No More Learning

If more big managers of corporations thrust forward in politics, the country may see something of what cold corporate rationality can do applied to government, assuming that such men retain the corporate approach. Robert S. McNamara, former president of Ford Motor Company, conducted his own specialized exercise in corporate rationality with the Defense Department, but his best efforts there had not been able to out-general Ho Chi Minh on his batteries of Pentagon computers.
In any event, it would appear that a change is under way when the industrial rich, descendants of original tycoons, and corporate nabobs participate directly in politics instead of working through subsidized lower-class stooges. There is a gain here, in the first place, for candor. At least the fractional thinking part of the electorate can now evaluate what these candidates publicly stand for instead of voting for men presumably independent but secretly harnessed to the corporate juggernaut. What any of these men propose politically may not be approved by the observer, but the observer will nevertheless learn by noticing public performance precisely what he does stand for.
Personalities like Lyndon B. Johnson, although moderately wealthy, are not included in the foregoing because they were not wealthy when they came to politics but were politicians first, wealthy men later.
No claim is implied here that all the wealthy who are lawyers have been named, for that list would run into hundreds, or that the mere fact of being a lawyer is something
wonderful, Quite a number of the wealthy and the well-to-do become lawyers although not so many, it appears, as become corporation executives, project promoters and nonprofit administrators.
The Ruling Class
That members of the wealthier classes do often become corporation executives, administrators, lawyers and appointed or elected officials, thereupon opening themselves to evaluation in terms of going standards of achievement, is hardly odd in the light of the concept in political science of a "ruling class. " Activists among the rich do seem to drift primarily into directorial, managerial or similar executive-type functional posts. However, to suggest that the United States, where sovereignty in theory lies within the whole people, has a ruling class is ideologically heretical, repugnant to public-school alumni and is for the most part volubly and emphatically denied. It is, above all, quite contrary to public school indoctrination.
For my part, I do not insist that the United States has a tight ruling class because there is often some ambiguity about what public activists in general are up to. Some appear confused themselves.
Objections to the idea of an American ruling class generally seem to flow from misconceptions about the nature of rule, which in the United States is indirect, and also from the idea that a ruling class must be formally constituted, as by titled nobility with certain formal privileges and immunities. Objections also seem to stem from the notion that a ruling class, in order to exist, must be closed to outsiders (which, for example, the ruling class of England never was).
But if a ruling class consists of people whose members veritably rule, a class whose imperative wishes and criteria largely order society, then it seems to me a case can be made that there is such a class in the United States, partly hereditary as to property and position and partly open to conforming newcomers. While not every member of a ruling class exercises rule, some being no more than detached observers and more or less graceful idlers, it is from such an established class that rulers may be selected.
If rulers are those who lay down and enforce the rules, then it would seem that the United States has such a class. The only question remaining would be whether these rulers are publicly selected on the basis of sheer merit or attain their positions largely by means of wealth or hereditary position. Newcomers to rule in the United States, it will be noticed, must pretty much accept and implement already going values established by preexistent rulers. A difference between being born into a ruling class and being accepted into it is that the newcomer must learn and adopt the general values of the ruling group. A man who works his way into the ruling group from the laboring class (and there have been and are such) does not ordinarily retain the values of his original class. He acquires, more or less, the values of his new associates. Like most converts he is often more orthodox than a pope. Everett Dirksen, once a journeyman baker, does not have the outlook today of a journeyman baker.
How, it may be asked, would one discern a member of a ruling class if there were such a class? The method, it seems to me, would be simple: One would notice whether or not he ruled and how much be ruled. In this sense there is certainly a ruling class in the United States; for radiating throughout the country are various wide-jurisdiction chains of command--political, economic, cultural and judicial--that always have someone at their heads. These head men are, or seem to me, rulers.
That there is something improper per se about such rulership, as is either directly charged or strongly implied in much leftist analysis, may be flatly denied. Social organization of any kind requires rule, and the fact that certain executive types from a
small group assume rule derives as much from the passivity and incoherence of the masses as from any impropriety or inequity in arrangements even though one concedes that anyone who has "influence," either through the possession of money or established position, does have an inside track when it comes to establishing himself in a position of rule. But under any possible version of socialism, for example, there would be similar rulers; and, despite all cant about a democratic socialism, such rulers would tend increasingly to be drawn from a semiprofessionalized self-perpetuating class, properly designated as privileged rulers.
The idea that we have rulers is somewhat obscured by phrase-makers who at least unconsciously are trying to hide the fact or to save the notion of popular sovereignty, which I unabashedly take to be simple nonsense in any possible social context. The vocabulary of concealment consists of words like "executive. " "administrator," "decision maker," "public servant," etc. ; the more direct and colloquial "boss" comes closer to the true state of affairs.
That the American people choose their own rulers (at least in the political sphere) is an idea that will die hard no matter how carefully one shows that the choice almost always narrows down to two not very different hand-picked men who have been long nurtured in the political pipeline, gradually rising to the top. That the American people as a whole "chose" any president or other official in the sense of selecting him from among many possible can be dismissed as a notion beneath notice. What there is to public choice of political officials is negative--and itself controlled. Anyone known, for example, to be an atheist, freethinker, socialist or (in many jurisdictions) a believer in divorce (or subject to a variety of other designations) will be rejected out of hand by the electorate because these words have been antecedently contextually placed as "scare" words. The public, without knowing it, is manipulated by its preconditioned emotional response to certain loaded words, often irrelevant to the man or issue. Such words are given their value content by dominant defining agencies, which are always in the hands of persons favoring the established order (members of a ruling class? ). It is not that people select among candidates as they are told. They limit their selection as they have been conditioned by definitions containing concealed value judgments. They are, then, mostly ruled from within themselves but by others who have antecedently determined their reactions. Far from being free men, they are puppets, prisoners of their indoctrination.
