The two most corrupt Presidential administrations in American history are generally agreed to be those of Ulysses Simpson Grant (1868-1876) and Warren Gamaliel Harding (1920-1924). Both of these men, oddly enough, were members of the Republican Party.
Why is it that I wasn't the least bit surprised to find this out?
Yes, it WAS a very different GOP in its infancy 130 years ago, but if they're so desperate to be known among Blacks and other minorities as the "Party of Lincoln," they'd better also be prepared to acknowledge that "Grantism" was coined as a synonym for greed and corruption during the term of the Republican president elected immediately afterwards.
Let's hop into the Way Back Machine and take a look at the earliest days of Crippled Conservatism...
For a long period following its creation, there was no significant difference between the Republican Party and other political parties of the era, of which there were several. They had not yet become exclusively the water carriers for Big Business, since ALL politicians--wealthy men themselves--legislated primarily in favor of corporate interests...hence, THEIR OWN interests.
During the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, Reconstruction from the Civil War was in full swing and, while that might explain some of the high-level scandals, it cannot wholly account for the rampant opportunism, exploitation, crony capitalism and blatant corruption. (And if you think our current White House Crime Syndicate is deja vu all over again, you're not far wrong.)
In 1867, Representative Oakes Ames and Thomas Durant, two major stockholders of the Union Pacific Railroad, formed Credit Mobilier, a dummy construction company tasked with completing the final 600 miles of the Transscontinental Railroad, itself a rather large swindle. Union Pacific and the federal government were bilked out of millions by Oakes and Durant and, when it looked like an investigation was going to be launched, Ames bribed influential Congressmen outright to save his miserable hide. Am I the only one who's reminded of Tom DeLay here?
A couple years later, Jim Fisk and Jay Gould attempted to corner the gold market with the help of Grant's slimy brother-in-law. They bought huge amounts of gold and gold futures, sending the price skyrocketing...but Grant found out and ordered $4 million in government gold sold on the open market. On September 24, 1869, known ever afterwards as Black Friday, the panic created by Fisk and Gould ended abruptly as the price of gold plunged to rock bottom...and thousands of people suffered financial losses. Fisk and Gould got off scot free...by simply refusing to honor their obligations.
These weren't all the scandals by any means. The so-called "Whiskey Ring" had distillers paying off members of the Treasury Department to issue them tax stamps at well below the usual rate...and rob the government of excise tax revenues. More than 100 officials were convicted in connection with that scurvy scheme. Then there was also the overt bribery of Secretary of War, William W. Belknap, for the rights of access to trade with Indian tribes, a lucrative opportunity. This led to Belknap's impeachment in 1876. Getting the idea now? Grant, an honorable man and a successful Civil War general, was himself victimized by his own atrocious judgement about people and by associates who were utterly without scruple. History has not been kind to his memory.
This period of great change and upheaval became known as the Era of the Robber Barons and--while Alexander Graham Bell was inventing the telephone, little realizing it would change the world--great fortunes were being amassed by men like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, James Mellon and JP Morgan. For the most part they operated legally...if not entirely ethically. (A study conducted in the 1870's indicated that 90% of the multi-millionaires of that time came from middle-class or upper-classs backgrounds; the old plotline popularized by Horatio Alger was then, as now, largely mythical, feel-good hogwash. Only an extraordinarily fortunate few ever managed the transition "from rags to riches.")
As Howard Zinn relates in his superlative work, A People's History of the United States:
"Meanwhile, the government...was behaving almost exactly as Karl Marx described a Communist state: pretending neutrality to maintain order, but serving the interests of the rich...the purpose of the state was to settle upper-class disputes, control lower-class rebellion and adopt policies that would further the long-range stability of the system."
There was a backroom deal struck between Democrats and the GOP to elect Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877. Hayes, ostensibly a Republican, swore not to alter federal policy toward monopolies and corporations in any meaningful way. The same was true of Grover Cleveland's defeat of Republican James G. Blaine in 1884 and, in fact, financier Jay Gould wired him, expressing confidence that "the vast business interests of the country would be entirely safe in your hands." Meet the new boss...same as the old boss.
