25 - enter George Perkins
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How Capitalists Rule:
"The Republocrats" Series
Number 25:
ENTER GEORGE PERKINS
By Vince Copeland
George Washburn Perkins was one of the line of kingmakers and presidential advisers that had begun with William Whitney and the election of the Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1884. Perkins actually entered the political picture nearly two decades before the 1912 election. He was a close adviser to Albert Beveridge, the imperialist-minded liberal senator from Indiana. And he was so close to Theodore Roosevelt that the latter showed him practically all his major speeches before delivering them.
Perkins was a partner of J.P. Morgan. After 1900, he left active participation in the Morgan office and devoted himself full-time to politics. Unlike Whitney and Hanna, he took neither Cabinet position nor senatorial honors. And unlike Vice President Levi Morton, the big banker who also became a Morgan partner, he never held elective office.
While fundamentally continuing the process begun by Whitney, he had to play a more complex role. According to some authorities, he was the real force behind the Progressive movement--that is, the Roosevelt and senatorial part of the movement.
Together with Frank Munsey, a publisher who was also a Wall Street stock speculator close to the Morgans, Perkins provided the core of financial support for the new Progressive Party. Naturally, in advocating this party with Roosevelt, he assured the latter that funds would be forthcoming. The funds came, but in nowhere near the amounts necessary for such a countrywide campaign to approach success.
At the same time, Perkins sponsored the publication of a newspaper in New Jersey, the Trenton True American, that only saw the light of day for the period of the election campaign. It supported the candidacy of Democrat Woodrow Wilson and was mailed all over the country.
While Perkins' role in the paper is publicly known today, it was fairly secret at the time. But Roosevelt must have known about it. How could he possibly have squared this with Perkins' apparent interest in progressivism and Roosevelt's candidacy for the Progressive Party? Is it conceivable that anyone pouring his or her energy into a new party of any kind would want to contribute to a rival political party to defeat the new one?
It was actually the oldest political trick in the world.
That is, Perkins' support for the Progressive Party was the trick; his support for Wilson and the Democrats was the aim of the game. The support for the Progressive Party, needless to say, made sure under the circumstances that the Republicans would lose and Wilson would win.
There is no record of Roosevelt having any kind of showdown with Perkins over this. Perhaps he closed his eyes and resigned himself to it in the hope that he could still win anyway, that although he was the victim of a maneuver, he could still overcome it all by sheer popularity.
ANOTHER SYNTHETIC LIBERAL
Woodrow Wilson was on the right wing of the Democratic Party. He was an open opponent of William Jennings Bryan and a racist Democrat of the "solid South." He was well known to the Wall Street money crowd as a fundraiser for Princeton University, of which he had become president in 1902.
The Wall Streeters made him their chief candidate in a series of secret maneuvers. These are now known, primarily because Wilson himself was so deceptive and disloyal to his friends and supporters that several of them told "the whole story" about his candidacy.
Being a university president, he had an aura of liberalism about him that appealed to the electorate in those tumultuous days. But with such conservative personal views, he could be depended upon, or so it seemed, to bring the Democratic Party "back to its senses," safely ensconced in Wall Street's golden bosom.
Like the Republicans Roosevelt, Taft and McKinley, and like the Democrat Cleveland, Wilson had a Wall Street angel hovering over him. This angel's name was George Harvey.
Harvey was an editor of Harpers magazine who was appointed by Harper Brothers to be publisher of the company's several magazines and books. He was an experienced political operator with enough very high connections in the ruling class to make his operations effective.
Harvey was a very talented, even brilliant journalistic servitor of the big rich who had proved himself quite useful in lining up "opinions" in syndicated columns to help the plans of some of the Morgan interests. (This was before quite so many newspapers were owned outright by the same corporations.)
At this particular time, the Morgans were helping Harper Brothers through bankruptcy and were reorganizing the company. Harvey's relation with the Morgans was close and friendly.
Whether Harvey coordinated his pro-Wilson activities with Perkins is not known. But it is probably not necessary for our understanding and analysis of the election of 1912. Harvey played the Democratic side of the street while Perkins played the Republican and Progressive. Each of them did a masterly job at it.
