No More Learning

But the aims of both political parties, declared and achieved, are to maintain the existing politico-economic system and the same relative distribution of its rewards. This is all Franklin D. Roosevelt ever said he sought to do and all he really did. His main promise was to get the system back in operation and this he did so thoroughly that the 1960's are little different in their externals from the 1920's.
All this is inevitable, as it must be when given the general low-level, don't-know- where-I'm-going-but-I'm-on-my-way outlook of the common citizen. He's bound to be short-changed.
The Dirty End of the Stick
Just what the common man gets by voting the prearranged preferences offered him in elections we may see by looking at the case of Negro Congressman William L. Dawson of Chicago.
Dawson's 90 per cent Negro First Congressional District contains one out of every three Negroes in the state of Illinois. Dawson has ruled it as a private fief for 24 years, and cooperative fellow politicians have continued to change the shape of the district as the Negro population keeps swelling and moving into white neighborhoods. If you are a Negro on the South Side, and you need a job, a favor or a bail bondsman, you see someone from Dawson's organization. His record in Congress is shabby; not a single Chicago journalist can remember a piece of legislation that bears his name. It doesn't matter.
"This man is not interested in politics as a means of helping his constituents," one political writer said. "What he is interested in is staying in power. "
Dawson in power has obtained for his faithful constituents the worst housing conditions in the city, a soaring crime rate, an increase in heroin addiction and the spread of teenage gangs who flock together in vicious packs, preying on strangers, extorting money from businessmen, and killing each other out of boredom. It is a record so marvellous that it should qualify Dawson for an ambassadorship to Haiti. . . .
Dawson stays in power at an age when most men are writing memoirs because he commands an organization that makes good old Tammany Hall seem like a congregation of Ethical Culture teachers. Every one of the 446 precincts in the district has its own captain and two assistants, and if possible a worker for every street. There are seven wards in the district, and each ward office is responsible for controlling the precinct captains. The seven wards in turn answer to the people who run Dawson's own Second Ward office.
Dawson has plenty of what Chicagoans call "clout. " He is vice chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee, and Mayor Daley understands perfectly just how important Dawson and his organization are in the general scheme of Chicago politics. In 1963, Daley won reelection by 139,000. Dawson-controlled Negro wards contributed 115,000 of those votes. 19
Representative Adam Clayton Powell, the Negro clergyman-sybarite, for more than twenty years ran a similar district in New York City.
The point here is not to highlight invidiously Negro personalities but to cite two extreme cases as models of what most people more or less get by voting along ethnic, religious, regional and national-origins lines. In almost every case of such widespread
voting, it can be shown that the constituents in the home district or state are in some way getting the dirty end of the stick, not perhaps so blatantly as under Dawson and Powell but perceptibly nevertheless. They get it especially in taxes but also in many other ways. Catholics are rooked by Catholics, Protestants by Protestants, Irish by Irish, Negroes by Negroes, and so on, all very democratically.
In the better-grade suburban, city "silk-stocking," Jewish and advanced farm districts it is different. Only in a diluted sense are the alert constituents there ever let down. For the most part they are served as they intelligently if narrowly understand their interests.
An inflexible rule can be stated here: The further one moves down the socio- economic-cultural scale the less the sweet-talking political organizations deliver on behalf of the broad constituencies, which is one reason politicians are repeatedly found by pollsters to be in popular ill repute. People realize that, somehow, they are short- changed. But it is defective understanding in most of the people themselves in attempting to utilize the popular franchise that is considerably to blame, although plenty of teachers have offered to instruct them. Boobs will not heed, however. They just do not seem to get the point. They think it's great to be a Ruritanian and a communicant of the Hocus-pocus Church.
Instances of Boobishness
As one out of many thousand instances of widespread boobishness one may cite the abrasively intrusive surveillance by the public over the private life of officials. A senator, photographed at a wedding holding a champagne glass, sought to have the picture suppressed owing to the painful impression it would make on constituents; he would not have minded if it had been a glass of whisky. 20 Deviations from local folkways are not tolerated in politicians by most American constituencies.
What can be done for a public who insist upon bringing irrelevant criteria to bear in voting for officials and who decline to participate in the basic task of seeking out and supporting suitable candidates?
Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York is a case very much in point. Professor Lipset as of 1960 thought it more likely "that Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican Governor of New York, will ultimately prove to be the true representative of the revived pattern of direct participation in politics by members of the upper class-participation through their traditional party, the Republican" rather than upper-class people like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, G. Mennen Williams, John F. Kennedy and Averell Harriman in the Democratic Party. At the time all politicians conceded that Rockefeller, had he forced his own nomination as he could have, would have beaten John F. Kennedy hands down.
