After having been forced to accept by testamentary bequest several large country
properties
that thus escaped figuring among taxable assets, New York passed a law requiring that all such bequests must first gain the consent of the state in order to escape the cash-draining tax net.
Lundberg - The-Rich-and-the-Super-Rich-by-Ferdinand-Lundberg
" Such recipients, to the contrary, usually start sending excited messages to all points of the compass.
Most of the rich, whether they arrived by their own scheming or have inherited, are not thus taken by surprise. It was always understood by most of them that they were going to be rich as soon as some older relative passed to his reward. While no great alteration is required in the style of life of such they, too, have it gradually borne in upon them by bankers, lawyers, wives and friends that they are under some irresistible compulsion to make moves in which their money plays a major role, something like the queen in a game of chess. Few new heirs, if any, find that they can ignore or even tranquilly contemplate from afar their newly acquired assets. They are suddenly burdened with problems: an investment problem, a tax problem, a political problem, a donation problem, a general living problem. Where to spend the summer? The winter? Spring and fall? And what of the difficult periods between seasons, where there is an overlap? And what to wear? What clothing? Who to see and not see?
A generalization that applies with hardly an exception to all of the rich is that asceticism is rarely if ever an ingredient in their personal scheme of affairs. Not that it should be; it just is not. Rather is it the case that however the life of one rich person may differ from that of another both live at the opposite pole from asceticism. The elder J. P. Morgan was quite a bon vivant, a swinger, and Rockefeller was a teetotaler and homebody; yet Rockefeller, among other things, maintained four palatial estates, one for each season of the year, from Maine to Florida. Although a tight-lipped Baptist elder, he was far from monkish.
The personal life of the rich, almost without exception, comes down to sensory gratification on a grand scale, gratification attained in the light of standards generally considered luxurious. A simplistic material determinism seems to rule their lives as by an iron law. Here and there, it is true, have been persons frugal to the point of miserliness, such as Hetty Green, but in general the rich are found to live according to popular conceptions of extreme luxury even though one may be comparatively restrained and another an obvious sybarite. They do, broadly, precisely what the average man in the street would do, neither more nor less, were he on their lofty pecuniary perch. What one may say in the most extreme criticism of them is that they are so ordinary, so common, so vulgar, yet placed in positions of extraordinary advantage. Far more than they themselves suppose, they are automatons, moved one way or the other almost always by considerations of money. To find a rich man, apart from an occasional eccentric inventor, living a life largely unmotivated by his money is, as I believe the record shows, a virtual impossibility. Successful inventors, yes; others, no.
The Gorgeous Setting
What unquestionably first strikes the most indolent observer about the personal lives of the rich compared with the nonrich is the opulence of their residential settings. These lush habitations, contrary to many hurried commentators, have more than a titillating value for outsiders. They are, I submit, deeply symbolic of a self-conception and of actual objective social status. They are, contrary to the eagle-eyed Veblen, more than an exercise in ostentatious display and conspicuous consumption. They are, in fact, a dead giveaway of what it is all about.
Since the time of the Pharaohs, and no doubt even before, the head man in the kingdom always had the biggest house, a palace, and with the advent of progress in
utilizing labor he came to have many palaces suitable to the different seasons of the year and different moods. The supporting nobility and priesthood had lesser but sufficiently palatial habitations, and it was only as some of these came to have more to say in ruling the realm that their homes began to rival in size that of the monarch.
At the risk of provoking the bargain-basement sages into charging that I am oversimplifying, let me say it plainly on the line: The people with the most say-so have always had the largest and most elaborate domiciles. Big house historically means big man in the realm; conversely, small house means nobody in the realm.
As direct survivals of this tradition, embellished by Roman emperors, Louis XIV, the czars and a few others, we today see the pope, spiritual ruler over some 500 million precious immortal souls, living in a series of huge palaces, one of which is set in his own small city. We see the figurehead kings and queens of England still housed in extraordinarily large houses, some approaching the size of the Kennedys' Merchandise Mart in Chicago. And we see the successors to the czars living in the Kremlin, no shack.
From time to time a vast residence has been awarded at the expense of the realm to someone who has been of signal service to the rulers, as in the case of huge Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, awarded in Queen Anne's reign to John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, for his victory in 1704 over the French and Bavarians at the decisive battle of Blenheim in Bavaria. Winston Churchill spent much of his boyhood in this truly imperial edifice.
A very big house, then, or a series of big houses, means historically that the inhabitant is either a ruler or one very closely associated with rule. It is never, never, never the case that anyone functionally or otherwise dissociated from rule, anyone such as an artist, philosopher, civil service official or scientist, inhabits such a big house except as a guest. The big houses, then, are the outward signs writ plain of a class habituated to rule, reminding us of the principle of Roman law: Cui bono?
As the United States does not have anything like a ruling class, according to an extensive assortment of fully housebroken professors, we are confronted here by an apparent anomaly: People who in theory have no more to say about governance than the ordinary truck driver somehow inhabit some of the choicest and most expensive establishments of all history. In American political theory, to be sure, the rulers are fundamentally the whole people, who from time to time duly elect their representatives. These latter, if anyone, are held to be the real rulers. Yet these putative real rulers, unless they already belong to the very rich class, never inhabit dwellings of comparable opulence even if they reach the White House, which is itself a comparatively modest affair with a short-term lease.
When American presidents leave office they almost invariably return to relatively unimposing dwellings--Eisenhower to a remodeled frame farmhouse in Gettysburg, Truman to a Victorian frame house in Independence and Lyndon B. Johnson eventually to a not very impressive ranch house in West Texas. With no intention of being disparaging, one can see that these ex-presidential habitations, comfortable enough to be sure, would hardly rate as servants' quarters on most of the larger estates. Members of the Supreme Court, as anyone can see, occupy nothing more substantial.
This is not to say that the president and members of Congress are not powerful for stipulated periods within constitutional limits. But their power, whether it consisted of Wilson steering the country far off center into World War I or Johnson by his own decision intervening massively in faraway Vietnam, was always exercised at the prompting and with the approval of the magnates. We know this, first, because the magnates publicly applauded and, secondly, not a single one of them seriously dissented. Except for certain features of policy under Franklin D. Roosevelt, when
counsels in a crisis were divided, the magnates have been in general harmony with national policy all along. Either the magnates wanted that policy (and heavy documentation by Gabriel Kolko for 1900-12 in The Triumph of Conservatism shows them as the very source of policy) or the political managers have been clairvoyant enough to hit upon policies that would meet with the broad approval of the magnates even as many highly intelligent and informed nonmagnates dissented (as with respect to Johnson on the Vietnam policy).
Much policy deeply affecting the lives of most citizens, as far as that goes, is never submitted to the political powers for their rescript. For whatever is not specifically forbidden under the rule of freedom is permitted. As a single example, let us consider technological innovation, always embarked upon by private decision but invariably of vast public consequence. in pursuit of greater economy and efficiency, higher productivity per man employed and more substantial profits, the corporate managers, deputies of the big owners, constantly refine the technology of production. More particularly they have recently, without any prompting word from formal government, plumped heavily for labor-eliminating automation. And although the size of the labor force has steadily increased it has not increased parallel with population growth, thus dealing large sections of the populace out of it, notably the younger, the crudely skilled and those designated as superannuated at sixty-two to sixty-five years. No representatives, near or remote, of those dealt out ever passed on the policy that has had such effects. The measures were simply taken by private, unilateral decision in consonance with sound corporate practice, an example of veiled power that has wide effects.
More formally, now, with the social effects apparent, the young were bidden to remain in school, for which many have no stomach either because of personal incapacity or because a considerable segment of conventional schooling is plainly boring and irrelevant to any felt issue. Many simply cannot stand the dull routine. Again, many in a pecuniary milieu want to earn money so as to feel some illusory independence. As a consequence, the country now possesses a large section of disoriented young, neither at school nor at work and getting into a variety of headline- making mischief from congregating in unseemly hordes to sedulous extra-curricular copulation and drug addiction.
No elected representative ever passed on the decisions that produced these results. The decisions were made quietly by quiet men in quiet corporate boardrooms.
The big houses, in brief, are occupied by the basic decision makers, and this has been the rule down through history. A difference, however, is that in the United States the decisions are only indirectly and obliquely imposed.
It should not be supposed that, the idea of this self-conception of rulership on the part of the rich is sustained only by the fact that they have a penchant for assorted ducal mansions and grounds. That this is the self-conception is shown, too, by the way many of them sign their names with Roman numerals appended, betokening an established family line in the style of European nobility. It is shown, furthermore, and more convincingly, in the affinity of the American rich, particularly with respect to their young women, for marriage with members of the European nobility.
Such marriages have taken place by the hundreds and I will not trouble once again to cite and update them. The most spectacular of them was the marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough, the two offspring of which are directly in the ducal Marlborough line. That the motivation in these marriages was the quest for titles, mainly on behalf of the mothers of daughters, is made clear by the fact that wealthy
young American males rarely married a titled European female; for in that case the title was not shared. 2
Almost always it was the case that marriage took place when the title could pass and the offspring, grandchildren of American commoners, could be authentically ennobled. "I am the mother of a genuine, 24-karat duke," the American woman could sigh in quiet idiotic joy.
It is obvious that the American industrial rich, not sharing the distaste of the Founding Fathers for titles, identified themselves with and saw themselves playing a role similar to European nobility and royalty.
True, a self-conception is not necessarily a reflection of reality; it could be pure fantasy. It is on other grounds, of actual rulership, that we see that the self-conception was not mistaken. The big-rich of the United States are in fact if not in form American dukes; the general populace pretty much enacts the role and has the outlook of peasantry, most of them quite gladly.
Patterns of Residence
While much has been written in detailed description of the opulent and vasty residences of the freedom-loving rich, and many photographs of them have been published, it has not been noticed as far as I am aware that they occur in distinct, different patterns.
These patterns are as follows:
I. The compound, or multiple estate, containing many large residences of different members of an extended family and sometimes including an entire village and much acreage.
