Beyond Politics
Publishing has attracted a number of the wealthy.
Publishing has attracted a number of the wealthy.
Lundberg - The-Rich-and-the-Super-Rich-by-Ferdinand-Lundberg
"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. Prior to 1913 senators were elected by state legislatures, many of which, staffed by dung-hill democrats, awarded Senate seats simply to the highest bidder. It did not take much in the way of political knowhow to sit in "The Rich Man's Club," as the Senate was commonly called.
I will not, then, count any of the pre-1913 rich senators as political achievers simply on the ground of their presence in the Senate.
Although rich and budding rich men were always shuttling about in the shadowy background of both political parties, supplying "campaign funds" and pulling devious strings right and left, they were in the more recent period brought forward and given more direct participation by the Republican Warren G. Harding. A former senator, President Harding was a small-town newspaper publisher of no great wealth. However, he appointed as his secretary of the treasury Andrew W. Mellon, then one of the richest men in the world--an inheritor as well as acquisitor; self-created Herbert C. Hoover as his secretary of commerce; the corporation lawyer Charles Evans Hughes as his secretary of state; and Albert B. Fall, stooge of the oil industry, his secretary of interior. Since Theodore Roosevelt it had become pretty much the custom to install corporation lawyers as secretary of state and attorney general.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, a minor millionaire himself before becoming a popular tribune, went much further in this respect than either Harding or Hoover, who appointed multi- millionaire Ogden L. Mills to succeed Mellon. Roosevelt, believing that men of wealth and good schooling should serve in government rather than lounge about in their clubs, practically stacked his cabinets with men of wealth, while standpatters, reactionaries and presumed malefactors of great wealth shrieked that he was a Communist and a "traitor to his class," here validating in action a Marxist conception of class consciousness among the rich. He started off with William H. Woodin, head of the American Car and Foundry Company, as secretary of the treasury and replaced him with multi-millionaire Henry Morgenthau, Jr. When the world situation became gravely serious in 1940 he appointed Frank Knox, Republican newspaper tycoon, as secretary of the navy and later James V. Forrestal, partner of Dillon, Read and Company, Wall Street investment bankers. He appointed Edward Stettinius, Jr. , son of a Morgan partner, secretary of state. He brought back the able Henry L. Stimson, Republican corporation lawyer and Hoover's secretary of state, as secretary of war. He made Jesse Jones, self-erected Texas Democratic big-league banker-politician, secretary of commerce and Francis Biddle attorney general. Down through the upper ranks of officialdom he drew freely upon men of great wealth, making Nelson A. Rockefeller the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs; W. Averell Harriman, former partner of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. , his representative from the beginning in a variety of posts, mainly diplomatic; Joseph P. Kennedy head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and so on. He gave both Harriman and Rockefeller their political starts.
Roosevelt, it is true, made many appointments from other quarters and, in fact, assembled a mixed bag. But, far from stacking his appointments with radicals or liberals, as recklessly charged, a far stronger case could be made that he drew most of his appointees from Wall Street, Newport, the corporate circuit and the big-city political machines. Scholarly liberals and radicals were brought in mainly as ideological window dressing in a time of great public discontent. Henry Wallace, considered a far-out radical in the bayou country, was himself a very wealthy man, at most a liberal conservative.
If results are what count, Roosevelt was not hostile to the private-property business system, which he found in self-induced crisis and left some years later revived and
reinforced with government support. Remove Rooseveltian government economic subsidy, patronage, guarantee and support today, and the much-vaunted free-enterprise system, beloved of Chamber of Commerce orators, would collapse like a bullet-riddled toy balloon. How many depositors would trust the banks, for a simple example, if it were not for government insurance of deposits? How many would trust the one-time wide-open Stock Exchange if it were not for the SEC?
The fact that the rich were in politics, then, was nothing new. What is new is that, more recently, taking their cue from Roosevelt, the latter-day rich have increasingly taken a direct part, with some of them at least showing signs of becoming forthright public men. They have themselves stood for election, and have been elected, a favorable development from the point of view that those who own the country should take responsibility openly for running it rather than hiding behind stooges in Uncle Sam and Abraham Lincoln suits.
Very rich men, inheritors or corporate wizards, have taken to winning elections right and left despite ingrown Populist prejudices. The electorate appears to be growing tired of the old-time "friend of the people," shaggy with folksy duplicity and athirst for franchises or whatever else he can lay furtive patriotic hands on. Winning an election, I take it, may be counted an achievement whereas winning friendly appointment is not particularly. For the latter all one needs is the nod from some Mr. Big.
By his untypical election as governor of New York in 1928 Franklin D. Roosevelt apparently led wealthy men to believe they too could be elected to that key office, although, as we have noticed, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft and Hoover were, earlier, in the wealthy class. Franklin Roosevelt was succeeded in the governorship by Herbert H. Lehman of the Wall Street banking family, who served from 1932 to 1942 before becoming a United States senator. Except for Thomas E. Dewey's twelve-year tenure after 1942 the governorship of New York has been held by wealthy men since 1928. In 1954, with strong labor support, W. Averell Harriman, later again in the State Department, became the first of the ultra-wealthy of later years to win an important election when he became governor of New York as a Democrat, opening the way psychologically for ultra-wealthy Nelson A. Rockefeller, also supported by labor, to succeed him in 1958 and to win reelection twice to date. As Roosevelt showed on several occasions, the electorate will not shy away from a man because he is wealthy. The voters, presumably, think he is less apt to tap the public till for himself than is an Horatio Alger boy from the grass roots and dung hills.
Outside of New York, too, wealthy men, some of whom got their political start under Roosevelt appointments, have also taken to winning elections. G. Mennen "Soapy" Williams, shaving soap and talcum powder dual heir, who began as a New Deal appointee in 1936, was the elected labor-supported governor of Michigan from 1949 to 1960 and thereafter was assistant secretary of state for African Affairs;. a lawyer, he is also a doctor of jurisprudence. William W. Scranton, also a lawyer and scion of an old Pennsylvania coal fortune, was first an Eisenhower official, then a member of Congress and in 1963 was elected governor of Pennsylvania.
The Kennedys, of course, stand out as men of great wealth who have directly participated in politics, although they are really members of an oldline political family like the Lodges, Stevensons and Tafts. John F. Kennedy, a budding journalist and war hero, was first easily elected a member of the House from Massachusetts, then of the Senate. In 1961 he became president. His brother Robert, a lawyer, was first his attorney general and then became senator from New York while brother Edward, also a lawyer, followed John F. to the Senate from Massachusetts.
Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania, whom we have noticed in his effort to democratize the Senate, is a wealthy as well as extremely able public-spirited man. Barry Goldwater, senator from Arizona before winning the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, inherited a substantial interest in a large department store, never had to work his way up from anywhere. The late Robert Taft, senator from Ohio and presidential aspirant, came of a wealthy family; and the same necessarily holds of his son, also directly concerned in Ohio politics.
This list could be extended--Theodore Green and Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, the Saltonstalls and Peabodys of Massachusetts, Ogden Reid of New York and Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, Angier Biddle Duke, Governor Winthrop Rockefeller of Arkansas, Harrison Williams, Jr. , of New Jersey, et al. --but the highlights have been indicated. While one might evaluate the political performances of each of these men differently, perhaps rating Roosevelt and Kennedy high and Goldwater and Taft low, or vice versa, each represents achievement on the ground that winning elections is itself a recognized achievement. Roosevelt I would call an outstanding achiever in politics.
In some quarters there is a tendency to downgrade the feat of a wealthy man in winning an election because he has had the use of his own funds. But money alone does not win elections, although it is in the plutocratic American system a necessary aid. Furthermore, nearly every man who wins an election is backed by money--his own, that of a moneyed group (like Richard Nixon and his oil backers in 1952) or of an established political machine. The few exceptions appear to be sheer flukes in American politics. Money from at least a small group is almost always behind the candidates, particularly the winner. Only here and there in political low-pressure areas an unfinanced amateur may sneak over the goal line.
A significant recent tendency has been the appearance of a number of successful high corporation officials in elective political office. Small and very medium-sized business people have been no great novelty in elective office, particularly at the state level; but men from the corporate big league have been pointedly absent. George Romney, former head of American Motors and twice elected governor of Michigan, launched a campaign as a 1968 Republican presidential aspirant; and Charles Percy, former head of Bell & Howell, was elected senator from Illinois in 1966. On the corporate circuit, these men were big guns. If more big managers of corporations thrust forward in politics, the country may see something of what cold corporate rationality can do applied to government, assuming that such men retain the corporate approach. Robert S. McNamara, former president of Ford Motor Company, conducted his own specialized exercise in corporate rationality with the Defense Department, but his best efforts there had not been able to out-general Ho Chi Minh on his batteries of Pentagon computers.
In any event, it would appear that a change is under way when the industrial rich, descendants of original tycoons, and corporate nabobs participate directly in politics instead of working through subsidized lower-class stooges. There is a gain here, in the first place, for candor. At least the fractional thinking part of the electorate can now evaluate what these candidates publicly stand for instead of voting for men presumably independent but secretly harnessed to the corporate juggernaut. What any of these men propose politically may not be approved by the observer, but the observer will nevertheless learn by noticing public performance precisely what he does stand for.