Yet Lipset's Republican hope was buried in political ashes for years owing largely to his subsequent divorce and remarriage. By reason of this purely personal action, which could not affect a man's managerial capability, a large section of the small-town Republican Party followership turned against him. As far as the presidency is concerned, Rockefeller was long pronounced dead by politicians but was at least tentatively exhumed as 1968 approached. Now many sophisticated observers such as Walter Lippmann and Gore Vidal began looking upon him as the nation's single hope of escape from Johnsonian realpolitik.
Wealthy party supporters proceed quite otherwise. If a man votes right in committees, on the legislative floor, makes the big decisions in favor of property, they are behind him no matter what he does privately. They could not care less if he maintained a string of supple mistresses of all colors, shapes, religions and sizes and smoked opium. All that would bother them about this sort of thing in a sound legislator or decision maker
would be the danger of the public getting wind of it. But the man's private life, if he was politically on the beam, would be strictly his own business. He could listen to string quartets and detest baseball for all they cared. He could even be civilized! --the ultimate of extreme democratic tolerance.
The common run of voter, a person nobody pays any attention to most of his life, when it comes to casting his ballot suddenly feels that he has some power: Intolerant of all differences, he intends to use his paltry power to the hilt. As anticipated by the politicians, he looks the candidates over and compares them with a mental cartoon of the perfect philistine and asks himself these questions: Is he baptized? Does he belong to the right Christian sect? Does he go to church regularly? What is his race? Does he show the least sign of being superior, uppity, in any way, such as by seriously using long words? Does he seem to enjoy himself in some unorthodox way?
Has he at any time stepped out of a petty conventional mold? Does he ever say anything original? The wrong answers to such questions, as politicians know, will usually swing large decisive blocks of votes and will cause ordinary boobs to break party regularity.
Aside from party regulars, most voters, in the belief of politicians, vote punitively. What they are voting against, furthermore, is not ordinarily some disliked policy but, usually, some personal characteristic of the man. He may, like Adlai Stevenson, be too witty. In this way the boobs, calling upon all other boobs to join with them, work off a good deal of their frustrated hostility. What their vote will do for them taxwise they have no idea. They don't know most of them are already paying 50 to 80 per cent more taxes under Democratic "leftism" than they ought to be paying under an equitable arrangement.
For some time to come, Negro politicians are going to have an easy task snaring boobish Negro votes. They are, borrowing a leaf from southern white colleagues, simply going to talk tough about the white man. They are not, however, going to overcome the white man. They are going to make deals with him, for their personal benefit, behind the scenes. Their Negro constituents meanwhile are going to continue more or less to eat humble pie in one form or other, like their white fellow-democrats. Adam Clayton Powell and William L. Dawson and the late Oscar De Priest of Chicago are merely precursors of a long line of coming Negro politicians who, under enlarging liberalized attitudes toward Negroes, will have found the road to Upward Social Mobility. They will have money in the bank, possibly a lively white mistress--or two-- under the bed.
As to his ethnicity or national origin a politician cannot usually deceive his public. If he is a Ruritanian he has to admit it and bray loudly that he is inordinately proud of it, thus securing the votes at least of nitwit Ruritanians. On the score of religion, except for sect, it is another matter. Being for the most part intelligent men, most politicians, although conspicuous church-goers, unquestionably have no more conventional religious belief than Lenin, Marx or Robert Ingersoll. True, most of them probably believe also that organized religion is a good thing for keeping the boobs in line, joining here the thought of Plato in his Laws. But it is almost a certainty that, tested under the influence of a truth serum, most politicians would admit they themselves had little or no religious belief. Indeed, every significant action of their lives shows most of them are devoid even of natural piety. Not only do most of them have little genuine respect for people, hesitating not at sending tender youth into trackless jungles on sleeveless errands of death; they clearly show they have no respect even for the universe; they do not hesitate to pollute the atmosphere with lethal dust. They are simply low-grade
technicians, in outlook so many plumbers (although it is probably an insult to hardworking plumbers to say so).
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
Reasonably sure of most of their men after election, the propertied elements-- inheritors, nouveaux riches and their many power-elite agents--unlike the general public do not sit back and wait to see what is brewing in the halls of government. Through lobbyists and other intermediaries they forcefully intervene at any and all times in the legislative and administrative processes, leaving nothing to chance.
They also prudently keep a close and constant watch at all times on their elected representatives through the medium of the corporate press, trade press and private reporters. Many trade associations and corporations maintain these private reporters in Washington and the state capitals, women as well as men who move about, mingle, socialize, listen, observe and write long regular reports. In distant files dossiers build up on all or on the key men in relation to general or special interests. Into these dossiers goes everything, including gossip, carefully labeled as such. All of this information is useful when it comes to making nominating or appointive recommendations, campaign contributions, "reaching" a man or developing a public offensive against some recalcitrant official. In a very real sense officials are captives of these elements.
