Page 4 of
5 THE SHAPE OF
US POPULISM, Part 4 A panic-stricken Federal
Reserve By Henry C K
Liu
These agencies have competed with each
other to woo institutions with lighter regulation.
"If we don't tread very carefully on
restructuring a very complex financial system, we
might stifle the necessary animal instincts of a
free market," said Mark A Bloomfield, president of
the American Council for Capital Formation, a
business advocacy group. "Every day, the cries of
populism grow stronger and could trample good
economic policy." This warning against populism
has also come from the host of the Larry Kudlow
Show in recent weeks as a threat against free
market capitalism.
For neo-liberal market
fundamentalists, the fear is not of an
economic depression, but
the populism that may follow it.
Rights
of labor The 1912 Democratic platform
repeated the declarations of the platform of 1908:
Questions of judicial practice have
arisen especially in connection with industrial
disputes. We believe that the parties to all
judicial proceedings should be treated with
rigid impartiality, and that injunctions should
not be issued in any case in which an injunction
would not issue if no industrial dispute were
involved.
The expanding organization of
industry makes it essential that there should be
no abridgement of the right of the wage earners
and producers to organize for the protection of
wages and the improvement of labor conditions,
to the end that such labor organizations and
their members should not be regarded as illegal
combinations in restraint of
trade.
The 1912 platform pledge the
enactment of a law creating a department of labor,
represented separately in the president's cabinet.
In 1913, the Labor Department was created by
president Wilson in his first year in office. The
Clayton Act of 1913 exempted unions from the
Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The Keating-Owen Act of
1916 banned child labor but was annulled by a
conservative Supreme Court in 1918. The Federal
Employees Compensation Act established the Office
of Workers Compensation Programs in 1916. The
International Labor Organization (ILO) held its
first meeting in 1919 in Washington, chaired by
Secretary William B Wilson, a second generation
coal miner and a former child laborer.
After the 1917 October Revolution in
Russia, more than four thousand alleged Communists
were arrested in the US for deportation under the
Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1918 in the first
anti-communist witch hunt. The Department of Labor
(DOL) refused to deport the bulk of those arrested
and Secretary Wilson was threatened with
impeachment for taking that position despite the
fact that the DOL under his leadership helped
indispensably in winning the war by mobilizing an
effective workforce for defense production.
The present "war on terror" is also
extracting a heavy toll on US domestic civil
liberty.
Conservation The 1912
Democratic platform declared:
... the Democrat belief in the
conservation and the development, for the use of
all the people, of the natural resources of the
country. Our forests, our sources of water
supply, our arable and our mineral lands, our
navigable streams, and all the other material
resources with which our country has been so
lavishly endowed, constitute the foundation of
our national wealth. Such additional legislation
as may be necessary to prevent their being
wasted or absorbed by special or privileged
interests should be enacted and the policy of
their conservation should be rigidly adhered
to.
The platform called for immediate
action by Congress to make available the vast and
valuable coal deposits of Alaska under conditions
that were intended to be a perfect guarantee
against their falling into the hands of
monopolizing corporations, associations or
interests.
It pledged to the extension of
the work of the bureau of mines in every way
appropriate for national legislation with a view
to safeguarding the lives of the miners, lessening
the waste of essential resources, and promoting
the economic development of mining, which, along
with agriculture, "must in the future, even more
than in the past, serve as the very foundation of
our national prosperity and welfare, and our
international commerce".
Agriculture The 1912 Democratic
platform supported the development of a modern
system of agriculture and a systematic effort to
improve the conditions of trade in farm products
so as to benefit both consumer and producer. And
as an efficient means to this end the platform
called for the enactment by Congress of
legislation that "will suppress the pernicious
practice of gambling in agricultural products by
organized exchanges or others."
In order
words, future, options and derivatives of all sort
that have landed the global economy in dire stress
in 2008, with ruinously high food prices. On this
issue, the 1912 Democratic platform failed
spectacularly as structured finance spread beyond
agricultural commodities to take full control of
finance capitalism in the final quarter of the
twentieth century and landed the global economy in
a financial crisis in 2007.
The
Philippines The 1912 Democratic platform
reaffirmed "the position thrice announced by the
Democracy in national convention assembled against
a policy of imperialism and colonial exploitation
in the Philippines or elsewhere. We condemn the
experiment in imperialism as an inexcusable
blunder, which has involved us in enormous
expense, brought us weakness instead of strength,
and laid our nation open to the charge of
abandonment of the fundamental doctrine of
self-government. We favor an immediate declaration
of the nation's purpose to recognize the
independence of the Philippine Islands as soon as
a stable government can be established, such
independence to be guaranteed by us until the
neutralization of the islands can be secured by
treaty with other Powers."
Progressivism a middle-class
movement Reflecting the socioeconomic
makeup of the nation, with the emergence of a
prosperous middle class, US progressivism in the
early 19th century was a movement with
predominantly middle-class values and objectives,
gaining support from small business owners,
independent farmers, and professionals such as
lawyers, doctors, teachers and journalists, as
well as the intelligentsia. They subscribed to
ethical, humanitarian and spiritual values rather
than socialist concepts of class struggle.