2. The cluster or territorial grouping of separate estates of an extended family.
3. Scattered estates up to fifty or more of the different branches of an extended family.
4. The single country estate of a nuclear family, usually the mark of someone new to wealth.
In all cases it should be understood that the estate is merely the family center. There remain to be reckoned town houses, distant estates in nonurban terrain and foreign estates; many wealthy Americans own either European or Latin American estates and a few persons have them in northern Africa, particularly Morocco.
One function of the large estate, of course, is to instil awe and thereby place social distance between the owner and the clamorous hoi polloi.
The question of preserving social distance is important for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it would be awkward in many ways if rich and poor were closely mingled. It would certainly be socially awkward when the rich man sat down to a feast and the poor man turned to his stew and grits. As a matter of common sociability the rich man would be expected to offer some of his steak and endive salad to the poor man and to accept some of the stew. If it were only one or a few poor men asked to partake of a sumptuous repast it would be one thing; but if the participation were quite general it would be another. A man worth $100 million would be broke over night, for example, if he treated all the families in the country to a single steak dinner at his expense.
Social distance, then, is seen to come down, among other things, to a matter of economy. One cannot invite everybody into the plantation and remain rich for long. The visitors will literally eat one out of house and home, like invading locusts. That the rich man is not ordinarily this open-handed does not signify that he is especially ungenerous;
he is merely prudent and posts his various signs: "Private, Keep Out. " Privacy becomes a cult.
Examples of Residential Patterns
A prime example of the compound or multiple-dwelling arrangement is the Rockefeller estate, Kykuit, of 4,180 acres at Pocantico Hills, New York, just east of Tarrytown in the fabled Sleepy Hollow country. Such land in the region sells at $5 to $10 thousand per acre and higher. Until Winthrop left for Arkansas all the brothers had each a large house on this estate, where lived also Rockefeller I and II. The place has many scores of buildings, for maintenance and the housing of a large staff, and includes a $1 million playhouse (at cost many years ago) that holds bowling alleys, tennis court, swimming pool and squash court. 3
The Rockefeller brothers also have New York City residences. John III and his wife share a large duplex apartment on the upper East Side and in 1950 built a house for guests near fashionable Beekman Place. 4 Nelson and his family occupy a triplex penthouse on Millionaire's Row of Fifth Avenue, facing Central Park. 5 David, Laurance, Rodman C. and Winthrop all have separate domiciles on New York's upper East Side, as shown in the telephone directory.
Nelson owns a large ranch in the highlands of Venezuela on which he sojourns at intervals, Laurance has a plantation in Hawaii and Winthrop has a palatial working plantation in Arkansas. It is not, however, necessary for the wealthy to own their separate places of residence; many of them lease large places from time to time in various parts of the world or take over entire floors in de luxe hotels as the occasion seems to require. They are, therefore, to be found now and again flitting in and out of Paris, London, the Riviera, the Bahamas or Puerto Rico.
Kykuit is bisected by a public road that affords views of dense forests and open fenced fields on either side for a stretch of many miles; this road is Route 117, connecting North Tarrytown with Pleasantville, New York.
Once entirely open to the public, only part is now open for hiking, horseback riding and hunting. But where the family homes are it is "as remote from the outside world as a fortified principality. " 6 Tight security is maintained: "high stone walls, massive iron gates, alert guards, police dogs and miles of barbed-wire fences make the homes a sanctuary. " 7 The home of David, however, is right on the main public road.
The main house, Kykuit itself, until his death occupied by John D. II and his wife, is a fifty-room granite structure in modified Georgian design with spacious views of the surrounding country. It has four stories with guest rooms on the third and fourth floors. 8
More recently the widow of John D. II, finding this edifice too roomy, constructed elsewhere on the estate a modest $300,000 Georgian home of only ten bedrooms. The destiny of the big house has not apparently yet been decided.
Various price tags have been put on all this by different commentators but as the books of account have not been made public it is perhaps misleading to cite any. When Rockefeller I died the New York Times (May 24, 1937) said the single granite house had cost $2 million to build, while the estate took $500,000 a year at Depression prices to maintain. The entire affair required a staff then of 350. Standard equipment throughout are elevators, air conditioning and just about anything in the way of appurtenances, comforts and conveniences one cares to name. The domicile of no potentate is any better equipped.
This compound or multiple assembly style of dwelling was adopted by the numerous Kennedys for their summer residences at Hyannisport, Massachusetts. For more
prolonged residence they appear to find the scatter-type of dwellings more suitable. Many families, indeed, have their summer estates in the compound form, a great many on coastal islands. In addition to the numerous Forbes family, whose places dot Naushon Island near Martha's Vineyard, there are many others of a similar nature. Islands appear to hold a great attraction for the rich, insuring complete privacy, and on them one finds the compound of estates and at times a collection of seasonal estates of many different high-ranking families, such as Jekyll Island off the Georgia coast was until the 1940's. The biggest island layout, of course, is Santa Catalina Island off California, owned by William Wrigley, Jr. , the chewing gum king, for many years. This sort of thing, one might say, is really living, for with an island of one's own one is really the local sovereign. 9
The more numerous Du Ponts provide the chief illustration of the cluster type of massed estates in northern Delaware and extending over into nearby Pennsylvania. Because of the many large Du Pont houses strewn about, the region has been dubbed by some as "America's chateau country" and "the du Ponts' duchy of Delaware. " 10
The largest of the Du Pont estates--Longwood, Nemours and Winterthur--have been given tax-free endowments as public museums so that the average citizen can now go and get some foretaste of what Valhalla is really like; but the names of two dozen others strew the countryside: Montchanin, Granogue, Chevannes, St. Amour, Louviers, Bellevue, Guyencourt, Owl's Nest, Bois des Fosse? s et al. 11
Latterly many of the Du Ponts, according to a recent expert biographer, have taken to acquiring more modest habitations such as Hexton of Samuel Francis du Pont, which we are reassured "has dignity without formality, spaciousness without ostentation, ease without opulence. " 12
It should not be supposed that Du Pont residences are confined to Delaware. Lammot du Pont, who died in 1952, had a big summer place on Fisher's Island, New York, near the mouth of Long Island Sound. Many of the wealthy have summer dachas on this hallowed isle. Alfred I. du Pont moved to Florida, where he left the mammoth Nemours Foundation noticed earlier. Others have extra residences by the scores, city and country, tucked away elsewhere.
For a detailed description with photographs of a fabulously elegant Du Pont house the reader is referred to Folsom. 13
The four third-generation branches of the Vanderbilt clan, less cohesive than either the Rockefellers or Du Ponts, scattered their many separate palazzi to all points of the compass.
The most ornate Vanderbilt place among many is the French Renaissance chateau of George W. Vanderbilt near Asheville, North Carolina, built when he had achieved hereditary success at the age of twenty-six. It contains 250 rooms and was set in 146,000 acres (now 12,000 acres) with a three-mile drive through 500 varieties of flora from the front gate to the house. 14 Inside views of the house show it to be, like many homes of the American rich, a quite literal variation on the themes of grandiloquent opulence expressed at Versailles and Fontainebleau. "As conceived by Mr. Vanderbilt, his new principality was typical of those developed by royal families in Europe hundreds of years earlier. " 15 This place was inherited by his daughter Cornelia and, as of 1964, by her two sons, George and William Cecil. Here is an example, one among many, of an original name lost to view through a distaff marriage. The original cost of this place in 1895 was estimated at $7 million and its present value is set at $50--$60 million. 16
Vanderbilt mansions, one after the other, used to dominate Fifth Avenue in New York but have since been torn down to make room for lucrative skyscrapers. Frederick W. Vanderbilt built a vast stone palazzo overlooking the Hudson River at Hyde Park, New York. Avoiding inheritance taxes, it was left to New York State and is now operated as a museum of high life in yesteryear. Cornelius Vanderbilt, another grandson of the founder, built The Breakers at Newport, with interiors that are practically replicas of royal French palaces. Other Vanderbilts played house with big houses elsewhere. Many presently occupied by authentic Vanderbilts are scattered about the country.
More usually a wealthy family has one or two single country estates and one or two town houses, such dispositions of course depending on the size of the family and the fortune.
Although the trend is now toward less ornate or more secluded places on distant shores, some of the original big houses, along with their large truly royal art collections, have since passed to public or educational use so as not to figure in testamentary estates for tax purposes.
Data, descriptions and dazzling photographs of a few among many ultraelaborate chateaux are given by Folsom in the following: Vizcaya, of James Deering, Miami; Marble Casa, of Henry M. Flagler, Palm Beach; Ca 'd' Zan, John Ringling, Sarasota; Shadow Lawn, Hubert T. Parson, former president of F. W. Woolworth Company, West Long Branch, New Jersey; Fifth Avenue mansion, Henry Clay Frick, New York City, lower floor now an art museum housing the Frick collection; Tudor mansion, Andrew W. Mellon, Pittsburgh, now Mellon Hall of Chatham College; La Cuesta Encantada, William Randolph Hearst, San Simeon, California; San Marino, Henry E. Huntington, San Marino, California; Ophir Hall, Whitelaw and Ogden Reid, Purchase, New York, now part of Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart; The Elms, E. J. Berwind, Newport; various mansion-sized Newport "summer cottages" belonging to Dukes, Youngs, Mrs. Perle Mesta, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, Vanderbilts, Firestones, Jelkes, Van Rensselaers, Havemeyers and others; Belcourt Castle, O. H. P. Belmont, Newport; Ochre Court, Ogden Goelet, Newport, now part of Salve Regina College; Stan Hywet Hall, Frank A. Seiberling, Akron; Fair Lane, Henry Ford, Dearborn, Michigan, part now of Dearborn campus of the University of Michigan; Meadow Brook Hall, Mr. and Mrs. Alfred G. (Dodge Motors) Wilson, Rochester, Michigan, now part of East Lansing campus of Michigan State University; and English manor house, Edsel Ford, Grosse Point Shores, Michigan.
These, let it be understood, are only a very few samples among many.
