No More Learning

As with most books by scions of the rich, readers appear to have been chiefly interested in Vanderbilt's autobiographical and "insider" revelations. This was true, too, in the case of Evelyn Walsh McLean's Father Struck It Rich.
Vanderbilt appears to me to have come the closest of one from a very rich family to being a professional writer and working editor; he was precisely that most of his adult
life. I call anyone here a professional writer who habitually sets words down on paper for sale to the public. The definition implies no critical judgments.
The Literary Set
Mary Borden (Lady Spears), daughter born in 1886 of William Borden, the dairy- products tycoon, comes the closest known (to me) of any higher-strata American rich to being a critically extolled professional creative writer. Author of some twenty works, mostly fiction, "Her novels reveal a quiet but devastating wit" according to William Rose Bene? t's The Reader's Encyclopedia (1955). There have been writers in some abundance from the propertied middle class, in possession of some modest private unearned income (Henry James, Clarence Day, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow and others), but this is not the question. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, daughter of a Morgan partner, should also be noticed as a writer of considerable distinction.
Creative writers about the rich and the upper classes in the United States--Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Frank Norris, Louis Auchincloss--have not themselves been of the very wealthy strata; although Edith Wharton was definitely upper class in that she was of the Rhinelander pre-Revolutionary family, wrote about some of the latter-day rich and was married to an affluent Bostonian. Auchincloss, as a big-firm Wall Street lawyer with Yale and Groton in the background, I would place in the cultivated upper middle class rather than the plutocracy.
Most writing, especially by scions of the post-Civil War industrial fortunes, has been in the form of memoirs, some of them emanating from literary ghosts. I conclude that few if any of the American big rich, excluding here descendants of early-established New England mercantile families, have distinguished themselves as writers; I do not, however, assert that none of them has authored a book of some sort or written an essay.
As to great editors--taking as par for this course Joseph Pulitzer, Maxwell Perkins, H. L. Mencken, E. W. Howe, Henry Watterson or almost anyone of a similar stripe--I would say the rich have produced none. Hearst would surely not rate.
Performing and Plastic Arts
In the performing and nonliterary creative arts, one can pick up a name here and there, mostly from lower levels of wealth, but the record is rather meager. Albert Spalding (1888-1953), a very fine violin virtuoso and composer, was a scion of the sporting- goods family; and Mary Cassatt (1845-1926), an esteemed painter especially of mothers and children, was the daughter of a banker and sister of the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Neither Spalding nor Cassatt, however, were from the top echelons of wealth.
In the upper level of wealth is Gerald Felix Warburg (b. 1901), son of Felix M. Warburg and Frieda Schiff and a distinguished performing cellist, formerly a member of the Stradivarius Quartet and known for his concertizing and involvement in musical enterprises. Here, too, should be mentioned James P. Warburg, son of Paul M. Warburg, the banker, and Nina J. Loeb (Kuhn, Loeb), who paralleled a career in investment banking and corporate management by authoring more than thirty books on aspects of economics, finance, politics and public affairs and found time to produce some books of verse--a literary geyser. There is, too, Edward M. M. Warburg (b. 1908), a social worker who has taught art, has participated in archaeological expeditions and more recently has taken a directorial role in various cultural and charitable enterprises. The Warburgs, offshoots of a cultivated Anglo-German Jewish banking family, seem to me an untypical case oriented more like certain descendants of earlier Boston mercantilists than latter-day industrialists, even though their center of activity has certainly been Wall Street. They were affluent, probably rich, before they came to the United States.
Beyond this one has to search carefully for more candidates. Gloria Vanderbilt has had "one-man" shows in painting. That there are creative sparks within the Vanderbilt clan is also suggested by the fact that Harold S. Vanderbilt, premier international yachting champion, around 1925 invented the game of contract bridge, which is an achievement of the same order that one would surely acknowledge to the unknown developers of games like chess, checkers and mah-jong.
Raymond Pitcairn, described in Who's Who as a lawyer, architect and philanthropist (1885-1966), president of the Pitcairn Company and a director of the family's inherited Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, one of the larger of the nation's industrial enterprises, was the architect of the Cathedral of the Bryn Athyn (Pennsylvania) Church of the New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian). He is the father of eight children, including Nathan Pitcairn (born 1912), director of Pittsburgh Plate Glass and many other companies.
Alfred Victor du Pont (born 1900) has been a career architect since 1930. Ire? ne? e du Pont, Jr. (born 1920), is a mechanical engineer with the family company. Many of the contemporary Du Ponts, however, have had educations in science or engineering at schools such as Harvard, Yale and M. I. T. , and many are ensconced in family enterprises. John du Pont presents himself as a marine biologist as well as an Olympic athlete.
In this book reference to the Du Pouts is only to the dominant owning group of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, which since its reorganization in 1902 is what gave this group its money-power; members of this group have largely concerned themselves with business, finance and, indirectly, politics. In politics they provided the backbone of the opposition to Roosevelt's New Deal.
