WEBVTT NOTE Reluctant Imperialism? William Howard Taft and the Colonial Empire 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:13.000 Well, the papers has already been commented by Lew Rockwell and in one of the topics have dealt with the, or will be dealing with the idea of the imperial presidency. 2 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:25.000 And I think it's fitting that we should do so for nothing has so characterized the past century of our history as our revolution toward empire. 3 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:54.920 It is appropriate that many of the opponents of empire and imperial intervention a century ago were advocates of market liberalism, who saw the events of 1898 and after, especially the annexation of the Philippines, as the first step down the slippery road toward imperial decline, such as had befallen Rome and other civilizations in the past. 4 00:00:54.920 --> 00:01:21.920 One intervention always seems to necessitate another until what was once thought of as an aberration becomes a predictable historical tendency or pattern, and I guess we once thought of impeachment as an aberration, but when you begin to get two of them discussed in 25 years, it no longer is an aberration either, I guess. 5 00:01:21.920 --> 00:01:29.040 For this dire prediction, the opponents of empire were ridiculed by those who saw the 6 00:01:29.040 --> 00:01:37.320 United States as an exception to those tendencies that had plagued other nations and civilizations. 7 00:01:37.320 --> 00:01:44.960 From this progressive, imperialist perspective, one might say we were sort of above or beyond 8 00:01:44.960 --> 00:01:49.220 history, a providential people indeed. 9 00:01:49.220 --> 00:01:55.960 This knee-jerk optimism, however, had not been shared by the Founding Fathers. As early 10 00:01:55.960 --> 00:02:05.640 as 1775, John Adams had understood that a republic was defined by a rule of law, an 11 00:02:05.640 --> 00:02:15.640 empire by capricious acts of its rulers. Elsewhere, I've suggested that aspects of empire were 12 00:02:15.640 --> 00:02:24.520 were already present in the birth of our republic. But there's no denial that the reality by 13 00:02:24.520 --> 00:02:32.440 the turn of the 20th century is that we had become serious players in the empire game. 14 00:02:32.440 --> 00:02:38.720 But with respect to the American Revolution and George Washington, I think our first effort 15 00:02:38.720 --> 00:02:46.480 and Empire, in the sense of the Philippines, was in 1781. We had tried to take Canada 16 00:02:46.480 --> 00:02:51.960 earlier. By 1781, it was pretty clear the Canadians didn't want to be part of the American 17 00:02:51.960 --> 00:03:01.200 states. And Washington sent Lafayette up to take Canada. And he met with the Green Mountain 18 00:03:01.200 --> 00:03:07.640 Boys. And the Green Mountain Boys, Ethan Allen said, yes, certainly General Lafayette. They 19 00:03:07.640 --> 00:03:10.640 They were militia, of course, not standing army. 20 00:03:10.640 --> 00:03:14.760 And they said, we'd be happy to go launch an attack on Canada. 21 00:03:14.760 --> 00:03:16.680 There's just one thing. 22 00:03:16.680 --> 00:03:18.960 We would like three things. 23 00:03:18.960 --> 00:03:25.720 We want double pay, double rations, and plunder. 24 00:03:25.720 --> 00:03:30.680 And Lafayette said, well, General Washington hasn't authorized me to give you that. 25 00:03:30.680 --> 00:03:35.360 And so he said, well, then we'll just go back to the old lady back there in the Green Mountains. 26 00:03:35.360 --> 00:03:42.400 And they departed and so much for the attempt to take Canada, the first American foreign 27 00:03:42.400 --> 00:03:48.320 aid program, 1792, to Haiti. 28 00:03:48.320 --> 00:03:53.720 Most Floridians, I think, will be surprised to learn that my state, with 15 million people 29 00:03:53.720 --> 00:03:56.400 now, fourth in numbers in the nation. 30 00:03:56.400 --> 00:04:01.560 This year, Florida taxpayers don't know it, but we've given a half million already for 31 00:04:01.560 --> 00:04:03.320 Haitian aid. 32 00:04:03.320 --> 00:04:06.440 to Government, not People to People. 