Socialism never developed any popular base
in US political culture despite strong communal
roots among the early settlers. No socialist
presidential candidate ever received substantial
votes in US political history. Union leader Eugene
V Debs, who ran as a Socialist Party candidate in
1908, received 420,793 votes against the 7,687,908
votes received by William H Taft; in 1912 Debs
received 900,672 votes against the 6,293,454 voted
received by Woodrow Wilson; and finally in 1920
Debs, running from prison serving a 10-year term
for making an anti-war speech in violation of the
Espionage Act of 1917, received 919,799 votes
against 16,152,200 received by Warren G Harding.
The last socialist presidential candidate was
Norman Thomas, who in 1932 in the depth of the
Great Depression received 881,951 votes against
the 22,831,857 received by Franklin D Roosevelt.
As a pragmatic political force,
progressivism found support among both
conservatives and liberals and spread to all
regions of the nation. Early 20th century
progressivism turned 19th-century Hamiltonian
preference for strong government to nurture a rich
economic elite, towards government promotion of
Jeffersonian popular democracy in defense of a
large wage-earning working class dominated by big
corporations. This movement created a prosperous
middle class out of previously exploited workers
and farmers, and resulted in a prosperous nation.
Love/hate towards government All
political ideologies realize that political
control of governmental power is the route to
shape the nation to its preference. As the nation
and its economy grow, attitudes toward government
change. Ideologies that have already gained
dominance to the point of being accepted as
natural order would resist big government, even if
their very ascendance had been brought about by
government policy. Ideologies that have remained
unfulfilled would argue for strong government to
right the wrongs.
When big business
crusades against big government, it generally
means it wants more freedom for big business to
expand the private sector at the expense of the
public sector. Big business opposes government
interference to protect workers against corporate
abuse. When big business is in distress either
from foreign competition or from internal collapse
from excesses, it calls for government assistance.
When populists and progressive reformers crusade
for government intervention, they generally mean
to use political authority to correct ossified
socio-economic injustice.
Anti-trust
and monopolies The problem of monopolies
was the main contentious issue of the Progressive
Era. Progressives were not of one mind on this
complex, multi-faceted issue. One group,
represented by Theodore Roosevelt, saw corporate
consolidation as inevitable in modern economies
and argued that the growth of big corporations
should be regulated rather than forbidden. The
Roosevelt faction leaned toward enlarging
governmental power, as summarized by journalist
Herbert Croly in his The Promise of American
Life. Croly argued that economic injustice
should be fought with governmental power and by
the legitimization of a strong labor union
movement to balance uneven market powers between
corporations and workers.
Another group,
represented by Woodrow Wilson, leaned toward
prohibition of bigness in favor of small business
to protect competition, arguing that bigness by
its very nature eventually would make regulation
on it ineffective without banning bigness. The
Wilson faction leaned instead towards judicial
enforcement of constitutional principles of
individualism.
In 1916 Wilson appointed
Louis D Brandeis to be Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court to prevent the expansion of the
"curse of bigness" by not permitting any one
corporation to control more than 30% of any
market. As a star litigator before the Supreme
Court, Brandeis filed his famous "Brandeis Brief"
to provide the court with sociological information
on the issue of the impact of long working hours
on women. The Brandeis Brief set a new direction
for Supreme Court deliberation and for US law and
became a model for future Supreme Court
presentations.
Together with Brandeis,
Roscoe Pound, Harvard Law School Dean, and
Benjamin Cardozo, known as the Three Musketeers of
the liberal faction of the court, argued that
justice is more likely to be done if judges take
into consideration the practical effect of general
legal principles.
The progressive role
of muckrakers The rise of the investigative
press played a crucial role in winning popular
support for progressivism. Labeled by Teddy
Roosevelt as Muckrakers, these pioneering
reporters filed well documented exposes of fraud
and graft and corruption. Henry Demarest Lloyd
published an anti-trust report: Wealth against
Commonwealth; Lincoln Steffens reported on
political corruption in cities, and Ida Tarbell
wrote History of the Standard Oil.
Muckraking after 1914 often degenerated into
unreliable sensational journalism and never quite
rose again to the standards set by the likes of
Lloyd, Steffens and Tarbell until the anti-Vietnam
War era. The communication revolution brought
about by the emergence of the Internet will
facilitate a new wave of populism rising from
collapse of the failure of unregulated free market
capitalism.
Robert Marion La Follette,
Republican governor of Wisconsin, introduced a
series of progressive reforms that came to be
known as the Wisconsin Idea. These reforms
included taxation of the railroads, standardizing
freight rates based on physical weight and size
rather than commercial value, adoption of income
and inheritance taxes, regulation of banks and
insurance companies, limitation of working hours
for women and children, passage of workman’s
compensation and welfare laws, creation of a
forest reserve and establishment of primary
elections for nomination of candidate for state
offices.
La Follette pioneered the use of
nonpartisan experts in government commissions. A
"new individualism" worked for a better chance for
average citizens to own property to maintain the
Jeffersonian ideal of popular democracy. The
Wisconsin Idea brought about similar trends in
many other states, including Iowa, Minnesota,
Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas. Many progressive
governors first attracted public attention by
serving as counsel for commissions set up to
investigate corruption in big business. Woodrow
Wilson, a future president, served a Democratic
governor of New Jersey with a progressive program.
Progressivism did not bring about any
major transformation of the political and economic
system partly because it was never its intention.
It concentrated on a series of specific regulatory
reforms, most of which had been achieved by 1914.
In politics, the movement did much to revitalize
democracy by making public
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