Outside the directly political area, in corporations and private organizations, the case for the selection of rulers by popular choice has not even the most tenuous ground to stand on and nobody at all argues for it. Yet corporate rules affect more people directly and immediately than governmental rules. And in the Catholic Church, by way of large example, the members have nothing to say about the selection of its personnel.
As all rulers, men at the head of chains of command, either come from a class habituated to producing decision makers or are strivers from the swamps and bayous who learn the same ways and vocabulary either in big organizations or government, the case is strong for at least entertaining the notion that there is in the United States a partially open ruling class oriented around its own special values. Among others, this class by cultural fiat rules out socialists, atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers--that is, as to the latter, people who make judgments only according to evidence. If one's mind is known so to operate, without prior commitment, one is a political pariah by decree, a strange political fact in a supposed free country. Jefferson could not be elected dog catcher today.
In the United States, according to theory, one is only ruled with one's consent. Yet this is true only in the sense that, if one does not successfully resist, one consents. Nobody
living ever had an opportunity to consent to the Constitution, to most of the laws on the books or to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the officials and rules to which he is subject. There is, it is said, an orderly mechanism for changing any feature one may not like about political reality. As to this, it is well known that the mechanism is so complicated and cumbersome that one can pretty much forget about timely orderly change. If the need for doing anything whatever in the world had to be determined by the processes for legally amending the United States Constitution, for example, we would live in an almost frozen universe.
Individual performance within a class, however, always differs; and even in a ruling class not all the members are likeminded, a fact which gives rise to differences about emphasis or policy. It is the outcome of policy that determines political achievement. But the fact that a man of wealth is carrying the ball at all in the political arena seems to me to represent political achievement unless it can be shown that be is, as in the self- proclaimed case of the late Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, simply looking after his own economic interests from the vantage point of public office.
Because the flood of hereditary wealth-holders into public office since Roosevelt has consisted largely of university men, it does seem to me that they have generally brought with them a broader conception of public interest than many hardbitten professional politicos or businessmen possess. Neither Roosevelt nor Kennedy played the narrow Wall Street game, although they were far from opposed to the general economic interests of wealth-holders. They were also far from socialists or even soft-headed dogooders.
One will have to evaluate the performance of the rich in public office from one's own point of view. I say only that whatever they do (if they don't merely service themselves) represents effort and the assumption of responsibility, hence achievement. The fact that Winston Churchill was an upperclass Tory does not lessen the fact that he was a tremendous achiever beyond the call of ordinary duty. And the more like Churchill, Roosevelt or Kennedy any politician is the more of an achiever I take him to be. In saying a man is an achiever one does not necessarily approve his achievement. One is not required to like an artist's picture, no matter how great an artist he may be. But the alleged achievement must be more than mere activity carried on for one's self-interest. Although his occupation may be onerous, a navel-gazer (or so it seems to me) cannot be rationally rated an achiever any more than can a miser.
Beyond Politics
Publishing has attracted a number of the wealthy. Whether there is achievement here is determined (at least by me) in the light of whether the publishing has any constructive purpose beyond making money. Here one must look for some indication of intent as well as fulfillment. Where the intent is general enlightenment, and where this intent is to some appreciable extent attained, I would look upon the enterprise as an achievement of public value; where the intent is obscurantic or merely commercial, one may disregard it; although it is probably always better that people read something than nothing.
Publishing enterprises that have grown from scratch and that have made the owners wealthy, as in the cases of the Pulitzer, McCormick-Patterson and Ochs families, do not fall into the category of our interest.
As to newspapers, it seems to me that Dorothy Schiff with the New York Post, the Eugene Myers family with the Washington Post and the late Marshall Field III with the Chicago Sun-Times have taken over or started newspapers which they have inclined broadly toward civilized values. The late William Randolph Hearst, the wealthiest man ever in the newspaper field, seems to me to have turned in a negative achievement, for the most part pandering to mass weaknesses. John Hay Whitney, in a costly attempt to
keep a revivified New York Herald Tribune afloat, made a particularly worthy effort in latter-day journalism, to be vanquished in 1966 by adverse circumstances. Under Whitney the Herald Tribune made notable contributions, to some of which allusion was made earlier.
Unfortunately, there is not much in newspaper publishing as a whole (or the mass media in general) subject to evaluation as contributory achievement. As the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of journalism reports:
Of the two hundred or so major papers, somewhere between ten and eighteen are generally ranked as excellent by such knowledgeable critics as reporters, editors, and journalism educators [with these figures I would concur--F. L. ]. A few critics would raise the total to thirty or forty. Perhaps another fifty to eighty smaller dailies would be ranked as "very good for their size. " All of these would be so ranked because they are reasonably complete, thorough, dependable, enterprising, and fair in their news columns, regardless of editorial-page views. At the other pole, a total of perhaps another fifty newspapers large and small, would be ranked as "bad" newspapers--some because of a tendency to distort news to conform with the owner's prejudices, others because of sheer incompetence in reporting and editing, some because of both faults. Between these extremes, at levels ranging from "poor" to "fair," lie the vast majority of American daily newspapers. 8
Most of the big newspapers, good or bad, are self-generated enterprises, not dependent on a wealthy sponsor so much as on commercial support by corporate advertisers.
