The higher elite must
therefore
mark itself off more precisely than either family, coat of arms, school or the possession of money can do.
Lundberg - The-Rich-and-the-Super-Rich-by-Ferdinand-Lundberg
The uninspired mass team, in brief, must have a quarterback and, preferably, a coach or set of coaches.
If the elite is truly aristocratic, selecting only the best, so much the better.
These theories and some of their prominent adherents are briefly dealt with by a voting sociologist in an interesting book; 1 there is, of course, a rather large literature about them. He himself found it necessary to apply them eclectically, although he believes in the greater inclusiveness of the pluralist view. As his attention was centered upon community decision-making in a small California town, the pluralist view is most serviceable; for its most fruitful application is on lower levels that are of little interest to
the financial elite. But it would plainly be useless if applied to a company or white- supremacy town.
He objects to the elitist theory because it allegedly imputes motivations to covert leadership groups. If they are covert by definition they cannot, he believes, be investigated by rational methods. Next, he holds, the elitist theory smooths over and obscures the many internal struggles over decisions within an elite. With such struggles in mind, it would seem that one must apply the pluralist theory to the operations of the elite itself, a logically well-taken point certainly germane to the paramountcy of theory. Thirdly, the theory of the elite must rely on the impact of events outside the elite system to explain changes within the system itself; for the elite, which does indeed change, does not change spontaneously. Most importantly, "elitist studies of community power typically do not present data to support their contentions that all major decision-making rests in the hands of single leadership groups. "
While I recoil from the operative "all," which I have emphasized, it is clearly incumbent upon anyone utilizing the elitist approach to show major decisions emanating from the elite group--decisions at variance with some established consensus. If such decisions are made, and are made to stick, then I think it may fairly be deduced that other decisions are similarly made. It isn't the general consuming public, we may say in a preliminary way, that decides to raise the prices. Nor is it, in view of the system of corporately administered prices, an automatic free market. It is clearly some distant and popularly distasteful "they" who decide this.
The elitist theory most broadly stated, holds that the United States, for example, is a society of many dominant elites. The elite levels of science, scholarship, the arts, entertainment and sports (but not politics or finance) are open to anyone of ability. These are, therefore "open" elites, and consonant with the democratic bias. But there is, it is asserted or implied by a variety of writers, a politico-economic elite of elites, which is a "closed" elite. It is closed because something other than personal ability is required to belong to it. The main although not exclusive qualification for membership, it is here contended, is money. This elite has been referred to as the moneybund-- the complex of finpolities. Its leading members, I suggest, are finpols. This moneybund is different from C. Wright Mills's "power elite," which is a somewhat fanciful and highly personal embroidery upon the old-established basic idea of a moneyed elite. Take the money crowd away and Mills' "power elite" crumbles into verbal dust.
Now, while the moneyed elite no doubt is pluralistically structured internally, toward the outside world it presents itself as a rather solid, small, coherent entity. Its decisions once having been taken or not taken (a decision in itself)--and we can obtain at least glimpses of some of its decision-making processes--it presents to the world pretty much of a united front even if it is not always unified internally in its views. Its members, at any rate, have various ways of knowing the difference between insiders and outsiders. *
(*The idea of an elite does not necessarily imply that it is homogeneous. Thus, Albert Mathiez, the French historian on the subject of the French nobility. says: "The nobility consisted, in fact, of distinct and rival castes, the most powerful of which were not those who could point to the longest pedigrees. Side by side with the old hereditary or military nobility, there had sprung tip in the course of the last two centuries a nobility 'of the long robe' (noblesse de robe); that is to say, an official nobility which monopolized administrative and judicial offices. This new caste, which was as proud as the old nobility, and perhaps richer, was headed by the members of the parlements, or courts of appeal," This new nobility, as Mathiez goes on to show. was in many ways more powerful than the old nobility, Albert Mathiez, The French Revolution, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. , N. Y. , 1926; Universal Library, N. Y. , 1964, pp. 6-7. One could similarly
divide the American elite into the old and new money and the leading corporate officials and corporation lawyers. )
As for motivations, it is, first, surely possible to deduce certain over-riding motivations in the moneyed elite by the way its members conduct their worldly affairs. One doesn't need to tap their telephones or induce their psychoanalysts to break confidences to see that they are nearly all motivated (1) to retain their money and power; (2) to add to money and power if possible; (3) to make use of all the resources of modern science, technology and politics in the retention and expansion of their power; (4) to keep their share of the tax burden as low as possible; (5) to support whatever politico-economic policies support or improve their position and to struggle against those which seem likely to diminish it; and (6) to have themselves presented to the world as especially worthy people.
What they want more specifically is shown by. their legislative lobbyists, trade association spokesmen and newspapers. Fortune, the Wall Street Journal and similar publications consciously and unconsciously tell us much about what they want. Beyond this, public inquiries, the taking of testimonies, the massing of evidence in the courts and occasional books by insiders have done much to reveal motivations. There have been memoirs such as those of the late Clarence W. Barron, critical and friendly biographies and even letters (although collections of letters, as in the case of the elder J. P. Morgan, have often been ordered burned by testamentary prescription) This in itself seems a bit conspiratorial.
The major ends of the moneyed elite are clearer, it must be confessed, than the devious means often used to attain those ends.
In view of this elite (judging purely by their outward behavior) what's good for them is good for the United States. They see their personal pecuniary interests as identical with the complex interests of the nation. This elite is known to favor, among other things, a minimum of government regulation of their corporate instrumentalities; they openly talk to this end and work to achieve it. Society, they feel, should be subject to minimal direction. Would anyone wish to assert there is any doubt about this?
As far as motivations go, it is not a difficulty that inheres peculiarly in the theory of an elite; in this day of Freudian psychology the motivations of every individual are a mystery even to himself. What are the motivations of participants in a pluralist decision- making process? If it is said, "How can we know what the elite is up to and why? " one may reply with another question: "How can we know what pluralists are up to and why? " Not being able to look inside people's heads, one makes deductions from external behavior. If a man hoards money in a hole in the floor we conclude that he is a miser. Can we be wrong? Can it be that he is in fact a spendthrift? As to why he does it, we turn to the psychoanalyst and hear talk about feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, rejection, alienation. Hoarding, it seems, makes him feel less anxious. Yet, he remains a miser vis-a`-vis others, an objective phenomenon. He is not merely a psychiatric case.
The theoretical objections to the theory of the elite, at any rate, are not nearly so compelling as they may seem when viewed only dialectically on the purely theoretical level, before testing against the facts.
But there are stronger reasons, compelling to any rational mind, for rejecting the idea of the greater serviceability of the pluralist theory in explaining decision-making on the national level. For if the pluralist theory indeed held, if major decisions in the United States were in fact the product of countervailing and balanced groups, with each group element of society making itself fully heard, the outcome in terms of money, position and prestige would be a great deal more equitable than it is. Sociologists can indeed show many decisions arrived at by pluralist means. But we are talking now about the
humanly fundamental decisions--the decisions about who gets what, where, how and why. Those decisions, I assert, are elitely determined, sometimes against considerable opposition.
If the decision about the distribution of the basic economic means is arrived at pluralistically, why is the payoff so uneven? If one goes along with the. pluralist view we must conclude that people have acquiesced in their relatively low reward by the economic system. Yet millions of people protest all the time that they are being underpaid, They sound as though they had not consented to the decision-making about the distribution of money.
Most people in the United States, including very many outstandingly intelligent and highly trained, are much like the participants in a dice game in which the opponent throws a long series of 7's and 11's, losing seldom; but when the dice change hands it develops that they follow the laws of randomness and show no runs of 7's and 11's. In a real dice game, most such losers would quickly conclude that the dice were loaded and they were being rooked.
Now, if the social dice weren't subject to manipulation from behind the scenes, would so many people be so far below par in the matter of money and property? Such subparity elements, it is often said by way of explanation, are the no-goods, without ambition or energy. But, we may ask, is this also true of Nobel laureates, university professors in general, the trained professional classes, whose pay in comparison with that of corporation executives and big dividend recipients is absurdly meager? Are we to suppose that highly skilled professionals have acquiesced in their relatively niggardly compensation? Hearing them complain, reading their complaints in professional journals, one would not suppose so. They sound very much as though they are complaining futilely against loaded dice.
