Visualizing The American Power Elite At Play:

How An Exclusive Club Helps Provide Groundwork For Policy Cohesion



G. William Domhoff
Research Professor in Sociology
University of California, Santa Cruz

Rhonda F. Levine
Professor of Sociology
Colgate University

Alejandro Tomas
Senior Faculty, Commercial Photography Program
Seattle Central Community College




ABSTRACT

This presentation you have just seen provides the first visual demonstration of how social cohesion develops within the American corporate elite in exclusive social clubs through the kinds of rituals and ceremonies familiar to sociologists through the work of Emile Durkheim. Focusing on a horse-riding retreat sponsored by the Rancheros Visitadores, the presentation graphically reveals how the Catholic Church and the U.S. Marines legitimate a week of class and male bonding that includes symbolic derision of women, the celebration of dominance over African Americans and Native Americans, and the ritual hazing of newcomers, . In this brief paper, the activities of the Rancheros are interpreted within a theoretical framework which emphasizes that social cohesion is important in facilitating the policy cohesion necessary for class dominance.

INTRODUCTION

As the photographic essay graphically shows through its chronological unfolding, the story of the annual retreat called the Rancheros Visitadores is a classic example of everything one of the founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim, had in mind when he described the sacred rites of the small indigenous societies first studied by anthropologists. In this theoretical gloss on the photographs, we show how Durkheim’s insights, along with group-dynamics research, can be used to help explain class dominance in American society. It is in retreats and inner sanctums such as the Rancheros that class values are reaffirmed and the imminent moral of the class is reinforced, In addition, bonds of trust are developed that help make it possible to create the policy cohesion which is necessary to dominate rival groups and classes.

Before turning to our analysis of the antics and activities of the Rancheros, it is important to note that this one-week retreat is just one “node” or instance, albeit a relatively unique and revealing one, in a very complex network of elite private schools, fraternities, sororities, social clubs, and policy-planning groups that are marked by their high status, exclusiveness, and desire to keep most of their activities to themselves. Whether it is prep school alumni gatherings, meetings of fraternities or secret societies, or off-the-record discussions at policy-planning groups like the Council on Foreign Relations, a feeling of elite superiority, efforts at exclusion, and a desire to keep discussions private are part of the overall picture.

The place of the Rancheros in this complex network has been documented in two different studies, one using matrix algebra to determine the centrality of 31 different clubs and policy groups, the second using Boolean algebra to look for potential clusters within an expanded version of the matrix from the first study that now includes 36 clubs and policy groups. The first study showed that the Rancheros ranked 21st in centrality among the 31 organizations in the matrix, well below prominent policy groups like the Business Council, the Committee for Economic Development, and the Council on Foreign Relations, and large-city clubs like the Links Club of New York, the Pacific Union Club of San Francisco, the Chicago Club of Chicago, and the California Club of Los Angeles (Domhoff, 1975). It was also below the Bohemian Club of San Francisco, widely known for its summer retreat, called the Bohemian Grove, an encampment in the redwoods of Northern California that goes back to the 1880s, and that served as the model for the Rancheros when they started their treks in 1930(Domhoff, 1974).

The Boolean algebra study, which established that there were three regional clusters and four “bridge” clusters, the largest of which included the Business Council, the Committee for Economic Development, the Conference Board, and the Links Club, placed the Rancheros, appropriately enough, in a Western-and-farm-oriented regional cluster that included the Bohemian Club, the California Club, the Chicago Club, and the Detroit Club, as well as the National Farm City Council, the Foundation for American Agriculture, and the Farm Foundation (Bonacich & Domhoff, 1981).

It probably could go without saying that this club-policy network is embedded in the highly interlocked corporate community that includes the largest several hundred banks and corporations. In case there are any doubts on this score, it can be noted that 673 of the largest 797 corporations in 1969 had at least one connection to the 15 most central organizations in the first study, with the largest corporations of that era, such as General Motors, Sears, and Chase Manhattan Bank, having anywhere from 28 to 47 connections to the overall club-policy network (Domhoff, 1975, p. 179). In the second study, it was shown that the people with the most club and policy-group memberships tended to be from the largest corporations and hold the largest number of corporate directorships (Bonacich & Domhoff, 1981, p. 188).