Public office, said Grover Cleveland, is a public trust. But big property owners, having large stakes, do not allow their trust officers, either in finance or politics, to get far out of sight. Heeding Jefferson, they believe in being vigilant and forehanded in defense of their profitable liberties. As to trust officers in finance, although they are carefully selected, thoroughly screened and carefully watched by stages through the years, they are nevertheless heavily bonded. This ultimate precaution makes sense because one can be most thoroughly betrayed only by someone one trusts most implicitly. One can never tell when any man may slip a neuron and dip into the till or cook the books. Strange chemical reactions sometimes take place when a trust officer encounters a nymph or a betting agent.
Public officers, however, are not ordinarily bonded. They can, though, be carefully watched, monitored, consulted, instructed, advised and personally assisted--in brief, surrounded. This they are, but only with respect to the specific felt interests of the propertied. The ordinary public, members of the labor force, cannot maintain such close vigilance and must depend on newspapers and the occasional reports of large organizations. Most of the electorate, in fact, does not even read these, preferring the sports pages, comics, crime sensations. Roll-call votes do not interest them unless they are about school prayers,
What the public learns about its representatives is only what appears in the newspapers or hostile pamphlets. It may learn to its dismay that their senator loves "the purr of a Cadillac, the genial clink of ice cubes late at night, the company of lovely ladies. . . . " 21 By means of such trivia, which might easily have applied to George Washington (who liked fast horses rather than Cadillacs but was fond of the ladies and a touch of the grape), home sentiment is raised to an angry simmer.
Any legislator who, perhaps seeking higher office, levels a lance at some large propertied interest, like the late Senator Estes Kefauver, instantly raises against himself formidable under-the-surface forces. And crusades such as Kefauver's against politically protected crime syndicates, high drug prices and monopoly are, beyond doubt, educational, informative and entertaining, and they do produce some temporary modifications. But in the long run matters settle back pretty much as they were, awaiting the appearance of another nine-day giant-killer.
Most people in politics--organization types--do not aim at being the Number One Man. And most who do, know that the spot is more easily attained deviously than by appearing as a fierce tribune of the people. For this reason crusaders are few and far between. But anyone in politics who feels neglected can always step into the crusading role. For this reason, among others, the propertied interests try to see that nobody feels neglected, everybody instead feels facilitated. "Don't stir up the animals," is the working maxim.
It should always be remembered that the man in office, even before he is approached by minions of the propertied, does not feel angry at any established interest. He is, usually, already in some degree a man of property himself, perhaps with glowing prospects ahead. While public promises he may rashly have made may be forgotten or disregarded, there being nobody immediately present to hold him to his duty, he is always in contact with those to whom he has made private promises. These must always be kept unless he is "let off the hook" for good reasons he can show.
The common erroneous assumption of the voters is that anyone of their ethnic or national-origin number, class, fraternal order, religion or region is sympathetically inclined toward them. Such a representative, they believe, "understands" them better. Yet, as the record shows, such voters have pretty consistently been let down in their day-to-day interests all the way down the line. Money cancels all prior obligations.
It is not necessarily that the politicians intend it this way, which is merely the way the ball bounces, the cookie crumbles, the rainbow disintegrates. It is simply that intelligent pressure and attention directed on them come mainly from the propertied. The nonpropertied are either absent or are interested chiefly in a long line of irrelevant nonsense like school prayers and ritual conformity to shopworn shibboleths. What can one do for people who believe their true friends are characters like the Reverend Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, Archbishop Fulton Sheen and Francis Cardinal Spellman? It costs a politician or his moneyed supporters nothing to declare in favor of school prayers; it may sound commendable to many. But, whether the prayers are held or not, they make no difference as between poverty and affluence.
It should not be thought, however, that a tight leash is kept on officials by the propertied. For it is not. The watchers are always sensitively aware that officials must play peekaboo with the larger public and must sometimes vote or act in ways that are thoroughly unsound from a propertied point of view. Such grandstand action is seldom resented by the watchers unless it is felt to be gratuitous and avoidable.
But any elected official who consistently goes against the grain of the propertied interests is quickly tagged "anti-business," tantamount to being labeled an anti-party deviationist in the Soviet Union. The man so labeled has been marked for political destruction, will have to fight to the hilt for his political life. Anti-labor he may be and live, anti-immigrant, anti-farmer, anti-intellectual and even anti-veteran. But if he consistently gives the watchful lobbyists a hard time he must depend strictly on his own resources and ingenuity to gain and hold electoral support. Very few have succeeded at it.
Public Discontent: How Deep Is It?
Most Americans, most of the time, nevertheless live in a state of mild semicontent in the substandard habitations that compose substandard residential areas of the richest industrial country on earth. Where there is positive discontent it is usually not very thoroughgoing and could usually be easily removed. Almost any person questioned, of course, would usually like a better job, perhaps a more lively or varied one; somewhat better pay but not necessarily a great deal more; a somewhat better neighborhood to live in, perhaps less noise, soot and crowding in the region; somewhat better schools for the
children but nothing outstanding; a longer vacation; not necessarily shorter hours but perhaps somewhat lower taxes (but not very much lower); possibly somewhat lower prices in general; a new car (possibly a Thunderbird); a color television set or even two; maybe a little fishing shack in the country but nothing fancy; some new or additional electric appliances for the home; possibly less crowded transportation to and from work; some deferred dental work; and the like. There is little among an average American's visualized needs, including medical, that would not be taken care of by just a little more money. As to cultural quality there is little felt need. Culturally, everything is thought to be good enough.
