The American Class System and How to End It
Massey, Thomas
The American Class System and How to End It by Thomas Massey Six years ago, while George Mcgovern was making his try for the presidency, fletcher Knebel published a novel about an even less...
...Persistepce...
...My name is Eddie Quinn and I’m running for President,” were the opening words of his acceptance speech, add from that point on he blazed a trail very similar to the one Jimmy Carter took in 1976...
...But it says nothing about the ability to teach...
...As long as we rely on this structure, measuring potential rather than performance, encouraging phony competition instead of the real thing, there are two kinds of people we are going to freeze out...
...Reliability...
...What this suggests is that the issue debated so hotly in the Bakke case-affirmative action in professional schoolswill never be terribly important...
...If not, if the people Lillian Rubin and Richard Price describe really never had their chance, then our meritocracy isn’t a very noble system at all...
...In the true competition of the sporting world, victory and defeat often turn on random chancethe toss of a coin, an official’s call, a ball that hits the foul pole and falls one way instead of the other...
...It hints that individual merit is not the basis of social ordering, a suggestion we are not eager to hear...
...McGovern made the same points about jobs, taxes, and privilege as Carter did, but his reputation for “acid, amnesty, and abortion,” not to mention the prospect of crawling on his knees to Hanoi, drove the workingclass voters right into Nixon’s hands...
...Some find the respite they need in angry explosions, some in deep withdrawals...
...The antidote to this selfrighteousness is a realization of the chanciness of life...
...It went over well with Jimmy Carter’s public too...
...Lillian Rubin remarks on how often working-class men and women still in their twenties use the phrase “when I was young”: “ ‘When I was young’-the phrase spoken by a 27-year-old sales clerk, mother of three, married ten years...
...The last step may come as a surprise, since arguments against tracking and tests are often taken to be arguments for a society in which no one is graded, no human difference is admitted, no judgments are made...
...Or perhaps this was simply a coincidence of the sort that leads scientists in different parts of the world, working independently, to reach the same conclusions at the same time...
...The test may be arbitrary, it may measure the household vocabulary of the child’s parents better than it measures anything else, but on the basis of the results, the children with “promise” are placed on a different academic track from the rest, the better for their own abilities to be developed...
...Everyone knows that doctors’ children go to college and plumbers’ children often don’t...
...Accuracy and Inequality He would win because, in our version of the meritocracy, the competition is over before it really begins...
...I can’t stand to have my life over when I’m so young.’ “Her 30-vear-old husband recalls: ‘I had just -turned 20 and, all of a sudden, I had a wife and kids...
...That was something other kids-rich kids-did...
...For, just as the Indian Brahmins tell themselves that merit in their previous life determines caste in the here-and-now, our “equal opportunity” society is based on the premise that we will succeed or fail according to our own desserts...
...Consider the example of Ulysses S. Grant, standard-bearer of the late bloomers whom the meritocracy would pass by...
...At the end they had an understanding of one another based not on distant stereotypes, which so often veer into romanticism or contempt, but on a realistic appreciation of each group’s weaknesses and strength...
...we didn’t have money to go places and do things anyway...
...Nor is it true enough to account for the complete certaiilty profession4 parents now have that their offspring will inherit their estate in life...
...A study conducted in 1966, cited in Andrew Levinson’s The Working Class Majority, found that a child from a professional family was about twice as likely to go to college-and, therefore, to end up earning $25,200, at the top of the heap himself-as a child with identical aptitude scores from a working-class family...
...Here we don’t even like to admit that such a class exists, much less that it needs permanen t represen tation...
...but he kept on writing his orders and talking, without the least interruption from the shots falling around him, and apparently not noticing what a target the place was becoming or paying any heed to the gentle reminders to ‘move on.’ After he had finished his dispatches he got up, took a view of the situation, and as he stared toward the other side of the farmhouse said with a quizzical look at the group around him: ‘Well, they do seem to have the range on us...
...As Knebel describes it, the result was nearly the same too...
...The reason is that “class” suggests a barrier that is hereditary, permanent, unfair...
...The tenure system is the most antimeritocratic notion imaginable, but it is the meritocracy’s constant handmaiden...
...Half of them go on to college, half do not-and in each category the results are remarkably consistent with what the tracks, the grades, and the aptitude tests predicted so many years before...
