If only the world had heeded the warnings of history, so cleverly laid before the audience by Ambassador Dodd. For that matter, Dodd's speech, given to the Berlin Branch of the American Chamber of Commerce, could have been directed at the US, Europe, and the world today.
Granted, there is not a blatant, heinous Hitler rising to power; however, the field is ripe for a repeat, clearly demonstrated by history over and over again.
The social experiment, in scientific terms, has a fixed number of variables. Why is it so difficult for world leaders to learn, adjust policies, and avoid the disasterous outcomes repeated innumerable times? Of course, human nature, fight or flight, survival, and what we call character defects, etc. This article won't address this debate.
However, Dodd's speech brilliantly walks the audience through history perfectly depicting the wrongful policies that repeatedly create chaos and misery. The speech is masterful. I can't believe I hadn't heard of this before.
Here are a few of my favorite lines from Dodd's speech:
With the breakdown of the old Roman democracy after the enormous success of the Punic Wars, great group leaders contending for personal and group advantages brought the Republic to the verge of collapse.
Governments from the top fail as often as those from the bottom; and every great failure brings a sad social reaction, thousands and millions of helpless men laying down their lives in the unhappy process. Why may not statesmen study the past and avoid such catastrophes?
No scheme has ever worked well more than a decade or two without popular support...
We must not think our generation is the only one that has suffered from violent economic and social disruptions.
In conclusion, one may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realise that no system, which implies control of society by privilege seekers, has ever ended in any other way than collapse.
Perhaps pass this article along to all of your 1% friends.
(There is another important history here. .covering the devious plans to kill the New Deal.)
To set the stage, it is October, 1933. Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January, 1933.
The brutalities of the SS and SA were dismissed as a regime start-up tactic and that, in time, the new regime would become more moderate. In short, wishful thinking.
As if in some trance of denial, the world refused to acknowledge the potential dangers. In fact, the US was more concerned about Germany repaying its debts. That was the mission given to Ambassador Dodd by the State Department: Get our money back!
What is perhaps more unsettling, according to author Erik Larson's book In the Garden of Beasts*, is that the Pretty Good Club (well-healed, well-off, well-connected men of privilege) at the State Department actually sympathized with Hitler's "Jewish Probem." Anti-semitism was not limited to Germany in 1933. The Pretty Good Club did not like Ambassador Dodd's speech at all.
In fact, the State Department's Pretty Good Club didn't like Dodd because he was not born into a wealthy, privileged American family. Dodd was not one of them.
It took a few months for Ambassador Dodd to admit that Germany's new regime was, in fact, brutal to both Americans who didn't raise their arms and shout "Heil Hitler" and Germany's Jewish population. The attacks on Americans continued in spite of the fact that Hitler had announced that the "Heil Hitler" requirement did not apply to Ex-Pats in Germany.
The last straw for Ambassador Dodd was the brutal Storm Trooper attack of the young son of a prominent American family, in the middle of the day, on a busy Berlin sidewalk during one of the many Storm Trooper parades.
Months of diplomatic requests to protect Americans in Germany from these attacks were fruitless.
Needless to say, Amabassador Dodd had to walk a very tight rope in Berlin. So, when Dodd was invited to address the Berlin Branch of the American Chamber of Commerce scheduled for October 12, 1933, Dodd decided to address the problem. In his own words:
"It was because I had seen so much injustice and domineering little groups, as well as heard the complaints of so many of the best people of the country, that I ventured as far as my position would allow and, by historical analogy, warned men as solemnly as possible against half-educated leaders being permitted to lead nations into war.
..."to continue to persuade and entreat men here not to be their own worst enemies"
Dodd admitted he chose the innocuous title of his speech
Economic Nationalism.
After the speech he told a friend
"I had no delusions about Hitler when I was appointed to my post in Berlin, but I had at least hoped to find some decent people around Hitler. I am horrified to discover that the whole gang is nothing but a horde of criminals and cowards"
Interestingly, the German's in the audience loved the speech as did others who read the speech afterwards. Dodd was heartened and said
"My interpretation of this is that all liberal Germany is with us -- and more than half of Germany is at heart liberal"
Sadly, Ambassador Dodd was only half right in his hope that the liberal Germans would stop the Nazi Terror.
