It does not
indicate
that new asset-nuclei were formed to this extent.
Lundberg - The-Rich-and-the-Super-Rich-by-Ferdinand-Lundberg
551b.
)
As to democracy, "the insatiate lust for wealth and the neglect of everything else for the sake of money-making were the cause of its undoing. " (Ibid. , 8. 562b. )
The arts and crafts are corrupted by the co-presence of great wealth and poverty. (Ibid. , 4. 421d. )
"Wealth and poverty" should be kept out of the good society "since the one brings luxury, idleness, and innovation, and the other illiberality and the evil of bad workmanship. . . . " (Ibid. , 4. 422a. )
Those most successful in the pursuit of wealth become the targets of the drones, become "the pastures of the drones. " (Ibid. , 8. 564e. )
". . . it is the evil life commonly led by the sons of autocrats and men of extraordinary wealth. Such a training will never, never lead to outstanding goodness in boy, or man, or graybeard. " (Laws, 3. 695e. )
"But to be at once exceedingly wealthy and good is impossible, if we mean by the wealthy those who are accounted so by the vulgar, that is, the exceptional few who own property of great pecuniary value--the very thing a bad man would be likely to own. Now since this is so, I can never concede to them that a rich man is truly happy unless he is also a good man, but that one who is exceptionally good should be exceptionally wealthy too is a mere impossibility. " (Ibid. , 5. 742e. )
"One arises from the passion for wealth which leaves a man not a moment of leisure to attend to anything beyond his personal fortunes. So long as a citizen's whole soul is wrapped up in these, he cannot give a thought to anything but the day's takings. Any study or pursuit which tends to that result everyone sets himself eagerly to learn and practice; all others are laughed to scorn. Here, then, we may say, is one reason in particular why society declines to take this or any other wholly admirable pursuit seriously, though everyone in it is ready enough, in his furious thirst for gold and silver, to stoop to any trade and any shift, honorable or dishonorable, which holds out a prospect of wealth, ready to scruple at no act whatsoever--innocent, sinful, or utterly shameful--so long as it promises to sate him, like some brute beast, with a perfect glut of eating, drinking, and sexual sport. " (Ibid. , 8. 831c,d. )
A soul stung to savagery by unsatisfied lusts "is chiefly found concerned with that on which most men's longing is most permanently and sharply set--wealth, with the power wealth gets alike from native bias and pernicious wrong education to breed countless cravings for insatiate and unbounded possession of itself. And the source of this perverse education is the credit given to false praise of riches alike by Greek and non- Greek; they promote wealth to the first place among good things, whereas in truth it holds but the third, and thus they deprive not only themselves but their posterity. " (Ibid. , 9. 870a. )
Plato has a great deal more to say about the wealthy, most of it disparaging. His remarks, indeed, foreshadow the Aristotelian position that the best society is one dominated by a middle class of the moderately affluent, with neither extremely rich nor extremely poor. In both the Platonic and Aristotelian perspectives the United States is a monstrously lopsided entity, a veritable Gorgon, a chamber of horrors.
What is perhaps of paramount interest is that no subsequent major thinker has departed essentially from the script as laid down by these giant pundits. It may be that thinkers in following Plato and Aristotle here merely felt rivalrous toward those with a claim to power other than intellectual, as Plato indeed unquestionably felt rivalrous
toward the poets. Yet intellectuals in general have not felt so uniformly against nonintellectual power rivals like soldiers, politicians, explorers, religious leaders or artists as they have against the rich, a feeling that by no means reached its apogee, as commonly supposed, in the writings of Karl Marx.
Marx has clearly been topped in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, the stylish French metaphysician, who refers to the wealthy and the respectable in general as salauds (filthy beasts) because he believes they have it in their power to produce alterations for the better but instead work assiduously to perpetuate ancient swindles while professing humane goals.
Sartre, like Aristotle and Plato, is rather remote from most Americans. Nearer home, a recent expression of the attitude, deeply etched into American radical and dissenting literature, can be sampled in the summary by the Marxist, Herbert Aptheker, of the non- Marxist C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite as "filled also with burning attacks--as passionate but not as muted as that of his mentor Veblen--upon the social and personal immorality of the rich, their coarseness, cruelty, hypocrisy, greed, and lustfulness. " 1
One could, it is true, assemble examples of the rich from the American scene who apparently fit different items of these characterizations. But, straying outside the circle of the rich, one could unquestionably find proportionately as many cases for each count in the indictment at all except the most refined levels of society. And seeking examples of virtuosic cruelty, one would find it impossible to discover any rival among the American rich to such a Marxist redeemer as Josef Stalin, to say nothing of Lavrenti Beria and a swarm of power-crazed leftist midgets from the lower depths. "Practical" Marxists like Dr. Aptheker, while launching their shafts of criticism, seem blissfully unaware of what their own affiliations and loyalties commit them to defend.
The Aptheker-Mills indictment of "the rich," as formulated above, is clearly far too broad and obviously loaded. It reveals and perhaps prescribes an attitude rather than describes.
But if one turns to the influential Alexander Hamilton among the Founding Fathers, one finds, contrary to Plato, Aristotle and almost every other considerable political thinker in western history, that government should belong to "the wealthy, the good and the wise. " As to the last two, Plato and Aristotle would have agreed; as to the first, we know what they thought.
Social thinkers down through the centuries have all had favorite classes, which they took to be the instruments of deliverance. With Plato it was the intellectuals, with Aristotle the middle classes, with Jefferson the small farmers, with Marx the factory workers, with Hamilton the wealthy and so on. In this boxing of the class compass, one contemporary writer, Nelson Algren, has oddly found his favorite social group among what Marx called the lumpenproletariat --thieves, pimps, prostitutes and down-and- outers.
But, in his admiration of the wealthy, Hamilton, political father of the American plutocracy, virtually represented an historical minority of one among political thinkers.
The Problematic Rich
Who, in the first place, are "the rich"?
Included in the designation are trust-fund infants who at the moment of birth are incalculably rich (and presumably no more offensive than any other infants), trust-fund children of various ages, women young and old of mixed capabilities and outlooks and men ranging from inane idlers and wastrels through routine performers to the intensely but not always laudably active. Whatever else one can say about most of the rich, one
cannot reasonably say they are especially coarse, cruel, greedy or more than commonly hypocritical or lustful. Money in a special place of high honor to one side, a person of ordinary sensibilities would much prefer to associate with many, perhaps most of them, than with the average run-of-the-mill politician, labor leader, advertising impresario or gospel-monger.
What Mills focused his attention on was the active rich, particularly the policy setters, and among these one could not deny the presence of the immoral (tax manipulators, for example), the coarse, the cruel, the hypocritical, the greedy and the lustful; but even among these, that all or most are of the order indicated can be easily shown to be fictional.
What is problematic about the rich is more as follows: The possession of wealth, inherited or acquired, itself informs the possessor that he is special, that he holds winning cards over most people in most social situations. He can, for one thing, finance a greater number of amorous episodes--a big advantage in the estimation of the simple- minded. He holds a social advantage over most others which, unluckily for him, may so turn his head as to give him delusions of inherent superiority, as is often the case in the possession of anything rare and desired. One hugs one's advantages--health, strength, intelligence, learning or wealth--and tends to take them as marks of invidious excellence: snobbism. In some rich families, the Rockefeller notably, the children are carefully reared in as middle class a way as possible to prevent their developing such common delusions; yet the fact cannot be concealed for long that they are special, that they hold a fistful of aces in worldly goods, and that others surely define them as different. They are different; they are rich--in effect, noble--in a society replete with poverty and degradation, Their wealth makes it possible for them to mobilize more effective power than most people at particular points, at times to their own undoing. Money is like a spirited horse in at least this respect: One must know how to ride it, which few really do.
Like anyone else, the rich person may experience frustrations and a sense of being unduly limited; but he does not usually feel it in as many ways nor as frequently or humiliatingly as the nonrich. He feels that he has, in general, more elbow room, a wider range of choice. And he has indeed more elbow room, geographic and psychological.
As to the active policy-making rich and their agents of the power elite (for these latter are mostly agents): Like nearly all people they are usually heedless of whatever is not before their eyes, either lack sufficient imagination (like reckless motorists) or have their attention fully absorbed (like nearly everyone else) by their personal problems and projects. The doers of the world all have projects, and one is either a doer or nondoer. And doers all derive an intense feeling of satisfaction from any project carried to success, whether it consists of writing a book, leading a revolution, creating or managing a corporation or winning an election. Absorption in one's own project, whether it is building a corporation or writing a poem, leaves one unable to play one's attention over other aspects of reality. Probably the greatest harm in the world comes of the simple fact that nobody is able to pay full attention to everything at once. One really should, yet it is impossible. Although this is so, it does not follow that attention cannot be focused on a wider horizon than immediate, specialized interests--a marked tendency of the rising rich at least. The basic offense of most of the active rich, if it is an offense, is that they usually pursue their own visions, skillfully or crudely, not only to the neglect of the rest of the world (as does the poet) but, at times, because they have power, against or indifferent to the needs and wishes of the rest of the world. Not only do they have power but, like most people, they are thoroughly egocentric.
Although now woven by means of large enterprises into the warp and woof of all society, the rich, like nearly everyone else, put their own enterprises first in the narrowly reasonable effort to preserve their social advantage, by means fair or seemingly questionable. Without that social advantage they would, like the common people, be at the beck and call of almost any self-appointed messiah presenting himself as the latest in the line of the Apostolic Succession or, perhaps, a spiritual representative of a freely prescribing Karl Marx or even, like Adolf Hitler, as the offspring of Wotan. Being rich is basically defensive in a rough world, although the defensive position has its own hazards.
What is perhaps most irksome about the rich to the intelligent nonrich, particularly to those with some other vision of how society should be arranged, is not actually what any rich individual may or may not do. True, by behaving outwardly like a gentleman the rich man may temper animosity; but he cannot, even by gentlemanly behavior, mollify persons like Plato, Aristotle, Marx, Sartre and others acutely aware of his necessary role, which is much like that of a character in a Greek drama enacting the capricious will of the gods.
The rich, the plain fact is, confront the rest of society as a solid, semicorporate phalanx, buttressed by law and public policy. By law they hold their positions legitimately and hence can feel complete rectitude. When the national anthem is being sung they can feel it is being sung in celebration of the legal system that supports them, for the aggrandizement of which every man, the poorer especially, may be called upon to offer his very life simply by presidential order, without any declaration of war by Congress. Beyond this, existing policies under the law favor them; they have been adopted largely by their agents with their corporate permission.
