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 the 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 post of the major institutional hierarchies.
The economy — once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance — has become dominated by 200 or 300 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, now enters into each and every crany 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.
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 his most important for the historical structure of the present.
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. Not all power 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.
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 an 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.
People are either accepted into this class or they are not, and there is a qualitative split, rather than 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 on another, understand one another, marry one another, tend to work and to think if not together at least alike.
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.
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.
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, such postures have become standard features of the PR programs of all men of power.
Much less it is to say that willful coordination 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.
Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, for example, endured for some 400 generations with but slight changes in their basic structure. That is 6.5 times as long as the entire Christian era, which has only only prevailed some 65 generations; its is about 80 times as long as the 5 generations of the US’ 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.
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.
Yet in our time the pivotal moment does arise, and at that moment, small circles do decide or fail to decide.
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 Burchkhardt 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.
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.
The ends of men are often merely hopes, but the 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.
Nobody called for or permitted Napoleon to chase Parlement home, and later to transform his consulate into an emperorship. Nobody called for or permitted Hitler to proclaim himself “Leader and Chancellor”, to abolish and usurp roles by merging the presidency and the chancellorship. Nobody called for or permitted Roosevelt to make a series of decisions that led to the entrance of the US into WW2. It was no “historical necessity,” but a man named Truman who, with a few other men, decided to drop a bomb on Hiroshima.
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.
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.
If the elite of our time do not have power, they cannot be held responsible; as men in a difficult situation, they should enlarge our sympathies.
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?
It is as fashionable to suppose that there is no power elite, as it was fashionable in the ‘30s to suppose a ruling-class villains to be the source of all social injustice and public malaise.
The top of the American system of power is much more unified and much more powerful, the bottom 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.
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 3 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.
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.
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.
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 upper class believes, were and are now more interested in “community and social” qualifications than in mere money.
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 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.
Such newly enriched classes — ranging from Texas multi-millionaire to petty Illinois war profiteers who have since consolidated their holdings — feel that they are somehow held down by the status pretension of older wealth and older families. They feel that they have achieved something and yet are not thought to be good enough to possess it fully.
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 VPs 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.
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.
With their country estates, they come to occupy the top rungs of what used to be called the farm ladder, although they know little or nothing of the lower rungs of that ladder.
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.
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.
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.”
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? 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.
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 insider 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.
Americans are not very conscious of family liens; 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 status struggle in America is not something that occurred at a given time and was then done with. The attempted 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 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.
During the ‘80s, 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.”
Not only in NY, 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 symbolize 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.
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. The belong to clubs and organizations to which only others like themselves are admitted, and they take quite seriously their appearances in these associations.
Their names are not in the chattering, gossiping columns or even the society columns of their local newspapers; many of them would be genuinely embarrassed among their own kind 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.
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.
It is not unusual for gentlemen to belong to 3 or 4 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.
The core of membership is usually families which successful 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.
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.
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 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.
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 to 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.
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.
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 or 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.
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 palace in the HQs 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.
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, the absorb the aspiration to be — if not the conviction that they are — The One Who Decide.
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.
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 POTUS. 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.
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.
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.
Yet prestige is the shadow of money and power. Where these are, there it is.
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 a measure 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 $200K. In the military ranks, of course, all this is made formal and rigid.
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.
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 pretense of politicians have to be held carefully in curb: high political figures, even when nit 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.
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 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.
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. “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.”
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 it is convenient for such people to believe that their repute is based on amiable virtues rather than past power.
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, 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.”
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?
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.
Here are the people whose circumstances make them independent of the good will of others, never waiting for anyone but always waited upon. By the sound of their voices, it is evident that they have been trained, carefully yet casually, to be somebody.
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 US for WW2, 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.
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.
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 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 int he 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 supposed to create and to focus.
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 of Schumpeter’s idea of the “gale of innovations”: he systematically confuses technological gain with financial manipulation. What is needed, as 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.”
The government has subsidized private industry by maintaining high tariff rates, and if the taxpayers of the US had not paid, out of their own labor, for paved road system, Henry Ford’s astuteness and thrift would not have enabled him to become a billionaire out of the automobile industry.
In capitalistic economies, wars have led to many opportunities for the private appropriation of fortune and power. But the complex facts of WW2 make previous appropriations seem puny indeed. Between 1940 and 1944, some $175B worth of prime supply contracts were given to private corporations.
By the 1840’s, in NYC and all of Massachusetts, there were only 39 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.
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 big money.
The rise into the very rich stratum seems to involve an economic career which as 2 pivotal features: the big jump and the accumulation of advantages.
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.
J.P. Morgan’s father left him $5M 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 privileged of wealth.
After the crash and after the New Deal, the very rich have had to operate with skilled, legal technicians 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.
These executives, it is held, are responsible for the refrigerator in the kitchen and the automobile in the garage — as well as all the plans and bombs that now guard Americans from instant peril. All of them, or nearly all, have come up from the bottom of the ladder; they are either farm boys who have now made good in the big city, or poor immigrants who have come to America and now enjoy the dream of success it allows. Full of the know-how that made America great; efficient, straightforward, honest, the CEOs, it is often said, ought really to be allowed to run the government, for if only such men were in charge there would be no waste, no corruption, no infiltration. Dirty politics, in short, would become clean business.
The corporations are the organized centers of the private property system: the CEOs are the organizers of that system. As economic men, they are at once creatures and creators of the corporate revolution, which, in brief, has transformed property from a tool of the workman into an elaborate instrument by which his work is controlled and a profit extracted from it.
Americans like to think of themselves as the most individualistic people in the world, but among them the impersonal corporation has proceeded the farthest and now reaches into every area and detail of daily life.
In the development of each major industrial line, competition between many small firms tends to be most frequent at the industry’s beginning. There is then a jockeying and maneuvering which, in due course, results in consolidation and merger. If they compete with one another they do so less in terms of price than in terms of “product development,” advertising, and packaging.
The 6.5M people who owned stock in publicly held corporations in 1952 made up less than 7% of all adults in the population. But that is not the whole story; in fact, by itself, it is misleading. What is important is, first, what types of people own any stock? And second, how concentrated is the value of the stock they own?
