And if the drift is toward accepting him as favorable or unfavorable, some member or members may interpose a cogent objection that reverses or halts some
emerging
conclusion.
Lundberg - The-Rich-and-the-Super-Rich-by-Ferdinand-Lundberg
William Ford, another of Edsel's sons, married Martha Firestone of the rubber fortune, by whom he has three children.
Here, among the comparatively late-arriving Fords, one finds a rococo interlacing of diverse elements the common social denominator of which is property, and this is typical of the upper ownership strata.
As to inward and outward twining cousinages among the moneyed elite, the Du Ponts provide perhaps the most spectacular example, interlinking with a number of other established and unlikely cousinages such as the Peabodys and Roosevelts. It is not usually easy in the hereditary strata of wealth to find someone unjoined to one or more other wealthy families by cousinly ties, and many of them link with what in Europe is known as nobility. Consinage threads through many apparently disparate propertied families.
To avoid detention here by details readily available elsewhere, let it simply be said that much about the affairs of the finpolities is a family matter. These families, it is true, are often subject to strains within themselves and vis-a-vis other families (pluralism); but they together present pretty much of a unified front to the world (eliteness).
Pretensions to Aristocracy
The American wealthy, as Cleveland Amory shows in considerable diverting detail, have confused money, ostentatious partying, politico-economic position and far-ranging power with aristocracy, of which they very commonly think themselves representative. 4 By the hundreds they have dug up for themselves, or caused to be devised, European coats of arms, more than 500 of which have been suitably proved and registered with
the New England Historic and Genealogical Society "easily the country's outstanding authority on coats of arms. " 5
The stress on coats of arms, both among bearers and disappointed nonbearers suggests that the wealthy themselves, unlike some unaccountably obtuse outside investigators, regard themselves as part of family enterprises, not as isolated persons who have won in an individualistic rat race. These families, to be sure, are placed within a certain setting of historically developed institutions of which American children sing innocently in school.
As the redoubtable H. L. Mencken remarked in 1926, "the plutocracy, in a democratic state, tends to take the place of the missing aristocracy, and even to be mistaken for it. It is, of course, something quite different. It lacks all the essential characters of a true aristocracy: a clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, honour, courage--above all, courage. It stands under no bond of obligation to the state; it has no public duty; it is transient and lacks a goal. Its most puissant dignitaries of to-day came out of the mob) only yesterday--and from the mob they bring its peculiar ignobilities. As practically encountered, the plutocracy stands quite as far from the honne^te homme as it stands from the Holy Saints. Its main character is its incurable timourouosness it is forever grasping at the straws held out by demagogues. . . . Its dreams are of banshees, hobgoblins, bugaboos. The honest, untroubled snores of a Percy or a Hohenstaufen are quite beyond it.
"The plutocracy, as I say, is comprehensible to the mob because its aspirations are essentially those of inferior men money. . . . What it lacks is aristocratic disinterestedness, born of aristocratic security. There is no body of opinion behind it that is, in the strictest sense, a free opinion. Its chief exponents, by some divine irony, are pedagogues of one sort or another. . . . Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other . . . what democracy needs most of all is a party that will separate the good that is in it theoretically from the evils that beset it practically, and then try to erect that good into workable system" (Notes on Democracy, Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y. , pp. 203-6).
Schools of the Elite
The children of the finpols and their higher servitors are early separated from the common run of children by being sent to special private schools, which exist as part of a different world. This point was inquired into by C. Wright Mills. 6 Not all the children in these schools are from the elite, because such a prescription would defeat educational ends. The private schools are "democratic," in that they take students, many on scholarships, from a wide social spectrum. Some now take able Negroes, although their quest is not exclusively for intellectual ability. But firmly sandwiched into the unquestionably mixed and in part subsidized mass are the children of the moneyed elite.
The formal education offered by the best of these private schools is no better, as far as any evidence shows, than that offered by the best public schools. But they do a better job for laggards, who are numerous in all strata, because their classes are smaller, the schools are isolated from distracting influences and the faculty supervision over studies is stricter. A highly motivated student in a good public school (which is not too frequently encountered) can get as much out of his school experience as he could at one of the better private schools; but the less scholastically motivated will probably get greater benefit from the good private school, which is more of a hothouse.
The products of the older private schools, at least, tend to form much closer ties to each other than are formed at the public school or college level. They are cemented, as it were, by the bonds of exile. Indeed, if asked about his educational background, the
private school product is far less apt to say that he went to Harvard, Yale or Princeton, even though he did so, than to say he went to Exeter, Andover, Choate, Groton, Hotchkiss or whatever the case may be.
Few children of the rich attend public schools, although there are rare exceptions. As inquiry will convince anyone, most of them attended one of the old-line private "prestige" schools. People who like to make the point, as though it was significant, that Jack Kennedy attended Harvard and Adlai Stevenson Princeton, simply aren't aware of the nuances. Both were Choate school boys and would still be Choate boys if they had gone on to Swampwater College, Okefenoke University or Oxford. Anybody might go to Harvard, Yale or Princeton. But anybody cannot go to Choate. 7
As Mills points out, the private-school boys do tend to stick together and to be found disproportionately later in or near the upper echelons of insurance companies, banks, investment trusts and general corporations. For the big owners of these enterprises are themselves products of the same schools. 8 The schools serve as unintended centers to bring bright members of lower social classes in as corporate personnel.
Until the recent past, the products of the private schools tended to monopolize Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other Ivy League universities. This trend has been diminished as private universities have intensified the intellectual rigor of their undergraduate colleges with a view to producing more teachers and scientists and fewer executives and salesmen.
The big rich, then, are more and more closely intermarried and generally send their children to a relatively small number of private schools. Some send them abroad to Switzerland or England.
Upon graduation from college, the children of the rich find themselves entering a world wherein many of their relatives are big owners of property and perhaps ensconced in important corporate or near-corporate positions. They move largely in a world which in England, whence the pattern came, would be familiarly described as the world of upper-class families, hunt clubs and the Old School Tie. The chances are high that they are going to marry someone whose family, like their own, is at least in the Social Register. They are on the estate and trust-fund circuit.
If they do not marry someone of the world of established property, if they marry instead a Rumanian chauffeur or the daughter of a Lithuanian iron puddler, they become the subject of excited newspaper accounts. For whenever wealth marries nonwealth it is a case, to the newspaper editors, of man bites dog. Although such marriages are not uncommon, the plain implication of all the fuss is that the marriage should not have taken place, any more than the King of England in the eyes of British Tories should have married Mrs. Simpson, Readers await news of the almost inevitable divorce.
The Exclusive Clubs
Neither family, coats of arms, nor attendance at private schools guarantees elite soundness. Elite families, lamentably, sometimes produce odd characters. The best private schools unfortunately turn out people who sometimes become song-writers, actors, photographers or even Kennedys, Stevensons or Roosevelts.
The higher elite must therefore mark itself off more precisely than either family, coat of arms, school or the possession of money can do. It does mark itself off through the system of private clubs, which in the East are so exclusive that neither the pope nor most presidents of the United States could qualify for membership.
The private clubs are the most "in" thing about the finpol and corp-pol elite. These clubs constitute the societal control centers of the elite.
There is at least one central club of the wealthy in every large city--the Chicago Club, the Cleveland Club, the Houston Petroleum Club, the Duquesne Club of Pittsburgh, etc. These are all imitations or outgrowths of earlier Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore clubs, which were imitations of English clubs. But the New York clubs are now the most important because the big money is centered in New York and the leading New York clubs include the wealthiest of the out-of-towners and many foreigners.