As for the Rancheros in particular, just over half the members in the 1970s were businessmen, and many were with companies large enough to be listed in Poor’s Register of Corporations, Executives, and Directors, including International Harvester, Seagram & Sons, Rexall Drugs, and Pauley Petroleum. About a quarter of the members were ranchers, and agri-business owners, which means that the Rancheros bring together businessmen and landowners, along with a miscellany of lawyers, physicians, engineers, architects, artists, and entertainers. There were also several California political leaders in the Rancheros at the time, the most famous of which was former California governor and future president Ronald Reagan (Domhoff, 1974, pp. 71-74).

Now that it is clear that the Rancheros are part of a network of clubs and policy groups that has significant overlaps with the corporate community, it is possible to explain what goes on at the Rancheros using insights first provided by Durkheim.

RITUALS OF MORAL AND SOCIAL COHESION

The basic underlying idea of any retreat is a distinct separation from the mundane workaday world for the purpose of group or individual renewal, and in the case of the Rancheros Visitadores, both purposes are served. As Durkheim first stated, group rituals serve to reaffirm the “conscience collective,” that is, the shared values that tie together small-scale societies. This ritual separation from the “profane” world brings people into the realm of the “sacred,” which for our purposes means a special time and space that reaffirms a whole range of beliefs that these men hold—and want others to hold—about themselves and the nature of the American social system. Put another way, the Rancheros retreat reinforces the imminent morale or espirit de corps of the corporate leaders and the landed elite.

First and foremost, this reaffirmation concerns the natural and enduring qualities of the American power structure, and most especially the rightness and timelessness of American capitalism. As we now suggest, the basic tenets of a capitalist-dominated power structure are the “conscience collective” at the center of all Ranchero events. This dimension is seen first of all in the conspicuous consumption that is engaged in by the riders in their down-home kind of way, including expensive horses, the finest boots money can buy, and gaudy cowboy costumes. The food and alcohol consumed during the ride is the best that can be gotten anywhere. Artists and entertainers are brought along as guests. Nothing is spared by way of luxury even though these men are supposedly out in the wilderness roughing it.

The reenactment of the power structure is next demonstrated by the deference that is afforded to the riders through the blessings of the ride by the Franciscan priests at the nearby Santa Inez Mission, itself a throwback to the days of Spanish California that the ride is pretending to imitate, and in the fact that there is a Marine Guard present to see them off. These events not only link the Rancheros with the religious and military power structures, but they quietly state the power of the Rancheros in that they can in effect command the attention of representatives of these two realms.

But it is not just representatives from religious and military organizations who are present to wish the Rancheros well as they begin their ride. The event is also a spectacle because tourists, local shopkeepers, and the mostly Latino workers and attendants who make the ride possible are present for the send-off. Also mingling in the crowd are some of the prostitutes who will be servicing the Rancheros throughout the week. So, with the peasants and prostitutes—that is, those who service the elites—dutifully present to observe the opening ceremonies, it is clear that these ceremonies are a ritual enactment of the class position of the Rancheros, a reaffirmation of the power structure. Specifically, the presence of workers and prostitutes reaffirms that labor and sexuality can be purchased by those who have huge incomes (by 2004, the top 1% of the population was receiving 16.2% of American income, the highest the figure has been since the late 1920s (Bernasen, 2006)).

Although the retreat first and foremost celebrates and reinforces the class solidarity necessary to dominate other social classes, another set of rituals and ceremonies unfold as the men ride off into the rolling hills of the Santa Inez Mountains. These further rituals are meant to reaffirm another timeless aspect of the moral universe these men want to sustain: male dominance. The very exclusion of women from the ride in and of itself makes this point, but it is underlined by the sexual horseplay, the pornographic pictures, the verbal put-downs of women, and the cross-dressing in silly and grotesque costumes, complete with too much lipstick, large falsies, and outsized wigs, and sometimes followed by a return to town to purchase sexual pleasures.

