Homage to Daniel Shays

by Gore Vidal

  Domhoff’s thesis is straightforward. The country is governed by a small elite which knows pretty much what it is up to and coordinates its various moves in foreign affairs and the economy. Most academics dispute this theory. They tend to be Jefferson I types who believe that the United States is a pluralist society filled with all sorts of dominations and powers constantly balancing and checking one another. To them, anyone who believes that an elite is really running the show is paranoid. But as the late Delmore Schwartz once said with the weary lucidity of his own rich madness, “Paranoids have real enemies, too.” Admittedly, it is difficult at first to accept the proposition that the owners of the country also rule it and that the electorate is nothing but a quadrennial chorus whose function is to ratify with hosannahs one or the other of two presidential candidates carefully picked for them by rulers who enjoy pretending that ours is really government of, by, and for the you-know-who. In the same manner, Tiberius always respectfully consulted a Senate to whose irrelevant ranks his heir nicely added a race horse.

  Domhoff’s style does not command admiration. His manner is disconcertingly gee whiz. He is given to easy liberal epithets like “Godforsaken Mississippi” yet forced to admit that except on the subject of race, the proud folk down there are populist to the core, and populist is the thing to be this year. But if one is not put off by the somewhat slap-dash manner, Domhoff has seen and measured the tip of an iceberg which most of the other passengers on the US Titanic have not noticed. He also does his best to figure out what lies beneath the water.

  Domhoff’s method is to examine those committees and advisory councils, federal and private, that do the actual work of making foreign and economic policy (something like three-quarters of the federal budget has to do with military and foreign aid expenditures—control the spending of that three-quarters and the US is your thing). He then studies the men who serve on these committees. Notes what schools they went to, what banks they work for (most are lawyers or lawyer-bankers), what political contributions they make. He also records the overlapping that goes on, or “linkage” as the American Metternich would say.

  In 1968, for instance, 51 of 284 trustees and honorary trustees of the Committee for Economic Development were also members of the Council on Foreign Relations, while 126 were members of the National Council of the Foreign Policy Association. Or as Domhoff puts it,

  Policy formation is the province of a bipartisan power elite of corporate rich [Rockefeller, Mellon] and their career hirelings [Nixon, McNamara] who work through an interlocking and overlapping maze of foundations, universities and institutes, discussion groups, associations and commissions. Political parties are only for finding interesting and genial people [usually ambitious middle-class lawyers] to ratify and implement these policies in such a way that the under classes feel themselves to be, somehow, a part of the governmental process. Politics is not exactly the heart of the action but it is nice work—if you can afford to campaign for it.

  If Domhoff’s thesis is even partly true (and at least one skeptic is persuaded that it is) much of the malaise one detects among intelligent members of the Senate and House is understandable. It is not so much the removal of power from the Hill to the White House (a resourceful Congress can still break a president if they want, or at least bring him to heel); rather, it is the knowledge or suspicion that the legislative branch reflects not the electorate but the elite who pay for congressional campaigns and are duly paid off with agreeable tax laws and military procurement and foreign aid bills passed at the dark of the moon. There is a constant if gentle tugging of the reins—perhaps Caligula had the right idea about what a proper senator should be. “We don’t seem to matter at all,” said one East Coast senator to me some years ago. “And I don’t know why. We’re every bit as bright or brighter than the Borah-La Follette group. But we’re just…well, nothing.” Domhoff agrees and tells us why.

  In Fat Cats and Democrats, Domhoff describes our rulers. Year in, year out, “About one percent of the population—a socially interacting upper class whose members go to prep schools, attend debutante balls, join exclusive clubs, ride to hounds and travel all over the world for business or pleasure—will continue to own 60 percent to 70 percent of all privately held corporate wealth and receive 24 percent of the national income.” Domhoff tends to be a bit wide-eyed about the life style of the nobles but, barring those riders to hounds, he seldom indulges in the sort of solemn generality recently dished up by a sociologist who discovered that most American banking is controlled by the Wasps (true) and that the Wasps at the top of the banking hierarchy have larger and fleshier ears than those farther down (true?).