33 00:04:06.440 --> 00:04:13.840 Very interesting how these things start as aberrations and then sort of continue. 34 00:04:13.840 --> 00:04:21.000 So we've had a succession of American presidents who've hinted that they're reluctant or ambivalent 35 00:04:21.000 --> 00:04:27.740 about doing this or the other, but we've had one foreign intervention after another. 36 00:04:27.740 --> 00:04:34.820 When McKinley made the decision to acquire the real estate in the Philippines and elsewhere, 37 00:04:34.820 --> 00:04:43.140 it fell to administrators such as Elihu Root and William Howard Taft to design and build 38 00:04:43.140 --> 00:04:46.060 the edifice, the colonial edifice. 39 00:04:46.060 --> 00:04:54.700 In doing so, they helped to move us toward an institutionalization of empire that would 40 00:04:54.700 --> 00:05:01.660 would make it difficult for the nation to disengage from such policies. 41 00:05:01.660 --> 00:05:07.060 And I think it's instructive that the two people that spoke already before me have touched 42 00:05:07.060 --> 00:05:16.860 upon the bureaucracy, as Lowell mentioned, that begins to proliferate around the presidency. 43 00:05:16.860 --> 00:05:22.460 And even with the first president, we have Hamilton there, and those people arguing that 44 00:05:22.460 --> 00:05:29.860 And he was really running the show. And I guess what I'm going to say here is that William 45 00:05:29.860 --> 00:05:37.440 McKinley is there as president and certainly later the flamboyant Teddy Roosevelt. But 46 00:05:37.440 --> 00:05:47.320 you can't understand their presidencies unless you comprehend the role that Elihu Root had 47 00:05:47.320 --> 00:05:54.120 as Secretary of War and then William Howard Taft had in the Philippines and then as Secretary 48 00:05:54.120 --> 00:05:56.800 of War and as President. 49 00:05:56.800 --> 00:06:03.560 And Taft is there for 12 years in one capacity or another. 50 00:06:03.560 --> 00:06:10.240 You could argue on that basis in terms of being in that cockpit of policy that Taft 51 00:06:10.240 --> 00:06:15.480 was perhaps one of the most influential people in the 20th century, though he's not viewed 52 00:06:15.480 --> 00:06:22.000 that way, because we don't see the continuity of the kinds of things that he was doing. 53 00:06:22.000 --> 00:06:28.560 And I might mention something about empire. How many of you here, just curious, have ever 54 00:06:28.560 --> 00:06:35.280 worked in the National Archives around the turn of the 20th century? Anybody? Am I the 55 00:06:35.280 --> 00:06:43.800 only one? Okay. Well, you know, there's this nice myth about the British Empire, that it's 56 00:06:43.800 --> 00:06:50.800 sort of, you know, in some sort of way backed into empire, sort of muddled in there, you 57 00:06:50.800 --> 00:07:00.760 know. Nobody muddles into empire. It is a very conscious, bureaucratic, centralized 58 00:07:00.760 --> 00:07:10.560 endeavor if you play it at all. And there's no better way to understand the imperialization 59 00:07:10.560 --> 00:07:16.840 of America in the 20th Century than to go look in the National Archives. I don't mean 60 00:07:16.840 --> 00:07:26.840 for any specific document. Go and look at the way records were kept. Before Empire, 61 00:07:26.840 --> 00:07:32.960 we have a quaint government that takes documents and folds them up into thirds and puts a 62 00:07:32.960 --> 00:07:38.080 little red string around them. And when you go to work there, since so few of us do, you 63 00:07:38.080 --> 00:07:43.800 You kind of blew the dust off and opened it up to read this document, and they were so 64 00:07:43.800 --> 00:07:49.960 afraid when I microfilmed a few of them back 30 something years ago. But by the time you 65 00:07:49.960 --> 00:07:55.560 get Elihu Root in there, who reorganized the Army, reorganized the State Department, they 66 00:07:55.560 --> 00:08:02.060 had to reorganize the record keeping because you can't run an empire with little pieces 67 00:08:02.060 --> 00:08:08.900 is a string wrapped around the paper. And you notice it immediately in the way that 68 00:08:08.900 --> 00:08:15.900 the records are kept. So here's Taft, who gets into the Philippines, negotiating with 69 00:08:15.900 --> 00:08:22.380 the Vatican, the