Money, not morality, is the principle of commercial nations.
—Thomas Jefferson
It’s 2:00 p.m.—do you know where your money is?
—Sign in a window of Merrill Lynch
The history of the United States is synonymous with the dream of riches. The first European explorers came looking for gold and the silk routes to the Indies; venture capitalists promoting the first colonies in Maryland and Virginia divided the landscape into the shares of a joint-stock deal. In Massachusetts Bay, the seventeenth-century founders of the Puritan enterprise believed that grace revealed itself as property. Together with John Calvin they assigned spiritual meaning to the texts of money and conceived of their New Jerusalem as a real estate development in which God and Mammon held equal interest. As early as 1690, having discovered that the North American forest lacked the gold and specie found by the Spanish in the south, the native transcendentalists relied on the abstracted forms of illusory credit. By 1750 the American colonists already were more accustomed than the Europeans to the sophisticated uses of paper currency. The divorce from England followed a long and bitter argument about taxes, and the first cry of rebellion was not Thomas Jefferson’s “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” but the Boston shipowners’ “Liberty, property and no stamps!” The Revolutionary War was as much a financial speculation with the worthless paper issued by the Continental Congress as it was a gamble on the weather and the temperament of France.
Although I don’t count myself a historian, I have read randomly enough in both primary and secondary sources to suspect that the gentlemen who wrote the Constitution in the summer of 1787 had it in mind to make their world safe for commerce, joining the moneyed interests of the merchant north with those in the planter South. Their prejudices were not dissimilar to those held dear by our contemporary members of the Business Round Table, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Cosmos Club. By the word “liberty” they meant liberty for property, not liberty for persons. At fetes in Colonial America the order of dancing was arranged in accordance with the net worth present in the ballroom. The principal guest, usually a British naval officer, danced first with the richest girl, then with the next richest girl, and so forth through the protocol of wealth.
Subject to the countinghouse atmospheres of the late eighteenth century (in which it was understood that every merchant was out for everything he could get and that no merchant could be overpaid for his services to mankind), the founders of the American republic could not conceive of human rights being established on anything other than property. The guarantee of freedom for economic forces took precedence over the guarantees of freedom to the powers of the intellect and imagination.
Madison worried about reckless agitation for “an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property and other wicked projects.” Anticipating the suspicions of Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of State George Shultz, John Jay observed that “the people who own the country ought to govern it.” John Adams of Massachusetts thought that the “great functions of state” should be reserved to “the rich, the well-born and the able.” Charles Pinckney of North Carolina suggested that no candidate be deemed fit for the office of the presidency unless he could prove a net worth of $100,000, which, in 1787, was enough money to buy, at current prices, a floor in the Trump Tower. His motion failed to persuade a majority, but it was indicative of the presiding sentiment. The Constitution didn’t set a fee for admission to the polls—one of the remarkable achievements in Philadelphia—but many state constitutions required the voters in local elections to own property.
Most of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention feared what they called “the turbulent passions” of the common man, and they detested both the theory and the practice of democracy. They wished to confine the popular spirit let dangerously loose in the streets by the recent excitements of the Revolutionary War, and, like President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, they assumed that the rabble couldn’t be trusted with the gift of speech.20 The argument of the convention had less to do with abstract ideals than with the division of interest between the financiers and merchants of seaboard towns and the farmers of the interior.
At the end of the summer in Philadelphia, the convention affirmed its belief in what Richard Hofstadter, in The American Political Tradition, defined as “an ideology of self-help, free enterprise, competition and beneficent cupidity.” By and large these beliefs have remained safely in place throughout the whole of the American experience. With varying degrees of emphasis, they have informed the thinking not only of the Reagan administration but also the administrations of Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
Having established the sovereignty of property, the convention reluctantly granted the so-called people a voice in the government. The delegates did so not for reasons of high-minded principle but because they recognized in one another the rapaciousness of wolves and feared the despotism of which they knew they were entirely capable. They expected the rich to plunder the poor and the poor to prey upon the rich. The Bill of Rights was appended to the Constitution as a grudging concession to a loud minority that persisted in thinking of money as a commodity rather than as sacrament. The argument between these two unambiguous factions comprises the American dialectic and tells most of the story of American politics. The nation’s history could be written as a long argument between opposed enthusiasms, an argument alternating between episodes of avarice and generosity, between spasms of orgiastic spending and sudden withdrawal behind the perimeters of guilt.
Conceived in bankruptcy, the new nation founded its capital city on a site convenient to the purposes of a real-estate swindle. The first American Congress addressed its first acts of legislation to the setting up of a national bank and a settlement of the war debt that enriched the speculators (most of them friends of Alexander Hamilton) who had bought up bonds at discounted prices. Recognizing the rule of money implicit in the American dream, the authors of the Tripoli Treaty in 1796 firmly declared, “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”
Before 1820 Thomas Jefferson knew that his hope of an aristocracy grounded in moral or intellectual merit had been outmatched by a plutocracy subservient to the rule of finance capital. In a letter to Du Pont de Nemours, he said, “We can never get rid of [Hamilton’s] financial system. It mortifies me to be strengthening principles which I deem radically vicious, but this vice is entailed on us by the first error.” He didn’t know the names of the lobbyists still unborn, but Jefferson already could foresee his hopes for the American republic reduced to government by building inspector and military contractor, by kickback and tax exemption. Writing to another friend in 1810, not long after he had seen the surrender of the southern agrarian interest to the mercantile interest of the Federalist north, Jefferson observed, “Money, not morality, is the principle of commercial nations.”
