10 - The Monopolists Take the Government
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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.
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(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; "workers@igc.apc.org".)
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