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...
...George F. Will, the columnist, collects these examples of the failure, as he calls it, of the “imaginative sympathy...
...I wish I got $13,000 a year...
...Social Power is evidenced in the lawyer’s son who is not booked by the police when he has an auto accident...
...Nina: Are you here for Ladies Day...
...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...
...There is a simple explanation...
...In the 1950s they were known in composite as St...
...pock...
...The subject is endlessly fascinating, and it crops up all the time...
...Second window on your left...
...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...
...If you have money, then you give people pleasure...
...If rich people didn’t spend money, the country would be in much worse shape than it is today...
...And what we remark on is the need for a land census, a detailed study of land ownership and land needs...
...I went fox hunting with them...
...pock . . . pock) I don’t even know anything about them really...
...The boarding school I attended, Foxcroft, typifies most such institutiohs...
...His wife was dropped from the car pool, and at church the family sat isolated in the air bubble of its pew...
...It is the justification and reaffirmation for all wealth...
...The essence of the propertied class is an avoidance of the outside world, a shying-off from pain...
...The good boarding schools are concentrated on the East Coast...
...In other words, Harry is a gentleman of leisure, a fact to be appreciated by Nina, whose husband is a renowned steeplechaser and foxhunter...
...Who’s going to pay for that...
...The Stanley Petters...
...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...
...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...
...market investments...
...In the necessity for a nonmaterialistic view of the world...
...The Reins of Command Sally Quinn did not ask her about Leon Jaworski...
...And a policeman in New York,” breaks in another, “makes $1 5,000 starting salary...
...But the Symingtons came over, looking for some children to play with their grandchildren...
...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...
...Even the children have it, a fact that a foreign service officer once brought to my attention...
...Very, very occasionally you read about the upbringing of someone with money...
...Even in the baby ward, that infant will receive a special attention, though no nurse would admit it...
...A change of any sort...
...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...
...pock...
...They are not joking, these people...
...They are not even forwarded as a budget line for the consideration of Congress...
...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...
...Jinx: Yes...
...Social Power enfolds and promotes its members on the one hand, and on the other, it excludes or downright kills...
...I have never heard a dinner table conversation in this set turn to a serious discussion of the redistribution of wealth...
...This article is adapted from her book, The Landed Gentry, to be published in May by G. P. Putnam’s...
...The stable has paneled tack rooms, and in its courtyard peacocks strut and spread their gorgeous tails...
...To this extent, their values and behavior affect us all...
...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...
...Don’t be fooled...
...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...
...The Valley was incensed...
...The boys attend Choate and St...
...Many are retired...
...One doesn’t do that sort of thing...
...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...
...Privilege exerts a psychological tug: the weight of fear, possessiveness, greed, all universal qualities, yes, but add one more...
...It is in response to this demand that people jump...
...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...
...Of course, I saw them...
...The question is: who belongs to the upper class...
...But it is not learned...
...I think children are better brought up with a governess...
...Two women were playing side by side on adjacent courts, each against her own partner...
...They do not stop to consider that $13,000 in income for a subway driver is just that-income, taxed and taxable without deductions...
...They can seldom be accurately perceived, and neither can they see out well...
...I’d spend more...
...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 cream of the propertied class...
...How it scutters quick as a cockroach under the kitchen sink...
...The institutions themselves betray our reverence for social caste...
...This is especially true when the act is negative, an act of omission...
...Perhaps” she told Sally Quinn, “more is expected of those of us who are better educated and come from more affluent families...
...Jinx now makes it clear that her husband does not go for financial interests...
...Eventually, MacKenzie called off the plans for a development...
...I had a governess for my children,’’ she told The Washington Post...
...Everyone will be out of town for the weekend...
...Attendance is not due to personal attraction...
...It means so much...
...Grottlesex...
...Elliot Richardson, of course...
...Look at Nelson Rockefeller...
...Military, political, or economic power bows to social force...
...It’s just that they think they have a monopoly on dividends...
...We’re friends of the Symingtons in Lexington, though...
...Oh, I have seen such mutilation of personality in this group as hardly seems possible, when all God-given bounty is bestowed thereon...
...Commission on Industrial Relations determined that “the Rich,” two per cent of the people, owned 35 per cent of the wealth...
...Nina: (persisting) Well, that’s not near you...
...Political power bends, likewise, to its call...
...For girls there are Madeira and Foxcroft in Virginia, Garrison Forest and St...
