Home · Book Reports · 2018 · The Power Elite

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Thoughts

Chapter one introduces the book. It lays out what it will cover: economic, political, and military coalescing. At this intersection we will see that there is a group that can be called the elite. This group exists and has power ‘somewhere between omnipotent and impotent.’ ‘To accept either view—of all history as conspiracy or of all history as drift—is to relax the effort to understand the facts of power and the ways of the powerful.’

It is also put forth that the world is changing more rapidly, circa 1956, than it has ever changed in the past. These changes are also more visible because of the emergence of a new observation technique: the media.

The media also gives us, in addition to a front row seat to the changes, a distraction from those very changes in the form of glamor and celebrity. In tandem these views work as cover for a covert authoritarian system.

Lastly the media also brings with it campaigns and congressional maneuvering, brought to fever pitch, but only represent the middle levels of power, ostensibly still controlled by the public, not the upper levels of power, inaccessible –if even known– to the common man.

Chapter two looks at how old-money often looks back, how it takes a historical view in which their families have shaped a local region and their place is derived from time. The key is the historical outlook, which is absent in middle class and poor people.

Alternatively, young-money sees the old as in the way of progress, but still desiring their status. Mills goes so far as to say that the young-money sees the old-money as money grubbing, while downplaying their own (rapidly expanding) wealth.

Simultaneous to the clash between the old- and young-money groups, a larger shift is taking place. The focus is moving from the local upper class to the national upper class. The big local deal is small compared to the deals of the big city. What local industry compares to GM? The national corporation has supplanted the local industry. This, described later in the book, also leads to media and entertainment refocusing to the national level as well. This all adds up to ever concentration of wealth and power, one of the main tenets of the book.

In chapter three the discussion shifts to the metropolitan 400; ‘The Social Register’ is the only real attempt at identifying American upper class since there is no aristocracy, no court society, and no true capital city. Making the list depends on large part to the clubs which one belongs to.

These clubs need not be clubs in the common sense, the Century Club for example, but can extend to a more wider definition, including schools. Boarding for girls. Prep for boys. The form a similar hierarchy as to the clubs for men. Education in private schools leading to Harvard, Yale, etc, is increasingly more important than family pedigree. These schools train the old and rich alike to behave properly in their place atop society.

From childhood through professional adult-life, the upper class is surrounded by like kind. Family friends, old schoolmates, etc. They all were trained/raised in the same manner, think the same way, accept each other as peers and accept their peers thoughts, decisions, and criticisms, if for no other reason than they come from the same exclusive circles. This ‘in crowd’ mentality creates what we today call an echo chamber. Even if the proverbial ship were sinking, unless someone ‘respectable’ points it out, the rest of the upper class could easily go on rearranging the deck chairs.

Celebrity, the bane of Society (300/400, Society=High Society), is introduced in chapter four. While celebrity itself is not new, the modern celebrity is something of an odd creation. Creation is the right word, since they are created from the top-down, created via nation wide mass communications. This coverage and the glamor and glitz of the celebrity overwhelmed Society.

The existence and the activities of these professional celebrities long ago overshadowed the social antics of the 400…

I wonder: could this be by design? As a distraction to away from the real power? In my opinion this is exactly what the celebrity was created for.

Some debutantes of the ‘thirties tried to compete with Hollywood. They hired press agents who saw to it that their pictures were in the newspapers and articles about them were printed in the national magazines. The ‘trick,’ Elsa Maxwell has said, was ‘to look so bizarre and so extreme that the truck drivers gasp but the ever-present cameraman will be bound to flash a bulb.’

This strengthens my view that the shock and awe surrounding even the celebrities of the thirties was weaponized. That last passage reminds me of the likes of Lady Gaga or the celebrity sex-tape craze.

Another shift, that came quietly alongside the trompe celebrity was the shift from family as a source of status to your position in a corporation. The small business owner earning a million dollars a year is unknown while the national CEO making 200k is known. The march toward a national stage, while discarding the local and regional stages, moves forward.

Least like the celebrity, but still sharing some of the spotlight was the military man, particular surrounding periods of war.

Interestingly the word ‘prestige’, which Mills uses in the colloquial way to describe the new celebrity class, finds in it etymology the meaning ’to dazzle.’

Chapter five discusses how this centralization gives rise to the very rich. These new rich, in their corporate positions, are rewriting the history of the mogul and the robber baron into an economic hero, fighting for the common man.

As an aside, this rings true to me when considering Donald Trump. Somehow it has been spun that a billionaire is acting on behalf of the people. Somehow his progressive past has been rewritten into that of conservatism, but I digress.

Neither the ruthlessness and illegality, with which Gustavus Myers tends to rest content, nor the far-sighted, industrial statesmanship, with which many historians now seem happier, are explanations—they are merely accusation or apology.

Eventually, when trying to understand these ultra wealthy, you reach a point of circular logic. This ability has led them to wealth. You know they posses ability because of their wealth.

This runs at odds with reality though: it often isn’t the innovator that commands wealth, it is the salesman and financiers who exploit the invention.

That said, the psychology of the rich is less important than the economic and political environment that they were built in. To understand the typical wealthy one must look beyond the often cited top few from each generation, this book looks at 275 from 1900, 1925, and 1950.

In none of the latest three generations has a majority of the very rich been composed of men who have risen.

Though most are still economically active, not totally living as a leisure class, they are not self-made men, but heirs. The easiest way to be very rich: be born very rich.

You don’t make it to the very rich from hard work, you need to have a stock of money and parlay it when an opportunity arises. Then you accumulate advantages. For example you reach a point where you get to play with other people’s (and governmental) money. Hedge funds, I’m looking at you.

Historically the very rich were the targets of expose, often called muckraking to discredit those who dare expose how the sausage is made. Today, with all the ‘human interest’ and celebrity distractions, the very rich are much less public.

Chapter six exhibits the CEOs and how they and the very rich are tightly wrapped together. In 1956 most of the stock owners fell into the top 0.2% of the population, by wealth. In contrast, 98.6% held no stock at all. These numbers are as representative today as they were 60+ years ago. It is no wonder then why the very rich would want CEOs that best serve their interests. The easiest way to do that: align said interests by admitting the CEOs to the very rich (or selecting CEOs from the existing very rich).

CEO and upper level management used to need brilliance, now they need character. They no longer lead or look to the future, they have many below them that do that. Instead, they act as a governor to check those below them. They have to be ‘in’, think, act, speak like the other executives. This is more important than technical ability. Judgment is what they do.

So what does this new CEO class look like? They are “business liberals” and have have “taken over liberal rhetoric and used it for their own purposes”. This isn’t to say they are actually liberal, but it is the show that is put on in an age (still today as it was then) when liberalism was regarded highly.

Interestingly Mills points out that CEOs don’t read. They don’t need knowledge, with all those knowledgeable worker bees beneath them. They don’t need to expand their horizons, everyone in their circle thinks essentially the same way. All of their input is sanitized and boiled down into a stark reductionism presented as a memo chock-a-block full of bullet (talking) points.

The ‘running’ of a large business consists essentially of getting somebody to make something which somebody else will sell to somebody else for more than it costs.

Entrepreneur and bureaucratic are middle-class words and don’t accurately convey what the CEO (or very rich) follow in their limited, common meanings. The higher you go, the more mixed up they become with the political.

Another interesting side note: Mills wrote a bit about how mechanization and automation were being brought into the business world. Again, I would say this is portending is apropos.

Mills looks closer at the corporate rich in chapter seven. First of all, says Mills, taxes are nothing but a joke to the rich. They avoid, defer, pay only capital gains, set up foundations or charities and give gifts so that they will end up paying less than a salaried worker (even more so today).

In Mills’ day, the expense accounts was the hot button topic. It allowed the corporate honchos to expense anything under the sun, since the accounting on this was at best vague if anything more than what said executive claimed. Though this isn’t as ubiquitous today, the increased salaries and, particularly, stock options have more than offset its loss.

Some examples, most still relevant today:

vacation properties in the company name (for entertaining potential clients)
access to corp lawyers and accountants
top class medical coverage
company cars/chauffeurs
company paid travel (corporate jet?)
scholarships for children
club dues

In short, the author restates, in no uncertain terms, that the corporate and political world are merging, relying more and more on one another.

Chapter eight turns its attention toward, what Mills calls, the warlords. By warlords he means military men. Somehow, he wonders, civilians have reined in these men of violence.

This usurping has occurred in much the same manner as the political and economic circles, it is merely a merging of power into a unified upper class (which I would unhesitatingly label: oligarchy).

Among themselves, rank and honor, keeps the men of violence vying for rank. This keeps most of them with their attention on what is right in front of them, as oblivious to the true concentration of power happening above their heads. This is not hard to see. As of 1956, 6 officers and 9 generals have become president. Today, in the 21st century we still see military service as a pillar to stand on when running for office.

Like the very rich and the corporate rich, the military elite have their own path to power. West point and the academy teach disciple, military mind, contempt for civilians, although not they are also taught not to show the latter. The Pentagon, a city in its own right, not unlike Vatican City, is something of a capstone where a successful student of military power will one day be employed.

Historically the military existed to protect a nation’s interests and to ‘keep the peace’, with invasions being nearly a thing of the past for decades. This, of course, is not exactly true. Mills quickly covers up such sentiment: now, with more advanced weapons, there is no longer a plan for peace. It is accepted that it will no longer be peace interrupted by periods of war, but war interrupted by periods of peace. Yes, this resembles the world of the 21st century. Endless, regionally contained (away from the voters), war.

Mills once again dons his prophet hat in exclaiming that we were entering the era of the never ending emergency, in 1956!

Continuing with the idea that power and wealth were concentrating, it is reasonable to assume that the tools of war (hard power) would follow suit.

Now, the governments of the world have a total centralized monopoly of violence. Rifles, the weapon of choice for such a long time, are now mere toys. The question of arming the population is irrelevant in the era of fighter jets and bombs. As things like drones and other electronic warfare come online, there will be need for less and less men controlling them. While this isn’t the same kind of concentration of power Mills is talking about (the average military man is not an elite) it does paint a stunningly similar picture of concentration of (hard) power.

Chapter nine continues looking at the military ascendancy of the warlords. The conclusion is that the military are fast becoming part of the elite. Their goals are coinciding with politics, the very rich, the executives, and economics in general.

In 1956 almost half of the ambassadors came from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and prep schools. This, of course, is the typical path of the very rich. Similar infiltration has occurred as the standards previously required for high level government and State Dept. positions have been reduced. While one might consider the Ivy League schools to be high standards, this is simply not the case. Though I am unable to speak for 1956, modern times shows that money begets admittance to these so-called prestigious schools. That isn’t to say all the students attending are dull, but that intelligence and ability are requirements that can be shirked via money and influence.

In other schools, the military has essentially taken over scientific research. Its budget more than all American research put together, dollar-wise. Universities are, in many cases, merely financial branches of the military, getting sometime 80% of their income in military grants circa 1956. The same as it ever was.

This understanding spills over into the general economy. There is no aspect of the economy where the military hasn’t wrangled its way in permanent war economy. The scariest thing to officials is not war, it is peace. Consider how much is spent on military contracting and then rebuilding, not to mention all of the support and infrastructure, often manned by civilians, required to keep the whole military industrial complex humming along. There is a reason why the Pentagon “can’t” be audited.

In chapter ten Mills expounds on how less and less the political elite serve at a local or state level. More are entering at the national level directly, often with little or no political experience. This is completely the opposite of how it was in the era of the founding fathers. More and more are not even elected, they are appointed. Political outsiders, mostly of the corporate type, have taken over the political executive posts. All of this is no more than another aspect of bureaucratization.

Chapter eleven starts looking at the lie that has been sold to the American people: the idea that America is ruled by the people, that there are many competing interest groups, in the economic and political realms, that there is a kind of balance of power keeping them all in check.

Few look beyond the public relations statements, which they take as true, to understand what is happening in secret or how the groups in question interact in a hierarchy of power.

How can such a lie sustain itself? Up to the Civil War, 4/5th of the white, free population were independent proprietors (Jeffersonian), but that declined after the war as corporate power came into focus. The middle class moved from largely independent to dependent, white-collar, workers.

The new working middle class has no political influence, they are held together by corporate authority. They are, in fact, worse off than the lower class since the lower class are at least organized.

The checks and balances only work with a preexisting balanced social structure and balance state. Since the lobby has become the government, since the very rich have taken over, there are no longer checks and balances. There are no longer competing interests. The very rich, the corporate rich, and the (rich) warlords have merged.

From here Mills produces in the last four chapters, in my opinion the best part of this work. He looks pragmatically at the effects his country is under, holding back none of his emotions. While this does remove the objectivity one might crave in a political work, I think that emotion, particularly anger, is exactly what one should be feeling, whether in 1956 or 2018. In the afterword, by Alan Wolfe, there is a criticism of the second part of this book. I think Mr. Wolfe, from Chicago University, is trying to control the interpretation of a book that itself calls out such academics for not being able to see beyond their ivory towers.

Chapter twelve begins by enumerating the 4 epochs of the power elite. We are now in the 5th, as of 1956.

In the first epoch we find the time between the American Revolution and John Adams. This period shows little to no unification. The second epoch begins in the early 19th century and includes Jeffersonian politics and Hamiltonian economics. In this second epoch the overlap of power begins. The Federalists become the Democrats and Republicans. The military is a secondary concern. The third epoch begins in 1886 with the 14th amendment protecting corporations. The shift from government to corporate power begins. The military is still secondary. This third era also includes the likes of post-Civil War trusts, robber barons, muckrakers, and corporations beginning to regulate government. It last until about 1920 and the New Deal. The fourth epoch, starting with the New Deal, does nothing to reverse the trend of political-economic relations. There is a struggle between large and small property owners, labor begins to organize, and the lower class still has a bit of influence. There is a degree of a welfare state and favors for all while still trying to maintain some kind of balance in the status quo.