Which of the New York clubs is most exclusive, or most important, is a matter of opinion. The Knickerbocker Club requires that its members be either born New Yorkers, of New York descent, or at least occasional New York residents. But The Links, formed in 1921 ostensibly to promote the game of golf, seems to represent heavier money on the whole. Distinctions among the leading clubs are obscure to outsiders. "At the Metropolitan or the Union League or the University," Cleveland Amory quotes a clubman, "you might do a $10,000 deal, but you'd use the Knickerbocker or the Union or the Racquet for $100,000 and then, for $1,000,000 you move on to the Brook or the Links. " 9 Some big wheels, to be safe, belong to them all.
My own rating of the New York clubs in order of finpolitan weight is as follows:
1. The Links. 2. The Knickerbocker Club. 3. The Metropolitan Club. 4. Racquet and
Tennis Club. 5. The Brook. 6. The Union. 7. The Union League.
These are, except perhaps the last two, the exclusive, highly restricted inner-circle clubs. The University Club, in addition to claiming a larger membership, also includes professionals, administrators and below-the-top executives--that is, not only chairmen, presidents and executive vice presidents of corporations. Although it includes unquestionably elite elements like Allan P. Kirby, Cleveland E. Dodge, the Goelets and others, it is more like a transmission connection between the elite clubs and the world of general management. The Union and the Union League also have much of this transmission character in the club hierarchy.
An even broader transmission link or meeting ground between the higher club strata and the world of public affairs is The Century Association, the membership of which is heavily composed of approved artists, musicians, columnists, writers, lawyers, editors and book-reading executives (a rare and special breed! ). A very few of the members of the top elite clubs mingle with the comparatively bohemian and always literate element of The Century. A careful review of the 1965 list of members-showing names like Dean Rusk, Isaac Stern, Eric Sevareid, Walter Lippmarm, Yehudi Menuhin, James Reston and Arnold Toynbee along with three Rockefellers and other indomitable men of the supra-corporate spaces--suggests that few would be inclined to question the essential rightness and goodness of the finpolitan world. Many of its members are its eloquent spokesmen and apologists; some express mild and at times melancholy dubiety. None flatly challenges the essential beneficence of the finpolitan course.
But the brains and wit of the big New York clubs are unquestionably concentrated most conspicuously in The Century, a few of whose members at least seem capable of arriving at independent judgments. The membership list has never wandered far enough to the left to take in people like Norman Thomas, Scott Nearing, C. Wright Mills, Thorstein Veblen or even John R. Commons, all keen discussants. It did, however, include Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, which about fixes its political poles. Investigators and questioners of the social frontiers are conspicuously lacking among its scholars.
An examination of its membership list up to 1965 fails to disclose the names of able organizational Negroes like Thurgood Marshall, Whitney Young, Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins or Robert C. Weaver. Walter White never belonged.
The precise scope of The Century, founded in 1847, can perhaps best be shown by citing the names of some others who never belonged. These were H. L. Mencken (but Andrew Mellon did), Mark Twain (but Cornelius Vanderbilt did), Lincoln Steffens, Joseph Pulitzer, Charles Beard, Edmund Wilson, Sinclair Lewis, G. Stanley Hall, Eugene O'Neill, Herbert Bayard Swope, Theodore Dreiser, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville (but J. Pierpont Morgan I and II did), Morris Rafael Cohen, Cleveland Amory, Bennett Cerf, William James of Harvard and so on. But John Dewey, Oliver Lafarge, Oswald Garrison Villard and Charles Peirce did belong.
In any event, The Century does not appear, either today or yesterday, to be intellectually, morally and artistically representative. Its precise rationale for membership selection does not readily show itself. The heterogeneous membership shows little common denominator, and some mighty big intellectual guns, past and present, are conspicuously missing. Deeply critical temperaments or anyone who "comes on strong" are notably absent.
But a function the University and Century Clubs also perform is that of reciprocal transmission: The finpol members in them also hear much about the outside world, the below-stairs world as it were, from the more bohemian elements who may move easily from the club precincts to a Greenwich Village coffee house or Yorkville saloon and then back. The bohemian element's greater down-ranging mobility may at times be the envy of some of the finpols.
Each of the leading clubs appears to have spawned a cluster of offspring or imitators, founded sometimes by dissidents. They specialize in various things, some such as The Brook (touchingly named after Tennyson's poem) in continuous twenty-four-hour service.
Lesser clubs, in the opinion of Amory and other alert club-watchers, appear to be the nonexclusive Manhattan, Lotos, the Coffee House (of which Nelson A. Rockefeller is a member), the Harvard, the Yale and the Princeton. Better known to the public perhaps because of their association with the entertainment world are the Lambs, the Friars and the Players but these, in all candor, are the bottom of the barrel in relation to the clubdom with which we are concerned and should really not be mentioned except by way of indicating what an upper-class club, properly speaking, is not.
The only one of the New York clubs John D. ("Big John") Rockefeller got into was the Union League. His son, "John the Good," had no interest in belonging and was advised against it by his investment mentor, Frederick T. Gates. However, he did join the University and The Century. The grandsons belong to the cream--variously The Links, Knickerbocker, the Metropolitan of Washington and others. None lists the Union League.
The original Rockefeller was not only in bad odor with radicals, populists and liberals but, it may come as strange to some readers, he was looked upon askance in the old- established elite. Says Cleveland Amory, "Only a generation ago, for example, Mrs. David Lion Gardiner, dowager empress of New York's proud Gardiner Family, was informed that her young grandson, Robert David Lion Gardiner, was about to go out and play with the Rockefeller children. Mrs. Gardiner forbade it. 'No Gardiner will ever play,' she said, 'with the grandchild of a gangster. '" And De Golyer, dean of oilmen, told Amory he could never decide "whether John D. Rockefeller was the greatest oil man who ever lived, or a goddam lying pirate who made a monkey out of the whole capitalistic svstem. " 10
Nelson Rockefeller is looked upon today as the savior of the Knickerbocker Club, which in 1954 was nearly submerged into the Union Club out of which it had sprung. A few leading members agreed to accept ten cents on the dollar for its bonded
indebtedness and Rockefeller bought the premises and permitted the club to occupy them rent-free for ten years and then rent-free for ten more years if he was still alive. 11 It seems fair to conclude that the Rockefellers have an interest, perhaps only sentimental, in keeping this distinctive club extant.
It should not be thought that the top clubs are purely sociable haunts where the rich idle away the time, although such is the impression conveyed by Amory, Wecter and the long line of cartoonists and satirists who have shown elderly members snoozing over newspapers in the windows and who have derisively quoted club nincompoops. The clubs, one may be sure, enjoy being mildly derided as centers of futility and senile naivete. As they say in spydom, this gives their serious members a good "cover" for serious purposes.
Nor should it be thought that the big tycoons are in constant attendance. The membership of even the biggest clubs is obviously layered or hierarchical, and consists of inner coteries according to specific serious and frivolous interests. There are, of course, always some amiable hangers-on and some retired from active life, and these provide something of a background Greek chorus or mob scene for the members with weightier concerns on their minds.
The clubs, in point of fact, have underlying deeply serious systemic functions behind their facades, as follows:
1. Their membership hierarchies from the leading to the minor clubs show in general who is A. O. K. by degrees in what is now variously referred to as the national power structure, the Establishment (in imitation of English jargon), the power elite (after Mills) and so on. Newer designations for the phenomena will no doubt turn up and, as the reader will recall, I seem to find the situation best summarized in the term finpolity. If one wants to know who really matters behind the scenes of national affairs, in the order that they matter, one can hardly do better than to line up the memberships of the New York clubs in the order given. Now add each of the central non-New York clubs: Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington, Cleveland, etc. , in about that order. Strike out duplications as they appear.
Here one gets, with few exceptions, the entire power structure. Everybody on the list will be A. O. K. , rarely voicing anything except what John Kenneth Galbraith calls "conventional wisdom"--that is, trite and shallow commonplaces.