First of all: 45% of the executives, 26% of all professional persons, and 19% of all supervisory officials hold stock. But only 0.2% of the unskilled workers, 1.4% of the semi-skilled workers, and 4.4% of foremen and skilled workers hold stock. Some 98.6% of all workers in manufacturing own no stock whatsoever.
Second, in 1952, only 1.6M (25%) of the 6.5M people who held any stock received as much as $10K per year from any and all sources.
About 1% of all US adults received 42% of all the corporate dividends going to individuals.
The economy of America has been largely incorporated, and within their incorporation the corporate chiefs have captured the technological innovation, accumulated the existing great fortunes as well as much lesser, scattered wealth, and capitalized the future. They command the most expensive, and therefore what must be the finest legal minds in the world, to invent and to refine their defenses and their strategies.
Executive circles do not overlap very much with those of artistic and literary interest. Among them are those who resent reading a report of a letter longer than one page, such avoidance of words being rather general. They are very much of the age of the “briefing,” of the digest, of the 2-paragraph memo. Such reading as they do, they often delegate to others, who clip and summarize for them.
As the incorporation of the economy got under way, corporations felt the need, on the one hand, to get in touch with lawyers in public office and, on the other, to have growing recourse to private legal advice in the making of day to day business decisions. The demand for such advice, indeed, became so great that the best paid metropolitan lawyers almost without exception after 1900 made business counseling the focus of their work, at the expense of traditional advocacy; and many lawyers yielded to the blandishments of the corporations to become house counsel and even regular business executives themselves.
There is the bureaucratic crawl and there is the entrepreneurial leap. But there is also the deal of the fixer, the coup of the promoter, the maneuver of the clique.
On the middle levels, specialization is required. But the operating specialist will not rise; only the “broadened” man will rise. What does that mean? It means, for one thing, that the specialist is below the level on which men are wholly alerted to profit. The “broadened” man is the man who, no matter what he may be doing, is able clearly to see the way to maximize the profit for the corporation as a whole, in the long as well as in the short run.
There is another item that ties in with the network of friends which people call “luck”: the social life of the corporation. It is a reasonable assumption that part of the executive career is spent “politicing.” Like any politician, especially when he is at or near the top of his hierarchy, the successful executive tries to win friends and to make alliances, and he spends a good deal of time guessing about the cliques he thinks oppose him. He makes power-plays, and these seem part of the career of the managerial elite.
In the corporate world, one is drawn upward by the appraisals of one’s superiors. Most CEOs take much pride in their ability “to judge men”.
One often hears that practical experience is what counts, but his is very short-sighted, for those on top control the changes to have practical experience of the sort that would be counted for the higher tasks of sound judgment and careful maneuver.
The fit survive, and fitness means, not formal competence — there probably is no such thing for top executive positions — but conformity with the criteria of those who have already succeeded. To be compatible with the top men is to act like them, to look like them, to think like them: to be of and for them.
Those who have started from on high have from their beginnings been formed by sound men and trained for soundness. They do not have to think of having to appear as sound men. They just are sound men; indeed, they embody the standards of soundness. Those who have had low beginnings must think all the harder before taking a risk of being thought unsound.
So speak in the rich, round voice and do not confuse you superiors with details. Know where to draw the line. Execute the ceremony of forming a judgment. Delay recognizing the choice you have already made, so as to make the truism sound like the deeply pondered notion. Speak like the quiet competent man of affairs and never personally say No.
All the old-fashioned rich are now more or less of the corporate rich, and the newer types of privileged men are there with them. In fact, no one can become rich or stay rich in America today without becoming involved, in one way or another, in the world of the corporate rich.
People of higher income figure their own tax deductions, or more usually have them figured by the experts they hire.
Perhaps the most important tax loophole in retaining current income is the long-term capital gain.
Generally, a foundation is defined as “any autonomous, non-profit legal entity that is set up t serve the welfare of mankind.” It administers wealth that is transferred to it through tax-free gifs or bequests. Actually, the setting up of foundations has often become a convenient way of avoiding taxes.
If a man’s chief concern is to raise a tax-free umbrella over part of his income and to give some jobs to needy retainers, he should by all means set up his own foundation, no matter how small. Then he may even prefer to have the overhead eat up all the income.
The various forms of feathering the nest now make it possible for executive members of the corporate rich to live richly on seemingly moderate incomes, while paying taxes lower than the law seemingly intends as fair and just.
Among the accoutrements that often go with the big executive job but are never reported to tax collectors are such fringe benefits as these: free medical care, payments of club fees, company lawyers and accountants available for tax, financial and legal advice, facilities for entertaining customers, private recreation areas — gold courses, swimming pools, gymnasiums — scholarship funds for children of executives, company automobiles, and dining rooms for executive use.
Theater people estimate that 30-40% of the NY theater audience is an expense-account audience.
Filling out an expense account itemization has been regarded as a kind of contest of wits with the company auditor, in which it is perfectly justifiable to use the most outrageous half-truths, little white lies and outright fantasies, anything at all which the auditor, regardless of how outraged he might be, cannot absolutely prove to be false.
The miser’s pleasure is in the potentiality of his spending power, so he draws back from the actual spending. He is a tense man, afraid of losing the potentiality and so never realizing it. His security and his power are embodied in his hoard, and in fearing to lose it, he fears loss of his very self.
For the very poor, the ends of necessity never meet. For the middle classes there are always new ends, if not of necessity, of status. For the very rich, the ends have never been separated, and within the limits of the common human species, they are today as free as any Americans.
If the rich are not happy it is because none of us are happy.
For of all the possible values of human society, one and one only is truly sovereign, truly universal, truly sound, truly and completely acceptable goal of man in America. That goal is money, and let there be no sour grapes about it from the losers.
In fact, from the standpoint of the American elite, of which the corporate rich are only one segment, the power over consumer goods is not nearly so important as the institutional powers of wealth.
Any President who wants to run a prosperous country depends on the corporation at least as much as — probably more than - the corporation depends on him. His dependence is not unlike that of King John on the landed barons of Runnymede, where Magna Carta was born.