...In other words, being a high-school or college graduate gave one a credential that opened up certain higher level jobs, but the poorer students in high school or college did as well in life as the top students...
...D e nasty note was never the dominant one in Cart e r ’s camp aign-unlike Eddie Quinn, he matched his appeals to the common man with suggestions that he had uncommon intelligence...
...Those who get into medical schools are largely the ones who are good at taking tests, but those who end up leading the professions-or becoming chief executives in business, or excelling in government or law or aca18 demics-are the ones who possess a mixture of the other, untestable qualities too...
...The redneck brother, the scenes from the farm, the military service, the denunciation of the three-martini lunch-all these showed that Jimmy Carter could (as Richard Nixon would put it) pick the same scabs as Eddie Quinn...
...The American Class System and How to End It by Thomas Massey Six years ago, while George Mcgovern was making his try for the presidency, fletcher Knebel published a novel about an even less probable run...
...There would, in fact, be as many washed-up doctors, lawyers, and academics as there are now washed-up writers and athletes, to choose two of the professions where there is still constant pressure to perform...
...Since the election, the official Carter sport has been tennis...
...The real candidate had died three weeks before the convention...
...He ended by working in a leather store-in Galena, Illinois-which was run by his two younger brothers...
...another will give his family first claim...
...Sometimes evidencescientific, political-is too powerful to be ignored...
...The professional classes have the luxury of choice among options, mastery of fate, selection from the rich smorgasbord of life...
...If we thought about it dt all, ke would have considered ourselves lucky to get through high school...
...But I still used to get mad at him, and at her too-my wife, I mean-because I felt like it was on account of them I was stuck.’ ” Darkened Brick and Stone At age 45, the lawyer, the doctor, the academic are all just hitting their stride, their decade of highest earning ahead of them, their greatest choices opening up...
...People from the Main Line went through the draft along with boys from downtown Philly...
...Waldo Heinrichs, in a book called American Ambassador (quoted in Martin Weil’s A Pretty Good Club), said that the men of the diplomatic service of the early 20th century “only deepened and circumscribed existing ties...
...In fact, one could do wone in interpreting the 1976 election than to use that paragraph as a guide...
...The only thing I can remember that he enjoyed was working in his garden...
...only two per cent of those from the bottom ten per cent did...
...Long After the Deadline This will be painful, for regular performance testing will weed the tenured professions of those who have stopped trying...
...If you made less than $15,000 a year-as about 51 per cent of all families in this country do-you most likely voted for Carter...
...Only a generation ago, most colleges and professional schools admitted far more freshmen than they intended to graduate as seniors...
...This element of class was a strong presence in the election of 1972, too, although it worked itself out in a different way...
...The fairness of the meritocracy today, however, is a phony...
...perhaps there is more coincidence in the world than one often expects...
...That wasn’t his point at all...
...But he was packed off to fight in Mexico under Zachary Taylor and, when the war was over, moved from post to sleepy post as a quartermaster...
...After her interviews with many working-class families who felt that, on those terms, they had failed, Lillian Rubin wrote about “those who have bought into the system, who believe in the ethic of hard work, who believe in the American myth that everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps if only they have the will and the brains...
...At the age of 32, he resigned from the service rather than stand trial...
...it is the beginning of understanding, and of love...
...If we must still make judgments and exercise discriminationas we should-it should be on standards that do justice to the range of talents we want ultimately to reward...
...Whoever failed to perform would be weeded out...
...Machinists who are good enough to become engineers, should be able to...
...only one family in eleven earns $30,000 or more), of culture (bowling versus skiing, Mantovani versus Rostropovich), of education, and occupation, and prestige...
...More people would flunk out of college...
...It will not remove the pain of failure...
...another is not...
...The time to equalize opportunity is at the beginning of the race, not near the end...
...You’ll find us in a nice, comfortable room in one of the 8 chain motels...
...A bookkeeper who’s been at it for ten years knows as much as most accountantsso why not let him take a step up the status ladder if he can demonstrate the ability to perform...
...Having the society divided into huge groups that fear and hate one another and never mingle is not...
...There didn’t seem much point in thinking about it, I guess...
...But they have little to do with skill as a surgeon...
...Grant and Galena Grant had gone to West Point only because his father, an Ohio tanner, leapt at the opportunity to educate his son for free...
...Some lack character...
