No More Learning

It is politically inert. If Russia permitted a Socialist Party and a Communist Party (joined behind the scenes) it would be on all fours with the United States in respect of parties in the field; the candidates in the two parties might be politically identical twins, as is often the case in the United States (Johnson versus Goldwater). In those rare cases where policy is uppermost in the mind of the electorate it is usually a destructive policy, as toward Negroes in the South (and elsewhere). Policies promising to be injurious to minority groups such as Negroes, Catholics, foreigners, Jews, Mexicans, Chinese, intellectuals and, in fact, all deviants from fixed philistinish norms, usually attract a larger-than-usual supporting vote. Ordinarily, policies are beyond the comprehension of the electorate, which chooses between two handpicked candidates strictly on nonability factors: religion, race, appearance, age, marital status, region of origin, platform manner, synthetic public image and the like. Officials thus elected I have termed pubpols, public politicians, to distinguish them from the many other types of more specialized politicians in the American politico-economic system: finpols, corp-pols, churchpols, lawpols and lab(or)pols. A close examination of the roles of any of these will show that they differ only in quality, not degree or kind, from pubpols. Less perspicuously, such are ordinarily styled "leaders" or "executives"; sometimes "trustees" or theologians. They are in sober fact politicians, primarily and exclusively concerned about the operation of government and who gets--and doesn't get--what, when, where and how.
2. As the attainment of office gives officials access to the dread levers of government, including the levers of the hangman, people who already possess or are acquiring well- defined economic stakes are especially alert to the whole process. While the masses are distractedly mesmerized by the number 1 television program or the World Series, the moneymen are busily planning and discussing far ahead. Owing to the power leverage at stake, rivalry for office is in most jurisdictions keen. It gets keener the higher one ascends in the system. Because of the rivalrous electoral grab for power leverage, the struggle is expensive. Money is needed, and can be obtained only from those relative few who have it to spare. Most of the labor force is too modestly compensated and improvident to contribute.
3. Money plays a large role in the manipulation of this system--much larger than is usually conceded, which means that persons who have money have a wide political edge over those who do not. First, there are the campaign contributions, always large and constantly getting larger. True, it takes money to run these campaigns wherein the issues are presumably being put before the people. But it was long known prior to the cases in 1967 of Senator Thomas J. Dodd before the Senate and of Bobby Baker in the courts that much of the money in probably most campaigns (although not all) is diverted to the private tax-free accounts of the politicians. As Frank R. Kent said decades ago, many politicians have what is known in the trade as "sticky fingers. " The money they collect is not for justifiable campaign expenses but is a down payment on future influence in government. Some of this money must often be divided--the "split"--to gain the support of local newspapers and key figures who stand forth as "community leaders. " Most campaign funds are, therefore, properly and soberly designatable as slush
funds. Some represent slush, slush, slush all the way. The American system is a slushy system.
Officeholders know this and at times show their clear recognition of the facts. Thus, in the campaign of the natural gas industry in 1956 for exemption from federal regulation when an enabling bill was before Congress, already endorsed by President Eisenhower, eager-beaver hinterland lawyers for the industry turned up and offered a cash "campaign contribution" to veteran Senator Francis Case of South Dakota, who instantly took umbrage and publicized what he interpreted as a barefaced attempt to influence his vote. This untypical incident scuttled the bill, which was vetoed. 2 Most politicos gladly accept such offerings, say nothing about them. (In England, campaign funds and the duration of campaigns are severely limited by law. Legislators are paid very modest salaries and are required to abstain from voting and discussion in matters affecting their private interests--the Jeffersonian rule. )
Lest I again be suspected of harboring Satanic leftish sentiments while setting down what is only God's own plain unvarnished fact, allow me to quote at some length Senator Russell Long, Establishment Democrat of Louisiana and Majority Whip, who in April, 1967, said on the Senate floor:
Most campaign money comes from businessmen. Labor contributions have been greatly exaggerated. It would be my guess that about 95 per cent of campaign funds at the congressional level are derived from businessmen. At least 80 per cent of this comes from men who could sign a net worth statement exceeding a quarter of a million dollars. Businessmen contribute because the Federal Corrupt Practices Act prohibits businesses from contributing. Funnelling contributions through their officers is a simple and safe way for business to accomplish what it cannot do directly.
A great number of businessmen contribute to legislators who have voted for laws to reduce the power of labor unions, to regulate unions, to outlaw the union shop.
Many businessmen contribute to legislators who have voted to exempt their businesses from the minimum wage.
Businessmen contribute to legislators who have fought against taxes that would have been burdensome to their businesses, whether the tax increase was proposed as a so- called reform, a loophole closer, or just an effort to balance the Federal budget.
Power company officials contribute to legislators who vote against public power and against expanding the Rural Electric Administration cooperatives. REA officers are also able to raise some money, although not nearly as much for those legislators who vote the other way around, although the real power of the REA cooperatives is to be found in the strong grassroots support they can generate against their enemies.
Bankers, insurance company executives, big moneylenders generally contribute to legislators who vote for policies that lead to high interest rates.
