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Eight

   UNDERSTRUCTURE OF THE
   FINPOLITAN ELITE

   As the various finpols and finpolities are rivalrous at least in respect to making and retaining money, how and in what way do they act in concert, if they act in concert at all? Do they, in fact, act in concert in imposing faits accompli and policies on the nation?

   To conclude that they more or less loosely act together as a moneybund is to proclaim oneself at once an adherent to what is pejoratively called the conspiracy theory, widely frowned upon by latter-day organizational academics in grey flannel suits (many of them briskly on the way up to the State, Defense or Treasury Departments or to the foundation refreshment troughs). In a broad sense, as it has been observed by unabashed exponents of the conspiracy theory, all history is a conspiracy. In this sense the word no more than broadly and perhaps privately and even unconsciously indicates coordinated action toward some mutually agreed upon end or ends at variance with public expectations; manifestly it does not have its specialized meaning in law.

   In any event, overeager members of the financial elite have been caught and convicted in American courts of many literal subconspiracies, so that even in the narrow juristic sense many of them stand forth individually as certified, simon-pure conspirators. Consequently, even if there is not a single all-embracing conspiracy in juristic terms, it is a fact that there are and have been hundreds of adjudicated single conspiracies. The conspiracy theory, then, has a little more to it than honors-bouond academics concede.

   There are in fact three major sociological theories, academically certified in all solemnity, to account for the phenomenon of socio-economic decision-making, the recondite problem being to determine: Who, if anybody in particular, really makes the basic decisions that govern society? Who calls the shots?

   To a considerable extent this is a pseudo-problem, for virtually every person knows that he isn't calling the shots nor are any of his neighbors, co-workers or acquaintances. Everybody knows it is some distant and obscure "they." But this fact (evident to any intelligent person) is not at all evident to many academics, who have made quite a scholastic mystery out of the whole business. Doubt is raised by some that any individual whatever makes any decisions; the theory is advanced that the entire process is occultly collective.

   There is, first, the theory of an elite, which is employed by some masterful investigators.

   Next, there is the theory of an inert, apathetic, partially alienated mass society, consisting largely of P. T. Barnum's myriad suckers and H. L. Mencken's swarming booboisie--the denizens of the grandstands and taverns. According to this theory, as most people are supine, unresponsive, childishly credulous and seeking no more than a job, diversion and comfortable mediocrity for themselves, the few who are seriously active emerge spontaneously at the decision-making level, more or less by default. As Tom, Dick and Harry won't bestir themselves and George the doer does, George finds himself willy-nilly among the decision-makers, a natural leader. But he got there more by chance than design, chosen if at all merely by fitting into the pattern of things and events. No conspirator he, no boob and no elitist.

   There is, finally, the pluralist theory, according to which many diverse groups, individuals and forces confront each other in various ways, and under various cultural auspices arrive after debate by consensus or compromise at decisions, a notion that fits in neatly with democratic prescriptions. The process is presented as one of mutual accommodation.

   There is something to be said for each of these theories, as each explains some of the data. Obviously a single synthesizing theory would be preferable. Lacking such, one can, and many sociologists do, attempt to blend them or to use them all. But as this is eclectic, theoretical purists are offended. The world, however--even the small world of society--is more complex than any all-embracing theory about it.

   My own tacit use of these theories with respect to our subject is hierarchical and eclectic in the order stated. The facts strongly suggest to me, in other words, that the elitist theory best explains the facts. Whatever it fails to explain is then explained by the concept of the mass society. Finally, in many matters, less paramount in almost every single case, the pluralistic theory does come into play as it finds supporting data. But it is far less often significantly applicable than its sponsors suppose.

   Actually. the elitist theory presupposes or implies the theory of the mass society. One could hardly have an elite without a mass. If everyone was alert and on his toes, how could an elite ever show itself? The mass itself paradoxically, would be an elite, and perfect high-level democracy would prevail. The mass-society theory, then, does not stand separately. If one has an elite, one must have a mass and, if society is to survive, vice versa. The uninspired mass team, in brief, must have a quarterback and, preferably, a coach or set of coaches. If the elite is truly aristocratic, selecting only the best, so much the better.

   These theories and some of their prominent adherents are briefly dealt with by a voting sociologist in an interesting book; ¹ there is, of course, a rather large literature about them. He himself found it necessary to apply them eclectically, although he believes in the greater inclusiveness of the pluralist view. As his attention was centered upon community decision-making in a small California town, the pluralist view is most serviceable; for its most fruitful application is on lower levels that are of little interest to the financial elite. But it would plainly be useless if applied to a company or white-supremacy town.

   He objects to the elitist theory because it allegedly imputes motivations to covert leadership groups. If they are covert by definition they cannot, he believes, be investigated by rational methods. Next, he holds, the elitist theory smooths over and obscures the many internal struggles over decisions within an elite. With such struggles in mind, it would seem that one must apply the pluralist theory to the operations of the elite itself, a logically well-taken point certainly germane to the paramountcy of theory. Thirdly, the theory of the elite must rely on the impact of events outside the elite system to explain changes within the system itself; for the elite, which does indeed change, does not change spontaneously. Most importantly, "elitist studies of community power typically do not present data to support their contentions that all major decision-making rests in the hands of single leadership groups."

   While I recoil from the operative "all," which I have emphasized, it is clearly incumbent upon anyone utilizing the elitist approach to show major decisions emanating from the elite group--decisions at variance with some established consensus. If such decisions are made, and are made to stick, then I think it may fairly be deduced that other decisions are similarly made. It isn't the general consuming public, we may say in a preliminary way, that decides to raise the prices. Nor is it, in view of the system of corporately administered prices, an automatic free market. It is clearly some distant and popularly distasteful "they" who decide this.

   The elitist theory most broadly stated, holds that the United States, for example, is a society of many dominant elites. The elite levels of science, scholarship, the arts, entertainment and sports (but not politics or finance) are open to anyone of ability. These are, therefore "open" elites, and consonant with the democratic bias. But there is, it is asserted or implied by a variety of writers, a politico-economic elite of elites, which is a "closed" elite. It is closed because something other than personal ability is required to belong to it. The main although not exclusive qualification for membership, it is here contended, is money. This elite has been referred to as the moneybund-- the complex of finpolities. Its leading members, I suggest, are finpols. This moneybund is different from C. Wright Mills's "power elite," which is a somewhat fanciful and highly personal embroidery upon the old-established basic idea of a moneyed elite. Take the money crowd away and Mills' "power elite" crumbles into verbal dust.

   Now, while the moneyed elite no doubt is pluralistically structured internally, toward the outside world it presents itself as a rather solid, small, coherent entity. Its decisions once having been taken or not taken (a decision in itself)--and we can obtain at least glimpses of some of its decision-making processes--it presents to the world pretty much of a united front even if it is not always unified internally in its views. Its members, at any rate, have various ways of knowing the difference between insiders and outsiders.*

   (*The idea of an elite does not necessarily imply that it is homogeneous. Thus, Albert Mathiez, the French historian on the subject of the French nobility. says: "The nobility consisted, in fact, of distinct and rival castes, the most powerful of which were not those who could point to the longest pedigrees. Side by side with the old hereditary or military nobility, there had sprung tip in the course of the last two centuries a nobility 'of the long robe' (noblesse de robe); that is to say, an official nobility which monopolized administrative and judicial offices. This new caste, which was as proud as the old nobility, and perhaps richer, was headed by the members of the parlements, or courts of appeal," This new nobility, as Mathiez goes on to show. was in many ways more powerful than the old nobility, Albert Mathiez, The French Revolution, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., N.Y., 1926; Universal Library, N.Y., 1964, pp. 6-7. One could similarly divide the American elite into the old and new money and the leading corporate officials and corporation lawyers.)

   As for motivations, it is, first, surely possible to deduce certain over-riding motivations in the moneyed elite by the way its members conduct their worldly affairs. One doesn't need to tap their telephones or induce their psychoanalysts to break confidences to see that they are nearly all motivated (1) to retain their money and power; (2) to add to money and power if possible; (3) to make use of all the resources of modern science, technology and politics in the retention and expansion of their power; (4) to keep their share of the tax burden as low as possible; (5) to support whatever politico-economic policies support or improve their position and to struggle against those which seem likely to diminish it; and (6) to have themselves presented to the world as especially worthy people.

   What they want more specifically is shown by. their legislative lobbyists, trade association spokesmen and newspapers. Fortune, the Wall Street Journal and similar publications consciously and unconsciously tell us much about what they want. Beyond this, public inquiries, the taking of testimonies, the massing of evidence in the courts and occasional books by insiders have done much to reveal motivations. There have been memoirs such as those of the late Clarence W. Barron, critical and friendly biographies and even letters (although collections of letters, as in the case of the elder J. P. Morgan, have often been ordered burned by testamentary prescription) This in itself seems a bit conspiratorial.

   The major ends of the moneyed elite are clearer, it must be confessed, than the devious means often used to attain those ends.

   In view of this elite (judging purely by their outward behavior) what's good for them is good for the United States. They see their personal pecuniary interests as identical with the complex interests of the nation. This elite is known to favor, among other things, a minimum of government regulation of their corporate instrumentalities; they openly talk to this end and work to achieve it. Society, they feel, should be subject to minimal direction. Would anyone wish to assert there is any doubt about this?

   As far as motivations go, it is not a difficulty that inheres peculiarly in the theory of an elite; in this day of Freudian psychology the motivations of every individual are a mystery even to himself. What are the motivations of participants in a pluralist decision-making process? If it is said, "How can we know what the elite is up to and why?" one may reply with another question: "How can we know what pluralists are up to and why?" Not being able to look inside people's heads, one makes deductions from external behavior. If a man hoards money in a hole in the floor we conclude that he is a miser. Can we be wrong? Can it be that he is in fact a spendthrift? As to why he does it, we turn to the psychoanalyst and hear talk about feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, rejection, alienation. Hoarding, it seems, makes him feel less anxious. Yet, he remains a miser vis-à-vis others, an objective phenomenon. He is not merely a psychiatric case.

   The theoretical objections to the theory of the elite, at any rate, are not nearly so compelling as they may seem when viewed only dialectically on the purely theoretical level, before testing against the facts.

   But there are stronger reasons, compelling to any rational mind, for rejecting the idea of the greater serviceability of the pluralist theory in explaining decision-making on the national level. For if the pluralist theory indeed held, if major decisions in the United States were in fact the product of countervailing and balanced groups, with each group element of society making itself fully heard, the outcome in terms of money, position and prestige would be a great deal more equitable than it is. Sociologists can indeed show many decisions arrived at by pluralist means. But we are talking now about the humanly fundamental decisions--the decisions about who gets what, where, how and why. Those decisions, I assert, are elitely determined, sometimes against considerable opposition.

   If the decision about the distribution of the basic economic means is arrived at pluralistically, why is the payoff so uneven? If one goes along with the. pluralist view we must conclude that people have acquiesced in their relatively low reward by the economic system. Yet millions of people protest all the time that they are being underpaid, They sound as though they had not consented to the decision-making about the distribution of money.

   Most people in the United States, including very many outstandingly intelligent and highly trained, are much like the participants in a dice game in which the opponent throws a long series of 7's and 11's, losing seldom; but when the dice change hands it develops that they follow the laws of randomness and show no runs of 7's and 11's. In a real dice game, most such losers would quickly conclude that the dice were loaded and they were being rooked.

   Now, if the social dice weren't subject to manipulation from behind the scenes, would so many people be so far below par in the matter of money and property? Such subparity elements, it is often said by way of explanation, are the no-goods, without ambition or energy. But, we may ask, is this also true of Nobel laureates, university professors in general, the trained professional classes, whose pay in comparison with that of corporation executives and big dividend recipients is absurdly meager? Are we to suppose that highly skilled professionals have acquiesced in their relatively niggardly compensation? Hearing them complain, reading their complaints in professional journals, one would not suppose so. They sound very much as though they are complaining futilely against loaded dice.

   Again, to look at the bottom of the labor force, are we to suppose that the poverty-stricken itinerant agricultural worker or the ghetto denizen has acquiesced through some pluralistic decision-making process in his low estate?

   In looking at the history of organized labor, the long record of anti-labor violence and counter-violence, one gets the strong impression that basic decisions were imposed upon unwilling and eventually maddened victims. Those who worked in Andrew Carnegie's steel mills at $10 for a seventy-two-hour (and longer) week of punishing effort under intense heat had never willingly, agreed to perform in this manner. Nobody had ever asked them or their representatives. They were driven by stark necessity to accept a one-sided bargain.

   It is true that all the persons to whom I refer have their compensation determined by a market. The elite, however, do not have their revenues impersonally determined by a market, to the dictates of which they submit. They make market rules pretty much to suit their inclinations.

   It does, then, look as though members of the labor force, high and low, have come up against a decree that says: So far and no further. They have not acquiesced in this decree; they have not been consulted about it. They are often opposed to it, but are as powerless to push it aside as Russian workers are powerless to push aside a state decree.

   It looks very much as though this decree has been handed down from some esoteric group, for there is no general rule against having an expansive income in a booming economy.

   In any play against the socio-economic elite of finpols with a view to, participating in its inner decisions, few--indeed, none--of the members of the various open elites find they can make it. They don't have the hereditary tickets; and even if they had the tickets they might not possess other qualifications.

   What, precisely, is the understructure of the top elite of finpolity?

   Largely headquartered in the East, this elite, first of all, is heavily intermarried . This fact has been shown in great detail and need not detain us. ² Most of the world of finpolity and its environs is interlaced by complicated cousinages, as in the case of the longer established European nobility. Intermarriage among the big propertied elite--the bourgeosie, the finpols-- continues, as the "society" pages of newspapers show nearly every week.

