Afterword
by Alan Wolfe

C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite was published in 1956, a time, as Mills himself put it, when Americans were living through 'a material boom, a nationalist celebration, a political vacuum.' It is not hard to understand why Americans were as complacent as Mills charged.

Let's say you were a typical thirty-five-year-old voter in 1956. Imagine what your life had been like. When you were eight years old, the stock market crashed, and the resulting Great Depression began just as you started third or fourth grade. Hence your childhood was consumed with fighting off the poverty and unemployment of the single greatest economic catastrophe in American history.

 

When you turned twenty-one, officially marking your maturity, the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor, ensuring that your years as a young adult, especially if you were male, would be spent fighting on the ground in Europe or from island to island in Asia. If you were lucky enough to survive that experience, you returned home at the ripe old age of twenty-four, ready to resume the semblance of a normal life - only then to witness the Korean War, McCarthyism, and the outbreak of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

No wonder that, as you contemplated casting your vote in the 1956 presidential elections, you were tempted to vote for the reelection of President Eisenhower. After all, he had commanded the Allied troops in World War II. To be sure, he often seemed uninspiring in his speeches, and he was most comfortable associating with rich businessmen, nearly all of whom were male, white, Christian, and conservative in their political leanings.

 

Still, Eisenhower offered stability for voters whose lives had known nothing but the opposite. For all the blustery talk of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles about the Russian menace, the President himself seemed somewhat disengaged from foreign policy. And his domestic program amounted to little more than constructing the highways which you planned to use as you thought about moving to Los Angeles in search of the jobs being created by what Eisenhower himself would soon call "the military industrial complex."

Into this milieu exploded The Power Elite. C. Wright Mills was one of the first intellectuals in America to write that the complacency of the Eisenhower years was not enough. His indictment was uncompromising. On the one hand, he claimed, vast concentrations of power had coagulated in America, making a mockery of American democracy. On the other, he charged that his fellow intellectuals had sold out to the conservative mood in America, leaving their audience - the American people themselves - in a state of ignorance and apathy bearing shocking resemblance to the totalitarian regimes that America had defeated or was currently fighting.

One of the goals Mills set for himself in The Power Elite was to tell his readers - again, assuming that they were roughly thirty-five years of age - how much the organization of power in America had changed during their lifetimes. In the 1920s, when this typical reader had been born, there existed what Mills called "local society," towns and small cities throughout America whose political and social life was dominated by resident businessmen. Small-town elites, usually Republican in their outlook, had a strong voice in Congress, for most of the congressmen who represented them were either members of the dominant families themselves or had close financial ties to them.

By the time Mills wrote his book, this world of local elites had become as obsolete as the telegraph machine. Power had become nationalized in America, Mills charged, and as a result had also become interconnected.

 

The Power Elite called attention to three prongs of power in the United States. First, business had shifted its focus from corporations that were primarily regional in their work-forces and customer bases to ones that produced products in national markets and developed national interests. What had once been a propertied class, tied to the ownership of real assets, had become a managerial class, rewarded for its ability to organize the vast scope of corporate enterprise into an engine for ever-expanding profits.

 

No longer were the chief executive officers of these companies chosen because they were of the right social background. Connections still mattered, but so did bureaucratic skill. The men who possessed those skills were rewarded well for their efforts. Larded with expense accounts and paid handsomely, they could exercise national influence not only through their companies, but through the roles they would called upon to serve in "the national interest."

Similar changes had taken place in the military sector of American society. World War II, Mills argued, and the subsequent start of the Cold War, led to the establishment of a 'permanent war economy' in the United States.

 

Mills wrote that the 'warlords,' his term for the military and its civilian allies, had once been 'only uneasy, poor relations within the American elite; now they are first cousins; soon they may become elder brothers.' Given an unlimited checking account for politicians anxious to appear tough, buoyed by fantastic technological and scientific achievements, and sinking roots in America's educational institutions, the military, Mills believed, was becoming increasingly autonomous.

 

Of all the prongs of the power elite, this 'military ascendancy' possessed the most dangerous implications. 'American militarism, in fully developed form, would mean the triumph in all areas of life of the military metaphysic, and hence the subordination to it of all other ways of life.'

Along with the military and corporate elites, Mill analyzed the role of what he called 'the political directorate.' Local elites had once been strongly represented in Congress, but Congress itself, Mills pointed out, had lost power to the executive branch. And within that branch, Mills could count roughly fifty people who, in his opinion, were 'now in charge of the executive decisions made in the name of the United States of America.'

 

The very top positions -  such as the secretaries of state or defense - were occupied with men with close ties to the leading national corporations in the United States. These people were not attracted to their positions for the money; often, they made less than they would have in the private sector. Rather, they understood that running the Central Intelligence Agency or being secretary of the treasury gave one vast influence over the direction taken by the country. Firmly interlocked with the military and corporate sectors, the political leaders of the United States fashioned an agenda favorable to their class rather than what might be good for the nation as a whole.

Although written very much as a product of its time, The Power Elite has had remarkable staying power. The book has remained in print for forty-four years in its original form, which means that the thirty-five-year-old person who read it when it first came out is now seventy-nine years old. The names and faces have changed since the book's appearance - younger readers will recognize hardly any of the corporate, military, and political leaders mentioned by Mills - but the underlying question of whether America is as democratic in practice as it is in theory continues to matter very much.2

The obvious question to any contemporary reader of The Power Elite is whether its conclusions apply to United States today. Sorting out what is helpful in Mills' book from what has become obsolete seems a task worth undertaking.

Each year, Fortune magazine publishes a list of the 500 leading American companies.

 

A glance at Table 1, which compares the top fifty corporations in America in 1956 with the top fifty in 1998, indicates that roughly thirty of the fifty companies that dominated the economy when Mills wrote his book no longer do so, including firms in such once seemingly impregnable industries such as steel, rubber, and food. Putting the point another way, the 1998 list contains the names of many corporations that would have been quite familiar to Mills: General Motors is ranked first, Ford second, and Exxon third.

 

But the company immediately following these giants - Wal-Mart stores - did not even exist at the time Mills wrote; indeed, the idea that a chain of retail stores started by a folksy Arkansas merchant would someday outrank Mobil Oil, General Electric, or Chrysler would have startled Mills. Furthermore, just as some industries have declined, whole new industries have appeared in America since 1956; IBM was fifty-ninth when Mills wrote, hardly the computer giant - sixth on the current Fortune 500 list - that it is now. (Compaq and Intel, neither of which existed when Mills wrote his book, are also in the top fifty of the 1998 list.)

 

To illustrate the closed world of the power elite, Mills called attention to the fact that one man, Winthrop W. Aldrich, the American ambassador to Great Britain, was a director of four of the top twenty-five companies in America in 1950.

 

In 1998, by contrast, only one of those companies, AT&T, was among the very top: Chase Manhattan was twenty-seventh, Metropolitan Life had fallen to forty-third, and the New York Central Railroad was not to be found.
 

Table 1

50 largest Corporations 1956 and 1998

 

   

Source: Fortune Magazine

 

One reason why places shift at the top of the corporate hierarchy is that American companies are continually merging with each other in an effort to secure dominant market shares.

 

Toward the end of 1998, the third largest company in America, Exxon, announced plans to merge with the eighth largest, Mobil, to make a new company that would dwarf in size anything contemplated by Mills. Indeed, one of the reasons why Mills called so much attention to corporate size was because of a long tradition in America, dating back to the Sherman Act of 1898, that viewed monopolies as bad things to be discouraged by law.

 

Under the influence of that tradition, some big companies have been broken up and new ones - SBC Communications, Lucent Technologies - encouraged to form. But the Sherman Act is rarely invoked these days, at least in part because both Republican and Democratic administrations are less likely to favor governmental regulation of the economy than they did in the Eisenhower years. When the former CEO of General Motors, who was also Eisenhower's secretary of defense, said that what was good for his company was also good for America, people were shocked. Today that statement would be considered a proper, if perhaps unspoken, guide to the relationship between government and business.

Mills got much right about the corporate elite. It is certainly the case, for example, that those who run companies are also among the very rich; the gap between what a CEO makes and what workers make is extraordinarily large.

 

But there is one difference between the world described by Mills and the world of today so striking that it cannot be passed over. As odd as it may sound, Mills' understanding of capitalism was not radical enough. Heavily influenced by the sociology of its time, The Power Elite portrays corporate executives as organization men who 'must "fit in" with those already at the top.'

 

They have to be concerned with managing their impressions, as if the appearance of getting good results is more important than the actuality of them. Mills was disdainful of the idea that leading businessmen were especially competent. 'The fit survive,' he wrote, '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.'

It may well have been true in the 1950s that corporate leaders were not especially inventive, but if so, that was because they faced relatively few challenges. If you were the head of General Motors in 1956, you knew that American automobile companies dominated your market; the last thing on your mind was the fact that someday cars called Toyotas or Hondas would be your biggest threat.

 

You did not like the union that organized your workers, but if you were smart, you realized that an ever-growing economy would enable you to trade off high wages for your workers in return for labor market stability. Smaller companies that supplied you with parts were dependent on you for orders.

 

Each year you wanted to outsell Ford and Chrysler, but you also had constructed with them an elaborate system of signals so that they would not undercut your prices and you would not undercut theirs. Whatever your market share in 1956, in other words, you could be fairly sure that it would be the same in 1957. Why then rock the boat? It made perfect sense for budding executives to do what Mills argued they did do: to assume that the best way to get ahead was to go along.

Very little of this picture remains accurate at the end of the twentieth century. Union membership as a percentage of the total work force has declined dramatically, and while this means that companies can pay their workers less, it also means that they cannot expect to invest much in the training of their workers on the assumption that those workers will remain with the company for most of their lives.

 

Foreign competition, once negligible, is now the rule of thumb for most American companies, leading many of them to move parts of their companies overseas and to create their own global marketing arrangements. America's fastest-growing industries can be found in the field of high technology, a development unanticipated by Mills. ('Many modern theories of industrial development,' he wrote, 'stress technological developments, but the number of inventors among the very rich is so small as to be unappreciable.')

 

Often dominated by self-made men (another phenomenon about which Mills was doubtful), these firms are ruthlessly competitive, which upsets any possibility of forming gentlemen's agreements to control prices; indeed, among internet companies the notion is to provide the product with no price whatsoever - that is, for free - in the hopes of winning future customer loyalty. Under these conditions, the executive who tried to follow the patterns described by Mills would be best off moving to a university and obtaining tenure.

These radical changes in the competitive dynamics of American capitalism have important implications for any effort to characterize the power elite of today. C. Wright Mills was a translator and interpreter of the German sociologist Max Weber, and he borrowed from Weber the idea that a heavily bureaucratized society would also be a stable and conservative society. Only in a society that changes relatively little is it possible for an elite to have power in the first place, for if events change radically, then it tends to be the events that control people rather than the people who control the events.

 

There can be little doubt that those who hold the highest positions in America's corporate hierarchy remain, as they did in Mills's day, the most powerful Americans. But not even they can control rapid technological transformations, intense global competition, and ever-changing consumer tastes. American capitalism is simply too dynamic to be controlled for very long by anyone.

The Power Elite was written at a time when the exact role that the military would play in American life was very much up for grabs. Historically, Americans had never been sympathetic to the idea that a permanent military presence was required to defend the nation against its enemies. To be sure, Americans were second to none in their expressions of patriotism. They admired generals and showed a distinct propensity to elect them to the presidency.

 

If war was required to defend the national interest, Americans would pay the costs in lost lives and lost opportunities. At the same time, Americans tended to be content with their geographic isolation from the rest of the world. They viewed peacetime as the normal situation and war as the exception. After each of the major wars fought by the United States, Americans retreated back into isolationism.

In their disinclination to have the military play an ongoing role in their lives, Americans received considerable support from the leaders of the Republican party. There is no other way to organize an effective military than through the use of government, but if government were involved in offering contracts to private business, conservative isolationists believed, it would not be long before government would be regulating the prices those businesses charged, the kinds of labor relations they practiced, and even how large their profits could be.

One of the crucial arguments Mills made in The Power Elite was that the emergence of the Cold War completely transformed this historic opposition to a permanent military establishment in the United States. Indeed, a key theme of Mills' book stressed that America's military elite was now linked to its economic and political elite.

 

Personnel were constantly shifting back and forth from the corporate world to the military world. Big companies like General Motors had become dependent on military contracts. Scientific and technological innovations sponsored by the military helped fuel the growth of the economy. And while all these links between the economy and the military were being sealed, the military had become an active political force. Members of Congress, once hostile to the military, now treated officers with great deference. And no president could hope to staff the Department of State, find intelligence officers, and appoint ambassadors without consulting with the military.

Mills was persuaded that the emergence of the military as a key force in American life required a substantial attack on the isolationism that had once characterized public opinion. He argued that 'the warlords, along with fellow travelers and spokesmen, are attempting to plant their metaphysics firmly among the population at large.' Their goal was nothing less than a redefinition of reality, one in which the American people would come to accept what Mills called 'an emergency without a foreseeable end.'

 

He wrote, 'War or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States.' In this state of constant war fever, America could no longer be considered a genuine democracy, for democracy thrives on dissent and disagreement, precisely what is not permitted in the military definition of reality. If the changes described by Mills were indeed permanent, then The Power Elite could be read as the description of a deeply radical, and depressing, transformation in the nature of the United States.

It remains true today, much as Mills wrote about his time, that Congress is extremely friendly to the military, at least in part because the military has become such a powerful force in the districts of most congressmen.

 

Military bases are an important source of jobs for many Americans. Government spending on the military is crucial to all those companies, such as Lockheed and Boeing, that manufacture military equipment. American firms are the leaders in the world's global arms market, manufacturing and exporting weapons everywhere.

 

Some weapons systems never seem to die, even, as was the case with a 'Star Wars' system design to repel incoming missiles, if there is no demonstrable military need for them. At least one recent American president, Ronald Reagan, enhanced his popularity by proclaiming the Soviet Union an 'evil empire'and by demonstrating his willingness to outspend the Russians in the arms race.

Yet despite these similarities with the 1950s, both the world and the role that America plays in that world have changed. For one thing, the United States has been unable to muster its forces for any sustained use in any foreign conflict since Vietnam. Worried about the possibility of a public backlash against the loss of American lives, American presidents either refrain from pursuing military adventures abroad or confine them to rapid strikes, along the lines pursued by presidents Bush and Clinton in Iraq.

 

Since 1989, moreover, the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has undermined the capacity of America's elites to mobilize support for military expenditures on the grounds of a Soviet threat. China, which at the time Mills wrote was considered a serious threat, is now viewed by American businessmen as a source of great potential investment. Domestic political support for a large and permanent military establishment in the United States, in short, can no longer be taken for granted.

The immediate consequence of these changes in the world's balance of power has been a dramatic decrease in that proportion of the American economy devoted to defense. At the time Mills wrote, defense expenditures constituted roughly 60 percent of all federal outlays and consumed nearly 10 percent of the U. S. gross domestic product. By the late 1990s, those proportions had fallen to 17 percent of federal outlays and 3.5 percent of GDP (see Figure 1).

 

Nearly three million Americans served in the armed forces at the time The Power Elite appeared, but that number had dropped by half at century's end.
 

Figure 1
 

Department of Defense Expenditures 1956-1998

 

Manpower 1956-1995

 

By almost any account, Mills' prediction that both the economy and the political system of Figure 1. the United States would come to be ever more dominated by the military is not borne out by the historical developments since his time.

The importance of these figures is strengthened by the cultural and political forces that produced them.

 

Mills believed that any conflict between military definitions of reality and popular American tendencies toward isolationism would be resolved in favor of the former. Yet it seems clear that in the 1990s, opposition to military adventures abroad has severely curtailed the ability of the military to have its way in both foreign and domestic policy. Most Americans just want to get on with the business of making enough money to lead the best lives they can. Their opposition to higher taxes makes it impossible for the military to grow.

 

The rhetoric of emergency - and with it the need for significant personal sacrifice - is not a rhetoric to which they are attracted. Not only are they generally unwilling to see their children go to war, they are even reluctant to support a compulsory peacetime draft.

Changes like these suggest that the role of the military in American life has been not so much reversed as modified. Strategists continue to plan possible wars, even if they try their best to do so in ways that avoid the use of American troops. Efforts are made to recruit young people into military service, but only by emphasizing how such steps would help their careers, not their country.

 

The Department of Defense continues to provide funds for scientific and technological innovation, but possible civilian uses of those innovations are stressed. The Republican party calls for a stronger America, but it is also a party whose leaders criticized President Clinton's military moves in Iraq during the impeachment controversies at the end of 1998. America has not returned to the dramatic isolationism that characterized much of its history before Mills wrote The Power Elite. But it would not be correct to say that we have witnessed the dramatic (and dangerous) military ascendancy described by Mills in 1956.

And how could we have? Business firms, still the most powerful force in American life, are increasingly global in its nature, more interested in protecting their profits wherever they are made than in the defense of the country in which perhaps a minority of its employees live and work. Give most of the leaders of America's largest companies a choice between invading another country and investing in its industries, they would nearly always choose the latter rather than the former.

 

Mills believed that in the 1950s, for the first time in American history, the military elite had formed a strong alliance with the economic elite. Now it would be more correct to say that America's economic elite finds more in common with economic elites in other countries than it does with the military elite of its own country. The Power Elite failed to foresee a situation in which at least one of the key elements of the power elite would no longer identify its fate with the fate of the country that spawned it.

Politicians and public officials who wield control over the executive and legislative branches of government constitute the third leg of the power elite. Mills believed that the politicians of his time no longer were required to serve a local apprenticeship before moving up the ladder to national politics. Because corporations and the military had become so interlocked with government, and because both of those were national institutions, what might be called "the nationalization of politics" was bound to follow. The new breed of political figure likely to climb to the highest political positions in the land would be those who were cozy with generals and CEOS, not those who were on a first-name basis with real estate brokers and savings and loan officials.

Mills believed that at the time he wrote, 'the politician must rely on the mass media, and access to these media is expensive.' But not even Mills could have predicted how expensive it would become to run for office half a century later. Television has become a factor in political campaigns to a degree unimaginable to those used to watching three black and white channels on a nine-inch screen. Campaigns are longer, more partisan, and generally more competitive than they were when Mills wrote.

 

Engaged in a permanent campaign for office, politicians have had to become full-time fund raisers. And, in order to finance their efforts, they must turn to those who can afford to pay for them. While labor unions remain an important source of those funds, especially for Democrats, politicians of both parties, incumbents as well as challengers, find the bulk of their financial support from corporations.

