1 - The Higher Circles

THE powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family, and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern.

 

'Great changes' are beyond their control, but affect their conduct and outlook none the less. The very framework of modern society confines them to projects not their own, but from every side, such changes now press upon the men and women of the mass society, who accordingly feel that they are without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power.

But not all men are in this sense ordinary. As the means of information and of power are centralized, some men come to occupy positions in American society from which they can look down upon, so to speak, and by their decisions mightily affect, the everyday worlds of ordinary men and women. They are not made by their jobs; they set up and break down jobs for thousands of others; they are not confined by simple family responsibilities; they can escape. They may live in many hotels and houses, but they are bound by no one community.

 

They need not merely 'meet the demands of the day and hour'; in some part, they create these demands, and cause others to meet them. Whether or not they profess their power, their technical and political experience of it far transcends that of the underlying population.

 

What Jacob Burckhardt said of 'great men,' most Americans might well say of their elite:

'They are all that we are not.'¹

The power elite is composed of men whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women; they are in positions to make decisions having major consequences.

 

Whether they do or do not make such decisions is less important than the fact that they do occupy such pivotal positions: their failure to act, their failure to make decisions, is itself an act that is often of greater consequence than the decisions they do make. For they are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society.

 

They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy.

The power elite are not solitary rulers. Advisers and consultants, spokesmen and opinion-makers are often the captains of their higher thought and decision. Immediately below the elite are the professional politicians of the middle levels of power, in the Congress and in the pressure groups, as well as among the new and old upper classes of town and city and region.

 

Mingling with them, in curious ways which we shall explore, are those professional celebrities who live by being continually displayed but are never, so long as they remain celebrities, displayed enough. If such celebrities are not at the head of any dominating hierarchy, they do often have the power to distract the attention of the public or afford sensations to the masses, or, more directly, to gain the ear of those who do occupy positions of direct power.

 

More or less unattached, as critics of morality and technicians of power, as spokesmen of God and creators of mass sensibility, such celebrities and consultants are part of the immediate scene in which the drama of the elite is enacted. But that drama itself is centered in the command posts of the major institutional hierarchies.

The truth about the nature and the power of the elite is not some secret which men of affairs know but will not tell. Such men hold quite various theories about their own roles in the sequence of event and decision. Often they are uncertain about their roles, and even more often they allow their fears and their hopes to affect their assessment of their own power.

 

No matter how great their actual power, they tend to be less acutely aware of it than of the resistances of others to its use.

 

Moreover, most American men of affairs have learned well the rhetoric of public relations, in some cases even to the point of using it when they are alone, and thus coming to believe it. The personal awareness of the actors is only one of the several sources one must examine in order to understand the higher circles.

 

Yet many who believe that there is no elite, or at any rate none of any consequence, rest their argument upon what men of affairs believe about themselves, or at least assert in public.

There is, however, another view: those who feel, even if vaguely, that a compact and powerful elite of great importance does now prevail in America often base that feeling upon the historical trend of our time.

 

They have felt, for example, the domination of the military event, and from this they infer that generals and admirals, as well as other men of decision influenced by them, must be enormously powerful. They hear that the Congress has again abdicated to a handful of men decisions clearly related to the issue of war or peace. They know that the bomb was dropped over Japan in the name of the United States of America, although they were at no time consulted about the matter. They feel that they live in a time of big decisions; they know that they are not making any.

 

Accordingly, as they consider the present as history, they infer that at its center, making decisions or failing to make them, there must be an elite of power.

On the one hand, those who share this feeling about big historical events assume that there is an elite and that its power is great. On the other hand, those who listen carefully to the reports of men apparently involved in the great decisions often do not believe that there is an elite whose powers are of decisive consequence.

Both views must be taken into account, but neither is adequate. The way to understand the power of the American elite lies neither solely in recognizing the historic scale of events nor in accepting the personal awareness reported by men of apparent decision. Behind such men and behind the events of history, linking the two, are the major institutions of modern society.

 

These hierarchies of state and corporation and army constitute the means of power; as such they are now of a consequence not before equaled in human history - and at their summits, there are now those command posts of modern society which offer us the sociological key to an understanding of the role of the higher circles in America.

Within American society, major national power now resides in the economic, the political, and the military domains. Other institutions seem off to the side of modern history, and, on occasion, duly subordinated to these. No family is as directly powerful in national affairs as any major corporation; no church is as directly powerful in the external biographies of young men in America today as the military establishment; no college is as powerful in the shaping of momentous events as the National Security Council.

 

Religious, educational, and family institutions are not autonomous centers of national power; on the contrary, these decentralized areas are increasingly shaped by the big three, in which developments of decisive and immediate consequence now occur.

Families and churches and schools adapt to modern life; governments and armies and corporations shape it; and, as they do so, they turn these lesser institutions into means for their ends. Religious institutions provide chaplains to the armed forces where they are used as a means of increasing the effectiveness of its morale to kill.

 

Schools select and train men for their jobs in corporations and their specialized tasks in the armed forces. The extended family has, of course, long been broken up by the industrial revolution, and now the son and the father are removed from the family, by compulsion if need be, whenever the army of the state sends out the call.

 

And the symbols of all these lesser institutions are used to legitimate the power and the decisions of the big three.

The life-fate of the modem individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years; not only upon the school where he is educated as a child and adolescent, but also upon the state which touches him throughout his life; not only upon the church in which on occasion he hears the word of God, but also upon the army in which he is disciplined.

If the centralized state could not rely upon the inculcation of nationalist loyalties in public and private schools, its leaders would promptly seek to modify the decentralized educational system.

 

If the bankruptcy rate among the top five hundred corporations were as high as the general divorce rate among the thirty-seven million married couples, there would be economic catastrophe on an international scale. If members of armies gave to them no more of their lives than do believers to the churches to which they belong, there would be a military crisis.

Within each of the big three, the typical institutional unit has become enlarged, has become administrative, and, in the power of its decisions, has become centralized. Behind these developments there is a fabulous technology, for as institutions, they have incorporated this technology and guide it, even as it shapes and paces their developments.

The economy - once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance - has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated, which together hold the keys to economic decisions.

The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized, executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered, and now enters into each and every cranny of the social structure.

The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government, and, although well versed in smiling public relations, now has all the grim and clumsy efficiency of a sprawling bureaucratic domain.

In each of these institutional areas, the means of power at the disposal of decision makers have increased enormously; their central executive powers have been enhanced; within each of them modern administrative routines have been elaborated and tightened up.

As each of these domains becomes enlarged and centralized, the consequences of its activities become greater, and its traffic with the others increases. The decisions of a handful of corporations bear upon military and political as well as upon economic developments around the world. The decisions of the military establishment rest upon and grievously affect political life as well as the very level of economic activity.

 

The decisions made within the political domain determine economic activities and military programs.

 

There is no longer, on the one hand, an economy, and, on the other hand, a political order containing a military establishment unimportant to politics and to money-making. There is a political economy linked, in a thousand ways, with military institutions and decisions. On each side of the world-split running through central Europe and around the Asiatic rim-lands, there is an ever-increasing interlocking of economic, military, and political structures.²

 

If there is government intervention in the corporate economy, so is there corporate intervention in the governmental process. In the structural sense, this triangle of power is the source of the interlocking directorate that is most important for the historical structure of the present.

The fact of the interlocking is clearly revealed at each of the points of crisis of modern capitalist society - slump, war, and boom. In each, men of decision are led to an awareness of the interdependence of the major institutional orders. In the nineteenth century, when the scale of all institutions was smaller, their liberal integration was achieved in the automatic economy, by an autonomous play of market forces, and in the automatic political domain, by the bargain and the vote.

 

It was then assumed that out of the imbalance and friction that followed the limited decisions then possible a new equilibrium would in due course emerge. That can no longer be assumed, and it is not assumed by the men at the top of each of the three dominant hierarchies.

For given the scope of their consequences, decisions - and indecisions - in any one of these ramify into the others, and hence top decisions tend either to become coordinated or to lead to a commanding indecision. It has not always been like this. When numerous small entrepreneurs made up the economy, for example, many of them could fail and the consequences still remain local; political and military authorities did not intervene.

 

But now, given political expectations and military commitments, can they afford to allow key units of the private corporate economy to break down in slump?

 

Increasingly, they do intervene in economic affairs, and as they do so, the controlling decisions in each order are inspected by agents of the other two, and economic, military, and political structures are interlocked.

At the pinnacle of each of the three enlarged and centralized domains, there have arisen those higher circles which make up the economic, the political, and the military elites. At the top of the

economy, among the corporate rich, there are the chief executives; at the top of the political order, the members of the political directorate; at the top of the military establishment, the elite of soldier-statesmen clustered in and around the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the upper echelon. As each of these domains has coincided with the others, as decisions tend to become total in their consequence, the leading men in each of the three domains of power - the warlords, the corporation chieftains, the political directorate - tend to come together, to form the power elite of America.

The higher circles in and around these command posts are often thought of in terms of what their members possess: they have a greater share than other people of the things and experiences that are most highly valued.

 

From this point of view, the elite are simply those who have the most of what there is to have, which is generally held to include money, power, and prestige - as well as all the ways of life to which these lead.³

 

But the elite are not simply those who have the most, for they could not 'have the most' were it not for their positions in the great institutions. For such institutions are the necessary bases of power, of wealth, and of prestige, and at the same time, the chief means of exercising power, of acquiring and retaining wealth, and of cashing in the higher claims for prestige.

By the powerful we mean, of course, those who are able to realize their will, even if others resist it.

 

No one, accordingly, can be truly powerful unless he has access to the command of major institutions, for it is over these institutional means of power that the truly powerful are, in the first instance, powerful. Higher politicians and key officials of government command such institutional power; so do admirals and generals, and so do the major owners and executives of the larger corporations. Not all power, it is true, is anchored in and exercised by means of such institutions, but only within and through them can power be more or less continuous and important.

Wealth also is acquired and held in and through institutions. The pyramid of wealth cannot be understood merely in terms of the very rich; for the great inheriting families, as we shall see, are now supplemented by the corporate institutions of modern society: every one of the very rich families has been and is closely connected - always legally and frequently managerially as well -  with one of the multi-million dollar corporations.

The modern corporation is the prime source of wealth, but, in latter-day capitalism, the political apparatus also opens and closes many avenues to wealth. The amount as well as the source of income, the power over consumer's goods as well as over productive capital, are determined by position within the political economy.

 

If our interest in the very rich goes beyond their lavish or their miserly consumption, we must examine their relations to modern forms of corporate property as well as to the state; for such relations now determine the chances of men to secure big property and to receive high income.

Great prestige increasingly follows the major institutional units of the social structure. It is obvious that prestige depends, often quite decisively, upon access to the publicity machines that are now a central and normal feature of all the big institutions of modern America. Moreover, one feature of these hierarchies of corporation, state, and military establishment is that their top positions are increasingly interchangeable.

 

One result of this is the accumulative nature of prestige. Claims for prestige, for example, may be initially based on military roles, then expressed in and augmented by an educational institution run by corporate executives, and cashed in, finally, in the political order, where, for General Eisenhower and those he represents, power and prestige finally meet at the very peak.

 

Like wealth and power, prestige tends to be cumulative: the more of it you have, the more you can get.

 

These values also tend to be translatable into one another: the wealthy find it easier than the poor to gain power; those with status find it easier than those without it to control opportunities for wealth.

If we took the one hundred most powerful men in America, the one hundred wealthiest, and the one hundred most celebrated away from the institutional positions they now occupy, away from their resources of men and women and money, away from the media of mass communication that are now focused upon them - then they would be powerless and poor and uncelebrated. For power is not of a man.

 

Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions, for the institutional positions men occupy determine in large part their chances to have and to hold these valued experiences.³
 

The people of the higher circles may also be conceived as members of a top social stratum, as a set of groups whose members know one another, see one another socially and at business, and so, in making decisions, take one another into account. The elite, according to this conception, feel themselves to be, and are felt by others to be, the inner circle of 'the upper social classes.'⁴

They form a more or less compact social and psychological entity; they have become self-conscious members of a social class. People are either accepted into this class or they are not, and there is a qualitative split, rather than merely a numerical scale, separating them from those who are not elite. They are more or less aware of themselves as a social class and they behave toward one another differently from the way they do toward members of other classes.

 

They accept one another, understand one another, marry one another, tend to work and to think if not together at least alike.

Now, we do not want by our definition to prejudge whether the elite of the command posts are conscious members of such a socially recognized class, or whether considerable proportions of the elite derive from such a clear and distinct class. These are matters to be investigated. Yet in order to be able to recognize what we intend to investigate, we must note something that all biographies and memoirs of the wealthy and the powerful and the eminent make clear: no matter what else they may be, the people of these higher circles are involved in a set of overlapping 'crowds' and intricately connected 'cliques.'

 

There is a kind of mutual attraction among those who 'sit on the same terrace' - although this often becomes clear to them, as well as to others, only at the point at which they feel the need to draw the line; only when, in their common defense, they come to understand what they have in common, and so close their ranks against outsiders.

The idea of such ruling stratum implies that most of its members have similar social origins, that throughout their lives they maintain a network of informal connections, and that to some degree there is an interchangeability of position between the various hierarchies of money and power and celebrity.

 

We must, of course, note at once that if such an elite stratum does exist, its social visibility and its form, for very solid historical reasons, are quite different from those of the noble cousinhoods that once ruled various European nations.

That American society has never passed through a feudal epoch is of decisive importance to the nature of the American elite, as well as to American society as a historic whole. For it means that no nobility or aristocracy, established before the capitalist era, has stood in tense opposition to the higher bourgeoisie. It means that this bourgeoisie has monopolized not only wealth but prestige and power as well.

 

It means that no set of noble families has commanded the top positions and monopolized the values that are generally held in high esteem; and certainly that no set has done so explicitly by inherited right. It means that no high church dignitaries or court nobilities, no entrenched landlords with honorific accouterments, no monopolists of high army posts have opposed the enriched bourgeoisie and in the name of birth and prerogative successfully resisted its self-making.

But this does not mean that there are no upper strata in the United States.

 

That they emerged from a 'middle class' that had no recognized aristocratic superiors does not mean they remained middle class when enormous increases in wealth made their own superiority possible. Their origins and their newness may have made the upper strata less visible in America than elsewhere. But in America today there are in fact tiers and ranges of wealth and power of which people in the middle and lower ranks know very little and may not even dream.

 

There are families who, in their well-being, are quite insulated from the economic jolts and lurches felt by the merely prosperous and those farther down the scale.

 

There are also men of power who in quite small groups make decisions of enormous consequence for the underlying population.

The American elite entered modern history as a virtually unopposed bourgeoisie. No national bourgeoisie, before or since, has had such opportunities and advantages. Having no military neighbors, they easily occupied an isolated continent stocked with natural resources and immensely inviting to a willing labor force. A framework of power and an ideology for its justification were already at hand.

 

Against mercantilist restriction, they inherited the principle of laissez-faire; against Southern planters, they imposed the principle of industrialism. The Revolutionary War put an end to colonial pretensions to nobility, as loyalists fled the country and many estates were broken up. The Jacksonian upheaval with its status revolution put an end to pretensions to monopoly of descent by the old New England families.

 

The Civil War broke the power, and so in due course the prestige, of the ante-bellum South's claimants for the higher esteem. The tempo of the whole capitalist development made it impossible for an inherited nobility to develop and endure in America.

No fixed ruling class, anchored in agrarian life and coming to flower in military glory, could contain in America the historic thrust of commerce and industry, or subordinate to itself the capitalist elite - as capitalists were subordinated, for example, in Germany and Japan. Nor could such a ruling class anywhere in the world contain that of the United States when industrialized violence came to decide history.

 

Witness the fate of Germany and Japan in the two world wars of the twentieth century; and indeed the fate of Britain herself and her model ruling class, as New York became the inevitable economic, and Washington the inevitable political capital of the western capitalist world.⁴

 

The elite who occupy the command posts may be seen as the possessors of power and wealth and celebrity; they may be seen as members of the upper stratum of a capitalistic society. They may also be defined in terms of psychological and moral criteria, as certain kinds of selected individuals. So defined, the elite, quite simply, are people of superior character and energy.

 

The humanist, for example, may conceive of the 'elite' not as a social level or category, but as a scatter of those individuals who attempt to transcend themselves, and accordingly, are more noble, more efficient, made out of better stuff. It does not matter whether they are poor or rich, whether they hold high position or low, whether they are acclaimed or despised; they are elite because of the kind of individuals they are. The rest of the population is mass, which, according to this conception, sluggishly relaxes into uncomfortable mediocrity.⁵

This is the sort of socially unlocated conception which some American writers with conservative yearnings have recently sought to develop.*

 

* See below, FOURTEEN: The Conservative Mood.

 

But most moral and psychological conceptions of the elite are much less sophisticated, concerning themselves not with individuals but with the stratum as a whole.

 

Such ideas, in fact, always arise in a society in which some people possess more than do others of what there is to possess. People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.

 

In this sense, the idea of the elite as composed of men and women having a finer moral character is an ideology of the elite as a privileged ruling stratum, and this is true whether the ideology is elite-made or made up for it by others.

In eras of equalitarian rhetoric, the more intelligent or the more articulate among the lower and middle classes, as well as guilty members of the upper, may come to entertain ideas of a counter-elite. In western society, as a matter of fact, there is a long tradition and varied images of the poor, the exploited, and the oppressed as the truly virtuous, the wise, and the blessed.

 

Stemming from christian tradition, this moral idea of a counter-elite, composed of essentially higher types condemned to a lowly station, may be and has been used by the underlying population to justify harsh criticism of ruling elites and to celebrate Utopian images of a new elite to come.

The moral conception of the elite, however, is not always merely an ideology of the over-privileged or a counter-ideology of the underprivileged. It is often a fact: having controlled experiences and select privileges, many individuals of the upper stratum do come in due course to approximate the types of character they claim to embody.

 

Even when we give up - as we must -  the idea that the elite man or woman is born with an elite character, we need not dismiss the idea that their experiences and trainings develop in them characters of a specific type.

Nowadays we must qualify the idea of elite as composed of higher types of individuals, for the men who are selected for and shaped by the top positions have many spokesmen and advisers and ghosts and make-up men who modify their self-conceptions and create their public images, as well as shape many of their decisions.

 

There is, of course, considerable variation among the elite in this respect, but as a general rule in America today, it would be naive to interpret any major elite group merely in terms of its ostensible personnel. The American elite often seems less a collection of persons than of corporate entities, which are in great part created and spoken for as standard types of 'personality.'

 

Even the most apparently free-lance celebrity is usually a sort of synthetic production turned out each week by a disciplined staff which systematically ponders the effect of the easy ad-libbed gags the celebrity 'spontaneously' echoes.

Yet, in so far as the elite flourishes as a social class or as a set of men at the command posts, it will select and form certain types of personality, and reject others. The kind of moral and psychological beings men become is in large part determined by the values they experience and the institutional roles they are allowed and expected to play.

 

From the biographer's point of view, a man of the upper classes is formed by his relations with others like himself in a series of small intimate groupings through which he passes and to which throughout his lifetime he may return. So conceived, the elite is a set of higher circles whose members are selected, trained and certified and permitted intimate access to those who command the impersonal institutional hierarchies of modern society.

 

If there is any one key to the psychological idea of the elite, it is that they combine in their persons an awareness of impersonal decision-making with intimate sensibilities shared with one another.

 

To understand the elite as a social class we must examine a whole series of smaller face-to-face milieu, the most obvious of which, historically, has been the upper-class family, but the most important of which today are the proper secondary school and the metropolitan club.6

These several notions of the elite, when appropriately understood, are intricately bound up with one another, and we shall use them all in this examination of American success. We shall study each of several higher circles as offering candidates for the elite, and we shall do so in terms of the major institutions making up the total society of America; within and between each of these institutions, we shall trace the interrelations of wealth and power and prestige.

 

But our main concern is with the power of those who now occupy the command posts, and with the role which they are enacting in the history of our epoch.

Such an elite may be conceived as omnipotent, and its powers thought of as a great hidden design. Thus, in vulgar Marxism, events and trends are explained by reference to 'the will of the bourgeoisie'; in Nazism, by reference to 'the conspiracy of the Jews'; by the petty right in America today, by reference to 'the hidden force' of Communist spies. According to such notions of the omnipotent elite as historical cause, the elite is never an entirely visible agency.

 

It is, in fact, a secular substitute for the will of God, being realized in a sort of providential design, except that usually non-elite men are thought capable of opposing it and eventually overcoming it.*

 

* Those who charge that Communist agents have been or are in the government, as well as those frightened by them, never raise the question: 'Well, suppose there are Communists in high places, how much power do they have?' They simply assume that men in high places, or in this case even those in positions from which they might influence such men, do decide important events. Those who think Communist agents lost China to the Soviet bloc, or influenced loyal Americans to lose it, simply assume that there is a set of men who decide such matters, actively or by neglect or by stupidity. Many others, who do not believe that Communist agents were so influential, still assume that loyal American decision-makers lost it all by themselves.


The opposite view - of the elite as impotent - is now quite popular among liberal-minded observers.

 

Far from being omnipotent, the elites are thought to be so scattered as to lack any coherence as a historical force. Their invisibility is not the invisibility of secrecy but the invisibility of the multitude.

 

Those who occupy the formal places of authority are so check-mated - by other elites exerting pressure, or by the public as an electorate, or by constitutional codes - that, although there may be upper classes, there is no ruling class; although there may be men of power, there is no power elite; although there may be a system of stratification, it has no effective top. In the extreme, this view of the elite, as weakened by compromise and disunited to the point of nullity, is a substitute for impersonal collective fate; for, in this view, the decisions of the visible men of the higher circles do not count in history.*

 

* The idea of the impotent elite, as we shall have occasion to see, in ELEVEN: The Theory of Balance, is mightily supported by the notion of an automatic economy in which the problem of power is solved for the economic elite by denying its existence. No one has enough power to make a real difference; events are the results of an anonymous balance. For the political elite too, the model of balance solves the problem of power. Parallel to the market-economy, there is the leaderless democracy in which no one is responsible for anything and everyone is responsible for everything; the will of men acts only through the impersonal workings of the electoral process.

Internationally, the image of the omnipotent elite tends to prevail.

 

All good events and pleasing happenings are quickly imputed by the opinion-makers to the leaders of their own nation; all bad events and unpleasant experiences are imputed to the enemy abroad. In both cases, the omnipotence of evil rulers or of virtuous leaders is assumed.

 

Within the nation, the use of such rhetoric is rather more complicated: when men speak of the power of their own party or circle, they and their leaders are, of course, impotent; only 'the people' are omnipotent. But, when they speak of the power of their opponent's party or circle, they impute to them omnipotence; 'the people' are now powerlessly taken in.

More generally, American men of power tend, by convention, to deny that they are powerful. No American runs for office in order to rule or even govern, but only to serve; he does not become a bureaucrat or even an official, but a public servant. And nowadays, as I have already pointed out, such postures have become standard features of the public-relations programs of all men of power. So firm a part of the style of power-wielding have they become that conservative writers readily misinterpret them as indicating a trend toward an 'amorphous power situation.'

But the 'power situation' of America today is less amorphous than is the perspective of those who see it as a romantic confusion. It is less a flat, momentary 'situation' than a graded, durable structure. And if those who occupy its top grades are not omnipotent, neither are they impotent. It is the form and the height of the gradation of power that we must examine if we would understand the degree of power held and exercised by the elite.

If the power to decide such national issues as are decided were shared in an absolutely equal way, there would be no power elite; in fact, there would be no gradation of power, but only a radical homogeneity. At the opposite extreme as well, if the power to decide issues were absolutely monopolized by one small group, there would be no gradation of power; there would simply be this small group in command, and below it, the undifferentiated, dominated masses.

 

American society today represents neither the one nor the other of these extremes, but a conception of them is none the less useful: it makes us realize more clearly the question of the structure of power in the United States and the position of the power elite within it.

Within each of the most powerful institutional orders of modern society there is a gradation of power. The owner of a roadside fruit stand does not have as much power in any area of social or economic or political decision as the head of a multi-million-dollar fruit corporation; no lieutenant on the line is as powerful as the Chief of Staff in the Pentagon; no deputy sheriff carries as much authority as the President of the United States.