   As a fairly recent and uncomplicated example of upper-crust family structure let us take the Fords. Edsel, the only child of grass-roots Henry, had four children. Henry Ford II, one of Edsel's three sons, married Anne McDonnell, a Catholic socialite by whom he had three children. His daughter Charlotte, twenty-four, in 1965 married the off-the-beach Greek shipping magnate Stavros Spiros Niarchos, fifty-six, reputed to be worth a minimal $260 million. ³ Her coming accouchement was duly announced early in February, 1966; not long thereafter a prospective divorce. Her debut in 1959, according to the Times, took a year to plan, was attended by 1,200 guests and cost about $250,000, of which 860,000 went for flowers alone. Recalled the Times nostalgically (December 17, 1965): "Two million magnolia leaves were flown from Mississippi and were used to cover the walls of the corridors leading to the reception room in the Country Club of Detroit, which had been redecorated to look like an eighteenth-century French chateau." Sister Anne Ford, twenty-two, was married with less fanfare a few days later to Giancario Uzielli, an international stockbroker of New York. Henry Ford II in his second marital venture, after a divorce that led to his excommunication from the Catholic Church, married the divorced, also excommunicant, Mrs. Maria Christina Vettore Austin, of Italy and England, who is more particularly one of the European Rothschilds of pecuniary repute. William Ford, another of Edsel's sons, married Martha Firestone of the rubber fortune, by whom he has three children.

   Here, among the comparatively late-arriving Fords, one finds a rococo interlacing of diverse elements the common social denominator of which is property, and this is typical of the upper ownership strata.

   As to inward and outward twining cousinages among the moneyed elite, the Du Ponts provide perhaps the most spectacular example, interlinking with a number of other established and unlikely cousinages such as the Peabodys and Roosevelts. It is not usually easy in the hereditary strata of wealth to find someone unjoined to one or more other wealthy families by cousinly ties, and many of them link with what in Europe is known as nobility. Consinage threads through many apparently disparate propertied families.

   To avoid detention here by details readily available elsewhere, let it simply be said that much about the affairs of the finpolities is a family matter. These families, it is true, are often subject to strains within themselves and vis-a-vis other families (pluralism); but they together present pretty much of a unified front to the world (eliteness).

   The American wealthy, as Cleveland Amory shows in considerable diverting detail, have confused money, ostentatious partying, politico-economic position and far-ranging power with aristocracy, of which they very commonly think themselves representative. ⁴ By the hundreds they have dug up for themselves, or caused to be devised, European coats of arms, more than 500 of which have been suitably proved and registered with the New England Historic and Genealogical Society "easily the country's outstanding authority on coats of arms." ⁵

   The stress on coats of arms, both among bearers and disappointed nonbearers suggests that the wealthy themselves, unlike some unaccountably obtuse outside investigators, regard themselves as part of family enterprises, not as isolated persons who have won in an individualistic rat race. These families, to be sure, are placed within a certain setting of historically developed institutions of which American children sing innocently in school.

   As the redoubtable H. L. Mencken remarked in 1926, "the plutocracy, in a democratic state, tends to take the place of the missing aristocracy, and even to be mistaken for it. It is, of course, something quite different. It lacks all the essential characters of a true aristocracy: a clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, honour, courage--above all, courage. It stands under no bond of obligation to the state; it has no public duty; it is transient and lacks a goal. Its most puissant dignitaries of to-day came out of the mob) only yesterday--and from the mob they bring its peculiar ignobilities. As practically encountered, the plutocracy stands quite as far from the honnête homme as it stands from the Holy Saints. Its main character is its incurable timourouosness it is forever grasping at the straws held out by demagogues. . . . Its dreams are of banshees, hobgoblins, bugaboos. The honest, untroubled snores of a Percy or a Hohenstaufen are quite beyond it.

   "The plutocracy, as I say, is comprehensible to the mob because its aspirations are essentially those of inferior men money. . . . What it lacks is aristocratic disinterestedness, born of aristocratic security. There is no body of opinion behind it that is, in the strictest sense, a free opinion. Its chief exponents, by some divine irony, are pedagogues of one sort or another. . . . Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other . . . what democracy needs most of all is a party that will separate the good that is in it theoretically from the evils that beset it practically, and then try to erect that good into workable system" (Notes on Democracy, Alfred A. Knopf, N.Y., pp. 203-6).

   The children of the finpols and their higher servitors are early separated from the common run of children by being sent to special private schools, which exist as part of a different world. This point was inquired into by C. Wright Mills. ⁶ Not all the children in these schools are from the elite, because such a prescription would defeat educational ends. The private schools are "democratic," in that they take students, many on scholarships, from a wide social spectrum. Some now take able Negroes, although their quest is not exclusively for intellectual ability. But firmly sandwiched into the unquestionably mixed and in part subsidized mass are the children of the moneyed elite.

   The formal education offered by the best of these private schools is no better, as far as any evidence shows, than that offered by the best public schools. But they do a better job for laggards, who are numerous in all strata, because their classes are smaller, the schools are isolated from distracting influences and the faculty supervision over studies is stricter. A highly motivated student in a good public school (which is not too frequently encountered) can get as much out of his school experience as he could at one of the better private schools; but the less scholastically motivated will probably get greater benefit from the good private school, which is more of a hothouse.

   The products of the older private schools, at least, tend to form much closer ties to each other than are formed at the public school or college level. They are cemented, as it were, by the bonds of exile. Indeed, if asked about his educational background, the private school product is far less apt to say that he went to Harvard, Yale or Princeton, even though he did so, than to say he went to Exeter, Andover, Choate, Groton, Hotchkiss or whatever the case may be.

   Few children of the rich attend public schools, although there are rare exceptions. As inquiry will convince anyone, most of them attended one of the old-line private "prestige" schools. People who like to make the point, as though it was significant, that Jack Kennedy attended Harvard and Adlai Stevenson Princeton, simply aren't aware of the nuances. Both were Choate school boys and would still be Choate boys if they had gone on to Swampwater College, Okefenoke University or Oxford. Anybody might go to Harvard, Yale or Princeton. But anybody cannot go to Choate. ⁷

   As Mills points out, the private-school boys do tend to stick together and to be found disproportionately later in or near the upper echelons of insurance companies, banks, investment trusts and general corporations. For the big owners of these enterprises are themselves products of the same schools. ⁸ The schools serve as unintended centers to bring bright members of lower social classes in as corporate personnel.

   Until the recent past, the products of the private schools tended to monopolize Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other Ivy League universities. This trend has been diminished as private universities have intensified the intellectual rigor of their undergraduate colleges with a view to producing more teachers and scientists and fewer executives and salesmen.

   The big rich, then, are more and more closely intermarried and generally send their children to a relatively small number of private schools. Some send them abroad to Switzerland or England.

   Upon graduation from college, the children of the rich find themselves entering a world wherein many of their relatives are big owners of property and perhaps ensconced in important corporate or near-corporate positions. They move largely in a world which in England, whence the pattern came, would be familiarly described as the world of upper-class families, hunt clubs and the Old School Tie. The chances are high that they are going to marry someone whose family, like their own, is at least in the Social Register. They are on the estate and trust-fund circuit.

   If they do not marry someone of the world of established property, if they marry instead a Rumanian chauffeur or the daughter of a Lithuanian iron puddler, they become the subject of excited newspaper accounts. For whenever wealth marries nonwealth it is a case, to the newspaper editors, of man bites dog. Although such marriages are not uncommon, the plain implication of all the fuss is that the marriage should not have taken place, any more than the King of England in the eyes of British Tories should have married Mrs. Simpson, Readers await news of the almost inevitable divorce.

   Neither family, coats of arms, nor attendance at private schools guarantees elite soundness. Elite families, lamentably, sometimes produce odd characters. The best private schools unfortunately turn out people who sometimes become song-writers, actors, photographers or even Kennedys, Stevensons or Roosevelts.

   The higher elite must therefore mark itself off more precisely than either family, coat of arms, school or the possession of money can do. It does mark itself off through the system of private clubs, which in the East are so exclusive that neither the pope nor most presidents of the United States could qualify for membership.

   The private clubs are the most "in" thing about the finpol and corp-pol elite. These clubs constitute the societal control centers of the elite.

   There is at least one central club of the wealthy in every large city--the Chicago Club, the Cleveland Club, the Houston Petroleum Club, the Duquesne Club of Pittsburgh, etc. These are all imitations or outgrowths of earlier Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore clubs, which were imitations of English clubs. But the New York clubs are now the most important because the big money is centered in New York and the leading New York clubs include the wealthiest of the out-of-towners and many foreigners.

   Which of the New York clubs is most exclusive, or most important, is a matter of opinion. The Knickerbocker Club requires that its members be either born New Yorkers, of New York descent, or at least occasional New York residents. But The Links, formed in 1921 ostensibly to promote the game of golf, seems to represent heavier money on the whole. Distinctions among the leading clubs are obscure to outsiders. "At the Metropolitan or the Union League or the University," Cleveland Amory quotes a clubman, "you might do a $10,000 deal, but you'd use the Knickerbocker or the Union or the Racquet for $100,000 and then, for $1,000,000 you move on to the Brook or the Links." ⁹ Some big wheels, to be safe, belong to them all.

   My own rating of the New York clubs in order of finpolitan weight is as follows:

   1. The Links. 2. The Knickerbocker Club. 3. The Metropolitan Club. 4. Racquet and Tennis Club. 5. The Brook. 6. The Union. 7. The Union League.

   These are, except perhaps the last two, the exclusive, highly restricted inner-circle clubs. The University Club, in addition to claiming a larger membership, also includes professionals, administrators and below-the-top executives--that is, not only chairmen, presidents and executive vice presidents of corporations. Although it includes unquestionably elite elements like Allan P. Kirby, Cleveland E. Dodge, the Goelets and others, it is more like a transmission connection between the elite clubs and the world of general management. The Union and the Union League also have much of this transmission character in the club hierarchy.

   An even broader transmission link or meeting ground between the higher club strata and the world of public affairs is The Century Association, the membership of which is heavily composed of approved artists, musicians, columnists, writers, lawyers, editors and book-reading executives (a rare and special breed!). A very few of the members of the top elite clubs mingle with the comparatively bohemian and always literate element of The Century. A careful review of the 1965 list of members-showing names like Dean Rusk, Isaac Stern, Eric Sevareid, Walter Lippmarm, Yehudi Menuhin, James Reston and Arnold Toynbee along with three Rockefellers and other indomitable men of the supra-corporate spaces--suggests that few would be inclined to question the essential rightness and goodness of the finpolitan world. Many of its members are its eloquent spokesmen and apologists; some express mild and at times melancholy dubiety. None flatly challenges the essential beneficence of the finpolitan course.

   But the brains and wit of the big New York clubs are unquestionably concentrated most conspicuously in The Century, a few of whose members at least seem capable of arriving at independent judgments. The membership list has never wandered far enough to the left to take in people like Norman Thomas, Scott Nearing, C. Wright Mills, Thorstein Veblen or even John R. Commons, all keen discussants. It did, however, include Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, which about fixes its political poles. Investigators and questioners of the social frontiers are conspicuously lacking among its scholars.

   An examination of its membership list up to 1965 fails to disclose the names of able organizational Negroes like Thurgood Marshall, Whitney Young, Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins or Robert C. Weaver. Walter White never belonged.

   The precise scope of The Century, founded in 1847, can perhaps best be shown by citing the names of some others who never belonged. These were H. L. Mencken (but Andrew Mellon did), Mark Twain (but Cornelius Vanderbilt did), Lincoln Steffens, Joseph Pulitzer, Charles Beard, Edmund Wilson, Sinclair Lewis, G. Stanley Hall, Eugene O'Neill, Herbert Bayard Swope, Theodore Dreiser, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville (but J. Pierpont Morgan I and II did), Morris Rafael Cohen, Cleveland Amory, Bennett Cerf, William James of Harvard and so on. But John Dewey, Oliver Lafarge, Oswald Garrison Villard and Charles Peirce did belong.

   In any event, The Century does not appear, either today or yesterday, to be intellectually, morally and artistically representative. Its precise rationale for membership selection does not readily show itself. The heterogeneous membership shows little common denominator, and some mighty big intellectual guns, past and present, are conspicuously missing. Deeply critical temperaments or anyone who "comes on strong" are notably absent.

   But a function the University and Century Clubs also perform is that of reciprocal transmission: The finpol members in them also hear much about the outside world, the below-stairs world as it were, from the more bohemian elements who may move easily from the club precincts to a Greenwich Village coffee house or Yorkville saloon and then back. The bohemian element's greater down-ranging mobility may at times be the envy of some of the finpols.

   Each of the leading clubs appears to have spawned a cluster of offspring or imitators, founded sometimes by dissidents. They specialize in various things, some such as The Brook (touchingly named after Tennyson's poem) in continuous twenty-four-hour service.

   Lesser clubs, in the opinion of Amory and other alert club-watchers, appear to be the nonexclusive Manhattan, Lotos, the Coffee House (of which Nelson A. Rockefeller is a member), the Harvard, the Yale and the Princeton. Better known to the public perhaps because of their association with the entertainment world are the Lambs, the Friars and the Players but these, in all candor, are the bottom of the barrel in relation to the clubdom with which we are concerned and should really not be mentioned except by way of indicating what an upper-class club, properly speaking, is not.

   The only one of the New York clubs John D. ("Big John") Rockefeller got into was the Union League. His son, "John the Good," had no interest in belonging and was advised against it by his investment mentor, Frederick T. Gates. However, he did join the University and The Century. The grandsons belong to the cream--variously The Links, Knickerbocker, the Metropolitan of Washington and others. None lists the Union League.

