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Sixteen

    THE CREAM OF THE QUEST

   The various attitudes and dispositions of the wealthy coterie--the up-and-coming, the active and established, the playful and the idly parasitic (artistic contrast on the social scene to the lethargic parasitic poor)--obviously have some sort of general end-in-view or goal. For a man ordinarily seeks to attain or retain great wealth for some more tangible reason than simple social security, which the American rich have achieved to an absurd and perhaps self-defeating degree. As seems evident, the common reason for attaining and retaining wealth, as displayed in specific careers, is to lead some personally determined insulated version of the Good Life. Considerable independence of others is an invariable hallmark of the good life as delineated by the rich. Power itself creates a barrier between those who possess it and those who do not.

   As all of the rich have far more choices open to them than the nonrich in selecting personal roles and scheduling their time, the way they live should at least shadow forth their conception of how one should properly live. Manifestly, if they thought it a hardship to sleep in a gold canopied bed in a mansion they could, exercising free choice, instead sleep in a Bowery doorway, under a haystack or in a cabin small by a waterfall; some, in fact, prefer to sleep, occasionally at least, in remote hunting lodges or on damp, unsteady yachts. As far as that is concerned, they could, exercising choice, retire to a monastery on a cold Himalayan slope or join (or even buy) a circus. A few, to be sure, have satisfied profound inclinations by buying Broadway shows and square-rigged sailing ships.

   Yet, despite the wide range of material choices open to them, recipes for living among the rich are so restricted and familiar as to have become historical clichés. Their general style of living has changed little since the days of the Pharaohs, both absolutely and relatively to the rest of society. The personal life of a rich man in truth is rather cut and dried and pretty much follows a longstanding script; it is about as stylized and full of surprises as a minuet. Within a rather narrow range one can accurately predict his moves from collecting expensive objects to breeding horses and dogs. To be rich and not a collector is to be a fairly rare bird.

   Certain broad patterns of living can be clearly discerned among the rich, although one may be a total abstainer and another a sturdy boozer; one may prefer blondes and another exotic non-Caucasians. It is no doubt because life for the rich is historically routinized, holding few surprises either enchanting or terrifying, that so many of them become addicted to gambling, from the stock market to the casino and horse race. Except for those who play out their gambling drive in politics or forms of business rulership, many of them are patently subject to boredom, as many photographs show. ¹

   While I would not go so far as to say that all of the rich are bored all of the time, boredom has historically been one of the occupational hazards of the upper classes; for people who have seen nearly everything and satisfied inclinations as much as they could each day acquire a considerable feeling of déjà vu. Unlike the common run of employee they have, for example, never had the unexpected thrill of being suddenly called to account. They have never suddenly been told: "You're fired," a dramatic experience known to thousands of poorer men, including university presidents.

   Unlike the very poor they are not, even rarely, bemused by unexpected kindness or consideration; for they have learned to expect such attitudes from others, especially from officials and personnel, and might, perhaps, be diverted rather than otherwise moved by some rare outburst of rudeness that would annoy a humbler man. Some of the rich no doubt get some release from boredom by reading the overheated Marxist press and learning what aspiring back-alley commissars have in store for them. But such roaring historic adventure on the guillotine, they no doubt sadly realize, is not to be for them. They are fully aware of all the overlapping mechanisms of social control, from the Holy Ghost and the local schools to the police and the military, to say nothing of privately retained legislators and eager-beaver rank-and-file vigilantes ever ready to show their patriotic zeal by harassing bedraggled dissenters.

   Whatever their orientation either as actives or passives on the social scene, the rich are all affected, almost without their knowledge, by the concentrated dynamic of money. Their assets, as it were, are constantly sending out invisible impulses to them to make some move, make some move, make some move. . . . To get away from the compulsively hypnotic influence of these assets is seemingly, for nearly all, virtually impossible. They are as Trilbys to the Svengali of their money.

   This is readily seen in the cases, always fulsomely reported, of people who unexpectedly come into large properties, either by inheritance or by winning some sweepstakes. As soon as happy news of the good fortune is received there must be a celebration with champagne, cigars and immoderate quantities of delicatessen goodies. Under the questioning of reporters the lucky recipient, delivered from an impecunious hell, must relate what he intends to do with his windfall. He is sometimes baffled at first, but the world insistently demands an answer and it is clear that he must do something with the money. To refuse it out of hand would be manifest folly. So we see that the money is already prodding him, and will keep on prodding until the day it is all gone. He can spend it all rapidly (and some have done just this) or he can more prudently bank it and spend only the income, thus reserving its magic power for disposition over a wider section of space and time; if he does this he has almost insensibly moved upward in the socioeconomic structure, joined the bourgeoisie.

   No case has yet been reported, although there may have been one, of a man informed that he had just come into an unexpected $5 million who, making a note of it, nonchalantly sauntered off to keep a dental appointment and to pick up some chopped meat for his dog on the way home. Nor has any case yet been reported of a man, telephoning a friend, who near the end of the conversation says something like, "By the way, George, I've just been surprised to learn I've come into $5 million." Such recipients, to the contrary, usually start sending excited messages to all points of the compass.

   Most of the rich, whether they arrived by their own scheming or have inherited, are not thus taken by surprise. It was always understood by most of them that they were going to be rich as soon as some older relative passed to his reward. While no great alteration is required in the style of life of such they, too, have it gradually borne in upon them by bankers, lawyers, wives and friends that they are under some irresistible compulsion to make moves in which their money plays a major role, something like the queen in a game of chess. Few new heirs, if any, find that they can ignore or even tranquilly contemplate from afar their newly acquired assets. They are suddenly burdened with problems: an investment problem, a tax problem, a political problem, a donation problem, a general living problem. Where to spend the summer? The winter? Spring and fall? And what of the difficult periods between seasons, where there is an overlap? And what to wear? What clothing? Who to see and not see?

   A generalization that applies with hardly an exception to all of the rich is that asceticism is rarely if ever an ingredient in their personal scheme of affairs. Not that it should be; it just is not. Rather is it the case that however the life of one rich person may differ from that of another both live at the opposite pole from asceticism. The elder J. P. Morgan was quite a bon vivant, a swinger, and Rockefeller was a teetotaler and homebody; yet Rockefeller, among other things, maintained four palatial estates, one for each season of the year, from Maine to Florida. Although a tight-lipped Baptist elder, he was far from monkish.

   The personal life of the rich, almost without exception, comes down to sensory gratification on a grand scale, gratification attained in the light of standards generally considered luxurious. A simplistic material determinism seems to rule their lives as by an iron law. Here and there, it is true, have been persons frugal to the point of miserliness, such as Hetty Green, but in general the rich are found to live according to popular conceptions of extreme luxury even though one may be comparatively restrained and another an obvious sybarite. They do, broadly, precisely what the average man in the street would do, neither more nor less, were he on their lofty pecuniary perch. What one may say in the most extreme criticism of them is that they are so ordinary, so common, so vulgar, yet placed in positions of extraordinary advantage. Far more than they themselves suppose, they are automatons, moved one way or the other almost always by considerations of money. To find a rich man, apart from an occasional eccentric inventor, living a life largely unmotivated by his money is, as I believe the record shows, a virtual impossibility. Successful inventors, yes; others, no.

   What unquestionably first strikes the most indolent observer about the personal lives of the rich compared with the nonrich is the opulence of their residential settings. These lush habitations, contrary to many hurried commentators, have more than a titillating value for outsiders. They are, I submit, deeply symbolic of a self-conception and of actual objective social status. They are, contrary to the eagle-eyed Veblen, more than an exercise in ostentatious display and conspicuous consumption. They are, in fact, a dead giveaway of what it is all about.

   Since the time of the Pharaohs, and no doubt even before, the head man in the kingdom always had the biggest house, a palace, and with the advent of progress in utilizing labor he came to have many palaces suitable to the different seasons of the year and different moods. The supporting nobility and priesthood had lesser but sufficiently palatial habitations, and it was only as some of these came to have more to say in ruling the realm that their homes began to rival in size that of the monarch.

   At the risk of provoking the bargain-basement sages into charging that I am oversimplifying, let me say it plainly on the line: The people with the most say-so have always had the largest and most elaborate domiciles. Big house historically means big man in the realm; conversely, small house means nobody in the realm.

   As direct survivals of this tradition, embellished by Roman emperors, Louis XIV, the czars and a few others, we today see the pope, spiritual ruler over some 500 million precious immortal souls, living in a series of huge palaces, one of which is set in his own small city. We see the figurehead kings and queens of England still housed in extraordinarily large houses, some approaching the size of the Kennedys' Merchandise Mart in Chicago. And we see the successors to the czars living in the Kremlin, no shack.

   From time to time a vast residence has been awarded at the expense of the realm to someone who has been of signal service to the rulers, as in the case of huge Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, awarded in Queen Anne's reign to John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, for his victory in 1704 over the French and Bavarians at the decisive battle of Blenheim in Bavaria. Winston Churchill spent much of his boyhood in this truly imperial edifice.

   A very big house, then, or a series of big houses, means historically that the inhabitant is either a ruler or one very closely associated with rule. It is never, never, never the case that anyone functionally or otherwise dissociated from rule, anyone such as an artist, philosopher, civil service official or scientist, inhabits such a big house except as a guest. The big houses, then, are the outward signs writ plain of a class habituated to rule, reminding us of the principle of Roman law: Cui bono?

   As the United States does not have anything like a ruling class, according to an extensive assortment of fully housebroken professors, we are confronted here by an apparent anomaly: People who in theory have no more to say about governance than the ordinary truck driver somehow inhabit some of the choicest and most expensive establishments of all history. In American political theory, to be sure, the rulers are fundamentally the whole people, who from time to time duly elect their representatives. These latter, if anyone, are held to be the real rulers. Yet these putative real rulers, unless they already belong to the very rich class, never inhabit dwellings of comparable opulence even if they reach the White House, which is itself a comparatively modest affair with a short-term lease.

   When American presidents leave office they almost invariably return to relatively unimposing dwellings--Eisenhower to a remodeled frame farmhouse in Gettysburg, Truman to a Victorian frame house in Independence and Lyndon B. Johnson eventually to a not very impressive ranch house in West Texas. With no intention of being disparaging, one can see that these ex-presidential habitations, comfortable enough to be sure, would hardly rate as servants' quarters on most of the larger estates. Members of the Supreme Court, as anyone can see, occupy nothing more substantial.

