No More Learning

What would happen if Congress, for instance, passed a thoroughly equitable tax law? For one thing, the members of Congress who voted for such a law would quickly find their extracurricular emoluments ended. The rich, it is well to note, make their political contributions out of part of their tax savings, thus serving to keep public policies as they want them and at public cost. Neat. . . .
A Note on Methodology
On the score of method many political scientists would no doubt be inclined to fault me for highlighting what they call the seamy side of politics. What they are almost uniformly inclined to do in their writings is to put it all "in perspective" by sandwiching in passing reference to these dealings among a vast mass of routine formal details. The story, as journalists say, gets lost. It is buried in the salad.
If sports writers used their method in reporting a prizefight, they would chronologically and even-handedly record every punch and movement from the beginning and terminate with the drab curt statement that the champion finally scored a knockout with an illegal punch on the back of the neck. The headline would read: FIGHT AT THE CARDEN. This would be "objectivity," but of a crazy sort.
Instead, able (and permitted) to sift the significant from the trivial, the seasoned sports writer is more apt to begin his account:
"Scoring a knock-out in the second minute of the ninth round with the illegal rabbit- punch, Plug-Ugly Muldoon last night retained the world's heavyweight championship as excited fans jeered and threw pop bottles. Apparently the referee did not see the illegal punch and therefore did not disqualify the champion although the blow was clearly visible from ringside.
"From the beginning it was a dirty fight with the loser, Ratsy Schlemiel, freely butting in the clinches and Muldoon levering in low blows of explosive force. Still, the referee, for whom many have suggested an eye examination or a long vacation, did not see although he twice warned each gladiator. . . . "
The headline on this masterpiece would read something like:
MULDOON RETAINS CROWN
IN DIRTY BRAWL AT GARDEN SCHLEMIEL K. O. 'D WITH FOUL BLOW REFEREE BOOED
Newspaper reporting of Congress, however, ordinarily tends to follow the drab cue given by the political scientists.
If congressional reporting in general were as forthright as sports reporting, a headline on a congressional session might read somewhat as follows:
CONGRESS IN NEW TAX SWINDLE CLIPS LABOR FORCE
AS STOCK PRICES SOAR BONE THROWN TO BLIND VETS DIRKSEN FORESEES PROSPERITY FOR ALL
The text would be similarly to the point.
In Defense of the Politician
For any reader who is now ready to bring in a hanging verdict against the genus politician Americanus, let me interpose a restraining caveat.
Under the American theory of government the people are sovereign and have the right to boot out any officeholder in duly prescribed elections. "Throw the rascals out," has been the battle cry in many rousing elections, often coming from the throats of other rascals trying to squeeze in.
The assumption behind this apparent permissiveness is that the people (by definition good) know, or can sense mysteriously, who is deserving between two politicians. But as seasoned politicians know, meritorious service is not sufficient to retain the favor of the electorate.
This could be shown by the citation of scores of cases but I will here cite a single recent lamentable case. Senator Kenneth B. Keating, Republican incumbent, was defeated in New York in 1964 by Robert F. Kennedy, Democrat. The electorate had no particular distaste for Keating, who had functioned as a liberal, voted for all measures preponderantly favored by New Yorkers and was roundly praised before and after his defeat by a wide spectrum of editorialists. As Senator Kennedy himself later analyzed his victory, Keating made a tactical mistake by not merely standing in dignity on his record. Instead, Keating in the course of the campaign launched a panicky attack on Kennedy as a carpetbagger from Massachusetts, thus opening the door to attention- getting verbal counter-blows by Kennedy which he could not otherwise have delivered with any good grace.
The downfall of the civilized but non-lustrous Keating showed once again that electoral tactics and the appearance of an attractive new face may count in an election more heavily than unquestioned merit in office.
Having seen this sort of thing happen many times, knowing the ditheriness of the electorate, the impecunious man in politics usually guards against it by clandestine counter-organizational measures and by seeing to it while in office that he gathers something of value to tide himself over in the event he is brusquely turned out. The politician, in the form of his personal profit enterprises, his organization and the various Establishments going up the line in a hierarchy, belongs to something very analogous to an underground trade union. Committed for life to the holding of public office, he does not intend to see himself unemployed or, if suddenly turned out, without ready means of self-support. He is, in brief, intelligent within his zany environment.
If arrangements similar to those affecting the politician applied to all employees they would be forced, every two, four or six years, to debate with rivals for their jobs before company stockholders, customers and assorted cranks. If these thought a new candidate looked fresher, younger, more clean-cut, sexier or was better spoken or more churchly they would vote him in. It is precisely to defend themselves against critical judgments of that kind that workers, whenever they succeed in organizing, vociferously stress job seniority and job security. The quixotic democratic idea that an officeholder, a man of no hereditary substance, dependent only upon his salary, should be subject to offhand dismissal every few years at the hands of the hoi polloi, thereupon to join the throng of job seekers in the open labor market, is one that has little appeal for the ordinary, up- from-nowhere, jerk-water politician. He therefore guards against such a dire eventuality in every way he can think of, some highly aromatic and far out in left field.
What happens in the case of many successful politicians is that they are so intelligently careful about their many defensive measures, and so lucky, that they reap far more than job security and carryover money for life's arduous road. They become authentically rich, in a position to thumb their noses at the foolish public, which they freely if covertly do.
