Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975)

by William Manchester

  On the Sunday after the trial two of Dr. Mundel’s supporters hurriedly summoned police to her apartment. She had not answered their urgent knocking, and a strong odor was seeping into the hall. Forcing an entrance, the policemen found her in a gas-filled bathroom; the window was tightly shut and the door calked. No charges were brought then, but after a night with friends she was accused of attacking her hostess with a letter opener. This time she was held in the Fairmont jail on charges of lunacy and assault, under constant supervision, until her sister arrived to take her home to Iowa. She went along quietly.

  In Defense of Snobs

  I discovered my snobbery the way most people learn grave truths about themselves these days, from an expert. I was discussing prison conditions with a sociologist, who agreed with me that they were bad and then went on to suggest extraordinary remedies. The first step, he said, was to change nomenclature; instead of penitentiaries, guards, and convicts, we must speak of penal hospitals, psychiatric aides, and social patients.

  “Then we can establish outpatient clinics,” he continued, “and give these sick people treatment. Remember, we’re dealing with the emotionally underprivileged. Basically they’re no worse than the rest of us.”

  I spent several years covering police courts for newspapers, and, remembering a certain ax murderer in Baltimore, I said, “They’re worse than I am.”

  A sharp exchange followed. The sociologist looked more and more upset. He had always known me as a liberal; a supporter of foreign aid, birth control and equality at the lunch counter. Now, clearly, I was sick. What was worse, I had a social disease.

  “I’m afraid you’re a snob,” he said diagnostically.

  I knew the word “snob” had evolved much during the past generation, but this was the first time I had heard it used in what is becoming its ultimate sense: to describe someone who regards himself better than anyone—literally anyone—else. I hope no one will confuse me with a Ku Kluxer when I say that I’ll have to get off here and walk back. I’ve passed my stop. I’m willing to grant that men often preen themselves for absurd reasons, but they’re not my kind of snob. I don’t see why the fact that some standards are idiotic means there oughtn’t to be any standards at all, and I refuse to slink away because I didn’t hear Caryl Chessman’s bell tolling for me.

  I refuse, in a word, to become an egalitarian. I am aware that I’m being unfashionable. In his classic work on snobs and snob worship, Thomas Carlyle observes that every age reverences its “gilt Popinjays” and “soot-smeared Mumbojumbos.” The current totem is this curious theory of equality. Of course, scarcely anyone calls it egalitarianism. Most egalitarians prefer to think of themselves as lower-case democrats. “We’re terribly democratic,” they say, and they are, they’re terribly democratic, though, of course, they don’t mean it that way. One of the conveniences of egalitaria is that if you denounce all precepts, you yourself needn’t conform to any. You needn’t, for example, use words properly. Someday I’m going to shove an egalitarian nose in The Oxford English Dictionary, whispering all the while in an egalitarian ear that democracy is a political concept, a form of government; that only in the last generation has it acquired its present significance. I doubt, however, that I shall be as successful as the managing editor of a large metropolitan newspaper, who appointed an assistant city editor and then found himself confronted by an office petition requesting him to change the appointment. “We’ve voted,” the chairman of the petition committee explained brightly. “We’re against Smith. We want Jones.” The editor, a Democrat at the polls but a snob elsewhere, turned on his heel. “I believe in democracy,” he snapped, “but this newspaper is not one.”

  If popular usage is undoing the concept of democracy, that of snobbery is already undone. William Makepeace Thackeray would be appalled to see the ruin of it. It was he who popularized the word, in whose changing definitions one can read a lot of social history, some of it splendid, some dismaying. In 1830, when Thackeray was a Cambridge undergraduate, a snob was a member of the community who wasn’t connected with the university—in short, a townie. Nobs were better than snobs, and that was that. Then Thackeray observed that certain members of the lower classes were getting uppity. Writing in Punch, he broadened the term to include them, giving it an interpretation almost precisely opposite its meaning today.

