The
difference
is enough to make the reasonable man prefer the American system with all its blemishes, about as one would unjoyfully prefer dysentery to cholera.
Lundberg - The-Rich-and-the-Super-Rich-by-Ferdinand-Lundberg
In subordinates, they may inspire envy or ridicule.
While an executive may make himself often inaccessible to subordinates as a symbol of his importance rationalized by his need for privacy, needless exclusiveness can arouse antagonism within his organization.
"
Symbols are assigned or self-selected, and in both cases there are grave dangers. A minor executive, for example, may acquire a desk set exactly like the one used by the chairman of the board, which "may be permissible, but it may also turn out to be poor strategy. " Will the chairman, one wonders, feel burned up?
As to assignment of symbols, Dr. Turfboer cites the sad case of a marketing executive given a much larger and more palatial office; yet the man had the effrontery to say he felt uncomfortable in his new deluxe surroundings. "Evidently," says Dr. Turfboer, "his self-esteem had not had a chance to rise to the level of the symbol bestowed on him. "
Offhand, a strictly part-time curbstone psychologist would assume that the man had very little self-esteem to begin with if it depended on anything so contrived as an office and its furbishings. 43
All is not well, as it is readily seen, along the corporate chain of executive command. Many of the men have doubts--about their worth, their importance, the value of their presence, their identities in the scheme of things, perhaps even about their potency. They need to be bolstered in a world of basic achievers, such as scientists.
Another study, however, finds top executives to be "Basically sound, above-average in effective intelligence. These men deal best with practical or tangible data in relation to problem-solving situations. They are as a group only fair conceptual thinkers. They do not do too well in dealing with theoretical, abstract or conceptual thoughts or ideas. "
As students they had above-average grades and were in the upper 25 per cent of their class at college, although not all were college graduates.
Most of them had engaged in some form of commercial venture before age fifteen and they are "Generally not socially aggressive. None were 'big men on campus' although some held fraternity offices. However, they were as a group somewhat lacking in the degree to which they participated in traditional student activities. "
Most of them married late, had children, and their wives played little noticeable role in their business affairs.
One fact applied to all: None came from poverty-stricken backgrounds. In other words, none was a poor boy who "made good. "
These findings were made by Dr. Louis F. Hackemann, president of Hackemann & Associates, an international management consulting company with headquarters in San Francisco. 44
Professor Mabel Newcomer, near the conclusion of a study based upon a very large number of cases--882--of top executive officers, says:
"Although he [the typical executive of 1950] has specialized training, he has never practiced independently, nor has he at any time run a business of his own as his father did. He is a business administrator--a bureaucrat--with little job experience outside his own corporation. His investments in 'his' company are nominal, in terms of potential control--less than 0. 1 per cent of the total stock outstanding. He is a Republican in politics; he attends the Episcopalian church, if he attends church at all; and he served the federal government in an advisory capacity during the war. He was, in 1950, sixty-one years of age, and he will probably be seventy when he retires. " 45
Of note here, direct verification in a study of the top executives themselves of what has been indicated before, is that the corporate executive is not ordinarily much of an owner. He is a hired man, the tool of big owners, never the servant of myriad small stockholders as in the fable of "People's Capitalism. "
Professor Newcomer makes the important point that corporations rarely comb the field looking for what would objectively be considered the best or most capable man for the top job. Why, in other words, do they "promote from within so frequently? And why do they promote so late? The reasons appear to be first, that the talent within the company is better known, and to that extent safer [nota bene--F. L. ], than outside talent. Also, there is always a feeling that one's own company is different and that intimate knowledge of its problems is important from the start. The president or chairman is likely to select his successor in advance and to groom him personally for the job. And loyalty to the company is stressed. Moreover, there is a sense of obligation to the officers with whom the chief has worked, and a conviction--which is doubtless justified--that morale will be higher and the chance of retaining able executives greater, if they are aware that the top offices will be filled from within. " 46
Corp-politan Vistas
To attempt anything like a complete survey of the executive and his sphere would be impossible short of encyclopedic format. Under the rubric Management the central reference room of the New York Public Library indexes nearly 4,000 volumes; under Executives, nearly 400. There is, too, some score of periodicals devoted to the topic.
So it is clear that the subject of management is a large one in a postulated democratic society where the individual is pretty much supposed to manage himself. Americans, in fact, are under constant political and economic management manipulation.
While many of the works on management are serious analytical and descriptive studies, the executive mystique, tending to show the superlative worth of the executive and his technique as such, occupies much attention. Management of property itself, it turns out, is an arcane science, worthy of graduate study in the universities.
For those who want a compressed view of the field there might be recommended the Reading Course in Executive Technique, published in eight volumes with many authors by Funk and Wagnalls Company, New York, 1948. The volumes are given a lengthy introduction, "Modern Executive Techniques," by the editor, Carl Heyel, who is president of Executive Techniques, Inc.
The books in this course are titled: Systematic Solution of Management Problems (how to think, operations control, management controls, manual of organization, use of statistics, charting the course); Human Relations (employee morale, employee suggestion systems, supervising women, hints on psychology, human relations in industry); Personnel and Industrial Relations; Creative Training Programs; Manufacturing Control; Distribution; Financial Control and General Office Management; and Public Relations. Thus armed, the aspiring executive can take over with confidence.
Management, it turns out, consists of a melange of many things, a smattering from many disciplines that turns into an ad hoc empiricism resembling a pseudo-science.
Much of the literature in management can be reduced to cautionary injunctions, applicable generally or in various specific situations to "Always do this," "Never do that," "Usually do this," "Usually do that," "Be very careful in doing this," etc. Concrete situations are cited from experience, sometimes careful observational studies such as those of Elton Mayo on how most easily to get maximum output from a work force. Taking all the injunctions together one is given what some writers term a "philosophy of management. " Troublemakers, so much sand in the gears, are especially unwanted and the place to spot them is at the personnel office, where the latest in psychological testing is put to use. Potential nonbelievers, doubters, scoffers, misfits and persons with "negative attitudes" generally must be weeded out lest they contaminate a basically sound work force and impede the smooth flow of profits.
Critics from time to time commiserate with the bureaucratic aspirant in the Leninist countries who must, before he arrives at the top, read the metaphysical works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and many lesser dialecticians. The American executive, however, to judge by the tomes he must read, is much worse off. For most of these writings are at best stodgy, usually turgid. And beckoning the American is no future society of shining mirages but, at most, an office with wall-to-wall carpeting, a gold key to the executive washroom and membership in a country club.
Not only are there special periodicals devoted to the executive and his sphere, but magazines of more general appeal do not overlook him. Fortune rarely lets a month slip by without at least one article on executives, of which a few since 1950 have been: "The Case of Charles Luckman," "The Nine Hundred," "Boards of Directors," "Do Stock Options Pay? " "How Hard Do Executives Work? " "Can Executives Be Taught to Think? " "How Executives Get Jobs," "Is There an Executive Face? " "The Executive Bonus," "Are Executives Paid Enough? " "How Executives Invest Their Money,"' "How Top Executives Live," "The Executive Crack-Up," "How Much Is an Executive Worth? " "Young Executive in Manhattan," "Executive Qualities," "Life in Bloomfield Hills," "The Pirates of Management," "Those American Managers Don't Impress Europe, "Executive Compensation: The New Wave," "How to Pay Executives," etc.
In "Those American Managers Don't Impress Europe" (Fortune, December, 1964) we were given a story of disillusion. American companies entering the European market, either by merger or establishing new plants, necessarily sent along American executives. Keyed by all the hoop-la from the American corporate press about high- powered, lynx-eyed American executives, Europeans proceeded to pay very close attention. Now, they apparently thought, they were going to see the very soul of American puissance in action. Alas, it was once again the story of mighty Casey at the bat. For the American wizards were found to be very so-so, nothing remarkable. After watching them Europeans felt reassured.
It might be argued that the Americans did not send their first team to play in a strictly bush league, and this was probably true. To see the varsity all-stars in action the
backward Europeans will have to come to the United States. Once they glimpse the Picassos in the executive washroom they will know they are in the very uterus of the big time, at the altar of the executive mystique. Now they will see how big, really big, decisions are made . . .
Twelve
THE REPUBLIC OF MONEY: THE PUBPOLS
As everything thus far inquired into has obviously flowered under the benign providence of government it is evident that government and politics have more than a little to do with the gaudy blooms of extreme wealth and poverty in the feverish American realm. It has not, to begin with, prevented whatever is the case. What it has ministered to, and how and why, will now be our theme.
How the government of the United States functions in all its ramifying complexity is the theme of ponderous treatises running into the proportions of Sears, Roebuck catalogues--composed by academicians somewhat left-handedly known as political scientists. Whatever they say is almost invariably correct in a formal sense as anatomical description, apart from any decorative filigree provided by such heady words as "democracy" and "freedom. "
What we are really interested in, however, is process, function--political physiology, as it were. Although many political scientists profess to deal with this aspect as well, they all tend to lose sight of the actual ball in play or to avert their eyes in horror at the clinches. They are as physicists would be who had never been in a laboratory, as members of a vice squad who had never been in a brothel or taken money under the table from a madame. They themselves were never in the celebrated smoke-filled backrooms, never on hand when the price was set, the bodies buried, the papers burned, the ballots destroyed, the payoff made, the double entendre arranged, the people bilked.
Like nearly everyone else in this sphere, the political scientist is dependent on reports, rumors, memoirs, documents, statistics, interpretations, deductions and more or less shrewd surmise. And, like everyone else, he is limited by his position as a strict outsider. Journalists are far more privy to what goes on than he, and indeed he depends on journalists for much of his information. It is one field where certain participants know more about it in its nook-and-cranny aspects than those self-dedicated to its systematic study.
The difference between government as reported by political scientists and government as it actually takes place is much like the difference between learned descriptions of amour and amour itself. The difference is far greater than that between description in general and phenomena in general, between symbol and act. The political scientist is in much the same outside position as a biologist or psychologist studying amour. What each says may be entirely correct, moderately enlightening or even exhilarating; but what the dedicated acolyte misses are the nuances these experts haven't been able to encompass even by delicate imaginative projection. Their often assumed delicacy is elephantine. Again, they often misinterpret simple rutting for amour, intrigue for politics.
