Through the
memberships
of The Links and the Knickerbocker Club one could obviously obtain instant entree to any financial-political circle in the world.
Lundberg - The-Rich-and-the-Super-Rich-by-Ferdinand-Lundberg
The grandsons belong to the cream--variously The Links, Knickerbocker, the Metropolitan of Washington and others.
None lists the Union League.
The original Rockefeller was not only in bad odor with radicals, populists and liberals but, it may come as strange to some readers, he was looked upon askance in the old- established elite. Says Cleveland Amory, "Only a generation ago, for example, Mrs. David Lion Gardiner, dowager empress of New York's proud Gardiner Family, was informed that her young grandson, Robert David Lion Gardiner, was about to go out and play with the Rockefeller children. Mrs. Gardiner forbade it. 'No Gardiner will ever play,' she said, 'with the grandchild of a gangster. '" And De Golyer, dean of oilmen, told Amory he could never decide "whether John D. Rockefeller was the greatest oil man who ever lived, or a goddam lying pirate who made a monkey out of the whole capitalistic svstem. " 10
Nelson Rockefeller is looked upon today as the savior of the Knickerbocker Club, which in 1954 was nearly submerged into the Union Club out of which it had sprung. A few leading members agreed to accept ten cents on the dollar for its bonded
indebtedness and Rockefeller bought the premises and permitted the club to occupy them rent-free for ten years and then rent-free for ten more years if he was still alive. 11 It seems fair to conclude that the Rockefellers have an interest, perhaps only sentimental, in keeping this distinctive club extant.
It should not be thought that the top clubs are purely sociable haunts where the rich idle away the time, although such is the impression conveyed by Amory, Wecter and the long line of cartoonists and satirists who have shown elderly members snoozing over newspapers in the windows and who have derisively quoted club nincompoops. The clubs, one may be sure, enjoy being mildly derided as centers of futility and senile naivete. As they say in spydom, this gives their serious members a good "cover" for serious purposes.
Nor should it be thought that the big tycoons are in constant attendance. The membership of even the biggest clubs is obviously layered or hierarchical, and consists of inner coteries according to specific serious and frivolous interests. There are, of course, always some amiable hangers-on and some retired from active life, and these provide something of a background Greek chorus or mob scene for the members with weightier concerns on their minds.
The clubs, in point of fact, have underlying deeply serious systemic functions behind their facades, as follows:
1. Their membership hierarchies from the leading to the minor clubs show in general who is A. O. K. by degrees in what is now variously referred to as the national power structure, the Establishment (in imitation of English jargon), the power elite (after Mills) and so on. Newer designations for the phenomena will no doubt turn up and, as the reader will recall, I seem to find the situation best summarized in the term finpolity. If one wants to know who really matters behind the scenes of national affairs, in the order that they matter, one can hardly do better than to line up the memberships of the New York clubs in the order given. Now add each of the central non-New York clubs: Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington, Cleveland, etc. , in about that order. Strike out duplications as they appear.
Here one gets, with few exceptions, the entire power structure. Everybody on the list will be A. O. K. , rarely voicing anything except what John Kenneth Galbraith calls "conventional wisdom"--that is, trite and shallow commonplaces.
2. The clubs are the scene, at least in the preliminary stages, of some of the biggest deals in the capitalist world. It is not denied that such deals are also broached on golf courses, yachts and perhaps even in exclusive executive washrooms and Turkish baths; it is only asserted that a very heavy documentation could be supplied showing that some of the biggest deals, consortiums, syndicates, raids and campaigns were first proposed in one of the clubs.
3. The clubs are to the general corporate world of finpolity what the boardrooms are to individual corporations and what Congress is to the American populace. They are the places where attitudes are shaped toward proposed national policies. Once a consensus has been reached, the clubs serve to hand down a general "party-line" of finpolity to members, who carry it to the world in their various functional capacities. For with the big proprietors sit the big executives, many big (usually Republican) political figures and leading owners of the 'biggest enterprises in mass media.
In saying that a party line is handed down, I do not suggest that members must accept the verdict of an always free and informal running discussion. Some members do object to and refuse to implement conclusions in whole or in part. Nobody is formally bound by any preponderant opinion, but everybody appears to be influenced by tendencies.
How, for example, should a particular president of the United States be presented in the mass media? Should the verdict be favorable, on the fence or unfavorable? Club talk will determine something of this. And if the drift is toward accepting him as favorable or unfavorable, some member or members may interpose a cogent objection that reverses or halts some emerging conclusion. One will get the verdict, whatever it is, in one's favorite newspaper or periodical.
Of one thing all club participants may always be sure: Views are invariably expressed in the light of some propertied interest. The discussions are never cluttered with extraneous and (by definition) ridiculous considerations that might occur to single- taxers, pacifists, social reformers, social workers, socialists, communists, populists, trade unionists, anti-vivisectionists, idealists, civil libertarians, utopians, New Dealers, unconventional ideologists, uplifters or even detached on-the-target scholars. The ideological center of all the discussion is, odd though it may seem, freedom, pointed simply to freedom of these elements to preserve and expand their propertied interests.
These clubs are the most intense partisans of freedom--their freedom--in the world today. While considerable imagination and ingenuity often enter into club discussions, to judge by leaked reports from occasional defectors, one element is invariably lacking: sympathy or concern for the rabble in the outer world.
In an earlier work I pointed out that often a uniform attitude comes suddenly to be expressed in the press from coast to coast on some topic, as though a hidden politburo had come to a decision. Never a dissent, never a deviation appears, as though one were reading the Russian press. The source--or sources--of such uniformity, as in the 85 per cent press opposition to Roosevelt, is the deliberations of the tycoons and tycoonlets in their clubs.
Unlike Congress, whose members must go home now and then to get re-elected, the clubs are always in session, unimpeded by parliamentary procedures, and the members need not fear being deposed from their positions. Congressmen and presidents come and go. The club members continue until death or disability does part them from the club discussions.
Discussions through the entire hierarchy of clubs, New York and provincial, are an important part of the informal process of government in the United States--far more important, say, than the political conventions, which often merely ratify what has been antecedently decided in the clubs. For these are the places where citizens of weight, of property, lawfully assemble and freely air their views and criticize the views of their peers. These are the democratic debating grounds of the first citizens, the people with the means and instrumentalities for making their views effective in the world. There are thousands of lesser clubs and associations throughout the United States; but a difference between them and the metropolitan clubs is that the formal resolutions of the lesser clubs, as contrasted with the purely informal resolutions of the metropolitan clubs, are usually ineffective. Nothing much, if anything, happens nationally after the passage of the solemn formal resolutions.
To control or influence public policy one is better placed if one has a strong voice in the clubs than if one has a strong voice in the Senate of the United States, yet the clubs draw little attention from the sociologists or political scientists, a serious oversight.
The leading clubs, such as The Links and the Knickerbocker Club, in their yearly alphabetical directories list members living and dead. These are like roll calls of American finpolity and corp-polity, past and present. Among the dead are many extensive family groups still with living members. Included among these, of course, is the coat-of-arms and inner private-school crowd.
The Links directory for 1964 includes such significant names as Winthrop Aldrich, former chairman of the Chase National Bank; Lester Armour of Chicago; Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr. and Sr. , of San Francisco; Charles H. Bell of Minneapolis; August Belmont; George R. Brown of Houston; Nicholas F. and James C. Brady; Paul C. Cabot of Boston; Lammot du Pont Copeland of Wilmington; C. Douglas Dillon; William H. Doheny; John T. Dorrance, Jr. ; William Hincks Duke; Pierre S. du Pont III; Benson Ford; Henry Ford II; G. Peabody Gardner of Boston; Robert Goelet; Joseph P. Grace, Jr. ; Crawford H. Greenewalt of Wilmington; E. Roland Harriman; John A. Hill; W. E. Hutton; Amory Houghton, Jr. and Sr. ; B. Brewster Jennings; Robert E. McCormick; William G. McKnight, Jr. ; Paul and Richard K. Mellon of Upperville and Pittsburgh, respectively; Jeremiah Milbank; Henry S. Morgan; John M. and Spencer T. Olin of East Alton; Howard Phipps, Jr. and Sr. ; John S. Pillsbury of Minneapolis; Frank C. and William B. Rand; David, James S. , Laurance S. , Avery, Jr. , William and Winthrop Rockefeller; Charles P. Stetson; Oliver de Gray Vanderbilt III; John Hay Whitney, publisher of the now defunct New York Herald Tribune; Robert E. Wilson of Chicago, and others.