Again, to look at the bottom of the labor force, are we to suppose that the poverty- stricken itinerant agricultural worker or the ghetto denizen has acquiesced through some pluralistic decision-making process in his low estate?
In looking at the history of organized labor, the long record of anti-labor violence and counter-violence, one gets the strong impression that basic decisions were imposed upon unwilling and eventually maddened victims. Those who worked in Andrew Carnegie's steel mills at $10 for a seventy-two-hour (and longer) week of punishing effort under intense heat had never willingly, agreed to perform in this manner. Nobody had ever asked them or their representatives. They were driven by stark necessity to accept a one-sided bargain.
It is true that all the persons to whom I refer have their compensation determined by a market. The elite, however, do not have their revenues impersonally determined by a market, to the dictates of which they submit. They make market rules pretty much to suit their inclinations.
It does, then, look as though members of the labor force, high and low, have come up against a decree that says: So far and no further. They have not acquiesced in this decree; they have not been consulted about it. They are often opposed to it, but are as powerless to push it aside as Russian workers are powerless to push aside a state decree.
It looks very much as though this decree has been handed down from some esoteric group, for there is no general rule against having an expansive income in a booming economy.
In any play against the socio-economic elite of finpols with a view to, participating in its inner decisions, few--indeed, none--of the members of the various open elites find
they can make it. They don't have the hereditary tickets; and even if they had the tickets they might not possess other qualifications.
What, precisely, is the understructure of the top elite of finpolity? Intermarriage of the Elite
Largely headquartered in the East, this elite, first of all, is heavily intermarried . This fact has been shown in great detail and need not detain us. 2 Most of the world of finpolity and its environs is interlaced by complicated cousinages, as in the case of the longer established European nobility. Intermarriage among the big propertied elite--the bourgeosie, the finpols-- continues, as the "society" pages of newspapers show nearly every week.
As a fairly recent and uncomplicated example of upper-crust family structure let us take the Fords. Edsel, the only child of grass-roots Henry, had four children. Henry Ford II, one of Edsel's three sons, married Anne McDonnell, a Catholic socialite by whom he had three children. His daughter Charlotte, twenty-four, in 1965 married the off-the- beach Greek shipping magnate Stavros Spiros Niarchos, fifty-six, reputed to be worth a minimal $260 million. 3 Her coming accouchement was duly announced early in February, 1966; not long thereafter a prospective divorce. Her debut in 1959, according to the Times, took a year to plan, was attended by 1,200 guests and cost about $250,000, of which 860,000 went for flowers alone. Recalled the Times nostalgically (December 17, 1965): "Two million magnolia leaves were flown from Mississippi and were used to cover the walls of the corridors leading to the reception room in the Country Club of Detroit, which had been redecorated to look like an eighteenth-century French chateau. " Sister Anne Ford, twenty-two, was married with less fanfare a few days later to Giancario Uzielli, an international stockbroker of New York. Henry Ford II in his second marital venture, after a divorce that led to his excommunication from the Catholic Church, married the divorced, also excommunicant, Mrs. Maria Christina Vettore Austin, of Italy and England, who is more particularly one of the European Rothschilds of pecuniary repute. William Ford, another of Edsel's sons, married Martha Firestone of the rubber fortune, by whom he has three children.
Here, among the comparatively late-arriving Fords, one finds a rococo interlacing of diverse elements the common social denominator of which is property, and this is typical of the upper ownership strata.
As to inward and outward twining cousinages among the moneyed elite, the Du Ponts provide perhaps the most spectacular example, interlinking with a number of other established and unlikely cousinages such as the Peabodys and Roosevelts. It is not usually easy in the hereditary strata of wealth to find someone unjoined to one or more other wealthy families by cousinly ties, and many of them link with what in Europe is known as nobility. Consinage threads through many apparently disparate propertied families.
To avoid detention here by details readily available elsewhere, let it simply be said that much about the affairs of the finpolities is a family matter. These families, it is true, are often subject to strains within themselves and vis-a-vis other families (pluralism); but they together present pretty much of a unified front to the world (eliteness).
Pretensions to Aristocracy
The American wealthy, as Cleveland Amory shows in considerable diverting detail, have confused money, ostentatious partying, politico-economic position and far-ranging power with aristocracy, of which they very commonly think themselves representative. 4 By the hundreds they have dug up for themselves, or caused to be devised, European coats of arms, more than 500 of which have been suitably proved and registered with
the New England Historic and Genealogical Society "easily the country's outstanding authority on coats of arms. " 5
The stress on coats of arms, both among bearers and disappointed nonbearers suggests that the wealthy themselves, unlike some unaccountably obtuse outside investigators, regard themselves as part of family enterprises, not as isolated persons who have won in an individualistic rat race. These families, to be sure, are placed within a certain setting of historically developed institutions of which American children sing innocently in school.
As the redoubtable H. L. Mencken remarked in 1926, "the plutocracy, in a democratic state, tends to take the place of the missing aristocracy, and even to be mistaken for it. It is, of course, something quite different. It lacks all the essential characters of a true aristocracy: a clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, honour, courage--above all, courage. It stands under no bond of obligation to the state; it has no public duty; it is transient and lacks a goal. Its most puissant dignitaries of to-day came out of the mob) only yesterday--and from the mob they bring its peculiar ignobilities. As practically encountered, the plutocracy stands quite as far from the honne^te homme as it stands from the Holy Saints. Its main character is its incurable timourouosness it is forever grasping at the straws held out by demagogues. . . . Its dreams are of banshees, hobgoblins, bugaboos. The honest, untroubled snores of a Percy or a Hohenstaufen are quite beyond it.
"The plutocracy, as I say, is comprehensible to the mob because its aspirations are essentially those of inferior men money. . . . What it lacks is aristocratic disinterestedness, born of aristocratic security. There is no body of opinion behind it that is, in the strictest sense, a free opinion. Its chief exponents, by some divine irony, are pedagogues of one sort or another. . . . Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other . . . what democracy needs most of all is a party that will separate the good that is in it theoretically from the evils that beset it practically, and then try to erect that good into workable system" (Notes on Democracy, Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y. , pp. 203-6).
Schools of the Elite
The children of the finpols and their higher servitors are early separated from the common run of children by being sent to special private schools, which exist as part of a different world. This point was inquired into by C. Wright Mills. 6 Not all the children in these schools are from the elite, because such a prescription would defeat educational ends. The private schools are "democratic," in that they take students, many on scholarships, from a wide social spectrum. Some now take able Negroes, although their quest is not exclusively for intellectual ability. But firmly sandwiched into the unquestionably mixed and in part subsidized mass are the children of the moneyed elite.
The formal education offered by the best of these private schools is no better, as far as any evidence shows, than that offered by the best public schools. But they do a better job for laggards, who are numerous in all strata, because their classes are smaller, the schools are isolated from distracting influences and the faculty supervision over studies is stricter. A highly motivated student in a good public school (which is not too frequently encountered) can get as much out of his school experience as he could at one of the better private schools; but the less scholastically motivated will probably get greater benefit from the good private school, which is more of a hothouse.
The products of the older private schools, at least, tend to form much closer ties to each other than are formed at the public school or college level. They are cemented, as it were, by the bonds of exile. Indeed, if asked about his educational background, the
private school product is far less apt to say that he went to Harvard, Yale or Princeton, even though he did so, than to say he went to Exeter, Andover, Choate, Groton, Hotchkiss or whatever the case may be.
Few children of the rich attend public schools, although there are rare exceptions. As inquiry will convince anyone, most of them attended one of the old-line private "prestige" schools. People who like to make the point, as though it was significant, that Jack Kennedy attended Harvard and Adlai Stevenson Princeton, simply aren't aware of the nuances. Both were Choate school boys and would still be Choate boys if they had gone on to Swampwater College, Okefenoke University or Oxford. Anybody might go to Harvard, Yale or Princeton. But anybody cannot go to Choate. 7
As Mills points out, the private-school boys do tend to stick together and to be found disproportionately later in or near the upper echelons of insurance companies, banks, investment trusts and general corporations. For the big owners of these enterprises are themselves products of the same schools. 8 The schools serve as unintended centers to bring bright members of lower social classes in as corporate personnel.