Personalities like Lyndon B. Johnson, although moderately wealthy, are not included in the foregoing because they were not wealthy when they came to politics but were politicians first, wealthy men later.
No claim is implied here that all the wealthy who are lawyers have been named, for that list would run into hundreds, or that the mere fact of being a lawyer is something
wonderful, Quite a number of the wealthy and the well-to-do become lawyers although not so many, it appears, as become corporation executives, project promoters and nonprofit administrators.
The Ruling Class
That members of the wealthier classes do often become corporation executives, administrators, lawyers and appointed or elected officials, thereupon opening themselves to evaluation in terms of going standards of achievement, is hardly odd in the light of the concept in political science of a "ruling class. " Activists among the rich do seem to drift primarily into directorial, managerial or similar executive-type functional posts. However, to suggest that the United States, where sovereignty in theory lies within the whole people, has a ruling class is ideologically heretical, repugnant to public-school alumni and is for the most part volubly and emphatically denied. It is, above all, quite contrary to public school indoctrination.
For my part, I do not insist that the United States has a tight ruling class because there is often some ambiguity about what public activists in general are up to. Some appear confused themselves.
Objections to the idea of an American ruling class generally seem to flow from misconceptions about the nature of rule, which in the United States is indirect, and also from the idea that a ruling class must be formally constituted, as by titled nobility with certain formal privileges and immunities. Objections also seem to stem from the notion that a ruling class, in order to exist, must be closed to outsiders (which, for example, the ruling class of England never was).
But if a ruling class consists of people whose members veritably rule, a class whose imperative wishes and criteria largely order society, then it seems to me a case can be made that there is such a class in the United States, partly hereditary as to property and position and partly open to conforming newcomers. While not every member of a ruling class exercises rule, some being no more than detached observers and more or less graceful idlers, it is from such an established class that rulers may be selected.
If rulers are those who lay down and enforce the rules, then it would seem that the United States has such a class. The only question remaining would be whether these rulers are publicly selected on the basis of sheer merit or attain their positions largely by means of wealth or hereditary position. Newcomers to rule in the United States, it will be noticed, must pretty much accept and implement already going values established by preexistent rulers. A difference between being born into a ruling class and being accepted into it is that the newcomer must learn and adopt the general values of the ruling group. A man who works his way into the ruling group from the laboring class (and there have been and are such) does not ordinarily retain the values of his original class. He acquires, more or less, the values of his new associates. Like most converts he is often more orthodox than a pope. Everett Dirksen, once a journeyman baker, does not have the outlook today of a journeyman baker.
How, it may be asked, would one discern a member of a ruling class if there were such a class? The method, it seems to me, would be simple: One would notice whether or not he ruled and how much be ruled. In this sense there is certainly a ruling class in the United States; for radiating throughout the country are various wide-jurisdiction chains of command--political, economic, cultural and judicial--that always have someone at their heads. These head men are, or seem to me, rulers.
That there is something improper per se about such rulership, as is either directly charged or strongly implied in much leftist analysis, may be flatly denied. Social organization of any kind requires rule, and the fact that certain executive types from a
small group assume rule derives as much from the passivity and incoherence of the masses as from any impropriety or inequity in arrangements even though one concedes that anyone who has "influence," either through the possession of money or established position, does have an inside track when it comes to establishing himself in a position of rule. But under any possible version of socialism, for example, there would be similar rulers; and, despite all cant about a democratic socialism, such rulers would tend increasingly to be drawn from a semiprofessionalized self-perpetuating class, properly designated as privileged rulers.
The idea that we have rulers is somewhat obscured by phrase-makers who at least unconsciously are trying to hide the fact or to save the notion of popular sovereignty, which I unabashedly take to be simple nonsense in any possible social context. The vocabulary of concealment consists of words like "executive. " "administrator," "decision maker," "public servant," etc. ; the more direct and colloquial "boss" comes closer to the true state of affairs.
That the American people choose their own rulers (at least in the political sphere) is an idea that will die hard no matter how carefully one shows that the choice almost always narrows down to two not very different hand-picked men who have been long nurtured in the political pipeline, gradually rising to the top. That the American people as a whole "chose" any president or other official in the sense of selecting him from among many possible can be dismissed as a notion beneath notice. What there is to public choice of political officials is negative--and itself controlled. Anyone known, for example, to be an atheist, freethinker, socialist or (in many jurisdictions) a believer in divorce (or subject to a variety of other designations) will be rejected out of hand by the electorate because these words have been antecedently contextually placed as "scare" words. The public, without knowing it, is manipulated by its preconditioned emotional response to certain loaded words, often irrelevant to the man or issue. Such words are given their value content by dominant defining agencies, which are always in the hands of persons favoring the established order (members of a ruling class? ). It is not that people select among candidates as they are told. They limit their selection as they have been conditioned by definitions containing concealed value judgments. They are, then, mostly ruled from within themselves but by others who have antecedently determined their reactions. Far from being free men, they are puppets, prisoners of their indoctrination.
Outside the directly political area, in corporations and private organizations, the case for the selection of rulers by popular choice has not even the most tenuous ground to stand on and nobody at all argues for it. Yet corporate rules affect more people directly and immediately than governmental rules. And in the Catholic Church, by way of large example, the members have nothing to say about the selection of its personnel.
As all rulers, men at the head of chains of command, either come from a class habituated to producing decision makers or are strivers from the swamps and bayous who learn the same ways and vocabulary either in big organizations or government, the case is strong for at least entertaining the notion that there is in the United States a partially open ruling class oriented around its own special values. Among others, this class by cultural fiat rules out socialists, atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers--that is, as to the latter, people who make judgments only according to evidence. If one's mind is known so to operate, without prior commitment, one is a political pariah by decree, a strange political fact in a supposed free country. Jefferson could not be elected dog catcher today.
In the United States, according to theory, one is only ruled with one's consent. Yet this is true only in the sense that, if one does not successfully resist, one consents. Nobody
living ever had an opportunity to consent to the Constitution, to most of the laws on the books or to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the officials and rules to which he is subject. There is, it is said, an orderly mechanism for changing any feature one may not like about political reality. As to this, it is well known that the mechanism is so complicated and cumbersome that one can pretty much forget about timely orderly change. If the need for doing anything whatever in the world had to be determined by the processes for legally amending the United States Constitution, for example, we would live in an almost frozen universe.
Individual performance within a class, however, always differs; and even in a ruling class not all the members are likeminded, a fact which gives rise to differences about emphasis or policy. It is the outcome of policy that determines political achievement. But the fact that a man of wealth is carrying the ball at all in the political arena seems to me to represent political achievement unless it can be shown that be is, as in the self- proclaimed case of the late Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, simply looking after his own economic interests from the vantage point of public office.
Because the flood of hereditary wealth-holders into public office since Roosevelt has consisted largely of university men, it does seem to me that they have generally brought with them a broader conception of public interest than many hardbitten professional politicos or businessmen possess. Neither Roosevelt nor Kennedy played the narrow Wall Street game, although they were far from opposed to the general economic interests of wealth-holders. They were also far from socialists or even soft-headed dogooders.
One will have to evaluate the performance of the rich in public office from one's own point of view. I say only that whatever they do (if they don't merely service themselves) represents effort and the assumption of responsibility, hence achievement. The fact that Winston Churchill was an upperclass Tory does not lessen the fact that he was a tremendous achiever beyond the call of ordinary duty. And the more like Churchill, Roosevelt or Kennedy any politician is the more of an achiever I take him to be. In saying a man is an achiever one does not necessarily approve his achievement. One is not required to like an artist's picture, no matter how great an artist he may be. But the alleged achievement must be more than mere activity carried on for one's self-interest. Although his occupation may be onerous, a navel-gazer (or so it seems to me) cannot be rationally rated an achiever any more than can a miser.
Beyond Politics
Publishing has attracted a number of the wealthy. Whether there is achievement here is determined (at least by me) in the light of whether the publishing has any constructive purpose beyond making money. Here one must look for some indication of intent as well as fulfillment. Where the intent is general enlightenment, and where this intent is to some appreciable extent attained, I would look upon the enterprise as an achievement of public value; where the intent is obscurantic or merely commercial, one may disregard it; although it is probably always better that people read something than nothing.
Publishing enterprises that have grown from scratch and that have made the owners wealthy, as in the cases of the Pulitzer, McCormick-Patterson and Ochs families, do not fall into the category of our interest.
As to newspapers, it seems to me that Dorothy Schiff with the New York Post, the Eugene Myers family with the Washington Post and the late Marshall Field III with the Chicago Sun-Times have taken over or started newspapers which they have inclined broadly toward civilized values. The late William Randolph Hearst, the wealthiest man ever in the newspaper field, seems to me to have turned in a negative achievement, for the most part pandering to mass weaknesses. John Hay Whitney, in a costly attempt to
keep a revivified New York Herald Tribune afloat, made a particularly worthy effort in latter-day journalism, to be vanquished in 1966 by adverse circumstances. Under Whitney the Herald Tribune made notable contributions, to some of which allusion was made earlier.
