Now we start with Coco, Times of Conservatism, chapters 1 and 2, which covers the merger movement,
which we'll get to probably next Tuesday, maybe Thursday, no, Tuesday I'm sure.
This is pages 11 to 56.
You might find Coco is not a great writer, unfortunately, but it's an excellent book,
but you have to slog your way through a little bit.
Anyway, we're getting out of oil, one of the great booms of the post-Civil War period,
petroleum, it starts, energy in those days, mostly heat, light, was whale oil.
In other words, whale oil was a major lamp for whale oil.
Did I mention this last time about whales?
Yeah, okay.
1859 is the first oil well in much of Pennsylvania and we now have the next saga, the next great
tycoon in this period, the fourth John D. Rockefeller who's the Mr. Petroleum and like
most of the other tycoons he was born poor, he was born in western New York and therefore
was a pietist, he was a baptist, his father was sort of, as I said before, was an itinerant
patent medicine salesman, so sort of guy like a music man, selling elixir of curable health
or whatever. He always had an interest in health, Archifar. His mother was therefore,
in many Christian homes in general, the mother was a carrier of religious, transmitter of
for Religious Values, brought John Dee up in the true pious tradition, hard work, not
showing your emotions, he's sort of a very calm, collected person, small beady eyes,
not too much expression on his face, and born to thrift and hard work, expressed as a so-called
Protestant ethic, and saved his pennies and all that sort of stuff, in the traditional
so-called stereotype, he was also short, once again, he was also thin, short, frail, of
the super tycoons of his whole period, I think J.P. Morgan was the only really tall
person, tall, he was six foot, which in those days was quite unusual, the whole idea of
everybody being six foot and higher, it only comes in the 20th century with improved nutrition,
so he was tall and he was also commanding presence, weighed about 200 pounds, you know,
The sort of guy, it's like in the movies, the sort of guy, he looked like a tycoon, acted like a movie tycoon.
Tough, commanding president. Most of these other guys, however, you wouldn't notice them if you didn't know they had a billion dollars.
Anyway, he grows up poor, John D. Rockefeller. He was born in western New York, in the heart of a pious country.
At the age of 14, his family moved to Cleveland, and again a poor Yankee pious.
Grows up in Cleveland and starts off in life, didn't go to, none of these guys went to college, you have to realize college is only for wealthy sons, okay, and didn't waste time going to college, he starts off as a bookkeeper, and gets a job at the age of 18 or something, as a bookkeeper, and pretty soon becomes a commission grocer, and how does he become a commission grocer? He didn't get any bank loans, these guys have no credit, there's no bank loan, but he does,
starts, he saves money from his small income as a bookkeeper, saves up his money and starts
a commission grocer business with a partner, a couple of partners, the Clarks, and gets
the money from, well, saves that money, borrows the money from his father, doesn't have much
either obviously, gets the money from friends a little bit, starts a commission, a wholesale
Commission Grocer Business and becomes a sort of a merchant and gets plows back profits.
In other words, the way these guys, almost invariably, these entrepreneurs like Hill and
like Rockefeller and like Harriman's we'll see later, these guys really start off, they're
poor, Carnegie, and they start working etc. and they start plowing back profits and get
borrowing money from relatives, their brother, something like that, and just saving up and
plowing back.
And he gets, so Rockefeller Clark, they start this little, let's say, Merckin-Hosam grocer
business in 1858, he's born in 1839, so he's now 21, no 19, isn't he, 19 years old he strikes
out into his own commissioned grocer business with a couple of partners of his own age.
And as he comes along, he finds out that there's a, the oil business is starting, in other
words, in western Pennsylvania, it began to have oil in 1959, by 1860, and he finds
a friend of his, a guy named Andrews, who has a small oil refinery, and those days oil
refinery means a small still somewhere, you have to realize it's a very small operation.
And Andrews comes to Rockefeller and Clark and said, look, why don't we have a, and along
Starting with the wholesale Rosabuick, because they want you to have a little oil refinery
and get oil from my railroad or something like that, Western Pennsylvania, and so they start
up and as a matter of fact Rockefeller was sent as a youngster to Western Pennsylvania
in the 1860s and now there's nothing much going on here, it's a flash in the pan, it's
petroleum, but anyway, keeps his eyes open and by 1862 they expand to wholesale refinery,
Mostly making, of course, kerosene. You have to realize that in those days kerosene was
the only real product. I mean, that was the major thing for lamps. Gasoline was a waste.
No use for gasoline. A little bit of residual, not much use for anything else. So when you're
refinery, of course, you have a fractionated sort of system, especially later on. You can
adjust the fractions to some extent. And of course, they made as much kerosene as they
could and as little gasoline as they could. There was no gasoline, just some waste. At
At any rate, they start a small kerosene refinery along with the wholesale grocer business,
and in 1865 Rockefeller realizes this oil thing is a real big thing here, but Clark doesn't
think so.
In other words, so what happens is Rockefeller and Andrews buy out the Clarks, they split
the business, in other words, the Clarks, I'm sure to their laughing regret, get the wholesale
and Rockefeller and Andrews now set up a specializing refinery and some of the anti-Rockefeller historians claim that Rockefeller somehow squeezed out Clark, well, they were squeezing out, they all saw the situation, Rockefeller and Andrews realized that oil was a big thing, Clark didn't think so, and so Clarks remained with the grocery business, and their tough luck was a lack of foresight, so at any rate, in this case,
So, in this situation, this is 1865, Andrews was a technologist, he was an oil refiner,
in other words, he knew a lot about oil refining. Rockefeller was a financier, he didn't know
much about technology, but he was a great cost person, more of a cutting cost and improving
the finances of the business. And so, Andrews was the inside man handling the technology
in 1867, and Rockefeller by the way, was always great at doing this. He was a genius at finding
good people and getting teams of people in. In 1867 they expand the business, they include
a whole bunch of other people to increase the capital investment and the management team.
They get a bunch of people, a guy named Flagler who becomes a partner, Rockefeller, Andrews
Andrews and Flagler, and Flagler had quite a bit of money. He was also the son-in-law
of Mr. Harkness, who was a big shot, quite wealthy businessman in Cleveland. So they all
come into the business and they start expanding. So by 1867, Rockefeller, Andrews and Flagler
had the top, the biggest refinery in Cleveland, which is the biggest in the country, because
Cleveland was now the center, just as Western Pennsylvania was the center of crude oil,
Cleveland is now the center of refinery. You refine the oil, you ship it across the
The Great Lakes. It's a beautiful kind of situation. You have come up with the
Pennsylvania, first by railroad and eventually when the railroads try to
increase the fare, the rate, they build a pipeline. In other words, the pipeline is a way
to compete with railroads, of course. Railroads can't get you a very high
price and then you ship the thing out, you know, to foreign countries or whatever,
the East. So, in other words, very quickly, by 1867, he got the largest
by 1870, it's the largest refinery in the world, in a very short period of time, it's
almost all the Rockefeller's business genius, what he does is he cuts costs, he innovates
in marketing and in refinery technology and also organization, the first company to have
really centralized business control, committee system, all sorts of stuff where you can supervise
as different parts of the business, course cutting, finding ways of coming in with the
lowest possible rates of transportation, et cetera, et cetera.