Below I have presented two copies of Ambassador Dodd's October, 1933 speech. One with no links and one with links for those who might enjoy the historical lessons Dodd was trying to impart.
We are sadly lacking great orators today.
Perhaps our new generation of shooting victims will rise to the occasion.
Ambassador William Dodd, 1933 Berlin.
I believe, and I don't say this lightly, we are on a dangerous precipice, one that has happened over and over throughout history.
Specifically, the western world is beginning to look ripe for wide-spread unrest or worse. The signs of a potentially horrific power grab by nationalist-minded extremists are here and now:
<> economic inequality and inflation which always creates civil unrest;
<> an increasingly unrepresentative, authoritative, plutocratic, barely transparent governance; and
<> media/message control.
All of the above purchased by the very wealthy that choose to spend more on building militaries and seemingly loathe to fund humane, socially responsible polices.
It is well-known that there are some very well-organized factions in the United States that are broiling for a good fight. They are armed to the teeth and have been stirred up to a hateful frenzy by Fox News and Tea Party/Right Wing Politicians. Those they hate and see as enemies of the USA & Freedom are very similar to those Hitler Et Al used to stir up Germany's extremists in 1933.
In response, the US liberals/progressives are also stirred up in response to the economic unfairness that has evolved over the past few decades, culminating in the nouveau poverty they face and the erosion of opportunities to live secure, dignified lives without the constant fear of losing everything due to bad luck: A chronic, life-threatening disease and/or loss of employment.
In short, middle class Americans are witnessing a full fledged policy war to end any/all social safety nets and economic fairness their families enjoyed when they were children. The real possibilities of America becoming a bastion of Dickensian policy looms as a profound reality. If we are honest, nothing speaks more clearly than the Orwellian term for the now wide-spread Right to Work laws.
The Rhetoric of Divisiveness is the biggest enemy of the United States. Divided we all fall, except for the wealthy and well-connected who will be able to cloister themselves from the civil unrest. For that matter, they can move their families elsewhere like Eric Prince has already done.
I know I'm talking to the choir here, but perhaps you can share history's lessons with some of your friends who are still on the fence and haven't swallowed the vitriolic policy dogma spewed 24/7 hook, line, and sinker. I hope so.
For those who understand world history, specifically Hitler's evolving Germany of 1933, and are up to speed on US/Global policies that are eroding democracy under the guise of fighting The Wars on Terror and Drugs, coupled with draconian measures to balance budgets while simultaneously increasing spending for national defense, it is no wonder that our alarm bells are going off.
Dodd's speech helps coalesce our thought process, explaining why his alarm bells were ringing loudly in October, 1933 in Hitler's Berlin. Dodd witnessed Hitler's rise, first hand, up close and personally, as the German population descended into brutal chaos and madness.
Although the speech's title and even some portions of the speech refer to economics, Ambassador Dodd's intention was to alert the world, using historical empirical evidence, of the dangers of using nationalism, bigotry, a skewed vision of what is good, and militant brute force/fear to solve a country's problems. Hitler used all of these, and the good-hearted German's were either eliminated or co-opted out of fear.
Will these people listen? Romney's friends jets parked near his recent Park City brain storming/fund raising weekend (you might want to turn down the sound, the roar is loud):
There are two (2) versions below. The speech as copied from the link and Dodd's speech with links to his historical references for those who might enjoy knowing the historical contexts Dodd refers to.
Enjoy and please share with those you know who are confused by the rhetoric of the candidates. History is a great teacher.
From the FDR Library:
Address by William E. Dodd, American Ambassador to Nazi Germany at Luncheon of American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin, Germany, 12 October 1933
ECONOMIC NATIONALISM
In times of great stress men are too apt to abandon too much of their past social devices and venture too far upon unchartered courses. And, the consequence has always been reaction, sometimes disaster. With the breakdown of the old Roman democracy after the enormous success of the Punic Wars, great group leaders contending for personal and group advantages brought the Republic to the verge of collapse. Then a Caesar rose, asserted autocratic powers and for a time stabilised society. The great fact so appealed to Gibson that he wrote the masterpiece of all historical work. He overlooked or under-emphasised the cruelties and the outside exploitation of his golden empire.
