Management of property itself, it turns out, is an arcane science, worthy of
graduate
study in the universities.
Lundberg - The-Rich-and-the-Super-Rich-by-Ferdinand-Lundberg
The salaries of scientists, academic and nonacademic, range far higher than those of college professors in general or even most college presidents, as shown in annual reports on salaries by the American Association of University Professors.
Many professors as of 1967, even at what are taken as "good" schools, were paid down in the range of $7,000 and less.
Most of the schools' teaching staff is paid far lower.
Professionals in general are paid on a similar low level. The most highly paid professionals are dentists, physicians, surgeons, lawyers and judges, and their median earnings in 1959 were somewhat about $10,000 annually, according to Statistical Abstract, 1964, page 229. The medians for other professionals were far lower--$4,020 for clergymen, $4,653 for musicians and music teachers, $7,207 for college presidents, professors and instructors, $5,827 for secondary school teachers, etc. Engineers, so vital to an industrial system, had a median of $8,361.
The reader should be reminded that the median indicates that half are paid below these levels.
Leaving aside the factor of scientific creativity, the man in science must have precise, detailed knowledge of thousands of minute and of all-enveloping aspects of his field, within which he must be able to reason subtly, usually mathematically, and he must maintain over long periods of time steadiness of purpose even though results are meager. He is rarely buoyed up by the great "breakthroughs" alluded to so facilely by journalists. Nor can these when they occur be patented and capitalized.
Neither in input of thought, effort, preparation or concentration is the work of any corporation executive remotely comparable. Indeed, on the basis of "inside" or friendly accounts the intellectual attainments of corporation executives appear to be slight. Fortune finds they do not do much reading, are weak in intellectual powers. 40 Others wonder how many of them have functional reading ability at all because so many seem poorly informed, constantly need assistance from public relations men (usually ex- journalists).
There is a great concentration of brains in a corporation. But it shows itself, not in the top executives as a rule, but in the lower-paid lawyers, engineers, scientists, market analysts and public relations men. These specialists usually work up the script for the trusted top men. When some of the executives decide to "go it alone" in public expressions of their conventional wisdom, one gets derisive reverberations, as in the case of Charles E. Wilson's what's-good-for-General Motors homily to Congress. Speaking out on his own, the top corporation man often sounds like a goof, a super- Babbitt, and the lower professionals in his company writhe uncomfortably. Indeed, in some companies the professional staff is under standing instructions to keep the top man so "boxed in" and isolated that he cannot put his foot in his mouth in public, cannot deliver himself of dazzling shafts of cracker-barrel wisdom.
It is sometimes argued that it is the vast concentrated responsibilities of the top corporate men that make them worth their pay; responsibilities of scientists and teachers, although not denied, are held to be more diffuse, less immediately decisive. Top military officers, however, certainly have organizational responsibilities that transcend those of any corporate officials. Their moment-to-moment decisions involve far more men, equipment, money and organizational niceties as well as the very safety of the nation. This is especially so in time of war.
Yet the Chief of Staff as of 1966 drew a maximum base pay of $2,140 a month or $25,680 per year. The men serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Chief of Staff of the Army, Chief of Naval Operations, Chief of Staff of the Air Force or Commandant of the Marine Corps receive basic pay for the grade of $2,019. 30 per month regardless of cumulative years of service. A Chief of Staff or Chief of Naval Operations also draws $4,000 per year in personal money allowance. A four-star general or an admiral gets $2,000 a year in money allowance and a maximum annual salary of $17,796. Corporately speaking, all this is taxable chicken feed.
When we ascend to the ineffable level of the Commander in Chief himself, the president of the United States, we find the salary is $100,000 a year and fully taxable. There is also a taxable expense allowance of $50,000 for officially connected duties and a nontaxable annual travel allowance of $40,000. Living quarters are also provided and an alert president can latch on to many free rides and free lunches. There now goes with the job a lifetime pension of $25,000 a year, $10,000 annually for presidential widows and up $50,000 a year (plus free mailing privileges) for the office help of ex-presidents. The maximum time a man may enjoy this comparatively modest salary and expense account is ten years.
Owing to the tax bite the in-pocket effectiveness of both the salary and the nontravel expense account is reduced by more than 50 per cent. For a, president like Lyndon B. Johnson, who was thriftily able to build up from hard-pan poverty an estate of some $13 million or more on his salary as a congressman, there was no particular problem involved. And for a big inheritor like President John F. Kennedy there was no problem.
This office carries with it vast responsibilities. Yet there is probably no president or chairman of any one of 750 or more of the largest corporations who is not paid far more. So much for responsibilities and the emoluments therefor.
The corporate executive, as I said, is no wizard. He is paid as he is because he is in a position to do much harm to big property holders. There is a further nuance that should perhaps be noticed. A big stockholder, everything else apart, wants his chief executives to feel identified as closely as possible with him. Hence he sees to it that their take- home pay is as close to $1 million a year as possible. He knows their expense account is phoney because he probably set it up himself and knows there is no such legitimate expense involved. It is all readily explainable as serving to keep up appearances.
The executives at various times must entertain foreign notables, public officials or other wealthy men. It would hardly do for them to entertain in meager surroundings. The residences of the top executives should say at a glance: The Super-Cosmos Corporation is an extremely rich and powerful entity, to be treated respectfully. Again, big executives must make political campaign-fund contributions.
No implication is here intended that executives, considering all circumstances, should really be paid less. They are paid by people who seldom overpay, who pay only what they feel they must pay in every situation. All I intend to say is that, despite all the ballyhoo about esoteric executive skill to cover up what the pay is really for, the executives are not paragons, are not superior people--superior to scientists, high military officers and pubpols--to the degree that their compensation might suggest. They are basically politicians, with all the popular connotations of the term. They are paid as they are to guarantee proper performance by people who are anxious about that performance.
The comparatively astronomic pay of corporate executives as stand-in overseers of large properties and manipulators of large numbers of employees, consumers and common citizens is shown in still another perspective when compared with the compensation, before taxes, of the entire American labor force. Here the pay of at least
some scientists begins to look pretty good, although at least half the scientists are paid on the level of the lower labor force.
The following chart-profile of family income in the United States from 1947 to 1964 in 1964 dollars is taken from Current Population Reports: Consumer Income of the United States Department of Commerce, issued September 24, 1965.
About 20 per cent of families as of 1964 had incomes above $10,000 a year. While only 10 per cent of individual incomes exceeded $10,000, with only 1 per cent exceeding $25,000, substantial family participation in plus-$10,000 income stems from the fact that some persons hold two jobs, some families have two or more wage earners and many families in this bracket own property. Nevertheless, 80 per cent of the families shown on this chart had incomes below $10,000, mostly from wages, no matter how many earners they had. From somewhat more than a quarter in the income-group under $3,000 in 1947 the families in this range by 1964 were slightly less than 20 per cent in dollars of 1964 value.
The United States is usually alluded to in the corporate press as a country of large incomes, high wages. And so it is in comparison with nonindustrial countries where incomes are very low. But in relation to the incomes of corporate executives and the owners of large inherited properties, and to American tax- padded price levels, Americans draw coolie pay. A few weeks out of a job and most of them are stony broke, on the relief rolls.
The careful reader should not suppose that the reference to "coolie pay" is hyperbolic.
Per capita "real" income from all sources in the United States in the first quarter of 1966--that is, income after personal taxes and in terms of the dollar stabilized at 1958 prices--was at an annual rate of $2,260, up from $1,900 in the first quarter of 1960 and from $1,831 in 1958. In terms of the 1966 dollar the rate was $2,490, showing an inflation of $230 or about 10 per cent over the "real" rate. 41
? These figures, of course, are averages, applicable to every man, woman and child. In order to have the latest figure applicable to members of his family, a married man with three children in 1966 would have required an income of $12,450, after taxes, in current dollars, which would yield a "real" income of $11,300 in 1958 dollars. If such was his income, though, he would have been well up among the upper 10 per cent of income receivers.
Owing to the very great incomes received by 1 per cent and less of the population, mostly from investments, the actual participation of some 90 per cent of the population in "real" income takes place at levels ranging far below the stated average of $2,260 per person.
Single persons who received from $2,490 and upward in 1966 after taxes were, of course, at or above the average. But a married man with a nonworking wife would have had to receive twice this much to be at the average and would need $2,490 of income in current dollars, always after personal taxes, for each of his children in order for them all to be at the average. Few persons participate at the "average" level!
This bedrock figure computed by the government, moreover, does not allow for the substantial taxes incorporated in prices.
In order to show the splendor of American workers' incomes it is often shown how much longer one must work in Russia for a loaf of bread, a pair of shoes, a bottle of milk, etc. What is shown is true specifically, but misleading. For some costs in Russia, such as of available housing, are less. Again, many services are provided at no direct cost. In Russia and throughout Europe, no college tuition is charged and a variety of services, costly in the United States, are provided at low cost.
The median figure on real income would necessarily be much lower than this average, for the lower half necessarily includes many with zero income--the publicly institutionalized sick and delinquent. There are also the low-paid seasonal agricultural workers, the unemployed and the only occasionally employed.
Total income in the United States is, of course, great--the greatest in the world. But popular participation in this vast income ranges from zero to very little for substantially more than half of the populace. Most literate people, however, believe just the opposite is true, a tribute to the power of propaganda and statistical manipulation.
In the 1930's large sectors of the population suffered from deflation. In the 1950's and 1960's large sectors are suffering from inflation as well as elevated taxes. In terms of income most people are being "whipsawed. "
What inflation over the long term has done to income is shown in a 1966 study by the conservative National Industrial Conference Board. According to this study, a man with a wife and two children today must receive $13,324 annually to buy the same amount of goods he could get for $5,000 in 1939. The man who received $10,000 in 1939 must now receive $27,288 to match that year's buying power and the man who received $100,000 in 1939 must now get $307,734 to have the equivalent buying power. The Conference Board concluded that a very large part of the fivefold rise in per-capita income has been eroded by taxes and price inflation. 42
The family-income chart, too, is misleading if it is taken as a guide to absolute income. For these figures are stated before taxes. It should always be remembered that as labor productivity has risen through the application of technology, as real wages have risen, there has gradually been shifted onto the labor force, especially since 1940, the high income taxes originally designed for large income receivers, as well as new sales taxes. In Chapter Nine we saw some (a small part) of the ways in which taxes for the warfare-welfare state have been largely shifted onto the working population, scientists
and professionals of all kinds included. We also saw to what extent large receivers of income, salaried and investment, have managed to place themselves like Bourbon favorites in the tax-exempt class.
