They are different; they are rich--in effect, noble--in a society replete with poverty and degradation, Their wealth makes it possible for them to
mobilize
more effective power than most people at particular points, at times to their own undoing.
Lundberg - The-Rich-and-the-Super-Rich-by-Ferdinand-Lundberg
In the 1960's, despite the escalation of the Vietnam war by President Johnson, anti-Communism was allowed to wane, as a diplomatic rapprochement gradually took place with the Soviet Union and trade relations were broadened with the Soviet bloc.
The Vietnam war was waged not against Communism but against an amorphous "aggression.
" True, many stalwarts tried to pump life back into the anti- Communist crusade of the 1950's but they were more and more ignored by the upper financial-political echelons.
These did not repudiate their former anti-Communist position, which might once again be useful; they simply abandoned it and chatted at length with Mr.
Gromyko, possibly discussing The Chinese Menace.
Soon, no doubt, it will be unpatriotic to eat chop suey and egg foo yung as it became unpatriotic to eat knockwurst, sauerkraut and hamburger (liberty steak) in 1917-18.
And so it goes in a fabulous democracy.
So extensive are the affairs of the finpols that all the members of each finpolitan financial syndicate (finsyn? ) require large personal staffs embracing far more than body servants. In the case of the exemplary Rockefellers, for example, "In addition to a special staff that each Rockefeller has to handle his personal affairs, the Rockefellers in mass have a general staff to handle their communal business. There are more than three hundred employees in this establishment, which includes a legal department, an investment department, a philanthropic department, a brigade of accountants, and a family archivist. " 70 Many of these are people of arcane knowledge in near and remote fields, including a specialist on theological education in underdeveloped regions.
It is the general style of this finpolitan world that newcomers to big wealth will in time, whatever their current reservations, come to embrace through their children and grandchildren. Although the more recent Texas oil millionaires do not belong to this world, they are already getting ready for it as shown by their sprouting foundations. Once one has made the money, as old judge Mellon recognized, it is necessary to hold on to it. And the finpolitan style is a way of becoming a permanent fixture, of weaving oneself into the warp and woof of the status quo. The finpolitans, it is evident, are far less concerned with today than with tomorrow.
Finpolitan Sociology
What any sociology of the finpolitan world would be devoted to, it seems to me, would be the outlining of point by point comparisons between the Rockefeller style and that of their contemporaries. There would be shown wherein the established big-rich copy the Rockefeller style and wherein they deviate from it. Variations of emphasis take place throughout. But, despite variations, basic similarities are visible, notably the presence of investments in huge slabs.
In one matter all the finpolitan groups resemble each other: None behaves as though it believed it had been called upon to preside over the dissolution of the family dukedom. All, like the man who came to dinner, act thoroughly at home and as though they intend to stay, even as mass-media propaganda trumpets that the great fortunes are being dissipated. Rather than being dissipated, they appear to be more permanently and acceptably entrenched from day to day. It is only a popular fantasy that the big fortunes are disappearing; but, perhaps like a bad dream, they disappear only in order to appear again.
Fifteen
THE DIVINE SPARK AMONG THE RICH
Pretty much ignored by the public relations artists, who usually have more specific fish to fry, some of the American rich at least have individually performed in ways commendable from strictly critical points of view and in ways that at least occasionally draw indulgent, even maudlin, commendation from outside their class. They have by no means, contrary to leftist propaganda, all been grabbers, wastrels and self-aggrandizers. In what ways they have been brushed by the divine and semi-divine afflatus, as far as they are visible to mortal man, it is the purpose of this chapter to indicate.
Commendations of the rich are by no means rare, especially in the many media subject to their own control or influence. The task, however, is to evaluate them in the light of criteria more widely shared. Results then become somewhat modified.
The public relations fraternity argues that the founding, building up, assembling, directing and managing of any one of the large corporations or banks represent prima facie an important creative contribution to something called The American Economy, a contribution which in the aggregate is taken as comparable to the genetic labors of the
Hebraic Jehovah over six prodigious days. While this may be so in some degree (the element of time to one side) there are a few obstacles to accepting this somewhat florid view--as, for example, whether the economy has been added to or subtracted from, accelerated or delayed. As far as that is concerned, many ingredients happily blended by economists into the potpourri of Gross National Product are pronounced by spoilsports as deleterious: whisky, cigarettes, gaseous industrial fumes, comic books, cheap films, ugly billboards, the traffic complex, misleading advertising, crumbling shelters, shoddy merchandise, slums and industrial wastes conscientiously dumped into natural waterways.
The public relations wizard points to corporation C and asks one to kowtow at least mentally to founder F for what is palpably a creative achievement, giving employment to X thousands of good and prayerfully parental souls of the Great Society who would, presumably, otherwise be living in trees and eaves. This pretty much accords with the foolish popular view of the corporation: a job-giving, life-sustaining entity. Ordinarily left out of such considerations is the fact that corporation C in its majestic rise, by various ruses (some possibly adjudicated illegal), may have blocked the rise of other laudably life-sustaining entities. Until pressured by a slow-moving government to relinquish its absolute monopoly, Aluminum Company of America, for example, certainly stood in the way of the emergence of aluminum-making jobs now provided by Kaiser Aluminum, Reynolds Metals, Olin Mathieson and various others. Corporate managers have not always or solely been concerned about all-out production and full employment. Right now by means of automation they are eliminating jobs right and left. They have been at least occasionally interested in making money for themselves, at times by restricting production and jobs, at times by nonproductive but profitable manipulation at the top. job creation has been quite incidental to the whole process, really has nothing to do with it.
The inimitable Beethoven, writing symphonies, did not have agents in the field impeding other symphonic writers, attempting to trip them up or cause them to write down sour notes. Like most creators he did his stuff and allowed others to do theirs. He did not hold patents on all possible combinations of musical notes, ready to direct his lawyers against other note jugglers. Much of corporate achievement, so-called, has involved sheer frustration of others, hardly creative. The sculptor, too, it is sometimes the riposte of nimble pro-corporate dialecticians here, destroys in order to create; he destroys pristine stone, reshaping its contours. But the sculptor does not destroy other sculptors! If he did he would indeed be the greatest living sculptor; but hardly on grounds of his own creativity.
The merging of companies, too, is usually hailed by the mass media as a stupendous creative act, a titanic generative copulation, which indeed it may in some cases be. It is, however, hardly creative in every single case or even in a majority of cases. What was created when a collection of existing steel companies were merged into the United States Steel Corporation by the elder J. P. Morgan other than a profitable opportunity to issue a vast quantity of watered stock? The constituent companies marched on under the triumphal arch of the new stock issue. The same is true of General Motors and many others.
While admitting there is creativity on the corporate circuit in peculiarly corporate matters (human creativity being hard to quell), I merely suggest that it should be specifically shown rather than uncritically assumed with respect to the panorama of corporations. Despite public relations puffery there are grounds to doubt there is much creativity in this quarter and instead much sedulous copying and overreaching (as shown by widespread corporate espionage), and I simply want to leave this phase out of consideration as a clear-cut social contribution. Most of what is remarkable about
corporations, as I noted earlier, is specifically noncorporate, technological, and derives from science and engineering rather than the business and financial offices. What is alone generally impressive about corporations, despite the glamour of the executive washroom and the keys thereunto pertaining, is their purely engineering aspect.
It is, therefore, of some interest to notice that when corporations put themselves on display in their best party clothes at world's fairs and in conducted tours of their premises they provide, no doubt in all innocence, only an engineering display. The ordinary visitor innocently thinks, as he is innocently expected to think, "This is a marvel of Big Business. Wall Street is really great. " The sophisticated observer, however, thinks, "What a marvelous exhibit of engineering skill! M. I. T. and Cal Tech are certainly great schools. " To the latter observer the business side of it all is comparatively dull and uninteresting, heavy-handed and simple-minded.
In the case of the foundations the situation is much the same. Concrete contributions may indeed have been made by mobilizing funds at strategic points and times, as in the case of the Rockefeller foundations; but far from all foundations have made parallel contributions. Most have as their end financial manipulation behind a sentimental screen.
Corporations manufacture, distribute and sell lifesaving penicillin, at a profit. But no corporation discovered penicillin. Corporations never discover, invent or create anything--are never any more than tools, as often for ill as for good.
The Philosophers on Wealth and Power
While public relations virtuosi busily confect their tales to lull the broad public in its belief that everything is for the best in the best of all possible deliriously free worlds, it may be of some interest to take note of the powerful cultural undertow these virtuosi, apparently unaware, are working against.
The rich, thanks in major degree to press agentry and the intellectual sinuosities of the mass media, currently appear to enjoy high status in the United States that will not diminish, presumably, as long as there is almost full general employment, the retention of which is a basic aim of national policy. As long as general employment keeps the populace moderately content, only a scattering of deviant and no doubt justly uncelebrated mentalities will be inclined to dissent from the image of the rich as public saviors and heroes. Hardly anyone except an obvious outcast or deviant presumes to venture doubts. From what quarter, if any, do these pathetic nay-sayers get their wrongheaded cues? What warrant have they for their nonadmiring and surely nonadmirable attitude? Have they indeed strayed from a nice, clean, healthy and wholesome disinfected Americanism owing to the insidious lucubrations of a tele- hypnotic, despicably fiendish Karl Marx sending aberrant messages from the documentary depths of the British Museum?
The simple fact is that the most reflective minds of western civilization, practically from inception, have looked with jaundiced eyes at the rich and the powerful. So to look is quite in harmony with the culture; to think otherwise is to step outside the intellectual boundaries of western civilization. All slick-paper public relations palaver in obeisance to the rich, indeed, is alien to the deepest currents of this civilization and represents nothing other than misbegotten ideological perversity, wrongheadedness of the nth degree.
Concededly one of the greatest minds of western civilization, teacher of Alexander the Great and still casting a broad shadow over us all, notably in his single-handed invention of logic, was Aristotle (384-322 B. C. ). On the subjects of the wealthy and the
powerful the great Aristotle resolutely put it into writing as follows (Rhetoric, Book II, Ch. 16, W. D. Ross trans. ):
The type of character produced by wealth lies on the surface for all to see. Wealthy men are insolent and arrogant; their possession of wealth affects their understanding; they feel as if they had every good thing that exists; wealth becomes a sort of standard of value for everything else, and therefore they imagine there is nothing it cannot buy. They are luxurious and ostentatious; luxurious, because of the luxury in which they live and the prosperity which they display; ostentatious and vulgar, because, like other people's, their minds are regularly occupied with the object of their love and admiration, and also because they think that other people's idea of happiness is the same as their own. It is indeed quite natural that they should be affected thus; for if you have money, there are always plenty of people who come begging from you. Hence the saying of Simonides about wise men and rich men, in answer to Hiero's Wife, who asked him whether it was better to grow rich or wise. "Why, rich," he said; "for I see the wise men spending their days at the rich men's doors. " Rich men also consider themselves worthy to hold public office; for they consider they already have the things that give a claim to office. In a word, the type of character produced by wealth is that of a prosperous fool.
