-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: AMERICA'S SECRET ARISTOCRACY by Stephen Birmingham (C) 1987 Berkley Book, New York, NY 1990 ----- A very interesting book for details and such. Very well researched and I would reccommend many of Mr. Birmingham's books to any searcher of history. For it is my belief, that by better understanding history, we can see today's course. Om K ----- 20. The Gospel of Wealth In Margaret Pardee's scrapbooks, files, and collections of family-related newspaper clippings, there are occasional items which indicate that life for privileged early-twentieth-century New Yorkers was not entirely one of ease and comfort and night-and-day-long dancing. There were certain vicissitudes as well. Automobiles, for example, were still something of a novelty, and automobile accidents made headlines on the front pages of the New York papers. Since motorcars were still affordable only to the wealthy, the accidents usually involved a prominent citizen. Such an occurrence involved Margaret Trevor Pardee's great-aunt, Mrs. Hamilton Fish, who, with a friend, Miss Emily Van Amringe, was being driven down Riverside Drive in Mrs. Fish's landaulet when their car struck a Fifth Avenue southbound motor stage at 1O1st Street. In this accident, the omnibus was not damaged, but the landaulet lost a wheel, and the ladies were thrown against the windscreen that separated the driver from his passengers. The chauffeur, Henry McEwen, was unhurt, but the ladies were taken to St. Luke's Hospital for treatment of cuts and bruises. To a policeman who came to the scene, Mrs. Fish commented, "If anybody is to be hurt by these accidents, I wish the chauffeur would suffer once in a while." The New York Sun agreed with her. America, after all, was a democracy, where everyone was entitled to equal treatment. Despite the aura of languor and complacency that seems to have hung around this era like a perfumed breeze, as the belle epoque glided to its close and the twentieth century entered its teens, there were disquieting signs of social unrest in the country that were hard for even the most gently bred and carefully sheltered to ignore. The first of these warnings had appeared in 1899, with the publication of Wisconsinite Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. with its introduction of such phrases as "conspicuous consumption," "conspicuous leisure," and "the pecuniary standard of living." Veblen was no Marxist or socialist, but his treatment of the leisure class was definitely impious and mocking. He placed clergymen, for example, in the servant class, pointing out that they put on elaborate uniforms in order to perform ritual duties -to a superior master. He also perhaps intentionally, or perhaps not-managed to misquote Shakespeare when he spoke of people who were "to the manor born. " What Hamlet actually said was, " . . . though I am a native here and to the manner born. . . ." Hamlet was talking about aristocratic attitudes and deportment, but Veblen left the impression that the subject was rich people who lived in manor houses. This confusion over the meaning of the term has persisted ever since. In any case, Veblen's book, which was widely read and discussed, left the distinct impression that the leisure class was frivolous and silly. Was the American aristocracy in danger of becoming a laughingstock and being ridiculed out of existence? Some people interpreted Veblen just that way. Fourteen years later, in 1913, the American rich found themselves under attack from several different directions at once, and there were ominous signs that the American public in general was growing less and less tolerant of the well-to-do. That year, the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution went into effect, empowering Congress to levy a graduated income tax on all incomes over three thousand dollars a year. This, it was proclaimed, would equal things out and require that the rich contribute a fuller share of their wealth to the public coffers-though the rich would soon devise loopholes and shelters against the tax laws that would leave most of them just as wealthy as before. And, also in 1913, a Columbia University professor named Charles A. Beard published Economic Interpretation of the Constitution and pointed out that America's founding fathers who drafted the Constitution in 1787 were all men of considerable property-colonial aristocrats. This fact, Beard suggested, had led to certain economic inequities in the years since then. These vaguely unsettling noises did not go unheard among the upper echelons of society in New York and elsewhere. The ideas had begun to take hold that, though some Americans were quite fortunate. There were many more who were less so; that though a privileged class had definitely evolved, there was another that was just as definitely underprivileged; that with great wealth there went proportionately great social responsibilities; and that there might be more important things to think about than the morality of the tango and the duration of the Yale Prom. Part of this sobering sense was inherited from the European concept of noblesse oblige and from the motto of the