2. The clubs are the scene, at least in the preliminary stages, of some of the biggest deals in the capitalist world. It is not denied that such deals are also broached on golf courses, yachts and perhaps even in exclusive executive washrooms and Turkish baths; it is only asserted that a very heavy documentation could be supplied showing that some of the biggest deals, consortiums, syndicates, raids and campaigns were first proposed in one of the clubs.
3. The clubs are to the general corporate world of finpolity what the boardrooms are to individual corporations and what Congress is to the American populace. They are the places where attitudes are shaped toward proposed national policies. Once a consensus has been reached, the clubs serve to hand down a general "party-line" of finpolity to members, who carry it to the world in their various functional capacities. For with the big proprietors sit the big executives, many big (usually Republican) political figures and leading owners of the 'biggest enterprises in mass media.
In saying that a party line is handed down, I do not suggest that members must accept the verdict of an always free and informal running discussion. Some members do object to and refuse to implement conclusions in whole or in part. Nobody is formally bound by any preponderant opinion, but everybody appears to be influenced by tendencies.
How, for example, should a particular president of the United States be presented in the mass media? Should the verdict be favorable, on the fence or unfavorable? Club talk will determine something of this.
And if the drift is toward accepting him as favorable or unfavorable, some member or members may interpose a cogent objection that reverses or halts some emerging conclusion. One will get the verdict, whatever it is, in one's favorite newspaper or periodical.
Of one thing all club participants may always be sure: Views are invariably expressed in the light of some propertied interest. The discussions are never cluttered with extraneous and (by definition) ridiculous considerations that might occur to single- taxers, pacifists, social reformers, social workers, socialists, communists, populists, trade unionists, anti-vivisectionists, idealists, civil libertarians, utopians, New Dealers, unconventional ideologists, uplifters or even detached on-the-target scholars. The ideological center of all the discussion is, odd though it may seem, freedom, pointed simply to freedom of these elements to preserve and expand their propertied interests.
These clubs are the most intense partisans of freedom--their freedom--in the world today. While considerable imagination and ingenuity often enter into club discussions, to judge by leaked reports from occasional defectors, one element is invariably lacking: sympathy or concern for the rabble in the outer world.
In an earlier work I pointed out that often a uniform attitude comes suddenly to be expressed in the press from coast to coast on some topic, as though a hidden politburo had come to a decision. Never a dissent, never a deviation appears, as though one were reading the Russian press. The source--or sources--of such uniformity, as in the 85 per cent press opposition to Roosevelt, is the deliberations of the tycoons and tycoonlets in their clubs.
Unlike Congress, whose members must go home now and then to get re-elected, the clubs are always in session, unimpeded by parliamentary procedures, and the members need not fear being deposed from their positions. Congressmen and presidents come and go. The club members continue until death or disability does part them from the club discussions.
Discussions through the entire hierarchy of clubs, New York and provincial, are an important part of the informal process of government in the United States--far more important, say, than the political conventions, which often merely ratify what has been antecedently decided in the clubs. For these are the places where citizens of weight, of property, lawfully assemble and freely air their views and criticize the views of their peers. These are the democratic debating grounds of the first citizens, the people with the means and instrumentalities for making their views effective in the world. There are thousands of lesser clubs and associations throughout the United States; but a difference between them and the metropolitan clubs is that the formal resolutions of the lesser clubs, as contrasted with the purely informal resolutions of the metropolitan clubs, are usually ineffective. Nothing much, if anything, happens nationally after the passage of the solemn formal resolutions.
To control or influence public policy one is better placed if one has a strong voice in the clubs than if one has a strong voice in the Senate of the United States, yet the clubs draw little attention from the sociologists or political scientists, a serious oversight.
The leading clubs, such as The Links and the Knickerbocker Club, in their yearly alphabetical directories list members living and dead. These are like roll calls of American finpolity and corp-polity, past and present. Among the dead are many extensive family groups still with living members. Included among these, of course, is the coat-of-arms and inner private-school crowd.
The Links directory for 1964 includes such significant names as Winthrop Aldrich, former chairman of the Chase National Bank; Lester Armour of Chicago; Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr. and Sr. , of San Francisco; Charles H. Bell of Minneapolis; August Belmont; George R. Brown of Houston; Nicholas F. and James C. Brady; Paul C. Cabot of Boston; Lammot du Pont Copeland of Wilmington; C. Douglas Dillon; William H. Doheny; John T. Dorrance, Jr. ; William Hincks Duke; Pierre S. du Pont III; Benson Ford; Henry Ford II; G. Peabody Gardner of Boston; Robert Goelet; Joseph P. Grace, Jr. ; Crawford H. Greenewalt of Wilmington; E. Roland Harriman; John A. Hill; W. E. Hutton; Amory Houghton, Jr. and Sr. ; B. Brewster Jennings; Robert E. McCormick; William G. McKnight, Jr. ; Paul and Richard K. Mellon of Upperville and Pittsburgh, respectively; Jeremiah Milbank; Henry S. Morgan; John M. and Spencer T. Olin of East Alton; Howard Phipps, Jr. and Sr. ; John S. Pillsbury of Minneapolis; Frank C. and William B. Rand; David, James S. , Laurance S. , Avery, Jr. , William and Winthrop Rockefeller; Charles P. Stetson; Oliver de Gray Vanderbilt III; John Hay Whitney, publisher of the now defunct New York Herald Tribune; Robert E. Wilson of Chicago, and others.
The foregoing list culls the names of a few of the big proprietors. But The Links includes among its members also top-level corporation executives, bank presidents, special-entree journalists, upper-echelon Pentagon and diplomatic figures, corporation lawyers and Republican political figures of the inner sanctum-people like Joseph W. Alsop of Washington; Owen R. Cheatham of Georgia-Pacific Plywood; General Lucius D. Clay; S. Sloan Colt of Bankers Trust; Ralph J. Cordiner, former chairman 'of General Electric (during its conspiracy conviction); Arthur H. Dean of the key law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell and numerous top-level diplomatic conferences; Thomas E. Dewey; Nelson Doubleday of the book publishing world; Lewis W. Douglas of Arizona; Frederic W. and Frederick H. Ecker of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; Dwight D. Eisenhower; the late Walter S. Gifford, former head of AT&T; Gabriel Hauge, president of Manufacturers Hanover Trust; Herbert C. Hoover; George M. Humphrey of Cleveland and the U. S. Treasury; Grayson Kirk, president of Columbia University; the late Henry R. Luce of Time-Life-Fortune; Air Force General Lauris Norstad; and, to arbitrarily end a list replete with many other gilt-edged rag-paper names, jean Monnet of Paris, architect of the European Common Market.
Financially and corporately speaking, there is little or no deadwood in the Links roster. If its membership does not exactly run the country it has much to say about its course. Here are what the Russian and Chinese press morosely refer to as "American ruling circles. "
A similar and sometimes overlapping cross-section of the upper elite is displayed by the 1965 list of the Knickerbocker Club. Here we obtain many other history-evoking names, past and current, such as Prince Amyn M. Aga Khan; Giovanni Agnelli, Italian industrialist; Winthrop W. Aldrich; John D. Archbold; Count Alessandro de Asarta Guiccioli; John Astor; Count Bertil Bernadotte of Sweden; Oliver C. Biddle; Francis H. , Henry B. , Jr. , and Powell Cabot; Lord Camoys; Rear Admiral Grayson B. Carter; Anthony Drexel Cassatt; Rear Admiral Hubert Winthrop Chanler; Charles W. Chatfield; Joseph H. Choate; Grenville Clark, Jr. ; Henry Clews; Count Charles-Louis de Cosse Brissac; William D. Crane; Seymour L. Cromwell; Lieutenant Colonel Charles C. Crossfield III (USMC); Major Robert Dickey III (USMC); C. Douglas Dillon; Colonel Joy Dow; John R. Drexel III; Henry Francis du Pont; Dwight D. Eisenhower; Thomas K. Finletter; Hamilton Fish, Jr. ; Peter O. Forrestal; Caspar C. de Gersdorff; Francis, John and Robert Goelet; George and Michael Gould; Charles B. and William Grosvenor; Ogden H. , Jr. , and William C. Hammond; Henry Upham Harris; Abram S. Hewitt; James T. , Nathaniel P. , and Patrick Hill; Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. ; R. E. K.