It should not be thought that I am offering an apology for the politician in thus presenting him, accurately, as a job-protecting specialized worker on his way up in the world. I am simply offering the perspective from his personal point of view. It is because of the position he occupies under oath, transcending in importance that of the physician-surgeon, that one holds him, after everything has been said on all sides, to the strictest accounting. When a physician-surgeon is able to enhance his own security by deviating from the highest canons of medical practice, as by performing unnecessary, high-fee operations, society and his peers do not forgive him merely because his financial problem is understood. In the same way we can safely condemn the typical off-the-soil politician: He is betraying his true responsibilities in order to achieve personal accommodation vis-a`-vis the mob.
The Upside-Down Republic
In his great Republic, praised by some, derided by others, Plato laid out a reasoned scheme of government in analogy with what his primitive psychology comprehended of the individual. A man, as Plato saw it, consists chiefly of a head or rational function, the chest or spirited function (heart and lungs) and the stomach or appetitional function. People, as he saw them, were classifiable as these functions dominated their temperaments.
Because the head was presumptively the better (because rational) part of a man, Plato deduced that the head should rule the state. Hence a philosopher or man of learning should be king, assisted by similar men of learning. Should a ruler be a man of knowledge or an ignorant man? Obviously, he should be a man of knowledge. The safety of the state and its people required it. Who would deny it?
Subject to these rational, informed rulers--men of learning and intellectuals--would be men of the spirit, whom Plato called guardians and auxiliaries. Guardians corresponded to our civil service employees and auxiliaries to soldiers. As Plato saw them, both regarded personal honor or prestige (status) as the highest value just as the philosophers primarily valued knowledge and insight.
These strata in the Platonic Republic would lead very ascetic lives, would own no property, would never marry and would conduct sexual relations only on rare occasions when perfect children were desired. Women as well as men were equally to be guardians and auxiliaries. Children of these strata would be brought up by special teachers, would never be left under the corrupting influence of their doting parents.
Below these strata would be the common people, perpetual victims of their insatiable appetites, who would lead their confused catch-as-catch-can lives under rules laid down from above, although they might rise into the ascetic strata if they wished. The people of the appetites might own property, marry, have and mal-educate their own children and copulate blissfully with all the abandon of Hindus on a holiday.
It is from Plato that we derive our high ideals of the lawgiver, rarely approached in reality, as anyone can see.
But although Plato's scheme, intended only as a didactic device, is now widely ridiculed by trivial minds, it is worth noticing that what we have in the United States is its exact opposite--hardly an improvement.
The rulers, in our present scheme, are people of the largest appetites, to whom most public deference is paid. While appetites exist among all, their greatest strength is obviously among the most voracious acquisitors, the rich and their sycophants in office.
Rated considerably below these in public esteem are our guardians and auxiliaries: civil servants and soldiers.
And, popularly rated lowest of all, are our philosophers or men of learning. One must admit that the public is a bit ambivalent and confused on this score owing to some colossal breakthroughs scored in recent years by the learned and by no one else; but as between a plutocrat and a politician on the one hand and a professor or vagrant intellectual on the other any popular survey will show that the professor, proverbially absent-minded and inept, is low man in the totem-poll. He is in most schools kept on a tight leash held by trustees. He is rarely a free agent.
We are confronted, it is evident, with an exact inversion of the Platonic scheme. Yet some persons unreasonably expect the common people of the larger appetites installed at the top to conduct themselves like Platonic philosophers, guardians and auxiliaries, which is much like expecting a gorilla to conduct himself like a Lord Chesterfield.
Subversive Jeffersonianism
In voting, politicians have noticed, the American electorate is hardly attracted by any except the most general Jeffersonian propositions. If the inclination of the electorate were toward true Jeffersonianism, actually an inverted aristocratic doctrine, politicians would conduct themselves differently and speak differently. Any even slightly successful politician is fully aware that any office-seeker who liberally salted his speeches with specific Jeffersonian views, or composed his speeches of actual Jeffersonian quotations, would be lucky to escape with his life from the nearest functionally illiterate mob. Radicals and civil-righters of various stripes have tried it again and again and have been deluged with rotten eggs, overripe fruit, stones and local police attentions. The broad public is simply not democratic, would find Jefferson repugnant if they could read him. If any stray reader doubts this let him dip into Jefferson's writings here and there or select common topics from their indexes.
For Jefferson, extolled in the abstract at annual Jefferson Day fund-raising dinners of the Democratic Party, was very close to being a political bedfellow of at least one prominent side of the later-coming Karl Marx and practically the antithesis of Lyndon B. Johnson and almost every American president since Lincoln.
Even more than in the Declaration of Independence Jefferson elsewhere explicitly preached an inherent popular right to make revolution, by force and violence, without awaiting a green light from the Supreme Court. The Confederacy acted precisely according to this doctrine although it did not in its support of slavery (its true love) subscribe to the notion of equality. Nor is civil equality the ideal of the broad populace today, as one can See from popular reactions to the ordinary claims of Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and a variety of other ethnic or national minority groups.
As anyone can readily detect, such sentiments are subversive and are hardly subscribed to by any discernible portion of the electorate, which instantly identifies them as akin to Bolshevism and unconducive to job security and quiet viewing of night baseball on TV.