I am not referring here, of course, to the lower 20 to 25 per cent, too stupefied by its condition to look for anything better or even to complain. Some at this level do remark plaintively, true enough, of rats infesting their scabrous homes or leaks in the roof and seem to hope that somebody will some day come and remove them. Unable to qualify for readily available jobs because of low intelligence, lack of training, psychic depression, uncouth manners or general debility (hereditary or acquired), lack of accurate information and personal neglect, often concentrated in regions to which they have earlier been enticed at temporarily good pay for now-abandoned mining or industrial processes under what economists blithely call Labor Mobility, they listlessly sit and vaguely hope that something new will turn up. What would suit them as well as anything else would be a first-class war for which they could get good wages making ammunition. In the meantime, forehanded fly-by-night, freedom-loving entrepreneurs extract from them whatever they may have in cash, usually public relief money, by means of conscientious overcharges for rent, food, clothing and dispensable gadgets dispensed on the basis of free misrepresentation.
Little noticed about the habitual poor is the fact that most of them are poorest of all in spirit. Most are from unusually large families in which they have been pointedly depreciated and "put down" by habitually irritated parents or, when such is not the case, they have come to see themselves as an operative cause of the harsh family condition-- another troublesome mouth to feed. Contrasting with the low sense of self-esteem among the poor is a correspondingly high sense of quiet self-esteem among the established rich, a reflex to their having usually been catered to by parents and servants and always spoken of as entitled to the best--in clothes, in food, in schools, in marriage, in trips to Europe and the like. The habitual rich do not place a high value upon self merely because they have money (as is often thought) but because in most cases they have been conditioned to being highly valued or overvalued by everybody around them. In many among poor as well as rich there is a noticeable reaction-formation to these basic feelings of value and nonvalue. Many of the poor react by assertively proclaiming their high value (which they do not really feel) and respond approvingly to the assertions of clergy, democratic ideologists and politicians about their superlative value: "God must love the poor because He made so many of them. " Some no doubt feel in their bones that it is a fairy tale--but it is a pleasant one. The rich, per contra, react by developing an outward mien of modesty, unassumingness, tentativeness and self- deprecation. Everybody remarks: "What a nice democratic guy! He'll talk with anybody, real friendly. Who'd ever think he was worth $100 million? A real gentleman. "
But, whether overassertive or submissive in attitude, most of the poor feel marked down. From birth onward their entire experience, with only unusual exceptions, has underlined and emphasized their lowliness and dispensability. Here, indeed, is the purely human difference between most of the rich and the poor, which F. Scott Fitzgerald correctly sensed in noting that the rich were different and which Ernest Hemingway failed to register when he observed in response that the only difference was that the rich had more money. Money, indeed, is the least of the differences, man for
man and pound for pound, between the rich and the poor, always allowing for exceptional cases on both sides of the fence. The broad difference lies in self-valuation-- too low in one case, too high in the other.
Two things the working American dreads but seldom talks about: loss of his health and loss of his job, which loss of health by itself usually entails. "Thank God for your health," it is commonly said reprovingly to complainers unless they are on their last legs.
Without the ownership of income-producing property, holding at most some small savings, some life insurance and possibly some equity in a mediocre mortgaged home, 90 per cent of Americans (as we have seen) are completely dependent on wages or salary. Relatively few hold jobs under tenure or long-term contract. If the jobs are removed the jugular vein is severed, not only on the means of livelihood but on self- esteem. Most Americans out of a job, no matter how they got that way, feel beaten. If joblessness continues very long they begin to be looked at askance by family and friends. Are they flat tires in the land of success? They begin to wonder themselves.
Full-scale employment is a prime basic aim of American public policy, supported by both parties. It has been recognized since the massive layoffs of the 1930's that here, if nowhere else, is a problem that could generate really big political upheaval. Although the labor force has grown with the population, unemployment remains and a number work part time as well as some at two jobs.
Those the political managers have not been able to absorb into the labor force they have tried to provide for by (1) prolonged routine schooling, (2) the maintenance of a German-style standing army of more than three million men and (3) paid retirement at ages 62 to 65. Anyone retired, in the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe or in school is obviously not unemployed. Yet approximately one-third cannot qualify for military service for physical or mental reasons; many of the same group plus others cannot absorb available schooling--a problem.
By way of providing for the inexorably growing labor force, the political parties foster schemes of government-subsidized capital expansion at home-- economic growth"--and investment abroad--"economic imperialism"under military protection.
There is present, then, especially as population growth has not even been tardily curbed, an obviously explosive situation--what professors are prone to call "a dynamic configuration. " This last implies only that almost anything can happen.
