Why The Rich Don't Care
Burnham, Sophy
why The Rich Don't Care by Sophy Burnham We’ve written often in recent months about the kinds of people the meritocratic system propels to the top of our society, and how they often function as...
...Just as we accepted the grooms who brought our horses to us, already saddled and I bridled, and the gardeners trimming the formal walks, clipping the hedges, and mowing the grass...
...In land prices...
...why The Rich Don't Care by Sophy Burnham We’ve written often in recent months about the kinds of people the meritocratic system propels to the top of our society, and how they often function as if they were a hereditary upper class...
...George F. Will, the columnist, collects these examples of the failure, as he calls it, of the “imaginative sympathy...
...market investments...
...We’ve never even seen them really...
...It’s just that they think they have a monopoly on dividends...
...In stock The essence of the propertied class is an avoidance of the outside world, a shying-off from pain...
...Neither do their remarks arise from affectation, but simply from the isolation of their rank...
...Nina: (with interest) Hi Petter...
...If the local gentry contribute to the election of the local sheriff, they engage in political action, as do Douglas Dillon and his wife when each contributes $1,000 to the campaign of their friend Millicent Fenwick, Republican of New Jersey...
...It is because of who he is Put the equation another way: watch his grandmother come to visit, a handsome woman with great, hooded eyes and a beak of a nose and a straight back, who will trounce down the hall in her tweeds, a fine leather purse over one arm, her gloves, her hat (properly dressed, that is to say, lest she be taken far riffraff...
...asked my foreign service officer about the little children...
...I had a governess for my children,’’ she told The Washington Post...
...Each class drags chains behind, and those of the aristocracy, though forged in silver, pull just as hard...
...Today, three fifths of the land mass of the United States, 1.3 billion acres, is privately owned, and the quantity of land in farms has remained relatively constant for the last 30 years...
...Even the children have it, a fact that a foreign service officer once brought to my attention...
...We substitute democratic euphemisms, like ‘‘socioeconomic stratifications” or “upper-middle-income group,” terms that churn the murky waters further...
...I have never met any rich person who ever read or discussed the kinds of figures we have just looked at, or has even been much interested in them...
...Timothy’s in Maryland, Rosemary Hall, Miss Porter’s or Ethel Walker’s in New England...
...They live up the road from us...
...In the 1920s, a Beacon Hill dowager, learning that many Boston houses lacked indoor plumbing, exclaimed: “You would think the people who live in them would have found out before moving in...
...According to Smith, about 50,000 Americans held stock worth $1 million in 1969...
...There are games to play, like “Do You Know” and “Who Are You...
...Nina: Oh...
...An example occurred in 1973 in the Valley of northern Maryland when Clark MacKenzie announced his plans to build a 20-acre shopping center and 1,000 houses (or “homes,” as he called them) on his 800-acre place...
...Jake L. Arvey, leader of the Cook County Democratic organization in Chicago, the man who groomed and developed Adlai Stevenson for political office, once defined politics as “the art of putting people under obligation to YOU...
...Nor callous...
...In other words, Harry is a gentleman of leisure, a fact to be appreciated by Nina, whose husband is a renowned steeplechaser and foxhunter...
...She has just established that she is on speaking terms with the Symingtons...
...In May 1977, The Washington Post ran a remarkable interview by Sally Sophy Burnham is a Washington writer...
...Remarks like that are still made: “Oh, you won’t have any trouble parking on Saturday,” says the East Side New Yorker...
...The first thing that strikes the visitor is the exti-aordinary richness of Foxcroft, visible in the tennis courts, gardens, stables, orchards, and servants, in the boxwood walks and 18th-century brick house, in the classrooms, art rooms, photo labs, and dorms...
...The Toss of Their Heads The first thing you notice about the gentry is a sense of assurance...
...The point is merely that the rich-no, all of us-are blind...
...Among the propertied classes, the exercise of political power is accomplished with subtlety, as befits a group whose greatest need is the preservation of its place...
...If you have money and servants, then you’re helping somebody...
...It means so much...
...President Carter comes out softly against redistribution, and one assistant secretary of agriculture lobbies in Congress quietly “as a personal citizen” to keep the thousands of illegal acres in that rich farm valley that his family owns...
...You should not conclude, however, that the propertied class does not discuss property...
...Nor did she bring up a phenomenon that I have observed: that it is often impossible for those of breeding to take the reins of command, for the care and training of this class prevent it...
...He did the right thing at Attica...
...One doesn’t do that sort of thing...
...pock...
...And after all, Winston didn’t marry me to be a maid...
...All they see is their taxes going for the redistribution of wealth...