Until the recent past, the products of the private schools tended to monopolize Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other Ivy League universities. This trend has been diminished as private universities have intensified the intellectual rigor of their undergraduate colleges with a view to producing more teachers and scientists and fewer executives and salesmen.
The big rich, then, are more and more closely intermarried and generally send their children to a relatively small number of private schools. Some send them abroad to Switzerland or England.
Upon graduation from college, the children of the rich find themselves entering a world wherein many of their relatives are big owners of property and perhaps ensconced in important corporate or near-corporate positions. They move largely in a world which in England, whence the pattern came, would be familiarly described as the world of upper-class families, hunt clubs and the Old School Tie. The chances are high that they are going to marry someone whose family, like their own, is at least in the Social Register. They are on the estate and trust-fund circuit.
If they do not marry someone of the world of established property, if they marry instead a Rumanian chauffeur or the daughter of a Lithuanian iron puddler, they become the subject of excited newspaper accounts. For whenever wealth marries nonwealth it is a case, to the newspaper editors, of man bites dog. Although such marriages are not uncommon, the plain implication of all the fuss is that the marriage should not have taken place, any more than the King of England in the eyes of British Tories should have married Mrs. Simpson, Readers await news of the almost inevitable divorce.
The Exclusive Clubs
Neither family, coats of arms, nor attendance at private schools guarantees elite soundness. Elite families, lamentably, sometimes produce odd characters. The best private schools unfortunately turn out people who sometimes become song-writers, actors, photographers or even Kennedys, Stevensons or Roosevelts.
The higher elite must therefore mark itself off more precisely than either family, coat of arms, school or the possession of money can do. It does mark itself off through the system of private clubs, which in the East are so exclusive that neither the pope nor most presidents of the United States could qualify for membership.
The private clubs are the most "in" thing about the finpol and corp-pol elite. These clubs constitute the societal control centers of the elite.
There is at least one central club of the wealthy in every large city--the Chicago Club, the Cleveland Club, the Houston Petroleum Club, the Duquesne Club of Pittsburgh, etc. These are all imitations or outgrowths of earlier Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore clubs, which were imitations of English clubs. But the New York clubs are now the most important because the big money is centered in New York and the leading New York clubs include the wealthiest of the out-of-towners and many foreigners.
Which of the New York clubs is most exclusive, or most important, is a matter of opinion. The Knickerbocker Club requires that its members be either born New Yorkers, of New York descent, or at least occasional New York residents. But The Links, formed in 1921 ostensibly to promote the game of golf, seems to represent heavier money on the whole. Distinctions among the leading clubs are obscure to outsiders. "At the Metropolitan or the Union League or the University," Cleveland Amory quotes a clubman, "you might do a $10,000 deal, but you'd use the Knickerbocker or the Union or the Racquet for $100,000 and then, for $1,000,000 you move on to the Brook or the Links. " 9 Some big wheels, to be safe, belong to them all.
My own rating of the New York clubs in order of finpolitan weight is as follows:
1. The Links. 2. The Knickerbocker Club. 3. The Metropolitan Club. 4. Racquet and
Tennis Club. 5. The Brook. 6. The Union. 7. The Union League.
These are, except perhaps the last two, the exclusive, highly restricted inner-circle clubs. The University Club, in addition to claiming a larger membership, also includes professionals, administrators and below-the-top executives--that is, not only chairmen, presidents and executive vice presidents of corporations. Although it includes unquestionably elite elements like Allan P. Kirby, Cleveland E. Dodge, the Goelets and others, it is more like a transmission connection between the elite clubs and the world of general management. The Union and the Union League also have much of this transmission character in the club hierarchy.
An even broader transmission link or meeting ground between the higher club strata and the world of public affairs is The Century Association, the membership of which is heavily composed of approved artists, musicians, columnists, writers, lawyers, editors and book-reading executives (a rare and special breed! ). A very few of the members of the top elite clubs mingle with the comparatively bohemian and always literate element of The Century. A careful review of the 1965 list of members-showing names like Dean Rusk, Isaac Stern, Eric Sevareid, Walter Lippmarm, Yehudi Menuhin, James Reston and Arnold Toynbee along with three Rockefellers and other indomitable men of the supra-corporate spaces--suggests that few would be inclined to question the essential rightness and goodness of the finpolitan world. Many of its members are its eloquent spokesmen and apologists; some express mild and at times melancholy dubiety. None flatly challenges the essential beneficence of the finpolitan course.
But the brains and wit of the big New York clubs are unquestionably concentrated most conspicuously in The Century, a few of whose members at least seem capable of arriving at independent judgments. The membership list has never wandered far enough to the left to take in people like Norman Thomas, Scott Nearing, C. Wright Mills, Thorstein Veblen or even John R. Commons, all keen discussants. It did, however, include Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, which about fixes its political poles. Investigators and questioners of the social frontiers are conspicuously lacking among its scholars.
An examination of its membership list up to 1965 fails to disclose the names of able organizational Negroes like Thurgood Marshall, Whitney Young, Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins or Robert C. Weaver. Walter White never belonged.
The precise scope of The Century, founded in 1847, can perhaps best be shown by citing the names of some others who never belonged. These were H. L. Mencken (but Andrew Mellon did), Mark Twain (but Cornelius Vanderbilt did), Lincoln Steffens, Joseph Pulitzer, Charles Beard, Edmund Wilson, Sinclair Lewis, G. Stanley Hall, Eugene O'Neill, Herbert Bayard Swope, Theodore Dreiser, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville (but J. Pierpont Morgan I and II did), Morris Rafael Cohen, Cleveland Amory, Bennett Cerf, William James of Harvard and so on. But John Dewey, Oliver Lafarge, Oswald Garrison Villard and Charles Peirce did belong.
In any event, The Century does not appear, either today or yesterday, to be intellectually, morally and artistically representative. Its precise rationale for membership selection does not readily show itself. The heterogeneous membership shows little common denominator, and some mighty big intellectual guns, past and present, are conspicuously missing. Deeply critical temperaments or anyone who "comes on strong" are notably absent.
But a function the University and Century Clubs also perform is that of reciprocal transmission: The finpol members in them also hear much about the outside world, the below-stairs world as it were, from the more bohemian elements who may move easily from the club precincts to a Greenwich Village coffee house or Yorkville saloon and then back. The bohemian element's greater down-ranging mobility may at times be the envy of some of the finpols.
Each of the leading clubs appears to have spawned a cluster of offspring or imitators, founded sometimes by dissidents. They specialize in various things, some such as The Brook (touchingly named after Tennyson's poem) in continuous twenty-four-hour service.
Lesser clubs, in the opinion of Amory and other alert club-watchers, appear to be the nonexclusive Manhattan, Lotos, the Coffee House (of which Nelson A. Rockefeller is a member), the Harvard, the Yale and the Princeton. Better known to the public perhaps because of their association with the entertainment world are the Lambs, the Friars and the Players but these, in all candor, are the bottom of the barrel in relation to the clubdom with which we are concerned and should really not be mentioned except by way of indicating what an upper-class club, properly speaking, is not.
The only one of the New York clubs John D. ("Big John") Rockefeller got into was the Union League. His son, "John the Good," had no interest in belonging and was advised against it by his investment mentor, Frederick T. Gates. However, he did join the University and The Century. The grandsons belong to the cream--variously The Links, Knickerbocker, the Metropolitan of Washington and others. None lists the Union League.
The original Rockefeller was not only in bad odor with radicals, populists and liberals but, it may come as strange to some readers, he was looked upon askance in the old- established elite. Says Cleveland Amory, "Only a generation ago, for example, Mrs. David Lion Gardiner, dowager empress of New York's proud Gardiner Family, was informed that her young grandson, Robert David Lion Gardiner, was about to go out and play with the Rockefeller children. Mrs. Gardiner forbade it. 'No Gardiner will ever play,' she said, 'with the grandchild of a gangster. '" And De Golyer, dean of oilmen, told Amory he could never decide "whether John D. Rockefeller was the greatest oil man who ever lived, or a goddam lying pirate who made a monkey out of the whole capitalistic svstem. " 10
Nelson Rockefeller is looked upon today as the savior of the Knickerbocker Club, which in 1954 was nearly submerged into the Union Club out of which it had sprung. A few leading members agreed to accept ten cents on the dollar for its bonded
indebtedness and Rockefeller bought the premises and permitted the club to occupy them rent-free for ten years and then rent-free for ten more years if he was still alive. 11 It seems fair to conclude that the Rockefellers have an interest, perhaps only sentimental, in keeping this distinctive club extant.