WEB DuBoise nailed it precisely when he said in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction:
"For there began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labor."
Enslavement. That was an even more powerful word then--and written by a Black man,too!--directly following a brutal and horribly bloody war for emancipation. DuBoise rightly saw this bondage as something economic rather than racial; poor Asian immigrants along with impoverished Blacks and Whites were ALL being exploited by the corporation executives. Sound familiar? Republicans had found their sheet music and were tuning up for wide-spread oppression of those least able to defend themselves.
William McKinley, a wholehearted Republican whose sonorous speeches could make hoary platitudes sound like fresh, profound insights, was elected in 1896, business interests uniting with the deliberate intention of influencing his election.
You see, in 1892, the People's Party, better known as the Populists, rose to prominence. Mainly composed of cotton farmers from the recently-Reconstructed South and wheat farmers from the newly-settled Great Plains, they were merely giving voice to widespread discontent among laborers who felt that, in the midst of broad American expansion, they were getting the dirty end of the stick. And they WERE! Plummeting prices on their crops, usurious interest rates, rising freight charges and supply costs--in other words, ARTIFICIALLY MANIPULATED financial conditions!--had forced their backs against the wall. By the time of the presidential campaign in 1896, the Populist movement had merged with the Democratic Party whose candidate was the fiery William Jennings Bryan. Fearful of an across-the-board decline in their already vulgar profits, corporations and the very powerful press of the late 19th century mobilized in the very first massive use of money in history to affect the outcome of a political campaign. The GOP was terrified by Populist ideas and their appeal to "the will of the people;" they pulled out all the stops. Little did anyone suspect the ugly precedent that was being set.
And McKinley knew precisely which side his bread was buttered on. From the first, he was the Big Business poster child, embedded in their pocket firmly and unconditionally, committed to champion their agenda as America's agenda. The 1870's and 1880's were tumultuous times of market fluctuations and recessions, brought about by uncertainty and intermittently striking laborers. While some of this can surely be attributed to growing pains within the early Industrial Age, a great deal of it was exacerbated by greedweasel profiteers who were simply treating their workers like cattle while marketing products with NO regard for quality or safety.
Women and even children who'd endured 12-16 hour days, toiling in filth, darkness and stench for beggars' wages, finally decided that enough was just about enough! Nor were their demands outrageous. They felt that, at the very least, they were duly entitled to fair pay, decent working conditions, humane treatment and some measure of workplace safety.
Even though they lost the presidential election, Populists knew their message was resonating with downtrodden workers in every part of the country. Madder than a tiger with a toothache, they met McKinley's pro-corporate policies head on...and their impact began to be felt in union organizing and at the ballot boxes in state, county and municipal races. Their vehement rhetoric had, at its heart, the decades of abuse they'd tolerated as the lifeblood of a nation whose wealthy elite showed neither respect nor gratitude. They gave Mckinley's administration fits, that is, until the Spanish-American War changed the dynamic of political discourse. Wars tend to do that.
Goaded on by "Remember the Maine" sloganeering and non-stop incendiary propaganda from William Randolph Hearst's mighty chain of newspapers, the US went to war against Spain in Cuba. To this day there exists NO clear evidence of the involvement of Spaniards in an explosion that killed 260 people as the ship lay at anchor in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898. (As a matter of fact, a friend informs me that the American military has been teaching for years that WE blew up our own ship in order to precipitate the war with Spain. I find it odd--at the very least!--that they would actually admit to mass murder...) It proved to be the 19th century's version of 9/11.
Ten months later, on December 10th, this country signed the Treaty of Paris, ending a short and decisive conflict. We had driven the Spaniards out of Cuba, leaving a power vacuum...that was filled almost at once by rapacious US corporations. Further west into the Pacific, half a million Filipinos were wiped out as we bullied the Philippine Islands away from Spain. McKinley justified this genocide by proclaiming that victory enabled us to "civilize" the "savages." we also annexed Guam, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, paying the Spanish some $20 million in reparation for the Philippines.
