No More Learning

Some Luxembourg holding companies date back to 1929, when Parliament passed a law making it easy and inexpensive for them to be established and kept here. Not a few were or are facades for family businesses in nearby countries, shells to make possible the investment of income hidden from the tax collector.
Since this is not such an easy contrivance anymore, the reasons for setting up Luxembourg holding companies nowadays are likely to stem primarily from difficulties in carrying on essential business operations elsewhere.
This indeed has been the basis for the recent stir of holding-company activity by American corporate giants in this quiet, 999-square-mile Grand Duchy. With direct dollar sources of capital restricted by the American balance-of-payments restraints, Luxembourg has become a strategic base for raising needed investment capital in Europe.
Apart from basic tax advantages, the Duchy also provides a singular freedom from business regulation.
A holding company can be formed within weeks--days, says one American lawyer. The company is exempt from income and capital-gains taxes. Most important, Luxembourg requires no tax withheld [on payments to foreigners].
Actually, the only chance for a significant change in Congress and the stripe of elected officials generally is to get an altogether different type of person into active politics, perhaps men of the type of the non-Establishmentarians. Considering all factors, including the fuzzy mentality of the electorate, this will be very hard if not impossible to accomplish. The fundamental difficulty is institutional: the universal equal franchise that gives the vote-to clods.
It is not for lack of precept that congressmen conduct themselves as they do while bringing a laudably strict set of standards to bear against appointees in the executive and
judicial branches. Thomas Jefferson laid down the rule in 1801 when he was vice president and Senate presiding officer that "Where the private interests of a member are concerned in a bill of question he is to withdraw. " This is just what a competent judge does if there is any question of his personal involvement in a case sub judice.
Such a rule assumes that the relevant body consists of gentlemen and, perhaps, scholars. The electorate, it is observable, does not usually support such when they appear.
For the latter-day comers up from bayous, swamps, gutters and sties the rule was broadened by House Speaker James G. Blaine of Maine, who in 1874 asserted astonishingly that a member might vote for his private interests if the measure was not for his exclusive benefit but for the benefit of a group. (Blaine was exposed in 1884 as a bribe taker in connection with the securing of land grants for the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad. )
Said the Herald Tribune significantly in concluding its valuable series:
"Frequently a Senator or Representative's outside income results directly from the fact
that he is a member of Congress. " 73
Political Sources of New Fortunes
That the transfer of moneys to congressmen is a long-term, standard affair is attested by the Wall Street Journal of May 11, 1966, which says that "dozens" of congressmen "allow wealthy supporters to set up office funds or let lobbyists for business and labor sponsor testimonials, anniversary celebrations, birthday parties and other occasions or excuses for fund-raising not necessarily related to campaign needs--namely, office, entertainment and travel expenses. "
Few legislators, the Journal noted, reject such helpful emoluments, which come under the heading of perquisites of office. "But a majority of legislators," continued the Wall Street Pravda, "regard contributions made outside regular campaign fund-raising channels as perfectly proper, always assuming that the recipient doesn't mortgage his independence to the givers. "
These statements come under the heading of "laying it on the line" by Wall Street for those multitudes who are under some illusion about how, and why, the government is operated.
It is always well to remember that existing laws, passed by Congress and Congress alone, do not prohibit these activities. In fact, in many ways it would be tedious to probe, they encourage them. Congress no more navigates under any canon of ethics than does the Politburo. In this respect both bodies are on all fours. As in the case of any true sovereign, Congress is richly privileged. So, indeed, is the president.
Whatever Congress and the president are not specifically, in detail and under penalty, prohibited from doing they may do. So they do it, whatever it is.
The simple enumeration of powers of Congress in Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution should show any doubter that, collectively, this is an awesomely powerful assembly. Any small group such as the Establishment leaders that can by intrigue (the supreme method of practical politics) manipulate this divided collectivity internally, obviously has in its hands a formidable engine, with a wealth of modern technology at its service. The only restraints upon Congress, largely theoretical as far as immediate or individual actions are concerned, are the Supreme Court and the president. The latter, if he wants cooperation from it, must cooperate with it.
Difficult though it is to build a fortune by engaging in new business ventures among the established corporate giants, there is a wide open road to wealth if one knows how
to worm one's way into politics. By all present indications, really big new fortunes in the future will be more and more politically based, and we are already, perhaps, in the era of big emerging political fortunes. Should this become so, it will be evident that the United States is reenacting parts of Roman and later European history when fortune- building was the perquisite of men associated with sovereign powers rather than of men more directly related to the market place. Much of such political fortune-building, it is notable, was in the past related to the systems of taxation and government contracting.
Ex-Senator Paul Douglas, a careful student of congressional ethics, does not believe it would do any good to raise congressional pay but, looking at the fat rewards given high executives by corporations to keep their wonder boys in line, one pauses to reflect. If congressmen were each paid $200,000 per year plus $50,000 expenses, all tax-free, they would at least know whence their good fortune came. They would know for whom they were working. And such pay, by visibly exalting the office, might attract many others who under the present system do not wish to engage in the shabby dodges, the money grubbing, necessary to achieve substantial emoluments--that is, so-called financial security. The total public cost would be relatively slight, only $133,750,000 annually, a bagatelle compared with sums now voted for all manner of dubious projects, far less than the cost of elections.
Opposition to such a pay boost might be counted upon to come from two quarters--the frugal-minded rank-and-file citizens to whom the present $30,000 annually plus expenses is in itself an astronomic sum, and the very rich. The latter--or at least their advisers and lobbyists--would in many cases probably oppose the idea because such pay would make congressmen truly independent of the patronage of the rich. A senator who had served only six years could easily accumulate $1 million of his own and could thereafter safely afford to stick his tongue out at ubiquitous paymasters. True, such compensation would still not be enough for some, who would be up to the old tricks, perhaps even more flamboyantly. But threatened loss of the cushy job, as in the corporations, would be a big deterrent to skulduggery. Corporate officers, it can be shown, are personally far more straitlaced than most congressmen.