HARVEY, THE CLAIRVOYANT
Harvey was probably not as able as Whitney, and certainly not as wealthy as Hanna. Perhaps he was even a little light-minded, as the following incident, related by Harvey's biographer, Willis Fletcher Johnson, shows:
At a dinner party given in 1919 by one of the leaders of New York society, the guests were in a merry political mood and vied with each other in guessing who the next chief executive would be. Harvey refused to join in, because, as he said with modest humor, "I KNOW who it will be." But he agreed to write down the name of the winner and seal it in an envelope to be opened after the Republican convention of 1920. When the great lady opened the envelope in the summer of 1920, she found the name "Warren Gamaliel Harding."
Neither Perkins nor the other kingmakers would have been so indiscreet as this. But Harvey, by this little show-off, has given us invaluable evidence that the big money does choose the presidents.
Harvey first decided upon the candidacy of Wilson well before the 1908 campaign, but knew he had to build his candidate up for a time. Thus it was that Wilson ran in 1912.
Wilson first came to Harvey's attention--at least as a presidential possibility--when the former submitted his five-volume "History of the People of the United States" to Harpers. Harvey was so impressed with it, so the story goes, that he immediately sent for all Wilson's other writings and studied them with a view to Wilson's qualifications to be president.
Actually, he must have been acquainted with Wilson for some time before this, mostly through Wilson's little fund-raising speeches for Princeton among the wealthiest New Yorkers. What probably impressed him most about Wilson's history was his clear support for the new imperialism and his open rejection of Bryanism--which were clearly stated in the book.
If the majority of people had read this Wilsonian exercise, it is somewhat doubtful that they would have given him even the plurality of votes he received, much less a majority. For one thing, he showed his racism and his anti-foreignism just as blandly as he would have talked about the color of his necktie. He differentiated, for instance, between southern and northern Europeans, saying only the latter were desirable citizens of the United States.
He was apparently embarrassed that the early white population of Georgia was mostly composed of prisoners, so he explained in his book that they were only prisoners for debt and not real criminals, a fact that he could not verify any better than we can. (He spent much time in Georgia before becoming a professor at Princeton.)
Unlike Theodore Roosevelt, who kept silent on the matter, Wilson was unabashedly reactionary on the question of Reconstruction, if not the Civil War itself. Roosevelt hardly ever discussed the Radical Republicans and Reconstruction in his official or unofficial writings. No doubt he was ashamed of these political ancestors. He was careful to describe his father, and by implication himself, as a "Lincoln Republican" in his autobiography, by which he meant that he supported the Emancipation as a "war measure" to end the Southern slaveholders' revolt, and not for its own radical and human merits.
Wilson, however, did publish his opinions about these things on several occasions. One quotation will suffice. It is from a historical essay in the Atlantic Monthly of January 1901 entitled "Reconstruction in the Southern States."
The following paragraph tells it all.
"An extraordinary and very perilous state of affairs had been created in the South by the sudden and absolute emancipation of the Negroes, and it was not strange that the Southern legislatures should deem it necessary to take extraordinary steps to guard against the manifest and pressing dangers that it entailed. Here was a vast laboring, landless, homeless class, once slaves, now free; unpracticed in liberty, unschooled in self-control; never sobered by the discipline of self-support; never established in any habit of prudence; excited by a freedom they did not understand, exalted by false hopes, bewildered by and without leaders and yet insolent and aggressive; sick of work, covetous of pleasure, a host of dusky children untimely put out of school."(Quoted in Rayford W. Logan, "The Betrayal of the Negro," Collier, New York, 1965)
Beneath his restrained and polished language is the same sharp harpoon of racist hatred heard in the fulminations of the vulgar Southern lynchers of the U.S. Senate in that same period.
Harvey, in his capacity as editor of Harpers magazine (which we quoted earlier in connection with the vituperations against the Bryan Democrats), was well aware of Wilson's attitude on this important subject, too.
Accordingly, he floated his first trial balloon in the South. He made a speech in Charleston, S.C., in which he advocated a Southerner for president on the Democratic ticket. This was in 1904, just after Judge Alton Parker, the conservative New York Democrat, had been defeated by Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican Progressive. The speech, which created a mild sensation, was widely reported in the South and drew some national attention, too.
Two years later, Harvey definitely put Wilson's hat in the presidential ring at a private dinner for the bigwigs of New York finance held at the Lotus Club. J.P. Morgan and others were in attendance, and Harvey's speech caused quite a stir.
