Book Review

The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats; A Study in Ruling-class Cohesiveness, by G. William Domhoff. Harper and Row, 1973, $23.

What is a “ruling class”? It is worth recalling that well into the 18th century, even the most penurious laird in Scotland enjoyed the regalities of “infangthief and outfangthief, pit and gallows”—in other words, the power of life and death over all those on his land. Compared to these rights of High and Low Justice, the political bigwigs, corporate CEOs, and scions of old, monied families identified by G. William Domhoff as the modern ruling class must be content with the relatively benign High and Low Jinks of the Bohemian Grove. Domhoff also describes two other less well-known clubs that put on similar festivities.

Is it surprising to anyone that rich people move largely in social circles made up of rich people? Is it surprising that they sometimes mix business with pleasure, or that they discuss common concerns? Prof. Domhoff is surprised, for he presents this information with an air of revelation, leading to the breathless and climactic conclusion that there is a “national ruling class” in the United States.

Of course there is a national élite. Every society in human history has had one. Even the Soviet Union, founded on the egalitarian premises of Marxism, couldn’t help developing an élite known as the nomenklatura. Furthermore, as Vilfredo Pareto reminds us, history is the graveyard of aristocracies. Élites shift and change. If resilient, tough, and adaptable enough, they absorb rising talent; if not, they are soon at one with Nineveh and Tyre. They also possess varying levels of power, authority, and influence. In the “workers’ paradise” established by Lenin, a telephone call from someone in a high place was sufficient to assure that an offensive person was immured in the Gulag or got a bullet in the nape of the neck. Prof. Domhoff, by contrast, says unkind things about corporate executives and Republican politicians, but this conduct has not interfered with his ability to hold forth as an author and teacher, however distressing he may be to those grey eminences. This says more about the nature of the American élite than do any of his books.

Prof. Domhoff has shown himself, in his other works (such as Who Rules America? and The Higher Circles) to be obsessed with the status indicators of the nineteenth-century WASP plutocracy, such as private prep schools, the Social Register, and men’s city clubs (like the Bohemian Club of San Francisco, of which the Bohemian Grove is a part). Like his others, this book (published in 1973) shows little recognition that the political and economic preëminence of the old haute bourgeoisie had been faltering for years. Indeed, James Burnham noted this as early as 1941 in The Managerial Revolution. While the rising managerial élite at first aped the manners and interests of the older upper class, its courtly and genteel institution-like clubs and cotillions were already falling on hard times by the early ’70s. If the Bohemian Club has survived, dozens of others have folded due to lack of time and interest on the part of the new élite. Nixon, in his day, may have favored retreats at the Bohemian Grove, where informal discussions of economics and public policy were mingled over the course of a fortnight with amateur play-acting. Clinton, by contrast, attended Renaissance Weekends, there to hear the earnest vaporings of his fellow policy wonks, sans home-brew theatrics, and on a much tighter schedule. Is the great revelation, at this late juncture, that Tricky Dick had a greater sense of fun and more appreciation of leisure than has Slick Willy?

The best parts of this book are the descriptions of the Club’s rather silly and harmless revels. These should be read with the same spirit as one might enjoy the eminently more humorous and sympathetic chronicles of such subjects by the late Lucius Beebe (e.g., The Big Spenders and Snoot if You Must). If anything positive can be said about Domhoff’s relentless left-wing antipathy to the people he describes, it is that he is at least less hysterical than the conspiracy theorists of the religious right, who invariably view as satanic any sort of ceremonial mummery other than the snake-handling and speaking in tongues of their own low-protestant conventicles. Better sociological understanding of élites may be found in Pareto’s The Rise and Fall of Élites and Gaetano Mosca’s The Ruling Class. The old WASP élite receives a more balanced view in the works of E. Digby Baltzell, as do its latter-day descendants in the films of Whit Stillman. For a picture of today’s “bohemian” upper crust, see David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise.

—Michael S. Swisher