holds of his son, also directly concerned in Ohio politics.

   This list could be extended--Theodore Green and Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, the Saltonstalls and Peabodys of Massachusetts, Ogden Reid of New York and Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, Angier Biddle Duke, Governor Winthrop Rockefeller of Arkansas, Harrison Williams, Jr., of New Jersey, et al. --but the highlights have been indicated. While one might evaluate the political performances of each of these men differently, perhaps rating Roosevelt and Kennedy high and Goldwater and Taft low, or vice versa, each represents achievement on the ground that winning elections is itself a recognized achievement. Roosevelt I would call an outstanding achiever in politics.

   In some quarters there is a tendency to downgrade the feat of a wealthy man in winning an election because he has had the use of his own funds. But money alone does not win elections, although it is in the plutocratic American system a necessary aid. Furthermore, nearly every man who wins an election is backed by money--his own, that of a moneyed group (like Richard Nixon and his oil backers in 1952) or of an established political machine. The few exceptions appear to be sheer flukes in American politics. Money from at least a small group is almost always behind the candidates, particularly the winner. Only here and there in political low-pressure areas an unfinanced amateur may sneak over the goal line.

   A significant recent tendency has been the appearance of a number of successful high corporation officials in elective political office. Small and very medium-sized business people have been no great novelty in elective office, particularly at the state level; but men from the corporate big league have been pointedly absent. George Romney, former head of American Motors and twice elected governor of Michigan, launched a campaign as a 1968 Republican presidential aspirant; and Charles Percy, former head of Bell & Howell, was elected senator from Illinois in 1966. On the corporate circuit, these men were big guns. If more big managers of corporations thrust forward in politics, the country may see something of what cold corporate rationality can do applied to government, assuming that such men retain the corporate approach. Robert S. McNamara, former president of Ford Motor Company, conducted his own specialized exercise in corporate rationality with the Defense Department, but his best efforts there had not been able to out-general Ho Chi Minh on his batteries of Pentagon computers.

   In any event, it would appear that a change is under way when the industrial rich, descendants of original tycoons, and corporate nabobs participate directly in politics instead of working through subsidized lower-class stooges. There is a gain here, in the first place, for candor. At least the fractional thinking part of the electorate can now evaluate what these candidates publicly stand for instead of voting for men presumably independent but secretly harnessed to the corporate juggernaut. What any of these men propose politically may not be approved by the observer, but the observer will nevertheless learn by noticing public performance precisely what he does stand for.

   Personalities like Lyndon B. Johnson, although moderately wealthy, are not included in the foregoing because they were not wealthy when they came to politics but were politicians first, wealthy men later.

   No claim is implied here that all the wealthy who are lawyers have been named, for that list would run into hundreds, or that the mere fact of being a lawyer is something wonderful, Quite a number of the wealthy and the well-to-do become lawyers although not so many, it appears, as become corporation executives, project promoters and nonprofit administrators.

   That members of the wealthier classes do often become corporation executives, administrators, lawyers and appointed or elected officials, thereupon opening themselves to evaluation in terms of going standards of achievement, is hardly odd in the light of the concept in political science of a "ruling class." Activists among the rich do seem to drift primarily into directorial, managerial or similar executive-type functional posts. However, to suggest that the United States, where sovereignty in theory lies within the whole people, has a ruling class is ideologically heretical, repugnant to public-school alumni and is for the most part volubly and emphatically denied. It is, above all, quite contrary to public school indoctrination.

   For my part, I do not insist that the United States has a tight ruling class because there is often some ambiguity about what public activists in general are up to. Some appear confused themselves.

   Objections to the idea of an American ruling class generally seem to flow from misconceptions about the nature of rule, which in the United States is indirect, and also from the idea that a ruling class must be formally constituted, as by titled nobility with certain formal privileges and immunities. Objections also seem to stem from the notion that a ruling class, in order to exist, must be closed to outsiders (which, for example, the ruling class of England never was).

   But if a ruling class consists of people whose members veritably rule, a class whose imperative wishes and criteria largely order society, then it seems to me a case can be made that there is such a class in the United States, partly hereditary as to property and position and partly open to conforming newcomers. While not every member of a ruling class exercises rule, some being no more than detached observers and more or less graceful idlers, it is from such an established class that rulers may be selected.

   If rulers are those who lay down and enforce the rules, then it would seem that the United States has such a class. The only question remaining would be whether these rulers are publicly selected on the basis of sheer merit or attain their positions largely by means of wealth or hereditary position. Newcomers to rule in the United States, it will be noticed, must pretty much accept and implement already going values established by preexistent rulers. A difference between being born into a ruling class and being accepted into it is that the newcomer must learn and adopt the general values of the ruling group. A man who works his way into the ruling group from the laboring class (and there have been and are such) does not ordinarily retain the values of his original class. He acquires, more or less, the values of his new associates. Like most converts he is often more orthodox than a pope. Everett Dirksen, once a journeyman baker, does not have the outlook today of a journeyman baker.

   How, it may be asked, would one discern a member of a ruling class if there were such a class? The method, it seems to me, would be simple: One would notice whether or not he ruled and how much be ruled. In this sense there is certainly a ruling class in the United States; for radiating throughout the country are various wide-jurisdiction chains of command--political, economic, cultural and judicial--that always have someone at their heads. These head men are, or seem to me, rulers.

   That there is something improper per se about such rulership, as is either directly charged or strongly implied in much leftist analysis, may be flatly denied. Social organization of any kind requires rule, and the fact that certain executive types from a small group assume rule derives as much from the passivity and incoherence of the masses as from any impropriety or inequity in arrangements even though one concedes that anyone who has "influence," either through the possession of money or established position, does have an inside track when it comes to establishing himself in a position of rule. But under any possible version of socialism, for example, there would be similar rulers; and, despite all cant about a democratic socialism, such rulers would tend increasingly to be drawn from a semiprofessionalized self-perpetuating class, properly designated as privileged rulers.