I allude to this because human governmental and economic combinations have always appeared under a few patterns and both philosophers and politicians waver and hesitate between the models offered in a Cato, a Gracchus or a Julius Caesar and the ideals which these figures connote. There are not many forms of human association- though many new names have been invented from time to time.
Half-educated statesmen today swing violently away from the ideal purpose of the first Gracchus and think they find salvation for their troubled fellows in the arbitrary modes of the man, who fall an easy victim to the cheap devices of the lewd Cleopatra. They forget that the Gracchus democracy failed upon the narrowest of margins and the Caesars succeeded only for a short moment as measured by the test of history.
"We must not think our generation is the only one that has suffered from violent economic and social disruptions."
As in ancient times, so in modern.... When the Spanish were dumping shiploads of South American gold and silver per year into the medieval complex of economic Europe, and prices, wages and currency values got as much out of all control as they are today, men cast about wildly for remedies.
There have rarely been more chaotic times in human history than those of the hundred years which followed the discovery of American and the religious reforms of Martin Luther. No nation's existence was half secure; no economic class rested upon sure foundation; peasants wandered aimlessly about their countries, starving by the hundreds of thousands; and city proletarians were everywhere ready to turn pirates upon the seas or mercenary soldiers upon the land. When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, England was confronted with imminent chaos, and forty-five years later France was in even worse plight, though victorious in the Thirty Years' War.
We must not think our generation is the only one that has suffered from violent economic and social disruptions. The Puritan fathers thought to redistribute the benefits of government and make England a model land; the Fronde rioters of France and Paris thought to anticipate the revolution of 1789.
Out of these chaotic eras there came two try-outs of economic nationalism, applied by autocratic methods. The first system was worked out by the marvelous little group of statesmen that surrounded Charles II. In 1660-1673 the aged Earl of Clarendon, a politician and a master historian, aided by the unscrupulous Duke of Buckingham, the canny Lord Arlington and the profiteer Duke of Albemarle, worked out a marvelous system which was to save England and fit all the trans-Atlantic colonies into a water-tight system. It was unlawful to ship a pound of gold out of the country.
No foreign goods were to be imported except upon a sort of quota system. A monopoly market was created for sugar, tobacco and ship timber, produced in the colonies. All "quota" imports from the colonies were taxed at two to four times their producers' value to enable to government to ignore public opinion and collect taxes without the consent of the people. Merchants and manufacturers were authorised to sell their goods to the public at prices fixed by the government.
And surplus products were to be dumped upon the continental market at half the prices paid at home. It was a marvelously perfect scheme under which workers on the land were to have no return at all for their labour, landlords somewhat more and industrialists and traders princely profits. His Majesty, Charles II, was to be autocratic master of the system and make war upon Holland, the one rival and free-trade advocate which might upset the scheme.
But no scheme has ever worked well more than a decade or two without popular support, and when the King had beaten Holland in 1674 and annexed all strategic points in North America, the craft Earl of Shaftsbury counseled by the canny John Locke, moved into the slums of London, organised groups of shouting, hurrahing followers, gained control of a parliament which could no longer be postponed and brought the cheap autocrat's life to a miserable end in 1684; and the long subdued lower middle classes of the country united with the new aristocracy and made the unloved William III of Holland King of England. All the larger cities and more developed shires, supported by the angry colonies from Massachusetts to South Carolina, shouted loud harrahs. It was the "glorious revolution," hardly a score of lives lost in the process. All the strenuous decrees of Charles II became dead letters which no one seriously heeded.
Seventy years later, when George III tried to revamp the system, the colonies revolted and started a world commotion, which lasted thirty years. Stuart economic nationalism had failed.
The English had hardly launched their scheme before John Baptiste Colbert, master statesman about Louis XIV, contrived a better system for the perfect government of France. Son of a moor trader in Rheims, he invented a pedigree, which proved him to be of noble birth, and he managed to get it to the snobbish young monarch. That was enough.