Two unequal strains have been woven through American politics from the beginning. There has been patrician Jeffersonianism, largely given lip service except by patricians themselves here and there. And there has been Hamiltonianism. Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), our first Secretary of the Treasury, was an ambitious poor boy in politics, a self-appointed spokesman for plutocracy and outright corruption in politics as a way of insuring its hold. Hamilton detested the common people with more fervor than is usual among those who have emerged from among them and did more than anyone else at the inception to give American economic affairs and much of political affairs their gamey flavor.
Slain in a duel with Aaron Burr, Hamilton fittingly lies buried in Trinity Churchyard at the head of Wall Street.
As far as ascendant trends are concerned, in the United States one openly talks John Locke and Thomas Jefferson but surreptitiously acts Alexander Hamilton.
A Plan for Improvement
It is not the duty of the critic to suggest ways of improving a bad show. After he has pronounced upon it his job is finished. A wide public, however, thinks otherwise and believes it stymies a critic when it says: "How would you improve the script? " The presumption is that this would be difficult or impossible to do.
Many cut-rate sages on the political fringes adopt this attitude and say: "Democracy [meaning the present system] may be imperfect but it is the best system possible. "
Denying this completely, I shall here, for the benefit of skeptical cogitators, sketch in a few strokes significant improvements that could easily be wrought in the American system, although such improvements would by no means produce everlasting salvation.
It cannot be denied that the best government would be that which was run by the most qualified men. As we see in the case of the medical profession, the. greatest proportion of qualified men is produced by rigorous attention to their education and training. Standards are imposed which prospective doctors must meet--in the medical schools, in post-school training and in state licensing examinations. Nevertheless, some bad hats slip through event in the strictest jurisdictions, and some degenerate into bad hats, which cannot readily be guarded against.
If a set of proper educational standards for officeholders were adopted, those who met them could be assigned to a public panel from which all candidates of any party would have to be chosen. In reply to nitwit sages who will say that this bars poor boys, the instruments of major corruption in politics, my reply is: Poor boys unable to afford schooling might qualify merely by passing the examinations given to the schooled. 87
Just as one would not think of licensing a man as a surgeon on his plea that he was too poor to afford medical school, so one would not in a well-ordered polity think of licensing a poorly schooled office-seeker.
Under the scheme I here propose bad hats would slip through but their number would be so significantly reduced that they would have a hard time finding enough fellow- travelers to caucus.
Again, no matter how strict the qualifications were, they would by no means intercept all inept politicians. While I can readily devise qualifications that would block out a Harding, a Coolidge, an Eisenhower, a Johnson and a horde in Congress, I do not, unfortunately, see any way of devising qualifications that would block out a Wilson or Hoover without at the same time blocking out some very good men.
In the matter of qualifications, law-school training would, as I view the prospect, count for very little but first-class degrees from first-class schools (the emphasis being on first-class) in social studies, humanities and general thought processes would be essential.
In the matter of improvement, attention should also be paid to those who select officeholders, those who vote. Improvement beyond the present level could here be attained by a simple scheme of weighted voting. Every citizen would have one vote, as at present. Those who finished grade school would have two votes, high school four votes and college sixteen votes. As the educated population is not evenly spread through all voting districts I would take the national average and re-weight the voting strengths in each election district so as to conform to the national average, distributing the voting
power pro rata. Those who did not have the formal schooling might be admitted to higher voting brackets by passing the same examinations passed by the schooled.
An ancillary good effect of this scheme would be to enhance the status of learning in the populace by equating it with political power. Any two-vote citizen could readily convert himself into a four-vote citizen simply by meeting high school requirements through self-study or part-time attendance at any of the many schools. The four-vote citizen could similarly convert himself into a sixteen-voter.
The more sophisticated the voter the more able would he be to decide on candidates on the already thoroughly screened panel.
I would extend the scheme to jurors, who would be full-time professionals, publicly salaried, of specially educated men sitting on public panels. Six-man juries, judges of the facts in every case, could probably do the job. Barred would be the present catch-as- catch-can juries of the witless who return too many dubious verdicts. The trained jurors, all skilled in evaluating evidence under the law, would provide a reservoir of future aspirants to elective office.
Such a scheme would not eliminate interest biases and class biases from voting, but it would soften them and would tend to eliminate much of the present chicanery and gullibility from politics.
Let not any reader suppose that I believe these extremely excellent ideas, for which I obviously deserve a high decoration and an ample public pension, will be seized upon and put into effect by the powers-that-be, who have other fish to fry. I simply set these notions down to make it evident that the present system does not contain the ultimate in entirely workable and sensible political ideas. And, who knows, in some happier day they may bear fruit for the Republic.
Only those who would deny that the ascertainably most qualified persons should run the government and should have greater weight in selecting government personnel can rationally oppose this plan, which can be put into force without any great disturbance to fundamental institutions.
Thirteen
THE CLEVERNESS OF THE RICH
There is a lush literature, much of it monographic, on the creation of the modern worlds large fortunes--most of them originated in and still concentrated in the United States, the self-advertised paradise of the common man. Almost always writers flatly claim or imply that the schemes of fortune-builders, legal or illegal, were extraordinarily clever, infinitely complicated and without supplemental support.
