The August Day Plutocracy Would Love Us To Forget
Tuesday 31 August 2010 by: Chuck Collins and Sam
Pizzigati | Campaign for America's Future | Op-Ed
Ex-Presidents almost always follow a small number
of well-worn scripts. Some rush to cash in on their celebrity. Some do
charitable good deeds. Some just lay low.
Exactly one century ago, on August 31, 1910, we had
an ex-President who took a brash and bold leap that took him far beyond
these narrowly circumscribed roles. On that day, in the middle of Middle
America, a former President — Theodore Roosevelt — essentially called
on his fellow citizens to smash the nation’s rich down to democratic
size.
We need, Roosevelt told a massive assembly of 30,000
listeners, to “destroy privilege.” Ruin for our democracy, he warned,
will be “inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than
swollen fortunes for the few.”
Those listeners — in Osawatomie, Kansas — roared
their approval. Back East, apologists for grand fortune would be aghast.
Editorial writers would label Roosevelt “frankly socialistic,” even
“anarchistic.” A later historian, George Mowry, would call TR’s talk,
soon to be known as his “New Nationalism” address, ”the most radical
speech ever given by an ex-President.”
Time hasn’t dimmed that radicalism. Indeed, TR’s
speech speaks powerfully to us today, mainly because we confront, a
hundred years after he spoke in Osawatomie, the same concentrated wealth
and power that TR so feared.
As President, between 1901 and early 1909, Roosevelt
had taken on a plutocracy just as entrenched as ours today. He won some
battles and ducked many others. But he left the White House feeling the
nation, under his successor William Howard Taft, would be headed in the
right direction.
But Taft disappointed Roosevelt and outraged the
progressive wing of Roosevelt’s Republican Party. TR saw a burning need
to spell out a clearer vision for his nation’s future, and he jumped at
the invitation from Osawatomie to help dedicate the historic small
city’s John Brown Memorial Park.
The event quickly figured to be the biggest in Kansas
political history. Roosevelt had just finished a triumphal global tour.
He ranked, observers agreed, as the “world’s most popular citizen.”
Kansans would pull out all the stops to set the stage
for a memorable speech. By the appointed day, Osawatomie had never
looked better. Bands and dignitaries would be everywhere.
“We are ready for plutocrat and peasant,” wrote one
local editor, “to honor the ground where John Brown made his decisive
stand for freedom.”
Plutocrats never did show. But average Kansans did.
They started coming the day before TR’s scheduled appearance, in a
driving rain, via “foot, bicycles, motors, buggies, wagons, trains.”
The rain, fortunately, would stop before the mud
became too deep. Roosevelt would have open skies when he stepped up onto
his podium, a kitchen table, to begin his address. The “surging
throng,” says historian Robert La Forte, “continually cheered” for the
next hour and a half.
Most Americans today would cheer, too. Are you
outraged by the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico? Our national
resources, Roosevelt pronounced, “must be used for the benefit of all
our people, and not monopolized for the benefit of the few.”
Think corporations wield too much clout?
“The Constitution guarantees protections to property,
and we must make that promise good,” Roosevelt noted. “But it does not
give the right of suffrage to any corporation.”
We must “prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for
political purposes,” TR enunciated, and hold corporate officials
“personally responsible when any corporation breaks the law.”
Again and again, Roosevelt urged his listeners to
demand state “and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair
money-getting.” The absence of that restraint, he noted, “has tended to
create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful
men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.”
But TR didn’t stop there. Restraining fortunes based
on “unfair money-getting” had to be only a first step. A fortune “gained
without doing damage to the community,” he added, deserves no praise.
Americans needed to set a higher standard. We should permit fortunes “to
be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the
community.”
And even those fortunes, Roosevelt added, needed to
be checked, because the “really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the
mere fact of its size acquires qualities” that “differentiate it in
kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively
small means,” qualities that help ensure the “political domination of
money.”
To check the growth and limit the power of these
fortunes, Roosevelt called for a progressive income tax and an
“inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion
and increasing rapidly in amount with the sizes of the estate.”
Three years after TR’s Osawatomie speech, we would
have an income tax in the United States. Six years later after
Osawatomie, we would have an estate tax. By the middle of the 20th
century, many of the corporate regulatory reforms that Roosevelt
demanded on that August day a century ago would be the law of the land.
By that mid century, the plutocracy that Roosevelt
decried had essentially disappeared. The United States had become a
middle class nation where average workers, as TR envisioned in 1910, had
“a wage more than sufficient to cover the bare cost of living, and
hours of labor short enough” to leave them “time and energy” to bear
their “share in the management of the community.”
Now that mid 20th century middle class has
disappeared. We live amid plutocracy once again. In fact, 2010 marks the
first year since 1916 that we don’t even have an estate tax on the
books. The heirs of the super rich can this year inherit billions in
inheritance totally tax-free.
A hundred years ago, Theodore Roosevelt refused to
accept these sorts of concentrations of enormous wealth. At Osawatomie,
he helped inspire a generation-long struggle to break up these
concentrations. That struggle succeeded.
Our struggle has only just begun. We can succeed, too.
Chuck Collins, a senior scholar at the Institute
for Policy Studies, is the co-author, with Bill Gates Sr. of Wealth and
Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes. Sam
Pizzigati, an Institute associate fellow, edits Too Much, an online
weekly on excess and inequality.
All republished content that appears on Truthout has been
obtained by permission or license.
http://www.truth-out.org/the-august-day-plutocracy-would-love-us-to-forget62841
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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