So there's a lot of innovation in this kind of business practices.
And with lower costs you have a tremendous increase in supply of kerosene.
And due to Rockefeller, really the largest, mostly responsible for the boom, you have
tremendous, over time, tremendous cut in kerosene prices, the benefit of consumers, the benefit
and everybody, the whole business world and energy gets cheaper and cheaper due to the
expansion of the Rockefeller refinery and the whole Rockefeller system and along with
him come brilliant manager, entrepreneur types, in other words, teams of people who from that
day to this are always invested with the Rockefeller, in other words, the Rockefeller financial
power and political powers we'll see later comes not just from his own wealth and his
own family but teams of families who have been with him ever since.
The Harknesses, the Flaglers, the Prats, Pratt was a big Rockefeller Standard Oil person.
In 1878 they incorporate, I should finish this task here, become the foremost manufacturing
corporation to that point. They're so big by this point they incorporated the Standard
Oil of Ohio, the first of the Standard Oil, beginning of the Standard Oil system, So-hi-o.
of Ohio. In other words, these are all partnerships, and this is one of the first manufacturing
corporations, maybe the first, the big one. You have the Harknesses, the Prats, the Bedfords,
the Flaglors, the Sepulchres, the Bostewakes, so they all, they continue, the Panes, I already
mentioned Secretary of the Navy, Whitney, the Panes, and they're still there, in other
words, they still invest with the Rockefellers, they move with the Rockefellers, it's like
The Rockwells are like a whole flagship, which gives the Rockwells enormous financial power,
because the Rockwells move, this whole group moves with them.
At any rate, so we have the whole, and then they build pipelines and a whole marketing system,
and really standard law begins the idea of retail, of retail breaking bulk and all that sort of stuff.
And very quickly, the Rockwells get the monopoly of the whole world oil market,
They're really the first, very little foreign oil until much later, until the 1890s or so
And so you have, in Western Europe and in Asia, Rockefeller becomes the major exporter of petroleum products
So you have, to show how kerosene prices fell in this whole period
To give you an idea, the enormous benefit to the consumer and the whole economy, it started
off in 1863, the beginning of the oil boom, the price of kerosene was 45 cents a gallon.
By 1872, two years after Sohia was founded, the price of kerosene has fallen to 22 cents
By 1874, it's down to 11 cents a gallon, and by the mid 1890s, in other words at the end
of this great boom here, it's down to 6 cents a gallon, this is an 87% drop from 1863-1899,
enormous!
and those people belly-aching about Rockefeller, St. Albion monopoly, look at the results of
the so-called monopoly, monopoly means you cut production and raise prices, this is an
unbelievable drop in prices as supply and production increases, this is the kind of
monopoly we can all enjoy, you know that.
And there are various stories about how he built this up, they claimed, for example,
that he, he would, well what he tried to do, he wanted to get a monopoly, as I mentioned
briefly last time, he tried to get a monopoly of refining, not, he didn't try for crude
oil because it was impossible, it was crude oil everywhere, and so he didn't try even
for export, for retail business, and at one point by 1879, 1880 he managed to get about
And he got 90% of the refinery business in the United States. That was the peak.
And he started declining after that. And the reason is, as I think I mentioned, is that he would pay full dollar, you know, for anybody, for any monopoly.
He wanted to buy the monopoly and buy the refinery out. And his object was to raise prices and cut production rates.
He was never able to do it, because people would produce refineries just to sell them to Rockefeller, as a sucker.
The story that grew up by historians is that the way he got a monopoly or almost a monopoly
is he undercut people. It's called predatory price cutting. In other words, he deliberately
cut the price and drove them out of business and then raised the price after that. This
is a... large businesses are often accused of this. It never happens. There's not one
case on record of Rockefeller doing that. If you do that, you drive people out of business.
First of all, you make losses in the meantime, let's say, if you finally drive the guy out of business and he goes bankrupt, the plan, as I mentioned last time, the plan is still there, the refinery doesn't disappear, somebody else buys it at an auction, bankruptcy auction, gets it for a solid and it repeats again, and then you're stuck with the same damn thing again.
So Rockefeller never did that, but he did was, the way he got these novelties, he bought them out, he paid a very handsome price for it, bought the refinery.
And there's a story about a guy, for example, who claimed that he was, the press, the anti-Rockefeller press would say, which was mostly, by the way, Morgan subsidized, we'll get to it later, claimed that a guy named George Price, who was a small oil refinery, he was victimized by a Rockefeller, he was driven out of business, nonsense. What he did was, he kept going to different areas, he would kind of cut prices against Rockefeller, he'd build a refinery, Rockefeller would buy it, and he'd go 100 miles away and build another refinery, Rockefeller would have to buy that.
And he made a lot of money that way. He made, for example, he built a refinery and Rockefeller
wanted to buy it all for $20,000, which of course is worth about $200,000 now, $160,000.
And he wouldn't do it. He finally held off for $500,000. Rockefeller had to buy it for
$500,000. Finally, this is one of the reasons why he stopped buying stuff, Rockefeller.
How was it? Why should I pay these jerks what he called blackmail? He just stopped it.
And from then on, the share of Rockford Standard World's share kept going down, steadily after that, of the oil refinery market.
So there were lots of refineries that were, who even in the 1980s, even in this period when you got 90% of the share, there were about 93 independent refineries who were constantly getting 10, 15, 20% of the sales.
What they, as Standard Oil got bigger, they finally got a whole trust set up, a whole
bunch of Standard Oils in many states, Standard Oil of New York, Standard Oil of California,
Standard Oil of Indiana, and they finally, Standard Oil of New Jersey was the basic holding
Company or so-called trust, which they merged into one company, which essentially was the
only company from all the others, and New Jersey became the central Carl Rockefeller
Empire. In 1899, it was capitalized, it was worth 110 million dollars. That was considered
enormous for that period. It's still not as much as various banks, but that was the
one of the biggest corporations
as Rockefeller began
I have a percentage here
got a little bit less than this, by the 1890s it was
by 85% it goes down steadily
I mentioned last time for two basic reasons, one is that
First of all, Rockwell himself began to retire around 1900s. He was born in 1839 and lived until 1947, died at the age of 98.
