NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/5821

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From: Blythe Systems <[e-mail]>
Subject: HIST:How Capitalists Rule, Pt.10
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Via The NY Transfer News Service ^ All the News that Doesn't Fit


The Republocrats: How Capitalists Rule/Part 10


               The Monopolists Take the Government

                        By Vince Copeland


The Rockefellers in government

Shortly after the Civil War, the Rockefeller oil barons sewed up
the Ohio legislature through bribery. They were just as effective
as Chauncey Depew had been when he delivered the New York State
legislature to the Vanderbilts and Morgans. These two states
provided large blocks of Electoral College votes in the
presidential election.

A curtain was raised on Rockefeller machinations in 1872 when
Standard Oil backed a well-known corrupt lobbyist running for
Congress. Despite much exposure and protest, he was elected. But
after this the political power of both the Rockefeller and Morgan
groups became more national in accordance with their widening
monopoly role.

During the 1880s, "the fifteen directors of Standard of New Jersey
held directorships in innumerable banks, insurance companies,
traction [streetcar] companies, electric light and gas companies
and industrial concerns of every sort." (John T. Flynn, "God's
Gold," p. 348)

Rockefeller people sat on the boards of railroads controlling
33,000 miles of track. And by 1884 James Stillman's National City
Bank (now Citibank) acquired the principal deposits of the
Rockefeller empire. Stillman, a partner of John D. Rockefeller's
brother William, later became an important link to the Morgans.

At about this time John D. moved his headquarters from Ohio to New
York, joining the financial aristocracy at the very top.

President Grover Cleveland was so thick with the biggest financial
operators in the country that his personal secretary, David S.
Lamont, proved to be an agent of several of them. He was made
Secretary of War in Cleveland's second administration.

The middle-class opposition

All this did not go unnoticed or unopposed. The middle class--the
small manufacturers, the many farmers, small retailers, shippers
and other business people--were being hemmed in by the oil and
railroad monopolies. They were charged sky-high rates that in
effect forced them to subsidize the cheap rates and rebates given
to the monopolists.

This middle class was still politically powerful, even though it
was not the ruling class. It included the coalition (among the
whites) that had really led the anti-slavery struggle in the Civil
War: the small industrialists and poor farmers.

It began organizing itself against the monopolists as early as the
1870s. The biggest organization of this progressive middle class
was probably the Anti-Monopoly League. At one point in 1881 no
less than 800 merchants and small producers sent the following
letter to the U.S. Senate protesting the ratification of Stanley
Matthews, another railroad attorney, for Justice of the Supreme
Court:

"We are informed and believe that the great railroad corporations
of this country are endeavoring to gain control of this court of
last resort, which has heretofore been the most important bulwark
in defending the public interest against the encroachment of
corporations; that Mr. Matthews has been educated as a railroad
attorney and views railroad questions from a railroad standpoint;
that his actions while in the U.S. Senate prove this, and in this
important respect render him unfit for a Justice of the Supreme
Court." It was signed by Ambrose Snow, President, and Darwin P.
James, Secretary of the Anti-Monopoly League. (Gustav Myer,
"History of the Supreme Court," p. 558)

There was much publicity about all this, but the millionaire
Senate ratified the appointment anyway.

Thus the middle class--the true middle class of small producers,
many exploiting only themselves and their families--had had its
day politically during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Now it
was engaged in a rearguard fight that was to last until at least
1896 and have its impact on the two big parties in some peculiar
ways.

Two tendencies

It is also important to emphasize that, while a virulent reaction
against the progressivism of the Civil War had taken hold by then,
there nevertheless was a counter tendency, represented by Mark
Twain and a number of people around him, that continued in a
progressive vein.

Theodore Roosevelt was one of the leaders in the reactionary camp
at this time (which indicates how sincere his later
"Progressivism" was). He insisted that the Civil War had nothing
to do with the anti-slavery fight and was only a matter of "saving
the Union." This, it will be remembered, was the line of the New
York bankers.  Roosevelt had been born in the bosom of these
bankers.

But the other tendency was strong, too. For example, there was a
period of revulsion against the vicious treatment of Native
peoples. Helen Hunt Jackson's book, "A Century of Dishonor,"
appeared in 1881 and caused quite a sensation. It was a polemic
against the many broken treaties.

Her novel "Romona," an eloquent plea for white understanding of
the Indians' plight, went through more than 300 printings and has
been dramatized several times for stage and screen.

Young Theodore Roosevelt attacked Jackson for "sentimentalizing"
the Native peoples, for "over-simplifying" the issue. He regarded
the Indians as savages and had several clashes with them on "his"
ranch, where he squatted on territory that was still partly
considered Indian land. (He had tried professional ranching in his
earlier years and wrote "The Winning of the West" in that period.)

The ordinarily conservative Republican President Chester B. Arthur
(1881-85) appointed Jackson director of the Bureau of Indian
Affairs shortly after her book came out in 1881. This was long
before any Native person was appointed and the ascendancy of
Jackson was considered a triumph for real liberalism.

The growth of the big cattle ranches, the multi-thousand-acre
wheat farms and the discovery of gold in the Dakotas upset this
equilibrium, however. The slaughter at Wounded Knee was the
result.