Many large companies benefit from research and development contracts which carry a guaranteed profit, a so-called fixed fee of about 7 per cent of the amount of the contract. Executives of such companies contribute to those who help them get the contracts or who make the money available. In recent years, quite a battle has developed over the desire of government research contractors to obtain and keep lush private monopoly patent rights on those things discovered with billions of dollars of government research money. The possibility of windfall profits in this area defies imagination. Research contractors contract to legislators who vote to permit them to have private patent rights on government research expenditures.
Drug companies are often able to sell brand-name drug products at anywhere from twice to 50 times the price of identical nonbranded products for welfare and medicare patients if the companies can prevail upon government to permit their drugs to be prescribed and dispensed by their private brand names rather than by the official or generic name of the product. Executives of drug companies will contribute to legislators who vote to permit or bring about such a result.
Many industries are regulated. This includes the railroads, the truckers, the airlines, the power companies, the pipelines, to name but a few. Executives of regulated companies contribute to legislators who vote to go easy on the regulation, and ask no more questions than necessary about their rates.
Companies facing threat of ruinous competition from foreign sources have executives who contribute to those who help protect them from competition by means of tariffs and quotas.
Many industries are subsidized. This includes the merchant marine, the shipbuilders, the sugar producers, the copper producers, and a host of others. Executives in such industries contribute to those who help keep them in business.
This list is merely illustrative; it could be elaborated upon and enlarged to include many more. . . . Merely by assiduously tending to the problems of business interests located in one's own state, a legislator can generally assure himself of enough financial support to campaign effectively for reelection. 3
The Majority Whip in his unguarded ire here spoke the simple, unvarnished truth. The only detail on which I would question him is in his use of the term "businessmen. " For these people, the big ones at least, are not businessmen in the senses commonly understood. They are finpols, and corp-pols, disguised as businessmen. They are actually rulers, like the dukes and barons of old. Business is not really their business; protected, nonrisk moneymaking is.
Scornfully rejecting the suggestion that some pontifical politicos did not accept campaign contributions, Senator Long said that "any person who is the darling of the newspaper publishers has much of his campaign covered in favorable news and editorial support they can afford. If his record has the overwhelming approval of the wealthy business people, if he has a consistent record of favoring penny-pinching economy when the needs of the sick and poor were involved, a consistent record of voting to protect management from the demands of labor, of protecting monopolies from the public rather than the other way around, he will find that the campaign expenses seem to take care of themselves. Radio and television broadcasts may be paid by unseen and unknown beneficiaries. The man may well find himself with a substantial campaign surplus and no place to spend it. " 4
Interrupting in the course of Long's speech, Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee reported that his study of campaign contributions in 1956 showed that the Republican Party collected more from the tiny island of Manhattan than from all the states combined, while the Democratic Party was not far removed from the same pattern. 5 This was not very astonishing as New York City is the financial capital of the country, the dog that wags the Washington tail. The slush comes from New York, the accommodating votes from the hinterland.
Long spoke in favor of retaining the short-lived law that allowed taxpayers to assign $1 of federal income taxes to campaign funds, which would be financed out of a common pool.
But money in American politics extends far beyond campaign contributions (largely supplied by corporations even though corporations are forbidden by law to contribute
directly). As we have seen, once they are elected, politicians have many ways of collecting money or monetarily convertible equivalents. (1) It is brought to them by lobbyists in their offices in paper bags. (2) It is paid to them by corporations through their law firms for vague legal services or for self-serving intervention in governmental bureaus. (3) It is available to them as in the case of Bobby Baker in the form of easy bank loans and also takes the form of allotting them shares gratis or at cut-rate terms in going enterprises such as insurance and loan companies and banks. Baker was obviously a middleman.
The object of transferring money in this way is to avoid any implication of bribery, a word which, politicians know has an ugly sound. Moreover, it is illegal. Although politicians are still bribed, and are sometimes convicted of accepting bribes (as in the recent case of highly placed W. Judson Morhouse), bribery after a distinguished history is now regarded as too cumbersome in the American system. But gifts with no explicit strings attached are not barred by law and are often conveyed in full public view in "testimonial dinners. " Will the recipient of such gifts thereafter take a detached view of the special requests of the donors? To believe so is to be credulous beyond hope of redemption.
The newer ways of conveying money to officials in a pervasively corrupt governmental system have clearly been devised to salve their consciences against any gnawing belief that they are being bribed. Thus, Senator Dodd after the call for his censure by the Senate was able to protest publicly with every show of righteous indignation, his voice vibrant, that he was not conscious of having done anything wrong. In this contention he was supported by not a few politicos with whom he had no partisan connection.
On a separate occasion, speaking in defense of Senator Dodd, Senator Long charged that half the members of the Senate Ethics Committee that sat in judgment on Dodd "couldn't stand the investigation Senator Dodd went through" and, finally, that "half the Senate" was in the same boat. A few days later, Senator Long apologized. In making his for-the-record apology Senator Long now surprisingly described the members of the Ethics Committee as "six of the finest members who have ever served in this body. "
"If I made a mistake and if I did wrong by saying what I said, I am here to offer them a public apology," said the Majority Whip. "If I have any complaint of this committee it is that their standards are too high. "
Senator John Stennis of retrograde Mississippi, chairman of the Ethics Committee, declined to shake hands with Senator Long after the trebly conditional apology. 6 This theatrical rebuke had much the same effect on public opinion as if Tweedledum had refused to shake hands with Tweedledee.