...The higher one rises on the social scale, the less controversy one can stand, the less publicity, the less mud and dirt of life’s unpleasantness...
...Social Power influences business decisions, which take place in old-line clubs that exclude women, mavericks, Jews, outsiders, blacks...
...We accepted the wealth as natural...
...pock) Nina: The Saratoga Horse Sales...
...If you have money, then you give people pleasure...
...Do you know what a subway driver gets today...
...To observers of social forms, the formation of this association was itself remarkable, given the general belief of the rich that almost any concerted action can lead to communism...
...Jinx: Oh, do you know him...
...pock...
...Who’s going to pay for that...
...His wife, C. Z., now 57, was promoting a book, First Gardens, and, for the first time in her life (a string of triumphs: competition riding at Madison Square Garden Horse Show, Best Dressed Woman in the World, the Fashion Hall of Fame), she ran into situations and people beyond the scope of her normal experience...
...Completely Understood The final step in the care and training of the propertied class occurs in the boarding school, a fact that is so completely understood all over the country that parents from Lake Forest, Illinois, or Pebble Beach, California, automatically send their children East to school...
...The essence of the propertied class is an avoidance of the outside world, a shying-off from pain...
...Or we arrogantly underestimate it, contemptuous that the sword of Social Power is wielded by women, our Mnemosyne, who pass down cultural values generation to generation...
...We cannot find an answer, and we respond instead with who is rich...
...From Baltimore...
...Nina was tall and blond, and Jinx, short, stocky, and dark...
...Therefore we deduce the increasing concentration of land ownership and the trend to landlordship...
...01978 by Sophy Burnham Quinn with C. Z. Guest, wife of Winston F. C. Guest, who is the grandson of Henry Phipps...
...Two women were playing side by side on adjacent courts, each against her own partner...
...It is not money that can be borrowed against at a bank or sold and reinvested for higher yield...
...But the Symingtons came over, looking for some children to play with their grandchildren...
...You know, that big one with the gables...
...pock . . . pock) I don’t even know anything about them really...
...I have never heard a dinner table conversation in this set turn to a serious discussion of the redistribution of wealth...
...Nina: Are you here for Ladies Day...
...A Different Tune It is important to recognize that the propertied class does not see itself as rich...
...Nina: Oh...
...Jinx: (Naming a community) in the hunt country...
...The cream of the propertied class...
...On the other hand, to illustrate wealth, 13,457 households reported incomes over $50,000 though none of their members worked...
...Guest’s father was first cousin to Winston Churchill, and Guest himself was once one of the top-ranking polo players in the world...
...And he never would have been able to handle it so beautifully if he hadn’t been brought up the way he was...
...Well, it’s not as if he needed the money,” said one Valley resident...
...Members of the propertied class are not selfish, exactly...
...That doesn’t mean I never saw them...
...From its actions, you guess at its presence...
...For girls there are Madeira and Foxcroft in Virginia, Garrison Forest and St...
...It was hard to know who won the game...
...He’s a foxhunter...
...It continues for the five or six days of his mother’s lyingin...
...A subway driver gets $13,000 starting salary...
...Nina: Who...
...Nina: Oh...
...But there’s also a real hereditary upper class in this country-small, out of the way, usually ignored, but important because it still controls a lot of land and a lot of money...
...Rich people live in a very selfenclosed world...
...Elliot Richardson, of course...
...Often it’s exercised so quietly, so discreetly, at the local country club or over a Sunday game of tennis or on the terrace at Royal Orchard, that it is hard for anyone to know-especially the principalsthat a political act has taken place...
...and we remark on the absence of such studies...
...Jinx: Harry’s just interested in horses...
...In the 1930s, an industrialist declared it didn’t pay to run radio ads on Sundays “because everyone’s playing polo...
...I wish I got $13,000 a year...
...A subway driver...
...Social Power is rooted in money, but only of the right kind...
...This accounts for the curious absence in the perceptions of the very rich: Nelson Rockefeller, telling an audience that the tax burden falls “on the average person, like you and me...
...A change of any sort...
...Eventually, MacKenzie called off the plans for a development...
...This article is adapted from her book, The Landed Gentry, to be published in May by G. P. Putnam’s...
...But it is not learned...
...Very, very occasionally you read about the upbringing of someone with money...
...pock...
...pock...
...The question is: who belongs to the upper class...
...and it seems that they’re always going out of their drive as we’re going in or out of ours, so we see them all the time...
...My husband was at school with him...
...I haven’t heard yet...
...Nina: (persisting) Well, that’s not near you...
...At that time, 390,708 of our 70 million households had incomes of $50,000 or more...