The family as a whole is much more extensive than the chemical kings and has been traced genealogically by two family members, obviously imbued with familial mystique. 9
As of 1949 the genealogy showed 1,035 descendants of Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, some of the eighth generation. 10 The first known ancestor of the line leading to Pierre Samuel, there being other branches, was Jehan du Pont, baptized at Rouen on February 22, 1565. 11 The French Du Ponts were inscribed generally on local roll-books as "bourgeois," so that the family may be said to have been officially middle class until the emergence of a section of it on the latter-day upper finpolitan circuit of plutocracy.
As a middle-class family it included a considerable number of nonbusiness achievers, a fact not germane to this inquiry about the wealthy of a later day. Nor is this inquiry concerned with any of the noncorporation Du Ponts, most of whom interestingly do not bear the surname of Du Pont at all. One would not, for example, associate the name of Lawrence Sven Anderson (b. 1944) with that of Du Pont; yet his mother was Rosina du Pont, who traces back directly to Pierre Samuel (1739-1817). Nor would one at first blush be inclined to designate Washington Irving, Jr. (b. 1952) as a Du Pont; but he too, is a direct descendant of Pierre Samuel. And so it goes with many others who do not bear the Du Pont name. 12
Medicine
In medicine we find William Larimer Mellon, a specialist in tropical diseases who has served the natives in the West Indies, and Henry Clay Frick II, grandson of the ironmaster, a physician and surgeon specializing in gynecology. If there are any other medical men from heavily moneyed strata, they have escaped my notice. As to medicine in general today (without any reference to those two valued practitioners), a variety of investigators has shown that it has become pretty much a lush prerogative of the middle class, members of which dominate it as a recently lucrative field. The great discoveries
of selfless medical scientists have, by and large, been capitalized along conspicuously lucrative lines by striving middle-class people. 13 It is the belief of some investigators that the present need to finance a medical education privately out of middle-class resources operates to exclude men of genuine talent from lower levels of society and to proliferate business-oriented unthorough doctors whose strictly middle-class economic outlook obviously dominates the policies and expressions of the American Medical Association. Doctors, it is implied by many dicta of this association, should properly function on a strictly individual cost-plus-average-rate-of-high-profit basis--all the traffic will bear.
Although wealthy men sometimes marry their nurses I was unable to find any women from wealthy families serving as professional nurses, but such a fact might be difficult to detect. Some wealthy women do serve as nurses' aids in home communities and during wartime. Most nurses of whatever degree probably serve mainly out of economic necessity in an ill-rewarded field. Despite immoderate public expressions of esteem for them, nurses in the United States are generally treated as lower servants.
Public Performers
Wealthy men and women not infrequently marry theatrical performers and opera stars, but there are few cases of a wealthy man or woman becoming a professional performer. One of these few cases was Grace Kelly (born 1929) who became a prize-winning film star and then Princess Grace of Monaco; she is the daughter of wealthy Philadelphia contractor John B. Kelly. More recently there has emerged film star Dina Merrill, daughter of cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. Similarly, wealthy people are sometimes sportsmen in the sense of following or bankrolling some sport such as horse racing or yachting, but one rarely finds one as a competitive participant like yachtsman Harold S. Vanderbilt in rough-and-tumble big-league action. Except for youngsters in college sports, hardly any stand forth under my scrutiny as athletes--Grace Kelly's father was a sculling champion--despite the newspaper-fostered national cult of athleticism. Many of the wealthy, of course, play golf and tennis; but they simply don't rate on the big-trophy circuit.
In general, the Hollywood, Broadway and athletic circuits are dominated by people who came up from the nonpropertied depths of nonentity. Some of these, of course, have hit it big financially and hobnob happily with the well-heeled in feverish Cafe? Society.
Scientists, Scholars and Philosophers
Nobody from a conspicuously rich established family was found in a possibly imperfect search among scientists or scholars as these are listed in American Men of Science: The Physical and Biological Sciences, 3 vols. , 11th edition (R. R. Bowker Co. , New York, 1965); and American Men of Science: The Social and Behavioral Sciences, lOth edition (the Jaques Cattell Press, Inc. , Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, 1962). In the four-volume Directory of American Scholars (R. R. Bowker Co. , New York, 1963), there is listed Corliss Lamont, son of a one-time leading Morgan partner, as a writer on contemporary and philosophical affairs. Among various books he is perhaps best known for his The Philosophy of Humanism, 1957.
1 would not deny that some--a few--scientists, scholars, philosophers or educators may have sprung from families of lesser property, perhaps up to $1 million by value, but I have been able to devise no system for readily locating those who trace a line of descent on the distaff side. In general, the record as I scan it suggests that few people of noticeable wealth go into science, scholarship, education, medicine, journalism, the judiciary, philosophy or the arts--that is to say, they shun subtle detail work all the way from managing their own accounting systems on upward. Some men-on-the-make,
however, like the original Rockefeller, have a genius for detail that reminds one of extremely self-demanding artists.
Echelons of Command
Activists among the rich (as distinguished from the more or less graceful and here and there civilized idlers) tend to surge toward positions of broad command in corporations, nonprofit cultural, social and artistic organizations and in government, in this last recalling Aristotle's observation about the penchant of the rich for political office. There they do what they can to lay out and enforce broad lines of policy within which the detail work of others will bear the requisite fruit. The wealthy may finance the detail work that goes into the creation of an instrument like television and may finally finance its launching; they thereafter determine, in concert with up-and-comers, how it shall be used --as an instrument of general enlightenment or an instrument for selling merchandise at a profit. While compromises are worked out to meet the objections of churlish dissenters, anyone is free to see where the emphasis falls and what the level of appeal is.