Anyway, he was less active after, say, 1900, and his sons took over and grandsons, but anyway, his brother,
it began to get bureaucratic, it began to miss out on one, the shift out of kerosene because electricity came in,
and two, the shift into gasoline after 1900 or so, the only reveals came in
and Rockefeller and Standard Oil
they thought, no, no, kerosene is always going to be the key thing, gasoline is a flash in the pan, electricity is a flash in the pan
it just became bureaucratic
and similarly they didn't, they missed out on a Texas-Oklahoma oil boom
so quite late
which permitted
new progressive, new small companies like Texaco and Gulf to come in and start
cultivating
Texas and Oklahoma crude
at any rate the uh...
for example in 1899
sixty
sixty-three percent of the oil refined of the fraction with kerosene
in other words
as much as possible poured stuff into kerosene. By 1919
is only fifteen percent, the rest is only in the gasoline, and the fraction of gasoline is at the top of the fraction and kerosene comes next to that,
you know, it's residual oil way down the bottom, so it's fairly easy to shift proportions between gasoline and kerosene.
My father was an oil company chemist, so I guess I grew up on this sort of stuff.
Anyway, the...
And as I said, when railroads try to charge a high rate, Rockefeller would build pipelines and then compete on the transportation front.
Again, one of the charges against standard oil was that it had a lot of railroad rebates, but everybody else had railroad rebates, as I mentioned before.
Every shipper had rebates. All the other oil refineries had rebates. It was a way of railroads competing with each other, down from list price.
So, by the 1880s, 1890s, Standard Oil had, for example, at their peak, Standard Oil of
New Jersey, which becomes the holding company for all of Standard Oil, 87% of the countries
In the 1880s refining, let's say 1890, they had 33% of the crude oil, so that was their
peak crude oil production, never even tried for a monopoly of crude oil because obviously
The point is, the point of view of the consumer, unless they like us cheap prices, the point
is, the point of view of the consumer, unless they like us cheap prices, the point of view
The predatory price cutting is when you lower the price to drive your competitor out of
business and then raise the price.
It's a temporary thing, that's the whole point.
Price cutting is when you're simply cutting a price and you have competition, you're trying
to get more customers.
See, one thing businessmen never want to do, they never want to raise the price, encourage
There's new competitors to come in, and then when price goes down again, they're stuck
with the new competitors.
You know, that's something, it's called an umbrella for new competitors.
Businessmen are trying to have their prices as low as possible so new competitors won't
come in.
They don't want new competitors.
The only way to keep them out if you don't have a government enforced cartel is to have
the price low enough so the other profits, profit margin low enough so the other competitors
won't be tempted to come in to compete with you.
So the competition is potential competition, but it's very strong for all that, it's very
powerful.
and the competition is going to be healthy, in case the business is going to get back up,
there was an act that was set up, there is a goal that we cannot buy up all of it up,
we are going to have to get it, 100 cannot buy it up.
We have to come back and have it back.
All the competition has come up.
be there if you make a misstep. If you raise the price above the free market level, I'd
say, above the competitive level, other than firms can come in. So the point is you don't
need existing, you don't even need existing competitors. You only have the threat of potential
competitors coming in to undercut you. That's what's really necessary. And you always have
that if you don't have the government excluding it. The government doesn't say somehow in
one way or the other, you can't come in and compete. That's what excludes it. So that's
that's really important, the, we're coming out of the influence on politics and what happens
very early in the game is the Rockefeller begins to dominate the Republican Party of
Ohio, Rockefeller was of course a Republican being a pietist, he begins to dominate it
and through, for example, the guy who was the, what I'm basically saying of course is one of the lessons of this whole course in a sense is that on the market the influence of all these people was very healthy, Rockefeller and all these other people, on politics however it's a different story.
Anyway, Rockefeller becomes, through Mark Hannah, Marcus Alonzo Hannah, who was a long-time
state chairman of the Republican Party of Ohio.
And when McKinley ran for president in 1896 from Ohio, Hannah became chairman of the Republican
National Committee, extremely powerful figure running the Ohio Republican Party.
And also happened to be a high school chum of Rockefeller at Central High School in Cleveland.
As I think I mentioned last time, if you happen to be a friend of Rockefeller in grammar school
or high school, you're in great shape for the rest of your life.
High school classmate and chum of Rockefeller, also head of the Hanna Steel Company, which
dealt in the coal and iron and steel business, which dealt at business dealings with standard
Standard Oil, and those would sell coal and steel rails, et cetera, to Standard Oil, closely
tied in, in other words, economically and politically and personally with Standard Oil.
They picked a guy who was a, well, first place in the thing I mentioned, but the Republican
nominees for President, nominations for President, from 1876 to 1920, most of them came from
from Ohio. Remember, Rockefeller begins to get power in 1870 with the founding of Sohoi,
the center of Ohio. 1876, Hayes, Ohio, becomes president, runs for president, republicans
ticket. 1880, Garfield, Ohio, becomes president. 1884-88 was Harrison, well Blaine was not
Robert Harrison of Indiana, 1896, McKinley, Ohio, 1900, same thing, 1908, William Howard Taft of Ohio, 1920, Harding, Ohio.
So you have a very peculiar situation, enormous number of people coming from Ohio, and if you ask the regular mainstream historians, they'll say, well, Ohio is a big state.
It was a big state, but there are other big states, Illinois, New York, why didn't they, Pennsylvania, why didn't they ever get any presidential nomination?
Because Ohio meant Rockefeller, it was Ohio Republican Party in that period equals Rockefeller.
McKinley, for example, who was an extremely bright guy, he was a congressman, was practically a Hanna tool, was a stooge of Hanna.
As a matter of fact, McKinley went heavily into debt. He became governor in 1891. He went heavily into debt.
He actually endorsed the note of some friend of his, a deadbeat.
And he's almost going bankrupt. He owed a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
He owed a million dollars net, equivalent to present day present dollars.
And there's no way he could pay it. He wasn't rich.
And so Hannah gets together, and of course if you're a governor and you go bankrupt,
your political career goes down in tubes, obviously, and suddenly the governor announces
bankruptcy, even these days he couldn't get away with it.
So Hannah gets together with a whole bunch of other industrialists, including Rockefeller,
of course, and they save McKinley, they bail him out, they just kick in money to McKinley
and they bail on that. Hannah himself, Andrew Carnegie that was not from Pittsburgh, of course, Frick from Pittsburgh, George Pullman from Chicago was a Pullman company, they all get together, Ormer, they all get together and bail out McKinley.
Of course this means of course from then on McKinley was beholden to Hannah and Rockefeller, obviously. Theirs for life. So at any rate, they run up for president in 1896.
Also, Senator Foraker, who was from Ohio, was not really a McKinley Rockefeller person,
he was on the Rockefeller payroll, and every month he collected a check from Standard Oil
from the Rockefeller personally, which meant that he voted in the correct manner.
When Garfield ran in 1880, Rockefeller and Hanna contributed very heavily to the Garfield
campaign, et cetera, et cetera.
Many loans to Foraker and McKinley, in addition, is failing him out of bankruptcy.
So what we have in other words is essentially a Rockefeller person.
