THE AFFLUENCE PEDDLERS

...Nor will any such shift take place unless we begin to look beyond the more obvious drawbacks of advertising and consuming innocuously discussed in the editorials...

...Van Doren at last report still had his house on Bleeker Street...

...In a similar way, President Eisenhower has clearly influenced a great many people who do not admire him...

...Never has the brotherhood of the slack-fibred been more masterfully rallied...

...Paradoxically enough, it was the hard-driving, hag-ridden Nixon who came persuasively into the act, and he did it with the Checkers speech...

...But the Checkers speech has acquired its own particular kind of immortality because it was a landmark in the history of seduction...

...Where do you find it...

...Liberals could and did laugh mockingly when the Great Crusader turned out to be just a middle-class, white-collar Community Chest chairman with a predilection for golf...

...There are the ones who work upon the society, and the ones who—despite all appearances of drive, opportunism, or outside circumstances—are the malleable creatures of the society...

...In business men declining government assignments, or working only briefly in Washington and then returning to their private concerns...

...In what way...

...But most importantly, from the point of view of effective social symbolism, both managed in a quiet way to end up in an improved situation financially...

...by the time he has been kept posted on Van Doren even after the downgraded Mr...

...But the celebrity phenomenon becomes a little simpler if it is considered that there is more than one kind of celebrity...

...but the barrier does not go up again...

...If we have at the moment an American climate of moral slackness, physical comfort, and general self-indulgence, it is in part because a succession of celebrities have helped to put across self-indulgence as a desirable quality—at the expense, of course, of self-discipline and responsibility...

...he has had a promotion at the small magazine where he works...

...Never has the implicit attitude of consumerdom come through more ringingly than it did in that performance: "Take what you want, you won't have to pay for it...

...Could it, for instance, in any way be interpreted as an extension of "democracy" and therefore a good thing...

...Black is white and white is black...

...And both postponed confession to a point well beyond where a sensitive conscience would seem to have demanded it, Chambers waiting until his espionage was outlawed by the statute of limitations and Van Doren until exposure by others was inevitable...

...It has more than that string to its bow...

...Take what you want, you won't have to pay for it...

...In fact, well beyond the area of the market place, self-indulgence has become so visible as to be almost not visible, like the Purloined Letter...

...Chambers' name may have disappeared from the news, but in Charles Van Doren he had a successor...

...It was so long ago," the Nixonites murmur...

...The highly publicized figure of the solvent penitent is a unique creation of our time...

...In basketball players taking bribes to toss games...

...Hence it is never promoted under its own name...

...Ethics is a picnic and morality a mere delightful drunkenness...

...The job of breaking up old-fashioned Puritan habits in the interest of a limitless market was one task that Eisenhower could certainly have handled alone...

...You do not have to admire a celebrity to be influenced by him, as the decade roughly spanned by Whittaker Chambers and Charles Van Doren clearly shows...

...But it was not these things which made the President so commanding a signpost pointing to the easy, irresponsible way of doing things...

...In the dependence on tranquilizers and the resort to marijuana...

...The end effect of the solvent penitent is, without disturbing moral conventions, to give permission for self-indulgence as a key motif of living...

...It is generally assumed that, in terms of social dynamics, McCarthy's role was to intimidate liberals so that they would not sign petitions or make humanitarian gestures unto the third and fourth generation...

...He did not, however, have to...

...The appeal to it is evident enough in the advertisements...

...by the time he has listened to Charles Van Doren discussions at every social gathering he attends...

...Had Senator McCarthy really been tough, he would not— upon being cast down from the pinnacle—have departed this life so quickly by the self-loving, self-warming alcohol route...

...and the Cumaean Sibyl is not saying flat out that he will never again get a chance to resume his chosen profession of teaching...

...Lattimore was described by the press as "truculent," though what else the Fourth Estate expected a man to be in those circumstances is hard to imagine...

...In the cadets at West Point cheating on exams...

...by the time he has heard Charles Van Doren's story reported on every news broadcast he turns on...

...but the people upon whom celebrityhood is bestowed often contribute substantially to getting the message across...

...You won't have to pay for it...

...And the press, which could have buried him on the financial page, gave him headlines for, quite literally, years...

...Perhaps at this point "self-indulgence" needs defining...

...It is perhaps ironically appropriate that the Fifties, which were in a manner of speaking ushered in by Whittaker Chambers, should have been ushered out by Charles Van Doren...

...Small wonder that telegrams, telephone calls, and letters poured into Republican headquarters by the thousands urging a Nixon candidacy...

...On the contrary, compared with the easeful vistas opened up by Ike's day-to-day performance, the Big Rock Candy Mountain was a chilling, killing, blizzard-breeding Matterhorn...

...They were symbols thrown off by the culture in its "one increasing purpose" of selling things —and of smoothing the path of the seller by spotlighting self-indulgence as a way of life...

...Complicated political overtones surround Chambers, and those overtones tend to obscure the fact that as an "image" he has had a significance transcending politics...

...but for all the sermonizing there seem to be no signs of a shift in the direction of plain living and high thinking...

...An echo in a ravine cannot sing the Liebestod, and the Affluence Peddlers will not, because they cannot, give us anything except more of what we have too much of already...

...Nixon adherents sometimes ask in genuine perplexity why liberals cannot forget the Checkers speech...

...Van Doren ultimately, to be sure, joins Whittaker Chambers in oblivion...

...In President Eisenhower ignoring Little Rock—or crying "I need him...

...In this way—that conduct which was formerly not only unthinkable but unfamiliar has become, if still unthinkable, at least familiar...