At the very dawn of the 1900's, Upton Sinclair and other Populist voices--dubbed 'muckrakers' by their critics in the press--shown bright lights into the dark corners of Big Business. They exposed ruthless exploitation and victimization of both workers and consumers. Sinclair's book, The Jungle, pulled the covers off the filthy and dangerous practices in the meat-packing industry and ultimately led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, a significant victory, but still tiny in the face of the unbridled, conscienceless capitalism that was the hallmark of a grim era.
This period is now known shamefully as the Age of Wage Slavery and it's what screwhead Grover Norquist envisions as his own personal goal for the Republican Party in this 21st century. Don't believe me? Read "Grover Norquist: Field Marshal of the Bush Plan" in the May 14, 2001 issue of The Nation Magazine. (It's posted on the Internet, just Google the title.) This interview with the radical reactionary policy-maker himself reveals to you in his own words that he wants nothing more than to turn the clock back an entire century. Don't tell ME that what passes for conservatism in this day and age isn't crippled!
Let's put all of this into context, shall we? This Populist war on inequality and especially on the role that government played in promoting and perpetuating that inequality, harkened back to the ideals of the Founding Fathers. Yes, they WERE landed aristocrats of their day, but they were staunchly against the idea of property qualifications for holding office under the Constitution. The fact that it's not in there was NOT an accidental oversight, but a deliberate omission; they wanted no "veneration of wealth" at the heart of their new republic. Any rightwad who tries to tell you differently is lying. Like a rug.
Thomas Jefferson built up a "Republican Party" (NO relation to the present-day obscenity of the same name) to take back government from the clutches of the speculators and the "stock-jobbers" as he called them who were moving in on the legislature even as early as 1800. Andrew Jackson, our only Whig president, slayed the dragon of the Second Bank of the United States in the 1830's. He was working for the people, the Constitution's "general welfare," and decidedly against the oligarchs who sat on the the bank's governing board. All of these folks--the Founders, Jackson, the Populists who came a hundred years later--opposed the governmental power to confer privilege on insiders, namely the wealthy elites who were our modern equivalent of the royal favorites in the dismal days of feudalism. And these were the very people that the driving force of the GOP was determined to embrace!
Populists were denounced, mocked...and feared. By 1904, they had pretty much ceased to exist as a viable political force, but they had spawned many powerful ideas, most of which ultimately found their way into legislation. They had also given rise to a genuine American hero: Eugene Victor Debs. A colorful figure and a potent orator, it was Debs who said: "While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." (Pause for thunderous applause.) He ran for president FIVE times, once from the confines of a prison cell...and got over a million votes, too!
Six months into his second term, the hated McKinley was assassinated and his Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt, succeeded him. Some of the populist concepts so intrigued and impresssed Roosevelt that he ran on a reform platform in 1904, even though he was nominally a Republican. (Today he'd be snidely dismissed as RINO.) This caused a rift in the party and the election of 1912 pitted former president Roosevelt against incumbent William Howard Taft, originally his Secretary of War. Republican votes thus split, Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was elected. He served two terms before the cheap-labor conservatives could get their act together to elect another president, Warren G. Harding.
There is the very real possibility that Harding's was the worst administration OF ALL TIME. He, himself, wasn't a bad guy...from all indications...but, like Grant, was the unlucky victim of his own poor judgement when supposed friends turned Washington DC into a cesspool of corruption. His scandal-ridden presidency is primarily remembered for the Teapot Dome affair which involved bribery, oil and Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, who wound up doing time in a federal lock-up. Harding died in office.
Succeeding Republicans Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover turned the federal government into an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord for Big Business and, on the surface, the 1920's were, indeed, roaring right along. However, the fundamental instabilities of a top-heavy, one-dimensional debt economy led inexorably to the greatest financial catastrophe in the history of the world, the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression. Take THAT, America, compliments of Crippled Conservatism!
Whether you know it or not, this is the direction in which we are headed even as I am typing this...and for many of the same reasons. The right doesn't do history--other than rampant revisionism--and so, as Santayana proclaimed in 1905, "...are condemned to repeat it."
We're at about the halfway point right now. My next part of this series will continue the historical retrospective with the dawn of the Golden Age in America, the rise of progressive thought, and it will begin the deconstruction of the flawed ideology of the regressive Republicans. Please stay tuned!