Since WW2 until this book (1956) we were in the fifth era. Here we see the government and corporate worlds intertwine, the military entering the elite, and the ruling class lashing themselves together by ‘class consciousness’ more than heredity, ala the aristocracy. These so-called elites have the same view, developed in their similar upbringings, often centered around prep and ivy leagues. There is a little conflict in these upper echelons of power, money, and influence, but in the end the know they are all in it together when they say of those they disagree with: he is one of us.

During this period the elite are still men of honor, but the code of honor they follow is such that they protect their interests. They often believe what they are doing is for the best even when the masses protest. This is poignant, they think they know better than everyone. They ooze chutzpa. Hubris en extremis.

Mills makes clear that his criticism is not an attack on their honor, but an attack on their code.

The core of this power elite changes ever so slowly. They are, again, not all friends but they are in it together. The surrounding fringe, who essentially server the core, changes with more regularity.

On the question of how this came to be, I’ll let Mills speak for himself.

The conception of the power elite, accordingly, does not rest upon the assumption that American history since the origins of World War II must be understood as a secret plot, or as a great and co-ordinated conspiracy of the members of this elite. The conception rests upon quite impersonal grounds.

There is, however, little doubt that the American power elite—which contains, we are told, some of ‘the greatest organizers in the world’—has also planned and has plotted. The rise of the elite, as we have already made clear, was not and could not have been caused by a plot; and the tenability of the conception does not rest upon the existence of any secret or any publicly known organization. But, once the conjunction of structural trend and of the personal will to utilize it gave rise to the power elite, then plans and programs did occur to its members and indeed it is not possible to interpret many events and official policies of the fifth epoch without reference to the power elite. ‘There is a great difference,’ Richard Hofstadter has remarked, ‘between locating conspiracies in history and saying that history is, in effect, a conspiracy … ’ 16

Here I disagree, there is most certainly secretive and public groups constantly conspiring. Do the get everything they want? Doubtfully. But over time they seem to get more and more of what they want. To dismiss things, or not mention them at all, like the Rhodes and Milner groups is a great disservice to the would-be understander of history. The author even says “there is little doubt that the power elite has planned and plotted,” and then simply dismisses his own statement.

There is accordingly reason to suspect—but by the nature of the case, no proof —that the power elite is not altogether ‘surfaced.’ There is nothing hidden about it, although its activities are not publicized. As an elite, it is not organized, although its members often know one another, seem quite naturally to work together, and share many organizations in common. There is nothing conspiratorial about it, although its decisions are often publicly unknown and its mode of operation manipulative rather than explicit.

This IS organization, though not of the top down kind a 1950’s mind would be looking for. This is the decentralized, graph theory, based kind of organization. Terrorist cells, so we are told, would operate this way. There is no close-knit organization, but a loose collection of cells all with the same general aim. We would call this a terrorist NETWORK today. What different between a terrorist network and a power elite network? Both work semi-independently toward a common goal, sometimes in very different, if not conflicting, ways.

Chapter thirteen examines the public, education, and how, theoretically, democratic society works.

In the democratic society of publics it was assumed that before public action would be taken, there would be rational discussion between individuals which would determine the action, and that, accordingly, the public opinion that resulted would be the infallible voice of reason. But this has been challenged not only (1) by the assumed need for experts to decide delicate and intricate issues, but (2) by the discovery—as by Freud—of the irrationality of the man in the street, and (3) by the discovery—as by Marx—of the socially conditioned nature of what was once assumed to be autonomous reason.

The “irrationality of the man in the street” is revealing. While I would mostly agree that experts are required to decide technical issues, and social conditioning plays an inordinate role in the decision making process for most people, Mills reveals his juxtaposing the man in the street to the ’educated’ men, of which he is a member of. Further, are the experts and men at the top (as opposed to in the street) purely rational? Are they not as affect by social conditioning, which Mills shows in the first half of the book, as the rest of us? Their biases may be different, but they are still biases.

From here Mills concludes that the public has become nothing more than a mass. This has happened primarily through communication asymmetry. At one extreme end of communication you have two people talking to one another. At the other extreme one spokesperson is speaking to millions; mass media. In the latter there is little to no flow of public opinion back to the speaker. Communication becomes a one way street.

The rules for who can speak and what they can say may be formal or informal. Anyone can certainly speak with anyone else, but Joe Average isn’t ever going to get a national platform, not that it is illegal, but the system is built, informally, to prevent it.

The Internet is interesting to look at in the regard, but I still think it is more confusion than real discourse. While it is formally possible to have a ’nobody’ reach the masses via the Internet, informally, like most other mass media it is unlikely. Couple this with the decades long drive towards more hedonistic outlooks and you see most people navigating to funny or exciting pages rather than of places of true communication.

Mills goes on to define a mass as a centralized expression consisting of more passive consumers. “Passive consumers”, need I say more?

Conversely a public is defined, by Mills, as a society in which people can all readily communicate to exchange opinions and ideas.

Again, we are free to communicate, but the social conditioning has left us unwilling or unable to communicate effectively nor focus on ‘real’ issues. Banal left/right dichotomies are trotted out ad nauseam while real ‘bipartisan’ issues, say, for example decaying infrastructure, suicide rates, and drug overdoses, are left to the conspiracy theorists.

How do you move from a public to a mass? Education. Education used to be liberal, as in liberating the mind, not the modern liberal as progressive meaning. Education was used for creating thoughtful citizens. Now it prepares you with job skills, merely vocational. Even further, modern education has taken up the mantle of social justice, moving a second step away from liberating minds and a first step from vocational training into full-scale indoctrination. This, it seems, is part of a feedback loop created by the aforementioned social conditioning.

All of this leads to a sort of mental divide and conquer. Whereas cities physically segregate people into milieux, education segregates us in opinion. A difference of opinion or values is now seen as rude. Today, you are more likely to be shouted down for expressing even the tamest of dissent than the be listened to, and responded to, critically.

This all leads to further segregation as people choose to associate with similar people. The same follows when people choose the media that fits their bias. Today this is self-selection bias is represented by so-called echo chambers.

The total result of this divisiveness and fracturing of society is that man loses his ability to be independent. He is driven by media, advertising, propaganda. Worse still, man loses the ability to even think about his position, his (lack of) independence, giving himself over to the mass produced world around him, focusing on the near-term: what can he get, as easy as possible that will make him happy (at least temporarily, though he never realizes the fleeting nature of this). As the generations pass, the ability to even consider this lack of independence disappears and we are left with the aforementioned passive consumers dead set in their belief that their ability to purchase 100 styles of jeans, to tune into 1000 television channels, or to dress in a way that conforms to one of the ever shifting fashion of cliques is testament to their (unconsidered) independence.

All of this can be succinctly summarized:

The top is coalescing into a unified power.
The middle is fragmenting into mass.
The bottom is already mass society.

Chapter fourteen looks at what is essentially the end of conservatism. There was, in 1956 and according to Mills, no more model of conservatism. There was no holdovers from a Feudal era like Europe had. This lack of ideology was no problem at all, since the elite follow no such ideologies. One could say their ideology is nothing more than pragmatism. This lets them jabber in liberalisms that are nothing more than hollow words uttered to appeal to the masses. A belief in this hollow ideology is created by hired academic hacks and public relations firms.

Those who espoused true conservatism may look for an aristocracy, but, since on can not be found, they turn to reinventing it as the ‘spirit of aristocracy, removing this faux-aristocracy from any actual social conditions. Sometimes they would go so far as to claim this new aristocracy was classless! The end result is a non-result; nothing more than a pipe dream support by ivory tower professors, hired by the very rich to keep true conservatives chasing their tails.

All the while, the eroding effect of liberalism takes it toll on the masses. More time is spent defending civil liberties than using them. They’ve become something you lock away and protect, like a deed or bond. Here again Mills shows his foresight. Today we have everything from the ACLU and Black Lives Matter to anti-fa protesting this that and the other thing, while not actually doing anything to create the better world they want. They protest, I assume, because that is what they were taught. They think marching and holding signs is somehow a counter to the real power holders. They, likely, were taught that there is a balance of power and if they make their ‘powerful’ voices heard, those in actual power will change.

Liberalism as a social theory rests on the notion of a society in automatic balance.11

Nothing could be further from the truth.

in postwar America mind has been divorced from reality.

What we actually have, and had since at least 1956, is a mass of useful idiots.

The right has been doing the liberal work on the middle levels, unknowingly, for decades. The left has been used as a battering ram to keep moving the goal posts, the conversation, the narrative, further left. The right concedes here and there and, over time, the whole left/right paradigm -flawed as it is- shifts.

This leads to a constant tension between those in the middle-classes. They see things only getting worse and often disengage into the immoral depravities that the high-class promote though said liberalism; sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. After decades of this, the results are staring us in the face. The masses are more interested in status and petty immoralities (sex scandals, etc) than pragmatic issues, even when they have very real effects directly on them. I look again at the crumbling infrastructure all across the country. The lead in so many of our pipes/drinking water is diabolic, yet the very people drinking said poison don’t know or care half as much about what they are putting in their bodies as what their favorite team or celebrity is doing. This leads smoothly into the next chapter.

Corruption as a feature, not a bug, is looked at in chapter fifteen. You may have corrupt individuals and you may have corrupt organizations. I imagine most would agree that latter worse. A corrupt individual, in a sound organization may be harmful, but may also be ferreted out. In fact, if the organization is sound, the removal of corruption would likely occur. On the other hand, a sound individual in a corrupt organization can be removed in the same manner. Worse still is that the corrupt organization may serve to corrupt the sound individual or even create an environment that breed more corruption. Sound individuals will soon find no place among such corrupt organization and will be force to follow the age old: if you can’t beat them, join them.

The business world is such a corrupt ‘organization’. Businessmen are expected to try to ‘cheat’ to get ahead. The regulating factor, usually a government, doling out penalties that pale in comparison reinforces this cheat-if-you-can-and-take-a-slap-on-the-wrist-if-caught mentality.

Of course, with the revolving door between business and politics, this should come as no surprise. What originally started as businesses trying to get ahead, however cutthroat they might need to behave, has spilled over into politics. One blatant example of this is regulatory capture. From there the dog-eat-dog mentality spilled over from politics into the street where it was adopted by the common man. The end result is that cheating the law is bad, but getting away with it is smart.

Those that have reached these higher echelons have created a myth, the myth of the self made man, to justify their goings-on and positions. This mythical man is created by a criteria of those that came before him. When trying to fit in, no matter the context, the existing structure will influence how you develop. Even if the so-called self made man pulls himself up, he is doing so in a preexisting culture. A simple example can be seen in art. A few artists may have blazed paths centuries ago, but many more followed along, regurgitating the same-old art. Modern rock music, for example, was greatly influenced by the 60’s rock idols. These rock idols can trace their roots back to jazz. The trail continues farther and farther back. Movies follow the same path.

This is important to understand because the elite shape not only their own milieu, but those of everyone below them, consciously or not (I would argue very consciously). An idea can be introduced by patronizing a few chose artists. The masses will rehash the same idea, unwittingly carrying water, spreading the oligarchical ideas the whole time.

A simple example of this can be seen in the current influx of movies dealing with artificial intelligence. If, playing the role of an elite, I would want to introduce people to the concept of A.I., of superior intelligence, of true artificial consciousness, what better way than to promote A.I. and all of its trappings in the cinema? First promote your ‘original’ work and show the world that it is a (manufactured) success. Other writers and directors, completely devoid of any direct influence, will see that movies featuring A.I. are selling. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the success will be emulated, further spreading the idea -in this case A.I., but it could be anything. Another example that follow the same pattern we see in Western media endlessly? LGBT. Without being pro- or con-, it is easy to see that LGBT is overrepresented when it comes to television and Hollywood. Why? Probably because the elite want to introduce this idea to the masses. Why? I would say, without straying too much from power, that promoting LGBT will result in less babies, which will result in a lower population. Call it soft eugenics.

Getting back on track, we can see modern validity in the next two statements by Mills:

Knowledge is no longer widely felt as an ideal; it is seen as an instrument. In a society of power and wealth, knowledge is valued as an instrument of power and wealth, and also, of course, as an ornament in conversation.

Today this manifests as vocational training in school. Ask a student or their parents what school is for. They will tell you to get into a good college. Ask them what college is for. To get a good job. What is a good job for? To earn lots of money. What is money for? To buy stuff. Maybe this is a bit callous, but on the whole it is true. You’d rarely hear an answer about developing as an individual or understanding (even experiencing) the splendor world. Occasionally you may stumble upon someone who has a goal of starting a family, though that is waning in recent years.

‘Bad men increase in knowledge as fast as good men,’ John Adams wrote [in 1790], ‘and science, arts, taste, sense and letters, are employed for the purpose of injustice as well as for virtue.’9

This again is common to see today. The true men of knowledge become consultants to those of power, often unwillingly, because of need for a job/money.

The most important aspect of the book, equally as valid a criticism today, is given near the end of the book:

The height of such mindless communications to masses, or what are thought to be masses, is probably the demagogic assumption that suspicion and accusation, if repeated often enough, somehow equal proof of guilt—just as repeated claims about toothpaste or brands of cigarettes are assumed to equal facts. The greatest kind of propaganda with which America is beset, the greatest at least in terms of volume and loudness, is commercial propaganda for soap and cigarettes and automobiles; it is to such things, or rather to Their Names, that this society most frequently sings its loudest praises.

