No More Learning

Lest anyone believe I am making a purely suppositious point let me make it clear that one capitalist often thoroughly detests another entire industry and that such detestation, properly financed, can lead to the root-and-branch destruction of the detested industry. John D. Rockefeller I, for example, disliked the liquor industry, and he opposed smoking, dancing and the theater as well. The liquor industry in the United States was for a time destroyed with heavy losses, through Prohibition, illustrating what can happen. I am not suggesting that it was Rockefeller who smashed the liquor industry; but he shared the point of view of the Prohibitionists in regarding liquor in general as a social menace, a blight on efficiency.
Rockefeller was by no means an exception in holding such straitlaced views about the propriety of certain entire industries. I once knew a successful Wall Street broker who always did whatever he could to dissuade his customers from buying shares in alcohol, cigarette, film and small-loan companies on the ground that he thought them socially harmful.
Yet such intramural antipathies, which usually have rational grounds (as in the widespread capitalistic detestation of the powerful domestic fire-arms industry), seldom lead to any effective action against the offenders; for everybody is, in a way, in the same boat and hence silent. As I used to argue to my moral broker-friend, his qualms were vain; customers could come into his office with money from any source, even from some illicit enterprise. What was gained if they now purchased only stocks in morally approved enterprises? Moral or immoral, the companies offering stocks were all legal entities in an economic system that does not discriminate between producers of fire- arms and producers of surgical instruments. All industries are created equal.
Being bound to keep quiet when he sees obvious destruction being wrought by some reckless peer, at least the intelligently reflective capitalist cannot, contrary to Mills, be entirely happy. And his unhappiness has an entirely different cause from that of most people. It is the unhappiness of a consciously powerful man who realizes he can do nothing effective against something he considers profoundly evil, cannot even fully protect his own children. Even though he may feel that his own enterprises are as far beyond criticism as ingenuity can make them, he knows that this is no defense against fabrications which can be circulated against him to his distress by powerful people his uncooperative crusading spirit has made angry.
It is for this reason, among others, that it is rare to find crusaders among capitalists, who all in one way or the other live in glass houses.
In the matter of divorce and broken families the rich are, if anything, worse off than most of the population; at least they are no better placed. For the divorce rate among the rich, with many of them such ardent believers in marriage that they remarry up to five and even ten times, is very much higher than the national rate. Divorce, even if one looks upon it as a desirable escape hatch from an untenable situation, is never taken as a sign of sound human relations; rather is it taken as an index of unresolvable interpersonal trouble.
If stable familial relations and intra-family continuity are desirable, as it is widely held, then divorce and the dispersion of family members, particularly the young, must be an index to failure. At least the children of divorced rich couples are not happy about the event. And this sort of failure is rife among the rich. Failure being the opposite of success, in this department of life the rich, however they got that way, cannot be looked upon as generally successful. Perhaps they are no more unhappy than others; yet they do not appear to be conspicuous winners in the marital sweepstakes. As in the case of most
divorcing couples, they find each other unbearable--and not simply in one instance but, as the record shows, in a train of instances. Not to be able to find a single retainable marital partner in a number of attempts surely argues some sort of personal impoverishment in a culture that values marital stability.
Deficiencies and lacks of the kind we have looked at are not, as many suppose, purely subjective, the ills to which all men are heir. They are social, deriving from the general social situation, which has much to do in shaping the psychologies of people.
The rich, it is clear, are not immune to the general fallout from the existing socio- political system even though they may have compensations denied to others. Far from all the fallout upon the rich has been indicated and one could go on at considerable length about more. However, confining ourselves again to the young and innocent rich, it is clear that their minds are as subverted as those of poorer youth by the all-pervading influence of persuasive advertising.
If someone systematically splashed mud on the clothing of rich children their parents would soon take steps to see that the offender was laid by the heels. Yet the rich, for all their power, cannot protect their children from the subversive influence of advertisers who insistently confuse the intellect in various detectable ways. Most of the time they misuse language and pictures in the effort solely to sell.
True, the rich youth like the poor, if he makes his way into the higher and more recondite studies such as semantics, logic and epistemology, can overcome the enervating intellectual influences of advertising and homespun propaganda, thus possessing himself at least of his own mind. But few find their way to such rarefied studies and the result is that the rich usually have as confused a view of the world as the poor, subject to exploded notions (particularly in economics) and with about the same general world view as that of a postman or bartender. That this is so is readily seen in the public utterances of the more vocal of them. Among the self-erected we have cracker-barrel philosophers like Henry Ford I and H. L. Hunt and among the more educated we have the sagging economic views of David Rockefeller and, on a much lower level of wealth, the socio-cultural divagations of William F. Buckley, Jr. , who asserts the presence of "eternal verities. " A B-minus undergraduate in epistemology at Swampwater College knows better than that even though Buckley's public vowel movements are intently studied by a select circle of admirers.
One would think that a rich man, with money at his fingertips, would get smart and hire an epistemologist who would at least straighten him out from time to time about the grounds for rational belief. For we may well suppose that a rich man, always wanting the best, does not wish to go about in a scatterbrained condition hawking absurdities. He must want the true view just as he wants a livewire girl, a prime steak and a sound wine. Yet we find him apparently no better off in this respect than the common man. Nor, considering the baneful social influences to which they are subject will most of his prized children be better off. Madison Avenue vomits on their minds as freely as on the battered mind of the ordinary clod.