What happens now politically, we have a very peculiar situation now coming into the picture.
I've already mentioned at the beginning of the course, I was always puzzled why you had
a hot fight over banking and gold and tariffs, which are now issues that can't get people
interested in at all.
How come everybody's interested?
I was related to the ethno-religious aspect, political parties.
Another question that comes in, and I was always puzzled about, how come
laissez-faire drops out, as we'll see pretty soon in the course.
Laissez-faire, which is very powerful, especially in the Democratic Party,
all of a sudden drops out by 1900, everybody becomes so-called progressive,
and the whole governmental system changes and becomes
more or less a welfare warfare state that we have today.
And nobody sticks up for laissez-faire, and I can say there are various trends
that account for it, but this is very sudden. In other words,
Up until 1896, the powerful laissez-faire sentiment in the United States, after 1900, is almost none.
Obviously, there's something peculiar here which needs to be accounted for.
And what accounts for it is essentially the disappearance of the Democratic Party as we have seen it,
as we have known it in this course until 1896.
1896 was a catastrophic death of the Democratic Party as the laissez-faire libertarian party.
So that's what we have to explore at this point
Let me get my notes here
but what happens, something happens to the political party structure
in the United States.
It begins to be obvious to the foresight of Republicans like Rockefeller, McKinley and
Hanna
that the Democrats were gradually beginning to take over
by about 1890.
And some people saw it earlier than others, but this is a
begins to be clear in 1890, and begins to be clear even before that.
The, for example, I'll give you a couple of instances of what happens in the, okay, there's
a big shift that occurs in 1890, in 1888, Harrison is pressed, Cleveland loses a very
close race for re-election in 1888, Harrison gets in from Indiana, Republican of Indiana,
As a Dark Horse nominee, that's not unusual, close race, but in 1890, before 1899, that was 1889,
the House of Representatives was 51% Republican, which is more or less, more or less classic, you know, very close.
Congressional elections of 1890, the House of Representatives becomes 71% Democrat.
This is phenomenal. Phenomenal had not happened before the Civil War. Phenomenal change.
Very sudden.
Also in 1890, and the Democrats captured every large, almost every large state. Again, very unusual.
The,
another way to look at it was to take the important states of the Midwest.
The Midwest in those days was considered
six states, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio,
Wisconsin, and Michigan.
All very powerful and important states.
In 1888,
the Republicans had six governors. Now, of these six states,
there's only five here.
Iowa, all right.
of these six states, republicans had six governors
and for the congressional delegation, they had five
congressional delegations, although the majority of five states
and congressional delegations, democrats had one
this was fairly standard, in 1890
all the governors
and all the Congressional delegates, all six were Democrats, very unusual, very sudden upheaval.
In other words, there's gradual demographics as we'll see, but something sudden happens as it changes, a sudden trigger
that shifted everything in 1890, which by the way paves the way for the 1892 in Cleveland, not only gets a second term but
captures both houses of Congress for the first time.
This is before the Civil War, we have Cleveland coming in
with a democratic house and a democratic Senate.
It was unusual in that period for the same party to have both houses anyway, certainly for the Democrats.
It was very unusual, a big change happened, something big happened in American politics.
First of all, the demographics. In other words,
in the Midwest and other places,
first of all, Catholics tend to have a higher birth rate than Protestants.
And one thing,
Catholics usually do not employ birth control
in that period. So you have a higher natural birth rate, plus the fact that immigration
in this period, from 1870s and 1880s, immigration was largely Catholic or German Lutheran, which
was high Lutheran, liturgical Lutheran. In other words, in the Midwest for example, there's
a big decline of proportion of Baptists and Methodists, and a big increase in German Lutherans
and German Catholics. By 1890, the Catholics were the largest single group, religious group, in the Midwest.
It was not true in 1870, I'd say. So, you have the demographics gradually building up the Catholics and German Lutherans
as a majority, getting to be a majority. This is a general trend. We still have to account for the sudden change in 1890.
But over the 20-year period, as I say, the far side of the republic began to realize that we're in deep trouble here.
The same way in the 1840s and 50s, the Democrats were becoming a majority party, but they were shafted by the slavery question, which split the Democrats.
But here there's no slavery question. The Republicans realized they're in deep trouble here, they've got to do something.
What the Republicans began to try to do, the German Lutherans were the swing vote.
In other words, the Catholics always voted Democratic throughout, and the German Lutherans tended to vote Democratic, except when they can be gotten on the Catholic issue.
In other words, the German Lutherans hated the German Catholics. In the areas where the German Lutherans did not live near the German Catholics, they voted completely Democratic.
When they were living nearby, they started voting Republicans. It's part of the ancient law to know them is to hate them.
You live near people you don't like, you start voting against them.
So the Republicans, especially the Rockefeller-McKinley people were quite far-sighted in this thing.
I mean, Rockefeller was a favorite of Prohibition, but he realized that he preferred profits to Prohibition and preferred victory.
So they began to get pragmatic.
So the Republicans, the shrewd Republicans like McKinley and Rockefeller and Hannah,
said, look, what you've got to do, you've got to get the German Lutheran vote.
The way to get the German Lutheran vote is for Christ's sake, drop Prohibition.
The one thing the German Lutherans hated above all things is Prohibition.
even more than the hate of the Catholics.
So, as I say, you have the German beer drinking.
You know, you leave church on Sunday,
immediately you're prepared to a beer garden.
This is German culture, German Catholic and Lutheran.
They said they didn't want to have fanatics outlawing beer.
So the first, so the moderate began to drop prohibition.
All right, forget about Sunday Blue Law,
forget about prohibition.
We love it.
We love you prohibitionists, but cool it.
When they started doing that,
they started picking up German Lutheran votes.
On the other hand, they started losing
their militant prohibitionist votes.
The republicans were in deep trouble here. They get more moderate, they pick up German Lutherans, especially if they whip up anti-Catholic sentiment, like the public school system.
If you can maneuver it, they started saying the Catholics are a menace to our schools. For example, McKinley won the governorship of Ohio in 1891, I think, bucking this whole Trento and the Democrats by attacking Catholics.
the anti-Catholic and menace of the schools, parochial schools in those days were getting government subsidies
so attacking that, attacking the menace of the schools, they couldn't be very clear about it
because they couldn't attack parochial schools, per se, because then the Lutherans would get upset
they had to just whip up anti-Catholic sentiment and drop prohibition, which is what McKinley did
on the other hand, they started losing prohibitionist votes, they said, you're selling out
The result you had in the 1870s, for example, the Greenback Party, which was pro-inflation and pro-prohibition, all pietists, there was not a single Greenbacker outside of the South, there was no Catholics and Lutherans who were Greenbackers, there were ex-Republicans, ex-Pietists, Methodists, Baptists, etc.
And then in the 1880s came the Prohibitionist Party, also bitter because of the Republican sell-out, they thought.
