Power And Class In Political Fiction: Elite Theory And The Post-War Washington Novel 3030267687, 9783030267681, 3030267695, 9783030267698

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Chapter 1: Introduction......Page 8
The Political Novel......Page 10
The Washington Novel......Page 14
Elite Theory and Ruling Elites......Page 16
References......Page 22
Chapter 2: Class Consciousness in Late-Twentieth-Century America......Page 23
Post-War Working-Class Consciousness......Page 30
Post-War Ruling-Class Consciousness......Page 37
References......Page 50
Chapter 3: Elite Theory and the American Political Directorate......Page 53
A Brief History of Elite Theory......Page 54
Contemporary American Elite Theory......Page 56
Class and the Elite......Page 58
Power......Page 66
References......Page 75
Chapter 4: Gore Vidal’s Washington, D.C.: Maintaining Legitimacy......Page 78
References......Page 103
Chapter 5: Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent: Moderate Ruling-Elite Ideology......Page 104
References......Page 126
Chapter 6: Joan Didion’s Democracy: Moderate Ruling-Elite Constituencies......Page 128
References......Page 150
Chapter 7: Ward Just’s Echo House: Implementing Policy/Accepting Others......Page 151
References......Page 175
Chapter 8: Conclusion......Page 176
The Cultural Problem......Page 178
The Political Problem......Page 179
References......Page 183
Index......Page 185

Citation preview

Power and Class in Political Fiction Elite Theory and the Post-War Washington Novel David Smit

Power and Class in Political Fiction

David Smit

Power and Class in Political Fiction Elite Theory and the Post-War Washington Novel

David Smit Kansas State University Manhattan, KS, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-26768-1    ISBN 978-3-030-26769-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26769-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Inge Johnsson / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

In writing this book, I relied on the help and support of a great many people to whom I would like to express my gratitude. To the anonymous outside reviewer of my proposal and final draft, who suggested that I more fully “historicize” my argument and broaden my focus to include matters of race and gender, which led to my adding a chapter and dealing with broader issues of identity in each of the novels I discuss. The book is much better because of the reviewer’s suggestions. To William Richter, a colleague in Political Science at Kansas State University, who gave my chapter on Elite Theory a careful reading. To the staff of Kansas State University’s Interlibrary Loan department: Kathy Coleman, Marcia Eaton, and their students. At a crucial moment in my researching and drafting the book, the library at Kansas State suffered a terrible fire that caused most of its collection to be withdrawn from circulation for an indefinite period, and so for my last year of research I worked at the mercy of the Interlibrary Loan staff, who almost always got books to me within a few days of my request. To the staff at Palgrave Macmillan—Rachel Jacobe, Vinoth Kuppan, and Vipin Kumar Mani—who were invariably helpful, considerate, and kind, and especially my main editor Allie Troyanos, who was sympathetic to my major argument from the beginning and helped me narrow my focus to the post-­war Washington novel. And last but not least, to Ward Just, whose novels and short stories first got me interested in Elite Theory and political fiction and whose deeply detailed character studies of those in power seem to me to capture the shaping influence of class on American governance better than any other novelist. v

Contents

1 Introduction  1 The Political Novel   3 The Washington Novel   7 Elite Theory and Ruling Elites   9 References  15 2 Class Consciousness in Late-Twentieth-­Century America 17 Post-War Working-Class Consciousness  24 Post-War Ruling-Class Consciousness  31 References  44 3 Elite Theory and the American Political Directorate 47 A Brief History of Elite Theory  48 Contemporary American Elite Theory  50 Class and the Elite  52 Power  60 References  69 4 Gore Vidal’s Washington, D.C.: Maintaining Legitimacy 73 References  98 5 Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent: Moderate Ruling-Elite Ideology 99 References 121 vii

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6 Joan Didion’s Democracy: Moderate Ruling-­Elite Constituencies123 References 145 7 Ward Just’s Echo House: Implementing Policy/Accepting Others147 References 171 8 Conclusion173 The Cultural Problem 175 The Political Problem 176 References 180 Index183

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Political fiction covers a wide range of genres and subject matter in almost all national literatures. These genres range from the spy novel and political thrillers to serious portrayals of characters wrestling with the ideas that shape political behavior. The subject matter ranges from electoral battles and crises in foreign affairs to utopian and dystopian visions of the social order. In American literary history, popular novels based on how the government actually functions at the national level are quite common, but serious literary novels about the function of government at various levels—national, state, and city—are relatively rare.1 It is generally accepted that serious literary fiction about American governance began with Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age and Henry Adams’ Democracy in the 1870s and was only continued a century later after World War II in three novels about local and state governments: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, whose protagonist is the governor of Louisiana; Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, whose protagonist is the mayor of Boston; and Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place, whose protagonist is the governor of Texas. There is some dispute over whether there are any post-war novels about national politics, a sub-genre of what are often called “Washington novels,” that are sufficiently insightful and eloquent to be called “literary.” In any case, American literary scholarship has tended to focus on the ideology and philosophy implicit in political fiction; there has been little work on how the class status of those who actually govern America influences their exercise of power.2 © The Author(s) 2019 D. Smit, Power and Class in Political Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26769-8_1

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In this book I nominate four novels as candidates for the genre of serious, literary “Washington novel” and study how the class status of their authors influenced the way they portray America’s ruling elites in the second half of the twentieth century and how these representations capture the paradox of elite rule: that America, despite its self-proclaimed myth of being a classless society, is ruled by a political directorate (a concept I borrow from Stanley Aronowitz), composed of a range of opposing factions, whose members are primarily from the upper-middle and upper classes. I argue that these four novels illustrate how such an upper-class directorate manages to maintain its legitimacy, given that its existence contradicts a major myth the nation is supposed to embody. The four novels are Gore Vidal’s Washington, D.C., Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, Joan Didion’s Democracy, and Ward Just’s Echo House. As a framework for understanding how elites maintain their legitimacy, I use a body of scholarship called Elite Theory. In my analyses of these writers, I engage in the “politics” of representation in fiction. As Cora Kaplan (2000) has pointed out, the novel as a genre is a site where social forces can be debated, theorized, or even policed, a form that is influential in shaping the ways we think about the factors that contribute to our notions of gender, race, and class. And individual novelists, as William Dow (2009, 221) puts it, necessarily express, even reify their own class interests, which in turn shapes the identities of their characters, which are built on class goals and aims. These social and psychological demands of representation raise a number of critical issues about authors: how their identity has been influenced by their class milieu, how that milieu informs their literary practice and their social allegiance, and how authors shape their novels to be accepted by their audiences, conditioned by the culture to expect fiction to follow certain conventions and meet certain expectations. The demands of representation also raise a number of critical issues about the epistemology of fiction, such as how or in what sense various characters can represent a certain social or economic class; whether the characters fairly represent the class; whether the author intended them to do so; whether the author is, intentionally or not, presenting the characters as positive models of their class or subtle critiques of the inadequacies of the class; and whether issues of class in particular works of fiction do in fact or ought to supersede or complement other issues important to cultural studies, such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and national identity. Of course, looming over all these issues is the larger “meta-critical” issue of how or in what sense the authors of fiction or the

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characters in their fictions have the “agency” to act independently of their class standing, the freedom to transcend the ideology of their class.3 Thus, I study my four novels as complex fictive constructs— “imaginaries,” if you will—that, on the one hand, embody the inherent point of view and biases of their authors but, on the other hand, taken as a group, offer us a reliable, even sociologically valid, portrayal of a significant faction of America’s ruling elite in the last half of the twentieth century. I explain how all four writers, as members of the upper classes but temperamentally “outsiders,” are qualified to write about our ruling elite and how they each deal with their fraught relationship with their class, taking into account the generic qualities the authors attribute to the class, the tropes they use to describe the class, and the ways they depict how upper-class ideology influences the gender expression, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and national identity of their characters. I show that while these writers do not, indeed cannot, transcend their elite status, in composing their novels they paradoxically draw attention to the unconscious ways in which their characters are limited by their elite status, and thus are incapable of seriously considering the needs and desires of those outside their class, especially members of the poor and working class. These novels also reinforce the common perception promoted by the popular media that politics is primarily a matter of individuals performing in an electoral game, of winning or losing battles based on strategically manufacturing images and promoting cultural issues that will excite the most voters and bring them out to the polls. These novels make explicit the ideology behind this strategy: that elite rule is less a matter of representing the interests of the great majority of citizens and more a matter of negotiating sets of policies among other factions of the elite out of the public view in order for the elites to further their own interests. What these novels elide or ignore—the needs and desires of “the people,” those whom our ruling elites supposedly represent—becomes a metaphor for what ruling elites themselves elide or ignore: that the poor and working class need to have some agency, some power, or at least some access to governance, in order to be represented at all.

The Political Novel The four Washington novels I study are “political” in two specific meanings of the term in the history of criticism. First, the novels I study are “political” very narrowly in the common-sense notion articulated by the

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first major theorist of political fiction, Morris Edmund Speare in The Political Novel: Its Development in England and America. To Speare (1924, 22) political novels are devoted to “the complex machinery of politics” and portray how those who “exercise the levers of power” are influenced in their decision-making and how the consequences of those decisions affect the essential life of the country: “wars, industrial adventure, economic adjustment, commercial progress, diplomacy in foreign lands, social experiences of every kind, education, art, science, discovery and exploration, expansion and internal development—all are the grist of the [political novelist’s] mill.” Thirty years later Joseph Blotner in The Political Novel would basically accept Speare’s definition but distinguish it from social novels that had political overtones. To Blotner (1955, 2) the political novel “directly describes, interprets, or analyzes political phenomena”; it does not merely foreground social or economic conditions, as do The Jungle or The Grapes of Wrath. The four novels in my study portray politics as defined by Speare and Blotner: they focus on politics fairly narrowly construed in the popular sense as getting things done, such as passing legislation, confirming nominees for federal posts, or, more broadly, influencing the way the actions of federal government are conducted. Politics in this sense involves four rings of power: (1) the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court, (2) the bureaucracy that interprets laws and implements policy, (3) the lobbyists, consultants, and the media who try to influence how laws are formulated or implemented, and (4) the think tanks, commissions, media barons; the boards of special interest groups; and the leaders of social movements that try to shape the ideology of those who exercise power more directly and promote their causes to the public at large. The four novels I study also illustrate another tradition in literary studies that defines the political novel much more broadly as dealing with ideology. In his highly influential book Politics and the Novel, Irving Howe (2002, 19) argues that the political novel, which arose in the nineteenth century, was based on characters for whom “the idea of society, as distinct from the mere unquestioned workings of society,” had so “penetrated the[ir] consciousness” that they could be identified as behaving according to “some coherent political loyalty or ideological identification” that drives them to “think in terms of supporting or opposing society” and rallying others to action in the name of that ideology. Howe had in mind such novels as The Possessed, Man’s Fate, Darkness at Noon, and The Princess Casamassima. Howe realized that this ideological aspect of the political

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novel had shallow roots in America and by the mid-twentieth century, the twin ideologies of representative government and free-market capitalism had become so pervasive that the main characters in more recent American political novels, such as Ben Compton in the USA Trilogy, Jack Burden in All the King’s Men, and John Laskell in The Middle of the Journey, all of them with an ideological vision for America, could not hope to rally others to their cause and were therefore shown at key moments to be isolated, exhausted, alone. This Howe called the politics of isolation: “an isolation that a wounded intelligence is trying desperately to transform into the composure of solitude” (Howe 2002, 200). In Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945, Robert Boyers (1985, 18, 20, 22) expanded on Howe’s definition of the political novel as the study of political or ideological ideas in relation to experience by adding the notion that political novels are a “sustained inquiry into the conditions of power and the ideas likely to move the world,” “a consideration of causes and probabilities and unforeseeable consequences” conditioned by an ideological “absent cause,” a concept he borrows from Louis Althusser and Fredric Jameson. Boyers (1985, 22) defines an absent cause as a total system of social relations so various that it is impossible to describe in its totality, and, the “material habitat” in which all of us act, even though it is, in Jameson’s words (1981, 25), “nowhere empirically present as an element.” To Howe and Boyers, then, we should expect political novelists to draw attention to the unconscious assumptions and biases, the unconscious ideology, of their characters, and of course, one dominant influence on any ideology is class standing. Following Howe and Boyers, I also analyze the unconscious assumptions and biases of both the authors and their major characters, pointing out the “absent causes” that shape their beliefs and actions. What these novels reveal is that their authors are only capable of portraying a limited range of what I call “ruling-class consciousness,” a spectrum of consciousness that in its most developed form expresses the collective effort by a faction of the political directorate to dominate all other factions among the elite by controlling all three branches of government and the electoral system, thus denying much of the electorate, especially the working class, minorities, and the poor, any political agency or influence. This highly developed form of ruling-class consciousness became increasingly evident in the closing decades of the twentieth century, which I describe in some detail in Chap. 2. Embedded as they were in the culture of the time, the novelists I study totally missed the rise of a fully developed

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ruling-class consciousness and portray instead a less developed form, illustrated by what are often called “moderate,” “middle-of-the-road,” or bipartisan factions of our ruling elites, factions associated with “centrist” Democrats and Republicans; actors who seem to be civil and broadminded, often open to pragmatic compromise on contentious issues, but who, in specific policy disputes with other factions, are fully capable of ignoring the law or even morality in order to accomplish certain ends. Because they are less conscious of how enmeshed they are in a web of family and class loyalties, less consciously involved in “collective” action to preserve their privilege and power, these characters are largely unaware of their true ideology: an unquestioning belief in democracy and capitalism, unquestioning support for the policies supported by their faction within the government, and no familiarity with issues such as “the national security state,” “the war economy,” “the imperial presidency,” “American imperialism,” or issues related to the general health and welfare of American citizens as a whole, such as the decline of labor unions and rising inequality, the increasing power of the bureaucratic and corporate state and what that means for traditional American values, such as liberty, freedom, and the American Dream. These “moderates” with a less developed sense of ruling-class consciousness also tend to be unaware of what we might call their own personal ideology: that they deserve to exercise power because they have the opportunity to do so. Their personal ideology is a function of both their personalities and their background, their being raised among the elite to be successful, to fulfill their own potential, to make a mark on the world, all the while being faithful to the values and ideology of their class. They enter politics primarily because they are ambitious and want to “serve”; they want to exercise their talents in order to solve problems and get things done. However, because of their class status, their social isolation, and their narrow education, they simply accept and reinforce the status quo. They tend to view the tasks of government in terms of large abstractions—national security, broad economic trends, basic human services—and they tend to assume that their own interests are synonymous with those of the country as a whole. Most of the elites in these novels are ignorant of how the poor and working class live, and thus they are incapable of thinking clearly—or even thinking at all—about how to better the lives of those below them on the socio-economic ladder.

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The Washington Novel Three of the novels I study are commonly called “Washington novels.” I have included Didion’s Democracy, even though it is not set in Washington because Didion’s protagonist is married to a failed presidential candidate trying to return to Washington by forming a new public interest group in the fourth ring of power as a means of regaining power and influence. Literary scholars have not expressed much interest in the Washington novel as a genre, but among journalists, there is a minor industry about the subject, even though there is little agreement about what a Washington novel is. The term can refer to novels in any genre that portray any aspect of the social life of the city as a whole, or even a particular section or neighborhood. A host of internet sites provides lists of novels set in the nation’s capital, which include everything from crime novels and romances to serious character studies of people who live in various parts of the district. However, the most common referent to the term “Washington novel” is to thrillers based on the politics of Washington: for example Fletcher Knebel’s Seven Days in May, in which an attempted military coup by an angry Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is thwarted by a savvy American president, or any in the long series of Jack Ryan novels written by Tom Clancy, in which US politicians, the military, and the CIA confront one existential crisis after another. Most of these thrillers have entirely implausible and mechanical plots, stereotypical characters, and almost nothing to say about how our ruling elites actually function, except that under stress they can do unbelievable things. As a result, reviewers and editorial writers for our major newspapers and news magazines universally complain that America has no great novel about Washington, D.C., nothing to match Honore de Balzac on Paris, Charles Dickens on London, Alfred Doblin on Berlin, or Leo Tolstoy on Moscow. They cite the fact that no major American novelists have been interested in Washington. However, one reason for this phenomenon is fairly obvious: Washington is not the cultural center of America, as is the case with Paris, London, Berlin, and Moscow. The cultural center of America is New  York. Washington is not even close to New  York as a reflection of the dynamics of American art and culture, and competes with Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Seattle for second place. The real subject of Washington is politics, and none of our greatest or most celebrated novelists know enough about the political culture of D.C., to write about it well. Our “greatest” writer with a personal knowledge of Washington politics was Henry Adams, who wrote Democracy in the 1870s.

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Still, regret that America has not yet produced a great Washington political novel abounds. Stephen Miller (1978) developed a five-category taxonomy of political fiction going back to Twain and Warner’s The Gilded Age and argued that a great political novel should be based on manners and show an appreciation of “the distinctive nature” of American politics. Miller put Vidal’s Washington, D.C. in the category of “Playing Politics,” and Drury’s Advise and Consent in the category of “Issues and Responsibilities,” but he found an earlier novel by Just, Nicholson at Large, closest to his ideal, a book that explores the discrepancy between public and private lives, and what it might mean to take “the claims of both worlds seriously.” A decade later, E.  J. Dionne (1989) acknowledged all the “kingdoms, phylums and classes” of the Washington political novel and lamented that since Advise and Consent in 1959 all of its sub-genres had degenerated into melodrama with unscrupulous power-crazed characters and plots about government coups. Another six years later, Terry Teachout (1995) declared dramatically that “[b]lockbuster novels about Washington as It Really Is are as dead as disco, victims of what might be called Grisham’s Law: in popular culture, trash gets trashier over time.” Teachout blamed the lack of creditable fiction about Washington politics to an increasing cynicism about government among the general public, who had been disillusioned by the Vietnam War and Watergate. To Teachout, with the collapse of communism, the public no longer needed mythical heroes to save them from the Evil Empire. Implied in Teachout’s diatribe is the post-modern notion that American political reality had become so grotesque that fiction could not do it justice. Finally, Christopher Hitchens (2010) surveyed the field of political fiction in his own inimitable way and found much to scorn and little to praise, although he did agree with his predecessors that Henry Adams’ Democracy set the standard for the American political novel, and found considerable merit in Vidal’s Lincoln—it has “no equal”—and some merit in Just’s Echo House—the theme that “politics is not for the idealistic.” However, Hitchens did articulate a standard with which to judge a modern American political novel, a standard based on a remark by salon hostess Mrs. Lightfoot Lee in Adams’ Democracy concerning the very idea of America. Said Mrs. Lee: “There is only one thing in life that I must and will have before I die. I must know whether America is right or wrong.” It is this issue— whether America is right or wrong—Hitchens says, that “transcends all the others” when we evaluate American political fiction, and “we still

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await the novelist who can address the matter of the last, best hope on earth and treat it without frivolity, without cynicism, and without embarrassment.” I doubt that Vidal, Drury, Didion, and Just would agree that America is “the last, best hope on earth,” but they take the idea of America seriously, without frivolity, cynicism, or embarrassment. In portraying the relationship of class and power, these novelists offer a common vision of how the idea of America is actually being implemented by moderate factions of the ruling elite, what Godfrey Hodgson (1976) calls “the liberal consensus” and others call “liberal individualism,” which I detail in the next chapter.

Elite Theory and Ruling Elites “Class” as a concept is very contested in literary theory and criticism. While many studies of working-class writing are still grounded in Marxism, increasingly scholars and critics define class more as one aspect of personal identity, along with gender and race, or as a “relationship” between groups. Those who study ruling elites have generally abandoned the Marxist view that class struggle is based on the “means of production” and rely on what is called Elite Theory, conceptions of how complex modern societies require elite leaders with the experience and expertise necessary to effectively administer governments. Begun by the European theorists Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels, and Vilfredo Pareto in the early twentieth century, Elite Theory has evolved in the United States into a complex network of theory and empirical research dedicated to theorizing the particular nature of America’s power elite and documenting the extent to which class influences those who, as Thomas Dye (2002) says, “run” America at the national level. Although Elite Theory arose in the early twentieth century and has generally focused on politics at the national level, there is no reason why it could not be used retroactively to help account for how elites that govern any modern nation, democratic or not, have exercised control, illustrating how class influences politics at every level of governance. The tenets of Elite Theory are few and seemingly straightforward. Ruling elites at the national level are indeed composed primarily of the upper classes, who maintain their legitimacy by promoting an ideology that justifies their rule, by embodying to some degree the values and aspirations of those below them in the class system, and by rejuvenating

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t­hemselves to some extent by being open to new members. Thus, Elite Theory raises the critical question of how or in what sense modern democracies are in fact democratic and the degree to which ruling elites actually represent the great majority of their constituents, especially the poor and working class. In the language of political theory, the issue is how or in what sense ruling elites formally “stand for” or “act in behalf of” those whom they represent, whether these representatives should act in accordance with the wishes of their constituencies or exercise independent judgment, the degree to which representatives should consult with their constituents and/or try to mobilize support for contentious issues on which their constituents may not be well informed. In the study of class, the issue is whether the poor and working class have the same access to their representatives, the same “agency” as the members of the upper classes.4 The ruling elites in the four novels in this study govern as if they have no significant obligation to represent anyone but themselves and those who support their faction in the government. * * * One reason scholars have focused their analyses of class in fiction almost entirely on middle- and working-class life is that fiction writers are mostly middle or working class.5 It is difficult to find serious fiction by authors who have sufficient knowledge and experience of the poles of our class system: the very poor and the very rich, to say nothing about the small fraction of the upper classes that constitute our ruling elite. However, all four novelists in this study are upper-middle or upper class. Two are “liberal” and two are “conservative,” but all four have the necessary background and experience, the necessary proximity to power, in order to give us a convincing portrait of at least one faction of our ruling elite. This is certainly not to say that being a member of the upper classes is necessary in order to adequately portray our ruling elites. Lower-middleand working-class authors can bring their own unique perspectives to our ruling elites, but they do need to be knowledgeable about elite governance. For example, Billy Lee Brammer had a solid middle-class background but worked as a journalist covering Texas politics and as a staff member for Senator Lyndon Johnson, which gave him the knowledge and perspective to use Johnson as a model for his protagonist in The Gay Place. Not being upper class themselves might well make authors more sensitive to the sheer self-interestedness of much elite rule.

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Despite their upper-class status, my four novelists do not identify with those in power and consider themselves outsiders. As a result, they provide very different perspectives on American politics, ranging from savage satire to mild, implicit criticism. They also wrote their novels under very different circumstances in four different decades. Yet, I would argue that taken together these novels accurately represent a “sociology” of those factions in our political directorate who exhibit “moderate” ruling-class consciousness in late twentieth-century America, a sociology confirmed by the studies of American Elite Theory that I discuss in Chap. 3. * * * None of the novels in this study deal with domestic policy or the major social movements of the period: the New Deal, the Civil Rights movement, LBJ’s War on Poverty, the Women’s movement, the beginning of Gay Rights, Ronald Reagan’s policies to “shrink” the government, and Bill Clinton’s attempt to make welfare recipients more accountable for the benefits they receive. All are devoted to foreign policy. This may be so because foreign policy is often the background of political thrillers, a kind of genre convention, and thus more likely to be commercially successful. On the other hand, the lack of focus of these novels on domestic issues may be due to the fact that domestic issues are too politically fraught, and protagonists taking a stand on issues such as poverty or civil rights may alienate more readers than they charm. Still, the fact that these four novels are about foreign policy may also tell us a major truth about our ruling elites, whatever the intentions of their authors: that domestic policy focusing on the health and welfare of our entire society is simply not a major interest of our ruling elite. The factions of the ruling elite portrayed in these novels simply do not see the need for significant change in domestic affairs because they are the primary beneficiaries of the status quo, and so at best, their only goals are to tinker at the margins of domestic policy, making this program more efficient, eliminating that program because it is ineffective. Often in working-class fiction and scholarly analysis, members of the ruling elite are represented as unsympathetic factory owners and managers or treated simply as abstract figures enforcing inherently unjust social, economic, and political systems: patriarchy, capitalism, autocracy or elitism, and imperialism. The result is often the very stereotyping of people and groups that is considered unfair or inadequate when dealing with the

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working class. However, the ruling elite in these four novels resist easy generalizations. The characters in these novels are complex and do not intentionally oppress anyone, but because of their upbringing and training, they are not aware of how their policies may contribute to the suffering of the poor and working class. The order of the novels is not chronological according to when they were written, but according to the period they portray. Thus, even though Vidal’s Washington, D.C. was written in the mid-1960s and published in 1967, I begin with that novel because it covers the politics of the late 1940s and early 1950s, during and immediately after World War II; and I deal with Drury’s Advise and Consent second, even though it was written first, because its events occur in the late 1950s, during the same time period in which it was written. Didion’s Democracy, written in the 1980s but about the 1970s, follows the chronological order of the events in the first two novels. I end with Just’s Echo House, which was written in the 1990s but captures the sweep of history from the 1940s to the 1990s, providing a broader historical perspective on the politics of the post-­war period. In discussing these novels, I focus primarily on how each of them expresses the unique perspective of their authors while still contributing to a common portrayal of “moderate” factions in our ruling elite, but also on how each of them illustrates some aspect of Elite Theory. In analyzing Washington, D.C., I focus on how the major characters work hard to keep much of their actual behavior hidden from the public in order to ostensibly exemplify a way of life that the rest of the country might aspire to, and what it takes for a member of the lower classes to break into and be accepted by the ruling elite. In analyzing Advise and Consent, I focus on what I call “moderate ruling-elite ideology,” how the personal ambition of the characters takes precedence over any shared ideology or empirical examination of the world as it is. In analyzing Democracy, I focus on how in their campaigns politicians claim to represent certain constituencies but that in fact these constituencies are small or even non-existent, giving free rein to their true constituency: the corporate world. And in analyzing Echo House, I focus on how the novel “sums up” its predecessors, illustrating how the evolution of lobbying and the rise of new media—in this case, television—evolved over the last decades of the twentieth century, giving the upper classes even greater power in the political directorate; and how the ruling elite dealt with the tensions in being open to new members, in this case, women and African Americans. * * *

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Class criticism matters, and we need to study fiction across the entire spectrum of class in our culture. At the end of his study of the working class in American fiction, William Dow (2009, 221) expresses his hope that class criticism can extend beyond the academy and contribute to a larger public role, working in complex ways to further a variety of social agendas: “confrontational engagement,” the promotion of broad “collective—and collaborative—identifications” that are not tied to “hegemonic racial and class formations,” and the use of new forms to “defamiliarize and reactivate” social forces, or perhaps more simply, to create “transient aesthetic moments” that might foster some “imagined community.” I have the same hopes for literary analyses of class in fiction, and so, in my conclusion, I specifically address the issue of how or in what sense American literary studies of class and power in politics as a form of critique can contribute to larger public debates about the nature of democracy. None of the novels in this study are didactic; they are complex works of art. But in their portrayal of the felt life of our ruling elites and in the complexities of their multiple perspectives, they give us the opportunity to understand more fully those who govern us, and if we find their governance inadequate or unfair, we can ponder what we can do to make our ruling elites more representative of the country as a whole and more sensitive to those in the bottom tiers of the system, how to put pressure on our ruling elites in order to further social justice, so that elite governance reflects what the great majority of Americans want their country to be. The possibility of thinking through issues like these is one among many reasons why the study of class in our ruling elite is so relevant and thought-provoking. * * * Power and Class in Political Fiction has seven chapters. Chapters 2 and 3 provide the background and theoretical justification for my later analyses in Chaps. 4, 5, 6, and 7. Chapter 2: “Class Consciousness in Late-­ Twentieth-­Century America” details the history of both working-class and ruling-class consciousness in post-war America and charts how these forms of consciousness influenced our politics. In Chap. 3: “Elite Theory and the American Political Directorate” I argue that Elite Theory rather than Marxism is the most appropriate framework for understanding our ruling elites during the period. I go on to survey the relevant issues arising

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from various theories of the ruling elite, explain my key concepts—“class,” “elite,” and “power”—and provide an overview of how I address the issues of authorial bias and point of view. In the chapters devoted to a single novelist, I explore how the class status of that author influences one particular novel, using two frameworks: Elite Theory and the issues associated with representing class in fiction. Each of the analytic chapters then will contain the following: first, a brief biography elaborating on the author’s class status and indicating how each novelist’s life might be said to influence his or her representation of the ruling elite; second, a brief explanation of the “vision” implicit in each novelist’s representation of the ruling elite and how that vision represents the author’s point of view at a particular historical moment, and finally, a detailed analysis of one novel from each author, showing how it illustrates the author’s representation of the ruling elite, especially in light of Elite Theory. In my concluding Chap. 8, I sum up my argument that in the four novels I study a significant faction of the American ruling elite largely governs as if the lower classes did not exist. Given this diagnosis, I go on to address the issue of how or in what sense academic literary studies of class and power can contribute to larger discussions of public policy later in history; for example, how a study of late-twentieth-century fiction can contribute to policy debates at the time I am writing in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Notes 1. For a bibliography and commentary on the full range of American political novels since the nineteenth century, see Milne (1966). 2. For studies of political ideas in fiction, see Baumeister and Horton (1996), Hutchison (2007), and Zuckert (1990). 3. To the agency of authors and characters, Cora Kaplan (2000, 12) adds the “the agency of particular genres and discourses,” such as the novel, whose ideology may express or constitute “the hegemony of the middle classes or of their political instrument, the nation.” 4. For an overview on this issue, see Parry (2005), Chapter 6: “Elites and Democratic Theory,” 126–37. There is a large and growing literature in political science on the nature of political “representation.” For an excellent introduction to the key issues, see Pitkin (1967). 5. For an overview of recent academic studies on middle- and working-class life, see Dow (2009, 4–7) and Kaplan (2000).

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References Baumeister, Andrea T., and John Horton, eds. 1996. Literature and the Political Imagination. New York: Routledge. Blotner, Joseph. 1955. The Political Novel. Westport: Greenwood Press. Boyers, Robert. 1985. Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945. New York: Oxford University Press. Dionne, E.J., Jr. 1989. Washington Talk; Fiction Mirrors the Loss of Majesty. New York Times, April 17. Dow, William. 2009. Narrating Class in American Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dye, Thomas R. 2002. Who’s Running America? The Bush Restoration. 7th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall. Hitchens, Christopher. 2010. In Search of the Washington Novel. City Journal Magazine, Autumn. Hodgson, Godfrey. 1976. America in Our Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Howe, Irving. 2002. Politics and the Novel. Introduction by David Bromwich. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Hutchison, Anthony. 2007. Writing the Republic: Liberalism and Morality in American Political Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press. Jamison, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kaplan, Cora. 2000. Millennial Class. PMLA 115: 9–19. Miller, Stephen. 1978. The Washington Novel. The Public Interest, Summer. Milne, Gordon. 1966. The American Political Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Parry, Geraint. 2005. Political Elites. Oxford: ECPR Press. Pitkin, Hanna. 1967. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Speare, Morris Edmund. 1924. The Political Novel: Its Development in England and America. New York: Oxford University Press. Teachout, Terry. 1995. Where Have You Gone, Orrin Knox? The Decline of the Washington Novel. New York Times, August 27. Zuckert, Catherine. 1990. Natural Right and the American Imagination: Political Philosophy in Novel Form. Savage: Rowan and Littlefield.

CHAPTER 2

Class Consciousness in Late-Twentieth-­Century America

Despite the myth that America is a classless society, Americans have always recognized the reality of class. Studies conducted after World War II indicate that when Americans think and talk about class, they tend to use variations of the same five terms—poor, working class, lower class, middle class, and upper class, with the last three terms modified with “lower-” or “upper-” to convey more careful distinctions. These studies indicate a broad consensus about the factors that contribute to a person’s class standing, both socio-economic factors, such as occupational status and earned income, and cultural factors, such as lifestyle and manners (Kahl and Davis 1957, 47–48; Jackman and Jackman 1983, 217–19). However, according to Anthony Giddens (1980, 111), this broadly accepted recognition of class is mere “awareness,” the product of “similar attitudes and beliefs, linked to a common style of life.” To Giddens, such awareness “does not involve a recognition that these attitudes signify a particular class affiliation, or the recognition that there exist other classes,” only that people can be vaguely aware that they live among people similar to themselves, those who have the same manners and “lifestyle” and who do similar kinds of work. Indeed, Giddens goes so far as to say that “class awareness may take the form of a denial of the existence of the reality of classes.” Sociologist Robert Rothman (1978, 175) developed a taxonomy of the degree to which members of any social class exhibit a range of class consciousness, which he defined as an expression of solidarity with others © The Author(s) 2019 D. Smit, Power and Class in Political Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26769-8_2

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based on common values and interests. In Rothman’s taxonomy, two stages are a precursor to class consciousness as solidarity: “awareness,” in Giddens’ sense of the term, and “identification,” defined as any feeling or empathy toward people either in one’s own class or in a class above or below them. The last stage in Rothman’s taxonomy is the willingness to act together to achieve common goals. Rothman argues from empirical data gathered during the post-war period until the mid-1970s that Americans generally lack an awareness of their shared interest as a class and do not generally think of classes as opposing one another; rather, they tend to think that the different classes complement one another, that some sort of class hierarchy is the nature of things. Most disconcerting for Marxists, post-war studies of the working class in nineteenth-century America and Great Britain (Wilentz 1986; Jones 1984) and of working-class life in contemporary Britain (Thompson 1963) provided convincing evidence that the working class would not be the vanguard for progressive politics and that notions of “class struggle” simply did not account for the trajectory of politics either before or after Marx’s work became well known. Moreover, a significant number, perhaps most, of social historians also agreed that membership in a particular class “structure” or “formation” does not necessarily determine the outlook of its members. As Fiona Divine and Mike Savage (2005, 11) put it, the idea that “class consciousness can be related to class position… relies on an instrumentalism that sees ideas and values as linked to the interests of particular structurally defined groups,” which is unsatisfactorily reductionist and does not account for “the complexity of values and ideas” of the individual members of the class.1 For example, in her complex study of social attitudes about redistributive justice in the 1970s, Jennifer Hochschild (1981) found that there was a wide range of opinion on most socio-­economic issues between members of the same class, be it working class, middle class, or upper class, and that commonly held and fervently expressed opinions on these issues crossed class lines. As a result of the cultural turn in scholarship in the humanities during the 1970s, scholars have found it more fruitful to study how individuals conceptualize their identities in all their complexity. Aspects of those identities are related not only to class but to such factors as gender and sexual expression, race and ethnicity, and to a range of psychological types, such as introversion and extroversion.2 Thus, the concept of class has emerged as a “relationship” between or among groups, conditioned by particular cultural and historical influences (Thompson 1963, 9–11), or a “performative process”

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(Gibson-Graham et al. 2000, 9) that in literature includes “the dynamic and experience of historical class agents, attempting to universalize their class-specific interests” (Janowitz 1994, 241). This skepticism of broad generalizations about class behavior is reflected in the rich history of scholarship devoted to American literature about the working class.3 Laura Hapke (2001, 339) ends her book Labor’s Text: The Worker in American Fiction, a comprehensive history of American working-­class literature from the 1840s to the end of the twentieth century, this way: “Clearly the workingman and –woman are radically revised with every shift in social ideology, with every conception of race, ethnicity, and gender. Thus working-class consciousness is a slippery term indeed, for it cannot be welded to the hopes of the Left any more than to the fears of the Right.” In his study of the “communitarian impulse” in American Literature from Walt Whitman to James Agee, William Dow (2009, 220–21) argues that these writers use esthetic language to engage political, ethical, and historical concerns, the point being to get away from “‘objective analyses’ of classes as groups but to explore how literary identities are built with class goals and aims.” Keith Gandal’s Class Representations in Modern Fiction and Film (2007, 12) considers “class” a cultural term or a form of identity, not a product of economics. Gandal focuses on shame in popular American cross-class tales, in which gender stereotypes complicate the issue of how popular novels deal with class.4 Following this tradition of analyzing the complexity of class consciousness and class identity in American fiction, in this book I extend such analyses to novels portraying America’s ruling elite and argue that our ruling elites exhibit a range of “ruling-class consciousness” analogous to the broad spectrum of “working-class consciousness” and that the identities of our ruling elites are as complex as those of the working class. However, I would argue that the Marxist concept of working-class consciousness provides us with a key concept missing from traditional sociological theories of class, a concept that also helps explain ruling-class consciousness and a major fault line in American politics. That key concept is agency. * * * Marx, of course, developed his theory of class consciousness only regarding the working class. The various iterations of Marx’s sense of “class consciousness” over time have included a number of features identified by Bertell Ollman (1993) as a knowledge of the dynamics of capitalism, an

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awareness of the “broad outlines of the class struggle and where one fits into it,” “feelings of solidarity toward one’s own class and of rational hostility toward opposition classes,” and finally “a vision of a more democratic and egalitarian society that is not only possible but that one can help bring about” through collective planning and collective action.5 The nature of class consciousness in the Marxist sense is then fundamentally a group process; it is difficult, if not impossible, for individuals to fully develop a class consciousness all by themselves. Individuals can only develop class consciousness by interacting with other members of their class and coming as a group to understand that their interests are opposed to another group or class. In doing this, they respond as a group to their immediate circumstances and develop a common way of thinking about those circumstances, a way of thinking that accurately diagnoses the problems they face and a provides a strategy for dealing with them. In short, according to Marx, the development of class consciousness is inherently “collectivist,” a function of individuals working in a group to promote the agency of the group, to seize initiative or control in a particular historical situation. It is this sense of being an integral part of a larger social group and actively participating in collective action that is so foreign to the traditional American mythology of rugged individualism and one reason why the Marxist sense of class consciousness has been so difficult to foster in this country. Rothman offers four reasons for the lack of identification and expression of solidarity among the working class: a relatively high standard of living, a belief in social mobility, the lack of class-based organizations that exist in Europe (such as political parties, cooperatives, youth groups, newspapers; in America, most interest groups are organized across class lines by religion, ethnicity, or geographic area), and finally the very American belief in rugged individualism and personal responsibility. Rothman (1978, 186) also notes that labor unions are “an instrument for class action, but only in a limited and contradictory manner”: in the mid-­ 1970s, unions represented less than one quarter of American workers, and they only represented union members, not the working class as a whole. In addition, Rothman argues, there is little solidarity among various unions, which often discriminate against minority workers and engage in “jurisdictional disputes among themselves.” When scholars and historians of the labor movement after World War II use the term “working class consciousness” to describe the thinking and behavior of particular working-class groups, they only refer to “expressions of solidarity” among workers, their families, and their supporters

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when the workers feel exploited by their employers and take collective action: for example, to go on strike. These scholars and historians tend to downplay or ignore the Marxist criteria of a knowledge of capitalism, some sense of class struggle, and the desire to implement a vision of society as a whole. Often, they even downplay the degree to which workers themselves participate in a collective process of devising strategies with which to confront their employers. As a result, these labor scholars and historians do not sufficiently acknowledge the key element of a Marxist sense of class consciousness: the desire of workers to develop a sense of agency, to collectively participate in determining the nature of their work and the nature of society. In downplaying the issue of agency, these scholars and historians ignore the key element in any theory of the relationship of class to power and control, which is essential to any understanding of American politics: the degree to which the upper classes control the government and the degree to which the lower classes are denied any real influence on policy or even access to policy-making. Political elites frame issues of class entirely in terms of poverty and equality, as a matter of business and government offering the poor and working class opportunities to exercise their individual initiative, hard work, and responsibility, but this is just a strategy for displacing the larger issue of power and control. In reality, the poor and working class do not suffer primarily because they lack initiative or because they do not sufficiently accept the largesse from business and government; they suffer primarily because they have little control over their lives, their work, the very nature of their government. To put the state of class consciousness in the post-war period in context, I first need to offer an adequate class-based description of how American politics during this period really worked. In the language of Elite Theory, since the nation’s founding, America’s political elites have been “consensually united” in accepting America as a “procedural democracy,” committed to following the Constitution and its prescribed governmental structures as a framework for their interactions and in accepting a common ideology. Within this Constitutional framework, political elites tacitly committed themselves to a particular structure of power rather than to individual personalities or policies, agreed to a common core of political norms and social values, and regarded bargaining and compromise among themselves as the best way to avoid major social disruption.6 However, the consensual unity of our political elites became increasingly frayed during the last decades of the twentieth century.

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Historically, the post-war ideology of our political elites has been known as “the liberal consensus” or “liberal individualism,” the idea that democratic capitalism would be so productive that it would provide a base of support across class lines and thus make class conflict obsolete, that the great majority of Americans had a common interest in prosperity and personal development, and that American society was becoming more equal. This ideology had two major consequences for elite rule. First, regarding foreign policy, it promoted the idea that the primary function of our ruling elites was national defense, opposition to communism, and the advancement of laissez-faire capitalism around the world, which justified the ruling elites’ lack of attention to the everyday lives of the great majority of citizens. When Michael Harrington exposed the level of poverty in the country in his book The Other America in 1962, our ruling elites claimed to be shocked. The very existence of poverty seemed to contradict the central tenets of their ideology. And second, the “liberal consensus” prompted ruling elites, and indeed the larger public, to conceptualize class entirely as a matter of wealth and inequality, simply a matter of economics and some relatively minor features of social status rather than a matter of power. It assumed that increased economic growth and bureaucratic resourcefulness, based on the best science and expert opinion, would be able to increase the availability of goods and services, thereby increasing consumption, and make people, if not happy, then at least content. In other words, the “liberal consensus” assumed that the basis for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was primarily economic, and that American myths about the values of individual initiative and hard work should be rewarded primarily by more consumer goods. According to this myth, the poor and working class did not need or deserve the same degree of agency in their lives, the same ability to control their own destinies, to fulfill their own potential, to participate in and shape the conditions of their work and the nature of the country that the upper classes enjoyed. Or to put it more bluntly, the “liberal consensus” took it as a fact of life that the poor and working class were by definition dependent on the largesse of business and government, or in the language of certain contemporary Republicans, they were “takers,” who could only advance by being offered employment by business or welfare by the government. The poor and working class were not entitled to lives that became meaningful by exercising control over their own futures, especially on the job and in the electoral process.

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Of course, how to conceptualize the nature of America’s political system and elite rule is a major issue in political science. However, I think that most persuasive theory has been offered by Stanley Aronowitz. To Aronowitz (2003, 10), our ruling elites are an ad hoc collection of shifting alliances. The underlying basis of class and power is still the economic system, but it cannot be limited to “questions of ownership and control of key means of material and immaterial production.” Rather, power in America at the national level is exercised by a ruling “political directorate,” which is only occasionally opposed by other shifting alliances of social groups that object to particular policies enforced by that directorate. This political directorate is composed of a diverse ruling class that is broadly stable over time but varies according to the way its various factions form alliances among “the permanent political class” and other groups, such as the representatives of capital and labor, the military, and major research universities. At some historical moments, for example, technological and financial industries may have more power and influence in the political directorate than at other times. The shifting power blocs in the directorate are somewhat constrained by the law, policy precedent, and the formal and informal rules that govern economic transactions, both nationally and internationally, but within this broad framework, their rule is generally a matter of various factions collaborating with each other to determine policy at the expense of other factions. For example, according to Aronowitz (2003, 101), during the post-war period, the Republican Party gradually became not only the party of “the most powerful fractions of capital, finance and industrial and regional financial capital,” which it had been in the 1950s and 1960s but also the party of “the social Right, including abortion opponents, privatizers of public goods, supporters of ‘faith-based’ publicly financed social services, and other interests linked to fundamentalist Christian churches; the embattled middle class of farmers, professionals, and merchants in small towns and rural areas.” What Aronowitz misses in his history is the rebellion of a faction of the Republican Party against the Nixon administration’s continuation of New Deal social programs and business regulation. Beginning in the early 1970s, this faction began very consciously creating institutions to seize control of the “permanent political class,” including all three branches of the federal government, and shaping the electoral process to deny the poor and working class as much agency as possible. In response to the rise of the Reactionary Right, Democrats began to abandon what Aronowitz (2003, 102) calls “their only distinctive political

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doctrine, the social welfare state developed during the second New Deal”—income support for the financial distressed and “the expansion of public goods”—and have since that time sponsored deregulation and free trade without any major compensation or support for workers adversely affected by the new freer market, in effect forsaking their alliance with labor. In Aronowitz’s conception, the only way most Americans can oppose the ruling elite and produce significant social change is not through elections, which simply ratify the options proposed by the political directorate but by forming “social formations” around particular issues, formations that include a broad range of people: wage workers, professionals, social activists; women, African Americans, and other oppressed groups. During the post-war period, of course, these social movements included those for civil rights, feminism, and gay rights.7 However, no social movement arose to advocate for the poor and working class. The history of working-class consciousness in post-war America is primarily a history of lost agency, of workers sacrificing their desire to control their immediate working conditions to union hierarchies for the promise of increased wages and benefits, and their losing political influence as a voting bloc, when the Democratic Party abandoned them in the 1980s. The history of ruling-class consciousness in post-war America is a history of increased agency for the Reactionary Right in their conscious attempts to take over the political directorate.

