Introduction
You often navigate a world where individual ambitions crash against vast, uncaring systems of power and wealth.
A lifelong bureaucrat and Watergate scapegoat navigates the remnants of his past, corporate mega-empires, and labor struggles to discover that love may fail, but courtesy will prevail.
Kurt Vonnegut traces the life of Walter F. Starbuck from humble beginnings through elite education to political disgrace and corporate servitude. The narrative examines how historical labor movements and radical politics connect to modern monopolies and economic inequality.
- How do personal choices lead to political downfall?
- What happens when a single mega-conglomerate owns almost everything?
- Can ordinary decency survive in a society driven by ruthless ambition?
1. Background and Influences
Your early life and ambitions are frequently shaped by wealthy patrons, elite institutions, and the heavy shadow of historical labor violence. You grow up near powerful figures whose fortunes connect directly to the brutal suppression of early American strikes.
Major historical milestones and violent labor struggles fade from public memory and become absorbed into modern corporate structures.
Daniel McCone announced a 10 percent cut in pay at the Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron Company in Cleveland in October 1894. This decision triggered a tense strike that escalated into tragedy during a severe economic downturn.
The Cuyahoga Massacre on Christmas morning in 1894 resulted in fourteen people killed outright by bullets and twenty-three seriously wounded. Unprepared militiamen and sharpshooters opened fire after agents provocateurs and corporate inflexibility drove the confrontation to extremes.
Alexander Hamilton McCone witnessed the Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron strike violence on Christmas morning from a clock tower. He was twenty-two and at Harvard in May before the strike began.
The horrific event permanently altered his speech patterns into a blocked stammer whenever he felt anxious. Witnessing extreme corporate violence caused profound psychological trauma, manifesting as a permanent speech impediment in the privileged heir.
Alexander Hamilton McCone participated in the management of his father's iron company and watched the massacre unfold from a bell tower. The lingering trauma ended his public life and drove him into art collecting.
Alexander Hamilton McCone married a Rockefeller and spent his later years playing chess with his cook and chauffeur's son, Walter F. Starbuck. The heavy packs worn by militiamen weighed fifty pounds during the fateful clash that shaped generations of local families.
2. The Watergate Fall
Taking the blame for high-ranking political figures by keeping silent about illegal campaign funds destroys your life and reduces your existence to prison monotony and political irrelevance.
You serve as the President's special advisor on youth affairs in the Nixon White House. Your office occupies the subbasement directly underneath the room where the President's burglars plan crimes. You receive a salary of 36000 dollars a year while smoking 4 packs of unfiltered Pall Malls a day.
You produce 200 or more weekly reports on youth culture that are shredded unread. You conclude that young people still refuse to see the impossibility of world disarmament and economic equality.
President Nixon stops an emergency meeting about the Kent State shootings to make a joke about you smoking multiple cigarettes. He compares you to someone demonstrating how to put out a campfire.
The high-level emergency meeting follows the killing of 4 antiwar protesters shot to death at Kent State University. Exactly 40 other people attend the emergency meeting with the President.
Officials present at the meeting include John N. Mitchell, John D. Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman, Henry Kissinger, and Spiro T. Agnew. Almost all of these men later face criminal charges or legal penalties.
You spend the night drafting elaborate proposals regarding how the President should respond to the tragedy by pardoning and reprimanding the National Guard. Your presence is entirely ignored except for presidential mockery.
Your office subbasement is selected to hide an old-fashioned steamer trunk containing one million dollars in unmarked twenty-dollar bills. This money originates as an illegal campaign contribution.
You go to prison for hiding the corpus delicti of the scandal inside your steamer trunk. You refuse to name the high-ranking malefactors who ordered it. Your loyalty leaves you with the exact total money of three hundred and twelve dollars and eleven cents upon your release.
3. Prison Years and Confrontations
Federal prison brings you into close contact with former powerful administration figures undergoing dramatic religious conversions alongside veterans of other historical scandals.
Higher education and elite degrees provide no special distinction or immunity from criminal sentencing in federal prison. The Federal Minimum Security Adult Correctional Facility near Atlanta was heavily populated by former high-ranking officials, lawyers, medical doctors, and holders of advanced degrees. A standard liberal arts degree became entirely unremarkable among the inmates. You met or heard of seven other Harvard men during your confinement.
