A close variation of the following New York Times headline (August 31, 1967; 22:4) is
repeated
every few months with respect to violent events in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and elsewhere:
SOCIETY MATRON BEATEN TO DEATH
It has become almost a standard story to read about women of property murdered in their isolated splendid homes by intruders, who as often as not are not caught.
SOCIETY MATRON BEATEN TO DEATH
It has become almost a standard story to read about women of property murdered in their isolated splendid homes by intruders, who as often as not are not caught.
Lundberg - The-Rich-and-the-Super-Rich-by-Ferdinand-Lundberg
While these exhilarating affairs (which seemed to outside observers to be rubbing it in) are now rarer, they are by no means entirely outmoded.
The big party in general has given way to more discreet entertaining in small groups.
They are, however, still served to the queen's taste.
A History of Luxury Parties in America would require a book of many hundreds of pages, the main source being the High Society pages of the leading newspapers. That
aspect of partying that exerts most fascination for the mythical man-in-the-street, however, is of the order of what is reported to have suited the staglike taste of the late T. Coleman du Pont, obviously a man of the people. "In 1912, in partnership with Charles P. Taft, the President's brother, Coly built the McAlpin Hotel in New York, and on its twenty-first floor he established his Manhattan pied-a`-terre. His parties there soon became famous for their gaiety and their pretty girls; Coly often had half the chorus of a Broadway show among the forty or more guests at an after-theater party. 'The General is loyal to a myriad of pretty girls who are proud to claim him as a friend,' a New York newspaper said in a needling story, 'and no one, not even Mrs. T. Coleman du Pont, seems to raise an objection. In fact, some people imagine that Mrs. T. Coleman du Pont must be a myth. One never sees her, never hears of her. '" 20
Dinner parties, sedate or hilarious, always were, and remain, a favorite form of entertaining eight to a dozen or so of the ranking gentry. While political figures from abroad are often present, no doubt useful in snagging distant concessions and other goodies, it is noticeable that local politicos are rarely on hand except in Washington, where political intrigue is the sole social interest. Generals and admirals, however, are much sought for a certain austere contrasting tone.
It would, in any event, be bad electoral image-making for a politician of the domestic variety to be counted among those present at some of the more rococo parties of the ultra-affluent, which smack to some of the more straitlaced in the constituencies of European royal revels simply because champagne (a high-class soda pop) out in the sticks connotes something exotically perverse.
A Map of American Wealth
If a map of the centers and nature of privately held wealth were drawn, it would show the larger corporations in their headquarters and principal plants as fortresses toward which raw materials are constantly moving and from which are streaming products. These fortresses would represent the "big business" factor.
The big banks, represented by a different symbol, would appear as special centers with influences radiating out into the world of "small business. " For in general, as we have noticed, "small business" is to a large extent the loan-supported business of the big banks, upon which some of the larger corporations are no longer dependent. Small business, paradoxically, is really fractionized big business.
The map would then show the family estates of the principal owners, numbering several hundred.
There would be symbols to show the locations of the principal metropolitan clubs and the principal pleasure resorts of the wealthy.
Corporate headquarters and big banks would tend to be clustered in New York City but plants, resorts and family estates would be more widely scattered, thinning out as one moved to the extreme west and south. In general, there would be considerable clustering around major urban centers and sparseness of symbols in nonurban areas.
Self-Image of the Rich
What all this shows, it would appear, is that the rich, despite the meagerness of their personal achievement as linmed in the preceding chapter, believe they are entitled to opulent settings. A divinity was once thought to hedge a king and it seemed only common sense that a divine personage be given the most opulent setting conceivable to man. The same sort of thinking applied to churchpols, who were believed to be in the closest confidence of the Deity. Faced by uncouth, undivine "robber barons," public
thought in Europe simply bowed to force majeure. It was difficult to dispute with armed gangsters.
The first thing that occurred to the newly emerged American rich was to ape the style of life of European nobility and royalty. The American rich, quite obviously, saw themselves playing the same relative roles as masters of the situation, "lords of creation" in the phrase of Frederick Lewis Allen. In the main, the style of life of the English and French higher gentleman became the style of life of the American rich, who took root in a country where, oddly, a powerful political symbol was still the log cabin.
Whereas European royalty and nobility played profound integral roles in European history, the latter-day American rich were more like hitch-hikers who opportunistically climbed aboard a good thing, They produced neither the technology, the climate, the land, the people nor the political system. Nor did they, like many European groups (as in England), take over the terrain as invading conquerors. Rather did they infiltrate the situation from below, insinuate themselves into opportunely presented economic gaps, subvert various rules and procedures, and, as it were, ride a rocket to the moon and beyond, meanwhile through their propagandists presenting themselves, no less, as the creators of machine industrialism which was in fact copied from England and transplanted into a lush terrain.
Let this be added: The fortune-builders were indeed organizers in a virgin terrain of little or no organization. They organized economic affairs according to well-establisbed European patterns, and for this service charged a fee that some commentators consider extortionate, others reasonable, What was it, really? It was extortionate, of course. Judging by their style of life they set a high value on their services which amounted to merely imposing their rule. If one evaluates their achievement in other than self-serving corporate terms, the great expense of maintaining their personal way of life begins to look very much like another instance of misallocation of resources. From my possibly jaundiced point of view, it does not seem to me that the country is getting any return for the wealth self-lavished on their style of living.
Lest anyone believe that I am particularly indignant about this prospect let me at once enter a disclaimer. I harbor no such indignation, not any more than I would have for a man who sees a particularly enticing meal outspread and sits down to enjoy it--a wholly natural thing to do. What indignation I have is reserved for those who contemplate the prospect and consider it in accord with the cosmic proprieties or even that a greater public show of deference is due. I would not wish to proclaim to the world that Americans are an especially slavish people; I do not believe such to be the case. But there is a considerable section of Americans, for reasons about which one can only speculate, who definitely are obviously slavish. They have been commented upon in the memoirs of visiting royalty and nobility taken aback by being advanced upon in the United States with alarming gesticulations of deference and extravagant signs and cries of voluntary submission.
My own explanation for this phenomenon is that the United States was largely settled by members of the lower classes of Europe in whom were deeply ingrained a sense of their class lowliness and fealty to the upper orders. Descendants of these still like to kowtow whenever they can, and the more affluent of them spend large sums of money so they can be presented at the English royal court, there to bow, curtsy and scrape, to any other royal or ducal ceremonial to which they can wrangle admittance or to the Vatican where they can experience the ineffable ecstasy of kissing the pope's ring, joy supreme. Some of this ingrained tendency, as it is easy to see, plays out on the domestic scene and is focused at times on public figures like Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller who, as the television cameras show, is at times plainly amazed and perhaps puzzled by
the ecstatic fervor of his enthusiastic public reception. That it is all pretty much of a preconditioned American mechanism, uncommitted to any particular object, is shown when it is directed, without partiality, at some former sausage-stuffer who has become a film star or at a toothsome female, obviously guilty of first-degree murder, who has just been released with cheers by a jury of her peers. Clamorous deference in such circumstances, as the newspapers regularly report, at times attains riotous proportions. What ensues is in fact a raving mass self-abasement.
In this purely American setting, the self-image of the rich is at times reflected back upon them in magnified dimensions, no doubt leading some of them to believe they have taken far too humble a view of themselves.
Deviants from the Norm
Among the wealthy there do not appear to be many who show the slightest tendency to deviate from the norm of being either a finpol, a pubpol, a corp-pol or a more or less graceful idler and rentier. The life of the rich, as we have noticed, is as patterned and stylized as the life of the poor, holding few surprises.
That this is the case is seemingly more and more clearly realized by at least some of them, of late notably by the pace-setting Rockefellers even though they have been outrun into healing by a Mellon and a Frick. The fourth generation of Rockefellers, however, seem to be deviating more than occasionally from the plush-lined ruts traveled by the general man of wealth. As a psychologist might say of them and a few contemporaries, they appear to be seeking an identity of their own by breaking into new ground, thus playing a role more original than that of mere descendants of John D. I, or even of travelers in his general trustified direction.
As one swallow proverbially does not make a summer one need not look upon what is happening in this quarter as a trend. It is perhaps, however, a portent that some of the descendants of the industrial rich may be about to retrace, if history grants them the chance, the path followed by the historically more distinguished descendants of the earlier and more modestly capitalized mercantile Boston and landed Hudson Valley gentry who were considerably eclipsed in wealth and central influence by the rise of the industrial rich.
Michael Rockefeller, twenty-three, son of Nelson A. , was an aspiring anthropologist until he was lost at sea from a disabled power-raft in 1961 while on an expedition to Dutch New Guinea with a Harvard University-Peabody Museum Expedition. He was declared legally dead on February 2, 1964. The Times reported he left an estate of $660,000. 21 According to all accounts, he was a superior fellow who was going to make some sort of individual mark.
Steven Rockefeller, another son, has become a clergyman, expounding the Gospel in benighted Chicago.
More recently Laurance Rockefeller, Jr. , twenty-two, has appeared in the news as a member of Vista (Volunteers In Service To America), sometimes referred to as the domestic Peace Corps. Newspapermen caught sight of him as he began an eight-week training period in East Harlem, beginning adult life literally among the dregs.
In the meantime John D. IV, whose father is John D. III, had moved into an impoverished neighborhood in West Virginia, started hobnobbing with the local descamisados and sans-culottes and was swiftly elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates. If other cases are any guide, he is on his way to becoming at least a governor or a senator, possibly president. The United States could very appropriately have a President John D. Rockefeller IV.
The various courses embarked upon by these four young Rockefellers are, though, obviously offbeat as far as most of the rich are concerned. Many more of the affluent young are to be found congregating at the nearest country club or yacht basin, as I have determined by personal anthropological observation in the field.
Cracks in the Compound Walls
What I have written thus far might tend to leave the impression that the rich are, relatively, in a cushy position. And so they are. But the enviableness of their position amid accumulating signs of storm on every hand can be easily exaggerated unless seen in perspective.
In saying that the rich are faced by difficulties I simply state sober fact, not trying to gain for them any feeling that they are as heroes and heroines in an enveloping Greek tragedy. C. Wright Mills was very careful to issue an elaborate caveat against pitying them when he wrote,
The idea that the millionaire finds nothing but a sad, empty place at the top of this society; the idea that the rich do not know what to do with their money; the idea that the successful become filled up with futility, and that those born successful are poor and little as well as rich--the idea, in short, of the disconsolateness of the rich--is, in the main, merely a way by which those who are not rich reconcile themselves to the fact. Wealth in America is directly gratifying and directly leads to many further gratifications.