The foregoing list culls the names of a few of the big proprietors. But The Links includes among its members also top-level corporation executives, bank presidents, special-entree journalists, upper-echelon Pentagon and diplomatic figures, corporation lawyers and Republican political figures of the inner sanctum-people like Joseph W. Alsop of Washington; Owen R. Cheatham of Georgia-Pacific Plywood; General Lucius D. Clay; S. Sloan Colt of Bankers Trust; Ralph J. Cordiner, former chairman 'of General Electric (during its conspiracy conviction); Arthur H. Dean of the key law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell and numerous top-level diplomatic conferences; Thomas E. Dewey; Nelson Doubleday of the book publishing world; Lewis W. Douglas of Arizona; Frederic W. and Frederick H. Ecker of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; Dwight D. Eisenhower; the late Walter S. Gifford, former head of AT&T; Gabriel Hauge, president of Manufacturers Hanover Trust; Herbert C. Hoover; George M. Humphrey of Cleveland and the U. S. Treasury; Grayson Kirk, president of Columbia University; the late Henry R. Luce of Time-Life-Fortune; Air Force General Lauris Norstad; and, to arbitrarily end a list replete with many other gilt-edged rag-paper names, jean Monnet of Paris, architect of the European Common Market.
Financially and corporately speaking, there is little or no deadwood in the Links roster. If its membership does not exactly run the country it has much to say about its course. Here are what the Russian and Chinese press morosely refer to as "American ruling circles. "
A similar and sometimes overlapping cross-section of the upper elite is displayed by the 1965 list of the Knickerbocker Club. Here we obtain many other history-evoking names, past and current, such as Prince Amyn M. Aga Khan; Giovanni Agnelli, Italian industrialist; Winthrop W. Aldrich; John D. Archbold; Count Alessandro de Asarta Guiccioli; John Astor; Count Bertil Bernadotte of Sweden; Oliver C. Biddle; Francis H. , Henry B. , Jr. , and Powell Cabot; Lord Camoys; Rear Admiral Grayson B. Carter; Anthony Drexel Cassatt; Rear Admiral Hubert Winthrop Chanler; Charles W. Chatfield; Joseph H. Choate; Grenville Clark, Jr. ; Henry Clews; Count Charles-Louis de Cosse Brissac; William D. Crane; Seymour L. Cromwell; Lieutenant Colonel Charles C. Crossfield III (USMC); Major Robert Dickey III (USMC); C. Douglas Dillon; Colonel Joy Dow; John R. Drexel III; Henry Francis du Pont; Dwight D. Eisenhower; Thomas K. Finletter; Hamilton Fish, Jr. ; Peter O. Forrestal; Caspar C. de Gersdorff; Francis, John and Robert Goelet; George and Michael Gould; Charles B. and William Grosvenor; Ogden H. , Jr. , and William C. Hammond; Henry Upham Harris; Abram S. Hewitt; James T. , Nathaniel P. , and Patrick Hill; Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. ; R. E. K.
Hutton; Vice Admiral Stuart H. Ingersoll; Ernest and O'Donnell Iselin; Commander John Dandridge Henley Kane; Hamilton Fish Kean; Moorhead C. Kennedy, Jr. and Sr. ; Count Jean de Lagarde; Brigadier Charles L. Lindemann, DSO; Count Marc de Logeres; Townsend M. McAlpin; Charles E. Mather III; Paul Mellon; Edmund C. Monell; Ivan Obolensky; Count Ogier d'Ivry; Cecil C. Olmstead; Thomas I. Parkinson, Jr. ; George B. Post; Sir Alec Randall; David, Laurance S. and Nelson A. Rockefeller; Kermit Roosevelt; Elibu Root, Jr. ; Prince Sadduddin Aga Khan; Ellery Sedgwick, Jr. ; Jean de Sieyes; Mortimer M. Singer; Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. ; Chauncey D. Stillman; Count Anthony Szapary; Marchese Filippo Theodoli; Brigadier General Clarence P. Townsley; Count Mario di Valmarana; Harold S. and William H. Vanderbilt; F. Skiddy von Stade; Count Leonardo Vitetti; George D. Widener; William Wood Prince; Lieutenant Commander Cameron Mc. R. Winslow; Admiral Jerauld Wright; and Sophocles N. Zoullas.
This partial list, through which shine sections of Debrett and the Almanach de Gotha, also reads in part like a diplomatic and military roll call of the upper echelons. The list of deceased members is even more impressive; it reads like the index of names to a complete financial and industrial history of the United States.
Through the memberships of The Links and the Knickerbocker Club one could obviously obtain instant entree to any financial-political circle in the world. These are the very penthouses of finpolity.
Where does the harried staff of a new president of the United States look for candidates for Cabinet and other high-level posts? The membership lists of the leading clubs serve at least as aides-memoires. Not all the members, admittedly, are of sufficient personal calibre; but it is a fact that many names, previously little known to the public, have appeared on these club rosters long before they emerged in Washington and on the world scene. Interspersed with the playboys and club hangers-on are names that recognizably belong only on the upper circuits of finpolitan affairs, the fellows who in the shadow of the heavy weaponry finally get down to talking very cold turkey with De Gaulle, Gromyko, Nasser, the oil sheiks, Chou En Lai, Erhard, and Ho Chi Mihn about who takes over what lush terrain and who gets the dirty end of the international stick (which one fears is pretty much the general myth-befuddled populace all over).
The leading clubs, though, are decidedly Republican in statistical orientation. This fact does not, of course, prevent Democratic Administrations from making use of valuable members such as Douglas Dillon. Nearly everybody in high appointive office, indeed, can be traced to one of the clubs, either the high or the lesser ones.
As Amory observes, the leading freedom of the top clubs is the freedom to be anti- democratic and (self-deludedly) pro-aristocratic; in an earlier day they would have been Federalist, although now one hears in them lamentation about lost states' rights that would have astonished the Founding Fathers. 12 Truman was merely disliked by most of the New York clubmen, Amory notes, but Franklin D. Roosevelt was apoplectically feared and consequently hated. Opinion about FDR even at the relatively cosmopolitan Harvard Club was sharply divided and feelings were intense. FDR, who did more to save their rickety world than any other man, was the be^te noir of the clubmen.
Many of the upper club members look back nostalgically to the good old days under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover and do not show much enthusiasm over Eisenhower, much less over Kennedy. But as of well into 1967, the clubs were reported to feel rather enthusiastic about Lyndon B. Johnson, a big depletion-allowance man, who could, if he continues to deal his cards right, become a club member himself. After all, Eisenhower, born in Abilene, made The Links, Tap day could well come for the statesman of the
Pedernales River valley who is committed to the proposition that a bomb is mightier than any valid syllogism or statement of fact.
Decision-Making by the Elite
We have been setting the stage for an answer to the question that opened this chapter: How and in what way do the finpolitan elite act in concert, if they do act in concert?
Any elite, in order to be an elite, must possess considerable autonomy within its special jurisdiction. This is true of all elites: of lawyers, artists, scientists, entertainers, philosophers or whatever. If the conditions are correctly stated here, they must also hold for a politico-economic elite. One would hardly have an elite if it had to be bound by ordinary rules or by some hard-and-fast tradition--if it had no area of privileged action.
The freedom to improvise as it sees its own interests must belong to any elite. If it doesn't have this freedom then it is just part of the mass. Physicists and mathematicians, for example, don't submit their differences to popular polls.
The closed American politico-economic elite, like any elite, does make its own rules, and it enforces its rulings in those areas where it believes its vital interests are involved; other areas it ignores. The task, now, is to show such elite rulings, and to show that they stick even against the opposition of Congresses, Supreme Courts, presidents and popular opinion. To claim that there is a privileged class and then not to be able to show it exercising privileges would be absurd.
Returning to the higher clubs, then, it should first be noticed that they do not allow any outright or avowed Jews to become members. Jews are not specifically barred in the by-laws but the procedure for admitting new members is such that none gets in, a fact noted by close students of the clubs. 13
The term "outright Jews" is used advisedly because in certain cases Jews on the family tree, as in the case of the Belin line of Du Ponts or the Belmonts, do not apparently provide sufficient ground to bar from membership in the leading metropolitan clubs like The Links and Knickerbocker where names such as Rosenwald, Warburg, Lehman, Baruch, Schiff, Kuhn, Loeb, Gimbel, Guggenheim and the like simply do not appear even though their holders are of big-money stature and even though the grounds for claims to gentility of some, such as Baruch and Warburg, antedate those of the most ancient transplanted Bostonians. Gentility has nothing to do with it. But what all this shows is only that the Hitlerian racist definition of what constitutes a Jew is not applied. What Professor Baltzell calls "gentlemanly anti- Semitism" is not, in fact, racist or religious. It relates to property and position.