What happened, for example, to give you an indication, in 1872, when the Democrats could have been resurgent,
the Democrats, like idiots, nominated Horace Wheely for president, who was a Republican anyway,
who was a pietist and a prohibitionist and sort of semi-socialist, immediately lost all of the Democratic votes,
he was smashed by Grant in 1872, and they didn't do that again.
So in 1872, in Wisconsin, I think and in Ohio, the Republican Institute of Prohibition, State Prohibition under the agitation of the Women's Prayer League for outlawing alcohol.
Women are always in the forefront of the pious in many ways and so in Wisconsin, in Illinois, in Wisconsin, outlawed liquor.
Immediately the German Lutherans voted, beat the Democrats, I mean beat the Republicans,
shifted the Democrats and Prohibition was repealed.
So the moderates, if you want to call them that, the pragmatists in the Republican Party
in Ohio, Wisconsin realized, look, we've got to drop this liquor crap, we love the Prohibitionists,
we've got to shove them aside, and they set up a Prohibitionist Party and they lose votes
that way.
But the pragmatists stuck to the idea, look, the more German Lutherans, the more Prohibitionists.
At any rate, that was the way they try to finesse this.
So what happened in 1890?
What happened in 1890 is basically the specter of prohibition suddenly hit the year before
in the Midwest.
In both Wisconsin and in I think Indiana, in Indiana, Ohio, in Indiana the prohibition
suddenly raises its ugly head in 1889, Republicans are sort of dominant in the state, all of
a sudden they start, they start, what had happened was this, the Ohio ban had prohibited
The sale of liquor on Sunday, in these old saloons as they're called in those days and
liquor stores, they didn't, they were shrewd enough not to enforce it in the German-speaking
areas, especially Cincinnati, which was solely German.
So this is very shrewd.
In pious areas, you enforce it to the hilt, in German areas, how will it?
So the prohibitionists, of course, got upset at this, they insist, they petitioned to the
governor to enforce the law prohibiting the sale of liquor on Sunday, this is 1889.
The governor was Foraker, the prohibitionist anyway.
The Cincinnati group, the petition, the governor to do this was called the Cincinnati Law and
Order Association.
In Cincinnati, among the Germans, they were known as the Evangelical Stranglers.
In other words, they were pietists and stranglers, trying to crush liberty.
So Foraker says, okay, happy to do this, and he removed the police of Cincinnati and the
states can do this.
There's no real home rule unless the states desire it.
He kicked out all the police, the police board which is, they had a board instead of one commissioner, kicked out the board, put in a new board
and ordered them to enforce the law of the hilt
At this point was called,
in a merger was called the saloon keepers rebellion, the saloon keepers of Cincinnati rose up
a couple hundred of them, there's 300 German saloon keepers in Cincinnati, said we disobeyed the law and I sell liquor anyway, looks to you
and law and order associations petitioned for enforcement, crushed them and so forth and so on and
What happened then is the Democrats truly said, we're in favor of home rule, we want each city and area to be able to have its own kind of liquor law and as a result, of course, Florek was kicked out in 1890 and the masses kicked out, the German masses rose up, Lutheran, it was called the Lutheran Rebellion in 1890 and Florek was kicked out, the Democrats came in and repealed the, you know, stopped enforcing the ban on Sunday liquor. So that was, later on, next time I'll go into more
But that sort of thing happened in each state in the Midwest, prohibitionism and anti-German language education.
Between the two of them, they managed to disaffect the German Lutherans almost permanently.
Not quite permanently, but certainly for a lot of people immigrating in this period.
But this is a peak, 1880s and 1890s, a peak of Irish Catholic and German Catholic and German Lutheran immigration.
Even though there was Scandinavian pious immigration, they were outstripped.
by German and Irish. Also, there was a more higher birth rate among Catholics and Lutherans than were among pietists.
In fact, it's still true. So that the immigration, plus the birth rate, meant that slowly but surely the Democratic Party was becoming a majority party in the United States.
There's also a one-party system in the South, but we'll get to that in a democratic ticket.
so slowly but surely the demographics were such
the same thing was happening by the way in the 1840s except at that point
slavery split the democratic party in two
and giving room for the republicans to finally come in
there's no slavery issue now so it looked as if the democratic party was in great shape
and the republicans then had to do something and we'll see
one of the things which spurred a radical
sudden shift
to the democrats in 1890
When the Democrats took both houses of Congress, took the House by a huge majority, and finally
paving the way for Rover Cleveland's in effect landslide victory, especially comparing both
houses of Congress with him, unprecedented, in 1892.
The way was paved by sudden outbursts of pietous fervor, especially prohibitionism.
So the Republicans in the 1870s were trying to put in prohibition, for example, 1872
in I think in Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and the next year the Germans shifted, Democrat,
and they learned their lesson, they dropped from the prohibition.
However, the prohibitionists, the Republicans were caught and had a real problem.
On one hand, if they waffle on prohibition, then they'll capture German Lutheran votes.
On the other hand, they lose the fanatical prohibitionists and pious types, who then
The Democrats always had much greater party loyalty than the Republicans and Whigs, the Republicans were interested in their great moral ideas, and so as they felt the Democrats, their leadership was getting a little too compromise, a little too moderate or sell-out-y, they formed a new party, the Greenback Party in the 1870s, which was an inflationist party.
Again, inflation fits in here. Inflation meant the people were getting more purchasing power from the government.
The government was paternalistically giving them purchasing power.
So either paper money inflation, which was the greenbacks, or later on the free silver agitation,
where silver becomes, in addition to gold, the inflationist symbol.
And in the 1880s, the Prohibition Party, which got very powerful and takes a lot of votes away from the Republicans.
So the Republicans are sort of caught between trying to, but they realized that demographics were with the Germans, and so they began to get more and more modern, especially headed by McKinley and the Rockefeller Empire, and there was Rockefeller, McKinley and Hanna in Ohio, who were leading the, Rockefeller of course loved the pietas, but he said, look, we love prohibition, but a profit is more important than morality, quote unquote, and therefore we have to drop these guys. So, at any rate, but they didn't, but in late 1880s comes a big circle,
The surge of prohibition sentiment, and I've already gone through what happened in Ohio.
In Ohio, when they enforced prohibition of the hilt, the Germans rebelled, in essence
the German Catholics and the Lutherans, voted democratic in a landslide, and in 1889, the
governor of Foraker, who was a hardcore prohibitionist, was kicked out.