The existence of this solid phalanx is sharply noticeable only to those who have some proposal to make with a view to adjusting policy in order to accommodate some large number of people who are, in one way or the other, supposedly being unduly inconvenienced by any number of things. Whenever any public proposal is made for any change (however slight), it is bound to encounter opposition. Upon inquiry it turns out that the opposition ordinarily stems from one or more affluent or rich people, usually referred to euphemistically as Interests. While there are indeed many interests in a society, the most assertive is surely the property interest.
Even a case about a trivial question, adversely affecting only one propertied person, may have wide implications for many or all propertied because it may set a precedent upon which further more extensive similar actions may be taken. The entire phalanx of the propertied becomes agitated and makes its displeasure known to legislators, judges and other officials. After all, one cannot have unsound decisions approved. Again, the entire phalanx of the propertied may be committed by simply one among the propertied, who presses deviously for and obtains some tax concession. This concession thereafter applies to all, whether they asked for it or not.
Thus it happens that even minor, purely common-sense proposals for reforms often precipitate fierce political dogfights.
In a relevant case, early in 1966 C. Wright Patman, the powerful chairman of the powerful House Banking and Currency Committee, decided on the basis of a committee vote to investigate the entire question of how trust funds are used in corporate and bank control. When subpoenas began to go out to banks requesting information there was suddenly called on June 7 a meeting by 17 of 33 committee members, who required the recall of many subpoenas; on a showdown, however, the right of the chairman to issue subpoenas was upheld.
This checking of a committee chairman was a very unusual action, which obviously had its source in some of the entities being investigated. Not many citizens, it is true, are alert to this situation or probably care very much.
What the final outcome of the investigation will be, whether it will be muted or not, is not yet known. Whether light will be thrown on what Chairman Patman claims are some $215 billion of trust fund holdings one cannot yet tell; all this is terra incognita right now.
By the end of the year, at any rate, Chairman Patman on the basis of subpoenas already returned was able to announce that three-quarters of the banks of the country had at least 5 per cent of their stock held by other banks through trust funds managed for beneficiaries and that this percentage of stock ownership represented a long step toward control. The very largest banks, he said, operated under this sort of interlocking ownership, were all more or less in the same ownership bed--one big happy incestuous family. 2
The information needed in this area is as follows: identifications of trust-fund holdings, book values and current market values, nature of trusts and length of time they run, beneficiaries of a multiplicity of trusts (reducing income taxes), cost of operation of trusts, validity of investment selections for trusts, etc. Whether the named beneficiaries or the managers benefit most is an undetermined question.
The propertied, for one thing, are mostly especially sensitive to anything about taxes-- how much shall be the total levy and, more important, how shall the collection be proportioned? In general, the propertied interest in the United States, sheltered behind technician-spokesmen, has been opposed (whatever some individual property owners felt) to government levies for the sake of the domestic comfort, convenience and necessity of the broad public (its own comfort and convenience being apparently assured) but has been generously unstinting in any military or semi-military expenditures that gave government a strong argument abroad in assuring access to markets, raw materials and trade routes. At present, with military and space exploration budgets inflated to record proportions, the cities internally are literally falling apart. It has been estimated by insiders that 75 per cent of the military budget is rationally unjustifiable.
Beyond the desire to keep down tax totals (hence the fiscally sound objection to "reckless government spending") there is the collective desire of the propertied to shove a disproportionate part of the tax burden over onto the lower labor force which, imbued with patriotic ardor, is presumably happy to support a democratic paradise that freely allows them to go and listen to happy tidings of the afterworld from the likes of Billy Graham and Fulton J. Sheen and to rub elbows with the rich at Coney Island. As we have already seen how deftly this tax burden is shouldered onto the pious, patriotic and not-too-bright lower labor force, the point need engage our fascinated interest no longer.
Whatever the call may be for social adjustment will either cost tax money or intrude more or less adversely on some propertied interest--that is, upon the revenues of some collection of rich persons. More public housing will tread on the toes of private landlords. And as this call for adjustment is fought by the "interests," some proponents are irked. The purely commonsense proposal, for example, to place effective health warnings on cigarette packages was fought to a standstill and defeated in Congress, with the result that the tobacco industry through intensified advertising is selling more cigarettes than ever before in the teeth of repeated formal government findings that they are a clear menace to health. Similarly there was fought tooth and nail suggested mandatory automobile safety equipment and there have been fights in the state
legislatures against attempts to limit in any way the free resale of unroadworthy second- hand cars. One could cite thousands of similar cases.
To be sure, when it is said that an "industry" opposes something, the source of the opposition is kept sufficiently abstract and remote. An industry is not something subject to sense experience. One cannot see it or feel it. "Industry" here boils down to no more than several boards of directorsperhaps fifty to a hundred men--who represent stockholders, mainly large stockholders--in brief, rich people. These latter are, somewhat poetically, as adversely affected by automobile air pollution as the poor although they can resort to air conditioning or retreat to remote fresh-air estates and ranches.
It is this consistent opposition to proposals for reasonable as well as unreasonable change that the propertied have offered down through history, opposition more effective than argument, that has caused the rich to be looked upon as problematic ever since Plato. It is not that they are necessarily vicious, as the Marxists often postulate; it is just that they are blandly or uncomprehendingly selfish, and not always very intelligently. The unpropertied person may be just as selfish but he has no telltale instrument such as property with which to reveal his selfishness so completely.
Like the small band of Greeks in the pass at Thermopylae the selfish rich hold back by their skill of maneuver in an entrenched position (always in the name of sound policy) huge disorganized armies of sansculottes and descamisados (among which, thoughtfully, they have their own friends haranguing on all manner of irrelevancies dear to the same sansculottes and descamisados). It is all much like a disciplined Roman legion against a barbarian rabble.
Because virtually everything has an economic aspect and because the rich, as we have seen, own and control the foundation and prime stages of the economic system, practically anything that anyone is likely to propose in the way of a new arrangement is going to strike some among the propertied and the rich adversely, and hence lead them to invoke the law defensively or work for a new self-serving public ordinance. Often the mere attempt to reroute traffic by local ordinance causes merchants to spring into tigerish opposition, presumably in defense of property rights.
Again, many individuals who engage in entrepreneurial action, hoping to become rich, find that the way is barred by persons, propertied or rich, already in established positions. As Henry J. Kaiser discovered, there is no room for another automobile manufacturer. True, there are interstices into which newcomers may insert themselves with success, particularly the area of new technology but, in the main, the road is blocked to all except the very clever--and lucky--among newcomers.
The rich, then, come to seem to those who have encountered their resistance like part of a single corporate entity, a special class, or, as the Marxists say, a class interest. Because they are each part of this class interest, embalmed like a fly in plastic, there is not much they can do to earn credit in the eyes of critics. Owing to the saying of Jesus in Matthew, XIX, 24, that "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God," there was no way out for a rich man for hundreds of years except to give his property to the church. The result was that in the late medieval period the churchpols in the name of the church held tightly more than half the land of Europe; the latecoming kings were far less gullible than the earlier gentry. In the eyes of the Marxists there is nothing a rich man can do except, like Frederick Engels, devote his wealth to the promotion of Marxism; anything less will fail to gain credit. The rich could, to be sure, turn all their wealth over to the government where it would at the present time fall under the benign jurisdiction of Lyndon B.
Johnson, in which circumstances few judicious moralists would see any particular gain for mankind.
Castigation of the rich, however, arises less from envy, as commonly supposed, than from people who have in some way been blocked or frustrated by the massed class interest of the rich. The rich man may be a really nice guy; but his very interests, indeed his whole being, force him to present himself in a certain stylized way. Most of the critics of the rich have themselves been power claimants, who know the rich and powerful can readily trump their cards. Plato, Aristotle and a long line of independent intellectuals have known that their carefully reasoned arguments are subject to political defeat less by sound counter-arguments than by the power of inertia, money and entrenched position. As any practical politician knows, in going before Congress on any question it is better to be backed by lucre than by a bullet-proof argument. Money will win almost every time on crucial questions, such as intruding from afar into World War I, and the only way apparently to defeat it is by some other brute power. Hence, as the Marxists say, revolution. The proffered cure here, though, except in cases of complete war-induced social collapse as in Russia in 1917 and China in the 1940's, is clearly worse than the disease because serviceable institutional restraints are swept away in the uproar and a clean slate is open to an unrestrained set of new power seekers, not at all squeamish (as history has shown) about how they apply their power. Leninist Communism is clearly a modern receivership in political bankruptcy.
Where those counts in the Aptheker indictment are best sustained is with respect to certain uneducated men of the poorer classes who have by book or crook made themselves rich: the original grabbers. In this country these are the "Robber Barons" of the nineteenth century and later replicas. The record on these is by now fairly well known. While many of the established rich, normally lacking imagination and perhaps sufficient sapience, have been normally heedless, the clear-cut depredations of the rich have in most cases been carried out by founders, newcomers, in panicky flight from poverty. It is the ex-poor among the rich who have been the most active social offenders. This was the crowd Veblen largely wrote about in all their vulgarity.
All of which is not to say that there is nothing of an overbearingly objectionable nature about the general policies since World War II contrived by Mills's insidiously bland power elite on behalf of remote principals. Those policies have been, on the whole, immediately self-serving, broadly neglectful of visible internal social decay and in that sense actually inimical over the long term to basic upper-class interests. What there really is to the idea of a power elite consists of people--upper-crust lawyers, politicians, officials, journalists, public relations men and idea men--who in various ways recommend themselves to the rich and well positioned by formulating defensive stopgaps for immediate problems. A way to remunerative position in the United States is to get the nod from some one of the wealthy or their adjutants, and those who get this nod are invariably from lower levels of society, usually chimpanzee-bright men who have developed know-how and can-do for poulticing over difficult situations in the interests of established arrangements. This is the level where "urban renewal" and roadbuilding become new ways of generating windfall profits. Nobody, it is pertinent to notice, gets the nod who is in any way seriously opposed to the established order. Indeed, nobody gets the nod who is merely reflectively doubtful and hesitant. Such persons would only generate dissension or uncertainty in high places and impede a smooth-smooth administrative operation.
As nobody to my knowledge has attempted to pinpoint collectively the possibly laudable achievements of rich people, quite apart from their class interests, I here set myself this heretical task with a view both to rounding out the picture and to seeing
concretely just what the achievements may amount to. How undeniably constructive and creative have the wealthy, more particularly the American wealthy, really been?
The Sacred Group
In seeking to isolate the achievements of the wealthy, it seems desirable to indicate the broad area within which one looks. Who, shall we say, are the wealthy?