But even in the case of approved persons with Jews in the family tree, the barriers often go down slowly, as in the case of Douglas Dillon, member of The Links and the Knickerbocker Club, whose "paternal grandfather was Sam Lapowski, son of a Polish Jew and a French Catholic, who emigrated to Texas after the Civil War, adopted his mother's maiden name of Dillon, prospered as a clothing merchant in San Antonio and Abilene, and finally moved to Milwaukee, where he entered the machinery- manufacturing business. " 14
But while a very few top-ranking people with Jews on the family tree are found in the top New York clubs, there are no avowed or full-fledged Jews, whatever their qualifications, none at all such as the otherwise technically eligible Meyer Kastenbaum or corporate bigwig Sidney Weinberg of Goldman Sachs and Company, with multiple upper-level corporate directorships and yachting companion of the mighty. 15 It is Weinberg who is credited with the scheme for preserving the Ford fortune in the Ford Foundation, thereby eluding a mountain of taxes. How much more cooperative can anyone ever be?
The first of the well-known middle-level clubs in which unambiguously Jewish names are encountered is The Century, with two Warburgs as well as others. The Manhattan Club, founded in 1865, has many Jewish as well as a few local Italian and Irish names. Its roster shows that it is obviously a nonelite Democratic opposite number to the Republican Union League Club; it included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert and Irving Lehman, Alvin and Irwin Untermyer, Joseph M. Proskauer and Alfred E. Smith. But the Manhattan, like the Century, is not considered by club experts to be an upper-strata club. Clubwise, in terms of inner corporate power, it is merely so-so. This isn't where the massed armored divisions of finpolity are controlled.
Hope is expressed by some optimists that the pattern of club exclusion may be changing: "In Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Newark, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, Syracuse and other cities, prestige clubs have admitted Jews--in some cases ending nearly a century of exclusion," say two observers. "The change has begun to affect all three of the major groupings of prestige clubs in the country; the University Club, Union Club and Union League Club. In addition, new, equally distinguished clubs without discriminatory policies have been launched in Atlanta, Dallas and Denver. . . .
"In 1960, only two of the 28 University Clubs in the country had any Jews on their rolls. Two years later, the University Club of New York City . . . began to accept Jewish members. This breakthrough paved the way for similar developments elsewhere. . . . As of 1965, seven University Clubs had accepted Jews to membership, one was about to do so, and five were engaged in exploratory discussion. . . . Thus, thirteen University Clubs had dispensed or were about to dispense with the discriminatory process, in contrast to two only five years earlier.
"The Union Club in Boston has enrolled its first Jewish members, and the Union League Club in Philadelphia is taking a similar step. The latter development is truly historic; for one of the founders of the Union League Club more than a century ago was the banker Joseph Seligman, who is remembered today as the first prominent victim of social discrimination against Jews. In 1877, Seligman and his family were refused accommodations at the fashionable resort of Saratoga Springs, New York; in the years that followed, the anti-Semitic virus spread rapidly, and soon Seligman's own club instituted an exclusionary policy. " 16
While the foregoing is true of what the authors call prestige clubs it is not yet true of the five top finpolitan elite clubs nor, for that matter, of the central elite club in each of the leading cities. The Union, University and Union League constitute pretty much a national club chain, offering inter-regional club privileges mainly to intermediate people. There may, in time, be a breakthrough, so that at least some token Jews are accepted as members of the very top clubs; but even that is doubtful, for reasons we shall see.
Something to be noticed is that the anti-Semitic bias, never prior to the 1870's a feature of American life, entered with the new industrialists, themselves from the Fundamentalist grassroots, poor boys like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Frick and others who "struck it rich. "
Professor Baltzell ascribes the barring of Jews to "Protestant values" but here I think he commits the post hoc fallacy. True, the members of the clubs are almost exclusively if nominally Protestant; but they would just about all find the writings of Martin Luther, John Calvin and So? ren Kierkegaard so much gibberish, the utterances of far-out clowns. The club members of late industrial derivation, the top dogs, came from the grassroots Horatio Algers who introduced the anti-Semitic rules. In addition to being nominally Protestant they were culturally and educationally of no higher level than the nineteenth-
century immigrants from Europe whom they despised. Not only were they of poverty- stricken origins but they were all educationally distinctly en retard. It was the attenuated and confused cultural values of this element, straight from the cracker barrel, that were applied. To trace it to Protestantism, especially in view of the long European Catholic anti-Semitic tradition, seems to me off target.
Earlier American attitudes toward Jews, though tinged here and there with the European virus of anti-Semitism, were on the whole respectful, perhaps unduly so, for Jews were widely regarded as children of the Holy Book. Some Americans claimed to belong to "lost" Jewish tribes. American Protestant colleges made a point in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of offering Hebrew as well as Latin and ancient Greek as the classical languages, in part because of the mistaken belief that the original New Testament had been written in Hebrew and that Jesus spoke this language. An early American classicist had to know Hebrew as well as Greek and Latin. Jews were friends and collaborators of a number of the Protestant Founding Fathers, were received into leadership circles North and South and were associated in vital early federal affairs. The idea of treating Jews as pariahs would have been deemed aberrant.
The exclusionary treatment of Jews in American life stemmed from a decision by the new financial elite, which elbowed to one side persons of the earlier aristocratic temper. Money became king, not Protestantism. The stock ticker became the dominant symbol, not the flag or the cross.
The exclusion of Jews from the inner metropolitan clubs is also imitatively enforced in elite and nonelite country clubs and in the old-line college fraternities. Actually, the Jewish exclusion serves to confer the special cachet of distinction on such clubs, most of the members of which are tedious Babbitts. A club or fraternity that does not exclude Jews is by this token advertising itself as an undistinguished affair, which it really is on the ground that its members are almost invariably persons of no intellectual or moral distinction. That the country-club and fraternity crowd consists in large part of simple animals, not always fully housebroken, one can ascertain by reading the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O'Hara and others who specialize in doings on the country-club circuit.
Catholics, although few and far between because most important Catholic money is concentrated in the hands of the Church hierarchy and because Catholics until very recently have been something of a self-segregated caste in American society, are not barred from the metropolitan clubs and one sees Nicholas F. Brady, Consolidated Edison tycoon, for example, as a member of The Links. There are others, such as Henry Ford II, but not many. John F. Kennedy became a member of The Brook.
It is doubtful if any Negro has ever been so much as proposed for membership. It would be erroneous to say Negroes are barred. They are simply not noticed. Negroes fall under the latter-day integrationist rule: They are not discriminated against as Negroes but it so happens they are found to be unqualified because of a tragic history over which the latter-day keepers of the keys have no retroactive control. The point is only: They couldn't get accepted even if they could fly to the moon and back in a kite.
Beyond this, as far as the clubs are concerned, Negroes not only lack titles to property (as quite a few Jews do not) but no one of them seems to be within 250 years of ever having them in any significant proportions. Who would a Negro be likely to inherit from?
As large property holdings are now mainly inherited and hard even for an occasional white nonproprietor to come by, it would seem that Negroes are forever circumstantially barred from becoming considerable American property owners. This is not to deny that
some Negro, some day, may in some flukey situation run a small stake up into a big corporate nest egg and then turn out to be one of the larger swindling wheeler-dealers.
One can see two roads opening up to a very few Negroes, even though not to an entire stratum of wealthy Negroes.
One of these roads might be the entertainment or sports world, where a successful Negro might use his earned stake to become an impresario, then perhaps an owner of chain hotels, eventually the Empire State Building and perhaps a 5 per cent cut of one of the big banks.
Another road would be through politics and the participation in its many slushy inside contracts of the kind that have lifted many shadowy political figures from hamburgers to affluence. Early in 1966 a New York State investigation of large-scale housing developments in Harlem with public money indicated that a Negro political leader who had put up $2,000 stood to make $250,000, not a bad or unusual prelude to larger operations. For great family oaks from such little acorns have grown all over the American scene since the Civil Way,
But that this sort of thing is going to happen to many Negroes and that they or their increasingly light-skinned progeny are going to be taken readily into the caste-iron clubs seems improbable.
We find, then, that at least 15 per cent of the population (Jews, Puerto Ricans and Negroes) is effectively barred from the clubs on intrinsic grounds. The remainder of the population is barred on extrinsic grounds: It has neither large properties nor high functional positions.
All this, it might be argued, is perfectly reasonable. These are private clubs, and clubs may choose their own clubmates. But these are not only social clubs; they are the staging areas of national policy and of the big deals that make Harlem real-estate deals look like pennyante poker.
Some of the clubs, indeed, in court actions over tax privileges have denied pointblank that they are social clubs, have claimed that they are in fact business clubs. This is true of the ninety-year-old Merchants Club of New York, located in the old textile district and allowing no Jews to belong, and it is true of the ultra-ultra Duquesne Club of Pittsburgh. 17
As it can be shown that many of the progenitors of club members came into their money via party politics, such as through early public utility and railroad franchises, and as their members shuttle in and out of high government posts with almost metronomic regularity, and are big political campaign contributors, it must be evident, prima facie, that they are also political clubs. They are concerned with finance and with politics. They are, in brief, finpolitan, perhaps 45 per cent devoted to business, 45 per cent to politics and 10 per cent to blessed sociability.