Bolstering Executive Egos
Yet, despite high pay, all is not well along the corporate chain of command. Owing to tensions, stress and, no doubt, the failure to extract a sense of meaning out of repetitious, essentially routine tasks such as the manufacture and distribution of soap, many executive egos are in constant danger of collapsing, and they need to be reinforced by heroic corporate measures. Obtaining little ego support from any solid achievement, they need constant emergency support.
According to Dr. Robert Turfboer, psychiatrist with the Yale University School of Medicine and consultant to several large corporations, "an executive must have emotional security like anyone else. Evidences of eminence, far beyond financial reward, help give him that sense of security. The president of a company can be as fearful of failure as the office boy or assistant sales manager is of being fired. "
Sagging executive egos are bolstered in two ways apart from money, says Dr. Turfboer: by special privileges and by special status symbols (although there are grave dangers in the utilization of the wrong status symbols).
Special privileges are of the following order: a $10,000 sauna in the executive suite of a new mid-Manhattan building for the sole benefit of the president and a few other top- echelon wizards; an $8,000 billiard room in the executive suite of another large corporation; in the Chase Manhattan Bank building $510,000 worth of fine art for private executive offices and executive reception rooms and, in general, office massage tables, office barber chairs, executive dining rooms, telephonic company automobiles (so that the great man need never be out of touch for an instant with GHQ), private executive planes, ultra-modern office furniture and plenty of service flunkies. There is, too, the expense account.
"Just as a king needs a crown for people to know he is a king, so an executive often needs the first-class symbols for his position as well as his self-esteem," says Dr. Turfboer.
How status symbols and special privileges are to be apportioned within the executive group is a problem; it is solved in accordance with an executive's putative importance. His importance is judged according to a criterion laid down by Dr. Elliott Jaques, British psychiatrist, who says, "The level of employment work can be measured in terms of the time span of discretion authorized and expected without review of that discretion by a superior. " Otherwise put, the more a man can be trusted to be on his own the more important he is. Thus, the corporation president need not report to his board for six months--very important. All who have to report to somebody once a month, once a week, once or more a day are obviously progressively less important. People under constant surveillance are of no hierarchic importance at all.
"Status symbols, therefore says Dr. Turfboer, "should be assigned or permitted according to a man's 'time span of discretion. '" The more discretion, the more costly the symbol. A company limousine costing $50 an hour should not, it is evident, be assigned to an office boy--or even to a junior vice president. Such a gadget can only be for Mr. Big himself.
Dr. Turfboer then goes into some subtle points of higher corporatology: how to distinguish at a glance among the guardians of big property. In the hierarchy of the average establishment, the third or lowest grade of vice president may be distinguished by Venetian office blinds and absence of carpeting. The second echelon generally
merits wall-to-wall carpeting (at $14 a yard) and draperies or curtains to the sill. For top executives, there are floor-to-ceiling draperies and carpeting at $17 a yard. As Vance Packard has pointed out, a mahogany desk outranks walnut, walnut outranks oak or metal. The man entitled to carpeting is likely to display a water carafe, which long ago displaced the brass spittoon as a symbol of flag rank. At one broadcasting company, only secretaries of executives above a certain specific level of advancement are entitled to electric typewriters.
What really determines the cost and number of status symbols is "the number of people an executive affects and the intensity with which he affects them," the doctor assures us.
But there are dangers in flaunting status symbols around indiscriminately, the doctor warns. "I refer to flashy office furniture and gold faucets, teak countertops, and Picassos in executive washrooms. The nonintellectual who displays books with fancy leather bindings, or the executive who hangs collectible art but does not appreciate what he has, may be marked as a fraud. A too-gadgety bar (except behind a sliding panel) should not be accepted as a proper status symbol. . . .
"The wrong kind of authoritative emblems can have negative consequences. In subordinates, they may inspire envy or ridicule. While an executive may make himself often inaccessible to subordinates as a symbol of his importance rationalized by his need for privacy, needless exclusiveness can arouse antagonism within his organization. "
Symbols are assigned or self-selected, and in both cases there are grave dangers. A minor executive, for example, may acquire a desk set exactly like the one used by the chairman of the board, which "may be permissible, but it may also turn out to be poor strategy. " Will the chairman, one wonders, feel burned up?
As to assignment of symbols, Dr. Turfboer cites the sad case of a marketing executive given a much larger and more palatial office; yet the man had the effrontery to say he felt uncomfortable in his new deluxe surroundings. "Evidently," says Dr. Turfboer, "his self-esteem had not had a chance to rise to the level of the symbol bestowed on him. "
Offhand, a strictly part-time curbstone psychologist would assume that the man had very little self-esteem to begin with if it depended on anything so contrived as an office and its furbishings. 43
All is not well, as it is readily seen, along the corporate chain of executive command. Many of the men have doubts--about their worth, their importance, the value of their presence, their identities in the scheme of things, perhaps even about their potency. They need to be bolstered in a world of basic achievers, such as scientists.
Another study, however, finds top executives to be "Basically sound, above-average in effective intelligence. These men deal best with practical or tangible data in relation to problem-solving situations. They are as a group only fair conceptual thinkers. They do not do too well in dealing with theoretical, abstract or conceptual thoughts or ideas. "
As students they had above-average grades and were in the upper 25 per cent of their class at college, although not all were college graduates.
Most of them had engaged in some form of commercial venture before age fifteen and they are "Generally not socially aggressive. None were 'big men on campus' although some held fraternity offices. However, they were as a group somewhat lacking in the degree to which they participated in traditional student activities. "
Most of them married late, had children, and their wives played little noticeable role in their business affairs.
One fact applied to all: None came from poverty-stricken backgrounds. In other words, none was a poor boy who "made good. "
These findings were made by Dr. Louis F. Hackemann, president of Hackemann & Associates, an international management consulting company with headquarters in San Francisco. 44
Professor Mabel Newcomer, near the conclusion of a study based upon a very large number of cases--882--of top executive officers, says:
"Although he [the typical executive of 1950] has specialized training, he has never practiced independently, nor has he at any time run a business of his own as his father did. He is a business administrator--a bureaucrat--with little job experience outside his own corporation. His investments in 'his' company are nominal, in terms of potential control--less than 0. 1 per cent of the total stock outstanding. He is a Republican in politics; he attends the Episcopalian church, if he attends church at all; and he served the federal government in an advisory capacity during the war. He was, in 1950, sixty-one years of age, and he will probably be seventy when he retires. " 45
Of note here, direct verification in a study of the top executives themselves of what has been indicated before, is that the corporate executive is not ordinarily much of an owner. He is a hired man, the tool of big owners, never the servant of myriad small stockholders as in the fable of "People's Capitalism. "
Professor Newcomer makes the important point that corporations rarely comb the field looking for what would objectively be considered the best or most capable man for the top job. Why, in other words, do they "promote from within so frequently? And why do they promote so late? The reasons appear to be first, that the talent within the company is better known, and to that extent safer [nota bene--F. L. ], than outside talent. Also, there is always a feeling that one's own company is different and that intimate knowledge of its problems is important from the start. The president or chairman is likely to select his successor in advance and to groom him personally for the job. And loyalty to the company is stressed. Moreover, there is a sense of obligation to the officers with whom the chief has worked, and a conviction--which is doubtless justified--that morale will be higher and the chance of retaining able executives greater, if they are aware that the top offices will be filled from within. " 46
Corp-politan Vistas
To attempt anything like a complete survey of the executive and his sphere would be impossible short of encyclopedic format. Under the rubric Management the central reference room of the New York Public Library indexes nearly 4,000 volumes; under Executives, nearly 400. There is, too, some score of periodicals devoted to the topic.
So it is clear that the subject of management is a large one in a postulated democratic society where the individual is pretty much supposed to manage himself. Americans, in fact, are under constant political and economic management manipulation.
While many of the works on management are serious analytical and descriptive studies, the executive mystique, tending to show the superlative worth of the executive and his technique as such, occupies much attention.
Management of property itself, it turns out, is an arcane science, worthy of graduate study in the universities.
For those who want a compressed view of the field there might be recommended the Reading Course in Executive Technique, published in eight volumes with many authors by Funk and Wagnalls Company, New York, 1948. The volumes are given a lengthy introduction, "Modern Executive Techniques," by the editor, Carl Heyel, who is president of Executive Techniques, Inc.
The books in this course are titled: Systematic Solution of Management Problems (how to think, operations control, management controls, manual of organization, use of statistics, charting the course); Human Relations (employee morale, employee suggestion systems, supervising women, hints on psychology, human relations in industry); Personnel and Industrial Relations; Creative Training Programs; Manufacturing Control; Distribution; Financial Control and General Office Management; and Public Relations. Thus armed, the aspiring executive can take over with confidence.
Management, it turns out, consists of a melange of many things, a smattering from many disciplines that turns into an ad hoc empiricism resembling a pseudo-science.
Much of the literature in management can be reduced to cautionary injunctions, applicable generally or in various specific situations to "Always do this," "Never do that," "Usually do this," "Usually do that," "Be very careful in doing this," etc. Concrete situations are cited from experience, sometimes careful observational studies such as those of Elton Mayo on how most easily to get maximum output from a work force. Taking all the injunctions together one is given what some writers term a "philosophy of management. " Troublemakers, so much sand in the gears, are especially unwanted and the place to spot them is at the personnel office, where the latest in psychological testing is put to use. Potential nonbelievers, doubters, scoffers, misfits and persons with "negative attitudes" generally must be weeded out lest they contaminate a basically sound work force and impede the smooth flow of profits.