Post-War Working-Class Consciousness Before World War II, America had pockets of vibrant working-class culture, associated with union membership and heavily influenced by socialism and communism, small subcultures with a tradition of radical union activism going back to the nineteenth century, subcultures in which the Marxist sense of class consciousness was alive. These subcultures included unions such as the Knights of Labor, which practiced what Alice Kessler-­ Harris (1987, 32) calls “social unionism,” living and acting together for the working class as a whole: “collective activity in the community, the workplace, and above all, in the political arena.”8 While the notion of “class struggle” did energize certain segments of the labor movement in the century before World War II, and although it was an essential part of the rhetoric of socialist and communist unions in the 1930s and 1940s, the notion of class identity died out almost completely after the war, certainly by the early 1960s, replaced by what Kessler-­

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Harris calls “business unionism”: a union hierarchy representing individual workers, not the working class as a whole. In fact, as Mike Davis (1986, 113) points out, in the American legal system, as opposed to those in Europe or Japan, unions are not officially recognized as having corporate rights. Quite the opposite: in America “collective bargaining is legally derived from a classically liberal concept of individual consent to representation.” Indeed, the word “union” does not appear in either of the major pieces of legislation regulating unions—the Wagner and Taft-Hartley acts—and as a result, “the rights of American unions under law are provisional and revocable,” always subject to criticism by anti-union corporations that unions do not adequately represent the political views of their individual dues-paying rank-and-file. The Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 outlawed the closed shop, allowed states to pass “right to work” legislation, and reduced the very notion of group solidarity by banning sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts and by defining union representation as the entire workforce rather than as the percentage of actual union members, thus allowing strikebreakers to vote in union elections. It would be difficult for any group to form an identity and agree on collective action if it were forced to grudgingly accept as voting members those who opposed what they stood for in the first place. Harry Bridges, the head of the Longshore and Warehouse Union, declared that the Taft-Hartley Act did indeed guarantee workers’ rights: the right to be “an informer, to be a scab, a strike-breaker, an anti-union, internal union wrecker” (qtd. in Fantasia 1989, 58). In his magisterial Rainbow at Midnight, George Lipsitz argues that during the first year and a half after World War II in America, from late 1945 to the end of 1946—that is, before the Taft-Hartley Act—the labor movement may have been comprised of the last significantly “class conscious” group of workers in American history. During this time of mass strikes, workers overwhelmingly indicated that some sense of agency on the job was what they wanted above all else. As a striking member of the union for Bell Telephone workers put it in April of 1947 during a nationwide strike: “You can talk yourself blue in the face about how prosperity for everybody depends on high production. You’ll never make it real to the worker in the shop unless he feels that he is a partner in the business…. Partnership is something that affects the whole running of the plant. You’ve got to give workers a voice in how these things are done and how the profits are divided” (qtd. in Lipsitz 1994, 337).

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A variety of surveys of attitudes among workers after the war also indicate that while workers thought that wages were important, what they really wanted was to be independent from supervision, feel a sense of fellowship with other people on the job, and have some say in their working conditions.9 One study of worker dissatisfaction on the job found that the major sources of frustration included resentment over lack of control, anxiety over having an undefined role, hostility toward changing conditions, and a sense of isolation from fellow workers (Eaton 1952, 35). As one union organizer commented during a strike in Illinois, “The real issue wasn’t the 15 cents an hour we asked for or the 5 cents we got. The real cause of the strike was that we had to convince the guy he couldn’t be a little dictator any longer” (Stagner 1950, 15). And representatives of business recognized what the stakes were. An executive for General Motors puts it this way: “Give the union the money, the least possible, but give them what it takes. But don’t let them take the business away from us” (Brody 1980, 187–88). With the post-war demonization of communism and socialism, talk about class as a structural feature of American life and collective action as an integral part of working-class identity disappeared from public discourse, and the “conceptual unity” of the working class became primarily identified, in Jefferson Cowie’s (2010, 18) deathless phrase, as “a unionized voting block” of the Democratic Party. The failure of the post-war labor movement to fight for the “collective agency” of its members as a class, not only on the shop floor but in the politics of the country as a whole, is best explained by one of the key early proponents of Elite Theory: Robert Michels and his “iron law of oligarchy.” Michels studied the nature and structure of political parties in Germany in the early twentieth century, especially socialist parties that claimed to represent the proletariat, and concluded that it was inevitable that such organizations, no matter how “democratic” their goals, would increasingly give advantages and power to leaders who could not be checked or held accountable by their followers. Party leaders needed to organize campaigns, gather immense amounts of information, canvas the electorate, supply speakers, raise money, keep records of finances, and monitor the legal restrictions on political campaigning. All these activities required particular kinds of expertise and put pressure on a core of leaders who had not only the requisite expertise but also the flexibility to adapt the party’s core principles to the need for electoral success. The requirement of flexibility rewarded leaders who were more adept at technique

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than principle, which doomed even the most socialist parties to become “bourgeoisified,” their leaders less working class and more the members of an elite with higher status and income than those they represented, a hierarchy in which a small group of key leaders made all the major decisions, carried out by an army of bureaucrats whose primary jobs were to do what they were told (Michels 1958, 288–89). In keeping with Michels’ diagnosis, Aronowitz (1973, 14, 425) documents the way post-war union bureaucracies became “institutions for the disciplining and control of workers,” institutions that sacrificed rank-and-­ file control in order to achieve bureaucratic equality with employers. To gain this equality in status, union leaders emphasized the wages and benefits they could achieve for workers but conceded issues of local control, allowing management to shift responsibility for production from “workers’ self-management” to workers’ councils or committees, and eventually to the union hierarchy itself and agreed to elaborate procedures for handling grievances that in effect removed them from immediate resolution and direct negotiation on the shop floor. In addition, they ceded to employers the right to hire and fire workers under conditions of their choice or furlough them if they needed to cut production. The more unions increased in size and became more “national,” the membership of the union as a whole was removed from the particular working and cultural conditions of their fellow workers, and it became difficult for local workers to communicate with those at other plants around the country. The large, impersonal bureaucracies of national unions allowed union leaders to take credit for increased wages and benefits, but when local unions complained about poor working conditions, the national offices could shift the blame to local leaders.10 And perhaps most important, labor relations became entirely a matter of business-worker relations rather than a means to work out larger issues of the place of industry in the larger culture. National unions discouraged workers from pondering whether their jobs should be considered a viable way to make a living in the first place: for example, coal miners were discouraged from questioning whether mining itself should be replaced by better sources of energy. While unions were still “an elementary organ of struggle,” they also became the major force for integrating workers into capitalism. The larger consequence of labor’s integration into capitalism was that workers increasingly lost any sense they had of a collective identity. The concept of class as a group expression of agency, of control, of seizing the

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initiative and confronting the opposition, gave way to the idea of group “solidarity” that could only be expressed by making participation in the business of the union more democratic, a matter of separate individuals exercising their right to vote. “Democratic representation” replaced “group participation” as the primary way to make unions more reflective of the needs and desires of its rank-and-file members. And even the notion of democratic representation in unions themselves came under attack. Workers had to deal with a bureaucracy that became increasingly corrupt and arbitrary and distant from the rank-andfile. Intense lobbying by activists to make unions more accountable to workers convinced Congress to pass the Landrum-Griffin Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act in 1959. Landrum-Griffin allowed workers to organize to get the right to participate more directly in union-­management negotiations, but this produced only fitful results. Although a large number of labor insurgencies arose to fight for greater democracy, control, and accountability in unions, these insurgencies— among them, the Association for Union Democracy (AUD), the Miners for Democracy, The New Directions Movement in the United Auto Workers, and Teamsters for a Democratic Union—achieved only a few individual victories. In the decades after the war, workers continued to strike over grievances of local control just as much as they did for higher wages. The number of strikes reached a peak in 1970 when “there were 2.4 million workers engaged in large-scale work stoppages, thirty-four massive stoppages of ten thousand workers or more, and a raft of wildcats, slowdowns, and aggressive stands in contact negotiations” (Cowie 2010, 2), but these strikes were “more of a ‘pressure tactic’ than a weapon of ‘class war’,” a formalized ritual of negotiation, often because agreed-upon grievance procedures were ignored. For example, the notorious strike at the Lordstown, Ohio, plant of General Motors was fueled by a backlog of 20,000 grievances that had not been dealt with (Fantasia 1989, 60, 61, 62). In three case studies of striking workers during this time Rick Fantasia confirms what had been clear from the beginning of the post-war period: that wildcat strikes were usually related to working conditions rather than wages, issues that could be dealt with if workers had more power and a “say” on such issues as “the rate and amount of production; health and safety conditions; hiring, firing, and disciplining of workers; the amount of personal time and how it is to be used; the hours of work, and compulsory overtime.”

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Working-class union members not only lost power and influence in their own unions; they lost power politically in the country as a whole. In the 1950s, unions had become a major political force by identifying themselves primarily with the Democratic Party, ignoring the fact that the party was clearly not just made up of liberals, workers, urbanites, and minorities, such as immigrants and African Americans, but also a faction identified by Hodgson (1976, 88) as “the rural, conservative, nativist South, an element that not only accounted for a third and more of its strength in Congress but held the balance of power in presidential elections.” Southern Democrats had only supported the New Deal for economic reasons, not social ones, and when the Democrats under Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Right Acts in 1964, the South became increasingly Republican. Still, the Democrats’ ad hoc New Deal coalition held together through the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations because post-war prosperity boosted the economy of the South, and even the Republican administration of Richard Nixon seemed to institutionalize the social programs of the New Deal. Lyndon Johnson expanded Medicare and created Medicaid and other anti-poverty programs. Not to be outdone, Nixon, who had to deal with a Democrat Congress, agreed to the greatest expansion in domestic spending since FDR.  He signed off on bills to greatly increase Social Security benefits and create the food stamp program, and provided more funds for the Old Age Assistant Program, which his administration transformed into the Supplemental Security Income program. Nixon also signed into law radically increased governmental regulations over business and created new governments agencies to enforce these regulations, agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Hacker and Pierson 2010, 97). And although in the 1972 election, Nixon attacked Democrat presidential candidate George McGovern’s proposal to give $1000 to every American citizen, he supported the idea of a guaranteed annual income for the poor and some form of subsidies for health care. In short, Nixon ran as a traditional Republican on cultural issues of “law and order,” but he sensed that competing at the national level necessitated some form of economic populism. But an economic populism focused on government welfare programs did little to restore agency to the working class. Alarmed at Nixon’s capitulation to the ideas of the New Deal, right-­ wing factions of the Republican Party began a coordinated movement to seize control of the political directorate—a movement I will document

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shortly—and in order to compete for support among rich donors, the Democrats abandoned the working class. Part of the strategy of these right-wing factions was to limit union control and influence, and as a result, after the 1950s, union membership began a long slow decline. When given the chance to join a union, workers increasingly chose not to. In 1966, unions had won 66 percent of representation elections. By 1979, unions were only winning 46 percent of these elections (Fantasia 1989, 166). By the 1990s, union membership fell to below 16 percent of the work force, the lowest it had been since the 1920s (Aronowitz 1973, 8). As a result of the decline in union membership and the political influence of unions, job conditions in many industries were seriously worse than in previous decades. Injury and illness rates increased by at least 10 percent and may have been much higher; real wages declined by 18 percent since 1973, the number of part-timers, defined as those working less than 35 hours a week, increased by 11.8 percent—over 38 million people; the number of temporary workers, or those hired out of personnel supply agencies increased “from 640,000 in 1987 to 2.7 million in mid-1997” (Moody 1999, 101). Even worse, by the 1990s, labor had basically disappeared from the larger public consciousness and was considered just another “problem” that business had to deal with, just another factor in how to increase “productivity.” The government and the media treated organized labor as yet another “interest group,” both institutions considering it perfectly obvious that business and finance deserved bailouts and tax breaks for the good of the country. It became commonplace to regularly blame workers— that is, union rules and high wages—for undermining the competitiveness of American corporations, but there was little outcry when the media reported on the low pay or the mistreatment of workers. With the rise of the “New Democrats,” just as beholden to business interests as the Republican Party, unions lost influence in the only political party to pay at least lip service to their interests. There were no major interest groups advocating for economic policies more supportive of low-income citizens and there were fewer battles to reform unions to make them more democratic. The trajectory of decline had been set, and in the decades that followed in the twenty-first century, the fortunes of the working class only got worse. There is, of course, no necessary reason to think that if American workers had been more fully class conscious in the Marxist sense, they would have had more prosperous and meaningful lives after World War II, but at least they would have gone down fighting.

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Post-War Ruling-Class Consciousness Rather ironically, the traditional Marxist notion of class consciousness can also apply to members of the ruling elite, except of course, that the vision of ruling elites is not for a more democratic and egalitarian society, but for a society in which ruling elites maintain or increase their power and control. As I will explain in more detail in Chap. 3, ruling elites exercise power by filling social roles in “high-status” institutions, institutions such as the government at various levels and institutions that influence the government and shape public policy: public interest groups, corporations, and banks; the mass media; and the law. As with working-class consciousness, ruling-class consciousness manifests itself in a broad spectrum of awareness, identification, consciousness, and action with both individuals and factions among the ruling elite varying in the degree to which they are aware of their social situation and its relationship with capitalism, identify and express solidarity with those in the same social circles, consider themselves opposed to other classes, and seek to implement a vision of the future through collective planning and action. The major characters of the novels in this study have a relatively under-­ developed sense of class consciousness. They are very aware of class distinctions, and if they are upper class, they overwhelmingly identify with their own class; if they are upper-middle class, they identify with the class above them. They fully recognize that they are wealthy, well educated, and in positions of power, and that others are not. However, to the extent that they think about these issues at all, they do not attribute class differences to capitalism but simply to the nature of things. They vaguely recognize that in promoting the policies of their faction of the government, they are also acting in their own interests, but not in any way that will seriously interfere with the interests of the lower classes: they only think of themselves as opposing other factions in the political directorate as a kind of game with winners and losers. Of course, they realize that the policies promoted by their faction of the directorate have implications for the lower classes, but in a very abstract and impersonal way. What my four novelists miss or simply ignore is the rise in the last decades of the twentieth century of a more fully developed ruling-class consciousness in one faction of America’s political directorate: the reactionary right-wing of the Republican Party. There is considerable evidence that the Reactionary Right is fully knowledgeable about “the dynamics of capitalism,” is aware that their economic and political success is based on

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class struggle, that their economic success and political dominance depends on a “rational hostility” toward more moderate factions of the political directorate and toward the lower classes. Members of the Reactionary Right collectively plot to implement their totalizing vision of a society in which their political faction controls all three branches of government and the electoral process, keeping not only the wages and benefits of workers to a minimum but also limiting as much as possible the agency of workers to participate in their own government. The ultimate goal of the Reactionary Right is to ensure that their wealth and power can survive any electoral wave, factional opposition, or court challenge. Let me quickly add that a fully developed ruling-class consciousness need not be necessarily reactionary; it may even be fairly “progressive.” As early elite theorists noted, it is certainly possible for political directorates to maintain their power and promote the illusion of democracy by limiting the policy options available to elected officials and those they represent, and providing just enough benefits to just as many of their constituents as they need to win elections, in effect buying support. The “city machine” politics of the nineteenth century are a good example. As long as the various communities within the city received sufficient benefits from the ruling party, they could be counted on to vote for the machine’s candidates. And so it is perfectly possible for liberal factions in our political directorate to meet all the requirements for a fully developed ruling-class consciousness: having a class-based opposition to the working class and working to maintain their power and control by granting their constituents a measure of access and agency and by doling out benefits as they need to. However, what these liberal factions cannot afford to do if they wish to remain in the political directorate is to grant the working class sufficient access and agency to compromise the liberal faction’s interests and ultimate control. For example, it would be highly unlikely that any liberal factions could satisfy a popular desire for universal health care because these factions are themselves heavily invested in and influenced by the insurance, hospital, medical, and drug industries. Groups, such as the US Chamber of Commerce, founded in 1912, and the National Association of Realtors, founded in 1908, have a long history of working together to influence government policy, and in doing so their members exhibit, to some degree, many of the key characteristics of Marxist class consciousness. The members of the US Chamber of Commerce, for example, a group founded to counter the influence of the labor movement, could be said to be knowledgeable about the nature of

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capitalism, aware of how the Chamber’s individual businesses struggle with, if not outright oppose, their workers, and express solidarity with their fellow business members. The Chamber members could also be said to have banded together to develop strategies to further their own interests at the expense of their workers and implement a totalizing vision of a society in which their class maintains its traditional power and influence. After the war, such businessmen and other reactionary factions of the Republican Party had always hoped to totally overturn the New Deal, but their desire to do so reached a fever pitch at the Nixon administration’s capitulation to the Democratic Congress. In response to Nixon’s betrayal of what they considered Republican values, these groups banded together to promote their class interests and deliberately plotted ways to dominate all three branches of the federal government, in effect attempting to seize power at the expense of moderate Republican and Democrat factions. The ways in which they did so is evidence of the “collectivism” missing from much working-class consciousness. On August 23, 1971, future Supreme Court justice, then chair of the Education Committee of the Chamber of Commerce, Lewis Powell sounded the alarm in a “Confidential Memorandum: Attack on the Free Enterprise System,” which served as a call to arms for corporate CEOs and other rich donors at the outer edges of the political directorate: the “American economic system is under broad attack,” Powell declared, and so business needed to learn that “political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary it must be used aggressively and with determination—without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.” Powell promoted the idea that business organizations should organize nationally and carefully design long-range plans that would be put into effect consistently into the “indefinite” future (Phelps-Fein 2009, 158, 160). Powell’s call to arms helped galvanize the business community. Corporate CEOs and business executives self-consciously began to organize in order to make the right-wing faction of the Republican Party the dominant faction in the political directorate. Early proponents of the movement were Richard Mellon Scaife, whose ancestors founded Mellon banking and Gulf Oil; Harry and Lynde Bradley, John M. Olin in ­chemicals and munitions, the Coors and De Vos families, and the oil magnates Charles and David Koch. The goals for former Libertarian presidential candidate Charles Koch were outlined in a paper given at a 1976 Koch-­ sponsored conference held by the Center for Libertarian Studies in

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New  York City. In that paper, Koch used the John Birch Society as a model for future libertarian organizations, critiquing the Society’s shortcomings but detailing its many strengths, which Libertarians could build on: keeping the structure and direction of the organization as secret as possible, making use of the latest “sales and motivation techniques to raise money and attract donors,” such as meeting in homes or other places where donors are comfortable, cultivating the media and arts communities, and focusing much of their work on “attracting youth.” Other speakers reinforced the notion of focusing their attention on young people, actually using the Nazi youth movement as a positive example, and emphasized courting prestigious universities through private funding in which, among other things, libertarians might be able to exert some control over hiring decisions. Two years later, Koch was even more explicit about his goals, “Our movement must destroy the prevalent statist paradigm” (Mayer 2016, 55–6, 3). The efforts of this newly galvanized reactionary faction proceeded in four ways to revolutionize all three branches of government. First and foremost, corporations significantly increased their lobbying in Washington: “The number of corporations with public affairs offices in Washington grew from 100 in 1968 to over 500 in 1978. In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in Washington, but by 1982, nearly 2,500 did” (Hacker and Pierson 2010, 118). The Business Roundtable, the first formal organization consisting exclusively of top corporate CEOs as a lobby with close connections to politicians, was founded in 1972. Moreover, the Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business doubled their memberships between 1974 and 1980, and the Chamber of Commerce tripled its budget. Members of the Reactionary Right also repurposed or founded a number of influential conservative policy institutes. William Baroody, the executive vice-president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), founded in 1938, a generally conservative organization but sympathetic to New Deal programs that often co-sponsored projects with the liberal Brookings Institute, was so alarmed at McGovern’s proposal for a guaranteed income and Nixon’s wholesale embrace of a large regulatory welfare state, that he began to remake the institute into a haven for “neo-conservatives.” Baroody brought in mainstream politicians from the Ford administration, such as Arthur Burns and Antonia Scalia; and intellectuals such as Irving Kristol, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak, and Ben Wattenberg. In 1973, Paul Weyrich, Edwin Feulner, and Joseph Coors founded the

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Heritage Foundation, funded by Coors and oil company executives Edward Noble and Richard Mellon Scaife, in order to provide policy makers with position papers promoting conservative policies (Hacker and Pierson 2010, 123–4). The following year Charles Koch funded the Cato Institute, with its mission to promote “public policies based on the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.” All of these institutes and foundations were quickly funded by major corporations, which could keep their contributions secret because non-profit groups were not legally required to reveal the names of donors. And so, these new think tanks could sell themselves as a safe way for corporations to influence policy without causing any scandal. However, the authors of a study of the papers of Clare Booth Luce, a supporter of the Heritage Foundation, discovered a letter which listed the foundation’s sponsors. On the list were 20 companies from the Fortune 500, including such well-­ known names as Amoco, Amway, Dow Chemical, General Electric, General Motors, Philip Morris, Proctor and Gamble, Sears and Roebuck, and Union Carbide (Mayer 2016, 88–9). Together, these reactionary institutes sponsored major campaigns promoting the ideas of freedom, liberty, small government, and lower taxes in order to make the very idea of truly representative democracy and “collective action” by people not part of the political directorate seem even more un-American. This right-wing propaganda contributed to the already existing idea of American individualism and pushed the idea of individualism to the limit, creating an image of the ideal society as a collection of individual social atoms in a large nebulous middle class, rather than as members of a working class with a collective identity with some degree of agency. These institutes were so successful at shaping public opinion that by the early 1980s public opinion polls indicated that, for the first time in history, the American public distrusted government more than it did business (Judis 2001, 129). But several of these institutes also had more specific aims: The Heritage Foundation spun off the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to promote conservative policies among state legislatures; the Olin Foundation began a wide-ranging program to sponsor conservative fellowships, chairs, and institutes in universities; the Koch Brothers founded Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) to promote lower taxes, less regulation, and less government spending, and in the early 1990s sponsored a re-enactment of the Boston Tea Party that laid the groundwork for the Tea Party Movement in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

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Ironically, the Reactionary Right also adopted an electoral tactic from labor and increased the number and size of right-wing-oriented Political Action Committees (PACs). This was ironic because the very idea of PACs had been initiated by the CIO in the 1940s, when it set up a committee to do political advocacy because the union itself was banned from doing so. Arguing that CIO-PAC was not part of the union, even though the union had complete control over the PAC, the CIO used the PAC to give publicity to candidates friendly to labor. The idea caught on and other unions quickly followed (Winkler 2018, 322). Corporations did not seriously begin to compete with the union PACs until the mid-1970s, when a number of corporations risked violating the Federal Election Campaign rules passed by Congress in 1974 to supplement the original 1971 act. The new rules restricted the amount of money both contributed to candidates and spent by those candidates. Conservative and libertarian politicians, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and a host of other plaintiffs challenged the law in the District Court of Washington, D.C., and when they lost, they appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. Their argument was that limiting money in politics violated the First and Fifth Amendments, their rights to free speech and due process. In 1976, the Supreme Court in the case of Buckley v. Veleo upheld the law’s limits on individual contributions but struck down any and all limits on the total amount of money that could be spent on campaigns, thus encouraging multiple donors across the political spectrum to flood campaigns with money. The Buckley decision revolutionized political campaigning in America because it made appealing to donors to raise money a more important aspect of seeking political office rather than seeking the support of a broad range of constituents and focusing on issues. As a result of the Buckley decision, in the ten years after the Supreme Court’s verdict, PACs sponsored by labor increased from 224 to 261, but corporate and trade association PACs increased from 992 to 2182. These corporate and trade association PACs outspent labor PACs by two or three to one (Hacker and Pierson 2010, 171). Corporate and trade association PACs focused their spending on funding Republican candidates, using cultural issues to pry working-class Democrats away from their traditional affiliation with candidates supported by organized labor. In the 1978 ­mid-­term elections, for example, campaign contributions to Democrat candidates from corporate PACs significantly decreased as the election progressed. During the primaries, Democrat candidates received about half of all corporate contributions, while on the Republican side, the

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money went to helping business-friendly Republicans compete against more moderate candidates. Just before the general election, corporate donors decreased their support to Democrats to only 29 percent. For the general election, corporate PACs spent more than 60 percent of their money on Republican candidates (Vogel 1989, 209–10). Finally, and perhaps of most consequence, the Reactionary Right funded conservative legal institutes. In 1977, the Chamber of Commerce established the National Chamber Litigation Center with its motto, “In the Case of The Government v. Business, NCLC is Your Strongest Ally.” The NCLC is now the most the country’s most influential legal advocate for business, filing cases and amicus briefs “seeking to restrict class actions, limit punitive damages, curtail environmental regulation,” and winning 70 percent of its cases before the Supreme Court (Winkler 2018, 322). In 1984, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, which grew out of a symposium sponsored by three conservative students from Yale and the University of Chicago in 1982, was founded to promote “originalist” interpretations of the Constitution, interpretations based on “the original understanding of the authors and ratifiers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” rather than on the “biases and policy preferences” of judges (Meese 2005). Of course, determining the “common” understanding of a large group of men riven by competing factions but committed to forging language acceptable to a majority is a difficult, if not an impossible task, and members of the Federalist Society pride themselves on the diversity of their views on how judges can discover such understandings. The two most straightforward theories argue that judges should attempt to determine a common “intention” among the authors of the Constitution or to determine what the words of the Constitution meant at the time it was written. Both of these theories do not address the fact that much of interpreting the law depends less on the circumstances that determined early precedents but finding the precedent that is most analogous to the current circumstance. The Federalist Society prides itself on taking no official stands on these issues, creating the impression that its members do not have an agreed-upon ideological agenda. However, Steven Calabresi (2007, 39–40), one of the three students who organized the symposium that led to the founding of the society and who is now a professor of law at Northwestern University, later admitted that the supposed independent scholarship of the Federalist Society should promote certain consequences. Those consequences include the right to read the Bible and pray in public schools, the abolition of abortion, the need for a

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strong executive branch with a “limited” bureaucracy, and above all, the core value that in political campaigns, there should be no limits on what individuals can contribute to candidates for public office. In other words, Calabresi believes that “originalist” interpretations of the Constitution entitle rich donors to have greater access to their elected officials than those who are less affluent, thereby limiting the voices of the poor and working class, that as we saw in the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision, money is speech, a bizarre interpretation of the First Amendment considering how concerned the Framers were about the corruption of money and gifts in politics (see Teachout 2014, 232–37). Equally bizarre is the decision in Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby that “closely-held corporations” are like “persons” in that they can have religious beliefs and are thus protected from laws requiring insurance companies to provide coverage for contraception. Both decisions illustrate the ideology behind the supposed neutrality of the Federalist Society’s “originalist” interpretive schemes: rich donors are entitled to have greater agency in order to influence government policy than the less affluent, and certain kinds of corporations have “collectivist” rights; labor unions do not. The Federalist Society was quickly funded by a number of right-wing organizations which saw the potential to influence the judiciary: the Institute for Educational Affairs, the Scaife Foundation, the Olin Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the Deer Creek Foundation. Within a year, the Society’s budget was more than $1 million (Kruse 2018). The society grew to have divisions devoted to law students, law faculty, and working lawyers, providing mentors for young lawyers and a network of supporting colleagues to such an extent that no one can be nominated for any post in the federal judiciary system during a Republican administration, without the approval of the Society. Indeed, the Society quickly became an adversary of the American Bar Association, which as a service to the executive branch had vetted nominees being considered for lifetime appointment in the federal judiciary since the Eisenhower administration. Every federal judge appointed by President George H. W. Bush and his son were either members of the Society or approved by the group, and the administration of George H. W. Bush went so far as to abolish the practice of having the American Bar Association rank nominees to the federal judiciary. Now Republican presidents informally consult only with the Federalist Society on these matters, so that the professional judgment of the legal profession as a whole has no significant public voice in debates over nominees to the federal judiciary, making it difficult for the general

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public to see how the entire federal judiciary system is being manipulated by right-wing interests.11 The new activism by right-wing elites was quickly felt during the first years of the Carter administration. Because Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, the Carter Administration quickly introduced two bills that had been passed during the previous administration only to be vetoed by President Ford. One bill created a $15-million Office of Consumer Representation to consolidate all consumer issues and coordinate policy-making in a single agency, an idea that was favored by the public by a ratio of two to one. The other bill, the Common Situs Picketing Bill, legalized the right of workers to picket an entire construction site over a grievance filed against a single contractor. However, the newly energized business community organized such an intense attack against both bills that they both suffered ignominious defeats. House Speaker Tip O’Neill said that the lobbying effort against Office of Consumer Representation Bill was the most intense he had ever seen (Congressional 1978), an extensive operation orchestrated by the business community to discredit the bill as “a massive expansion of government authority,” mobilizing constituents to bombard their representatives with telephone calls, letters, and personal visits and targeting moderate Democrats for defeat in the next election, especially those in suburban districts that often voted Republican. The defeat of the Picketing Bill and a later bill revising the Landrum-­ Griffin Act to streamline procedures and accelerate decisions by the National Labor Relations Board, caused United Auto Workers leader Douglas Fraser to resign from President Carter’s Labor-Management Group, whose purpose was to foster improved industrial relations. In his resignation letter, Frasier said this: “I believe leaders of the business community, with few exceptions, have chosen to wage a one-sided class war… against working people… and even many in the middle class of our society…. At virtually every level, I discern a demand by business for docile government and unrestrained corporate individualism. Where industry once yearned for subservient unions, it now wants no unions at all” (qtd. in Zinn and Arnove 2009, 530–33; Hacker and Pierson 2010, 131–2). These defeats of Democrats in a Congress they controlled forced the party to recognize that they needed to court business more effectively, and over the next 20 years, Democrats began to cater to the business interests in their state and districts: for example, supporting a repeal of the estate tax if their districts contained families with large fortunes, or opposing any

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restrictions on the stock options available to CEOs if their districts contained tech companies. Perhaps the most prolific Democrat fund-raiser in this new era of right-wing dominance of the political directorate was “New Democrat” Chuck Schumer of New  York. As a congressman during the five election cycles from 1989 to 1998, Schumer raised $2.5 million for his own campaign in contributions from securities and investment firms, triple that of his Republican opponent (Hacker and Pierson 2010, 230, 239–40). In addition, Democrats became extremely leery about promoting any programs that might result in increased taxes or “larger” government because of the success of Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Norquist had founded Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) in 1985, supposedly at the suggestion of President Reagan, to help prepare the ground for Reagan’s revenue neutral tax-cut bill in 1986. The announced purpose of the organization was to reduce the amount of government revenues as a percentage of GDP; that is, to shrink the size of government at all levels by only supporting candidates who would oppose any and all tax increases. ATR gave birth to an anti-tax mania in the Republican Party whose first “success” was the defeat of Republican President George H. W. Bush for re-election. ATR mercilessly criticized Bush because he had not kept the promise he made during his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in 1988: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Republican candidates quickly got the message: ATR would be ruthless in supporting anti-tax candidates, even if it meant helping Democrats such as Bill Clinton win the presidency. ATR’s next major success was the defeat of President Clinton’s signature health-care program, a program he had made a major issue in his election campaign to defeat Bush. Clinton’s proposal required every citizen to enroll in a qualified health plan offered through businesses with more than 5000 full-time employees, the government providing subsidies to those too poor to afford coverage and pay the entire bill for those below a certain income level. All this required a larger bureaucracy, a host of new regulations, and the threat of higher taxes, and was not helped by the secrecy in which the program was put together. Needless to say, the Republican assault on the bill focused on its increasing the size of government, the possible lack of choice in care, and the likelihood of tax increases, and congressional Democrats, now shy of supporting any controversial legislation, confused the issue by offering a host of competing plans. In the end, all versions of Clinton’s initial proposal lacked support from both Republicans and Democrats.

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Republicans went on to make the 1994 mid-term elections a “referendum on big government,” which led to what is now called the “Republican Revolution,” headed by Newt Gingrich. The 1994 mid-term elections gave the GOP control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time since the mid-1950s. After his historic, calamitous defeat in the midterm elections. Clinton admitted privately to his aides, “We’re all Eisenhower Republicans… We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn’t that great?” (Woodward 1994, 161). But in his admission Clinton was not considering the fortunes of the working class that his party had abandoned. Having lost any agency to influence or control their immediate working conditions, with their unions dedicated only to wages and benefits, and bombarded with reactionary propaganda about the glories of freedom and responsibility that denigrated collective action, working people found it more difficult than ever to think of themselves in class terms and as having any agency in the political process. * * * The only other way Americans have expressed some semblance of “collectivist” class consciousness is by joining large cross-class social movements that oppose some aspect of elite rule. These social movements for equality under the law for African Americans, women, and gays and lesbians were often supported across class lines, but because national labor unions had long agreed to keep anti-discrimination statutes out of labor legislation in order to protect segregated locals, these social revolutions arose as union membership and effectiveness declined. Equality under the law came to mean that everyone, regardless of gender, race, or sexual orientation, could compete for some aspects of the good life, but as Jefferson Cowie rightly notes (2010, 240), the new emphasis on “inclusion, identity, and diversity… tended to allow jobs, pay, and labor rights to fall out of the equation, leaving workers with a set of individual rights to non-­ discrimination amidst a more brutal economy—a multi-cultural neo-­ liberalism.” The politics of “diversity” encouraged white men to define themselves in opposition to women and minorities and the general population to think even less of the working class as a coherent group, worthy of consideration in larger social and economic issues. The social movements dedicated to inclusion were very important and vital to making America more equal and democratic. Although participation in social movements is not necessarily based on a knowledge of the

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dynamics of capitalism or an awareness of the “broad outlines of the class struggle and where one fits into it,” such participation does promote feelings of solidarity and a hostility toward specific aspects of elite rule that have been obstacles to the goals the social movement demands. In addition, participation in social movements can provide its participants with “a vision of a more democratic and egalitarian society that is not only possible but that one can help bring about.” Participation in social movements, then, may be as close to class consciousness as most Americans get. However, the social movements dedicated to inclusion that arose in the late decades of twentieth-century America ignored the fact that economic issues became increasingly more important to voters as the century progressed. Gallup surveys indicate that between 1946 and 1972, voters chose the economy as “the most important problem” facing the country one-sixth of the time; between 1973 and 2004, that number shot up to three-quarters of the time (Smith 2007, 65). In addition, surveys also indicated that most Americans, including bare majorities of Republicans and high-income earners, thought that “differences in income in America are too large” and that “the money and wealth in this country should be more evenly distributed among a larger percentage of the people.” For all Americans, between 68 and 72 percent supported both propositions (Page and Jacobs 2009, 44). Despite all of the accomplishments of the various social movements in the late-twentieth-century America, no movement arose to confront the severe economic inequality in America and the lack of representation for the poor and working class. * * * As far as I know, there are no political novels during the post-war period whose characters exhibit reactionary ruling-class consciousness, and in many ways, this is perfectly understandable. The rise of the Reactionary Right did not become evident in the public media until the “Republican Revolution” during the Clinton administration. Nevertheless, the psychological distance of the four novelists in this study from the working class and their isolation from the major social trends of the period may be a synecdoche for the isolation of most factions in our ruling elite from the rest of the country. To a large degree, significant numbers of America’s ruling elites in the late-twentieth century, no matter what faction they represented or their degree of ruling-class consciousness, governed as if the working class did not exist.

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Notes 1. See Divine and Savage (2005, 10–12) for a history of theories of class consciousness, and Divine (2005, 142–46) for a history of the study of the nature of class consciousness. For an argument that Americans are more class conscious than has been generally recognized, see Vanneman and Cannon (1987). 2. This view is reiterated by Gibson-Graham et  al. (2000, 9) and William Dow (2009, 6). 3. One subset of working-class literature is proletarian literature, which is devoted, Bill Mullen says, to “a class-conscious or Marxist approach to themes that have shaped American literature from 19th-century realism and naturalism forward to contemporary multiculturalism: the individual versus the collective, the impact of race, gender, and sexuality on identity, labor, and work conditions, and the problem of upward mobility.” See especially Foley (1993) for a defense of proletarian literature as a sophisticated genre in regards to aesthetics and politics. 4. Schocket (2006, 14) resists the trend toward treating class as a matter of personal identity and instead defines class as a process of ongoing, historically contingent exploitation, which is understood in part by the way this exploitation is “constructed” in fiction. 5. To Ollman’s basic categories, Michael Mann (1973, 13) adds the concept of “totality” as a bridge between opposing another class and conceiving of an alternative society. To Mann, in order to make the leap toward conceiving an alternative society, workers need to realize that their own class status is a synecdoche for all of society, that their oppression is inherent in society as a whole. 6. For a brief history of the elite formation of the American governmental structure, see Higley and Burton (2006, 109–14). 7. Rather confusingly, Aronowitz (2003, 11) calls these social formations “class formations,” or as he puts it, “class occurs when insurgent social formations(s) make demands that cleave society and engender new social and cultural relations.” This usage, however, ignores the traditional distinctions among classes in the standard taxonomies of economic and social ­status, and so I will refer to what Aronowitz calls “class formations” as social movements that often cross class lines. 8. See Fink (1983) for a history of the Knights of Labor. 9. For a summary of these surveys, see Lipsitz (1994, 230–33). 10. See also Lipset, Trow, and Coleman (1956) on the International Typesetter’s Union as an example of a union that kept local control as long as it could—until the early twentieth century. 11. For a full history of the right-wing attempt to dominate the federal judicial system, see McGlaughlin and Avery (2013).

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References Aronowitz, Stanley. 1973. False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness. Rev. ed. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2003. How Class Works: Power and Social Movement. New Haven: Yale University Press. Brody, David. 1980. Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth-­ Century Struggle. New York: Oxford University Press. Calabresi, Steven G. 2007. Introduction. In Originalism: A Quarter-Century of Debate, ed. Steven G. Calabresi, 1–40. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing. Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report. 1978. Carter Dealt Major Defeat on Consumer Bills. February 11. Cowie, Jefferson. 2010. Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. New York: New Press. Davis, Mike. 1986. The Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U. S. Working Class. London: Verso. Divine, Fiona. 2005. Middle Class Identities in the United States. In Devine et al. (2005), 140–62. Divine, Fiona, and Mike Savage. 2005. The Cultural Turn, Sociology and Class Analysis. In Devine et al. (2005), 1–23. Divine, Fiona, et al., eds. 2005. Rethinking Class, Culture, Identities, and Lifestyles. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dow, William. 2009. Narrating Class in American Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Eaton, Walter H. 1952. Hypotheses Relating to Worker Frustration. Journal of Social Psychology 35 (1): 69–58. Fantasia, Rick. 1989. Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary Workers. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Fink, Leon. 1983. Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knight of Labor and American Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Foley, Barbara. 1993. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. Durham: Duke University Press. Gandal, Keith. 2007. Class Representations in Modern Fiction and Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gibson-Graham, J.K., Stephen A.  Resnick, and Richard D.  Wolff. 2000. Introduction: Class in a Poststructuralist Frame. In Class and Its Others, ed. J.K.  Gibson-Graham, Stephen A.  Resnick, and Richard D.  Wolff, 1–22. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1980. The Class Structure of Advanced Societies. London: Hutchinson. Hacker, Jacob S., and Paul Pierson. 2010. Winner-Take-All Politics. New  York: Simon & Schuster.

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Hapke, Laura. 2001. Labor’s Text: The Worker in American Fiction. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Higley, John, and Michel Burton. 2006. Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Hochschild, Jennifer L. 1981. What’s Fair: American Beliefs About Distributive Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hodgson, Godfrey. 1976. America in Our Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jackman, Mary R., and Robert W. Jackman. 1983. Class Awareness in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press. Janowitz, Anne. 1994. Class and Literature: The Case for Romantic Chartism. In Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations, ed. Wai Chee Dimcock and Michael T. Gilmore, 239–266. New York: Columbia University Press. Jones, Gareth Stedman. 1984. Languages of Class: Studies in Working Class History, 1832–1882. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Judis, John. 2001. The Paradox of American Democracy. New York: Routledge. Kahl, Joseph A., and Kingsly Davis. 1957. The American Class Structure. New York: Rinehart. Kessler-Harris, Alice. 1987. Trade Unions Mirror Society in Conflict Between Collectivism and Individualism. Monthly Labor Review 110 (8): 32–36. Kruse, Michael. 2018. The Weekend at Yale That Changed American Politics. Politico Magazine, September/October. Lipset, Seymour Martin, Martin Trow, and James S.  Coleman. 1956. Union Democracy. New York: Free Press. Lipsitz, George. 1994. Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Mann, Michael. 1973. Consciousness and Action Among the Western Working Class. London: Macmillan. Mayer, Jane. 2016. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Doubleday. McGlaughlin, Danielle, and Michael Avery. 2013. The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Meese, Edwin, III. 2005. The Case for ‘Originalism.’ Heritage Foundation, June 6. https://www.heritage.org/commentary/the-case-originalism Michels, Robert. 1958. Political Parties. Glencoe: Free Press. Moody, Kim. 1999. The Dynamics of Change. In The Transformations of U. S. Unions: Voices, Visions, and Strategies from the Grass Roots, edited by Ray M. Tillman and Michael S. Cummings, 97–115. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Mullen, Bill. Proletarian Literature. Oxford Bibliographies On-line. http:// www. ox for dbi b l i o g ra h i es.c o m / vi e w / o b o -9780199827251/ obo9780199827251-0130.xml

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Ollman, Bertell. 1993. Dialectical Investigations. New York: Routledge. https:// www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/di_ch01.php Page, Benjamin I., and Lawrence R. Jacobs. 2009. Class War? What Americans Really Think About Economic Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Phelps-Fein, Kim. 2009. Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan. New York: Norton. Rothman, Robert A. 1978. Inequality and Stratification in the United States. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Schocket, Eric. 2006. Vanishing Moments: Class and American Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Smith, Mark A. 2007. The Right Talk: How Conservatives Transformed the Great Society into the Economic Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stagner, Ross. 1950. Psychological Aspects of Industrial Conflict II: Motivation. Personnel Psychology 3 (1): 1–15. Teachout, Zepher. 2014. Corruption in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, E.P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Pantheon. Vanneman, Reeve, and Lynn Weber Cannon. 1987. The American Perception of Class. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Vogel, David. 1989. Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America. New York: Basic Books. Wilentz, Sean. 1986. Chants Democratic: New  York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850. New York: Oxford University Press. Winkler, Adam. 2018. We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights. New York: Liveright. Woodward, Bob. 1994. The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House. New York: Simon & Schuster. Zinn, Howard, and Anthony Arnove. 2009. Voices of a People’s History of the United States. 2nd ed. New York: Seven Stories.

