December 31, 1912

(What does the future hold? Let's turn back the clock to the end of a year over a century ago.)  

By Daniel Greenfield  December 31, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

(Posting this article has become an annual tradition ever since the grim end of 2012. It's a reminder that the end of each year ushers in unknowns, but also opportunities for heroism. History does not stand still, and we should never assume that we know how it will come out.)  

The next year  sweeps around the earth like the hand of a clock, from Australia to Europe and across the great stretch of the Atlantic it rides the darkness to America. And then around and around again, each passing day marking another sweep of the hours.

While the year makes its first pass around the world, even if it doesn't feel like there is much to celebrate, let us leave it behind, open a door in time and step back to another year, a century past.

December 31, 1912.

The crowds are large, the men wear hats, and the word 'gay' means happy. Liquor is harder to come by because the end of the year has fallen on a Sunday. 

There are more dances and fewer corporate brands. Horns are blown, and the occasional revolver fired into the air, a sight unimaginable in the controlled celebrations of today's urban metropolis.

The Hotel Workers Union strike fizzled out on Broadway though a volley of bricks was hurled at the Hotel Astor during the celebrations. New York's Finest spent the evening outside the Rockefeller mansion waiting to subpoena the tycoon in the money trust investigation. And the Postmaster General inaugurated the new parcel service by shipping a silver loving cup from Washington to New York.

On Ellis Island, Castro, a bitter enemy of the United States, and the former president of Venezuela, had been arrested for trying to sneak into the country while the customs officers had their guard down. Gazing at the Statue of Liberty, Castro denied that he was a revolutionary and bitterly urged the American masses to rise up and tear down the statue in the name of freedom.

Times Square has far fewer billboards and no videos, but it does have the giant Horn and Hardart Automat which opened just that year, where food comes from banks of vending machines giving celebrating crowds a view of the amazing world of tomorrow for the world of 1912 is after all like our own. We can open a door into the past, but we cannot escape the present.

The Presidential election of 1912 ended in disaster. Both Taft and Roosevelt lost and Woodrow Wilson won. In the White House, President Taft met with cabinet members and diplomats for a final reception.

Woodrow Wilson, who would lead America into a bloody and senseless war, subvert its Constitution, and begin the process of making global government and statism into the national religion of his party, was optimistic about the new year. "Thirteen is my lucky number," he said. "It is curious how the number 13 has figured in my life and never with bad fortune." 

In Indianapolis, the train carrying union leaders guilty of the dynamite plot was making its secret way to Federal prison even while the lawyers of the dynamiters vowed to appeal.

The passing year, a century past, had its distinct echoes in our own time. There had been, what the men of the time, thought of as wars, yet they could not even conceive of the wars shortly to come. There were the usual dry news items about the collapse of the government in Spain, a war and an economic crisis in distant parts of the world that did not concern them. The Federal Reserve Act would be signed at the end of 1913, partly in response to the economic crisis. 

Socialism was on the march with the Socialist Party having doubled its votes in the national election.  All three major candidates, Wilson, Roosevelt and Taft, had warned that the country was drifting toward Socialism and that they were the only ones who could stop it. 

"Unless Socialism is checked," Professor Albert Bushnell Hart warned, "within sixteen years there will be a Socialist President of the United States." 

Hart was off by four years. Hoover won in 1928. FDR won in 1932. 

At New York City's May Day rally, the American flag was torn down and replaced with the red flag, to cries of, "Take down that dirty rag" and "We don't recognize that flag."

The site of the rally was Union Square, one of the locations where Black Lives Matter hangs out, taking over from Occupy Wall Street and generations of radicals.

There was tension on the Mexican border and alarm over Socialist successes in German elections. An obscure fellow with the silly name of Lenin had carved out a group with the even sillier name of the Bolsheviks. China became a Republic. New Mexico became a state, the African National Congress was founded and the Titanic sank.  

There was bloody fighting in Benghazi where 20,000 Italian troops faced off against 20,000 Arabs and 8,000 Turks. The Italians had modern warships and armored vehicles, while the Muslim forces were supplied by voluntary donations and fighters crossing from Egypt and across North Africa to join in attacking the infidels.

The Italian-Turkish war has since been forgotten, except by the Italians, the Libyans and the Turks, but it featured the first strategic use of airships, ushering in a century of European aerial warfare. 

There was a good deal going on while the horns were blown and men in heavy coats and wet hats made their way through the festivities.

World War I was two years away, but the Balkan War had already fired the first shots. The rest was just a matter of bringing the non-phosphorus matches closer to the kindling. The Anti-Saloon League was gathering strength for a nationwide effort that would hijack the political system and divide it into dry and wet, and, among other things, ram through the personal income tax.