The Basic Deal
We are now in a position to understand the basic deal, arrived at by unconscious but instinctively sure stages, among finpols, corp-pols and pubpols in the welfare-warfare economy.
In return for substantial camouflaged tax (and other) concessions ranging up to complete exemption for very large incomes (these being constantly sought by the spokesmen for big wealth who appear before congressional committees) and for thoughtfully saddling most of the tax burden onto the politically illiterate lower labor force, the pubpols have been heavily financed on their road to financial independence by "campaign" contributions, testimonial gifts, law firm retainers and simple donations. Without such financing the poor-boys-who-made-good in politics would never have acquired the stake necessary to set themselves up as entrepreneurs under federal allocation of licenses (which they indirectly control), in building-and-loan operations, television-radio broadcasting, consumer loan sharking, local banking and insurance underwriting and subsidized speculation in oil and mineral lands. And without retainers from grateful corporate clients many lawyer-congressmen would be hard put to divert lucrative business from some of the less directly political law firms.
Just as the more impetuous racketeers when in difficult straits with the law turn to skillful high-fee pleaders like Edward Bennett Williams or Percy Foreman (in an earlier day they turned to the Max Steuers and Clarence Darrows), so the big corporations when they find themselves in a tight spot, legalistically speaking, turn to the big-league
law firms of Wall Street, State Street and La Salle Street. While for routine matters the bush league of congressional law firms will do, when the action gets really serious it is necessary to bring the big guns of the big-name firms to bear. Before such luminaries, entranced judges sit properly spellbound at seeing it uncontrovertibly proved once again by law, logic and philosophy that wealth is virtue, poverty is crime. The lesser firms, however, are indispensable for routinely guiding legislation or softening the touch of regulatory commissions to a delicate pianissimo that would arouse the artistic envy of a Horowitz.
Naturally, with the big property owners given a large degree of accommodation up to complete exemption, with loopholes liberally carved in the imposing tax wall, it is necessary to saddle the rising costs of the welfare-warfare economy onto the shoulders of the rank-and-file in the labor force. Hence the lopsided tax structure, Wilbur Mills's "House of Horrors," that we have scrutinized in only slight detail.
The signal contribution of the democratic politician here (and this is well understood in such places as Wall Street) is that he is gifted with the ability to flimflam this large collection of taxpayers with stupefying rhetorical pyrotechnics and appeals to free- floating sentiment; he puts these gifts to work so that, even if not cheered, the public cannot grope its way out of the verbal barrage in which appear all the gems of stale oratory. In addition, to show he is friendly he kisses babies, smiles, shakes hands endlessly and gobbles strange foods thrust upon him by the local constituency.
His brain in something of a fog, grasping desperately at some notion of a lesser evil, the common man feels that the vote he is about to cast is the best thing, everything considered, that he can manage in the hairy circumstances. So, perhaps not too happy about the whole thing, he stoutly votes for Horace "Bugsy" Latrine, "The People's Friend," and against John "The Louse" Outhouse, who slipped and allowed himself to be photographed giving candy to a Negro baby, thus fomenting the sinister rumor that he keeps a harem of lascivious Negresses contrary to the laws of God and men.
Karl Marx, in an often quoted apothegm, thundered that "The State is the executive committee of the ruling class. " Although this is merely redundantly truistic it is often disputed by bargain-counter sages. Yet the utterance has misled many self-styled Marxists to believe that the finpols or big capitalists issue direct whiplash orders to their docile minions in government, sometimes by picking up a phone in Wall Street and barking harsh instructions over the wire. Nothing could be further from the truth, even though direct wires from Wall Street to the White House have been known to exist during Republican Administrations up to the time at least of Herbert Clark Hoover.
The process through which the finpols induce the pubpols to march in lock-step with them is much subtler than this but not so Marxianly subtle as merely being common participants in a cultural climate; nor does it consist of winning them over by powerful logical arguments in favor of the free enterprise or capitalist system. The finpols insure that the pubpols will be like-minded by making it possible for the latter to become free-- that is, government-licensed entrepreneurs themselves. The fusion of thoughtways is achieved this simply. That the process is not more subtle anyone may observe by noticing how quickly a politician can change his outlook if the quid pro quo is not forthcoming. In such circumstances self-styled conservatives can be led to stand for quite radical measures, let the cultural climate be what it may.
It is noticeable that congressmen and spokesmen for the rich in general are much more impassioned in defense of the free enterprise system of government economic support than the prime beneficiaries. One seldom hears of a Rockefeller, Du Pont, Mellon, Ford or lesser luminary of great wealth bawling wildly to the countryside about the
impeccable virtues of free and easy enterprise. This task is discreetly left to recent converts.
And while I believe there is much to be said for capitalism in some of the modified variegated forms it takes, particularly in Europe, and while I also believe there is little, humanistically speaking, to be said for the Leninist version of the vaguely outlined Marxist substitute, capitalism at its best can arouse in the sensitive observer at most a cool and moderate sort of admiration. It did not, contrary to the sly suggestion of its political friends, invent science and machine technology (industrialism), launch the Age of Discovery or put in their places the natural resources of the earth. Rather did it impress these into its service. Nor did it foster the population boom, which is greatest outside its confines. Even tried-and-true capitalist economists of any stature do not trace to capitalism all novel boons, whatever they may be, although anti-capitalists madly trace to it all evil.
It is left to recent off-the-street converts, beneficiaries of the big quick deal, the windfall, to discover overwhelming virtues in a system that, whatever its merits, is subject to evaluative analysis that brings to light not a few dubious aspects into which it is not edifying to delve.