...only an automobile accident, with Chappaquidick-like adulterous overtones, kept Quinn from the same narrow victory that Carter eventually achieved...
...In such an ideal society, all the bright children would rise to the top and all the dull ones would sink to the bottom...
...We bowl...
...Skill as a Surgeon Beneath all the glories of professionalism lies this inconvenient fact, that professional credentials bear only a rough resemblance to the ability to perform...
...In fact, their most admirable qualities come from being exposed to a far richer slice of humanity than the “tracked” high school could embrace...
...A 25-year-old woman, the oldest in a family of two, recalls: ‘My father never seemed to talk or be a part of the family...
...As you might expect in a novel, the race turned out in a surprising way...
...We deal from a stacked deck, and then treat the losers as if they had misplayed a full hand...
...those who don’t get the lucky break are not recognized at all...
...No matter how able he is, an enlisted man will have trouble in peacetime rising above sergeant...
...This is not even to mention the one hereditary group-the blackswho remain on the bottom generation after generation...
...The fnst step is getting rid of the track system...
...In a truly competitive system, they would not be able to write, as Midge Decter did several years ago to the children of her professional-class peers: “As children of this particular enlightened class, you were expected one day to be manning a more than proportional share of the positions of power and prestige in this society...
...One assistant is nearby when the boss needs help...
...but during the campaign, it was stock car racing and softball...
...None of this will change...
...Why not let those without degrees teach, if they can prove that they’re able to...
...The first step is the aptitude test, given in the grade school years...
...small wonder that they yearned for a standard they could objectively make or miss...
...If we don’t take this as prima facie evidence of a class system, it is largely because of the notion of the “meritocracy...
...But the single clearest class difference, the sum of all the other parts, is the feeling of control...
...There are only two explanations for this: either blacks are inherently twice as stupid as whites when it comes to the law, or else whatever tracking system shunted the blacks off many years before had a remarkably permanent effect...
...Quotas,” in those days, were not ways of recruiting blacks but of keeping out Jews...
...But it’s not true enough to explain why educational levels and occupational success follow family lines so much more closely than does skill as a champion athlete-which presumably depends just as heavily on inherited traits...
...Earlier Alternatives To those who have profited by it, the merit system seems patently just, and any attacks on it, like those being debated in the Bakke case, call forth an impassioned defense...
...The rest eat what’s put before them...
...He became an alcoholic and got into a fight with his commander when he was too drunk to count the payroll...
...But Woodworth could not have taken your tax case, because he lacked a law degree...
...It never occurred to me to think about it...
...The hierarchy would be determined exclusively on the basis of merit...
...He was taken out of school when he was nine, and him not having an education, it kept him from seeing a lot of hopes for his kids...
...Here is how a 32-yearold appliance salesman described it to Lillian Rubin in her book, Worlds of Pain : “We were maybe one step above what you would call white trash...
...But more importantly, it will allow people of talent to enter them long after the present deadline...
...As a matter of statistical fact, material and occupational success in America do turn out to follow hereditary lines...
...One student hits a streak of teachers whose personalities click with his...
...When the bureaucracy is bloated and confused, the powerful always manage to discover and occupy niches of special influence and privilege...
...Consider for a moment just how narrow a range that is...
...Even granting the p o p record of his two terms as President, Grant was clearly one of the great men of the 19th century...
...As a college teacher, I found this hard to believe until I made a simple check...
...You couldn’t just go out any more when you felt like i t . . . . We used to run around a lot before he was born, and then we couldn’t anymore...
...He’d come home, eat, and go out in the yard almost every night of the year, even when it was raining...
...At age 45, the electrician Tommy DeCoco, in Richard Price’s novel Bloodbrothers, knows that such choices as he ever had have now passed him by: “Tommy cruised through a red light on the deserted road, and turned left up a hill into an expensive residential section...
...Putting more effort into finding the Grants and the Churchills is important, because it helps provide us with a real merit-based system of social ordering, with the real benefits a meritocracy is supposed to have-a fair chance for individuals, and efficient use of talent by society...
...the leaders of the party, knowing that the chances of victory were nil, settled on Quinn as a harmless figurehead who might keep the rest of?he ticket from going down to total ruin...
...Yes, high scores in organic chemistry are necessary for diagnostic specialists or for medical research...
...All this is part of the cruelty of democracy-if you give everybody a fair chance to compete in America, there will of course be bruises...