In this matter, however, the rich man is no doubt imbued with the unjustified self- pride of others as summarized by Descartes in the opening lines of his Discourse on Method: "Good sense is of all things in the world most evenly distributed among men, for each one believes himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the most difficult to please in all other things are generally satisfied with their share. " (For our purposes we may ignore the non sequitur noticed by logicians between the warranting reasons cited and the conclusion. ) In any event, the rich man like the nonrich believes his own mind is as good as any and its way of operation to be in no particular corrigible; one can see this in the bland assurance with which the rich often express themselves
publicly on recondite matters such as achieving the national destiny. In this belief, no doubt in the majority of cases, the rich are like others demonstrably self-deceived, victims of self-pride, unless they have gone to herculean efforts to free themselves from the free-market socio-cultural seepage all about them; they are as much off the track as T. W. K. Mits, the well-known man in the street.
The Successful Kennedys
Sufficient grounds have been stated, I believe, to suggest, contrary to supposition among both the rich and their critics, that the rich are not so well off as they themselves sometimes suppose and are commonly supposed to be, even though they may be more advantageously placed than the average man in many selected areas. Their difficulties, furthermore, are not merely those common to the flesh of man but often derive from their own celebrated social system, from the propaganda-hallowed but rickety social structure itself. Such is the resistance of indurated dogma to reasonable refutation, however, that one could pile further proof on proof in the single well-known case of the successful Kennedys, dogged by socially induced tragedies; nor are they alone.
The first of the Kennedys to feel the blow of adversity was the eldest son, Joseph P. , Jr. , who had early been earmarked in the family circle as a future president of the United States. Aged twenty-nine, he was killed in action as an eager airman in Europe during the replay with special Hitlerian effects of World War I. Two weeks later Kathleen's ultra-British husband was also killed in action. And in 1948 Kathleen herself, flying in a private plane to join her father on the Riviera, was killed as the machine crashed in rain and fog over France.
With the election to the presidency in 1960 of John F. Kennedy, the second oldest son, the Kennedys' star seemed once again in the ascendancy; they were literally the darlings of the world. The abrupt assassination of the socially aware president in Dallas in 1963 by a publicly neglected, mentally disturbed ex-marine was especially ironic; a social system eroded by neglect struck down a potential statesman through one of its neglected cases.
The theme of violence in the Kennedy later history, which had almost finished JFK during the war in the South Pacific, showed itself again in the nearly fatal airplane crash of Senator Edward M. Kennedy in his own plane in 1964. As it was, his back was severely injured, necessitating the wearing of a brace.
The Airplane and The Rich
The airplane, it may be observed in this melancholy recital, is a special hazard of the rich and affluent. Few plane crashes, unless upon buildings, ever involve lower-class citizens; many tycoons have already met their end in the skies. And the bored rich, in their affinity for plane travel as for everything technologically novel and "advanced," are themselves the victims of a smooth statistical falsification given wide currency: that the rate of passenger fatalities in aircraft is lower than that on railroads. This falsification is achieved by comparing fatalities per passenger-mile. If, however, one properly takes into consideration all the relevant factors and makes the comparison on the basis of passenger-mile-hours (for time is an essential factor in measuring motion, which is a function of time as well as distance), then it is seen that the rate of fatality is tremendously higher in air travel. As far as that goes, in absolute figures passenger air fatalities are greater than passenger railroad fatalities.
We see here that the rich are as susceptible as anyone to being gulled by institutionalized propaganda (assuming that they are indeed misled by the claims of alleged superior safety in airplanes). Although airplanes may be sufficiently safe, considering all factors, they are self-propelled kites flying with heavy loads of volatile
fuel, obviously highly vulnerable to serious mishap. In computing air fatalities the Federal Aviation Agency, for example, excludes deaths occurring in airborne dynamite explosions! 25 Such are apparently not deemed statistically kosher.
The Curse of Prominence
Great prominence itself, as many of the wealthy know, carries with it special problems. In the case of the Kennedys this was shown in the wrangle over the wording of the originally authorized book by William Manchester about the assassination of the president. Said The Nation (February 6, 1967): "The subsequent attempts on the part of the Kennedys to control the text of the book and its serialization gave the impression of an arrogant use of money and power. They may have been within their legal rights, but that is not the point. Apparently most of what they objected to was of little moment one way or the other. The public was not in a mood to go along with them, whether they were right or wrong. The John F. Kennedy aura was blown away by the exchange of recriminations.
"At a given point of idolatry," The Nation continued, "the public turns from adoring its idols and begins to examine their feet. Once celebrities reach a certain level of overexposure, there is just as much mileage to be gained from cutting them down as there was from building them up. The writers and broadcasters who provide this sort of fare are familiar with the reaction, and when some of them sense the turning point, the others follow. All of the overexposed live in the shadow of an obloquy. It is one of the hazards of publicity. "
What is less widely known is that scholarly John F. Kennedy himself, in 1959, successfully brought pressure to bear to exclude from the book The Kennedy Family by Joseph Dinneen three summary paragraphs about the attitude of his father toward Jews. Dinneen in 1944 had interviewed the elder Kennedy for the Boston Globe and had taken shorthand notes of the interview. Present also was Lawrence Spivak, then editor of The American Mercury and later a national television news panelist. The Globe decided not to publish the interview and Dinneen fifteen years later summarized it in his book, of which he sent a set of galley proofs as a courtesy to JFK. The president-to-be, disturbed, insisted over the telephone from Oregon that the prickly paragraphs be omitted even though the work was now in plates. Dinneen and the publishers after some resistance consented to the awkward deletion and substituted some inoffensive material. 26
JFK, soundly from a public image point of view, recognized that the nature of the interview, far from settling the issue of anti-Semitism raised against his father, piqued critical interest and raised more questions than it resolved. From an electoral point of view, though the president-to-be was not at all anti-Semitic, even a brief summary of the interview could have been troubling by reason of association.