1891, two years later, McKinley comes back as governor, but comes back in a very different
Robert Pickett drops prohibition. He says, okay, we're not going to enforce prohibition in German areas, in other words, in wet areas, so to speak, but prohibitions are called the dries, and the people who drink alcohol are called the wets, so in areas where they, in localities, communities where the people drink, we're not going to enforce it. That was essentially the compromise that the McKinley people put over it. And they openly attack prohibitionists as meddling fanatics and things like that.
which is something only the German Lutherans or Catholics would say, McKinley people began
to talk in the same way. And also another thing McKinley did, presaging a very important
thing that happened in 1896 which we're leading up to, a climactic year, he began to drop,
the Republican Party had always been, since the Civil War, the inflationist party, in
other words, a party of greenbacks and paper money, irredeemable paper money, and silver
later on. The Democrats were the hard-money party, the gold standard party, and so it
took the Republicans 18 years of kicking and screaming to go back to the gold standard
and eliminate greenback money. In other words, we were on an irredeemable fiat paper money
standard from 1863 or 1862 to 1879. It took 14 years after the Civil War was over for
The Republicans would be drag-kicking and screaming back to the gold standard.
Even then it was technically gold and silver standard and so there was a big fight about
silver and gold and I don't want to get into technicalities of it.
But the Republicans were known as the soft money party, which fits in with piety, which
fits in with the idea that the government should be helping people out and increasing
their so-called purchasing power.
The Democrats were the hard money party and so another thing the Democrats wanted to restore
free banking.
They want to eliminate the national banking system, which essentially had a centralised
kind of banking system, susceptible to inflation.
In 1891, McKinley shifts his position, this is only in a local level, so it wasn't picked
up much by the national media, so to speak.
In Ohio, he begins to come out in favour of the gold standard for the first time, it presages
his big shift in 1896 as president, presidential candidate, because they began to realise that
German Lutherans and German Catholics, the one thing above all else, of course they're against prohibition.
The other thing is they're very much in favor of the gold standard. They hated inflation, purple passion.
They're pro-gold because anything else deteriorates the value of their savings.
The Germans are a very thrifty group and they realize that inflation is a way of spoiling their savings.
So in order to capture the German Lutheran vote, which in the Middle West was a great swing vote,
Two things to do, you drop prohibition, scuttle it, you start talking about gold, and McKinley
was the first one to do that realizing the demographics of the situation.
A similar thing happened in Indiana, I'm going to go through this, yeah, it began to drop
prohibition, shelve it, forget it, put it on the back burner, and they began to adopt
a pro-gold position.
gold standard position as a hard money anti-inflationist position, which was very much the major German
economic, the German-American economic program, very much a favorite goal as a hard money
anti-inflationist party.
So that fit in with a pietist, as I've already talked about, the pietist economic program
And it was pro-protective tariff and pro-inflation. It was part of big government paternalism.
Yeah.
Another question.
Is a pietist a person or a religion?
No, no. A pietist is just the opposite.
Huh?
That's atheist.
Yeah.
No, very different.
A pietist are very strong believers in a pietist manner.
That's different.
No, that's atheist or agnostic or whatever.
While McKinley begins the ship as an Ohio Republican, not as a national picket, he begins
being a far-sighted politician, he begins to realize that you have to capture the Germans
in order for the Republicans to win, you have to get the German Lutheran vote, the German
Lutheran is a swing vote.
In order to get the German Lutheran vote, you have to forget about prohibition and start
talking about gold as an important monetary standard.
Anyway, in Wisconsin and Indiana the same thing happens. Prohibition again was the key thing.
And in Iowa, also an important middle western state, again prohibition becomes the key point.
Iowa was a state which had never been democratic. It had always been controlled by the Republican Party.
The other states were much closer. In other words, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio had been a swing state.
Iowa had always been a Republican. And after the Civil War, Iowa became the subject of intense prohibitionist pressure.
As a matter of fact, the Prohibitionist Party really begins in Iowa, and also big was the
first big Prohibitionist organization, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, extremely
powerful group, the WCTU.
There have been organized females with a stronghold of pious as there always have been and they started having, before the Prohibitionist Party was founded,
before the WCT was founded, they had women's prayer groups against alcohol and they'd get together and they'd picket some bar, saloon they'd be called, and with prayer leagues,
and development of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and in 1875 they almost
captured the Republican Party of Iowa, the Prohibitionists, with General Weaver
who later became the populist presidential candidate in 1890s. All these
groups were very similar, the Prohibitionists, the Greenbacks Party in the 70s,
the Prohibitionists in the 80s, the Populist Party in the 90s, all very very similar.
Finally, in 1879, a prohibition was captured by the Republican Party of Iowa at a convention.
They pushed for total prohibition.
See, what they had had previous to that, they had a statute prohibiting alcohol, but then
giving local option.
In other words, local communities could have liquor.
You still have that in many states, by the way, in the south and southwest.
Different counties will have different local options, with, of course, high license taxes.
If you have any liquor store or liquor distillery or something, you have to pay a high tax.
These are methods of quasi-prohibition, which we still have in the United States, of course.
At any rate, total prohibition had only been put in by two states, Maine and Kansas, both
of course extreme-private states, outlawing all liquor, period.
So they tried to do that in Iowa.
In July 1882, they had a constitutional amendment, in other words, outlaw all liquor in the state
of Iowa, and was defeated, excuse me, in the past.
The big push was the temperance alliance, was the main group in favor of it, saying this is morality, Christian morality and American civilization require the total prohibition of law and alcohol.
The Democrats, the Lutherans and Catholics fought back by saying these are puritanical fanatics, fanatical preachers.
Holy Joe's is another term which is often used by Catholics against pietists.
and aggressing against personal liberty, the amendment passed by 55% to 45%, it was then outlawed on technicality, in other words, the Supreme Court said it didn't, you know, some clause that didn't quite work
but the result of this was a big shift of German votes in the Democratic Party, the Republicans got a little antsy about this, they went back on a statute, they didn't want to have a constitutional amendment, they favored alien and old German voters permanently in Iowa, so
So, they went back to statutory prohibition, they kept stepping that up.
Finally, in 1889, the enforcement kept expanding, an ultra-piatist takes over as governor, first
Republican, in Iowa, and he starts, he's an amateur politician, he wants to get into Republicans
and not the Democrats, as they believe that you can only ensure personal liberty through
a political party system.
We're always much more party loyal than the Republicans, Republicans are much more interested
and they're abandoning the party if they waffle a little bit.
So Governor Hutchinson was an amateur politician, he was a grocer, he was just gone into politics
and therefore he wanted to of course outlaw a liquor to the hilt and he says in his speech
that prohibition is a struggle for morality and for the true devotion of the human race.
This is a hardcore religious thing with him, of course, and he said that at civilization
The fight is a fight between modern civilization on the one hand and the cursed barracudas of the saloon, as he put it.
The saloon, by the way, we'll get to this later on in the course when we get to the urban problems.
The saloon, in addition to being the fountainhead of liquor, of course.
Saloon, you see, used to serve liquor and food at the same time. It was a little bit different from a bar.
At any rate, the saloon was, first of all, the social center of all Catholic and Lutheran males.
And it still is, by the way, in New York or in a big city.
So what happens is the Irish or German or whatever, male, after coming home at night, repairs to the local saloon.