Even more than the theoreticians of amour, who sometimes have the advantage of being tentative practitioners themselves, the political scientist is at a disadvantage: For he has never actually been in the situation, does not occupy a privileged position denied, say, to the editors of the New York Times. The terrain, clearly, belongs in the particular jurisdiction of someone else, as amour lies in the jurisdiction of the poet or madman. A poet, even a madman, now and then has something revealing or poignant to say about amour; it would be astonishing if a political scientist ever said anything about government that approached a Machiavelli or a Hobbes who, be it noticed, were nonscientific "insiders. "
The indubitable experts I call upon to bear witness in this chapter (leaving to one side the delicate question of my own expertise) will all be far, far closer to what goes on than any political scientist has ever been, valuable though the compilations, commentaries, commonplaces and occasional insights of these gentry may be as aides-memoires and reference classifications.
As most people have some more or less accurate conception of the gross mechanics of the United States government, seen mostly in rose lights and soft-focus, I omit the citation of basic supposed facts on which we might be improbably supposed to agree in advance. Let us simply descend on the phenomenon oozing in its habitat.
In much of what follows for quite a way I lean heavily on first-hand analysis by the erudite and resolutely democratic Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania, until his election in 1956 the Democratic burgomeister of dingy Philadelphia, magna cum laude, Harvard, '23--in brief, a man of parts. Having Clark on hand is pretty much like having a literate psychoanalyst stationed right on the vice squad itself, an entrancing and unexpected combination. Here and there I shall set the focus a little more sharply than does the truly able but somewhat romantic senator. He, although sufficiently forthright, is a gentleman and becomes queasy at spelling out certain details which I, here as a pathologist, will have no more hesitancy in scrutinizing in the light of the evidence available than has a coroner in examining a mildewed cadaver.
As Senator Clark has made microscopically clear, no doubt to the consternation of the more polite observers, each house of Congress is under the tight control of a dour inner clique, the general intended aim of which is to cater to favored ultra-acquisitive interests and to frustrate the general lightheartedly nonacquisitive interests. As far as these cliques are concerned, the general populace can go and slide on its collective buttocks if it has any complaints to make--and stick its finger in its ear for good measure.
To these twin cliques, composed to a man of self-certified back-country patriots, we owe the gamey tax laws, among others. Senator Clark stylishly refers to the cliques as "The Senate Establishment" and "The House Establishment. " They run Congress, when necessary with a heavy hand, at times in opposition to any president, sometimes as under Lyndon B. Johnson in close harmony with him. When they are in full-blown opposition, the government simply deadlocks, freezes, as far as rational adjustment to events is concerned.
The special merit of Senator Clark's analysis is that he shows at first hand the precise inner mechanics of Establishment control, so that even a child can understand it.
The senator endorses the conclusion of James Macgregor Burns that there are always two governing parties in power, a Congressional party and a Presidential party. The Presidential party is national, necessarily concerned with broad interests, and is at least halfheartedly oriented toward carrying out the cloudy party platform submitted every four years to the bemused voters. The Congressional party is devoted to particularistic self-seekers (as shown by near-the-spot sources other than Senator Clark); these include most of the members themselves as on-the-sly entrepreneurs. It is bipartisan--a coalition
of standpat Republicans and Democrats. It is generally opposed, usually by indirection, to the party platform, most of which it covertly sabotages. The function of the party platform is only to stir enthusiasm in Presidential voters. After serving this purpose it is subject to discard.
The Establishment, moreover, is as permanently and fixedly in power as the Communist leadership in Russia. Nothing about it alters over the decades except the fall of a few of its aging personnel by the wayside. Only extreme force and violence could remove it. It is anchored, in sober fact, in extra-legal violence, intimidation and terrorism as religiously practiced especially throughout the South but visible at times elsewhere.
The findings of Senator Clark were expressed at considerable personal risk. For no professional can ever give such pointedly documented critical testimony to the outside heathen without thereafter having every hand of the Establishment secretly raised against him. All that can now save Senator Clark from political oblivion is the popular constituency--by itself a weak reed, as every practicing politician knows.
Barriers against the Majority
Barriers to the expression of majority will at the governmental level are, among others, the following:
Many persons do not vote--some for the intelligent reasons that they suspect the electoral process is rigged or they do not know enough about the issues or candidates; most from indifference, apathy, intimidation, terror stemming from localized violence, simple mental or physical ill health or because they are barred from voting by peculiar residential requirements devised by local politicos with little enthusiasm for voting.
Only a bit more than 60 per cent now vote in presidential elections (presidents have never been true majority officers). On statewide bases, the voters always number fewer than 50 per cent in purely congressional elections and range downward to less than 10 per cent in other elections.
In 1962 only 46. 7 per cent of civilians of voting age cast ballots for House congressmen, a record high in a nonpresidential year. 1 In many states (all Establishment Country) the percentage of voters was far lower: 13. 7 per cent in steamy Mississippi; below 20 per cent in Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Virginia; between 20 and 30 per cent in Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas; and between 30 and 40 per cent in Kentucky, Maryland and North Carolina. The largest statewide vote for House congressmen that year was in Idaho with 66. 5 per cent. Only eleven states attained 60 per cent or better. 2
In 1964 even the presidential vote was below 40 per cent in Alabama, District of Columbia, Georgia, Mississippi (33. 3 per cent), and South Carolina. Usually it attains lower levels in these and some other states. 3
It is often said that the Democratic primaries are the true elections in the South, the election itself just a formality. But even so they do not involve a significantly large segment of the population. Again, it is often said that the poor showing in the South is traceable to the exclusion of Negroes; yet most of the abstentions are of low-grade whites. In 1960, Mississippi, with the largest proportion of Negro population, had less than 40 per cent Negroes in its population of voting age. 4 So it is not only the exclusion of Afro-Americans that accounts for the poor voting record of the South. It is mainly whites (or pinks and rednecks) who abstain from voting, in part because they are culturally as retarded as the sepia shades and in part because they are dissuaded by the local padrones.
The vast disparity of participation between presidential and congressional elections-- in 1960 the presidential vote drew 64 per cent--reveals the degree of purposeful abstention and lack of ardor in many people for an electoral process widely suspected of being greased and rigged and at least ineffective as a means of producing tangibly gratifying results. Too many people have seen too much remain the same after too many high-flown elections to be carried away by the prospect of another.
Many of those who vote do not vote their interests intelligently, perhaps do not even know what they are. Again, many of those elected obviously do not themselves know what the score is, as they show by asinine pronouncements. One must be very much of a mystic to believe that, at variance with rational criteria, there is something intrinsically valuable about a popular vote. It is at best a rough way of selecting somebody, even a Lyndon B. Johnson.
Having voted for one of the two handpicked puppets of backroom schemers (except where there are open primaries), usually with some childish ethnic or religious bias most prominently in mind, the functioning portion of the electorate favors a man (as often as not deemed unfit by the community for other walks of life) who is then thrown into close working contact with others of like mind arrived in the halls of government by the same dubious road. There are some 750,000 elective offices in the land and, considering the fact that there is at least one aspirant arrayed against every incumbent, it is evident that the mere filling of offices amounts to quite an industry in an economic sense--gives employment to many people.
Despite all hosannahs to the collective sagacity of the people (what politician or newspaper editor would publicly question it? ) the arrangements under which popular elections have been held since their inception have been as crooked as a fixed wheel in a low gambling house. Long asserted by the tough-minded, denied by the tender-minded, the plain fact was only recently underscored in terse decisions by the United States Supreme Court. Various transparent devices, the Court found, were traditionally used in many states to keep Negroes and other a priori undesirables from voting, thus trammeling gloriously free even if obtuse popular expression at the very source. A wider and subtler abuse was found in the legislative districts, federal and state, which had been traditionally gerrymandered by one-party and two-party establishment- controlled state legislatures so that in some cases enormous numbers of distraught voters, mostly urban and suburban dwellers, had only one dubious representative; while in other cases very few voters, mostly functionally illiterate rural hinds, also had a dubious representative. A handful of rustics thus were the means for stifling the representatives of thousands of trapped city patsies. The consequence was that even if a majority of a legislative body was allowed to prevail (not always the case, as we shall see) the majority did not reflect the majority of the voting population either in its wisdom, folly or confusion.
Although the Court has now issued its ukase against these practices, the men borne to prominence by them will remain on the scene and in office until they wilt; and there is no guarantee that something equally objectionable, or more so, will not be devised by the always cunning pubpols.
Americans, it is often said unthinkingly, believe in majority rule. Yet, oddly, they never have had it; they have always had oligarchic rule, usually of a rather low order. The farther one moves away from a gerrymandered, intimidated, meagerly educated, emotionally immature and partly disqualified electorate the fewer become the participants in any decision until in the legislatures it is always and invariably far less than a majority, either representatively or among those present. For all those brain-
laundered with the doctrine of majority rule this is, admittedly, a strange, even unpatriotic notion. Yet it is an exact statement of the case.
"The primary and overriding duty and responsibility of each member of the House of Representatives is to get re-elected," it has been well said by Adam Clayton Powell, long a proficient preacher of the Gospel and a successful and highly affluent congressman since 1945. 5
The Establishment legislator in Congress-and some not so classifiable--has three further informal, off-the-record duties: (1) to work loyally with the legislative Establishment as an organization man; (2) to insure his own position whenever possible as a member in good standing of the affluent sector of society by acquiring any available cash, securities, real estate, franchises, market tips or whatever else may be of value; and (3) to share his affluence with indispensable offstage key figures of his home district organization grouped around the state or district party chairman. Nobody, it is plainly evident, plays the game alone.
Not to do this is to leave himself at the mercy of the shifting whims and moods of a potentially unstable constituency, wide open to the claims of eager rivals for his office, Despite careful planning by the legislator, he is at times the victim of political upsets and internal feuds. Yet if he is of the Establishment he is never wholly extinguished even if he has not had time to become affluent, because he has made many Establishment friends who remember him as a "regular. " They see to it that his post- legislative life is enriched by various appointments suitable to a "lame duck"-- commissionerships, judgeships, receiverships, lobby clients and the like. He belongs to a bund.