...They’re real good friends of some friends of ours in the horse business there...
...What we remark on is the constancy of the ratio between rich and poor...
...Listen to what she is saying: it is the Gregorian chant of the propertied class, learned by rote and repeated at the nurse’s knee...
...The boys attend Choate and St...
...Oh, I have seen such mutilation of personality in this group as hardly seems possible, when all God-given bounty is bestowed thereon...
...Both ladies have established that their husbands are attending the most fashionable and social horse sales in the country, where an untried filly may bring $500,000...
...Listen...
...What’s the world coming to...
...I think children are better brought up with a governess...
...Distribution of wealth in the United States has consistently been less equitable than the distribution of income...
...And a policeman in New York,” breaks in another, “makes $1 5,000 starting salary...
...Can you imagine...
...I’m not ashamed of the way I live,” she told Sally Quinn...
...It is in response to this demand that people jump...
...pock...
...Don’t you live on XYZ Road...
...Social Power enfolds and promotes its members on the one hand, and on the other, it excludes or downright kills...
...I’d spend more...
...Income is taxed and taxable without deductions...
...The distinction between wealth and income is important...
...It’s inexcusable,” said another...
...Even in the baby ward, that infant will receive a special attention, though no nurse would admit it...
...We did not speak when passing them, but grunted, eyes grounded in pride or shyness, as they touched their caps...
...Jinx: We’ve just bought the old house.on the point...
...Instead, you hear a different tune...
...We are embarrassed by the term...
...They bought it about two years ago...
...No, it is not for his personal charm that his cry produces a glance just a trace quicker than that for the other babies or a thump of his bottom at diaper-changing time, and a satisfied “There...
...We’re friends of the Symingtons in Lexington, though...
...The subject is endlessly fascinating, and it crops up all the time...
...Clark MacKenzie, a developer, was in his mid-thirties at the time...
...And so the babe, with his first breath, is sucking in the investiture of his power and privilege, the inheritance of established wealth...
...Don’t they have .Barley Field Cove...
...They exercise the prerogatives of the very old, very solid, and very respectable established wealth...
...The 1970 census, based on incomes for 1969, was a long time ago...
...The expectation of success...
...pock) Jinx: We were...
...The institutions themselves betray our reverence for social caste...
...pock . . . pock) My serve...
...One alumna donated a $500,000 stable and indoor riding ring to the school in the 1960s-to the annoyance of other alumnae, who prided themselves on riding outdoors even in the drenching rain...
...They are not joking, these people...
...It is no accident that the Department of Agriculture collects information only on farm operators and almost none on owners of land...
...But $50,000 in income includes many people with no property and no real wealth, salaried and professional people, executives who can be called “well-off,” perhaps, but hardly “rich...
...We all see through a screen of class...
...Even so, his method is filled with pitfalls, not the least of which is that his figures date from 1969...
...And is this new...
...and when she asks where the babies are kept, her voice holds not a question, but an ineffable demand...
...The gentry’s political power may be deduced from the Maryland law that permits a country club to take a tax deduction for the “open spaces” of its private golf course-so long as the membership is not “restricted...
...No matter...
...The children of the gentry had only to enter a room, and there was something in their manner, their carriage, the toss of their heads, their glance around the room (lilliputian imitations of their parents) that carried an expectation of success...
...The following article is a look at that class and its role in American life...
...Paul’s, Deerfield, Andover, Groton, Exeter, St...
...Yet, because it is evasive, visible only in the reflection of its acts, we easily lose sight of or misread its strength...
...More is expected of us,” she said...
...Political power bends, likewise, to its call...
...The boarding school I attended, Foxcroft, typifies most such institutiohs...
...If there had been people of his background, people who had been brought up the way we were, in Nixon’s cabinet, if Nixon had had the proper breeding, Watergate would never have happened...
...pock) Jinx won this round...
...Because he was from Boston, he had been raised properly, he knew what to do, knew what was right and what was wrong...
...He had repeatedly observed it at State Department gatherings...
...And the hereditary pull...
...pock...
...Children need someone to discipline them...
...It is acquired by intangible transpiration, a part of inheritance that begins at birth...
...Among our rights to privacy, this one-what we own- is paramount...
...How nice...
...It begins at the moment that the private doctor places the newborn babe in the hands of a nurse, who carries him to his own special plastic crib in the private hospital...
...But how can we afford it...
...A century later, in 1915, the U.S...
...The stable has paneled tack rooms, and in its courtyard peacocks strut and spread their gorgeous tails...
...How it abhors publicity...
...To sit on the board of a cultural institution (an art museum) reveals the trustee to be of a higher rank than if he sits on the board of an educational institution (a university), which, in turn, reveals and bestows more clout than an institution of health (a hospital...