   The original Rockefeller was not only in bad odor with radicals, populists and liberals but, it may come as strange to some readers, he was looked upon askance in the old-established elite. Says Cleveland Amory, "Only a generation ago, for example, Mrs. David Lion Gardiner, dowager empress of New York's proud Gardiner Family, was informed that her young grandson, Robert David Lion Gardiner, was about to go out and play with the Rockefeller children. Mrs. Gardiner forbade it. 'No Gardiner will ever play,' she said, 'with the grandchild of a gangster.'" And De Golyer, dean of oilmen, told Amory he could never decide "whether John D. Rockefeller was the greatest oil man who ever lived, or a goddam lying pirate who made a monkey out of the whole capitalistic svstem." ¹⁰

   Nelson Rockefeller is looked upon today as the savior of the Knickerbocker Club, which in 1954 was nearly submerged into the Union Club out of which it had sprung. A few leading members agreed to accept ten cents on the dollar for its bonded indebtedness and Rockefeller bought the premises and permitted the club to occupy them rent-free for ten years and then rent-free for ten more years if he was still alive. ¹¹ It seems fair to conclude that the Rockefellers have an interest, perhaps only sentimental, in keeping this distinctive club extant.

   It should not be thought that the top clubs are purely sociable haunts where the rich idle away the time, although such is the impression conveyed by Amory, Wecter and the long line of cartoonists and satirists who have shown elderly members snoozing over newspapers in the windows and who have derisively quoted club nincompoops. The clubs, one may be sure, enjoy being mildly derided as centers of futility and senile naivete. As they say in spydom, this gives their serious members a good "cover" for serious purposes.

   Nor should it be thought that the big tycoons are in constant attendance. The membership of even the biggest clubs is obviously layered or hierarchical, and consists of inner coteries according to specific serious and frivolous interests. There are, of course, always some amiable hangers-on and some retired from active life, and these provide something of a background Greek chorus or mob scene for the members with weightier concerns on their minds.

   The clubs, in point of fact, have underlying deeply serious systemic functions behind their facades, as follows:

   1. Their membership hierarchies from the leading to the minor clubs show in general who is A.O.K. by degrees in what is now variously referred to as the national power structure, the Establishment (in imitation of English jargon), the power elite (after Mills) and so on. Newer designations for the phenomena will no doubt turn up and, as the reader will recall, I seem to find the situation best summarized in the term finpolity. If one wants to know who really matters behind the scenes of national affairs, in the order that they matter, one can hardly do better than to line up the memberships of the New York clubs in the order given. Now add each of the central non-New York clubs: Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington, Cleveland, etc., in about that order. Strike out duplications as they appear.

   Here one gets, with few exceptions, the entire power structure. Everybody on the list will be A.O.K., rarely voicing anything except what John Kenneth Galbraith calls "conventional wisdom"--that is, trite and shallow commonplaces.

   2. The clubs are the scene, at least in the preliminary stages, of some of the biggest deals in the capitalist world. It is not denied that such deals are also broached on golf courses, yachts and perhaps even in exclusive executive washrooms and Turkish baths; it is only asserted that a very heavy documentation could be supplied showing that some of the biggest deals, consortiums, syndicates, raids and campaigns were first proposed in one of the clubs.

   3. The clubs are to the general corporate world of finpolity what the boardrooms are to individual corporations and what Congress is to the American populace. They are the places where attitudes are shaped toward proposed national policies. Once a consensus has been reached, the clubs serve to hand down a general "party-line" of finpolity to members, who carry it to the world in their various functional capacities. For with the big proprietors sit the big executives, many big (usually Republican) political figures and leading owners of the 'biggest enterprises in mass media.

   In saying that a party line is handed down, I do not suggest that members must accept the verdict of an always free and informal running discussion. Some members do object to and refuse to implement conclusions in whole or in part. Nobody is formally bound by any preponderant opinion, but everybody appears to be influenced by tendencies.

   How, for example, should a particular president of the United States be presented in the mass media? Should the verdict be favorable, on the fence or unfavorable? Club talk will determine something of this. And if the drift is toward accepting him as favorable or unfavorable, some member or members may interpose a cogent objection that reverses or halts some emerging conclusion. One will get the verdict, whatever it is, in one's favorite newspaper or periodical.

   Of one thing all club participants may always be sure: Views are invariably expressed in the light of some propertied interest. The discussions are never cluttered with extraneous and (by definition) ridiculous considerations that might occur to single-taxers, pacifists, social reformers, social workers, socialists, communists, populists, trade unionists, anti-vivisectionists, idealists, civil libertarians, utopians, New Dealers, unconventional ideologists, uplifters or even detached on-the-target scholars. The ideological center of all the discussion is, odd though it may seem, freedom, pointed simply to freedom of these elements to preserve and expand their propertied interests.

   These clubs are the most intense partisans of freedom--their freedom--in the world today. While considerable imagination and ingenuity often enter into club discussions, to judge by leaked reports from occasional defectors, one element is invariably lacking: sympathy or concern for the rabble in the outer world.

   In an earlier work I pointed out that often a uniform attitude comes suddenly to be expressed in the press from coast to coast on some topic, as though a hidden politburo had come to a decision. Never a dissent, never a deviation appears, as though one were reading the Russian press. The source--or sources--of such uniformity, as in the 85 per cent press opposition to Roosevelt, is the deliberations of the tycoons and tycoonlets in their clubs.

   Unlike Congress, whose members must go home now and then to get re-elected, the clubs are always in session, unimpeded by parliamentary procedures, and the members need not fear being deposed from their positions. Congressmen and presidents come and go. The club members continue until death or disability does part them from the club discussions.

   Discussions through the entire hierarchy of clubs, New York and provincial, are an important part of the informal process of government in the United States--far more important, say, than the political conventions, which often merely ratify what has been antecedently decided in the clubs. For these are the places where citizens of weight, of property, lawfully assemble and freely air their views and criticize the views of their peers. These are the democratic debating grounds of the first citizens, the people with the means and instrumentalities for making their views effective in the world. There are thousands of lesser clubs and associations throughout the United States; but a difference between them and the metropolitan clubs is that the formal resolutions of the lesser clubs, as contrasted with the purely informal resolutions of the metropolitan clubs, are usually ineffective. Nothing much, if anything, happens nationally after the passage of the solemn formal resolutions.

   To control or influence public policy one is better placed if one has a strong voice in the clubs than if one has a strong voice in the Senate of the United States, yet the clubs draw little attention from the sociologists or political scientists, a serious oversight.

   The leading clubs, such as The Links and the Knickerbocker Club, in their yearly alphabetical directories list members living and dead. These are like roll calls of American finpolity and corp-polity, past and present. Among the dead are many extensive family groups still with living members. Included among these, of course, is the coat-of-arms and inner private-school crowd.

   The Links directory for 1964 includes such significant names as Winthrop Aldrich, former chairman of the Chase National Bank; Lester Armour of Chicago; Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr. and Sr., of San Francisco; Charles H. Bell of Minneapolis; August Belmont; George R. Brown of Houston; Nicholas F. and James C. Brady; Paul C. Cabot of Boston; Lammot du Pont Copeland of Wilmington; C. Douglas Dillon; William H. Doheny; John T. Dorrance, Jr.; William Hincks Duke; Pierre S. du Pont III; Benson Ford; Henry Ford II; G. Peabody Gardner of Boston; Robert Goelet; Joseph P. Grace, Jr.; Crawford H. Greenewalt of Wilmington; E. Roland Harriman; John A. Hill; W. E. Hutton; Amory Houghton, Jr. and Sr.; B. Brewster Jennings; Robert E. McCormick; William G. McKnight, Jr.; Paul and Richard K. Mellon of Upperville and Pittsburgh, respectively; Jeremiah Milbank; Henry S. Morgan; John M. and Spencer T. Olin of East Alton; Howard Phipps, Jr. and Sr.; John S. Pillsbury of Minneapolis; Frank C. and William B. Rand; David, James S., Laurance S., Avery, Jr., William and Winthrop Rockefeller; Charles P. Stetson; Oliver de Gray Vanderbilt III; John Hay Whitney, publisher of the now defunct New York Herald Tribune; Robert E. Wilson of Chicago, and others.

   The foregoing list culls the names of a few of the big proprietors. But The Links includes among its members also top-level corporation executives, bank presidents, special-entree journalists, upper-echelon Pentagon and diplomatic figures, corporation lawyers and Republican political figures of the inner sanctum-people like Joseph W. Alsop of Washington; Owen R. Cheatham of Georgia-Pacific Plywood; General Lucius D. Clay; S. Sloan Colt of Bankers Trust; Ralph J. Cordiner, former chairman 'of General Electric (during its conspiracy conviction); Arthur H. Dean of the key law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell and numerous top-level diplomatic conferences; Thomas E. Dewey; Nelson Doubleday of the book publishing world; Lewis W. Douglas of Arizona; Frederic W. and Frederick H. Ecker of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; Dwight D. Eisenhower; the late Walter S. Gifford, former head of AT&T; Gabriel Hauge, president of Manufacturers Hanover Trust; Herbert C. Hoover; George M. Humphrey of Cleveland and the U.S. Treasury; Grayson Kirk, president of Columbia University; the late Henry R. Luce of Time-Life-Fortune; Air Force General Lauris Norstad; and, to arbitrarily end a list replete with many other gilt-edged rag-paper names, jean Monnet of Paris, architect of the European Common Market.

   Financially and corporately speaking, there is little or no deadwood in the Links roster. If its membership does not exactly run the country it has much to say about its course. Here are what the Russian and Chinese press morosely refer to as "American ruling circles."

   A similar and sometimes overlapping cross-section of the upper elite is displayed by the 1965 list of the Knickerbocker Club. Here we obtain many other history-evoking names, past and current, such as Prince Amyn M. Aga Khan; Giovanni Agnelli, Italian industrialist; Winthrop W. Aldrich; John D. Archbold; Count Alessandro de Asarta Guiccioli; John Astor; Count Bertil Bernadotte of Sweden; Oliver C. Biddle; Francis H., Henry B., Jr., and Powell Cabot; Lord Camoys; Rear Admiral Grayson B. Carter; Anthony Drexel Cassatt; Rear Admiral Hubert Winthrop Chanler; Charles W. Chatfield; Joseph H. Choate; Grenville Clark, Jr.; Henry Clews; Count Charles-Louis de Cosse Brissac; William D. Crane; Seymour L. Cromwell; Lieutenant Colonel Charles C. Crossfield III (USMC); Major Robert Dickey III (USMC); C. Douglas Dillon; Colonel Joy Dow; John R. Drexel III; Henry Francis du Pont; Dwight D. Eisenhower; Thomas K. Finletter; Hamilton Fish, Jr.; Peter O. Forrestal; Caspar C. de Gersdorff; Francis, John and Robert Goelet; George and Michael Gould; Charles B. and William Grosvenor; Ogden H., Jr., and William C. Hammond; Henry Upham Harris; Abram S. Hewitt; James T., Nathaniel P., and Patrick Hill; Arthur A. Houghton, Jr.; R. E. K. Hutton; Vice Admiral Stuart H. Ingersoll; Ernest and O'Donnell Iselin; Commander John Dandridge Henley Kane; Hamilton Fish Kean; Moorhead C. Kennedy, Jr. and Sr.; Count Jean de Lagarde; Brigadier Charles L. Lindemann, DSO; Count Marc de Logeres; Townsend M. McAlpin; Charles E. Mather III; Paul Mellon; Edmund C. Monell; Ivan Obolensky; Count Ogier d'Ivry; Cecil C. Olmstead; Thomas I. Parkinson, Jr.; George B. Post; Sir Alec Randall; David, Laurance S. and Nelson A. Rockefeller; Kermit Roosevelt; Elibu Root, Jr.; Prince Sadduddin Aga Khan; Ellery Sedgwick, Jr.; Jean de Sieyes; Mortimer M. Singer; Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.; Chauncey D. Stillman; Count Anthony Szapary; Marchese Filippo Theodoli; Brigadier General Clarence P. Townsley; Count Mario di Valmarana; Harold S. and William H. Vanderbilt; F. Skiddy von Stade; Count Leonardo Vitetti; George D. Widener; William Wood Prince; Lieutenant Commander Cameron Mc. R. Winslow; Admiral Jerauld Wright; and Sophocles N. Zoullas.

   This partial list, through which shine sections of Debrett and the Almanach de Gotha, also reads in part like a diplomatic and military roll call of the upper echelons. The list of deceased members is even more impressive; it reads like the index of names to a complete financial and industrial history of the United States.

   Through the memberships of The Links and the Knickerbocker Club one could obviously obtain instant entree to any financial-political circle in the world. These are the very penthouses of finpolity.

   Where does the harried staff of a new president of the United States look for candidates for Cabinet and other high-level posts? The membership lists of the leading clubs serve at least as aides-memoires. Not all the members, admittedly, are of sufficient personal calibre; but it is a fact that many names, previously little known to the public, have appeared on these club rosters long before they emerged in Washington and on the world scene. Interspersed with the playboys and club hangers-on are names that recognizably belong only on the upper circuits of finpolitan affairs, the fellows who in the shadow of the heavy weaponry finally get down to talking very cold turkey with De Gaulle, Gromyko, Nasser, the oil sheiks, Chou En Lai, Erhard, and Ho Chi Mihn about who takes over what lush terrain and who gets the dirty end of the international stick (which one fears is pretty much the general myth-befuddled populace all over).

   The leading clubs, though, are decidedly Republican in statistical orientation. This fact does not, of course, prevent Democratic Administrations from making use of valuable members such as Douglas Dillon. Nearly everybody in high appointive office, indeed, can be traced to one of the clubs, either the high or the lesser ones.

   As Amory observes, the leading freedom of the top clubs is the freedom to be anti-democratic and (self-deludedly) pro-aristocratic; in an earlier day they would have been Federalist, although now one hears in them lamentation about lost states' rights that would have astonished the Founding Fathers. ¹² Truman was merely disliked by most of the New York clubmen, Amory notes, but Franklin D. Roosevelt was apoplectically feared and consequently hated. Opinion about FDR even at the relatively cosmopolitan Harvard Club was sharply divided and feelings were intense. FDR, who did more to save their rickety world than any other man, was the bête noir of the clubmen.