  Domhoff accepts the Ferdinand Lundberg formulation that there is only one political party in the United States and that is the Property Party, whose Republican wing tends to be rigid in maintaining the status quo and not given to any accommodation of the poor and the black. Although the Democratic wing shares most of the basic principles (that is to say, money) of the Republicans, its members are often shrewd enough to know that what is too rigid will shatter under stress. The Democrats have also understood for some time the nature of the American empire. While the Republicans indulge in Jefferson I rhetoric and unrealities, including isolationism, the Democrats have known all along that this is a Jefferson II world. As Dean Acheson put it in 1947, “You must look to foreign markets.” As early as 1928 a distinguished member of the Republican wing of the Property Party saw its limitations. After all, Averell Harriman was involved in German zinc mines, Polish iron mines, and Soviet manganese. “I thought Republican isolationism was disastrous.” And just before the 1929 crash, he switched.

  But essentially the two wings of the Property Party are more alike than not. Witness the bipartisan foreign policy which the elite hammered out twenty-five years ago over the dead bodies of the Republican faithful. The Property Party has known from the beginning how and when to reconcile its two wings in order to survive. After all, according to Domhoff,

  The American Constitution was carefully rigged by the noteholders, land speculators, rum runners, and slave holders who were the Founding Fathers, so that it would be next to impossible for upstart dirt farmers and indebted masses to challenge the various forms of private property held by these well read robber barons. Through this Constitution, the overprivileged attempted to rule certain topics out of order for proper political discussion. To bring these topics up in polite company was to invite snide invective, charges of personal instability, or financial ruin.

  In other words, don’t start a political party in opposition to the Property Party. From Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party, so viciously smeared by the liberal ADA, to today’s sad attempt to field a People’s Party, those who wish to promote economic equality should not be surprised to have their heads handed to them, particularly by a “free” press which refuses to recognize any alternative to the way things are.

  Property is power, as those Massachusetts veterans of the revolution discovered when they joined Captain Daniel Shays in his resistance to the landed gentry’s replacement of a loose confederation of states with a tax-levying central government. The veterans thought that they had been fighting a war for true independence. They did not want London to be replaced by New York. They did want an abolition of debts and a division of property. Their rebellion was promptly put down. But so shaken was the elite by the experience that their most important (and wealthiest) figure grimly emerged from private life with a letter to Harry Lee. “You talk of employing influence,” wrote George Washington, “to appease the present tumults in Massachusetts. I know not where that influence is to be found, or if attainable, that it would be a proper remedy for the disorders. Influence is no government. Let us have one by which our lives, liberties and properties will be secured or let us know the worst at once.” So was born the Property Party and with it the Constitution of the United States. We have known the “best” for nearly 200 years. What would the “wors
t” have been like?

  The rulers of the country are, according to Domhoff, 80 percent to 90 percent Republican. For the most part they are not isolationist. They know that money is to be made overseas either from peace or war, from the garrison state and its attendant machismo charms. Who then supports the Democratic wing? Labor is responsible for 20 percent to 25 percent of the party’s financing. Racketeers from 10 percent to 15 percent—obviously certain areas like New York, Chicago, and Las Vegas interest these entrepreneurs more than, say, the Good Government League of Bangor, Maine. Around 15 percent is contributed by the “little man.” The rest comes from the fat cats. Who are they? And why do they give money to the wrong wing of the Property Party?

  Domhoff rather coldbloodedly divides these perverse investors into two groups. Sentimental liberals—usually from rich families, reacting against Dad’s Republicanism, and status seekers among new-money Jews and Catholics with some Texas oilmen thrown in. Yet the margin of action, like that of debate, is deliberately limited by the conservative as well as the reactionary wing of the Property Party. Or as Domhoff puts it, the elite Republicans “must accommodate the reactionaries just enough to keep them from forming an ultra-conservative party, just as it is the task of the wealthy moderate Democrats to assimilate or crush any sanguine liberals who try to stray through the left boundary of the sacred two-party system.”