Appreciations of capitalism by economists, it is always evident, are far more muted than those of its public political celebrants. For those who wonder at the emotional fervor of the politicos, the explanation is as simple as it is vulgar. Would not almost anyone except the rarely cultivated man be inclined to see, as in a Pauline revelation, vast merits in a system that suddenly, without any forewarning, showers down upon him personally, apparently from nowhere, vast rewards? Would not such a man--a Dirksen, perhaps--be dramatically and sincerely struck by the suddenly revealed beauties of the system? Would he not feel strongly impelled when the occasion presented itself to draw upon whatever eloquence he commanded to defend and extol that system? He was nothing, and he knows this; the system made him into something, perhaps a television pundit, perhaps a senator, even president. Here is ground for true belief.
There is a more immediate reason, too, for the pubpols to see extravagant merits in the system, which plays the role of the goose that repeatedly lays the golden eggs--for them. Many economists, some in dismay, have observed how Congress is inclined to starve the public sector of the economy (as government nonmilitary operations are somewhat ornately styled) and to favor the private or corporate sector. Congressmen in general show little enthusiasm for schools, parks, hospitals, sanatoria, low-income housing, libraries and the like but immoderate enthusiasm for, say, armaments entrepreneurs and bowling alley proprietors. While structures and programs in the public sector can be "milked" to a certain extent at their inception, as in the letting of contracts and buying land, the process cannot be repeated indefinitely as with going concerns in the private sector.
With a going concern, such as a bowling alley, it is different. It can, first, be taxed continuously--a great advantage; schools and the like pay no taxes but eat them up. Furthermore, the proprietor can be shaken down regularly for campaign contributions and off-the-cuff gifts in return for regulatory legerdemain. The proprietor is to a certain extent, at least as far as the courts will permit, at the mercy of the "democratic" politician and his little tin box.
And if the "democratic" politician has been thoughtful enough to intersect two new superhighways at the door of the bowling alley, with mandatory long-cycle traffic lights installed, he is obviously deserving of a testimonial donation for public service from the bowling alley proprietor.
Hasn't the business generated boosted gross national product? A politician who can do this and at the same time gain public plaudits for his sagacity is obviously a statesman who should be concretely recognized.
Cooperation, it is evident, is necessary between finpols and pubpols if the system is to work as it does. Nor are showdowns between the two ever necessary because all that is usually required to bring most of the latter into line (if they stray) is money, the big grease of American politics. In saying this, one is not saying that all pubpols are susceptible to the monetary touch. It is not necessary to have all of them on the side of the big money. The entire operation, indeed, looks better if there are some honest dissenters, even vociferous dissenters. Such dissent appears to imply that positions have been taken, each way, on the merits of an argument. There are, perhaps, mysterious reasons on the side of the majority, which consists of sound down-to-earth men like Everett Dirksen and Lyndon Baines Johnson.
All that the big money needs is a "democratic" majority-of a subcommittee of 3 to a legislative committee, of a legislative committee of 15 to 25, of a caucus of 50 to 100, of a legislative body of 100 or 435. This is not much to achieve in a nation of some 200 million immortal souls. And even if there is not a majority on the side of the money interest, all is not lost because any suddenly flaring opposition can be blocked and stalemated by a minority under the rules. If the money interest cannot have its way, neither can anyone else unless there has been a rare political upheaval induced by nontypical circumstances.
So much has been written about the veritable misdeeds of the corporations, not without ample grounds, that there is a tendency among critics to overlook the indubitable fact that business enterprises sometimes, even often, like black sheep of a family, act quite legally, properly and even meritoriously and are nevertheless clipped below the belt by the pubpols. It would take hundreds of pages to detail all the harrowing cases in this vastly neglected area, so I cite a single recent major instance simply to remind the reader of what goes on.
L. Judson Morhouse, fifty-two, an authentic Anglo-Saxon and chairman of the Republican Party in New York State, was convicted and sentenced in June, 1966, to two to three years of penal servitude on two counts of bribery, a very serious offense. The judge could have imposed a sentence of twenty years and a fine of $9,000 but, as he explained, the defendant until his conviction had an "unblemished" reputation and "has many good friends in most high places who have willingly come forward to urge leniency. " The judge also noted that Morhouse "was a man who wielded tremendous governmental power and influence" which, as the judge himself volunteered, he had "perverted" for "personal and private gain. " According to the prosecutor, Morhouse was an "influence peddler"--not uncommon in politics.
The specific charge against Morhouse was that he induced former State Liquor Authority Chairman Epstein to accept an illegal $50,000 for granting the Playboy Club of Chicago a New York liquor license and that he, initiator of the deal, assisted the Playboy group in bribing Epstein. The Playboy Club was a legitimate taxpaying enterprise--not even a sweatshop--that sought to do legitimate taxpaying business in New York City. Yet it was required to pay toll to do legitimate business--a common occurrence as between small and moderate-sized businesses and politicians. This is one reason (rather than labor costs) many enterprises move from one part of the country to another, especially out of big cities, although after they get well settled in a new location they often have the "bite" again put on them by local politicos. Sometimes, though, the "bite" is smaller in one place than another so moving may be advantageous.
One can refuse to pay and instead fight for one's rights in the courts, but experience has shown that this process can be so costly as to be ruinous.