...Now the schools, like the professions they feed, have adopted a sort of premature tenure system...
...More Coincidence Perhaps no one in the Carter entourage had read Dark Horse when their first campaign plans were being laid...
...Of all the ways to break down the voting results-by race, by religion, by region of the country-one of the most reliable is simply by level of income...
...In the early days of the republic Americans used the phrase “natural aristocracy” (or, sometimes, “nature’s noblemen”) to distinguish their financiers and social lions from the explicitly hereditary aristocrats of the old world...
...Indeed, the Diplomatic Service most nearly resembled a club...
...Honesty is not on the list...
...The bright children of the hinterlands-whether Abe Lincoln or Willie Morris or Jimmy Carter-have not suffered because they went to un-tracked, rough and tumble public schools...
...Aristocratic names can still serve as . . . arguments against tracking and tests are often taken to be arguments for a society in which no one is graded, no human difference is admitted, no judgments are made...
...Carter may find those sentiments inconvenient now, especially the last, but they played an important part in getting him where he is today...
...And we know that for many years our country has been mismanaged, depleted, corrupted, polluted, and almost bankrupted by the country club set and the front office crowd...
...You were to be its executives, its professionals, its artists and intellectuals, among its business leaders...
...He was the ablest of the Union generals, the one Lincoln turned to to reverse the tide of blunder and to keep inept Northern ,generals from frittering away the North’s great natural advantages over the South...
...If he seemed, by the end of his career, to embody all the qualities that made Britain survive rather than fall, he appeared, for the fnst two decades of his life, simply another dull son of another upper class family...
...me seven years that followed,’’ Edmund Wilson wrote, “were equally depressing: he tried several occupations-selling real estate, clerking in a custom house, running for county engineer-and failed in every one...
...But a world where each of us is thrown on our own resources, rather than protected from chance by the cocoon of early advantage, may give each of us more sympathy for those to whom chance has not been kind...
...I used to look at the papers and read the Congress reports with eagerness to see the progress the bill made and hoping tbat the school had been abolished...
...At the surrender of Lee, he was as impassive as on the most ordinary occasion, and until some of us congratulated him, he seemed scarcely to have realized that he had accomplished one of the greatest achievements in modem history...
...They know they have the will...
...There were more people on the bottom than on the top, so Carter won...
...another does not...
...He can hardly write his own name, even now...
...But if such a system would give some people a rougher time than they’re accustomed to, it would also open room up for those who can perform, even if they missed the early cut or lack the right credential...
...In practice, as everyone must remember from school days, bright students will get special attention-from teachers, from parents-no matter how the school system is arranged...
...The foreign service, to give an extreme example, was more or less reserved for those who were entitled by birth to a place in the Social Register...
...Spared Further Judgments The meritocracy also departs from the principles of true competition because once each group is set on its track, the top group is spared-and the bottom group denied-further judgments on the basis of performance...
...Humor...
...People will still get fired, and flunk out of school, and lose the big case, and get edged out for that great job...
...and in the case of the Quinn and Carter campaigns, the evidence was of differences between our country’s social classes...
...In theory, tracking keeps bright students from being held back by their dumber brethren...
...The contrast between performance testing and the credential-inspection of the modern meritocracy is well illustrated by the United States Army...
...No doubt, a truly competitive system would be crueler to college students, doctors and lawyers, executives’ children...
...The only difference I noted was that those with better grades got into better law or medical schools, but even with this supposed advantage they did not have notably more successful careers as compared with the poorer students who had had to be satisfied with ‘second-rate’ law and medical schools at the outset...
...With each step away from the world of master and slave, czar and serf, we open the possibility that some people will be defeated precisely because they lack the skills to prevail...
...I took the top eight students in a class in the late 1940s at Wesleyan University where I was teaching-all straight-A students-and contrasted what they were doing in the early 1960s with what eight really poor students were doing-all of whom were getting barely passing averages in college (C- or below...
...A child whose parents’ income was in the top ten per cent of the sample was likely to end up earning $25,200, while a child from a family in the bottom ten per cent of the sample would probably earn about $1 1,500...
...To have a society in which those on top all deserved to be there and those at the bottom all deserved to be there too, would be far from socially healthy for either group, since the one would be excessively strong and the other excessively weak...