While the inner pattern of arrangements differs from club to club, we may take a look at the redoubtable Duquesne Club to find out what they are all really about.
"It is when you go upstairs in the Duquesne that you begin to enter the substratosphere of executive power," says Osborn Elliott. "On the second floor there are no fewer than five dining rooms, including the main one; and in each of these. , day after day, the same people sit at the same tables. As you enter the main dining room, the Gulf Oil table is across the way; Gulf's chairman David Proctor sits facing the door, surrounded by his senior vice presidents. In the corner over to the right is the Koppers table, populated by most of the top men in that company, and next to it is the U. S. Steel table, where sales vice presidents break bread together. In another smaller room nearby, Pittsburgh Coke
& Chemical's president, chairman and vice presidents gather daily; in still another, Pittsburgh Plate Glass has a central spot, while Alcoa's executive committee chairman, Boy Hunt, holds forth in the corner--next to Jack Heinz's table.
"If the Duquesne's second floor feeds the captains of industry, many of the field marshals are to be found on the fourth and fifth floors, where thirty-five suites are rented out by the year (at $12,000 and up) to such companies as U. S. Steel, Gulf Oil, Jones & Laughlin, Blaw-Knox, and Alcoa, to name just a few. These attractively decorated apartments usually have a bedroom, living room and dining room; they are used by the companies' topmost brass for meetings and lunch almost very day, and for dinners perhaps two or three times a week, particularly when a visiting fireman, or rather fire chief, comes to town. . . .
"In these company suites new products and mergers are planned, bargaining strategy for labor negotiations is hammered out, multi-million-dollar financing arrangements are made. Here, and in the public dining rooms below, the professionals of production get together and exchange ideas, day by day. There is a daily exposure of people to people who are all of the same mold or forced into the same mold. This tends, no doubt, to channel their interests and energies toward the mono-purpose goal of production; and it may well be, as has been said, that Pittsburgh would not be the production marvel it is without the exchange of information, techniques and ideas that take place every noontime at the Duquesne. " 18
This continuous-performance center is obviously a caucus room and continuous seminar of finpolity. Jews, of course, and anyone without big money or high position, are barred. Baltzell relates that "Even today there is in Pittsburgh an executive at the very top level of leadership in one of the nation's major corporations who has never been taken into the Duquesne because of his Jewish origins (even though he has never been associated in any way with the city's Jewish community). But as this executive's high functional position would ordinarily demand Duquesne Club membership, other arrangements have been made. In other words, although it may seem absurd, he is allowed and encouraged to entertain important business associates in his company's private suite on the upper floor of the Duquesne. And he does this in spite of being barred from membership in the club! It may seem hard to believe that such a dehumanizing situation would be tolerated either by this talented executive of Jewish antecedents or by his gentile office colleagues who are also leaders at the Duquesne. " 19
Baltzell also tells of a high Jewish executive in Chicago who was denied the presidency of a corporation founded by Jews because he would be barred from membership on "religious" grounds from the leading club. He resigned and, a man of proper temper, refused to reconsider when the board of directors changed its mind. 20
"Many such dreams of corporate and financial empire-building have been
consummated within the halls of America's more exclusive clubs," notes Professor
Baltzell after relating how Cecil Rhodes had used his club to buy out Jewish Barney
Barnato in the De Beers diamond syndicate, "The greatest financial imperialist of them
all, J. Pierpont Morgan, belonged to no less than nineteen clubs in this country and
along Pall Mall. One of his dreams was realized on the night of December 12, 1900, in
the course of a private dinner at the University Club in New York. Carnegie's man,
Charles M. Schwab, was the guest of honor and the steel trust was planned that night. " 21
Not only are the big deals arranged in the comfortable privacy of the interlocking clubs, where nosey journalists, repelled by the claim of privacy, are not about watching the comings and goings of the sociable principals but, as already indicated, general policy governing the interlocking corporate world, as distinct from the specific policy of
each company, is there determined. Even big tycoons must eat; and they eat together in their clubs. As it happens, during the meals, arrangements are made for organizing the world after their hearts' desires.
The Corporate Rule: Gentiles Only
The club rule against Jews, not at all strangely, turns out also to be the corporate rule. Some writers deplore, directly or by implication, the nonadmittance of Jews (and Negroes) to the clubs; but even if they were admitted matters would be little different. What significant alteration of the world for the better would follow if Sidney Weinberg, Meyer Kastenbaum or Thurgood Marshall were made members of The Links or the Knickerbocker Club? Could they, even if they wanted to, change the finpolitan outlook? For the clubs make sure, in advance, that anyone taken in agrees broadly with their weltaunschauung.
If Jews were suddenly admitted to the clubs and upper corporate positions would it be a gain for liberalism? In view of Baltzell it would (and he is probably right in this) result in a strengthening of the ruling class, in making it more competent, less mindlessly castelike. It would make the ruling class more effective, would make it, as far as sheer merit is concerned, more aristocratic. But merely the selection of the best people in a certain limited scale of values is no guarantee of general aristocracy. The best gangster, although he may be an aristocrat among gangsters, can hardly be taken as an aristocrat.
Baltzell defines aristocracy as follows: "By an aristocracy I mean (1) a community of upper-class families whose members are born to positions of high prestige and assured dignity because their ancestors have been leaders (elite members) for one generation or more; (2) that these families are carriers of a set of traditional values which command authority because they represent the aspirations of both the elite and the rest of the population; and (3) that this class continue to justify its authority (a) by contributing its share of contemporary leaders and (b) by continuing to assimilate, in each generation, the families of new members of the elite. As with the elite concept, I do not conceive of the aristocracy as the 'best' or the 'fittest' in the sense of the term 'natural aristocracy' as used by Jefferson. The aristocratic process means that the upper class is open. " 22
He is not, however, making a plea for aristocratic rule but, as he stresses, "it is the central thesis of this book that no nation can long endure without both the liberal democratic and the authoritative aristocratic processes. " 23 He sees the true aristocrat as a public leader.
But aristocrats, in Jefferson's sense of the naturally best, are not produced invariably or even generally from a community of hereditary upper-class families, as Baltzell's tracing of the class origins of Abraham Lincoln shows.
"If an upper class degenerates into a caste, moreover," as Baltzell so well puts it, "the traditional authority of an establishment is in grave danger of disintegrating, while society becomes a field for careerists seeking success and affluence. " And this is the present American position.
A true aristocracy developed in the clubs (or elsewhere) might indeed change the world for the better. But merely lowering the barriers to Jews and Negroes would not accomplish this, as the clubs also bar on other caste grounds. It is the general values of the clubs more than their exclusionary policy that are most open to question.
The very caste structure of the American propertied elite--as Baltzell agrees--shows it not to be an aristocracy, shows that it is afraid of competition from natural excellence. Plato, an aristocrat, would not have barred a man from his Academy because he was a Jew but he did bar him if he did not know geometry. Nor would he have barred from
discourse a man just because he disagreed with him; he even reported for history the crucial difficulties for his beloved theory of ideas raised by Parmenides.
The nonadmittance of Jews (and Negroes) to the upper ruling clubs is cited here not to reiterate the truism that the finpols are illiberal and narrow-minded or to imply that Jews and Negroes should in the name of democracy or aristocracy be admitted to their circle. My observations, unlike those of Baltzell and others, are made only descriptively, to establish a tracer, as is done when physicians inject radioactive isotopes in order to make some determination about an organism. The nonadmittance of Jews to the central clubs enables us to make a vital determination: that decisions made in the clubs hold with rigor out in the corporate world and in society. If Jews and Negroes should now suddenly be admitted, the determination here made would still stand, for all time. It would signal only that the finpols had changed their minds: The acceptance of Jews and Negroes in the clubs and corporations would still show they had determining power. Whatever they do in this matter, pro or con, it is still their decision before history.
Jews, we may remind ourselves, are and have been members of the United States Supreme Court, the Cabinet and both houses of Congress. They have been high in the armed forces, often charged with the most vital matters of national defense, as in the case of Admiral Hyman Rickover. They have been governors of leading states such as New York and Connecticut, have been deep in the construction of delicate national policy in war and in peace. They are neither formally excluded by American public institutions nor informally excluded by the popular political process. The instrumentality of their entrance into political life has been, largely, the post-Civil War Democratic Party, and in this sense the latter-day urban Democratic Party has been more democratic (as well as more republican) than the Republican Party. Jews like Jacob Javits, Louis Lefkowitz and even Barry Goldwater in the Republican Party are distinct odd numbers.