In general, however, the ideology of the executives, as members of the corporate rich, is conservatism without any ideology. They are conservative, if for no other reason than that they feel themselves to be a sort of fraternity of the successful. They are without ideology because they feel themselves to be practical men.
During the 18th century, observers of the historic scene began to notice a remarkable trend in the division of power at the top of modern society: Civilians, coming into authority, were able to control men of military violence, whose power, being hedged in and neutralized, declined.
All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence. Why, then, is not military dictatorship the normal and usual form of government? For the greater part of human history, men have, in fact, lived under the sword, and in any serious disturbance of human affairs, real or imagined, societies do tend to revert to military rule.
He assumes that, in any society, there is a sort of quota of men who when appropriately provoked will resort to violence. But if you give such a man a job in a certain kind of social hierarchy, you will get a professional soldier and often civilians can control him.
Now what kind of remarkable institution is this standing army that it can channel the combative tendencies of men of violence so that they come under civilian authority, and in fact adopt among themselves such obedience as their very code of honor?
There are several quite open mechanisms which have bene at work whenever standing armies are under civilian control. First of all, these armies have been “aristocratic” kinds of institutions. Whenever, as in the early Bolshevik enthusiasm, attempts have been made to do away with this character, they have failed. There is maintained in the national standing army an absolute distinction between officers and men; and the officer group has generally been recruited from among the ruling strata of the civilian population or from those who sympathize with their interests; accordingly, the balance of forces within the ruling strata has been reflected within the standing army. And finally, there have developed in this standing army, or in many of them, certain gratifications which even men of violence often want: the security of a job, but more, the calculable glory of living according to a rigid code of honor.
The soldier compares himself with his fellows, and contends for promotion to be a Corporal: the Corporals vie with each other to be Sergeants; the Sergeants will mount breaches to be Ensigns; and thus every man in an army is constantly aspiring to be something higher, as every citizen in the commonwealth is constantly struggling for a better rank, that he may draw the observation of more eyes.
Prestige to the point of honor, and all that this involves, has, as it were, been the pay-off for the military’s renunciation of political power. This renunciation has gone quite far: it has been incorporated in the military code of honor. Inside their often trim bureaucracy, where everything seems under neat control, army officers have felt that “politics” is a dirty, uncertain, and ungentlemanly kind of game; and in terms of their status code, they have often felt that politicians were unqualified creatures inhabiting an uncertain world.
From the time of the Monroe Doctrine until it was applied to Britain in the later part of the 19th century, the British fleet, in order to protect British markets in the western hemisphere, stood between the US and the continental states of Europe.
A country whose people have been most centrally preoccupied by the individual acquisition of wealth would not be expected to favor subsidizing an organized body of men who, economically speaking, are parasitical. A country whose middle class cherished freedom and personal initiative would not be likely to esteem disciplined soldiers who all too often seemed to be tyrannically used in the support of less free governments. Economic forces and political climate, therefore, have historically favored the civilian devaluation of the military as an at-times necessary evil but always a burden.
And perhaps the historians are right. But the first armies in Europe based on universal conscription were revolutionary armies. Other countries armed their populations reluctantly; Metternich at the Congress of Vienna urged the abolition of mass conscription; Prussia adopted it only after her professional army suffered defeats without it; the Tzars, only after the Crimean war; and Austria, only after Bismarck’s recruits defeat Franz Josef’s troops.
He did not earn the respect of his men by logistical planning in the Pentagon; he earned it by better shooting, harder riding, faster improvisation when in trouble.
But the navy was more like a gentleman’s club, which occasionally went on exploring and rescuing expeditions, and the prestige of the navy was among the upper classes. This explains, and is in part explained by, the higher level of origin and more professional training of its officer corps.
The higher prestige of the navy has been due to the fact that the skills of the naval officer were more mysterious to laymen than those of the army — few civilians would dare try to command a ship, but many might a brigade. Since there was not, as in the army, a volunteer system — there was the prestige of skill augmented by the prestige of a formal, specialized education at Annapolis. There was also the fact of heavy capital investment, represented by the ships in the naval officer’s command. And finally, there was the absolute authority that The Master of a ship exercises which lifted the officers high indeed.
Given the meticulous crawl of his career, it was important that he be commissioned early and live long, in order to reach admiralcy before compulsory retirement at 62. It usually took some 25 years to become a captain. “Officers spent so long a time in the lower subordinate grades that they never learned to think for themselves. They usually reached command ranks so late that they had lost their youth and ambition and had learned only to obey, not to command.”
For the first time in their history, they find that none of the combatants would win. They have no image of what “victory” might mean, and they have no idea of any road to victory.
It produces 10 tons of non-classified waste paper a day, which is sold for about $80K a year.
At the very top, among civilians and military, there have been, since WW2, sweeping changes of personnel — although the types of men have not decisively changed. As Secretary, there has been a politician, a broker, a general, a banker, a corporation executive. Directly confronting such men, sit the 4 highest military who are “all military.” From the military standpoint, perhaps the ideal civilian at the top would be a front to Congress but a willing tool of military decision.
The general and the admiral are more professionalized executives than inherited images of fighting men would suggest.
During the interwar years nothing really happened in their professional lives. It was in some ways as if a doctor were passing his life without seeing any patients, for the military were not called upon rally to exercise their professional skill.
The summer cruises were exciting, and the gold stripes and extra privileges of upper-class life made you begin to feel like somebody after all. And you learned good manners. You listened to so many lectures admonishing you not to consider yourself superior to a civilian that you found yourself feeling that you really were a cut above, but that it would be improper to show that you thought so.
The military world selects and forms those who become a professional part of it. The harsh initiation at The Point or The Academy — and on lower levels of the military service, in basic training — reveals the attempt to break up early civilian values and sensibilities in order the more easily to implant a character structure as totally new as possible.
It is this attempt to break up the earlier acquired sensibilities that lies back of the “breaking” of the recruit and the assignment to him of very low status in the military world.
The discipline of the Naval Academy well illustrates the principle that in every community discipline means simply organized living.
There is the resolute mouth and usually the steady eye, and always the tendency to expressionlessness; there is the erect posture, the square shoulders, and the regulated cadence of the walk. They have the “military mind,” which is no idle phrase: it points to the product of a specialized bureaucratic training; it points to the results of a system of formal selection and common experiences and friendships and activities — all enclosed within similar routines. Even within the military realm, this mind distrust “theorists,” if only because they tend to be different: bureaucratic thinking is orderly and concrete thinking.
