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Seventeen

   OLIGARCHY BY DEFAULT

   Latter-day discourses on the economic system as something separate merely because it can be analytically isolated, bypass the inescapable fact that there is always present a politico-economic system: government with economic ramifications, an economy with political ramifications. Governments and economic systems are never separate; they are opposite sides of the same coin. As experience shows, their leading personnel are interchangeable. Such being the case, in any study of economic and financial affairs we are invariably concerned with some sort of system of coercion and repression. For all government is universally conceded to rest at bottom on systematized collective coercion and repression.

   Such coercion and repression, to be sure, are necessary. Without them life, in the words of a famous dictum, would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Without them anarchic individual coercion would prevail in a social jungle.

   In the long, turbulent course of history many cushions and restraints were developed within governmental systems to protect the populace from their fierce protector--that is, to soften some of the more outrageous aspects of coercion the engine of government itself made possible. For the instrument of government was usually freely used by rulers--"the insolence of office," "power corrupts," "to the victor belong the spoils"--for ulterior and wholly private ends. Today, in the celebration of particular systems of government, one finds that it is the imperfect restraints against self-serving rulers and their friends that are really celebrated--Constitution, Bill of Rights, written laws, half-measures of social support, the development of equity in law, and the like.

   Nevertheless, after all the fine print has been duly perused and applauded, coercive power (soothingly designated as sovereign power) remains and is properly suspect. Behind their bland masks the most civilized of governments retain all the powers of any despotism, their application duly prescribed (and the prescriptions not infrequently violated). Taking into consideration all governmental powers and their usual application, there are in fact no genial governments at all. And in the interstices of even the most finely meshed restraints (those of the United States probably being less finely meshed than those, for example, of England, France or Sweden) there is much room for one-sided self-service by the rulers and those with clandestine privileged access to them. While one might balk at assenting to the proposition that government is the executive committee of the ruling class, it is a demonstrable fact that it is peculiarly at the service of the upper economic class, which accordingly is warrantably regarded as in effect a ruling class.

   Lest such an observation be thought by provincials to give this exposition an unholy Marxist aura, let us in reverential solemnity quote such an austere Establishmentarian as Woodrow Wilson, who said (Franklin D. Roosevelt later concurring) in words as valid today as when first uttered:

   "The masters [sic!] of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States. It is written over every intimate page of the record of Congress, it is written all through the history of conferences at the White House, that the suggestions of economic policy in this country have come from one source, not from many sources. The benevolent guardians, the kind hearted trustees who have taken the troubles of government off our hands have become so conspicuous that almost anybody can write out a list of them. . . .

   "Suppose you go to Washington and try to get at your government. You will always find that while you are politely listened to, the men really consulted are the men who have the biggest stake--the big bankers, the big manufacturers, the big masters of commerce, the heads of railroad corporations and of steamship corporations. . . . The government of the United States at present is a foster child of the special interests." ¹

   For the alleged violation of some of its peculiar, even minor, mandates any government whatever will execute any high-minded offender whether he be Jesus, Socrates, John Hus, Servetus, Thomas More, Joan of Arc or John Brown. Socrates was executed by a far more democratic system than any now even claims to be and in a more refined system of civilization than that of any modern country. Under threat of durance vile all governments require the payment of taxes, even unfairly apportioned taxes as in the United States with its packed poor-boy legislatures.

   Again, any government even in a trivial or doubtful cause such as Vietnam may place the lives of its younger male citizens in extreme jeopardy by coercing them into the armed forces under the claims of routinely invoked patriotic duty and sending them into kill-or-be-killed situations. Most Americans have been astonished in recent years to see what was always known to the informed: that the president alone can send existing armed forces anywhere without consulting anyone, least of all the public or Congress. He could order an overnight assault against any country, thereby precipitating general war. He could, in full constitutionality, order all of the armed forces into the depths of the Congo and nobody could legally halt the operation. Congress, it is true, could refuse the money to continue the operation and thus be in the position of refusing to support helpless men who had only obeyed legal orders. And this is only a very little of what a fully constitutional American president can do--without consulting anyone.

   Most of what a president does not ordinarily do--such as send secret police to citizens' doors late in the night--he does not do because he does not want to. He can do this sort of thing quite legally; there is no law saying at what hour police may call. And such a personally likeable man as President John F. Kennedy did indeed send out nocturnal police visitors in the squabble over steel prices.

   Government power, wielded by officials, individual human beings, is evidently great power over others, not necessarily for others, and anyone who wields it, smiling or not, or has ready access to the wielders obviously has great power far beyond that of any man in the street. Moreover, this power with modern techniques is far greater than it ever was. By means of modern methods of communication, government can put its agents into action anywhere in a matter of minutes. It has been credibly reported that President Johnson, with far more power at his fingertips than all presidents combined up to Harry Truman, and more than either Truman, Eisenhower or Kennedy, personally designated overnight targets in North Vietnam for powerful air squadrons waiting to take off from remote, dawn-shrouded airfields. We possess today, in brief, pinpoint government. It can even listen in on conversations anywhere, and freely does so despite denials. It freely uses internal spies, especially in the matter of taxes on obscure citizens.

   For these and other reasons it is now said by some students of the situation that we live under an elective despotism. Freely celebrating our condition in strictly American style, if we accept this dictum we could say we live under the greatest and most glorious elective despotism in history. Most people--well over 95 per cent of them--have no more power in this system, either immediately or ultimately, than has a rank-and-file Russian in the Soviet system, and this despite all the blandishing talk about government with the consent of the governed and the sovereignty of the people. As to consent, which of my readers can step forward and say he was ever asked for his consent to the Constitution or any of its varied interpretations? The electorate of 1789 was asked for and gave such consent and we may readily agree that the majority of people in states asking for admission, at the time of admission, have so consented. But who else? When the people of the Confederacy, disliking the arrangement, pointedly withdrew the consent given by their forebears they were confronted by military force and after a sanguinary struggle were eventually subdued. As Lincoln said, the Union must be preserved, a proposition drawn from out of the air that flatly contradicts the doctrine of consent. Yet Lincoln was right; it is inherently of the nature of government that, like a tiger, it never voluntarily assents to its own dismemberment. The idea of consent vis-à-vis an established government is the purest of nonsense, written though it is into the American myth.

   Treatises on American government often with scrupulous accuracy tell how the government operates formally--the federal system, separation of powers, checks and balances, popular election of officials, judicial review, administrative agencies and the whole remaining bit. None of these treatises depicts how the government actually works in the application of the forms, how it works informally. What really takes place constitutes a considerable deviation from the formal script. Rules are freely bent, especially in the conduct of the legislatures, which make their own rules. Police, too, function pretty autonomously. For a starter let us notice that most of the precious electorate in most elections--state, federal and local--do not vote at all. Many, even though unconstrained, have never voted; and these, under one possible interpretation, may be politically the most sensible of all. For most of those voting haven't the least idea what it is all about.

   Power not exercised by dilatory members of any functioning organization will of necessity be exercised by more diligent members, a universal rule applying to corporations, fraternal societies and labor unions as well as to government. To a very considerable extent, then, we see in all organizations, including the government of the United States, rule by default, by a self-selected oligarchy. If the citizens won't run the show the endless procession of Bobby Bakers, W. Judson Morhouses, Everett Dirksens and Lyndon B. Johnsons will.

   In what follows I shall first state summarily, with gloves off, precisely how government actually operates in the United States.

   1. Officials (except judges) nominated by either one of two major parties are periodically elected at local, state and federal levels by a largely inept electorate that in most elections fails to participate to the full and in general turns out far below 50 per cent. Whether the electorate fully participates makes no operational difference because most of the candidates are handpicked by nominating caucuses of the two major parties rather than of one party as in Russia. These caucuses function in default of popular activity; the populace simply has no political drive of its own. It is politically inert. If Russia permitted a Socialist Party and a Communist Party (joined behind the scenes) it would be on all fours with the United States in respect of parties in the field; the candidates in the two parties might be politically identical twins, as is often the case in the United States (Johnson versus Goldwater). In those rare cases where policy is uppermost in the mind of the electorate it is usually a destructive policy, as toward Negroes in the South (and elsewhere). Policies promising to be injurious to minority groups such as Negroes, Catholics, foreigners, Jews, Mexicans, Chinese, intellectuals and, in fact, all deviants from fixed philistinish norms, usually attract a larger-than-usual supporting vote. Ordinarily, policies are beyond the comprehension of the electorate, which chooses between two handpicked candidates strictly on nonability factors: religion, race, appearance, age, marital status, region of origin, platform manner, synthetic public image and the like. Officials thus elected I have termed pubpols, public politicians, to distinguish them from the many other types of more specialized politicians in the American politico-economic system: finpols, corp-pols, churchpols, lawpols and lab(or)pols. A close examination of the roles of any of these will show that they differ only in quality, not degree or kind, from pubpols. Less perspicuously, such are ordinarily styled "leaders" or "executives"; sometimes "trustees" or theologians. They are in sober fact politicians, primarily and exclusively concerned about the operation of government and who gets--and doesn't get--what, when, where and how.

   2. As the attainment of office gives officials access to the dread levers of government, including the levers of the hangman, people who already possess or are acquiring well-defined economic stakes are especially alert to the whole process. While the masses are distractedly mesmerized by the number 1 television program or the World Series, the moneymen are busily planning and discussing far ahead. Owing to the power leverage at stake, rivalry for office is in most jurisdictions keen. It gets keener the higher one ascends in the system. Because of the rivalrous electoral grab for power leverage, the struggle is expensive. Money is needed, and can be obtained only from those relative few who have it to spare. Most of the labor force is too modestly compensated and improvident to contribute.