Cosmetic Images
In passing, it is standard although not universal finpolitan and pubpolitan practice to attempt to control or influence--that is, censor--writings and other expressions that becloud one's public image by suggesting something untoward or disturbing. What is wanted is a carefully retouched pleasant studio portrait of persons and events, not a candid catch-as-catch-can camera shot of some bigwig off guard and thus completely himself. For this reason writers and other commentators on public affairs are generally wooed, flattered, facilitated in various ways and, at times, subsidized, authorized, edited, lied to, intimidated or coerced by powerful public figures. While resorting to the courts to expunge nonlibelous matter from a text is rather unusual, the general attitude of those Kennedys involved in the Manchester controversy is not unusual among political and corporate people, whatever illusions the public may have about the free- wheeling independence of writers under the Star Spangled Banner.
Attempts to control the projected image extend even to photographs. Few politicians like to be photographed smoking cigars, perhaps because that typical act of politicians reminds the public of cartoons about paunchy, cigar-smoking ward bosses, concededly corrupt. Herbert Hoover had the plates confiscated from a photographer who snapped him cigar-smoking aboard a battleship, and Jack Kennedy, who smoked panetelas, did not like to be photographed in the act. Roosevelt, however, did not conceal that he smoked cigarettes, no doubt feeling that by doing it openly he projected an image of insouciance and self-sufficiency. Nor do politicians like to be photographed with a convivial glass in hand.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, always sensitively concerned about his image, worked carefully to see that it was not clouded. For a long time, although he was under close direct scrutiny, it was unknown by the general public that be was wholly paralyzed from the waist down and had to wear leg braces. Roosevelt himself went to herculean and physically exhausting lengths to keep the surely significant fact of this weakness from becoming generally known. 27 John F. Kennedy, too, kept from general circulation the fact that he suffered from Addison's disease.
Moreover, writers and photographers who offend by engaging in unauthorized image revision are thereafter rebuffed, barred, harassed, denounced, spied upon, rebuked, intimidated and otherwise made to feel remorse, regret or fear at having offended the higher powers, whose claim to kid-gloved handling is invariably based upon nothing more than money or position.
Ralph Nader, for presuming to question automobile safety in Unsafe at Any Speed, was subjected to close surveillance by General Motors, largest corporation by sales in the world, for which act a high GM official later publicly apologized. According to Nader, with General Motors denying the charge, the object was to obtain some bit of publicly inflammatory information of an irrelevantly derogatory nature. 28 True or not in this case, it is often true in many other cases because a largely confused philistine public believes that the truth of some statement is brought into serious question if it can be shown that its originator is a Communist, Socialist, atheist, homosexual, yogi, imbiber in strong waters, freethinker or one addicted to engaging in crim. con. with amiable ladies. Dedicated, sincere heterosexuality may itself be impugning.
Unsettling though it may be to many sturdy citizens, it is probably a fact that a majority of the scientists at work on the federal space-exploration program are thoroughgoing atheists or agnostics. For careful studies have shown that most American scientists (save us all! ) are of this horrifying, cosmosshattering orientation. Should, therefore, the space program not be canceled or its personnel changed? Should not, in the name of common safety, Billy Graham and Fulton J. Sheen be placed in charge? Why, the perturbed grass-roots citizen may well ask himself, cannot persons with a wholesome, dung-hill, 100 per cent American outlook be selected for this highly elevating work?
In one of his few but revealing gauche moves, President John F. Kennedy, deeply annoyed, canceled the White House subscription to the New York Herald Tribune and barred it from the sacred premises--an instance of Jove hurling the penultimate thunderbolt: banishment.
Concluding, although the difficulties encountered along life's way by the Kennedys and others can hardly be taken as par for the course among the rich and powerful they do show, in concentrated cases, what in varying degree all of the rich are up against in a highly turbulent irrationally structured society. The rich are by no means as well off as they are often imagined to be and as a sociologist such as C. Wright Mills imagines
them to be. They have many troubles going far beyond those to which the flesh of man is heir. They are, in many ways, "on the spot. " They have a lion by the tail.
Nowhere else is this better shown than in the matter of self-protection in the atomic age. The rich are individually as subject to nuclear holocaust as the poor in the brave new world's threatened nuclear democracy of all-encompassing death. And although many of the rich have constructed elaborate bomb shelters on their estates, complete with television (what station will be on the air? ), among the more intelligent such contrivances must be clearly recognized as no more than tranquilizers for the women, children and servants. The world to which hypothetical shelter survivors would emerge would be one, according to all estimates, in which the dead would be looked upon with envy. The tycoons know this as well as does Herman Kahn.