Although not usually rich, they have never faced the perils of earning a living in the same way that lower and middle-class persons have. The orderly ranks of their chain of command, as we have seen, are carried into their social life: such striving for status as they have known has been within an unambiguous and well-organized hierarchy of status, in which each knows his place and remains within it.
In this military world, debate is no more at a premium than persuasion: one obeys and one commands, and matters, even unimportant matters, are not to be decided by voting. Life in the military world accordingly influences the military mind’s outlook on other institutions as well as on its own. The warlord often sees economic institutions as means for military production and the huge corporation as a sort of ill-run military establishment. In his world, wages are fixed, unions impossible to conceive. He sees political institutions as often corrupt and usually inefficient obstacles, full of undisciplined and cantankerous creatures.
They now have more connections; and they are now operating in a nation whose elite and whose underlying population have accepted what can only be called a military definition of reality.
It has been said that a military man, acting as SecDef for example, might be more civilian in effect than a civilian who, knowing little of military affairs and personnel, is easily hoodwinked by the generals and admirals who surround him. It might also be felt that the military man in politics does not have a strong-willed, new and decisive line of policy, and even that, in a civilian political world, the general becomes aimless and, in his lack of know-how and purpose, even weak.
As men of power, some develop quite arrogant, and others quite shrewd, drives to influence, enjoying as a high value the exercise of power.
One must also remember that, by virtue of their training and experience, the professional military believe firmly in the military definition of world reality, and that, accordingly, given the new and enormous means of violence and the nervous default of civilian diplomacy, they are genuinely frightened for their country. Those with the most conviction and, in their terms, ability, will be frustrated by retreat into the role of the strictly apolitical technician of violence. Besides, many are too high up and already too deeply involved for soldierly withdrawal.
Military men are supposed to be the mere instruments of political men, but the problems they confront increasingly require political decisions. To treat such political decisions as “military necessities” is of course to surrender civilian responsibility, if not decision, to the military elite.
General Mark Clark, who has probably had more political experience while on active duty than any other American warlord, believes in what he calls the “buddy system” — a political man and a military man working together. In the past, many American generals were inclined to say of politics: “To hell with it, let’s talk politics later.” But you can’t do it this way any more.
This speech, helped put General Bradley and the Joint Chiefs into the political hustings where they have no business to be.
Only in those settings in which subtle nuances of social life and political intention blend, can “diplomacy” — which is at once a political function and a social art — be performed. Such an art has seemed to require those social graces usually acquired by persons of upper-class education and style of life. And the career diplomat has, in fact, been representative of the wealthier classes.
As managers of the largest corporate body in America, the military has a board of directors: the President, the service Secretaries, the men on the military-affairs committees of Congress. Yet many of the men on the board, i.e., the Congressmen, can really do little more than express general confidence, or the lack of it, in the management. Even the most influential directors, the Presidents and the SecDef, can usually argue with the management only as laymen arguing with professionals — a significantly different relationship from that of board and management in industry.
After WW2, military demands continued to shape and to pace the corporate economy. It is accordingly not surprising that during the last decade, many generals and admirals, instead of merely retiring, have become members of boards of directors.
The military, which is now the largest single supporter and director of scientific research in fact, as large, dollar-wise, as all other American research put together. Since WW2, the general direction of pure scientific research has been set by military considerations, its major finances are from military funds, and very few of those engaged in basic scientific research are not working under military direction.
Some universities, in fact, are financial branches of the military establishment, receiving 3 or 4 times as much money from military as from all other sources combined.
Since WW2, in fact, the warlords have caused a large-scale and intensive PR program to be carried out. They have spent millions of dollars and they have employed thousands of skilled publicists, in and out of uniform, in order to sell their ideas and themselves to the public and to the Congress.
The content of this great effort reveals its fundamental purpose: to define the reality of international relations in a military way, to portray the armed forces in a manner attractive to civilians, and thus to emphasize the need for the expansion of military facilities.
Top admirals and generals, of course, have their own PR men. In 1948, General MacArthur’s command included 135 army men and 40 civilians assigned to publicity.
The greatest fraternity on the face of the earth are the people who wear wings. You’re not just jet jokeys. Take up the broader duty of understanding and preaching the role of air power. The people who won’t face the truth must be told repeatedly, earnestly, logically that air power will save the world from destruction.
In all of pluralist America, there is no interest — there is no possible combination of interests — that has anywhere near the time, the money, the manpower, to present a point of view on the issues involved that can effectively compete with the views presented day in and day out by the warlords and by those whom they employ.
This means, for one thing, that there is no free and wide debate of military policy or of policies of military relevance. But that, of course, is in line with the professional soldier’s training for command and obedience, and with his ethos, which is certainly not that of a debating society in which decisions are put to a vote.
By constitutional definition, the military is subordinated to political authority, and is generally considered, and has generally been, a servant as well as an adviser of civilian politicians; but the warlord is moving into these circles, and by his definitions of reality, influencing their decisions.
The key to an understanding of status is power. The military cannot successfully claim status among civilians if they do not have, or are not thought to have power. Now power, as well as images of it, are always relative: one man’s powers are another man’s weaknesses. And the powers that have weakened the status of the military in America have been the powers of money and of money-makers, and the powers of the civilian politicians over the military establishment.
Among those who have reached the top positions of the American government one can find at least 2 or 3 who represent almost anything for which one looks. One could endlessly collect biographical anecdotes and colorful images about them — but these would not add up to any conclusions about the leading types of men and their usual careers. We must understand how history and biography have interplayed to shape the course of American politics, for every epoch selects and forms its own representative political men — as well as prevailing images of them.
The classic commentaries of American politics — those of Tocqueville, Bryce, and Ostrogorski — rest upon 19th-century experience — generally from Andrew Jackson to Theodore Roosevelt. It is, of course, true that many of the trends that determined the political shape of the long middle period are still at work influencing the type of politician that prevails in our own political times — especially on the middle levels of power, in the Congress. But during the 20th century, and especially after WW1, other forces have greatly modified the content and the importance in America of political institutions. The political establishment of the US has become more tightly knit, it has been enlarged in scope, and has come up closer to virtually all of the social institutions which it frames.