CHAPTER 3

Elite Theory and the American Political Directorate

There have been no literary studies of class that focus on the representation of America’s ruling elites, or the ways they exercise and maintain their power, especially in relation to such issues as inequality and social justice. Analyses of class in the literature about the rich—for example, in the critical work on F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, and Louis Auchincloss—do not in any way offer a framework for considering how the upper classes become members of the ruling elite and how they conduct the nation’s business. In order to understand how our four novelists portray America’s ruling elite in the last half of the twentieth century, we need a theoretical basis for understanding the ruling elite that goes beyond Marxism. Marx of course argued that the basis of upper-class rule was economic, that the class controlling the means of production controls the larger state. To Marx, groups of people only become conscious of themselves as a class when they become aware of their similarities in conflict with an opposing class, and groups involved in these conflicts should work toward an ideal in which divisions between classes are abolished. But Marx is notoriously vague about his ideal classless society and how it would operate. In the early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx (1956) paints a picture of a classless society composed of individuals who would be able to control their destinies in equality with others, liberated from the tyranny of the old social arrangements: the stifling bureaucracy of the state, the oppression of capital and technology. They would be productive rather than merely acquisitive and find cooperation more satisfying than competition. In the © The Author(s) 2019 D. Smit, Power and Class in Political Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26769-8_3

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later German Ideology, Marx with his colleague Frederick Engels (1964) expanded on this vision: freed from the constraints of class and personal occupations, individuals would participate as fully as possible in a larger group deciding issues of social importance. Here Marx and Engel’s model seems to be the Paris Commune, a government of municipal councilors chosen by the people, responsible to the people, and capable of being replaced quickly if they ran into problems, all public workers receiving the same wages. Classes having been abolished, the classless society would no longer have a “division of labor,” no division between owners and nonowners, and no division between manual and intellectual work. Everyone would do multiple tasks, “production as a whole regulated by society.” Marx and Engel’s example in German Ideology (1964, 44–5) is extremely romantic: any individual could do one thing today and another tomorrow, hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening, criticizing social relations after dinner, all at the individual’s inclinations, “without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” However, in the first volume of Capital, Marx (1887) was more realistic, arguing that the revolution would produce more “fully developed individuals,” capable of performing multiple activities through the establishment of technical schools. Here at least Marx admits that individuals would need to be trained in some way to fulfill such a broad range of social roles. Consistently Marx’s vision of a classless society seems to oppose the very idea of a functional elite, even one based on merit. His ideal seems to be a society in which everyone would participate both in organizing and planning society and in carrying out the everyday tasks of that society. To Marx, a classless society by definition cannot include divisions of labor. It is no surprise then, that in the first decades of the twentieth century, a number of social theorists rejected Marx’s ideal society as unattainable and began to articulate the requirements for well-functioning modern democracies. In these theories, now called Elite Theory, I find a useful framework with which to analyze fictional portrayals of America’s political directorate.

A Brief History of Elite Theory As I noted in Chap. 2, during the second decade of the twentieth century, roughly at the same time as the Russian Revolution, German sociologist Robert Michels (1962) articulated the “iron law of oligarchy”: that the governance of all modern social organizations from political parties and labor unions to entire governments require an expert elite with the necessary

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knowledge and skill to work in the specialized divisions of labor required in such hierarchical organizations. Michels evolved his famous law by studying labor unions and working-class social movements and concluded that even these groups required an elite to run them. However, the elites who governed working-class institutions tended in the long run to abandon their constituencies’ causes in favor of their own interests. Thus, to Michels, the Marxist ideal of direct rule by a classless society or a society controlled by the working class was impossible. A ruling elite was a “tactical and technical” necessity in order for any modern organization to consolidate and channel power effectively. Michel’s theory complemented the work of two Italian theorists who assumed, as Michels did, that because of the complexity of modern societies, social organizations must be dominated by an educated or expert elite. Vilfredo Pareto (1935) divided the ruling elite into two major groups: those who rule by controlling the popular imagination through the use of language and ideology and those who rule by sheer force. Interestingly, Pareto thought that the second group most clearly reflected the will of the masses, who understood force and preferred a stable political order. Still, Pareto argued that in democracies, elites who ruled through promulgating an ideology were dominant and maintained their legitimacy by constantly regenerating themselves, primarily by accepting “vigorous” families from the lower classes. In addition, according to Pareto, in many modern democracies, especially the United States, elites maintained their power through “machine politics,” catering to the interests of factions and cliques, in effect, buying them off. Like Pareto, Gaetano Mosca (1939), a political scientist, argued that as modern societies became more complex, “political elites” would be necessary and would have to maintain their hold on power by finding ever-new ways to recruit new members into the elite in new circumstances. In the past, Mosca argued, elites were based on tradition, religious affiliation, or clan structure, but modern societies need different criteria to recruit people into the administrative bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the military. Mosca also emphasized that representative democracies were not truly democratic but the means by which a ruling elite offered voters a limited range of policy options to choose from, and that the most effective democracies achieved a balance between the specialization required for elite rule and the general interests of the larger public. To Mosca, a balance was also required for sufficient “cooperation and reciprocal control” between elected officials, who were accountable to the people, and bureaucrats, who were not.

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These three pioneers of Elite Theory concluded that ruling elites then are not primarily owners of the “means of production” but those whose specialized expertise and experience are required for modern corporate and bureaucratic life.1 Even a radically ideal, egalitarian and socially just society in the modern world would require a ruling elite. Thomas Dye (2002, 3) sums up early Elite Theory and applies it to the United States: “the elitist character of American society is not a product of political conspiracy, capitalist exploitation, or any specific malfunction of democracy. All societies are elitist.”2

Contemporary American Elite Theory Contemporary elite theorists usually agree on a number of common tenets in describing the roles of the ruling elite in modern societies, all of them variations on earlier ideas articulated by Michels, Pareto, and Mosca: • Ruling elites are indeed based on class. America’s ruling elite is composed almost entirely of white men who are members of the upper or upper-middle class. • The legitimacy of ruling elites and the effectiveness of their control depends on two major factors: (1) their embodying in some sense the aspirations, values, and ways of life appreciated by those below them in the class system and (2) their being open to new members from outside the elite. They must avoid the impression that the system exists simply to keep them in power. • Ruling elites promote both consciously and unconsciously an ideology that justifies their existence as a ruling elite, primarily through their control and manipulation of the national media. In the United States, the ruling elite being open to new members involves the following: • The recruitment of new members with the talent and accomplishments necessary to succeed in the elite, talents and accomplishments generally associated with “occupational prestige” in civic life, business, or the military—occupations that require an ability “to manage, to direct, or to command”—and “the accumulation of wealth”: “the best predictor of the amount of power and responsibility a

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­ erson has is the amount he recently had” (Prewitt and Stone 1973, p 138–39, 143). • New members identifying with the upper class rather than with their own class or those below them on the socio-economic ladder or being similar in status, background, and ideology to some faction of the elite who would give them access. • New members being sufficiently assertive, aggressive, and ambitious in their desire to join the elite, qualities associated with members of the upper class, who have the appropriate role models, the requisite education, and the access to careers known to be stepping stones to power: business, finance, and the law. And to justify their existence, American ruling elites promote the following ideologies: • The sacredness of the American Constitution and America’s political and economic system as a particular vision of democracy, representative government, and lightly regulated capitalism that equates the status quo as the essence of the “idea” of America, thus making problematic any thought of changing or modifying these systems. • What Kenneth Burke calls “God terms”: America’s God terms being freedom, liberty, democracy, the free market, and the American Dream; America as a light to the world, a city on a hill; America as the greatest nation on earth, all of which makes questioning any aspect of American institutions or unfavorable comparisons of America with the democratic and economic systems of other nations seem unpatriotic. • An emphasis on national security and foreign policy over domestic issues as the primary function of government, and in the process playing on fears of safety to distract the electorate from considering how well their interests are truly being represented: fearful, insecure people are easier to manipulate and control. • Maintaining through the media an image of themselves as embodying the aspirations and values of their constituents, ostensibly representing their interests and expressing “the will of the people,” sufficiently fulfilling the requirements of their offices and doing their constitutional or socially prescribed duties, thus disguising the fact

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that most of their governance involves competing for power among other factions of the political directorate rather than any consideration of the wishes or needs of the great majority of their constituents. • Maintaining the myth of America as a classless nation and accusing any proposals to limit the wealth of the elite or reduce inequality as “class warfare.” Central to a discussion of how elites exercise control and maintain the legitimacy of their rule are two key issues: whether the basis for elite power and influence resides in a “class” or an “elite,” and whether the upper class or the ruling elite, however we define these terms, functions as a unified group.

Class and the Elite The key question is whether our ruling elite is dominated by an upper class. The major theorist on the subject is E. Bigby Baltzell, who has conducted extensive historical studies of the evolution of those who run our nation. In a series of books Baltzell has convincingly shown that our ruling elite at the national level has traditionally been staffed by an upper class, but that the upper class is losing its grip, as it were, on power. In the process, Baltzell (1964, 7–8), following Pareto and Mosca, developed a theory that America is ruled by what he calls an aristocratic establishment; that is, “a community of upper-class families whose members are born to positions of high prestige and assured dignity because their ancestors have been leaders (elite members) for one generation or more,” “families [who] are carriers of a set of traditional values which command authority because they represent the aspirations of both the elite and the rest of the population.” Such ruling elites are “authoritative” because they set a standard for the rest of the culture, they live in ways that justify their authority, and they contribute their share to the leadership of the country. If our ruling elites are not models for the larger society and not open to new members, according to Baltzell, they become an “authoritarian” caste and lose legitimacy. Baltzell was extremely concerned that since the Civil War, America’s elite has been gradually becoming a caste system. Baltzell (1964, 74–5) argues that the American aristocracy has evolved in three stages since 1776. At first, the aristocracy was only open to white men, “regardless of ethnic origin,” including Catholics and a host of immigrant families, from

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Ireland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Poland. After the Civil War, the aristocracy became increasingly White-­ Anglo-­Saxon-Protestant (WASP) and less representative of the population as a whole; it managed to maintain its authority, but it drew less on “the pool of national talent which inevitably resides in all classes.” By the middle of the twentieth century, according to Baltzell, the WASP establishment was “forced to share its power while at the same time continuing to hoard its social privileges.” As a result, we now have “a caste-ridden, open-­ class society” in which women and minorities are accepted into the power structure but not granted sufficient status. Baltzell died in 1996 but did not update his theory to address the situation at the end of the twentieth century. Since the 1960s, the United States has gone through a number of social revolutions—the Civil Rights movement, the feminist revolution, the rise of multiculturalism, and the Gay Rights movement—all of which have fragmented the country and given rise, aided by new technology that has decentralized national media, to the polarization of politics. In our current culture, we may no longer have a consensus about what constitutes “traditional values which command authority,” values that represent the aspirations of the people as a whole, so it is questionable whether our ruling elite is as homogenous as Baltzell implied and whether in the long term any elite can embody a set of traditions and values common to a great majority of the population. However, Baltzell did account for the rise of the Civil Rights Movement as a challenge to elite white authority and we can view that movement as a synecdoche of the “revolutions” that followed. Richard Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff’s more recent studies seem to confirm Baltzell’s conclusion that our ruling elite is more open to new members but still caste-ridden. Zweigenhaft and Domhoff’s research shows that women and a wide range of minorities—Jews, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and gays and lesbians—are much more prevalent in the ruling elite than they used to be because of the pressure put on elites by the social movements of the past 50 years. But Zweigenhaft and Domhoff (2006, 246) argue that the increased presence of women and minorities in the power elite has had two ironic consequences. First, anecdotal evidence suggests that when women and minorities join the power elite, their “perspectives and values, their modes of operation and decision-making processes, do not differ markedly from those of their white male counterparts”; that is, they are not more sensitive to class differences and sympathetic to the working class and the poor than white men. And second, the inclusion

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of more women and minorities in the power elite seems to have become mere tokenism and allowed political leaders and the courts to shift the focus of social policy to individual rights and lessen the drive toward greater equality in income and wealth. Baltzell’s theory also provides a useful framework for understanding the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in 2016. From Baltzell’s point of view, Trump’s election may be an indication that American elites have identified more with elites in other cultures than with people beneath them on the social ladder in their own country. As a result, they have “hoarded their social privileges” not only by denying sufficient power to women and minorities but also by promoting the free movement of labor. As a result, they have emphasized immigration rather than the economic problems of middle- and working-class white people. Whether this is an adequate explanation for Trump’s becoming President or not, Baltzell would argue that providing a means for all groups in society to be represented in the ruling elite is the first step toward providing adequate solutions to the problems of every group in American life. The preponderance of evidence suggests that Baltzell’s aristocracy is not a single “upper class” but three groups at the top of the socioeconomic ladder: an upper-class that can be divided into two distinct groups, and an upper-middle class. The two groups that make up the upper class are people in families who have inherited their wealth and position from their ancestors, often going back many generations, even to the founding of the Republic, and those in the first generations of families who have more recently risen from their middle-class origins to top positions in business and the professions. Informally, these two groups are known by both scholars and members of the upper class themselves as Old Money and New Money. They can be distinguished not simply by when they achieved their wealth, but by a large number of other social indicators: members of Old Money are in the Social Register, attend private schools and join exclusive clubs, participate in the debutante season—a series of teas, parties, and dances that signal the arrival of young women into “adult society”—and they tend to socialize with and marry within their own class (Domhoff 2006, 34–37). The first generations of New Money do not share many of these social indicators: they themselves are not recognized in the Social Register; they have not gone to private schools, and although they may join certain clubs, those clubs will not be in the highest rank. However, depending on their status in the community, their children might be invited to debutante parties and if their children are bright, they

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may be accepted at the private schools that cater to the elite. It is quite possible for second-generation New Money to be fairly well integrated into the upper class, although older generations of Old Money may condescend to them to a certain degree. Many members of the upper class are very well aware of the class pecking order. Contrary to stereotypes, members of the upper class, both Old and New Money, work very hard, even when they are very rich. One study indicates that of the 90 richest men in 1950, only 26 percent were men living off their inheritances (Domhoff 2006, 37). Upper-class men tend to go into business, finance, and the law, but they are also represented in all the major professions. The women tend to be civic leaders and volunteers, writers and artists, editors and journalists, and academics, but they also value family life, often have three or more children, and arrange to be home when their children come home from school. True, a very small percentage of the upper class achieve a certain notoriety as jetsetters cavorting with European nobility and movie stars, as bohemian musicians and writers living in a sense “beneath their class,” or as outright failures, squandering their inheritances or succumbing to drugs and alcohol. But these are the exceptions. A solid majority of the upper class leads very traditional lives, and although they have enormous wealth to spend on anything they want—mansions, elaborate vacations, lavish parties—their day-to-day lives are devoted to the world of work. Because most of the upper class inherited their wealth, their families often going back many generations, they are also very concerned about carrying on traditions, maintaining their lineage, the family estate, and the family business, sending their children to the same schools that they attended, showcasing the heirlooms that connect them to their heritage. Dedicated as they usually are to work and community service, the upper class may not in public be distinguishable from the middle class with this one exception: the upper class, especially Old Money, is devoted to what Joseph Kahl and Kingsley Davis (1957, 191) call “the art of graceful living,” that is, the art of knowing how to spend money “‘properly,’ which means spending it almost as though it were unimportant.” Because they take money for granted, they consider it to be crude or boorish to display their wealth ostentatiously or even talk about it much, which in turn means that they have to be knowledgeable about and exhibit a certain kind of taste in such matters as real estate, art, music, history, and literature.3 Indeed, many members of Old Money can be quite outspoken about the burden of descending from an ancient lineage and distinguishing

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themselves from New Money. Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr., who can trace his ancestors back to the Revolutionary War, calls belonging to the upper class “Hemingway’s Curse.” Hemingway famously responded to F.  Scott Fitzgerald’s assertion that the rich are different from you and me, by saying, Yes, they have more money. But if we think that Hemingway is right, according to Aldrich (1989, 267, 269), then “Old Money has very little appeal to the American imagination of wealth” because the social life of Old Money is so depressingly limited. Most Americans think of their culture as a vibrant marketplace of producers and consumers, whether that work involves “ideas and artifacts and performances, candidacies and celebrities, lines of credit and bottom lines, goods and services.” To Aldrich, if members of Old Money contribute nothing of tangible value to the culture at large, if they can’t adequately answer the question from the stranger sitting next to them on the airplane, “What do you do for a living?” then they cannot justify themselves as a class. Thus, Old Money suffers the burden of needing to be a beacon to the rest of society, exemplifying “a more gracious, edifying, and socially responsible life” in order to justify its existence. Of course, Aldrich’s point here is very similar to Baltzell’s theory that the establishment maintains its power by representing the aspirations of those below them on the economic ladder. There is considerable evidence that Old Money is very aware of how it is different from New Money. Lewis Lapham (1988, 73–4), for many years the editor of Harper’s magazine and a relatively new member of Old Money—his great grandfather founded the oil company Texaco—is satirically eloquent in offering a long list of characteristics that distinguish Old Money from New Money. For example, people from Old Money, “certain of their prerogatives seek to appear no different from ordinary people, subject to the same desires, appetites, weakness and fears,” and so they wait “patiently in line at theaters and sporting events” because “they feel that this is somehow democratic, that by so doing they associate themselves, however briefly, with the lot of the common man.” Representatives of New Money, “all too familiar with those weaknesses and fears,” try “to put as much distance as possible between [themselves] and the small-time sorrows of economy class.” They insist on sitting at tables close to the band, and “at a charity ball they judge the evening a success in proportion to the number and quality of the celebrities on the dance floor.” Still, as Domhoff (2006, 37) points out, the upper class exhibits “both continuity and social mobility, with the newer members being assimilated into the life-style of the class through participation in the [same] schools,

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clubs, and other social institutions…. There may be some tensions between those newly arrived and those of established status, as novelists and journalists love to point out, but what they have in common soon outweighs their differences.” What distinguishes the upper-middle class from New Money or from the lower-middle class is a matter of degree concerning money, power, and prestige. Socially, what distinguishes the two levels of the middle class from each other is that members of the upper-middle class have careers and go into management or the professions. Members of the lower-­middle class have jobs in factories or offices, which are managed by members of the upper-middle class. Members of the upper-middle class are also professionals at the top of their professions, such as doctors or lawyers; highly placed in management positions in small corporations, or successful entrepreneurs owning their own small companies. In short, members of the upper-middle class have highly successful careers, but they are not as successful or influential as members of the upper class: they are not the CEOs or vice-presidents in the highest levels of the country’s major corporations; they are not lawyers in the county’s major corporate and political law firms; the businesses they own are not large or of national importance. Their power and influence tend to be local, at the state level or in smaller cities and towns. Upper-middle class members are highly educated and trained for their positions, but they have not graduated from prestigious prep schools and universities. They may live in expensive high-rise apartments in our major cities or in single-family homes in exclusive suburbs or gated communities, but not in the most prestigious apartment complexes or on landed estates like the upper classes. Still, given their wealth and success in their careers, the members of the upper-middle class have a good chance of joining the ruling elite themselves or having their children do so, especially if they are bright. Upper-middle class parents choose to live in upper-middle class neighborhoods comfortable with supporting good public schools, or they send their children to private schools. As a result, upper-middle class children are often as isolated from those below them in the social order as those upper-class children who go to exclusive prep schools in the East. One person who moved from the upper-middle class to the upper class is our current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts. Roberts’ father, a plant manager for Bethlehem Steel in Indiana, sent his son to private Catholic schools. Roberts’ dedication to his studies, especially in Latin and French, got him into Harvard University, where he graduated

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summa cum laude. He went on to law school at Harvard and was ­managing editor of the Law Review. In the spring of 2017, Roberts gave a speech to the graduating ninth-grade class of his son’s exclusive boarding school in New Hampshire, Cardigan Mountain School. Roberts’ speech is an indication that when members of the upper-middle class join the upper classes, they adopt their attitudes, manners, and values. In his speech, Roberts offered tips to the students about how to succeed in their next school, presumably schools such as Phillips Academy, Choate, or Deerfield. His major counsel was that the students should try to “appear no different from ordinary people.” He put it this way: I know you are good guys. But you are also privileged young men. And if you weren’t privileged when you came here, you are privileged now because you have been here. My advice is: Don’t act like it. When you get to your new school, walk up and introduce yourself to the person who is raking the leaves, shoveling the snow or emptying the trash. Learn their name and call them by their name during your time at the school. (qtd. in Reilly 2017)

Roberts’ advice is perilously close to Lapham’s satirical description of Old Money’s desire to “establish its genuine humanity” by appearing “no different from ordinary people.” According to Roberts, privileged students need not concern themselves with the lives of those who rake the leaves, shovel the snow, or empty the trash at their new school, the conditions of their employment, whether they are adequately compensated; indeed, whether they have the opportunities the students themselves have. Rather, privileged students should simply be pleasant to members of the working class. By joining the upper class, Roberts seems to have forgotten the workers at his father’s Bethlehem Steel plant and now, at least in his speech to the students of Cardigan Mountain School, does not consider the differences between his life and theirs to be worth thinking about. He gives no indication that issues of social justice have ever crossed his mind. Roberts’ speech also indicates how the ruling elite prepares its children and young people to take their place in the next generation of the elite. Upper-class children, like the middle-class children studied by Annette Lareau (2003), are intimately involved with adults outside the family at relatively early ages. They are given adult attention in a process Lareau calls “concerted cultivation”: interactions that introduce them to the adult world and certain social skills, which may be more important than anything they may learn from private lessons. Upper-class parents also send their

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children off to boarding school at an early age, schools known for promoting a sense of service to the country as a whole, for “giving back” to a country that has given them so much, a form of noblesse oblige. What upper-class young people learn in these prep schools and the select private universities they attend afterward may be less important than their becoming familiar with various social roles and learning to “envision” their taking on those roles. Dalton Conley (2008, 369) explains this “envisioning” process with a personal example. Conley himself was once given a tour of the White House, saw the Oval Office, and shook President Bill Clinton’s hand at a later reception, but he simply could not imagine himself sitting at the President’s desk and doing the President’s job. This had nothing to do with Conley’s intelligence, abilities, or qualifications: it was simply a failure of his imagination. In some sense, being the president of the United States was beyond his ability to even consider the idea. But, Conley speculates, George W. Bush—a man, Conley strongly implies, with fewer qualifications than he has—would have had “little trouble envisaging himself as president” given the fact that his father showed him how the job worked. This “inheritance of ‘possibility’ is… just as important as all the social and economic resources that George Bush Sr. (and his connections) provided his son. The presidency, for George W. Bush, was not a totally abstract idea. It was a job that people (and even relatives) did.” Neither elite prep schools nor elite private universities require any sustained critical analysis of the ideologies that produce ruling-class consciousness; and so, most upper-class students are only vaguely aware, if they are aware at all, of how their class status is dependent on keeping the working class from full participation in our political and economic systems. This lack of education and training is reinforced by the ruling elite’s limited experiences with those below them in the social hierarchy, and the fact that most of the people from the lower classes they meet tend to want to share their values, their lifestyle, to be like them. Because of their privilege and lack of training, they simply never learn to be critical of the systems in which they operate. They epitomize the totalizing vision of a ruling elite that precludes any systematic thought about the nature of the system itself, its bias toward the status quo that grants power to a relatively small percentage of the population and ensures that inequality is an inherent characteristic of the system. Although these generalizations about the ruling elite apply to the major characters in the novels I am about to discuss, they are obviously not representative of the ruling elite as a whole. Many members of the Trump

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Administration, including the President himself, Speaker Paul Ryan, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell exhibit a fully developed form of ruling-class consciousness that is explicitly ideological and focused on maximizing their wealth, power, and influence at the expense of other government factions and the lower classes. Speaker Ryan’s commitment to the philosophy of Ayn Rand and his life-long commitment to maximizing tax cuts for the rich under any and all economic conditions while trying to destroy the social safety net, is a good example. As far as I know, there are no studies indicating the degree of ideological fervor of the various factions of the ruling elite, but the fact that we consider the Trump administration to be something of an anomaly in the history of American government may indicate that the portrayal of the ruling elite in the novels of Vidal, Drury, Didion, and Just is more representative of the elite as a whole than the Trump administration is. There is a broad consensus among elite theorists that America’s ruling elite is primarily composed of the three groups—Old Money, New Money, and the upper-middle class—at the top of the country’s socio-economic system.4 Still, three issues remain: the proportion of the various classes among the elite, how or in what sense they exercise power, and the extent to which they do so in a unified way.

Power Following Thomas Dye, I understand “power” to be an attribute of social roles, rather than of individuals. As Dye (2002, 4) puts it, “[P]ower is not so much the act of control as the potential to act—the social expectation that such control is possible and legitimate.” Elites, then, are those people who work in social institutions with high social status: the four circles of government I mentioned in the introduction. Dye describes these elites as working in the government at various levels, either as elected officials or as member of the bureaucracy; in public interest groups, such as foundations and think tanks; in corporations and banks; and in the mass media and the law; they exercise authority in these institutions by directing and managing “programs, policies, and activities” with consequences for society as a whole. Clearly, a certain amount of power can be exercised by individuals and groups more informally than by participating in major social institutions. Individual citizens can lobby their congressman to help rectify a personal injustice they have suffered. Small groups can spontaneously organize to

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boycott products or manufacturers. To say nothing about the way the course of history has been altered by lone assassins murdering heads of state or the exemplary behavior of people in times of social unrest who have influenced future generations: the Mother Theresas and Martin Luther Kings of this world. But in general, power is not a function of the personal qualities of individuals: their charisma, their persuasive or lobbying skills, and their dedication or commitment. Neither is it inherently a function of wealth or celebrity. A wealthy billionaire comfortably living his life on a huge estate, uninterested in interacting with the rest of the world, may benefit from the power exercised by others in positions of authority who work to limit taxes on the rich or provide tax breaks for business and investment, but the billionaire himself exercises little power at all, unless he contributes to organizations dedicated to what Jeffrey Winters and Benjamin Page (2009, 733) call the defense of property and income, policies designed to avoid “confiscation by force” or “legal redistribution of otherwise secure private property.” Celebrities have power and influence only so long as they have access to the media: television, film, and the internet. Absent any formal relationship with these institutions of power, celebrities are reduced to small clubs, local theaters, and endless auditions simply to maintain a living. Individuals have significant power only in so far as they participate in institutions that grant them the right to control or influence others. Martin Luther King only gained power when he was recognized as the head of a movement by the media, a movement to which the federal government eventually had to grant legitimacy. Power is a function of the social roles of individuals, the positions they occupy in the major institutions of society. One sign of the power invested in individuals occupying certain social roles is that they exercise power not only by making decisions but by not doing so. People in positions of power often influence society by not taking action. Consider, for example, a major political donor who refuses to fund a particular candidate or a group of senators who refuse to approve a judicial appointment by the President. Elites in positions of authority exercise their power not only by what they do but what they don’t do. Whether they do so for the “common good” or for their own benefit is, of course, a major issue in debates about public policy. Overwhelmingly, sociological studies of those who fill these positions of power indicate that they are white men, but they do not come from exclusively upper-class backgrounds. Depending on the particular areas of power, a small group of the elite even grew up poor or working class. Only

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30 percent of our institutional elite as a whole is upper class “in social origin,” which is often defined as having at least one parent already in the ruling elite. Seventy percent of the ruling elite were born into the middle or upper-middle class, even occasionally into the working class, and rose to fill powerful social roles through education, their own abilities, and their being “chosen” to join the elite, but, of course, the primary reason that certain members of the upper-middle class join the political directorate is that they want to be upper class and enjoy the power and prestige that goes with that elite status. Interestingly, the elites least likely to have grown up poor are those who work in the “Public Interest”—think tanks and consulting firms outside the government which work to influence the government—while those who are most likely to have grown up poor work for “Labor”—unions and related lobbying groups (Lerner et  al. 1996, 26). Because ruling elites allow members of the middle-class to climb the social ladder, we might consider the ruling elite to be a “meritocracy,” but that depends on how we define a meritocracy. Stephen McNamee and Robert Miller (2009, 2) define a meritocracy as an entire social system “in which individuals get ahead and earn rewards in direct proportion to their individual efforts and abilities.” By McNamee and Miller’s definition the ruling elite is not a true meritocracy. It is very difficult for someone from a poor or working-class family to rise into the ruling elite from sheer effort or ability. Usually members of the poor or working class rise because they develop knowledge or skill in areas key to positions of power. Domhoff provides an illustrative hypothetical case: [M]ost upward social mobility in the United States involves relatively small changes for those above the lowest 20 percent and below the top 5 percent. The grandfather is a blue-collar worker, the father has a good white collar job based on a B.A. degree, and one or two of the father’s children are lawyers or physicians, but most of the father’s grandchildren are back to being white-collar workers and middle-class executives. (1983, 73)

Summarizing the relevant studies, Robert Putnam (1976, 23) states that, like “legislative elites” in Great Britain, Italy, and West Germany, “upperand middle-class children [in America] have between five and ten times as good a chance of entering the political elite as do children of working class families.” Kenneth Prewitt and Alan Stone (1973, 137–39), using a different metric, estimate that the wealthiest one-fifth of American families

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provide 90 percent of the members of the political directorate and make a convincing case that access to the ruling elite is much more likely for those who are “well born, wealthy, well-educated, in a prestigious occupation, and beneficiary of establishment connections.” It is especially helpful if those who want to join the ruling elite have occupations that provide experience in power and control, such as business, the law, and the military (see also Kerbo 2000; Mishel et al. 2007, Ch. 2). The best way to join the ruling elite is to be at least a member of an upper-middle-class family to begin with. Given that the ruling elite is overwhelmingly composed of the top three classes in America, a major issue is whether our ruling elites exercise hegemony, some sense of unified control, in filling the roles of power and influence in the United States. Domhoff focuses on “indicators” of upper-class status: the Social Register, attendance at private schools and social clubs, participation in debutante balls, intermarriage, “preoccupations” with finance, business, the law, and wealth and income. Domhoff argues that the people bound together in the web of social relations demonstrated by his “indicators” constitute a true upper class, that they disproportionately occupy the major social functions that constitute centers of power in American life, that they shape policy by financing and providing free services to institutions that shape policy and opinion and by serving as directors and trustees of policy-making groups, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, The Committee on Economic Development, The National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, and a host of foundations, think tanks, and research institutes. They also are much more likely to serve on presidential commissions, government-sponsored business councils and roundtables, and to be awarded government appointments. And finally, although our elected officials are not primarily from the upper class, they are “from the top 10 to 15 percent of the occupational and income ladders” and “in a majority of cases they share in common a business and legal background with members of the upper class” (1983, 126). Perhaps the most conspiratorial scholar studying our ruling elites is Thomas Dye, who has identified 7314 elite positions in three sectors of our nation—the corporate sector, the public interest sector, and the governmental sector—which for all practical purposes run our country as an “oligarchy” of national policy-making. To Dye (2002, 207), the President and the Congress only implement policies that have been determined ahead of time by organizations in these three sectors, and since many of

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the people who fill these 7314 positions serve multiple roles as, for ­example, the head of a corporation also serving on the board of directors of a foundation and the board of trustees at a university, the number of people who really determine national policy is only 5778. These individuals “exercise formal authority over institutions that control roughly half of the nation’s resources in industry, finance, insurance, mass media, foundations, education, law, and civic and cultural affairs.” These elites are overwhelmingly upper-class and upper-middle-class white men. Nearly all are college-educated and half of them hold advanced degrees: “Over 50 percent of top corporate leaders and over 40 percent of top governmental leaders are alumni from just twelve well-known private universities.” A substantial number of these leaders also attended one of “thirty-three private ‘name’ prep schools” (Dye 2002, 209). They exercise their power on policy-making not only by contributing directly to political campaigns but by funding and serving of the boards of a host of foundations and committees that interact directly with elected officials and government bureaucrats, groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Business Roundtable, the Committee on Economic Development, the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation. These groups basically build consensus among elites across the spectrum of opinion and ideology and then communicate their ideas to the relevant policy makers in the government. Of course, these groups may not build a national consensus about various policies; indeed, often these groups propose conflicting policies. However, the point is that although the federal legislative process may involve “bargaining, competition, persuasion, and compromise,” these interactions “occur after the agenda for policy-making has been established and the major directions of policy changes have been determined” (Dye 2002, 211). So, on the one hand, the American political directorate, whether it is a “class” or not, by definition occupies key positions in all of the major institutions that govern the country. On the other hand, as Aronowitz has argued, this directorate is composed of shifting alliances among these institutions, which do not often have a common interest, except in some sense to preserve the status quo or to work for the benefit of some interests over others. Consider, for example, the conflicting interests of the Chamber of Commerce and our major labor unions. In addition, there are both liberal and conservative think tanks—The Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation—liberal and conservative media—MSNBC and

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Fox News—liberal and conservative entrepreneurs—Warren Buffett and the Koch brothers—as well as major supporters of both the Democrat and Republican parties and of interests specific to certain areas of the country: the aging manufacturing industries of the Midwest, the tech industries of the west coast, the farms and ranches of the Great Plains, to say nothing of the competing interests of urban and rural areas, or of the fossil fuel industries and environmental groups, all of whom have major support from among our ruling elites. Suzanne Keller (1963, 70) uses the term “strategic elites,” to characterize the wide range of groups who exercise power in modern societies. She finds that elites fill too many different roles and are too diverse to act together in concert. As a result, the argument that elites constitute a hegemonic group rests on the assertion that, regardless of their political affiliation or views on social issues, they share an ideological commitment to the free enterprise system, oppose certain limits on wealth and income, and favor “economic growth, a stable business cycle, incentives for investment, economy, and efficiency in government, a stable two-party system, and maintaining popular support of political institutions” (Dye 2002, 212). They employ massive resources to lobby in favor of policies that provide them with tax breaks for their businesses and investments and against policies that threaten the sources of their own economic security, such as estate taxes or increased income taxes, what Winters and Page call the wealth and income defense industries. And even if most billionaires followed Warren Buffet’s admonition to give away the great bulk of their fortunes to charity, they would still occupy positions of power. Still, I don’t find the two sides of this argument contradictory. The power of our political elites is dispersed across many sectors of our economic and political life, and these elites work to defend their own particular but very different interests, often disagreeing about major issues of national importance, such as tax laws and whether, just to take one example, the government should prop up the coal industry despite its declining profitability, or instead provide subsidies for renewable energy. However, these disagreements are perfectly compatible with the idea that our ruling elites can also be a hegemonic oligarchy, which acts, despite its factionalism, in ways that protect the interests of its members as a ruling class over the interests of the great majority of the public. No matter what faction of the ruling elite is currently in power, that faction will broadly protect the interests of elites out of power. After all, the factions of the elite in power cannot control the government forever, and thus cannot

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afford to seriously offend those who may come to power in the next election. For my analysis of post-war political fiction, I need only assume that our ruling elites are composed overwhelmingly of members of the top three social classes—Old Money, New Money, and the upper-middle class—and that they share at least a determination to maintain their status and privilege. The protagonists of these novels exercise a great deal of power, but in the hurly-burly of national politics, their allegiances are constantly shifting, and those in the government below the cabinet level and those outside the government employed to influence legislation are primarily “hired guns” whose major purpose is to implement policies already decided upon by their superiors. As far as I know, there are few studies that focus on the degree to which people in positions of power in the federal government exemplify the major characteristics of our ruling elites in society as a whole. However, all indications are that they are overwhelming upper-class and upper-middle class in terms of wealth and income. Several studies on the status of members of Congress from the early 1940s to the early1970s indicated that two-thirds of the senators and three-fourths of the representatives “came from the 10 percent of families with professional or business occupations, and that virtually all of the senators and representatives were themselves professional people or former business executives. Twenty percent of the senators and 5 percent of a sample of representatives were members of the upper class…; none had been blue-collar workers” (Domhoff 1983, 127). More recently, Nicholas Carnes (2013, 5, 20) has studied reliable sets of data on the backgrounds of senators and representatives, subjected the data to sophisticated statistical analysis, and determined that only two percent of members of Congress in the postwar period had working-class backgrounds and only six percent had ever had any experience at all working in a blue-collar job. Moreover, Carnes found that the class status of members of Congress correlate with how they vote. Overwhelmingly, members of Congress with working-class backgrounds are more liberal than their more upper-class colleagues and much more likely to support legislation favored by prominent labor unions, legislation to increase the minimum wage and to provide a more secure safety net through social security, Medicare, and health insurance. Carnes’ research has been confirmed by Jacob Grumbach (2015), who studied the relationship between class background and roll call votes and learned that upper-class members of Congress with working-class parents are significantly more liberal than members with upper-class parents. In

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Grumbach’s study, the correlation between class and voting patterns was more robust than with other ­factors, such as race, gender, and the characteristics of the congressmen’s district. Sixty percent of cabinet members are also members of the upper class and close to 80 percent are members of the business community, defined broadly to include people sitting on boards of directors and working in law firms specializing in corporate clients (Mintz 1975). Another study found that 64 percent of cabinet and diplomatic appointees from 1933 to 1980 were rich landowners, financiers, and corporate lawyers. After World War II, the figures were roughly the same: in the Kennedy-Johnson administration, they were 63 percent; in the Nixon-Ford years, 69 percent; and in the Carter administration, 65 percent (Burch 1981, 278, 383, and Appendix B). Moreover, when administrations change, cabinet and sub-cabinet members “return to their private jobs, only to reappear in Washington when their party regains power” (Putnam 1976, 48). Dye (2002, 118, 120), following C. Wright Mills, notes the power of “super-lawyers” from a small number of firms, about 25, who represent corporations and investment firms “not only in the courts but also before Congress and the federal regulatory agencies.” Dye argues that these super-lawyers act as “professional go-betweens,” a unifying force connecting the economic, political, and military factions of the elite. Many famous names in government service were chosen because they were first super-­ lawyers: Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Clark Clifford, William P. Rogers, Cyrus Vance, Warren Christopher, and James Baker. Recruitment into the political ruling elite usually occurs through institutional channels: political parties, the bureaucracy, and local governments. New administrations in Washington, D.C., choose consultants, lobbyists, super-lawyers, and fixers associated with their political party to fill cabinet and sub-cabinet positions in the bureaucracy. When a new political party takes over in Washington, these groups leave and go to work as consultants and lobbyists for businesses and special interests that need access to governmental officials in the new administration and need to know whom to contact and how the new administration “works.” When their party returns to power, these consultants and lobbyists return to the government. No matter what their social class or how they were recruited, once people join the ruling elite, they tend to become more like the stereotypes we associate with those in power. Christopher Hayes (2012, 189) summarizes this research:

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[T]hose in high-power situations are more abstract in their thinking and pay less attention to details; they are more inclined to stereotype and form judgments. They display a larger appetite for risk and are more inclined to be optimistic and think that things will work out. They are also more inclined to take decisive action when faced with stimuli or uncertainty. Perhaps least surprising of all, the research finds that those in high-power situations are more self-justifying.

Moreover, empirical evidence suggests that people in the upper class tend to be less empathetic than those in the lower classes, one obvious reason being that they are more independent and less reliant on neighbors and members of the community. This means that they are prone to be less sensitive to the views of others (see Galinsky et al. 2006). More decisive, comfortable with risk, confident in their own judgment, and impervious to criticism than the general population, our elected officials, bureaucrats, and lobbyists congregate in our nation’s capital, divided into a range of factions that transcend the traditional distinctions between Democrats and Republican, each faction supported by a host of special interests and range of constituents with special access to members of the White House, Congress, or the various government bureaus around town. All these factions have something in common: overwhelmingly, they come from the top three classes in our society. They constitute our ruling elite.

Notes 1. See Wright (1977, 67–71) on the difficulties of using the basic Marxist notion of “mode of production” to account for work in a governmental bureaucracy. 2. For an extended argument about the implications of elite rule in America, see Dye and Zeigler (1996). 3. As far as I know, there is no solid sociological research on whether the lifestyle of Old Money has changed since the 1980s. However, popular notions of what it means to be a member of Old Money do not seem to have changed much. See, for example, Rosenthal et al. (2018). 4. A number of recent studies (Reeves 2017; Stewart 2018) have argued that since the 1970s the wealthiest 20 percent of households, outside the top 1 percent, now constitute a new force in American culture, hoarding their privileges at the expense of the lower classes and forming a new aristocracy. These households contain at least one credentialed manager or professional. Perrucci and Wysong (2008, 31) go so far as to argue that this privi-

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leged top 20 percent have turned America into a two-class society: an upper privileged class and a lower “new working class,” although Perucci and Wysong label the top segment of the new working class as “comfortable.” This group includes “school teachers, civil servants, social workers, nurses, some small-­ business owners, and skilled unionized carpenters, machinists, or electricians.” The evidence for the “top 20 percent” does help explain increasing inequality in the United States since the 1970s, but it does not fundamentally change how we should conceptualize the ruling elite. The “top 20 percent,” not counting the very top 1 percent, includes those who have been traditionally labeled “upper-middle class” and New Money, two of the three groups that have historically constituted the ruling elite.

References Aldrich, Nelson W., Jr. 1989. Old Money: The Mythology of America’s Upper Class. New York: Vintage. Baltzell, E.  Bigby. 1964. The Protestant Establishment: Autocracy and Class in America. New York: Random House. Burch, Philip H. 1981. Elites in American History. Vol. 3. New  York: Holmes and Meier. Carnes, Nicholas. 2013. White Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Conley, Dalton. 2008. Reading Class Between the Lines (of This Volume): A Reflection on Why We Should Stick to Folk Concepts of Social Class. In Social Class: How Does It Work? ed. Annette Lareau and Dalton Conley, 366–373. New York: Sage Foundation. Domhoff, G. William. 1983. Who Rules America? A View for the 80s. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. ———. 2006. Who Rules America? Power, Politics, and Social Change. 5th ed. New York: McGraw Hill. Dye, Thomas R. 2002. Who’s Running America? The Bush Restoration. 7th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall. Dye, Thomas R., and Harmon Zeigler. 1996. The Irony of Democracy. 10th ed. Belmont: Wadsworth. Galinsky, Adam, et  al. 2006. Power and Perspectives Not Taken. Psychological Science 17 (12): 1068–1074. Grumbach, Jacob M. 2015. Does the American Dream Matter for Members of Congress? Social Class Background and Roll Call Votes. Political Research Quarterly 68 (2): 306–323. Hayes, Christopher. 2012. Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. New York: Crown.

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Kahl, Joseph A., and Kingsley Davis. 1957. The American Class Structure. New York: Rinehart. Keller, Suzanne. 1963. Beyond the Ruling Class: Strategic Elites in Modern Societies. New York: Random House. Kerbo, Harold R. 2000. Social Stratification and Inequality: Class Conflict in Historical, Comparative, and Global Perspective. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Lapham, Lewis H. 1988. Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on Our Civil Religion. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lerner, Robert, Althea Nagai, and Stanley Rothman. 1996. American Elites. New Haven: Yale University Press. Marx, Karl. 1887. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Moscow: Progress. ———. 1956. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Trans. Martin Milligan. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1964. German Ideology. Trans. Clemens Dutt, W. Lough, and C. P. Magill. Moscow: Progress. McNamee, Stephen J., and Robert K. Miller Jr. 2009. The Meritocracy Myth. 2nd ed. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Michels, Robert. 1962. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. Trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. New  York: Free Press. Mintz, Ruth. 1975. The President’s Cabinet, 1897–1972. Insurgent Sociologist 5 (3): 131–149. Mishel, Larry, Jared Bernstein, and Sylvia Allegretto. 2007. The State of Working America 2006/2007. Ithaca: ILR Press. Mosca, Gaetano. 1939. The Ruling Class, ed. Arthur Livingston. Trans. Hannah D. Kahn. New York: McGraw-Hill. Pareto, Vilfredo. 1935. Mind and Society. Trans. Andrew Bongiorno and Arthur Livingston. New York: Harcourt Brace. Perrucci, Robert, and Earl Wysong. 2008. The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream? 3rd ed. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Prewitt, Kenneth, and Alan Stone. 1973. The Ruling Elites: Elite Theory, Power, and American Democracy. New York: Harper and Row. Putnam, Robert D. 1976. The Comparative Study of Political Elites. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Reeves, Richard. 2017. Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute.

