Snobbery on the Left
I
SNOBBERY is well defined by Thackeray as the attitude of one who licks the boots of those above him and kicks the faces of those below. It arises from ambition tinctured by insecurity, as its evolution from snob, ‘a cobbler’s apprentice, a person of vulgar manners,’ reveals. Although marks of the arrogance of caste, along with social climbing, may be found even among the Greeks and Romans, the rise of snobbery as a word and as the practice of a numerous social group is curiously modern. The Book of Snobs, the novels of Meredith, the plays of Oscar Wilde, the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, the saga of Marcel Proust, and in America the sketches of N. P. Willis and much of Henry James and Edith Wharton, contain a brand of comedy which would have been almost meaningless, for example, to a gentleman of the Renaissance — even though his was the age of magnificent upstarts like the Fuggers, the Medicis, Jacques Cœur, and the Cecils. How then shall one explain the birth of modern snobbery?
So long as the western world was ruled by the aristocrat, especially the gentleman of many broad acres, the widespread economic and social aspiration of a class beneath him was rarely manifest. A man generally kept to the station of his birth and often took pride in being a good butcher, tinker, or baker. Certain individuals, of course, mounted to higher rank — in the Middle Ages by the ladder of the Church, which was itself a deterrent to worldly pride and carried besides no hereditary place, and in the Renaissance by new wealth, shrewdness, learning, or other careers open to personal talent. And at all times war and conquest meant the reshuffling of power and the prestige which stemmed from it. Proving valuable to a king or nation, men of baser birth rose to the surface one by one; but the general barriers of caste were unbroken.
The invasion of a great restless class advancing inch by inch, from which modern snobbery was bred, began in Western Europe and America with the rising bourgeoisie and the Industrial Revolution, which made trade respectable. Heralded by the fresh political power of Puritans, mercantile Whigs, shopkeeping patriots, and citizens with umbrellas instead of swords, the march toward democracy was often led in its more audacious decisions by a handful of radical aristocrats like Hampden, Jefferson, and Mirabeau, whom their peers branded as renegades, but who were faithful in their fashion to the mores of a gentleman as disinterested public servant. But, among the people led, economic and political gains awoke social ambition, while the spirit of equalitarianism quickly ran into new moulds of class consciousness, which in turn hardened into snobbery.
Meanwhile the virtues, real or supposed, of the old noblesse, — generosity, charm, loyalty, bravery, — which had once been the stuff of art and idealism, were changed insensibly into thrift, prudence, self-reliance, enterprise, and stability. In the mirror of knighthood the industrious apprentice now saw his own sober face. To glorify the rising middle class came the inspirational poem, the success novel, the materialistic sermon, and perhaps even the brownstone age of architecture and the Royal Academy portrait of the merchant prince. But, ironically, during every age of social change, while artist and philosopher are busy justifying the new ideal, arrivistes of this class hanker for the dash and splendor of their now-discredited betters. Sometimes they reach the misty mid-region called by newspapers and etiquette books ‘Society.’
Also, paradoxically, modern snobbery has grown side by side with humanitarianism. The same age which discovered the brotherhood of man developed a nervous awareness of caste unknown to earlier days when stratification was never challenged. Those prosperous middleclass Victorians who worked for the abolition of slavery, and such relief of poverty as could be made within the compass of laissez faire, drew finer social fines to compensate for the broad traditional ones they helped erase. Chimney sweeps and mill hands, Negroes, debtors in prison, and criminals of the more personable sort — people with whom one could never be confused — struck the chord of human brotherhood more resoundingly than country cousins with bad manners, grocers’ wives who offered to shake hands, or dentists with whom one might be seated at large mixed parties.
Anthony Trollope’s mother, inspired to visit us by the glowing liberalism of Frances Wright, was horrified at being introduced to a milliner on her first day in America, and counted among the rigors of steamboat travel the necessity which forced her to dine at the same table with her servant. Charles Dickens, whose chief impression of his first American visit was the thousands of ‘ bores ’ he met, reported that an impertinent little boy on a stagecoach near Harrisburg dared accost him, ‘Well, now, stranger, I guess you find this a’most like an English a’ternoon—;hey?’ ‘It is unnecessary to add,’ wrote the irritable creator of Little Nell and Oliver Twist, ‘that I thirsted for his blood.’