The Congressional Establishment, as Senator Clark proves, has a life of its own, policies of its own, aims of its own. These either have no connection with the needs or desires of the nation as a whole or harmonize with them only occasionally, fitfully, incidentally and, as it were, accidentally. It is a parasitical oligarchy. It produces results of its own predetermined stamp. It explains much about the chills, fevers and shudders of American society--its volume of crime, riots and lynchings.
The Bottom of the Bird Cage
"The trouble with Congress today,". writes Senator Clark, "is that it exercises negative and unjust powers to which the governed, the people of the United States, have never consented. . . . The heart of the trouble is that the power is exercised by minority, not majority rule. " 6
As in Soviet Russia and Red China, power is in the hands of solidly installed intriguing manipulators, with the difference that in the United States the intrigue takes place behind a facade of reasoned if blurry constitutionality. In Russia and China the bayonets show through the periodic purges.
The difference is enough to make the reasonable man prefer the American system with all its blemishes, about as one would unjoyfully prefer dysentery to cholera.
"Our forms of government are heavily weighted against any kind of action, and especially any that might alter significantly the status quo. It takes too many units of government to consent before anything can be done. " 7 This, of course, is a truism. The constitutional bulwarks against tyranny, placed there by the Founders' hands, are used to produce a creeping, low-key tyranny.
It is the third branch of government, the legislative, where things have gone awry. Whether we look at city councils, the state legislatures or the Congress of the United States, we react to what we see with scarcely concealed contempt. This is the area where democratic government is breaking down. This is where the vested-interest
lobbies tend to run riot, where conflict of interest is concealed from the public, where demagoguery, sophisticated or primitive, knows few bounds, where political lag keeps needed action often a generation behind the times, where the nineteenth century sometimes reigns supreme in committees, where the evil influence of arrogant and corrupt political machines, at the local and state level, ignores most successfully the general welfare, where the lust for patronage and favors for the faithful do the greatest damage to the public interest.
. . . the legislatures of America, local, state and national, are presently the greatest menace in our country to the successful operation of the democratic process. 8
Lest the sheltered reader, tucked away in his bower, think that Senator Clark here delivers himself of an extravagant opinion or resorts to hyperbole, it is a settled conclusion among seasoned observers that, Congress apart as a separate case, the lower legislatures--state, county and municipal--are Augean stables of misfeasance, malfeasance and nonfeasance from year to year and decade to decade and that they are preponderantly staffed by riffraff or what police define as "undesirables," people who if they were not in influential positions would be unceremoniously told to "keep moving. " Exceptions among them are minor. Many of them, including congressmen, refuse to go before the television cameras because it is then so plainly obvious to everybody they are what they are. Their whole demeanor arouses instant distrust in the intelligent. They are, all too painfully, type-cast for the racetrack, the sideshow carnival, the back alley, the peep-show, the low tavern, the bordello, the dive. Evasiveness, dissimulation, insincerity shine through their false bonhomie like beacon lights.
The New York Times, customarily referred to as staid, has vouched editorially that the Massachusetts legislature is the most corrupt in the country. If this is so, the Commonwealth lawmakers have nosed out many others, including neighboring Rhode Island, merely by millimeters, The Times based its opinion on a solid report of the Massachusetts Crime Commission, submitted by impeccable leading citizens of the Bay State to Governor John Volpe in response to frenetic public clamor. "Corruption permeates the state, the report said, from town governments to the state house and involves politicians, business men, lawyers and ordinary citizens. " 9
This official report, a state document, cited wide-scale bribery by corporations and lawyers and the fact that legislators are on the payrolls of companies doing business with the state. Corruption was encouraged, the report said, because of "the lack of backbone" in the legislature.
As to this particular legislature, the Boston Globe analyzed it during the week of April 11, 1966, revealing elements of a pestilent tale. Most of the legislature, the Globe indicated, is composed of Babbittian local real estate dealers, insurance brokers, fixing lawyers, loan sharks, used-car entrepreneurs, miscellaneous fast-buck operators and obscure local hangers-on and roustabouts--many of them types who if they could not become attached to a public payroll, there to divert commerce their way, would be local misfits and perhaps panhandlers, vagrants, con men, family dependents, procurers or on local relief or unemployment rolls. The net impression given by the Globe (a rather reserved family paper) was of a political lumpenproletariat, a scabrous crew.
As to other legislatures, Senator Estes Kefauver found representatives of the vulpine Chicago Mafia ensconced in the Illinois legislature, which has been rocked by one scandal of the standard variety after the other off and on for seventy-five or more years. What he didn't bring out was that the Mafians were clearly superior types to many non- Mafians.
Public attention, indeed, usually centers on only a few lower legislatures-- Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois--and the impression is
thereby fostered in the unduly trusting that the ones they don't hear about are on the level. But such an impression is false. The ones just mentioned come into more frequent view because their jurisdictions are extremely competitive and the pickings are richer. Fierce fights over the spoils generate telltale commotion. Most of the states are quieter under strict one-party quasi-Soviet Establishment dominance, with local newspapers cut in on the gravy. Public criticism and information are held to a minimum, grousers are thrown a bone and not many in the low-level populace know or really care. Even so, scandalous goings-on explode into view from time to time in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri and elsewhere--no states excepted. Any enterprising newspaper at any time could send an aggressive reporter into any one of them and come up with enough ordure to make the Founding Fathers collectively vomit up their very souls in their graves. 10
The territorial base of the Establishment lies in the low-down one-party states. Ten have been found by careful political scientists to be generally one-party. They are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Virginia. Twelve were found to be practically one-party: Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Tennessee. 11 Ignoring for the moment still others that alternate over long periods as one-party jobs, like Florida recently, it is noticeable that the above array is nominally Republican as well as Democratic. Among the clearly Republican one-party strongholds are Vermont, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon and South Dakota. At least twenty-two states, then, or nearly half, are one-party setups, with some dozen others coming very close to qualifying. Public political scandals, it will be noted, are much less frequently heard of in the one- party states. Here it is as in one-party countries.
The single point to emphasize here is that Senator Clark is entirely correct, even reserved, in his sweeping reference to the legislatures. He does not exaggerate. As the lawyers would say, he is a sound witness. He does not, however, delve into the processes that brought such uncomely personnel into the legislative bodies. How did the honest electorate come to elect such canaille? That is, manifestly, another story, and is left to the next chapter.
As Senator Clark sees it, there is no continuing discipline in Congress whereby a majority of the members of a party are able, by simple vote, to discipline recalcitrant members interested only in blocking national measures and in feathering their own nests. The recent Powell and Dodd cases were token ceremonies. Although the parties have various committees, the policy committees give out no policies, the steering committees do not steer but block; and, in general, every man is for himself. And yet, important decisions are made.
The Congressional Establishment
The Congressional Establishment "consists of those Democratic chairmen and ranking Republican members of the important legislative committees who, through seniority and pressures exerted on junior colleagues, control the institutional machinery of Congress. . . . The official leadership group of the Congress--Speaker of the House, Senate Majority Leader, et al. are usually captives of the Establishment, although they can sometimes be found looking out over the walls of their prison, plotting escape. " 12
"It is important to note that the views of the Congressional Establishment are not shared by a majority of their colleagues, who, left to their own devices, would be prepared to bring the Congress into line to cope with the necessities of our times. " 13 This, as we shall see) may be gravely questionable.
The Senate Establishment is "almost the antithesis of democracy. It is not selected by any democratic process. It appears to be quite unresponsive to the caucuses of the two parties. . . . It is what might be called a self-perpetuating oligarchy with mild, but only mild, overtones of plutocracy.
"There are plenty of rich men in the Senate, but only a few of them are high in the ranks of the Establishment; and none of them would admit [sic! ] to a belief that the accumulation of great wealth is a principal object of life. This is another distinction between the American and the Congressional Establishments. The former [consisting of the prime beneficiaries of the status quo] has, despite its slightly liberal orientation, definite overtones of plutocracy, although its tolerance is much more for inherited than for recently acquired wealth. " 14
Senator Clark now comes to the ties that bind the Congressional Establishment. They are: a common militant belief in white supremacy, a stronger devotion to property- ownership rights than to rights of the person, strong support of the military establishment at all times, marked belligerence in foreign affairs and an absolute determination to block internal congressional reform.
"A substantial number of the members of Congress in both parties are the product of political forces which give them a rural, pro-business, anti-labor, isolationist, conservative perspective with an attitude toward civil rights which ranges from passive unconcern to outright hostility. " 15
It is plain that the legislative strength of the Big-Business Establishment is, ironically, mainly in the agrarian districts. What are the "political forces" to which Senator Clark here refers in a somewhat opaque manner? They may be summed up in a word: money. The rural legislator--not directly tied to the business system, which is invariably weak in his home district (few stockholders, consumers, corporation employees or factories are found there)--has something to sell: his vote. And he sells it in a circumlocutional way, wrapped in some rococo principle such as states' rights, sacred privacy, economy, government anti-centralism, economic individualism or plain pure Americanism. This is the kernel of support by rustic solons for softly regulated big-city industrialism.
Politics, popularly thought to consist mainly of elections, really begins only after elections, when those elected come together to divide the spoils. The meetings of any legislative body, as of a floating crap game, must be under rules, which like laws themselves must emanate from the legislative body itself. The Constitution does not stipulate how Congress must govern itself. This is a "political question," wide open.
One of the Senate rules is that there may be unlimited debate; no senator may be silenced, unless, under Rule XXII, two-thirds of the senators present vote to terminate debate. With all senators present, this rule requires 66 votes to end debate. If only 35 refuse to limit debate, those who have the floor may go on talking endlessly, in relays. Such filibustering blocks all business until an agreement is reached to withdraw some proposal disliked by a sometimes very small minority.
As Senator Clark notes, the United States Senate is the only open legislative body in the world under such an extravagantly absurd rule, which calls to mind the veto power held by any member in the House of Nobles of the old Polish Kingdom. There the rule, more severe than ours, so effectively paralyzed the country as to leave it an easy prey to neighboring Prussia, Russia and Austria.