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Reilly, Katie. 2017. ‘I Wish You Bad Luck.’ Read Supreme Court Justice John Roberts’ Unconventional Speech to His Son’s Graduating Class. Time, June 5. Rosenthal, Jeff, et  al. 2018. What Are the Characteristics of Old Money East-­ Coast Culture? Quora. Thread from 2012 to 2018. https://www.quora.com/ What-are-the-characteristics-of-old-money-East-Coast-culture Stewart, Matthew. 2018. The Birth of a New Aristocracy. Atlantic Monthly 321 (5): 48–63. Winters, Jeffrey A., and Benjamin I. Page. 2009. Oligarchy in the United States? Perspectives on Politics 7 (4): 731–751. Wright, Erin Olin. 1977. Rethinking, Once Again, the Concept of Class Structure. In Reworking Class, ed. John R. Hall, 41–78. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Zweigenhaft, Richard L., and G. William Domhoff. 2006. Diversity in the Power Elite. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

CHAPTER 4

Gore Vidal’s Washington, D.C.: Maintaining Legitimacy

Class was the core of Gore Vidal’s identity. Although he came from humble origins, he identified, and often invented, an aristocratic lineage, and because he was bisexual and as a child often abandoned by his parents and step-parents, he felt alienated from an upper class he thought he had inherited. This psychological conflict carried over into his politics. Twice Vidal ran for public office, campaigning as a liberal Democrat, but his rhetoric obscured a much more complex, and insidious, view of our social, economic, and political systems. He was cynical about democracy and distrusted “common people.” He believed in the rule of a well-intentioned aristocracy. And because he internalized the upper-class notion that he was entitled to develop his character and fulfill his potential in any way he chose, he dealt with his own sexuality as a personal matter and refused to join any larger social groups that worked to improve the status of gays and lesbians in the culture. Writing political fiction became for Vidal a way of working out his complex personal issues of class and gender, thereby unconsciously revealing how upper-class attitudes and values permeate the political directorate. Uniquely placed as an outsider on the edges of real power, Vidal captures how the governance of our political directorate is not based on any sense of the “will of the people” but primarily as a function of who they are as a class, maintaining their legitimacy by cloaking their personal ambitions in the language of policy, providing public rationales for their private ambitions, and keeping their scandalous behavior out of the public eye, © The Author(s) 2019 D. Smit, Power and Class in Political Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26769-8_4

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ostensibly exemplifying a way of life that the rest of the country might aspire to. They can accomplish all this because they own or control much of the public media. Vidal also illustrates how the ruling elite is dynamic and open to new members: joining the elite requires new recruits to identify with the values and lifestyle of the upper class and exhibit a certain kind of aggressive ambition associated with upper-class privilege. Considering himself a natural aristocrat, Vidal looks down on our ruling elite as if from Mount Olympus, cynically commenting on their shortcomings, and structuring his novel Washington, D.C. as a series of revelations on how all of the characters, both major and minor, succumb to the allure of power. Only at the end of the novel, perhaps as a sop to the conventions of popular fiction, does Vidal offer any hope that our political elites might come to rule in ways more responsive to the needs and desires of the greater public. * * * Vidal’s father Eugene L. Vidal was a South Dakota farm boy who joined the upper class because his good looks, pleasant demeanor, and prowess in sports prompted a local congressman to recommend him as a candidate for West Point. After graduating from West Point and spending a few years in the Army, where he rose to be a first lieutenant, Gene played professional football for the Washington Senators, competed in the decathlon at the 1920 Olympics, finishing in seventh place, got his pilot’s license, and then returned to West Point as an instructor of aeronautics. As a dashing young officer and football player in Washington, Gene found himself in the same social milieu as Nina Gore, the daughter of the former Senator from Oklahoma Thomas Gore, then a high-powered attorney in D.C., with a large estate overlooking Rock Creek Park. Nina was beautiful and obviously attracted to Gene; her father was a power in Washington who would eventually be re-elected as the Senator from Oklahoma in 1930. It did not take Gene long to realize that Nina represented the kind of life he had only dreamed of back in South Dakota. The two were married and their only son was born three years later. After teaching at West Point and being certified as a pilot, Gene would go on to become an aviation pioneer, founding three airlines, including Transcontinental Air Transport that would become Trans World Airlines. In 1933, Gene joined the political directorate by becoming the first Director of Air Commerce in the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. Because of his native intelligence,

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good looks, and natural charm, Gene Vidal became a model of how members of the lower classes can join the ruling elite. Because of his parents’ active social life and tumultuous marriage, each engaging in multiple affairs, Vidal was raised in part by his maternal grandparents, Senator Gore and his wife Nina. Thomas Gore was also a farm boy, whose intelligence and ambition got him into a Mississippi normal school or teacher’s college, despite being practically blind from two freak accidents in his childhood. With his degree, Gore taught for a while, then studied law at Cumberland University in Tennessee. His oratorical skills drew the attention of the Populist Party in Mississippi, who recruited him to run for Congress in 1998, but he lost the election. After marrying Nina Belle Kay, he moved his law practice to Oklahoma, where, running as a Democrat, he was elected one of the state’s first two US Senators in 1907, the year it joined the Union. The shift from the Populist to the Democrat ticket indicated a fundamental tension in Gore between his populist roots and his increasing southern Democrat conservatism, a tension that is also attributed to his grandson, who was close to his grandfather, often read to him, and had open access to his extensive library. Vidal’s access to the ruling elite was further enhanced when he was 10 years old and his mother divorced his father in order to marry Hugh Auchincloss, an heir to the Rockefeller oil fortune, but also on his own a successful lawyer and stockbroker, and a descendent of an uncle of Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson’s first vice president. Auchincloss’ politics were, according to Vidal, “Neanderthal”: “Hughdie” hated Franklin Roosevelt, socialism, and Jews, and found a kindred spirit in Senator Gore, who also hated the New Deal (Parini 2015, 22). And so during the height of the Depression, Vidal moved from his grandparents’ estate on Rock Creek Park, where he was cared for by his grandmother, to Hughdie’s estate called Merrywood, on the Potomac River near Manassas, Virginia, where he lived “the life of a very rich prince,” cared for by five servants and a French governess, the servants being white, “a sign of wealth unique for Washington in those years” (Parini 2015, 20). Later, in 1942, Hughdie divorced Vidal’s mother and married Janet Lee Bouvier, the mother of Jacqueline Kennedy, and so at the age of 17, Vidal became Jackie’s step-­brother at Merrywood, where she took over his old bedroom. On her first night there, he shared with her lurid stories his mother had told him about Hughdie’s sex life. Because he was related to Jackie, Vidal had an insider’s access to the politics of the Kennedy Administration.

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Because his parents and step-parents were all sufficiently wealthy, Vidal spent much of his late childhood in elite boarding schools in D.C. and the surrounding area, moving from school to school because he was unhappy in all of them, and his mother and grandparents kept trying new schools, hoping he might fit it. Vidal moved from the Potomac School to the Landon School for Boys, the Sidwell Friends School, St. Albans, a boy’s school in New Mexico, and Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. In all of these schools, the great majority of boys came from “good families”; that is to say, wealthy families with connections; however, for a variety of reasons—his troubled family life, his awareness of his attraction to young men—Vidal did not feel as if he belonged in these schools, except perhaps St. Albans, where he remained aloof and did not get very good grades but was known for speaking well in class. Vidal (1995, 25, 31) came to think of his time at St. Albans as an “idyll,” primarily because he developed an intense attraction to Jimmy Trimble, with whom he may or may not have had experimental sex, what he describes in his first memoir Palimpsest as coming together as one, “belly to belly.” Some friends of his at the time later told Vidal’s biographers that they doubted these stories because Jimmy was a typical athlete of the period and would not have tolerated any behavior associated with homosexuality. In any case, Vidal associated his time at St. Albans, the only private school in which he was happy, with his first positive experiences of being homosexual, with his first attempts to express his sexuality within the confines of his class status. Like his parents hiding their infidelities, Vidal intuitively understood that being upper class meant that being gay was a form of individual, private rebellion. For the rest of his life, Vidal could not bring himself to explicitly support gay rights as a social movement. Because of the humble origins of his father and maternal grandfather, Vidal was a member of New Money, although his first step-father was Old Money. Given his lineage, Vidal could very well have chosen to identify with his lower-class background. Instead, he did the opposite. The more successful he became, the more he rejected his actual heritage and fantasized about the possible aristocrats in his family’s distant past. Vidal’s paternal great-grandfather came from an Austrian family of merchants and professionals and was something of a con man, who pretended to have a medical degree in order to practice as a pharmacist. Great-grandfather Vidal married a Swiss woman whom Vidal insisted against all evidence had been a well-born “heiress” but was disinherited by her family for marrying beneath her. The only things we know about her for certain was that late

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in life she made a living as a seamstress and knew four European languages well enough to translate them for the newspapers. Vidal also strongly identified with his step-father Auchincloss’ ancestry going back to Aaron Burr, which was the basis for his Empire series of historical novels on American politics. Vidal’s questionable veneration of his maternal great-­ grandmother and his identification with his step-father’s Burr lineage, even though he was no blood relation, are examples what his biographer Jay Parini (2015, 11) calls his “profound sense of his aristocratic lineage.” This preoccupation with being an aristocrat explains the succession of exotic “palatial” estates that Gore chose to live in over the course of his life: the Convent of El Carmen in Antigua that he renovated after the success of his first novel Williwaw, the Edgewater estate on the Hudson River in Duchess County, the estate La Rondinaia (The Swallow’s Nest) at Ravello on the Amalfi coast of Italy in the 1990s, and a huge home on Outpost Drive in the Hollywood Hills in the last years of his life. And it explains his extravagant lifestyle. Later in life when Vidal visited Great Britain, he consorted with members of the upper class and considered himself “a kind of socialist Tory,” “a snob who nevertheless objected to people in power using their leverage in ways detrimental to working people” (Parini 2015, 82). Yet Vidal’s objection to Tory attitudes toward the working class had no consequences. While in London he stayed at an exclusive club, the Athenaeum, in Pall Mall, whose bar contained portraits of Matthew Arnold and Charles Dickens, and in whose library Thackeray often wrote. Vidal would meet friends and visitors at posh restaurants and bars, such as Claridge’s or later on at the Connaught in Mayfair. Despite his often cynical portrayals of our ruling elites, Vidal thought of himself as a natural aristocrat and entitled to a certain style of living. Vidal’s identification with an aristocratic past and his choice of life style indicates his isolation from those further down the social ladder. Although Vidal always insisted that he “worked” in the sense that he inherited very little money from his parents and had to write just to pay his bills, once early in his career knocking out five novels in a few years, he had very little experience of how most people lived. Perhaps his most significant experience of lower-class life occurred when he was seven years old and accompanied his grandfather to the Capitol in 1932, where thousands of veterans of World War I, their friends and families, were joined in what was called the Bonus Army Protest against the federal government for its failure to redeem the service certificates they had been given as a kind of bonus. On the outskirts of the encampment of small tents and cardboard shanties, a

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small group of protesters recognized Senator Gore in his chauffeur-driven limousine, his grandson sitting next to him. Because the Senator had voiced his opposition to the protest in the Senate, the protestors began to throw rocks at the limo, one of which came through an open window, whereupon the Senator shouted for Vidal to close the window. Two months later, the Army drove the encampment out, killing a number of veterans and driving the protestors across the Anacostia River. A few days after the rout, Vidal’s father flew him over the devastated areas where the burned shanties were still smoldering. Vidal’s only comment on the episode was that he “had never seen anything like this before” (Parini 2015, 21). Joining the army rather than attending a university gave Vidal his first experience of actually living among the poor and working class, but again he makes little of the experience, perhaps because he was not assigned to jobs that forged allegiances. Rather, he worked as an office clerk for the US Army Air Force, and later passed the examinations required to be a maritime warrant officer. After three years of service, he developed rheumatoid arthritis and was reassigned to the duty of a mess officer. Outside of the Army, Vidal’s only first-hand experience of working-­ class life was in his father’s factories, first in the summer of 1942 on an assembly line in Camden, New Jersey, for 40 cents an hour, “making wingtips for what was designed as a secret glide-bomber” out of Vidal Weldwood, a kind of laminated plywood invented by his father (Kaplan 1999, 142; Vidal 1995, 91). Later as “director of personnel” for a factory his father leased in Poughkeepsie to make plastic bread trays for the General Baking Company, Vidal helped “supervise” workers. Vidal commuted two miles from his Edgewater estate and often talked as if he ran the factory, but his title and the fact that he did not keep regular hours suggest that this job was only a “sinecure”: he had asked his father to move one his factories to Poughkeepsie to help him supplement the income he received from writing and lecturing, another advantage of being upper class (Kaplan 1999, 347, 354). Vidal’s aristocratic temperament and ignorance of the working-class life greatly influenced his politics. Vidal’s biographers and critics generally interpret Vidal’s political views as a variation of the politics of his grandfather, torn between a form of liberal populism and a reactionary conservatism caused by Gore’s revulsion at Franklin Roosevelt’s expansion of executive power. It is true that Vidal had a visceral disgust of FDR, but it was more personal than political: it was an expression of his solidarity with

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his grandfather Gore, who hated FDR for taking the country into World War II simply “because he wanted it” (Parini 2015, 46). Vidal supported his grandfather despite the fact that his father Gene worked in the Roosevelt administration in a position just below cabinet-level. In terms of practical politics, Vidal did have a populist side. Over the course of his life, he tended to support Democrats, such as Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, and consumer-advocate Ralph Nader in the 1972 presidential election, while he was chairman of the People’s Party for two years. He himself ran for office two times. In 1960, while he was living at Edgewater on the Hudson River, he was the Democratic candidate for Congress for the 29th Congressional District of New York, a usually Republican district whose current incumbent was a very conservative dentist and dairy farmer named J. Ernest Wharton. Campaigning under the slogan of You’ll Get More with Gore, Vidal ran as a leftist liberal, supporting such policies as Federal aide to education, recognizing Red China, and more broadly “dialogue with one’s enemies, the movement toward eliminating nuclear weapons, a smaller defense budget, strong antipollution measures, and the abolition of capital punishment.” Vidal’s biographer Fred Kaplan (1999, 466) argues that Vidal had “a strong residual idealism, especially on issues of justice, partly an expression of his intellectual honesty and his determination never to falsify ideas. Intellect and ideas were sacred.” According to Kaplan, Vidal believed that “ideas counted” and that he had an obligation “to contribute to a public discourse in which the commitment of the Founding Fathers to open discussion would be realized in political debate.” I think Kaplan is literally correct, but fails to recognize that Vidal’s political idealism was based on ideas in the abstract, more on a love of argument and a standard politician’s need for attention, even adoration, than for intellectual commitment to improving people’s lives. Kaplan does not acknowledge Vidal’s own elitism, his candid admission that he ran for office primarily when he was bored with the writing life. Vidal (1995, 346) had a low opinion of the voters he courted and accepted Eleanor Roosevelt’s position that if politicians explain things carefully enough, “people might be persuaded to vote for their own interests.” In campaigning he tended to focus on broad, more abstract issues than on issues directly related to the lives of most of the population, issues such the minimum wage, the rights of unions, the safety net. Vidal lost the 1960 election by a margin of 57 percent to 43 percent, but campaigning did connect him with the major figures in the Democratic Party and gave him access to how elites actually exercise power. Harry

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Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, all campaigned for Vidal, JFK as part of his run for the presidency. Party activists Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, who were good friends, also campaigned for him. In losing, Vidal took some consolation from the fact that he received the most votes any Democratic candidate had received in the district in 50 years, and lost by a lower margin than John Kennedy. Later in 1982, Vidal campaigned against Jerry Brown, the incumbent Governor of California, who was then running for the Senate in the Democratic primary. In campaigning against Brown, Gore’s major issues included accepting only small contributions from individuals, reducing the defense budget, more funds for schools, gun control, “a stronger defense of civil liberties, the decriminalization of victimless crimes, a new constitutional convention to promote more direct democracy, and a fairer tax structure that would feature a 10- to 15-percent tax on all corporations” (Kaplan 1999, 731). In the end, Brown won by a margin of three to one, but Brown went on to incorporate many of Vidal’s issues into his campaign in the general election, where he lost to San Diego mayor Pete Wilson. In “Homage to Daniel Shays,” an essay he wrote in 1972, for the New York Review of Books, five years after the publication of Washington, D.C., Vidal (1972, 448, 443) supported William Domhoff’s analysis of our ruling elite, that despite the two-party system, our elite is composed really of one party, what Vidal calls the Property Party, which maintains control by “keep[ing] actual issues out of political debate.” But in this piece, Vidal demonstrates that his fascination with politics is primarily intellectual rather than with any emotional identification with those suffering under the burden of a ruling elite. Vidal’s only hint of his larger political philosophy is to imply that the country should return to its Revolutionary War roots and side with Daniel Shays’ “resistance to the landed gentry’s replacement of a loose confederation of states with a tax-levying central government.” Needless to say, in terms of practical politics, Vidal’s consideration of Shays’ Rebellion as a governing ideal is fanciful, not to say unworldly, and betrays what he often declares as his major objection to our governmental system: that citizens are highly taxed but do not receive sufficient benefits in return. Over the course of his political career, Vidal never directly addressed issues related the lives of the poor and working class: their access to the political process, their representation in unions, the adequacy of the social safety net. Indeed, there is little evidence that Vidal ever consulted with members of the lower classes who would be part of his constituency.

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As with politics, Vidal’s upper-class status also influenced his handling of his own sexual identity. Vidal dealt with his bisexuality the same way he dealt with his class status: by distancing himself from both his class and his sexuality, treating both in the abstract as a private problem that could not be discussed directly in public. He dared not publicly admit to his sexuality in the face of public opinion, just as he could not admit to his class status, his cynical criticism of his class as a cover for his essential elitism. All his adult life, once he had accepted his bisexuality, Vidal had a voracious sexual appetite and was constantly on the prowl for sex, especially with men. On being analyzed by Alfred Kinsey, Vidal declared that he lacked any sense of guilt over his promiscuity because guilt was a “middle-­ class disorder from which power people seemed exempt” (Parini 2015, 102–3). Despite his being constantly on the prowl, Vidal had a 50-year “open” arrangement with his partner Howard Austen, which, he claimed, lasted so long because it involved “no sex” (Parini 2015, 132). As late as the early 1980s, in Vidal’s campaign for US Senator in California, when his relationship with Howard came up in interviews, Vidal declined to discuss his sexuality, saying it was a private matter and that Howard was just a friend. Still, in his 1948 novel The City and the Pillar, which was a minor best-­ seller, Vidal created an openly gay protagonist, but his portrayal is now often taken as perpetuating stereotypes about homosexuals. As Jamie Harker (2009, 201–2) points out, the gay characters in that novel are effeminate (“shy and a bit frail,” “passive,” “noticeably effeminate”) and narcissistic (“too handsome,” an athlete, “in love with yourself”); and with their increasing awareness and experimentation of their sexuality they become either a dominant hunter or a passive wife, although Vidal (1948, 98) states in the novel that there may be “a dozen types and many different patterns.” Harker acknowledges that in this early novel Vidal made gay life “intelligible” and perhaps “sympathetic,” but in the way it functions as an expose in the tradition of literature about slumming, “visibility may only lead to greater condemnation.” Later, in the mid-1960s, when he was writing Washington, D.C., Vidal publicly defended homosexuality, but never discussed his own sexual preferences, even though his bisexuality was an open secret in political, literary, and journalistic circles. Homosexuality was in this period what Guy Davidson calls “embarrassing—a matter best not mentioned in public,” even though there were a number of active gay rights groups such as the Mattachine Society, ONE, and the Daughters of Bilitis, and the gay sub-

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culture was increasingly being featured in exposs in the national media, such as Life magazine’s article “Homosexuality in America” in 1964, and a CBS documentary “The Homosexuals” in 1967. Davidson (2015, 159) argues that these exposes were embarrassing in some of the “less usual” senses of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary, namely “to encumber or impede” and “to perplex, to throw into doubt or difficulty” the fiction of normative heterosexuality. In this context, during a fraught interview on conservative William Buckley’s national television show Firing Line, the debate went off the rails when Vidal called Buckley a Nazi, and Buckley retaliated by calling Vidal a queer. Asked by Esquire magazine to elaborate on the conflict in essays in which each man had the opportunity to respond to and edit each other’s drafts, Vidal never admitted to being homosexual. In response to Buckley’s charge that he was an “evangelist for bisexuality,” Vidal argued that even though he thought that homosexuality was “natural” but not “normal,” he was “not an evangelist of anything in sexual matters except a decent withdrawal of the state from the bedroom” (qtd. in Davidson 2015, 156). And so, Vidal was being consistent when in 1973 he allowed himself to be interviewed by Fag Rag, a Boston newspaper promoting gay rights, and treated homosexuality more as an embarrassment than a social cause. In the interview, he downplays the paper’s mission for recognition and equality by calling it a hopeless dream and asserting with his trademark irony that publicizing the life style of homosexuals would not necessarily make chiefs of police “realize with a sudden blaze that Fags are not only GOOD but BETTER!” As biographer Kaplan notes, Vidal could not bring himself to be “associated exclusively with a political or a sexual movement” (1999, 667–8). * * * In the mid-1960s Vidal decided to write Washington, D.C., a historical novel going back 20 years to the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt based on his own experience of living in two sexually promiscuous upper-class political families constantly on the verge of scandal, and his own experience of running for public office in 1960. In doing so, Vidal used members of his own family—his beloved grandfather Senator Thomas Gore and his step-brother-in-law President John F. Kennedy—as models for his two major characters.

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Never shy about declaring his own aristocratic views, Vidal used the novel to comment on the nature of American politics rather than focus on the current issues of the time: the rise of feminism, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and the Vietnam War, although he may have become interested in the genre because of the wave of successful melodramatic political novels during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, including two best-sellers: Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s Fail-Safe and Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II’s Seven Days in May. Vidal’s wrestling with his sense of himself as a committed aristocrat who did not quite fit into upper-class culture can be seen in his fictional style, which is predominantly third-person limited narration with the extensive use of free indirect discourse (FID) and free indirect thought (FIT). This style makes it difficult to determine the source of the cynical tone of Washington, D.C. Although the characters are sufficiently distinguished by their pasts and their personalities, their political attitudes and behaviors can seem remarkably similar, and although much of the cynicism can be attributed to particular characters in FIT, it often occurs in extended outbursts in which we lose track of just who is being so cynical, a character or the narrator. And of course, the issue is complicated by the fact that the cynicism of the novel, no matter what its source, often imitates the attitudes of Vidal himself as the author in the same sardonic tone he uses in everyday speech and in his essays. It is difficult to resist attributing most of the large generalizations about politics and class made by the characters to Vidal himself. By choosing to write a historical novel—indeed, the idea of a series of historical novels roughly based on his step-father’s ancestry going back to Aaron Burr had already occurred to him—Vidal could also finesse dealing with the two major social revolutions of the early 1960s: the Civil Rights movement and the rise of feminism with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl. A more socially conscious writer would have found ways to at least allude to these issues in setting a novel 20 years earlier, perhaps by having a strong independent female protagonist or African American characters not shy about addressing discrimination, but Vidal was simply not interested in social movements. Instead, he only used Washington, D.C. to comment sardonically on a corrupt ruling elite that as a “natural aristocrat” in both intellect and lineage, he thought himself above. Similarly, although he was familiar with some of the experimental fiction of the period, having written essays on Norman Mailer, the French

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New Novel, and Susan Sontag’s Death Kit—but not on the work of Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, and John Barth—Vidal was not interested in expanding on or playing with the conventions of the traditional novel. His most experimental novel—Myra Breckinridge, written a year after Washington, D.C.—is a satire of gender conventions whose protagonist is transgendered, but it is written as a series of diary entries, a convention that goes back to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740. Although Vidal could very well have written experimental fiction on his own, he chose not to, perhaps because he always thought of writing as “work,” needed the money, and thought that novels in traditional formats were more likely to be popular. As a result, Washington, D.C. is a conventional historical novel that covers a period of 20 years. The novel’s opening scene occurs on July 22, 1937, the day that the US Senate defeated FDR’s bill to pack the Supreme Court, and ends in 1951 with its two major characters Senator James Burden Day and Congressman Clay Overbury planning for the next Senate race in 1952 as a first step for making a run for the presidency. The history of the period—FDR’s desire for the country to go to war with Germany and Japan against strong isolationist opposition, the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America’s entering the war, various characters going off to fight the war or report on it, the victory of the Allies, the death of FDR, Truman’s becoming President and winning re-election, and the rise of McCarthyism—is simply a background for the main focuses of the novel: the maneuvering of various factions among the political directorate to gain some edge in the exercise of power and the implementation of policy, and their constant personal scandals, which they need to keep out of public view. Of course, one of the major myths of American democracy is that election campaigns provide the citizenry with differing policy proposals and in voting citizens decide what policies they want implemented; ideally, in this mythic ideal, the faction that wins the election is given a mandate to implement those policies. In Washington, D.C., Vidal totally subverts this ideal of governance. He portrays a political directorate that never acknowledges any obligation to meet the expressed needs and desires of the larger public and governs primarily for personal gain, either by gratifying their own private interests or by winning political contests as a matter of imposing their will on the members of other factions of the ruling elite with different ambitions and world-views. Often the elite refer to their differences as a matter of opposing “political philosophies,” but that language dignifies them as being the result of intense study, deep thought, and considered

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judgment, and they are no such thing; most often they are simply rationales to justify the elites’ own behavior. All of the characters in the novel who have an explicit political philosophy modify their philosophies to account for their current ambitions, and those with radical philosophies contrary to those of the two major political parties eventually “sell out” for personal reasons to the faction with the best chance of maintaining or seizing power. The two main political conflicts in the novel have nothing to do with expressing the will of the people. The basic conflict between Senator Burden Day and Franklin Delano Roosevelt over the course of the novel is ostensibly about FDR’s usurpation of power for the executive branch at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches, which Burden associates with a loss of “personal freedom.” Thus, Burden strongly opposes FDR’s attempt to increase the number of Supreme Court justices and FDR’s pressuring Congress to go to war in Europe. However, neither Burden nor any other character ever offers a credible explanation or argument for why America should or should not be an imperialist power or why American should or should not be isolationist, and the novel provides no indication of whose interests are being served in either case. Early in the novel, confronted with the argument that Roosevelt was merely filling a vacuum caused by a Congress of small men afraid of exercising leadership, Burden concedes the point, but for the rest of the novel rings variations on the theme that FDR believes “government must do everything, and I don’t see how it can do much more than it does if we’re to keep any sort of personal freedom” (Vidal 1967, 84). However, nowhere does Burden ever articulate just how his or anyone else’s personal freedom is being stifled by Roosevelt’s policies, and much of his grousing about FDR hints at envy of Roosevelt’s reach and influence, his “performing” on the world stage, consorting with foreign royalty and hiding his domestic “failures” behind overseas pageantry, again without any clear indication of the failures Roosevelt is trying to compensate for. Burden’s differences with Roosevelt seem based more on personality than policy, his resentment that Roosevelt receives more attention than he does. Indeed, Burden himself could be accused of being an opportunist whose political philosophy shifts with the currents of the time. Like his model, Senator Thomas Gore, Burden was originally a radical, elected to “nationalize the railroads and smash the trusts.” Now he is a conservative, and claims he doesn’t know why he changed his mind, although it is clear that his conservatism is an obvious justification for his own interests, since

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he is now a wealthy power-broker and a solid favorite to win re-election, and no longer needs to campaign on a populist platform to stay in power. As a convert to conservatism, he quotes Plato to the effect that elites must respond to calls to public life because if they don’t, the government will be in the hands of “worthless men” without “the best motives,” a position which echoes Vidal’s own view (1967, 83) that democracy is best ruled by an aristocratic elite. And like Senator Gore, Burden is careful with his own money and suspicious of how the government spends its money. He opposes FDR Lend-Lease proposal to help Europe ward off fascism primarily for financial reasons: because Britain is broke, America may never get its money back. In other words, Burden thinks that the nation’s business should be conducted the way he handles his own finances, not to accomplish any larger social goals. The other major conflict in the novel illustrates how the elite govern primarily by catering to the interests of business and private donors. This conflict begins when oil man Ed Nillson involves Burden in a scandalous purchase of government land and then blackmails him with the threat of revelation. Nillson wants to purchase land deeded to a Native-American tribe at a greatly reduced price because he thinks there is oil on the property. Indeed, the tribe wants to sell the land. Nillson knows that the Department of Interior won’t object to the sale but that Burden, who sits on the relevant Senate subcommittee, might object in order to protect the Indians from themselves. Nillson’s plan is for Burden to accept a long-­ standing invitation to speak in Ottawa, and while he is gone, his subcommittee will approve the land sale without discussion. As the quid pro quo, Nillson will arrange for a James Burden Day for President Committee to be established in Washington with a minimum of $250,000, all from “legitimate sources.” Nillson informs Burden that he considers this political contribution as a business investment, in case Burden chooses to run against Roosevelt in the next presidential election. To Burden’s objection that he is not for sale, Nillson reassures him that he will demand less from Burden than he would from the CIO or the National Association of Manufacturers. Burden eventually rationalizes his acceptance of Nillson’s deal by telling himself that any discussion of corruption is “fatuous”: politicians did what they had to do to win, and “that included selling votes as well as buying them” (Vidal 1967, 121). When FDR runs for a third term, Burden bows out of the race because he knows that he cannot win, but Nillson continues to involve himself in Burden’s affairs, just in case he wants to run for the presidency later.

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Eventually, at FDR’s death, Nillson shifts his support to Congressman Clay Overbury, whom he recognizes has a better shot at the presidency than Burden. To aid the Overbury campaign, Nillson tells Overbury about the Native American land sale scheme, which Overbury uses to blackmail Burden into dropping out of the presidential race. Burden’s involvement in Nillson’s purchase of Native American land is an example of elites caught up in the interests of their wealthy constituents at the expense of others, albeit in this case, against their inclinations. Nillson needs to get Burden out of town during his subcommittee hearing because he suspects Burden will argue against the expressed interests of the Native Americans themselves who want to sell the land. With Vidal there is always irony, or perhaps the Buddhist notion of unintended consequences: one of the Native Americans whose land was sold tells Burden that it was the best thing that ever happened to his tribe. There was no oil, and if they hadn’t sold the land, they would have stayed poor and uneducated. Because he himself believed in the necessity of an educated elite to govern an unruly and uneducated public, Vidal portrays Burden as contemptuous of his lower-class constituents, thinking of them as generally rude and uninformed. Burden recalls that in his early campaigns, he discovered that his supporters were just as corrupt as the politicians they voted for, that his campaign managers were literally buying votes: over a thousand people were being paid US$2 apiece to vote for him. Although he was at first dismayed, Burden’s cynicism about voters was confirmed when Eleanor Roosevelt told him a story about complaining to Franklin that she had learned his campaign was buying votes in up-scale Duchess County. Franklin had laughed and reassured her, “Don’t worry, dear, the Republicans buy them, too” (Vidal 1967, 121). After the war, Burden receives letters from his constituents, asking him to support Joseph McCarthy in his attacks on Communists in the State Department, an example of how easily American citizens can be duped by demagogues. But Burden feels that he cannot afford to offend these constituents, so he responds to their appeals by being “patriotic but evasive,” and rationalizes his behavior as necessary in order to get re-elected with the vague hope that McCarthy will selfdestruct. Once re-elected, he says to himself, he will be in a stronger position and have the time to “do in the mucker” (Vidal 1967, 352–53). In this small anecdote Vidal captures one unfortunate dynamic of elite rule: how elected officials consider their re-election more important than telling the truth to a citizenry they consider beneath them.

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Washington, D.C. illustrates in one other way how class-based personal ambition is at the core of elite power. The severe critics of the political establishment in the novel, all of them leftists to some degree, are coopted by the elite for a variety of reasons: the critic may personally benefit socially or financially, he may identify with upper-class “intellectual life,” especially its tolerance for homosexuality, or he may lust for power himself. Harold Griffiths, a poet who works as a critic for the Tribune and associates with theater people, is an example of a person who is coopted by the elite simply out of gratitude. Griffiths is suspected by some of being a Communist, but he never goes public with his private beliefs, perhaps because he is gay and does not want publicity. He takes a job as a correspondent for a newspaper, covering the war in the Pacific and becomes almost religious in his commitment to recording the life of soldiers preparing for and in battle. Back state-side, he is caught soliciting gay sex from an undercover FBI agent, but is saved from prosecution by Overbury, whom he covered while overseas. As a result, Griffiths becomes a devotee of Overbury and claims to be a personal witness to support Overbury’s contested story that he was wounded in the war while hauling a fellow soldier from a burning hangar. After the war Griffiths writes a relatively conservative newspaper column for a Washington paper and works on a book about his war coverage. With his success as a reporter for elite media, he becomes critical of all left-wing ideology, and justifies his shift in political commitment by claiming that he is still “opposed to the exploitation of man by man,” but now he is focused on doing justice to the heroism of the troops, an oblique reference to the help he received from Overbury. Billy Thorne, a socialist who lost a leg fighting in the Spanish Civil War and afterward worked for the Department of Commerce as a statistician, quits his government job to start a new leftist political magazine, “more adventurous than The Nation,” that will be a voice for the proletariat, mobilizing them to raise barricades in the streets and demand socialized medicine, the nationalization of all natural resources, and inheritance taxes to end great fortunes. But unable to resist the post-War rhetoric against communism, Thorne returns to government work for both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and testifies against his former Communist friends before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He justifies this reversal of world-and-life views by saying, “you cannot change anybody except at the point of a gun,” and he did not want to hold that gun. Peter Sanford has a more likely explanation: Thorne was an absolutist in his thinking, and “when one god failed it was necessary to choose another” (Vidal 1967, 420, 421).

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Aeneus Duncan also is a socialist as a young man, a scholar and writer who taught philosophy and is a parody of intellectuals with too many ideas and uninterested in actual politics. Duncan falls in love with the old-­money rich, especially socialite matron Millicent Carhart, because in their solons he can discuss ideas as if they mattered. At the end of the novel, Duncan becomes the ghost writer for Overbury’s autobiography, and supports Overbury as a politician for incoherent reasons that indicate Duncan’s muddled thinking. He supports Overbury because he has a chance to be “good,” even though Duncan cannot define what “good” means, and because Overbury has ideas about issues, even though Duncan cannot articulate which of these ideas could actually be implemented, ideas popular at the time, such as “the necessity of abandoning the two-party system, the similarity between the orgasm and the Bomb, the fact that television advertising is the principal cause of cancer” (Vidal 1967, 405). All these men eventually compromise their leftist beliefs and are coopted into the elite, the ruling elite being a black hole that sucks in all around it. Vidal reinforces his vision of our ruling elites as lacking in serious intellectual and moral commitments by portraying their personal lives as self-­ centered and sexually promiscuous. Like a best-selling pot-boiler, almost every character in Washington, D.C. has a history of tempestuous affairs and/or serial monogamy, modeled on Vidal’s own family life. The two most aggressively sexual characters are Overbury and publisher Blaise Sanford’s daughter Enid. Overbury, like John F. Kennedy, is a womanizer because, the narrator opines, when he seduces a woman, he not only “wins” her, but he also wins over all the men who had previously wanted her. He has affairs and a liaison with Enid Sanford before he marries her; with Dolly Perrine, who is on Burden’s staff and engaged to be married to another man; and a reported host of other women. Overbury’s final marriage to Elizabeth Wattress is “open”: Wattress tacitly gives him permission to roam. Enid Sanford, perhaps stimulated by her addiction to drugs and alcohol, is almost as promiscuous as Overbury and needs to be institutionalized for her own safety. Diana Day, Burden’s daughter, is in love with Overbury but, thwarted in love, marries Billy Thorne and when that marriage becomes unsatisfying, takes up with Peter Sanford. Clearly, if the public knew the degree to which our political directorate governs in their own interest at the expense of the broader public and the degree to which their personal behavior and lifestyle deviates from commonly accepted social and moral norms, they would question why they should grant elites power over their lives. Thus, the need for elites to con-

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trol all of the major media outlets: in Washington, D.C. Blaise Sanford publishes the major Washington newspaper, the Tribune, and his son Peter takes over an influential intellectual journal, The American Idea modeled after The New Republic. Burden learns early in his political career that the editors of local newspapers tend to support candidates who buy the most advertising in their papers. Of course, the primary purpose of elite media is to keep the focus of the public on politics as the embodiment of abstract ideologies, such as “democracy” and “freedom,” on campaigns as personal competition rather than about actual policies, on presenting members of the directorate as exemplary models of respectable behavior. Because his audiences love the idea that they live in a country that is a world power, Burden often campaigns on the issue, despite his reservations about the dangers of imperialism and the cost to some of his constituents: for example, that the farmers in his state may suffer considerably from certain trade policies. To Burden, Vidal’s idealist, running on an issue that his constituents may not recognize as against their own interests is the price he has to pay to stay in office. Both Burden and Overbury campaign by creating images of themselves as self-effacing heroes working only for the common good and work very hard to keep much of their actual behavior hidden from the public. Burden sells himself as first a populist and then as a proponent of “individual freedom.” Overbury sells himself as a war hero. The media’s power to promote candidates for office is one reason why Overbury is able to defeat Burden for the senatorial nomination: Overbury has the support of Blaise Sanford’s newspaper. Just how Clay Overbury rose to become a senatorial candidate with the potential to become president is a model of how members of the lower class can join the ruling elite: they must identify with the ruling elite rather than their own class, have the requisite managerial and oratorical skills that give them access to influential elite networks, and be aggressively confident in pursuing their personal ambitions, in effect acting as if they were already members of the elite. Because of Vidal’s lack of experience with working-class life, the weakest part of the novel is its portrayal of Overbury’s origins and how he managed to become Burden’s administrative assistant. Vidal provides ­ almost no detail about the childhood Overbury had to transcend in order to be an accepted by the ruling elite. All Vidal can muster are flitting images of Overbury growing up in a house without indoor plumbing on an unpaved street, and he and his mother being abandoned by his hand-

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some father, who had a tattoo on his arm with the name of a woman not his mother’s. We learn nothing of how Overbury developed the ambition, talents, and skills needed to join Burden’s office staff. From the fact that Overbury intensely admires FDR and wants to emulate him, we can reasonably infer that he very early decided that he wanted to become President of the United States and shaped his career to make himself an ideal candidate. We might also infer that Overbury was able to ingratiate himself with Burden because he was good looking and supremely confident; a good listener and a fluent speaker; and because somehow in his previous life he developed sufficient managerial skills and a knowledge of politics to meet Burden’s requirements for a personal aide. When Vidal introduces Overbury in the opening chapter of the novel at a party sponsored by the influential publisher Blaise Sanford, he is already Burden’s assistant, and has been discovered by Blaise’s son Peter making love to Peter’s sister Enid in the Sanford pool house. Vidal deftly characterizes Overbury as someone to be reckoned with. Later at the party, the elder Sanford confronts Overbury about his suitability as a suitor for Enid. Blaise wants to know how Overbury plans to support his daughter in a style to which she is accustomed on a senator’s aide’s salary and lacking a “decent”—that is, upper-class—family background. Blaise despises Overbury for presuming that he can marry a rich girl and live happily ever after on her money. Overbury handles Blaise’s hostility with charm and aplomb, replying confidently that he will be successful in politics. Here, Overbury manages to assuage the concerns of his potential father-in-law and patron that he is using his sexual charm to gain entry to the ruling elite. And even after he marries Enid and her abuse of drug and alcohol becomes a political liability, he has the rhetorical skills to convince Blaise that he—Overbury—is the wounded party and that Blaise should have his daughter institutionalized in order to keep any news of family discord out of Blaise’s newspaper and improve Overbury’s electoral prospects. Indeed, over the course of the novel, Overbury acts as if he is following a script he has devised to gain political power. Once the United States enters World War II, Overbury joins the military, primarily because being a soldier will look good on his political resume. He returns to run for the House and later the Senate. Because he has an instinct for self-publicity, Overbury recognizes more than anyone else in Washington the potential for television to revolutionize politics, or as he puts it, the ability to “see the news as well as hear it” (Vidal 1967, 20). And so, during his Senate

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campaign he harnesses his instincts about television to market himself as a war hero, or as one character puts it, to sell himself like soap. By the end of the novel, when Overbury decides to compete with Burden, his former mentor, for the Democratic senatorial nomination, a position generally understood to be a stepping stone on the way to the presidency, most of the major characters have come to judge Overbury as a man whose only moral principle is his own advancement. Burden wonders whether Overbury believes in anything at all, and Peter argues that Overbury has no principles, only positions based on polling, so that a computer could anticipate his position. He tells a colleague that Overbury “practices politics in a vacuum. There is nothing to him but a desire to be first” (Vidal 1967, 406). In his lack of principles Overbury may not be typical of those in the lower classes who aspire to join the ruling elite, but he does illustrate the degree to which they have to identify with the lifestyle of the elite and have the requisite ambition, talent, and personal connections in order to successfully climb the socio-economic ladder. In Washington, D.C., Vidal is especially good at illustrating how our ruling elites have little or no experience of the lower classes, except as servants. Because “the people” are an abstraction, elites project their own values onto them. Burden in particular views his constituents as raw material to be molded by what he sees in them. In campaigning he recognizes that the “people” are fascinated by the fact that by entering the war their country has become a world power, despite its dangers: they are more attentive, learning forward, eyes wide, and so asserting America’s power becomes a major feature of Burden’s campaign speeches. By the end of his career, Burden understands the citizenry to be just as corrupt as their governors. As he waits for the scandal to break over his participation in the Native American land sale, he realizes that the scandal would fit into a series of exposes Harold Griffiths has written recently on the usual corruption in Congress: padded payrolls and illegal campaign contributions. In an extended passage of FIT, Vidal dramatizes Burden’s thinking that Americans generally accept the fact that their government is corrupt because, given the opportunity, they would be equally corrupt: “As it was, the common folk daily cheated one another, misrepresenting the goods they sold and otherwise conducting themselves like their governors” (Vidal 1967, 386). Because these words are buried in an extended passage of third-person narration, it is tempting to consider them the judgment of the narrator, and even Vidal himself.

