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

Unfortunately for the aristocrat who wishes to expose his son to the same training process as that which molded his own outlook, he finds this a difficult thing to do because the organizations that helped form him outside the family, the Episcopal Church (or its local equivalent), the boarding school, the Ivy League university, and the once-sheltered summer resort have all changed and are being invaded by a large number of nonaristocratic intruders who change the atmosphere of the whole place.

This change in atmosphere is hard to define to anyone who has not experienced it personally. Fundamentally it is a distinction between playing the game and playing to win. The aristocrat plays for the sake of the game or the team or the school. He plays whether he is much good or not, because he feels that he is contributing to a community effort even if he is on the scrubs rather than a star or starting player. The newer recruits to former aristocratic educational institutions play for more personal reasons, with much greater intensity, even fanaticism, and play to excel and to distinguish themselves from others.

One reason for the accessibility of formerly aristocratic organizations to people of nonaristocratic origin has already been noted, but probably was discounted by the reader. That is my statement that the American Establishment, which is so aristocratic and Anglophile in its foundation, came to accept the liberal ideology. The Episcopal Church, exclusive boarding schools, and Ivy League universities (like Eton and Oxford) decided that they must open their door to the “more able” of the nonaristocratic classes. Accordingly, they established scholarships, recruited for these in lower schools they had never thought of before, and made efforts to have their admission requirements and examinations fit the past experiences of nonaristocratic applicants. By the end of the 1920’s, Philips Exeter Academy was welcoming on scholarships the sons of laboring immigrants with polysyllabic names, and by the 1950’s Episcopal clergymen were making calls on “likely-looking” Negro families.

As a consequence of this, the sons of aristocrats found themselves being squeezed out of the formative institutions that had previously trained their fathers and, at the same time, discovered that these institutions were themselves changing their character and becoming dominated by petty-bourgeois rather than by aristocratic values. At the alumni reunions of June 1964, the President of Harvard was asked in an open forum what the questioner should do with his son, recently rejected for admission to Harvard in spite of the fact that the son was descended from the Mayflower voyagers by eleven consecutive generations of Harvard men. To this tragic question President Pusey replied: “I don’t know what we can do about your son. We can’t send him back, because the Mayflower isn’t running any more.” Despite this facetious retort, which may have been called forth by the inebriate condition of the questioner, the fact remains that the aristocratic outlook has a great deal to contribute to any organization fortunate enough to share it. Among other things, it has kept Harvard (where aristocratic control continued almost to the present day) at the top or close to the top of the American educational hierarchy decade after decade.

The sincere effort, by aristocrats and democrats alike, to make the social ladder in America a ladder of opportunity rather than a ladder of privilege has opened the way to a surge of petty-bourgeois recruits over the faltering bodies of the disintegrating middle class.

The petty bourgeois are rising in American society along the channels established in the great American hierarchies of business, the armed forces, academic life, the professions, finance, and politics. They are doing this not because they have imagination, broad vision, judgment, moderation, versatility, or group loyalties but because they have neurotic drives of personal ambition and competitiveness, great insecurities and resentments, narrow specialization, and fanatical application to the task before each of them. Their fathers, earning $100 a week as bank clerks or insurance agents while unionized bricklayers were getting $120 a week when they cared to work, embraced the middle-class ideology with tenacity as the chief means (along with their “white collared” clothing) of distinguishing themselves from the unionized labor they feared or hated. Their wives, whom they had married because they held the same outlook, looked forward eagerly to seeing their sons become the kind of material success the father had failed to reach. The family accepted a common outlook that believed specialization and hard work, either in business or in a profession, would win this material success. The steps up that ladder of success were clearly marked—to be the outstanding boy student and graduate in school, to win entrance to and graduation from “the best” university possible (naturally an Ivy League one), and then the final years of specialized application in a professional school.

Many of these eager workers headed for medicine, because to them medicine, despite the ten years of necessary preparation, meant up to $40,000 a year income by age fifty. As a consequence, the medical profession in the United States ceased, very largely, to be a profession of fatherly confessors and unprofessing humanitarians and became one of the largest groups of hardheaded petty-bourgeois hustlers in the United States, and their professional association became the most ruthlessly materialistic lobbying association of any professional group. Similar persons with lesser opportunities were shunted off the more advantageous rungs of the ladder into second-best schools and third-rate universities. All flocked into the professions, even to teaching (which, on the face of it, might have expected that its practitioners would have some allegiance to the truth and to helping the young to realize their less materialistic potentialities), where they quickly abandoned the classroom for the more remunerative tasks of educational administration. And, of course, the great mass of these eager beavers went into science or business, preferably into the largest corporations, where they looked with fishy-eyed anticipation at those rich, if remote, plums of vice-presidencies, in General Motors, Ford, General Dynamics, or International Business Machines.

The success of these petty-bourgeois recruits in America’s organizational structure rested on their ability to adapt their lives to the screening processes the middle classes had set up covering access to the middle-class organizational structures. The petty bourgeoisie, as the last fanatical defenders of the middle-class outlook, had, in excess degree, the qualities of self-discipline and future preference the middle classes had established as the unstated assumptions behind their screens of aptitude testing, intelligence evaluation, motivational research, and potential-success measurements. Above all, the American public school system, permeated with the unstated assumptions of middle-class values, was ideally suited to demonstrate petty-bourgeois “success quotients.” These successive barriers in the middle-class screening process were almost insurmountable to the working class and the outcast, became very difficult to the new generation of middle-class children, who rejected their parents’ value system, but were ideally adapted to the petty-bourgeois anxiety neuroses.

By 1960, however, big business, government civil service, and the Ivy League universities were becoming disillusioned with these petty-bourgeois recruits. The difficulty was that these new recruits were rigid, unimaginative, narrow and, above all, illiberal at a time when liberalism (in the sense of reaching tentative and approximate decisions through flexible community interaction) was coming to be regarded as the proper approach to large organization problems. In his farewell report the Chairman of Harvard’s Admissions Committee, Wilbur Bender, summed up the problem this way: