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THE RICH and the SUPER-RICH a Study in the Power of Money Today by FERDINAND LUNDBERG

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THE RICH and the SUPER-RICH a Study in the Power of Money Today by FERDINAND LUNDBERG THE RICH AND THE SUPER-RICH A Study in the Power of Money Today BY FERDINAND LUNDBERG Lyle Stuart, Inc. • New York THE RICH AND THE SUPER-RICH. Copyright 1968 by Ferdinand Lundberg. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from Lyle Stuart except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review. Queries regarding rights and permissions should be addressed to Lyle Stuart at 239 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10003. EDITED BY EILEEN BRAND PUBLISHED BY LYLE STUART, INC. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG NUMBER 67-10015 Dedication: To Bernie and Lillian, Humanists of the Deed. Molto Affetuoso. Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we bad to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to acknowledge with gratitude the permissions granted by the following publishers to make somewhat extended quotations from the books here listed: To The Free Press of Glencoe for permission to quote from Robert E. Lane, Political Life, 1965 To Harper and Row, New York, for permission to quote from Joseph S. Clark, Congress: The Sapless Branch, 1964, and W. Lloyd Warner and James C. Abegglen, Big Business Leadership in America, 1955 To Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, for permission to quote from Alan Harrington, Life in the Crystal Palace, 1959 To Oxford University Press, New York, for permission to quote from C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956 To The Ronald Press Company, New York, for permission to quote from Louis Eisenstein, The Ideologies of Taxation, 1961, Copyright Beyond this I am obviously indebted and feel appropriately grateful to writers and publishers for all shorter quotations from other works, and to leading newspapers such as the New York Times, the late New York Herald Tribune and the Wall Street Journal for the many excerpts taken from their pages. Obviously nobody could have developed so large a canvas as that of the present book without summoning many scholarly witnesses. To mention all such here would be superogatory, as they are all prominently mentioned in the running text as well as in the appended notes. Needless to say, my debt to such is great and without them much would have been obscure which is now precise. However, much more work remains to be done in many areas that are yet obscure. Special thanks are due to the staff of the New York Public Library, Central Branch, which was unfailingly helpful over a long period in locating for me much not readily accessible or very well-known data. F.L. Contents* Note: This enormous (and enormously important) book is "under construction." As each chapter is finished, it will be added. (22 August 2000) I. The Elect and the Damned II Room at the Top: The New Rich III. Crime and Wealth IV. The Inheritors: I V. The Inheritors: II VI. Where Are They Now? VII. The American Plantation: A Profile VIII. Understructure of the Finpolitan Elite IX. The Great Tax Swindle X. Philanthropic Vistas: The Tax-Exempt Foundations XI. Ministers of Finpolity: The Upper Executives XII. The Republic of Money: The Pubpols XIII. The Cleverness of the Rich XIV. Finpolitan Frontiers XV. The Divine Spark among the Rich XVI. The Cream of the Quest XVII. Oligarchy by Default APPENDIX A. Largest Net Taxable Incomes since 1940 (after Deductions) APPENDIX B. Companies with Largest Total Assets One THE ELECT AND THE DAMNED Most Americans--citizens of the wealthiest, most powerful and most ideal-swathed country in the world--by a very wide margin own nothing more than their household goods, a few glittering gadgets such as automobiles and television sets (usually purchased on the installment plan, many at second hand) and the clothes on their backs. A horde if not a majority of Americans live in shacks, cabins, hovels, shanties, hand- me-down Victorian eyesores, rickety tenements and flaky apartment buildings--as the newspapers from time to time chortle that new Russian apartment-house construction is falling apart. (Conditions abroad, in the standard American view, are everywhere far worse than anywhere in the United States. The French, for example, could learn much about cooking from the Automat and Howard Johnson.) At the same time, a relative handful of Americans are extravagantly endowed, like princes in the Arabian Nights tales. Their agents deafen a baffled world with a never- ceasing chant about the occult merits of private-property ownership (good for everything that ails man and thoroughly familiar to the rest of the world, not invented in the United States), and the vaulting puissance of the American owners. It would be difficult in the 