Critics from time to time commiserate with the bureaucratic aspirant in the Leninist countries who must, before he arrives at the top, read the metaphysical works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and many lesser dialecticians. The American executive, however, to judge by the tomes he must read, is much worse off. For most of these writings are at best stodgy, usually turgid. And beckoning the American is no future society of shining mirages but, at most, an office with wall-to-wall carpeting, a gold key to the executive washroom and membership in a country club.
Not only are there special periodicals devoted to the executive and his sphere, but magazines of more general appeal do not overlook him. Fortune rarely lets a month slip by without at least one article on executives, of which a few since 1950 have been: "The Case of Charles Luckman," "The Nine Hundred," "Boards of Directors," "Do Stock Options Pay? " "How Hard Do Executives Work? " "Can Executives Be Taught to Think? " "How Executives Get Jobs," "Is There an Executive Face? " "The Executive Bonus," "Are Executives Paid Enough? " "How Executives Invest Their Money,"' "How Top Executives Live," "The Executive Crack-Up," "How Much Is an Executive Worth? " "Young Executive in Manhattan," "Executive Qualities," "Life in Bloomfield Hills," "The Pirates of Management," "Those American Managers Don't Impress Europe, "Executive Compensation: The New Wave," "How to Pay Executives," etc.
In "Those American Managers Don't Impress Europe" (Fortune, December, 1964) we were given a story of disillusion. American companies entering the European market, either by merger or establishing new plants, necessarily sent along American executives. Keyed by all the hoop-la from the American corporate press about high- powered, lynx-eyed American executives, Europeans proceeded to pay very close attention. Now, they apparently thought, they were going to see the very soul of American puissance in action. Alas, it was once again the story of mighty Casey at the bat. For the American wizards were found to be very so-so, nothing remarkable. After watching them Europeans felt reassured.
It might be argued that the Americans did not send their first team to play in a strictly bush league, and this was probably true. To see the varsity all-stars in action the
backward Europeans will have to come to the United States. Once they glimpse the Picassos in the executive washroom they will know they are in the very uterus of the big time, at the altar of the executive mystique. Now they will see how big, really big, decisions are made . . .
Twelve
THE REPUBLIC OF MONEY: THE PUBPOLS
As everything thus far inquired into has obviously flowered under the benign providence of government it is evident that government and politics have more than a little to do with the gaudy blooms of extreme wealth and poverty in the feverish American realm. It has not, to begin with, prevented whatever is the case. What it has ministered to, and how and why, will now be our theme.
How the government of the United States functions in all its ramifying complexity is the theme of ponderous treatises running into the proportions of Sears, Roebuck catalogues--composed by academicians somewhat left-handedly known as political scientists. Whatever they say is almost invariably correct in a formal sense as anatomical description, apart from any decorative filigree provided by such heady words as "democracy" and "freedom. "
What we are really interested in, however, is process, function--political physiology, as it were. Although many political scientists profess to deal with this aspect as well, they all tend to lose sight of the actual ball in play or to avert their eyes in horror at the clinches. They are as physicists would be who had never been in a laboratory, as members of a vice squad who had never been in a brothel or taken money under the table from a madame. They themselves were never in the celebrated smoke-filled backrooms, never on hand when the price was set, the bodies buried, the papers burned, the ballots destroyed, the payoff made, the double entendre arranged, the people bilked.
Like nearly everyone else in this sphere, the political scientist is dependent on reports, rumors, memoirs, documents, statistics, interpretations, deductions and more or less shrewd surmise. And, like everyone else, he is limited by his position as a strict outsider. Journalists are far more privy to what goes on than he, and indeed he depends on journalists for much of his information. It is one field where certain participants know more about it in its nook-and-cranny aspects than those self-dedicated to its systematic study.
The difference between government as reported by political scientists and government as it actually takes place is much like the difference between learned descriptions of amour and amour itself. The difference is far greater than that between description in general and phenomena in general, between symbol and act. The political scientist is in much the same outside position as a biologist or psychologist studying amour. What each says may be entirely correct, moderately enlightening or even exhilarating; but what the dedicated acolyte misses are the nuances these experts haven't been able to encompass even by delicate imaginative projection. Their often assumed delicacy is elephantine. Again, they often misinterpret simple rutting for amour, intrigue for politics.
Even more than the theoreticians of amour, who sometimes have the advantage of being tentative practitioners themselves, the political scientist is at a disadvantage: For he has never actually been in the situation, does not occupy a privileged position denied, say, to the editors of the New York Times. The terrain, clearly, belongs in the particular jurisdiction of someone else, as amour lies in the jurisdiction of the poet or madman. A poet, even a madman, now and then has something revealing or poignant to say about amour; it would be astonishing if a political scientist ever said anything about government that approached a Machiavelli or a Hobbes who, be it noticed, were nonscientific "insiders. "
The indubitable experts I call upon to bear witness in this chapter (leaving to one side the delicate question of my own expertise) will all be far, far closer to what goes on than any political scientist has ever been, valuable though the compilations, commentaries, commonplaces and occasional insights of these gentry may be as aides-memoires and reference classifications.
As most people have some more or less accurate conception of the gross mechanics of the United States government, seen mostly in rose lights and soft-focus, I omit the citation of basic supposed facts on which we might be improbably supposed to agree in advance. Let us simply descend on the phenomenon oozing in its habitat.
In much of what follows for quite a way I lean heavily on first-hand analysis by the erudite and resolutely democratic Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania, until his election in 1956 the Democratic burgomeister of dingy Philadelphia, magna cum laude, Harvard, '23--in brief, a man of parts. Having Clark on hand is pretty much like having a literate psychoanalyst stationed right on the vice squad itself, an entrancing and unexpected combination. Here and there I shall set the focus a little more sharply than does the truly able but somewhat romantic senator. He, although sufficiently forthright, is a gentleman and becomes queasy at spelling out certain details which I, here as a pathologist, will have no more hesitancy in scrutinizing in the light of the evidence available than has a coroner in examining a mildewed cadaver.
As Senator Clark has made microscopically clear, no doubt to the consternation of the more polite observers, each house of Congress is under the tight control of a dour inner clique, the general intended aim of which is to cater to favored ultra-acquisitive interests and to frustrate the general lightheartedly nonacquisitive interests. As far as these cliques are concerned, the general populace can go and slide on its collective buttocks if it has any complaints to make--and stick its finger in its ear for good measure.
To these twin cliques, composed to a man of self-certified back-country patriots, we owe the gamey tax laws, among others. Senator Clark stylishly refers to the cliques as "The Senate Establishment" and "The House Establishment. " They run Congress, when necessary with a heavy hand, at times in opposition to any president, sometimes as under Lyndon B. Johnson in close harmony with him. When they are in full-blown opposition, the government simply deadlocks, freezes, as far as rational adjustment to events is concerned.
The special merit of Senator Clark's analysis is that he shows at first hand the precise inner mechanics of Establishment control, so that even a child can understand it.
The senator endorses the conclusion of James Macgregor Burns that there are always two governing parties in power, a Congressional party and a Presidential party. The Presidential party is national, necessarily concerned with broad interests, and is at least halfheartedly oriented toward carrying out the cloudy party platform submitted every four years to the bemused voters. The Congressional party is devoted to particularistic self-seekers (as shown by near-the-spot sources other than Senator Clark); these include most of the members themselves as on-the-sly entrepreneurs. It is bipartisan--a coalition
of standpat Republicans and Democrats. It is generally opposed, usually by indirection, to the party platform, most of which it covertly sabotages. The function of the party platform is only to stir enthusiasm in Presidential voters. After serving this purpose it is subject to discard.
The Establishment, moreover, is as permanently and fixedly in power as the Communist leadership in Russia. Nothing about it alters over the decades except the fall of a few of its aging personnel by the wayside. Only extreme force and violence could remove it. It is anchored, in sober fact, in extra-legal violence, intimidation and terrorism as religiously practiced especially throughout the South but visible at times elsewhere.
The findings of Senator Clark were expressed at considerable personal risk. For no professional can ever give such pointedly documented critical testimony to the outside heathen without thereafter having every hand of the Establishment secretly raised against him. All that can now save Senator Clark from political oblivion is the popular constituency--by itself a weak reed, as every practicing politician knows.
Barriers against the Majority
Barriers to the expression of majority will at the governmental level are, among others, the following:
Many persons do not vote--some for the intelligent reasons that they suspect the electoral process is rigged or they do not know enough about the issues or candidates; most from indifference, apathy, intimidation, terror stemming from localized violence, simple mental or physical ill health or because they are barred from voting by peculiar residential requirements devised by local politicos with little enthusiasm for voting.
Only a bit more than 60 per cent now vote in presidential elections (presidents have never been true majority officers). On statewide bases, the voters always number fewer than 50 per cent in purely congressional elections and range downward to less than 10 per cent in other elections.
In 1962 only 46. 7 per cent of civilians of voting age cast ballots for House congressmen, a record high in a nonpresidential year. 1 In many states (all Establishment Country) the percentage of voters was far lower: 13. 7 per cent in steamy Mississippi; below 20 per cent in Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Virginia; between 20 and 30 per cent in Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas; and between 30 and 40 per cent in Kentucky, Maryland and North Carolina. The largest statewide vote for House congressmen that year was in Idaho with 66. 5 per cent. Only eleven states attained 60 per cent or better. 2
In 1964 even the presidential vote was below 40 per cent in Alabama, District of Columbia, Georgia, Mississippi (33. 3 per cent), and South Carolina. Usually it attains lower levels in these and some other states. 3
It is often said that the Democratic primaries are the true elections in the South, the election itself just a formality. But even so they do not involve a significantly large segment of the population. Again, it is often said that the poor showing in the South is traceable to the exclusion of Negroes; yet most of the abstentions are of low-grade whites. In 1960, Mississippi, with the largest proportion of Negro population, had less than 40 per cent Negroes in its population of voting age. 4 So it is not only the exclusion of Afro-Americans that accounts for the poor voting record of the South. It is mainly whites (or pinks and rednecks) who abstain from voting, in part because they are culturally as retarded as the sepia shades and in part because they are dissuaded by the local padrones.