   This is not to say that the president and members of Congress are not powerful for stipulated periods within constitutional limits. But their power, whether it consisted of Wilson steering the country far off center into World War I or Johnson by his own decision intervening massively in faraway Vietnam, was always exercised at the prompting and with the approval of the magnates. We know this, first, because the magnates publicly applauded and, secondly, not a single one of them seriously dissented. Except for certain features of policy under Franklin D. Roosevelt, when counsels in a crisis were divided, the magnates have been in general harmony with national policy all along. Either the magnates wanted that policy (and heavy documentation by Gabriel Kolko for 1900-12 in The Triumph of Conservatism shows them as the very source of policy) or the political managers have been clairvoyant enough to hit upon policies that would meet with the broad approval of the magnates even as many highly intelligent and informed nonmagnates dissented (as with respect to Johnson on the Vietnam policy).

   Much policy deeply affecting the lives of most citizens, as far as that goes, is never submitted to the political powers for their rescript. For whatever is not specifically forbidden under the rule of freedom is permitted. As a single example, let us consider technological innovation, always embarked upon by private decision but invariably of vast public consequence. in pursuit of greater economy and efficiency, higher productivity per man employed and more substantial profits, the corporate managers, deputies of the big owners, constantly refine the technology of production. More particularly they have recently, without any prompting word from formal government, plumped heavily for labor-eliminating automation. And although the size of the labor force has steadily increased it has not increased parallel with population growth, thus dealing large sections of the populace out of it, notably the younger, the crudely skilled and those designated as superannuated at sixty-two to sixty-five years. No representatives, near or remote, of those dealt out ever passed on the policy that has had such effects. The measures were simply taken by private, unilateral decision in consonance with sound corporate practice, an example of veiled power that has wide effects.

   More formally, now, with the social effects apparent, the young were bidden to remain in school, for which many have no stomach either because of personal incapacity or because a considerable segment of conventional schooling is plainly boring and irrelevant to any felt issue. Many simply cannot stand the dull routine. Again, many in a pecuniary milieu want to earn money so as to feel some illusory independence. As a consequence, the country now possesses a large section of disoriented young, neither at school nor at work and getting into a variety of headline-making mischief from congregating in unseemly hordes to sedulous extra-curricular copulation and drug addiction.

   No elected representative ever passed on the decisions that produced these results. The decisions were made quietly by quiet men in quiet corporate boardrooms.

   The big houses, in brief, are occupied by the basic decision makers, and this has been the rule down through history. A difference, however, is that in the United States the decisions are only indirectly and obliquely imposed.

   It should not be supposed that, the idea of this self-conception of rulership on the part of the rich is sustained only by the fact that they have a penchant for assorted ducal mansions and grounds. That this is the self-conception is shown, too, by the way many of them sign their names with Roman numerals appended, betokening an established family line in the style of European nobility. It is shown, furthermore, and more convincingly, in the affinity of the American rich, particularly with respect to their young women, for marriage with members of the European nobility.

   Such marriages have taken place by the hundreds and I will not trouble once again to cite and update them. The most spectacular of them was the marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough, the two offspring of which are directly in the ducal Marlborough line. That the motivation in these marriages was the quest for titles, mainly on behalf of the mothers of daughters, is made clear by the fact that wealthy young American males rarely married a titled European female; for in that case the title was not shared. ²

   Almost always it was the case that marriage took place when the title could pass and the offspring, grandchildren of American commoners, could be authentically ennobled. "I am the mother of a genuine, 24-karat duke," the American woman could sigh in quiet idiotic joy.

   It is obvious that the American industrial rich, not sharing the distaste of the Founding Fathers for titles, identified themselves with and saw themselves playing a role similar to European nobility and royalty.

   True, a self-conception is not necessarily a reflection of reality; it could be pure fantasy. It is on other grounds, of actual rulership, that we see that the self-conception was not mistaken. The big-rich of the United States are in fact if not in form American dukes; the general populace pretty much enacts the role and has the outlook of peasantry, most of them quite gladly.

   While much has been written in detailed description of the opulent and vasty residences of the freedom-loving rich, and many photographs of them have been published, it has not been noticed as far as I am aware that they occur in distinct, different patterns.

   These patterns are as follows:

   I. The compound, or multiple estate, containing many large residences of different members of an extended family and sometimes including an entire village and much acreage.

   2. The cluster or territorial grouping of separate estates of an extended family.

   3. Scattered estates up to fifty or more of the different branches of an extended family.

   4. The single country estate of a nuclear family, usually the mark of someone new to wealth.

   In all cases it should be understood that the estate is merely the family center. There remain to be reckoned town houses, distant estates in nonurban terrain and foreign estates; many wealthy Americans own either European or Latin American estates and a few persons have them in northern Africa, particularly Morocco.

   One function of the large estate, of course, is to instil awe and thereby place social distance between the owner and the clamorous hoi polloi.

   The question of preserving social distance is important for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it would be awkward in many ways if rich and poor were closely mingled. It would certainly be socially awkward when the rich man sat down to a feast and the poor man turned to his stew and grits. As a matter of common sociability the rich man would be expected to offer some of his steak and endive salad to the poor man and to accept some of the stew. If it were only one or a few poor men asked to partake of a sumptuous repast it would be one thing; but if the participation were quite general it would be another. A man worth $100 million would be broke over night, for example, if he treated all the families in the country to a single steak dinner at his expense.

   Social distance, then, is seen to come down, among other things, to a matter of economy. One cannot invite everybody into the plantation and remain rich for long. The visitors will literally eat one out of house and home, like invading locusts. That the rich man is not ordinarily this open-handed does not signify that he is especially ungenerous; he is merely prudent and posts his various signs: "Private, Keep Out." Privacy becomes a cult.

   A prime example of the compound or multiple-dwelling arrangement is the Rockefeller estate, Kykuit, of 4,180 acres at Pocantico Hills, New York, just east of Tarrytown in the fabled Sleepy Hollow country. Such land in the region sells at $5 to $10 thousand per acre and higher. Until Winthrop left for Arkansas all the brothers had each a large house on this estate, where lived also Rockefeller I and II. The place has many scores of buildings, for maintenance and the housing of a large staff, and includes a $1 million playhouse (at cost many years ago) that holds bowling alleys, tennis court, swimming pool and squash court. ³

   The Rockefeller brothers also have New York City residences. John III and his wife share a large duplex apartment on the upper East Side and in 1950 built a house for guests near fashionable Beekman Place. ⁴ Nelson and his family occupy a triplex penthouse on Millionaire's Row of Fifth Avenue, facing Central Park. ⁵ David, Laurance, Rodman C. and Winthrop all have separate domiciles on New York's upper East Side, as shown in the telephone directory.

   Nelson owns a large ranch in the highlands of Venezuela on which he sojourns at intervals, Laurance has a plantation in Hawaii and Winthrop has a palatial working plantation in Arkansas. It is not, however, necessary for the wealthy to own their separate places of residence; many of them lease large places from time to time in various parts of the world or take over entire floors in de luxe hotels as the occasion seems to require. They are, therefore, to be found now and again flitting in and out of Paris, London, the Riviera, the Bahamas or Puerto Rico.

   Kykuit is bisected by a public road that affords views of dense forests and open fenced fields on either side for a stretch of many miles; this road is Route 117, connecting North Tarrytown with Pleasantville, New York.

   Once entirely open to the public, only part is now open for hiking, horseback riding and hunting. But where the family homes are it is "as remote from the outside world as a fortified principality." ⁶ Tight security is maintained: "high stone walls, massive iron gates, alert guards, police dogs and miles of barbed-wire fences make the homes a sanctuary." ⁷ The home of David, however, is right on the main public road.

   The main house, Kykuit itself, until his death occupied by John D. II and his wife, is a fifty-room granite structure in modified Georgian design with spacious views of the surrounding country. It has four stories with guest rooms on the third and fourth floors. ⁸

   More recently the widow of John D. II, finding this edifice too roomy, constructed elsewhere on the estate a modest $300,000 Georgian home of only ten bedrooms. The destiny of the big house has not apparently yet been decided.

   Various price tags have been put on all this by different commentators but as the books of account have not been made public it is perhaps misleading to cite any. When Rockefeller I died the New York Times (May 24, 1937) said the single granite house had cost $2 million to build, while the estate took $500,000 a year at Depression prices to maintain. The entire affair required a staff then of 350. Standard equipment throughout are elevators, air conditioning and just about anything in the way of appurtenances, comforts and conveniences one cares to name. The domicile of no potentate is any better equipped.

   This compound or multiple assembly style of dwelling was adopted by the numerous Kennedys for their summer residences at Hyannisport, Massachusetts. For more prolonged residence they appear to find the scatter-type of dwellings more suitable. Many families, indeed, have their summer estates in the compound form, a great many on coastal islands. In addition to the numerous Forbes family, whose places dot Naushon Island near Martha's Vineyard, there are many others of a similar nature. Islands appear to hold a great attraction for the rich, insuring complete privacy, and on them one finds the compound of estates and at times a collection of seasonal estates of many different high-ranking families, such as Jekyll Island off the Georgia coast was until the 1940's. The biggest island layout, of course, is Santa Catalina Island off California, owned by William Wrigley, Jr., the chewing gum king, for many years. This sort of thing, one might say, is really living, for with an island of one's own one is really the local sovereign. ⁹

   The more numerous Du Ponts provide the chief illustration of the cluster type of massed estates in northern Delaware and extending over into nearby Pennsylvania. Because of the many large Du Pont houses strewn about, the region has been dubbed by some as "America's chateau country" and "the du Ponts' duchy of Delaware." ¹⁰

   The largest of the Du Pont estates--Longwood, Nemours and Winterthur--have been given tax-free endowments as public museums so that the average citizen can now go and get some foretaste of what Valhalla is really like; but the names of two dozen others strew the countryside: Montchanin, Granogue, Chevannes, St. Amour, Louviers, Bellevue, Guyencourt, Owl's Nest, Bois des Fossés et al. ¹¹

   Latterly many of the Du Ponts, according to a recent expert biographer, have taken to acquiring more modest habitations such as Hexton of Samuel Francis du Pont, which we are reassured "has dignity without formality, spaciousness without ostentation, ease without opulence." ¹²

   It should not be supposed that Du Pont residences are confined to Delaware. Lammot du Pont, who died in 1952, had a big summer place on Fisher's Island, New York, near the mouth of Long Island Sound. Many of the wealthy have summer dachas on this hallowed isle. Alfred I. du Pont moved to Florida, where he left the mammoth Nemours Foundation noticed earlier. Others have extra residences by the scores, city and country, tucked away elsewhere.

   For a detailed description with photographs of a fabulously elegant Du Pont house the reader is referred to Folsom. ¹³

   The four third-generation branches of the Vanderbilt clan, less cohesive than either the Rockefellers or Du Ponts, scattered their many separate palazzi to all points of the compass.