Hutton; Vice Admiral Stuart H. Ingersoll; Ernest and O'Donnell Iselin; Commander John Dandridge Henley Kane; Hamilton Fish Kean; Moorhead C. Kennedy, Jr. and Sr. ; Count Jean de Lagarde; Brigadier Charles L. Lindemann, DSO; Count Marc de Logeres; Townsend M. McAlpin; Charles E. Mather III; Paul Mellon; Edmund C. Monell; Ivan Obolensky; Count Ogier d'Ivry; Cecil C. Olmstead; Thomas I. Parkinson, Jr. ; George B. Post; Sir Alec Randall; David, Laurance S. and Nelson A. Rockefeller; Kermit Roosevelt; Elibu Root, Jr. ; Prince Sadduddin Aga Khan; Ellery Sedgwick, Jr. ; Jean de Sieyes; Mortimer M. Singer; Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. ; Chauncey D. Stillman; Count Anthony Szapary; Marchese Filippo Theodoli; Brigadier General Clarence P. Townsley; Count Mario di Valmarana; Harold S. and William H. Vanderbilt; F. Skiddy von Stade; Count Leonardo Vitetti; George D. Widener; William Wood Prince; Lieutenant Commander Cameron Mc. R. Winslow; Admiral Jerauld Wright; and Sophocles N. Zoullas.
This partial list, through which shine sections of Debrett and the Almanach de Gotha, also reads in part like a diplomatic and military roll call of the upper echelons. The list of deceased members is even more impressive; it reads like the index of names to a complete financial and industrial history of the United States.
Through the memberships of The Links and the Knickerbocker Club one could obviously obtain instant entree to any financial-political circle in the world. These are the very penthouses of finpolity.
Where does the harried staff of a new president of the United States look for candidates for Cabinet and other high-level posts? The membership lists of the leading clubs serve at least as aides-memoires. Not all the members, admittedly, are of sufficient personal calibre; but it is a fact that many names, previously little known to the public, have appeared on these club rosters long before they emerged in Washington and on the world scene. Interspersed with the playboys and club hangers-on are names that recognizably belong only on the upper circuits of finpolitan affairs, the fellows who in the shadow of the heavy weaponry finally get down to talking very cold turkey with De Gaulle, Gromyko, Nasser, the oil sheiks, Chou En Lai, Erhard, and Ho Chi Mihn about who takes over what lush terrain and who gets the dirty end of the international stick (which one fears is pretty much the general myth-befuddled populace all over).
The leading clubs, though, are decidedly Republican in statistical orientation. This fact does not, of course, prevent Democratic Administrations from making use of valuable members such as Douglas Dillon. Nearly everybody in high appointive office, indeed, can be traced to one of the clubs, either the high or the lesser ones.
As Amory observes, the leading freedom of the top clubs is the freedom to be anti- democratic and (self-deludedly) pro-aristocratic; in an earlier day they would have been Federalist, although now one hears in them lamentation about lost states' rights that would have astonished the Founding Fathers. 12 Truman was merely disliked by most of the New York clubmen, Amory notes, but Franklin D. Roosevelt was apoplectically feared and consequently hated. Opinion about FDR even at the relatively cosmopolitan Harvard Club was sharply divided and feelings were intense. FDR, who did more to save their rickety world than any other man, was the be^te noir of the clubmen.
Many of the upper club members look back nostalgically to the good old days under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover and do not show much enthusiasm over Eisenhower, much less over Kennedy. But as of well into 1967, the clubs were reported to feel rather enthusiastic about Lyndon B. Johnson, a big depletion-allowance man, who could, if he continues to deal his cards right, become a club member himself. After all, Eisenhower, born in Abilene, made The Links, Tap day could well come for the statesman of the
Pedernales River valley who is committed to the proposition that a bomb is mightier than any valid syllogism or statement of fact.
Decision-Making by the Elite
We have been setting the stage for an answer to the question that opened this chapter: How and in what way do the finpolitan elite act in concert, if they do act in concert?
Any elite, in order to be an elite, must possess considerable autonomy within its special jurisdiction. This is true of all elites: of lawyers, artists, scientists, entertainers, philosophers or whatever. If the conditions are correctly stated here, they must also hold for a politico-economic elite. One would hardly have an elite if it had to be bound by ordinary rules or by some hard-and-fast tradition--if it had no area of privileged action.
The freedom to improvise as it sees its own interests must belong to any elite. If it doesn't have this freedom then it is just part of the mass. Physicists and mathematicians, for example, don't submit their differences to popular polls.
The closed American politico-economic elite, like any elite, does make its own rules, and it enforces its rulings in those areas where it believes its vital interests are involved; other areas it ignores. The task, now, is to show such elite rulings, and to show that they stick even against the opposition of Congresses, Supreme Courts, presidents and popular opinion. To claim that there is a privileged class and then not to be able to show it exercising privileges would be absurd.
Returning to the higher clubs, then, it should first be noticed that they do not allow any outright or avowed Jews to become members. Jews are not specifically barred in the by-laws but the procedure for admitting new members is such that none gets in, a fact noted by close students of the clubs. 13
The term "outright Jews" is used advisedly because in certain cases Jews on the family tree, as in the case of the Belin line of Du Ponts or the Belmonts, do not apparently provide sufficient ground to bar from membership in the leading metropolitan clubs like The Links and Knickerbocker where names such as Rosenwald, Warburg, Lehman, Baruch, Schiff, Kuhn, Loeb, Gimbel, Guggenheim and the like simply do not appear even though their holders are of big-money stature and even though the grounds for claims to gentility of some, such as Baruch and Warburg, antedate those of the most ancient transplanted Bostonians. Gentility has nothing to do with it. But what all this shows is only that the Hitlerian racist definition of what constitutes a Jew is not applied. What Professor Baltzell calls "gentlemanly anti- Semitism" is not, in fact, racist or religious. It relates to property and position.
But even in the case of approved persons with Jews in the family tree, the barriers often go down slowly, as in the case of Douglas Dillon, member of The Links and the Knickerbocker Club, whose "paternal grandfather was Sam Lapowski, son of a Polish Jew and a French Catholic, who emigrated to Texas after the Civil War, adopted his mother's maiden name of Dillon, prospered as a clothing merchant in San Antonio and Abilene, and finally moved to Milwaukee, where he entered the machinery- manufacturing business. " 14
But while a very few top-ranking people with Jews on the family tree are found in the top New York clubs, there are no avowed or full-fledged Jews, whatever their qualifications, none at all such as the otherwise technically eligible Meyer Kastenbaum or corporate bigwig Sidney Weinberg of Goldman Sachs and Company, with multiple upper-level corporate directorships and yachting companion of the mighty. 15 It is Weinberg who is credited with the scheme for preserving the Ford fortune in the Ford Foundation, thereby eluding a mountain of taxes. How much more cooperative can anyone ever be?
The first of the well-known middle-level clubs in which unambiguously Jewish names are encountered is The Century, with two Warburgs as well as others. The Manhattan Club, founded in 1865, has many Jewish as well as a few local Italian and Irish names. Its roster shows that it is obviously a nonelite Democratic opposite number to the Republican Union League Club; it included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert and Irving Lehman, Alvin and Irwin Untermyer, Joseph M. Proskauer and Alfred E. Smith. But the Manhattan, like the Century, is not considered by club experts to be an upper-strata club. Clubwise, in terms of inner corporate power, it is merely so-so. This isn't where the massed armored divisions of finpolity are controlled.
