32 MONOPOLY CAPITAL
ing companies, doctoring them up, and selling them at a big
profit. For this purpose he has a string of high-powered
retainers lawyers, management consultants, spies, etc. He has
no interest in holding onto or developing any of the properties
which come into his control, and for this reason he is con-
trasted throughout the book with the ''company man'' (the
term is Hawley's) whose first loyalty is to the company he
works for and who is represented as becoming increasingly the
normal American businessman. Here is the gist of Frank
Abrams's opinion of Cash McCall (the insertions and omissions
are Business Week's) :
The individualist seems [in Hawley's book] to be the man of
ideas who performs miracles in reorganization, and the company
man the plodder who makes little or no contribution to the larger
scheme of things. My experience is quite to the contrary. The com-
pany man, I have found, is the man who likes to serve a good cause
to the best of his ability, and is content to prosper with [his com-
pany]. The individualist is quite apt to be a self-seeker ... he will
switch alleg~ance from company to company, and seems mainly
concerned with personal power and the trappings of wealth.
My business experience has been ... relatively free of the tax
manipulations and promotional shenanigans that seem the chief
~oncern of the principal characters of this book. Perhaps I have been
insulated from some of the facts of smaller business life, and if so I
can now, in retirement, appreciate how fortunate I have been.
This is the voice of the genuine aristocrat, one who is firmly
· established in his station in life, secure and confident. He is
proud to identify himself with his company, to share in its
prosperity. He has little use for individualists: they are unreli-
able and their insecurities lead them into the vulgarities of
power-grabbing and conspicuous display. Above all, he is con-
scious · of living in the world of Big Business, the rulers of
~hich, l~~e the feudal nobility of old, have learned to live gra-
ciously, insulated from the facts of smaller business life."
This last phrase speaks volumes about present-day American
society. Cash McCall is no petty shopkeeper. He owns one of
the largest hotels in Philadelphia and occupies a whole floor of
THE GIANT CORPORATION 33
it; he flies his own private plane and maintains a great country
estate; he spends millions of dollars on the impulse of the
moment. By Hollywood standards, in fact, Cash McCall is the
very model of a Big Businessman. And yet to Frank Abrams:-
who may or may not have as much money as Cash McCall is
supposed to have all this is merely vulgar display and cheap
shenanigans. To the aristocracy of company men, Big Business
is Standard Oil and a few score similai· corporate giants which
collectively control the nation's economic destiny all the rest
is unceremoniously relegated to the limbo of ''smaller busi-
ness." ''In the United States today," writes one of the aristo-
crats, a Vice President of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company,
''135 corporations own 4S-percent of the industrial assets.
These are the companies to watch. Here lies managerial
power." 14 Clearly, the exercise of power is matched by the
consciousness of power. 15
5
Big corporations, then, are run by company men. What kind
of people are they? What do they want and why? What posi-
tion do they hold in the class structure of American society?
14
Leland Hazard, "What Economists Don't Know About Wages,"
Harvard Business Review, January-February 1957, p. 56.
15
No attempt can be made here to explore the ramifications and
implications of the transformation of the Big Businessman from tycoon
to company man. Nevertheless, we cannot leave the subject without
noting that it has made its mark on serious literature (Cash McCall is to
be rated rather as a tract for the times in novel form). ''In the fifty-four
years since Frank Norris created the prototype of the modern capitalist in
The Pit," writes David Dempsey, "the approach of American novelists
toward the world of business has undergone a complete revision. Norris,
and subsequently Dreiser, saw the rise of the corporation as a one-mar1
affair· their focus was on the individual who dominated business for his
own 'ends, but whose actions affected society at large. Norris' wheat
speculator Curtis Jadwin, like Dreiser's nineteenth-century capitalist,
Frank Cowperwood, is molded in the classic tradition of the hero who
builds an empire at the cost of his own integrity. Since few American
corporations at present are dominated by a single individual, the novelist
has been compelled to reorient-actually, to invert-his point of view.
Today, it is the corporation itself ... that has become the villain; it is the