482
PARTISAN REVIEW
The hard core of the stratum that lives off ideas, of which the
Lucites are the most typical representatives, are the graduates of the
fashionable Eastern colleges whose social origin is in the upper in–
come-bracket groups. This is no coincidence, of course. Those placed
on the policy-making level of the hierarchy favor the employment of
this type because of their knowledge of his reliability both in the
production of desired copy and in the creation of an
esprit de corps
derived from class and status. Family, which
in
America means a
background of several generations of wealth and identification with
approved ethnic groups, is a major criterion of employment. Those
who lack the proper qualifications must assimilate the manners,
dress, and attitudes of the favored group if they desire to rise in
the organization. The fellow-travelers of the haute bourgeoisie often
regard themselves as "liberals," that is to say, they have no objections
to strategic renovations in the existing social structure provided their
position remains secure. In addition to their "liberalism" they have
a superficial acquaintance with what has been traditionally con–
sidered "intellectual" subject matter. They have Proust and Joyce
and Mann prominently placed on their bookshelves and they com–
mand a store of epigrammatic erudition gleaned from disparate cor–
ners of the intellectual world. This lends them that masterful glibness
of sophisticated philistinism in which their copy abounds.
Their way of life follows the pattern of the upper middle class–
in dress, manners, and tone. Mating flexibility makes a succession
of marriage partners an accepted routine, even though the marriages
must be arranged through the proper church channels with florid
social embellishment and due notice in the newspapers. Their rhythm
of life changes with the quick shifts they are called upon to make in
manipulation of ideas which best serve the demands of their em–
ployers. On occasion they will confess their distress at these demands.
They are doubtful of the quality of the work they tum out, yet they
are deprived of an alternative mode of life, being limited by years of
doing the proper thing and by an acquaintance no more than casual
with the internal rigors of the intellectual process. They have been
digesting for short-run purposes of exploitation the work of more
scrupulous and imaginative men much too long. These popular journ–
alists make much of the justification that their labors lift the general
level of culture among the masses. But the truth
is
that for the
masses they have a lofty contempt.
The stratification in the fellow-travelers of the haute bourgeoisie
is more or less identical with that found in the nonintellectual mem-
