OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
583
on the road toward reducing poverty to a very marginal phase of
our life than any other social system in history. Or consider the
classic question of monopoly capitalism. The monopolies have grown
in scope and power, and have crowded out many small concerns.
Yet they have not been able to crush the unions nor overshadow the
government: the unions are thriving, the government has shaped
~.
welfare-state, and those who own the country are not running it.
Toynbee has said that the two rocks on which a civilization is
likely to founder are Class and War. What will happen about war is
still
in
the balance, and surely as much of it depends on the nature
of Communist civilization as on our own. But we can see clearly
enough the shape of our class system. The image of an American
"classless society" which crops up in the more lyric business pro–
nouncements such as William H. Whyte, Jr. has so delightfully
gathered, is largely NAM ammunition. What we have roughly is an
open-class system, with a high degree of mobility still left in it despite
its recent rigidities on top and bottom, and (as Riesman documents
it in
Faces in the Crowd)
with vast stores of new experience opened
for all classes, especially the middle. We have a "democratic class
struggle" still operative, in which the working class and its allies use
every economic and political means to better their own position and
the nation's welfare. Finally-and worst of all-how about our
Negro population, whose treatment is the ugliest scar we bear? Or
better, it is a Nessus-shirt that clothes the sick spirit of caste, too in–
tolerable for the American to keep on, yet it cannot be torn off
without ripping off also a lot of painful, festering tissue of American
life. Yet we are engaged in ripping it off. The Negro is entering into
the full stream of our effort, helped by the great assimilative energies
of an impersonal economy, a legal system which is ceaselessly being
used on his side, and the conscience of decent men. Civil Rights is
still a great problem. But to understand why it is one must go back
to the matchless passage in Tocqueville's
Democracy in America.
"This never dying, ever kindling hatred," Tocqueville called it,
"which sets a democratic people against the smallest privilege."
Every step made in the fight against small and big privilege must be
followed ceaselessly by another. This is the Great Hunger of American
society, which "grows by what it feeds on."
Obviously
in
reacting against the sneers there is a danger of