   Many of the upper club members look back nostalgically to the good old days under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover and do not show much enthusiasm over Eisenhower, much less over Kennedy. But as of well into 1967, the clubs were reported to feel rather enthusiastic about Lyndon B. Johnson, a big depletion-allowance man, who could, if he continues to deal his cards right, become a club member himself. After all, Eisenhower, born in Abilene, made The Links, Tap day could well come for the statesman of the Pedernales River valley who is committed to the proposition that a bomb is mightier than any valid syllogism or statement of fact.

   We have been setting the stage for an answer to the question that opened this chapter: How and in what way do the finpolitan elite act in concert, if they do act in concert?

   Any elite, in order to be an elite, must possess considerable autonomy within its special jurisdiction. This is true of all elites: of lawyers, artists, scientists, entertainers, philosophers or whatever. If the conditions are correctly stated here, they must also hold for a politico-economic elite. One would hardly have an elite if it had to be bound by ordinary rules or by some hard-and-fast tradition--if it had no area of privileged action.

   The freedom to improvise as it sees its own interests must belong to any elite. If it doesn't have this freedom then it is just part of the mass. Physicists and mathematicians, for example, don't submit their differences to popular polls.

   The closed American politico-economic elite, like any elite, does make its own rules, and it enforces its rulings in those areas where it believes its vital interests are involved; other areas it ignores. The task, now, is to show such elite rulings, and to show that they stick even against the opposition of Congresses, Supreme Courts, presidents and popular opinion. To claim that there is a privileged class and then not to be able to show it exercising privileges would be absurd.

   Returning to the higher clubs, then, it should first be noticed that they do not allow any outright or avowed Jews to become members. Jews are not specifically barred in the by-laws but the procedure for admitting new members is such that none gets in, a fact noted by close students of the clubs. ¹³

   The term "outright Jews" is used advisedly because in certain cases Jews on the family tree, as in the case of the Belin line of Du Ponts or the Belmonts, do not apparently provide sufficient ground to bar from membership in the leading metropolitan clubs like The Links and Knickerbocker where names such as Rosenwald, Warburg, Lehman, Baruch, Schiff, Kuhn, Loeb, Gimbel, Guggenheim and the like simply do not appear even though their holders are of big-money stature and even though the grounds for claims to gentility of some, such as Baruch and Warburg, antedate those of the most ancient transplanted Bostonians. Gentility has nothing to do with it. But what all this shows is only that the Hitlerian racist definition of what constitutes a Jew is not applied. What Professor Baltzell calls "gentlemanly anti-Semitism" is not, in fact, racist or religious. It relates to property and position.

   But even in the case of approved persons with Jews in the family tree, the barriers often go down slowly, as in the case of Douglas Dillon, member of The Links and the Knickerbocker Club, whose "paternal grandfather was Sam Lapowski, son of a Polish Jew and a French Catholic, who emigrated to Texas after the Civil War, adopted his mother's maiden name of Dillon, prospered as a clothing merchant in San Antonio and Abilene, and finally moved to Milwaukee, where he entered the machinery-manufacturing business." ¹⁴

   But while a very few top-ranking people with Jews on the family tree are found in the top New York clubs, there are no avowed or full-fledged Jews, whatever their qualifications, none at all such as the otherwise technically eligible Meyer Kastenbaum or corporate bigwig Sidney Weinberg of Goldman Sachs and Company, with multiple upper-level corporate directorships and yachting companion of the mighty. ¹⁵ It is Weinberg who is credited with the scheme for preserving the Ford fortune in the Ford Foundation, thereby eluding a mountain of taxes. How much more cooperative can anyone ever be?

   The first of the well-known middle-level clubs in which unambiguously Jewish names are encountered is The Century, with two Warburgs as well as others. The Manhattan Club, founded in 1865, has many Jewish as well as a few local Italian and Irish names. Its roster shows that it is obviously a nonelite Democratic opposite number to the Republican Union League Club; it included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert and Irving Lehman, Alvin and Irwin Untermyer, Joseph M. Proskauer and Alfred E. Smith. But the Manhattan, like the Century, is not considered by club experts to be an upper-strata club. Clubwise, in terms of inner corporate power, it is merely so-so. This isn't where the massed armored divisions of finpolity are controlled.

   Hope is expressed by some optimists that the pattern of club exclusion may be changing: "In Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Newark, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, Syracuse and other cities, prestige clubs have admitted Jews--in some cases ending nearly a century of exclusion," say two observers. "The change has begun to affect all three of the major groupings of prestige clubs in the country; the University Club, Union Club and Union League Club. In addition, new, equally distinguished clubs without discriminatory policies have been launched in Atlanta, Dallas and Denver. . . .

   "In 1960, only two of the 28 University Clubs in the country had any Jews on their rolls. Two years later, the University Club of New York City . . . began to accept Jewish members. This breakthrough paved the way for similar developments elsewhere. . . . As of 1965, seven University Clubs had accepted Jews to membership, one was about to do so, and five were engaged in exploratory discussion. . . . Thus, thirteen University Clubs had dispensed or were about to dispense with the discriminatory process, in contrast to two only five years earlier.

   "The Union Club in Boston has enrolled its first Jewish members, and the Union League Club in Philadelphia is taking a similar step. The latter development is truly historic; for one of the founders of the Union League Club more than a century ago was the banker Joseph Seligman, who is remembered today as the first prominent victim of social discrimination against Jews. In 1877, Seligman and his family were refused accommodations at the fashionable resort of Saratoga Springs, New York; in the years that followed, the anti-Semitic virus spread rapidly, and soon Seligman's own club instituted an exclusionary policy." ¹⁶

   While the foregoing is true of what the authors call prestige clubs it is not yet true of the five top finpolitan elite clubs nor, for that matter, of the central elite club in each of the leading cities. The Union, University and Union League constitute pretty much a national club chain, offering inter-regional club privileges mainly to intermediate people. There may, in time, be a breakthrough, so that at least some token Jews are accepted as members of the very top clubs; but even that is doubtful, for reasons we shall see.

   Something to be noticed is that the anti-Semitic bias, never prior to the 1870's a feature of American life, entered with the new industrialists, themselves from the Fundamentalist grassroots, poor boys like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Frick and others who "struck it rich."

   Professor Baltzell ascribes the barring of Jews to "Protestant values" but here I think he commits the post hoc fallacy. True, the members of the clubs are almost exclusively if nominally Protestant; but they would just about all find the writings of Martin Luther, John Calvin and Sören Kierkegaard so much gibberish, the utterances of far-out clowns. The club members of late industrial derivation, the top dogs, came from the grassroots Horatio Algers who introduced the anti-Semitic rules. In addition to being nominally Protestant they were culturally and educationally of no higher level than the nineteenth-century immigrants from Europe whom they despised. Not only were they of poverty-stricken origins but they were all educationally distinctly en retard. It was the attenuated and confused cultural values of this element, straight from the cracker barrel, that were applied. To trace it to Protestantism, especially in view of the long European Catholic anti-Semitic tradition, seems to me off target.

   Earlier American attitudes toward Jews, though tinged here and there with the European virus of anti-Semitism, were on the whole respectful, perhaps unduly so, for Jews were widely regarded as children of the Holy Book. Some Americans claimed to belong to "lost" Jewish tribes. American Protestant colleges made a point in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of offering Hebrew as well as Latin and ancient Greek as the classical languages, in part because of the mistaken belief that the original New Testament had been written in Hebrew and that Jesus spoke this language. An early American classicist had to know Hebrew as well as Greek and Latin. Jews were friends and collaborators of a number of the Protestant Founding Fathers, were received into leadership circles North and South and were associated in vital early federal affairs. The idea of treating Jews as pariahs would have been deemed aberrant.

   The exclusionary treatment of Jews in American life stemmed from a decision by the new financial elite, which elbowed to one side persons of the earlier aristocratic temper. Money became king, not Protestantism. The stock ticker became the dominant symbol, not the flag or the cross.

   The exclusion of Jews from the inner metropolitan clubs is also imitatively enforced in elite and nonelite country clubs and in the old-line college fraternities. Actually, the Jewish exclusion serves to confer the special cachet of distinction on such clubs, most of the members of which are tedious Babbitts. A club or fraternity that does not exclude Jews is by this token advertising itself as an undistinguished affair, which it really is on the ground that its members are almost invariably persons of no intellectual or moral distinction. That the country-club and fraternity crowd consists in large part of simple animals, not always fully housebroken, one can ascertain by reading the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O'Hara and others who specialize in doings on the country-club circuit.

   Catholics, although few and far between because most important Catholic money is concentrated in the hands of the Church hierarchy and because Catholics until very recently have been something of a self-segregated caste in American society, are not barred from the metropolitan clubs and one sees Nicholas F. Brady, Consolidated Edison tycoon, for example, as a member of The Links. There are others, such as Henry Ford II, but not many. John F. Kennedy became a member of The Brook.

   It is doubtful if any Negro has ever been so much as proposed for membership. It would be erroneous to say Negroes are barred. They are simply not noticed. Negroes fall under the latter-day integrationist rule: They are not discriminated against as Negroes but it so happens they are found to be unqualified because of a tragic history over which the latter-day keepers of the keys have no retroactive control. The point is only: They couldn't get accepted even if they could fly to the moon and back in a kite.

   Beyond this, as far as the clubs are concerned, Negroes not only lack titles to property (as quite a few Jews do not) but no one of them seems to be within 250 years of ever having them in any significant proportions. Who would a Negro be likely to inherit from?

   As large property holdings are now mainly inherited and hard even for an occasional white nonproprietor to come by, it would seem that Negroes are forever circumstantially barred from becoming considerable American property owners. This is not to deny that some Negro, some day, may in some flukey situation run a small stake up into a big corporate nest egg and then turn out to be one of the larger swindling wheeler-dealers.

   One can see two roads opening up to a very few Negroes, even though not to an entire stratum of wealthy Negroes.

   One of these roads might be the entertainment or sports world, where a successful Negro might use his earned stake to become an impresario, then perhaps an owner of chain hotels, eventually the Empire State Building and perhaps a 5 per cent cut of one of the big banks.

   Another road would be through politics and the participation in its many slushy inside contracts of the kind that have lifted many shadowy political figures from hamburgers to affluence. Early in 1966 a New York State investigation of large-scale housing developments in Harlem with public money indicated that a Negro political leader who had put up $2,000 stood to make $250,000, not a bad or unusual prelude to larger operations. For great family oaks from such little acorns have grown all over the American scene since the Civil Way,

   But that this sort of thing is going to happen to many Negroes and that they or their increasingly light-skinned progeny are going to be taken readily into the caste-iron clubs seems improbable.

   We find, then, that at least 15 per cent of the population (Jews, Puerto Ricans and Negroes) is effectively barred from the clubs on intrinsic grounds. The remainder of the population is barred on extrinsic grounds: It has neither large properties nor high functional positions.

   All this, it might be argued, is perfectly reasonable. These are private clubs, and clubs may choose their own clubmates. But these are not only social clubs; they are the staging areas of national policy and of the big deals that make Harlem real-estate deals look like pennyante poker.

   Some of the clubs, indeed, in court actions over tax privileges have denied pointblank that they are social clubs, have claimed that they are in fact business clubs. This is true of the ninety-year-old Merchants Club of New York, located in the old textile district and allowing no Jews to belong, and it is true of the ultra-ultra Duquesne Club of Pittsburgh. ¹⁷

   As it can be shown that many of the progenitors of club members came into their money via party politics, such as through early public utility and railroad franchises, and as their members shuttle in and out of high government posts with almost metronomic regularity, and are big political campaign contributors, it must be evident, prima facie, that they are also political clubs. They are concerned with finance and with politics. They are, in brief, finpolitan, perhaps 45 per cent devoted to business, 45 per cent to politics and 10 per cent to blessed sociability.

   While the inner pattern of arrangements differs from club to club, we may take a look at the redoubtable Duquesne Club to find out what they are all really about.

   "It is when you go upstairs in the Duquesne that you begin to enter the substratosphere of executive power," says Osborn Elliott. "On the second floor there are no fewer than five dining rooms, including the main one; and in each of these., day after day, the same people sit at the same tables. As you enter the main dining room, the Gulf Oil table is across the way; Gulf's chairman David Proctor sits facing the door, surrounded by his senior vice presidents. In the corner over to the right is the Koppers table, populated by most of the top men in that company, and next to it is the U.S. Steel table, where sales vice presidents break bread together. In another smaller room nearby, Pittsburgh Coke & Chemical's president, chairman and vice presidents gather daily; in still another, Pittsburgh Plate Glass has a central spot, while Alcoa's executive committee chairman, Boy Hunt, holds forth in the corner--next to Jack Heinz's table.

   "If the Duquesne's second floor feeds the captains of industry, many of the field marshals are to be found on the fourth and fifth floors, where thirty-five suites are rented out by the year (at $12,000 and up) to such companies as U.S. Steel, Gulf Oil, Jones & Laughlin, Blaw-Knox, and Alcoa, to name just a few. These attractively decorated apartments usually have a bedroom, living room and dining room; they are used by the companies' topmost brass for meetings and lunch almost very day, and for dinners perhaps two or three times a week, particularly when a visiting fireman, or rather fire chief, comes to town. . . .