From the day of the earliest men’s huts and secret societies, the point of these kinds of displays has been to reassure the insecure male psyche that it is right and just that men should rule women, even to the extreme that women would be gang raped in some societies if they heard the sacred flutes or ventured into the men’s hut (e.g., Gregor, 1985). Based on the kind of things that go on in modern-day men’s clubs and fraternities, it is not an exaggeration to say that they are direct descendants of the “primitive” men’s clubs, as Gregor (1982) showed in a comparison of their practices with events at the Bohemian Grove. It is also seen in Sanday’s (1990) study of a fraternity gang rape at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1980s, which was met with attempts at cover-up by the university administration and a brotherhood of silence on the part of every male who knew anything about what had happened.

The rituals of sexual exclusion and female degradation practiced by the Rancheros also link back to the larger issue of male bonding. It is not just that they are excluding women, but that they are learning to trust each other by sharing in raunchy activities that would be frowned upon if they were carried out in public spaces or in front of ordinary people—and, of course, they would be especially proscribed by women. They are learning to keep secrets from outsiders, which is also a good part of what is going on when fraternities force their new initiates to learn a lot of silly and worthless information.

However, the retreat does not just reaffirm the desire to dominate women. There are also numerous commemorations of the triumphs of whites over Native Americans, such as a wooden statue of an Indian maiden wrapped in chains inside the Rancheros clubhouse and a cigar store Indian in one of the camps. And the black-face comedy skits are carried out as if nothing had changed in the United States in the past 45 years, and the only African Americans who have been seen at the retreat, at least in recent years, are a father and son who delivered hay for the horses. These and other aspects of the retreat demonstrate that it attempts to reinforce racial as well as gender hierarchies.

There is a final reaffirmation that is central to the Rancheros retreat: they are not aging alpha males coming face to face with their own mortality, but the same youthful and vigorous guys who carried out pranks and joined fraternities when they were in college. It is the good old days all over again. In their heart of hearts, they still feel like they are somewhere between 18 and 23, at least after a drink or two, so they enjoy being part of this make-believe world for a few days. Just as the collectivity called the Rancheros has been reconstituted by the events of the week, so too the men feel individually renewed.

The attempt to provide the retreat with a timeless quality also can be seen in its emphasis on tradition. Tales of the old days are constantly retold, and there is very little that changes from year to year. The account of the Rancheros written by the first author of this paper in the early 1970s, based on his interviews and observational studies by students, fit perfectly with the observations made by the third author in the years between 1981 and 2005 when he was developing the photographic essay on which this paper is based.

The illusion of timelessness is further revealed in the Rancheros’ invented past, an alleged reenactment of the return from taking their cattle to market by the benefactors of Spanish land grants. This story was developed by the founder of the Rancheros, a Chicago banker who had married in the Armour meatpacking family and acquired a huge ranch in the Santa Inez area. After becoming a member of the Bohemian Club in 1928 and enjoying its encampments, he decided he wanted to create a similar retreat in his own neck of the woods. So he instructed his personal assistant to purchase all available memorabilia from Spanish California days to provide the proper flavor and ring of authenticity for the new group. He soon owned innumerable stagecoaches, wagons, surreys, buckboards and rigs from the mission days, and even reconstructed an old salon in one of his barns.

To add to the exotic nature of the week, he also imported some unusual wildlife even though the animals had nothing to do with the mission-days motif. They included 15 Belgian draft horses, 10 sacred cattle from India, 10 Sicilian donkeys, 3 buffaloes, and 3 kangaroos. Here, truly, was a grazing area that might pique the interest of even the most jaded of weekend cowboys. Those animals are long gone from the Rancheros, but their legacy adds to the mythical nature of the whole setting.