To be truly rich is to possess the means of realizing in big ways one's little whims and fantasies and sicknesses. . . . The rich, like other men, are perhaps more simply human than otherwise. But their toys are bigger; they have more of them; they have more of them all at once.
. . . If the rich are not happy it is because none of us are happy. Moreover, to believe that they are unhappy would probably be un-American. For if they are not happy, then the very terms of success in America, the very aspirations of all sound men, lead to ashes rather than fruit. . . . If those who win the game for which the entire society seems designed are not "happy," are then those who lose the happy ones? Must we believe that only those who live within, but not of, the American society can be happy? Were it calamitous to lose, and horrible to win, then the game of success would indeed be a sad game, doubly so in that it is a game everyone in and of the American culture cannot avoid playing. For to withdraw is of course objectively to lose, and to lose objectively, although subjectively to believe one has not lost--that borders on insanity. We simply must believe that the American rich are happy, else our confidence in the whole endeavor must be shaken. For of all the possible values of human society, one and one only is truly sovereign, truly universal, truly sound, truly and completely acceptable goal of man in America. That goal is money, and let there be no sour grapes about it from the losers. 22
Mills here is partly ironic because his whole book expresses a complete lack of confidence in the general American endeavor. There is, then, no reason why the rich from his point of view should be even theoretically regarded as happy. It is probably true, however, that on balance they are no unhappier than anyone else and probably have at least a greater number of euphoric interludes.
In speaking of the rich as of any collective group there is always the danger of tacitly assuming that all the units in the collection, because they share some characteristic, are as alike as peas. The rich, of course, differ among each other in age, constitution, temperament, intelligence and knowledge. They also differ as to source of wealth: inherited or self-accumulated, diversified or concentrated, held in the form of bonds,
equities, real estate or a combination of all. Yet, despite individual differences, they are similar in that they are, most of them, held within the same social matrix, subject to the same external compulsions and pressures.
This fact is clearly brought into view when we consider that although the rich have much power, more than the common run of men surely, they also experience in general a deeper sense of frustration than most people owing to the fact that their greater power is exercised within the restraints of a certain system and under the scrutiny of other powerful people. This amounts to saying that, though great, their power has limits, often annoying limits.
We can see this at a glance by looking at the problem of air pollution. And New York City, financial center of the world, is fittingly held by experts to have the worst pollution problem in the country. True, the rich man can flee the city from time to time and has in his homes and offices the latest air filtration devices; he is not so badly off as the ordinary citizen who must breathe the lethal stuff without interruption. Yet he knows that his staff, to which he is as loyal as it is to him, is caught in the muck. And he knows various projects of interest to him--perhaps a big skyscraper promotion--are qualified in their attractiveness and even value.
Why, then, as he has power, does he not deal with the problem decisively?
He is unable to do so, no doubt to his chagrin, because of the very momentum and direction of the system. Although he may publicly deprecate stress on the health issue he understands it as well as anyone. He is, however, caught in the situation as depicted by Theodore B. Merrill, an editor of Business Week, who said in a comprehensive national survey as long ago as 1960 (and in the meantime the problem has become more urgent) that "Nobody is going to put in any kind of control devices that cost him money unless he has to. . . . It simply has to be unprofitable for an industry to pollute the air or else they are going to pollute it, because it is cheaper to use the air for a sewer than to pay for keeping it clean. " 23 The same holds true of polluting waterways.
Here, it would seem, profit is being put before human life and health, a point made endlessly by nasty socialists. And it is not merely profit that is in question but the general standing of an institution, a particular company. Although a rich man may control this company and could instantly make it stop polluting the air, such unilateral action would not solve the pollution problem, to which other companies also contribute. Unless all the companies acted in concert the action of one would have little effect.
And if all the companies in a particular region agreed to undergo the expense of reducing air pollution their costs would rise and profits fall in relation to companies in less populated regions not burdened with such costs. The inter-company position of the social-minded companies would decline. At this point multitudes of investors, some of them large but not controlling, would perhaps begin selling the stock of the social- minded companies because the relative return was diminishing in comparison with that of unsocial-minded companies. Dutch, Swiss, South American and ordinarily prudent domestic investors would sell out, realizing that these social-minded companies have expensive profit-eroding problems.
Investors, high or low, do not feel sympathetically identified with a company's problems, do not "forgive" it for making a poorer financial showing in a good cause. They simply analyze the figures and prospects of various companies. Some of these investors live in the bracing air of distant mountain resorts, by the seaside, off on distant healthy pampas. All they know is that as between company A and company B the latter, not burdened with many social-minded expenses, shows an ascending line of profitability and that this is better for them.
Why not then, it may be asked, make all companies uniformly comply to the maximum with all social-minded regulations, thus putting them on all fours and passing additional costs on in price? Doing this, however, would raise national costs vis-a`-vis industries in other countries, which could undersell the Americans. In the world market the lowest-cost producer, everything else being equal, has a profit advantage and most readily attracts new capital most cheaply. And the world market is an area of prime interest to capitalists.
It is, then, "The System," as socialists have long contended, that gives priority here to its own systemic needs over the larger question of human life and health in specific instances.
As many scattered stockholders begin selling out of a company with a declining relative level of profitability, the price of the stock, its value, declines, affecting multitudes, jeopardizing bank loans and inducing an endless train of economic troubles. And when it comes to new financing the capital is not readily available, must be obtained along the route of a fixed rate of high interest, itself damaging to profitability, rather than through the issuance of equities. Being unilaterally social-minded, then, is ruinous.
Although powerful, the rich man, even the grouping of all rich men, is not powerful enough to fly in the face of the requirements of the supporting system. Beyond a certain level they must all take the rough with the smooth as offered by that system, a point that no doubt makes disconsolate the more reflective of them.
We may, now, imagine that one of the many economists who devote their lives to extolling the beauties of this system, its contributions to "progress," is dying in a hospital of lung cancer or emphysema contracted because of pervading air pollution. A case of poetic justice, it will be said. Yet he, as insight-limited as most economists, fails to make the connection between his lamentable condition and the economic system he so much admires. He considers himself only the victim of genetics or "bad luck," and if pressed will probably echo rueful Adam Smith that there's a great deal of ruin in every system--surely an intellectually weak stance.
The rich man wants for his children, whom he often loves passionately, the best in the way of education. He sends them to special schools that have the choice of teachers for small groups that are carefully supervised from dawn to nightfall. Most of these children, many of whom sign the family name with coveted large Roman numerals suffixed, go on to the best available in the way of colleges.
Yet the rich and powerful man cannot forever shield from his own children knowledge that they are going into a society bristling with avoidable destructive problems that it is unable owing to its corporate systemic requirements to solve. Many of these problems have their horns pointed directly at the children of the rich man.
Let us took at this neglected aspect.
All general disturbing and life-threatening social problems--air and water pollution; crime; overpopulation; vexed race relations; traffic tangles; accumulated causes of civil disturbance such as slums, unemployment and extreme poverty--intrude upon the young rich with about as much force as upon the young poor. The rich young person may have better oases to which to retreat; but he is nevertheless adversely affected by the same accumulating, neglected phenomena.
Even in their oases the young rich are by no means safe. They, like others, are subject to narcotic addiction, alcoholism and psychological disorders--and an inventory of all their tribulations along this line would be impressive. They, too, in various ways are assailed by hard types. And let us remember that their fathers are powerful men.
Of crime, against their own persons and in its aspect of crime against property a rising, low-grade, guerrilla variant of Marxist class war, they are steady direct and indirect targets. As the Wall Street Journal in many articles during the 1960's made clear, there is a broad and steady determined assault on the merchandise and cash of the big companies by shoplifters and employees--crime carried out by noncriminal classes. Losses here, contrived by people whose appetites are stimulated beyond the reach of their means through the agency of voracious advertising, are passed on to the general public as much as possible in higher prices; but some of these losses, running into billions annually, must be absorbed. There are not sufficient jails to hold most of the offenders, many of whom when caught are let off with suspended sentences, dire threats from the bench, paroles, disgracing publicity, etc.
That the rich are as subject as anyone to misadventures in a wide-open society (kept wide-open in general so as to facilitate double-dealing in profitable particulars) can be shown by the citation of a number of salient cases, abstracted from among many.
In 1966 the young daughter of Charles Percy, former chairman of Bell & Howell, camera manufacturers, and now junior senator from Illinois, was wantonly murdered in her bed in the family home in exclusive Kenilworth, Illinois, on the Gold Coast north of Chicago. Her unknown slayer was not apprehended. Wealth, power and exalted position did not protect her in a jungle society.
In the same year a well-organized kidnapping plot against Leonard K. Firestone, rubber scion of Beverly Hills, California, was frustrated through the enterprise of an underworld tipster. The two plotters, one the tipster, were killed by eager police in the attempt. Had the plot been successful Mr. Firestone would have been abducted and held for ransom as a number of rich people have been, despite the severe "Lindbergh law" against kidnapping and despite the virtual impossibility of circulating ransom money. Such money, in whatever form, is subject to modern, high-speed photographic recording by the FBI and instantly becomes "hot" money, hardly worth the risk at ten cents on the dollar. It can even be treated and made radioactive, a dead giveaway when passed over Geiger counters.
Robberies in the homes of the rich are frequent and there is reason to believe they are not always reported. And this despite elaborate protective systems. While traveling, the rich are especially the targets of expert thieves, as in the case of Henry Ford II in New York City, also in 1966. His hotel suite was burglarized and jewels in the reported amount of $50,000 were taken. Servants in the homes of the affluent and rather wealthy, according to news reports, are pretty regularly trussed up by invading thieves and the premises ransacked. Burglaries are common in wealthy residential districts.
Grant-laden Establishment methodologists, exponents of a sterile sociological scholasticism, will no doubt charge that I have selected a few unrepresentative cases to make my point. Actually, I cite these as representative cases, available in any year. This is what is going on, all the time.
A close variation of the following New York Times headline (August 31, 1967; 22:4) is repeated every few months with respect to violent events in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and elsewhere:
SOCIETY MATRON BEATEN TO DEATH
It has become almost a standard story to read about women of property murdered in their isolated splendid homes by intruders, who as often as not are not caught. The only reason I don't list those of a recent year or two is that I don't want to use the space.
