No More Learning

The specific charge against Morhouse was that he induced former State Liquor Authority Chairman Epstein to accept an illegal $50,000 for granting the Playboy Club of Chicago a New York liquor license and that he, initiator of the deal, assisted the Playboy group in bribing Epstein. The Playboy Club was a legitimate taxpaying enterprise--not even a sweatshop--that sought to do legitimate taxpaying business in New York City. Yet it was required to pay toll to do legitimate business--a common occurrence as between small and moderate-sized businesses and politicians. This is one reason (rather than labor costs) many enterprises move from one part of the country to another, especially out of big cities, although after they get well settled in a new location they often have the "bite" again put on them by local politicos. Sometimes, though, the "bite" is smaller in one place than another so moving may be advantageous.
One can refuse to pay and instead fight for one's rights in the courts, but experience has shown that this process can be so costly as to be ruinous.
Morhouse took his sentence stoically, although his lawyer said he had been punished enough by merely being put on trial (a strange doctrine) . Against this contention, the prosecutor cited a long list of other instances in which Morhouse had received "fees" ranging up to $100,000 from enterprises engaged in legitimate endeavors, enough to give him success or what sociologists coyly refer to as "upward social mobility. "
So it is not, very evidently, necessary for a company to be delinquent in some way in order to experience the exactions of politicians, although the big corporations are seldom bustled about in the way the Playboy Club was. Morhouse would never have acted as he did in this case if the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey had wished to put up a gas station or refinery in some unseemly place. When the big corporation wants anything out of the routine--and the Playboy Club did not even ask that--it simply states its case "on the merits" in high places and gets all or most of what it wants. As a matter of tactics it asks for a great deal more than it really wants in order to be roundly rejected in some way, thus making the regulatory commission, public executive or legislature look properly vigilant in the eyes of the public--a simple instance of finpolitics. The reason the big enterprises no longer resort to crude bribery, except perhaps through remote agents in minor situations where a local ordinance bars the road, is that they have the ways already thoroughly greased all along the line through "campaign" contributions, donations-for-public-merit, testimonials, law business, foundation grants to savants and other forms of patronage involving legal tender. The request, whatever it is, in substance slips through easily all the way up to and including Congress. But if some random individual made an analogous request, he would be hailed before the nearest psychiatrist or, perhaps, jailed for jarring the dust on some moth-eaten statute.
Morhouse, it should be made clear, did not suddenly suffer any loss of esteem among those "in the know. " He had simply been caught working on a highly competitive street- New York City is Democratic and upstate New York Republican and hostile to the city; Morhouse in the city was somewhat out of the jurisdiction under his surveillance and up against rivalrous politicos. According to the well-understood rules of the game, he had to serve as a scapegoat, thereby helping to reassure the public. My own opinion of Morhouse did not change in the slightest when he was convicted because I always assumed, on the basis of a long line of similar cases, that as a state party chairman he was doing something of the sort--if not this then something else of a gamey order. What he did was hardly more than par for the course.
Just as the businessman is not in business for his health, the typical American politician is not in politics for his health, the pay of office or because he is enamored of the public. So to suppose would, in the light of much evidence, strain credulity beyond the breaking point.
Money in Politics
That a great deal of money is bandied about in politics is well known. On this topic many extensive studies have been written that need not be summarized here. All, fragmentary though they are, show a steady avalanche of money. 74
What is now, today, causing concern about this telltale phase of American political life is the rising cost.
It was estimated, for example, by Dr. Herbert E. Alexander, an authority on election costs, director of the Citizens Research Foundation and Kennedy-appointed executive director of the President's Commission on Campaign Costs, that the 1964 national campaigns cost at least a whopping $200 million, not counting efforts by volunteers,
unpaid efforts by public officials or amateurs and sideline commentary by telecasters, newspapers and other publications. 75 And campaign costs, as we have observed, are not the only items of political expenditure. The bill, it is evident, is running very high.
An incisive, brief updating of the situation was written by Victor Bernstein for The Nation, June 27, 1966, under the title of "Private Wealth and Public Office: The High Cost of Campaigning. " As it was shown, political money is not put up by the rank and file of citizens. In all its forms it invariably Comes from property owners and people of assured position-the upper 1 per cent of income receivers--apart from such money as has in recent decades filtered into the pot from labor leaders, themselves in the upper- income strata.
As Bernstein made clear, the electoral system, as distinct from the extra-legal politicians' system within government (another item of big expense), is extremely costly to operate. In the 1966 off-year, for example, $175 million were scheduled to be spent solely at the state levels. Again, a Senate seat, as Bernstein testifies, can cost a million or more, and $2 million were spent to make John Lindsay the able mayor of New York. This last leaves out of account what was spent to defeat him.
Noting that in order to be in politics one must be rich or have rich friends, some of the currently rich ones cited being the Kennedys, Harriman, the Rockefellers, Romney, Pell, Ottinger and Johnson (there are others), Bernstein raised the rather marginal question of whether democracy (by which he meant the rundown U. S. political system) is "better served by relatively penurious politicians who owe office to support by the rich" or by the rich in person. He did not note the fact, significant in my view, that Johnson like many others not mentioned grew rich while in, of, by and for politics.