...America’s rich, he concludes, consist of 50,000 to 60,000 people, representing perhaps 20,000 households...
...Harry’s going to Saratoga next week with them...
...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...
...And so the babe, with his first breath, is sucking in the investiture of his power and privilege, the inheritance of established wealth...
...Listen...
...Don’t you live on XYZ Road...
...When the King Ranch maintains and protects its kinenos, it commits, in a broad sense, a political act...
...The expectation of success...
...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...
...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...
...It is not money that can be borrowed against at a bank or sold and reinvested for higher yield...
...They bought it about two years ago...
...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...
...No matter...
...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...
...Jinx: (Naming a community) in the hunt country...
...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...
...I’m not ashamed of the way I live,” she told Sally Quinn...
...pock...
...And he never would have been able to handle it so beautifully if he hadn’t been brought up the way he was...
...the tennis balls floated across the two nets...
...Why is it...
...James...
...They live up the road from us...
...In May 1977, The Washington Post ran a remarkable interview by Sally Sophy Burnham is a Washington writer...
...How elusive is Social Power...
...Nor callous...
...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...
...I don’t see how we can afford to live...
...Except during the Depression and World War II,” he writes, “the relative concentration of wealth has stayed the same or worsened...
...How nice...
...Jinx: Harry’s just interested in horses...
...pock...
...We are embarrassed by the term...
...Symington is a granddaughter of Henry Frick, and the Symingtons are well known in horse circles as well as in politics...
...Can you imagine...
...And the hereditary pull...
...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...
...pock...
...I haven’t heard yet...
...Distribution of wealth in the United States has consistently been less equitable than the distribution of income...
...From its actions, you guess at its presence...
...Instead, you hear a different tune...
...All they see is their taxes going for the redistribution of wealth...
...We did not speak when passing them, but grunted, eyes grounded in pride or shyness, as they touched their caps...
...Nina: (with interest) Hi Petter...
...Guest, for example, who was raised and who raised her own children with nannies, mam’zells, and duennas...
...MacKenzie was ostracized...
...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...
...Clark MacKenzie, a developer, was in his mid-thirties at the time...
...pock) Nina: The Saratoga Horse Sales...
...Members of the propertied class are not selfish, exactly...
...Social Power influences business decisions, which take place in old-line clubs that exclude women, mavericks, Jews, outsiders, blacks...
...pock) Jinx won this round...
...The other children, he noticed, were attracted to them as plants to light...
...My husband was at school with him...
...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...
...That doesn’t mean I never saw them...
...They had that air of ease, that unambitious expectation of being well received...
...and we remark on the absence of such studies...
...From Baltimore...
...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...
...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...
...pock) Jinx: The Fife Symingtons...
...The 1970 census, based on incomes for 1969, was a long time ago...
...The point is merely that the rich-no, all of us-are blind...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...It is acquired by intangible transpiration, a part of inheritance that begins at birth...
...He put the property up for sale...
...The distinction between wealth and income is important...
...Remarks like that are still made: “Oh, you won’t have any trouble parking on Saturday,” says the East Side New Yorker...
...On wealth itself, however, as on land ownership, no reliable information exists...
...At that time, 390,708 of our 70 million households had incomes of $50,000 or more...
...In the 1930s, an industrialist declared it didn’t pay to run radio ads on Sundays “because everyone’s playing polo...
...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...
...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...
...Look at the jobs I’ve given people...
...pock...
...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...
...asked my foreign service officer about the little children...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...A subway driver...
...Pock...
...And who is the one person who came out all right...
...pock...
...Kenzies were...
...The following article is a look at that class and its role in American life...
...According to Smith, about 50,000 Americans held stock worth $1 million in 1969...
...Nina: Who...
...So we arrived too late for that...
...They exercise the prerogatives of the very old, very solid, and very respectable established wealth...
...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...
...What’s the world coming to...
...And whom do you find...
...Therefore we deduce the increasing concentration of land ownership and the trend to landlordship...
...We didn’t even see it...
...There are games to play, like “Do You Know” and “Who Are You...
...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...
...Because we have learned courage and learned what’s right and what’s wrong...
...According to one economist, in 1810, the top one per cent of families owned 21 per cent of the American wealth...
...Nina: But they don’t live near you...
...We’ve never even seen them really...
...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...
...It is no accident that the Department of Agriculture collects information only on farm operators and almost none on owners of land...
...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...
...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...
...He had repeatedly observed it at State Department gatherings...
...Jinx: Oh, do you know him...