The Fundamental Problem of the Rich
The fundamental difficulty of the rich has not yet been fully indicated. This difficulty consists of acquiring a sense of worthwhile function (and getting the world to agree with the self-estimate of this function) and, at the same time, of containing the many eruptions and breakdowns in a social system the obsolete structure of which is continually being strained by the introduction of new profit-making technology as well as by the rise of appropriately ferocious rivalry abroad. The situation in which the contemporary rich find themselves could be described by some pundit, brightly, as challenging.
As to function, it comes down largely to rule under various euphemistic rubrics. At times, as the pages of Who's Who attest, the claims to function are more flamboyant and see the subjects pathetically proclaiming themselves as financiers, investors, venture entrepreneurs, philanthropists and the like. After all, a financier is only a money lender, an investor is someone who owns something producing revenue for his own account, a venture entrepreneur a promoter for his own account and a philanthropist a lover of mankind. While being a lover of mankind may be laudable it does not bespeak any particular knack. For what is man or mankind but an abstraction? One never encounters man in experience, only men, women and children. What some testy observers ask is this: Will some of the self-proclaimed lovers of mankind kindly get off the necks of men, women and children?
Function, among the rich, as we have seen, is most often stated in terms that boil down to rule: executive, public official, administrator, trustee and the like.
In the modern world, function is closely related to self-identity because the question is no longer who one is but what one does. To the question "Who are you? " the answer is generally that one is a truck driver, clerk, teacher, performer or what-not of a certain name. "I am a tuba player named John Jones" is, at least for a beginning, a satisfactory designation (if true) of one's identity.
The rich, however, have difficulty in stating any function for themselves that is dissociated from rule. While terms like financier, investor, venture entrepreneur and philanthropist suggest commendable, nonintrusive and possibly supportive roles, terms such as executive, director, official, trustee and administrator and the like are clearly epitomized in a revealing term: boss.
In the contexts in which they are publicly advanced, all these terms hazily suggest synonyms for "hero," and at times a halo is also indicated for the heroic figure as in "international financier" and "upper-echelon executive. " As one bears and reads of such, one is literally stunned by the superhuman vistas suggested. And when one reads that messages are being exchanged--actually exchanged--between the president of the United States on the one hand and international financiers and upper-eschelon
executives on the other (subject: something or other) one can imaginatively feel the world grinding on its hinges.
Whether the rich recognize it or not, in most public roles they seem to feel qualified to play they appear as bosses, however disguised, and not necessarily unbenevolent. In any other function they may elect to attempt--of a physicist, a ballplayer, a soft-shoe dancer, an artist, a writer or a philosopher--they find that their money gives them no edge at all. In roles of nonrulership, where the competition is extremely lively, if they decided to go in for poetry they find that par for the course is set by hard-to-beat T. S. Eliot or Robert Lowell, if for ballplaying by Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio, etc. Most of the rich seeking active roles therefore drift, by default as it were, to corporations, banks, brokerage houses, nonprofit funds and various political jurisdictions. These are all organizational havens for imprecision even though they all harbor aspects where precision may be required of underlings, and appreciated.
In attempting to establish his unique identity through some unfinanced achievement, the rich man is pretty much in the position of anyone else, even a pauper. If his claim to competence is that he is very good at chess, all he need do to establish it is to beat a few lower-rung chess experts and then move higher. If his forte is science all he need do is gain the accolade of other scientists, hard to do. Normally finding such feats difficult, his next recourse is to get for himself one of the vaguely heroic current designations, crown it with an adjectival halo and project it into print: a public image. Most people will accept him, even applaud him, in his self-designation. The only ones who will ever question his bona fides will be dyspeptic churls, fit only for treasons, spoils and stratagems, perhaps to boot connoisseurs of pornography and arcane seances--in short, losers.
No matter what designation of puissance the rich man permits his media of publicity to allot him, however, there remains the harsh fact that be is operating within an increasingly obsolete social structure, politically designed for an agricultural and local commercial economy and culturally for the most part of even more antedated vintage. This social structure, under the impact of high-powered technology, is obviously increasingly inadequate to its supportive task, requires much change and is insulated against change by the resistance of many established economic groups, perhaps including his own.
What to do? One palliative after the other is embraced, resulting in an increasingly cross-stress, tension-producing patchwork. Where will it all lead? What will happen to the rich man's special stake, constantly threatened by science-derived innovations and requirements for more and more government intervention?
Obeying the maxim "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em," most of the rich appear increasingly to have joined forces with government in developing the welfare-warfare state, largely utilizing tax money from the labor force and thereby guaranteeing themselves one big profitable customer. Yet even this maneuver introduces endless new difficulties, and there remains to be contended with the rest of the terrestrial world exploding into smoggy industrialism.
The state of mind of a fully aware wealthy man, then, cannot be as tranquil as commonly supposed. And that it is not at all tranquil is shown by the endless fulminations of the various communications media against communism, socialism, statism, totalitarianism, radicalism, fascism, technocracy, liberalism, crime in the streets (where it clearly should not be), do-goodism, reformism, softism, sentimentalism, apathy, unpatriotism, unconstitutionalism, centralization, bureaucracy and the like, and by the stream of contributions to super-patriotic Pied Pipers. All persons who think seriously in terms of adjustment to modern conditions then find they must be extremely
circumspect so as not to be suspected as subversive and un-American, in the ideological company of foreigners.