   The most ornate Vanderbilt place among many is the French Renaissance chateau of George W. Vanderbilt near Asheville, North Carolina, built when he had achieved hereditary success at the age of twenty-six. It contains 250 rooms and was set in 146,000 acres (now 12,000 acres) with a three-mile drive through 500 varieties of flora from the front gate to the house. ¹⁴ Inside views of the house show it to be, like many homes of the American rich, a quite literal variation on the themes of grandiloquent opulence expressed at Versailles and Fontainebleau. "As conceived by Mr. Vanderbilt, his new principality was typical of those developed by royal families in Europe hundreds of years earlier." ¹⁵ This place was inherited by his daughter Cornelia and, as of 1964, by her two sons, George and William Cecil. Here is an example, one among many, of an original name lost to view through a distaff marriage. The original cost of this place in 1895 was estimated at $7 million and its present value is set at $50--$60 million. ¹⁶

   Vanderbilt mansions, one after the other, used to dominate Fifth Avenue in New York but have since been torn down to make room for lucrative skyscrapers. Frederick W. Vanderbilt built a vast stone palazzo overlooking the Hudson River at Hyde Park, New York. Avoiding inheritance taxes, it was left to New York State and is now operated as a museum of high life in yesteryear. Cornelius Vanderbilt, another grandson of the founder, built The Breakers at Newport, with interiors that are practically replicas of royal French palaces. Other Vanderbilts played house with big houses elsewhere. Many presently occupied by authentic Vanderbilts are scattered about the country.

   More usually a wealthy family has one or two single country estates and one or two town houses, such dispositions of course depending on the size of the family and the fortune.

   Although the trend is now toward less ornate or more secluded places on distant shores, some of the original big houses, along with their large truly royal art collections, have since passed to public or educational use so as not to figure in testamentary estates for tax purposes.

   Data, descriptions and dazzling photographs of a few among many ultraelaborate chateaux are given by Folsom in the following: Vizcaya, of James Deering, Miami; Marble Casa, of Henry M. Flagler, Palm Beach; Ca 'd' Zan, John Ringling, Sarasota; Shadow Lawn, Hubert T. Parson, former president of F. W. Woolworth Company, West Long Branch, New Jersey; Fifth Avenue mansion, Henry Clay Frick, New York City, lower floor now an art museum housing the Frick collection; Tudor mansion, Andrew W. Mellon, Pittsburgh, now Mellon Hall of Chatham College; La Cuesta Encantada, William Randolph Hearst, San Simeon, California; San Marino, Henry E. Huntington, San Marino, California; Ophir Hall, Whitelaw and Ogden Reid, Purchase, New York, now part of Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart; The Elms, E. J. Berwind, Newport; various mansion-sized Newport "summer cottages" belonging to Dukes, Youngs, Mrs. Perle Mesta, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, Vanderbilts, Firestones, Jelkes, Van Rensselaers, Havemeyers and others; Belcourt Castle, O. H. P. Belmont, Newport; Ochre Court, Ogden Goelet, Newport, now part of Salve Regina College; Stan Hywet Hall, Frank A. Seiberling, Akron; Fair Lane, Henry Ford, Dearborn, Michigan, part now of Dearborn campus of the University of Michigan; Meadow Brook Hall, Mr. and Mrs. Alfred G. (Dodge Motors) Wilson, Rochester, Michigan, now part of East Lansing campus of Michigan State University; and English manor house, Edsel Ford, Grosse Point Shores, Michigan.

   These, let it be understood, are only a very few samples among many.

   While the ducal country and foreign estate is still part of the standard equipment of the very wealthy, the big town house has been largely replaced by the cooperative luxury apartment which in many cases amounts to a large town house sequestered behind the flat facade of an apartment building. The advantage of a cooperative apartment is that it need never become a taxable white elephant but can be sold at full value as it is or broken down into more saleable smaller apartments. Taxwise, the cooperative apartment is a liquid asset as the big town palazzi and their art collections failed to remain under post-1913 tax policy.

   The Rockefeller estate at Pocantico Hills is almost certain to wind up either as a huge public park, a fashionable real estate development or as part of each. After having been forced to accept by testamentary bequest several large country properties that thus escaped figuring among taxable assets, New York passed a law requiring that all such bequests must first gain the consent of the state in order to escape the cash-draining tax net.

   The interiors of most of these houses are more spectacular than the exteriors, which are mostly impressive in their dimensions. As photographs, liberally supplied by Folsom, show very well, rooms are often of palacelike proportions with the marble walls covered by expensive paintings and tapestries. Rare Oriental draperies and rugs, entire imported paneled rooms from European chateaux and expensive bric-a-brac and furniture are in most places strictly de rigeur. Expensive is the operational word. The National Gallery in Washington now houses the Andrew M. Mellon art collection and the Frick Museum shows what Frick collected. There is, too, the opulent J. P. Morgan Library of rare medieval illustrated books and manuscripts, once a private sanctuary. This sort of thing, as a matter of fact, is scattered all around.

   The magnates were, and many remain, art-minded, and no doubt saw themselves secretly as latter-day versions of Renaissance princes. But a difference in their relation to art is that, while the princes and later kings subsidized working artists, the American wealthy usually merely bid up the prices of extant art. A few today, such as Nelson Rockefeller, collect modern art and thus may be looked upon as giving monetary encouragement to living artists. But, by and large, art dealers rather than artists benefited from the artistic interest of the American magnates, who were traders and collectors rather than art patrons.

   The artistic impulses of most of the rich are recognized in their own circles as essentially pecuniary. Thus, the Wall Street Journal, January 3, 1967, impiously notes that a work of art is looked upon as "a growth stock, a whopping tax deduction--or an artful fake." Actually, says this authoritative publication, "it's possible for a painting to be all these things at once."

   "The rise in prices has led many purchasers to view art primarily as an investment whose growth potential puts many a high-flying stock to shame," said the Journal. "According to dealers and others in the art world, some 'collectors,' who not long ago thought Modigliani was some kind of Italian dish, now move in and out of the art market like so many Wall Street speculators, bunting bargains, and then trying to resell them at a fancy profit."

   Works of art, acquired at bargains, in other words have the potentialities of capital gains and do represent diversification of holdings in an always uncertain world. In any market they would always (unlike money) be worth something. This apart, as the Journal said, art works, whether genuine or fake, make possible huge tax deductions that offset actual money income. The way this works is as follows: a man buys a painting, genuine or fake, for $1,000, holds it a while and then donates it to a museum at a declared market value of $10,000, thus obtaining a net $9,000 deduction from taxable income for a tax-free gift to the always-to-be-considered public. If the museum spots it as a fake, it says nothing for fear of discouraging the later donation of genuine works. There is, thus, a ready market for palpable fakes.

   In order to obtain tax benefits the operation requires only that the declared value of the gift exceed the cost, whatever it was.

   "In surveying the appraisals used in justifying the tax deductions of 400 donated works," said the Journal, "IRS [Internal Revenue Service] found that the art objects had cost the donors a total of $1,471,502--but that their total declared 'fair market value' as deductions had climbed to $5,811,908." The ruse is profitable whether the art work is authentic or not.

   Art works, too, may play other financial roles. A man may pay $10,000 for a painting and later bestow it as a gift on a friend or relative. As a gift of valuable property this is theoretically taxable, but gifts of portable objects are not ordinarily scrutinized and, as far as that goes, the tax courts have ruled that valuable gifts to, say, a lady friend, are not taxable; so to argue would check sentiment. An ardent admirer may give a series of such gifts to a lady and not be subject to a tax, thus building up her net worth tax free. The gifts, being valuable, may be used as collateral up to at least half their value against loans. And they may be sold privately for cash.

   Art collecting, again, may be used to pay a large portion of inheritance taxes. Thus, as part of his general operation, a wealthy man, otherwise no aesthete, gradually builds up a collection of paintings of some artist or school; his very acquisitions have the effect of giving these paintings a scarcity value--and it is scarcity as well as vogue that gives these objects their appraisal value whether they are works of art, postage stamps, books and manuscripts or old coins. A collection that cost $10 million may ultimately have a market value of $50 million, which is recovered in careful sales and the proceeds used to pay inheritance taxes relating to revenue-producing properties as well. Two birds are thus killed with one tax stone: There is no capital-gain tax on the increment in value (death excluding capital gains under the tax law) and the proceeds pay all or a large part of taxes, thus preserving revenue-producing property for the inheritors.

   Aesthetic objects thus play a dual decorative as well as pecuniary role.

   Concluding this bit, it can be shown that the pecuniary approach to art has been thoroughly systematized for the benefit of a well-heeled clientele. For verification the reader is referred to two large-paged books: Richard H. Rush, Art as an Investment, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1961, 418 pages, and Robert Wraight, The Art Game, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1965, 224 pages. The ins and outs, and the "angles," get full treatment here.

   Since World War II, even as more and more of the booboisie are found to be sleeping in subway trains, doorways, flophouses, parks and bus stations, there has been a surge of building large luxury apartment buildings in the larger cities: New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. This building boom has, perhaps, been greatest in New York City where on central Manhattan there have been erected scores of luxury apartment buildings, many of them cooperatively owned by the well-heeled tenants.

   As it would require a great deal of space to list and describe them all let us concentrate on an outstanding recent example, the United Nations Plaza, as described by the always staid New York Times. ¹⁷

   United Nations Plaza, of thirty-eight stories, is the tallest residential structure in the city and faces the United Nations headquarters from the north at 48th Street and the East River. The initial cost of each apartment is $25,900 for 31/2 rooms to $166,000 for a nine-room duplex "with its own little elevator, wood-burning fireplace and curving stairs, and with carrying charges that range from $248 to $1,590 a month. . . . The cost of the apartment is only the beginning for a lot of tenants. Fully a third of them have taken down walls, put up new ones, installed circular columns or big square pillars, and otherwise altered the original floor plan. And it is taken for granted that a majority of the tenants will upgrade bathroom fixtures and kitchen appliances."

   Although there were more than 335 basic apartments, some tenants acquired several and joined them together while enlarging rooms so as to have, in effect, a large townhouse behind a flat glass-and-aluminum facade. This is standard procedure in luxury apartment buildings. In many of the apartments metal fittings have been replaced with gold or sterling silver fittings.

   Corner suites have seven-foot-high windows that stretch for forty-eight feet in the living-dining areas, and many look out over the East River. All apartments are air-conditioned and at the touch of a switch can be kept at any moderate temperature, winter or summer. Bathroom floors and walls are of Carrara marble, kitchens are eighteen feet long and a gourmet restaurant on the ground floor offers room service to tenants.