Here, among the comparatively late-arriving Fords, one finds a rococo interlacing of diverse elements the common social denominator of which is property, and this is typical of the upper ownership strata.
As to inward and outward twining cousinages among the moneyed elite, the Du Ponts provide perhaps the most spectacular example, interlinking with a number of other established and unlikely cousinages such as the Peabodys and Roosevelts. It is not usually easy in the hereditary strata of wealth to find someone unjoined to one or more other wealthy families by cousinly ties, and many of them link with what in Europe is known as nobility. Consinage threads through many apparently disparate propertied families.
To avoid detention here by details readily available elsewhere, let it simply be said that much about the affairs of the finpolities is a family matter. These families, it is true, are often subject to strains within themselves and vis-a-vis other families (pluralism); but they together present pretty much of a unified front to the world (eliteness).
Pretensions to Aristocracy
The American wealthy, as Cleveland Amory shows in considerable diverting detail, have confused money, ostentatious partying, politico-economic position and far-ranging power with aristocracy, of which they very commonly think themselves representative. 4 By the hundreds they have dug up for themselves, or caused to be devised, European coats of arms, more than 500 of which have been suitably proved and registered with
the New England Historic and Genealogical Society "easily the country's outstanding authority on coats of arms. " 5
The stress on coats of arms, both among bearers and disappointed nonbearers suggests that the wealthy themselves, unlike some unaccountably obtuse outside investigators, regard themselves as part of family enterprises, not as isolated persons who have won in an individualistic rat race. These families, to be sure, are placed within a certain setting of historically developed institutions of which American children sing innocently in school.
As the redoubtable H. L. Mencken remarked in 1926, "the plutocracy, in a democratic state, tends to take the place of the missing aristocracy, and even to be mistaken for it. It is, of course, something quite different. It lacks all the essential characters of a true aristocracy: a clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, honour, courage--above all, courage. It stands under no bond of obligation to the state; it has no public duty; it is transient and lacks a goal. Its most puissant dignitaries of to-day came out of the mob) only yesterday--and from the mob they bring its peculiar ignobilities. As practically encountered, the plutocracy stands quite as far from the honne^te homme as it stands from the Holy Saints. Its main character is its incurable timourouosness it is forever grasping at the straws held out by demagogues. . . . Its dreams are of banshees, hobgoblins, bugaboos. The honest, untroubled snores of a Percy or a Hohenstaufen are quite beyond it.
"The plutocracy, as I say, is comprehensible to the mob because its aspirations are essentially those of inferior men money. . . . What it lacks is aristocratic disinterestedness, born of aristocratic security. There is no body of opinion behind it that is, in the strictest sense, a free opinion. Its chief exponents, by some divine irony, are pedagogues of one sort or another. . . . Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other . . . what democracy needs most of all is a party that will separate the good that is in it theoretically from the evils that beset it practically, and then try to erect that good into workable system" (Notes on Democracy, Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y. , pp. 203-6).
Schools of the Elite
The children of the finpols and their higher servitors are early separated from the common run of children by being sent to special private schools, which exist as part of a different world. This point was inquired into by C. Wright Mills. 6 Not all the children in these schools are from the elite, because such a prescription would defeat educational ends. The private schools are "democratic," in that they take students, many on scholarships, from a wide social spectrum. Some now take able Negroes, although their quest is not exclusively for intellectual ability. But firmly sandwiched into the unquestionably mixed and in part subsidized mass are the children of the moneyed elite.
The formal education offered by the best of these private schools is no better, as far as any evidence shows, than that offered by the best public schools. But they do a better job for laggards, who are numerous in all strata, because their classes are smaller, the schools are isolated from distracting influences and the faculty supervision over studies is stricter. A highly motivated student in a good public school (which is not too frequently encountered) can get as much out of his school experience as he could at one of the better private schools; but the less scholastically motivated will probably get greater benefit from the good private school, which is more of a hothouse.
The products of the older private schools, at least, tend to form much closer ties to each other than are formed at the public school or college level. They are cemented, as it were, by the bonds of exile. Indeed, if asked about his educational background, the
private school product is far less apt to say that he went to Harvard, Yale or Princeton, even though he did so, than to say he went to Exeter, Andover, Choate, Groton, Hotchkiss or whatever the case may be.
Few children of the rich attend public schools, although there are rare exceptions. As inquiry will convince anyone, most of them attended one of the old-line private "prestige" schools. People who like to make the point, as though it was significant, that Jack Kennedy attended Harvard and Adlai Stevenson Princeton, simply aren't aware of the nuances. Both were Choate school boys and would still be Choate boys if they had gone on to Swampwater College, Okefenoke University or Oxford. Anybody might go to Harvard, Yale or Princeton. But anybody cannot go to Choate. 7
As Mills points out, the private-school boys do tend to stick together and to be found disproportionately later in or near the upper echelons of insurance companies, banks, investment trusts and general corporations. For the big owners of these enterprises are themselves products of the same schools. 8 The schools serve as unintended centers to bring bright members of lower social classes in as corporate personnel.
Until the recent past, the products of the private schools tended to monopolize Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other Ivy League universities. This trend has been diminished as private universities have intensified the intellectual rigor of their undergraduate colleges with a view to producing more teachers and scientists and fewer executives and salesmen.
The big rich, then, are more and more closely intermarried and generally send their children to a relatively small number of private schools. Some send them abroad to Switzerland or England.
Upon graduation from college, the children of the rich find themselves entering a world wherein many of their relatives are big owners of property and perhaps ensconced in important corporate or near-corporate positions. They move largely in a world which in England, whence the pattern came, would be familiarly described as the world of upper-class families, hunt clubs and the Old School Tie. The chances are high that they are going to marry someone whose family, like their own, is at least in the Social Register. They are on the estate and trust-fund circuit.
If they do not marry someone of the world of established property, if they marry instead a Rumanian chauffeur or the daughter of a Lithuanian iron puddler, they become the subject of excited newspaper accounts. For whenever wealth marries nonwealth it is a case, to the newspaper editors, of man bites dog. Although such marriages are not uncommon, the plain implication of all the fuss is that the marriage should not have taken place, any more than the King of England in the eyes of British Tories should have married Mrs. Simpson, Readers await news of the almost inevitable divorce.
The Exclusive Clubs
Neither family, coats of arms, nor attendance at private schools guarantees elite soundness. Elite families, lamentably, sometimes produce odd characters. The best private schools unfortunately turn out people who sometimes become song-writers, actors, photographers or even Kennedys, Stevensons or Roosevelts.
The higher elite must therefore mark itself off more precisely than either family, coat of arms, school or the possession of money can do. It does mark itself off through the system of private clubs, which in the East are so exclusive that neither the pope nor most presidents of the United States could qualify for membership.
The private clubs are the most "in" thing about the finpol and corp-pol elite. These clubs constitute the societal control centers of the elite.
There is at least one central club of the wealthy in every large city--the Chicago Club, the Cleveland Club, the Houston Petroleum Club, the Duquesne Club of Pittsburgh, etc. These are all imitations or outgrowths of earlier Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore clubs, which were imitations of English clubs. But the New York clubs are now the most important because the big money is centered in New York and the leading New York clubs include the wealthiest of the out-of-towners and many foreigners.
Which of the New York clubs is most exclusive, or most important, is a matter of opinion. The Knickerbocker Club requires that its members be either born New Yorkers, of New York descent, or at least occasional New York residents. But The Links, formed in 1921 ostensibly to promote the game of golf, seems to represent heavier money on the whole. Distinctions among the leading clubs are obscure to outsiders. "At the Metropolitan or the Union League or the University," Cleveland Amory quotes a clubman, "you might do a $10,000 deal, but you'd use the Knickerbocker or the Union or the Racquet for $100,000 and then, for $1,000,000 you move on to the Brook or the Links. " 9 Some big wheels, to be safe, belong to them all.