Nor was this state of mind peculiar to British middle-class visitors who came to America burning with humanitarian fire and went home to write books about the vulgarity of our manners. At home one thinks of the Boston tradition, with its piquant blend of fraternal idealism, missionary zeal, and tight social smugness. In fact, snobbery may be regarded as a form of self-protection against the social consequences of democracy. In countries where the democratic idea has never struck deep root, as in Central and Southern Europe and the Orient, snobbism has never become the subject of comment and satire which it has long been in England, America, and France.
II
To-day the world drift toward socialism, third and ultimate phase of this cycle, is bringing forth the cult of the common man. Agriculture once made the landed gentleman the pattern of prestige, and then the single artisan at the machine endowed the middle-class industrialist with wealth and influence; now the great factory, with its ramifications of skill, has converted the labor politician and organizer into a new hero of power, although for purposes of idealism it is the workingman himself who is put forward as the true creator of civilization’s goods and benefits. Hence a curious new snobbery is even now arising. That there is no group of traditionally lower economic status, manners, or education upon which to look down docs not rob this attitude of its ingredient of scorn. From the hands of shrewd mythmakers it has already borrowed feelings of superiority about classes or races — such as ‘proletarian’ or ‘Aryan’ — which, like all snobberies, judge individuals not upon personal merit but upon membership in a group whose earmarks are dim and often imaginary.
The ministry of art and idealism is already busy creating a fresh romantic interest in the worker — with his brawny strength, his virile common sense, and his supposed passion for social justice and the liberation of the underdog throughout the world. Novels, plays, poems, sermons, and mural paintings show him clear-eyed and broad-thinking, marching confidently out of the old fogs of capitalism into the dawn. As these lines are written I find on my desk a manifesto from some forty of my colleagues in the state university where I teach who have just formed a labor union in hopes of ultimate affiliation with the CIO. They ‘are aware that no part of the community is more deeply convinced of the necessity for preserving liberty of thought and utterance than the labor group, with skies as dark as they now are,’ and that ‘the courage engendered by the support of Labor makes of the teacher a self-respecting American citizen’ — while President Jerome Davis of the American Federation of Teachers gravely reminds his fellow unionists that ‘teachers stand in danger of considering themselves as just a little bit better than the rank and file of workers.’
Although to everyone save the Union Square orator the labels ‘proletarian’ and ‘bourgeois’ still seem alien and bookish in their American context, yet even in this country a point of view is being created which Bertrand Russell has ironically called ‘the superior virtue of the oppressed.’ The oppression, however, is conceived to be near an end; and whether we listen to the familiar call from Moscow for a world dictatorship of the masses, or its echo in New York’s latest Marxist revue that ‘We’ve got the power — and we mean to use it!’ it is clear that those who regard themselves as the new masters of the world have learned nothing from the old annals of group selfishness. While a growing number of individuals from the upper and middle strata have been trying for several generations with belated and perhaps enforced earnestness to learn how the other half lives, the proletarian radical makes no effort to understand the problems outside his class or the rounded claims of social justice. In view of the real exploitation of the past, one cannot blame him too harshly; but among his intellectual apologists, who can see the wider horizon and the consequences of hate, fomenting the class bitterness is less easily forgiven.
