"Where real movers and Quakers connect."

Thoughts on being invited to join the Penn Club -- to "start realizing [my] future with a membership that opens doors."

Patrimonial capitalism -- a state of affairs in which the returns from capital grow and concentrate, allowing a small class of idlers the luxury of massive income from zero work -- carried with it an entire cultural apparatus of patronage and sycophantism. Ironically, however, its cultural assumptions and values were perhaps most widespread and reinforced among the class right beneath them, those striving for advantage and entry into the otherwise closed world of the elite and ruling classes, who did still have to work.[1] Such figures populate the worlds of Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, those who want entry to society (while  desiring the gates be closed behind them) but lack the capital or lineage required to be included as a matter of course. And as is often the case, few embraced more wholly or dogmatically the values of a culture than those outsiders who desired to be included.

But gaining access to this closed world required achieving a pedigree that one otherwise lacked. Institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania were organized not simply, or even primarily, to provide an education, but to provide such a pedigree. And their success hinged on providing an infrastructure of alumni networks that would turn an otherwise brief association with what is notionally a school into the basis for a connection or trust that could open doors for some--reproducing the culture and class of the elite--while making (as a sheer function of cartelization) such connections or opportunities closed or more difficult for others. It served the interests of some of the striving class, and reinforced the values and importance of the established class, and kicked in the teeth everyone who might have access to the professional class but lacked the connections needed for great success.

The Penn Club, a piece of nonsense in Manhattan, the center of the American upper class' universe and certainly not Philadelphia, explicitly caters to this purpose

'"When they [grads] are to enter the world, the trustees shall zealously unite, and make all the interests that can be made, to promote and establish them, whether in business, offices, marriages, or any other thing for their advantage." -- Ben Franklin

The Penn Club fulfills this mission.'

This, from a pamphlet printed in 2014, mailed without any sign that the content of Franklin's statement could be read as anything but a great and wonderful thing. Given the club's overpriced membership, rooms, and gym facilities, the pamphlet inviting recent grads to join is understandably pitched at the parents:

"Introduce your young graduate firsthand to the real world of networking. Create valuable connections for yourself."

Since arriving in the US I have been constantly reminded that there is a distinction between "real world" and whatever it is I do, and that a "real salary" earning "real money" was that which far less than half of Americans lived on. I always imagined the "real world," however, to involve production, consequential deadlines, decisions that in some way impacted the well-being of yourself and your colleagues. Little did I know that the "real world" is gladhanding in the Kit & Key Bar (where they offer $2 Yuengling's once [!] a month as a benefit of membership), "where real movers and Quakers connect."

 [1] Work in the sense of earning a salary from contributing something beyond their ownership. They could not sustain their desired lifestyle by simply counting the returns on investment. And of course, those who could sustain such a lifestyle likely 'worked' as well, although one suspects that they did this to build a certain type of respectability, and that they moved up in this fake world of not really needing to work not as a function of their actual marginal contribution but as a function of their connections. But no one would suggest that this occurs today.

Davy Crockett

I've never liked the man, and I still don't, but given the tightening legal environment -- renewed efforts to wish away the existence of free blacks by restricting their movements, by treating them as equal to slaves in various laws, by casting them as "outside the laws" if they didn't leave the state -- this seems like the right thing to do, regardless of what the relief in question may have entailed.

The last line on a page from the Tennessee Legislature's Journal from 1822 :

Slave labor and manufacturing

In case there was ever any doubt as to the underlying purpose of slavery, I submit the brief prepared by S.D. Morgan, "one of the most intelligent and extensive manufacturers in the State," for the Tennessee Assembly's joint select committee on manufacturing in 1845:

You ask... what are the advantages or disadvantages attending slave labor compared with white labor employed in manufacturing?

In answering this the most important of your questions, I am aware of having to encounter the old and deep rooted prejudices of most persons who have not investigated the subject for themselves, butwho have rather adopted opinions expressed (perhaps interestedly) by others. To such an extent has this opinion that slave labor cannot successfully compete with free labor in manufacturing operations, taken possession of the public mind, that it has become in a manner a proverb, and like all other old maxims is most difficult to eradicate.

In some of the more delicate and intricate operations, where there is much exercise of the mind requisite, I admit that it may be true— but to an extent beyond this I deny its truth; and I appeal to all whose experience qualify them as judges to bear, me out in the assertion--that in all operations, where patience, care, application and strength are the chief requisites, that the slave is found in all respects Competent. He is patient of toil, submits readily to discipline, and unencumbered with cares of the mind; hence it is more entirely brought to bear on the operation he may be performing. To this may be added his physical ability of enduring the heat of the iron-furnace or of the spinning room decidedly better than the white man.

Again: The employer of the slave operative is not deprived of his services from having him, called off to sit on juries; to attend musters and elections, and many other such drawbacks on labor.

Nor is he found uniting in combinations “to strike for higher wages” or for “shorter hours of work” at that particular juncture of time, too, when his services are most needed.

And yet another reason still more cogent is at hand, to prove that to the manufacturer, who is the owner of the slave, his services are doubly valuable. It is this; when the owner has taught him the art of manufacturing he is not called on from time to time, as improvement in skill take place, to increase his wages, as is always the case with the white laborer, who becoming more and more expert, demand and is certainly entitled to higher pay, because the instruction he has acquired, enables him to make for his employer more money.

Note also, that the committee insisted that Tennessee iron was the best the world over:

"English imported iron is not to be compared with our Tennessee iron, to the honor of which I beg leave here to mention that none of the steam boilers made of Tennessee iron, out of which I am informed several have been constructed in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, have burst, of course therefore our iron masters are free from any blame of having contributed to the sacrifice of the hundreds of lives that have been lost by those accidents."

p.594-97, Journal of the Assembly--Tennessee, 1845-46.