Lewis Lapham's Money and Class in America

Lewis Henry Lapham is an American writer. He was the editor of the American monthly Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and from 1983 until 2006. He is the founder of Lapham's Quarterly, a quarterly publication about history and literature, and has written numerous books on politics and current affairs. --Wikipedia

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For years I was a subscriber to Harper's Magazine during the second period Lewis Lapham served as editor of the publication. Many, if not most, magazines have an opening letter from the editor, and Lapham's lengthy editorial was always something I looked forward to reading. George Plimpton called him a cross between Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken. Even when not in alignment, his prose was pointed and insights worth chewing on, even when sad and cynical. 

For this reason I went on to acquire his book Money and Class in America. Its subtitle: Notes and Observations on the Civil Religion. 

While reading yet another story about California, wealth and poverty recently, Lapham's California pedigree came to mind. I pulled it off the shelf in search of a couple comments he made about his family. Now I'm re-reading it and appreciating it even more than the first time I'd held it in my hands.

The factoid I was looking for I haven't found yet, but it went something like this: his family once owned about one-fourth of the real estate of California. What I did find was that his great-grandfather was a co-founder of Texaco and his grandfather was once mayor of San Francisco. Lapham came from money -- as in Big Money -- and understand the paradoxes associated with wealth.

Here's an overview of the book's contents. 

Money and Class in America

Creative Commons license. Author uncited.

Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich; never in the history of the world have so many of those same people felt themselves so poor.

Chapter One: The Gilded Cage
Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream.

Chapter Two: Protocols of Wealth
The history of the United States is synonymous with the dream of riches.

Chapter Three: The Golden Horde
At this late stage in the history of American capitalism I'm not sure I know how much testimony still needs to be presented to establish the relation between profit and theft.

Chapter Four: The Romance of Crime
The pose of innocence is as mandatory as the ability to eat banquet food and endure the scourging of the press.

Chapter Five: Social Hygiene
Once having proclaimed our loyalty to the abstract idea that all men are created equal, we do everything in our power to prove ourselves unequal. Among the world's peoples, none other belongs to so many clubs, associations, committees and secret societies.

Chapter Six: The Precarious Eden
The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.

Chapter Seven: Descent into the Mirror
Since the eighteenth century the immense expansion of the world's wealth has come about as a result of a correspondingly immense expansion of credit, which in turn has demanded increasingly stupendous suspensions of disbelief.

Chapter Eight: Holy Dread
Wars might come and go, but the seven o'clock news lives forever.

Chapter Nine: Coined Souls
That the obsession with money dulls the capacity for feeling and thought I think can be an axiom requiring no further argument.

Chapter Ten: Envoi
Surely they knew that the very idea of the future came in an American box - complete with instructions for assembling a Constitution, a MacDonald's hamburger franchise, a row of Marriot hotels and a First Amendment.

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The book is a pretty scathing indictment of American values. Today there are more riches than ever being showered on sports stars, Hollywood celebrities, Silicon Valley whiz kids and Wall Street bankers. Lapham asks, "What's the point of all this wealth without Character?" Hence we see the self-destruction emblazoned across headlines, Tweets and supermarket tabloids. 

"If we could let go of our faith in money, who knows what we might put in its place?"