The Second American Revolution and Other Essays 1976--1982

by Gore Vidal

  Dr. Coles notes a significant difference between rich and poor children. The poor tend to live in a long unchanging present while the rich have a future to look forward to. For the rich there is always “next year” when they will go to Switzerland to ski or to the West Indies to scuba-dive. Early on, rich children are trained to think of themselves as having a certain “entitlement” (Dr. Coles’s not so bad synonym for “privilege”—from the Latin for “private law”) to a way of life that despite numerous perils and often onerous obligations is bound to be satisfactory and worthwhile. Unlike the present-trapped poor, each child of privilege is acutely conscious of his own specialness. Dr. Coles defines this self-consciousness most elegantly: “With none of the…children I have worked with” (well, disregard those two inelegant “withs”) “have I heard such a continuous and strong emphasis put on the ‘self.’ In fact, other children rarely if ever think about themselves in the way children of well-to-do and rich parents do—with insistence, regularity, and, not least, out of a learned sense of obligation. These privileged ones are children who live in homes with many mirrors. They have mirrors in their rooms, larger mirrors in adjoining bathrooms….” Mirrored Ones or Reflected Ones might have been an even better title than Privileged Ones. At his best, Dr. Coles is himself something of a mirror, with fun-house tendencies.

  Certain themes emerge from these monologues. The collapse of the financial order in the early Thirties made a lasting impression on the parents of these children. The Depression convinced them of the essential fragility of what is now known as the consumer society. Menaced, on the one hand, by labor unions and, on the other, by the federal government, even the richest American family feels insecure. It is fascinating that this unease…no, paranoia (somehow or other they will ruin us) still persists after so many years of prosperity for the rich. But then, the privileged had a number of frights in the Thirties. One of my first memories was the march on Washington of war veterans in 1932. Demanding bonuses for having served in World War I, they were nicknamed Boners. I thought them Halloween skeletons. Then I saw them at the Capitol. They looked like comic-strip hobos. But there was nothing comic about the rocks that they heaved at my grandfather’s car. In due course, General MacArthur and his corps of photographers sent the Boners home; nevertheless, we knew that one day they would come back and kill us all. Like Cavafy’s urbanites, we waited with a certain excitement for the barbarians to return and sack the city.

  Dr. Coles’s children also fear the Boners. Only now they are called communists or liberals, blacks or Chicanos; and the federal government is in league with them. Worse, the Boners are no longer encamped outside the city; they have occupied the city. All streets are dangerous now. Apartment houses are fortresses; and even the suburbs and exurbs are endangered by “them,” and (recurrent theme) there is nowhere to go. Although some of Dr. Coles’s children talk of France and England as relative paradises (curious, the fascination with Europe), most are fatalistic. As an Alaskan girl puts it, “I hear Daddy tell Mom that he feels like taking all his money out of the bank and getting a compass and spinning it, and wherever it ends up pointing to, we would go there. But if it pointed straight north, we couldn’t go to live near the North Pole.” Meanwhile the son of a Boston banker reports that, “It’s hard to trust the help these days.” He worries about the house being robbed: “Someone tips off the crooks.” As for Boston, his mother “doesn’t like to walk even a block in the city when it gets dark….”

  Dr. Coles’s principal interest is how the rich regard the poor. This is a good subject. But one wishes that he was a bit less direct and on target in his approach. After all, there are a lot of ways to come at the subject. For instance, many of the children are pubescent or even adolescent; yet sex is hardly mentioned. Now the question of sexual role is every bit as political, in the true sense, as conditioned attitudes toward money, class, and race. Dr. Coles nowhere deals with the idea of the family (“fealty” to which is so excitedly sworn by certain childless lowbrow moralists). For instance, what do the young girls he talked to think of motherhood? Most of the girl children (genus privileged) that I know are adamant about not having children. They believe that the planet is overcrowded, that resources are limited, that the environment is endangered. Their vehemence is often startling—if, perhaps, short-lived. Dr. Coles notes none of this. But then his “crisis” was racial integration.

