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PARTISAN REVIEW
well as racial equality, many of the impoverished could accept the
former and ignore the latter. Now, having achieved a modicum of
prosperity, the political philosophy of the intellectuals, which always
requires government spending, taxes, and inflation, is felt as a threat
-and the racial equality, which could be viewed with indifference in
the city tenement or homogeneous small town, is a formidable reality
in the new suburbs. When the intellectuals were developing the ideol–
ogy justifying cutting in the masses on the bounties of American pro–
ductivity, they were less apt to be called do-gooders and bleeding
hearts-the grown-up version of that unendurable taunt of being a
sissy-than now when the greater part of the masses needing help
are outside the nation's boundaries.
2
Very often, moreover, the individuals making up the discon–
tented classes have come, not to the large civilizing cities, but to the
new or expanding industrial frontiers-to Wichita and Rock Island,
to Jacksonville or the Gulf Coast, to Houston or San Diego, to Ta–
coma or Tonawonda. Even those who become very rich no longer
head automatically for New York and Newport. Whereas the Baptist
Rockefeller, coming from Cleveland, allowed Easterners to help civil–
ize him by giving away his money, as Carnegie and Frick also did,
these new rich lack such centralized opportunities for gratuitous be–
nevolence, being constrained by the income tax and the institutionali–
zation of philanthropy. And their wives (whatever their secret and
suppressed yearnings) no longer seem to want the approval of Eastern
women of culture and fashion; they choose to remain within their
provincial orbits, rather than to become immigrants to an alien cos–
mopolitan center. Indeed, the airplane has made it possible for the
men-and
Vogue
and Neiman-Marcus for the women- to share in
the advantages of New York without the miseries, expenses, and con–
taminations of living there. Howard Hughes, for example, can do
business operating from a plane, yacht, or hotel room.
All this, however, puts some complex processes too simply. New
big money in America has always tended to unsettle its possessors
and the society at large. For one thing, the absence of an aristocracy
means that there is no single, time-approved course of good behavior.
2 The concept of "intolerance of ambiguity," developed by Else Frenkel–
Brunswik and co-workers, is relevant h ere : these newly prosperous ones want
to see the world clearly bounded, in blacks and whites ; they have been brought
up conventionally, to make use of conventional categories, and fluidity of boun–
daries threatens their self-assurance and their very hold on reality.