It should not be thought that the top clubs are purely sociable haunts where the rich idle away the time, although such is the impression conveyed by Amory, Wecter and the long line of cartoonists and satirists who have shown elderly members snoozing over newspapers in the windows and who have derisively quoted club nincompoops. The clubs, one may be sure, enjoy being mildly derided as centers of futility and senile naivete. As they say in spydom, this gives their serious members a good "cover" for serious purposes.
Nor should it be thought that the big tycoons are in constant attendance. The membership of even the biggest clubs is obviously layered or hierarchical, and consists of inner coteries according to specific serious and frivolous interests. There are, of course, always some amiable hangers-on and some retired from active life, and these provide something of a background Greek chorus or mob scene for the members with weightier concerns on their minds.
The clubs, in point of fact, have underlying deeply serious systemic functions behind their facades, as follows:
1. Their membership hierarchies from the leading to the minor clubs show in general who is A. O. K. by degrees in what is now variously referred to as the national power structure, the Establishment (in imitation of English jargon), the power elite (after Mills) and so on. Newer designations for the phenomena will no doubt turn up and, as the reader will recall, I seem to find the situation best summarized in the term finpolity. If one wants to know who really matters behind the scenes of national affairs, in the order that they matter, one can hardly do better than to line up the memberships of the New York clubs in the order given. Now add each of the central non-New York clubs: Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington, Cleveland, etc. , in about that order. Strike out duplications as they appear.
Here one gets, with few exceptions, the entire power structure. Everybody on the list will be A. O. K. , rarely voicing anything except what John Kenneth Galbraith calls "conventional wisdom"--that is, trite and shallow commonplaces.
2. The clubs are the scene, at least in the preliminary stages, of some of the biggest deals in the capitalist world. It is not denied that such deals are also broached on golf courses, yachts and perhaps even in exclusive executive washrooms and Turkish baths; it is only asserted that a very heavy documentation could be supplied showing that some of the biggest deals, consortiums, syndicates, raids and campaigns were first proposed in one of the clubs.
3. The clubs are to the general corporate world of finpolity what the boardrooms are to individual corporations and what Congress is to the American populace. They are the places where attitudes are shaped toward proposed national policies. Once a consensus has been reached, the clubs serve to hand down a general "party-line" of finpolity to members, who carry it to the world in their various functional capacities. For with the big proprietors sit the big executives, many big (usually Republican) political figures and leading owners of the 'biggest enterprises in mass media.
In saying that a party line is handed down, I do not suggest that members must accept the verdict of an always free and informal running discussion. Some members do object to and refuse to implement conclusions in whole or in part. Nobody is formally bound by any preponderant opinion, but everybody appears to be influenced by tendencies.
How, for example, should a particular president of the United States be presented in the mass media? Should the verdict be favorable, on the fence or unfavorable? Club talk will determine something of this. And if the drift is toward accepting him as favorable or unfavorable, some member or members may interpose a cogent objection that reverses or halts some emerging conclusion. One will get the verdict, whatever it is, in one's favorite newspaper or periodical.
Of one thing all club participants may always be sure: Views are invariably expressed in the light of some propertied interest. The discussions are never cluttered with extraneous and (by definition) ridiculous considerations that might occur to single- taxers, pacifists, social reformers, social workers, socialists, communists, populists, trade unionists, anti-vivisectionists, idealists, civil libertarians, utopians, New Dealers, unconventional ideologists, uplifters or even detached on-the-target scholars. The ideological center of all the discussion is, odd though it may seem, freedom, pointed simply to freedom of these elements to preserve and expand their propertied interests.
These clubs are the most intense partisans of freedom--their freedom--in the world today. While considerable imagination and ingenuity often enter into club discussions, to judge by leaked reports from occasional defectors, one element is invariably lacking: sympathy or concern for the rabble in the outer world.
In an earlier work I pointed out that often a uniform attitude comes suddenly to be expressed in the press from coast to coast on some topic, as though a hidden politburo had come to a decision. Never a dissent, never a deviation appears, as though one were reading the Russian press. The source--or sources--of such uniformity, as in the 85 per cent press opposition to Roosevelt, is the deliberations of the tycoons and tycoonlets in their clubs.
Unlike Congress, whose members must go home now and then to get re-elected, the clubs are always in session, unimpeded by parliamentary procedures, and the members need not fear being deposed from their positions. Congressmen and presidents come and go. The club members continue until death or disability does part them from the club discussions.
Discussions through the entire hierarchy of clubs, New York and provincial, are an important part of the informal process of government in the United States--far more important, say, than the political conventions, which often merely ratify what has been antecedently decided in the clubs. For these are the places where citizens of weight, of property, lawfully assemble and freely air their views and criticize the views of their peers. These are the democratic debating grounds of the first citizens, the people with the means and instrumentalities for making their views effective in the world. There are thousands of lesser clubs and associations throughout the United States; but a difference between them and the metropolitan clubs is that the formal resolutions of the lesser clubs, as contrasted with the purely informal resolutions of the metropolitan clubs, are usually ineffective. Nothing much, if anything, happens nationally after the passage of the solemn formal resolutions.
To control or influence public policy one is better placed if one has a strong voice in the clubs than if one has a strong voice in the Senate of the United States, yet the clubs draw little attention from the sociologists or political scientists, a serious oversight.
The leading clubs, such as The Links and the Knickerbocker Club, in their yearly alphabetical directories list members living and dead. These are like roll calls of American finpolity and corp-polity, past and present. Among the dead are many extensive family groups still with living members. Included among these, of course, is the coat-of-arms and inner private-school crowd.
The Links directory for 1964 includes such significant names as Winthrop Aldrich, former chairman of the Chase National Bank; Lester Armour of Chicago; Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr. and Sr. , of San Francisco; Charles H. Bell of Minneapolis; August Belmont; George R. Brown of Houston; Nicholas F. and James C. Brady; Paul C. Cabot of Boston; Lammot du Pont Copeland of Wilmington; C. Douglas Dillon; William H. Doheny; John T. Dorrance, Jr. ; William Hincks Duke; Pierre S. du Pont III; Benson Ford; Henry Ford II; G. Peabody Gardner of Boston; Robert Goelet; Joseph P. Grace, Jr. ; Crawford H. Greenewalt of Wilmington; E. Roland Harriman; John A. Hill; W. E. Hutton; Amory Houghton, Jr. and Sr. ; B. Brewster Jennings; Robert E. McCormick; William G. McKnight, Jr. ; Paul and Richard K. Mellon of Upperville and Pittsburgh, respectively; Jeremiah Milbank; Henry S. Morgan; John M. and Spencer T. Olin of East Alton; Howard Phipps, Jr. and Sr. ; John S. Pillsbury of Minneapolis; Frank C. and William B. Rand; David, James S. , Laurance S. , Avery, Jr. , William and Winthrop Rockefeller; Charles P. Stetson; Oliver de Gray Vanderbilt III; John Hay Whitney, publisher of the now defunct New York Herald Tribune; Robert E. Wilson of Chicago, and others.
The foregoing list culls the names of a few of the big proprietors. But The Links includes among its members also top-level corporation executives, bank presidents, special-entree journalists, upper-echelon Pentagon and diplomatic figures, corporation lawyers and Republican political figures of the inner sanctum-people like Joseph W. Alsop of Washington; Owen R. Cheatham of Georgia-Pacific Plywood; General Lucius D. Clay; S. Sloan Colt of Bankers Trust; Ralph J. Cordiner, former chairman 'of General Electric (during its conspiracy conviction); Arthur H. Dean of the key law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell and numerous top-level diplomatic conferences; Thomas E. Dewey; Nelson Doubleday of the book publishing world; Lewis W. Douglas of Arizona; Frederic W. and Frederick H. Ecker of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; Dwight D. Eisenhower; the late Walter S. Gifford, former head of AT&T; Gabriel Hauge, president of Manufacturers Hanover Trust; Herbert C. Hoover; George M. Humphrey of Cleveland and the U.