While it is by no means the case that all officeholders are thus beholden to outside moneymen, mainly corp-pols, it certainly appears to be the case that most legislators are. The conditions are evident in the legislatures of the largest industrial states where there is the most money, but they are most plainly evident in Congress. The case of Senator Dodd and the shenanigans of Bobby Baker to sophisticated observers merely represent instances of rather general practice floating inconveniently into view, like garbage at a fashionable swimming beach.
Contrary to common supposition, most officeholders act officially as they do not out of ideological or intellectual commitment but out of monetary devotion. They believe fervently, for example, in "the free enterprise system"--that is, capitalism. Why not? It is keeping them politically afloat on a sea of slush, as nonradical Senator Long lengthily attested.
These money transfers in politics, then, are largely payoffs or retainers to guarantee tractable political behavior. And they do ordinarily have this result.
Congress, which now operates pretty wide open on this sort of thing, applies much stricter criteria to appointees in the executive branch and the judiciary than it does to itself. Congressional committees often, with a great show of virtue, closely question presidential appointees about possible conflicts of interest between their properties and their assigned role in government. Usually Congress is satisfied if a man like the late Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson of General Motors sells his stock. President Johnson, not subject to Congress, did not even do this but appointed trustees for his properties. Is it likely that the trustees would make any decision adverse to the easily irked president? So to suppose would, it seems to me, be infinitely boobish.
In disclosures such as in the recent Bobby Baker, Dodd and Morhouse cases, the latest of thousands of analogous instances where the politico has been caught redhanded, his fingers streaming lucre, editorialists often piously refer to "corruption" and "venality. " Such moralistic judgments, while understandable, conceal the true causes, and tend to support a widespread erroneous view that politicians are for some reason a special odious breed.
The precise reason there are so many lightfingered and readily purchasable figures in American political life traces directly to the politico-social structure. In the first place, in the American system to have money, however obtained, entitles one to special deference. Not to have it incurs ready contempt. This is straight free-enterprise doctrine, expressing the difference between success and failure, the elect and the damned. Next, and perhaps most importantly, with the opening of the free franchise and public office to all comers in the early nineteenth century in the name of democracy the procuring of impecunious purchasable politicians was in effect guaranteed.
For poor boys to make good in democratic politics was by definition as noble as for them to make good in anything else, part of the holy American vision. But it takes time and therefore money to be in politics, which made it inevitable that moneymen behind the scene retained more than a little to say. In the popular electoral system the electorate was supposed to pick (but not finance) its representatives, who would faithfully represent them; when the electorate was displeased it might vote them out in favor of new men. But it was early noted that the electorate more often than not endorsed men for superficial reasons and voted out faithful men for trivial reasons or for no other reason than a vague discontent about general conditions. In political landslides, for example, everybody went out, saints and sinners alike.
Career politicians, pubpols, early saw that it did little good to be a true "friend of the people," who had little insight into affairs or genuine concern about policy. Against the possibility that they might be abruptly voted out of office and livelihood through public caprice or vindictiveness, officeholders began to take prudent measures of self protection. One such measure was the development of local party organizations, "machines," the labor unions of politicians. Another was to use ingenuity in developing unorthodox sources of income with a view to providing nest-eggs that would tide meagerly paid officeholders over lean periods when they were out. (In the latter nineteenth century, the distinguished Charles Francis Adams II reports, he could not live on the $1,000 a year he was paid as mayor of Quincy, Massachusetts. ) In many cases unorthodox income was illegal, as from bribes and extortion; in most cases it was questionable. But, up to a point, in all cases it was a practical necessity, although some politicos garnered more than enough under the rule of serendipity.
This broad consequence, which we see exemplified in most originally unpropertied career pubpols, in no way derived from the nature of politics as a black art but from the
nature of a specific system raised on the unsupported (and, since, often disproved) theory that ambitious, self-willed, untutored men elected from among the people will be the respected, loyal, sympathetic, low-paid servitors of those same people--the democratic dogma. Some few will, as events have shown. Most won't, and the people are usually too inattentive, unperceptive or lacking in judgment to be able to distinguish potential friend from betrayer. They reelect their betrayers, again and again.
This system of popular elections, moreover, was not one devised by the perspicacious Founding Fathers but represented a later dubious embroidery on the basic constitutional system, an embroidery that most of the Founders would have rejected as absurd. Madison, for example, was astute, enough to discern what would happen under the universal franchise. The Fathers, often hymned, had no confidence in a universal franchise that would elevate poor boys in urgent and continual need of funds to high office, there to be readily tempted and seduced and to acquire personal interests of their own that ran against those of the populace. But this result was in a few decades broadly achieved amid sentimental clamor for "democracy. " Instead of obtaining a boon in the form of electoral democracy, as ideological democrats contended, the people insensibly had rigorous public demands made upon them by such a system--demands they could not meet, to their own undoing. In giving them electoral democracy, history played a dirty trick on the American people, most of whom actually want and need benevolent paternalism.