While the ducal country and foreign estate is still part of the standard equipment of the very wealthy, the big town house has been largely replaced by the cooperative luxury apartment which in many cases amounts to a large town house sequestered behind the flat facade of an apartment building. The advantage of a cooperative apartment is that it need never become a taxable white elephant but can be sold at full value as it is or broken down into more saleable smaller apartments. Taxwise, the cooperative apartment is a liquid asset as the big town palazzi and their art collections failed to remain under post-1913 tax policy.
The Rockefeller estate at Pocantico Hills is almost certain to wind up either as a huge public park, a fashionable real estate development or as part of each.
After having been forced to accept by testamentary bequest several large country properties that thus escaped figuring among taxable assets, New York passed a law requiring that all such bequests must first gain the consent of the state in order to escape the cash-draining tax net.
Dazzling Interiors
The interiors of most of these houses are more spectacular than the exteriors, which are mostly impressive in their dimensions. As photographs, liberally supplied by Folsom, show very well, rooms are often of palacelike proportions with the marble walls covered by expensive paintings and tapestries. Rare Oriental draperies and rugs, entire imported paneled rooms from European chateaux and expensive bric-a-brac and furniture are in most places strictly de rigeur. Expensive is the operational word. The National Gallery in Washington now houses the Andrew M. Mellon art collection and the Frick Museum shows what Frick collected. There is, too, the opulent J. P. Morgan Library of rare medieval illustrated books and manuscripts, once a private sanctuary. This sort of thing, as a matter of fact, is scattered all around.
The magnates were, and many remain, art-minded, and no doubt saw themselves secretly as latter-day versions of Renaissance princes. But a difference in their relation to art is that, while the princes and later kings subsidized working artists, the American wealthy usually merely bid up the prices of extant art. A few today, such as Nelson Rockefeller, collect modern art and thus may be looked upon as giving monetary encouragement to living artists. But, by and large, art dealers rather than artists benefited from the artistic interest of the American magnates, who were traders and collectors rather than art patrons.
The artistic impulses of most of the rich are recognized in their own circles as essentially pecuniary. Thus, the Wall Street Journal, January 3, 1967, impiously notes that a work of art is looked upon as "a growth stock, a whopping tax deduction--or an artful fake. " Actually, says this authoritative publication, "it's possible for a painting to be all these things at once. "
"The rise in prices has led many purchasers to view art primarily as an investment whose growth potential puts many a high-flying stock to shame," said the Journal. "According to dealers and others in the art world, some 'collectors,' who not long ago thought Modigliani was some kind of Italian dish, now move in and out of the art market like so many Wall Street speculators, bunting bargains, and then trying to resell them at a fancy profit. "
Works of art, acquired at bargains, in other words have the potentialities of capital gains and do represent diversification of holdings in an always uncertain world. In any market they would always (unlike money) be worth something. This apart, as the Journal said, art works, whether genuine or fake, make possible huge tax deductions that offset actual money income. The way this works is as follows: a man buys a painting, genuine or fake, for $1,000, holds it a while and then donates it to a museum at a declared market value of $10,000, thus obtaining a net $9,000 deduction from taxable income for a tax-free gift to the always-to-be-considered public. If the museum spots it as a fake, it says nothing for fear of discouraging the later donation of genuine works. There is, thus, a ready market for palpable fakes.
In order to obtain tax benefits the operation requires only that the declared value of the gift exceed the cost, whatever it was.
"In surveying the appraisals used in justifying the tax deductions of 400 donated works," said the Journal, "IRS [Internal Revenue Service] found that the art objects had cost the donors a total of $1,471,502--but that their total declared 'fair market value' as deductions had climbed to $5,811,908. " The ruse is profitable whether the art work is authentic or not.
Art works, too, may play other financial roles. A man may pay $10,000 for a painting and later bestow it as a gift on a friend or relative. As a gift of valuable property this is theoretically taxable, but gifts of portable objects are not ordinarily scrutinized and, as far as that goes, the tax courts have ruled that valuable gifts to, say, a lady friend, are not
taxable; so to argue would check sentiment. An ardent admirer may give a series of such gifts to a lady and not be subject to a tax, thus building up her net worth tax free. The gifts, being valuable, may be used as collateral up to at least half their value against loans. And they may be sold privately for cash.
Art collecting, again, may be used to pay a large portion of inheritance taxes. Thus, as part of his general operation, a wealthy man, otherwise no aesthete, gradually builds up a collection of paintings of some artist or school; his very acquisitions have the effect of giving these paintings a scarcity value--and it is scarcity as well as vogue that gives these objects their appraisal value whether they are works of art, postage stamps, books and manuscripts or old coins. A collection that cost $10 million may ultimately have a market value of $50 million, which is recovered in careful sales and the proceeds used to pay inheritance taxes relating to revenue-producing properties as well. Two birds are thus killed with one tax stone: There is no capital-gain tax on the increment in value (death excluding capital gains under the tax law) and the proceeds pay all or a large part of taxes, thus preserving revenue-producing property for the inheritors.
Aesthetic objects thus play a dual decorative as well as pecuniary role.
Concluding this bit, it can be shown that the pecuniary approach to art has been thoroughly systematized for the benefit of a well-heeled clientele. For verification the reader is referred to two large-paged books: Richard H. Rush, Art as an Investment, Prentice-Hall, Inc. , Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1961, 418 pages, and Robert Wraight, The Art Game, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1965, 224 pages. The ins and outs, and the "angles," get full treatment here.
Apartment House Chateaux
Since World War II, even as more and more of the booboisie are found to be sleeping in subway trains, doorways, flophouses, parks and bus stations, there has been a surge of building large luxury apartment buildings in the larger cities: New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. This building boom has, perhaps, been greatest in New York City where on central Manhattan there have been erected scores of luxury apartment buildings, many of them cooperatively owned by the well-heeled tenants.
As it would require a great deal of space to list and describe them all let us concentrate on an outstanding recent example, the United Nations Plaza, as described by the always staid New York Times. 17
United Nations Plaza, of thirty-eight stories, is the tallest residential structure in the city and faces the United Nations headquarters from the north at 48th Street and the East River. The initial cost of each apartment is $25,900 for 31/2 rooms to $166,000 for a nine-room duplex "with its own little elevator, wood-burning fireplace and curving stairs, and with carrying charges that range from $248 to $1,590 a month. . . . The cost of the apartment is only the beginning for a lot of tenants. Fully a third of them have taken down walls, put up new ones, installed circular columns or big square pillars, and otherwise altered the original floor plan. And it is taken for granted that a majority of the tenants will upgrade bathroom fixtures and kitchen appliances. "
Although there were more than 335 basic apartments, some tenants acquired several and joined them together while enlarging rooms so as to have, in effect, a large townhouse behind a flat glass-and-aluminum facade. This is standard procedure in luxury apartment buildings. In many of the apartments metal fittings have been replaced with gold or sterling silver fittings.
Corner suites have seven-foot-high windows that stretch for forty-eight feet in the living-dining areas, and many look out over the East River. All apartments are air- conditioned and at the touch of a switch can be kept at any moderate temperature,
winter or summer. Bathroom floors and walls are of Carrara marble, kitchens are eighteen feet long and a gourmet restaurant on the ground floor offers room service to tenants.
Luxurious to the nth degree, the edifice has tenants who are fully a match for the setting. At the time of making its report, said the Times, among the owners,
. . . there are no theater people, no familiar television faces, and only one writer, Truman Capote. What is filling United Nations Plaza, especially the East tower, is a sort of power elite.
Of the 71 per cent that quietly make wheels go 'round, 69 per cent are senior vice presidents, executive vice presidents, presidents or chairmen of the board.
In big business they include John Dickson Harper, president of Alcoa, the company that put up the building; William Johnstone, chairman of the finance committee of Bethlehem Steel; Chester Laing, president of John Nuveen & Co. , investment bankers; and Lowell P. Weicker, president of Bigelow-Sanford, Inc.
In publishing they are Roy Larsen, chairman of the executive committee of Time, Inc. ; Andrew Haiskell, chairman of the board of Time, Inc. , and Mrs. Philip (Katherine) Graham, publisher of The Washington Post and president of Newsweek magazine.
The 9 per cent of the tenants who are lawyers include Christian Herter Jr. , whose father was Secretary of State, and William Pierce Rogers, who was Attorney General under Eisenhower.
Eight per cent are classed as persons of independent means; a good many of them have sold homes and taken apartments to simplify living.
Among the 6 per cent embracing various professions are William S. Brown, a partner of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, architects; Ross Claiborne, editor of the Dell Publishing Company, Inc. ; and Bonnie Cashin, who designs clothes for Seventh Avenue. . . .
Among the 6 per cent of the tenants who are identified with government or with philanthropic foundations are Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Raymond Dinsmore and Mrs. Albert (Mary) Lasker, widow of an advertising tycoon. . . .
Mary Lasker, whose apartment will not be finished until early summer, and who wanted to be no higher than the 10th and 11th floors because otherwise she would "be too far above the trees, . . . " [will use her apartment] as a kind of annex to her house on Beekman Place--where she will continue to live. . . . [She has an apartment of only five rooms] but it was actually made by taking three and a half apartments with a total of 22 rooms.
That the rich, as F. Scott Fitzgerald sensitively discerned, inhabit an altogether special reality is shown in what they designate a room. The dimensions of a living room in a lower middle-class home become in a rich man's house those of a dressing room, a mop room or a linen closet. Rooms, properly speaking, in a rich man's house are generally at least four times larger than average residential rooms, sometimes ten or even twenty times larger. . . . They are often of museum and ballroom calibre, as photographs show.
"To Bonnie Cashin, United Nations Plaza represents 'a whole new world. And moving into it is almost like going to a new country. . . . '"
Interiors and intimate methods of operation of United Nations Plaza have been shown on television. As there explained, the tightest security is maintained, both at the front door and with respect to deliveries. Delivery men must show credentials at various guarded barriers in the basement, will be admitted only on explicit instructions from on
high and must be checked in and out. Names of occupants are not listed on mail boxes. The security staff and supportive personnel have all had their backgrounds rigidly scrutinized before gaining clearance by standards reported to be more exacting than those of the FBI and CIA for their finely tuned personnel.