   "In these company suites new products and mergers are planned, bargaining strategy for labor negotiations is hammered out, multi-million-dollar financing arrangements are made. Here, and in the public dining rooms below, the professionals of production get together and exchange ideas, day by day. There is a daily exposure of people to people who are all of the same mold or forced into the same mold. This tends, no doubt, to channel their interests and energies toward the mono-purpose goal of production; and it may well be, as has been said, that Pittsburgh would not be the production marvel it is without the exchange of information, techniques and ideas that take place every noontime at the Duquesne." ¹⁸

   This continuous-performance center is obviously a caucus room and continuous seminar of finpolity. Jews, of course, and anyone without big money or high position, are barred. Baltzell relates that "Even today there is in Pittsburgh an executive at the very top level of leadership in one of the nation's major corporations who has never been taken into the Duquesne because of his Jewish origins (even though he has never been associated in any way with the city's Jewish community). But as this executive's high functional position would ordinarily demand Duquesne Club membership, other arrangements have been made. In other words, although it may seem absurd, he is allowed and encouraged to entertain important business associates in his company's private suite on the upper floor of the Duquesne. And he does this in spite of being barred from membership in the club! It may seem hard to believe that such a dehumanizing situation would be tolerated either by this talented executive of Jewish antecedents or by his gentile office colleagues who are also leaders at the Duquesne." ¹⁹

   Baltzell also tells of a high Jewish executive in Chicago who was denied the presidency of a corporation founded by Jews because he would be barred from membership on "religious" grounds from the leading club. He resigned and, a man of proper temper, refused to reconsider when the board of directors changed its mind. ²⁰

   "Many such dreams of corporate and financial empire-building have been consummated within the halls of America's more exclusive clubs," notes Professor Baltzell after relating how Cecil Rhodes had used his club to buy out Jewish Barney Barnato in the De Beers diamond syndicate, "The greatest financial imperialist of them all, J. Pierpont Morgan, belonged to no less than nineteen clubs in this country and along Pall Mall. One of his dreams was realized on the night of December 12, 1900, in the course of a private dinner at the University Club in New York. Carnegie's man, Charles M. Schwab, was the guest of honor and the steel trust was planned that night." ²¹

   Not only are the big deals arranged in the comfortable privacy of the interlocking clubs, where nosey journalists, repelled by the claim of privacy, are not about watching the comings and goings of the sociable principals but, as already indicated, general policy governing the interlocking corporate world, as distinct from the specific policy of each company, is there determined. Even big tycoons must eat; and they eat together in their clubs. As it happens, during the meals, arrangements are made for organizing the world after their hearts' desires.

   The club rule against Jews, not at all strangely, turns out also to be the corporate rule. Some writers deplore, directly or by implication, the nonadmittance of Jews (and Negroes) to the clubs; but even if they were admitted matters would be little different. What significant alteration of the world for the better would follow if Sidney Weinberg, Meyer Kastenbaum or Thurgood Marshall were made members of The Links or the Knickerbocker Club? Could they, even if they wanted to, change the finpolitan outlook? For the clubs make sure, in advance, that anyone taken in agrees broadly with their weltaunschauung.

   If Jews were suddenly admitted to the clubs and upper corporate positions would it be a gain for liberalism? In view of Baltzell it would (and he is probably right in this) result in a strengthening of the ruling class, in making it more competent, less mindlessly castelike. It would make the ruling class more effective, would make it, as far as sheer merit is concerned, more aristocratic. But merely the selection of the best people in a certain limited scale of values is no guarantee of general aristocracy. The best gangster, although he may be an aristocrat among gangsters, can hardly be taken as an aristocrat.

   Baltzell defines aristocracy as follows: "By an aristocracy I mean (1) a community of upper-class families whose members are born to positions of high prestige and assured dignity because their ancestors have been leaders (elite members) for one generation or more; (2) that these families are carriers of a set of traditional values which command authority because they represent the aspirations of both the elite and the rest of the population; and (3) that this class continue to justify its authority (a) by contributing its share of contemporary leaders and (b) by continuing to assimilate, in each generation, the families of new members of the elite. As with the elite concept, I do not conceive of the aristocracy as the 'best' or the 'fittest' in the sense of the term 'natural aristocracy' as used by Jefferson. The aristocratic process means that the upper class is open." ²²

   He is not, however, making a plea for aristocratic rule but, as he stresses, "it is the central thesis of this book that no nation can long endure without both the liberal democratic and the authoritative aristocratic processes." ²³ He sees the true aristocrat as a public leader.

   But aristocrats, in Jefferson's sense of the naturally best, are not produced invariably or even generally from a community of hereditary upper-class families, as Baltzell's tracing of the class origins of Abraham Lincoln shows.

   "If an upper class degenerates into a caste, moreover," as Baltzell so well puts it, "the traditional authority of an establishment is in grave danger of disintegrating, while society becomes a field for careerists seeking success and affluence." And this is the present American position.

   A true aristocracy developed in the clubs (or elsewhere) might indeed change the world for the better. But merely lowering the barriers to Jews and Negroes would not accomplish this, as the clubs also bar on other caste grounds. It is the general values of the clubs more than their exclusionary policy that are most open to question.

   The very caste structure of the American propertied elite--as Baltzell agrees--shows it not to be an aristocracy, shows that it is afraid of competition from natural excellence. Plato, an aristocrat, would not have barred a man from his Academy because he was a Jew but he did bar him if he did not know geometry. Nor would he have barred from discourse a man just because he disagreed with him; he even reported for history the crucial difficulties for his beloved theory of ideas raised by Parmenides.

   The nonadmittance of Jews (and Negroes) to the upper ruling clubs is cited here not to reiterate the truism that the finpols are illiberal and narrow-minded or to imply that Jews and Negroes should in the name of democracy or aristocracy be admitted to their circle. My observations, unlike those of Baltzell and others, are made only descriptively, to establish a tracer, as is done when physicians inject radioactive isotopes in order to make some determination about an organism. The nonadmittance of Jews to the central clubs enables us to make a vital determination: that decisions made in the clubs hold with rigor out in the corporate world and in society. If Jews and Negroes should now suddenly be admitted, the determination here made would still stand, for all time. It would signal only that the finpols had changed their minds: The acceptance of Jews and Negroes in the clubs and corporations would still show they had determining power. Whatever they do in this matter, pro or con, it is still their decision before history.

   Jews, we may remind ourselves, are and have been members of the United States Supreme Court, the Cabinet and both houses of Congress. They have been high in the armed forces, often charged with the most vital matters of national defense, as in the case of Admiral Hyman Rickover. They have been governors of leading states such as New York and Connecticut, have been deep in the construction of delicate national policy in war and in peace. They are neither formally excluded by American public institutions nor informally excluded by the popular political process. The instrumentality of their entrance into political life has been, largely, the post-Civil War Democratic Party, and in this sense the latter-day urban Democratic Party has been more democratic (as well as more republican) than the Republican Party. Jews like Jacob Javits, Louis Lefkowitz and even Barry Goldwater in the Republican Party are distinct odd numbers.

   But Jews, although very much to the fore in public life, and quite distinguished (Brandeis, Cardozo, Frankfurter, Lehman, Rickover, Baruch, Arthur J. Goldberg, Morgenthau, Ribicoff and others), disproportionately distinguished in the fields of learning and the arts and disproportionately few in prisons, are rarely acceptable as middle-range executives of the leading corporations and seldom appear as chief executive officers.

   Now, it may be purely coincidental that we have before us these two parallel facts: exclusion of Jews from the leading clubs and from the corporate ranks. But this seems extremely doubtful. For the clubs have as their members virtually every leading stockholder, higher executive and key corporation lawyer. The policy vis-à-vis Jews which they collectively enforce in the clubs in the name of personal selection of associates is the same policy they separately enforce in the quasi-public corporations.

   Considering the wide acceptance of Jews in public life and in the elites of science, scholarship, professions, the arts, entertainment and organized sports and their simultaneous nonadmittance to the entirely private metropolitan clubs and quasi-public corporations, we are forced to conclude that elitist decisions have been made, pro in some quarters, contra in others.

   It might be argued in the light of the evidence thus far that Jews are not admitted to the clubs because they are not admitted to the corporations, that the corporations control the club people rather than the club people the corporations. But as this is a uniform policy and the corporations have no unified meeting ground of their own, it seems evidentially preferable to conclude that the unified ruling must come from the locus of unified membership, the clubs.

   In any event, we know on the basis of very careful direct research that the club is primary to the corporation. For if one is not admitted to one of the clubs first--in New York the leading clubs that have been mentioned or in one of the provincial cities to the central club, such as the Duquesne in Pittsburgh--one will never move into the upper corporate executive echelons. Admission to one of the prime clubs of, say, a vice president or general manager, is the general signal that one is regarded as a Coming Man, that one is either at or very near the top. Shades of deference the man was never before accorded now become his due. Not being admitted usually signals that a man has reached the end of his climb.

   This general fact is precisely established by E. Digby Baltzell. ²⁴ The evidence, says Professor Baltzell, shows that the club is the tail that wags the corporate dog.

   Others, such as Osborn Elliott, traversing the same ground, cite evidence pointing to the same conclusion. ²⁵

   As a purely mechanical matter it would be difficult for a ruling by the corporations to be transmitted to the clubs; but it is easy for a consensus ruling to go from the clubs to the corporations. The leading stockholders and corporate officers all meet and mingle in the clubs; they do not meet and mingle in the corporations where they are limited to one or a few companies each. Unified policy comes, then, from the clubs, not from the corporations. The clubs are the centers of finpolitan eliteness.

   For the purposes of this presentation it makes no difference where the discrimination begins--the clubs or the corporations. But by reason of the fact that it prevails in the leading clubs as well as the leading corporations, in the private sanctuaries of the controlling large stockholders, it seems clearly evident that the discrimination is the consequence of a decision in a closely knit group at the top. As we have seen, the corporations are controlled by very small groups, with ownership stakes ranging from 10 to 100 per cent. If these owner-controllers wished policy to be otherwise they could easily order it, in the corporations as well as the clubs. They do not want a different policy, however--at least not yet--so the present policy prevails.

   As this is a policy neither required by law nor sanctioned by formal public policy, it clearly emanates from control quarters outside the framework of formal government or public discussion. It is policy based upon an autonomous elite decision. That decision was probably never taken after a full-dress discussion but originally emanated from, and has since been repeatedly endorsed in, innumerable informal club conversations.

   Now, what are the grounds for saying that Jews are excluded from corporate managerial employment?

   "In the United States," says a key University of Michigan study, "Jews are no longer disadvantaged with respect to education or income. Their training and educational background are conspicuously underutilized, however, in the executive ranks of most major corporations. The evidence need not be recapitulated here; every serious effort to collect data on this subject has yielded the same general conclusions. In recent years, for example, Jews have comprised 12 to 15 per cent of the graduating classes of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, an institution to which the executive recruiters of many large companies regularly turn. Among the executives of such companies appearing at Harvard's seminars and training programs for businessmen, fewer than 0.5 per cent were estimated to be Jewish." ²⁶

   Exclusion is contrived, says this study, by the ostensible utilization of easily manipulated "nonability" factors in evaluating prospective personnel--social connections, religious background, attendance at the right schools, membership in the right clubs and fraternities, appearance, residence in good neighborhoods and circumspectly self-assured deportment. Baltzell, however, cites instances where highly competent applicants for corporate entry who had all the "nonability" factors on their side in abundance, and seemed to be on the way in, were turned down as soon as it became clear they were Jewish. One sees this, in fact, very frequently.

   "Approximately 8 per cent of the college-trained population of the United States is Jewish," says Vance Packard; "against this, consider the fact that Jews constitute less than one half of 1 per cent of the total executive personnel in leading American industrial companies." ²⁷ This figure should also be considered in relation to the fact that 3 per cent of the population is Jewish. Jews, very clearly, are glaringly underrepresented in corporate management in relation to their frequency in the population and among college graduates.

   Out of 2,000 management people at U.S. Steel a researcher for the American Jewish Committee could find only nine or ten who were Jews, less than 0.5 per cent. ²⁸

   The facts are established as well in a number of careful special studies, national and local. Even in cities with large Jewish populations, like New York and Philadelphia, where frequency in the population might be expected to be reflected at least locally in management ranks, the percentage of Jewish participation is negligible. ²⁹

   Exceptions have been few. Gerard Swope, one-time president of General Electric, was never accepted by the leading clubs, nor was David Sarnoff of the Radio Corporation of America, which was developed with Jewish money. Sears, Roebuck, although built by Jews, goes along with the practice of preferring non-Jewish executives.

   Of perhaps more significance to most people is the fact that this exclusion extends to lower levels of employment in companies and industries. Many companies and industries discriminate boldly in lower-level employment of Jews as well as Negroes; some discriminate only against Negroes.

   It was reported in 1965 to Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz that major corporations, recipients of huge government defense contracts financed out of public tax money, were discriminating against Jews and Catholics as well on managerial and lower levels. Secretary Wirtz promised to seek laws to stop the practice. ³⁰ When discrimination against Catholics can be shown, it becomes political dynamite owing to the frequency of Catholics in the national electorate. Jews, in addition to being fewer, are more concentrated in certain regions, and anti-Jewish discrimination is more easily and slyly applied. It is, moreover, approved by the mindless generally, Catholic or Protestant.

   Because corporations have grown so that they extend over such a great portion of daily life, discrimination in corporations on managerial and lower levels serves to cut people off from positions where they can function. Among the many things corporations are tending more and more to monopolize are human functions. Most members of the labor force now work for a large organization--the $50-million-asset-plus corporations, government or the public-private educational system; it is increasingly difficult to find people who do not work for one of these. When corporations, thrusting into larger and larger areas of local and personal life, practice discrimination it simply cuts the victims off from a chance to function. Jews particularly, and Negroes, sometimes Catholics, are denied such functional opportunities, although some Jews have unwittingly benefited by being forced into independent though marginal enterprises of their own.

   The most keenly felt loss, perhaps--and loss to the country--stems from the fact that many positions are classified as managerial when they are really technical and semiprofessional.

   But the reason the barriers will not be as easily removed as some seem to suppose is this: The modern corporation is organized very much along military lines, although its military lineaments are carefully cloaked in all sorts of public-relations formulas. There is a chain of command, from the directors and top officers down to the department foremen. In this chain of command one obeys orders. The orders are not usually passed on brusquely, as in an army, and failure to obey the orders does not bring one before a courtmartial. The process is much subtler. The successful organization man can hear orders that are never uttered. In order to move up in the managerial ranks one must be "smart" enough to "catch on" without being told everything.

   As William Whyte makes clear in The Organization Man, the members of the managerial chain of command are carefully selected with the minutest attention to detail. One can be shunted into numberless corporate Siberias, never to emerge, for all sorts of sins of omission and commission. If one's wife does not qualify for the country-club set this can impede promotion. Queer people in the family like pacifists or single-taxers can create doubts. Wearing the wrong clothes--too gay, too funereal, inharmonious--can earn disapproval and lack of promotion.

   One is usually fired only for some overt infraction or glaring blunder. But not being promoted is often tantamount to being fired.

   What is wanted, as Whyte makes clear, is the pleasantly agreeable conformist--an intellectual and moral castrate. Like the German soldier, it is not for him to reason why, but only to follow orders or to anticipate unvoiced orders. The aim of it all is maximum profitability amid public acceptance for the corporation.

   The basic rule of the corporation is that which Theodore Roosevelt said was the ultimate criterion of his social class: "Does it pay?" ³¹

   This chain of command in the corporations with their huge assets is obviously very important. It is no place for deviants, real or supposed. And the big owners of property are extremely nervous, very defensive, as some of their memoirs show. ³² One could deduce the same conclusion by considering their elaborate electronically guarded safe-deposit vaults, high electrified fences and stone walls around estates and complicated systems of guards, watchmen and locks in their dwellings. And it is true, as demonstrated by the existence of bank robbers and safe crackers and the utterances of radicals of the Left, that many persons have designs on their enormous wealth and position.

   They are, therefore, unduly sensitive, perhaps hypersensitive, about their propertied domains. They don't want any wrong elements in their precious chain of command, and any element they don't fully understand is apt to seem unsuitable.

   While Jews--and Catholics and Negroes--like other groupings of people, distribute according to the normal curve of probability, showing certain percentages of every type and most of them concentrated in the middle area, Jews like Negroes have a higher visibility. In the case of Jews the higher visibility, where it is present, comes from cultural differences.

   Again, a number of prominent Jews appear to have taken seriously, too seriously, the formal documents of the American legal system, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and perhaps Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Such were, obviously, Joseph Pulitzer and Louis D. Brandeis, who did not see the emerging corporation as an unalloyed boon. These were public men rather than finpols. How many other Jews, the finpols no doubt ask themselves, are like these?

   Within the corporations, as the recent electrical-industry scandal shows, many things go on that are bound to be viewed askance by the public. When the milk is watered it is necessary to have a line of loyal managers, to have nobody present who is apt to blow the whistle and call in the police. To insure this one needs carefully screened people. People who are excluded are, then, not basically excluded on racial or religious grounds--for the corporate men have no more interest in ideology than has a giraffe--but on grounds of reliability, real or supposed. Anyone about whom there is doubt that his primary loyalty will be to the corporation must be left out--and this goes for Jew, Catholic, deeply committed Protestant or any overt moralist, unorthodox ideologist or detached scholar.

   In objecting to the exclusion of Jews it is overlooked that corporations exclude on other grounds as well. They wouldn't knowingly hire a David Thoreau for example. They aren't partial to liberals, and Jews are associated historically with liberalism. The exclusion of Jews, then, even by some corporate people who marry Jews, traces back today to the general fear of any disturbing influence along the chain of command. It is not that the corporations want passive people. They want aggressive, ambitious people, but aggressiveness and ambition must be channelized toward one goal: making money. Any other interest is disturbing.

   While it is no doubt galling for any people, especially people within a supposedly democratic society, to be stigmatized in advance of performance, this whole prospect is not as bleak as it at first seems. Corporations (on behalf of their owners.) get their way in society by both the proper and improper use of money. In one of the approved ways, they constantly entice personnel away from government, the educational system and other socially supportive areas. A man may be doing an excellent job as a personnel director for a school or hospital at, say, $8,000-$9,000 a year when he is spotted by an alert corporation scout, who offers him, say, $18,000 a year plus other prospects. As the saying goes, the man cannot afford to turn down this opportunity to better his condition, and few would ask him to; his family stages a celebration over father's "promotion." He joins the corporation, where his work may not be nearly as socially effective as it was; it may, indeed, be socially destructive, depending upon what policies he is required to implement. He may have chosen people before on the basis purely of talent; now he must take into account "nonability factors."

   The corporations in this way constantly drain to themselves directing personnel of talent, whose talent they often misuse in the service of profitability and a sense of corporate security.

   But an uncalculated social advantage to the barring of Jews by the corporations, although not relished by Jews themselves, is that they are left undisturbed in society as free-lance teachers, lawyers, physicians, editors, publishers, writers, surgeons, accountants and what-not. As the corporations don't want them, they come to form something of a reflex professional caste. Their services, thus, are available to noncorporation elements.

   Lest some readers think I strain at a minor point, let it be noticed that many lawyers, physicians, surgeons, even publishers, refuse to handle certain types of cases or accounts for purely caste reasons. They feel the eye of Big Brother in the clubs, in the newspapers, is upon them. Many lawyers won't take certain cases because the elite of the community frown on the plaintiff or defendant (who presumably is not entitled to due process). Some doctors won't heed the wishes of those who call them if handling the case by purely medical canons violates the rule of some perhaps religious caste to which they belong (won't abort at the request of a patient but will remove a wart or lift a face, won't give godless injections, etc.). Certain publishers won't publish books that reflect upon the nobly born and well connected or upon caste-approved ideas although they will publish books that show such in a deceptively favorable light. It is an advantage, then, for the majority of noncaste people to have available to them the services of competent people uncontrolled and left at liberty by the corporations. One is more apt to get untrammeled skill.

   We see in prospect, similarly, the lifting of Negroes from a caste of unskilled workers to one of prizefighters, athletes, entertainers and purely Negro politicians--the American Dream converted into a comedy of errors.

   The unsought creative effects of barring Jews from corporations are perhaps most evident in publishing, although they may be found elsewhere as well. For the American cultural scene is incalculably richer for the presence of Jewish publishers, originally barred as higher functionaries for the older Anglo-Saxon publishing houses. Jewish publishers have been willing to publish all sorts of books that caste-minded Anglo-Saxon publishers were afraid to publish. Thus Simon and Schuster published Bertrand Russell, an Anglo-Saxon; and Alfred Knopf published the books of the very Saxon H. L. Mencken. Random House, Inc., and Viking Press have been right up in line also publishing various non-Establishment Anglo-Saxon writers. There was, too, Joseph Pulitzer.

   Now, if the Jews who founded these and other publishing houses had been initially taken into the older houses they would have been absorbed into the Anglo-Saxon nest, their best ideas blunted in the name of organizational gemutlichkeit. This is not to say there are no independent publishers other than Jews; but Jews were clearly the pace-setters who kept the publishing tracks wide open, as anyone can see by looking up the early experiences of American writers like Theodore Dreiser.

   The most threatening feature about Jewish and Negro exclusion by elite establishments, though, is that it reinforces the ever-present biases of the mindless, who are always with us. "Gentlemanly anti-Semitism" in Germany, as Baltzell points out, paved the way for the later demonism of Nazism. "Gentlemanly anti-Semitism," in other words, is a charge of unfused dynamite lying about, waiting for the circumstance and the paranoid personality to supply the fuse.

   Baltzell, citing memoirs and biographies, tells of a number of instances in which rejection of Jews in the financial world by the clubs induced much anguish of spirit. But just how sympathetic one ought to feel about someone--Jew, Gentile or Negro--being denied acceptance in the inner finpolitan world I wouldn't know, because I feel that being barred by The Links is about on a par, from a purely human point of view, with being barred by The Elks. The clubs, in other words, are not centers of excellence.

   Baltzell relates that Bernard Baruch, an admirer of clubman J. P. Morgan, felt hurt at being excluded from the inner club circles of finpolity. Doesn't it seem as though his admiration was misplaced? Moneyed Jews, instead of feeling personally affronted at what would pass for insulting behavior in the world of ordinary men, surely ought to be able to see that finpolity precedes ordinary civility. What matter the opinions of curbstone moralists and liberals when billions are felt to be at stake?

   What this pattern of discrimination imposed by the elite clubs on the corporate world, the country clubs and the college fraternities shows (leaving aside the alleged good or bad effects or the reasons for it all) is that (1) an elite decision has been effectively imposed on the country without leave of the government or any pluralist plebiscite and (2) that it is possible to impose effectively such elite decisions.

   If it is possible to impose such decisions--in corporations, college fraternities and suburban residential areas--it is equally possible to impose them with respect to any individual or to any types-- ethnic, political, intellectual. The prejudices of the upper clubs, in other words, have the force of effective law throughout the land.

   It is not unusual in history for the prejudices of a ruling class to prevail over a society as law, but it is the general supposition that the United States is sharply divorced from such a state of affairs. The supposition, however, is mistaken. Operatively the United States is not so new a model in the world as commonly thought.

   The question now is: Are other such elite decisions made and imposed?

   A casuist might counter what has been shown with this response: It is true that an effective decision has been made by the financial elite against Jews, Negroes and sometimes Catholics but this does not prove that similar decisions of sweeping effect are imposed. All that has been shown is that it is possible to impose such decisions and that one has indeed been imposed.

   It is necessary, then, to show that the same sort of decision-making takes place in various momentous areas whenever the finpolitans feel their vital interests are concerned. It is not denied that other people make decisions, that there is a formal governmental structure for decision-making, as when President Truman decided in person to drop atomic bombs on Japan or President Johnson decided after consultation only with the joint Chiefs of Staff to involve the United States in futile large-scale warfare in Vietnam.

   What is asserted is that often, in contravention or supplementation of formal government, effective, informal and momentous decisions are made by the financial elite without consulting anyone else. These decisions pragmatically have the force of law. They enable certain things to happen, prevent other things from happening. Furthermore, these decisions relate to fundamental dollars-and-cents areas in the life of the American people.

   Our next area for consideration will be that of regulation of the corporations, long a vexing subject.

   Many laws have been placed on the books for the ostensible purpose of regulating corporations, and they do regulate the corporations in those respects in which the corporations resign themselves to being regulated. Among these laws are the Sherman Anti-Trust Act as amended, the Clayton Act and various others that can be read about in a wide literature devoted to describing, analyzing and criticizing the anti-trust laws.

   The proclaimed purpose of these laws is to preserve competition. Supplementing the work of the courts in applying these laws is the Federal Trade Commission and other quasi-judicial regulatory bodies.

   Yet, despite token prosecutions under these laws and repeated investigations and disclosures by Congress and the regulatory agencies, competition dwindles steadily in American economic life. Fewer and fewer companies, as we have seen, control wider and wider areas of economic activity, more and more jobs. Except on the margins, small, independent owner-operated businesses are being slowly squeezed out of existence, nearly everybody is being forced to work for the corporations--or not to work at all.

   As Professor Sutherland of Indiana University has pointed out, the token regulation of corporations follows the same lines as the probation system for juvenile delinquents, who are irresponsibles of tender years. The corporation like the delinquent is found to be doing something forbidden by law and is hailed before the court or commission. Light punishment and a suspended sentence are prescribed for both, and from each is exacted a promise not to repeat the forbidden act. In fact, each is enjoined against a repetition and is told that if it does repeat it will be called back and--now--seriously treated; the delinquent will be sent to jail, the corporation could be fined for contempt of court. This last proviso is a criminal sanction, held in reserve.

   But the corporation, unlike the juvenile, may offend against some other law, and may indeed be a constant offender over the legal spectrum, as many have been. If the juvenile delinquent did this he would be locked up for a long stretch.

   Despite the continuous outcry about antitrust law enforcement it was demonstrated to the country recently in The Great Electrical Industry Case that the big enterprises are no more impressed by the government than are gangsters by a "fixed" police force. It will also be recalled that those officers who were convicted and fined and either made to serve thirty days in jail, or given suspended sentences, felt greatly put upon because they had done nothing that was not being done throughout every industry.

   Not all monopolistic trusts break the law so precisely as the electrical industry brazenly did, carefully touching all the illegal bases, and those that do are careful to avoid having the proof as available as it was in the electrical industry case. The same situation prevails, there is strong reason to believe, in many industries but the judicial proof is not at hand or is not sought.

   The laws usually, except in the case of vague charges like obscenity and blasphemy, state precisely what series of acts constitute the offense and under what conditions. Evidence must show that these acts and conditions were plainly present. In the case of something so complicated as a conspiracy to restrain trade, it is often difficult to muster the requisite evidence.

   Not many open-and-shut convictions, therefore, have taken place under the antitrust laws. And they have not been much of a deterrent, as the electrical-industry case showed.

   But, as we have seen, monopoly proceeds to establish itself also in many ways not stylistically forbidden by law, as in the case of heterogeneous or conglomerate mergers. Here we see companies in one central industry gobbling up companies in all sorts of directly unrelated industries, finally producing a giant finpolity of massive proportions with much concentrated economic and political power. There is up to this writing no law whatever against such combinations, which have the effect of giving a small group of owners and controllers monopolistic control over huge sectors of the economic system itself.

   The antitrust laws did not apply at all to the public utility holding companies which had acquired operating companies all over the country and were "milking" them for excessive service charges, which were passed on to the public in the form of higher rates. The participants favor mergers because they broaden opportunities for screened internal, intra-divisional lucrative transactions, all ultimately affecting the prices paid by the public. Prices in the wake of the merger movement, as anyone can see, do not go down; they go up, and up, and up.