 

Accordingly, the problem of defining the power elite concerns the level at which we wish to draw the line. By lowering the line, we could define the elite out of existence; by raising it, we could make the elite a very small circle indeed. In a preliminary and minimum way, we draw the line crudely, in charcoal as it were:

 

By the power elite, we refer to those political, economic, and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least national consequences. In so far as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them.

To say that there are obvious gradations of power and of opportunities to decide within modern society is not to say that the powerful are united, that they fully know what they do, or that they are consciously joined in conspiracy. Such issues are best faced if we concern ourselves, in the first instance, more with the structural position of the high and mighty, and with the consequences of their decisions, than with the extent of their awareness or the purity of their motives.

 

To understand the power elite, we must attend to three major keys:

1. One, which we shall emphasize throughout our discussion of each of the higher circles, is the psychology of the several elites in their respective milieu. In so far as the power elite is composed of men of similar origin and education, in so far as their careers and their styles of life are similar, there are psychological and social bases for their unity, resting upon the fact that they are of similar social type and leading to the fact of their easy intermingling.

    

   This kind of unity reaches its frothier apex in the sharing of that prestige that is to be had in the world of the celebrity; it achieves a more solid culmination in the fact of the interchangeability of positions within and between the three dominant institutional orders.
   
    

2. Behind such psychological and social unity as we may find, are the structure and the mechanics of those institutional hierarchies over which the political directorate, the corporate rich, and the high military now preside. The greater the scale of these bureaucratic domains, the greater the scope of their respective elite's power.

    

   How each of the major hierarchies is shaped and and what relations it has with the other hierarchies determine in large part the relations of their rulers. If these hierarchies are scattered and disjointed, then their respective elites tend to be scattered and disjointed; if they have many interconnections and points of coinciding interest, then their elites tend to form a coherent kind of grouping.
   
   The unity of the elite is not a simple reflection of the unity of institutions, but men and institutions are always related, and our conception of the power elite invites us to determine that relation. Today in America there are several important structural coincidences of interest between these institutional domains, including the development of a permanent war establishment by a privately incorporated economy inside a political vacuum.
   
    

3. The unity of the power elite, however, does not rest solely on psychological similarity and social intermingling, nor entirely on the structural coincidences of commanding positions and interests. At times it is the unity of a more explicit co-ordination. To say that these three higher circles are increasingly coordinated, that this is one basis of their unity, and that at times - as during the wars - such co-ordination is quite decisive, is not to say that the co-ordination is total or continuous, or even that it is very sure-footed.

    

   Much less is it to say that willful co-ordination is the sole or the major basis of their unity, or that the power elite has emerged as the realization of a plan.

    

   But it is to say that as the institutional mechanics of our time have opened up avenues to men pursuing their several interests, many of them have come to see that these several interests could be realized more easily if they worked together, in informal as well as in more formal ways, and accordingly they have done so.⁶

It is not my thesis that for all epochs of human history and in all nations, a creative minority, a ruling class, an omnipotent elite, shape all historical events. Such statements, upon careful examination, usually turn out to be mere tautologies,⁷ and even when they are not, they are so entirely general as to be useless in the attempt to understand the history of the present.

 

The minimum definition of the power elite as those who decide whatever is decided of major consequence, does not imply that the members of this elite are always and necessarily the history-makers; neither does it imply that they never are. We must not confuse the conception of the elite, which we wish to define, with one theory about their role: that they are the history-makers of our time.

 

To define the elite, for example, as 'those who rule America' is less to define a conception than to state one hypothesis about the role and power of that elite.

 

No matter how we might define the elite, the extent of its members' power is subject to historical variation. If, in a dogmatic way, we try to include that variation in our generic definition, we foolishly limit the use of a needed conception. If we insist that the elite be defined as a strictly coordinated class that continually and absolutely rules, we are closing off from our view much to which the term more modestly defined might open to our observation.

 

In short, our definition of the power elite cannot properly contain dogma concerning the degree and kind of power that ruling groups everywhere have. Much less should it permit us to smuggle into our discussion a theory of history. During most of human history, historical change has not been visible to the people who were involved in it, or even to those enacting it.

 

Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, for example, endured for some four hundred generations with but slight changes in their basic structure. That is six and a half times as long as the entire Christian era, which has only prevailed some sixty generations; it is about eighty times as long as the five generations of the United States' existence.

 

But now the tempo of change is so rapid, and the means of observation so accessible, that the interplay of event and decision seems often to be quite historically visible, if we will only look carefully and from an adequate vantage point.

When knowledgeable journalists tell us that 'events, not men, shape the big decisions,' they are echoing the theory of history as Fortune, Chance, Fate, or the work of The Unseen Hand. For 'events' is merely a modern word for these older ideas, all of which separate men from history-making, because all of them lead us to believe that history goes on behind men's backs.

 

History is drift with no mastery; within it there is action but no deed; history is mere happening and the event intended by no one.⁸

The course of events in our time depends more on a series of human decisions than on any inevitable fate. The sociological meaning of 'fate' is simply this: that, when the decisions are innumerable and each one is of small consequence, all of them add up in a way no man intended - to history as fate. But not all epochs are equally fateful.

 

As the circle of those who decide is narrowed, as the means of decision are centralized and the consequences of decisions become enormous, then the course of great events often rests upon the decisions of determinable circles. This does not necessarily mean that the same circle of men follow through from one event to another in such a way that all of history is merely their plot.

 

The power of the elite does not necessarily mean that history is not also shaped by a series of small decisions, none of which are thought out. It does not mean that a hundred small arrangements and compromises and adaptations may not be built into the going policy and the living event. The idea of the power elite implies nothing about the process of decision-making as such: it is an attempt to delimit the social areas within which that process, whatever its character, goes on. It is a conception of who is involved in the process.

The degree of foresight and control of those who are involved in decisions that count may also vary.

 

The idea of the power elite does not mean that the estimations and calculated risks upon which decisions are made are not often wrong and that the consequences are sometimes, indeed often, not those intended. Often those who make decisions are trapped by their own inadequacies and blinded by their own errors.

Yet in our time the pivotal moment does arise, and at that moment, small circles do decide or fail to decide. In either case, they are an elite of power. The dropping of the A-bombs over Japan was such a moment; the decision on Korea was such a moment; the confusion about Quemoy and Matsu, as well as before Dienbienphu were such moments; the sequence of maneuvers which involved the United States in World War II was such a 'moment.'

 

Is it not true that much of the history of our times is composed of such moments? And is not that what is meant when it is said that we live in a time of big decisions, of decisively centralized power?

Most of us do not try to make sense of our age by believing in a Greek-like, eternal recurrence, nor by a christian belief in a salvation to come, nor by any steady march of human progress.

 

Even though we do not reflect upon such matters, the chances are we believe with Burckhardt that we live in a mere succession of events; that sheer continuity is the only principle of history. History is merely one thing after another; history is meaningless in that it is not the realization of any determinate plot. It is true, of course, that our sense of continuity, our feeling for the history of our time, is affected by crisis.

 

But we seldom look beyond the immediate crisis or the crisis felt to be just ahead. We believe neither in fate nor providence; and we assume, without talking about it, that 'we' - as a nation - can decisively shape the future but that 'we' as individuals somehow cannot do so.

Any meaning history has, 'we' shall have to give to it by our actions. Yet the fact is that although we are all of us within history we do not all possess equal powers to make history. To pretend that we do is sociological nonsense and political irresponsibility. It is nonsense because any group or any individual is limited, first of all, by the technical and institutional means of power at its command; we do not all have equal access to the means of power that now exist, nor equal influence over their use.

 

To pretend that 'we' are all history-makers is politically irresponsible because it obfuscates any attempt to locate responsibility for the consequential decisions of men who do have access to the means of power.

From even the most superficial examination of the history of the western society we learn that the power of decision-makers is first of all limited by the level of technique, by the means of power and violence and organization that prevail in a given society.

 

In this connection we also learn that there is a fairly straight line running upward through the history of the West; that the means of oppression and exploitation, of violence and destruction, as well as the means of production and reconstruction, have been progressively enlarged and increasingly centralized.

As the institutional means of power and the means of communications that tie them together have become steadily more efficient, those now in command of them have come into command of instruments of rule quite unsurpassed in the history of mankind. And we are not yet at the climax of their development. We can no longer lean upon or take soft comfort from the historical ups and downs of ruling groups of previous epochs. In that sense, Hegel is correct: we learn from history that we cannot learn from it.

For every epoch and for every social structure, we must work out an answer to the question of the power of the elite. The ends of men are often merely hopes, but means are facts within some men's control. That is why all means of power tend to become ends to an elite that is in command of them. And that is why we may define the power elite in terms of the means of power - as those who occupy the command posts.

 

The major questions about the American elite today - its composition, its unity, its power-must now be faced with due attention to the awesome means of power available to them. Caesar could do less with Rome than Napoleon with France; Napoleon less with France than Lenin with Russia; and Lenin less with Russia than Hitler with Germany.

 

But what was Caesar's power at its peak compared with the power of the changing inner circle of Soviet Russia or of America's temporary administrations?

 

The men of either circle can cause great cities to be wiped out in a single night, and in a few weeks turn continents into thermonuclear wastelands. That the facilities of power are enormously enlarged and decisively centralized means that the decisions of small groups are now more consequential.

But to know that the top posts of modern social structures now permit more commanding decisions is not to know that the elite who occupy these posts are the history-makers. We might grant that the enlarged and integrated economic, military, and political structures are shaped to permit command decisions, yet still feel that, as it were, 'they run themselves,' that those who are on top, in short, are determined in their decisions by 'necessity,' which presumably means by the instituted roles that they play and the situation of these institutions in the total structure of society.

Do the elite determine the roles that they enact? Or do the roles that institutions make available to them determine the power of the elite?

 

The general answer - and no general answer is sufficient  - is that in different kinds of structures and epochs elites are quite differently related to the roles that they play: nothing in the nature of the elite or in the nature of history dictates an answer. It is also true that if most men and women take whatever roles are permitted to them and enact them as they are expected to by virtue of their position, this is precisely what the elite need not do, and often do not do.

 

They may call into question the structure, their position within it, or the way in which they are to enact that position.

Nobody called for or permitted Napoleon to chase Parliament home on the 18 Brumaire, and later to transform his consulate into an emperorship.⁹ Nobody called for or permitted Adolf Hitler to proclaim himself 'Leader and Chancellor' the day President Hindenburg died, to abolish and usurp roles by merging the presidency and the chancellorship.

 

Nobody called for or permitted Franklin D. Roosevelt to make the series of decisions that led to the entrance of the United States into World War II. It was no 'historical necessity,' but a man named Truman who, with a few other men, decided to drop a bomb on Hiroshima. It was no historical necessity, but an argument within a small circle of men that defeated Admiral Radford's proposal to bomb troops before Dienbienphu.

 

Far from being dependent upon the structure of institutions, modern elites may smash one structure and set up another in which they then enact quite different roles. In fact, such destruction and creation of institutional structures, with all their means of power, when events seem to turn out well, is just what is involved in 'great leadership,' or, when they seem to turn out badly, great tyranny.

Some elite men are, of course, typically role-determined, but others are at times role-determining. They determine not only the role they play but today the roles of millions of other men.

 

The creation of pivotal roles and their pivotal enactment occurs most readily when social structures are undergoing epochal transitions. It is clear that the international development of the United States to one of the two 'great powers' - along with the new means of annihilation and administrative and psychic domination - have made of the United States in the middle years of the twentieth century precisely such an epochal pivot.

There is nothing about history that tells us that a power elite cannot make it. To be sure, the will of such men is always limited, but never before have the limits been so broad, for never before have the means of power been so enormous. It is this that makes our situation so precarious, and makes even more important an understanding of the powers and the limitations of the American elite. The problem of the nature and the power of this elite is now the only realistic and serious way to raise again the problem of responsible government.

Those who have abandoned criticism for the new American celebration take readily to the view that the elite is impotent. If they were politically serious, they ought, on the basis of their view, to say to those presumably in charge of American policy:¹⁰

'One day soon, you may believe that you have an opportunity to drop a bomb or a chance to exacerbate further your relations with allies or with the Russians who might also drop it. But don't be so foolish as to believe that you really have a choice. You have neither choice nor chance.

 

The whole Complex Situation of which you are merely one balancing part is the result of Economic and Social Forces, and so will be the fateful outcome. So stand by quietly, like Tolstoy's general, and let events proceed. Even if you did act, the consequences would not be what you intended, even if you had an intention.

'But - if events come out well, talk as though you had decided.
 

For then men have had moral choices and the power to make them and are, of course, responsible.

'If events come out badly, say that you didn't have the real choice, and are, of course, not accountable: they, the others, had the choice and they are responsible. You can get away with this even though you have at your command half the world's forces and God knows how many bombs and bombers.

 

For you are, in fact, an impotent item in the historical fate of your times; and moral responsibility is an illusion, although it is of great use if handled in a really alert public relations manner.'

The one implication that can be drawn from all such fatalisms is that if fortune or providence rules, then no elite of power can be justly considered a source of historical decisions, and the idea-much less the demand - of responsible leadership is an idle and an irresponsible notion.

 

For clearly, an impotent elite, the plaything of history, cannot be held accountable. If the elite of our time do not have power, they cannot be held responsible; as men in a difficult position, they should engage our sympathies. The people of the United States are ruled by sovereign fortune; they, and with them their elite, are fatally overwhelmed by consequences they cannot control. If that is so, we ought all to do what many have in fact already done: withdraw entirely from political reflection and action into a materially comfortable and entirely private life.

If, on the other hand, we believe that war and peace and slump and prosperity are, precisely now, no longer matters of 'fortune' or 'fate,' but that, precisely now more than ever, they are controllable, then we must ask - controllable by whom?

 

The answer must be: By whom else but those who now command the enormously enlarged and decisively centralized means of decision and power?

 

We may then ask: Why don't they, then? And for the answer to that, we must understand the context and the character of the American elite today.

There is nothing in the idea of the elite as impotent which should deter us from asking just such questions, which are now the most important questions political men can ask. The American elite is neither omnipotent nor impotent. These are abstract absolutes used publicly by spokesmen, as excuses or as boasts, but in terms of which we may seek to clarify the political issues before us, which just now are above all the issues of responsible power.

There is nothing in 'the nature of history' in our epoch that rules out the pivotal function of small groups of decision-makers. On the contrary, the structure of the present is such as to make this not only a reasonable, but a rather compelling, view.

There is nothing in 'the psychology of man,' or in the social manner by which men are shaped and selected for and by the command posts of modern society, that makes unreasonable the view that they do confront choices and that the choices they make - or their failure to confront them - are history-making in their consequences.

Accordingly, political men now have every reason to hold the American power elite accountable for a decisive range of the historical events that make up the history of the present.

It is as fashionable, just now, to suppose that there is no power elite, as it was fashionable in the 'thirties to suppose a set of ruling-class villains to be the source of all social injustice and public malaise. I should be as far from supposing that some simple and unilateral ruling class could be firmly located as the prime mover of American society, as I should be from supposing that all historical change in America today is merely impersonal drift.

The view that all is blind drift is largely a fatalist projection of one's own feeling of impotence and perhaps, if one has ever been active politically in a principled way, a salve of one's guilt.

The view that all of history is due to the conspiracy of an easily located set of villains, or of heroes, is also a hurried projection from the difficult effort to understand how shifts in the structure of society open opportunities to various elites and how various elites take advantage or fail to take advantage of them. To accept either view - of all history as conspiracy or of all history as drift - is to relax the effort to understand the facts of power and the ways of the powerful.

In my attempt to discern the shape of the power elite of our time, and thus to give a responsible meaning to the anonymous 'They,' which the underlying population opposes to the anonymous 'We,' I shall begin by briefly examining the higher elements which most people know best: the new and the old upper classes of local society and the metropolitan 400. I shall then outline the world of the celebrity, attempting to show that the prestige system of

American society has now for the first time become truly national in scope; and that the more trivial and glamorous aspects of this national system of status tend at once to distract attention from its more authoritarian features and to justify the power that it often conceals.

In examining the very rich and the chief executives, I shall indicate how neither 'America's Sixty Families' nor 'The Managerial Revolution' provides an adequate idea of the transformation of the upper classes as they are organized today in the privileged stratum of the corporate rich.

After describing the American statesman as a historical type, I shall attempt to show that what observers in the Progressive Era called 'the invisible government' has now become quite visible; and that what is usually taken to be the central content of politics, the pressures and the campaigns and the congressional maneuvering, has, in considerable part, now been relegated to the middle levels of power.

In discussing the military ascendancy, I shall try to make clear how it has come about that admirals and generals have assumed positions of decisive political and economic relevance, and how, in doing so, they have found many points of coinciding interests with the corporate rich and the political directorate of the visible government.

After these and other trends are made as plain as I can make them, I shall return to the master problems of the power elite, as well as take up the complementary notion of the mass society.

What I am asserting is that in this particular epoch a conjunction of historical circumstances has led to the rise of an elite of power; that the men of the circles composing this elite, severally and collectively, now make such key decisions as are made; and that, given the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power now available, the decisions that they make and fail to make carry more consequences for more people than has ever been the case in the world history of mankind.

I am also asserting that there has developed on the middle levels of power, a semi-organized stalemate, and that on the bottom level there has come into being a mass-like society which has little resemblance to the image of a society in which voluntary associations and classic publics hold the keys to power.

 

The top of the American system of power is much more unified and much more powerful, the bottom is much more fragmented, and in truth, impotent, than is generally supposed by those who are distracted by the middling units of power which neither express such will as exists at the bottom nor determine the decisions at the top.

 

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2 - Local Society

IN every town and small city of America an upper set of families stands above the middle classes and towers over the underlying population of clerks and wage workers.

 

The members of this set possess more than do others of whatever there is locally to possess; they hold the keys to local decision; their names and faces are often printed in the local paper; in fact, they own the newspaper as well as the radio station; they also own the three important local plants and most of the commercial properties along the main street; they direct the banks.

 

Mingling closely with one another, they are quite conscious of the fact that they belong to the leading class of the leading families.

All their sons and daughters go to college, often after private schools; then they marry one another, or other boys and girls from similar families in similar towns. After they are well married, they come to possess, to occupy, to decide. The son of one of these old families, to his father's chagrin and his grandfather's fury, is now an executive in the local branch of a national corporation.

 

The leading family doctor has two sons, one of whom now takes up the practice; the other - who is soon to marry the daughter of the second largest factory - will probably be the next district attorney. So it has traditionally been, and so it is today in the small towns of America.

Class consciousness is not equally characteristic of all levels of American society: it is most apparent in the upper class. Among the underlying population everywhere in America there is much confusion and blurring of the lines of demarcation, of the status value of clothing and houses, of the ways of money-making and of money-spending. The people of the lower and middle classes are of course differentiated by the values, things, and experiences to which differing amounts of income lead, but often they are aware neither of these values nor of their class bases.

Those of the upper strata, on the other hand, if only because they are fewer in number, are able with much more ease to know more about one another, to maintain among themselves a common tradition, and thus to be conscious of their own land. They have the money and the time required to uphold their common standards. A propertied class, they are also a more or less distinct set of people who, mingling with one another, form compact circles with common claims to recognition as the leading families of their cities.

Examining the small city, both the novelist and the sociologist have felt most clearly the drama of the old and the new upper classes. The struggle for status which they have observed going on in these towns may be seen on a historic scale in the modern course of the whole of Western Society; for centuries the parvenus and snobs of new upper classes have stood in tension with the 'old guard.'

 

There are, of course, regional variations but across the country the small-town rich are surprisingly standardized. In these cities today, two types of upper classes prevail, one composed of rentier and socially older families, the other of newer families which, economically and socially, are of a more entrepreneurial type. Members of these two top classes understand the several distinctions between them, although each has its own particular view of them.¹

It should not be supposed that the old upper class is necessarily "higher' than the new, or that the new is simply a nouveau riche, struggling to drape new-won wealth in the prestige garments worn so easily by the old. The new upper class has a style of life of its own, and although its members - especially the women  - borrow considerably from the old upper-class style, they also -  especially the men - debunk that style in the name of their own values and aspirations. In many ways, these two upper sets compete for prestige and their competition involves some mutual deflation of claims for merit.

The old upper-class person feels that his prestige originates in time itself.

'Somewhere in the past,' he seems to say, 'my Original Ancestor rose up to become the Founder Of This Local Family Line and now His Blood flows in my veins. I am what My Family has been, and My Family has always been among the very best people.'

In New England and in the South, more families than in other regions are acutely conscious of family lines and old residence, and more resistant to the social ascendancy of the newly rich and the newly arrived.

 

There is perhaps a stronger and more embracing sense of family, which, especially in the South, comes to include long faithful servants as well as grandchildren. The sense of kinship may be extended even to those who, although not related by marriage or blood, are considered as 'cousins' or 'aunts' because they 'grew up with mother.'

 

Old upper-class families thus tend to form an endogenous cousinhood, whose clan piety and sense of kinship lead to a reverence for the past and often to a cultivated interest in the history of the region in which the clan has for so long played such an honorable role.

To speak of 'old families' is of course to speak of 'wealthy old families,' but in the status world of the old upper class, ready money and property are simply assumed - and then played down:

'Of course, you have to have enough of this world's goods to stand the cost of keeping up, of entertaining and for church donations ... but social standing is more than money.'

The men and women of the old upper class generally consider money in a negative way -  as something in which the new upper-class people are too closely interested.

 

'I'm sorry to say that our larger industrialists are increasingly money-conscious,' they say, and in saying it, they have in mind the older generation of industrialists who are now retired, generally on real-estate holdings; these rich men and their women folk, the old upper class believes, were and are more interested in 'community and social' qualifications than in mere money.

One major theme in old upper-class discussions of smaller business people is that they made a great deal of money during the late war, but that socially they aren't to be allowed to count. Another theme concerns the less respectable ways in which the money of the newly moneyed people has been earned. They mention pin-ball concessionaires, tavern keepers, and people in the trucking lines.

 

And, having patronized them, they are quite aware of the wartime black markets.

The continuance of the old-family line as the basis of prestige is challenged by the rip-snorting style as well as the money of the new upper classes, which World War II expanded and enriched, and made socially bold. Their style, the old upper classes feel, is replacing the older, quieter one. Underlying this status tension, there is often a tendency of decline in the economic basis of many old upper-class families, which, in many towns, is mainly real estate.

 

Yet the old upper class still generally has its firm hold on local financial institutions: in the market centers of Georgia and Nebraska, the trading and manufacturing towns of Vermont and California - the old upper-class banker is usually the lord of his community's domain, lending prestige to the businessmen with whom he associates, naming The Church by merely belonging to it.

 

Thus embodying salvation, social standing and financial soundness, he is accepted by others at his own shrewd and able valuation.

In the South the tension between old and new upper classes is often more dramatic than in other regions, for here old families have been based on land ownership and the agricultural economy. The synthesis of new wealth with older status, which of course has been under way since the Civil War, has been accelerated since the slump and World War II. The old southern aristocracy, in fictional image and in researched fact, is indeed often in a sorry state of decline. If it does not join the rising class based on industry and trade, it will surely die out, for when given sufficient time if status does not remain wealthy it crumbles into ignored eccentricity. Without sufficient money, quiet dignity and self-satisfied withdrawal comes to seem mere decay and even decadence.

The emphasis upon family descent, coupled with withdrawal, tends to enhance the status of older people, especially of those older women who become dowager judges of the conduct of the young. Such a situation is not conducive to the marriage of old upper-class daughters to sons of a new but up-and-coming class of wealth.

 

Yet the industrialization of the smaller cities steadily breaks up old status formations and leads to new ones: the rise of the enriched industrialist and tradesman inevitably leads to the decline of the land-owning aristocracy. In the South, as well as elsewhere, the larger requirements of capital for agricultural endeavor on sufficient scale, as well as favorable taxation and subsidy for 'farmers,' lead to new upper-class formations on the land as in the city.