Fortunately the Federal Reserve Board and Census Bureau, as noticed earlier, have come up with recent figures, the most precise on official record, to the effect that there were an estimated 200,000 nuclear families averaging three persons in the country as of December 31, 1962, in possession of net assets of $500,000 or more. 3 So, for these purposes, we shall take this last as the maximum figure representing a proto-wealthy family, although a person worth a few thousands less could hardly be considered impoverished. Naturally, the indicated small group includes everybody in possession of up to a heady billion dollars by value and beyond.
But even a group of this reduced size is cumbersome to inquire into and includes more than the definitively wealthy. This group of 200,000 nuclear families can be narrowed down somewhat, however. U. S. News and World Report, October 11, 1965, estimated on the basis of more recent Treasury figures that: "Today there are about 90,000 millionaires," by which it alluded to persons owning assets worth at least $1 million. 4 Some of these were in extended family clusters, and some families as we know (Du Ponts, Fords, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts et al. ) contain many millionaires and millionaire nuclear families. Total holdings of the group were estimated in excess of $250 billion. As of 1948, the millionaire group totaled only 13,000 by the reckoning of this same source.
U. S. News pointed out that this 90,000 indicated that one family in every 625 was in the millionaire class, which meant approximately 1/6 of 1 per cent of families, a fraction of a sliver, had net assets of at least $1 million.
The sevenfold variation in number of millionaires between 1948 and 1965 stemmed from the fact that most wealth-holders concentrate their holdings in corporation stocks; and in 1948 stock prices were comparatively low, in 1964 and 1965 they were comparatively high.
It does not indicate that new asset-nuclei were formed to this extent. Judging by the composition of estates in 1961, Treasury figures showed (as U. S. News and World Report acknowledged), that upper-class wealth was held as follows on the average: Stocks, 65. 1 per cent; tax-exempt bonds, 8. 5 per cent; real estate, 6. 7 per cent; cash, 4. 3 per cent; U. S. government bonds, 4. 2 per cent; mortgages and notes, 1. 8 per cent; insurance, 1. 8 per cent; other bonds, . 8 per cent; and miscellaneous, 6. 8 per cent. Such being the case, any appreciable rise and fall of the stock market will alternately see-saw many suddenly up into the millionaire class or ease them down. The 1948 figure, in my view, is more indicative of the really heavy money than a 1965 figure. Better yet would be a 1932 figure. 5 As to the formation of new asset-nuclei, this is a far rarer occurrence than is regularly suggested in Time, Fortune and the Wall Street Journal.
As far as the achievements of the really wealthy are concerned, then, we may limit ourselves to looking within a contemporary group of very few families.
Not only will contemporary names be drawn from this property bracket but, at times, a retrospective view will be taken of individual achievers, always leaving out of consideration, for reasons stated, business organizers and managers as such. In order to read of their corporate deeds of derring-do one need merely turn to the pages of Fortune, which publishes a continual celebration of how well men run their own plantations.
Excluded will be any who have entered the indicated property bracket through achievements in the world of entertainment, sports and the arts--popular playwrights, actors, athletes, opera singers and virtuoso musicians. Those of whom note will be taken will be only those known to be in, around or about this property class prior to their achievement, not those who got into it through recognizable achievement. A financially successful once poor inventor would not be included.
Standards of Achievement
Anything that passes by worldly standards as achievement other than ambiguous corporate success will be counted as such. The operative phrase here is "by worldly standards," for much not applauded by the world as an achievement represents a great purely personal achievement as in the case of many persons, rich or poor, who daily force themselves up from a bed of pain and painfully perform daily duties or anyone, rich or poor, who becomes fairly civilized, a lamentably rare occurrence.
The commonly recognized areas of formal achievement, apart from business (which appears to rate high in popular esteem), are politics, law, the performing and creative arts, the sciences, scholarship, medicine, philosophy, religion, education, engineering, entertainment in the broadest sense, sports and journalism. In considering a sub-division of possibly 90,000 individuals and families we have considerable leeway, a large group to deal with although only a sliver of the population. But this, at least, is the area within which to look.
Psychologists generally consider 1/2 of 1 per cent of the population to be "gifted" in some way so that if the same ratio were preserved among 200,000 families owning $500,000 or more of property there would be at least 2,000 (two adults) "gifted" upper wealth-holders. Because not all the "gifted" bring their gifts to fruition there would not necessarily be this many outstanding achievers in the group; but there should be on the basis of the general distribution at least 500. Available data, however, do not enable one to assemble such a total, so that outstanding achievers are either proportionately fewer in the heavily propertied group, are somehow concealed from external view or are unpublicized. Yet it is in the nature of outstanding achievement sooner or later to call attention to itself.
It would be possible to identify all wealthy individuals only if one were provided with statements of net worth, which are not available; there are, however, indications in many cases, as already noticed. Achievement itself is notable and focuses public attention on the achiever and his background in an age of excessive publicity. As far as the very rich are concerned, we know pretty well who they are and can inspect them directly.
But I shall not, owing to the absence of precise data, be able to spot all, or nearly all, especially down near the lower levels of wealth-holding. There may be a wealthy man of considerable achievement, but if it is not shown on the record that his family has a certain net worth I cannot name him, much as I would like to. However, in the interests of an increase in knowledge, this is a game that others, privy to facts inaccessible to me, can play by supplementing my report. For, owing to the inattention of sociologists, we do not know with any precision the record of personal achievement or nonachievement of all large and largish property holders. The evidence only becomes clear as we ascend into the rarified realm of the known very large property holders, the super rich.
Area of Greatest Impact
It is not, first, usually thought possible for a man of wealth to be any sort of achiever. "Inherited wealth is a big handicap to happiness," said William K. Vanderbilt in a press interview in 1905. "It is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to morality. " 6 As to
the attainment of wealth through personal achievement, a universally spread view is summarized in an old Chinese proverb: "A man seldom gets rich without ill-got gain; as a horse does not fatten without feeding in the night. " 7
Yet the handicap indicated by Vanderbilt is sometimes overcome.
As the record shows, law combined with politics has been the area of greatest impact of propertied activists apart from corporate management. Not that legal practice as such, which in general is not extravagantly rewarded, has attracted big propertied people to any conspicuous extent. The rigors of either advocacy or jurisconsultation appear to have had few attractions for the wealthy, although the acquisition of a law degree and admission to the bar I take to be concrete achievements, whatever further steps are necessary to attaining distinction as a lawyer.
In general, lawyers from heavily propertied families do not enter into general legal practice, civil or criminal. Some members of lower wealth-holding layers do go into the practice of corporate law. As such they are, in general, necessarily defenders of the propertied position. Non-Establishment lawyers are, in general, defending criminal lawyers and plaintiffs' lawyers in civil actions, apart from a few affiliated with nonconformist causes such as constitutional rights. The Establishment, so-called, is usually interested either in prosecuting someone, rarely a member of the Establishment itself, or in defending some part of itself against not always valid individual claims.
While there may be lawyers from wealthy families who are non-Establishment practitioners, such a fact does not clearly show on the record.
In politics some of the more prominent of wealthy lawyers have been Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson and members of the Taft family beginning with William Howard Taft, one-time president of the United States. The Tafts, in addition to law, have notably operated in real estate.
William Howard Taft became chief justice of the Supreme Court but he is one of the very few among latter-day big wealth-holders who have held a judgeship. Taft, of course, was a thoroughgoing Establishment judge. A less well-known but highly distinguished judge was Curtis Bok of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, who died in 1962. A grandson of Cyrus H. K. Curtis, the mass publisher, and Edward M. Bok, Curtis Bok was also a gifted and sensitive author who wrote Star Wormwood, The Backbone of the Herring and I, Too, Nicodemus, all worth reading. Over a long period of years he was an exceptionally fine public servant. There was, too, Judge Thomas Mellon, the founder.
Judges are quite rare, though, among families of notable wealth. One draws a comparative blank among the big-wealthy on judges although one would unquestionably find a few among some of more modest fortune if the data were available. Judges, of course, are often men of some modest property, acquired through the practice of law, inheritance or marriage except for those few who have made financial killings as members of political syndicates.
Wealthy men directly in politics are no special novelty in American history. George Washington, the first president, was considered perhaps the wealthiest man of his time in the country, an inheritor. Many of the nation's founders, relative to their time, were quite wealthy, including Thomas Jefferson--at least until his final years. They were nearly all men of property, usually landed, a fact pointedly reflected in the Constitution. But even on a relative scale their wealth did not attain the proportions of the latter-day industrial fortunes.
After the Civil War there were many, usually self-erected, former poor men, who sat in the United States Senate, there closely guiding their interests in railroads, oil, mining
and lumbering; but that these held their seats in consequence of any political achievement or aptitude is open to serious question. Prior to 1913 senators were elected by state legislatures, many of which, staffed by dung-hill democrats, awarded Senate seats simply to the highest bidder. It did not take much in the way of political knowhow to sit in "The Rich Man's Club," as the Senate was commonly called.
I will not, then, count any of the pre-1913 rich senators as political achievers simply on the ground of their presence in the Senate.
Although rich and budding rich men were always shuttling about in the shadowy background of both political parties, supplying "campaign funds" and pulling devious strings right and left, they were in the more recent period brought forward and given more direct participation by the Republican Warren G. Harding. A former senator, President Harding was a small-town newspaper publisher of no great wealth. However, he appointed as his secretary of the treasury Andrew W. Mellon, then one of the richest men in the world--an inheritor as well as acquisitor; self-created Herbert C. Hoover as his secretary of commerce; the corporation lawyer Charles Evans Hughes as his secretary of state; and Albert B. Fall, stooge of the oil industry, his secretary of interior. Since Theodore Roosevelt it had become pretty much the custom to install corporation lawyers as secretary of state and attorney general.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, a minor millionaire himself before becoming a popular tribune, went much further in this respect than either Harding or Hoover, who appointed multi- millionaire Ogden L. Mills to succeed Mellon. Roosevelt, believing that men of wealth and good schooling should serve in government rather than lounge about in their clubs, practically stacked his cabinets with men of wealth, while standpatters, reactionaries and presumed malefactors of great wealth shrieked that he was a Communist and a "traitor to his class," here validating in action a Marxist conception of class consciousness among the rich. He started off with William H. Woodin, head of the American Car and Foundry Company, as secretary of the treasury and replaced him with multi-millionaire Henry Morgenthau, Jr. When the world situation became gravely serious in 1940 he appointed Frank Knox, Republican newspaper tycoon, as secretary of the navy and later James V. Forrestal, partner of Dillon, Read and Company, Wall Street investment bankers. He appointed Edward Stettinius, Jr. , son of a Morgan partner, secretary of state. He brought back the able Henry L. Stimson, Republican corporation lawyer and Hoover's secretary of state, as secretary of war. He made Jesse Jones, self-erected Texas Democratic big-league banker-politician, secretary of commerce and Francis Biddle attorney general. Down through the upper ranks of officialdom he drew freely upon men of great wealth, making Nelson A. Rockefeller the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs; W. Averell Harriman, former partner of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. , his representative from the beginning in a variety of posts, mainly diplomatic; Joseph P. Kennedy head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and so on. He gave both Harriman and Rockefeller their political starts.