The American government from the very beginning willingly implicated itself in business, financing toll roads, canals, the first experiment in mass production (of rifles) and whatever else seemed likely to turn a profit. Throughout the nineteenth century the country borrowed extravagantly from abroad, providing considerably more of its well-advertised “freedom and opportunity” to foreign capital than it did to foreign labor. Most of the loans went bad. By 1845 the national preoccupation with money had become so virulent that Alexis de Tocqueville, the French politician and essayist commonly regarded as the wisest anatomist of the American body politic, devoted a good part of his Democracy in America to the fever of avarice. “In democracies,” Tocqueville said, “nothing is greater or more brilliant than commerce. It attracts the attention of the public and fills the imagination of the multitude.”
The primary American political disputes always have resolved into conflicts between different forms of property: between landed and financial wealth, between old and new enterprise, between Rust Belt and Sun Belt, between manufacturing and service industries, between large and small capital. The emergent commercial interests invariably campaign on the promise to get the government off the backs of the people, by which they mean, off the backs of their own profits. The ideas in which the arguments happen to be dressed remain matters of minor importance. Only the slogans change, but these, as every politician knows, can be bought and sold as easily as the ornamental drapery of the best academic opinion.
Jefferson’s argument with Hamilton was superseded by a variation of the same quarrel between Andrew Jackson and Livingston Biddle on the question of the National Bank. The origins of the Civil War had less to do with slavery than with the southern hatred of the northern tariff against which, in 1832, John Calhoun first preached the doctrines of nullification and states’ rights. By 1859 Lincoln understood that the United States was well on its way to becoming what Henry Adams later proclaimed “a banker’s Olympus,” and he accused the Democrats of adhering to the principle that “one man’s liberty was absolutely nothing when it conflicted with another man’s property.” Between 1865 and 1914 the United States transformed itself into an industrial society, and the Gilded Age, much like our own, reveled in the glory of newfound wealth. Then as now, the press cast itself as unctuous sycophant, marveling at the sublime exploits of the financial magnates who breathed the life of capital into Walt Whitman’s “factories divine.” Most of the journalists then writing encomia to the glory of wealth would have been entirely content contributing the same sort of flattery to Fortune, Forbes or Manhattan, Inc. People took pride in their sharp practice, and they admired the figure of the small entrepreneur portrayed as Sam Slick, Yankee peddler.
The politics of the period revolved around the antagonism between the “money power” of the eastern seaboard and the populist sentiment of the West, between private property and “free grass,” the cattle rancher and the homesteader, between the apologists for gold and silver currencies, between the nabobs and the small merchants, the manufacturing combinations and the Grange, Teddy Roosevelt and the trusts. For everybody on all sides of every argument the proofs of democracy were economic. Did the systems currently in place provide access to the ranks of property? Were the right sort of people (i.e., one’s friends and allies) being admitted to the precincts of Eden?
No matter what their specific interests, the antagonists believed, with Daniel Webster, that “intelligence and industry ask only for fair play and an open field” and expected, with Henry George, that “the state would clear the ways and let things alone.”
Every now and then the country’s politics seem to fall into the hands of reformers eager to violate the protocols of wealth and bring down the walls of established privilege. But when these high-minded gentlemen manage to win an election and capture the insignia of office, their noble intentions somehow remain enbalmed in the tombs of rhetoric. Their supposed enemies (“vicious profiteers,” “oppressors of the common man,” “the resplendent economic aristocracy,” etc.) somehow end up, much to everybody’s wonder and surprise, with an even larger percentage of the spoils.
Both Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson worried about the spirit of a nation lost to the swinishness of its appetite. Roosevelt complained of the “kind of moneymaker whose soul has grown hard while his body has grown soft,” and Wilson, recapitulating the melancholy of Jefferson, said, “The truth is we are all caught in a great economic system, which is heartless.” Neither President, however, could come up with a plausible counterweight.21 Like the romantically dissident young men at the Hotchkiss School in the 1950s, they possessed no body of doctrine which they could oppose to the traditional principles of competition, self-help and the rights of property. They were too heavily indebted to their friends in Wall Street, and the proofs of the miracle of new wealth were too many and too spectacular. In the manner of modern neoconservative philosophers, Roosevelt comforted himself with little lectures to the plutocracy about the need for some kind of moral resurgence and a return to the old virtues that could rescue the country from its folly. He attempted to set vigorous military examples, and he presented himself as the implacable enemy of the trusts. But during his tenure in the White House the trusts multiplied at a rate never equaled before or since, and by the end of the First World War, even as Wilson was mumbling his pious hopes for mankind over the recent dead at the American cemetery in Suresnes, the United States already had put in place the mechanisms of an industrial state most likely to prosper under the conditions of permanent war.