   3. Money plays a large role in the manipulation of this system--much larger than is usually conceded, which means that persons who have money have a wide political edge over those who do not. First, there are the campaign contributions, always large and constantly getting larger. True, it takes money to run these campaigns wherein the issues are presumably being put before the people. But it was long known prior to the cases in 1967 of Senator Thomas J. Dodd before the Senate and of Bobby Baker in the courts that much of the money in probably most campaigns (although not all) is diverted to the private tax-free accounts of the politicians. As Frank R. Kent said decades ago, many politicians have what is known in the trade as "sticky fingers." The money they collect is not for justifiable campaign expenses but is a down payment on future influence in government. Some of this money must often be divided--the "split"--to gain the support of local newspapers and key figures who stand forth as "community leaders." Most campaign funds are, therefore, properly and soberly designatable as slush funds. Some represent slush, slush, slush all the way. The American system is a slushy system.

   Officeholders know this and at times show their clear recognition of the facts. Thus, in the campaign of the natural gas industry in 1956 for exemption from federal regulation when an enabling bill was before Congress, already endorsed by President Eisenhower, eager-beaver hinterland lawyers for the industry turned up and offered a cash "campaign contribution" to veteran Senator Francis Case of South Dakota, who instantly took umbrage and publicized what he interpreted as a barefaced attempt to influence his vote. This untypical incident scuttled the bill, which was vetoed. ² Most politicos gladly accept such offerings, say nothing about them. (In England, campaign funds and the duration of campaigns are severely limited by law. Legislators are paid very modest salaries and are required to abstain from voting and discussion in matters affecting their private interests--the Jeffersonian rule.)

   Lest I again be suspected of harboring Satanic leftish sentiments while setting down what is only God's own plain unvarnished fact, allow me to quote at some length Senator Russell Long, Establishment Democrat of Louisiana and Majority Whip, who in April, 1967, said on the Senate floor:

   Most campaign money comes from businessmen. Labor contributions have been greatly exaggerated. It would be my guess that about 95 per cent of campaign funds at the congressional level are derived from businessmen. At least 80 per cent of this comes from men who could sign a net worth statement exceeding a quarter of a million dollars. Businessmen contribute because the Federal Corrupt Practices Act prohibits businesses from contributing. Funnelling contributions through their officers is a simple and safe way for business to accomplish what it cannot do directly.

   A great number of businessmen contribute to legislators who have voted for laws to reduce the power of labor unions, to regulate unions, to outlaw the union shop.

   Many businessmen contribute to legislators who have voted to exempt their businesses from the minimum wage.

   Businessmen contribute to legislators who have fought against taxes that would have been burdensome to their businesses, whether the tax increase was proposed as a so-called reform, a loophole closer, or just an effort to balance the Federal budget.

   Power company officials contribute to legislators who vote against public power and against expanding the Rural Electric Administration cooperatives. REA officers are also able to raise some money, although not nearly as much for those legislators who vote the other way around, although the real power of the REA cooperatives is to be found in the strong grassroots support they can generate against their enemies.

   Bankers, insurance company executives, big moneylenders generally contribute to legislators who vote for policies that lead to high interest rates.

   Many large companies benefit from research and development contracts which carry a guaranteed profit, a so-called fixed fee of about 7 per cent of the amount of the contract. Executives of such companies contribute to those who help them get the contracts or who make the money available. In recent years, quite a battle has developed over the desire of government research contractors to obtain and keep lush private monopoly patent rights on those things discovered with billions of dollars of government research money. The possibility of windfall profits in this area defies imagination. Research contractors contract to legislators who vote to permit them to have private patent rights on government research expenditures.

   Drug companies are often able to sell brand-name drug products at anywhere from twice to 50 times the price of identical nonbranded products for welfare and medicare patients if the companies can prevail upon government to permit their drugs to be prescribed and dispensed by their private brand names rather than by the official or generic name of the product. Executives of drug companies will contribute to legislators who vote to permit or bring about such a result.

   Many industries are regulated. This includes the railroads, the truckers, the airlines, the power companies, the pipelines, to name but a few. Executives of regulated companies contribute to legislators who vote to go easy on the regulation, and ask no more questions than necessary about their rates.

   Companies facing threat of ruinous competition from foreign sources have executives who contribute to those who help protect them from competition by means of tariffs and quotas.

   Many industries are subsidized. This includes the merchant marine, the shipbuilders, the sugar producers, the copper producers, and a host of others. Executives in such industries contribute to those who help keep them in business.

   This list is merely illustrative; it could be elaborated upon and enlarged to include many more. . . . Merely by assiduously tending to the problems of business interests located in one's own state, a legislator can generally assure himself of enough financial support to campaign effectively for reelection. ³

   The Majority Whip in his unguarded ire here spoke the simple, unvarnished truth. The only detail on which I would question him is in his use of the term "businessmen." For these people, the big ones at least, are not businessmen in the senses commonly understood. They are finpols, and corp-pols, disguised as businessmen. They are actually rulers, like the dukes and barons of old. Business is not really their business; protected, nonrisk moneymaking is.

   Scornfully rejecting the suggestion that some pontifical politicos did not accept campaign contributions, Senator Long said that "any person who is the darling of the newspaper publishers has much of his campaign covered in favorable news and editorial support they can afford. If his record has the overwhelming approval of the wealthy business people, if he has a consistent record of favoring penny-pinching economy when the needs of the sick and poor were involved, a consistent record of voting to protect management from the demands of labor, of protecting monopolies from the public rather than the other way around, he will find that the campaign expenses seem to take care of themselves. Radio and television broadcasts may be paid by unseen and unknown beneficiaries. The man may well find himself with a substantial campaign surplus and no place to spend it." ⁴

   Interrupting in the course of Long's speech, Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee reported that his study of campaign contributions in 1956 showed that the Republican Party collected more from the tiny island of Manhattan than from all the states combined, while the Democratic Party was not far removed from the same pattern. ⁵ This was not very astonishing as New York City is the financial capital of the country, the dog that wags the Washington tail. The slush comes from New York, the accommodating votes from the hinterland.

   Long spoke in favor of retaining the short-lived law that allowed taxpayers to assign $1 of federal income taxes to campaign funds, which would be financed out of a common pool.

   But money in American politics extends far beyond campaign contributions (largely supplied by corporations even though corporations are forbidden by law to contribute directly). As we have seen, once they are elected, politicians have many ways of collecting money or monetarily convertible equivalents. (1) It is brought to them by lobbyists in their offices in paper bags. (2) It is paid to them by corporations through their law firms for vague legal services or for self-serving intervention in governmental bureaus. (3) It is available to them as in the case of Bobby Baker in the form of easy bank loans and also takes the form of allotting them shares gratis or at cut-rate terms in going enterprises such as insurance and loan companies and banks. Baker was obviously a middleman.

   The object of transferring money in this way is to avoid any implication of bribery, a word which, politicians know has an ugly sound. Moreover, it is illegal. Although politicians are still bribed, and are sometimes convicted of accepting bribes (as in the recent case of highly placed W. Judson Morhouse), bribery after a distinguished history is now regarded as too cumbersome in the American system. But gifts with no explicit strings attached are not barred by law and are often conveyed in full public view in "testimonial dinners." Will the recipient of such gifts thereafter take a detached view of the special requests of the donors? To believe so is to be credulous beyond hope of redemption.

   The newer ways of conveying money to officials in a pervasively corrupt governmental system have clearly been devised to salve their consciences against any gnawing belief that they are being bribed. Thus, Senator Dodd after the call for his censure by the Senate was able to protest publicly with every show of righteous indignation, his voice vibrant, that he was not conscious of having done anything wrong. In this contention he was supported by not a few politicos with whom he had no partisan connection.

   On a separate occasion, speaking in defense of Senator Dodd, Senator Long charged that half the members of the Senate Ethics Committee that sat in judgment on Dodd "couldn't stand the investigation Senator Dodd went through" and, finally, that "half the Senate" was in the same boat. A few days later, Senator Long apologized. In making his for-the-record apology Senator Long now surprisingly described the members of the Ethics Committee as "six of the finest members who have ever served in this body."

   "If I made a mistake and if I did wrong by saying what I said, I am here to offer them a public apology," said the Majority Whip. "If I have any complaint of this committee it is that their standards are too high."

   Senator John Stennis of retrograde Mississippi, chairman of the Ethics Committee, declined to shake hands with Senator Long after the trebly conditional apology. ⁶ This theatrical rebuke had much the same effect on public opinion as if Tweedledum had refused to shake hands with Tweedledee.

   While it is by no means the case that all officeholders are thus beholden to outside moneymen, mainly corp-pols, it certainly appears to be the case that most legislators are. The conditions are evident in the legislatures of the largest industrial states where there is the most money, but they are most plainly evident in Congress. The case of Senator Dodd and the shenanigans of Bobby Baker to sophisticated observers merely represent instances of rather general practice floating inconveniently into view, like garbage at a fashionable swimming beach.

   Contrary to common supposition, most officeholders act officially as they do not out of ideological or intellectual commitment but out of monetary devotion. They believe fervently, for example, in "the free enterprise system"--that is, capitalism. Why not? It is keeping them politically afloat on a sea of slush, as nonradical Senator Long lengthily attested.

   These money transfers in politics, then, are largely payoffs or retainers to guarantee tractable political behavior. And they do ordinarily have this result.

   Congress, which now operates pretty wide open on this sort of thing, applies much stricter criteria to appointees in the executive branch and the judiciary than it does to itself. Congressional committees often, with a great show of virtue, closely question presidential appointees about possible conflicts of interest between their properties and their assigned role in government. Usually Congress is satisfied if a man like the late Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson of General Motors sells his stock. President Johnson, not subject to Congress, did not even do this but appointed trustees for his properties. Is it likely that the trustees would make any decision adverse to the easily irked president? So to suppose would, it seems to me, be infinitely boobish.

   In disclosures such as in the recent Bobby Baker, Dodd and Morhouse cases, the latest of thousands of analogous instances where the politico has been caught redhanded, his fingers streaming lucre, editorialists often piously refer to "corruption" and "venality." Such moralistic judgments, while understandable, conceal the true causes, and tend to support a widespread erroneous view that politicians are for some reason a special odious breed.