Roosevelt, it is true, made many appointments from other quarters and, in fact, assembled a mixed bag. But, far from stacking his appointments with radicals or liberals, as recklessly charged, a far stronger case could be made that he drew most of his appointees from Wall Street, Newport, the corporate circuit and the big-city political machines. Scholarly liberals and radicals were brought in mainly as ideological window dressing in a time of great public discontent. Henry Wallace, considered a far-out radical in the bayou country, was himself a very wealthy man, at most a liberal conservative.
If results are what count, Roosevelt was not hostile to the private-property business system, which he found in self-induced crisis and left some years later revived and
reinforced with government support. Remove Rooseveltian government economic subsidy, patronage, guarantee and support today, and the much-vaunted free-enterprise system, beloved of Chamber of Commerce orators, would collapse like a bullet-riddled toy balloon. How many depositors would trust the banks, for a simple example, if it were not for government insurance of deposits? How many would trust the one-time wide-open Stock Exchange if it were not for the SEC?
The fact that the rich were in politics, then, was nothing new. What is new is that, more recently, taking their cue from Roosevelt, the latter-day rich have increasingly taken a direct part, with some of them at least showing signs of becoming forthright public men. They have themselves stood for election, and have been elected, a favorable development from the point of view that those who own the country should take responsibility openly for running it rather than hiding behind stooges in Uncle Sam and Abraham Lincoln suits.
Very rich men, inheritors or corporate wizards, have taken to winning elections right and left despite ingrown Populist prejudices. The electorate appears to be growing tired of the old-time "friend of the people," shaggy with folksy duplicity and athirst for franchises or whatever else he can lay furtive patriotic hands on. Winning an election, I take it, may be counted an achievement whereas winning friendly appointment is not particularly. For the latter all one needs is the nod from some Mr. Big.
By his untypical election as governor of New York in 1928 Franklin D. Roosevelt apparently led wealthy men to believe they too could be elected to that key office, although, as we have noticed, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft and Hoover were, earlier, in the wealthy class. Franklin Roosevelt was succeeded in the governorship by Herbert H. Lehman of the Wall Street banking family, who served from 1932 to 1942 before becoming a United States senator. Except for Thomas E. Dewey's twelve-year tenure after 1942 the governorship of New York has been held by wealthy men since 1928. In 1954, with strong labor support, W. Averell Harriman, later again in the State Department, became the first of the ultra-wealthy of later years to win an important election when he became governor of New York as a Democrat, opening the way psychologically for ultra-wealthy Nelson A. Rockefeller, also supported by labor, to succeed him in 1958 and to win reelection twice to date. As Roosevelt showed on several occasions, the electorate will not shy away from a man because he is wealthy. The voters, presumably, think he is less apt to tap the public till for himself than is an Horatio Alger boy from the grass roots and dung hills.
Outside of New York, too, wealthy men, some of whom got their political start under Roosevelt appointments, have also taken to winning elections. G. Mennen "Soapy" Williams, shaving soap and talcum powder dual heir, who began as a New Deal appointee in 1936, was the elected labor-supported governor of Michigan from 1949 to 1960 and thereafter was assistant secretary of state for African Affairs;. a lawyer, he is also a doctor of jurisprudence. William W. Scranton, also a lawyer and scion of an old Pennsylvania coal fortune, was first an Eisenhower official, then a member of Congress and in 1963 was elected governor of Pennsylvania.
The Kennedys, of course, stand out as men of great wealth who have directly participated in politics, although they are really members of an oldline political family like the Lodges, Stevensons and Tafts. John F. Kennedy, a budding journalist and war hero, was first easily elected a member of the House from Massachusetts, then of the Senate. In 1961 he became president. His brother Robert, a lawyer, was first his attorney general and then became senator from New York while brother Edward, also a lawyer, followed John F. to the Senate from Massachusetts.
Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania, whom we have noticed in his effort to democratize the Senate, is a wealthy as well as extremely able public-spirited man. Barry Goldwater, senator from Arizona before winning the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, inherited a substantial interest in a large department store, never had to work his way up from anywhere. The late Robert Taft, senator from Ohio and presidential aspirant, came of a wealthy family; and the same necessarily holds of his son, also directly concerned in Ohio politics.
This list could be extended--Theodore Green and Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, the Saltonstalls and Peabodys of Massachusetts, Ogden Reid of New York and Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, Angier Biddle Duke, Governor Winthrop Rockefeller of Arkansas, Harrison Williams, Jr. , of New Jersey, et al. --but the highlights have been indicated. While one might evaluate the political performances of each of these men differently, perhaps rating Roosevelt and Kennedy high and Goldwater and Taft low, or vice versa, each represents achievement on the ground that winning elections is itself a recognized achievement. Roosevelt I would call an outstanding achiever in politics.
In some quarters there is a tendency to downgrade the feat of a wealthy man in winning an election because he has had the use of his own funds. But money alone does not win elections, although it is in the plutocratic American system a necessary aid. Furthermore, nearly every man who wins an election is backed by money--his own, that of a moneyed group (like Richard Nixon and his oil backers in 1952) or of an established political machine. The few exceptions appear to be sheer flukes in American politics. Money from at least a small group is almost always behind the candidates, particularly the winner. Only here and there in political low-pressure areas an unfinanced amateur may sneak over the goal line.
A significant recent tendency has been the appearance of a number of successful high corporation officials in elective political office. Small and very medium-sized business people have been no great novelty in elective office, particularly at the state level; but men from the corporate big league have been pointedly absent. George Romney, former head of American Motors and twice elected governor of Michigan, launched a campaign as a 1968 Republican presidential aspirant; and Charles Percy, former head of Bell & Howell, was elected senator from Illinois in 1966. On the corporate circuit, these men were big guns. If more big managers of corporations thrust forward in politics, the country may see something of what cold corporate rationality can do applied to government, assuming that such men retain the corporate approach. Robert S. McNamara, former president of Ford Motor Company, conducted his own specialized exercise in corporate rationality with the Defense Department, but his best efforts there had not been able to out-general Ho Chi Minh on his batteries of Pentagon computers.
In any event, it would appear that a change is under way when the industrial rich, descendants of original tycoons, and corporate nabobs participate directly in politics instead of working through subsidized lower-class stooges. There is a gain here, in the first place, for candor. At least the fractional thinking part of the electorate can now evaluate what these candidates publicly stand for instead of voting for men presumably independent but secretly harnessed to the corporate juggernaut. What any of these men propose politically may not be approved by the observer, but the observer will nevertheless learn by noticing public performance precisely what he does stand for.
Personalities like Lyndon B. Johnson, although moderately wealthy, are not included in the foregoing because they were not wealthy when they came to politics but were politicians first, wealthy men later.
No claim is implied here that all the wealthy who are lawyers have been named, for that list would run into hundreds, or that the mere fact of being a lawyer is something
wonderful, Quite a number of the wealthy and the well-to-do become lawyers although not so many, it appears, as become corporation executives, project promoters and nonprofit administrators.
The Ruling Class
That members of the wealthier classes do often become corporation executives, administrators, lawyers and appointed or elected officials, thereupon opening themselves to evaluation in terms of going standards of achievement, is hardly odd in the light of the concept in political science of a "ruling class. " Activists among the rich do seem to drift primarily into directorial, managerial or similar executive-type functional posts. However, to suggest that the United States, where sovereignty in theory lies within the whole people, has a ruling class is ideologically heretical, repugnant to public-school alumni and is for the most part volubly and emphatically denied. It is, above all, quite contrary to public school indoctrination.
For my part, I do not insist that the United States has a tight ruling class because there is often some ambiguity about what public activists in general are up to. Some appear confused themselves.
Objections to the idea of an American ruling class generally seem to flow from misconceptions about the nature of rule, which in the United States is indirect, and also from the idea that a ruling class must be formally constituted, as by titled nobility with certain formal privileges and immunities. Objections also seem to stem from the notion that a ruling class, in order to exist, must be closed to outsiders (which, for example, the ruling class of England never was).
But if a ruling class consists of people whose members veritably rule, a class whose imperative wishes and criteria largely order society, then it seems to me a case can be made that there is such a class in the United States, partly hereditary as to property and position and partly open to conforming newcomers. While not every member of a ruling class exercises rule, some being no more than detached observers and more or less graceful idlers, it is from such an established class that rulers may be selected.
If rulers are those who lay down and enforce the rules, then it would seem that the United States has such a class. The only question remaining would be whether these rulers are publicly selected on the basis of sheer merit or attain their positions largely by means of wealth or hereditary position. Newcomers to rule in the United States, it will be noticed, must pretty much accept and implement already going values established by preexistent rulers. A difference between being born into a ruling class and being accepted into it is that the newcomer must learn and adopt the general values of the ruling group. A man who works his way into the ruling group from the laboring class (and there have been and are such) does not ordinarily retain the values of his original class. He acquires, more or less, the values of his new associates. Like most converts he is often more orthodox than a pope. Everett Dirksen, once a journeyman baker, does not have the outlook today of a journeyman baker.
How, it may be asked, would one discern a member of a ruling class if there were such a class? The method, it seems to me, would be simple: One would notice whether or not he ruled and how much be ruled. In this sense there is certainly a ruling class in the United States; for radiating throughout the country are various wide-jurisdiction chains of command--political, economic, cultural and judicial--that always have someone at their heads. These head men are, or seem to me, rulers.
That there is something improper per se about such rulership, as is either directly charged or strongly implied in much leftist analysis, may be flatly denied. Social organization of any kind requires rule, and the fact that certain executive types from a
small group assume rule derives as much from the passivity and incoherence of the masses as from any impropriety or inequity in arrangements even though one concedes that anyone who has "influence," either through the possession of money or established position, does have an inside track when it comes to establishing himself in a position of rule. But under any possible version of socialism, for example, there would be similar rulers; and, despite all cant about a democratic socialism, such rulers would tend increasingly to be drawn from a semiprofessionalized self-perpetuating class, properly designated as privileged rulers.