In short, propaganda is what has allowed the influencers to amplify their influence to the point of almost total opaque control.

There is a lengthy afterword by Alan Wolfe. It praises and criticizes simultaneously in what feels to me a kind of controlled opposition. He does hail from Chicago University… Some of his arguments were valid in the late 90s, but 20 years later I’d say Mills was spot on, if very early to the party.

Further Reading

• ‘Nothing is more revealing,’ James Reston has written, ‘than to read the debate in the House of Representatives in the Eighteen Thirties on Greece’s fight with Turkey for independence and the Greek-Turkish debate in the Congress in 1947. The first is dignified and eloquent, the argument marching from principle through illustration to conclusion; the second is a dreary garble of debating points, full of irrelevancies and bad history.’ 6

Exceptional Excepts

Families and churches and schools adapt to modern life; governments and armies and corporations shape it; and, as they do so, they turn these lesser institutions into means for their ends. Religious institutions provide chaplains to the armed forces where they are used as a means of increasing the effectiveness of its morale to kill. Schools select and train men for their jobs in corporations and their specialized tasks in the armed forces. The extended family has, of course, long been broken up by the industrial revolution, and now the son and the father are removed from the family, by compulsion if need be, whenever the army of the state sends out the call.

If the centralized state could not rely upon the inculcation of nationalist loyalties in public and private schools, its leaders would promptly seek to modify the decentralized educational system. If the bankruptcy rate among the top five hundred corporations were as high as the general divorce rate among the thirty-seven million married couples, there would be economic catastrophe on an international scale.

The economy—once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance—has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated, which together hold the keys to economic decisions.

When numerous small entrepreneurs made up the economy, for example, many of them could fail and the consequences still remain local; political and military authorities did not intervene. But now, given political expectations and military commitments, can they afford to allow key units of the private corporate economy to break down in slump? Increasingly, they do intervene in economic affairs, and as they do so, the controlling decisions in each order are inspected by agents of the other two, and economic, military, and political structures are interlocked.

Such an elite may be conceived as omnipotent, and its powers thought of as a great hidden design. Thus, in vulgar Marxism, events and trends are explained by reference to ‘the will of the bourgeoisie’; in Nazism, by reference to ‘the conspiracy of the Jews’; by the petty right in America today, by reference to ‘the hidden force’ of Communist spies.

the prestige system of American society has now for the first time become truly national in scope; and that the more trivial and glamorous aspects of this national system of status tend at once to distract attention from its more authoritarian features and to justify the power that it often conceals.

The school-rather than the upper-class family—is the most important agency for transmitting the traditions of the upper social classes, and regulating the admission of new wealth and talent.

This world, [celebrity] which is now the American forum of public honor, has not been built from below, as a slow and steady linking of local societies and metropolitan 400’s. It has been created from above. Based upon nation-wide hierarchies of power and wealth, it is expressed by nation-wide means of mass communication.

The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency and skill than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States. It is carried to the point where a chattering radio and television entertainer becomes the hunting chum of leading industrial executives, cabinet members, and the higher military. It does not seem to matter what the man is the very best at; so long as he has won out in competition over all others, he is celebrated.

Some debutantes of the ’thirties tried to compete with Hollywood. They hired press agents who saw to it that their pictures were in the newspapers and articles about them were printed in the national magazines. The ’trick,’ Elsa Maxwell has said, was ’to look so bizarre and so extreme that the truck drivers gasp but the ever-present cameraman will be bound to flash a bulb.’ 17

Yet prestige is the shadow of money and power.

As military men have become more powerful during the wars and during the war-like interludes between, they too have joined the new national prestige scheme. They, as well as policemen, derive such importance as they have from the simple fact that violence is the final support of power and the final resort of those who would contest it. Only when revolution or crime threaten to disturb domestic order does the police captain, and only when diplomacy and war threaten international order, do the generals and admirals, come to be recognized for what at all times they are: indispensable elements of the order of power that prevails within and between the national states of the world.

through the magnifying glass of the mass media, men and women now form a kaleidoscope of highly distracting images

Many modern theories of industrial development stress technological developments, but the number of inventors among the very rich is so small as to be unappreciable. It is, as a matter of fact, not the far-seeing inventor or the captain of industry but the general of finance who becomes one of the very rich. That is one of the errors in Schumpeter’s idea of the ‘gale of innovations’: he systematically confuses technological gain with financial manipulation. What is needed, as Frederick Lewis Allen once remarked, is ‘not specialized knowledge, but persuasive salesmanship, coupled with the ability to command the millions and the investment-sales machinery of a large banking house, and to command also the services of astute corporation lawyers and stock-market operators.’ 4

It had cost some $40 billion to build all the manufacturing facilities existing in the United States in 1939. By 1945, an additional $26 billion worth of high quality new plant and equipment had been added—two thirds of it paid for directly from government funds. Some 20 of this $26 billion worth was usable for producing peacetime products. If to the $40 billion existing, we add this $20 billion, we have a $60 billion productive plan usable in the postwar period. The top 250 corporations owned in 1939 about 65 per cent of the facilities then existing, operated during the war 79 per cent of all new privately operated facilities built with government money, and held 78 per cent of all active prime war supply contracts as of September 1944. 6 No wonder that in World War II, little fortunes became big and many new little ones were created.

I. No man, to my knowledge has ever entered the ranks of the great American fortunes merely by saving a surplus from his salary or wages. In one way or another, he has to come into command of a strategic position which allows him the chance to appropriate big money, and usually he has to have available a considerable sum of money in order to be able to parlay it into really big wealth. He may work and slowly accumulate up to this big jump, but at some point he must find himself in a position to take up the main chance for which he has been on the lookout. On a salary of two or three hundred thousand a year, even forgetting taxes, and living like a miser in a board shack, it has been mathematically impossible to save up a great American fortune.*

What has happened is that the very rich are not so visible as they once seemed, to observers of the muckraker age, for example—who provided the last really public view of the top of American society. The absence of systematic information and the distraction of ‘human-interest’ trivia tend to make us suppose that they do not really matter and even that they do not really exist. But they are still very much among us—even though many are hidden, as it were, in the impersonal organizations in which their power, their wealth, and their privileges are anchored.

The six and a half million people who owned stock in publicly held corporations in 1952 made up less than 7 per cent of all adults in the population. 6 But that is not the whole story; in fact, by itself, it is misleading. What is important is, first, what types of people own any stock? And second, how concentrated is the value of the stock they own?

First of all: 45 per cent of the executives, 26 per cent of all professional persons, and 19 per cent of all supervisory officials hold stock. But only 0.2 per cent of the unskilled workers, 1.4 per cent of the semi-skilled workers, and 4.4 per cent of foremen and skilled workers hold stock. 7 Some 98.6 per cent of all workers in manufacturing own no stock whatsoever.

Second, in 1952, only 1.6 million (25 per cent) of the 6.5 million people who held any stock received as much as $10,000 per year from any and all sources. We do not know how much of that $10,000 came from dividends, but there is reason to believe that the average proportion was not great. 8 In 1949, some 165,000 about one-tenth of 1 per cent of all U.S. adults—received 42 per cent of all the corporate dividends going to individuals. The minimum income of these people for that year was $30,000. 9 The idea of a really wide distribution of economic ownership is a cultivated illusion: at the very most, 0.2 or 0.3 per cent of the adult population own the bulk, the pay-off shares, of the corporate world.

What the business liberals represent is the outlook and the interests of the newer propertied class as a whole. They are ‘sophisticated’ because they are more flexible in adjusting to such political facts of life as the New Deal and big labor, because they have taken over and used the dominant liberal rhetoric for their own purposes

It is not characteristic of American executives to read books, except books on ‘management’ and mysteries; ‘The majority of top executives almost never read drama, great fiction, the philosophers, the poets. Those who do venture into this area … are definitely sports of the executive type, looked upon by their colleagues with mingled awe and incredulity.’ 25 Executive circles do not overlap very much with those of artistic or literary interest. Among them are those who resent reading a report or a letter longer than one page, such avoidance of words being rather general. They seem somehow suspicious of long-winded speeches, except when they are the speakers, and they do not, of course, have the time. They are very much of the age of the ‘briefing,’ of the digest, of the two-paragraph memo. Such reading as they do, they often delegate to others, who clip and summarize for them. They are talkers and listeners rather than readers or writers. They pick up much of what they know at the conference table and from friends in other fields.

The ‘running’ of a large business consists essentially of getting somebody to make something which somebody else will sell to somebody else for more than it costs.

War is of course the health of the corporate economy; during war the political economy tends to become more unified, and moreover, political legitimations of the most unquestionable sort—national security itself—are gained for corporate economic activities.

All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence. Why, then, is not military dictatorship the normal and usual form of government?

for the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an ‘emergency’ without a foreseeable end. During modern times, and especially in the United States, men had come to look upon history as a peaceful continuum interrupted by war. But now, the American elite does not have any real image of peace—other than as an uneasy interlude existing precariously by virtue of the balance of mutual fright. The only seriously accepted plan for ‘peace’ is the fully loaded pistol. In short, war or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States.

Given the means of violence that now exist, ‘massive retaliation’ is neither a war plan nor an image of victory, but merely a violent diplomatic—which is to say political—gesture and a recognition that all-out war between two nations has now become the means of their mutual destruction. The position amounts to this: with war all nations may fall, so in their mutual fright of war, they survive. Peace is a mutual fright, a balance of armed fear.

A recent member of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department wrote: ‘One hopes that the American public will see at last that the word “security” has become a euphemism. It covers the primitive political drive of the last five years to eliminate intellectual and moral distinction from the Government service, and to staff the Government instead with political good fellows who cannot be suspected of superiority. Under the reorganized Foreign Service, for example, educational standards for admission are being avowedly lowered. It is as if the mediocrity of the mindless has become the ideal.’ 26

‘What officials fear more than dateless war in Korea,’ Arthur Krock reported in April of 1953, ‘is peace … The vision of peace which could lure the free world into letting down its guard, and demolishing the slow and costly process ofbuilding collective security in western Europe while the Soviets maintained and increased their military power, is enough to make men in office indecisive. And the stock market selling that followed the sudden conciliatory overtures from the Kremlin supports the thesis that immediate prosperity in this country is linked to a war economy and suggests desperate economic problems that may arise on the home front.’ 45

The warlords, along with fellow travelers and spokesmen, are attempting to plant their metaphysics firmly among the population at large.

Daily, in war and in peace, they [the military] release items and stories to the press and to the three or four dozen newsmen housed in the newsroom of the Pentagon. They prepare scripts, make recordings, and take pictures for radio and TV outlets; they maintain the largest motion-picture studio in the East, bought from Paramount in 1942. They are ready to serve magazine editors with prepared copy. They arrange speaking engagements for military personnel and provide the speeches. They establish liaison with important national organizations, and arrange orientation conferences and field trips for their leaders, as well as for executives and key people in the business, the educational, the religious, the entertainment worlds. They have arranged, in some 600 communities, ‘advisory committees’ which open the way to their messages and advise them of unfavorable reactions. 56

The cost of this program varies from year to year, but interested Senators have estimated it as between $5 million and $12 million. Such estimates, however, mean little, for the position of the military is such that they were able to enjoy, during one twelve-month period, some $30 million worth of motion pictures, which they co-operated in producing; obtain millions of dollars worth of free time on TV, and, according to Variety’s estimate, about $6 million of free radio time.

tendency in a mass society for manipulation to replace explicitly debated authority

But it confuses, indeed it does not even distinguish between the top, the middle, and the bottom levels of power. In fact, the strategy of all such romantic pluralism, with its image of a semi-organized stalemate, is rather clear: You elaborate the number of groups involved, in a kind of bewildering, Whitmanesque enthusiasm for variety. Indeed, what group fails to qualify as a ‘veto group’? You do not try to clarify the hodge-podge by classifying these groups, occupations, strata, organizations according to their political relevance or even according to whether they are organized politically at all. You do not try to see how they may be connected with one another into a structure of power, for by virtue of his perspective, the romantic conservative focuses upon a scatter of milieux rather than upon their connections within a structure of power. And you do not consider the possibility of any community of interests among the top groups. You do not connect all these milieux and miscellaneous groups with the big decisions: you do not ask and answer with historical detail: exactly what, directly or indirectly, did ‘small retailers’ or ‘brick masons’ have to do with the sequence of decision and event that led to World War II? What did ‘insurance agents,’ or for that matter, the Congress, have to do with the decision to make or not to make, to drop or not to drop, the early model of the new weapon? Moreover, you take seriously the public-relations-minded statements of the leaders of all groups, strata, and blocs, and thus confuse psychological uneasiness with the facts of power and policy. So long as power is not nakedly displayed, it must not be power. And of course you do not consider the difficulties posed for you as an observer by the fact of secrecy, official and otherwise.

In fact, his parochialism is in some cases so intense that as a local candidate he may even invite and collect for local display an assortment of out-of-state attacks upon him, thus turning his campaign into a crusade of the sovereign locality against national outsiders. 20

Political freedom and economic security were anchored in the fact of small-scale and independent properties; they are not anchored in the job world of the new middle class. Scattered properties, and their holders, were integrated economically by free and autonomous markets; the jobs of the new middle class are integrated by corporate authority. The white-collar middle classes do not form an independent base of power: economically, they are in the same situation as property-less wage workers; politically they are in a worse condition, for they are not as organized.

There is nothing magical or eternal about checks and balances. In time of revolution, checks and balances may be significant as a restraint upon unorganized and organized masses. In time of rigid dictatorship, they may be significant as a technique of divide and rule. Only under a state which is already quite well balanced, and which has under it a balanced social structure, do checks and balances mean a restraint upon the rulers.