Panama Canal, Cuba, the Mexican Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, 70 00:08:22.380 --> 00:08:29.960 the Nicaraguan Revolution, and dollar diplomacy in a whole bunch of places. So it's an incredible 71 00:08:29.960 --> 00:08:37.120 kind of involvement that we're looking at here. I don't have time in this short presentation 72 00:08:37.120 --> 00:08:41.440 to deal with more than just a couple of them. We'll try to get into the Philippines and 73 00:08:41.440 --> 00:08:49.440 Cuba if we have time. Taft was a fascinating character. When I was doing research on the 74 00:08:49.440 --> 00:08:55.400 anti-imperialist, I was in the Wisconsin archives, and he took a trip back to the Philippines 75 00:08:55.400 --> 00:09:01.920 in 1905, and there's this hilarious, I started laughing as I was reading the papers and everyone 76 00:09:01.920 --> 00:09:06.800 was looking at me, but if you can picture this, they were on this boat and it was at 77 00:09:06.800 --> 00:09:11.800 a small Philippine village out on an island, so between the boat and the dock was kind 78 00:09:11.800 --> 00:09:17.600 of a disparity. So there were about five or six little Filipinos, as this fellow described 79 00:09:17.600 --> 00:09:24.000 it, holding this ladder while Big Bill Taft, over 300 pounds, is out there in the middle 80 00:09:24.000 --> 00:09:43.000 The Man had prickly heat all over him. He had several severe operations while he was in the islands, but there's no question he became a very dedicated administrator for the Empire. 81 00:09:43.000 --> 00:09:57.000 And what the tragedy has tapped, it seems to me, is that here is a man who, when McKinley made the decision to take the Philippines, was opposed to it. 82 00:09:57.000 --> 00:10:08.000 He was an anti-imperialist, but he also wanted to be on the Supreme Court sometime in his career, and as you all know, he finally made it after his presidency. 83 00:10:08.000 --> 00:10:20.000 So he allowed himself to be convinced, even though he was an anti-imperialist, that the thing to do was go out there and shape things up in the Philippine islands. 84 00:10:20.000 --> 00:10:35.000 And he always was thinking of his career, so he managed to use the leverage to become head of the commission to replace Jacob Gould Sherman, who is the one who used the term reluctant imperialist, by the way. 85 00:10:35.000 --> 00:10:40.000 Kevin was president of Cornell and went out in the first Philippine Commission and then went and returned. 86 00:10:40.000 --> 00:10:49.000 So Taft went out to the islands and by the time he got there, of course, the insurgency was in full swing. 87 00:10:49.000 --> 00:10:53.000 The killing was going on in full swing. 88 00:10:53.000 --> 00:11:03.000 And those of us who are Southerners can appreciate the differences between the military and the Philippines, 89 00:11:03.000 --> 00:11:23.000 Headed by General Arthur MacArthur and the Civilian Administration headed by William Howard Taft because the Army in the Philippines is very much like Lincoln and Johnson at the end of the Civil War. 90 00:11:23.000 --> 00:11:29.000 They believed they didn't really want to meddle too much in Philippine affairs except to 91 00:11:29.000 --> 00:11:30.800 put down the insurrection. 92 00:11:30.800 --> 00:11:38.040 And so if you were one of the rebels and you signed the oath with the United States, you 93 00:11:38.040 --> 00:11:40.440 could participate again. 94 00:11:40.440 --> 00:11:50.960 Now the civilian administrators in Taft wanted to meddle in the Philippine Revolution and 95 00:11:50.960 --> 00:12:00.100 They took the position that the Radical Republicans did, and that is, they wanted their people in, you see. 96 00:12:00.100 --> 00:12:11.080 Now once you take that position, as we all know, it means the intervention gets deeper and deeper and deeper. 97 00:12:11.080 --> 00:12:18.640 Because you're meddling in a very complex social phenomenon, revolution. 98 00:12:18.640 --> 00:12:23.720 and Taft managed to be president or secretary of war when we had the Philippine Revolution, 99 00:12:23.720 --> 00:12:28.120 the Cuban Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, you know, that's a 100 00:12:28.120 --> 00:12:31.600 lot of meddling and revolution. 