  Except for one anecdote about a New Orleans girl who liked to contemplate a nearby cemetery, wondering “who ‘those people’ were,” death is hardly present in these tales. Although Dr. Coles handles with delicacy the New Orleans girl’s “morbidity,” he seems not to have been interested in what the other children had to say on a subject of enormous concern to children. The moment that a child comprehends not only the absoluteness but the inevitability of his own death, he is obliged, for better or worse, to come to terms with how best to live in the world. For a rich child to whom all things seem possible, the knowledge of death often brings on a vastation not unlike the one that helped to propel to enlightenment the uniquely over-advantaged Prince Siddhartha.

  But if death is absent in Dr. Coles’s testaments, God is all over the place. Since Dr. Coles has so generalized the families that he writes about, it is hard to tell just what their actual beliefs are. I would guess that none is Jewish or Roman Catholic. I would assume that the southern or southwestern families are Protestant with fundamentalist tendencies of the twice-born variety. West, north, and well north of Boston, the rich tend to belong to the highly refined Episcopal Church where talk of God is considered bad taste. Yet I was startled by how many of Dr. Coles’s families say grace before meals; go to church; refer to God. I never heard grace said at table in any house that I visited as a child. Yet God and religion mean so much to so many of Dr. Coles’s families that I can’t help thinking he himself is enthralled by that tripartite deity whose sense of fun has made sublunary life so strenuous and odd.

  In describing a disaster dream, “My father asked God to spare us,” says a girl with a pair of alcoholic parents. A New Mexico boy wonders if Indians “pray to the same God his parents ask him to beseech before going to sleep. His parents are Presbyterians, attend church with their children every Sunday, and encourage in them prayer at the table and upon retiring.” The son of a black entrepreneur notes his father’s appeals to God to forgive him if he has wronged anyone in the course of making money. A southern girl notes that “Christ didn’t want people to look down on the poor….” The good poor, that is. One child is critical of his father’s treatment of migrant labor; he is regarded with some unease by his family as “a believing Christian.” I suspect that Dr. Coles may himself be a believing Christian (like Bernanos, O’Connor, Weil, et al.). If he is, it is possible that he has exaggerated the importance of religion in the lives of the families that he deals with. But I propose this only tentatively. After all, a recent poll assured us that one-third of the American population (mostly unrich) claims to be twice-born.

  According to Dr. Coles’s research, the children of the rich (poor, too, but in a different way) pass through an altruistic phase at about the age of ten or eleven. They become aware not only of injustice but of hypocrisy. They question seriously the ancient parental injunction: do as I say, not as I do. Thanks to television, an unexpected agent of revolution, a white child can watch a black child being menaced by a mob (thus compassion begins), while television serials like “The Adventures of Robin Hood” can have a positively subversive effect. After all, to rob the rich in order to give to the poor is not entirely unlike what he has been taught in Sunday School. Eventually, there is a showdown between parent and child. “Robin Hood” is replaced by “Gilligan’s Island” and all’s right with the world—for the time being, anyway. Predictably, parents get a good deal of help from schoolteachers who also have a stake in maintaining things as they are. Dr. Coles’s children are uncommonly shrewd when it comes to analyzing their teachers. They know that the
teachers are terrified of saying anything that might distress the parents. The children also know when a teacher does get out of line, there is hell to pay: the subject of one of Dr. Coles’s best tales.

  The stories that comprise Privileged Ones seem to me to belong more to moral literature than to science. I assume that psychology still pretends to be a science. Dr. Coles has used conversations with actual children in order to write a series of short stories. Since the author is the least disinterested of men, these stories are essentially polemical and so, to my mind, entirely honorable if not exactly “scientific.” Dr. Coles’s mind tends to the political and the moral rather than to the abstract or the empirical. He believes that the economic system by which this country maintains its celebrated standard of living (for a few) is eminently unfair. Millions of men, women, and children are financially exploited in order to support one percent of the population in opulence and the rest in sufficient discomfort to keep them working at jobs that they dislike in order to buy things that they do not need in order to create jobs to make money to be able to buy, etc. This is not a just society. It may not last much longer. But for the present, the children of the rich are as carefully conditioned to the world as it is as are those of the poor.