British monarch, Ich dien, "I serve." But even more of it seems to have involved a very American capitalist-sense of Protestant guilt. On the heels of Mr. Beard's published thesis came the House Committee on Banking and Currency's report on the "money trust," a loosely organized but highly effective cabal of bankers and industrialists, led by J. P. Morgan, that controlled financial power in the United States. And, to bring home the notion of the enormous power held by the rich in a violent and frightening way, 1913 was also the year of the bloody strike called by the United Mine Workers at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, protesting the policies of the firm that was headed by John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil. Twenty-seven strikers were killed, and Mr. Rockefeller, whose attitude up to that point had been one of simple arrogance, found it wise to enlist the services of one Ivy Ledbetter Lee, a pioneer in the new "science" of public relations. It was Mr. Lee who counseled Mr. Rockefeller to travel to -Colorado and to personally address the striking miners, a gesture that had an immediately calming effect on the highly charged situation. It was also Mr. Lee's suggestion that Rockefeller adopt the tactic of handing out shiny new dimes to bystanders wherever he went, helping to create the illusion that the ruthless oil tycoon was not a curmudgeonly despot at all but a kindly national Santa Claus of sorts. At the same time, Lee was helping Rockefeller lay the groundwork for the vast Rockefeller Foundation, which would become a major force in improving world health, world agriculture, and education. It is thanks to the foundation, rather than to any individual family member, that the Rockefellers today have been admitted, albeit begrudgingly, into the ranks of the American aristocracy-though to members of the Old Guard they will perhaps always be regarded as newcomers. Ivy Lee had to teach John D. Rockefeller that "rich" and "responsibility" began with the same letter of the alphabet. Lee himself was born with the knowledge. Six feet tall, lean and erect and handsome, he bore himself with the courtliness and dignity of a southern gentleman, which, indeed, he was. A childhood accident had left him with a slight limp, which only managed to add to his kindly, decorous demeanor. Though he had started his career in the somewhat raffish world of newspaper reportage, his presence added a touch of unexpected class to that profession, and it was the kind of class that Lee owed both to his heritage and to his education. On his father's side, the family could trace itself back to the first Richard Lee of the Lees of Virginia. On his mother's side, he was descended from George Washington's father and, beyond the Washingtons-admittedly with a slight genealogical hiccup*(*George Washington's father, Augustine Washington, married twice. His first wife was a Butler. His second wife, the former Mary Ball, was the mother of George.) -to Margaret Butler, whose illustrious ancestors included nearly all the kings of Europe, including Charlemagne. Ivy Lee's grandfather Zachary Lee had been a wealthy Georgia planter and gristmill owner, and Ivy Lee's father, James Wideman Lee, had been privately educated at Bawsville Academy before the Civil War. But the family fortune was lost when General William Sherman put a torch to the Lee plantation and mill on his march to the sea, and so James W. Lee chose the best occupation that was open to a newly impoverished gentleman and became a Methodist Episcopal clergyman. Soon he was one of the most popular ministers in Atlanta. For his time, James Lee was an altogether remarkable man, and Ivy Lee grew up listening to his father's sermons, which were about love, racial and religious tolerance. thrift, hard work, and moral duties. He was an early southern advocate of civil rights for blacks and for government programs that would improve the quality of black education in the postwar South. Following an anti-Semitic incident in St. Louis, the Reverend Lee preached a sermon that made national headlines: "METHODIST PASTOR LAUDS JEWISH RACE." Later, he led a campaign to admit Jews, Catholics, and blacks into the YMCA and proposed a "Cathedral of Cooperation" in Atlanta that would welcome all faiths, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Ivy Lee's mother was equally extraordinary. Born in the middle of the War Between the States, and growing up in the southern Poverty that followed, she had no opportunity for any education whatsoever. Yet she taught herself to read and write, and became an eloquent public speaker, traveling widely about the United States lecturing at women's clubs and church functions. Like her husband's, her themes were tolerance, compassion, humanity, and duty. With their combined incomes, the Lees were able to send their firstborn son north to be educated at Princeton. At Princeton, Ivy Lee came under the influence of the university's then president, James McCosh, a leading exponent of the Scots philosophy of common sense. According to McCosh, individualism, freedom from government interference, the rights to acquire and own property, and