...and he did not pay for them as the perquisites of power are usually paid for in a democracy—with a merciless burden of work, a crushing sense of responsibility, an ineluctable loneliness, and the slings and arrows of a hostile opposition...

...All the nudges in that direction have to be oblique, which results in a great prevalence of things not being called by their right names...

...But McCarthy had an additional function, culturally speaking...

...But since no one ever thinks of himself as self-indulgent, or even as approving of self-indulgence, there cannot be any organized effort—either open or conspiratorial—to cultivate such an atmosphere...

...That figure serves an important social purpose, even though the purpose is not articulately or consciously held...

...There is an old Spanish proverb to the effect that God says, "Take what you want and pay for it...

...Once more out of the breach, dear friends...

...Not only did many eggheads, intellectuals, and teachers feel bitterly that what Van Doren was guilty of, in their terms, was treason...

...Chips has retired to comparatively private life...

...These latter owe their elevation, basically, to the fact that they either embody and dramatize certain attitudes the society finds needful or are very skillful in evoking such attitudes...

...Shrewd observers realized early that President Eisenhower was about as close to asceticism as Hermann Goering was to St...

...That message reads: "Take what you want...

...He stood up on the floor of the Senate, protected by Congressional immunity, and sprayed baseless and unsubstantiated charges at innocent people...

...The Affluence Peddlers are mere reflections in a mirror...

...by the time this process has been gone through, that man is closer to thinking and acting like Charles Van Doren than he would have been if he had never heard of the young instructor...

...What made Eisenhower the persuasive, compelling, and irresistible symbol for a consuming society was the fact that he so clearly and visibly took what he wanted and did not pay for it...

...In the electorate which does not like the "image" of leadership and prefers the "image" of an undemanding folksiness...

...The unver-balized but powerful message that comes to us via the solvent penitents is just the opposite...

...Francis of Assisi...

...Both started out with one story and ended up with a radically different one...

...In a market society organized as ours currently is, self-indulgence must unavoidably be cherished and rewarded and held up as a social ideal...

...But by the time that man has seen Charles Van Doren's name in every paper he picks up for two weeks...

...but both men were self-confessed perjurers who acknowledged their wrongdoing in a blaze of publicity and with studiously composed mea culpas...

...The market society does not rely solely on the ubiquitous commercial to influence behavior...

...He let General George C. Marshall down...

...For instance, the kind of people who come boiling to the top of the social brew —the kind of people who become celebrities—sometimes have a good deal to do with shaping national attitudes...

...A man may know that nothing in the world could have induced him to think as Charles Van Doren thought and do as Charles Van Doren did...

...Occupying the limelight for longer or shorter periods—and for apparently the most diverse and unconnected of reasons—these headliners nevertheless have all had one basic element in common...

...Charles Van Doren, it was said, was known to ninety-seven million people...

...In Nixon on his South American trip, jeopardizing the dignity and "face" of his own and several other countries merely to make a point about his personal courage...

...Self-indulgence is an outlook rather than a creed, and an outlook always carefully rationalized and prettily disMARGARET HALSEY has written for a number of publications and is the author of several books including "With Malice Towards Some," "Color Blind," and "The Folks at Home...

...The most outstanding, of course, was Dwight Eisenhower...

...But if toughness means the ability not to crack up under pressure, then the tough man in the McCarthy trajectory was Owen Lat-timore...

...In conflict-of-interest cases...

...when probity demands that he get rid of Sherman Adams...

...Fortified with emoluments from Time, Random House, the Saturday Evening Post and the Book-of-the-Month Club, Chambers retired to a Maryland farm...

...Of two potential barriers against such conduct, one has been broken down...

...Though separated in point of time by ten years, the two heroes of modern Congressional investigation reveal an astonishing number of parallels...

...and this objective the Senator achieved...

...guised...

...It had, among others, three first-magnitude celebrities to convey its silent but saturative message, all of whom had become household words via the political route...

...Fly now, pay later .. . For only pennies a day .. . You can't afford not to own our elasticised cemetery plot . . . This kind of persuasion has had a receptive audience...

...This is a "fact," and ought somehow, one felt, to be assimilated or placed in a suitable frame of reference...

...You find it in "private luxury, public squalor...

...In the time that elapsed between Chambers and Van Doren, the cause of affluence did not have to struggle along unaided...

...Their contribution is frequently not recognized because—in our popularity-obsessed culture—it is not generally understood that you do not have to admire a headliner to be influenced by him...

...Among the best-known and most influential of these celebrities have been Charles Van Doren, Whittaker Chambers, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, and the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy...

...The invitation to self-indulgence could hardly have been spelled out more clearly...

...A General Marshall is a celebrity because of indisputable achievement—an Adlai Stevenson because of a consistently meaningful approach to life...

...He could not tolerate criticism...

...He took the bubbletop car, the plaudits and the smiling crowds, the herd of black Angus, the cheery confraternity of millionaires, the incessant vacations, the silken cushioning of the one-party press...

...These data, while they showed that the Chief Executive was a natural-born affluence peddler, did not sink deeply into the public consciousness...

...With them, there can be no question of a reaffirmation of values, either in politics, literature, education, or anywhere else...

...For a long time now, intelligent people have been trying to cope with the slippery, evasive phenomenon of "popularity," "success," and the celebrity...

...Even people who loathed him and were sickened by his career sometimes still refer to the late Senator McCarthy, with a grudging admiration, as "tough...

...Chambers and Van Doren were not only penitents—they were solvent penitents, unthreatened by prison bars and babbling happily to a wide public about their inmost thoughts...

...But despite the mockery, an appalling amount of Eisenhower softness, slackness, and inertia rubbed off on the liberal movement...

...In the golden cesspool of television...