...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...
...Among our rights to privacy, this one-what we own- is paramount...
...He did the right thing at Attica...
...Neither do their remarks arise from affectation, but simply from the isolation of their rank...
...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...
...And after all, Winston didn’t marry me to be a maid...
...A Different Tune It is important to recognize that the propertied class does not see itself as rich...
...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...
...pock...
...pock) A draw...
...Nina: Oh...
...Together, these 55,000 people owned 18 per cent of the country’s personally held corporate stock...
...They called to each other across their individual games...
...Or Judge Sirica, or any of the hundreds of others who assisted in the untangling of the Watergate scandal without the advantage of breeding...
...Timothy’s in Maryland, Rosemary Hall, Miss Porter’s or Ethel Walker’s in New England...
...Even so, his method is filled with pitfalls, not the least of which is that his figures date from 1969...
...Children need someone to discipline them...
...How it abhors publicity...
...You should not conclude, however, that the propertied class does not discuss property...
...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...
...Nina: Oh...
...We all see through a screen of class...
...pock) Jinx: We were...
...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...
...and when she asks where the babies are kept, her voice holds not a question, but an ineffable demand...
...Because he was from Boston, he had been raised properly, he knew what to do, knew what was right and what was wrong...
...Jinx: We’ve just bought the old house.on the point...
...Nina: How nice...
...But how can we afford it...
...Mark’s, Kent, Middlesex...
...Where do they learn it...
...It’s inexcusable,” said another...
...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...
...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...
...pock) Where do you live in the winter...
...Here is a conversation overheard on the Fisher’s Island tennis courts one lovely summer’s day...
...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...
...We substitute democratic euphemisms, like ‘‘socioeconomic stratifications” or “upper-middle-income group,” terms that churn the murky waters further...
...Yet, because it is evasive, visible only in the reflection of its acts, we easily lose sight of or misread its strength...
...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...
...In part, our confusion over class may stem from our reluctance to recognize the existence of a class system in America at all...
...People turned their backs...
...pock...
...He’s a foxhunter...
...Nina was tall and blond, and Jinx, short, stocky, and dark...
...Do you know what a subway driver gets today...
...We accepted the wealth as natural...
...pock . . . pock) My serve...
...What we remark on is the constancy of the ratio between rich and poor...
...And is this new...
...We cannot find an answer, and we respond instead with who is rich...
...Nina: Oh...
...pock) Jinx: We don’t know them...
...More is expected of us,” she said...
...A century later, in 1915, the U.S...
...Well, it’s not as if he needed the money,” said one Valley resident...
...But property is at the root of it all, and the reinforcement of shared values...
...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...
...Income is taxed and taxable without deductions...
...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...
...The family underwent, said Clark MacKenzie, a “continuing personal harrassment” for nearly ten months...
...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...
...Social Power is rooted in money, but only of the right kind...
...Don’t they have .Barley Field Cove...
...I wish I had more money...
...At its base level, this is patronage...
...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...
...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...
...Guest’s father was first cousin to Winston Churchill, and Guest himself was once one of the top-ranking polo players in the world...
...invisible...
...The Toss of Their Heads The first thing you notice about the gentry is a sense of assurance...
...5,000 held stock worth more than $5 million...
...A subway driver gets $13,000 starting salary...
...Rep...
...If you have money and servants, then you’re helping somebody...
...Only of the Right Kind social Power is the ability of a class as a unit to maintain itself...
...In stock The essence of the propertied class is an avoidance of the outside world, a shying-off from pain...
...His children were not invited to play with other children at school...
...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...
...It continues for the five or six days of his mother’s lyingin...
...Paul’s, Deerfield, Andover, Groton, Exeter, St...
...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...
...They’re real good friends of some friends of ours in the horse business there...
...Freddy may be going to that...
...You know, that big one with the gables...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...She has just established that she is on speaking terms with the Symingtons...
...By the end of the 19th century all of the agricultural land in the country was in private hands...
...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...
...01978 by Sophy Burnham Quinn with C. Z. Guest, wife of Winston F. C. Guest, who is the grandson of Henry Phipps...
...Rich people live in a very selfenclosed world...
...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...
...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...
...Each class drags chains behind, and those of the aristocracy, though forged in silver, pull just as hard...
...On the other hand, to illustrate wealth, 13,457 households reported incomes over $50,000 though none of their members worked...
...It was hard to know who won the game...
Vol. 10 • April 1978 • No. 2