From the universities to the corporations and cultural organizations, the wealthy and their chosen aides supervise the detail workers. In their various positions of command the supervisors are known as executives, administrators, directors, publishers, trustees, sponsors, officials, community leaders, philanthropists and public servants. I imply no criticism here, simply point to the fact that activity and achievement among the rich at any level usually boil down primarily to concern with ordering the surrounding state of affairs and directing detail work along soundly approved lines of profitability.
I do not deny but indeed assert, while pointing to Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, that such concern may visualize improvement in the surrounding state of affairs rather than keeping them soundly headed toward the rocks. Yet, whether it represents improvement, deterioration (as C. Wright Mills contended) or the maintenance of the status quo, it shows the area of major interest. The active rich and upcoming rich, as far as one can judge from the available record, are far less interested in understanding, improving or embellishing the world than in running it, at times running it close to the rocks as when the German industrialists embraced Hitler, or as when American financiers thrust the United States into World War I.
The World of Celebrity
The Celebrity Register, edited by Cleveland Amory (Harper and Row, New, York, 1963), lists people as noteworthy according to the amount of space they are given in the mass media. Among the rich there mentioned one finds Douglas Dillon; Donald Douglas; Angier Biddle Duke; Doris Duke; Ire? ne? e du Pont; Cyrus Eaton; Henry J. Kaiser; Sherman Fairchild; Marshall Field IV (d. ); Harvey S. , Leonard, Raymond and Russell Firestone; Randolph and William Randolph (Jr. ) Hearst; Henry, Benson, William C. and Mrs. Edsel Ford; Paul and Richard King Mellon; John Pillsbury; Alfred G. , Cornelius, Jr. , Gloria and Harold S. Vanderbilt; all the Rockefeller brothers and Jievute Paulekiute Sears ("Bobo") Rockefeller; Ogden Reid; Walter P. Chrysler; Amon Carter, Jr. ; Dorothy Schiff; Lady and John Jacob Astor of England; Henry Crown; Lammot du Pont Copeland; August Busch; and a medley of others.
In combing through the list of the rich who are also celebrated by percipient editors one does not encounter any significantly additional names relating to notable personal achievement and, indeed, one notes many omissions.
The Question of Achievement
This question of achievement has arisen, I remind the reader, for two reasons: (1) It is part of standard public relations ideology that the big fortunes are used in all ways for
public support and (2) the criteria of achievement are applied in general most forcefully by the rich to others. What I am doing, heretically, is applying the standards to them. I mention this because it should not be inferred that I myself value achievement as such, and in and of itself, very highly; there is much to be said along the line of Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness. As far as people in general are concerned, I personally value them first for general amiability, which I consider beyond price, and after that for such higher cultivation as they may have acquired. A man amiable and cultivated seems to me the limit of what one can ask for in a human being. If he is also creative he is, patently, ineffable.
The achiever, as it is now known, is usually a person psychologically programmed or impelled to function in a certain way and possessing the ability to satisfy his impulsion. It is, however, part of the middle-class cult of personality to celebrate immoderately the carrier of such often purely fortuitous programming. A man's specific achievement, as far as that goes, is often greater or lesser than he is, a fact sensed by those achievers who draw back from public acclaim not so much out of modesty as uneasiness with the personal judgment of which they are the objects.
Although achievement is a splashy middle-class value, it is applied most rigorously by the rich, who bring it to bear on others far more rigorously than I have applied it to them in this chapter, where at times I have inwardly quailed at the thought of how purists would look upon the free catholicity of some of my inclusions. As I explained initially, however, I do not pretend to be applying the canons in all their rigor but will take almost anything offered.
What the rich generally demand in all things of direct concern to them is perfection- from food, clothing, drink, raiment and shelter to expertise in all skills of which they feel need. This is readily seen in the food and service in their clubs and restaurants and in the arrangements in their own hospitals. Where the rich congregate and bestow their patronage everything is offered according to tiptop standards. It is the same when it comes to choosing skills for their cultural and economic enterprises. In the plastic arts what they clearly want is the best, for which they pay astronomic prices. On the cultural front standards, particularly technical, are most rigorously imposed, on students and faculty alike, in the key universities; as one traces the chain of command upward one arrives finally at the board of trustees, where the familiar names of the rich, absent farther down, begin to occur with frequency and regularity. The more prestigious the university the more frequently do outstanding names in science and scholarship appear among the faculty-Nobel laureates or men of comparable lofty stature. The higher one ascends among the graduates, from the cum laudes to the magna cum laudes and on to the summa cum laudes the more rigorous are the applied standards. It is the same among the big corporations, which skim the cream of the physicists, chemists and engineers. Who wishes to invest money in a skyscraper if it is going to turn out to be another Leaning Tower of Pisa?
In brief, only the best is wanted except perhaps in social analysis. Many are called, few are chosen.