   Luxurious to the nth degree, the edifice has tenants who are fully a match for the setting. At the time of making its report, said the Times, among the owners,

   . . . there are no theater people, no familiar television faces, and only one writer, Truman Capote. What is filling United Nations Plaza, especially the East tower, is a sort of power elite.

   Of the 71 per cent that quietly make wheels go 'round, 69 per cent are senior vice presidents, executive vice presidents, presidents or chairmen of the board.

   In big business they include John Dickson Harper, president of Alcoa, the company that put up the building; William Johnstone, chairman of the finance committee of Bethlehem Steel; Chester Laing, president of John Nuveen & Co., investment bankers; and Lowell P. Weicker, president of Bigelow-Sanford, Inc.

   In publishing they are Roy Larsen, chairman of the executive committee of Time, Inc.; Andrew Haiskell, chairman of the board of Time, Inc., and Mrs. Philip (Katherine) Graham, publisher of The Washington Post and president of Newsweek magazine.

   The 9 per cent of the tenants who are lawyers include Christian Herter Jr., whose father was Secretary of State, and William Pierce Rogers, who was Attorney General under Eisenhower.

   Eight per cent are classed as persons of independent means; a good many of them have sold homes and taken apartments to simplify living.

   Among the 6 per cent embracing various professions are William S. Brown, a partner of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, architects; Ross Claiborne, editor of the Dell Publishing Company, Inc.; and Bonnie Cashin, who designs clothes for Seventh Avenue. . . .

   Among the 6 per cent of the tenants who are identified with government or with philanthropic foundations are Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Raymond Dinsmore and Mrs. Albert (Mary) Lasker, widow of an advertising tycoon. . . .

   Mary Lasker, whose apartment will not be finished until early summer, and who wanted to be no higher than the 10th and 11th floors because otherwise she would "be too far above the trees, . . ." [will use her apartment] as a kind of annex to her house on Beekman Place--where she will continue to live. . . . [She has an apartment of only five rooms] but it was actually made by taking three and a half apartments with a total of 22 rooms.

   That the rich, as F. Scott Fitzgerald sensitively discerned, inhabit an altogether special reality is shown in what they designate a room. The dimensions of a living room in a lower middle-class home become in a rich man's house those of a dressing room, a mop room or a linen closet. Rooms, properly speaking, in a rich man's house are generally at least four times larger than average residential rooms, sometimes ten or even twenty times larger. . . . They are often of museum and ballroom calibre, as photographs show.

   "To Bonnie Cashin, United Nations Plaza represents 'a whole new world. And moving into it is almost like going to a new country. . . .'"

   Interiors and intimate methods of operation of United Nations Plaza have been shown on television. As there explained, the tightest security is maintained, both at the front door and with respect to deliveries. Delivery men must show credentials at various guarded barriers in the basement, will be admitted only on explicit instructions from on high and must be checked in and out. Names of occupants are not listed on mail boxes. The security staff and supportive personnel have all had their backgrounds rigidly scrutinized before gaining clearance by standards reported to be more exacting than those of the FBI and CIA for their finely tuned personnel.

   While by no means the only such place in the larger cities United Nations Plaza may be taken at least as the dernier cri in "compact," luxury urban living quarters even though some of its larger apartments are no more than annexes to and extensions of nearby town houses for overflow guests, power brokers and relatives.

   Practically standard equipment in all the bigger houses of the superwealthy are items like pipe organs, extensive gardens and hothouses, interior and exterior swimming pools, chapels, statuary and sculpture strewn about, inlaid imported wall paneling and ceilings and a full line of all gadgets known to modern man. Expense has not been spared, money is plentiful.

   Whereas early this century most of the big-rich owned their own private railroad cars and later their fleets of chauffeured automobiles, more recently many own their own long-distance airplanes standing ready at some nearby airport. Whereas upper corporation managers make free use of company planes to look in on plant operations in distant parts, the big stockholders have their private planes and crews. ¹⁸

   The random reader will be happy to learn that the government thoughtfully provides a subsidy of $160 million per year to provide services for private and corporate aircraft and that taxes on aviation gasoline now cover only 4 per cent of this cost; the rest is charged to the general taxpayers. ¹⁹ Actually the government underwrites the wealthy 100 per cent.

   The private large cruising aircraft appears to have largely replaced the private railway car and ocean-going steam yacht of an earlier day, although sports yachts are still present in single-ownership fleets.

   These elaborate residences are used a great deal for entertaining and partying. The rich do a good deal of entertaining for friends and acquaintances because they do not ordinarily congregate in public places. If they did not provide a great deal of room in their homes for many guests and servile personnel they would, in order to avoid monkish seclusion, be forced to congregate where the public gathers in so-called public luxury establishments that are, in fact, largely patronized by pushers, entertainers, people "on the make" and obvious fourflushers. One rarely, as a matter of fact, sees any of the very rich in the presumably fashionable bistros. Here and there, now and then, yes; generally, no.

   Expensive parties to mark various occasions have long been a predilection of the American rich, with the costs ranging from $250,000 to $1 million or more per shindig. The debutante party, through which the rich man presents his nubile daughters to the world, was long a standard affair with double orchestras blending entrancing sounds in huge ballrooms and champagne and caviar pouring down the gullets of thousands of well-heeled democrats amid banks of imported flora. While these exhilarating affairs (which seemed to outside observers to be rubbing it in) are now rarer, they are by no means entirely outmoded. The big party in general has given way to more discreet entertaining in small groups. They are, however, still served to the queen's taste.

   A History of Luxury Parties in America would require a book of many hundreds of pages, the main source being the High Society pages of the leading newspapers. That aspect of partying that exerts most fascination for the mythical man-in-the-street, however, is of the order of what is reported to have suited the staglike taste of the late T. Coleman du Pont, obviously a man of the people. "In 1912, in partnership with Charles P. Taft, the President's brother, Coly built the McAlpin Hotel in New York, and on its twenty-first floor he established his Manhattan pied-à-terre. His parties there soon became famous for their gaiety and their pretty girls; Coly often had half the chorus of a Broadway show among the forty or more guests at an after-theater party. 'The General is loyal to a myriad of pretty girls who are proud to claim him as a friend,' a New York newspaper said in a needling story, 'and no one, not even Mrs. T. Coleman du Pont, seems to raise an objection. In fact, some people imagine that Mrs. T. Coleman du Pont must be a myth. One never sees her, never hears of her.'" ²⁰

   Dinner parties, sedate or hilarious, always were, and remain, a favorite form of entertaining eight to a dozen or so of the ranking gentry. While political figures from abroad are often present, no doubt useful in snagging distant concessions and other goodies, it is noticeable that local politicos are rarely on hand except in Washington, where political intrigue is the sole social interest. Generals and admirals, however, are much sought for a certain austere contrasting tone.

   It would, in any event, be bad electoral image-making for a politician of the domestic variety to be counted among those present at some of the more rococo parties of the ultra-affluent, which smack to some of the more straitlaced in the constituencies of European royal revels simply because champagne (a high-class soda pop) out in the sticks connotes something exotically perverse.

   If a map of the centers and nature of privately held wealth were drawn, it would show the larger corporations in their headquarters and principal plants as fortresses toward which raw materials are constantly moving and from which are streaming products. These fortresses would represent the "big business" factor.

   The big banks, represented by a different symbol, would appear as special centers with influences radiating out into the world of "small business." For in general, as we have noticed, "small business" is to a large extent the loan-supported business of the big banks, upon which some of the larger corporations are no longer dependent. Small business, paradoxically, is really fractionized big business.

   The map would then show the family estates of the principal owners, numbering several hundred.

   There would be symbols to show the locations of the principal metropolitan clubs and the principal pleasure resorts of the wealthy.

   Corporate headquarters and big banks would tend to be clustered in New York City but plants, resorts and family estates would be more widely scattered, thinning out as one moved to the extreme west and south. In general, there would be considerable clustering around major urban centers and sparseness of symbols in nonurban areas.

   What all this shows, it would appear, is that the rich, despite the meagerness of their personal achievement as linmed in the preceding chapter, believe they are entitled to opulent settings. A divinity was once thought to hedge a king and it seemed only common sense that a divine personage be given the most opulent setting conceivable to man. The same sort of thinking applied to churchpols, who were believed to be in the closest confidence of the Deity. Faced by uncouth, undivine "robber barons," public thought in Europe simply bowed to force majeure. It was difficult to dispute with armed gangsters.

   The first thing that occurred to the newly emerged American rich was to ape the style of life of European nobility and royalty. The American rich, quite obviously, saw themselves playing the same relative roles as masters of the situation, "lords of creation" in the phrase of Frederick Lewis Allen. In the main, the style of life of the English and French higher gentleman became the style of life of the American rich, who took root in a country where, oddly, a powerful political symbol was still the log cabin.

   Whereas European royalty and nobility played profound integral roles in European history, the latter-day American rich were more like hitch-hikers who opportunistically climbed aboard a good thing, They produced neither the technology, the climate, the land, the people nor the political system. Nor did they, like many European groups (as in England), take over the terrain as invading conquerors. Rather did they infiltrate the situation from below, insinuate themselves into opportunely presented economic gaps, subvert various rules and procedures, and, as it were, ride a rocket to the moon and beyond, meanwhile through their propagandists presenting themselves, no less, as the creators of machine industrialism which was in fact copied from England and transplanted into a lush terrain.

   Let this be added: The fortune-builders were indeed organizers in a virgin terrain of little or no organization. They organized economic affairs according to well-establisbed European patterns, and for this service charged a fee that some commentators consider extortionate, others reasonable, What was it, really? It was extortionate, of course. Judging by their style of life they set a high value on their services which amounted to merely imposing their rule. If one evaluates their achievement in other than self-serving corporate terms, the great expense of maintaining their personal way of life begins to look very much like another instance of misallocation of resources. From my possibly jaundiced point of view, it does not seem to me that the country is getting any return for the wealth self-lavished on their style of living.

   Lest anyone believe that I am particularly indignant about this prospect let me at once enter a disclaimer. I harbor no such indignation, not any more than I would have for a man who sees a particularly enticing meal outspread and sits down to enjoy it--a wholly natural thing to do. What indignation I have is reserved for those who contemplate the prospect and consider it in accord with the cosmic proprieties or even that a greater public show of deference is due. I would not wish to proclaim to the world that Americans are an especially slavish people; I do not believe such to be the case. But there is a considerable section of Americans, for reasons about which one can only speculate, who definitely are obviously slavish. They have been commented upon in the memoirs of visiting royalty and nobility taken aback by being advanced upon in the United States with alarming gesticulations of deference and extravagant signs and cries of voluntary submission.

