The Pump House Gang

What Hacker News says

1. PaulHouleAug 2025
   That's a great find.

   I'm not sure though that G.W. Bush had a lower IQ than Al Gore, but certainly G.W. Bush related to people who didn't think that they were so smart or at least educated.

   I found a lot of people in the early 1950s for instance who thought Dwight Eisenhower was a lightweight I think because of his image

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP7WaUPACuY

   and that he worked hard to come across as relatable to "the common man" whereas his opponent in the 1952 election was the opposite type.

   Anyhow I'm sure that you've seen many of my favorite sources on this but I'll point out both C. Wright Mills The Power Elite and the Tom Wolfe books The Pump House Gang and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.

   Mills defies the reductivism of 2025 in that he says there is not just one power elite but multiple power elites and just analyzes those in a great amount of detail. Those two Wolfe books pursue a theory that people can't all compete in the "master" status hierarchy but we can all be a star in our own little sky and that it's OK to find meaning in little things -- he explores a bunch of entertaining case studies and I like it so much better than that Acid Test book that gets read to death.

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2. gabriel666smithMar 2025
   I love Tom Wolfe; I’d not connected his out-of-vougeness to the recent preference for ‘truthiness’ in reporting the reviewer identifies.

   I remember reading him at ~13 - my dad gave me a copy of ‘The Pump House Gang’, and told me something to the effect of: “try to write like this - don’t ever try to sound like this.”

   We live in Didion times - clean lines and clean sentences - and though maximalism on the page (or in any design) is hard to achieve, especially when written from reality, I think we have room for a few more.

   Or at the very least, I think Wolfe deserves to be thought of better by the zeitgeist. He’s so much fun!

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3. PaulHouleAug 2021
   I would have you read ‘The Pump House Gang’ by Tom Wolfe and realize that there is limited room at the top of the wealth status hierarchy.

   It is not realistic that you will get there. But the people in that book all found a community that they could excel in and goals that were realistic.

   Lately I met somebody who had ‘failed’ in business (no longer a going concern) but I had admiration for what they did because what they did upheld high quality. I hope that person can be proud of that even if they didn’t make it big.

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4. PaulHouleApr 2016
   Social class is astonishingly multidimensional as pointed out in the works of C. Wright Mills (Power Elite), Paul Fussel (Class), Tom Wolfe (The Pump House Gang), etc.

   In my extended family there are no college professors, but a lot of cops, even a lot of women that are cops. (There are some accountants, but they are forensic accountants ;-)

   When I get stopped by the cops I don't worry, they like my attitude, they will tell me that people don't like speeding in their residential neighborhood and to them I look more like a guy who doesn't like speeding in my residential neighborhood and not the kind of guy who likes to play Initial D in residential neighborhoods.

   Sometimes I've been a bystander when it looked like the cops showed up to arrest the first black person they saw, or when 15 police vehicles show up to arrest some black guy as thin as a rail and I even have a friend who grew up in a much richer family than me who had a bad attitude towards the police and has had his ass kicked, etc. Somehow though, even though I am not a cop and I don't particularly see things the way cops do, I've somehow absorbed enough protective coloration that I have a lot of "privilege" in this area, and less in some other areas.

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