From 1789 to 1806 the Senate rules included the motion for the previous question, as provided for in Jefferson's Manual. On two occasions it was used to close debate. Since 1811 the motion has been used frequently in the House to end debate and is provided for in House Rule XVII. Virtually all the state legislatures allow the procedure, which,
as Jefferson pointed out, was used in the British Parliament as early as 1604. It is not, as Senator Clark reminds us, alien to hallowed Anglo-Saxon parliamentary procedure. It is, in truth, almost sacred and not to allow it full rein is ground for the deepest suspicion.
May a majority of the Senate at the beginning of a new Congress vote to terminate debate in order to pass on a change in the standing rules? This question was put point- blank as recently as 1963 by the vice president as the presiding Senate officer. In response there were only 44 ayes and 53 nays, with no roll call. The Establishment had triumphed, by a clear majority. (The question has since been put at the opening of every term with a similar outcome. )
Early in 1964 on a cloture petition that would have ended further debate on the question of a change of the rule--and which, under the rule, required a favorable vote of two-thirds of those present--the Clarkian majority lost by 54 for and 42 opposed. Senator Clark draws comfort from the fact that, including 4 absentees, the Senate at the time stood 56-44 in favor of cloture, only 10 short of the necessary two-thirds. But the earlier vote, with 53 nays, showed the full fire-power of the Establishment on the bedrock issue. On such showdowns the Establishment has thus far been able to muster far more than a third--pointedly, more than a half.
The Establishment itself is not a majority but it can, owing to the many strings in its octopal fingers, pull many unhappy non-Establishment senators into line when all the chips go down. On basic questions affecting its own power it is, in sober fact, a majority.
The sole contemporary full-face defeat of the Establishment was on the Test Ban Treaty, which came to a vote September 24, 1963, after a long debate. Two-thirds of those present and voting were required for ratification under the Constitution. The vote was 80 to 19 in favor.
Those who voted "No" at the time constituted the stone-faced core of the Senate Establishment in Senator Clark's view: Russell and Talmadge of Georgia, Stennis and Eastland of Mississippi, Long of Louisiana, Byrd and Robertson of Virginia, Byrd of West Virginia, McClellan of Arkansas, Thurmond of South Carolina, Curtis of Nebraska, Goldwater of Arizona, Simpson of Wyoming, Jordan of Idaho, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, Bennett of Utah and Tower of Texas. Most of these were from rule-by-terror states, nearly all from one-party states. Mundt of South Dakota, who usually votes down the line with the Establishment, defected.
But for changes in Rule XXII and cloture all of these, with Mundt, voted "No," including the following Establishment people who had defected momentarily on the Test Ban Treaty: Ellender of Louisiana, Hayden of Arizona, Holland of Florida, Johnston of South Carolina, Hill and Sparkman of Alabama, Cannon of Nevada, Cotton of New Hampshire, Williams of Delaware and Dirksen of Illinois. Half of these were also from rule-by-terror states; most were from one-party states.
It is the men mentioned in these two paragraphs, according to Senator Clark, who constitute the nucleus of the present Senate Establishment, which has its counterpart in the House. How one stands on Rule XXII determines whether one is for or against the Establishment.
A few of those mentioned are not present as of 1968. Such absence makes no difference to the Establishment because fresh replacements are always available approximately from the same states. When death approached Byrd of Virginia, the ailing senator retired and had his fifty-year-old son appointed in his place--an hereditary senator! Hardly any of the states represented by Establishment senators are
industrialized--only Illinois and Delaware. The rest are predominantly rural and agricultural or extractive; most are nonurbanized and are of exceptionally low general educational levels--defective schools, few libraries and bookstores, mediocre newspapers, poor radio-television programs, etc. Money for these is shot away nationally in wars. The core of the group is the southern Democratic bloc, which has been said to be the South's revenge on the rest of the country for the loss of the Civil War. But it has many members from parts of the country that are as economically and culturally retarded--in general, the Bible Belt, which tends to look indulgently on terror and intimidation.
The Establishment people are not men of parts; they are devoid of generally esteemed talents. None, possibly excepting McClellan and Sparkman, is a persuasive speaker. Many such as Eastland show themselves conspicuously deficient in reasoning powers, confidently propounding howlers in elementary logic that would shame most college freshmen. Nearly all appear to be quite innocent of acquaintance with semantics. Although most are members of the bar, none is rated high as a practicing lawyer. Few seem to be well read. None, as far as the record shows, is a writer; Goldwaters books of shabby notions were ghost-written. Few if any are soundly schooled. Their knowledge of the world--and of the language itself--appears to be meager. Their talents lean almost entirely to simple intrigue. Everett Dirksen is their prototype of a prophet. They are a drab crew.
If these people did not band together as they do behind Rule XXII, if they relied on their own capabilities in open debate on the merits of issues, they would stand forth in all hollowness among more talented men. And this is one reason for the Establishment: It is a refuge for the untalented, a closed trade union of the meagerly endowed.
What do Establishment members want? Are they merely interested in preserving the ties that bind them together and give them factitious substance: Rule XXII, white supremacy, the celebration of property and military derring-do and a truculent stance in foreign affairs? So to suppose would be to credit them with very limited, purely symbolical objectives. Actually, as Senator Clark stresses, many members of the Establishment go along with other measures, some with quite liberal measures, as long as Rule XXII and white supremacy remain inviolate. They are political traders, keen for cheapjack opportunities.
When blockages arise under Rule XXII, the Establishment is in a position to trade. In return for concessions it becomes its turn to make demands, to enforce its gloomy will on the country.
Customary analyses of Congress distinguish Republicans from Democrats, Southerners from Northerners and Westerners and conservatives from liberals. The latter distinction suggests, misleadingly, that there are reasoned attitudes present rather than rationalization for narrowly pecuniary self-interest. Political scientists are united in believing that national party affiliations are meaningless, that congressmen nearly all stem from purely local state and district factions. 16 Nor is the regional distinction fundamentally any more important than that of party.
There are, in truth, more fundamental distinctions to be observed. There is, first, the Establishment and anti-Establishment distinction that Senator Clark brings to view, with most of the Establishment people organization men from Soviet-style one-party districts or states. As unchaperoned strangers in them quickly discover, most of these states have extremely inquisitive polizei. Few such states are industrialized, few are very rich, and the rich ones, like Texas, are largely absentee-owned, obvious colonies of Wall Street and State Street. In all, organized politics offers one of the few sure roads to personal
affluence, functional latitude and renown. In the industrial states there are many such roads.
Much about American politics would be clearer if one thought of a metropolitan and a colonial or provincial United States. Metropolitan United States consists of southern New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, California, perhaps the state of Washington and the very eastern portions of Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota. just about everything else is nonmetropolitan, culturally below par and holds nearly all one-party politics. It is more like eastern Europe than like eastern United States.
Economically, this division is generally made as between agrarian and industrial states. Yet the congressional politics of the representatives of the agrarian states are not distinctively agrarian. Elected by a politically illiterate, often very small electorate unaware of the true drift of affairs and with few vital demands of its own to make, congressmen from these states are far freer than those of the metropolitan states to place their votes where the most money is, on the side of big property. For doing this they are allowed to join the propertied class by backstairs methods and are impressively referred to as conservatives.
Leadership in the nonmetropolitan states is noticeably below par (one of their basic deficiencies) owing to the steady drainage of homegrown talent into the metropolitan sector. It is not that the nonmetropolitan region fails to produce talented leadership material. It does produce it but discourages it and loses it steadily to the metropolitan sector, culturally more attractive. New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and other metropolitan centers fairly crawl with talented people from Georgia, Mississippi, Kansas and other retrograde provinces. On trips back home they are careful to keep a tight rein on their tongues lest they face the prospect of being expertly tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail by the local authorities, acting through local thugs.
Many organization politicians inside and outside Metropolia are known to feel, self- righteously, that their party ties provide a democratic device for the distribution of some of the industrial wealth--to themselves. They are sadly mistaken. No distribution of wealth to public-spirited connivers is taking place by this route. What is available, in various ways, is only a small percentage of the untaxed industrial revenues in the form of "campaign" contributions, gifts, fees and retainers. These are tips to menials.
It is not being suggested here that members of the Establishment and their veiled supporters are in all cases primarily trying to gain affluence for its own sake. Rather is it a fact that they must have affluence in order to function on their chosen level. The organization men split their "take" with other organization men in the home party organization. Many, it can be plainly shown, are eager estate builders--Johnsons, Dodds, Dirksens, Kerrs et al. Some, probably most, are a combination of the two. The prospect of money is definitely in the picture except in a very few cases.
Money is needed to get into electoral politics. Money is needed to remain there. And money is needed to carry one over the bleak days if one is voted out.
In saying this, one is not saying something that would have astounded the Founding Fathers. Under the Constitution as it originally stood, there were property qualifications for voting even for members of the House of Representatives and the state legislatures. Only as the various states gave the franchise to the nonpropertied in the early nineteenth century was this qualification removed, thus opening the way to office for poor men. This was a dangerous development because the poor newcomers to politics, seldom themselves partisans of the poor, needed money going far beyond the paltry pay of office, originally designed purely as honoraria for men of property and still on this level
in many jurisdictions. The unpropertied man in politics was in time, according to an unwritten convention, expected to use ingenuity in providing for himself. Imaginative and defensible schemes were devised by some, but the sheer logical possibilities of making adequate monetary provision outside of meager salary without going beyond the law or the proprieties are few and largely boil down to writing, lecturing, making after- dinner speeches or practicing ordinary law--all of which take some talent. Promotions in which the name of the officeholder was used to confer prestige were legitimate--when the promotions themselves were legitimate. But for most of the new off-the-soil officeholders, always with noteworthy exceptions. it all boiled down to acquiring money in some questionable way. They were necessarily purchasable men. In the practice of law the purchase price took the form of heavy retainers from big interests.
In order to attain congressional or any political office one must, as many experts have attested: (1) be independently wealthy either as an inheritor or a builder of better booby traps; (2) have the backing of a wealthy individual, group or organization; or (3) have the backing of a local party organization which in turn has access to suspect supporting funds. Sometimes a "bad" organization supports a man of impeccable probity as a way of disarming critics. The supporting funds, it is true, could come from thousands of "little people" chipping in quarters or dollars; but the "little people" are either not sufficiently interested, do not understand or cannot afford to contribute--or a combination of the three.