   Instead of proving monopoly now, so much of it having been shown in hundreds of court cases, Federal Trade Commission hearings, congressional investigations and a voluminous scholarly literature devoted to the subject, the burden of proof has shifted to the other side. What must now be done as far as a public defense of the big corporations is concerned is to show a single clear instance of free competition on the upper corporate circuit. One doubts that this can be shown.

   Now, it will be noticed that virtually all the leading stockholders, all the leading executives and all the leading lawyers of (1) big corporations that have been convicted in open court of monopoly or restraint of trade or related practices, (2) big corporations that have consented under threat of judicial proceedings to desist from certain practices, (3) big corporations that have been shown in congressional and Federal Trade Commission investigations to be monopolistic or quasi-monopolistic and (4) big corporations that have been found guilty in open court of breaking other laws and ordered either to desist or fined--all these leading stockholders, executives and lawyers are members of the restricted clubs of the finpolitan elite.

   If it could be shown as positively that they were all members of the Communist Party everybody would agree that the corporate practices were unquestionably part of a subversive Communist plot, directed from Moscow. The cry of "subversive conspiracy" would be raised from coast to coast.

   There is, of course, no "plot." There are certain shared attitudes and ways of doing business in a small continually consulting group, and these are reflected in the public behavior of the corporations. In a group committed to pecuniary aggrandizement as a major aim in life there will, naturally, be calculated breaking of rules made by plebeian outsiders who are, by definition, cranks, screwballs and crackpots.

   The dominant feeling in the clubs, one may surmise from publications owned and religiously patronized by club members, is basic opposition to any and all effective antitrust laws. For regulation of the corporations by government agencies amounts to "interference" in private business affairs, one of the worst sins government can commit in the finpolitan view. Less bad, to be sure, is purely token regulation, which is mere insistence upon a principle, but even it is bad enough. "Hands off the corporations" is the covert club slogan vis-à-vis the government. No club member would seriously disagree with it.

   In the clubs, too, are matured various campaigns to influence public opinion with a view to making it possible for basically accommodating government to modify policies. As such campaigns number into the hundreds, there will be mentioned here only the postwar campaign to remove price controls, which were very irksome to the corporations. The case was loudly made throughout the press that the economy would do much better with the controls removed. They were removed and the economy moved on, as predicted by experts, into endlessly troublesome inflation. Leading club people, such as Henry Ford II, spoke out in this campaign. But as profits outpaced the inflation, and eventually outpaced lower taxes, the decision to remove price controls was correct from the finpolitan point of view. The populace as a whole, however, grew poorer and proceeded to run over its neck into personal debt.

   Here we may ask: Did the populace want higher prices? Does it ever?

   Another type of case is this: It is shown by the government that some huge consolidation is clearly illegal and the Department of Justice calls for its termination under the threat of submitting the issue to the courts, whose ruling is a foregone conclusion. The offending party thereupon sets its agents to work on Congress with a view to getting the law changed so as to permit the particular consolidation, and succeeds in its efforts. This, of course, takes power, especially as many congressmen initially opposed to passing the enabling legislation must be won over. But, apparently so strong is the case for the consolidation, or the radiant power of money, that even the most antitrust congressmen finally agree.

   Such a case was in 1965 and 1966 provided by the giant Manufacturers Trust Company of New York (Kirby), which had merged with the competing Hanover Bank and Trust Company and had absorbed the many directly competing Hanover branches into its system. The more the Department of Justice studied this merger, undertaken without anyone's by-your-leave, the more it was convinced that it violated the applicable law all around. The Department served notice it was going to the courts.

   Efforts thereupon began with Congress, which in 1966 passed the enabling legislation that permitted this and some other challenged bank mergers to stand.

   Here is a clear case of a corporate decision that was made in violation of the law, with the law later changed in order to permit the initial elite-level decision to stand.

   Again, many persons, some in Congress, made pointed note of how rapidly Congress (after the Supreme Court ordered Du Pont to divest itself of improperly held General Motors shares) acted to exempt the recipients of the General Motors distribution from a capital gains tax. The oldest and largest holders, owners of the greatest capital gains, were the Du Ponts themselves. Many observers thought it would have been more seemly if Congress had at least dragged its feet (as it ordinarily does) before passing this special bill. But congressional leaders, it seemed, were anxious in this matter to give especially rapid service, thus showing profound deference. Had Congress not acted as it did the Internal Revenue Service would have reached out for all the taxes it could get in the situation, as it usually does whether gains have been made legally or illegally.

   So here is a case of another after-the-fact law being passed to facilitate top elitists in holding on to gains made out of what the Supreme Court considered a legally dubious situation.

   Private elite decision-making extends to more personal matters involving the violation of the law, literally to murder. For the elite decision-making process can interfere with and prevent investigations and prosecutions for murder.

   Cleveland Amory notes that in the case of at least seven notorious "Society" murders since 1920 the investigations were quashed "for the sake of the families." ³³ The greatest amount of publicity had attended all these cases, and yet investigations fizzled out. The killings were all "unsolved."

   The pattern in every case was of wealthy, black-sheep philanderers or cut-ups-rebels-who were variously shot, stabbed or bludgeoned, sometimes in the proximity of other people, often in peculiar, veiled circumstances.

   While the plea of dropping investigations "for the sake of the family" has a sentimental appeal, in all the cases the waywardness of the victims was known to family and social set and in some instances had been bruited about in the tabloids. News about the black sheep would hardly be novel or unduly shocking to family or friends.

   But a broader reason for quashing the investigations is found, perhaps, in the idea that ventilating all the circumstances would tend to indict a broad class of moneyed people in the eyes of the populace, which retains certain illusions about the gentry. The painstaking presentation of evidence in court, then blazoned in the circulation-hungry tabloids, and the sketching in of sordid background high jinks, would tend to document many doubts about the aristocratic pretensions of the moneyed "social leaders."

   There is no suggestion here that initial steps to quash investigations were taken in any of the metropolitan clubs--although they could have been--or that the police were the initiators of negative action. The police, as professionals, are normally inclined to proceed with investigations. Nor, in any of the cases, is it necessary to suppose that any of the families in any of the cases initiated the negative action.

   The mechanics of these affairs are, in general, as follows: After the crime, with the police beginning to set up their lines of investigation, prominent individuals in the same social set, with at least the consent of the family (which could rightfully insist upon full investigation) get in touch with the leading politician or politicians upon whom the police are dependent for their jobs. The right politician, responsive to the halo of money, tells the chief of police: "Drop this investigation, for the sake of the grief-stricken family. The guy got what he deserved anyhow and the family knows it."

   Here the police instincts are satisfied on two counts: first, on sentimental grounds (and most police are basically conventionally sentimental) and, second, on retributional grounds. Lost in the shuffle is the fact that someone, no doubt of high social position, has committed murder and is about to get away with it, law or no law.

   Now, in the case of most murders, the victim has a family; and in many cases the family is as sick of the victim as any Society Family of its black sheep. But this does not deter police from delving into every aspect of his career that might point to his murderer. Even if it is thought the victim got precisely what he deserved, the police probe in every direction, and family now be damned. For the family involved is not an Important Family.

   Whatever one thinks of all this, one must agree that the police in such quashed cases act in response to an elite decision.

   Elite decisions are most often, perhaps, implemented by legislative bodies, Congress or the state legislatures. It would take hundreds of pages to show all of these in detail. Here I shall take space only to mention two conclusive examples, leaving Congress for scrutiny until later.

   In the early 1960's there were before Congress two proposals, one to terminate tax-free expense account privileges of corporation executives and another to enforce by law greater truth in advertising. After some minor trimming with respect to the first, much to the disgust of the New York Times editorial board, which favored an end to the tax privileges, the tax-free fringe benefits were allowed to stand virtually unchanged. In the second instance, with newspapers and magazines taking a hand behind the inspiriting slogan of "freedom of the press," the call for more stringent policing of misleading advertising claims was defeated. Similarly, the cigarette industry succeeded in having watered down the anti-cancer warning proposed for cigarette packages.

   Even though the outcome was determined in Congress it can hardly be doubted the decisions were made on high, for special interests, and were simply validated in congressional horse trading.

   Who in the country, apart from the corporations, corporation executives and pleasure resorts, want these executives to have untaxed expense-account privileges, which amount to a hidden, untaxed raise in pay? The ordinary citizen cannot deduct the cost of carfare to or lunch on his job even though these are clearly expenses in his way of doing business.

   Again, who in the country aside from advertisers and their publications and other outlets will stand up in favor of free and easy deception in advertising?

   Both of these are clearly elite decisions carried out against what would be the true wishes of nearly all people if the issue were ever effectively submitted to them.

   Let us recall another among many salient cases wherein Congress obliged. In 1948, as mentioned earlier, Congress changed the inheritance tax law so that half of a married person's estate would be untaxed--the marital deduction. As most people are married, they no doubt favor anything that favors the marital state, and "marital deduction" has a fine, solid, homebuilding ring. Who would be so abandoned as to oppose a marital deduction?

   Again, as we live under the principle of equality before the law, it is well to notice that this law applies to everyone--provided only that he have a taxable estate, which means that it does not in fact apply to about 95 per cent of people.

   In the present law the first $60,000 in any estate is tax free. Thus, if a married man dies and leaves a net estate of $100,000, only $40,000 of it was taxable before the revision of the law and only $20,000 after the revision. In each case only a small tax was paid.

   But after the law was revised a married man who left an estate of $100 million was subject, first, to the deduction of $60,000 of taxable estate and then of $50 million! As of 1966, the estate would have paid a tax under the pre-1948 law of $75,342,000. But under the revised law such an estate would pay only $36,149,000! This represents a saving of $40 million, worth going to some trouble to obtain.

   Cui bono (Who benefits?) was a Roman principle used for determining the instigator of an action. Could anyone claim that the decision to revise this tax law, of appreciable benefit to very, very few people, was the consequence of some pluralist process? The country was not even aware that the law was being revised in this sleight-of-hand fashion, thus tending to preserve the very large estates and giving a minor tax benefit to small taxable estates.

   The decision to revise this law was obviously taken among some wealthy discussants, possibly in one of the clubs, and the assignment to procure its revision was obviously given to some legislative representative of the elite.

   Not only do the finpolitan elite make decisions such as the foregoing, mostly in their clubs, but they make all other decisions deemed relevant to, their vital interests--on taxes, wages, prices, price controls, interest rates, ethnic and religious employment policies, investment expansion or contraction, the evaluation of public personalities in the mass media, etc., etc. Hence the propriety of referring to them as a ruling class.

   But they don't, it will be said, make the decisions on war or peace. This is usually true, although they did make the decision to involve the country in World War I, a decision fraught with many troublesome consequences for themselves and the world. But at other times they are usually not heard on the question of war or peace, which they leave to constitutional officers, because they are ready to play their cards either way. Whether there is war or peace, they adjust their profit enterprises to the situation and make out very well in either case. No doubt, like most people, particularly in the age of catastrophic weapons, they prefer peace. But if constitutionally formal decision makers decide for war they interpose no visible objection. They are, however, always interested in "defense" contracts.

   None of these decisions is made conspiratorially. All are arrived at after purely informal discussion, although now and then leading figures may retire to some private club room when delicate subject matter is to be broached. But the general atmosphere in the clubs is quite free and easy, open and aboveboard, with no hint of conspiracy afoot. These matters are just part of the ordinary course of finpolitan affairs, like shop talk in any professional or vocational club. New ways of contriving mergers, avoiding taxes or circumventing labor unions amount to so much club chit-chat, but one should always note that club chit-chat on various matters becomes translated into external effective action in society. If club members happen to feel that Jews are not suitable as corporation executives it just so happens, without any fuss or noise, that Jews do not become corporation executives. Smooth, smooth. . . .

   Everything about club decisions is in this way informal, offhand, in a low key--unhurried, unhysterical, gentlemanly. The high pressure atmosphere of the corporation sales meetings is noticeably lacking.*

   (*Here, if not elsewhere, the judicious reader may pause and ask himself: "How can a writer, and an outsider at that, be so sure projects are handled so easily on the upper strata?" The answer is: one turns to entirely credible, literal reports. Thus, George Santavana, long a professor of philosophy at Harvard and for many yeares an intimate friend of Charles A. Strong, son-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, report's an incident in the first decade of this century at Rockefeller's Lakewood, New Jersey, between-seasons residence: "One day when I had mentioned Spain, he (Rockefeller) asked me, after a little pause, what was the population of Spain. I said I believed it was then nineteen millions. There was another pause, this time rather longer, and then he said, half to himself : 'I must tell them at the office that they don't sell enough oil in Spain. They must look the matter up.'" George Santayana, Persons and Places: The Middle Span, Vol. II, Charles Scribner's Sons, N.Y., 1945, p. 134.

   Santayana makes this penetrating observation about Rockefeller: "He was beyond comParing himself with his competitors; he compared himself with himself." Ibid.)

    As it seems to me, it has been shown that the finpolitan elite unilaterally makes momentous decisions that in one way or the other, in contexts large or small, are imposed on the country whenever the elite feels its vital interests are affected. Where it does not see its vital interests involved, either collectively or singly, it simply stands aside and lets others decide in issues such as, say, whether or not a new school should be built or whether a park should be located here or there. The finpolitans have little interest in such details and allow anyone who presses to make the decision.

   There may be some, however, who will say that I haven't proved my case. Although many other supporting instances could be mentioned in this chapter, it should be evident that for those determined not to accept the clearly warranted conclusion there would be no admission that the case was proved if instance were piled on instance in detailed profusion for hundreds of pages.

   One either intelligently sees the force of the proof offered or goes on muttering idiotically forever, no matter how much evidence is adduced, "Not proven, not proven."