As long as they are employed at fairly reasonable wages Americans, far less politicalized than their European counterparts, are sufficiently content. Only low prices for farmers, low wages or unemployment, as history shows, can put a noticeable number of them into serious political motion and make them start thinking, reading and talking about their plight. Even then their political expression in the form of dissident parties has never amounted to a considerable percentage of the popular vote. As long as there seems any hope simply of bottom-level, hand-to-mouth employment, they remain glued to one of the prefabricated parties. In this they are very much like the diligent Germans who, as history attests, will go any way politically that the jobs lie. Perhaps this is only reasonable.
Popular Gratitude
Americans, moderately content (except for certain minority blocs in times of crisis), are almost to a man grateful for living in such a marvelous political and economic situation, extending liberty and equal justice to all--the last in part a reflex attitude to propaganda that begins early in the public schools. Those rank-and-file Americans who do not feel grateful tend to feel guilty over their lack of gratitude for such a reputedly fine system.
The intense gratitude felt by many is well illustrated by a case cited by Drew Pearson: Nick Galinfianakis, a lawyer, Duke University professor and member of the North Carolina state legislature, stood as a candidate for Congress in 1966 against Smith Bagley, young grandson of R. J. Reynolds, the tobacco tycoon. Pearson noted that Galinfianakis got into politics when friends put up $18 to file his name as a candidate for the state legislature. Said Galinfianakis to Pearson:
"With a name as monstrous as mine I thought it was a joke. I didn't think anyone would vote for a name like mine. However, my father was born in Crete and had a sense of gratitude toward this country. He used to run water out of a spigot and say, 'Look at the clean water we have to drink. We couldn't get that back in Greece! ' My father ran a little hot dog stand, and he felt a deep obligation to this country. I feel that in the Legislature I've been discharging his obligation--and mine. " 22
This is far from an isolated instance but typifies, I have found, a general attitude especially among immigrant groups down to the third generation and among recent refugees from Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism. Second- and third-generation children of immigrant families have in millions of cases been told, when complaining of anything, to "be grateful you have a roof over your head," "be grateful you have something at all to eat. " "Be grateful. . . . "
In most of the immigrant families, and among many of the earlier native frontier families, there remains a family tradition about some sort of distant, life-sapping and perhaps nameless hardship that has been narrowly escaped. The descendants of those who escaped that hardship, whatever it was, are repeatedly told to be grateful for living in a country of so many opportunities, such wide liberties, such bountiful fields, such clean water, such blue skies. The children owe gratitude above all to parents for choosing such a country. Examples of poor boys who have "made good," from Rockefeller and Carnegie to Everett M. Dirksen and Lyndon B. Johnson, are often cited and the mass media can run the list up into the thousands, the ten thousands. But, and here is the dazzling moment of truth, they can't run it up to a million, not to 500,000, not perhaps even to 100,000. There are enough showcase examples of "successes," however, who have made it to become the biggest used-car-lot operator in all history, to overwhelm most dissenters. The unconvinced are merely carpers. Whatever is amiss, it is implied, will soon be rectified, perhaps after the next big election.
If times are bad or uncertain they will sooner or later improve. In any event, there is no need for anything drastic although many persons would no doubt agree it would be a boon if there were only guaranteed jobs or income, perhaps hereditary jobs.
In reading their newspapers Americans reinforce their attitudes by making note of wholesale death camps in Germany; concentration camps and secret police in Russia; mass slaughters in India, Turkey, China and Pakistan; famines in Greece and elsewhere; overpopulation; lack of water, and, in general, secret police, executions, a bad situation all over the earth. They little realize that foreign newspapers, with equal truth, regularly feature lynchings and riots in the United States, American unemployment and slums rivaled perhaps only by those of India, floods, soup lines, Hoovervilles, gangsters, periodic American depressions and recessions, McCarthyite cultural vigilantism, widespread American lawlessness, traffic jams, ugly cities, water and air pollution, advertising fakery, and other vile conditions. There is, evidently, widespread editorial selection all over precisely with the idea of fostering in-group feelings of complacency. Actually, things are varyingly bad in most places. All Utopias are bogus.
Not everybody, of course, has traditional grounds, however tenuous, for feeling grateful. There are, first, the Negroes--10 per cent of the population. Negroes provide
clamorous evidence that the American system, whatever it is, is not benign in all its dispensations. Oddly, to those nurtured on myth, it has its Siberias.
There are, as a matter of fact, many others who seem to have little ground for gratitude; most of them appear to be of the politically apathetic strata that cannot even bring themselves to vote. As a financial writer for the New York Post, commenting on an analysis in the Social Security Bulletin, puts it:
The number of "poor" Americans-officially defined as having a yearly income of about $3,100 or less for a non-farm family of four-has been slashed a minimum of 6,000,000 since 1960. In the same period, the number of "near poor" just above this lowest income bracket has jumped at least 1,000,000. In totals today, 34,000,000 are living under the "poverty" line and 16,000,000 Americans are living right above it. These facts . . . are a warning of what even a slight economic recession could mean to 50,000,000 Americans. . . .