   The precise reason there are so many lightfingered and readily purchasable figures in American political life traces directly to the politico-social structure. In the first place, in the American system to have money, however obtained, entitles one to special deference. Not to have it incurs ready contempt. This is straight free-enterprise doctrine, expressing the difference between success and failure, the elect and the damned. Next, and perhaps most importantly, with the opening of the free franchise and public office to all comers in the early nineteenth century in the name of democracy the procuring of impecunious purchasable politicians was in effect guaranteed.

   For poor boys to make good in democratic politics was by definition as noble as for them to make good in anything else, part of the holy American vision. But it takes time and therefore money to be in politics, which made it inevitable that moneymen behind the scene retained more than a little to say. In the popular electoral system the electorate was supposed to pick (but not finance) its representatives, who would faithfully represent them; when the electorate was displeased it might vote them out in favor of new men. But it was early noted that the electorate more often than not endorsed men for superficial reasons and voted out faithful men for trivial reasons or for no other reason than a vague discontent about general conditions. In political landslides, for example, everybody went out, saints and sinners alike.

   Career politicians, pubpols, early saw that it did little good to be a true "friend of the people," who had little insight into affairs or genuine concern about policy. Against the possibility that they might be abruptly voted out of office and livelihood through public caprice or vindictiveness, officeholders began to take prudent measures of self protection. One such measure was the development of local party organizations, "machines," the labor unions of politicians. Another was to use ingenuity in developing unorthodox sources of income with a view to providing nest-eggs that would tide meagerly paid officeholders over lean periods when they were out. (In the latter nineteenth century, the distinguished Charles Francis Adams II reports, he could not live on the $1,000 a year he was paid as mayor of Quincy, Massachusetts.) In many cases unorthodox income was illegal, as from bribes and extortion; in most cases it was questionable. But, up to a point, in all cases it was a practical necessity, although some politicos garnered more than enough under the rule of serendipity.

   This broad consequence, which we see exemplified in most originally unpropertied career pubpols, in no way derived from the nature of politics as a black art but from the nature of a specific system raised on the unsupported (and, since, often disproved) theory that ambitious, self-willed, untutored men elected from among the people will be the respected, loyal, sympathetic, low-paid servitors of those same people--the democratic dogma. Some few will, as events have shown. Most won't, and the people are usually too inattentive, unperceptive or lacking in judgment to be able to distinguish potential friend from betrayer. They reelect their betrayers, again and again.

   This system of popular elections, moreover, was not one devised by the perspicacious Founding Fathers but represented a later dubious embroidery on the basic constitutional system, an embroidery that most of the Founders would have rejected as absurd. Madison, for example, was astute, enough to discern what would happen under the universal franchise. The Fathers, often hymned, had no confidence in a universal franchise that would elevate poor boys in urgent and continual need of funds to high office, there to be readily tempted and seduced and to acquire personal interests of their own that ran against those of the populace. But this result was in a few decades broadly achieved amid sentimental clamor for "democracy." Instead of obtaining a boon in the form of electoral democracy, as ideological democrats contended, the people insensibly had rigorous public demands made upon them by such a system--demands they could not meet, to their own undoing. In giving them electoral democracy, history played a dirty trick on the American people, most of whom actually want and need benevolent paternalism.

   In getting electoral democracy, the American people had figuratively thrust upon them a political version of a Stradivarius violin. But they had not the least conception of how to play it. One result has been continual and avoidable disharmony. Emotionally committed though one may be to democracy, which on speculative grounds might be thought desirable, operationally it is as impossible as perpetual motion. For democracy is something that belongs to the psyche, to group interaction, not to outward forms. As an avalanche of evidence shows, people in general are not the least bit democratic at heart. True democracy, of course, can be learned; but only under carefully controlled favorable conditions such as are rarely present in the upbringing of most children.

   That there is considerable disaffection with popular elections even at grass-roots levels is shown by the widespread growth of city managership this century in replacement of elected mayors. In no fewer than 40 per cent of municipalities, some of them rather large, city managers are now hired as trained administrators by the city council. This compares with 50 per cent of the cities that retain elected mayors and 10 per cent governed by commissions, town meetings or representative town meetings. ⁷ The idea could well be applied to the states which, like Nebraska, could also replace bicameral legislatures (baseless imitations of the federal model) with unicameral bodies.

   Officeholding in the provision of the Founding Fathers was limited to property owners, as was most voting, an idea repugnant today but which in its operation in the eighteenth-century American context limited public office at least on the higher levels to men of considerable education and public responsibility. One would not, however, agree with the prescription of H. L. Hunt today that the vote now be limited to people of property; for too many propertied people now are uneducated and have the cracker-barrel grasp of H. L. Hunt.

   What made the Founding Fathers and the signers of the Declaration of Independence so noteworthy was not that they were men of property; they were noteworthy because they happened also to be men of broad learning and insight, ready to defer to those of their own number like James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton who showed especially sharp insight. True, among the signers of the Declaration some, such as Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson, were early optimistic democrats; most were not. In any event, this crowd was a far cry from the Everett Dirksens, Thomas J. Dodds, George A. Smatherses and a host of other once poor boys (later indifferent to the poor) who found affluence in politics and became, in sooth, cracker-barrel statesmen. The Founding Fathers were a historical fluke.

   Among many areas of significance missed by sociologists in their frequent preference for the trivial is this one of the changes in the socio-financial condition of career politicians, either bosses or officeholders. Many, although originally poor and never in highly remunerative employment, like the late Mayor Frank Hague and President Lyndon B. Johnson, accumulate sizable estates. In the case of others, members of their immediate families suddenly blossom in effulgent prosperity. Clearly, most of them are financial entrepreneurs of no mean cut. Also omitted by the sociologists is a ground-up study of the relation between the corporate clients of legislators' law firms and the performance record of the legislators. Are legislators with oil companies in their law offices, for example, for or against special favors to the oil industry? Are legislators whose law offices represent banks in favor of more or less regulation of banks?

   The essence, of the way the American politico-economic system operates can be brought out most readily by means of employing two key words: overreaching and patronage. The term "patronage" here excludes reference in this text to governmental job appointments by political parties; such patronage, dwelt upon by newspapers, does exist but it is patronage in a distinctly minor form and of little relevance here.

   The chief instrument of economic power in the United States is the corporation, more particularly the large corporation. The corporation is, at its best, a completely rational mechanism with a single overriding goal: the maximization of profits consonant with steady growth. From an internal point of view, everything about the successful large corporation is rational which is one of the aspects that make it an attractive object of study to those who like to study something wholly rational in an irrational world. Corporate rationality, however, is wholly internal. It is at variance, with social rationality and, in fact, the rational corporation takes advantage for itself of much social irrationality, as some corporations take advantage of the desire of many people to, swill whisky and to smoke cancer-inducing cigarettes.

   The United States, I am convinced, would be a vastly superior place in which to live if it were organized along corporate lines as a single corporation rationally committed to maximizing the welfare of all people. I don't have in mind here a fascist corporate state, although this is probably what the outcome would be if misguided idealists set about trying to install a benevolent political corporation. Short of such a goal, we have before us as a model the welfare capitalism of Sweden, disliked by rabid free-enterprisers athirst for tax exemption.

   In its rationality the corporation does everything it can, including much that is illegal, to maximize its profits. It employs deceptive (and irrational) advertising, produces below-par goods even for vital military and space programs, resorts to deceptive packaging, evades taxes, abuses weights and measures, engages in monopolistic price-fixing, caters to popular irrationalities, overcharges, profiteers, and, in general, does whatever it can, evaluated as good or bad, legal or illegal, to maximize its position. To the outsider there is something questionable about one act or the other of the big business corporation. If the quality of the goods is excellent the price may be too high; if the price is low the quality suffers. In any event, it pays no taxes, merely collects them from customers. Again, much of corporate goods produced is of no utility other than in catering to free-floating anxieties, often stimulated by advertising. Here the rational corporation profits from irrational people.

   Overreaching is not something new in history. But in its American systematization, complete with computers, it is distinctly new, and it affects every nook and cranny of society as well as of individual attitudes. It is seen, for example, in many of the formal and publicly defended economic policies of the medical profession; some doctors, alarmingly, are no more than overreaching businessmen and bad doctors to boot. It extends into the ghettos with their high prices and high installment interest rates for below-par merchandise. It is reflected in the terms and product given by builders to home buyers. It is freely practiced against the general labor force by the stronger trade unions. It stands out blatantly in advertising. Systematic overreaching of the weak, in sooth, is as American as apple pie. It is respectable. Rightly practiced it will lead one to membership in the country club, a zero in the infinite.

   The rich themselves are in many ways the victims of this spirit of overreaching and must be constantly on their guard against swindles, an involved story commended to the sociologists for further inquiry. As an example, although the best medicine is available to the rich they are in fact the victims of many medical rackets and in known instances unscrupulous doctors play a cat-and-mouse game with them, prolonging their disabilities and, for all one knows, bringing them to premature avoidable ends. The rich get into this impasse on the theory that whatever costs most must be best, and there are doctors who do not hesitate to set especially high fees. There exists, among other things, a special tier of high-fee proprietary hospitals, physical and psychiatric, especially programmed to act as a vacuum cleaner on the pockets of those with ability to pay, and not markedly notable for sound medical results. The victims of such establishments, however, can comfort themselves with the fact that there are being applied in medicine the most rigorous canons of free and unregulated private enterprise.

   The corp-pols, are the actual front line and cutting edge of capitalism. They represent the hard-nosed elements in the system and, during successful behavior, under the canons of strict business principles, are largely autonomous. As long as they run the corporation in harmony with hard business rationality, always with deference to public opinion (manipulated through public relations) they are in complete charge. True, if the big stockholders wished to interfere with operations they could.

   The big stockholders, however, often but not always rentiers and sometimes personally tender-minded, not up to conducting confrontations with nail-hard labor leaders and nagging politicos, not always well informed, do not interfere with the corp-pols unless there is a crisis in internal company affairs or between the company and the outside world. In such instances the big stockholders can and often do intervene decisively, especially against a runaway or berserk management. Ordinarily, though, the big stockholders let well enough alone, even endorsing judicially certified illegal conduct.