The supremacy of corporate economic power began, in a formal way, with the Congressional elections of 1866, and was consolidated by the Supreme Court decision of 1886 which declared that the Fourteenth Amendment protected the corporation. That period witnessed the transfer of the center of initiative from government to corporation.

The ‘welfare state,’ created to sustain the balance and to carry out the subsidy, differed from the ‘laissez-faire’ state: ‘If the state was believed neutral in the days of T.R. because its leaders claimed to sanction favors for no one,’ Richard Hofstadter has remarked, ‘the state under F.D.R. could be called neutral only in the sense that it offered favors to everyone.’ 7

Neither the idea of a ‘ruling class’ nor of a simple monolithic rise of ‘bureaucratic politicians’ nor of a ‘military clique’ is adequate. The power elite today involves the often uneasy coincidence of economic, military, and political power.

But what is honor? Honor can only mean living up to a code that one believes to be honorable.

Since the French Revolution, conservative thinkers have Viewed With Alarm the rise of the public, which they called the masses, or something to that effect. ‘The populace is sovereign, and the tide of barbarism mounts,’ wrote Gustave Le Bon. ‘The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings,’ and already ‘the destinies of nations are elaborated at present in the heart of the masses, and no longer in the councils of princes.’ 4 During the twentieth century, liberal and even socialist thinkers have followed suit, with more explicit reference to what we have called the society of masses. From Le Bon to Emil Lederer and Ortega y Gasset, they have held that the influence of the mass in unfortunately increasing.

But surely those who have supposed the masses to be all powerful, or at least well on their way to triumph, are wrong. In our time, as Chakhotin knew, the influence of autonomous collectivities within political life is in fact diminishing. 5 Furthermore, such influence as they do have is guided; they must now be seen not as publics acting autonomously, but as masses manipulated at focal points into crowds of demonstrators. For as publics become masses, masses sometimes become crowds; and, in crowds, the psychical rape by the mass media is supplemented up-close by the harsh and sudden harangue. Then the people in the crowd disperse again—as atomized and submissive masses.

With the broadening of the base of politics within the context of a folk-lore of democratic decision-making, and with the increased means of mass persuasion that are available, the public of public opinion has become the object of intensive efforts to control, manage, manipulate, and increasingly intimidate.

in addition to their enlarged and centralized means of administration, exploitation, and violence, the modern elite have had placed within their grasp historically unique instruments of psychic management and manipulation, which include universal compulsory education as well as the media of mass communication.

we must recognize that ‘the common sense’ of our children is going to be less the result of any firm social tradition than of the stereotypes carried by the mass media to which they are now so fully exposed.

III. The media have not only filtered into our experience of external realities, they have also entered into our very experience of our own selves. They have provided us with new identities and new aspirations of what we should like to be, and what we should like to appear to be. They have provided in the models of conduct they hold out to us a new and larger and more flexible set of appraisals of our very selves.

IV. As they now generally prevail, the mass media, especially television, often encroach upon the small-scale discussion, and destroy the chance for the reasonable and leisurely and human interchange of opinion. They are an important cause of the destruction of privacy in its full human meaning. That is an important reason why they not only fail as an educational force, but are a malign force:

Alongside or just below the elite, there is the propagandist, the publicity expert, the public-relations man, who would control the very formation of public opinion in order to be able to include it as one more pacified item in calculations of effective power, increased prestige, more secure wealth.

mass education, in many respects, has become—another mass medium.

The prime task of public education, as it came widely to be understood in this country, was political: to make the citizen more knowledgeable and thus better able to think and to judge of public affairs. In time, the function of education shifted from the political to the economic: to train people for better-paying jobs and thus to get ahead. This is especially true of the high-school movement, which has met the business demands for white-collar skills at the public’s expense. In large part education has become merely vocational; in so far as its political task is concerned, in many schools, that has been reduced to a routine training of nationalist loyalties.

The training of skills that are of more or less direct use in the vocational life is an important task to perform, but ought not to be mistaken for liberal education: job advancement, no matter on what levels, is not the same as self development, although the two are now systematically confused. 10 Among ‘skills,’ some are more and some are less relevant to the aims ofliberal—that is to say, liberating—education.

The knowledgeable man in the genuine public is able to turn his personal troubles into social issues, to see their relevance for his community and his community’s relevance for them. He understands that what he thinks and feels as personal troubles are very often not only that but problems shared by others and indeed not subject to solution by any one individual but only by modifications of the structure of the groups in which he lives and sometimes the structure of the entire society.

It is the task of the liberal institution, as of the liberally educated man, continually to translate troubles into issues and issues into the terms of their human meaning for the individual.

in the hands of ‘professional educators,’ many schools have come to operate on an ideology of ‘life adjustment’ that encourages happy acceptance of mass ways of life rather than the struggle for individual and public transcendence. *

People, we know, tend to select those formal media which confirm what they already believe and enjoy. In a parallel way, they tend in the metropolitan segregation to come into live touch with those whose opinions are similar to theirs. Others they tend to treat unseriously.

Liberalism as a social theory rests on the notion of a society in automatic balance. 11

in postwar America mind has been divorced from reality.

Given the state of the mass society, we should not expect anything else. Most of its members are distracted by status, by the disclosures of pettier immortalities, and by that Machiavellianism-for the-little-man that is the death of political insurgency.

‘Crisis’ is a bankrupted term, because so many men in high places have evoked it in order to cover up their extraordinary policies and deeds; as a matter of fact, it is precisely the absence of crises that is a cardinal feature of the higher immorality.

A society that is in its higher circles and on its middle levels widely believed to be a network of smart rackets does not produce men with an inner moral sense; a society that is merely expedient does not produce men of conscience. A society that narrows the meaning of ‘success’ to the big money and in its terms condemns failure as the chief vice, raising money to the plane of absolute value, will produce the sharp operator and the shady deal.

‘Nothing is more revealing,’ James Reston has written, ‘than to read the debate in the House of Representatives in the Eighteen Thirties on Greece’s fight with Turkey for independence and the Greek-Turkish debate in the Congress in 1947. The first is dignified and eloquent, the argument marching from principle through illustration to conclusion; the second is a dreary garble of debating points, full of irrelevancies and bad history.’ 6

Knowledge is no longer widely felt as an ideal; it is seen as an instrument. In a society of power and wealth, knowledge is valued as an instrument of power and wealth, and also, of course, as an ornament in conversation.

‘Bad men increase in knowledge as fast as good men,’ John Adams wrote, ‘and science, arts, taste, sense and letters, are employed for the purpose of injustice as well as for virtue.’ 9 That was in 1790

The height of such mindless communications to masses, or what are thought to be masses, is probably the demagogic assumption that suspicion and accusation, if repeated often enough, somehow equal proof of guilt—just as repeated claims about toothpaste or brands of cigarettes are assumed to equal facts. The greatest kind of propaganda with which America is beset, the greatest at least in terms of volume and loudness, is commercial propaganda for soap and cigarettes and automobiles; it is to such things, or rather to Their Names, that this society most frequently sings its loudest praises.

Table of Contents

• 01: The Higher Circles
• 02: Local Society
• 03: Metropolitan 400
• 04: The Celebrities
• 05: The Very Rich
• 06: The Chief Executives
• 07: The Corporate Rich
• 08: The Warlords
• 09: The Military Ascendancy
• 10: The Political Directorate
• 11: The Theory of Balance
• 12: The Power Elite
• 13: The Mass Society
• 14: The Conservative Mood
• 15: The Higher Immorality
• Afterword: by Alan Wolfe

• Pages numbers from the pdf.

· 01: The Higher Circles

page 11:

• hierarchies of state and corporation and army constitute the means of power; as such they are now of a consequence not before equaled in human history and at their summits, there are now those command posts of modern society which offer us the sociological key to an understanding of the role of the higher circles in America.

• Within American society, major national power now resides in the economic, the political, and the military domains.

• Families and churches and schools adapt to modern life; governments and armies and corporations shape it; and, as they do so, they turn these lesser institutions into means for their ends. Religious institutions provide chaplains to the armed forces where they are used as a means of increasing the effectiveness of its morale to kill. Schools select and train men for their jobs in corporations and their specialized tasks in the armed forces. The extended family has, of course, long been broken up by the industrial revolution, and now the son and the father are removed from the family, by compulsion if need be, whenever the army of the state sends out the call.

• If the centralized state could not rely upon the inculcation of nationalist loyalties in public and private schools, its leaders would promptly seek to modify the decentralized educational system. If the bankruptcy rate among the top five hundred corporations were as high as the general divorce rate among the thirty-seven million married couples, there would be economic catastrophe on an international scale.

page 12:

• The economy—once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance—has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated, which together hold the keys to economic decisions.

• The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized, executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered, and now enters into each and every crany of the social structure.

• The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government

• When numerous small entrepreneurs made up the economy, for example, many of them could fail and the consequences still remain local; political and military authorities did not intervene. But now, given political expectations and military commitments, can they afford to allow key units of the private corporate economy to break down in slump? Increasingly, they do intervene in economic affairs, and as they do so, the controlling decisions in each order are inspected by agents of the other two, and economic, military, and political structures are interlocked.

• Too big too fail.

page 14:

• No one, accordingly, can be truly powerful unless he has access to the command of major institutions

page 15:

• If we took the one hundred most powerful men in America, the one hundred wealthiest, and the one hundred most celebrated away from the institutional positions they now occupy, away from their resources of men and women and money, away from the media of mass communication that are now focused upon them—then they would be powerless and poor and uncelebrated.

• no matter what else they may be, the people of these higher circles are involved in a set of overlapping ‘crowds’ and intricately connected ‘cliques.’

page 19:

• Such an elite may be conceived as omnipotent, and its powers thought of as a great hidden design. Thus, in vulgar Marxism, events and trends are explained by reference to ‘the will of the bourgeoisie’; in Nazism, by reference to ‘the conspiracy of the Jews’; by the petty right in America today, by reference to ‘the hidden force’ of Communist spies.

• As far as I can tell, all three of his examples are the same group with different names.

page 22:

• But now the tempo of change is so rapid, and the means of observation so accessible, that the interplay of event and decision seems often to be quite historically visible, if we will only look carefully and from an adequate vantage point.

page 23:

• To pretend that ‘we’ are all history makers is politically irresponsible because it obfuscates any attempt to locate responsibility for the consequential decisions of men who do have access to the means of power.

page 25:

• modern elites may smash one structure and set up another in which they then enact quite different roles.

page 26:

• If the elite of our time do not have power, they cannot be held responsible; as men in a difficult position, they should engage our sympathies. The people of the United States are ruled by sovereign fortune; they, and with them their elite, are fatally overwhelmed by consequences they cannot control. If that is so, we ought all to do what many have in fact already done: withdraw entirely from political reflection and action into a materially comfortable and entirely private life.

• If, on the other hand, we believe that war and peace and slump and prosperity are, precisely now, no longer matters of ‘fortune’ or ‘fate,’ but that, precisely now more than ever, they are controllable,then we must ask—controllable by whom?

page 27:

• To accept either view—of all history as conspiracy or of all history as drift—is to relax the effort to understand the facts of power and the ways of the powerful.

• the prestige system of American society has now for the first time become truly national in scope; and that the more trivial and glamorous aspects of this national system of status tend at once to distract attention from its more authoritarian features and to justify the power that it often conceals.

page 28:

• what observers in the Progressive Era called ‘the invisible government’ has now become quite visible; and that what is usually taken to be the central content of politics, the pressures and the campaigns and the congressional maneuvering, has, in considerable part, now been relegated to the middle levels of power.

· 02: Local Society

page 35:

• ‘We would not go to the “associations,” as you call them—that is, not right away,’ one powerful man of a sizable city in the mid-South told Professor Floyd Hunter. ‘A lot of those associations, if you mean by associations the Chamber of Commerce or the Community Council, sit around and discuss “goals” and “ideals.” I don’t know what a lot of those things mean. I’ll be frank with you, I do not get onto a lot of those committees. A lot of the others in town do, but I don’t… Charles Homer is the biggest man in our crowd … When he gets an idea, others will get the idea… recently he got the idea that Regional City should be the national headquarters for an International Trade Council. He called in some of us [the inner crowd], and he talked briefly about his idea. He did not talk much. We do not engage in loose talk about the “ideals” of the situation and all that other stuff. We get right down to the problem, that is, how to get this Council. We all think it is a good idea right around the circle. There are six of us in the meeting … All of us are assigned tasks to carry out. Moster is to draw up the papers of incorporation. He is the lawyer. I have a group of friends that I will carry along. Everyone else has a group of friends he will do the same with. These fellows are what you might call followers.

• ‘We decide we need to raise $65,000 to put this thing over. We could raise that amount within our own crowd, but eventually this thing is going to be a community proposition, so we decide to bring the other crowds in on the deal. We decide to have a meeting at the Grandview Club with select members of other crowds … When we meet at the Club at dinner with the other crowds, Mr. Homer makes a brief talk; again, he does not need to talk long. He ends his talk by saying he believes in his proposition enough that he is willing to put $10,000 of his own money into it for the first year. He sits down. You can see some of the other crowds getting their heads together, and the Growers Bank crowd, not to be outdone, offers a like amount plus a guarantee that they will go along with the project for three years. Others throw in $5,000 to $10,000 until—I’d say within thirty or forty minutes—we have pledges of the money we need. In three hours the whole thing is settled, including the time for eating!