Congressional Origins
Most congressmen, all now in the upper 1 per cent of income receivers, were at least originally impecunious. This is made crystal clear in Donald R. Matthews's thorough study, U. S. Senators and Their World. According to Matthews, all except a handful of senators were the sons of men in middle-class occupations. 76
On the basis of the mainly blurry class indices he cites--professional, proprietor and official, farmers, low-salaried workers and industrial wage earners--I should rather say most came from lower-middle-class and middle-class occupational backgrounds. This is made evident, first by the fact that among 180 senators in the decade 1947-57 no fewer than 52 per cent were rural born 77 and at the time of their birth none of the criteria of upper-middle-class status such as relatively high income and prolonged schooling were ordinarily found in rural areas. "Places like Centerville, South Dakota; Isabel, Illinois; Ten Mile, Pennsylvania; Rising Sun, Delaware; and Honea Path, South Carolina, nurtured more senators [in the group studied] than all the cities of the United States combined. " 78 Most of the remaining senators came from small towns, with the most overrepresented small-towners from places of 2,500 to 5,000 population. 79 The Senate, in brief, consisted largely of pure hicks, ruling an urbanized, mechanized society.
As to class origins, "The children of low-salaried workers, wage earners, servants, and farm laborers, which together comprised 66 per cent of the gainfully employed in 1900, contributed only 7 per cent of postwar senators. [Owing to the disparity of birth rates between the upper and lower classes, the disparity in political life-chances, as Matthews notes, was "actually greater than these figures indicate. "--F. L. ] Only two of the 180 men, Senators Wagner and O'Daniel, were the sons of unskilled, urban wage earners. Wagner's father was a janitor in a New York City tenement; O'Daniel's father was a construction worker. Senator Purtell was the son of a cigarmaker; McNamara, of a shipfitter; Daniel (S. C. ), of a millwright; Welker, of a carpenter; Pastore, of a tailor; Cordon and Dirksen, of painters; Payne and Dworshak, of printers; Anderson, of a
salesman; Myers, of a bookkeeper; Lennon, of a clerk; Margaret Chase Smith was the daughter of a barber. " 80 There were no Negroes, although Negroes constituted 10 per cent of the population.
"Among the sons of farmers, some were born in relative poverty, yet it is virtually impossible to ascertain this in specific cases. It is still possible to conclude that very few senators were born in working-class and lower-class families. " 81
Yet 33 per cent of Democrats and 31 per cent of Republicans had fathers who were farmers. 82 Farmers have never been considered upper middle class. And 16 per cent of Democrats and 7 per cent of Republicans had fathers who were lawyers, not invariably an upper-middle-class index in the United States.
That most of these men are generically middle class, and as such likely to be upward strivers and admirers of entrepreneurial as distinct from rentier plutocracy, is also shown by the fact that just prior to their debut in the Senate 102 were job-holding political officials, 88 having started out as lawyers and 97 regarding the law as their principal nonpolitical occupation. 83 By percentages, 26 per cent of these pre-senatorial officeholders were in law-enforcement offices (prosecutors), 23 per cent in administrative offices, 17 per cent in state legislatures, 11 per cent in the House of Representatives, 9 per cent in the governor's chair, 9 per cent in local elective offices, 3 per cent in some statewide elective office and 2 per cent on the congressional staff. 84
For those hoping for a better day in politics with new upcoming men, it should be noticed that the pipelines feeding high office are now filled with similar types. Anyone looking to the state legislatures for zeal in better government can get a glimpse of the future in Congress that will induce sober second thoughts.
While class origin may be broadly indicative of outlook it is not determining in every case, as is easily shown. Despite their humble origins Everett M. Dirksen and Margaret Chase Smith have all along been pillars of the Establishment which Joseph C. Clark and a number of other propertied patricians sharply oppose. Johnson, once literally dirt- poor, was a leader of the Establishment. Looking further afield one sees that some of the leading oppressors of all time were of lower-class origin: Hitler was a house painter, Stalin was a lower class theological student and Mussolini was a one-time school teacher. On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the modern world's most forceful exponent of democracy, and Frederick Engels, collaborator and financial angel of Karl Marx, were both wealthy. Nearly all the original Bolshevik leaders were middle-class and upper-class intellectuals; there was not a true proletarian among them nor, be it noted, did they produce a pro-proletarian government. Most of the Fabian Socialists and, indeed, socialists in general, have been middle class, upper middle class or aristocrats like Lord Bertrand Russell and many others duly certified as such in Burke's Peerage. Socialism is too remote in its aims for most workers to understand. Most lower-class people in politics, perhaps influenced by the cultural climate, act so as to deny their origins.
Although class origins, especially from the middle upward, do often have an influence on political outlooks, what should be rationally determining in judging politicians is the set of propositions they are willing to implement in action. If they frame their working propositions rationally, in the light of the evidence and according to critically refined values they are, as I see it, jewels beyond price whether born and raised in a sty or a palace and whether styled conservative, moderate, liberal or radical.
Digressing a bit, let it be noted that Matthews brings out that 84 per cent of senators went to college, and of those attending college 31 per cent went to the most highly rated institutions. No less than 45 per cent specialized in law. Of those specializing in law, 47 per cent went to law schools of the highest type. As lawyers, then, many of these men
were theoretically capable of understanding what a new statute meant. They could, if they wished, spot the loophole in a tax measure on first reading as though it were the Empire State Building. The point is: The tax laws are no accident or consequence of carelessness. They are as premeditated by the Establishment as a bullet from a Colt . 45, intended to kill. Most senators, in other words, usually know precisely what they are doing. What is in question is not their intelligence but their values-in-action.
Professor Matthews is carried away by misplaced enthusiasm, however, when he notes that "Senators are among the most educated--in the formal sense of the word--of all occupational groups in the United States," with 85 per cent of them having been to college against only 14 per cent in the entire population. 85 It is true that he qualifies with the phrase "in the formal sense of the word," which merely indicates they attended school.