Unfortunately, there is not much in newspaper publishing as a whole (or the mass media in general) subject to evaluation as contributory achievement. As the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of journalism reports:
Of the two hundred or so major papers, somewhere between ten and eighteen are generally ranked as excellent by such knowledgeable critics as reporters, editors, and journalism educators [with these figures I would concur--F. L. ]. A few critics would raise the total to thirty or forty. Perhaps another fifty to eighty smaller dailies would be ranked as "very good for their size. " All of these would be so ranked because they are reasonably complete, thorough, dependable, enterprising, and fair in their news columns, regardless of editorial-page views. At the other pole, a total of perhaps another fifty newspapers large and small, would be ranked as "bad" newspapers--some because of a tendency to distort news to conform with the owner's prejudices, others because of sheer incompetence in reporting and editing, some because of both faults. Between these extremes, at levels ranging from "poor" to "fair," lie the vast majority of American daily newspapers. 8
Most of the big newspapers, good or bad, are self-generated enterprises, not dependent on a wealthy sponsor so much as on commercial support by corporate advertisers.
Marshall Field broadened his publishing effort by going heavily into the field of adult and children's reference and educational books, with notable success. More recently a number of wealthy people have gone into book publishing but, it seems to me, mainly for investment purposes. In the field of books in general during the past fifty years young men of some original small property have entered and achieved commercial as well as cultural publishing success, but as these have not until recently represented anything to be regarded as considerable established wealth they do not belong in this account.
In the early 1960's Huntington Hartford, enamored of Broadway, launched the elaborate magazine Show, a critical but not commercial success. It was soon relinquished.
Paul Mellon's Bollingen Foundation has published or reprinted many books in the field of art and the humanities--worthwhile books that would otherwise not have appeared and highly esteemed by a critical few. Praise seems to me due in such a case.
One of the most distinguished publishing enterprises founded and endowed by a wealthy man was the Loeb Classical Library of Greek and Latin classics with English translations on facing pages; it was established by James Loeb (1867-1933, Harvard, '88), a member of the banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company until his retirement at the age of thirty-four. Loeb in 1905 also founded the Institute of Musical Art, now part of the Juilliard School of Music, and established in Munich a clinic for psychiatric study--a man far ahead of his time.
Many creative writers have been facilitated in the production of new works by fellowships issued for several decades by the Guggenheim Foundation, although this foundation would not be classifiable as a publishing enterprise.
Wealth-financed writings are far more extensive than the uncontrolled productions of Guggenheim fellows. Study grants are issued by many foundations, but one cannot uniformly regard the results as publishing achievements because, with the exception of occasional eye-opening works like Myrdal's An American Dilemma and Kinsey's two
books on sexual behavior, they are often indirect apologies or rationalizations for existing states of affairs. Where contra-factual or misleading conclusions are put forth even unconsciously under the rubric of certified scholarship as links in a covert in-group celebration under a self-protecting mythology, they can be regarded, it seems to me, only very dubiously as achievements. There are such sponsored writings.
Publications that in their various ways have represented noncommercial contributions to political and social understanding have been The Nation and the New Republic. The Nation was subsidized for many years by wealthy inheritor-editor Oswald Garrison Villard and more recently published under James J. Storrow, Jr. , son of the Boston banker; and the New Republic was assisted into being by Willard Straight of the J. P. Morgan firm. The Reporter, financed with Rosenwald money, has also turned in a distinguished noncommercial record. Dogmatic leftists tend to dismiss these publications because they are gradualist-reformist in tendency. It is interesting to notice, though, that the leftist publications pick up most of their grist from publications such as these and the better newspapers, subjecting it to their own ideological interpretation. Without the better publications to rely upon for information, the editors of the left would be completely blind.
Except for small enterprises run by artistic or intellectual groups there is little or nothing of value in daily, weekly or monthly publications that has not emerged as a consequence either of pure commercialism or of patronage by the more enlightened of the wealthy or affluent. Out of the masses themselves has come nothing in this line except fantastic religious, moralistic and political tracts. "The Face on the Bar-Room Floor" is an epic of this school.
While some of the rich have stood forth as publishers, not many, as in the case of Curtis Bok, have distinguished themselves as writers. John F. Kennedy, to be sure, instantly comes to mind as a writer who with his Profiles in Courage rang bells; he very evidently had it in him to function at least at the Lippmann-Reston level, or perhaps beyond, even had he been no more than a poor scholarship student in his youth. Money or no money, Kennedy was obviously a talented fellow; money simply gave him a longer reach. Talented himself, he could recognize talent, something successful politicians are often unable to do. His obvious admiration for political courage, too, seemed to augur something in his political future that political and economic climbers tended to fear, lending color to the disputed view that his assassination was the outcome of a rightist conspiracy.
If more than a very few of the wealthy have individually distinguished themselves as practicing journalists, I have not been able to pick up the trail from the dim record. There was, of course, Villard.
Six times married and divorced Cornelius Vanderbilt III (b. 1898) lists himself as an author, lecturer, cinematographer and televiser and has served as a working reporter and then founder, publisher and president of Vanderbilt Newspapers, Inc. , which briefly issued illustrated newspapers in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami. He was associate editor of Hearst's New York Mirror from 1925 to 1929 and has since worked as a columnist for many newspapers and periodicals. He is the author of more than fifteen semi-popular, semi-autobiographical books, including Farewell to Fifth Avenue (1935).
As with most books by scions of the rich, readers appear to have been chiefly interested in Vanderbilt's autobiographical and "insider" revelations. This was true, too, in the case of Evelyn Walsh McLean's Father Struck It Rich.
Vanderbilt appears to me to have come the closest of one from a very rich family to being a professional writer and working editor; he was precisely that most of his adult
life. I call anyone here a professional writer who habitually sets words down on paper for sale to the public. The definition implies no critical judgments.
The Literary Set
Mary Borden (Lady Spears), daughter born in 1886 of William Borden, the dairy- products tycoon, comes the closest known (to me) of any higher-strata American rich to being a critically extolled professional creative writer. Author of some twenty works, mostly fiction, "Her novels reveal a quiet but devastating wit" according to William Rose Bene? t's The Reader's Encyclopedia (1955). There have been writers in some abundance from the propertied middle class, in possession of some modest private unearned income (Henry James, Clarence Day, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow and others), but this is not the question. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, daughter of a Morgan partner, should also be noticed as a writer of considerable distinction.
Creative writers about the rich and the upper classes in the United States--Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Frank Norris, Louis Auchincloss--have not themselves been of the very wealthy strata; although Edith Wharton was definitely upper class in that she was of the Rhinelander pre-Revolutionary family, wrote about some of the latter-day rich and was married to an affluent Bostonian. Auchincloss, as a big-firm Wall Street lawyer with Yale and Groton in the background, I would place in the cultivated upper middle class rather than the plutocracy.
Most writing, especially by scions of the post-Civil War industrial fortunes, has been in the form of memoirs, some of them emanating from literary ghosts. I conclude that few if any of the American big rich, excluding here descendants of early-established New England mercantile families, have distinguished themselves as writers; I do not, however, assert that none of them has authored a book of some sort or written an essay.
As to great editors--taking as par for this course Joseph Pulitzer, Maxwell Perkins, H. L. Mencken, E. W. Howe, Henry Watterson or almost anyone of a similar stripe--I would say the rich have produced none. Hearst would surely not rate.
Performing and Plastic Arts
In the performing and nonliterary creative arts, one can pick up a name here and there, mostly from lower levels of wealth, but the record is rather meager. Albert Spalding (1888-1953), a very fine violin virtuoso and composer, was a scion of the sporting- goods family; and Mary Cassatt (1845-1926), an esteemed painter especially of mothers and children, was the daughter of a banker and sister of the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Neither Spalding nor Cassatt, however, were from the top echelons of wealth.
In the upper level of wealth is Gerald Felix Warburg (b. 1901), son of Felix M. Warburg and Frieda Schiff and a distinguished performing cellist, formerly a member of the Stradivarius Quartet and known for his concertizing and involvement in musical enterprises. Here, too, should be mentioned James P. Warburg, son of Paul M. Warburg, the banker, and Nina J. Loeb (Kuhn, Loeb), who paralleled a career in investment banking and corporate management by authoring more than thirty books on aspects of economics, finance, politics and public affairs and found time to produce some books of verse--a literary geyser. There is, too, Edward M. M. Warburg (b. 1908), a social worker who has taught art, has participated in archaeological expeditions and more recently has taken a directorial role in various cultural and charitable enterprises. The Warburgs, offshoots of a cultivated Anglo-German Jewish banking family, seem to me an untypical case oriented more like certain descendants of earlier Boston mercantilists than latter-day industrialists, even though their center of activity has certainly been Wall Street. They were affluent, probably rich, before they came to the United States.
Beyond this one has to search carefully for more candidates. Gloria Vanderbilt has had "one-man" shows in painting. That there are creative sparks within the Vanderbilt clan is also suggested by the fact that Harold S. Vanderbilt, premier international yachting champion, around 1925 invented the game of contract bridge, which is an achievement of the same order that one would surely acknowledge to the unknown developers of games like chess, checkers and mah-jong.
Raymond Pitcairn, described in Who's Who as a lawyer, architect and philanthropist (1885-1966), president of the Pitcairn Company and a director of the family's inherited Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, one of the larger of the nation's industrial enterprises, was the architect of the Cathedral of the Bryn Athyn (Pennsylvania) Church of the New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian). He is the father of eight children, including Nathan Pitcairn (born 1912), director of Pittsburgh Plate Glass and many other companies.