The vast disparity of participation between presidential and congressional elections-- in 1960 the presidential vote drew 64 per cent--reveals the degree of purposeful abstention and lack of ardor in many people for an electoral process widely suspected of being greased and rigged and at least ineffective as a means of producing tangibly gratifying results. Too many people have seen too much remain the same after too many high-flown elections to be carried away by the prospect of another.
Many of those who vote do not vote their interests intelligently, perhaps do not even know what they are. Again, many of those elected obviously do not themselves know what the score is, as they show by asinine pronouncements. One must be very much of a mystic to believe that, at variance with rational criteria, there is something intrinsically valuable about a popular vote. It is at best a rough way of selecting somebody, even a Lyndon B. Johnson.
Having voted for one of the two handpicked puppets of backroom schemers (except where there are open primaries), usually with some childish ethnic or religious bias most prominently in mind, the functioning portion of the electorate favors a man (as often as not deemed unfit by the community for other walks of life) who is then thrown into close working contact with others of like mind arrived in the halls of government by the same dubious road. There are some 750,000 elective offices in the land and, considering the fact that there is at least one aspirant arrayed against every incumbent, it is evident that the mere filling of offices amounts to quite an industry in an economic sense--gives employment to many people.
Despite all hosannahs to the collective sagacity of the people (what politician or newspaper editor would publicly question it? ) the arrangements under which popular elections have been held since their inception have been as crooked as a fixed wheel in a low gambling house. Long asserted by the tough-minded, denied by the tender-minded, the plain fact was only recently underscored in terse decisions by the United States Supreme Court. Various transparent devices, the Court found, were traditionally used in many states to keep Negroes and other a priori undesirables from voting, thus trammeling gloriously free even if obtuse popular expression at the very source. A wider and subtler abuse was found in the legislative districts, federal and state, which had been traditionally gerrymandered by one-party and two-party establishment- controlled state legislatures so that in some cases enormous numbers of distraught voters, mostly urban and suburban dwellers, had only one dubious representative; while in other cases very few voters, mostly functionally illiterate rural hinds, also had a dubious representative. A handful of rustics thus were the means for stifling the representatives of thousands of trapped city patsies. The consequence was that even if a majority of a legislative body was allowed to prevail (not always the case, as we shall see) the majority did not reflect the majority of the voting population either in its wisdom, folly or confusion.
Although the Court has now issued its ukase against these practices, the men borne to prominence by them will remain on the scene and in office until they wilt; and there is no guarantee that something equally objectionable, or more so, will not be devised by the always cunning pubpols.
Americans, it is often said unthinkingly, believe in majority rule. Yet, oddly, they never have had it; they have always had oligarchic rule, usually of a rather low order. The farther one moves away from a gerrymandered, intimidated, meagerly educated, emotionally immature and partly disqualified electorate the fewer become the participants in any decision until in the legislatures it is always and invariably far less than a majority, either representatively or among those present. For all those brain-
laundered with the doctrine of majority rule this is, admittedly, a strange, even unpatriotic notion. Yet it is an exact statement of the case.
"The primary and overriding duty and responsibility of each member of the House of Representatives is to get re-elected," it has been well said by Adam Clayton Powell, long a proficient preacher of the Gospel and a successful and highly affluent congressman since 1945. 5
The Establishment legislator in Congress-and some not so classifiable--has three further informal, off-the-record duties: (1) to work loyally with the legislative Establishment as an organization man; (2) to insure his own position whenever possible as a member in good standing of the affluent sector of society by acquiring any available cash, securities, real estate, franchises, market tips or whatever else may be of value; and (3) to share his affluence with indispensable offstage key figures of his home district organization grouped around the state or district party chairman. Nobody, it is plainly evident, plays the game alone.
Not to do this is to leave himself at the mercy of the shifting whims and moods of a potentially unstable constituency, wide open to the claims of eager rivals for his office, Despite careful planning by the legislator, he is at times the victim of political upsets and internal feuds. Yet if he is of the Establishment he is never wholly extinguished even if he has not had time to become affluent, because he has made many Establishment friends who remember him as a "regular. " They see to it that his post- legislative life is enriched by various appointments suitable to a "lame duck"-- commissionerships, judgeships, receiverships, lobby clients and the like. He belongs to a bund.
The Congressional Establishment, as Senator Clark proves, has a life of its own, policies of its own, aims of its own. These either have no connection with the needs or desires of the nation as a whole or harmonize with them only occasionally, fitfully, incidentally and, as it were, accidentally. It is a parasitical oligarchy. It produces results of its own predetermined stamp. It explains much about the chills, fevers and shudders of American society--its volume of crime, riots and lynchings.
The Bottom of the Bird Cage
"The trouble with Congress today,". writes Senator Clark, "is that it exercises negative and unjust powers to which the governed, the people of the United States, have never consented. . . . The heart of the trouble is that the power is exercised by minority, not majority rule. " 6
As in Soviet Russia and Red China, power is in the hands of solidly installed intriguing manipulators, with the difference that in the United States the intrigue takes place behind a facade of reasoned if blurry constitutionality. In Russia and China the bayonets show through the periodic purges. The difference is enough to make the reasonable man prefer the American system with all its blemishes, about as one would unjoyfully prefer dysentery to cholera.
"Our forms of government are heavily weighted against any kind of action, and especially any that might alter significantly the status quo. It takes too many units of government to consent before anything can be done. " 7 This, of course, is a truism. The constitutional bulwarks against tyranny, placed there by the Founders' hands, are used to produce a creeping, low-key tyranny.
It is the third branch of government, the legislative, where things have gone awry. Whether we look at city councils, the state legislatures or the Congress of the United States, we react to what we see with scarcely concealed contempt. This is the area where democratic government is breaking down. This is where the vested-interest
lobbies tend to run riot, where conflict of interest is concealed from the public, where demagoguery, sophisticated or primitive, knows few bounds, where political lag keeps needed action often a generation behind the times, where the nineteenth century sometimes reigns supreme in committees, where the evil influence of arrogant and corrupt political machines, at the local and state level, ignores most successfully the general welfare, where the lust for patronage and favors for the faithful do the greatest damage to the public interest.
. . . the legislatures of America, local, state and national, are presently the greatest menace in our country to the successful operation of the democratic process. 8
Lest the sheltered reader, tucked away in his bower, think that Senator Clark here delivers himself of an extravagant opinion or resorts to hyperbole, it is a settled conclusion among seasoned observers that, Congress apart as a separate case, the lower legislatures--state, county and municipal--are Augean stables of misfeasance, malfeasance and nonfeasance from year to year and decade to decade and that they are preponderantly staffed by riffraff or what police define as "undesirables," people who if they were not in influential positions would be unceremoniously told to "keep moving. " Exceptions among them are minor. Many of them, including congressmen, refuse to go before the television cameras because it is then so plainly obvious to everybody they are what they are. Their whole demeanor arouses instant distrust in the intelligent. They are, all too painfully, type-cast for the racetrack, the sideshow carnival, the back alley, the peep-show, the low tavern, the bordello, the dive. Evasiveness, dissimulation, insincerity shine through their false bonhomie like beacon lights.
The New York Times, customarily referred to as staid, has vouched editorially that the Massachusetts legislature is the most corrupt in the country. If this is so, the Commonwealth lawmakers have nosed out many others, including neighboring Rhode Island, merely by millimeters, The Times based its opinion on a solid report of the Massachusetts Crime Commission, submitted by impeccable leading citizens of the Bay State to Governor John Volpe in response to frenetic public clamor. "Corruption permeates the state, the report said, from town governments to the state house and involves politicians, business men, lawyers and ordinary citizens. " 9
This official report, a state document, cited wide-scale bribery by corporations and lawyers and the fact that legislators are on the payrolls of companies doing business with the state. Corruption was encouraged, the report said, because of "the lack of backbone" in the legislature.
As to this particular legislature, the Boston Globe analyzed it during the week of April 11, 1966, revealing elements of a pestilent tale. Most of the legislature, the Globe indicated, is composed of Babbittian local real estate dealers, insurance brokers, fixing lawyers, loan sharks, used-car entrepreneurs, miscellaneous fast-buck operators and obscure local hangers-on and roustabouts--many of them types who if they could not become attached to a public payroll, there to divert commerce their way, would be local misfits and perhaps panhandlers, vagrants, con men, family dependents, procurers or on local relief or unemployment rolls. The net impression given by the Globe (a rather reserved family paper) was of a political lumpenproletariat, a scabrous crew.
As to other legislatures, Senator Estes Kefauver found representatives of the vulpine Chicago Mafia ensconced in the Illinois legislature, which has been rocked by one scandal of the standard variety after the other off and on for seventy-five or more years. What he didn't bring out was that the Mafians were clearly superior types to many non- Mafians.
Public attention, indeed, usually centers on only a few lower legislatures-- Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois--and the impression is
thereby fostered in the unduly trusting that the ones they don't hear about are on the level. But such an impression is false. The ones just mentioned come into more frequent view because their jurisdictions are extremely competitive and the pickings are richer. Fierce fights over the spoils generate telltale commotion. Most of the states are quieter under strict one-party quasi-Soviet Establishment dominance, with local newspapers cut in on the gravy. Public criticism and information are held to a minimum, grousers are thrown a bone and not many in the low-level populace know or really care. Even so, scandalous goings-on explode into view from time to time in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri and elsewhere--no states excepted. Any enterprising newspaper at any time could send an aggressive reporter into any one of them and come up with enough ordure to make the Founding Fathers collectively vomit up their very souls in their graves. 10
The territorial base of the Establishment lies in the low-down one-party states. Ten have been found by careful political scientists to be generally one-party. They are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Virginia. Twelve were found to be practically one-party: Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Tennessee. 11 Ignoring for the moment still others that alternate over long periods as one-party jobs, like Florida recently, it is noticeable that the above array is nominally Republican as well as Democratic. Among the clearly Republican one-party strongholds are Vermont, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon and South Dakota. At least twenty-two states, then, or nearly half, are one-party setups, with some dozen others coming very close to qualifying. Public political scandals, it will be noted, are much less frequently heard of in the one- party states. Here it is as in one-party countries.