  An uneasy alliance of Jewish bankers and Texas oilmen has financed most of the Democratic Party. Yet this Jewish-cow-boy axis (Domhoff’s phrase), powerful and rich though it is, represents only a small, moderately lunatic fringe to the sturdy fabric of the ruling class. They are the sports who give us Democratic presidential candidates guaranteed to speak of change and different deals while altering nothing. But then how could they change anything and still get the money to buy television spots?

  Interestingly enough, Domhoff does not think that the Nixon Southern strategy has a chance of working at the congressional or local level. The South tends to be hawkish and racist—two chords the incumbent Property Party manager knows how to pluck. But the South is not about to support a party which is against federal spending. Nine Rehnquists would not be anywhere near enough to counterbalance the Southward flow of money from Treasury through the conduit of Southern Democratic Congressional leaders who have employed the seniority system to reverse that bad trip at the Appomattox Courthouse. They govern the House in tandem with machine Democrats from the North. Each takes in the other’s washing. The Northerners get a few housing bills out of the Southerners, who in turn are granted military bases and agricultural subsidies. Both groups are devoted to keeping the Property Party prosperous and the money where it belongs, in the hands of the elite. Southern Democrats are not about to join with Nixon’s true-blue Republicans in turning off federal aid.

  At the congressional level, one can see how the elite works even more clearly than at the presidential level, where enthusiasm for attractive candidates often blinds even the sharpest critic (not to mention, very often, the candidate himself) to the charade being enacted by the Property Party. It is in the House and the Senate that the day-by-day dirty work is done, and Bella Abzug gives a splendid account (Bella!) of her two years in the House, trying to represent her constituents and her conscience, to the amusement of a genial body of corrupt politicians whose votes are all too often for sale to the highest bidder, usually in the form of cash in white envelopes, if Robert N. Winter-Berger’s astonishing book The Washington Pay-Off is to be believed. With these two books, one ideological, the other muckraking, the bankruptcy of the House of Representatives has been duly filed.

  Bella Abzug was elected from Lower Manhattan to end the war, gain equal rights for women and blacks, and generally be herself, serving the unpropertied. A bright lawyer as well as a formidable self-publicist, she immediately struck the fancy of the press (when they get her full range, she will be dropped—tense?). Ail in all, Abzug rather likes the floor managers of the Property Party. They are good fun and she always knows where she stands with them. “The men in the Club here are very charming to me,” which they can afford to be since “they have all the power.” They even “like to be entertained a bit. I don’t mean in a ha-ha funny way, but in an interesting way.” It is the liberals for whom she has real contempt. They have fallen for “the old crap, the anaesthesia of the liberals: If you want to get along, you’ve got to go along…very little men.” They would rather fight one another for such posts as House Majority leader than unite to keep a reactionary from continuing in that job.

  For five years (1964 to 1969) Mr. Winter-Berger was a Washington lobbyist, engaged in getting favors done for a wide range of people. Nathan Voloshen was his principle contact. This extraordinary man had known Representative John W. McCormack since 1945. In 1962, McCormack became Speaker of the House and Voloshen’s “public relations” career soared. For use of the Speaker’s opulent office in the Capitol, Voloshen paid McCormack $2,500 a month rent, a small amount considering the address. As clients came and went, the Speaker would assure them, “Nat can take care of that for you. Nat’s my dear friend and I will do anything I can for him. Any friend of Nat’s is a friend of mine.” In one form or another, this speech is the ancient Washington formula to indicate that things will be done if you pay the price.