Alfred Victor du Pont (born 1900) has been a career architect since 1930. Ire? ne? e du Pont, Jr. (born 1920), is a mechanical engineer with the family company. Many of the contemporary Du Ponts, however, have had educations in science or engineering at schools such as Harvard, Yale and M. I. T. , and many are ensconced in family enterprises. John du Pont presents himself as a marine biologist as well as an Olympic athlete.
In this book reference to the Du Pouts is only to the dominant owning group of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, which since its reorganization in 1902 is what gave this group its money-power; members of this group have largely concerned themselves with business, finance and, indirectly, politics. In politics they provided the backbone of the opposition to Roosevelt's New Deal.
The family as a whole is much more extensive than the chemical kings and has been traced genealogically by two family members, obviously imbued with familial mystique. 9
As of 1949 the genealogy showed 1,035 descendants of Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, some of the eighth generation. 10 The first known ancestor of the line leading to Pierre Samuel, there being other branches, was Jehan du Pont, baptized at Rouen on February 22, 1565. 11 The French Du Ponts were inscribed generally on local roll-books as "bourgeois," so that the family may be said to have been officially middle class until the emergence of a section of it on the latter-day upper finpolitan circuit of plutocracy.
As a middle-class family it included a considerable number of nonbusiness achievers, a fact not germane to this inquiry about the wealthy of a later day. Nor is this inquiry concerned with any of the noncorporation Du Ponts, most of whom interestingly do not bear the surname of Du Pont at all. One would not, for example, associate the name of Lawrence Sven Anderson (b. 1944) with that of Du Pont; yet his mother was Rosina du Pont, who traces back directly to Pierre Samuel (1739-1817). Nor would one at first blush be inclined to designate Washington Irving, Jr. (b. 1952) as a Du Pont; but he too, is a direct descendant of Pierre Samuel. And so it goes with many others who do not bear the Du Pont name. 12
Medicine
In medicine we find William Larimer Mellon, a specialist in tropical diseases who has served the natives in the West Indies, and Henry Clay Frick II, grandson of the ironmaster, a physician and surgeon specializing in gynecology. If there are any other medical men from heavily moneyed strata, they have escaped my notice. As to medicine in general today (without any reference to those two valued practitioners), a variety of investigators has shown that it has become pretty much a lush prerogative of the middle class, members of which dominate it as a recently lucrative field. The great discoveries
of selfless medical scientists have, by and large, been capitalized along conspicuously lucrative lines by striving middle-class people. 13 It is the belief of some investigators that the present need to finance a medical education privately out of middle-class resources operates to exclude men of genuine talent from lower levels of society and to proliferate business-oriented unthorough doctors whose strictly middle-class economic outlook obviously dominates the policies and expressions of the American Medical Association. Doctors, it is implied by many dicta of this association, should properly function on a strictly individual cost-plus-average-rate-of-high-profit basis--all the traffic will bear.
Although wealthy men sometimes marry their nurses I was unable to find any women from wealthy families serving as professional nurses, but such a fact might be difficult to detect. Some wealthy women do serve as nurses' aids in home communities and during wartime. Most nurses of whatever degree probably serve mainly out of economic necessity in an ill-rewarded field. Despite immoderate public expressions of esteem for them, nurses in the United States are generally treated as lower servants.
Public Performers
Wealthy men and women not infrequently marry theatrical performers and opera stars, but there are few cases of a wealthy man or woman becoming a professional performer. One of these few cases was Grace Kelly (born 1929) who became a prize-winning film star and then Princess Grace of Monaco; she is the daughter of wealthy Philadelphia contractor John B. Kelly. More recently there has emerged film star Dina Merrill, daughter of cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. Similarly, wealthy people are sometimes sportsmen in the sense of following or bankrolling some sport such as horse racing or yachting, but one rarely finds one as a competitive participant like yachtsman Harold S. Vanderbilt in rough-and-tumble big-league action. Except for youngsters in college sports, hardly any stand forth under my scrutiny as athletes--Grace Kelly's father was a sculling champion--despite the newspaper-fostered national cult of athleticism. Many of the wealthy, of course, play golf and tennis; but they simply don't rate on the big-trophy circuit.
In general, the Hollywood, Broadway and athletic circuits are dominated by people who came up from the nonpropertied depths of nonentity. Some of these, of course, have hit it big financially and hobnob happily with the well-heeled in feverish Cafe? Society.
Scientists, Scholars and Philosophers
Nobody from a conspicuously rich established family was found in a possibly imperfect search among scientists or scholars as these are listed in American Men of Science: The Physical and Biological Sciences, 3 vols. , 11th edition (R. R. Bowker Co. , New York, 1965); and American Men of Science: The Social and Behavioral Sciences, lOth edition (the Jaques Cattell Press, Inc. , Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, 1962). In the four-volume Directory of American Scholars (R. R. Bowker Co. , New York, 1963), there is listed Corliss Lamont, son of a one-time leading Morgan partner, as a writer on contemporary and philosophical affairs. Among various books he is perhaps best known for his The Philosophy of Humanism, 1957.
1 would not deny that some--a few--scientists, scholars, philosophers or educators may have sprung from families of lesser property, perhaps up to $1 million by value, but I have been able to devise no system for readily locating those who trace a line of descent on the distaff side. In general, the record as I scan it suggests that few people of noticeable wealth go into science, scholarship, education, medicine, journalism, the judiciary, philosophy or the arts--that is to say, they shun subtle detail work all the way from managing their own accounting systems on upward. Some men-on-the-make,
however, like the original Rockefeller, have a genius for detail that reminds one of extremely self-demanding artists.
Echelons of Command
Activists among the rich (as distinguished from the more or less graceful and here and there civilized idlers) tend to surge toward positions of broad command in corporations, nonprofit cultural, social and artistic organizations and in government, in this last recalling Aristotle's observation about the penchant of the rich for political office. There they do what they can to lay out and enforce broad lines of policy within which the detail work of others will bear the requisite fruit. The wealthy may finance the detail work that goes into the creation of an instrument like television and may finally finance its launching; they thereafter determine, in concert with up-and-comers, how it shall be used --as an instrument of general enlightenment or an instrument for selling merchandise at a profit. While compromises are worked out to meet the objections of churlish dissenters, anyone is free to see where the emphasis falls and what the level of appeal is.
From the universities to the corporations and cultural organizations, the wealthy and their chosen aides supervise the detail workers. In their various positions of command the supervisors are known as executives, administrators, directors, publishers, trustees, sponsors, officials, community leaders, philanthropists and public servants. I imply no criticism here, simply point to the fact that activity and achievement among the rich at any level usually boil down primarily to concern with ordering the surrounding state of affairs and directing detail work along soundly approved lines of profitability.
I do not deny but indeed assert, while pointing to Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, that such concern may visualize improvement in the surrounding state of affairs rather than keeping them soundly headed toward the rocks. Yet, whether it represents improvement, deterioration (as C. Wright Mills contended) or the maintenance of the status quo, it shows the area of major interest. The active rich and upcoming rich, as far as one can judge from the available record, are far less interested in understanding, improving or embellishing the world than in running it, at times running it close to the rocks as when the German industrialists embraced Hitler, or as when American financiers thrust the United States into World War I.
The World of Celebrity
The Celebrity Register, edited by Cleveland Amory (Harper and Row, New, York, 1963), lists people as noteworthy according to the amount of space they are given in the mass media. Among the rich there mentioned one finds Douglas Dillon; Donald Douglas; Angier Biddle Duke; Doris Duke; Ire? ne? e du Pont; Cyrus Eaton; Henry J. Kaiser; Sherman Fairchild; Marshall Field IV (d. ); Harvey S. , Leonard, Raymond and Russell Firestone; Randolph and William Randolph (Jr. ) Hearst; Henry, Benson, William C. and Mrs. Edsel Ford; Paul and Richard King Mellon; John Pillsbury; Alfred G. , Cornelius, Jr. , Gloria and Harold S. Vanderbilt; all the Rockefeller brothers and Jievute Paulekiute Sears ("Bobo") Rockefeller; Ogden Reid; Walter P. Chrysler; Amon Carter, Jr. ; Dorothy Schiff; Lady and John Jacob Astor of England; Henry Crown; Lammot du Pont Copeland; August Busch; and a medley of others.
In combing through the list of the rich who are also celebrated by percipient editors one does not encounter any significantly additional names relating to notable personal achievement and, indeed, one notes many omissions.
The Question of Achievement
This question of achievement has arisen, I remind the reader, for two reasons: (1) It is part of standard public relations ideology that the big fortunes are used in all ways for
public support and (2) the criteria of achievement are applied in general most forcefully by the rich to others. What I am doing, heretically, is applying the standards to them. I mention this because it should not be inferred that I myself value achievement as such, and in and of itself, very highly; there is much to be said along the line of Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness. As far as people in general are concerned, I personally value them first for general amiability, which I consider beyond price, and after that for such higher cultivation as they may have acquired. A man amiable and cultivated seems to me the limit of what one can ask for in a human being. If he is also creative he is, patently, ineffable.
The achiever, as it is now known, is usually a person psychologically programmed or impelled to function in a certain way and possessing the ability to satisfy his impulsion. It is, however, part of the middle-class cult of personality to celebrate immoderately the carrier of such often purely fortuitous programming. A man's specific achievement, as far as that goes, is often greater or lesser than he is, a fact sensed by those achievers who draw back from public acclaim not so much out of modesty as uneasiness with the personal judgment of which they are the objects.