With respect to the high-toned village of Purchase, New York, a "three-square-mile domain of big homes, colorful gardens, private swimming pools, tree-shaded bridle paths, elegant country clubs and winding lanes" said the Times of August 13, 1967 (66:4-6), "Sixteen burglaries of estates have occurred in the last month. Some estimates of the loss in jewelry, antiques and cash run up to $250,000 but Harrison police detectives are dubious at the high estimates. . . "
No police dubiety was expressed, however, about the amount of $780,000 set as the value of jewels stolen from Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney at Saratoga Springs, reported by the Times on August 6, 1967. The thieves missed $175,000 additional in gems only because Mrs. Whitney wore them to dinner.
What I want to say here for the methodologists is that the rich, almost as much as the poor in their slums, are the recurrent victims of violence in a cuckoo-clock political system. The profiteers and their poor-boys-who-made-good in the legislatures seem unable to give much protection to their own women and children, to say nothing of the women and children of the less well heeled.
The rich, like the rest of us, are as readily victimized by deleterious products: dentifrices, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and various untested chemical applications to various parts of the body. After all, there is only a certain range of offerings of this kind; the rich have no more sophisticated choices open to them than the rest of the public in the way of deodorants, depilatories, mouth washes, unguents and the like. Their young gorge on rancid hot dogs and hamburgers at ball games like any other red-blooded, true- blue American.
That various of these products, including widely circulating food preparations, are dangerous to health is regularly made known by appropriate federal supervisory agencies, kept thoughtfully understaffed through the courtesy of a bought bucolic Congress. The rich here are often hoist by their own politico-economic petard.
For a resounding case--one among many--let us go back a few years, to 1932. In that year died after a long wasting illness Eben McBurney Byers director of a number of companies and chairman of A. M. Byers Company: of Pittsburgh, makers of iron pipe. Mr. Byers, a Groton-Yale man, had been national amateur golf champion in 1906, came of a wealthy established family and was no small-bore personality. The medical diagnosis at Doctors' Hospital, New York City, was that he had a brain abscess, caused by radium poisoning. For three or four years he had been dosing himself with two to three two-ounce bottles per day of a widely advertised preparation containing minute quantities of radium. He was under the impression that the lethal stuff was doing him some good. Following testimony by one of his physicians, the Federal Trade Commission in January, 1932, issued a stupendous order prohibiting, no less, the Bailey Radium Laboratories from advertising Radithor as harmless. Not only had this product been so advertised, it was reported by the Times, but it had been recommended, said the Times, for 160 conditions and symptoms. 24 So ended Eben McBurney Byers, a man on the inside track of wealth.
That the rich are as gullible as anyone else in readily gobbling up and smearing themselves with whatever products are offered in the free-free-free market is readily apparent. Merely because a man is clever at conserving what he has inherited or is skillful in overreaching the public in the clinches affords no indication that he is clever enough to protect himself and his family in all aspects of the freedom-blessed American politico-economic jungle.
The situation is made clearer still in the case of the automobile. A rich man is obviously in a position to purchase the best there is in the way of automobiles and have his own private mechanics service them. But, as Ralph Nader has shown and as Detroit
has more recently admitted through extensive recalls of delivered automobiles, many automobiles are not mechanically safe in a country crosshatched with roads literally clogged with cars. Even though a rich man may have a car that is in perfect working order, there is no guarantee that he will not be run into or run down by some automobile that is either mechanically defective or in the hands of a defective driver, of which numerous are disclosed from time to time. The rich man and his family, it is evident, are as exposed to the automobile menace as they are to poisonous smog. They are no better off in this respect, unless they remain permanently indoors, than the rest of society. And, sure enough, as newspaper reports from time to time show, top-drawer eminents and their children are from time to time cut down in the streets by cars or battered on the roads. A complete inventory of such cases would require many pages.
Although injured by avoidable accidents or made ill by detestable products, the rich man does have an edge in that he can procure, no matter where he is, the very best and most expensive medical services. But doctors cannot always save him, much as they would like to.
The rich are especially enamored of medicine, and give heavily to their own hospitals and to medical research. Plainly, like the rest of us, they are seeking mundane salvation. But their faith in the powers of the doctors at times passeth all understanding. What I mean is illustrated by a story told me some years ago by an eminent internist, who complained that he had been detained for several hours on a sleeveless errand while many patients were in need of attention. He had been summoned with some ten or a dozen other specialists to attend a wealthy New York banker in his eighties who was very ill. It was obvious at a glance that the man was dying and yet members of the family walked about on tiptoe, with bated breath, and looked upon the assembled doctors as a high priesthood capable of saving the wasted hulk--the patriarch and founder of the clan.
The fees for this consultation, my annoyed informant told me, were bound to be astronomical, and the whole gathering obviously futile, an instance of medical fetishism. As E. M. Byers discovered, expensive medical care cannot always save one.
One might suppose that a rich and powerful man, aware of the source of some patently deleterious influence, would take arms and gird himself against the common threat. Here we come to an aspect of inner finpolitan affairs to which most of the sociologists have turned a blind, uncomprehending eye. It is a finpolitan rule that one company does not take a public position against another--whatever it does--as long as it does not act directly as an adversary; and the members of one industry do not lead or join in the public denunciation of another industry. Each industry, each company is allowed to pursue its own way unless it tries to grab too big a share of the market.
Thus, when public criticisms gain momentum against one company or one industry, when that company or industry stands in the public dock, as it were, others preserve diplomatic silence. The mass media, too, stand aside if they do not offer outright defenses of the criticized practices. Thus we see the entire corporate world maintaining a studied silence as pharmaceuticals are criticized for pricing practices, automotives for safety factors, the oil industry for special tax shelters and any or all for monopoly, gouging prices, poor products or community pollution.
The reason for this impotent silence is simply that if one wealthy group opens fire on the cushy preserve of another wealthy group there will be retaliation in kind. For each industry has vulnerable points open to criticism. It is the need, then, to preserve some semblance of intramural harmony that causes the financial groups to maintain silence about the shortcomings of their various members. Higher capitalism is a little club holding within it diverse temperaments, true enough, but temperaments that must, under
pain of direct reciprocal attack, preserve an appearance of outward solidarity to the world.
Lest anyone believe I am making a purely suppositious point let me make it clear that one capitalist often thoroughly detests another entire industry and that such detestation, properly financed, can lead to the root-and-branch destruction of the detested industry. John D. Rockefeller I, for example, disliked the liquor industry, and he opposed smoking, dancing and the theater as well. The liquor industry in the United States was for a time destroyed with heavy losses, through Prohibition, illustrating what can happen. I am not suggesting that it was Rockefeller who smashed the liquor industry; but he shared the point of view of the Prohibitionists in regarding liquor in general as a social menace, a blight on efficiency.
Rockefeller was by no means an exception in holding such straitlaced views about the propriety of certain entire industries. I once knew a successful Wall Street broker who always did whatever he could to dissuade his customers from buying shares in alcohol, cigarette, film and small-loan companies on the ground that he thought them socially harmful.
Yet such intramural antipathies, which usually have rational grounds (as in the widespread capitalistic detestation of the powerful domestic fire-arms industry), seldom lead to any effective action against the offenders; for everybody is, in a way, in the same boat and hence silent. As I used to argue to my moral broker-friend, his qualms were vain; customers could come into his office with money from any source, even from some illicit enterprise. What was gained if they now purchased only stocks in morally approved enterprises? Moral or immoral, the companies offering stocks were all legal entities in an economic system that does not discriminate between producers of fire- arms and producers of surgical instruments. All industries are created equal.
Being bound to keep quiet when he sees obvious destruction being wrought by some reckless peer, at least the intelligently reflective capitalist cannot, contrary to Mills, be entirely happy. And his unhappiness has an entirely different cause from that of most people. It is the unhappiness of a consciously powerful man who realizes he can do nothing effective against something he considers profoundly evil, cannot even fully protect his own children. Even though he may feel that his own enterprises are as far beyond criticism as ingenuity can make them, he knows that this is no defense against fabrications which can be circulated against him to his distress by powerful people his uncooperative crusading spirit has made angry.
It is for this reason, among others, that it is rare to find crusaders among capitalists, who all in one way or the other live in glass houses.
In the matter of divorce and broken families the rich are, if anything, worse off than most of the population; at least they are no better placed. For the divorce rate among the rich, with many of them such ardent believers in marriage that they remarry up to five and even ten times, is very much higher than the national rate. Divorce, even if one looks upon it as a desirable escape hatch from an untenable situation, is never taken as a sign of sound human relations; rather is it taken as an index of unresolvable interpersonal trouble.
If stable familial relations and intra-family continuity are desirable, as it is widely held, then divorce and the dispersion of family members, particularly the young, must be an index to failure. At least the children of divorced rich couples are not happy about the event. And this sort of failure is rife among the rich. Failure being the opposite of success, in this department of life the rich, however they got that way, cannot be looked upon as generally successful. Perhaps they are no more unhappy than others; yet they do not appear to be conspicuous winners in the marital sweepstakes. As in the case of most
divorcing couples, they find each other unbearable--and not simply in one instance but, as the record shows, in a train of instances. Not to be able to find a single retainable marital partner in a number of attempts surely argues some sort of personal impoverishment in a culture that values marital stability.
Deficiencies and lacks of the kind we have looked at are not, as many suppose, purely subjective, the ills to which all men are heir. They are social, deriving from the general social situation, which has much to do in shaping the psychologies of people.
The rich, it is clear, are not immune to the general fallout from the existing socio- political system even though they may have compensations denied to others. Far from all the fallout upon the rich has been indicated and one could go on at considerable length about more. However, confining ourselves again to the young and innocent rich, it is clear that their minds are as subverted as those of poorer youth by the all-pervading influence of persuasive advertising.
If someone systematically splashed mud on the clothing of rich children their parents would soon take steps to see that the offender was laid by the heels. Yet the rich, for all their power, cannot protect their children from the subversive influence of advertisers who insistently confuse the intellect in various detectable ways. Most of the time they misuse language and pictures in the effort solely to sell.