   My own explanation for this phenomenon is that the United States was largely settled by members of the lower classes of Europe in whom were deeply ingrained a sense of their class lowliness and fealty to the upper orders. Descendants of these still like to kowtow whenever they can, and the more affluent of them spend large sums of money so they can be presented at the English royal court, there to bow, curtsy and scrape, to any other royal or ducal ceremonial to which they can wrangle admittance or to the Vatican where they can experience the ineffable ecstasy of kissing the pope's ring, joy supreme. Some of this ingrained tendency, as it is easy to see, plays out on the domestic scene and is focused at times on public figures like Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller who, as the television cameras show, is at times plainly amazed and perhaps puzzled by the ecstatic fervor of his enthusiastic public reception. That it is all pretty much of a preconditioned American mechanism, uncommitted to any particular object, is shown when it is directed, without partiality, at some former sausage-stuffer who has become a film star or at a toothsome female, obviously guilty of first-degree murder, who has just been released with cheers by a jury of her peers. Clamorous deference in such circumstances, as the newspapers regularly report, at times attains riotous proportions. What ensues is in fact a raving mass self-abasement.

   In this purely American setting, the self-image of the rich is at times reflected back upon them in magnified dimensions, no doubt leading some of them to believe they have taken far too humble a view of themselves.

   Among the wealthy there do not appear to be many who show the slightest tendency to deviate from the norm of being either a finpol, a pubpol, a corp-pol or a more or less graceful idler and rentier. The life of the rich, as we have noticed, is as patterned and stylized as the life of the poor, holding few surprises.

   That this is the case is seemingly more and more clearly realized by at least some of them, of late notably by the pace-setting Rockefellers even though they have been outrun into healing by a Mellon and a Frick. The fourth generation of Rockefellers, however, seem to be deviating more than occasionally from the plush-lined ruts traveled by the general man of wealth. As a psychologist might say of them and a few contemporaries, they appear to be seeking an identity of their own by breaking into new ground, thus playing a role more original than that of mere descendants of John D. I, or even of travelers in his general trustified direction.

   As one swallow proverbially does not make a summer one need not look upon what is happening in this quarter as a trend. It is perhaps, however, a portent that some of the descendants of the industrial rich may be about to retrace, if history grants them the chance, the path followed by the historically more distinguished descendants of the earlier and more modestly capitalized mercantile Boston and landed Hudson Valley gentry who were considerably eclipsed in wealth and central influence by the rise of the industrial rich.

   Michael Rockefeller, twenty-three, son of Nelson A., was an aspiring anthropologist until he was lost at sea from a disabled power-raft in 1961 while on an expedition to Dutch New Guinea with a Harvard University-Peabody Museum Expedition. He was declared legally dead on February 2, 1964. The Times reported he left an estate of $660,000. ²¹ According to all accounts, he was a superior fellow who was going to make some sort of individual mark.

   Steven Rockefeller, another son, has become a clergyman, expounding the Gospel in benighted Chicago.

   More recently Laurance Rockefeller, Jr., twenty-two, has appeared in the news as a member of Vista (Volunteers In Service To America), sometimes referred to as the domestic Peace Corps. Newspapermen caught sight of him as he began an eight-week training period in East Harlem, beginning adult life literally among the dregs.

   In the meantime John D. IV, whose father is John D. III, had moved into an impoverished neighborhood in West Virginia, started hobnobbing with the local descamisados and sans-culottes and was swiftly elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates. If other cases are any guide, he is on his way to becoming at least a governor or a senator, possibly president. The United States could very appropriately have a President John D. Rockefeller IV.

   The various courses embarked upon by these four young Rockefellers are, though, obviously offbeat as far as most of the rich are concerned. Many more of the affluent young are to be found congregating at the nearest country club or yacht basin, as I have determined by personal anthropological observation in the field.

   What I have written thus far might tend to leave the impression that the rich are, relatively, in a cushy position. And so they are. But the enviableness of their position amid accumulating signs of storm on every hand can be easily exaggerated unless seen in perspective.

   In saying that the rich are faced by difficulties I simply state sober fact, not trying to gain for them any feeling that they are as heroes and heroines in an enveloping Greek tragedy. C. Wright Mills was very careful to issue an elaborate caveat against pitying them when he wrote,

   The idea that the millionaire finds nothing but a sad, empty place at the top of this society; the idea that the rich do not know what to do with their money; the idea that the successful become filled up with futility, and that those born successful are poor and little as well as rich--the idea, in short, of the disconsolateness of the rich--is, in the main, merely a way by which those who are not rich reconcile themselves to the fact. Wealth in America is directly gratifying and directly leads to many further gratifications.

   To be truly rich is to possess the means of realizing in big ways one's little whims and fantasies and sicknesses. . . . The rich, like other men, are perhaps more simply human than otherwise. But their toys are bigger; they have more of them; they have more of them all at once.

   . . . If the rich are not happy it is because none of us are happy. Moreover, to believe that they are unhappy would probably be un-American. For if they are not happy, then the very terms of success in America, the very aspirations of all sound men, lead to ashes rather than fruit. . . . If those who win the game for which the entire society seems designed are not "happy," are then those who lose the happy ones? Must we believe that only those who live within, but not of, the American society can be happy? Were it calamitous to lose, and horrible to win, then the game of success would indeed be a sad game, doubly so in that it is a game everyone in and of the American culture cannot avoid playing. For to withdraw is of course objectively to lose, and to lose objectively, although subjectively to believe one has not lost--that borders on insanity. We simply must believe that the American rich are happy, else our confidence in the whole endeavor must be shaken. For of all the possible values of human society, one and one only is truly sovereign, truly universal, truly sound, truly and completely acceptable goal of man in America. That goal is money, and let there be no sour grapes about it from the losers. ²²

   Mills here is partly ironic because his whole book expresses a complete lack of confidence in the general American endeavor. There is, then, no reason why the rich from his point of view should be even theoretically regarded as happy. It is probably true, however, that on balance they are no unhappier than anyone else and probably have at least a greater number of euphoric interludes.

   In speaking of the rich as of any collective group there is always the danger of tacitly assuming that all the units in the collection, because they share some characteristic, are as alike as peas. The rich, of course, differ among each other in age, constitution, temperament, intelligence and knowledge. They also differ as to source of wealth: inherited or self-accumulated, diversified or concentrated, held in the form of bonds, equities, real estate or a combination of all. Yet, despite individual differences, they are similar in that they are, most of them, held within the same social matrix, subject to the same external compulsions and pressures.

   This fact is clearly brought into view when we consider that although the rich have much power, more than the common run of men surely, they also experience in general a deeper sense of frustration than most people owing to the fact that their greater power is exercised within the restraints of a certain system and under the scrutiny of other powerful people. This amounts to saying that, though great, their power has limits, often annoying limits.

   We can see this at a glance by looking at the problem of air pollution. And New York City, financial center of the world, is fittingly held by experts to have the worst pollution problem in the country. True, the rich man can flee the city from time to time and has in his homes and offices the latest air filtration devices; he is not so badly off as the ordinary citizen who must breathe the lethal stuff without interruption. Yet he knows that his staff, to which he is as loyal as it is to him, is caught in the muck. And he knows various projects of interest to him--perhaps a big skyscraper promotion--are qualified in their attractiveness and even value.

   Why, then, as he has power, does he not deal with the problem decisively?

   He is unable to do so, no doubt to his chagrin, because of the very momentum and direction of the system. Although he may publicly deprecate stress on the health issue he understands it as well as anyone. He is, however, caught in the situation as depicted by Theodore B. Merrill, an editor of Business Week, who said in a comprehensive national survey as long ago as 1960 (and in the meantime the problem has become more urgent) that "Nobody is going to put in any kind of control devices that cost him money unless he has to. . . . It simply has to be unprofitable for an industry to pollute the air or else they are going to pollute it, because it is cheaper to use the air for a sewer than to pay for keeping it clean." ²³ The same holds true of polluting waterways.

   Here, it would seem, profit is being put before human life and health, a point made endlessly by nasty socialists. And it is not merely profit that is in question but the general standing of an institution, a particular company. Although a rich man may control this company and could instantly make it stop polluting the air, such unilateral action would not solve the pollution problem, to which other companies also contribute. Unless all the companies acted in concert the action of one would have little effect.

   And if all the companies in a particular region agreed to undergo the expense of reducing air pollution their costs would rise and profits fall in relation to companies in less populated regions not burdened with such costs. The inter-company position of the social-minded companies would decline. At this point multitudes of investors, some of them large but not controlling, would perhaps begin selling the stock of the social-minded companies because the relative return was diminishing in comparison with that of unsocial-minded companies. Dutch, Swiss, South American and ordinarily prudent domestic investors would sell out, realizing that these social-minded companies have expensive profit-eroding problems.

   Investors, high or low, do not feel sympathetically identified with a company's problems, do not "forgive" it for making a poorer financial showing in a good cause. They simply analyze the figures and prospects of various companies. Some of these investors live in the bracing air of distant mountain resorts, by the seaside, off on distant healthy pampas. All they know is that as between company A and company B the latter, not burdened with many social-minded expenses, shows an ascending line of profitability and that this is better for them.

   Why not then, it may be asked, make all companies uniformly comply to the maximum with all social-minded regulations, thus putting them on all fours and passing additional costs on in price? Doing this, however, would raise national costs vis-à-vis industries in other countries, which could undersell the Americans. In the world market the lowest-cost producer, everything else being equal, has a profit advantage and most readily attracts new capital most cheaply. And the world market is an area of prime interest to capitalists.

   It is, then, "The System," as socialists have long contended, that gives priority here to its own systemic needs over the larger question of human life and health in specific instances.

   As many scattered stockholders begin selling out of a company with a declining relative level of profitability, the price of the stock, its value, declines, affecting multitudes, jeopardizing bank loans and inducing an endless train of economic troubles. And when it comes to new financing the capital is not readily available, must be obtained along the route of a fixed rate of high interest, itself damaging to profitability, rather than through the issuance of equities. Being unilaterally social-minded, then, is ruinous.

   Although powerful, the rich man, even the grouping of all rich men, is not powerful enough to fly in the face of the requirements of the supporting system. Beyond a certain level they must all take the rough with the smooth as offered by that system, a point that no doubt makes disconsolate the more reflective of them.

   We may, now, imagine that one of the many economists who devote their lives to extolling the beauties of this system, its contributions to "progress," is dying in a hospital of lung cancer or emphysema contracted because of pervading air pollution. A case of poetic justice, it will be said. Yet he, as insight-limited as most economists, fails to make the connection between his lamentable condition and the economic system he so much admires. He considers himself only the victim of genetics or "bad luck," and if pressed will probably echo rueful Adam Smith that there's a great deal of ruin in every system--surely an intellectually weak stance.