As to democracy, "the insatiate lust for wealth and the neglect of everything else for the sake of money-making were the cause of its undoing. " (Ibid. , 8. 562b. )
The arts and crafts are corrupted by the co-presence of great wealth and poverty. (Ibid. , 4. 421d. )
"Wealth and poverty" should be kept out of the good society "since the one brings luxury, idleness, and innovation, and the other illiberality and the evil of bad workmanship. . . . " (Ibid. , 4. 422a. )
Those most successful in the pursuit of wealth become the targets of the drones, become "the pastures of the drones. " (Ibid. , 8. 564e. )
". . . it is the evil life commonly led by the sons of autocrats and men of extraordinary wealth. Such a training will never, never lead to outstanding goodness in boy, or man, or graybeard. " (Laws, 3. 695e. )
"But to be at once exceedingly wealthy and good is impossible, if we mean by the wealthy those who are accounted so by the vulgar, that is, the exceptional few who own property of great pecuniary value--the very thing a bad man would be likely to own. Now since this is so, I can never concede to them that a rich man is truly happy unless he is also a good man, but that one who is exceptionally good should be exceptionally wealthy too is a mere impossibility. " (Ibid. , 5. 742e. )
"One arises from the passion for wealth which leaves a man not a moment of leisure to attend to anything beyond his personal fortunes. So long as a citizen's whole soul is wrapped up in these, he cannot give a thought to anything but the day's takings. Any study or pursuit which tends to that result everyone sets himself eagerly to learn and practice; all others are laughed to scorn. Here, then, we may say, is one reason in particular why society declines to take this or any other wholly admirable pursuit seriously, though everyone in it is ready enough, in his furious thirst for gold and silver, to stoop to any trade and any shift, honorable or dishonorable, which holds out a prospect of wealth, ready to scruple at no act whatsoever--innocent, sinful, or utterly shameful--so long as it promises to sate him, like some brute beast, with a perfect glut of eating, drinking, and sexual sport. " (Ibid. , 8. 831c,d. )
A soul stung to savagery by unsatisfied lusts "is chiefly found concerned with that on which most men's longing is most permanently and sharply set--wealth, with the power wealth gets alike from native bias and pernicious wrong education to breed countless cravings for insatiate and unbounded possession of itself. And the source of this perverse education is the credit given to false praise of riches alike by Greek and non- Greek; they promote wealth to the first place among good things, whereas in truth it holds but the third, and thus they deprive not only themselves but their posterity. " (Ibid. , 9. 870a. )
Plato has a great deal more to say about the wealthy, most of it disparaging. His remarks, indeed, foreshadow the Aristotelian position that the best society is one dominated by a middle class of the moderately affluent, with neither extremely rich nor extremely poor. In both the Platonic and Aristotelian perspectives the United States is a monstrously lopsided entity, a veritable Gorgon, a chamber of horrors.
What is perhaps of paramount interest is that no subsequent major thinker has departed essentially from the script as laid down by these giant pundits. It may be that thinkers in following Plato and Aristotle here merely felt rivalrous toward those with a claim to power other than intellectual, as Plato indeed unquestionably felt rivalrous
toward the poets. Yet intellectuals in general have not felt so uniformly against nonintellectual power rivals like soldiers, politicians, explorers, religious leaders or artists as they have against the rich, a feeling that by no means reached its apogee, as commonly supposed, in the writings of Karl Marx.
Marx has clearly been topped in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, the stylish French metaphysician, who refers to the wealthy and the respectable in general as salauds (filthy beasts) because he believes they have it in their power to produce alterations for the better but instead work assiduously to perpetuate ancient swindles while professing humane goals.
Sartre, like Aristotle and Plato, is rather remote from most Americans. Nearer home, a recent expression of the attitude, deeply etched into American radical and dissenting literature, can be sampled in the summary by the Marxist, Herbert Aptheker, of the non- Marxist C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite as "filled also with burning attacks--as passionate but not as muted as that of his mentor Veblen--upon the social and personal immorality of the rich, their coarseness, cruelty, hypocrisy, greed, and lustfulness. " 1
One could, it is true, assemble examples of the rich from the American scene who apparently fit different items of these characterizations. But, straying outside the circle of the rich, one could unquestionably find proportionately as many cases for each count in the indictment at all except the most refined levels of society. And seeking examples of virtuosic cruelty, one would find it impossible to discover any rival among the American rich to such a Marxist redeemer as Josef Stalin, to say nothing of Lavrenti Beria and a swarm of power-crazed leftist midgets from the lower depths. "Practical" Marxists like Dr. Aptheker, while launching their shafts of criticism, seem blissfully unaware of what their own affiliations and loyalties commit them to defend.
The Aptheker-Mills indictment of "the rich," as formulated above, is clearly far too broad and obviously loaded. It reveals and perhaps prescribes an attitude rather than describes.
But if one turns to the influential Alexander Hamilton among the Founding Fathers, one finds, contrary to Plato, Aristotle and almost every other considerable political thinker in western history, that government should belong to "the wealthy, the good and the wise. " As to the last two, Plato and Aristotle would have agreed; as to the first, we know what they thought.
Social thinkers down through the centuries have all had favorite classes, which they took to be the instruments of deliverance. With Plato it was the intellectuals, with Aristotle the middle classes, with Jefferson the small farmers, with Marx the factory workers, with Hamilton the wealthy and so on. In this boxing of the class compass, one contemporary writer, Nelson Algren, has oddly found his favorite social group among what Marx called the lumpenproletariat --thieves, pimps, prostitutes and down-and- outers.
But, in his admiration of the wealthy, Hamilton, political father of the American plutocracy, virtually represented an historical minority of one among political thinkers.
The Problematic Rich
Who, in the first place, are "the rich"?
Included in the designation are trust-fund infants who at the moment of birth are incalculably rich (and presumably no more offensive than any other infants), trust-fund children of various ages, women young and old of mixed capabilities and outlooks and men ranging from inane idlers and wastrels through routine performers to the intensely but not always laudably active. Whatever else one can say about most of the rich, one
cannot reasonably say they are especially coarse, cruel, greedy or more than commonly hypocritical or lustful. Money in a special place of high honor to one side, a person of ordinary sensibilities would much prefer to associate with many, perhaps most of them, than with the average run-of-the-mill politician, labor leader, advertising impresario or gospel-monger.
What Mills focused his attention on was the active rich, particularly the policy setters, and among these one could not deny the presence of the immoral (tax manipulators, for example), the coarse, the cruel, the hypocritical, the greedy and the lustful; but even among these, that all or most are of the order indicated can be easily shown to be fictional.
What is problematic about the rich is more as follows: The possession of wealth, inherited or acquired, itself informs the possessor that he is special, that he holds winning cards over most people in most social situations. He can, for one thing, finance a greater number of amorous episodes--a big advantage in the estimation of the simple- minded. He holds a social advantage over most others which, unluckily for him, may so turn his head as to give him delusions of inherent superiority, as is often the case in the possession of anything rare and desired. One hugs one's advantages--health, strength, intelligence, learning or wealth--and tends to take them as marks of invidious excellence: snobbism. In some rich families, the Rockefeller notably, the children are carefully reared in as middle class a way as possible to prevent their developing such common delusions; yet the fact cannot be concealed for long that they are special, that they hold a fistful of aces in worldly goods, and that others surely define them as different. They are different; they are rich--in effect, noble--in a society replete with poverty and degradation, Their wealth makes it possible for them to mobilize more effective power than most people at particular points, at times to their own undoing. Money is like a spirited horse in at least this respect: One must know how to ride it, which few really do.
Like anyone else, the rich person may experience frustrations and a sense of being unduly limited; but he does not usually feel it in as many ways nor as frequently or humiliatingly as the nonrich. He feels that he has, in general, more elbow room, a wider range of choice. And he has indeed more elbow room, geographic and psychological.
As to the active policy-making rich and their agents of the power elite (for these latter are mostly agents): Like nearly all people they are usually heedless of whatever is not before their eyes, either lack sufficient imagination (like reckless motorists) or have their attention fully absorbed (like nearly everyone else) by their personal problems and projects. The doers of the world all have projects, and one is either a doer or nondoer. And doers all derive an intense feeling of satisfaction from any project carried to success, whether it consists of writing a book, leading a revolution, creating or managing a corporation or winning an election. Absorption in one's own project, whether it is building a corporation or writing a poem, leaves one unable to play one's attention over other aspects of reality. Probably the greatest harm in the world comes of the simple fact that nobody is able to pay full attention to everything at once. One really should, yet it is impossible. Although this is so, it does not follow that attention cannot be focused on a wider horizon than immediate, specialized interests--a marked tendency of the rising rich at least. The basic offense of most of the active rich, if it is an offense, is that they usually pursue their own visions, skillfully or crudely, not only to the neglect of the rest of the world (as does the poet) but, at times, because they have power, against or indifferent to the needs and wishes of the rest of the world. Not only do they have power but, like most people, they are thoroughly egocentric.
Although now woven by means of large enterprises into the warp and woof of all society, the rich, like nearly everyone else, put their own enterprises first in the narrowly reasonable effort to preserve their social advantage, by means fair or seemingly questionable. Without that social advantage they would, like the common people, be at the beck and call of almost any self-appointed messiah presenting himself as the latest in the line of the Apostolic Succession or, perhaps, a spiritual representative of a freely prescribing Karl Marx or even, like Adolf Hitler, as the offspring of Wotan. Being rich is basically defensive in a rough world, although the defensive position has its own hazards.
What is perhaps most irksome about the rich to the intelligent nonrich, particularly to those with some other vision of how society should be arranged, is not actually what any rich individual may or may not do. True, by behaving outwardly like a gentleman the rich man may temper animosity; but he cannot, even by gentlemanly behavior, mollify persons like Plato, Aristotle, Marx, Sartre and others acutely aware of his necessary role, which is much like that of a character in a Greek drama enacting the capricious will of the gods.
The rich, the plain fact is, confront the rest of society as a solid, semicorporate phalanx, buttressed by law and public policy. By law they hold their positions legitimately and hence can feel complete rectitude. When the national anthem is being sung they can feel it is being sung in celebration of the legal system that supports them, for the aggrandizement of which every man, the poorer especially, may be called upon to offer his very life simply by presidential order, without any declaration of war by Congress. Beyond this, existing policies under the law favor them; they have been adopted largely by their agents with their corporate permission.