101 00:12:31.600 --> 00:12:40.240 And it's interesting, I guess meddlers get tired after about 12 years because the Northern 102 00:12:40.240 --> 00:12:46.040 Army withdrew from its southern occupation after about 12 years. 103 00:12:46.040 --> 00:12:52.520 And the regime of Taft in the Philippines, when they seriously went after this, before 104 00:12:52.520 --> 00:13:02.880 the Democrats got back in and began a Philippinization of the service, was 12 years, from 1900 to 105 00:13:02.880 --> 00:13:03.880 1912. 106 00:13:03.880 --> 00:13:09.220 And I suppose you take a little comfort in that. 107 00:13:09.220 --> 00:13:17.320 But almost every revolution is like the American Revolution, as Carl Becker said, it's not 108 00:13:17.320 --> 00:13:26.200 only a question of home rule, it's a question of who is going to rule at home. 109 00:13:26.200 --> 00:13:39.060 And we like to talk about self-determination, but really we mean self-determination as long 110 00:13:39.060 --> 00:13:43.620 as those people that get in think the way we do. 111 00:13:43.620 --> 00:13:52.180 And I think that what Taft tended to do, and what we've done in all these revolutions, 112 00:13:52.180 --> 00:13:58.140 is to begin to support people that view the world the way we do. 113 00:13:58.140 --> 00:14:06.860 And the sociologists these days, as they study this, they talk about bureaucracy's ability 114 00:14:06.860 --> 00:14:14.540 to Induce Change and they call that state capacity and what it really tells you is how 115 00:14:14.540 --> 00:14:20.700 much sociology is this kind of a status study as far as I'm concerned. 116 00:14:20.700 --> 00:14:26.940 Now in western civilization the first people who really studied social change were the 117 00:14:26.940 --> 00:14:33.060 Catholics in China after Marco Polo as they went out there. The Jesuits had a great debate 118 00:14:33.060 --> 00:14:40.260 with the Dominicans, the Franciscans, about how to achieve change in China. 119 00:14:40.260 --> 00:14:46.540 And those two philosophies about how to achieve change are still with us today. 120 00:14:46.540 --> 00:14:54.220 The Jesuit view is that you work with the existing elite and you try to find common 121 00:14:54.220 --> 00:15:02.020 denominators like heaven and tian as being, the Dominican view is the pure unadulterated 122 00:15:02.020 --> 00:15:06.660 were none of this compromise and going to the masses and of course they got 123 00:15:06.660 --> 00:15:12.900 involved with such arguments that the Chinese Emperor finally threw them out. 124 00:15:12.900 --> 00:15:21.860 But when I lectured in the Philippines for the State Department in the 1980s I 125 00:15:21.860 --> 00:15:28.620 was reminded of how the United States instead of allowing the kind of 126 00:15:28.620 --> 00:15:38.620 of Revolutionary Development that people like Senator Borah argued in the 20th century as one of our great anti-imperialists that we had to allow. 127 00:15:38.620 --> 00:15:48.620 We always went back and retrenched ourselves with the existing rulers, in this case the people who'd been sympathetic to the Spanish. 128 00:15:48.620 --> 00:15:53.620 And I gave a talk at the Makati Business Club. It's sort of like the New York Chamber of Commerce. 129 00:15:53.620 --> 00:16:07.120 There were about 1,500 people out there. I'd been dragged away from the Joint Economic Committee where I was working as an economist on housing to lecture in the Philippines because I'd written on this. 130 00:16:07.120 --> 00:16:13.460 And this fellow took me aside. He was a Harvard Ph.D. economist, Philippine minister. He said, you have a Spanish name. 131 00:16:13.460 --> 00:16:26.460 and so he took me to his club and here was this magnificent thing out of late 19th century Paris, Gilded, etc. 132 00:16:26.460 --> 00:16:33.460 All the wives had just returned from either Madrid or Paris on shopping tours and he regaled me, said, 133 00:16:33.460 --> 00:16:48.460 We said, you know, we Spanish have been here, we've had to endure the brown man, the yellow man, the Japanese, the brown man again, but we survive and endure in all of this. 134 00:16:48.460 --> 00:17:02.460 And the real tragedy at the end of World War II, we put into a kind of Orwellian black hole the Filipinos who had fought against the Japanese. 