Throughout society, ordered from on high, the screws are tight as to (1) technical standards of production and service and (2) rates of pay for all subordinates. The consequence is that the United States is a high-tension society, invisibly and almost insensibly imposing upon all achievers demanding standards of performance and upon the labor force minimal rates of pay in the name of strictest economy and efficiency. It would clearly be inefficient as well as uneconomical to pay more than was required according to the unbreakable "law" of supply and demand. Hence, when rare skills are required by the ruling group--at this point we can stop all fencing and notice that we are
in fact confronted by a quite small ruling group--more bearers of these rare skills are produced, thus bringing into play the "law" of supply and demand. It would not do to have only 500 or so physicists in the country, each of whom could command an exorbitant salary comparable to that of a corporation chairman (and possibly tax exempt). It is better to produce thousands of physicists so that few can expect a salary above that of, say, an assistant bank cashier.
It is a curious fact in the United States that some of the rarest and most difficult skills--as of a creative mathematician--are paid for on a very low scale (Einstein, we recall, got $16,000) whereas far less rare skills, such as in the imposing of rules and standards, are relatively well rewarded. True savants in the United States are far more of the order of menial servants than they themselves suspect.
Although rejecting and resenting it when applied to themselves, the rich in general make full use of the instrument of criticism, in their own service. While this can be shown in many directions it appears most readily in the matter of politics. Not only is criticism sharp here but it is oriented not philosophically, according to reason, but along lines of naked and narrow self-interest. The politician who pursues under necessity some unfamiliar course, such as Franklin Roosevelt, is subjected to the most unsparing and ungenerous appraisal. No holds are barred. A Norman Thomas is hooted off the rostrum.
If it is one of the functions of criticism to encourage the performer to do better, it must follow that a function of criticism of the rich is to enable them to do better--as they expect everyone to do from waiters and bus boys on upward to presidents.
Achievement as a Value
The important value of achievement is directly imposed on American society largely by pushful products of the lower middle class who have received the nod from on high to occupy executive posts throughout the mass media, the great carriers of values in our day.
Any competent news editor can determine in a flash how noteworthy anyone is. His is an important function, for he decides how much valuable space can with maximum economic efficiency be allotted to anyone. He achieves his end by drawing upon wide background knowledge and evaluating how wealthy a person is, how elevated his position in the social hierarchy or the proper dimension of his apparent objective achievement. He believes he is governed by audience interest; that this is not so can be proved by showing that many of his emphases are of interest to no very wide audience. Attaining the presidency, winning a Nobel Prize, getting some championship, hitting a record number of home runs or writing a Broadway "hit" are instantly recognized pretty indiscriminately as big achievement; he has more difficulty in presenting some important scientific breakthrough. Not that many really care. As those know very well who make these measurements, not to have money, position or some approved tangible achievement to one's credit is to be a nobody, an employee at most, subject to downplay in the news columns unless one commits some titillating indiscretion or stupefying horror.
There are those moralists who carefully explain that such facile valuation is mistaken, that the widow suffering with lumbago and sciatica who rears six children to become solid citizens is as good as anyone, perhaps better. One may agree; but, as they say in electoral politics, if you have to explain just how good somebody really is you are lost. One either sees the point instantly against the background of accumulated values, as the news editor sees it, or never. Attention wanders as the moralists drone on hollowly that every person is invested with high human dignity and is of infinite inherent value. As anyone can see by looking about him, in terms of established going values this is just
not so; operationally it is pure bunk. In terms of applied going values, most people are crashing nobodies.
Eccentrically applying this same scale of going values to the rich, as they are applied to everybody else, produces results approximately of the order I have indicated in this chapter. The activists among the rich are not achievers so much as commanders and through their intricate public-relations system project their positions of command as superlative achievements. A man is not an "industrialist" because he possesses some recondite skill denied to other men; he is an industrialist because he possesses and commands capital. And so it is with most of the roles the rich play. Put another way, give many other men the same cards and they could play the same hand, perhaps to better effect, surely not to worse.
Achievement and the Middle Class
Achievement in general appears to be a middle-class prerogative. The rich, as William H. Vanderbilt observed, do not appear motivated by any particular ambition, other than to rule. They are brought up to feel that they have already somehow made the grade. The poor and near-poor, having all they can do to keep their heads economically above water, cannot aspire even in fantasy to much in the way of achievement except possibly in sports or entertainment. Becoming a soft-shoe dancer or a professional ballplayer represents perhaps the zenith of aspiration among some of the more ambitious of the younger poor.
In the middle classes--lower middle class being those with nontaxable estates, higher middle with taxable estates up to whatever level one would consider wealthy, let us provisionally say $1 million--there is just enough feeling of scarcity to suggest that something more might be desirable and enough feeling of attainment to lead to the belief that more might be achieved along some line. It is in this social stratum that dreams are born of becoming big corporation executives, big lawyers, big scientists, novelists, college presidents, scholars, roving journalists and super-salesmen.
The middle classes invariably have something to begin with but often feel capable of more distinctive performance. Not, as it is commonly said, that they are mere status strivers, although there are those, too.