The existence of this solid phalanx is sharply noticeable only to those who have some proposal to make with a view to adjusting policy in order to accommodate some large number of people who are, in one way or the other, supposedly being unduly inconvenienced by any number of things. Whenever any public proposal is made for any change (however slight), it is bound to encounter opposition. Upon inquiry it turns out that the opposition ordinarily stems from one or more affluent or rich people, usually referred to euphemistically as Interests. While there are indeed many interests in a society, the most assertive is surely the property interest.
Even a case about a trivial question, adversely affecting only one propertied person, may have wide implications for many or all propertied because it may set a precedent upon which further more extensive similar actions may be taken. The entire phalanx of the propertied becomes agitated and makes its displeasure known to legislators, judges and other officials. After all, one cannot have unsound decisions approved. Again, the entire phalanx of the propertied may be committed by simply one among the propertied, who presses deviously for and obtains some tax concession. This concession thereafter applies to all, whether they asked for it or not.
Thus it happens that even minor, purely common-sense proposals for reforms often precipitate fierce political dogfights.
In a relevant case, early in 1966 C. Wright Patman, the powerful chairman of the powerful House Banking and Currency Committee, decided on the basis of a committee vote to investigate the entire question of how trust funds are used in corporate and bank control. When subpoenas began to go out to banks requesting information there was suddenly called on June 7 a meeting by 17 of 33 committee members, who required the recall of many subpoenas; on a showdown, however, the right of the chairman to issue subpoenas was upheld.
This checking of a committee chairman was a very unusual action, which obviously had its source in some of the entities being investigated. Not many citizens, it is true, are alert to this situation or probably care very much.
What the final outcome of the investigation will be, whether it will be muted or not, is not yet known. Whether light will be thrown on what Chairman Patman claims are some $215 billion of trust fund holdings one cannot yet tell; all this is terra incognita right now.
By the end of the year, at any rate, Chairman Patman on the basis of subpoenas already returned was able to announce that three-quarters of the banks of the country had at least 5 per cent of their stock held by other banks through trust funds managed for beneficiaries and that this percentage of stock ownership represented a long step toward control. The very largest banks, he said, operated under this sort of interlocking ownership, were all more or less in the same ownership bed--one big happy incestuous family. 2
The information needed in this area is as follows: identifications of trust-fund holdings, book values and current market values, nature of trusts and length of time they run, beneficiaries of a multiplicity of trusts (reducing income taxes), cost of operation of trusts, validity of investment selections for trusts, etc. Whether the named beneficiaries or the managers benefit most is an undetermined question.
The propertied, for one thing, are mostly especially sensitive to anything about taxes-- how much shall be the total levy and, more important, how shall the collection be proportioned? In general, the propertied interest in the United States, sheltered behind technician-spokesmen, has been opposed (whatever some individual property owners felt) to government levies for the sake of the domestic comfort, convenience and necessity of the broad public (its own comfort and convenience being apparently assured) but has been generously unstinting in any military or semi-military expenditures that gave government a strong argument abroad in assuring access to markets, raw materials and trade routes. At present, with military and space exploration budgets inflated to record proportions, the cities internally are literally falling apart. It has been estimated by insiders that 75 per cent of the military budget is rationally unjustifiable.
Beyond the desire to keep down tax totals (hence the fiscally sound objection to "reckless government spending") there is the collective desire of the propertied to shove a disproportionate part of the tax burden over onto the lower labor force which, imbued with patriotic ardor, is presumably happy to support a democratic paradise that freely allows them to go and listen to happy tidings of the afterworld from the likes of Billy Graham and Fulton J. Sheen and to rub elbows with the rich at Coney Island. As we have already seen how deftly this tax burden is shouldered onto the pious, patriotic and not-too-bright lower labor force, the point need engage our fascinated interest no longer.
Whatever the call may be for social adjustment will either cost tax money or intrude more or less adversely on some propertied interest--that is, upon the revenues of some collection of rich persons. More public housing will tread on the toes of private landlords. And as this call for adjustment is fought by the "interests," some proponents are irked. The purely commonsense proposal, for example, to place effective health warnings on cigarette packages was fought to a standstill and defeated in Congress, with the result that the tobacco industry through intensified advertising is selling more cigarettes than ever before in the teeth of repeated formal government findings that they are a clear menace to health. Similarly there was fought tooth and nail suggested mandatory automobile safety equipment and there have been fights in the state
legislatures against attempts to limit in any way the free resale of unroadworthy second- hand cars. One could cite thousands of similar cases.
To be sure, when it is said that an "industry" opposes something, the source of the opposition is kept sufficiently abstract and remote. An industry is not something subject to sense experience. One cannot see it or feel it. "Industry" here boils down to no more than several boards of directorsperhaps fifty to a hundred men--who represent stockholders, mainly large stockholders--in brief, rich people. These latter are, somewhat poetically, as adversely affected by automobile air pollution as the poor although they can resort to air conditioning or retreat to remote fresh-air estates and ranches.
It is this consistent opposition to proposals for reasonable as well as unreasonable change that the propertied have offered down through history, opposition more effective than argument, that has caused the rich to be looked upon as problematic ever since Plato. It is not that they are necessarily vicious, as the Marxists often postulate; it is just that they are blandly or uncomprehendingly selfish, and not always very intelligently. The unpropertied person may be just as selfish but he has no telltale instrument such as property with which to reveal his selfishness so completely.
Like the small band of Greeks in the pass at Thermopylae the selfish rich hold back by their skill of maneuver in an entrenched position (always in the name of sound policy) huge disorganized armies of sansculottes and descamisados (among which, thoughtfully, they have their own friends haranguing on all manner of irrelevancies dear to the same sansculottes and descamisados). It is all much like a disciplined Roman legion against a barbarian rabble.
Because virtually everything has an economic aspect and because the rich, as we have seen, own and control the foundation and prime stages of the economic system, practically anything that anyone is likely to propose in the way of a new arrangement is going to strike some among the propertied and the rich adversely, and hence lead them to invoke the law defensively or work for a new self-serving public ordinance. Often the mere attempt to reroute traffic by local ordinance causes merchants to spring into tigerish opposition, presumably in defense of property rights.
Again, many individuals who engage in entrepreneurial action, hoping to become rich, find that the way is barred by persons, propertied or rich, already in established positions. As Henry J. Kaiser discovered, there is no room for another automobile manufacturer. True, there are interstices into which newcomers may insert themselves with success, particularly the area of new technology but, in the main, the road is blocked to all except the very clever--and lucky--among newcomers.
The rich, then, come to seem to those who have encountered their resistance like part of a single corporate entity, a special class, or, as the Marxists say, a class interest. Because they are each part of this class interest, embalmed like a fly in plastic, there is not much they can do to earn credit in the eyes of critics. Owing to the saying of Jesus in Matthew, XIX, 24, that "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God," there was no way out for a rich man for hundreds of years except to give his property to the church. The result was that in the late medieval period the churchpols in the name of the church held tightly more than half the land of Europe; the latecoming kings were far less gullible than the earlier gentry. In the eyes of the Marxists there is nothing a rich man can do except, like Frederick Engels, devote his wealth to the promotion of Marxism; anything less will fail to gain credit. The rich could, to be sure, turn all their wealth over to the government where it would at the present time fall under the benign jurisdiction of Lyndon B.
Johnson, in which circumstances few judicious moralists would see any particular gain for mankind.
Castigation of the rich, however, arises less from envy, as commonly supposed, than from people who have in some way been blocked or frustrated by the massed class interest of the rich. The rich man may be a really nice guy; but his very interests, indeed his whole being, force him to present himself in a certain stylized way. Most of the critics of the rich have themselves been power claimants, who know the rich and powerful can readily trump their cards. Plato, Aristotle and a long line of independent intellectuals have known that their carefully reasoned arguments are subject to political defeat less by sound counter-arguments than by the power of inertia, money and entrenched position. As any practical politician knows, in going before Congress on any question it is better to be backed by lucre than by a bullet-proof argument. Money will win almost every time on crucial questions, such as intruding from afar into World War I, and the only way apparently to defeat it is by some other brute power. Hence, as the Marxists say, revolution. The proffered cure here, though, except in cases of complete war-induced social collapse as in Russia in 1917 and China in the 1940's, is clearly worse than the disease because serviceable institutional restraints are swept away in the uproar and a clean slate is open to an unrestrained set of new power seekers, not at all squeamish (as history has shown) about how they apply their power. Leninist Communism is clearly a modern receivership in political bankruptcy.
Where those counts in the Aptheker indictment are best sustained is with respect to certain uneducated men of the poorer classes who have by book or crook made themselves rich: the original grabbers. In this country these are the "Robber Barons" of the nineteenth century and later replicas. The record on these is by now fairly well known. While many of the established rich, normally lacking imagination and perhaps sufficient sapience, have been normally heedless, the clear-cut depredations of the rich have in most cases been carried out by founders, newcomers, in panicky flight from poverty. It is the ex-poor among the rich who have been the most active social offenders. This was the crowd Veblen largely wrote about in all their vulgarity.
All of which is not to say that there is nothing of an overbearingly objectionable nature about the general policies since World War II contrived by Mills's insidiously bland power elite on behalf of remote principals. Those policies have been, on the whole, immediately self-serving, broadly neglectful of visible internal social decay and in that sense actually inimical over the long term to basic upper-class interests. What there really is to the idea of a power elite consists of people--upper-crust lawyers, politicians, officials, journalists, public relations men and idea men--who in various ways recommend themselves to the rich and well positioned by formulating defensive stopgaps for immediate problems. A way to remunerative position in the United States is to get the nod from some one of the wealthy or their adjutants, and those who get this nod are invariably from lower levels of society, usually chimpanzee-bright men who have developed know-how and can-do for poulticing over difficult situations in the interests of established arrangements. This is the level where "urban renewal" and roadbuilding become new ways of generating windfall profits. Nobody, it is pertinent to notice, gets the nod who is in any way seriously opposed to the established order. Indeed, nobody gets the nod who is merely reflectively doubtful and hesitant. Such persons would only generate dissension or uncertainty in high places and impede a smooth-smooth administrative operation.
As nobody to my knowledge has attempted to pinpoint collectively the possibly laudable achievements of rich people, quite apart from their class interests, I here set myself this heretical task with a view both to rounding out the picture and to seeing
concretely just what the achievements may amount to. How undeniably constructive and creative have the wealthy, more particularly the American wealthy, really been?
The Sacred Group
In seeking to isolate the achievements of the wealthy, it seems desirable to indicate the broad area within which one looks. Who, shall we say, are the wealthy?