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. Prior to 1913 senators were elected by state legislatures, many of which, staffed by dung-hill democrats, awarded Senate seats simply to the highest bidder. It did not take much in the way of political knowhow to sit in "The Rich Man's Club," as the Senate was commonly called.
I will not, then, count any of the pre-1913 rich senators as political achievers simply on the ground of their presence in the Senate.
Although rich and budding rich men were always shuttling about in the shadowy background of both political parties, supplying "campaign funds" and pulling devious strings right and left, they were in the more recent period brought forward and given more direct participation by the Republican Warren G. Harding. A former senator, President Harding was a small-town newspaper publisher of no great wealth. However, he appointed as his secretary of the treasury Andrew W. Mellon, then one of the richest men in the world--an inheritor as well as acquisitor; self-created Herbert C. Hoover as his secretary of commerce; the corporation lawyer Charles Evans Hughes as his secretary of state; and Albert B. Fall, stooge of the oil industry, his secretary of interior. Since Theodore Roosevelt it had become pretty much the custom to install corporation lawyers as secretary of state and attorney general.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, a minor millionaire himself before becoming a popular tribune, went much further in this respect than either Harding or Hoover, who appointed multi- millionaire Ogden L. Mills to succeed Mellon. Roosevelt, believing that men of wealth and good schooling should serve in government rather than lounge about in their clubs, practically stacked his cabinets with men of wealth, while standpatters, reactionaries and presumed malefactors of great wealth shrieked that he was a Communist and a "traitor to his class," here validating in action a Marxist conception of class consciousness among the rich. He started off with William H. Woodin, head of the American Car and Foundry Company, as secretary of the treasury and replaced him with multi-millionaire Henry Morgenthau, Jr. When the world situation became gravely serious in 1940 he appointed Frank Knox, Republican newspaper tycoon, as secretary of the navy and later James V. Forrestal, partner of Dillon, Read and Company, Wall Street investment bankers. He appointed Edward Stettinius, Jr. , son of a Morgan partner, secretary of state. He brought back the able Henry L. Stimson, Republican corporation lawyer and Hoover's secretary of state, as secretary of war. He made Jesse Jones, self-erected Texas Democratic big-league banker-politician, secretary of commerce and Francis Biddle attorney general. Down through the upper ranks of officialdom he drew freely upon men of great wealth, making Nelson A. Rockefeller the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs; W. Averell Harriman, former partner of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. , his representative from the beginning in a variety of posts, mainly diplomatic; Joseph P. Kennedy head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and so on. He gave both Harriman and Rockefeller their political starts.
Roosevelt, it is true, made many appointments from other quarters and, in fact, assembled a mixed bag. But, far from stacking his appointments with radicals or liberals, as recklessly charged, a far stronger case could be made that he drew most of his appointees from Wall Street, Newport, the corporate circuit and the big-city political machines. Scholarly liberals and radicals were brought in mainly as ideological window dressing in a time of great public discontent. Henry Wallace, considered a far-out radical in the bayou country, was himself a very wealthy man, at most a liberal conservative.
If results are what count, Roosevelt was not hostile to the private-property business system, which he found in self-induced crisis and left some years later revived and
reinforced with government support. Remove Rooseveltian government economic subsidy, patronage, guarantee and support today, and the much-vaunted free-enterprise system, beloved of Chamber of Commerce orators, would collapse like a bullet-riddled toy balloon. How many depositors would trust the banks, for a simple example, if it were not for government insurance of deposits? How many would trust the one-time wide-open Stock Exchange if it were not for the SEC?
The fact that the rich were in politics, then, was nothing new. What is new is that, more recently, taking their cue from Roosevelt, the latter-day rich have increasingly taken a direct part, with some of them at least showing signs of becoming forthright public men. They have themselves stood for election, and have been elected, a favorable development from the point of view that those who own the country should take responsibility openly for running it rather than hiding behind stooges in Uncle Sam and Abraham Lincoln suits.
Very rich men, inheritors or corporate wizards, have taken to winning elections right and left despite ingrown Populist prejudices. The electorate appears to be growing tired of the old-time "friend of the people," shaggy with folksy duplicity and athirst for franchises or whatever else he can lay furtive patriotic hands on. Winning an election, I take it, may be counted an achievement whereas winning friendly appointment is not particularly. For the latter all one needs is the nod from some Mr. Big.
By his untypical election as governor of New York in 1928 Franklin D. Roosevelt apparently led wealthy men to believe they too could be elected to that key office, although, as we have noticed, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft and Hoover were, earlier, in the wealthy class. Franklin Roosevelt was succeeded in the governorship by Herbert H. Lehman of the Wall Street banking family, who served from 1932 to 1942 before becoming a United States senator. Except for Thomas E. Dewey's twelve-year tenure after 1942 the governorship of New York has been held by wealthy men since 1928. In 1954, with strong labor support, W. Averell Harriman, later again in the State Department, became the first of the ultra-wealthy of later years to win an important election when he became governor of New York as a Democrat, opening the way psychologically for ultra-wealthy Nelson A. Rockefeller, also supported by labor, to succeed him in 1958 and to win reelection twice to date. As Roosevelt showed on several occasions, the electorate will not shy away from a man because he is wealthy. The voters, presumably, think he is less apt to tap the public till for himself than is an Horatio Alger boy from the grass roots and dung hills.
Outside of New York, too, wealthy men, some of whom got their political start under Roosevelt appointments, have also taken to winning elections. G. Mennen "Soapy" Williams, shaving soap and talcum powder dual heir, who began as a New Deal appointee in 1936, was the elected labor-supported governor of Michigan from 1949 to 1960 and thereafter was assistant secretary of state for African Affairs;. a lawyer, he is also a doctor of jurisprudence. William W. Scranton, also a lawyer and scion of an old Pennsylvania coal fortune, was first an Eisenhower official, then a member of Congress and in 1963 was elected governor of Pennsylvania.
The Kennedys, of course, stand out as men of great wealth who have directly participated in politics, although they are really members of an oldline political family like the Lodges, Stevensons and Tafts. John F. Kennedy, a budding journalist and war hero, was first easily elected a member of the House from Massachusetts, then of the Senate. In 1961 he became president. His brother Robert, a lawyer, was first his attorney general and then became senator from New York while brother Edward, also a lawyer, followed John F. to the Senate from Massachusetts.
Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania, whom we have noticed in his effort to democratize the Senate, is a wealthy as well as extremely able public-spirited man. Barry Goldwater, senator from Arizona before winning the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, inherited a substantial interest in a large department store, never had to work his way up from anywhere. The late Robert Taft, senator from Ohio and presidential aspirant, came of a wealthy family; and the same necessarily holds of his son, also directly concerned in Ohio politics.
This list could be extended--Theodore Green and Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, the Saltonstalls and Peabodys of Massachusetts, Ogden Reid of New York and Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, Angier Biddle Duke, Governor Winthrop Rockefeller of Arkansas, Harrison Williams, Jr. , of New Jersey, et al. --but the highlights have been indicated. While one might evaluate the political performances of each of these men differently, perhaps rating Roosevelt and Kennedy high and Goldwater and Taft low, or vice versa, each represents achievement on the ground that winning elections is itself a recognized achievement. Roosevelt I would call an outstanding achiever in politics.
In some quarters there is a tendency to downgrade the feat of a wealthy man in winning an election because he has had the use of his own funds. But money alone does not win elections, although it is in the plutocratic American system a necessary aid. Furthermore, nearly every man who wins an election is backed by money--his own, that of a moneyed group (like Richard Nixon and his oil backers in 1952) or of an established political machine. The few exceptions appear to be sheer flukes in American politics. Money from at least a small group is almost always behind the candidates, particularly the winner. Only here and there in political low-pressure areas an unfinanced amateur may sneak over the goal line.
A significant recent tendency has been the appearance of a number of successful high corporation officials in elective political office. Small and very medium-sized business people have been no great novelty in elective office, particularly at the state level; but men from the corporate big league have been pointedly absent. George Romney, former head of American Motors and twice elected governor of Michigan, launched a campaign as a 1968 Republican presidential aspirant; and Charles Percy, former head of Bell & Howell, was elected senator from Illinois in 1966. On the corporate circuit, these men were big guns. If more big managers of corporations thrust forward in politics, the country may see something of what cold corporate rationality can do applied to government, assuming that such men retain the corporate approach. Robert S. McNamara, former president of Ford Motor Company, conducted his own specialized exercise in corporate rationality with the Defense Department, but his best efforts there had not been able to out-general Ho Chi Minh on his batteries of Pentagon computers.
In any event, it would appear that a change is under way when the industrial rich, descendants of original tycoons, and corporate nabobs participate directly in politics instead of working through subsidized lower-class stooges. There is a gain here, in the first place, for candor. At least the fractional thinking part of the electorate can now evaluate what these candidates publicly stand for instead of voting for men presumably independent but secretly harnessed to the corporate juggernaut. What any of these men propose politically may not be approved by the observer, but the observer will nevertheless learn by noticing public performance precisely what he does stand for.
Personalities like Lyndon B. Johnson, although moderately wealthy, are not included in the foregoing because they were not wealthy when they came to politics but were politicians first, wealthy men later.