Marshall Field broadened his publishing effort by going heavily into the field of adult and children's reference and educational books, with notable success. More recently a number of wealthy people have gone into book publishing but, it seems to me, mainly for investment purposes. In the field of books in general during the past fifty years young men of some original small property have entered and achieved commercial as well as cultural publishing success, but as these have not until recently represented anything to be regarded as considerable established wealth they do not belong in this account.
In the early 1960's Huntington Hartford, enamored of Broadway, launched the elaborate magazine Show, a critical but not commercial success. It was soon relinquished.
Paul Mellon's Bollingen Foundation has published or reprinted many books in the field of art and the humanities--worthwhile books that would otherwise not have appeared and highly esteemed by a critical few. Praise seems to me due in such a case.
One of the most distinguished publishing enterprises founded and endowed by a wealthy man was the Loeb Classical Library of Greek and Latin classics with English translations on facing pages; it was established by James Loeb (1867-1933, Harvard, '88), a member of the banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company until his retirement at the age of thirty-four. Loeb in 1905 also founded the Institute of Musical Art, now part of the Juilliard School of Music, and established in Munich a clinic for psychiatric study--a man far ahead of his time.
Many creative writers have been facilitated in the production of new works by fellowships issued for several decades by the Guggenheim Foundation, although this foundation would not be classifiable as a publishing enterprise.
Wealth-financed writings are far more extensive than the uncontrolled productions of Guggenheim fellows. Study grants are issued by many foundations, but one cannot uniformly regard the results as publishing achievements because, with the exception of occasional eye-opening works like Myrdal's An American Dilemma and Kinsey's two
books on sexual behavior, they are often indirect apologies or rationalizations for existing states of affairs. Where contra-factual or misleading conclusions are put forth even unconsciously under the rubric of certified scholarship as links in a covert in-group celebration under a self-protecting mythology, they can be regarded, it seems to me, only very dubiously as achievements. There are such sponsored writings.
Publications that in their various ways have represented noncommercial contributions to political and social understanding have been The Nation and the New Republic. The Nation was subsidized for many years by wealthy inheritor-editor Oswald Garrison Villard and more recently published under James J. Storrow, Jr. , son of the Boston banker; and the New Republic was assisted into being by Willard Straight of the J. P. Morgan firm. The Reporter, financed with Rosenwald money, has also turned in a distinguished noncommercial record. Dogmatic leftists tend to dismiss these publications because they are gradualist-reformist in tendency. It is interesting to notice, though, that the leftist publications pick up most of their grist from publications such as these and the better newspapers, subjecting it to their own ideological interpretation. Without the better publications to rely upon for information, the editors of the left would be completely blind.
Except for small enterprises run by artistic or intellectual groups there is little or nothing of value in daily, weekly or monthly publications that has not emerged as a consequence either of pure commercialism or of patronage by the more enlightened of the wealthy or affluent. Out of the masses themselves has come nothing in this line except fantastic religious, moralistic and political tracts. "The Face on the Bar-Room Floor" is an epic of this school.
While some of the rich have stood forth as publishers, not many, as in the case of Curtis Bok, have distinguished themselves as writers. John F. Kennedy, to be sure, instantly comes to mind as a writer who with his Profiles in Courage rang bells; he very evidently had it in him to function at least at the Lippmann-Reston level, or perhaps beyond, even had he been no more than a poor scholarship student in his youth. Money or no money, Kennedy was obviously a talented fellow; money simply gave him a longer reach. Talented himself, he could recognize talent, something successful politicians are often unable to do. His obvious admiration for political courage, too, seemed to augur something in his political future that political and economic climbers tended to fear, lending color to the disputed view that his assassination was the outcome of a rightist conspiracy.
If more than a very few of the wealthy have individually distinguished themselves as practicing journalists, I have not been able to pick up the trail from the dim record. There was, of course, Villard.
Six times married and divorced Cornelius Vanderbilt III (b. 1898) lists himself as an author, lecturer, cinematographer and televiser and has served as a working reporter and then founder, publisher and president of Vanderbilt Newspapers, Inc. , which briefly issued illustrated newspapers in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami. He was associate editor of Hearst's New York Mirror from 1925 to 1929 and has since worked as a columnist for many newspapers and periodicals. He is the author of more than fifteen semi-popular, semi-autobiographical books, including Farewell to Fifth Avenue (1935).
As with most books by scions of the rich, readers appear to have been chiefly interested in Vanderbilt's autobiographical and "insider" revelations. This was true, too, in the case of Evelyn Walsh McLean's Father Struck It Rich.
Vanderbilt appears to me to have come the closest of one from a very rich family to being a professional writer and working editor; he was precisely that most of his adult
life. I call anyone here a professional writer who habitually sets words down on paper for sale to the public. The definition implies no critical judgments.