Symbols are assigned or self-selected, and in both cases there are grave dangers. A minor executive, for example, may acquire a desk set exactly like the one used by the chairman of the board, which "may be permissible, but it may also turn out to be poor strategy. " Will the chairman, one wonders, feel burned up?
As to assignment of symbols, Dr. Turfboer cites the sad case of a marketing executive given a much larger and more palatial office; yet the man had the effrontery to say he felt uncomfortable in his new deluxe surroundings. "Evidently," says Dr. Turfboer, "his self-esteem had not had a chance to rise to the level of the symbol bestowed on him. "
Offhand, a strictly part-time curbstone psychologist would assume that the man had very little self-esteem to begin with if it depended on anything so contrived as an office and its furbishings. 43
All is not well, as it is readily seen, along the corporate chain of executive command. Many of the men have doubts--about their worth, their importance, the value of their presence, their identities in the scheme of things, perhaps even about their potency. They need to be bolstered in a world of basic achievers, such as scientists.
Another study, however, finds top executives to be "Basically sound, above-average in effective intelligence. These men deal best with practical or tangible data in relation to problem-solving situations. They are as a group only fair conceptual thinkers. They do not do too well in dealing with theoretical, abstract or conceptual thoughts or ideas. "
As students they had above-average grades and were in the upper 25 per cent of their class at college, although not all were college graduates.
Most of them had engaged in some form of commercial venture before age fifteen and they are "Generally not socially aggressive. None were 'big men on campus' although some held fraternity offices. However, they were as a group somewhat lacking in the degree to which they participated in traditional student activities. "
Most of them married late, had children, and their wives played little noticeable role in their business affairs.
One fact applied to all: None came from poverty-stricken backgrounds. In other words, none was a poor boy who "made good. "
These findings were made by Dr. Louis F. Hackemann, president of Hackemann & Associates, an international management consulting company with headquarters in San Francisco. 44
Professor Mabel Newcomer, near the conclusion of a study based upon a very large number of cases--882--of top executive officers, says:
"Although he [the typical executive of 1950] has specialized training, he has never practiced independently, nor has he at any time run a business of his own as his father did. He is a business administrator--a bureaucrat--with little job experience outside his own corporation. His investments in 'his' company are nominal, in terms of potential control--less than 0. 1 per cent of the total stock outstanding. He is a Republican in politics; he attends the Episcopalian church, if he attends church at all; and he served the federal government in an advisory capacity during the war. He was, in 1950, sixty-one years of age, and he will probably be seventy when he retires. " 45
Of note here, direct verification in a study of the top executives themselves of what has been indicated before, is that the corporate executive is not ordinarily much of an owner. He is a hired man, the tool of big owners, never the servant of myriad small stockholders as in the fable of "People's Capitalism. "
Professor Newcomer makes the important point that corporations rarely comb the field looking for what would objectively be considered the best or most capable man for the top job. Why, in other words, do they "promote from within so frequently? And why do they promote so late? The reasons appear to be first, that the talent within the company is better known, and to that extent safer [nota bene--F. L. ], than outside talent. Also, there is always a feeling that one's own company is different and that intimate knowledge of its problems is important from the start. The president or chairman is likely to select his successor in advance and to groom him personally for the job. And loyalty to the company is stressed. Moreover, there is a sense of obligation to the officers with whom the chief has worked, and a conviction--which is doubtless justified--that morale will be higher and the chance of retaining able executives greater, if they are aware that the top offices will be filled from within. " 46
Corp-politan Vistas
To attempt anything like a complete survey of the executive and his sphere would be impossible short of encyclopedic format. Under the rubric Management the central reference room of the New York Public Library indexes nearly 4,000 volumes; under Executives, nearly 400. There is, too, some score of periodicals devoted to the topic.
So it is clear that the subject of management is a large one in a postulated democratic society where the individual is pretty much supposed to manage himself. Americans, in fact, are under constant political and economic management manipulation.
While many of the works on management are serious analytical and descriptive studies, the executive mystique, tending to show the superlative worth of the executive and his technique as such, occupies much attention. Management of property itself, it turns out, is an arcane science, worthy of graduate study in the universities.
For those who want a compressed view of the field there might be recommended the Reading Course in Executive Technique, published in eight volumes with many authors by Funk and Wagnalls Company, New York, 1948. The volumes are given a lengthy introduction, "Modern Executive Techniques," by the editor, Carl Heyel, who is president of Executive Techniques, Inc.
The books in this course are titled: Systematic Solution of Management Problems (how to think, operations control, management controls, manual of organization, use of statistics, charting the course); Human Relations (employee morale, employee suggestion systems, supervising women, hints on psychology, human relations in industry); Personnel and Industrial Relations; Creative Training Programs; Manufacturing Control; Distribution; Financial Control and General Office Management; and Public Relations. Thus armed, the aspiring executive can take over with confidence.
Management, it turns out, consists of a melange of many things, a smattering from many disciplines that turns into an ad hoc empiricism resembling a pseudo-science.
Much of the literature in management can be reduced to cautionary injunctions, applicable generally or in various specific situations to "Always do this," "Never do that," "Usually do this," "Usually do that," "Be very careful in doing this," etc. Concrete situations are cited from experience, sometimes careful observational studies such as those of Elton Mayo on how most easily to get maximum output from a work force. Taking all the injunctions together one is given what some writers term a "philosophy of management. " Troublemakers, so much sand in the gears, are especially unwanted and the place to spot them is at the personnel office, where the latest in psychological testing is put to use. Potential nonbelievers, doubters, scoffers, misfits and persons with "negative attitudes" generally must be weeded out lest they contaminate a basically sound work force and impede the smooth flow of profits.
Critics from time to time commiserate with the bureaucratic aspirant in the Leninist countries who must, before he arrives at the top, read the metaphysical works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and many lesser dialecticians. The American executive, however, to judge by the tomes he must read, is much worse off. For most of these writings are at best stodgy, usually turgid. And beckoning the American is no future society of shining mirages but, at most, an office with wall-to-wall carpeting, a gold key to the executive washroom and membership in a country club.
Not only are there special periodicals devoted to the executive and his sphere, but magazines of more general appeal do not overlook him. Fortune rarely lets a month slip by without at least one article on executives, of which a few since 1950 have been: "The Case of Charles Luckman," "The Nine Hundred," "Boards of Directors," "Do Stock Options Pay? " "How Hard Do Executives Work? " "Can Executives Be Taught to Think? " "How Executives Get Jobs," "Is There an Executive Face? " "The Executive Bonus," "Are Executives Paid Enough? " "How Executives Invest Their Money,"' "How Top Executives Live," "The Executive Crack-Up," "How Much Is an Executive Worth? " "Young Executive in Manhattan," "Executive Qualities," "Life in Bloomfield Hills," "The Pirates of Management," "Those American Managers Don't Impress Europe, "Executive Compensation: The New Wave," "How to Pay Executives," etc.
In "Those American Managers Don't Impress Europe" (Fortune, December, 1964) we were given a story of disillusion. American companies entering the European market, either by merger or establishing new plants, necessarily sent along American executives. Keyed by all the hoop-la from the American corporate press about high- powered, lynx-eyed American executives, Europeans proceeded to pay very close attention. Now, they apparently thought, they were going to see the very soul of American puissance in action. Alas, it was once again the story of mighty Casey at the bat. For the American wizards were found to be very so-so, nothing remarkable. After watching them Europeans felt reassured.
It might be argued that the Americans did not send their first team to play in a strictly bush league, and this was probably true. To see the varsity all-stars in action the
backward Europeans will have to come to the United States. Once they glimpse the Picassos in the executive washroom they will know they are in the very uterus of the big time, at the altar of the executive mystique. Now they will see how big, really big, decisions are made . . .
Twelve
THE REPUBLIC OF MONEY: THE PUBPOLS
As everything thus far inquired into has obviously flowered under the benign providence of government it is evident that government and politics have more than a little to do with the gaudy blooms of extreme wealth and poverty in the feverish American realm. It has not, to begin with, prevented whatever is the case. What it has ministered to, and how and why, will now be our theme.
How the government of the United States functions in all its ramifying complexity is the theme of ponderous treatises running into the proportions of Sears, Roebuck catalogues--composed by academicians somewhat left-handedly known as political scientists. Whatever they say is almost invariably correct in a formal sense as anatomical description, apart from any decorative filigree provided by such heady words as "democracy" and "freedom. "
What we are really interested in, however, is process, function--political physiology, as it were. Although many political scientists profess to deal with this aspect as well, they all tend to lose sight of the actual ball in play or to avert their eyes in horror at the clinches. They are as physicists would be who had never been in a laboratory, as members of a vice squad who had never been in a brothel or taken money under the table from a madame. They themselves were never in the celebrated smoke-filled backrooms, never on hand when the price was set, the bodies buried, the papers burned, the ballots destroyed, the payoff made, the double entendre arranged, the people bilked.
Like nearly everyone else in this sphere, the political scientist is dependent on reports, rumors, memoirs, documents, statistics, interpretations, deductions and more or less shrewd surmise. And, like everyone else, he is limited by his position as a strict outsider. Journalists are far more privy to what goes on than he, and indeed he depends on journalists for much of his information. It is one field where certain participants know more about it in its nook-and-cranny aspects than those self-dedicated to its systematic study.
The difference between government as reported by political scientists and government as it actually takes place is much like the difference between learned descriptions of amour and amour itself. The difference is far greater than that between description in general and phenomena in general, between symbol and act. The political scientist is in much the same outside position as a biologist or psychologist studying amour. What each says may be entirely correct, moderately enlightening or even exhilarating; but what the dedicated acolyte misses are the nuances these experts haven't been able to encompass even by delicate imaginative projection. Their often assumed delicacy is elephantine. Again, they often misinterpret simple rutting for amour, intrigue for politics.