   The idea that we have rulers is somewhat obscured by phrase-makers who at least unconsciously are trying to hide the fact or to save the notion of popular sovereignty, which I unabashedly take to be simple nonsense in any possible social context. The vocabulary of concealment consists of words like "executive." "administrator," "decision maker," "public servant," etc.; the more direct and colloquial "boss" comes closer to the true state of affairs.

   That the American people choose their own rulers (at least in the political sphere) is an idea that will die hard no matter how carefully one shows that the choice almost always narrows down to two not very different hand-picked men who have been long nurtured in the political pipeline, gradually rising to the top. That the American people as a whole "chose" any president or other official in the sense of selecting him from among many possible can be dismissed as a notion beneath notice. What there is to public choice of political officials is negative--and itself controlled. Anyone known, for example, to be an atheist, freethinker, socialist or (in many jurisdictions) a believer in divorce (or subject to a variety of other designations) will be rejected out of hand by the electorate because these words have been antecedently contextually placed as "scare" words. The public, without knowing it, is manipulated by its preconditioned emotional response to certain loaded words, often irrelevant to the man or issue. Such words are given their value content by dominant defining agencies, which are always in the hands of persons favoring the established order (members of a ruling class?). It is not that people select among candidates as they are told. They limit their selection as they have been conditioned by definitions containing concealed value judgments. They are, then, mostly ruled from within themselves but by others who have antecedently determined their reactions. Far from being free men, they are puppets, prisoners of their indoctrination.

   Outside the directly political area, in corporations and private organizations, the case for the selection of rulers by popular choice has not even the most tenuous ground to stand on and nobody at all argues for it. Yet corporate rules affect more people directly and immediately than governmental rules. And in the Catholic Church, by way of large example, the members have nothing to say about the selection of its personnel.

   As all rulers, men at the head of chains of command, either come from a class habituated to producing decision makers or are strivers from the swamps and bayous who learn the same ways and vocabulary either in big organizations or government, the case is strong for at least entertaining the notion that there is in the United States a partially open ruling class oriented around its own special values. Among others, this class by cultural fiat rules out socialists, atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers--that is, as to the latter, people who make judgments only according to evidence. If one's mind is known so to operate, without prior commitment, one is a political pariah by decree, a strange political fact in a supposed free country. Jefferson could not be elected dog catcher today.

   In the United States, according to theory, one is only ruled with one's consent. Yet this is true only in the sense that, if one does not successfully resist, one consents. Nobody living ever had an opportunity to consent to the Constitution, to most of the laws on the books or to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the officials and rules to which he is subject. There is, it is said, an orderly mechanism for changing any feature one may not like about political reality. As to this, it is well known that the mechanism is so complicated and cumbersome that one can pretty much forget about timely orderly change. If the need for doing anything whatever in the world had to be determined by the processes for legally amending the United States Constitution, for example, we would live in an almost frozen universe.

   Individual performance within a class, however, always differs; and even in a ruling class not all the members are likeminded, a fact which gives rise to differences about emphasis or policy. It is the outcome of policy that determines political achievement. But the fact that a man of wealth is carrying the ball at all in the political arena seems to me to represent political achievement unless it can be shown that be is, as in the self-proclaimed case of the late Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, simply looking after his own economic interests from the vantage point of public office.

   Because the flood of hereditary wealth-holders into public office since Roosevelt has consisted largely of university men, it does seem to me that they have generally brought with them a broader conception of public interest than many hardbitten professional politicos or businessmen possess. Neither Roosevelt nor Kennedy played the narrow Wall Street game, although they were far from opposed to the general economic interests of wealth-holders. They were also far from socialists or even soft-headed dogooders.

   One will have to evaluate the performance of the rich in public office from one's own point of view. I say only that whatever they do (if they don't merely service themselves) represents effort and the assumption of responsibility, hence achievement. The fact that Winston Churchill was an upperclass Tory does not lessen the fact that he was a tremendous achiever beyond the call of ordinary duty. And the more like Churchill, Roosevelt or Kennedy any politician is the more of an achiever I take him to be. In saying a man is an achiever one does not necessarily approve his achievement. One is not required to like an artist's picture, no matter how great an artist he may be. But the alleged achievement must be more than mere activity carried on for one's self-interest. Although his occupation may be onerous, a navel-gazer (or so it seems to me) cannot be rationally rated an achiever any more than can a miser.

   Publishing has attracted a number of the wealthy. Whether there is achievement here is determined (at least by me) in the light of whether the publishing has any constructive purpose beyond making money. Here one must look for some indication of intent as well as fulfillment. Where the intent is general enlightenment, and where this intent is to some appreciable extent attained, I would look upon the enterprise as an achievement of public value; where the intent is obscurantic or merely commercial, one may disregard it; although it is probably always better that people read something than nothing.

   Publishing enterprises that have grown from scratch and that have made the owners wealthy, as in the cases of the Pulitzer, McCormick-Patterson and Ochs families, do not fall into the category of our interest.

   As to newspapers, it seems to me that Dorothy Schiff with the New York Post, the Eugene Myers family with the Washington Post and the late Marshall Field III with the Chicago Sun-Times have taken over or started newspapers which they have inclined broadly toward civilized values. The late William Randolph Hearst, the wealthiest man ever in the newspaper field, seems to me to have turned in a negative achievement, for the most part pandering to mass weaknesses. John Hay Whitney, in a costly attempt to keep a revivified New York Herald Tribune afloat, made a particularly worthy effort in latter-day journalism, to be vanquished in 1966 by adverse circumstances. Under Whitney the Herald Tribune made notable contributions, to some of which allusion was made earlier.