He is taught that contempt, as fierce as it is unquestioning, must be visited upon those outside the pale. While the workers and unemployed are an anointed people soon to inherit the earth, — a legend for whose sake all the racial fantasies of a Chosen People have been melted down, — all others belong to ‘the old parasitic classes,’ ‘bourgeois barbarians,’ or ‘plutocrat vultures with their infected golden beaks,’ or else are assailed with phrases snatched from the ether like ‘economic royalists,’ ‘diehard Tories,’ ‘greedy Bourbons,’ and ‘princes of privilege.’ A late novel by Elmer Rice gives us, we are told by a reviewer in the New Masses, ‘the portrait of a modern plutocrat: powerful, childish, crass, gross, oleaginous, and treacherous — and absolutely disgusting in his ideas and personality,’ while an obituary of George Horace Lorimer concludes with the remark that the success of the most popular American weekly is ‘based on an undistinguished, cheap, mass-production product designed to match the lowest common denominator of taste and pocketbook.’
One is a little shocked to find Marxists sneering at the lowest common denominator of pocketbook, even as one is surprised, incidentally, in the same issue to come upon the advertisement of a vacation camp called ‘Hotel Royale’ which promises ‘proletarian camaraderie.’ More expected is a cartoon of the rich as fat hens, pouter pigeons, macaws, and parrots in a box at the Metropolitan, entitled ‘Unnatural History: the Roost at the Opera.’ Newspapers ranging from the New York Daily Worker to the San Francisco People’s World ring daily changes upon the same theme, and often with remarkable ingenuity: a reporter on the former journal lately told me of a news story about the collision of a Packard with a Ford which the editor sent back with the order to ‘class-angle it.’
As always, disparagement of the old order goes hand in hand with personal envy and, wherever possible, a fair sumptuary imitation. ‘Socialism in America might in rather short order provide every family with the equivalent of a $25,000 annual income,’ write Corliss and Margaret Lamont in Russia Day by Day, showing us that since the modest times of two chickens in every pot the ante of felicity has been raised remarkably. Whenever some realization of these ambitions comes to the dominant few, we see our self-made labor leaders ordering their lives with chauffeurs and butlers and collections of antique furniture, while they post by plane or Pullman drawing-room on missions of social justice.
Doubtless some apology can be made for this pomp, though the impartial observer may find it puzzling that the dignity of Labor should be commensurate with the number of cylinders, namely sixteen, in Mr. John L. Lewis’s limousine. In Mexico City, Diego Rivera attends Communist rallies dressed in khaki shirt and greasy corduroys after parking his new automobile and chauffeur around the corner. The present writer, who speaks of this detail from experience, also recalls entering the shop of an earnest and humble bookseller up from the East Side, a Marxist , early one morning to discover him having his shoes shined by a small ragged bootblack, while he leaned back expansively and lit a cigar; sighting an unexpected customer, he reddened and looked as if he had been caught in a slightly shady transaction.
III
Among various political régimes now in power one finds ardent praise of the common man’s wisdom joined to a rank cynicism in practice — in respect to dictatorship and propaganda, courtship by impossible promises, theatrical distractions from any vital issue, and manipulations of the ballot to secure landslide majorities — which old-line liberals like Tom Paine and Condorcet would have called dishonest.
The most obvious case is that of Soviet Russia, whose fetish is redblooded proletarian origin. As an extreme instance of this cult, the Soviet Government withdrew its invitation to the International Genetics Congress to meet in Moscow in 1937, after deciding that the drift of modern genetic research — with its study of hereditary differences between men — was anti-democratic. Yet, by a perverse but all too human alchemy, professed love for one class is readily converted into hatred of all others. Children of Tsarist clerks or prosperous farmers often pretend to be sprung from manual laborers, or else may find themselves barred from education or fired from jobs on the score of ‘social origins.’ Such snobbery, like that of Aryan stat us in Germany, is of course the fulcrum for countless individual acts of spite and cruelty. On the other hand, sons and daughters of commissars and the new bureaucracy are regarded with awe by their schoolfellows — whenever their parents choose to expose them to democratic institutions rather than to tutors and ‘little schools’ which are available to them in the larger cities.
