But, considering the confused
mentality
of the mass, the two- party or multi-party electoral system is much like a formally fair duel between a man stricken with palsy (the general public) and a dead-shot duelist (the professional politician) or a chess match between a tyro and a master.
Lundberg - The-Rich-and-the-Super-Rich-by-Ferdinand-Lundberg
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. To look for the sociologists' precious Upward Social Mobility by this route is veritably to chase dancing moonbeams.
To understand fully how fortunes came to grow so profusely in the United States to grotesque, diseased dimensions and how they are so readily maintained in full panoply amid outlandish cries that they are being whittled away by taxation, one must give some attention to the general populace.
Referring to this populace, the profoundly experienced P. T. Barnum said: "A sucker is born every minute. " 9
The late H. L. Mencken referred to the common citizen as a boob and to the collectivity of common citizens, what sociologists now drably refer to as "the mass," as the booboisie, a thesis he tirelessly embellished with copious examples in voluminous brilliant writings over several decades. Mencken never tired of pointing to the obvious chicaneries and obscenities in the spectrum of phenomena which disoriented professors and clear-eyed politicians call democracy.
Expressing the purely operational as distinct from the formal attitude of American society, Texas Guinan, joyously echoed by W. C. Fields, whooped: "Never give a sucker an even break. " 10
There was hardly any need to give utterance to this thoughtful homily, which appears to have been ventured in gleeful satire at contemplation of the absurd American scene.
It would be advisable here, or so I suppose, to avoid such epithets born of anguished subjectivity and find some other meaningful term for the masses with reference to their inadequacies of judgment. I propose, therefore, that they be regarded, in varying degrees, as handicapped, crippled, unable to make sound judgments and decisions in their own self-interest. They live blindly in a system that offers wide although not unlimited free choice and they are unable to choose wisely. They are victims of their own choices. Nobody protects them from themselves!
What qualifies most of the mass for being regarded sympathetically as handicapped people, mental cripples, rather than astringently as willful suckers and boobs is their seemingly inherent infantile gullibility. The masses are handicapped in that they are ready believers in tales and promises of nimbler wits, prone to give credence to the improbable or very doubtful. They believe that some obvious charlatan--a preacher, a politician, a vendor of cheap merchandise--is going to do something very good for them, at only a slight fee or absolutely free. At their most extreme these people are the followers of astrologers, spiritualists, religious dervishes and messiahs of all kinds, very often political messiahs. They believe, for example, that installment selling is something contrived for their special advantage, rarely suspecting that it is elevating already high prices of shoddy goods by 14 to 30 per cent. "Nothing down"--and they buy happily. Furthermore, they tend strongly to resist whatever is objectively the case if it does not harmonize with their delusions. Tell most of them today that Lyndon B. Johnson, or anyone else, has no more serious intention of establishing the Great Society than he has of becoming sheriff of Buncombe County and they will want to report their veracious informant to J. Edgar Hoover as seditious, possibly a full-fledged heterosexual and viviparous.
Gullibility and muddle-headedness are functions of insufficient intelligence. The intelligent person is prone to make significant distinctions, to analyze, compare, reflect and seek out difficulties in proffered propositions whether flattering or promising to himself or not. Skeptical self-analysis is beyond the powers of the gullible because they already feel insecure, must (as they say) "believe in something" if only in believing. Intimations of any lack in their judgment are resisted. Hence it follows that they believe whatever ethnic, religious or national group to which they belong is inherently superlative. "If I belong it must be good; hence, I'm proud to be a Ruritanian. " Having little sense of individual identity, they derive their identity from some extensive tribe-- hence White Supremacy, Black Power, etc.
Sagging IQs
While all men may have been created equal, whatever that means, what strikes the most casual observer is their disparity of age, circumstance, capability and condition. And, considering people in general with respect to their judgmental powers, what is most unequal about them is their intelligence,
During World War II the government administered what was known as the General Education Test to nearly ten million men. A score of 100 represented the average. Approximately 50 per cent of all who took the test scored from 86 to 114; 25 per cent were below 86; and 25 per cent above 114. The method of grading was based on earlier inquiries of psychologists into the national distribution of intelligence. Of college graduates who took this test more than 81 per cent scored 115 or higher so that by present standards four out of five persons completing college have the ability suggested by the test score of 115 or higher. An IQ of 110 is the minimum required for admission to standard colleges and universities today, excluding at a stroke 75 per cent. Colleges, however, do not get all the high IQs.
Testing for IQ, although regularly done by government, universities and corporations in selecting personnel and admitting students, is a scientific practice as widely resisted today, and roundly condemned, as was the assertion by Copernicus and Galileo in the sixteenth century that the earth was spherical and revolved about the sun. IQ testing yields information generally unwanted because, among other things, it strikes at the basis of the democratic dogma: the doctrine of equality and the alleged ability of people to act with equal skill in their own interest.
Resistance to accepting the idea of an IQ is reinforced by its frequent presentation as something honorific, like having blue blood in the old days. Yet a person of lower IQ will often outachieve one of higher IQ who may, owing to adverse emotional factors, amount to nothing. However, everything else being equal (which it rarely is) the higher IQ will have the edge, and the very low IQs will never get into the running. Nonetheless at most levels IQs can be raised at least a few points--sometimes many points.
Although widely assailed by radicals as well as democrats as revealing nothing inherent (a doubtful contention) but only skills acquired in a certain cultural milieu, the methods of psychological testing are expertly defended by specialists. Children in the same family, subject to identical cultural influences although to different kinds of stress in the family constellation, often show wide variations in IQ. Cultural deficiency, therefore, although it often plays some role, cannot be designated the sole cause of low ratings. There is more than training in a Heifetz or Einstein. Tests have been devised, as a matter of fact, that bypass cultural influences in testing. They show no uniformity in intelligence. 11
It is this utterly pathetic low state of IQness in much of the population that points up the observation made some forty years ago by an acute political observer that "Actually the great bulk of the 119,000,000 [citizens] are thoroughly muddy-minded about politics, swayed by feeling rather than reason, really incapable of clear-headed thought or understanding. " 12
Open elections, where they take place, are quite correctly cited as one of the hallmarks of a democratic system.