Like men of other pursuits, politician, high or low, are sometimes driven by technological love of their activities — of the campaigning and the conniving and the holding of office; more frequently than others, they are drawn to politics by the prestige that their success brings to them; in fact, “power for power’s sake” — a very complicated set of motives — usually involves the feeling of prestige which the exercise of power bestows. Rarely is it the money they receive as officeholders which attracts them.
There are, to be sure, other ways of classifying men as political animals, but these types — the party politician, the professional administrator, the political outsider — are quite serviceable in understanding the social make-up and psychological complexion of the political visage of present-day America.
All these tendencies — (I) for the political elite to begin on the national level and thus to by-pass local and state offices, (II) never to serve in national legislative bodies, (III) to have more of an appointed than an elected career, and (IV) to spend less proportion of their total working life in politics — these tendencies point to the decline of the legislative body and to the by-passing of elective offices in the higher political career. They signify the “bureaucratization” of politics and the decline at the political top of men who are professional politicians in the simple, old-fashioned sense of being elected up the political hierarchy and experienced in electoral politics. They point, in short, to the political outsider.
The 3 top policy-making positions in the country (secretaries of state, treasury, and defense) are occupied by a NY representative of the leading law firm of the country which does international business for Morgan and Rockefeller interests; by a Mid-West corporation executive who was a director of a complex of over 30 corporations; and by the former president of one of the 3 or 4 largest corporations and the largest producer of military equipment in the US.
On the “second team” of the political directorate, there is a “Little Cabinet,” whose members stand in for the first and, who, in fact, handle most of the administrative functions of governing.
By a “genuine” bureaucracy, we refer to an organized hierarchy of skills and authorities, within which each office and rank is restricted to its specialized tasks. Those who occupy these offices do not own the equipment required for their duties, and they, personally, have no authority: the authority they wield is vested in the offices they occupy. Their salary, along with the honor due each rank, is the sole renumeration offered.
The bureaucrat or civil servant, accordingly, is above all an expert whose knowledge and skill have been attested to by qualifying examination, and later in his career, qualifying experience. As a specially qualified man, his access to his office and his advancement to higher offices are regulated by more or less formal tests of competence. By aspiration and by achievement, he is set for a career, regulated according to merit and seniority, within the prearranged hierarchy of the bureaucracy. He is, moreover, a disciplined man, whose conduct can be readily calculated, and who will carry out policies even if they go against his grain, for his “merely personal opinions” are strictly segregated from his official life, outlook, and duties. Socially, the bureaucrat is likely to be rather formal with his colleagues, as the smooth functioning of a bureaucratic hierarchy requires a proper balance between personal good will and adequate social distance according to rank.
Even if its members only approximate the principled image of such a man, the bureaucracy is a most efficient form of human organization. But such an organized corps is quite difficult to develop, and the attempt can easily result in an apparatus that is obstreperous and clumsy, hide-bound and snarled with procedure, rather than an instrument of policy.
The integrity of a bureaucracy as a unit of a government depends upon whether or not, as a corps of officials, it survives changes of political administration. The integrity of a professional bureaucrat depends upon whether or not his official conduct, and even his person, embodies the status codes of the official, foremost among them political neutrality.
As a more or less permanent staff with a more or less permanent hierarchy beneath it, the bureaucracy is loyal only to the policies that are given it to execute. It has been recognized almost universally that interference with this neutrality from political parties means loss of technical skill to the state as a whole.
Now of the 2M or so government employees, perhaps some 1500 can be considered “key officials”: these include the head men of the executive departments, under-secretaries and assistant secretaries, the chiefs of the independent agencies and their deputy and assistant heads, the chiefs of the various bureaus and their deputies, the ambassadors and other chiefs of missions. Occupationally they include lawyers and air force officers, economists and physicians, engineers and accountants, aeronautical experts and bankers, chemists and newspaper men, diplomats and soldiers. Altogether, they occupy the key administrative, technical, military, and professional positions of the federal government.
The superior man who might be bent on a professional career in government is naturally not disposed to train himself for such political perils and administrative helplessness.
No intellectually qualified personnel for a genuine bureaucracy can be provided if the Civil Service is kept in a political state of apprehension; for that selects mediocrities and trains them for unreflective conformity.
No morally qualified personnel can be provided if civil servants must work in a context of universal distrust, paralyzed by suspicion and fear.
Magazines for business executives and ghost writers for politicians regularly run pious editorials on the need for a better Civil Service. But neither executives nor politicians really want a group of expert administrators who are genuinely independent of party considerations, and who, by training and experience, are the depository of the kind of skills needed to judge carefully the consequences of alternative policies. The political and economic meaning of such a corps for responsible government is all too clear.
In the lower ranks of the state hierarchy, from which genuine civil servants might be recruited, there has not been enough prestige or money to attract really first-rate men. In the upper ranks, “outsiders,” that is, men from outside the bureaucracy, have been called upon.
The market is sovereign and in the magic economy of the small entrepreneur there is no authoritarian center. And in the political sphere as well: the division, the equilibrium, of powers prevails, and hence there is no chance of despotism. “The nation which will not adopt an equilibrium of power,” John Adams wrote, “must adopt a despotism. There is no other alternative.” As developed by the men of the 18th century, equilibrium, or checks and balances, thus becomes the chief mechanism by which both economic and political freedom were guaranteed and the absence of tyranny insured among the sovereign nations of the world.
Yet there is some reality in such romantic pluralism, even in such a pasticcio of power as Mr. Riesman invents: it is a recognizable, although a confused, statement of the middle levels of power, especially as revealed in Congressional districts and in the Congress itself. But it confuses, indeed it does not even distinguish between the top, the middle, and the bottom levels of power.