He was granted despotic powers. He dispossessed hundreds of great families of newly rich folk, handed their properties over to the Crown, condemned thousands to death because they resisted, and so readjusted taxes that Louis henceforth had income enough to wage war when he would, and, at the same time, pension every promising leader or emerging writer, not excluding scores in Germany and Spain. The recalcitrant landed aristocracy was everywhere subdued, parliaments were not allowed to assemble, while the nouveaux riche and all the talent of the time were allowed to bask in the sunshine of the royal presence.
The young monarch rose to unparalleled eminence in Europe and Colbert applied by decree an import-export system like that of England.
Nothing could come in except upon approval and the payment of high tariffs. Every surplus, except gold, must go out at whatever prices could be obtained. A third class like that of England arose. Monopoly privileges prevailed everywhere. A countryman who objected to aristocratic hunters running over his ripe wheat fields was simply shot like a pheasant or a partridge. France was wonderfully organized from the top-like Augustus Caesar's reorganised Rome. There was not a popular assembly in a hundred and forty years, and terrorizing wars were the older of the time 1666-7, 1672-6, 1683-7, 1190-97, 1701-13.
France was perfectly pyramided at home and on the continent. The glamor of Versailles was seen and imitated all over Germany, while thousands of men rotted in French prisons because they had ventured to protect; and peasant farmers reached so low an estate that, like North American Indians, they lived off roots and herbs or died unswept along the roadside, as they do today in a great minority government of our time.
It was the economic nationalism which "had saved France after the chaotic days of Mazarin." However, it collapsed in 1789 with a crash and a thunder which reverberated for a score of years all over the world. Thus, the best laid schemes of Bourbon autocrats failed as dismally as that of their Stuart cousins. Governments from the top fail as often as those from the bottom; and every great failure brings a sad social reaction, thousands and millions of helpless men laying down their lives in the unhappy process. Why may not statesmen study the past and avoid such catastrophes?
When Napoléon I came to his end in 1815, a great world congress had set everything to rights in Vienna and told everybody how to behave for a hundred years; but soon came the accustomed chaos in victorious as well as defeated countries. From 1818 to 1846 there was depression; here and there, everywhere, as now the markets of Europe, except for cotton, were dead for young America, and Europe was distracted by debts and new revolutions. Would mankind never learn the effects of war?
In far-off Kentucky, a lean, lanky, half-educated, but clever orator, Henry Clay, worked out in 1823 another system of economic nationalism. He would bar the ports of the United States against cheap, but excellent European goods, associate all Latin-American peoples with those of his own country, create huge markets by building cities, roadways, and canals and leave the builders of the new industry and the new-old banking system the utmost freedom in exploiting their fellows. It was an unconscious imitation of the English and the French systems of the seventeenth century - the fussy, cantankerous John Randolph was about the only member of Congress, who knew enough of history, to give Clay's so-called "American system" its proper European name. Clay fought long and hard, always dreaming of the Presidency for himself, and the ability to reward his ablest lieutenants, Daniel Webster and the unscrupulous bank president, Nicholas Biddle, with plushy jobs and honourifics. He was defeated by the rising cotton kingdom in the South and it was left to the troubled Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of a great war, 1861-64, to grant industrialists and bankers all that the dead Clay had promised them.
The economic nationalism, which Benjamin Franklin and George Mason had feared and warned Washington against, was now firmly fixed on "free American soil" and its success was far greater than that of Clarendon or Colbert. England, France and Germany had, after long debates, adopted in the main the Adam Smith philosophy on which the Americans had gone to war in 1776. That is, Europe had adopted the ideals of Young America and opened their markets in order to sell their growing industrial output to the far corners of the world. The United States had adopted the attitude of Europe in 1776 and closed their vast domestic market while they sold billions of dollars’ worth of foodstuffs to England, France and Germany.
There had never been anything like it in all history. England and Germany developed more in fifty years than either of them had developed in the preceding five hundred years. It was the machine age, and populations increased faster than machines. Cyrus McCormick, a Virginia inventor, showed American farmers how to grow wheat at thirty cents a bushel and produce meat at two cents a pound. And American farmers, aided by free land and new machines, drove British and German farmers out of business and crowded them on to emigrant boats bound for the farms of the great West. "Everybody was getting rich."
