When did the smiles begin?

[Otis]

Trustbuster? TR? Of the Wall Street connected political Roosevelts who've held office since 1700?

A few of his highlights. He was the grandson of Cornelius Roosevelt, founder of Chemical Bank. He held various NY state offices until elected VP in 1900, assumed the Presidency in 1901 after the assassination of McKinley, was re-elected in 1904 and founded the Progressive party with major JP Morgan backing.

Here's the relevant section of the Progressive Party platform - let's see how Trustbusterish it sounds...

"We therefore demand a strong national regulation of interstate corporations. The corporation is an essential part of modern business. The concentration of modern business, in some degree, is both inevitable and necessary for national and international business efficiency."

So where is his assumed hostility to big business?

 

[HudsonHawk]

So where is his assumed hostility to big business?

From all the cartoons man...

 

[Asienizen]

Teddy did trust bust, he broke up the trusts that he didn't like and the ones that got in the way of his Morgan cronies. You see if you create massive corporate monopolies under the rhetoric of breaking them up - all people will remember is what you said, not what you did.

Trustbuster? TR? Of the Wall Street connected political Roosevelts who've held office since 1700?

A few of his highlights. He was the grandson of Cornelius Roosevelt, founder of Chemical Bank. He held various NY state offices until elected VP in 1900, assumed the Presidency in 1901 after the assassination of McKinley, was re-elected in 1904 and founded the Progressive party with major JP Morgan backing.

Here's the relevant section of the Progressive Party platform - let's see how Trustbusterish it sounds...

"We therefore demand a strong national regulation of interstate corporations. The corporation is an essential part of modern business. The concentration of modern business, in some degree, is both inevitable and necessary for national and international business efficiency."

So where is his assumed hostility to big business?

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Forget about selling candy, that's for chumps. Conspiracy theories are where the money is."

Not much of a smile, though.

 

[Otis]

...he broke up the trusts that he didn't like and the ones that got in the way of his Morgan cronies. You see if you create massive corporate monopolies under the rhetoric of breaking them up - all people will remember is what you said, not what you did.

That's precisely how it works. The well-connected rich have no fear of regulation or "reform" because they always buy themselves loopholes. Too bad for those without connections and influence. They lose.

LizzieMaine, is your caption under Welch's picture your own jest, or did he really say that? My understanding (but without any evidence) is that Welch took no salary from the Birchers and at the end of his life had only his house and a few modest book royalties left.
Do you know differently?

 

[sheeplady]

He was the grandson of Cornelius Roosevelt, founder of Chemical Bank. He held various NY state offices until elected VP in 1900, assumed the Presidency in 1901 after the assassination of McKinley, was re-elected in 1904 and founded the Progressive party with major JP Morgan backing.

Interesting to note that Chemical Bank is the center of what became Chase Manhattan... so we are not talking peanuts here as a company. (Now JP Morgan Chase.)

If your statement about backing the progressive movement is correct, it appears the amount of inbreeding is relatively the same among corporations both then and now.

 

[vitanola]

Interesting to note that Chemical Bank is the center of what became Chase Manhattan... so we are not talking peanuts here as a company. (Now JP Morgan Chase.)

If your statement about backing the progressive movement is correct, it appears the amount of inbreeding is relatively the same among corporations both then and now.

Well, Morgan, Herriman, and Frick did heavily back Roosevelt for re-election in 1904, considering him to be the lesser of two evils. Although the Democratic Party had nominated the safe, sane and conservative Alton B. Parker for the presidency, the previous two election cycles, which had been dominated by the "Silver Tongued "Bryan, had given the Wall Street operators quite a scare, and they eschewed the "predictable head of an unpredictable party" to "the unpredictable head of a predictable party".

In 1912 it appears that most of the Morgan interests' quite considerable political contributions went to the Wilson campaign, channeled through Newton Baker, then mayor of Cleveland, but also a nationally prominent corporate attorney who had for some years been working as a go-between, reconciling Morgan and Rockefeller interests.

Had Morgan been backing Roosevelt it would have raised quite a furore in the Progressive and Democratic papers and magazines. Albert Shaw at the Review of Reviews would have been shouting from the housetops. McClures editorial board would have been indignant (they were pretty strident in '04), and The World would liked to have come to its own end. Even The Sun might have flickered.

I can find no mention of Morgan's supposed support of the 1912 Progressive party until the addendum to the second edition of "Lincoln Money Martyred!", published privately by a certain "Dr. R. E. Search" in 1935, a book which claims to carefully outline the longstanding plot by banking interests (presumably with Semitic connections) to re-make the world. This most interesting book is rather easily available, for in the early 1960's many thousands of copies were distributed gratis by the John Birch Society, the cost of which books was underwritten by a certain Fred Chase Koch. I still have my grandfather's copy acquired during his brief flirtation with the JBS. Most mentions of the Morgan support for the "Bull Moose" campaign that I could find were unsourced and quite modern, coming from either Birch or Larouche sources. I should like to see more on this matter.