A constant danger now faced by the jumpy finpols is the possibility that someone among the pubpols, like a Roosevelt or a Kennedy, will really take the bit in his teeth and start running the ball in a different direction, perhaps change the nature of the whole game. For, in the shadow of the uncertainties of an old-line local business economy with high-speed technology grafted on to it, the pubpols appear to be slowly shaping a wider role for themselves as government is required to step supportively into various fissures of a misshapen society.
While it appears a bit early to assert that the days of the rich are numbered, as socialists like to believe, it does appear they are in for some stormy times and, perhaps, for eventual extinction at the hands of rising forces--a subject to be broached in the next and concluding chapter. The rich, in any event, are in a time of many troubles as their wealth increases, and I conclude that the more thoughtful among them cannot be feeling as complacent as the bland-bland exterior of their power elite may suggest.
For it is veritably written: "So foul a sky clears not without a storm. "
Seventeen
OLIGARCHY BY DEFAULT
Latter-day discourses on the economic system as something separate merely because it can be analytically isolated, bypass the inescapable fact that there is always present a politico-economic system: government with economic ramifications, an economy with political ramifications. Governments and economic systems are never separate; they are opposite sides of the same coin. As experience shows, their leading personnel are interchangeable. Such being the case, in any study of economic and financial affairs we are invariably concerned with some sort of system of coercion and repression.
For all government is universally conceded to rest at bottom on systematized collective coercion and repression.
Such coercion and repression, to be sure, are necessary. Without them life, in the words of a famous dictum, would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. " Without them anarchic individual coercion would prevail in a social jungle.
In the long, turbulent course of history many cushions and restraints were developed within governmental systems to protect the populace from their fierce protector--that is, to soften some of the more outrageous aspects of coercion the engine of government itself made possible. For the instrument of government was usually freely used by rulers--"the insolence of office," "power corrupts," "to the victor belong the spoils"--for ulterior and wholly private ends. Today, in the celebration of particular systems of government, one finds that it is the imperfect restraints against self-serving rulers and their friends that are really celebrated--Constitution, Bill of Rights, written laws, half- measures of social support, the development of equity in law, and the like.
Nevertheless, after all the fine print has been duly perused and applauded, coercive power (soothingly designated as sovereign power) remains and is properly suspect. Behind their bland masks the most civilized of governments retain all the powers of any despotism, their application duly prescribed (and the prescriptions not infrequently violated). Taking into consideration all governmental powers and their usual
application, there are in fact no genial governments at all. And in the interstices of even the most finely meshed restraints (those of the United States probably being less finely meshed than those, for example, of England, France or Sweden) there is much room for one-sided self-service by the rulers and those with clandestine privileged access to them. While one might balk at assenting to the proposition that government is the executive committee of the ruling class, it is a demonstrable fact that it is peculiarly at the service of the upper economic class, which accordingly is warrantably regarded as in effect a ruling class.
Lest such an observation be thought by provincials to give this exposition an unholy Marxist aura, let us in reverential solemnity quote such an austere Establishmentarian as Woodrow Wilson, who said (Franklin D. Roosevelt later concurring) in words as valid today as when first uttered:
"The masters [sic! ] of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States. It is written over every intimate page of the record of Congress, it is written all through the history of conferences at the White House, that the suggestions of economic policy in this country have come from one source, not from many sources. The benevolent guardians, the kind hearted trustees who have taken the troubles of government off our hands have become so conspicuous that almost anybody can write out a list of them. . . .
"Suppose you go to Washington and try to get at your government. You will always find that while you are politely listened to, the men really consulted are the men who have the biggest stake--the big bankers, the big manufacturers, the big masters of commerce, the heads of railroad corporations and of steamship corporations. . . . The government of the United States at present is a foster child of the special interests. " 1
For the alleged violation of some of its peculiar, even minor, mandates any government whatever will execute any high-minded offender whether he be Jesus, Socrates, John Hus, Servetus, Thomas More, Joan of Arc or John Brown. Socrates was executed by a far more democratic system than any now even claims to be and in a more refined system of civilization than that of any modern country. Under threat of durance vile all governments require the payment of taxes, even unfairly apportioned taxes as in the United States with its packed poor-boy legislatures.
Again, any government even in a trivial or doubtful cause such as Vietnam may place the lives of its younger male citizens in extreme jeopardy by coercing them into the armed forces under the claims of routinely invoked patriotic duty and sending them into kill-or-be-killed situations. Most Americans have been astonished in recent years to see what was always known to the informed: that the president alone can send existing armed forces anywhere without consulting anyone, least of all the public or Congress. He could order an overnight assault against any country, thereby precipitating general war. He could, in full constitutionality, order all of the armed forces into the depths of the Congo and nobody could legally halt the operation. Congress, it is true, could refuse the money to continue the operation and thus be in the position of refusing to support helpless men who had only obeyed legal orders. And this is only a very little of what a fully constitutional American president can do--without consulting anyone.
Most of what a president does not ordinarily do--such as send secret police to citizens' doors late in the night--he does not do because he does not want to. He can do this sort of thing quite legally; there is no law saying at what hour police may call. And such a personally likeable man as President John F. Kennedy did indeed send out nocturnal police visitors in the squabble over steel prices.