the right to amass wealth were basic tenets. Not long before Ivy Lee arrived at Princeton, President McCosh had written that "God has bestowed upon us certain powers and gifts which no one is at liberty to take from us or to interfere with. All attempts to deprive us of them is theft. Under the same head may be placed all purposes to deprive us of the right to earn property or to use it as we see fit." Poverty, in McCosh's view, was simply the result of laziness. Wealth resulted from hard work and thrift, and from hard work and thrift came civilization. Wealth was a kind of divine reward. By the early 1900s, however, this somewhat harsh and simplistic view required some sort of tempering. The era of the robber barons that had followed the Civil War had produced fortunes far more vast than any America had ever seen-fortunes that were patently out of all proportion with any intellectual, moral, or even business capacities on the part of the individual entrepreneurs who made them. While a handful of Americans had become enormously wealthy, the other side of the coin was displaying an alarming spread of urban slums, destitution, and disease. The gulf of disparity between the very rich and the very poor had become so yawningly wide that some sort of explanation seemed needed. Could it all be written off as the will of the Almighty? How did one reconcile the pursuit of wealth with the spread of social ills that seemed to accompany it? How, in short, could the obvious success of American capitalism be credibly advertised as being for the common good? One answer had been proposed a few years earlier by Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest men of his day and one of the few new American millionaires who actually appeared to possess such a thing as a social conscience. Carnegie had given the matter of excessive riches serious thought. In 1889, in the North American Review, he had published an article titled, simply and honestly, "Wealth." And out of this had evolved what came to be known as "the gospel of wealth." Soberly and painstakingly, Carnegie had outlined what he felt to be the duties and responsibilities of the man of wealth, and how he felt that wealth must be used to ease the social ills of the world. The first duty of the man of wealth, Carnegie wrote, was "to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which came to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner . . . best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community." Needless to say, very few of the new millionaires of the era were living their lives according to this gospel-though some were, and most of these, interestingly enough, were members of the newly rich American Jewish community, led by such eminent and conscientious men as the banker Jacob H. Schiff and the lawyer Louis Marshall. Schiff, for example, believed in the principle of tithing, and at least 10 percent of everything he made went somehow or other toward the Public weal-to Jewish and non-Jewish causes alike. Schiff, furthermore, believed in the Talmudic doctrine that "Twice blessed is he who gives in secret," and so most of his major benefactions were made anonymously. When his son-in-law, Felix Warburg, embarked on a project to build himself an elaborate mansion on Fifth Avenue, a display of extravagance if there ever was one, Schiff stopped speaking to him. But in the case of men like John D. Rockefeller and others who were busily erecting vast, showy mansions in Newport, on Long Island, in Bar Harbor and Palm Beach, there was a need by 1913-as Ivy Lee saw it-for the very rich to at least pay lip service to the gospel of wealth, if their gilded gates were not to be stormed by the hungry rabble. Following his graduation from Princeton, and a few years as a newspaperman, which taught him the importance of having "a good press," Lee moved into the world of the rich, where, with his looks and manners. he seemed more than at home and where he offered his services as a polisher of seriously tarnished images. One after another, he became adviser on what he dubbed public relations to such men as George Westinghouse, Thomas Fortune Ryan, Charles Schwab, Walter Chrysler, Harry F. Guggenheim, Alton B. Parker, John W. Davis, Henry P. Davison, Dwight Morrow, Otto Kahn, Winthrop Aldrich, and the Rockefellers. In the process, to be sure, Ivy Lee himself would become a moderately rich man. Still, he remained true to the gospel. When universities, foundations, charities, or churches sought his services, he offered them for nothing. But he had discovered that there was money to be made in teaching new money how to behave like old money. And he was so successful at it that the general public would begin having trouble distinguishing which kind of money was which-a fact that would have the effect of driving the old money even deeper into its cave, licking its wounds, cringing at the thought of having names such as Rockefeller and Vanderbilt uttered in the same sentence as Livingston or Jay. pp.226-232 --fini-- Aloha, He'Ping Om, Shalom, Salaam. Peace Be, Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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