Within the free-fire zones of the American language the uses of the words “money” and “class” shift with the social terrain, the tone of voice and the angle of the sales pitch. Few words come armed with as many contradictions or as much ambivalence. On more than one occasion I have passed half the night in earnest argument with a number of otherwise intelligent people who, although they thought they were talking about money and class, were talking about something else. Only at the end, when the wine was gone and the host was no longer speaking to most of the guests, did it occur to the company still in the room that one of us had been talking about freedom, another about his lost youth, still another about God.
The profusion of meanings is peculiarly American. Among the Europeans the two words refer to phenomena more or less concrete—to a store of wealth or an accident of birth. With Americans it isn’t so simple. We like to assign spiritual meanings to the texts of money, and it is this transfer of value that forms the subject of this book. What interests me is not so much our vanity and greed (vanity and greed being as common among Balts or Kurds as among Texans), but the place of money in the American imagination. What do we expect of it, and what do we think it means? How does it come to pass that we can transform a stock market trade into a symbol of salvation or a grocer’s bill into “the romance, the poetry of our age”?
Because the book is more speculative essay than social history, it makes no attempt at a formal portrait of the American rich, who, whether dressed in the raiment of the old or the new money, decorate the pages of the nation’s fashion press. Such people appear from time to time in the narrative, but they do so as exemplary figures in a cautionary tale, as comic variations on a theme as old as Aristophanes, Juvenal or Molière.
Nor can the book be read, at least not with any hope of advancing anybody’s social ambition, as an instruction manual. I don’t know where to meet “the right people,” and I never can remember what wine to order with which fish. Nor can I offer any advice about the supervision and manufacture of money. I admire people who can change $100 into $100 million, but I’ve never learned to imitate their profitable example. Most of my investments have gone as far south as the Brazilian loans made by the Chase Manhattan Bank.
My curiosity veers off in less practical directions. I begin by asking myself why, after all these years in the Puritan wilderness, do we still find it so hard to decide whether money is a virtue or a sin? A testimony to God’s infinite wisdom and grace or a short-term contract with the Devil? The alpha and omega of human existence, or, as Lucius Beebe was fond of saying, “a stuff best suited to throwing off the back of moving trains”?
Why so many questions, and why does a comparable ambivalence inform our attitudes toward social rank? Our political rhetoric relies on the promise that nobody is better than anybody else, that all men are made of the same egalitarian clay. The more expensive rhetoric of our commercial advertising mocks the promise as a sop for fools and promotes the antipodal truth that anybody with enough cash in hand can become, by noon tomorrow, better than everybody else. No nation gives so much of its wealth to charity; no nation invests so much of its earned income in the desperate buying and selling of status.
This double-mindedness is as American as baseball. We have a genius for holding in our minds innumerable sets of passionately opposed beliefs—about the land, religion, scientific invention and the law—and it is the energy generated by these opposites that, like the positive and negative charges of electrical current, drives the juggernaut of the American enterprise. America is most itself when most at odds with itself, when nearly equal forces—expressed as dreams or catcalls or bribes—balance one another in a unified field of mutual suspicion. The dialectic assumes conflict not only as the normal but also as the necessary condition of existence and defines itself as a continuous process of change. The structure of the idea resembles a suspension bridge rather than an Egyptian tomb. Its strength rests on the transient nature of its forms. The idea collapses unless the stresses oppose one another with more or less equal weight and intensity—unless enough people have enough courage to sustain the argument between government and governed, city and town, capital and labor, men and women, matter and spirit.
None of our traditional disputes better exemplify the American dialectic than the ones about money and class. The first American fortunes, blessed by the prayers of Calvinist divines, derived from the slave trade and the traffic in bootleg rum. Well before American colonists declared their independence from Britain, they declared themselves of two minds about the purposes of their New Jerusalem. One faction thought that money was merely a commodity (as drab as wood, or straw or cloth) and that the American experiment was about the discovery of a moral commonwealth. Another faction, equally idealistic but not as pious, thought money was a sacrament and America was about the miracle of self-enrichment. The congenital enmity between these two temperaments gives rise to the argument, as confused in Philadelphia in 1787 as it is in New York in 1987, that runs like a theme for trumpet and drums through the whole music of our history, literature and politics.
The argument rises and falls in a cyclical but irregular rhythm. At different moments, one or the other of the two factions embodies the wisdom in office. With the advent of the Reagan administration in 1981 the majority clearly favored the party of self-enrichment and the singing of hymns to Mammon. The antiphonal voices didn’t fall silent, but they were harder to hear.