But, considering the confused mentality of the mass, the two- party or multi-party electoral system is much like a formally fair duel between a man stricken with palsy (the general public) and a dead-shot duelist (the professional politician) or a chess match between a tyro and a master. Only one outcome is possible: the way of the politician.
What is the case, then, is that a largely incapable public exercises its judgment in validating the selection of its legislators and officials, with the melancholy results for that same public shown by the history of popular elections since before the Civil War. Voting behavior has been extensively studied. Although many new details have since been brought to light in various studies, nothing essential has been changed since Frank R. Kent made the foregoing observation in 1928.
Where the Public Goes Wrong
Where the voting public goes wrong is in whom it accepts in each jurisdiction as plausible candidates--not men of proven knowledge, ability and purpose but men who appeal to various unexamined prejudices: ethnic, religious, national-origin, occupational, aesthetic, regional, personal and the like. As Plato brought out in his dialogue Gorgias the politician uses rhetoric to flatter and seduce his public and to carry the decision even against the man of knowledge and sound judgment. People in general, it seems, are far more responsive to blandishment than to reason. They love obvious charlatans.
Although bemusingly capable men are by chance indeed elected occasionally, thereby serving as justification and embellishment for the system, in most cases the public elects flexible men who are prepared to betray it at the first sign of personal profit. Such officials have no more sympathy with the public, itself callous, than have Soviet commissars, possibly less. Each set, Soviet or U. S. -type democratic, is cut out of the same bolt, concerned only with advancing their own small-bore careers.
The electoral system, then, is the setting for a cat-and-mouse game between the greater part of the demoralized public and the professional politician, who knows what he wants for himself and usually gets it. One of the many outcomes of it all is seen in the tax laws. Here, of course, we find that the rich have indeed managed rather cleverly.
There has never been an even approximate correlation of level of IQ with voting statistics, but studies in the sociology of political participation show clearly that it is the socially lower and less skilled classes who most abstain from electoral voting. The largest voting turnouts in Europe and the United States are among higher income receivers--the more educated, businessmen, white-collar workers, government employees, commercial-crop farmers, miners, whites, people over age thirty-five, men, industrial workers in western Europe, older residents, married people and members of organizations. Lower voting turnouts are consistently seen among low-income receivers--unskilled workers, servants, service workers, peasants, subsistence farmers, Negroes (often barred), women, persons under age thirty-five, newer residents, industrial workers in the United States, unmarried people and isolated individuals. Voting in general tends to rise in crisis situations, and then the otherwise quiescent lower orders tend to vote more heavily but from authoritarian and anti-democratic points of view. 13 In crisis, extremism and strongarm tactics become de rigeur, appealing especially to the lowly, no doubt satisfying feelings of frustrated hostility.
Self-Defeat: The Lot of the Common Man
Just how and why the common man in the United States gets spun off the merry-go- round as he does is most precisely shown by systematic stages.
When it comes to voting the choice narrows down to two almost indistinguishable men. In Russia there is ludicrously only one man to vote for; but it is hardly more absurd than voting for almost identical political twins like Johnson and Goldwater. Both systems are equally absurd.
Before an election the choice of candidates has already been made and almost always either one of two men is going to win although both may be absolutely undesirable--as undesirable, indeed, as a Russian might find a candidate on his single slate.
The crucially important political phase, then, as Frank R. Kent has pinpointed it, is when the candidates are selected. All the sociological analysis of partisan and class voting after this stage, as far as the American two party system is concerned, is politically quite beside the point. The fundamental line has been pre-determined.
In almost all cases in the United States candidates are selected in primaries or by conventions of delegates themselves elected in primaries. Except in the South the choice of candidates--whether by primaries, caucuses or conventions--is determined wholly by political leaders, bosses, owing to the voluntary abstention of the public from serious political activity.
In Russia the bosses will not allow anyone else to present candidates. In the United States anybody may present candidates but usually fails to do so. Political bosses in the United States come into being by reason either of the political default of the people or of circumstances such as specialized nonpolitical occupation that keeps people from broad political activity. Politics, democratic or otherwise, is intrinsically a specialty.
Because in the South there is broader public participation in the primaries, although not very broad, in this respect the South seems more alert politically. But the candidates in the southern primaries usually differ from each other only in contending that each would be more diligent in repressing Negroes. The South, then, has been not only one- party but, stupidly, one-issue.
Where conventions determine the candidate, the bosses obviously have the determining role. But in the primaries, too, they determine the outcome because the broad public virtually boycotts the process. The participants are almost entirely political jobholders or patronage beneficiaries, informally compelled to vote and to vote in ways that enable them to hold their benefices. If it were not for this compulsory voting by beneficiaries, primaries could not be held in most cases.
It is the primaries that give the major parties their legal status. This is because the law of most states stipulates, with no broad dissent, that parties shall hold primaries participated in by party voters for nominating party candidates and officers. The only other way a candidate can get on the ballot is by petition, signed by a certain number of voters, and such a candidate does not run under a party label and has no established organization working for him.
"There could not be a greater mistake" than abstention from primaries, says the able Kent. It is this public abstention that gives the political machine its chance to control the situation, which it does through the precinct executives. "It actually permits the machine to run the country. " Here is the veritable foundation for the various legislative Establishments and for legislation biased in favor of the propertied. It rests on pervasive popular ineptitude.
As there is no other effective way for candidates to get on the ballot, the primary is the political key that unlocks all doors.
"It ought to be plain, then," says Kent, "that so long as the machine controls the primaries, it is in a position to limit the choice of the voters in the general election to its choice in the primaries. That is the real secret of its power, and, so long as it holds that power, it cannot be put out of business. Defeating its candidates in the general election not only does not break its grip, it often does not make even a dent in it. The only place a machine can be beaten is in the primaries. "
As for the candidate who gets on the ballot by petition, "Nothing short of a political tidal wave or revolution can carry an independent candidate to success," Kent points out. "He may pull sufficient votes from one side or the other to bring about the defeat of one of the regular party nominees, but his own election is a thing so rare as to be almost negligible. "
To the established party the primary, which validates it legally, is far more important than the election, which alone seems important to the public. Even if it loses the election, the party organization remains intact owing to patronage--federal, state, county and (over the long term) judicial--gained in past elections. The party organization can, indeed, survive many election defeats. Remaining organized, it is always a threat and draws some deferential attention from the ascendant party which, in fact, helps it out from time to time with "nonpolitical" and "bi-partisan" appointments. The legal parties have much in common, notably their tender joint concern and realistically proper solicitude for their angels, the propertied classes. There are many informal party intermediaries.