My own rating of the New York clubs in order of finpolitan weight is as follows:
1. The Links. 2. The Knickerbocker Club. 3. The Metropolitan Club. 4. Racquet and
Tennis Club. 5. The Brook. 6. The Union. 7. The Union League.
These are, except perhaps the last two, the exclusive, highly restricted inner-circle clubs. The University Club, in addition to claiming a larger membership, also includes professionals, administrators and below-the-top executives--that is, not only chairmen, presidents and executive vice presidents of corporations. Although it includes unquestionably elite elements like Allan P. Kirby, Cleveland E. Dodge, the Goelets and others, it is more like a transmission connection between the elite clubs and the world of general management. The Union and the Union League also have much of this transmission character in the club hierarchy.
An even broader transmission link or meeting ground between the higher club strata and the world of public affairs is The Century Association, the membership of which is heavily composed of approved artists, musicians, columnists, writers, lawyers, editors and book-reading executives (a rare and special breed! ). A very few of the members of the top elite clubs mingle with the comparatively bohemian and always literate element of The Century. A careful review of the 1965 list of members-showing names like Dean Rusk, Isaac Stern, Eric Sevareid, Walter Lippmarm, Yehudi Menuhin, James Reston and Arnold Toynbee along with three Rockefellers and other indomitable men of the supra-corporate spaces--suggests that few would be inclined to question the essential rightness and goodness of the finpolitan world. Many of its members are its eloquent spokesmen and apologists; some express mild and at times melancholy dubiety. None flatly challenges the essential beneficence of the finpolitan course.
But the brains and wit of the big New York clubs are unquestionably concentrated most conspicuously in The Century, a few of whose members at least seem capable of arriving at independent judgments. The membership list has never wandered far enough to the left to take in people like Norman Thomas, Scott Nearing, C. Wright Mills, Thorstein Veblen or even John R. Commons, all keen discussants. It did, however, include Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, which about fixes its political poles. Investigators and questioners of the social frontiers are conspicuously lacking among its scholars.
An examination of its membership list up to 1965 fails to disclose the names of able organizational Negroes like Thurgood Marshall, Whitney Young, Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins or Robert C. Weaver. Walter White never belonged.
The precise scope of The Century, founded in 1847, can perhaps best be shown by citing the names of some others who never belonged. These were H. L. Mencken (but Andrew Mellon did), Mark Twain (but Cornelius Vanderbilt did), Lincoln Steffens, Joseph Pulitzer, Charles Beard, Edmund Wilson, Sinclair Lewis, G. Stanley Hall, Eugene O'Neill, Herbert Bayard Swope, Theodore Dreiser, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville (but J. Pierpont Morgan I and II did), Morris Rafael Cohen, Cleveland Amory, Bennett Cerf, William James of Harvard and so on. But John Dewey, Oliver Lafarge, Oswald Garrison Villard and Charles Peirce did belong.
In any event, The Century does not appear, either today or yesterday, to be intellectually, morally and artistically representative. Its precise rationale for membership selection does not readily show itself. The heterogeneous membership shows little common denominator, and some mighty big intellectual guns, past and present, are conspicuously missing. Deeply critical temperaments or anyone who "comes on strong" are notably absent.
But a function the University and Century Clubs also perform is that of reciprocal transmission: The finpol members in them also hear much about the outside world, the below-stairs world as it were, from the more bohemian elements who may move easily from the club precincts to a Greenwich Village coffee house or Yorkville saloon and then back. The bohemian element's greater down-ranging mobility may at times be the envy of some of the finpols.
Each of the leading clubs appears to have spawned a cluster of offspring or imitators, founded sometimes by dissidents. They specialize in various things, some such as The Brook (touchingly named after Tennyson's poem) in continuous twenty-four-hour service.
Lesser clubs, in the opinion of Amory and other alert club-watchers, appear to be the nonexclusive Manhattan, Lotos, the Coffee House (of which Nelson A. Rockefeller is a member), the Harvard, the Yale and the Princeton. Better known to the public perhaps because of their association with the entertainment world are the Lambs, the Friars and the Players but these, in all candor, are the bottom of the barrel in relation to the clubdom with which we are concerned and should really not be mentioned except by way of indicating what an upper-class club, properly speaking, is not.
The only one of the New York clubs John D. ("Big John") Rockefeller got into was the Union League. His son, "John the Good," had no interest in belonging and was advised against it by his investment mentor, Frederick T. Gates. However, he did join the University and The Century. The grandsons belong to the cream--variously The Links, Knickerbocker, the Metropolitan of Washington and others. None lists the Union League.
The original Rockefeller was not only in bad odor with radicals, populists and liberals but, it may come as strange to some readers, he was looked upon askance in the old- established elite. Says Cleveland Amory, "Only a generation ago, for example, Mrs. David Lion Gardiner, dowager empress of New York's proud Gardiner Family, was informed that her young grandson, Robert David Lion Gardiner, was about to go out and play with the Rockefeller children. Mrs. Gardiner forbade it. 'No Gardiner will ever play,' she said, 'with the grandchild of a gangster. '" And De Golyer, dean of oilmen, told Amory he could never decide "whether John D. Rockefeller was the greatest oil man who ever lived, or a goddam lying pirate who made a monkey out of the whole capitalistic svstem. " 10
Nelson Rockefeller is looked upon today as the savior of the Knickerbocker Club, which in 1954 was nearly submerged into the Union Club out of which it had sprung. A few leading members agreed to accept ten cents on the dollar for its bonded
indebtedness and Rockefeller bought the premises and permitted the club to occupy them rent-free for ten years and then rent-free for ten more years if he was still alive. 11 It seems fair to conclude that the Rockefellers have an interest, perhaps only sentimental, in keeping this distinctive club extant.
It should not be thought that the top clubs are purely sociable haunts where the rich idle away the time, although such is the impression conveyed by Amory, Wecter and the long line of cartoonists and satirists who have shown elderly members snoozing over newspapers in the windows and who have derisively quoted club nincompoops. The clubs, one may be sure, enjoy being mildly derided as centers of futility and senile naivete. As they say in spydom, this gives their serious members a good "cover" for serious purposes.
Nor should it be thought that the big tycoons are in constant attendance. The membership of even the biggest clubs is obviously layered or hierarchical, and consists of inner coteries according to specific serious and frivolous interests. There are, of course, always some amiable hangers-on and some retired from active life, and these provide something of a background Greek chorus or mob scene for the members with weightier concerns on their minds.
The clubs, in point of fact, have underlying deeply serious systemic functions behind their facades, as follows:
1. Their membership hierarchies from the leading to the minor clubs show in general who is A. O. K. by degrees in what is now variously referred to as the national power structure, the Establishment (in imitation of English jargon), the power elite (after Mills) and so on. Newer designations for the phenomena will no doubt turn up and, as the reader will recall, I seem to find the situation best summarized in the term finpolity. If one wants to know who really matters behind the scenes of national affairs, in the order that they matter, one can hardly do better than to line up the memberships of the New York clubs in the order given. Now add each of the central non-New York clubs: Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington, Cleveland, etc. , in about that order. Strike out duplications as they appear.
Here one gets, with few exceptions, the entire power structure. Everybody on the list will be A. O. K. , rarely voicing anything except what John Kenneth Galbraith calls "conventional wisdom"--that is, trite and shallow commonplaces.
2. The clubs are the scene, at least in the preliminary stages, of some of the biggest deals in the capitalist world. It is not denied that such deals are also broached on golf courses, yachts and perhaps even in exclusive executive washrooms and Turkish baths; it is only asserted that a very heavy documentation could be supplied showing that some of the biggest deals, consortiums, syndicates, raids and campaigns were first proposed in one of the clubs.