 

When companies provide those funds, they rarely do so out of a sense of civic duty. The list of things that government can provide for business is nearly as long as the list of things business does not want government to be involved with. None of this means that corporations give money with the explicit quid pro quo that politicians will pass laws that will line their pockets. But it does mean that because politics is so expensive, corporations, in all likelihood, have more power over congressmen now than they did when Mills wrote his book.

For Mills, politics was primarily a facade in any case. Historically speaking, American politics had been organized on the theory of balance: each branch of government would balance the other; competitive parties would insure adequate representation; and interest groups like labor unions would serve as a counterweight to other interests like business. But the emergence of the power elite had transformed the theory of balance in a romantic Jeffersonian myth.

 

So antidemocratic had America become under the rule of the power elite, according to Mills, that most decisions were made behind the scenes. As a result, neither Congress nor the political parties had much substantive work to carry out. 'In the absence of policy differences of consequences between the major parties,' Mills wrote, 'the professional party politician must invent themes about which to talk.'

Mills was right to emphasize the irrelevance of eighteenth-and nineteenth century images to the actualities of twentieth century American political power. But he was not necessarily correct that politics would therefore become something of an empty theatrical show. Mills believed that in the absence of real substance, the parties would become more like each other.

 

Yet today the ideological differences between Republicans and Democrats are severe - as, in fact, they were in 1956. Joseph McCarthy, the conservative anti-Communist senator from Wisconsin who gave his name to the period in which Mills wrote his book, appears a few times in The Power Elite, but not as a major figure. In his emphasis on politics and economics, Mills underestimated the important role that powerful symbolic and moral crusades have had in American life, including McCarthy's witch-hunt after communist influence.

 

Had he paid more attention to McCarthyism, Mills would have been more likely to predict such events as the 1998-99 effort by Republicans to impeach President Clinton, the role played by divisive issues such as abortion, immigration, and affirmative action in American politics, and the continued importance of negative campaigning. Real substance may not be high on the American political agenda, but that does not mean that politics is unimportant. Through our political system, we make decisions about what kind of people we imagine ourselves to me, which is why it matters a great deal at the end of the twentieth century which political party is in power.

How, then, does The Power Elite stand in retrospect? Should it be considered a classic? Can it be read as a guide for the present as well as an explanation of the past?

 

I believe that answers to these questions hang on the fact that The Power Elite is really two books. In the first of these books (chapters 1 through 10), Mills writes in a somewhat clinical language aimed at describing the structure of power in America. This part of the book is driven by data and makes use of extensive original research.

 

Having presented his case, Mills then (in chapters 11 through 15) shifts to a language of outrage. It is in these chapters that some of Mills' most famous phrases - 'crackpot realism,' 'the higher ignorance' - appear. Here he sounds like a biblical prophet, foreshadowing doom and harshly denouncing 'the second rate mind' and the 'ponderously spoken platitude.' This is Mills the social critic, leaving descriptive science behind to make his feelings about the power elite quite prominent.

Contemporary commentators believe that Mills was an outstanding social critic but not necessarily a first-rate social scientist. Yet I believe that The Power Elite survives better as a work of social science than of social criticism.

At the time Mills was writing, academic sociology was in the process of proclaiming itself a science. The proper role of the sociologist, many of Mills' colleagues believed, was to conduct value-free research emphasizing the close empirical testing of small-bore hypotheses. A grand science would eventually be built upon extensive empirical work that, like the best of the natural sciences, would be published in highly specialized journals emphasizing methodological innovation and technical proficiency. Because he never agreed with these objectives - indeed, Mills wrote scathing critiques of scientific sociology - Mills was never considered a good scientist by his sociological peers.

Yet not much of the academic sociology of the 1950s has survived, while The Power Elite is rivaled by only very few books of its period in terms of longevity. In his own way, Mills contributed much to the understanding of his era. Social scientists of the 1950s emphasized pluralism, a concept that Mills attacked in his criticisms of the theory of balance. The dominant idea of the day was that the concentration of power in America ought not be considered excessive because one group always balanced the power of others. The biggest problem facing America was not concentrated power but what sociologists began to call "the end of ideology." America, they believed, had reached a point in which grand passions over ideas were exhausted. From now on, we would require technical expertise to solve our problems, not the musings of intellectuals.

Compared to such ideas, Mills' picture of American reality, for all its exaggerations, seems closer to the mark. If the test of science is to get reality right, the very passionate convictions of C. Wright Mills drove him to develop a better scientific grasp on American society than his more objective and clinical contemporaries. We can, therefore, read The Power Elite as a fairly good account of what was taking place in America at the time it was written.

As a social critic, however, Mills leave something to be desired. In that role, Mills portrays himself as a lonely battler for the truth, insistent upon his correctness no matter how many others are seduced by the siren calls of power or wealth.

 

This gives his book emotional power, but it comes at the cost of a certain irresponsibility. 'In America today,' Mills wrote in a typical passage, 'men of affairs are not so much dogmatic as they are mindless.' Yet however one may dislike the decisions made by those in power in the 1950s, as decision-makers they were responsible for the consequences of their acts.

 

It is often easier to criticize from afar than it is to get a sense of what it actually means to make a corporate decision involving thousands of workers, to consider a possible military action that might cost lives, or to decide whether public funds should be spent on roads or welfare. In calling public officials mindless, Mills implies that he knows how they might have acted better. But if he did, he never told readers of The Power Elite, for missing from the book is a statement of what could concretely be done to make the world accord more with the values in which Mills believed.

It is, moreover, one thing to attack the power elite, yet another to extend his criticisms to other intellectuals - and even the public at large. When he does the latter, Mills runs the risk of becoming as antidemocratic as he believed America had become.

 

As he brings his book to an end, Mills adopts a term once strongly identified with conservative political theorists. Appalled by the spread of democracy, conservative European writers proclaimed the twentieth century as the age of 'mass society.' The great majority, this theory held, would never act rationally but would respond more like a crowd, hysterically caught up in frenzy at one point, apathetic and withdrawn at another.

 

'The United States is not altogether a mass society,' Mills wrote, but he then went on to write as if it were. And when he did, the image he conveyed of what an American had become was thoroughly unattractive:

"He loses his independence, and more importantly, he loses the desire to be independent; in fact, he does not have hold of the idea of being an independent individual with his own mind and his own worked-out way of life."

Mills had become so persuaded of the power of the power elite that he seemed to have lost all hope that the American people could find themselves and put a stop to the abuses he detected.

This tone of resigned bitterness can come across to a contemporary reader as arrogant, as if Mills and Mills alone were the only one capable of seeing a truth impenetrable to everyone else. Good social criticism requires attachment as well as alienation. One must identify with and even admire something before it makes sense to expend one's energies criticizing it.

 

That sense of engagement with America once sparked writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman to hold their country up to a higher standard. All too often Mills does not share their generous sense of American life and writes instead as cantankerous critic, sour in his anger, rejectionist in his views of the world around him. For that reason, if for no other, Mills the social critic is not always as effective as Mills the social scientist.

In pointing out some of the problems of The Power Elite, I am not suggesting that the book fails to live up to its reputation as a contemporary classic; the best honor one can give a social critic is criticism.

 

Generations of students and informed readers have been stimulated by their reading of The Power Elite to think about the kind of society they have and the kind of society they might want. The book deserves to be read by every new generation, for it reminds us of the importance of bringing our analytic powers together with our passionate commitments - an essential task if one wants to be an informed and caring citizen. The publication of Mills' book did not change the composition or the character of the power elite.

 

But it did bring its existence to light, no small accomplishment for a professor of sociology somewhat marginal to the discipline which spawned him.
 

 

For Further Reading
One indicator of the importance of Mills' book was that it spurred other social scientists and social critics to carry forward studies of power in the United States.

 

This, in turn, led to numerous scholarly debates over such questions as whether the most influential people in America should be called a power elite or a ruling class; whether business; dominated government or whether government retained some autonomy from business; whether it was possible for democratic governments to pass laws that run counter to the interests of business; whether the military or civilians dominated the making of foreign policy; and whether additional institutions -  education, entertainment, sports - needed to be added to the three discussed by Mills.

The leading figures writing roughly within the tradition that Mills established include G. William Domhoff, The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America (New York: Random House, 1970) and Michael Schwartz and Beth Mintz, The Power Structure of American Business (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

 

David Vogel's Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (New York: Basic Books, 1989) treats business power not necessarily as a given but as something business can gain - and lose. Many scholars these days lean to the position that business does not always get what it wants in politics, for the government, in their view, has its own degrees of autonomy; see, for example, Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

 

Mills' understanding of the managerial character of the business elite ought to be supplemented with a reading of Steven Brint, In an Age of Experts: The Changing Role of the Professions in America (Princeton, N. J. : Princeton University Press, 1994).

A study that tries to bring Mills' ideas about the military up to date is John L. Boies, Buying for Armageddon: Business, Society, and Military Spending Since the Cuban Missile Crisis (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

 

At least one recent book strongly disagrees with Mills' characterization of the military as antidemocratic, pointing out, for example, that the armed forces is one of the few places in America where extensive racial integration has taken place: Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler, All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

Some recent works on the role that money and corporate power play in shaping the nature of the political elite include Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Ronald Frederick King, Money, Time, and Politics: Investment Tax Subsidies and American Democracy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993). Some scholars point out, however, that business often wants contradictory things, thereby making it impossible for the state to serve as a direct servant of the corporate elite. See Cathie J. Martin, Shifting the Burden: The Struggle over Growth and Corporate Taxation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

Two recent books deal with social criticism, addressing such questions as what makes it effective and its relationship to social science: Michael Walzer, In the Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1988) and Alan Wolfe, Marginalized in the Middle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
 

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Acknowledgments

NEITHER the very top nor the very bottom of modem society is a normal part of the world of those who read and write books; we are more familiar with the middle ranks. To understand the middle classes we have only to see what is actually around us, but to understand the very top or the very bottom, we must first seek to discover and describe. And that is very difficult to do: the very top of modern society is often inaccessible, the very bottom often hidden.

The terms of such national surveys as are undertaken are far too gross to catch such numerically fine groups as make up the American elite; much public information about their character and their activities is systematically misleading; and they are themselves busy and aloof and even secretive. Were we to select our field of study according to the ready availability of much unworked material, we should never choose the elite.

 

And yet, if we are trying to understand something of the true nature of the society in which we live, we cannot allow the impossibility of rigorous proof to keep us from studying whatever we believe to be important. We must expect fumbles when, without authority or official aid, we set out to investigate something which is in part organized for the purpose of causing fumbles among those who would understand it plainly. Yet, by asserting what we can under such conditions, we may engage them and their agents in controversy, and thus learn more.

Our desire for tight proof and our genuine need for facts do not at all mean that reasoning together is not still a very important part of the proper way of arriving at the truth. A book of this sort consists of three conversations: There is the conversation which the writer has with himself and with imaginary persons, which is here recorded.

 

Underneath this, there is going on, whether the writer knows it or not, a conversation between certain influential thinkers and observers whose views have filtered into his mind and into the minds of his readers. And also, in the minds of his readers there is going on another unspoken conversation with themselves and with him - a conversation in which each confronts what is written here with what he has experienced or found out.

 

One of the jobs of the writer, accordingly, is to try to get as much of these two unspoken conversations as he can into his written work. In reasoning together with his readers, he does more than set forth his views.

He also clarifies them, and in doing so, becomes aware of ideas he did not even know he had.

We do not want to so busy ourselves with details that we take the world in which they exist for granted. We neither take the world for granted nor believe it to be a simple fact. Our business is with facts only in so far as we need them to upset or to clinch our ideas. Facts and figures are only the beginning of the proper study. Our main interest is in making sense of the facts we know or can readily find out. We do not want merely to take an inventory, we want to discover meanings, for most of our important questions are questions of meaning.

We have, of course, gotten outside the dialogue by which we reason together and found out what we could by various kinds of special study, the results of which we have introduced into the conversation going on in 'our inner city.' There are good reasons why we should adopt just this essay-like way of reasoning together - especially for such a sprawling and controversial topic. In a convenient, and I hope fruitful, way it enables us to bring together an effective variety of viewpoints and skills, and it allows us to invite the reader to become a member of our dialogue about the higher circles of America.

Funds for the research that has gone into this book were provided by Columbia University's Social Science Research Council and I am glad to thank my colleagues for their aid. Funds were also supplied by The Oxford University Press, New York, which has in fact gone beyond the ordinary office of publisher in helping me get on with this as well as other books. A first draft of the materials was completed while in residence as a visitor at Brandeis University during the spring of 1953 and I wish to thank my friends of that institution for their many kindnesses.

During the summer of 1954, my wife and I were resident fellows at the Huntington Hartford Foundation of Pacific Palisades, California, and I am grateful to the fellows of that foundation for making the summer's work both pleasant and profitable.

My wife, Ruth Harper Mills, as chief researcher and editorial adviser, has shaped much of the book. Walter Klink, Paul Lucas, and William Taber have assisted me by writing research memoranda. I wish also to thank Mrs. Katherine Stanton for her secretarial services; without her there would be no book but only a chaotic file of manuscript.

Several individuals who know at first hand the Federal government, the military, or large corporations have helped me enormously. Without their help this book would be much the poorer, which makes all the more onerous to me the fact that at their request I cannot acknowledge their help by name.

Other friends who have generously given me the benefit of their advice include: Lewis Coser, Louis Friedland, Herbert Gold, Richard Hofstadter, Irving Howe, Floyd Hunter, Paolo Milano, Harry L. Miller, William Miller, Irving Sanes, Ben Seligman, Kenneth M. Stampp, and Harvey Swados.
 

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Notes

 

1. The Higher Circles
1. Jacob Burckhardt, Force and Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 1943), pp. 303 ff.
2. Cf. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), pp. 457 ff.
3. The statistical idea of choosing some value and calling those who have the most of it an elite derives, in modern times, from the Italian economist, Pareto, who puts the central point in this way: 'Let us assume that in every branch of human activity each individual is given an index which stands as a sign of his capacity, very much the way grades are given in the various subjects in examinations in school. The highest type of lawyer, for instance, will be given 10. The man who does not get a client will be given 1 - reserving zero for the man who is an out-and-out idiot. To the man who has made his millions - honestly or dishonestly as the case may be - we will give 10. To the man who has earned his thousands we will give 6; to such as just manage to keep out of the poor-house, 1, keeping zero for those who get in ... So let us make a class of people who have the highest indices in their branch of activity, and to that class give the name of elite.' Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), par. 2027 and 2031. Those who follow this approach end up not with one elite, but with a number corresponding to the number of values they select. Like many rather abstract ways of reasoning, this one is useful because it forces us to think in a clear-cut way. For a skillful use of this approach, see the work of Harold D. Lasswell, in particular, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936); and for a more systematic use, H. D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).
4. The conception of the elite as members of a top social stratum, is, of course, in line with the prevailing common-sense view of stratification. Technically, it is closer to 'status group' than to 'class,' and has been very well stated by Joseph A. Schumpeter, 'Social Classes in an Ethically Homogeneous Environment,' Imperialism and Social Classes (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, Inc., 1951), pp. 133 ff., especially pp. 137 47. Cf. also his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper, 1950), Part II. For the distinction between class and status groups, see From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (trans. and ed. by Gerth and Mills; New York: Oxford University Press, 1946). For an analysis of Pareto's conception of the elite compared with Marx's conception of classes, as well as data on France, see Raymond Aron, 'Social Structure and Ruling Class,' British Journal of Sociology, vol. I, nos. 1 and 2 (1950).

1. The most popular essay in recent years which defines the elite and the mass in terms of a morally evaluated character-type is probably Jose Ortega y Gasset's, The Revolt of the Masses, 1932 (New York: New American Library, Mentor Edition, 1950), esp. pp. 91 ff.
2. The American elite' is a confused and confusing set of images, and yet when we hear or when we use such words as Upper Class, Big Shot, Top Brass, The Millionaire Club, The High and The Mighty, we feel at least vaguely that we know what they mean, and often do. What we do not often do, however, is connect each of these images with the others; we make little effort to form a coherent picture in our minds of the elite as a whole. Even when, very occasionally, we do try to do this, we usually come to believe that it is indeed no 'whole'; that, like our images of it, there is no one elite, but many, and that they are not really connected with one another. What we must realize is that until we do try to see it as a whole, perhaps our impression that it may not be is a result merely of our lack of analytic rigor and sociological imagination.

The first conception defines the elite in terms of the sociology of institutional position and the social structure these institutions form; the second, in terms of the statistics of selected values; the third, in terms of membership in a clique-like set of people; and the fourth, in terms of the morality of certain personality types. Or, put into inelegant shorthand: what they head up, what they have, what they belong to, who they really are.

In this chapter, as in this book as a whole, I have taken as generic the first view - of the elite defined in terms of institutional position - and have located the other views within it. This straight-forward conception of the elite has one practical and two theoretical advantages. The practical advantage is that it seems the easiest and the most concrete 'way into' the whole problem - if only because a good deal of information is more or less readily available for sociological reflection about such circles and institutions.

But the theoretical advantages are much more important. The institutional or structural definition, first of all, does not force us to prejudge by definition that we ought properly to leave open for investigation. The elite conceived morally, for example, as people having a certain type of character is not an ultimate definition, for apart from being rather morally arbitrary, it leads us immediately to ask why these people have this or that sort of character. Accordingly, we should leave open the type of characters which the members of the elite in fact turn out to have, rather than by definition select them in terms of one type or another. In a similar way, we do not want, by mere definition, to prejudge whether or not the elite are conscious members of a social class. The second theoretical advantage of defining the elite in terms of major institutions, which I hope this book as a whole makes clear, is the fact that it allows us to fit the other three conceptions of the elite into place in a systematic way: (1) The institutional positions men occupy throughout their lifetime determine their chances to get and to hold selected values. (2) The kind of psychological beings they become is in large part determined by the values they thus experience and the institutional roles they play. (3) Finally, whether or not they come to feel that they belong to a select social class, and whether or not they act according to what they hold to be its interests - these are also matters in large part determined by their institutional position, and in turn, the select values they possess and the characters they acquire.