The Republican Party long survived in the Deep South despite endless election defeats, owing to its nourishment by federal patronage. Although it held primaries, where federal jobholders voted, it never won state elections or sent members to
Congress. The party delegates, however, often played a determining role in the choice of presidential and vice presidential candidates at Republican national conventions. They had something to sell--their organizational votes.
Although the party organization can survive a long series of election defeats, it could hardly survive a defeat in the primaries and could absolutely not survive two primary defeats. If twice defeated it would be clear that it had been outwitted by rival organizers or an intelligent public to whom recipients of party patronage would turn for protection. Organizers able to outwit an entrenched machine are men obviously more capable of outwitting the opposing party in the coming election.
Sometimes factions contend in primaries--the Old Guard, Reformers and independents. Each puts up a slate, for public office and party office. Each is committed to high-flown party principles, and contends that it can best implement those principles and achieve electoral success. On such a question the general voter in effect has the difficult job of a personnel manager for a large corporation. He must know principles and policy and he must pick out the electorally most plausible man. This, obviously, is usually hard to do. Information is lacking--all the men seem superficially good. If one seems better in some ways the others seem better in other ways. Whose side are they really on? What to do? Here the average voter, who isn't versed anyhow in the ins and outs of the situation, throws up his hands. The primary and its ends baffle him and he stays away. Yet here is the very heart of the electoral process and from now on nature takes its course.
Generally the Old Guard wins owing to its control of patronage. If enough patronage holders are discontented, owing to what the Reformers call poor leadership, they may vote with the Reformers or Independents. In this case party leadership changes, perhaps party policy. What change, actually, has been wrought? Usually it is nothing of broad importance--perhaps only a change from Anglo-Saxon to Irish candidates, from Irish to Italian, from Italian to Puerto Rican. In a changing electoral district the new candidates have more "political sex appeal," are more likely to entice more boobish voters.
An important feature of party primaries often is that they not only nominate party candidates but also party officials: county and state committeemen who elect chairmen. The party chairmen may or may not hold public office, but they are the main part of the continuing party machinery. They are, legally, the party, and they participate in party decisions, convey party views to officeholders. They are men who have immediate access to executive officials, legislators and judges. What they have to say is always very, very important, not to be lightly disregarded.
As Kent points out, by not participating in the primaries the general voter loses at least 50 per cent of the effectiveness of his franchise. He thereby assumes his actual political status--a second-class citizen. As few participate in primaries it may seem, by this token, that virtually everybody is a second-class citizen. But this is not so, for there are those, nonvoters in primaries, who recapture the first-class citizenship at a later stage by contributing to political campaign funds. They "buy in. " They are politically first class. They are rich people in a plutocracy.
Nobody has chased the common man away from the primaries. He just does not feel up to participating. His democratic franchise here he finds just too much to handle. He does not, in fact, have anything to contribute; he is politically empty. As a result, the party apparatus and candidates on both tickets belong to professionals, often men never heard of in the community, usually men of limited outlook. They function behind the scenes. They have the party power. They are American versions of Gromyko, Kosygin, Brezhnev et al. 14
The party managers must find men ready, able and willing to campaign and at the same time men who will be acceptable to a broad, culturally differentiated, intellectually and emotionally low-grade public--Mencken's boobs, Barnum's suckers, Kipling's "muddied oafs. " The party managers are, contrary to common supposition, restricted to a very narrow potential group, with characteristics shared by less than 5 per cent of the population.
Men selected as candidates must, first, have independent financial means or be in occupations that will permit long leaves of absence. Persons dependent on an assured wage or salary would, even if approached, turn down the offer because they could not take a chance on being out of a job if they lost the election, nor could they take a chance on not winning the next election in two to four years. So, most of the labor force is automatically self-excluded. True, here and there somebody at times takes the long chance; but not many. Again, scientists, physicians, surgeons, scholars, engineers cannot be had because even if they won election they would not be able to keep abreast in their professions; only men willing to abandon their specialized life work might be obtained and they are virtually nonexistent among high-level practitioners. Again, successful corporation executives, unless retired, cannot be induced to run because if they won they would be automatically excluded from the line of corporate promotion and extravagant remuneration and if they lost they would probably be out of any job. They would be "controversial. " As it turns out, most of the highly capable men in the country are in sober fact not available to stand as candidates for public office. Either personal economics or professional commitments keep them out. 15 Yet, the inferior types that predominate in politics seem to satisfy the propertied. One can easily make deals with them. They are purchasable.
The political manager, then, must go shopping under conditions of extreme scarcity for prospective candidates. He finds most of them among young lawyers, men with partners willing to see them take long leaves of absence and who, if defeated, can return to the practice of law. Thus Matthews found that among Democrats in the Senate, our supreme political body, 63 per cent were lawyers; among Republicans, 45 per cent. Those who defined themselves as businessmen were 17 per cent among the Democrats and 40 per cent among Republicans. Among the Democrats 7 per cent were farmers, 7 per cent professors and 5 per cent other professionals; among the Republicans 8 per cent were farmers, 1 per cent professors and 5 per cent other professionals. 16
The up-and-coming men in politics, then, must be lawyers, men of independent means or in some business they can run by remote control as an adjunct to politics. The lawyers chosen are usually not at the top of their profession either as pleaders, brief specialists or jurisconsults but are men seeking to make their way, hopeful that their political participation will bring big retainers to their law firms--and it will! With nice corporate retainers in the office, however, these public officials develop a sound procorporate point of view. While rhetorically they may swing far to the left or right, when it comes to voting and deciding, they must see things as the corporations do. They must then follow the corporate "party line. " They are at least corporate fellow travelers.