Actually, scrutiny of the way any very large fortune was put together shows that the method was simple, often but not invariably at least partly illegal, usually secret and sooner or later supplemented with the direct or indirect aid of sovereignty or its agents. One can show the creation of singularly few very large fortunes that was not aided by
the stealthy support or benign tolerance of government agents. A preponderance of politicians, like flies around garbage, is always on the side where the money is.
Whatever cleverness was shown invariably lay in the transparent simplicity of the scheme. In the case of no known large fortune was there a complex scheme. Apart from three exceptions by type every large fortune is the consequence of a simple formative pattern, pursued in most cases in secrecy, in all cases with pertinacity and with the direct or indirect aid of sovereign power or its agents.
The three typical exceptions to the rule of secrecy are: Where the scheme involved a patent, land title or franchise that effectively kept other grabbers off the known valuable terrain. There is also the special case of a lawful operation that got such a head start out of gusher earnings others found it difficult or impossible to raise the capital to overtake it.
As to patents, themselves often covering complex processes, in virtually all instances the operative patent holders were not the inventors. The MelIons, for example, did not invent the aluminum extraction process although they took the lion's share for financing its beginnings with bank money, "other people's money"--a true case of "nothing down. "
It is noticeable that whenever anyone puts into play a good commercial idea others (such is the widely distributed appetite for easy lucre) instantly copy it. Competitive copying is especially noticeable in the spheres of fashion and novelties although it extends to designs and innovations in almost everything. The person who first develops the idea does not derive full profit from its exploitation owing to the rapid appearance of panting interlopers. He is thus prevented from making a full killing but in theory a wide and infinitely deserving public is catered to at constantly lower prices by many avaricious sellers.
On the other hand, the man especially protected by the umbrella of sovereignty or its agents and who has a franchise, effective possession of a basic patent, or is working a good thing in secrecy with respect to potential competitors and the public, need not fear being forced to share with others. In the presence of fully established competition no one can build a fortune; competition divides the market, diminishes the share of each operator, impedes or prevents fortune-building.
But can this be true? the careful reader will ask. Is it not a fact that fortunes are being openly made or monumentally added to all around us today by giant competitive corporations, without benefit of special franchises as in public utilities, of effectively held patents or of operating secrecy?
The prime money-making factor for nearly all existing large corporations and many smaller ones--not merely legal monopolies like AT&T--is that they are parts of discreet monopolies. They only pretend to be competing. If they had to compete, they would be little better off than a fashion designer whose work is infringed overnight.
There is no need venturing to show here that the large corporations are monopolistic units within each industry. The job has been done many times. The reader is referred to a long line of analytic literature, much of it monographic and scholarly and dealing with specific monopoly situations, many formally adjudicated as monopolies under the laws and others not so adjudicated either because the purposely imperfect law does not prohibit their monopoly practices or has not been brought to bear owing to lack of zeal in law-enforcement officials. 1
Earlier the illegal monopoly conspiracies in the electrical and steel industries were touched upon, each formally and solemnly adjudicated as such under the Great Seal of the United States in federal court. Until the time of exposure (an unfortunate occurrence to all corporate right-thinkers) such frequent conspiracies are secret--meeting one of the
prime requirements of fortune-building here laid down. Analogous conspiracies seem to exist at all times in all American industries, although the facts are hard to produce. In Europe such cartel practices are legal, a triumph for candor if not for distributive justice.
The Rockefeller Story
As complicated a money-making scheme as any that led to a large fortune (and it was essentially a simple scheme) was that devised by John D. Rockefeller, the proverbial poor boy who became very rich almost overnight. As the high-pressure methods he diligently employed have been copiously recorded, there is no need to review them in detail. The methods were secret and conspiratorial at every step of the way--so much so that it took nearly forty years to bring even the earliest steps to light. Standard Oil was in its long formative period one of the world's biggest clandestine operations. And always there was assistance from the agents of sovereignty; for Standard Oil infiltrated its well-rewarded henchmen into strategic nooks and crannies of the political system as well as into the ranks of its competitors. It developed one of the earliest systems of industrial espionage, hardly gentlemanly.
Rockefeller's advantage, which he used to beat down thousands of producers and to force hundreds of rival refiners into his hands, was the consistently lower freight rates he obtained from railroads and pipelines as a large buyer of crude oil and shipper of refined oil. The railroad rebates and drawbacks, secretly granted by common carriers which under law were required to give everyone the same rates, were only one aspect of illegality that saturated Standard Oil up to the final paper dissolution by Supreme Court decision in 1911. But Rockefeller kept his holdings; and the constituent parts of the one- time trust remained intact, loosely united by stockholdings in foundations, trust funds and the hands of family members and partners. By his ability to control transportation rates unfairly with the connivance of railroads fighting each other for huge shipments, Rockefeller could force down the price of crude oil to him at the well-head and could undersell refineries outside his combination until they sold out to him at sacrificial prices or went under. By this process he became what Establishment writers joyously salute as an industrial statesman.
Rockefeller, after a sketchy education and a brief apprenticeship as a bookkeeper, started in business for himself in 1859 at the age of twenty. By the early 1880's, slightly more than ten years after the Standard Oil Company of Ohio was founded to succeed the firm of Rockefeller, Andrews and Flagler, the company's portion of the national oil business, crude and refined, was rated at 85 per cent and the fledgling company was already extending its spiderweb into California and Texas. As early as 1883 the company took the output of 20,000 wells, held 4,000 miles of pipeline, used 5,000 tank cars and employed 100,000 people. 2 It was already an obvious monopoly, alluded to as such on the floor of Congress.
