Ferdinand Lundberg, in 1939, wrote a
book about the sixty wealthiest families in America. He made the audacious
claim that these families collectively owned and directed most of America’s
wealth – her industrial capacity, her speculative/financial sector, her raw
materials. He names the families and engages in the tedious geneological work
of showing how marriage and strategic alliances maintain and expand fortunes
that have their roots, many of them, in the 19th century. He goes
there from the first sentence in the book, which proclaims: “The United States
is owned and dominated today by a hierarchy of its sixty richest families,
buttressed by no more than ninety families of lesser wealth.” He claims that
behind the de jure democratic form of government is a de facto government, “absolutist
and plutocratic.”
Now, it is a difficult business,
tracking family fortunes. For one thing, “family” is a misleading category.
Lundberg’s prey are really more like the famous modern Russian clans, blat. Numbers of families and associates
are held together in a web of mutual interests, which one can generally call
after the family name of those who founded it. Thus, to use Lundberg’s first
family, the Rockefellers, we can see that a Carnegie marrying a Rockefeller (a
scion of one of the branches), which occurred when J. Stillman Rockefeller
married Nancy C. S. Carnegie, grandniece of Andrew. Lundberg, incidentally, is
a deadeye for those middle names. Where does “Stillman” come from? It comes
from James Stillman, whose daughter married a Rockefeller. Stillman was the
founder of National City Bank, now known as Citibank.
If Lundberg is right, then American
historians have truly missed the boat. It would be like historians of 15th
century France ignoring the nobility and misunderstood the form of French
government. In other words, historians have treated the United States as though
it were permanently the country Tocqueville described, but it is really, since
Tocqueville’s time, the country of magnates and their sons and daughters that
Henry James wrote about.
Since the notion that America is an
oligarchy has recently been revived – a paper with this thesis cowritten by Martin
Gilens and Benjamin Page has recently been reported on in the media – and because
we are all rivetted by Piketty’s thesis concerning the inequality endemic to
capitalism, perhaps it is time to turn to the muckrakers who have always
considered oligarchy the operational mode by which America is run.
Consider, then, a figure like Thomas
W. Lamont. Lamont is in the Morgan blat.
He negotiated enormous loans to keep England and France fighting in WWI; he
also negotiated loans to Mussolini after the war. He was, Lundberg claims, a “mentor”
to Wilson – and certainly he was one of Herbert Hoover’s unofficial advisors,
famous for misjudging Black Friday in 1929. For Lundberg, Lamont is everywhere.
Calvin Coolidge (who Lundberg is scornful of in a fine, Menckenish way – he adduces
the series Coolidge wrote when he was vice president for a woman’s magazine,
Enemies of the Republic: are the reds stalking our college Women? As a typical
product of Calvin’s low wattage mind – didn’t make a major decision without
calling him; Lamont is also, Lundberg claims, the “single most influential
person in contemporary American journalism.” Lamont was the grey eminence
behind the pronouncements of the uber-pundits of the day, like his friend,
Walter Lippman. He was influential with Luce, Forbes and Sulzberger. His
dinners were attended by the celebrity literati like H.G. Wells.
And yet, who among us has heard of this
perfect blatman, Thomas W.Lamont? if
Lundberg is even close to right, we should be viewing the twenties not only as
the time of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, but as the era of Lamont as well. He
is represented by a chapter in Behind the throne, with the perhaps misleading
subtitle: servants of power to imperial presidents, 1898-1968, because his
loans had a major effect on Mexico’s post-revolutionary history.
In any case, if we take Lundberg’s
families as clans, we have, perhaps, a clearer view of how fortunes are made
and power is exercized in the United States. Lundberg quotes an interesting
statistic from a man named Robert Doane,
who studied incomes for a Roosevelt era government office. According to Doane,
although incomes above $50,000 accounted
for 30 percent of American savings in 1929, only 38,899 persons had such
incomes, accounting for .05 of 1 percent of the American population.
The American one percenters – there
is a long history there, campers.
1 comment:
Here's a tidbit from Robert Parry:
"According to a campaign visitor log for September 11, 1980, David Rockefeller and several of his aides who were dealing with the Iranian issue signed in to see Casey at his campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.
With Rockefeller were Joseph Reed, whom Rockefeller had assigned to coordinate U.S. policy toward the Shah, and Archibald Roosevelt, the former CIA officer who was monitoring events in the Persian Gulf for Chase Manhattan and who had collaborated with Miles Copeland on the Iran hostage-rescue plan. The fourth member of the party was Owen Frisbie, Rockefeller’s chief lobbyist in Washington."
It's not surprising that last year's confirmation of Nixon's sabotage of peace talks in 1968 passed without interest, because that basically puts the October Surprise on the table as a possibility as well. That the dirty tricks used in Iran or Guatemala were then employed in America goes way beyond what is allowed for normal cynics.
Modulo Myself
Post a Comment