Emil Larkin, once Nixon's hatchet man, spent his time praying on hard prison floors. This practice caused him housemaid's knee. He eventually published a best-selling Christian autobiography through Heartland House whose royalties went to the Salvation Army.
Virgil Greathouse, founder of a major public relations firm defending dictatorships and a former secretary of health, education, and welfare, suddenly entered the same prison to begin serving his sentence without appeals. Virgil Greathouse took your prison cot upon his release. Your lawyers claimed you still owed them 26000 dollars for their services. Ruth received a burial in a plain pine box that cost 156 dollars.
You inadvertently destroyed the promising diplomatic career of Leland Clewes during congressional hearings by mistakenly linking him to past communist associations. During a 1949 congressional hearing led by Congressman Richard Nixon, you named a roster of individuals who had been communists during the Depression but patriotic during the war. You erroneously included Clewes, who had never been a communist.
Leland Clewes vehemently denied the charge and demanded to testify. Two years later he was convicted on six perjury counts and imprisoned at the Federal Minimum Security Adult Correctional Facility located thirty-five miles from Atlanta, Georgia.
Timothy Beame, head of the prestigious Washington law firm Beame, Mearns, Weld and Weld, fiercely berated you for your testimony against Leland Clewes. This meeting happened thirteen years after you last spoke with Timothy Beame, who was seventy-four years of age at the time. He argued that obeying every technical law while exposing peers makes a man the worst criminal of his time by shattering public trust in government service. Timothy Beame summoned you to his Washington office to berate you for making Mutt-and-Jeff-style fame out of your feud with Leland Clewes.
4. The RAMJAC Corporation
Mega-conglomerates operate as thoughtless weather systems, indifferent to human needs and tragedies.
The RAMJAC Corporation ultimately owned 19 percent of the country's economy. Its vast portfolio included diverse entities from The New York Times and Universal Pictures to Ringling Bros. and a catfood company.
When RAMJAC took over publications like The New York Times, it promised no internal changes in personnel or editorial policy. Arpad Leen announced this takeover with a welcoming note bearing the thumb and finger prints of Mrs. Jack Graham. The New York Times gave only three inches of space on an inside page regarding its own acquisition.
Corporate empires can be controlled by reclusive figures who rely on extreme security measures and biometric verification to prove their existence.
Mrs. Jack Graham, Jr., served as the majority stockholder of RAMJAC and had not been seen in public for five years. When sued by stockholders, she appeared in a New York courtroom wearing a black caftan pinned shut with diaper pins. She was accompanied by eight uniformed bodyguards from Pinkerton, Inc., and proved her identity by fingerprinting herself on the spot. Her past included being put on probation in 1952 for drunken driving.
Starbuck managed a corporate division that achieved staggering commercial and artistic success while under his leadership. By managing various media, publishing, and entertainment subsidiaries, his division consistently generated a minimum return on capital of 23 percent.
During Starbuck's tenure, his division accumulated major cultural awards:
- eleven platinum records;
- forty-two gold records;
- twenty-two Oscars;
- eleven National Book Awards;
- two World Series;
- fifty-three Grammies.
5. Labor History and Radical Roots
Early radical political movements and violent labor struggles form deep ideological bonds that are eventually absorbed into modern corporate structures.
Starbuck was a card-carrying communist at Harvard until the 1939 nonaggression pact between Hitler and Stalin. He believed that people should work as they were able and be rewarded according to simple needs, and that common people should control the planet's wealth and disband national armies.
Starbuck won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford and a job in Roosevelt's Department of Agriculture despite his open communist past. Starbuck and Mary Kathleen originally met through a radical publication in Cambridge, driven by a fierce hatred of capitalism stemming from tragic industrial poisonings in their families.
Mary Kathleen's mother died of radium poisoning working for the Wyatt Clock Company, and her father went blind drinking wood alcohol while working as a night watchman.
The martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti serves as a modern historical passion play exposing the lethal flaws of judicial systems operating against immigrants and political radicals. Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants, an anarchist shoemaker and a fish peddler, who were falsely accused of payroll murders during a time of intense anti-foreign hysteria and government surveillance. Despite international protests and appeals backed by prominent figures, a judicial review committee led by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell upheld their death sentences.