True, the rich youth like the poor, if he makes his way into the higher and more recondite studies such as semantics, logic and epistemology, can overcome the enervating intellectual influences of advertising and homespun propaganda, thus possessing himself at least of his own mind. But few find their way to such rarefied studies and the result is that the rich usually have as confused a view of the world as the poor, subject to exploded notions (particularly in economics) and with about the same general world view as that of a postman or bartender. That this is so is readily seen in the public utterances of the more vocal of them. Among the self-erected we have cracker-barrel philosophers like Henry Ford I and H. L. Hunt and among the more educated we have the sagging economic views of David Rockefeller and, on a much lower level of wealth, the socio-cultural divagations of William F. Buckley, Jr. , who asserts the presence of "eternal verities. " A B-minus undergraduate in epistemology at Swampwater College knows better than that even though Buckley's public vowel movements are intently studied by a select circle of admirers.
One would think that a rich man, with money at his fingertips, would get smart and hire an epistemologist who would at least straighten him out from time to time about the grounds for rational belief. For we may well suppose that a rich man, always wanting the best, does not wish to go about in a scatterbrained condition hawking absurdities. He must want the true view just as he wants a livewire girl, a prime steak and a sound wine. Yet we find him apparently no better off in this respect than the common man. Nor, considering the baneful social influences to which they are subject will most of his prized children be better off. Madison Avenue vomits on their minds as freely as on the battered mind of the ordinary clod.
In this matter, however, the rich man is no doubt imbued with the unjustified self- pride of others as summarized by Descartes in the opening lines of his Discourse on Method: "Good sense is of all things in the world most evenly distributed among men, for each one believes himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the most difficult to please in all other things are generally satisfied with their share. " (For our purposes we may ignore the non sequitur noticed by logicians between the warranting reasons cited and the conclusion. ) In any event, the rich man like the nonrich believes his own mind is as good as any and its way of operation to be in no particular corrigible; one can see this in the bland assurance with which the rich often express themselves
publicly on recondite matters such as achieving the national destiny. In this belief, no doubt in the majority of cases, the rich are like others demonstrably self-deceived, victims of self-pride, unless they have gone to herculean efforts to free themselves from the free-market socio-cultural seepage all about them; they are as much off the track as T. W. K. Mits, the well-known man in the street.
The Successful Kennedys
Sufficient grounds have been stated, I believe, to suggest, contrary to supposition among both the rich and their critics, that the rich are not so well off as they themselves sometimes suppose and are commonly supposed to be, even though they may be more advantageously placed than the average man in many selected areas. Their difficulties, furthermore, are not merely those common to the flesh of man but often derive from their own celebrated social system, from the propaganda-hallowed but rickety social structure itself. Such is the resistance of indurated dogma to reasonable refutation, however, that one could pile further proof on proof in the single well-known case of the successful Kennedys, dogged by socially induced tragedies; nor are they alone.
The first of the Kennedys to feel the blow of adversity was the eldest son, Joseph P. , Jr. , who had early been earmarked in the family circle as a future president of the United States. Aged twenty-nine, he was killed in action as an eager airman in Europe during the replay with special Hitlerian effects of World War I. Two weeks later Kathleen's ultra-British husband was also killed in action. And in 1948 Kathleen herself, flying in a private plane to join her father on the Riviera, was killed as the machine crashed in rain and fog over France.
With the election to the presidency in 1960 of John F. Kennedy, the second oldest son, the Kennedys' star seemed once again in the ascendancy; they were literally the darlings of the world. The abrupt assassination of the socially aware president in Dallas in 1963 by a publicly neglected, mentally disturbed ex-marine was especially ironic; a social system eroded by neglect struck down a potential statesman through one of its neglected cases.
The theme of violence in the Kennedy later history, which had almost finished JFK during the war in the South Pacific, showed itself again in the nearly fatal airplane crash of Senator Edward M. Kennedy in his own plane in 1964. As it was, his back was severely injured, necessitating the wearing of a brace.
The Airplane and The Rich
The airplane, it may be observed in this melancholy recital, is a special hazard of the rich and affluent. Few plane crashes, unless upon buildings, ever involve lower-class citizens; many tycoons have already met their end in the skies. And the bored rich, in their affinity for plane travel as for everything technologically novel and "advanced," are themselves the victims of a smooth statistical falsification given wide currency: that the rate of passenger fatalities in aircraft is lower than that on railroads. This falsification is achieved by comparing fatalities per passenger-mile. If, however, one properly takes into consideration all the relevant factors and makes the comparison on the basis of passenger-mile-hours (for time is an essential factor in measuring motion, which is a function of time as well as distance), then it is seen that the rate of fatality is tremendously higher in air travel. As far as that goes, in absolute figures passenger air fatalities are greater than passenger railroad fatalities.
We see here that the rich are as susceptible as anyone to being gulled by institutionalized propaganda (assuming that they are indeed misled by the claims of alleged superior safety in airplanes). Although airplanes may be sufficiently safe, considering all factors, they are self-propelled kites flying with heavy loads of volatile
fuel, obviously highly vulnerable to serious mishap. In computing air fatalities the Federal Aviation Agency, for example, excludes deaths occurring in airborne dynamite explosions! 25 Such are apparently not deemed statistically kosher.
The Curse of Prominence
Great prominence itself, as many of the wealthy know, carries with it special problems. In the case of the Kennedys this was shown in the wrangle over the wording of the originally authorized book by William Manchester about the assassination of the president. Said The Nation (February 6, 1967): "The subsequent attempts on the part of the Kennedys to control the text of the book and its serialization gave the impression of an arrogant use of money and power. They may have been within their legal rights, but that is not the point. Apparently most of what they objected to was of little moment one way or the other. The public was not in a mood to go along with them, whether they were right or wrong. The John F. Kennedy aura was blown away by the exchange of recriminations.
"At a given point of idolatry," The Nation continued, "the public turns from adoring its idols and begins to examine their feet. Once celebrities reach a certain level of overexposure, there is just as much mileage to be gained from cutting them down as there was from building them up. The writers and broadcasters who provide this sort of fare are familiar with the reaction, and when some of them sense the turning point, the others follow. All of the overexposed live in the shadow of an obloquy. It is one of the hazards of publicity. "
What is less widely known is that scholarly John F. Kennedy himself, in 1959, successfully brought pressure to bear to exclude from the book The Kennedy Family by Joseph Dinneen three summary paragraphs about the attitude of his father toward Jews. Dinneen in 1944 had interviewed the elder Kennedy for the Boston Globe and had taken shorthand notes of the interview. Present also was Lawrence Spivak, then editor of The American Mercury and later a national television news panelist. The Globe decided not to publish the interview and Dinneen fifteen years later summarized it in his book, of which he sent a set of galley proofs as a courtesy to JFK. The president-to-be, disturbed, insisted over the telephone from Oregon that the prickly paragraphs be omitted even though the work was now in plates. Dinneen and the publishers after some resistance consented to the awkward deletion and substituted some inoffensive material. 26
JFK, soundly from a public image point of view, recognized that the nature of the interview, far from settling the issue of anti-Semitism raised against his father, piqued critical interest and raised more questions than it resolved. From an electoral point of view, though the president-to-be was not at all anti-Semitic, even a brief summary of the interview could have been troubling by reason of association.
Cosmetic Images
In passing, it is standard although not universal finpolitan and pubpolitan practice to attempt to control or influence--that is, censor--writings and other expressions that becloud one's public image by suggesting something untoward or disturbing. What is wanted is a carefully retouched pleasant studio portrait of persons and events, not a candid catch-as-catch-can camera shot of some bigwig off guard and thus completely himself. For this reason writers and other commentators on public affairs are generally wooed, flattered, facilitated in various ways and, at times, subsidized, authorized, edited, lied to, intimidated or coerced by powerful public figures. While resorting to the courts to expunge nonlibelous matter from a text is rather unusual, the general attitude of those Kennedys involved in the Manchester controversy is not unusual among political and corporate people, whatever illusions the public may have about the free- wheeling independence of writers under the Star Spangled Banner.
Attempts to control the projected image extend even to photographs. Few politicians like to be photographed smoking cigars, perhaps because that typical act of politicians reminds the public of cartoons about paunchy, cigar-smoking ward bosses, concededly corrupt. Herbert Hoover had the plates confiscated from a photographer who snapped him cigar-smoking aboard a battleship, and Jack Kennedy, who smoked panetelas, did not like to be photographed in the act. Roosevelt, however, did not conceal that he smoked cigarettes, no doubt feeling that by doing it openly he projected an image of insouciance and self-sufficiency. Nor do politicians like to be photographed with a convivial glass in hand.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, always sensitively concerned about his image, worked carefully to see that it was not clouded. For a long time, although he was under close direct scrutiny, it was unknown by the general public that be was wholly paralyzed from the waist down and had to wear leg braces. Roosevelt himself went to herculean and physically exhausting lengths to keep the surely significant fact of this weakness from becoming generally known. 27 John F. Kennedy, too, kept from general circulation the fact that he suffered from Addison's disease.
Moreover, writers and photographers who offend by engaging in unauthorized image revision are thereafter rebuffed, barred, harassed, denounced, spied upon, rebuked, intimidated and otherwise made to feel remorse, regret or fear at having offended the higher powers, whose claim to kid-gloved handling is invariably based upon nothing more than money or position.
Ralph Nader, for presuming to question automobile safety in Unsafe at Any Speed, was subjected to close surveillance by General Motors, largest corporation by sales in the world, for which act a high GM official later publicly apologized. According to Nader, with General Motors denying the charge, the object was to obtain some bit of publicly inflammatory information of an irrelevantly derogatory nature. 28 True or not in this case, it is often true in many other cases because a largely confused philistine public believes that the truth of some statement is brought into serious question if it can be shown that its originator is a Communist, Socialist, atheist, homosexual, yogi, imbiber in strong waters, freethinker or one addicted to engaging in crim. con. with amiable ladies. Dedicated, sincere heterosexuality may itself be impugning.
Unsettling though it may be to many sturdy citizens, it is probably a fact that a majority of the scientists at work on the federal space-exploration program are thoroughgoing atheists or agnostics. For careful studies have shown that most American scientists (save us all! ) are of this horrifying, cosmosshattering orientation. Should, therefore, the space program not be canceled or its personnel changed? Should not, in the name of common safety, Billy Graham and Fulton J. Sheen be placed in charge? Why, the perturbed grass-roots citizen may well ask himself, cannot persons with a wholesome, dung-hill, 100 per cent American outlook be selected for this highly elevating work?
In one of his few but revealing gauche moves, President John F. Kennedy, deeply annoyed, canceled the White House subscription to the New York Herald Tribune and barred it from the sacred premises--an instance of Jove hurling the penultimate thunderbolt: banishment.