But the masters of industry, of railroads and banks managed to pocket nearly all the profits and there came a depression and an outcry, which all but enabled the young William Jennings Bryan to work a revolution in 1896. He failed on a narrow margin through bribed votes, and the system was sustained in wobbly estate till Europe went to war in 1914 as France had done in 1805. The outcome all the world knows.
The marvelous American system seemed successful at when it was not, and the Presidents of 1921-28 with their optimistic Secretary of Treasury thought it a sort of millennium which must rapidly cover the earth. To this dream, a later President added the prophesy that poverty, the curse of mankind, would be abolished when he took his seat in the mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue. [Editor's Note: Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 over the objections of more than 1,000 economist. Hoover was intent on protecting American jobs and wages, but his actions resulted in a trade war that hurt American workers far more than he could have ever imagined.]
But when the collapse came; it was almost as terrible as that of 1789 in Paris. The hopeful, buoyant United States now fell into the economic chaos into which the Great War had thrust all the states of Europe. The unemployed outnumbered the dead and wounded of the recent struggle. In place of Hoover's universal and everlasting prosperity, there was threat of universal poverty. The American economic nationalism the dangers of which Franklin and Mason had foreseen in 1787 had run its course - as had the schemes of Clarendon and Colbert.
In conclusion, one may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realise that no system, which implies control of society by privilege seekers, has ever ended in any other way than collapse. The wisest of all American statesmen insisted all his life that the way to develop the ideal social order was to leave every man the utmost freedom of initiative and action and always to forbid any man or group of men to profiteer at the expense of others.
May we not reasonably expect the statesmen of today a sufficient knowledge of the blunders of the past to realise that if western civilisation is to survive, they must find a way to avoid the crime and the terrific disasters of war; they must learn how to develop in a friendly spirit the resources of undeveloped regions of the world; they must lower, not raise, the barriers against the migration of surplus populations; and they must facilitate, and not defeat, the interchange of surplus goods - with these rational changes of international procedure, a higher culture might easily be carried to the masses of men everywhere; without these, another war and chaos.
Ambassador Dodd's speech with links, provided for history buffs.
Bolded text my emphasis.
Enjoy.
“ ECONOMIC NATIONALISM
I.
Succeeded only for a short moment as measured by the test of history."
In times of great stress men are too apt to abandon too much of their past social devices and venture too far upon unchartered courses. And, the consequence has always been reaction, sometimes disaster.
With the breakdown of the old Roman democracy after the enormous success of the Punic Wars, great group leaders contending for personal and group advantages brought the Republic to the verge of collapse.
Then a Caesar rose, asserted autocratic powers and for a time stabilised society. The great fact so appealed to Gibbon that he wrote the masterpiece of all historical work. He overlooked or under-emphasised the cruelties and the outside exploitation of his golden empire.
I allude to this because human governmental and economic combinations have always appeared under a few patterns and both philosophers and politicians waver and hesitate between the models offered in a Cato, a Gracchus or a Julius Caesar and the ideals which these figures connote. There are not many forms of human association - though many new names have been invented from time to time.
Half-educated statesmen today swing violently away from the ideal purpose of the first Gracchus and think they find salvation for their troubled fellows in the arbitrary modes of the man, who fall an easy victim to the cheap devices of the lewd Cleopatra. They forget that the Gracchus democracy failed upon the narrowest of margins and the Caesars succeeded only for a short moment as measured by the test of history.
"We must not think our generation is the only one that has suffered from violent economic and social disruptions."
As in ancient times, so in modern.... When the Spanish were dumping shiploads of South American gold and silver per year into the medieval complex of economic Europe, and prices, wages and currency values got as much out of all control as they are today, men cast about wildly for remedies.
There have rarely been more chaotic times in human history than those of the hundred years which followed the discovery of America and the religious reforms of Martin Luther.
<> No nation's existence was half secure;
<> No economic class rested upon sure foundation;
<> Peasants wandered aimlessly about their countries, starving by the hundreds of thousands; and
<> City proletarians were everywhere ready to turn pirates upon the seas or mercenary soldiers upon the land.
When Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, England was confronted with imminent chaos, and forty-five years later France was in even worse plight, though victorious in the Thirty Years' War.
We must not think our generation is the only one that has suffered from violent economic and social disruptions. The Puritan fathers thought to redistribute the benefits of government and make England a model land; the Fronde rioters of France and Paris thought to anticipate the revolution of 1789.
III.
"Stuart economic nationalism had failed."
Out of these chaotic eras there came two try-outs of economic nationalism, applied by autocratic methods:
The first system was worked out by the marvelous little group of statesmen that surrounded Charles II. In 1660-1673 the aged Earl of Clarendon, a politician and a master historian, aided by the unscrupulousDuke of Buckingham, the canny Lord Arlington and the profiteer Duke of Albemarle, worked out a marvelous system which was to save England and fit all the trans-Atlantic colonies into a water-tight system:
<> It was unlawful to ship a pound of gold out of the country.
<> No foreign goods were to be imported except upon a sort of quota system.
<> A monopoly market was created for sugar, tobacco and ship timber, produced in the colonies.
<> All "quota" imports from the colonies were taxed at two to four times their producers' value to enable to government to ignore public opinion and collect taxes without the consent of the people.
<> Merchants and manufacturers were authorised to sell their goods to the public at prices fixed by the government.
<> And surplus products were to be dumped upon the continental market at half the prices paid at home.
It was a marvelously perfect scheme under which workers on the land were to have no return at all for their labour, landlords somewhat more, and industrialists and traders princely profits.
His Majesty, Charles II, was to be autocratic master of the system and make war upon Holland, the one rival and free-trade advocate which might upset the scheme.
But no scheme has ever worked well more than a decade or two without popular support, and when the King had beaten Holland in 1674 and annexed all strategic points in North America, the crafty Earl of Shaftsbury, counseled by the canny John Locke,
<> moved into the slums of London,
<> organised groups of shouting, hurrahing followers,
<> gained control of a parliament which could no longer be postponed and
<> brought the cheap autocrat's life to a miserable end in 1684; and
<> the long subdued lower middle classes of the country united with the new aristocracy and made the unloved William III of Holland King of England.
All the larger cities and more developed shires, supported by the angry colonies from Massachusetts to South Carolina, shouted loud harrahs.
It was the "glorious revolution," hardly a score of lives lost in the process. All the strenuous decrees of Charles II became dead letters which no one seriously heeded.
Seventy years later, when George III tried to revamp the system, the colonies revolted and started a world commotion, which lasted thirty years. Stuart economic nationalism had failed.
IV.
"Governments from the top fail as often as those from the bottom; and every great failure brings a sad social reaction, thousands and millions of helpless men laying down their lives in the unhappy process. Why may not statesmen study the past and avoid such catastrophes?"
The English had hardly launched their scheme before John Baptiste Colbert, master statesman about Louis XIV, contrived a better system for the perfect government of France. Son of a moor trader in Rheims, he invented a pedigree, which proved him to be of noble birth, and he managed to get it to the snobbish young monarch. That was enough.
He (John Baptiste Colbert) was granted despotic powers.
<> He dispossessed hundreds of great families of newly rich folk,
<> Handed their properties over to the Crown,
<> Condemned thousands to death because they resisted, and so
<> Readjusted taxes that Louis henceforth had income enough to wage (four) wars when he would, and, at the same time,
<> Pension every promising leader or emerging writer, not excluding scores in Germany and Spain.
<> The recalcitrant landed aristocracy was everywhere subdued,
<> parliaments were not allowed to assemble,
while the nouveaux riche and all the talent of the time were allowed to bask in the sunshine of the royal presence.
The young monarch rose to unparalleled eminence in Europe and Colbert applied by decree an import-export system like that of England.
<> Nothing could come in except upon approval and the payment of high tariffs.
<> Every surplus, except gold, must go out at whatever prices could be obtained.
<> A third class like that of England arose.
<> Monopoly privileges prevailed everywhere.
<> A countryman who objected to aristocratic hunters running over his ripe wheat fields was simply shot like a pheasant or a partridge.
<> France was wonderfully organized from the top - like Augustus Caesar's reorganised Rome.