Apart from some new capital early brought into the coercive combination by investors such as whisky-distiller H. V. Harkness, most of the money for the expansion came from especially favorable secret transportation rates. These were always Rockefeller's hidden ace, his major source of growing capital. 3
With variations of detail one will find a similar pattern of secrecy in the building of virtually every large fortune.
Why the Fortune-Builders Succeeded
The builders of the large fortunes succeeded, then, because the crucial part of their operations was kept secret. When attempts were made to uncover the inelegant facts, they were blocked by Horatio Alger officials under the purchased control or influence of the fortune-builders.
This last was true, for example, of the Standard Oil Company as of others. From a very early stage its partisans bloomed miraculously in the Ohio legislature and executive branch and in the Congress and the national executive branch. These "representatives of the people" at every turn nipped one attempt after the other at investigation, despite widespread indignation in Congress and among the then free- entrepreneurial newspapers. 4
The question widely asked was: If there is nothing wrong, why will not the friends of Standard Oil permit an investigation?
When effective investigation finally took place, despite herculean opposition and proclaimed attempts to bribe officials such as the attorney generals of Ohio, there was indeed found much reason for concealment. In his annual report to the governor of Ohio in 1899, Attorney General F. S. Monnett detailed charges of six attempts to bribe his predecessor, David K.
Watson, to withdraw a suit filed in 1890 against the Standard Oil Company of Ohio for participating illegally in the Standard Oil Trust. 5 Mr. Monnett also charged in court that he had been offered a bribe of $400,000 to quash a later suit to enforce the court decision in the first. 6 This and other suits brought by Monnett were abruptly quashed as soon as a successor took office in January, 1900, but not before enough information about the secret operations of Standard Oil had been developed to prepare the way for later federal dissolution suits. 7
"It was a matter of constant comment in Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania that the Standard was active in all elections, and that it 'stood in' with every ambitious young politician, that rarely did an able young lawyer get into office who was not retained by the Standard. " 8 This practice promoted by Rockefeller prevails among corporations today with their coast-to-coast chains of retained political law firms. As a result, most of our legislators in Washington and the state capitals are bluff and hearty corporation men, yet they speak in public in common accents, as though they were human.
It is evident, then, that although some elected officials perform their duties as required by law and the expectancies of constituents, a majority do not. For proof, turn to the tax laws. This prospect brings into range for consideration those who elect officials, the people themselves.
That the public in general through the shallow criteria it brings to bear in selecting its wayward officials makes possible the ostensible cleverness of the rich is, as far as I know, a thesis never before explicitly laid down and forthrightly argued. As we are interested in ascertaining how the lopsided distribution of the world's goods came about in so short a time in the United States and why it is likely to continue for the indefinite future, this phase is germane. For without a public and a system constituted in a certain way it would be impossible for anyone, clever though he might be, to become extremely rich in the ways that have been practiced.
Favorable Circumstances
Nobody, first of all, would be rich if he had not been favored by circumstances. Favoring general circumstances in the United States have been a naturally rich virgin continent, an enlarging widely skilled population, a basic law designed to facilitate private property under earlier purely agrarian-mercantile circumstances, an expanding machine technology that took multiplied advantage of agrarian-mercantile law and a plethora of purchasable officials.
Had Henry Ford been a Swiss, operating under Swiss law, he could never, no matter how shrewd, have developed the Ford Motor Company. Had Rockefeller been a citizen of England, France, Russia, Germany or China, functioning in any of those countries, he
could never, by whatever hook, crook or cleverness, have developed the Standard Oil Company.
If one nevertheless insists that the fortune-builders were unusually clever men, entitled to their fortunes as a reward for performing vast economic services--and this is the line apologists do take--one cannot go on to argue equal cleverness in their heirs. For the performance of what service, for the display of what cleverness, do they hold their enormous riches and transcendent power? Does their cleverness consist of their pre-selection of ancestors?
In the case of either the originators or the inheritors the fortune was hardly derived by conspicuous cleverness but a set of fortuitous circumstances, one element of which (still bearing particularly on inheritance) was a body of pre-existing law reasonably designed to fit more modest cases, not designed to apply to huge international estates enjoying the application of machine technology in mass production. In the United States it is now common for heirs (sometimes quite stupid) to come into estates, largely untaxed, that make the inherited dukedoms decried by eighteenth-century republicans and democrats seem microscopic. No grand duchy ever came near the proportions of many American corporations and banks. The United States is the most exaggerated case of plutocracy in all history, eclipsing all others combined.
The Demon of Demos
A big factor in modern fortune-building, however, was unquestionably the state of popular opinion and understanding. This opinion has never been more than occasionally, in fits of temper, opposed to fortune-building. The common if languid supposition seems to be that everyone may have his fair chance in this inspiring game. As every clean-living, clear-eyed, pure-souled American boy may look forward to being at least president, so every American virgin may marry a millionaire. Those boys who fail to achieve the presidency may quite easily (one gathers in reading the Wall Street Journal, Time and Fortune) as consolation prizes become millionaires or marry an heiress. The films play about a good deal with this popular fantasy of heir-pauper marriage, blissfully passing over the fact that if every nubile scion of wealth each year married someone on the relief rolls there would be hardly more than a hundred such marriages a year. To look for the sociologists' precious Upward Social Mobility by this route is veritably to chase dancing moonbeams.