  Eventually, Voloshen and company were nabbed by the embarrassingly honest Property Party maverick, US Attorney Robert Morgenthau. Voloshen pleaded guilty. At the trial of one of Voloshen’s henchmen,

  McCormack pleaded ignorance which, according to the 1925 House Code of Ethics Act, made him innocent. Rather ludicrously, on the stand, McCormack said: “I am not an inquiring fellow.” Actually, if ever a man always knew precisely what was going on around him it was John McCormack.

  Mr. Winter-Berger also tells us that he was present in the Speaker’s office when Lyndon Johnson sailed in and, thinking the Speaker was alone, began a tirade with, “John, that son of a bitch is going to ruin me. If that cocksucker talks, I’m gonna land in jail.” Apparently the President did not want his former Senate aide, Bobby Baker, to contest certain charges brought against him. “I will give him a million dollars if he takes the rap,” said Johnson.

  It is no wonder that most newspapers and magazines have refused to review this book and that many bookstores will not sell it. The fear is not of libel. Something much more elemental is involved. If the corruption and greed of the men the Property Party has placed in the Congress and the White House become common knowledge, the whole rotten business could very well collapse and property itself would be endangered. Had there actually been a two-party system in the United States, the incoming President would have taken advantage of such an extraordinary scandal in the Democratic ranks. Instead, Nixon moved swiftly to remove Robert Morgenthau from office. If there is one thing Nixon understands, it is dominoes. Or as Mr. Winter-Berger puts it,

  At the time, Voloshen said to me: “Mitchell is afraid that if any of the Congressmen are found guilty, the whole public image of the Congress would be destroyed.” Voloshen also told me about the proviso which Attorney General Mitchell added to his offer to drop the case against Frenkil [Voloshen’s pal]: House Speaker John McCormack would have to resign from Congress. Knowing how much McCormack loved his job and his life in the world of politics, I didn’t think such a powerful man would go along. But in fact he did.

  Yet the personal enrichment of congressmen and their friends is small potatoes compared to the way the great corporations use the government and its money for their own ends. The recent ITT comedy was just one example—and hardly investigated by the Property Party men in the Senate. The press also plays its supporting role. Mr. Winter-Berger notes that the Bobby Baker scandal became big news with suspicious slowness. “Having been filed in the court records, information about the suit should have been available immediately to any newspaper reporter, but it took the Washington Post three days to find out about it and break the story.” This was S
eptember 12, 1963. The New York Times did not think this news fit to print until October 5, and then buried it on page 19. Not until Bobby Baker resigned three days later, did he make the front page of the Times.

  But then, as Domhoff has remarked, few substantive matters are considered fit for open discussion in our society. Every president is honest because he is our president and we are honest. An occasional congressman may fall from grace because there are always a few rotten apples in every barrel, but the majority are straightshooters. The Congress represents all the interests of the people, at least district by district by district and state by state. The New York Times will always call the shots if there is any funny business anywhere. Just as they will always support the best “liberal” candidate (Abzug has a nice horror story about how the Times killed a piece on her because it was too favorable). These threadbare myths sustain us. But for how much longer?

  After the burning of Newark, the elite decided, some more reluctantly than others, that if they did not appear to pay off the poor and/or black, who knows what might be next for burning? To the amazement of the innocent, the Nixon Administration came up with a family income plan for the poor which was favored (fathered?) by the Council for Economic Development. The council then set out to sell the plan to the Right Wing. Predictably, Ronald Reagan was opposed because of a “philosophical antipathy” which he thought reflected the prejudices of his constituency. A number of the council’s leaders swiftly materialized in San Francisco and proceeded to instruct the public in the virtues of the plan. They stressed that not only businessmen but experts favored it. Why even Democrats thought it sound. Gently chiding Reagan, they sold the program to California’s media and public in a bipartisan way. The Property Party has no intention of actually putting this plan into effect, of course, but at least they now have something nice to talk about when the poor are restive. The fact that McGovern acts as if he might implement the plan has caused alarm.