The new and the old upper classes thus stand in the smaller cities eyeing one another with considerable tension, with some disdain, and with begrudging admiration. The upper-class man sees the old as having a prestige which he would like to have, but also as an old fogy blocking important business and political traffic and as a provincial, bound to the local set-up, without the vision to get up and go.

 

The old upper-class man, in turn, eyes the new and thinks of him as too money-conscious, as having made money and as grabbing for more, but as not having acquired the social background or the style of cultured life befitting his financial rank, and as not really being interested in the civic life of the city, except in so far as he might use it for personal and alien ends.

When they come up against the prestige of the old upper class on business and on civic and political issues, the new upper-class men often translate that prestige into 'old age,' which is associated in their minds with the quiet, 'old-fashioned' manner, the slower civic tempo, and the dragging political views of the old upper class. They feel that the old upper-class people do not use their prestige to make money in the manner of the new upper class.

 

They do not understand old prestige as something to be enjoyed; they see it in its political and economic relevance: when they do not have it, it is something standing in their way.*

* The woman of the new upper class has a somewhat different image: she often sees the prestige of the old upper class as something 'cultural' to appreciate. She often attempts to give to the old status an 'educational' meaning: this is especially true among those younger women of the station-wagon set whose husbands are professional men and who are themselves from a 'good college.' Having education themselves, and the time and money with which to organize cultural community affairs, the new upper-class women have more respect for the 'cultural' component of the old upper-class style than do their men. In thus acknowledging the social superiority of the older class, new upper-class women stress those of its themes which are available to them also. But such women form today the most reliable cash-in area for the status claims of the old upper classes in the small towns. Toward the middle classes, in general, such women snobbishly assert: They might be interested in cultural things but they would not have the opportunities or background or education. They could take advantage of the lecture series, but they don't have the background for heading it.'

That the social and economic split of the upper classes is also a political split is not yet fully apparent in all localities, but it is a fact that has tended to become national since World War II.

Local upper classes - new and old, seen and unseen, active and passive - make up the social backbone of the Republican party. Members of the old upper class, however, do not seem as strident or as active politically in the postwar scene as do many of the new.

 

Perhaps it is because they do not feel able, as Allison Davis and others have suggested of the old southern upper classes,

'to lessen the social distance between themselves and the voters.' Of course, everywhere their social position 'is clearly recognized by the officials. They are free from many of the minor legal restrictions, are almost never arrested for drunkenness or for minor traffic violations, are seldom called for jury duty, and usually receive any favors they request.'²

They are, it is true, very much concerned with tax rates and property assessments, but these concerns, being fully shared by the new upper classes, are well served without the personal intervention of the old.

The new upper class often practices those noisy political emotions and status frustrations which, on a national scale and in extreme form, have been so readily observable in The Investigators.

 

The key to these political emotions, in the Congress as in the local society, lies in the status psychology of the nouveau riche.*

 

* See below, FOURTEEN: The Conservative Mood.
 

Such newly enriched classes - ranging from Texas multi-millionaires to petty Illinois war profiteers who have since consolidated their holdings - feel that they are somehow held down by the status pretensions of older wealth and older families.

 

The suddenly $30,000-a-year insurance salesmen who drive the 260 hp cars and guiltily buy vulgar diamond rings for their wives; the suddenly $60,000-a-year businessmen who put in 50-foot swimming pools and do not know how to act toward their new servants - they feel that they have achieved something and yet are not thought to be good enough to possess it fully.

 

There are men in Texas today whose names are strictly local, but who have more money than many nationally prominent families of the East. But they are not often nationally prominent, and even when they are, it is not in just the same way.

Such feelings exist, on a smaller scale, in virtually every smaller city and town. They are not always articulated, and certainly they have not become the bases of any real political movement. But they lie back of the wide and deep gratification at beholding men of established prestige 'told off,' observing the general reprimanded by the upstart, hearing the parvenu familiarly, even insultingly, call the old wealthy by their first names in public controversy.

The political aim of the petty right formed among the new upper classes of the small cities is the destruction of the legislative achievements of the New and Fair Deals.

 

Moreover, the rise of labor unions in many of these cities during the war, with more labor leaders clamoring to be on local civic boards; the increased security of the wage workers who during the war cashed larger weekly checks in stores and banks and crowded the sidewalks on Saturday; the big new automobiles of the small people - all these class changes of the last two decades psychologically threaten the new upper class by reducing their own feelings of significance, their own sense of a fit order of prestige.

The old upper classes are also made less socially secure by such goings on in the street, in the stores, and in the bank; but after all, they reason:

'These people do not really touch us. All they have is money.'

The newly rich, however, being less socially firm than the old, do feel themselves to be of lesser worth as they see others also rise in the economic worlds of the small cities.

Local society is a structure of power as well as a hierarchy of status; at its top there is a set of cliques or 'crowds' whose members judge and decide the important community issues, as well as many larger issues of state and nation in which 'the community' is involved.3 Usually, although by no means always, these cliques are composed of old upper-class people; they include the larger businessmen and those who control the banks who usually also have connections with the major real-estate holders.

 

Informally organized, these cliques are often each centered in the several economic functions: there is an industrial, a retailing, a banking clique. The cliques overlap, and there are usually some men who, moving from one to another, co-ordinate viewpoints and decisions. There are also the lawyers and administrators of the solid rentier families, who, by the power of proxy and by the many contacts between old and new wealth they embody, tie together and focus in decision the power of money, of credit, of organization.

Immediately below such cliques are the hustlers, largely of new upper-class status, who carry out the decisions and programs of the top - sometimes anticipating them and always trying to do so. Here are the 'operations' men - the vice-presidents of the banks, successful small businessmen, the ranking public officials, contractors, and executives of local industries.

 

This number two level shades off into the third string men - the heads of civic agencies, organization officials, the pettier civic leaders, newspaper men, and, finally, into the fourth order of the power hierarchy - the rank and file of the professional and business strata, the ministers, the leading teachers, social workers, personnel directors.

On almost any given topic of interest or decision, some top clique, or even some one key man, becomes strategic to the decision at hand and to the informal co-ordination of its support among the important cliques. Now it is the man who is the clique's liaison with the state governor; now it is the bankers' clique; now it is the man who is well liked by the rank and file of both Rotary Club and Chamber of Commerce, both Community Chest and Bar Association.

Power does not reside in these middle-level organizations; key decisions are not made by their membership.

 

Top men belong to them, but are only infrequently active in them.

 

As associations, they help put into effect the policy-line worked out by the higher circles of power; they are training grounds in which younger hustlers of the top prove themselves; and sometimes, especially in the smaller cities, they are recruiting grounds for new members of the top.

'We would not go to the "associations," as you call them - that is, not right away,' one powerful man of a sizable city in the mid-South told Professor Floyd Hunter. 'A lot of those associations, if you mean by associations the Chamber of Commerce or the Community Council, sit around and discuss "goals" and "ideals." I don't know what a lot of those things mean. I'll be frank with you, I do not get onto a lot of those committees.

 

A lot of the others in town do, but I don't... Charles Homer is the biggest man in our crowd ... When he gets an idea, others will get the idea... recently he got the idea that Regional City should be the national headquarters for an International Trade Council. He called in some of us [the inner crowd], and he talked briefly about his idea. He did not talk much. We do not engage in loose talk about the "ideals" of the situation and all that other stuff. We get right down to the problem, that is, how to get this Council.

 

We all think it is a good idea right around the circle. There are six of us in the meeting ... All of us are assigned tasks to carry out. Moster is to draw up the papers of incorporation. He is the lawyer. I have a group of friends that I will carry along. Everyone else has a group of friends he will do the same with. These fellows are what you might call followers.

'We decide we need to raise $65,000 to put this thing over. We could raise that amount within our own crowd, but eventually this thing is going to be a community proposition, so we decide to bring the other crowds in on the deal. We decide to have a meeting at the Grandview Club with select members of other crowds...

 

When we meet at the Club at dinner with the other crowds, Mr. Homer makes a brief talk; again, he does not need to talk long. He ends his talk by saying he believes in his proposition enough that he is willing to put $10,000 of his own money into it for the first year. He sits down. You can see some of the other crowds getting their heads together, and the Growers Bank crowd, not to be outdone, offers a like amount plus a guarantee that they will go along with the project for three years.

 

Others throw in $5,000 to $10,000 until - I'd say within thirty or forty minutes - we have pledges of the money we need. In three hours the whole thing is settled, including the time for eating!

There is one detail I left out, and it is an important one. We went into that meeting with a board of directors picked. The constitution was all written, and the man who was to head the council as executive was named ... a third-string man, a fellow who will take advice .. . The public doesn't know anything about the project until it reaches the stage I've been talking about.

 

After the matter is financially sound, then we go to the newspapers and say there is a proposal for consideration. Of course, it is not news to a lot of people by then, but the Chamber committees and other civic organizations are brought in on the idea. They all think it's a good idea. They help to get the Council located and established.

 

That's about all there is to it.' ⁴

The status drama of the old and the new upper class; the class structure that underpins that drama; the power system of the higher cliques - these now form the rather standard, if somewhat intricate, pattern of the upper levels of local society.

 

But we could not understand that pattern or what is happening to it, were we to forget that all these cities are very much part of a national system of status and power and wealth. Despite the loyal rhetoric practiced by many Congressional spokesmen, no local society is in truth a sovereign locality. During the past century, local society has become part of a national economy; its status and power hierarchies have come to be subordinate parts of the larger hierarchies of the nation.

 

Even as early as the decades after the Civil War, persons of local eminence were becoming - merely local.5 Men whose sphere of active decision and public acclaim was regional and national in scope were rising into view. Today, to remain merely local is to fail; it is to be overshadowed by the wealth, the power, and the status of nationally important men.

 

To succeed is to leave local society behind - although certification by it may be needed in order to be selected for national cliques.

All truly old ways in America are, of course, rural. Yet the value of rural origin and of rural residences is sometimes ambiguous. On the one hand, there is the tradition of the town against the hayseed, of the big city against the small-town hick, and in many smaller cities, some prestige is achieved by those who, unlike the lower, working classes, have been in the city for all of one generation.

 

On the other hand, men who have achieved eminence often boast of the solidity of their rural origin; which may be due to the Jeffersonian ethos which holds rural virtues to be higher than the ways of the city, or to the desire to show how very far one has come.

If, in public life, the farm is often a good place to have come from, in social life, it is always a good place to own and to visit. Both small-city and big-city upper classes now quite typically own and visit their 'places in the country.' In part, all this, which even in the Middle West began as far back as the eighteen-nineties, is a way by which the merely rich attempt to anchor themselves in what is old and esteemed, of proving with cash and loving care and sometimes with inconvenience, their reverence for the past.

 

So in the South there is the exactly restored Old Plantation Mansion, in Texas and California the huge cattle spread or the manicured fruit ranch, in Iowa the model farm with its purebred stock and magnificent barns. There is also the motive of buying the farm as an investment and as a tax evasion, as well as, of course, the pleasure of such a seasonable residence and hobby.

For the small town and the surrounding countryside, these facts mean that local status arrangements can no longer be strictly local. Small town and countryside are already pretty well consolidated, for wealthy farmers, especially upon retiring, often move into the small city, and wealthy urban families have bought much country land. In one middle-western community, Mr. Hollingshead has reported, some twenty-five families of pioneer ancestry have accumulated more than sixty per cent of the surrounding one hundred sixty square miles of rich agricultural land.⁶

 

Such concentration has been strengthened by marriages between rural and urban upper-class families. Locally, any 'rural aristocracy' that may prevail is already centered in at least the small city; rural upper classes and the local society of smaller cities are in close contact, often in fact, belonging to the same higher cousinhood.

In addition to the farms owned by city families and the town-centered activities and residences of rural families, there is the increased seasonal change of residence among both rural and small-town upper classes. The women and children of the rural upper classes go to 'the lake' for the summer period, and the men for long week ends, even as New York families do the same in the winters in Florida. The democratization of the seasonable vacation to coast, mountain, or island now extends to local upper classes of small cities and rural district, where thirty years ago it was more confined to metropolitan upper classes.

The connections of small town with countryside, and the centering of the status worlds of both upon the larger city, are most dramatically revealed when into the country surrounding a small town there moves a set of gentlemen farmers. These seasonal residents are involved in the conduct and values of the larger cities in which they live; they know nothing and often care less for local claims to eminence.

 

With their country estates, they come to occupy the top rung of what used to be called the farm ladder, although they know little or nothing of the lower rungs of that ladder. In one middle-western township studied by Evon Vogt, such urban groups own half the land.7 They do not seek connections with local society and often do not even welcome its advances, but they are passing on these country estates to their children and now even to their grandchildren.

The members of local society, rural and urban, can attempt to follow one of two courses: they can withdraw and try to debunk the immoral ways of the newcomers, or they can attempt to join them, in which case they too will come to focus their social ways of life upon the metropolitan area. But whichever course they elect, they soon come to know, often with bitterness, that the new upper class as well as the local upper-middle classes, among whom they once cashed in their claims for status, are watching them with close attention and sometimes with amusement.

 

What was once a little principality, a seemingly self-sufficient world of status, is becoming an occasionally used satellite of the big-city upper class.

What has been happening in and to local society is its consolidation with the surrounding rural area, and its gradual incorporation in a national system of power and status. Muncie, Indiana, is now much closer to Indianapolis and Chicago than it was fifty years ago; and the upper classes of Muncie travel farther and travel more frequently than do the local middle and lower classes.

 

There are few small towns today whose upper classes, both new and old, are not likely to visit a near-by large city at least every month or so. Such travel is now a standard operation of the business, educational, and social fife of the small-city rich. They have more friends at a distance and more frequent relations with them.

 

The world of the local upper-class person is simply larger than it was in 1900 and larger than the worlds of the middle and lower classes today.

It is to the metropolitan upper classes that the local society of the smaller cities looks; its newer members with open admiration, its older, with less open admiration.

 

What good is it to show a horse or a dog in a small city of 100,000 population, even if you could, when you know that The Show will be in New York next fall? More seriously, what prestige is there in a $50,000 local deal, however financially convenient, when you know that in Chicago, only 175 miles away, men are turning over $500,000?

 

The very broadening of their status area makes the small-town woman and man unsatisfied to make big splashes in such little ponds, makes them yearn for the lakes of big city prestige, if not for truly national repute. Accordingly, to the extent that local society maintains its position, even locally, it comes to mingle with and to identify itself with a more metropolitan crowd and to talk more easily of eastern schools and New York night clubs.

There is one point of difference between the old and the new upper classes in the smaller cities that is of great concern to the old, for it causes the new to be a less ready and less reliable cash-in area for the status claims of the old. The old upper class, after all, is old only in relation to the new and hence needs the new in order to feel that all is right in its little world of status. But the new, as well as many of the old, know well that this local society is now only local.

The men and women of the old upper class understand their station to be well within their own city. They may go to Florida or California in the winter, but they go always as visitors, not as explorers of new ways or as makers of new business contacts.

 

They feel their place to be in their own city and they tend to think of this city as containing all the principles necessary for ranking all people everywhere. The new upper class, on the other hand, tends to esteem local people in terms of the number and types of contacts they have with places and people outside the city - which the true old upper-class person often excludes as 'outsiders.'

 

Moreover, many articulate members of the middle and lower classes look up to the new upper class because of such 'outside' contacts which, in a decisive way, are the very opposite of 'old family residence.'

 

Old family residence is a criterion that is community-centered; outside contacts center in the big city or even in the national scene.*

 

* More aggressive than the old, the new upper-class criterion for the really top people is not only that they are rich but that they are 'going places' and have connections with others who are 'going places' in an even bigger way than they. In one typical small city, the heroes of the new upper class were described to me as 'Boys with a lot of dynamite ... They're in there together going places and doing everything that's good for [the city]. They operate nationally, see, and that's very important in their outlook. They're not very active in strictly local affairs, but they are active men.

They have active investments all over, not money just lying around doing nothing.' Stories of old families that have fallen and of active new families that have risen illustrate to the new upper class the 'workings of democracy' and the possibility of 'anybody with the energy and brains' getting ahead. Such stories serve to justify their own position and style, and enable them to draw upon the national flow of official myths concerning the inevitable success of those who know how to work smartly.

The old upper classes do not tell such stories, at least not to strangers, for among them prestige is a positive thing in itself, somehow inherent in their way of life, and indeed, their very being.

But to the new upper-class man, prestige seems something that he himself does not truly possess, but could very well use in his business and social advancement; he tends to see the social position of the old upper class as an instrument for the 'selling' of a project or the making of more money. 'You can't get anything done in this town without them [the old upper class]. The handles on those names are very important...

Look, if you and I go out on a project in this town, or any other town we've got to have names with handles. Investors, proprietors, and so on, they just hold back until we do that. Otherwise if we had the finest project in the world, it would be born dead.'

Today 'outside contacts' often center in one very specific and galling reminder of national status and power which exists right in the local city: During the last thirty years, and especially with the business expansions of World War II, the national corporation has come into many of these smaller cities.

 

Its arrival has upset the old economic status balances within the local upper classes; for, with its local branch, there have come the executives from the big city, who tend to dwarf and to ignore local society.⁸

Prestige is, of course, achieved by 'getting in with' and imitating those who possess power as well as prestige. Nowadays such social standing as the local upper classes, in particular the new upper classes, may secure, is increasingly obtained through association with the leading officials of the great absentee-owned corporations, through following their style of living, through moving to their suburbs outside the city's limits, attending their social functions.

 

Since the status world of the corporation group does not characteristically center in the local city, local society tends to drift away from civic prestige, looking upon it as 'local stuff.'

In the eyes of the new upper class, the old social leaders of the city come gradually to be displaced by the corporation group. The local upper classes struggle to be invited to the affairs of the new leaders, and even to marry their children into their circles. One of the most obvious symptoms of the drift is the definite movement of the local upper-class families into the exclusive suburbs built largely by the corporation managers. The new upper class tends to imitate and to mingle with the corporation group; the 'bright young men' of all educated classes tend to leave the small city and to make their careers within the corporate world.

 

The local world of the old upper class is simply by-passed.

Such developments are often more important to women than to men. Women are frequently more active in social and civic matters - particularly in those relating to education, health, and charities - if for no other reason than that they have more time for them. They center their social life in the local cities because 'it is the thing to do,' and it is the thing to do only if those with top prestige do it.

 

Local women, however, gain little or no social standing among the corporate elite by participating in local affairs, since the executives' wives, corporation-and city-centered, do not concern themselves with local society, nor even with such important local matters as education; for they send their own children to private schools or, on lower executive levels, to their own public schools in their own suburbs, distinct and separate from the city's.

 

A typical local woman could work herself to the bone on civic matters and never be noticed or accepted by the executives' wives. But if it became known that by some chance she happened to be well acquainted with a metropolitan celebrity, she might well be 'in.'

Local women often participate in local and civic affairs in order to help their husband's business, but the terms of the executive's success lie within his national corporation. The corporate officials have very few business dealings with strictly local businessmen. They deal with distant individuals of other corporations who buy the plant's products or sell it materials and parts.

 

Even when the executive does undertake some deal with a local businessman, no social contact is required - unless it is part of the corporation's 'good-will' policy. So it is quite unnecessary for the executive's wife to participate in local society: the power of the corporation's name will readily provide him with all the contacts in the smaller city that he will ever require.

Perhaps there was a time - before the Civil War - when local societies composed the only society there was in America. It is still true, of course, that every small city is a local hierarchy of status and that at the top of each there is still a local elite of power and wealth and esteem.

 

But one cannot now study the upper groups in even a great number of smaller communities and then - as many American sociologists are prone to do - generalize the results to the nation, as the American System.9 Some members of the higher circles of the nation do live in small towns - although that is not usual. Moreover, where they happen to maintain a house means little; their area of operation is nation-wide.

 

The upper social classes of all the small towns of America cannot merely be added up to form a national upper class; their power cliques cannot merely be added up to form the national power elite. In each locality there is an upper set of families, and in each, with certain regional variations, they are quite similar. But the national structure of classes is not a mere enumeration of equally important local units. The class and status and power systems of local societies are not equally weighted; they are not autonomous.

 

Like the economic and political systems of the nation, the prestige and the power systems are no longer made up of decentralized little hierarchies, each having only thin and distant connections, if any at all, with the others. The kinds of relations that exist between the countryside and the town, the town and the big city, and between the various big cities, form a structure that is now national in scope.

 

Moreover, certain forces, which by their very nature are not rooted in any one town or city, now modify, by direct as well as indirect lines of control, the local hierarchies of status and power and wealth that prevail in each of them.

It is to the cities of the Social Register and the celebrity, to the seats of the corporate power, to the national centers of political and military decision, that local society now looks - even though some of its older members will not always admit that these cities and corporations and powers exist socially.

 

The strivings of the new upper class and the example of the managerial elite of the national corporation cause local societies everywhere to become satellites of status and class and power systems that extend beyond their local horizon.

 

What town in New England is socially comparable with Boston? What local industry is economically comparable with General Motors? What local political chief with the political directorate of the nation?

 

Back to Contents

 

 

 

3 - Metropolitan 400

THE little cities look to the big cities, but where do the big cities look?

 

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub. Local societies of small town and large city have had no historic court which, once and for all and officially, could certify the elect.

 

The political capital of the country is not the status capital, nor even in any real sense an important segment of Society; the political career does not parallel the social climb. New York, not Washington, has become the financial capital. What a difference it might have made if from the beginning Boston and Washington and New York had been combined into one great social, political, and financial capital of the nation!

 

Then, Mrs. John Jay's set ('Dinner and Supper List for 1787 and 1788'), in which men of high family, great wealth, and decisive power mingled, might, as part of the national census, have been kept intact and up-to-date.1

And yet despite the lack of official and metropolitan unity, today - seventeen decades later - there does flourish in the big cities of America a recognizable upper social class, which seems in many ways to be quite compact. In Boston and in New York, in Philadelphia and in Baltimore and in San Francisco, there exists a solid core of older, wealthy families surrounded by looser circles of newer, wealthy families.

 

This older core, which in New York was once said - by Mrs. Astor's Ward McAllister - to number Four Hundred, has made several bids to be The Society of America, and perhaps, once upon a time, it almost succeeded. Today, in so far as it tries to base itself on pride of family descent, its chances to be truly national are subject to great risks.

 

There is little doubt, however, that among the metropolitan 400's, as well as among their small-town counterparts, there is an accumulation of advantages in which objective opportunity and psychological readiness interact to create and to maintain for each generation the world of the upper social classes. These classes, in each of the big cities, look first of all to one another.¹

Before the Civil War the big-city upper classes were compact and stable. At least social chroniclers, looking back, say that they were.

'Society,' Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer wrote, grew 'from within rather than from without... The foreign elements absorbed were negligible. The social circle widened, generation by generation, through, the abundant contributions made by each family to posterity... There was a boundary as solid and as difficult to ignore as the Chinese Wall' Family lineage ran back to the formation of the colonies and the only divisions among upper-class groups 'were those of the church; Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed and Episcopalians formed fairly definite sections of a compact organization.' ²

In each locality and region, nineteenth-century wealth created its own industrial hierarchy of local families.

 

Up the Hudson, there were patrons, proud of their origins, and in Virginia, the planters. In every New England town, there were Puritan ship-owners and early industrialists, and in St. Louis, fashionable descendants of French Creoles living off real estate. In Denver, Colorado, there were wealthy gold and silver miners.

 

And in New York City, as Dixon Wecter has put it, there was,

'a class made up of coupon-clippers, sportsmen living off their fathers' accumulation, and a stratum like the Astors and Vanderbilts trying to renounce their commercial origins as quickly as possible.' ³

The richest people could be regarded as a distinct caste, their fortunes as permanent, their families as honorably old.

 

As long as they kept their wealth and no newer and bigger wealth threatened it, there was no reason to distinguish status by family lineage and status by wealth.⁴ The stability of the older upper classes rested rather securely upon the coincidence of old family and great wealth. For the push, the wealth, the power of new upper classes was contained by the old, who, while remaining distinct and unthreatened, could occasionally admit new members.

In the decades following the Civil War, the old upper classes of the older cities were overwhelmed by the new wealth.