   Unfortunately, there is not much in newspaper publishing as a whole (or the mass media in general) subject to evaluation as contributory achievement. As the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of journalism reports:

   Of the two hundred or so major papers, somewhere between ten and eighteen are generally ranked as excellent by such knowledgeable critics as reporters, editors, and journalism educators [with these figures I would concur--F.L.]. A few critics would raise the total to thirty or forty. Perhaps another fifty to eighty smaller dailies would be ranked as "very good for their size." All of these would be so ranked because they are reasonably complete, thorough, dependable, enterprising, and fair in their news columns, regardless of editorial-page views. At the other pole, a total of perhaps another fifty newspapers large and small, would be ranked as "bad" newspapers--some because of a tendency to distort news to conform with the owner's prejudices, others because of sheer incompetence in reporting and editing, some because of both faults. Between these extremes, at levels ranging from "poor" to "fair," lie the vast majority of American daily newspapers. ⁸

   Most of the big newspapers, good or bad, are self-generated enterprises, not dependent on a wealthy sponsor so much as on commercial support by corporate advertisers.

   Marshall Field broadened his publishing effort by going heavily into the field of adult and children's reference and educational books, with notable success. More recently a number of wealthy people have gone into book publishing but, it seems to me, mainly for investment purposes. In the field of books in general during the past fifty years young men of some original small property have entered and achieved commercial as well as cultural publishing success, but as these have not until recently represented anything to be regarded as considerable established wealth they do not belong in this account.

   In the early 1960's Huntington Hartford, enamored of Broadway, launched the elaborate magazine Show, a critical but not commercial success. It was soon relinquished.

   Paul Mellon's Bollingen Foundation has published or reprinted many books in the field of art and the humanities--worthwhile books that would otherwise not have appeared and highly esteemed by a critical few. Praise seems to me due in such a case.

   One of the most distinguished publishing enterprises founded and endowed by a wealthy man was the Loeb Classical Library of Greek and Latin classics with English translations on facing pages; it was established by James Loeb (1867-1933, Harvard, '88), a member of the banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company until his retirement at the age of thirty-four. Loeb in 1905 also founded the Institute of Musical Art, now part of the Juilliard School of Music, and established in Munich a clinic for psychiatric study--a man far ahead of his time.

   Many creative writers have been facilitated in the production of new works by fellowships issued for several decades by the Guggenheim Foundation, although this foundation would not be classifiable as a publishing enterprise.

   Wealth-financed writings are far more extensive than the uncontrolled productions of Guggenheim fellows. Study grants are issued by many foundations, but one cannot uniformly regard the results as publishing achievements because, with the exception of occasional eye-opening works like Myrdal's An American Dilemma and Kinsey's two books on sexual behavior, they are often indirect apologies or rationalizations for existing states of affairs. Where contra-factual or misleading conclusions are put forth even unconsciously under the rubric of certified scholarship as links in a covert in-group celebration under a self-protecting mythology, they can be regarded, it seems to me, only very dubiously as achievements. There are such sponsored writings.

   Publications that in their various ways have represented noncommercial contributions to political and social understanding have been The Nation and the New Republic. The Nation was subsidized for many years by wealthy inheritor-editor Oswald Garrison Villard and more recently published under James J. Storrow, Jr., son of the Boston banker; and the New Republic was assisted into being by Willard Straight of the J. P. Morgan firm. The Reporter, financed with Rosenwald money, has also turned in a distinguished noncommercial record. Dogmatic leftists tend to dismiss these publications because they are gradualist-reformist in tendency. It is interesting to notice, though, that the leftist publications pick up most of their grist from publications such as these and the better newspapers, subjecting it to their own ideological interpretation. Without the better publications to rely upon for information, the editors of the left would be completely blind.

   Except for small enterprises run by artistic or intellectual groups there is little or nothing of value in daily, weekly or monthly publications that has not emerged as a consequence either of pure commercialism or of patronage by the more enlightened of the wealthy or affluent. Out of the masses themselves has come nothing in this line except fantastic religious, moralistic and political tracts. "The Face on the Bar-Room Floor" is an epic of this school.

   While some of the rich have stood forth as publishers, not many, as in the case of Curtis Bok, have distinguished themselves as writers. John F. Kennedy, to be sure, instantly comes to mind as a writer who with his Profiles in Courage rang bells; he very evidently had it in him to function at least at the Lippmann-Reston level, or perhaps beyond, even had he been no more than a poor scholarship student in his youth. Money or no money, Kennedy was obviously a talented fellow; money simply gave him a longer reach. Talented himself, he could recognize talent, something successful politicians are often unable to do. His obvious admiration for political courage, too, seemed to augur something in his political future that political and economic climbers tended to fear, lending color to the disputed view that his assassination was the outcome of a rightist conspiracy.

   If more than a very few of the wealthy have individually distinguished themselves as practicing journalists, I have not been able to pick up the trail from the dim record. There was, of course, Villard.

   Six times married and divorced Cornelius Vanderbilt III (b. 1898) lists himself as an author, lecturer, cinematographer and televiser and has served as a working reporter and then founder, publisher and president of Vanderbilt Newspapers, Inc., which briefly issued illustrated newspapers in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami. He was associate editor of Hearst's New York Mirror from 1925 to 1929 and has since worked as a columnist for many newspapers and periodicals. He is the author of more than fifteen semi-popular, semi-autobiographical books, including Farewell to Fifth Avenue (1935).

   As with most books by scions of the rich, readers appear to have been chiefly interested in Vanderbilt's autobiographical and "insider" revelations. This was true, too, in the case of Evelyn Walsh McLean's Father Struck It Rich.

   Vanderbilt appears to me to have come the closest of one from a very rich family to being a professional writer and working editor; he was precisely that most of his adult life. I call anyone here a professional writer who habitually sets words down on paper for sale to the public. The definition implies no critical judgments.

   Mary Borden (Lady Spears), daughter born in 1886 of William Borden, the dairy-products tycoon, comes the closest known (to me) of any higher-strata American rich to being a critically extolled professional creative writer. Author of some twenty works, mostly fiction, "Her novels reveal a quiet but devastating wit" according to William Rose Benét's The Reader's Encyclopedia (1955). There have been writers in some abundance from the propertied middle class, in possession of some modest private unearned income (Henry James, Clarence Day, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow and others), but this is not the question. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, daughter of a Morgan partner, should also be noticed as a writer of considerable distinction.