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Aeneus Duncan judges the people just as Burden does, when, having agreed to forsake his socialist principles and work for Overbury, he hears Overbury accuse Peter of incest with Enid, and leaps to this conclusion: “Between the middle class to which he [Duncan] belonged and the class whose existence he often denied, there was plainly a division more significant than any he had suspected: the guilty dreams of the one were suddenly revealed to be the essential acts of the other” (Vidal 1967, 408). This passage is not clear, but one possible interpretation is that Duncan realizes that his own middle-class longing to join the ruling elite is not just about his desire for power but also about his desire to indulge his own sexual fantasies without the fear of being discovered or ostracized, another aspect of upper-class privilege. Here Vidal again has one of his characters generalize about class standing, based entirely on his own immediate experience. Likewise, Vidal’s ruling elites have no sense of how minorities live, think, and feel. Indeed, Vidal’s failure to detail Overbury’s lower-class life is similar to the lack of detail in his portrayal of minorities in the novel. The only African Americans in the novel are servants, even though the novel was written during the Civil Rights Movement, which highlighted the history of black protests before and during the war. Vidal’s black servants parrot the politics of their masters, behavior which the narrator never questions, leaving open the possibility that they are hiding contempt for their masters behind a façade of subservience. One such butler named John works at the District Club in D.C., a club started by a high-society widow as a modern salon, a place where the Washington gentry could have “discreet parties” or lunches “while charting the course of a love affair or, more likely, threading the maze of government bureaus in search of treasure” (Vidal 1967, 178). John adopts the snobbish attitude of his employers toward newly elected officials, considering “them” as outsiders, as opposed to “us,” those who have lived in Washington for some time, those seemingly permanent residents who are regularly re-elected or having been defeated stay in the town as lawyers and lobbyists. Vidal’s sketch of John is so perfunctory that we cannot know the significance of his identifying with his employers and the guests at the club. In this he is like the other servants in the novel. Millicent Carhart’s life-long household help treat her premises as a shrine to the family Carhart’s god-like uncle, who was President of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Burden’s servant Henry “worships” the Senate, echoing Burden’s disdain for Roosevelt. Although these minority characters are not central to the

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plot, Vidal could have at least given us enough information about them to understand their motivation in ostensibly mimicking the point of view and political stance of their employers. In not doing so, Vidal implies that he does not have a clue about the lives of his minority characters. Dennis Altman (2005, 63) asserts that in the totality of his work Vidal failed “to grasp the full magnitude of the scars left by race on the United States.” In Washington, D.C., Vidal only treats race directly a few times. He dramatizes Burden’s casual racism when Burden beds a black prostitute just to discover whether black prostitutes differ from white prostitutes. Burden is disappointed to learn that they are not. Vidal also shows that Burden does not have the courage to challenge racism in the larger culture. While Burden is liberal enough to call the internment without due process of Japanese-Americans during the war as the equivalent to putting them in concentration camps, he is talked out of using this precise language on the record to a Washington reporter. Both Burden and the reporter are relieved when Burden rephrases his harsh denunciation of the camps as simply a matter of his being shocked at the illiberality of a supposedly liberal administration. The reporter is particularly happy because “one could defend the rights even of Japanese if the issue was plainly partisan” (Vidal 1967, 192). Finally, of course, the major plot of Washington, D.C. is devoted to “robbing” Native Americans of their government lands, but Vidal never suggests that this may be a matter of racism; rather, it is simply a matter of business using government to further its own interest. Vidal does not, however, shy away from detailing the anti-Semitism of two of the characters. Frederika Sanford, Blaise’s wife, is not only racist, wondering why Marian Anderson has been invited to sing at a White House dinner, when there were enough white singers in the country to suit the bill, but also casually anti-Jewish. Frederika supports Overbury’s courtship of Enid by arguing that at least he is not “a Communist or a lounge lizard or a Jew” (Vidal 1967, 117, 119). Even Peter, often interpreted as best representing Vidal’s own views, has difficulty accepting Jews at his parents’ estate. Peter considers the presence of Irene Bloch, a future sponsor of his journal at a party at Laurel House this way: “There had to be some standards in society. Jews could be intellectually stimulating but they were not the way people ought to be. They tended to look wrong and behave badly,” as Mrs. Bloch did, having gotten Polish diplomats to bring her to a house “where she knew she was not welcome” (Vidal 1967, 145). In all these incidents, Vidal seems to suggest that racism is indeed endemic among the ruling elite, and that even social liberals like Burden cannot

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afford to offend either the racist members of the political directorate or their constituents. Tolerating racism is yet another tactic elites use to balance the interests of their various members. The desire to be upper class, to exercise power or to be associated with it, not only determines the characters’ political affiliation and racial attitudes but other forms of identity, such as gender and sexual expression. All of the novel’s female and gay characters, like those with leftist political philosophies, subordinate their complex identities, their personal ambitions, and their love lives in order to maintain upper-class mores or to join some faction of the ruling elite. The wives of the older generation who came to power before the war, Frederika Sanford and Kitty Day, are conventional society hostesses, distinguished primarily by their respective boldness and shyness in public. Two minor female characters from the same generation become players among the ruling elite only through their husbands. Millicent Smith Carhart, the niece of a former nineteenth-­ century president, who lived in the White House, and twice a widow, having married a British earl and the heir of a New England fortune who traced his ancestry back to Scottish Robert the Bruce, holds one of the most popular salons in the capital. Irene Bloch, another Washington hostess, also widowed but now the wife of Ogden Wattress, a bankrupt businessman who maintains a lavish lifestyle based on his family’s reputation, finds Peter au fond spiritual and becomes a major donor to The American Idea. Eventually, she buys Laurel House, and her niece by Ogden Wattress marries Clay Overbury, and so Irene positions herself symbolically as an heir to the Sanford political establishment and as a relative to a potential president. The next generation of upper-class women, who come of age during or after the war, find it difficult to break away from the roles set by their mothers and to establish lives of their own, even though they are vaguely dissatisfied with their lives. Both Diana Day, daughter of Senator Burden Day, and Enid Sanford, Blaise Sanford’s daughter and Peter’s sister, in their different ways are constrained by their upper-class upbringing and only Diana finds a way to make something of her life. Even though she is bright and knowledgeable about politics, Diana spends much of her young life in love with Clay Overbury, even after he marries Enid. She winds up marrying Billy Thorne, primarily because she finds his socialist views intellectually engaging, and she wants to help him fulfill his ambition to start a left-wing journal. When Thorne proves not up to the task, Diana becomes disenchanted with him and turns to Peter Sanford, whom she recruits to

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help with the magazine. The two become occasional lovers—Peter more taken with Diana than she is with him—Diana divorces Thorne, and co-­ editing the magazine with Peter becomes central to her life. Enid Sanford, on the other hand, is seduced by Clay Overbury and at war with him during their marriage, the two are bound together by aggressive, violent sex. Enid can find no larger purpose for her life and rebels by becoming a hard-­ drinking, drug-taking thrill-seeker, who has multiple affairs, is institutionalized by her father as a danger to herself and her daughter, and eventually dies in a car accident, driving while drunk. Diana and Enid are clearly examples of the obstacles facing young upper-class women in the 1940s if they want to be more socially or professionally engaged than their mothers. Vidal also uses the novel to explore how the attitudes of ruling elites toward homosexuals during the war years were no more enlightened than among the population at large and may in fact have been more insidious and contemptible because accusations of homosexuality could be used as weapons in personal and political struggles. Having little knowledge of sex but recognizing the implications of being gay, Peter keeps his initiation into gay sex, mutual masturbation with his friend Scotty in the bathroom at Laurel House, a secret from everyone. When Harold Griffiths, the gay reporter for the Washington Tribune who covers the war in the Pacific, is accused by two undercover policemen of initiating gay sex in the men’s room of the Capitol Theater one afternoon, he argues that the police entrapped him. Given that Griffiths is a well-known public figure, the policemen allow Griffiths to call Overbury, then a congressman, from his home to help “straighten things out.” When Overbury saves Griffiths from being prosecuted for having gay sex under a D.C. District law, Griffiths becomes so grateful to Overbury for keeping his sexuality out of the news that he is willing to testify that he personally observed Overbury’s heroism in the Philippines, being wounded while hauling a fellow soldier out of a burning hangar, even though there is evidence that Overbury was not even at the airfield at the time. The cynical tone of the novel culminates in the final vision of the two characters most associated with Vidal himself: Senator Burden Day and Peter Sanford. Throughout the novel, Vidal contrasts Burden’s “idealism” with Overbury’s shameless, idea-free opportunism, indicating that their differences are less about policy issues and more about their essential moral character. But Burden’s idealism is compromised by his involvement in the Native American land sale. Pondering the end of his career and caught up in Overbury’s blackmail scheme, Burden thinks that in the

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early 1950s “hardly anyone even pretended to worry about right and wrong. Today’s man knew no motive but interest, acknowledged no criterion but success, worshipped no god but ambition” (Vidal 1967, 355). At Burden’s fall, Peter reaches a similar conclusion: “There is no virtue in any of us. We are savages,” and the game everyone in Washington played was “war”: “A conquers B who conquers C who conquers A. Each in his own way was struggling with precedence and to deny this essential predatoriness was sentimental; to accommodate it wrong; to change it impossible” (Vidal 1967, 397). Thus, the achieved wisdom of the novel’s two most thoughtful characters merely expresses the similar views expressed by the narrator himself and by multiple characters throughout the novel. But Vidal could not bring himself to end the novel with this cynicism alone and so he added a rather melodramatic and sentimental note of hope, perhaps as a sop to the conventions of popular fiction. Despite Peter’s final cynicism, he does decide to join with Diana and fight Overbury’s campaign for the Presidency with every tool at his disposal. This is an advance for Peter, who had only become interested in The American Idea because he had nothing else to do, and he had become attracted to Diana because he found the feelings associated with his inclination for men too difficult to deal with. As he observed the malleability of “ideas” in the likes of Harold Griffiths and Aeneas Duncan, Peter became more cynical, but at the end of the novel, now about 30 years old, he recognizes that Burden’s suicide implies that there is such a thing as right and wrong. Peter concludes that Overbury is wrong and vows to make Overbury’s election difficult. However, Peter’s vow could be considered just another maneuver in the games played by the various factions of the ruling elite. If Peter intends to make Overbury’s winning difficult simply to thwart one candidate’s personal ambition, then nothing has really changed: the game will continue to be played as usual. But if Peter is dedicating his magazine to the goal of making ideas and policy issues central to campaigning and indeed to all important discussions of America’s public life, then it has the potential to be more consequential: it holds out the hope that public debates about actual policies can result in better policies for the poor and working class. Because of Vidal’s use of free indirect thought, we cannot know just what Peter has in mind, and in any case the novel as a whole suggests that changing the game of politics is an uphill battle, if not an impossible task. In wrestling with his own sense of himself as an aristocrat with a controversial sexuality, Vidal managed in Washington, D.C. to create a com-

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plex imaginary of our political directorate consistent with Elite Theory, an imaginary that will be confirmed by his fellow novelists in the post-war period with their comparable portrayals of a political directorate riven by factions but dedicated to maintaining as much power as possible at almost any cost, without regard for the great majority of people the directorate supposedly represents.

References Altman, Dennis. 2005. Gore Vidal’s America. Malden: Polity. Davidson, Guy. 2015. Embarrassment in 1968: Gore Vidal’s Sexuality in the Public Sphere. Mosaic 48 (1): 147–164. Harker, Jamie. 2009. ‘Look, Baby, I Know You’: Gay Fiction and the Cold War Era. American Literary History 22 (1): 191–206. Kaplan, Fred. 1999. Gore Vidal: A Biography. New York: Doubleday. Parini, Jay. 2015. Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal. New York: Doubleday. Vidal, Gore. 1948. The City and the Pillar. New York: E. P. Dutton. ———. 1967. Washington, D.C. New York: Vintage/Random House. ———. 1972. Homage to Daniel Shays. In Homage to Daniel Shays: Collected Essays 1952–1972, 434–449. New York: Random House. ———. 1995. Palimpsest: A Memoir. New York: Penguin Books.

CHAPTER 5

Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent: Moderate Ruling-Elite Ideology

Allen Drury wrote Advise and Consent in the late 1950s, a time when America was going through a period of self-doubt, suffering from a recession and confronting the fact that the Soviet Union had put a man into space, which called into question America’s technological superiority. These events reinforced a virulent anti-communism that Drury had held for years. But because of his upper-class background and intense conservative politics, Drury was incapable of understanding how our political elites are governed by Boyers’ concept of an ideological “absent cause.” In his first and most successful novel, Advise and Consent, Drury portrays his major characters—US senators charged with confirming a president’s nominee for Secretary of State whose primary responsibility will be standing up to Soviet communism—as being motivated only by their own personal notions of “ambition” and “integrity,” their own personal fears and need for security. Drury’s senators do not rely on any objective analysis of why communism is such a threat and they never confront the ideological basis for why they are so preoccupied with foreign policy in the first place. As a result, Drury conceptualizes his major themes as simple binaries, thus reducing their complexity and dramatizing the major choices confronting his characters as yes or no, all or nothing. Still, Drury’s blindness to ideology, his virulent anti-communism, and his politics of the personal may be his greatest contribution to our understanding of less developed forms of ruling-class consciousness. Lacking any larger vision of governance for or against opposing classes, unable to © The Author(s) 2019 D. Smit, Power and Class in Political Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26769-8_5

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recognize his own ideological biases, Drury treated the behavior of his senators as a form of gamesmanship based on attitudes, feelings, and the exploitation of personal relationships, as a series of opportunities to tilt the status quo for or against this or that faction of the political directorate, or as a means to further their own political ambitions. In Advice and Consent, this emphasis on the personal rather than on social policy even applies to the issue of homosexuality, which becomes a major element in the plot toward the end of the novel. Because Drury’s portrayal of senators is otherwise so apparently faithful to their codes of conduct, especially the ways they follow the arcane protocols and procedures of the Senate, the blindness of Drury and his characters to their own ideology takes on a metaphoric resonance, suggesting how at least some factions of our ruling elite in general actually govern, not only during the 1950s but perhaps since the beginnings of our republic. They govern without any conscious understanding of perhaps the major sources for their personal ambition: their obsessive need for adulation and power. * * * Unlike Gore Vidal, Allen Drury was not a public figure. Despite the fact that Advise and Consent spent 102 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1960, Drury rarely gave interviews, and although he was not a recluse like J. D. Salinger, he was something of a mystery, a very private person who, for whatever reason, did not need or want to be a celebrity. There are no biographies of Drury, although his nephew Kenneth Killiany is reportedly writing one. What little we know about Drury reveals that in many ways he was a difficult man, with a peculiar upper-middle-class upbringing and a unique view of the world that both exemplifies and transcends his class status. The politicized hot-house atmosphere of Drury’s family may help explain his extreme anti-communism and his tendency to think in extreme binaries. Drury never married, which raises questions about his sexual orientation and given the attitude toward gays and lesbians in mid-century America, provides, perhaps, a too-easy explanation for his desire to avoid the limelight. Drury’s family life was apparently wracked by deep emotional conflicts that were often not addressed directly, dividing the family into factions— Drury and his sister on the one side; their mother on the other, their father aloof, distant, or at least not contributing. Drury grew up in

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Porterville, California, in the San Joaquin Valley, known for its citrus groves. His father Alden Monteith Drury traced his ancestry back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the seventeenth century and was, during his son’s childhood and adolescence in the late 1920s and 1930s, a manager in the citrus industry and later a real estate broker and insurance agent. His mother Flora Allen Drury was socially active, a “legislative representative” for the California Parent-Teacher Association for two years and a chair of the U.S.O.  She organized and managed a free nursery school sponsored by the Porterville citrus growers for the children of migrant workers and received an award from the governor for her contribution to the youth of the state. Drury had one sibling, a sister six years younger named Anne Elizabeth. We know little of Drury’s life in Porterville. Almost everything we know about the family’s dynamics are from much later after Drury and his sister left home, related in various anecdotes by Anne’s children and Drury’s nephews, Kevin and Kenneth Killiany. We know, for example, that Drury and his sister were close. They lived together in Washington, D.C., while he reported on the Senate and she went to art school. Anne accompanied Drury to dinners with other reporters, the most well-known being Helen Thomas. Since Drury was much more conservative than the other reporters, during one intense conversation, he became so excited that “he wadded up his linen napkin and threw it in his plate,” which mortified Anne. Once he became a successful novelist, Drury settled in Tiburon, California, an unincorporated town with a US Navy station and some manufacturing, but also with large tracts of undeveloped land, its politics dominated by a number of very wealthy families. He lived alone in a small house high on Ridge Road on the north shore overlooking San Francisco Bay. But Drury also spent several weeks every year, often extending to six months, living in Florida with his sister, who by then was married and had two sons. Drury stayed in a “bachelor apartment” at the Killiany house: one large room with its own bathroom and private deck. During the summer, Drury often vacationed with his family—his mother, his sister, and his nephews—at a cabin in a small private community in the High Sierra. When the nephews tell stories about the family, they never mention their grandfather. Kenneth Killiany (2014, 661, 664) reports that family dinners were often the occasion for “ferocious rows” caused primarily by Drury’s mother, “a starchy New England lady,” “a bitter, disappointed woman,” who provoked not only fights about politics but at times fights about

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“everything.” Drury dealt with his mother’s rants by simply sitting passively, lost in reverie, which infuriated Anne, who apparently wanted him to fight back. Anne complained to her sons that Drury “just sits there with his mind a million miles away.” Occasionally, these fights boiled over into public venues, and even occurred between Drury and his nephews, including one memorable event at a birthday dinner for Drury at an up-scale Sausalito restaurant that degenerated into a heated exchange over the virtues of Western civilization versus academic notions of cultural diversity. Kenneth was then in college and “full of cultural relativism.” Drury of course praised the value of Western civilization. Anne reported that afterward Drury expressed his embarrassment at the intensity of the argument. With his nephews, Drury was, according to Kenneth, always formal and somewhat distant, his “modes” for expressing his love for his nephews “always kind of matter of fact, or emphatic, or sometimes angry.” These family conflicts may have driven Drury inward, isolating him from everyone but his sister, and compelling him to retreat into his imagination. This sense of isolation, perhaps exacerbated by his sexuality, may have contributed to his tendency to think in terms of explicit binaries— you are either for me or against me in ways I do not fully understand—and appreciate formalities and rituals as a way of mitigating conflict. This may account for Drury’s admiring descriptions of the US Senate in both Advise and Consent and his non-fiction A Senate Journal, 1943–1945. To Drury, the Senate’s elaborate rituals and formal codes of address became a model for him to follow in dealing with his own fears and anxieties, his own personal, artistic, and perhaps sexual demons, which otherwise caused him to be passive-aggressive in public, his personal fears projected onto national issues, such as communism and homosexuality. Other than his family, we know little of Drury’s social life. He lived for his work. When he was not writing a novel, he traveled around the world or conducted research for his next book. We do know that he was a member of several exclusive upper-class men’s clubs: the Cosmo Club and the University Club in Washington, D.C., and the Bohemian Club in San Francisco. The Bohemian Club is used by sociologist G. William Domhoff (1975) as “a study in ruling-class cohesiveness”: 20–30 percent of its members in 1970 were listed in Standard & Poor’s Register of Corporations, Executives, and Directors. The club sponsored a summer encampment that included among its participants over the years Dwight Eisenhower, Henry Kissinger, and any number of well-known cabinet secretaries and high-ranking generals.1 Perhaps more suggestive, when Drury was dying, Kenneth Killiany

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(2014, 661) went through his uncle’s rolodex, looking for the names of friends to notify and was struck by the fact that when he was contacting these friends, none of them seemed to know each other. Kenneth concluded that he was the only other person his uncle’s many friends had in common: “My stately, silent uncle had had friends one by one, in singles.” While Drury seemed matter-of-fact, emphatic, and angry with his nephews, with others in public he was confident to the point of arrogance and bristled at being edited or even questioned about anything he said or wrote. In a memorandum he wrote to accompany the papers he donated to the Hoover Institute at Stanford University in 1961, Drury documents his resistance to various advice he received from editors and reviewers about how to improve Advise and Consent, much of it about what he ought to cut. In response to the cuts suggested by the reviewer for the Book of the Month Club, Clifton Fadiman, Drury (2014, 672) reports that he yielded “one one-sixteenth of an inch on one one-hundredth of the points” Fadiman made and never explicitly promised to make any changes; he only promised to go over the novel carefully in the galley stage. In response to criticism that his refusal to identify the senators in the novel as Republican or Democratic made their political stances difficult to distinguish, Drury replied that he wanted to avoid “unnecessary cluttering by automatic prejudices” and that anyone who could not understand why he avoided explicit political labels for his characters were fools “for not seeing the reason for a deliberate decision that must be obvious to any perceptive child over the age of three.” Drury could also be pretentious and prejudiced. In the memo to the Hoover Institute, he relates (2014, 673) that his original subtitle for Advise and Consent was “A Novel of the Western World” because the conflict in the novel could only happen in a Western country’s “parliamentary struggle,” as if such conflicts were impossible in Eastern democracies, as in India and Japan, and as if America’s Senate was somehow a representative model of the governments in all the countries associated with the West. The memorandum also indicates that Drury had a religious sensibility that his nephews do not mention. When he was ill in the mid-50s, he promised the Lord he would finish one of the several “embryo” novels he had begun, and at the publication and success of Advice and Consent, he could say, “I kept my promise to the Lord, and He was kind enough to see me through.” In an article for Western newspapers in 1951 on his standard theme of American submission to Russian aggression, Drury (1965, 247) asserts that America has relied too much on Providence, under which

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the country has “drifted dreamily along for 175 years, getting steadily bigger and fatter and richer and more lucky and more confident of our destiny, while around us the fabric of world society has crumbled and crumpled and wasted away.” Allen Drury was not an intellectual as Gore Vidal was: there is little evidence that he kept up with current issues in art and culture. All we know of his intellectual life before he became a best-selling author is that he covered politics as a reporter. After graduating from Stanford University, that bastion of status and intellect, Drury quickly established himself in journalism and worked his way up the ladder to become a reporter for the New York Times. At Stanford University, Drury joined the Alpha Kappa Lambda fraternity and worked on the campus newspaper as an associate editor, columnist, and editorial writer. With his work at Stanford on his resume, Drury quickly got jobs as a reporter and editorial writer in small papers in California, writing after graduation for the Tulare Bee in Porterville, where he won the Sigma Delta Chi Award for editorial writing from the Society of Professional Journalists, and then for the Bakersfield Californian. After a brief stint in the Army—he volunteered and was put in the infantry but discharged because of an old back injury—Drury moved to Washington, where he reported on the US Senate for United Press, keeping a journal of personal impressions of Senate procedures and the personalities of the senators he covered. After Advise and Consent became popular, he published these notes in 1963 as A Senate Journal 1943–1945. Leaving United Press, Drury freelanced from 1946 to 1954, writing columns for the Palo Alto Times, where the column was called “Westerner in Washington,” the Waterloo (Iowa) Courier, and occasionally the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. Later he joined the staff of Pathfinder Magazine and then the Washington Evening Star. His columns from this period were published in Three Kids in a Cart. In all of his reporting, there is no indication that Drury was even aware of serious, literary fiction by such novelists as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O’Connor, to say nothing of more experimental work by the Beats, John Hawkes, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon. This isolation from the literary world explains the conventional “dramatic” structure of his many novels—the tensions between characters opposed on certain issues expressed in rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and denouement. Indeed, the fact that Drury’s non-fiction A Senate Journal has the same sympathetic tone and lofty rhetoric of Advice and Consent suggests that the form and style of his fiction is based on the

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same elements as his journalism: an engagement with the intellectual issues associated with politics turned into major themes, intense research, and close sympathetic observation of human behavior. What the novels add to the journalism is the use of free indirect thought, in which the characters justify their behavior according to their very limited self-­awareness, and occasional outbursts of authorial judgment on both the characters and their cultural milieu. Despite the fact that his fiction is conventional, even formulaic, Drury had a successful career as a novelist, writing 19 novels, including five sequels to Advise and Consent, seven other political novels, one romance, one work of science fiction, three “university” novels that follow the lives of a class of Stanford graduates, and two novels about ancient Egypt.2 Being so conservative, Drury was extremely Manichean on foreign policy: he thought that any accommodation of Russia, China, or North Korea was a sign of weakness, and to the extent that liberals sought to contain or accommodate communism, they were putting the very existence of the country at risk. According to Tom Kemme, the author of the only book-­ length academic study of Drury’s work (1987, 10–11), Drury’s view of liberals and the Democratic Party was that they had a superficial—not to say, erroneous—understanding of the evils of communism, and by trying to accommodate communist nations, they consciously or unconsciously “destroyed” patriotism by belittling “the ideals, the goals, and the accomplishments of America,” thereby contributing to America’s decreasing power, influence, and confidence in itself. In the columns he collected in Three Kids in a Cart, Drury provides evidence for Kemme’s judgment. In those columns, Drury overwhelmingly focused on what he considered the abject, craven passivity of our governments under FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower to communist countries. In one section in which ten columns are grouped under the title “To Find a Purpose,” Drury rails against the hope of accommodation and negotiation with Russia, China, and North Korea, and in effect calls over and over again for the United States and its allies to draw red lines in the sand over any provocation and if that line is crossed, Drury strongly implies that the country should immediately go to war, that negotiating with communist regimes is pointless. On domestic issues Drury was perhaps more moderate, but it is hard to tell because his writing does not often deal directly with domestic policy. Nephew Kenneth labeled Drury a “Scoop Jackson Republican,” Jackson being a Democrat from Washington State and a personal friend (Miller 2015, 26). Killiany (2014, 656) grants that Drury was in favor of a small

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government that was “one step removed from the lives of individual citizens—enforcing standards or providing resources when needed, but otherwise not directly involved”—but that Drury also favored strong public schools, job training for the unemployed, and racial equality. Drury’s virulent anti-communism, vividly portrayed in Advise and Consent, may have struck a particular chord in late 1950s and account for the novel’s great success. In the novel, Drury captures the mood of the country at the time: a decline in national self-confidence. The economic machine that had produced post-war prosperity had begun to sputter. There was a major recession from 1957 to 1958, particularly vexing because the resulting unemployment was accompanied by inflation, which was theoretically not supposed to happen. The recession drew attention to the relatively high rate of unemployment that post-war prosperity had hidden and, as a result, unions became more active and began to strike for higher wages. Major strikes occurred almost every week between 1957 and 1960, and high-profile unions, such as the Longshoremen and the Steelworkers, shut down their industries for months (Perrett 1979, 525–27). Post-war prosperity seemed in jeopardy, or at least, the benefits of that prosperity were shown to be very unevenly distributed. Moreover, the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik into orbit in 1957 caused many Americans to believe that the country might be losing the space race and that its educational system was second to Russia’s. Widespread anxiety about a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union increased, and in the summer of 1959, the year Advise and Consent was published, Life magazine featured a story about a couple who spent their two-week honeymoon in a fallout shelter. One of the photographs accompanying the story shows the couple sitting on the lawn in front of all the food and supplies that they plan to take with them down the hatch to the shelter.3 In response to the country’s purported low morale, President Eisenhower established a Commission on National Goals, and the resulting document Goals for Americans, released in late 1960, championed “the primacy of the individual,” but all it could do to promote this goal was to recommend more of the same: more money for more equality of opportunity, more housing, more education, more help for the poor (Perrett 1979, 555). Congress also held hearings on the country’s “National Purpose,” and Life ran a series of articles by prominent writers and intellectuals debating whether the country had reached a crisis point and had become so decadent that it could no longer compete with the Soviet Union.4

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Obsessed as he was with communism, Drury captured the prevailing discontent and lack of purpose in the country, not by dealing with domestic issues but by focusing on foreign policy, which is a trope for how ruling elites distract the public from other larger issues of governance and representation. In failing to confront the underlying ideology behind the demonization of communism in the 1950s, Drury unintentionally provides a convincing portrait of the ideology of our ruling elite, which is less a matter of political philosophy than a function of their personal ambitions and class relationships. I will examine the ideology of Drury’s elites as illustrations of two major themes: “the ideology of the personal” and “reductionary binaries.” * * * Drury (2014, 667) claimed that he wrote Advise and Consent “to show people that this was how their government worked,” and the novel’s great achievement is the lavish detail with which Drury documents the legislative processes of the US Senate, its apparently arcane rituals, parliamentary procedures, and elaborate codes of behavior. Like Gore Vidal in Washington, D.C., Drury portrays the politicians on either side of the major point of contention in Advise and Consent—the confirmation of a candidate for Secretary of State—as having less than a fully developed ruling-class consciousness. Drury’s senators are very conscious of the interests they share among their faction of the political directorate in order to stay in power and pass the legislation their faction favors, but those competing interests are strictly among the ruling elite and not grounded in a conscious opposition to any other class. In relating how his major characters achieved office, Drury never mentions what they campaigned on or what they pledged to do for their constituents. Indeed, in describing the careers of his major characters, Drury often portrays them in free indirect thought, but in all their private musings over the course of their careers or in their deliberations over the Senate confirmation, as they ponder their choices, Drury never indicates that they have any underlying goals or vision for the country, only an inchoate ambition to “succeed,” whatever that might mean, and a fierce sense of their own “integrity,” which is rarely defined, except in Senator Orrin Knox’s formulation: as a set of convictions that cannot be bargained away, no matter what those convictions are. In light of the confirmation hearings for Secretary of State, the senators never analyze the geo-political situation to determine

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specifically why communism is such a threat; they never articulate the guidelines for a policy to defend the country based on specific Soviet actions except “strength.” They rely only on their vague sense of what it means for a nation to be strong or safe, not on any explicit policy toward communism. With only their personal ambition and their personal integrity to guide them, Drury’s senators base their decisions not on fact-finding and deliberate policy but on whom they can trust. Because they are incapable of adequately addressing issues of ideological commitment, the basis for personal trust is forever eluding them. As Kevin Killiany (2014, 656) said of his uncle, “Underlying all of his positions was a belief in the fundamental integrity of human beings. Even the worst villains in his novels are motivated by their sense of what is right; though some of his characters are delusional in their convictions, they always act out of those convictions.” But if even delusional villains are to be granted their integrity, then integrity cannot be an adequate standard to judge a person’s values and behavior. Because Drury’s senators never stand for any explicit programs or policies and never demonstrate any sense of what their constituents may want or need, they feel free to govern in any way they choose. Governing, then, is simply a matter of the shifting balance of power among competing factions of the political directorate, and the nation is fated to live by the whims of a ruling elite that is unaccountable to its constituencies. Even more than the other novelists in this study, Drury does not think in terms of class directly, and so we have to infer the class status of his senators from the details of their lives. One good indication of their class status is where they live: in fashionable hotels and up-scale neighborhoods, such as the Sheraton-Park and Woodner hotels, on Chevy Chase Circle and in Georgetown, and in the suburb of Spring Valley on the edge of D.C. on the way to Normandy Farms, likely a renaming of the actual D.C. suburbs of Bethesda or Chevy Chase, Maryland. There are also the tell-tale signs of the senators’ awareness of each other’s social standing. Senator Seab Cooley, as a political tactic, is forever reminding people that he is just a poor boy from South Carolina, even though his family owns a chain of grocery stores. One sign of Majority Leader Bob Munson’s upper-class snobbishness is his attributing Senator Fred van Ackerman’s “irrationality” over Senate procedures to the kind of family he came from, the implication being that Ackerman’s inability to control himself must mean that Ackerman is lower class.

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Drury structures the novel from the point of view of four senators, providing us with their political backgrounds. In doing so, he illustrates how all four—three of them upper-middle class, one lower class—develop an “ambition” for politics and climb the political ladder, with support from appropriate donors and political groups, thus modeling how members of the lower classes, like Clay Overbury in Gore Vidal’s Washington, D.C. join the ruling elite. The “ambition” of these men is strictly personal, a sign that they identify with the ruling elite that is a step above them on the socio-economic ladder. They want to serve, contribute, exercise power but give no indication of what they might actually want to accomplish, as if they were in a vacuum, with no larger pressures to represent their constituents, the platform of their party, or some larger vision of what the country should strive to become. These four senators illustrate the usual ways that those currently outside the ruling elite are accepted into the ranks: because of their family background; their academic achievements, speaking abilities, and natural charm; and their raw desire for power. Majority Leader Bob Munson goes into politics because he comes from a political family: his grandfather had been a Massachusetts senator, and being the only grandchild, he was expected to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. Munson follows the standard career for a bright son of an upper-class political family: he attends Harvard Law, marries a daughter of an auto manufacturer, joins a major law firm in Detroit, discovers that he is good at making speeches, and, having inherited some of his grandfather’s political savvy, recognizes that in his state of Michigan one way to gain political power was to align yourself with labor unions. Once ensconced in Washington, his wife May organizes the equivalent of a nineteenth-century salon in their house in Cleveland Park, attended over time by two presidents and three Supreme Court justices. After his wife dies, Munson takes as a lover, Dolly Phelps Harrison, a millionaire heiress and socialite, whose parties are attended by only the highest members of the D.C. political establishment. Brigham Anderson, the Senator from Utah, does not come from a political family, but his upper-middle-class family is similar to Munson’s. The fourth child of six in a Mormon family that followed the “social season,” his father a lawyer, Anderson goes to Stanford, like Drury himself, where as vice-president of his fraternity, president of the junior class, and an elected member of the student government, he comes to realize that he wanted to go into public life, a “natural” ambition for someone so privileged, who was also a member of the football team, and attractive to

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women, who were, in his social circles, eager to be associated with men prominent in campus life. After serving with distinction in the Air Force in WWII, Anderson returns to Utah, and “because he was his father’s son, many doors were open to him; because he was himself, he walked through them with ease, gathering friends and supporters wherever he went” (Drury 1959, 349). Anderson easily wins his first election and goes off to Washington, thus fulfilling an ambition “natural” to a person of his social class. The background of Orrin Knox, the senator from Illinois, also fits the stereotype for becoming a US Senator. Like Anderson, Knox had an upper-middle class upbringing with a lawyer father, went to a decent undergraduate school—the University of Illinois-Champaign-Urbana— served in a fraternity and the debating society, and like Munson, graduated from an ivy-league law school—in this case, Yale. Indeed, the similarities between Knox and Anderson are so marked that their differences in personality seem surprising. Knox early develops a driving ambition for politics and is elected governor of Illinois before being elected to the Senate, but not for any particular vision of the country. He just wants power, although once in the Senate he does develop a belief that because the country as a whole has become apathetic, shoddy, and second-rate, it needs to shake off its apathy, reject the “dry rot,” and once again exercise “world leadership.” However, Knox has no vision or policy proposals to improve America’s collective psychological state. The exception to the other three major characters in the novel is Seab Cooley, the Senator from South Carolina, who grew up poor, his father a storekeeper in a small country town, although Cooley shares with his colleagues an academic brilliance and oratorical skill. The major difference with his senate colleagues is that Cooley is actively recruited into the ruling elite. Forced to work to support the family at the age of nine, Cooley does odd jobs for neighbors and the businesses in the small town of Barnwell and takes correspondence courses to graduate early from high school. Because of his natural intelligence and excellence at high school oratory and debate, Cooley is taken up by Colonel Tom Cashton, a rich plantation owner, who pays for his undergraduate education at the University of South Carolina and eventually suggests, after Cooley has worked as Superintendent of Schools for several years, that he go into politics. Shrewdly, Cooley puts off running for office until he can obtain a law degree from Harvard, after which he is again taken up by the local political party, and starts winning elections, first to the House and then to

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the Senate. Drury mentions but does not develop the fact that Cooley’s being in politics is accompanied by the success of the family grocery stores, later a chain in three states, implying that there is a connection between Cooley’s being in politics and his family’s improved financial situation. Drury is also coy about Cooley’s actual politics: he starts out a Wilsonian “liberal” but somehow evolves to become the scourge of liberalism, at least according to the liberal media. This may be because of the decline and sale of Cashton’s plantation to obnoxious Yankees—metonymy for the South in general. In any case, by the time of the hearings for the new Secretary of State, Cooley instinctively dislikes the nominee Bob Leffingwell because of “his clever skatings along the outskirts of the flabbily-­principled and dangerously over-liberal fads of his era” (Drury 1959, 188). Drury never explains what policies Cooley might actually favor to compensate for the liberal fads he finds so flabby and dangerous. The three upper-middle-class senators obviously identify with the upper class and go into politics as a way to fulfill their sense of their own potential. Senator Cooley, despite coming from the working class, shows no sense of identification with the class he was born into, and the fact that his family becomes wealthy as he rises in power suggests that entering politics is an excellent way to improve one’s social status. None of these characters is elected on a platform to accomplish anything at all, and Drury never addresses the issue of how or in what sense elected officials should represent the interests of its citizens and their general welfare, especially the poor and working class. Once his characters become senators, Drury continues to portray them as non-ideological, but now their major concern is their own “integrity,” which is contradicted by their common assumption than any of them can be swayed by various forms of horse-trading and polite forms of bribery. One good example is how the President tries to win Senator Knox’s support for Leffingwell by offering to help him achieve his ultimate dream: becoming president himself. In exchange for Knox’s support, the President offers Knox a letter guaranteeing that he will support Knox for the presidency at the end of his term. At first, Knox instinctively rejects, even ridicules, the offer as beneath him, an offense against his integrity, but after the meeting Knox has second thoughts and consults his colleagues, who to a person sympathize with his dilemma and reassure him that all that matters is his being true to himself, the nomination of Leffingwell as a matter of policy being largely irrelevant, although Senator Cooley does tell Knox that “when a man deserts something he basically and fundamentally believes in, he loses something inside” (695). Eventually

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Knox is so conflicted over this choice that he consults his wife, asking her rather pathetically what he should do. Apparently, his integrity is not as rock solid as he thought. The preoccupation with integrity in the abstract at the expense of any ideological principles or even empirically based policy considerations is illustrated by the novel’s central plot. The debate over the confirmation of Robert Leffingwell as Secretary of State alludes to contrary views of how to deal with the Soviet Union: containment or confrontation through military strength versus peaceful negotiation on common interests. However, even though the novel uses free indirect discourse to record the characters’ thought, the characters rarely think about what they actually know about Russia—what guides its foreign policy, its strengths and weaknesses relative to the United States, its actual behavior globally, the degree to which it is a real threat to the United States—and what should be the larger goals of American foreign policy, especially its need for security. All we are given is the ugly, bombastic, vaguely threatening person of the Russian Ambassador Tashikov, a cartoon-like stereotype, who more than any other character indicates Drury’s inability to imagine points of view other than his own: in this case, that the Russian government is as complex as America’s and needs to be studied with the intensity the senators devote to Leffingwell’s temperament. During the hearings, no one ever offers any empirical evidence for whether the senate should take Tashikov’s bellicose rhetoric at face value: what, if anything, intelligence reports from the Department of Defense and the CIA say about the degree to which Russia is a threat. The Russian threat is simply assumed and the split over the Leffingwell nomination is entirely argued in absolute binary terms: the only choices are belligerent confrontation and strength through force, which may increase the risk of war, versus negotiation for peace, which may lead to appeasement. The novel in effect concedes that the major issue of security facing the country is not subject to rational argument or actual evidence, only to subjective appeals of what it means to be safe and secure. As a result, the debates in the novel do not really deal with actual policy at all, only with the degree of Leffingwell’s “toughness” toward Russia. This is comparable to a novel about McCarthyism that focuses only on the degree to which McCarthy was a drunk and a liar and totally ignores the evidence of whether there really was a world-wide communist conspiracy and whether particular members of the government did anything to aid that conspiracy. Indeed, the way Cooley and Knox treat Leffingwell is

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close to McCarthyism, and recapitulates the arguments during the McCarthy hearings about whether membership in the Communist Party or even the Popular Front was sufficient evidence to disqualify anyone from having a government job. Perhaps the best episode to illustrate this key issue of the Leffingwell nomination is at the first hearing when Leffingwell is grilled by Senator John DeWilton, who demands to know on what evidence Leffingwell thinks that the Russians will negotiate in good faith. Leffingwell responds that although the Soviets have made no formal promise or commitments, they have recently communicated, almost daily, a greater willingness to negotiate and have urged the US to join them. Senator DeWilton counters that in previous negotiations the United States has offered the Russians a great deal, but they have refused to make any concessions. Given such behavior, why continue to negotiate? To which Leffingwell responds that as long as the two parties are negotiating, they are not at war. But DeWilton will not take this for an answer and demands to know what new knowledge Leffingwell has that would indicate new negotiations would succeed, knowledge of course, that Leffingwell cannot provide, except to say that at the last few negotiating sessions, the Soviets agreed to consider a program based on gradual mutual disarmament. DeWilton ridicules this idea, in effect repeating his early statement that during the previous negotiations the Soviets did not offer the United States sufficient concessions. Significantly, DeWilton does not suggest what sort of concessions he would accept, and from then on, the exchange between the two men degenerates into mutual accusations of bad faith. Given no knowledge of specific Soviet capabilities and intensions and no actual guidelines for the US policy, all that the two men can do is talk about their hopes and fears. In fact, the entire conflict over Leffingwell’s nomination is a matter of personal trust rather than actual policy. In appointing Leffingwell, the President does not have a particular analysis of the Soviet Union’s intentions and capabilities at his command, nor does he have any intuitions about what policy to follow. He simply wants Leffingwell because he is a terrific administrator with “brains, character, and ability.” Munson’s first response in learning the name of the President’s nominee (Drury 1959, 4, 10) is equally personal: he finds Leffingwell “supercilious, arrogant, holier-­than-­thou,” a “Sir Gawain, Purist of the Pure,” beloved by the liberal media, who provide him with a protective screen so that the larger public has no idea if his reputation is deserved. Cooley’s major objection is that Leffingwell denied in public something he had told Cooley pri-

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vately, which makes him a liar. Senator Knox, who believes the Russians will never be reasonable until they are forced to surrender, thinks Leffingwell is not firm enough and simply doesn’t like him. The lines for and against Leffingwell are entirely determined by the general attitudes of the two major factions in Drury’s version of our political directorate. Labor unions favor Leffingwell. So does the liberal Supreme Court Justice Davis and the liberal press. The Senate chaplain the Reverend Carney Birch, a conservative, implicitly criticizes Leffingwell when he prays that the Senate not inadvertently confirm someone who could “misguide and mislead” people. But Drury does not, or cannot, provide any detail about the ideologies that determine the basis for this liberal-conservative split among the political directorate, what it is that drives our elites into its various factions. Even when the news arrives that the Soviet Union have landed a man on the moon and declared it to be a new Russian colony, possibly giving that country a military edge in any major war, no senator immediately engages with the practical implications of the Russian achievement. Rather than even think about policy—greater funding for America’s own space program, reinforcing NATO troops in eastern Europe, finding ways to undercut Russia’s economic development, challenging the Russian argument that their landing on the moon establishes the moon as Russian territory—the senators are only concerned with whether Leffingwell is “tough enough” to deal with the Soviets now that they have an even greater military edge. The great irony of the novel is that the overly simple binary choice at the heart of the debate over Leffingwell’s confirmation is undercut by Drury’s conventional resolution to the novel, in which, despite the Senate’s rejection of Leffingwell’s nomination because he may have lied about his membership in a communist cell when he was younger, both Vice-President Harley Hudson and the President himself propose policies toward the Soviet Union which seem to incorporate something of Leffingwell’s point of view, thus achieving a compromise that all the action of the novel up to that point vehemently denied was possible. First, the Vice-President proposes to the Russian ambassador that the United States might recognize Red China and offer that country a billion-dollar loan, thereby giving China a reason to reconsider its relationship with Russia and possibly opening a rift between the two communist countries. Then, the President announces that, despite the Russian threat that the moon is now its colony, the United States has just launched an expedition to the

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moon to challenge Russia’s claim. Still, the President will meet with Russia in Geneva, not because of Russia’s implicit threats but “humanity and conscience demand it” (Drury 1959, 728). These actions and proposals by the Vice-President and President are perfectly compatible with Leffingwell’s stance toward Russia, except that they are phrased in more bellicose language. If such policy proposals had been a part of the confirmation hearings in the first place, all of the posturing over Leffingwell’s qualifications and suitability for the job might have been dealt with in a more open and honest matter, and the truth of Leffingwell’s past could have been evaluated in the context of the particular policies he proposed to advocate. The most obvious “absent cause” of the unanimous demonization of communism by the political directorate in Advise and Consent is that having enemies is good politics; the need for enemies allows the elite to focus on fear and insecurity and distract the populace from domestic policy, limiting discussion of other important issues, such as the degree to which the economy should be based on “a national security state” in the first place. During the late 1950s, defense spending accounted for 15–20 percent of the entire Gross National Product (Miller and Nowak 1975, 117), and early in his first term, even President Eisenhower (1953) had warned, in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C., that the war economy distracted the country from domestic issues: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed…. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

And of course, there is also that fact that federal money for defense spending is spread primarily among industries and military bases in the states of key senators, so that defense spending helps senators support their local economies and aid in their re-election. It is no wonder then that Drury’s senators demonize communism and are fully invested in foreign policy crises. It is in their own best interest to do so, something that Drury never acknowledges.

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However, in order to do justice to the political stance of his senators, Drury cannot avoid providing hints of the interests they really represent, which gives some indication of their ideology. The President of General Motors personally lobbies the junior senator from Michigan to oppose Leffingwell by simply calling him up on the phone, a tactic not available to most citizens. Here, Drury illustrates not only that campaign contributors, lobbyists, and firms doing business with the government have privileged access to the senators, but that anti-communism is in the best interest of General Motors, which is an integral part of the military-­ industrial complex. The only mention in the novel of a senator actually meeting with and listening to constituents is made by a minor senator named Ray Smith as a throw-away line. Smith interrupts the small talk after a committee hearing to announce elaborately that he is off to meet some constituents because if there is one thing he has learned over his years in the senate, it is to be “kind” to constituents (Drury 1959, 483). Drury does not follow the senator to his constituent meeting, but it is clear from the novel as a whole that his constituents are probably just lobbyists and representatives of interest groups. While the Leffingwell hearings are going on, Drury portrays what is occurring in various committee hearings on Capitol Hill at the same time, suggesting in each instance practices that the senators would not want the public to know about, again providing evidence that emotional debates on foreign policy are a useful distraction. Testifying before an Appropriations subcommittee on Public Works, two representatives of the Army Corps of Engineers withstand some good-natured ribbing from the Committee, serene in the knowledge that their budget will be fully funded because the Corps is planning to spend a great deal of money in each of the states represented by the Committee members and the Speaker of the House. Over in the Banking and Currency Committee hearing, the Secretary of the Treasury is being lectured on the need to lower interest rates on certain select small businesses, code for business owners with access to members of the Committee. Although the Treasury Secretary thinks this is bad policy and will not endorse the idea, the Committee knows that they have the votes and the President’s blessing, so the Treasury Secretary will advise the President to veto the bill, but the President will not do so, and despite this difference of opinion, members of the Committee will be playing golf with the Treasury Secretary days after the bill passes.