'All at once,' Mrs. Van Rensselaer thought, Society 'was assailed from every side by persons who sought to climb boldly over the walls of social exclusiveness.' Moreover, from overseas the immigrants came, like southerners, and later westerners, to make their fortunes in the city. 'Others who had made theirs elsewhere, journeyed to New York to spend them on pleasure and social recognition.' ⁶

From the eighteen-seventies until the nineteen-twenties, the struggle of old family with new money occurred on a grandiose national scale.

 

Those families that were old because they had become wealthy prior to the Civil War attempted to close up their ranks against the post-Civil War rich. They failed primarily because the new wealth was so enormous compared with the old that it simply could not be resisted. Moreover, the newly wealthy could not be contained in any locality.

 

Like the broadening national territory, new wealth and power - in family and now in corporate form as well - grew to national size and scope. The city, the county, the state could not contain this socially powerful wealth. Everywhere, its possessors invaded the fine old families of metropolitan society.

All families would seem to be rather 'old,' but not all of them have possessed wealth for at least two but preferably three or four generations. The formula for 'old families' in America is money plus inclination plus time. After all, there have only been some six or seven generations in the whole of United States history. For every old family there must have been a time when someone was of that family but it was not 'old.' Accordingly, in America, it is almost as great a thing to be an ancestor as to have an ancestor.

It must not be supposed that the pedigreed families do not and have not admitted unregistered families to their social circles, especially after the unregistered have captured their banking firms. It is only that those whose ancestors bought their way into slightly older families only two or three generations ago now push hard to keep out those who would follow suit.

 

This game of the old rich and the parvenu began with the beginning of the national history, and continues today in the small town as in the metropolitan center. The one firm rule of the game is that, given persistent inclination, any family can win out on whatever level its money permits.

 

Money - sheer, naked, vulgar money - has with few exceptions won its possessors entrance anywhere and everywhere into American society.

From the point of view of status, which always tries to base itself on family descent, this means that the walls are always crumbling; from the more general standpoint of an upper social class of more than local recognition, it means that top level is always being renovated. It also means that, no matter what its pretensions, the American upper class is merely an enriched bourgeoisie, and that, no matter how powerful its members may be, they cannot invent an aristocratic past where one did not exist.

 

One careful genealogist has asserted that at the beginning of this century, there were 'not ten families occupying conspicuous social positions' in either the moneyed set or the old-family set of New York 'whose progenitors' names appeared on Mrs. John Jay's dinner list.' ⁶

In America, the prideful attempt to gain status by virtue of family descent has been an uneasy practice never touching more than a very small fraction of the population. With their real and invented ancestors, the 'well-born' and the 'high-born' have attempted to elaborate pedigrees and, on the basis of their consciousness of these pedigrees, to keep their distance from the 'low-born.'

 

But they have attempted this with an underlying population which, in an utterly vulgar way, seemed to glory in being low-born, and which was too ready with too many jokes about the breeding of horses to make such pretensions easy or widespread.

There has been too much movement - of family residence and between occupations, in the lifetime of an individual and between the generations - for feeling of family line to take root. Even when such feeling does strengthen the claims of the upper classes, it is without avail unless it is honored by the underlying strata. Americans are not very conscious of family lines; they are not the sort of underlying population which would readily cash in claims for prestige on the basis of family descent.

 

It is only when a social structure does not essentially change in the course of generations, only when occupation and wealth and station tend to become hereditary, that such pride and prejudice, and with them, such servility and sense of inferiority, can become stable bases of a prestige system.

The establishment of a pedigreed society, based on the prestige of family line, was possible, for a brief period, despite the absence of a feudal past and the presence of mobility, because of the immigrant situation. It was precisely during the decades when the flow of the new immigration into the big cities was largest that metropolitan Society was at its American peak.

 

In such Yankee ghettoes, claims for status by descent were most successful, not so much among the population at large as among those who claimed some descent and wanted more. Such claims were and are involved in the status hierarchy of nationality groups.

But there came a time when the lowly immigrant no longer served this purpose: the flow of immigration was stopped, and in a little while everyone in North America became - or soon would become - a native-born American of native-born parents.

Even while the supply of immigrants was huge and their number in the big cities outnumbered those of native parentage, liberal sentiments of nationalism were becoming too strong to be shaped by the barriers of strict descent. 'The Americanization of the Immigrant' - as an organized movement, as an ideology, and as a fact - made loyalties to one ideological version of the nation more important than Anglo-Saxon descent.

 

The view of the nation as a glorious melting pot of races and nations - carried by middle classes and intelligentsia - came to prevail over the Anglo-Saxon views of those concerned with 'racial' descent and with the pedigreed, registered society. Besides, each of these national groups -  from the Irish to the Puerto Rican - has slowly won local political power.

The attempt to create a pedigreed society has gone on among an upper class whose component localities competed: the eastern seaboard was settled first; so those who remained there have been local families longer than the families of more recently populated regions. Yet there are locally eminent families who have been locally eminent in many small New England towns for as long as any Boston family; there are small-town southern families whose claims for continuity of cousinhood could not be outdone by the most fanatic Boston Brahmin; and there are early California families who, within their own strongly felt framework of time, feel older and better established than any New York family might be.

 

The localities competed economically as well. The mining families and the railroad families and the real-estate families - in each industry, in each locality and region, as we have said, big wealth created its own hierarchy of local families.

The pedigree is a firm and stable basis of prestige when the class structure is firm and stable. Only then can all sorts of conventions and patterns of etiquette take root and flower in firm economic ground. When economic change is swift and mobility decisive, then the moneyed class as such will surely assert itself; status pretensions will collapse and time-honored prejudices will be swept away.

 

From the standpoint of class, a dollar is a dollar, but from the standpoint of a pedigreed society, two identical sums of money - the one received from four generations of inherited trusts, the other from a real kill on the market last week - are very different sums.

 

And yet, what is one to do when the new money becomes simply enormous? What is Mrs. Astor (the pedigreed lady of Knickerbocker origin married to old, real-estate wealth) going to do about Mrs. Vanderbilt (of the vulgar railroad money and the more vulgar grandfather-in-law) in 1870?

 

Mrs. Astor is going to lose: in 1883 she leaves her calling card at Mrs. Vanderbilt's door, and accepts an invitation to Mrs. Vanderbilt's fancy-dress ball.7 With that sort of thing happening, you cannot run a real pedigreed status show.

 

Always in America, as perhaps elsewhere, society based on descent has been either by-passed or bought-out by the new and vulgar rich.*

* But not only the fast-moving mechanics of class upset the show. Almost anything fast moving does. For the conventions of a style of life are important to the prestige of local society, and only where class and status relations are stable can conventions be stabilized. If conventions are truly rigid, then dress becomes 'costume,' and conventions become 'traditions.' High prestige of ancestors, of old age, of old wealth, of antiques, of 'seniority' of residence, and membership and of old ways of doing anything and everything - they go together and together make up the status conventions of a fixed circle in a stable society.

When social change is swift, prestige tends to go to the young and the beautiful, even if they are the damned; to the merely different and Here, in the social context of the self-made man, the parvenu claimed status.

 

He claimed it as a self-made man rather than despite it. In each generation some family-made men and women have looked down upon him as an intruder, a nouveau riche, as an outsider in every way. But in each following generation - or the one following that - he has been admitted to the upper social classes of the duly pedigreed families.²

 

The status struggle in America is not something that occurred at a given time and was then done with. The attempt of the old rich to remain exclusively prominent by virtue of family pedigree has been a continual attempt, which always fails and always succeeds. It fails because in each generation new additions are made; it succeeds because at all times an upper social class is making the fight. A stable upper class with a really fixed membership does not exist; but an upper social class does exist. Change in the membership of a class, no matter how rapid, does not destroy the class.

 

Not the identical individual or families, but the same type prevails within it. There have been numerous attempts to fix this type by drawing the line in a more or less formal way.

 

Even before the Civil War, when new wealth was not as pushing as it later became, some social arbiter seemed to be needed by worried hostesses confronted with social decisions. For two generations before 1850, New York Society depended upon the services of one Isaac Brown, sexton of Grace Church, who, we are told by Dixon Wecter, had a,

'faultless memory for names, pedigrees, and gossip.' He was quite ready to tell hostesses about to issue invitations who was in mourning, who had gone bankrupt, who had friends visiting them, who were the new arrivals in town and in Society.'

He would preside at the doorstep at parties, and some observers claimed that he,

'possessed a list of "dancing young men" for the benefit of newly arrived party-givers.' ⁸

The extravagant wealth of the post-Civil War period called for a more articulate means of determining the elect, and Ward McAllister, for a time, established himself as selector.

 

In order that,

'society might be given that solidity needed to resist invasion of the flashiest profiteers,' McAllister wished to undertake the needed mixture of old families with position but without fashion, and the ' "swells" who had to entertain and be smart in order to win their way.'

He is said to have taken his task very seriously, giving over,

'his days and nights to study of heraldry, books of court etiquette, genealogy, and cookery...'

In the winter of 1872-3, he organized the Patriarchs,

'a committee of twenty-five men "who had the right to create and lead Society" by inviting to each ball four ladies and five gentlemen on their individual responsibility, which McAllister stressed as a sacred trust.'

 

The original patriarchs were old-family New Yorkers of at least four generations, which, in McAllister's American generosity, he thought 'make as good and true a gentleman as forty.' ⁹

During the,

'eighties, McAllister had been dropping comments to newspaper men that there were really 'only about 400 people in fashionable New York Society. If you go outside that number you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease.'¹⁰

In 1892, when both the exclusiveness of the Patriarchs and the popularity of Ward McAllister were beginning seriously to decline, he published his list of '400,' which in fact contained about 300 names.

 

It was simply the rollcall of the Patriarch Balls, the inner circle of pre-Civil War New York families, embellished by unattached daughters and sons who liked to dance, and a select few of the new rich whom McAllister deemed fit for admittance. Only nine out of a list of the ninety richest men of the day¹¹ appear on his list.

The attention given McAllister's list of the '400,' and his subsequent retirement from high society, reflect the precarious situation of the old upper classes he tried to consolidate. Not only in New York, but in other cities as well, all sorts of attempts have been made to preserve the 'old-guard' from the social entree of new wealth. McAllister's demise symbolizes the failure of all these attempts. The only sensible thing that could be done was to admit the new wealth, or at least selected members of it.

 

This, the most successful attempt, The Social Register, has done.

In the gilded age of the 1880's, a New York bachelor who had inherited 'a small life-income and a sound though inconspicuous social standing,' decided to publish 'a list of the Best People from which advertising was wisely excluded but which merchants might buy.'¹²

 

The Social Register presented a judicious combination of the old with the new, and, with the hearty support of friends among such New York clubs as Calumet and Union, became an immediate success. The first Social Register of New York contained some 881 families; in due course, lists were published for other cities, and the business of compiling and publishing such lists became incorporated as The Social Register Association.

 

During the 'twenties, social registers were being issued for twenty-one cities, but nine of these were later dropped 'for lack of interest.'

 

By 1928, twelve volumes were being printed in the autumn of each year, and ever since then there have been Social Registers for New York and Boston (since 1890), Philadelphia (1890), Baltimore (1892), Chicago (1893), Washington (1900), St. Louis (1903), Buffalo (1903), Pittsburgh (1904), San Francisco (1906), Cleveland (1910), and Cincinnati (1910).¹³

The Registers list the 'socially elect' together with addresses, children, schools, telephone numbers, and clubs. Supplements appear in December and January, and a summer edition is published each June. The Association advises the reader to purchase an index containing all the names in all the Registers, this being useful in so far as there are many intermarriages among families from the various cities and changes of address from one city to another.

The Social Register describes the people eligible for its listing as,

'those families who by descent or by social standing or from other qualifications are naturally included in the best society of any particular city or cities.'

The exact criteria for admission, however, are hard to discern perhaps because, as Wecter has asserted,

'an efficient impersonality, detachment, and air of secret inquisition surround The Social Register. A certain anonymity is essential to its continued success and prestige.'¹⁴

Today, the Social Register Association, with headquarters in New York, seems to be run by a Miss Bertha Eastmond, secretary of the Association's founder from the early days.

 

She judges all the names, some to be added, some to be rejected as unworthy, some to be considered in the future. In this work, she may call upon the counsel of certain social advisers, and each city for which there is a Register has a personal representative who keeps track of current names, addresses, and telephone numbers.

Who are included in the some 38,000 conjugal family units now listed,¹⁵ and why are they included? Anyone residing in any of the twelve chosen cities may apply for inclusion, although the recommendations of several listed families must be obtained as well as a list of club memberships.

 

But money alone, or family alone, or even both together do not seem to guarantee immediate admittance or final retention. In a rather arbitrary manner, people of old-family are sometimes dropped; second generations of new wealth which try to get in are often not successful. To say, however, that birth and wealth are not sufficient is not to say that they, along with proper conduct, are not necessary.

Moderately successful corporation executives, once they set their minds to it, have been known to get into the Register, but the point should not be overstressed. In particular, it ought to be made historically specific: the thirty-year span 1890-1920 was the major period for entrance into the registered circle.

 

Since the first decade of the twentieth century, in fact, the rate of admission of new families into the Social Register - at least in one major city, Philadelphia - has steadily declined: during the first decade of this century, there was a 68 per cent increase, by the decade of the 'thirties, the rate of increase was down to 6 per cent.¹⁶

Those who are dropped from The Social Register are often so well known that much is made of their being dropped; the 'arbitrary' character of the Register is then used to ridicule its social meaning. Actually, Dixon Wecter has concluded,

'unfavorable publicity seems as near as one can come to the reason for banishment, but this again is applied with more intuition than logic... It is safe to say that anyone who keeps out of [the newspaper's] columns - whatever his private life may be, or clandestine rumors may report - will not fall foul of The Social Register.'¹⁷

With all the seemingly arbitrary selection and rejection, and with all the snobbery and anguish that surrounds and even characterizes it, The Social Register is a serious listing that does mean something.

 

It is an attempt, under quite trying circumstances, to close out of the truly proper circles the merely nouveau riche and those with mere notoriety, to certify and consolidate these proper circles of wealth, and to keep the chosen circles proper and thus presumably worthy of being chosen. After all, it is the only list of registered families that Americans have, and it is the nearest thing to an official status center that this country, with no aristocratic past, no court society, no truly capital city, possesses.

 

In any individual case, admission may be unpredictable or even arbitrary, but as a group, the people in The Social Register have been chosen for their money, their family, and their style of life. Accordingly, the names contained in these twelve magic volumes do stand for a certain type of person.

In each of the chosen metropolitan areas of the nation, there is an upper social class whose members were born into families which have been registered since the Social Register began. This registered social class, as well as newly registered and unregistered classes in other big cities, is composed of groups of ancient families who for two or three or four generations have been prominent and wealthy.

 

They are set apart from the rest of the community by their manner of origin, appearance, and conduct.

They live in one or more exclusive and expensive residential areas in fine old houses in which many of them were born, or in elaborately simple modern ones which they have constructed. In these houses, old or new, there are the correct furnishings and the cherished equipage. Their clothing, even when it is apparently casual and undoubtedly old, is somehow different in cut and hang from the clothes of other men and women.

 

The things they buy are quietly expensive and they use them in an inconspicuous way. They belong to clubs and organizations to which only others like themselves are admitted, and they take quite seriously their appearances in these associations.

They have relatives and friends in common, but more than that, they have in common experiences of a carefully selected and family-controlled sort. They have attended the same or similar private and exclusive schools, preferably one of the Episcopal boarding schools of New England. Their men have been to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or if local pride could not be overcome, to a locally esteemed college to which their families have contributed.

 

And now they frequent the clubs of these schools, as well as leading clubs in their own city, and as often as not, also a club or two in other metropolitan centers.

Their names are not in the chattering, gossiping columns or even the society columns of their local newspapers; many of them, proper Bostonians and proper San Franciscans that they are, would be genuinely embarrassed among their own land were their names so taken in vain - cheap publicity and cafe-society scandal are for newer families of more strident and gaudy style, not for the old social classes. For those established at the top are 'proud'; those not yet established are merely conceited.

 

The proud really do not care what others below them think of them; the conceited depend on flattery and are easily cheated by it, for they are not aware of the dependence of their ideas of self upon others.*

* A word about Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) which - fortunately - is still read, not because his criticism of the American upper class is still adequate, but because his style makes it plausible, even when the criticism is not taken seriously. What he wrote remains strong with the truth, even though his facts do not cover the scenes and the characters that have emerged in our own time. It remains strong because we could not see the newer features of our own time had he not written what and as he did. Which is one meaning of the fact that his biases are the most fruitful that have appeared in the literature of American social protest. But all critics are mortal; and Veblen's theory is in general no longer an adequate account of the American system of prestige.

The Theory of the Leisure Class, is not the theory of the leisure class.

 

It is a theory of a particular element of the upper classes in one period of the history of one nation. It is an account of the status struggle between new and old wealth and, in particular, it is an examination of the nouveau riche, so much in evidence in Veblen's formative time, the America of the latter half of the nineteenth century, of the Vanderbilts, Goulds, and Harrimans, of Saratoga Springs and Newport, of the glitter and the gold.

It is an analysis of an upper class which is climbing socially by translating its money into symbols of status, but doing so in a status situation in which the symbols are ambiguous.

 

Moreover, the audience for the Veblenian drama is not traditional, nor the actors firmly set in an inherited social structure, as in feudalism. Accordingly, consumption patterns are the only means of competing for status honor. Veblen does not analyze societies with an old nobility or a court society where the courtier was a successful style of life.
 

In depicting the higher style of American life, Veblen - like the actors of whom he writes - seems to confuse aristocratic and bourgeois traits.

 

At one or two points, he does so explicitly:

'The aristocratic and the bourgeois virtues - that is to say the destructive and pecuniary traits-should be found chiefly among the upper classes...'¹⁸

One has only to examine the taste of the small businessmen to know that this is certainly not true.

'Conspicuous consumption,' as Veblen knew, is not confined to the upper classes.

But today I should say that it prevails especially among one element of the new upper classes - the nouveau riche of the new corporate privileges - the men on expense accounts, and those enjoying other corporate prerogatives - and with even more grievous effects on the standard and style of life of the professional celebrities of stage and screen, radio and TV.

 

And, of course, among recent crops of more old-fashioned nouveau riche dramatized by the 'Texas millionaires.'

In the middle of the twentieth century, as at the end of the nineteenth which Veblen observed, there are fantastic goings-on:

'Tenor Mario Lanza now owns an outsize, custom-built white Cadillac with a gold-plated dashboard... Restaurateur Mike Romanoff ships his silk and pongee shirts air express to Sulka's in Manhattan for proper laundering... Construction Tycoon Hal Hayes... has a built-in bar in his Cadillac plus faucets for Scotch, bourbon, champagne and beer in his home....'¹⁹

But in established local society, the men and women of the fourth and fifth generation are quietly expensive and expensively quiet; they are, in fact, often deliberately inconspicuous in their consumption: with unpretentious farm houses and summer retreats, they often live quite simply, and certainly without any ostentatious display of vulgar opulence.

The terms of Veblen's theory are not adequate to describe the established upper classes of today. Moreover - as we shall see in FOUR, Veblen's work, as a theory of the American status system, does not take into adequate account the rise of the instituted elite or of the world of the celebrity.

 

He could not, of course, have been expected in the eighteen-nineties to see the meaning for a truly national status system of 'the professional celebrities,' who have arisen as part of the national media of mass communication and entertainment, or anticipate the development of national glamour, whereby the debutante is replaced by the movie star, and the local society lady by the military and political and economic managers - 'the power elite' - whom many now celebrate as their proper chieftains.

 

Within and between the various cliques which they form, members of these proud families form close friendships and strong loyalties.

 

They are served at one another's dinners and attend one another's balls. They take the quietly elegant weddings, the somber funerals, the gay coming-out parties with seriousness and restraint. The social appearances they seem to like best are often informal, although among them codes of dress and manner, the sensibility of what is correct and what is not done, govern the informal and the natural as well as the formal.

Their sense of civic service does not seem to take direct political form, but causes them gladly to lead the charitable, educational, and cultural institutions of their city. Their wealth is such - probably several millions on the average - that they do not usually have to use the principal; if they do not wish to work, they probably do not have to. Yet their men - especially the more substantial older men - generally do work and sometimes quite diligently. They make up the business aristocracy of their city, especially the financial and legal aristocracy.

 

The true gentleman - in the eastern cities, and increasingly across the nation - is usually a banker or a lawyer, which is convenient, for those who possess a fortune are in need of trusted, wise, and sober men to preserve its integrity. They are the directors and the presidents of the major banks, and they are the senior partners and investment counselors of the leading law firms of their cities.

Almost everywhere in America, the metropolitan upper classes have in common, more or less, race, religion, and nativity. Even if they are not of long family descent, they are uniformly of longer American origin than the underlying population. There are, of course, exceptions, some of them important exceptions. In various cities, Italian and Jewish and Irish Catholic families - having become wealthy and powerful - have risen high in status.

 

But however important, these are still exceptions: the model of the upper social classes is still 'pure' by race, by ethnic group, by national extraction. In each city, they tend to be Protestant; moreover Protestants of class-church denominations, Episcopalian mainly, or Unitarian, or Presbyterian.

In many cities - New York for example - there are several rather than one metropolitan 400. This fact, however, does not mean that the big-city upper classes do not exist, but rather that in such cities the status structure is more elaborate than in those with more unified societies. That there are social feuds between competing status centers does not destroy the status hierarchy.

The family of higher status may belong to an exclusive country club where sporting activities and social events occur, but this pattern is not of decisive importance to the upper levels, for 'country clubs' have spread downward into the middle and even into the lower-middle classes. In smaller cities, membership in the best country club is often the significant organizational mark of the upper groups; but this is not so in the metropolitan status market.

 

It is the gentleman's club, an exclusive male organization, that is socially most important.

Gentlemen belong to the metropolitan man's club, and the men of the upper-class stature usually belong to such clubs in more than one city; clubs for both sexes, such as country clubs, are usually local. Among the out-of-town clubs to which the old upper-class man belongs are those of Harvard and Princeton and Yale, but the world of the urban clubs extends well beyond those anchored in the better schools.

 

It is not unusual for gentlemen to belong to three or four or even more. These clubs of the various cities are truly exclusive in the sense that they are not widely known to the middle and lower classes in general. They are above those better-known arenas where upper-class status is more widely recognized. They are of and by and for the upper circles, and no other.

 

But they are known and visited by the upper circles of more than one city.*

 

* Even in 1933, some fifty New Yorkers maintained their full-rate dues in Boston's Somerset Club.20

To the outsider, the club to which the upper class man or woman belongs is a badge of certification of his status; to the insider, the club provides a more intimate or clan-like set of exclusive groupings which places and characterizes a man.

 

Their core of membership is usually families which successfully claim status by descent. From intimate association with such men, newer members borrow status, and in turn, the accomplishments of the newer entrants help shore up the status of the club as a going concern.

Membership in the right clubs assumes great social importance when the merely rich push and shove at the boundaries of society, for then the line tends to become vague, and club membership clearly defines exclusiveness. And yet the metropolitan clubs are important rungs in the social ladder for would-be members of the top status levels: they are status elevators for the new into the old upper classes; for men, and their sons, can be gradually advanced from one club to the next, and so, if successful, into the inner citadel of the most exclusive.

 

They are also important in the business life within and between the metropolitan circles: to many men of these circles, it seems convenient and somehow fitting to come to important decisions within the exclusive club.

'The private club,' one national magazine for executives recently put it, is becoming 'the businessman's castle.' ²¹

The metropolitan upper classes, as wealthy classes having control of each locality's key financial and legal institutions, thereby have business and legal relations with one another.

 

For the economy of the city, especially of a metropolitan area, is not confined to the city. To the extent that the economy is national and big-city centered, and to the extent that the upper classes control its key places of big-city decision - the upper classes of each city are related to those of other cities. In the rich if gloomy quiet of a Boston club and also in the rich and brisk chrome of a Houston club-to belong is to be accepted. It is also to be in easy, informal touch with those who are socially acceptable, and so to be in a better position to make a deal over a luncheon table.