During the bleak interlude of the Great Depression the protocols of wealth were called severely in doubt, but Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, denounced by a generation of Republicans as the prelude to the end of the world, proved to be the salvation of state capitalism. Even Jimmy Carter received the endorsement of the northern money interests because it was thought that he would play the part of a faithful Snopes, mouthing the acceptable pieties about the greatness of the human spirit while tending to the business of sweating the last dime of profit from the local sharecroppers. He disappointed his promoters because he proved to be too weak and girlish, too much given to moralisms in which, to everybody’s disgust, he apparently believed.
Ronald Reagan campaigned on a promise to balance the federal budget; within six years he had run up the national debt to almost $2 trillion. Like his predecessors in office, Reagan understood that a successful American politician is a smiling and accommodating fellow who learns to put a human face on the imperatives of property.
Nothing in Reagan’s presidency, least of all the crimes of pecuniary indecency committed by so many of his subordinates, served to dim the charm of his amiable improvisations on the theme of government. Standing firmly on the side of the family and the flag—against the officiousness of federal bureaucrats and the villainy of Soviet warmongers, against pornography, drugs, the ghost of Jane Fonda and the stale metropolitan sensibility of public television—Reagan gave the impression of being at his ease in Zion. He had about him an air of reassuring opulence, of a man familiar with the protocols of wealth and the comforts of Beverly Hills, accustomed to the safer suburbs, expensive cars, the scent of jasmine on a golf course, Bob Hope’s geopolitics and the smiling camaraderie of Frank Sinatra. Like the late John F. Kennedy, whom he in many ways resembled, Reagan imparted to money the luster of something new and irreproachable.
Although money always has occupied an exalted place in the American imagination, never in the history of the Republic had that place been raised so high as in the years of the Reagan ascendancy. President Reagan’s gaudy inauguration in 1981 cost $8 million and established the aura of vulgarity and conspicuous consumption synonymous with both his terms in office. The entertainments, reminiscent of those staged by the parvenu industrialists of the Gilded Age (William Vanderbilt, August Belmont, William Fahnestock et al.), lasted for four days and included nine formal balls, a fireworks display of 10,000 rockets, a reception for “7,000 distinguished ladies” and a vaudeville performance starring, among others, Charlton Heston, Johnny Carson, Donny Osmond and General Omar Bradley rolled onstage in a wheelchair as the personification of a conquering general. By 1985 the new style had congealed into a tasteless opulence expressed in fur coats for Cabbage Patch dolls and advertising copy that read, “Feel gloriously rich,” “Satisfy her passion for gold,” “It comes in 23 colors, including envy green,” and “Rich is better.” At a fashion show in Washington, the sponsors hired a ladies’ room attendant to sprinkle carnation petals into the toilet bowls after each use; Tiffany & Company in New York advertised a $50,000 diamond necklace in a window display that presented a “bag lady” sitting in a cardboard box reading House & Garden.
Since the autumn of 1980 the nation has made no secret of its delight in money. The dreams of avarice glitter in the shop windows of every American city large enough to support a market in German engineering and Italian silk; college freshmen pin photographs of T. Boone Pickens and Donald Trump on dormitory walls once reserved for posters of Bob Dylan and Che Guevara. Among the parvenu real-estate magnates in New York with whom poor George Amory felt obliged to maintain par value, it has become more or less “the done thing” to engage three jet aircrafts to the spring pilgrimage to Florida or the Caribbean—one for the principals, one for the children, one for the luggage and the servants. Aaron Spelling travels between New York and California in a private railroad car, and the wives of big-time stock salesmen spend as much as $20,000 a week on flowers, limousines and incidental porcelain. The media, both electronic and print, dote on the iconography of wealth. The magazines glisten with the display of opulence; the lists of best-selling books, both trade and mass market, attest to the public obsession with the beauty and power of money—who has it, how to groom and cherish it, what to wear in its presence, why it is so beautiful, where it likes to go in the summer.22
The obeisance to wealth takes so many forms that it would need a concordance to list them in hierarchical or alphabetical order. It is a matter not only of how people behave and to whom they show deference, but also what our society looks like, how it arranges its politics and expresses its feelings, what it talks about and how it administers its spiritual as well as its temporal rewards.
Across the whole of the American continent the talk of money is never quiet. Twenty-four hours a day it seeps through walls and shouts on the floors of the exchanges, whispers in darkened bedrooms and clatters in all-night restaurants, pleads and wheedles through telephone lines, takes up most of the space in the media, screams across kitchen tables, gloats in the windows of Madison Avenue and Rodeo Drive, drifts through bus stations and convention halls, worries in elevators, makes crazy the would-be artists in the gloom of the avant-garde. The papers print more advice on money than advice to the lovelorn; the tip sheets offer inside information in the manner of pardoners selling indulgences and tickets to paradise. Nobody can escape the insistent and commanding presence of money, and the unfortunate idealists who try to deny money’s importance discover themselves doomed to embrace an attitude more fully centered on money than that of the greediest plutocrat. The language of commerce is the lingua franca that knits together all the jargons of the professions, the one national vocabulary in which people express the worth of their meaning.