To understand fully how fortunes came to grow so profusely in the United States to grotesque, diseased dimensions and how they are so readily maintained in full panoply amid outlandish cries that they are being whittled away by taxation, one must give some attention to the general populace.
Referring to this populace, the profoundly experienced P. T. Barnum said: "A sucker is born every minute. " 9
The late H. L. Mencken referred to the common citizen as a boob and to the collectivity of common citizens, what sociologists now drably refer to as "the mass," as the booboisie, a thesis he tirelessly embellished with copious examples in voluminous brilliant writings over several decades. Mencken never tired of pointing to the obvious chicaneries and obscenities in the spectrum of phenomena which disoriented professors and clear-eyed politicians call democracy.
Expressing the purely operational as distinct from the formal attitude of American society, Texas Guinan, joyously echoed by W. C. Fields, whooped: "Never give a sucker an even break. " 10
There was hardly any need to give utterance to this thoughtful homily, which appears to have been ventured in gleeful satire at contemplation of the absurd American scene.
It would be advisable here, or so I suppose, to avoid such epithets born of anguished subjectivity and find some other meaningful term for the masses with reference to their inadequacies of judgment. I propose, therefore, that they be regarded, in varying degrees, as handicapped, crippled, unable to make sound judgments and decisions in their own self-interest. They live blindly in a system that offers wide although not unlimited free choice and they are unable to choose wisely. They are victims of their own choices. Nobody protects them from themselves!
What qualifies most of the mass for being regarded sympathetically as handicapped people, mental cripples, rather than astringently as willful suckers and boobs is their seemingly inherent infantile gullibility. The masses are handicapped in that they are ready believers in tales and promises of nimbler wits, prone to give credence to the improbable or very doubtful. They believe that some obvious charlatan--a preacher, a politician, a vendor of cheap merchandise--is going to do something very good for them, at only a slight fee or absolutely free. At their most extreme these people are the followers of astrologers, spiritualists, religious dervishes and messiahs of all kinds, very often political messiahs. They believe, for example, that installment selling is something contrived for their special advantage, rarely suspecting that it is elevating already high prices of shoddy goods by 14 to 30 per cent. "Nothing down"--and they buy happily. Furthermore, they tend strongly to resist whatever is objectively the case if it does not harmonize with their delusions. Tell most of them today that Lyndon B. Johnson, or anyone else, has no more serious intention of establishing the Great Society than he has of becoming sheriff of Buncombe County and they will want to report their veracious informant to J. Edgar Hoover as seditious, possibly a full-fledged heterosexual and viviparous.
Gullibility and muddle-headedness are functions of insufficient intelligence. The intelligent person is prone to make significant distinctions, to analyze, compare, reflect and seek out difficulties in proffered propositions whether flattering or promising to himself or not. Skeptical self-analysis is beyond the powers of the gullible because they already feel insecure, must (as they say) "believe in something" if only in believing. Intimations of any lack in their judgment are resisted. Hence it follows that they believe whatever ethnic, religious or national group to which they belong is inherently superlative. "If I belong it must be good; hence, I'm proud to be a Ruritanian. " Having little sense of individual identity, they derive their identity from some extensive tribe-- hence White Supremacy, Black Power, etc.
Sagging IQs
While all men may have been created equal, whatever that means, what strikes the most casual observer is their disparity of age, circumstance, capability and condition. And, considering people in general with respect to their judgmental powers, what is most unequal about them is their intelligence,
During World War II the government administered what was known as the General Education Test to nearly ten million men. A score of 100 represented the average. Approximately 50 per cent of all who took the test scored from 86 to 114; 25 per cent were below 86; and 25 per cent above 114. The method of grading was based on earlier inquiries of psychologists into the national distribution of intelligence. Of college graduates who took this test more than 81 per cent scored 115 or higher so that by present standards four out of five persons completing college have the ability suggested by the test score of 115 or higher. An IQ of 110 is the minimum required for admission to standard colleges and universities today, excluding at a stroke 75 per cent. Colleges, however, do not get all the high IQs.
Testing for IQ, although regularly done by government, universities and corporations in selecting personnel and admitting students, is a scientific practice as widely resisted today, and roundly condemned, as was the assertion by Copernicus and Galileo in the sixteenth century that the earth was spherical and revolved about the sun. IQ testing yields information generally unwanted because, among other things, it strikes at the basis of the democratic dogma: the doctrine of equality and the alleged ability of people to act with equal skill in their own interest.
Resistance to accepting the idea of an IQ is reinforced by its frequent presentation as something honorific, like having blue blood in the old days. Yet a person of lower IQ will often outachieve one of higher IQ who may, owing to adverse emotional factors, amount to nothing. However, everything else being equal (which it rarely is) the higher IQ will have the edge, and the very low IQs will never get into the running. Nonetheless at most levels IQs can be raised at least a few points--sometimes many points.