   The rich man wants for his children, whom he often loves passionately, the best in the way of education. He sends them to special schools that have the choice of teachers for small groups that are carefully supervised from dawn to nightfall. Most of these children, many of whom sign the family name with coveted large Roman numerals suffixed, go on to the best available in the way of colleges.

   Yet the rich and powerful man cannot forever shield from his own children knowledge that they are going into a society bristling with avoidable destructive problems that it is unable owing to its corporate systemic requirements to solve. Many of these problems have their horns pointed directly at the children of the rich man.

   Let us took at this neglected aspect.

   All general disturbing and life-threatening social problems--air and water pollution; crime; overpopulation; vexed race relations; traffic tangles; accumulated causes of civil disturbance such as slums, unemployment and extreme poverty--intrude upon the young rich with about as much force as upon the young poor. The rich young person may have better oases to which to retreat; but he is nevertheless adversely affected by the same accumulating, neglected phenomena.

   Even in their oases the young rich are by no means safe. They, like others, are subject to narcotic addiction, alcoholism and psychological disorders--and an inventory of all their tribulations along this line would be impressive. They, too, in various ways are assailed by hard types. And let us remember that their fathers are powerful men.

   Of crime, against their own persons and in its aspect of crime against property a rising, low-grade, guerrilla variant of Marxist class war, they are steady direct and indirect targets. As the Wall Street Journal in many articles during the 1960's made clear, there is a broad and steady determined assault on the merchandise and cash of the big companies by shoplifters and employees--crime carried out by noncriminal classes. Losses here, contrived by people whose appetites are stimulated beyond the reach of their means through the agency of voracious advertising, are passed on to the general public as much as possible in higher prices; but some of these losses, running into billions annually, must be absorbed. There are not sufficient jails to hold most of the offenders, many of whom when caught are let off with suspended sentences, dire threats from the bench, paroles, disgracing publicity, etc.

   That the rich are as subject as anyone to misadventures in a wide-open society (kept wide-open in general so as to facilitate double-dealing in profitable particulars) can be shown by the citation of a number of salient cases, abstracted from among many.

   In 1966 the young daughter of Charles Percy, former chairman of Bell & Howell, camera manufacturers, and now junior senator from Illinois, was wantonly murdered in her bed in the family home in exclusive Kenilworth, Illinois, on the Gold Coast north of Chicago. Her unknown slayer was not apprehended. Wealth, power and exalted position did not protect her in a jungle society.

   In the same year a well-organized kidnapping plot against Leonard K. Firestone, rubber scion of Beverly Hills, California, was frustrated through the enterprise of an underworld tipster. The two plotters, one the tipster, were killed by eager police in the attempt. Had the plot been successful Mr. Firestone would have been abducted and held for ransom as a number of rich people have been, despite the severe "Lindbergh law" against kidnapping and despite the virtual impossibility of circulating ransom money. Such money, in whatever form, is subject to modern, high-speed photographic recording by the FBI and instantly becomes "hot" money, hardly worth the risk at ten cents on the dollar. It can even be treated and made radioactive, a dead giveaway when passed over Geiger counters.

   Robberies in the homes of the rich are frequent and there is reason to believe they are not always reported. And this despite elaborate protective systems. While traveling, the rich are especially the targets of expert thieves, as in the case of Henry Ford II in New York City, also in 1966. His hotel suite was burglarized and jewels in the reported amount of $50,000 were taken. Servants in the homes of the affluent and rather wealthy, according to news reports, are pretty regularly trussed up by invading thieves and the premises ransacked. Burglaries are common in wealthy residential districts.

   Grant-laden Establishment methodologists, exponents of a sterile sociological scholasticism, will no doubt charge that I have selected a few unrepresentative cases to make my point. Actually, I cite these as representative cases, available in any year. This is what is going on, all the time.

   A close variation of the following New York Times headline (August 31, 1967; 22:4) is repeated every few months with respect to violent events in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and elsewhere:

   It has become almost a standard story to read about women of property murdered in their isolated splendid homes by intruders, who as often as not are not caught. The only reason I don't list those of a recent year or two is that I don't want to use the space.

   With respect to the high-toned village of Purchase, New York, a "three-square-mile domain of big homes, colorful gardens, private swimming pools, tree-shaded bridle paths, elegant country clubs and winding lanes" said the Times of August 13, 1967 (66:4-6), "Sixteen burglaries of estates have occurred in the last month. Some estimates of the loss in jewelry, antiques and cash run up to $250,000 but Harrison police detectives are dubious at the high estimates. . ."

   No police dubiety was expressed, however, about the amount of $780,000 set as the value of jewels stolen from Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney at Saratoga Springs, reported by the Times on August 6, 1967. The thieves missed $175,000 additional in gems only because Mrs. Whitney wore them to dinner.

   What I want to say here for the methodologists is that the rich, almost as much as the poor in their slums, are the recurrent victims of violence in a cuckoo-clock political system. The profiteers and their poor-boys-who-made-good in the legislatures seem unable to give much protection to their own women and children, to say nothing of the women and children of the less well heeled.

   The rich, like the rest of us, are as readily victimized by deleterious products: dentifrices, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and various untested chemical applications to various parts of the body. After all, there is only a certain range of offerings of this kind; the rich have no more sophisticated choices open to them than the rest of the public in the way of deodorants, depilatories, mouth washes, unguents and the like. Their young gorge on rancid hot dogs and hamburgers at ball games like any other red-blooded, true-blue American.

   That various of these products, including widely circulating food preparations, are dangerous to health is regularly made known by appropriate federal supervisory agencies, kept thoughtfully understaffed through the courtesy of a bought bucolic Congress. The rich here are often hoist by their own politico-economic petard.

   For a resounding case--one among many--let us go back a few years, to 1932. In that year died after a long wasting illness Eben McBurney Byers director of a number of companies and chairman of A. M. Byers Company: of Pittsburgh, makers of iron pipe. Mr. Byers, a Groton-Yale man, had been national amateur golf champion in 1906, came of a wealthy established family and was no small-bore personality. The medical diagnosis at Doctors' Hospital, New York City, was that he had a brain abscess, caused by radium poisoning. For three or four years he had been dosing himself with two to three two-ounce bottles per day of a widely advertised preparation containing minute quantities of radium. He was under the impression that the lethal stuff was doing him some good. Following testimony by one of his physicians, the Federal Trade Commission in January, 1932, issued a stupendous order prohibiting, no less, the Bailey Radium Laboratories from advertising Radithor as harmless. Not only had this product been so advertised, it was reported by the Times, but it had been recommended, said the Times, for 160 conditions and symptoms. ²⁴ So ended Eben McBurney Byers, a man on the inside track of wealth.

   That the rich are as gullible as anyone else in readily gobbling up and smearing themselves with whatever products are offered in the free-free-free market is readily apparent. Merely because a man is clever at conserving what he has inherited or is skillful in overreaching the public in the clinches affords no indication that he is clever enough to protect himself and his family in all aspects of the freedom-blessed American politico-economic jungle.

   The situation is made clearer still in the case of the automobile. A rich man is obviously in a position to purchase the best there is in the way of automobiles and have his own private mechanics service them. But, as Ralph Nader has shown and as Detroit has more recently admitted through extensive recalls of delivered automobiles, many automobiles are not mechanically safe in a country crosshatched with roads literally clogged with cars. Even though a rich man may have a car that is in perfect working order, there is no guarantee that he will not be run into or run down by some automobile that is either mechanically defective or in the hands of a defective driver, of which numerous are disclosed from time to time. The rich man and his family, it is evident, are as exposed to the automobile menace as they are to poisonous smog. They are no better off in this respect, unless they remain permanently indoors, than the rest of society. And, sure enough, as newspaper reports from time to time show, top-drawer eminents and their children are from time to time cut down in the streets by cars or battered on the roads. A complete inventory of such cases would require many pages.

   Although injured by avoidable accidents or made ill by detestable products, the rich man does have an edge in that he can procure, no matter where he is, the very best and most expensive medical services. But doctors cannot always save him, much as they would like to.

   The rich are especially enamored of medicine, and give heavily to their own hospitals and to medical research. Plainly, like the rest of us, they are seeking mundane salvation. But their faith in the powers of the doctors at times passeth all understanding. What I mean is illustrated by a story told me some years ago by an eminent internist, who complained that he had been detained for several hours on a sleeveless errand while many patients were in need of attention. He had been summoned with some ten or a dozen other specialists to attend a wealthy New York banker in his eighties who was very ill. It was obvious at a glance that the man was dying and yet members of the family walked about on tiptoe, with bated breath, and looked upon the assembled doctors as a high priesthood capable of saving the wasted hulk--the patriarch and founder of the clan.

   The fees for this consultation, my annoyed informant told me, were bound to be astronomical, and the whole gathering obviously futile, an instance of medical fetishism. As E. M. Byers discovered, expensive medical care cannot always save one.

   One might suppose that a rich and powerful man, aware of the source of some patently deleterious influence, would take arms and gird himself against the common threat. Here we come to an aspect of inner finpolitan affairs to which most of the sociologists have turned a blind, uncomprehending eye. It is a finpolitan rule that one company does not take a public position against another--whatever it does--as long as it does not act directly as an adversary; and the members of one industry do not lead or join in the public denunciation of another industry. Each industry, each company is allowed to pursue its own way unless it tries to grab too big a share of the market.

   Thus, when public criticisms gain momentum against one company or one industry, when that company or industry stands in the public dock, as it were, others preserve diplomatic silence. The mass media, too, stand aside if they do not offer outright defenses of the criticized practices. Thus we see the entire corporate world maintaining a studied silence as pharmaceuticals are criticized for pricing practices, automotives for safety factors, the oil industry for special tax shelters and any or all for monopoly, gouging prices, poor products or community pollution.

   The reason for this impotent silence is simply that if one wealthy group opens fire on the cushy preserve of another wealthy group there will be retaliation in kind. For each industry has vulnerable points open to criticism. It is the need, then, to preserve some semblance of intramural harmony that causes the financial groups to maintain silence about the shortcomings of their various members. Higher capitalism is a little club holding within it diverse temperaments, true enough, but temperaments that must, under pain of direct reciprocal attack, preserve an appearance of outward solidarity to the world.

   Lest anyone believe I am making a purely suppositious point let me make it clear that one capitalist often thoroughly detests another entire industry and that such detestation, properly financed, can lead to the root-and-branch destruction of the detested industry. John D. Rockefeller I, for example, disliked the liquor industry, and he opposed smoking, dancing and the theater as well. The liquor industry in the United States was for a time destroyed with heavy losses, through Prohibition, illustrating what can happen. I am not suggesting that it was Rockefeller who smashed the liquor industry; but he shared the point of view of the Prohibitionists in regarding liquor in general as a social menace, a blight on efficiency.