   Big stockholders could, it is true, meddle into the affairs of corporate management and, theoretically, could insist upon strict social-minded policies. They do not do this, usually, not because they are of the despicable temperaments pictured by C. Wright Mills and others but because they are indifferent, diffident or are afraid to disturb a smoothly running profitable operation.

   Some clarification of the roles of corp-pols and pubpols seems advisable here lest they be misrepresented. Despite adverse moral judgments often registered against them by critical commentators each of these types always does broadly what is inherently required by the system he serves. More significantly, each at all times implements to the best of his ability the chief operative value of American society: worship of William James's bitch-goddess, Success. In their various ways these men are all successes and exemplify in their dreary daily activity the American doctrine of success. As men who faithfully obey the inner rules of the game they merit and receive wide public approbation. If at times what they do appears messy under close scrutiny, this is only because the American idea of success is messy. At such times they may be called upon to act as scapegoats for the system, to take the blame as moral lepers. This they do, grimly.

   It should be observed that, except for disaffected, out-of-step critics, there is no widespread rejection on the American scene of the ascendant notion of success. Not only does a broad public uncritically accept steamy monetary success as a proper life goal but it feels any questioning of this goal to be un-American, possibly traitorous or at least subversive and surely cowardly. Who but a coward would shrink from entering the glorious contest for success? The "unsuccessful" are regarded with contempt or pity, often even by themselves.

   What we find, if we delve deeply enough, is a special value system at the root of it all.

   The traditional value system, originated out of long and tragic human experience, was encapsulated in traditional religion. As religious mythology, cult and ritual were demolished by critical rationalism the values of which these were the virtually sole and fragile carriers also suffered, came into disrepute as goody-goodyness and were insensibly superseded by the harsh values of success, of which the mass media stood as the principal guarantors. Instead of the clergy now defining values for society the job was taken over by half-literate, often personally demoralized editors and publishers.

   Religion, in the process, was reduced from a vital, widely shared world view to routine churchgoing on the part of the less educated. As the healthy baby of traditional values was thrown out with the dirty bathwater of myth and cult, the only repositories remaining for traditional values were the university and traditional philosophy, neither of which had much impact in the daily lives of people and both of which were strangers to the editors and publishers of the mass media, nearly all militantly ignorant men.

   Because man by his very nature must always live by one set of values or the other, the new set of harsh values not only filled a vacuum but accorded with, the experience of what had until recently been a frontier society. In that society difficult conditions at once highlighted the competent and the incompetent. The competent man was he who could take care of himself: the self-reliant man, the successful man.

   The original American fortune-builders, the Robber Barons of the nineteenth century, it is well to notice, were all with hardly an exception faintly educated or illiterate lower-class men, none at all above the lower middle class and many from even further down: unskilled laborers, farmers, wandering adventurers. The American plutocracy, in truth, did not originate from within an aristocracy but came straight from the hoi polloi and implemented by far-ranging commercial action the narrow, culturally impoverished daily values of this hoi polloi. It was this element up from the lower cultural depths, making common cause with formerly poor boys in politics, that provided American society with personal proof of the worth of the new scale of values by enriching themselves. Expression of an inherent American point of view was given by the Rev. Horatio Alger, Jr., in his novels of successful economic derring-do on the part of poor boys.

   These good-in-their-place frontier values, as much evidence now shows, are insidiously destructive in a more developed environment, even of their own votaries. While the bulk of attention is focused on the massive poverty sector of American industrial society, what is generally overlooked, except by a few close observers, is that affluent suburbia and much of the success-striving middle class is also engulfed in its own particular variety of emotional slum-ghettos. The very winners in the system, the affluent, are in different ways as malserved as the poor, a fact increasingly evident to educated middle-class youth.

   That the values put to the fore by the success cult are destructive is seen most readily in the blighted personal lives even of winning strivers under the system. Within the reaches of the Social Register we see ample evidences of the blight reflected in a book such as Cleveland Amory's Who Killed Society? Lower down we find it in special reports.

   "According to psychologists, physicians, family counselors and others," reports the Wall Street Journal, "companies now absorb too much of the time, energy and devotion of their rising young executives; exhausted by their jobs, they are mere shells at home, unable to function effectively as husbands and fathers.

   "The result is seldom divorce, which is bad for the careers of young men on the go. Instead, marriages in name only are preserved between weary, indifferent men and women beset by all sorts of emotional ills, including chronic loneliness, sexual frustration, alcoholism and excessive dependence on their children." ⁸

   There followed an interesting, long, quasi-psychiatric analysis of emotional troubles on the suburbia executive success-circuit, about which there is a growing special literature.

   In two surveys in the Chicago area on attitudes of women it developed that they saw their mates, not as persons, but in order of importance as breadwinner, father and husband; and saw themselves, again, not as persons but as mother, wife and homemaker. Few of the women had any interest in or knowledge of their husband's work but evaluated the man in terms of being "a good provider" or having "a good job." Commenting on this phenomenon Marya Mannes said: "Throughout their responses, the conclusion was inescapable that the wives cared far more about what their husbands did than about what they were, as persons. About one-third of the women not only put their own role as mothers first, but indicated that the husband was essentially outside the basic family unit of herself and her children." It is because men are primarily an accessory to the fact of the contemporary family "instead of half of a primary relation" that so many, in the opinion of Miss Mannes, find ways outside the family of establishing the fact of their manhood. Said Miss Mannes mordantly: "Is a primary relationship between man and wife indeed possible in a society where secondary considerations--success, status, possessions, social acceptance, public opinion--impinge more and more on a family unit less and less tied together by common needs and bonds? . . . . If the illusion of a truly companionable marriage is to exist, women might start thinking of their husbands as men first, and accessories last. And vice versa." ⁹

   Financial deficiencies are blamed on the man; family deficiencies are blamed on the woman. As comparatively few individual incomes, only 10 per cent until the more recent Johnsonian inflation, exceed $10,000 a year, according to the cold statistics, it is evident that most American males are big flops incomewise and are wide open to cutting remarks from their success-oriented, status-craving wives wrestling with child care and household chores.

   All, then, as one could easily show by citing a variety of sources, is not happy sailing in the alcohol-sustained, drug-propped affluent belt of society, which in its own way is as badly churned up as the city slums and ghettos. Children in this situation, of course, suffer most of all.

   In passing, it is difficult for a habitual reader of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post to avoid concluding that the United States shelters under the glorious Star Spangled Banner an extremely sick society, fundamentally made ill by the institutional implementation of a set of extremely destructive values.

   Let us return, now, to the big corporation.

   The management is the soul of any corporation. Without good management--that is, the rational application of unsentimental business principles as rigorously as possible in an imperfect world--the best corporation is bound to lose ground steadily to demonic rivals. And the importance of management is recognized in the many university courses and books and periodicals devoted to it. Management, in fact, is governance, rule. And within the modern corporation one finds the most rational and usually judicious application of rule in history, although for ends often extraneous to the general welfare. Corporate management fries its own fish and makes the best terms it can with cloudy public opinion and with government that is, with pubpols. The men who run these corporate fiefdoms, managers, are actually rulers of vast domains, corp-pols. Although comparatively most of them are not extremely rich, the corp-pols are indispensable to the rich. Some become very rich.

   A good management of a corporation is the equivalent of a John D. Rockefeller in the Standard Oil Company and performs a similar general role. As pristine Rockefellers are hard to find growing naturally, it is necessary to train them up. This uptraining is done on the chain of command, from the junior executives onward. Along this chain of command many are called, few ultimately chosen; some are dropped along the way, some shunted into corporation dead ends or cul-de-sacs, some lost to rivals. The hard, sharp, rational, dominant, smart and highly acquisitive are moved upward under the incentives of higher pay, more and more public deference and elevated social status. Emerging as executive vice president and president, a man is known to be a crashing success within the system. He is somebody to be reckoned with. He is a corp-pol, as powerful in his way as any senator, sometimes more powerful. As chairman he becomes something of an Elder Statesman, ready to tell congressional committees what is, and what is not, sound. For these are all, with few exceptions, sound men. They know the inner workings of affairs as many large stockholders do not.

   What critics of the abstraction called capitalism rarely see is the impersonality of the actual system, allowing few involved in it to experience it in its fullness. Thus, owners in this system, unless they are also managers, have only remote impersonal relation to it. Absentees, they are seldom directly touched by it. As far as knowing precisely what goes on, most of them are as ignorant as the common man. Some do not wish to be put to the inconvenience of knowing, in which case the system also serves them well. Capitalists, at any rate, are rarely close students of capitalism and the way it works. All most of them know is that they are getting only what they believe they are in all plain justice cosmically entitled to, and this holds of many inheritors who never soiled a finger as well as of the self-erected. The courts agree to the hilt.

   As to harsh characterizations of the rich as special hard types, it is easy to show that they are false. As Lampman showed, 40 per cent of the owners of taxable estates are women. As Professor James Smith showed, women predominate among the owners of estates exceeding $10 million, a figure more recently verified by Herman P. Miller, special assistant to the director of the Census Bureau. As of 1958, millionaires by sex and average age, Miller found, were as follows: ¹⁰

Amount             Men     Age       Women      Age
(in millions)
Total            22,024     61       17,630      58
$1-2             16,336     59       11,063      60
 2-3              3,156     62        3,048      56
 3-5              1,124     68        1,320      63
 5-10             1,073     63          541      67
 10 and over        335     58        1,658      40

   The predominant number of very big holders, then (five to one), are women of an average age of forty, who are in this category either as heirs, widows or as a consequence of estate splitting by older men, usually husbands. Most such female holdings, of course, are under the direction of male investment managers, lawyers, trustees, husbands or fathers. As far as that is concerned, some of the richest people are minors, children.