Among the faithful in New York and Los Angeles not even the rumor of incest commands so sudden and respectful a silence as the mention of money in sufficient magnitude. Anybody wishing to recruit an audience, whether of insurance brokers or university professors allegedly Marxist, has merely to speak of his recent encounter with the sum in excess of $500,000. Maybe he has just had lunch with somebody who made a killing in real estate. Perhaps he ran across an author who just sold the movie rights for $2.5 million. Possibly he has fresh news of an expensive divorce or of a merger said to involve oil companies with combined assets of $8 billion. For a brief and luminous moment the money achieves the stature of celebrity, almost as if it were Robert Redford standing in a circle of klieg light. The audience listens with dumbstruck awe for as long as the messenger can clothe the apparition in the specific numbers of a deal. Once the tale is done, the vision fades, and the great spirit vanishes as mysteriously as it came. The guests rouse themselves from their trance, and resume, reluctantly, the familiar and languid gossip about the host’s sexual indiscretions or the chance of nuclear war.23
A society’s attitude toward its principal scandals offers an instructive measure of the society’s order of value and obsession, and during the spring of 1987 Americans were entertained by a number of stories that allowed for ribald variations on the themes of eros—Gary Hart’s presidential campaign destroyed by his liaison with Donna Rice, at least two Marines seduced by a Soviet temptress at the embassy in Moscow, the Reverend Jim Bakker fallen from grace in a Florida hotel.
In other countries, most notably England and France, the media and its many audiences would have cherished both the official details and the unofficial rumors of sexual intrigue. Who was seen with whom, and when, and in what states of undress? What was the color of the woman’s chemise? From whom did the gentleman hire the chains or borrow the house in the country? Where was the gentleman’s wife, and did the lady also know the Duke of Kent?
Within recent memory at least six British cabinet ministers have left the government in the midst of newspaper dispatches worthy of the Marquis de Sade. In France nothing so delights the public as the news of an archbishop’s dying in a brothel, or the report of the President’s romance with an actress, or the suggestion that the President’s wife might have gone to Marseilles in the company of Algerian gangsters.
But in the United States the prurient interest attaches itself to money. The downfall of Gary Hart offered an especially instructive lesson in the presiding order of value. Under ordinary circumstances an American politician can keep as many mistresses as he can afford. Unless he stumbles into a crowd scene in the pages of Playboy, he can continue, without fear of contradiction, to make long and well-received speeches about the need for the new awakening of a new American morality.
But Hart happened to be campaigning for the office of the presidency, and what was at stake was not so much a question of character as the immense sum of money—measured as political spoils, patronage, graft—that changes hands with the election of a new President from the other political party. Hart’s indiscretion provided his competitors with a convenient way to eliminate his claim on the national fortune. The polls made it plain enough that the public wasn’t much concerned with the gentleman’s infidelity and sexual masquerades. What bothered people was his lack of business acumen. If a presidential election can be compared to a poker game, Hart had forsaken what looked like a winning hand for the sake of a woman’s smile. Who could trust a man so stupid?
The press reflected the popular sentiment by dropping the lines of sexual investigation as soon as it was clear that Hart was a political bankrupt. A fair number of the nation’s leading columnists, among them Anthony Lewis and Tom Wicker of The New York Times, felt obliged to apologize (on behalf of their profession) for having been associated, even tangentially, with such an indecent set of questions.
The Reverend Bakker’s defeat at the hands of Satan allowed for a number of further questions—about a young girl maybe drugged, a minister conceivably well-versed in the art of seduction, a cadre of church functionaries possibly employed as panders—but none of these lines of inquiry excited the popular imagination as much as the hope of fraud. The primary concern centered not on the humor and sorrow implicit in the vagaries of human desire but on the cost-benefit analyses. How much money was the Reverend Bakker gathering from the credulity of his flock? Where did the money go? What would become of the financial enterprise?
If the libido can be employed in the service of commerce (as a kind of glossy varnish that improves the sale of cosmetics, office equipment, Caribbean cruises, television drama and second mortgages), then so much the better, and all well and good. But customers must remember to look, not touch, to give way to their impulses not in a cocktail lounge but in a department store or automobile showroom. Even the best-selling pulp novels that purport to expose the lasciviousness of the Hollywood gentry read like those self-help manuals that promise to teach typing or real-estate development. The characters don’t go to bed with one another because they take pleasure in the encounter. They do so in order to advance their careers or because they want a better table at the Bistro.