Concluding, although the difficulties encountered along life's way by the Kennedys and others can hardly be taken as par for the course among the rich and powerful they do show, in concentrated cases, what in varying degree all of the rich are up against in a highly turbulent irrationally structured society. The rich are by no means as well off as they are often imagined to be and as a sociologist such as C. Wright Mills imagines
them to be.
A History of Luxury Parties in America would require a book of many hundreds of pages, the main source being the High Society pages of the leading newspapers. That
aspect of partying that exerts most fascination for the mythical man-in-the-street, however, is of the order of what is reported to have suited the staglike taste of the late T. Coleman du Pont, obviously a man of the people. "In 1912, in partnership with Charles P. Taft, the President's brother, Coly built the McAlpin Hotel in New York, and on its twenty-first floor he established his Manhattan pied-a`-terre. His parties there soon became famous for their gaiety and their pretty girls; Coly often had half the chorus of a Broadway show among the forty or more guests at an after-theater party. 'The General is loyal to a myriad of pretty girls who are proud to claim him as a friend,' a New York newspaper said in a needling story, 'and no one, not even Mrs. T. Coleman du Pont, seems to raise an objection. In fact, some people imagine that Mrs. T. Coleman du Pont must be a myth. One never sees her, never hears of her. '" 20
Dinner parties, sedate or hilarious, always were, and remain, a favorite form of entertaining eight to a dozen or so of the ranking gentry. While political figures from abroad are often present, no doubt useful in snagging distant concessions and other goodies, it is noticeable that local politicos are rarely on hand except in Washington, where political intrigue is the sole social interest. Generals and admirals, however, are much sought for a certain austere contrasting tone.
It would, in any event, be bad electoral image-making for a politician of the domestic variety to be counted among those present at some of the more rococo parties of the ultra-affluent, which smack to some of the more straitlaced in the constituencies of European royal revels simply because champagne (a high-class soda pop) out in the sticks connotes something exotically perverse.
A Map of American Wealth
If a map of the centers and nature of privately held wealth were drawn, it would show the larger corporations in their headquarters and principal plants as fortresses toward which raw materials are constantly moving and from which are streaming products. These fortresses would represent the "big business" factor.
The big banks, represented by a different symbol, would appear as special centers with influences radiating out into the world of "small business. " For in general, as we have noticed, "small business" is to a large extent the loan-supported business of the big banks, upon which some of the larger corporations are no longer dependent. Small business, paradoxically, is really fractionized big business.
The map would then show the family estates of the principal owners, numbering several hundred.
There would be symbols to show the locations of the principal metropolitan clubs and the principal pleasure resorts of the wealthy.
Corporate headquarters and big banks would tend to be clustered in New York City but plants, resorts and family estates would be more widely scattered, thinning out as one moved to the extreme west and south. In general, there would be considerable clustering around major urban centers and sparseness of symbols in nonurban areas.
Self-Image of the Rich
What all this shows, it would appear, is that the rich, despite the meagerness of their personal achievement as linmed in the preceding chapter, believe they are entitled to opulent settings. A divinity was once thought to hedge a king and it seemed only common sense that a divine personage be given the most opulent setting conceivable to man. The same sort of thinking applied to churchpols, who were believed to be in the closest confidence of the Deity. Faced by uncouth, undivine "robber barons," public
thought in Europe simply bowed to force majeure. It was difficult to dispute with armed gangsters.
The first thing that occurred to the newly emerged American rich was to ape the style of life of European nobility and royalty. The American rich, quite obviously, saw themselves playing the same relative roles as masters of the situation, "lords of creation" in the phrase of Frederick Lewis Allen. In the main, the style of life of the English and French higher gentleman became the style of life of the American rich, who took root in a country where, oddly, a powerful political symbol was still the log cabin.
Whereas European royalty and nobility played profound integral roles in European history, the latter-day American rich were more like hitch-hikers who opportunistically climbed aboard a good thing, They produced neither the technology, the climate, the land, the people nor the political system. Nor did they, like many European groups (as in England), take over the terrain as invading conquerors. Rather did they infiltrate the situation from below, insinuate themselves into opportunely presented economic gaps, subvert various rules and procedures, and, as it were, ride a rocket to the moon and beyond, meanwhile through their propagandists presenting themselves, no less, as the creators of machine industrialism which was in fact copied from England and transplanted into a lush terrain.
Let this be added: The fortune-builders were indeed organizers in a virgin terrain of little or no organization. They organized economic affairs according to well-establisbed European patterns, and for this service charged a fee that some commentators consider extortionate, others reasonable, What was it, really? It was extortionate, of course. Judging by their style of life they set a high value on their services which amounted to merely imposing their rule. If one evaluates their achievement in other than self-serving corporate terms, the great expense of maintaining their personal way of life begins to look very much like another instance of misallocation of resources. From my possibly jaundiced point of view, it does not seem to me that the country is getting any return for the wealth self-lavished on their style of living.
Lest anyone believe that I am particularly indignant about this prospect let me at once enter a disclaimer. I harbor no such indignation, not any more than I would have for a man who sees a particularly enticing meal outspread and sits down to enjoy it--a wholly natural thing to do. What indignation I have is reserved for those who contemplate the prospect and consider it in accord with the cosmic proprieties or even that a greater public show of deference is due. I would not wish to proclaim to the world that Americans are an especially slavish people; I do not believe such to be the case. But there is a considerable section of Americans, for reasons about which one can only speculate, who definitely are obviously slavish. They have been commented upon in the memoirs of visiting royalty and nobility taken aback by being advanced upon in the United States with alarming gesticulations of deference and extravagant signs and cries of voluntary submission.
My own explanation for this phenomenon is that the United States was largely settled by members of the lower classes of Europe in whom were deeply ingrained a sense of their class lowliness and fealty to the upper orders. Descendants of these still like to kowtow whenever they can, and the more affluent of them spend large sums of money so they can be presented at the English royal court, there to bow, curtsy and scrape, to any other royal or ducal ceremonial to which they can wrangle admittance or to the Vatican where they can experience the ineffable ecstasy of kissing the pope's ring, joy supreme. Some of this ingrained tendency, as it is easy to see, plays out on the domestic scene and is focused at times on public figures like Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller who, as the television cameras show, is at times plainly amazed and perhaps puzzled by
the ecstatic fervor of his enthusiastic public reception. That it is all pretty much of a preconditioned American mechanism, uncommitted to any particular object, is shown when it is directed, without partiality, at some former sausage-stuffer who has become a film star or at a toothsome female, obviously guilty of first-degree murder, who has just been released with cheers by a jury of her peers. Clamorous deference in such circumstances, as the newspapers regularly report, at times attains riotous proportions. What ensues is in fact a raving mass self-abasement.
In this purely American setting, the self-image of the rich is at times reflected back upon them in magnified dimensions, no doubt leading some of them to believe they have taken far too humble a view of themselves.
Deviants from the Norm
Among the wealthy there do not appear to be many who show the slightest tendency to deviate from the norm of being either a finpol, a pubpol, a corp-pol or a more or less graceful idler and rentier. The life of the rich, as we have noticed, is as patterned and stylized as the life of the poor, holding few surprises.
That this is the case is seemingly more and more clearly realized by at least some of them, of late notably by the pace-setting Rockefellers even though they have been outrun into healing by a Mellon and a Frick. The fourth generation of Rockefellers, however, seem to be deviating more than occasionally from the plush-lined ruts traveled by the general man of wealth. As a psychologist might say of them and a few contemporaries, they appear to be seeking an identity of their own by breaking into new ground, thus playing a role more original than that of mere descendants of John D. I, or even of travelers in his general trustified direction.
As one swallow proverbially does not make a summer one need not look upon what is happening in this quarter as a trend. It is perhaps, however, a portent that some of the descendants of the industrial rich may be about to retrace, if history grants them the chance, the path followed by the historically more distinguished descendants of the earlier and more modestly capitalized mercantile Boston and landed Hudson Valley gentry who were considerably eclipsed in wealth and central influence by the rise of the industrial rich.
Michael Rockefeller, twenty-three, son of Nelson A. , was an aspiring anthropologist until he was lost at sea from a disabled power-raft in 1961 while on an expedition to Dutch New Guinea with a Harvard University-Peabody Museum Expedition. He was declared legally dead on February 2, 1964. The Times reported he left an estate of $660,000. 21 According to all accounts, he was a superior fellow who was going to make some sort of individual mark.
Steven Rockefeller, another son, has become a clergyman, expounding the Gospel in benighted Chicago.
More recently Laurance Rockefeller, Jr. , twenty-two, has appeared in the news as a member of Vista (Volunteers In Service To America), sometimes referred to as the domestic Peace Corps. Newspapermen caught sight of him as he began an eight-week training period in East Harlem, beginning adult life literally among the dregs.
In the meantime John D. IV, whose father is John D. III, had moved into an impoverished neighborhood in West Virginia, started hobnobbing with the local descamisados and sans-culottes and was swiftly elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates. If other cases are any guide, he is on his way to becoming at least a governor or a senator, possibly president. The United States could very appropriately have a President John D. Rockefeller IV.
The various courses embarked upon by these four young Rockefellers are, though, obviously offbeat as far as most of the rich are concerned. Many more of the affluent young are to be found congregating at the nearest country club or yacht basin, as I have determined by personal anthropological observation in the field.
Cracks in the Compound Walls
What I have written thus far might tend to leave the impression that the rich are, relatively, in a cushy position. And so they are. But the enviableness of their position amid accumulating signs of storm on every hand can be easily exaggerated unless seen in perspective.
In saying that the rich are faced by difficulties I simply state sober fact, not trying to gain for them any feeling that they are as heroes and heroines in an enveloping Greek tragedy. C. Wright Mills was very careful to issue an elaborate caveat against pitying them when he wrote,
The idea that the millionaire finds nothing but a sad, empty place at the top of this society; the idea that the rich do not know what to do with their money; the idea that the successful become filled up with futility, and that those born successful are poor and little as well as rich--the idea, in short, of the disconsolateness of the rich--is, in the main, merely a way by which those who are not rich reconcile themselves to the fact. Wealth in America is directly gratifying and directly leads to many further gratifications.
To be truly rich is to possess the means of realizing in big ways one's little whims and fantasies and sicknesses. . . . The rich, like other men, are perhaps more simply human than otherwise. But their toys are bigger; they have more of them; they have more of them all at once.