There is indeed one difference between the type of the newly-enriched and those who have long been rich: the newly enriched have all the bad qualities mentioned in an exaggerated and worse form--to be newly-enriched means, so to speak, no education in riches. The wrongs they do others are not meant to injure their victims, but spring from insolence or self indulgence, e. g. , those that end in assault or in adultery.
As to Power: here too it may fairly be said that the type of character it produces is mostly obvious enough. Some elements in this type it shares with the wealthy type, others are better. Those in power are more ambitious and more manly in character than the wealthy, because they aspire to do the great deeds that their power permits them to do. Responsibility makes them more serious: they have to keep paying attention to the duties their position involves. They are dignified rather than arrogant, for the respect in which they are held inspires them with dignity and therefore with moderation--dignity being a mild and becoming form of arrogance. If they wrong others, they wrong them not on a small but on a great scale.
Good fortune in certain of its branches produces the types of character belonging to the conditions just described, since these conditions are in fact more or less the kinds of good fortune that are regarded as most important. It may be added that good fortune leads us to gain all we can in the way of family happiness and bodily advantages. It does indeed make men more supercilious and more reckless; but there is one excellent quality that goes with it--piety, and respect for the divine power, in which they believe because of events which are really the result of chance.
This account of the types of character that correspond to differences of age or fortune may end here; for to arrive at the opposite types to those described, namely, those of the poor, the unfortunate, and the powerless, we have only to ask what the opposite qualities are.
Nor is the earnest inquirer given a less severe view if he turns to Plato, the other great cultural legislator whose shadow is imbedded integrally in western civilization. All European philosophy, said Alfred North Whitehead (no radical), is but a footnote to Plato. The "divine Plato" took an extremely dim view of wealthy people and personal wealth. Dipping into the excellent Hamilton-Cairns one-volume edition published by the Bollingen Foundation, a Paul Mellon enterprise, we find the following nuggets:
"So, when wealth is honored in a state, and the wealthy, virtue and the good are less honored. . . . Thus, finally, from being lovers of victory and lovers of honor they
become lovers of gain getting and of money, and they commend and admire the rich man and put him in office but despise the man who is poor. " (Republic, 8. 551b. )
As to democracy, "the insatiate lust for wealth and the neglect of everything else for the sake of money-making were the cause of its undoing. " (Ibid. , 8. 562b. )
The arts and crafts are corrupted by the co-presence of great wealth and poverty. (Ibid. , 4. 421d. )
"Wealth and poverty" should be kept out of the good society "since the one brings luxury, idleness, and innovation, and the other illiberality and the evil of bad workmanship. . . . " (Ibid. , 4. 422a. )
Those most successful in the pursuit of wealth become the targets of the drones, become "the pastures of the drones. " (Ibid. , 8. 564e. )
". . . it is the evil life commonly led by the sons of autocrats and men of extraordinary wealth. Such a training will never, never lead to outstanding goodness in boy, or man, or graybeard. " (Laws, 3. 695e. )
"But to be at once exceedingly wealthy and good is impossible, if we mean by the wealthy those who are accounted so by the vulgar, that is, the exceptional few who own property of great pecuniary value--the very thing a bad man would be likely to own. Now since this is so, I can never concede to them that a rich man is truly happy unless he is also a good man, but that one who is exceptionally good should be exceptionally wealthy too is a mere impossibility. " (Ibid. , 5. 742e. )
"One arises from the passion for wealth which leaves a man not a moment of leisure to attend to anything beyond his personal fortunes. So long as a citizen's whole soul is wrapped up in these, he cannot give a thought to anything but the day's takings. Any study or pursuit which tends to that result everyone sets himself eagerly to learn and practice; all others are laughed to scorn. Here, then, we may say, is one reason in particular why society declines to take this or any other wholly admirable pursuit seriously, though everyone in it is ready enough, in his furious thirst for gold and silver, to stoop to any trade and any shift, honorable or dishonorable, which holds out a prospect of wealth, ready to scruple at no act whatsoever--innocent, sinful, or utterly shameful--so long as it promises to sate him, like some brute beast, with a perfect glut of eating, drinking, and sexual sport. " (Ibid. , 8. 831c,d. )
A soul stung to savagery by unsatisfied lusts "is chiefly found concerned with that on which most men's longing is most permanently and sharply set--wealth, with the power wealth gets alike from native bias and pernicious wrong education to breed countless cravings for insatiate and unbounded possession of itself. And the source of this perverse education is the credit given to false praise of riches alike by Greek and non- Greek; they promote wealth to the first place among good things, whereas in truth it holds but the third, and thus they deprive not only themselves but their posterity. " (Ibid. , 9. 870a. )
Plato has a great deal more to say about the wealthy, most of it disparaging. His remarks, indeed, foreshadow the Aristotelian position that the best society is one dominated by a middle class of the moderately affluent, with neither extremely rich nor extremely poor. In both the Platonic and Aristotelian perspectives the United States is a monstrously lopsided entity, a veritable Gorgon, a chamber of horrors.
What is perhaps of paramount interest is that no subsequent major thinker has departed essentially from the script as laid down by these giant pundits. It may be that thinkers in following Plato and Aristotle here merely felt rivalrous toward those with a claim to power other than intellectual, as Plato indeed unquestionably felt rivalrous
toward the poets. Yet intellectuals in general have not felt so uniformly against nonintellectual power rivals like soldiers, politicians, explorers, religious leaders or artists as they have against the rich, a feeling that by no means reached its apogee, as commonly supposed, in the writings of Karl Marx.
Marx has clearly been topped in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, the stylish French metaphysician, who refers to the wealthy and the respectable in general as salauds (filthy beasts) because he believes they have it in their power to produce alterations for the better but instead work assiduously to perpetuate ancient swindles while professing humane goals.
Sartre, like Aristotle and Plato, is rather remote from most Americans. Nearer home, a recent expression of the attitude, deeply etched into American radical and dissenting literature, can be sampled in the summary by the Marxist, Herbert Aptheker, of the non- Marxist C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite as "filled also with burning attacks--as passionate but not as muted as that of his mentor Veblen--upon the social and personal immorality of the rich, their coarseness, cruelty, hypocrisy, greed, and lustfulness. " 1
One could, it is true, assemble examples of the rich from the American scene who apparently fit different items of these characterizations. But, straying outside the circle of the rich, one could unquestionably find proportionately as many cases for each count in the indictment at all except the most refined levels of society. And seeking examples of virtuosic cruelty, one would find it impossible to discover any rival among the American rich to such a Marxist redeemer as Josef Stalin, to say nothing of Lavrenti Beria and a swarm of power-crazed leftist midgets from the lower depths. "Practical" Marxists like Dr. Aptheker, while launching their shafts of criticism, seem blissfully unaware of what their own affiliations and loyalties commit them to defend.
The Aptheker-Mills indictment of "the rich," as formulated above, is clearly far too broad and obviously loaded. It reveals and perhaps prescribes an attitude rather than describes.
But if one turns to the influential Alexander Hamilton among the Founding Fathers, one finds, contrary to Plato, Aristotle and almost every other considerable political thinker in western history, that government should belong to "the wealthy, the good and the wise. " As to the last two, Plato and Aristotle would have agreed; as to the first, we know what they thought.
Social thinkers down through the centuries have all had favorite classes, which they took to be the instruments of deliverance. With Plato it was the intellectuals, with Aristotle the middle classes, with Jefferson the small farmers, with Marx the factory workers, with Hamilton the wealthy and so on. In this boxing of the class compass, one contemporary writer, Nelson Algren, has oddly found his favorite social group among what Marx called the lumpenproletariat --thieves, pimps, prostitutes and down-and- outers.
But, in his admiration of the wealthy, Hamilton, political father of the American plutocracy, virtually represented an historical minority of one among political thinkers.
The Problematic Rich
Who, in the first place, are "the rich"?
Included in the designation are trust-fund infants who at the moment of birth are incalculably rich (and presumably no more offensive than any other infants), trust-fund children of various ages, women young and old of mixed capabilities and outlooks and men ranging from inane idlers and wastrels through routine performers to the intensely but not always laudably active. Whatever else one can say about most of the rich, one
cannot reasonably say they are especially coarse, cruel, greedy or more than commonly hypocritical or lustful. Money in a special place of high honor to one side, a person of ordinary sensibilities would much prefer to associate with many, perhaps most of them, than with the average run-of-the-mill politician, labor leader, advertising impresario or gospel-monger.
What Mills focused his attention on was the active rich, particularly the policy setters, and among these one could not deny the presence of the immoral (tax manipulators, for example), the coarse, the cruel, the hypocritical, the greedy and the lustful; but even among these, that all or most are of the order indicated can be easily shown to be fictional.
What is problematic about the rich is more as follows: The possession of wealth, inherited or acquired, itself informs the possessor that he is special, that he holds winning cards over most people in most social situations. He can, for one thing, finance a greater number of amorous episodes--a big advantage in the estimation of the simple- minded. He holds a social advantage over most others which, unluckily for him, may so turn his head as to give him delusions of inherent superiority, as is often the case in the possession of anything rare and desired. One hugs one's advantages--health, strength, intelligence, learning or wealth--and tends to take them as marks of invidious excellence: snobbism. In some rich families, the Rockefeller notably, the children are carefully reared in as middle class a way as possible to prevent their developing such common delusions; yet the fact cannot be concealed for long that they are special, that they hold a fistful of aces in worldly goods, and that others surely define them as different.
They are different; they are rich--in effect, noble--in a society replete with poverty and degradation, Their wealth makes it possible for them to mobilize more effective power than most people at particular points, at times to their own undoing. Money is like a spirited horse in at least this respect: One must know how to ride it, which few really do.
Like anyone else, the rich person may experience frustrations and a sense of being unduly limited; but he does not usually feel it in as many ways nor as frequently or humiliatingly as the nonrich. He feels that he has, in general, more elbow room, a wider range of choice. And he has indeed more elbow room, geographic and psychological.