Spends the whole evening drinking with his buddies and talking politics and stuff like that, socializing.
Women do other stuff, but this is basically what it still is, I think, the Catholic, Lutheran, so-called ethnic social life.
So the saloon keeper becomes the key political, he becomes the key political boss of his area because everybody takes their political views from the saloon keeper.
He becomes sort of like a local ward healer. So Patty somebody, who do you vote for, Patty? I'm voting for O'Driscoll or something like that.
Everybody in the neighborhood votes for O'Driscoll. So the saloons are not only the fountainhead of evil to the fighters, they're also the fountainhead of urban, ethnic, political power.
And so if they could smash the saloon, they also smash the Democratic Party ethnic machines,
in other words, the political machines or political, the major political strength of the hated opposition.
It was a two-fold thing. One, if you're attacking a saloon, you're destroying evil demon rum,
and also you're destroying the political social base of the opposition.
So, in this fight, backing Governor Hutchinson in this fight to crush a little liquor in Iowa,
were, of course, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, prohibitionists, the Good Templars and other temperance groups, the Methodist Church, of course, very heavy in this and also another thing they wanted to push through was outlawing all desecration of the Sabbath, once again, in other words, any activity on Sunday, not going to church should be outlawed, it's all part of the same schtick, including, by the way, they wanted to outlaw all newspapers on Sunday, because newspapers, any activity
Newspapers, baseball games, and railroads. Nothing should be able to move on Sunday.
This was the objective of the pious fanatics.
So what the Democrats did, and they did very shrewd things, the Iowa governorship election in 1889,
they picked a former Republican, they picked a guy who himself was a temperance person,
that was himself abstaining from alcohol. It was against prohibition.
It was against using government force to do it.
And so they picked this guy who would appeal to moderate Republicans, so to speak,
and Horace Boyce, and in 1889 he won, the Democrats won with Boyce for the first time in the history of Iowa, won the election by 50% to 48%,
and for the first time the Democrats won the legislature, excuse me, the Congress, congressional delegation in Congress.
So this, he was re-elected again the following year, two years later.
So in other words, the Democrats win in Iowa for the first time in the history of Iowa
because they're fighting extreme prohibitionists and anybody who's slightly moderate on the issue shifts
to sort of a moderate Democrat and wins. So the handwriting is on the wall here.
Three states, three key Midwestern states, Ohio, Indiana and Iowa, go Democratic on a prohibition question.
The prohibition is being taken up by the Republican Party in that area.
The other two states were swung to the Democrats on a similar question, not on liquor, but
on something else.
Another client is concerned, of course, with education, as I already mentioned, crush the
Catholic or parochial school systems, force everybody into the public school where they
can learn Protestantism, WASP, Protestantism.
So in 1889, the new governor of Wisconsin, Governor William Hoard, a Republican governor,
We've got an amateur politician, the first time he's been in politics, he's a newspaper publisher, and a fanatical pietist, and he passes a law, well, first of all, there was a law in the books, a compulsory education law, which was general, you know, had been passed by many states, this is a law, however, requiring, I get this, not only should everybody have to go to school, all education has to be in the English language, even private schools, in other words, outlawing all use of German language
and many private or parochial schools and he starts enforcing this. This has been on the books, nobody pays attention to it.
He's now enforced the notorious Bennett Law, passed by State Senator Bennett, outlawing all German language educations, what it amounts to.
And of course, much of the parochial schools, Catholic and Lutheran, were in German language, as most of these people were recent immigrants.
This not only incensed the German Catholics in Wisconsin, it also incensed the German Lutherans.
Lutheran, hey, we got parochial schools, so what is this?
And so there's a big opposition on this, flaming opposition that assaults on the private school system.
As a result, in 1889, when the election comes up, the big Catholic and Lutheran organizing front now is a repeal of Bennett law.
And it was Bennett law outlawing German language education.
But notice this is different from the argument now, say, in many states, that there should
be bilingual education in a public school. This applies to the private school, in other
words, outlawing all use of German language in the private school system, parochial school
system.
Take part?
Well, Ford was the governor, Bennett was the guy in the legislature who introduced the
law.
So this is the, so comes the, so the, in Milwaukee for example, here's an idea, Milwaukee which
is a heavily German city, and still is, not as much, in Milwaukee the Republican vote
in 1888 was 53%. After the Bennett law comes into play as the big political issue, I mean
The following year, the Republicans get, excuse me 1890, the Republicans get only 25% of the vote in Milwaukee due to the defection of the German Lutherans, the German Lutherans I'd say are the swing vote.
So in 1890 the question is should the Republican, should the Whore get renominated for governor?
The moderates said this guy's a loser, he's going to lose us the state, they try to get rid of him, but he was a big pietist and prohibitionist.
Hello, ambitionists, coming from Western and Northern Wisconsin, which are pietist areas,
from Nils Haugen, who was a Norwegian immigrant, who of course also hated German, being a Norwegian
pietist, a Lutheran pietist, and not only that Hoard was again an amateur politician,
he didn't really, he was lashed out, he attacked by name German people, it says Germans are
evil and so forth and so on, it's not exactly the thing to do as a politician, even in that
period. So, anyway, he's renominated and in the election of 1890, Ford was smashed. It was called the Lutheran landslide. Almost every German Lutheran shifts to the Democratic Party and the Democrats sweep in.
Ford is crushed. The first thing they do is repeal the Bennon law. The legislature meets half the Republicans to repeal it. The Republicans are beginning to see that the jig is up. We can't continue this stuff. We've got to change our perspective because we're going to be losers.
and Losers, and in Illinois the same thing happened too, in Illinois they passed a very
similar law called the Edwards Law outlawing old German parochial German language, again
the same thing happened, Democrats won, so you have of the six states in the middle west,
four or three of the five states, it's only Michigan where something similar happened,
three states shift democratic on a prohibition question, two states on outlawing the German
and Language and School System question and so the Republicans realize I've got to they've
got to do something here and they do something rapidly to try to reverse course and one thing
they try to do is to moderate, get rid of prohibitions, dump it, moderate it, led by
by McKinley and led by the Lancashire people, try to do that, it's difficult to do because
the prohibitions are getting more and more intense, the prohibitions are getting more
and more fierce about this thing, the young people's Christian societies are going to,
all over the place, are going to pop up, dedicated to pietism and prohibition, the Young Men's
Christian Association, a typical pietist group, YWCA, dedicated to prohibition and pietism,
And now, of course, it's very innocuous. In those days, there were big, big intense
propagandists. Also, the Women's Christian Temperance Union got through hygiene courses
in the public school system, devoted to attacking alcohol. It's another way, another part of
the propaganda of life. Yeah?