   While some of the women are as dividend-hungry as any man, and some hungrier, by and large they are not hard types; nobody at all has ever suggested they are. At worst what one could say of most of them is that they are foolish, uninformed, self-centered, inexperienced, possibly insensitive, often childishly arrogant. Many of the men, given sheltered rearing under tutors and in hothouse schools, are as temperamentally detached from the workings of monopoly capitalism as the women. Usually products of the Ivy League, they are in all ways gentlemen, often highly civilized. They collect modern art, give money to universities and libraries, support unquestionably worthy causes and even give privately off the record for laudable ends.

   The absurd self-image of at least some of these women, many of whom appear to consider critics of their forebears as guilty at least of lèse majesté, was publicly projected recently by Helen Clay Frick, the seventy-seven-year-old spinster daughter of the harsh ironmaster, partner of Carnegie, who died in 1919. Miss Frick in 1965 brought suit for libel against Dr., Sylvester K. Stevens, executive director of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, for some unusually mild depreciative characterizations of the deceased Henry Clay Frick in Stevens's Pennsylvania: Birthplace of a Nation. In what must be considered the extreme of understatement he suggested that the rapacious Frick was hardly a model Christian gentleman but was rude and autocratic.

   Frick, during and after his lifetime, had steadily been depicted by many writers as the prototype of a ruthless nineteenth-century Robber Baron, overreaching and ignorant, but Miss Frick, in bringing suit, denied ever having heard any of this, claimed to be shocked at the besmirching of her sire's reputation by a scholar and asserted that he had been libeled and she had been caused great anguish of spirit. Waiving damages, she asked that the book be suppressed and the record corrected.

   After carefully listening to a great deal of testimony from both sides judge Clinton R. Weidner of the Cumberland County (Pennsylvania) Court of Common Pleas, handed down a masterly fifty-one-page opinion that could have been written by justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. The court's opinion was far more critical of Frick than the book had been. Not only were the alleged defamatory statements completely true, said the learned jurist, but they were milder than were warranted by the facts. Frick himself, in view of his stance as a lone wolf against the world, would have been proud of them.

   As the Times pointed out, the judge's opinion, ventured in the face of as many as four plaintiffs lawyers at one time in the courtroom itself, "came close to calling her suit frivolous." Scolding the plaintiff, the court said she knew nothing whatever about her father's affairs and wanted nobody else to know about them.

   "Dr. Stevens has written what he believes to be true and what the court believes to be true," said the court firmly.

   In the ordinary case, this would have been the end. But some two and a half months later, upon the withdrawal of the baseless case by stipulation, Miss Frick reopened it and thereby suddenly found herself in the role of defendant. She reopened it by absurdly expressing "delight" at the author's "retraction of false statements." Dr. Stevens at once characterized this statement of hers as "positively vicious and face-saving." He went on to say: "This whole thing, on the very day she has admitted her suit was groundless, is designed to make it look as though I am retracting something and Miss Frick is graciously consenting to withdraw."

   The stipulation withdrawing the case was made "with prejudice," which meant that she lost the option of reopening her complaint. As the Times pointed out, the stipulation was signed by her attorney with the knowledge that subsequent editions of the book, after changes in two trivial references to fact, one being the suppression of the word "coal," would contain some new language sharply critical of her father.

   Charging "deception" and "bad faith," attorneys for Dr. Stevens asked the court to revoke the dismissal of her suit and thrash out her claim that there had been a retraction of false statements. There the matter rests at this writing. ¹¹

   What was of general interest about this case was the way it showed one of the reserve powers of the wealthy to harass in costly and timewasting legal actions writers who comment critically on their public actions, even on those dead. It was knowledge of such powers that led attorneys for the publisher of Professor Edwin Sutherland's White Collar Crime to require that the names of companies that had been repeatedly convicted of violating the law not be mentioned. Individuals who have been convicted of violating the law, especially in the commission of felonies, can be and are thereafter often for the rest of their lives referred to as "criminals." Any scribbler can refer to anyone of such as "ex cons." Although it might seem that one should by the same token be able to refer to a convicted corporation as a criminal corporation, the publishers attorneys in the Sutherland case thought it the better part of prudence not to mention their names.

   The situation is this: Can the Super-Cosmos Corporation, convicted in open court many times of felonies and thereupon subjected to penalties and restraining orders backed by sanctions, be referred to as a criminal corporation? Lawyers, as we have seen, advise against it, knowing that their client may soon be served by a summons sworn out by the law firm of King, Lord, Duke and Pontiff of 1 Wall Street. Hardly any judge in Anglo-Saxondom would dream of even entertaining a motion to dismiss an action brought by this pontifical firm, whose members look with basilisk eyes even upon Lowells and Cabots. The offender will surely be forced to prove that crime is crime.

   Even individuals, always lower class, who have never been convicted of anything are open to unpleasant characterizations in the press. Persons frequently arrested by the police, or questioned, are thereafter often referred to as "police characters." By this token at least the top 1,000, and probably more, leading corporations are police characters; for they are constantly having run-ins with the authorities, are constantly being questioned about alleged violations, sometimes convicted. Yet to refer to any of them as police characters or as suspected outlaws might be costly. If not themselves sovereign they are so tightly interlaced with sovereignty that one is indeed guilty of lèse majesté, in impugning them to the slightest degree. Like a king, they are hedged by divinity.

   Beyond this there are "undesirable characters," rather degagé, unaesthetic types the police do not enjoy seeing lounge about in central city districts, with newspapers often concurring in the appellation. What, now, about composing a list of undesirable corporations, opening with whiskey and cigarette companies?

   Yet, most of the rich today are not a demonic crowd. They are not ordinarily fanatics. Often quite "democratic," they will bandy pleasant words with almost anyone over drinks, will probably mildly fault their severer critics as persons who unaccountably "come on too strong." Some of this, of course, may be simple evasiveness.

   Again, they are sufficiently numerous, random products, so that the law of large numbers applies to them. They range over the whole bell-shaped spectrum of the law of probability so that for every one with some unlovely characteristic there is a balancing personality with, the opposite characteristic. There are not only Miss Fricks but diametrically opposite types. In the middle range of 50 per cent one finds more similarities, usually acceptably decorous along average lines neither great nor odious.

   As I said, most of the rich, except possibly some of the self-erected, are not hard types.

   The hard types in the system, the ones who make the system work like an automatic mouse-trap for the largely unconscious benefit of the rich, are, first, the corp-pols, and, second, a plain majority of the pubpols. These upward-striving intermediaries are selected hard types in the same sense that a surgeon or a commando soldier is a hard type. They are decision makers, and the decisions they make are invariably devoid of sentiment. A surgeon does not refrain from cutting because it will draw blood, possibly induce death or leave a scar; a commando does not refrain from slitting a throat because he will be dispatching some kind mother's son, some worthy wife's husband, some innocent child's father. By training and temperament these are indeed special types, not subject within their group to the law of probability as to their functional characteristics. With each one it is possible to predict almost certainly how he will act in given circumstances.

   The big stockholding rich, largely absentees, to a considerable extent women, have little direct contact with the corp-pols, their plantation overseers. Such little functional contact as there is takes place, if at all, through boards of directors; on these, however, many of the very rich do not sit.

   The social meeting ground for them all--big male stockholders, finpols, and corp-pols--is the metropolitan club, where there is on the whole a rather desultory mingling. Although glad to be present as evidence of their puissance, many of the intermediary corp-pols in this milieu look with some reserve, possibly even disdain, on some of the big stockholders and finpols. For the corp-pols are usually different, and know it, in that they for the most part came up the long, hard way. They feel pretty much as battle-hardened veterans do in the presence of inexperienced though superior officers. Many of the rich they no doubt look upon as pampered nonrealists. Some of the corp-pols did not finish high school because their families were too poor; others went to Jerkwater College--or to business college.

   The human drive in the system clearly comes, for the most part, from the corp-pols and pubpols, men from comparatively deprived backgrounds hungry for position, money and deference. The system would work perfectly well if all the big stockholders were playboys and playgirls. The system does not really need the big stockholders who are, as it were, wards of the courts.

   True, many of the rich no doubt see the situation pretty much as do the corp-pols and pubpols. They recognize that there should be money incentives and that "success," not public sustenance, is the proper goal. Whether they do or not, however, makes little difference as long as they keep hands off smoothly running operations. Difficulties are best handled by the highly paid corp-pols in concert with the pubpols, most of each category commando types.

   Little is known of the direct relations between corporate managers and the big owners. "To what degree do these richest families or groups use their voting power to influence the operations of 'their' companies?" asks Robert Heilbroner. "We do not know. There exists a shroud of secrecy over the relation between the centers of inherited wealth and the determination of working policy in capitalism." ¹²

   Here, one must note, top management officers even after their retirement never produce revelatory memoirs of inner company affairs as do men who have served a stint in government. The latter, even high military officers, often finally "tell all," sparing nobody up to the president of the United States and his wife. Perhaps a reason such inner revelations about the corporations never appear is that the qualified writers are still on the payroll, drawing large retirement pay. By telling what went on they might be kicking the bottom out of their own boat. Thus the system automatically covers its most significant inner traces.

   We are not, however, without some clues that the big hereditary owners have some direct influence in their corporations. One clue, as we have noticed, exists in the anti-Semitism of the metropolitan clubs, introduced there by rough-house nineteenth-century tycoons and echoed today in the personnel policies of the large corporations and the memberships of country clubs. In their respective outlooks, then, the big owners and the corp-pols are not strangers to each other. Somebody must initiate such a policy at the top, somebody must enforce it. The Founding Fathers were not anti-Semitic. Other policies may similarly be left-handedly, indirectly, imposed. Yet in this quarter all is very shadowy.

   Nor, one may infer, are the very rich merely accidental beneficiaries of the one-sided tax laws. Parties of interest must have asked, sub rosa, for such preferential treatment. The pubpols could not have written such laws without some prompting. Had they done so they would be in the creative class of Franz Kafka.