Change was coming, and as in 1912, the country was no longer hopeful, it was wary.

The century, for all its expected glamor, had been a difficult one. The future, political and economic, was unknown. Few knew exactly what was to come, but equally few were especially optimistic even when the champagne was flowing.

If we were to stop a reveler staggering out of a hotel, stand in his path and tell him that war was five years away and a great depression would come in on its tail, that liquor would be banned, crime would proliferate and a Socialist president would rule the United States for three terms, while wielding near absolute power, he might have decided to make his way to the recently constructed Manhattan Bridge for a swan dive into the river.

And yet we know that though all this is true, there is a deeper truth. For all those setbacks, the United States survived, and many of us look nostalgically toward a time that was every bit as uncertain and nerve-wracking as our own.

December 31, 1912 was a door that opened onto many things.

Our December 31 is likewise a door, and if a man in shiny clothes from the year 2120 were to stop us on the street and spill out everything he knew about the next century, it is likely that there would be as much greatness as tragedy in that tale.

As the year sweeps across the earth, let us remember that history is more than the worst of its events, that all times bear the burden of their uncertainties, but also carry within them the seeds of greatness. Looking back on this time, it may be that it is not the defeats that we will recall, but how they readied us for the fight ahead.

 

America has not fallen, no more than it did when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1912. Though it may not seem likely now, there are many great things ahead, and though the challenges at times seem insurmountable and the defeats many, another year and another century await us.

Daniel Greenfield is a columnist, an investigative journalist and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Leftist Rights and Wrongs - or - Fixing Education is Job One in America

By Rich Kozlovich

 

Today, December 16, 2022 Allan J. Feifer posted this piece on American Thinker, The Rapidly Dissipating Art of Thinking, outlining things that should be obvious to the most casual observer, unfortunately that requires rational thought processes, something that's becoming more and more rare, especially in the media.  And especially among celebrities and those nitwits....and especially internet trolls.....who  spew out nonsensical, irrational comments and logical fallacies.  

He notes some of those irrational views, and in light of recent insane Congressional efforts, all being supported by RINO's, I think these are worth exploring. He states:

What do all of the following have in common? 

• I have a right to practice recreational oblivion (drug use). 
• I have a right to steal “stuff” from stores and not get prosecuted. 
• I have a right to believe my “facts” are equal to yours, and then I can make you live by mine. 
• I have a “right” to come to America, and then you must support me to become a citizen.
•  I have a right to wealth equal to yours, and if that means taking it from you, that’s okay. 
• I have a right to say whatever I want, but you don’t because you are irredeemably White.  
• I have a right not to work if I don’t want to because the government is obligated to support me.

They’re all modern attitudes that are totally antithetical to a structured and sound thought process!.........one dares not call out certain classes of people on their logic, sense, truth, or perception of reality for fear of being called any of several powerful, nasty, and socially irredeemable names.  Indeed, the power of the law backs up this craziness more every day as our society begins to buy into the belief in “thought crime.”

This didn't just come about overnight.  This has been under construction by the left for 125 years in America, with the goal of destroying all the foundational values and intellectual constructs that made America great, and it started with education.  The goal of the socialists who created organized education was to make sure the apple fell as far away from the tree as possible.  

[Starting with] John Dewey, leftists have been feverishly working to politically destroy the United States. Mr. Dewey and his like-minded followers understood, in order to change the United States into a lesser nation under international dominance, Americans would have to be weaned off of the principles that made her great. So, the gradual turning away from school education toward globalist-oriented indoctrination began. The evil father of the indoctrination system of government schools producing misguided fools began in earnest in the latter half of the nineteenth century.............Think about it. Today, almost half of American students hate God. They are also willing to take on the mantle of socialism, despite the horrors of it displayed in our hemisphere via Venezuela, and so many more failed countries.

The goal was to make the state the final and ultimate moral arbiter for the children, not their parents, not the churches.  The state!  We're there now, and they did it with the help of two Presidents, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom believed in two concepts:  "l'etat se moi", I am the state, and the Constitution is an impediment to human progress.  

All this is now supported by a totally corrupted education system in America. and the false history that's promoted and touted by the left is causing America to commit suicide, destroying us with out own values.  All outlined by Saul Alinsky in his Rules for Radicals.  

We know their goals and their means, now we have to have the courage and fortitude to confront them and transform education in America.  That starts with understanding education must become Job One in America.  It's been totally taken over by leftists, Marxists, socialists, communists, Democrats ..... sorry .... I'm repeating myself ..... and if America is to survive education at all levels must be totally transformed, and that has to start at the local school boards.  These school boards must be forced to realize the parents exercising their Constitutional rights are the power, and they're just hired help.  Hired help that can be thrown out of office, and that needs to start now.

