By Wayne Holliday
Special to THE DAILY

According to Jack Beatty, America, “having redeemed democracy in the Civil War,” then “betrayed it in the Gilded Age.”

Beatty is only partially correct.

With the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution enacted during, and shortly following, the American Civil War, fully half of the potential electorate (American women) were still excluded. But, it was a noble beginning.

The American Civil War generated enormous profits that made possible an explosive industrial revolution.

The result was an accumulation of huge fortunes that were increasingly consolidated into fewer and fewer hands as the 19th century waned.

Aristotle defined oligarchy as the state that exists “when the men of property have the government in their hands.”

This described both the American federal, and in most cases, state, governments during the post-Civil War era known as the Gilded Age.

Only in the 1890s, with the emergence of the Populist Party, was a significant challenge mounted against this oligarchy.

With little money, and few institutions to perpetuate this movement of the poor and middle classes, Populism folded after a decade of battle.

Men of wealth have always tried, and have often succeeded, in controlling our government.

During President Andrew Jackson’s administration, he noted that “The rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. ... Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought to make themselves richer by act of Congress.”

That did not change during the Gilded Age.

Confiding to his diary after leaving the presidency, Rutherford B. Hayes wrote that “this is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer.

“It is a government by the corporations, of the corporations, and for the corporations.”

The perfection of the oligarchic nature of America during the Gilded Age would not have been possible without the active aid of the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the first century of our history, there was considerable reluctance to grant incorporation for business, while incorporation was freely granted for educational, charitable and religious purposes.

Why was this so?

According to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis it was because of a “fear of encroachment upon the liberties and opportunities of the individual.

Fear of the subjection of labor to capital. Fear of monopoly. Fear that absorption of capital by corporations, and their perpetual life, might bring evils similar to those which attended mortmain.

There was a sense of some insidious menace inherent in large aggregations of capital, particularly when held by corporations.”

In the 1873 Slaughter-House Cases, in which the city of New Orleans tried to protect its citizens against disease epidemics caused by the dumping of slaughterhouse offal into the Mississippi River above the city’s intake of drinking water, the U.S. Supreme Court essentially nullified the 14th Amendment’s protection of former slaves by applying its protection only against federal, not state laws.

According to Beatty, the 14th Amendment became “a charter of white Anglo-Saxon freedom passed not to protect blacks from whites but whites from blacks.”

Associate Justice Stephen Breyer concurs. “Before May 17” (1954, in the Brown v Board of Education decision), Breyer writes, “the Court read the 14th Amendment’s words ‘equal protection of the laws’ as if they protected only members of the majority race.

After May 17, it read those words as the framers who wrote them after the Civil War meant them to read, as offering the same protection to citizens of every race.”

In an 1886 case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., which dealt with the taxation of railroad property in California, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite declared, before taking oral arguments, “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.”

The court reporter printed this statement in the syllabus and case history above the decision, but it was not in the opinion itself.

Thus, an extemporaneous remark about an issue that was not in the body of the case, made by Chief Justice Waite, that had no authority of precedent, became the basis of law that has haunted America’s political and legal landscape for well over a century. Corporations have become, through Supreme Court largesse, juristic persons with every right granted to real citizens.

Beatty compares America of the Gilded Age to America of today: a government in the hands of the wealthy, election fraud, a very conservative and increasingly activist Supreme Court, the accumulation of wealth into the hands of the few, and the increasing impoverishment of the many.

Whenever the subject of increased taxation of wealth is broached, political conservatives almost always interject the topic of “class warfare” into the discussion.

With few exceptions in the past century, there has been rampant class warfare in our nation. And the perpetrators have not come from the poor and middle classes.

As Andrew Jackson, Rutherford Hayes, Franklin Roosevelt, and myriad others have told us, the wealthy seek to, and usually succeed in, controlling government, and thus the economy, and fashions the legal and economic structures to benefit themselves.

Class warfare in this country has been top down.

Beatty has written a fascinating and informative book.

It is indeed sad that so little of this information gets into the daily media news background, or school texts that purport to teach our children about our economy and government.

It is little wonder we are so ignorant of the realities of our government and economic system, and are so susceptible to the blatant falsehoods of propaganda, both economic and political, that is ubiquitous in our land.

Email This Page