TIME FOR A RIGHT-WING DEMOCRAT
Practically spelling out the motive of the big capitalists in backing Wilson, Harvey said:
"As one of a considerable number of Democrats who have grown tired of voting Republican tickets, it is with a feeling of almost rapture that I occasionally contemplate even a remote possibility of casting a ballot for the President of Princeton University to become the President of the United States." (Willis Fletcher Johnson, "George Harvey: Passionate Patriot," Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1929, p. 106)
This was an ingenuous way of saying, "It's about time that we, the real ruling class, put a final end to this radicalism of the Democrats and make the party more like the Republican."
A few other less influential people had mentioned Wilson for the high honor, but with infinitely less effect. Harvey's biography compares this Lotus Club nomination with "Columbus' discovery of America." Leif Erickson, not to speak of the indigenous peoples, were here first, but that didn't count in the history books. Harvey's nomination, unlike other proposals, took root and became a living force from that time on.
That Lotus Club dinner was attended by most of the wheelers and dealers who would really choose the president, even though they had to wait until 1912 for this particular one.
Harvey then proceeded to sing a constant refrain for Wilson in his publications. However, his plans suffered from the fact that it was mainly his own project, even though the Morgans and others were favorable to it. So he got the help of Joseph Pulitzer, editor of the World newspaper, and persuaded him to run a lead editorial on Jan. 10, 1908, supporting Wilson.
This might have been meant for the 1908 election, but Roosevelt's sponsorship of Taft was so powerful with the people and so acceptable to at least the Rockefellers, if not the Morgans, that Taft won both the nomination and the election very easily.
Harvey had once been the director of the World and was a good friend of Pulitzer. So Pulitzer let him write the editorial himself, although this was kept secret from both the World staff and the general public.
The editorial began:
"If the Democratic Party is to be saved from falling into the hands of William Jennings Bryan as a permanent receiver, a Man must be found--and soon. Dissociated opposition will no longer suffice. There must arise a real leader around whom all Democrats uninfected by Populism and thousands of dissatisfied Republicans may rally with the enthusiasm which springs only from a certainty of deserving success and at least a chance of achieving it."
The editorial mentioned Wilson by name. It identified him as from the South as well as being president of Princeton. Observed and quoted all over the country, it made Wilson "the recognized candidate of an influential section of the Democratic Party," says Harvey's biographer, who also presents an interesting rationalization for the failure to pursue the 1908 nomination. It is both cynical and naive--or at least mechanical--but is worth thinking about.
"Harvey believed that ... one candidate must stand for the opposite of what the other candidate stood for. Thus, in 1896 and 1900 the Conservative, gold-standard McKinley was opposed by the Radical, free-silver Bryan. In 1904, Roosevelt was a pronounced Progressive, and the Democrats opposed him with the Conservative Parker. Now in 1908 the Republicans had nominated Taft, who despite Roosevelt's sponsorship of him, was more Conservative then Progressive and was certainly at the very antipodes of Radicalism. It behooved the Democrats, therefore, to nominate a decided Progressive. But Wilson was a Conservative and it would be illogical to set him against the Republican Conservative, Taft. There was not time to transform him into a Progressive. Such a conversion, especially while out of office, would seem too sudden to be true. So Harvey shrewdly chose to keep his candidate not a `standpatter' nor a reactionary, but what might be termed as an open-minded Conservative, waiting to see what would happen in 1912 or before and whether it would be necessary for Wilson to run then as a Conservative or a Progressive."(Willis Fletcher Johnson, p. 136)
If this was the true situation, then Harvey was saying that it was better for Bryan to have the Democratic nomination in 1908. And the truth is that Taft was not at all distasteful to big business at the time of his election. Known as a judge and legal worker, governor general of the Philippines and Secretary of War, a personal friend of the Rockefellers, he could hardly have better credentials as a member of the ruling elite. As the choice of Theodore Roosevelt, he would be a good vote-getter as well.
Indeed, this may have strongly influenced the Morgans, Rockefellers, etc., enough to treat a Wilson candidacy with only tepid enthusiasm at that time. It took Taft's ineptness in office and his innocent continuation (through his administration) of some of the more serious "trust-busting" against Rockefeller's Standard Oil to convince the Rockefeller group that he should be replaced. His moves into the no-no area of the Morgan empires would temper the enthusiasm of the Morgan crowd and lose the support of Roosevelt, if not the rest of the Progressives.
(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" on PeaceNet; on Internet: "workers@mcimail.com".)
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