As to the active policy-making rich and their agents of the power elite (for these latter are mostly agents): Like nearly all people they are usually heedless of whatever is not before their eyes, either lack sufficient imagination (like reckless motorists) or have their attention fully absorbed (like nearly everyone else) by their personal problems and projects. The doers of the world all have projects, and one is either a doer or nondoer. And doers all derive an intense feeling of satisfaction from any project carried to success, whether it consists of writing a book, leading a revolution, creating or managing a corporation or winning an election. Absorption in one's own project, whether it is building a corporation or writing a poem, leaves one unable to play one's attention over other aspects of reality. Probably the greatest harm in the world comes of the simple fact that nobody is able to pay full attention to everything at once. One really should, yet it is impossible. Although this is so, it does not follow that attention cannot be focused on a wider horizon than immediate, specialized interests--a marked tendency of the rising rich at least. The basic offense of most of the active rich, if it is an offense, is that they usually pursue their own visions, skillfully or crudely, not only to the neglect of the rest of the world (as does the poet) but, at times, because they have power, against or indifferent to the needs and wishes of the rest of the world. Not only do they have power but, like most people, they are thoroughly egocentric.
Although now woven by means of large enterprises into the warp and woof of all society, the rich, like nearly everyone else, put their own enterprises first in the narrowly reasonable effort to preserve their social advantage, by means fair or seemingly questionable. Without that social advantage they would, like the common people, be at the beck and call of almost any self-appointed messiah presenting himself as the latest in the line of the Apostolic Succession or, perhaps, a spiritual representative of a freely prescribing Karl Marx or even, like Adolf Hitler, as the offspring of Wotan. Being rich is basically defensive in a rough world, although the defensive position has its own hazards.
What is perhaps most irksome about the rich to the intelligent nonrich, particularly to those with some other vision of how society should be arranged, is not actually what any rich individual may or may not do. True, by behaving outwardly like a gentleman the rich man may temper animosity; but he cannot, even by gentlemanly behavior, mollify persons like Plato, Aristotle, Marx, Sartre and others acutely aware of his necessary role, which is much like that of a character in a Greek drama enacting the capricious will of the gods.
The rich, the plain fact is, confront the rest of society as a solid, semicorporate phalanx, buttressed by law and public policy. By law they hold their positions legitimately and hence can feel complete rectitude. When the national anthem is being sung they can feel it is being sung in celebration of the legal system that supports them, for the aggrandizement of which every man, the poorer especially, may be called upon to offer his very life simply by presidential order, without any declaration of war by Congress. Beyond this, existing policies under the law favor them; they have been adopted largely by their agents with their corporate permission.
The existence of this solid phalanx is sharply noticeable only to those who have some proposal to make with a view to adjusting policy in order to accommodate some large number of people who are, in one way or the other, supposedly being unduly inconvenienced by any number of things. Whenever any public proposal is made for any change (however slight), it is bound to encounter opposition. Upon inquiry it turns out that the opposition ordinarily stems from one or more affluent or rich people, usually referred to euphemistically as Interests. While there are indeed many interests in a society, the most assertive is surely the property interest.
Even a case about a trivial question, adversely affecting only one propertied person, may have wide implications for many or all propertied because it may set a precedent upon which further more extensive similar actions may be taken. The entire phalanx of the propertied becomes agitated and makes its displeasure known to legislators, judges and other officials. After all, one cannot have unsound decisions approved. Again, the entire phalanx of the propertied may be committed by simply one among the propertied, who presses deviously for and obtains some tax concession. This concession thereafter applies to all, whether they asked for it or not.
Thus it happens that even minor, purely common-sense proposals for reforms often precipitate fierce political dogfights.
In a relevant case, early in 1966 C. Wright Patman, the powerful chairman of the powerful House Banking and Currency Committee, decided on the basis of a committee vote to investigate the entire question of how trust funds are used in corporate and bank control. When subpoenas began to go out to banks requesting information there was suddenly called on June 7 a meeting by 17 of 33 committee members, who required the recall of many subpoenas; on a showdown, however, the right of the chairman to issue subpoenas was upheld.
This checking of a committee chairman was a very unusual action, which obviously had its source in some of the entities being investigated. Not many citizens, it is true, are alert to this situation or probably care very much.
What the final outcome of the investigation will be, whether it will be muted or not, is not yet known. Whether light will be thrown on what Chairman Patman claims are some $215 billion of trust fund holdings one cannot yet tell; all this is terra incognita right now.
By the end of the year, at any rate, Chairman Patman on the basis of subpoenas already returned was able to announce that three-quarters of the banks of the country had at least 5 per cent of their stock held by other banks through trust funds managed for beneficiaries and that this percentage of stock ownership represented a long step toward control. The very largest banks, he said, operated under this sort of interlocking ownership, were all more or less in the same ownership bed--one big happy incestuous family. 2
The information needed in this area is as follows: identifications of trust-fund holdings, book values and current market values, nature of trusts and length of time they run, beneficiaries of a multiplicity of trusts (reducing income taxes), cost of operation of trusts, validity of investment selections for trusts, etc. Whether the named beneficiaries or the managers benefit most is an undetermined question.
The propertied, for one thing, are mostly especially sensitive to anything about taxes-- how much shall be the total levy and, more important, how shall the collection be proportioned? In general, the propertied interest in the United States, sheltered behind technician-spokesmen, has been opposed (whatever some individual property owners felt) to government levies for the sake of the domestic comfort, convenience and necessity of the broad public (its own comfort and convenience being apparently assured) but has been generously unstinting in any military or semi-military expenditures that gave government a strong argument abroad in assuring access to markets, raw materials and trade routes. At present, with military and space exploration budgets inflated to record proportions, the cities internally are literally falling apart. It has been estimated by insiders that 75 per cent of the military budget is rationally unjustifiable.
Beyond the desire to keep down tax totals (hence the fiscally sound objection to "reckless government spending") there is the collective desire of the propertied to shove a disproportionate part of the tax burden over onto the lower labor force which, imbued with patriotic ardor, is presumably happy to support a democratic paradise that freely allows them to go and listen to happy tidings of the afterworld from the likes of Billy Graham and Fulton J. Sheen and to rub elbows with the rich at Coney Island. As we have already seen how deftly this tax burden is shouldered onto the pious, patriotic and not-too-bright lower labor force, the point need engage our fascinated interest no longer.
Whatever the call may be for social adjustment will either cost tax money or intrude more or less adversely on some propertied interest--that is, upon the revenues of some collection of rich persons. More public housing will tread on the toes of private landlords. And as this call for adjustment is fought by the "interests," some proponents are irked. The purely commonsense proposal, for example, to place effective health warnings on cigarette packages was fought to a standstill and defeated in Congress, with the result that the tobacco industry through intensified advertising is selling more cigarettes than ever before in the teeth of repeated formal government findings that they are a clear menace to health. Similarly there was fought tooth and nail suggested mandatory automobile safety equipment and there have been fights in the state
legislatures against attempts to limit in any way the free resale of unroadworthy second- hand cars. One could cite thousands of similar cases.
To be sure, when it is said that an "industry" opposes something, the source of the opposition is kept sufficiently abstract and remote. An industry is not something subject to sense experience. One cannot see it or feel it. "Industry" here boils down to no more than several boards of directorsperhaps fifty to a hundred men--who represent stockholders, mainly large stockholders--in brief, rich people. These latter are, somewhat poetically, as adversely affected by automobile air pollution as the poor although they can resort to air conditioning or retreat to remote fresh-air estates and ranches.
It is this consistent opposition to proposals for reasonable as well as unreasonable change that the propertied have offered down through history, opposition more effective than argument, that has caused the rich to be looked upon as problematic ever since Plato. It is not that they are necessarily vicious, as the Marxists often postulate; it is just that they are blandly or uncomprehendingly selfish, and not always very intelligently. The unpropertied person may be just as selfish but he has no telltale instrument such as property with which to reveal his selfishness so completely.
Like the small band of Greeks in the pass at Thermopylae the selfish rich hold back by their skill of maneuver in an entrenched position (always in the name of sound policy) huge disorganized armies of sansculottes and descamisados (among which, thoughtfully, they have their own friends haranguing on all manner of irrelevancies dear to the same sansculottes and descamisados). It is all much like a disciplined Roman legion against a barbarian rabble.
Because virtually everything has an economic aspect and because the rich, as we have seen, own and control the foundation and prime stages of the economic system, practically anything that anyone is likely to propose in the way of a new arrangement is going to strike some among the propertied and the rich adversely, and hence lead them to invoke the law defensively or work for a new self-serving public ordinance. Often the mere attempt to reroute traffic by local ordinance causes merchants to spring into tigerish opposition, presumably in defense of property rights.
Again, many individuals who engage in entrepreneurial action, hoping to become rich, find that the way is barred by persons, propertied or rich, already in established positions. As Henry J. Kaiser discovered, there is no room for another automobile manufacturer. True, there are interstices into which newcomers may insert themselves with success, particularly the area of new technology but, in the main, the road is blocked to all except the very clever--and lucky--among newcomers.
The rich, then, come to seem to those who have encountered their resistance like part of a single corporate entity, a special class, or, as the Marxists say, a class interest. Because they are each part of this class interest, embalmed like a fly in plastic, there is not much they can do to earn credit in the eyes of critics. Owing to the saying of Jesus in Matthew, XIX, 24, that "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God," there was no way out for a rich man for hundreds of years except to give his property to the church. The result was that in the late medieval period the churchpols in the name of the church held tightly more than half the land of Europe; the latecoming kings were far less gullible than the earlier gentry. In the eyes of the Marxists there is nothing a rich man can do except, like Frederick Engels, devote his wealth to the promotion of Marxism; anything less will fail to gain credit. The rich could, to be sure, turn all their wealth over to the government where it would at the present time fall under the benign jurisdiction of Lyndon B.
Johnson, in which circumstances few judicious moralists would see any particular gain for mankind.
Castigation of the rich, however, arises less from envy, as commonly supposed, than from people who have in some way been blocked or frustrated by the massed class interest of the rich. The rich man may be a really nice guy; but his very interests, indeed his whole being, force him to present himself in a certain stylized way. Most of the critics of the rich have themselves been power claimants, who know the rich and powerful can readily trump their cards. Plato, Aristotle and a long line of independent intellectuals have known that their carefully reasoned arguments are subject to political defeat less by sound counter-arguments than by the power of inertia, money and entrenched position. As any practical politician knows, in going before Congress on any question it is better to be backed by lucre than by a bullet-proof argument. Money will win almost every time on crucial questions, such as intruding from afar into World War I, and the only way apparently to defeat it is by some other brute power. Hence, as the Marxists say, revolution. The proffered cure here, though, except in cases of complete war-induced social collapse as in Russia in 1917 and China in the 1940's, is clearly worse than the disease because serviceable institutional restraints are swept away in the uproar and a clean slate is open to an unrestrained set of new power seekers, not at all squeamish (as history has shown) about how they apply their power. Leninist Communism is clearly a modern receivership in political bankruptcy.