But Jews, although very much to the fore in public life, and quite distinguished (Brandeis, Cardozo, Frankfurter, Lehman, Rickover, Baruch, Arthur J.
The original Rockefeller was not only in bad odor with radicals, populists and liberals but, it may come as strange to some readers, he was looked upon askance in the old- established elite. Says Cleveland Amory, "Only a generation ago, for example, Mrs. David Lion Gardiner, dowager empress of New York's proud Gardiner Family, was informed that her young grandson, Robert David Lion Gardiner, was about to go out and play with the Rockefeller children. Mrs. Gardiner forbade it. 'No Gardiner will ever play,' she said, 'with the grandchild of a gangster. '" And De Golyer, dean of oilmen, told Amory he could never decide "whether John D. Rockefeller was the greatest oil man who ever lived, or a goddam lying pirate who made a monkey out of the whole capitalistic svstem. " 10
Nelson Rockefeller is looked upon today as the savior of the Knickerbocker Club, which in 1954 was nearly submerged into the Union Club out of which it had sprung. A few leading members agreed to accept ten cents on the dollar for its bonded
indebtedness and Rockefeller bought the premises and permitted the club to occupy them rent-free for ten years and then rent-free for ten more years if he was still alive. 11 It seems fair to conclude that the Rockefellers have an interest, perhaps only sentimental, in keeping this distinctive club extant.
It should not be thought that the top clubs are purely sociable haunts where the rich idle away the time, although such is the impression conveyed by Amory, Wecter and the long line of cartoonists and satirists who have shown elderly members snoozing over newspapers in the windows and who have derisively quoted club nincompoops. The clubs, one may be sure, enjoy being mildly derided as centers of futility and senile naivete. As they say in spydom, this gives their serious members a good "cover" for serious purposes.
Nor should it be thought that the big tycoons are in constant attendance. The membership of even the biggest clubs is obviously layered or hierarchical, and consists of inner coteries according to specific serious and frivolous interests. There are, of course, always some amiable hangers-on and some retired from active life, and these provide something of a background Greek chorus or mob scene for the members with weightier concerns on their minds.
The clubs, in point of fact, have underlying deeply serious systemic functions behind their facades, as follows:
1. Their membership hierarchies from the leading to the minor clubs show in general who is A. O. K. by degrees in what is now variously referred to as the national power structure, the Establishment (in imitation of English jargon), the power elite (after Mills) and so on. Newer designations for the phenomena will no doubt turn up and, as the reader will recall, I seem to find the situation best summarized in the term finpolity. If one wants to know who really matters behind the scenes of national affairs, in the order that they matter, one can hardly do better than to line up the memberships of the New York clubs in the order given. Now add each of the central non-New York clubs: Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington, Cleveland, etc. , in about that order. Strike out duplications as they appear.
Here one gets, with few exceptions, the entire power structure. Everybody on the list will be A. O. K. , rarely voicing anything except what John Kenneth Galbraith calls "conventional wisdom"--that is, trite and shallow commonplaces.
2. The clubs are the scene, at least in the preliminary stages, of some of the biggest deals in the capitalist world. It is not denied that such deals are also broached on golf courses, yachts and perhaps even in exclusive executive washrooms and Turkish baths; it is only asserted that a very heavy documentation could be supplied showing that some of the biggest deals, consortiums, syndicates, raids and campaigns were first proposed in one of the clubs.
3. The clubs are to the general corporate world of finpolity what the boardrooms are to individual corporations and what Congress is to the American populace. They are the places where attitudes are shaped toward proposed national policies. Once a consensus has been reached, the clubs serve to hand down a general "party-line" of finpolity to members, who carry it to the world in their various functional capacities. For with the big proprietors sit the big executives, many big (usually Republican) political figures and leading owners of the 'biggest enterprises in mass media.
In saying that a party line is handed down, I do not suggest that members must accept the verdict of an always free and informal running discussion. Some members do object to and refuse to implement conclusions in whole or in part. Nobody is formally bound by any preponderant opinion, but everybody appears to be influenced by tendencies.
How, for example, should a particular president of the United States be presented in the mass media? Should the verdict be favorable, on the fence or unfavorable? Club talk will determine something of this. And if the drift is toward accepting him as favorable or unfavorable, some member or members may interpose a cogent objection that reverses or halts some emerging conclusion. One will get the verdict, whatever it is, in one's favorite newspaper or periodical.
Of one thing all club participants may always be sure: Views are invariably expressed in the light of some propertied interest. The discussions are never cluttered with extraneous and (by definition) ridiculous considerations that might occur to single- taxers, pacifists, social reformers, social workers, socialists, communists, populists, trade unionists, anti-vivisectionists, idealists, civil libertarians, utopians, New Dealers, unconventional ideologists, uplifters or even detached on-the-target scholars. The ideological center of all the discussion is, odd though it may seem, freedom, pointed simply to freedom of these elements to preserve and expand their propertied interests.
These clubs are the most intense partisans of freedom--their freedom--in the world today. While considerable imagination and ingenuity often enter into club discussions, to judge by leaked reports from occasional defectors, one element is invariably lacking: sympathy or concern for the rabble in the outer world.
In an earlier work I pointed out that often a uniform attitude comes suddenly to be expressed in the press from coast to coast on some topic, as though a hidden politburo had come to a decision. Never a dissent, never a deviation appears, as though one were reading the Russian press. The source--or sources--of such uniformity, as in the 85 per cent press opposition to Roosevelt, is the deliberations of the tycoons and tycoonlets in their clubs.
Unlike Congress, whose members must go home now and then to get re-elected, the clubs are always in session, unimpeded by parliamentary procedures, and the members need not fear being deposed from their positions. Congressmen and presidents come and go. The club members continue until death or disability does part them from the club discussions.
Discussions through the entire hierarchy of clubs, New York and provincial, are an important part of the informal process of government in the United States--far more important, say, than the political conventions, which often merely ratify what has been antecedently decided in the clubs. For these are the places where citizens of weight, of property, lawfully assemble and freely air their views and criticize the views of their peers. These are the democratic debating grounds of the first citizens, the people with the means and instrumentalities for making their views effective in the world. There are thousands of lesser clubs and associations throughout the United States; but a difference between them and the metropolitan clubs is that the formal resolutions of the lesser clubs, as contrasted with the purely informal resolutions of the metropolitan clubs, are usually ineffective. Nothing much, if anything, happens nationally after the passage of the solemn formal resolutions.
To control or influence public policy one is better placed if one has a strong voice in the clubs than if one has a strong voice in the Senate of the United States, yet the clubs draw little attention from the sociologists or political scientists, a serious oversight.
The leading clubs, such as The Links and the Knickerbocker Club, in their yearly alphabetical directories list members living and dead. These are like roll calls of American finpolity and corp-polity, past and present. Among the dead are many extensive family groups still with living members. Included among these, of course, is the coat-of-arms and inner private-school crowd.
The Links directory for 1964 includes such significant names as Winthrop Aldrich, former chairman of the Chase National Bank; Lester Armour of Chicago; Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr. and Sr. , of San Francisco; Charles H. Bell of Minneapolis; August Belmont; George R. Brown of Houston; Nicholas F. and James C. Brady; Paul C. Cabot of Boston; Lammot du Pont Copeland of Wilmington; C. Douglas Dillon; William H. Doheny; John T. Dorrance, Jr. ; William Hincks Duke; Pierre S. du Pont III; Benson Ford; Henry Ford II; G. Peabody Gardner of Boston; Robert Goelet; Joseph P. Grace, Jr. ; Crawford H. Greenewalt of Wilmington; E. Roland Harriman; John A. Hill; W. E. Hutton; Amory Houghton, Jr. and Sr. ; B. Brewster Jennings; Robert E. McCormick; William G. McKnight, Jr. ; Paul and Richard K. Mellon of Upperville and Pittsburgh, respectively; Jeremiah Milbank; Henry S. Morgan; John M. and Spencer T. Olin of East Alton; Howard Phipps, Jr. and Sr. ; John S. Pillsbury of Minneapolis; Frank C. and William B. Rand; David, James S. , Laurance S. , Avery, Jr. , William and Winthrop Rockefeller; Charles P. Stetson; Oliver de Gray Vanderbilt III; John Hay Whitney, publisher of the now defunct New York Herald Tribune; Robert E. Wilson of Chicago, and others.