  In story after story, Dr. Coles shows a child at the moment he becomes aware of the problems of those who work his father’s mine, or harvest his father’s crops. Then he is enlightened. He is told that the world is a cruel place where big fish eat little fish and Daddy is a big fish. Family and teachers unite; convince the child that there is not much he can do now—or, perhaps, ever. The world is as it is. Perhaps, later, something might be done. Just wait. Meanwhile….But the waiting is not long. Metamorphosis is at hand. Parents and teachers know that the principal agent of social conformity is puberty. As Old Faithful DNA triggers, on schedule, certain hormones, the bright outward-looking compassionate ten-year-old becomes like everyone else. Or sixteen equals cynicism equals a car.

  From the cradle, our economic rulers-to-be are imbued with a strong sense of what they are entitled to, which is, technically speaking, 25 percent of the wealth of the United States. To make sure that they will be able to hold on to this entitlement, most of the boys and one of the girls want to be—what else?—lawyers. Dr. Coles keens: “it is unfair that a few be so very privileged and that the overwhelming majority be either hard-pressed or barely able to make do.” He also worries that his own social-meliorizing views might have colored these stories because “one has to distinguish between social criticism and psychological observation.” I can’t think why. At least not in the case of Robert Coles. Whatever pretensions he may have as a scientific observer, he is essentially a moralist and, in these interesting stories, he has shown how the ruling class of an unjust society perpetuates itself through the indoctrination of its young.

  Unfortunately, Dr. Coles does nothing much with his material. He is hortatory; good-hearted; vague. Were he less timid, he might have proposed a kind of socialism as partial solution to the “crisis.” But like those collusive schoolteachers he writes about and resembles, he keeps within the familiar framework of a political system which is itself not only in crisis but the crisis. Although Dr. Coles’s notes on contemporary children are in themselves of no particular urgency, they might one day serve as useful appendices to some yet to be written synthesizing work in which our peculiar society is looked at plain from an economic or political or (why not?) religious point of view.

  The New York Review of Books

  FEBRUARY 9, 1978

  * Atlantic/Little, Brown, 587 pp., $15.00

  Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy

  In Washington, D.C., there is—or was—a place where Rock Creek crosses the main road and makes a ford which horses and, later, car could cross if the creek was not in flood. Half a hundred years ago, I lived with my grandparents on a wooded hill not far from the ford. On summer days, my grandmother and I would walk down to the creek, careful to avoid the poison ivy that grew so luxuriously amid the crowded laurel. We would then walk beside the creek, looking out for crayfish and salamanders. When we came to the ford, I would ask her to tell me, yet again, what happened when the old President Roosevelt—not the current President Roosevelt—had come riding out of the woods on a huge horse just as two ladies on slow nags had begun a slow crossing of the ford.

  “Well, suddenly, Mr. Roosevelt screamed at them, ‘Out of my way!’ ” My grandmother imitated the president’s harsh falsetto. “Stand to one side, women. I am the President.” What happened next? I’d ask, delighted. “Oh, they were both soaked to the skin by his horse’s splashing all over them. But then, the very next year,” she would say with some satisfaction, “nice Mr. Taft was the president.” Plainly, there was a link in her mind between the Event at the Ford and the change in the presidency. Perhaps there was. In those stately pre-personal days you did not call ladies women.

  The attic of the Rock Creek house was filled with thousands of books on undusted shelves while newspapers, clippings, copies of the Congressional Record were strewn about the floor. My grandmother was not a zealous housekeeper. There was never a time when rolled-up Persian rugs did not lie at the edge of the drawing room, like crocodiles dozing. In 1907, the last year but one of Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, my grandfather came to the Senate. I don’t think that they had much to do with each other. I found only one reference to TR—as he was always known—on the attic floor. In 1908, when Senator Gore nominated William Jennings Bryan for president, he made an alliterative aside, “I much prefer the strenuosity of Roosevelt to the sinuosity of Taft.”