While by no means the only such place in the larger cities United Nations Plaza may be taken at least as the dernier cri in "compact," luxury urban living quarters even though some of its larger apartments are no more than annexes to and extensions of nearby town houses for overflow guests, power brokers and relatives.
Standard Equipment
Practically standard equipment in all the bigger houses of the superwealthy are items like pipe organs, extensive gardens and hothouses, interior and exterior swimming pools, chapels, statuary and sculpture strewn about, inlaid imported wall paneling and ceilings and a full line of all gadgets known to modern man. Expense has not been spared, money is plentiful.
Whereas early this century most of the big-rich owned their own private railroad cars and later their fleets of chauffeured automobiles, more recently many own their own long-distance airplanes standing ready at some nearby airport. Whereas upper corporation managers make free use of company planes to look in on plant operations in distant parts, the big stockholders have their private planes and crews. 18
The random reader will be happy to learn that the government thoughtfully provides a subsidy of $160 million per year to provide services for private and corporate aircraft and that taxes on aviation gasoline now cover only 4 per cent of this cost; the rest is charged to the general taxpayers. 19 Actually the government underwrites the wealthy 100 per cent.
The private large cruising aircraft appears to have largely replaced the private railway car and ocean-going steam yacht of an earlier day, although sports yachts are still present in single-ownership fleets.
Entertainment and Parties
These elaborate residences are used a great deal for entertaining and partying. The rich do a good deal of entertaining for friends and acquaintances because they do not ordinarily congregate in public places. If they did not provide a great deal of room in their homes for many guests and servile personnel they would, in order to avoid monkish seclusion, be forced to congregate where the public gathers in so-called public luxury establishments that are, in fact, largely patronized by pushers, entertainers, people "on the make" and obvious fourflushers. One rarely, as a matter of fact, sees any of the very rich in the presumably fashionable bistros. Here and there, now and then, yes; generally, no.
Expensive parties to mark various occasions have long been a predilection of the American rich, with the costs ranging from $250,000 to $1 million or more per shindig. The debutante party, through which the rich man presents his nubile daughters to the world, was long a standard affair with double orchestras blending entrancing sounds in huge ballrooms and champagne and caviar pouring down the gullets of thousands of well-heeled democrats amid banks of imported flora. While these exhilarating affairs (which seemed to outside observers to be rubbing it in) are now rarer, they are by no means entirely outmoded. The big party in general has given way to more discreet entertaining in small groups. They are, however, still served to the queen's taste.
A History of Luxury Parties in America would require a book of many hundreds of pages, the main source being the High Society pages of the leading newspapers. That
aspect of partying that exerts most fascination for the mythical man-in-the-street, however, is of the order of what is reported to have suited the staglike taste of the late T. Coleman du Pont, obviously a man of the people. "In 1912, in partnership with Charles P. Taft, the President's brother, Coly built the McAlpin Hotel in New York, and on its twenty-first floor he established his Manhattan pied-a`-terre. His parties there soon became famous for their gaiety and their pretty girls; Coly often had half the chorus of a Broadway show among the forty or more guests at an after-theater party. 'The General is loyal to a myriad of pretty girls who are proud to claim him as a friend,' a New York newspaper said in a needling story, 'and no one, not even Mrs. T. Coleman du Pont, seems to raise an objection. In fact, some people imagine that Mrs. T. Coleman du Pont must be a myth. One never sees her, never hears of her. '" 20
Dinner parties, sedate or hilarious, always were, and remain, a favorite form of entertaining eight to a dozen or so of the ranking gentry. While political figures from abroad are often present, no doubt useful in snagging distant concessions and other goodies, it is noticeable that local politicos are rarely on hand except in Washington, where political intrigue is the sole social interest. Generals and admirals, however, are much sought for a certain austere contrasting tone.
It would, in any event, be bad electoral image-making for a politician of the domestic variety to be counted among those present at some of the more rococo parties of the ultra-affluent, which smack to some of the more straitlaced in the constituencies of European royal revels simply because champagne (a high-class soda pop) out in the sticks connotes something exotically perverse.
A Map of American Wealth
If a map of the centers and nature of privately held wealth were drawn, it would show the larger corporations in their headquarters and principal plants as fortresses toward which raw materials are constantly moving and from which are streaming products. These fortresses would represent the "big business" factor.
The big banks, represented by a different symbol, would appear as special centers with influences radiating out into the world of "small business. " For in general, as we have noticed, "small business" is to a large extent the loan-supported business of the big banks, upon which some of the larger corporations are no longer dependent. Small business, paradoxically, is really fractionized big business.
The map would then show the family estates of the principal owners, numbering several hundred.
There would be symbols to show the locations of the principal metropolitan clubs and the principal pleasure resorts of the wealthy.
Corporate headquarters and big banks would tend to be clustered in New York City but plants, resorts and family estates would be more widely scattered, thinning out as one moved to the extreme west and south. In general, there would be considerable clustering around major urban centers and sparseness of symbols in nonurban areas.
Self-Image of the Rich
What all this shows, it would appear, is that the rich, despite the meagerness of their personal achievement as linmed in the preceding chapter, believe they are entitled to opulent settings. A divinity was once thought to hedge a king and it seemed only common sense that a divine personage be given the most opulent setting conceivable to man. The same sort of thinking applied to churchpols, who were believed to be in the closest confidence of the Deity. Faced by uncouth, undivine "robber barons," public
thought in Europe simply bowed to force majeure. It was difficult to dispute with armed gangsters.
The first thing that occurred to the newly emerged American rich was to ape the style of life of European nobility and royalty. The American rich, quite obviously, saw themselves playing the same relative roles as masters of the situation, "lords of creation" in the phrase of Frederick Lewis Allen. In the main, the style of life of the English and French higher gentleman became the style of life of the American rich, who took root in a country where, oddly, a powerful political symbol was still the log cabin.
Whereas European royalty and nobility played profound integral roles in European history, the latter-day American rich were more like hitch-hikers who opportunistically climbed aboard a good thing, They produced neither the technology, the climate, the land, the people nor the political system. Nor did they, like many European groups (as in England), take over the terrain as invading conquerors. Rather did they infiltrate the situation from below, insinuate themselves into opportunely presented economic gaps, subvert various rules and procedures, and, as it were, ride a rocket to the moon and beyond, meanwhile through their propagandists presenting themselves, no less, as the creators of machine industrialism which was in fact copied from England and transplanted into a lush terrain.
Let this be added: The fortune-builders were indeed organizers in a virgin terrain of little or no organization. They organized economic affairs according to well-establisbed European patterns, and for this service charged a fee that some commentators consider extortionate, others reasonable, What was it, really? It was extortionate, of course. Judging by their style of life they set a high value on their services which amounted to merely imposing their rule. If one evaluates their achievement in other than self-serving corporate terms, the great expense of maintaining their personal way of life begins to look very much like another instance of misallocation of resources. From my possibly jaundiced point of view, it does not seem to me that the country is getting any return for the wealth self-lavished on their style of living.
Lest anyone believe that I am particularly indignant about this prospect let me at once enter a disclaimer. I harbor no such indignation, not any more than I would have for a man who sees a particularly enticing meal outspread and sits down to enjoy it--a wholly natural thing to do. What indignation I have is reserved for those who contemplate the prospect and consider it in accord with the cosmic proprieties or even that a greater public show of deference is due. I would not wish to proclaim to the world that Americans are an especially slavish people; I do not believe such to be the case. But there is a considerable section of Americans, for reasons about which one can only speculate, who definitely are obviously slavish. They have been commented upon in the memoirs of visiting royalty and nobility taken aback by being advanced upon in the United States with alarming gesticulations of deference and extravagant signs and cries of voluntary submission.
My own explanation for this phenomenon is that the United States was largely settled by members of the lower classes of Europe in whom were deeply ingrained a sense of their class lowliness and fealty to the upper orders. Descendants of these still like to kowtow whenever they can, and the more affluent of them spend large sums of money so they can be presented at the English royal court, there to bow, curtsy and scrape, to any other royal or ducal ceremonial to which they can wrangle admittance or to the Vatican where they can experience the ineffable ecstasy of kissing the pope's ring, joy supreme. Some of this ingrained tendency, as it is easy to see, plays out on the domestic scene and is focused at times on public figures like Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller who, as the television cameras show, is at times plainly amazed and perhaps puzzled by
the ecstatic fervor of his enthusiastic public reception. That it is all pretty much of a preconditioned American mechanism, uncommitted to any particular object, is shown when it is directed, without partiality, at some former sausage-stuffer who has become a film star or at a toothsome female, obviously guilty of first-degree murder, who has just been released with cheers by a jury of her peers. Clamorous deference in such circumstances, as the newspapers regularly report, at times attains riotous proportions. What ensues is in fact a raving mass self-abasement.
In this purely American setting, the self-image of the rich is at times reflected back upon them in magnified dimensions, no doubt leading some of them to believe they have taken far too humble a view of themselves.
Deviants from the Norm
Among the wealthy there do not appear to be many who show the slightest tendency to deviate from the norm of being either a finpol, a pubpol, a corp-pol or a more or less graceful idler and rentier. The life of the rich, as we have noticed, is as patterned and stylized as the life of the poor, holding few surprises.
That this is the case is seemingly more and more clearly realized by at least some of them, of late notably by the pace-setting Rockefellers even though they have been outrun into healing by a Mellon and a Frick. The fourth generation of Rockefellers, however, seem to be deviating more than occasionally from the plush-lined ruts traveled by the general man of wealth. As a psychologist might say of them and a few contemporaries, they appear to be seeking an identity of their own by breaking into new ground, thus playing a role more original than that of mere descendants of John D. I, or even of travelers in his general trustified direction.
As one swallow proverbially does not make a summer one need not look upon what is happening in this quarter as a trend. It is perhaps, however, a portent that some of the descendants of the industrial rich may be about to retrace, if history grants them the chance, the path followed by the historically more distinguished descendants of the earlier and more modestly capitalized mercantile Boston and landed Hudson Valley gentry who were considerably eclipsed in wealth and central influence by the rise of the industrial rich.