   Since World War II and the upthrust of Russia there have emerged "Russian Institutes" in various of the universities, devoted to studying all things Russian. Some of the scholars focus directly on the ruling group in the Kremlin, attempting at a distance, amid considerable difficulty, to deduce what is going on at the top. They pore over Russian newspapers, study the order of precedence of names of officials, examine budgets, make note of who appears and who does not appear at diplomatic receptions, analyze Russian jokes, and subject every conceivable aspect of Kremlin affairs to minute scrutiny.

   Many problems challenge attention: Who is the No. 1 man, who is No. 2 and what is the likely line of succession? What are the rivalrous groups within the top leadership and what policies does each stand for? What is the current dominant policy? What are the temperaments of the top men--irascible, bland, suspicious, etc.?

   With this in mind, it may be said that a purely domestic variety of Kremlinology or American finpology could well be developed as a subsection to university departments of political science.

   What is the main current orientation of the finpols? What are their alternate policies in the event of a variety of possible occurrences?

   Who, if anyone, is the chief arbiter of the finpols? If they have no chief arbiter do they have a committee, a sort of sub-executive committee of the ruling class; or may any accredited person take a hand?

   This sub-executive committee, if it exists, has how many members--five, eleven, twenty-six" Where, if it exists, does it meet0at The Links, The Knickerbocker Club or in one of the suites at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel? What does it call itself, if it answers to a name?

   Who is the top man or is there collective leadership? What are the respective orders of priority among Richard King Mellon, Crawford Greenewalt and, say, David Rockefeller? Do these ever consult? Does Nelson Rockefeller join them with an admonitory word? Is anyone else ever consulted? Where do they go? What do they say? Do their jokes, if any, have hidden meanings of national or world significance?

   Or, if they do exchange views, is such exchanging done through underlings? What, in other words, is the procedure, always assuming there is some sort of at least informal procedure?

   The answers to these questions I do not know. That would be something for finpologists to determine. Not to know the answers is not to know what is taking place in an important sector of American government.

   But we do already possess certain deductions in finpology analogous to those in Kremlinology in our knowledge of how to determine who is moving to the top in the corporations. As E. Digby Baltzell and Osborn Elliott tell us, one can spot the Coming Men in the corporations by their admission to the metropolitan clubs. This is as good as seeing a name unaccountably moved up nearer the top in a list of officials published in Pravda and Izvestia. Some corporate vice president, not a member of the clubs, suddenly is made a member. We know enough now to know he is next in line for executive vice president or president.

   Again, we know where to look for who really counts. We look to the metropolitan clubs. There we find future Cabinet officers and diplomatic negotiators. If I have arranged the clubs in their right order of priority we know in what laver of eminence personalities are to be found. Some other finpologist might want to dispute the point. Some, I know, would have their reasons for rating The Brook and the Racquet and Tennis ahead of the Metropolitan Club. They should make their reasons known and we might, as the Kremlinologists do, thrash it all out in a weekend seminar at Aspen financed by the Ford Foundation.

   It is more difficult today than it was thirty-five years ago, it seems to me, to determine precisely where the center of gravity in all this lies. Perhaps there is now no center of gravity and perhaps the issue of dominance in finpolity is being left in abeyance or quietly fought out behind the scenes. Is there, as in the Kremlin, a behind-the-scenes struggle for power?

   Thirty-five years ago, prior to the disruption caused by the Depression and the New Deal, any knowledgeable Wall Streeter could have named the inner executive committee in the exact order of precedence: J. P. Morgan (or 23 Wall Street), John D. Rockefeller I (or 26 Broadway) and Andrew W. Mellon of Pittsburgh. Anything these three agreed on happened as they said it would, including sometimes as in 1916-1917 the decision to enter the war.

   One thing they agreed upon basically: not to meddle in each other's respective domains. None wished to tangle at close quarters with either of the others.

   But 23 Wall Street, without downrating the others, made its words felt over the most varied domain. That was where newsmen went for tips on what was likely to happen--in Washington, in London, in Paris, at the Federal Reserve. If no tips were available there, the pickings were apt to become slim; although sometimes Winthrop Aldrich at the Rockefellers' Chase Bank, only figuratively at 26 Broadway, might be able to give some special insight.

   But when Aldrich spoke, newsmen understood that although the words were his the dramatic line was surely approved by "Big John," doddering along the golf course at Ormond Beach and manically handing out shiny dimes to everyone who came near. J. P. Morgan II rarely spoke. In his place spoke Thomas W. Lamont, the eminence grise of the firm, whose mind perceived so many aspects to any simple question that he could, if he had wished (which he rarely did), have discoursed with visitors for hours about them. Mellon, except when he was Secretary of the Treasury, rarely bothered to cue any outsider into his thinking.

   But Morgan's, 23 Wall Street, was the center of the action, a fact often alleged but rarely shown. For example: A. P. Giannini, the self-erected San Francisco banking tycoon, in 1928 bought control of the 116-year-old Bank of America, of New York, from Ralph Jonas and associates, paying $510 a share for 35,000 of 65,000 outstanding shares. He then absorbed the Bowery East River National Bank and the Commercial Exchange National Bank and formed the Bancamerica Corporation as a securities-underwritirig affiliate.

   But before he bought the Bank of America Giannini needed the consent of J. P. Morgan and Company.

   "I don't want it unless I have the consent of 'The Corner,'" Giannini told his agent.

   "I can get that consent," the agent said.

   A meeting was arranged between Giannini and Morgan.

   "I'll see Seward Prosser and the Federal Reserve officials at once," the New York tycoon told him. "You will certainly be welcomed into the banking picture here." ³⁴

   Said Seward Prosser, chairman of the New York Clearing House and president of the Bankers Trust Company, to Giannini:

   "We don't favor ownership of banks by holding corporations. However, we'll be glad to welcome you to the Street if you will agree to do away with all but twenty per cent of your holdings of this consolidated bank." ³⁵

   Giannini agreed reluctantly. While he was distributing this stock, says his biographer, he was informed that an official of the commercial bank-controlled Federal Reserve Bank of New York, speaking for the chairman, had said the Reserve Bank would not transmit to the Federal Reserve Board in Washington the application for trust powers unless Bancitaly Corporation of San Francisco agreed to divest itself of every share it owned of Bank of America in New York.

   Giannini immediately went to Washington, where he was told by Roy Young, governor of the Reserve Board, that the Board had no legal right to take over the trust department. Whereupon Giannini refused to distribute the remainder of the stock and went into the market to buy back what he had sold.

   "If you don't conform to our wishes here," said Francis D. Bartow, a Morgan partner, to Giannini back in New York, "we must ask you to take your various accounts out of J. P. Morgan and Company. Right or wrong, you do as you're told down here."

   "The hell I will," retorted Giannini. "If you boys want a fight I'll see that you get it." ³⁶

   The next day, reports Julian Dana, a meeting was arranged with Jackson Reynolds, head of the First National Bank, a Morgan satellite. "Reynolds, always an admirer of Giannini, had a word of caution for his ear. 'You have made such a tremendous success that I'm not trying to give you advice on what you should do, A. P.,' said Reynolds frankly. 'You know your own business better than I do. You may have been badly treated--have all the law on your side. But if I were you I'd take my orders and say nothing. If you don't--well, they'll knock you down and walk all over you.'

   "'They can't do that to a red-blooded California boy,' said A. P. coolly. 'If they try it they'll have the biggest damn scrap on their hands they ever tackled.'" ³⁷

   Several years later Giannini, by rallying his stockholders, fought back a complicated attempt by Morgan associates to take over his giant Transamerica Corporation from the inside. The story is told in detail by Giannini's biographer. ³⁸

   Morgan dominance, so thorough that no outsider could enter Wall Street without Morgan consent (gained at a price) was broken by a host of New Deal banking laws that shifted control over many key financial matters to Washington--to the Federal Reserve Board, which had previously been informally circumvented by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to the Securities and Exchange Commission and other agencies. Morgan power thereafter declined; in its day it was great.

   This is the way it was, at any rate, up to the date that A. P. Giannini successfully challenged it and until the Depression and New Deal laws undermined it. The Morgan word in Wall Street and far beyond, without the consent of Congress or any president, was law. Morgan's ran Wall Street, not in the sense that it initiated whatever went on down there but in the sense that it could veto anything it didn't like. Mellon and Rockefeller stayed out of its way; only A. P. Giannini was foolish and lucky enough to put the Morgan power to the final test, when Morgan's was under other pressures.

   Says Elliott V. Bell, a one-time member of the staff of the New York Times (writing in 1938) and more recently chairman of the executive committee of McGraw-Hill Publishing Company and a director of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the New York Life Insurance Company, the New York Telephone Company, the Tri-Continental Corporation and other stratospheric entities:

   "The position of the House of Morgan is unique and in those days [prior to the New Deal] its right to leadership was undisputed. The basis of the Morgan power is not easy to explain. It is not a large bank, as Wall Street banks go. A dozen other institutions have much larger resources. True, the firm exercises a strong influence over a number of these larger banks--the so-called Morgan banks--but it has never been established to what extent that influence is based on financial control. The sheer money power of the Corner is, of course, great; but my own belief is that this is a minor factor in the firm's leadership. What really counts is not so much its money as its reputation and brains. . . .

   "But to get back to the Corner. It is not a mere bank; it is an institution. It has become a symbol of Wall Street itself, viewed variously as a predatory creature, exercising a 'spider-web' control over most of the banking and business resources of the country, or, at the other extreme, as a semiphilanthropic organization whose benign ministrations cause great banks and corporations to flourish, giving employment to millions of workers and causing the stocks of 'widows and orphans' to rise in value and give off dividends.

   "There was a time, still within the memory of many in Wall Street, when financial titans booted the stock market about to satisfy their own feuds or ambitions; a time when the elder J. P. Morgan could call a handful of bankers into his awe-inspiring presence and bark out orders that would stop a panic. There was a time, much more recent, when government turned first to Wall Street's leaders for advice and means in meeting economic problems; when it almost seemed as though Wall Street regulated Washington.

   "In the early years of the depression it was not unusual for one of the big bankers to tell me that he had just been talking to President Hoover on the telephone about this or that proposal to accelerate prosperity's coming around the corner. The comments on these consultations were often by no means flattering to the Chief Executive." ³⁹

   Although the Rockefellers and Morgan partners never tangled and sedulously kept to their own back yards as far as they were each concerned, Mr. Bell relates succinctly the Rockefeller thrust that really undid Morgan's. John D. Rockefeller, actually, had never liked the bullying elder Morgan.

   This thrust was administered in 1933 by Winthrop W. Aldrich, then head of the Chase Bank, when he publicly proposed precisely those banking reforms that struck at the heart of the Morgan financial empire and which were later enacted into law: notably the elimination of joint investment and deposit banking.

   "In openly challenging the Morgan system," says Mr. Bell, "Mr. Aldrich displayed at its most daring his flair for anticipating events. Probably few people realized at that time, despite the attendant collapse of the banking system, how greatly the power and prestige of the Morgan firm had been impaired and how much it was to be clipped in the events that were to come. Mr. Aldrich by his action made certain that the searchlight of the Senate investigation (already bearing upon his own bank) should be turned with full force upon the Morgans."

   What has been shown here, now, is what once was and is no more. But the crucial question is: What, if anything, has replaced the old order behind the scenes, if it has been replaced?

   To believe that all the strings have been moved to Washington would be too naive, although elected officials now do unquestionably have more to say about the country than they had prior to the New Deal. But they don't appear to have enough say-so to open all opportunities in the economic and social system to Jews--or Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans or intellectual independents--or to stop the continuing concentration of more and more assets into fewer and fewer hands. One assumes, as they don't oppose it, that they tacitly consent to all of these as well as other practices such as informal publication censorship.

   The finpols we do know, after actions by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, can no longer dictate prices; they must at least get acquiescence from Washington, which appears to have moved into a closer partnership with finpolity whether the finpols like it or not. They can no longer dictate interest rates either.

   As long as affairs proceed more or less smoothly, this unsolemnized partnership will no doubt continue: Money talks. But when, as and if matters get out of hand and crises strike, it will again be a case of each for himself. While the Crown and the Baronage appear to be honeymooning just now in the Welfare-Warfare State it is probable that in some great crisis analogous to the Great Depression they will find they are pulling in different directions, have different basic interests.

   Should that happen, should the finpols find they are once again confronted by pubpols with overwhelming problems on their hands, what will happen? Assuming that the crisis is not too great it seems that the pubpols, always able to wrap themselves in the flag and point to the apostolic succession since George Washington, will have the edge. The finpols are at their best in behind-the-scenes maneuvering. When public questions must be openly dealt with the pubpols are able to make use of the vast (if temporary in the, life of every pubpol) reserve powers conferred upon them by the Constitution.

   What will happen, though, if the pubpols in charge are abject servitors of the finpols, their sincere admirers? What happens to pubpols who follow too slavishly the finpol script was shown by Herbert Hoover. They expire in futility and the national situation deteriorates. Sooner or later (and for the sake of the public one hopes it is always sooner) the pubpols must be guided by the remorseless logic of the situation as it confronts them and must address it forthrightly in terms of the values their culture has provided them.

   The newspapers, largely owned, controlled or patronized with advertising by the finpols do, with the emphasis on Washington affairs, practice pubpology assiduously. Not much in the goings, comings and doings, even private thinking, of the pubpols escapes minute scrutiny and repeated review. It would be too much to expect these same finpolitan newspapers to turn the spotlight of critical attention on their esteemed friends, the finpols. But what the newspapers don't do, perhaps some nonconformist political scientists might do.

   Very possibly what we have today at the top is not a tight little committee that hands out the "party line" of finpolity. The leading clubs appear to function more as a Committee of the Whole, with no personality presently thrusting itself forward. They function, not as an open Vatican Council nor as an organization under a pope, but more as the secretive Roman Curia; though always very, very informally. Their determinations, however, are far-reaching and penetrating, having the operative force on true believers of a papal decree.