Although widely assailed by radicals as well as democrats as revealing nothing inherent (a doubtful contention) but only skills acquired in a certain cultural milieu, the methods of psychological testing are expertly defended by specialists. Children in the same family, subject to identical cultural influences although to different kinds of stress in the family constellation, often show wide variations in IQ. Cultural deficiency, therefore, although it often plays some role, cannot be designated the sole cause of low ratings. There is more than training in a Heifetz or Einstein. Tests have been devised, as a matter of fact, that bypass cultural influences in testing. They show no uniformity in intelligence. 11
It is this utterly pathetic low state of IQness in much of the population that points up the observation made some forty years ago by an acute political observer that "Actually the great bulk of the 119,000,000 [citizens] are thoroughly muddy-minded about politics, swayed by feeling rather than reason, really incapable of clear-headed thought or understanding. " 12
Open elections, where they take place, are quite correctly cited as one of the hallmarks of a democratic system. But, considering the confused mentality of the mass, the two- party or multi-party electoral system is much like a formally fair duel between a man stricken with palsy (the general public) and a dead-shot duelist (the professional politician) or a chess match between a tyro and a master. Only one outcome is possible: the way of the politician.
What is the case, then, is that a largely incapable public exercises its judgment in validating the selection of its legislators and officials, with the melancholy results for that same public shown by the history of popular elections since before the Civil War. Voting behavior has been extensively studied. Although many new details have since been brought to light in various studies, nothing essential has been changed since Frank R. Kent made the foregoing observation in 1928.
Where the Public Goes Wrong
Where the voting public goes wrong is in whom it accepts in each jurisdiction as plausible candidates--not men of proven knowledge, ability and purpose but men who appeal to various unexamined prejudices: ethnic, religious, national-origin, occupational, aesthetic, regional, personal and the like. As Plato brought out in his dialogue Gorgias the politician uses rhetoric to flatter and seduce his public and to carry the decision even against the man of knowledge and sound judgment. People in general, it seems, are far more responsive to blandishment than to reason. They love obvious charlatans.
Although bemusingly capable men are by chance indeed elected occasionally, thereby serving as justification and embellishment for the system, in most cases the public elects flexible men who are prepared to betray it at the first sign of personal profit. Such officials have no more sympathy with the public, itself callous, than have Soviet commissars, possibly less. Each set, Soviet or U. S. -type democratic, is cut out of the same bolt, concerned only with advancing their own small-bore careers.
The electoral system, then, is the setting for a cat-and-mouse game between the greater part of the demoralized public and the professional politician, who knows what he wants for himself and usually gets it. One of the many outcomes of it all is seen in the tax laws. Here, of course, we find that the rich have indeed managed rather cleverly.
There has never been an even approximate correlation of level of IQ with voting statistics, but studies in the sociology of political participation show clearly that it is the socially lower and less skilled classes who most abstain from electoral voting. The largest voting turnouts in Europe and the United States are among higher income receivers--the more educated, businessmen, white-collar workers, government employees, commercial-crop farmers, miners, whites, people over age thirty-five, men, industrial workers in western Europe, older residents, married people and members of organizations. Lower voting turnouts are consistently seen among low-income receivers--unskilled workers, servants, service workers, peasants, subsistence farmers, Negroes (often barred), women, persons under age thirty-five, newer residents, industrial workers in the United States, unmarried people and isolated individuals. Voting in general tends to rise in crisis situations, and then the otherwise quiescent lower orders tend to vote more heavily but from authoritarian and anti-democratic points of view. 13 In crisis, extremism and strongarm tactics become de rigeur, appealing especially to the lowly, no doubt satisfying feelings of frustrated hostility.
Self-Defeat: The Lot of the Common Man
Just how and why the common man in the United States gets spun off the merry-go- round as he does is most precisely shown by systematic stages.
When it comes to voting the choice narrows down to two almost indistinguishable men. In Russia there is ludicrously only one man to vote for; but it is hardly more absurd than voting for almost identical political twins like Johnson and Goldwater. Both systems are equally absurd.
Before an election the choice of candidates has already been made and almost always either one of two men is going to win although both may be absolutely undesirable--as undesirable, indeed, as a Russian might find a candidate on his single slate.
The crucially important political phase, then, as Frank R. Kent has pinpointed it, is when the candidates are selected. All the sociological analysis of partisan and class voting after this stage, as far as the American two party system is concerned, is politically quite beside the point. The fundamental line has been pre-determined.
In almost all cases in the United States candidates are selected in primaries or by conventions of delegates themselves elected in primaries. Except in the South the choice of candidates--whether by primaries, caucuses or conventions--is determined wholly by political leaders, bosses, owing to the voluntary abstention of the public from serious political activity.
In Russia the bosses will not allow anyone else to present candidates. In the United States anybody may present candidates but usually fails to do so. Political bosses in the United States come into being by reason either of the political default of the people or of circumstances such as specialized nonpolitical occupation that keeps people from broad political activity. Politics, democratic or otherwise, is intrinsically a specialty.
Because in the South there is broader public participation in the primaries, although not very broad, in this respect the South seems more alert politically. But the candidates in the southern primaries usually differ from each other only in contending that each would be more diligent in repressing Negroes. The South, then, has been not only one- party but, stupidly, one-issue.
Where conventions determine the candidate, the bosses obviously have the determining role. But in the primaries, too, they determine the outcome because the broad public virtually boycotts the process. The participants are almost entirely political jobholders or patronage beneficiaries, informally compelled to vote and to vote in ways that enable them to hold their benefices. If it were not for this compulsory voting by beneficiaries, primaries could not be held in most cases.