Michael Rockefeller, twenty-three, son of Nelson A.
Most of the rich, whether they arrived by their own scheming or have inherited, are not thus taken by surprise. It was always understood by most of them that they were going to be rich as soon as some older relative passed to his reward. While no great alteration is required in the style of life of such they, too, have it gradually borne in upon them by bankers, lawyers, wives and friends that they are under some irresistible compulsion to make moves in which their money plays a major role, something like the queen in a game of chess. Few new heirs, if any, find that they can ignore or even tranquilly contemplate from afar their newly acquired assets. They are suddenly burdened with problems: an investment problem, a tax problem, a political problem, a donation problem, a general living problem. Where to spend the summer? The winter? Spring and fall? And what of the difficult periods between seasons, where there is an overlap? And what to wear? What clothing? Who to see and not see?
A generalization that applies with hardly an exception to all of the rich is that asceticism is rarely if ever an ingredient in their personal scheme of affairs. Not that it should be; it just is not. Rather is it the case that however the life of one rich person may differ from that of another both live at the opposite pole from asceticism. The elder J. P. Morgan was quite a bon vivant, a swinger, and Rockefeller was a teetotaler and homebody; yet Rockefeller, among other things, maintained four palatial estates, one for each season of the year, from Maine to Florida. Although a tight-lipped Baptist elder, he was far from monkish.
The personal life of the rich, almost without exception, comes down to sensory gratification on a grand scale, gratification attained in the light of standards generally considered luxurious. A simplistic material determinism seems to rule their lives as by an iron law. Here and there, it is true, have been persons frugal to the point of miserliness, such as Hetty Green, but in general the rich are found to live according to popular conceptions of extreme luxury even though one may be comparatively restrained and another an obvious sybarite. They do, broadly, precisely what the average man in the street would do, neither more nor less, were he on their lofty pecuniary perch. What one may say in the most extreme criticism of them is that they are so ordinary, so common, so vulgar, yet placed in positions of extraordinary advantage. Far more than they themselves suppose, they are automatons, moved one way or the other almost always by considerations of money. To find a rich man, apart from an occasional eccentric inventor, living a life largely unmotivated by his money is, as I believe the record shows, a virtual impossibility. Successful inventors, yes; others, no.
The Gorgeous Setting
What unquestionably first strikes the most indolent observer about the personal lives of the rich compared with the nonrich is the opulence of their residential settings. These lush habitations, contrary to many hurried commentators, have more than a titillating value for outsiders. They are, I submit, deeply symbolic of a self-conception and of actual objective social status. They are, contrary to the eagle-eyed Veblen, more than an exercise in ostentatious display and conspicuous consumption. They are, in fact, a dead giveaway of what it is all about.
Since the time of the Pharaohs, and no doubt even before, the head man in the kingdom always had the biggest house, a palace, and with the advent of progress in
utilizing labor he came to have many palaces suitable to the different seasons of the year and different moods. The supporting nobility and priesthood had lesser but sufficiently palatial habitations, and it was only as some of these came to have more to say in ruling the realm that their homes began to rival in size that of the monarch.
At the risk of provoking the bargain-basement sages into charging that I am oversimplifying, let me say it plainly on the line: The people with the most say-so have always had the largest and most elaborate domiciles. Big house historically means big man in the realm; conversely, small house means nobody in the realm.
As direct survivals of this tradition, embellished by Roman emperors, Louis XIV, the czars and a few others, we today see the pope, spiritual ruler over some 500 million precious immortal souls, living in a series of huge palaces, one of which is set in his own small city. We see the figurehead kings and queens of England still housed in extraordinarily large houses, some approaching the size of the Kennedys' Merchandise Mart in Chicago. And we see the successors to the czars living in the Kremlin, no shack.
From time to time a vast residence has been awarded at the expense of the realm to someone who has been of signal service to the rulers, as in the case of huge Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, awarded in Queen Anne's reign to John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, for his victory in 1704 over the French and Bavarians at the decisive battle of Blenheim in Bavaria. Winston Churchill spent much of his boyhood in this truly imperial edifice.
A very big house, then, or a series of big houses, means historically that the inhabitant is either a ruler or one very closely associated with rule. It is never, never, never the case that anyone functionally or otherwise dissociated from rule, anyone such as an artist, philosopher, civil service official or scientist, inhabits such a big house except as a guest. The big houses, then, are the outward signs writ plain of a class habituated to rule, reminding us of the principle of Roman law: Cui bono?
As the United States does not have anything like a ruling class, according to an extensive assortment of fully housebroken professors, we are confronted here by an apparent anomaly: People who in theory have no more to say about governance than the ordinary truck driver somehow inhabit some of the choicest and most expensive establishments of all history. In American political theory, to be sure, the rulers are fundamentally the whole people, who from time to time duly elect their representatives. These latter, if anyone, are held to be the real rulers. Yet these putative real rulers, unless they already belong to the very rich class, never inhabit dwellings of comparable opulence even if they reach the White House, which is itself a comparatively modest affair with a short-term lease.
When American presidents leave office they almost invariably return to relatively unimposing dwellings--Eisenhower to a remodeled frame farmhouse in Gettysburg, Truman to a Victorian frame house in Independence and Lyndon B. Johnson eventually to a not very impressive ranch house in West Texas. With no intention of being disparaging, one can see that these ex-presidential habitations, comfortable enough to be sure, would hardly rate as servants' quarters on most of the larger estates. Members of the Supreme Court, as anyone can see, occupy nothing more substantial.
This is not to say that the president and members of Congress are not powerful for stipulated periods within constitutional limits. But their power, whether it consisted of Wilson steering the country far off center into World War I or Johnson by his own decision intervening massively in faraway Vietnam, was always exercised at the prompting and with the approval of the magnates. We know this, first, because the magnates publicly applauded and, secondly, not a single one of them seriously dissented. Except for certain features of policy under Franklin D. Roosevelt, when
counsels in a crisis were divided, the magnates have been in general harmony with national policy all along. Either the magnates wanted that policy (and heavy documentation by Gabriel Kolko for 1900-12 in The Triumph of Conservatism shows them as the very source of policy) or the political managers have been clairvoyant enough to hit upon policies that would meet with the broad approval of the magnates even as many highly intelligent and informed nonmagnates dissented (as with respect to Johnson on the Vietnam policy).
Much policy deeply affecting the lives of most citizens, as far as that goes, is never submitted to the political powers for their rescript. For whatever is not specifically forbidden under the rule of freedom is permitted. As a single example, let us consider technological innovation, always embarked upon by private decision but invariably of vast public consequence. in pursuit of greater economy and efficiency, higher productivity per man employed and more substantial profits, the corporate managers, deputies of the big owners, constantly refine the technology of production. More particularly they have recently, without any prompting word from formal government, plumped heavily for labor-eliminating automation. And although the size of the labor force has steadily increased it has not increased parallel with population growth, thus dealing large sections of the populace out of it, notably the younger, the crudely skilled and those designated as superannuated at sixty-two to sixty-five years. No representatives, near or remote, of those dealt out ever passed on the policy that has had such effects. The measures were simply taken by private, unilateral decision in consonance with sound corporate practice, an example of veiled power that has wide effects.
More formally, now, with the social effects apparent, the young were bidden to remain in school, for which many have no stomach either because of personal incapacity or because a considerable segment of conventional schooling is plainly boring and irrelevant to any felt issue. Many simply cannot stand the dull routine. Again, many in a pecuniary milieu want to earn money so as to feel some illusory independence. As a consequence, the country now possesses a large section of disoriented young, neither at school nor at work and getting into a variety of headline- making mischief from congregating in unseemly hordes to sedulous extra-curricular copulation and drug addiction.
No elected representative ever passed on the decisions that produced these results. The decisions were made quietly by quiet men in quiet corporate boardrooms.
The big houses, in brief, are occupied by the basic decision makers, and this has been the rule down through history. A difference, however, is that in the United States the decisions are only indirectly and obliquely imposed.
It should not be supposed that, the idea of this self-conception of rulership on the part of the rich is sustained only by the fact that they have a penchant for assorted ducal mansions and grounds. That this is the self-conception is shown, too, by the way many of them sign their names with Roman numerals appended, betokening an established family line in the style of European nobility. It is shown, furthermore, and more convincingly, in the affinity of the American rich, particularly with respect to their young women, for marriage with members of the European nobility.
Such marriages have taken place by the hundreds and I will not trouble once again to cite and update them. The most spectacular of them was the marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough, the two offspring of which are directly in the ducal Marlborough line. That the motivation in these marriages was the quest for titles, mainly on behalf of the mothers of daughters, is made clear by the fact that wealthy
young American males rarely married a titled European female; for in that case the title was not shared. 2
Almost always it was the case that marriage took place when the title could pass and the offspring, grandchildren of American commoners, could be authentically ennobled. "I am the mother of a genuine, 24-karat duke," the American woman could sigh in quiet idiotic joy.
It is obvious that the American industrial rich, not sharing the distaste of the Founding Fathers for titles, identified themselves with and saw themselves playing a role similar to European nobility and royalty.
True, a self-conception is not necessarily a reflection of reality; it could be pure fantasy. It is on other grounds, of actual rulership, that we see that the self-conception was not mistaken. The big-rich of the United States are in fact if not in form American dukes; the general populace pretty much enacts the role and has the outlook of peasantry, most of them quite gladly.
Patterns of Residence
While much has been written in detailed description of the opulent and vasty residences of the freedom-loving rich, and many photographs of them have been published, it has not been noticed as far as I am aware that they occur in distinct, different patterns.
These patterns are as follows:
I. The compound, or multiple estate, containing many large residences of different members of an extended family and sometimes including an entire village and much acreage.
2. The cluster or territorial grouping of separate estates of an extended family.
3. Scattered estates up to fifty or more of the different branches of an extended family.
4. The single country estate of a nuclear family, usually the mark of someone new to wealth.
In all cases it should be understood that the estate is merely the family center. There remain to be reckoned town houses, distant estates in nonurban terrain and foreign estates; many wealthy Americans own either European or Latin American estates and a few persons have them in northern Africa, particularly Morocco.
