As John D. Rockefeller and other oligarchs rose in power and political influence, what little middle class America had collapsed. The richest 1 percent held over half of America's wealth in 1900; combined into the top fifth of Americans that group owned fully 87 percent of all the nation's wealth, and the second fifth -- arguably the middle class -- held the remaining 11 percent. The bottom 40 percent of Americans had zero or negative net worth.
The average American worker during that era earned around $800 annually, and worked a 60 hour week to accomplish that.
Anti-oligarch political pressure built and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed in 1890, but wasn't seriously used until progressive Republican presidents Teddy Roosevelt (TR) and William Howard Taft used it against John D. Rockefeller and other oligarchs in the 1901-1916 era.
TR famously believed and said:
"There can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching economic democracy."
President Wilson used World War I to raise the top income tax rate on multimillionaires up to 91 percent, adding to TR's and Taft's somewhat successful efforts to restrain the oligarchs.
In 1920, though, in the wake of the end of World War I and the Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919, Republican Warren Harding campaigned on lowering that top tax rate all the way down to 25% (which he did when elected: his anti-tax campaign slogan was "A return to normalcy").
He also stopped enforcing the Sherman Act, among others: his pro-oligarchy campaign slogan was: "More business in government (privatization) and less government in business (deregulation)."
The Ronald Reagan of his era, Harding's policies -- continued by Coolidge and Hoover from 1921 to 1933 -- led straight to the Republican Great Depression.
Franklin D. Roosevelt came to power in 1933 and openly declared war on the morbidly rich, particularly after they unsuccessfully tried to kidnap and kill him that year in a plot outed by Marine General Smedley Butler (it was appropriately called "the businessman's plot").
"They hate me," he thundered at the Democratic National Convention in 1936, "and I welcome their hatred!"
FDR raised the top income tax rate back up to 91 percent. He put Harry Truman in charge of finding and prosecuting war profiteers, further chastising America's oligarchs.
From their failed coup plot in 1933 until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, our nation's morbidly rich mostly contented themselves with simply making money and enjoying their mansions and yachts all around the world. It was Great Gatsby all the time.
But in 1971, tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell wrote an infamous memo to his friend who ran the US Chamber of Commerce, recommending businessmen once again involve themselves in politics as they had in the 1920s.
They needed to take over the court system, Powell said, buy legislators, sponsor pro-oligarch professors, and create a political system and network that could act as a shadow government, making America once again a safe place for oligarchs to control the political and media systems.
Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court in 1972, and Powell then authored the decision in First National Bank that struck down a century of laws restraining corporate and CEO political activism, setting the stage for Clarence Thomas to cast the deciding vote in the 2010 Citizens United decision that finally, fully legalized political bribery.
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