Through the forties and fifties, Sammy endured as the quintessential antihero, the bad example, the free-enterprise system at its meanest, brass-knuckle, kick-in-the-groin dirtiest. By now the book had sold into the millions, read by people who loved to hate Sammy Glick.
It was in the early seventies that I began to feel the first disturbing shift in what was to become a 180-degree turn in our national attitude toward Sammy. Following a talk I had just given at a local college on the impact of success on American writers, a young man came up to thank me for creating Sammy Glick. “He’s a great character. I love him. I felt a little nervous about going out into the world and making it. But reading Sammy gives me confidence. I read it over and over. It’s my bible.”
He put out his hand, the hand that would soon be knifing friends and colleagues in the back. As I took it hesitantly, I asked myself, What have I done? Or what has a changing, greedier, more cynical America done to Sammy Glick? Speaking on other campuses through the seventies, I found to my dismay that the first young man hitching his star to Sammy Glick’s was not at all an aberration but the harbinger of a trend. Now all the young people in college reading a new edition of What Makes Sammy Run? were reacting to him as if he were a positive guide to their futures onward and upward. The book I had written as an angry exposé of Sammy Glick was becoming a character reference: How to succeed in America when really trying!
What had happened, of course, is that we had left the sixties behind, with its hippies and flower children and their communal dream of sharing and loving, and had moved on to the Nixon generation, the Bebe Rebozo generation of deal-makers and Do-It-to-Them-Before-They-Do-It-to-Us. In that context, the Watergate break-in was no accident, nor was Attorney General Mitchell’s Glickish boast, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”
Nor the blanket apology for immoral acts or immoral behavior, “Everybody does it.”
No, not everybody does it; conscience and social responsibility are still alive if not too well in America. But the dramatic transformation of Sammy Glick from the antihero of the forties to the role-model hero for the Yuppies of the eighties is a painful reminder of the moral breakdown we are suffering without even seeming to realize that suffering is involved. This is a new nation, created in ambivalence, with idealistic individuality contending with selfish individualism. From the very beginning it was Jefferson versus Hamilton, the democratic dream versus the autocratic reality of hard money and the bank, social justice vs. a narrow interpretation of law and order.
Individualism run rampant, an arrogant disregard for the views and the welfare of our fellow man, was the root of the Iran-contra debacle, which brought the Great Communicator down from his mythic high. Small wonder in such an atmosphere that a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marines became his own CIA and State Department, wheeling and dealing with foreign countries, international arms dealers, Swiss bank accounts and rebels in Miami who dreamed of the good old days of Somoza while they gobbled up those mysterious millions.
In the closing lines of What Makes Sammy Run? I had described his meteoric career “as a blueprint of a way of life that was paying dividends in America in the first half of the twentieth century.” Well, with our takeover artists, our inside traders, our Ivan Boeskys and Mike Milkens, our Ollie Norths, our college football heroes on the take from filthy rich alumni, our New York City commissioners compromised almost to a man (and woman), all signs point to even bigger dividends for the Sammy Glicks in the remainder of this century, and on into the next.
The book I had written as an attack on antisocial behavior has become a how- to book on Looking Out for Number 1. Change that line of the old hymn to read, “America, America, God shed His grace on me.” Let’s hear it for me, me, me!
Who needs free milk and hot lunches for poor kids in school? Who needs loans and assistance for high-school graduates who can’t go on to college for lack of bread? It’s Darwin Time: survival of the fittest! Sure, all people are created equal. Only Sammy Glick is created more equal than the Schleppers, get it?
O.K. That’s how they’re reading it in 1989. And if that’s the way they go on reading it, marching behind the flag of Sammy Glick, with a big dollar sign in the square where the stars used to be, the twentieth-century version of Sammy is going to look like an Eagle Scout compared to the twenty-first.
BUDD SCHULBERG
Brookside, Quiogue, New York
June 1989
Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?
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