Where those counts in the Aptheker indictment are best sustained is with respect to certain uneducated men of the poorer classes who have by book or crook made themselves rich: the original grabbers. In this country these are the "Robber Barons" of the nineteenth century and later replicas. The record on these is by now fairly well known. While many of the established rich, normally lacking imagination and perhaps sufficient sapience, have been normally heedless, the clear-cut depredations of the rich have in most cases been carried out by founders, newcomers, in panicky flight from poverty. It is the ex-poor among the rich who have been the most active social offenders. This was the crowd Veblen largely wrote about in all their vulgarity.
All of which is not to say that there is nothing of an overbearingly objectionable nature about the general policies since World War II contrived by Mills's insidiously bland power elite on behalf of remote principals. Those policies have been, on the whole, immediately self-serving, broadly neglectful of visible internal social decay and in that sense actually inimical over the long term to basic upper-class interests. What there really is to the idea of a power elite consists of people--upper-crust lawyers, politicians, officials, journalists, public relations men and idea men--who in various ways recommend themselves to the rich and well positioned by formulating defensive stopgaps for immediate problems. A way to remunerative position in the United States is to get the nod from some one of the wealthy or their adjutants, and those who get this nod are invariably from lower levels of society, usually chimpanzee-bright men who have developed know-how and can-do for poulticing over difficult situations in the interests of established arrangements. This is the level where "urban renewal" and roadbuilding become new ways of generating windfall profits. Nobody, it is pertinent to notice, gets the nod who is in any way seriously opposed to the established order. Indeed, nobody gets the nod who is merely reflectively doubtful and hesitant. Such persons would only generate dissension or uncertainty in high places and impede a smooth-smooth administrative operation.
As nobody to my knowledge has attempted to pinpoint collectively the possibly laudable achievements of rich people, quite apart from their class interests, I here set myself this heretical task with a view both to rounding out the picture and to seeing
concretely just what the achievements may amount to. How undeniably constructive and creative have the wealthy, more particularly the American wealthy, really been?
The Sacred Group
In seeking to isolate the achievements of the wealthy, it seems desirable to indicate the broad area within which one looks. Who, shall we say, are the wealthy?
Fortunately the Federal Reserve Board and Census Bureau, as noticed earlier, have come up with recent figures, the most precise on official record, to the effect that there were an estimated 200,000 nuclear families averaging three persons in the country as of December 31, 1962, in possession of net assets of $500,000 or more. 3 So, for these purposes, we shall take this last as the maximum figure representing a proto-wealthy family, although a person worth a few thousands less could hardly be considered impoverished. Naturally, the indicated small group includes everybody in possession of up to a heady billion dollars by value and beyond.
But even a group of this reduced size is cumbersome to inquire into and includes more than the definitively wealthy. This group of 200,000 nuclear families can be narrowed down somewhat, however. U. S. News and World Report, October 11, 1965, estimated on the basis of more recent Treasury figures that: "Today there are about 90,000 millionaires," by which it alluded to persons owning assets worth at least $1 million. 4 Some of these were in extended family clusters, and some families as we know (Du Ponts, Fords, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts et al. ) contain many millionaires and millionaire nuclear families. Total holdings of the group were estimated in excess of $250 billion. As of 1948, the millionaire group totaled only 13,000 by the reckoning of this same source.
U. S. News pointed out that this 90,000 indicated that one family in every 625 was in the millionaire class, which meant approximately 1/6 of 1 per cent of families, a fraction of a sliver, had net assets of at least $1 million.
The sevenfold variation in number of millionaires between 1948 and 1965 stemmed from the fact that most wealth-holders concentrate their holdings in corporation stocks; and in 1948 stock prices were comparatively low, in 1964 and 1965 they were comparatively high. It does not indicate that new asset-nuclei were formed to this extent. Judging by the composition of estates in 1961, Treasury figures showed (as U. S. News and World Report acknowledged), that upper-class wealth was held as follows on the average: Stocks, 65. 1 per cent; tax-exempt bonds, 8. 5 per cent; real estate, 6. 7 per cent; cash, 4. 3 per cent; U. S. government bonds, 4. 2 per cent; mortgages and notes, 1. 8 per cent; insurance, 1. 8 per cent; other bonds, . 8 per cent; and miscellaneous, 6. 8 per cent. Such being the case, any appreciable rise and fall of the stock market will alternately see-saw many suddenly up into the millionaire class or ease them down. The 1948 figure, in my view, is more indicative of the really heavy money than a 1965 figure. Better yet would be a 1932 figure. 5 As to the formation of new asset-nuclei, this is a far rarer occurrence than is regularly suggested in Time, Fortune and the Wall Street Journal.
As far as the achievements of the really wealthy are concerned, then, we may limit ourselves to looking within a contemporary group of very few families.
Not only will contemporary names be drawn from this property bracket but, at times, a retrospective view will be taken of individual achievers, always leaving out of consideration, for reasons stated, business organizers and managers as such. In order to read of their corporate deeds of derring-do one need merely turn to the pages of Fortune, which publishes a continual celebration of how well men run their own plantations.
Excluded will be any who have entered the indicated property bracket through achievements in the world of entertainment, sports and the arts--popular playwrights, actors, athletes, opera singers and virtuoso musicians. Those of whom note will be taken will be only those known to be in, around or about this property class prior to their achievement, not those who got into it through recognizable achievement. A financially successful once poor inventor would not be included.
Standards of Achievement
Anything that passes by worldly standards as achievement other than ambiguous corporate success will be counted as such. The operative phrase here is "by worldly standards," for much not applauded by the world as an achievement represents a great purely personal achievement as in the case of many persons, rich or poor, who daily force themselves up from a bed of pain and painfully perform daily duties or anyone, rich or poor, who becomes fairly civilized, a lamentably rare occurrence.
The commonly recognized areas of formal achievement, apart from business (which appears to rate high in popular esteem), are politics, law, the performing and creative arts, the sciences, scholarship, medicine, philosophy, religion, education, engineering, entertainment in the broadest sense, sports and journalism. In considering a sub-division of possibly 90,000 individuals and families we have considerable leeway, a large group to deal with although only a sliver of the population. But this, at least, is the area within which to look.
Psychologists generally consider 1/2 of 1 per cent of the population to be "gifted" in some way so that if the same ratio were preserved among 200,000 families owning $500,000 or more of property there would be at least 2,000 (two adults) "gifted" upper wealth-holders. Because not all the "gifted" bring their gifts to fruition there would not necessarily be this many outstanding achievers in the group; but there should be on the basis of the general distribution at least 500. Available data, however, do not enable one to assemble such a total, so that outstanding achievers are either proportionately fewer in the heavily propertied group, are somehow concealed from external view or are unpublicized. Yet it is in the nature of outstanding achievement sooner or later to call attention to itself.
It would be possible to identify all wealthy individuals only if one were provided with statements of net worth, which are not available; there are, however, indications in many cases, as already noticed. Achievement itself is notable and focuses public attention on the achiever and his background in an age of excessive publicity. As far as the very rich are concerned, we know pretty well who they are and can inspect them directly.
But I shall not, owing to the absence of precise data, be able to spot all, or nearly all, especially down near the lower levels of wealth-holding. There may be a wealthy man of considerable achievement, but if it is not shown on the record that his family has a certain net worth I cannot name him, much as I would like to. However, in the interests of an increase in knowledge, this is a game that others, privy to facts inaccessible to me, can play by supplementing my report. For, owing to the inattention of sociologists, we do not know with any precision the record of personal achievement or nonachievement of all large and largish property holders. The evidence only becomes clear as we ascend into the rarified realm of the known very large property holders, the super rich.
Area of Greatest Impact
It is not, first, usually thought possible for a man of wealth to be any sort of achiever. "Inherited wealth is a big handicap to happiness," said William K. Vanderbilt in a press interview in 1905. "It is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to morality. " 6 As to
the attainment of wealth through personal achievement, a universally spread view is summarized in an old Chinese proverb: "A man seldom gets rich without ill-got gain; as a horse does not fatten without feeding in the night. " 7
Yet the handicap indicated by Vanderbilt is sometimes overcome.
As the record shows, law combined with politics has been the area of greatest impact of propertied activists apart from corporate management. Not that legal practice as such, which in general is not extravagantly rewarded, has attracted big propertied people to any conspicuous extent. The rigors of either advocacy or jurisconsultation appear to have had few attractions for the wealthy, although the acquisition of a law degree and admission to the bar I take to be concrete achievements, whatever further steps are necessary to attaining distinction as a lawyer.
In general, lawyers from heavily propertied families do not enter into general legal practice, civil or criminal. Some members of lower wealth-holding layers do go into the practice of corporate law. As such they are, in general, necessarily defenders of the propertied position. Non-Establishment lawyers are, in general, defending criminal lawyers and plaintiffs' lawyers in civil actions, apart from a few affiliated with nonconformist causes such as constitutional rights. The Establishment, so-called, is usually interested either in prosecuting someone, rarely a member of the Establishment itself, or in defending some part of itself against not always valid individual claims.
While there may be lawyers from wealthy families who are non-Establishment practitioners, such a fact does not clearly show on the record.
In politics some of the more prominent of wealthy lawyers have been Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson and members of the Taft family beginning with William Howard Taft, one-time president of the United States. The Tafts, in addition to law, have notably operated in real estate.
William Howard Taft became chief justice of the Supreme Court but he is one of the very few among latter-day big wealth-holders who have held a judgeship. Taft, of course, was a thoroughgoing Establishment judge. A less well-known but highly distinguished judge was Curtis Bok of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, who died in 1962. A grandson of Cyrus H. K. Curtis, the mass publisher, and Edward M. Bok, Curtis Bok was also a gifted and sensitive author who wrote Star Wormwood, The Backbone of the Herring and I, Too, Nicodemus, all worth reading. Over a long period of years he was an exceptionally fine public servant. There was, too, Judge Thomas Mellon, the founder.
Judges are quite rare, though, among families of notable wealth. One draws a comparative blank among the big-wealthy on judges although one would unquestionably find a few among some of more modest fortune if the data were available. Judges, of course, are often men of some modest property, acquired through the practice of law, inheritance or marriage except for those few who have made financial killings as members of political syndicates.