1. As in the case, quite notably, of Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939). For a sharp analysis of Mosca, see Fritz Morstein Marx, 'The Bureaucratic State,' Review of Politics, vol. I, 1939, pp. 457 ff. Cf. also Mills, 'On Intellectual Craftsmanship,' April 1952, mimeographed, Columbia College, February 1955.
2. Cf. Karl Lowith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), pp. 125 ff. for concise and penetrating statements of several leading philosophies of history.
3. Some of these items are taken from Gerth and Mills, Character and Social Structure, pp. 405 ff. On role-determined and role-determining men, see also Sidney Hook's discussion, The Hero in History (New York: John Day, 1943).
4. I have taken the idea of the following kind of formulation from Joseph Wood Krutch's presentation of the morality of choice. See The Measure of Man (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954), p. 52.
 

 

2. Local Society
1. Much of this chapter is based upon my own observations and interviews in some dozen middle-sized cities in the Northeast, the Middle-West, and the South. Some results of this work have appeared in 'Small Business and Civic Welfare, Report of the Smaller War Plants Corporation to the Special Committee to Study Problems of American Small Business,' (with Melville J. Ulmer), Senate Document No. 135, 79th Cong., 2nd Session, Washington, 1946; 'The Middle Classes in Middle-sized Cities,' American Sociological Review, October 1946; and White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951). I have also used field notes made during the course of an intensive study of a city of 60,000 in Illinois during the summer of 1945. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this chapter are from my own research. I have also drawn upon a memorandum, prepared for me by Mr. J. W. Harless, in which all statements about local upper classes appearing in the following studies were organized: Robert S. Lynd and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929) and Middletown in Transition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937); Elin L. Anderson, We Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938); Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom (New York: The Viking Press, 1939); John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper, 1950); W. Lloyd Warner and Paul S. Lunt, The Social Life of a Modern Community (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), volume I of the Yankee City Series; Allison Davis and Burleigh B. Gardner and Mary R. Gardner, Deep South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941); Liston Pope, Millhands and Preachers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942); John Useem, Pierre Tangent, and Ruth Useem, 'Stratification in a Prairie Town,' American Sociological Review, July 1942; James West, Plainville, U.S.A. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950); Harold F. Kaufman, Defining Prestige in a Rural Community (New York: Beacon House, 1946); Evon Z. Vogt, Jr., 'Social Stratification in the Rural Midwest: A Structural Analysis,' Rural Sociology, December 1947; August B. Hollings-head, Elmtown's Youth (New York: John Wiley, 1949); W. Lloyd Warner, et al, Democracy in Jonesville (New York: Harper, 1949); M. C. Hill and Bevode C. McCall, 'Social Stratification in "Georgiatown,"' American Sociological Review, December 1950; and Alfred Winslow Jones, Life, Liberty and Property (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1941).

Most local community studies of prestige, so often the unit of sociological study, are of merely local interest. One cannot even say that they are of interest beyond that because of the methodological innovations they make possible, for in truth most of these methodological advancements are suitable only for what they have been worked out for - local community studies.

It is interesting to notice that in examining the small American city, both novelist and sociologist have, each in his own way, been interested in similar details and reached quite similar conclusions. They have both generally been more interested in status than in power. The novelist has been more interested in manners and in the frustrating effects of small-town life on human relations and personality; the sociologist has not paid very full attention to the small city as a structure of power, much less as a unit in a system of power that is nation-wide. The similarity of their descriptive effects is revealed by the fact that, despite the rituals of proof they contain, the endless 'community studies' of the sociologists often read like badly written novels; and the novels, like better-written sociology.

1. See Allison Davis, et al, op. cit. p. 497.
2. I have drawn in this section from various parts of Floyd Hunter's first-hand study, Community Power Structure (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953).

1. Cf. ibid. pp. 172-4.
2. See Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Knopf, 1955), pp. 46 ff.
3. See Hollingshead, op. cit. p. 59. On farm ownership in a southern county, see Allison Davis, op. cit. p. 276.
4. On urban ownership of farm land in a Middle-Western county, see Evon Vogt, op. cit.
5. Compare, on the small city and the national corporation, Mills and Ulmer, 'Small Business and Civic Welfare,' op. cit.
6. For an example of the confusion of small town with nation to the point of caricature, see W. Lloyd Warner, American Life: Dream and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).
 

3. Metropolitan 400
1. Cf. Dixon Wecter, The Saga of American Society (New York: Scribner's, 1937), pp. 199 ff., which is the standard work on the history of American 'Society.' The best examinations of the 'Societies' of particular big cities are Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947); and Edward Digby Baltzell Jr., The Elite and the Upper Class in Metropolitan America: A Study of Stratification in Philadelphia, (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1953), both of which I have used.
2. Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, The Social Ladder (New York: Henry Holt, 1924), pp. 30-32.
3. Dixon Wecter, op. cit. pp. 294-5.
4. Cf. J. L. Ford, 'New York of the Seventies,' Scribner's Magazine, June 1923, p. 744.
5. Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, op. cit. pp. 53-4.
6. W. J. Mills, 'New York Society,' Delineator, November 1904. Cf. also Ralph Pulitzer, 'New York Society at Work,' Harper's Bazaar, December 1909.
7. Cf. Harvey O'Connor, The Astors (New York: Knopf, 1941), p. 197.

1. Wecter, op. cit. pp. 209-10.
2. Ibid. pp. 212, 214.
3. Cited in ibid. p. 215.
4. See FIVE: The Very Rich, and notes to that chapter.
5. Wecter, op. cit. pp. 232-3.
6. See Mona Gardner, 'Social Register Blues,' Collier's, 14 December 1946 and G. Holland, 'Social Register,' American Mercury, June 1932. On the volumes of The Social Register published up to 1925, see Wecter, op. cit. p. 233.
7. Wecter, op. cit. p. 234.
8. As of 1940. Cf. Baltzell Jr., op. cit. Table 2.
9. See ibid. Table 14, pp. 89 ff.
10. Wecter, op. cit. pp. 235, 234.
11. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899 (New York: New American Library, Mentor Edition, 1953), p. 162. Cf. also my Introduction to that edition for a fuller criticism of Veblen's theory.
12. Time, 26 October 1953.
13. See 'Boston,' Fortune, February 1933, p. 27.
14. Business Week, 5 June 1954, pp. 92-3.
15. From private estimations. Cf. Baltzell Jr., op. cit. p. 178.
16. Cf. ibid, footnote 5, p. 172.
17. 'Miss Chapin's, Miss Walker's, Foxcroft, Farmington,' Fortune, August 1931, p. 38.
18. See Porter Sargent, A Handbook of Private Schools, 25th ed. (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1941); 'Schools for Boys,' Fortune, May 1944, pp. 165 ff.; 'St. Paul's, St. Mark's, Groton, Andover, et al,' Fortune, September 1931, pp. 76 ff. Cf. also George S. Counts, 'Girls' Schools,' Fortune, August 1931 and Twelve of The Best American Schools,' Fortune, January 1936, pp. 48 ff.
19. 'Schools for Boys, op. cit. p. 165. Cf. also 'Boys' Prep School,' Life, 1 March 1954, which deals with Hotchkiss. Compare Eleanor Roosevelt's feelings upon sending her youngest son, John, to Groton, as reported by her in This I Remember (New York: Harper, 1949), p. 43.

1. Cf. Frank D. Ashburn, Peabody of Groton (New York: Coward McCann, 1944), pp. 30, 67-8.
2. 'St. Paul's, St. Mark's, Groton, Andover, et al,' op. cit. p. 76.
3. Cf. Allan Heely, Why the Private School? (New York: Harper, 1951).
4. Cf. John P. Marquand, ff. M. Pulham Esquire (New York: Bantam Edition, 1950), pp. 76, 60; and W. M. Spackman, Heyday (New York: Ballantine Edition, 1953), p. 12.
5. Cf. Baltzell Jr., op. cit. pp. 218-20.
 

4. The Celebrities
1. See 'The Yankee Doodle Salon,' Fortune, December 1937; and, for a recent account, George Frazier, 'Cafe Society: Wild, Wicked and Worthless,' Coronet, August 1954. Cf. also Elsa Maxwell, R.S.V.P., Elsa Maxwell's Own Story (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954).
2. Cf. Business Week, 12 January 1953, pp. 58, 64.
3. The U.S. Debutante,' Fortune, December 1938, pp. 48 ff.; and The Yankee Doodle Salon,' op. cit. pp. 128-9.
4. Cf. ibid. p. 127; and Mrs. John King Van Rennselaer, 'Entertaining Royalty,' Ladies' Home Journal, May 1925, p. 72.
5. The Yankee Doodle Salon,' op. cit. pp. 124-5.
6. Jack Gould, Television in Review,' The New York Times, 6 April 1954. Cf. also Jack Gould, 'TV Techniques on the Political Stage,' The New York Times Magazine, 25 April 1954, pp. 12 ff.
7. Cf. Igor Cassini, 'The New 400,' Esquire, June 1953. On Cassini, see Who's Who in America, vol. 27; Time, 5 November 1945, pp. 6970; and Newsweek, 3 September 1945, p. 68.
8. I did not feel that Cassini's list warranted exhaustive analysis; in a cursory way, I was able to classify only 342 of the 399 names he listed: 102 professional celebrities; 41 of the metropolitan 400; and 199 institutional leaders (93 in government and 79 in business).
9. 'By and large, branch by branch, family by family, the Bostonian of today has withdrawn from productive enterprise. He has lost the active management of his industries. He has lost the political control of his city. He is no longer a figure, as he was a dominant figure a hundred years ago, in the government of the nation. He no longer leads either in public opinion or in private thought. And he has so completely lost his leadership in the arts that his former influence has become a subject for satire.' But 'no great Boston family of the first rank has lost either means or position. No real break has been made in the city's ruling class. And all the laws of economic determinism seem to have been violated in that fact. ... At present, by the supplementary device of giving trustees discretion to pay or not to pay income as they see the necessity, a Massachusetts estate may be tied up beyond the reach of any power but the Communist International. But it was already possible three generations ago to expedite one's fortune safely into eternity - or into so much of eternity as the Rule Against Perpetuities left open. And Boston families early formed the habit - a habit in which the highly reputed Suffolk County Bar and the helpful provisions of the Massachusetts laws on trustee investments confirmed them. Fortunately - or unfortunately - for Boston they formed the habit in the days of their wealth... Time cannot wither nor custom stale their infinite variety of sound investments. Social power is theirs. Civilization is theirs. But should they attempt to strike back through the mirror into the world of actual power they would bleed to death. Farther forward and in the focus of living authority is the great banking unity, the First National. Below it in various relations of financial dependence are the Boston industries. Above it, in a somewhat shadowy perspective, are the individuals who control it... To the side, and in no apparent relation either to the financial web or to the social, stands the political hierarchy... And above the political hierarchy but in no apparent relation to it other than the relation established by a common blood and a common religion stands the Irish Catholic hierarchy of the city... There are doubtless mysterious threads and channels which lead from one focus of power to another. Certainly there are rumors enough of such connectives... There is no agreement. Or if there is agreement it is agreement upon the single point that no threads of power, save the threads which bind Harvard College to the sterns of the clipper ships, lead to the Bostonians.' 'Boston,' Fortune, February 1933, pp. 27 ff.
10. For example, Mrs. J. Borden Harriman wrote that 'The Four Hundred have grown to four thousand. Perhaps I exaggerate, but certainly there are a dozen sets, each sufficient unto itself, and yet inter locking, like directorates, that set the fashions in New York today...' 'Hither and Yon,' The Century Magazine, September 1923, p. 881. And Alice-Leone Moats made it clear that 'the cold nose' was not sufficient: 'One must have the showmanship to put it across, to make it obvious that the possession of the coldest nose entitles one to a position of eminence. But the person who can go into a restaurant, be instantly recognized and given the best table in the room has cafe value. In other words, the outstanding social figures are all Diamond Jim Bradys.' 'Cafe Value,' The Saturday Evening Post, 3 August 1935, p. 12.

1. See 'The Yankee Doodle Salon,' op. cit. pp. 183, 186.
2. Time, 31 January 1955, p. 57.
3. See Time, 18 January 1954, p. 30.
4. Perhaps it is also revealed by two contrasting stories recently carried in a national news magazine: (1) Upon her death in 1953, no less a Society Lady than Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt is treated as a quaint sort of curiosity (Cf. Time, 19 January 1953, p. 21). (2) About the same time, we read of Prince Mike Romanoff, probably born one Harry F. Gerguson in Brooklyn, of cafe society fame. In the account of his personality, Harry F. Gerguson is treated with due deference and quite some jolly admiration for being such a successful fake. Cf. Time, 9 June 1952, p. 41.
5. Dixon Wecter, The Saga of American Society (New York: Scribner's, 1937), pp. 227, 226, 228.
6. 'The U.S. Debutante,' op. cit. pp. 48, 52. Cf. also Alida K. L. Milliken, 'This Debutante Business,' North American Review, February 1930.
7. Elsa Maxwell, 'Society-What's Left of It,' Collier's, March 1939, p. 101.

1. Cf., for example, the Woodbury ad in the Ladies' Home Journal, February 1939, p. 45.
2. Cf. Life, 25 December 1950, p. 67.
3. 'Yankee Doodle Salon,' op. cit. p. 126.
4. Business Week, 3 October 1953, p. 184. Cf. also Anonymous, 'Piloting a Social Climber,' Ladies' Home Journal, August 1927.
5. Maude Parker, 'The New Four Hundred of New York,' The Saturday Evening Post, 2 April 1927, p. 214.
6. Mona Gardner, 'Social Register Blues,' Collier's, 14 December 1946, p. 97. Cf. also 'Society,' Literary Digest, 16 January 1937, p. 22; and Bennett Schiff, 'Inside Cafe Society: The Debutantes,' New York Post, 20 April 1955, pp. 4 ff.
7. For various recent images of 'The Ail-American Girl,' see Elizabeth Hardwick, 'The American Woman as Snow-Queen,' Commentary, December 1951, pp. 546 ff.; Parker Tyler, The Hollywood Hallucination (New York: Creative Age Press, 1944); and Bennett Schiff, 'Inside Cafe Society,' New York Post, 19 April 1955, pp. 4 ff.
8. On the relation between night clubs and businessmen on expense accounts, cf. Business Week, 12 January 1952, pp. 58 ff. On the 'expense-account girls,' see reports of the Micky Jelke hearings, especially Life, 2 March 1953, pp. 29 ff. On cafe-society morality in general, see Mills, 'Public Morality: Girls Using Vice To Help Careers,' New York Journal-American, 31 August 1952, p. 4-L.

1. In 1946, one important Washington social list, it is said, had 3,000 changes out of 5,000. Jane Eads, 'Washington Playground,' Collier's, 13 April 1946, p. 52. There is, in Washington, of course, a metropolitan 400 known as 'The Cave Dwellers,' the families whose members have resided in Washington for at least two or three generations, and who live by the engagement book. But, competing with them are the 'great hostesses,' not all of them familied to any notable degree, who are rather professional in the strategy of status; and the wealthy, although temporary, residents whose entertaining is frequent and socially successful. And, as in other cities, there are the climbers who have the money of the new upper classes, as well as the social inclination, but not the accomplished status.
2. Cf. John K. Galbraith, American Capitalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952).
3. Ida M. Tarbell, Owen D. Young (New York: Macmillan, 1932), pp. 211-12.
4. Quoted in Fortune, March 1931, pp. 92, 94.
5. The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, Vol. II: The Inside Struggle, 1936-1939 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), p. 644.
6. 'Last year [1954] Wisconsin's Republican Senator Alexander Wiley impressed himself on the folks back home by posing for photographs with his gavel about to descend on the bald dome of New Jersey's G. O. P. Senator H. Alexander Smith; this year New Jersey's 320lb. Democratic Representative T. James Tumulty made a big impression by posing in his underpants.

'During this session, while the 84th Congress has been deliberating on the state of the U. S., Maine's Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith has been seen on Edward R. Murrow's television program as she traipsed around the globe - e.g., to Formosa, India, Spain. A pixy TV program called Masquerade Party has achieved a clown's gallery of Senators, e.g., Indiana's Republican Senator Homer Capehart came with a Roman toga draped around his aldermanic figure, South Dakota's Republican Senator Karl Mundt and his wife appeared as Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, Alabama's Democratic Senator John Spark-man (his party's 1952 nominee for Vice President) showed up disguised as a fireman.' Time, 4 April 1955, p. 17. See also Douglas Cater's excellent analysis, 'Every Congressman a Television Star,' The Reporter, 16 June 1955, pp. 26 ff.

On the status of businessmen, compare the 1907 presidential address of Jeremiah W. Jenks, 'The Modern Standard of Business Honor,' to the American Economic Association (Third Series, vol. in), pp. 1-22, with comments to be found in Sigmund Diamond's The Reputation of the American Businessman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955). See also 'Corporation Life Gets a Literature,' Business Week, 5 June 1954, p. 79.

1. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd, 1896 (London: Ernest Benn, 1952), pp. 129, 130, 131.
2. In this section, I have drawn upon Harold Nicolson's The Meaning of Prestige (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1937).
3. Gustave Le Bon, op. cit. p. 140.
4. Cf. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899 (New York: New American Library, Mentor Edition, 1953).
5. Cf. John Adams, Discourses on Davila (Boston: Russell and Cutler, 1805), especially pp. 26-7, 30-34, 48-9. The subsequent quotations are from pp. 40, 28-9, and 18.
6. But see Rene Sedillot, 'Now Medals for Civilians, Too,' The New York Times Magazine, 24 April 1955, pp. 22 ff., for recent attempts to have honor more officially recognized.
7. Winthrop Rockefeller. Cf. The New York Times, 27 December 1953, and the New York Post, 16 October 1953.
8. Haroldson L. Hunt. Cf. The New York Times Magazine, 8 March 1953.
9. Barbara Sears Rockefeller. See Time, 28 June 1954 and The New York Times, 4 August 1954.
10. Dorothy Taylor di Frasso. Cf. The New York Herald Tribune, 5 January 1954, p. 9 and Time, 18 January 1954, p. 88.
 