The foregoing list culls the names of a few of the big proprietors. But The Links includes among its members also top-level corporation executives, bank presidents, special-entree journalists, upper-echelon Pentagon and diplomatic figures, corporation lawyers and Republican political figures of the inner sanctum-people like Joseph W. Alsop of Washington; Owen R. Cheatham of Georgia-Pacific Plywood; General Lucius D. Clay; S. Sloan Colt of Bankers Trust; Ralph J. Cordiner, former chairman 'of General Electric (during its conspiracy conviction); Arthur H. Dean of the key law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell and numerous top-level diplomatic conferences; Thomas E. Dewey; Nelson Doubleday of the book publishing world; Lewis W. Douglas of Arizona; Frederic W. and Frederick H. Ecker of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; Dwight D. Eisenhower; the late Walter S. Gifford, former head of AT&T; Gabriel Hauge, president of Manufacturers Hanover Trust; Herbert C. Hoover; George M. Humphrey of Cleveland and the U. S. Treasury; Grayson Kirk, president of Columbia University; the late Henry R. Luce of Time-Life-Fortune; Air Force General Lauris Norstad; and, to arbitrarily end a list replete with many other gilt-edged rag-paper names, jean Monnet of Paris, architect of the European Common Market.
Financially and corporately speaking, there is little or no deadwood in the Links roster. If its membership does not exactly run the country it has much to say about its course. Here are what the Russian and Chinese press morosely refer to as "American ruling circles. "
A similar and sometimes overlapping cross-section of the upper elite is displayed by the 1965 list of the Knickerbocker Club. Here we obtain many other history-evoking names, past and current, such as Prince Amyn M. Aga Khan; Giovanni Agnelli, Italian industrialist; Winthrop W. Aldrich; John D. Archbold; Count Alessandro de Asarta Guiccioli; John Astor; Count Bertil Bernadotte of Sweden; Oliver C. Biddle; Francis H. , Henry B. , Jr. , and Powell Cabot; Lord Camoys; Rear Admiral Grayson B. Carter; Anthony Drexel Cassatt; Rear Admiral Hubert Winthrop Chanler; Charles W. Chatfield; Joseph H. Choate; Grenville Clark, Jr. ; Henry Clews; Count Charles-Louis de Cosse Brissac; William D. Crane; Seymour L. Cromwell; Lieutenant Colonel Charles C. Crossfield III (USMC); Major Robert Dickey III (USMC); C. Douglas Dillon; Colonel Joy Dow; John R. Drexel III; Henry Francis du Pont; Dwight D. Eisenhower; Thomas K. Finletter; Hamilton Fish, Jr. ; Peter O. Forrestal; Caspar C. de Gersdorff; Francis, John and Robert Goelet; George and Michael Gould; Charles B. and William Grosvenor; Ogden H. , Jr. , and William C. Hammond; Henry Upham Harris; Abram S. Hewitt; James T. , Nathaniel P. , and Patrick Hill; Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. ; R. E. K.
Hutton; Vice Admiral Stuart H. Ingersoll; Ernest and O'Donnell Iselin; Commander John Dandridge Henley Kane; Hamilton Fish Kean; Moorhead C. Kennedy, Jr. and Sr. ; Count Jean de Lagarde; Brigadier Charles L. Lindemann, DSO; Count Marc de Logeres; Townsend M. McAlpin; Charles E. Mather III; Paul Mellon; Edmund C. Monell; Ivan Obolensky; Count Ogier d'Ivry; Cecil C. Olmstead; Thomas I. Parkinson, Jr. ; George B. Post; Sir Alec Randall; David, Laurance S. and Nelson A. Rockefeller; Kermit Roosevelt; Elibu Root, Jr. ; Prince Sadduddin Aga Khan; Ellery Sedgwick, Jr. ; Jean de Sieyes; Mortimer M. Singer; Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. ; Chauncey D. Stillman; Count Anthony Szapary; Marchese Filippo Theodoli; Brigadier General Clarence P. Townsley; Count Mario di Valmarana; Harold S. and William H. Vanderbilt; F. Skiddy von Stade; Count Leonardo Vitetti; George D. Widener; William Wood Prince; Lieutenant Commander Cameron Mc. R. Winslow; Admiral Jerauld Wright; and Sophocles N. Zoullas.
This partial list, through which shine sections of Debrett and the Almanach de Gotha, also reads in part like a diplomatic and military roll call of the upper echelons. The list of deceased members is even more impressive; it reads like the index of names to a complete financial and industrial history of the United States.
Through the memberships of The Links and the Knickerbocker Club one could obviously obtain instant entree to any financial-political circle in the world. These are the very penthouses of finpolity.
Where does the harried staff of a new president of the United States look for candidates for Cabinet and other high-level posts? The membership lists of the leading clubs serve at least as aides-memoires. Not all the members, admittedly, are of sufficient personal calibre; but it is a fact that many names, previously little known to the public, have appeared on these club rosters long before they emerged in Washington and on the world scene. Interspersed with the playboys and club hangers-on are names that recognizably belong only on the upper circuits of finpolitan affairs, the fellows who in the shadow of the heavy weaponry finally get down to talking very cold turkey with De Gaulle, Gromyko, Nasser, the oil sheiks, Chou En Lai, Erhard, and Ho Chi Mihn about who takes over what lush terrain and who gets the dirty end of the international stick (which one fears is pretty much the general myth-befuddled populace all over).
The leading clubs, though, are decidedly Republican in statistical orientation. This fact does not, of course, prevent Democratic Administrations from making use of valuable members such as Douglas Dillon. Nearly everybody in high appointive office, indeed, can be traced to one of the clubs, either the high or the lesser ones.
As Amory observes, the leading freedom of the top clubs is the freedom to be anti- democratic and (self-deludedly) pro-aristocratic; in an earlier day they would have been Federalist, although now one hears in them lamentation about lost states' rights that would have astonished the Founding Fathers. 12 Truman was merely disliked by most of the New York clubmen, Amory notes, but Franklin D. Roosevelt was apoplectically feared and consequently hated. Opinion about FDR even at the relatively cosmopolitan Harvard Club was sharply divided and feelings were intense. FDR, who did more to save their rickety world than any other man, was the be^te noir of the clubmen.
Many of the upper club members look back nostalgically to the good old days under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover and do not show much enthusiasm over Eisenhower, much less over Kennedy. But as of well into 1967, the clubs were reported to feel rather enthusiastic about Lyndon B. Johnson, a big depletion-allowance man, who could, if he continues to deal his cards right, become a club member himself. After all, Eisenhower, born in Abilene, made The Links, Tap day could well come for the statesman of the
Pedernales River valley who is committed to the proposition that a bomb is mightier than any valid syllogism or statement of fact.
Decision-Making by the Elite
We have been setting the stage for an answer to the question that opened this chapter: How and in what way do the finpolitan elite act in concert, if they do act in concert?
Any elite, in order to be an elite, must possess considerable autonomy within its special jurisdiction. This is true of all elites: of lawyers, artists, scientists, entertainers, philosophers or whatever. If the conditions are correctly stated here, they must also hold for a politico-economic elite. One would hardly have an elite if it had to be bound by ordinary rules or by some hard-and-fast tradition--if it had no area of privileged action.
The freedom to improvise as it sees its own interests must belong to any elite. If it doesn't have this freedom then it is just part of the mass. Physicists and mathematicians, for example, don't submit their differences to popular polls.
The closed American politico-economic elite, like any elite, does make its own rules, and it enforces its rulings in those areas where it believes its vital interests are involved; other areas it ignores. The task, now, is to show such elite rulings, and to show that they stick even against the opposition of Congresses, Supreme Courts, presidents and popular opinion. To claim that there is a privileged class and then not to be able to show it exercising privileges would be absurd.
Returning to the higher clubs, then, it should first be noticed that they do not allow any outright or avowed Jews to become members. Jews are not specifically barred in the by-laws but the procedure for admitting new members is such that none gets in, a fact noted by close students of the clubs. 13
The term "outright Jews" is used advisedly because in certain cases Jews on the family tree, as in the case of the Belin line of Du Ponts or the Belmonts, do not apparently provide sufficient ground to bar from membership in the leading metropolitan clubs like The Links and Knickerbocker where names such as Rosenwald, Warburg, Lehman, Baruch, Schiff, Kuhn, Loeb, Gimbel, Guggenheim and the like simply do not appear even though their holders are of big-money stature and even though the grounds for claims to gentility of some, such as Baruch and Warburg, antedate those of the most ancient transplanted Bostonians. Gentility has nothing to do with it. But what all this shows is only that the Hitlerian racist definition of what constitutes a Jew is not applied. What Professor Baltzell calls "gentlemanly anti- Semitism" is not, in fact, racist or religious. It relates to property and position.