   Creative writers about the rich and the upper classes in the United States--Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Frank Norris, Louis Auchincloss--have not themselves been of the very wealthy strata; although Edith Wharton was definitely upper class in that she was of the Rhinelander pre-Revolutionary family, wrote about some of the latter-day rich and was married to an affluent Bostonian. Auchincloss, as a big-firm Wall Street lawyer with Yale and Groton in the background, I would place in the cultivated upper middle class rather than the plutocracy.

   Most writing, especially by scions of the post-Civil War industrial fortunes, has been in the form of memoirs, some of them emanating from literary ghosts. I conclude that few if any of the American big rich, excluding here descendants of early-established New England mercantile families, have distinguished themselves as writers; I do not, however, assert that none of them has authored a book of some sort or written an essay.

   As to great editors--taking as par for this course Joseph Pulitzer, Maxwell Perkins, H. L. Mencken, E. W. Howe, Henry Watterson or almost anyone of a similar stripe--I would say the rich have produced none. Hearst would surely not rate.

   In the performing and nonliterary creative arts, one can pick up a name here and there, mostly from lower levels of wealth, but the record is rather meager. Albert Spalding (1888-1953), a very fine violin virtuoso and composer, was a scion of the sporting-goods family; and Mary Cassatt (1845-1926), an esteemed painter especially of mothers and children, was the daughter of a banker and sister of the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Neither Spalding nor Cassatt, however, were from the top echelons of wealth.

   In the upper level of wealth is Gerald Felix Warburg (b. 1901), son of Felix M. Warburg and Frieda Schiff and a distinguished performing cellist, formerly a member of the Stradivarius Quartet and known for his concertizing and involvement in musical enterprises. Here, too, should be mentioned James P. Warburg, son of Paul M. Warburg, the banker, and Nina J. Loeb (Kuhn, Loeb), who paralleled a career in investment banking and corporate management by authoring more than thirty books on aspects of economics, finance, politics and public affairs and found time to produce some books of verse--a literary geyser. There is, too, Edward M. M. Warburg (b. 1908), a social worker who has taught art, has participated in archaeological expeditions and more recently has taken a directorial role in various cultural and charitable enterprises. The Warburgs, offshoots of a cultivated Anglo-German Jewish banking family, seem to me an untypical case oriented more like certain descendants of earlier Boston mercantilists than latter-day industrialists, even though their center of activity has certainly been Wall Street. They were affluent, probably rich, before they came to the United States.

   Beyond this one has to search carefully for more candidates. Gloria Vanderbilt has had "one-man" shows in painting. That there are creative sparks within the Vanderbilt clan is also suggested by the fact that Harold S. Vanderbilt, premier international yachting champion, around 1925 invented the game of contract bridge, which is an achievement of the same order that one would surely acknowledge to the unknown developers of games like chess, checkers and mah-jong.

   Raymond Pitcairn, described in Who's Who as a lawyer, architect and philanthropist (1885-1966), president of the Pitcairn Company and a director of the family's inherited Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, one of the larger of the nation's industrial enterprises, was the architect of the Cathedral of the Bryn Athyn (Pennsylvania) Church of the New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian). He is the father of eight children, including Nathan Pitcairn (born 1912), director of Pittsburgh Plate Glass and many other companies.

   Alfred Victor du Pont (born 1900) has been a career architect since 1930. Irénée du Pont, Jr. (born 1920), is a mechanical engineer with the family company. Many of the contemporary Du Ponts, however, have had educations in science or engineering at schools such as Harvard, Yale and M.I.T., and many are ensconced in family enterprises. John du Pont presents himself as a marine biologist as well as an Olympic athlete.

   In this book reference to the Du Pouts is only to the dominant owning group of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, which since its reorganization in 1902 is what gave this group its money-power; members of this group have largely concerned themselves with business, finance and, indirectly, politics. In politics they provided the backbone of the opposition to Roosevelt's New Deal.

   The family as a whole is much more extensive than the chemical kings and has been traced genealogically by two family members, obviously imbued with familial mystique. ⁹

   As of 1949 the genealogy showed 1,035 descendants of Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, some of the eighth generation. ¹⁰ The first known ancestor of the line leading to Pierre Samuel, there being other branches, was Jehan du Pont, baptized at Rouen on February 22, 1565. ¹¹ The French Du Ponts were inscribed generally on local roll-books as "bourgeois," so that the family may be said to have been officially middle class until the emergence of a section of it on the latter-day upper finpolitan circuit of plutocracy.

   As a middle-class family it included a considerable number of nonbusiness achievers, a fact not germane to this inquiry about the wealthy of a later day. Nor is this inquiry concerned with any of the noncorporation Du Ponts, most of whom interestingly do not bear the surname of Du Pont at all. One would not, for example, associate the name of Lawrence Sven Anderson (b. 1944) with that of Du Pont; yet his mother was Rosina du Pont, who traces back directly to Pierre Samuel (1739-1817). Nor would one at first blush be inclined to designate Washington Irving, Jr. (b. 1952) as a Du Pont; but he too, is a direct descendant of Pierre Samuel. And so it goes with many others who do not bear the Du Pont name. ¹²

   In medicine we find William Larimer Mellon, a specialist in tropical diseases who has served the natives in the West Indies, and Henry Clay Frick II, grandson of the ironmaster, a physician and surgeon specializing in gynecology. If there are any other medical men from heavily moneyed strata, they have escaped my notice. As to medicine in general today (without any reference to those two valued practitioners), a variety of investigators has shown that it has become pretty much a lush prerogative of the middle class, members of which dominate it as a recently lucrative field. The great discoveries of selfless medical scientists have, by and large, been capitalized along conspicuously lucrative lines by striving middle-class people. ¹³ It is the belief of some investigators that the present need to finance a medical education privately out of middle-class resources operates to exclude men of genuine talent from lower levels of society and to proliferate business-oriented unthorough doctors whose strictly middle-class economic outlook obviously dominates the policies and expressions of the American Medical Association. Doctors, it is implied by many dicta of this association, should properly function on a strictly individual cost-plus-average-rate-of-high-profit basis--all the traffic will bear.