Wealthy men directly in politics are no special novelty in American history. George Washington, the first president, was considered perhaps the wealthiest man of his time in the country, an inheritor. Many of the nation's founders, relative to their time, were quite wealthy, including Thomas Jefferson--at least until his final years. They were nearly all men of property, usually landed, a fact pointedly reflected in the Constitution. But even on a relative scale their wealth did not attain the proportions of the latter-day industrial fortunes.
After the Civil War there were many, usually self-erected, former poor men, who sat in the United States Senate, there closely guiding their interests in railroads, oil, mining
and lumbering; but that these held their seats in consequence of any political achievement or aptitude is open to serious question.
So extensive are the affairs of the finpols that all the members of each finpolitan financial syndicate (finsyn? ) require large personal staffs embracing far more than body servants. In the case of the exemplary Rockefellers, for example, "In addition to a special staff that each Rockefeller has to handle his personal affairs, the Rockefellers in mass have a general staff to handle their communal business. There are more than three hundred employees in this establishment, which includes a legal department, an investment department, a philanthropic department, a brigade of accountants, and a family archivist. " 70 Many of these are people of arcane knowledge in near and remote fields, including a specialist on theological education in underdeveloped regions.
It is the general style of this finpolitan world that newcomers to big wealth will in time, whatever their current reservations, come to embrace through their children and grandchildren. Although the more recent Texas oil millionaires do not belong to this world, they are already getting ready for it as shown by their sprouting foundations. Once one has made the money, as old judge Mellon recognized, it is necessary to hold on to it. And the finpolitan style is a way of becoming a permanent fixture, of weaving oneself into the warp and woof of the status quo. The finpolitans, it is evident, are far less concerned with today than with tomorrow.
Finpolitan Sociology
What any sociology of the finpolitan world would be devoted to, it seems to me, would be the outlining of point by point comparisons between the Rockefeller style and that of their contemporaries. There would be shown wherein the established big-rich copy the Rockefeller style and wherein they deviate from it. Variations of emphasis take place throughout. But, despite variations, basic similarities are visible, notably the presence of investments in huge slabs.
In one matter all the finpolitan groups resemble each other: None behaves as though it believed it had been called upon to preside over the dissolution of the family dukedom. All, like the man who came to dinner, act thoroughly at home and as though they intend to stay, even as mass-media propaganda trumpets that the great fortunes are being dissipated. Rather than being dissipated, they appear to be more permanently and acceptably entrenched from day to day. It is only a popular fantasy that the big fortunes are disappearing; but, perhaps like a bad dream, they disappear only in order to appear again.
Fifteen
THE DIVINE SPARK AMONG THE RICH
Pretty much ignored by the public relations artists, who usually have more specific fish to fry, some of the American rich at least have individually performed in ways commendable from strictly critical points of view and in ways that at least occasionally draw indulgent, even maudlin, commendation from outside their class. They have by no means, contrary to leftist propaganda, all been grabbers, wastrels and self-aggrandizers. In what ways they have been brushed by the divine and semi-divine afflatus, as far as they are visible to mortal man, it is the purpose of this chapter to indicate.
Commendations of the rich are by no means rare, especially in the many media subject to their own control or influence. The task, however, is to evaluate them in the light of criteria more widely shared. Results then become somewhat modified.
The public relations fraternity argues that the founding, building up, assembling, directing and managing of any one of the large corporations or banks represent prima facie an important creative contribution to something called The American Economy, a contribution which in the aggregate is taken as comparable to the genetic labors of the
Hebraic Jehovah over six prodigious days. While this may be so in some degree (the element of time to one side) there are a few obstacles to accepting this somewhat florid view--as, for example, whether the economy has been added to or subtracted from, accelerated or delayed. As far as that is concerned, many ingredients happily blended by economists into the potpourri of Gross National Product are pronounced by spoilsports as deleterious: whisky, cigarettes, gaseous industrial fumes, comic books, cheap films, ugly billboards, the traffic complex, misleading advertising, crumbling shelters, shoddy merchandise, slums and industrial wastes conscientiously dumped into natural waterways.
The public relations wizard points to corporation C and asks one to kowtow at least mentally to founder F for what is palpably a creative achievement, giving employment to X thousands of good and prayerfully parental souls of the Great Society who would, presumably, otherwise be living in trees and eaves. This pretty much accords with the foolish popular view of the corporation: a job-giving, life-sustaining entity. Ordinarily left out of such considerations is the fact that corporation C in its majestic rise, by various ruses (some possibly adjudicated illegal), may have blocked the rise of other laudably life-sustaining entities. Until pressured by a slow-moving government to relinquish its absolute monopoly, Aluminum Company of America, for example, certainly stood in the way of the emergence of aluminum-making jobs now provided by Kaiser Aluminum, Reynolds Metals, Olin Mathieson and various others. Corporate managers have not always or solely been concerned about all-out production and full employment. Right now by means of automation they are eliminating jobs right and left. They have been at least occasionally interested in making money for themselves, at times by restricting production and jobs, at times by nonproductive but profitable manipulation at the top. job creation has been quite incidental to the whole process, really has nothing to do with it.
The inimitable Beethoven, writing symphonies, did not have agents in the field impeding other symphonic writers, attempting to trip them up or cause them to write down sour notes. Like most creators he did his stuff and allowed others to do theirs. He did not hold patents on all possible combinations of musical notes, ready to direct his lawyers against other note jugglers. Much of corporate achievement, so-called, has involved sheer frustration of others, hardly creative. The sculptor, too, it is sometimes the riposte of nimble pro-corporate dialecticians here, destroys in order to create; he destroys pristine stone, reshaping its contours. But the sculptor does not destroy other sculptors! If he did he would indeed be the greatest living sculptor; but hardly on grounds of his own creativity.
The merging of companies, too, is usually hailed by the mass media as a stupendous creative act, a titanic generative copulation, which indeed it may in some cases be. It is, however, hardly creative in every single case or even in a majority of cases. What was created when a collection of existing steel companies were merged into the United States Steel Corporation by the elder J. P. Morgan other than a profitable opportunity to issue a vast quantity of watered stock? The constituent companies marched on under the triumphal arch of the new stock issue. The same is true of General Motors and many others.
While admitting there is creativity on the corporate circuit in peculiarly corporate matters (human creativity being hard to quell), I merely suggest that it should be specifically shown rather than uncritically assumed with respect to the panorama of corporations. Despite public relations puffery there are grounds to doubt there is much creativity in this quarter and instead much sedulous copying and overreaching (as shown by widespread corporate espionage), and I simply want to leave this phase out of consideration as a clear-cut social contribution. Most of what is remarkable about
corporations, as I noted earlier, is specifically noncorporate, technological, and derives from science and engineering rather than the business and financial offices. What is alone generally impressive about corporations, despite the glamour of the executive washroom and the keys thereunto pertaining, is their purely engineering aspect.
It is, therefore, of some interest to notice that when corporations put themselves on display in their best party clothes at world's fairs and in conducted tours of their premises they provide, no doubt in all innocence, only an engineering display. The ordinary visitor innocently thinks, as he is innocently expected to think, "This is a marvel of Big Business. Wall Street is really great. " The sophisticated observer, however, thinks, "What a marvelous exhibit of engineering skill! M. I. T. and Cal Tech are certainly great schools. " To the latter observer the business side of it all is comparatively dull and uninteresting, heavy-handed and simple-minded.
In the case of the foundations the situation is much the same. Concrete contributions may indeed have been made by mobilizing funds at strategic points and times, as in the case of the Rockefeller foundations; but far from all foundations have made parallel contributions. Most have as their end financial manipulation behind a sentimental screen.
Corporations manufacture, distribute and sell lifesaving penicillin, at a profit. But no corporation discovered penicillin. Corporations never discover, invent or create anything--are never any more than tools, as often for ill as for good.
The Philosophers on Wealth and Power
While public relations virtuosi busily confect their tales to lull the broad public in its belief that everything is for the best in the best of all possible deliriously free worlds, it may be of some interest to take note of the powerful cultural undertow these virtuosi, apparently unaware, are working against.
The rich, thanks in major degree to press agentry and the intellectual sinuosities of the mass media, currently appear to enjoy high status in the United States that will not diminish, presumably, as long as there is almost full general employment, the retention of which is a basic aim of national policy. As long as general employment keeps the populace moderately content, only a scattering of deviant and no doubt justly uncelebrated mentalities will be inclined to dissent from the image of the rich as public saviors and heroes. Hardly anyone except an obvious outcast or deviant presumes to venture doubts. From what quarter, if any, do these pathetic nay-sayers get their wrongheaded cues? What warrant have they for their nonadmiring and surely nonadmirable attitude? Have they indeed strayed from a nice, clean, healthy and wholesome disinfected Americanism owing to the insidious lucubrations of a tele- hypnotic, despicably fiendish Karl Marx sending aberrant messages from the documentary depths of the British Museum?
The simple fact is that the most reflective minds of western civilization, practically from inception, have looked with jaundiced eyes at the rich and the powerful. So to look is quite in harmony with the culture; to think otherwise is to step outside the intellectual boundaries of western civilization. All slick-paper public relations palaver in obeisance to the rich, indeed, is alien to the deepest currents of this civilization and represents nothing other than misbegotten ideological perversity, wrongheadedness of the nth degree.
Concededly one of the greatest minds of western civilization, teacher of Alexander the Great and still casting a broad shadow over us all, notably in his single-handed invention of logic, was Aristotle (384-322 B. C. ). On the subjects of the wealthy and the
powerful the great Aristotle resolutely put it into writing as follows (Rhetoric, Book II, Ch. 16, W. D. Ross trans. ):
The type of character produced by wealth lies on the surface for all to see. Wealthy men are insolent and arrogant; their possession of wealth affects their understanding; they feel as if they had every good thing that exists; wealth becomes a sort of standard of value for everything else, and therefore they imagine there is nothing it cannot buy. They are luxurious and ostentatious; luxurious, because of the luxury in which they live and the prosperity which they display; ostentatious and vulgar, because, like other people's, their minds are regularly occupied with the object of their love and admiration, and also because they think that other people's idea of happiness is the same as their own. It is indeed quite natural that they should be affected thus; for if you have money, there are always plenty of people who come begging from you. Hence the saying of Simonides about wise men and rich men, in answer to Hiero's Wife, who asked him whether it was better to grow rich or wise. "Why, rich," he said; "for I see the wise men spending their days at the rich men's doors. " Rich men also consider themselves worthy to hold public office; for they consider they already have the things that give a claim to office. In a word, the type of character produced by wealth is that of a prosperous fool.