And that mentality needs to be expanded to the state boards of education.  To fix this it must become an organized national effort, which is clear Trump is forcing the Republican party to adopt and promote, including the elimination of the Department of Education and any funding to universities, and taxing their endowments that are worth billions of dollars.  

Force them to become for profit institutions that have to compete without government grant money or student loans.  Then as totally private businesses, it they wish to push their leftist agenda and compete for student dollars in an open market, that's their business.  But the government must be forced to stay out of it and not force these insane diversity, inclusion and equity programs that are doing nothing more than destroying the nation. 

We must recognize and understand all the "rights" demanded by leftists are "wrongs", all promoted by losers who through the years imposed:

1. The totalitarian brutality in nations that (so far) have murdered and starved 100 million people?
2. The economic illiteracy of a system that has anywhere and everywhere produced misery and poverty?
3. The moral abomination of an ideology that assumes individuals are abjectly subservient to the state.

That's history and that history is incontestable, and that's the history that needs to be taught and it needs to be taught now, and as I've stated, Trump is forcing the Republican Party to embrace that concept, and vigorously promote it, because parents in America are now being awakened to the tyranny and corruption at the school board level.  All it takes is some leadership to create a national agenda and definitive corrective action, and I believe that would expand into all aspects of American life. 

The base has been awakened!  Will the leadership act?  We'll see.

What Progressives Wrought

A concise new volume will help Americans make sense of the stark divisions that confront us. 

Mike Sabo September 16, 2021 @ City Journal

America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism, by Ronald J. Pestritto (Encounter Books, 288 pp., $28.99)

It is no secret that American public life is fracturing. The fissures can be seen in our gladiatorial-like Supreme Court nomination hearings, the collapse of confidence in our institutions, and the mounting sense that many have that elections won’t change the country’s fundamental trajectory. These disputes are merely symptoms, however, of a broader problem, the roots of which extend back decades.

As Ronald J. Pestritto, graduate dean and professor of politics at Hillsdale College, argues in America Transformed, our present-day clashes reflect a fundamental “divide over first principles,” which he traces to the rise of the Progressive Movement in the late nineteenth century. Pestritto makes a convincing case that the Progressives—including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly, and John Dewey—sought to “revolutionize both the theory and practice of American government.”

The Progressives had their differences and factions: consider the fierce 1912 presidential campaign between Wilson and Roosevelt. Yet they adhered to a “coherent set of principles, with a common purpose.” They unleashed a “direct assault on the core ideas of the American founding,” openly rejecting the natural rights teachings of the Declaration of Independence. Wilson once told an audience that “if you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface”—the same preface that contains the most concise articulation of the Founders’ political theory.

Pestritto argues that, for progressives like education reformer Dewey, the Founders’ “great sin” was to think that principles such as a natural human equality in rights and government by consent transcended “the particular circumstances of that day.” Influenced by Hegel’s philosophical idealism, they argued that historical progress had shown that what the Founders thought were universal truths were in fact simply ideas of their time. In fact, the principles of the American Founding, and the Constitution built to reflect them, actively prevented government from taking the swift action that the public now demanded.

Pestritto suggests that “native influences” had already compromised the American immune system by the time the Progressive Movement emerged. A toxic mix of Social Darwinism, pragmatism, and the rejection of social compact theory in New England and the antebellum South prepared American intellectuals and politicians to accept an alternative account of politics that seemed better able to meet the challenges of modern society. The Progressives claimed that historical progress necessitated a dynamic and perfectible human nature, an idea that the Founders rejected. James Madison’s claim in Federalist 10 that the prevention of majority tyranny would always be a problem in political life was simply false, they believed. Thus Woodrow Wilson and political scientist Frank Goodnow sharply criticized the Constitution’s separation of powers and the slow, methodical lawmaking process the Framers had put in place, which they saw as hopelessly out of step with the public will and too often stymied by a combination of political machines, big business, and other special interests.

Pestritto maintains that the progressives worked toward “democratizing and unifying national political institutions,” though they sometimes differed on the means to achieve this end. Ever the radical, Theodore Roosevelt proposed policies such as overturning judicial decisions and the recall of recalcitrant judges who resisted heavy regulation of business. Herbert Croly, a cofounder of The New Republic, wanted to eliminate political parties altogether.