1960's for a large majority of Americans to show fewer significant possessions if the country had long labored under a grasping dictatorship. How has this process been contrived of stripping threadbare most of the populace, which once at least owned small patches of virgin land? To this fascinating if off-color question we shall give some attention later. Statements such as the foregoing on the rare occasions when they are ventured (although strictly true and by no means new)1 are bound to be challenged by the alert propaganda watchdogs of the established order. These proprgandists, when hard pressed, offer an incantation about a mythical high American standard of living which on inspection turns out to be no more than a standard of gross consumption. The statements must, therefore--particularly in this age of burgeoning one-sided affluence-- be monumentally and precisely documented and redocumented. Not that this will deter the watchdogs, who have limitless resources of casuistry and dialectic to fall back upon as well as an endless supply of white paper from denuded forests. Critical Scholarship Takes a Hand But (fortunately for truth) critical scholarship, roused from its one-time somnolence by echoing charges and counter-charges over the years, has finally been led to make penetrating, detailed, exhaustive and definitive revelations of the underlying facts-- although the findings of such scholarship are not featured in the controlled prints, are not publicly discussed and are not even alluded to in polite society. As far as the broad public is concerned in an age of unrestrained publicity, when even the martyrdom of a virile young president is made overnight into a profitable industry, the facts about the skeletons in the closet of the affluent society are shrouded in secrecy for all except those queer beings willing to delve for hours among dusty tomes in library crypts. Nonetheless, irreproachable scholarly analyses of diamond-hard official data fully support my initial assertions, which to the average newspaper reader. may seem incredibly. iconoclastic, ludicrously wrongheaded or the maunderings: of an idiot. Further along, some of the complex reasons for the odd situation will be touched upon, after the paramount position of the wealthy and the ways they are maintained have been fully depicted. A Nation of Employees Most adult Americans in the quasi-affluent society of today, successors to the resourceful (and wholly imaginative) Americano of Walt Whitman's lush fantasy, are nothing more than employees. For the most part they are precariously situated; nearly all of them are menials. In this particular respect Americans, though illusion-ridden, are like the Russians under Communism, except that the Russians inhabit a less technologized society and have a single employer, There are, of course, other differences (such as the fact that Americans are allowed a longer civil leash), but not of social position. And this nation of free and equal employees is the reality that underlies and surrounds the wealthy few on the great North American continent. Those few newspapers that make a practice of printing foreign news occasionally survey Latin American countries. The writers are invariably grieved to find a small oligarchy of big landowners in control, with the remainder of the population consisting of sycophantic hangers-on and landless, poverty-stricken peasants. But I have never seen it remarked that the basic description, with the alteration of a few nouns, applies just as well to the United States, where the position of the landowners is occupied by the financiers, industrialists and big rentiers and that of the peasants by the low-paid employees (all subject to dismissal for one reason or other just like the peasants). The Banana Republics These same writers, focusing attention on Central America, refer caustically to the "banana republics"--those countries, economically dominated mainly by the United Fruit Company, where political leaders are bought and sold like popcorn and where ambitious insurrectos from time to time overthrow earlier insurrectos who run the government for their own profit. But the United States, sacred land of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Madison--"Of thee I sing"--itself often displays many similar aspects, mingled with a heady atmosphere at times reminiscent of rural carnivals, Oriental bazaars, raucous gambling houses and plush bordellos. If anyone thinks I exaggerate he should notice how the mingled images of Coney Island, Atlantic City, Miami Beach, Hollywood, Palm Springs, Broadway, Las Vegas and Madison Avenue often disconcertingly float into plain view at political conventions, state funerals, elections, court proceedings and congressional hearings, much to the glee of enchanted but I fear disrespectful and unconsciously alienated spectators.
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