5. The Very Rich
1. Cf. Joseph A. Schumperer, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy 3rd ed. (New York: Harper, 1950), pp. 81 ff.
2. For a careful and revealing analysis of the attitudes and connections of the Presidents and the commissioners involved in anti-trust action during the crucial Progressive Era, see Meyer H. Fishbein, Bureau of Corporations: An Agency of the Progressive Era (MA thesis, American University, 1954), esp. pp. 19-29, 100-119.
3. Frederick Lewis Allen, The Lords of Creation (New York: Harper, 1935), pp. 9-10.
4. Ibid. p. 12.
5. Cf. Time, 10 August 1953, p. 82.
6. Report of the Smaller War Plants Corporation to the Special Committee to Study Problems of American Small Business, U.S. Senate, Economic Concentration and World War II, 79th Congress, 2nd Session, Senate Committee Print No. 6 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946). pp. 37, 39, 40.
7. On wealth in Colonial America, see Dixon Wecter, The Saga of American Society (New York: Scribner's, 1937), chap. 2; and Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes, 1907 (revised Modern Library edition, 1936), pp. 55-6, 59, 85. On the estate of George Washington, see ibid. p. 49. On the multi-millionaires in the early 1840's, see A. Forbes and J. W. Greene, The Rich Men of Massachusetts (Boston: Fetridge & Co., 1851); Moses Yale Beach, Wealth and Pedigree of the Wealthy Citizens of New York City (New York: Compiled with much care and published at the Sun Office, 1842), 4th ed.; and 'Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of Philadelphia,' by a Member of the Philadelphia Bar, 1845. On the New York multi-millionaires in the middle 1850's, see Moses Yale Beach, 'The Wealthy Citizens of the City of New York,' 12th ed. (New York: Published at the Sun Office, 1855). On the coinage of the word 'millionaire,' see Wecter, op. cit. p. 113.

1. See The New York Tribune, Tribune Monthly, June 1892. Sidney Ratner has recently edited a book, New Light on the History of Great American Fortunes (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1953), which reprints two listings of American millionaires - from the Tribune Monthly, June 1892 and the World Almanac, 1902. These lists are of little use in the attempt to list the very rich (see footnote 9 below) since only rarely is an estimate of the exact size of the fortune given; examination of this list shows that hundreds of 'mere millionaires' appear alongside John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.
2. In a country which, as Ferdinand Lundberg once remarked, literally flaunts a chaos of statistics about subjects of little general interest,' there are no precise figures on the great fortunes. To list the names of the richest people of three generations, I have had to do the best that I could with such unsystematic sources as are available. I have, of course, availed myself of all the histories of great fortunes in the United States, as well as the biographies of those who possessed them. Twice in the twentieth century - 1924 and 1938 - rather systematic information has been published on large incomes or big properties (see below); and there is an intermittent stream of information and myth appearing in newspapers and magazines, the facts of a probated will, the tax scandal, the anecdote about rich individuals.

I began with a list of all persons mentioned in the books listed below who were born after 1799 and who were stated to have ever possessed $30 million or more. In many cases, the size of the fortune was not estimated in the source of the name; but taking note of all possible names, we searched all the sources at hand for estimations of the size of fortune. The general criterion of $30 million is mainly a matter of convenience. We found that such a criterion will yield 371 names: since it was necessary to compile detailed information about the fortune and the career of each of these individuals, our resources did not permit us to handle a larger list.

 

Here are the sources used:

(I) Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes, 1907 (revised Modern Library edition, 1936).

(II) Gustavus Myers, The Ending of Hereditary Fortunes (New York: Julian Messner, 1939).

(III) Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934).

(IV) Frederick Lewis Allen, The Lords of Creation (New York: Harper, 1935).

(V) Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families, 1937 (New York: The Citadel Press, 1946)-our cautious use of this book is discussed below in (XI).

(VI) Dixon Wecter, The Saga of American Society (New York: Scribner's 1937).

 

(VII) 'Richest U.S. Women,' Fortune, November 1936 (VIII) Stewart H. Holbrook, The Age of the Moguls (New York: Doubleday, 1953). Based in considerable detail upon Myers' work and those of other historians, this work is mainly a popularization of earlier work.

 

(IX) 'Noted Americans of the Past: American Industrial Leaders, Financiers and Merchants,' World Almanac, 1952, p. 381, and 1953, p. 783. Does not include estimates of fortunes.

 

(X) Cleveland Amory, The Last Resorts (New York: Harper, 1952). There are naturally many duplications of people mentioned in these sources; but each one of them has yielded information unmentioned by all the others. Three further sources require more detailed discussion:
 

(XI) In 1924 and again in 1925, a temporary law allowed the release of information on the size of income-tax payments made on incomes for 1923 and 1924. Journalists were admitted to various offices of the Bureau of Internal Revenue and there copied names with the taxes paid by each. The release of this data was so administratively sloppy that one paper published data about a man whom another paper ignored, some errors were printed, and in some cases all journalists missed the names of people who were known to have paid large taxes. (There were, of course, some wealthy people whose entire income was tax free. Selecting the 1924 income tax list for study, we took everyone who had paid $200,000 or more in taxes as listed in either or in both The New York Times or The New York Herald Tribune, 2 to 15 September 1925.
The average tax at this time and at these levels resulted in a payment of about 40 per cent of the gross income; so a payment of $200,000 reveals an annual income during 1924 of about $500,000. Since most such high incomes are derived from investments, an overall figure of 5 per cent return on investment would mean that for one to obtain a half million dollars from investments, the capital owned would have to be about $10 million. It has been presumed that only about one-third of most entire fortunes were at that time in taxable sources; hence, the over-all fortune owned would be three times larger than the taxable fortune. (These are the calculations Ferdinand Lundberg made on the 1924 returns in his book cited above. He comments that 'in individual instances the multiplication by three of the net fortune upon whose in come a tax was paid may result in some distortion, but this appears to be the only way in which to obtain a general approximation; and as the method gives generally accurate results, the picture as a whole is not overdrawn. Rather it is very conservative.' (p. 25.) I think this is so.)

By these calculations, then, a tax of $200,000 indicates an income of $500,000, a taxable fortune of 10 million, and an entire fortune of 30 million. Most evidence from those estates that were probated shortly after 1924 shows that these calculations are reasonably accurate. For instance, according to these calculations, the $434,000 tax payment of Richard Teller Crane, Jr., indicated a total fortune of $64.8 million; he died in 1931 leaving an estate of 50 million. Ogden Mills' tax payment of $372,000 would indicate a fortune of 55.5 million in 1924; he died in 1929 leaving 41 million. There are, of course, cases in which people's estates were much less, but they usually were known to have lost their money (such as grain speculator Arthur W. Cutten who was wiped out in the 1929 crash) or given it away before their death. I included such people as long as they were at any one time in possession of $30 million.

I know of no systematic use of these names. Ferdinand Lundberg, in 1937, compiled a list of '60 families' which, in fact, are not all families and which number - as 'families' -  not 60, but about 74. But he does not analyze them systematically. By 'systematic' I understand that similar information is compiled for each person on the list and generalizations made therefrom.

What Lundberg does is (1) generalize blood relations -sometimes cousinhood only - into power and financial cliques. We do not wish to confuse the two. In addition (2), we cannot go along with the list he has abstracted from The New York Times, which is not uniformly made up of families or individuals or companies but is a miscellany.

Of the so-called 60 families, there are 37 'families' represented by more than one member's tax payments. There are eight unrelated men included along with the Morgans; and there is another group of seven families forming his 38th 'family' (this is the 'Standard Oil Group'). The list is filled out with 22 individuals paying 1924 taxes ranging from $188,608 to $791,851. Thus, if 'family' is to mean a blood tie, there are many more than 60 families on his list; but the list is not even a full account of these families, since only those paying a tax under the family name were included. Moreover, there are a number of people (e.g. J. H. Brewer, L. L. Cooke) who paid much higher taxes in 1924 than many of the people named by Lundberg but who are not included in his listing of '60 families.' Some, but not all, of these are not listed in The New York Times, but are in The New York Herald Tribune, which Mr. Lund-berg seems to have ignored.

More importantly for the purpose of obtaining a list of the top richest persons is the fact that some of the families in Lundberg's list of the top 60 do not even appear among the very rich when individuals are concerned. The Deerings, for instance: Lundberg uses three Deerings; the tax payment of all three adds up to $315,701. We do not include the Deerings on our list of the 'very rich' since James Deering paid a tax of only $179,896; Charles, only $139,341; the third Deering, some $7,000. The same type of procedure holds for the Tafts, Lehmans, and deForests. They are all undoubtedly rich people, but not to the same degree as the people in whom we are interested.

(XII) A more recent systematic source of information regarding size of private fortunes is the Temporary National Economic Committee's Monograph No. 29: 'The Distribution of Ownership in the 200 Largest Non-Financial Corporations' (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1940). This monograph gives the 20 largest stockholders of record in each of the 200 largest non-financial corporations, along with the stockholdings of the directors and officers of these corporations, as of 1937 or 1938. Although it does contain most of the well-known fortunes that are based upon industrial ownership, the list is not complete: it does not cover money held in government or local bonds, in real estate or in financial houses. Moreover, in a number of instances ownership even of industrial corporations is disguised by the practice of recording the ownership of a block of stock under various investment houses which do not divulge the names of the actual owners. Nevertheless, this TNEC list represents the best we have found for the later period. Compared with the scattered case studies available for the nineteenth century, the wealthy it discloses are a rather stable set of men.

From this source I have taken each person for whom the total value of all shares owned in all companies listed was equal to $10 million or more in 1937 or 1938. Multiplying this figure by three (assuming again that the taxable wealth represents only one-third of the total fortune owned), gives us all those people owning $30 million or more in the late 'thirties.

(XIII) None of the sources above provide really up-to-date information about the very rich. Many of the people named in the various books, and in the 1924 and 1938 lists, are, of course, still alive; and we have found living heirs to people now dead - through obituaries, we tried to trace the fortunes of all names selected, and included in our list all those heirs whom we have found to have inherited $30 million or more.

(XIV) In order to obtain information about people now alive, the following agencies and government bureaus were contacted - various officials in each of them gave us such information as they could, none of it 'official,' and none of much use to us: the Federal Reserve Board of New York; the Securities Exchange Commission; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Domestic Commerce; and the Bureau of Internal Revenue's Statistical Division and Information Division. Individuals were also contacted in the following private organizations: Dun & Bradstreet; The National Industrial Conference Board's Division of Business Economics; The Wall Street Journal; Barron's; Fortune; The Russell Sage Foundation; U.S. News and World Report; Brookings Institution; Bureau of National Affairs, Federal Savings and Loan; and two private investment houses. People seen in these organizations could only refer us to sources of which we were already aware. Some had never thought much about the problem, others seemed slightly shocked at the idea of 'finding out' about the top wealthy people, others were enchanted with the idea but helpless as to sources. I am grateful to Professor Fred Blum for making most of these contacts for us, and for his helpful comments on this whole problem.

(XV) During the post-World War II years, I have been searching current papers and periodicals for any mention of other multi-millionaires. From magazines such as Business Week, Look and Life and Time and from The New York Times, I have picked up additional names, mainly of the new crop of Texans. In this search for additional names, I have had the benefit of about two dozen interested students and friends.

Because of the necessarily miscellaneous character of the collection of names, we cannot be certain, and I do not claim, that the list includes all the richest people in America over the last 100 years; nor that all the people whom we have included in our list have, in proven fact, possessed at one time or another, $30 million.

Two things, however, can be said with reasonable surety: (1) There is fairly good evidence for the accuracy of the $30 million figure. In cases of people who have died, I have checked by probate of will and found that these estimations seem quite accurate. (2) Even though the list cannot be proved to exhaust the richest - including every single person who has owned the prescribed amounts - all of these people are undoubtedly among the richest people in the United States by any reasonable definition. Undoubtedly in our listing we have missed some who should have been included, and have included others who should not have been. But we have included all those people about whom printed information is available to us, and it is our opinion that such errors as might occur do not materially affect the picture. In short, no exact and proven list seems to us possible; this list seems to us a quite reasonable approximation of the most prominent very rich people in America over the last one hundred years.

The foregoing outline of procedure, along with a preliminary listing of the names selected, and a secondary listing of people we had designated as being of lesser wealth, were sent, for suggestions and criticisms to the following: Dr. John M. Blair of the Bureau of Industrial Economics, Federal Trade Commission; Professor Thomas Cochran of the University of Pennsylvania; Professor Shepard Clough of Columbia University; Professors Arthur Cole, Leland H. Jenks, and Sigmund O. Diamond of the Besearch Center of Entrepreneurial History at Harvard University; Professors Joseph Dorfman and Bobert S. Lynd of Columbia University; Professor Frank Freidel of Stanford University; Frank Fogarty of Business Week; Ernest Dale of the School of Business, Columbia University; and Max Lerner of the New York Post and Brandeis University. I wish to thank these people for their time, consideration and help on this problem, although they are in no way responsible for any errors of fact or judgment.

Of the 371 names, I was unable to find, from a search of biographical sources, the books mentioned above, and newspaper files, any information about the life of 69 of them. More than half of these names came from the 1924 tax lists where we had only the last name and first initials to go by. The speculative nature of many large incomes during the 'twenties would lead me to believe that the chances were high that many of these incomes did not represent durable great fortunes; and our concern with the 'most prominent' very rich in America makes it feasible to omit these 69 people from the Very Rich. At any rate it was necessary.

In an effort to make some allowance for the variance in the value of the dollar over the periods in which we are interested, I ranked the members of each of our three generations by the estimated sizes of their fortunes. Economic historians whom I consulted have indicated that they 'do not know of any satisfactory device for reducing a given amount of money to purchasing power equivalents over a long period of time' (Letter to the author from Sigmund O. Diamond and Leland H. Jenks, 30 March 1954). Of course, when one gets into the multi-million-dollar categories, the cost of living - which is usually the purpose of stablishing relative purchasing power - is not a matter of concern.

For each generation I took the 90 richest people. We are thus considering the 90 or so most prominent and richest in each of the three historical epochs. This gives us a total of 275 cases for concentrated analysis, which is the upper 74 per cent of the 371 cases mentioned by all sources known to us.

Of the 90 cases selected as Group I, the median year of birth is 1841; the median years of death, 1912. The year when the median age is 60 is therefore 1901; hereafter Group I is identified as the 1900 generation.

Of the 95 cases selected from Group II, the median year of birth is 1867; the median year of death, 1936. The year when the median age is 60 is therefore 1927; Group II thus consists of the 1925 generation.

Of the 90 cases in Group III, the median year of birth is 1887; and most of these were still alive in 1954. On the average they were 60 in 1947; Group III is thus the 1950 generation.

 

10. On John D. Rockefeller, see Wecter, op. cit. pp. 141-2, 482; Frederick Lewis Allen, op. cit. pp. 4-7; The New York Times, 24 May 1937 and 6 June 1937; and, for further references, John T. Flynn, Gods Gold (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932). On Henry O. Havemeyer, see Dictionary of American Biography; Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes, pp 697 ff.; and The New York Times, 5 December 1907. On Henrietta Green, see Dictionary of American Biography; The New York Times, 4 July 1916, p. 1 and 9 July 1916, magazine section; and Boyden Sparkes and Samuel Taylor Moore, The Witch of Wall Street: Hetty Green (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Doran, 1935). On George F. Baker, Jr., see Who Was Who, 1897-1942; and The New York Times, 31 May 1937.

1. On Hunt and Cullen, see The New York Times, 21 November 1952 and the magazine section of 8 March 1953; The Washington Post, 15 through 19 February 1954; and other reports of the United Press Survey such as those of Preston McGraw in the Long Island Star-Journal, 4 and 5 August 1954 and Gene Patterson, 'World's Richest Man is a Texan,' Pacific Coast Business and Shipping Register, 16 August 1954.
2. The figure on the proportion of foreign-born adult U.S. males in 1900 was calculated from the U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the U.S.,1789-1945, p. 32. On the foreign-born white population in the United States in 1950, cf. The World Almanac, 1954 p. 266.

1. See Historical Statistics of the U.S., 1789-1945, p. 29.
2. The general figures on religion cannot be given with more precision for religious faith is unknown for a good many of the very rich. The censuses are likewise inaccurate on religious denominations for most periods of U.S. history, thus also prohibiting comparison of any one group with the general population.
3. For instance, Eleanor Rice, who was the daughter of William L. Elkins and at one time the wife of George D. Widener, gave millions to a variety of artistic and educational organizations and her last husband was a physician and geographer who was famed for expeditions to South America to study tropical diseases and native tribes. See The New York Herald Tribune, 5 October 1951. At her palatial home in California, Mary Virginia McCormick had a permanent staff of musicians and imported entire symphony orchestras for parties and concerts. See The New York Times, 26 May 1951.
4. On Anita McCormick Blaine, see The New York Times, 13 February 1954; on Hetty Sylvia Green Wilks, see The New York Times, 6 February 1951, p. 27
5. Even in 1900, when only 39 per cent of the very rich were recruited from the upper classes, some 25 per cent of the very rich were economic men of this family-manager type. William Henry Vanderbilt, son of the Commodore and dead by 1900, became a conservative manager of the Vanderbilt enterprises, and, in fact, was head of them when they reached their financial high point. It is, of course, difficult to know whether this was a result of his management - which was neither speculative nor extravagant - or a result of objective changes resulting in the increased value of railroad securities. The indolence of his sons, who spent more time in Europe playing a game of fashion, was perhaps less a cause of the relative decline of the Vanderbilt fortune than the downswing of the railroad economy. Cf. Wayne Andrews, The Vanderbilt Legend, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941. George D. Widener, son of P. A. B. Widener, became a stockholder in 23 companies and was president and director of 18. He was an active type of economic man in that he was involved in 1902 in a suit for fraud for praising a weak company so that he could sell his stock in it and get out before it failed. Cf. Philadelphia Public Ledger, 2 April 1912 and Philadelphia Press, 23 September 1902.

Of the modern-day family managers there is, for instance, Vincent Astor - the great-grandson of John Jacob Astor - who may be an enthusiast for yachting and automobile racing, but he disappointed society editors in their search for the idle life of scandal when, at the death of his father, he quit Harvard and, at the age of 21, began to improve the value of the Astor land in New York City. Young Vincent changed the management policy by abolishing many tenements and attempting to bring middle and upper-class clientele to Astor land, thus, of course, increasing its value to him. Cf. Harvey O'Connor, The Astors, New York: Knopf, 1941, p. 336. And the daily decisions of John D. Rockefeller III involve the disposition of millions of dollars; he has a full-time job for which he was trained: philanthropic work on an international scope. Moreover, he has been active as a director in many American corporations, including the New York Life Insurance Company and the Chase National Bank.