They do, however, have a base from which to launch operations, if only in the direction of money-making or attaining position. The only way most of the poor feel they might make some money beyond the subsistence level is by winning against heavy odds in a sweepstakes, finding oil or robbing a bank. For the really poor man, imbedded in a poverty culture, the outlook for personal achievement is bleak. He needs constant help and encouragement of the kind available to its members from within the middle class: "Sure you can be a big engineer. Look at So-and-So and So-and-So. All you need do is stick to your studies and pick up some good connections. "
Both the rich and the poor lack the balanced tension for achievement found in the middle class, often to the undoing of its more taut members.
So, although I don't decry the slender evidences of achievement within the wealthier classes, some of whom are at least percipient enough to underwrite and finance achievement in others, it is a fact that it doesn't amount to very much and is concentrated within the less well-heeled middle classes. This conclusion has bearing from a different direction on the contention out of public relations metaphysics that the big fortunes in one way or the other are really great public benefactions, largely devoted to public good works. That this contention is prevalent may be seen by noticing the designation by newspapers of nearly all wealthy men as philanthropists. Some may be here and there but surely not all.
As we have seen, only 8 per cent of all donation, in the neighborhood of an aggregate $10 billion annually, comes from foundations; 50 per cent of all public giving goes to religious institutions and amounts, in fact, to the price of support of untaxed church services. There remains 42 per cent, or about $4. 2 billion, spread around among Community Funds and special-purpose charitable and medical organizations to which the public in general contributes.
Achieving saviors put forth from among the big fortune-holders, then, appear to be few. If there were any Mozarts or Pasteurs among them it would be evident that the public was receiving gifts beyond price; but I could find none although I stand ready to be corrected on the point by any one of the many articulate admirers and supported supporters of the rich.
While it may be that the American rich, compared with the European rich, have devoted more lucre to good works, it is nevertheless true that they have had more to parcel out and what they have parceled out has not been great proportionately. Even if one concedes without further ado the acts of the twelve largest foundation donors as unquestionably and unchallengeably disinterested and publicly supportive they, as it happens, do not turn out to be much in bulk.
Most of the cash revenues of the active and inactive among the rich seem to me devoted to supporting a life of luxury and ease amid surrounding conditions of pressing need. Not that what is devoted to luxurious living represents out-of-pocket deprivation of the poor or that the latter would be sustained if only they had these revenues. Such a contention would not stand up under analysis.
What fosters the great disparity between the wealthy few and the impoverished many is public policy. Although some of the wealthy disagree with important aspects of this public policy, the wealthy and the near-wealthy as a class use their considerable influence to maintain it in their own interest. It is not that they take from the poor what belongs to the poor but that they sponsor, support and underwrite public arrangements, such as the tax structure, that makes any different outcome impossible. With the tax structure, merely one detail among many (the price system is another), rigged against him the way it is, it is almost impossible now for any member of the labor force even to save his way into the economic middle class. The tax bite on earned incomes is much too great in the Garrison State.
Even with smaller taxes most members of the labor force would be unable to save their way out of it because, hazards apart, the system of advertising consumer goods often operates upon them with coercive effect. Able himself to resist the blandishments of the advertisers, an employee finds that his wife and children more readily succumb, importune him to make rash purchases for their delight and put him in the position of a niggardly churl for counseling prudence. "All the other families in the neighborhood have one; why should we be different? " Given the choice between being intelligent Economic Man or compliant Good Father, he usually chooses the latter role and becomes, as the news editors will say, Mr. Nobody. He complains, may console himself with strong drink but always gives in. In the end, he has not made the grade but is given a gold watch for forty years' service before being ushered off to live on less than $100 per month Social Security. His children often look on him as a flop, speak of him disparagingly.
In their influence over public policy the rich and their power-elite, then, are not successful merely through being devilishly clever or unscrupulous. They are usually successful because their natural victim (or, better perhaps, bystander) the mass-man about whom reformers are continually concerned, is passive, relaxed, psychologically
conditioned to submission and usually broadly untutored. He irrationally favors, in fact, many aspects of policy that are most disadvantageous to him.
While there is much else to be said pro and con about mass-man, he nevertheless shows these broad characteristics:
1. Since infancy he has been indoctrinated by parents and parental substitutes to believe there is a supernatural power on which he can safely rely. "The Lord will provide," it is said, although it is not said just what provision He will make. Those who sincerely believe they are supernaturally protected do not apparently feel it necessary to rely on their own wits. Owing to the belief, probably well founded, that religion makes most people readily tractable, the State exempts religious institutions from taxation as an adjunct to its more direct police powers. Whatever is tranquilizing on the masses is generally approved by social managers.
Conservatives, standpatters and reactionaries invariably extol religious belief as a political support, and this was well exemplified in the inaugural address of Ronald Reagan as governor of California when he said: "Belief in and dependence on God is absolutely essential. It will be an integral part of our public life as long as I am Governor. No one could think of carrying on with our problems without the help of God. " 14
For this reason critics of the established order--radicals and many liberals who would wish to change or modify it--see religion as part of the political process of keeping the common man in chains and submissive to higher secularists, often in clerical garb. The issue as between conservatives and radicals is not whether God exists--for this question is of interest to neither--but what the effect is on the populace of belief or disbelief in God. Religion is seen by both equally as an adjunct to repression and inhibition.