The Literary Set
Mary Borden (Lady Spears), daughter born in 1886 of William Borden, the dairy- products tycoon, comes the closest known (to me) of any higher-strata American rich to being a critically extolled professional creative writer. Author of some twenty works, mostly fiction, "Her novels reveal a quiet but devastating wit" according to William Rose Bene? t's The Reader's Encyclopedia (1955). There have been writers in some abundance from the propertied middle class, in possession of some modest private unearned income (Henry James, Clarence Day, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow and others), but this is not the question. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, daughter of a Morgan partner, should also be noticed as a writer of considerable distinction.
Creative writers about the rich and the upper classes in the United States--Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Frank Norris, Louis Auchincloss--have not themselves been of the very wealthy strata; although Edith Wharton was definitely upper class in that she was of the Rhinelander pre-Revolutionary family, wrote about some of the latter-day rich and was married to an affluent Bostonian. Auchincloss, as a big-firm Wall Street lawyer with Yale and Groton in the background, I would place in the cultivated upper middle class rather than the plutocracy.
Most writing, especially by scions of the post-Civil War industrial fortunes, has been in the form of memoirs, some of them emanating from literary ghosts. I conclude that few if any of the American big rich, excluding here descendants of early-established New England mercantile families, have distinguished themselves as writers; I do not, however, assert that none of them has authored a book of some sort or written an essay.
As to great editors--taking as par for this course Joseph Pulitzer, Maxwell Perkins, H. L. Mencken, E. W. Howe, Henry Watterson or almost anyone of a similar stripe--I would say the rich have produced none. Hearst would surely not rate.
Performing and Plastic Arts
In the performing and nonliterary creative arts, one can pick up a name here and there, mostly from lower levels of wealth, but the record is rather meager. Albert Spalding (1888-1953), a very fine violin virtuoso and composer, was a scion of the sporting- goods family; and Mary Cassatt (1845-1926), an esteemed painter especially of mothers and children, was the daughter of a banker and sister of the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Neither Spalding nor Cassatt, however, were from the top echelons of wealth.
In the upper level of wealth is Gerald Felix Warburg (b. 1901), son of Felix M. Warburg and Frieda Schiff and a distinguished performing cellist, formerly a member of the Stradivarius Quartet and known for his concertizing and involvement in musical enterprises. Here, too, should be mentioned James P. Warburg, son of Paul M. Warburg, the banker, and Nina J. Loeb (Kuhn, Loeb), who paralleled a career in investment banking and corporate management by authoring more than thirty books on aspects of economics, finance, politics and public affairs and found time to produce some books of verse--a literary geyser. There is, too, Edward M. M. Warburg (b. 1908), a social worker who has taught art, has participated in archaeological expeditions and more recently has taken a directorial role in various cultural and charitable enterprises. The Warburgs, offshoots of a cultivated Anglo-German Jewish banking family, seem to me an untypical case oriented more like certain descendants of earlier Boston mercantilists than latter-day industrialists, even though their center of activity has certainly been Wall Street. They were affluent, probably rich, before they came to the United States.
Beyond this one has to search carefully for more candidates. Gloria Vanderbilt has had "one-man" shows in painting. That there are creative sparks within the Vanderbilt clan is also suggested by the fact that Harold S. Vanderbilt, premier international yachting champion, around 1925 invented the game of contract bridge, which is an achievement of the same order that one would surely acknowledge to the unknown developers of games like chess, checkers and mah-jong.
Raymond Pitcairn, described in Who's Who as a lawyer, architect and philanthropist (1885-1966), president of the Pitcairn Company and a director of the family's inherited Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, one of the larger of the nation's industrial enterprises, was the architect of the Cathedral of the Bryn Athyn (Pennsylvania) Church of the New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian). He is the father of eight children, including Nathan Pitcairn (born 1912), director of Pittsburgh Plate Glass and many other companies.
Alfred Victor du Pont (born 1900) has been a career architect since 1930. Ire? ne? e du Pont, Jr. (born 1920), is a mechanical engineer with the family company. Many of the contemporary Du Ponts, however, have had educations in science or engineering at schools such as Harvard, Yale and M. I. T. , and many are ensconced in family enterprises. John du Pont presents himself as a marine biologist as well as an Olympic athlete.
In this book reference to the Du Pouts is only to the dominant owning group of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, which since its reorganization in 1902 is what gave this group its money-power; members of this group have largely concerned themselves with business, finance and, indirectly, politics. In politics they provided the backbone of the opposition to Roosevelt's New Deal.
The family as a whole is much more extensive than the chemical kings and has been traced genealogically by two family members, obviously imbued with familial mystique. 9
As of 1949 the genealogy showed 1,035 descendants of Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, some of the eighth generation. 10 The first known ancestor of the line leading to Pierre Samuel, there being other branches, was Jehan du Pont, baptized at Rouen on February 22, 1565. 11 The French Du Ponts were inscribed generally on local roll-books as "bourgeois," so that the family may be said to have been officially middle class until the emergence of a section of it on the latter-day upper finpolitan circuit of plutocracy.
As a middle-class family it included a considerable number of nonbusiness achievers, a fact not germane to this inquiry about the wealthy of a later day. Nor is this inquiry concerned with any of the noncorporation Du Ponts, most of whom interestingly do not bear the surname of Du Pont at all. One would not, for example, associate the name of Lawrence Sven Anderson (b.