   Although wealthy men sometimes marry their nurses I was unable to find any women from wealthy families serving as professional nurses, but such a fact might be difficult to detect. Some wealthy women do serve as nurses' aids in home communities and during wartime. Most nurses of whatever degree probably serve mainly out of economic necessity in an ill-rewarded field. Despite immoderate public expressions of esteem for them, nurses in the United States are generally treated as lower servants.

   Wealthy men and women not infrequently marry theatrical performers and opera stars, but there are few cases of a wealthy man or woman becoming a professional performer. One of these few cases was Grace Kelly (born 1929) who became a prize-winning film star and then Princess Grace of Monaco; she is the daughter of wealthy Philadelphia contractor John B. Kelly. More recently there has emerged film star Dina Merrill, daughter of cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. Similarly, wealthy people are sometimes sportsmen in the sense of following or bankrolling some sport such as horse racing or yachting, but one rarely finds one as a competitive participant like yachtsman Harold S. Vanderbilt in rough-and-tumble big-league action. Except for youngsters in college sports, hardly any stand forth under my scrutiny as athletes--Grace Kelly's father was a sculling champion--despite the newspaper-fostered national cult of athleticism. Many of the wealthy, of course, play golf and tennis; but they simply don't rate on the big-trophy circuit.

   In general, the Hollywood, Broadway and athletic circuits are dominated by people who came up from the nonpropertied depths of nonentity. Some of these, of course, have hit it big financially and hobnob happily with the well-heeled in feverish Café Society.

   Nobody from a conspicuously rich established family was found in a possibly imperfect search among scientists or scholars as these are listed in American Men of Science: The Physical and Biological Sciences, 3 vols., 11th edition (R. R. Bowker Co., New York, 1965); and American Men of Science: The Social and Behavioral Sciences, lOth edition (the Jaques Cattell Press, Inc., Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, 1962). In the four-volume Directory of American Scholars (R. R. Bowker Co., New York, 1963), there is listed Corliss Lamont, son of a one-time leading Morgan partner, as a writer on contemporary and philosophical affairs. Among various books he is perhaps best known for his The Philosophy of Humanism, 1957.

   1 would not deny that some--a few--scientists, scholars, philosophers or educators may have sprung from families of lesser property, perhaps up to $1 million by value, but I have been able to devise no system for readily locating those who trace a line of descent on the distaff side. In general, the record as I scan it suggests that few people of noticeable wealth go into science, scholarship, education, medicine, journalism, the judiciary, philosophy or the arts--that is to say, they shun subtle detail work all the way from managing their own accounting systems on upward. Some men-on-the-make, however, like the original Rockefeller, have a genius for detail that reminds one of extremely self-demanding artists.

   Activists among the rich (as distinguished from the more or less graceful and here and there civilized idlers) tend to surge toward positions of broad command in corporations, nonprofit cultural, social and artistic organizations and in government, in this last recalling Aristotle's observation about the penchant of the rich for political office. There they do what they can to lay out and enforce broad lines of policy within which the detail work of others will bear the requisite fruit. The wealthy may finance the detail work that goes into the creation of an instrument like television and may finally finance its launching; they thereafter determine, in concert with up-and-comers, how it shall be used --as an instrument of general enlightenment or an instrument for selling merchandise at a profit. While compromises are worked out to meet the objections of churlish dissenters, anyone is free to see where the emphasis falls and what the level of appeal is.

   From the universities to the corporations and cultural organizations, the wealthy and their chosen aides supervise the detail workers. In their various positions of command the supervisors are known as executives, administrators, directors, publishers, trustees, sponsors, officials, community leaders, philanthropists and public servants. I imply no criticism here, simply point to the fact that activity and achievement among the rich at any level usually boil down primarily to concern with ordering the surrounding state of affairs and directing detail work along soundly approved lines of profitability.

   I do not deny but indeed assert, while pointing to Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, that such concern may visualize improvement in the surrounding state of affairs rather than keeping them soundly headed toward the rocks. Yet, whether it represents improvement, deterioration (as C. Wright Mills contended) or the maintenance of the status quo, it shows the area of major interest. The active rich and upcoming rich, as far as one can judge from the available record, are far less interested in understanding, improving or embellishing the world than in running it, at times running it close to the rocks as when the German industrialists embraced Hitler, or as when American financiers thrust the United States into World War I.

   The Celebrity Register, edited by Cleveland Amory (Harper and Row, New, York, 1963), lists people as noteworthy according to the amount of space they are given in the mass media. Among the rich there mentioned one finds Douglas Dillon; Donald Douglas; Angier Biddle Duke; Doris Duke; Irénée du Pont; Cyrus Eaton; Henry J. Kaiser; Sherman Fairchild; Marshall Field IV (d.); Harvey S., Leonard, Raymond and Russell Firestone; Randolph and William Randolph (Jr.) Hearst; Henry, Benson, William C. and Mrs. Edsel Ford; Paul and Richard King Mellon; John Pillsbury; Alfred G., Cornelius, Jr., Gloria and Harold S. Vanderbilt; all the Rockefeller brothers and Jievute Paulekiute Sears ("Bobo") Rockefeller; Ogden Reid; Walter P. Chrysler; Amon Carter, Jr.; Dorothy Schiff; Lady and John Jacob Astor of England; Henry Crown; Lammot du Pont Copeland; August Busch; and a medley of others.

   In combing through the list of the rich who are also celebrated by percipient editors one does not encounter any significantly additional names relating to notable personal achievement and, indeed, one notes many omissions.

   This question of achievement has arisen, I remind the reader, for two reasons: (1) It is part of standard public relations ideology that the big fortunes are used in all ways for public support and (2) the criteria of achievement are applied in general most forcefully by the rich to others. What I am doing, heretically, is applying the standards to them. I mention this because it should not be inferred that I myself value achievement as such, and in and of itself, very highly; there is much to be said along the line of Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness. As far as people in general are concerned, I personally value them first for general amiability, which I consider beyond price, and after that for such higher cultivation as they may have acquired. A man amiable and cultivated seems to me the limit of what one can ask for in a human being. If he is also creative he is, patently, ineffable.