• There is one detail I left out, and it is an important one. We went into that meeting with a board of directors picked. The constitution was all written, and the man who was to head the council as executive was named … a third-string man, a fellow who will take advice … The public doesn’t know anything about the project until it reaches the stage I’ve been talking about. After the matter is financially sound, then we go to the newspapers and say there is a proposal for consideration. Of course, it is not news to a lot of people by then, but the Chamber committees and other civic organizations are brought in on the idea. They all think it’s a good idea. They help to get the Council located and established. That’s about all there is to it.’ 4

page 39:

• the ‘bright young men’ of all educated classes tend to leave the small city and to make their careers within the corporate world. The local world of the old upper class is simply by-passed.

· 03: Metropolitan 400

page 43:

• The formula for ‘old families’ in America is money plus inclination plus time. After all, there have only been some six or seven generations in the whole of United States history. For every old family there must have been a time when someone was of that family but it was not ‘old.’ Accordingly, in America, it is almost as great a thing to be an ancestor as to have an ancestor.

• The focus on history is exactly what is being (has been?) destroyed. The past is ‘ancient history’ to the modern generation, knowing nothing of its own roots, not recognizing the disadvantage they are at in disregarding their history.

• Americans are not very conscious of family lines; they are not the sort of underlying population which would readily cash in claims for prestige on the basis of family descent. It is only when a social structure does not essentially change in the course of generations, only when occupation and wealth and station tend to become hereditary, that such pride and prejudice, and with them, such servility and sense of inferiority, can become stable bases of a prestige system.

page 47:

• The [Social] Register lists the ‘socially elect’ together with addresses, children, schools, telephone numbers, and clubs.

• The Social Register describes the people eligible for its listing as ‘those families who by descent or by social standing or from other qualifications are naturally included in the best society of any particular city or cities.’

page 53:

• The school-rather than the upper-class family—is the most important agency for transmitting the traditions of the upper social classes, and regulating the admission of new wealth and talent.

• Daily life in the exclusive schools is usually quite simple, even Spartan; within its atmosphere of snobbish simplicity, there is a democracy of status.

• These schools are not usually oriented to any obvious practical end. It is true that the boys’ schools are invariably preparatory for college; while those for girls offer one curriculum for college preparation, and one terminal course for girls contemplating earlier marriage. But the middle-class ethos of competitiveness is generally lacking. One should, the school seems to say, compare one’s work and activity not with the boy or girl next to you, but with what you and your teacher believe is your own best. Besides, if you are too interested, you become conspicuous.

page 54:

• The elders of the school community are those older children in the higher Forms, and they become the models aspired to by the younger children. For young boys, up to eight and nine, there are carefully chosen Housemothers; between twelve and thirteen, they are weaned from women and have exclusively male teachers, although the wives of instructors often live with their husbands in apartments within the boys’ dormitories and continue a virtual kinship role with them. Care is taken that the self-image of the child not be slapped down, as it might by an insecure parent, and that manners at table as elsewhere be imbibed from the general atmosphere rather than from authoritarian and forbidding figures.

• Harvard or Yale or Princeton is not enough. It is the really exclusive prep school that counts, for that determines which of the ‘two Harvards’ one attends.

· 04: The Celebrities

page 58:

• This world, [celebrity] which is now the American forum of public honor, has not been built from below, as a slow and steady linking of local societies and metropolitan 400’s. It has been created from above. Based upon nation-wide hierarchies of power and wealth, it is expressed by nation-wide means of mass communication.

page 60:

• The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency and skill than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States. It is carried to the point where a chattering radio and television entertainer becomes the hunting chum of leading industrial executives, cabinet members, and the higher military. It does not seem to matter what the man is the very best at; so long as he has won out in competition over all others, he is celebrated.

• As a business, the networks of mass communication, publicity, and entertainment are not only the means whereby celebrities are celebrated; they also select and create celebrities for a profit.

• Rather than being celebrated because they occupy positions of prestige, they occupy positions of prestige because they are celebrated.

page 61:

• The existence and the activities of these professional celebrities long ago overshadowed the social antics of the 400…

• Could this be by design? As a distraction to away from the real power?

page 65:

• Some debutantes of the ‘thirties tried to compete with Hollywood. They hired press agents who saw to it that their pictures were in the newspapers and articles about them were printed in the national magazines. The ‘trick,’ Elsa Maxwell has said, was ‘to look so bizarre and so extreme that the truck drivers gasp but the ever-present cameraman will be bound to flash a bulb.’ 17

page 66:

• The model’s money does not add up to much. But the men she meets have money, and her tastes quickly become expensive. The men she meets control careers, and she wants a career.

page 67:

• Yet prestige is the shadow of money and power.

page 68:

• The position held in the national corporation has become a major basis for status claims. The corporation is now the organized power center of the propertied classes…

page 69:

• As military men have become more powerful during the wars and during the war-like interludes between, they too have joined the new national prestige scheme. They, as well as policemen, derive such importance as they have from the simple fact that violence is the final support of power and the final resort of those who would contest it. Only when revolution or crime threaten to disturb domestic order does the police captain, and only when diplomacy and war threaten international order, do the generals and admirals, come to be recognized for what at all times they are: indispensable elements of the order of power that prevails within and between the national states of the world.

page 73:

• through the magnifying glass of the mass media, men and women now form a kaleidoscope of highly distracting images

· 05: The Very Rich

page 75:

• The great corporations, full of publicity consciousness, are having their scholarly histories written, and the colorful image of the great mogul is becoming the image of a constructive economic hero from whose great achievement all have benefited and from whose character the corporate executive borrows his right to rule and his good, solid, justified feelings about doing so. It is as if the historians could not hold in their heads a hundred-year stretch of history but saw all of it carefully through the political lens of each and every administration.

page 77:

• Neither the ruthlessness and illegality, with which Gustavus Myers tends to rest content, nor the far-sighted, industrial statesmanship, with which many historians now seem happier, are explanations—they are merely accusation or apology.

page 78:

• it is more important to understand the geographical distribution of oil and the structure of taxation than the psychological traits of Haroldson L. Hunt; more important to understand the legal framework of American capitalism and the corruptibility of its agents than the early childhood of John D. Rockefeller; more important to understand the technological progression of the capitalist mechanism than the boundless energy of Henry Ford, more important to understand the effects of war upon the need for oil and the tax loophole of depletion than Sid Richardson’s undoubted sagacity; more important to understand the rise of a system of national distribution and of the mass market than the frugality of F. W. Woolworth. Perhaps J. P. Morgan did as a child have very severe feelings of inadequacy, perhaps his father did believe that he would not amount to anything; perhaps this did effect in him an inordinate drive for power for power’s sake. But all this would be quite irrelevant had he been living in a peasant village in India in 1890. If we would understand the very rich we must first understand the economic and political structure of the nation in which they become the very rich.

page 79:

• The general facts, however, are clear: the very rich have used existing laws, they have circumvented and violated existing laws, and they have had laws created and enforced for their direct benefit.

• The state guaranteed the right of private property; it made legal the existence of the corporation, and by further laws, interpretations of laws, and lack of reinforcement made possible its elaboration. Accordingly, the very rich could use the device of the corporation to juggle many ventures at once and to speculate with other people’s money. As the ‘trust’ was outlawed, the holding company law made it legal by other means for one corporation to own stock in another. Soon ‘the formation and financing of holding companies offered the easiest way to get rich quickly that had ever legally existed in the United States.’ 3 In the later years of higher taxes, a combination of ‘tax write-offs’ and capital gains has helped the accumulation of private fortunes before they have been incorporated.

• Many modern theories of industrial development stress technological developments, but the number of inventors among the very rich is so small as to be unappreciable. It is, as a matter of fact, not the far-seeing inventor or the captain of industry but the general of finance who becomes one of the very rich. That is one of the errors in Schumpeter’s idea of the ‘gale of innovations’: he systematically confuses technological gain with financial manipulation. What is needed, as Frederick Lewis Allen once remarked, is ‘not specialized knowledge, but persuasive salesmanship, coupled with the ability to command the millions and the investment-sales machinery of a large banking house, and to command also the services of astute corporation lawyers and stock-market operators.’ 4

page 80:

• In understanding the private appropriations of the very rich, we must also bearin mind that the private industrial development of the United States has been much underwritten by outright gifts out of the people’s domain. State, local, and federal governments have given land free to railroads, paid for the cost of shipbuilding, for the transportation of important mail. Much more free land has been given to businesses than to small, independent homesteaders. Coal and iron have been legally determined not to be covered by the ‘mineral’ rights held by the government on the land it leased. The government has subsidized private industry by maintaining high tariff rates, and if the taxpayers of the United States had not paid, out of their own labor, for a paved road system, Henry Ford’s astuteness and thrift would not have enabled him to become a billionaire out of the automobile industry. 5

• This is what Obama said, but in the totally opposite context. When he said you didn’t build your business, you used the public roads and other investments, he was putting down the little guy. As if the taxpayer didn’t do anything, when in reality it was the robber barons that “didn’t do anything” but exploit the taxpayers.

• It had cost some $40 billion to build all the manufacturing facilities existing in the United States in 1939. By 1945, an additional $26 billion worth of high quality new plant and equipment had been added—two thirds of it paid for directly from government funds. Some 20 of this $26 billion worth was usable for producing peacetime products. If to the $40 billion existing, we add this $20 billion, we have a $60 billion productive plan usable in the postwar period. The top 250 corporations owned in 1939 about 65 per cent of the facilities then existing, operated during the war 79 per cent of all new privately operated facilities built with government money, and held 78 per cent of all active prime war supply contracts as of September 1944. 6 No wonder that in World War II, little fortunes became big and many new little ones were created.

page 81:

• But about the latter nineteenth century all historians seem agreed: between the Civil War and World War I, great captains of enormous wealth rose speedily to preeminence.

page 82:

• In none of the latest three generations has a majority of the very rich been composed of men who have risen.

• During the course of American history since the Civil War, the proportion of the very rich whose fathers worked as small farmers or storekeepers, as white collar employees or wage workers has steadily decreased. Only 9 per cent of the very rich of our own time originated in lower-class families—in families with only enough money to provide essential needs and sometimes minor comforts. The history of the middle-class contribution to the very rich is a fairly stable one: in the 1900 generation, it provided two out of ten; in 1925, three; and in 1950 again two. But the upper-class and the lower-class contributions have quite steadily reversed themselves. Even in the famous nineteenth-century generation, which scholarly historians usually discuss with the anectocal details of the self-making myth, as many of the very rich derived from the upper class (39 per cent) as from the lower. Still, it is a fact that in that generation, 39 per cent of the very rich were sons of lower-class people. In the 1925 generation, the proportion had shrunk to 12 per cent, and by 1950, as we have seen, to 9 per cent. The upper classes, on the other hand, contributed 56 per cent in 1925; and in 1950, 68 per cent.

page 83:

• The very rich —of 1900 as of 1950—have come out of the entrepreneurial strata; and, as we shall see, in a rather curious way, on their higher levels, many of them have continued to be active in an ‘entrepreneurial’ manner.

page 87:

• I. No man, to my knowledge has ever entered the ranks of the great American fortunes merely by saving a surplus from his salary or wages. In one way or another, he has to come into command of a strategic position which allows him the chance to appropriate big money, and usually he has to have available a considerable sum of money in order to be able to parlay it into really big wealth. He may work and slowly accumulate up to this big jump, but at some point he must find himself in a position to take up the main chance for which he has been on the lookout. On a salary of two or three hundred thousand a year, even forgetting taxes, and living like a miser in a board shack, it has been mathematically impossible to save up a great American fortune.*

page 88:

• it is not by industry but by finance, not by management but by promotion and speculation that they typically become enriched.

page 89:

• The economic careers of the very rich are neither ‘entrepreneurial’ nor ‘bureaucratic.’ Moreover, among them, many of those who take on the management of their families’ firms are just as ‘entrepreneurial’ or as ‘bureaucratic’ as those who have not enjoyed such inheritance. ‘Entrepreneur’ and ‘bureaucrat’ are middle-class words with middle-class associations and they cannot be stretched to contain the career junctures of the higher economic life in America.

• The entrepreneur, in the classic image, was supposed to have taken a risk, not only with his money but with his very career; but once the founder of a business has made the big jump he does not usually take serious risks as he comes to enjoy the accumulation of advantages that lead him into great fortune. If there is any risk, someone else is usually taking it. Of late, that someone else, as during World War II and in the Dixon-Yates attempt, has been the government of the United States. If a middle-class businessman is in debt for $50,000, he may well be in trouble. But if a man manages to get into debt for $2 million, his creditors, if they can, may well find it convenient to produce chances for his making money in order to repay them. 25

page 90:

• Sixty-five per cent of the very richest people in America today are involved in enterprises which their families have passed on to them or are simply living as rentiers on the huge returns from such properties.

page 92:

• What has happened is that the very rich are not so visible as they once seemed, to observers of the muckraker age, for example—who provided the last really public view of the top of American society. The absence of systematic information and the distraction of ‘human-interest’ trivia tend to make us suppose that they do not really matter and even that they do not really exist. But they are still very much among us—even though many are hidden, as it were, in the impersonal organizations in which their power, their wealth, and their privileges are anchored.

· 06: The Chief Executives

page 94:

• chief executives and the very rich are not two distinct and clearly segregated groups. They are both very much mixed up in the corporate world of property and privilege

• ‘The power exercised by a few large firms,’ John K. Galbraith has remarked, ‘is different only in degree and precision of its exercise from that of the single-firm monopoly.’ 3

page 95:

• The six and a half million people who owned stock in publicly held corporations in 1952 made up less than 7 per cent of all adults in the population. 6 But that is not the whole story; in fact, by itself, it is misleading. What is important is, first, what types of people own any stock? And second, how concentrated is the value of the stock they own?