<> There was not a popular assembly in a hundred and forty years, and terrorizing wars were the order of the time 1666-7, 1672-6, 1683-7, 1190-97, 1701-13.
France was perfectly pyramided at home and on the continent.
The glamor of Versailles was seen and imitated all over Germany, while thousands of men rotted in French prisons because they had ventured to protect; and peasant farmers reached so low an estate that, like North American Indians, they lived off roots and herbs or died unswept along the roadside, as they do today in a great minority government of our time.
It was the economic nationalism which "had saved France after the chaotic days of Mazarin."
However, it collapsed in 1789 with a crash and a thunder which reverberated for a score of years all over the world.
Thus, the best laid schemes of Bourbon autocrats failed as dismally as that of their Stuart cousins.
Governments from the top fail as often as those from the bottom; and every great failure brings a sad social reaction, thousands and millions of helpless men laying down their lives in the unhappy process. Why may not statesmen study the past and avoid such catastrophes?
V.
The economic nationalism, which Benjamin Franklin and George Mason had feared and warned Washington against, was now firmly fixed on "free American soil" and its success was far greater than that of Clarendon or Colbert.
When Napoléon I came to his end in 1815, a great world congress(which created the Concert of Europe) had set everything to rights in Vienna and told everybody how to behave for a hundred years; but soon came the accustomed chaos in victorious as well as defeated countries.
From 1818 to 1846 there was depression; here and there, everywhere, as now the markets of Europe, except for cotton, were dead for young America, and Europe was distracted by debts and new revolutions.
Would mankind never learn the effects of war?
In far-off Kentucky, a lean, lanky, half-educated, but clever orator, Henry Clay, worked outin 1823 another system of economic nationalism.
Henry Clay's plan would
<> Bar the ports of the United States against cheap, but excellent European goods,
<> Associate all Latin-American peoples with those of his own country,
<> Create huge markets by building cities, roadways, and canals and
<> Leave the builders of the new industry and the new-old banking system the utmost freedom in exploiting their fellows.
It was an unconscious imitation of the English and the French systems of the seventeenth century - the fussy, cantankerous John Randolphwas about the only member of Congress, who knew enough of history, to give Clay's so-called "American system" its proper European name.
Clay fought long and hard, always dreaming of the Presidency for himself, and the ability to reward his ablest lieutenants, Daniel Webster and the unscrupulous bank president, Nicholas Biddle, with plushy jobs and honourifics.
He was defeated by the rising cotton kingdom in the South, James Polk, and it was left to the troubled Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of a great war, 1861-64, to grant industrialists and bankers all that the dead Clay had promised them.
The economic nationalism, which Benjamin Franklin and George Mason had feared and warned Washington against, was now firmly fixed on "free American soil" and its success was far greater than that of Clarendon or Colbert.
England, France and Germany had, after long debates, adopted, in the main, the Adam Smith philosophy on which the Americans had gone to war in 1776.
That is, Europe had adopted the ideals of Young America and opened their markets in order to sell their growing industrial output to the far corners of the world.
The United States had adopted the attitude of Europe in 1776 and closed their vast domestic market while they sold billions of dollars’ worth of foodstuffs to England, France and Germany.
There had never been anything like it in all history.
England and Germany developed more in fifty years than either of them had developed in the preceding five hundred years.
It was the machine age, and populations increased faster than machines.
Cyrus McCormick, a Virginia inventor, showed American farmers how to grow wheat at thirty cents a bushel and produce meat at two cents a pound. And American farmers, aided by free land and new machines, drove British and German farmers out of business and crowded them on to emigrant boats bound for the farms of the great West.
"Everybody was getting rich." (sarcasm, my note here)
But the masters of industry, of railroads and banks managed to pocket nearly all the profits and there came a depression and an outcry,which all but enabled the young William Jennings Bryan to work a revolution in 1896. He failed on a narrow margin through bribed votes, and the system was sustained in wobbly estate till Europe went to war in 1914 as France had done in 1805. The outcome all the world knows.
The marvelous American system seemed successful when it was not, and the Presidents of 1921-28 with their optimistic Secretary of Treasurythought it a sort of millennium which must rapidly cover the earth.