Morhouse took his sentence stoically, although his lawyer said he had been punished enough by merely being put on trial (a strange doctrine) . Against this contention, the prosecutor cited a long list of other instances in which Morhouse had received "fees" ranging up to $100,000 from enterprises engaged in legitimate endeavors, enough to give him success or what sociologists coyly refer to as "upward social mobility. "
So it is not, very evidently, necessary for a company to be delinquent in some way in order to experience the exactions of politicians, although the big corporations are seldom bustled about in the way the Playboy Club was. Morhouse would never have acted as he did in this case if the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey had wished to put up a gas station or refinery in some unseemly place. When the big corporation wants anything out of the routine--and the Playboy Club did not even ask that--it simply states its case "on the merits" in high places and gets all or most of what it wants. As a matter of tactics it asks for a great deal more than it really wants in order to be roundly rejected in some way, thus making the regulatory commission, public executive or legislature look properly vigilant in the eyes of the public--a simple instance of finpolitics. The reason the big enterprises no longer resort to crude bribery, except perhaps through remote agents in minor situations where a local ordinance bars the road, is that they have the ways already thoroughly greased all along the line through "campaign" contributions, donations-for-public-merit, testimonials, law business, foundation grants to savants and other forms of patronage involving legal tender. The request, whatever it is, in substance slips through easily all the way up to and including Congress. But if some random individual made an analogous request, he would be hailed before the nearest psychiatrist or, perhaps, jailed for jarring the dust on some moth-eaten statute.
Morhouse, it should be made clear, did not suddenly suffer any loss of esteem among those "in the know. " He had simply been caught working on a highly competitive street- New York City is Democratic and upstate New York Republican and hostile to the city; Morhouse in the city was somewhat out of the jurisdiction under his surveillance and up against rivalrous politicos. According to the well-understood rules of the game, he had to serve as a scapegoat, thereby helping to reassure the public. My own opinion of Morhouse did not change in the slightest when he was convicted because I always assumed, on the basis of a long line of similar cases, that as a state party chairman he was doing something of the sort--if not this then something else of a gamey order. What he did was hardly more than par for the course.
Just as the businessman is not in business for his health, the typical American politician is not in politics for his health, the pay of office or because he is enamored of the public. So to suppose would, in the light of much evidence, strain credulity beyond the breaking point.
Money in Politics
That a great deal of money is bandied about in politics is well known. On this topic many extensive studies have been written that need not be summarized here. All, fragmentary though they are, show a steady avalanche of money. 74
What is now, today, causing concern about this telltale phase of American political life is the rising cost.
It was estimated, for example, by Dr. Herbert E. Alexander, an authority on election costs, director of the Citizens Research Foundation and Kennedy-appointed executive director of the President's Commission on Campaign Costs, that the 1964 national campaigns cost at least a whopping $200 million, not counting efforts by volunteers,
unpaid efforts by public officials or amateurs and sideline commentary by telecasters, newspapers and other publications. 75 And campaign costs, as we have observed, are not the only items of political expenditure. The bill, it is evident, is running very high.
An incisive, brief updating of the situation was written by Victor Bernstein for The Nation, June 27, 1966, under the title of "Private Wealth and Public Office: The High Cost of Campaigning. " As it was shown, political money is not put up by the rank and file of citizens. In all its forms it invariably Comes from property owners and people of assured position-the upper 1 per cent of income receivers--apart from such money as has in recent decades filtered into the pot from labor leaders, themselves in the upper- income strata.
As Bernstein made clear, the electoral system, as distinct from the extra-legal politicians' system within government (another item of big expense), is extremely costly to operate. In the 1966 off-year, for example, $175 million were scheduled to be spent solely at the state levels. Again, a Senate seat, as Bernstein testifies, can cost a million or more, and $2 million were spent to make John Lindsay the able mayor of New York. This last leaves out of account what was spent to defeat him.
Noting that in order to be in politics one must be rich or have rich friends, some of the currently rich ones cited being the Kennedys, Harriman, the Rockefellers, Romney, Pell, Ottinger and Johnson (there are others), Bernstein raised the rather marginal question of whether democracy (by which he meant the rundown U. S. political system) is "better served by relatively penurious politicians who owe office to support by the rich" or by the rich in person. He did not note the fact, significant in my view, that Johnson like many others not mentioned grew rich while in, of, by and for politics.
Congressional Origins
Most congressmen, all now in the upper 1 per cent of income receivers, were at least originally impecunious. This is made crystal clear in Donald R. Matthews's thorough study, U. S. Senators and Their World. According to Matthews, all except a handful of senators were the sons of men in middle-class occupations. 76
On the basis of the mainly blurry class indices he cites--professional, proprietor and official, farmers, low-salaried workers and industrial wage earners--I should rather say most came from lower-middle-class and middle-class occupational backgrounds. This is made evident, first by the fact that among 180 senators in the decade 1947-57 no fewer than 52 per cent were rural born 77 and at the time of their birth none of the criteria of upper-middle-class status such as relatively high income and prolonged schooling were ordinarily found in rural areas. "Places like Centerville, South Dakota; Isabel, Illinois; Ten Mile, Pennsylvania; Rising Sun, Delaware; and Honea Path, South Carolina, nurtured more senators [in the group studied] than all the cities of the United States combined. " 78 Most of the remaining senators came from small towns, with the most overrepresented small-towners from places of 2,500 to 5,000 population. 79 The Senate, in brief, consisted largely of pure hicks, ruling an urbanized, mechanized society.
As to class origins, "The children of low-salaried workers, wage earners, servants, and farm laborers, which together comprised 66 per cent of the gainfully employed in 1900, contributed only 7 per cent of postwar senators. [Owing to the disparity of birth rates between the upper and lower classes, the disparity in political life-chances, as Matthews notes, was "actually greater than these figures indicate. "--F. L. ] Only two of the 180 men, Senators Wagner and O'Daniel, were the sons of unskilled, urban wage earners. Wagner's father was a janitor in a New York City tenement; O'Daniel's father was a construction worker. Senator Purtell was the son of a cigarmaker; McNamara, of a shipfitter; Daniel (S. C. ), of a millwright; Welker, of a carpenter; Pastore, of a tailor; Cordon and Dirksen, of painters; Payne and Dworshak, of printers; Anderson, of a
salesman; Myers, of a bookkeeper; Lennon, of a clerk; Margaret Chase Smith was the daughter of a barber. " 80 There were no Negroes, although Negroes constituted 10 per cent of the population.