   The achiever, as it is now known, is usually a person psychologically programmed or impelled to function in a certain way and possessing the ability to satisfy his impulsion. It is, however, part of the middle-class cult of personality to celebrate immoderately the carrier of such often purely fortuitous programming. A man's specific achievement, as far as that goes, is often greater or lesser than he is, a fact sensed by those achievers who draw back from public acclaim not so much out of modesty as uneasiness with the personal judgment of which they are the objects.

   Although achievement is a splashy middle-class value, it is applied most rigorously by the rich, who bring it to bear on others far more rigorously than I have applied it to them in this chapter, where at times I have inwardly quailed at the thought of how purists would look upon the free catholicity of some of my inclusions. As I explained initially, however, I do not pretend to be applying the canons in all their rigor but will take almost anything offered.

   What the rich generally demand in all things of direct concern to them is perfection-from food, clothing, drink, raiment and shelter to expertise in all skills of which they feel need. This is readily seen in the food and service in their clubs and restaurants and in the arrangements in their own hospitals. Where the rich congregate and bestow their patronage everything is offered according to tiptop standards. It is the same when it comes to choosing skills for their cultural and economic enterprises. In the plastic arts what they clearly want is the best, for which they pay astronomic prices. On the cultural front standards, particularly technical, are most rigorously imposed, on students and faculty alike, in the key universities; as one traces the chain of command upward one arrives finally at the board of trustees, where the familiar names of the rich, absent farther down, begin to occur with frequency and regularity. The more prestigious the university the more frequently do outstanding names in science and scholarship appear among the faculty-Nobel laureates or men of comparable lofty stature. The higher one ascends among the graduates, from the cum laudes to the magna cum laudes and on to the summa cum laudes the more rigorous are the applied standards. It is the same among the big corporations, which skim the cream of the physicists, chemists and engineers. Who wishes to invest money in a skyscraper if it is going to turn out to be another Leaning Tower of Pisa?

   In brief, only the best is wanted except perhaps in social analysis. Many are called, few are chosen.

   Throughout society, ordered from on high, the screws are tight as to (1) technical standards of production and service and (2) rates of pay for all subordinates. The consequence is that the United States is a high-tension society, invisibly and almost insensibly imposing upon all achievers demanding standards of performance and upon the labor force minimal rates of pay in the name of strictest economy and efficiency. It would clearly be inefficient as well as uneconomical to pay more than was required according to the unbreakable "law" of supply and demand. Hence, when rare skills are required by the ruling group--at this point we can stop all fencing and notice that we are in fact confronted by a quite small ruling group--more bearers of these rare skills are produced, thus bringing into play the "law" of supply and demand. It would not do to have only 500 or so physicists in the country, each of whom could command an exorbitant salary comparable to that of a corporation chairman (and possibly tax exempt). It is better to produce thousands of physicists so that few can expect a salary above that of, say, an assistant bank cashier.

   It is a curious fact in the United States that some of the rarest and most difficult skills--as of a creative mathematician--are paid for on a very low scale (Einstein, we recall, got $16,000) whereas far less rare skills, such as in the imposing of rules and standards, are relatively well rewarded. True savants in the United States are far more of the order of menial servants than they themselves suspect.

   Although rejecting and resenting it when applied to themselves, the rich in general make full use of the instrument of criticism, in their own service. While this can be shown in many directions it appears most readily in the matter of politics. Not only is criticism sharp here but it is oriented not philosophically, according to reason, but along lines of naked and narrow self-interest. The politician who pursues under necessity some unfamiliar course, such as Franklin Roosevelt, is subjected to the most unsparing and ungenerous appraisal. No holds are barred. A Norman Thomas is hooted off the rostrum.

   If it is one of the functions of criticism to encourage the performer to do better, it must follow that a function of criticism of the rich is to enable them to do better--as they expect everyone to do from waiters and bus boys on upward to presidents.

   The important value of achievement is directly imposed on American society largely by pushful products of the lower middle class who have received the nod from on high to occupy executive posts throughout the mass media, the great carriers of values in our day.

   Any competent news editor can determine in a flash how noteworthy anyone is. His is an important function, for he decides how much valuable space can with maximum economic efficiency be allotted to anyone. He achieves his end by drawing upon wide background knowledge and evaluating how wealthy a person is, how elevated his position in the social hierarchy or the proper dimension of his apparent objective achievement. He believes he is governed by audience interest; that this is not so can be proved by showing that many of his emphases are of interest to no very wide audience. Attaining the presidency, winning a Nobel Prize, getting some championship, hitting a record number of home runs or writing a Broadway "hit" are instantly recognized pretty indiscriminately as big achievement; he has more difficulty in presenting some important scientific breakthrough. Not that many really care. As those know very well who make these measurements, not to have money, position or some approved tangible achievement to one's credit is to be a nobody, an employee at most, subject to downplay in the news columns unless one commits some titillating indiscretion or stupefying horror.

   There are those moralists who carefully explain that such facile valuation is mistaken, that the widow suffering with lumbago and sciatica who rears six children to become solid citizens is as good as anyone, perhaps better. One may agree; but, as they say in electoral politics, if you have to explain just how good somebody really is you are lost. One either sees the point instantly against the background of accumulated values, as the news editor sees it, or never. Attention wanders as the moralists drone on hollowly that every person is invested with high human dignity and is of infinite inherent value. As anyone can see by looking about him, in terms of established going values this is just not so; operationally it is pure bunk. In terms of applied going values, most people are crashing nobodies.

   Eccentrically applying this same scale of going values to the rich, as they are applied to everybody else, produces results approximately of the order I have indicated in this chapter. The activists among the rich are not achievers so much as commanders and through their intricate public-relations system project their positions of command as superlative achievements. A man is not an "industrialist" because he possesses some recondite skill denied to other men; he is an industrialist because he possesses and commands capital. And so it is with most of the roles the rich play. Put another way, give many other men the same cards and they could play the same hand, perhaps to better effect, surely not to worse.