But, thorough, Professor Matthews makes clear that of those who attended but did not necessarily finish college 69 per cent attended other than Ivy League (20 per cent non- Ivy League eastern schools or the midwestern "Big Ten" universities). While some of this 69 per cent may have attended, finishing or not, rigorous schools, most of them, as Who's Who shows, attended distinctly makeshift swampwater colleges. *
(* Matthews, in his discussion of senators and lobbyists, pp. 176-96, illustrates very well the tendency of academic political scientists to avert their eyes from obvious unpleasant facts. He introduces his genteel discussion of this phase with a lobbyist's story about two women watching a senator and a lobbyist conversing innocently in a Senate waiting room. "O-o-h! " says one of the women, awed, "Is he bribing him now? " Although a very fine study, the Matthews book on this and similar phases we have examined reminds one very much of an old-time silent film drama in which the hero chastely kisses the heroine, who thereupon proceeds to have a baby. That anything else happened between kiss and the appearance of the little stranger was not suggested. Similarly, legislation to this school of political science seems to be the consequence of immaculate ratiocination. "Slush" is a word it does not recognize. )
That many of the senators are in no sense educated men, whatever their on-the-record schooling, I shall show by citing two salient cases.
Senatorial Irrationality
Senator James Eastland, chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee, whom Who's Who reports as having attended without finishing the University of Alabama and Vanderbilt University, in 1962 published an elaborate report prepared by his staff purporting that various of the justices of the Supreme Court had in scores of cases made "pro-Communist" decisions and that the court as a whole had made such decisions no less than forty-six times. 86
In every instance the Eastland mode of logic adhered to the following form: "Communist officials are politicians.
"Republican and Democratic officials are politicians.
"Therefore, Republican and Democratic officials are pro-Communist. "
No educated man could seriously make such a carefully premeditated argument on a serious question.
Former Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson since entering the White House has shown the same sort of elementary confusion, especially on the Vietnam question, thereby disturbing the professoriate from coast to coast. The Johnsonian whirligig arguments in favor of its Vietnam action have been notoriously confused, contrary and contradictory, thus destroying the entire ostensibly reasonable structure.
The initial Johnsonian logical error about Vietnam did not concern form but content. The argument was as follows:
"If people are bombed they will negotiate.
"These people are bombed.
"Therefore, these people will negotiate. "
Although valid in form this argument was completely unsound because its first premise was known to be factually false. Official studies of the behavior of people and governments in England, Germany, Russia and elsewhere in World War II, all known to the American military, showed in fact that if people are bombed their tendency to resist increases. Malta was bombed almost to extinction by the Germans yet never sued for peace.
The sound argument, dismissed out of hand by Johnson, who was probably not bright enough to grasp it, was as follows: "If people are bombed it is known they will resist more desperately (and not negotiate). "
This, in fact, happened, showing the value of logic-if one knows it and applies it.
Mr. Johnson's educational attainments, on the formal record, go beyond those of Mr. Eastland. Mr. Johnson holds a Bachelor of Science degree--from the Southwest Texas State Teachers College.
Not only does the Senate (and House) consist mainly of hicks but of poorly educated hicks even though they must be conceded to possess a certain low animal cunning. The main sin of the majority consists of simple presumption in presenting themselves as leaders of men.
Blue-Sky Limits
As to money in politics, Bernstein quotes Robert Price, one-time hard-headed deputy mayor of New York, very precisely to the point that beyond a certain small amount from the national and county committees a congressional candidate must rely on his own efforts. "If he commands a popular following, he can raise a substantial sum from the small contributions of many people through a broadcast or mail appeal," said Price. "But usually for the bulk of what he needs he must rely on friends, or friends of friends, or labor or business. The biggest givers are likely to be firms with government contracts, or with hopes of getting one; they are what I call the predators--the guys who, if you win, will want something for their money. " [Emphasis added. ]
Noting that most campaigners are not so fussy as Mayor Lindsay of New York in turning down certain large offerings, Bernstein agrees with many observers that "the higher and more influential the office sought, the more likely is the contributors' list to be studded with the names of the wealthy. " These give directly to many party committees, buy a full-page ad in a party pamphlet for $15,000 at a clip (until recently tax-deductible), join the President's Club for $1,000 or more and clamor to pay high rates for places at testimonial dinners.
Again quoting Mr. Price after reviewing the influence of money in politics, Bernstein continues:
"'It is in seeking the nomination,' says Robert Price, 'that wealth or access to it, counts most for the candidate. Once he wins the nomination, he already has the attraction of a winner, and he has the party apparatus at his disposal; until then, he is more or less on his own. '" John F. Kennedy's triumph over Hubert Humphrey in the West Virginia primaries is given as a case in point.
There are jungles of laws governing the use of money in the electoral process but, as Bernstein shows, they are full of holes, obviously premeditated.
A political committee is allowed to receive or spend only $3 million in any year, but the law applies only to committees operating in two or more states--not to state or local committees and not to series of interstate committees. A candidate could legally have a hundred committees collecting $3 million each, or $300 million in all. He could have a local committee that collected the whole $300 million.
. Every political committee under federal jurisdiction must report to the House of Representatives all contributors of $100 or more and all recipients of $10 or more, but the reports are kept in Washington (for a period of only two years) and are not subject to check or audit.
Each Senate candidate may spend personally up to $25,000, each House candidate up to $5,000 but there is no limit on contributions receivable or on what others spend for him. Each can legally have an infinity of committees receiving unlimited amounts.
No national bank, corporation or labor union may contribute as much as a dime to the election, primary, pre-nomination convention or caucus campaign of any federal candidate but officers of such entities may legally contribute without limit and may form any number of "educational" and "nonpartisan" organizations.
No government contractor may contribute to a federal candidate during the negotiations for or the life of his contracts but an officer of a contracting firm may legally contribute without hindrance or limit.