In getting electoral democracy, the American people had figuratively thrust upon them a political version of a Stradivarius violin. But they had not the least conception of how to play it. One result has been continual and avoidable disharmony. Emotionally committed though one may be to democracy, which on speculative grounds might be thought desirable, operationally it is as impossible as perpetual motion. For democracy is something that belongs to the psyche, to group interaction, not to outward forms. As an avalanche of evidence shows, people in general are not the least bit democratic at heart. True democracy, of course, can be learned; but only under carefully controlled favorable conditions such as are rarely present in the upbringing of most children.
That there is considerable disaffection with popular elections even at grass-roots levels is shown by the widespread growth of city managership this century in replacement of elected mayors. In no fewer than 40 per cent of municipalities, some of them rather large, city managers are now hired as trained administrators by the city council. This compares with 50 per cent of the cities that retain elected mayors and 10 per cent governed by commissions, town meetings or representative town meetings. 7 The idea could well be applied to the states which, like Nebraska, could also replace bicameral legislatures (baseless imitations of the federal model) with unicameral bodies.
Officeholding in the provision of the Founding Fathers was limited to property owners, as was most voting, an idea repugnant today but which in its operation in the eighteenth-century American context limited public office at least on the higher levels to men of considerable education and public responsibility. One would not, however, agree with the prescription of H. L. Hunt today that the vote now be limited to people of property; for too many propertied people now are uneducated and have the cracker- barrel grasp of H. L. Hunt.
What made the Founding Fathers and the signers of the Declaration of Independence so noteworthy was not that they were men of property; they were noteworthy because they happened also to be men of broad learning and insight, ready to defer to those of their own number like James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton who showed especially sharp insight. True, among the signers of the Declaration some, such as Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson, were early optimistic democrats; most
were not. In any event, this crowd was a far cry from the Everett Dirksens, Thomas J. Dodds, George A. Smatherses and a host of other once poor boys (later indifferent to the poor) who found affluence in politics and became, in sooth, cracker-barrel statesmen. The Founding Fathers were a historical fluke.
Among many areas of significance missed by sociologists in their frequent preference for the trivial is this one of the changes in the socio-financial condition of career politicians, either bosses or officeholders. Many, although originally poor and never in highly remunerative employment, like the late Mayor Frank Hague and President Lyndon B. Johnson, accumulate sizable estates. In the case of others, members of their immediate families suddenly blossom in effulgent prosperity. Clearly, most of them are financial entrepreneurs of no mean cut. Also omitted by the sociologists is a ground-up study of the relation between the corporate clients of legislators' law firms and the performance record of the legislators. Are legislators with oil companies in their law offices, for example, for or against special favors to the oil industry? Are legislators whose law offices represent banks in favor of more or less regulation of banks?
The Dance of the Pubpols, Finpols and Corp-pols
The essence, of the way the American politico-economic system operates can be brought out most readily by means of employing two key words: overreaching and patronage. The term "patronage" here excludes reference in this text to governmental job appointments by political parties; such patronage, dwelt upon by newspapers, does exist but it is patronage in a distinctly minor form and of little relevance here.
The chief instrument of economic power in the United States is the corporation, more particularly the large corporation. The corporation is, at its best, a completely rational mechanism with a single overriding goal: the maximization of profits consonant with steady growth. From an internal point of view, everything about the successful large corporation is rational which is one of the aspects that make it an attractive object of study to those who like to study something wholly rational in an irrational world. Corporate rationality, however, is wholly internal. It is at variance, with social rationality and, in fact, the rational corporation takes advantage for itself of much social irrationality, as some corporations take advantage of the desire of many people to, swill whisky and to smoke cancer-inducing cigarettes.
The United States, I am convinced, would be a vastly superior place in which to live if it were organized along corporate lines as a single corporation rationally committed to maximizing the welfare of all people. I don't have in mind here a fascist corporate state, although this is probably what the outcome would be if misguided idealists set about trying to install a benevolent political corporation. Short of such a goal, we have before us as a model the welfare capitalism of Sweden, disliked by rabid free-enterprisers athirst for tax exemption.
In its rationality the corporation does everything it can, including much that is illegal, to maximize its profits. It employs deceptive (and irrational) advertising, produces below-par goods even for vital military and space programs, resorts to deceptive packaging, evades taxes, abuses weights and measures, engages in monopolistic price- fixing, caters to popular irrationalities, overcharges, profiteers, and, in general, does whatever it can, evaluated as good or bad, legal or illegal, to maximize its position. To the outsider there is something questionable about one act or the other of the big business corporation. If the quality of the goods is excellent the price may be too high; if the price is low the quality suffers. In any event, it pays no taxes, merely collects them from customers. Again, much of corporate goods produced is of no utility other than in catering to free-floating anxieties, often stimulated by advertising. Here the rational corporation profits from irrational people.
Overreaching is not something new in history. But in its American systematization, complete with computers, it is distinctly new, and it affects every nook and cranny of society as well as of individual attitudes. It is seen, for example, in many of the formal and publicly defended economic policies of the medical profession; some doctors, alarmingly, are no more than overreaching businessmen and bad doctors to boot.