The passions of the moment and attentions of the media center upon shows of opulence. No topic of conversation, no labor of love or work of the imagination, can diminish the wonder of money. The best-selling authors of the most welcome truths do their best to clothe the god of the world’s leading religion in the milk-white robes of a Christian conscience or the glittering uniforms of a military band.
The history books report equivalent passions abroad in the land in the 1830s, when President Andrew Jackson’s friends invented the spoils system, in the 1870s amid the gaudy corruptions of the Grant administration, again in the 1920s under the dispensations of jazz music and bathtub gin. Whether the spirit of the times was different then—whether Boss Tweed was less venal than Mayor Edward Koch, or Andrew Mellon more rapacious than Donald Trump—I cannot say. I do know that all the numbers have been raised to the power of ten and that our own gilded age finds more people with more money in their hands.
The immense prosperity accruing to the accounts of the United States after the victories of the Second World War produced a correspondingly immense crowd of newly enriched citizens. What was once a relatively small plutocracy, almost homespun in its pretensions and amounting to no more than a few thousand semiliterate millionaires, has evolved into a large spawn of affluent mandarins—in government, the corporations, the professions and the media. If these people were counted as a simple percentage of the population they might be construed as a negligible minority, but the reach of their influence far exceeds both their numbers and their grasp. Whether new rich or old rich, Protestant or Jew, celebrity or anonym, they constitute the American equestrian classes that own the bulk of the nation’s wealth, wield the instruments of power, write the newspapers and arrange the television schedules. They perform the feats of higher shopping and personify the tenor of the age.
My acquaintance with this equestrian class reflects my long employment in the media trades as well as my long sojourn in “the holy city of New York.” They happen to be people I know well enough to write about with some degree of verisimilitude. I don’t think these limitations are as provincial as they might have been in the 1880s. Attitudes once specific to Ward McAllister’s “Four Hundred” dining at Delmonico’s in New York have become general among like-minded plutocracies in Washington, Los Angeles, Dallas and Chicago.
The temporary ascension of the party of self-enrichment has not been achieved without cost and ill effect. To the extent that the delight in money becomes a transcendent faith, converts to “the world’s leading religion” imagine that money stands as surrogate for all other denominations of human currency—for love, work, art, play and thought. Believing they can buy the future and make time stand still, the faithful fall victim to a nameless and stupefying dread. They possess all the goods and services a rich society can afford, but because they expect from money more than it can supply they feel themselves deprived. They rent the Philadelphia Orchestra and complain that the musicians don’t know how to play the music of the spheres. No matter how much they spend on shows of their magnificence, they have trouble proving to themselves the theory of their own existence. Their avarice testifies not to the fullness of their appetite but to the failure of their imagination. They worry about the provenance of their shoes and the politics of their dinner invitations, about unknown microbes loose in the rose garden and the humiliation of having to live at a minor street address. Drifting through their afternoons in increasingly somnambulistic states of mind, they discover themselves herded into a gilded cage from which they find it increasingly harder to escape.
Unhappily for all concerned, the pathologies of wealth afflict the whole society, inhibiting the conduct of government as well as expressions of art and literature. The rituals of worship produce deformations of character in institutions as well as individuals, in the making of third marriages as well as in the making of laws and Broadway musicals. It isn’t money itself that causes trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.
The methodology of the book assumes an analogy between public and private confessions of faith in money. Because the faith is ecumenical, embracing most of the texts of American experience, the book borrows from a plurality of sources—from newspapers and economic tracts as well as from scenes observed and conversations overheard. The reader shouldn’t infer from my criticism of the presiding theology that I bear a grudge against money. I take as much pleasure in it as the circumstances allow, and like anybody else old enough to fear the IRS and pay entirely too many pipers, I’m always glad to know that it’s coming in the mail. To the best of my knowledge I have never professed—not even in California in the early 1960s—the faintest allegiance to Marxist heresy. Nor can I muster the scolding tone of voice sometimes deemed obligatory in any discussion of money and class. Possibly this is because the fear and resentment of the impoverished rich moves me to sadness rather than anger.
What interests me is the cramped melancholy habitual among a citizenry that proclaims itself the happiest and freest ever to have bestrode the earth. Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich. Never in the history of the world have so many of those same people felt themselves so poor. It is an odd paradox, and one that seems deserving of a few notes and observations, if not a theory or sermon.