The insights into an exclusive club like the Rancheros provided by Durkheim have received confirmation in the group dynamics literature within sociology and social psychology. It might seem at first glance that a gathering of many hundreds of men does not qualify as a small group, but another feature of the Rancheros, and the Bohemian Grove, for that matter, is that they are divided into 17 smaller groups with cutesy names like Los Tontos (bums), Los Flojos (lazy ones), and Los Bandidos, as well as more crass names like Los Bustardos (the bastards) and Los Chingadores (the fuckers). It is a fraternity system within the larger group, with some groups having higher status than others (Reagan, for instance, belonged to Adolpho Campo, the most powerful group). This system allows for even more intimate bonding. There is also rivalry and horseplay between camps, which also heightens feelings of closeness.

Studies of artificially created small groups beginning in the 1940s have provided the following conclusions that fit well with the small camps within the Rancheros: First, physical proximity is likely to lead to group solidarity. Thus, the mere fact that the Rancheros gather together in such intimate and isolated physical settings implies that cohesiveness develops. Second, the more people interact with each other, the more they tend to like each other. This is hardly a profound discovery, but we can note that the Rancheros and other men’s groups maximize personal interactions, especially in the smaller camps. Third, groups seen as high in status are more cohesive; the Rancheros, with their stringent membership requirements, ritual hazing of newcomers, long waiting lists, and high dues, certainly fit the category of a high-status group, leading members to think of themselves as "special" people, which in turn increases the likelihood of interaction and cohesiveness. Fourth, this research concludes that the best atmosphere for increasing group cohesiveness is one that is relaxed and cooperative, which once again fits what happens when the Rancheros head out for their retreat.

Interesting though these research findings may be, they are not earthshaking, and they would hardly be worth mentioning if they did not lead to a more important conclusion. Group-dynamics research suggests that members of socially cohesive groups are more open to the opinions of other members, and more likely to change their views to those of fellow members. Thus, it can be argued that social cohesion is a factor in policy consensus because it creates a desire on the part of group members to reconcile differences with other members of the group. After all, even corporate leaders can have differences of opinion, especially if they are in different business sectors, or come from different parts of the country. Based on group-dynamics literature, it is plausible to argue that clubs and retreats play a role in overcoming these potential differences. That is, we can argue that the clubs and retreats that are part of the larger corporate and policy-planning networks have the kind of role that Durkheim thought they do: social cohesion aids in creating a shared world view, and for our purposes, policy cohesion. They grease the wheels for agreeing on new policies in more formal and serious settings.

Policy cohesion, we now add, is necessary for class domination. At that point, however, we leave Durkheimian territory and enter the worlds of Max Weber and Karl Marx. Durkheim tells us how status groups generate a conscience collective, but it is Weber who tells us they also need a “party,” that is, the various means and methods by which they try to influence community action in a planned manner, And it is Marx—and Adam Smith before him--who tells us that it is capitalists who have the wealth and motives to turn themselves into a status group and develop a party—which mostly means the policy-planning network of foundations, think tanks, and policy-discussion groups in the case of the United States--in order to dominate large-scale societies rooted in the institutions of private property and markets.
REFERENCES
Bernasen, A. (2006, June 25). Income inequality, and its cost: The rich get richer, again. New York Times, pp. C-4.
Bonacich, P., & Domhoff, G. W. (1981). Latent classes and group membership. Social Networks, 3, 175-196.
Domhoff, G. W. (1974). The Bohemian Grove and other retreats; a study in ruling-class cohesiveness. New York: Harper & Row.
Domhoff, G. W. (1975). Social clubs, policy-planning groups, and corporations: A network study of ruling-class cohesiveness. The Insurgent Sociologist, 5, 173-184.
Gregor, T. (1982, December). No girls allowed. Science 82, 27-31.
Gregor, T. (1985). Anxious pleasures: The sexual lives of an Amazonian people. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sanday, P. (1990). Fraternity gang rape: Sex, brotherhood, and privilege on campus. New York: New York University Press.