People in Politics: Pop Politics
People in politics all, contrary to popular supposition, work very hard. It is common for a citizen to walk into some public building and, noticing its rather soiled condition and easygoing atmosphere, make an invidious comparison with the trim premises of a tightly run corporation. Here is mute evidence of the difference, he thinks, between shoddy government enterprise and efficient private enterprise. Bank pens work smoothly, post office pens sputter.
The rank and file in the political organizations put in long hours and work hard, often at two or three jobs-and most of them put money in the bank every week, usually sufficiently honest money. Many of their tasks are boring. Others would not perform them. But, in some measure, they carry with them a heady something called power.
In the selection of candidates, however, the political organizer must be careful to select men who will not offend large blocks of voters, As experience has shown, the average mentally handicapped or boobish citizen, his brain in a scramble, attaches vast importance in candidates to religion, race or ethnic grouping, national origin, sex and generally conventional conformist outlook and behavior. He feels grimly punitive toward any sort of deviation from a fixed norm, a stereotype, in his mind. He wants, above all, no independent thinkers--freaks who emit horrible propositions about the importance of intelligence tests, read books--or use three syllable words. 17
Politicians oblige. If the voters wanted men who spoke Sanskrit, dressed in kilts or used the language of mathematics, the politicians would procure them.
Voters, it has been found, are also partial to men against women, married men against bachelors, fathers as against the childless, the personable against the less personable, the fluent and expansive against the reflective the generally reassuring, humorous and blandishing against the fellow who raises odd difficulties. They prefer Gorgias to Socrates. They will not, as politicians know, take anybody who lectures to them or even indirectly appears to be lecturing to them, although this is precisely what they need before anything else. They need hard instruction, prolonged, grueling, on the line.
The party leaders, to give them credit, do the best they can in selecting candidates. They do the best they can, too, in seeking to detect hidden aberrancies in a new man, such as penchants for reading, concert-going, tennis-playing or a compulsive desire to speak the exact unvarnished truth at all times--all of which in the budding statesman would spell trouble with the booboisie.
The Role of Money
With the organization now functioning smoothly, something else is needed: money. Here is where the affluent regain their first-class citizenship.
If the organization has not been very successful it must depend on its own resources, mainly "kickbacks" from its successful candidates and appointees. But with victory comes prosperity in the form of campaign contributions, always and almost only from the affluent and well positionedthe wealthy, corporation executives and lawyers, government contractors, brokers, influence-seekers, friends of the candidates, etc. Here and there trade unions are heard from, but for the most part the labor force is now quiescent, not in sight. It is at work, out at the beach or watching television.
Because it is almost entirely the affluent that put up party campaign funds, knowing that some lucre is going to stick to the fingers of political managers, we see here the reason both the Republican and Democratic Parties are, basically and primarily, the parties of the propertied classes--the corporations, the trade associations, the real estate lobbies, the millionaires, the big rich and the super-rich. This is the simple, nonscandalous fact. Money, big money, rules the roost from now on.
Leftist agitators have thundered about this thousands of times from soap boxes at gaping hinds, as though this ought not to be and as though it was sinful. This, as it happens, is the way babies are born in politics--or by even rougher methods as under totalitarianism. They are not brought in by the stork.
The electoral process, owing to the childish nature and behavior of the public, is expensive, and is really paid for by the public in elevated prices. Much is at stake in the
public policy that will be made by officeholders--who will pay most of the taxes in an increasingly expensive welfare-warfare state, who will get contracts of $100 million, $500 million, $1 billion, where $200-million roads and dams will go and where they won't go, etc. This is obviously a game (as most participants see it) for big stakes, far from the pitifully petty concerns of the electorate about the religion of the candidates, whether they are divorced and whether they are hetero-, homo-, bi- or a-sexual.
As the public has the franchise, almost without restriction except for Negroes, if it does not like the way matters are arranged all some eighty million members of the labor force need do is (1) participate intelligently in all primaries and (2) contribute about $5 a year to their party, amounting to about $400 million a year in all. If it did this, the public might have more to say in determining policy--if it knew anything at all about policy.
This is an easy prescription but hard to apply to an engine with some eighty million separate parts. Not only does the public consist of many parts but many of these parts are mutually and irrationally antagonistic on grounds irrelevant to the welfare of each. Their various ethnic, religious, nationalistic, regional, occupational, class, caste and cultural differences have in most cases nothing to do with their personal and mutual welfare. Yet they enjoy indulging these irrelevant infantile predilections as though they mattered--and politicians are solicitously attentive. Where the constituency would not like a Ruritanian on the ticket there is no Ruritanian. Where a Ruritanian would help, there he is. Is he pro-bono publico? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it is electorally irrelevant. And so with all other types.
If the voters participated intelligently in the primaries, their spokesmen would need to find truly representative candidates--not too easy to do. Most likely persons would turn them down for more agreeable pastures.
In any event, the rank-and-file citizen prefers to accept the ready-made pre-financed, pre-fixed parties, in which in most cases he is permanently enrolled as in a religious brotherhood. Most voters ploddingly vote straight tickets, for one party, year after year. They are, as anyone can see, creatures of easy habit with little genuine political discernment. One can count most of their votes in advance. Politicians do.
But here, as elsewhere, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Although each of the major parties is usually (except when befogged by ideology) alert to whatever may transiently pull the handicapped boobs to their banners, they deliver in major matters, always and invariably, for their main financial supporters. Considering the way everybody performs politically and thinks privately, this is the only way it could possibly be. The idea of democracy first killed itself in ancient Greece. In modern times it did it again in the United States.
Left and Right
Much is made by such writers as Professor Seymour M. Lipset of Left and Right and of which of the major parties is the friend of the common man and which of Big Business. 18 In these respects, in fact, there is little to choose. The Democratic Party came by its latter-day reputation as a peculiar friend of the common man because of its purely sensible emphasis since 1932 on federal programs in sagging domestic affairs and on adjusting to some of the dislocations brought about by technological change. Earlier, this one-time party of the southern slave owners had made friends in the North by welcoming the European refugees of the immigration, each of whom had a vote, most of whom were politically snubbed by the well-washed Whigs and Republicans.