...Every time I go through here,’ Tommy said, maneuvering the car on narrow winding curves and peering at the darkened brick and stone mansions, ‘every time I go through here I feel like a fuckin’ kid, you know...
...Those who have an instinct for the real-world situations that demand performance but view school work as a charade should have a chance to prove their skills in the working world...
...Instinct for the Real World Second is to expand the range of abilities on which young people are judged...
...In this area as in others, Japan sets an example with its widespread suicides among children who do poorly on entrance exams...
...The doctor believes he’s middle class because he hasn’t yet reached the point of living on capital, and the salesgirl is middle class because she holds a steady job and does not rely on welfare...
...We don’t play-uhsquash or tennis or seldom golf...
...When the public schools are inferior or tom by strife, their children go to exclusive private schools...
...The ability to teach-to take the most obvious example-has almost nothing to do with degrees from the state teaching school...
...Some people are dumb...
...He showed a combination of calmness and concentration that made him the most successful of all Union generals...
...One businessman wants to work night and day to make his first million...
...The differences can be defined in terms of income (one fifth of the families in this country make more than $20,000 each year, four fifths make less...
...Even the professions themselves realize that there is’more to life than answering multiple choice exam questions...
...There’s little left but to accept that they don’t have the brains -a devastating self-image from which all people must seek periodic relief and surcease...
...Doubtless the C- students could not get into even secondrate law and medical schools under the stricter admissions-testing standards of today...
...The doctor earning $80,000, the salesgirl making $1 1,500-both would probably define themselves as part of the middle class, if forced to choose...
...But in our times, the hare would win on form alone...
...There is only one way that competition should be judged, and that is on the basis of performance...
...If you made more, you probably voted for Ford...
...There are even some qualities, such as Originality or Character, which by the meritocracy’s measure are liabilities...
...Louis, as so hopeless a down-and-outer that, fearing they would be asked for a loan, people sometimes crossed the street in order not to meet him...
...Before that it does not, because the lasting effects of this early segregation-which cuts each class off from the other classes of society, which denies children knowledge of the human strengths and weaknesses of people from different walks of life-outweighs any good it can do...
...Now “meritocracy,” as the term in vogue, makes even more explicit the assumption that the differences in people’s status are the result of similar differences in their merit...
...To do this, we need new ways to govern the process of getting ahead in America...
...Two things gave him a chance to show he could perform: a respectable name and a mother who not only knew there was something special about this boy, if only he’d have a chance, but also did everything possible to make sure that her friends in the military, journalism, and politics gave Winston his chance...
...By the time he graduated, Grant was still eager to escape the military, hoping perhaps to teach mathematics somewhere...
...While those at the very top of their college classes-the A students-usually are smarter or harder-working than the rest, those one level down, the Astudents, often differ from their B+ peers in their greater willingness to cut comers in the quest for grades...
...Most of the kids in the family didn’t do that...
...Again and again the men and women I met recall parents, especially fathers, who were taciturn and unresponsive...
...When we travel, we don’t hire expensive suites in the fancy hotels...
...If you were worried about inflation, you voted for Ford...
...Most recently, the British conservative Peregrine Worsthorne presented a “Defense of Class” in The American Spectator: “Let us consider for a moment the situation in a society where social mobility is totally unfettered by the barriers of class...
...I live in fuckin’ Co-op City and that’s straight life.’ ” Likely Earnings Like “pornography,” this kind of “class” is easy to recognize when we see it, but we are reluctant to call it by its name...
...The book was called Dark horsr and it concerned one Eddie Quinn, a highway commisioner from New Jersey, who suddenly found himself the presidential niminee of a party closely resembling the Republicans...
...All in all, it is hard to think of a more effective way than the tracking system of making sure that class is handed down along hereditary lines...
...In England, there is a political party explicitly for the “working class...
...20 We need, in fact, the opposite of such a system, with many more standards to be met, much later in life, and all of them based on performance...
...The first group is the people who are not early bloomers because they never had a chance to bloom at all...
...They possessed a common background, common experience, m’d a common liking for old wines, proper English, and Savile Row clothing...
...Consider the tortoise and the hare...
...Small wonder that blood boiled among students at Bronx High School of Science when they knew that only prejudice and pique kept them from positions they deserved...