   Rockefeller was by no means an exception in holding such straitlaced views about the propriety of certain entire industries. I once knew a successful Wall Street broker who always did whatever he could to dissuade his customers from buying shares in alcohol, cigarette, film and small-loan companies on the ground that he thought them socially harmful.

   Yet such intramural antipathies, which usually have rational grounds (as in the widespread capitalistic detestation of the powerful domestic fire-arms industry), seldom lead to any effective action against the offenders; for everybody is, in a way, in the same boat and hence silent. As I used to argue to my moral broker-friend, his qualms were vain; customers could come into his office with money from any source, even from some illicit enterprise. What was gained if they now purchased only stocks in morally approved enterprises? Moral or immoral, the companies offering stocks were all legal entities in an economic system that does not discriminate between producers of fire-arms and producers of surgical instruments. All industries are created equal.

   Being bound to keep quiet when he sees obvious destruction being wrought by some reckless peer, at least the intelligently reflective capitalist cannot, contrary to Mills, be entirely happy. And his unhappiness has an entirely different cause from that of most people. It is the unhappiness of a consciously powerful man who realizes he can do nothing effective against something he considers profoundly evil, cannot even fully protect his own children. Even though he may feel that his own enterprises are as far beyond criticism as ingenuity can make them, he knows that this is no defense against fabrications which can be circulated against him to his distress by powerful people his uncooperative crusading spirit has made angry.

   It is for this reason, among others, that it is rare to find crusaders among capitalists, who all in one way or the other live in glass houses.

   In the matter of divorce and broken families the rich are, if anything, worse off than most of the population; at least they are no better placed. For the divorce rate among the rich, with many of them such ardent believers in marriage that they remarry up to five and even ten times, is very much higher than the national rate. Divorce, even if one looks upon it as a desirable escape hatch from an untenable situation, is never taken as a sign of sound human relations; rather is it taken as an index of unresolvable interpersonal trouble.

   If stable familial relations and intra-family continuity are desirable, as it is widely held, then divorce and the dispersion of family members, particularly the young, must be an index to failure. At least the children of divorced rich couples are not happy about the event. And this sort of failure is rife among the rich. Failure being the opposite of success, in this department of life the rich, however they got that way, cannot be looked upon as generally successful. Perhaps they are no more unhappy than others; yet they do not appear to be conspicuous winners in the marital sweepstakes. As in the case of most divorcing couples, they find each other unbearable--and not simply in one instance but, as the record shows, in a train of instances. Not to be able to find a single retainable marital partner in a number of attempts surely argues some sort of personal impoverishment in a culture that values marital stability.

   Deficiencies and lacks of the kind we have looked at are not, as many suppose, purely subjective, the ills to which all men are heir. They are social, deriving from the general social situation, which has much to do in shaping the psychologies of people.

   The rich, it is clear, are not immune to the general fallout from the existing socio-political system even though they may have compensations denied to others. Far from all the fallout upon the rich has been indicated and one could go on at considerable length about more. However, confining ourselves again to the young and innocent rich, it is clear that their minds are as subverted as those of poorer youth by the all-pervading influence of persuasive advertising.

   If someone systematically splashed mud on the clothing of rich children their parents would soon take steps to see that the offender was laid by the heels. Yet the rich, for all their power, cannot protect their children from the subversive influence of advertisers who insistently confuse the intellect in various detectable ways. Most of the time they misuse language and pictures in the effort solely to sell.

   True, the rich youth like the poor, if he makes his way into the higher and more recondite studies such as semantics, logic and epistemology, can overcome the enervating intellectual influences of advertising and homespun propaganda, thus possessing himself at least of his own mind. But few find their way to such rarefied studies and the result is that the rich usually have as confused a view of the world as the poor, subject to exploded notions (particularly in economics) and with about the same general world view as that of a postman or bartender. That this is so is readily seen in the public utterances of the more vocal of them. Among the self-erected we have cracker-barrel philosophers like Henry Ford I and H. L. Hunt and among the more educated we have the sagging economic views of David Rockefeller and, on a much lower level of wealth, the socio-cultural divagations of William F. Buckley, Jr., who asserts the presence of "eternal verities." A B-minus undergraduate in epistemology at Swampwater College knows better than that even though Buckley's public vowel movements are intently studied by a select circle of admirers.

   One would think that a rich man, with money at his fingertips, would get smart and hire an epistemologist who would at least straighten him out from time to time about the grounds for rational belief. For we may well suppose that a rich man, always wanting the best, does not wish to go about in a scatterbrained condition hawking absurdities. He must want the true view just as he wants a livewire girl, a prime steak and a sound wine. Yet we find him apparently no better off in this respect than the common man. Nor, considering the baneful social influences to which they are subject will most of his prized children be better off. Madison Avenue vomits on their minds as freely as on the battered mind of the ordinary clod.

   In this matter, however, the rich man is no doubt imbued with the unjustified self-pride of others as summarized by Descartes in the opening lines of his Discourse on Method: "Good sense is of all things in the world most evenly distributed among men, for each one believes himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the most difficult to please in all other things are generally satisfied with their share." (For our purposes we may ignore the non sequitur noticed by logicians between the warranting reasons cited and the conclusion.) In any event, the rich man like the nonrich believes his own mind is as good as any and its way of operation to be in no particular corrigible; one can see this in the bland assurance with which the rich often express themselves publicly on recondite matters such as achieving the national destiny. In this belief, no doubt in the majority of cases, the rich are like others demonstrably self-deceived, victims of self-pride, unless they have gone to herculean efforts to free themselves from the free-market socio-cultural seepage all about them; they are as much off the track as T. W. K. Mits, the well-known man in the street.

   Sufficient grounds have been stated, I believe, to suggest, contrary to supposition among both the rich and their critics, that the rich are not so well off as they themselves sometimes suppose and are commonly supposed to be, even though they may be more advantageously placed than the average man in many selected areas. Their difficulties, furthermore, are not merely those common to the flesh of man but often derive from their own celebrated social system, from the propaganda-hallowed but rickety social structure itself. Such is the resistance of indurated dogma to reasonable refutation, however, that one could pile further proof on proof in the single well-known case of the successful Kennedys, dogged by socially induced tragedies; nor are they alone.

   The first of the Kennedys to feel the blow of adversity was the eldest son, Joseph P., Jr., who had early been earmarked in the family circle as a future president of the United States. Aged twenty-nine, he was killed in action as an eager airman in Europe during the replay with special Hitlerian effects of World War I. Two weeks later Kathleen's ultra-British husband was also killed in action. And in 1948 Kathleen herself, flying in a private plane to join her father on the Riviera, was killed as the machine crashed in rain and fog over France.

   With the election to the presidency in 1960 of John F. Kennedy, the second oldest son, the Kennedys' star seemed once again in the ascendancy; they were literally the darlings of the world. The abrupt assassination of the socially aware president in Dallas in 1963 by a publicly neglected, mentally disturbed ex-marine was especially ironic; a social system eroded by neglect struck down a potential statesman through one of its neglected cases.

   The theme of violence in the Kennedy later history, which had almost finished JFK during the war in the South Pacific, showed itself again in the nearly fatal airplane crash of Senator Edward M. Kennedy in his own plane in 1964. As it was, his back was severely injured, necessitating the wearing of a brace.

   The airplane, it may be observed in this melancholy recital, is a special hazard of the rich and affluent. Few plane crashes, unless upon buildings, ever involve lower-class citizens; many tycoons have already met their end in the skies. And the bored rich, in their affinity for plane travel as for everything technologically novel and "advanced," are themselves the victims of a smooth statistical falsification given wide currency: that the rate of passenger fatalities in aircraft is lower than that on railroads. This falsification is achieved by comparing fatalities per passenger-mile. If, however, one properly takes into consideration all the relevant factors and makes the comparison on the basis of passenger-mile-hours (for time is an essential factor in measuring motion, which is a function of time as well as distance), then it is seen that the rate of fatality is tremendously higher in air travel. As far as that goes, in absolute figures passenger air fatalities are greater than passenger railroad fatalities.

   We see here that the rich are as susceptible as anyone to being gulled by institutionalized propaganda (assuming that they are indeed misled by the claims of alleged superior safety in airplanes). Although airplanes may be sufficiently safe, considering all factors, they are self-propelled kites flying with heavy loads of volatile fuel, obviously highly vulnerable to serious mishap. In computing air fatalities the Federal Aviation Agency, for example, excludes deaths occurring in airborne dynamite explosions! ²⁵ Such are apparently not deemed statistically kosher.

   Great prominence itself, as many of the wealthy know, carries with it special problems. In the case of the Kennedys this was shown in the wrangle over the wording of the originally authorized book by William Manchester about the assassination of the president. Said The Nation (February 6, 1967): "The subsequent attempts on the part of the Kennedys to control the text of the book and its serialization gave the impression of an arrogant use of money and power. They may have been within their legal rights, but that is not the point. Apparently most of what they objected to was of little moment one way or the other. The public was not in a mood to go along with them, whether they were right or wrong. The John F. Kennedy aura was blown away by the exchange of recriminations.

   "At a given point of idolatry," The Nation continued, "the public turns from adoring its idols and begins to examine their feet. Once celebrities reach a certain level of overexposure, there is just as much mileage to be gained from cutting them down as there was from building them up. The writers and broadcasters who provide this sort of fare are familiar with the reaction, and when some of them sense the turning point, the others follow. All of the overexposed live in the shadow of an obloquy. It is one of the hazards of publicity."

   What is less widely known is that scholarly John F. Kennedy himself, in 1959, successfully brought pressure to bear to exclude from the book The Kennedy Family by Joseph Dinneen three summary paragraphs about the attitude of his father toward Jews. Dinneen in 1944 had interviewed the elder Kennedy for the Boston Globe and had taken shorthand notes of the interview. Present also was Lawrence Spivak, then editor of The American Mercury and later a national television news panelist. The Globe decided not to publish the interview and Dinneen fifteen years later summarized it in his book, of which he sent a set of galley proofs as a courtesy to JFK. The president-to-be, disturbed, insisted over the telephone from Oregon that the prickly paragraphs be omitted even though the work was now in plates. Dinneen and the publishers after some resistance consented to the awkward deletion and substituted some inoffensive material. ²⁶

   JFK, soundly from a public image point of view, recognized that the nature of the interview, far from settling the issue of anti-Semitism raised against his father, piqued critical interest and raised more questions than it resolved. From an electoral point of view, though the president-to-be was not at all anti-Semitic, even a brief summary of the interview could have been troubling by reason of association.