1. See The New York Times, 1 August 1954, pp. 1, 7.
2. On the vicious circle of poverty and the withdrawal from success, see Mills, White Collar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 259 ff.
3. See Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes, pp. 634 ff.; Lewis Corey, The House of Morgan (New York: G. Howard Watt, 1930); and John K. Winkler, Morgan the Magnificent (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1930).
4. See Harvey O'Connor, How Mellon Got Rich (New York: International Pamphlets, 1933) and Mellons Millions (New York: John Day, 1933); Frank R. Denton, The Mellons of Pittsburgh (New York: Newcomen Society of England, American Branch, 1948); and The New York Times, 30 August 1937, p. 16.
5. Quoted in Time, 1 June 1953, p. 38.
6. See The New York Times, 2 February 1944, p. 15.
7. See The New York Times, 7 June 1948, p. 19.
8. See Wallace Davis, Corduroy Road (Houston: Anson Jones Press, 1951).

See also the testimony of James D. Stietenroth, former chief financial officer of the Mississippi Power & Light Co., in regard to the Dixon-Yates contract, reported in the Interim Report of the Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary on Antitrust and Monopoly on Investigation Into Monopoly in the Power Industry, Monopoly in the Power Industry, U.S. Senate, 83d Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955), pp. 12 ff. 26. Cf. Frederick Lewis Allen, op. cit. p. 85.

 

6. The Chief Executives
1. See Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), Chapters 2 and 3.
2. Calculated from Bureau of the Census, 1951 Annual Survey of Manufacturers and 'The Fortune Directory of the 500 Largest U.S. Industrial Corporations,' Fortune, July 1955, Supplement and p. 96.
3. John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), p. 58; see also pp. 115 ff. and 171 ff.
4. For substantiation, with recent data, of the Gardiner Means view of price rigidity in the corporate economy, see John M. Blair, 'Economic Concentration and Depression Price Rigidity,' American Economic Review, vol. XLV, May 1955, pp. 566-82.

1. Cf. Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families, 1937 (New York: The Citadel Press, 1946), Appendix E.
2. The number of stockholders in 1952, and the proportion they represent of the various occupational groups and income levels which follow, are from a study by Lewis H. Kimmel, Share Ownership in the United States (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1952). Cf. also '1955 Survey of Consumer Finances' Federal Reserve Bulletin, June 1955, which reveals that only two percent of 'the spending units' hold $10,000 worth or more in stock. On the adult population in 1950, see The World Almanac, 1954, p. 259.
3. Between these polar groups of stockholders there are the farmers, 7 per cent of whom own some stock. Cf. Kimmel, op. cit.
4. Back in 1936 only about 55,000 people - lesss than 1 per cent of all the stockholders - received as much as $10,000 a year in dividends. Cf. 'The 30,000 Managers,' Fortune, February 1940, p. 108. In 1937, people with incomes of $20,000 or more - excluding capital gains and losses - collected between 40 and 50 per cent of all corporate dividends, and represented less than 1 per cent of all stockholders. See Temporary National Emergency Committee, 'Final Report to the Executive Secretary,' p. 167.
5. Furthermore, 13 per cent of the corporate dividends received in 1949 went to people who had either no taxable income or income of less than $5,000 a year. Calculated from the U.S. Treasury Department, Bureau of Internal Revenue, 'Statistics of Income for 1949, Part I,' pp. 16,17.
6. Cf. Floyd Hunter, Community Power Structure (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953); and Robert A. Brady, Business as a System of Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943).
7. Cf. Mills, The New Men of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948), pp. 23-7.
8. For details on interlocking directorship in 1938, see TNEC Monograph No. 29: 'The Distribution of Ownership in the 200 Largest Non-financial Corporations,' pp. 59, 533 ff.; cf. also TNEC Monograph No. 30: 'Survey of Shareholdings in 1710 Corporations with Securities Listed on a National Securities Exchange.' In 1947, the story for the broader base of U.S. corporations, financial and non-financial, was practically the same as among the director-owners of the top 200 non-financial corporations in 1938: Of the 10,000 persons who were directors in the 1,600 leading corporations, some 1,500 had seats on more than one board. Since 1914 it has been illegal for a person to be the director of two or more corporations if those corporations are in competition; in 1951, the Federal Trade Commission argued that it wanted the law amplified to include two or more corporations of a certain size regardless of whether or not they are in competition. 'The present law is unduly limited in its conception of the competition that may be prevented by interlocking directorates. The law applies only where there is or has been competition between the interlocked companies. It does not apply where these companies might readily become competitors and probably would do so but for the effect of the interlock... [The law] is applicable only to direct interlocks among competitors, whereas there are competition-reducing potentialities in indirect interlocks as well.' See Report of The Federal Trade Commission on Interlocking Directorates (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1951), esp. pp. 14-15.

In 1950 there were 556 positions as director in the 25 largest corporations in America. One man (Winthrop W. Aldrich), who is now the Ambassador to Great Britain, held directorships in four of these companies (Chase National Bank, American Telephone and Telegraph Company, New York Central Railroad, and Metropolitan Life Insurance Company). Seven men each held directorships in three of these companies; 40, in two companies; and 451 men held directorships in only one company. Thus, 105 of the 556 seats on the boards of these 25 companies were held by 48 men. See the table prepared for Congressman Emanuel Celler, Chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary, by the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on the Study of Monopoly Power of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Eighty-second Congress, First Session, Serial No. 1, Part 2 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1951), p. 77, Exhibit A.

The concentration of corporation power and the informal co-ordination of the business world - with and without interlocking directorships  - has become such that the Department of Labor estimates that only some 147 employers really bargain out their wage terms with their labor forces. These bargains set the pattern of wage contracts; thousands of other employers may go through the motions of bargaining, but the odds are high that they will end up according to the pattern set by the few giant deals. See Business Week, 18 October 1952, p. 148; Frederick H. Harbison and Robert Dubin, Patterns of Union-Management Relations (Chicago: Science Research Associates, 1947); Mills, The New Men of Power, pp. 233 ff. and Frederick H. Harbison and John R. Coleman, Goals and Strategy in Collective Bargaining (New York: Harper, 1951), pp. 125 ff.

1. 'Special Report to Executives on Tomorrow's Management,' Business Week, 15 August 1953, p. 161.
2. John M. Blair, 'Technology and Size,' American Economic Review, vol. XXXVIII, May 1948, Number 2, pp. 150-51. Blair argues that present-day technology, unlike that of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, is a force leading toward decentralization rather than consolidation. For new techniques - such as the replacement of steam by electricity and the replacement of iron and steel by light metals, alloys, plastics, and plywood - reduce the scale of operations at which diminishing returns set in. Given these new technological developments, the maximum profitability of a plant will be reached at a much lower scale of operations than heretofore. 'In summary ... it may be expected that the increased substitution of these new materials will reduce the amount of capital required per unit of product and thereby tend to result in the establishment of newer, smaller, and more efficient plants.' Ibid. p. 124.

1. Cf. Galbraith, op. cit; and American Economic Review, vol. XLIV, May 1954 for criticisms of Galbraith.
2. Cf. A. A. Berle, Jr., The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954) and Ben B. Seligman's perceptive review of it in Dissent, Winter 1955, pp. 92 ff.
3. F. W. Taussig and C. S. Joslyn broke the ground by obtaining information from about 7,000 businessmen listed in Poor's 1928 Register of Directors: American Business Leaders: A Study in Social Origins and Social Stratification (New York: Macmillan, 1932).

Mills analyzed 1,464 'eminent American businessmen' whose biographies appeared in The Dictionary of American Biography and who were bom between 1570 and 1879: 'The American Business Elite: A Collective Portrait,' The Tasks of Economic History, Supplement V to The Journal of Economic History, December 1945.

William Miller has made the chief and the best collection of biographies of business leaders. He has personally analyzed these materials and published four articles on them: 'American Historians and the Business Elite,' Journal of Economic History, vol. IX, No. 2, November 1949, which compares 190 business leaders of 1903 with their 188 political contemporaries; 'The Recruitment of the Business Elite,' Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. LXIV, No. 2, May 1950, which deals with the social origins of the business leaders of 1903 as compared with the general population; 'American Lawyers in Business and Politics,' Yale Law Journal, vol. LX, NO. 1, January 1951, which compares the social characteristics of the lawyers found among the business leaders of 1903 with those found among the politicians; and 'The Business Bureaucracies: Careers of Top Executives in the Early Twentieth Century,' Men in Business: Essays in the History of Entrepreneurship (Edited by William Miller) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), which discusses the business careers of the businessmen of 1903. Mr. Miller also gathered biographical material on 412 business leaders of 1950.

Under the direction of Miller at the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard University, a similar study was undertaken on industrial leaders of 1870-1879: see Frances W. Gregory and Irene D. Neu, 'The American Industrial Elite in the 1870's: Their Social Origins,' Men in Business.

An analysis of all three of these generations has been written by Suzanne I. Keller, 'Social Origins and Career Lines of Three Generations of American Business Leaders,' Columbia University Ph.D. Thesis, 1954. Using an approach similar to that of Miller, Fortune magazine analyzed a group of 900 top executives in 1952 - the three highest paid men in the 250 largest industrial corporations, the 25 largest railroads and the 20 largest utilities: The Nine Hundred,' Fortune, November 1952, pp. 132 ff., which consists of the largest contemporary sample available, good materials not adequately analyzed. Cf. also Mabel Newcomer, 'The Chief Executives of Large Business Corporations,' Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, Vol. V (Cambridge: Research Center for Entrepreneurial History at Harvard University, 1952-3), pp. 1-34, which deals with the chief executives of corporations in 1899, 1923, and 1948.

All such studies of career-lines, as well as others used in this book, are, however, readily liable to many technical difficulties of interpretation, the information needed is often very hard to come by, and one may quite easily be misled. For example, the superficial 'social origin' of Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey, judged by his father's occupation, is 'pleasant but not prosperous': he is the son of a Protestant minister who died when Clifford was sixteen. His uncle, however, was a state senator and, for 23 years, a state supreme court justice. (See Time, 18 October 1954, p. 21.) On the dangers inherent in using such career-line statistical studies as predictions of the course of social events, see Richard H. S. Crossman, 'Explaining the Revolution of Our Time: Can Social Science Predict Its Course?' Commentary, July 1952, pp. 77 ff.

The figures used in Sections 2 and 3 of this chapter are, unless otherwise noted, from Keller's analysis of Miller's data; in no case is this data used unless it is commensurate with other relevant studies: we may thus take those figures presented in the text as representing a general consensus of all the relevant studies done.

1. 'The Nine Hundred,' op. cit., p. 235.
2. As you extend the sample to more executives, the proportion of the top 900 executives in 1952 who graduated from college is roughly the same (about 65 per cent), but only about one-third of these have had post-graduate training. Of the youngest group of present-day exec-utives - those under 50 years of age - 84 per cent have graduated from college. See 'The Nine Hundred,' op. cit., p. 135.
3. See ibid., p. 133.
4. See the study of 127 executives in 57 leading companies reported by Business Week, 31 May 1952, pp. 112 ff. Seventy-two of the 127 executives received these extra benefits in addition to their salaries.
5. Cf. Business Week, 23 May 1953, pp. 110ff.
6. We do not know exactly for an adequate sample how long or how hard the executives work, but we do have a few recent facts about a small group of West Coast executives, all of whom received salaries of $35,000 or more; we are not given data on how much they own or get from dividends. Some 37 out of this group of 111 men got to work at about 10 a.m., quit around 3 p.m., 'took three-hour lunches, played golf or went fishing two or three times a week, often stretched their weekends to lour or five days. All but five of this group owned their own companies or were officers of small local businesses.' Only 10 men (nine per cent) worked a straight 40-hour week. But 64 (some 58 per cent) worked very hard indeed: 'They were almost all employees of large national corporations... They worked from 69 hours a week to as high as 112, and I mean all work... Most were in the office by 8, left at 6:30 with a pile of homework; when they went out to dinner (an average of three times a week), it was always on business.' From a study done by Arthur Stanley Talbott, as reported in Time, 10 November 1952, p. 109.

1. The New York Times, 10 April 1955, p. 74.
2. See 'Why Don't Businessmen Read Books?' Fortune, May 1954.
3. William Miller, 'American Lawyers in Business and Politics,' op. cit. p. 66.
4. Since they were about 29 when they first joined their companies, and have been in them about the same length of time - 29 years - and have been in the present job 6 years, it took them an average of 23 years to reach the top. These and the figures in the two paragraphs of the text, are from, or re-classified from, "The Nine Hundred,' op. cit.
5. Robert A. Gordon, Business Leadership in the Large Corporation (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1945), p. 71.
6. On the 'Number Two' executives, see, for example, Business Week, 2 January 1954 on the du Pont set-up.
7. See Business Week, 16 May 1953.
8. John L. McCaffrey in a speech of 10 June 1953 before the graduating class of the University of Chicago's two-year Executive Program, reprinted as 'What Corporation Presidents Think About at Night,' Fortune, September 1953, pp. 128 ff.
9. Cf. Business Week, 3 October 1953.
10. See Gordon, op. cit. p. 91; and Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York: Harper, 1954).
11. Both the letters of Lammot du Pont and Alfred P. Sloan were reprinted in The New York Times, 7 January 1953, pp. 33, 35.
12. The facts and quotation concerning Robert R. Young's fight to get control of the New York Central are from John Brooks, 'The Great Proxy Fight,' The New Yorker, 3 July 1954, pp. 28 ff. See also Business Week, 24 July 1954, p. 70.
13. See Business Week, 15 May 1954.
14. See The New York Post, 16 April 1954.
15. Cf. Robert Coughlin, 'Top Managers in Business Cabinet,' Life, 19 January 1953, pp. 111, 105.
16. The quotation concerning a high executive of the world's largest oil company is from Business Week, 17 April 1954, p. 76. On the self-perpetuation of executives like those already at the top, see Melville Dalton, 'Informal Factors in Career Achievements,' American Journal of Sociology, vol. LVI, NO. 5 (March 1951), p. 414.
17. See Keller, op. cit. pp. 108-111.
18. See 'The 30,000 Managers,' op. cit.; and Robert W. Wald, 'The Top Executive - a First Hand Profile,' Harvard Business Review, August 1954.

1. A recent survey by Booz, Allen & Hamilton showed that half of 50 major companies studied used only one man's opinion in rating executives; 30 per cent 'used several persons' opinions to evaluate ability, and only 20 per cent tried more scientific methods.' Business Week, 2 April 1955, p. 88.
2. Business Week, 3 November 1951, p. 86. Cf. also Mills, White Collar, pp. 106 ff.; and William H. Whyte, Jr., and the editors of Fortune, Is Anybody Listening? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952).
3. 'The Crown Princes of Business,' Fortune, October 1953, p. 152.
4. 'The Nine Hundred,' op. cit. p. 135.
5. The quotations and facts in these two paragraphs are from The Crown Princes of Business,' op. cit. pp. 152-3.
6. Ibid. p. 264.
7. The quotation from Fortune is from ibid. p. 266; and that from the executive is from an anonymous 'president of a well-known corporation,' loc. cit.
8. Ida M. Tarbell, Owen D. Young (New York: Macmillan, 1932), pp. 232, 113, 229-30, 121, and 95-6.
 

7. The Corporate Rich
1. On 'the managerial revolution,' see James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (New York: John Day, 1941); for a detailed comment on Burnham's view, see H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 'A Marx For the Managers,' Ethics, vol. LII, No. 2, January 1942. For the theory of the leading families, see Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families, 1937 (New York: The Citadel Press, 1946).
2. For the income distribution of 1951 compared with that of 1929, see Business Week, 20 December 1952, pp. 122-3; the income for both 1929 and 1951 is in terms of 1951 dollars. Cf. also Business Week, 18 October 1952, pp. 28-9.
3. For discussions of some of the general economic facts behind the changed income distribution, see Frederick Lewis Allen, The Big Change (New York: Harper, 1952), and Business Week, 25 October 1952, p. 192.
4. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 'Current Population Reports: Consumer Income,' Series P-60, No. 12, June 1953, p. 4.
5. The figures on declared income for 1949 and its sources are computed from U.S. Treasury Department, Bureau of Internal Revenue, 'Statistics of Income for 1949, Part I, Preliminary Report of Individual Income Tax Returns and Taxable Fiduciary Income Tax Returns filed in 1950' (Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), pp. 16-19.
6. Corporate dividends made up the largest share of those 81 people who received from one to 1.9 million dollars (42 and 45 per cent). Estates and trusts made up the largest share (48 per cent) of the money received by the 20 people in the 2 to 2.9 million-dollar income group. Capital gains accounted for 49 per cent of the money received by those earning three million or more. Dividends were, however, secondary sources in these two last highest groups - 39 and 43 per cent. See ibid, pp. 16-19.
7. Ibid. pp. 45-7.
8. Historical figures on million-dollar incomes from 1917 to 1936 have been compiled by the Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation of the Congress of the United States, 'Million-dollar Incomes' (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1938). In the years prior to 1944, individual incomes were not separated from estates and trusts. If one were to include these in the 1949 returns to make them comparable with the 513 in 1929, there would be 145 million-dollar incomes in 1949. On the proportion of families with incomes of less than $2,000 in 1939, see The New York Times,' (5 March 1952) presentation of Bureau of Census data.
9. 'Preliminary Findings of the 1955 Survey of Consumer Finances,' Federal Reserve Bulletin, March 1955, page 3 of reprint.
10. Simon Kuznets, an expert with tax-derived data, finds that the share in total income after taxes of the richest 1 per cent (which goes down to families earning a mere $15,000) of the population has decreased from 19.1 per cent in 1928 to 7.4 per cent in 1945; but he carefully adds: 'It must be evident from our presentation that we encountered considerable difficulty in contructing estimates with a high degree of reliability and in unearthing data for checking the several hypotheses.' Yet, his are the figures upon which the great leveling up' and the 'decline of the rich' theories are popularly based. These figures involve a certain amount of 'estimates' and 'adjustments' which could be debated in great detail; but, the important debate ought to concern the data from which they are 'estimated.' From what we know - and we know only a small part - of the legal and the illegal ways of the heavily taxed, we seriously wonder if the drop from 19.1 to 7.4 per cent is as much an illustration of how well the corporate rich have learned to keep information about their income from the government than of an 'income revolution.' No one, however, will ever really know. For the kind of official investigation required is not politically feasible. See Simon Kuznets, 'Shares of Upper Income Groups in Income and Savings,' National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., Occasional Paper No. 35, pp. 67 and 59; and Simon Kuznets, assisted by Elizabeth Jenks, Shares of Upper Income Groups in Income and Savings (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1953). For one debate over the methods employed by Kuznets by means of a different interpretation of tax data, see J. Keith Butters, Lawrence E. Thompson and Lyn L. Bollinger, Effects of Taxation: Investment by Individuals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), especially p. 104.