Government power, wielded by officials, individual human beings, is evidently great power over others, not necessarily for others, and anyone who wields it, smiling or not,
or has ready access to the wielders obviously has great power far beyond that of any man in the street. Moreover, this power with modern techniques is far greater than it ever was. By means of modern methods of communication, government can put its agents into action anywhere in a matter of minutes. It has been credibly reported that President Johnson, with far more power at his fingertips than all presidents combined up to Harry Truman, and more than either Truman, Eisenhower or Kennedy, personally designated overnight targets in North Vietnam for powerful air squadrons waiting to take off from remote, dawn-shrouded airfields. We possess today, in brief, pinpoint government. It can even listen in on conversations anywhere, and freely does so despite denials. It freely uses internal spies, especially in the matter of taxes on obscure citizens.
For these and other reasons it is now said by some students of the situation that we live under an elective despotism. Freely celebrating our condition in strictly American style, if we accept this dictum we could say we live under the greatest and most glorious elective despotism in history. Most people--well over 95 per cent of them--have no more power in this system, either immediately or ultimately, than has a rank-and-file Russian in the Soviet system, and this despite all the blandishing talk about government with the consent of the governed and the sovereignty of the people. As to consent, which of my readers can step forward and say he was ever asked for his consent to the Constitution or any of its varied interpretations? The electorate of 1789 was asked for and gave such consent and we may readily agree that the majority of people in states asking for admission, at the time of admission, have so consented. But who else? When the people of the Confederacy, disliking the arrangement, pointedly withdrew the consent given by their forebears they were confronted by military force and after a sanguinary struggle were eventually subdued. As Lincoln said, the Union must be preserved, a proposition drawn from out of the air that flatly contradicts the doctrine of consent. Yet Lincoln was right; it is inherently of the nature of government that, like a tiger, it never voluntarily assents to its own dismemberment. The idea of consent vis-a`- vis an established government is the purest of nonsense, written though it is into the American myth.
The American System
Treatises on American government often with scrupulous accuracy tell how the government operates formally--the federal system, separation of powers, checks and balances, popular election of officials, judicial review, administrative agencies and the whole remaining bit. None of these treatises depicts how the government actually works in the application of the forms, how it works informally. What really takes place constitutes a considerable deviation from the formal script. Rules are freely bent, especially in the conduct of the legislatures, which make their own rules. Police, too, function pretty autonomously. For a starter let us notice that most of the precious electorate in most elections--state, federal and local--do not vote at all. Many, even though unconstrained, have never voted; and these, under one possible interpretation, may be politically the most sensible of all. For most of those voting haven't the least idea what it is all about.
Power not exercised by dilatory members of any functioning organization will of necessity be exercised by more diligent members, a universal rule applying to corporations, fraternal societies and labor unions as well as to government. To a very considerable extent, then, we see in all organizations, including the government of the United States, rule by default, by a self-selected oligarchy. If the citizens won't run the show the endless procession of Bobby Bakers, W. Judson Morhouses, Everett Dirksens and Lyndon B. Johnsons will.
In what follows I shall first state summarily, with gloves off, precisely how government actually operates in the United States.
1. Officials (except judges) nominated by either one of two major parties are periodically elected at local, state and federal levels by a largely inept electorate that in most elections fails to participate to the full and in general turns out far below 50 per cent. Whether the electorate fully participates makes no operational difference because most of the candidates are handpicked by nominating caucuses of the two major parties rather than of one party as in Russia. These caucuses function in default of popular activity; the populace simply has no political drive of its own. It is politically inert. If Russia permitted a Socialist Party and a Communist Party (joined behind the scenes) it would be on all fours with the United States in respect of parties in the field; the candidates in the two parties might be politically identical twins, as is often the case in the United States (Johnson versus Goldwater). In those rare cases where policy is uppermost in the mind of the electorate it is usually a destructive policy, as toward Negroes in the South (and elsewhere). Policies promising to be injurious to minority groups such as Negroes, Catholics, foreigners, Jews, Mexicans, Chinese, intellectuals and, in fact, all deviants from fixed philistinish norms, usually attract a larger-than-usual supporting vote. Ordinarily, policies are beyond the comprehension of the electorate, which chooses between two handpicked candidates strictly on nonability factors: religion, race, appearance, age, marital status, region of origin, platform manner, synthetic public image and the like. Officials thus elected I have termed pubpols, public politicians, to distinguish them from the many other types of more specialized politicians in the American politico-economic system: finpols, corp-pols, churchpols, lawpols and lab(or)pols. A close examination of the roles of any of these will show that they differ only in quality, not degree or kind, from pubpols. Less perspicuously, such are ordinarily styled "leaders" or "executives"; sometimes "trustees" or theologians. They are in sober fact politicians, primarily and exclusively concerned about the operation of government and who gets--and doesn't get--what, when, where and how.
2. As the attainment of office gives officials access to the dread levers of government, including the levers of the hangman, people who already possess or are acquiring well- defined economic stakes are especially alert to the whole process. While the masses are distractedly mesmerized by the number 1 television program or the World Series, the moneymen are busily planning and discussing far ahead. Owing to the power leverage at stake, rivalry for office is in most jurisdictions keen. It gets keener the higher one ascends in the system. Because of the rivalrous electoral grab for power leverage, the struggle is expensive. Money is needed, and can be obtained only from those relative few who have it to spare. Most of the labor force is too modestly compensated and improvident to contribute.