The Republican Party has tended, impolitically, to decry recent Democratic emphases and has consequently lost majority support, which it held from 1860 to 1932, as long as
it was able to guarantee low-paid jobs. What money the workers were not paid in those days went, in general, into the sprouting fortunes and for the most part now rests comfortably in trust.
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. To look for the sociologists' precious Upward Social Mobility by this route is veritably to chase dancing moonbeams.
To understand fully how fortunes came to grow so profusely in the United States to grotesque, diseased dimensions and how they are so readily maintained in full panoply amid outlandish cries that they are being whittled away by taxation, one must give some attention to the general populace.
Referring to this populace, the profoundly experienced P. T. Barnum said: "A sucker is born every minute. " 9
The late H. L. Mencken referred to the common citizen as a boob and to the collectivity of common citizens, what sociologists now drably refer to as "the mass," as the booboisie, a thesis he tirelessly embellished with copious examples in voluminous brilliant writings over several decades. Mencken never tired of pointing to the obvious chicaneries and obscenities in the spectrum of phenomena which disoriented professors and clear-eyed politicians call democracy.
Expressing the purely operational as distinct from the formal attitude of American society, Texas Guinan, joyously echoed by W. C. Fields, whooped: "Never give a sucker an even break. " 10
There was hardly any need to give utterance to this thoughtful homily, which appears to have been ventured in gleeful satire at contemplation of the absurd American scene.
It would be advisable here, or so I suppose, to avoid such epithets born of anguished subjectivity and find some other meaningful term for the masses with reference to their inadequacies of judgment. I propose, therefore, that they be regarded, in varying degrees, as handicapped, crippled, unable to make sound judgments and decisions in their own self-interest. They live blindly in a system that offers wide although not unlimited free choice and they are unable to choose wisely. They are victims of their own choices. Nobody protects them from themselves!
What qualifies most of the mass for being regarded sympathetically as handicapped people, mental cripples, rather than astringently as willful suckers and boobs is their seemingly inherent infantile gullibility. The masses are handicapped in that they are ready believers in tales and promises of nimbler wits, prone to give credence to the improbable or very doubtful. They believe that some obvious charlatan--a preacher, a politician, a vendor of cheap merchandise--is going to do something very good for them, at only a slight fee or absolutely free. At their most extreme these people are the followers of astrologers, spiritualists, religious dervishes and messiahs of all kinds, very often political messiahs. They believe, for example, that installment selling is something contrived for their special advantage, rarely suspecting that it is elevating already high prices of shoddy goods by 14 to 30 per cent. "Nothing down"--and they buy happily. Furthermore, they tend strongly to resist whatever is objectively the case if it does not harmonize with their delusions. Tell most of them today that Lyndon B. Johnson, or anyone else, has no more serious intention of establishing the Great Society than he has of becoming sheriff of Buncombe County and they will want to report their veracious informant to J. Edgar Hoover as seditious, possibly a full-fledged heterosexual and viviparous.
Gullibility and muddle-headedness are functions of insufficient intelligence. The intelligent person is prone to make significant distinctions, to analyze, compare, reflect and seek out difficulties in proffered propositions whether flattering or promising to himself or not. Skeptical self-analysis is beyond the powers of the gullible because they already feel insecure, must (as they say) "believe in something" if only in believing. Intimations of any lack in their judgment are resisted. Hence it follows that they believe whatever ethnic, religious or national group to which they belong is inherently superlative. "If I belong it must be good; hence, I'm proud to be a Ruritanian. " Having little sense of individual identity, they derive their identity from some extensive tribe-- hence White Supremacy, Black Power, etc.
Sagging IQs
While all men may have been created equal, whatever that means, what strikes the most casual observer is their disparity of age, circumstance, capability and condition. And, considering people in general with respect to their judgmental powers, what is most unequal about them is their intelligence,
During World War II the government administered what was known as the General Education Test to nearly ten million men. A score of 100 represented the average. Approximately 50 per cent of all who took the test scored from 86 to 114; 25 per cent were below 86; and 25 per cent above 114. The method of grading was based on earlier inquiries of psychologists into the national distribution of intelligence. Of college graduates who took this test more than 81 per cent scored 115 or higher so that by present standards four out of five persons completing college have the ability suggested by the test score of 115 or higher. An IQ of 110 is the minimum required for admission to standard colleges and universities today, excluding at a stroke 75 per cent. Colleges, however, do not get all the high IQs.
Testing for IQ, although regularly done by government, universities and corporations in selecting personnel and admitting students, is a scientific practice as widely resisted today, and roundly condemned, as was the assertion by Copernicus and Galileo in the sixteenth century that the earth was spherical and revolved about the sun. IQ testing yields information generally unwanted because, among other things, it strikes at the basis of the democratic dogma: the doctrine of equality and the alleged ability of people to act with equal skill in their own interest.
Resistance to accepting the idea of an IQ is reinforced by its frequent presentation as something honorific, like having blue blood in the old days. Yet a person of lower IQ will often outachieve one of higher IQ who may, owing to adverse emotional factors, amount to nothing. However, everything else being equal (which it rarely is) the higher IQ will have the edge, and the very low IQs will never get into the running. Nonetheless at most levels IQs can be raised at least a few points--sometimes many points.
Although widely assailed by radicals as well as democrats as revealing nothing inherent (a doubtful contention) but only skills acquired in a certain cultural milieu, the methods of psychological testing are expertly defended by specialists. Children in the same family, subject to identical cultural influences although to different kinds of stress in the family constellation, often show wide variations in IQ. Cultural deficiency, therefore, although it often plays some role, cannot be designated the sole cause of low ratings. There is more than training in a Heifetz or Einstein. Tests have been devised, as a matter of fact, that bypass cultural influences in testing. They show no uniformity in intelligence. 11
It is this utterly pathetic low state of IQness in much of the population that points up the observation made some forty years ago by an acute political observer that "Actually the great bulk of the 119,000,000 [citizens] are thoroughly muddy-minded about politics, swayed by feeling rather than reason, really incapable of clear-headed thought or understanding. " 12
Open elections, where they take place, are quite correctly cited as one of the hallmarks of a democratic system.
But, considering the confused mentality of the mass, the two- party or multi-party electoral system is much like a formally fair duel between a man stricken with palsy (the general public) and a dead-shot duelist (the professional politician) or a chess match between a tyro and a master. Only one outcome is possible: the way of the politician.