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The Committee on Government Operations is investigating the government’s own procurement agencies, noting how certain businesses have overcharged the government millions of dollars with the connivance of the government’s own inspectors, with no indication of what can be done to curb this ancient practice. Drury’s tone in describing these hearings is one of weary cynicism, but he cannot bring himself to detail the extent to which the ideology of his individual senators justifies their promoting various business interests. It would have been instructive to know what each congressional representative gains from promoting the interests of the various businesses to which they grant access. Because the angry, hostile rhetoric of the senators during the confirmation hearings seems ungrounded in any particular ideology or world-view, Drury resorts to scapegoating a particular senator as an extreme case, suggesting that the senators’ anger and frustration, their hostility toward opposing factions, are not a sign of a deeper dysfunction or ideological divide. The scapegoat is Senator Fred Van Ackerman, the only senator with an explicit stance toward the Soviet Union, whom Drury portrays, not coincidentally, as partisan and outside the usual senatorial norms of civility. Van Ackerman is associated with COMFORT, the Committee on Making Further Offers for a Russian Truce. The group has for its slogan “Better Red Than Dead,” and at a rally Van Ackerman actually yells, “As for me, I had rather crawl on my knees to Moscow than die under an atom bomb” (Drury 1959, 532). Many senators call Van Ackerman a fanatic, and the President considers him to be “smart and glib and evil, without basic principle, without basic character, and without restraints” (Drury 1959, 552). Thus, Drury sets up Van Ackerman as a villain comparable to the Russian ambassador. Drury cannot imagine a person with a decent moral sense fearing the total annihilation of America and, facing the threat of nuclear holocaust, wanting to preserve some vestige of American life. To Drury, such a person can only be contemptible—or evil. And so, it is Van Ackerman who implements a major plot line late in the novel, a scheme to blackmail Senator Anderson into voting for Leffingwell by threatening to reveal that Anderson had a homosexual encounter when he was in the military. However, in blackmailing Anderson, Van Ackerman is in many ways no better than the President, who counts on Van Ackerman to do his dirty work for him. It is the President who gives Van Ackerman the evidence of Anderson’s homosexual liaison, knowing full well that Van Ackerman will

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use it in some way to smear Anderson, and as a result, Anderson commits suicide. Yet Drury (1959, 553) goes out of his way to have his narrator excuse the President as being fundamentally “a decent man,” his action a matter of mere misjudgment, of his being “clever and devious” rather than “straightforward and forthright,” and so not really responsible for Anderson’s suicide. Drury needs to associate an accommodating stance toward communism, a position he hates, with evil and excuse those who traffic in blackmail and intimidation as acting for some defensible moral purpose. The final resolution of the novel confirms Drury’s insight into the personal nature of politics. When the President dies and Vice-President Hudson takes his place, Hudson’s first major speech as president offers a vision of bipartisanship, papering over the deep ideological divide implied by the confirmation battle. In his conciliatory speech as the new president, Hudson announces that he will not run for president the following year, he appoints Leffingwell to a commission to “overhaul” the administration of government; and he makes Senator Knox Secretary of State, thereby giving Knox a base from which to run for president himself. Thus, Hudson’s actions reward the key players on both sides of the Leffingwell confirmation fight, gaining the good will and trust of the two major factions they represent. This resolution suggests that the ultimate ideology of Drury’s moderate elites is less a matter of actual policies than a means for all the factions, in a spirit of compromise, to gratify the personal ambitions of as many of the elite as possible. Drury not only uses false binaries as a way to dramatize the Leffingwell confirmation hearings: confrontation versus negotiation, strength versus weakness. He uses the same technique to dramatize one of his major plot devices: Senator Anderson’s homosexual past. Having had a sexual encounter with another man while he was in the army, Anderson is subject to blackmail in order to force him to support Leffingwell. Drury (1959, 545) presents Anderson’s previous homosexual experience sympathetically but as something over and done with long ago, an act “beyond [Anderson’s] own volition.” Anderson feels little guilt for his act and does not really consider himself homosexual. In portraying Anderson this way, Drury does not directly deal with the issue of why homosexuality was such a social problem, psychologically, religiously, and culturally, in the 1950s. Instead, he presents Anderson’s homosexual past almost entirely as an intellectual exercise: as an issue about the distinction between public and private behavior, what the public is

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entitled to know about a government official’s private life. In setting up this binary, Drury equates Anderson’s homosexual past with Leffingwell’s past membership in a communist cell. The most damning evidence against Leffingwell is that he may have not only been a member of a communist cell, but he may have lied about it while testifying before the Senate. In his despair at being blackmailed for a homosexual act, Anderson, like Leffingwell, faces the choice of either lying about his past or facing public condemnation for telling the truth. To make the point explicit, Drury (1959, 545–46) portrays Anderson’s thoughts on the matter in free indirect thought: “Here was [Anderson], carrying a secret in his past, fighting the nominee, who carried a secret in his past; and what, essentially, except that his secret was purely personal and harmed no one else, while the nominee’s went to his public philosophies and could conceivably be of great harm to his country, was the difference between them?” But in framing the issue this way, Drury is ignoring the ugly reality that during the 1950s, homosexuality was often demonized in terms similar to those used to demonize communism—both were “evil,” “horrible,” “a sign of degeneration”—and both homosexuals and communists could also be dismissed from a government job. During the period thousands of people were fired from government jobs and publicly ostracized for being either communists or homosexuals, and Drury may have based Anderson’s suicide on an actual event. During the time Drury was writing the novel, the son of Senator Lester Hunt, Democrat of Wyoming, was arrested for soliciting gay sex in a D.C. park. When Hunt’s political opponents, two other senators, threatened to spread the news back in Wyoming, Hunt committed suicide (Isikoff 2015). In thinking that his “secret was purely personal and harmed no one else,” Anderson is acting like a social liberal who is sympathetic and tolerant toward homosexuals and going against the grain of the dominant attitude toward gays and lesbians at the time. However, in portraying Anderson’s final thoughts about how he should respond to being blackmailed, Drury has Anderson resort to a partisan attack on the Majority, even though at the time social liberals in the Democratic Party would be more likely to sympathize with Anderson than Republican conservatives. In summing up his situation, Anderson concludes that “if it had been the nominee [Leffingwell] who had kept an inadvertent wartime rendezvous the fact would have been hushed up and covered over and hidden from the public.” Here, Anderson seems to think

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that he is in effect a victim of not just the President and Van Ackerman’s scheming but also of all the liberal factions of the government, including their supporters in the media, even though their attitude toward homosexuality at the time was more tolerant and accepting than the attitudes of the conservative factions. In dramatizing Anderson’s final decision, Drury returns to his value-­ free, ideologically empty concept of “integrity” and has Anderson decide that his integrity demands that he “sacrifice” himself to ease the conscience of “the ruthless and the righteous,” which he associates with the fanaticism of Van Ackerman, the COMFORT movement, and by extension, liberalism in general. But since Anderson feels little guilt for his homosexual act and his wife accepts him “as he is,” it is not at all clear why Anderson feels he must sacrifice himself by committing suicide. Since Drury has no larger insight into the ideological basis for the demonization of homosexuality or is incapable of addressing the issue directly, he is reduced to having Anderson commit suicide simply as a plot device and as a way to demonize the liberal Majority in the novel. And so Anderson kills himself, presumably with a gun—a colleague hears something like a gunshot coming from Anderson’s office—and when Anderson’s homosexual partner learns about Anderson’s death, he gets drunk and jumps off a bridge. In Drury’s imaginary of our political system, liberalism is simply dangerous not only for its accommodation of the evils of communism but also for the scandalous methods it uses to achieve its political ends. * * * In imagining the US Senate in Advice and Consent, Allen Drury captures the way members of the major factions in that august body govern primarily by relying on their own personal ambitions and sense of integrity, concerned primarily with issues of national security and largely unconcerned with the ways domestic policy is shaped by business interests and political donors. As these factions work to gain or maintain their control of the Senate, they can be ruthless, but in Drury’s imaginary, no matter which factions are in control, the insular world of the US Senate will always be isolated from the world of the poor and working class.

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Notes 1. For a brief history and analysis of the Bohemian Club, see Didion (2003, 1005–09). 2. Perhaps because Drury has no distinctive literary style and uses conventional literary structures, there are no major critical studies of his work done by literary scholars other than Kemme (1987). The two best critical analyses of Advise and Consent are by journalists: Kaplan (1999) and Miller (2015). 3. During the late 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement also provoked a great deal of violence. From the mid- 1950s to 1963, black churches and meeting places in Birmingham, Alabama, were bombed 59 times. And “[b]etween January 1956 and July 1963 not a single month had gone by without a racial bombing somewhere in the eleven states of the Old Confederacy” (Perrett 1979, 697), a subject Drury never mentions in Advise and Consent, although he does deal with issues of race in his next novel, A Shade of Difference. 4. The series entitled “The National Purpose” began with the May 23, 1960, issue of Life. It was a response to an earlier charge by Walter Lippmann that Americans no longer had “great purposes which they are united in wanting to achieve.” Rather, Lippmann thought, Americans were defensive, wanting “to conserve, not to push forward and to create.” They talk about their country as if it “were a completed society, one which has achieved its purposes, and has no further great business to transact….” (Life 1960, 23). The series included responses by Adlai Stevenson, Archibald MacLeish, Billy Graham, John Gardner, David Sarnoff, Albert Wohlstetter, and Clinton Rossiter. For a reasoned response as to whether nations can even have some broad philosophical purpose, see Meyerhoff (1960).

References Didion, Joan. 2003. Where I Was From. In We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Non-Fiction, 949–1104. New York: Knopf. Domhoff, G. William. 1975. The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness. New York: HarperCollins. Drury, Allen. 1959. Advise and Consent. New York: Pocket Books. ———. 1963. A Senate Journal 1943–1945. New York: McGraw-Hill. ———. 1965. Three Kids in a Cart: A Visit to Ike and Other Diversions. New York: Doubleday. ———. 2014. Memorandum on Advise and Consent. In Advise and Consent by Allen Drury, 667–673. Colorado Springs: Word Fire Press.

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Eisenhower, Dwight D. 1953. The Chance for Peace. Social Justice Speeches. http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/ike_chance_for_peace. html. Accessed 9 Apr 2019. Isikoff, Michael. 2015. Uniquely Nasty: The Blockbuster Novel That Haunted Gay Washington. Yahoo News, January 15. http://www.yahoo.com/news/ uniquely-Nasty-advise-consent-blockbuster-novel-haunted-gay-washington-203331641.html Kaplan, Roger. 1999. Allen Drury and the Washington Novel. Policy Review, October/November. Kemme, Tom. 1987. Political Fiction, the Spirit of the Age, and Allen Drury. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press. Killiany, Kenneth. 2014. Memories of Al. Appendices to Advise and Consent by Allen Drury, 659–664. Colorado Springs: Wordfire Press. Killiany, Kevin. 2014. Memories of Al. Appendices to Advise and Consent by Allen Drury, 655–658. Colorado Springs: Wordfire Press. Life Magazine. 1959. Their Sheltered Honeymoon. August 10, pp. 51–52. Life Magazine. 1960. The National Purpose. May 23, pp. 22–41. Meyerhoff, Hans. 1960. The Case of the Missing Purpose. The Nation 191: 85–89. Miller, John J. 2015. The Great Washington Novel: Rediscovering Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent. National Review 67 (2): 24–26. Miller, Douglas, and Marion Nowak. 1975. The Fifties: The Way We Really Were. Garden City: Doubleday. Perrett, Geoffrey. 1979. A Dream of Greatness: The American People 1945–1963. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan.

CHAPTER 6

Joan Didion’s Democracy: Moderate Ruling-­Elite Constituencies

Joan Didion is a fifth-generation Californian, a member of Old Money, who can trace her ancestors back to the American Revolution. Her extended family are major landowners near Sacramento, the state capital, where Didion attended school with many daughters of California’s political class. Raised by her mother as a delicate flower, Didion early developed an unusual ability to attend to sensory detail and a gift for imaginative exploration that gradually evolved into an elaborate sense of self-­ consciousness, in which her observations become important primarily for what they say about her rather than her social and political environment. In her writing, the personal is what really matters, and politics is merely background information. And because Didion is a conservative sympathetic to anarchism, when she does write explicitly about politics, it is to satirize the pretentions of liberals. Early in Democracy, her most overtly political novel, Didion (1984a, 16–17) has her narrator address her readers directly, inviting them to call her “Joan Didion,” “upon whose character and doings much will depend,” a “Joan Didion” who bears a striking resemblance to Didion herself. What fascinates “Didion”-the-narrator is her protagonist, Inez Victor, an upper-­ class political wife, whose husband Harry is a former congressman, senator, and failed presidential candidate trying to make a comeback, and whose lover, Jack Lovett, is an international arms dealer. “Didion”-the-­ narrator is primarily interested in Inez for her self-absorbed sensibility, her alienation from her husband and his politics, and so Didion-the-author’s © The Author(s) 2019 D. Smit, Power and Class in Political Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26769-8_6

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self-reflective post-modern technique becomes a metaphor not only of how Didion-the-author writes primarily about her own consciousness but also as a metaphor of the limited ideological awareness that “Didion”-the-­ narrator and her protagonist have about their social status. Still, “Didion”-the-narrator (1984a, 71–72) does tell us that one source for the novel was a course she taught at Berkeley in 1975 during the fall of Saigon on “the idea of democracy in the work of certain post-­ industrial writers,” which included consideration of the “social organization implicit in the use of the autobiographical third person.” In light of the novel’s title, Democracy, “Didion”-the-narrator seems to be inviting us to explore not only her relationship to her author and her fascination with Inez Victor but also what these relationships might suggest about Inez’s political family as a reflection of the current status of democracy in America. Taking the cue from “Didion”-the-narrator, we can understand the novel as a portrayal of America’s ruling elite through the lens of “Didion”-the-author’s own distinctively narrow upper-class upbringing, personal preoccupations and obsessions, and idiosyncratic conservative politics. From this perspective, we can see how Didion satirically portrays Harry Victor’s attempt to return to electoral politics, his promoting himself as a brand representing a phantom “constituency,” as an illustration of how the political directorate represents the interests of only a narrow range of its citizens and uses the media in a culture of celebrity to avoid confronting issues that most directly affect the great majority of the population. In doing so, Didion demonstrates how the political elite’s focus on foreign policy and social issues allows corporate interests to act with impunity and the upper classes to use politics to further their own interests. In addition, we can also see how Didion, despite her expressed contempt for aspects of the feminist movement, portrays the plight of Inez Victor as a woman who needs to recognize the patriarchal ideology that accounts for much of her suffering. Both “Didion”-the-author and “Didion”-the-­ narrator are members of the upper class and the celebrity culture. They both portray members of that class and culture, and as typical members of that class, they both can afford the luxury of satirizing the political directorate without having any obligation to provide an alternative vision for a more just society. * * *

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Didion’s ancestors helped settle California. Her great-great-great grandmother, Nancy Hardin Cornwall, was part of the Donner-Reed Party in 1846 that was snow-bound in the Rockies while taking wagon trains to California. Trapped in the mountains, the party engaged in cannibalism in order to survive. The Didion family first established a 360-acre ranch in Florin, just south of Sacramento, and then acquired an additional 280 acres over the years. By the time of Didion’s adolescence, the family’s land holdings had been incorporated into the Elizabeth Reese Estate Company, in which all the family were members. Didion’s paternal grandfather was a tax collector; her step-grandmother served as president of the Sacramento Board of Education for many years, and an elementary school was named after her. Her extended family, including those with the surnames of Jerrett and Reese, were prominent in Sacramento life as ranchers and bankers, part of what Sacramento historian William Burg calls the “landed gentry,” “families that called themselves agriculturalists, farmers, ranchers, progressives, but they were the owners, not the ones who got their hands dirty” (Daugherty 2015, 19). Being part of the Sacramento landed gentry did not mean that all members of the family were well off, just solidly connected. Owning land was subject to the whims of circumstance: flooding, the commodities market, and the boom-and-bust cycles of the California economy. Late in life, Didion (2016, 4) recalled that until she went away to college, she thought of her family as “poor”: “that we had no money, that pennies mattered. I recall being surprised the first time my small brother ordered a dime rather than a nickel ice cream cone and no one seemed to mind.” She goes on to assert that her maternal grandmother Edna Jerrett was “in fact, poor,” this despite the fact that she wore elite brands of hats and vicuna coats, and used hand-milled soap and perfume that cost US$60-an-ounce. Still, Didion acknowledges that she never knew “deprivation.” Didion’s father Frank grew up in downtown Sacramento in a Victorian Gothic house a block away from a house that eventually became the Governor’s Mansion. As a young man, Frank Didion sold insurance, but after serving in World War II, he made a great deal of money buying old government property—everything from typewriters to old mess halls on valuable land—and selling them at a considerable profit. He then became a real-estate speculator, whose fortunes rose and fell according to the market, and although he was generally prosperous, he was often depressed and could resort to an ethics based on the values of the frontier: dig down deeper, do it yourself.

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Didion’s mother Eduene, although a part-time city librarian before she married, played the part of a lady in the romantic bohemian culture of nineteen-century San Francisco, treating her house as a museum of family heirlooms, the rooms dim and still, the heavy curtains closed, the wallpaper sun-streaked, with displays of greened brass and copper ornaments, dried flowers, faded prints. Eduene held Sunday teas for friends and relatives. Didion’s aunts, Eduene’s sisters, were active in genteel society: Aunt Pearl in the Saturday Club to support classical music in the city, and Aunt Genevieve in the Camellia Society to promote appreciation of the flower. The Camellia Society eventually created a Camellia Grove in the park across the street from the state capitol. Didion (2003, 992) recalls that on formal occasions her mother dressed her as if she were in a Pre-Raphaelite painting, in “muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black,” often including a black mantilla, “several yards of heavy black lace.” Her bedroom was painted in “faded carnation-pink,” and when Didion left for college, her mother treated the room like a museum. After Didion began to write novels, she got in the habit of returning home to polish the final drafts in her old room. The greater Didion-Reese-Jerrett family was leery of “newcomers,” by which they meant any group of people who seemed to come to California au mass: the Oakies during the Depression, the migration to the state after World War II. These “new people,” the family assumed, were ignorant of the state’s special history, unaware of the hardships the pioneers had endured and the special dangers the state still presented. In high school, Didion joined the Manana Club, sponsored by the public school district but known as a “rich girls’ sorority” and later declared by an appellate court to use a “process of selection designed to create a membership composed of the ‘socially elite’” (Daugherty 2015, 39). The club’s bylaws stated that the club was dedicated to “democracy, charity, and literature—specifically the reading of poetry.” Joining the club involved an initiation rite that involved being blindfolded while the members shouted insults at the new recruits. Didion (1979, 71) was “dumbfounded” when Nina Warren, daughter of the governor Earl Warren, who was a year ahead of her at C. K. McClatchy Senior High School, stated that Didion was “stuck on herself.” Didion was also friends with Nancy Kennedy, daughter of Anthony Kennedy, lawyer and lobbyist, who would become an associate justice on the US Supreme Court. At dinner with the Kennedy family, Didion met Kennedy’s colleagues and clients, executives

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of the oil companies he represented, her first experience of the relationship of class to power. Later at the University of California-Berkeley, she became friends with Barbara Brown, daughter of Pat Brown, California’s attorney general and next governor. After winning a guest editorship at Mademoiselle and spending a few months in New York City in 1955, Didion won a similar contest at Vogue, and moved to New York full-time a year later. She worked at Vogue for 10 years, continued to write occasional pieces for Mademoiselle and, in 1960, also began contributing to William F.  Buckley’s National Review. After the success of her first novel Run River in 1963 and her marriage to writer John Gregory Dunne in 1964, the two moved to Hollywood and worked as screenwriters and script doctors in addition to continuing to write fiction. They lived in upscale Malibu and Brentwood Park, Dunne driving a pearl-gray Jaguar, Didion a yellow Corvette Sting Ray. They often socialized with the celebrity culture of Hollywood. On one occasion, interviewer Michiko Kakutani (1984) accompanied Didion, Dunne, and Carl Bernstein to Ma Maison on Melrose Avenue, a celebrity hangout, where they mingled with George Cukor, Jackie Bisset, Dustin Hoffman, and the Jack Lemmons. Personally, Didion seems to embody the characteristics of her paternal grandmother Ethel Reese Didion, who in family stories was nervous and “different,” incapable of being teased, and her mother Eduene, who was frail, preoccupied, and self-obsessed. On the other hand, Didion is capable of trying to transcend her genetic heritage and her upbringing, primarily in her thinking, but that thinking still reflects the preoccupations of her mother, in which everything relates to her and her own sensibility. To Didion, what is important is what you see and experience and how you incorporate these perceptions and sensations into your sensibility, and by extension into your writing. It is not what you do, behaviorally, socially, that matters; it is who you are and what you think and feel. Didion was also shy, retiring or withdrawn, often ill, and as a result, something of an outsider to her family and others, used to rejection and disappointment, having failed to get into Stanford University or accepted by Phi Beta Kappa, but “plucky,” courageous, and a ferocious worker when it came to writing. At her first major job at Vogue, she could put in a full day at the magazine and go back to her apartment in the East Nineties and work half the night on articles and short stories to such magazines and journals as Mademoiselle, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, Commonweal, The Nation, and The Reporter.

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Looking back at her youth in 2016, Didion (2016, 4) can only remember being a fraud and a failure, despite having achieved a certain celebrity and membership in the “right” clubs, but “rewarded, out of all proportion to [her] generally undistinguished academic record, with an incommensurate number of prizes and scholarships…and recommendations and special attention and very probably the envy and admiration of at least certain of [her] peers.” Although Didion’s mother told her that “class” is not a word they use, Didion did learn about how the lower classes lived when her father Frank, who had for years served in the National Guard, was assigned to the US Army Air Corps during WWII to work on finances and was sent to two military bases around the country—Fort Lewis in Washington State and Peterson Field in Colorado Springs—as well as Duke University to study army records. Didion’s family accompanied him, living in a number of lower-class hotels and boarding houses with shared bathrooms that caused Eduene a great deal of distress. Didion remembers her mother pouring a bottle of pine-scented disinfectant into a shared bathtub every time she gave the children a bath. In Durham, the Didions boarded in the house of a fundamentalist preacher in a neighborhood so poor the children crawled under the back stoop to eat dirt, “scooping it up with a cut potato and licking it off, craving some element their diet lacked. Pica.” When her grandmother came to visit them in these places, she brought luxury items, such as “thick blue towels and Helena Rubinstein soap in the shape of apply blossoms,” and in Colorado Springs, she took the family out to visit the world-famous Broadmoor Hotel (Didion 2003, 1092–3). Despite the experiences of attending local public schools dominated by military kids from all social classes, Didion seems not to have been greatly impressed with how those below her in the class hierarchy actually live. Didion never experienced lower-class life intimately enough for her to identify with characters from that milieu and write about them in her fiction. When she addresses poverty directly, it is rarely in terms of individuals or personal experience but in the abstract. Working-class characters are rare in her work: the young couples “marrying absurd” in Slouching Toward Bethlehem—one bride in “an orange mini-dress and masses of flame-colored hair” stumbling down the steps of a chapel on the Las Vegas strip on the arm of her groom, whimpering about picking up the kids and the sitter and getting to the midnight show on time—are the primary examples, and Didion (1968, 82) provides them with no back story at all; they are simply examples of a certain kind of absurdity, the false dreams of

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our consumer culture. Even the down-and-out drug users and dealers in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the title essay of Slouching Toward Bethlehem seem to be mostly refugees from middle-class life, exemplifying another kind of absurdity: an attempt to escape from the empty boredom of conventional prosperity by using drugs to achieve a more ecstatic existence. Otherwise, Didion’s treatment of poverty is mostly at the level of broad sociological generalizations. In Where I Was From (2003, 1075–78), she comments on the fact that California as a whole has not been able to fund its educational system and the small towns around Sacramento are so “impoverished in spirit” that they need to compete as sites for state prisons, even though these prisons were not staffed by local people. When she deals in class more specifically, it is often to make distinctions among the upper classes, as in her total revulsion at the Governor’s Mansion that Ronald and Nancy Reagan built in 1975 for $1,400,000, that is a monument to bad taste: “a very common kind of California tract house…, a case study in the architecture of limited possibilities, insistently and malevolently ‘democratic,’ flattened out, mediocre and ‘open’ and as devoid of privacy or personal eccentricity as the lobby area in a Ramada Inn” (Didion 1979, 69). Didion’s biographer Tracy Daugherty notes that although Didion did live as a child among tar-paper shacks and near dirt runways, these experiences were primarily valuable to her as a contribution to her sense of herself as a writer: they were experiences she could not have in Sacramento. Even in elementary school, Didion had developed the habit of carrying a notebook and recording her experiences, and this tested her ability, Daugherty asserts, to try to make sense of what she saw, to think of herself as a reporter. Perhaps. But in her well-known essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” Didion confesses that her jotting down notes even in her first Big Five tablet was less about recording what she did and felt and more about capturing extreme events that appealed to her imagination. Not only did she have “trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened,” she remained as an adult “unconvinced that the distinction, for [her] purposes, matters” (Didion 1968, 134). Everything she recorded was a matter of how it felt to her. In her essay “Why I Write” Didion (1984b, 5–6) confesses that she only has one subject, the act of writing itself, and that she stole her title from George Orwell, one reason being the sounds of the words “I, I, I,” arranged down the page. In the act of composing she discovers what it is

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she has to say, beginning with an image, a “picture” in her mind, a feeling, a phrase, and then writing entirely, in her own words, to “find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Indeed, it is Didion’s attention to very idiosyncratic details and how they stimulate her imagination which dominates her prose style. On her first job, writing editorial copy for Vogue, Didion (1978, 5) says that in learning to write captions for photographs, drawing attention to the vivid detail—a house with a Frank Stella on the kitchen wall, “a table covered with frankly brilliant oilcloth, a Mexican find at fifteen cents a yard”—she discovered “a kind of ease with words,” the use of “shock verbs two lines in,” the ability to prune things down to the essentials, “a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page.” This discovery reinforced what she had learned from her introduction to the New Criticism in college, especially an influential essay “Technique as Discovery” written by one of her favorite professors, Mark Schorer (1948), in which he proclaimed that in developing “the form and rhythm” of their novels, writers “discovered” the deepest sense of what they were trying to say, transforming their experience into a “texture and tone” which provided readers with a unique vicarious experience of their own. Studying the technique of writers revealed the intellectual and moral implications of their work. The intellectual and moral sense of Didion’s work began with her interrogation of the family mythology. Even as a little girl, Didion was made aware of the family traditions, lectured by her grandfather on the “Code of the West” and constantly shown the abstractions on the tombstones in the cemetery where her ancestors were buried: fidelity, courage, and integrity. But as she grew older Didion became deeply aware that the family’s storied past may have been mere mythologizing, exemplified by a revelation she received taking her adopted daughter Quintana at the age of five or six to visit Old Sacramento, where her great-great grandfather had owned a saloon. In trying to provide Quintana with some sense of her family’s history, Didion suddenly realized that she had no more connection to the sidewalks and saloons of Old Sacramento than Quintana did: that Old Sacramento was just an expression of a theme with “decorative effects,” that “the entire enchantment” under which she had lived her life to that point suddenly seemed foreign (Menand 2015, 201).

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Years later, this revelation was confirmed when Didion (2003, 1080–1) began to question the family’s reverence for the land they had wrested from the wilderness. In the 1980s, Kilgore Cemetery, a historic site named after an ancestor on the Kilgore side of the family, was being severely trashed by partiers and vandals. In one instance, vandals dug up a grave and made off with the head of the corpse. But when Didion asked her mother if the family was helping to clean up Kilgore Cemetery, Eduene replied that the family didn’t own it, as if the family had no responsibility for public land. Didion decided to not pursue that question, and asked instead how it had come to pass that the family did not own the cemetery since they had once owned most of the property in the area. Eduene answered, “I presume somebody sold it.” This led Didion into an intense reflection on the “code of west” and what it meant for her family to revere their heritage but still gradually sell it off to developers whom they considered “outsiders,” not quite worthy of what they were receiving. This disenchantment perhaps contributed to Didion’s views about society and politics in general: she is extremely aware of the hypocrisy practiced by people of privilege and power. Didion’s family consists entirely of “conservative California Republicans,” and she herself was a stalwart supporter of Goldwater, a “true” conservative, until the rise of Ronald Reagan, when Didion registered as a Democrat and became the first and perhaps the only member of her family ever to do so. However, in an interview with Sara Davidson (1984, 14–15), Didion illustrates that she is still very much a conservative politically: I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political. I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in man’s soul. I have an aversion to social action because it usually meant social regulation. It meant interference, rules, doing what other people wanted me to do. The ethic I was raised in was specifically a Western/frontier ethic. That means being left alone and leaving others alone. It is regarded by members of my family as the highest form of human endeavor…. …The politics I personally want are anarchic. Throw out the laws. Tear it down. Start all over. That is very romantic because it presumes that, left to their own devices, people would do good things for one another. I doubt that that’s true. But I would like to believe it.

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This is of course a vision of society as primarily tribal, and much easier to accept if you are wealthy enough to have a decent life without “help” from outside sources. If you are lower class, you are at the mercy of everyone further up the social-political ladder, dependent on the good will of those for whom you have to work and those who determine the laws you have to live by. Didion’s social conservatism, not to say her sympathetic view of anarchy, is illustrated by the number of essays she wrote for The White Album in which she savages the vacuity of liberals. In “Good Citizens,” she reports on the Hollywood club Eugene’s, open to supporters of Eugene McCarthy in 1968, where she mixes and mingles with the crowd to hear a debate between William Styron and Ossie Davis on whether Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner is racist, James Baldwin sitting between them. Didion (1979, 87–9) considers the “vanity and irrelevance” of the occasion memorable because of the name-dropping, and the vapidity of the language, epitomized by David Wolper, who had bought the film rights, and expressed his bewilderment of the controversy surrounding the book, which to Wolper, had “withstood the critical test of time since last October.” To these people, Didion says, social problems have a standard scenario in which scenes of confrontation always end on an up-beat note. If Budd Schulberg starts a Writers’ Workshop in Watts, then it must produce “Twenty Young Writers,” and if Barbara Streisand helps provide clothes for the Poor People’s Campaign march on Washington, then some good must come of it. Didion’s bottom-line thesis in “Good Citizens” is that there is “a particular vanity of perceiving social life as a problem to be solved by the good will of individuals.” Didion never addresses the issue of how society should deal with social problems, except to imply, like Drury, that an ideal government would be minimal and that in general people should rely primarily on their friends and neighbors. * * * When in Democracy “Didion”-the-narrator (1984a, 21, 16) declares that her initial fascination with Inez Victor began with a phrase in a first-person voice declaring, “Imagine my mother dancing,” we may reasonably infer that Didion-the-author began the novel searching for a context for this voice, a back story to explain her opening line. She decided to abandon the voice of her fictional character and continue in her own “first-person” in order to dramatize her attempt to invent the character of Inez Victor,

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and apparently because she associated the voice of the words “Imagine my mother dancing” with someone from Hawaii, she decided to set the novel in the context of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War farther west across the Pacific, rather than in other political contexts from the previous decade: President Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal in 1974, President Ford’s pardon of his former boss, the Carter Administration’s disastrous handling of the energy crisis and the Iranian hostages, and the election of Ronald Reagan, the first president to proclaim a major credo of the new Reactionary Right in his First Inaugural Speech: that the government is not the solution to social problems but the source of those problems. Having registered as a Democrat for the first time in response to Reagan’s ascendance in conservative politics, Didion did not choose to wrestle with a back story that explored how her own conservative, not to say libertarian, beliefs, were being put to the test by Reagan’s policies. Instead, Didion chose to again explore the vacuity of upper-class liberal politics. Didion is not a political thinker; rather she is a satirist of a particular brand of liberal politics. In Democracy, the primary object of Didion’s satire is Inez’s husband Harry, who carefully structures his career in order to create a certain image he can sell to the public, just as Clay Overbury did in Vidal’s Washington, D.C., Harry decides early in his life to create a reputation as a “liberal” and build a constituency by appealing to those who support civil rights and who later in the 1960s oppose the Vietnam War. He begins by working for the Justice Department for two years and then publishing an article in the New York Times Magazine entitled “Justice for Whom? A Young Lawyer Wants Out.” Harry’s next step is to establish the storefront Neighborhood Legal Coalition in East Harlem for a year or two, giving him the supposed credentials to publish the pamphlet “The View from the Street: Root Causes, Radical Solutions, and a Modest Proposal.” Didion gives us these titles without ever mentioning what the publications actually say, the implication being that their content is unimportant: the titles merely signal the issues Harry wants to be identified with. During his time in New York, Harry meets and marries Inez. All we learn about their romance is that in May of 1955 Inez, two months pregnant, walks out of a dance class at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers in order to meet Harry and drive into Manhattan to marry him at City Hall. Married, Harry goes on to participate in civil rights demonstrations in Mississippi and in protests supporting migrant farm workers in the San Joachin Valley in California, and attends sit-ins at Harvard, the Pentagon,

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and various Dow Chemical plants around the country protesting the Vietnam War. These activities get Harry elected to Congress for three terms in the mid- to late 1960s, culminating in his being appointed to fill out the last three years of a vacated Senate term. Having deliberately paid his dues in the House of Representatives for five years and in the Senate for three, Harry decides to reach for the goal that he has organized his entire life to achieve: he decides to run for the presidency in 1972, and only then does he experience the first major setback of his career. At the Democratic Convention, Harry discovers after several days that he doesn’t have the votes to win the nomination. Crushed, Harry seeks solace in defeat by casting about for a new role to play, a role that will put him back in the political spotlight. Harry loves the idea of being a celebrity, and he intuitively understands that branding himself as a celebrity associated with a few poll-tested issues is one way for him to not only to gratify his need for recognition and power but to regain a foothold in politics by creating a constituency that will buy his brand of politics. Given the issues Harry has campaigned on in the past, he decides to refine his image and become “the voice of a generation that had taken fire on the battlefields of Vietnam and Chicago,” a role in which he will bear what Inez refers to as his “burden,” the burden of those who have suffered from the war but who have not been able to stop it (Didion 1984a, 180). The problem is that Harry’s burden, his new image, is entirely fictional: Harry did not serve in Vietnam and did not participate in the violent protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. In honing his image, Harry adapts to the new culture of what Robert Westbrook calls “politics as consumption.” Didion documents in the novel how politics have evolved since the 1940s of Washington, D.C. and the 1950s of Advise and Consent. In those earlier novels, ruling elites had to either own the media or cultivate publishers and reporters in order to control their images before the public. By the 1970s and 1980s, the disposition of voters had sufficiently “hardened” that the focus of electoral campaigns was on “shaping perceptions,” political consultants using polling to determine the wants and needs of small pockets of voters and advising politicians on how to use vague and ambiguous language to “shape the perception” of voters across these niche markets, implying that they— the politicians—could somehow gratify those disparate needs and desires (Westbrook 1983, 165, 168). With the rise of political consultants, the prominence of television, and the increasing need for media corporations to provide non-stop coverage of the “news,” political elites also discovered

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that they, like advertisers, could create what Daniel Boorstin (1992, 11–12) calls “pseudo-events” that the media would cover as “news.”1 Pseudo-events are not spontaneous but planned primarily to be covered by the media. They are announced in advance using language suggesting that the pseudo-event has already happened, which raises the question of whether these events are “real” or merely being staged, which in turn raises the question of what they mean. Our interest in “real events,” such as elections, is how they happened and their results, but our interest in pseudo-events, such as interviews and demonstrations, is the motives of the people staging them. The motive of those who stage pseudo-events is to create “self-fulfilling prophecies”: a demonstration on the importance of a particular political stance becomes important because the demonstration made it so. As part of these trends, Harry treats his career as a business and packages himself as a brand to sell to the public, staging pseudo-events that imply he represents a constituency he hopes to create because of his pseudo-events. One other strategy Harry uses to resurrect his political career is to create a think tank, the Alliance for Democratic Institutions, funded by people who want to “keep current the particular framework of ideas, the particular political dynamic” that Harry represents. The Alliance is constantly threatened by “ideological rifts” among its donors, investigations by the IRS over its tax-exempt status, and the perception that Harry’s ideas lacked “momentum,” and “momentum was all in the perception of momentum,” a key factor that makes pseudo-events seem more significant than they inherently are (Didion 1984a, 110–11). Didion’s cynical portrayal of Harry’s Alliance for Democratic Institutions bears a strong similarity to her reporting on Santa Barbara’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a “mutation” of the Fund for the Republic, in her article “California Dreaming.” The Center’s mission is to “clarify the basic issues,” but Didion (1968, 73) finds its rhetoric banal: “the kind of ectoplasmic generality that always makes me sense that I am on the track of the real soufflé, the genuine American kitsch.” The Center’s President Robert M. Hutchins prefers resident scholars and intellectuals to be “controversial, stimulating, and, perhaps above all, cooperative, or our kind,” in the sense that they are encouraged to “work with the group as a group,” not “just on their own stuff,” which Didion strongly implies, is a way for the Center to impose a common “group-think” vision on all the supposedly independent scholars. In order to maintain its million dollar budget, the Center encourages contributions from celebrity donors, or

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­ visionaries,” as “an investment [tax-exempt] in the preservation of our “ free way of life,” and as an added bonus, these celebrities get to help “clarify issues” with noted scholars: Dinah Shore can talk civil rights with Bayard Rustin, Steve Allen can talk “Ideology and Intervention” with Senator William Fulbright and Arnold Toynbee, and Paul Newman and Jack Lemon can talk about “The University in America” with Dr. Hutchins and Supreme Court Justice William O.  Douglas. In its fundraising, the Center presents itself as “besieged by the forces of darkness,” which Didion (1968, 77) clearly thinks is liberal overkill. The only dark force she sees threatening the Center is the local chapter of the John Birch Society, which she implies, is no threat at all. Harry is like Robert Hutchins in that his constituency is based on his small social circle, and so he needs to create the illusion that his constituency is broader than it is. “Didion”-the-narrator (1984a, 48–50) declares that “the demographics of Harry Victor’s phantom constituency were based on comfort and its concomitant uneasiness,” and provides a satiric portrait of the type of people who paid attention to Harry: those who read certain New  York magazines and newspapers, knew “what kind of girls came with the life,” and knew where there was “big green on the barrelhead,” people who noted that Inez bought printed sheets on sale in Bloomington’s basement and stemmed strawberries at Gristedes grocery stores, and sent her children to the Dalton School with their own. In other words, Harry’s core constituency is a very small slice of upper-class liberal New York, people with money but who shopped down in order to project an image of themselves as middle-class. Harry’s only hope to regain prominence as a political figure is to create a sense of “momentum” by increasing his presence in the media, and in order to get the attention of the media, he travels the world staging pseudo-events in various countries as evidence that he is experienced in foreign policy. Still, Harry does like to use banal populist rhetoric, which Didion (1984a, 57) best conveys in a scene at a faculty party given in Harry’s honor at Berkeley. There Harry converses with a physicist, who questions Harry’s “approach to one or another energy program,” and Harry responds, “I’ve always tried to talk up to the American people. Not down. You talk down to the American people at your peril.” When the physicist details his point, which is “technical and abstruse,” Harry replies, “Either Jefferson was right or he wasn’t…. I happened to believe he was.” Michael Tager (1994, 206) argues that Harry is correct—democracy does depend on informed citizens contributing to a dialogue about the country’s

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future—but in the post-war period, our ruling elites tried to “discard the premise of democracy” by insisting that major issues of science and technology and foreign policy were too complex and technical for most citizens to grasp, and only capable of being handled by experts in various governmental agencies. To Tager, Harry’s “cynical reliance upon Jefferson to avoid losing arguments suggests just how little relevance Jeffersonian democracy has for a highly technological, media-oriented polity with imperial ambitions,” and how both liberals and conservatives use the language of democracy to further their own power and dominance. Tager is correct as far as he goes. But because he does not offer a larger theory of the nature of democratic government, Tager avoids the issue addressed by Elite Theory: that modern complex, technologically advanced societies do need an educated elite to govern. The real issue is how or in what sense the political directorate should consult with the full range of its constituents in order to adequately “represent” the people it governs. Harry Victor is a classic case of how not to do so. He is not interested in formulating policies that actually meet the needs and desires of a broad constituency, especially on economic issues, engaging the broader electorate in dialogue to create some sense of consensus, and adapting policy to the interests of that broad constituency across class lines. Rather, in dramatizing Harry’s failure to represent any constituency than a small group of liberal donors in New York and his reliance on foreign affairs as a way to get attention from the media, Didion illustrates how elites keep domestic policy, especially economic issues, out of public discussion. Indeed, in contrasting Harry’s attempt to create a constituency with the businesses of his in-laws, Didion, perhaps inadvertently, provides a convincing portrait of what happens when the political directorate refuses to address economic issues, and as a result upper-class business interests are allowed to operate freely outside the constraints of any government regulation Inez’s family, the Christians, illustrate the complex relationship between business and politics, while Inez’s lover, ironically named Jack Lovett, illustrates the degree to which private entrepreneurship can operate entirely outside the bounds of national loyalty and even morality. Both illustrate capitalism run amok. Like Didion’s own family in California, the Christian family traces its ancestry in Hawaii back to the nineteenth century, their wealth based on land seized from the indigenous people. Inez’s father Paul Christian is a “globe-trotter” who lives off his family’s inheritance. Inez’s uncle Dwight manages a world-wide construction business with contracts to build

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American military bases in Vietnam. Inez’s brother-in-law Dick Ziegler, sister Janet’s husband, is a real estate developer who made a fortune in Hong Kong housing. These upper-class elites consider both politics and business as power games with winners and losers, games without any larger social significance. The major crisis and turning point of the novel concerns how the family uses their political connections to further their own interests at the expense of other family members. Dick Ziegler decides to develop a swampy parcel of real estate near the Christian ranch, which he calls “Sea Meadows.” However, for reasons Didion never makes clear, Dwight opposes Ziegler’s attempt, perhaps because it is too close to the family property. In any case, using the influence of congressional representative Wendell Omura, Dwight manages to get the land declared a sacred kahuna burial ground, putting Zeigler’s entire fortune at risk. Apparently, Ziegler’s action also alienates him from his wife Janet because she presents Congressman Omura with an Outdoor Circle Environmental Protection Award for Special Effort in Blocking Development. This family conflict is exacerbated by Paul Christian’s becoming increasing unbalanced and disgruntled with his upper-class status and heritage. Paul lives below his class standing, often sleeping in a room at the YMCA and surviving on canned tuna. He fosters rumors that he is writing his autobiography, which would be an indictment of his family’s history in Hawaii. He stops speaking to his brother and refuses to attend Dwight’s annual dinner on the eve of the Hawaiian Open on the grounds that it is a “vulgar extravagance,” but ironically sides with his son-in-law Dick Ziegler in the dispute over Ziegler’s real estate deal, which eventually drives him to shoot his daughter Janet and Wendell Omura. Paul’s insanity is a satiric exaggeration of his sense of personal entitlement, transcending traditional notions of loyalty and morality, but that insanity does not necessarily undercut the validity of his criticism of his class: that his family has somehow gone beyond the bounds of propriety. The family’s response to Paul’s crime illustrates the way the rich and powerful use their political connections to their own advantage. Harry has Billy Dillon, his political consultant, contact Frank Tawagata, a quintessential political lawyer and fixer, to help arrange “mutually choreographed proceedings” with the district attorney’s office, so that Paul Christian will not be jailed for his crime but hospitalized because of his psychological state. And Harry uses the tragedy as a way of getting a “free radio spot” to express not only his sympathy for the families of the victims but also his conviction that “this occasion of sadness for all Americans could be an

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occasion of resolve as well… resolve to overcome the divisions and differences brought to mind today by this incident in the distant Pacific,” a clear allusion to the Vietnam War (Didion 1984a, 156–57). Given the context, Didion’s dry paraphrase of Harry’s radio spot is intensely ironic. Billy Dillon uses the behind-the-scenes maneuvering over Ziegler’s development proposal as leverage to put pressure on Tawagata to help keep Paul Christian out of jail. Tawagata’s wife’s cousin is married to Wendell Omura, who used his influence to help Dwight Christian get Dick Ziegler’s property rezoned, making it worthless. With this information, Dillon in effect blackmails Tawagata into doing his bidding. Dillon thinks of the dispute over Ziegler’s real estate deal as “a ‘new angle’ on the crisis-management techniques of the American business class” (Didion 1984a, 128). To the political opportunism of Harry Victor and the craven economic competition of the Christian family, Didion contrasts the hard-headed realist Jack Lovett, who like the fixers we will see in Ward Just’s Echo House, plays the system merely because he has the opportunity to do so, which may make him as a type the most dangerous to democracy. Lovett’s ex-wives call him an army officer or aircraft executive, but his business cards state that he is a consultant in international development, a job for which he is constantly on the move, living in hotels and one-room apartments in various cities around the world, available only through addresses that are post office boxes and telephone numbers beginning with “800.” Lovett is, in fact, an arms dealer, selling weapons from M-16s and AK-47s to “weapons-grade uranium” to both nations and “non-state actors” and known in the past to have made elusive deals with a “failed third force” in Southeast Asia. As “Didion”-the-narrator (1984a, 159) says drily, “That there is money to be made in time of war is something we all understand abstractly. Fewer of us understand war itself as a specifically commercial enterprise.” Indeed, for Lovett, arms dealing is simply a business, which has no larger political or moral implications: he does not think it part of his job to consider the consequences or ethics of his actions. He is in the business, he says, because the arms trade will go on with or without him. In conducting that business, Lovett has little national loyalty. He travels the world with passports from multiple countries, and regards the country of the passport he is currently using as “an abstraction, a state actor, one of several to be factored into any given play” (Didion 1984a, 219). Lovett simply ignores any laws, regulations, or standard operating procedures

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that stand in the way of getting what he wants. In this, he is an extreme example of the upper-class entrepreneur who justifies the value of his business as an extension of his own personality and almost a parody of the way members of the upper class try to pass themselves off as “just folks.” Lovett is the kind of man who is totally comfortable being an anonymous world-­ class traveler, who on airplanes quickly establishes rapport with the crew, remembering their names and making his preferences known, staking out blankets and pillows. In hotel lobbies and transit lounges, he makes a point of engaging in conversation not only with fellow businessmen but also with desk clerks and ticket agents, oil riggers and salesmen, Fulbright scholars, and foundation agronomists, picking up any information he can. But Lovett’s practices are not simply an example of noblesse oblige. Lovett is much too utilitarian for that. Rather, Lovett’s behavior is an expression of his two most distinguishing characteristics: he is temperamentally secretive, and he likes knowing things; he appreciates information as “an end in itself.” In his discourse with strangers on airplanes and in airports and hotel lobbies, he rarely says anything about himself but he encourages his brief companions to tell him everything they know about what they do. He believes that any random fact might sooner or later be useful to him personally, and when circumstances demand it, he can use all he knows in order to get things done. In this, Lovett is very different from Harry Victor. Lovett knows the way the world actually works and can act on it, illustrated by an episode in Jakarta in 1969, when Lovett has to rescue the Victors from rioting protesters because Harry is preoccupied at a university reception, going on and on about how rioting is a sign of “the normal turbulence of a nascent democracy.” Lovett responds that there is only one lesson that Americans should be learning in Southeast Asia: “A tripped Claymore mine explodes straight up.” When Harry resists leaving the reception, Lovett is as ironic as Billy Dillon: he says, “I believe some human rights are being violated on the verandah” (Didion 1984a, 99–100). It is Lovett who arranges for the Victors to escape to the ambassador’s bungalow in the foothills, where they hear on the radio that a grenade has exploded in the embassy commissary. Lovett is capable of action, but again only if it suits his purposes: he gets the Victors to safety in Indonesia, he rescues Jessie trapped in Saigon during the American evacuation, but these actions are only personal, not matters of policy. Lovett has no interest in policy. At the end of the novel, Lovett’s contacts, rather ironically, provide him the means to accomplish, mostly by accident, the most heroic feat of

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a­ nyone in the novel: despite all the chaos over the American evacuation of Saigon, he manages to find Jessie Victor and get her out of Vietnam. Call it privilege, chutzpah, stupidity—or simply a narrative convenience—but this is how Jessie got to Vietnam: she walked out of a rehab facility in Seattle and used a fake press card given to her during her father’s presidential run to get on a military plane to Saigon. At Vietnamese customs, she used a New York driver’s license to enter the country, having left her passport back in the Victors’ New  York apartment. Customs confiscated Jessie’s driver’s license, so now she is persona non grata and has no way of leaving Saigon. On the flight into Saigon to rescue Jessie, Lovett strikes up a conversation with a helicopter maintenance instructor and offers him a ride into the city. The instructor accepts but wants to stop off at the American Legion club on the way into town, and it is there that Lovett discovers Jessie working as a waitress. And because he is an old acquaintance of an intelligence analyst at the Defense Attache Office, Lovett can ask the woman to put up Jessie for a night or two while he arranges to get her out of the country. Given Lovett’s lack of patriotism, it is ironic that his military connections work for him even after he is dead. The military gives him a decent burial in an American military cemetery. Having been born and raised in the Christian family and married to a man compatible with her family’s social status and personal values, Inez Victor struggles to fulfill her primary function: to support her husband by maintaining the household, raising the children, serving on various civic boards and benefit committees, and occasionally attending rallies and being available for interviews on what it is like being married to a politician. Didion (1984a, 54–6) makes clear that none of these activities provide Inez with any meaning or even satisfaction. Except for her first house in Georgetown when Harry works for the Justice Department, Inez’s homes are “professionally kept” and “entirely impersonal.” Her children as teenagers and young adults are difficult to manage, Adlai subject to periodic automobile “accidents” under the influence of alcohol and Jessie a drug addict. Inez takes occasional jobs but has no real work. Because she knows something about painting, she once was a consultant for the State Department on what art should hang on the walls of American embassies. Asked to develop a special interest appropriate for a wife of a presidential candidate, Inez expresses an interest in refugee work but Harry’s campaign staff considers that interest too controversial. “Didion”-the- ­narrator looking back, however, thinks that Inez had herself “the protective instincts” of a kind of refugee: “She never looked back.”