No individual whatsoever, in the entire universe, may contribute more than $5,000 to any one candidate or any one committee during any calendar year whatsoever but --any individual may make an infinite series of $5,000 gifts to as many candidates or as many committees for a single candidate as he likes.
What all this means, behind the legalistic verbiage, is that the sky is the limit and that any individual, corporation, bank, labor union or other entity whatever can contribute by various channels as much as it wants to any single man or collection of men seeking office. The laws governing the use of money in elections, like the laws governing the use of money in rewarding public officials, are pure balderdash as far as interfering with the practice. The sole purpose of the laws as drawn is, as in the case of the tax laws, to appease uninstructed public opinion and at the same time permit popularly irksome practices to continue without let-up.
And what all this shows most saliently is that influence over or ready access to the makers of public policy has very high cash value.
For readers who may feel that the sources I cite on this point are not sufficiently conservative and are therefore tainted, we may turn once again to the trusty Wall Street Journal, under date of September 20, 1960. There, on the subject of campaign money, it is duly set forth:
"Where does all the money come from? Despite growing stress on little gifts, fund- raisers still depend on wealthy contributors who give $500 or more. That's why Republican Chairman [Thruston] Morton made a special plea last week to the members of New York Union League Club, calling the party's financial problem 'most difficult. ' And that's why some Democrats are worried over possible defections of Texas oil men. As a measure of concern, a Democratic team made up of Sen. Smathers of Florida and Rep. lkard of Texas last month gathered 100 Houston oil men together to reassure them: Don't worry about the platform; the Democrats won't hurt you. " Smathers and Ikard spoke truly.
One can always say this to people of wealth about both parties: Don't worry about the platform; you won't get hurt because the little old Establishment and, most likely, the president himself have everything under nice control. The platform is pure blarney.
What would happen if Congress, for instance, passed a thoroughly equitable tax law? For one thing, the members of Congress who voted for such a law would quickly find their extracurricular emoluments ended. The rich, it is well to note, make their political contributions out of part of their tax savings, thus serving to keep public policies as they want them and at public cost. Neat. . . .
A Note on Methodology
On the score of method many political scientists would no doubt be inclined to fault me for highlighting what they call the seamy side of politics. What they are almost uniformly inclined to do in their writings is to put it all "in perspective" by sandwiching in passing reference to these dealings among a vast mass of routine formal details. The story, as journalists say, gets lost. It is buried in the salad.
If sports writers used their method in reporting a prizefight, they would chronologically and even-handedly record every punch and movement from the beginning and terminate with the drab curt statement that the champion finally scored a knockout with an illegal punch on the back of the neck. The headline would read: FIGHT AT THE CARDEN. This would be "objectivity," but of a crazy sort.
Instead, able (and permitted) to sift the significant from the trivial, the seasoned sports writer is more apt to begin his account:
"Scoring a knock-out in the second minute of the ninth round with the illegal rabbit- punch, Plug-Ugly Muldoon last night retained the world's heavyweight championship as excited fans jeered and threw pop bottles. Apparently the referee did not see the illegal punch and therefore did not disqualify the champion although the blow was clearly visible from ringside.
"From the beginning it was a dirty fight with the loser, Ratsy Schlemiel, freely butting in the clinches and Muldoon levering in low blows of explosive force. Still, the referee, for whom many have suggested an eye examination or a long vacation, did not see although he twice warned each gladiator. . . . "
The headline on this masterpiece would read something like:
MULDOON RETAINS CROWN
IN DIRTY BRAWL AT GARDEN SCHLEMIEL K. O. 'D WITH FOUL BLOW REFEREE BOOED
Newspaper reporting of Congress, however, ordinarily tends to follow the drab cue given by the political scientists.
If congressional reporting in general were as forthright as sports reporting, a headline on a congressional session might read somewhat as follows:
CONGRESS IN NEW TAX SWINDLE CLIPS LABOR FORCE
AS STOCK PRICES SOAR BONE THROWN TO BLIND VETS DIRKSEN FORESEES PROSPERITY FOR ALL
The text would be similarly to the point.
In Defense of the Politician
For any reader who is now ready to bring in a hanging verdict against the genus politician Americanus, let me interpose a restraining caveat.
Under the American theory of government the people are sovereign and have the right to boot out any officeholder in duly prescribed elections. "Throw the rascals out," has been the battle cry in many rousing elections, often coming from the throats of other rascals trying to squeeze in.
The assumption behind this apparent permissiveness is that the people (by definition good) know, or can sense mysteriously, who is deserving between two politicians.
But as seasoned politicians know, meritorious service is not sufficient to retain the favor of the electorate.
This could be shown by the citation of scores of cases but I will here cite a single recent lamentable case. Senator Kenneth B. Keating, Republican incumbent, was defeated in New York in 1964 by Robert F. Kennedy, Democrat. The electorate had no particular distaste for Keating, who had functioned as a liberal, voted for all measures preponderantly favored by New Yorkers and was roundly praised before and after his defeat by a wide spectrum of editorialists. As Senator Kennedy himself later analyzed his victory, Keating made a tactical mistake by not merely standing in dignity on his record. Instead, Keating in the course of the campaign launched a panicky attack on Kennedy as a carpetbagger from Massachusetts, thus opening the door to attention- getting verbal counter-blows by Kennedy which he could not otherwise have delivered with any good grace.
The downfall of the civilized but non-lustrous Keating showed once again that electoral tactics and the appearance of an attractive new face may count in an election more heavily than unquestioned merit in office.
