THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES
53
Though Rockefeller tried philanthropy, he was still hated, still needed
the services of
Ivy
Lee. Yet he lived at a time when the aristocratic
model, in Europe if not here, provided certain guide-posts. Today, the
enormously wealthy new men of Texas have not even the promise of
an assured well-traveled road, at the end of which stand duchesses,
Newport, and gate-keepers like Ward McAllister-instead, such men
may prefer to buy a television program for McCarthy, or to acquire
the publishing firm of Henry Holt, or, on behalf of an anti-Wall
Street business demagogue, the very railroad which once helped ce–
ment New York "Society."
Moreover, the partial and uneven spread of cosmopolitan values
to the lower strata and to the hinterland has as one consequence the
fact that rich men can no longer simply spend their way to salvation,
for conspicuous underconsumption replaces conspicuous consump–
tion as the visible sign of status; with the result that men who have
made enough money to indulge the gaudy dreams of their under–
privileged youth learn all too fast that they must not be flamboyant.
This is a trick that the older centers of culture have played on the
newer centers of wealth. The latter can try to catch up; Baylor and
Houston Universities, and the Dallas Symphony, have not done too
badly. Or they can enter the still gaudy forum of politics to get back
at those they suspect of ridiculing their efforts. Perhaps there was
something of this in Hearst, as there is in some of the newer magnates
of the media. Senator McCarthy, with his corny charm and his Popu–
list roots, seems made to order for such men; and he has attracted
some of the political plungers among the new "underprivileged" rich
("underprivileged" in comparison with what was allowed the rich
fifty years ago).3
Furthermore, a great many Americans, newly risen from poverty
or the catastrophe of the Depression, are much more fearful of losing
their wealth than are scions of more established families already accus–
tomed to paying taxes, giving to charity, and to the practice of
no-
3 It is at this point that the lack of connection between the small cadre of
truly conservative intellectuals and any sizable anti-liberal audience becomes a
major factor in the present political scene. For patronage politics and for the
untutored businessman, writers like Allen Tate or Russell Kirk have nothing but
contempt; their conservatism (as writers in PR have pointed out) is based
on an irrelevant landed-gentry and professional-class model. With a few excep–
tions, the pseudo-conservatives who have a radical and nihilistic message for the
untutored have to face little intellectual competition, save from occasional socially
conscious clergymen and priests.