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Indeed, the refugee metaphor captures some sense of why Inez’s life is so empty: she does not find her upper-class lifestyle—the apartment on Central Park West, the second home in Amagansett, on the southern shore of Long Island; the children Adlai and Jessie attending the exclusive Dalton prep school, her participation in arts and education—safe, comfortable, or sustaining; rather, she finds all these things intolerable. Inez considers herself forced to live “outside” her class, relying on her own tenuous inner resources. She resents that her name is in the paper two or three times a week, and she is preoccupied with preserving some sense of privacy. She wants to sue People magazine for an article mentioning Adlai’s “accidents,” presumably while driving drunk, and enjoin Who’s Who to delete any information about the family from her husband’s entry. Forced to hide her private life from the public in order to promote Harry’s presidential run, Inez breaks down when a writer from the Associated Press asks her what she considers the “major cost” of public life. Inez responds that constantly creating “a pleasant past for public consumption” is forcing her to lose her memory, her control over her own past, a process she compares to shock treatment. When pressed about whether she has ever actually had shock treatment, Inez switches to another devastating metaphor: “I said ‘as if.’ I said ‘something like.’ I mean you drop fuel. You jettison cargo. Eject the crew. You lose track” (Didion 1984a, 50–53). She compares her life to that of an airplane crew flailing about, trying whatever methods they can to lessen the effect of their stalled plane making a crash landing. In dramatizing the tensions in the Victor family and how Inez resists the demands of a public life, Didion reveals why, despite her expressed disgust with the feminist movement in an earlier essay, Inez needs to recognize to some degree the upper-class patriarchal ideology that accounts for much of her suffering. In that earlier essay, titled “The Women’s Movement,” Didion (1979, 110) makes the point that more extreme feminist theorists have not recognized the contradiction in their claims for a universal feminist condition. In pointing out this contradiction, Didion compares women to the proletariat and to minorities who do not protest for some grand common cause, some grand social ideal of universal “brotherhood.” Didion argues that the proletariats lack revolutionary fervor because as have-nots, they “aspire mainly to having,” and minorities protest for immediate social goals for themselves, “the integration of the luncheonette and the seat in the front of the bus as real goals.” And so Didion finds it incoherent for the left-wing of the feminist movement to argue for the right of women to be “free.” If women are truly free, they may very well not choose to accept the

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agenda of left-wing feminists and choose to be evangelical, pro-life, and right-wing Republican. But in proclaiming her distain for leftist feminism, Didion refuses to acknowledge any real validity to claims that patriarchy discriminates against women. Ironically, Didion’s portrait of Inez Victor is a classic example of a woman so limited by her social status, so debilitated by her lack of agency, that she might benefit from some exposure to the feminist consciousness-raising that Didion so despises. Until the end of the novel, almost everything Inez does is primarily a response to the demands of the men in her life, and the first decision she makes to take control of her life is to run off with Jack Lovett rather than stay married to Harry Victor. Although she has known Lovett for most of her life, she never felt emotionally involved with him until he shows up during the crisis over Jessie’s being trapped in Saigon and offers to get her out. “Didion”-the-narrator implies that Inez’s decision to leave Harry for Lovett is inexplicable, and when she asks Inez about it later, Inez says this: “We were together all our lives. If you count thinking about it” (Didion 1984a, 229). Inez never considered any alternative to her way of life than with particular men. At the death of Jack Lovett, Inez ostensibly forsakes her upper-class life to help run a refugee camp, but she does so more to escape from the “deadness” of her life than to help the dispossessed. Although Inez had always been fascinated with refugees and was a kind of refugee herself, her work for a refugee camp is not an example of self-sacrifice. Inez is more concerned with her own existential state than she is with the lives of the refugees. In conveying why she works at the refugee camp, Inez does not talk about alleviating the plight of refugees; she can only cite the sensations that help alleviate the deadness of her life: colors, moisture, heat, enough blue in the air.2 By playing on the title used by Henry Adams, Didion suggests that the wheeling and dealing done by Senator Harry Victor and his entourage, Inez’s family’s real estate business, and her lover’s arms trading are all of a piece with politics back in Washington, that they are corrupt in the same way as Senator Ratcliffe in Henry Adams’ novel. Didion says the idea of using the title of Adams’ novel came from Dunne, but she was familiar with Adams’ work, and biographer Daugherty (2015, 436) sees Inez Victor at the end of Democracy as similar to Madeleine Lee in Adams’ novel: “disillusioned with the experience of American democracy and flee[ing] to an ‘older’ world.” But Inez is not really fleeing the corruption of democracy per se; she is fleeing the emptiness of an upper-class life based on personal ambition and self-promotion at the expense of any larger public good.

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At the end of the novel “Joan Didion”-the-narrator (1984a, 232–34) confesses that on purely technical matters Democracy is not the novel she set out to write. Writing the novel, she did not experience any “rush of narrative inevitability,” had no sense that “the past is prologue to the present,” thought that “anything could happen.” “Didion” also suggests that in writing the novel she became not “exactly the person who set out to write it,” implying that the novel changed her in some way. But a change of heart in a narrator is also a narrative convention, an appropriate accompaniment to “Didion”-the-narrator’s conventional denouement to the novel explaining what her fictional characters are doing now. What they are doing illustrates the resilience that comes with being upper class: Harry Victor has been appointed as a special envoy to the Common Market, Adlai is clerking for a federal judge, Jessie is in Mexico City writing a novel, and Billy Dillon has a new candidate to shill for. No matter how severe the crisis, the privileged always live on to put their lives back together, one way or another. Like her characters, “Didion”-the-narrator herself has accepted who she is in the scheme of her own creation: that she shares Inez’s sensibility, that she too has no concern for refugees or politics. Inez is still in Kuala Lumpur, taking breaks from her refugee work by teaching a course in American literature at the University of Malaysia and having dinner at the Lake Club. Reading a quotation from Inez in a piece in the Guardian on Southeast Asian refugees, “Didion”-the-narrator has “a sudden sense” of “how it feels to fly into that part of the world,” Inez’s world of “colors, moisture, heat, enough blue in the air,” a world primarily of sensations and feelings, devoid of conscious political import or rational analysis, a world where members of the upper class always rebound from disaster and always remain, however tenuously, close to power, with no obligation to even think about social justice. Democracy may not be the novel Joan Didion set out to write, but it is the kind of novel about politics we would expect from Joan Didion.

Notes 1. For a brief history of political campaigning and the rise of political consultants after World War II, see Westbrook (1983). 2. In her travels before writing Democracy, Didion did take a tour of the Kai Tak East transit camp for refugees near Kowloon, Hong Kong (Daugherty 2015, 410), and so she could have described in detail the poverty Inez was ostensibly trying to help alleviate. It is telling that she does not do so.

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References Boorstin, Daniel J. 1992. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage. Davidson, Sara. 1984. A Visit with Joan Didion. In Friedman (1984), 13–21. Didion, Joan. 1968. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. New  York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1978. Telling Stories. Berkeley: Friends of the Bancroft Library. ———. 1979. The White Album. New York: Simon and Schuster. ———. 1984a. Democracy: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster. ———. 1984b. Why I Write. In Friedman (1984), 5–10. ———. 2003. Where I Was From. In We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Non-Fiction, 949–1104. New York: Knopf, 2006. ———. 2016. California Notes. New York Review of Books, May 26. Daugherty, Tracy. 2015. The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Friedman, Ellen G., ed. 1984. Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations. Princeton: Ontario Review Press. Kakutani, Michiko. 1984. Joan Didion: Staking Out California. In Friedman (1984), 29–40. Menand, Louis. 2015. Out of Bethlehem: The Radicalization of Joan Didion. New Yorker, August 24. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/24/ out-of-bethlehem Schorer, Mark. 1948. Technique as Discovery. Hudson Review 1 (1): 67–87. Tager, Michael. 1994. The Political Vision of Joan Didion’s Democracy. In The Critical Response to Joan Didion, ed. Joan Felton, 199–209. Westport: Greenwood Press. Westbrook, Robert. 1983. Politics as Consumption: Managing the Modern American Election. In The Culture of Consumption, ed. Richard Fox and Jackson Lears, 143–174. New York: Pantheon.

CHAPTER 7

Ward Just’s Echo House: Implementing Policy/Accepting Others

Of the four novelists in this study, Ward Just may be the most self-­ consciously sensitive about class. Growing up in an upper-middle-class family on the edge of New Money, Just attended a public elementary school before switching to private prep schools, and in the process became sensitive to the subtle differences in class status between Old and New Money. As a reporter for Newsweek and the Washington Post, Just reported on politics in Washington, D.C. and the Vietnam War during the 1960s, but during his career as a reporter, he also wrote about poverty and inner-­ city riots during the decade. In doing so, Just learned how the poor and working class actually lived, which may account for his “politics of representation.” Just seems to write fiction as if he were still a reporter, as a “neutral observer,” primarily from the limited third-person point of view of a variety of characters: that of a privileged white man in government, a point of view we can associate with him as the author or implied author, but also from the point of view of a number of women and minorities. Just has an attitude toward the ruling elite closer to Drury’s than Vidal’s or Didion’s. Just refuses to judge his fictional elite, and indeed seems fond of them, even though he thinks they are what he calls “compromised.” His only implied criticism of the ruling elite is in the way he structures his political novels, illustrating how those protagonists become increasingly dissatisfied with what they do and presenting the points of view of women and racial or ethnic minorities who comment on and criticize the actions of his privileged white protagonists. By providing multiple points of view, © The Author(s) 2019 D. Smit, Power and Class in Political Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26769-8_7

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Just ensures that we cannot take any one point of view for granted but must evaluate each on its merits. Of course, adopting the point of view of women and minorities raises the issue of whether Just is appropriating the views of these groups in order to advance his own agenda. But I argue that in Echo House, Just’s portrayal of women and African Americans is sympathetic, that he is trying in good faith to “recreate,” as it were, their own voices without comment, and that what these other voices offer is primarily incisive commentary and radical criticism of the major characters. To put it another way, Just structures his narratives around contradictory points of view that are not resolved, but subtly draw attention to the questionable behavior and values of the members of his imaginary ruling elite. In a sense, Just’s Echo House sums up the vision of the ruling elite articulated by its predecessors but takes a longer, more historical view of the late twentieth century. The novel dramatizes how over this period the ruling elite adapted to new technology and societal change; in this case, how the rise of television changed the way political consultants and fixers operate, and in response to the Civil Rights and Women’s movements, how factions in the political directorate with moderate ruling-class consciousness grudgingly accommodated themselves to an increasing number of women and minorities in or close to the government. Indeed, two of Just’s characters who are outsiders to politics, a woman and an African American, function like a Greek chorus, commenting on the action. They find Washington to be corrupt and alienating. In structuring the novel this way, Just implies that to see our ruling elite for what it is, you have to be knowledgeable about the ruling elite, but on the margins, someone who thinks of himself as an outsider, someone like Just himself. * * * Born into a family that owned not only the major newspaper in town, the Waukegan [Illinois] News-Sun, but another paper, a radio station, and a small printing company, his grandfather a power in Republican politics, Just recognized even in elementary school—the fifth or sixth grade—that he received special treatment from his teachers because of the status of his family. After elementary school, Just attended private prep schools: Lake Forest Academy in Lake Forest, Illinois, where Just’s family moved when he was 11, and the Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Attending these schools, Just found that many of his fellow students came from Old

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Money, families that traced their lineage and wealth back for generations, and that they behaved differently from him. Just came to realize that his family being New Money put him a step below those higher on the social ladder. Being well off but feeling something like an outsider in the world of power and influence gave Just the connections to understand and sympathize with the ruling elite but also the detachment to see them for what they were: isolated, unfamiliar with life in the larger world, unusually confident in their own abilities. When Just was 35, his father died, and Just became the publisher and chairman of the board of the family papers, a position he held for 14 years, commuting back to Waukegan at least once a month from wherever he was living at the time. Selling the company in 1984 not only freed him from a monthly commute back to Waukegan but provided him with a solid financial footing for the rest of his life. As a full-time reporter for the first 15 years of his adult life, Just covered, among other things, the Lake County Democratic Party for the family paper, state politicians in the Midwest for Newsweek, and national politics for the Washington Post. Just’s posting in Washington put him in the center of power during the first years of John F. Kennedy’s presidency. For a year and a half, he reported on congressional matters. His appointment books during the period indicate briefings and lunches with many of the major players in the Kennedy administration: Ted Sorenson, Larry O’Brian, Pierre Salinger, McGeorge Bundy, Sargent Shriver, Stu Symington, Adlai Stevenson, and Alan Dulles. He was also mentored by the famous columnist Joseph Alsop. Just established his reputation for Newsweek with a major article on the new breed of bureaucrats in the Kennedy administration with political ambitions. It was titled, “Frontiersmen: Do They All Want to Be President?” For the Washington Post, Just reported on the Vietnam War for a year and a half, and then the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Richard Nixon, before joining the editorial board of the paper for two years. In 1970, he quit journalism to write fiction full-time, although in his first few years as a novelist, he took time off to cover the presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon in 1972 and Jimmy Carter in 1976. He also joined the editorial board of the Atlantic Monthly, where he wrote a column for a year and half. In reporting from Vietnam, Just interviewed scores of American officials—members of the military, the embassy, and various aid agencies— and forged life-long friendships with fellow journalists and people

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connected to the State Department and CIA, people from whom he could learn about the mutually beneficial relationship between the government and the press, the nature of US diplomacy overseas, and how the CIA works at the highest levels. Just’s stories from the Vietnam were greatly at odds with the official government assessments and caused a great deal of concern in the Johnson administration. Indeed, Just was once invited to dinner at the house of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to be lectured by Robert Kennedy, George McBundy, columnist Joseph Alsop, and the Secretary himself on how the United States was winning the war in Vietnam. Just had reached the pinnacle of success as a reporter: he was influencing national policy. To this day, Just’s stories from Vietnam regularly appear in anthologies of reporting about the war; for example, “Reconnaissance” and “Saigon and Other Syndromes” are collected in the Library of America volume Reporting Vietnam, Part One: American Journalism 1959–1969. Just married three times. His second wife, Anne Burling, whom he married after returning from Vietnam, was the daughter of Edward Burling, a lawyer in the prestigious firm of Covington and Burling and a member of the capital’s aristocracy. Just’s father-in-law often sponsored parties that included the lawyers, private consultants, and lobbyists who influence the nation’s business, giving Just even more contact with people who knew how do get things done in the federal bureaucracy. In addition to reporting on politics, Just covered stories that introduced him to life among the working class and among minorities. While he was at Newsweek, Just provided background for a story on the poverty in Bovey, Minnesota, which had once produced 80 percent of the nation’s iron ore but was then producing less than 40 percent. As a result, 23 of Bovey’s 48 stores had closed, and some 200 people had up and left. Of those who had stayed on, 70–80 percent were unemployed. One of those men was the focus of the story: Joe Anderson, a 25-year-old former mine worker who lived with his family in a cluttered, rugless apartment that was heated so poorly the family clustered in three of six rooms, the sitting room with the television having a hole in the wall the size of a fist. Joe worked odd jobs that only brought in US$10 a week with little chance of finding another (Newsweek 1961). Joe’s was a life far removed from the comforts of upper-middle-class Waukegan. But it was in Vietnam that Just became best acquainted with those near the bottom of the social ladder in American culture. The great majority of combat troops were lower class, often from dirt poor families; many from

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Southern states who had joined the military because being a soldier was a better job than they could find at home or because they had been convicted of small crimes and the judge had given them the choice of time in jail or enlisting. Just had deep sympathy for the men fighting the war. His newspaper stories and his book on his experiences in Vietnam, To What End, are full of anecdotes of the courage, dignity, and honor exhibited by the troops. There was the Cuban sergeant who expressed contempt for a fearful lieutenant who had left his dead captain on the battlefield and organized a group of men to go out and bring the captain’s body back. There was the lieutenant who kept a reconnaissance platoon together for six hours after it was ambushed, moving up and down a hill, firing with seeming purpose into the dense jungle where the enemy was invisible, rallying those strung out away from the command post, comforting the wounded, who were waiting for the MEDVAC helicopters to arrive. Observing the lieutenant, Just thought that he did his job with the skill and grace of a ballet dancer. By contrast, Just felt something bordering on contempt for the white educated upper-class young men who could get deferments and protest the war from the safety of home. After Vietnam, Just was further educated in matters of race, when he covered the rioting after the death of Martin Luther King and the trial of Black Panther, Huey Newton. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and the African American community in Washington erupted in anger. Rioting began in downtown D.C. and the surrounding black enclaves in Maryland; in D.C., the mayor called out the riot police; the governor of Maryland called in the National Guard. Having lived in the city for years, Just had a good sense of what was involved. His stories on the riots have his usual balanced but often ironic tone. With the threat of rioting, the University of Maryland at College Park canceled classes, the Cherry Blossom Festival on the national mall was postponed, liquor stores in the city closed, and the National Guard arrived. Amid the tension, Just (1968b, c) noted similar responses from both races: “‘Oh, God. I’m scared’ said a white girl in an elevator in a downtown office building. A Negro riding at the rear reached over and touched her arm. ‘Well, I am too,’ he said.” When the riots did begin, Negros and whites banded together to save a downtown Safeway, which they had fought hard to bring into the neighborhood. Just also notes the complex motives that might have motivated the rioters—37 percent of the previous year’s graduation class at Eastern high school could not find a job, although if they were in the cadet program, they were taught how to use rifles—and

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again the complexity of the black community’s responses: an old black businessman who says the rioters should be locked up; the mother who tells her son as they loot a delicatessen, “Grab the book,” meaning the notebook where the accounts were kept. Just explains: “Destroy the book and everyone has a free ride—for a time.” He (1968d) wraps up his coverage this way: “Being in the city is the only way to find out ‘how deep this fire goes and how long it is likely to burn’.” In late July of 1968, Just covered the trial of Black Panther Huey Newton in Oakland, California, for a few days while on his way to another assignment. Newton was charged with multiple counts of murdering a police officer, assaulting another with a deadly weapon, and kidnapping a motorist in a confrontation with the police in which he himself was shot in the stomach. When Just arrived in Oakland, the trial was in its fourth day of jury selection. In the two stories he filed on the trial, Just focused on the racial implications of picking a jury and the issue of whether Newton could get a fair trial. He (1968e) emphasizes the argument of Newton’s lawyer Charles Garry that Alameda County juries cannot adequately represent the county as a whole. Jurors are selected from voter registration lists, but only 52 percent of citizens in primarily black West Oakland are registered, while 82 percent of the citizens of the white areas of Oakland are registered. Just also managed to get an interview with Newton for a half an hour. To do this he simply went through channels, getting permission from both the warden and Newton himself. Both Newton’s lawyer and his girlfriend were present for the interview. Just (1968f) describes the atmosphere in the city from both sides—Newton and the Panthers claiming that the police are out to destroy them; the police claiming that Newton and the Panthers were out to destroy American institutions. Newton reveals little in the interview, but Just records his views without comment, allowing Newton his own voice: Newton insists that Blacks in Oakland live in a plantation colony similar to those in the old South, that a fair trial in Oakland is impossible, that he expects he will be convicted but he will appeal to the Supreme Court.1 Although written in the 1990s, Echo House expresses the “liberal values” of a man whose views were formed in the 1950s and 1960s. Just is a classic liberal Democrat who favors a government that rigorously promotes civil liberties and equality and provides a safety net to ameliorate the effects of poverty; a government that redistributes wealth to help the poor, regulates the economy more than social life, and engages in a rigorous

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foreign policy that reinforces America’s post-war standing as a major world power; in short, the kind of liberalism associated with Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. Just’s only explicit statement of a “social vision” is contained in an editorial he wrote for the Washington Post in 1968, the year of the MLK and Robert Kennedy assassinations. The piece uses as a refrain the verses of two songs by Simon and Garfunkel: “Mrs. Robinson” and “The Sound of Silence.” Here Just (1968a) is enraged at the inability of politicians to address the issues of the day—the Vietnam War, racial inequality—and the media’s focus on the radical fringes of the country—“black militants and student revolutionaries”—rather than “ordinary people”—people George Wallace identified as “forgotten Americans”—who simply wanted their leaders to lead, and got instead shrugs and handwringing, stammering incoherence, and confusion, which Just attributes variously to student activists handing out, in George Orwell’s phrase, “the smelly little orthodoxies of the New Left”; Eugene McCarthy listening to a Black Power militant rave about the country being criminal, its leaders like Caligulas, but smiling and saying nothing in response; Romney and Rockefeller displaying the “confusion and the particular arrogance that infects the very rich.” The only person in public life who seemed to Just to confront the major issues head-on was Robert Kennedy, and he was dead. It was Kennedy who confronted students with their privilege and argued that the poor alone should not be fighting the war, who confronted a Democratic rally in Omaha with the idea that America needed other personal standards of achievement than wealth and a higher standard of national greatness than our gross national product. However, Just’s appreciation of RFK’s campaign was severely tempered by his knowledge of how all of the Kennedy brothers really operated: they were ruthless, they enjoyed taking risks, and they were shameless at exploiting a public image that bore little resemblance to reality. However, despite his distrust of Robert Kennedy, Just is largely sympathetic to our ruling elites, considering them decent human beings with the usual human flaws, or as he would say, “compromised” in some way. Just provides complex portraits of his government fixers and the characters around them, often using free indirect discourse to capture how they think and feel as they go about conducting the nation’s business, drawing us in, making us sympathetic to their situations, seemingly encouraging us to identify with them. But since he is also studiously neutral and nonjudgmental about whether the characters are assessing their situations

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a­ ccurately, whether they make the right decisions, whether their motives are sound, whether their actions are justified by consequences, we readers can never take his characters for granted, never accept their justifications and rationalizations at face value. Just forces us to constantly evaluate his characters and decide for ourselves if they deserve our respect. * * * The protagonists of Washington, D.C. and Advise and Consent are White House staff and legislators or those directly engaged in electoral politics. Harry Victor in Democracy is a former elected official trying to get back to the center of power in the country. In Echo House, Ward Just does not deal with the first circle of power in the United States. Instead, he focuses on the second tier of power in the political directorate: mid-level government bureaucrats, political lawyers, and consultants, also known as “fixers,” whose jobs are to implement the policies decided by their superiors. They go about doing their jobs in ways that seem to transcend party affiliation, often implying that such affiliations are irrelevant to larger policy goals, and in any case, being in the second tier of the political universe, they have little opportunity to influence the policies they implement. Like their superiors, Just’s fixers are upper class, and like the elites in the novels by Gore, Drury, and Didion, Just’s elites exhibit a moderate ruling-­ class consciousness: they are aware of their class status, but this awareness is not grounded in any explicit knowledge of the economic basis of their status or any collective opposition to those below them in the economic system. As members of the ruling elite, their service to the country is conditioned by their identity as a class, which promotes personal fulfillment and getting the job done above all else. They think of themselves primarily as problem-solvers and risk takers, resistant to outside opinion. Their jobs, their exercise of power, ostensibly for the good of the country, are their primary sources of satisfaction, but they rarely ever think critically about their ideological commitments, they have little knowledge of lower-class life, and they see no need for policies aimed at making the country more egalitarian. They rarely demonstrate any sense of social justice. And because they are liberals, supposedly broad-minded and sensitive to issues of gender and class, they are open to accepting women and minorities into their ranks but almost willfully ignorant of the barriers facing those who have not been born into the upper ranks of society. They see no need whatsoever for affirmative action and assume that women and

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minorities will eventually increase their numbers in the directorate simply by moving up the political ladder the way these liberals themselves did: by being bright, by being highly educated in the right institutions, and by being recognized and mentored by the right people. Echo House is perhaps Just’s best-known book. It was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1995. Ken Ringle (1997) asserts that the novel is the best example of Just’s “recurring subject”: “the hidden secrets and sorrows and pathos and ethos of the social and institutional insider.” Echo House follows the fortunes of three generations of a Washington family, a United States Senator, his son and grandson. Structurally, Echo House is divided into decades, slices of time that we associate with Henry James’ scenic method. In each chapter, the characters provide exposition, filling us in on what has happened since the previous chapter, and alluding to current events. The action begins in the 1940s and ends in the 1990s. Since many of the major events in the plot take place off-stage, as it were, the novel seems to call into question the degree to which the characters are contributing to history. The protagonists of Echo House are the male members of the Behl family, headed by Adolph Behl, a US Senator from Illinois. The family owns a two-acre estate in Washington, D.C., overlooking Rock Creek Park; the manor is called Echo House, so named because the rooms get gradually smaller as you walk from the front to the back. The Behls are Old Money, at least on the mother’s side. All we learn about Adolph Behl is that back in Illinois as an amateur he grew and bred roses, an activity we do not associate with lower-class life. But Adolph’s wife Constance traces her ancestry back to the French de Barquin family, who fled to Ireland during the Paris Commune in 1871, “when aristocrats were shot on sight,” and established themselves as Anglo-Irish gentry, in the process Anglicizing their name to Barkin. Constance and Adolph disagree about how aristocratic her parents were: Constance tells anyone who will listen that her father was a captain for the British forces fighting in the Transvaal, that at her father’s death in battle, the Queen sent the family her condolences; Adolph says that Constance’s father was a conscript and doubts the story about the Queen (Just 1997, 2, 9). Clearly, we are to understand that Constance’s ancestry is ambiguous but that her class standing is important to her. Indeed, the primary reason she supports her husband is that her major goal in life is to have the grandest salon in the nation’s capital. No matter what the status of the Irish Barkins or Adolph’s history, the Behls are very wealthy. Their son Axel marries within his class: his wife

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Sylvia is from “the best of old New York,” whose parents have an apartment in Gramercy Park, an exclusive enclave in the city. At the rehearsal dinner for Axel’s marriage to Sylvia, a friend of the Behls, Judge Aswell of the federal Appeals Court in the city, explains to Sylvia’s family just how interconnected the Behls are to others in the wedding party: many of Axel’s good friends are the sons of his father’s friends, and they have all gone to school together; they are all “related by blood or by marriage or by school or university, in-laws and stepchildren and stepparents and cousins, roommates, clubmates, teammates, friends from summers on Cape Cod or Long Island or Mackinac.” And indeed, Judge Aswell has discovered that Alice, the wife of one of the Behl cohort, was related to Sylvia “via Sylvia’s great-aunt and Alice’s brother’s first wife’s grandmother” (Just 1997, 83–84). To Judge Aswell, lineage matters as much as it does to Constance. On the surface, the Behls embody the kinds of upper-class values that others admire and might want to emulate, a way to maintain the legitimacy of upper-class rule. As government consultants, the Behl men are dedicated to their jobs and engaged ostensibly in public service, working as consultants to promote government policies. As part of a wealthy family, they do not obviously have to work, and thus their dedication to working with the government could be seen as government service, working for the common good. The Behl women exhibit the traits commonly associated with upper-class women of their generation. Axel’s wife Sylvia is an amateur poet and dedicated to the arts. Alec’s wife Leila works in a lobbying firm until she can break away and form her own firm. Moreover, the Behls carefully exemplify traditional family values, keeping their unhappiness out of the papers. Although he is a womanizer, Axel seems to be faithful to Sylvia during their marriage. After their divorce, he discreetly squires various women around town. Alec is also careful to keep his affairs out of the news. After finishing law school, Axel takes a low-level position in the State Department, but as soon as he feels that he has good relationships with enough of the right people and that he is comfortable with exercising various levers of power, he leaves the State Department and becomes “a fixer without portfolio” with “no formal title” but someone loosely allied with the bureaucracy, which offers him space in the War Department building (Just 1997, 104). Axel, however, prefers his own office near Farragut Square and close to the White House, symbolically positioning himself as a mediator between the Washington hierarchy and those who wish to

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influence legislation and appointments. Despite his being formally out of the government, Axel still has his eyes set on electoral office, even the presidency. In fact, Constance buys a farm in rural Maryland just so Axel has a state to campaign in. However, during his service in World War II, Axel drives over a land mine on a road supposedly outside the war zone, leaving him disfigured and no longer a serious candidate for electoral office. Not content to be just a fixer, Axel gets together with a number of colleagues equally integrated into the Washington bureaucratic establishment and uses a private bank called Longfellow’s in order to fund projects that the State Department and CIA cannot accomplish through normal political channels. Because the nature of the bank is clearly illegal, Axel and his colleagues keep it secret from the public. Thus, the novel illustrates how Axel has to hide his methods of implementing policy in order to maintain some sense of legitimacy. Axel’s bank is a response to a real need—to actively counter communism around the world—and the threat is immediate. In these circumstances, Axel is comfortable making decisions, taking risks, willing to deal with fallout when he needs to. How Axel exercises his power and influence is dramatized in a scene that takes place in the gallery of the Senate chamber, where Axel is in the process of sending a note to the Senate floor in order to prevent a senator known as Alfalfa Bob from giving a speech that will embarrass the nominee for Ambassador to Portugal, James T. C. Longfellow, and thus make a simple unanimous vote difficult. Axel’s friend Ed Peralta from the CIA visits him there and informs Axel that the State Department and the CIA are having trouble getting money overseas to their various projects: sympathetic foreign political parties, cultural exchanges, clandestine groups, and spy rings. Currently, money for these organizations are channeled through embassies or laundered through a host of “foundations and philanthropies,” but too often the conduits overcharge or the money is mishandled or even embezzled or stolen. Worse, occasionally, the money arrives too late to avoid a crisis and people in the field die. Immediately, Axel proposes what Peralta must have expected: that these funds go through a private bank, run by Axel and several associates. By coincidence Axel even has a bank in mind: the bank owned by the father of Jimmy Longfellow, the man whose nomination Axel is in the Senate gallery to save. Since he will soon be Ambassador to Portugal, Jimmy wanted to divest himself of shares in the family bank, so to help Jimmy along, Axel bought them himself. Peralta reminds Axel that channeling public funds through a private back is against the law; it isn’t “an

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established procedure.” Axel replies, “Procedures can be changed” (Just 1997, 112–13). During the conversation with Peralta, Axel exchanges notes with Alfalfa Bob on the Senate floor, causing Bob to leave the chamber, clearing the way for Longfellow’s confirmation to proceed by voice vote. When Ed asks about what changed Alfalfa Bob’s mind, Axel’s replies, a man’s name, a name I wasn’t supposed to know, a name that is inconvenient for me to know. In this context, Axel’s proposal to set up a private bank to “facilitate” the work of the Department of State and the CIA looks like business as usual in Washington. As Axel implies, procedures and laws, like votes, can be made to change. Clearly, Longfellow’s Bank is a solution to a real problem that has arisen because of the increased complexity of national and international relations, the need to support America’s interests overseas through clandestine means.2 But Axel is not bothered by the fact that his proposal is illegal and that he owns an interest in an institution that will benefit from government business. Neither is he is concerned about who may suffer the consequences if the illegality is uncovered. To Axel, any proposal to further the interests of his faction in the government is, in a sense, beyond good and evil: to Axel, his interests, the interests of his faction of the government, and his own sense of his country’s interests are identical. Obviously, it is not in Axel’s interest for the larger public to know that Longfellow’s Bank now has a new covert and illegal purpose. He manages to keep this purpose secret for 25 years. However, in the 1970s, some indiscreet behavior by the bank’s operatives fall under the scrutiny of a Senate Committee, and this becomes the occasion for Just to detail the extent to which our ruling elites will go to maintain the illusion of their propriety. As he did with the scene in the Senate chamber, Just (1997, 207–8) dramatizes the scandal over Longfellow’s Bank in a single scene: this one between Sylvia Behl, now Axel’s ex-wife and remarried, and Ed Peralta, whom she meets while shopping in Georgetown. The two go out for lunch. During their lunch, catching up on each other’s news, Ed confesses his role in the scandal. He tells Sylvia that the bank’s board of directors has been accused of skimming profits for themselves, “profiteering with public money.” According to Ed, the major charge was patently false, but the bank had been getting careless. After “one of the most brilliant coups in the history of our intelligence service,” “a little gem of an operation” in Munich, he and two other men had a lavish dinner at Kempinski’s and

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“somehow the bank picked up the tab.” The Senate Committee managed to get a copy of the bill, which included charges for “the cocktails, the caviar, the sea bass, the Sacher tortes, the Mumm’s, the Cognac and the cigars, and of course the car and driver we hired. Spies’ Night Out, [the chief counsel to the Committee] called it.” According to Ed, Axel has stayed in the background—to protect his own skin, Sylvia thinks—but Axel did arrange for his friends to bring in son Alec, by then a high-powered lawyer in Chicago, to help with Peralta’s appearance before the Committee because Alec had strong ties to the committee’s main counsel. This became Alec’s first major appearance on the national stage, and he handled it well, although he was not concerned about the bank’s status but simply getting his father off the hook. In doing so, Alec devised two strategies. The first was to counsel Peralta himself during the hearing rather than bring in a “Venerable” Washington lawyer whose reputation might be a kind of buffer to the questioning. With Alec at his side during his testimony, Peralta had to admit to the Committee that he was the person responsible for the Boys’ Night Out, but that what the boys were celebrating was not a rogue operation, in effect, implying that the operation as a whole was sanctioned by his superiors. To prevent the Committee from delving deeper into the workings of Longfellow’s Bank, Alec sent a transcript of the hearing to African American columnist Wilson Slyde, who commenced, Ed reports, “a series on corruption in the security services, complete with quotes from the transcript,” which blew Ed’s cover but kept the focus of the hearings on personal corruption and not on the structural illegality of Longfellow’s Bank channeling funds for the CIA (Just 1997, 220). Although Ed Peralta will not admit it, Alec’s tactics were clearly designed to protect his father’s reputation and preserve Longfellow’s Bank, not to help Ed himself. Alec’s strategy created the impression, promoted in the media, that the ruling elite can acknowledge mistakes and correct itself. But in the process of protecting his father, Alec sacrificed the reputation of the CIA, at least for a short while, and made Ed Peralta the fall guy. Thus, in his first appearance in Washington, Alec in effect takes his father’s place in the hierarchy of Washington fixers. Axel’s generation of lobbyists and consultants are referred to as “the Venerables”; Alex’s generation are called “the New Visibles.” Typical of this newer generation of fixers, Alec demonstrates that he intuitively knows how to manipulate the media, in this case print media, to further his own ends. However, Alec is in a different atmosphere and has less direct influence than his father. Alec

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controls no committee, no institution conducting clandestine government business. Instead, he carries on the normal business of a fixer outside the government. In an earlier novel titled In the City of Fear, Just dramatizes more explicitly the historical development of the fixer culture in Washington, the transfer of power from old Ben Joyce, a lawyer, former senator, elder statesman, and one of the original fixers in the administration of FDR, who at least has past experience as an elected official, to Henry Costello, the new breed of fixer, who has considerably less government experience and is known primarily for whom he knows. Old Ben Joyce became a fixer because he perceived “gaps,” as it were, in the implementation of policy because of the increasing complexity of government, gaps that only people could fill. Old Ben believes in “a government of men, not of laws, and therefore of cultivated men. If you knew the men, the laws would take care of themselves” (Just 1982, 144). In other words, to get the laws you want or an interpretation of federal policies favorable to your interests, you need access to the people who make the laws or interpret them. In a scene at a birthday party given in Ben Joyce’s honor, we see the baton passed from Joyce to Costello, who has no personal political philosophy himself; he is a career bureaucrat who has worked his way up the ladder in the Defense Department with connections throughout the government. He was good friends with a member of the National Security Council before he died, and later in the novel we see him ingratiate himself with his dead friend’s wife and take over arrangements for his funeral. Costello is like an ambulance-chasing lawyer in his desire for power and influence. He has no experience in elected office and takes Old Ben’s philosophy to its logical conclusion. For his efforts he eventually is chosen by the President to be the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Ben Joyce appreciates the new form of influence he is bequeathing to Henry Costello: “It’s breathtaking,” he explains to the people at his party. “Mr. Costello acts on behalf of the matter itself! Not the parties, but the matter! It is as if…. There was a civil suit involving an idea. Mr. Costello represents the idea. The idea is his client” (Just 1982, 199). But as I said, Just almost always gives multiple perspectives on the issues confronting his characters, and in City of Fear other characters are more cynical about the fixer culture of which Costello is a part. One character compares the world of legislators and fixers to the closed world of a plantation: “We’re a service industry, we supervise the pursuit of happiness. We legislate it, then we adjudicate it, finally we administer it…. There’s no room for bigotry or

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simple snobbery here, not among those of us who are permanents; who are part of the permanent collection, and remain on the walls no matter who owns the mansion…. In Washington we are beyond philosophy or ideology; we are assimilated, Judeo-Christians all. And all far from home” (Just 1982, 184–85). Another character comes to think of what Costello does as suitable for a “bazaar,” not the government (Just 1982, 203). Whatever we may think of Costello’s role as a fixer in the federal government, Just makes clear that Costello is concerned neither with the consequences nor the morality of what he accomplishes. Costello conceives of his job entirely as merely “solving problems” for his clients, without considering the larger issues involved. In one case, at the request of the White House, Costello puts pressure on a senate committee member to vote in favor of a candidate to implement a government policy during the Vietnam War that is extremely risky, and if the policy fails, the candidate’s career may be ruined. Costello shows no concern whatsoever for the candidate’s welfare, indicating that the candidate should “do what is determined for him, he is not in control of this,” even though the White House is setting up the candidate to take the fall if necessary (Just 1982, 219). The history of the Behls as lobbyists in Echo House dramatizes how those in and around the government have to adapt to new historical trends, including developing technology. Alec has to master the new medium of television that grows increasingly influential over the course of the novel, from the 1950s, when Alec first encountered it at an election night party for Adlai Stevenson, and his father Axel called it “an invention like gun powder.” By the 1960s, Alec’s mentor Lloyd Fisher could marvel at the politics of getting television licenses. The people getting the licenses were often allies of political figures, and during elections “all their resources, financial and editorial,” were working for those senators and congressmen. “Damnedest thing,” Lloyd thinks, “Television’s like the Hearst press in the old days. You make money faster than you can count it, and then you elect a man to insure that you keep it” (Just 1997, 192–93). Then in two scenes in the 1980s and 1990s, news having become increasingly promulgated through television rather than the print media, Just dramatizes how television changed the ways elites control their image. In the first scene, Alec tries to isolate himself from media scrutiny and keep his father’s name out of a magazine. In a second scene, Alec acknowledges to clients that one of their most effective strategies to accomplish their goals is to wage a public relations campaign on television.