In a rich man’s culture the wisdom of the rich consists of what the rich wish to hear and think about themselves. Despite its occasional bouts of invective and melancholia, the American press is, and always has been, a booster press, its editorial pages characteristically advancing the same arguments as the paid advertising copy. Together with the teaching in the schools, the national media preserve the myths that society deems precious, reassuring their patrons (i.e., the thousands of separate audiences that constitute the American public) that all is well, that the American truths remain securely in place, that the banks are safe, our generals competent, our presidents interested in the common welfare, our artists capable of masterpieces, our weapons invincible and our democratic institutions the wonder of an admiring world.24
Again in combination with the schools, the nation’s media reflect the character of a society impressed by displays of power and opulence rather than by the play of mind. The ancient Greeks admired in their art what they called the glittering play of “windswift thought.” Pericles in his funeral oration boasted not of the weapons or statues collected in Athens, although these were many and beautiful, but of the character of the Athenian citizen—self-reliant, resourceful, public-spirited, loyal, skeptical, marked “by refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy.” “Numberless are the world’s wonders,” said Sophocles, “but none more wonderful than man.”
Americans don’t think so. We prefer the beauty and wonder of property. If asked to revise Sophocles along more contemporary lines, an American publicist, whether employed by Newsweek, a university or a corporation, could be relied upon to come up with a statement extolling the perfection of the profit margin or the value of the architecture donated by the alumni.
At the San Francisco Examiner the editorial staff observed the protocols of wealth by assigning prices to people as well as to objects and events. An executive known to earn $800,000 a year was entitled to more space in the paper than an executive earning $500,000 a year—unless, of course, the less opulent executive committed an especially atrocious crime. Actresses living in beach houses worth $2 million outranked actresses living in bungalows worth $1 million; aircraft carriers that cost $17 billion were more to be feared than aircraft carriers that cost $10 billion. The sums of money stood as surrogates for further efforts of imaginative definition.25 The larger the number, the more magnificent the personality, the more necessary the corporation, the more deadly the weapon. Similar calculations governed the appraisal of press releases. If a messenger arrived carrying a paper embossed with the letterhead of some rich institution (the Ford Foundation, say, or the Mobil Oil Corporation), then clearly the message deserved to be read with informed gratitude. Let the same words appear typed on a piece of foolscap in the hands of an ordinary civilian, and the news was patently worthless. The deference of the city room aped the example of the stockbroker whom Heinrich Heine noticed one morning in the 1830s in the anteroom of the Baron de Rothschild’s bank in Paris. The establishment lacked the amenities of modern plumbing, and as a factotum emerged from the baron’s inner office bearing a chamber pot, the broker rose to his feet, removed his hat and bowed deeply to the proof of the baron’s mortality.
Over a number of years in the newspaper business, I dutifully took down notes of speeches delivered by people noteworthy for the titles and offices they held, not for their wit or intelligence. Most of what they had to say was bland or fatuous, but this didn’t prevent their remarks from being prominently displayed on the front page of next day’s editions. Banality in the mouth of a failed businessman or an unpublished novelist sounds banal; in the mouth of David Rockefeller or Philip Roth the same words acquire the weight of oracle.
Similar protocols regulate the size and duration of the applause meted out at fundraising dinners. Whether pledged to African orphans or victims of muscular dystrophy, $200,000 always gets a bigger hand than $50,000. On announcement of sums in excess of $500,000 the audience customarily rises to its feet like Heine’s stockbroker, the warmth of its ovation appropriate to the welcoming of a newly elected President or the return of a triumphant general.
Speaking to a related point in January 1983, William Proxmire, senator from Wisconsin, explained the political variant of the rule to a reporter from The New York Times soon after he had ceased to be chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Proxmire had held the rank of chairman by virtue of the Democratic majority in the Senate; when the Republicans assumed control of the Senate in 1981, Proxmire’s annual lecture fees dropped from over $100,000 to less than $12,000. “If you’re chairman of the Banking Committee,” he said, “you don’t have to speak at all. All you have to do is show up. You can read the phone book, and they’ll be happy to pay your honoraria.”26
Prior to his appointment as Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford was known as an amiable but not very bright congressman from Michigan. Once arrived in office Ford was assigned, together with the Marine guard and the Great Seal of the United States, a reputation for sagacity. Not even The New York Times went quite so far as to describe him as a philosopher-king, but suddenly the paper’s Washington correspondents recognized in Ford the lineaments of the homely wisdom traditionally ascribed to rural folk and singers of country songs.
At differing levels of intensity, this peculiarly American form of idolatry pervades the whole of the society. No matter what the venue—restaurant, newspaper office, hospital admissions office, department store, ballpark—the resident personnel reserve their deepest respect for the richest customers. Forever bowing to the Baron Rothschild’s chamber pot, the nation pays homage to the sum of money in a room, not the people. Profit takes precedence over life and art and love; the freedoms of property take precedence over individual liberties.27 Corporations—that is, money evolved to its highest and purest form of abstraction—enjoy more privileges than mere persons. The legal system rests on the necessary and fundamental premise that property rights remain absolute and supreme. Witnesses in a civil suit about a question of money can be forced to give testimony on pain of going to jail if they refuse to comply with a court’s order. In criminal cases (i.e., those that address the lesser questions of human life), witnesses retain the right to keep silent.