No claim is implied here that all the wealthy who are lawyers have been named, for that list would run into hundreds, or that the mere fact of being a lawyer is something
wonderful, Quite a number of the wealthy and the well-to-do become lawyers although not so many, it appears, as become corporation executives, project promoters and nonprofit administrators.
The Ruling Class
That members of the wealthier classes do often become corporation executives, administrators, lawyers and appointed or elected officials, thereupon opening themselves to evaluation in terms of going standards of achievement, is hardly odd in the light of the concept in political science of a "ruling class. " Activists among the rich do seem to drift primarily into directorial, managerial or similar executive-type functional posts. However, to suggest that the United States, where sovereignty in theory lies within the whole people, has a ruling class is ideologically heretical, repugnant to public-school alumni and is for the most part volubly and emphatically denied. It is, above all, quite contrary to public school indoctrination.
For my part, I do not insist that the United States has a tight ruling class because there is often some ambiguity about what public activists in general are up to. Some appear confused themselves.
Objections to the idea of an American ruling class generally seem to flow from misconceptions about the nature of rule, which in the United States is indirect, and also from the idea that a ruling class must be formally constituted, as by titled nobility with certain formal privileges and immunities. Objections also seem to stem from the notion that a ruling class, in order to exist, must be closed to outsiders (which, for example, the ruling class of England never was).
But if a ruling class consists of people whose members veritably rule, a class whose imperative wishes and criteria largely order society, then it seems to me a case can be made that there is such a class in the United States, partly hereditary as to property and position and partly open to conforming newcomers. While not every member of a ruling class exercises rule, some being no more than detached observers and more or less graceful idlers, it is from such an established class that rulers may be selected.
If rulers are those who lay down and enforce the rules, then it would seem that the United States has such a class. The only question remaining would be whether these rulers are publicly selected on the basis of sheer merit or attain their positions largely by means of wealth or hereditary position. Newcomers to rule in the United States, it will be noticed, must pretty much accept and implement already going values established by preexistent rulers. A difference between being born into a ruling class and being accepted into it is that the newcomer must learn and adopt the general values of the ruling group. A man who works his way into the ruling group from the laboring class (and there have been and are such) does not ordinarily retain the values of his original class. He acquires, more or less, the values of his new associates. Like most converts he is often more orthodox than a pope. Everett Dirksen, once a journeyman baker, does not have the outlook today of a journeyman baker.
How, it may be asked, would one discern a member of a ruling class if there were such a class? The method, it seems to me, would be simple: One would notice whether or not he ruled and how much be ruled. In this sense there is certainly a ruling class in the United States; for radiating throughout the country are various wide-jurisdiction chains of command--political, economic, cultural and judicial--that always have someone at their heads. These head men are, or seem to me, rulers.
That there is something improper per se about such rulership, as is either directly charged or strongly implied in much leftist analysis, may be flatly denied. Social organization of any kind requires rule, and the fact that certain executive types from a
small group assume rule derives as much from the passivity and incoherence of the masses as from any impropriety or inequity in arrangements even though one concedes that anyone who has "influence," either through the possession of money or established position, does have an inside track when it comes to establishing himself in a position of rule. But under any possible version of socialism, for example, there would be similar rulers; and, despite all cant about a democratic socialism, such rulers would tend increasingly to be drawn from a semiprofessionalized self-perpetuating class, properly designated as privileged rulers.
The idea that we have rulers is somewhat obscured by phrase-makers who at least unconsciously are trying to hide the fact or to save the notion of popular sovereignty, which I unabashedly take to be simple nonsense in any possible social context. The vocabulary of concealment consists of words like "executive. " "administrator," "decision maker," "public servant," etc. ; the more direct and colloquial "boss" comes closer to the true state of affairs.
That the American people choose their own rulers (at least in the political sphere) is an idea that will die hard no matter how carefully one shows that the choice almost always narrows down to two not very different hand-picked men who have been long nurtured in the political pipeline, gradually rising to the top. That the American people as a whole "chose" any president or other official in the sense of selecting him from among many possible can be dismissed as a notion beneath notice. What there is to public choice of political officials is negative--and itself controlled. Anyone known, for example, to be an atheist, freethinker, socialist or (in many jurisdictions) a believer in divorce (or subject to a variety of other designations) will be rejected out of hand by the electorate because these words have been antecedently contextually placed as "scare" words. The public, without knowing it, is manipulated by its preconditioned emotional response to certain loaded words, often irrelevant to the man or issue. Such words are given their value content by dominant defining agencies, which are always in the hands of persons favoring the established order (members of a ruling class? ). It is not that people select among candidates as they are told. They limit their selection as they have been conditioned by definitions containing concealed value judgments. They are, then, mostly ruled from within themselves but by others who have antecedently determined their reactions. Far from being free men, they are puppets, prisoners of their indoctrination.
Outside the directly political area, in corporations and private organizations, the case for the selection of rulers by popular choice has not even the most tenuous ground to stand on and nobody at all argues for it. Yet corporate rules affect more people directly and immediately than governmental rules. And in the Catholic Church, by way of large example, the members have nothing to say about the selection of its personnel.
As all rulers, men at the head of chains of command, either come from a class habituated to producing decision makers or are strivers from the swamps and bayous who learn the same ways and vocabulary either in big organizations or government, the case is strong for at least entertaining the notion that there is in the United States a partially open ruling class oriented around its own special values. Among others, this class by cultural fiat rules out socialists, atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers--that is, as to the latter, people who make judgments only according to evidence. If one's mind is known so to operate, without prior commitment, one is a political pariah by decree, a strange political fact in a supposed free country. Jefferson could not be elected dog catcher today.
In the United States, according to theory, one is only ruled with one's consent. Yet this is true only in the sense that, if one does not successfully resist, one consents. Nobody
living ever had an opportunity to consent to the Constitution, to most of the laws on the books or to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the officials and rules to which he is subject. There is, it is said, an orderly mechanism for changing any feature one may not like about political reality. As to this, it is well known that the mechanism is so complicated and cumbersome that one can pretty much forget about timely orderly change. If the need for doing anything whatever in the world had to be determined by the processes for legally amending the United States Constitution, for example, we would live in an almost frozen universe.
Individual performance within a class, however, always differs; and even in a ruling class not all the members are likeminded, a fact which gives rise to differences about emphasis or policy. It is the outcome of policy that determines political achievement. But the fact that a man of wealth is carrying the ball at all in the political arena seems to me to represent political achievement unless it can be shown that be is, as in the self- proclaimed case of the late Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, simply looking after his own economic interests from the vantage point of public office.
Because the flood of hereditary wealth-holders into public office since Roosevelt has consisted largely of university men, it does seem to me that they have generally brought with them a broader conception of public interest than many hardbitten professional politicos or businessmen possess. Neither Roosevelt nor Kennedy played the narrow Wall Street game, although they were far from opposed to the general economic interests of wealth-holders. They were also far from socialists or even soft-headed dogooders.
One will have to evaluate the performance of the rich in public office from one's own point of view. I say only that whatever they do (if they don't merely service themselves) represents effort and the assumption of responsibility, hence achievement. The fact that Winston Churchill was an upperclass Tory does not lessen the fact that he was a tremendous achiever beyond the call of ordinary duty. And the more like Churchill, Roosevelt or Kennedy any politician is the more of an achiever I take him to be. In saying a man is an achiever one does not necessarily approve his achievement. One is not required to like an artist's picture, no matter how great an artist he may be. But the alleged achievement must be more than mere activity carried on for one's self-interest. Although his occupation may be onerous, a navel-gazer (or so it seems to me) cannot be rationally rated an achiever any more than can a miser.
Beyond Politics
Publishing has attracted a number of the wealthy. Whether there is achievement here is determined (at least by me) in the light of whether the publishing has any constructive purpose beyond making money. Here one must look for some indication of intent as well as fulfillment. Where the intent is general enlightenment, and where this intent is to some appreciable extent attained, I would look upon the enterprise as an achievement of public value; where the intent is obscurantic or merely commercial, one may disregard it; although it is probably always better that people read something than nothing.
Publishing enterprises that have grown from scratch and that have made the owners wealthy, as in the cases of the Pulitzer, McCormick-Patterson and Ochs families, do not fall into the category of our interest.
As to newspapers, it seems to me that Dorothy Schiff with the New York Post, the Eugene Myers family with the Washington Post and the late Marshall Field III with the Chicago Sun-Times have taken over or started newspapers which they have inclined broadly toward civilized values. The late William Randolph Hearst, the wealthiest man ever in the newspaper field, seems to me to have turned in a negative achievement, for the most part pandering to mass weaknesses. John Hay Whitney, in a costly attempt to
keep a revivified New York Herald Tribune afloat, made a particularly worthy effort in latter-day journalism, to be vanquished in 1966 by adverse circumstances. Under Whitney the Herald Tribune made notable contributions, to some of which allusion was made earlier.