Having seen this sort of thing happen many times, knowing the ditheriness of the electorate, the impecunious man in politics usually guards against it by clandestine counter-organizational measures and by seeing to it while in office that he gathers something of value to tide himself over in the event he is brusquely turned out. The politician, in the form of his personal profit enterprises, his organization and the various Establishments going up the line in a hierarchy, belongs to something very analogous to an underground trade union. Committed for life to the holding of public office, he does not intend to see himself unemployed or, if suddenly turned out, without ready means of self-support. He is, in brief, intelligent within his zany environment.
If arrangements similar to those affecting the politician applied to all employees they would be forced, every two, four or six years, to debate with rivals for their jobs before company stockholders, customers and assorted cranks. If these thought a new candidate looked fresher, younger, more clean-cut, sexier or was better spoken or more churchly they would vote him in. It is precisely to defend themselves against critical judgments of that kind that workers, whenever they succeed in organizing, vociferously stress job seniority and job security. The quixotic democratic idea that an officeholder, a man of no hereditary substance, dependent only upon his salary, should be subject to offhand dismissal every few years at the hands of the hoi polloi, thereupon to join the throng of job seekers in the open labor market, is one that has little appeal for the ordinary, up- from-nowhere, jerk-water politician. He therefore guards against such a dire eventuality in every way he can think of, some highly aromatic and far out in left field.
What happens in the case of many successful politicians is that they are so intelligently careful about their many defensive measures, and so lucky, that they reap far more than job security and carryover money for life's arduous road. They become authentically rich, in a position to thumb their noses at the foolish public, which they freely if covertly do.
It should not be thought that I am offering an apology for the politician in thus presenting him, accurately, as a job-protecting specialized worker on his way up in the world. I am simply offering the perspective from his personal point of view. It is because of the position he occupies under oath, transcending in importance that of the physician-surgeon, that one holds him, after everything has been said on all sides, to the strictest accounting. When a physician-surgeon is able to enhance his own security by deviating from the highest canons of medical practice, as by performing unnecessary, high-fee operations, society and his peers do not forgive him merely because his financial problem is understood. In the same way we can safely condemn the typical off-the-soil politician: He is betraying his true responsibilities in order to achieve personal accommodation vis-a`-vis the mob.
The Upside-Down Republic
In his great Republic, praised by some, derided by others, Plato laid out a reasoned scheme of government in analogy with what his primitive psychology comprehended of the individual. A man, as Plato saw it, consists chiefly of a head or rational function, the chest or spirited function (heart and lungs) and the stomach or appetitional function. People, as he saw them, were classifiable as these functions dominated their temperaments.
Because the head was presumptively the better (because rational) part of a man, Plato deduced that the head should rule the state. Hence a philosopher or man of learning should be king, assisted by similar men of learning. Should a ruler be a man of knowledge or an ignorant man? Obviously, he should be a man of knowledge. The safety of the state and its people required it. Who would deny it?
Subject to these rational, informed rulers--men of learning and intellectuals--would be men of the spirit, whom Plato called guardians and auxiliaries. Guardians corresponded to our civil service employees and auxiliaries to soldiers. As Plato saw them, both regarded personal honor or prestige (status) as the highest value just as the philosophers primarily valued knowledge and insight.
These strata in the Platonic Republic would lead very ascetic lives, would own no property, would never marry and would conduct sexual relations only on rare occasions when perfect children were desired. Women as well as men were equally to be guardians and auxiliaries. Children of these strata would be brought up by special teachers, would never be left under the corrupting influence of their doting parents.
Below these strata would be the common people, perpetual victims of their insatiable appetites, who would lead their confused catch-as-catch-can lives under rules laid down from above, although they might rise into the ascetic strata if they wished. The people of the appetites might own property, marry, have and mal-educate their own children and copulate blissfully with all the abandon of Hindus on a holiday.
It is from Plato that we derive our high ideals of the lawgiver, rarely approached in reality, as anyone can see.
But although Plato's scheme, intended only as a didactic device, is now widely ridiculed by trivial minds, it is worth noticing that what we have in the United States is its exact opposite--hardly an improvement.
The rulers, in our present scheme, are people of the largest appetites, to whom most public deference is paid. While appetites exist among all, their greatest strength is obviously among the most voracious acquisitors, the rich and their sycophants in office.
Rated considerably below these in public esteem are our guardians and auxiliaries: civil servants and soldiers.
And, popularly rated lowest of all, are our philosophers or men of learning. One must admit that the public is a bit ambivalent and confused on this score owing to some colossal breakthroughs scored in recent years by the learned and by no one else; but as between a plutocrat and a politician on the one hand and a professor or vagrant intellectual on the other any popular survey will show that the professor, proverbially absent-minded and inept, is low man in the totem-poll. He is in most schools kept on a tight leash held by trustees. He is rarely a free agent.
We are confronted, it is evident, with an exact inversion of the Platonic scheme. Yet some persons unreasonably expect the common people of the larger appetites installed at the top to conduct themselves like Platonic philosophers, guardians and auxiliaries, which is much like expecting a gorilla to conduct himself like a Lord Chesterfield.
Subversive Jeffersonianism
In voting, politicians have noticed, the American electorate is hardly attracted by any except the most general Jeffersonian propositions. If the inclination of the electorate were toward true Jeffersonianism, actually an inverted aristocratic doctrine, politicians would conduct themselves differently and speak differently. Any even slightly successful politician is fully aware that any office-seeker who liberally salted his speeches with specific Jeffersonian views, or composed his speeches of actual Jeffersonian quotations, would be lucky to escape with his life from the nearest functionally illiterate mob. Radicals and civil-righters of various stripes have tried it again and again and have been deluged with rotten eggs, overripe fruit, stones and local police attentions. The broad public is simply not democratic, would find Jefferson repugnant if they could read him. If any stray reader doubts this let him dip into Jefferson's writings here and there or select common topics from their indexes.