According to the Social Security yardstick, the poor individual today has 70? a day to spend on food plus $1. 40 for rent, clothes, home maintenance, transportation, everything else. The near poor person has 93? a day for food, plus $1. 85 for everything else. The fact is that one in four Americans (including 22,000,000 children under 18) now exist at these levels. The fact is that 43 per cent of all Americans over the age of 65 today are either poor or near poor. 23
This is about what many smokers spend in a day on cigars.
Perhaps even most of these feel grateful for something. If they do not, their discontent is not translated into political action. Very possibly most of them are of low IQ, perhaps inordinately low owing to diet deficiencies and self-depreciation.
But if 25 per cent of Americans live in poverty and near-poverty another 50 per cent can hardly be said, in the light of official income statistics, to be living more than meagerly. Touches of "the affluent society" begin to be encountered only in the lower levels of the economically upper 25 per cent and do not amount to much until one gets into the upper 10 per cent of income receivers. The "affluent society" is really a not too thick veneer, mostly a surcharged installment-credit affair.
Educational Levels
According to the 1960 census, the formal schooling of Americans twenty-five years old and over was as follows: 24
Total persons in this age range
No schooling
One to four years of school
Five to seven years of school
Eight years of school
One to three years of high school
Four years of high school
One to three years of college
Four years or more of college
Number
99,024,000
2,251,000
5,997,000
13,710,000
17,397,000
19,047,000
24,330,000
8,705,000
7,588,000
Per Cent
100. 0
2. 3
6. 0
13. 8
18. 0
19. 2
24. 5
8. 8
7. 5
Impressive when compared with the data for Basutoland, as they sometimes are, these statistics, as educators warn, do not portend what they are taken to portend owing to the general low quality of the American educational system, especially at the elementary and secondary levels and more than half of the college level. Most formal education in the United States is of the once-over-lightly, hit-and-run, masscult, bargain-counter and vocational variety so that even many college graduates have lingering difficulties about spelling, writing plain prose, identifying crucial historical figures, events and ideas or
reading beyond the level of Reader's Digest. If one is seeking effectively schooled people one must reduce the high school and college figures of a largely Potemkin- Village system by more than half. 25 No other large country, however, has a better system.
Education, of course, is not to be confused with mere schooling. Eric Hoffer, lightly schooled longshoreman-author of The True Believer, stands out as a far more thoroughly educated man than, for example, William F. Buckley, Jr. , Yale graduate who wrote the grotesque God and Man at Yale, as good a sample as any of the Buckley lucubrations. If one concedes Buckley every one of his points against Yale--and a civilized man would hold them to be positive virtues--one sees that he has unwarrantably built his case about a complex institution on few and untypical cases relating wholly to the minor undergraduate college, ignoring the mountain for the mouse.
It should not, then, be supposed that I make a cult of schooling and believe that even at its best it necessarily represents education. A cultivated autodidact like Hoffer (and there are others) can, as it so happens, hold his own with swarms of Ph. D. 's. A few topflight professors do not even have a bachelor's degree--Lewis Mumford for one example.
George Gallup, the poll wizard, every so often makes a popular survey on topics of immediate public interest. Invariably, on whatever is of, trivial interest he finds the public well informed, on whatever is of serious concern the vast majority is abysmally ignorant even though the newspapers have gone overboard on the subject. Few will know what a cyclotron is; nearly everyone will be quite expert on something like the Profumo Affair or miniskirts.
If one gives credence to the bare school statistics, however, a considerable part of the population is sufficiently educated: 40. 8 per cent over twenty-five as of 1960 had graduated from high school, with 7. 5 per cent finishing four years or more of college and 8. 8 attending college for one to three years, mostly one. There is obviously a weak base here for general intelligent political action. Statistically, the certified laggards outnumber the certified competents. Recalling the figures on the distribution of intelligence, knowing that formal completion of schooling in a loose system is not always indicative of solid knowledge and good judgment, it is evident why the populace is not able to select, elect and retain representatives who will act in their broad interests.
The Brain Drain
Educational attainment in the United States, indeed, is generally so low that this complex industrial nation must now increasingly draw much of its highly skilled personnel from abroad, often attracting from needier nations their people of great skill. Just as the United States now processes far more of the raw materials of the world than any other country so it seems well over the threshold of attracting to its shores by offers of higher salaries and better professional facilities most of the brains of the world. The process has been called "the brain drain. " Immigration, once confined to the unskilled, now features the highly skilled.