 

The gentlemen's club is at once an important center of the financial and business network of decision and an essential center for certifying the socially fit. In it all the traits that make up the old upper classes seem to coincide: the old family and the proper marriage and the correct residence and the right church and the right schools - and the power of the key decision.

 

The 'leading men' in each city belong to such clubs, and when the leading men of other cities visit them, they are very likely to be seen at lunch in Boston's Somerset or Union, Philadelphia's Racquet or Philadelphia Club, San Francisco's Pacific Union, or New York's Knickerbocker, Links, Brook, or Racquet and Tennis.²²

The upper-class style of life is pretty much the same - although there are regional variations - in each of the big cities of the nation. The houses and clothing, the types of social occasions the metropolitan 400 care about, tend to be homogeneous.

 

The Brooks Brothers suit-and-shirt is not extensively advertised nationally and the store has only four branches outside New York City, but it is well-known in every major city of the nation, and in no key city do the 'representatives' of Brooks Brothers feel themselves to be strangers.²³ There are other such externals that are specific and common to the proper upper-class style, yet, after all, anyone with the money and the inclination can learn to be uncomfortable in anything but a Brooks Brothers suit. The style of life of the old upper social classes across the nation goes deeper than such things.

The one deep experience that distinguishes the social rich from the merely rich and those below is their schooling, and with it, all the associations, the sense and sensibility, to which this educational routine leads throughout their lives.

The daughter of an old upper-class New York family, for example, is usually under the care of nurse and mother until she is four years of age, after which she is under the daily care of a governess who often speaks French as well as English. When she is six or seven, she goes to a private day school, perhaps Miss Chapin's or Brearley.

 

She is often driven to and from school by the family chauffeur and in the afternoons, after school, she is in the general care of the governess, who now spends most of her time with the younger children. When she is about fourteen she goes to boarding school, perhaps to St. Timothy's in Maryland or Miss Porter's or Westover in Connecticut.

 

Then she may attend Finch Junior College of New York City and thus be 'finished,' or if she is to attend college proper, she will be enrolled, along with many plain middle-class girls, in Bryn Mawr or Vassar or Wellesley or Smith or Bennington.

 

She will marry soon after finishing school or college, and presumably begin to guide her own children through the same educational sequence.*

 

* 'The daughter of the industrial leader, of the great professional man must thrive in a complex civilization which places little premium upon its women's homelier virtues: meekness and modesty, earnestness and Godliness. Yet such a man must, according to the mores of his kind, send his daughter to pne of a handful of institutions whose codes rest upon these foundations... Of the 1,200-odd private schools for girls in this country, curiously enough only a score or more really matter ... so ephemeral are the things which make one school and mar another that intangible indeed are the distinctions.' ²⁴

The boy of this family, while under seven years of age, will follow a similar pattern.

 

Then he too will go to day school, and, at a rather earlier age than the girls, to boarding school, although for boys it will be called prep school: St. Mark's or St. Paul's, Choate or Groton, Andover or Lawrenceville, Phillips Exeter or Hotchkiss.²⁵

 

Then he will go to Princeton or Harvard, Yale or Dartmouth. As likely as not, he will finish with a law school attached to one of these colleges.

Each stage of this education is important to the formation of the upper-class man or woman; it is an educational sequence that is common to the upper classes in all the leading cities of the nation. There is, in fact, a strong tendency for children from all these cities to attend one of the more fashionable boarding or prep schools in New England, in which students from two dozen or so states, as well as from foreign countries, may be readily found. As claims for status based on family descent become increasingly difficult to realize, the proper school transcends the family pedigree in social importance.

 

Accordingly, if one had to choose one clue to the national unity of the upper social classes in America today, it would best be the really exclusive boarding school for girls and prep school for boys.

Many educators of the private school world feel that economic shifts bring to the top people whose children have had no proper family background and tone, and that the private school is a prime institution in preparing them to live at the top of the nation in a manner befitting upper-class men and women. And whether the headmasters know it or not, it seems to be a fact that like the hierarchy of clubs for the fathers - but in more important and deeper ways - the private schools do perform the task of selecting and training newer members of a national upper stratum, as well as upholding the higher standards among the children of families who have long been at the top.

 

It is in 'the next generation,' in the private school, that the tensions between new and old upper classes are relaxed and even resolved. And it is by means of these schools more than by any other single agency that the older and the newer families - when their time is due - become members of a self-conscious upper class.

As a selection and training place of the upper classes, both old and new, the private school is a unifying influence, a force for the nationalization of the upper classes. The less important the pedigreed family becomes in the careful transmission of moral and cultural traits, the more important the private school. The school-rather than the upper-class family - is the most important agency

for transmitting the traditions of the upper social classes, and regulating the admission of new wealth and talent. It is the characterizing point in the upper-class experience. In the top fifteen or twenty such schools, if anywhere, one finds a prime organizing center of the national upper social classes.

 

For in these private schools for adolescents, the religious and family and educational tasks of the upper social classes are fused, and in them the major tasks of upholding such standards as prevail in these classes are centered.*

 

* 'These schools for boys,' the editors of Fortune have written, 'are conspicuous far out of proportion to the numbers enrolled in them. More than seven million boys and girls in the U.S. now (1944) receive secondary education, 460,000 of whom are in private schools. Of this number more than 360,000 were in Catholic schools (1941 figures, latest available) and more than 10,000 in military schools, whose special purposes are obvious. Of the remainder, girls' schools, whose job is also relatively well defined, accounted for almost 30,000 more. Forty thousand odd were in co-educational schools, largely day schools. Some 20,000 were in the schools for boys, the group that particularly desires selfjustification.' ²⁶

These schools are self-supporting and autonomous in policy, and the most proper of them are non-profit institutions.

 

They are not 'church schools' in that they are not governed by religious bodies, but they do require students to attend religious services, and although not sectarian, they are permeated by religiously inspired principles.

 

The statement of the founders of Groton, still used today, includes this fundamental aim:

'Every endeavor will be made to cultivate manly, Christian character, having regard to moral and physical as well as intellectual development. The Headmaster of the School will be a clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church.' ²⁷

 

'The vitals of a prep-school are not located in the curriculum. They are located in a dozen other places, some of them queer places indeed: in the relations between boys and faculty; in who the boys are and where they come from; in a Gothic chapel or a shiny new gymnasium; in the type of building the boys live in and the sort of thing they do after supper; and, above all in the headmaster.'²⁸

There is a kind of implicit ideal for the school to be an organized extension of the family, but a large family in which the proper children from Boston and Philadelphia and New York together learn the proper style of conduct.

 

This family ideal is strengthened by the common religious practices of the school, which tend to be Episcopalian; by the tendency for given upper-class families to send all their sons to the same schools that the father, or even grandfather, attended; and by the donations as well as the social and sentimental activities of the alumni associations.

 

The underlying purpose of the Choate School, for example, is to prove that family and school may be effectively combined, so that a boy while gaining the benefits that school provides - in particular 'spiritual leadership' and 'association with boys of purpose' - will retain the intimate influences that ought to characterize a proper home.

Daily life in the exclusive schools is usually quite simple, even Spartan; within its atmosphere of snobbish simplicity, there is a democracy of status. Everyone follows more or less the same routine, and there are no opportunities for officially approved inclinations for ostentatious display or snobbery.29

These schools are not usually oriented to any obvious practical end. It is true that the boys' schools are invariably preparatory for college; while those for girls offer one curriculum for college preparation, and one terminal course for girls contemplating earlier marriage. But the middle-class ethos of competitiveness is generally lacking. One should, the school seems to say, compare one's work and activity not with the boy or girl next to you, but with what you and your teacher believe is your own best. Besides, if you are too interested, you become conspicuous.

Certainly competition for status among students is held to a minimum: where allowances are permitted, they are usually fixed at modest levels, and the tendency is for boys to have no spending money at all; the wearing of school blazers by boys, or a uniform jumper or blouse, skirt and sweater by girls, is not, as it is usually interpreted by outsiders, so much upper-class swash as it is an attempt to defeat displays of haberdashery within the exclusive group. A

 

nd girls, however rich, are not usually allowed to own their own horses.

The elders of the school community are those older children in the higher Forms, and they become the models aspired to by the younger children. For young boys, up to eight and nine, there are carefully chosen Housemothers; between twelve and thirteen, they are weaned from women and have exclusively male teachers, although the wives of instructors often live with their husbands in apartments within the boys' dormitories and continue a virtual kinship role with them.

 

Care is taken that the self-image of the child not be slapped down, as it might by an insecure parent, and that manners at table as elsewhere be imbibed from the general atmosphere rather than from authoritarian and forbidding figures.

Then one will always know what to do, even if one is sometimes puzzled. One will react appropriately upon meeting the man who is too carefully groomed and above all, the man who tries too hard to please, for one knows that that is not necessary if one is 'the right sort of person.' There will be the manner of simplicity and the easy dignity that can arise only out of an inner certainty that one's being is a definitely established fact of one's world, from which one cannot be excluded, ignored, snubbed, or paid off.

 

And, in due course, as a young broker, banker, executive, one will feel smooth and handsome, with the easy bonhomie, the look of superior amusement, and all the useful friendships; one will have just the proper touch of deference toward the older men, even if they are members of your own club, and just the right degree of intelligence and enthusiasms - but not too much of either, for one's style is, after all, a realization of the motto of one's schooling: nothing in excess.³⁰

Harvard or Yale or Princeton is not enough. It is the really exclusive prep school that counts, for that determines which of the 'two Harvards' one attends.

 

The clubs and cliques of college are usually composed of carry-overs of association and name made in the lower levels at the proper schools; one's friends at Harvard are friends made at prep school. That is why in the upper social classes, it does not by itself mean much merely to have a degree from an Ivy League college.

 

That is assumed: the point is not Harvard, but which Harvard? By Harvard, one means Porcellian, Fly, or A.D.: by Yale, one means Zeta Psi or Fence or Delta Kappa Epsilon; by Princeton, Cottage, Tiger, Cap and Gown, or Ivy.³¹

 

It is the prestige of a properly certified secondary education followed by a proper club in a proper Ivy League college that is the standard admission ticket to the world of urban clubs and parties in any major city of the nation. To the prestige of the voice and manner, constructed in such schools, local loyalties bow, for that experience is a major clue to the nation-wide upper class that is homogeneous and self-conscious.

Among those who are being educated in similar ways, the school naturally leads to marriage. The prep schools for boys are usually within a convenient range of boarding schools for girls of similar age, and several times a year the students from each are thrown together for chaperoned occasions. There are, in addition, the sisters of the other boys and the brothers of the other girls. And for those attending the more exclusive boys' and girls' colleges, there are formally arranged visits and parties - in short, dating patterns - established between them.

 

On the college level, the exclusive schools become components of a broadened marriage market, which brings into dating relation the children of the upper social classes of the nation.

 

The rich who became rich before the Civil War also became the founders of most old American families, and those who have become rich since then have joined them. The metropolitan upper class which they have formed has not been and is not now a pedigreed society with a fixed membership, but for all of that, it has become a nationally recognized upper social class with many homogeneous features and a strong sense of unity.

 

If new families are added to it, they are always wealthy families, and new or old, their sons and daughters attend the same types of exclusive schools and tend to marry one another. They belong to the same associations at the same set of Ivy League colleges, and they remain in social and business touch by means of the big-city network of metropolitan clubs. In each of the nation's leading cities, they recognize one another, if not strictly as peers, as people with much in common.

 

In one another's biographies they recognize the experiences they have had in common; in their financial positions of brokerage firm, bank, and corporation, they recognize the interests they would all serve. To the extent that business becomes truly national, the economic roles of the upper classes become similar and even interchangeable; to the extent that politics becomes truly national, the political opinion and activity of the upper classes become consolidated.

 

All those forces that transform a confederation of localities and a scatter of companies into a corporate nation, also make for the coinciding interests and functions and unity of the metropolitan 400.

The upper social classes have come to include a variety of members concerned with power in its several contexts, and these concerns are shared among the members of the clubs, the cousin-hoods, the firms, the law offices. They are topics of conversation around the dinner table, where family members and club associates experience the range of great issues in a quite informal context. Having grown up together, trusting one another implicitly, their personal intimacy comes to include a respect for the specialized concerns of each member as a top man, a policy-maker in his own particular area of power and decision.

They spread into various commanding circles of the institutions of power. One promising son enters upon a high governmental career - perhaps the State Department; his first cousin is in due course elevated to a high executive place in the headquarters of a corporation; his uncle has already ascended to naval command; and a brother of the first cousin is about to become the president of a leading college.

 

And, of course, there is the family law firm, whose partners keep in close touch with outlying members and with the problems they face.

Accordingly, in the inner circles of the upper classes, the most impersonal problems of the largest and most important institutions are fused with the sentiments and worries of small, closed, intimate groups. This is one very important meaning of the upper-class family and of the upper-class school: 'background' is one way in which, on the basis of intimate association, the activities of an upper class may be tacitly coordinated. It is also important because in such circles, adolescent boys and girls are exposed to the table conversations of decision-makers, and thus have bred into them the informal skills and pretensions of decision-makers; in short, they imbibe what is called 'judgment.'

 

Without conscious effort, they absorb the aspiration to be - if not the conviction that they are - The Ones Who Decide.

Within and between the upper-class families as well as their firms and offices, there are the schoolboy friendships and the prep schools and the college clubs, and later the key social and political clubs. And, in all these houses and organizations, there are the men who will later - or at the time of meeting - operate in the diverse higher circles of modern society.

The exclusive schools and clubs and resorts of the upper social classes are not exclusive merely because their members are snobs. Such locales and associations have a real part in building the upper-class character, and more than that, the connections to which they naturally lead help to link one higher circle with another.

So the distinguished law student, after prep school and Harvard, is 'clerk' to a Supreme Court judge, then a corporation lawyer, then in the diplomatic service, then in the law firm again. In each of these spheres, he meets and knows men of his own kind, and, as a kind of continuum, there are the old family friends and the schoolboy chums, the dinners at the club, and each year of his life the summer resorts.

 

In each of these circles in which he moves, he acquires and exercises a confidence in his own ability to judge, to decide, and in this confidence he is supported by his ready access to the experience and sensibility of those who are his social peers and who act with decision in each of the important institutions and areas of public life. One does not turn one's back on a man whose presence is accepted in such circles, even under most trying circumstances.

 

All over the top of the nation, he is 'in,' his appearance, a certificate of social position; his voice and manner, a badge of proper training; his associates, proof at once of their acceptance and of his stereotyped discernment.
 

Back to Contents

 

 

 

 

4 - The Celebrities

ALL those who succeed in America - no matter what their circle of origin or their sphere of action - are likely to become involved in the world of the celebrity.

 

This world, which is now the American forum of public honor, has not been built from below, as a slow and steady linking of local societies and metropolitan 400's. It has been created from above. Based upon nation-wide hierarchies of power and wealth, it is expressed by nation-wide means of mass communication.

 

As these hierarchies and these media have come to overlay American society, new types of prestigiously men and women have come to compete with, to supplement, and even to displace the society lady and the man of pedigreed wealth.

With the incorporation of the economy, the ascendancy of the military establishment, and the centralization of the enlarged state, there have arisen the national elite, who, in occupying the command posts of the big hierarchies, have taken the spotlight of publicity and become subjects of the intensive build-up. At the same time, with the elaboration of the national means of mass communication, the professional celebrities of the entertainment world have come fully and continuously into the national view.

 

As personalities of national glamour, they are at the focal point of all the means of entertainment and publicity. Both the metropolitan 400 and the institutional elite must now compete with and borrow prestige from these professionals in the world of the celebrity.

But what are the celebrities? The celebrities are The Names that need no further identification.

 

Those who know them so far exceed those of whom they know as to require no exact computation. Wherever the celebrities go, they are recognized, and moreover, recognized with some excitement and awe. Whatever they do has publicity value. More or less continuously, over a period of time, they are the material for the media of communication and entertainment.

 

And, when that time ends - as it must - and the celebrity still lives - as he may - from time to time it may be asked, 'Remember him?' That is what celebrity means.¹

In cafe society, the major inhabitants of the world of the celebrity - the institutional elite, the metropolitan socialite, and the professional entertainer - mingle, publicly cashing in one another's claims for prestige. It is upon cafe society that all the spotlights of publicity often coincide, spreading the glamour found there to wider publics.

 

For in cafe society national glamour has become a hard fact of well-established business routines.

Cafe society exists in the restaurants and night clubs of New York City - from Fiftieth to Sixtieth streets, between Third Avenue and Sixth. Maury Paul (the original 'Cholly Knickerbocker') seems to have invented the phrase in 1919 to indicate a small group of people who mingled in public but would not be likely to visit in one another's homes. By 1937, when Fortune magazine printed an incisive report on cafe society,1 the professional celebrities of erotic beauty and transient talent were well-planted at the key tables, along with such charter members of the old upper classes as John Hay ('Jock') Whitney.

Cafe society is above all founded upon publicity. Its members often seem to live for the exhibitionist mention of their doings and relations by social chroniclers and gossip columnists. Beginning as professional party-givers or as journalists, these chroniclers, along with headwaiters, have come to be professional celebrators and have shaped the world of celebrity as others know it.

 

Maury Paul in 1937 was still commenting upon the accredited metropolitan 400, although he covered their livelier aspects. His successor, today's 'Cholly Knickerbocker,' one Igor Cassini, is not so limited. The world he writes about is more glossy than accredited and certainly is not bound by The Social Register. Around such names as Stork Club, columnists of tabloid and television have co-operated to fashion an aura of glamour seldom equaled in volume by the majesty of other courts.²

Perhaps it began in the 'twenties when socialites became really bored with Newport, and began to look to Broadway, then to Hollywood, for livelier playmates and wittier companions.

 

Then, the speakeasy became a crossroads of Society and Broadway and Hollywood.

'Its Ward McAllister was the bootlegger; its visiting list was Dun & Bradstreet's; its Mrs. Astor could come from across the railroad tracks if only she came via Hollywood...'

 

'Prohibition,' write the editors of Fortune, 'helped pull it out of private houses and respectable hotels into speakeasies in search first of a drink and then of adventure; the automobile and radio industries gave it some new millionaires; rising real estate values drove Society out of its old brownstone houses into apartments and reconciled it to standardized mass entertainment parallel with new standardized mass housing; and if short skirts at first raised its eyebrows, Greenwich Village lowered its sex standard.' ³

Five decades before, John L. Sullivan could not be recognized by Mrs. Astor's Ward McAllister; but Gene Tunney was welcomed by cafe society.

 

And in 1924, what was the 400 to do, when the Prince of Wales seemed to prefer the jazz palace to the quiet homes of the proper families?4 Cafe society rather than Newport frequently became the social target of new millionaires. And the new upper classes of the time - much of their wealth derived from the entertainment industries - seemed to press less upon the old upper classes than upon cafe society, in which they found ready entree.

Nowadays, cafe society often seems to be the top of such American Society as is on national view. For, if its inhabitants do not have dinner rights in a few exclusive homes, they are instantly recognizable from their photographs.

 

Cafe society's publicity has replaced the 400's family-line, printer's ink has replaced blue-blood, and a sort of talent in which the energy of hoped-for success, rather than the assurance of background or the manners of inherited wealth, is the key to the big entrance. In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth. Not the gentleman's club, but the night club, not Newport in the afternoon but Manhattan at night; not the old family but the celebrity.

 

By 1937, according to Fortune's listings, about one-third of the cafe society 'social list' was not in The Social Register;⁵ today the proportion is probably less than that.

The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency and skill than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States. It is carried to the point where a chattering radio and television entertainer becomes the hunting chum of leading industrial executives, cabinet members, and the higher military.

 

It does not seem to matter what the man is the very best at; so long as he has won out in competition over all others, he is celebrated. Then, a second feature of the star system begins to work: all the stars of any other sphere of endeavor or position are drawn toward the new star and he toward them. The success, the champion, accordingly, is one who mingles freely with other champions to populate the world of the celebrity.

This world is at once the pinnacle of the prestige system and a big-scale business. As a business, the networks of mass communication, publicity, and entertainment are not only the means whereby celebrities are celebrated; they also select and create celebrities for a profit. One type of celebrity, accordingly, is a professional at it, earning sizeable income not only from working in, but virtually living on, the mass media of communication and distraction.

The movie stars and the Broadway actress, the crooners and the TV clowns, are celebrities because of what they do on and to these media.

 

They are celebrated because they are displayed as celebrities. If they are not thus celebrated, in due time - often very short - they lose their jobs. In them, the panic for status has become a professional craving: their very image of self is dependent upon publicity, and they need increasing doses of it. Often they seem to have celebrity and nothing else.

 

Rather than being celebrated because they occupy positions of prestige, they occupy positions of prestige because they are celebrated. The basis of the celebration - in a strange and intricate way - is at once personal and synthetic: it is their Talent - which seems to mean their appearance value and their skill combined into what is known as A Personality.

 

Their very importance makes them seem charming people, and they are celebrated all the time: they seem to live a sort of gay, high life, and others, by curiously watching them live it, celebrate them as well as their celebrated way of life.

The existence and the activities of these professional celebrities long ago overshadowed the social antics of the 400, and their competition for national attention has modified the character and the conduct of those who bear great institutional prestige. In part, they have stolen the show, for that is their business; in part, they have been given the show by the upper classes who have withdrawn and who have other business to accomplish.

The star of the silver screen has displaced the golden debutante, to the point where the latter, in New York or Boston or even Baltimore, is happy indeed to mingle in cafe society with these truly national queens. There is no doubt that it is enormously more important to one's prestige to have one's picture on the cover of a truly big national magazine than in the society column of any newspaper in America or even ten of them. And there is no doubt who gets on the cover of such magazines.

 

The top spot for young ladies is probably Life:

during the decade of the 'forties, no debutante from any city got there as a debutante, but no less than 178 movie queens, professional models, and the like were there displayed.

More serious public figures too, must now compete for attention and acclaim with the professionals of the mass media. On provincial levels, politicians play in hillbilly bands; on national levels, they are carefully groomed and coached for the TV camera, and, like other performers, the more important of them are subject to review by entertainment critics:

'Last night's "information talk" by President Eisenhower,' Jack Gould of The New York Times reported on 6 April 1954, 'was much his most successful television appearance... The President and his television consultant, Robert Montgomery, apparently found a "format" that enabled General Eisenhower to achieve relaxation and immeasurably greater freedom of movement. The result was the attainment of television's most desired quality-naturalness...

 

As the program began the President was shown sitting on the edge of a desk, his arms folded and a quiet smile on his lips. To his right - and the viewer's left - was seen the flag. Then casually and conversationally he began speaking. The same mood and tone were sustained for the next half hour... In past appearances when he used prompters, the President's eyes never quite hit the camera; he always was looking just a hair to the left or to the right. But last night his eyes were dead on the lens and the viewer had a sense of being spoken to directly...

 

As he neared the end of his talk and wanted to employ added emphasis, the General alternately knotted his hands or tapped the fingers of one on the palm of the other. Because they were intuitive his actions had the stamp of reality...

 

The contents of General Eisenhower's informal talk admittedly were not too earthshaking...' ⁶

It is quite proper that 'The New 400' should be listed by the gossip columnist who, in the world of the celebrity, has replaced the well-bred man-about-town and the social hostess - the self-conscious social arbiters who once lent stability to the metropolitan 400.

 

In charge of the publicity, these new arbiters are not the obvious satellites of any of those about whom they write and talk. They are quite ready to tell us who belongs to 'The New 400,' as well as to identify them with 'our magnificent accomplishments as a nation.'

 

In 1953, Igor Loiewski Cassini - who became 'Cholly Knickerbocker' during the nineteen-forties - published a list of 399 names which he believed to represent the 'aristocracy of achievement in this country.' ⁷

 

These, he holds, are people who are 'loyal' Americans, leaders in their field of work, men of 'excellent character,' men of 'culture and taste,' whole men having harmonious qualities as well as humility. Any such list, Cassini asserts, would change from year to year, since it is leadership and humility that get them in and their children won't make it unless they 'have also bequeathed all the talents that have made them leaders.'

All of which is more or less complicated nonsense.