The single point to emphasize here is that Senator Clark is entirely correct, even reserved, in his sweeping reference to the legislatures. He does not exaggerate. As the lawyers would say, he is a sound witness. He does not, however, delve into the processes that brought such uncomely personnel into the legislative bodies. How did the honest electorate come to elect such canaille? That is, manifestly, another story, and is left to the next chapter.
Professionals in general are paid on a similar low level. The most highly paid professionals are dentists, physicians, surgeons, lawyers and judges, and their median earnings in 1959 were somewhat about $10,000 annually, according to Statistical Abstract, 1964, page 229. The medians for other professionals were far lower--$4,020 for clergymen, $4,653 for musicians and music teachers, $7,207 for college presidents, professors and instructors, $5,827 for secondary school teachers, etc. Engineers, so vital to an industrial system, had a median of $8,361.
The reader should be reminded that the median indicates that half are paid below these levels.
Leaving aside the factor of scientific creativity, the man in science must have precise, detailed knowledge of thousands of minute and of all-enveloping aspects of his field, within which he must be able to reason subtly, usually mathematically, and he must maintain over long periods of time steadiness of purpose even though results are meager. He is rarely buoyed up by the great "breakthroughs" alluded to so facilely by journalists. Nor can these when they occur be patented and capitalized.
Neither in input of thought, effort, preparation or concentration is the work of any corporation executive remotely comparable. Indeed, on the basis of "inside" or friendly accounts the intellectual attainments of corporation executives appear to be slight. Fortune finds they do not do much reading, are weak in intellectual powers. 40 Others wonder how many of them have functional reading ability at all because so many seem poorly informed, constantly need assistance from public relations men (usually ex- journalists).
There is a great concentration of brains in a corporation. But it shows itself, not in the top executives as a rule, but in the lower-paid lawyers, engineers, scientists, market analysts and public relations men. These specialists usually work up the script for the trusted top men. When some of the executives decide to "go it alone" in public expressions of their conventional wisdom, one gets derisive reverberations, as in the case of Charles E. Wilson's what's-good-for-General Motors homily to Congress. Speaking out on his own, the top corporation man often sounds like a goof, a super- Babbitt, and the lower professionals in his company writhe uncomfortably. Indeed, in some companies the professional staff is under standing instructions to keep the top man so "boxed in" and isolated that he cannot put his foot in his mouth in public, cannot deliver himself of dazzling shafts of cracker-barrel wisdom.
It is sometimes argued that it is the vast concentrated responsibilities of the top corporate men that make them worth their pay; responsibilities of scientists and teachers, although not denied, are held to be more diffuse, less immediately decisive. Top military officers, however, certainly have organizational responsibilities that transcend those of any corporate officials. Their moment-to-moment decisions involve far more men, equipment, money and organizational niceties as well as the very safety of the nation. This is especially so in time of war.
Yet the Chief of Staff as of 1966 drew a maximum base pay of $2,140 a month or $25,680 per year. The men serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Chief of Staff of the Army, Chief of Naval Operations, Chief of Staff of the Air Force or Commandant of the Marine Corps receive basic pay for the grade of $2,019. 30 per month regardless of cumulative years of service. A Chief of Staff or Chief of Naval Operations also draws $4,000 per year in personal money allowance. A four-star general or an admiral gets $2,000 a year in money allowance and a maximum annual salary of $17,796. Corporately speaking, all this is taxable chicken feed.
When we ascend to the ineffable level of the Commander in Chief himself, the president of the United States, we find the salary is $100,000 a year and fully taxable. There is also a taxable expense allowance of $50,000 for officially connected duties and a nontaxable annual travel allowance of $40,000. Living quarters are also provided and an alert president can latch on to many free rides and free lunches. There now goes with the job a lifetime pension of $25,000 a year, $10,000 annually for presidential widows and up $50,000 a year (plus free mailing privileges) for the office help of ex-presidents. The maximum time a man may enjoy this comparatively modest salary and expense account is ten years.
Owing to the tax bite the in-pocket effectiveness of both the salary and the nontravel expense account is reduced by more than 50 per cent. For a, president like Lyndon B. Johnson, who was thriftily able to build up from hard-pan poverty an estate of some $13 million or more on his salary as a congressman, there was no particular problem involved. And for a big inheritor like President John F. Kennedy there was no problem.
This office carries with it vast responsibilities. Yet there is probably no president or chairman of any one of 750 or more of the largest corporations who is not paid far more. So much for responsibilities and the emoluments therefor.
The corporate executive, as I said, is no wizard. He is paid as he is because he is in a position to do much harm to big property holders. There is a further nuance that should perhaps be noticed. A big stockholder, everything else apart, wants his chief executives to feel identified as closely as possible with him. Hence he sees to it that their take- home pay is as close to $1 million a year as possible. He knows their expense account is phoney because he probably set it up himself and knows there is no such legitimate expense involved. It is all readily explainable as serving to keep up appearances.
The executives at various times must entertain foreign notables, public officials or other wealthy men. It would hardly do for them to entertain in meager surroundings. The residences of the top executives should say at a glance: The Super-Cosmos Corporation is an extremely rich and powerful entity, to be treated respectfully. Again, big executives must make political campaign-fund contributions.
No implication is here intended that executives, considering all circumstances, should really be paid less. They are paid by people who seldom overpay, who pay only what they feel they must pay in every situation. All I intend to say is that, despite all the ballyhoo about esoteric executive skill to cover up what the pay is really for, the executives are not paragons, are not superior people--superior to scientists, high military officers and pubpols--to the degree that their compensation might suggest. They are basically politicians, with all the popular connotations of the term. They are paid as they are to guarantee proper performance by people who are anxious about that performance.
The comparatively astronomic pay of corporate executives as stand-in overseers of large properties and manipulators of large numbers of employees, consumers and common citizens is shown in still another perspective when compared with the compensation, before taxes, of the entire American labor force. Here the pay of at least
some scientists begins to look pretty good, although at least half the scientists are paid on the level of the lower labor force.
The following chart-profile of family income in the United States from 1947 to 1964 in 1964 dollars is taken from Current Population Reports: Consumer Income of the United States Department of Commerce, issued September 24, 1965.
About 20 per cent of families as of 1964 had incomes above $10,000 a year. While only 10 per cent of individual incomes exceeded $10,000, with only 1 per cent exceeding $25,000, substantial family participation in plus-$10,000 income stems from the fact that some persons hold two jobs, some families have two or more wage earners and many families in this bracket own property. Nevertheless, 80 per cent of the families shown on this chart had incomes below $10,000, mostly from wages, no matter how many earners they had. From somewhat more than a quarter in the income-group under $3,000 in 1947 the families in this range by 1964 were slightly less than 20 per cent in dollars of 1964 value.
The United States is usually alluded to in the corporate press as a country of large incomes, high wages. And so it is in comparison with nonindustrial countries where incomes are very low. But in relation to the incomes of corporate executives and the owners of large inherited properties, and to American tax- padded price levels, Americans draw coolie pay. A few weeks out of a job and most of them are stony broke, on the relief rolls.
The careful reader should not suppose that the reference to "coolie pay" is hyperbolic.
Per capita "real" income from all sources in the United States in the first quarter of 1966--that is, income after personal taxes and in terms of the dollar stabilized at 1958 prices--was at an annual rate of $2,260, up from $1,900 in the first quarter of 1960 and from $1,831 in 1958. In terms of the 1966 dollar the rate was $2,490, showing an inflation of $230 or about 10 per cent over the "real" rate. 41
? These figures, of course, are averages, applicable to every man, woman and child. In order to have the latest figure applicable to members of his family, a married man with three children in 1966 would have required an income of $12,450, after taxes, in current dollars, which would yield a "real" income of $11,300 in 1958 dollars. If such was his income, though, he would have been well up among the upper 10 per cent of income receivers.
Owing to the very great incomes received by 1 per cent and less of the population, mostly from investments, the actual participation of some 90 per cent of the population in "real" income takes place at levels ranging far below the stated average of $2,260 per person.
Single persons who received from $2,490 and upward in 1966 after taxes were, of course, at or above the average. But a married man with a nonworking wife would have had to receive twice this much to be at the average and would need $2,490 of income in current dollars, always after personal taxes, for each of his children in order for them all to be at the average. Few persons participate at the "average" level!
This bedrock figure computed by the government, moreover, does not allow for the substantial taxes incorporated in prices.
In order to show the splendor of American workers' incomes it is often shown how much longer one must work in Russia for a loaf of bread, a pair of shoes, a bottle of milk, etc. What is shown is true specifically, but misleading. For some costs in Russia, such as of available housing, are less. Again, many services are provided at no direct cost. In Russia and throughout Europe, no college tuition is charged and a variety of services, costly in the United States, are provided at low cost.
The median figure on real income would necessarily be much lower than this average, for the lower half necessarily includes many with zero income--the publicly institutionalized sick and delinquent. There are also the low-paid seasonal agricultural workers, the unemployed and the only occasionally employed.
Total income in the United States is, of course, great--the greatest in the world. But popular participation in this vast income ranges from zero to very little for substantially more than half of the populace. Most literate people, however, believe just the opposite is true, a tribute to the power of propaganda and statistical manipulation.
In the 1930's large sectors of the population suffered from deflation. In the 1950's and 1960's large sectors are suffering from inflation as well as elevated taxes. In terms of income most people are being "whipsawed. "
What inflation over the long term has done to income is shown in a 1966 study by the conservative National Industrial Conference Board. According to this study, a man with a wife and two children today must receive $13,324 annually to buy the same amount of goods he could get for $5,000 in 1939. The man who received $10,000 in 1939 must now receive $27,288 to match that year's buying power and the man who received $100,000 in 1939 must now get $307,734 to have the equivalent buying power. The Conference Board concluded that a very large part of the fivefold rise in per-capita income has been eroded by taxes and price inflation. 42
The family-income chart, too, is misleading if it is taken as a guide to absolute income. For these figures are stated before taxes. It should always be remembered that as labor productivity has risen through the application of technology, as real wages have risen, there has gradually been shifted onto the labor force, especially since 1940, the high income taxes originally designed for large income receivers, as well as new sales taxes. In Chapter Nine we saw some (a small part) of the ways in which taxes for the warfare-welfare state have been largely shifted onto the working population, scientists
and professionals of all kinds included. We also saw to what extent large receivers of income, salaried and investment, have managed to place themselves like Bourbon favorites in the tax-exempt class.