"Among the sons of farmers, some were born in relative poverty, yet it is virtually impossible to ascertain this in specific cases. It is still possible to conclude that very few senators were born in working-class and lower-class families. " 81
Yet 33 per cent of Democrats and 31 per cent of Republicans had fathers who were farmers. 82 Farmers have never been considered upper middle class. And 16 per cent of Democrats and 7 per cent of Republicans had fathers who were lawyers, not invariably an upper-middle-class index in the United States.
That most of these men are generically middle class, and as such likely to be upward strivers and admirers of entrepreneurial as distinct from rentier plutocracy, is also shown by the fact that just prior to their debut in the Senate 102 were job-holding political officials, 88 having started out as lawyers and 97 regarding the law as their principal nonpolitical occupation. 83 By percentages, 26 per cent of these pre-senatorial officeholders were in law-enforcement offices (prosecutors), 23 per cent in administrative offices, 17 per cent in state legislatures, 11 per cent in the House of Representatives, 9 per cent in the governor's chair, 9 per cent in local elective offices, 3 per cent in some statewide elective office and 2 per cent on the congressional staff. 84
For those hoping for a better day in politics with new upcoming men, it should be noticed that the pipelines feeding high office are now filled with similar types. Anyone looking to the state legislatures for zeal in better government can get a glimpse of the future in Congress that will induce sober second thoughts.
While class origin may be broadly indicative of outlook it is not determining in every case, as is easily shown. Despite their humble origins Everett M. Dirksen and Margaret Chase Smith have all along been pillars of the Establishment which Joseph C. Clark and a number of other propertied patricians sharply oppose. Johnson, once literally dirt- poor, was a leader of the Establishment. Looking further afield one sees that some of the leading oppressors of all time were of lower-class origin: Hitler was a house painter, Stalin was a lower class theological student and Mussolini was a one-time school teacher. On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the modern world's most forceful exponent of democracy, and Frederick Engels, collaborator and financial angel of Karl Marx, were both wealthy. Nearly all the original Bolshevik leaders were middle-class and upper-class intellectuals; there was not a true proletarian among them nor, be it noted, did they produce a pro-proletarian government.
Most of the Fabian Socialists and, indeed, socialists in general, have been middle class, upper middle class or aristocrats like Lord Bertrand Russell and many others duly certified as such in Burke's Peerage. Socialism is too remote in its aims for most workers to understand. Most lower-class people in politics, perhaps influenced by the cultural climate, act so as to deny their origins.
Although class origins, especially from the middle upward, do often have an influence on political outlooks, what should be rationally determining in judging politicians is the set of propositions they are willing to implement in action. If they frame their working propositions rationally, in the light of the evidence and according to critically refined values they are, as I see it, jewels beyond price whether born and raised in a sty or a palace and whether styled conservative, moderate, liberal or radical.
Digressing a bit, let it be noted that Matthews brings out that 84 per cent of senators went to college, and of those attending college 31 per cent went to the most highly rated institutions. No less than 45 per cent specialized in law. Of those specializing in law, 47 per cent went to law schools of the highest type. As lawyers, then, many of these men
were theoretically capable of understanding what a new statute meant. They could, if they wished, spot the loophole in a tax measure on first reading as though it were the Empire State Building. The point is: The tax laws are no accident or consequence of carelessness. They are as premeditated by the Establishment as a bullet from a Colt . 45, intended to kill. Most senators, in other words, usually know precisely what they are doing. What is in question is not their intelligence but their values-in-action.
Professor Matthews is carried away by misplaced enthusiasm, however, when he notes that "Senators are among the most educated--in the formal sense of the word--of all occupational groups in the United States," with 85 per cent of them having been to college against only 14 per cent in the entire population. 85 It is true that he qualifies with the phrase "in the formal sense of the word," which merely indicates they attended school.
But, thorough, Professor Matthews makes clear that of those who attended but did not necessarily finish college 69 per cent attended other than Ivy League (20 per cent non- Ivy League eastern schools or the midwestern "Big Ten" universities). While some of this 69 per cent may have attended, finishing or not, rigorous schools, most of them, as Who's Who shows, attended distinctly makeshift swampwater colleges. *
(* Matthews, in his discussion of senators and lobbyists, pp. 176-96, illustrates very well the tendency of academic political scientists to avert their eyes from obvious unpleasant facts. He introduces his genteel discussion of this phase with a lobbyist's story about two women watching a senator and a lobbyist conversing innocently in a Senate waiting room. "O-o-h! " says one of the women, awed, "Is he bribing him now? " Although a very fine study, the Matthews book on this and similar phases we have examined reminds one very much of an old-time silent film drama in which the hero chastely kisses the heroine, who thereupon proceeds to have a baby. That anything else happened between kiss and the appearance of the little stranger was not suggested. Similarly, legislation to this school of political science seems to be the consequence of immaculate ratiocination. "Slush" is a word it does not recognize. )
That many of the senators are in no sense educated men, whatever their on-the-record schooling, I shall show by citing two salient cases.
Senatorial Irrationality
Senator James Eastland, chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee, whom Who's Who reports as having attended without finishing the University of Alabama and Vanderbilt University, in 1962 published an elaborate report prepared by his staff purporting that various of the justices of the Supreme Court had in scores of cases made "pro-Communist" decisions and that the court as a whole had made such decisions no less than forty-six times. 86
In every instance the Eastland mode of logic adhered to the following form: "Communist officials are politicians.
"Republican and Democratic officials are politicians.
"Therefore, Republican and Democratic officials are pro-Communist. "
No educated man could seriously make such a carefully premeditated argument on a serious question.
Former Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson since entering the White House has shown the same sort of elementary confusion, especially on the Vietnam question, thereby disturbing the professoriate from coast to coast. The Johnsonian whirligig arguments in favor of its Vietnam action have been notoriously confused, contrary and contradictory, thus destroying the entire ostensibly reasonable structure.