135 00:18:32.460 --> 00:18:39.900 One, about imperialist meddling on Taft's model, is that revolutions from the American 136 00:18:39.900 --> 00:18:48.080 and any other, very complex social phenomena, just as the market is a very complex economic 137 00:18:48.080 --> 00:18:58.420 phenomenon. And you have about as much chance as an outsider trying to meddle through intervention, 138 00:18:58.420 --> 00:19:09.920 Military intervention in a vast thing like the Chinese Revolution as you have as some kind of progressive planner meddling in the market. 139 00:19:09.920 --> 00:19:15.420 And I think the two are very similar, the analysis there. 140 00:19:15.420 --> 00:19:29.320 Lesson two about empire is, as was touched on, that it requires a very large bureaucracy to carry out imperial policies. 141 00:19:29.320 --> 00:19:37.920 Thus, by 1902, there are already almost 3,000 American civilian bureaucrats in the island, 142 00:19:37.920 --> 00:19:43.120 more than there were Filipinos administering policy, 143 00:19:43.120 --> 00:19:47.960 And this did not include American teachers or the military. 144 00:19:47.960 --> 00:19:54.600 By the way, we have this image that the military is this kind of neutral observer. 145 00:19:54.600 --> 00:19:56.320 That is nonsense. 146 00:19:56.320 --> 00:20:01.160 People, historians like John Gates, who studied the American army in the Philippines, 147 00:20:01.160 --> 00:20:07.720 those boys were getting, the officers, were getting indoctrinated at West Point by the faculty 148 00:20:07.720 --> 00:20:12.040 about the virtues of progressivism. 149 00:20:12.040 --> 00:20:18.720 And they went out in the islands and practiced it. What was said earlier about the universities. 150 00:20:18.720 --> 00:20:24.680 By the turn of the century, as anti-imperialists like William James were aware, American universities 151 00:20:24.680 --> 00:20:31.720 were always turning, were beginning to turn out public administrators. And they had a 152 00:20:31.720 --> 00:20:37.640 job out in the Philippines, obviously, if they wanted to go there. Taft in one of his 153 00:20:37.640 --> 00:20:43.920 His reports argued that the Philippine Foreign Civil Service that he was building was more 154 00:20:43.920 --> 00:20:48.560 honest than the American Civil Service, and that was probably true. 155 00:20:48.560 --> 00:20:55.240 But these young people who went out there as administrators and then administered to 156 00:20:55.240 --> 00:20:59.160 the little brown brother, what do you think they wanted to do when they came back to the 157 00:20:59.160 --> 00:21:02.100 United States? 158 00:21:02.100 --> 00:21:06.840 They wanted to become an administrator in the progressive movement. 159 00:21:06.840 --> 00:21:11.880 When you can't understand the New Deal, which was being commented upon, unless you understand 160 00:21:11.880 --> 00:21:17.800 and some studies have been done on this, how many of the New Dealers were old frustrated 161 00:21:17.800 --> 00:21:24.120 progressives from the turn of the century in the Roosevelt years and after. 162 00:21:24.120 --> 00:21:31.200 The great creation of this period was the Bureau of Insular Affairs, the BIA, not to 163 00:21:31.200 --> 00:21:35.200 The BIA and the Bureau of Indian Affairs 164 00:21:35.200 --> 00:21:46.200 But significant that the military and not the civilians were in charge of the BIA 165 00:21:46.200 --> 00:21:52.200 And Elihu Root compared it to, well, like everybody else's colonial office 166 00:21:52.200 --> 00:21:55.200 Like the British, but it really wasn't 167 00:21:55.200 --> 00:22:04.040 because of the extent to which the military was in charge of so-called American state-building. 168 00:22:04.040 --> 00:22:12.240 And it was so important that by the time, by 1912, it had been elevated to major general. 169 00:22:12.240 --> 00:22:21.840 The head of the BIA was a major general. And the papers of the BIA are extraordinary in 170 00:22:21.840 --> 00:22:36.120 in terms of showing this enormous bureaucratic involvement and institutionalization of empire. 