Unfortunately, there is not much in newspaper publishing as a whole (or the mass media in general) subject to evaluation as contributory achievement. As the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of journalism reports:
Of the two hundred or so major papers, somewhere between ten and eighteen are generally ranked as excellent by such knowledgeable critics as reporters, editors, and journalism educators [with these figures I would concur--F. L. ]. A few critics would raise the total to thirty or forty. Perhaps another fifty to eighty smaller dailies would be ranked as "very good for their size. " All of these would be so ranked because they are reasonably complete, thorough, dependable, enterprising, and fair in their news columns, regardless of editorial-page views. At the other pole, a total of perhaps another fifty newspapers large and small, would be ranked as "bad" newspapers--some because of a tendency to distort news to conform with the owner's prejudices, others because of sheer incompetence in reporting and editing, some because of both faults. Between these extremes, at levels ranging from "poor" to "fair," lie the vast majority of American daily newspapers. 8
Most of the big newspapers, good or bad, are self-generated enterprises, not dependent on a wealthy sponsor so much as on commercial support by corporate advertisers.
Marshall Field broadened his publishing effort by going heavily into the field of adult and children's reference and educational books, with notable success. More recently a number of wealthy people have gone into book publishing but, it seems to me, mainly for investment purposes. In the field of books in general during the past fifty years young men of some original small property have entered and achieved commercial as well as cultural publishing success, but as these have not until recently represented anything to be regarded as considerable established wealth they do not belong in this account.
In the early 1960's Huntington Hartford, enamored of Broadway, launched the elaborate magazine Show, a critical but not commercial success. It was soon relinquished.
Paul Mellon's Bollingen Foundation has published or reprinted many books in the field of art and the humanities--worthwhile books that would otherwise not have appeared and highly esteemed by a critical few. Praise seems to me due in such a case.
One of the most distinguished publishing enterprises founded and endowed by a wealthy man was the Loeb Classical Library of Greek and Latin classics with English translations on facing pages; it was established by James Loeb (1867-1933, Harvard, '88), a member of the banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company until his retirement at the age of thirty-four. Loeb in 1905 also founded the Institute of Musical Art, now part of the Juilliard School of Music, and established in Munich a clinic for psychiatric study--a man far ahead of his time.
Many creative writers have been facilitated in the production of new works by fellowships issued for several decades by the Guggenheim Foundation, although this foundation would not be classifiable as a publishing enterprise.
Wealth-financed writings are far more extensive than the uncontrolled productions of Guggenheim fellows. Study grants are issued by many foundations, but one cannot uniformly regard the results as publishing achievements because, with the exception of occasional eye-opening works like Myrdal's An American Dilemma and Kinsey's two
books on sexual behavior, they are often indirect apologies or rationalizations for existing states of affairs. Where contra-factual or misleading conclusions are put forth even unconsciously under the rubric of certified scholarship as links in a covert in-group celebration under a self-protecting mythology, they can be regarded, it seems to me, only very dubiously as achievements. There are such sponsored writings.
Publications that in their various ways have represented noncommercial contributions to political and social understanding have been The Nation and the New Republic. The Nation was subsidized for many years by wealthy inheritor-editor Oswald Garrison Villard and more recently published under James J. Storrow, Jr. , son of the Boston banker; and the New Republic was assisted into being by Willard Straight of the J. P. Morgan firm. The Reporter, financed with Rosenwald money, has also turned in a distinguished noncommercial record. Dogmatic leftists tend to dismiss these publications because they are gradualist-reformist in tendency. It is interesting to notice, though, that the leftist publications pick up most of their grist from publications such as these and the better newspapers, subjecting it to their own ideological interpretation. Without the better publications to rely upon for information, the editors of the left would be completely blind.
Except for small enterprises run by artistic or intellectual groups there is little or nothing of value in daily, weekly or monthly publications that has not emerged as a consequence either of pure commercialism or of patronage by the more enlightened of the wealthy or affluent. Out of the masses themselves has come nothing in this line except fantastic religious, moralistic and political tracts. "The Face on the Bar-Room Floor" is an epic of this school.
While some of the rich have stood forth as publishers, not many, as in the case of Curtis Bok, have distinguished themselves as writers. John F. Kennedy, to be sure, instantly comes to mind as a writer who with his Profiles in Courage rang bells; he very evidently had it in him to function at least at the Lippmann-Reston level, or perhaps beyond, even had he been no more than a poor scholarship student in his youth. Money or no money, Kennedy was obviously a talented fellow; money simply gave him a longer reach. Talented himself, he could recognize talent, something successful politicians are often unable to do. His obvious admiration for political courage, too, seemed to augur something in his political future that political and economic climbers tended to fear, lending color to the disputed view that his assassination was the outcome of a rightist conspiracy.
If more than a very few of the wealthy have individually distinguished themselves as practicing journalists, I have not been able to pick up the trail from the dim record. There was, of course, Villard.
Six times married and divorced Cornelius Vanderbilt III (b. 1898) lists himself as an author, lecturer, cinematographer and televiser and has served as a working reporter and then founder, publisher and president of Vanderbilt Newspapers, Inc. , which briefly issued illustrated newspapers in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami. He was associate editor of Hearst's New York Mirror from 1925 to 1929 and has since worked as a columnist for many newspapers and periodicals. He is the author of more than fifteen semi-popular, semi-autobiographical books, including Farewell to Fifth Avenue (1935).
As with most books by scions of the rich, readers appear to have been chiefly interested in Vanderbilt's autobiographical and "insider" revelations. This was true, too, in the case of Evelyn Walsh McLean's Father Struck It Rich.
Vanderbilt appears to me to have come the closest of one from a very rich family to being a professional writer and working editor; he was precisely that most of his adult
life. I call anyone here a professional writer who habitually sets words down on paper for sale to the public. The definition implies no critical judgments.
The Literary Set
Mary Borden (Lady Spears), daughter born in 1886 of William Borden, the dairy- products tycoon, comes the closest known (to me) of any higher-strata American rich to being a critically extolled professional creative writer. Author of some twenty works, mostly fiction, "Her novels reveal a quiet but devastating wit" according to William Rose Bene? t's The Reader's Encyclopedia (1955). There have been writers in some abundance from the propertied middle class, in possession of some modest private unearned income (Henry James, Clarence Day, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow and others), but this is not the question. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, daughter of a Morgan partner, should also be noticed as a writer of considerable distinction.
Creative writers about the rich and the upper classes in the United States--Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Frank Norris, Louis Auchincloss--have not themselves been of the very wealthy strata; although Edith Wharton was definitely upper class in that she was of the Rhinelander pre-Revolutionary family, wrote about some of the latter-day rich and was married to an affluent Bostonian. Auchincloss, as a big-firm Wall Street lawyer with Yale and Groton in the background, I would place in the cultivated upper middle class rather than the plutocracy.
Most writing, especially by scions of the post-Civil War industrial fortunes, has been in the form of memoirs, some of them emanating from literary ghosts. I conclude that few if any of the American big rich, excluding here descendants of early-established New England mercantile families, have distinguished themselves as writers; I do not, however, assert that none of them has authored a book of some sort or written an essay.
As to great editors--taking as par for this course Joseph Pulitzer, Maxwell Perkins, H. L. Mencken, E. W. Howe, Henry Watterson or almost anyone of a similar stripe--I would say the rich have produced none. Hearst would surely not rate.
Performing and Plastic Arts
In the performing and nonliterary creative arts, one can pick up a name here and there, mostly from lower levels of wealth, but the record is rather meager. Albert Spalding (1888-1953), a very fine violin virtuoso and composer, was a scion of the sporting- goods family; and Mary Cassatt (1845-1926), an esteemed painter especially of mothers and children, was the daughter of a banker and sister of the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Neither Spalding nor Cassatt, however, were from the top echelons of wealth.
In the upper level of wealth is Gerald Felix Warburg (b. 1901), son of Felix M. Warburg and Frieda Schiff and a distinguished performing cellist, formerly a member of the Stradivarius Quartet and known for his concertizing and involvement in musical enterprises. Here, too, should be mentioned James P. Warburg, son of Paul M. Warburg, the banker, and Nina J. Loeb (Kuhn, Loeb), who paralleled a career in investment banking and corporate management by authoring more than thirty books on aspects of economics, finance, politics and public affairs and found time to produce some books of verse--a literary geyser. There is, too, Edward M. M. Warburg (b. 1908), a social worker who has taught art, has participated in archaeological expeditions and more recently has taken a directorial role in various cultural and charitable enterprises. The Warburgs, offshoots of a cultivated Anglo-German Jewish banking family, seem to me an untypical case oriented more like certain descendants of earlier Boston mercantilists than latter-day industrialists, even though their center of activity has certainly been Wall Street. They were affluent, probably rich, before they came to the United States.
Beyond this one has to search carefully for more candidates. Gloria Vanderbilt has had "one-man" shows in painting. That there are creative sparks within the Vanderbilt clan is also suggested by the fact that Harold S. Vanderbilt, premier international yachting champion, around 1925 invented the game of contract bridge, which is an achievement of the same order that one would surely acknowledge to the unknown developers of games like chess, checkers and mah-jong.
Raymond Pitcairn, described in Who's Who as a lawyer, architect and philanthropist (1885-1966), president of the Pitcairn Company and a director of the family's inherited Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, one of the larger of the nation's industrial enterprises, was the architect of the Cathedral of the Bryn Athyn (Pennsylvania) Church of the New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian). He is the father of eight children, including Nathan Pitcairn (born 1912), director of Pittsburgh Plate Glass and many other companies.