Incidentally, the proportion of income that goes for taxation of all kinds - which members of the several income levels pay - has not recently been studied with care. During the New Deal, however, the results of such a study by Gerhard Colm and Helen Tarasov for the TNEC (Monograph No. 3: 'Who Pays the Taxes?' see especially p. 6) revealed that a person earning from $1,500 to $2,000 a year paid 17.8 per cent of his income in taxes, and was only able to save 5.8 per cent; while someone earning ten times that income ($15,000 to $20,000) had just less than twice as high proportion of his income taken away by taxes (31.7 per cent) and was able to save over five times as high a proportion (32.3 per cent).

11. Such cost deductions in any given year reduce the amount of 'depletion allowance' since they reduce the size of the net income; but they do not affect the percentage allowed for depletion. See Roy Blough, The Federal Taxing Process (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952) p. 318.

All businesses were given a depletion boost as of 31 July 1954: instead of amortizing the cost of capital equipment bought equally over its entire useful life, two-thirds may now be deducted in the first half of its life. See The New York Times, 22 July 1954, pp. 1, 10.

1. See Time, 2 November 1953, p. 98.
2. On the gift tax, see Business Week, 7 August 1954, pp. 103104; and 13 November 1954, p. 175.
3. Business Week, 7 March 1953, p. 143.
4. Loc. Cit. On family trusts, see also Business Week, 9 October 1954, pp. 175 ff.
5. These facts and quotations concerning foundations are from Business Week, 19 June 1954, pp. 167-9, 173.
6. Business Week, 17 May 1952. A survey of some 164 representative corporations in 1952 revealed that only 8 per cent of them pay their executives by salary alone - cited by Richard A. Girard, 'They Escape Income Taxes - But You Can't!' American Magazine, December 1952, p. 16.
7. Girard, op. cit. p. 89.
8. At present such stock options are only open to executives who own less than 10 per cent of the company's stock; but there is talk of liberalizing the option to include big owners, although at prices slightly higher than the market prices, so that the owner-executive can retain control of the company's stock when new stock issues are floated. On executive stock options, see Business Week, 4 April 1953, pp. 85-8; and 17 July 1954, pp. 52, 54.
9. Business Week, 25 December 1954.
10. Ibid. 19 July 1952.
11. The New York Times, 17 October 1954, p. F3.
12. Group life insurance, health, accident, disability, and pension plans are increasingly popular among the corporate rich. On new trends in group life insurance and disability, see Business Week, 14 February 1953, pp. 78, 83; 26 September 1953, pp. 120, 122; and 24 July 1954; p. 65. On 'split-dollar' life insurance, see Business Week, 24 July 1954, pp. 64, 65.

1. Cf. Business Week, 20 June 1953, p. 183.
2. William H. Whyte, Jr., 'The Cadillac Phenomenon,' Fortune, February 1955, p. 178.
3. Cf. Business Week, 11 June 1955, p. 168 and 9 July 1955, pp. 40 ff.
4. Ernest Haveman, 'The Expense Account Aristocracy,' Life, 9 March 1953. Some 73 per cent of one sample of companies recently studied pay all or part of their key executives' club expenses - see Girard, op. cit. p. 88.
5. The New York Times, 22 February 1953, News of the Week Section, 'Journeys' End.'
6. See Business Week, 15 May 1954.
7. See Business Week, 16 October 1954.
8. See Business Week, 9 January 1954.
9. Girard, op. cit. p. 89. Sf. also Business Week, 29 August 1953.
10. Marya Mannes, 'Broadway Speculators,' The Reporter, 7 April 1955, p. 39.
11. Ernest Haveman, op. cit.
12. Honore de Balzac, The Thirteen (New York: Macmillan, 1901), p. 64.

1. Quoted in Look, 9 February 1954.
2. Honore de Balzac, op. cit.
3. See, for example, 'Hearings before the Subcommittee on Study of Monopoly Power of the Committee on the Judiciary,' House of Representatives, Eighty-first Congress, First Session, Serial No. 14, Part 2-A (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950), pp. 468-9.
4. Theodore H. White, Texas: Land of Wealth and Fear,' The Reporter, 25 May 1954, pp. 11 and 15. On Hugh Roy Cullen, see also The Washington Post, 14 February 1954.
5. The New York Times, 11 October 1953, p. 65. The Hatch Political Activities Act,' The New York Times continues, 'makes it illegal to give more than $5,000 to any one national group. But it allows an individual to give up to that amount to each of any number of separate organizations and permits each member of a family to make separate donations.'
6. Harry Carman and Harold C. Syrett, A History of the American People (New York: Knopf, 1952), vol. n, p. 451.
7. Jonathan Stout, 'Capital Comment,' The New Leader, 5 December 1942.
8. Quoted in The Reporter, 25 October 1954, p. 2.
9. John Knox Jessup, 'A Political Role for the Corporation,' Fortune, August 1952.
 

8. The Warlords
1. Cf. Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (Translated by Hannah D. Kahn) (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), especially pp. 226ff, and Livingston's Introduction, pp. xxii ff.
2. John Adams, Discourses on Davila (Boston: Russell and Cutler, 1805), pp. 36-7.
3. Cf. Ray Jackson, 'Aspects of American Militarism' Contemporary Issues, Summer 1948, pp. 19 ff.
4. 'Why An Army?' Fortune, September 1935, p. 48.
5. See Stanislaw Andrzejewski, Military Organization and Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), pp. 68 ff. The best book on 'militarism' in the west is undoubtedly Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism (New York: Norton, 1937).
6. The generals and admirals selected for detailed study were taken, in formal rank order - from top down - from official army, navy, and air force registers. The 1900 army men appear in the registers from 1895 through 1905, and include the following fifteen Major Generals: Nelson A. Miles, Thomas H. Ruger, Wealy Merritt, John R. Brooke, Elwell S. Otis, Samuel B. M. Young, Adna R. Chaffee, Arthur MacArthur, Lloyd Wheaton, Robert P. Hughes, John C. Bates, James F. Wade, Samuel S. Sumner, Leonard Wood, George L. Gillespie. Of the some 64 rear admirals appearing in the registers from 1895 to 1905, only those who appeared for at least three years were taken. This yielded 18 admirals, about the number appearing in any given year: George Brown, John G. Walker, Francis M. Ramsay, William A. Kirkland, Lester A. Beardslee, George Dewey, John A. Howell, William T. Sampson, John C. Watson, Francis J. Higginson, Frederick Rodgers, Albert S. Barker, Charles S. Cotton, Silas Terry, Merrill Miller, John J. Read, Robley D. Evans, Henry Glass. I wish to thank Henry Barbera for use of material from his M.A. thesis at Columbia University, 1954, in connection with the data on military careers of 1900 and 1950.
7. Gordon Carpenter O'Gara, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of the Modern Navy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943), p. 102.

1. Cf. for example, Business Week, 26 September 1953, p. 38.
2. Lieutenant Colonel Melvin B. Voorhees, Korean Tales (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), cited in Time, 3 August 1953, p. 9, as is the comment by Time.
3. The following factual information on the Pentagon is from a report in Time, 2 July 1951, pp. 16 ff.
4. The Hoover Commission, cited in Harold D. Lasswell, National Security and Individual Freedom (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), p.23.

1. See Hanson W. Baldwin, 'The Men Who Run the Pentagon, The New York Times Magazine, 14 February 1954, pp. 10 ff.
2. Cf. 'The New Brass,' Time, 25 May 1953, p. 21; 'New Pentagon Team,' The New York Times Magazine, 26 July 1953, pp. 6, 7; and Elie Abel, 'The Joint Chiefs,' The New York Times Magazine, 6 February 1955, pp. 10 ff.
3. Secretary Robert B. Anderson and Rear Admiral Homer N. Wallin. Admiral Wallin was removed from a top position in the Pentagon to the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton, Washington; the Admiral had, in effect, told Anderson to be content 'with broad policy and leave the details to the admirals.' See Time, 10 August 1953, p. 18.
4. See Hanson W. Baldwin, '4 Army "Groupings" Noted,' The New York Times, 9 May 1951.
5. 'New Joint Chiefs,' Business Week, 16 May 1953, pp. 28-9.
6. Hanson W. Baldwin, 'Skill in the Services,' The New York Times, 14 July 1954, p. 10C.
7. 'Insuring Military Officers,' Business Week, 15 August 1953, p.70.

1. S. L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire (New York: Wm. Morrow, 1947), pp. 50 ff.
2. See note 6 above. The army registers from 1942 to 1953 yielded 36 men, each of whom is a 4 or a 5 star general: George C. Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, Malin Craig, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Henry H. Arnold, Joseph W. Stilwell, Walter W. Krueger, Brehon B. Somervell, Jacob L. Devers, Mark W. Clark, Omar N. Bradley, Thomas T. Handy, Courtney H. Hodges, Jonathan M. Wainwright, Lucius D. Clay, Joseph L. Collins, Waide H. Haislip, Matthew B. Ridgway, Walter B. Smith, John E. Hull, James A. Van Fleet, Alfred M. Gruenther, John R. Hodge, Carl Spaatz, Hoyt S. Vandenberg, Muir S. Fairchild, Joseph T. Mc-Narney, George C. Kenny, Lauris Norstad, Benjamin Chidlaw, Curtis E. LeMay, John K. Cannon, Otto P. Weyland.

The typical general of 1950 was born in the mean year of 1893 of American parents and is of British ancestry. It took him 35 years, from the first year at the academy or the service, to reach his top command status or generalcy at the age of 52. His father was a professional and from the upper-middle class, and probably had political friendships or connections. The typical general graduated from West Point, besides graduating from four schools in the Army. If he is religious, he is probably Protestant and maybe Episcopalian. He has married (endogomously) an upper-middle class girl and her father might have been a General, a professional, or a businessman. He belongs to about three clubs, e.g., the Army-Navy, Army-Navy Country, and the Masons. He has written about two books and someone has written something about him. He has also received two honorary degrees and probably expects to receive more.

The 25 navy admirals and fleet admirals of 1950 selected were: Harold R. Stark, Ernest J. King, Chester W. Nimitz, Royal E. Ingersoll, William F. Halsey, Raymond A. Spruance, William D. Leahy, Jonas H. Ingram, Frederick J. Horne, Richard S. Edwards, Henry K. Hewitt, Thomas C. Kinkaid, Richoon K. Turner, John H. Towers, Devvitt C. Ramsey, Louis E. Denfield, Charles M. Coke, Richard L. Conollv, William H. P. Blandy, Forrest P. Sherman, Arthur VV. Radford, William M. Fechteler, Robert B. Carney, Lynde D. McCormick, Donald B. Duncan.

The Admiral of 1950 was born in the mean year of 1887, of American parents and is of British ancestry. It took 40 years to reach the top command post from the year he entered the Naval Academy, and he was 58 when this occurred. He was born somewhere in the Eastern-North-Central section of the U.S. and grew up in the middle Atlantic region. He was born in an urban area and his rather was a military man when the admiral was about 17 years old. The father's class level at this time was upper-middle and the family might have had some key political connections. He graduated from the Naval Academy and had some college previously. While in service he graduated, also, from a specialty school, e.g., the Naval War College (the top school for commanders and captains). His religion is Episcopalian and his father-in-law is from the upper-middle class and is either in the professional or the business world. He has possibly written one book or is now writing one. He may have received an honorary degree, if not, anticipates one soon.

1. 'Who's in the Army Now?' Fortune, September 1935, p. 39.
2. Katharine Tupper Marshall, Together (New York: Tupper and Love, Inc., 1946), pp. 8, 17, 22. See also Anne Briscoe Pye and Nancy Shea, The Navy Wife (New York: Harper, 1949).
3. Helen Montgomery, The Colonel's Lady (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1943), pp. 207, 151, 195.
4. Time, 2 June 1952, pp. 21-2.
5. Business Week, 15 August 1954.
6. 'You'll Never Get Rich,' Fortune, March 1938, p. 66.
7. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1898;, pp. 247-9.
8. H. Irving Hancock, Life at West Point (New York: Putnam, 1903), pp. 222-3, 228.
9. Out of the 165 men who had held the rank of general officer in the regular army for at least one year between 1898 and 1940, 68 per cent were West Point graduates, most of the remainder serving during the first decade of the century. Two per cent were of working-class origin; 27 per cent were the sons of professional men; 21 per cent, of businessmen; 22 per cent, of farmers; 14 per cent, of public officials; and 14 per cent, of military men. Sixty-three per cent were either Episcopalians or Presbyterians; 28 per cent were other types of Protestants; and 9 per cent were Catholics. See R. C. Brown, 'Social Attitudes of American Generals, 1898-1940,' University of Wisconsin Ph.D. Thesis, 1951.
10. For excellent accounts of professional military indoctrination, see Sanford M. Dornbusch, 'The Military Academy as an Assimilating Institution,' Social Forces, May 1955; and M. Brewster Smith's description of the Officer Candidate School of World War II, which is described 'mainly as an attack on the candidate's personality' and the 'building up of a positive officer's personality.' S. A. Stouffer, et. al. The American Soldier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), vol. I, pp. 389 90.

1. 'At the outbreak of World War I, West Pointers constituted 43 per cent of the Regular officers of the army. At its close they occupied the principal positions of responsibility ... All army commanders, and 34 out of 38 division and corps commanders came from the Academy. At the time of World War II, although West Pointers were only about 1 per cent of the total officer corps, at the close of the war they held 57 per cent of the division and higher combat commands.' Major General Maxwell D. Taylor, West Point: Its Objectives and Methods (West Point, November 1947), pp. 16-17.
2. Quoted in Ralph Earle, Life at the U.S. Naval Academy (New York: Putnam, 1917), p. 167.
3. Earle, op. cit. pp. 165, 79, 162-3.
4. Cf. John P. Marquand, 'Inquiry Into the Military Mind,' The New York Times Magazine, 30 March 1952, pp. 9 ff.
5. Cf. C. S. Forester, The General (New York: Bantam Edition, 1953), p. 168.
 

9. The Military Ascendancy
1. For example, John K. Galbraith, review of John W. Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics in The Reporter, 27 April 1954, pp. 54 ff.
2. 'The U.S. Military Mind,' Fortune, February 1952, p. 91.
3. See Time, 18 August 1952, p. 14.
4. Hanson W. Baldwin, The New York Times, 21 February 1954, p. 2. Cf. also the article by James Reston, ibid. p. 1.

1. Time, 7 July 1954, p. 22.
2. Hanson W. Baldwin, 'Army Men in High Posts,' The New York Times, 12 January 1947.
3. The New York Times, 15 November 1954 and 9 November 1954.
4. See the editorial, 'The Army in Politics,' The New Leader, 11 March 1944, p. 1.
5. Hanson W. Baldwin, The New York Times, 2 April 1952.
6. Cf. The New York Times, 15 November 1954.
7. General MacArthur, speaking in New York in March 1953, and in Boston in 1951, quoted in The Reporter, 16 December 1954, p. 3.
8. Mark Skinner Watson, The War Department; Vol. 1: Chief of Staff, Pre-War Plans and Preparations (Washington: Historical Division of the Department of the Army, 1950); Maurice Matloff and Edwin M. Snell, The War Department, Vol. II: Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1941-42 (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, Dept. of the Army, 1953); R. S. Cline, The War Department, Vol. III: Washington Command Post: The Operations Division (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, Dept. of the Army, 1954. These three volumes are the best sources on the details of the military ascendancy in the political realm just before and during World War II.

1. Edward L. Katzenbach, Jr., 'Information as a Limitation on Military Legislation: A Problem in National Security,' Journal of International Affairs, vol. III, No. 2,1954, pp. 196 ff.
2. Robert Bendiner, The Riddle of the State Department (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942), p. 135. On the foreign service in general, see also the article prepared by the staff of the Foreign Service, 'Miscellaneous Staff Studies Pertaining to the Foreign Service,' Foreign Affairs Task Force, Appendix VIIA, 1 September 1948; J. L. Mc-Camy, The Administration of American Foreign Affairs (New York: Knopf, 1950); The Diplomats: 1919-1939 (Edited by Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953); C. L. Sulzberger in The New York Times, 8 November 1954; and Henry M. Wriston, 'Young Men and the Foreign Service,' Foreign Affairs, October 1954, pp. 28-42.

1. Based upon a study of the careers of the 20 top ambassadors of 1899 who earned salaries of $10,000 or more. On two of these men (Hart and Townsend) we could not find adequate information. The 20 men and the 23 countries included are as follows: Argentina - William I. Buchanan; Austria - Addison C. Harris; Belgium - Lawrence Townsend; Chile - Henry L. Wilson; Brazil - Charles Page Bryan; China - Edwin H. Conger; Colombia - Charles Burdett Hart; Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Salvador - William L. Merry; France - Horace Porter; Germany - Andrew D. White; Great Britain - Joseph H. Choate; Guatemala and Honduras - W. Godfrey Hunter; Italy - William F. Draper; Japan - Alfred E. Buck; Mexico - Powell Clayton; Peru - Irving B. Dudley; Russia - Charlemagne Tower; Spain - Bellamy Storer; Turkey - Oscar S. Straus; Venezuela - Francis Loomis. I wish to thank Mr. Friedman for his research on this project.
2. Of the 53 British Ambassadors from 1893-1930, 76 per cent came from the Foreign Service. Cf. D. A. Hartman, 'British and American Ambassadors: 1893-1930,' Economica, vol. XI, August 1931, pp. 328 ff., especially p. 340.
3. Data compiled from the U.S. State Department, Foreign Service List by Sylvia Feldman and Harold Sheppard in a course on the "Sociology of the Professions,' at the University of Maryland, Spring 1943.
4. The New York Times, 7 February 1954, p. 27.
5. Walter H. Waggoner, The New York Times, 3 December 1952, p. 12.