. . . If the rich are not happy it is because none of us are happy. Moreover, to believe that they are unhappy would probably be un-American. For if they are not happy, then the very terms of success in America, the very aspirations of all sound men, lead to ashes rather than fruit. . . . If those who win the game for which the entire society seems designed are not "happy," are then those who lose the happy ones? Must we believe that only those who live within, but not of, the American society can be happy? Were it calamitous to lose, and horrible to win, then the game of success would indeed be a sad game, doubly so in that it is a game everyone in and of the American culture cannot avoid playing. For to withdraw is of course objectively to lose, and to lose objectively, although subjectively to believe one has not lost--that borders on insanity. We simply must believe that the American rich are happy, else our confidence in the whole endeavor must be shaken. For of all the possible values of human society, one and one only is truly sovereign, truly universal, truly sound, truly and completely acceptable goal of man in America. That goal is money, and let there be no sour grapes about it from the losers. 22
Mills here is partly ironic because his whole book expresses a complete lack of confidence in the general American endeavor. There is, then, no reason why the rich from his point of view should be even theoretically regarded as happy. It is probably true, however, that on balance they are no unhappier than anyone else and probably have at least a greater number of euphoric interludes.
In speaking of the rich as of any collective group there is always the danger of tacitly assuming that all the units in the collection, because they share some characteristic, are as alike as peas. The rich, of course, differ among each other in age, constitution, temperament, intelligence and knowledge. They also differ as to source of wealth: inherited or self-accumulated, diversified or concentrated, held in the form of bonds,
equities, real estate or a combination of all. Yet, despite individual differences, they are similar in that they are, most of them, held within the same social matrix, subject to the same external compulsions and pressures.
This fact is clearly brought into view when we consider that although the rich have much power, more than the common run of men surely, they also experience in general a deeper sense of frustration than most people owing to the fact that their greater power is exercised within the restraints of a certain system and under the scrutiny of other powerful people. This amounts to saying that, though great, their power has limits, often annoying limits.
We can see this at a glance by looking at the problem of air pollution. And New York City, financial center of the world, is fittingly held by experts to have the worst pollution problem in the country. True, the rich man can flee the city from time to time and has in his homes and offices the latest air filtration devices; he is not so badly off as the ordinary citizen who must breathe the lethal stuff without interruption. Yet he knows that his staff, to which he is as loyal as it is to him, is caught in the muck. And he knows various projects of interest to him--perhaps a big skyscraper promotion--are qualified in their attractiveness and even value.
Why, then, as he has power, does he not deal with the problem decisively?
He is unable to do so, no doubt to his chagrin, because of the very momentum and direction of the system. Although he may publicly deprecate stress on the health issue he understands it as well as anyone. He is, however, caught in the situation as depicted by Theodore B. Merrill, an editor of Business Week, who said in a comprehensive national survey as long ago as 1960 (and in the meantime the problem has become more urgent) that "Nobody is going to put in any kind of control devices that cost him money unless he has to. . . . It simply has to be unprofitable for an industry to pollute the air or else they are going to pollute it, because it is cheaper to use the air for a sewer than to pay for keeping it clean. " 23 The same holds true of polluting waterways.
Here, it would seem, profit is being put before human life and health, a point made endlessly by nasty socialists. And it is not merely profit that is in question but the general standing of an institution, a particular company. Although a rich man may control this company and could instantly make it stop polluting the air, such unilateral action would not solve the pollution problem, to which other companies also contribute. Unless all the companies acted in concert the action of one would have little effect.
And if all the companies in a particular region agreed to undergo the expense of reducing air pollution their costs would rise and profits fall in relation to companies in less populated regions not burdened with such costs. The inter-company position of the social-minded companies would decline. At this point multitudes of investors, some of them large but not controlling, would perhaps begin selling the stock of the social- minded companies because the relative return was diminishing in comparison with that of unsocial-minded companies. Dutch, Swiss, South American and ordinarily prudent domestic investors would sell out, realizing that these social-minded companies have expensive profit-eroding problems.
Investors, high or low, do not feel sympathetically identified with a company's problems, do not "forgive" it for making a poorer financial showing in a good cause. They simply analyze the figures and prospects of various companies. Some of these investors live in the bracing air of distant mountain resorts, by the seaside, off on distant healthy pampas. All they know is that as between company A and company B the latter, not burdened with many social-minded expenses, shows an ascending line of profitability and that this is better for them.
Why not then, it may be asked, make all companies uniformly comply to the maximum with all social-minded regulations, thus putting them on all fours and passing additional costs on in price? Doing this, however, would raise national costs vis-a`-vis industries in other countries, which could undersell the Americans. In the world market the lowest-cost producer, everything else being equal, has a profit advantage and most readily attracts new capital most cheaply. And the world market is an area of prime interest to capitalists.
It is, then, "The System," as socialists have long contended, that gives priority here to its own systemic needs over the larger question of human life and health in specific instances.
As many scattered stockholders begin selling out of a company with a declining relative level of profitability, the price of the stock, its value, declines, affecting multitudes, jeopardizing bank loans and inducing an endless train of economic troubles. And when it comes to new financing the capital is not readily available, must be obtained along the route of a fixed rate of high interest, itself damaging to profitability, rather than through the issuance of equities. Being unilaterally social-minded, then, is ruinous.
Although powerful, the rich man, even the grouping of all rich men, is not powerful enough to fly in the face of the requirements of the supporting system. Beyond a certain level they must all take the rough with the smooth as offered by that system, a point that no doubt makes disconsolate the more reflective of them.
We may, now, imagine that one of the many economists who devote their lives to extolling the beauties of this system, its contributions to "progress," is dying in a hospital of lung cancer or emphysema contracted because of pervading air pollution. A case of poetic justice, it will be said. Yet he, as insight-limited as most economists, fails to make the connection between his lamentable condition and the economic system he so much admires. He considers himself only the victim of genetics or "bad luck," and if pressed will probably echo rueful Adam Smith that there's a great deal of ruin in every system--surely an intellectually weak stance.
The rich man wants for his children, whom he often loves passionately, the best in the way of education. He sends them to special schools that have the choice of teachers for small groups that are carefully supervised from dawn to nightfall. Most of these children, many of whom sign the family name with coveted large Roman numerals suffixed, go on to the best available in the way of colleges.
Yet the rich and powerful man cannot forever shield from his own children knowledge that they are going into a society bristling with avoidable destructive problems that it is unable owing to its corporate systemic requirements to solve. Many of these problems have their horns pointed directly at the children of the rich man.
Let us took at this neglected aspect.
All general disturbing and life-threatening social problems--air and water pollution; crime; overpopulation; vexed race relations; traffic tangles; accumulated causes of civil disturbance such as slums, unemployment and extreme poverty--intrude upon the young rich with about as much force as upon the young poor. The rich young person may have better oases to which to retreat; but he is nevertheless adversely affected by the same accumulating, neglected phenomena.
Even in their oases the young rich are by no means safe. They, like others, are subject to narcotic addiction, alcoholism and psychological disorders--and an inventory of all their tribulations along this line would be impressive. They, too, in various ways are assailed by hard types. And let us remember that their fathers are powerful men.
Of crime, against their own persons and in its aspect of crime against property a rising, low-grade, guerrilla variant of Marxist class war, they are steady direct and indirect targets. As the Wall Street Journal in many articles during the 1960's made clear, there is a broad and steady determined assault on the merchandise and cash of the big companies by shoplifters and employees--crime carried out by noncriminal classes. Losses here, contrived by people whose appetites are stimulated beyond the reach of their means through the agency of voracious advertising, are passed on to the general public as much as possible in higher prices; but some of these losses, running into billions annually, must be absorbed. There are not sufficient jails to hold most of the offenders, many of whom when caught are let off with suspended sentences, dire threats from the bench, paroles, disgracing publicity, etc.
That the rich are as subject as anyone to misadventures in a wide-open society (kept wide-open in general so as to facilitate double-dealing in profitable particulars) can be shown by the citation of a number of salient cases, abstracted from among many.
In 1966 the young daughter of Charles Percy, former chairman of Bell & Howell, camera manufacturers, and now junior senator from Illinois, was wantonly murdered in her bed in the family home in exclusive Kenilworth, Illinois, on the Gold Coast north of Chicago. Her unknown slayer was not apprehended. Wealth, power and exalted position did not protect her in a jungle society.
In the same year a well-organized kidnapping plot against Leonard K. Firestone, rubber scion of Beverly Hills, California, was frustrated through the enterprise of an underworld tipster. The two plotters, one the tipster, were killed by eager police in the attempt. Had the plot been successful Mr. Firestone would have been abducted and held for ransom as a number of rich people have been, despite the severe "Lindbergh law" against kidnapping and despite the virtual impossibility of circulating ransom money. Such money, in whatever form, is subject to modern, high-speed photographic recording by the FBI and instantly becomes "hot" money, hardly worth the risk at ten cents on the dollar. It can even be treated and made radioactive, a dead giveaway when passed over Geiger counters.
Robberies in the homes of the rich are frequent and there is reason to believe they are not always reported. And this despite elaborate protective systems. While traveling, the rich are especially the targets of expert thieves, as in the case of Henry Ford II in New York City, also in 1966. His hotel suite was burglarized and jewels in the reported amount of $50,000 were taken. Servants in the homes of the affluent and rather wealthy, according to news reports, are pretty regularly trussed up by invading thieves and the premises ransacked. Burglaries are common in wealthy residential districts.
Grant-laden Establishment methodologists, exponents of a sterile sociological scholasticism, will no doubt charge that I have selected a few unrepresentative cases to make my point. Actually, I cite these as representative cases, available in any year. This is what is going on, all the time.
A close variation of the following New York Times headline (August 31, 1967; 22:4) is repeated every few months with respect to violent events in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and elsewhere:
SOCIETY MATRON BEATEN TO DEATH
It has become almost a standard story to read about women of property murdered in their isolated splendid homes by intruders, who as often as not are not caught. The only reason I don't list those of a recent year or two is that I don't want to use the space.
With respect to the high-toned village of Purchase, New York, a "three-square-mile domain of big homes, colorful gardens, private swimming pools, tree-shaded bridle paths, elegant country clubs and winding lanes" said the Times of August 13, 1967 (66:4-6), "Sixteen burglaries of estates have occurred in the last month. Some estimates of the loss in jewelry, antiques and cash run up to $250,000 but Harrison police detectives are dubious at the high estimates. . . "
No police dubiety was expressed, however, about the amount of $780,000 set as the value of jewels stolen from Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney at Saratoga Springs, reported by the Times on August 6, 1967. The thieves missed $175,000 additional in gems only because Mrs. Whitney wore them to dinner.