To make politics fully democratic, the Progressives insisted that political leaders accountable to the people needed to find means of breaking the constitutional logjam—think of Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit.” Roosevelt and Wilson frequently enlisted (and refashioned) the memory of American statesmen such as Abraham Lincoln, John Marshall, and Daniel Webster, men who, in their rendering, had supposedly discerned history’s centralizing trends.

Pestritto argues that as the Progressives seemingly brought politics closer to the people, they simultaneously moved “policymaking power away from popular institutions,” handing it to “educated elites.” They essentially established a fourth branch of government, a vast bureaucracy that wields legislative, executive, and judicial powers—what Madison considered the very definition of tyranny—that would fully bloom during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency. What we know today as the administrative state (a phrase coined by the political scientist Dwight Waldo in the 1950s) had its genesis in the Supreme Court’s ruling in J.W. Hampton v. United States, which granted broad powers to supposedly nonideological experts insulated from the corrupting effects of electoral politics.

Pestritto notes that this new conception of government—the sharp split between politics and administration—originated in the “laboratories of democracy” of state and local governments. There, Progressive governors such as California’s Hiram Johnson and Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette pushed direct democracy: the ballot initiative, recall, referendum, the direct election of senators, and electoral primaries. Through the establishment of government by unelected commission and the rise of nonpartisan city managers, the notion of expert administration permeated state governments in Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, and Illinois, as well as cities such as Galveston, Cincinnati, Des Moines, and Cleveland.

The Progressives’ strong belief in the notion of historical progress also guided their foreign policy. History had demonstrated that modern democracy was the “permanent and most advanced form of government,” Wilson once wrote. To make the world safe for democracy, the Progressives’ idealistic foreign policy necessitated an aggressive series of interventions in Haiti, Santo Domingo, Cuba, Mexico, and the Philippines.

History had chosen the United States to lead the “children” (as Wilson described other sovereign nations) so that they could someday reach the heights of democratic governance. And should certain “barbaric races” fail to do what they were told, Progressive historian Charles Merriam wrote in a particularly appalling passage, they “may be swept away.”

Some Progressives saw historical progress as the will of God Himself. Marshaling rhetoric that today would be regarded as extreme Christian nationalism, Roosevelt told the Progressive Party convention in 1912, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

Adherents of the Social Gospel, the Progressive Movement’s religious wing, were liberal Protestants who worked to reconcile life “on earth as it is in heaven.” They turned away from concerns over individual salvation and other orthodox theological concerns and instead inculcated a social ethic that sought to use the modern state to equalize economic conditions. Pestritto observes that in one of his more moderate moments Baptist pastor Walter Rauschenbusch called for the “public ownership of essential industries.” By following God’s unfolding plan, which history was revealing to mankind, human beings would someday experience the Eden that our ancestors had failed to maintain.

Pestritto concludes America Transformed by noting that, thanks to the Progressives’ handiwork, “citizens of two different regimes [are] occupying the same country.” The regime that today opposes that of the Founders is far different from what the original Progressives intended, but by uncoupling America from its natural rights foundations, they can justly be credited (or rather, blamed) for inaugurating our current crisis. Pestritto’s concise volume, the best available overview of progressive political thought and practice, will help Americans make sense of the stark divisions that confront us.

Mike Sabo is the editor of RealClear’s American Civics portal.

Photo: Lingbeek/iStock

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529).

 

What Progressives Wrought

A concise new volume will help Americans make sense of the stark divisions that confront us.

Mike Sabo September 16, 2021 @ City Journal 

America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism, by Ronald J. Pestritto (Encounter Books, 288 pp., $28.99)

It is no secret that American public life is fracturing. The fissures can be seen in our gladiatorial-like Supreme Court nomination hearings, the collapse of confidence in our institutions, and the mounting sense that many have that elections won’t change the country’s fundamental trajectory. These disputes are merely symptoms, however, of a broader problem, the roots of which extend back decades.

As Ronald J. Pestritto, graduate dean and professor of politics at Hillsdale College, argues in America Transformed, our present-day clashes reflect a fundamental “divide over first principles,” which he traces to the rise of the Progressive Movement in the late nineteenth century. Pestritto makes a convincing case that the Progressives—including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly, and John Dewey—sought to “revolutionize both the theory and practice of American government.”

The Progressives had their differences and factions: consider the fierce 1912 presidential campaign between Wilson and Roosevelt. Yet they adhered to a “coherent set of principles, with a common purpose.” They unleashed a “direct assault on the core ideas of the American founding,” openly rejecting the natural rights teachings of the Declaration of Independence. Wilson once told an audience that “if you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface”—the same preface that contains the most concise articulation of the Founders’ political theory.