 

Actually, Cassini's list is a rather arbitrary selection from among the three types of people continuously, or on occasion, caught up in the largest sub-group among these are straight entertainers, although a handful of them could as well be considered 'businessmen' of the entertaining world of celebrity:

1. There are the professional celebrities - making up some 30 per cent of the list - names of the entertainment industries, champions of sport, art, journalism, and commentating.
    

2. There are the metropolitan 400 - but only some 12 per cent of them - people of family lineage and property. Some of these seem merely to have been born into such families, but the majority combine old families with active business positions.
    

3. Well over half of 'The New 400' - 58 per cent - are simply people who occupy key positions in the major institutional hierarchies: most of these are government and business officials, although many are involved in both domains. There is also a small scattering (7% of the whole) of scientists, medical men, educators, religionists, and labor leaders.8

As a social grouping, the metropolitan 400 has been supplemented and displaced, but as individuals and as cliques, they have become part of the national system of prestige.

 

That system does not now center in the several metropolitan 400's. For if, as we have said, the 400's of various cities can find no one city to which to look, in all cities, large and small, they can all look to the nationally celebrated, and those among them with the inclination and the money can join the world of the celebrity.

What many local observers assume to be the decline of the big-city upper classes is, in fact, the decline of the metropolitan 400 as the most emphatic public bearer of prestige.9 If members of the 400 do not become part of this national system, they must withdraw into quiet local islands, living in another dimension than that of industrial and political power. Those who would now claim prestige in America must join the world of the celebrity or fade from the national scene.

The metropolitan 400 reached its peak of publicized prestige as the top of the national system of prestige about the turn of the century. In the 'eighties and 'nineties, the older families had contended with newer families of wealth, but by World War I these newer families had gotten in. Today, the new wealthy of the post-Civil War period are among the established upper classes of various big cities all over the country.

 

But, during the 'twenties and 'thirties, as we have seen, the new and more glamorous contenders for prestige came to overshadow the metropolitan 400's, which thus had to contend not only with new upper classes, but the celebrities of the entertainment world as well. Even before the 'twenties, complaints and reminiscences by members of the 400 began frequently to be heard.10 But all this is by no means to say that there is no longer a metropolitan 400. In fact, one feature of cafe society has remained 'the celebrated socialites' as well as 'the society-minded celebrities' who inhabit it.

 

The prestige of the metropolitan 400 within cafe society is revealed by the fact that many people of older society and wealth could gain entree but do not care to do so.11 But it is also true that the old certainty of position is no longer so firm among those who 'do not care' to enter the ranks of the new celebrated.

The metropolitan 400 has not declined at the same rate in all the major cities. The center of its decline, and its replacement in public view by cafe society, has been New York City, and generally in the Middle West, which apes the East. In Philadelphia and in the South, its decline has proceeded more slowly.

 

'Society' is quite diverse:

'In Atlanta, "the club you belong to counts"; in Washington "anyone 'official' is society"; in Detroit it is "who you are in the auto industry"; in Miami "it's simply your Dun & Bradstreet rating." In Los Angeles the new society is intertwined with the movie colony. "One thing that's forced us to change," explains the Los Angeles Examiners Society Editor Lynn Spencer, "is that now when Eastern socialites come West, they're more interested in seeing our movie stars than in meeting our own Western Society." '¹²

In New York, the old Knickerbocker Society has virtually withdrawn from the ostensible social scene; but, in Chicago it was still possible in 1954 for some two hundred pedigreed socialites, all supposedly with firm dinner rights, to know that Mrs. Chauncey McCormick - who serves impeccable dinners on gold plate and Lowestoft china - was Queen of the Society which they formed.¹³

The main drift in status, however, is clearly revealed by the parade of women who have been given American acclaim:¹⁴

1. The type of woman known as The Salon Lady - who passes before us in the pages of Proust - has never been known in America. The salon lady was the status representative of the household she commanded; as hostess, she judged who was and who was not to be admitted socially to it. If she gave birth to children, private tutors, not she, educated them.

    

   And in her salon, where courtiers jousted with one another intellectually for her attention, the value and the fact of monogamous virtue frequently broke down. Eroticism became a sort of competitive sport in which women and men conquered one another in ways that were intriguing and exciting.
   
   Apart from stray figures like Mabel Dodge of lower Fifth Avenue and Taos, New Mexico, there have not been women who ran genuine salons in the sense that salons were run as artistic and intellectual centers in Europe. The drawing rooms of the most famous American society ladies have been more often peopled by bores than by dilettantish intellectuals.

    

   They have, of course, contained a 'few dandies in the sense known to Savile Row and the boulevards of Paris,' but their forte, as Dixon Wecter put it, has most usually been the mimicry of personalities and their 'fame in repartee' has often rested 'upon the affinity between stammering and drollery.'15 The dominant type of 'Society' man in America between the Civil War and World War I was rather the dancing man  - the cotillion leader; and accordingly, discussion, let alone the type heard in the salon, has not played a noticeable part in the life of the American society lady.
   
   The society lady, who held the balls and arranged the advantageous marriage for her daughter, was queen for only a relatively short period and only among a rather small public. The fashionable lady may have longed for publicity, but as a fashionable lady she did not have much of a chance to get it.

    

   By the 'twenties, when the mass media began their work with serious consequences, the society lady knew that her brief national time was over.
   
    

2. The leading figure of metropolitan 400 during the 'twenties and 'thirties was the debutante. Traditionally, the debut was for the purpose of introducing a young girl of high family to an exclusive marriage market, and hence perpetuating the set of upper families as an exclusive circle. In 1938, about 1,000 debuts were made, at an average cost of $8,000 each; but they could not really compete as spectacles with Hollywood.

    

   As a status model the debutante declined, not only because of the competition of the more entertaining glamour girls of the fashion industry and cafe society but because by the middle 'thirties the metropolitan 400, as based on family lineage, had so diminished in social exclusiveness that the debutante had no Society into which to make her debut. Or, at least, it did not seem a well-enough defined Society.

    

   By 1938, the editors of Fortune were noting that the vanishing of polite society left 'the debutante all dressed up with no place to go.'¹⁶

Some debutantes of the 'thirties tried to compete with Hollywood.

 

They hired press agents who saw to it that their pictures were in the newspapers and articles about them were printed in the national magazines. The 'trick,' Elsa Maxwell has said, was,

'to look so bizarre and so extreme that the truck drivers gasp but the ever-present cameraman will be bound to flash a bulb.'¹⁷

As 'glamorous members of the younger set,' interested in charities and horse-racing, their faces - with complexions 'as translucent as alabaster' - appeared, endorsing soap in the women's magazines.¹⁸

 

Grade-A debutantes not only frequented midtown East Side bars, but also worked as mannequins and even as salesgirls in exclusive shops. But their very use by advertising media and fashion industry revealed the ambiguity of their 'social distinction.'

Perhaps the extravagant private ball and the publicity that attended the debut of Brenda Frazier signified both the height of the debutante as a publicized American woman and the demise of the debutante's monopoly on glamour. Today the debutante is frequently not 'introduced to society' at private parties at her parent's sumptuous home; she comes out along with ninety-nine other girls at a large subscription dance in a hotel.¹⁹

 

The assembly line of interlocking subscription dances is not so automatic,

'that it will produce a debutante no matter who is put into it... There are ten committees guarding the approaches to the debut in New York, though a girl need not pass muster with more than five...'²⁰

To these subscription dances are attached most of the social secretaries, who keep lists of sub-debs and debutantes and eligible boys and arrange coming-out parties.

 

Business magazines advise executives as to when and how to arrange for their daughter's debut, even if they are not listed in The Social Register. If the executive goes about it right, he is assured, his daughter 'can be considered as successfully launched socially as if she were a blueblood.'²¹

There are still private debuts, but the mass debuts now predominate, and probably will so long as,

'society as a well-organized, clearly defined group' does not exist after the debutante year. Yet the year of the debut is still of social importance, no matter how standardized, since 'everything's got to be crammed into that short period because after that it disintegrates.'²²

In so far as the more socially prominent modem debutante makes her debut into anything that will give her celebrity she makes it into cafe society. And, in so far as she is celebrated widely, she must compete with the other glamorous occupants of cafe society.

 

The professional institutions of Conover and Powers, Mona Gardner reported in 1946,

'have raised modeling to such a glamour pinnacle that eligible men would far rather have a Powers or Conover girl on the arm, or in the home, than one of the bluebloods.'²³

In cafe society today there are still the crew-cut young men from Yale and the debutante, but now there are also the heavy expense-account executives and The All-American Girl.²⁴

 

In any New York night club on a big night at the time of the two-o'clock show her current model can be found: with the doll face and the swank body starved down for the camera, a rather thin, ganted girl with the wan smile, the bored gaze, and often the slightly opened mouth, over which the tongue occasionally slides to insure the highlights.

 

She seems, in fact, always to be practicing for those high, nervous moments when the lens is actually there. The terms of her competition are quite clear: her professional stance is the stance of the woman for whom a haughty kind of unconquerable eroticism has become a way of life. It is the expensive look of an expensive woman who feels herself to be expensive.

 

She has the look of a girl who knows her fate rests quite fully - even exclusively - upon the effect of her look upon a certain type of man.

This is the queen - the all-American girl - who, whether she be debutante or fashion model or professional entertainer, sets the images of appearance and conduct which are imitated down the national hierarchy of glamour, to the girls carefully trained and selected for the commercial display of erotic promise, as well as to the young housewife in the kitchen.

 

While the public, by its imitation, openly supports her image as a piece of very fancy sex, it is duly shocked when disclosures are occasionally made revealing the commercial fulfillment of this promise. But how could it be otherwise? The model's money does not add up to much. But the men she meets have money, and her tastes quickly become expensive. The men she meets control careers, and she wants a career.

She is of, but not solidly in, the world of breakfasts at noon and the long lunch. The all-American girl sits at the top of cafe society, and cafe society, we must remember, is a profitable set of businesses, supported by executives on expense accounts. And so the imitators of the queen sometimes become expense-account girls.²⁵

 

No 'New American Woman' of Theodore Dreiser's era knew as well as the all-American girl knows that 'the wages of sin might easily be success.'

The public is quite used to the idea of vice, but it likes to think it involves only idle rich boys and poor country girls. The men involved in the vice of cafe society, however, are by no means boys; they are not idle; they need not personally be rich; and they are not interested in poor or innocent or country girls.

 

The women involved are not exactly girls; they may have come from smaller cities, but they are now very much big city; they are not innocent, and they are not exactly poor. One easily forgets that the underside of the glamour of cafe society is simply a service trade in vice. Those engaged in it - the procurers, the prostitutes, the customers, who buy and sell assorted varieties of erotical service - are often known to their associates as quite respectable.

 

And the all-American girl, as a photographed image and as a person, is often a valued and indispensable helpmate to the great American salesman.

Among those whom Americans honor none is so ubiquitous as the young girl. It is as if Americans had undertaken to paint a continuing national portrait of the girl as Queen. Everywhere one looks there is this glossy little animal, sometimes quite young and sometimes a little older, but always imagined, always pictured, as The Girl. She sells beer and she sells books, cigarettes, and clothes; every night she is on the TV screen, and every week on every other page of the magazines, and at the movies too, there she is.

We have noted that since Mrs. John Jay's eighteenth-century dinner list, the political, military, and economic elite have not neatly coincided with those of superior social status.

 

This is clearly reflected in the Society of Washington, D.C., today. In so far as there is a metropolitan 400 in Washington, it is merely one element in the social life of the Capitol, and is, in fact, overshadowed and out-ranked by official Society, especially by the Embassy Row along Massachusetts Avenue. Yet not all officials take Society seriously, and some avoid it altogether; moreover, key officials, regardless of social qualifications, must be invited, and, given the facts of politics, the turnover rate is high.²⁶

If cafe society and all that it represents has invaded and distracted New York Society, the ascendancy of politics and the fact of political turnover have made Society difficult to maintain in Washington.

 

There is nothing that could be called cafe society in Washington; the key affairs are in private houses or in official residences, and most elaborately in the embassies with their titled attaches. In fact, there is no really firm line-up of Society in Washington, composed as it is of public officials and politicians, of familied hostesses and wealthy climbers, of widows with know-how and ambassadors with unofficial messages to impart.

Yet prestige is the shadow of money and power. Where these are, there it is. Like the national market for soap or automobiles and the enlarged arena of federal power, the national cash-in area for prestige has grown, slowly being consolidated into a truly national system.

 

Since the men of the higher political, economic, and military circles are an elite of money and power, they accumulate a prestige that is considerably above the ordinary; all of them have publicity value and some of them are downright eminent; increasingly, by virtue of their position and by means of conscious public relations, they strive to make their names notable, their actions acceptable, their policies popular. And in all this, they tend to become national celebrities.

Members of the power elite are celebrated because of the positions they occupy and the decisions they command. They are celebrities because they have prestige, and they have prestige because they are thought to have power or wealth. It is true that they, too, must enter the world of publicity, become material for the mass media, but they are sought as material almost irrespective of what they do on and to these media.

The prestige of the Congressmen, John Galbraith has re-marked,²⁷ is graded by the number of votes he controls and by the committees he is on. The official's importance is set by the number of people working under him. The prestige of the businessman is measured less by his wealth or his income - although, of course, these are important - than by the size of his business.

 

He borrows his prestige from the power of his company as measured by its size, and from his own position in its hierarchy.

 

A small businessman making a million a year is not so important and does not have the national prestige enjoyed by the head of a major corporation who is making only two hundred thousand. In the military ranks, of course, all this is made formal and rigid.

At the turn of the century, the nationalization of status meant that there were rising elite groups with which local upper classes in every town and city of the nation had to compare themselves, and that when they did so, they came to realize that only locally were they at the top.

 

Now, fifty years later, it means that, and much more. For what separates that age from ours is the rise of mass communication, the prime means of acclaim and even a creator of those acclaimed. From the coincidence of the mass media and the big organization there has emerged the prestige of the national elite.

 

These national means of mass communication have been the channels through which those at the top could reach the underlying population. Heavy publicity, the technique of the build-up, and the avaricious demand of the media for continuous copy have placed a spotlight upon these people such as no higher circles of any nation in world history have ever had upon them.

The big institutions are in themselves graded worlds of prestige. They are stratified by level of office, with each level carrying its appropriate prestige. They constitute a hierarchy of people who by training and position defer to those above them, and come in time to respect their commanders who have such enormous power over them. No one can have such an organized deference group below him, and possess such powers of command as it provides, without also acquiring prestige among those who are directly of the big institution itself.

Instead of servants, there is the row of private secretaries; instead of the fine old house, the paneled office; instead of the private car, the company's limousine, the agency's chauffeur, the Air Force's motor pool. Frequently, of course, there are both the fine old house and the paneled office. Yet the prestige of the elite is, in the first instance, a prestige of the office they command rather than of the families to which they belong.

The position held in the national corporation has become a major basis for status claims. The corporation is now the organized power center of the propertied classes; the owning and managerial elites of the big-city upper class, as well as the members of local society, now tend to look to the corporation in claiming and in assigning prestige to one another, and from it they derive many of the status privileges they enjoy.*

 

Inside the corporation and outside it among other corporate worlds as well as in the country at large, they gain the prestige of their positions.

 

* See SEVEN: The Corporate Rich.

As the national state becomes enlarged, the men who occupy the command posts within it are transformed from 'merely dirty politicians' into statesmen and administrators of note.

 

Of course, it is true that the status pretenses of politicians have to be held carefully in curb: high political figures, even when it goes against their status grain, have had to learn to be folksy, and, from the standpoint of more ceremonial codes, vulgar in their tone of speech and style of life. Yet as the power of political institutions becomes greater, the men at the top become celebrities in a national system of prestige that cannot very well be resisted.

As military men have become more powerful during the wars and during the war-like interludes between, they too have joined the new national prestige scheme. They, as well as policemen, derive such importance as they have from the simple fact that violence is the final support of power and the final resort of those who would contest it.

 

Only when revolution or crime threaten to disturb domestic order does the police captain, and only when diplomacy and war threaten international order, do the generals and admirals, come to be recognized for what at all times they are: indispensable elements of the order of power that prevails within and between the national states of the world.

A nation becomes a great power only on one condition: that its military establishment and resources are such that it could really threaten decisive warfare. In the rank order of states a nation must fight a great war successfully in order to be truly great.

 

The effective force of what an ambassador says is a rather direct reflection of how mighty the general, how large and effective the fighting force standing back of him, is supposed to be. Military power determines the political standing of nations, and to the extent that nationalism is honored, to that extent generals and admirals share decisively in the system of national honor.

The public prestige of these various institutions varies, and accordingly the prestige of their elites.

 

The prestige of public office and military position, for example, is higher in times of war, when business executives become dollar-a-year men and railroad colonels, and all groups rally behind the militant state at war. But when business-as-usual prevails, when businessmen leave government to others, public office and military status have often been vilified, as the prestige of public employment is deflated in favor of big business.

During the 'twenties the president of General Electric apparently was considered too valuable a man to be president of the United States;* and, even during the 'thirties, members of the mere cabinet of the United States were not always to be placed on an equal footing with members of very rich families.**

* '...In his inside circle of business and legal associates,' Ida Tar-bell has noted of Owen D. Young, 'while everyone agrees that he would make a "great president," there is a feeling that he is too valuable a public servant where he is, to be, as one man put it to me, "spoiled by the presidency" ... He has other admirers that intimate as much: Will Rogers who wants to keep him "to point to with pride"; Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, who in introducing him in the fall of 1930 at a complimentary dinner said: "Our guest of honor is a public servant, although he holds no office. Whether the public servant receives office or not is accidental, and if this public servant by accident does assume office, as likely as not it is apt to reduce a great deal of the public servant's public service." '28

Mr. Young stated in his own economic metaphysics in 1931: 'A certain amount of horseplay seems to be required as stage effect for the functioning of democratic government. The world has learned that it can afford a certain amount of horseplay in politics. It is awakening to the realization that it cannot have horseplay in economics... Charming as politics may be at times on the stage, she is often petulant and petty in the dressing rooms... Nothing is clearer, from the experiences of the last ten years, than the necessity of keeping our economic machinery and especially our finance free from the domination and control of politics.'29

** Thus Harold Ickes writes concerning a 'state visit from the heads of one political entity to those of another political entity': 'Only a few chosen souls were asked to sit on the porch where the King and Queen spent most of their time, and apparently Jim Farley was the only member of the Cabinet, aside from the Hulls, who was considered worthy of inclusion among the elect. But J. P. Morgan was there and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, etc. The rest of the members of the Cabinet milled about with the common herd down on the lawn, some fifteen hundred of them, and at not too frequent intervals the King and Queen would graciously go down among the herd bowing here and there and being introduced to some of the more select.'30

 

Yet this lack of esteem for political office when compared with high corporate position has been changing and will change more - as the several elites come closer together within the state, and all of them learn better how to avail themselves of the means of publicity well within their powers to buy, command, or otherwise use.

 

Those whose power or wealth exceeds their reputation will all the more readily become engaged in the means of publicity. More and more they play to the microphone and the lens as well as the news conference.³¹

Those who are familiar with the humanities, we should recall, often shy at the word 'prestige'; they know that in its origins it means dazzling the eye with conjuring tricks. Prestige, it is often held, is a mysterious force.

'Whatever has been a ruling power in the world,' Gustave Le Bon once remarked, 'whether it be ideas or men, has in the main enforced its authority by means of that irresistible force expressed by the word "prestige"... Prestige in reality is a sort of domination exercised on our mind by an individual, a work, or an idea...' This domination 'paralyzes our critical faculty' and fills us with 'astonishment and respect...'³²

Mr. Gladstone much preferred 'honor' to 'prestige.' But, of course, as Harold Nicolson has noted,33 the meaning of prestige varies in the several countries of the western world.*

* In France 'prestige' carries an emotional association of fraudulence, of the art of illusion, or at least of something adventitious. In Italy, too, the word is often used to mean something 'dazzling, deceptive or legendary.' And in Germany, where it is a definitely foreign word, it corresponds to the German Anshen or 'esteem'; or to der Nimbus, which is close to our 'glamour'; or it is a variant of 'national honor,' with the hysterical obstinacy everywhere associated with such phrases.
 

Moreover, men of power do not want to believe that prestige is merely something nice that is given to the powerful.

 

They want their prestige to imply that other people are prepared to believe in their power 'without that power having either to be demonstrated or exercised.' But still this conception is neither complete nor satisfactory. In fact, it is a conception of prestige very convenient for the already powerful - for those who would maintain it cheaply, without having to use power.

 

And, of course, it is convenient for such people to believe that their repute is based on amiable virtues rather than past power.

Yet it is true that the power of guns or of money is not all there is to prestige. Some reputation must be mixed with power in order to create prestige. An elite cannot acquire prestige without power; it cannot retain prestige without reputation. Its past power and success builds a reputation, on which it can coast for a while. But it is no longer possible for the power of an elite based on reputation alone to be maintained against reputation that is based on power.

If the prestige of elite circles contains a large element of moral reputation, they can keep it even if they lose considerable power; if they have prestige with but little reputation, their prestige can be destroyed by even a temporary and relative decline of power. Perhaps that is what has happened to the local societies and metropolitan 400's of the United States.

In his theory of American prestige, Thorstein Veblen, being more interested in psychological gratification, tended to overlook the social function of much of what he described.

 

But prestige is not merely social nonsense that gratifies the individual ego: it serves, first of all, a unifying function. Many of the social phenomena with which Veblen had so much fun - in fact most 'status behavior' - serve to mediate between the elite of various hierarchies and regions. The locales of status are the meeting places for various elites of decision, and leisure activities are one way of securing co-ordination between various sections and elements of the upper class.

Like high families and exclusive schools, status activities also provide a marriage market, the functions of which go well beyond the gratifications of displayed elegance, of brown orchids and white satin: they serve to keep a propertied class intact and unscattered; by monopoly of sons and daughters, anchoring the class in the legalities of blood lines.

'Snobbish' exclusiveness secures privacy to those who can afford it.

 

To exclude others enables the high and mighty to set up and to maintain a series of private worlds in which they can and do discuss issues in which they train their young informally for the decision-making temper. In this way they blend impersonal decision-making with informal sensitivities, and so shape the character structure of an elite.

There is another function - today the most important - of prestige and of status conduct. Prestige buttresses power, turning it into authority, and protecting it from social challenge.

'Prestige lost by want of success,' Le Bon has remarked, 'disappears in a brief space of time. It can also be worn away, but more slowly, by being subjected to discussion... From the moment prestige is called in question it ceases to be prestige. The gods and men who have kept their prestige for long have never tolerated discussion. For the crowd to admire, it must be kept at a distance.'³⁴

'Power for power's sake' is psychologically based on prestige gratification.

 

But Veblen laughed so hard and so consistently at the servants and the dogs and the women and the sports of the elite that he failed to see that their military, economic, and political activity is not at all funny. In short, he did not succeed in relating a view of their power over armies and factories to what he believed, quite rightly, to be their funny business. He was, in my view, not quite serious enough about status because he did not see its full and intricate importance to power.

 

He saw 'the kept classes' and 'the underlying population,' but in his time, he could not really understand the prestige of the power elite.³⁵

The heart of Veblen's conception of prestige, and even some of its terms, were set forth by John Adams in the late eighteenth century.³⁶ But to know that John Adams anticipated much of Veblen's idea is in no way to deprecate Veblen, for is not his theory essentially an extended piece of worldly wisdom, long known and perhaps often stated, but stated by Veblen in magnificent form and at a time when it could take hold of a literate public?

 

Adams, however, went farther than Veblen in at least two respects: He was shrewder psychologically - and more complicated; among his comments we also come upon certain passages in which he tries social to coandnnect stapersonal tus life, phenomwith ena, the conceived political as the realities sphere, conceived, of as his generation was wont, as a problem of constitution building.

 

Adams understands the status system of a nation in a way that Veblen does not, as politically relevant, and in this we had better listen to John Adams:

'A death bed, it is said, shows the emptiness of titles. That may be. But does it not equally show the futility of riches, power, liberty, and all earthly things?... Shall it be inferred from this, that fame, liberty, property and life, shall be always despised and neglected? Shall laws and government, which regulate sublunary things be neglected, because they appear baubles at the hour of death?