When I return home I will ask Dr. Folsom about the matter. He seems to come up with a lot of this unsourced stuff.

 

[Otis]

....I can find no mention of Morgan's supposed support of the 1912 Progressive party...

Ahh, footnotes, the key to finding obscure texts. (great post btw, Vitanola!)

This comes from Antony Sutton, Wall Street and FDR
"Roosevelt's Progressive Party plugging for business regulation was financed by Wall Street, including the Morgan-controlled International Harvester Corporation and J. P. Morgan partners."

and this...

Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism (London: Free Press, 1963), p. 202...
"The party's financial records for 1912 list C. K. McCormick, Mr. and Mrs. Medill McCormick, Mrs. Katherine McCormick, Mrs. A. A. McCormick, Fred S. Oliver, and James H. Pierce. The largest donations for the Progressives, however, came from Munsey, Perkins, the Willard Straights of the Morgan Company, Douglas Robinson, W. E. Roosevelt, and Thomas Plant."


P.S. Sheeplady, yes, sadly it would seem so.

 

[Dragon Soldier]

If your statement about backing the progressive movement is correct, it appears the amount of inbreeding is relatively the same among corporations both then and now.

Of course. There were many wonderful things about the past, I wouldn't be here if I didn't think so. There were also some decidedly nasty things.

But when you consider the era that those here debate most is still within living memory and historically no more than a blink of an eye away, it really shouldn't be a surprise to any of us that things are pretty much the same now as they were then.

I read Orwell's Road To Wigan Pier again quite recently and as I was reading through the descriptions, particularly the snarky comments about folks' lifestyles, it struck me that bar for some of the language which has dated, I could be reading the "comments" section on any modern news site.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

(In fact, I think I have a new signature)

 

[vitanola]

I've always found Sutton to be more than a bit suspect, as he tends to make leaps of judgement which do not appear to be entirely supported by his source materiel. He is also the fellow who first "discovered" the link between Yale's twentieth century "Skull and Bones" club, the "Bavarian Illumnati" of the eighteenth century, and the ostensible conspiracy to traduce first the American state and then the world. This rather hysterical conspiratorial bent makes his work less useful than it might otherwise be, I think.

Kolko, as excellent as his work may be, appears to have left out the mention of some important connections. The McCormick family, in the generation before Robert McCormack were, though staunchly Republican, strongly effected by the perceived wrongs against our yeomanry which led to the formation of the Farmer-Labor wing of the Progressive coalition.

Oliver was connected to the McCormack family by personal ties, and to Roosevelt by aspiration and admiration. Roosevelt and Oliver had an extensive , wide ranging and long lived personal correspondence which was intiated by Roosevelts admiration for Oliver's visionary novel "A Dweller on Two Planets".

Willard Straight's connection to Roosevelt is altogether more personal than his Morgan connection. Straight was for some years engaged to Roosevelt's daughter, Ethel, and there were yet deep bonds of personal affection between Straight and his potential father-in-law. Straight married Dorothy Payne Whitney, daughter of the industrialist and Democratic reformer Wm. Whitney. Wm. Whitney was the brother-in-law of O. H. Payne, of the Perry and Payne families, who was treasurer of he Standard Oil as well as being connected to Morgan interests through the Tobacco Trust which he organized. That said, Dorothy Whitney Straight was even a stronger reformer than her father, generously supporting Women's sufferage, minimum wage and child labor laws, the ILGWU, workmen's educational facitlities, Americanization campaigns, and other Progressive causes. in addition to being one of the wealthiest women in the world she had a deep, if somewhat naive admiration for President Roosevelt. Note that Straight'sMorgan connection came because his wife was a Morgan creditor.

Douglas Robinson was strongly affected by L. D. Brandeis' attitudes towards the amelioration of the more severe negative effects of modern capitalism, and supported "Prorgessive" causes for some time. The same was true of Plant, a Boston shoe manufacturer who was introduced to Progressive ideas when Brandeis assisted in the settlement of a labor dispute in the early years of the Twentieth Century. Plant had no real connection to Morgan interests save that he leased equipment from the Shoe Machinery Trust, as did all similar manufacturers.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've always found Sutton to be more than a bit suspect, as he tends to make leaps of judgement which do not appear to be entirely supported by his source materiel. He is also the fellow who first "discovered" the link between Yale's twentieth century "Skull and Bones" club, the "Bavarian Illumnati" of the eighteenth century, and the ostensible conspiracy to traduce first the American state and then the world. This rather hysterical conspiratorial bent makes his work less useful than it might otherwise be, I think.

As one would expect from a friend of a certain Ms. Iserbyt, whom I used to cover when she was doing her best to disrupt a small-town school board with her -- ah -- theories. It's a small world, especially for cultists.