...pock) Jinx: We don’t know them...
...In the 1950s they were known in composite as St...
...Don’t be fooled...
...The work of Professor James D. Smith of Pennsylvania State University is, therefore, of much interest, for he has analyzed estate records to determine, at the moment of death, how much property a certain segment of the population has...
...Perhaps” she told Sally Quinn, “more is expected of those of us who are better educated and come from more affluent families...
...Attendance is not due to personal attraction...
...pock...
...5,000 held stock worth more than $5 million...
...pock) Jinx: The Fife Symingtons...
...This is especially true when the act is negative, an act of omission...
...Commission on Industrial Relations determined that “the Rich,” two per cent of the people, owned 35 per cent of the wealth...
...Millicent Fenwick went to Foxcroft, and the Rockefellers and Mellons, the McCormicks of Illinois, and Anne Armstrong, who was a Legendre before she married into one branch of the King Ranch family and became the chairperson of the Republican party during Nixon’s term and finally ambassador to the Court of St...
...The matter of the Westlands Water District still continues, with Congress winding itself up in rhetorical promulgations on the need for the redistribution of our land, and with the situation apparently quite safely stable and set...
...When the landowners of California determine that votes on water rights shall be settled according to the size of each individual’s acreage, they flex their political muscle...
...Neither the Census Bureau nor the Internal Revenue Service has ever asked people to declare their holdings, and what you own is no one’s business unless you run for public office or die...
...How it scutters quick as a cockroach under the kitchen sink...
...It is the justification and reaffirmation for all wealth...
...His children were not invited to play with other children at school...
...I don’t see how we can afford to live...
...Why is it...
...On wealth itself, however, as on land ownership, no reliable information exists...
...The good boarding schools are concentrated on the East Coast...
...Then, too, our rationalism blocks our view, our necessity to systematize and categorize our lives: it is a national obsession, as if a thing does not exist unless we catalog it...
...When the Rockefellers recommend a position for their colleague and former employee Henry Kissinger or suggest for the head of the National Endowment for the Arts their competent associate Nancy Hanks, they deliver patronage, a political act...
...Look at the jobs I’ve given people...
...A meeting was held at the Butler Fire House that drew 150 or 200 people, depending on whom you believe, and resulted in the formation of the Central Baltimore County Planning Association...
...Jinx now makes it clear that her husband does not go for financial interests...
...Certainly, the children of the gentry are no handsomer than others, and often they are marked by remarkable lack of looks, if you consider the receding chin and pale pop eyes-no beauty except to his mother, perhaps, who probably thinks him fine enough, just like his Daddy...
...In the necessity for a nonmaterialistic view of the world...
...There is a simple explanation...
...The staff of the Economic Research Service is well aware of the deficiency, has made repeated budget requests for ownership studies, and discovered every time that these requests go no farther than the Secretary of Agriculture...
...Nina: But they don’t live near you...
...Mark’s, Kent, Middlesex...
...Rep...
...America’s rich, he concludes, consist of 50,000 to 60,000 people, representing perhaps 20,000 households...
...It is not our farmland that has declined, but the number of “operators” who own their land: 3.9 million in 1945-50, 2.4 million in 1969, less than 2.2 million in 1974...
...Where do they learn it...
...They can seldom be accurately perceived, and neither can they see out well...
...Often political power is expressed as a negative quantity, like a minus digit in mathematics, which takes the shape not of action but of blocking action to protect from poaching and intrusion...
...He put the property up for sale...
...Social Power is evidenced in the lawyer’s son who is not booked by the police when he has an auto accident...
...Jinx: Yes...
...MacKenzie was ostracized...
...The family underwent, said Clark MacKenzie, a “continuing personal harrassment” for nearly ten months...
...Second window on your left...
...The Reins of Command Sally Quinn did not ask her about Leon Jaworski...
...And whom do you find...
...pock...
...The largest group is made up of local property owners, the proprietors of the big department store in a small city, the owners of the newspapers, banks, and brokerage houses, the real estate developers, and the landlords of agriculture...
...or the zoning case, where the air-tight lower court decision is overturned, without explanation, at the appellate level after the judges-landowners themselves-make an unauthorized and illegal personal inspection of the site...
...Military, political, or economic power bows to social force...
...Pock...
...Only of the Right Kind social Power is the ability of a class as a unit to maintain itself...
...The Valley was incensed...
...Besides, I couldn’t go around with Winston, traveling, doing all the things he wants me to do, if I’d had to stay home and take care of the children...
...Grottlesex...
...I wish I had more money...