Pestritto argues that, for progressives like education reformer Dewey, the Founders’ “great sin” was to think that principles such as a natural human equality in rights and government by consent transcended “the particular circumstances of that day.” Influenced by Hegel’s philosophical idealism, they argued that historical progress had shown that what the Founders thought were universal truths were in fact simply ideas of their time. In fact, the principles of the American Founding, and the Constitution built to reflect them, actively prevented government from taking the swift action that the public now demanded.

Pestritto suggests that “native influences” had already compromised the American immune system by the time the Progressive Movement emerged. A toxic mix of Social Darwinism, pragmatism, and the rejection of social compact theory in New England and the antebellum South prepared American intellectuals and politicians to accept an alternative account of politics that seemed better able to meet the challenges of modern society. The Progressives claimed that historical progress necessitated a dynamic and perfectible human nature, an idea that the Founders rejected. James Madison’s claim in Federalist 10 that the prevention of majority tyranny would always be a problem in political life was simply false, they believed. Thus Woodrow Wilson and political scientist Frank Goodnow sharply criticized the Constitution’s separation of powers and the slow, methodical lawmaking process the Framers had put in place, which they saw as hopelessly out of step with the public will and too often stymied by a combination of political machines, big business, and other special interests.

Pestritto maintains that the progressives worked toward “democratizing and unifying national political institutions,” though they sometimes differed on the means to achieve this end. Ever the radical, Theodore Roosevelt proposed policies such as overturning judicial decisions and the recall of recalcitrant judges who resisted heavy regulation of business. Herbert Croly, a cofounder of The New Republic, wanted to eliminate political parties altogether.

To make politics fully democratic, the Progressives insisted that political leaders accountable to the people needed to find means of breaking the constitutional logjam—think of Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit.” Roosevelt and Wilson frequently enlisted (and refashioned) the memory of American statesmen such as Abraham Lincoln, John Marshall, and Daniel Webster, men who, in their rendering, had supposedly discerned history’s centralizing trends.

Pestritto argues that as the Progressives seemingly brought politics closer to the people, they simultaneously moved “policymaking power away from popular institutions,” handing it to “educated elites.” They essentially established a fourth branch of government, a vast bureaucracy that wields legislative, executive, and judicial powers—what Madison considered the very definition of tyranny—that would fully bloom during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency. What we know today as the administrative state (a phrase coined by the political scientist Dwight Waldo in the 1950s) had its genesis in the Supreme Court’s ruling in J.W. Hampton v. United States, which granted broad powers to supposedly nonideological experts insulated from the corrupting effects of electoral politics.

Pestritto notes that this new conception of government—the sharp split between politics and administration—originated in the “laboratories of democracy” of state and local governments. There, Progressive governors such as California’s Hiram Johnson and Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette pushed direct democracy: the ballot initiative, recall, referendum, the direct election of senators, and electoral primaries. Through the establishment of government by unelected commission and the rise of nonpartisan city managers, the notion of expert administration permeated state governments in Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, and Illinois, as well as cities such as Galveston, Cincinnati, Des Moines, and Cleveland.

The Progressives’ strong belief in the notion of historical progress also guided their foreign policy. History had demonstrated that modern democracy was the “permanent and most advanced form of government,” Wilson once wrote. To make the world safe for democracy, the Progressives’ idealistic foreign policy necessitated an aggressive series of interventions in Haiti, Santo Domingo, Cuba, Mexico, and the Philippines.

History had chosen the United States to lead the “children” (as Wilson described other sovereign nations) so that they could someday reach the heights of democratic governance. And should certain “barbaric races” fail to do what they were told, Progressive historian Charles Merriam wrote in a particularly appalling passage, they “may be swept away.”

Some Progressives saw historical progress as the will of God Himself. Marshaling rhetoric that today would be regarded as extreme Christian nationalism, Roosevelt told the Progressive Party convention in 1912, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

Adherents of the Social Gospel, the Progressive Movement’s religious wing, were liberal Protestants who worked to reconcile life “on earth as it is in heaven.” They turned away from concerns over individual salvation and other orthodox theological concerns and instead inculcated a social ethic that sought to use the modern state to equalize economic conditions. Pestritto observes that in one of his more moderate moments Baptist pastor Walter Rauschenbusch called for the “public ownership of essential industries.” By following God’s unfolding plan, which history was revealing to mankind, human beings would someday experience the Eden that our ancestors had failed to maintain.

