Who Rules America?

Who Rules America? Power and Politics, G. William Domhoff, Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002.

The author runs an excellent website from UCSC, which, along with Val Burris’s site at the U of Oregon, offer a good introduction to power structure analysis. I ran into them as a result of reading Zeitlin’s books on the elites in Chile, for my thesis.

Domhoff begins with the obvious question: “Why does the richest nation in the world also have the most poverty compared to any other democratic country?” The way he frames it is interesting; other democracies do a better job than we do, distributing the benefits. Domhoff’s answer to his question is basically that everything revolves around labor markets. The freer workers are to organize, the evener the distribution of wealth. Politics becomes corrupted by power relationships, Domhoff says. Unions are the only defense.

I was reading primarily for the history, of course (I’m really curious about whether this theory has been used by historians to any great degree?). Some interesting things jumped out at me:

Domhoff says the need to win the Revolutionary War pushed the classes together. Afterward, these normally antagonistic groups were held together for a while by ideological needs (“we’re different from Europe”) and especially by the twin challenges of Black Slavery in the South and Native Americans in the West. (2)

“By 1845,” he says, “a group of 80 men known...as the Boston Associates controlled 31 textile companies that accounted for 20% of the national textile industry. 17 of these men served as directors of Boston banks that owned 40% of the city’s banking capital, 20 were directors of 6 insurance companies, and 11 sat on the boards of 5 railroad companies.” (16, refers to Robert Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, 1987)

This is a rich vein that I suspect I’ll be coming back to again and again.

Link to post on www.danallosso.com: http://www.danallosso.com/Reading/Entries/2008/9/30_Who_Rules_America.html

I grabbed all the books about Thomas Paine available in the libraries of the nearest State College and University, as well as some really old ones that are available on Google Books. I took a look at them in preparation for a historiographical essay on Paine, for my Biography seminar. A brief synopsis of each is posted on my other blog (click), for those interested in what's been written about Paine.