1944) with that of Du Pont; yet his mother was Rosina du Pont, who traces back directly to Pierre Samuel (1739-1817). Nor would one at first blush be inclined to designate Washington Irving, Jr. (b. 1952) as a Du Pont; but he too, is a direct descendant of Pierre Samuel. And so it goes with many others who do not bear the Du Pont name. 12
Medicine
In medicine we find William Larimer Mellon, a specialist in tropical diseases who has served the natives in the West Indies, and Henry Clay Frick II, grandson of the ironmaster, a physician and surgeon specializing in gynecology. If there are any other medical men from heavily moneyed strata, they have escaped my notice. As to medicine in general today (without any reference to those two valued practitioners), a variety of investigators has shown that it has become pretty much a lush prerogative of the middle class, members of which dominate it as a recently lucrative field. The great discoveries
of selfless medical scientists have, by and large, been capitalized along conspicuously lucrative lines by striving middle-class people. 13 It is the belief of some investigators that the present need to finance a medical education privately out of middle-class resources operates to exclude men of genuine talent from lower levels of society and to proliferate business-oriented unthorough doctors whose strictly middle-class economic outlook obviously dominates the policies and expressions of the American Medical Association. Doctors, it is implied by many dicta of this association, should properly function on a strictly individual cost-plus-average-rate-of-high-profit basis--all the traffic will bear.
Although wealthy men sometimes marry their nurses I was unable to find any women from wealthy families serving as professional nurses, but such a fact might be difficult to detect. Some wealthy women do serve as nurses' aids in home communities and during wartime. Most nurses of whatever degree probably serve mainly out of economic necessity in an ill-rewarded field. Despite immoderate public expressions of esteem for them, nurses in the United States are generally treated as lower servants.
Public Performers
Wealthy men and women not infrequently marry theatrical performers and opera stars, but there are few cases of a wealthy man or woman becoming a professional performer. One of these few cases was Grace Kelly (born 1929) who became a prize-winning film star and then Princess Grace of Monaco; she is the daughter of wealthy Philadelphia contractor John B. Kelly. More recently there has emerged film star Dina Merrill, daughter of cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. Similarly, wealthy people are sometimes sportsmen in the sense of following or bankrolling some sport such as horse racing or yachting, but one rarely finds one as a competitive participant like yachtsman Harold S. Vanderbilt in rough-and-tumble big-league action. Except for youngsters in college sports, hardly any stand forth under my scrutiny as athletes--Grace Kelly's father was a sculling champion--despite the newspaper-fostered national cult of athleticism. Many of the wealthy, of course, play golf and tennis; but they simply don't rate on the big-trophy circuit.
In general, the Hollywood, Broadway and athletic circuits are dominated by people who came up from the nonpropertied depths of nonentity. Some of these, of course, have hit it big financially and hobnob happily with the well-heeled in feverish Cafe? Society.
Scientists, Scholars and Philosophers
Nobody from a conspicuously rich established family was found in a possibly imperfect search among scientists or scholars as these are listed in American Men of Science: The Physical and Biological Sciences, 3 vols. , 11th edition (R. R. Bowker Co. , New York, 1965); and American Men of Science: The Social and Behavioral Sciences, lOth edition (the Jaques Cattell Press, Inc. , Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, 1962). In the four-volume Directory of American Scholars (R. R. Bowker Co. , New York, 1963), there is listed Corliss Lamont, son of a one-time leading Morgan partner, as a writer on contemporary and philosophical affairs. Among various books he is perhaps best known for his The Philosophy of Humanism, 1957.
1 would not deny that some--a few--scientists, scholars, philosophers or educators may have sprung from families of lesser property, perhaps up to $1 million by value, but I have been able to devise no system for readily locating those who trace a line of descent on the distaff side. In general, the record as I scan it suggests that few people of noticeable wealth go into science, scholarship, education, medicine, journalism, the judiciary, philosophy or the arts--that is to say, they shun subtle detail work all the way from managing their own accounting systems on upward. Some men-on-the-make,
however, like the original Rockefeller, have a genius for detail that reminds one of extremely self-demanding artists.
Echelons of Command
Activists among the rich (as distinguished from the more or less graceful and here and there civilized idlers) tend to surge toward positions of broad command in corporations, nonprofit cultural, social and artistic organizations and in government, in this last recalling Aristotle's observation about the penchant of the rich for political office. There they do what they can to lay out and enforce broad lines of policy within which the detail work of others will bear the requisite fruit. The wealthy may finance the detail work that goes into the creation of an instrument like television and may finally finance its launching; they thereafter determine, in concert with up-and-comers, how it shall be used --as an instrument of general enlightenment or an instrument for selling merchandise at a profit. While compromises are worked out to meet the objections of churlish dissenters, anyone is free to see where the emphasis falls and what the level of appeal is.
From the universities to the corporations and cultural organizations, the wealthy and their chosen aides supervise the detail workers. In their various positions of command the supervisors are known as executives, administrators, directors, publishers, trustees, sponsors, officials, community leaders, philanthropists and public servants. I imply no criticism here, simply point to the fact that activity and achievement among the rich at any level usually boil down primarily to concern with ordering the surrounding state of affairs and directing detail work along soundly approved lines of profitability.
I do not deny but indeed assert, while pointing to Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, that such concern may visualize improvement in the surrounding state of affairs rather than keeping them soundly headed toward the rocks. Yet, whether it represents improvement, deterioration (as C. Wright Mills contended) or the maintenance of the status quo, it shows the area of major interest. The active rich and upcoming rich, as far as one can judge from the available record, are far less interested in understanding, improving or embellishing the world than in running it, at times running it close to the rocks as when the German industrialists embraced Hitler, or as when American financiers thrust the United States into World War I.