For Jefferson, extolled in the abstract at annual Jefferson Day fund-raising dinners of the Democratic Party, was very close to being a political bedfellow of at least one prominent side of the later-coming Karl Marx and practically the antithesis of Lyndon B. Johnson and almost every American president since Lincoln.
Even more than in the Declaration of Independence Jefferson elsewhere explicitly preached an inherent popular right to make revolution, by force and violence, without awaiting a green light from the Supreme Court. The Confederacy acted precisely according to this doctrine although it did not in its support of slavery (its true love) subscribe to the notion of equality. Nor is civil equality the ideal of the broad populace today, as one can See from popular reactions to the ordinary claims of Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and a variety of other ethnic or national minority groups.
As anyone can readily detect, such sentiments are subversive and are hardly subscribed to by any discernible portion of the electorate, which instantly identifies them as akin to Bolshevism and unconducive to job security and quiet viewing of night baseball on TV.
Two unequal strains have been woven through American politics from the beginning. There has been patrician Jeffersonianism, largely given lip service except by patricians themselves here and there. And there has been Hamiltonianism. Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), our first Secretary of the Treasury, was an ambitious poor boy in politics, a self-appointed spokesman for plutocracy and outright corruption in politics as a way of insuring its hold. Hamilton detested the common people with more fervor than is usual among those who have emerged from among them and did more than anyone else at the inception to give American economic affairs and much of political affairs their gamey flavor.
Slain in a duel with Aaron Burr, Hamilton fittingly lies buried in Trinity Churchyard at the head of Wall Street.
As far as ascendant trends are concerned, in the United States one openly talks John Locke and Thomas Jefferson but surreptitiously acts Alexander Hamilton.
A Plan for Improvement
It is not the duty of the critic to suggest ways of improving a bad show. After he has pronounced upon it his job is finished. A wide public, however, thinks otherwise and believes it stymies a critic when it says: "How would you improve the script? " The presumption is that this would be difficult or impossible to do.
Many cut-rate sages on the political fringes adopt this attitude and say: "Democracy [meaning the present system] may be imperfect but it is the best system possible. "
Denying this completely, I shall here, for the benefit of skeptical cogitators, sketch in a few strokes significant improvements that could easily be wrought in the American system, although such improvements would by no means produce everlasting salvation.
It cannot be denied that the best government would be that which was run by the most qualified men. As we see in the case of the medical profession, the. greatest proportion of qualified men is produced by rigorous attention to their education and training. Standards are imposed which prospective doctors must meet--in the medical schools, in post-school training and in state licensing examinations. Nevertheless, some bad hats slip through event in the strictest jurisdictions, and some degenerate into bad hats, which cannot readily be guarded against.
If a set of proper educational standards for officeholders were adopted, those who met them could be assigned to a public panel from which all candidates of any party would have to be chosen. In reply to nitwit sages who will say that this bars poor boys, the instruments of major corruption in politics, my reply is: Poor boys unable to afford schooling might qualify merely by passing the examinations given to the schooled. 87
Just as one would not think of licensing a man as a surgeon on his plea that he was too poor to afford medical school, so one would not in a well-ordered polity think of licensing a poorly schooled office-seeker.
Under the scheme I here propose bad hats would slip through but their number would be so significantly reduced that they would have a hard time finding enough fellow- travelers to caucus.
Again, no matter how strict the qualifications were, they would by no means intercept all inept politicians. While I can readily devise qualifications that would block out a Harding, a Coolidge, an Eisenhower, a Johnson and a horde in Congress, I do not, unfortunately, see any way of devising qualifications that would block out a Wilson or Hoover without at the same time blocking out some very good men.
In the matter of qualifications, law-school training would, as I view the prospect, count for very little but first-class degrees from first-class schools (the emphasis being on first-class) in social studies, humanities and general thought processes would be essential.
In the matter of improvement, attention should also be paid to those who select officeholders, those who vote. Improvement beyond the present level could here be attained by a simple scheme of weighted voting. Every citizen would have one vote, as at present. Those who finished grade school would have two votes, high school four votes and college sixteen votes. As the educated population is not evenly spread through all voting districts I would take the national average and re-weight the voting strengths in each election district so as to conform to the national average, distributing the voting
power pro rata. Those who did not have the formal schooling might be admitted to higher voting brackets by passing the same examinations passed by the schooled.
An ancillary good effect of this scheme would be to enhance the status of learning in the populace by equating it with political power. Any two-vote citizen could readily convert himself into a four-vote citizen simply by meeting high school requirements through self-study or part-time attendance at any of the many schools. The four-vote citizen could similarly convert himself into a sixteen-voter.
The more sophisticated the voter the more able would he be to decide on candidates on the already thoroughly screened panel.
I would extend the scheme to jurors, who would be full-time professionals, publicly salaried, of specially educated men sitting on public panels. Six-man juries, judges of the facts in every case, could probably do the job. Barred would be the present catch-as- catch-can juries of the witless who return too many dubious verdicts. The trained jurors, all skilled in evaluating evidence under the law, would provide a reservoir of future aspirants to elective office.
Such a scheme would not eliminate interest biases and class biases from voting, but it would soften them and would tend to eliminate much of the present chicanery and gullibility from politics.
Let not any reader suppose that I believe these extremely excellent ideas, for which I obviously deserve a high decoration and an ample public pension, will be seized upon and put into effect by the powers-that-be, who have other fish to fry. I simply set these notions down to make it evident that the present system does not contain the ultimate in entirely workable and sensible political ideas. And, who knows, in some happier day they may bear fruit for the Republic.