It is the primaries that give the major parties their legal status. This is because the law of most states stipulates, with no broad dissent, that parties shall hold primaries participated in by party voters for nominating party candidates and officers. The only other way a candidate can get on the ballot is by petition, signed by a certain number of voters, and such a candidate does not run under a party label and has no established organization working for him.
"There could not be a greater mistake" than abstention from primaries, says the able Kent. It is this public abstention that gives the political machine its chance to control the situation, which it does through the precinct executives. "It actually permits the machine to run the country. " Here is the veritable foundation for the various legislative Establishments and for legislation biased in favor of the propertied. It rests on pervasive popular ineptitude.
As there is no other effective way for candidates to get on the ballot, the primary is the political key that unlocks all doors.
"It ought to be plain, then," says Kent, "that so long as the machine controls the primaries, it is in a position to limit the choice of the voters in the general election to its choice in the primaries. That is the real secret of its power, and, so long as it holds that power, it cannot be put out of business. Defeating its candidates in the general election not only does not break its grip, it often does not make even a dent in it. The only place a machine can be beaten is in the primaries. "
As for the candidate who gets on the ballot by petition, "Nothing short of a political tidal wave or revolution can carry an independent candidate to success," Kent points out. "He may pull sufficient votes from one side or the other to bring about the defeat of one of the regular party nominees, but his own election is a thing so rare as to be almost negligible. "
To the established party the primary, which validates it legally, is far more important than the election, which alone seems important to the public. Even if it loses the election, the party organization remains intact owing to patronage--federal, state, county and (over the long term) judicial--gained in past elections. The party organization can, indeed, survive many election defeats. Remaining organized, it is always a threat and draws some deferential attention from the ascendant party which, in fact, helps it out from time to time with "nonpolitical" and "bi-partisan" appointments. The legal parties have much in common, notably their tender joint concern and realistically proper solicitude for their angels, the propertied classes. There are many informal party intermediaries.
The Republican Party long survived in the Deep South despite endless election defeats, owing to its nourishment by federal patronage. Although it held primaries, where federal jobholders voted, it never won state elections or sent members to
Congress. The party delegates, however, often played a determining role in the choice of presidential and vice presidential candidates at Republican national conventions. They had something to sell--their organizational votes.
Although the party organization can survive a long series of election defeats, it could hardly survive a defeat in the primaries and could absolutely not survive two primary defeats. If twice defeated it would be clear that it had been outwitted by rival organizers or an intelligent public to whom recipients of party patronage would turn for protection. Organizers able to outwit an entrenched machine are men obviously more capable of outwitting the opposing party in the coming election.
Sometimes factions contend in primaries--the Old Guard, Reformers and independents. Each puts up a slate, for public office and party office. Each is committed to high-flown party principles, and contends that it can best implement those principles and achieve electoral success. On such a question the general voter in effect has the difficult job of a personnel manager for a large corporation. He must know principles and policy and he must pick out the electorally most plausible man. This, obviously, is usually hard to do. Information is lacking--all the men seem superficially good. If one seems better in some ways the others seem better in other ways. Whose side are they really on? What to do? Here the average voter, who isn't versed anyhow in the ins and outs of the situation, throws up his hands. The primary and its ends baffle him and he stays away. Yet here is the very heart of the electoral process and from now on nature takes its course.
Generally the Old Guard wins owing to its control of patronage. If enough patronage holders are discontented, owing to what the Reformers call poor leadership, they may vote with the Reformers or Independents. In this case party leadership changes, perhaps party policy. What change, actually, has been wrought? Usually it is nothing of broad importance--perhaps only a change from Anglo-Saxon to Irish candidates, from Irish to Italian, from Italian to Puerto Rican. In a changing electoral district the new candidates have more "political sex appeal," are more likely to entice more boobish voters.
An important feature of party primaries often is that they not only nominate party candidates but also party officials: county and state committeemen who elect chairmen. The party chairmen may or may not hold public office, but they are the main part of the continuing party machinery. They are, legally, the party, and they participate in party decisions, convey party views to officeholders. They are men who have immediate access to executive officials, legislators and judges. What they have to say is always very, very important, not to be lightly disregarded.
As Kent points out, by not participating in the primaries the general voter loses at least 50 per cent of the effectiveness of his franchise. He thereby assumes his actual political status--a second-class citizen. As few participate in primaries it may seem, by this token, that virtually everybody is a second-class citizen. But this is not so, for there are those, nonvoters in primaries, who recapture the first-class citizenship at a later stage by contributing to political campaign funds. They "buy in. " They are politically first class. They are rich people in a plutocracy.
Nobody has chased the common man away from the primaries. He just does not feel up to participating. His democratic franchise here he finds just too much to handle. He does not, in fact, have anything to contribute; he is politically empty. As a result, the party apparatus and candidates on both tickets belong to professionals, often men never heard of in the community, usually men of limited outlook. They function behind the scenes. They have the party power. They are American versions of Gromyko, Kosygin, Brezhnev et al. 14
The party managers must find men ready, able and willing to campaign and at the same time men who will be acceptable to a broad, culturally differentiated, intellectually and emotionally low-grade public--Mencken's boobs, Barnum's suckers, Kipling's "muddied oafs. " The party managers are, contrary to common supposition, restricted to a very narrow potential group, with characteristics shared by less than 5 per cent of the population.