One function of the large estate, of course, is to instil awe and thereby place social distance between the owner and the clamorous hoi polloi.
The question of preserving social distance is important for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it would be awkward in many ways if rich and poor were closely mingled. It would certainly be socially awkward when the rich man sat down to a feast and the poor man turned to his stew and grits. As a matter of common sociability the rich man would be expected to offer some of his steak and endive salad to the poor man and to accept some of the stew. If it were only one or a few poor men asked to partake of a sumptuous repast it would be one thing; but if the participation were quite general it would be another. A man worth $100 million would be broke over night, for example, if he treated all the families in the country to a single steak dinner at his expense.
Social distance, then, is seen to come down, among other things, to a matter of economy. One cannot invite everybody into the plantation and remain rich for long. The visitors will literally eat one out of house and home, like invading locusts. That the rich man is not ordinarily this open-handed does not signify that he is especially ungenerous;
he is merely prudent and posts his various signs: "Private, Keep Out. " Privacy becomes a cult.
Examples of Residential Patterns
A prime example of the compound or multiple-dwelling arrangement is the Rockefeller estate, Kykuit, of 4,180 acres at Pocantico Hills, New York, just east of Tarrytown in the fabled Sleepy Hollow country. Such land in the region sells at $5 to $10 thousand per acre and higher. Until Winthrop left for Arkansas all the brothers had each a large house on this estate, where lived also Rockefeller I and II. The place has many scores of buildings, for maintenance and the housing of a large staff, and includes a $1 million playhouse (at cost many years ago) that holds bowling alleys, tennis court, swimming pool and squash court. 3
The Rockefeller brothers also have New York City residences. John III and his wife share a large duplex apartment on the upper East Side and in 1950 built a house for guests near fashionable Beekman Place. 4 Nelson and his family occupy a triplex penthouse on Millionaire's Row of Fifth Avenue, facing Central Park. 5 David, Laurance, Rodman C. and Winthrop all have separate domiciles on New York's upper East Side, as shown in the telephone directory.
Nelson owns a large ranch in the highlands of Venezuela on which he sojourns at intervals, Laurance has a plantation in Hawaii and Winthrop has a palatial working plantation in Arkansas. It is not, however, necessary for the wealthy to own their separate places of residence; many of them lease large places from time to time in various parts of the world or take over entire floors in de luxe hotels as the occasion seems to require. They are, therefore, to be found now and again flitting in and out of Paris, London, the Riviera, the Bahamas or Puerto Rico.
Kykuit is bisected by a public road that affords views of dense forests and open fenced fields on either side for a stretch of many miles; this road is Route 117, connecting North Tarrytown with Pleasantville, New York.
Once entirely open to the public, only part is now open for hiking, horseback riding and hunting. But where the family homes are it is "as remote from the outside world as a fortified principality. " 6 Tight security is maintained: "high stone walls, massive iron gates, alert guards, police dogs and miles of barbed-wire fences make the homes a sanctuary. " 7 The home of David, however, is right on the main public road.
The main house, Kykuit itself, until his death occupied by John D. II and his wife, is a fifty-room granite structure in modified Georgian design with spacious views of the surrounding country. It has four stories with guest rooms on the third and fourth floors. 8
More recently the widow of John D. II, finding this edifice too roomy, constructed elsewhere on the estate a modest $300,000 Georgian home of only ten bedrooms. The destiny of the big house has not apparently yet been decided.
Various price tags have been put on all this by different commentators but as the books of account have not been made public it is perhaps misleading to cite any. When Rockefeller I died the New York Times (May 24, 1937) said the single granite house had cost $2 million to build, while the estate took $500,000 a year at Depression prices to maintain. The entire affair required a staff then of 350. Standard equipment throughout are elevators, air conditioning and just about anything in the way of appurtenances, comforts and conveniences one cares to name. The domicile of no potentate is any better equipped.
This compound or multiple assembly style of dwelling was adopted by the numerous Kennedys for their summer residences at Hyannisport, Massachusetts. For more
prolonged residence they appear to find the scatter-type of dwellings more suitable. Many families, indeed, have their summer estates in the compound form, a great many on coastal islands. In addition to the numerous Forbes family, whose places dot Naushon Island near Martha's Vineyard, there are many others of a similar nature. Islands appear to hold a great attraction for the rich, insuring complete privacy, and on them one finds the compound of estates and at times a collection of seasonal estates of many different high-ranking families, such as Jekyll Island off the Georgia coast was until the 1940's. The biggest island layout, of course, is Santa Catalina Island off California, owned by William Wrigley, Jr. , the chewing gum king, for many years. This sort of thing, one might say, is really living, for with an island of one's own one is really the local sovereign. 9
The more numerous Du Ponts provide the chief illustration of the cluster type of massed estates in northern Delaware and extending over into nearby Pennsylvania. Because of the many large Du Pont houses strewn about, the region has been dubbed by some as "America's chateau country" and "the du Ponts' duchy of Delaware. " 10
The largest of the Du Pont estates--Longwood, Nemours and Winterthur--have been given tax-free endowments as public museums so that the average citizen can now go and get some foretaste of what Valhalla is really like; but the names of two dozen others strew the countryside: Montchanin, Granogue, Chevannes, St. Amour, Louviers, Bellevue, Guyencourt, Owl's Nest, Bois des Fosse? s et al. 11
Latterly many of the Du Ponts, according to a recent expert biographer, have taken to acquiring more modest habitations such as Hexton of Samuel Francis du Pont, which we are reassured "has dignity without formality, spaciousness without ostentation, ease without opulence. " 12
It should not be supposed that Du Pont residences are confined to Delaware. Lammot du Pont, who died in 1952, had a big summer place on Fisher's Island, New York, near the mouth of Long Island Sound. Many of the wealthy have summer dachas on this hallowed isle. Alfred I. du Pont moved to Florida, where he left the mammoth Nemours Foundation noticed earlier. Others have extra residences by the scores, city and country, tucked away elsewhere.
For a detailed description with photographs of a fabulously elegant Du Pont house the reader is referred to Folsom. 13
The four third-generation branches of the Vanderbilt clan, less cohesive than either the Rockefellers or Du Ponts, scattered their many separate palazzi to all points of the compass.
The most ornate Vanderbilt place among many is the French Renaissance chateau of George W. Vanderbilt near Asheville, North Carolina, built when he had achieved hereditary success at the age of twenty-six. It contains 250 rooms and was set in 146,000 acres (now 12,000 acres) with a three-mile drive through 500 varieties of flora from the front gate to the house. 14 Inside views of the house show it to be, like many homes of the American rich, a quite literal variation on the themes of grandiloquent opulence expressed at Versailles and Fontainebleau. "As conceived by Mr. Vanderbilt, his new principality was typical of those developed by royal families in Europe hundreds of years earlier. " 15 This place was inherited by his daughter Cornelia and, as of 1964, by her two sons, George and William Cecil. Here is an example, one among many, of an original name lost to view through a distaff marriage. The original cost of this place in 1895 was estimated at $7 million and its present value is set at $50--$60 million. 16
Vanderbilt mansions, one after the other, used to dominate Fifth Avenue in New York but have since been torn down to make room for lucrative skyscrapers. Frederick W. Vanderbilt built a vast stone palazzo overlooking the Hudson River at Hyde Park, New York. Avoiding inheritance taxes, it was left to New York State and is now operated as a museum of high life in yesteryear. Cornelius Vanderbilt, another grandson of the founder, built The Breakers at Newport, with interiors that are practically replicas of royal French palaces. Other Vanderbilts played house with big houses elsewhere. Many presently occupied by authentic Vanderbilts are scattered about the country.
More usually a wealthy family has one or two single country estates and one or two town houses, such dispositions of course depending on the size of the family and the fortune.
Although the trend is now toward less ornate or more secluded places on distant shores, some of the original big houses, along with their large truly royal art collections, have since passed to public or educational use so as not to figure in testamentary estates for tax purposes.
Data, descriptions and dazzling photographs of a few among many ultraelaborate chateaux are given by Folsom in the following: Vizcaya, of James Deering, Miami; Marble Casa, of Henry M. Flagler, Palm Beach; Ca 'd' Zan, John Ringling, Sarasota; Shadow Lawn, Hubert T. Parson, former president of F. W. Woolworth Company, West Long Branch, New Jersey; Fifth Avenue mansion, Henry Clay Frick, New York City, lower floor now an art museum housing the Frick collection; Tudor mansion, Andrew W. Mellon, Pittsburgh, now Mellon Hall of Chatham College; La Cuesta Encantada, William Randolph Hearst, San Simeon, California; San Marino, Henry E. Huntington, San Marino, California; Ophir Hall, Whitelaw and Ogden Reid, Purchase, New York, now part of Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart; The Elms, E. J. Berwind, Newport; various mansion-sized Newport "summer cottages" belonging to Dukes, Youngs, Mrs. Perle Mesta, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, Vanderbilts, Firestones, Jelkes, Van Rensselaers, Havemeyers and others; Belcourt Castle, O. H. P. Belmont, Newport; Ochre Court, Ogden Goelet, Newport, now part of Salve Regina College; Stan Hywet Hall, Frank A. Seiberling, Akron; Fair Lane, Henry Ford, Dearborn, Michigan, part now of Dearborn campus of the University of Michigan; Meadow Brook Hall, Mr. and Mrs. Alfred G. (Dodge Motors) Wilson, Rochester, Michigan, now part of East Lansing campus of Michigan State University; and English manor house, Edsel Ford, Grosse Point Shores, Michigan.
These, let it be understood, are only a very few samples among many.
While the ducal country and foreign estate is still part of the standard equipment of the very wealthy, the big town house has been largely replaced by the cooperative luxury apartment which in many cases amounts to a large town house sequestered behind the flat facade of an apartment building. The advantage of a cooperative apartment is that it need never become a taxable white elephant but can be sold at full value as it is or broken down into more saleable smaller apartments. Taxwise, the cooperative apartment is a liquid asset as the big town palazzi and their art collections failed to remain under post-1913 tax policy.