But even in the case of approved persons with Jews in the family tree, the barriers often go down slowly, as in the case of Douglas Dillon, member of The Links and the Knickerbocker Club, whose "paternal grandfather was Sam Lapowski, son of a Polish Jew and a French Catholic, who emigrated to Texas after the Civil War, adopted his mother's maiden name of Dillon, prospered as a clothing merchant in San Antonio and Abilene, and finally moved to Milwaukee, where he entered the machinery- manufacturing business. " 14
But while a very few top-ranking people with Jews on the family tree are found in the top New York clubs, there are no avowed or full-fledged Jews, whatever their qualifications, none at all such as the otherwise technically eligible Meyer Kastenbaum or corporate bigwig Sidney Weinberg of Goldman Sachs and Company, with multiple upper-level corporate directorships and yachting companion of the mighty. 15 It is Weinberg who is credited with the scheme for preserving the Ford fortune in the Ford Foundation, thereby eluding a mountain of taxes. How much more cooperative can anyone ever be?
The first of the well-known middle-level clubs in which unambiguously Jewish names are encountered is The Century, with two Warburgs as well as others. The Manhattan Club, founded in 1865, has many Jewish as well as a few local Italian and Irish names. Its roster shows that it is obviously a nonelite Democratic opposite number to the Republican Union League Club; it included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert and Irving Lehman, Alvin and Irwin Untermyer, Joseph M. Proskauer and Alfred E. Smith. But the Manhattan, like the Century, is not considered by club experts to be an upper-strata club. Clubwise, in terms of inner corporate power, it is merely so-so. This isn't where the massed armored divisions of finpolity are controlled.
Hope is expressed by some optimists that the pattern of club exclusion may be changing: "In Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Newark, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, Syracuse and other cities, prestige clubs have admitted Jews--in some cases ending nearly a century of exclusion," say two observers. "The change has begun to affect all three of the major groupings of prestige clubs in the country; the University Club, Union Club and Union League Club. In addition, new, equally distinguished clubs without discriminatory policies have been launched in Atlanta, Dallas and Denver. . . .
"In 1960, only two of the 28 University Clubs in the country had any Jews on their rolls. Two years later, the University Club of New York City . . . began to accept Jewish members. This breakthrough paved the way for similar developments elsewhere. . . . As of 1965, seven University Clubs had accepted Jews to membership, one was about to do so, and five were engaged in exploratory discussion. . . . Thus, thirteen University Clubs had dispensed or were about to dispense with the discriminatory process, in contrast to two only five years earlier.
"The Union Club in Boston has enrolled its first Jewish members, and the Union League Club in Philadelphia is taking a similar step. The latter development is truly historic; for one of the founders of the Union League Club more than a century ago was the banker Joseph Seligman, who is remembered today as the first prominent victim of social discrimination against Jews. In 1877, Seligman and his family were refused accommodations at the fashionable resort of Saratoga Springs, New York; in the years that followed, the anti-Semitic virus spread rapidly, and soon Seligman's own club instituted an exclusionary policy. " 16
While the foregoing is true of what the authors call prestige clubs it is not yet true of the five top finpolitan elite clubs nor, for that matter, of the central elite club in each of the leading cities. The Union, University and Union League constitute pretty much a national club chain, offering inter-regional club privileges mainly to intermediate people. There may, in time, be a breakthrough, so that at least some token Jews are accepted as members of the very top clubs; but even that is doubtful, for reasons we shall see.
Something to be noticed is that the anti-Semitic bias, never prior to the 1870's a feature of American life, entered with the new industrialists, themselves from the Fundamentalist grassroots, poor boys like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Frick and others who "struck it rich. "
Professor Baltzell ascribes the barring of Jews to "Protestant values" but here I think he commits the post hoc fallacy. True, the members of the clubs are almost exclusively if nominally Protestant; but they would just about all find the writings of Martin Luther, John Calvin and So? ren Kierkegaard so much gibberish, the utterances of far-out clowns. The club members of late industrial derivation, the top dogs, came from the grassroots Horatio Algers who introduced the anti-Semitic rules. In addition to being nominally Protestant they were culturally and educationally of no higher level than the nineteenth-
century immigrants from Europe whom they despised. Not only were they of poverty- stricken origins but they were all educationally distinctly en retard. It was the attenuated and confused cultural values of this element, straight from the cracker barrel, that were applied. To trace it to Protestantism, especially in view of the long European Catholic anti-Semitic tradition, seems to me off target.
Earlier American attitudes toward Jews, though tinged here and there with the European virus of anti-Semitism, were on the whole respectful, perhaps unduly so, for Jews were widely regarded as children of the Holy Book. Some Americans claimed to belong to "lost" Jewish tribes. American Protestant colleges made a point in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of offering Hebrew as well as Latin and ancient Greek as the classical languages, in part because of the mistaken belief that the original New Testament had been written in Hebrew and that Jesus spoke this language. An early American classicist had to know Hebrew as well as Greek and Latin. Jews were friends and collaborators of a number of the Protestant Founding Fathers, were received into leadership circles North and South and were associated in vital early federal affairs. The idea of treating Jews as pariahs would have been deemed aberrant.
The exclusionary treatment of Jews in American life stemmed from a decision by the new financial elite, which elbowed to one side persons of the earlier aristocratic temper. Money became king, not Protestantism. The stock ticker became the dominant symbol, not the flag or the cross.
The exclusion of Jews from the inner metropolitan clubs is also imitatively enforced in elite and nonelite country clubs and in the old-line college fraternities. Actually, the Jewish exclusion serves to confer the special cachet of distinction on such clubs, most of the members of which are tedious Babbitts. A club or fraternity that does not exclude Jews is by this token advertising itself as an undistinguished affair, which it really is on the ground that its members are almost invariably persons of no intellectual or moral distinction. That the country-club and fraternity crowd consists in large part of simple animals, not always fully housebroken, one can ascertain by reading the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O'Hara and others who specialize in doings on the country-club circuit.
Catholics, although few and far between because most important Catholic money is concentrated in the hands of the Church hierarchy and because Catholics until very recently have been something of a self-segregated caste in American society, are not barred from the metropolitan clubs and one sees Nicholas F. Brady, Consolidated Edison tycoon, for example, as a member of The Links. There are others, such as Henry Ford II, but not many. John F. Kennedy became a member of The Brook.
It is doubtful if any Negro has ever been so much as proposed for membership. It would be erroneous to say Negroes are barred. They are simply not noticed. Negroes fall under the latter-day integrationist rule: They are not discriminated against as Negroes but it so happens they are found to be unqualified because of a tragic history over which the latter-day keepers of the keys have no retroactive control. The point is only: They couldn't get accepted even if they could fly to the moon and back in a kite.
Beyond this, as far as the clubs are concerned, Negroes not only lack titles to property (as quite a few Jews do not) but no one of them seems to be within 250 years of ever having them in any significant proportions. Who would a Negro be likely to inherit from?
As large property holdings are now mainly inherited and hard even for an occasional white nonproprietor to come by, it would seem that Negroes are forever circumstantially barred from becoming considerable American property owners. This is not to deny that
some Negro, some day, may in some flukey situation run a small stake up into a big corporate nest egg and then turn out to be one of the larger swindling wheeler-dealers.
One can see two roads opening up to a very few Negroes, even though not to an entire stratum of wealthy Negroes.
One of these roads might be the entertainment or sports world, where a successful Negro might use his earned stake to become an impresario, then perhaps an owner of chain hotels, eventually the Empire State Building and perhaps a 5 per cent cut of one of the big banks.
Another road would be through politics and the participation in its many slushy inside contracts of the kind that have lifted many shadowy political figures from hamburgers to affluence. Early in 1966 a New York State investigation of large-scale housing developments in Harlem with public money indicated that a Negro political leader who had put up $2,000 stood to make $250,000, not a bad or unusual prelude to larger operations. For great family oaks from such little acorns have grown all over the American scene since the Civil Way,
But that this sort of thing is going to happen to many Negroes and that they or their increasingly light-skinned progeny are going to be taken readily into the caste-iron clubs seems improbable.
We find, then, that at least 15 per cent of the population (Jews, Puerto Ricans and Negroes) is effectively barred from the clubs on intrinsic grounds. The remainder of the population is barred on extrinsic grounds: It has neither large properties nor high functional positions.
All this, it might be argued, is perfectly reasonable. These are private clubs, and clubs may choose their own clubmates. But these are not only social clubs; they are the staging areas of national policy and of the big deals that make Harlem real-estate deals look like pennyante poker.
Some of the clubs, indeed, in court actions over tax privileges have denied pointblank that they are social clubs, have claimed that they are in fact business clubs. This is true of the ninety-year-old Merchants Club of New York, located in the old textile district and allowing no Jews to belong, and it is true of the ultra-ultra Duquesne Club of Pittsburgh. 17
As it can be shown that many of the progenitors of club members came into their money via party politics, such as through early public utility and railroad franchises, and as their members shuttle in and out of high government posts with almost metronomic regularity, and are big political campaign contributors, it must be evident, prima facie, that they are also political clubs. They are concerned with finance and with politics. They are, in brief, finpolitan, perhaps 45 per cent devoted to business, 45 per cent to politics and 10 per cent to blessed sociability.