171 00:22:36.120 --> 00:22:41.160 The church lands were one of the things that Taft had to get involved with the Vatican 172 00:22:41.160 --> 00:22:48.960 over the friar lands in attempting to settle that issue. 173 00:22:48.960 --> 00:22:55.240 So that what you get here by the time Taft comes back to become Secretary of War and 174 00:22:55.240 --> 00:23:02.440 he continues with Philippine policy is an enormous American bureaucratic involvement 175 00:23:02.440 --> 00:23:09.280 out there. And it would have gotten deeper and longer if people like Taft and the Republicans 176 00:23:09.280 --> 00:23:16.680 had stayed because in Taft's idea the Filipinos were never going to be ready for self-government 177 00:23:16.680 --> 00:23:23.880 for a century or so. The anti-imperialists, by the way, did triumph. There were many younger 178 00:23:23.880 --> 00:23:33.080 ones like Cordell Hall, who were young anti-imperialists in 1898, who continued and gained power and 179 00:23:33.080 --> 00:23:39.560 worked to get us out of the Philippines, which we did under Woodrow Wilson, made finally 180 00:23:39.560 --> 00:23:58.560 and finally the promise of Philippine independence and the British were infuriated by this because Gandhi and all kinds of nationalists all over Asia immediately asked if the United States can do this, can make a promise of independence, why can't other nations? 181 00:23:58.560 --> 00:24:09.560 Certainly, that was not due to Taft's efforts, because he would have wanted us very much to stay. 182 00:24:09.560 --> 00:24:24.560 I don't think we should judge Taft too harshly, however, in his inability to understand the difference between nationalism and people being sympathetic to the United States. 183 00:24:24.560 --> 00:24:32.960 through the BIA records. He constantly is castigating the Filipinos who are his Filipinos 184 00:24:32.960 --> 00:24:39.680 because they may make a statement that appears to him anti-American. And the Filipino conservatives 185 00:24:39.680 --> 00:24:47.120 are always explaining to him that if we don't say these things, we'll have no credibility 186 00:24:47.120 --> 00:24:53.120 as a kind of comprador scallywag in front of our own people. 187 00:24:53.120 --> 00:24:57.560 And Tam could never seem to understand that. 188 00:24:57.560 --> 00:25:03.160 In the same way that John Foster Dulles and a whole bunch of American policymakers with 189 00:25:03.160 --> 00:25:09.320 respect to this idea of social revolution could never seem to understand that someone 190 00:25:09.320 --> 00:25:17.020 can be a communist and a nationalist, as Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong were. 191 00:25:17.020 --> 00:25:24.780 And so Taft could never comprehend that distinction. 192 00:25:24.780 --> 00:25:33.940 The biggest tragedy was Taft's unwillingness to allow the publication in 1908 of Colonel 193 00:25:33.940 --> 00:25:43.780 John R.M. Taylor's four volumes on the Philippine Insurgency. And before he died in the 30s, 194 00:25:43.780 --> 00:25:50.660 Taylor was still trying to get that study published because he feared that the United 195 00:25:50.660 --> 00:25:58.140 States, if it ever got involved in another guerilla insurgency in Asia, ought to have 196 00:25:58.140 --> 00:25:59.980 the benefit of that study. 197 00:25:59.980 --> 00:26:06.260 And the reason Taft didn't want it published is because it embarrassed so many of the Filipino 198 00:26:06.260 --> 00:26:16.540 politicians who've now become our quote-unquote friends in the islands I'll switch very quickly 199 00:26:16.540 --> 00:26:25.820 since I only have apparently five minutes left to the Panama Canal now most of us think 200 00:26:25.820 --> 00:26:33.740 that that was a wonderful sort of thing remember Teddy took the canal he once justified this 201 00:26:33.740 --> 00:26:37.540 with respect to Western Civilization. 202 00:26:37.540 --> 00:26:42.740 In a talk, and he asked Ella Hugh Root after about an hour, have I justified myself? 203 00:26:42.740 --> 00:26:47.900 And Root turned to him and he said, oh yes, Teddy, you were accused of seduction. 