These theories and some of their prominent adherents are briefly dealt with by a voting sociologist in an interesting book; 1 there is, of course, a rather large literature about them. He himself found it necessary to apply them eclectically, although he believes in the greater inclusiveness of the pluralist view. As his attention was centered upon community decision-making in a small California town, the pluralist view is most serviceable; for its most fruitful application is on lower levels that are of little interest to
the financial elite. But it would plainly be useless if applied to a company or white- supremacy town.
He objects to the elitist theory because it allegedly imputes motivations to covert leadership groups. If they are covert by definition they cannot, he believes, be investigated by rational methods. Next, he holds, the elitist theory smooths over and obscures the many internal struggles over decisions within an elite. With such struggles in mind, it would seem that one must apply the pluralist theory to the operations of the elite itself, a logically well-taken point certainly germane to the paramountcy of theory. Thirdly, the theory of the elite must rely on the impact of events outside the elite system to explain changes within the system itself; for the elite, which does indeed change, does not change spontaneously. Most importantly, "elitist studies of community power typically do not present data to support their contentions that all major decision-making rests in the hands of single leadership groups. "
While I recoil from the operative "all," which I have emphasized, it is clearly incumbent upon anyone utilizing the elitist approach to show major decisions emanating from the elite group--decisions at variance with some established consensus. If such decisions are made, and are made to stick, then I think it may fairly be deduced that other decisions are similarly made. It isn't the general consuming public, we may say in a preliminary way, that decides to raise the prices. Nor is it, in view of the system of corporately administered prices, an automatic free market. It is clearly some distant and popularly distasteful "they" who decide this.
The elitist theory most broadly stated, holds that the United States, for example, is a society of many dominant elites. The elite levels of science, scholarship, the arts, entertainment and sports (but not politics or finance) are open to anyone of ability. These are, therefore "open" elites, and consonant with the democratic bias. But there is, it is asserted or implied by a variety of writers, a politico-economic elite of elites, which is a "closed" elite. It is closed because something other than personal ability is required to belong to it. The main although not exclusive qualification for membership, it is here contended, is money. This elite has been referred to as the moneybund-- the complex of finpolities. Its leading members, I suggest, are finpols. This moneybund is different from C. Wright Mills's "power elite," which is a somewhat fanciful and highly personal embroidery upon the old-established basic idea of a moneyed elite. Take the money crowd away and Mills' "power elite" crumbles into verbal dust.
Now, while the moneyed elite no doubt is pluralistically structured internally, toward the outside world it presents itself as a rather solid, small, coherent entity. Its decisions once having been taken or not taken (a decision in itself)--and we can obtain at least glimpses of some of its decision-making processes--it presents to the world pretty much of a united front even if it is not always unified internally in its views. Its members, at any rate, have various ways of knowing the difference between insiders and outsiders. *
(*The idea of an elite does not necessarily imply that it is homogeneous. Thus, Albert Mathiez, the French historian on the subject of the French nobility. says: "The nobility consisted, in fact, of distinct and rival castes, the most powerful of which were not those who could point to the longest pedigrees. Side by side with the old hereditary or military nobility, there had sprung tip in the course of the last two centuries a nobility 'of the long robe' (noblesse de robe); that is to say, an official nobility which monopolized administrative and judicial offices. This new caste, which was as proud as the old nobility, and perhaps richer, was headed by the members of the parlements, or courts of appeal," This new nobility, as Mathiez goes on to show. was in many ways more powerful than the old nobility, Albert Mathiez, The French Revolution, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. , N. Y. , 1926; Universal Library, N. Y. , 1964, pp. 6-7. One could similarly
divide the American elite into the old and new money and the leading corporate officials and corporation lawyers. )
As for motivations, it is, first, surely possible to deduce certain over-riding motivations in the moneyed elite by the way its members conduct their worldly affairs. One doesn't need to tap their telephones or induce their psychoanalysts to break confidences to see that they are nearly all motivated (1) to retain their money and power; (2) to add to money and power if possible; (3) to make use of all the resources of modern science, technology and politics in the retention and expansion of their power; (4) to keep their share of the tax burden as low as possible; (5) to support whatever politico-economic policies support or improve their position and to struggle against those which seem likely to diminish it; and (6) to have themselves presented to the world as especially worthy people.
What they want more specifically is shown by. their legislative lobbyists, trade association spokesmen and newspapers. Fortune, the Wall Street Journal and similar publications consciously and unconsciously tell us much about what they want. Beyond this, public inquiries, the taking of testimonies, the massing of evidence in the courts and occasional books by insiders have done much to reveal motivations. There have been memoirs such as those of the late Clarence W. Barron, critical and friendly biographies and even letters (although collections of letters, as in the case of the elder J. P. Morgan, have often been ordered burned by testamentary prescription) This in itself seems a bit conspiratorial.
The major ends of the moneyed elite are clearer, it must be confessed, than the devious means often used to attain those ends.
In view of this elite (judging purely by their outward behavior) what's good for them is good for the United States. They see their personal pecuniary interests as identical with the complex interests of the nation. This elite is known to favor, among other things, a minimum of government regulation of their corporate instrumentalities; they openly talk to this end and work to achieve it. Society, they feel, should be subject to minimal direction. Would anyone wish to assert there is any doubt about this?
As far as motivations go, it is not a difficulty that inheres peculiarly in the theory of an elite; in this day of Freudian psychology the motivations of every individual are a mystery even to himself. What are the motivations of participants in a pluralist decision- making process? If it is said, "How can we know what the elite is up to and why? " one may reply with another question: "How can we know what pluralists are up to and why? " Not being able to look inside people's heads, one makes deductions from external behavior. If a man hoards money in a hole in the floor we conclude that he is a miser. Can we be wrong? Can it be that he is in fact a spendthrift? As to why he does it, we turn to the psychoanalyst and hear talk about feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, rejection, alienation. Hoarding, it seems, makes him feel less anxious. Yet, he remains a miser vis-a`-vis others, an objective phenomenon. He is not merely a psychiatric case.
The theoretical objections to the theory of the elite, at any rate, are not nearly so compelling as they may seem when viewed only dialectically on the purely theoretical level, before testing against the facts.
But there are stronger reasons, compelling to any rational mind, for rejecting the idea of the greater serviceability of the pluralist theory in explaining decision-making on the national level. For if the pluralist theory indeed held, if major decisions in the United States were in fact the product of countervailing and balanced groups, with each group element of society making itself fully heard, the outcome in terms of money, position and prestige would be a great deal more equitable than it is. Sociologists can indeed show many decisions arrived at by pluralist means. But we are talking now about the
humanly fundamental decisions--the decisions about who gets what, where, how and why. Those decisions, I assert, are elitely determined, sometimes against considerable opposition.
If the decision about the distribution of the basic economic means is arrived at pluralistically, why is the payoff so uneven? If one goes along with the. pluralist view we must conclude that people have acquiesced in their relatively low reward by the economic system. Yet millions of people protest all the time that they are being underpaid, They sound as though they had not consented to the decision-making about the distribution of money.
Most people in the United States, including very many outstandingly intelligent and highly trained, are much like the participants in a dice game in which the opponent throws a long series of 7's and 11's, losing seldom; but when the dice change hands it develops that they follow the laws of randomness and show no runs of 7's and 11's. In a real dice game, most such losers would quickly conclude that the dice were loaded and they were being rooked.
Now, if the social dice weren't subject to manipulation from behind the scenes, would so many people be so far below par in the matter of money and property? Such subparity elements, it is often said by way of explanation, are the no-goods, without ambition or energy. But, we may ask, is this also true of Nobel laureates, university professors in general, the trained professional classes, whose pay in comparison with that of corporation executives and big dividend recipients is absurdly meager? Are we to suppose that highly skilled professionals have acquiesced in their relatively niggardly compensation? Hearing them complain, reading their complaints in professional journals, one would not suppose so. They sound very much as though they are complaining futilely against loaded dice.
Again, to look at the bottom of the labor force, are we to suppose that the poverty- stricken itinerant agricultural worker or the ghetto denizen has acquiesced through some pluralistic decision-making process in his low estate?