• First of all: 45 per cent of the executives, 26 per cent of all professional persons, and 19 per cent of all supervisory officials hold stock. But only 0.2 per cent of the unskilled workers, 1.4 per cent of the semi-skilled workers, and 4.4 per cent of foremen and skilled workers hold stock. 7 Some 98.6 per cent of all workers in manufacturing own no stock whatsoever.

• Second, in 1952, only 1.6 million (25 per cent) of the 6.5 million people who held any stock received as much as $10,000 per year from any and all sources. We do not know how much of that $10,000 came from dividends, but there is reason to believe that the average proportion was not great. 8 In 1949, some 165,000 about one-tenth of 1 per cent of all U.S. adults—received 42 per cent of all the corporate dividends going to individuals. The minimum income of these people for that year was $30,000. 9 The idea of a really wide distribution of economic ownership is a cultivated illusion: at the very most, 0.2 or 0.3 per cent of the adult population own the bulk, the pay-off shares, of the corporate world.

page 96:

• What the business liberals represent is the outlook and the interests of the newer propertied class as a whole. They are ‘sophisticated’ because they are more flexible in adjusting to such political facts of life as the New Deal and big labor, because they have taken over and used the dominant liberal rhetoric for their own purposes

page 97:

• Productivity has and will increase fabulously, especially when automation makes it possible to interlock several machines in such a way as to eliminate the need for much of the human control at the point of production that is now required. That means that the corporate executives will not need to manage huge organizations of people; rather, in Business Week’s words, they will be ‘operating great mechanical organizations using fewer and fewer people.’ 13

page 98:

• Not ‘Wall Street financiers’ or bankers, but large owners and executives in their self-financing corporations hold the keys of economic power. Not the politicians of the visible government, but the chief executives who sit in the political directorate, by fact and by proxy, hold the power and the means of defending the privileges of their corporate world. If they do not reign, they do govern at many of the vital points of everyday life in America, and no powers effectively and consistently countervail against them, nor have they as corporate-made men developed any effectively restraining conscience.*

• I don’t think this is still true. “self-financing corporations” are a thing of the past. Even GM, who used to make things, is nothing more than a bank with a production wing. The same is often said about the Ivy League, they are little more than hedge funds with education wings.

page 101:

• It is not characteristic of American executives to read books, except books on ‘management’ and mysteries; ‘The majority of top executives almost never read drama, great fiction, the philosophers, the poets. Those who do venture into this area … are definitely sports of the executive type, looked upon by their colleagues with mingled awe and incredulity.’ 25 Executive circles do not overlap very much with those of artistic or literary interest. Among them are those who resent reading a report or a letter longer than one page, such avoidance of words being rather general. They seem somehow suspicious of long-winded speeches, except when they are the speakers, and they do not, of course, have the time. They are very much of the age of the ‘briefing,’ of the digest, of the two-paragraph memo. Such reading as they do, they often delegate to others, who clip and summarize for them. They are talkers and listeners rather than readers or writers. They pick up much of what they know at the conference table and from friends in other fields.

page 102:

• Two generations ago, 36 per cent of the executives—as compared with only 6 per cent today—were entrepreneurial; 32 per cent were family-managers, as against 11 per cent today; there were about the same proportion then of professional men, 14 per cent, as now, 13 per cent. Steadily and swiftly—from 18 per cent in 1870 to 68 per cent in 1950—the career of the business executive has become a movement within and between the corporate hierarchies.

page 103:

• Words like entrepreneur and bureaucrat are no more adequate to convey the realities of the higher corporate career than of the appropriation of great fortunes. They are, as we have noted in connection with the very rich, middle-class words, and retain the limitations of middle-class perspectives.

page 104:

• The technical men, for example, may negotiate for months with the salesmen over a tubeless tire before the chief executives descend to operation-level conferences. 30 Theirs is not the idea nor even the decision, but The Judgment. On the top levels this judgment usually has to do with the spending of money to make more money and the getting of others to do the work involved.

• The ‘running’ of a large business consists essentially of getting somebody to make something which somebody else will sell to somebody else for more than it costs.

• John L. McCaffrey, the chief executive of International Harvester, recently said, ‘… he [a business president] seldom lies awake very long thinking about finances or law suits or sales or production or engineering or accounting problems … When he approaches such problems the president can bring to bear on them all the energy and the trained judgment and past experience of his whole organization.’ And he goes on to say what top executives do think about at night: ‘the biggest trouble with industry is that it is full of human beings.’

page 108:

• the most accurate single definition of ability—a many-sided word—is: usefulness to those above, to those in control of one’s advancement.

page 110:

• So speak in the rich, round voice and do not confuse your superiors with details.Know where to draw the line. Execute the ceremony of forming a judgment. Delay recognizing the choice you have already made, so as to make the truism sound like the deeply pondered notion. Speak like the quiet competent man of affairs and never personally say No. Hire the No-man as well as the Yes-man. Be the tolerant Maybe-man and they will cluster around you, filled with hopefulness. Practice softening the facts into the optimistic, practical, forward looking, cordial, brisk view. Speak to the well-blunted point. Have weight; be stable: caricature what you are supposed to be but never become aware of it much less amused by it. And never let your brains show.

· 07: The Corporate Rich

page 119:

• For virtually every law taxing big money, there is a way those with big money can avoid it or minimize it.

page 127:

• War is of course the health of the corporate economy; during war the political economy tends to become more unified, and moreover, political legitimations of the most unquestionable sort—national security itself—are gained for corporate economic activities.

· 08: The Warlords

page 130:

• All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence. Why, then, is not military dictatorship the normal and usual form of government?

page 134:

• From Shays’ Rebellion to the Korean War there has been no period of any length without official violence. Since 1776, in fact, the United States has engaged in seven foreign wars, a four-year Civil War, a century of running battles and skirmishes with Indians, and intermittent displays of violence in China, and in subjugating the Caribbean and parts of Central America.

• This violent streak is yet unbroken.

page 139:

• for the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an ‘emergency’ without a foreseeable end. During modern times, and especially in the United States, men had come to look upon history as a peaceful continuum interrupted by war. But now, the American elite does not have any real image of peace—other than as an uneasy interlude existing precariously by virtue of the balance of mutual fright. The only seriously accepted plan for ‘peace’ is the fully loaded pistol. In short, war or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States.

page 140:

• Given the means of violence that now exist, ‘massive retaliation’ is neither a war plan nor an image of victory, but merely a violent diplomatic—which is to say political—gesture and a recognition that all-out war between two nations has now become the means of their mutual destruction. The position amounts to this: with war all nations may fall, so in their mutual fright of war, they survive. Peace is a mutual fright, a balance of armed fear.

page 141:

• The most dramatic symbol of the scale and shape of the new military edifice is the Pentagon. 10 This concrete and limestone maze contains the organized brain of the American means of violence. The world’s largest office building, the United States Capitol would fit neatly into any one of its five segments. Three football fields would reach only the length of one of its five outer walls. Its seventeen and a half miles of corridor, 40,000-phone switchboards, fifteen miles of pneumatic tubing, 2,100 intercoms, connect with one another and with the world, the 31,300 Pentagonians. Prowled by 170 security officers, served by 1,000 men and women, it has four full-time workers doing nothing but replacing light bulbs, and another four watching the master panel which synchronizes its 4,000 clocks. Underneath its river entrance are five handball courts and four bowling alleys. It produces ten tons of non-classified waste paper a day, which is sold for about $80,000 a year. It produces three nation wide programs a week in its radio-TV studio. Its communication system permits four-party conversations between people as far apart as Washington, Tokyo, Berlin, and London.

· 09: The Military Ascendancy

page 150:

• statesman Dulles said in support of General Eisenhower for President, there are needed men with the capacity for ‘making grave decisions.’ 3

page 156:

• A recent member of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department wrote: ‘One hopes that the American public will see at last that the word “security” has become a euphemism. It covers the primitive political drive of the last five years to eliminate intellectual and moral distinction from the Government service, and to staff the Government instead with political good fellows who cannot be suspected of superiority. Under the reorganized Foreign Service, for example, educational standards for admission are being avowedly lowered. It is as if the mediocrity of the mindless has become the ideal.’ 26

page 157:

• George Kennan, a veteran diplomat and a distinguished student of foreign affairs, has advised a class of students at Princeton not to choose the foreign service as a career. In other words: ‘the morale of the State Department is so broken that its finest men flee from it, and advise others to flee.’ 27

page 160:

• ‘The Industrial College of the Armed Forces,’ concerned with the interdependence of economy and warfare, is at the top level of the military educational system. 44

• To the optimistic liberal of the nineteenth century all this would appear a most paradoxical fact. Most representatives of liberalism at that time assumed that the growth of industrialism would quickly relegate militarism to a very minor role in modern affairs. Under the amiable canons of the industrial society, the heroic violence of the military state would simply disappear. Did not the rise of industrialism and the long era of nineteenth-century peace reveal as much? But the classic liberal expectation of men like Herbert Spencer has proved quite mistaken. What the main drift of the twentieth century has revealed is that as the economy has become concentrated and incorporated into great hierarchies, the military has become enlarged and decisive to the shape of the entire economic structure; and, moreover, the economic and the military have become structurally and deeply interrelated, as the economy has become a seemingly permanent war economy; and military men and policies have increasingly penetrated the corporate economy.*

page 161:

• ‘What officials fear more than dateless war in Korea,’ Arthur Krock reported in April of 1953, ‘is peace … The vision of peace which could lure the free world into letting down its guard, and demolishing the slow and costly process ofbuilding collective security in western Europe while the Soviets maintained and increased their military power, is enough to make men in office indecisive. And the stock market selling that followed the sudden conciliatory overtures from the Kremlin supports the thesis that immediate prosperity in this country is linked to a war economy and suggests desperate economic problems that may arise on the home front.’ 45

• Scientific and technological development, once seated in the economy, has increasingly become part of the military order, which is now the largest single supporter and director of scientific research in fact, as large, dollar-wise, as all other American research put together.

• By 1954, the government was spending about $2 billion on research (twenty times the prewar rate); and 85 per cent of it was for ‘national security.’ 47

• Some universities, in fact, are financial branches of the military establishment, receiving three or four times as much money from military as from all other sources combined.

• By October of 1954, this had reached the point at which Dr. Vannevar Bush—World War II Chief of the Office of Scientific Research and Development —felt it necessary to assert flatly that the scientific community was ‘demoralized.’ ‘You won’t find any strikes…’ he said, ‘but scientists today are discouraged and downhearted and feel that they are being pushed out, and they are.’ 49 In the context of distrust, no less a scientist than Albert Einstein publicly asserted: ‘If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances.’ 50

page 163:

• The warlords, along with fellow travelers and spokesmen, are attempting to plant their metaphysics firmly among the population at large.

page 164:

• Daily, in war and in peace, they [the military] release items and stories to the press and to the three or four dozen newsmen housed in the newsroom of the Pentagon. They prepare scripts, make recordings, and take pictures for radio and TV outlets; they maintain the largest motion-picture studio in the East, bought from Paramount in 1942. They are ready to serve magazine editors with prepared copy. They arrange speaking engagements for military personnel and provide the speeches. They establish liaison with important national organizations, and arrange orientation conferences and field trips for their leaders, as well as for executives and key people in the business, the educational, the religious, the entertainment worlds. They have arranged, in some 600 communities, ‘advisory committees’ which open the way to their messages and advise them of unfavorable reactions. 56

• Everything that appears in the news or on the air that concerns the military is summarized and analyzed; and everything which they release, including the writing of retired warlords, is reviewed and censored.

• The cost of this program varies from year to year, but interested Senators have estimated it as between $5 million and $12 million. Such estimates, however, mean little, for the position of the military is such that they were able to enjoy, during one twelve-month period, some $30 million worth of motion pictures, which they co-operated in producing; obtain millions of dollars worth of free time on TV, and, according to Variety’s estimate, about $6 million of free radio time.

page 165:

• tendency in a mass society for manipulation to replace explicitly debated authority

· 10: The Political Directorate

page 171:

• between 1865 and 1881—only 19 per cent of the men at the top of the government began their political career on the national level; but from 1901 to 1953, about one-third of the political elite began there, and, in the Eisenhower administration, some 42 per cent started in politics at the national level

• From 1789 right up to 1921, generation after generation, the proportion of the political elite which has ever held local or state offices decreased from 93 to 69 per cent. In the Eisenhower administration, it fell to 57 per cent. Moreover, only 14 per cent of this current group—and only about one-quarter of earlier twentieth-century politicians—have ever served in any state legislature. In the Founding Fathers’ generation of 1789–1801, 81 per cent of the higher politicians had done so.

page 174:

• There is also Allen Dulles who spent ten years in the diplomatic service, left it (because a promotion in rank offered him no increase above his $8,000 salary) to join the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell (about the time that his brother became its senior partner) and then returned to the government as its senior spy.

page 175:

• As a group, the political outsiders who occupy the executive command posts and form the political directorate are legal, managerial, and financial members of the corporate rich.