20. We selected for study the men in the 25 countries judged to be either the more powerful countries in the world or to be centers of interest because of location or natural resources for the more powerful countries. Those selected were: Greece - Cavendish W. Cannon; Yugoslavia - James W. Riddleberger; Egypt - Jefferson Caffrey; Indonesia-Hugh S. Comming Jr.; Portugal - Robert M. Guggenheim; England -  Winthrop W. Aldrich; Spain - James Clement Dunn; Mexico - Francis White; U.S.S.R.-Charles E. Bohlen; India-George V. Allen; Canada-R. Douglas Stuart; France - C. Douglas Dillon; Czechoslovakia - George Wadsworth; Union of South Africa - Waldemar J. Gullman; Italy - Clare Booth Luce; Korea - Ellis O. Briggs; Formosa - Karl L. Rankin; Iran -  Loy W. Henderson; Israel - Monnett B. Davis; Japan - John M. Allison; Austria - Llewellyn E. Thompson; Poland - Joseph Flack; Australia-Amos J. Peaslee; Vietnam - Donald R. Heath; Turkey - Aura M. Warren.

I. In England, still the most coveted diplomatic post, Winthrop W. Aldrich is a millionaire banker and brother-in-law of John D. Rockefeller

II. In France, C. Douglas Dillon is a graduate of Groton and, like Aldrich, of Harvard, the son of the founder of the banking firm of Dillon, Read & Co. Mid-west banking and business interests are represented in Canada by R. Douglas Stuart; Amos J. Peaslee, Ambassador to Australia, is an expert in international law, prominent Republican, son of a banker and a descendant of an old colonial family; Robert M. Guggenheim in Portugal is the son of one of the founders of the Guggenheim fortune; and in Italy, Mrs. Clare Booth Luce.

The countries to which the career diplomats were appointed were: Japan, Korea, Israel, Poland, the Union of South Africa, Vietnam, India, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Formosa, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, Indonesia, Iran, Yugoslavia, Spain and Austria. In only one important countryRussia - is there a career diplomat, Charles E. Bohlen - and his appointment was very nearly not confirmed by the Senate. Like most of the career men in the Foreign Service, Bohlen came from an upper-class family - his father being a 'well-known sportsman'; Bohlen was educated at St. Paul's School and was a member of the Porcellian Club at Harvard. See The New York Post, 8 March 1953.

1. Cf. Marquis Childs in The New York Post, 16 January 1955; and William V. Shannon, The New York Post, 13 March 1955, pp. 5, 8.
2. Quoted by C. L. Sulzberger, 'Foreign Affairs,' The New York Times, 8 November 1954.
3. Charlotte Knight, 'What Price Security,' Colliers, 9 July 1954, p. 65.

1. Theodore H. White, Fire in the Ashes (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1953), p. 375.
2. See The New York Times, 7 November 1954, p. 31, and 13 and 14 December 1954; and The Manchester Guardian, 11 November 1954, p. 2.

1. Louis J. Halle, in a letter to the editors of The New York Times, 14 November 1954, p. 8E.
2. George F. Kennan, cited in The New York Post, 16 March 1954.
3. The information and quotations on military attaches in both the text and the footnote are from Hanson W. Baldwin, 'Army Intelligence -I,' The New York Times, 13 April 1952, p. 12.
4. See Burton M. Sapin and Richard C. Snyder, 'The Role of the Military in American Foreign Policy' (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1954), pp. 33-4.
5. The Economist, 22 November 1952.
6. See Edgar Kemler, 'No. 1 Strong Man,' The Nation, 17 July 1954, pp. 45 ff.
7. See Time, 23 August 1954, p. 9.
8. See Thomas J. Hamilton, The New York Times, 15 August 1954, p. E3.

1. Arthur Maass, Muddy Waters: The Army Engineers and the Nation's Rivers (New York: Harper, 1951), p. 6. Cf. also his article with Robert de Roos, 'The Lobby That Can't Be Licked,' Harpers, August 1949.
2. C. E. and R. E. Merriam, The American Government (New York: Ginn & Co., 1954), pp. 774, 775.
3. Eric Sevareid's column in The Reporter, 10 February 1955. Cf. The New York Times, 14 February 1954. By 1954, The Strategic Air Command alone represented 'a direct fixed capital investment of upwards of $8.5 billion. This covers mainly the cost of its aircraft and bases. The largest U.S. industrial corporation in point of assets is Standard Oil of New Jersey, with its approximately $5.4 billion. And SAC's 175,000 "employees" are not too far from Jersey Standard's 119,000 in employee-assets ratio. Like oilmen, SAC men operate a lot of expensive equipment. (The extreme case is the B-47 crew of three taking up more than $2 million worth.) The assets comparison cannot be pressed very far, however, for the $8.5 billion figure is only a part of SAC's true cost, a complete accounting of which would include a pro rata share of the equipment and installations of other commands (United States Air Forces in Europe, Military Air Transport, Air Material Command, Research and Development, and others) contributory to SAC's operation. A true figure would run well above $10 billion.' John McDonald, 'General LeMay's Management Problem' Fortune, May 1954, p. 102.
4. Levin H. Campbell, The Industry-Ordnance Team (New York: Whittlesey House, 1946), pp. 3-4.
5. 'The S.O.S.,' Fortune, September 1942, p. 67.
6. Major General Lucius D. Clay, General Staff Corps, Assistant Chief of Staff for Material, 'The Army Supply Program,' Fortune, February 1943, p. 96.
7. 'The U.S. Military Mind,' Fortune, February 1952, p. 91.
8. For details on the coincidence of military and economic views of reconversion, see Bruce Catton, The Warlords of Washington (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948), esp. pp. 245-88.
9. 'Generals - Then and Now,' The New York Times Magazine, 7 March 1954, pp. 78-79; U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Transcript of Hearing Before Personnel Security Board, 12 April 1954 through 6 May 1954 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954), pp. 163 and 176; The New York Times, 20 August 1954 and 15 February 1955; Business Week, 19 December 1953, 9 October 1954, 27 June 1955; For many other names and positions, see 'The Military Businessmen,' Fortune, September 1952, p. 128 f.

1. See loc. cit. and Business Week, 9 August 1952.
2. The U.S. Military Mind,' op. cit.
3. Arthur Krock, The New York Times, 5 April 1953, News of the Week section.
4. John Blair, et al. Economic Concentration and World War II (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), pp. 51 ff. See also 'Special Report to Executives: Science Dons a Uniform,' Business Week, 14 September 1946, pp. 19 ff; and 'The New World of Research,' Business Week, 28 May 1954, pp. 105 ff.
5. The New York Times, 5 October 1954.
6. See 'Government and Science,' The New York Times, 18 October 1954, p. 24.
7. Quoted in The New York Times, 19 October 1954, p. 12.
8. In a letter to the Editor of The Reporter, 18 November 1954, p. 8.

1. See Theodore H. White, 'U.S. Science: The Troubled Quest - II,' The Reporter, 23 September 1954, pp. 26ff. For a comparison with the number of scientists in Russia, see The New York Times, 8 November 1954.
2. See Theodore H. White, 'U.S. Science: The Troubled Quest-II,' op. cit., pp. 27 ff; and Philip Rieff, 'The Case of Dr. Oppenheimer,' The Twentieth Century, August and September 1954.
3. Benjamin Fine, 'Education in Review,' The New York Times, 8 March 1953, News of the Week Section.
4. See John M. Swomley Jr., 'Militarism in Education' (Washington, D.C.: National Council Against Conscription, February 1950), pp. 65-7.
5. See The New York Times, 22 August 1953, p. 7.
6. See John M. Swomley Jr., 'Press Agents of the Pentagon' (Washington, D.C.: National Council Against Conscription, July 1953), pp. 16-18.
7. Ibid. pp. 13 and 9.
8. Quoted in Time, 29 June 1953.
9. On factors working for the success of the military publicists, see Swomley Jr., 'Press Agents of the Pentagon,' op. cit. pp. 53-4.
10. Alfred Vagts, The History of Militarism (New York: Norton, 1937).
11. Quoted in Samuel E. Morison and Henry S. Commager, Growth of the American Republic, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), vol. 2, p. 468.
12. Wm. O. Douglas and Omar N. Bradley, 'Should We Fear the Military?' Look, II March 1952.
 

10. The Political Directorate
1. The lead to this chapter is adapted from Robert Bendiner, 'Portrait of the Perfect Candidate,' The New York Times Magazine, 18 May 1952, pp. 9 ff.
2. On power as the politician's major motive, see Harold D. Lasswell. Power and Personality (New York: Norton, 1948) p. 20.
3. Unless otherwise cited, all statistical data presented in section 1 of this chapter come from an original study of the origins and careers of the occupants of the positions cited below between 1789 and June 1953. For an earlier release of materials from this study, which did not include the Eisenhower administration, see C. Wright and Ruth Mills, 'What Helps Most in Politics,' Pageant, November 1952. Cf. also H. Dewey Anderson, 'The Educational and Occupational Attainments of our National Rulers,' Scientific Monthly, vol. xxxx, pp. 511ff; and Richard B. Fisher, The American Executive (Hoover Institute and Library on War, Revolution and Peace; Stanford University Press)

If we would understand the higher politician, we must collect information about not one or two, or even fifty, but about the several hundred statesmen who have occupied the highest political offices, and in that simple sense, are the political elite. The statistics presented in this note concern the 513 men who between 1789 and June 1953 occupied the following positions: President, Vice-President, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Cabinet Member, and Supreme Court Justice. To call any selection of men 'the statesmen' or 'the political elite' is to invite disagreement about their selection. In this selection, I have tried to include only the very pinnacles of the American government. The major omission involves the legislators: even to include the committee chairmen of the House and Senate over such a long period was beyond my means of research. Yet such men are the prototypes of 'the politician.' In this section, however, I am not interested in the American politician at large, but in those who have been at the formal head of the government. Whether they are party politicians or not is one thing I am trying to find out. It is quite true that at times leading members of the Senate, and even governors of key states, have exercised national political power without ever having served in one of the top governmental positions studied here. But many senators and governors are caught in the net which I have thrown: of the 513 men, 94 have been governors and 143 have been United States Senators. I do not contend, of course, that those who occupied these positions and who later occupied one of the positions from which I have selected the 513 statesmen were the most powerful and important senators and governors. 'Party politicians' as such are discussed in ELEVEN: The Theory of Balance.

Six out of ten of the 500-odd men who have come to the top of the government during the course of United States history have come from quite prosperous family circumstances, being comfortable boys whose fathers were usually the prosperous and often the wealthy men of local society. Their families - which were among the upper 5 or 6 per cent of the American population - could well afford to give them distinct advantages in the selection and pursuit of their careers: 28 per cent are from the distinctly upper class of landed wealth, big merchants, industrialists, financiers of nation-wide prominence, or professional families of great wealth and national standing; 30 per cent are from the prosperous upper-middle class of businessmen, farmers, and professionals, who, although not of national stature, nevertheless were quite successful and prominent in their respective localities.

Two or three out of ten (24 per cent) have come from that middle class which is neither rich nor poor; their fathers were generally respected businessmen or farmers, or were in the professions of law and medicine - or were dead at the time the future statesmen left school, leaving their otherwise prosperous families in less comfortable, but manageable, circumstances.

The final two out of ten (18 per cent) originate in lower-class families - 13 per cent from small-business or small-farming families that did not do so well, but could readily hold their heads above dire poverty; and 5 per cent from the class of wage workers or destitute small businessmen and farmers.

Occupationally, in each and every generation, the statesmen have come from business and professional families in much greater proportions than the proportions of such families in the population at large. Professional men in the occupied population have never exceeded 7 per cent, and over the years have averaged about 2 per cent; but 44 per cent of this political elite have come from such fathers' homes. Businessmen have never exceeded 10 per cent of the total American labor force, but 25 per cent of the political elite have been sons of businessmen. Farmers have never dropped below 18 per cent and have averaged over 50 per cent of the working force, but only 27 per cent of the political elite come from farmsteads. Moreover, the 'farmers' whose sons have entered the political elite have been much more often prosperous than not.

It has seldom been a disadvantage for a man bent on entering politics to have a father who is the governor of the state or a senator in Washington. Even an uncle or a father-in-law in such positions can be very helpful. At least 25 per cent of these higher politicians have had fathers who were in some kind of political office about the time the sons left school, and when the political connections of all relatives are considered, we find that at least 30 per cent of the statesmen are known to have had such political connections at the time they were setting out on their careers. In this there is some decrease: before the end of the Civil War, about four out of ten, after the Civil War, about three out of ten, had political connections among relatives.

There have been, of course, political dynasties in American politics. Yet, it can safely be said that throughout United States history well over half of the higher politicians have come from families not previously connected with political affairs. They come more frequently from families highly placed in terms of social and economic position than political influence.

Since so many of the higher politicians come from families with distinct advantages to offer, it is not surprising that no less than 67 per cent of them have graduated from college. Even today - the historical peak of American education - only 6 or 7 per cent of all the people in the United States old enough to have gone, have, in fact, gone to college. But in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when very few people indeed were college-educated, 54 per cent of the men then holding high political positions had graduated from college. Generally, each generation of the higher politicians has included larger proportions of college graduates, thus paralleling, on a much higher level, the educational history of Americans at large.

Moreover, the colleges they attended have more often been of the Ivy League than is the case for the ordinary college graduate. Harvard and Princeton lead with about 8 per cent each of all the higher politicians among their alumni; Yale is third with about 6 per cent. Slightly over one-quarter attended Ivy League schools, and well over one-third of those who went to any college went to Ivy League schools. If one includes such famous schools as Dartmouth and Amherst, then one-third of all the higher politicians, and 44 per cent of those who ever spent any time in college, went to top-notch eastern schools.

Over half of these men grew up on the Adantic seaboard, and were educated in the East. That the proportion is so large in spite of the western expansion is largely a reflection of the national hold die densely populated Middle Atlantic states of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey have held in the origins of top politicians. Despite the immigration to the United States of 40 million foreign-born between 1820 and 1953, only 4 per cent of the American statesmen have been foreign-born. Only 2 per cent of them grew up outside the United States - and most of this handful are of The Founding Fathers' generation.

The higher politicians in America have not only been politicians; in fact, only five of these 513 followed no careeer other than politics before entering their top positions. During the entire history of the United States, about three-fourths of them have been lawyers; almost one-fourth have been businessmen; a handful - some 4 per cent - have followed other careers. The industrialization of the American economy is directly reflected in the fact that over three times as many were businessmen immediately after the Civil War as just before it. Since then that fact has remained more or less constant: nearly one-third of the higher politicians since World War I have been businessmen; over 40 per cent of the most recent men, those of the Eisenhower administration, have been.

4. The following are the men and positions included as those 'in charge of executive decisions,' as of 2 May 1953: President Dwight D. Eisenhower; Vice-president Richard M. Nixon. The Cabinet: Secretary of State John Foster Dulles; Secretary of the Treasury George M. Humphrey; Secretary of Defense Charles Erwin Wilson; Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr.; Postmaster General Arthur Sommerfield; Secretary of the Interior Douglas McKay; Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson; Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks; Secretary of Labor Martin P. Durkin; Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Oveta Culp Hobby.

Sub-Cabinet - The Departments: Under Secretary of State Walter Bedell Smith; Director of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department Robert R. Bowie; Counselor to the Department of State Douglas MacArthur II; Deputy Under Secretary of State H. Freeman Matthews; Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Relations Thurston B. Morton; Under Secretary of the Treasury Marion B. Folsom; Deputy Secretary of Defense Roger M. Keyes; Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs Fred Seaton; Secretary of the Army Robert T. Stevens; Under Secretary of the Army Earl D. Johnson; Secretary of the Navy Robert B. Anderson; Under Secretary of the Navy Charles S. Thomas; Secretary of the Air Force Harold E. Talbott; Under Secretary of the Air Force James H. Douglas Jr.; Deputy Attorney General William P. Rogers; Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation John Edgar Hoover; Deputy Postmaster General Charles R. Hook Jr.; Under Secretary of the Interior Ralph A. Tudor; Under Secretary of Agriculture True D. Morse; Under Secretary of Commerce W. Walter Williams; Under Secretary of Labor Lloyd A. Mashburn; Under Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Nelson A. Rockefeller; Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission Lewis Strauss; Chairman of the Civil Service Commission Philip Young; Director of Mutual Security Agency Harold E. Stassen.

Sub-Cabinet - Executive Office of the President: Director of the Bureau of the Budget Joseph M. Dodge; Deputy Director of the Bureau of the Budget Percival F. Brundage; Director of the Office of Defense Mobilization Arthur S. Fleming; Deputy Director of the Office of Defense Mobilization Victor E. Cooley; Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Arthur F. Bums; Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Allen W. Dulles; Chairman of the National Security Resources Board Jack Gorrie.

White-House Staff: Assistant to the President Sherman Adams; Deputy Assistant to the President Wilton B. Persons; Secretary to the President Thomas E. Stephens; Press Secretary to the President James C. Hagerty; Special Counsel to the President Bernard M. Shanley; Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Robert Cutler; Special Assistant to the President C. D. Jackson; Administrative Assistant to the President Gabriel S. Hauge; Administrative Assistant to the President Emmet J. Hughes.

In obtaining information about these men, I have relied most consistently upon the sketches concerning them appearing in the various monthly issues of Current Biography in the early months of 1953. I wish to thank Mr. Roy Shotland for a preliminary memorandum concerning these men.

1. See Fletcher Knebel, 'Ike's Cronies,' Look, 1 June 1954, p. 61.
2. 'What goes on at Ike's Dinners,' U.S. News and World Report, 4 February 1955.
3. Theodore Roosevelt as quoted by Matthew Josephson, in The President-Makers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), p. 142; see also William H. Lawrence's review of Merriman Smith, Meet Mister Eisenhower (New York: Harper, 1955) in The New York Times Book Review, 10 April 1955, p. 3.
4. Herman Finer, 'Civil Service,' Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. III, p. 522.
5. The departments of the civilian government vary considerably as to whether or not they are covered by the existing civil-service regulations. Some agencies - such as the Forest Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Standards, the Interstate Commerce Commission - are highly professionalized. 'As a general rule, the more professional the agency, the more secure its personnel against job-hungry politicians.' See James MacGregor Burns, 'Policy and Politics of Patronage,' The New York Times Magazine, 5 July 1953, p. 24. The exception to this rule, of course, is now the State Department. Furthermore, promotion under civil service is supposed to proceed according to merit which is measured by progress reports. 'This system fails, however, to exclude personal favor inasmuch as a superior officer is still the judge.' Finer, op. cit. p. 521.
6. Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, vol. 6, p. 414.
7. Some 88 per cent of all government employees had tenure under the civil-service regulations; some of the remaining seven per cent were protected by a 1947 Executive Order to the effect that if an employee, after having been under civil service, had taken a non-civil-service job, his protection from removal was to be continued; others had been appointed for terms of office overlapping the new administration. Time, 20 July 1953, p. 14. Cf. also Burns, op. cit. p. 8; and 'On U.S. Jobholders,' The New York Times, 28 June 1953.
8. In 1953 there were 2.1 million full-time civilian employees in the United States and almost 200,000 employed outside the continental domain. About 1.2 million of these civilian employees worked in the Department of Defense; a half million in the Post Office Department, with the next largest group (178,402) employed in the Veterans Administration, followed by the Department of the Treasury (85,490) and the Department of Agriculture (78,097). Cf. The World Almanac 1954, p. 64.