   Achievement in general appears to be a middle-class prerogative. The rich, as William H. Vanderbilt observed, do not appear motivated by any particular ambition, other than to rule. They are brought up to feel that they have already somehow made the grade. The poor and near-poor, having all they can do to keep their heads economically above water, cannot aspire even in fantasy to much in the way of achievement except possibly in sports or entertainment. Becoming a soft-shoe dancer or a professional ballplayer represents perhaps the zenith of aspiration among some of the more ambitious of the younger poor.

   In the middle classes--lower middle class being those with nontaxable estates, higher middle with taxable estates up to whatever level one would consider wealthy, let us provisionally say $1 million--there is just enough feeling of scarcity to suggest that something more might be desirable and enough feeling of attainment to lead to the belief that more might be achieved along some line. It is in this social stratum that dreams are born of becoming big corporation executives, big lawyers, big scientists, novelists, college presidents, scholars, roving journalists and super-salesmen.

   The middle classes invariably have something to begin with but often feel capable of more distinctive performance. Not, as it is commonly said, that they are mere status strivers, although there are those, too. They do, however, have a base from which to launch operations, if only in the direction of money-making or attaining position. The only way most of the poor feel they might make some money beyond the subsistence level is by winning against heavy odds in a sweepstakes, finding oil or robbing a bank. For the really poor man, imbedded in a poverty culture, the outlook for personal achievement is bleak. He needs constant help and encouragement of the kind available to its members from within the middle class: "Sure you can be a big engineer. Look at So-and-So and So-and-So. All you need do is stick to your studies and pick up some good connections."

   Both the rich and the poor lack the balanced tension for achievement found in the middle class, often to the undoing of its more taut members.

   So, although I don't decry the slender evidences of achievement within the wealthier classes, some of whom are at least percipient enough to underwrite and finance achievement in others, it is a fact that it doesn't amount to very much and is concentrated within the less well-heeled middle classes. This conclusion has bearing from a different direction on the contention out of public relations metaphysics that the big fortunes in one way or the other are really great public benefactions, largely devoted to public good works. That this contention is prevalent may be seen by noticing the designation by newspapers of nearly all wealthy men as philanthropists. Some may be here and there but surely not all.

   As we have seen, only 8 per cent of all donation, in the neighborhood of an aggregate $10 billion annually, comes from foundations; 50 per cent of all public giving goes to religious institutions and amounts, in fact, to the price of support of untaxed church services. There remains 42 per cent, or about $4.2 billion, spread around among Community Funds and special-purpose charitable and medical organizations to which the public in general contributes.

   Achieving saviors put forth from among the big fortune-holders, then, appear to be few. If there were any Mozarts or Pasteurs among them it would be evident that the public was receiving gifts beyond price; but I could find none although I stand ready to be corrected on the point by any one of the many articulate admirers and supported supporters of the rich.

   While it may be that the American rich, compared with the European rich, have devoted more lucre to good works, it is nevertheless true that they have had more to parcel out and what they have parceled out has not been great proportionately. Even if one concedes without further ado the acts of the twelve largest foundation donors as unquestionably and unchallengeably disinterested and publicly supportive they, as it happens, do not turn out to be much in bulk.

   Most of the cash revenues of the active and inactive among the rich seem to me devoted to supporting a life of luxury and ease amid surrounding conditions of pressing need. Not that what is devoted to luxurious living represents out-of-pocket deprivation of the poor or that the latter would be sustained if only they had these revenues. Such a contention would not stand up under analysis.

   What fosters the great disparity between the wealthy few and the impoverished many is public policy. Although some of the wealthy disagree with important aspects of this public policy, the wealthy and the near-wealthy as a class use their considerable influence to maintain it in their own interest. It is not that they take from the poor what belongs to the poor but that they sponsor, support and underwrite public arrangements, such as the tax structure, that makes any different outcome impossible. With the tax structure, merely one detail among many (the price system is another), rigged against him the way it is, it is almost impossible now for any member of the labor force even to save his way into the economic middle class. The tax bite on earned incomes is much too great in the Garrison State.

   Even with smaller taxes most members of the labor force would be unable to save their way out of it because, hazards apart, the system of advertising consumer goods often operates upon them with coercive effect. Able himself to resist the blandishments of the advertisers, an employee finds that his wife and children more readily succumb, importune him to make rash purchases for their delight and put him in the position of a niggardly churl for counseling prudence. "All the other families in the neighborhood have one; why should we be different?" Given the choice between being intelligent Economic Man or compliant Good Father, he usually chooses the latter role and becomes, as the news editors will say, Mr. Nobody. He complains, may console himself with strong drink but always gives in. In the end, he has not made the grade but is given a gold watch for forty years' service before being ushered off to live on less than $100 per month Social Security. His children often look on him as a flop, speak of him disparagingly.

   In their influence over public policy the rich and their power-elite, then, are not successful merely through being devilishly clever or unscrupulous. They are usually successful because their natural victim (or, better perhaps, bystander) the mass-man about whom reformers are continually concerned, is passive, relaxed, psychologically conditioned to submission and usually broadly untutored. He irrationally favors, in fact, many aspects of policy that are most disadvantageous to him.

   While there is much else to be said pro and con about mass-man, he nevertheless shows these broad characteristics:

   1. Since infancy he has been indoctrinated by parents and parental substitutes to believe there is a supernatural power on which he can safely rely. "The Lord will provide," it is said, although it is not said just what provision He will make. Those who sincerely believe they are supernaturally protected do not apparently feel it necessary to rely on their own wits. Owing to the belief, probably well founded, that religion makes most people readily tractable, the State exempts religious institutions from taxation as an adjunct to its more direct police powers. Whatever is tranquilizing on the masses is generally approved by social managers.