The World of Celebrity
The Celebrity Register, edited by Cleveland Amory (Harper and Row, New, York, 1963), lists people as noteworthy according to the amount of space they are given in the mass media. Among the rich there mentioned one finds Douglas Dillon; Donald Douglas; Angier Biddle Duke; Doris Duke; Ire? ne? e du Pont; Cyrus Eaton; Henry J. Kaiser; Sherman Fairchild; Marshall Field IV (d. ); Harvey S. , Leonard, Raymond and Russell Firestone; Randolph and William Randolph (Jr. ) Hearst; Henry, Benson, William C. and Mrs. Edsel Ford; Paul and Richard King Mellon; John Pillsbury; Alfred G. , Cornelius, Jr. , Gloria and Harold S. Vanderbilt; all the Rockefeller brothers and Jievute Paulekiute Sears ("Bobo") Rockefeller; Ogden Reid; Walter P. Chrysler; Amon Carter, Jr. ; Dorothy Schiff; Lady and John Jacob Astor of England; Henry Crown; Lammot du Pont Copeland; August Busch; and a medley of others.
In combing through the list of the rich who are also celebrated by percipient editors one does not encounter any significantly additional names relating to notable personal achievement and, indeed, one notes many omissions.
The Question of Achievement
This question of achievement has arisen, I remind the reader, for two reasons: (1) It is part of standard public relations ideology that the big fortunes are used in all ways for
public support and (2) the criteria of achievement are applied in general most forcefully by the rich to others. What I am doing, heretically, is applying the standards to them. I mention this because it should not be inferred that I myself value achievement as such, and in and of itself, very highly; there is much to be said along the line of Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness. As far as people in general are concerned, I personally value them first for general amiability, which I consider beyond price, and after that for such higher cultivation as they may have acquired. A man amiable and cultivated seems to me the limit of what one can ask for in a human being. If he is also creative he is, patently, ineffable.
The achiever, as it is now known, is usually a person psychologically programmed or impelled to function in a certain way and possessing the ability to satisfy his impulsion. It is, however, part of the middle-class cult of personality to celebrate immoderately the carrier of such often purely fortuitous programming. A man's specific achievement, as far as that goes, is often greater or lesser than he is, a fact sensed by those achievers who draw back from public acclaim not so much out of modesty as uneasiness with the personal judgment of which they are the objects.
Although achievement is a splashy middle-class value, it is applied most rigorously by the rich, who bring it to bear on others far more rigorously than I have applied it to them in this chapter, where at times I have inwardly quailed at the thought of how purists would look upon the free catholicity of some of my inclusions. As I explained initially, however, I do not pretend to be applying the canons in all their rigor but will take almost anything offered.
What the rich generally demand in all things of direct concern to them is perfection- from food, clothing, drink, raiment and shelter to expertise in all skills of which they feel need. This is readily seen in the food and service in their clubs and restaurants and in the arrangements in their own hospitals. Where the rich congregate and bestow their patronage everything is offered according to tiptop standards. It is the same when it comes to choosing skills for their cultural and economic enterprises. In the plastic arts what they clearly want is the best, for which they pay astronomic prices. On the cultural front standards, particularly technical, are most rigorously imposed, on students and faculty alike, in the key universities; as one traces the chain of command upward one arrives finally at the board of trustees, where the familiar names of the rich, absent farther down, begin to occur with frequency and regularity. The more prestigious the university the more frequently do outstanding names in science and scholarship appear among the faculty-Nobel laureates or men of comparable lofty stature. The higher one ascends among the graduates, from the cum laudes to the magna cum laudes and on to the summa cum laudes the more rigorous are the applied standards. It is the same among the big corporations, which skim the cream of the physicists, chemists and engineers. Who wishes to invest money in a skyscraper if it is going to turn out to be another Leaning Tower of Pisa?
In brief, only the best is wanted except perhaps in social analysis. Many are called, few are chosen.
Throughout society, ordered from on high, the screws are tight as to (1) technical standards of production and service and (2) rates of pay for all subordinates. The consequence is that the United States is a high-tension society, invisibly and almost insensibly imposing upon all achievers demanding standards of performance and upon the labor force minimal rates of pay in the name of strictest economy and efficiency. It would clearly be inefficient as well as uneconomical to pay more than was required according to the unbreakable "law" of supply and demand. Hence, when rare skills are required by the ruling group--at this point we can stop all fencing and notice that we are
in fact confronted by a quite small ruling group--more bearers of these rare skills are produced, thus bringing into play the "law" of supply and demand. It would not do to have only 500 or so physicists in the country, each of whom could command an exorbitant salary comparable to that of a corporation chairman (and possibly tax exempt). It is better to produce thousands of physicists so that few can expect a salary above that of, say, an assistant bank cashier.
It is a curious fact in the United States that some of the rarest and most difficult skills--as of a creative mathematician--are paid for on a very low scale (Einstein, we recall, got $16,000) whereas far less rare skills, such as in the imposing of rules and standards, are relatively well rewarded. True savants in the United States are far more of the order of menial servants than they themselves suspect.