· 11: The Theory of Balance

page 181:

• But it confuses, indeed it does not even distinguish between the top, the middle, and the bottom levels of power. In fact, the strategy of all such romantic pluralism, with its image of a semi-organized stalemate, is rather clear: You elaborate the number of groups involved, in a kind of bewildering, Whitmanesque enthusiasm for variety. Indeed, what group fails to qualify as a ‘veto group’? You do not try to clarify the hodge-podge by classifying these groups, occupations, strata, organizations according to their political relevance or even according to whether they are organized politically at all. You do not try to see how they may be connected with one another into a structure of power, for by virtue of his perspective, the romantic conservative focuses upon a scatter of milieux rather than upon their connections within a structure of power. And you do not consider the possibility of any community of interests among the top groups. You do not connect all these milieux and miscellaneous groups with the big decisions: you do not ask and answer with historical detail: exactly what, directly or indirectly, did ‘small retailers’ or ‘brick masons’ have to do with the sequence of decision and event that led to World War II? What did ‘insurance agents,’ or for that matter, the Congress, have to do with the decision to make or not to make, to drop or not to drop, the early model of the new weapon? Moreover, you take seriously the public-relations-minded statements of the leaders of all groups, strata, and blocs, and thus confuse psychological uneasiness with the facts of power and policy. So long as power is not nakedly displayed, it must not be power. And of course you do not consider the difficulties posed for you as an observer by the fact of secrecy, official and otherwise.

page 182:

• The balance of power theory, as Irving Howe has noted, is a narrow-focus view of American politics. 4 With it one can explain temporary alliances within one party or the other. It is also narrow-focus in the choice of time-span: the shorter the period of time in which you are interested, the more usable the balance of power theory appears.

• Undue attention to the middle levels of power obscures the structure of power as a whole, especially the top and the bottom.

page 183:

• the hopeful ideal of balance often masquerades as a description of fact.

• Moreover, ‘in most fields … only one interest is organized, none is, or some of the major ones are not.’ 8 In these cases, to speak, as Mr. David Truman does, of ‘unorganized interests’ 9 is merely to use another word for what used to be called ‘the public,’ a conception we shall presently examine. *

page 185:

• Independently wealthy men are becoming increasingly common on Capitol Hill … For those who are without private means … life as a member of Congress can border on desperation.’* ‘If Federal law really meant what it seems to mean concerning the uses of cash in election campaigns,’ Robert Bendiner has recently remarked, ‘more politicians would wind up in Leavenworth than in Washington.’ 17

page 186:

• In fact, his parochialism is in some cases so intense that as a local candidate he may even invite and collect for local display an assortment of out-of-state attacks upon him, thus turning his campaign into a crusade of the sovereign locality against national outsiders. 20

page 191:

• But in the executive agency a number of small and coherent interests are often the only ones at play, and often they are able to install themselves within the agency or effectively nullify its action against themselves. Thus regulatory agencies, as John Kenneth Galbraith has remarked, ‘become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or servile.’ 34

• Regulatory capture.

page 192:

• The romantic pluralism of the Jeffersonian ideal prevailed in a society in which perhaps four-fifths of the free, white population were in one sense or another, independent proprietors. But in the epoch following the Civil War, that old middle class of independent proprietors began to decline, as, in one industry after another, larger and more concentrated economic units came into ascendancy; and in the later part of the progressive era, the independent middle class of farmers and small businessmen fought politically—and lost their last real chance for a decisive role in the political balance. 38

• Alongside the old independent middle class, there had arisen inside the corporate society a new dependent middle class of white-collar employees. Roughly, in the last two generations, as proportions of the middle classes as a whole, the old middle class has declined from 85 to 44 per cent; the new middle class has risen from 15 to 56 per cent.

page 193:

• Political freedom and economic security were anchored in the fact of small-scale and independent properties; they are not anchored in the job world of the new middle class. Scattered properties, and their holders, were integrated economically by free and autonomous markets; the jobs of the new middle class are integrated by corporate authority. The white-collar middle classes do not form an independent base of power: economically, they are in the same situation as property-less wage workers; politically they are in a worse condition, for they are not as organized.

• After becoming dependent upon the governmental system, however, the labor unions suffered rapid decline in power and now have little part in major national decisions.

page 195:

• There is nothing magical or eternal about checks and balances. In time of revolution, checks and balances may be significant as a restraint upon unorganized and organized masses. In time of rigid dictatorship, they may be significant as a technique of divide and rule. Only under a state which is already quite well balanced, and which has under it a balanced social structure, do checks and balances mean a restraint upon the rulers.

page 197:

• The old lobby, visible or invisible, is now the visible government. This ‘governmentalization of the lobby’ has proceeded in both the legislative and the executive domains, as well as between them.

• Administration replaces electoral politics; the maneuvering of cliques replaces the clash of parties.

· 12: The Power Elite

page 200:

• The supremacy of corporate economic power began, in a formal way, with the Congressional elections of 1866, and was consolidated by the Supreme Court decision of 1886 which declared that the Fourteenth Amendment protected the corporation. That period witnessed the transfer of the center of initiative from government to corporation.

page 202:

• The ‘welfare state,’ created to sustain the balance and to carry out the subsidy, differed from the ‘laissez-faire’ state: ‘If the state was believed neutral in the days of T.R. because its leaders claimed to sanction favors for no one,’ Richard Hofstadter has remarked, ‘the state under F.D.R. could be called neutral only in the sense that it offered favors to everyone.’ 7

page 205:

• Neither the idea of a ‘ruling class’ nor of a simple monolithic rise of ‘bureaucratic politicians’ nor of a ‘military clique’ is adequate. The power elite today involves the often uneasy coincidence of economic, military, and political power.

page 210:

• But what is honor? Honor can only mean living up to a code that one believes to be honorable.

• The question is not: are these honorable men? The question is: what are their codes of honor? The answer to that question is that they are the codes of their circles, of those to whose opinions they defer.

page 214:

• During the Democratic era, one link between private corporate organizations and governmental institutions was the investment house of Dillon, Read. From it came such men as James Forrestal and Charles F. Detmar, Jr.; Ferdinand Eberstadt had once been a partner in it before he branched out into his own investment house from which came other men to political and military circles. Republican administrations seem to favor the investment firm of Kuhn, Loeb and the advertising firm of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn.

• Regardless of administrations, there is always the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. Mid-West investment banker Cyrus Eaton has said that ‘Arthur H. Dean, a senior partner of Sullivan & Cromwell of No. 48 Wall Street, was one of those who assisted in the drafting of the Securities Act of 1933, the first of the series of bills passed to regulate the capital markets. He and his firm, which is reputed to be the largest in the United States, havemaintained close relations with the SEC since its creation, and theirs is the dominating influence on the Commission.’ 12

• There is also the third largest bank in the United States: the Chase National Bank of New York (now Chase-Manhattan). Regardless of political administration, executives of this bank and those of the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development have changed positions: John J. McCloy, who became Chairman of the Chase National in 1953, is a former president of the World Bank; and his successor to the presidency of the World Bank was a former senior vice-president of the Chase National Bank. 13 And in 1953, the president of the Chase National Bank, Winthrop W. Aldrich, had left to become Ambassador to Great Britain.

page 217:

• The conception of the power elite, accordingly, does not rest upon the assumption that American history since the origins of World War II must be understood as a secret plot, or as a great and co-ordinated conspiracy of the members of this elite. The conception rests upon quite impersonal grounds.

• There is, however, little doubt that the American power elite—which contains, we are told, some of ‘the greatest organizers in the world’—has also planned and has plotted. The rise of the elite, as we have already made clear, was not and could not have been caused by a plot; and the tenability of the conception does not rest upon the existence of any secret or any publicly known organization. But, once the conjunction of structural trend and of the personal will to utilize it gave rise to the power elite, then plans and programs did occur to its members and indeed it is not possible to interpret many events and official policies of the fifth epoch without reference to the power elite. ‘There is a great difference,’ Richard Hofstadter has remarked, ‘between locating conspiracies in history and saying that history is, in effect, a conspiracy … ’ 16

• Here I disagree, there is most certainly secretive and public groups constantly conspiring. Do the get everything they want, doubtfully, but over time they seem to get more and more of what they want. To dismiss things, or not mention them at all, like the Rhodes and Milner groups is a great disservice to the would-be understander of history. The author even says “there is little doubt that the power elite has planned and plotted,” and then simply dismisses his own statement.

• There is accordingly reason to suspect—but by the nature of the case, no proof —that the power elite is not altogether ‘surfaced.’ There is nothing hidden about it, although its activities are not publicized. As an elite, it is not organized, although its members often know one another, seem quite naturally to work together, and share many organizations in common. There is nothing conspiratorial about it, although its decisions are often publicly unknown and its mode of operation manipulative rather than explicit.

• This IS organization, though not of the top down kind a 1950’s mind would be looking for. This is the decentralized, graph theory, based kind of organization. Terrorist cells, so we are told, would operate this way. There is no close-knit organization, but a loose collection of cells all with the same general aim. We would call this a terrorist NETWORK today. What different between a terrorist network and a power elite network? Both work semi-independently toward a common goal, sometimes in very different, if not conflicting, ways.

· 13: The Mass Society

page 223:

• In the democratic society of publics it was assumed that before public action would be taken, there would be rational discussion between individuals which would determine the action, and that, accordingly, the public opinion that resulted would be the infallible voice of reason. But this has been challenged not only (1) by the assumed need for experts to decide delicate and intricate issues, but (2) by the discovery—as by Freud—of the irrationality of the man in the street, and (3) by the discovery—as by Marx—of the socially conditioned nature of what was once assumed to be autonomous reason.

• Irrationality of man in the street. I guess the men at the top are purely rational? I can agree with the other two points.

page 225:

• the community of publics becomes an abstract collection of individuals who receive impressions from the mass media.

page 226:

• The small shop serving the neighborhood is replaced by the anonymity of the national corporation: mass advertisement replaces the personal influence of opinion between merchant and customer. The political leader hooks up his speech to a national network and speaks, with appropriate personal touches, to a million people he never saw and never will see. Entire brackets of professions and industries are in the ‘opinion business,’ impersonally manipulating the public for hire.

page 227:

• What the public stands for, accordingly, is often a vagueness of policy (called open-mindedness), a lack of involvement in public affairs (known as reasonableness), and a professional disinterest (known as tolerance).

page 229:

• The older world of voluntary organization was as different from the world of the mass organization, as was Tom Paine’s world of pamphleteering from the world of the mass media.

• Since the French Revolution, conservative thinkers have Viewed With Alarm the rise of the public, which they called the masses, or something to that effect. ‘The populace is sovereign, and the tide of barbarism mounts,’ wrote Gustave Le Bon. ‘The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings,’ and already ‘the destinies of nations are elaborated at present in the heart of the masses, and no longer in the councils of princes.’ 4 During the twentieth century, liberal and even socialist thinkers have followed suit, with more explicit reference to what we have called the society of masses. From Le Bon to Emil Lederer and Ortega y Gasset, they have held that the influence of the mass in unfortunately increasing.

• But surely those who have supposed the masses to be all powerful, or at least well on their way to triumph, are wrong. In our time, as Chakhotin knew, the influence of autonomous collectivities within political life is in fact diminishing. 5 Furthermore, such influence as they do have is guided; they must now be seen not as publics acting autonomously, but as masses manipulated at focal points into crowds of demonstrators. For as publics become masses, masses sometimes become crowds; and, in crowds, the psychical rape by the mass media is supplemented up-close by the harsh and sudden harangue. Then the people in the crowd disperse again—as atomized and submissive masses.

page 230:

• such associations are replaced in virtually every sphere of life by centralized organizations, and it is such organizations with all their new means of power that take charge of the terrorized or—as the case may be—merely intimidated, society of masses.

• With the broadening of the base of politics within the context of a folk-lore of democratic decision-making, and with the increased means of mass persuasion that are available, the public of public opinion has become the object of intensive efforts to control, manage, manipulate, and increasingly intimidate.

• in addition to their enlarged and centralized means of administration, exploitation, and violence, the modern elite have had placed within their grasp historically unique instruments of psychic management and manipulation, which include universal compulsory education as well as the media of mass communication.

page 231:

• No one really knows all the functions of the mass media, for in their entirety these functions are probably so pervasive and so subtle that they cannot be caught by the means of social research now available. But we do now have reason to believe that these media have helped less to enlarge and animate the discussions of primary publics than to transform them into a set of media markets in mass-like society. I do not refer merely to the higher ratio of deliverers of opinion to receivers and to the decreased chance to answer back; nor do I refer merely to the violent banalization and stereotyping of our very sense organs in terms of which these media now compete for ‘attention.’ I have in mind a sort of psychological illiteracy that is facilitated by the media, and that is expressed in several ways:

• I. Very little of what we think we know of the social realities of the world have we found out first-hand. Most of ‘the pictures in our heads’ we have gained from these media—even to the point where we often do not really believe what we see before us until we read about it in the paper or hear about it on the radio. 7 The media not only give us information; they guide our very experiences. Our standards of credulity, our standards of reality, tend to be set by these media rather than by our own fragmentary experience.

• This is even worse today; It isn’t real unless I post/see it on Facebook.

• The individual does not trust his own experience, as I have said, until it is confirmed by others or by the media. Usually such direct exposure is not accepted if it disturbs loyalties and beliefs that the individual already holds.

• Cognitive dissonance.

page 232:

• To accept opinions in their terms is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think.

• we must recognize that ‘the common sense’ of our children is going to be less the result of any firm social tradition than of the stereotypes carried by the mass media to which they are now so fully exposed.

• II. So long as the media are not entirely monopolized, the individual can play one medium off against another; he can compare them, and hence resist what any one of them puts out. The more genuine competition there is among the media, the more resistance the individual might be able to command. But how much is this now the case? Do people compare reports on public events or policies, playing one medium’s content off against another’s?

• The answer is: generally no, very few do: (I) We know that people tend strongly to select those media which carry contents with which they already agree. There is a kind of selection of new opinions on the basis of prior opinions. No one seems to search out such counter-statements as may be found in alternative media offerings.

page 233:

• The media display an apparent variety and competition, but on closer view they seem to compete more in terms of variations on a few standardized themes than of clashing issues.

