Today the intellectual finds his life and status attacked both from above and below. Whatever may be the other and somewhat problematic results of mass production, it has assuredly made the rich incredibly richer than they ever were before. Ford, who has refused an offer of one billion dollars’ cash for his plant, and who, in his incorporated form, keeps a balance at the bank of four hundred millions, is only a glaring example of what has been going on all around us. The same figures that represented the entire capital values of considerable fortunes twenty years ago represent today but the annual incomes of the fortunate transient war profiteers or permanent mass producers. This colossal[Pg 187] increase in the wealth of the wealthy is tending to place a complete gulf between classes and at the same time to establish unprecedented standards of living. Though it may seem a minor matter, take for example the question of furnishing a home. If the laws of imitation are of great power in society, so is that which makes expressing one’s own personality one of the joys of life. The masters of mass production may preach the benefits of standardization but they themselves are exempt from the process. “A standardized print on your wall is just the thing for you,” say they, while, like Mr. Mellon, they are reported to bid Count Czernin a million dollars for a Vermeer. “Standardized furniture is just the thing for the home,” they preach from magazines while they sweep the market clean, at fabulous prices, of the fine old bits that even the most modest collector might have hoped to pick up with luck twenty years ago, until they have forced even the richest museums to forgo purchase. The intellectuals, because they are intellectual, are among the most insistent of human beings against being standardized. The mass production managers feed them Ford cars, Victrolas, cheap prints and other forms of panes et circenses and tell them they should be satisfied, while they themselves by the power of their wealth, and in their frantic endeavor to escape standardized homes for themselves, bid fantastic prices against one another for old silver, chairs, tables, pictures, and every product of non-machine-made art and artisanship. The average man today, who wishes to make his home, sees everything but standardized articles soaring into the financial heavens above like toy balloons escaped from a child’s hand. It is symptomatic of much else in a new world suffering from colossal and[Pg 188] concentrated wealth. The intellectual finds himself deprived of more and more in comparison with the business man, and shoved downward into the general undistinguished standardized mass.