Although rejecting and resenting it when applied to themselves, the rich in general make full use of the instrument of criticism, in their own service. While this can be shown in many directions it appears most readily in the matter of politics. Not only is criticism sharp here but it is oriented not philosophically, according to reason, but along lines of naked and narrow self-interest. The politician who pursues under necessity some unfamiliar course, such as Franklin Roosevelt, is subjected to the most unsparing and ungenerous appraisal. No holds are barred. A Norman Thomas is hooted off the rostrum.
If it is one of the functions of criticism to encourage the performer to do better, it must follow that a function of criticism of the rich is to enable them to do better--as they expect everyone to do from waiters and bus boys on upward to presidents.
Achievement as a Value
The important value of achievement is directly imposed on American society largely by pushful products of the lower middle class who have received the nod from on high to occupy executive posts throughout the mass media, the great carriers of values in our day.
Any competent news editor can determine in a flash how noteworthy anyone is. His is an important function, for he decides how much valuable space can with maximum economic efficiency be allotted to anyone. He achieves his end by drawing upon wide background knowledge and evaluating how wealthy a person is, how elevated his position in the social hierarchy or the proper dimension of his apparent objective achievement. He believes he is governed by audience interest; that this is not so can be proved by showing that many of his emphases are of interest to no very wide audience. Attaining the presidency, winning a Nobel Prize, getting some championship, hitting a record number of home runs or writing a Broadway "hit" are instantly recognized pretty indiscriminately as big achievement; he has more difficulty in presenting some important scientific breakthrough. Not that many really care. As those know very well who make these measurements, not to have money, position or some approved tangible achievement to one's credit is to be a nobody, an employee at most, subject to downplay in the news columns unless one commits some titillating indiscretion or stupefying horror.
There are those moralists who carefully explain that such facile valuation is mistaken, that the widow suffering with lumbago and sciatica who rears six children to become solid citizens is as good as anyone, perhaps better. One may agree; but, as they say in electoral politics, if you have to explain just how good somebody really is you are lost. One either sees the point instantly against the background of accumulated values, as the news editor sees it, or never. Attention wanders as the moralists drone on hollowly that every person is invested with high human dignity and is of infinite inherent value. As anyone can see by looking about him, in terms of established going values this is just
not so; operationally it is pure bunk. In terms of applied going values, most people are crashing nobodies.
Eccentrically applying this same scale of going values to the rich, as they are applied to everybody else, produces results approximately of the order I have indicated in this chapter. The activists among the rich are not achievers so much as commanders and through their intricate public-relations system project their positions of command as superlative achievements. A man is not an "industrialist" because he possesses some recondite skill denied to other men; he is an industrialist because he possesses and commands capital. And so it is with most of the roles the rich play. Put another way, give many other men the same cards and they could play the same hand, perhaps to better effect, surely not to worse.
Achievement and the Middle Class
Achievement in general appears to be a middle-class prerogative. The rich, as William H. Vanderbilt observed, do not appear motivated by any particular ambition, other than to rule. They are brought up to feel that they have already somehow made the grade. The poor and near-poor, having all they can do to keep their heads economically above water, cannot aspire even in fantasy to much in the way of achievement except possibly in sports or entertainment. Becoming a soft-shoe dancer or a professional ballplayer represents perhaps the zenith of aspiration among some of the more ambitious of the younger poor.
In the middle classes--lower middle class being those with nontaxable estates, higher middle with taxable estates up to whatever level one would consider wealthy, let us provisionally say $1 million--there is just enough feeling of scarcity to suggest that something more might be desirable and enough feeling of attainment to lead to the belief that more might be achieved along some line. It is in this social stratum that dreams are born of becoming big corporation executives, big lawyers, big scientists, novelists, college presidents, scholars, roving journalists and super-salesmen.
The middle classes invariably have something to begin with but often feel capable of more distinctive performance. Not, as it is commonly said, that they are mere status strivers, although there are those, too. They do, however, have a base from which to launch operations, if only in the direction of money-making or attaining position. The only way most of the poor feel they might make some money beyond the subsistence level is by winning against heavy odds in a sweepstakes, finding oil or robbing a bank. For the really poor man, imbedded in a poverty culture, the outlook for personal achievement is bleak. He needs constant help and encouragement of the kind available to its members from within the middle class: "Sure you can be a big engineer. Look at So-and-So and So-and-So. All you need do is stick to your studies and pick up some good connections. "
Both the rich and the poor lack the balanced tension for achievement found in the middle class, often to the undoing of its more taut members.
So, although I don't decry the slender evidences of achievement within the wealthier classes, some of whom are at least percipient enough to underwrite and finance achievement in others, it is a fact that it doesn't amount to very much and is concentrated within the less well-heeled middle classes. This conclusion has bearing from a different direction on the contention out of public relations metaphysics that the big fortunes in one way or the other are really great public benefactions, largely devoted to public good works. That this contention is prevalent may be seen by noticing the designation by newspapers of nearly all wealthy men as philanthropists. Some may be here and there but surely not all.
As we have seen, only 8 per cent of all donation, in the neighborhood of an aggregate $10 billion annually, comes from foundations; 50 per cent of all public giving goes to religious institutions and amounts, in fact, to the price of support of untaxed church services. There remains 42 per cent, or about $4. 2 billion, spread around among Community Funds and special-purpose charitable and medical organizations to which the public in general contributes.