It extends into the ghettos with their high prices and high installment interest rates for below-par merchandise. It is reflected in the terms and product given by builders to home buyers. It is freely practiced against the general labor force by the stronger trade unions. It stands out blatantly in advertising. Systematic overreaching of the weak, in sooth, is as American as apple pie. It is respectable. Rightly practiced it will lead one to membership in the country club, a zero in the infinite.
The rich themselves are in many ways the victims of this spirit of overreaching and must be constantly on their guard against swindles, an involved story commended to the sociologists for further inquiry. As an example, although the best medicine is available to the rich they are in fact the victims of many medical rackets and in known instances unscrupulous doctors play a cat-and-mouse game with them, prolonging their disabilities and, for all one knows, bringing them to premature avoidable ends. The rich get into this impasse on the theory that whatever costs most must be best, and there are doctors who do not hesitate to set especially high fees. There exists, among other things, a special tier of high-fee proprietary hospitals, physical and psychiatric, especially programmed to act as a vacuum cleaner on the pockets of those with ability to pay, and not markedly notable for sound medical results. The victims of such establishments, however, can comfort themselves with the fact that there are being applied in medicine the most rigorous canons of free and unregulated private enterprise.
The corp-pols, are the actual front line and cutting edge of capitalism. They represent the hard-nosed elements in the system and, during successful behavior, under the canons of strict business principles, are largely autonomous. As long as they run the corporation in harmony with hard business rationality, always with deference to public opinion (manipulated through public relations) they are in complete charge. True, if the big stockholders wished to interfere with operations they could.
The big stockholders, however, often but not always rentiers and sometimes personally tender-minded, not up to conducting confrontations with nail-hard labor leaders and nagging politicos, not always well informed, do not interfere with the corp- pols unless there is a crisis in internal company affairs or between the company and the outside world. In such instances the big stockholders can and often do intervene decisively, especially against a runaway or berserk management. Ordinarily, though, the big stockholders let well enough alone, even endorsing judicially certified illegal conduct.
Big stockholders could, it is true, meddle into the affairs of corporate management and, theoretically, could insist upon strict social-minded policies. They do not do this, usually, not because they are of the despicable temperaments pictured by C. Wright Mills and others but because they are indifferent, diffident or are afraid to disturb a smoothly running profitable operation.
Some clarification of the roles of corp-pols and pubpols seems advisable here lest they be misrepresented. Despite adverse moral judgments often registered against them by critical commentators each of these types always does broadly what is inherently required by the system he serves. More significantly, each at all times implements to the best of his ability the chief operative value of American society: worship of William James's bitch-goddess, Success. In their various ways these men are all successes and exemplify in their dreary daily activity the American doctrine of success. As men who
faithfully obey the inner rules of the game they merit and receive wide public approbation. If at times what they do appears messy under close scrutiny, this is only because the American idea of success is messy. At such times they may be called upon to act as scapegoats for the system, to take the blame as moral lepers. This they do, grimly.
It should be observed that, except for disaffected, out-of-step critics, there is no widespread rejection on the American scene of the ascendant notion of success. Not only does a broad public uncritically accept steamy monetary success as a proper life goal but it feels any questioning of this goal to be un-American, possibly traitorous or at least subversive and surely cowardly. Who but a coward would shrink from entering the glorious contest for success? The "unsuccessful" are regarded with contempt or pity, often even by themselves.
What we find, if we delve deeply enough, is a special value system at the root of it all.
The traditional value system, originated out of long and tragic human experience, was encapsulated in traditional religion. As religious mythology, cult and ritual were demolished by critical rationalism the values of which these were the virtually sole and fragile carriers also suffered, came into disrepute as goody-goodyness and were insensibly superseded by the harsh values of success, of which the mass media stood as the principal guarantors. Instead of the clergy now defining values for society the job was taken over by half-literate, often personally demoralized editors and publishers.
Religion, in the process, was reduced from a vital, widely shared world view to routine churchgoing on the part of the less educated. As the healthy baby of traditional values was thrown out with the dirty bathwater of myth and cult, the only repositories remaining for traditional values were the university and traditional philosophy, neither of which had much impact in the daily lives of people and both of which were strangers to the editors and publishers of the mass media, nearly all militantly ignorant men.
Because man by his very nature must always live by one set of values or the other, the new set of harsh values not only filled a vacuum but accorded with, the experience of what had until recently been a frontier society. In that society difficult conditions at once highlighted the competent and the incompetent. The competent man was he who could take care of himself: the self-reliant man, the successful man.
The original American fortune-builders, the Robber Barons of the nineteenth century, it is well to notice, were all with hardly an exception faintly educated or illiterate lower- class men, none at all above the lower middle class and many from even further down: unskilled laborers, farmers, wandering adventurers. The American plutocracy, in truth, did not originate from within an aristocracy but came straight from the hoi polloi and implemented by far-ranging commercial action the narrow, culturally impoverished daily values of this hoi polloi. It was this element up from the lower cultural depths, making common cause with formerly poor boys in politics, that provided American society with personal proof of the worth of the new scale of values by enriching themselves. Expression of an inherent American point of view was given by the Rev. Horatio Alger, Jr. , in his novels of successful economic derring-do on the part of poor boys.