A Republican atheist

Although it would be inconceivable today in these "enlightened"
modern times, Col. Robert Ingersoll was quite prominent in the
Republican Party in those days. Ingersoll was a popular atheist
with a very large following. A matchless, if somewhat florid,
orator, he was not bashful about supporting his friends in
politics. He made great speeches in the presidential campaigns of
Garfield and Hayes and delivered the main nominating speech for
James G. Blaine at the Republican convention of 1876.

Those "Victorian" times were full of such contradictions. It is
not that people were accustomed to different ideas so much as that
they were not persecuted for having them, nor were they barred
from political life. But this was only true in the North and West.
The South was becoming a wilderness of poverty and backwardness,
ruled by local lynch law and national neglect.

Blaine had been attacked by the Democrats as a corrupt lawmaker
for the railroads. In eulogizing him, Ingersoll intoned that the
good Republicans "do not demand that their candidate have a
certificate of moral character signed by the Confederate
Congress."

He said that the people "call for a man who has torn from the
throat of treason the tongue of slander--for the man who has
snatched the mask of Democracy from the hideous face of
rebellion.... Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James
G.  Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress and
threw his shining lance full and fair against the defamers of his
country and maligners of his honor.... In the name of those who
perished in the skeleton clutch of famine at Andersonville...,
whose sufferings he so vividly remembers, Illinois nominates for
the next President of this country that prince of
parliamentarians--that leader of leaders--James G. Blaine."

Unfortunately, the "plumed knight" had engaged in too many
unknightly bargains with the railroad corporations and others to
quite make the nomination.

Blaine, however, did get the Republican nomination in 1884, but we
have seen that in that election the campaign funds were not so
forthcoming from Wall Street, even though he had served them well.
The Democrat Cleveland became the knight of that day.

1888: Republicans again

Cleveland overreached himself, however. Correctly calculating,
toward the end of his first term, that he had the majority of
Congress (and possibly the people) with him, he moved to implement
the old Democratic program of low tariffs. He should have known
that this was forbidden territory.

The result was that Wall Street shifted from him to the
Republicans in 1888, supporting Benjamin Harrison, grandson of
William Henry Harrison, the Whig president of 1840. Where the
Democratic fund had exceeded the Republican in 1884, the Democrats
gleaned only $855,000 in 1888, while the Republicans harvested
$1,350,000.

Ironically enough, Cleveland still received the majority of the
popular vote in 1888, but failed to get a majority of the
electoral vote. So he was defeated.

The Businessmen's Cabinet

Harrison's Cabinet was known as the "Businessmen's Cabinet." Of
course, this implies that the previous Cabinets were something
else. But everything is relative. The truth is that Harrison just
took another step toward allowing the complete domination of big
business over the administration in Washington.

Even at that, he felt the pressure of the Republican Party machine
and complained that "I could not name my own Cabinet. They [the
`bosses'] had sold out every place to pay the election expenses."
(Matthew Josephson, "The Politicos," p. 438)

His vice president, Levi P. Morton, was the second biggest banker
in the country after J.P. Morgan. This was duly noted in the
agitation of the oppressed farming districts in the West and
Midwest and among the growing working class movements.

It is interesting that in our own more sophisticated age, a member
of a notorious banking family, more powerful both relatively and
absolutely than Morton, was vice president from 1974-76. This was
Nelson Rockefeller. After the Watergate scandal, he was elected by
the House of Representatives rather than by the people and foisted
upon the government like a hound dog upon his meat. There wasn't a
peep out of the modern electorate.

Harrison's Secretary of War was Redfield Proctor, leader of the
High Tariff League and president of Vermont Marble, Inc.  Proctor
was not of the first rank of tycoons, but served them faithfully
in his position, which gave him the power to assign big military
orders even though it was peacetime.

John Wanamaker, the most famous retailer of the time, was given
the job of Postmaster General, which always included the most lush
fields for patronage. He went at it with a will and seemed to have
enjoyed wielding the axe on the Democratic office-holders and
hiring the Republican faithful.

Gilding the Supreme Court

Harrison's appointments to the Supreme Court were models of
capitalist achievement: big railroad and banking attorneys with
the closest connections to the wealthiest families in the country.

In 1893 Harrison named Howell E. Jackson to the Court.  Jackson
had earlier represented big railroads before the Court. He settled
in Tennessee during Reconstruction and opened the law firm of
Estes, Jackson and Elliott. This firm represented big banks and
other corporations. Jackson himself became the second-richest
person in Tennessee--after his brother.

As Supreme Court Justice, his decisions were uniformly favorable
to the corporations.

His chief sponsor in the U.S. Senate was Thomas C. Platt, a
Morgan-anointed Republican "boss" of New York State and president
of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Co. (later taken over completely by
the Morgan-sponsored US Steel Co.). Jackson had sat in judgment on
this company during his period on the circuit court. His decisions
had been favorable to Platt's firm.

                               -30-

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if
source is cited. For more info contact Workers World,46 W. 21 St.,
New York, NY 10010; "[e-mail]".)

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