Pestritto concludes America Transformed by noting that, thanks to the Progressives’ handiwork, “citizens of two different regimes [are] occupying the same country.” The regime that today opposes that of the Founders is far different from what the original Progressives intended, but by uncoupling America from its natural rights foundations, they can justly be credited (or rather, blamed) for inaugurating our current crisis. Pestritto’s concise volume, the best available overview of progressive political thought and practice, will help Americans make sense of the stark divisions that confront us.

Mike Sabo is the editor of RealClear’s American Civics portal.

Photo: Lingbeek/iStock

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529). DONATE

 

The Original Deep State

August 26, 2020 By Robert Spencer

Donald Trump is not the first president to face down a deep-state cabal, that is, an unelected oligarchy of shadowy figures who wielded enormous power while being unaccountable to the American public. The first was President Andrew Jackson, who faced down the Bank of the United States in the 1820s and 1830s; then as now, the deep state has apparently included a significant financial element. Trump’s top economic aide Lawrence Kudlow said it last October: “I don’t want to get into a lot of Fed bashing,” but “their models are highly flawed. The deep state board staff, of course, has not been very helpful -- oops, did I say that?”

Yes, he did. And whatever the actual role of the Federal Reserve in the coup attempt against Trump, there is no doubt that some have been sounding warnings about it since at least 1931 – people in a position to know.

As Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster explains, the Federal Reserve was established in December 1913, during the “progressive” Woodrow Wilson administration. But the Fed was just a new version of the same Bank of the United States that Jackson fought: a private corporation that kept the public treasury. Its foes argued that it was dangerous to turn power over the public funds to an oligarchy of private financiers, since the possibility for corruption, and for a de facto second government developed by buying favors until large enough to challenge the government of the United States, was immense.

Yet as far as Wilson was concerned, that was by design. Late in the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, the Knickerbocker Trust Company was failing, leading to a significant economic downturn, the Panic of 1907. Banking baron J. P. Morgan stepped in to aid banks that were failing and thus minimize the crisis. Wilson, at that time the president of Princeton University, showed a taste for authoritarian government, writing: “All this trouble could be averted if we appointed a committee of six or seven public-spirited men like J. P. Morgan to handle the affairs of our country.”............To Read More....

Theodore Roosevelt: Leftist

By John Ray -- July, 2018 @ John Ray.com

(Editor's Note: For years I've been saying the worst President of the United States in the 20th century was Teddy Roosevelt, and this explains why. Also, My Home Page still isn't working properly and so none of the links will work. However, I've decided to post full articles that are profound anyway. If you type in the article title followed by "in Paradigms and Demographics" you may be able to get to the article through that venue and if so - all links will then work and the side bar will appear. Best wishes, RK)

The life and times of Theodore Roosevelt are amply documented in many sources but I want to offer here a brief summary of some lesser known aspects of his life. The first thing I need to mention is probably that there were two Roosevelts, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore was President just before WWI and Franklin was President during WWII. They were related but only distantly. The surname is an old Dutch name, going back to the time when New York was New Amsterdam.

Let me start with a characterization of his personality drawn from here:

Philosophically, Roosevelt was the consummate Progressive, determined to bring efficiency and coordinated intelligence to bear against the trusts, against despoilers of the natural environment, and against international disorder. He was, as one historian put it, "the first great president-reformer of the modern industrial era." He therefore had little patience with federalism and indeed with most of the constitutional impediments that stood between him and the construction of a new American state. 

Politically he was a committed nationalist. He thus could barely bring himself to speak of Thomas Jefferson, whom he loathed; and as late as the 1880s he was still condemning Jefferson Davis as a traitor. The Confederate cause, since it denied that a large consolidated nation was its own justification, enraged him. Roosevelt brought to the presidential office a thorough and consistent philosophy of the presidency. What a previous president may have done hesitatingly or without fanfare, Theodore Roosevelt made a matter of principle.  

Presidential scholar Edward Corwin has spoken of the "personalization of the presidency," by which he means that the accident of personality has played a considerable role in shaping the office. And indeed it is hard to think of a stronger personality than that of Theodore Roosevelt who ever served as president. One presidential scholar observed that Roosevelt gave the office "the absorbing drama of a Western movie." And no wonder. Mark Twain, who met with the president twice, declared him "clearly insane."

In a way, Roosevelt set the tone for his public life to come at age 20, when, after an argument with his girlfriend, he went home and shot and killed his neighbor's dog. He told a friend in 1884 that when he donned his special cowboy suit, which featured revolver and rifle, "I feel able to face anything." When he killed his first buffalo, he "abandoned himself to complete hysteria," as historian Edmund Morris put it, "whooping and shrieking while his guide watched in stolid amazement." His reaction was similar in 1898 when he killed his first Spaniard.