At business conventions the rules of etiquette decree that the president of the richest corporation be accorded the places of honor at the banquet tables and the afternoon seminars, and if two businessmen otherwise unknown to one another meet on an airplane or at a wedding reception in the suburbs, the question, “Who are you with?” establishes their rank within the hierarchies of wealth and determines which one owes the other what measures of attention, notice and respect. The division of the prospective spoils in any venture capital deal (for a new electronics company, say, or first novel) awards the commanding interest to the man who puts up the money, not to the man who conceives of the idea, registers the patent or does the work. Adolescents embark on their rites of passage by proving their capacity to earn their own money, and within the desolate silences of failing marriages the arguments about money take precedence (i.e., they are angrier and more deep-seated) over the arguments about sex. On Wall Street people talk about the “size” of the money in a stock trade as if it were a measurement of sexual prowess, and on the terraces of the nation’s better clubs the members find it difficult to believe that anybody can become trustworthy, or even decently human, on an income of less than $150,000 a year. Similar rules and procedures govern the manufacture of the nation’s so-called arts and letters. The sum of a publisher’s advance, together with the money allocated to promotion and distribution, determines the worth of a book. In Hollywood the liveliest dialogue and most inventive plot situations pertain to the preliminary structuring of the financial deal, not to the making of the subsequent movie or television series.
The protocols of wealth govern the distribution of the society’s awards and punishments. People seeking redress for their grievances or compassion for their sorrow have no choice but to translate their grief into a specific sum of money. The nation’s courts occupy themselves with problems in existential arithmetic. How much for a divorce? For a life? For lost arm or lost child? Given the current expectations among an increasingly rich and fastidious clientele it is entirely plausible to imagine a dissatisfied traveler to Florida bringing a lawsuit against the sun. If the plaintiff named as codefendants Eastern Airlines, Bloomingdale’s and the manufacturers of Coppertone coconut oil—all joined in the conspiracy to deny plaintiff’s right to a perfect suntan—the suit might enlist the eloquence of the ACLU as well as the guile of counsel willing to work for a percentage of the gross. After several years of lesser argument plaintiff’s lawyers could bring their writs to the Supreme Court and demand a revision of the contract between an American citizen and the universe.
With respect to criminal cases, the sociological studies show that the judgments align themselves with a hierarchy of cash value. An offender is likely to be imprisoned if his or her status (i.e., net worth) is lower than that of the victim—for example, an unemployed youth who robs a prosperous citizen on a city street. But if the offender’s status is higher than that of the victim—for example, a stock market swindler who steals from anonymous widows and orphans—then the offender is likely to be punished with a fine. The few well-publicized exceptions to the rule (Patricia Hearst, Paul Thayer et al.) sustain the mythology of a legal system founded on something other than the right of property.
As also might be expected of a commercial nation that has so long observed the protocols of wealth, the society possesses nothing that isn’t for sale. This is as it should be, and, as Jefferson well understood, not an excuse for cynicism. Again with a few notable exceptions, it is difficult to think of anything in the United States that cannot be bought or sold—the presidency, a television network, longer life, The New Yorker, the Baltimore Colts, a municipal judge, an ambassadorial post, Revlon, justice, social rank.28 Actors and popular athletes present themselves as billboards, paid as much as $300,000 per annum to wear Nike sneakers or tout the virtues of beauty creams and long-distance telephone lines. Once upon a time in West Los Angeles, in an elevator rising into the higher and more expensive atmospheres of Century City, I overheard a theatrical agent say to a friend, “There’s nothing wrong with a quality piece of junk,” and by the inflection of his voice I couldn’t tell whether he was referring to a script, an actress or a politician.
Money paid in salaries and fees provides the first and most elementary measure of society’s order of value. As answers to the familiar but always pressing question, “Who gets how much for doing what to whom?” the numbers establish the moral coordinates of the American dream. Because we value ourselves to the degree that other people stand willing to pay for our labor or our presence, money serves as the only acceptable collateral for speculations on the patents of an American self. The people who earn the most money are never those who advance the frontiers of knowledge or extend the reach of sympathetic imagination. With surprisingly few exceptions the highest fees are paid to the people who deal in the commodity of money. They might never become as rich as the entrepreneur who invents a new product or service, but the people who hold in their hands the vessels of power (i.e., the tax lawyers, corporate executives, investment bankers) enjoy the sumptuous living and the presumptions of grace granted the clergy in medieval Europe. Of the thirteen highest salaries (in excess of $1 million a year) paid to corporate executives in 1985, nine of them were claimed by senior partners in investment or brokerage firms. As explained by Peter Drucker in one of his astute essays on American corporate management, salaries reflect neither individual merit nor the workings of a market. They obey “the internal logic of hierarchical structure.” All corporations delight in elaborate tables of organization; if the worker on the lowest tier of authority earns $15,000 a year, and if the corporation is large enough to boast thirteen intermediate grades of promotion, then the executive on the highest tier earns $300,000 a year—not because he is worth that much more than the man on the bottom but because it is necessary to preserve the proper order of deference.