The balance of power theory is a narrow-focus view of American politics. With it one can explain temporary alliances within one party or the other. It is also narrow-focus in the choice of timespan: the shorter the period of time in which you are interested, the more usable the balance of power theory appears. For when one is up-close and dealing journalistically with short periods, a given election, for example, one is frequently overwhelmed by a multiplicity of forces and causes. One continual weakness of American “social science” has been its assumption that a mere enumeration of a plurality of causes is the wise and scientific way of going about understanding modern society. Of course it is nothing of the sort: it is a past-pot eclecticism which avoids the real task of social analysis: that task is to go beyond a mere enumeration of all the facts that might conceivably be involved and weigh each of them in such a way as to understand how they fit together, how they form a model of what it is you are trying to understand.
Most “political” news is news and gossip about middle-level issues and conflicts. And in America, the political theorist too is often merely a more systematic student of elections, of who voted for whom. As a professor or as a freelance intellectual, the political analyst is generally on the middle levels of power himself. He knows the top only by gossip; the bottom, if at all, only by “research.” But he is at home with the leaders of the middle level, and, as a talker himself, with their “bargaining.”
When it is said that a “balance of power” exists, it may be meant that no one interest can impose its will or its terms upon others; or that any one interest can create a stalemate; or that in the course of time, first one and then another interest gets itself realized, in a kind of symmetrical taking of turns; or that all policies are the results of compromises, that no one wins all they want to win, but each gets something. All these possible meanings are, in fact, attempts to describe what can happen when, permanently or temporarily, there is said to be “equality of bargaining power.” But the goals for which interests struggle are not merely given; they reflect the current state of expectation and acceptance. Accordingly, to say that various interests are “balanced” is generally to evaluate the status quo as satisfactory or even good; the hopeful ideal of balance often masquerades as a description of fact.
“Balance of power” implies equality of power, and equality of power seems wholly fair and even honorable, but in fact what is one man’s honorable balance is often another’s unfair imbalance. Ascendant groups of course tend readily to proclaim a just balance of power and a true harmony of interest, for they prefer their domination to be uninterrupted and peaceful. So large businessmen condemn small labor leaders as “disturbers of the peace” and upsetters of the universal interests inherent in business-labor cooperation. So privileged nations condemn weaker ones in the name of internationalism, defending with moral notions what has been won by force against those have-nots whom, making their bid for ascendancy or equality later, can hope to change the status quo only by force.
Yet as social types, these 96 Senators and 435 Representatives are not representative of the rank and file citizens. They represent those who have been successful in entrepreneurial and professional endeavors. They are, in short, in and of the new and old upper classes of local society.
The political career does not attract as able a set of men as it once did. From a money standpoint, the alert lawyer who can readily make $25K to $50K a year, is not very likely to trade it for the perils of the Congressman’s position; and, no doubt with exceptions, if they are not wealthy men, it is likely that the candidates for Congress will be a country attorney, a local judge, or a mayor — whose salaries are even less than those of Congressmen. Many observers agree that the Congress has fallen in public esteem over the last 50 years; and that, even in their home districts and states, the Congressmen are by no means the important figures they once were. How many people, in fact, know the name of their Representative, or even of their Senators?
The politicians are surrounded by the demands and requests of such groups, large and small, local and national. As brokers of power, the politicians must compromise one interest by another, and, in the process, they are themselves often compromised into men without any firm line of policy.
There comes a time in the life of every Congressman when he must rise above principle. As a political actor, the Congressman is part of the compromised balances of local societies, as well as one or the other of the nationally irresponsible parties. As a result, he is caught in the semi-organized stalemate of the middle levels of national power.
Their touchiness about prestige matters, especially on the national scene, has been due to (1) their self-made character, and to the fact (2) that their self-making was helped no end by government and the atmosphere it created in the decade after 1935. They are government-made men, and they have feared — correctly, it turns out — that they can be unmade by government. Their status tension is also due to the fact (3) that they are simply new to the power elite and its ways, and (4) that they feel a tension between their publics: their union members — before whom it is politically dangerous to be too big a “big shot” or too closely associated with inherited enemies — and their newly found companions and routines of life.
Many observers mistake the status accoutrement of labor leaders for evidence of labor’s power. In a way they are, but in a way they are not. They are when they are based on and lead to power. They are not when they become status traps for leaders without resulting in power. In such matters, it is well to remember that this is no chicken-and-egg issue. The chicken is power, and comes first, the egg is status.
Among the plurality of these middle powers, in fact, are all those strata and interests which in the course of American history have been defeated in their bids for top power or which have never made such bids. They include: rural small property, urban small property, the wage-worker unions, all consumers, and all major white-collar groups. These are indeed still in an unromantic scatter; being structurally unable to unite among themselves, they do indeed balance one another — in a system of semi-organized stalemate. They “get in the way” of the unified top, but no one of them has a chance to come into the top circles, where the political outsiders from corporate institution and military order are firmly in command.
The important fact about these early days is that social life, economic institutions, military establishment, and political order coincided, and men who were high politicians also played key roles in the economy and, with their families, were among those of the reputable who made up local society.
The elite are political men of education and of administrative experience, and, as Lord Bryce noted, possess a certain “largeness of view and dignity of character.”
Until WW1 this was an age of raids on the government by the economic elite, an age of simple corruption, when Senators and judges were simply bought up. Here, once upon a time, in the era of McKinley and Morgan, far removed from the undocumented complexities of our own time, many now believe, was the golden era of the American ruling class.
The military order of this period, as in the second, was subordinate to the political, which in turn was subordinate to the economic. The military was thus off to the side of the main driving forces of US history. Political institutions in the US have never formed a centralized and autonomous domain of power; they have been enlarged and centralized only reluctantly in slow response to the public consequence of the corporate economy.
In the post-Civil-War era, that economy was the dynamic; the “trusts” — as policies and events make amply clear — could readily use the relatively weak governmental apparatus for their own ends. That both state and federal governments were decisively limited in their power to regulate, in fact meant that they were themselves regulatable by the larger moneyed interests. Their powers were scattered and unorganized; the powers of the industrial and financial corporations concentrated and interlocked.
In so far as the structural clue to the power elite today lies in the economic order, that clue is the fact that the economy is at once a permanent-war economy and a private-corporation economy. American capitalism is now in considerable part a military capitalism, and the most important relation of the big corporation to the state rests on the coincidence of interests between military and corporate needs, as defined by warlords and corporate rich.