What I want to say here for the methodologists is that the rich, almost as much as the poor in their slums, are the recurrent victims of violence in a cuckoo-clock political system. The profiteers and their poor-boys-who-made-good in the legislatures seem unable to give much protection to their own women and children, to say nothing of the women and children of the less well heeled.
The rich, like the rest of us, are as readily victimized by deleterious products: dentifrices, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and various untested chemical applications to various parts of the body. After all, there is only a certain range of offerings of this kind; the rich have no more sophisticated choices open to them than the rest of the public in the way of deodorants, depilatories, mouth washes, unguents and the like. Their young gorge on rancid hot dogs and hamburgers at ball games like any other red-blooded, true- blue American.
That various of these products, including widely circulating food preparations, are dangerous to health is regularly made known by appropriate federal supervisory agencies, kept thoughtfully understaffed through the courtesy of a bought bucolic Congress. The rich here are often hoist by their own politico-economic petard.
For a resounding case--one among many--let us go back a few years, to 1932. In that year died after a long wasting illness Eben McBurney Byers director of a number of companies and chairman of A. M. Byers Company: of Pittsburgh, makers of iron pipe. Mr. Byers, a Groton-Yale man, had been national amateur golf champion in 1906, came of a wealthy established family and was no small-bore personality. The medical diagnosis at Doctors' Hospital, New York City, was that he had a brain abscess, caused by radium poisoning. For three or four years he had been dosing himself with two to three two-ounce bottles per day of a widely advertised preparation containing minute quantities of radium. He was under the impression that the lethal stuff was doing him some good. Following testimony by one of his physicians, the Federal Trade Commission in January, 1932, issued a stupendous order prohibiting, no less, the Bailey Radium Laboratories from advertising Radithor as harmless. Not only had this product been so advertised, it was reported by the Times, but it had been recommended, said the Times, for 160 conditions and symptoms. 24 So ended Eben McBurney Byers, a man on the inside track of wealth.
That the rich are as gullible as anyone else in readily gobbling up and smearing themselves with whatever products are offered in the free-free-free market is readily apparent. Merely because a man is clever at conserving what he has inherited or is skillful in overreaching the public in the clinches affords no indication that he is clever enough to protect himself and his family in all aspects of the freedom-blessed American politico-economic jungle.
The situation is made clearer still in the case of the automobile. A rich man is obviously in a position to purchase the best there is in the way of automobiles and have his own private mechanics service them. But, as Ralph Nader has shown and as Detroit
has more recently admitted through extensive recalls of delivered automobiles, many automobiles are not mechanically safe in a country crosshatched with roads literally clogged with cars. Even though a rich man may have a car that is in perfect working order, there is no guarantee that he will not be run into or run down by some automobile that is either mechanically defective or in the hands of a defective driver, of which numerous are disclosed from time to time. The rich man and his family, it is evident, are as exposed to the automobile menace as they are to poisonous smog. They are no better off in this respect, unless they remain permanently indoors, than the rest of society. And, sure enough, as newspaper reports from time to time show, top-drawer eminents and their children are from time to time cut down in the streets by cars or battered on the roads. A complete inventory of such cases would require many pages.
Although injured by avoidable accidents or made ill by detestable products, the rich man does have an edge in that he can procure, no matter where he is, the very best and most expensive medical services. But doctors cannot always save him, much as they would like to.
The rich are especially enamored of medicine, and give heavily to their own hospitals and to medical research. Plainly, like the rest of us, they are seeking mundane salvation. But their faith in the powers of the doctors at times passeth all understanding. What I mean is illustrated by a story told me some years ago by an eminent internist, who complained that he had been detained for several hours on a sleeveless errand while many patients were in need of attention. He had been summoned with some ten or a dozen other specialists to attend a wealthy New York banker in his eighties who was very ill. It was obvious at a glance that the man was dying and yet members of the family walked about on tiptoe, with bated breath, and looked upon the assembled doctors as a high priesthood capable of saving the wasted hulk--the patriarch and founder of the clan.
The fees for this consultation, my annoyed informant told me, were bound to be astronomical, and the whole gathering obviously futile, an instance of medical fetishism. As E. M. Byers discovered, expensive medical care cannot always save one.
One might suppose that a rich and powerful man, aware of the source of some patently deleterious influence, would take arms and gird himself against the common threat. Here we come to an aspect of inner finpolitan affairs to which most of the sociologists have turned a blind, uncomprehending eye. It is a finpolitan rule that one company does not take a public position against another--whatever it does--as long as it does not act directly as an adversary; and the members of one industry do not lead or join in the public denunciation of another industry. Each industry, each company is allowed to pursue its own way unless it tries to grab too big a share of the market.
Thus, when public criticisms gain momentum against one company or one industry, when that company or industry stands in the public dock, as it were, others preserve diplomatic silence. The mass media, too, stand aside if they do not offer outright defenses of the criticized practices. Thus we see the entire corporate world maintaining a studied silence as pharmaceuticals are criticized for pricing practices, automotives for safety factors, the oil industry for special tax shelters and any or all for monopoly, gouging prices, poor products or community pollution.
The reason for this impotent silence is simply that if one wealthy group opens fire on the cushy preserve of another wealthy group there will be retaliation in kind. For each industry has vulnerable points open to criticism. It is the need, then, to preserve some semblance of intramural harmony that causes the financial groups to maintain silence about the shortcomings of their various members. Higher capitalism is a little club holding within it diverse temperaments, true enough, but temperaments that must, under
pain of direct reciprocal attack, preserve an appearance of outward solidarity to the world.
Lest anyone believe I am making a purely suppositious point let me make it clear that one capitalist often thoroughly detests another entire industry and that such detestation, properly financed, can lead to the root-and-branch destruction of the detested industry. John D. Rockefeller I, for example, disliked the liquor industry, and he opposed smoking, dancing and the theater as well. The liquor industry in the United States was for a time destroyed with heavy losses, through Prohibition, illustrating what can happen. I am not suggesting that it was Rockefeller who smashed the liquor industry; but he shared the point of view of the Prohibitionists in regarding liquor in general as a social menace, a blight on efficiency.
Rockefeller was by no means an exception in holding such straitlaced views about the propriety of certain entire industries. I once knew a successful Wall Street broker who always did whatever he could to dissuade his customers from buying shares in alcohol, cigarette, film and small-loan companies on the ground that he thought them socially harmful.
Yet such intramural antipathies, which usually have rational grounds (as in the widespread capitalistic detestation of the powerful domestic fire-arms industry), seldom lead to any effective action against the offenders; for everybody is, in a way, in the same boat and hence silent. As I used to argue to my moral broker-friend, his qualms were vain; customers could come into his office with money from any source, even from some illicit enterprise. What was gained if they now purchased only stocks in morally approved enterprises? Moral or immoral, the companies offering stocks were all legal entities in an economic system that does not discriminate between producers of fire- arms and producers of surgical instruments. All industries are created equal.
Being bound to keep quiet when he sees obvious destruction being wrought by some reckless peer, at least the intelligently reflective capitalist cannot, contrary to Mills, be entirely happy. And his unhappiness has an entirely different cause from that of most people. It is the unhappiness of a consciously powerful man who realizes he can do nothing effective against something he considers profoundly evil, cannot even fully protect his own children. Even though he may feel that his own enterprises are as far beyond criticism as ingenuity can make them, he knows that this is no defense against fabrications which can be circulated against him to his distress by powerful people his uncooperative crusading spirit has made angry.
It is for this reason, among others, that it is rare to find crusaders among capitalists, who all in one way or the other live in glass houses.
In the matter of divorce and broken families the rich are, if anything, worse off than most of the population; at least they are no better placed. For the divorce rate among the rich, with many of them such ardent believers in marriage that they remarry up to five and even ten times, is very much higher than the national rate. Divorce, even if one looks upon it as a desirable escape hatch from an untenable situation, is never taken as a sign of sound human relations; rather is it taken as an index of unresolvable interpersonal trouble.
If stable familial relations and intra-family continuity are desirable, as it is widely held, then divorce and the dispersion of family members, particularly the young, must be an index to failure. At least the children of divorced rich couples are not happy about the event. And this sort of failure is rife among the rich. Failure being the opposite of success, in this department of life the rich, however they got that way, cannot be looked upon as generally successful. Perhaps they are no more unhappy than others; yet they do not appear to be conspicuous winners in the marital sweepstakes. As in the case of most
divorcing couples, they find each other unbearable--and not simply in one instance but, as the record shows, in a train of instances. Not to be able to find a single retainable marital partner in a number of attempts surely argues some sort of personal impoverishment in a culture that values marital stability.
Deficiencies and lacks of the kind we have looked at are not, as many suppose, purely subjective, the ills to which all men are heir. They are social, deriving from the general social situation, which has much to do in shaping the psychologies of people.
The rich, it is clear, are not immune to the general fallout from the existing socio- political system even though they may have compensations denied to others. Far from all the fallout upon the rich has been indicated and one could go on at considerable length about more. However, confining ourselves again to the young and innocent rich, it is clear that their minds are as subverted as those of poorer youth by the all-pervading influence of persuasive advertising.
If someone systematically splashed mud on the clothing of rich children their parents would soon take steps to see that the offender was laid by the heels. Yet the rich, for all their power, cannot protect their children from the subversive influence of advertisers who insistently confuse the intellect in various detectable ways. Most of the time they misuse language and pictures in the effort solely to sell.
True, the rich youth like the poor, if he makes his way into the higher and more recondite studies such as semantics, logic and epistemology, can overcome the enervating intellectual influences of advertising and homespun propaganda, thus possessing himself at least of his own mind. But few find their way to such rarefied studies and the result is that the rich usually have as confused a view of the world as the poor, subject to exploded notions (particularly in economics) and with about the same general world view as that of a postman or bartender. That this is so is readily seen in the public utterances of the more vocal of them. Among the self-erected we have cracker-barrel philosophers like Henry Ford I and H. L. Hunt and among the more educated we have the sagging economic views of David Rockefeller and, on a much lower level of wealth, the socio-cultural divagations of William F. Buckley, Jr. , who asserts the presence of "eternal verities. " A B-minus undergraduate in epistemology at Swampwater College knows better than that even though Buckley's public vowel movements are intently studied by a select circle of admirers.