It is well known that the perquisites of Soviet officialdom range from upholstery in railway carriages to the possession of summer villas, and that under the dubious financial system of Russia social and political prestige have long been the equivalent of money in obtaining the luxuries of life. Revival within the past five years of hand-kissing, military saluting, fashion shows, horse races, dinner coats, and even white tie and tails at official parties on the anniversary of the Revolution, are symbolic of the new class respectability and pomp. An artless snobbery of taste — nourished perhaps by the materialism of Marxist economy — flourishes among the Soviets. An American mining engineer and his wife, just back from seven years in the USSR, report that upon going unheralded to small towns and arriving in a travel-stained state, often with a useful teakettle tied to their sled, they were invariably snubbed by the local bigwig with whom the engineer had to do business — but when they appeared in sport or dinner clothes, or unpacked their best china and silver for a party, the atmosphere warmed immediately.
Visitors to Moscow able to understand Russian have witnessed what is elsewhere known as ‘the bum’s rush’ given by a headwaiter to provincial Stakhanovists on holiday — the heroes of Soviet industry, and well able to pay the bill — who yearned to eat just one meal in a luxury hotel. And although Soviet opera house and theatre have no diamond horseshoe, there is the institution known as ‘the closed night,’ when the canaille are shut out and officials of the Politburo and their bejeweled wives arrive in limousines.
Nor is the breach between theory and practice confined to the Marxists. Although our liberals, in repeating endlessly John Strachey’s phrase, ‘Fascism is the last stand of capitalism,’ have led us to believe that it is the creation of frantic industrialists, and that if we fail to keep an eye upon Mr. Ford and the Du Ponts we shall wake some morning with the fetters of Fascism about our own necks, there is only a minor aspect of the corporative State which supports this analysis. That capitalists in Italy and Germany have fallen sooner or later into step with state syndicalism — with its heavy taxes, compulsory employment, and government determination of quotas, prices, and wages — is explained largely by their appreciation that half a loaf is better than no bread. On the contrary, Fascism would be impotent were it not a mob movement, a national or racial hysteria, which plays into the hands of a leader from the common people and transforms him from demagogue into demigod.
Another phase of Ortega y Gasset’s ‘revolt of the masses,’ Fascism has won its way by enlisting the little man, like the small shopkeeper, clerk, waiter, and farmer, with a somewhat thriftier stake in society than the grandchildren of serfs who make up the Soviet proletariat — but whose smouldering distrust of plutocrats, moneylenders, and alien nations is a field just as fertile for propaganda. An ingrained sense of folk suspicion and insecurity has been adroitly put to use by all the dictators of Europe, so that fear is the essence of much anti-Communism which calls itself Fascism, just as anti-Fascism is to-day the rallying point of Communism. Both systems also tempt the man in the street with bread and circuses: with jobs and public works, the panoply of purges and parades, and the promise of Utopia to come where every man — being a noble Roman, a pure-blooded Nordic, or a true proletarian — will be king.
To be sure, there are obvious differences between Italian and German Fascism in method and oratory — perhaps best explained by likening the Latin temper to a peach, with an outward luxuriance and warmth but a hard core of realism, and the Teuton to a melon, with a deceptively tough rind and an interior lushness of sentiment. Yet the appeal to the common people of both régimes is remarkably alike. These dictators represent, not the divinity that doth hedge a king, but the Divine Average. Throughout Italy and the Reich one meets their photographs, newspaper interviews, and biographies with a tiresome stress upon the homely domestic detail an evident departure from the Cæsars, Napoleons, and Romanovs of the past. Mussolini, son of a blacksmith and editor of Il Popolo d’Italia, strips to the waist in harvest time and glorifies the peasant of the Campagna as the true Italy, sturdy and wise; while he scolds a variety of vices ranging from cosmetics to contraception which are supposed to be favored by the upper-class decadent. In a speech from the Capitol on March 23, 1936, he promised the representatives of Labor and Production: ‘That higher Social Justice which has been from immemorial times the aspiration of the multitudes in their bitter daily struggle with the most elementary necessities of life shall be attained within the Fascist Economic System.'