In looking at the history of organized labor, the long record of anti-labor violence and counter-violence, one gets the strong impression that basic decisions were imposed upon unwilling and eventually maddened victims. Those who worked in Andrew Carnegie's steel mills at $10 for a seventy-two-hour (and longer) week of punishing effort under intense heat had never willingly, agreed to perform in this manner. Nobody had ever asked them or their representatives. They were driven by stark necessity to accept a one-sided bargain.
It is true that all the persons to whom I refer have their compensation determined by a market. The elite, however, do not have their revenues impersonally determined by a market, to the dictates of which they submit. They make market rules pretty much to suit their inclinations.
It does, then, look as though members of the labor force, high and low, have come up against a decree that says: So far and no further. They have not acquiesced in this decree; they have not been consulted about it. They are often opposed to it, but are as powerless to push it aside as Russian workers are powerless to push aside a state decree.
It looks very much as though this decree has been handed down from some esoteric group, for there is no general rule against having an expansive income in a booming economy.
In any play against the socio-economic elite of finpols with a view to, participating in its inner decisions, few--indeed, none--of the members of the various open elites find
they can make it. They don't have the hereditary tickets; and even if they had the tickets they might not possess other qualifications.
What, precisely, is the understructure of the top elite of finpolity? Intermarriage of the Elite
Largely headquartered in the East, this elite, first of all, is heavily intermarried . This fact has been shown in great detail and need not detain us. 2 Most of the world of finpolity and its environs is interlaced by complicated cousinages, as in the case of the longer established European nobility. Intermarriage among the big propertied elite--the bourgeosie, the finpols-- continues, as the "society" pages of newspapers show nearly every week.
As a fairly recent and uncomplicated example of upper-crust family structure let us take the Fords. Edsel, the only child of grass-roots Henry, had four children. Henry Ford II, one of Edsel's three sons, married Anne McDonnell, a Catholic socialite by whom he had three children. His daughter Charlotte, twenty-four, in 1965 married the off-the- beach Greek shipping magnate Stavros Spiros Niarchos, fifty-six, reputed to be worth a minimal $260 million. 3 Her coming accouchement was duly announced early in February, 1966; not long thereafter a prospective divorce. Her debut in 1959, according to the Times, took a year to plan, was attended by 1,200 guests and cost about $250,000, of which 860,000 went for flowers alone. Recalled the Times nostalgically (December 17, 1965): "Two million magnolia leaves were flown from Mississippi and were used to cover the walls of the corridors leading to the reception room in the Country Club of Detroit, which had been redecorated to look like an eighteenth-century French chateau. " Sister Anne Ford, twenty-two, was married with less fanfare a few days later to Giancario Uzielli, an international stockbroker of New York. Henry Ford II in his second marital venture, after a divorce that led to his excommunication from the Catholic Church, married the divorced, also excommunicant, Mrs. Maria Christina Vettore Austin, of Italy and England, who is more particularly one of the European Rothschilds of pecuniary repute. William Ford, another of Edsel's sons, married Martha Firestone of the rubber fortune, by whom he has three children.
Here, among the comparatively late-arriving Fords, one finds a rococo interlacing of diverse elements the common social denominator of which is property, and this is typical of the upper ownership strata.
As to inward and outward twining cousinages among the moneyed elite, the Du Ponts provide perhaps the most spectacular example, interlinking with a number of other established and unlikely cousinages such as the Peabodys and Roosevelts. It is not usually easy in the hereditary strata of wealth to find someone unjoined to one or more other wealthy families by cousinly ties, and many of them link with what in Europe is known as nobility. Consinage threads through many apparently disparate propertied families.
To avoid detention here by details readily available elsewhere, let it simply be said that much about the affairs of the finpolities is a family matter. These families, it is true, are often subject to strains within themselves and vis-a-vis other families (pluralism); but they together present pretty much of a unified front to the world (eliteness).
Pretensions to Aristocracy
The American wealthy, as Cleveland Amory shows in considerable diverting detail, have confused money, ostentatious partying, politico-economic position and far-ranging power with aristocracy, of which they very commonly think themselves representative. 4 By the hundreds they have dug up for themselves, or caused to be devised, European coats of arms, more than 500 of which have been suitably proved and registered with
the New England Historic and Genealogical Society "easily the country's outstanding authority on coats of arms. " 5
The stress on coats of arms, both among bearers and disappointed nonbearers suggests that the wealthy themselves, unlike some unaccountably obtuse outside investigators, regard themselves as part of family enterprises, not as isolated persons who have won in an individualistic rat race. These families, to be sure, are placed within a certain setting of historically developed institutions of which American children sing innocently in school.
As the redoubtable H. L. Mencken remarked in 1926, "the plutocracy, in a democratic state, tends to take the place of the missing aristocracy, and even to be mistaken for it. It is, of course, something quite different. It lacks all the essential characters of a true aristocracy: a clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, honour, courage--above all, courage. It stands under no bond of obligation to the state; it has no public duty; it is transient and lacks a goal. Its most puissant dignitaries of to-day came out of the mob) only yesterday--and from the mob they bring its peculiar ignobilities. As practically encountered, the plutocracy stands quite as far from the honne^te homme as it stands from the Holy Saints. Its main character is its incurable timourouosness it is forever grasping at the straws held out by demagogues. . . . Its dreams are of banshees, hobgoblins, bugaboos. The honest, untroubled snores of a Percy or a Hohenstaufen are quite beyond it.
"The plutocracy, as I say, is comprehensible to the mob because its aspirations are essentially those of inferior men money. . . . What it lacks is aristocratic disinterestedness, born of aristocratic security. There is no body of opinion behind it that is, in the strictest sense, a free opinion. Its chief exponents, by some divine irony, are pedagogues of one sort or another. . . . Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other . . . what democracy needs most of all is a party that will separate the good that is in it theoretically from the evils that beset it practically, and then try to erect that good into workable system" (Notes on Democracy, Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y. , pp. 203-6).
Schools of the Elite
The children of the finpols and their higher servitors are early separated from the common run of children by being sent to special private schools, which exist as part of a different world. This point was inquired into by C. Wright Mills. 6 Not all the children in these schools are from the elite, because such a prescription would defeat educational ends. The private schools are "democratic," in that they take students, many on scholarships, from a wide social spectrum. Some now take able Negroes, although their quest is not exclusively for intellectual ability. But firmly sandwiched into the unquestionably mixed and in part subsidized mass are the children of the moneyed elite.
The formal education offered by the best of these private schools is no better, as far as any evidence shows, than that offered by the best public schools. But they do a better job for laggards, who are numerous in all strata, because their classes are smaller, the schools are isolated from distracting influences and the faculty supervision over studies is stricter. A highly motivated student in a good public school (which is not too frequently encountered) can get as much out of his school experience as he could at one of the better private schools; but the less scholastically motivated will probably get greater benefit from the good private school, which is more of a hothouse.
The products of the older private schools, at least, tend to form much closer ties to each other than are formed at the public school or college level. They are cemented, as it were, by the bonds of exile. Indeed, if asked about his educational background, the
private school product is far less apt to say that he went to Harvard, Yale or Princeton, even though he did so, than to say he went to Exeter, Andover, Choate, Groton, Hotchkiss or whatever the case may be.
Few children of the rich attend public schools, although there are rare exceptions. As inquiry will convince anyone, most of them attended one of the old-line private "prestige" schools. People who like to make the point, as though it was significant, that Jack Kennedy attended Harvard and Adlai Stevenson Princeton, simply aren't aware of the nuances. Both were Choate school boys and would still be Choate boys if they had gone on to Swampwater College, Okefenoke University or Oxford. Anybody might go to Harvard, Yale or Princeton. But anybody cannot go to Choate. 7
As Mills points out, the private-school boys do tend to stick together and to be found disproportionately later in or near the upper echelons of insurance companies, banks, investment trusts and general corporations. For the big owners of these enterprises are themselves products of the same schools. 8 The schools serve as unintended centers to bring bright members of lower social classes in as corporate personnel.
Until the recent past, the products of the private schools tended to monopolize Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other Ivy League universities. This trend has been diminished as private universities have intensified the intellectual rigor of their undergraduate colleges with a view to producing more teachers and scientists and fewer executives and salesmen.