  Thackeray didn’t live to see his word and his world turned upside down. After his death, contempt for the dirty shirt was succeeded by contempt for the stuffed shirt. In England nobs were transformed into tax fugitives, in the United States Town and Country chronicled the blurring of class lines, and in Webster a snob became a man with an extravagant notion of his own worth. A dart once aimed down was now fired up. It was, in fact, becoming bad form to have any notion of worth at all. If you acquired a light, you cast about quickly for a bushel. As early as 1916 Yale athletes were observed wearing their letter sweaters inside out; today letter sweaters are rarely seen anywhere. Nor are Legion of Honor ribbons seen, nor Phi Beta Kappa keys, nor any of the bijoux of distinction in which people once took pride. In their place is a strange, false humility, sometimes ludicrous, sometimes moving. The most striking example of it I have ever seen occurred in the Summer of 1945, when a group of veterans of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were decorated by the U.S. Marine Corps, an organization of insufferable snobs devoted to democracy. As the ceremony broke up, men unpinned their medals and thrust them in their pockets and shuffled off, as though in shame.

  Preposterous? Of course. Yet it made a hideous kind of sense. Today a great war, a Depression, another great war, Vietnam, and Watergate have destroyed respect for the image of authority. It has become awkward to admit that you have the conn—awkward even to acknowledge achievements, since superiority of any kind is suspect. Thus everyone tries to look as much as possible like everyone else, and thus all distinctions which once separated man from man have become unsavory. Instead of football captains we have co-captains, or revolving captaincies which change with each game; instead of judges we have referees; instead of a chief executive we have a team; instead of a general-in-chief we have a chairman of the joint chiefs; and in lieu of graceful manners we have the cult of informality, which, in a way that eludes me, is regarded as a democratic virtue—as though Mirabeau and Tom Paine would have smiled benignly on jeans and come-as-you-are barbecues and, most frightful of all, the aggressive use of nicknames.

  The decline of formal address deserves special mention. It becomes increasingly difficult to find out to whom you’re talking. Everyone you meet is plain Pete, or Al, or Jane, or Jill. A President of the United States is Ike or Gerry. The Secretary of State is simply Henry the K. We know these men from their pictures, but what happens when you drop down a ledge or two? Confusion happens, that’s what. A dazzling Washington hostess I know holds parties around her swimming pool at which guests, clad in bathing suits, are introduced to strangers by coy diminutives. Once she led me to two elderly Englishmen dozing in the sun. “Billy,” she said, “This is Denny and Bobby.” Exit the hostess, into water. After a reticent, fumbling conversation I discovered that Denny was an eminent political scientist from Thackeray’s university, and Bobby had been an Air Vice-Marshal of the R.A.F. during the Battle of Britain. (“You have heard of the Battle of Britain, haven’t you?” he asked wistfully.)

  After such an affair men mutter to their wives—or, in this deliciously casual age, to the wives they happen to have in tow—“Who was that bearded Cuban? You don’t suppose….” No real harm done, though in public this custom, or absence of custom, can be highly embarrassing. When my first book was published I appeared in an hour-long radio program at the invitation of Mary Margaret McBride. There was another writer present, a gray, shaggily handsome man to whom she presented me moments before the broadcast. “Here’s Bob,” she told me. I was about to inquire further when I found we were on the air. I hadn’t his other name, so I called him by that one for the first ten minutes; then the mistress of ceremonies informed the aud
ience and me that this Bob had been awarded four Pulitzer prizes. He was Robert Sherwood. I writhed for the rest of the hour. I had no way to greet him. I could hardly start using his surname, yet Bob now stuck in my throat; at the age of twenty-eight I wasn’t his equal, and if Miss McBride did not realize that, Billy keenly did.

  Nominal equality has become a fetish in modern offices. Once an employee was expected to sir his boss. Now he’s not even allowed to mister him. Here and there a thin red line of snobs fights a gallant rearguard action (when Roy Howard ordered New York World-Telegram reporters to call him Roy, A. J. Liebling cited his record on the paper and concluded, “Now may I please call you Mr. Howard?”), but they are hopelessly outnumbered by dense squares of jovial executives who, during coffee breaks and at company parties, stridently insist that nobody rise, let’s not stand on ceremony, feel free, and remember, we’re all Joes here. One Joe may have absolute power over the other Joe’s career. One may be the pile-driving force behind the firm; the other may be a forelock-tugging serf. Still they speak as brothers, and if Big Joe has an order to deliver he prefaces it with some such groveling remark as, “Just let me give you my thinking on this,” or, “This is off the top of my head,” or, “Probably I don’t know what I’m talking about.” Is this democracy? I think it’s hypocrisy.