204 00:26:47.900 --> 00:26:54.140 You proved conclusively you were guilty of rape. 205 00:26:54.140 --> 00:27:00.100 You know, today, whenever somebody invokes Western Civilization as a rationale for policy 206 00:27:00.100 --> 00:27:06.060 out there. You better be careful and look where your pocketbook is. Now, of course, 207 00:27:06.060 --> 00:27:14.800 we talk about the necessity to save the world with the IMF. And when the UFOers and NASA 208 00:27:14.800 --> 00:27:22.160 get together, no doubt, no doubt, we will be told that there is going to have to be 209 00:27:22.160 --> 00:27:29.500 something called intergalactic salvation. And then you better certainly watch out for 210 00:27:29.500 --> 00:27:33.500 The Theory of Money and Credit 211 00:27:33.500 --> 00:27:37.500 The Theory of Money and Credit 212 00:27:59.500 --> 00:28:09.220 in 1978, when Jimmy Carter was moving toward fulfilling getting out of the canal zone. 213 00:28:09.220 --> 00:28:15.580 And Ronald Reagan, who's supposed to be something of a free market fellow, revealed himself 214 00:28:15.580 --> 00:28:20.860 as basically just a jingoist because he ran around saying, oh, we can't get out of the 215 00:28:20.860 --> 00:28:21.860 islands. 216 00:28:21.860 --> 00:28:24.220 I mean, excuse me, the canal. 217 00:28:24.220 --> 00:28:26.220 But that's absolutely silly. 218 00:28:26.220 --> 00:28:33.780 Look, there was a railroad across the isthmus from 1855 to 1914 built by Commodore Vanderbilt. 219 00:28:33.780 --> 00:28:38.180 It paid a profit every year until the canal came in. 220 00:28:38.180 --> 00:28:47.380 The canal has been a massive, massive subsidy by the American taxpayer to the shipping industries 221 00:28:47.380 --> 00:28:48.960 of various countries. 222 00:28:48.960 --> 00:28:53.580 When I did the study, who was the biggest user of the canal? 223 00:28:53.580 --> 00:29:01.140 Japanese ore carrying ships going from Brazil to Osaka. 224 00:29:01.140 --> 00:29:06.600 So then, of course, the American steelmaker wants a subsidy so he can compete with that 225 00:29:06.600 --> 00:29:11.700 Japanese steel that we subsidized in the canal. 226 00:29:11.700 --> 00:29:17.180 And the best kept secret, except Forbes magazine was the only one pointing out a true capitalist 227 00:29:17.180 --> 00:29:19.700 market perspective. 228 00:29:19.700 --> 00:29:26.900 Railroad bridging has replaced the need to take a ship down there with a unionized crew, 229 00:29:26.900 --> 00:29:32.260 go through the canal locks with the water from Lake Gatan, and come back up the other 230 00:29:32.260 --> 00:29:39.060 side. And we have at least a dozen now of such railroad bridging with containerization 231 00:29:39.060 --> 00:29:44.200 and all the rest of that. And had there been no canal, that's what would have happened. 232 00:29:44.200 --> 00:29:49.520 I'm sure that there would have been two railroads down there before the Justice Department got 233 00:30:19.520 --> 00:30:25.520 We had to spend $175 million of American taxpayer money because there was a K then. 234 00:30:25.520 --> 00:30:28.520 Well, who's going to do that when the Panamanians have it? 235 00:30:28.520 --> 00:30:30.520 Well, I want to very quickly close. 236 00:30:30.520 --> 00:30:38.520 I have a great quote here from TR in which he says, he tells Taft, 237 00:30:38.520 --> 00:30:43.520 the kind of presidency we need is one that leads the Congress around 238 00:30:43.520 --> 00:30:48.520 because they're really not too informed and able to act, etc. 239 00:30:48.520 --> 00:31:01.520 et cetera. And that's what the Presidency has become. But I want to finish with one question. What is the similarity between Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and William Crystal? 240 00:31:01.520 --> 00:31:14.520 They all three are on record as saying that they really think we need TR again. Crystal and the neocoms have put him forward as their Boe ideal. 241 00:31:14.520 --> 00:31:20.120 Newt Gingrich tells us that he came out of that whole tradition, his uncle was a Gifford 242 00:31:20.120 --> 00:31:28.800 Pinchot Taft man. And Bill Clinton wants to be on Mount Rushmore. And I think, I don't 243 00:31:28.800 --> 00:31:35.120 think he'll make it, but if he does, they may not put his face up there as his most 244 00:31:35.120 --> 00:31:37.320 familiar appendage. Thank you very much.