The big rich, then, are more and more closely intermarried and generally send their children to a relatively small number of private schools. Some send them abroad to Switzerland or England.
Upon graduation from college, the children of the rich find themselves entering a world wherein many of their relatives are big owners of property and perhaps ensconced in important corporate or near-corporate positions. They move largely in a world which in England, whence the pattern came, would be familiarly described as the world of upper-class families, hunt clubs and the Old School Tie. The chances are high that they are going to marry someone whose family, like their own, is at least in the Social Register. They are on the estate and trust-fund circuit.
If they do not marry someone of the world of established property, if they marry instead a Rumanian chauffeur or the daughter of a Lithuanian iron puddler, they become the subject of excited newspaper accounts. For whenever wealth marries nonwealth it is a case, to the newspaper editors, of man bites dog. Although such marriages are not uncommon, the plain implication of all the fuss is that the marriage should not have taken place, any more than the King of England in the eyes of British Tories should have married Mrs. Simpson, Readers await news of the almost inevitable divorce.
The Exclusive Clubs
Neither family, coats of arms, nor attendance at private schools guarantees elite soundness. Elite families, lamentably, sometimes produce odd characters. The best private schools unfortunately turn out people who sometimes become song-writers, actors, photographers or even Kennedys, Stevensons or Roosevelts.
The higher elite must therefore mark itself off more precisely than either family, coat of arms, school or the possession of money can do. It does mark itself off through the system of private clubs, which in the East are so exclusive that neither the pope nor most presidents of the United States could qualify for membership.
The private clubs are the most "in" thing about the finpol and corp-pol elite. These clubs constitute the societal control centers of the elite.
There is at least one central club of the wealthy in every large city--the Chicago Club, the Cleveland Club, the Houston Petroleum Club, the Duquesne Club of Pittsburgh, etc. These are all imitations or outgrowths of earlier Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore clubs, which were imitations of English clubs. But the New York clubs are now the most important because the big money is centered in New York and the leading New York clubs include the wealthiest of the out-of-towners and many foreigners.
Which of the New York clubs is most exclusive, or most important, is a matter of opinion. The Knickerbocker Club requires that its members be either born New Yorkers, of New York descent, or at least occasional New York residents. But The Links, formed in 1921 ostensibly to promote the game of golf, seems to represent heavier money on the whole. Distinctions among the leading clubs are obscure to outsiders. "At the Metropolitan or the Union League or the University," Cleveland Amory quotes a clubman, "you might do a $10,000 deal, but you'd use the Knickerbocker or the Union or the Racquet for $100,000 and then, for $1,000,000 you move on to the Brook or the Links. " 9 Some big wheels, to be safe, belong to them all.
My own rating of the New York clubs in order of finpolitan weight is as follows:
1. The Links. 2. The Knickerbocker Club. 3. The Metropolitan Club. 4. Racquet and
Tennis Club. 5. The Brook. 6. The Union. 7. The Union League.
These are, except perhaps the last two, the exclusive, highly restricted inner-circle clubs. The University Club, in addition to claiming a larger membership, also includes professionals, administrators and below-the-top executives--that is, not only chairmen, presidents and executive vice presidents of corporations. Although it includes unquestionably elite elements like Allan P. Kirby, Cleveland E. Dodge, the Goelets and others, it is more like a transmission connection between the elite clubs and the world of general management. The Union and the Union League also have much of this transmission character in the club hierarchy.
An even broader transmission link or meeting ground between the higher club strata and the world of public affairs is The Century Association, the membership of which is heavily composed of approved artists, musicians, columnists, writers, lawyers, editors and book-reading executives (a rare and special breed! ). A very few of the members of the top elite clubs mingle with the comparatively bohemian and always literate element of The Century. A careful review of the 1965 list of members-showing names like Dean Rusk, Isaac Stern, Eric Sevareid, Walter Lippmarm, Yehudi Menuhin, James Reston and Arnold Toynbee along with three Rockefellers and other indomitable men of the supra-corporate spaces--suggests that few would be inclined to question the essential rightness and goodness of the finpolitan world. Many of its members are its eloquent spokesmen and apologists; some express mild and at times melancholy dubiety. None flatly challenges the essential beneficence of the finpolitan course.
But the brains and wit of the big New York clubs are unquestionably concentrated most conspicuously in The Century, a few of whose members at least seem capable of arriving at independent judgments. The membership list has never wandered far enough to the left to take in people like Norman Thomas, Scott Nearing, C. Wright Mills, Thorstein Veblen or even John R. Commons, all keen discussants. It did, however, include Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, which about fixes its political poles. Investigators and questioners of the social frontiers are conspicuously lacking among its scholars.
An examination of its membership list up to 1965 fails to disclose the names of able organizational Negroes like Thurgood Marshall, Whitney Young, Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins or Robert C. Weaver. Walter White never belonged.
The precise scope of The Century, founded in 1847, can perhaps best be shown by citing the names of some others who never belonged. These were H. L. Mencken (but Andrew Mellon did), Mark Twain (but Cornelius Vanderbilt did), Lincoln Steffens, Joseph Pulitzer, Charles Beard, Edmund Wilson, Sinclair Lewis, G. Stanley Hall, Eugene O'Neill, Herbert Bayard Swope, Theodore Dreiser, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville (but J. Pierpont Morgan I and II did), Morris Rafael Cohen, Cleveland Amory, Bennett Cerf, William James of Harvard and so on. But John Dewey, Oliver Lafarge, Oswald Garrison Villard and Charles Peirce did belong.
In any event, The Century does not appear, either today or yesterday, to be intellectually, morally and artistically representative. Its precise rationale for membership selection does not readily show itself. The heterogeneous membership shows little common denominator, and some mighty big intellectual guns, past and present, are conspicuously missing. Deeply critical temperaments or anyone who "comes on strong" are notably absent.
But a function the University and Century Clubs also perform is that of reciprocal transmission: The finpol members in them also hear much about the outside world, the below-stairs world as it were, from the more bohemian elements who may move easily from the club precincts to a Greenwich Village coffee house or Yorkville saloon and then back. The bohemian element's greater down-ranging mobility may at times be the envy of some of the finpols.
Each of the leading clubs appears to have spawned a cluster of offspring or imitators, founded sometimes by dissidents. They specialize in various things, some such as The Brook (touchingly named after Tennyson's poem) in continuous twenty-four-hour service.
Lesser clubs, in the opinion of Amory and other alert club-watchers, appear to be the nonexclusive Manhattan, Lotos, the Coffee House (of which Nelson A. Rockefeller is a member), the Harvard, the Yale and the Princeton. Better known to the public perhaps because of their association with the entertainment world are the Lambs, the Friars and the Players but these, in all candor, are the bottom of the barrel in relation to the clubdom with which we are concerned and should really not be mentioned except by way of indicating what an upper-class club, properly speaking, is not.
The only one of the New York clubs John D. ("Big John") Rockefeller got into was the Union League. His son, "John the Good," had no interest in belonging and was advised against it by his investment mentor, Frederick T. Gates. However, he did join the University and The Century. The grandsons belong to the cream--variously The Links, Knickerbocker, the Metropolitan of Washington and others. None lists the Union League.
The original Rockefeller was not only in bad odor with radicals, populists and liberals but, it may come as strange to some readers, he was looked upon askance in the old- established elite. Says Cleveland Amory, "Only a generation ago, for example, Mrs. David Lion Gardiner, dowager empress of New York's proud Gardiner Family, was informed that her young grandson, Robert David Lion Gardiner, was about to go out and play with the Rockefeller children. Mrs. Gardiner forbade it. 'No Gardiner will ever play,' she said, 'with the grandchild of a gangster. '" And De Golyer, dean of oilmen, told Amory he could never decide "whether John D. Rockefeller was the greatest oil man who ever lived, or a goddam lying pirate who made a monkey out of the whole capitalistic svstem. " 10
Nelson Rockefeller is looked upon today as the savior of the Knickerbocker Club, which in 1954 was nearly submerged into the Union Club out of which it had sprung. A few leading members agreed to accept ten cents on the dollar for its bonded
indebtedness and Rockefeller bought the premises and permitted the club to occupy them rent-free for ten years and then rent-free for ten more years if he was still alive. 11 It seems fair to conclude that the Rockefellers have an interest, perhaps only sentimental, in keeping this distinctive club extant.