   Conservatives, standpatters and reactionaries invariably extol religious belief as a political support, and this was well exemplified in the inaugural address of Ronald Reagan as governor of California when he said: "Belief in and dependence on God is absolutely essential. It will be an integral part of our public life as long as I am Governor. No one could think of carrying on with our problems without the help of God." ¹⁴

   For this reason critics of the established order--radicals and many liberals who would wish to change or modify it--see religion as part of the political process of keeping the common man in chains and submissive to higher secularists, often in clerical garb. The issue as between conservatives and radicals is not whether God exists--for this question is of interest to neither--but what the effect is on the populace of belief or disbelief in God. Religion is seen by both equally as an adjunct to repression and inhibition.

   What is perhaps most significant about sincere religious belief with respect to its influence on political and economic attitudes is this: If one, for example, can believe without any difficulty in the Virgin Birth of Jesus and that Jesus walked on the waters, changed water into wine and performed other unnatural acts then one will experience little difficulty in accepting Everett M. Dirksen and Lyndon B. Johnson, to name no others, as great statesmen, and little difficulty in believing that some fifty-nine-cent cosmetic will make one irresistible to the opposite sex. A social effect of religion, at least in its cruder forms, is that it fosters widespread public credulity, makes a wide public sitting ducks for political and economic short-change artists. As people joyfully sing "Washed in the Blood of the Lamb," they are beset by thousands of invisible vampires. Offended by this spectacle, the skeptic turns away.

   2. He has been schooled to believe sincerely that he lives under a government as nearly perfect as the subtlest mind of man can devise. Indeed, the better his schooling and the more apt a student he has been in elementary and secondary grades on the subject of government, the more widely he has been misled. For what has been presented to him, at least in the best schools, has been razor-exact in its formalism. Although formally true, most of the lessons he has learned on the subject of government have been intrinsically and deeply false or at least misleading. The difference between government as he has learned about it and government as practiced is the difference between a battle plan on which troops have been briefed and the actual battle. What is in the latter that was not in the plan are blood, pain, pillage, destruction, cries of agony and death. The plan is neat; its execution is sheer havoc.

   The American governmental system, I do deeply believe, is beautifully rational in its structure. It implicitly assumes that all will be well if everyone, equally endowed, is intelligently self-protective. What throws it askew, however, is that people are neither equally endowed by nature or law. Paradoxically, one might say that the system was devised by dogmatic, somewhat myopic rationalists.

   3. On top of this religio-political indoctrination he is given most of his information about daily affairs not by experts but by the daily press, which many analyses have shown to be deficient. While a close reading of six to a dozen of the best newspapers at home and abroad will give one a close approximation to much relevant contemporary truth, few people can give the time to such reading and, even if they were fully intelligent, they would not always be well served. During World War I, for example, a close reading of all the best papers in the United States and Europe would not have given one so much as an inkling of the true causes, origins and aims of the war. Historians had to ferret out the facts later.

   In consequence of the foregoing (among other things) we get Mencken's booboisie, Barnum's suckers, my own handicapped dependents.

   The man of affairs, however, either rich or up-and-coming, usually has a different background. He has not, first, been successfully indoctrinated with the idea that he can rely on a Higher Power. He is more apt to believe that "the Lord helps those who help themselves," or that the Lord is a neutral referee.

   As to schooling, he has usually pursued it further to the advanced level that introduces comparative government and problems in American government; or he has heard government talked about in skeptical terms at home. Whether he studies government in college or from the vantage point of a law school, he becomes aware there is much fine print about exceptions and variations to be absorbed. There are many "buts." The whole thing does not operate according to the broad strokes of elementary summaries. There are, as it turns out, "smoke-filled backrooms" where men of easy virtue bargain with tight abandon for imperial stakes.

   Any high-level course in problems of American government quickly acquaints the student with the fact that the governmental system is shot through with difficulties and contradictions. In many situations and circumstances the system will no more save or protect the individual than the deity to which daily prayers are directed.

   People of affairs, particularly wealthy people, do not rely on the newspapers, even the best newspapers, for information upon which to act. They employ their own research staffs and subscribe to many expensive informational services unknown to the general public. A clerk, for example, may read about a stock in some publication and decide to commit a large percentage of his slender capital to its purchase. A wealthy man has a staff or a specialist study such a stock and, if he buys at all, commits to it only a small portion of his capital, perhaps less than 1 per cent.

   It is, then, natural that when any popular interest enters the public arena against any particular or combined money interest it is much like a muscle-bound amateur entering the ring against a lithe battlewise champion. It is only a question of what round the amateur will go down in or by what margin he will be outpointed. The champion can deliver the result any way, and on order. He can even, if this seems politically desirable, allow himself to be knocked out in some contest where the issue is minor, giving the popular faction a sense of triumph for a change. Such popular victories turn out to be "no title" contests. Winning or losing them makes no fundamental difference.

   The dice, in brief, are loaded by (shall we say? ) destiny.

   Instead of the rich being irresistible exploiters, then, as Marxists present them, the situation as a whole is much more like a sadomasochistic process with one small group internally programmed for command and the other, much larger, for gratifying submission. While the outcome of submission is not widely relished, the process of submission itself appears to be pleasing to most people. In Barnum's words, they are born suckers. They like to salute.

   Freud looked upon all civilization as a process of necessary repression. Most of this repression is achieved by psychological means through the uptraining of children in certain ways by parents and parental substitutes. Where such training fails and overt rebels against the system of repression appear, the police and the military stand ready. They carry out direct repression.

   What happens within these systems of repression at different periods and places is that certain small classes arise, identify themselves with rule, and turn the whole mechanism of necessary repression to their personal advantage. Necessary repression, expressed in law, becomes the mechanism behind which they carry on repression in their own interests. Law and order, desirable in general, mean in the light of special emphases wealth or affluence for a few, poverty for many.

   For the people in charge of the instruments of repression in time are emboldened to make more and more exceptions in their own immediate interests, as in the case of the medieval popes. What was forbidden to everyone else was allowed, off the record, to the pope. Who was there, after all, to say him nay?