The Founding Fortune: a New Anatomy of the Super-Rich Families in America.

• Author: Lessard, Suzannah

The difference between Lapham's book and The Founding Fortunes by Michael Patrick Allen(*) is amusing. The gent and the outsider, they would make a good comedy team. The gent is in a stylish froth, the outsider is imperturbably dull. Allen is a professor of sociology at Washington State University (Lapham, of course, is the editor of Harper's magazine) and his book, studiedly neutral in tone, structured, full of even, word-processed research out of the library, rather than life, is so cleansed of detail, color, and human interest that one begins to feel that one has left life altogether for some kind of sociologist's hereafter. Unlike Lapham, who believes that we are really all just like the rich, and who talks to us as if we know what nilgai is, Allen's tone suggests that until recently he had never heard of rich people and is sure that we haven't either. "The homes of the corporate rich are generally much larger and more expensive than ordinary homes," he writes. "Indeed, many of these homes are so large they can only be called mansions." This pseudo-naivete, or whatever it is, gives the book the air of exposing some hither-to unsuspected evil, namely that the rich have a lot of money, that they manage to keep it by hiring good tax lawyers, that they have more power than other Americans because they contribute to campaigns, own newspapers, and set up philanthropic organizations to retain power over money that would otherwise go to the government. I don't know about you, but I knew this.

All in the family

Unlike Lapham, who is a whirling dervish of opinion, Allen is so coy that he never states in his own words that he personally feels that it's bad for the rich to be rich and powerful. In the beginning of the book he writes, "As G. William Domhoff puts it, `legally the government is all of us, but members of the upper class have the predominant, all-pervasive influence.'" At the end of the book, he writes:

In the final analysis, the issue is not

whether the corporate rich in America have

lost any important battles, but whether they

have lost the war. For the members of these

families, the most important war is the war

for wealth. Although the corporate rich

have lost some significant political battles,

such as the imposition of progressive transfer

taxes, they have certainly not lost the

war for wealth.

By reading between the lines, I think that we can deduce that Allen feels that this state of affairs is bad. Occasionally disapproval seeps through his man-from-Mars impartiality, as when he writes, "The practice of naming male scions for their illustrious forebears represents a form of ancestor worship for wealthy families." One could even say that spleen appears in a ghostly form when he says that these famous names give the rich an advantage when they enter politics and that they achieve success only after adopting...