He loathed inactivity. At one point during the 1880s he wrote to a friend that he had been working so hard lately that for the next month he was going to do nothing but relax - and write a life of Oliver Cromwell. Henry Adams said that all Roosevelt's friends know that his restless and combative energy was more than abnormal.

One of his sons is said to have remarked, "Father always wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral."

Mark Twain was right. From all of the above it emerges clearly that Roosevelt had some form of mental abnormality and there is little dispute that he was bipolar.   He suffered from a sub-clinical form of manic/depression. His energy and constant activity were manic. Those who hold him up as an example are basically holding up a madman as an example. He had sufficient grip of reality to avoid getting himself into serious trouble, however. He managed to deploy his energies constructively.

One of the biggest confusions surrounding TR is that the was some sort of conservative. That mainly stems from his being for most of his political career a member of the Republican party. But that only happened because the identity of American political parties over the last two hundred years or so has been very fluid, as the Democrat campaign poster below rather graphically shows:

Over time the two major parties have almost switched roles. The GOP was once the party of big government (particularly in the person of Abraham Lincoln) and the party of blacks. The "copperheads" (mostly Democrats) opposed Lincoln's war, thus obstructing both big government and black emancipation. And the drift away from that particular polarization has been ongoing ever since. And in Roosevelt's day, the process was half way to where it is today, with the GOP comprising both liberal and conservative wings. TR belonged to the liberal wing.

Eventually even the liberal wing of the GOP was too conservative for him and he founded a new political party which he called the "Progressive" party. It was however better known by its nickname: "The Bull Moose" party. The name TR gave his party was significant. In the later part of the 19th century the intellectual life of America was dominated by a "Progressive" movement.

Following is a description of American Progressivism of the early 20th century. It was collectivist and reform-minded though in other ways it was not like modern-day Leftism.

"Progressive policies embodied an underlying philosophy repugnant to Jeffersonianism. As Ekirch describes this philosophy, "Society in the future would have to be based more and more on an explicit subordination of the individual to a collectivist, or nationalized, political and social order. This change, generally explained as one of progress and reform, was of course also highly important in building up nationalistic sentiment. At the same time, the rising authority and prestige of the state served to weaken the vestiges of internationalism and cosmopolitanism and to intensify the growing imperialistic rivalries." In their statist cause the progressives, who were now appropriating the name "liberal," enlisted Social Darwinism, economic determinism, and relativism.

And from very early-on TR was reform-minded and anti-big-business. And even whilst a Republican President he was notable for his worker-welfare and environmentalist initiatives -- setting up national parks in particular. And in good Progressive fashion (See Obama) he stretched his Presidential authority to the limit in some of those initiatives

But harking back to the description at the beginning of this article we see even more of TR's Leftism. The initial mention of "Trusts" translates to "big business" in modern terms or perhaps "oligopolies' in economist's terms. In good Leftist style, TR was against them. Compare that with the Leftist fury at Wal-Mart during Bush II's second election campaign.

And TR was of course a Greenie (e.g. National parks) when that was little known outside Germany.

And the fact that he was against international disorder is mirrored in the fact that it was three Democrat Presidents that got an unwilling America into WWI, WWII and Vietnam. Leftists are meddlers in other people's affairs.

Something that really goes to the heart of Leftism is ego. Angry dissatisfaction with the world about them is definitional of Leftism but something else is needed as well: Arrogance. The Leftist both believes that he knows better how to organize the world and feels entitled to force change upon it -- preferably by revolution but alternatively by an unending stream of "reform" legislation if there is no widespread appetite for revolution. The Leftist has a big ego, in other words. And TR clearly had that in abundance. His son's formulation that his father "always wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral." must be about as strong a formulation of egocentricity as there is. And his "whooping and shrieking" when he killed a buffalo also suggests extreme self-satisfaction.

Unlike the American Leftists of today, the Progressives were in fact thoroughly patriotic, and Croly -- arguably the leading light of Progressivism -- was certainly explicitly nationalist. And one of Croly's disciples was both vastly influential and a remarkably exact model for Mussolini's imperialistic nationalism. The disciple concerned? Theodore Roosevelt. To know anything of American history of the early 20th century is to know of TR's strident American nationalism and militarism and his key role in the conquest of the Spanish empire in Cuba and the Philippines on quite shallow pretexts.

TR's nationalism really was nationalism, not mere patriotism. Like other Leftist nationalists such as Hitler and Mussolini, he really did want to conquer and control other countries. Unlike those two gentlemen, however, he actually got on his horse and took a personal part in conquering one: Cuba. His explosive energies would have been responsible for that.

