I’m reading “The Big Change: America Transforms Itself 1900-1950” by former Harper’s editor Frederick Lewis Allen. Allen an interesting glimpse into the socio-economic views of 1950’s America. My overall impression is that the middle class felt pretty damn comfortable. So fucking comfortable that, well, I kind of understand why the cooked up the Red Scare.
But the real gems come from Allen’s analysis of early 20th century America, which looks strikingly familiar.
Yale professor William Graham Sumner, in his book What Social Classes Owe to Eachother, published in 1883, writes, “The yearning after equality is the offspring of envy and covetousnous, and there is no possible plan for satisfying that yearning which can do aught else what rob A to give to B; consequently all such plans nourish some of the meanest vices of human nature, waste capital, and overthrow civilization.” He argued that:
“Instead of endeavoring to redistribute the acquisitions which have been made between the existing classes, our aim should be to increase, multiply, and extend the changes. Such is the work of civilization. Every old error or abuse which is removed opens new chances for development to all the new energy of society. Every improvement in education, science, art or government expands the chances of man on earth. Such expansion is no guarantee of equality.”
Lewis continues:
The irony of the situation lay in the fact that for generations men had been tinkering with economic law to their own advantage, and in the process had produced institutions which were emphatically not God’s work—as most of Sumner’s hearers presumably supposed them to be—but man’s. The corporation, for instance, was not an invention of God’s. It was an invention of man’s. It was a creature of the state: its privileges, its limitations, were defined by legislation…by taking adroit advantage of the legislative acts which defined its privileges, one could play extraordinary tricks with it. Corporate devices could be used to permit A to rob B—or let us say, more charitably, to permit A to drain off all the gravy in sigh and leave none for B. And it was foolish to defend such devices on the ground that one must let economic nature take its course.
It was largely as a result of the discovery of tricks that could be played with corporations, and particularly with their capital stock, that the wealth produced in such a tremendous spate at the turn of the century flowed into a few well-placed hands.
Henry Clew, a stalwart defender of Wall Street, was awed by the speculative success of the men on Wall Street:
With them, manipulation has ceased to be speculation. Their resources are so vast that they need only to concentrate upon any given property in order to do with it what they please…They are the greatest operators the world has ever seen, and the beauty of their method is the quietness and lack of ostentation with which they carry it on. There are no gallery plays, there are no scare heads in the newspapers, there is no wild scramble or excitement. With them the process is gradual, thorough, and steady, with never a waver or break. How much money this group of men have made is impossible to estimate. That is a sum beside which the gain of the most daring speculator of the past was a mere bagatelle is putting the case mildly. And there is an utter absence of chance that is terrible to contemplate.
Most businessmen believed in competition—theoretically. But in practice there was a ceaseless search for new ways in which to prevent it, so that rival companies in an industry might all jack up their prices and enlarge their profits. (Sound familiar?)
One of my favorite passages:
What [William Allen] White called “the alliance between government and business for the benefit of business” was an honest love affair to [Mark] Hanna. He felt that if the path were made easy for the great corporations to do as they pleased, the riches they accumulated would filter down to the less fortunate, and that any attempt to change the rules of the game except to give the great corporations even more opportunity to prosper would opent he way to demagoguery, mob rules, and destruction. With others the alliance was not a matter of emotional affinity or of conviction, but of purchase and sale—the prostitution of government bodies for favors and cash. Big corporations advanced their interests not only by making sizable campaign contributions—often to both parties—but also by subsidizing or bribing legislators and even judges.
…
Senator Joseph B. Foraker of Ohio received $44,000 from Standard Oil in four successive certificates of deposit sent by Archbold (which Foraker later claimed were retainers); and it showed Archbold subsequently writing Foraker about an “objectionable bill” that “needed to be looked after.”
Thus, by hints, suggestions, loans, so-called loans that were in fact gifts, and on occasion outright secret bribes, could a big corporation make legislators, elected officials and even judges do its bidding. The Soviet propagandists of the ninteen-fifties are forever talking about “lackeys of Wall Street.” Well, in 1900 the United States government included many men who might aptly, if not quite idiomatically, have been described as lackeys of Wall Street. Moving into public life in those days was like moving into the neighborhood of a million-dollar fruit tree whose fruit could readily be dislodged if one but made the slightest move in its direction. And this was easily done, for no one much seemed to be looking.