   What is probably true of many or most of the special benefits enjoyed by the rich is that at different times some one or a few of the rich utilized leverage available to them with amiable key pubpols and exerted their will with respect to some facet of the law. Whatever was of benefit to one then became of benefit to all in that category. As many at different times busied themselves with different facets of the laws, the result was a tremendously wide range of special benefits made available to a broad upper-income class. While the full range of the benefits looks as though it could only have resulted from a common conspiracy, each individual benefit was obtained by some individual go-getter exerting his political leverage. There is, then, nothing like a central moneybund calling all the shots, only individual go-getters exerting power through stooges that brings unsought benefits to others. Naturally, nobody objects to features of the law that he finds give him a favored outcome. This is only what is known in popular parlance as "getting the breaks." The rich get many such "breaks," for many of which most of them never asked. For most of them it is all pure serendipity.

   Where the dominant rich enter the system most openly is through patronage, political and cultural. The political patronage comes from the rich directly in the form of campaign contributions and indirectly from their corporations that hand out largess through their overpaid officers in the form of campaign contributions and direct payments in the form of money from lobbyists and corporate retainers for political law firms. For sources of campaign funds, see Alexander Heard, The Costs of Democracy, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1960. Cultural patronage is exercised through the foundations and, sometimes, the trustee-controlled universities directly. Scholars and scientists whose work either contributes to the well-being of the existing establishment or provides justification and rationalization for it are supported with lavish grants and cushy appointments. Others, either critical or producing unwelcome or unusable findings, are not. It is as simple as that.

   This sort of foundation patronage produces a double advantage for the donors for it is publicly designated not as patronage but as philanthropy. In some cases philanthropy may be truly involved; over the entire foundation panorama, as we have seen, it is not. The foundations serve many ulterior purposes, the very least of them philanthropic.

   There is, too, the general patronage in the form of rich corporate advertising placements in the mass media, serving to keep these firmly on the side of the existing establishment at all times when the chips go down.

   As far as the Establishment is concerned, there is convenient scholarship and inconvenient scholarship. Inconvenient scholarship, while tolerated is simply neither supported nor promoted. Scholarship that validates the American Celebration, however, showing Uncle Sam ueber alles, is heavily supported.

   What this amounts to, quite simply, is patronage, impersonally conferred.

   Basically, what gains befuddled acceptance for the system generally, it will be noticed, is verbiage--political, social, economic and cultural. Elaborate quasi-metaphysical arguments are ready at every point to prove that the existing state of affairs is exactly as it inevitably should be--all factors, of course, taken into consideration. Everybody, in other words, is right where he ought to be in the social scale, including the foundation-supported professors who excel at such arguments. Anybody who says differently is a deviant, a kook, unsound, far out in left field and probably infected by some un-American ideology. The horror of horrors is for an academic to be an avowed Marxist, as Richard Nixon showed in campaigning rabidly up and down the state of New Jersey in 1965 to have a Marxist school teacher cashiered. The obtuse Nixon lost, probably because his intended victim bore a politically potent Italian name.

   It would be extraordinary if the winners in the system did not believe, after the way they had obeyed its rigorous rules (including those of inheritance), that everything was as it properly ought to be. And it is the winners who monopolize the stage in evaluating the system.

   But neither overreaching nor patronage would get very far unless they were practiced within a population that was emotionally simple and not in possession of sound knowledge and realistic judgment. Most of the population, whatever one may say on its behalf, is of this order, is quite uninformed and readily susceptible of being emotionally worked upon, distracted.

   A Harris poll, for example, has shown that 40 per cent of American Catholics believe that whenever the pope delivers himself of an opinion it has the status of a law, a bizarre claim that the Catholic Church itself is far from making. ¹³ Just as large a percentage of non-Catholics, if not larger, are under similar misapprehensions about facts relating to the Catholic and perhaps their own ecclesiastical establishments.

   A vast majority of the white population south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and large numbers, probably a majority elsewhere, are firmly of the belief that Negroes are subhuman or only semihuman, despite the positive assertions of biology and anthropology to the contrary. Merely to argue the scientific findings in many quarters is to risk being assaulted by righteously indignant citizens who consider the speaker erotically irregular, a "nigger-lover."

   A Louis Harris poll in 1966 showed that whereas 78 per cent of the more affluent and educated sections of the population believed Negroes are unfairly discriminated against, only 46 per cent of lower-income people thought so. "Almost three out of every four whites who earn less than $5,000 a year and never went beyond the eighth grade in school think the education available to Negroes is as good as that available to whites," said Mr. Harris. "What is more, about half of this group thinks Negroes are not discriminated against in general and that housing for Negroes is as good as it is for whites." ¹⁴

   Careful sociological studies have shown that the masses are poorly informed on vital topics despite a plethora of accurate information available and that they are politically illiberal and withdrawn in their attitudes. Astrology flourishes.

   As noted earlier, the further one moves down the social scale the more authoritarian and illiberal become the individuals.

   Professor Robert E. Lane on the basis of a comprehensive study concluded that:

   The lesser degree of political participation and interest in lower status groups is partly accountable by the following factors: (1) Lower-strata women (but not men) have less leisure available for political activity. (2) Lower status persons have less economic security, and, partly for that reason, feel less of a sense of control over their (political) environment. (3) The threat of deprivation of upper-strata groups present in the politics of the welfare state provides greater motivation than the promise of reward to the lower-status groups.

   The relation of public policy to the group stakes at issue in that policy is made more visible to upper-status groups than to lower-status groups.

   Lower-status individuals can influence and benefit from governmental action only socially, by group activity and membership, while upper-class persons can influence and benefit from such action individually. Therefore, upper-class persons have a higher incentive to participate.

   Lower-status people, feeling at a disadvantage compared to upper-class people, tend to avoid social contact in mixed groups, withdraw interest, defer to others in "difficult" matters, and generally reveal a lack of self-confidence. Actually, lack of experience and influence combined with pressures to be "opinionated" leads to unrealistic participation in some instances.

   Child-rearing practices in the lower-status groups tend to provide a less adequate personality basis for appropriately self-assertive social participation.

   The social norms and roles in the lower-status group tend to emphasize political participation less than do the norms and roles of the upper-status groups. There is a tendency for these political roles to be concentrated in middle-class rather than upper-class or working-class groups. . . .

   Lower-status persons experience greater cross pressures with respect to (a) ethnic versus class identifications, (b) divergent political appeals of the media to which they are exposed, and conflict between media and status identification, (c) community leadership and own-group leadership, and (d) subjective versus objective class identification.

   Lower-status persons belong to fewer formal organizations and have fewer intimate personal friends. However, union membership tends to modify this pattern.

   Lower-status persons have less capacity to deal with abstract issues and less awareness of their larger social environment.

   Lower-status persons are less satisfied with their lives and communities, leading, in a minimally class conscious society, to withdrawal from civic activities, or, alternatively, to participation in deviant politics.

   Inter-class mobility tends to weaken the forces for political participation, a tendency modified by identification with upper-status (participant) norms by both upwardly mobile and downwardly mobile groups. ¹⁵

   None of this, however, accounts for greater lower-class response when politicians promise authoritarian repression of some segment of the populace. The promise by such as Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace that heads are going to roll never fails to galvanize the lower orders politically.

   The lower-status groups--that is, those below the middle class--are, in other words, confused. And it is this element, peasantlike in outlook, that constitutes most of the electorate, accounting for the easy nomination and election of so many persons who in medical parlance would be designated as quacks or unqualified practitioners. Public office in the United States--and elsewhere--is full of them: quacks.

   Politics, contrary to roaring democratic theory, is not something that can be readily practiced with proper success by anybody. Politics, like any other discipline, requires qualified specialists.

   Here a note seems in order. There is theoretical as well as practical politics. The multi-vocal structure of theoretical politics is laid out in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Kant and many similar savants. A formal exercise in practical politics, based on actual political maneuver, is Machiavelli's The Prince. Biographies abound with additional material. Formally qualified people in career politics ought to be thoroughly acquainted with this whole literature and to be broadly grounded as well in logic, semantics, linguistics, epistemology, scientific methods, the social studies and the humanities. Simply by laying down such formal requirements I have disqualified practically every working politician on the American scene. But I have no hesitancy in saying that those who, do not have some approach to such preparation are at the very least quacks. Quackery is of the very essence of being a politician on the American scene, a leader of the booboisie into fetid blind alleys.

   This quackery shows itself most blatantly in the wild abuse of language by routine career politicians. Language in routine American politics is not used to inform, or to analyze problems but to manipulate emotions and to obfuscate. Purely whimsical bandying of language, as in the case of Senator Everett Dirksen, can alone make one a national character in the eyes of the press. But the more sober use of language by politicians not given to the devious Dirksen's fanciful flights of bombinating rhetoric is equally misleading so that the nation literally, under President Johnson, fell into the position of the polity of George Orwell's 1984 where peace means war, defense means aggression, the Great Society means the Shabby Society, prosperity means recession and a "war on poverty" means befuddlement of the poor and the perpetration of financial skulduggery.

   Few politicians use language warrantably. In a well-known dictum, they use it to conceal thought. The gobbledegook of endless government reports and political speeches furnishes proof without end. The Congressional Record is full of the stuff. Madison Avenue and the politicians are as one in this respect. Such use of language stamps the user an arrant quack, on a par with a healer who professes to cure disease with electric belts and charms.

   The United States Senate no doubt contains the greatest concentration of professional political intelligence in the nation. Yet, leaving aside terms such as liberal, moderate and conservative and applying the loosest criteria possible, it is difficult to exempt more than a bare third of it from the rubric of quack. The House of Representatives is far more meagerly equipped, and in the state legislatures it is often a case of 100 per cent quackery among their various member lawyers, real estate and insurance brokers, loan sharks, undertakers and small-time dealers. The executive offices are for the most part filled by similar quacks, fugitives from anything resembling culture. Ghost writers fill the breach.