  In any event, snobbery is dead.

  Or is it?

  Twenty-five years ago Russell Lynes picked up Thackeray’s fallen pen and pricked what he called The New Snobbism. Like his predecessor, he recognized that the essence of snobbery is ego manipulation. Every honest snob will cheerfully acknowledge that. Lynes went on to say that since nearly every ego needs some titillation, we are all snobs of one sort or another. He listed some of the chief categories he had found: social snobs, intellectual snobs, regional snobs, moral snobs, sensual snobs, physical snobs and occupational snobs. We’ve all encountered varieties of these. In any group there are people who are proud of the schools they attended, or the clubs which have admitted them, or the books they have read, or the fact that they go to Florida every winter, or stay physically fit (or don’t), or can replace a faucet washer (or can’t), or have a taste for fine wines (or can’t tell one from another). Frequently the reason for a man’s vanity is as fatuous as that of Aesop’s fly, who sat on the axle of a chariot and marveled at the dust he raised, but often it is entirely justified: Omar Bradley is a famous soldier, Mayor Daley is a gifted politician. Anyhow, pride is here to stay; no vigorous society can do without it. The Russians tried to abolish distinctions in the twenties; by the thirties they had brought back fashion shows, hand-kissing, saluting, and full-dress clothes—for banquets on the anniversary of the Revolution.

  Today’s American effort is more determined, which brings us to Lynes’ final category—the reverse snob, or anti-snob snob. I have already introduced him as the egalitarian. He is the pious worshiper of the Divine Average, the man who adopts what Robert Frost described as a “tenderer-than-thou” attitude toward social problems. Sometimes he is as transparently bogus as the late Diego Rivera, who used to dress carefully in a khaki shirt and greasy corduroys before being driven in a limousine to rallies of Mexican workers. Other times he is pitifully sincere, like the president of the teachers’ federation who warned his colleagues several years ago that they were “in danger of considering themselves as just a little bit better” than the rank and file of laborers. At all times, however, he is bent on downstaging the rest of us, carrying himself with an air of craven modesty and reproaching with cow eyes everyone who holds himself erect. He is, as Lynes suggested, the worst sort of snob, and he behaves in execrable taste.

  No well-bred snob, for example, would dream of sneering openly at those who lack what he prizes. It would violate his sense of decency to imply that there’s something wrong about a house furnished with Grand Rapids imitations, say, or to let on that it’s a bit shaming to have been born outside Virginia (or Boston, or Charleston). I may give low marks to the man who prefers C. S. Forester to E. M. Forster, thinks Jackie Gleason funnier than Alec Guinness, enjoys Atlantic City more than Watch Hill, and orders a Scarlett O’Hara when martinis are available. I shouldn’t tell him that to his face, though; that would be shabby of me. The egalitarian has fewer scruples. He attacks religious snobs in the religious press, cultural snobs in parent-teacher journals (“What Can We Do About Snobbery?” “Don’t Raise a Snob!”), and intellectual snobs on the floor of the Senate. Evidence cannot stand against him: if genetic research turns up new evidence of inherited characteristics, then the geneticists are anti-democratic impostors. No national priority deflects him: on the eve of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, the superegalitarian J. B. Priestly actually charged in the London News Chronicle that the greatest threat to Great Britain was snobbery. And to simplify his argument, the enemy of standards has completely corrupted Thackeray’s meaning. Margaret Kennedy tells the story of a Welsh woman who learned that a neighbor’s daughter was about to be married, although not pregnant. She exclaimed, “There’s snob for you!”

  Against such tumidity the proper snob, a courteous chap, is almost helpless. “Snobbery,” wrote Dixon Wecter, “may be regarded as a form of self-protection against the social consequences of democracy.” Its critics notwithstanding, it is essentially defensive, and it seems to me that it grows more defensive each year. In the last generation a George Bernard Shaw could assert that England’s snobs were actually her greatest strength; a Virginia Woolf could defiantly proclaim her artistic superiority; a José Ortega y Gasset could observe that the average citizen is “incapable of receiving the sacrament of art, blind and deaf to pure beauty.” Today, either because of the bitterness of the assault or because the other-directed virus has infected even us, we snobs are more diffident, more anxious not to appear gross. And so the virtue of our time has become what Bertrand Russell ironically called “the superior virtue of the oppressed.” And so the gray tide of mediocrity rises higher and higher. Of mediocrity—and of worse.