Fortunately the Federal Reserve Board and Census Bureau, as noticed earlier, have come up with recent figures, the most precise on official record, to the effect that there were an estimated 200,000 nuclear families averaging three persons in the country as of December 31, 1962, in possession of net assets of $500,000 or more. 3 So, for these purposes, we shall take this last as the maximum figure representing a proto-wealthy family, although a person worth a few thousands less could hardly be considered impoverished. Naturally, the indicated small group includes everybody in possession of up to a heady billion dollars by value and beyond.
But even a group of this reduced size is cumbersome to inquire into and includes more than the definitively wealthy. This group of 200,000 nuclear families can be narrowed down somewhat, however. U. S. News and World Report, October 11, 1965, estimated on the basis of more recent Treasury figures that: "Today there are about 90,000 millionaires," by which it alluded to persons owning assets worth at least $1 million. 4 Some of these were in extended family clusters, and some families as we know (Du Ponts, Fords, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts et al. ) contain many millionaires and millionaire nuclear families. Total holdings of the group were estimated in excess of $250 billion. As of 1948, the millionaire group totaled only 13,000 by the reckoning of this same source.
U. S. News pointed out that this 90,000 indicated that one family in every 625 was in the millionaire class, which meant approximately 1/6 of 1 per cent of families, a fraction of a sliver, had net assets of at least $1 million.
The sevenfold variation in number of millionaires between 1948 and 1965 stemmed from the fact that most wealth-holders concentrate their holdings in corporation stocks; and in 1948 stock prices were comparatively low, in 1964 and 1965 they were comparatively high.
It does not indicate that new asset-nuclei were formed to this extent. Judging by the composition of estates in 1961, Treasury figures showed (as U. S. News and World Report acknowledged), that upper-class wealth was held as follows on the average: Stocks, 65. 1 per cent; tax-exempt bonds, 8. 5 per cent; real estate, 6. 7 per cent; cash, 4. 3 per cent; U. S. government bonds, 4. 2 per cent; mortgages and notes, 1. 8 per cent; insurance, 1. 8 per cent; other bonds, . 8 per cent; and miscellaneous, 6. 8 per cent. Such being the case, any appreciable rise and fall of the stock market will alternately see-saw many suddenly up into the millionaire class or ease them down. The 1948 figure, in my view, is more indicative of the really heavy money than a 1965 figure. Better yet would be a 1932 figure. 5 As to the formation of new asset-nuclei, this is a far rarer occurrence than is regularly suggested in Time, Fortune and the Wall Street Journal.
As far as the achievements of the really wealthy are concerned, then, we may limit ourselves to looking within a contemporary group of very few families.
Not only will contemporary names be drawn from this property bracket but, at times, a retrospective view will be taken of individual achievers, always leaving out of consideration, for reasons stated, business organizers and managers as such. In order to read of their corporate deeds of derring-do one need merely turn to the pages of Fortune, which publishes a continual celebration of how well men run their own plantations.
Excluded will be any who have entered the indicated property bracket through achievements in the world of entertainment, sports and the arts--popular playwrights, actors, athletes, opera singers and virtuoso musicians. Those of whom note will be taken will be only those known to be in, around or about this property class prior to their achievement, not those who got into it through recognizable achievement. A financially successful once poor inventor would not be included.
Standards of Achievement
Anything that passes by worldly standards as achievement other than ambiguous corporate success will be counted as such. The operative phrase here is "by worldly standards," for much not applauded by the world as an achievement represents a great purely personal achievement as in the case of many persons, rich or poor, who daily force themselves up from a bed of pain and painfully perform daily duties or anyone, rich or poor, who becomes fairly civilized, a lamentably rare occurrence.
The commonly recognized areas of formal achievement, apart from business (which appears to rate high in popular esteem), are politics, law, the performing and creative arts, the sciences, scholarship, medicine, philosophy, religion, education, engineering, entertainment in the broadest sense, sports and journalism. In considering a sub-division of possibly 90,000 individuals and families we have considerable leeway, a large group to deal with although only a sliver of the population. But this, at least, is the area within which to look.
Psychologists generally consider 1/2 of 1 per cent of the population to be "gifted" in some way so that if the same ratio were preserved among 200,000 families owning $500,000 or more of property there would be at least 2,000 (two adults) "gifted" upper wealth-holders. Because not all the "gifted" bring their gifts to fruition there would not necessarily be this many outstanding achievers in the group; but there should be on the basis of the general distribution at least 500. Available data, however, do not enable one to assemble such a total, so that outstanding achievers are either proportionately fewer in the heavily propertied group, are somehow concealed from external view or are unpublicized. Yet it is in the nature of outstanding achievement sooner or later to call attention to itself.
It would be possible to identify all wealthy individuals only if one were provided with statements of net worth, which are not available; there are, however, indications in many cases, as already noticed. Achievement itself is notable and focuses public attention on the achiever and his background in an age of excessive publicity. As far as the very rich are concerned, we know pretty well who they are and can inspect them directly.
But I shall not, owing to the absence of precise data, be able to spot all, or nearly all, especially down near the lower levels of wealth-holding. There may be a wealthy man of considerable achievement, but if it is not shown on the record that his family has a certain net worth I cannot name him, much as I would like to. However, in the interests of an increase in knowledge, this is a game that others, privy to facts inaccessible to me, can play by supplementing my report. For, owing to the inattention of sociologists, we do not know with any precision the record of personal achievement or nonachievement of all large and largish property holders. The evidence only becomes clear as we ascend into the rarified realm of the known very large property holders, the super rich.
Area of Greatest Impact
It is not, first, usually thought possible for a man of wealth to be any sort of achiever. "Inherited wealth is a big handicap to happiness," said William K. Vanderbilt in a press interview in 1905. "It is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to morality. " 6 As to
the attainment of wealth through personal achievement, a universally spread view is summarized in an old Chinese proverb: "A man seldom gets rich without ill-got gain; as a horse does not fatten without feeding in the night. " 7
Yet the handicap indicated by Vanderbilt is sometimes overcome.
As the record shows, law combined with politics has been the area of greatest impact of propertied activists apart from corporate management. Not that legal practice as such, which in general is not extravagantly rewarded, has attracted big propertied people to any conspicuous extent. The rigors of either advocacy or jurisconsultation appear to have had few attractions for the wealthy, although the acquisition of a law degree and admission to the bar I take to be concrete achievements, whatever further steps are necessary to attaining distinction as a lawyer.
In general, lawyers from heavily propertied families do not enter into general legal practice, civil or criminal. Some members of lower wealth-holding layers do go into the practice of corporate law. As such they are, in general, necessarily defenders of the propertied position. Non-Establishment lawyers are, in general, defending criminal lawyers and plaintiffs' lawyers in civil actions, apart from a few affiliated with nonconformist causes such as constitutional rights. The Establishment, so-called, is usually interested either in prosecuting someone, rarely a member of the Establishment itself, or in defending some part of itself against not always valid individual claims.
While there may be lawyers from wealthy families who are non-Establishment practitioners, such a fact does not clearly show on the record.
In politics some of the more prominent of wealthy lawyers have been Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson and members of the Taft family beginning with William Howard Taft, one-time president of the United States. The Tafts, in addition to law, have notably operated in real estate.
William Howard Taft became chief justice of the Supreme Court but he is one of the very few among latter-day big wealth-holders who have held a judgeship. Taft, of course, was a thoroughgoing Establishment judge. A less well-known but highly distinguished judge was Curtis Bok of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, who died in 1962. A grandson of Cyrus H. K. Curtis, the mass publisher, and Edward M. Bok, Curtis Bok was also a gifted and sensitive author who wrote Star Wormwood, The Backbone of the Herring and I, Too, Nicodemus, all worth reading. Over a long period of years he was an exceptionally fine public servant. There was, too, Judge Thomas Mellon, the founder.
Judges are quite rare, though, among families of notable wealth. One draws a comparative blank among the big-wealthy on judges although one would unquestionably find a few among some of more modest fortune if the data were available. Judges, of course, are often men of some modest property, acquired through the practice of law, inheritance or marriage except for those few who have made financial killings as members of political syndicates.
Wealthy men directly in politics are no special novelty in American history. George Washington, the first president, was considered perhaps the wealthiest man of his time in the country, an inheritor. Many of the nation's founders, relative to their time, were quite wealthy, including Thomas Jefferson--at least until his final years. They were nearly all men of property, usually landed, a fact pointedly reflected in the Constitution. But even on a relative scale their wealth did not attain the proportions of the latter-day industrial fortunes.
After the Civil War there were many, usually self-erected, former poor men, who sat in the United States Senate, there closely guiding their interests in railroads, oil, mining
and lumbering; but that these held their seats in consequence of any political achievement or aptitude is open to serious question. Prior to 1913 senators were elected by state legislatures, many of which, staffed by dung-hill democrats, awarded Senate seats simply to the highest bidder. It did not take much in the way of political knowhow to sit in "The Rich Man's Club," as the Senate was commonly called.
I will not, then, count any of the pre-1913 rich senators as political achievers simply on the ground of their presence in the Senate.
Although rich and budding rich men were always shuttling about in the shadowy background of both political parties, supplying "campaign funds" and pulling devious strings right and left, they were in the more recent period brought forward and given more direct participation by the Republican Warren G. Harding. A former senator, President Harding was a small-town newspaper publisher of no great wealth. However, he appointed as his secretary of the treasury Andrew W. Mellon, then one of the richest men in the world--an inheritor as well as acquisitor; self-created Herbert C. Hoover as his secretary of commerce; the corporation lawyer Charles Evans Hughes as his secretary of state; and Albert B. Fall, stooge of the oil industry, his secretary of interior. Since Theodore Roosevelt it had become pretty much the custom to install corporation lawyers as secretary of state and attorney general.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, a minor millionaire himself before becoming a popular tribune, went much further in this respect than either Harding or Hoover, who appointed multi- millionaire Ogden L. Mills to succeed Mellon. Roosevelt, believing that men of wealth and good schooling should serve in government rather than lounge about in their clubs, practically stacked his cabinets with men of wealth, while standpatters, reactionaries and presumed malefactors of great wealth shrieked that he was a Communist and a "traitor to his class," here validating in action a Marxist conception of class consciousness among the rich. He started off with William H. Woodin, head of the American Car and Foundry Company, as secretary of the treasury and replaced him with multi-millionaire Henry Morgenthau, Jr. When the world situation became gravely serious in 1940 he appointed Frank Knox, Republican newspaper tycoon, as secretary of the navy and later James V. Forrestal, partner of Dillon, Read and Company, Wall Street investment bankers. He appointed Edward Stettinius, Jr. , son of a Morgan partner, secretary of state. He brought back the able Henry L. Stimson, Republican corporation lawyer and Hoover's secretary of state, as secretary of war. He made Jesse Jones, self-erected Texas Democratic big-league banker-politician, secretary of commerce and Francis Biddle attorney general. Down through the upper ranks of officialdom he drew freely upon men of great wealth, making Nelson A. Rockefeller the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs; W. Averell Harriman, former partner of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. , his representative from the beginning in a variety of posts, mainly diplomatic; Joseph P. Kennedy head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and so on. He gave both Harriman and Rockefeller their political starts.