Even more than the theoreticians of amour, who sometimes have the advantage of being tentative practitioners themselves, the political scientist is at a disadvantage: For he has never actually been in the situation, does not occupy a privileged position denied, say, to the editors of the New York Times. The terrain, clearly, belongs in the particular jurisdiction of someone else, as amour lies in the jurisdiction of the poet or madman. A poet, even a madman, now and then has something revealing or poignant to say about amour; it would be astonishing if a political scientist ever said anything about government that approached a Machiavelli or a Hobbes who, be it noticed, were nonscientific "insiders. "
The indubitable experts I call upon to bear witness in this chapter (leaving to one side the delicate question of my own expertise) will all be far, far closer to what goes on than any political scientist has ever been, valuable though the compilations, commentaries, commonplaces and occasional insights of these gentry may be as aides-memoires and reference classifications.
As most people have some more or less accurate conception of the gross mechanics of the United States government, seen mostly in rose lights and soft-focus, I omit the citation of basic supposed facts on which we might be improbably supposed to agree in advance. Let us simply descend on the phenomenon oozing in its habitat.
In much of what follows for quite a way I lean heavily on first-hand analysis by the erudite and resolutely democratic Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania, until his election in 1956 the Democratic burgomeister of dingy Philadelphia, magna cum laude, Harvard, '23--in brief, a man of parts. Having Clark on hand is pretty much like having a literate psychoanalyst stationed right on the vice squad itself, an entrancing and unexpected combination. Here and there I shall set the focus a little more sharply than does the truly able but somewhat romantic senator. He, although sufficiently forthright, is a gentleman and becomes queasy at spelling out certain details which I, here as a pathologist, will have no more hesitancy in scrutinizing in the light of the evidence available than has a coroner in examining a mildewed cadaver.
As Senator Clark has made microscopically clear, no doubt to the consternation of the more polite observers, each house of Congress is under the tight control of a dour inner clique, the general intended aim of which is to cater to favored ultra-acquisitive interests and to frustrate the general lightheartedly nonacquisitive interests. As far as these cliques are concerned, the general populace can go and slide on its collective buttocks if it has any complaints to make--and stick its finger in its ear for good measure.
To these twin cliques, composed to a man of self-certified back-country patriots, we owe the gamey tax laws, among others. Senator Clark stylishly refers to the cliques as "The Senate Establishment" and "The House Establishment. " They run Congress, when necessary with a heavy hand, at times in opposition to any president, sometimes as under Lyndon B. Johnson in close harmony with him. When they are in full-blown opposition, the government simply deadlocks, freezes, as far as rational adjustment to events is concerned.
The special merit of Senator Clark's analysis is that he shows at first hand the precise inner mechanics of Establishment control, so that even a child can understand it.
The senator endorses the conclusion of James Macgregor Burns that there are always two governing parties in power, a Congressional party and a Presidential party. The Presidential party is national, necessarily concerned with broad interests, and is at least halfheartedly oriented toward carrying out the cloudy party platform submitted every four years to the bemused voters. The Congressional party is devoted to particularistic self-seekers (as shown by near-the-spot sources other than Senator Clark); these include most of the members themselves as on-the-sly entrepreneurs. It is bipartisan--a coalition
of standpat Republicans and Democrats. It is generally opposed, usually by indirection, to the party platform, most of which it covertly sabotages. The function of the party platform is only to stir enthusiasm in Presidential voters. After serving this purpose it is subject to discard.
The Establishment, moreover, is as permanently and fixedly in power as the Communist leadership in Russia. Nothing about it alters over the decades except the fall of a few of its aging personnel by the wayside. Only extreme force and violence could remove it. It is anchored, in sober fact, in extra-legal violence, intimidation and terrorism as religiously practiced especially throughout the South but visible at times elsewhere.
The findings of Senator Clark were expressed at considerable personal risk. For no professional can ever give such pointedly documented critical testimony to the outside heathen without thereafter having every hand of the Establishment secretly raised against him. All that can now save Senator Clark from political oblivion is the popular constituency--by itself a weak reed, as every practicing politician knows.
Barriers against the Majority
Barriers to the expression of majority will at the governmental level are, among others, the following:
Many persons do not vote--some for the intelligent reasons that they suspect the electoral process is rigged or they do not know enough about the issues or candidates; most from indifference, apathy, intimidation, terror stemming from localized violence, simple mental or physical ill health or because they are barred from voting by peculiar residential requirements devised by local politicos with little enthusiasm for voting.
Only a bit more than 60 per cent now vote in presidential elections (presidents have never been true majority officers). On statewide bases, the voters always number fewer than 50 per cent in purely congressional elections and range downward to less than 10 per cent in other elections.
In 1962 only 46. 7 per cent of civilians of voting age cast ballots for House congressmen, a record high in a nonpresidential year. 1 In many states (all Establishment Country) the percentage of voters was far lower: 13. 7 per cent in steamy Mississippi; below 20 per cent in Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Virginia; between 20 and 30 per cent in Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas; and between 30 and 40 per cent in Kentucky, Maryland and North Carolina. The largest statewide vote for House congressmen that year was in Idaho with 66. 5 per cent. Only eleven states attained 60 per cent or better. 2
In 1964 even the presidential vote was below 40 per cent in Alabama, District of Columbia, Georgia, Mississippi (33. 3 per cent), and South Carolina. Usually it attains lower levels in these and some other states. 3
It is often said that the Democratic primaries are the true elections in the South, the election itself just a formality. But even so they do not involve a significantly large segment of the population. Again, it is often said that the poor showing in the South is traceable to the exclusion of Negroes; yet most of the abstentions are of low-grade whites. In 1960, Mississippi, with the largest proportion of Negro population, had less than 40 per cent Negroes in its population of voting age. 4 So it is not only the exclusion of Afro-Americans that accounts for the poor voting record of the South. It is mainly whites (or pinks and rednecks) who abstain from voting, in part because they are culturally as retarded as the sepia shades and in part because they are dissuaded by the local padrones.
The vast disparity of participation between presidential and congressional elections-- in 1960 the presidential vote drew 64 per cent--reveals the degree of purposeful abstention and lack of ardor in many people for an electoral process widely suspected of being greased and rigged and at least ineffective as a means of producing tangibly gratifying results. Too many people have seen too much remain the same after too many high-flown elections to be carried away by the prospect of another.
Many of those who vote do not vote their interests intelligently, perhaps do not even know what they are. Again, many of those elected obviously do not themselves know what the score is, as they show by asinine pronouncements. One must be very much of a mystic to believe that, at variance with rational criteria, there is something intrinsically valuable about a popular vote. It is at best a rough way of selecting somebody, even a Lyndon B. Johnson.
Having voted for one of the two handpicked puppets of backroom schemers (except where there are open primaries), usually with some childish ethnic or religious bias most prominently in mind, the functioning portion of the electorate favors a man (as often as not deemed unfit by the community for other walks of life) who is then thrown into close working contact with others of like mind arrived in the halls of government by the same dubious road. There are some 750,000 elective offices in the land and, considering the fact that there is at least one aspirant arrayed against every incumbent, it is evident that the mere filling of offices amounts to quite an industry in an economic sense--gives employment to many people.
Despite all hosannahs to the collective sagacity of the people (what politician or newspaper editor would publicly question it? ) the arrangements under which popular elections have been held since their inception have been as crooked as a fixed wheel in a low gambling house. Long asserted by the tough-minded, denied by the tender-minded, the plain fact was only recently underscored in terse decisions by the United States Supreme Court. Various transparent devices, the Court found, were traditionally used in many states to keep Negroes and other a priori undesirables from voting, thus trammeling gloriously free even if obtuse popular expression at the very source. A wider and subtler abuse was found in the legislative districts, federal and state, which had been traditionally gerrymandered by one-party and two-party establishment- controlled state legislatures so that in some cases enormous numbers of distraught voters, mostly urban and suburban dwellers, had only one dubious representative; while in other cases very few voters, mostly functionally illiterate rural hinds, also had a dubious representative. A handful of rustics thus were the means for stifling the representatives of thousands of trapped city patsies. The consequence was that even if a majority of a legislative body was allowed to prevail (not always the case, as we shall see) the majority did not reflect the majority of the voting population either in its wisdom, folly or confusion.
Although the Court has now issued its ukase against these practices, the men borne to prominence by them will remain on the scene and in office until they wilt; and there is no guarantee that something equally objectionable, or more so, will not be devised by the always cunning pubpols.
Americans, it is often said unthinkingly, believe in majority rule. Yet, oddly, they never have had it; they have always had oligarchic rule, usually of a rather low order. The farther one moves away from a gerrymandered, intimidated, meagerly educated, emotionally immature and partly disqualified electorate the fewer become the participants in any decision until in the legislatures it is always and invariably far less than a majority, either representatively or among those present. For all those brain-
laundered with the doctrine of majority rule this is, admittedly, a strange, even unpatriotic notion. Yet it is an exact statement of the case.
"The primary and overriding duty and responsibility of each member of the House of Representatives is to get re-elected," it has been well said by Adam Clayton Powell, long a proficient preacher of the Gospel and a successful and highly affluent congressman since 1945. 5
The Establishment legislator in Congress-and some not so classifiable--has three further informal, off-the-record duties: (1) to work loyally with the legislative Establishment as an organization man; (2) to insure his own position whenever possible as a member in good standing of the affluent sector of society by acquiring any available cash, securities, real estate, franchises, market tips or whatever else may be of value; and (3) to share his affluence with indispensable offstage key figures of his home district organization grouped around the state or district party chairman. Nobody, it is plainly evident, plays the game alone.
Not to do this is to leave himself at the mercy of the shifting whims and moods of a potentially unstable constituency, wide open to the claims of eager rivals for his office, Despite careful planning by the legislator, he is at times the victim of political upsets and internal feuds. Yet if he is of the Establishment he is never wholly extinguished even if he has not had time to become affluent, because he has made many Establishment friends who remember him as a "regular. " They see to it that his post- legislative life is enriched by various appointments suitable to a "lame duck"-- commissionerships, judgeships, receiverships, lobby clients and the like. He belongs to a bund.