3. Money plays a large role in the manipulation of this system--much larger than is usually conceded, which means that persons who have money have a wide political edge over those who do not. First, there are the campaign contributions, always large and constantly getting larger. True, it takes money to run these campaigns wherein the issues are presumably being put before the people. But it was long known prior to the cases in 1967 of Senator Thomas J. Dodd before the Senate and of Bobby Baker in the courts that much of the money in probably most campaigns (although not all) is diverted to the private tax-free accounts of the politicians. As Frank R. Kent said decades ago, many politicians have what is known in the trade as "sticky fingers. " The money they collect is not for justifiable campaign expenses but is a down payment on future influence in government. Some of this money must often be divided--the "split"--to gain the support of local newspapers and key figures who stand forth as "community leaders. " Most campaign funds are, therefore, properly and soberly designatable as slush
funds. Some represent slush, slush, slush all the way. The American system is a slushy system.
Officeholders know this and at times show their clear recognition of the facts. Thus, in the campaign of the natural gas industry in 1956 for exemption from federal regulation when an enabling bill was before Congress, already endorsed by President Eisenhower, eager-beaver hinterland lawyers for the industry turned up and offered a cash "campaign contribution" to veteran Senator Francis Case of South Dakota, who instantly took umbrage and publicized what he interpreted as a barefaced attempt to influence his vote. This untypical incident scuttled the bill, which was vetoed. 2 Most politicos gladly accept such offerings, say nothing about them. (In England, campaign funds and the duration of campaigns are severely limited by law. Legislators are paid very modest salaries and are required to abstain from voting and discussion in matters affecting their private interests--the Jeffersonian rule. )
Lest I again be suspected of harboring Satanic leftish sentiments while setting down what is only God's own plain unvarnished fact, allow me to quote at some length Senator Russell Long, Establishment Democrat of Louisiana and Majority Whip, who in April, 1967, said on the Senate floor:
Most campaign money comes from businessmen. Labor contributions have been greatly exaggerated. It would be my guess that about 95 per cent of campaign funds at the congressional level are derived from businessmen. At least 80 per cent of this comes from men who could sign a net worth statement exceeding a quarter of a million dollars. Businessmen contribute because the Federal Corrupt Practices Act prohibits businesses from contributing. Funnelling contributions through their officers is a simple and safe way for business to accomplish what it cannot do directly.
A great number of businessmen contribute to legislators who have voted for laws to reduce the power of labor unions, to regulate unions, to outlaw the union shop.
Many businessmen contribute to legislators who have voted to exempt their businesses from the minimum wage.
Businessmen contribute to legislators who have fought against taxes that would have been burdensome to their businesses, whether the tax increase was proposed as a so- called reform, a loophole closer, or just an effort to balance the Federal budget.
Power company officials contribute to legislators who vote against public power and against expanding the Rural Electric Administration cooperatives. REA officers are also able to raise some money, although not nearly as much for those legislators who vote the other way around, although the real power of the REA cooperatives is to be found in the strong grassroots support they can generate against their enemies.
Bankers, insurance company executives, big moneylenders generally contribute to legislators who vote for policies that lead to high interest rates.
Many large companies benefit from research and development contracts which carry a guaranteed profit, a so-called fixed fee of about 7 per cent of the amount of the contract. Executives of such companies contribute to those who help them get the contracts or who make the money available. In recent years, quite a battle has developed over the desire of government research contractors to obtain and keep lush private monopoly patent rights on those things discovered with billions of dollars of government research money. The possibility of windfall profits in this area defies imagination. Research contractors contract to legislators who vote to permit them to have private patent rights on government research expenditures.
Drug companies are often able to sell brand-name drug products at anywhere from twice to 50 times the price of identical nonbranded products for welfare and medicare patients if the companies can prevail upon government to permit their drugs to be prescribed and dispensed by their private brand names rather than by the official or generic name of the product. Executives of drug companies will contribute to legislators who vote to permit or bring about such a result.
Many industries are regulated. This includes the railroads, the truckers, the airlines, the power companies, the pipelines, to name but a few. Executives of regulated companies contribute to legislators who vote to go easy on the regulation, and ask no more questions than necessary about their rates.
Companies facing threat of ruinous competition from foreign sources have executives who contribute to those who help protect them from competition by means of tariffs and quotas.
Many industries are subsidized. This includes the merchant marine, the shipbuilders, the sugar producers, the copper producers, and a host of others. Executives in such industries contribute to those who help keep them in business.
This list is merely illustrative; it could be elaborated upon and enlarged to include many more. . . . Merely by assiduously tending to the problems of business interests located in one's own state, a legislator can generally assure himself of enough financial support to campaign effectively for reelection. 3
The Majority Whip in his unguarded ire here spoke the simple, unvarnished truth. The only detail on which I would question him is in his use of the term "businessmen. " For these people, the big ones at least, are not businessmen in the senses commonly understood. They are finpols, and corp-pols, disguised as businessmen. They are actually rulers, like the dukes and barons of old. Business is not really their business; protected, nonrisk moneymaking is.