What is perhaps most significant about sincere religious belief with respect to its influence on political and economic attitudes is this: If one, for example, can believe without any difficulty in the Virgin Birth of Jesus and that Jesus walked on the waters, changed water into wine and performed other unnatural acts then one will experience little difficulty in accepting Everett M. Dirksen and Lyndon B. Johnson, to name no others, as great statesmen, and little difficulty in believing that some fifty-nine-cent cosmetic will make one irresistible to the opposite sex. A social effect of religion, at least in its cruder forms, is that it fosters widespread public credulity, makes a wide public sitting ducks for political and economic short-change artists. As people joyfully sing "Washed in the Blood of the Lamb," they are beset by thousands of invisible vampires. Offended by this spectacle, the skeptic turns away.
2. He has been schooled to believe sincerely that he lives under a government as nearly perfect as the subtlest mind of man can devise. Indeed, the better his schooling and the more apt a student he has been in elementary and secondary grades on the subject of government, the more widely he has been misled. For what has been presented to him, at least in the best schools, has been razor-exact in its formalism. Although formally true, most of the lessons he has learned on the subject of government have been intrinsically and deeply false or at least misleading. The difference between government as he has learned about it and government as practiced is the difference between a battle plan on which troops have been briefed and the actual battle. What is in the latter that was not in the plan are blood, pain, pillage, destruction, cries of agony and death. The plan is neat; its execution is sheer havoc.
The American governmental system, I do deeply believe, is beautifully rational in its structure. It implicitly assumes that all will be well if everyone, equally endowed, is intelligently self-protective. What throws it askew, however, is that people are neither
equally endowed by nature or law. Paradoxically, one might say that the system was devised by dogmatic, somewhat myopic rationalists.
3. On top of this religio-political indoctrination he is given most of his information about daily affairs not by experts but by the daily press, which many analyses have shown to be deficient. While a close reading of six to a dozen of the best newspapers at home and abroad will give one a close approximation to much relevant contemporary truth, few people can give the time to such reading and, even if they were fully intelligent, they would not always be well served. During World War I, for example, a close reading of all the best papers in the United States and Europe would not have given one so much as an inkling of the true causes, origins and aims of the war. Historians had to ferret out the facts later.
In consequence of the foregoing (among other things) we get Mencken's booboisie, Barnum's suckers, my own handicapped dependents.
The man of affairs, however, either rich or up-and-coming, usually has a different background. He has not, first, been successfully indoctrinated with the idea that he can rely on a Higher Power. He is more apt to believe that "the Lord helps those who help themselves," or that the Lord is a neutral referee.
As to schooling, he has usually pursued it further to the advanced level that introduces comparative government and problems in American government; or he has heard government talked about in skeptical terms at home. Whether he studies government in college or from the vantage point of a law school, he becomes aware there is much fine print about exceptions and variations to be absorbed. There are many "buts. " The whole thing does not operate according to the broad strokes of elementary summaries. There are, as it turns out, "smoke-filled backrooms" where men of easy virtue bargain with tight abandon for imperial stakes.
Any high-level course in problems of American government quickly acquaints the student with the fact that the governmental system is shot through with difficulties and contradictions. In many situations and circumstances the system will no more save or protect the individual than the deity to which daily prayers are directed.
People of affairs, particularly wealthy people, do not rely on the newspapers, even the best newspapers, for information upon which to act. They employ their own research staffs and subscribe to many expensive informational services unknown to the general public. A clerk, for example, may read about a stock in some publication and decide to commit a large percentage of his slender capital to its purchase. A wealthy man has a staff or a specialist study such a stock and, if he buys at all, commits to it only a small portion of his capital, perhaps less than 1 per cent.
It is, then, natural that when any popular interest enters the public arena against any particular or combined money interest it is much like a muscle-bound amateur entering the ring against a lithe battlewise champion. It is only a question of what round the amateur will go down in or by what margin he will be outpointed. The champion can deliver the result any way, and on order. He can even, if this seems politically desirable, allow himself to be knocked out in some contest where the issue is minor, giving the popular faction a sense of triumph for a change. Such popular victories turn out to be "no title" contests. Winning or losing them makes no fundamental difference.
The dice, in brief, are loaded by (shall we say? ) destiny.
Instead of the rich being irresistible exploiters, then, as Marxists present them, the situation as a whole is much more like a sadomasochistic process with one small group internally programmed for command and the other, much larger, for gratifying submission. While the outcome of submission is not widely relished, the process of
submission itself appears to be pleasing to most people. In Barnum's words, they are born suckers. They like to salute.
Freud looked upon all civilization as a process of necessary repression. Most of this repression is achieved by psychological means through the uptraining of children in certain ways by parents and parental substitutes. Where such training fails and overt rebels against the system of repression appear, the police and the military stand ready. They carry out direct repression.
What happens within these systems of repression at different periods and places is that certain small classes arise, identify themselves with rule, and turn the whole mechanism of necessary repression to their personal advantage. Necessary repression, expressed in law, becomes the mechanism behind which they carry on repression in their own interests. Law and order, desirable in general, mean in the light of special emphases wealth or affluence for a few, poverty for many.
For the people in charge of the instruments of repression in time are emboldened to make more and more exceptions in their own immediate interests, as in the case of the medieval popes. What was forbidden to everyone else was allowed, off the record, to the pope. Who was there, after all, to say him nay?