The Rockefeller estate at Pocantico Hills is almost certain to wind up either as a huge public park, a fashionable real estate development or as part of each.
After having been forced to accept by testamentary bequest several large country properties that thus escaped figuring among taxable assets, New York passed a law requiring that all such bequests must first gain the consent of the state in order to escape the cash-draining tax net.
Dazzling Interiors
The interiors of most of these houses are more spectacular than the exteriors, which are mostly impressive in their dimensions. As photographs, liberally supplied by Folsom, show very well, rooms are often of palacelike proportions with the marble walls covered by expensive paintings and tapestries. Rare Oriental draperies and rugs, entire imported paneled rooms from European chateaux and expensive bric-a-brac and furniture are in most places strictly de rigeur. Expensive is the operational word. The National Gallery in Washington now houses the Andrew M. Mellon art collection and the Frick Museum shows what Frick collected. There is, too, the opulent J. P. Morgan Library of rare medieval illustrated books and manuscripts, once a private sanctuary. This sort of thing, as a matter of fact, is scattered all around.
The magnates were, and many remain, art-minded, and no doubt saw themselves secretly as latter-day versions of Renaissance princes. But a difference in their relation to art is that, while the princes and later kings subsidized working artists, the American wealthy usually merely bid up the prices of extant art. A few today, such as Nelson Rockefeller, collect modern art and thus may be looked upon as giving monetary encouragement to living artists. But, by and large, art dealers rather than artists benefited from the artistic interest of the American magnates, who were traders and collectors rather than art patrons.
The artistic impulses of most of the rich are recognized in their own circles as essentially pecuniary. Thus, the Wall Street Journal, January 3, 1967, impiously notes that a work of art is looked upon as "a growth stock, a whopping tax deduction--or an artful fake. " Actually, says this authoritative publication, "it's possible for a painting to be all these things at once. "
"The rise in prices has led many purchasers to view art primarily as an investment whose growth potential puts many a high-flying stock to shame," said the Journal. "According to dealers and others in the art world, some 'collectors,' who not long ago thought Modigliani was some kind of Italian dish, now move in and out of the art market like so many Wall Street speculators, bunting bargains, and then trying to resell them at a fancy profit. "
Works of art, acquired at bargains, in other words have the potentialities of capital gains and do represent diversification of holdings in an always uncertain world. In any market they would always (unlike money) be worth something. This apart, as the Journal said, art works, whether genuine or fake, make possible huge tax deductions that offset actual money income. The way this works is as follows: a man buys a painting, genuine or fake, for $1,000, holds it a while and then donates it to a museum at a declared market value of $10,000, thus obtaining a net $9,000 deduction from taxable income for a tax-free gift to the always-to-be-considered public. If the museum spots it as a fake, it says nothing for fear of discouraging the later donation of genuine works. There is, thus, a ready market for palpable fakes.
In order to obtain tax benefits the operation requires only that the declared value of the gift exceed the cost, whatever it was.
"In surveying the appraisals used in justifying the tax deductions of 400 donated works," said the Journal, "IRS [Internal Revenue Service] found that the art objects had cost the donors a total of $1,471,502--but that their total declared 'fair market value' as deductions had climbed to $5,811,908. " The ruse is profitable whether the art work is authentic or not.
Art works, too, may play other financial roles. A man may pay $10,000 for a painting and later bestow it as a gift on a friend or relative. As a gift of valuable property this is theoretically taxable, but gifts of portable objects are not ordinarily scrutinized and, as far as that goes, the tax courts have ruled that valuable gifts to, say, a lady friend, are not
taxable; so to argue would check sentiment. An ardent admirer may give a series of such gifts to a lady and not be subject to a tax, thus building up her net worth tax free. The gifts, being valuable, may be used as collateral up to at least half their value against loans. And they may be sold privately for cash.
Art collecting, again, may be used to pay a large portion of inheritance taxes. Thus, as part of his general operation, a wealthy man, otherwise no aesthete, gradually builds up a collection of paintings of some artist or school; his very acquisitions have the effect of giving these paintings a scarcity value--and it is scarcity as well as vogue that gives these objects their appraisal value whether they are works of art, postage stamps, books and manuscripts or old coins. A collection that cost $10 million may ultimately have a market value of $50 million, which is recovered in careful sales and the proceeds used to pay inheritance taxes relating to revenue-producing properties as well. Two birds are thus killed with one tax stone: There is no capital-gain tax on the increment in value (death excluding capital gains under the tax law) and the proceeds pay all or a large part of taxes, thus preserving revenue-producing property for the inheritors.
Aesthetic objects thus play a dual decorative as well as pecuniary role.
Concluding this bit, it can be shown that the pecuniary approach to art has been thoroughly systematized for the benefit of a well-heeled clientele. For verification the reader is referred to two large-paged books: Richard H. Rush, Art as an Investment, Prentice-Hall, Inc. , Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1961, 418 pages, and Robert Wraight, The Art Game, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1965, 224 pages. The ins and outs, and the "angles," get full treatment here.
Apartment House Chateaux
Since World War II, even as more and more of the booboisie are found to be sleeping in subway trains, doorways, flophouses, parks and bus stations, there has been a surge of building large luxury apartment buildings in the larger cities: New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. This building boom has, perhaps, been greatest in New York City where on central Manhattan there have been erected scores of luxury apartment buildings, many of them cooperatively owned by the well-heeled tenants.
As it would require a great deal of space to list and describe them all let us concentrate on an outstanding recent example, the United Nations Plaza, as described by the always staid New York Times. 17
United Nations Plaza, of thirty-eight stories, is the tallest residential structure in the city and faces the United Nations headquarters from the north at 48th Street and the East River. The initial cost of each apartment is $25,900 for 31/2 rooms to $166,000 for a nine-room duplex "with its own little elevator, wood-burning fireplace and curving stairs, and with carrying charges that range from $248 to $1,590 a month. . . . The cost of the apartment is only the beginning for a lot of tenants. Fully a third of them have taken down walls, put up new ones, installed circular columns or big square pillars, and otherwise altered the original floor plan. And it is taken for granted that a majority of the tenants will upgrade bathroom fixtures and kitchen appliances. "
Although there were more than 335 basic apartments, some tenants acquired several and joined them together while enlarging rooms so as to have, in effect, a large townhouse behind a flat glass-and-aluminum facade. This is standard procedure in luxury apartment buildings. In many of the apartments metal fittings have been replaced with gold or sterling silver fittings.
Corner suites have seven-foot-high windows that stretch for forty-eight feet in the living-dining areas, and many look out over the East River. All apartments are air- conditioned and at the touch of a switch can be kept at any moderate temperature,
winter or summer. Bathroom floors and walls are of Carrara marble, kitchens are eighteen feet long and a gourmet restaurant on the ground floor offers room service to tenants.
Luxurious to the nth degree, the edifice has tenants who are fully a match for the setting. At the time of making its report, said the Times, among the owners,
. . . there are no theater people, no familiar television faces, and only one writer, Truman Capote. What is filling United Nations Plaza, especially the East tower, is a sort of power elite.
Of the 71 per cent that quietly make wheels go 'round, 69 per cent are senior vice presidents, executive vice presidents, presidents or chairmen of the board.
In big business they include John Dickson Harper, president of Alcoa, the company that put up the building; William Johnstone, chairman of the finance committee of Bethlehem Steel; Chester Laing, president of John Nuveen & Co. , investment bankers; and Lowell P. Weicker, president of Bigelow-Sanford, Inc.
In publishing they are Roy Larsen, chairman of the executive committee of Time, Inc. ; Andrew Haiskell, chairman of the board of Time, Inc. , and Mrs. Philip (Katherine) Graham, publisher of The Washington Post and president of Newsweek magazine.
The 9 per cent of the tenants who are lawyers include Christian Herter Jr. , whose father was Secretary of State, and William Pierce Rogers, who was Attorney General under Eisenhower.
Eight per cent are classed as persons of independent means; a good many of them have sold homes and taken apartments to simplify living.
Among the 6 per cent embracing various professions are William S. Brown, a partner of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, architects; Ross Claiborne, editor of the Dell Publishing Company, Inc. ; and Bonnie Cashin, who designs clothes for Seventh Avenue. . . .
Among the 6 per cent of the tenants who are identified with government or with philanthropic foundations are Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Raymond Dinsmore and Mrs. Albert (Mary) Lasker, widow of an advertising tycoon. . . .
Mary Lasker, whose apartment will not be finished until early summer, and who wanted to be no higher than the 10th and 11th floors because otherwise she would "be too far above the trees, . . . " [will use her apartment] as a kind of annex to her house on Beekman Place--where she will continue to live. . . . [She has an apartment of only five rooms] but it was actually made by taking three and a half apartments with a total of 22 rooms.
That the rich, as F. Scott Fitzgerald sensitively discerned, inhabit an altogether special reality is shown in what they designate a room. The dimensions of a living room in a lower middle-class home become in a rich man's house those of a dressing room, a mop room or a linen closet. Rooms, properly speaking, in a rich man's house are generally at least four times larger than average residential rooms, sometimes ten or even twenty times larger. . . . They are often of museum and ballroom calibre, as photographs show.
"To Bonnie Cashin, United Nations Plaza represents 'a whole new world. And moving into it is almost like going to a new country. . . . '"
Interiors and intimate methods of operation of United Nations Plaza have been shown on television. As there explained, the tightest security is maintained, both at the front door and with respect to deliveries. Delivery men must show credentials at various guarded barriers in the basement, will be admitted only on explicit instructions from on
high and must be checked in and out. Names of occupants are not listed on mail boxes. The security staff and supportive personnel have all had their backgrounds rigidly scrutinized before gaining clearance by standards reported to be more exacting than those of the FBI and CIA for their finely tuned personnel.