But we must always be historically specific and open to complexities. The simple Marxian view makes the big economic man the real holder of power; the simple liberal view makes the big political man the chief of the power system; and there some who would view the warlords as virtual dictators. Each of these is an oversimplified view. It is to avoid them that we use the term “power elite” rather than, for example, “ruling class.”
We cannot infer the direction of policy merely from the social origins and careers of the policymakers. The social and economic backgrounds of the men of power do not tell us all that we need to know in order to understand the distribution of social power. For (1) Men from high places may be ideological representatives of the poor and humble. (2) Men of humble origin, brightly self-made, may energetically serve the most vested and inherited interests. Moreover 93), not all men who effectively represent the interests of a stratum need in any way belong to it or personally benefit by policies that further its interests. Among the politicians, in short, there are sympathetic agents of given groups, conscious and unconscious, paid and unpaid. Finally (4), among the top decision-makers we find men who have been chosen for their positions because of their “expert knowledge.”
There is a kind of reciprocal attraction among the fraternity of the successful — not between each and every member of the circles of the high and mighty, but between enough of them to insure a certain unity. On the slight side, it is a sort of tacit, mutual admiration; in the strongest tie-ins, it proceeds by intermarriage. And there are all grades and types of connection between these extremes. Some overlaps certainly occur by means of cliques and clubs, churches and schools.
Member of the several higher circles know one another as personal friends and even as neighbors; they mingle with one another on the golf course, in the gentleman’s clubs, at resorts, on transcontinental airplanes, and on ocean liners. They meet at the estates of mutual friends, face each other in front of the TV camera, or serve on the same philanthropic committee.
The key organizations, perhaps, are the major corporations themselves, for on the boards of directors we find a heavy overlapping among the members of these several elites.
All the structural coincidence of their interests as well as the intricate, psychological facts of their origins and their education, their careers and their associations make possible the psychological affinities that prevail among them, affinities that make it possible for them to say to one another: He is, of course, one of us. And all this points to the basic, psychological meaning of class consciousness. Nowhere in America is there as great a “class consciousness” as among the elite; nowhere is it organized as effectively as among the power elite. For by class consciousness, as a psychological fact, one means that the individual member of a “class” accepts only those accepted by his circle as among those who are significant to this own image of self.
We are sure that they are honorable men. But what is honor? Honor can only mean living up to a code that one believes to be honorable. There is no one code upon which we are all agreed. That is why, if we are civilized men, we do not kill off all of those with whom we disagree. The question is not: are these honorable men? The question is: what are their code of honor? The answer to that question is that they are the codes of their circles, of those to whose opinions they defer.
It would be an insult to the effective training of the military, and to their indoctrination as well, to suppose that military officials shed their military character and outlook upon changing from uniform to mufti. This background is more important perhaps in the military case than in that of the corporate executives, for the training of the career is deeper and more total.
Lack of imagination is not to be confused with lack of principle. On the contrary, an unimaginative man is often a man of the highest principles.
The elite cannot be truly thought of as man who are merely doing their duty. They are the ones who determine their duty, as well as the duties of those beneath them. They are not merely following orders: they give the orders. They are not merely “bureaucrats”: they command bureaucracies.
The inner core of the power elite also includes men of the higher legal and financial type from the great law factories and investment firms, who are almost professional go-betweens of economic, political and military affairs, and who thus act to unify the power elite. by the nature of their work, they transcend the narrower milieu of any one industry, and accordingly are in a position to speak and act for the corporate world or at least sizable sectors of it.
On the fringes and below them, somewhat to the side of the lower echelons, the power elite fades off into the middle levels of power, into the rank and file of the Congress, the pressure groups that are not vested in the power elite itself, as well as a multiplicity of regional and state and local interests. If all the men on the middle levels are not among those who count, they sometimes must be taken into account, handled, cajoled, broken or raised to higher circles.
It is just that the people are of necessity confused and must, like trusting children, place all the new world of foreign policy and strategy and executive action in the hands of experts.
In the standard image of power and decision, no force is held to be as important as The Great American Public. More than merely another check and balance, this public is thought to be the seat of all legitimate power. In official life as in popular folklore, it is held to be the very balance wheel of democratic power.
This 18th-century idea of the public of public opinion parallels the economic idea of the market of the free economy. Here is the market composed of freely competing entrepreneurs; there is the public composed of discussion circles of opinion peers. As price is the result of anonymous, equally weighted, bargaining individuals, so public opinion is the result of each man’s having thought things out for himself and contributing his voice to the great chorus. To be sure, some might have more influence on the state of opinion than others, but no one group monopolizes the discussion, or by itself determines the opinions that prevail.
The people are presented with problems. They discuss them. They decide on them. They formulate viewpoints. These viewpoints are organized, and they compete. One viewpoint “wins out.”
We must recognize this description as a set of images out of a fairy tale: they are not adequate even as an approximate model of how the American system of power works. The issues that now shape man’s fate are neither raised nor decided by the public at large. The idea of the community of publics is not a description of act, but an assertion of an ideal, an assertion of a legitimation masquerading as fact.
In the democratic society of publics it was assumed that before public action would be taken, there would be rational discussion between individuals which would determine the action, and that, accordingly, the public opinion that resulted would be the infallible voice of reason. But this has been challenged not only (1) by the assumed need for experts to decide delicate and intricate issues, but (2) by the discovery — as by Freud — of the irrationality of the man on the street, and (3) by the discovery — as by Marx — of the socially conditioned nature of what was once assumed to be autonomous reason.
It is not difficult to understand the articulate optimism of many 19th-century thinkers, for the theory of the public is, in many ways, a projection upon the community at large of the intellectual’s ideal of the supremacy of intellect. The evolution of the intellect determines the main course of social evolution. If looking about them, 19th-century thinkers still saw irrationality and ignorance and apathy, all that was merely an intellectual lag, to which the spread of education would soon put an end.
By the middle of that century: individualism had begun to be replaced by collective forms of economic and political life; harmony of interests by inharmonious struggle of classes and organized pressures; rational discussions undermined by expert decisions on complicated issues, by recognition of the interested bias of argument by vested position; and by the discovery of the effectiveness of irrational appeal to the citizen. Moreover, certain structural changes of modern society had begun to cut off the public from the power of active decision.