Sixteen
THE CREAM OF THE QUEST
The various attitudes and dispositions of the wealthy coterie--the up-and-coming, the active and established, the playful and the idly parasitic (artistic contrast on the social scene to the lethargic parasitic poor)--obviously have some sort of general end-in-view or goal. For a man ordinarily seeks to attain or retain great wealth for some more tangible reason than simple social security, which the American rich have achieved to an absurd and perhaps self-defeating degree. As seems evident, the common reason for attaining and retaining wealth, as displayed in specific careers, is to lead some personally determined insulated version of the Good Life. Considerable independence of others is an invariable hallmark of the good life as delineated by the rich. Power itself creates a barrier between those who possess it and those who do not.
As all of the rich have far more choices open to them than the nonrich in selecting personal roles and scheduling their time, the way they live should at least shadow forth their conception of how one should properly live. Manifestly, if they thought it a hardship to sleep in a gold canopied bed in a mansion they could, exercising free choice, instead sleep in a Bowery doorway, under a haystack or in a cabin small by a waterfall; some, in fact, prefer to sleep, occasionally at least, in remote hunting lodges or on damp, unsteady yachts. As far as that is concerned, they could, exercising choice, retire to a monastery on a cold Himalayan slope or join (or even buy) a circus. A few, to be sure, have satisfied profound inclinations by buying Broadway shows and square-rigged sailing ships.
Yet, despite the wide range of material choices open to them, recipes for living among the rich are so restricted and familiar as to have become historical cliche? s. Their general style of living has changed little since the days of the Pharaohs, both absolutely and relatively to the rest of society. The personal life of a rich man in truth is rather cut and
dried and pretty much follows a longstanding script; it is about as stylized and full of surprises as a minuet. Within a rather narrow range one can accurately predict his moves from collecting expensive objects to breeding horses and dogs. To be rich and not a collector is to be a fairly rare bird.
Certain broad patterns of living can be clearly discerned among the rich, although one may be a total abstainer and another a sturdy boozer; one may prefer blondes and another exotic non-Caucasians. It is no doubt because life for the rich is historically routinized, holding few surprises either enchanting or terrifying, that so many of them become addicted to gambling, from the stock market to the casino and horse race. Except for those who play out their gambling drive in politics or forms of business rulership, many of them are patently subject to boredom, as many photographs show. 1
While I would not go so far as to say that all of the rich are bored all of the time, boredom has historically been one of the occupational hazards of the upper classes; for people who have seen nearly everything and satisfied inclinations as much as they could each day acquire a considerable feeling of de? ja` vu. Unlike the common run of employee they have, for example, never had the unexpected thrill of being suddenly called to account. They have never suddenly been told: "You're fired," a dramatic experience known to thousands of poorer men, including university presidents.
Unlike the very poor they are not, even rarely, bemused by unexpected kindness or consideration; for they have learned to expect such attitudes from others, especially from officials and personnel, and might, perhaps, be diverted rather than otherwise moved by some rare outburst of rudeness that would annoy a humbler man. Some of the rich no doubt get some release from boredom by reading the overheated Marxist press and learning what aspiring back-alley commissars have in store for them. But such roaring historic adventure on the guillotine, they no doubt sadly realize, is not to be for them. They are fully aware of all the overlapping mechanisms of social control, from the Holy Ghost and the local schools to the police and the military, to say nothing of privately retained legislators and eager-beaver rank-and-file vigilantes ever ready to show their patriotic zeal by harassing bedraggled dissenters.
Whatever their orientation either as actives or passives on the social scene, the rich are all affected, almost without their knowledge, by the concentrated dynamic of money. Their assets, as it were, are constantly sending out invisible impulses to them to make some move, make some move, make some move. . . . To get away from the compulsively hypnotic influence of these assets is seemingly, for nearly all, virtually impossible. They are as Trilbys to the Svengali of their money.
This is readily seen in the cases, always fulsomely reported, of people who unexpectedly come into large properties, either by inheritance or by winning some sweepstakes. As soon as happy news of the good fortune is received there must be a celebration with champagne, cigars and immoderate quantities of delicatessen goodies. Under the questioning of reporters the lucky recipient, delivered from an impecunious hell, must relate what he intends to do with his windfall. He is sometimes baffled at first, but the world insistently demands an answer and it is clear that he must do something with the money. To refuse it out of hand would be manifest folly. So we see that the money is already prodding him, and will keep on prodding until the day it is all gone. He can spend it all rapidly (and some have done just this) or he can more prudently bank it and spend only the income, thus reserving its magic power for disposition over a wider section of space and time; if he does this he has almost insensibly moved upward in the socioeconomic structure, joined the bourgeoisie.
No case has yet been reported, although there may have been one, of a man informed that he had just come into an unexpected $5 million who, making a note of it,
nonchalantly sauntered off to keep a dental appointment and to pick up some chopped meat for his dog on the way home. Nor has any case yet been reported of a man, telephoning a friend, who near the end of the conversation says something like, "By the way, George, I've just been surprised to learn I've come into $5 million. " Such recipients, to the contrary, usually start sending excited messages to all points of the compass.