The professions adhere to the principle that the best is the most expensive, the most expensive the best. A Wall Street lawyer cannot afford to charge less than $250 an hour because if he lowered his fee he also would diminish his reputation for guile. So also with the Washington lobbyists who, in order to convey an impression of sagacity, must be seen in the best restaurants, dressed in $1,500 suits, comforting themselves with oysters.29 The lawyer and lobbyist might be fools, but their clients think that by paying a high price, they purchase an equivalent weight of intelligence. Comparable acts of blind faith sustain the fees charged by surgeons, literary agents and managers of investment portfolios. By the time the client discovers he has mistaken form for substance, he is either bankrupt or dead.
The protocols of wealth dictate the language of elections and define the nation’s political ideal. All candidates profess their heartfelt belief in what might be described as Hotel America—that is, the earthly paradise that certainly would arise from the ashes of a corrupt society if all their promises could be redeemed and all their good intentions changed into the currency of law. Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, insurgent or incumbent, the candidates offer all but identical blueprints of the great, good American place. No matter what the differences in their policy positions (on foreign and economic affairs, racial prejudice, education, weapons, the deficit, etc.) the assumptions implicit in their texts reveal a uniform conception not only of the state but also of what is meant by the pursuit of happiness.
The narrowness of their collective political imagination leads them to conceive of the Republic as something very much like a resort hotel, in which the citizens receive the comforts owed them by virtue of their status as America’s guests. The subsidiary ideological arguments amount to little more than complaints about the number, quality and cost of the available services. Listed under the rubrics of a travel advertisement, the principal characteristics of Hotel America might be described as follows:
The guests have no obligation to the state except to pay their bills, preferably with a credit card and, if possible, under the heading of a tax-deductible business expense. This commercial definition of the state (as object rather than subject, as inanimate machinery instead of living organism) would have frightened both Aristotle and Machiavelli. It differs only slightly from the Mafia’s designation of itself as Cosa Nostra, our thing.
To the extent that these assumptions underlie the political discourse, the vote-getting image of Hotel America bears an unhappy resemblance to the Marxist advertisement for a workers’ resort on the shores of the Black Sea.
In a nation that makes a business its culture, and of its culture a business, the Constitution is customarily seen as a part of the boring paperwork preliminary to the closing of a real-estate deal, which is why Reagan and his attorney general could be excused for knowing so little about it. So can most of the nation’s lawyers and elected officials. Among those whom I have met over a period of twenty-five years I think it fair to say that unless provided with a set of crib notes very few of them could name more than five of the constitutional amendments. The practice of government has more in common with the stock exchange than a civics class, but the news media’s habitual piety seldom permits the discussion of politics in the language of commerce. In one of the few lapses into candor, William Greider, then an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, some years ago described the acts of “buying, selling, swapping and hustling” as the fundamental means of expression occupying “the poetic center” of the national capital. Certainly this has been my own experience of the city. Traveling in and out of Washington on various assignments over the last twenty years I’ve noticed that I’m almost always in the company of people planning raids on the federal treasury. The politicians dress up the deals in the language of law or policy, but they’re in the business of brokering the tax revenue. What keeps them in office is not their talent for oratory but their skill at redistributing the national income in a way that rewards their constituents, clients, patrons and friends. They trade in every known commodity—school lunches, tax exemptions, water and mineral rights, aluminum siding, farm subsidies, pension benefits, weapons contracts and prison uniforms—and they know that the simple act of writing a single sentence into a trade or housing bill can result in the making of fortunes. They work the levers of government like gamblers pulling at slot machines.
Nearly three in every ten Americans live in a household receiving direct payments from the government; four of the remaining seven probably work for an enterprise dependent upon a federal subsidy or dole. As has been pointed out by a number of alarmed observers in recent years, the cost of political campaigns has become so high that almost everybody in Congress spends most of his or her time begging money from would-be patrons. Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, who retired in 1985 after three terms in the Senate, guessed that his colleagues were devoting 85 percent of their waking efforts to fundraising. Nobody, he said, could afford to attend committee meetings.
It is no wonder that in the United States people come to be valued for the money they command, not for their deeds or character. As their capacity to command money decreases, so also does their stature as human beings, which is why the advertising business has no interest in citizens beyond the age of fifty. Television sells to its advertisers an audience of women, aged eighteen to forty-nine, at a price of $16.50 per thousand. Older women and teenaged children sell for less. Elsewhere in the society anybody living on a pension trades at discount, on a par with the black, the crippled, the retarded and the insane; they remain of interest primarily to the doctors and travel agents who still can extract money from the wreckage of their health.