While by no means the only such place in the larger cities United Nations Plaza may be taken at least as the dernier cri in "compact," luxury urban living quarters even though some of its larger apartments are no more than annexes to and extensions of nearby town houses for overflow guests, power brokers and relatives.
Standard Equipment
Practically standard equipment in all the bigger houses of the superwealthy are items like pipe organs, extensive gardens and hothouses, interior and exterior swimming pools, chapels, statuary and sculpture strewn about, inlaid imported wall paneling and ceilings and a full line of all gadgets known to modern man. Expense has not been spared, money is plentiful.
Whereas early this century most of the big-rich owned their own private railroad cars and later their fleets of chauffeured automobiles, more recently many own their own long-distance airplanes standing ready at some nearby airport. Whereas upper corporation managers make free use of company planes to look in on plant operations in distant parts, the big stockholders have their private planes and crews. 18
The random reader will be happy to learn that the government thoughtfully provides a subsidy of $160 million per year to provide services for private and corporate aircraft and that taxes on aviation gasoline now cover only 4 per cent of this cost; the rest is charged to the general taxpayers. 19 Actually the government underwrites the wealthy 100 per cent.
The private large cruising aircraft appears to have largely replaced the private railway car and ocean-going steam yacht of an earlier day, although sports yachts are still present in single-ownership fleets.
Entertainment and Parties
These elaborate residences are used a great deal for entertaining and partying. The rich do a good deal of entertaining for friends and acquaintances because they do not ordinarily congregate in public places. If they did not provide a great deal of room in their homes for many guests and servile personnel they would, in order to avoid monkish seclusion, be forced to congregate where the public gathers in so-called public luxury establishments that are, in fact, largely patronized by pushers, entertainers, people "on the make" and obvious fourflushers. One rarely, as a matter of fact, sees any of the very rich in the presumably fashionable bistros. Here and there, now and then, yes; generally, no.
Expensive parties to mark various occasions have long been a predilection of the American rich, with the costs ranging from $250,000 to $1 million or more per shindig. The debutante party, through which the rich man presents his nubile daughters to the world, was long a standard affair with double orchestras blending entrancing sounds in huge ballrooms and champagne and caviar pouring down the gullets of thousands of well-heeled democrats amid banks of imported flora. While these exhilarating affairs (which seemed to outside observers to be rubbing it in) are now rarer, they are by no means entirely outmoded. The big party in general has given way to more discreet entertaining in small groups. They are, however, still served to the queen's taste.
A History of Luxury Parties in America would require a book of many hundreds of pages, the main source being the High Society pages of the leading newspapers. That
aspect of partying that exerts most fascination for the mythical man-in-the-street, however, is of the order of what is reported to have suited the staglike taste of the late T. Coleman du Pont, obviously a man of the people. "In 1912, in partnership with Charles P. Taft, the President's brother, Coly built the McAlpin Hotel in New York, and on its twenty-first floor he established his Manhattan pied-a`-terre. His parties there soon became famous for their gaiety and their pretty girls; Coly often had half the chorus of a Broadway show among the forty or more guests at an after-theater party. 'The General is loyal to a myriad of pretty girls who are proud to claim him as a friend,' a New York newspaper said in a needling story, 'and no one, not even Mrs. T. Coleman du Pont, seems to raise an objection. In fact, some people imagine that Mrs. T. Coleman du Pont must be a myth. One never sees her, never hears of her. '" 20
Dinner parties, sedate or hilarious, always were, and remain, a favorite form of entertaining eight to a dozen or so of the ranking gentry. While political figures from abroad are often present, no doubt useful in snagging distant concessions and other goodies, it is noticeable that local politicos are rarely on hand except in Washington, where political intrigue is the sole social interest. Generals and admirals, however, are much sought for a certain austere contrasting tone.
It would, in any event, be bad electoral image-making for a politician of the domestic variety to be counted among those present at some of the more rococo parties of the ultra-affluent, which smack to some of the more straitlaced in the constituencies of European royal revels simply because champagne (a high-class soda pop) out in the sticks connotes something exotically perverse.
A Map of American Wealth
If a map of the centers and nature of privately held wealth were drawn, it would show the larger corporations in their headquarters and principal plants as fortresses toward which raw materials are constantly moving and from which are streaming products. These fortresses would represent the "big business" factor.
The big banks, represented by a different symbol, would appear as special centers with influences radiating out into the world of "small business. " For in general, as we have noticed, "small business" is to a large extent the loan-supported business of the big banks, upon which some of the larger corporations are no longer dependent. Small business, paradoxically, is really fractionized big business.
The map would then show the family estates of the principal owners, numbering several hundred.
There would be symbols to show the locations of the principal metropolitan clubs and the principal pleasure resorts of the wealthy.
Corporate headquarters and big banks would tend to be clustered in New York City but plants, resorts and family estates would be more widely scattered, thinning out as one moved to the extreme west and south. In general, there would be considerable clustering around major urban centers and sparseness of symbols in nonurban areas.
Self-Image of the Rich
What all this shows, it would appear, is that the rich, despite the meagerness of their personal achievement as linmed in the preceding chapter, believe they are entitled to opulent settings. A divinity was once thought to hedge a king and it seemed only common sense that a divine personage be given the most opulent setting conceivable to man. The same sort of thinking applied to churchpols, who were believed to be in the closest confidence of the Deity. Faced by uncouth, undivine "robber barons," public
thought in Europe simply bowed to force majeure. It was difficult to dispute with armed gangsters.
The first thing that occurred to the newly emerged American rich was to ape the style of life of European nobility and royalty. The American rich, quite obviously, saw themselves playing the same relative roles as masters of the situation, "lords of creation" in the phrase of Frederick Lewis Allen. In the main, the style of life of the English and French higher gentleman became the style of life of the American rich, who took root in a country where, oddly, a powerful political symbol was still the log cabin.
Whereas European royalty and nobility played profound integral roles in European history, the latter-day American rich were more like hitch-hikers who opportunistically climbed aboard a good thing, They produced neither the technology, the climate, the land, the people nor the political system. Nor did they, like many European groups (as in England), take over the terrain as invading conquerors. Rather did they infiltrate the situation from below, insinuate themselves into opportunely presented economic gaps, subvert various rules and procedures, and, as it were, ride a rocket to the moon and beyond, meanwhile through their propagandists presenting themselves, no less, as the creators of machine industrialism which was in fact copied from England and transplanted into a lush terrain.
Let this be added: The fortune-builders were indeed organizers in a virgin terrain of little or no organization. They organized economic affairs according to well-establisbed European patterns, and for this service charged a fee that some commentators consider extortionate, others reasonable, What was it, really? It was extortionate, of course. Judging by their style of life they set a high value on their services which amounted to merely imposing their rule. If one evaluates their achievement in other than self-serving corporate terms, the great expense of maintaining their personal way of life begins to look very much like another instance of misallocation of resources. From my possibly jaundiced point of view, it does not seem to me that the country is getting any return for the wealth self-lavished on their style of living.
Lest anyone believe that I am particularly indignant about this prospect let me at once enter a disclaimer. I harbor no such indignation, not any more than I would have for a man who sees a particularly enticing meal outspread and sits down to enjoy it--a wholly natural thing to do. What indignation I have is reserved for those who contemplate the prospect and consider it in accord with the cosmic proprieties or even that a greater public show of deference is due. I would not wish to proclaim to the world that Americans are an especially slavish people; I do not believe such to be the case. But there is a considerable section of Americans, for reasons about which one can only speculate, who definitely are obviously slavish. They have been commented upon in the memoirs of visiting royalty and nobility taken aback by being advanced upon in the United States with alarming gesticulations of deference and extravagant signs and cries of voluntary submission.
My own explanation for this phenomenon is that the United States was largely settled by members of the lower classes of Europe in whom were deeply ingrained a sense of their class lowliness and fealty to the upper orders. Descendants of these still like to kowtow whenever they can, and the more affluent of them spend large sums of money so they can be presented at the English royal court, there to bow, curtsy and scrape, to any other royal or ducal ceremonial to which they can wrangle admittance or to the Vatican where they can experience the ineffable ecstasy of kissing the pope's ring, joy supreme. Some of this ingrained tendency, as it is easy to see, plays out on the domestic scene and is focused at times on public figures like Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller who, as the television cameras show, is at times plainly amazed and perhaps puzzled by
the ecstatic fervor of his enthusiastic public reception. That it is all pretty much of a preconditioned American mechanism, uncommitted to any particular object, is shown when it is directed, without partiality, at some former sausage-stuffer who has become a film star or at a toothsome female, obviously guilty of first-degree murder, who has just been released with cheers by a jury of her peers. Clamorous deference in such circumstances, as the newspapers regularly report, at times attains riotous proportions. What ensues is in fact a raving mass self-abasement.
In this purely American setting, the self-image of the rich is at times reflected back upon them in magnified dimensions, no doubt leading some of them to believe they have taken far too humble a view of themselves.
Deviants from the Norm
Among the wealthy there do not appear to be many who show the slightest tendency to deviate from the norm of being either a finpol, a pubpol, a corp-pol or a more or less graceful idler and rentier. The life of the rich, as we have noticed, is as patterned and stylized as the life of the poor, holding few surprises.
That this is the case is seemingly more and more clearly realized by at least some of them, of late notably by the pace-setting Rockefellers even though they have been outrun into healing by a Mellon and a Frick. The fourth generation of Rockefellers, however, seem to be deviating more than occasionally from the plush-lined ruts traveled by the general man of wealth. As a psychologist might say of them and a few contemporaries, they appear to be seeking an identity of their own by breaking into new ground, thus playing a role more original than that of mere descendants of John D. I, or even of travelers in his general trustified direction.
As one swallow proverbially does not make a summer one need not look upon what is happening in this quarter as a trend. It is perhaps, however, a portent that some of the descendants of the industrial rich may be about to retrace, if history grants them the chance, the path followed by the historically more distinguished descendants of the earlier and more modestly capitalized mercantile Boston and landed Hudson Valley gentry who were considerably eclipsed in wealth and central influence by the rise of the industrial rich.
Michael Rockefeller, twenty-three, son of Nelson A.