What is the case, then, is that a largely incapable public exercises its judgment in validating the selection of its legislators and officials, with the melancholy results for that same public shown by the history of popular elections since before the Civil War. Voting behavior has been extensively studied. Although many new details have since been brought to light in various studies, nothing essential has been changed since Frank R. Kent made the foregoing observation in 1928.
Where the Public Goes Wrong
Where the voting public goes wrong is in whom it accepts in each jurisdiction as plausible candidates--not men of proven knowledge, ability and purpose but men who appeal to various unexamined prejudices: ethnic, religious, national-origin, occupational, aesthetic, regional, personal and the like. As Plato brought out in his dialogue Gorgias the politician uses rhetoric to flatter and seduce his public and to carry the decision even against the man of knowledge and sound judgment. People in general, it seems, are far more responsive to blandishment than to reason. They love obvious charlatans.
Although bemusingly capable men are by chance indeed elected occasionally, thereby serving as justification and embellishment for the system, in most cases the public elects flexible men who are prepared to betray it at the first sign of personal profit. Such officials have no more sympathy with the public, itself callous, than have Soviet commissars, possibly less. Each set, Soviet or U. S. -type democratic, is cut out of the same bolt, concerned only with advancing their own small-bore careers.
The electoral system, then, is the setting for a cat-and-mouse game between the greater part of the demoralized public and the professional politician, who knows what he wants for himself and usually gets it. One of the many outcomes of it all is seen in the tax laws. Here, of course, we find that the rich have indeed managed rather cleverly.
There has never been an even approximate correlation of level of IQ with voting statistics, but studies in the sociology of political participation show clearly that it is the socially lower and less skilled classes who most abstain from electoral voting. The largest voting turnouts in Europe and the United States are among higher income receivers--the more educated, businessmen, white-collar workers, government employees, commercial-crop farmers, miners, whites, people over age thirty-five, men, industrial workers in western Europe, older residents, married people and members of organizations. Lower voting turnouts are consistently seen among low-income receivers--unskilled workers, servants, service workers, peasants, subsistence farmers, Negroes (often barred), women, persons under age thirty-five, newer residents, industrial workers in the United States, unmarried people and isolated individuals. Voting in general tends to rise in crisis situations, and then the otherwise quiescent lower orders tend to vote more heavily but from authoritarian and anti-democratic points of view. 13 In crisis, extremism and strongarm tactics become de rigeur, appealing especially to the lowly, no doubt satisfying feelings of frustrated hostility.
Self-Defeat: The Lot of the Common Man
Just how and why the common man in the United States gets spun off the merry-go- round as he does is most precisely shown by systematic stages.
When it comes to voting the choice narrows down to two almost indistinguishable men. In Russia there is ludicrously only one man to vote for; but it is hardly more absurd than voting for almost identical political twins like Johnson and Goldwater. Both systems are equally absurd.
Before an election the choice of candidates has already been made and almost always either one of two men is going to win although both may be absolutely undesirable--as undesirable, indeed, as a Russian might find a candidate on his single slate.
The crucially important political phase, then, as Frank R. Kent has pinpointed it, is when the candidates are selected. All the sociological analysis of partisan and class voting after this stage, as far as the American two party system is concerned, is politically quite beside the point. The fundamental line has been pre-determined.
In almost all cases in the United States candidates are selected in primaries or by conventions of delegates themselves elected in primaries. Except in the South the choice of candidates--whether by primaries, caucuses or conventions--is determined wholly by political leaders, bosses, owing to the voluntary abstention of the public from serious political activity.
In Russia the bosses will not allow anyone else to present candidates. In the United States anybody may present candidates but usually fails to do so. Political bosses in the United States come into being by reason either of the political default of the people or of circumstances such as specialized nonpolitical occupation that keeps people from broad political activity. Politics, democratic or otherwise, is intrinsically a specialty.
Because in the South there is broader public participation in the primaries, although not very broad, in this respect the South seems more alert politically. But the candidates in the southern primaries usually differ from each other only in contending that each would be more diligent in repressing Negroes. The South, then, has been not only one- party but, stupidly, one-issue.
Where conventions determine the candidate, the bosses obviously have the determining role. But in the primaries, too, they determine the outcome because the broad public virtually boycotts the process. The participants are almost entirely political jobholders or patronage beneficiaries, informally compelled to vote and to vote in ways that enable them to hold their benefices. If it were not for this compulsory voting by beneficiaries, primaries could not be held in most cases.
It is the primaries that give the major parties their legal status. This is because the law of most states stipulates, with no broad dissent, that parties shall hold primaries participated in by party voters for nominating party candidates and officers. The only other way a candidate can get on the ballot is by petition, signed by a certain number of voters, and such a candidate does not run under a party label and has no established organization working for him.
"There could not be a greater mistake" than abstention from primaries, says the able Kent. It is this public abstention that gives the political machine its chance to control the situation, which it does through the precinct executives. "It actually permits the machine to run the country. " Here is the veritable foundation for the various legislative Establishments and for legislation biased in favor of the propertied. It rests on pervasive popular ineptitude.
As there is no other effective way for candidates to get on the ballot, the primary is the political key that unlocks all doors.
"It ought to be plain, then," says Kent, "that so long as the machine controls the primaries, it is in a position to limit the choice of the voters in the general election to its choice in the primaries. That is the real secret of its power, and, so long as it holds that power, it cannot be put out of business. Defeating its candidates in the general election not only does not break its grip, it often does not make even a dent in it. The only place a machine can be beaten is in the primaries. "
As for the candidate who gets on the ballot by petition, "Nothing short of a political tidal wave or revolution can carry an independent candidate to success," Kent points out. "He may pull sufficient votes from one side or the other to bring about the defeat of one of the regular party nominees, but his own election is a thing so rare as to be almost negligible. "
To the established party the primary, which validates it legally, is far more important than the election, which alone seems important to the public. Even if it loses the election, the party organization remains intact owing to patronage--federal, state, county and (over the long term) judicial--gained in past elections. The party organization can, indeed, survive many election defeats. Remaining organized, it is always a threat and draws some deferential attention from the ascendant party which, in fact, helps it out from time to time with "nonpolitical" and "bi-partisan" appointments. The legal parties have much in common, notably their tender joint concern and realistically proper solicitude for their angels, the propertied classes. There are many informal party intermediaries.