Celestino Madeiros confessed to the murders before his own execution, but the judicial system ignored the truth to eliminate political enemies, culminating in their electrocution.
Industrial democracy experiments attempted to give workers ownership and comprehensive benefits, but ultimately failed under severe economic pressure. William Hapgood founded The Columbia Conserve Company in 1903 as a cannery dependent on tomatoes, later introducing worker councils, free medical care, vacations, and stock bonuses before the Great Depression crushed it.
The Columbia Conserve Company, founded in Indianapolis in 1903, thrived until 1931 when the Great Depression forced massive layoffs and wage cuts.
Some privileged individuals chose to live and work as ordinary laborers out of adherence to spiritual principles and political solidarity. Powers Hapgood graduated from Harvard and chose to mine coal and participate in union organizing because he believed true friends of working people should be workers themselves, driven by the Sermon on the Mount.
Powers Hapgood was arrested and thrown into a lunatic asylum after leading pickets at the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, and later testified before Judge Claycomb.
6. Redemption and Climax
You discover that the true owner of the immense RAMJAC Corporation is a destitute shopping-bag lady intending to return the entire enterprise to the American people.
Destitute shopping-bag women on city streets can occasionally harbor hidden identities of immense financial and corporate power. Mary Kathleen O'Looney, a ragged and eccentric woman carrying her belongings and legal papers in basketball shoes and designer shopping bags, is revealed to be Mrs. Jack Graham, the majority stockholder of The RAMJAC Corporation. Mary Kathleen used an inkpad and paper hidden inside her basketball shoes to maintain control over RAMJAC while living anonymously in the underground locomotive catacombs beneath Grand Central Station.
To effectively connect with working people, you must engage them on the one subject where they possess undeniable, expert knowledge: their actual daily labor. Kenneth Whistler realized that instead of speaking abstractly, he could prompt working people to critique society by asking them about the specifics of their trade. When asked about factory management, workers demonstrated deep competence regarding raw materials, machinery maintenance, and quality control.
Workers at the Johannsen Grinder Company testified that while past owners knew how to run the factory properly, the current owner Nils Johannsen was entirely incompetent and frightened of the facility. Being placed under the authority of a frightened human being is a fundamental recipe for systemic failure and oppression. Nils Johannsen inherited the Johannsen Grinder Company and relied on loaded dice, such as unfair laws and police protection, because he could not manage the factory competently.
You should heed practical wisdom regarding authority:
- Offer a sensible prayer from time to time: Dear Lord—never put me in the charge of a frightened human being.
John Figler of Crown Point, Indiana, wrote a letter to Vonnegut on November 16, 1978, sharing an insight on your fiftieth-sixth birthday. John Figler stated the idea that love may fail, but courtesy will prevail, making Vonnegut realize a seven-word telegram would have sufficed.
10 Key Ideas
- Witnessing extreme corporate violence during the Cuyahoga Massacre caused profound psychological trauma, manifesting as a permanent speech impediment in the privileged heir Alexander Hamilton McCone.
- Taking the blame for high-ranking political figures by keeping silent about illegal campaign funds destroys your life and reduces your existence to prison monotony and political irrelevance.
- Federal prison brings you into close contact with former powerful administration figures undergoing dramatic religious conversions alongside veterans of other historical scandals.
- Mega-conglomerates like RAMJAC operate as thoughtless weather systems, indifferent to human needs and tragedies.
- Corporate empires can be controlled by reclusive figures like Mrs. Jack Graham who rely on extreme security measures and biometric verification to prove their existence.
- Early radical political movements and violent labor struggles form deep ideological bonds that are eventually absorbed into modern corporate structures.
- The martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti serves as a modern historical passion play exposing the lethal flaws of judicial systems operating against immigrants and political radicals.
- Industrial democracy experiments attempted to give workers ownership and comprehensive benefits, but ultimately failed under severe economic pressure.
- You discover that the true owner of the immense RAMJAC Corporation is the destitute shopping-bag lady Mary Kathleen O'Looney intending to return the entire enterprise to the American people.
- To effectively connect with working people, you must engage them on the one subject where they possess undeniable, expert knowledge: their actual daily labor.