Only those who would deny that the ascertainably most qualified persons should run the government and should have greater weight in selecting government personnel can rationally oppose this plan, which can be put into force without any great disturbance to fundamental institutions.
Thirteen
THE CLEVERNESS OF THE RICH
There is a lush literature, much of it monographic, on the creation of the modern worlds large fortunes--most of them originated in and still concentrated in the United States, the self-advertised paradise of the common man. Almost always writers flatly claim or imply that the schemes of fortune-builders, legal or illegal, were extraordinarily clever, infinitely complicated and without supplemental support.
Actually, scrutiny of the way any very large fortune was put together shows that the method was simple, often but not invariably at least partly illegal, usually secret and sooner or later supplemented with the direct or indirect aid of sovereignty or its agents. One can show the creation of singularly few very large fortunes that was not aided by
the stealthy support or benign tolerance of government agents. A preponderance of politicians, like flies around garbage, is always on the side where the money is.
Whatever cleverness was shown invariably lay in the transparent simplicity of the scheme. In the case of no known large fortune was there a complex scheme. Apart from three exceptions by type every large fortune is the consequence of a simple formative pattern, pursued in most cases in secrecy, in all cases with pertinacity and with the direct or indirect aid of sovereign power or its agents.
The three typical exceptions to the rule of secrecy are: Where the scheme involved a patent, land title or franchise that effectively kept other grabbers off the known valuable terrain. There is also the special case of a lawful operation that got such a head start out of gusher earnings others found it difficult or impossible to raise the capital to overtake it.
As to patents, themselves often covering complex processes, in virtually all instances the operative patent holders were not the inventors. The MelIons, for example, did not invent the aluminum extraction process although they took the lion's share for financing its beginnings with bank money, "other people's money"--a true case of "nothing down. "
It is noticeable that whenever anyone puts into play a good commercial idea others (such is the widely distributed appetite for easy lucre) instantly copy it. Competitive copying is especially noticeable in the spheres of fashion and novelties although it extends to designs and innovations in almost everything. The person who first develops the idea does not derive full profit from its exploitation owing to the rapid appearance of panting interlopers. He is thus prevented from making a full killing but in theory a wide and infinitely deserving public is catered to at constantly lower prices by many avaricious sellers.
On the other hand, the man especially protected by the umbrella of sovereignty or its agents and who has a franchise, effective possession of a basic patent, or is working a good thing in secrecy with respect to potential competitors and the public, need not fear being forced to share with others. In the presence of fully established competition no one can build a fortune; competition divides the market, diminishes the share of each operator, impedes or prevents fortune-building.
But can this be true? the careful reader will ask. Is it not a fact that fortunes are being openly made or monumentally added to all around us today by giant competitive corporations, without benefit of special franchises as in public utilities, of effectively held patents or of operating secrecy?
The prime money-making factor for nearly all existing large corporations and many smaller ones--not merely legal monopolies like AT&T--is that they are parts of discreet monopolies. They only pretend to be competing. If they had to compete, they would be little better off than a fashion designer whose work is infringed overnight.
There is no need venturing to show here that the large corporations are monopolistic units within each industry. The job has been done many times. The reader is referred to a long line of analytic literature, much of it monographic and scholarly and dealing with specific monopoly situations, many formally adjudicated as monopolies under the laws and others not so adjudicated either because the purposely imperfect law does not prohibit their monopoly practices or has not been brought to bear owing to lack of zeal in law-enforcement officials. 1
Earlier the illegal monopoly conspiracies in the electrical and steel industries were touched upon, each formally and solemnly adjudicated as such under the Great Seal of the United States in federal court. Until the time of exposure (an unfortunate occurrence to all corporate right-thinkers) such frequent conspiracies are secret--meeting one of the
prime requirements of fortune-building here laid down. Analogous conspiracies seem to exist at all times in all American industries, although the facts are hard to produce. In Europe such cartel practices are legal, a triumph for candor if not for distributive justice.
The Rockefeller Story
As complicated a money-making scheme as any that led to a large fortune (and it was essentially a simple scheme) was that devised by John D. Rockefeller, the proverbial poor boy who became very rich almost overnight. As the high-pressure methods he diligently employed have been copiously recorded, there is no need to review them in detail. The methods were secret and conspiratorial at every step of the way--so much so that it took nearly forty years to bring even the earliest steps to light. Standard Oil was in its long formative period one of the world's biggest clandestine operations. And always there was assistance from the agents of sovereignty; for Standard Oil infiltrated its well-rewarded henchmen into strategic nooks and crannies of the political system as well as into the ranks of its competitors. It developed one of the earliest systems of industrial espionage, hardly gentlemanly.
Rockefeller's advantage, which he used to beat down thousands of producers and to force hundreds of rival refiners into his hands, was the consistently lower freight rates he obtained from railroads and pipelines as a large buyer of crude oil and shipper of refined oil. The railroad rebates and drawbacks, secretly granted by common carriers which under law were required to give everyone the same rates, were only one aspect of illegality that saturated Standard Oil up to the final paper dissolution by Supreme Court decision in 1911. But Rockefeller kept his holdings; and the constituent parts of the one- time trust remained intact, loosely united by stockholdings in foundations, trust funds and the hands of family members and partners. By his ability to control transportation rates unfairly with the connivance of railroads fighting each other for huge shipments, Rockefeller could force down the price of crude oil to him at the well-head and could undersell refineries outside his combination until they sold out to him at sacrificial prices or went under. By this process he became what Establishment writers joyously salute as an industrial statesman.