The Republican Party long survived in the Deep South despite endless election defeats, owing to its nourishment by federal patronage. Although it held primaries, where federal jobholders voted, it never won state elections or sent members to
Congress. The party delegates, however, often played a determining role in the choice of presidential and vice presidential candidates at Republican national conventions. They had something to sell--their organizational votes.
Although the party organization can survive a long series of election defeats, it could hardly survive a defeat in the primaries and could absolutely not survive two primary defeats. If twice defeated it would be clear that it had been outwitted by rival organizers or an intelligent public to whom recipients of party patronage would turn for protection. Organizers able to outwit an entrenched machine are men obviously more capable of outwitting the opposing party in the coming election.
Sometimes factions contend in primaries--the Old Guard, Reformers and independents. Each puts up a slate, for public office and party office. Each is committed to high-flown party principles, and contends that it can best implement those principles and achieve electoral success. On such a question the general voter in effect has the difficult job of a personnel manager for a large corporation. He must know principles and policy and he must pick out the electorally most plausible man. This, obviously, is usually hard to do. Information is lacking--all the men seem superficially good. If one seems better in some ways the others seem better in other ways. Whose side are they really on? What to do? Here the average voter, who isn't versed anyhow in the ins and outs of the situation, throws up his hands. The primary and its ends baffle him and he stays away. Yet here is the very heart of the electoral process and from now on nature takes its course.
Generally the Old Guard wins owing to its control of patronage. If enough patronage holders are discontented, owing to what the Reformers call poor leadership, they may vote with the Reformers or Independents. In this case party leadership changes, perhaps party policy. What change, actually, has been wrought? Usually it is nothing of broad importance--perhaps only a change from Anglo-Saxon to Irish candidates, from Irish to Italian, from Italian to Puerto Rican. In a changing electoral district the new candidates have more "political sex appeal," are more likely to entice more boobish voters.
An important feature of party primaries often is that they not only nominate party candidates but also party officials: county and state committeemen who elect chairmen. The party chairmen may or may not hold public office, but they are the main part of the continuing party machinery. They are, legally, the party, and they participate in party decisions, convey party views to officeholders. They are men who have immediate access to executive officials, legislators and judges. What they have to say is always very, very important, not to be lightly disregarded.
As Kent points out, by not participating in the primaries the general voter loses at least 50 per cent of the effectiveness of his franchise. He thereby assumes his actual political status--a second-class citizen. As few participate in primaries it may seem, by this token, that virtually everybody is a second-class citizen. But this is not so, for there are those, nonvoters in primaries, who recapture the first-class citizenship at a later stage by contributing to political campaign funds. They "buy in. " They are politically first class. They are rich people in a plutocracy.
Nobody has chased the common man away from the primaries. He just does not feel up to participating. His democratic franchise here he finds just too much to handle. He does not, in fact, have anything to contribute; he is politically empty. As a result, the party apparatus and candidates on both tickets belong to professionals, often men never heard of in the community, usually men of limited outlook. They function behind the scenes. They have the party power. They are American versions of Gromyko, Kosygin, Brezhnev et al. 14
The party managers must find men ready, able and willing to campaign and at the same time men who will be acceptable to a broad, culturally differentiated, intellectually and emotionally low-grade public--Mencken's boobs, Barnum's suckers, Kipling's "muddied oafs. " The party managers are, contrary to common supposition, restricted to a very narrow potential group, with characteristics shared by less than 5 per cent of the population.
Men selected as candidates must, first, have independent financial means or be in occupations that will permit long leaves of absence. Persons dependent on an assured wage or salary would, even if approached, turn down the offer because they could not take a chance on being out of a job if they lost the election, nor could they take a chance on not winning the next election in two to four years. So, most of the labor force is automatically self-excluded. True, here and there somebody at times takes the long chance; but not many. Again, scientists, physicians, surgeons, scholars, engineers cannot be had because even if they won election they would not be able to keep abreast in their professions; only men willing to abandon their specialized life work might be obtained and they are virtually nonexistent among high-level practitioners. Again, successful corporation executives, unless retired, cannot be induced to run because if they won they would be automatically excluded from the line of corporate promotion and extravagant remuneration and if they lost they would probably be out of any job. They would be "controversial. " As it turns out, most of the highly capable men in the country are in sober fact not available to stand as candidates for public office. Either personal economics or professional commitments keep them out. 15 Yet, the inferior types that predominate in politics seem to satisfy the propertied. One can easily make deals with them. They are purchasable.
The political manager, then, must go shopping under conditions of extreme scarcity for prospective candidates. He finds most of them among young lawyers, men with partners willing to see them take long leaves of absence and who, if defeated, can return to the practice of law. Thus Matthews found that among Democrats in the Senate, our supreme political body, 63 per cent were lawyers; among Republicans, 45 per cent. Those who defined themselves as businessmen were 17 per cent among the Democrats and 40 per cent among Republicans. Among the Democrats 7 per cent were farmers, 7 per cent professors and 5 per cent other professionals; among the Republicans 8 per cent were farmers, 1 per cent professors and 5 per cent other professionals. 16
The up-and-coming men in politics, then, must be lawyers, men of independent means or in some business they can run by remote control as an adjunct to politics. The lawyers chosen are usually not at the top of their profession either as pleaders, brief specialists or jurisconsults but are men seeking to make their way, hopeful that their political participation will bring big retainers to their law firms--and it will! With nice corporate retainers in the office, however, these public officials develop a sound procorporate point of view. While rhetorically they may swing far to the left or right, when it comes to voting and deciding, they must see things as the corporations do. They must then follow the corporate "party line. " They are at least corporate fellow travelers.
People in Politics: Pop Politics
People in politics all, contrary to popular supposition, work very hard. It is common for a citizen to walk into some public building and, noticing its rather soiled condition and easygoing atmosphere, make an invidious comparison with the trim premises of a tightly run corporation. Here is mute evidence of the difference, he thinks, between shoddy government enterprise and efficient private enterprise. Bank pens work smoothly, post office pens sputter.