The initial Johnsonian logical error about Vietnam did not concern form but content. The argument was as follows:
"If people are bombed they will negotiate.
"These people are bombed.
"Therefore, these people will negotiate. "
Although valid in form this argument was completely unsound because its first premise was known to be factually false. Official studies of the behavior of people and governments in England, Germany, Russia and elsewhere in World War II, all known to the American military, showed in fact that if people are bombed their tendency to resist increases. Malta was bombed almost to extinction by the Germans yet never sued for peace.
The sound argument, dismissed out of hand by Johnson, who was probably not bright enough to grasp it, was as follows: "If people are bombed it is known they will resist more desperately (and not negotiate). "
This, in fact, happened, showing the value of logic-if one knows it and applies it.
Mr. Johnson's educational attainments, on the formal record, go beyond those of Mr. Eastland. Mr. Johnson holds a Bachelor of Science degree--from the Southwest Texas State Teachers College.
Not only does the Senate (and House) consist mainly of hicks but of poorly educated hicks even though they must be conceded to possess a certain low animal cunning. The main sin of the majority consists of simple presumption in presenting themselves as leaders of men.
Blue-Sky Limits
As to money in politics, Bernstein quotes Robert Price, one-time hard-headed deputy mayor of New York, very precisely to the point that beyond a certain small amount from the national and county committees a congressional candidate must rely on his own efforts. "If he commands a popular following, he can raise a substantial sum from the small contributions of many people through a broadcast or mail appeal," said Price. "But usually for the bulk of what he needs he must rely on friends, or friends of friends, or labor or business. The biggest givers are likely to be firms with government contracts, or with hopes of getting one; they are what I call the predators--the guys who, if you win, will want something for their money. " [Emphasis added. ]
Noting that most campaigners are not so fussy as Mayor Lindsay of New York in turning down certain large offerings, Bernstein agrees with many observers that "the higher and more influential the office sought, the more likely is the contributors' list to be studded with the names of the wealthy. " These give directly to many party committees, buy a full-page ad in a party pamphlet for $15,000 at a clip (until recently tax-deductible), join the President's Club for $1,000 or more and clamor to pay high rates for places at testimonial dinners.
Again quoting Mr. Price after reviewing the influence of money in politics, Bernstein continues:
"'It is in seeking the nomination,' says Robert Price, 'that wealth or access to it, counts most for the candidate. Once he wins the nomination, he already has the attraction of a winner, and he has the party apparatus at his disposal; until then, he is more or less on his own. '" John F. Kennedy's triumph over Hubert Humphrey in the West Virginia primaries is given as a case in point.
There are jungles of laws governing the use of money in the electoral process but, as Bernstein shows, they are full of holes, obviously premeditated.
A political committee is allowed to receive or spend only $3 million in any year, but the law applies only to committees operating in two or more states--not to state or local committees and not to series of interstate committees. A candidate could legally have a hundred committees collecting $3 million each, or $300 million in all. He could have a local committee that collected the whole $300 million.
. Every political committee under federal jurisdiction must report to the House of Representatives all contributors of $100 or more and all recipients of $10 or more, but the reports are kept in Washington (for a period of only two years) and are not subject to check or audit.
Each Senate candidate may spend personally up to $25,000, each House candidate up to $5,000 but there is no limit on contributions receivable or on what others spend for him. Each can legally have an infinity of committees receiving unlimited amounts.
No national bank, corporation or labor union may contribute as much as a dime to the election, primary, pre-nomination convention or caucus campaign of any federal candidate but officers of such entities may legally contribute without limit and may form any number of "educational" and "nonpartisan" organizations.
No government contractor may contribute to a federal candidate during the negotiations for or the life of his contracts but an officer of a contracting firm may legally contribute without hindrance or limit.
No individual whatsoever, in the entire universe, may contribute more than $5,000 to any one candidate or any one committee during any calendar year whatsoever but --any individual may make an infinite series of $5,000 gifts to as many candidates or as many committees for a single candidate as he likes.
What all this means, behind the legalistic verbiage, is that the sky is the limit and that any individual, corporation, bank, labor union or other entity whatever can contribute by various channels as much as it wants to any single man or collection of men seeking office. The laws governing the use of money in elections, like the laws governing the use of money in rewarding public officials, are pure balderdash as far as interfering with the practice. The sole purpose of the laws as drawn is, as in the case of the tax laws, to appease uninstructed public opinion and at the same time permit popularly irksome practices to continue without let-up.
And what all this shows most saliently is that influence over or ready access to the makers of public policy has very high cash value.
For readers who may feel that the sources I cite on this point are not sufficiently conservative and are therefore tainted, we may turn once again to the trusty Wall Street Journal, under date of September 20, 1960. There, on the subject of campaign money, it is duly set forth:
"Where does all the money come from? Despite growing stress on little gifts, fund- raisers still depend on wealthy contributors who give $500 or more. That's why Republican Chairman [Thruston] Morton made a special plea last week to the members of New York Union League Club, calling the party's financial problem 'most difficult. ' And that's why some Democrats are worried over possible defections of Texas oil men. As a measure of concern, a Democratic team made up of Sen. Smathers of Florida and Rep. lkard of Texas last month gathered 100 Houston oil men together to reassure them: Don't worry about the platform; the Democrats won't hurt you. " Smathers and Ikard spoke truly.
One can always say this to people of wealth about both parties: Don't worry about the platform; you won't get hurt because the little old Establishment and, most likely, the president himself have everything under nice control. The platform is pure blarney.
What would happen if Congress, for instance, passed a thoroughly equitable tax law? For one thing, the members of Congress who voted for such a law would quickly find their extracurricular emoluments ended. The rich, it is well to note, make their political contributions out of part of their tax savings, thus serving to keep public policies as they want them and at public cost. Neat. . . .
