HOW DID IT COME TO THIS?
The Return of the Robber Barons and the Decline of Democracy
Omaha 1892
It's the Gilded Age, the Robber Barons are at their peak, and in Omaha on the Fourth of July, 1892, Ignatius Donnelly is delivering his fiery keynote speech at the founding convention of the Populist Party, denouncing capitalism that produces "the two classes, of tramps and millionaires." Donnelly had written a sci-fi book, Caesar's Column, depicting the poor rising up, killing the ruling class and cementing their bodies into a pillar. The people of the 19th century feared class war the way we fear nuclear war! The Populist Party called for many reforms to soften the class war, including public works, an income tax, and an eight hour work day. Factory workers, miners and farmers rallied behind Nebraska's William Jennings Bryan in his two Presidential campaigns. He was supported by the World Herald, where he'd been an editor. The paper was accused of spreading "Bryanarchy!" Nebraskans did elect a Populist- Democrat governor, William Poynter, but Bryan was defeated, and the excesses of the Gilded Age persisted.
Nebraska's Pulitzer-winning author Willa Cather considered "Two Friends" her best short story. It tells of two small-town Nebraskans who were the closest of friends and how they were torn apart by the divisive politics of Bryan's time. They grieved over the loss of their friendship (sound familiar?).
Robber Barons confronted. By 1900 J. P. Morgan created the world’s first billion dollar corporation, U.S. Steel, and paid himself a fee of $150,000,000. Now, folks, this was when a beer cost a nickel and a meal cost a quarter. What did this vast fortune rest on? Shutting down competition and “working 200,000 men twelve hours a day for wages that barely kept their families alive” -Howard Zinn. Monopolies dominated the economy and politics, with the rich atop a pyramidal class structure (sound familiar?). Why not tap the immense wealth hoarded at the top, to benefit the workers at the bottom whose labor produced it? The income tax was so popular that all three candidates for President in 1912, Teddy Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson, had to support it. (Obviously it wasn't meant to be like it is now!)
The Populists were preceded by, and absorbed, the Single-Taxers and the Farmer's Alliances. The Southern Farmer's Alliance brought blacks and whites together, far ahead of their time, but they encountered Jim Crow laws, and were attacked by the KKK. Single-Taxers were followers of Henry George, whose book, Progress and Poverty, was a runaway bestseller, prompting big tent "revivals." Even more popular was Edward Bellamy's utopian Looking Backward: 2000-1887, still worth reading, inspiring a wave of experimental communes. Reform was in the air. More: Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (won a Pulitzer).
The Progressives. In the early 20th century our Senator George W. Norris was one of the three most influential Progressives (Hiram Johnson of California and Robert LaFollete of Wisconsin being the other two.) They democratized politics with direct election of Senators, the referendum, and the initiative. Analysis: "At the end of Reconstruction [1877], the lives of most Americans were still controlled by the values of the village, the conventional 19th-century beliefs in individualism, laissez-faire [libertarianism], progress, and a divinely ordained social system. But in the last decades of the century, the spread of science and technology, industrialism, urbanization, immigration and economic depressions eroded this world-view." In The Search for Order, Robert Wiebe depicts the Progressive Era of Teddy Roosevelt (R) and Woodrow Wilson (D) as "a search for organizing principles around which a new viable social order could be constructed in the new, modern, largely impersonal world." That project continues to this day.
Reform. Facing the Great Depression in the 1930s, the pragmatic President Franklin D. Roosevelt said "Take a method and try it. If it fails, try another." The result: His New Deal programs ranged across a broad spectrum from the highly successful Tennessee Valley Authority on the far left (publicly owned utilities and services), the brainchild of Nebraska’s George W. Norris, to parades under the Blue Eagle flag of the National Recovery Administration on the far right; too corporate, monopolistic, and fascist, struck down by the Supreme Court. In between Left and Right: The REA, which brought electricity to rural areas, Social Security, banking regulation, FDIC-insured savings, unemployment compensation, FHA insurance which replaced the down payment of 90% formerly required to buy a house, the CCC, which put unemployed young men to work in National Parks and rural areas, and many other beneficial programs. The New Deal created modern America, and the excitement of that era is brought to life vividly in William Leuchtenberg'sbook, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, and in the 1993 PBS series The Great Depression.