Achieving saviors put forth from among the big fortune-holders, then, appear to be few. If there were any Mozarts or Pasteurs among them it would be evident that the public was receiving gifts beyond price; but I could find none although I stand ready to be corrected on the point by any one of the many articulate admirers and supported supporters of the rich.
While it may be that the American rich, compared with the European rich, have devoted more lucre to good works, it is nevertheless true that they have had more to parcel out and what they have parceled out has not been great proportionately. Even if one concedes without further ado the acts of the twelve largest foundation donors as unquestionably and unchallengeably disinterested and publicly supportive they, as it happens, do not turn out to be much in bulk.
Most of the cash revenues of the active and inactive among the rich seem to me devoted to supporting a life of luxury and ease amid surrounding conditions of pressing need. Not that what is devoted to luxurious living represents out-of-pocket deprivation of the poor or that the latter would be sustained if only they had these revenues. Such a contention would not stand up under analysis.
What fosters the great disparity between the wealthy few and the impoverished many is public policy. Although some of the wealthy disagree with important aspects of this public policy, the wealthy and the near-wealthy as a class use their considerable influence to maintain it in their own interest. It is not that they take from the poor what belongs to the poor but that they sponsor, support and underwrite public arrangements, such as the tax structure, that makes any different outcome impossible. With the tax structure, merely one detail among many (the price system is another), rigged against him the way it is, it is almost impossible now for any member of the labor force even to save his way into the economic middle class. The tax bite on earned incomes is much too great in the Garrison State.
Even with smaller taxes most members of the labor force would be unable to save their way out of it because, hazards apart, the system of advertising consumer goods often operates upon them with coercive effect. Able himself to resist the blandishments of the advertisers, an employee finds that his wife and children more readily succumb, importune him to make rash purchases for their delight and put him in the position of a niggardly churl for counseling prudence. "All the other families in the neighborhood have one; why should we be different? " Given the choice between being intelligent Economic Man or compliant Good Father, he usually chooses the latter role and becomes, as the news editors will say, Mr. Nobody. He complains, may console himself with strong drink but always gives in. In the end, he has not made the grade but is given a gold watch for forty years' service before being ushered off to live on less than $100 per month Social Security. His children often look on him as a flop, speak of him disparagingly.
In their influence over public policy the rich and their power-elite, then, are not successful merely through being devilishly clever or unscrupulous. They are usually successful because their natural victim (or, better perhaps, bystander) the mass-man about whom reformers are continually concerned, is passive, relaxed, psychologically
conditioned to submission and usually broadly untutored. He irrationally favors, in fact, many aspects of policy that are most disadvantageous to him.
While there is much else to be said pro and con about mass-man, he nevertheless shows these broad characteristics:
1. Since infancy he has been indoctrinated by parents and parental substitutes to believe there is a supernatural power on which he can safely rely. "The Lord will provide," it is said, although it is not said just what provision He will make. Those who sincerely believe they are supernaturally protected do not apparently feel it necessary to rely on their own wits. Owing to the belief, probably well founded, that religion makes most people readily tractable, the State exempts religious institutions from taxation as an adjunct to its more direct police powers. Whatever is tranquilizing on the masses is generally approved by social managers.
Conservatives, standpatters and reactionaries invariably extol religious belief as a political support, and this was well exemplified in the inaugural address of Ronald Reagan as governor of California when he said: "Belief in and dependence on God is absolutely essential. It will be an integral part of our public life as long as I am Governor. No one could think of carrying on with our problems without the help of God. " 14
For this reason critics of the established order--radicals and many liberals who would wish to change or modify it--see religion as part of the political process of keeping the common man in chains and submissive to higher secularists, often in clerical garb. The issue as between conservatives and radicals is not whether God exists--for this question is of interest to neither--but what the effect is on the populace of belief or disbelief in God. Religion is seen by both equally as an adjunct to repression and inhibition.
What is perhaps most significant about sincere religious belief with respect to its influence on political and economic attitudes is this: If one, for example, can believe without any difficulty in the Virgin Birth of Jesus and that Jesus walked on the waters, changed water into wine and performed other unnatural acts then one will experience little difficulty in accepting Everett M. Dirksen and Lyndon B. Johnson, to name no others, as great statesmen, and little difficulty in believing that some fifty-nine-cent cosmetic will make one irresistible to the opposite sex. A social effect of religion, at least in its cruder forms, is that it fosters widespread public credulity, makes a wide public sitting ducks for political and economic short-change artists. As people joyfully sing "Washed in the Blood of the Lamb," they are beset by thousands of invisible vampires. Offended by this spectacle, the skeptic turns away.
2. He has been schooled to believe sincerely that he lives under a government as nearly perfect as the subtlest mind of man can devise. Indeed, the better his schooling and the more apt a student he has been in elementary and secondary grades on the subject of government, the more widely he has been misled. For what has been presented to him, at least in the best schools, has been razor-exact in its formalism. Although formally true, most of the lessons he has learned on the subject of government have been intrinsically and deeply false or at least misleading. The difference between government as he has learned about it and government as practiced is the difference between a battle plan on which troops have been briefed and the actual battle. What is in the latter that was not in the plan are blood, pain, pillage, destruction, cries of agony and death. The plan is neat; its execution is sheer havoc.
The American governmental system, I do deeply believe, is beautifully rational in its structure. It implicitly assumes that all will be well if everyone, equally endowed, is intelligently self-protective.