A Note on Methodology
On the score of method many political scientists would no doubt be inclined to fault me for highlighting what they call the seamy side of politics. What they are almost uniformly inclined to do in their writings is to put it all "in perspective" by sandwiching in passing reference to these dealings among a vast mass of routine formal details. The story, as journalists say, gets lost. It is buried in the salad.
If sports writers used their method in reporting a prizefight, they would chronologically and even-handedly record every punch and movement from the beginning and terminate with the drab curt statement that the champion finally scored a knockout with an illegal punch on the back of the neck. The headline would read: FIGHT AT THE CARDEN. This would be "objectivity," but of a crazy sort.
Instead, able (and permitted) to sift the significant from the trivial, the seasoned sports writer is more apt to begin his account:
"Scoring a knock-out in the second minute of the ninth round with the illegal rabbit- punch, Plug-Ugly Muldoon last night retained the world's heavyweight championship as excited fans jeered and threw pop bottles. Apparently the referee did not see the illegal punch and therefore did not disqualify the champion although the blow was clearly visible from ringside.
"From the beginning it was a dirty fight with the loser, Ratsy Schlemiel, freely butting in the clinches and Muldoon levering in low blows of explosive force. Still, the referee, for whom many have suggested an eye examination or a long vacation, did not see although he twice warned each gladiator. . . . "
The headline on this masterpiece would read something like:
MULDOON RETAINS CROWN
IN DIRTY BRAWL AT GARDEN SCHLEMIEL K. O. 'D WITH FOUL BLOW REFEREE BOOED
Newspaper reporting of Congress, however, ordinarily tends to follow the drab cue given by the political scientists.
If congressional reporting in general were as forthright as sports reporting, a headline on a congressional session might read somewhat as follows:
CONGRESS IN NEW TAX SWINDLE CLIPS LABOR FORCE
AS STOCK PRICES SOAR BONE THROWN TO BLIND VETS DIRKSEN FORESEES PROSPERITY FOR ALL
The text would be similarly to the point.
In Defense of the Politician
For any reader who is now ready to bring in a hanging verdict against the genus politician Americanus, let me interpose a restraining caveat.
Under the American theory of government the people are sovereign and have the right to boot out any officeholder in duly prescribed elections. "Throw the rascals out," has been the battle cry in many rousing elections, often coming from the throats of other rascals trying to squeeze in.
The assumption behind this apparent permissiveness is that the people (by definition good) know, or can sense mysteriously, who is deserving between two politicians. But as seasoned politicians know, meritorious service is not sufficient to retain the favor of the electorate.
This could be shown by the citation of scores of cases but I will here cite a single recent lamentable case. Senator Kenneth B. Keating, Republican incumbent, was defeated in New York in 1964 by Robert F. Kennedy, Democrat. The electorate had no particular distaste for Keating, who had functioned as a liberal, voted for all measures preponderantly favored by New Yorkers and was roundly praised before and after his defeat by a wide spectrum of editorialists. As Senator Kennedy himself later analyzed his victory, Keating made a tactical mistake by not merely standing in dignity on his record. Instead, Keating in the course of the campaign launched a panicky attack on Kennedy as a carpetbagger from Massachusetts, thus opening the door to attention- getting verbal counter-blows by Kennedy which he could not otherwise have delivered with any good grace.
The downfall of the civilized but non-lustrous Keating showed once again that electoral tactics and the appearance of an attractive new face may count in an election more heavily than unquestioned merit in office.
Having seen this sort of thing happen many times, knowing the ditheriness of the electorate, the impecunious man in politics usually guards against it by clandestine counter-organizational measures and by seeing to it while in office that he gathers something of value to tide himself over in the event he is brusquely turned out. The politician, in the form of his personal profit enterprises, his organization and the various Establishments going up the line in a hierarchy, belongs to something very analogous to an underground trade union. Committed for life to the holding of public office, he does not intend to see himself unemployed or, if suddenly turned out, without ready means of self-support. He is, in brief, intelligent within his zany environment.
If arrangements similar to those affecting the politician applied to all employees they would be forced, every two, four or six years, to debate with rivals for their jobs before company stockholders, customers and assorted cranks. If these thought a new candidate looked fresher, younger, more clean-cut, sexier or was better spoken or more churchly they would vote him in. It is precisely to defend themselves against critical judgments of that kind that workers, whenever they succeed in organizing, vociferously stress job seniority and job security. The quixotic democratic idea that an officeholder, a man of no hereditary substance, dependent only upon his salary, should be subject to offhand dismissal every few years at the hands of the hoi polloi, thereupon to join the throng of job seekers in the open labor market, is one that has little appeal for the ordinary, up- from-nowhere, jerk-water politician. He therefore guards against such a dire eventuality in every way he can think of, some highly aromatic and far out in left field.
What happens in the case of many successful politicians is that they are so intelligently careful about their many defensive measures, and so lucky, that they reap far more than job security and carryover money for life's arduous road. They become authentically rich, in a position to thumb their noses at the foolish public, which they freely if covertly do.
It should not be thought that I am offering an apology for the politician in thus presenting him, accurately, as a job-protecting specialized worker on his way up in the world. I am simply offering the perspective from his personal point of view. It is because of the position he occupies under oath, transcending in importance that of the physician-surgeon, that one holds him, after everything has been said on all sides, to the strictest accounting. When a physician-surgeon is able to enhance his own security by deviating from the highest canons of medical practice, as by performing unnecessary, high-fee operations, society and his peers do not forgive him merely because his financial problem is understood. In the same way we can safely condemn the typical off-the-soil politician: He is betraying his true responsibilities in order to achieve personal accommodation vis-a`-vis the mob.
The Upside-Down Republic
In his great Republic, praised by some, derided by others, Plato laid out a reasoned scheme of government in analogy with what his primitive psychology comprehended of the individual. A man, as Plato saw it, consists chiefly of a head or rational function, the chest or spirited function (heart and lungs) and the stomach or appetitional function. People, as he saw them, were classifiable as these functions dominated their temperaments.