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The first scene takes place on a sidewalk in mid-town D.C., when Alec is confronted with a high-powered Washington journalist named Virginia Spears, who wants to write a cover story about him for a major news magazine. Spears gives Alec her pitch: she wants to extend the column format for “a new kind of coverage in Washington,” focused on “texture and nuance,” “the faces behind the masks,” “where the power really is as opposed to where it’s supposed to be” (Just 1997, 244–45). Alex is ambivalent. He does not like the idea, but he knows that Spears may do the story without him, and if he agrees to be interviewed he has some control over the story. The problem is that Spears will want personal information about him and his father, and his father is definitely off-limits. Alec tells Spears that he will consider her offer, and as she runs off, Alec asks Spears’ fellow journalist Wilson Slyde, “Is she going somewhere?” Slyde replies, “Television; she’s made for it. Those legs! That voice!…. She’s Ms. Inside-out, doesn’t even need to wear a wristwatch. She’ll know someone who can tell her the time” (Just 1997, 248). Alec takes great care negotiating over his interviews with Spears, what he can and cannot tell her, and decides that to keep Spears sympathetic, he has to cajole his father into being interviewed by her. Axel firmly refuses, but relents when Alec does him the favor of getting him a ride to Europe with the President on Air Force One to celebrate D-Day. When Spears’ piece is eventually published as a cover story, it is entitled “The Alec Behl Story, the Man to See in Washington.” The ironies here are many, and they include the matter of who is using whom. Alec is, of course, using the interview to advance his celebrity, to become an even more “New Visible” man behind the scenes and therefore increase his influence as a fixer. Spears is using the story as a step up the media ladder: the next stop is a role on television, perhaps as an anchor of an evening news show. In addition, Alec gets his way by treating his father as a client, a fixer making a deal with and for another fixer, in this case, getting his father the ride on Air Force One. The second scene dramatizing the influence of television on lobbying occurs years later and is the last in the novel. The scene is a birthday party at which Axel is scheduled to accept the Medal of Freedom from the President himself. Waiting for the presentation of the award, Alec admits to a possible client—Bud Weinberg, the president’s nominee to be Ambassador to France—that television must now be part of how fixers do business. Weinberg’s nomination is in trouble, and Alec’s advice to the nominee is to conduct a public relations campaign in the media, or as he

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puts it, “You need someone to tell your story. In a time of trouble, everyone needs a personal journalist” (Just 1997, 323). Of course, this episode in the 1990s foreshadows our current situation, when every major candidate and political party has its own personal Internet sites, TV networks, radio talk-show hosts, and PAC committees. Perhaps the greatest irony in Echo House is how both Axel and Alec come to view their careers at the end of the novel. The scandal over Longfellow’s Bank effectively marginalizes Axel’s power in Washington. Seeing his influence ebbing away, Axel becomes disillusioned with all of the power he has exercised over the years. Even at his birthday party, where he is scheduled to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the President himself, Axel claims, “I live in a museum. Everyone’s dead now. I helped make the city of the dead and now I live in it, the last corpse. Many of them don’t even know. Millions” (Just 1997, 301). After his father’s party, Alec has a similar epiphany. Alec’s appearance on the cover of a national newsmagazine was the height of his career, the closest he would come to achieving his grandmother Constance’s dream of a family dynasty. His visibility signaled his decline. After most of the guests at his father’s party have gone home, he is left alone for quiet small talk in the garden of Echo House with a few family friends. They float the idea of promoting Alec as a possible ambassador to France, but Flo, the First Lady, argues that he would never be confirmed. As the guests drift off to various parts of the garden, Alec sits on a bench, marshaling his ghosts, surveying Echo House, and realizes that “this was the house he had inherited and the life he had made and he could not rid himself of either one. He guessed he had another thirty years to live” (Just 1997, 328). That Alec would even think about ridding himself of Echo House is a sign of his alienation, and the thought that he had another 30 years to live is devastating in its understatement. The attitudes of the two Behl men about their own careers are the closest Just comes to judging their characters. Besides dramatizing the work of the Behl family, Echo House also provides a rich and detailed portrait of the rise of women and minorities in Washington life, a sign of the openness of ruling elite to new members, just enough to maintain the American myth that even children born in log cabins can become president of the United States. In this, Just is reflecting on the access of women and minorities to power late in the twentieth century. By the mid-1990s, women and African Americans had become commonplace in politics, although, of course, nowhere near their proportion as part of the larger population. By the time of the Clinton Administration

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beginning in 1992, both of California’s senators were women—Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein—and Illinois’ junior senator was a black woman: Carol Moseley Braun. Clinton appointed Janet Reno as the first female Attorney General and Ruth Bader Ginsberg as the second woman on the Supreme Court after Sandra Day O’Connor. Three of Clinton’s cabinet members were black: Mike Espy at Agriculture, Ron Brown at Commerce, and Alexis Herman at Labor. During his second term, Clinton chose Madeleine Albright as the first female Secretary of State. There is also the example of Christine A.  Varney to illustrate the revolving door between government service and lobbying for particular interests. Varney left a lucrative position as an associate at the high-powered law firm of Pierson, Semmes & Finley to become the general counsel to the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton-Gore campaign, and the Presidential Inaugural Committee. Then, she returned to private practice as an associate at the firm of Hogan & Hartson, where as a lobbyist specializing in antitrust law, privacy issues, and intellectual property, she represented such computer and internet firms as Netscape, eBay, AOL, Compaq, and Gateway, as well as various oil and gas interests (Privacy 2006). After two years at Hogan & Hartson, Varney was recruited back into the Clinton Administration as Assistant to the President and Secretary to the Cabinet, acted as a liaison between the White House and cabinet departments, and went on to become a Federal Trade Commissioner. Despite this apparent success, Echo House provides illustrative examples of the tensions caused by women and minorities joining the political directorate. Because most of the women were already upper class, their difficulties were more subtle than those for African Americans. The women of Adolph’s generation, like Constance and most of the elite women of the 1940s portrayed in Vidal’s Washington, D.C., were only part of the elite behind the scenes: they could only exercise influence as society hostesses or as patrons of various causes. The women of Axel’s generation—what Tom Brokaw calls the “greatest generation,” those who came of age just before World War II—are also traditional wives, not directly involved in politics: Axel’s wife Sylvia is a published poet with no political ambitions; the other major woman in Axel’s life is a fantasy figure from his past. Before his marriage to Sylvia, Axel has casual affairs. Although Axel’s marriage to Sylvia is tortured, he is apparently faithful, but after his divorce from Sylvia, he takes up squiring well-known celebrities and party girls around town, women such as Lauren Bacall and Paulina, an Italian woman

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known as La Bella Figura. All this maintains Axel’s image as a perfectly acceptable, eligible bachelor. The women in Alec’s life, members of the next generation, early “boomers,” now expect to join the power elite, but like their upper-class mothers and grandmothers, they do so by working with and through men. They do not complain about the inherent sexism of Washington. They accept their status as simply the way things are, and they are willing to use their sexuality to accomplish their goals. Alec’s wife Leila Berggren is a polling analyst turned lobbyist, for whom he acts as a consultant. Early in their relationship there are hints that Leila is just using Alec. When he first came to Washington to help his father, Leila encouraged him to stay: because of your father, she told him, the President knows who you are, so you already have your “foot in the door” as a consultant. Because of her relationship with Alec, Leila thinks that she too will gain access to the right people. The two eventually marry and have two children but as the years go by, their heavy workloads drive them apart, and as the romance ebbs, Leila decides to join with a man named Hugo Borne to lease a brownstone close to the White House and “come on strong” as a permanent player among the elite of “consultants fee-for-­ hire” (Just 1997, 252). Once allied with Hugo, Leila works to further her own status. She badgers Alec for money to help pay for the lease on a new office for her and Hugo. Alec gives her the money and recognizes that this is the beginning of the end of their marriage. He resigns as general counsel to her firm, and shortly afterward they break up. We never learn how well Leila does with her own lobbying firm. One other woman in Alec’s life becomes a major player in Washington. Flo, an old friend of Alec from Chicago who now works for the Bureau of the Budget, has plans to make her husband a force in Illinois politics, even though he does not know it yet. Flo drops by Alec’s apartment one night to get some advice about politics in Chicago, especially how to manipulate press coverage, while Leila is away on one of her many trips. One thing leads to another, and the two wind up in bed. Flo “bullies” her dull husband into running for Congress, with no real hope of winning, but her husband seems to enjoy campaigning and wins his seat. In fact, he is so good at campaigning that he eventually becomes President of the United States and Flo his First Lady. Just does not give us enough background on Leila and Flo to clearly identify their social class, but it is highly likely that both are at least

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­ pper-­middle class, indicating the shift in the status of women among the u ruling elite. Both Leila and Flo are not content to accept the traditional roles for upper-class women as teachers, artists, and sponsors of charities. They want to exercise power, and having been raised to fulfill their sense of themselves and confident in their own abilities, they do not feel any need to be “feminist.” They find it perfectly acceptable to achieve power through men. However, Just also uses a woman as an example of a certain kind of outsider in the political directorate who can provide a critical perspective. In the novel, Sylvia Behl becomes a one-woman Greek chorus, commenting on the action, and she often seems to illustrate a point of view we might associate with Just himself. Sylvia is a published poet, and she finds life in Washington boring and pretentious. In an English hospital Sylvia visits her husband while he is recuperating from the injuries he suffered during World War II. Axel hears Sylvia talking with the doctor, explaining Axel’s job: “Axel was not a professional soldier. He was not a professional anything. He went places and advised people. He was very good at giving advice. He wanted to be a professional politician because politics was the family business, like a Southern plantation or a bank. She said, ‘He protested, denied it up and down, but I knew that he wanted to be President of the United States. Can you imagine…? Have you ever been in Washington, Doctor? It’s the midlands with monuments. A dreadful small-minded provincial town where the President’s a kind of doge presiding over a Council of Ten. Lives like one, too, in a white palace in front of a huge square”’ (Just 1997, 63–4). At parties, Sylvia often becomes bored and is prone to address what she considers Washington’s limitations, its group think and petty scandals. Once she brings the conversation at a dinner table to a halt with an impromptu monologue on her “hydraulic theory of gossip” in the capital, how the leak of a few drops of spring water by a source in northwest Washington could eventually flow downhill to the center of town, gaining force as it was joined by other streams from obscure sources until at last it became a veritable “Amazon of rumor and speculation and innuendo,” indistinguishable reporters dipping their cups into the stream and publishing their findings, creating an impression of a single river of Truth on the front pages of newspapers, to which “people would gasp audibly and observe, ‘If you made that up, no one would believe you.’” Axel tells Sylvia to shut up (Just 1997, 203).

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During their break-up Sylvia argues with Axel about his life. Axel offers the standard rationale for justifying the ruling elite as born to serve: “It was easy to explain that government was noble work, the only work worth doing. If you had a talent for it, you had to do it. If you could afford to do it, you had a duty to try. But it was not easy explaining the way you went about it, the evasions and compromises.” Sylvia calls Axel’s defense of government work “the civics lecture that concealed the raunchy joke” and counters that Axel simply “wanted to control things and people, and the government was the officially approved way of going about it; making the world safe for democracy meant making the world safe for him and his ilk” (Just 1997, 69). She accuses Axel and his associates in the government of being “hollow men,” a judgment perhaps reinforced by the plot of the novel, in which neither Axel nor Alec end up happy, only frustrated that their lives have not been more meaningful. Once again, Just is studiously neutral in the way he presents the argument about the Behls’ government service, leaving us to decide whether Sylvia’s critique of her husband is justified. The other major critic of the ruling elite in Echo House is African American columnist Wilson W. Slyde, Jr., who also illustrates what black people face when they join the political directorate: in Slyde’s case, how their expertise is overlooked, how they are often not taken seriously and how they are condescended to, to say nothing of how they are the subject to offensive remarks. In depicting Slyde’s aggressive responses to this kind of treatment, Just runs the real risk of perpetuating negative stereotypes about African Americans. Along with his colleague Teddy O’Banion, Slyde writes opinions under the title “Our Side” that run in 300 newspapers. Slyde has paid a price for his rise to power among the Commentariat, and uses black dialect and a parodic “Uncle Tom” manner to deflect racism. The people Slyde responds to often do not get the point of what he is doing, and Just leaves it to us to “get” Slyde’s implied criticism of the elite and its racist condescension. Slyde, the son of an army sergeant with an interest in military history, got scholarships at Milton, at Yale, and then at MIT, where he graduated with honors and wrote his thesis on the tactical use of nuclear weapons. Then he worked for the Defense Department and the CIA, where he wanted to be involved in nuclear strategy, but in the language of Ed Peralta, “his bosses dealt him the equal opportunity account” and gave him the job of selling the military’s policies on integration to the NAACP and Urban League: “he was holding the race card when he wanted the

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strategy card” (Just 1997, 219). During his career, Wilson becomes acting spokesman for a working group in the Defense Department specializing in Caribbean regimes, and at a meeting that he attends with his boss Red Lombardo, Lombardo asks Alec to take Slyde’s place because “Wilson’s young and we need someone with more experience or…the right kind of experience. Everything depends on the presentation.” Alec sees that Slyde is furious, and recognizes that “God alone knew what effort it had taken Wilson Slyde to make a place for himself at the table, and now it was about to be snatched away.” Alec doesn’t want the job anyway, so he tells Lombardo, “It’s Wilson’ job. Let him do it.” Lombardo retorts that Alec is making a big mistake: “You don’t know what you’re missing.” Slyde interrupts, no longer able to restrain himself: “Yes, he does. He knows what it is. It’s a field hand’s work. Leave it to the field hand. Leave it to the nigger.” Like a good stereotypical liberal Lombardo responds violently to Slyde’s use of the N-word, smashing his fist on the table and declaiming, “Never use that word again in my presence, Wilson” (Just 1997, 191). Of course, Lombardo totally misses Slyde’s point: that with his expertise, he should never have been assigned to the Caribbean beat in the first place. Slyde was not criticizing Alec; he was criticizing Lombardo. Eventually, Slyde quits the government and joins O’Banion, a “poolhall Marxist” Irishman from Boston who graduated from Harvard, to start their own column. O’Banion drove a Jaguar, so in Peralta’s casually racist phrase, “in the privacy of one’s own home or office the column was known as the Jig and the Jag” (Just 1997, 219). Slyde becomes a media celebrity, the only black man in Washington to be invited to parties thrown by Alec and Sylvia’s friends, who expect him, Sylvia thinks, to reveal aspects of black life they know only from television and James Baldwin’s work. Slyde dresses the part, wearing custom-made suits, a gold Rolex on his wrist. At the parties he drinks only Courvoisier and soda. He is cool and ironic, a manner that saves his savage criticism of administration policies about the minorities and the poor from being offensive. At a party during the late Nixon years, while the country was waiting for the President to implement his secret plan to end the Vietnam War, Slyde proposed an alternative method of recruiting soldiers to counter the excessive number of “body bags filled by black boys”: a Princeton Brigade something like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain that would be filled exclusively by the sons of congressmen, senators, Cabinet secretaries, and White House staff, “Mr. Charlie to fight the Charlies, you hear what I’m saying to you?” (Just 1997, 229). Needless to say, no one at the

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party took Slyde’s proposal seriously, although they did think he was correct in pointing out the number of poor black men from the south, who chose to join the army, having been convicted of a felony and given the choice by a judge of either the penitentiary or Vietnam. The trouble, Slyde went on, was that the young men didn’t know there was a war on because Vietnam was not part of the curriculum in the one-room schoolhouses they attended, the ones with the cracked blackboards, no chalk, and no maps either. Patriotic kids, Slyde said, ironically, and his audience murmured and nodded, too embarrassed or naïve to acknowledge the ignorance that resulted from underfunded schools in segregated districts. Slyde decided to not pursue the matter: to maintain his place in Washington society Slyde could not afford to be explicit about the systemic racism in the country that even good liberals could not face up to. Slyde contributes to the plot of the novel in two ways: he is the columnist to whom Alec leaks the information that will in effect tarnish the CIA but seems to exonerate Alec’s father and make Ed Peralta the fall guy. Slyde is also the man who introduces Alec to Virginia Spears, after Ed Peralta’s funeral, and as they walk down to street to lunch, he offers a running commentary on Spears’ ambition and lack of self-awareness as she tries to convince Alec to agree to an intensive interview that would put him on the cover of a national magazine. Minutes after she talks about wanting to bring “a new kind of coverage to Washington,” coverage with “texture and nuance,” Slyde waves at a man across the street. Spears demands to know who the man is. Slyde replies, “New man at the National Security Council.” Spears says she never heard of him. “You’d like him,” Slyde says. “He’s full of nuance.” Spears does not acknowledge the jibe. When Spears suggests to Alec that her magazine article about him might be titled “Attorney Alec Behl. The Man to See in Washington,” Slyde resorts to black dialect: “Ole Alec, he lays on de hands, gives dem his blessing and washes dey feet, an sends dem away wiser an poorer” (Just 1997, 245). Spears tells Slyde to shut up, but Alec laughs and takes Slyde’s cue to try to back off. Spears, however, will not take no for an answer and Alec protests that he has to be careful of the media because if a story came out wrong it may destroy the trust and the perception of trust his clients have invested in him. Spears proceeds to lecture Alec on the way she carefully deals with facts, using an elaborate metaphor to explain the degree of reliability in what she reports: facts are like children in a nursery. All of them came from someplace else. Some were the children of aristocrats, some were mongrels, and some were orphans, parents unknown. Some facts you had to

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dress up somewhat to make them presentable; with others, you simply slashed their throats. With the orphans, you had to be especially careful because you didn’t know their gene pool and thus their inherent reliability. Spears presses the analogy to absurdity. About Spears’ absurd metaphor, Slyde is scathing. “A dirty business,” Slyde comments: “You have to change their diapers, too. Wipe the snot from their noses” (Just 1997, 247–48). Once again Spears brushes Slyde off. Just adds one more detail to guarantee that we sympathize with Slyde’s point of view. Spears and Alec are so intently engaged that they do not see a panhandler rattling his cup. Only Slyde stops to put some money in the man’s cup. In short, Slyde’s criticism of the pretentions of both the bureaucracy and the media make the ruling elite seem small-minded and not as “liberal” as they think they are. Echo House complements and sums up the class-based nature of politics of the three earlier novels I have analyzed. The novel illustrates how politics is a “natural” vocation for the upper classes, in the case of the Behls almost a family business; how the ruling elite control their public image as models for members of the lower classes to aspire to, and how because of their limited upbringing and lack of training in thinking about their own ideological biases, the ruling elite are rarely capable of even recognizing the barriers women and minorities have to mount in order to join the political directorate. If we want to make at least the moderate factions of our ruling elite more open, more concerned with social justice, more responsible to the “will of the people” we need to find ways to make the elite more accountable to the wishes of the great majority of people. I deal with this issue in Chap. 8, my conclusion.

Notes 1. The material on the Newton trial has been supplemented by comments from an interview with Just on February 23, 2017. 2. Just may have gotten the idea for Longfellow’s Bank from a series of articles in 1967 in Ramparts magazine, documenting how the CIA used the Olin Foundation as a bank to launder about US$1.95 million to anti-communist intellectuals and publications. According to Ramparts, this was just one of a number of schemes in which the CIA tried to covertly promote American foreign policy by funding groups such as Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and the Asia Foundation, as well as teachers’ unions and the National Student Association so that their members could attend international student congresses in eastern European countries (Mayer 2016, 104–5, 392). See also Prados (2006, 372–74).

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References Just, Ward. 1968a. 1968… A Year That Hurt Everyone It Touched. Washington Post, November 6. ———. 1968b. The City Beseiged: A Study in Ironies and Contrasts. Washington Post, April 6. ———. 1968c. City’s Mood: Resignation, Bitterness. Washington Post, April 7. ———. 1968d. Generation Gap in the Ghetto. Washington Post, April 7. ———. 1968e. The Making of a Martyr. Washington Post, July 28. ———. 1968f. Newton Trial… Microcosmic Oakland Drama. Washington Post, July 24. ———. 1982. In the City of Fear. New York: Viking. ———. 1997. Echo House. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ———. 1998. “Reconnaissance” and “Saigon and Other Syndromes”. In Reporting Vietnam, Part One: American Journalism 1959–1969, ed. Milton J. Bates, et al., 262–80, 348–70. New York: Library of America. Mayer, Jane. 2016. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Doubleday. Newsweek. 1961. Challenges…to the New Frontier—The Depressed Areas. February 6. Prados, John. 2006. Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Privacy Piracy KUCI (radio show). 2006. Interview with Christine Varney. November 8. www.kuci.org/privacypiracy/2006Archive.html#11_08_06 Ringle, Ken. 1997. Author About Town. Washington Post, May 22.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion

In arguing that “aesthetic representation can be a mode of confrontational engagement,” William Dow (2009, 221) hopes that the study of class in fiction will help readers transcend the mere esthetic appreciation inherent in close reading and foster their ability to contemplate visions of society that transcend “hegemonic racial and class formations” and even “reactivate … social forces and political possibilities.” However, the sense in which literary analyses of class as a form of “confrontational engagement” can contribute to the political process is intensely contested among literary theorists. Rita Felski (2015, 140–41) notes that while literary critique is often associated with leftist politics and “allied, in some way, with the interests of traditionally subordinate groups: the working class, women, racial or sexual minorities,” it is not obvious how critiques of literary texts intended for small academic audiences have any bearing or impact on larger political struggles, that in fact many theorists value critique precisely because it is not political in practice. As Felski (2015, 143) puts it: [Critique] reserves the right to query the actions and attitudes of the oppressed as well as the oppressors. Its ability to say no to the world, to refuse obligations and affiliations, to carve out a space of negative freedom, remains vital to its own sense of mission. Critique, in this sense, is the quintessential form of unhappy consciousness, forever torn between its intellectual and its broader political allegiances.

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It is common for scholars on the left to call for “cultural intervention” in general, but often they only go as far as Joseph North (2017, 211–12), whose suggestion is frustratingly vague. North’s proposal is an attempt to “outmaneuver” the academy’s “default strategy for defusing dissent,” which ignores new ways of thinking and being, then accepts the creation of new “fields,” and finally after all the controversies have died down, treats the new field the same as all the others. But North only suggests “making broader alliances with the left outside the discipline” and “cultivating new collectivities … bent on pursuing modes of life deeper than any that the existing order is willing to allow.” Quite frankly, I cannot imagine what such new and deeper “collectivities” outside the discipline would be like, other than those already available: non-academic ad hoc action committees, politically oriented consulting firms, think tanks, and political parties. Still, there may be something to Dow’s insight that creating rich and stimulating esthetic moments that focus on class might foster some “imagined communities” that would find common ground in some form of political engagement. Studying power and class in political fiction can invite scholars, critics, and readers to consider the degree to which these imaginaries adequately portray the realities of political life and, if these imaginaries seem truthful, encourage them to see analogies to their own situation and imagine ways they could participate in the political process or join groups that deal with the issues raised in these texts. To do so, scholars, critics, and readers would first need to evaluate whether the political conditions described in older literary texts still apply to their current situation and put aside their critical tendency to appreciate historicist arguments about the determining influences of particular cultural eras. If they decided that the historical conditions in these fictional texts were similar to their own, then they might use these texts as a basis for how they could actually act politically in order to improve their current politics. If the four post-war Washington novels in this study are essentially accurate in portraying the complexities of at least the “moderate” factions of America’s ruling elite in the last decades of the twentieth century—that these moderate elites govern in their own self-interest and in defense of the status quo as if the poor and working class do not exist, as if the great majority of US citizens do not need consideration, a voice in governmental affairs, the kind of agency the elite themselves possess because of their class status—and if we readers in the first decades of the twenty-first century think that certain factions of our current political elites seem to

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behave in a similar fashion, we have a basis for envisioning how we might work to change their behavior. This would not apply to the Reactionary Right, which is more consciously driven by ideology, collectively organized to dominate the political directorate, and not committed to the norms of bargaining and compromise that other factions of the elite have “consensually agreed to.” Moderate factions of the elite are the only hope for significant change. In the spirit of envisioning an imaginary community dedicated to improving the agency of the poor and working class in our own era, let me briefly suggest several policies and initiatives for literary critics and theorists of class to rally around. These policies and initiatives are based on the two major problems raised by an ignorant and isolated ruling elite: a cultural problem and a political problem.

The Cultural Problem Over the past 50 years, any number of scholars and critics have addressed the issue of class inequality and conceded that at least part of the problem is with the ignorance, not of the ruling class itself, but of society in general. Of course, Americans, going back to the Puritans, have always tended to associate wealth and upper-class status with virtue. Still, more recent scholars and critics have basically proposed raising the consciousness of the culture but without actually offering concrete ways to do so. Back in the 1950s, Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb (1973, 261) documented the “shaming” inherent in a class system in which it is tacitly understood that the poor and working class must somehow deserve their status and argued that society should “recognize a diversity, rather than a hierarchy of talents” and do away with shaming, that it was “no longer necessary, if it ever was, for organizations to make a few individuals into the ‘best’ and treat the rest as an undifferentiated mass.” More recently, like Sennett and Cobb, Rachel Sherman has commented on the tendency of Americans across classes to associate wealth and success with moral virtue, to believe that elites somehow deserve their status while the vast majority of workers, even those who build and maintain the infrastructure that makes our society possible—everyone from receptionists to coal miners—are somehow less deserving, less virtuous. To Sherman (2017, 236), the key question for a democracy is how to distribute “material and experiential resources” to prevent “extreme inequality, which is both pernicious to society and itself immoral,” how to, in effect, distribute society’s assets in ways that are fair and just, limiting income and wealth on the affluent in order to p ­ rovide

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for the poor and the disadvantaged and to adequately compensate the working class. However, like Sennett and Cobb, Sherman presents no proposals about how to begin a serious societal discussion of income redistribution.1 As far as I know, the only person to propose a concrete solution that directly addresses the fact that our ruling elites have no first-hand knowledge of the way the poor and working class live is New York Times columnist and NPR commentator David Brooks. Brooks (2012) proposed that if he were given a billion dollars, he would try to “reweave the social fabric” at both the top and the bottom of the social ladder by forming 25-person cross-class collectives at three stages of life: poor kids, young adults, and older groups of “successful people between 36 and 40.” These collectives “would identify rising stars in local and national life, and would help build intimate bonds across parties and groups, creating a baseline of sympathy and understanding these people could carry as they rose to power.” Such groups would promote “the habit of performing small tasks of service and self-control for one another, thus engraving the habits of citizenship and good character,” study biographies and philosophical reflections to help participants master “the intellectual virtues required for public debate,” and discuss basic issues of purpose and meaning in order to foster a personal “spiritual true north that orients a life.” Interestingly, Brooks notes in an aside that “insular elites” already have groups similar to those he wants to form, but his example is Skull and Bones, the Yale undergraduate secret society known more for its exclusionary snobbishness than any major contribution to the nation as a whole. Perhaps because two of the alumni of Skull and Bones were both presidential candidates in the 2004 election—George W. Bush and John Kerry—Skull and Bones does not seem to be a terribly promising model for Brooks’ proposal, and while the idea of “reintegrating” the country across class lines may be theoretically appealing, it would be almost impossible to implement on a scale large enough to change the basic tenor of the country.

The Political Problem The major evidence indicating why the lower classes lack a “collective” sense of agency is in surveys of what they expect from their government. These surveys indicate that there is no consensus among working people on economic issues and that their ideas on income distribution and taxes range across a broad spectrum of beliefs and values shared by all classes.2 On the other hand, a great deal of research suggests that a majority of

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Americans across class lines are much more “liberal” on economic issues than the Reactionary Right. In 2009, for example, Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs found that most Americans regardless of their class status were aware of economic inequality and favored broadly based “government programs that foster the American Dream and provide a measure of economic security.” Page and Jacobs (2009, xi) call this significant cross-­ class majority of Americans—rich and poor, conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat—conservative egalitarians, people who believe in “individual initiative, and free markets,” but “when their well being (and that of people they care about) is threatened, or when their dreams are blocked by forces beyond their control,” they become pragmatic liberals and want the government to provide concrete programs to help. Through their surveys, Page and Jacobs (2009, 3) learned that Americans, more than the citizens of other Western democracies, are intensely suspicious of government “ineffectiveness, waste, and corruption,” and strongly believe that people should be self-reliant and take care of themselves. Still, they, often grudgingly, expect the government to “address concrete barriers to pursuing opportunity,” provide “employment opportunities through education and training,” and help protect them from the worst insecurities associated with “illness, old age, or disability.” To accomplish these goals, they favor specific programs, for which they are willing to pay higher taxes: they want the federal government to spend “whatever is necessary” in order to insure that “no one goes without food, clothing, and shelter.” They favor policies to insure that everyone who wants to go to college can afford to do so; to guarantee everyone a job, even if the government itself has to provide the jobs; to set the minimum wage and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit at levels in which no one will be mired in poverty; to establish a system of universal health insurance; and to expand Social Security.3 Given the lack of Marxist class consciousness in this country, the aversion to be part of large “collectivist” organizations and movements, and the lack of any leadership for a mass movement based on economic issues, the issue is how to provide the poor and working class with some sense of agency in implementing policies they favor. There may be only two ways to do so. The first is to make our elected officials more representative of the country as a whole by recruiting more working-class people into running for electoral office, and the second is to hold these elected officials more accountable by making elections more competitive and thereby ­forcing ruling elites to attract a broader range of voters than their usual constituencies.

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To get more members of the working class into the government, Nicholas Carnes (2018) recommends efforts similar to those of large, powerful east-coast unions that offer scholarships, provide seed money, and operate programs to train working-class people in the art of campaigning for office. These union-sponsored efforts to broaden the class status of our ruling elites have often been successful at the local level—it is common to have members of the working class as majorities on city councils—but have not carried over into state and national levels. Carnes argues that the reason for the lack of working-class representatives at higher levels of government is a “gap” in resources and recruitment—the lack of time and money and the lack of support from state and national party officials—which can be overcome by the sheer hard work of union recruiters and trainers and the candidates themselves. But in his analysis of the problem Carnes does not grapple seriously with the issue of class. Carnes has no good explanation for why “moderate” politicians discourage lower-­ class candidates from running for state and national office. From the standpoint of Elite Theory, the explanation is obvious: ruling elites tend to only recruit and accept new members who identify with the upper class and want to share their class status, who have the qualities of assertion and aggression associated with those that feel a sense of entitlement, who have at least some access to an existing network connected to the elite, and who have demonstrated that they can manage or direct an institution viewed as a stepping stone to government, positions in a business, a military organization, or a law firm. While recruiting working-class people into running for office is a worthy goal, the class-based structure of our ruling elite will always make it difficult for great numbers of the lower classes to successfully join their ranks. Efforts to make our elections more democratic and thus more directly reflective of the wishes of a broad range of the citizenry, including the poor and working class, are more likely to succeed. If a much larger percentage of the poor and working class voted regularly, moderate elites would be more inclined to favor policies that strong majorities favor, programs that benefit the lower classes more than the upper: support for child care, job training for welfare recipients, increases in the minimum wage, and spending on education. As Martin Gilens (2012) has noted, the best way to make government more responsive to a broader range of voters would involve supporting various initiatives. One set of initiatives would work to do three things: to reduce the importance of money in elections or shifting the source of con-

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tributions to a broader range of less-affluent donors, to eliminate gerrymandering that produces safe seats for incumbents, and to increase support for non-partisan get-out-the-vote drives. Another set of initiatives would work to make registering to vote easier by tying it to getting a driver’s license or a state-approved ID, making national election days “holidays” or scheduling them on the weekend so that working people can get to the polls more easily, and providing publicly sponsored transportation available to the home-bound to get them to the polls.4 Needless to say, moderate factions of the ruling elite would not necessarily support these policies out of the goodness of their hearts: they would do so in their own best interest. If these moderate factions provided a strong safety net for the poor and working class, these groups would be more content, more likely to accept the mythology of a classless society, and more likely to support the continued rule of those factions of the ruling elite that had granted them these benefits. They would be less likely to notice and question their lack of more direct agency in the electoral process and their ability to influence the policy-making of their own government. And because increasing voter turnout can be argued within the ideological framework promoted by the ruling elite—that they represent “the will of the people”—implementing such proposals is at least feasible. Other proposals to promote the agency of the working class are much less likely because they would threaten the corporate power that supports all of the factions in the ruling elite. I am thinking of major legislation to repeal right-to-work laws and to require a certain percentage of working people or union representatives on the boards of all major corporations. However, even lesser proposals would be hard to implement: for example, demanding that the Public Broadcasting Service produce a program to compete with the Nightly Business Report called the Nightly Labor Report, which would investigate the working conditions in American industries, report on wages and benefits, examine labor disputes, and offer tips to working-class people on how to shop for better jobs, deal with their managers and employers, and negotiate for higher salaries and better conditions. There is also Barbara Ehrenreich’s proposal (2001) that the government publish data on company salaries and benefits in particular locales so that working people could make more informed choices about where to look for work, given where they are forced to live, either close to their jobs or reliant on public transportation. * * *

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It is debatable whether any of these proposals to provide the poor and working class with some sense of agency in political and economic affairs would be effective, but they are at least a step in the right direction. They might provide a common basis for critics, theorists, and readers who appreciate the analysis of class in political fiction to support particular forms of political action. Fictional class imaginaries are just that: imaginaries, constructs, ways to continue the conversation about class and our ruling elite. The degree to which these imaginaries do justice to their subject—the class, its members, the issues of nature and nurture, of structure and agency—will always be a matter of interpretation and argument. The political fictions of Gore Vidal, Allen Drury, Joan Didion, and Ward Just offer no stinging critique of late-twentieth-century politics and no grand vision of the possible. Rather, these novels show us how the moderate factions of our elites do their jobs, the way they think and feel about the world, conditioned as they are by their personalities and upbringing in upper-class enclaves. In doing so, these novels make a powerful case that working toward a more equal and fair society will not be simple, but that understanding the nature of our ruling elite in all of its complexity may be an important step in working toward significant social change.

Notes 1. Sherman’s rhetoric is similar to that of Christopher Lasch (1995). 2. See Hochschild (1981) and Jackman and Jackman (1983, 201–215). 3. Piston (2018) confirmed Page and Jacobs’ conclusions with a study of how a significant majority of Americans, while not supporting “welfare programs,” do support taxing the rich at higher rates in order to provide such programs as the Earned Income Tax Credit, Supplemental Security Income, Head Start, and Social Security. A majority of the public supports these and similar programs when they know who specifically benefits from them. 4. On making voting easier, see Skocpol (2003, 283–5).

References Brooks, David. 2012. Giving Away Your Billion. New York Times, June 6. Carnes, Nicholas. 2018. The Cash Ceiling: Why Only the Rich Run for Office—and What We Can Do About It. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dow, William. 2009. Narrating Class in American Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2001. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. New York: Henry Holt. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilens, Martin. 2012. Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America. New  York: Russell Sage Foundation/Princeton University Press. Hochschild, Jennifer L. 1981. What’s Fair: American Beliefs About Distributive Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jackman, Mary R., and Robert W. Jackman. 1983. Class Awareness in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press. Joseph North. 2017. Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lasch, Christopher. 1995. Communitarianism or Populism? In The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy by Christopher Lasch, 92–114. New York: Norton. Page, Benjamin I., and Lawrence R. Jacobs. 2009. Class War? What Americans Really Think About Economic Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Piston, Spencer. 2018. Class Attitudes in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sennett, Richard, and Jonathan Cobb. 1973. The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Knopf. Sherman, Rachel. 2017. Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Skocpol, Theda. 2003. Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Index

A Adams, Henry Democracy, 1, 8, 143 Advise and Consent (Drury), 2, 8, 12, 99, 100, 102–120, 134, 154 “ambition” as personal ideology, 108 binary structure, 107, 114 binary treatment of homosexuality, 118–120 class status of characters, 108 constituencies of senators, 116 foreign policy as distraction from corruption, 116 foreign policy as trope, 107 four characters as models of the ideology of the personal, 108–112 ideological basis for foreign policy, 115–116 ideology of the personal, 99–100, 107–108 “integrity” as personal ideology, 107–108, 111–112 resolution as sign of elite unity, 118 scapegoating anti-communism, 117

Agency, 2–3, 9–10, 19, 21, 24, 26, 27, 29, 175 proposals to increase working-class agency, 176–178 working class desire for, 26–27 See also Labor history Aldrich, Nelson W. Jr., 56 Americans for Tax Reform, 40–41 Anti-union legislation Landrum-Griffin Act, 28 Taft-Hartley Act, 24–28 unions lacking corporate rights, 25 See also Labor history; Labor unions Aronowitz, Stanley, 2, 64 theory of American political system, 23–25 on unions integrating workers into capitalism, 27–28 B Baltzell, E. Bigby on election of Donald Trump, 54 ruling elites as aristocratic establishment and caste system, 52–54

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Blotner, Joseph, 3–4 Boorstin, Daniel “pseudo-events,” 135 Boyers, Robert, 5, 99 “absent cause,” 99, 115 Brammer, Billy Lee: The Gay Place, 1 Brooks, David proposal to integrate elites, 176 C Calabresi, Steven, 37, 38 Carnes, Nicholas, 66, 178 Class, 9, 17 of cabinet members, 67 of members of Congress, 66–67 New Money, 54–56, 60, 76 Old Money, 54–56, 60, 76 upper-class education, 58–59 upper-middle class, 57, 60 Class consciousness, 5–6, 18–21, 31, 32, 41, 177 stages of, 17–19 See also Ruling-class consciousness; Working-class consciousness Cobb, Jonathan, 175–176 Conley, Dalton: envisioning, 58–59 Criticism, literary as basis for considering political action, 174 class-based, 13 as political critique, 173–174 D Daugherty, Tracy, 129, 143 Davidson, Guy, 81–82 Davis, Kingsley, 55 Democracy (Didion), 2, 7, 123, 124, 132, 133, 144, 154 allusion to Henry Adams’ novel, 124, 143

back story for, 132–134 conventional resolution of, 144 on discontent of political wives, 140–141 on elite economic competition as game-playing, 137–139 on elites’ personal use of politics, 138–139 on liberal failure to represent the people, 136–138 on phantom liberal constituencies, 136 on populist liberal rhetoric, 136–137 postmodern technique of, 123–124 as reflection of current status of democracy in America, 124–125 as satire of liberal politics, 132–136 on war as “commercial enterprise,” 139–140 on the women’s movement, 142–143 Didion, Joan, 9, 12, 60, 180 adolescent social life, 126 ancestry, 125–126 class awareness, 128–129 early career, 127 family leery of newcomers, 126 family politics, 131 interrogating family mythology, 130–132 personal characteristics, 127–129 personal politics, 131 prose style, 130 treatment of poverty, 129–130 Works; “California Dreaming,” 135–137; “Good Citizens,” 132–133; Run River, 127; Slouching Toward Bethlehem, 128; Where I Was From, 129; The White Album, 132; “Why I Write,” 129; “The Women’s Movement,” 142–144 See also Democracy (Didion)

 INDEX 

Dionne, E. J., 8 Domhoff, G. William, 53, 56, 62, 63, 80, 102 Dow, William, 2, 13, 19, 173, 174 Drury, Allen, 9, 60, 180 ancestry, 101 domestic policy views, 105–106 family life, 99–102 intellectual life, 104–105 religious sensibility, 103 social life, 102, 132–133 Works; A Senate Journal, 1943-­ 1945, 102, 104; Three Kids in a Cart, 104, 105 See also Advise and Consent (Drury) Dye, Thomas, 9, 50, 63–64, 67 E Echo House (Just), 2, 8, 12, 139, 148 African American as critic of government, 167–170 class status of characters, 154–156 development of fixer culture, 160–161 fixers adapting to new technology, 160–163 Henry James’ scenic method, 155 ironies of career as fixer, 163 neutral point of view, 147–149 overview, 148 rise of women and minorities, 163 woman as critic of politics, 166–167 Elite Theory, 2, 9–11, 21–23 classical theorists, 48–50 See also Elite Theory, contemporary American; Michels, Robert; Mosca, Gaetano; Pareto, Vilfredo

185

Elite Theory, contemporary American, 50–68, 178 basic tenets, 50 effects of social movements, 53 ruling elite ideology, 66–67 ruling elites accepting new members, 50–51 See also Baltzell, E. Bigby; Ideology F Federalist Society, 37–40 Felski, Rita, 173 G Gandal, Keith, 19 Giddens, Anthony, 17–19 Gilens, Martin, 178 Grumbach, Jacob, 66–67 H Hapke, Laura, 19 Harker, Jamie, 81 Hitchens, Christopher, 8–9 Hochschild, Jennifer, 18–19 Hodgson, Godfrey, 9 Howe, Irving, 4 I Ideology: of elite rule, 3, 51–52 See also Advise and Consent (Drury) J Jameson, Fredric, 5 Jacobs, Lawrence survey of what people want from government, 176–177

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INDEX

Just, Ward, 9, 60, 180 as classic liberal Democrat, 152 knowledge of lobbying, 150 as publisher, 149 reporting on African Americans, 151–152 reporting on politics, 149–150 reporting on poverty, 150 reporting on Vietnam War, 150–151 social vision, 153 Works; In the City of Fear, 159–161; “Reconnaissance” and “Saigon and Other Syndromes,” 150; To What End, 151 See also Echo House (Just) K Kahl, Joseph, 55 Kaplan, Cora, 2 Kaplan, Fred, 79, 82 Kemme, Tom, 105 Kennedy, John F., 80, 82, 89 Kessler-Harris, Alice, 24 Killiany, Kenneth, 100–103, 105 Killiany, Kevin, 101, 108 L Labor history decline in union membership, 29–30 desire for agency, 25–27 disappearance from public notice, 30–31 loss of agency, 27–28 loss of collective identity, 35 unions abandoned by the Democratic Party, 30, 41 worsening job conditions, 30 See also Anti-union legislation; Labor unions

Labor Unions “business unionism,” 25 “social unionism,” 24–25 See also Anti-union legislation; Labor history Lapham, Lewis, 56 Lareau, Annette: concerted cultivation, 58 Liberal consensus, 9, 22–23 Lipsitz, George, 25 M Marxism, 9–10, 19–21 on a classless society, 47–48 See also Ollman, Bertell McNamee, Stephen, 62 Michels, Robert, 9, 26–28 “iron law of oligarchy,” 26–28, 48 Miller, Robert, 62 Miller, Stephen, 8 Mosca, Gaetano, 9, 49 N North, Joseph, 173–174 O O’Connor, Edwin: The Last Hurrah, 1 Ollman, Bertell Marxism’s major tenets, 19 P Page, Benjamin, 61 survey of what people want from government, 176–177 Pareto, Vilfredo, 9, 49 Political fiction illustrating ideology, 4–5

 INDEX 

portraying power, 4 types, 1 Power, political, 60–66 as attribute of social roles, 60–62 See also Ruling elites Prewitt, Kenneth, 62–63 Putnam, Robert, 62 R Reactionary Right, 31, 32, 42, 177 Douglas Fraser’s judgment of, 39–40 founding policy institutes, 34–35 funding legal institutes, 37–39 immediate effects of action, 39–40 increase in lobbying, 34–35, 39 increase in use of PACs, 36–38 Lewis Powell’s call to action, 33 “Republican Revolution,” 41–42 Representation in fiction politics of, 2–3, 147 Representation, political, 42 in unions, 28 Roberts, John, 57–59 Rothman, Robert, 17–20 Ruling-class consciousness, 5–6, 19, 24, 31, 59–60 highly developed form of, 5 history of in late-twentieth century, 30–40 moderate form of, 5–6, 11, 31–32, 107 See also Reactionary Right Ruling elites as hegemonic oligarchy, 63–66 isolation as cultural problem, 174–176 as meritocracy, 62–63 as political problem, 176–179

187

psychological characteristics of, 67–68 recruitment into, 67 social origins, 62 See also Class; Power, political S Schorer, Mark “Technique as Discovery,” 130 Sennett, Richard, 175–176 Sherman, Rachel, 175 Social movements, 24, 41–42 “Sociology” of the ruling elite, 11 Speare, Morris Edmund, 4 Stone, Alan, 62–63 “Super-lawyers,” 67 T Tager, Michael, 137 Teachout, Terry, 8 Twain, Mark, and Charles Dudley Warner: The Gilded Age, 1 V Vidal, Gore, 9, 60, 100, 104, 107, 109, 180 ancestry, 74–75 defense of homosexuality, 81–82 education, 76 fantasies of aristocratic heritage, 76–77 isolation from lower classes, 77–78 personal politics, 78–80 sexuality, 81–82 Works; The City and the Pillar, 81; “Homage to Daniel Shays,” 80; Palimpsest, 76; Williwaw, 77 See also Washington, D.C. (Vidal)

188 

INDEX

W Warren, Robert Penn: All the King’s Men, 1 Washington, D.C. (Vidal), 1, 2, 12, 74, 80, 81, 109, 132–134, 154, 164 ambiguous ending, 97–98 cynical tone, 96 on elites controlled by corporate interests, 86–87 on elites controlling media, 89–90 on elites coopting critics, 88–89 on elites’ ignorance of lower classes, 92–94 on elites’ treatment of minorities, 93–94 on elites’ treatment of women and homosexuals, 95–96 historical background for plot, 84 on how lower classes join elites, 90–92 literary context, 82–84 major themes, 85

on politics as personal competition, 85 social context, 83 style, 83 Washington novel, 1, 7–9 definitions and taxonomies of, 8–9 Westbrook, Robert “politics as consumption,” 134–136 Winters, Jeffrey, 61 Working-class consciousness, 19–21, 24–30, 33 desire for agency, 25–27 history of in late-twentieth century, 24–30 proposals to increase agency of, 176–178 Working-class fiction, 11 Z Zweigenhaft, Richard, 53