Roosevelt, it is true, made many appointments from other quarters and, in fact, assembled a mixed bag. But, far from stacking his appointments with radicals or liberals, as recklessly charged, a far stronger case could be made that he drew most of his appointees from Wall Street, Newport, the corporate circuit and the big-city political machines. Scholarly liberals and radicals were brought in mainly as ideological window dressing in a time of great public discontent. Henry Wallace, considered a far-out radical in the bayou country, was himself a very wealthy man, at most a liberal conservative.
If results are what count, Roosevelt was not hostile to the private-property business system, which he found in self-induced crisis and left some years later revived and
reinforced with government support. Remove Rooseveltian government economic subsidy, patronage, guarantee and support today, and the much-vaunted free-enterprise system, beloved of Chamber of Commerce orators, would collapse like a bullet-riddled toy balloon. How many depositors would trust the banks, for a simple example, if it were not for government insurance of deposits? How many would trust the one-time wide-open Stock Exchange if it were not for the SEC?
The fact that the rich were in politics, then, was nothing new. What is new is that, more recently, taking their cue from Roosevelt, the latter-day rich have increasingly taken a direct part, with some of them at least showing signs of becoming forthright public men. They have themselves stood for election, and have been elected, a favorable development from the point of view that those who own the country should take responsibility openly for running it rather than hiding behind stooges in Uncle Sam and Abraham Lincoln suits.
Very rich men, inheritors or corporate wizards, have taken to winning elections right and left despite ingrown Populist prejudices. The electorate appears to be growing tired of the old-time "friend of the people," shaggy with folksy duplicity and athirst for franchises or whatever else he can lay furtive patriotic hands on. Winning an election, I take it, may be counted an achievement whereas winning friendly appointment is not particularly. For the latter all one needs is the nod from some Mr. Big.
By his untypical election as governor of New York in 1928 Franklin D. Roosevelt apparently led wealthy men to believe they too could be elected to that key office, although, as we have noticed, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft and Hoover were, earlier, in the wealthy class. Franklin Roosevelt was succeeded in the governorship by Herbert H. Lehman of the Wall Street banking family, who served from 1932 to 1942 before becoming a United States senator. Except for Thomas E. Dewey's twelve-year tenure after 1942 the governorship of New York has been held by wealthy men since 1928. In 1954, with strong labor support, W. Averell Harriman, later again in the State Department, became the first of the ultra-wealthy of later years to win an important election when he became governor of New York as a Democrat, opening the way psychologically for ultra-wealthy Nelson A. Rockefeller, also supported by labor, to succeed him in 1958 and to win reelection twice to date. As Roosevelt showed on several occasions, the electorate will not shy away from a man because he is wealthy. The voters, presumably, think he is less apt to tap the public till for himself than is an Horatio Alger boy from the grass roots and dung hills.
Outside of New York, too, wealthy men, some of whom got their political start under Roosevelt appointments, have also taken to winning elections. G. Mennen "Soapy" Williams, shaving soap and talcum powder dual heir, who began as a New Deal appointee in 1936, was the elected labor-supported governor of Michigan from 1949 to 1960 and thereafter was assistant secretary of state for African Affairs;. a lawyer, he is also a doctor of jurisprudence. William W. Scranton, also a lawyer and scion of an old Pennsylvania coal fortune, was first an Eisenhower official, then a member of Congress and in 1963 was elected governor of Pennsylvania.
The Kennedys, of course, stand out as men of great wealth who have directly participated in politics, although they are really members of an oldline political family like the Lodges, Stevensons and Tafts. John F. Kennedy, a budding journalist and war hero, was first easily elected a member of the House from Massachusetts, then of the Senate. In 1961 he became president. His brother Robert, a lawyer, was first his attorney general and then became senator from New York while brother Edward, also a lawyer, followed John F. to the Senate from Massachusetts.
Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania, whom we have noticed in his effort to democratize the Senate, is a wealthy as well as extremely able public-spirited man. Barry Goldwater, senator from Arizona before winning the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, inherited a substantial interest in a large department store, never had to work his way up from anywhere. The late Robert Taft, senator from Ohio and presidential aspirant, came of a wealthy family; and the same necessarily holds of his son, also directly concerned in Ohio politics.
This list could be extended--Theodore Green and Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, the Saltonstalls and Peabodys of Massachusetts, Ogden Reid of New York and Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, Angier Biddle Duke, Governor Winthrop Rockefeller of Arkansas, Harrison Williams, Jr. , of New Jersey, et al. --but the highlights have been indicated. While one might evaluate the political performances of each of these men differently, perhaps rating Roosevelt and Kennedy high and Goldwater and Taft low, or vice versa, each represents achievement on the ground that winning elections is itself a recognized achievement. Roosevelt I would call an outstanding achiever in politics.
In some quarters there is a tendency to downgrade the feat of a wealthy man in winning an election because he has had the use of his own funds. But money alone does not win elections, although it is in the plutocratic American system a necessary aid. Furthermore, nearly every man who wins an election is backed by money--his own, that of a moneyed group (like Richard Nixon and his oil backers in 1952) or of an established political machine. The few exceptions appear to be sheer flukes in American politics. Money from at least a small group is almost always behind the candidates, particularly the winner. Only here and there in political low-pressure areas an unfinanced amateur may sneak over the goal line.
A significant recent tendency has been the appearance of a number of successful high corporation officials in elective political office. Small and very medium-sized business people have been no great novelty in elective office, particularly at the state level; but men from the corporate big league have been pointedly absent. George Romney, former head of American Motors and twice elected governor of Michigan, launched a campaign as a 1968 Republican presidential aspirant; and Charles Percy, former head of Bell & Howell, was elected senator from Illinois in 1966. On the corporate circuit, these men were big guns. If more big managers of corporations thrust forward in politics, the country may see something of what cold corporate rationality can do applied to government, assuming that such men retain the corporate approach. Robert S. McNamara, former president of Ford Motor Company, conducted his own specialized exercise in corporate rationality with the Defense Department, but his best efforts there had not been able to out-general Ho Chi Minh on his batteries of Pentagon computers.
In any event, it would appear that a change is under way when the industrial rich, descendants of original tycoons, and corporate nabobs participate directly in politics instead of working through subsidized lower-class stooges. There is a gain here, in the first place, for candor. At least the fractional thinking part of the electorate can now evaluate what these candidates publicly stand for instead of voting for men presumably independent but secretly harnessed to the corporate juggernaut. What any of these men propose politically may not be approved by the observer, but the observer will nevertheless learn by noticing public performance precisely what he does stand for.
Personalities like Lyndon B. Johnson, although moderately wealthy, are not included in the foregoing because they were not wealthy when they came to politics but were politicians first, wealthy men later.
No claim is implied here that all the wealthy who are lawyers have been named, for that list would run into hundreds, or that the mere fact of being a lawyer is something
wonderful, Quite a number of the wealthy and the well-to-do become lawyers although not so many, it appears, as become corporation executives, project promoters and nonprofit administrators.
The Ruling Class
That members of the wealthier classes do often become corporation executives, administrators, lawyers and appointed or elected officials, thereupon opening themselves to evaluation in terms of going standards of achievement, is hardly odd in the light of the concept in political science of a "ruling class. " Activists among the rich do seem to drift primarily into directorial, managerial or similar executive-type functional posts. However, to suggest that the United States, where sovereignty in theory lies within the whole people, has a ruling class is ideologically heretical, repugnant to public-school alumni and is for the most part volubly and emphatically denied. It is, above all, quite contrary to public school indoctrination.
For my part, I do not insist that the United States has a tight ruling class because there is often some ambiguity about what public activists in general are up to. Some appear confused themselves.
Objections to the idea of an American ruling class generally seem to flow from misconceptions about the nature of rule, which in the United States is indirect, and also from the idea that a ruling class must be formally constituted, as by titled nobility with certain formal privileges and immunities. Objections also seem to stem from the notion that a ruling class, in order to exist, must be closed to outsiders (which, for example, the ruling class of England never was).
But if a ruling class consists of people whose members veritably rule, a class whose imperative wishes and criteria largely order society, then it seems to me a case can be made that there is such a class in the United States, partly hereditary as to property and position and partly open to conforming newcomers. While not every member of a ruling class exercises rule, some being no more than detached observers and more or less graceful idlers, it is from such an established class that rulers may be selected.
If rulers are those who lay down and enforce the rules, then it would seem that the United States has such a class. The only question remaining would be whether these rulers are publicly selected on the basis of sheer merit or attain their positions largely by means of wealth or hereditary position. Newcomers to rule in the United States, it will be noticed, must pretty much accept and implement already going values established by preexistent rulers. A difference between being born into a ruling class and being accepted into it is that the newcomer must learn and adopt the general values of the ruling group. A man who works his way into the ruling group from the laboring class (and there have been and are such) does not ordinarily retain the values of his original class. He acquires, more or less, the values of his new associates. Like most converts he is often more orthodox than a pope. Everett Dirksen, once a journeyman baker, does not have the outlook today of a journeyman baker.
How, it may be asked, would one discern a member of a ruling class if there were such a class? The method, it seems to me, would be simple: One would notice whether or not he ruled and how much be ruled. In this sense there is certainly a ruling class in the United States; for radiating throughout the country are various wide-jurisdiction chains of command--political, economic, cultural and judicial--that always have someone at their heads. These head men are, or seem to me, rulers.
That there is something improper per se about such rulership, as is either directly charged or strongly implied in much leftist analysis, may be flatly denied. Social organization of any kind requires rule, and the fact that certain executive types from a
small group assume rule derives as much from the passivity and incoherence of the masses as from any impropriety or inequity in arrangements even though one concedes that anyone who has "influence," either through the possession of money or established position, does have an inside track when it comes to establishing himself in a position of rule. But under any possible version of socialism, for example, there would be similar rulers; and, despite all cant about a democratic socialism, such rulers would tend increasingly to be drawn from a semiprofessionalized self-perpetuating class, properly designated as privileged rulers.
