Where Do People Get the Idea That They Are Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires?

In Slaughter-house Five Kurt Vonnegut's narrator presents a lengthy passage from a (fictional) monograph about America intended to help German officers in charge of American prisoners of war better understand those with whom they are dealing. In the passage the author of the monograph explains that all peoples "believe many things that are obviously untrue," with the "most destructive" of the untruths that Americans believe "that it is very easy for any American to make money." Thinking this way they do "not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by," with the result that "those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves," a self-blame that "has been a treasure for the rich and powerful" of America which has permitted the American ruling class "to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any" of its counterparts "since, say Napoleonic times."

This passage is so often quoted because it has resonated with a great many readers as containing and lucidly expressing a good deal of truth not ordinarily acknowledged in American life--and I am certainly in agreement with that. Yes, the culture of "economic opportunity" and self-help and Horatio Alger and the rest does promulgate the lie that "it is . . . very easy to make money," and when Americans discover the lie--when, to borrow another phrase relevant to this syndrome, the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" realizes their embarrassment is not at all temporary--many (not all, but probably at least enough to make for a difference) blame themselves bitterly, which has left the poor with less sense of dignity and less able to love themselves than they have been elsewhere, and less of the social solidarity that has contained the potential for social change.

However, there also seems much that Vonnegut overlooks. He tells us of the "untruth," but does not say where it comes from, and reading the passage one can easily get the impression that this delusion just sprang up among its sufferers--the more in as Vonnegut's characterization of this as "a treasure for the rich and powerful" makes it seem as if it were something they just happened upon, discovered as if they had stumbled upon a pirate's chest while walking down a beach.

Indeed, he can seem to be blaming the victims of the delusion for their own troubles.

Upton Sinclair was sounder when he characterized the public as, rather, the victims of the propaganda of the rich and powerful--who built up that treasure rather than stumbling upon it. Indeed, quite mainstream historians--an Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. or Louis Hartz, for example--have pretty well documented this process. This can be summed up as a matter of America's conservative elite in the country's early days ("Hamiltonians," "Federalists," "Whigs"), initially hoping to create a society where the franchise was confined to a property-holding elite failed to get popular acquiescence in this vision; and turned from simply demanding lower-class deference to neutralizing lower-class opposition in subtler ways. Critical to this was the idea that social class was nonexistent or trivial in America--in part on the basis of claims about the interests of rich and poor being one and the same, about the poor lead happier lives than the possession-burdened rich, about class mobility and "economic opportunity" permitting today's working man to be tomorrow's capitalist. All clichés of American discussion of class for nearly two centuries now, they have most definitely derived from, represented, advanced an Agenda so ever-present in contemporary politics, education, culture that many do not even notice that it is there--and fewer in Vonnegut's day than in Sinclair's, when social vision had not yet been driven from the public square by Modernism, postmodernism and cultural Cold War.