Dear Mr. Alger:
I confess that at first I was strongly tempted to ignore your curious letter requesting guidelines on the art of being very, very rich. I simply did not believe your statement that you had suddenly acquired a yearly income of $5,000,000. Why hadn't I ever heard of you?
Not that I know many of the 100,000 Americans who are now worth more than $1,000,000. But your income suggested a fortune of at least $100 million, which clearly ranked you in what I thought was our own small crowd. So I should have recognized your name. For all I knew, you were really some journalist "researching" one of those dreadful exposes' of the superrich, such as that new book by Ferdinand Lundberg, which my wife says is so old hat that she may demand her $10 back. On principle, of course.
But then I spotted your name in FORTUNE, which listed you among the roughly 150 Americans who now have at least $100 million the crowd isn't so small, after all. How few of them I know! Many of these super-rich seem to be technological arrivistes. Your own fascinating rise from obscurity (forgive me) typifies the phenomenon. Even though you graduated from Caltech with honors (in 1953!), who ever expected that your invention of some electronic what's-it-scope would lead to your having your own company and then to your being bought out by IBM.
I can see why you seek advice. Without background, it must be terrifying to become a centimillionaire at 37. But let me allay your anxieties at once. Being very rich is mostly what raucous people call a gas. C. Wright Mills, one of the egghead sociologists, was near the mark when he said: "If the rich are not happy, it is because none of us is happy." Sophie Tucker got it right the first time. "I've been rich and I've been poor," she said. "Rich is better."
Sinful Enjoyment
There is a legend in America that because everybody has a car and a television set, and a lot of people own houses and can afford vacations, the rich don't live so very differently from the middle class. Don't you believe it. Still, being very, very rich is not quite as much fun as it used to be. We've gradually lost the old exuberance of my parents' day. No more marble palaces or French chateaux imported stone by stone; no more parties reminiscent of the triumphal march in Aida. Instead of encouraging the peasantry to goggle enviously through our iron fences or line the roadside as we take the air be- hind a four-in-hand of matched greys, we ride around invisibly in Buicks and keep our houses as well screened from the road as possible.
We American rich have always felt a little guilty. As David Brinkley puts it, there is "an attitude widely held in this country (but almost nowhere else) that it may not always be sinful to have a lot of money, but it is vaguely sinful to enjoy it and unforgivably sinful to do so in public." Of course, this feeling is less a matter of morality than envy. In this wonderfully egalitarian country, the have-nots naturally demand: "Why not me?" And in politics, the voters have come to accept rich candidates, if not actually to prefer them.