Alfred Victor du Pont (born 1900) has been a career architect since 1930. Ire? ne? e du Pont, Jr. (born 1920), is a mechanical engineer with the family company. Many of the contemporary Du Ponts, however, have had educations in science or engineering at schools such as Harvard, Yale and M. I. T. , and many are ensconced in family enterprises. John du Pont presents himself as a marine biologist as well as an Olympic athlete.
In this book reference to the Du Pouts is only to the dominant owning group of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, which since its reorganization in 1902 is what gave this group its money-power; members of this group have largely concerned themselves with business, finance and, indirectly, politics. In politics they provided the backbone of the opposition to Roosevelt's New Deal.
The family as a whole is much more extensive than the chemical kings and has been traced genealogically by two family members, obviously imbued with familial mystique. 9
As of 1949 the genealogy showed 1,035 descendants of Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, some of the eighth generation. 10 The first known ancestor of the line leading to Pierre Samuel, there being other branches, was Jehan du Pont, baptized at Rouen on February 22, 1565. 11 The French Du Ponts were inscribed generally on local roll-books as "bourgeois," so that the family may be said to have been officially middle class until the emergence of a section of it on the latter-day upper finpolitan circuit of plutocracy.
As a middle-class family it included a considerable number of nonbusiness achievers, a fact not germane to this inquiry about the wealthy of a later day. Nor is this inquiry concerned with any of the noncorporation Du Ponts, most of whom interestingly do not bear the surname of Du Pont at all. One would not, for example, associate the name of Lawrence Sven Anderson (b. 1944) with that of Du Pont; yet his mother was Rosina du Pont, who traces back directly to Pierre Samuel (1739-1817). Nor would one at first blush be inclined to designate Washington Irving, Jr. (b. 1952) as a Du Pont; but he too, is a direct descendant of Pierre Samuel. And so it goes with many others who do not bear the Du Pont name. 12
Medicine
In medicine we find William Larimer Mellon, a specialist in tropical diseases who has served the natives in the West Indies, and Henry Clay Frick II, grandson of the ironmaster, a physician and surgeon specializing in gynecology. If there are any other medical men from heavily moneyed strata, they have escaped my notice. As to medicine in general today (without any reference to those two valued practitioners), a variety of investigators has shown that it has become pretty much a lush prerogative of the middle class, members of which dominate it as a recently lucrative field. The great discoveries
of selfless medical scientists have, by and large, been capitalized along conspicuously lucrative lines by striving middle-class people. 13 It is the belief of some investigators that the present need to finance a medical education privately out of middle-class resources operates to exclude men of genuine talent from lower levels of society and to proliferate business-oriented unthorough doctors whose strictly middle-class economic outlook obviously dominates the policies and expressions of the American Medical Association. Doctors, it is implied by many dicta of this association, should properly function on a strictly individual cost-plus-average-rate-of-high-profit basis--all the traffic will bear.
Although wealthy men sometimes marry their nurses I was unable to find any women from wealthy families serving as professional nurses, but such a fact might be difficult to detect. Some wealthy women do serve as nurses' aids in home communities and during wartime. Most nurses of whatever degree probably serve mainly out of economic necessity in an ill-rewarded field. Despite immoderate public expressions of esteem for them, nurses in the United States are generally treated as lower servants.
Public Performers
Wealthy men and women not infrequently marry theatrical performers and opera stars, but there are few cases of a wealthy man or woman becoming a professional performer. One of these few cases was Grace Kelly (born 1929) who became a prize-winning film star and then Princess Grace of Monaco; she is the daughter of wealthy Philadelphia contractor John B. Kelly. More recently there has emerged film star Dina Merrill, daughter of cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. Similarly, wealthy people are sometimes sportsmen in the sense of following or bankrolling some sport such as horse racing or yachting, but one rarely finds one as a competitive participant like yachtsman Harold S. Vanderbilt in rough-and-tumble big-league action. Except for youngsters in college sports, hardly any stand forth under my scrutiny as athletes--Grace Kelly's father was a sculling champion--despite the newspaper-fostered national cult of athleticism. Many of the wealthy, of course, play golf and tennis; but they simply don't rate on the big-trophy circuit.
In general, the Hollywood, Broadway and athletic circuits are dominated by people who came up from the nonpropertied depths of nonentity. Some of these, of course, have hit it big financially and hobnob happily with the well-heeled in feverish Cafe? Society.
Scientists, Scholars and Philosophers
Nobody from a conspicuously rich established family was found in a possibly imperfect search among scientists or scholars as these are listed in American Men of Science: The Physical and Biological Sciences, 3 vols. , 11th edition (R. R. Bowker Co. , New York, 1965); and American Men of Science: The Social and Behavioral Sciences, lOth edition (the Jaques Cattell Press, Inc. , Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, 1962). In the four-volume Directory of American Scholars (R. R. Bowker Co. , New York, 1963), there is listed Corliss Lamont, son of a one-time leading Morgan partner, as a writer on contemporary and philosophical affairs. Among various books he is perhaps best known for his The Philosophy of Humanism, 1957.
1 would not deny that some--a few--scientists, scholars, philosophers or educators may have sprung from families of lesser property, perhaps up to $1 million by value, but I have been able to devise no system for readily locating those who trace a line of descent on the distaff side. In general, the record as I scan it suggests that few people of noticeable wealth go into science, scholarship, education, medicine, journalism, the judiciary, philosophy or the arts--that is to say, they shun subtle detail work all the way from managing their own accounting systems on upward. Some men-on-the-make,
however, like the original Rockefeller, have a genius for detail that reminds one of extremely self-demanding artists.
Echelons of Command
Activists among the rich (as distinguished from the more or less graceful and here and there civilized idlers) tend to surge toward positions of broad command in corporations, nonprofit cultural, social and artistic organizations and in government, in this last recalling Aristotle's observation about the penchant of the rich for political office. There they do what they can to lay out and enforce broad lines of policy within which the detail work of others will bear the requisite fruit. The wealthy may finance the detail work that goes into the creation of an instrument like television and may finally finance its launching; they thereafter determine, in concert with up-and-comers, how it shall be used --as an instrument of general enlightenment or an instrument for selling merchandise at a profit. While compromises are worked out to meet the objections of churlish dissenters, anyone is free to see where the emphasis falls and what the level of appeal is.
From the universities to the corporations and cultural organizations, the wealthy and their chosen aides supervise the detail workers. In their various positions of command the supervisors are known as executives, administrators, directors, publishers, trustees, sponsors, officials, community leaders, philanthropists and public servants. I imply no criticism here, simply point to the fact that activity and achievement among the rich at any level usually boil down primarily to concern with ordering the surrounding state of affairs and directing detail work along soundly approved lines of profitability.
I do not deny but indeed assert, while pointing to Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, that such concern may visualize improvement in the surrounding state of affairs rather than keeping them soundly headed toward the rocks. Yet, whether it represents improvement, deterioration (as C. Wright Mills contended) or the maintenance of the status quo, it shows the area of major interest. The active rich and upcoming rich, as far as one can judge from the available record, are far less interested in understanding, improving or embellishing the world than in running it, at times running it close to the rocks as when the German industrialists embraced Hitler, or as when American financiers thrust the United States into World War I.
The World of Celebrity
The Celebrity Register, edited by Cleveland Amory (Harper and Row, New, York, 1963), lists people as noteworthy according to the amount of space they are given in the mass media. Among the rich there mentioned one finds Douglas Dillon; Donald Douglas; Angier Biddle Duke; Doris Duke; Ire? ne? e du Pont; Cyrus Eaton; Henry J. Kaiser; Sherman Fairchild; Marshall Field IV (d. ); Harvey S. , Leonard, Raymond and Russell Firestone; Randolph and William Randolph (Jr. ) Hearst; Henry, Benson, William C. and Mrs. Edsel Ford; Paul and Richard King Mellon; John Pillsbury; Alfred G. , Cornelius, Jr. , Gloria and Harold S. Vanderbilt; all the Rockefeller brothers and Jievute Paulekiute Sears ("Bobo") Rockefeller; Ogden Reid; Walter P. Chrysler; Amon Carter, Jr. ; Dorothy Schiff; Lady and John Jacob Astor of England; Henry Crown; Lammot du Pont Copeland; August Busch; and a medley of others.
In combing through the list of the rich who are also celebrated by percipient editors one does not encounter any significantly additional names relating to notable personal achievement and, indeed, one notes many omissions.
The Question of Achievement
This question of achievement has arisen, I remind the reader, for two reasons: (1) It is part of standard public relations ideology that the big fortunes are used in all ways for
public support and (2) the criteria of achievement are applied in general most forcefully by the rich to others. What I am doing, heretically, is applying the standards to them. I mention this because it should not be inferred that I myself value achievement as such, and in and of itself, very highly; there is much to be said along the line of Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness. As far as people in general are concerned, I personally value them first for general amiability, which I consider beyond price, and after that for such higher cultivation as they may have acquired. A man amiable and cultivated seems to me the limit of what one can ask for in a human being. If he is also creative he is, patently, ineffable.
The achiever, as it is now known, is usually a person psychologically programmed or impelled to function in a certain way and possessing the ability to satisfy his impulsion. It is, however, part of the middle-class cult of personality to celebrate immoderately the carrier of such often purely fortuitous programming. A man's specific achievement, as far as that goes, is often greater or lesser than he is, a fact sensed by those achievers who draw back from public acclaim not so much out of modesty as uneasiness with the personal judgment of which they are the objects.