Because the head was presumptively the better (because rational) part of a man, Plato deduced that the head should rule the state. Hence a philosopher or man of learning should be king, assisted by similar men of learning. Should a ruler be a man of knowledge or an ignorant man? Obviously, he should be a man of knowledge. The safety of the state and its people required it. Who would deny it?
Subject to these rational, informed rulers--men of learning and intellectuals--would be men of the spirit, whom Plato called guardians and auxiliaries. Guardians corresponded to our civil service employees and auxiliaries to soldiers. As Plato saw them, both regarded personal honor or prestige (status) as the highest value just as the philosophers primarily valued knowledge and insight.
These strata in the Platonic Republic would lead very ascetic lives, would own no property, would never marry and would conduct sexual relations only on rare occasions when perfect children were desired. Women as well as men were equally to be guardians and auxiliaries. Children of these strata would be brought up by special teachers, would never be left under the corrupting influence of their doting parents.
Below these strata would be the common people, perpetual victims of their insatiable appetites, who would lead their confused catch-as-catch-can lives under rules laid down from above, although they might rise into the ascetic strata if they wished. The people of the appetites might own property, marry, have and mal-educate their own children and copulate blissfully with all the abandon of Hindus on a holiday.
It is from Plato that we derive our high ideals of the lawgiver, rarely approached in reality, as anyone can see.
But although Plato's scheme, intended only as a didactic device, is now widely ridiculed by trivial minds, it is worth noticing that what we have in the United States is its exact opposite--hardly an improvement.
The rulers, in our present scheme, are people of the largest appetites, to whom most public deference is paid. While appetites exist among all, their greatest strength is obviously among the most voracious acquisitors, the rich and their sycophants in office.
Rated considerably below these in public esteem are our guardians and auxiliaries: civil servants and soldiers.
And, popularly rated lowest of all, are our philosophers or men of learning. One must admit that the public is a bit ambivalent and confused on this score owing to some colossal breakthroughs scored in recent years by the learned and by no one else; but as between a plutocrat and a politician on the one hand and a professor or vagrant intellectual on the other any popular survey will show that the professor, proverbially absent-minded and inept, is low man in the totem-poll. He is in most schools kept on a tight leash held by trustees. He is rarely a free agent.
We are confronted, it is evident, with an exact inversion of the Platonic scheme. Yet some persons unreasonably expect the common people of the larger appetites installed at the top to conduct themselves like Platonic philosophers, guardians and auxiliaries, which is much like expecting a gorilla to conduct himself like a Lord Chesterfield.
Subversive Jeffersonianism
In voting, politicians have noticed, the American electorate is hardly attracted by any except the most general Jeffersonian propositions. If the inclination of the electorate were toward true Jeffersonianism, actually an inverted aristocratic doctrine, politicians would conduct themselves differently and speak differently. Any even slightly successful politician is fully aware that any office-seeker who liberally salted his speeches with specific Jeffersonian views, or composed his speeches of actual Jeffersonian quotations, would be lucky to escape with his life from the nearest functionally illiterate mob. Radicals and civil-righters of various stripes have tried it again and again and have been deluged with rotten eggs, overripe fruit, stones and local police attentions. The broad public is simply not democratic, would find Jefferson repugnant if they could read him. If any stray reader doubts this let him dip into Jefferson's writings here and there or select common topics from their indexes.
For Jefferson, extolled in the abstract at annual Jefferson Day fund-raising dinners of the Democratic Party, was very close to being a political bedfellow of at least one prominent side of the later-coming Karl Marx and practically the antithesis of Lyndon B. Johnson and almost every American president since Lincoln.
Even more than in the Declaration of Independence Jefferson elsewhere explicitly preached an inherent popular right to make revolution, by force and violence, without awaiting a green light from the Supreme Court. The Confederacy acted precisely according to this doctrine although it did not in its support of slavery (its true love) subscribe to the notion of equality. Nor is civil equality the ideal of the broad populace today, as one can See from popular reactions to the ordinary claims of Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and a variety of other ethnic or national minority groups.
As anyone can readily detect, such sentiments are subversive and are hardly subscribed to by any discernible portion of the electorate, which instantly identifies them as akin to Bolshevism and unconducive to job security and quiet viewing of night baseball on TV.
Two unequal strains have been woven through American politics from the beginning. There has been patrician Jeffersonianism, largely given lip service except by patricians themselves here and there. And there has been Hamiltonianism. Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), our first Secretary of the Treasury, was an ambitious poor boy in politics, a self-appointed spokesman for plutocracy and outright corruption in politics as a way of insuring its hold. Hamilton detested the common people with more fervor than is usual among those who have emerged from among them and did more than anyone else at the inception to give American economic affairs and much of political affairs their gamey flavor.
Slain in a duel with Aaron Burr, Hamilton fittingly lies buried in Trinity Churchyard at the head of Wall Street.
As far as ascendant trends are concerned, in the United States one openly talks John Locke and Thomas Jefferson but surreptitiously acts Alexander Hamilton.
A Plan for Improvement
It is not the duty of the critic to suggest ways of improving a bad show. After he has pronounced upon it his job is finished. A wide public, however, thinks otherwise and believes it stymies a critic when it says: "How would you improve the script? " The presumption is that this would be difficult or impossible to do.
Many cut-rate sages on the political fringes adopt this attitude and say: "Democracy [meaning the present system] may be imperfect but it is the best system possible. "
Denying this completely, I shall here, for the benefit of skeptical cogitators, sketch in a few strokes significant improvements that could easily be wrought in the American system, although such improvements would by no means produce everlasting salvation.
It cannot be denied that the best government would be that which was run by the most qualified men. As we see in the case of the medical profession, the. greatest proportion of qualified men is produced by rigorous attention to their education and training.