   Still, the average officeholder is of a capability far superior to the average of the peasantlike populace he serves. The politician is not, as often supposed, of an inferior order comparatively. There is not the slightest doubt that Senators Stennis and Eastland, for example, are people superior in ability and drive to the population average in Mississippi. And the same holds true elsewhere. Again, officeholders, whatever one may say of them, meet the criteria of the broad electorate. They have what it takes to gain acceptance by the boobs. The "pork barrel," for which the politicos are castigated, is what gains them votes out in the spiritually barren home districts.

   As Professor Lane remarks:

   Most of the current criticism of popular rule does not emanate from the enemies of democracy, but rather from its saddened friends. It deals in part with the capacities of the people to make wise decisions in their own interest, the strength of their desire to participate in government, and the nature of the benefits they derive therefrom. On the basis of clinical research and public opinion polls, students of democratic government have concluded that the electorate is wanting both in vital information and in rational pursuit of enduring self-interest; the tasks have exceeded the capacities of the public to perform them. Thus, Walter Lippmann, continuing a line of argument he began so brilliantly in Public Opinion some thirty-five years ago, states that a central cause for the breakdown of democratic governments in modern times has been that "the assemblies and the mass electorates have acquired the monopoly of effective powers" and do not know how to use them. . . .

   Erich Fromm, although he favors widespread social participation, has cast doubt upon men's desire for the burdens which such participation implies. Freedom implies choice, participation implies responsibility, and under stress the majority of the people may find choice painful and responsibility too weighty a load. Apathy, withdrawal, conformity, "pseudo-willing," result. . . .

   It is said that the masses have not gained through their new political power because the sources of their trouble are not political but economic. Democracy is a mask for plutocracy, and the plutocrats remain entrenched in power. Thus the long struggle to enfranchise the masses of men has, so far, come to no avail; the franchise is useful only as it offers leverage to attack the real citadel of power.

   [Commenting here, Lane says:] This idea is curiously at the confluence of three streams of thought. The first, liberal democracy, is illustrated by [Carl L.] Becker who says that "economic forces . . . brought about an increasing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the fortunate few, and thereby nullified, for the majority of people, many of those essential liberties which provide both the theoretical justification and the necessary conditions for the practical success of democratic institutions." The second element in this confluence is contributed by Mosca and Pareto, both of whom identify democracy with plutocracy. And the third element, of coarse, is the Marxian interpretation of bourgeois democracy as a complex of institutions manipulated by the capitalist class. ¹⁶

   That the universal franchise and the wide open consumer market are on the basis of their experience with it, now fully acceptable to the dominate orders has been seen in the massive and costly efforts of the Johnson Administration to force them upon the Vietnamese at the point of firepower. In the Johnsonian view even people to whom the idea of voting is bewildering, contra-cultural and perhaps repugnant, are to be forced to vote. This, the American Way, it is held, will lead to their liberation. Yet neither voting nor the open consumer market has led to the liberation of the masses in the United States; rather have they delivered them into the pincers of ignorance, poverty or near poverty and emotional deprivation. The masses are, literally, stupefied by the "opportunities" open to them.

   Voting, unless there is ground-up, knowledge-based participation, cannot lead to popular deliverance. Only if the assumption were true that each participant is of fairly equal capability could the process work. But people simply are not of equal capability and motivation, contrary to the dream of the early democrats. They must lose out in the electoral game for a multitude of reasons, some of which have been cited. The shrewd manipulators--the pubpols, corp-pols, finpols, admen and scholpols--must come out on top every time just as the heavyweight champion must easily defeat every amateur who steps into the ring with him.

   Democrats, liberals and radicals, have wasted millions of words and hours of their time trying to arouse the people in their own interests either to electoral or to revolutionary assault, and always without avail. Marx predicted, erroneously, that factory operatives, the workers, would take the lead in an assault on the owners; such an assault has never taken place in any industrial country. Marxist parties have taken power only under conditions of war-induced general social collapse, as in agricultural Russia and China, with only the most meager of Marxist proletarian support. Non-Marxist peasants in both cases were the revolutionary instrument. (Marx, inter alia, detested the peasantry, which he saw as reactionary.)

   Nor have popular causes been more successful in the electoral arena, where splinter parties have long failed to gain even a foot-hold. For the mass does not vote for its objective interests; it always votes for some fantasy.

   From Lincoln onward no more than two out of nineteen presidents are argued by anybody to have been oriented toward the popular interest and even those two are rejected by some experts as true paladins of the people. The people, very obviously, are not capable of wielding the electoral sword, thus accounting for the success of institutionalized overreaching and patronage. The rich, in plain fact, are rich because they cannot help it. They are playing marbles for big stakes against blind men, cannot help winning with little effort.

   To the Marxists all these presidents were tools of the capitalist Establishment; but not to the people, to whom the Marxists look vainly as the instrument of social reconstruction. As to this, say the Marxists, the people are fooled by the mass media; but it is of the essence of politics, as of military affairs, not to be fooled. To be fooled in politics is to be conquered. In losing out so consistently by means of open elections the people, clearly, are being hoist by their own petard. They have not the least inkling what the elections are all about.

    It would be difficult for any set of men, however qualified, to run so complexly ponderous a country as the United States really well. As it is, the United States is very, very poorly run, year after year, by the quacks, overreachers and patrons, as the accumulation and multiplication of social problems attest. At the same time, propagandic apologists continually bellow how well the country is run. Nothing, though, ever seems to get any better; everything gets demonstrably worse and worse, converging toward some awesome future crisis, some catastrophic reckoning. Après nous, le deluge.

   So really bad is the situation that American sociologists have gradually developed a forbidding branch of their discipline labeled, simply, Social Problems, the equivalent of pathology in medicine. To this melancholy subject scores of textbooks are devoted, dealing with crime, its causes and its steady increase; rigging of courts and elections; poverty; racial and religious conflict; curtailments of civil rights; prison brutality; ill health and inadequate and profit-perverted medical care; mal-education, non-education and illiteracy; the prevalence of divorce and desertion; the excesses of pressure groups; faulty mass transportation; child mistreatment and abandonment; personal anomy; inadequate housing; social disorganization; widespread psychic disorder; slums, overcrowding and overpopulation in relation to available facilities; advertising and propaganda; unattended mental illness; commercialized alcoholism; gambling; drug addiction; traffic tangles; prostitution; pathological deviancies; war, etc., etc. ¹⁷ All of this bespeaks a very sick society, a poor political system.

   What is most remarkable about all these problems is that despite the reports and recommendations of one public commission after the other none ever appears to be solved or even made more tractable. Each appears to be growing greater and new ones, such as water and air pollution and air traffic, are constantly being added. As the sociologists report, many causes are discernible but a general cause seldom mentioned is simple political neglect. Forthright confrontation of the problems is prevented by the various forms of political blockage at which the pubpols are most adept. Again, as much of the brains of the country are in the service of overreaching in the market place and political arena in pursuit of the dollar there are few competent people left in circulation to deal adequately with the problems. Money for social problem-solving, of course, is kept to a minimum as the public coffers are opened wide for the purchase of multi-redundant military hardware and space rockets to the moon: Over-kill.

   Lavish in the money rewards given to corp-pols and pubpols, as we have seen, the going system becomes niggardly in the pay scales adopted for supportive personnel such as teachers, social workers, scientists, counselors, aides, nurses, engineers and the like. As a way of obtaining money and forthright action with respect to these problems the proper method would appear to place them all under the jurisdiction of the Defense Department, where they seem to belong. For what is the value of keeping the nation muscular on the outer frontiers while it is eroding at the core? In view of the rising tide of unsolved, gingerly tended social problems, what is it, precisely, that is being defended?

   Where will it all end? What will be the historical outcome of the concentration of wealth and power in the United States?

   Although all answers to such questions must be speculative we have recently been provided with a brilliantly suggestive study along these precise lines by Robert L. Heilbroner in The Limits of American Capitalism. ¹⁸

    Heilbroner, in harmony with details laid out earlier in this text, is well aware of corporate dominance in American affairs. He notes that, out of some eleven million separate economic enterprises down to single newsstands, about a million companies do approximately 85 per cent of the business, and a half million corporations do 98 per cent of all corporate business and 75 per cent of all business. In turn, 1/10th of 1 per cent of the biggest industrial corporations, the 500 at the top, do about 33 per cent of all business in the corporate field. Furthermore, the top 50 industrial companies have sales as great as the next 450 while the profits of the top 10 are equal to those of almost half of the remaining 490. The 500th on the annual Fortune list has total sales of only $97 million, which is less than the profits of any of 26 of the 50 largest. ¹⁹

   By 1975, according to Willard Mueller, chief economist of the Federal Trade Commission, 200 corporations will own two-thirds of all American manufacturing assets compared with the same proportion owned by 500 corporations in 1962. The reason for this further concentration, it was indicated, is the renewed, Administration-sanctioned merger movement. ²⁰

   We are confronted, in short, by corporate giantism. The backbone of political support comes from this corporate world.

   A single company, AT&T, holds nearly 5 per cent of all nonbank corporate assets.

   If only the top 150 companies with assets or sales at $1 billion or more were suddenly to stop doing business the entire economy would collapse. These companies compromise 50 industrials, 40 banks, 20 insurance companies, 10 merchandisers, 10 transportation lines and 20 public utilities. ²¹

   While the 100 top industrial corporations owned 25 per cent of all business assets in 1929, they owned 31 per cent in 1960. In 1963 they accounted for 53.8 per cent of total national income compared with 55.8 per cent in 1955.

   Contrary to misleading propaganda about widespread ownership, in the 100 largest corporations the directors alone owned or controlled at least 10 per cent of the voting stock.

   "Among the 150 super-corporations, there are perhaps as many as 1,500 or 2,000 operational top managers, but as few as 200 to 300 families own blocks of stock that ultimately control these corporations." ²²

   Heilbroner, unlike Karl Marx, does not see the corporate system terminating in revolution although, sensitively aware of the vagaries of history, he does not absolutely rule out transitional phases of violence. Rather does he see the system very gradually and slowly changing just as the feudal manorial system was transformed gradually to the system of the open cash market, the citadel of bourgeois capitalism.