...Perhaps that is because the tracks-and the colleges, professional schools, licensing examinations, and tenured professions that flow out from them-become selffulfilling systems, making it as difficult for those on the upper level to fall as for those on the lower level to rise...
...Not intentions, or hopes, or initial advantagesbut results...
...Some are lazy...
...and then people are channeled on to their fated designations, with few real tests of performance to distract them as they go...
...The difference between the successful Carter campaign and George McGovern’s disastrous run is that Carter presented a consistent front: his cultural symbols appealed to the same class as his economic arguments...
...I looked into the matter and concluded that while grade level attained seemed related to future measures of success in life, performance within grade was related only slightly...
...But at the same age, Rubin says, their working class counterparts “felt stuck, thrust abruptly into adulthood, expectedly facing the fear that their youth was behind them...
...If you were worried about unemployment, you voted for Carter-despite his talk about fiscal prudence...
...World War I1 was also our last major illustration of first-hand contact among the classes...
...He was regarded at one point, in St...
...In the genuine meritocracy of the fable, the tortoise won the race, through a combination of modest talent and considerable determination...
...a phrase that surprised my middle-class professional ears, accustomed as they are to hearing students, parents, children of friends, my own children-all of like age-struggling with problems of identity, reluctant to step into adulthood, still defining themselves in terms of youth and the youth culture...
...anyone who makes the first cut has a secure berth...
...But that’s far better than the pain of class, the knowledge that getting ahead is impossible and that your fate in life is sealed by the circumstances of your birth...
...Is that an advantage for society...
...Control means that children of the affluent classes do not have their youth stolen from them by early marriage, inconvenient pregnancy, unavoidable job’s...
...Standardized tests will never be able to measure more than standardized skills, which is precisely why the aptitude and college-entrance exams should not be able to shunt a student off the mainline of opportunity and self-respect...
...Our club is the corner bar or one along the highway strip...
...Plainly not...
...Unfortunately, you’d have to make your choice from among the ranks of people whose professional training bears only rough resemblance to the skills you seek...
...Adam Badeau, his military secretary, wrote that as the shelling at Petersburg grew intense, “several of the officers, apprehensive for the general’s safety, urged him to move to some less conspicuous position...
...This is certainly not an attractive aspect of our system, and it is made worse by the meritocrats’ immense self-righteousness and lack of concern for their brothers and sisters among the losers...
...Some winning and losing is part of life in America...
...Once there, Grant looked for ways to escape...
...Equalizing educational opportunity,” he said, “may have the unwelcome and unexpected effect of emphasizing the inborn intellect u a1 differences between people...
...Like, going to college was never discussed...
...We need, in fact, the opposite of such a system, with many more standards to be met, much later in life, and all of them based on performance...
...A recent Brookings Institution report, called The Inheritance of Economic Status, studied the connection between fathers’ and sons’ incomes and found that ‘between 34 and 57 per cent of the variance in economic status was explained by family effects...
...they spent years together learning who they could rely upon and who they could not...
...Otherwise he’d just sit quiet for hours, like he wasn’t there or something.’ ” Lacking the Skills This is the cruelty of democracy, and there is no way to disguise it...
...To attain a position of leadership and responsibility, you have to have made the first cut for education as an sfficer...
...He later wrote: “About the time I entered the academy there were debates in Congress over a proposal to abolish West Point...
...Our tracks lead on through the end of high school, when the children face the real continental divide...
...I feel like saying...
...you were to think its influential thoughts, tend its major institutions, and reap its highest reward...
...to read the autobiographies of Claude Brown, Malcolm X, Richard Wright, and others is to know that, for people of their class, “meritocracy” is a ludicrous conceit...
...During peacetime, the Army is traditionally professionalized-that is to say, run on principles other than performance...
...It was not much different in finance, the arts, and much of academe...
...Oh, I guess he didn’t want us to be just ordinary laborers like he was, but it wasn’t even talked about...
...In fairness, it must be conceded to the Norman Podhoretzes and Irving Kristols of the world, those who have taken the lead in defending the merit system, that it is a clear improvement on what went before...
...What, then, are such people to say to themselves when they don’t succeed...
...Drive...
...Five years ago, Richard Herrnstein of Harvard caused a tremendous flap when his theory of inherited intelligence was construed, unfairly, as referring only to blacks...
...life-rafts for their bearers: if you are born a Saltonstall or an Aldrich, you will have a few extra years to prove you might have some special quality, buried as it might be...