Rockefeller, after a sketchy education and a brief apprenticeship as a bookkeeper, started in business for himself in 1859 at the age of twenty. By the early 1880's, slightly more than ten years after the Standard Oil Company of Ohio was founded to succeed the firm of Rockefeller, Andrews and Flagler, the company's portion of the national oil business, crude and refined, was rated at 85 per cent and the fledgling company was already extending its spiderweb into California and Texas. As early as 1883 the company took the output of 20,000 wells, held 4,000 miles of pipeline, used 5,000 tank cars and employed 100,000 people. 2 It was already an obvious monopoly, alluded to as such on the floor of Congress.
Apart from some new capital early brought into the coercive combination by investors such as whisky-distiller H. V. Harkness, most of the money for the expansion came from especially favorable secret transportation rates. These were always Rockefeller's hidden ace, his major source of growing capital. 3
With variations of detail one will find a similar pattern of secrecy in the building of virtually every large fortune.
Why the Fortune-Builders Succeeded
The builders of the large fortunes succeeded, then, because the crucial part of their operations was kept secret. When attempts were made to uncover the inelegant facts, they were blocked by Horatio Alger officials under the purchased control or influence of the fortune-builders.
This last was true, for example, of the Standard Oil Company as of others. From a very early stage its partisans bloomed miraculously in the Ohio legislature and executive branch and in the Congress and the national executive branch. These "representatives of the people" at every turn nipped one attempt after the other at investigation, despite widespread indignation in Congress and among the then free- entrepreneurial newspapers. 4
The question widely asked was: If there is nothing wrong, why will not the friends of Standard Oil permit an investigation?
When effective investigation finally took place, despite herculean opposition and proclaimed attempts to bribe officials such as the attorney generals of Ohio, there was indeed found much reason for concealment. In his annual report to the governor of Ohio in 1899, Attorney General F. S. Monnett detailed charges of six attempts to bribe his predecessor, David K. Watson, to withdraw a suit filed in 1890 against the Standard Oil Company of Ohio for participating illegally in the Standard Oil Trust. 5 Mr. Monnett also charged in court that he had been offered a bribe of $400,000 to quash a later suit to enforce the court decision in the first. 6 This and other suits brought by Monnett were abruptly quashed as soon as a successor took office in January, 1900, but not before enough information about the secret operations of Standard Oil had been developed to prepare the way for later federal dissolution suits. 7
"It was a matter of constant comment in Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania that the Standard was active in all elections, and that it 'stood in' with every ambitious young politician, that rarely did an able young lawyer get into office who was not retained by the Standard. " 8 This practice promoted by Rockefeller prevails among corporations today with their coast-to-coast chains of retained political law firms. As a result, most of our legislators in Washington and the state capitals are bluff and hearty corporation men, yet they speak in public in common accents, as though they were human.
It is evident, then, that although some elected officials perform their duties as required by law and the expectancies of constituents, a majority do not. For proof, turn to the tax laws. This prospect brings into range for consideration those who elect officials, the people themselves.
That the public in general through the shallow criteria it brings to bear in selecting its wayward officials makes possible the ostensible cleverness of the rich is, as far as I know, a thesis never before explicitly laid down and forthrightly argued. As we are interested in ascertaining how the lopsided distribution of the world's goods came about in so short a time in the United States and why it is likely to continue for the indefinite future, this phase is germane. For without a public and a system constituted in a certain way it would be impossible for anyone, clever though he might be, to become extremely rich in the ways that have been practiced.
Favorable Circumstances
Nobody, first of all, would be rich if he had not been favored by circumstances. Favoring general circumstances in the United States have been a naturally rich virgin continent, an enlarging widely skilled population, a basic law designed to facilitate private property under earlier purely agrarian-mercantile circumstances, an expanding machine technology that took multiplied advantage of agrarian-mercantile law and a plethora of purchasable officials.
Had Henry Ford been a Swiss, operating under Swiss law, he could never, no matter how shrewd, have developed the Ford Motor Company. Had Rockefeller been a citizen of England, France, Russia, Germany or China, functioning in any of those countries, he
could never, by whatever hook, crook or cleverness, have developed the Standard Oil Company.
If one nevertheless insists that the fortune-builders were unusually clever men, entitled to their fortunes as a reward for performing vast economic services--and this is the line apologists do take--one cannot go on to argue equal cleverness in their heirs. For the performance of what service, for the display of what cleverness, do they hold their enormous riches and transcendent power? Does their cleverness consist of their pre-selection of ancestors?
In the case of either the originators or the inheritors the fortune was hardly derived by conspicuous cleverness but a set of fortuitous circumstances, one element of which (still bearing particularly on inheritance) was a body of pre-existing law reasonably designed to fit more modest cases, not designed to apply to huge international estates enjoying the application of machine technology in mass production. In the United States it is now common for heirs (sometimes quite stupid) to come into estates, largely untaxed, that make the inherited dukedoms decried by eighteenth-century republicans and democrats seem microscopic. No grand duchy ever came near the proportions of many American corporations and banks. The United States is the most exaggerated case of plutocracy in all history, eclipsing all others combined.
The Demon of Demos
A big factor in modern fortune-building, however, was unquestionably the state of popular opinion and understanding. This opinion has never been more than occasionally, in fits of temper, opposed to fortune-building. The common if languid supposition seems to be that everyone may have his fair chance in this inspiring game. As every clean-living, clear-eyed, pure-souled American boy may look forward to being at least president, so every American virgin may marry a millionaire. Those boys who fail to achieve the presidency may quite easily (one gathers in reading the Wall Street Journal, Time and Fortune) as consolation prizes become millionaires or marry an heiress. The films play about a good deal with this popular fantasy of heir-pauper marriage, blissfully passing over the fact that if every nubile scion of wealth each year married someone on the relief rolls there would be hardly more than a hundred such marriages a year.