There is indeed one difference between the type of the newly-enriched and those who have long been rich: the newly enriched have all the bad qualities mentioned in an exaggerated and worse form--to be newly-enriched means, so to speak, no education in riches. The wrongs they do others are not meant to injure their victims, but spring from insolence or self indulgence, e. g. , those that end in assault or in adultery.
As to Power: here too it may fairly be said that the type of character it produces is mostly obvious enough. Some elements in this type it shares with the wealthy type, others are better. Those in power are more ambitious and more manly in character than the wealthy, because they aspire to do the great deeds that their power permits them to do. Responsibility makes them more serious: they have to keep paying attention to the duties their position involves. They are dignified rather than arrogant, for the respect in which they are held inspires them with dignity and therefore with moderation--dignity being a mild and becoming form of arrogance. If they wrong others, they wrong them not on a small but on a great scale.
Good fortune in certain of its branches produces the types of character belonging to the conditions just described, since these conditions are in fact more or less the kinds of good fortune that are regarded as most important. It may be added that good fortune leads us to gain all we can in the way of family happiness and bodily advantages. It does indeed make men more supercilious and more reckless; but there is one excellent quality that goes with it--piety, and respect for the divine power, in which they believe because of events which are really the result of chance.
This account of the types of character that correspond to differences of age or fortune may end here; for to arrive at the opposite types to those described, namely, those of the poor, the unfortunate, and the powerless, we have only to ask what the opposite qualities are.
Nor is the earnest inquirer given a less severe view if he turns to Plato, the other great cultural legislator whose shadow is imbedded integrally in western civilization. All European philosophy, said Alfred North Whitehead (no radical), is but a footnote to Plato. The "divine Plato" took an extremely dim view of wealthy people and personal wealth. Dipping into the excellent Hamilton-Cairns one-volume edition published by the Bollingen Foundation, a Paul Mellon enterprise, we find the following nuggets:
"So, when wealth is honored in a state, and the wealthy, virtue and the good are less honored. . . . Thus, finally, from being lovers of victory and lovers of honor they
become lovers of gain getting and of money, and they commend and admire the rich man and put him in office but despise the man who is poor. " (Republic, 8. 551b. )
As to democracy, "the insatiate lust for wealth and the neglect of everything else for the sake of money-making were the cause of its undoing. " (Ibid. , 8. 562b. )
The arts and crafts are corrupted by the co-presence of great wealth and poverty. (Ibid. , 4. 421d. )
"Wealth and poverty" should be kept out of the good society "since the one brings luxury, idleness, and innovation, and the other illiberality and the evil of bad workmanship. . . . " (Ibid. , 4. 422a. )
Those most successful in the pursuit of wealth become the targets of the drones, become "the pastures of the drones. " (Ibid. , 8. 564e. )
". . . it is the evil life commonly led by the sons of autocrats and men of extraordinary wealth. Such a training will never, never lead to outstanding goodness in boy, or man, or graybeard. " (Laws, 3. 695e. )
"But to be at once exceedingly wealthy and good is impossible, if we mean by the wealthy those who are accounted so by the vulgar, that is, the exceptional few who own property of great pecuniary value--the very thing a bad man would be likely to own. Now since this is so, I can never concede to them that a rich man is truly happy unless he is also a good man, but that one who is exceptionally good should be exceptionally wealthy too is a mere impossibility. " (Ibid. , 5. 742e. )
"One arises from the passion for wealth which leaves a man not a moment of leisure to attend to anything beyond his personal fortunes. So long as a citizen's whole soul is wrapped up in these, he cannot give a thought to anything but the day's takings. Any study or pursuit which tends to that result everyone sets himself eagerly to learn and practice; all others are laughed to scorn. Here, then, we may say, is one reason in particular why society declines to take this or any other wholly admirable pursuit seriously, though everyone in it is ready enough, in his furious thirst for gold and silver, to stoop to any trade and any shift, honorable or dishonorable, which holds out a prospect of wealth, ready to scruple at no act whatsoever--innocent, sinful, or utterly shameful--so long as it promises to sate him, like some brute beast, with a perfect glut of eating, drinking, and sexual sport. " (Ibid. , 8. 831c,d. )
A soul stung to savagery by unsatisfied lusts "is chiefly found concerned with that on which most men's longing is most permanently and sharply set--wealth, with the power wealth gets alike from native bias and pernicious wrong education to breed countless cravings for insatiate and unbounded possession of itself. And the source of this perverse education is the credit given to false praise of riches alike by Greek and non- Greek; they promote wealth to the first place among good things, whereas in truth it holds but the third, and thus they deprive not only themselves but their posterity. " (Ibid. , 9. 870a. )
Plato has a great deal more to say about the wealthy, most of it disparaging. His remarks, indeed, foreshadow the Aristotelian position that the best society is one dominated by a middle class of the moderately affluent, with neither extremely rich nor extremely poor. In both the Platonic and Aristotelian perspectives the United States is a monstrously lopsided entity, a veritable Gorgon, a chamber of horrors.
What is perhaps of paramount interest is that no subsequent major thinker has departed essentially from the script as laid down by these giant pundits. It may be that thinkers in following Plato and Aristotle here merely felt rivalrous toward those with a claim to power other than intellectual, as Plato indeed unquestionably felt rivalrous
toward the poets. Yet intellectuals in general have not felt so uniformly against nonintellectual power rivals like soldiers, politicians, explorers, religious leaders or artists as they have against the rich, a feeling that by no means reached its apogee, as commonly supposed, in the writings of Karl Marx.
Marx has clearly been topped in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, the stylish French metaphysician, who refers to the wealthy and the respectable in general as salauds (filthy beasts) because he believes they have it in their power to produce alterations for the better but instead work assiduously to perpetuate ancient swindles while professing humane goals.
Sartre, like Aristotle and Plato, is rather remote from most Americans. Nearer home, a recent expression of the attitude, deeply etched into American radical and dissenting literature, can be sampled in the summary by the Marxist, Herbert Aptheker, of the non- Marxist C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite as "filled also with burning attacks--as passionate but not as muted as that of his mentor Veblen--upon the social and personal immorality of the rich, their coarseness, cruelty, hypocrisy, greed, and lustfulness. " 1
One could, it is true, assemble examples of the rich from the American scene who apparently fit different items of these characterizations. But, straying outside the circle of the rich, one could unquestionably find proportionately as many cases for each count in the indictment at all except the most refined levels of society. And seeking examples of virtuosic cruelty, one would find it impossible to discover any rival among the American rich to such a Marxist redeemer as Josef Stalin, to say nothing of Lavrenti Beria and a swarm of power-crazed leftist midgets from the lower depths. "Practical" Marxists like Dr. Aptheker, while launching their shafts of criticism, seem blissfully unaware of what their own affiliations and loyalties commit them to defend.
The Aptheker-Mills indictment of "the rich," as formulated above, is clearly far too broad and obviously loaded. It reveals and perhaps prescribes an attitude rather than describes.
But if one turns to the influential Alexander Hamilton among the Founding Fathers, one finds, contrary to Plato, Aristotle and almost every other considerable political thinker in western history, that government should belong to "the wealthy, the good and the wise. " As to the last two, Plato and Aristotle would have agreed; as to the first, we know what they thought.
Social thinkers down through the centuries have all had favorite classes, which they took to be the instruments of deliverance. With Plato it was the intellectuals, with Aristotle the middle classes, with Jefferson the small farmers, with Marx the factory workers, with Hamilton the wealthy and so on. In this boxing of the class compass, one contemporary writer, Nelson Algren, has oddly found his favorite social group among what Marx called the lumpenproletariat --thieves, pimps, prostitutes and down-and- outers.
But, in his admiration of the wealthy, Hamilton, political father of the American plutocracy, virtually represented an historical minority of one among political thinkers.
The Problematic Rich
Who, in the first place, are "the rich"?
Included in the designation are trust-fund infants who at the moment of birth are incalculably rich (and presumably no more offensive than any other infants), trust-fund children of various ages, women young and old of mixed capabilities and outlooks and men ranging from inane idlers and wastrels through routine performers to the intensely but not always laudably active. Whatever else one can say about most of the rich, one
cannot reasonably say they are especially coarse, cruel, greedy or more than commonly hypocritical or lustful. Money in a special place of high honor to one side, a person of ordinary sensibilities would much prefer to associate with many, perhaps most of them, than with the average run-of-the-mill politician, labor leader, advertising impresario or gospel-monger.
What Mills focused his attention on was the active rich, particularly the policy setters, and among these one could not deny the presence of the immoral (tax manipulators, for example), the coarse, the cruel, the hypocritical, the greedy and the lustful; but even among these, that all or most are of the order indicated can be easily shown to be fictional.
What is problematic about the rich is more as follows: The possession of wealth, inherited or acquired, itself informs the possessor that he is special, that he holds winning cards over most people in most social situations. He can, for one thing, finance a greater number of amorous episodes--a big advantage in the estimation of the simple- minded. He holds a social advantage over most others which, unluckily for him, may so turn his head as to give him delusions of inherent superiority, as is often the case in the possession of anything rare and desired. One hugs one's advantages--health, strength, intelligence, learning or wealth--and tends to take them as marks of invidious excellence: snobbism. In some rich families, the Rockefeller notably, the children are carefully reared in as middle class a way as possible to prevent their developing such common delusions; yet the fact cannot be concealed for long that they are special, that they hold a fistful of aces in worldly goods, and that others surely define them as different.
They are different; they are rich--in effect, noble--in a society replete with poverty and degradation, Their wealth makes it possible for them to mobilize more effective power than most people at particular points, at times to their own undoing. Money is like a spirited horse in at least this respect: One must know how to ride it, which few really do.
Like anyone else, the rich person may experience frustrations and a sense of being unduly limited; but he does not usually feel it in as many ways nor as frequently or humiliatingly as the nonrich. He feels that he has, in general, more elbow room, a wider range of choice. And he has indeed more elbow room, geographic and psychological.
As to the active policy-making rich and their agents of the power elite (for these latter are mostly agents): Like nearly all people they are usually heedless of whatever is not before their eyes, either lack sufficient imagination (like reckless motorists) or have their attention fully absorbed (like nearly everyone else) by their personal problems and projects. The doers of the world all have projects, and one is either a doer or nondoer. And doers all derive an intense feeling of satisfaction from any project carried to success, whether it consists of writing a book, leading a revolution, creating or managing a corporation or winning an election. Absorption in one's own project, whether it is building a corporation or writing a poem, leaves one unable to play one's attention over other aspects of reality. Probably the greatest harm in the world comes of the simple fact that nobody is able to pay full attention to everything at once. One really should, yet it is impossible. Although this is so, it does not follow that attention cannot be focused on a wider horizon than immediate, specialized interests--a marked tendency of the rising rich at least. The basic offense of most of the active rich, if it is an offense, is that they usually pursue their own visions, skillfully or crudely, not only to the neglect of the rest of the world (as does the poet) but, at times, because they have power, against or indifferent to the needs and wishes of the rest of the world. Not only do they have power but, like most people, they are thoroughly egocentric.