...Therefore, the fewer decisions one cares to make and, therefore, one’s preference for the rarefied world of art, where a decision has less consequences than educating someone’s children or warding off death No Farther Than the Secretary It is no accident that no land census has ever been taken...
...He got an architect, who drew up plans for schools and a shopping island, housing and sewage-a mini-city that he would build in the midst of the horse farms...
...Freddy may be going to that...
...And what we remark on is the need for a land census, a detailed study of land ownership and land needs...
...To this extent, their values and behavior affect us all...
...Or Judge Sirica, or any of the hundreds of others who assisted in the untangling of the Watergate scandal without the advantage of breeding...
...If rich people didn’t spend money, the country would be in much worse shape than it is today...
...They called to each other across their individual games...
...They are not even forwarded as a budget line for the consideration of Congress...
...pock...
...The other children, he noticed, were attracted to them as plants to light...
...And who is the one person who came out all right...
...Some people say the decision not to develop was based on economics rather than social factors, but Clark MacKenzie, when I tried to reach him, refused to take any telephone calls or to talk about the matter at all...
...pock...
...Look at Nelson Rockefeller...
...Because we have learned courage and learned what’s right and what’s wrong...
...He goes in at the age of 20 with a high-school diploma, and at 40 he can begin a whole new career, with a pension for life...
...The Stanley Petters...
...Therefore the necessity for privacy among the aristocracy, who build, with their private islands, private estates, private schools and servants and clubs, walls of privilege that serve as much to imprison as to protect them...
...They do not stop to consider that $13,000 in income for a subway driver is just that-income, taxed and taxable without deductions...
...People turned their backs...
...Nina: How nice...
...Today, the rich, the top one per cent of the population, or some 600,000 households, control 25 per cent of all personal and financial assets, according to Professor Smith...
...Therefore the fewer decisions one cares to make and, therefore, one’s preference for the rarefied world of art, where a decision has less consequences than educating someone’s children or warding off death...
...Everybody except the infirm or disabled has the capacity to derive income from labor,” says Peter Barnes, formerly with The New Republic, “but to derive income from wealth you must first own something...
...At its base level, this is patronage...
...Harry’s going to Saratoga next week with them...
...Of course, I saw them...
...By the end of the 19th century all of the agricultural land in the country was in private hands...
...How elusive is Social Power...
...We didn’t even see it...
...Guest, for example, who was raised and who raised her own children with nannies, mam’zells, and duennas...
...His wife was dropped from the car pool, and at church the family sat isolated in the air bubble of its pew...
...the tennis balls floated across the two nets...
...But property is at the root of it all, and the reinforcement of shared values...
...I went fox hunting with them...
...Symington is a granddaughter of Henry Frick, and the Symingtons are well known in horse circles as well as in politics...
...When the King Ranch maintains and protects its kinenos, it commits, in a broad sense, a political act...
...And after the service, when the members of the congregation gather in the churchyard to greet each other cordially and invite one another for a drink or perhaps a round of golf-at that time, which is surely one of the pleasantest of a summer’s morning, the MacThe higher one rises on the social scale, the less controversy one can stand, the less publicity, the less mud and dirt of life’s unpleasantness...
...pock) A draw...
...Everyone will be out of town for the weekend...
...Here is a conversation overheard on the Fisher’s Island tennis courts one lovely summer’s day...
...Together, these 55,000 people owned 18 per cent of the country’s personally held corporate stock...
...Therefore the necessity for privacy among the aristocracy, who build, with their private islands, private estates, private schools and servants and clubs, walls of privilege that serve as much to imprison as to protect them...
...You catch the shadow of its action, like a movement glimpsed from the corner of your eye-and it’s gone as you turn your head...
...According to one economist, in 1810, the top one per cent of families owned 21 per cent of the American wealth...
...pock) Where do you live in the winter...
...Kenzies were...
...Except during the Depression and World War II,” he writes, “the relative concentration of wealth has stayed the same or worsened...
...Many are retired...
...In part, our confusion over class may stem from our reluctance to recognize the existence of a class system in America at all...
...They had that air of ease, that unambitious expectation of being well received...
...So we arrived too late for that...
...invisible...
...You look at the voluntary boards of our charitable institutions: of museums, hospitals, schools, and universities, of garden clubs and associations dedicated to historical preservation or conservation of land...
...James...
...Privilege exerts a psychological tug: the weight of fear, possessiveness, greed, all universal qualities, yes, but add one more...
...To serve on the board of any of these three bestows more prestige and reveals it more than to serve on the board of the Police Athletic League or the YMCA...
Vol. 10 • April 1978 • No. 2