And certainly in war-glorifying, militaristic, nationalistic, action-worshipping and big-government ideas TR very strongly anticipated Mussolini. And TR, of course, "entirely" agreed that as a race negroes are "altogether inferior to the whites." That latter sentiment however was virtually universal at the time so cannot be taken as diagnostoic of anything much.

Roosevelt's compulsive action orientation also had an echo in the formation of Fascist Italy. Predecessors of the Fascists were the Italian Futurists, who later merged with the Fascists.

"We shall sing the love of danger, energy and boldness!" the Futurist Manifesto shouted from the rooftops in 1909. "We declare that the world's splendour has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. There is no more beauty except in strife, no masterpiece without aggressiveness, a violent onslaught upon the unknown forces, to force them to bow to the will of man ..."

Because Leftists these days are barely patriotic, let alone nationalistic, it is customary to ignore the socialism in the policies of Hitler and Mussolini and attribute their nationalism to "Rightism" but any reading of their policies and writings will show that they were thoroughly Leftist. And nationalism was once common worldwide on the Left, not only in Croly and the American Progressives. Friedrich Engels, co-author with Karl Marx of Das Kapital was, for instance, a furious German nationalist. So TR was in fact a predecessor of Mussolini and Hitler. I will get a kneejerk reaction from any Leftist reading these notes to the effect that Hitler and Mussolini could not possibly have been Leftists, but see here and here for a very  for a very comprehensive coverage of the evidence for their Leftism.

And TR had other baggage similar to Hitler's and Mussolini's. Following the Progressives of his day, he saw war as a purifying force and put his faith in battleships and the like. He managed a big buildup of the U.S. navy and used it for boasting purposes. He painted his ships white ("peacetime colours"), added some nifty gold trims and in 1907 sent his "Great White Fleet" -- including 16 battleships -- on a round-the-world cruise to make it clear the U.S. navy had arrived -- after that unfortunate affair with the battleship "Maine". The fleet was generally greeted with enthusiasm wherever it came into port but it is notable that the fleet bypassed the great British naval base at Portsmouth. Why?

My guess is that it was because Britain had outbuilt TR. Both the British and American navies were at that time the work of strong personalities.

In Britain, the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, Jackie Fisher, was a very capable and persuasive person in getting funds for his fleet -- but he had an even more persuasive backstop in the person of the King, who had great respect for his country's naval traditions. Edward VII, like all British monarchs since Cromwell, had great formal powers but little customary power. Edward was however a very plausible personality (He even kept his cousin the Kaiser quiescent while he lived) and if Fisher's submissions were not being treated with sufficient gravity, an invitation to an audiece at Buckingham palace to the First Lord of the Admiralty (the government minister with responsibility for the navy) would go out. And NOBODY refuses an audience at Buck House. So the combination of the King and the First Sea Lord was heavily felt and often resulted in money for the navy being "found".  A short play about those times is here.

So Fisher had managed to build a large and modern fleet. And TR probably feared that if his fleet pulled into Portsmouth, the British would draw down enough ships from Scapa Flow and Lough Swilly to outnumber the American fleet, which would be seen as a humiliation. And Britain's latest mega-battleship, the "Dreadnought" was already at sea by that time and Mr Roosevelt was known to be very interested in her. So mooring that anywhere near the American fleet would have made the American battleships look obsolete, which they were. They were relatively new but were poorly designed. They were barely seaworthy and would have been toast in a war. One wonders a little why the great British expertise in naval design was not called upon in designing them but the American naval architects apparently thought that they could reinvent the wheel.

They were wrong

Corruption: Why Trump Will No Longer Defend Ryan

By William R. Hawkins

Trump has won the attention of the working class on the issues of trade and immigration. These issues are intertwined under the heading of “open borders” and are central to the division within the GOP. In short, Big Business wants open borders because they no longer see commerce as related to national societies. The issue is not trade in its traditional form. The outsourcing of consumer goods is obvious, but heavy manufacturing has also been hollowed out. Republican leaders and establishment conservatives are on board with this. It is to defend this corrupt system that has led House Speaker Paul Ryan to break with Donald Trump.............To Read More

My Take - His recent history is interesting but his conclusions are all wrong, especially espousing  Teddy Roosevelt.  TR was a progressive, the name adopted by socialists because socialism wasn't popular in the U.S. because it's foundationally atheistic, so they adopted the name progressive to fool the public.  Teddy had to know that, yet he was the first national leader to give the progressive movement personality, and for that reason I consider TR to have been the worst President the 20th century.  All the fascist policies of Woodrow Wilson and then the rebirth of those policies in the form of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal were given foundation by TR.