Although now woven by means of large enterprises into the warp and woof of all society, the rich, like nearly everyone else, put their own enterprises first in the narrowly reasonable effort to preserve their social advantage, by means fair or seemingly questionable. Without that social advantage they would, like the common people, be at the beck and call of almost any self-appointed messiah presenting himself as the latest in the line of the Apostolic Succession or, perhaps, a spiritual representative of a freely prescribing Karl Marx or even, like Adolf Hitler, as the offspring of Wotan. Being rich is basically defensive in a rough world, although the defensive position has its own hazards.
What is perhaps most irksome about the rich to the intelligent nonrich, particularly to those with some other vision of how society should be arranged, is not actually what any rich individual may or may not do. True, by behaving outwardly like a gentleman the rich man may temper animosity; but he cannot, even by gentlemanly behavior, mollify persons like Plato, Aristotle, Marx, Sartre and others acutely aware of his necessary role, which is much like that of a character in a Greek drama enacting the capricious will of the gods.
The rich, the plain fact is, confront the rest of society as a solid, semicorporate phalanx, buttressed by law and public policy. By law they hold their positions legitimately and hence can feel complete rectitude. When the national anthem is being sung they can feel it is being sung in celebration of the legal system that supports them, for the aggrandizement of which every man, the poorer especially, may be called upon to offer his very life simply by presidential order, without any declaration of war by Congress. Beyond this, existing policies under the law favor them; they have been adopted largely by their agents with their corporate permission.
The existence of this solid phalanx is sharply noticeable only to those who have some proposal to make with a view to adjusting policy in order to accommodate some large number of people who are, in one way or the other, supposedly being unduly inconvenienced by any number of things. Whenever any public proposal is made for any change (however slight), it is bound to encounter opposition. Upon inquiry it turns out that the opposition ordinarily stems from one or more affluent or rich people, usually referred to euphemistically as Interests. While there are indeed many interests in a society, the most assertive is surely the property interest.
Even a case about a trivial question, adversely affecting only one propertied person, may have wide implications for many or all propertied because it may set a precedent upon which further more extensive similar actions may be taken. The entire phalanx of the propertied becomes agitated and makes its displeasure known to legislators, judges and other officials. After all, one cannot have unsound decisions approved. Again, the entire phalanx of the propertied may be committed by simply one among the propertied, who presses deviously for and obtains some tax concession. This concession thereafter applies to all, whether they asked for it or not.
Thus it happens that even minor, purely common-sense proposals for reforms often precipitate fierce political dogfights.
In a relevant case, early in 1966 C. Wright Patman, the powerful chairman of the powerful House Banking and Currency Committee, decided on the basis of a committee vote to investigate the entire question of how trust funds are used in corporate and bank control. When subpoenas began to go out to banks requesting information there was suddenly called on June 7 a meeting by 17 of 33 committee members, who required the recall of many subpoenas; on a showdown, however, the right of the chairman to issue subpoenas was upheld.
This checking of a committee chairman was a very unusual action, which obviously had its source in some of the entities being investigated. Not many citizens, it is true, are alert to this situation or probably care very much.
What the final outcome of the investigation will be, whether it will be muted or not, is not yet known. Whether light will be thrown on what Chairman Patman claims are some $215 billion of trust fund holdings one cannot yet tell; all this is terra incognita right now.
By the end of the year, at any rate, Chairman Patman on the basis of subpoenas already returned was able to announce that three-quarters of the banks of the country had at least 5 per cent of their stock held by other banks through trust funds managed for beneficiaries and that this percentage of stock ownership represented a long step toward control. The very largest banks, he said, operated under this sort of interlocking ownership, were all more or less in the same ownership bed--one big happy incestuous family. 2
The information needed in this area is as follows: identifications of trust-fund holdings, book values and current market values, nature of trusts and length of time they run, beneficiaries of a multiplicity of trusts (reducing income taxes), cost of operation of trusts, validity of investment selections for trusts, etc. Whether the named beneficiaries or the managers benefit most is an undetermined question.
The propertied, for one thing, are mostly especially sensitive to anything about taxes-- how much shall be the total levy and, more important, how shall the collection be proportioned? In general, the propertied interest in the United States, sheltered behind technician-spokesmen, has been opposed (whatever some individual property owners felt) to government levies for the sake of the domestic comfort, convenience and necessity of the broad public (its own comfort and convenience being apparently assured) but has been generously unstinting in any military or semi-military expenditures that gave government a strong argument abroad in assuring access to markets, raw materials and trade routes. At present, with military and space exploration budgets inflated to record proportions, the cities internally are literally falling apart. It has been estimated by insiders that 75 per cent of the military budget is rationally unjustifiable.
Beyond the desire to keep down tax totals (hence the fiscally sound objection to "reckless government spending") there is the collective desire of the propertied to shove a disproportionate part of the tax burden over onto the lower labor force which, imbued with patriotic ardor, is presumably happy to support a democratic paradise that freely allows them to go and listen to happy tidings of the afterworld from the likes of Billy Graham and Fulton J. Sheen and to rub elbows with the rich at Coney Island. As we have already seen how deftly this tax burden is shouldered onto the pious, patriotic and not-too-bright lower labor force, the point need engage our fascinated interest no longer.
Whatever the call may be for social adjustment will either cost tax money or intrude more or less adversely on some propertied interest--that is, upon the revenues of some collection of rich persons. More public housing will tread on the toes of private landlords. And as this call for adjustment is fought by the "interests," some proponents are irked. The purely commonsense proposal, for example, to place effective health warnings on cigarette packages was fought to a standstill and defeated in Congress, with the result that the tobacco industry through intensified advertising is selling more cigarettes than ever before in the teeth of repeated formal government findings that they are a clear menace to health. Similarly there was fought tooth and nail suggested mandatory automobile safety equipment and there have been fights in the state
legislatures against attempts to limit in any way the free resale of unroadworthy second- hand cars. One could cite thousands of similar cases.
To be sure, when it is said that an "industry" opposes something, the source of the opposition is kept sufficiently abstract and remote. An industry is not something subject to sense experience. One cannot see it or feel it. "Industry" here boils down to no more than several boards of directorsperhaps fifty to a hundred men--who represent stockholders, mainly large stockholders--in brief, rich people. These latter are, somewhat poetically, as adversely affected by automobile air pollution as the poor although they can resort to air conditioning or retreat to remote fresh-air estates and ranches.
It is this consistent opposition to proposals for reasonable as well as unreasonable change that the propertied have offered down through history, opposition more effective than argument, that has caused the rich to be looked upon as problematic ever since Plato. It is not that they are necessarily vicious, as the Marxists often postulate; it is just that they are blandly or uncomprehendingly selfish, and not always very intelligently. The unpropertied person may be just as selfish but he has no telltale instrument such as property with which to reveal his selfishness so completely.
Like the small band of Greeks in the pass at Thermopylae the selfish rich hold back by their skill of maneuver in an entrenched position (always in the name of sound policy) huge disorganized armies of sansculottes and descamisados (among which, thoughtfully, they have their own friends haranguing on all manner of irrelevancies dear to the same sansculottes and descamisados). It is all much like a disciplined Roman legion against a barbarian rabble.
Because virtually everything has an economic aspect and because the rich, as we have seen, own and control the foundation and prime stages of the economic system, practically anything that anyone is likely to propose in the way of a new arrangement is going to strike some among the propertied and the rich adversely, and hence lead them to invoke the law defensively or work for a new self-serving public ordinance. Often the mere attempt to reroute traffic by local ordinance causes merchants to spring into tigerish opposition, presumably in defense of property rights.
Again, many individuals who engage in entrepreneurial action, hoping to become rich, find that the way is barred by persons, propertied or rich, already in established positions. As Henry J. Kaiser discovered, there is no room for another automobile manufacturer. True, there are interstices into which newcomers may insert themselves with success, particularly the area of new technology but, in the main, the road is blocked to all except the very clever--and lucky--among newcomers.
The rich, then, come to seem to those who have encountered their resistance like part of a single corporate entity, a special class, or, as the Marxists say, a class interest. Because they are each part of this class interest, embalmed like a fly in plastic, there is not much they can do to earn credit in the eyes of critics. Owing to the saying of Jesus in Matthew, XIX, 24, that "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God," there was no way out for a rich man for hundreds of years except to give his property to the church. The result was that in the late medieval period the churchpols in the name of the church held tightly more than half the land of Europe; the latecoming kings were far less gullible than the earlier gentry. In the eyes of the Marxists there is nothing a rich man can do except, like Frederick Engels, devote his wealth to the promotion of Marxism; anything less will fail to gain credit. The rich could, to be sure, turn all their wealth over to the government where it would at the present time fall under the benign jurisdiction of Lyndon B.
Johnson, in which circumstances few judicious moralists would see any particular gain for mankind.
Castigation of the rich, however, arises less from envy, as commonly supposed, than from people who have in some way been blocked or frustrated by the massed class interest of the rich. The rich man may be a really nice guy; but his very interests, indeed his whole being, force him to present himself in a certain stylized way. Most of the critics of the rich have themselves been power claimants, who know the rich and powerful can readily trump their cards. Plato, Aristotle and a long line of independent intellectuals have known that their carefully reasoned arguments are subject to political defeat less by sound counter-arguments than by the power of inertia, money and entrenched position. As any practical politician knows, in going before Congress on any question it is better to be backed by lucre than by a bullet-proof argument. Money will win almost every time on crucial questions, such as intruding from afar into World War I, and the only way apparently to defeat it is by some other brute power. Hence, as the Marxists say, revolution. The proffered cure here, though, except in cases of complete war-induced social collapse as in Russia in 1917 and China in the 1940's, is clearly worse than the disease because serviceable institutional restraints are swept away in the uproar and a clean slate is open to an unrestrained set of new power seekers, not at all squeamish (as history has shown) about how they apply their power. Leninist Communism is clearly a modern receivership in political bankruptcy.