To this dream, a later President added the prophesy that poverty, the curse of mankind, would be abolished when he took his seat in the mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue. [Editor's Note: Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 over the objections of more than 1,000 economist. Hoover was intent on protecting American jobs and wages, but his actions resulted in a trade war that hurt American workers far more than he could have ever imagined.] (My note: To Republican Hoover's credit he did raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations, a fact rarely mentioned)
VI.
"One may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realise that no system, which implies control of society by privilege seekers, has ever ended in any other way than collapse."
But when the collapse came; it was almost as terrible as that of 1789 in Paris.
The hopeful, buoyant United States now fell into the economic chaos into which the Great War had thrust all the states of Europe.
The unemployed outnumbered the dead and wounded of the recent struggle.
In place of Hoover's universal and everlasting prosperity, there was threat of universal poverty.
The American economic nationalism, the dangers of which Franklin and Mason had foreseen in 1787, had run its course - as had the schemes of Clarendon and Colbert.
In conclusion, one may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realise that no system, which implies control of society by privilege seekers, has ever ended in any other way than collapse. The wisest of all American statesmen insisted all his life that the way to develop the ideal social order was to leave every man the utmost freedom of initiative and action and always to forbid any man or group of men to profiteer at the expense of others.
May we not reasonably expect the statesmen of today have a sufficient knowledge of the blunders of the past, to realise that if western civilisation is to survive,
<> they must find a way to avoid the crime and the terrific disasters of war;
<> they must learn how to develop, in a friendly spirit, the resources of undeveloped regions of the world;
<> they must lower, not raise, the barriers against the migration of surplus populations;
<> and they must facilitate, and not defeat, the interchange of surplus goods -
with these rational changes of international procedure, a higher culture might easily be carried to the masses of men everywhere; without these, another war and chaos.
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And here we are. Donald Trump is President. Congress is complicit. There are several million Americans who think Trump is God’s answer.
<> We continue the crimes and disasters of war;
<> We watch as multi-national corporations rob and pillage the resources, including human, of other lands;
<> We are all over the place regarding immigration; and
<> We watch as corporations send all of our goods onto the global market to be pooled under one price and sold back to us and others at inflated rates, with few exceptions. Price fixing has been simplified with the creation of OPEC, where price fixing used to be against the law.
If you have read through Dodd's speech and understand the historical examples, are you better able to see through the weak rhetoric of our political candidates?
I genuinely hope you will reach out to the Ron Paul supporters in your circle. I believe they don't all understand the historical failures of many of Paul's doctrine.
And don't let any politician, including Democrats, try to steer the US in the wrong directions under the guise of economic nationalism that does NOT include the phrase "living wage."
America is a hair's breadth away from resembling Colbert's France and Clay's vision for America:
Privilege and security for the few, insecurity and misery for the many.
We have seen this movie before!
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*William Dodd's quotes taken from this book: In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin.
My Book Review: 5 Stars for author's research and presentation of on-the-street and behind-the-diplomatic-curtain reality. The author's presentation of the story uses real letters written to or from US Ambassador Dodd and his querky, intellectual daughter who seems to know all the important writers and correspondents of the year 1933, both American and German. Yes, I've read better written books with a wider breadth of information; however, I really enjoyed the up close and personal expose' of this critical year depicting Hitler's rise to power. Finding Dodd's speech made the purchase worthwhile.
UPDATEd February 26, 2017
Krugman, 2017. Krugman, 2017 on Trumps promised Economic Nationalism:
Meanwhile, things have moved very slowly on the economic nationalism front — partly because a bit of reality struck, as export industries realized what was at stake and retailers and others balked at the notion of new import taxes. But also, there were very few actual voices for that policy with Trump’s ear — mainly Bannon, as far as I can tell.
So if Bannon is out, what’s left? It’s just reverse Robin Hood with extra racism.
On real policy, in other words, Trump is now bankrupt.
But he does have the racism thing. And my prediction is that with Bannon and economic nationalism gone, he will eventually double down on that part even more. If anything, Trumpism is going to get even uglier, and Trump even less presidential (if such a thing is possible) now that he has fewer people pushing for trade wars.