These good-in-their-place frontier values, as much evidence now shows, are insidiously destructive in a more developed environment, even of their own votaries. While the bulk of attention is focused on the massive poverty sector of American industrial society, what is generally overlooked, except by a few close observers, is that affluent suburbia and much of the success-striving middle class is also engulfed in its own particular variety of emotional slum-ghettos. The very winners in the system, the
affluent, are in different ways as malserved as the poor, a fact increasingly evident to educated middle-class youth.
That the values put to the fore by the success cult are destructive is seen most readily in the blighted personal lives even of winning strivers under the system. Within the reaches of the Social Register we see ample evidences of the blight reflected in a book such as Cleveland Amory's Who Killed Society? Lower down we find it in special reports.
"According to psychologists, physicians, family counselors and others," reports the Wall Street Journal, "companies now absorb too much of the time, energy and devotion of their rising young executives; exhausted by their jobs, they are mere shells at home, unable to function effectively as husbands and fathers.
"The result is seldom divorce, which is bad for the careers of young men on the go. Instead, marriages in name only are preserved between weary, indifferent men and women beset by all sorts of emotional ills, including chronic loneliness, sexual frustration, alcoholism and excessive dependence on their children. " 8
There followed an interesting, long, quasi-psychiatric analysis of emotional troubles on the suburbia executive success-circuit, about which there is a growing special literature.
In two surveys in the Chicago area on attitudes of women it developed that they saw their mates, not as persons, but in order of importance as breadwinner, father and husband; and saw themselves, again, not as persons but as mother, wife and homemaker. Few of the women had any interest in or knowledge of their husband's work but evaluated the man in terms of being "a good provider" or having "a good job. " Commenting on this phenomenon Marya Mannes said: "Throughout their responses, the conclusion was inescapable that the wives cared far more about what their husbands did than about what they were, as persons. About one-third of the women not only put their own role as mothers first, but indicated that the husband was essentially outside the basic family unit of herself and her children. " It is because men are primarily an accessory to the fact of the contemporary family "instead of half of a primary relation" that so many, in the opinion of Miss Mannes, find ways outside the family of establishing the fact of their manhood. Said Miss Mannes mordantly: "Is a primary relationship between man and wife indeed possible in a society where secondary considerations--success, status, possessions, social acceptance, public opinion--impinge more and more on a family unit less and less tied together by common needs and bonds? . . . . If the illusion of a truly companionable marriage is to exist, women might start thinking of their husbands as men first, and accessories last. And vice versa. " 9
Financial deficiencies are blamed on the man; family deficiencies are blamed on the woman. As comparatively few individual incomes, only 10 per cent until the more recent Johnsonian inflation, exceed $10,000 a year, according to the cold statistics, it is evident that most American males are big flops incomewise and are wide open to cutting remarks from their success-oriented, status-craving wives wrestling with child care and household chores.
All, then, as one could easily show by citing a variety of sources, is not happy sailing in the alcohol-sustained, drug-propped affluent belt of society, which in its own way is as badly churned up as the city slums and ghettos. Children in this situation, of course, suffer most of all.
In passing, it is difficult for a habitual reader of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post to avoid concluding that the United States shelters under the glorious Star Spangled Banner an extremely
sick society, fundamentally made ill by the institutional implementation of a set of extremely destructive values.
Let us return, now, to the big corporation.
The management is the soul of any corporation. Without good management--that is, the rational application of unsentimental business principles as rigorously as possible in an imperfect world--the best corporation is bound to lose ground steadily to demonic rivals. And the importance of management is recognized in the many university courses and books and periodicals devoted to it. Management, in fact, is governance, rule. And within the modern corporation one finds the most rational and usually judicious application of rule in history, although for ends often extraneous to the general welfare. Corporate management fries its own fish and makes the best terms it can with cloudy public opinion and with government that is, with pubpols. The men who run these corporate fiefdoms, managers, are actually rulers of vast domains, corp-pols. Although comparatively most of them are not extremely rich, the corp-pols are indispensable to the rich. Some become very rich.
A good management of a corporation is the equivalent of a John D. Rockefeller in the Standard Oil Company and performs a similar general role. As pristine Rockefellers are hard to find growing naturally, it is necessary to train them up. This uptraining is done on the chain of command, from the junior executives onward. Along this chain of command many are called, few ultimately chosen; some are dropped along the way, some shunted into corporation dead ends or cul-de-sacs, some lost to rivals. The hard, sharp, rational, dominant, smart and highly acquisitive are moved upward under the incentives of higher pay, more and more public deference and elevated social status. Emerging as executive vice president and president, a man is known to be a crashing success within the system. He is somebody to be reckoned with. He is a corp-pol, as powerful in his way as any senator, sometimes more powerful. As chairman he becomes something of an Elder Statesman, ready to tell congressional committees what is, and what is not, sound. For these are all, with few exceptions, sound men. They know the inner workings of affairs as many large stockholders do not.