According to Foreign Affairs on the subject of the "brain drain" to the United States, "the statistics that have been developed on the so-called 'brain drain' present a somber picture. According to one UNESCO report, 43,000 scientists and engineers emigrated to the United States between 1949 and 1961, 'many' of whom came from the less developed countries. Of the 11,200 immigrants from Argentina alone between 1951 and 1963, nearly half were technicians and professional people, 15 percent were high-level administrators and 38 percent skilled workers. In 1964-65, 28 percent of the internships and 26 percent of the residencies in U. S. hospitals were filled by foreign graduates--
nearly 11,000 in all--and 80 percent of the foreign interns and 70 percent of the foreign residents were from developing countries. The drain from Asian nations, particularly Taiwan and Korea, is the most serious: it is estimated that over 90 percent of the Asian students who come here to study never return home. " 26
Those who came to the United States as advanced students came under foreign assistance programs; but they remain to fill in gaps of higher personnel that are not filled by the native products of the American school system.
England, which itself drains the Commonwealth countries of talent, is alarmed at the drain of its own physicians, surgeons and scientists to the United States. It is losing physicians and surgeons in the proportion of one-fifth to one-third of the graduates of its medical schools each year, some of them intensively trained specialists. 27
While the official unemployment rate hovers a little below 4 per cent and the extreme poverty rate around 25 per cent, the Department of Labor has advised that there are three million high-level jobs more or less permanently vacant in the country--for engineers, scientists, technicians, statisticians, administrators, nurses, physicians, teachers and the like. Neither the populace nor the educational system seems able to supply fully the needs of a technologically advanced system, partly because of native incapacity, partly because of educational shortsightedness and parsimony and partly because of low-level communal goals set by half-literate local community leaders and politicos.
Corporations, universities and government agencies compete madly with each other for well-schooled personnel. Local communities flounder and sink because men of informed judgment have been drawn away to distant points of the compass, leaving local Chamber of Commerce mentalities in charge.
These figures, true enough, can be interpreted in various ways. It can be said that technology has advanced so fast that it has left much of the population behind, breathless, which is strictly true. It can also be said that the population and communal institutions have not been adequate to meet rising needs, which is equally true.
Just as the level of educational attainment is not sufficient to meet the general needs of the time so, it is my argument, the level of educational attainment is not sufficient to meet the political needs of the people in selecting political personnel devoted to the needs of the nation. One gets instead the well-known variety of peanut politician, mainly exemplified at or near the top in streamlined hicks like Lyndon B. Johnson, Everett Dirksen, Orville Faubus and George C. Wallace, to name only a few of the currently most obtrusive and obnoxious. 28
As politics is the realm productive of public policy, the troubles of the country trace back inevitably to politics. Here we find largely inadequate officeholders chosen by largely inadequate people on the basis of largely irrelevant criteria, always allowing for the fact that a minority of the officeholders and a minority of the people are fully adequate to their responsibilities.
The democratic system thus comes full circle and in the United States presents a parody of itself on the governmental level. 29 As a consequence the entire land is officially plunged into Madison Avenue nonsense. The system, it turns out, has been infiltrated and subverted by boobocrats.
While institutional inadequacy is involved it is (contrary to a long line of radicals, liberals and plain democrats) by no means the whole story. Although many Americans above age twenty-five are inadequately educated and schooled, nobody at all is twisting their arms to make them remain that way. The major cities are all heavily supplied with public night schools on every level from the primary grades to university postgraduate
levels and anybody may rectify his educational defects very readily, usually free of direct charge. Some do; most don't. Again, most of the major cities have excellent libraries, very lightly patronized.
Where the interests of the broad public he may be discerned on any weekend when they hit the roads in their cars. While this aimless driving about on superb highways may be cosmically innocent, like praying, it is not done by a populace seriously concerned about its destiny. It is done, in fact, by handicapped boobs.
The Market Place
What we have before us is an operative and a formal political-legal system. The latter, it should be perfectly understood, is quite well devised to respond in an orderly, systematic way to the collective will of the populace.
The operative system, the real system--control by corporation--subsidized politicians--quickly came into being and prevailed owing simply to the inability of the electorate to understand and use properly the system offered. This electorate consisted almost entirely of rustic Anglo-Saxon and Scotch-Irish hinds and, in the course of time, largely illiterate continental European immigrants.
With the spread of the popular franchise after 1830 the system decreasingly elevated characters like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the choices of an educated landed and mercantile enfranchised political elite, and instead pushed up from the soil confused Jacksons, Van Burens, Buchanans, Grants, McKinleys and more recently Hardings, Coolidges, Eisenhowers, Johnsons et al. The trend was even more marked on the lower levels and only exceptionally did men of genuine political grasp make their way upward. Many of this order simply did not make it and turned away from politics.
