Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

On the whole, the number of aristocratic families in the United States is very few, with a couple in each of the older states, especially New England, and in the older areas of the South such as Charleston or Natchez, Mississippi, with the chief concentrations in the small towns around Boston and in the Hudson River Valley. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt would be an example. A somewhat larger group of semiaristocrats consist of those like the Lodges, Rockefellers, or Kennedys who are not yet completely aristocratic either because they are not, in generations, far enough removed from money-making, or because of the persistence of a commercial or business tradition in the family. But these are aristocrats in the sense that they have accepted a family obligation of service to the community. The significance of this aristocratic tradition may be seen in Massachusetts politics; there two decades ago, the governorship and both senatorial seats were held by a Bradford, a Saltonstall and a Lodge, while in 1964 two of these positions were held by Endicott Peabody and Leverett Saltonstall.

The working class in the United States is much smaller than we might assume, since most American workers are seeking to rise socially, to help their children to rise socially, and are considerably concerned with status symbols. Such people, even if laborers, are not working class, but are rather petty bourgeoisie. The real working class are rather relaxed, have present rather than future preference, generally worry very little about their status in the eyes of the world, enjoy their ordinary lives, including food, sex, and leisure, and have little desire to change their jobs or positions. They are often unambitious, have a taste for broad humor, are natural, direct, and friendly, without large basic insecurities of personality. The world depression, by destroying their jobs and economic security, much reduced this group, which was always proportionately smaller in America, the land of aspiration for everyone, than in Europe.

The second most numerous group in the United States is the petty bourgeoisie, including millions of persons who regard themselves as middle class and are under all the middle-class anxieties and pressures, but often earn less money than unionized laborers. As a result of these things, they are often very insecure, envious, filled with hatreds, and are generally the chief recruits for any Radical Right, Fascist, or hate campaigns against any group that is different or which refuses to conform to middle-class values. Made up of clerks, shopkeepers, and vast numbers of office workers in business, government, finance, and education, these tend to regard their white-collar status as the chief value in life, and live in an atmosphere of envy, pettiness, insecurity, and frustration. They form the major portion of the Republican Party’s supporters in the towns of America, as they did for the Nazis in Germany thirty years ago.

In general, the political alignments in the United States have been influenced even more by these class and psychological considerations than they have been by income, economic, or occupational considerations. The Republican Party has been the party of the middle classes and the Democratic Party has been the party of the rest. In general, aristocrats have tended to move toward the Democrats, while semiaristocrats often remain Republican (with their middle-class parents or grandparents), except where historical circumstance (chiefly in New England, the Middle West, and the South, where Civil War memories remained green) operated. This meant that the Republican Party, whose nineteenth century superiority had been based on the division of farmers into South and West over the slave issue, became an established majority party in the twentieth century, but became, once again, a minority party, because of the disintegration of their middle-class support following 1945.

Even in the period of middle-class dominance, the Republicans had lost control of the Federal government because of the narrowly plutocratic control of the party that split it in 1912 and alienated most of the rest of the country in 1932. Twenty years later, in 1952, the country looked solidly middle class, but, in fact, by that date middle-class morale was almost totally destroyed, the middle classes themselves were in disintegration, and the majority of Americans were becoming less middle-class in outlook. This change is one of the most significant transformations of the twentieth century. The future of the United States, of Western Civilization, and of the world depends on what kind of outlook replaces the dissolving middle-class ideology in the next generation.

The weakening of this middle-class ideology was a chief cause of the panic of the middle-classes, and especially of the petty bourgeoisie, in the Eisenhower era. The general himself was repelled by the Radical Right, whose impetus had been a chief element (but far from the most important element) in his election, although the lower-middle-class groups had preferred Senator Taft as their leader. Eisenhower, however, had been preferred by the Eastern Establishment of old Wall Street, Ivy League, semiaristocratic Anglophiles whose real strength rested in their control of eastern financial endowments, operating from foundations, academic halls, and other tax-exempt refuges.

As we have said, this Eastern Establishment was really above parties and was much more concerned with policies than with party victories. They had been the dominant element in both parties since 1900, and practiced the political techniques of William C. Whitney and J. P. Morgan. They were, as we have said, Anglophile, cosmopolitan, Ivy League, internationalist, astonishingly liberal, patrons of the arts, and relatively humanitarian. All these things made them anathema to the lower-middle-class and petty-bourgeois groups, chiefly in small towns and in the Middle West, who supplied the votes in Republican electoral victories, but found it so difficult to control nominations (especially in presidential elections) because the big money necessary for nominating in a Republican National Convention was allied to Wall Street and to the Eastern Establishment. The ability of the latter to nominate Eisenhower over Taft in 1952 was a bitter pill to the radical bourgeoisie, and was not coated sufficiently by the naming of Nixon, a man much closer to their hearts, for the vice-presidential post. The split between these two wings of the Republican Party, and Eisenhower’s preference for the upper bourgeois rather than for the petty-bourgeois wing, paralyzed both of his administrations and was the significant element in Kennedy’s narrow victory over Nixon in 1960 and in Johnson’s much more decisive victory over Goldwater in 1964.

Kennedy, despite his Irish Catholicism, was an Establishment figure. This did not arise from his semiaristocratic attitudes or his Harvard connections (which were always tenuous, since Irish Catholicism is not yet completely acceptable at Harvard). These helped, but John Kennedy’s introduction to the Establishment arose from his support of Britain, in opposition to his father, in the critical days at the American Embassy in London in 1938-1940. His acceptance into the English Establishment opened its American branch as well. The former was indicated by a number of events, such as sister Kathleen’s marriage to the Marquis of Hartington and the shifting of Caroline’s nursery school from the White House to the British Embassy after her father’s assassination. (The ambassador, Ormsby-Gore, fifth Baron Harlech, was the son of an old associate of Lord Milner and Leo Amery, when they were the active core of the British-American Atlantic Establishment.) Another indication of this connection was the large number of Oxford-trained men appointed to office by President Kennedy.

The period since 1950 has seen the beginnings of a revolutionary change in American politics. This change is not so closely related to the changes in American economic life as it is to the transformation in social life. But without the changes in economic life, the social influences could not have operated. What has been happening has been a disintegration of the middle class and a corresponding increase in significance by the petty bourgeoisie at the same time that the economic influence of the older Wall Street financial groups has been weakening and been challenged by new wealth springing up outside the eastern cities, notably in the Southwest and Far West. These new sources of wealth have been based very largely on government action and government spending but have, none the less, adopted a petty-bourgeois outlook rather than the semiaristocratic outlook that pervades the Eastern Establishment. This new wealth, based on petroleum, natural gas, ruthless exploitation of national resources, the aviation industry, military bases in the South and West, and finally on space with all its attendant activities, has centered in Texas and southern California. Its existence, for the first time, made it possible for the petty-bourgeois outlook to make itself felt in the political nomination process instead of in the unrewarding effort to influence politics by voting for a Republican candidate nominated under Eastern Establishment influence.