What critics of the abstraction called capitalism rarely see is the impersonality of the actual system, allowing few involved in it to experience it in its fullness. Thus, owners in this system, unless they are also managers, have only remote impersonal relation to it. Absentees, they are seldom directly touched by it. As far as knowing precisely what goes on, most of them are as ignorant as the common man. Some do not wish to be put to the inconvenience of knowing, in which case the system also serves them well. Capitalists, at any rate, are rarely close students of capitalism and the way it works. All most of them know is that they are getting only what they believe they are in all plain justice cosmically entitled to, and this holds of many inheritors who never soiled a finger as well as of the self-erected. The courts agree to the hilt.
As to harsh characterizations of the rich as special hard types, it is easy to show that they are false. As Lampman showed, 40 per cent of the owners of taxable estates are women. As Professor James Smith showed, women predominate among the owners of estates exceeding $10 million, a figure more recently verified by Herman P. Miller, special assistant to the director of the Census Bureau. As of 1958, millionaires by sex and average age, Miller found, were as follows: 10
Amount
(in millions)
Total
$1-2
2-3 3-5
Men Age
22,024 61
16,336 59
3,156 62
1,124 68
Women Age
17,630 58
11,063 60
3,048 56
1,320 63
5-10 1,073 63 541 67
10 and over 335 58 1,658 40
The predominant number of very big holders, then (five to one), are women of an average age of forty, who are in this category either as heirs, widows or as a consequence of estate splitting by older men, usually husbands. Most such female holdings, of course, are under the direction of male investment managers, lawyers, trustees, husbands or fathers. As far as that is concerned, some of the richest people are minors, children.
While some of the women are as dividend-hungry as any man, and some hungrier, by and large they are not hard types; nobody at all has ever suggested they are. At worst what one could say of most of them is that they are foolish, uninformed, self-centered, inexperienced, possibly insensitive, often childishly arrogant. Many of the men, given sheltered rearing under tutors and in hothouse schools, are as temperamentally detached from the workings of monopoly capitalism as the women. Usually products of the Ivy League, they are in all ways gentlemen, often highly civilized. They collect modern art, give money to universities and libraries, support unquestionably worthy causes and even give privately off the record for laudable ends.
The absurd self-image of at least some of these women, many of whom appear to consider critics of their forebears as guilty at least of le`se majeste? , was publicly projected recently by Helen Clay Frick, the seventy-seven-year-old spinster daughter of the harsh ironmaster, partner of Carnegie, who died in 1919. Miss Frick in 1965 brought suit for libel against Dr. , Sylvester K. Stevens, executive director of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, for some unusually mild depreciative characterizations of the deceased Henry Clay Frick in Stevens's Pennsylvania: Birthplace of a Nation. In what must be considered the extreme of understatement he suggested that the rapacious Frick was hardly a model Christian gentleman but was rude and autocratic.
Frick, during and after his lifetime, had steadily been depicted by many writers as the prototype of a ruthless nineteenth-century Robber Baron, overreaching and ignorant, but Miss Frick, in bringing suit, denied ever having heard any of this, claimed to be shocked at the besmirching of her sire's reputation by a scholar and asserted that he had been libeled and she had been caused great anguish of spirit. Waiving damages, she asked that the book be suppressed and the record corrected.
After carefully listening to a great deal of testimony from both sides judge Clinton R. Weidner of the Cumberland County (Pennsylvania) Court of Common Pleas, handed down a masterly fifty-one-page opinion that could have been written by justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. The court's opinion was far more critical of Frick than the book had been. Not only were the alleged defamatory statements completely true, said the learned jurist, but they were milder than were warranted by the facts. Frick himself, in view of his stance as a lone wolf against the world, would have been proud of them.
As the Times pointed out, the judge's opinion, ventured in the face of as many as four plaintiffs lawyers at one time in the courtroom itself, "came close to calling her suit frivolous. " Scolding the plaintiff, the court said she knew nothing whatever about her father's affairs and wanted nobody else to know about them.
"Dr. Stevens has written what he believes to be true and what the court believes to be true," said the court firmly.
In the ordinary case, this would have been the end. But some two and a half months later, upon the withdrawal of the baseless case by stipulation, Miss Frick reopened it and thereby suddenly found herself in the role of defendant. She reopened it by absurdly
expressing "delight" at the author's "retraction of false statements. " Dr. Stevens at once characterized this statement of hers as "positively vicious and face-saving. " He went on to say: "This whole thing, on the very day she has admitted her suit was groundless, is designed to make it look as though I am retracting something and Miss Frick is graciously consenting to withdraw. "
The stipulation withdrawing the case was made "with prejudice," which meant that she lost the option of reopening her complaint. As the Times pointed out, the stipulation was signed by her attorney with the knowledge that subsequent editions of the book, after changes in two trivial references to fact, one being the suppression of the word "coal," would contain some new language sharply critical of her father.
Charging "deception" and "bad faith," attorneys for Dr. Stevens asked the court to revoke the dismissal of her suit and thrash out her claim that there had been a retraction of false statements. There the matter rests at this writing. 11
What was of general interest about this case was the way it showed one of the reserve powers of the wealthy to harass in costly and timewasting legal actions writers who comment critically on their public actions, even on those dead. It was knowledge of such powers that led attorneys for the publisher of Professor Edwin Sutherland's White Collar Crime to require that the names of companies that had been repeatedly convicted of violating the law not be mentioned. Individuals who have been convicted of violating the law, especially in the commission of felonies, can be and are thereafter often for the rest of their lives referred to as "criminals. " Any scribbler can refer to anyone of such as "ex cons. " Although it might seem that one should by the same token be able to refer to a convicted corporation as a criminal corporation, the publishers attorneys in the Sutherland case thought it the better part of prudence not to mention their names.