Where those counts in the Aptheker indictment are best sustained is with respect to certain uneducated men of the poorer classes who have by book or crook made themselves rich: the original grabbers. In this country these are the "Robber Barons" of the nineteenth century and later replicas. The record on these is by now fairly well known. While many of the established rich, normally lacking imagination and perhaps sufficient sapience, have been normally heedless, the clear-cut depredations of the rich have in most cases been carried out by founders, newcomers, in panicky flight from poverty. It is the ex-poor among the rich who have been the most active social offenders. This was the crowd Veblen largely wrote about in all their vulgarity.
All of which is not to say that there is nothing of an overbearingly objectionable nature about the general policies since World War II contrived by Mills's insidiously bland power elite on behalf of remote principals. Those policies have been, on the whole, immediately self-serving, broadly neglectful of visible internal social decay and in that sense actually inimical over the long term to basic upper-class interests. What there really is to the idea of a power elite consists of people--upper-crust lawyers, politicians, officials, journalists, public relations men and idea men--who in various ways recommend themselves to the rich and well positioned by formulating defensive stopgaps for immediate problems. A way to remunerative position in the United States is to get the nod from some one of the wealthy or their adjutants, and those who get this nod are invariably from lower levels of society, usually chimpanzee-bright men who have developed know-how and can-do for poulticing over difficult situations in the interests of established arrangements. This is the level where "urban renewal" and roadbuilding become new ways of generating windfall profits. Nobody, it is pertinent to notice, gets the nod who is in any way seriously opposed to the established order. Indeed, nobody gets the nod who is merely reflectively doubtful and hesitant. Such persons would only generate dissension or uncertainty in high places and impede a smooth-smooth administrative operation.
As nobody to my knowledge has attempted to pinpoint collectively the possibly laudable achievements of rich people, quite apart from their class interests, I here set myself this heretical task with a view both to rounding out the picture and to seeing
concretely just what the achievements may amount to. How undeniably constructive and creative have the wealthy, more particularly the American wealthy, really been?
The Sacred Group
In seeking to isolate the achievements of the wealthy, it seems desirable to indicate the broad area within which one looks. Who, shall we say, are the wealthy?
Fortunately the Federal Reserve Board and Census Bureau, as noticed earlier, have come up with recent figures, the most precise on official record, to the effect that there were an estimated 200,000 nuclear families averaging three persons in the country as of December 31, 1962, in possession of net assets of $500,000 or more. 3 So, for these purposes, we shall take this last as the maximum figure representing a proto-wealthy family, although a person worth a few thousands less could hardly be considered impoverished. Naturally, the indicated small group includes everybody in possession of up to a heady billion dollars by value and beyond.
But even a group of this reduced size is cumbersome to inquire into and includes more than the definitively wealthy. This group of 200,000 nuclear families can be narrowed down somewhat, however. U. S. News and World Report, October 11, 1965, estimated on the basis of more recent Treasury figures that: "Today there are about 90,000 millionaires," by which it alluded to persons owning assets worth at least $1 million. 4 Some of these were in extended family clusters, and some families as we know (Du Ponts, Fords, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts et al. ) contain many millionaires and millionaire nuclear families. Total holdings of the group were estimated in excess of $250 billion. As of 1948, the millionaire group totaled only 13,000 by the reckoning of this same source.
U. S. News pointed out that this 90,000 indicated that one family in every 625 was in the millionaire class, which meant approximately 1/6 of 1 per cent of families, a fraction of a sliver, had net assets of at least $1 million.
The sevenfold variation in number of millionaires between 1948 and 1965 stemmed from the fact that most wealth-holders concentrate their holdings in corporation stocks; and in 1948 stock prices were comparatively low, in 1964 and 1965 they were comparatively high. It does not indicate that new asset-nuclei were formed to this extent. Judging by the composition of estates in 1961, Treasury figures showed (as U. S. News and World Report acknowledged), that upper-class wealth was held as follows on the average: Stocks, 65. 1 per cent; tax-exempt bonds, 8. 5 per cent; real estate, 6. 7 per cent; cash, 4. 3 per cent; U. S. government bonds, 4. 2 per cent; mortgages and notes, 1. 8 per cent; insurance, 1. 8 per cent; other bonds, . 8 per cent; and miscellaneous, 6. 8 per cent. Such being the case, any appreciable rise and fall of the stock market will alternately see-saw many suddenly up into the millionaire class or ease them down. The 1948 figure, in my view, is more indicative of the really heavy money than a 1965 figure. Better yet would be a 1932 figure. 5 As to the formation of new asset-nuclei, this is a far rarer occurrence than is regularly suggested in Time, Fortune and the Wall Street Journal.
As far as the achievements of the really wealthy are concerned, then, we may limit ourselves to looking within a contemporary group of very few families.
Not only will contemporary names be drawn from this property bracket but, at times, a retrospective view will be taken of individual achievers, always leaving out of consideration, for reasons stated, business organizers and managers as such. In order to read of their corporate deeds of derring-do one need merely turn to the pages of Fortune, which publishes a continual celebration of how well men run their own plantations.
Excluded will be any who have entered the indicated property bracket through achievements in the world of entertainment, sports and the arts--popular playwrights, actors, athletes, opera singers and virtuoso musicians. Those of whom note will be taken will be only those known to be in, around or about this property class prior to their achievement, not those who got into it through recognizable achievement. A financially successful once poor inventor would not be included.
Standards of Achievement
Anything that passes by worldly standards as achievement other than ambiguous corporate success will be counted as such. The operative phrase here is "by worldly standards," for much not applauded by the world as an achievement represents a great purely personal achievement as in the case of many persons, rich or poor, who daily force themselves up from a bed of pain and painfully perform daily duties or anyone, rich or poor, who becomes fairly civilized, a lamentably rare occurrence.
The commonly recognized areas of formal achievement, apart from business (which appears to rate high in popular esteem), are politics, law, the performing and creative arts, the sciences, scholarship, medicine, philosophy, religion, education, engineering, entertainment in the broadest sense, sports and journalism. In considering a sub-division of possibly 90,000 individuals and families we have considerable leeway, a large group to deal with although only a sliver of the population. But this, at least, is the area within which to look.
Psychologists generally consider 1/2 of 1 per cent of the population to be "gifted" in some way so that if the same ratio were preserved among 200,000 families owning $500,000 or more of property there would be at least 2,000 (two adults) "gifted" upper wealth-holders. Because not all the "gifted" bring their gifts to fruition there would not necessarily be this many outstanding achievers in the group; but there should be on the basis of the general distribution at least 500. Available data, however, do not enable one to assemble such a total, so that outstanding achievers are either proportionately fewer in the heavily propertied group, are somehow concealed from external view or are unpublicized. Yet it is in the nature of outstanding achievement sooner or later to call attention to itself.
It would be possible to identify all wealthy individuals only if one were provided with statements of net worth, which are not available; there are, however, indications in many cases, as already noticed. Achievement itself is notable and focuses public attention on the achiever and his background in an age of excessive publicity. As far as the very rich are concerned, we know pretty well who they are and can inspect them directly.
But I shall not, owing to the absence of precise data, be able to spot all, or nearly all, especially down near the lower levels of wealth-holding. There may be a wealthy man of considerable achievement, but if it is not shown on the record that his family has a certain net worth I cannot name him, much as I would like to. However, in the interests of an increase in knowledge, this is a game that others, privy to facts inaccessible to me, can play by supplementing my report. For, owing to the inattention of sociologists, we do not know with any precision the record of personal achievement or nonachievement of all large and largish property holders. The evidence only becomes clear as we ascend into the rarified realm of the known very large property holders, the super rich.
Area of Greatest Impact
It is not, first, usually thought possible for a man of wealth to be any sort of achiever. "Inherited wealth is a big handicap to happiness," said William K. Vanderbilt in a press interview in 1905. "It is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to morality. " 6 As to
the attainment of wealth through personal achievement, a universally spread view is summarized in an old Chinese proverb: "A man seldom gets rich without ill-got gain; as a horse does not fatten without feeding in the night. " 7
Yet the handicap indicated by Vanderbilt is sometimes overcome.
As the record shows, law combined with politics has been the area of greatest impact of propertied activists apart from corporate management. Not that legal practice as such, which in general is not extravagantly rewarded, has attracted big propertied people to any conspicuous extent. The rigors of either advocacy or jurisconsultation appear to have had few attractions for the wealthy, although the acquisition of a law degree and admission to the bar I take to be concrete achievements, whatever further steps are necessary to attaining distinction as a lawyer.
In general, lawyers from heavily propertied families do not enter into general legal practice, civil or criminal. Some members of lower wealth-holding layers do go into the practice of corporate law. As such they are, in general, necessarily defenders of the propertied position. Non-Establishment lawyers are, in general, defending criminal lawyers and plaintiffs' lawyers in civil actions, apart from a few affiliated with nonconformist causes such as constitutional rights. The Establishment, so-called, is usually interested either in prosecuting someone, rarely a member of the Establishment itself, or in defending some part of itself against not always valid individual claims.
While there may be lawyers from wealthy families who are non-Establishment practitioners, such a fact does not clearly show on the record.
In politics some of the more prominent of wealthy lawyers have been Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson and members of the Taft family beginning with William Howard Taft, one-time president of the United States. The Tafts, in addition to law, have notably operated in real estate.
William Howard Taft became chief justice of the Supreme Court but he is one of the very few among latter-day big wealth-holders who have held a judgeship. Taft, of course, was a thoroughgoing Establishment judge. A less well-known but highly distinguished judge was Curtis Bok of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, who died in 1962. A grandson of Cyrus H. K. Curtis, the mass publisher, and Edward M. Bok, Curtis Bok was also a gifted and sensitive author who wrote Star Wormwood, The Backbone of the Herring and I, Too, Nicodemus, all worth reading. Over a long period of years he was an exceptionally fine public servant. There was, too, Judge Thomas Mellon, the founder.
Judges are quite rare, though, among families of notable wealth. One draws a comparative blank among the big-wealthy on judges although one would unquestionably find a few among some of more modest fortune if the data were available. Judges, of course, are often men of some modest property, acquired through the practice of law, inheritance or marriage except for those few who have made financial killings as members of political syndicates.
Wealthy men directly in politics are no special novelty in American history. George Washington, the first president, was considered perhaps the wealthiest man of his time in the country, an inheritor. Many of the nation's founders, relative to their time, were quite wealthy, including Thomas Jefferson--at least until his final years. They were nearly all men of property, usually landed, a fact pointedly reflected in the Constitution. But even on a relative scale their wealth did not attain the proportions of the latter-day industrial fortunes.
After the Civil War there were many, usually self-erected, former poor men, who sat in the United States Senate, there closely guiding their interests in railroads, oil, mining
and lumbering; but that these held their seats in consequence of any political achievement or aptitude is open to serious question.