In Crawford and Gordon, Nebraska, people were wandering door to door begging for a scrap of food, while the State Museum's fossil excavations were shutting down. The New Deal's Works Project Administration brought them together. An Omaha World Herald story in 1995 quoted Mylan Stout, retired curator: "That was one of the worst years ... People gravely needed work. They were starving. And our excavations were closing down." The WPA stepped in and paid 500 workers $40 to $60 a month to work on the crews. "Those were long days," Stout said. "We assembled by 6 a.m. and returned by 5. They were excellent workers, like all Nebraskans are." We gained world-class museum material and people's lives were redeemed, a win-win program. The WPA funded music, history and art projects, built 1,000 dams, 2,000 stadiums, 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 10,000 bridges, 20,000 miles of water mains, 700,000 miles of roads and a thousand airfields; wise investments in infrastructure that were never repeated on such a scale.
Backlash. FDR's Republican successor Eisenhower left important New Deal accomplishments in place, like Social Security, legalization of unions, minimum wage, bank regulation, and even added to them; interstate highways and student loans (justified as military necessities in the Cold War). As a result Americans enjoyed decades of consensus and progress while the middle class grew to its largest ever, before or since. FDR had fulfilled the dreams of the Populists, Progressives, and New Dealers, but a backlash simmered. Many of the wealthiest hated FDR as a "traitor to his class." Lindbergh and others even flirted with 1930s fascism.
The 1960s postwar baby boom brought new social movements; for the environment, peace, and Civil Rights. Martin Luther King was followed by Betty Friedan's feminism, Delores Huerta's UFW, and Robert Butler on ageism. Activism by gays began in self-defense at Stonewall Inn. Progress and social change produce backlash. Our new Robber Barons had money, influence, and a desire to turn back the clock.
The goal of the super-rich has always been to escape regulation and cut taxes (which require draconian budget cuts). How? By reversing the gains of the New Deal -and President Johnson's Great Society: Medicare, Civil Rights, Wilderness Protection, etc. For more: The excellent PBS series America's War on Poverty. Spoiler: LBJ didn't fail; it got cancelled, as Reaganomics and budget-cutting replaced "promote the general welfare," which the Constitution mandates. (Btw, will AI robots honor that?) "The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy" -Alex Carey. The 1971 Powell Memo urged training right-wing judges, converting news media to right-wing propaganda and setting up think tanks. It led to the Koch Brothers' Heritage Foundation Project 2025, Fox 'news,' DOGE's chainsaw. Inflict suffering; slash budgets and staff, shrink government back to the Gilded Age, when Robber Barons ruled unimpeded. Overcoming their propaganda and protecting democracy is the great challenge of our time.
Denouement (or is it Armageddon?). At a closed meeting for the super-rich in Las Vegas in October of 2010 the Koch Brothers defined "Freedom" as freedom from government regulation and from taxes. The old Robber Baron fantasy! Their greedy dream came true when the backlash against President Obama, including a rise in militant white nationalism, produced Donald Trump, whose election was applauded by neonazis at the Daily Stormer, the League of the South, and the KKK. Then Elon Musk's DOGE chainsaw slashed away at the Civil Service, which has remained at two million employees since the 1960s!, while at the same time the population doubled and services multiplied -a truly dedicated work force that didn't deserve the wrecking ball from Trump, and leaves us shortstaffed to face environmental crisis, health, etc. He is Putin's stealth "Manchurian Candidate." Putin's people trained Trump's first two campaign managers, Paul Manafort and Steve Bannon, and worked to get him elected. Putin's media czar Dmitry Kiselev said "a new star is rising: Trump," and trained Bannon in media propaganda. Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev said "Putin realizes that Trump will trample American democracy and damage, if not destroy, America." General Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA and the NSA, warned in his book The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies, Putin has won his media cyberwar. Our Supreme Leader, a decaying narcissistic sociopath, the delusional Emperor of Entropy, is the result, a destructive полезные идиоты (useful idiot).
The times demand a new social movement.
Pocket guide to resistance: Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny: 20 lessons from the 20th Century. For details about Putin & Trump: Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom.
Jim Bechtel, Omaha, for No Kings. Citations, sources, and further readings are posted on https://www.reason.ws/