Bolstering Executive Egos
Yet, despite high pay, all is not well along the corporate chain of command. Owing to tensions, stress and, no doubt, the failure to extract a sense of meaning out of repetitious, essentially routine tasks such as the manufacture and distribution of soap, many executive egos are in constant danger of collapsing, and they need to be reinforced by heroic corporate measures. Obtaining little ego support from any solid achievement, they need constant emergency support.
According to Dr. Robert Turfboer, psychiatrist with the Yale University School of Medicine and consultant to several large corporations, "an executive must have emotional security like anyone else. Evidences of eminence, far beyond financial reward, help give him that sense of security. The president of a company can be as fearful of failure as the office boy or assistant sales manager is of being fired. "
Sagging executive egos are bolstered in two ways apart from money, says Dr. Turfboer: by special privileges and by special status symbols (although there are grave dangers in the utilization of the wrong status symbols).
Special privileges are of the following order: a $10,000 sauna in the executive suite of a new mid-Manhattan building for the sole benefit of the president and a few other top- echelon wizards; an $8,000 billiard room in the executive suite of another large corporation; in the Chase Manhattan Bank building $510,000 worth of fine art for private executive offices and executive reception rooms and, in general, office massage tables, office barber chairs, executive dining rooms, telephonic company automobiles (so that the great man need never be out of touch for an instant with GHQ), private executive planes, ultra-modern office furniture and plenty of service flunkies. There is, too, the expense account.
"Just as a king needs a crown for people to know he is a king, so an executive often needs the first-class symbols for his position as well as his self-esteem," says Dr. Turfboer.
How status symbols and special privileges are to be apportioned within the executive group is a problem; it is solved in accordance with an executive's putative importance. His importance is judged according to a criterion laid down by Dr. Elliott Jaques, British psychiatrist, who says, "The level of employment work can be measured in terms of the time span of discretion authorized and expected without review of that discretion by a superior. " Otherwise put, the more a man can be trusted to be on his own the more important he is. Thus, the corporation president need not report to his board for six months--very important. All who have to report to somebody once a month, once a week, once or more a day are obviously progressively less important. People under constant surveillance are of no hierarchic importance at all.
"Status symbols, therefore says Dr. Turfboer, "should be assigned or permitted according to a man's 'time span of discretion. '" The more discretion, the more costly the symbol. A company limousine costing $50 an hour should not, it is evident, be assigned to an office boy--or even to a junior vice president. Such a gadget can only be for Mr. Big himself.
Dr. Turfboer then goes into some subtle points of higher corporatology: how to distinguish at a glance among the guardians of big property. In the hierarchy of the average establishment, the third or lowest grade of vice president may be distinguished by Venetian office blinds and absence of carpeting. The second echelon generally
merits wall-to-wall carpeting (at $14 a yard) and draperies or curtains to the sill. For top executives, there are floor-to-ceiling draperies and carpeting at $17 a yard. As Vance Packard has pointed out, a mahogany desk outranks walnut, walnut outranks oak or metal. The man entitled to carpeting is likely to display a water carafe, which long ago displaced the brass spittoon as a symbol of flag rank. At one broadcasting company, only secretaries of executives above a certain specific level of advancement are entitled to electric typewriters.
What really determines the cost and number of status symbols is "the number of people an executive affects and the intensity with which he affects them," the doctor assures us.
But there are dangers in flaunting status symbols around indiscriminately, the doctor warns. "I refer to flashy office furniture and gold faucets, teak countertops, and Picassos in executive washrooms. The nonintellectual who displays books with fancy leather bindings, or the executive who hangs collectible art but does not appreciate what he has, may be marked as a fraud. A too-gadgety bar (except behind a sliding panel) should not be accepted as a proper status symbol. . . .
"The wrong kind of authoritative emblems can have negative consequences. In subordinates, they may inspire envy or ridicule. While an executive may make himself often inaccessible to subordinates as a symbol of his importance rationalized by his need for privacy, needless exclusiveness can arouse antagonism within his organization. "
Symbols are assigned or self-selected, and in both cases there are grave dangers. A minor executive, for example, may acquire a desk set exactly like the one used by the chairman of the board, which "may be permissible, but it may also turn out to be poor strategy. " Will the chairman, one wonders, feel burned up?
As to assignment of symbols, Dr. Turfboer cites the sad case of a marketing executive given a much larger and more palatial office; yet the man had the effrontery to say he felt uncomfortable in his new deluxe surroundings. "Evidently," says Dr. Turfboer, "his self-esteem had not had a chance to rise to the level of the symbol bestowed on him. "
Offhand, a strictly part-time curbstone psychologist would assume that the man had very little self-esteem to begin with if it depended on anything so contrived as an office and its furbishings. 43
All is not well, as it is readily seen, along the corporate chain of executive command. Many of the men have doubts--about their worth, their importance, the value of their presence, their identities in the scheme of things, perhaps even about their potency. They need to be bolstered in a world of basic achievers, such as scientists.
Another study, however, finds top executives to be "Basically sound, above-average in effective intelligence. These men deal best with practical or tangible data in relation to problem-solving situations. They are as a group only fair conceptual thinkers. They do not do too well in dealing with theoretical, abstract or conceptual thoughts or ideas. "
As students they had above-average grades and were in the upper 25 per cent of their class at college, although not all were college graduates.
Most of them had engaged in some form of commercial venture before age fifteen and they are "Generally not socially aggressive. None were 'big men on campus' although some held fraternity offices. However, they were as a group somewhat lacking in the degree to which they participated in traditional student activities. "
Most of them married late, had children, and their wives played little noticeable role in their business affairs.
One fact applied to all: None came from poverty-stricken backgrounds. In other words, none was a poor boy who "made good. "
These findings were made by Dr. Louis F. Hackemann, president of Hackemann & Associates, an international management consulting company with headquarters in San Francisco. 44
Professor Mabel Newcomer, near the conclusion of a study based upon a very large number of cases--882--of top executive officers, says:
"Although he [the typical executive of 1950] has specialized training, he has never practiced independently, nor has he at any time run a business of his own as his father did. He is a business administrator--a bureaucrat--with little job experience outside his own corporation. His investments in 'his' company are nominal, in terms of potential control--less than 0. 1 per cent of the total stock outstanding. He is a Republican in politics; he attends the Episcopalian church, if he attends church at all; and he served the federal government in an advisory capacity during the war. He was, in 1950, sixty-one years of age, and he will probably be seventy when he retires. " 45
Of note here, direct verification in a study of the top executives themselves of what has been indicated before, is that the corporate executive is not ordinarily much of an owner. He is a hired man, the tool of big owners, never the servant of myriad small stockholders as in the fable of "People's Capitalism. "
Professor Newcomer makes the important point that corporations rarely comb the field looking for what would objectively be considered the best or most capable man for the top job. Why, in other words, do they "promote from within so frequently? And why do they promote so late? The reasons appear to be first, that the talent within the company is better known, and to that extent safer [nota bene--F. L. ], than outside talent. Also, there is always a feeling that one's own company is different and that intimate knowledge of its problems is important from the start. The president or chairman is likely to select his successor in advance and to groom him personally for the job. And loyalty to the company is stressed. Moreover, there is a sense of obligation to the officers with whom the chief has worked, and a conviction--which is doubtless justified--that morale will be higher and the chance of retaining able executives greater, if they are aware that the top offices will be filled from within. " 46
Corp-politan Vistas
To attempt anything like a complete survey of the executive and his sphere would be impossible short of encyclopedic format. Under the rubric Management the central reference room of the New York Public Library indexes nearly 4,000 volumes; under Executives, nearly 400. There is, too, some score of periodicals devoted to the topic.
So it is clear that the subject of management is a large one in a postulated democratic society where the individual is pretty much supposed to manage himself. Americans, in fact, are under constant political and economic management manipulation.
While many of the works on management are serious analytical and descriptive studies, the executive mystique, tending to show the superlative worth of the executive and his technique as such, occupies much attention.
Management of property itself, it turns out, is an arcane science, worthy of graduate study in the universities.
For those who want a compressed view of the field there might be recommended the Reading Course in Executive Technique, published in eight volumes with many authors by Funk and Wagnalls Company, New York, 1948. The volumes are given a lengthy introduction, "Modern Executive Techniques," by the editor, Carl Heyel, who is president of Executive Techniques, Inc.
The books in this course are titled: Systematic Solution of Management Problems (how to think, operations control, management controls, manual of organization, use of statistics, charting the course); Human Relations (employee morale, employee suggestion systems, supervising women, hints on psychology, human relations in industry); Personnel and Industrial Relations; Creative Training Programs; Manufacturing Control; Distribution; Financial Control and General Office Management; and Public Relations. Thus armed, the aspiring executive can take over with confidence.
Management, it turns out, consists of a melange of many things, a smattering from many disciplines that turns into an ad hoc empiricism resembling a pseudo-science.
Much of the literature in management can be reduced to cautionary injunctions, applicable generally or in various specific situations to "Always do this," "Never do that," "Usually do this," "Usually do that," "Be very careful in doing this," etc. Concrete situations are cited from experience, sometimes careful observational studies such as those of Elton Mayo on how most easily to get maximum output from a work force. Taking all the injunctions together one is given what some writers term a "philosophy of management. " Troublemakers, so much sand in the gears, are especially unwanted and the place to spot them is at the personnel office, where the latest in psychological testing is put to use. Potential nonbelievers, doubters, scoffers, misfits and persons with "negative attitudes" generally must be weeded out lest they contaminate a basically sound work force and impede the smooth flow of profits.
Critics from time to time commiserate with the bureaucratic aspirant in the Leninist countries who must, before he arrives at the top, read the metaphysical works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and many lesser dialecticians. The American executive, however, to judge by the tomes he must read, is much worse off. For most of these writings are at best stodgy, usually turgid. And beckoning the American is no future society of shining mirages but, at most, an office with wall-to-wall carpeting, a gold key to the executive washroom and membership in a country club.