The operative system that came into being, then, was a reflex to popular rather than institutional inadequacy, an important distinction. It is the Marxist idea that all social evil is traceable to existing institutions. I deny this although I do not deny that existing institutions are often influences toward evil, especially as these institutions are distorted under usage. Beautiful parks are despoiled by ordinary people misusing them, not by their managers. 30
In glancing at the market place, it will be observed that what is chiefly criticizable about it is that much of it, as in "democratic" politics, represents a genuine adjustment to the low-level understanding and goals of much of its public, the customers. It is also true, however, that much of this market place simply ignores the customer, the public, and goes about blithely frying its fish in its own way, as in the establishment of monopoly arrangements. In many ways the market and its institutions, as it turns out, pointedly do not exist to serve the public; the public exists to serve the market, to facilitate its operation. 31
The American economist Thorstein Veblen developed the concept of economic surplus, most recently employed by the neo-Marxists Baran and Sweezy in computing it (for the first time) for 1929-63. It was Veblen's contention in The Theory of Business Enterprise and The Theory of the Leisure Class that much, perhaps most, of this surplus was wasted, purposely and conscientiously, so that it could not be used to improve institutions or the life of the people as a whole. The argument was: Capitalism establishes monopolies and uses advanced technology in order to increase surplus to a certain point and then wastes much or most of this surplus in order not to alter the necessary conditions for generating such surplus. Instead of operating to uplift and improve everybody and ameliorate the conditions of life, thus altering institutions, it
was held it operated to keep everybody right where he was, which meant that the rich became richer and the poor remained poor or meagerly sustained.
The economic surplus, specifically, is the difference between what a society produces and the cost of producing it. The larger the surplus the more a society has to dispose of in various ways of its theoretical choice.
As derived by Baran and Sweezy with the assistance of Joseph D. Phillips from orthodox official data, since 1929 the American surplus has ranged from a low of 40. 4 per cent of gross national product in 1934 to a high of 71. 6 per cent in 1943; it stood at 56. 1 per cent in 1963. It stood at 46. 9 per cent in 1929 and has shown a definite tendency to rise over the decades. As estimates are used even in some of the official government figures employed, there is room for error. But even if error went as high as 10 per cent, or even 15 per cent, either way, the computations would be broadly indicative.
The major components of the surplus for 1963, for example, were as follows: 32
Total property income
(Corporate and noncorporate income, rents,
interest, profit component of corporate
officers, etc. )
Waste in distribution (sales effort, trade
advertising, etc. )
Nontrade corporate advertising
$104,618,000,000
Surplus employees' compensation
(Finance, insurance, realty and legal services,
which last cost only $870 million)
Absorbed by government
Total surplus
Percentage of Gross National Product
168,008,000,000
$327,725,000,000
56. 1
The direct return to property, then (out of gross national product of $589. 2 billions- plus), amounted to more than 17 per cent, which accrued in all to not much more than 10 per cent of the populace by any reckoning and was concentrated most heavily in a thin upper level of this 10 per cent. With respect to the surplus itself, the take of property was nearly 30 per cent.
Waste in the Business Process
The components of waste in the business process shown in the Baran-Sweezy computation consist of expenditures for advertising, market research, expense-account entertaining, maintaining an excessive number of sales outlets, public relations and lobbying, salaries and bonuses of salesmen, maintenance of showy office buildings and business litigation. None of this adds anything to the value or utility of what is produced. 33
There would be an element of waste in any system, but the argument here is that the waste under capitalism is institutionally determined in order to maintain capitalism itself rather than a high quality of social life. It does no good to argue with a Moscow- oriented Marxist that there is as much or more waste and irrationality in the Soviet system, because the defensive answer here would be that the Russian system was not an outgrowth of capitalism, as Marx stipulated that socialism should be, but is an originally backward system that must pass through a capitalist phase of labor exploitation and the
29,749,000,000
7,700,000,000
17,650,000,000
like in order to establish an industrial base for socialism, which is something that will be ushered into being in due course. Those who believe this, in view of the rise of a Soviet vested political bureaucracy, must draw upon whatever credulity they possess. My own view with respect both to capitalism and to sovietism is: There is no Santa Claus. Under whichever system one has, workers, it seems, will work and administrators will administer, on terms more or less unequal in all cases unless administrators deliberately choose to play fair.
As to advertising, it is recognized by many economists of repute as an uneconomic aberration, introduced by corporations as a substitute for competitive pricing. The advertisements create the illusion of product differentiation among large varieties of essentially identical products. These essentially identical products are, it is true, differently styled and packaged but in most cases the "talking points" are irrelevant.
Economists agree that the ultimate consumer pays for the advertising which in turn defeats the ultimate consumer in his search for lower prices, maintains monopoly prices. The worst thing that can happen in the system, in the view of its managers, is price- cutting, which reduces surplus.
Continual advertising itself, by its overwhelming success, in some cases leads to a virtual monopoly of some products--for example, the Gillette among the wet-shave safety razors.
As the gilt-edged economist E. H. Chamberlin observed, "selling methods which play upon the buyer's susceptibilities, which use against him [my emphasis] laws of psychology with which he is unfamiliar and therefore against which he cannot defend himself, which frighten or flatter or disarm him--all of these have nothing to do with his knowledge. They are not informative; they are manipulative.