  The greatest egalitarian gains were made in the years immediately after World War II. It was in 1946 that the Army’s Doolittle Board, goaded by wartime egalitarians like William Mauldin, stripped rank of its privileges. Indeed, it was a novel about the Army, James Jones’ From Here to Eternity, which most clearly expressed the reverse values of the new egalitaria. The measure of a man’s worth was in inverse proportion to his pay grade, education and civility. Anyone with a commission was an outcast. Women were similarly graded. The essence of purity was the prostitute. The faithful wife was a fallen sister.

  A subtler specimen of egalitarian literature is The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Sloan Wilson’s seraphim aren’t dope fiends and hookers, but like Jones, Nelson Algren, and Tennessee Williams he stands on his hands to look at the world. His protagonist is a man who wants to make more money. He leaves an easy berth for a job with a higher salary and discovers his new employer expects him to work. His reaction is moral outrage. He concedes that the employer is dedicated, but cannot admire him, because the old man is industrious and diligent—in approved cant, he is a driven neurotic. The employer is apologetic, as villains are in all sophisticated melodramas; he can only plead for understanding. “Atlas,” wrote Carlyle, “the hero of old has had to cramp himself into strange places: the world knows not well at any time what to do with him, so foreign is his aspect in the world!”

  In supporting this twaddle, the passionate egalitarian tirelessly generalizes from the specific. He had this second john, see, and the creep couldn’t even read a map. (Leaders are incompetent.) Talk about swinging from both sides of the plate—Charles Dickens kept a mistress. (Moralists are phonies.) A junior exec in the front office just fired a man for wearing Bermudas. (Bosses are blackguards.) But this is cheating. The issue is not whether rules are broken. It is whether we ought to have any rules at all. Snobbery’s quarrel with the anti-snob isn’t that he’s affronted by snobs who blot their copybooks, for he’s not; he exults in them; they support his argument.
This argument, and the real issue, is that every homo Sap is like every other homo Sap—that the differences between us are infinitesimal, and may be put down to external influence. If evil is done, society is to blame. If evil is redressed, society is triumphant. It naturally follows that anyone who believes this, and is honestly convinced that we are all children of the same gravid earth bitch, must regard any pretension as a bugbear and any authority as a fee-faw-fum.

  As illogical as a superstition, this notion also has a superstition’s power. It would be hard to find an American citadel free of its spell. Certainly the home isn’t. The dictatorial father of Freud’s time is virtually extinct. Once he roamed the land in vast herds, snorting virile snorts and refreshing himself in austere men’s clubs walled with fumed oak, before thundering home to preside over his cave. In the 1970s he exists as a flaccid parody of his grandfather, a comic figure on television programs whose cretin blunders are deftly corrected by his amused family. The teen-ager who wants to get married while in high school does so, because, as a mother explained to me, “Kids are people and have a right to make up their own minds.” Her husband was unreconciled, but he recognized that he was a low, atavistic creature, and he merely looked uncomfortable when she added airily, “We believe in democracy at home.”

  “Democracy at home.” Is this the last slogan of egalitaria? It is more than a slogan. It is a course of study in grade schools. Snobs suffered one of their first routs in public education; they have no friends among the jitney messiahs of bread-and-circuses curricula. The number of classrooms which vote on what they are to be taught is small, but pupils are polled on nearly everything else, including the personality of the teacher, the value of her instruction, and the real-life meaning of a course: “How many think Lincoln was well-adjusted? Hands, please.” Popular sovereignty extends to the intellectual coin of the realm, the language which, according to egalitarian dialectic, should be determined by a kind of continuing voice vote. If sufficient people say, “I feel badly,” or “It is me,” then grammatical snobs are confounded; the error is accepted. “That’s what we mean by usage,” an Ed. D. blandly explained to me, though he twitched when I asked whether he would endorse the usage of the Massachusetts legislator who said, “Teachers is cheap.”