The Congressional Establishment, as Senator Clark proves, has a life of its own, policies of its own, aims of its own. These either have no connection with the needs or desires of the nation as a whole or harmonize with them only occasionally, fitfully, incidentally and, as it were, accidentally. It is a parasitical oligarchy. It produces results of its own predetermined stamp. It explains much about the chills, fevers and shudders of American society--its volume of crime, riots and lynchings.
The Bottom of the Bird Cage
"The trouble with Congress today,". writes Senator Clark, "is that it exercises negative and unjust powers to which the governed, the people of the United States, have never consented. . . . The heart of the trouble is that the power is exercised by minority, not majority rule. " 6
As in Soviet Russia and Red China, power is in the hands of solidly installed intriguing manipulators, with the difference that in the United States the intrigue takes place behind a facade of reasoned if blurry constitutionality. In Russia and China the bayonets show through the periodic purges.
The difference is enough to make the reasonable man prefer the American system with all its blemishes, about as one would unjoyfully prefer dysentery to cholera.
"Our forms of government are heavily weighted against any kind of action, and especially any that might alter significantly the status quo. It takes too many units of government to consent before anything can be done. " 7 This, of course, is a truism. The constitutional bulwarks against tyranny, placed there by the Founders' hands, are used to produce a creeping, low-key tyranny.
It is the third branch of government, the legislative, where things have gone awry. Whether we look at city councils, the state legislatures or the Congress of the United States, we react to what we see with scarcely concealed contempt. This is the area where democratic government is breaking down. This is where the vested-interest
lobbies tend to run riot, where conflict of interest is concealed from the public, where demagoguery, sophisticated or primitive, knows few bounds, where political lag keeps needed action often a generation behind the times, where the nineteenth century sometimes reigns supreme in committees, where the evil influence of arrogant and corrupt political machines, at the local and state level, ignores most successfully the general welfare, where the lust for patronage and favors for the faithful do the greatest damage to the public interest.
. . . the legislatures of America, local, state and national, are presently the greatest menace in our country to the successful operation of the democratic process. 8
Lest the sheltered reader, tucked away in his bower, think that Senator Clark here delivers himself of an extravagant opinion or resorts to hyperbole, it is a settled conclusion among seasoned observers that, Congress apart as a separate case, the lower legislatures--state, county and municipal--are Augean stables of misfeasance, malfeasance and nonfeasance from year to year and decade to decade and that they are preponderantly staffed by riffraff or what police define as "undesirables," people who if they were not in influential positions would be unceremoniously told to "keep moving. " Exceptions among them are minor. Many of them, including congressmen, refuse to go before the television cameras because it is then so plainly obvious to everybody they are what they are. Their whole demeanor arouses instant distrust in the intelligent. They are, all too painfully, type-cast for the racetrack, the sideshow carnival, the back alley, the peep-show, the low tavern, the bordello, the dive. Evasiveness, dissimulation, insincerity shine through their false bonhomie like beacon lights.
The New York Times, customarily referred to as staid, has vouched editorially that the Massachusetts legislature is the most corrupt in the country. If this is so, the Commonwealth lawmakers have nosed out many others, including neighboring Rhode Island, merely by millimeters, The Times based its opinion on a solid report of the Massachusetts Crime Commission, submitted by impeccable leading citizens of the Bay State to Governor John Volpe in response to frenetic public clamor. "Corruption permeates the state, the report said, from town governments to the state house and involves politicians, business men, lawyers and ordinary citizens. " 9
This official report, a state document, cited wide-scale bribery by corporations and lawyers and the fact that legislators are on the payrolls of companies doing business with the state. Corruption was encouraged, the report said, because of "the lack of backbone" in the legislature.
As to this particular legislature, the Boston Globe analyzed it during the week of April 11, 1966, revealing elements of a pestilent tale. Most of the legislature, the Globe indicated, is composed of Babbittian local real estate dealers, insurance brokers, fixing lawyers, loan sharks, used-car entrepreneurs, miscellaneous fast-buck operators and obscure local hangers-on and roustabouts--many of them types who if they could not become attached to a public payroll, there to divert commerce their way, would be local misfits and perhaps panhandlers, vagrants, con men, family dependents, procurers or on local relief or unemployment rolls. The net impression given by the Globe (a rather reserved family paper) was of a political lumpenproletariat, a scabrous crew.
As to other legislatures, Senator Estes Kefauver found representatives of the vulpine Chicago Mafia ensconced in the Illinois legislature, which has been rocked by one scandal of the standard variety after the other off and on for seventy-five or more years. What he didn't bring out was that the Mafians were clearly superior types to many non- Mafians.
Public attention, indeed, usually centers on only a few lower legislatures-- Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois--and the impression is
thereby fostered in the unduly trusting that the ones they don't hear about are on the level. But such an impression is false. The ones just mentioned come into more frequent view because their jurisdictions are extremely competitive and the pickings are richer. Fierce fights over the spoils generate telltale commotion. Most of the states are quieter under strict one-party quasi-Soviet Establishment dominance, with local newspapers cut in on the gravy. Public criticism and information are held to a minimum, grousers are thrown a bone and not many in the low-level populace know or really care. Even so, scandalous goings-on explode into view from time to time in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri and elsewhere--no states excepted. Any enterprising newspaper at any time could send an aggressive reporter into any one of them and come up with enough ordure to make the Founding Fathers collectively vomit up their very souls in their graves. 10
The territorial base of the Establishment lies in the low-down one-party states. Ten have been found by careful political scientists to be generally one-party. They are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Virginia. Twelve were found to be practically one-party: Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Tennessee. 11 Ignoring for the moment still others that alternate over long periods as one-party jobs, like Florida recently, it is noticeable that the above array is nominally Republican as well as Democratic. Among the clearly Republican one-party strongholds are Vermont, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon and South Dakota. At least twenty-two states, then, or nearly half, are one-party setups, with some dozen others coming very close to qualifying. Public political scandals, it will be noted, are much less frequently heard of in the one- party states. Here it is as in one-party countries.
The single point to emphasize here is that Senator Clark is entirely correct, even reserved, in his sweeping reference to the legislatures. He does not exaggerate. As the lawyers would say, he is a sound witness. He does not, however, delve into the processes that brought such uncomely personnel into the legislative bodies. How did the honest electorate come to elect such canaille? That is, manifestly, another story, and is left to the next chapter.
As Senator Clark sees it, there is no continuing discipline in Congress whereby a majority of the members of a party are able, by simple vote, to discipline recalcitrant members interested only in blocking national measures and in feathering their own nests. The recent Powell and Dodd cases were token ceremonies. Although the parties have various committees, the policy committees give out no policies, the steering committees do not steer but block; and, in general, every man is for himself. And yet, important decisions are made.
The Congressional Establishment
The Congressional Establishment "consists of those Democratic chairmen and ranking Republican members of the important legislative committees who, through seniority and pressures exerted on junior colleagues, control the institutional machinery of Congress. . . . The official leadership group of the Congress--Speaker of the House, Senate Majority Leader, et al. are usually captives of the Establishment, although they can sometimes be found looking out over the walls of their prison, plotting escape. " 12
"It is important to note that the views of the Congressional Establishment are not shared by a majority of their colleagues, who, left to their own devices, would be prepared to bring the Congress into line to cope with the necessities of our times. " 13 This, as we shall see) may be gravely questionable.
The Senate Establishment is "almost the antithesis of democracy. It is not selected by any democratic process. It appears to be quite unresponsive to the caucuses of the two parties. . . . It is what might be called a self-perpetuating oligarchy with mild, but only mild, overtones of plutocracy.
"There are plenty of rich men in the Senate, but only a few of them are high in the ranks of the Establishment; and none of them would admit [sic! ] to a belief that the accumulation of great wealth is a principal object of life. This is another distinction between the American and the Congressional Establishments. The former [consisting of the prime beneficiaries of the status quo] has, despite its slightly liberal orientation, definite overtones of plutocracy, although its tolerance is much more for inherited than for recently acquired wealth. " 14
Senator Clark now comes to the ties that bind the Congressional Establishment. They are: a common militant belief in white supremacy, a stronger devotion to property- ownership rights than to rights of the person, strong support of the military establishment at all times, marked belligerence in foreign affairs and an absolute determination to block internal congressional reform.
"A substantial number of the members of Congress in both parties are the product of political forces which give them a rural, pro-business, anti-labor, isolationist, conservative perspective with an attitude toward civil rights which ranges from passive unconcern to outright hostility. " 15
It is plain that the legislative strength of the Big-Business Establishment is, ironically, mainly in the agrarian districts. What are the "political forces" to which Senator Clark here refers in a somewhat opaque manner? They may be summed up in a word: money. The rural legislator--not directly tied to the business system, which is invariably weak in his home district (few stockholders, consumers, corporation employees or factories are found there)--has something to sell: his vote. And he sells it in a circumlocutional way, wrapped in some rococo principle such as states' rights, sacred privacy, economy, government anti-centralism, economic individualism or plain pure Americanism. This is the kernel of support by rustic solons for softly regulated big-city industrialism.
Politics, popularly thought to consist mainly of elections, really begins only after elections, when those elected come together to divide the spoils. The meetings of any legislative body, as of a floating crap game, must be under rules, which like laws themselves must emanate from the legislative body itself. The Constitution does not stipulate how Congress must govern itself. This is a "political question," wide open.
One of the Senate rules is that there may be unlimited debate; no senator may be silenced, unless, under Rule XXII, two-thirds of the senators present vote to terminate debate. With all senators present, this rule requires 66 votes to end debate. If only 35 refuse to limit debate, those who have the floor may go on talking endlessly, in relays. Such filibustering blocks all business until an agreement is reached to withdraw some proposal disliked by a sometimes very small minority.
As Senator Clark notes, the United States Senate is the only open legislative body in the world under such an extravagantly absurd rule, which calls to mind the veto power held by any member in the House of Nobles of the old Polish Kingdom. There the rule, more severe than ours, so effectively paralyzed the country as to leave it an easy prey to neighboring Prussia, Russia and Austria.