3. The clubs are to the general corporate world of finpolity what the boardrooms are to individual corporations and what Congress is to the American populace. They are the places where attitudes are shaped toward proposed national policies. Once a consensus has been reached, the clubs serve to hand down a general "party-line" of finpolity to members, who carry it to the world in their various functional capacities. For with the big proprietors sit the big executives, many big (usually Republican) political figures and leading owners of the 'biggest enterprises in mass media.
In saying that a party line is handed down, I do not suggest that members must accept the verdict of an always free and informal running discussion. Some members do object to and refuse to implement conclusions in whole or in part. Nobody is formally bound by any preponderant opinion, but everybody appears to be influenced by tendencies.
How, for example, should a particular president of the United States be presented in the mass media? Should the verdict be favorable, on the fence or unfavorable? Club talk will determine something of this.
And if the drift is toward accepting him as favorable or unfavorable, some member or members may interpose a cogent objection that reverses or halts some emerging conclusion. One will get the verdict, whatever it is, in one's favorite newspaper or periodical.
Of one thing all club participants may always be sure: Views are invariably expressed in the light of some propertied interest. The discussions are never cluttered with extraneous and (by definition) ridiculous considerations that might occur to single- taxers, pacifists, social reformers, social workers, socialists, communists, populists, trade unionists, anti-vivisectionists, idealists, civil libertarians, utopians, New Dealers, unconventional ideologists, uplifters or even detached on-the-target scholars. The ideological center of all the discussion is, odd though it may seem, freedom, pointed simply to freedom of these elements to preserve and expand their propertied interests.
These clubs are the most intense partisans of freedom--their freedom--in the world today. While considerable imagination and ingenuity often enter into club discussions, to judge by leaked reports from occasional defectors, one element is invariably lacking: sympathy or concern for the rabble in the outer world.
In an earlier work I pointed out that often a uniform attitude comes suddenly to be expressed in the press from coast to coast on some topic, as though a hidden politburo had come to a decision. Never a dissent, never a deviation appears, as though one were reading the Russian press. The source--or sources--of such uniformity, as in the 85 per cent press opposition to Roosevelt, is the deliberations of the tycoons and tycoonlets in their clubs.
Unlike Congress, whose members must go home now and then to get re-elected, the clubs are always in session, unimpeded by parliamentary procedures, and the members need not fear being deposed from their positions. Congressmen and presidents come and go. The club members continue until death or disability does part them from the club discussions.
Discussions through the entire hierarchy of clubs, New York and provincial, are an important part of the informal process of government in the United States--far more important, say, than the political conventions, which often merely ratify what has been antecedently decided in the clubs. For these are the places where citizens of weight, of property, lawfully assemble and freely air their views and criticize the views of their peers. These are the democratic debating grounds of the first citizens, the people with the means and instrumentalities for making their views effective in the world. There are thousands of lesser clubs and associations throughout the United States; but a difference between them and the metropolitan clubs is that the formal resolutions of the lesser clubs, as contrasted with the purely informal resolutions of the metropolitan clubs, are usually ineffective. Nothing much, if anything, happens nationally after the passage of the solemn formal resolutions.
To control or influence public policy one is better placed if one has a strong voice in the clubs than if one has a strong voice in the Senate of the United States, yet the clubs draw little attention from the sociologists or political scientists, a serious oversight.
The leading clubs, such as The Links and the Knickerbocker Club, in their yearly alphabetical directories list members living and dead. These are like roll calls of American finpolity and corp-polity, past and present. Among the dead are many extensive family groups still with living members. Included among these, of course, is the coat-of-arms and inner private-school crowd.
The Links directory for 1964 includes such significant names as Winthrop Aldrich, former chairman of the Chase National Bank; Lester Armour of Chicago; Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr. and Sr. , of San Francisco; Charles H. Bell of Minneapolis; August Belmont; George R. Brown of Houston; Nicholas F. and James C. Brady; Paul C. Cabot of Boston; Lammot du Pont Copeland of Wilmington; C. Douglas Dillon; William H. Doheny; John T. Dorrance, Jr. ; William Hincks Duke; Pierre S. du Pont III; Benson Ford; Henry Ford II; G. Peabody Gardner of Boston; Robert Goelet; Joseph P. Grace, Jr. ; Crawford H. Greenewalt of Wilmington; E. Roland Harriman; John A. Hill; W. E. Hutton; Amory Houghton, Jr. and Sr. ; B. Brewster Jennings; Robert E. McCormick; William G. McKnight, Jr. ; Paul and Richard K. Mellon of Upperville and Pittsburgh, respectively; Jeremiah Milbank; Henry S. Morgan; John M. and Spencer T. Olin of East Alton; Howard Phipps, Jr. and Sr. ; John S. Pillsbury of Minneapolis; Frank C. and William B. Rand; David, James S. , Laurance S. , Avery, Jr. , William and Winthrop Rockefeller; Charles P. Stetson; Oliver de Gray Vanderbilt III; John Hay Whitney, publisher of the now defunct New York Herald Tribune; Robert E. Wilson of Chicago, and others.
The foregoing list culls the names of a few of the big proprietors. But The Links includes among its members also top-level corporation executives, bank presidents, special-entree journalists, upper-echelon Pentagon and diplomatic figures, corporation lawyers and Republican political figures of the inner sanctum-people like Joseph W. Alsop of Washington; Owen R. Cheatham of Georgia-Pacific Plywood; General Lucius D. Clay; S. Sloan Colt of Bankers Trust; Ralph J. Cordiner, former chairman 'of General Electric (during its conspiracy conviction); Arthur H. Dean of the key law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell and numerous top-level diplomatic conferences; Thomas E. Dewey; Nelson Doubleday of the book publishing world; Lewis W. Douglas of Arizona; Frederic W. and Frederick H. Ecker of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; Dwight D. Eisenhower; the late Walter S. Gifford, former head of AT&T; Gabriel Hauge, president of Manufacturers Hanover Trust; Herbert C. Hoover; George M. Humphrey of Cleveland and the U. S. Treasury; Grayson Kirk, president of Columbia University; the late Henry R. Luce of Time-Life-Fortune; Air Force General Lauris Norstad; and, to arbitrarily end a list replete with many other gilt-edged rag-paper names, jean Monnet of Paris, architect of the European Common Market.
Financially and corporately speaking, there is little or no deadwood in the Links roster. If its membership does not exactly run the country it has much to say about its course. Here are what the Russian and Chinese press morosely refer to as "American ruling circles. "
A similar and sometimes overlapping cross-section of the upper elite is displayed by the 1965 list of the Knickerbocker Club. Here we obtain many other history-evoking names, past and current, such as Prince Amyn M. Aga Khan; Giovanni Agnelli, Italian industrialist; Winthrop W. Aldrich; John D. Archbold; Count Alessandro de Asarta Guiccioli; John Astor; Count Bertil Bernadotte of Sweden; Oliver C. Biddle; Francis H. , Henry B. , Jr. , and Powell Cabot; Lord Camoys; Rear Admiral Grayson B. Carter; Anthony Drexel Cassatt; Rear Admiral Hubert Winthrop Chanler; Charles W. Chatfield; Joseph H. Choate; Grenville Clark, Jr. ; Henry Clews; Count Charles-Louis de Cosse Brissac; William D. Crane; Seymour L. Cromwell; Lieutenant Colonel Charles C. Crossfield III (USMC); Major Robert Dickey III (USMC); C. Douglas Dillon; Colonel Joy Dow; John R. Drexel III; Henry Francis du Pont; Dwight D. Eisenhower; Thomas K. Finletter; Hamilton Fish, Jr. ; Peter O. Forrestal; Caspar C. de Gersdorff; Francis, John and Robert Goelet; George and Michael Gould; Charles B. and William Grosvenor; Ogden H. , Jr. , and William C. Hammond; Henry Upham Harris; Abram S. Hewitt; James T. , Nathaniel P. , and Patrick Hill; Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. ; R. E. K.