Hitler, who lived two years with fellow derelicts in a charity hostel, turns away from the blandishments of Hohenzollerns and Junkers to court the German lower middle class and manual workers, with rich intuition of their prejudices, fears, hopes, and emotional moodiness. And he has devised the Arbeitsdienst in order, he declares, that every German, ‘whether he be rich and of high estate, or poor, whether the son of a professor or of a factory worker, shall once in his life do manual labor.’ Folk jealousy of economic privilege is thus fostered, along with hostile suspicion of all mental superiorities which are not slavishly dedicated to the Party: Goebbels and Kaganovich never tire of contrasting the contemptible grumbling intellectual or artist with the splendidly regimented worker, peasant, or soldier.
IV
Throughout the modern world the plain man — if he can read or buy a radio — will receive almost daily homage to his wisdom, heroism, and importance. To set the wise and honest poor against the vulgar predatory rich has become the fashion of our times. Once a casual piece of flattery upon the politician’s tongue, it has now become an article of faith to which all progressives, liberals, and friends of the Administration are bound to subscribe. ‘The poorest are no longer necessarily the most ignorant part of society,’declares President Roosevelt in terms which are readily turned into the vulgate as ‘ the poorest are the wisest.’ We infer that the stupidity of industrialists and the greed of America’s Sixty Families would have driven us upon the rocks long ago had it not been for tolerant wisdom from the White House and the long-suffering of the forgotten man. In the philosophy of the New Deal reformers— the ‘tenderer than thou’ school, as Robert Frost has called them — it is apparent that wealth necessarily stultifies and brutalizes its owner, while the little man or the unemployed has come to resemble the ‘reasonable man’ of legal theory, who can do no wrong because he is common sense and fairness incarnate.
Although nobody doubts that brains and a noble passion for humanity may appear in men sprung from low economic levels, and though few will deny that monopoly of opportunity must be discouraged from age to age by fair and temperate means, yet to insist upon the Messianic character of the common man qua common man, or the infallibility of the discontented, is to build a snobbery which is even more mischievous than the contumely of a Hamilton or Jay. Invidious class systems can be based upon labor-union membership or upon the ‘have-not’ principle just as surely as upon wealth or social prestige.
Yet the result of this appeal is currently successful in regard to votes, enthusiasm, and popular faith. Among many humble testimonials here in the West, for example, on boxcars in the freight yards one sees scrawled in chalk ‘Roosevelt is my Friend.’ It is a final fillip of irony that, while Mr. Roosevelt avows his faith in the humble man’s innate wisdom and calls boldly for the expression of his collective will, the President is thrusting the government into waters of managed economy so deep that vital issues now call for expert rather than popular decision.
One is tempted, then, to doubt that the court now paid everywhere to the common man, as potential voter and soldier, is deeply sincere. To put more and more power into the hands of a hero or superman, whose cult has fed upon the decay of democratic self-sufficience, is the practice of his suitors. Beneath their oratory one senses a real distrust of the average man’s ability to think rationally. They have actually lost faith in the perfectibility of Demos through education which was the sheet anchor of elder liberals like Jefferson, Helvetius, and James Mill, and cynically would replace education by propaganda. One of the latest favorites of the New Deal, Assistant Attorney General Arnold, has written a widely read book to explain how ‘from a humanitarian point of view the best government is that of an insane asylum . . . whose aim is to make the inmates as comfortable as possible,’ and to show how the modern State cannot survive unless it forges a mythology to its purpose. To the thoughtful man, such aspects of statesmanship in the year 1938 as the dramatizing of complex economic problems into a simple and exciting class war, and the notion that sufficient unto the day is the strategy thereof, are of graver concern than a mere passing phase of national extravagance in spending.
During the present election year one hears in every state the provincial parodies and echoes, as it were, of the now classic promises to the forgotten man. That social justice is the brightest star in the skies of human idealism few will deny — hut when the great bandwagon is hitched to it we may be forgiven our longing for some less reckless conveyance.
The snobbery of a higher for a lower class is no pretty thing, for its essence is contempt ; that of a lower for a higher class is dangerous, since it is readily convertible into hatred.