Fairly interesting piece from Slate....
Barry
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2012/02/income_inequality_the_government_had_better_ideas_for_fixing_it_100_years_ago.html
Radical Solutions to Economic Inequality
If only Americans today were as open-minded about leveling the playing
field as we were 100 years ago.
By Beverly Gage|Posted Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2012, at 6:50 AM ET
William Howard Taft, 27th President of the United States and 10th
Chief Justice of the United States.
United States Library of Congress
A century ago, in one of his last acts of office, President William
Howard Taft attempted to solve the problem of inequality in America.
In August 1912, on the cusp of a brutal third-place finish in the
presidential election, he created a Commission on Industrial Relations
to investigate “the general condition of labor in the principal
industries.” Despite its fusty charge, the commission turned out to be
one of the most sensational sideshows of the Progressive Era, a cross-
country journey through the wilds of American class conflict. For
three years, government commissioners traipsed from city to city
asking capitalists, union organizers, and reformers what it was like
to work in America, and whether the spoils of industry seemed to be
distributed fairly among the rich and poor.
The commission’s answer, released in a 1916 report, speaks volumes
about the persistent dilemma of inequality in the United States, and
about the intellectual timidity of today’s political responses. “Have
the workers received a fair share of the enormous increase in wealth
which has taken place in this country…?” the report demanded. “The
answer is emphatically—No!”
Their numbers bore this out. According to the commission, the “Rich”—
or top 2 percent—owned 60 percent of the nation’s wealth. By contrast,
the “Poor”—or bottom 60 percent—owned just 5 percent of the wealth.
Today, after a century of ups and down, we’ve landed back at those
extremes, give or take a few percentage points. But what’s striking
about the commission’s report, read from a 21st-century perspective,
is how limited our own debate about inequality seems by comparison.
For the commission, inequality was a fundamental problem that
threatened the entire fabric of American democracy. Today, by
contrast, we’re busy debating whether a multimillionaire like Mitt
Romney ought to pay a few more percentage points in federal taxes.
The driving force behind the commission’s creation in 1912 was, to put
it bluntly, fear: If something wasn’t done, even tepid progressives
agreed, the country was looking at a period of sustained social chaos,
or worse. Evidence of a broken system seemed to be everywhere and went
far beyond the sorts of peaceful protests and encampments that have
roiled today’s 1 percent. On the West Coast, the Bridge and Structural
Iron Workers were blowing up nonunion bridges and work sites. On the
East Coast, the radical Industrial Workers of the World were actually
winning strikes. In New York in 1914, thousands of people turned out
for a rally in Union Square to mourn the deaths of three anarchists
who had blown themselves up attempting to build a bomb aimed at John
D. Rockefeller Jr., the country’s richest man.
To capture what this all looked like from the top, the commission
turned to the words of Daniel Guggenheim, one of dozens of industrial
titans asked to weigh in at its public hearings. In a decidedly un-
Romney-esque concession, Guggenheim thanked his lucky stars that labor
organizers and government reformers had stepped in to help where
capitalism had failed. “If it is not for what has been done and what
is being done,” he concluded, “we would have revolution in this
country.”
The depth of violence and anxiety about class revolt is one of the
most striking differences between then and now. What’s just as
remarkable, though, is the commission’s willingness to engage a vast
range of opinion on the subject. The “great men” of the day—
Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford—showed up to
testify at commission hearings. But so did hundreds of reformers,
organizers, and ordinary laborers, all invited to speak under official
government auspices, and all with their own ideas about how to fix a
broken system.
The most controversial witness was William D. “Big Bill” Haywood,
general secretary of the IWW. Less than a decade earlier, Haywood had
been on trial for conspiring to murder the governor of Idaho in the
midst of a bitter union war. During his testimony in 1915, the
commission listened patiently as Haywood explained that workers would
continue to fight regardless of what the commission might do, and “of
anything that capitalists and their shareholders and stockholders may
say to the contrary.” Imagine the federal government inviting Noam
Chomsky to weigh in on American class relations at an official
hearing, throw in a murder charge and a series of mass revolts, and
you have some idea of how just how ambitious the commission’s
experiment in democracy really was.
Haywood’s testimony marked the high point of Americans’ willingness to
entertain radical solutions to the inequality problem. By 1917, the
country was at war; by 1918 Haywood was on trial for criticizing the
draft. But what the commission did in its final report was radical in
its own way. Despite divisions among its members, the commission
insisted that the growing divide between rich and poor was more than
an economic problem. Wealth inequality, the final report concluded,
struck at the heart of American democracy, threatening to undermine
the national ideal that hard work would bring just reward.
There is something almost quaint—but decidedly refreshing—about the
commissioners’ blunt language. “Effective action by Congress is
required…,” the report proclaimed, “to check the growth of an
hereditary aristocracy, which is foreign to every conception of
American Government and menacing to the welfare of the people and the
existence of the Nation as a democracy.” Far from debating whether
“corporations are people,” the commission took for granted that
concentrations of corporate power were undemocratic, that gigantic
fortunes “constitute a menace to the State,” and that it was the duty
of government to restore a balance of power.
How did they plan to do it? The commission offered two chief
solutions, neither one of which has won much of an airing in our
latest rounds of debate. The first was an inheritance tax, aimed not
at the fearless entrepreneur, but at his sons and daughters, who had
done nothing to deserve a fortune. The second was increased support
for union organizing, on the principle that workers deserved to elect
their own representatives on the job just as they did in the government.
Both of these ideas ultimately became law—the inheritance tax almost
immediately, union organizing rights in fits and starts over the next
few decades. Today, by contrast, we seem to be going in the opposite
direction, with unions under attack and the so-called “death tax” all
but eliminated from the federal code.
The partisan stalemate in Washington suggests that situation is
unlikely to change anytime soon. But today’s lawmakers could do worse
than to follow the Industrial Commission’s broader example of
democratic debate. The national conversation about inequality is
already underway. The least they could do is listen.
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