Hutton; Vice Admiral Stuart H. Ingersoll; Ernest and O'Donnell Iselin; Commander John Dandridge Henley Kane; Hamilton Fish Kean; Moorhead C. Kennedy, Jr. and Sr. ; Count Jean de Lagarde; Brigadier Charles L. Lindemann, DSO; Count Marc de Logeres; Townsend M. McAlpin; Charles E. Mather III; Paul Mellon; Edmund C. Monell; Ivan Obolensky; Count Ogier d'Ivry; Cecil C. Olmstead; Thomas I. Parkinson, Jr. ; George B. Post; Sir Alec Randall; David, Laurance S. and Nelson A. Rockefeller; Kermit Roosevelt; Elibu Root, Jr. ; Prince Sadduddin Aga Khan; Ellery Sedgwick, Jr. ; Jean de Sieyes; Mortimer M. Singer; Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. ; Chauncey D. Stillman; Count Anthony Szapary; Marchese Filippo Theodoli; Brigadier General Clarence P. Townsley; Count Mario di Valmarana; Harold S. and William H. Vanderbilt; F. Skiddy von Stade; Count Leonardo Vitetti; George D. Widener; William Wood Prince; Lieutenant Commander Cameron Mc. R. Winslow; Admiral Jerauld Wright; and Sophocles N. Zoullas.
This partial list, through which shine sections of Debrett and the Almanach de Gotha, also reads in part like a diplomatic and military roll call of the upper echelons. The list of deceased members is even more impressive; it reads like the index of names to a complete financial and industrial history of the United States.
Through the memberships of The Links and the Knickerbocker Club one could obviously obtain instant entree to any financial-political circle in the world. These are the very penthouses of finpolity.
Where does the harried staff of a new president of the United States look for candidates for Cabinet and other high-level posts? The membership lists of the leading clubs serve at least as aides-memoires. Not all the members, admittedly, are of sufficient personal calibre; but it is a fact that many names, previously little known to the public, have appeared on these club rosters long before they emerged in Washington and on the world scene. Interspersed with the playboys and club hangers-on are names that recognizably belong only on the upper circuits of finpolitan affairs, the fellows who in the shadow of the heavy weaponry finally get down to talking very cold turkey with De Gaulle, Gromyko, Nasser, the oil sheiks, Chou En Lai, Erhard, and Ho Chi Mihn about who takes over what lush terrain and who gets the dirty end of the international stick (which one fears is pretty much the general myth-befuddled populace all over).
The leading clubs, though, are decidedly Republican in statistical orientation. This fact does not, of course, prevent Democratic Administrations from making use of valuable members such as Douglas Dillon. Nearly everybody in high appointive office, indeed, can be traced to one of the clubs, either the high or the lesser ones.
As Amory observes, the leading freedom of the top clubs is the freedom to be anti- democratic and (self-deludedly) pro-aristocratic; in an earlier day they would have been Federalist, although now one hears in them lamentation about lost states' rights that would have astonished the Founding Fathers. 12 Truman was merely disliked by most of the New York clubmen, Amory notes, but Franklin D. Roosevelt was apoplectically feared and consequently hated. Opinion about FDR even at the relatively cosmopolitan Harvard Club was sharply divided and feelings were intense. FDR, who did more to save their rickety world than any other man, was the be^te noir of the clubmen.
Many of the upper club members look back nostalgically to the good old days under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover and do not show much enthusiasm over Eisenhower, much less over Kennedy. But as of well into 1967, the clubs were reported to feel rather enthusiastic about Lyndon B. Johnson, a big depletion-allowance man, who could, if he continues to deal his cards right, become a club member himself. After all, Eisenhower, born in Abilene, made The Links, Tap day could well come for the statesman of the
Pedernales River valley who is committed to the proposition that a bomb is mightier than any valid syllogism or statement of fact.
Decision-Making by the Elite
We have been setting the stage for an answer to the question that opened this chapter: How and in what way do the finpolitan elite act in concert, if they do act in concert?
Any elite, in order to be an elite, must possess considerable autonomy within its special jurisdiction. This is true of all elites: of lawyers, artists, scientists, entertainers, philosophers or whatever. If the conditions are correctly stated here, they must also hold for a politico-economic elite. One would hardly have an elite if it had to be bound by ordinary rules or by some hard-and-fast tradition--if it had no area of privileged action.
The freedom to improvise as it sees its own interests must belong to any elite. If it doesn't have this freedom then it is just part of the mass. Physicists and mathematicians, for example, don't submit their differences to popular polls.
The closed American politico-economic elite, like any elite, does make its own rules, and it enforces its rulings in those areas where it believes its vital interests are involved; other areas it ignores. The task, now, is to show such elite rulings, and to show that they stick even against the opposition of Congresses, Supreme Courts, presidents and popular opinion. To claim that there is a privileged class and then not to be able to show it exercising privileges would be absurd.
Returning to the higher clubs, then, it should first be noticed that they do not allow any outright or avowed Jews to become members. Jews are not specifically barred in the by-laws but the procedure for admitting new members is such that none gets in, a fact noted by close students of the clubs. 13
The term "outright Jews" is used advisedly because in certain cases Jews on the family tree, as in the case of the Belin line of Du Ponts or the Belmonts, do not apparently provide sufficient ground to bar from membership in the leading metropolitan clubs like The Links and Knickerbocker where names such as Rosenwald, Warburg, Lehman, Baruch, Schiff, Kuhn, Loeb, Gimbel, Guggenheim and the like simply do not appear even though their holders are of big-money stature and even though the grounds for claims to gentility of some, such as Baruch and Warburg, antedate those of the most ancient transplanted Bostonians. Gentility has nothing to do with it. But what all this shows is only that the Hitlerian racist definition of what constitutes a Jew is not applied. What Professor Baltzell calls "gentlemanly anti- Semitism" is not, in fact, racist or religious. It relates to property and position.
But even in the case of approved persons with Jews in the family tree, the barriers often go down slowly, as in the case of Douglas Dillon, member of The Links and the Knickerbocker Club, whose "paternal grandfather was Sam Lapowski, son of a Polish Jew and a French Catholic, who emigrated to Texas after the Civil War, adopted his mother's maiden name of Dillon, prospered as a clothing merchant in San Antonio and Abilene, and finally moved to Milwaukee, where he entered the machinery- manufacturing business. " 14
But while a very few top-ranking people with Jews on the family tree are found in the top New York clubs, there are no avowed or full-fledged Jews, whatever their qualifications, none at all such as the otherwise technically eligible Meyer Kastenbaum or corporate bigwig Sidney Weinberg of Goldman Sachs and Company, with multiple upper-level corporate directorships and yachting companion of the mighty. 15 It is Weinberg who is credited with the scheme for preserving the Ford fortune in the Ford Foundation, thereby eluding a mountain of taxes. How much more cooperative can anyone ever be?
The first of the well-known middle-level clubs in which unambiguously Jewish names are encountered is The Century, with two Warburgs as well as others. The Manhattan Club, founded in 1865, has many Jewish as well as a few local Italian and Irish names. Its roster shows that it is obviously a nonelite Democratic opposite number to the Republican Union League Club; it included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert and Irving Lehman, Alvin and Irwin Untermyer, Joseph M. Proskauer and Alfred E. Smith. But the Manhattan, like the Century, is not considered by club experts to be an upper-strata club. Clubwise, in terms of inner corporate power, it is merely so-so. This isn't where the massed armored divisions of finpolity are controlled.