   In passing, it is standard although not universal finpolitan and pubpolitan practice to attempt to control or influence--that is, censor--writings and other expressions that becloud one's public image by suggesting something untoward or disturbing. What is wanted is a carefully retouched pleasant studio portrait of persons and events, not a candid catch-as-catch-can camera shot of some bigwig off guard and thus completely himself. For this reason writers and other commentators on public affairs are generally wooed, flattered, facilitated in various ways and, at times, subsidized, authorized, edited, lied to, intimidated or coerced by powerful public figures. While resorting to the courts to expunge nonlibelous matter from a text is rather unusual, the general attitude of those Kennedys involved in the Manchester controversy is not unusual among political and corporate people, whatever illusions the public may have about the free-wheeling independence of writers under the Star Spangled Banner.

   Attempts to control the projected image extend even to photographs. Few politicians like to be photographed smoking cigars, perhaps because that typical act of politicians reminds the public of cartoons about paunchy, cigar-smoking ward bosses, concededly corrupt. Herbert Hoover had the plates confiscated from a photographer who snapped him cigar-smoking aboard a battleship, and Jack Kennedy, who smoked panetelas, did not like to be photographed in the act. Roosevelt, however, did not conceal that he smoked cigarettes, no doubt feeling that by doing it openly he projected an image of insouciance and self-sufficiency. Nor do politicians like to be photographed with a convivial glass in hand.

   Franklin D. Roosevelt, always sensitively concerned about his image, worked carefully to see that it was not clouded. For a long time, although he was under close direct scrutiny, it was unknown by the general public that be was wholly paralyzed from the waist down and had to wear leg braces. Roosevelt himself went to herculean and physically exhausting lengths to keep the surely significant fact of this weakness from becoming generally known. ²⁷ John F. Kennedy, too, kept from general circulation the fact that he suffered from Addison's disease.

   Moreover, writers and photographers who offend by engaging in unauthorized image revision are thereafter rebuffed, barred, harassed, denounced, spied upon, rebuked, intimidated and otherwise made to feel remorse, regret or fear at having offended the higher powers, whose claim to kid-gloved handling is invariably based upon nothing more than money or position.

   Ralph Nader, for presuming to question automobile safety in Unsafe at Any Speed, was subjected to close surveillance by General Motors, largest corporation by sales in the world, for which act a high GM official later publicly apologized. According to Nader, with General Motors denying the charge, the object was to obtain some bit of publicly inflammatory information of an irrelevantly derogatory nature. ²⁸ True or not in this case, it is often true in many other cases because a largely confused philistine public believes that the truth of some statement is brought into serious question if it can be shown that its originator is a Communist, Socialist, atheist, homosexual, yogi, imbiber in strong waters, freethinker or one addicted to engaging in crim. con. with amiable ladies. Dedicated, sincere heterosexuality may itself be impugning.

   Unsettling though it may be to many sturdy citizens, it is probably a fact that a majority of the scientists at work on the federal space-exploration program are thoroughgoing atheists or agnostics. For careful studies have shown that most American scientists (save us all!) are of this horrifying, cosmosshattering orientation. Should, therefore, the space program not be canceled or its personnel changed? Should not, in the name of common safety, Billy Graham and Fulton J. Sheen be placed in charge? Why, the perturbed grass-roots citizen may well ask himself, cannot persons with a wholesome, dung-hill, 100 per cent American outlook be selected for this highly elevating work?

   In one of his few but revealing gauche moves, President John F. Kennedy, deeply annoyed, canceled the White House subscription to the New York Herald Tribune and barred it from the sacred premises--an instance of Jove hurling the penultimate thunderbolt: banishment.

   Concluding, although the difficulties encountered along life's way by the Kennedys and others can hardly be taken as par for the course among the rich and powerful they do show, in concentrated cases, what in varying degree all of the rich are up against in a highly turbulent irrationally structured society. The rich are by no means as well off as they are often imagined to be and as a sociologist such as C. Wright Mills imagines them to be. They have many troubles going far beyond those to which the flesh of man is heir. They are, in many ways, "on the spot." They have a lion by the tail.

   Nowhere else is this better shown than in the matter of self-protection in the atomic age. The rich are individually as subject to nuclear holocaust as the poor in the brave new world's threatened nuclear democracy of all-encompassing death. And although many of the rich have constructed elaborate bomb shelters on their estates, complete with television (what station will be on the air?), among the more intelligent such contrivances must be clearly recognized as no more than tranquilizers for the women, children and servants. The world to which hypothetical shelter survivors would emerge would be one, according to all estimates, in which the dead would be looked upon with envy. The tycoons know this as well as does Herman Kahn.

   The fundamental difficulty of the rich has not yet been fully indicated. This difficulty consists of acquiring a sense of worthwhile function (and getting the world to agree with the self-estimate of this function) and, at the same time, of containing the many eruptions and breakdowns in a social system the obsolete structure of which is continually being strained by the introduction of new profit-making technology as well as by the rise of appropriately ferocious rivalry abroad. The situation in which the contemporary rich find themselves could be described by some pundit, brightly, as challenging.

   As to function, it comes down largely to rule under various euphemistic rubrics. At times, as the pages of Who's Who attest, the claims to function are more flamboyant and see the subjects pathetically proclaiming themselves as financiers, investors, venture entrepreneurs, philanthropists and the like. After all, a financier is only a money lender, an investor is someone who owns something producing revenue for his own account, a venture entrepreneur a promoter for his own account and a philanthropist a lover of mankind. While being a lover of mankind may be laudable it does not bespeak any particular knack. For what is man or mankind but an abstraction? One never encounters man in experience, only men, women and children. What some testy observers ask is this: Will some of the self-proclaimed lovers of mankind kindly get off the necks of men, women and children?

   Function, among the rich, as we have seen, is most often stated in terms that boil down to rule: executive, public official, administrator, trustee and the like.

   In the modern world, function is closely related to self-identity because the question is no longer who one is but what one does. To the question "Who are you?" the answer is generally that one is a truck driver, clerk, teacher, performer or what-not of a certain name. "I am a tuba player named John Jones" is, at least for a beginning, a satisfactory designation (if true) of one's identity.

   The rich, however, have difficulty in stating any function for themselves that is dissociated from rule. While terms like financier, investor, venture entrepreneur and philanthropist suggest commendable, nonintrusive and possibly supportive roles, terms such as executive, director, official, trustee and administrator and the like are clearly epitomized in a revealing term: boss.

   In the contexts in which they are publicly advanced, all these terms hazily suggest synonyms for "hero," and at times a halo is also indicated for the heroic figure as in "international financier" and "upper-echelon executive." As one bears and reads of such, one is literally stunned by the superhuman vistas suggested. And when one reads that messages are being exchanged--actually exchanged--between the president of the United States on the one hand and international financiers and upper-eschelon executives on the other (subject: something or other) one can imaginatively feel the world grinding on its hinges.

   Whether the rich recognize it or not, in most public roles they seem to feel qualified to play they appear as bosses, however disguised, and not necessarily unbenevolent. In any other function they may elect to attempt--of a physicist, a ballplayer, a soft-shoe dancer, an artist, a writer or a philosopher--they find that their money gives them no edge at all. In roles of nonrulership, where the competition is extremely lively, if they decided to go in for poetry they find that par for the course is set by hard-to-beat T. S. Eliot or Robert Lowell, if for ballplaying by Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio, etc. Most of the rich seeking active roles therefore drift, by default as it were, to corporations, banks, brokerage houses, nonprofit funds and various political jurisdictions. These are all organizational havens for imprecision even though they all harbor aspects where precision may be required of underlings, and appreciated.

   In attempting to establish his unique identity through some unfinanced achievement, the rich man is pretty much in the position of anyone else, even a pauper. If his claim to competence is that he is very good at chess, all he need do to establish it is to beat a few lower-rung chess experts and then move higher. If his forte is science all he need do is gain the accolade of other scientists, hard to do. Normally finding such feats difficult, his next recourse is to get for himself one of the vaguely heroic current designations, crown it with an adjectival halo and project it into print: a public image. Most people will accept him, even applaud him, in his self-designation. The only ones who will ever question his bona fides will be dyspeptic churls, fit only for treasons, spoils and stratagems, perhaps to boot connoisseurs of pornography and arcane seances--in short, losers.

   No matter what designation of puissance the rich man permits his media of publicity to allot him, however, there remains the harsh fact that be is operating within an increasingly obsolete social structure, politically designed for an agricultural and local commercial economy and culturally for the most part of even more antedated vintage. This social structure, under the impact of high-powered technology, is obviously increasingly inadequate to its supportive task, requires much change and is insulated against change by the resistance of many established economic groups, perhaps including his own.

   What to do? One palliative after the other is embraced, resulting in an increasingly cross-stress, tension-producing patchwork. Where will it all lead? What will happen to the rich man's special stake, constantly threatened by science-derived innovations and requirements for more and more government intervention?

   Obeying the maxim "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em," most of the rich appear increasingly to have joined forces with government in developing the welfare-warfare state, largely utilizing tax money from the labor force and thereby guaranteeing themselves one big profitable customer. Yet even this maneuver introduces endless new difficulties, and there remains to be contended with the rest of the terrestrial world exploding into smoggy industrialism.

   The state of mind of a fully aware wealthy man, then, cannot be as tranquil as commonly supposed. And that it is not at all tranquil is shown by the endless fulminations of the various communications media against communism, socialism, statism, totalitarianism, radicalism, fascism, technocracy, liberalism, crime in the streets (where it clearly should not be), do-goodism, reformism, softism, sentimentalism, apathy, unpatriotism, unconstitutionalism, centralization, bureaucracy and the like, and by the stream of contributions to super-patriotic Pied Pipers. All persons who think seriously in terms of adjustment to modern conditions then find they must be extremely circumspect so as not to be suspected as subversive and un-American, in the ideological company of foreigners.

   A constant danger now faced by the jumpy finpols is the possibility that someone among the pubpols, like a Roosevelt or a Kennedy, will really take the bit in his teeth and start running the ball in a different direction, perhaps change the nature of the whole game. For, in the shadow of the uncertainties of an old-line local business economy with high-speed technology grafted on to it, the pubpols appear to be slowly shaping a wider role for themselves as government is required to step supportively into various fissures of a misshapen society.

   While it appears a bit early to assert that the days of the rich are numbered, as socialists like to believe, it does appear they are in for some stormy times and, perhaps, for eventual extinction at the hands of rising forces--a subject to be broached in the next and concluding chapter. The rich, in any event, are in a time of many troubles as their wealth increases, and I conclude that the more thoughtful among them cannot be feeling as complacent as the bland-bland exterior of their power elite may suggest.

   For it is veritably written: "So foul a sky clears not without a storm."