...One actress gets her break when the star comes down with laryngitis...
...But we would be rid of the most poisonous aspect of the bogus merit system, which is the unfairness of its success, and the automatic self-perpetuation of the successful...
...It is no trivial thing, this cruelty of competition...
...When their talents are recognized, it’s usually because of some wild happenstance...
...All I knew was that I’d have to work, and I didn’t think much about what kind of work I’d be doing...
...Nothing makes success more important in today’s meritocracy than the denial of selfrespect to those who fail...
...The greatest courtroom lawyers often barely scrape through law school, because there is so little connection between what they can do well and what the school can measure...
...The doctors tell themselves that’s because smart parents have smart children, and no doubt that is partially true...
...I guess it wasn’t all his fault...
...Admitting chance destroys the selfrighteousness of success...
...Such understanding is all too rare in these days of class segregation by residence, education, and occupation...
...Umer Class Familv Like Grant, Winston Churchill would also have failed our current meritocratic tests...
...Doctors and Salesgirls These results make it all the stranger that “class,” as such, is rarely mentioned as an explanation for our political behavior-or for much else, in this “classless” society...
...But then the Civil War began, and at 39 Grant volunteered and was able to perform...
...And I thought, ‘I can’t stand it...
...That is the passion behind the merit system, and it is not to be scorned...
...Would this really be a desirable development...
...But no one has to think twice to recognize the difference in the daily lives of the two, their different prospects for the future, the different receptions they win from the world...
...Blacks are the most obvious example...
...An unfair tax system serves their needs, and tight secrecy always seems to prevent reform...
...It Sat Well Enough This went over poorly with the bankers and oilmen of Quinn’s own party-so poorly that the very people who had selected him were soon plotting his defeat-but it sat well enough with the rest of the public to put him within inches of victory...
...In an excellent article entitled “Measuring Competence Rather than Intelligence,” David McClelland explained what was wrong with tracks and grades this way: “It seems so self-evident to educators that those who do,well in their classes must go on to do well in life, that they systematically have disregarded evidence to the contrary...
...Our system is one in which people’s “merit” is judged quite early on, using standards of dubious accuracy that emphasize inequalities of rearing and birth...
...Cruelty First Let us consider the cruelty first...
...This calmness was the same in the greatest moral emergencies...
...When Michael Young invented the term meritocracy 20 years ago, he did so to warn of its effects...
...I bowl with Melheisen’s Pontiac on Tuesday nights...
...If you were taking the case to court, you would want, above all else, someone who had a cross between a debator’s skills and an actor’s, who knew how to read jurors and make his points in a way they could not resist...
...The fault, dear salesgirl, is not in your stars, but in yourself...
...My hangout is a tavern in New Brunswick in my home state...
...But the meritocracy discriminates too-not irrationally, against Jews and immigrants, but sensibly, against the dumb and the lazy...
...A 28-year-old clerk in a cleaning store, mother of three, married eleven years, sums up those feelings: “ ‘One day I woke up and there I was, married and with a baby...
...if anything, it increases it...
...The spirit of Churchill’s mother is to assume that everyone may have something special, to look for it constantly, and to give it every chance to develop, rather than dumping overboard as many people as possible as early as possible because they can’t pass a few narrow tests...
...Yes, a lust for the archives is important for certain kinds of scholarship...
...The rationality of the discrimination doesn’t lessen the pain of the people on the receiving end...
...he was saying, about both blacks and whites, that the fairer we tried to make society the less fair it would ultimately be...
...At age 28, a young lawyer is just beginning to practice, a young doctor is still in training, a young academic may still be working on his dissertation...
...Of children from the top ten per cent, half earned more than $25,000...
...Some have bad luck...
...Middle-aged captains and majors, kept from promotion because the upper ranks were filled with tenured graybeards, become generals...
...but what is most surprising about the book is how eerily familiar . Quinn’s campaign now seems...
...But any system that functions on the principle of letting the cream rise to the top is bound to cause some pain, offset by the sense that the competition, if cruel, has been fair...
...another does not...
...when I grow up this is where I’m gonna live’ . . . an’ then I remember I’m fuckin’ 45 an’ ain’t never gonna live here...
...The champions we hate, like Jimmy Connors, are those who exult in their victory, shove their opponents, and refuse to admit the influence of luck...