All societies judge by appearances, but the compulsion to do so becomes more urgent in those societies that depend so heavily on the external measures of success. To the extent that one’s condition is oneself, the surfaces of that condition must be kept as bright and clean as a new shopping center. Americans cannot bring themselves to trust a poor man, and it is no accident that our Presidents appoint as Cabinet members and ambassadors men readily identified as the masters or servants of wealth. Although the media have made much of this tendency in the Reagan administration, noting the financial bona fides of such gentlemen as Donald Regan, Caspar Weinberger and George Shultz, the same principle governed the appointments in the Carter, Ford, Nixon and Kennedy administrations. Without money it is all but impossible to aspire to a public voice or persona in American society, which is why a journalist who wishes to be heard or read must first attach himself to a wealthy media conglomerate and why it is much easier for incumbent politicians to raise campaign money.30
Even the more cynical and well-traveled Europeans, accustomed to seeing strange sights in Paris or the Malaysian Archipelago, admit to a degree of surprise when introduced to the American faith in cash. Perhaps this is because Europeans still tend toward a mercantile rather than a capitalist understanding of money. They think of the stuff as a finite commodity: any addition to the substance of A implies a subtraction from the substance of B. Americans take a more transcendent view. We construe money as an infinitely expanding resource, like helium or greeting-card sentiment or leaves on eucalyptus trees. In support of our faith we can offer so many miraculous proofs—of fortunes gained almost overnight in anything from California real estate to chocolate chip cookies—that it becomes easy to think of money not as a means but as an end.
Throughout the nineteenth century immigrants of all nationalities found it difficult to comprehend the American uses of money. Their letters and diaries express their confusion in a commercial society that wasn’t held together by ties of family, by a monarchy, by tradition, by the secret police. They felt threatened by a capitalist dynamic that could so easily overturn moral certainties and so readily dissolve the stability of the land. Precisely the same fears haunt the recently arrived immigrants from points of origin as diverse as Guatemala and the Soviet Union.
The shock of recognition is most poignant among the Russians. Over the years I have encountered a fair number of exiles from Odessa, or Moscow or Tbilisi. Although grateful for the material comforts of the United States and glad to escape the gray austerity of their own society, they cannot help noticing the crassness of the American market in human relations. Without exception they deplore the monetization of feeling. Alexander Solzhenitsyn made the point in a conversation with his biographer, Michael Scammell. “Absolutely everybody lives badly in our country,” Solzhenitsyn said, “but you only have to call for help if you need it. For example, I was helped by dozens of people absolutely disinterestedly. And I never had to ask myself, ‘Can I pay?’”
The newest immigrants cannot understand the substitution of cash transactions for the barter of love, sympathy, courage, neighborliness and honor. They never quite get it into their heads that in the United States the forming of loyalties and friendships requires the preliminary condition of commercial association or economic parity.
Without a deal or a business relation held in common, Americans discover they have little to say to one another. The pioneers moving west from Independence, Missouri, in the 1850s organized themselves into companies and elected their captains and treasurers for terms of no longer than a few weeks. Once arrived in California the transient conglomerate dissolved into its original subsidiaries. No matter what hardship people suffered together on the journey, they went their separate ways and disappeared into the void from whence they came. Much the same thing happens to people who change jobs and move to another city, corporation or marriage. They take down their prior loyalties as if these were little more than set decorations; within a week they have pitched the tents of their emotion on the ground lines of a new deal.
It is the monetization of human feeling that so enrages the women who resort to the furious speech of militant feminism. Ceaselessly reminded that the society reposes its trust in the personifications of money (i.e., in lawyers and captains of finance) women feel estranged from their natural roles as the protectors of society’s values and the keepers of its rules. They see these prerogatives assigned to wealth, mostly to fairly dull-witted gentlemen who, despite their knack for money-getting, display an appalling ignorance of human feeling and priority. The feminists imagine that if only they could become presidents of companies, somebody would listen to what they had to say. They learn to trust what the literary agents and the divorce lawyers call “the sincerity of the final figure,” and they come to believe that any sentiment not backed by cash must be deemed counterfeit.
The equivalence between money and feeling becomes increasingly apparent in the upper reaches of income and net worth. People who define their lives as functions of wealth display their affection, or lack of it, by withholding both the substance and symbolism of money. Between a rich man and his estranged son (or a rich mother and her alienated daughter) the casus belli almost always can be reduced to a precise sum: the inheritance the son expected but didn’t get, the wife’s fee for being cheated of her youth, the father’s price for mortgaging what he thought was his own happiness to the speculation of his daughter’s future. I sometimes think the only American story is the one about the reading of the will.
Howard Cosell once put the proposition in the fewest possible words. Together with Frank Gifford he was broadcasting a Monday Night Football game when the play on the field turned dull. Cosell lost interest in the score, and he began to talk to Gifford about the celebrities who had visited them in the booth during an earlier segment of the broadcast. Reggie Jackson had appeared briefly to acknowledge signing a $3 million contract with the Yankees, and Jimmy Connors had dropped by to report winnings of $80,000 the previous weekend at a tennis tournament in Las Vegas. Drifting into fond reverie, Cosell said: “Well, Frank, we’ve had a lot of money in the booth tonight.” He didn’t think it necessary to mention the names of the people to whom the money was attached. The names weren’t important. Athletes come and go, some in triumph and some on stretchers, but the money lives forever.