Not only are there special periodicals devoted to the executive and his sphere, but magazines of more general appeal do not overlook him. Fortune rarely lets a month slip by without at least one article on executives, of which a few since 1950 have been: "The Case of Charles Luckman," "The Nine Hundred," "Boards of Directors," "Do Stock Options Pay? " "How Hard Do Executives Work? " "Can Executives Be Taught to Think? " "How Executives Get Jobs," "Is There an Executive Face? " "The Executive Bonus," "Are Executives Paid Enough? " "How Executives Invest Their Money,"' "How Top Executives Live," "The Executive Crack-Up," "How Much Is an Executive Worth? " "Young Executive in Manhattan," "Executive Qualities," "Life in Bloomfield Hills," "The Pirates of Management," "Those American Managers Don't Impress Europe, "Executive Compensation: The New Wave," "How to Pay Executives," etc.
In "Those American Managers Don't Impress Europe" (Fortune, December, 1964) we were given a story of disillusion. American companies entering the European market, either by merger or establishing new plants, necessarily sent along American executives. Keyed by all the hoop-la from the American corporate press about high- powered, lynx-eyed American executives, Europeans proceeded to pay very close attention. Now, they apparently thought, they were going to see the very soul of American puissance in action. Alas, it was once again the story of mighty Casey at the bat. For the American wizards were found to be very so-so, nothing remarkable. After watching them Europeans felt reassured.
It might be argued that the Americans did not send their first team to play in a strictly bush league, and this was probably true. To see the varsity all-stars in action the
backward Europeans will have to come to the United States. Once they glimpse the Picassos in the executive washroom they will know they are in the very uterus of the big time, at the altar of the executive mystique. Now they will see how big, really big, decisions are made . . .
Twelve
THE REPUBLIC OF MONEY: THE PUBPOLS
As everything thus far inquired into has obviously flowered under the benign providence of government it is evident that government and politics have more than a little to do with the gaudy blooms of extreme wealth and poverty in the feverish American realm. It has not, to begin with, prevented whatever is the case. What it has ministered to, and how and why, will now be our theme.
How the government of the United States functions in all its ramifying complexity is the theme of ponderous treatises running into the proportions of Sears, Roebuck catalogues--composed by academicians somewhat left-handedly known as political scientists. Whatever they say is almost invariably correct in a formal sense as anatomical description, apart from any decorative filigree provided by such heady words as "democracy" and "freedom. "
What we are really interested in, however, is process, function--political physiology, as it were. Although many political scientists profess to deal with this aspect as well, they all tend to lose sight of the actual ball in play or to avert their eyes in horror at the clinches. They are as physicists would be who had never been in a laboratory, as members of a vice squad who had never been in a brothel or taken money under the table from a madame. They themselves were never in the celebrated smoke-filled backrooms, never on hand when the price was set, the bodies buried, the papers burned, the ballots destroyed, the payoff made, the double entendre arranged, the people bilked.
Like nearly everyone else in this sphere, the political scientist is dependent on reports, rumors, memoirs, documents, statistics, interpretations, deductions and more or less shrewd surmise. And, like everyone else, he is limited by his position as a strict outsider. Journalists are far more privy to what goes on than he, and indeed he depends on journalists for much of his information. It is one field where certain participants know more about it in its nook-and-cranny aspects than those self-dedicated to its systematic study.
The difference between government as reported by political scientists and government as it actually takes place is much like the difference between learned descriptions of amour and amour itself. The difference is far greater than that between description in general and phenomena in general, between symbol and act. The political scientist is in much the same outside position as a biologist or psychologist studying amour. What each says may be entirely correct, moderately enlightening or even exhilarating; but what the dedicated acolyte misses are the nuances these experts haven't been able to encompass even by delicate imaginative projection. Their often assumed delicacy is elephantine. Again, they often misinterpret simple rutting for amour, intrigue for politics.
Even more than the theoreticians of amour, who sometimes have the advantage of being tentative practitioners themselves, the political scientist is at a disadvantage: For he has never actually been in the situation, does not occupy a privileged position denied, say, to the editors of the New York Times. The terrain, clearly, belongs in the particular jurisdiction of someone else, as amour lies in the jurisdiction of the poet or madman. A poet, even a madman, now and then has something revealing or poignant to say about amour; it would be astonishing if a political scientist ever said anything about government that approached a Machiavelli or a Hobbes who, be it noticed, were nonscientific "insiders. "
The indubitable experts I call upon to bear witness in this chapter (leaving to one side the delicate question of my own expertise) will all be far, far closer to what goes on than any political scientist has ever been, valuable though the compilations, commentaries, commonplaces and occasional insights of these gentry may be as aides-memoires and reference classifications.
As most people have some more or less accurate conception of the gross mechanics of the United States government, seen mostly in rose lights and soft-focus, I omit the citation of basic supposed facts on which we might be improbably supposed to agree in advance. Let us simply descend on the phenomenon oozing in its habitat.
In much of what follows for quite a way I lean heavily on first-hand analysis by the erudite and resolutely democratic Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania, until his election in 1956 the Democratic burgomeister of dingy Philadelphia, magna cum laude, Harvard, '23--in brief, a man of parts. Having Clark on hand is pretty much like having a literate psychoanalyst stationed right on the vice squad itself, an entrancing and unexpected combination. Here and there I shall set the focus a little more sharply than does the truly able but somewhat romantic senator. He, although sufficiently forthright, is a gentleman and becomes queasy at spelling out certain details which I, here as a pathologist, will have no more hesitancy in scrutinizing in the light of the evidence available than has a coroner in examining a mildewed cadaver.
As Senator Clark has made microscopically clear, no doubt to the consternation of the more polite observers, each house of Congress is under the tight control of a dour inner clique, the general intended aim of which is to cater to favored ultra-acquisitive interests and to frustrate the general lightheartedly nonacquisitive interests. As far as these cliques are concerned, the general populace can go and slide on its collective buttocks if it has any complaints to make--and stick its finger in its ear for good measure.
To these twin cliques, composed to a man of self-certified back-country patriots, we owe the gamey tax laws, among others. Senator Clark stylishly refers to the cliques as "The Senate Establishment" and "The House Establishment. " They run Congress, when necessary with a heavy hand, at times in opposition to any president, sometimes as under Lyndon B. Johnson in close harmony with him. When they are in full-blown opposition, the government simply deadlocks, freezes, as far as rational adjustment to events is concerned.
The special merit of Senator Clark's analysis is that he shows at first hand the precise inner mechanics of Establishment control, so that even a child can understand it.
The senator endorses the conclusion of James Macgregor Burns that there are always two governing parties in power, a Congressional party and a Presidential party. The Presidential party is national, necessarily concerned with broad interests, and is at least halfheartedly oriented toward carrying out the cloudy party platform submitted every four years to the bemused voters. The Congressional party is devoted to particularistic self-seekers (as shown by near-the-spot sources other than Senator Clark); these include most of the members themselves as on-the-sly entrepreneurs. It is bipartisan--a coalition
of standpat Republicans and Democrats. It is generally opposed, usually by indirection, to the party platform, most of which it covertly sabotages. The function of the party platform is only to stir enthusiasm in Presidential voters. After serving this purpose it is subject to discard.
The Establishment, moreover, is as permanently and fixedly in power as the Communist leadership in Russia. Nothing about it alters over the decades except the fall of a few of its aging personnel by the wayside. Only extreme force and violence could remove it. It is anchored, in sober fact, in extra-legal violence, intimidation and terrorism as religiously practiced especially throughout the South but visible at times elsewhere.
The findings of Senator Clark were expressed at considerable personal risk. For no professional can ever give such pointedly documented critical testimony to the outside heathen without thereafter having every hand of the Establishment secretly raised against him. All that can now save Senator Clark from political oblivion is the popular constituency--by itself a weak reed, as every practicing politician knows.
Barriers against the Majority
Barriers to the expression of majority will at the governmental level are, among others, the following:
Many persons do not vote--some for the intelligent reasons that they suspect the electoral process is rigged or they do not know enough about the issues or candidates; most from indifference, apathy, intimidation, terror stemming from localized violence, simple mental or physical ill health or because they are barred from voting by peculiar residential requirements devised by local politicos with little enthusiasm for voting.
Only a bit more than 60 per cent now vote in presidential elections (presidents have never been true majority officers). On statewide bases, the voters always number fewer than 50 per cent in purely congressional elections and range downward to less than 10 per cent in other elections.
In 1962 only 46. 7 per cent of civilians of voting age cast ballots for House congressmen, a record high in a nonpresidential year. 1 In many states (all Establishment Country) the percentage of voters was far lower: 13. 7 per cent in steamy Mississippi; below 20 per cent in Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Virginia; between 20 and 30 per cent in Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas; and between 30 and 40 per cent in Kentucky, Maryland and North Carolina. The largest statewide vote for House congressmen that year was in Idaho with 66. 5 per cent. Only eleven states attained 60 per cent or better. 2
In 1964 even the presidential vote was below 40 per cent in Alabama, District of Columbia, Georgia, Mississippi (33. 3 per cent), and South Carolina. Usually it attains lower levels in these and some other states. 3
It is often said that the Democratic primaries are the true elections in the South, the election itself just a formality. But even so they do not involve a significantly large segment of the population. Again, it is often said that the poor showing in the South is traceable to the exclusion of Negroes; yet most of the abstentions are of low-grade whites. In 1960, Mississippi, with the largest proportion of Negro population, had less than 40 per cent Negroes in its population of voting age. 4 So it is not only the exclusion of Afro-Americans that accounts for the poor voting record of the South. It is mainly whites (or pinks and rednecks) who abstain from voting, in part because they are culturally as retarded as the sepia shades and in part because they are dissuaded by the local padrones.
The vast disparity of participation between presidential and congressional elections-- in 1960 the presidential vote drew 64 per cent--reveals the degree of purposeful abstention and lack of ardor in many people for an electoral process widely suspected of being greased and rigged and at least ineffective as a means of producing tangibly gratifying results. Too many people have seen too much remain the same after too many high-flown elections to be carried away by the prospect of another.