• III. The media have not only filtered into our experience of external realities, they have also entered into our very experience of our own selves. They have provided us with new identities and new aspirations of what we should like to be, and what we should like to appear to be. They have provided in the models of conduct they hold out to us a new and larger and more flexible set of appraisals of our very selves.

• In short, media is shaping culture. Life imitates art more than art imitates life.

• IV. As they now generally prevail, the mass media, especially television, often encroach upon the small-scale discussion, and destroy the chance for the reasonable and leisurely and human interchange of opinion. They are an important cause of the destruction of privacy in its full human meaning. That is an important reason why they not only fail as an educational force, but are a malign force:

• they distract him and obscure his chance to understand himself or his world, by fastening his attention upon artificial frenzies that are resolved within the program framework, usually by violent action or by what is called humor. In short, for the viewer they are not really resolved at all. The chief distracting tension of the media is between the wanting and the not having of commodities or of women held to be good looking. There is almost always the general tone of animated distraction, of suspended agitation, but it is going nowhere and it has nowhere to go.

page 234:

• Alongside or just below the elite, there is the propagandist, the publicity expert, the public-relations man, who would control the very formation of public opinion in order to be able to include it as one more pacified item in calculations of effective power, increased prestige, more secure wealth.

• To change opinion and activity, they [propagandists] say to one another, we must pay close attention to the full context and lives of the people to be managed. Along with mass persuasion, we must somehow use personal influence; we must reach people in their life context and through other people, their daily associates, those whom they trust: we must get at them by some kind of ‘personal’ persuasion. We must not show our hand directly;rather than merely advise or command, we must manipulate.

page 235:

• Authority is power that is explicit and more or less ‘voluntarily’ obeyed; manipulation is the ‘secret’ exercise of power, unknown to those who are influenced. In the model of the classic democratic society, manipulation is not a problem, because formal authority resides in the public itself and in its representatives who are made or broken by the public. In the completely authoritarian society, manipulation is not a problem, because authority is openly identified with the ruling institutions and their agents, who may use authority explicitly and nakedly. They do not, in the extreme case, have to gain or retain power by hiding its exercise.

• Manipulation becomes a problem wherever men have power that is concentrated and willful but do not have authority, or when, for any reason, they do not wish to use their power openly. Then the powerful seek to rule without showing their powerfulness. They want to rule, as it were, secretly, without publicized legitimation. It is in this mixed case—as in the intermediate reality of the American today—that manipulation is a prime way of exercising power. Small circles of men are making decisions which they need to have at least authorized by indifferent or recalcitrant people over whom they do not exercise explicit authority. So the small circle tries to manipulate these people into willing acceptance or cheerful support of their decisions or opinions—or at least to the rejection of possible counter-opinions.

• Authority formally resides ‘in the people,’ but the power of initiation is in fact held by small circles of men. That is why the standard strategy of manipulation is to make it appear that the people, or at least a large group of them, ‘really made the decision.’

page 236:

• mass education, in many respects, has become—another mass medium.

• The prime task of public education, as it came widely to be understood in this country, was political: to make the citizen more knowledgeable and thus better able to think and to judge of public affairs. In time, the function of education shifted from the political to the economic: to train people for better-paying jobs and thus to get ahead. This is especially true of the high-school movement, which has met the business demands for white-collar skills at the public’s expense. In large part education has become merely vocational; in so far as its political task is concerned, in many schools, that has been reduced to a routine training of nationalist loyalties.

• The training of skills that are of more or less direct use in the vocational life is an important task to perform, but ought not to be mistaken for liberal education: job advancement, no matter on what levels, is not the same as self development, although the two are now systematically confused. 10 Among ‘skills,’ some are more and some are less relevant to the aims ofliberal—that is to say, liberating—education.

• the end product of such liberal education of sensibilities is simply the self-educating, self cultivating man or woman.

• The knowledgeable man in the genuine public is able to turn his personal troubles into social issues, to see their relevance for his community and his community’s relevance for them. He understands that what he thinks and feels as personal troubles are very often not only that but problems shared by others and indeed not subject to solution by any one individual but only by modifications of the structure of the groups in which he lives and sometimes the structure of the entire society.

• Men in masses are gripped by personal troubles, but they are not aware of their true meaning and source.

page 237:

• It is the task of the liberal institution, as of the liberally educated man, continually to translate troubles into issues and issues into the terms of their human meaning for the individual.

• in the hands of ‘professional educators,’ many schools have come to operate on an ideology of ‘life adjustment’ that encourages happy acceptance of mass ways of life rather than the struggle for individual and public transcendence. *

• The structural trends of modern society and the manipulative character of its communication technique come to a point of coincidence in the mass society, which is largely a metropolitan society. The growth of the metropolis, segregating men and women into narrowed routines and environments, causes them to lose any firm sense of their integrity as a public. The members of publics in smaller communities know each other more or less fully, because they meet in the several aspects of the total life routine. The members of masses in a metropolitan society know one another only as fractions in specialized milieux

• Divide and conquer.

page 238:

• People, we know, tend to select those formal media which confirm what they already believe and enjoy. In a parallel way, they tend in the metropolitan segregation to come into live touch with those whose opinions are similar to theirs. Others they tend to treat unseriously.

• Echo chamber.

page 239:

• He [mass man] takes things for granted, he makes the best of them, he tries to look ahead —a year or two perhaps, or even longer if he has children or a mortgage—but he does not seriously ask, What do I want? How can I get it? A vague optimism suffuses and sustains him, broken occasionally by little miseries and disappointments that are soon buried.

· 14: The Conservative Mood

page 248:

• In their moral fright, postwar liberals have not defended any left or even any militantly liberal position: their defensive posture has, first of all, led them to celebrate the ‘civil liberties,’ in contrast with their absence from Soviet Russia. In fact, many have been so busy celebrating the civil liberties that they have had less time to defend them; and, more importantly, most have been so busy defending civil liberties that they have had neither the time nor the inclination to use them. ‘In the old days,’ Archibald MacLeish remarked at the end of the ‘forties, freedom ‘was something you used … [it] has now become something you save—something you put away and protect like your other possessions like a deed or a bond in a bank.’9

page 250:

• Liberalism as a social theory rests on the notion of a society in automatic balance. 11

page 251:

• in postwar America mind has been divorced from reality.

• The elite of corporation, army, and state have benefited politically and economically and militarily by the antics of the petty right, who have become, often unwittingly, their political shocktroops.

page 253:

• the old middle-class moralities have been replaced in America by the higher immorality.

• Given the state of the mass society, we should not expect anything else. Most of its members are distracted by status, by the disclosures of pettier immortalities, and by that Machiavellianism-for the-little-man that is the death of political insurgency.

• Sex scandals and the like.

· 15: The Higher Immorality

page 254:

• The higher immorality is a systematic feature of the American elite; its general acceptance is an essential feature of the mass society.

page 255:

• ‘Crisis’ is a bankrupted term, because so many men in high places have evoked it in order to cover up their extraordinary policies and deeds; as a matter of fact, it is precisely the absence of crises that is a cardinal feature of the higher immorality.

page 257

• Like prohibition, the laws of income taxes and the regulations of wartime exist without the support of firm business convention. It is merely illegal to cheat them, but it is smart to get away with it. Laws without supporting moral conventions invite crime, but much more importantly, they spur the growth of an expedient, amoral attitude.

• A society that is in its higher circles and on its middle levels widely believed to be a network of smart rackets does not produce men with an inner moral sense; a society that is merely expedient does not produce men of conscience. A society that narrows the meaning of ‘success’ to the big money and in its terms condemns failure as the chief vice, raising money to the plane of absolute value, will produce the sharp operator and the shady deal.

page 259:

• revealed in the prevalence of such views as: ‘it’s all just another racket,’ and ‘it’s not what you know but who you know.’

• ‘Nothing is more revealing,’ James Reston has written, ‘than to read the debate in the House of Representatives in the Eighteen Thirties on Greece’s fight with Turkey for independence and the Greek-Turkish debate in the Congress in 1947. The first is dignified and eloquent, the argument marching from principle through illustration to conclusion; the second is a dreary garble of debating points, full of irrelevancies and bad history.’ 6

page 260:

• Knowledge is no longer widely felt as an ideal; it is seen as an instrument. In a society of power and wealth, knowledge is valued as an instrument of power and wealth, and also, of course, as an ornament in conversation.

• ‘Bad men increase in knowledge as fast as good men,’ John Adams wrote, ‘and science, arts, taste, sense and letters, are employed for the purpose of injustice as well as for virtue.’ 9 That was in 1790

page 261:

• Like most others in this society, the man of knowledge is himself dependent for his livelihood upon the job, which nowadays is a prime sanction of thought control. Where getting ahead requires the good opinions of more powerful others, their judgments become prime objects of concern. Accordingly, in so far as intellectuals serve power directly—in a job hierarchy—they often do so unfreely.

• Two things are needed in a democracy: articulate and knowledgeable publics, and political leaders who if not men of reason are at least reasonably responsible to such knowledgeable publics as exist.

page 263:

• The height of such mindless communications to masses, or what are thought to be masses, is probably the demagogic assumption that suspicion and accusation, if repeated often enough, somehow equal proof of guilt—just as repeated claims about toothpaste or brands of cigarettes are assumed to equal facts. The greatest kind of propaganda with which America is beset, the greatest at least in terms of volume and loudness, is commercial propaganda for soap and cigarettes and automobiles; it is to such things, or rather to Their Names, that this society most frequently sings its loudest praises.

· Afterword: by Alan Wolfe

page 268:

• C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite was published in 1956, a time, as Mills himself put it, when Americans were living through ‘a material boom, a nationalist celebration, a political vacuum.’ It is not hard to understand why Americans were as complacent as Mills charged.

• Let’s say you were a typical thirty-five-year-old voter in 1956. Imagine what your life had been like. When you were eight years old, the stock market crashed, and the resulting Great Depression began just as you started third or fourth grade. Hence your childhood was consumed with fighting off the poverty and unemployment of the single greatest economic catastrophe in American history. When you turned twenty-one, officially marking your maturity, the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor, ensuring that your years as a young adult, especially if you were male, would be spent fighting on the ground in Europe or from island to island in Asia. If you were lucky enough to survive that experience, you returned home at the ripe old age of twenty-four, ready to resume the semblance of a normal life—only then to witness the Korean War, McCarthyism, and the outbreak of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. No wonder that, as you contemplated casting your vote in the 1956 presidential elections, you were tempted to vote for the reelection of President Eisenhower. After all, he had commanded the Allied troops in World War II. To be sure, he often seemed uninspiring in his speeches, and he was most comfortable associating with rich businessmen, nearly all of whom were male, white, Christian, and conservative in their political leanings. Still, Eisenhower offered stability for voters whose lives had known nothing but the opposite. For all the blustery talk of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles about the Russian menace, the President himself seemed somewhat disengaged from foreign policy. And his domestic program amounted to little more than constructing the highways which you planned to use as you thought about moving to Los Angeles in search of the jobs being created by what Eisenhower himself would soon call “the military industrial complex.”

page 271:

• Wolfe describes the top 50 of the Fortune 500, concluding that 30 have changed since 1956 (afterword written in 1998). He alludes that this means the world has changed. 40% are still the exact same companies, and there is no reason to not be able to draw the conclusion that the company itself is not particularly relevant: the system in which the company exists is more important. Intel and Microsoft, Amazon and Walmart, these are no less seats of concentrated power than AT&T or US Rubber.

page 274:

• Mills was persuaded that the emergence of the military as a key force in American life required a substantial attack on the isolationism that had once characterized public opinion. He argued that ‘the warlords, along with fellow travelers and spokesmen, are attempting to plant their metaphysics firmly among the population at large.’ Their goal was nothing less than a redefinition of reality, one in which the American people would come to accept what Mills called ‘an emergency without a foreseeable end.’ He wrote, ‘War or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States.’ In this state of constant war fever, America could no longer be considered a genuine democracy, for democracy thrives on dissent and disagreement, precisely what is not permitted in the military definition of reality. If the changes described by Mills were indeed permanent, then The Power Elite could be read as the description of a deeply radical, and depressing, transformation in the nature of the United States.

• It remains true today, much as Mills wrote about his time, that Congress is extremely friendly to the military, at least in part because the military has become such a powerful force in the districts of most congressmen. Military bases are an important source of jobs for many Americans. Government spending on the military is crucial to all those companies, such as Lockheed and Boeing, that manufacture military equipment. American firms are the leaders in the world’s global arms market, manufacturing and exporting weapons everywhere. Some weapons systems never seem to die, even, as was the case with a ‘Star Wars’ system design to repel incoming missiles, if there is no demonstrable military need for them. At least one recent American president, Ronald Reagan, enhanced his popularity by proclaiming the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’and by demonstrating his willingness to outspend the Russians in the arms race.

• Yet despite these similarities with the 1950s, both the world and the role that America plays in that world have changed. For one thing, the United States has been unable to muster its forces for any sustained use in any foreign conflict since Vietnam. Worried about the possibility of a public backlash against the loss of American lives, American presidents either refrain from pursuing military adventures abroad or confine them to rapid strikes, along the lines pursued by presidents Bush and Clinton in Iraq. Since 1989, moreover, the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has undermined the capacity of America’s elites to mobilize support for military expenditures on the grounds of a Soviet threat. China, which at the time Mills wrote was considered a serious threat, is now viewed by American businessmen as a source of great potential investment. Domestic political support for a large and permanent military establishment in the United States, in short, can no longer be taken for granted.