The Last Patrician (5 page)

with a world that broke most of them.… They could no longer play the rôle … of a trained and public-spirited caste; the new society did not recognize them. The rate of failure and suicide in some of the college “classes” of the 'eighties shows an appalling demoralization.
5

The patricians retired to the club or the sanitarium, read Walter Pater, and attempted—usually unsuccessfully—to cure themselves of their neurasthenic symptoms.
6
Although they retained all the outward show of aristocracy—the high ideals, the heavy pride, the intense conviction of their own superiority—the substance of aristocracy was gone. The greater number of America's snobbish hereditary organizations (Daughters of the American Revolution, Mayflower Descendants, etc.) were founded during this period, a sure sign, Richard Hofstadter observed, of patrician insecurity.
7
(The first
Social Register
s appeared, in Boston and New York, around 1890.
8
) A man like Henry Adams would doubtless have despised such pathetic attempts to recapture lost grandeur, but in spending his own life lamenting the demise of the eighteenth-century republic his ancestors had ruled, Adams himself, though in a more sophisticated and literary way, did much the same thing. Had the patrician order continued, in the twentieth century, to produce men like Henry James and Henry Adams, had these men continued to embody the highest qualities of the breed, it is doubtful whether Joseph Kennedy would have wanted any part of it. He would never have coveted the Court of St. James's, the most aristocratic of the diplomatic posts, in the shameless way he did.
9
He would never have established a household at Hyannis Port. He would have kept Bobby and his brothers away from the Brahmins, lest the Brahmins corrupt their masculine virtue. Milton and Harvard were worse than useless, if in the end they produced T. S. Eliot.

But Joseph Kennedy
did
covet a place in the aristocratic firmament, for by the time he entered Harvard College in 1908, the character of the aristocracy had greatly changed. The origins of the change can be dated with some precision. The revolt of the blue-bloods against their consignment to an historical oblivion of poetry and country houses began on the day when the young Teddy Roosevelt, bullied “almost beyond endurance” by two boys whom he had neither the strength nor the skill to subdue, decided to take up boxing and learn how to fight back. Roosevelt's struggle to overcome his own tendencies toward dandyism was by no means an easy one; when he first took his seat in the New York State Assembly, the newspapermen, amused by his foppish apparel and shrill aristocratic accent, cried, “Oscar Wilde!” and hailed the arrival of a disciple of Walter Pater in Albany.
10
But Roosevelt persevered, and eventually purged the last remnant of sissiness from his character. It was the first indication of a new spirit at work in the descendants of America's most respectable families. Roosevelt—who was to become one of Bobby Kennedy's greatest heroes—was the embodiment of a patrician generation that could not be content with the passivity of its fathers.
11
Where the previous generation had luxuriated in its pain, its “obscure hurt,” or transformed the pain into art, the new generation turned away from its suffering; it lost itself in action. “Get action, do things; be sane,” Roosevelt once said, “don't fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody: get action.”
12
Roosevelt had injected a dose of testosterone into the feckless aristocracy, and the Four Hundred would never afterward be the same.

Roosevelt's conception of an aristocracy of action and power was one with which Joseph Kennedy could sympathize. But there was irony in Kennedy's adoration of the reinvigorated aristocracy, for Roosevelt and the preppy junta over which he presided despised men of Kennedy's type. Like all classes of people who have been deprived of influence by revolutionary transformations in the organization of society, America's patrician classes resented the economic changes that had, during the course of the nineteenth century, rendered their own position in society a so much more inferior one. Commerce had destroyed their claims to preeminence. The patricians lamented the economic “anarchy” of a free market that elevated such crude, raw-mannered men as Jim Fisk, Daniel Drew, Henry Clay Frick, and Joseph Kennedy himself to prominence.
13
Richard Hofstadter observed that, while in the 1840s “there were not twenty millionaires” in the United States, by 1910 “there were probably more than twenty millionaires sitting in the United States Senate.”
14
Henry Adams, that brilliant snob, looking out of the window of his club at the “turmoil of Fifth Avenue” in the nineties, felt himself at Rome, under Diocletian, a witness to civic anarchy, the triumph of barbarism:

The city [Adams wrote] had the air and movement of hysteria.… Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid. All New York was demanding new men, and all the new forces, condensed into corporations, were demanding a new type of man,—a man with ten times the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type,—for whom they were willing to pay millions at sight.
15

The corporations, of course, were only the apparent villains; the real villains were the “new type of men,” the men who, like Joseph Kennedy, stood at the head of the corporations, or who controlled their capital stock.
16
The politics of both of the Roosevelt cousins, Theodore and Franklin, were in part a reaction against Adams's “new type of man.” Implicit in the political programs of the two Roosevelts was the idea that, if Americans were to continue to make progress, if they were to continue their marvelous ascent from pain and privation to ever loftier heights of prosperity, they would have to put their fate once again into the hands of the
aristoi,
into the hands of Enlightened statesmen who, through a rational application of modern theories of economic planning and control, could mitigate the more pernicious effects of a market economy—and not incidentally frustrate the ambitions of the tycoons and stock speculators (Joseph Kennedy among them) who were trying to take over the country.
17
Drawing on novel theories of economic regulation and European ideas of social reform, America's twentieth-century patrician reformers discovered a new means of enjoying the old feudal pleasures, and they found in the Creed of the Expert a way to effect their salvation as a class. They claimed a mandate for a new and Enlightened approach to the problem of human pain and human suffering, but beneath the trappings of science and economic sophistication lurked the familiar paternalistic ideas of the past.
18
The patricians succeeded in creating a grand seigneurial role, not indeed for themselves, but for the state, which in their theory was to function like a benevolent paterfamilias, helping people who (it was argued) could not help themselves. When he declared that he was going to be “President of all the people,” Edmund Wilson observed, Franklin Roosevelt “meant that, as lord of the nation, he was going to take responsibility for seeing that all the various ranks of people, as far as was in his power, were going to be given what was good for them.”
19

The Idea of a Capitalist Villain

J
OSEPH
K
ENNEDY, THE
Irish Catholic boy who dreamed of one day attaching his family to the aristocracy, was, of course, precisely the kind of interloper the patricians most feared when they denounced the “anarchy” of the free market. Kennedy was precisely the kind of capitalist predator whom the patricians believed effective government regulation would eliminate. Thirty years after his death, this picture of Joseph Kennedy as unprincipled capitalist villain continues to be a seductive one. To us no less than to his patrician contemporaries he appears crude, unscrupulous, untrustworthy. We picture him crossing the Atlantic (with Gloria Swanson in tow) or sitting amid the ticker-tape machines on the veranda of his house in Palm Beach, the very embodiment of a certain type of tycoon, a type that flourished in the twenties and thirties. To us he figures almost as a caricature, the Sinister Capitalist in a Graham Greene novel (cf. Lord Benditch in
The Confidential Agent
), a vulgar philistine who, if he enjoyed classical music, rarely read a serious book.
20
We put him in the same class with Max Beaverbrook and Waugh's Rex Mottram: a transatlantic adventurer, a cad, floating above the world on his own little cushion of capital, beholden to no one, selling short stocks and governments with equal ease, ready to do business with whoever made him the highest bid. Waugh's Charles Ryder says of Rex Mottram:

One quickly learned all that he wished to know about him, that he was a lucky man with money, a member of Parliament, a gambler, a good fellow; that he played golf regularly with the Prince of Wales and was on easy terms with “Max” and “F.E.”
21

For the patrician, however, revenge is always sweet, and in the literature of aristocratic elegy the philistine stockjobber always gets his comeuppance. The “world was an older and better place” than men like Joseph Kennedy and Rex Mottram knew, and it soon enough saw through them. Like Joseph Kennedy's, Rex Mottram's ambition is frustrated by the orthodox patricians:

Things had not gone as smoothly with him as he had planned. I knew nothing of finance, but I heard it said that his dealings were badly looked on by orthodox Conservatives.… There was always too much about him in the papers; he was one with the Press lords and their sad-eyed, smiling hangers-on; in his speeches he said the sort of thing which “made a story” in Fleet Street, and that did him no good with his party chiefs.
22

