By Richard Sale, author of Clinton?s Secret Wars and Traitors.?
What is first needed is an historical sketch.
Belonging to a superior social class in Europe rested on family, lineage, and vast holdings of property. The wealth that resulted gave social prestige. Wealth was simply an enabler. In Europe, its possession did not make you a gentleman.?
Flash forward to America.?
The key to power in America was money and the possession of huge amounts of it.? After the Civil War, money was the key to ascending the social ladder, and getting a fortune was not a matter of polite duels between nimble rapiers but of brass knuckles. It was a high stakes game. Success meant glory; failure, bankruptcy and oblivion. Respect for the rule of law was ignored as irrelevant. When Jay Fiske and JP Morgan found themselves in control of the two ends of the Susquenna Railroad, they resolved the conflict by mounting locomotives at each end and then ramming them headfirst into each other. And even when one party lost, it retaliated as best as it could by ripping up tracks and destroying trestles as they went.
Competition between companies meant no quarter given and none asked. In one case, a persistent opponent of Standard Oil was blown up by dynamite.? Some organizations resorted to kidnapping. There were other incidents of moral charm as well. When a great blizzard blew down telephone poles in New York, Jay Gould, a ruthless master of money markets was forced to send his financial dispatches by messenger. His competitors kidnapped the boy, substituted a look-alike, and for days, Gould was dismayed to find his moves were known days in advance.
Not only were these titans of industry ruthless and implacable, they were vulgar and flagrantly arrogant, boasting openly about their immorality. At no time did they treat the American public with any reverence. Commodore Vanderbilt, the king of shipping and commerce, once said, ?What do I care about the law? Haint I got the power?? J. Pierpont Morgan was no better. When an associate of his, Judge Gary, challenged him, he said, ?I don?t want some lawyer telling me what I cannot do. I hired him to tell me how to do what I want to do.?
Finding an honest financier in those days was as rare as finding a jewel in the head of a toad. The historian Robert Heilbroner once said that the rich in the 19th century ran the country as one big casino, but what he didn?t say was that the game was almost entirely rigged.? Heilbroner, Hofstadter, Josephson, and many others abound with incidents that make you turn away in moral disgust. These robber barons were alas simply ordinary men, simple, sentimental, and unimaginative and not very well educated. ?Some like Carnegie turned to philanthropy later in life, but they were very old by then. They had spent their vital force.
Over time, after the Civil War, embraced a doctrine of a debased, heartless form of Darwinism that proclaimed that those that had emerged at the top of the conniving heap were the best fitted to survive.? They claimed to be choicest flower of civilization. When the philosopher Herbert Spencer visited New York, it was almost a state occasion. Spencer, of course, was a close friend of Andrew Carnegie.
And, of course, it followed that Carnegie had never read Darwin?s book.? When I was at Columbia College, one day I spoke of Freud to my grandmother who flew into a fit of atrocious rage. ??She went at me again and again, pulling at my cuff like an enraged puppy, saying, ?Freud says everything is sex, sex, sex.? She, of course, had never put herself to the trouble of reading him.
Huge financial success has a strange effect. When any one of us begins his career, little notice is taken of him or her. When a businessman becomes a captain of industry, his fame somehow results in his being seen as a gifted person with extraordinary skills, superior diligence and superior insight.? Soon an ideology springs up around him, based on cowed servility, that embraces his poisonous practices all based on the maximization of profits, the minimization of risks -- as if it were the source of the American greatness. Hofstadter said, ?Assured by intellectuals of the progressive and civilizing value of their work, encouraged by their status exemplars of the order of opportunity, exhilarated by the thought that their energies were making the country rich, industrial millionaires felt safe in their exploitation and justified their dominion.?
Every other measurement of merit was discarded as trivial or eccentric.? The long trials of reform -- the passage of child labor laws, the Factory Acts, the struggle for Social Security -- meant nothing for Big Business. The fact that economic life for the masses was intolerable meant nothing at all. For Big Business, power to compel was the grim idol it worshiped and adored. And worse, the famed barons were a incredibly crass bunch who smoked cigars wrapped in one hundred dollar bills.? They were vulgar and pedestrian souls.
It is therefore a trial of forebearance, to hear the descendents of such men preach to the country about ?moral values.? Admiration by reflex is no admiration at all.? It is not an achievement when the leg flies out when you hit the right sinew. The genuine threat to the current worship of Big Business, portraying it as the embodiment of all that is noble and generous in the American spirit, has in fact been the march of events. The current array of mental defectives called Republican candidates doesn?t seem to realize their ideology has long ago become obsolete.
Men like Carnegie, Fisk, who ruined everything he touched, James Blaine, Roscoe Conkling -- they didn?t give, they took. They subtracted, they didn?t add.? They amassed, they didn?t build. They were full of crafty self-glorification, self-exultation, a cruelty of spirit and, most of all, the blind desire to rule. Morality to them was just a pose. They were the ?higher? spirits of the day; the rest of us were merely insignificant and mediocre. In the end, they were semi-barbaric in body and desire.
Their descendants have done everything possible to help ruin the country and cause the sufferings of thousands of ordinary people who were blameless except that they were born ordinary. The old business barons, like the new ones, remained total strangers to the Eighth Commandment and its strictures against theft.
The Republicans seem to know nothing of this. Blessed are the forgetful.
If Pat offers me his hospitality, I would like to explain the false pretense of strength and the total misreading of history that the animates current Republican rhetoric.?
????A brief note.? Michael Benner disputes my observation that politics is impossible without the indifference of the majority.? I would refer him to the great British historian Herbert Butterfield who said, ?One must beware the optical illusions of political history, and remember that most people, even in democracies, give only a very small part of their lives and thought to public affairs.?
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