1. On the 1500 'key officials' in the government, see the study made of them by Jerome M. Rosow, American Men in Government (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1949). The data on these 1500 men are from this study.
2. See Time, 12 January 1953, p. 18.
3. Business Week, 27 September 1952, p. 84.
4. See the remarkably forthright article, 'The Little Oscars and Civil Service,' Fortune, January 1953, pp. 77 ff.
5. See Time, 20 July 1953, p. 14. Not only career men who had risen through civil service to jobs not covered by it lost their job security - but also a miscellanea of government workers such as Coast Guard lamplighters and Hindi interpreters who 'do not fit into the regular civil-service merit system.'
6. Burns, op. cit. p. 8.
7. Business Week, 23 October 1954, p. 192.
 

11. The Theory of Balance
1. John Adams, Discourses on Davila (Boston: Russell and Cutler, 1805), pp. 92-3.
2. David Riesman, in collaboration with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), pp. 234-9, 260, 281, 250, 254-5.
3. George Graham, Morals in American Politics (New York: Random House, 1952), p. 4.
4. Cf. Irving Howe, 'Critics of American Socialism,' New International, May-June 1952, p. 146.
5. For such an approach, cf. Gerth and Mills, Character and Social Structure (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953).
6. Murray Edelman, 'Government's Balance of Power in Labor-Management Relations,' Labor Law Journal, January 1951, p. 31.
7. See E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1949), pp. 82-3.
8. Edelman, op. cit. p. 32.
9. Cf. David B. Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1951), pp. 506ff.
10. See Floyd Hunter, 'Structures of Power and Education,' Conference Report: Studying the University's Community (New Orleans: Center for the Study of Liberal Education for Adults, April 1954), for the composition of such cliques in a single city, and preliminary notes on his forthcoming book on the national scene.
11. E. H. Carr, op. cit. p. 80.
12. On the members of the 83rd Congress (1954), see Cabell Phillips, 'A Profile of Congress,' The New York Times Magazine, 10 January 1954, pp. 16 ff. On the members of the 1949-51 Congress, see Donald R. Matthews, The Social Background of Political Decision-Makers (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1954), p. 29. See also Madge M. McKinney, 'The Personnel of the Seventy-seventh Congress,' The American Political Science Review, vol. xxxvi (1942), pp. 67 ff.

13. Matthews, op. cit. pp. 30 and 23. Cf. also Mills, White Collar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 127-8.
14. Matthews, op. cit.
15. Ibid. pp. 24 and 26-27. Catholics were only 9 per cent of the Senators in the 83rd Congress. See the report of the National Council of Churches, cited in Time, 19 January 1953.
16. The quotation in the text is from Cabell Phillips, 'The High Cost of our Low-Paid Congress,' The New York Times Magazine, 24 February 1952, pp. 42, 44. Franklin Delano Roosevelt has even said of political office in general, that 'either the individual should have enough money of his own safely invested to take care of him when not holding office ... or else he should have business connections, a profession or a job to which he can turn from time to time.' In a magazine article in 1932, reprinted by Harold F. Gosnell, Champion Campaigner: Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York: Macmillan, 1952) and cited in The New York Times, 15 October 1952. Cf. also George B. Galloway, The Legislative Process in Congress (New York: Crowell, 1953). On the average total income of members of Congress in 1952, see Phillips, 'The High Cost of Our Low-Paid Congress,' op. cit.; and, on the raising of the annual salaries of Congressmen in 1955, see 'Congress Take-Home,' The New York Times, 6 March 1955, p. 2E.
17. Robert Bendiner, Spotlight on a Giant Hoax,' The Progressive, June 1955, p. 5.
18. See, for example, Martin Dies, Congressman-at-large from Texas, 'The Truth About Congressmen,' Saturday Evening Post, 30 October 1954, pp. 31 ff.
19. See Martin Dies, op. cit. p. 138; on John F. Kennedy, see The New York Times, 1 December 1952, p. 16. In the campaign of 1952, the late Senator from Michigan, 'Blair Moody and several committees working for him reported having raised $98,940. The Senator's personal report listed expenses of $37,224, while the Wayne County Committee for his campaign spent $36,224.' In all their campaigns of 1952, New York State Republicans reported that they had spent $227,290 with the Batten, Barton, Dustine and Osborne advertising agency and an additional $20,844 with other agencies. (Loc. cit.)
20. Fifty years ago, the Senator, even though he might be the 'representative from the railroads,' was a virtual patriarch in comparison with the Representative; for he was responsible to interests powerful enough to influence decisively the state legislature which elected him. But, since 1913, the directly-elected Senator has also had to maneuver among the multiplicity of interests which so often fragment the attention and compromise the policy of the Representative.On the parochialism of the professional politician, in general, see the excellent book by James MacGregor Burns, Congress on Trial: The Legislative Process and the Administrative State (New York: Harper, 1949), pp. 8, 14, 59, 142, 143.

21. Stanley High, quoted in Stephen K. Bailey and Howard D. Samuel, Congress at Work (New York: Henry Holt, 1952), p. 8.
22. There is an excellent description of a typical day in the life of a big senator and a key representative in Bailey and Samuel, op. cit.
23. For a good summary of the local 'issues' in the campaign of 1954, see Life, 1 November 1954, pp. 30, 20, and 21. The Senator who called his opponent 'dishonest or dumb or stupid and a dupe' was Irving Ives, quoted in The New York Times, 29 October 1954, p. 22.
24. Sixty per cent of the electorate were reported not to have thought about the 1954 campaign at all. Gallup poll of 4 October 1954, reported in Business Week, 30 October 1954, p. 29.
25. See Burns, op. cit. pp. 198 and 36. Not Norman Thomas, but Arthur Krock has said that 'the mix-up has gone so far that in some states and on some national issues, the voters have great difficulty in finding the major parties' dividing line ... one outstanding reason is... that administrations and major party platforms designate as national positions what are not national in fact... because in large sections of the country those under the same party label oppose these positions of the national majority.' The New York Times, 15 June 1954.
26. Burns, op. cit. p. 181. Cf. also pp. 123, 124, 182.
27. Cf. ibid. pp. 18, 19, 24.
28. See David G. Phillips, The Treason of the Senate, 1906 (Stanford, California: Academic Beprints, 1953).
29. See John D. Morris, 'The Ways and Means of Dan Beed,' The New York Times Magazine, 5 July 1953, p. 29.
30. Anonymous member of Congress, quoted by Dies, op. cit. p. 141.
31. See Murray Edelman, 'Government's Balance of Power in Labor-Management Belations.' op. cit. p. 35; and 'Governmental Organization and Policy,' Public Administration Review, vol. XII, No. 4, Autumn 1952, pp. 276 ff.
32. See the excellent account of the Senate Judiciary Anti-Monopoly Subcommittee, scheduled to undertake the Dixon-Yates and power inquiry by Elizabeth Donahue, The Prosecution Bests,' New Republic, 23 May 1955, pp. 11 ff.
33. See Edelman, 'Governmental Organization and Public Policy,' op. cit. pp. 276-83.
34. John K. Galbraith, The Great Crash (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), p. 171.
35. For one statement of presidential and congressional leadership, see Burns, op. cit. pp. 166 ff.
36. Cf. Otto Kirchheimer, 'Changes in the Structure of Political Compromise,' Studies in Philosophy and Social Science (Institute of Social Besearch, New York City), 1941, pp. 264 ff.
37. Those who would understand the present power system as a balancing society must accordingly either (1) smuggle in the old, decentralized society or (2) attempt to find a new equilibrium on the higher level within the new. For comments concerning (2), see six: 'The Chief Executives' and TWELVE: The Power Elite.'
38. Cf. Mills, White Collar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 54 ff.
39. Cf. Kenneth S. Lynn, The Dream of Success (Boston: Little Brown, 1955), pp. 148 ff.
40. Cf. Mills, op. cit. p. 65 and Chapters 13,14,15.
41. Cf. Mills, 'The Labor Leaders and the Power Elite,' Industrial Conflict (Edited by Arthur Kornhauser, Robert Dubin, and Arthur M. Ross) (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954), pp. 144 ff; and Mills, The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948). See also Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946).
 

12. The Power Elite
1. Cf. Elmer Davis, Rut We Were Rorn Free (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), p. 187.
2. For points used to characterize the first and second of these phases, I have drawn from Robert Lamb, 'Political Elites and the Process of Economic Development,' The Progress of Underdeveloped Areas (Edited by Bert Hoselitz) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952).
3. Henry Cabot Lodge, Early Memoirs, cited by Dixon Wecter, The Saga of American Society (New York: Scribner's, 1937), p. 206.
4. Lord James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (New York: Macmillan, 1918), vol. I, pp. 84-5. In pre-revolutionary America, regional differences were of course important; but see: William E. Dodd, The Cotton Kingdom (Volume 27 of the Chronicles of America Series, edited by Allen Johnson) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), p. 41; Louis B. Wright, The First Gentlemen of Virginia (Huntington Library, 1940), Chapter 12; Samuel Morison and Henry S. Commager, The Growth of the American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 177-8; James T. Adams, Provincial Society, 16901763 (New York: Macmillan, 1927), p. 83.
5. Cf., for example, David Riesman, in collaboration with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).
6. See the Hearings of the Pujo Committee, quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Knopf, 1955), p. 230; and Louis D. Brandeis, Other People's Money (New York: Stokes, 1932), pp. 22-3.
7. Richard Hofstadter, op. cit., p. 305.
8. Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York: Random House, 1952), p. 550.
9. For an excellent introduction to the international unity of corporate interests, see James Stewart Martin, All Honorable Men (Boston: Little Brown, 1950).
10. Gerald W. Johnson, 'The Superficial Aspect,' New Republic, 25 October 1954, p. 7.
11. See the Hearings before the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, Eighty-third Congress, First Session, On Nominees Designate Charles E. Wilson, Roger M. Keyes, Robert T. Stevens, Robert B. Anderson, and Harold E. Talbott, 15, 16, and 23 January 1953 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953).
12. Hearings before the Subcommittee on Study of Monopoly Power of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Eighty-first Congress, First Session, Serial No. 14, Part 2-A (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950), p. 468.
13. Cf. The New York Times, 6 December 1952, p. 1.
14. Floyd Hunter, 'Pilot Study of National Power and Policy Structures.' Institute for Research in Social Science, University of North Carolina, Research Previews, vol. 2, No. 2, March 1954 (mimeo), p. 8,
15. Ibid. p. 9.
16. Richard Hofstadter, op. cit., pp. 71-2.
17. Cf. Gerth and Mills, Character and Social Structure (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953).
18. Cf. Mills, 'The Conscription of America,' Common Sense, April 1945, pp. 15 ff.
19. Cf. Twelve of the Best American Schools,' Fortune, January 1936, p. 48.
20. Speech of Field Marshall Viscount Montgomery at Columbia University as reported in The New York Times, 24 November 1954, p. 25.
21. Cf. Dean Acheson, 'What a Secretary of State Really Does,' Harper's, December 1954, p. 48.
 

13. The Mass Society
1. See E. H. Carr, The New Society (London: Macmillan, 1951), pp. 63-6, on whom I lean heavily in this and the following paragraphs.
2. On elections in modern formal democracies, E. H. Carr has concluded: 'To speak today of the defence of democracy as if we were defending something which we knew and had possessed for many decades or many centuries is self-deception and sham - mass democracy is a new phenomenon - a creation of the last half-century - which it is inappropriate and misleading to consider in terms of the philosophy of Locke or of the liberal democracy of the nineteenth century. We should be nearer the mark, and should have a far more convincing slogan, if we spoke of the need, not to defend democracy, but to create it.' (ibid. pp. 75-6).
3. Cf. Hans Speier, Social Order and The Risks of War (New York: George Stewart, 1952), pp. 323-39.
4. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1952 -  first English edition, 1896), pp. 207. Cf. also pp. 6, 23, 30, 187.
5. Sergei Chakhotin, The Rape of the Masses (New York: Alliance, 1940), pp. 289-91.
6. Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization (New York: Scribner's, 1909), p. 93. Cf. also Chapter IX.
7. See Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922), which is still the best account of this aspect of the media. Cf. especially pp. 1-25 and 59-121.
8. Cf. Gerth and Mills, Character and Social Structure (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), pp. 84 ff.
9. J. Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931) p. 360.
10. Cf. Mills, 'Work Milieu and Social Structure,' a speech to 'The Asilomar Conference' of the Mental Health Society of Northern California, March 1954, reprinted in their bulletin, People At Work: A Symposium, pp. 20 ff.
11. A. E. Bestor, Educational Wastelands (Urbana, III.: University of Illinois, 1953), p. 7. Cf. also p. 80.
 

14. The Conservative Mood
1. Cf. Karl Mannheim, Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology (Edited and translated by Paul Kecskemeti) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), Chapter II: 'Conservative Thought,' pp. 74 ff.
2. See Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953), especially Chapter One. For a further discussion of Mr. Kirk, see Mills, 'The Conservative Mood,' Dissent, Winter 1954. For a sympathetic guide to Conservatism in America see the book by that title by Clinton Rossiter (New York: Knopf, 1955).
3. Cf. Mills, The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948), Chapter Six: 'The Liberal Rhetoric,' pp. III ff.
4. Cf. Kenneth S. Lynn, The Dream of Success (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955), p. 216.
5. When Senator Taft, before his death, was asked if he had read Russell Kirk's book, he replied that he did not have much time for books. See 'Robert Taft's Congress' and 'Who Dares to Be a Conservative?' Fortune, August 1953, pp. 95, 136.
6. See Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited (New York: Scribner's, 1950); and Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, 1932 (New York: New American Library, 1950).
7. Although the interpretation of 'McCarthyism' as having its roots in the status frustrated is now widely published, Paul Sweezy's and Leo Huberman's original article remains the most forthright account of it: The Roots and Prospects of McCarthyism,' Monthly Review, January 1954. See also articles by Peter Viereck, for example, 'Old Slums plus New Rich: The Alliance Against the Elite' and 'The Impieties of Progress,' The New Leader, 24 January and 31 January 1955. For a more sophisticated statement, see Richard Hofstadter, 'The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,' The American Scholar, Winter 1954-55. On the general theme of middle-class status, see Chapter Eleven: 'The Status Panic,' in Mills, White Collar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951).
8. See Robert Bendiner's excellent article, The Liberals' Political Road Back,' Commentary, May 1953, pp. 431 ff.
9. Archibald MacLeish, 'Conquest of America,' The Atlantic Monthly, August 1949.
10. Examples of The American Celebration are embarrassingly available. Unfortunately no one of them is really worth examining in detail: in order that the sort of thing I have in mind may be clear, by all means see Jacques Barzun, God's Country and Mine (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954). For a less flamboyant example, see Daniel J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); for a scatter of celebrants, see America and The Intellectuals (New York: Partisan Review Series, Number Four, 1953).
11. Cf. Mills, 'Liberal Values in the Modern World,' Anvil and Student Partisan, Winter 1952.
12. See the definitive examination of David Riesman and his work by Elizabeth Hardwick, 'Riesman Considered,' Partisan Review, September-October, 1954, pp. 548 ff.
13. See Business Week, 18 September 1954, p. 32; and Time, 12 July 1954, pp. 80-81.
14. The New York Times, 7 December 1952, p. 3F.
15. On big-time illegal enterprises, see various reports of the Kefauver hearings in 1950, especially Third Interim Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, 82nd Congress, 1st Session, Report 307.
16. Alfred R. Lindesmith, 'Organized Crime,' Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, September 1941, as abridged and adapted in Leonard Broom and Philip Selznick, Sociology: A Text with Adapted Readings (Evanston, Illinois and White Plains, New York: Row, Peterson, 1955), p. 631.
17. For the above items, see: Time, 28 June 1954, pp. 21-2; The New York Times, 19 September 1954, pp. 1, 8; ibid. 20 February 1954, pp. 1, 15; ibid. 24 February 1954, pp. 1, 15; and Time, 3 March 1952; Look, 9 March 1954, pp. 38 ff; The New York Times, 12 February 1954, pp. 1, 17; ibid. 16 March 1954; Time, 12 July 1954, p. 24 and The New York Times, 26 June 1954, p. 1, and 30 June 1954, pp. 1, 28.
 

15. The Higher Immorality
1. Cf. Mills, 'A Diagnosis of Our Moral Uneasiness,' The New York Times Magazine, 23 November 1952.
2. James Reston, The New York Times, 10 April 1955, p. 10E.
3. Sophie Tucker, as quoted in Time, 16 November 1953.
4. Cf. Mills, White Collar; (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 259 ff.
5. Cf. Mills, 'The Contribution of Sociology to Industrial Relations,' Proceedings of the First Annual Conference of the Industrial Relations Research Association, December 1948.
 

NOTES 431
1. James Reston, The New York Times, 31 January 1954, section 4, p.8.
2. The New York Times Book Review, 23 August 1953. But see also Time, 28 February 1955, pp. 12 ff.
3. Hearings Before the Committee on Banking and Currency, United States Senate, Eighty-fourth Congress, First Session (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1955), p. 1001.
4. John Adams, Discourses on Davila (Boston: Russell and Cutler, 1805).
5. In Perspectives, USA, No. 3, Mr. Lionel Trilling has written optimistically of 'new intellectual classes.' For an informed account of new cultural strata by a brilliantly self-conscious insider, see also Louis Kronenberger, Company Manners (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954).
6. Leo Egan, 'Political "Ghosts" Playing Usual Quiet Role as Experts,' The New York Times, 14 October 1954, p. 20.
7. Charles E. Wilson, quoted in The New York Times, 10 March 1954, p. 1.
8. John Adams, op. cit. pp. 57-8.
9. Cf. William Harlan Hale, 'The Boom in American History,' The Reporter, 24 February 1955, pp. 42 ff.
10. See Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (New York: D. Appleton, 1912), pp. 36, 146-7, 205-6.

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