'...The rewards... in this life, are esteem and admiration of others - the punishments are neglect and contempt - nor may anyone imagine that these are not as real as the others. The desire of the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger - and the neglect and contempt of the world as severe a pain, as the gout or stone...

 

It is a principal end of government to regulate this passion, which in its turn becomes a principal means of government. It is the only adequate instrument of order and subordination in society, and alone commands effectual obedience to laws, since without it neither human reason, nor standing armies, would ever produce that great effect.

 

Every personal quality, and every blessing of fortune, is cherished in proportion to its capacity of gratifying this universal affection for the esteem, the sympathy, admiration and congratulations of the public...

'Opportunity will generally excite ambition to aspire; and if even an improbable case should happen of an exception to this rule, danger will always be suspected and apprehended, in such circumstances, from such causes.

 

We may soon see, that a form of government, in which every passion has an adequate counterpoise, can alone secure the public from the dangers and mischief, of such rivalries, jealousies, envies and hatreds.'

Just what does Veblen's theory of status have to say about the operations of the political economy?

 

The metropolitan 400 - about which Veblen wrote - did not become the center of a national system of prestige. The professional celebrities of the mass media are without power of any stable sort and are in fact ephemeral figures among those we celebrate.

Yet there is an elite demand for some sort of organization of enduring and stable prestige, which Veblen's analysis misses. It is a 'need' quite consciously and quite deeply felt by the elite of wealth and especially the elite of power in the United States today.

During the nineteenth century neither the political nor the military elite were able to establish themselves firmly at the head or even near the head of a national system of prestige. John Adams's suggestions, which leaned in that direction, were not taken up.³⁷

 

Other forces and not any official system of distinction and honor have given such order as it has had to the American polity. The economic elite - for this very reason it is uniquely significant - rose to economic power in such a way as to upset repeated attempts to found national status on enduring family lines.

But in the last thirty years, there have been signs of a status merger among the economic, political, and military elite. As an elite of power, they have begun to seek, as powerful men everywhere have always sought, to buttress their power with the mantle of authoritative status. They have begun to consolidate their new status privileges - popularized in terms of the expense account but rooted deeply in their corporate way of life.

 

As they come more fully to realize their position in the cultural world of nations, will they be content with the clowns and the queens - the professional celebrities - as the world representatives of their American nation?

Horatio Alger dies hard, but in due course will not those Americans who are celebrated come to coincide more clearly with those who are the most powerful among them? The rituals of democratic leadership are firmly expected, but in due course will not snobbery become official and the underlying population startled into its appropriate grade and rank?

 

To believe otherwise, it might seem, is to reject all that is relevant in human history. But on the other hand, the liberal rhetoric - as a cloak for actual power - and the professional celebrity - as a status distraction - do permit the power elite conveniently to keep out of the limelight. It is by no means certain, just at this historical juncture, that they are not quite content to rest uncelebrated.

In the meantime, the American celebrities include the trivial as well as the grim. Behind all The Names are the images displayed in tabloid and on movie screen, over radio and television  - and sometimes not displayed but just imagined. For now all of the higher types are seen by those lower down as celebrities. In the world of the celebrities, seen through the magnifying glass of the mass media, men and women now form a kaleidoscope of highly distracting images:

In downtown New York, on a short street with a graveyard at one end and a river at the other, the rich are getting out of company limousines. On the flattened top of an Arkansas hill, the grandson of a late mogul is creating a ranch with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy.³⁸ Behind a mahogany table in the caucus room of the United States Senate, seven senators lean toward the television lenses.

 

In Texas an oil man, it is said, is taking out two hundred thousand dollars a day.³⁹ Somewhere in Maryland people in red coats are riding to hounds; in a Park Avenue apartment, a coal miner's daughter, having lived in the married state for twenty months, has just decided to accept a five-and-one-half million dollar settlement.⁴⁰

 

At Kelly Field, the General walks carelessly between rows of painfully rigid men; on Fifty-Seventh Street, expensive women inspect the taut manikins.

 

Between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, an American-born Countess is found dead in her railway compartment, lying full-length in a long mink coat alongside a quarter of a million dollars worth of jewelry.41 Seated in Boston, a board of directors orders three industrial plants moved, without employees, to Nashville. And in Washington, D.C., a sober politician, surrounded by high military aides and scientific advisers, orders a team of American airmen to fly toward Hiroshima.

In Switzerland are those who never know winter except as the chosen occasion for sport, on southern islands those who never sweat in the sun except at their February leisure.

 

All over the world, like lords of creation, are those who, by travel, command the seasons and, by many houses, the very landscape they will see each morning or afternoon they are awakened. Here is the old whiskey and the new vice; the blonde girl with the moist mouth, always ready to go around the world; the silver Mercedes climbing the mountain bend, going where it wants to go for so long as it wants to stay. From Washington, D.C., and Dallas, Texas, it is reported that 103 women have each paid $300 for a gold lipstick.

 

On a yacht, with its crew of ten, somewhere off the Keys, a man of distinction lies on his bed and worries about the report from his New York office that the agents of the Bureau of Internal Revenue are busy again.

Here are the officials at the big desks with the four telephones, the ambassadors in the lounge-rooms, talking earnestly but somehow lightly. Here are the men who motor in from the airport with a secret service man beside the chauffeur, motorcycled outriders on either flank, and another tailing a block behind. Here are the people whose circumstances make them independent of the good will of others, never waiting for anyone but always waited upon.

 

Here are the Very Important Persons who during the wars come and go, doubled up in the General's jeep. Here are those who have ascended to office, who have been elevated to distinguished employments. By the sound of their voices, it is evident that they have been trained, carefully yet casually, to be somebody.

Here are the names and faces and voices that are always before you, in the newspapers and on the radio, in the newsreels and on the television screen,-and also the names and faces you do not know about, not even from a distance, but who really run things, or so informed sources say, but you could never prove it.

 

Here are the somebodies who are held to be worthy of notice: now they are news, later they will be history. Here are the men who own a firm of lawyers and four accountants. Here are the men who have the inside track. Here are all the expensive commodities, to which the rich seem appendages.

 

Here is the money talking in its husky, silky voice of cash, power, celebrity.

 

Back to Contents

 

 

 

 

5 - The Very Rich

MANY Americans now feel that the great American fortunes are something that were made before World War I, or at least that they were broken up for good by the crash of 1929.

 

Except perhaps in Texas, it is felt, there are no very rich anymore, and, even if there are, they are simply elderly inheritors about to die, leaving their millions to tax collectors and favorite charities. Once upon a time in America there were the fabulously rich; now that time is past and everyone is only middle class.

Such notions are not quite accurate. As a machine for producing millionaires, American capitalism is in better shape than such unsound pessimism would indicate. The fabulously rich, as well as the mere millionaires, are still very much among us; moreover, since the organization of the United States for World War II, new types of 'rich men' with new types of power and prerogative have joined their ranks.

 

Together they form the corporate rich of America, whose wealth and power is today comparable with those of any stratum, anywhere or anytime in world history.

It is somewhat amusing to observe how the scholarly world has changed its views of the big-business circles of which the very rich are a part. When the great moguls were first discovered in print, the muckrakers of journalism had their counterparts in the academic journals and books; during the 'thirties, The Robber Barons clawed and bit their way to infamy, as Gustavus Myers's neglected work became a Modern Library best-seller and Matthew Josephson and Ferdinand Lundberg were the men to quote. Just now, with the conservative postwar trend, the robber barons are being transformed into the industrial statesmen.

 

The great corporations, full of publicity consciousness, are having their scholarly histories written, and the colorful image of the great mogul is becoming the image of a constructive economic hero from whose great achievement all have benefited and from whose character the corporate executive borrows his right to rule and his good, solid, justified feelings about doing so.

 

It is as if the historians could not hold in their heads a hundred-year stretch of history but saw all of it carefully through the political lens of each and every administration.

Two general explanations for the fact of the very rich - now and in the past - are widely available.

 

The first, of muckraker origin, was best stated by Gustavus Myers, whose work is a gigantic gloss in pedantic detail upon Balzac's assertion that behind every great fortune there lies a crime. The robber barons, as the tycoons of the post-Civil-War era came to be called, descended upon the investing public much as a swarm of women might descend into a bargain basement on Saturday morning.

 

They exploited national resources, waged economic wars among themselves, entered into combinations, made private capital out of the public domain, and used any and every method to achieve their ends. They made agreements with railroads for rebates; they purchased newspapers and bought editors; they killed off competing and independent businesses, and employed lawyers of skill and statesmen of repute to sustain their rights and secure their privileges. There is something demonic about these lords of creation; it is not merely rhetoric to call them robber barons.

 

Perhaps there is no straightforward economic way to accumulate $100 million for private use; although, of course, along the way the unstraightforward ways can be delegated and the appropriator's hands kept clean. If all the big money is not easy money, all the easy money that is safe is big.

 

It is better, so the image runs, to take one dime from each of ten million people at the point of a corporation than $100,000 from each of ten banks at the point of a gun. It is also safer.

Such harsh images of the big rich have been frequently challenged, not so much on the grounds of any error in the facts advanced, as on the grounds that they result from estimations from the point of view of legality, morality, and personality, and that the more appropriate view would consider the economic function that the propertied moguls have performed in their time and place.

 

According to this view, which has been most ably summed up by Joseph Schumpeter, the propertied giants are seen as men who stand at the focal points of the 'perennial gale of innovations' that sweeps through the heyday of capitalism. By their personal acumen and supernormal effort, they create and combine private enterprises in which are embodied new technical and financial techniques or new uses for old ones.

 

These techniques and the social forms they have assumed are the very motors of the capitalist advance, and the great moguls who create and command them are the pace-setters of the capitalist motion itself. In this way, Schumpeter combines a theory of capitalist progress with a theory of social stratification to explain, and indeed to celebrate, the 'creative destruction' of the great entrepreneurs.¹

These contrasting images - of the robber and of the innovator  - are not necessarily contradictory: much of both could be true, for they differ mainly in the context in which those who hold them choose to view the accumulators of great fortune.

 

Myers is more interested in legal conditions and violations, and in the more brutal psychological traits of the men; Schumpeter is more interested in their role in the technological and economic mechanics of various phases of capitalism, although he, too, is rather free and easy with his moral evaluations, believing that only men of superior acumen and energy in each generation are lifted to the top by the mechanics they are assumed to create and to focus.

The problem of the very rich is one example of the larger problem of how individual men are related to institutions, and, in turn, of how both particular institutions and individual men are related to the social structure in which they perform their roles. Although men sometimes shape institutions, institutions always select and form men. In any given period, we must balance the weight of the character or will or intelligence of individual men with the objective institutional structure which allows them to exercise these traits.

It is not possible to solve such problems by referring anecdotally either to the guile or the sagacity, the dogmatism or the determination, the native intelligence or the magical luck, the fanaticism or the superhuman energy of the very rich as individuals. These are but differing vocabularies, carrying different moral judgments, with which the activities of the accumulators may be described.

 

Neither the ruthlessness and illegality, with which Gustavus Myers tends to rest content, nor the far-sighted, industrial statesmanship, with which many historians now seem happier, are explanations - they are merely accusation or apology. That is why modern social psychologists are not content to explain the rise of any social and economic stratum by moral reference to the personal traits of its members.

The more useful key, and one which rests easier within the modern mind, is provided by more objective circumstances. We must understand the objective structure of opportunities as well as the personal traits which allow and encourage given men to exploit these objective opportunities which economic history provides them.

 

Now, it is perfectly obvious that the personal traits required for rising and for holding one's place among waterfront gangsters will be different from those required for success among peaceful sheepherders. Within American capitalism, it is equally obvious that different qualities were required for men who would rise in 1870 than for men who would rise eight decades later.

 

It seems therefore rather beside the point to seek the key to the very rich in the secret springs of their personalities and mannerisms.

Moreover, explanations of the rich as a social fact by reference to their personal traits as individuals are usually tautological. The test of 'ability,' for example, in a society in which money is a sovereign value is widely taken to be money-making: Tf you are so smart, why aren't you rich?' And since the criterion of ability is the making of money, of course ability is graded according to wealth and the very rich have the greatest ability.

 

But if that is so, then ability cannot be used in explanation of the rich; to use the acquisition of wealth as a sign of ability and then to use ability as an explanation of wealth is merely to play with two words for the same fact: the existence of the very rich.

The shape of the economy at the time of Carnegie's adolescence was more important to his chances than the fact that he had a practical mother. No matter how 'ruthless' Commodore Vanderbilt might have been, he would have accomplished little in appropriating railroads had the political system not been utterly corruptible. And suppose the Sherman Act had been enforced in such a way as to break up the legal buttress of the great corporation.²

 

Where would the very rich in America - no matter what their psychological traits - now be?

 

To understand the very rich in America, it is more important to understand the geographical distribution of oil and the structure of taxation than the psychological traits of Haroldson L. Hunt; more important to understand the legal framework of American capitalism and the corruptibility of its agents than the early childhood of John D. Rockefeller; more important to understand the technological progression of the capitalist mechanism than the boundless energy of Henry Ford, more important to understand the effects of war upon the need for oil and the tax loophole of depletion than Sid Richardson's undoubted sagacity; more important to understand the rise of a system of national distribution and of the mass market than the frugality of F. W. Woolworth.

 

Perhaps J.P. Morgan did as a child have very severe feelings of inadequacy, perhaps his father did believe that he would not amount to anything; perhaps this did effect in him an inordinate drive for power for power's sake.

 

But all this would be quite irrelevant had he been living in a peasant village in India in 1890. If we would understand the very rich we must first understand the economic and political structure of the nation in which they become the very rich.

It requires many types of men and vast quantities of national endowment to run capitalism as a productive apparatus and a money-making machine. No type of man could have accumulated the big fortunes had there not been certain conditions of economic, material, and political sort. The great American fortunes are aspects of a particular kind of industrialization which has gone on in a particular country.

 

This kind of industrialization, involving very private enterprise, has made it possible for men to occupy such strategic positions that they can dominate the fabulous means of man's production; link the powers of science and labor; control man's relation to nature - and make millions out of it. It is not hindsight that makes us sure of this; we can easily predict it of nations not yet industrialized, and we can confirm it by observing other ways of industrialization.

The industrialization of Soviet Russia has now revealed clearly to the world that it is possible to carry through a rapidly advancing industrialization without the services of a private stratum of multimillionaires. That the Soviet Union has done so at the cost of political freedom does not alter the fact of the industrialization. The private corporation - and its attendant multimillionaire accumulations - is only one way, not the only way, to industrialize a nation. But in America it has been the way in which a vast rural continent has been turned into a great industrial grid.

 

And it has been a way that has involved and allowed the great accumulators to appropriate their fortunes from the industrial process.

The opportunities to appropriate great fortunes out of the industrialization of America have included many facts and forces which were not and could not be contingent upon what manner of men the very rich have been, or upon anything they have done or did not do.

The basic facts of the case are rather simple. Here was a continental domain full of untapped natural resources. Into it there migrated millions of people. As the population steadily increased, the value of the land continuously rose. As the population increased, it formed at once a growing market for produce and goods and a growing labor supply.

 

Since the agricultural sector of the population was growing, the industrialist did not have to depend upon his own laborers in factory and mine for his market.

Such facts of population and resources do not of themselves lead to great accumulations. For that, a compliant political authority is needed. It is not necessary to retail anecdotes about the legal illegalities and the plainer illegalities which the very rich of each of our three generations have successfully practiced, for they are well known. It is not possible to judge quantitatively the effects of these practices upon the accumulations of great fortunes, for we lack the necessary information.

 

The general facts, however, are clear: the very rich have used existing laws, they have circumvented and violated existing laws, and they have had laws created and enforced for their direct benefit.

The state guaranteed the right of private property; it made legal the existence of the corporation, and by further laws, interpretations of laws, and lack of reinforcement made possible its elaboration. Accordingly, the very rich could use the device of the corporation to juggle many ventures at once and to speculate with other people's money.

 

As the 'trust' was outlawed, the holding company law made it legal by other means for one corporation to own stock in another.

Soon 'the formation and financing of holding companies offered the easiest way to get rich quickly that had ever legally existed in the United States.'³

In the later years of higher taxes, a combination of 'tax write-offs' and capital gains has helped the accumulation of private fortunes before they have been incorporated.

Many modern theories of industrial development stress technological developments, but the number of inventors among the very rich is so small as to be unappreciable. It is, as a matter of fact, not the far-seeing inventor or the captain of industry but the general of finance who becomes one of the very rich. That is one of the errors in Schumpeter's idea of the 'gale of innovations': he systematically confuses technological gain with financial manipulation.

 

What is needed, as Frederick Lewis Allen once remarked, is 'not specialized knowledge, but persuasive salesmanship, coupled with the ability to command the millions and the investment-sales machinery of a large banking house, and to command also the services of astute corporation lawyers and stock-market operators.'4

In understanding the private appropriations of the very rich, we must also bear in mind that the private industrial development of the United States has been much underwritten by outright gifts out of the people's domain. State, local, and federal governments have given land free to railroads, paid for the cost of shipbuilding, for the transportation of important mail.

 

Much more free land has been given to businesses than to small, independent homesteaders. Coal and iron have been legally determined not to be covered by the 'mineral' rights held by the government on the land it leased.

 

The government has subsidized private industry by maintaining high tariff rates, and if the taxpayers of the United States had not paid, out of their own labor, for a paved road system, Henry Ford's astuteness and thrift would not have enabled him to become a billionaire out of the automobile industry.⁵

In capitalistic economies, wars have led to many opportunities for the private appropriation of fortune and power. But the complex facts of World War II make previous appropriations seem puny indeed. Between 1940 and 1944, some $175 billion worth of prime supply contracts - the key to control of the nation's means of production - were given to private corporations. A full two-thirds of this went to the top one hundred corporations - in fact, almost one-third went to ten private corporations.

 

These companies then made money by selling what they had produced to the government. They were granted priorities and allotments for materials and parts; they decided how much of these were to be passed down to sub-contractors, as well as who and how many sub-contractors there should be. They were allowed to expand their own facilities under extremely favorable amortization (20 per cent a year) and tax privileges. Instead of the normal twenty or thirty years, they could write off the cost in five.

 

These were also generally the same corporations which operated most of the government-owned facilities, and obtained the most favorable options to 'buy' them after the war.

It had cost some $40 billion to build all the manufacturing facilities existing in the United States in 1939.

 

By 1945, an additional $26 billion worth of high-quality new plant and equipment had been added - two thirds of it paid for directly from government funds. Some 20 of this $26 billion worth was usable for producing peacetime products. If to the $40 billion existing, we add this $20 billion, we have a $60 billion productive plan usable in the postwar period.

 

The top 250 corporations owned in 1939 about 65 per cent of the facilities then existing, operated during the war 79 per cent of all new privately operated facilities built with government money, and held 78 per cent of all active prime war supply contracts as of September 1944.6 No wonder that in World War II, little fortunes became big and many new little ones were created.

Before the Civil War, only a handful of wealthy men, notably Astor and Vanderbilt, were multimillionaires on a truly American scale. Few of the great fortunes exceeded $1,000,000; in fact, George Washington, who in 1799 left an estate valued at $530,000, was judged to be one of the richest Americans of his time. By the 1840's, in New York City and all of Massachusetts, there were only thirty-nine millionaires.

 

The word 'millionaire,' in fact, was coined only in 1843, when, upon the death of Peter Lorillard (snuff, banking, real estate), the newspapers needed a term to denote great affluence.⁷

After the Civil War, these men of earlier wealth were to be recognized as Family Founders, the social shadow of their earlier wealth was to affect the status struggle within the metropolitan 400, and in due course their fortunes were to become part of the higher corporate world of the American economy.

 

But the first really great American fortunes were developed during the economic transformation of the Civil War era, and out of the decisive corruptions that seem to be part of all American wars. A rural, commercial capitalism was then transformed into an industrial economy, within the legal framework of the tariff, the National Banking Act of 1863 and, in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment, which by later interpretations sanctified the corporate revolution.

 

During this shift in political framework and economic base, the first generation of the very rich came to possess units of wealth that dwarfed any that had previously been appropriated. Not only were the peaks of the money pyramid higher, but the base of the upper levels was apparently broader. By 1892, one survey revealed the existence of at least 4,046 American millionaires.⁸

In our own era of slump and war, there is debate about the number and the security - and even the very existence - of great American fortunes. But about the latter nineteenth century all historians seem agreed: between the Civil War and World War I, great captains of enormous wealth rose speedily to pre-eminence.

We shall take this generation, which came to full maturity in the 'nineties, as the first generation of the very rich. But we shall use it merely as a bench mark for the two following generations, the second coming to maturity about 1925, and the third, in the middle years of the twentieth century. Moreover, we shall not study merely the six or seven best-known men upon whom text book historians and anecdotal biographers have based their criticisms and their adulations.

 

For each of these last three generations, we have gathered information about the richest ninety or so individuals. In all, our study of these three lists enables us to expand our view of the American rich to include 275 American men and women, each of whom has possessed a minimum of about $30 million.⁹ *

* See this footnote for a statement of the procedures used in selecting the very rich.

Among the very rich one can find men born poor and men born rich, men who were - and are - as flamboyant in their exercise of the power of money as they were in accumulating it, and others as miserly in their lives as harsh in their acquisitions.

 

Here is John D. Rockefeller - the pious son of a Baptist peddler - who created literally scores of multimillionaire descendents.

 

But here is Henry O. Havemeyer whose grandfather left him three million, and Henrietta Green who as a child was taught to study the financial pages of the paper and died at age eighty-two leaving 100 million. And we must not forget George F. Baker, Jr., a Harvard graduate and inheritor of the presidency of the First National Bank of New York, who bathed and shaved and dressed each morning on his speed cruiser coming into Wall Street from Long Island, and who, in 1929, with six other bankers, mobilized a quarter of a billion dollars in a futile effort to stabilize the crash.¹⁰

The big rich are not all of the past nor are they all from Texas. It is true that five of the richest ten among us today are of the Texas crop, but of the 90 richest men and women of 1950 of whom we have adequate knowledge, only 10 per cent are Texans.

Popular literature now offers many glimpses of fabulously rich individuals in various postures - august and ridiculous; of various origins - humble and elevated; of different styles of life - gay, sad, lonely, convivial. But what do all these glimpses mean? Some started poor, some were born rich - but which is the typical fact? And what are the keys to their success?

 

To find out we must go beyond the six or seven tycoons in each generation about whom social historians and biographers have provided endless anecdotes. We must study a large enough number of individuals to feel that we have a representative group.

The 275 people about whom we have gathered information represent the bulk of those individuals who are known to historians, biographers, and journalists as the richest people living in the United States since the Civil War-the 90 richest of 1900, the 95 of 1925, and the 90 of 1950. Only by examining such groups are we able to ask and to answer, with some accuracy, the deceptively simple questions that interest us about the origins and careers of the very rich.

At the top of the 1900 group is John D. Rockerfeller with his billion dollars; at the top in 1925 is Henry Ford I with his billion; and, in 1950, it is reported (although it is not so certain as in other periods) that H. L. Hunt is worth 'one or two billions.'

 

The fortune of another Texan, Hugh Roy Cullen, has also been reputed of late to come to a billion.¹¹

 

These three or four men are probably the richest of the rich Americans; they are the only billionaires of which financial biographers are fairly certain.* ³

 

* The same amount of money of course has had different value at different periods. But we have not allowed this fact to modify our listings. We are not here interested in the question of whether $15 million in 1900 was worth $30 or $40 million in 1950 values. Our sole interest is in the richest at each of these periods, regardless of how rich that may be compared with the rich of other periods, or compared with the income and property of the population at large. The wealth of each generation, accordingly, is presented here in the dollar value of the time each generation reached the mature age of about 60.

Because of the unknown factor of inflation, it is necessary to use extreme caution in interpreting such facts as the following: of the 1950 generation, including billionaire Hunt, some six people are estimated to own more than $300 million, compared with no more than three such people in 1900 or 1925. Farther down the pyramid from these exalted levels, the distribution according to size of fortune is rather similar in each of the three generations. Roughly, about 20 per cent of each group are in the 100 million or more bracket; the remaining being rather equally divided between the $50-99 million and the $30-49 million levels.