In brief, there is a movement from widely scattered little powers to concentrated powers and the attempt at monopoly control from powerful centers, which, being partially hidden, are centers of manipulation as well as of authority. The small shop serving the neighborhood is replaced by the anonymity of the national corporation: mass advertisement replaces personal influence of opinion between merchant and customer. The political leader hooks up his speech to a national network and speaks, with appropriate personal touches, to a million people he never saw and never will see. Entire brackets of professions and industries are in the “opinion business,” impersonally manipulating the public for hire.
In terms of scale, the transformation of public into mass has been underpinned by the shift from a political public decisively restricted in size (by property and education, as well as by sex and age) to a greatly enlarged mass having only the qualifications of citizenship and age.
In terms of organization, the transformation has been underpinned by the shift from the individual and his primary community to the voluntary association and the mass party as the major units of organized power.
As soon as a man gets to be a leader of an association large enough to count he readily becomes lost as an instrument of that association. He does so (1) in the interests of maintaining his leading position in, or rather over, his mass association, and he does so (2) because he comes to see himself not as a mere delegate, instructed or not, of the mass association he represents, but as a member of “an elite” composed of such men as himself. These facts, in turn, lead to (3) the big gap between the terms in which issues are debated and resolved among members of this elite, and the terms in which they are presented to the members of the various mass associations. For the decisions that are made must take into account those who are important-other elites — but they must be sold to the mass memberships.
It is because they do not find available associations at once psychologically meaningful and historically effective that men often feel uneasy in their political and economic loyalties. The effective units of power are now the huge corporation, the inaccessible government, the grim military establishment. Between these, on the one hand, and the family and the small community on the other, we find no intermediate associations in which men feel secure and with which they feel powerful.
Very little of what we think we know of the social realities of the world have we found out first-hand. Most of “the pictures in our heads” we have gained from these media — even to the point where we often do not really believe what we see before us until we read about it in the paper or hear about it on the radio. The media not only give us information; they guide our very experiences. Our standards of credulity, our standards of reality, tend to be set by these media rather than by our own fragmentary experience.
(1) We know that people tend strongly to select those media which carry contents with which they already agree. There is a kind of selection of new opinions on the basis of prior opinions. No one seems to search out such counter-statements as many be found in alternative media offerings. (2) This idea of playing one medium off against another assumes that the media really have varying contents. It assumes genuine competition, which is not widely true.
The mass media often encroach upon the small-scale discussion, and destroy the chance for the reasonable and leisurely and human interchange of opinion. That is an important reason why they not only fail as an educational force, but are a malign force: they do not articulate for the viewer or listener the broader sources of his private tensions and anxieties, his inarticulate resentments and half-formed hopes.
The media provide much information and news about what is happening in the world, but they do not often enable the listener or the viewer truly to connect with his daily life with these larger realities. They do not connect the information they provide on public issues with the troubles felt by the individual. They do not increase rational insight into tensions, either those in the individual or those of the society which are reflected in the individual. On the contrary, they distract him and obscure his chance to understand himself or his world, by fastening his attention upon artificial frenzies that are resolved within the program framework.
Authority is power that is explicit and more or less “voluntarily” obeyed; manipulation is the “secret” exercise of power, unknown to those who are influenced.
The members of publics in smaller communities know each other more or less fully, because they meet in the several aspects of the total life routine. The members of masses in a metropolitan society know one another only as fractions in specialized milieux: the man who fixes the car, the girl who serves your lunch, the saleslady, the women who take care of your child at school during the day. Prejudgment and stereotype flourish when people meet in such ways.
Sunk in their routines, they do not transcend, even by discussion, much less by action, their more or less narrow lives. They do not gain a view of the structure of their society and of their role as a public within it. The city is a structure composed of such little environments, and the people in them tend to be detached from one another.
He cannot detach himself in order to observe, much less to evaluate, what he is experiencing, much less what he is not experiencing. Rather than that internal discussion we call reflection, he is accompanied through his life-experience with a sort of unconscious, echoing monologue.
The top of modern American society is increasingly unified, and often seems willfully coordinated: at the top there has emerged an elite of power. The middle levels are a drifting set of stalemated, balancing forces: the middle does not link the bottom with the top. The bottom of this society is politically fragmented, and even as a passive fact, increasingly powerless: at the bottom there is emerging a mass society.
For democracy implies that those who bear the consequences of decisions have enough knowledge — not to speak of power — to hold the decision-makers accountable. Everyone must depend upon knowledge provided by others, for no man can know by his own experience more than a small portion of the social worlds that now affect him. Most of our experience is indirect and, as we have seen, subject to much distortion.
Like prohibition, the laws of income taxes and the regulations of wartime exist without the support of firm business convention. It is merely illegal to cheat them, but it is smart to get away with it. Laws without supporting moral conventions invite crime, but much more importantly, they spur the growth of an expedient, amoral attitude.
The sober, personal virtues of will power and honesty, of high-mindedness and the constitutional inability to say “yes” to The Easy Road of women, tobacco, and wine — this later 19th-century image has given way to “the most important factor, the effective personality,” which “commands attention by charm,” and “radiates self-confidence.” In this “new way of life,” one must smile often and be a good listener, talk in terms of the other man’s interests and make the other feel important — and one must do all this sincerely. Personal relations, in short, have become part of “public relations,” a sacrifice of selfhood on a personality market, to the sole end of individual success in the corporate way of life.
It is not the barbarous irrationality of dour political primitives that is the American danger; it is the respected judgments of Secretaries of State, the earnest platitudes of Presidents, the fearful self-righteousness of sincere young American politicians from sunny California. These men have replaced mind with platitude, and the dogmas by which they are legitimated are so widely accepted that no counter-balance of mind prevails against them. Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own; in the name of practicality they have projected a utopian image of capitalism. They have replaced the responsible interpretation of events with the disguise of events by a maze of public relations; respect for public debate with unshrewd notions of psychological warfare; intellectual ability with agility of the sound, mediocre judgment; the capacity to elaborate alternatives and gauge their consequences with the executive stance.