    This being the probability, "Under the limits imposed by the present reach of business thought, the prospect is still for a society of narrow ambitions and small achievements, a society in which we belatedly repair old social ills and ungenerously attend to new ones ." ²³

   Although the present system is one, like feudalism, of lopsided privilege, Heilbroner in a keen insight points out that the legal basis of privilege now is screened as such even from the beneficiaries, who are not aware that they are privileged. This basis consists of the laws that permit private benefit to be derived from huge-scale production and allows free and untrammeled use of the national and international market place for private enrichment.

   Therefore, "privilege under capitalism is much less 'visible,' especially to the favored groups, than privilege under other systems." ²⁴ Under feudalism, the privileges were harshly evident and explicitly known to all participants.

   Instead of resisting encroachments upon privilege forthrightly, those who are privileged unconsciously resort to ideology, befuddling all but the well informed. Thus, attempts to deal with the periodic vast malfunctionings and slumps of individualistic capitalism by means of national planning (in place of egocentric planning on the part of huge corporations) are vociferously cried down as encroachments upon an abstraction called Freedom.

   Because the system is now too deeply rooted and generally accepted it could not be violently or arbitrarily uprooted without enveloping the nation in prolonged chaos, as Heilbroner fully recognizes; and no responsible thinker any longer seriously proposes that it be uprooted.

   How then, will it change, as all things involved in history do change?

   The long-run threat to monopolistic capitalism, as Heilbroner sees it, is similar to the original threat to feudalism in that it is subtle and seemingly harmless. The manorial economy of feudalism was undermined by what was originally a cloud no larger than a man's hand: the cash market that established itself right in the shadow of the manorial walls. This cash market brought into being a new social type: the businessman. In his first guise the businessman was looked upon by the lords of the manor much as we today look upon a pushcart peddler--as a person of no economic, social or political consequence, at worst a mere nuisance. From this tiny seed, however, were to come the future original Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Du Pont, Woolworth, Mellon, Ford et al. These men in their various ways were all pushcart peddlers grown to giant size under favoring conditions and laws.

   The intangible, subversive threat to capitalism, as the cash market was to feudalism, Heilbroner sees as science and technology, without which modern capitalism cannot function but with which it cannot make its peace because it is constantly thrown into deep inner turmoil and confusion by them. For one thing, the composition of the labor force is constantly radically altered by technological change, first by the introduction of new machinery that converted agricultural workers into urbanized factory workers and more recently by automation which displaces factory workers into rising service industries, dumps them on the unemployment rolls or wastes them in huge and militarily unnecessary peacetime standing armies. Technology has even displaced the traditional foot soldier and cavalryman for all but relatively small-scale anti-insurrectionary operations, brush-fire wars, and replaced them by higher functional types like aviators, astronauts, rocketmen and a horde of advanced technicians. Warfare has been transformed into a vast engineering operation by which entire populations are exterminated. There is no longer, actually, much fighting in war. It has become mass slaughter. The mass destruction is the inverse of mass production.

   The alteration in the labor force shows itself most spectacularly in the emergence of new elites, rising to share influence and authority with the business elite of finpols and corp-pols.

   These new elites in Heilbroner's view consist of the new military policy-makers (milpols), the professional expert from the academic world in the form particularly of specialists in the social and natural sciences, the highly trained new type of government administrator and possibly the administrators that have come into view with the emergence of the big labor unions. These labor administrators are of a type quite different from the old-line ward-boss variety of labor leader.

   While few if any of these men are hostile to the existing system of monopoly capitalism, Heilbroner believes (in which belief I concur) that in the long run, over a span of 50 to 150 years, the differences in background, method and objectives of these elites from those of the business elite will generate frictions between them, as frictions were generated between the feudal lords and the rising business classes. The business elite has a single-minded objective: profit. Although the new elites are not opposed, now, to corporate profit aims, in part because they are accustomed to these aims as assumptions of the established system, what will be their reaction when, as and if the plans of the profiteers seriously conflict with their plans?

   It should be pointed out that the members of the new--and indispensable--elites share a characteristic in common not shared with the business elite.

   They are all problem-oriented and are, in fine, problem-solvers over a widely inclusive range of problems. Name almost any problem and one may be sure that at least one of them nurtures it as a pet project.

   If it is argued that the corp-pols, and finpols, too, are problem-solvers (which may indeed be the case), it is evident at once that they are concerned with a single overriding problem: profits. Such a single overriding aim is not to be found among any of the new elites who, although not men of the broad reach of the major philosophers or of diverse talents like Renaissance men, are nevertheless basically and incontrovertibly reflective intellectuals of some sort. They are all thoroughly infected by pervasive rationality, which in the long run seems of ill omen to the freewheeling corporation.

   There is already low-grade although tolerable friction in some quarters between some of these new types and members of the business elite. Unless big business radically alters some of its characteristic orientations it seems that one may expect increasing friction, with dominance no longer guaranteed to the business elite. The inherent social irrationality of the system of production chiefly for private profit, utilizing for the short run the increasingly powerful tools of science and technology, practically guarantees the long-run end of such dominance.

   Marx saw socialism as something to be soon ushered into developed capitalist societies by revolution carried out by the new class of factory workers, led by history-conscious intellectuals. Heilbroner sees something very akin to socialism, or production-for-use in a rationally aspiring society, ushered in by a new class consisting of these intellectual elites. The revolutionary potential, in sum, resides in the intellectual middle classes, not in the passive, dependent proletariat, who have no "historical task."

   I see one possible flaw in Heilbroner's reasoning, which to my somewhat skeptical eyes is tinged with historical optimism. History, contrary to the devotees of the idea of progress, rarely produces solutions in accord with ideal aims, a lamentable fact. Historical solutions are, somehow, always flawed.

   The fly I discern in this particular mixture is the presence of the new military elite who, although men of a different order from the old-time military spit-and-polish drillmasters, are nevertheless military men. And the military in any instance that comes to mind have never allied themselves with a New Order as opposed to an Old Order. Military people are usually essentially conservative if not reactionary and are usually socially naive. Professor Morris Janowitz of the University of Chicago, who directed two large-scale studies, the first of 465 American generals appointed between 1898 and 1940 and the second of 761 Army, Navy and Air Force general and flag officers appointed between 1910 and 1950, found that as of 1954 only 5 per cent of the generals identified themselves as "liberals" but 68 per cent declared they were "a little on the conservative side or plain "conservatives." "Such a finding win startle no one familiar with the published political views of retired generals," as one writer observed. ²⁵ It may be that such characteristics do not inhere in the new computer-automation jet-propulsion type of military person, who may indeed be above and beyond the authoritarian master-servant, mentality of the traditional military personality. If so, my doubts are beside the point.

   But if the new military elite is anything like the old one it would, in any great crisis, tend to side with the Old Order and defend the status quo, if necessary, by force.

   In the words of the standard police bulletin known to all radio listeners, "These men are armed--they may be dangerous."

   Historically, the established military have always fought and thrown their influence against all rising new social orders, whether capitalist or socialist, and have always been strong supporters of reaction. Where they have retained influence after any revolution, peaceful or violent, they have been Bonapartists. Like all conservatives, they take a pessimistic view of the human enterprise, are partial to the heavy hand. Devotees of applied force, habituated to organizing their entire experience around its use, they are rarely men of peaceful persuasion and evolutionary transition.

   As I freely admit, I may be wrong in thus looking at the new military elite, which by reason of the experience-broadening complex technology it now commands may be of an entirely new historical stripe. If it is, and no available evidence supports such a view, then Heilbroner's vision may be more penetrating than my own tentative doubts allow me to concede.

   In any event, it cannot be denied that science and technology are already injecting much uncertainty into the demonic corporate thrust for profits. Allowed unrestrained and continued free play, that thrust cannot but disrupt the entire social system to an extent greater than yet ever seen.

   Yet, as Heilbroner sees it, it is not the immediate needs of science and capitalism that are in conflict so much as a basic divergence of intent--of science to impose the human will on society and of capitalism to allow society to function by happenstance as if it were not subject to the will. Whereas science is socially active capitalism is socially passive and "In the end capitalism is weighed in the scale of science and found wanting, not alone as a system but as a philosophy." ²⁶

   American politicos, swelling with fatuous misbegotten pride, have increasingly taken to presenting the United States and the American people as the major guarantors of what remains of civilization in a world torn by shabby power struggles on every band. Whatever else the foregoing pages may portend, they should suggest that anyone looking to the United States for the solution to world problems is depending on a huge but weak reed. With a thoroughly antiquated, distorted political system--formally 178 years old but with many later dubious additions such as the universal franchise--the United States is unable even to begin solving its own many very serious domestic problems. How, then, can it take on those of Asia, Africa, Europe and South America?

   Not unless it underwent a considerable amount of basic politico-economic revision would the United States be in a position to play more than a palliative international role. And as its inept, intrusion into Vietnam under the guidance of a strictly backwoods politician has shown very clearly, it may be capable of playing vastly destructive roles. What reasonable ground there is for believing that American presence in laggardly developed regions and political power-vacuums is more likely to achieve human gains than English, French, Japanese, Dutch or Russian presence has certainly not been shown.

   If they prove nothing else the widespread American riots, increasing and spreading from the 1940's and 1950's into the 1960's, prove that the American ruling class, given the political instrumentalities of its rule through low-grade stooges, is unable to rule at home. The general cry goes out for law and order, yet there is steadily less and less law and order, more and more crime and insurrection as Lyndon B. Johnson calls for national days of prayer. For prayer rather than science or reason is the tool of the political medicine men. What is happening as the average citizen looks on in disbelief is that an outworn, patched politico-economic system is cracking, while no serious steps are taken to ascertain the causes and remedies. The causes of American insufficiency, at home and abroad, are political, not economic, or at least political before they are economic. Better put, they are cultural. Serious problems cannot be solved on the basis of a consensus of value-disoriented dolts.