While the inner pattern of arrangements differs from club to club, we may take a look at the redoubtable Duquesne Club to find out what they are all really about.
"It is when you go upstairs in the Duquesne that you begin to enter the substratosphere of executive power," says Osborn Elliott. "On the second floor there are no fewer than five dining rooms, including the main one; and in each of these. , day after day, the same people sit at the same tables. As you enter the main dining room, the Gulf Oil table is across the way; Gulf's chairman David Proctor sits facing the door, surrounded by his senior vice presidents. In the corner over to the right is the Koppers table, populated by most of the top men in that company, and next to it is the U. S. Steel table, where sales vice presidents break bread together. In another smaller room nearby, Pittsburgh Coke
& Chemical's president, chairman and vice presidents gather daily; in still another, Pittsburgh Plate Glass has a central spot, while Alcoa's executive committee chairman, Boy Hunt, holds forth in the corner--next to Jack Heinz's table.
"If the Duquesne's second floor feeds the captains of industry, many of the field marshals are to be found on the fourth and fifth floors, where thirty-five suites are rented out by the year (at $12,000 and up) to such companies as U. S. Steel, Gulf Oil, Jones & Laughlin, Blaw-Knox, and Alcoa, to name just a few. These attractively decorated apartments usually have a bedroom, living room and dining room; they are used by the companies' topmost brass for meetings and lunch almost very day, and for dinners perhaps two or three times a week, particularly when a visiting fireman, or rather fire chief, comes to town. . . .
"In these company suites new products and mergers are planned, bargaining strategy for labor negotiations is hammered out, multi-million-dollar financing arrangements are made. Here, and in the public dining rooms below, the professionals of production get together and exchange ideas, day by day. There is a daily exposure of people to people who are all of the same mold or forced into the same mold. This tends, no doubt, to channel their interests and energies toward the mono-purpose goal of production; and it may well be, as has been said, that Pittsburgh would not be the production marvel it is without the exchange of information, techniques and ideas that take place every noontime at the Duquesne. " 18
This continuous-performance center is obviously a caucus room and continuous seminar of finpolity. Jews, of course, and anyone without big money or high position, are barred. Baltzell relates that "Even today there is in Pittsburgh an executive at the very top level of leadership in one of the nation's major corporations who has never been taken into the Duquesne because of his Jewish origins (even though he has never been associated in any way with the city's Jewish community). But as this executive's high functional position would ordinarily demand Duquesne Club membership, other arrangements have been made. In other words, although it may seem absurd, he is allowed and encouraged to entertain important business associates in his company's private suite on the upper floor of the Duquesne. And he does this in spite of being barred from membership in the club! It may seem hard to believe that such a dehumanizing situation would be tolerated either by this talented executive of Jewish antecedents or by his gentile office colleagues who are also leaders at the Duquesne. " 19
Baltzell also tells of a high Jewish executive in Chicago who was denied the presidency of a corporation founded by Jews because he would be barred from membership on "religious" grounds from the leading club. He resigned and, a man of proper temper, refused to reconsider when the board of directors changed its mind. 20
"Many such dreams of corporate and financial empire-building have been
consummated within the halls of America's more exclusive clubs," notes Professor
Baltzell after relating how Cecil Rhodes had used his club to buy out Jewish Barney
Barnato in the De Beers diamond syndicate, "The greatest financial imperialist of them
all, J. Pierpont Morgan, belonged to no less than nineteen clubs in this country and
along Pall Mall. One of his dreams was realized on the night of December 12, 1900, in
the course of a private dinner at the University Club in New York. Carnegie's man,
Charles M. Schwab, was the guest of honor and the steel trust was planned that night. " 21
Not only are the big deals arranged in the comfortable privacy of the interlocking clubs, where nosey journalists, repelled by the claim of privacy, are not about watching the comings and goings of the sociable principals but, as already indicated, general policy governing the interlocking corporate world, as distinct from the specific policy of
each company, is there determined. Even big tycoons must eat; and they eat together in their clubs. As it happens, during the meals, arrangements are made for organizing the world after their hearts' desires.
The Corporate Rule: Gentiles Only
The club rule against Jews, not at all strangely, turns out also to be the corporate rule. Some writers deplore, directly or by implication, the nonadmittance of Jews (and Negroes) to the clubs; but even if they were admitted matters would be little different. What significant alteration of the world for the better would follow if Sidney Weinberg, Meyer Kastenbaum or Thurgood Marshall were made members of The Links or the Knickerbocker Club? Could they, even if they wanted to, change the finpolitan outlook? For the clubs make sure, in advance, that anyone taken in agrees broadly with their weltaunschauung.
If Jews were suddenly admitted to the clubs and upper corporate positions would it be a gain for liberalism? In view of Baltzell it would (and he is probably right in this) result in a strengthening of the ruling class, in making it more competent, less mindlessly castelike. It would make the ruling class more effective, would make it, as far as sheer merit is concerned, more aristocratic. But merely the selection of the best people in a certain limited scale of values is no guarantee of general aristocracy. The best gangster, although he may be an aristocrat among gangsters, can hardly be taken as an aristocrat.
Baltzell defines aristocracy as follows: "By an aristocracy I mean (1) a community of upper-class families whose members are born to positions of high prestige and assured dignity because their ancestors have been leaders (elite members) for one generation or more; (2) that these families are carriers of a set of traditional values which command authority because they represent the aspirations of both the elite and the rest of the population; and (3) that this class continue to justify its authority (a) by contributing its share of contemporary leaders and (b) by continuing to assimilate, in each generation, the families of new members of the elite. As with the elite concept, I do not conceive of the aristocracy as the 'best' or the 'fittest' in the sense of the term 'natural aristocracy' as used by Jefferson. The aristocratic process means that the upper class is open. " 22
He is not, however, making a plea for aristocratic rule but, as he stresses, "it is the central thesis of this book that no nation can long endure without both the liberal democratic and the authoritative aristocratic processes. " 23 He sees the true aristocrat as a public leader.
But aristocrats, in Jefferson's sense of the naturally best, are not produced invariably or even generally from a community of hereditary upper-class families, as Baltzell's tracing of the class origins of Abraham Lincoln shows.
"If an upper class degenerates into a caste, moreover," as Baltzell so well puts it, "the traditional authority of an establishment is in grave danger of disintegrating, while society becomes a field for careerists seeking success and affluence. " And this is the present American position.
A true aristocracy developed in the clubs (or elsewhere) might indeed change the world for the better. But merely lowering the barriers to Jews and Negroes would not accomplish this, as the clubs also bar on other caste grounds. It is the general values of the clubs more than their exclusionary policy that are most open to question.
The very caste structure of the American propertied elite--as Baltzell agrees--shows it not to be an aristocracy, shows that it is afraid of competition from natural excellence. Plato, an aristocrat, would not have barred a man from his Academy because he was a Jew but he did bar him if he did not know geometry. Nor would he have barred from
discourse a man just because he disagreed with him; he even reported for history the crucial difficulties for his beloved theory of ideas raised by Parmenides.
The nonadmittance of Jews (and Negroes) to the upper ruling clubs is cited here not to reiterate the truism that the finpols are illiberal and narrow-minded or to imply that Jews and Negroes should in the name of democracy or aristocracy be admitted to their circle. My observations, unlike those of Baltzell and others, are made only descriptively, to establish a tracer, as is done when physicians inject radioactive isotopes in order to make some determination about an organism. The nonadmittance of Jews to the central clubs enables us to make a vital determination: that decisions made in the clubs hold with rigor out in the corporate world and in society. If Jews and Negroes should now suddenly be admitted, the determination here made would still stand, for all time. It would signal only that the finpols had changed their minds: The acceptance of Jews and Negroes in the clubs and corporations would still show they had determining power. Whatever they do in this matter, pro or con, it is still their decision before history.
Jews, we may remind ourselves, are and have been members of the United States Supreme Court, the Cabinet and both houses of Congress. They have been high in the armed forces, often charged with the most vital matters of national defense, as in the case of Admiral Hyman Rickover. They have been governors of leading states such as New York and Connecticut, have been deep in the construction of delicate national policy in war and in peace. They are neither formally excluded by American public institutions nor informally excluded by the popular political process. The instrumentality of their entrance into political life has been, largely, the post-Civil War Democratic Party, and in this sense the latter-day urban Democratic Party has been more democratic (as well as more republican) than the Republican Party. Jews like Jacob Javits, Louis Lefkowitz and even Barry Goldwater in the Republican Party are distinct odd numbers.
But Jews, although very much to the fore in public life, and quite distinguished (Brandeis, Cardozo, Frankfurter, Lehman, Rickover, Baruch, Arthur J.