In none of the latest three generations has a majority of the very rich been composed of men who have risen.

 

During the course of American history since the Civil War, the proportion of the very rich whose fathers worked as small farmers or storekeepers, as white-collar employees or wage workers has steadily decreased.

 

Only 9 per cent of the very rich of our own time originated in lower-class families - in families with only enough money to provide essential needs and sometimes minor comforts. The history of the middle-class contribution to the very rich is a fairly stable one: in the 1900 generation, it provided two out of ten; in 1925, three; and in 1950 again two.

 

But the upper-class and the lower-class contributions have quite steadily reversed themselves. Even in the famous nineteenth-century generation, which scholarly historians usually discuss with the anecdotal details of the self-making myth, as many of the very rich derived from the upper class (39 per cent) as from the lower.

 

Still, it is a fact that in that generation, 39 per cent of the very rich were sons of lower-class people. In the 1925 generation, the proportion had shrunk to 12 per cent, and by 1950, as we have seen, to 9 per cent.

 

The upper classes, on the other hand, contributed 56 per cent in 1925; and in 1950, 68 per cent.

The reality and the trend are clearly the upper-class recruitment of the truly upper class of propertied wealth. Wealth not only tends to perpetuate itself, but as we shall see, tends also to monopolize new opportunities for getting 'great wealth.' Seven out of ten of the very rich among us today were born into distinctly upper-class homes, two out of ten on the level of middle-class comfort, and only one in lower-class milieu.

Occupationally, 'upper class' among these very rich has meant the big businessman.

 

At no time has the entire business stratum in America, big and little, been greater than 8 or 9 per cent of the working population at large; but in these three generations of the very rich as a whole, seven out of ten of the fathers have been urban entrepreneurs; one has been a professional man, one has been a farmer, and one has been a white-collar employee or wage worker. Across the generations these proportions have been quite stable.

 

The very rich - of 1900 as of 1950 - have come out of the entrepreneurial strata; and, as we shall see, in a rather curious way, on their higher levels, many of them have continued to be active in an 'entrepreneurial' manner.

About 10 per cent of those who have possessed the great American fortunes have been born in foreign lands, although only 6 per cent grew up outside the United States, immigrating after they were adult. Of the late nineteenth-century generation which reached full maturity by 1900, of course, more were foreign-born than in 1950. About 13 per cent of the 1900 rich were foreign-born, compared with about 24 per cent of the adult male U.S. population who were at that time foreign-born.

 

By 1950, only 2 per cent of the very rich were foreign-born (compared with 7 per cent of the white 1950 population).¹²

The eastern seaboard has, of course, been the historical locale of the very rich: in all, some eight out of ten of those who grew up in America have done so in this region. There were as many from the East in 1925 (82 per cent) as in 1900 (80 per cent). By 1950, however, the proportions from the East - as among the population in the country as a whole - had dropped (to 68 per cent), a direct result of the emergence of the southwestern multimillionaires, who make up some 10 per cent of the very rich of 1950, compared with only about 1 per cent in 1900 and in 1925.

 

The proportions who grew up in the Chicago-Detroit-Cleveland area have remained rather constant over the three historical epochs, 16 per cent in 1900 to 19 per cent in 1950.

The very rich come from the cities, especially from the larger cities of the East. Even in 1900, a full 65 per cent of the general American population lived in rural areas,13 and many more than that had grown up on the farm; but only 25 per cent of the very rich of 1900 came from rural areas. And, since 1925 more than six out of ten of the very rich have grown up in metropolitan areas.

American-born, city-bred, eastern-originated, the very rich have been from families of higher class status, and, like other members of the new and old upper classes of local society and metropolitan 400, they have been Protestants. Moreover, about half have been Episcopalians, and a fourth, Presbyterians.¹⁴

With such facts before us, we would expect, and we do find, that the very rich have always been more highly educated than the common run of the population: even in 1900, 31 per cent of the very rich had graduated from college; by 1925, 57 per cent had done so; and by 1950, 68 per cent of the holders of great American fortunes were college graduates.

 

That educational advantages are generally a result of family advantages is made clear by the fact that within each generation those from higher class levels are better educated than those from lower - in 1900, 46 per cent of those of upper-class levels, but only 17 per cent of those from lower, had graduated from college.

 

But, by the third generation considered here - the very rich of 1950 - the difference in the amount of education according to class origin decreased: 60 per cent of the very rich who had originated on lower or middle-class levels graduated from college, compared with 71 per cent of those from the upper classes.

Half of all those among the very rich who attended any college attended those of The Ivy League; in fact, almost a third went either to Harvard or to Yale, the rest being scattered among Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Pennsylvania. An additional 10 per cent attended other famous eastern colleges, such as Amherst, Brown, Lafayette, Williams, Bowdoin, and another 10 per cent were students at one of a handful of well-known technical schools.

 

The remaining 30 per cent went to colleges and universities scattered all over the United States.

The preponderance of Ivy League colleges is, of course, a direct result of the higher class origin of the very rich: as the proportions of very rich from the upper classes increases, so do the proportions who attend the Ivy League schools. Of those who were college educated, 37 per cent of the 1900 generation, 47 per cent of 1925, and 60 per cent of 1950 very rich attended such schools.

Back in 1900, when only 39 per cent of the very rich were children of upper-class parents, 88 per cent of those originating in such upper-class families are known to have inherited fortunes of a half a million dollars or more - usually much more. By 1950, some 93 per cent of the very rich from the upper classes were inheritors.

 

It is frequently said that taxes now make it impossible for the very rich to leave outright a fortune of $90 or $100 million to their children, and this is, in a simple legal sense, true. Yet, the 1950 very rich are very much a continuation of the very rich of 1925; in fact, more of a continuation than those of 1925 were of the 1900 generation.

 

While 56 per cent of the very rich of 1925 originated in the upper classes, only 33 per cent had relatives among the very rich of 1900. But 68 per cent of the 1950 very rich originated in the upper classes and 62 per cent had relatives among the very rich of the earlier generations.

Moreover, by the middle years of the twentieth century, it is, in some ways easier to transfer position and power to one's children than it was in 1900 or 1925, for then the lines of power and position were not so elaborately organized, buttressed, and entrenched in well-established circles, and the transfer of power and position seemed to be firmly assured only by means of huge personal fortunes.

 

Among the very rich of 1950, however, there are many ways, as we shall have occasion to see, to pass on to children strategic positions in the apparatus of appropriation that constitutes the higher corporate level of American free, private enterprise.⁴

The very rich in America are not dominantly an idle rich and never have been. The proportions among them that are rentiers and not much else, have, of course, increased significantly: in 1900, some 14 per cent; in 1925, some 17 per cent; and by 1950, 26 per cent. By virtue of how they spend their time, about one-fourth of the very richest people can now be called members of a leisure class.

Yet neither the idea of the very rich as miserly coupon clippers nor as flamboyant playboys is the representative fact.

 

The idle miser as well as the busy spendthrift are represented among the very rich of America, but, in the history of the great American fortunes, the misers have not all been mere coupon clippers; they have usually 'worked' in some way to increase the value of the coupons they would have to clip - or at least pretended to do so while having others to manage for them.*

* The supposed shamefulness of labor, on which many of Veblen's conceptions of the upper classes rest, does not square very well with the Puritan work ethic so characteristic of much of American life, including many upper-class elements. I suppose that in his book on the leisure class, Veblen is speaking only of upper, not middle, classes - certainly he is not writing of wealthy Puritan middle classes. He did not want to call what the higher businessman does 'work,' much less productive work. The very term, leisure class, became for him synonymous with upper class, but there has been and there is a working upper class - in fact, a class of prodigiously active men. That Veblen did not approve of their work, and in fact refused to give it that term - work being one of his positive words - is irrelevant. Moreover, in this case it obscures and distorts our understanding of the upper classes as a social formation. Yet for Veblen fully to have admitted this simple fact would have destroyed (or forced the much greater sophistication of) his whole perspective and indeed one of the chief moral bases of his criticism.

From one rather formal viewpoint, it should be noted that Veblen was a profoundly conservative critic of America: he wholeheartedly accepted one of the few unambiguous, all-American values: the value of efficiency, of utility, of pragmatic simplicity. His criticism of institutions and the personnel of American society was based without exception on his belief that they did not adequately fulfill this American value. If he was, as I believe, a Socratic figure, he was in his own way as American as Socrates in his was Athenian. As a critic, Veblen was effective precisely because he used the American value of efficiency to criticize

And the spendthrifts have not all been merely that: some have gambled a million and often come up with two or three more; for their spendthrift activities have often been in the realm of appropriative speculation.

The men among the idle rich of 1900 were either third-or fourth-generation Astors or third-generation Vanderbilts: on their estates they relaxed with their horses, or on beaches with their yachts offshore, while their wives played often frantic and always expensive social games.

 

By 1925, there were only a few more rentiers among the very rich but many more of them were women. They lived as expensively as did those of 1900, but now they were more scattered over the United States and they were given less publicity in the emerging world of the celebrity. Having beyond any doubt 'arrived' socially, these very rich women often became engaged by 'the arts' instead of 'society,' or busily pretended to be.¹⁵

 

And in fact, some of them were spending more time in philanthropy than in social amusements or personal splendor, a fact that was in part due to the sober, Puritan beliefs of John D. Rockefeller from whose accumulations much of their money derived.

In the 1950 generation, both the proportion of rentiers (which we have seen to be 26 per cent) and the proportions of women among them (70 per cent) have increased, but they do not seem to form any one social type. There are the modern playgirls - Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton now expertly and expensively trying to conserve their youth; but there are also those who live, as did Mrs. Anita McCormick Blaine, an active life of spending money and time on philanthropy and education, taking little active part in social affairs.

 

And there was Hetty Sylvia H. Green Wilks, the modern version of the miserly coupon clipper, who, as a child, had spent her summers,

'in a barred and shuttered house and had to go to bed at 7:30 p.m. for no lights burned in the Green house after that hour.'¹⁸

American reality.

 

He merely took this value seriously and used it with devastatingly systematic rigor. It was a strange perspective for an American critic in the nineteenth century, or in our own. One looked down from Mont St. Michel, like Henry Adams, or across from England, like Henry James. With Veblen perhaps the whole character of American social criticism shifted.

 

The figure of the last-generation American faded and the figure of the first-generation American - the Norwegian immigrant's son, the New York Jew teaching English literature in a midwestern university, the southerner come north to crash New York - was installed as the genuine, if no longer 100-per-cent-American, critic.

The history of the very rich in America is, in the main, a patriarchal history: men have always held from 80 to 90 per cent of great American fortunes. The increase, over the generations, in the proportions of the very rich who are recruited from inheritors of great wealth has not meant that all the rich have become 'idle.'

 

We have seen that 62 per cent of the very rich of 1950 were born into families connected with earlier generations of very rich; but that only 26 per cent of the 1950 very rich are in their life-ways an idle rich. And many of the very rich who have inherited their wealth have spent their lives working to keep it or to increase it. The game that has interested them most has been the game of the big money.

Yet some 26 per cent of the very rich of today are rentiers and more or Jess economically idle; and another 39 per cent occupy high positions in firms owned or controlled by their families.17 The rentiers and the family-managers thus account for 65 per cent of the very rich of our time. What of the 35 per cent remaining who rose to very rich status?

If many of those who were born into the very rich have spent their lives working, it is obvious that those who rose into it from middle and lower class levels are not likely to have been idle. The rise into the very rich stratum seems to involve an economic career which has two pivotal features: the big jump and the accumulation of advantages.
 

1. No man, to my knowledge has ever entered the ranks of the great American fortunes merely by saving a surplus from his salary or wages. In one way or another, he has to come into command of a strategic position which allows him the chance to appropriate big money, and usually he has to have available a considerable sum of money in order to be able to parlay it into really big wealth.

    

   He may work and slowly accumulate up to this big jump, but at some point he must find himself in a position to take up the main chance for which he has been on the lookout.

    

   On a salary of two or three hundred thousand a year, even forgetting taxes, and living like a miser in a board shack, it has been mathematically impossible to save up a great American fortune.*

    

   * If you started at 20 years of age and worked until you were 50 or so, saving $200,000 a year, you would still have, at a rate of 5 per cent compound interest, only $14 million, less than half of the lower limits we have taken for the great American fortunes.
   
    

2. Once he has made the big jump, once he has negotiated the main chance, the man who is rising gets involved in the accumulation of advantages, which is merely another way of saying that to him that hath shall be given. To parlay considerable money into the truly big money, he must be in a position to benefit from the accumulation advantages.

    

   The more he has, and the more strategic his economic position, the greater and the surer are his chances to gain more. The more he has, the greater his credit - his opportunities to use other people's money - and hence the less risk he need take in order to accumulate more. There comes a point in the accumulation of advantages, in fact, when the risk is no risk, but is as sure as the tax yield of the government itself.
   
   The accumulation of advantages at the very top parallels the vicious cycle of poverty at the very bottom.

    

   For the cycle of advantages includes psychological readiness as well as objective opportunities: just as the limitations of lower class and status position produce a lack of interest and a lack of self-confidence, so do objective opportunities of class and status produce interest in advancement and self-confidence. The confident feeling that one can of course get what one desires tends to arise out of and to feed back into the objective opportunities to do so.

    

   Energetic aspiration lives off a series of successes; and continual, petty failure cuts the nerve of the will to succeed.¹⁹

But if you had bought only $9,900 worth of General Motors stock in 1913, and, rather than use your judgment, had gone into a coma - allowing the proceeds to pile up in General Motors - then, in 1953, you would have about $7 million.

And, if you had not even exercised the judgment of choosing General Motors, but merely put $10,000 into each of the total of 480 stocks fisted in 1913 - a total investment of about $1 million - and then gone into a coma until 1953, you would have come out worth $10 million and have received in dividends and rights another $10 million. The increase in value would have amounted to about 899 per cent, the dividend return at 999 per cent.

 

Once you have the million, advantages would accumulate - even for a man in a coma.¹⁸

Most of the 1950 very rich who are related to the very rich of earlier generations have been born with the big jump already made for them and the accumulation of advantages already firmly in operation. The 39 per cent of the very rich of 1900 who originated from the upper classes inherited the big jump; and a few of them, notably the Vanderbilts and Astors, also inherited the positions involving the accumulation of advantages.

 

 J. P. Morgan's father left him $5 million and set him up as a partner in a banking firm connected with financial concerns in both Europe and America. That was his big jump. But the accumulation of advantages came later when, in his capacity as financier and broker, J. P. Morgan could lend other people's money to promote the sale of stocks and bonds in new companies, or the consolidation of existing companies, and receive as his commission enough stock to eventually enable his firm to control the new corporation.²⁰

After experience and profit in a lumber business, with his millionaire father's financial support, Andrew Mellon went into his father's bank and expanded it to national scale. He then became involved in the accumulation of advantages by lending the bank's money to young businesses - particularly in 1888, when the owners of patents for the refining of aluminum sold a share of their Pittsburgh Reduction Company to the Mellons in return for $250,000 which they used to construct a mill.

 

Andrew saw to it that this aluminum company remained a monopoly, and that the Mellons came out the controlling power.²¹

No man, to my knowledge, has ever entered the ranks of the great American fortunes merely by a slow bureaucratic crawl up the corporate hierarchies.

'Many of the top executives in some of our largest corporations,' Benjamin F. Fairless, Chairman of the Board of U. S. Steel, said in 1953, 'have spent a lifetime in the field of industrial management without ever having been able to accumulate as much as a million dollars. And I know that to be fact because I happen to be one of them myself.'²²

That statement is not true in the sense that the heads of the larger corporations do not typically become millionaires: they do.

 

But it is true in the sense that they do not become millionaires because they are 'experts' in the field of industrial management; and it is true in that it is not by industry but by finance, not by management but by promotion and speculation that they typically become enriched. Those who have risen into the very rich have been economic politicians and members of important cliques who have been in positions permitting them to appropriate for personal uses out of the accumulation of advantages.

Very few of those who have risen to great wealth have spent the major portions of their working lives steadily advancing from one position to another within and between the corporate hierarchies.

 

Such a long crawl was made by only 6 per cent of the very rich in 1900, and 14 per cent in 1950. But even these, who apparently did move slowly up the corporate hierarchy, seem rarely to have made the grade because of talents in business management. More often such talents as they possessed were the talents of the lawyer or - very infrequently - those of the industrial inventor.

The long crawl comes to a pay-off only if it is transformed into an accumulation of advantages; this transformation is often a result of a merger of companies. Usually such a merger takes place when the companies are relatively small and often it is cemented by marriage - as when the du Ponts bought out Laflin and Rand, their largest competitor, and Charles Copeland - assistant to the president of Laflin and Rand - became assistant treasurer of du Pont and married Luisa D'Anbelot du Pont.²³

The slow movement through a sequence of corporate positions may also mean that one has accumulated enough inside information and enough friendship to be able, with less risk or with no risk, to speculate in the promotion or manipulation of securities.

 

That is why the generation of 1925 contains the largest proportions of the very rich making the long crawl; then the market was open for such profits and the rules of speculation were not so difficult as they were later to become.

Whatever type of venture it is that enables the rich man to parlay his stake into a great appropriation, at one point or another the 'bureaucratic' men have usually been as much 'entrepreneurs' as were the classic founders of fortunes after the Civil War. Many of them, in fact - like Charles W. Nash ²⁴ - broke out on their own to found their own companies. Once the crawl was made, many of these men, especially of the 1925 set, took on all the gambling spirit and even some of the magnificence usually associated with the robber barons of the late nineteenth century.

The economic careers of the very rich are neither 'entrepreneurial' nor 'bureaucratic' Moreover, among them, many of those who take on the management of their families' firms are just as 'entrepreneurial' or as 'bureaucratic' as those who have not enjoyed such inheritance. 'Entrepreneur' and 'bureaucrat' are middle-class words with middle-class associations and they cannot be stretched to contain the career junctures of the higher economic life in America.

The misleading term 'entrepreneur' does not have the same meaning when applied to small businessmen as it does when applied to those men who have come to possess the great American fortunes. The sober bourgeois founding of a business, the gradual expanding of this business under careful guidance until it becomes a great American corporation is not an adequate picture of the fortune founders at the higher levels.

The entrepreneur, in the classic image, was supposed to have taken a risk, not only with his money but with his very career; but once the founder of a business has made the big jump he does not usually take serious risks as he comes to enjoy the accumulation of advantages that lead him into great fortune. If there is any risk, someone else is usually taking it. Of late, that someone else, as during World War II and in the Dixon-Yates attempt, has been the government of the United States.

 

If a middle-class businessman is in debt for $50,000, he may well be in trouble. But if a man manages to get into debt for $2 million, his creditors, if they can, may well find it convenient to produce chances for his making money in order to repay them.²⁵

The robber barons of the late nineteenth century usually founded or organized companies which became springboards for the financial accumulations that placed them among the very rich. In fact, 55 per cent of the very rich of 1900 made the first step to great fortune by the big jump of promoting or organizing their own companies.

 

By 1925, however, and again in 1950, only 22 per cent of the very rich made such a jump.

Very rarely have the men of any of these generations become very rich merely by the energetic tutelage of one big firm. The accumulation of advantages has usually required the merging of other businesses with the first one founded - a financial operation  - until a large 'trust' is formed. The manipulation of securities and fast legal footwork are the major keys to the success of such higher entrepreneurs. For by such manipulation and footwork they attained positions involved in the accumulation of advantages.

The major economic fact about the very rich is the fact of the accumulation of advantages: those who have great wealth are in a dozen strategic positions to make it yield further wealth.

 

Sixty-five per cent of the very richest people in America today are involved in enterprises which their families have passed on to them or are simply living as rentiers on the huge returns from such properties. The remaining 35 per cent are playing the higher economic game more actively, if no more daringly, than those who used to be called entrepreneurs but who in later day capitalism are more accurately called the economic politicians of the corporate world.

There are several ways to become rich. By the middle of the twentieth century in the United States, it has become increasingly difficult to earn and to keep enough money so as to accumulate your way to the top. Marriage involving money is at all times a delicate matter, and when it involves big money, it is often inconvenient and sometimes insecure.

 

Stealing, if you do not already have much money, is a perilous undertaking.

 

If you are really gambling for money, and do so long enough, your capital will, in the end, balance out; if the game is fixed, you are really earning it or stealing it, or both, depending on which side of the table you sit. It is not usual, and it never has been the dominant fact, to create a great American fortune merely by nursing a little business into a big one. It is not usual and never has been the dominant fact carefully to accumulate your way to the top in a slow, bureaucratic crawl. It is difficult to climb to the top, and many who try fall by the way. It is easier and much safer to be born there.

In earlier generations the main chance, usually with other people's money, was the key; in later generations the accumulation of corporate advantages, based on grandfathers' and father's position, replaces the main chance. Over the last three generations, the trend is quite unmistakable: today, only 9 per cent of the very rich came from the bottom; only 23 per cent are of mid-dle-class origin; 68 per cent came from the upper classes.

The incorporation of the United States economy occurred on a continent abundantly supplied with natural resources, rapidly peopled by migrants, within a legal and political framework willing and able to permit private men to do the job. They did it.

 

And in fulfilling their historical task of organizing for profit the industrialization and the incorporation, they acquired for their private use the great American fortunes. Within the private corporate system, they became the very rich.

In realizing the power of property and in acquiring instruments for its protection, the very rich have become involved, and now they are deeply entrenched, in the higher corporate world of the twentieth-century American economy. Not great fortunes, but great corporations are the important units of wealth, to which individuals of property are variously attached.

 

The corporation is the source of wealth, and the basis of the continued power and privilege of wealth. All the men and the families of great wealth are now identified with large corporations in which their property is seated.

Economically, as we have seen, neither the inheritors nor the accumulators have become an idle rich class of leisurely and cultivated persons. There are such among them, but almost three-fourths of the very rich of our day have continued to be more or less, and in one way or another, economically active. Their economic activities are, of course, corporation activities: promoting and managing, directing and speculating.

Moreover, as the propertied family has entered the corporate economy, it has been joined in the corporate world by the managers of these properties, who, as we shall presently see, are not themselves exactly unpropertied, and who, in fact, are not an entirely distinct economic species from the very rich. The organizing center of the propertied classes has, of course, shifted to include other powers than those held by the big propertied families.

 

The property system, of which rich men form so key a part, has been strengthened by its managerial reorganization, and it has been supplemented by the executive stratum, within and between the great corporations, which works energetically for the common interests of the corporate rich.

Socially, the men and women of the great American fortunes have taken their places as leaders of the several metropolitan 400's.

 

Of the ninety members of the 1900 very rich, only nine were included in Ward McAllister's 1892 list, but roughly half of the families in our 1900 listing have descendants who in 1940 were listed in the Social Registers of Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, or New York. The very rich are leading members of the metropolitan 400.

 

They belong to its clubs, and many of them, and almost all of their children, went to Groton and then to Harvard, or to other such schools. Twelve of the fifteen sons (who lived to be of college age) of the ten men out of the 1900 very rich whom Frederick Lewis Allen selected as the leading financiers of 1905, went to either Harvard or Yale; the other three to Amherst, Brown, and Columbia.²⁶

The very rich do not reign alone on top of visible and simple hierarchies.

 

But that they have been supplemented by agents and by hierarchies in the corporate structure of the economy and of the state does not mean that they have been displaced. Economically and socially, the very rich have not declined. After the crash and after the New Deal, the very rich have had to operate with skilled, legal technicians (both in and out of governments) whose services are essential in the fields of taxes and government regulations, corporate reorganization and merger, war contracts and public relations.

 

They have also adopted every conceivable type of protective coloration for the essentially irresponsible nature of their power, creating the image of the small-town boy who made good, the 'industrial statesman,' the great inventor who 'provides jobs,' but who, withal, remains just an average guy.

What has happened is that the very rich are not so visible as they once seemed, to observers of the muckraker age, for example - who provided the last really public view of the top of American society. The absence of systematic information and the distraction of 'human-interest' trivia tend to make us suppose that they do not really matter and even that they do not really exist.

 

But they are still very much among us - even though many are hidden, as it were, in the impersonal organizations in which their power, their wealth, and their privileges are anchored.
 

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