  Years later I asked him why he had supported Bryan, a man who had never, in my grandfather’s own words, “developed.” “He was too famous too young. He just stopped in his thirties.” So why had he nominated Bryan for president? Well, at the time there were reasons: he was vague. Then, suddenly, the pale face grew mischievous and the thin, straight Roman mouth broke into a crooked grin. “After I nominated him at Denver, we rode back to the hotel in the same carriage and he turned to me and said, ‘You know, I base my political success on just three things.’ ” The old man paused for dramatic effect. What were they? I asked. “I’ve completely forgotten,” he said. “But I do remember wondering why he thought he was a success.”

  In 1936, Theodore Roosevelt’s sinuous cousin Franklin brought an end to my grandfather’s career in the Senate. But the old man stayed on in Rock Creek Park and lived to a Nestorian age, convinced that FDR, as it was always known, was our republic’s Caesar while his wife, Eleanor, Theodore’s niece, was a revolutionary. The old man despised the whole family except Theodore’s daughter Alice Longworth.

  Alice gave pleasure to three generations of our family. She was as witty—and as reactionary—as Senator Gore; she was also deeply resentful of her distant cousin Franklin’s success while the canonization of her own first cousin Eleanor filled her with horror. “Isn’t Eleanor no-ble,” she would say, breaking the word into two syllables, each hummed reverently. “So very, very good!” Then she would imitate Eleanor’s buck teeth which were not so very unlike her own quite prominent choppers. But Alice did have occasional, rare fits of fairness. She realized that what she felt for her cousins was “Simply envy. We were the President Roosevelt family. But then along came the Feather Duster,” as she habitually referred to Franklin, “and we were forgotten.” But she was exaggerating, as a number of new books attest, not to mention that once beautiful Dakota cliff defaced by the somber Gutzon Borglum with the faces of dead pols.

  It is hard for Americans today to realize what a power the Roosevelts exerted not only in our politics but in the public’s imagination. There had been nothing like them since the entirely different Adamses and there has been nothing like them since—the sad story of the Kennedys bears about as much resemblance to the Roosevelts as the admittedly entertaining and cautionary television series Dallas does to Shakespeare’s chronicle plays
.

  From the moment in 1898 when TR raced up Kettle Hill (incorrectly known as San Juan) to April 12, 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt died, the Roosevelts were at the republic’s center stage. Also, for nearly half that fifty-year period, a Roosevelt had been president. Then, as poignant coda, Eleanor Roosevelt, now quite alone, acted for seventeen years as conscience to a world very different from that of her uncle TR or even of FDR, her cousin-husband.

  In the age of the condominium and fast foods, the family has declined not only as a fact but as a concept. Although there are, presumably, just as many Roosevelts alive today as there were a century ago, they are now like everyone else, scattered about, no longer tribal or even all of the same class. Americans can now change class almost as fast—downward, at least—as they shift from city to city or job to job. A century ago, a member of the patriciate was not allowed to drop out of his class no matter how little money he had. He might be allowed to retire from the world, like TR’s alcoholic brother Elliott, in order to cultivate his vices, but even Elliott remained very much a part of the family until death—not his own kind—declassed him.

  As a descendant of Theodore Roosevelt said to David McCullough, author of Mornings on Horseback, “No writer seems to have understood the degree to which [TR] was part of a clan.” A clan that was on the rise, socially and financially, in nineteenth-century New York City. In three generations the Roosevelts had gone from hardware to plate glass to land development and banking (Chemical). By and large, the Roosevelts of that era were a solemn, hardworking, uninspired lot who, according to the New York World, had a tendency “to cling to the fixed and the venerable.” Then, suddenly, out of this clan of solid burghers erupted the restless Theodore and his interesting siblings. How did this happen? Cherchez la mère is the usual key to the unexpected—for good or ill—in a family’s history.