One would think that a rich man, with money at his fingertips, would get smart and hire an epistemologist who would at least straighten him out from time to time about the grounds for rational belief. For we may well suppose that a rich man, always wanting the best, does not wish to go about in a scatterbrained condition hawking absurdities. He must want the true view just as he wants a livewire girl, a prime steak and a sound wine. Yet we find him apparently no better off in this respect than the common man. Nor, considering the baneful social influences to which they are subject will most of his prized children be better off. Madison Avenue vomits on their minds as freely as on the battered mind of the ordinary clod.
In this matter, however, the rich man is no doubt imbued with the unjustified self- pride of others as summarized by Descartes in the opening lines of his Discourse on Method: "Good sense is of all things in the world most evenly distributed among men, for each one believes himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the most difficult to please in all other things are generally satisfied with their share. " (For our purposes we may ignore the non sequitur noticed by logicians between the warranting reasons cited and the conclusion. ) In any event, the rich man like the nonrich believes his own mind is as good as any and its way of operation to be in no particular corrigible; one can see this in the bland assurance with which the rich often express themselves
publicly on recondite matters such as achieving the national destiny. In this belief, no doubt in the majority of cases, the rich are like others demonstrably self-deceived, victims of self-pride, unless they have gone to herculean efforts to free themselves from the free-market socio-cultural seepage all about them; they are as much off the track as T. W. K. Mits, the well-known man in the street.
The Successful Kennedys
Sufficient grounds have been stated, I believe, to suggest, contrary to supposition among both the rich and their critics, that the rich are not so well off as they themselves sometimes suppose and are commonly supposed to be, even though they may be more advantageously placed than the average man in many selected areas. Their difficulties, furthermore, are not merely those common to the flesh of man but often derive from their own celebrated social system, from the propaganda-hallowed but rickety social structure itself. Such is the resistance of indurated dogma to reasonable refutation, however, that one could pile further proof on proof in the single well-known case of the successful Kennedys, dogged by socially induced tragedies; nor are they alone.
The first of the Kennedys to feel the blow of adversity was the eldest son, Joseph P. , Jr. , who had early been earmarked in the family circle as a future president of the United States. Aged twenty-nine, he was killed in action as an eager airman in Europe during the replay with special Hitlerian effects of World War I. Two weeks later Kathleen's ultra-British husband was also killed in action. And in 1948 Kathleen herself, flying in a private plane to join her father on the Riviera, was killed as the machine crashed in rain and fog over France.
With the election to the presidency in 1960 of John F. Kennedy, the second oldest son, the Kennedys' star seemed once again in the ascendancy; they were literally the darlings of the world. The abrupt assassination of the socially aware president in Dallas in 1963 by a publicly neglected, mentally disturbed ex-marine was especially ironic; a social system eroded by neglect struck down a potential statesman through one of its neglected cases.
The theme of violence in the Kennedy later history, which had almost finished JFK during the war in the South Pacific, showed itself again in the nearly fatal airplane crash of Senator Edward M. Kennedy in his own plane in 1964. As it was, his back was severely injured, necessitating the wearing of a brace.
The Airplane and The Rich
The airplane, it may be observed in this melancholy recital, is a special hazard of the rich and affluent. Few plane crashes, unless upon buildings, ever involve lower-class citizens; many tycoons have already met their end in the skies. And the bored rich, in their affinity for plane travel as for everything technologically novel and "advanced," are themselves the victims of a smooth statistical falsification given wide currency: that the rate of passenger fatalities in aircraft is lower than that on railroads. This falsification is achieved by comparing fatalities per passenger-mile. If, however, one properly takes into consideration all the relevant factors and makes the comparison on the basis of passenger-mile-hours (for time is an essential factor in measuring motion, which is a function of time as well as distance), then it is seen that the rate of fatality is tremendously higher in air travel. As far as that goes, in absolute figures passenger air fatalities are greater than passenger railroad fatalities.
We see here that the rich are as susceptible as anyone to being gulled by institutionalized propaganda (assuming that they are indeed misled by the claims of alleged superior safety in airplanes). Although airplanes may be sufficiently safe, considering all factors, they are self-propelled kites flying with heavy loads of volatile
fuel, obviously highly vulnerable to serious mishap. In computing air fatalities the Federal Aviation Agency, for example, excludes deaths occurring in airborne dynamite explosions! 25 Such are apparently not deemed statistically kosher.
The Curse of Prominence
Great prominence itself, as many of the wealthy know, carries with it special problems. In the case of the Kennedys this was shown in the wrangle over the wording of the originally authorized book by William Manchester about the assassination of the president. Said The Nation (February 6, 1967): "The subsequent attempts on the part of the Kennedys to control the text of the book and its serialization gave the impression of an arrogant use of money and power. They may have been within their legal rights, but that is not the point. Apparently most of what they objected to was of little moment one way or the other. The public was not in a mood to go along with them, whether they were right or wrong. The John F. Kennedy aura was blown away by the exchange of recriminations.
"At a given point of idolatry," The Nation continued, "the public turns from adoring its idols and begins to examine their feet. Once celebrities reach a certain level of overexposure, there is just as much mileage to be gained from cutting them down as there was from building them up. The writers and broadcasters who provide this sort of fare are familiar with the reaction, and when some of them sense the turning point, the others follow. All of the overexposed live in the shadow of an obloquy. It is one of the hazards of publicity. "
What is less widely known is that scholarly John F. Kennedy himself, in 1959, successfully brought pressure to bear to exclude from the book The Kennedy Family by Joseph Dinneen three summary paragraphs about the attitude of his father toward Jews. Dinneen in 1944 had interviewed the elder Kennedy for the Boston Globe and had taken shorthand notes of the interview. Present also was Lawrence Spivak, then editor of The American Mercury and later a national television news panelist. The Globe decided not to publish the interview and Dinneen fifteen years later summarized it in his book, of which he sent a set of galley proofs as a courtesy to JFK. The president-to-be, disturbed, insisted over the telephone from Oregon that the prickly paragraphs be omitted even though the work was now in plates. Dinneen and the publishers after some resistance consented to the awkward deletion and substituted some inoffensive material. 26
JFK, soundly from a public image point of view, recognized that the nature of the interview, far from settling the issue of anti-Semitism raised against his father, piqued critical interest and raised more questions than it resolved. From an electoral point of view, though the president-to-be was not at all anti-Semitic, even a brief summary of the interview could have been troubling by reason of association.
Cosmetic Images
In passing, it is standard although not universal finpolitan and pubpolitan practice to attempt to control or influence--that is, censor--writings and other expressions that becloud one's public image by suggesting something untoward or disturbing. What is wanted is a carefully retouched pleasant studio portrait of persons and events, not a candid catch-as-catch-can camera shot of some bigwig off guard and thus completely himself. For this reason writers and other commentators on public affairs are generally wooed, flattered, facilitated in various ways and, at times, subsidized, authorized, edited, lied to, intimidated or coerced by powerful public figures. While resorting to the courts to expunge nonlibelous matter from a text is rather unusual, the general attitude of those Kennedys involved in the Manchester controversy is not unusual among political and corporate people, whatever illusions the public may have about the free- wheeling independence of writers under the Star Spangled Banner.
Attempts to control the projected image extend even to photographs. Few politicians like to be photographed smoking cigars, perhaps because that typical act of politicians reminds the public of cartoons about paunchy, cigar-smoking ward bosses, concededly corrupt. Herbert Hoover had the plates confiscated from a photographer who snapped him cigar-smoking aboard a battleship, and Jack Kennedy, who smoked panetelas, did not like to be photographed in the act. Roosevelt, however, did not conceal that he smoked cigarettes, no doubt feeling that by doing it openly he projected an image of insouciance and self-sufficiency. Nor do politicians like to be photographed with a convivial glass in hand.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, always sensitively concerned about his image, worked carefully to see that it was not clouded. For a long time, although he was under close direct scrutiny, it was unknown by the general public that be was wholly paralyzed from the waist down and had to wear leg braces. Roosevelt himself went to herculean and physically exhausting lengths to keep the surely significant fact of this weakness from becoming generally known. 27 John F. Kennedy, too, kept from general circulation the fact that he suffered from Addison's disease.
Moreover, writers and photographers who offend by engaging in unauthorized image revision are thereafter rebuffed, barred, harassed, denounced, spied upon, rebuked, intimidated and otherwise made to feel remorse, regret or fear at having offended the higher powers, whose claim to kid-gloved handling is invariably based upon nothing more than money or position.
Ralph Nader, for presuming to question automobile safety in Unsafe at Any Speed, was subjected to close surveillance by General Motors, largest corporation by sales in the world, for which act a high GM official later publicly apologized. According to Nader, with General Motors denying the charge, the object was to obtain some bit of publicly inflammatory information of an irrelevantly derogatory nature. 28 True or not in this case, it is often true in many other cases because a largely confused philistine public believes that the truth of some statement is brought into serious question if it can be shown that its originator is a Communist, Socialist, atheist, homosexual, yogi, imbiber in strong waters, freethinker or one addicted to engaging in crim. con. with amiable ladies. Dedicated, sincere heterosexuality may itself be impugning.
Unsettling though it may be to many sturdy citizens, it is probably a fact that a majority of the scientists at work on the federal space-exploration program are thoroughgoing atheists or agnostics. For careful studies have shown that most American scientists (save us all! ) are of this horrifying, cosmosshattering orientation. Should, therefore, the space program not be canceled or its personnel changed? Should not, in the name of common safety, Billy Graham and Fulton J. Sheen be placed in charge? Why, the perturbed grass-roots citizen may well ask himself, cannot persons with a wholesome, dung-hill, 100 per cent American outlook be selected for this highly elevating work?
In one of his few but revealing gauche moves, President John F. Kennedy, deeply annoyed, canceled the White House subscription to the New York Herald Tribune and barred it from the sacred premises--an instance of Jove hurling the penultimate thunderbolt: banishment.
Concluding, although the difficulties encountered along life's way by the Kennedys and others can hardly be taken as par for the course among the rich and powerful they do show, in concentrated cases, what in varying degree all of the rich are up against in a highly turbulent irrationally structured society. The rich are by no means as well off as they are often imagined to be and as a sociologist such as C. Wright Mills imagines
them to be.