The rank and file in the political organizations put in long hours and work hard, often at two or three jobs-and most of them put money in the bank every week, usually sufficiently honest money. Many of their tasks are boring. Others would not perform them. But, in some measure, they carry with them a heady something called power.
In the selection of candidates, however, the political organizer must be careful to select men who will not offend large blocks of voters, As experience has shown, the average mentally handicapped or boobish citizen, his brain in a scramble, attaches vast importance in candidates to religion, race or ethnic grouping, national origin, sex and generally conventional conformist outlook and behavior. He feels grimly punitive toward any sort of deviation from a fixed norm, a stereotype, in his mind. He wants, above all, no independent thinkers--freaks who emit horrible propositions about the importance of intelligence tests, read books--or use three syllable words. 17
Politicians oblige. If the voters wanted men who spoke Sanskrit, dressed in kilts or used the language of mathematics, the politicians would procure them.
Voters, it has been found, are also partial to men against women, married men against bachelors, fathers as against the childless, the personable against the less personable, the fluent and expansive against the reflective the generally reassuring, humorous and blandishing against the fellow who raises odd difficulties. They prefer Gorgias to Socrates. They will not, as politicians know, take anybody who lectures to them or even indirectly appears to be lecturing to them, although this is precisely what they need before anything else. They need hard instruction, prolonged, grueling, on the line.
The party leaders, to give them credit, do the best they can in selecting candidates. They do the best they can, too, in seeking to detect hidden aberrancies in a new man, such as penchants for reading, concert-going, tennis-playing or a compulsive desire to speak the exact unvarnished truth at all times--all of which in the budding statesman would spell trouble with the booboisie.
The Role of Money
With the organization now functioning smoothly, something else is needed: money. Here is where the affluent regain their first-class citizenship.
If the organization has not been very successful it must depend on its own resources, mainly "kickbacks" from its successful candidates and appointees. But with victory comes prosperity in the form of campaign contributions, always and almost only from the affluent and well positionedthe wealthy, corporation executives and lawyers, government contractors, brokers, influence-seekers, friends of the candidates, etc. Here and there trade unions are heard from, but for the most part the labor force is now quiescent, not in sight. It is at work, out at the beach or watching television.
Because it is almost entirely the affluent that put up party campaign funds, knowing that some lucre is going to stick to the fingers of political managers, we see here the reason both the Republican and Democratic Parties are, basically and primarily, the parties of the propertied classes--the corporations, the trade associations, the real estate lobbies, the millionaires, the big rich and the super-rich. This is the simple, nonscandalous fact. Money, big money, rules the roost from now on.
Leftist agitators have thundered about this thousands of times from soap boxes at gaping hinds, as though this ought not to be and as though it was sinful. This, as it happens, is the way babies are born in politics--or by even rougher methods as under totalitarianism. They are not brought in by the stork.
The electoral process, owing to the childish nature and behavior of the public, is expensive, and is really paid for by the public in elevated prices. Much is at stake in the
public policy that will be made by officeholders--who will pay most of the taxes in an increasingly expensive welfare-warfare state, who will get contracts of $100 million, $500 million, $1 billion, where $200-million roads and dams will go and where they won't go, etc. This is obviously a game (as most participants see it) for big stakes, far from the pitifully petty concerns of the electorate about the religion of the candidates, whether they are divorced and whether they are hetero-, homo-, bi- or a-sexual.
As the public has the franchise, almost without restriction except for Negroes, if it does not like the way matters are arranged all some eighty million members of the labor force need do is (1) participate intelligently in all primaries and (2) contribute about $5 a year to their party, amounting to about $400 million a year in all. If it did this, the public might have more to say in determining policy--if it knew anything at all about policy.
This is an easy prescription but hard to apply to an engine with some eighty million separate parts. Not only does the public consist of many parts but many of these parts are mutually and irrationally antagonistic on grounds irrelevant to the welfare of each. Their various ethnic, religious, nationalistic, regional, occupational, class, caste and cultural differences have in most cases nothing to do with their personal and mutual welfare. Yet they enjoy indulging these irrelevant infantile predilections as though they mattered--and politicians are solicitously attentive. Where the constituency would not like a Ruritanian on the ticket there is no Ruritanian. Where a Ruritanian would help, there he is. Is he pro-bono publico? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it is electorally irrelevant. And so with all other types.
If the voters participated intelligently in the primaries, their spokesmen would need to find truly representative candidates--not too easy to do. Most likely persons would turn them down for more agreeable pastures.
In any event, the rank-and-file citizen prefers to accept the ready-made pre-financed, pre-fixed parties, in which in most cases he is permanently enrolled as in a religious brotherhood. Most voters ploddingly vote straight tickets, for one party, year after year. They are, as anyone can see, creatures of easy habit with little genuine political discernment. One can count most of their votes in advance. Politicians do.
But here, as elsewhere, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Although each of the major parties is usually (except when befogged by ideology) alert to whatever may transiently pull the handicapped boobs to their banners, they deliver in major matters, always and invariably, for their main financial supporters. Considering the way everybody performs politically and thinks privately, this is the only way it could possibly be. The idea of democracy first killed itself in ancient Greece. In modern times it did it again in the United States.
Left and Right
Much is made by such writers as Professor Seymour M. Lipset of Left and Right and of which of the major parties is the friend of the common man and which of Big Business. 18 In these respects, in fact, there is little to choose. The Democratic Party came by its latter-day reputation as a peculiar friend of the common man because of its purely sensible emphasis since 1932 on federal programs in sagging domestic affairs and on adjusting to some of the dislocations brought about by technological change. Earlier, this one-time party of the southern slave owners had made friends in the North by welcoming the European refugees of the immigration, each of whom had a vote, most of whom were politically snubbed by the well-washed Whigs and Republicans.
The Republican Party has tended, impolitically, to decry recent Democratic emphases and has consequently lost majority support, which it held from 1860 to 1932, as long as
it was able to guarantee low-paid jobs. What money the workers were not paid in those days went, in general, into the sprouting fortunes and for the most part now rests comfortably in trust.