Most of the rich, whether they arrived by their own scheming or have inherited, are not thus taken by surprise. It was always understood by most of them that they were going to be rich as soon as some older relative passed to his reward. While no great alteration is required in the style of life of such they, too, have it gradually borne in upon them by bankers, lawyers, wives and friends that they are under some irresistible compulsion to make moves in which their money plays a major role, something like the queen in a game of chess. Few new heirs, if any, find that they can ignore or even tranquilly contemplate from afar their newly acquired assets. They are suddenly burdened with problems: an investment problem, a tax problem, a political problem, a donation problem, a general living problem. Where to spend the summer? The winter? Spring and fall? And what of the difficult periods between seasons, where there is an overlap? And what to wear? What clothing? Who to see and not see?
A generalization that applies with hardly an exception to all of the rich is that asceticism is rarely if ever an ingredient in their personal scheme of affairs. Not that it should be; it just is not. Rather is it the case that however the life of one rich person may differ from that of another both live at the opposite pole from asceticism. The elder J. P. Morgan was quite a bon vivant, a swinger, and Rockefeller was a teetotaler and homebody; yet Rockefeller, among other things, maintained four palatial estates, one for each season of the year, from Maine to Florida. Although a tight-lipped Baptist elder, he was far from monkish.
The personal life of the rich, almost without exception, comes down to sensory gratification on a grand scale, gratification attained in the light of standards generally considered luxurious. A simplistic material determinism seems to rule their lives as by an iron law. Here and there, it is true, have been persons frugal to the point of miserliness, such as Hetty Green, but in general the rich are found to live according to popular conceptions of extreme luxury even though one may be comparatively restrained and another an obvious sybarite. They do, broadly, precisely what the average man in the street would do, neither more nor less, were he on their lofty pecuniary perch. What one may say in the most extreme criticism of them is that they are so ordinary, so common, so vulgar, yet placed in positions of extraordinary advantage. Far more than they themselves suppose, they are automatons, moved one way or the other almost always by considerations of money. To find a rich man, apart from an occasional eccentric inventor, living a life largely unmotivated by his money is, as I believe the record shows, a virtual impossibility. Successful inventors, yes; others, no.
The Gorgeous Setting
What unquestionably first strikes the most indolent observer about the personal lives of the rich compared with the nonrich is the opulence of their residential settings. These lush habitations, contrary to many hurried commentators, have more than a titillating value for outsiders. They are, I submit, deeply symbolic of a self-conception and of actual objective social status. They are, contrary to the eagle-eyed Veblen, more than an exercise in ostentatious display and conspicuous consumption. They are, in fact, a dead giveaway of what it is all about.
Since the time of the Pharaohs, and no doubt even before, the head man in the kingdom always had the biggest house, a palace, and with the advent of progress in
utilizing labor he came to have many palaces suitable to the different seasons of the year and different moods. The supporting nobility and priesthood had lesser but sufficiently palatial habitations, and it was only as some of these came to have more to say in ruling the realm that their homes began to rival in size that of the monarch.
At the risk of provoking the bargain-basement sages into charging that I am oversimplifying, let me say it plainly on the line: The people with the most say-so have always had the largest and most elaborate domiciles. Big house historically means big man in the realm; conversely, small house means nobody in the realm.
As direct survivals of this tradition, embellished by Roman emperors, Louis XIV, the czars and a few others, we today see the pope, spiritual ruler over some 500 million precious immortal souls, living in a series of huge palaces, one of which is set in his own small city. We see the figurehead kings and queens of England still housed in extraordinarily large houses, some approaching the size of the Kennedys' Merchandise Mart in Chicago. And we see the successors to the czars living in the Kremlin, no shack.
From time to time a vast residence has been awarded at the expense of the realm to someone who has been of signal service to the rulers, as in the case of huge Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, awarded in Queen Anne's reign to John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, for his victory in 1704 over the French and Bavarians at the decisive battle of Blenheim in Bavaria. Winston Churchill spent much of his boyhood in this truly imperial edifice.
A very big house, then, or a series of big houses, means historically that the inhabitant is either a ruler or one very closely associated with rule. It is never, never, never the case that anyone functionally or otherwise dissociated from rule, anyone such as an artist, philosopher, civil service official or scientist, inhabits such a big house except as a guest. The big houses, then, are the outward signs writ plain of a class habituated to rule, reminding us of the principle of Roman law: Cui bono?
As the United States does not have anything like a ruling class, according to an extensive assortment of fully housebroken professors, we are confronted here by an apparent anomaly: People who in theory have no more to say about governance than the ordinary truck driver somehow inhabit some of the choicest and most expensive establishments of all history. In American political theory, to be sure, the rulers are fundamentally the whole people, who from time to time duly elect their representatives. These latter, if anyone, are held to be the real rulers. Yet these putative real rulers, unless they already belong to the very rich class, never inhabit dwellings of comparable opulence even if they reach the White House, which is itself a comparatively modest affair with a short-term lease.
When American presidents leave office they almost invariably return to relatively unimposing dwellings--Eisenhower to a remodeled frame farmhouse in Gettysburg, Truman to a Victorian frame house in Independence and Lyndon B.