Waugh's Rex Mottram is a caricature; Joseph Kennedy was not. Like Mottram, Kennedy, too, was a friend of Beaverbrook and Luce and the other “Press lords”; he, too, got his name in the newspapers and used public relations men to “make a story” in the press; he, too, was accused of irregular business dealings and did things that got him into trouble with his party's chiefs. Joseph Kennedy might not have “played golf regularly” with the Prince of Wales, but long before his English embassy he succeeded, through a combination of brash and charm, in meeting the prince at a fashionable Paris restaurant and persuading him to give him letters of introduction to influential London businessmen.
23
And yet the picture of Joseph Kennedy that the patricians have left us is a deceptive one; the relevant evidence has been arranged to show him in the worst possible light. His mistakes are magnified, and his virtues are ignored or, worse, made to seem like vices. Shrewdness and entrepreneurial spirit become synonymous with dishonesty and treachery. Financial success becomes indistinguishable from moral corruption. Did Kennedy urge FDR to make a deal with Hitler? If he did, it was an unforgivable mistake. Did this mistake mean that he was rotten to the core?
24
It depends on the standard against which he is judged. Neville Chamberlain, after all, tried to make a deal with Hitler; but while we—very properly—censure Chamberlain's judgment, we do not question his integrity. Joseph Kennedy, however, is held to a different standard, for he was a Sinister Capitalist, unlike Chamberlain, who was merely descended from Sinister Capitalists. We are unable to resist the patrician interpretation of Joseph Kennedy precisely because we have been so powerfully influenced by it ourselves; we, too, tend instinctively to confound new money and entrepreneurial energy with lack of moral scruple. Even today we are quick to perceive villainy in the capitalist and the entrepreneur: Bill Gates, we are sure, must be violating the antitrust laws; Joseph Kennedy must have been a crook.

The elder Kennedy was shrewder, tougher, quicker than most of his patrician contemporaries; FDR alone, whom Kennedy called “the hardest trader I'd ever run up against,” was a match for him.
25
In the relatively unfettered markets of the twenties Kennedy laid the foundations of a fortune that would in time dwarf the inherited wealth of most of his Harvard classmates. But although he had benefited greatly from the very opportunities the aristocrats sought to foreclose, Kennedy was nonetheless determined to ally, first himself, and later his sons, with a patrician caste eager to avenge the insults of the nouveaux riches by getting its hands on virgin markets as yet innocent of the government's suffocating embrace. Kennedy himself became the first full-time federal regulator of capital markets in the United States.
26
His Securities and Exchange Commission did not, it is true, have the cachet of Jerome Frank's Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Mecca of the new regulatory state, the place to which bright young men like Adlai Stevenson, Telford Taylor, and the most talented of Frankfurter's “hot dogs” went to be confirmed in the New Deal faith, but the SEC could nonetheless boast of talented regulators like William O. Douglas of Yale and James Landis of Harvard.
27
Whatever doubts Kennedy might have had about the aristocratic program of federally sponsored paternalism, he eventually embraced it, and with some fervor. “An organized functioning society,” he wrote in his 1936 book,
I'm for Roosevelt,
“requires a planned economy.” The “more complex the society,” he declared, “the greater the demand for planning.” Certain “things have to be done,” he concluded, “which no one but government can do.”
28

Half a century earlier, when the power of the patricians was at its lowest ebb, a tycoon such as Joseph Kennedy might have eschewed an alliance with the aristocracy, might have balked at the feudal sentimentality of the grand seigneurs, might have insisted on the critical role that unconstrained private initiative must always play in increasing a nation's prosperity. By the thirties, however, the idea of private initiative, the grand idea of Adam Smith and the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment, was thought to be passé; the patrician reformers with whom Joseph Kennedy cast his lot drew instead on French theories of Enlightenment and Fabian notions of an elite class of “capable men.”
29
Only a people who have been guided by wise and prescient leaders could ever hope to see the light, or know the truth. If Kennedy's decision to embrace FDR's theories of grand government was in part an act of prudence—he was afraid that if FDR failed, a purer form of socialism might triumph in America—it also represented a calculated gamble for power.
30
He had made his millions; he could afford to embrace the generous politics of noblesse oblige. “The boys might as well work for the government,” he said of Bobby and his brothers, “because politics will control the business of the country in the future.”
31