Scornfully rejecting the suggestion that some pontifical politicos did not accept campaign contributions, Senator Long said that "any person who is the darling of the newspaper publishers has much of his campaign covered in favorable news and editorial support they can afford. If his record has the overwhelming approval of the wealthy business people, if he has a consistent record of favoring penny-pinching economy when the needs of the sick and poor were involved, a consistent record of voting to protect management from the demands of labor, of protecting monopolies from the public rather than the other way around, he will find that the campaign expenses seem to take care of themselves. Radio and television broadcasts may be paid by unseen and unknown beneficiaries. The man may well find himself with a substantial campaign surplus and no place to spend it. " 4
Interrupting in the course of Long's speech, Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee reported that his study of campaign contributions in 1956 showed that the Republican Party collected more from the tiny island of Manhattan than from all the states combined, while the Democratic Party was not far removed from the same pattern. 5 This was not very astonishing as New York City is the financial capital of the country, the dog that wags the Washington tail. The slush comes from New York, the accommodating votes from the hinterland.
Long spoke in favor of retaining the short-lived law that allowed taxpayers to assign $1 of federal income taxes to campaign funds, which would be financed out of a common pool.
But money in American politics extends far beyond campaign contributions (largely supplied by corporations even though corporations are forbidden by law to contribute
directly). As we have seen, once they are elected, politicians have many ways of collecting money or monetarily convertible equivalents. (1) It is brought to them by lobbyists in their offices in paper bags. (2) It is paid to them by corporations through their law firms for vague legal services or for self-serving intervention in governmental bureaus. (3) It is available to them as in the case of Bobby Baker in the form of easy bank loans and also takes the form of allotting them shares gratis or at cut-rate terms in going enterprises such as insurance and loan companies and banks. Baker was obviously a middleman.
The object of transferring money in this way is to avoid any implication of bribery, a word which, politicians know has an ugly sound. Moreover, it is illegal. Although politicians are still bribed, and are sometimes convicted of accepting bribes (as in the recent case of highly placed W. Judson Morhouse), bribery after a distinguished history is now regarded as too cumbersome in the American system. But gifts with no explicit strings attached are not barred by law and are often conveyed in full public view in "testimonial dinners. " Will the recipient of such gifts thereafter take a detached view of the special requests of the donors? To believe so is to be credulous beyond hope of redemption.
The newer ways of conveying money to officials in a pervasively corrupt governmental system have clearly been devised to salve their consciences against any gnawing belief that they are being bribed. Thus, Senator Dodd after the call for his censure by the Senate was able to protest publicly with every show of righteous indignation, his voice vibrant, that he was not conscious of having done anything wrong. In this contention he was supported by not a few politicos with whom he had no partisan connection.
On a separate occasion, speaking in defense of Senator Dodd, Senator Long charged that half the members of the Senate Ethics Committee that sat in judgment on Dodd "couldn't stand the investigation Senator Dodd went through" and, finally, that "half the Senate" was in the same boat. A few days later, Senator Long apologized. In making his for-the-record apology Senator Long now surprisingly described the members of the Ethics Committee as "six of the finest members who have ever served in this body. "
"If I made a mistake and if I did wrong by saying what I said, I am here to offer them a public apology," said the Majority Whip. "If I have any complaint of this committee it is that their standards are too high. "
Senator John Stennis of retrograde Mississippi, chairman of the Ethics Committee, declined to shake hands with Senator Long after the trebly conditional apology. 6 This theatrical rebuke had much the same effect on public opinion as if Tweedledum had refused to shake hands with Tweedledee.
While it is by no means the case that all officeholders are thus beholden to outside moneymen, mainly corp-pols, it certainly appears to be the case that most legislators are. The conditions are evident in the legislatures of the largest industrial states where there is the most money, but they are most plainly evident in Congress. The case of Senator Dodd and the shenanigans of Bobby Baker to sophisticated observers merely represent instances of rather general practice floating inconveniently into view, like garbage at a fashionable swimming beach.
Contrary to common supposition, most officeholders act officially as they do not out of ideological or intellectual commitment but out of monetary devotion. They believe fervently, for example, in "the free enterprise system"--that is, capitalism. Why not? It is keeping them politically afloat on a sea of slush, as nonradical Senator Long lengthily attested.
These money transfers in politics, then, are largely payoffs or retainers to guarantee tractable political behavior. And they do ordinarily have this result.
Congress, which now operates pretty wide open on this sort of thing, applies much stricter criteria to appointees in the executive branch and the judiciary than it does to itself. Congressional committees often, with a great show of virtue, closely question presidential appointees about possible conflicts of interest between their properties and their assigned role in government. Usually Congress is satisfied if a man like the late Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson of General Motors sells his stock. President Johnson, not subject to Congress, did not even do this but appointed trustees for his properties. Is it likely that the trustees would make any decision adverse to the easily irked president? So to suppose would, it seems to me, be infinitely boobish.
In disclosures such as in the recent Bobby Baker, Dodd and Morhouse cases, the latest of thousands of analogous instances where the politico has been caught redhanded, his fingers streaming lucre, editorialists often piously refer to "corruption" and "venality. " Such moralistic judgments, while understandable, conceal the true causes, and tend to support a widespread erroneous view that politicians are for some reason a special odious breed.
The precise reason there are so many lightfingered and readily purchasable figures in American political life traces directly to the politico-social structure. In the first place, in the American system to have money, however obtained, entitles one to special deference. Not to have it incurs ready contempt. This is straight free-enterprise doctrine, expressing the difference between success and failure, the elect and the damned. Next, and perhaps most importantly, with the opening of the free franchise and public office to all comers in the early nineteenth century in the name of democracy the procuring of impecunious purchasable politicians was in effect guaranteed.