From 1789 to 1806 the Senate rules included the motion for the previous question, as provided for in Jefferson's Manual. On two occasions it was used to close debate. Since 1811 the motion has been used frequently in the House to end debate and is provided for in House Rule XVII. Virtually all the state legislatures allow the procedure, which,
as Jefferson pointed out, was used in the British Parliament as early as 1604. It is not, as Senator Clark reminds us, alien to hallowed Anglo-Saxon parliamentary procedure. It is, in truth, almost sacred and not to allow it full rein is ground for the deepest suspicion.
May a majority of the Senate at the beginning of a new Congress vote to terminate debate in order to pass on a change in the standing rules? This question was put point- blank as recently as 1963 by the vice president as the presiding Senate officer. In response there were only 44 ayes and 53 nays, with no roll call. The Establishment had triumphed, by a clear majority. (The question has since been put at the opening of every term with a similar outcome. )
Early in 1964 on a cloture petition that would have ended further debate on the question of a change of the rule--and which, under the rule, required a favorable vote of two-thirds of those present--the Clarkian majority lost by 54 for and 42 opposed. Senator Clark draws comfort from the fact that, including 4 absentees, the Senate at the time stood 56-44 in favor of cloture, only 10 short of the necessary two-thirds. But the earlier vote, with 53 nays, showed the full fire-power of the Establishment on the bedrock issue. On such showdowns the Establishment has thus far been able to muster far more than a third--pointedly, more than a half.
The Establishment itself is not a majority but it can, owing to the many strings in its octopal fingers, pull many unhappy non-Establishment senators into line when all the chips go down. On basic questions affecting its own power it is, in sober fact, a majority.
The sole contemporary full-face defeat of the Establishment was on the Test Ban Treaty, which came to a vote September 24, 1963, after a long debate. Two-thirds of those present and voting were required for ratification under the Constitution. The vote was 80 to 19 in favor.
Those who voted "No" at the time constituted the stone-faced core of the Senate Establishment in Senator Clark's view: Russell and Talmadge of Georgia, Stennis and Eastland of Mississippi, Long of Louisiana, Byrd and Robertson of Virginia, Byrd of West Virginia, McClellan of Arkansas, Thurmond of South Carolina, Curtis of Nebraska, Goldwater of Arizona, Simpson of Wyoming, Jordan of Idaho, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, Bennett of Utah and Tower of Texas. Most of these were from rule-by-terror states, nearly all from one-party states. Mundt of South Dakota, who usually votes down the line with the Establishment, defected.
But for changes in Rule XXII and cloture all of these, with Mundt, voted "No," including the following Establishment people who had defected momentarily on the Test Ban Treaty: Ellender of Louisiana, Hayden of Arizona, Holland of Florida, Johnston of South Carolina, Hill and Sparkman of Alabama, Cannon of Nevada, Cotton of New Hampshire, Williams of Delaware and Dirksen of Illinois. Half of these were also from rule-by-terror states; most were from one-party states.
It is the men mentioned in these two paragraphs, according to Senator Clark, who constitute the nucleus of the present Senate Establishment, which has its counterpart in the House. How one stands on Rule XXII determines whether one is for or against the Establishment.
A few of those mentioned are not present as of 1968. Such absence makes no difference to the Establishment because fresh replacements are always available approximately from the same states. When death approached Byrd of Virginia, the ailing senator retired and had his fifty-year-old son appointed in his place--an hereditary senator! Hardly any of the states represented by Establishment senators are
industrialized--only Illinois and Delaware. The rest are predominantly rural and agricultural or extractive; most are nonurbanized and are of exceptionally low general educational levels--defective schools, few libraries and bookstores, mediocre newspapers, poor radio-television programs, etc. Money for these is shot away nationally in wars. The core of the group is the southern Democratic bloc, which has been said to be the South's revenge on the rest of the country for the loss of the Civil War. But it has many members from parts of the country that are as economically and culturally retarded--in general, the Bible Belt, which tends to look indulgently on terror and intimidation.
The Establishment people are not men of parts; they are devoid of generally esteemed talents. None, possibly excepting McClellan and Sparkman, is a persuasive speaker. Many such as Eastland show themselves conspicuously deficient in reasoning powers, confidently propounding howlers in elementary logic that would shame most college freshmen. Nearly all appear to be quite innocent of acquaintance with semantics. Although most are members of the bar, none is rated high as a practicing lawyer. Few seem to be well read. None, as far as the record shows, is a writer; Goldwaters books of shabby notions were ghost-written. Few if any are soundly schooled. Their knowledge of the world--and of the language itself--appears to be meager. Their talents lean almost entirely to simple intrigue. Everett Dirksen is their prototype of a prophet. They are a drab crew.
If these people did not band together as they do behind Rule XXII, if they relied on their own capabilities in open debate on the merits of issues, they would stand forth in all hollowness among more talented men. And this is one reason for the Establishment: It is a refuge for the untalented, a closed trade union of the meagerly endowed.
What do Establishment members want? Are they merely interested in preserving the ties that bind them together and give them factitious substance: Rule XXII, white supremacy, the celebration of property and military derring-do and a truculent stance in foreign affairs? So to suppose would be to credit them with very limited, purely symbolical objectives. Actually, as Senator Clark stresses, many members of the Establishment go along with other measures, some with quite liberal measures, as long as Rule XXII and white supremacy remain inviolate. They are political traders, keen for cheapjack opportunities.
When blockages arise under Rule XXII, the Establishment is in a position to trade. In return for concessions it becomes its turn to make demands, to enforce its gloomy will on the country.
Customary analyses of Congress distinguish Republicans from Democrats, Southerners from Northerners and Westerners and conservatives from liberals. The latter distinction suggests, misleadingly, that there are reasoned attitudes present rather than rationalization for narrowly pecuniary self-interest. Political scientists are united in believing that national party affiliations are meaningless, that congressmen nearly all stem from purely local state and district factions. 16 Nor is the regional distinction fundamentally any more important than that of party.
There are, in truth, more fundamental distinctions to be observed. There is, first, the Establishment and anti-Establishment distinction that Senator Clark brings to view, with most of the Establishment people organization men from Soviet-style one-party districts or states. As unchaperoned strangers in them quickly discover, most of these states have extremely inquisitive polizei. Few such states are industrialized, few are very rich, and the rich ones, like Texas, are largely absentee-owned, obvious colonies of Wall Street and State Street. In all, organized politics offers one of the few sure roads to personal
affluence, functional latitude and renown. In the industrial states there are many such roads.
Much about American politics would be clearer if one thought of a metropolitan and a colonial or provincial United States. Metropolitan United States consists of southern New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, California, perhaps the state of Washington and the very eastern portions of Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota. just about everything else is nonmetropolitan, culturally below par and holds nearly all one-party politics. It is more like eastern Europe than like eastern United States.
Economically, this division is generally made as between agrarian and industrial states. Yet the congressional politics of the representatives of the agrarian states are not distinctively agrarian. Elected by a politically illiterate, often very small electorate unaware of the true drift of affairs and with few vital demands of its own to make, congressmen from these states are far freer than those of the metropolitan states to place their votes where the most money is, on the side of big property. For doing this they are allowed to join the propertied class by backstairs methods and are impressively referred to as conservatives.
Leadership in the nonmetropolitan states is noticeably below par (one of their basic deficiencies) owing to the steady drainage of homegrown talent into the metropolitan sector. It is not that the nonmetropolitan region fails to produce talented leadership material. It does produce it but discourages it and loses it steadily to the metropolitan sector, culturally more attractive. New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and other metropolitan centers fairly crawl with talented people from Georgia, Mississippi, Kansas and other retrograde provinces. On trips back home they are careful to keep a tight rein on their tongues lest they face the prospect of being expertly tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail by the local authorities, acting through local thugs.
Many organization politicians inside and outside Metropolia are known to feel, self- righteously, that their party ties provide a democratic device for the distribution of some of the industrial wealth--to themselves. They are sadly mistaken. No distribution of wealth to public-spirited connivers is taking place by this route. What is available, in various ways, is only a small percentage of the untaxed industrial revenues in the form of "campaign" contributions, gifts, fees and retainers. These are tips to menials.
It is not being suggested here that members of the Establishment and their veiled supporters are in all cases primarily trying to gain affluence for its own sake. Rather is it a fact that they must have affluence in order to function on their chosen level. The organization men split their "take" with other organization men in the home party organization. Many, it can be plainly shown, are eager estate builders--Johnsons, Dodds, Dirksens, Kerrs et al. Some, probably most, are a combination of the two. The prospect of money is definitely in the picture except in a very few cases.
Money is needed to get into electoral politics. Money is needed to remain there. And money is needed to carry one over the bleak days if one is voted out.
In saying this, one is not saying something that would have astounded the Founding Fathers. Under the Constitution as it originally stood, there were property qualifications for voting even for members of the House of Representatives and the state legislatures. Only as the various states gave the franchise to the nonpropertied in the early nineteenth century was this qualification removed, thus opening the way to office for poor men. This was a dangerous development because the poor newcomers to politics, seldom themselves partisans of the poor, needed money going far beyond the paltry pay of office, originally designed purely as honoraria for men of property and still on this level
in many jurisdictions. The unpropertied man in politics was in time, according to an unwritten convention, expected to use ingenuity in providing for himself. Imaginative and defensible schemes were devised by some, but the sheer logical possibilities of making adequate monetary provision outside of meager salary without going beyond the law or the proprieties are few and largely boil down to writing, lecturing, making after- dinner speeches or practicing ordinary law--all of which take some talent. Promotions in which the name of the officeholder was used to confer prestige were legitimate--when the promotions themselves were legitimate. But for most of the new off-the-soil officeholders, always with noteworthy exceptions. it all boiled down to acquiring money in some questionable way. They were necessarily purchasable men. In the practice of law the purchase price took the form of heavy retainers from big interests.
In order to attain congressional or any political office one must, as many experts have attested: (1) be independently wealthy either as an inheritor or a builder of better booby traps; (2) have the backing of a wealthy individual, group or organization; or (3) have the backing of a local party organization which in turn has access to suspect supporting funds. Sometimes a "bad" organization supports a man of impeccable probity as a way of disarming critics. The supporting funds, it is true, could come from thousands of "little people" chipping in quarters or dollars; but the "little people" are either not sufficiently interested, do not understand or cannot afford to contribute--or a combination of the three.