It should not be thought that the top clubs are purely sociable haunts where the rich idle away the time, although such is the impression conveyed by Amory, Wecter and the long line of cartoonists and satirists who have shown elderly members snoozing over newspapers in the windows and who have derisively quoted club nincompoops. The clubs, one may be sure, enjoy being mildly derided as centers of futility and senile naivete. As they say in spydom, this gives their serious members a good "cover" for serious purposes.
Nor should it be thought that the big tycoons are in constant attendance. The membership of even the biggest clubs is obviously layered or hierarchical, and consists of inner coteries according to specific serious and frivolous interests. There are, of course, always some amiable hangers-on and some retired from active life, and these provide something of a background Greek chorus or mob scene for the members with weightier concerns on their minds.
The clubs, in point of fact, have underlying deeply serious systemic functions behind their facades, as follows:
1. Their membership hierarchies from the leading to the minor clubs show in general who is A. O. K. by degrees in what is now variously referred to as the national power structure, the Establishment (in imitation of English jargon), the power elite (after Mills) and so on. Newer designations for the phenomena will no doubt turn up and, as the reader will recall, I seem to find the situation best summarized in the term finpolity. If one wants to know who really matters behind the scenes of national affairs, in the order that they matter, one can hardly do better than to line up the memberships of the New York clubs in the order given. Now add each of the central non-New York clubs: Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington, Cleveland, etc. , in about that order. Strike out duplications as they appear.
Here one gets, with few exceptions, the entire power structure. Everybody on the list will be A. O. K. , rarely voicing anything except what John Kenneth Galbraith calls "conventional wisdom"--that is, trite and shallow commonplaces.
2. The clubs are the scene, at least in the preliminary stages, of some of the biggest deals in the capitalist world. It is not denied that such deals are also broached on golf courses, yachts and perhaps even in exclusive executive washrooms and Turkish baths; it is only asserted that a very heavy documentation could be supplied showing that some of the biggest deals, consortiums, syndicates, raids and campaigns were first proposed in one of the clubs.
3. The clubs are to the general corporate world of finpolity what the boardrooms are to individual corporations and what Congress is to the American populace. They are the places where attitudes are shaped toward proposed national policies. Once a consensus has been reached, the clubs serve to hand down a general "party-line" of finpolity to members, who carry it to the world in their various functional capacities. For with the big proprietors sit the big executives, many big (usually Republican) political figures and leading owners of the 'biggest enterprises in mass media.
In saying that a party line is handed down, I do not suggest that members must accept the verdict of an always free and informal running discussion. Some members do object to and refuse to implement conclusions in whole or in part. Nobody is formally bound by any preponderant opinion, but everybody appears to be influenced by tendencies.
How, for example, should a particular president of the United States be presented in the mass media? Should the verdict be favorable, on the fence or unfavorable? Club talk will determine something of this. And if the drift is toward accepting him as favorable or unfavorable, some member or members may interpose a cogent objection that reverses or halts some emerging conclusion. One will get the verdict, whatever it is, in one's favorite newspaper or periodical.
Of one thing all club participants may always be sure: Views are invariably expressed in the light of some propertied interest. The discussions are never cluttered with extraneous and (by definition) ridiculous considerations that might occur to single- taxers, pacifists, social reformers, social workers, socialists, communists, populists, trade unionists, anti-vivisectionists, idealists, civil libertarians, utopians, New Dealers, unconventional ideologists, uplifters or even detached on-the-target scholars. The ideological center of all the discussion is, odd though it may seem, freedom, pointed simply to freedom of these elements to preserve and expand their propertied interests.
These clubs are the most intense partisans of freedom--their freedom--in the world today. While considerable imagination and ingenuity often enter into club discussions, to judge by leaked reports from occasional defectors, one element is invariably lacking: sympathy or concern for the rabble in the outer world.
In an earlier work I pointed out that often a uniform attitude comes suddenly to be expressed in the press from coast to coast on some topic, as though a hidden politburo had come to a decision. Never a dissent, never a deviation appears, as though one were reading the Russian press. The source--or sources--of such uniformity, as in the 85 per cent press opposition to Roosevelt, is the deliberations of the tycoons and tycoonlets in their clubs.
Unlike Congress, whose members must go home now and then to get re-elected, the clubs are always in session, unimpeded by parliamentary procedures, and the members need not fear being deposed from their positions. Congressmen and presidents come and go. The club members continue until death or disability does part them from the club discussions.
Discussions through the entire hierarchy of clubs, New York and provincial, are an important part of the informal process of government in the United States--far more important, say, than the political conventions, which often merely ratify what has been antecedently decided in the clubs. For these are the places where citizens of weight, of property, lawfully assemble and freely air their views and criticize the views of their peers. These are the democratic debating grounds of the first citizens, the people with the means and instrumentalities for making their views effective in the world. There are thousands of lesser clubs and associations throughout the United States; but a difference between them and the metropolitan clubs is that the formal resolutions of the lesser clubs, as contrasted with the purely informal resolutions of the metropolitan clubs, are usually ineffective. Nothing much, if anything, happens nationally after the passage of the solemn formal resolutions.
To control or influence public policy one is better placed if one has a strong voice in the clubs than if one has a strong voice in the Senate of the United States, yet the clubs draw little attention from the sociologists or political scientists, a serious oversight.
The leading clubs, such as The Links and the Knickerbocker Club, in their yearly alphabetical directories list members living and dead. These are like roll calls of American finpolity and corp-polity, past and present. Among the dead are many extensive family groups still with living members. Included among these, of course, is the coat-of-arms and inner private-school crowd.
The Links directory for 1964 includes such significant names as Winthrop Aldrich, former chairman of the Chase National Bank; Lester Armour of Chicago; Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr. and Sr. , of San Francisco; Charles H. Bell of Minneapolis; August Belmont; George R. Brown of Houston; Nicholas F. and James C. Brady; Paul C. Cabot of Boston; Lammot du Pont Copeland of Wilmington; C. Douglas Dillon; William H. Doheny; John T. Dorrance, Jr. ; William Hincks Duke; Pierre S. du Pont III; Benson Ford; Henry Ford II; G. Peabody Gardner of Boston; Robert Goelet; Joseph P. Grace, Jr. ; Crawford H. Greenewalt of Wilmington; E. Roland Harriman; John A. Hill; W. E. Hutton; Amory Houghton, Jr. and Sr. ; B. Brewster Jennings; Robert E. McCormick; William G. McKnight, Jr. ; Paul and Richard K. Mellon of Upperville and Pittsburgh, respectively; Jeremiah Milbank; Henry S. Morgan; John M. and Spencer T. Olin of East Alton; Howard Phipps, Jr. and Sr. ; John S. Pillsbury of Minneapolis; Frank C. and William B. Rand; David, James S. , Laurance S. , Avery, Jr. , William and Winthrop Rockefeller; Charles P. Stetson; Oliver de Gray Vanderbilt III; John Hay Whitney, publisher of the now defunct New York Herald Tribune; Robert E. Wilson of Chicago, and others.
The foregoing list culls the names of a few of the big proprietors. But The Links includes among its members also top-level corporation executives, bank presidents, special-entree journalists, upper-echelon Pentagon and diplomatic figures, corporation lawyers and Republican political figures of the inner sanctum-people like Joseph W. Alsop of Washington; Owen R. Cheatham of Georgia-Pacific Plywood; General Lucius D. Clay; S. Sloan Colt of Bankers Trust; Ralph J. Cordiner, former chairman 'of General Electric (during its conspiracy conviction); Arthur H. Dean of the key law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell and numerous top-level diplomatic conferences; Thomas E. Dewey; Nelson Doubleday of the book publishing world; Lewis W. Douglas of Arizona; Frederic W. and Frederick H. Ecker of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; Dwight D. Eisenhower; the late Walter S. Gifford, former head of AT&T; Gabriel Hauge, president of Manufacturers Hanover Trust; Herbert C. Hoover; George M. Humphrey of Cleveland and the U.