...People like Laurence Woodworth ought not be barred from practicing tax law...
...The alternative, earlier in this century, was the system of Connections: that fellow from the club, your father’s roommate from Andover, your mother’s society friend-those were the people who got you where you wanted to go...
...There was no demand on any of us for any goal...
...As Eddie Quinn put it in his acceptance speech, it was the difference between those who were privileged and Quinn’s own kinsmen, the “average guys”: “We don’t belong to exclusive country clubs...
...By the time the students get to college, it may make sense for them to be hived off according to their different interests, talents, and tastes...
...Those who don’t have a talent for, say, math, should not be made to suffer lifetime exclusion from the law or government service or medicine because of it...
...Talented sergeants win commissions, based on their conduct in the field...
...unlike George Wallace, he balanced each phrase of division with two about tolerance and care-but in his own acceptance speech, Carter made the point about class differences as bluntly as any major candidate since FDR has done: “Too many have had to suffer at the hands of a political and economic elite who has shaped decisions and never had to account for mistakes or to suffer from injustice...
...Recently The New York Times reported that while 70 per cent of white law school graduates pass their bar exams, only 34 per cent of black graduates do...
...In today’s meritocracy, even more depends on chance than in the sporting world-which parents we are born to, which schools we attend, which teachers (or policemen) we encounter, and in which direction they point us...
...Any one of the nation’s hundreds of thousands of lawyers could take that case, even if there was nothing in his pedigree to guarantee that he had ever taken a tax course, had a flair for this kind of law, or was likely to perform...
...Those who do not flinch at cutting off half the population’s chances at age 15 would rather die than put a professional in his 40s out of work...
...It was at least partly to this end that we brought you up...
...The other class that’s frozen out is made of those whose talents don’t fit into the narrow range recognized by aptitude tests and college exams...
...Such an extended psycho-social moratorium and concomitant crisis of identity is, it would seem, a luxury of the affluent middle class-a luxury that belongs to an economy and a culture that can afford to permit its young the privileges of adulthood without its responsibilities...
...The tracks have not yet reached the advanced state of the Japanese system-in which children enter prep school at age three so as to pass, at age five, the kindergarten entrance exams that more or less determine their lots in life-but we are giving the Japanese a run for their money...
...more would fail in their professions...
...But during war, a contest that will be won or lost, nothing matters but performance, and all the rules are changed...
...To my great surprise, I could not aistinguish the two lists of hen 15 to 18 years later...
...When unemployment prevails, they never stand in line looking for a job...
...His book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, cast a baleful look towards a society in which differences in mental ability, largely inherited, determined social rank...
...These distorted and imprecise credentials, which restrict some people who could perform and license others who can’t, are the natural result of the whole meritocratic structure, with its tracks, its early decisions, its obliviousness to later results...
...Instead, we insist that this is a “middle-class” nation...
...In the fair competition of a performancebased system, luck would still play its part...
...Two years later they were commanding the American forces in Europe and the Pacific, because we needed their talent more than we needed the rules that had been keeping them from using it...
...The question is whether in exchange for its cruelty we reap large social benefitsan equal chance for everybody, an assurance that as a society we’ll make the best use of our human resources...
...The State of New York is proposing a step in this direction by examining the performance of doctors throughout their careers...
...You see, my father wasn’t an educated man...
...more children would lack a guarantee that they would achieve their parents’ level of success...
...He failed because the cultural power of class is one of the few things that can override economic class interests...
...Only the blindest zealots of meritocracy would deny that it is cruel...
...Nor is Good Nature...
...The Most Poisonous Aspect On the battlefield, in the arena, competition produces anguish, and a true meritocracy would create winners and losers too...
...when there are no fetters about the feet of each racer, he has no one but himself to blame for his loss...
...In 1940 Dwight Eisenhower was a 50-year-old major, and Douglas MacArthur was 60 and retired...
...There was no one better suited in this country to handle an income tax case than Laurence Woodworth, who died last year after nearly 40 years as a tax advisor to congressmen and finally, to President Carter...
...In such a world, there will be few who will not know that a small difference in their mixture of good and bad luck might have made a big difference in their success or failure...
...It might prepare us, too, to purge the other poison from our social system-the noxious desire of those who have succeeded to humiliate those who have not...
Vol. 9 • February 1978 • No. 12