Many of those who vote do not vote their interests intelligently, perhaps do not even know what they are. Again, many of those elected obviously do not themselves know what the score is, as they show by asinine pronouncements. One must be very much of a mystic to believe that, at variance with rational criteria, there is something intrinsically valuable about a popular vote. It is at best a rough way of selecting somebody, even a Lyndon B. Johnson.
Having voted for one of the two handpicked puppets of backroom schemers (except where there are open primaries), usually with some childish ethnic or religious bias most prominently in mind, the functioning portion of the electorate favors a man (as often as not deemed unfit by the community for other walks of life) who is then thrown into close working contact with others of like mind arrived in the halls of government by the same dubious road. There are some 750,000 elective offices in the land and, considering the fact that there is at least one aspirant arrayed against every incumbent, it is evident that the mere filling of offices amounts to quite an industry in an economic sense--gives employment to many people.
Despite all hosannahs to the collective sagacity of the people (what politician or newspaper editor would publicly question it? ) the arrangements under which popular elections have been held since their inception have been as crooked as a fixed wheel in a low gambling house. Long asserted by the tough-minded, denied by the tender-minded, the plain fact was only recently underscored in terse decisions by the United States Supreme Court. Various transparent devices, the Court found, were traditionally used in many states to keep Negroes and other a priori undesirables from voting, thus trammeling gloriously free even if obtuse popular expression at the very source. A wider and subtler abuse was found in the legislative districts, federal and state, which had been traditionally gerrymandered by one-party and two-party establishment- controlled state legislatures so that in some cases enormous numbers of distraught voters, mostly urban and suburban dwellers, had only one dubious representative; while in other cases very few voters, mostly functionally illiterate rural hinds, also had a dubious representative. A handful of rustics thus were the means for stifling the representatives of thousands of trapped city patsies. The consequence was that even if a majority of a legislative body was allowed to prevail (not always the case, as we shall see) the majority did not reflect the majority of the voting population either in its wisdom, folly or confusion.
Although the Court has now issued its ukase against these practices, the men borne to prominence by them will remain on the scene and in office until they wilt; and there is no guarantee that something equally objectionable, or more so, will not be devised by the always cunning pubpols.
Americans, it is often said unthinkingly, believe in majority rule. Yet, oddly, they never have had it; they have always had oligarchic rule, usually of a rather low order. The farther one moves away from a gerrymandered, intimidated, meagerly educated, emotionally immature and partly disqualified electorate the fewer become the participants in any decision until in the legislatures it is always and invariably far less than a majority, either representatively or among those present. For all those brain-
laundered with the doctrine of majority rule this is, admittedly, a strange, even unpatriotic notion. Yet it is an exact statement of the case.
"The primary and overriding duty and responsibility of each member of the House of Representatives is to get re-elected," it has been well said by Adam Clayton Powell, long a proficient preacher of the Gospel and a successful and highly affluent congressman since 1945. 5
The Establishment legislator in Congress-and some not so classifiable--has three further informal, off-the-record duties: (1) to work loyally with the legislative Establishment as an organization man; (2) to insure his own position whenever possible as a member in good standing of the affluent sector of society by acquiring any available cash, securities, real estate, franchises, market tips or whatever else may be of value; and (3) to share his affluence with indispensable offstage key figures of his home district organization grouped around the state or district party chairman. Nobody, it is plainly evident, plays the game alone.
Not to do this is to leave himself at the mercy of the shifting whims and moods of a potentially unstable constituency, wide open to the claims of eager rivals for his office, Despite careful planning by the legislator, he is at times the victim of political upsets and internal feuds. Yet if he is of the Establishment he is never wholly extinguished even if he has not had time to become affluent, because he has made many Establishment friends who remember him as a "regular. " They see to it that his post- legislative life is enriched by various appointments suitable to a "lame duck"-- commissionerships, judgeships, receiverships, lobby clients and the like. He belongs to a bund.
The Congressional Establishment, as Senator Clark proves, has a life of its own, policies of its own, aims of its own. These either have no connection with the needs or desires of the nation as a whole or harmonize with them only occasionally, fitfully, incidentally and, as it were, accidentally. It is a parasitical oligarchy. It produces results of its own predetermined stamp. It explains much about the chills, fevers and shudders of American society--its volume of crime, riots and lynchings.
The Bottom of the Bird Cage
"The trouble with Congress today,". writes Senator Clark, "is that it exercises negative and unjust powers to which the governed, the people of the United States, have never consented. . . . The heart of the trouble is that the power is exercised by minority, not majority rule. " 6
As in Soviet Russia and Red China, power is in the hands of solidly installed intriguing manipulators, with the difference that in the United States the intrigue takes place behind a facade of reasoned if blurry constitutionality. In Russia and China the bayonets show through the periodic purges. The difference is enough to make the reasonable man prefer the American system with all its blemishes, about as one would unjoyfully prefer dysentery to cholera.
"Our forms of government are heavily weighted against any kind of action, and especially any that might alter significantly the status quo. It takes too many units of government to consent before anything can be done. " 7 This, of course, is a truism. The constitutional bulwarks against tyranny, placed there by the Founders' hands, are used to produce a creeping, low-key tyranny.
It is the third branch of government, the legislative, where things have gone awry. Whether we look at city councils, the state legislatures or the Congress of the United States, we react to what we see with scarcely concealed contempt. This is the area where democratic government is breaking down. This is where the vested-interest
lobbies tend to run riot, where conflict of interest is concealed from the public, where demagoguery, sophisticated or primitive, knows few bounds, where political lag keeps needed action often a generation behind the times, where the nineteenth century sometimes reigns supreme in committees, where the evil influence of arrogant and corrupt political machines, at the local and state level, ignores most successfully the general welfare, where the lust for patronage and favors for the faithful do the greatest damage to the public interest.
. . . the legislatures of America, local, state and national, are presently the greatest menace in our country to the successful operation of the democratic process. 8
Lest the sheltered reader, tucked away in his bower, think that Senator Clark here delivers himself of an extravagant opinion or resorts to hyperbole, it is a settled conclusion among seasoned observers that, Congress apart as a separate case, the lower legislatures--state, county and municipal--are Augean stables of misfeasance, malfeasance and nonfeasance from year to year and decade to decade and that they are preponderantly staffed by riffraff or what police define as "undesirables," people who if they were not in influential positions would be unceremoniously told to "keep moving. " Exceptions among them are minor. Many of them, including congressmen, refuse to go before the television cameras because it is then so plainly obvious to everybody they are what they are. Their whole demeanor arouses instant distrust in the intelligent. They are, all too painfully, type-cast for the racetrack, the sideshow carnival, the back alley, the peep-show, the low tavern, the bordello, the dive. Evasiveness, dissimulation, insincerity shine through their false bonhomie like beacon lights.
The New York Times, customarily referred to as staid, has vouched editorially that the Massachusetts legislature is the most corrupt in the country. If this is so, the Commonwealth lawmakers have nosed out many others, including neighboring Rhode Island, merely by millimeters, The Times based its opinion on a solid report of the Massachusetts Crime Commission, submitted by impeccable leading citizens of the Bay State to Governor John Volpe in response to frenetic public clamor. "Corruption permeates the state, the report said, from town governments to the state house and involves politicians, business men, lawyers and ordinary citizens. " 9
This official report, a state document, cited wide-scale bribery by corporations and lawyers and the fact that legislators are on the payrolls of companies doing business with the state. Corruption was encouraged, the report said, because of "the lack of backbone" in the legislature.
As to this particular legislature, the Boston Globe analyzed it during the week of April 11, 1966, revealing elements of a pestilent tale. Most of the legislature, the Globe indicated, is composed of Babbittian local real estate dealers, insurance brokers, fixing lawyers, loan sharks, used-car entrepreneurs, miscellaneous fast-buck operators and obscure local hangers-on and roustabouts--many of them types who if they could not become attached to a public payroll, there to divert commerce their way, would be local misfits and perhaps panhandlers, vagrants, con men, family dependents, procurers or on local relief or unemployment rolls. The net impression given by the Globe (a rather reserved family paper) was of a political lumpenproletariat, a scabrous crew.
As to other legislatures, Senator Estes Kefauver found representatives of the vulpine Chicago Mafia ensconced in the Illinois legislature, which has been rocked by one scandal of the standard variety after the other off and on for seventy-five or more years. What he didn't bring out was that the Mafians were clearly superior types to many non- Mafians.
Public attention, indeed, usually centers on only a few lower legislatures-- Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois--and the impression is
thereby fostered in the unduly trusting that the ones they don't hear about are on the level. But such an impression is false. The ones just mentioned come into more frequent view because their jurisdictions are extremely competitive and the pickings are richer. Fierce fights over the spoils generate telltale commotion. Most of the states are quieter under strict one-party quasi-Soviet Establishment dominance, with local newspapers cut in on the gravy. Public criticism and information are held to a minimum, grousers are thrown a bone and not many in the low-level populace know or really care. Even so, scandalous goings-on explode into view from time to time in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri and elsewhere--no states excepted. Any enterprising newspaper at any time could send an aggressive reporter into any one of them and come up with enough ordure to make the Founding Fathers collectively vomit up their very souls in their graves. 10
The territorial base of the Establishment lies in the low-down one-party states. Ten have been found by careful political scientists to be generally one-party. They are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Virginia. Twelve were found to be practically one-party: Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Tennessee. 11 Ignoring for the moment still others that alternate over long periods as one-party jobs, like Florida recently, it is noticeable that the above array is nominally Republican as well as Democratic. Among the clearly Republican one-party strongholds are Vermont, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon and South Dakota. At least twenty-two states, then, or nearly half, are one-party setups, with some dozen others coming very close to qualifying. Public political scandals, it will be noted, are much less frequently heard of in the one- party states. Here it is as in one-party countries.
The single point to emphasize here is that Senator Clark is entirely correct, even reserved, in his sweeping reference to the legislatures. He does not exaggerate. As the lawyers would say, he is a sound witness. He does not, however, delve into the processes that brought such uncomely personnel into the legislative bodies. How did the honest electorate come to elect such canaille? That is, manifestly, another story, and is left to the next chapter.