The situation is this: Can the Super-Cosmos Corporation, convicted in open court many times of felonies and thereupon subjected to penalties and restraining orders backed by sanctions, be referred to as a criminal corporation? Lawyers, as we have seen, advise against it, knowing that their client may soon be served by a summons sworn out by the law firm of King, Lord, Duke and Pontiff of 1 Wall Street. Hardly any judge in Anglo-Saxondom would dream of even entertaining a motion to dismiss an action brought by this pontifical firm, whose members look with basilisk eyes even upon Lowells and Cabots. The offender will surely be forced to prove that crime is crime.
Even individuals, always lower class, who have never been convicted of anything are open to unpleasant characterizations in the press. Persons frequently arrested by the police, or questioned, are thereafter often referred to as "police characters. " By this token at least the top 1,000, and probably more, leading corporations are police characters; for they are constantly having run-ins with the authorities, are constantly being questioned about alleged violations, sometimes convicted. Yet to refer to any of them as police characters or as suspected outlaws might be costly. If not themselves sovereign they are so tightly interlaced with sovereignty that one is indeed guilty of le`se majeste? , in impugning them to the slightest degree. Like a king, they are hedged by divinity.
Beyond this there are "undesirable characters," rather degage? , unaesthetic types the police do not enjoy seeing lounge about in central city districts, with newspapers often concurring in the appellation. What, now, about composing a list of undesirable corporations, opening with whiskey and cigarette companies?
Yet, most of the rich today are not a demonic crowd. They are not ordinarily fanatics. Often quite "democratic," they will bandy pleasant words with almost anyone over
drinks, will probably mildly fault their severer critics as persons who unaccountably "come on too strong. " Some of this, of course, may be simple evasiveness.
Again, they are sufficiently numerous, random products, so that the law of large numbers applies to them. They range over the whole bell-shaped spectrum of the law of probability so that for every one with some unlovely characteristic there is a balancing personality with, the opposite characteristic. There are not only Miss Fricks but diametrically opposite types. In the middle range of 50 per cent one finds more similarities, usually acceptably decorous along average lines neither great nor odious.
As I said, most of the rich, except possibly some of the self-erected, are not hard types.
The hard types in the system, the ones who make the system work like an automatic mouse-trap for the largely unconscious benefit of the rich, are, first, the corp-pols, and, second, a plain majority of the pubpols. These upward-striving intermediaries are selected hard types in the same sense that a surgeon or a commando soldier is a hard type. They are decision makers, and the decisions they make are invariably devoid of sentiment. A surgeon does not refrain from cutting because it will draw blood, possibly induce death or leave a scar; a commando does not refrain from slitting a throat because he will be dispatching some kind mother's son, some worthy wife's husband, some innocent child's father. By training and temperament these are indeed special types, not subject within their group to the law of probability as to their functional characteristics. With each one it is possible to predict almost certainly how he will act in given circumstances.
The big stockholding rich, largely absentees, to a considerable extent women, have little direct contact with the corp-pols, their plantation overseers. Such little functional contact as there is takes place, if at all, through boards of directors; on these, however, many of the very rich do not sit.
The social meeting ground for them all--big male stockholders, finpols, and corp- pols--is the metropolitan club, where there is on the whole a rather desultory mingling. Although glad to be present as evidence of their puissance, many of the intermediary corp-pols in this milieu look with some reserve, possibly even disdain, on some of the big stockholders and finpols. For the corp-pols are usually different, and know it, in that they for the most part came up the long, hard way. They feel pretty much as battle- hardened veterans do in the presence of inexperienced though superior officers. Many of the rich they no doubt look upon as pampered nonrealists. Some of the corp-pols did not finish high school because their families were too poor; others went to Jerkwater College--or to business college.
The human drive in the system clearly comes, for the most part, from the corp-pols and pubpols, men from comparatively deprived backgrounds hungry for position, money and deference. The system would work perfectly well if all the big stockholders were playboys and playgirls. The system does not really need the big stockholders who are, as it were, wards of the courts.
True, many of the rich no doubt see the situation pretty much as do the corp-pols and pubpols. They recognize that there should be money incentives and that "success," not public sustenance, is the proper goal. Whether they do or not, however, makes little difference as long as they keep hands off smoothly running operations. Difficulties are best handled by the highly paid corp-pols in concert with the pubpols, most of each category commando types.
Little is known of the direct relations between corporate managers and the big owners. "To what degree do these richest families or groups use their voting power to influence
the operations of 'their' companies? " asks Robert Heilbroner. "We do not know. There exists a shroud of secrecy over the relation between the centers of inherited wealth and the determination of working policy in capitalism. " 12
Here, one must note, top management officers even after their retirement never produce revelatory memoirs of inner company affairs as do men who have served a stint in government.