What is the reason why you gave an example of the birth of the Netherlands?
for various historical reasons were pious, they were low-church pious, whereas the higher Lutherans, German Lutherans were so-called formalistic, they were essentially liturgical, their whole attitude was very close to the Catholic attitude, sacraments and so on, whereas the Scandinavian Lutherans were very pious, they were almost like Baptists and Methodists, they were not much different, they were split in the Lutheran Church. So, anyway, one interesting thing is, for example, in the 1890s,
One of the reasons why it was difficult, very difficult for Republicans to drop the Prohibitionists.
200,000 people, which the W.E.S. Women's Christian Temperance Union set up a Loyal Temperance Legion as a youth affiliate.
In the 1890s there were 200,000 members of the Loyal Temperance League.
It's enormous considering it's a much lower population than that.
So, pietists were getting stronger and stronger, and not so much in breadth, but in depth,
and there was an intensity of feeling.
For example, in 1892, in 1890, excuse me, of all the Midwestern college students, now
college students, remember, are elite students, they're not, it's not like now everybody
goes to college, a very small proportion went to college, these are sort of the leaders
of tomorrow type, two-thirds of all Midwestern college students were pietists, and most of
Most of them were members of YMCA, YWCA, which were, of course, which then was heavily
pietistic.
The University of Chicago in 1892, this is really remarkable, which is an elite college
even then, they took a presidential poll, they always do these days, a preference in
the 1892 election.
And here you have a poll of undergraduates, there was no graduate school, I don't think.
The University of Chicago was founded by Rockefeller, Johnny Rockefeller, as a Baptist, heavy, Rockefeller's Baptist, a heavy Baptist aura, but at any rate, they had a preference poll.
Grover Cleveland was a Democratic candidate, of course, liturgical.
Undergraduate preference pool, University of Chicago, Cleveland got 52 votes, President
Harrison, who was a Republican of Indiana, got 151 votes, and get this, another guy named
Bidwell, and I can't find his first name, see how important he was in American history,
He was a prohibitionist candidate.
He got 164 votes.
In other words, Bidwell wins the University of Chicago undergraduate election.
It's pretty remarkable considering most, we think of college students as being more leftist
than the rest of the adults. Here we have a situation where these are ultra-pietists
with Cleveland getting almost no votes. You consider this is like,
15% of the vote or something, as a major democratic party
and the prohibitionists winning out, these are the youths, the leaders of tomorrow
unbelievable, at any rate
so the
what happens with the prohibitionists, they didn't know what to do, they didn't know whether to stick with a prohibitionist party
and be a balance of power party, obviously they weren't winning
because what was happening is the republicans were getting less and less prohibitionist
Prohibitionists, should they stick with the Republican Party or should they become a single
issue pressure group?
And finally in 1893, 1892 when prohibitionists did very badly at Cypher University of Chicago
on a national scale they did badly and so they finally decided a way to go with a single
issue, single issue organization which would then punish, reward your friends and punish
your enemies.
In other words, pick a guy for president or congress just on the basis of his vote on
on Liquor, and they set up the Anti-Saloon League, which became largely responsible for eventually putting Prohibition across.
So that was the, they dropped the Prohibitionist Party, Prohibitionist Party is still around by the way, they get like 20 votes.
Basically the Prohibitionists dropped the Prohibitionist Party and went through a single issue pressure group concept.
So the Republicans realized we have to drop prohibition. It was tough to do it because they had all these intensifiers, so they did it during the 1890s, led by McKinley and Rockefeller.
Then they tried other methods. Well, let's see, what we're trying to do, let's restrict immigration to keep it consistent. Most of the immigrants are Catholic.
If we can keep out immigrants altogether, we'll do well. We'll stop the demographics from going against us.
The Republicans began an anti-immigrant drive, aside from the Chinese immigration, which I'll talk about a little later, next time or something, which is this special deal which started earlier, and particularly in the 1880s, I'd say, there was a big German and an Irish immigration, and then in the 1890s, beginning of the red specter of Italian immigration, even more Catholics coming in, they figured, okay, we're going to stop this.
The big drive by the Republicans to restrict immigration, they started until 1882, immigration was totally free in the United States, regulated only by New York State or any other state, it was essentially not regulated at all.
In 1882, Republicans passed a first step in immigration restriction, which is to require every immigrant to pay 50 cents, a 50 cent tax.
In the 80s and those days, you know, it meant a considerable amount. I don't know, close to $5 or something like that. It kept out poor immigrants.
And also, all ex-convicts were prohibited from coming in, plus anybody was likely to be a public charge.
Anybody who was likely deemed an immigration official might go on welfare or whatever.
So this begins the immigration restriction.
In 1886, we begin to drive by states. In those days, aliens could vote, much different from now.
Aliens could vote if they only declare their intent to eventually become a citizen, they were allowed to vote.
The states begin, the Republican controlled states, began to tighten up on that to prevent aliens,
not just from voting, but also from being employed on public works projects, government and public works projects.
In other words, the anti-alien thing begins in late 1886 or so, 1887,
Keep aliens from voting in public, employed in public works.
In 1885, they passed a law outlawing contract labor.
This was put in by the labor unions. We'll get to labor unions a little bit later on.
Maybe next time, time after.
Labor unions put through a law. In those days, you see there was contract labor.
There was a force of labor, quote, shortage, unquote.
There was always this need more people. There was lots of land and very few people.
So businessmen would contract with Europeans in Europe, agencies, to bring people over as contract laborers.
This was outlawed in 1885, federal government.
Of course, if you outlaw people from becoming contract laborers, it means they're more likely to become public chargers.
They haven't got a job.
In other words, the great thing about contract labor is you know you have a job already, and you're coming on the boat.
So this way, you're not allowed to have a job in advance, and you're more likely to become a welfare case or whatever.
of Governance.
They could then ban people as being poor because they're deprived of a job, it's great, they
first you deprive somebody of a job and then you say, he hasn't got a job line up, you
have to prevent him from entering the country.
There's of course particular attacks on Catholic immigrants, it was very explicit.
In those days you have to realize nowadays it's considered at least unesthetic and probably
immoral to be engaged in religious and racial discrimination.
In the early days, they didn't have these restrictions, people were much franker, and so they said the Presbyterian Senate in 1887 said we have to keep out Catholic immigrants, they're evil, they talk about bohemian bruisers and Atanian cutthroats, and the National Temperance Society attacked Catholic immigrants, they drank liquor, and the Prohibition Party attacked immigrants and Catholic immigrants and the independent Presbyterian Church and all that. Another thing that comes in this picture was used by
As anti-Catholic people and also anti-emigrant, the Grand Army of the Republic, the Civil War veterans, means Northern Civil War veterans, the GAR, who were of course all Republican into the Hill.
They got special jobs, and whenever Republicans got into any state, they would give preference to the Civil War veterans, Union veterans.
In the 1880s there was their peak membership, 400,000, an enormous number of Civil War veterans, all of whom had the public trough, getting the money, getting the bootles from the Republican Party, they were denouncing immigrants because they were allies of copperheads and ex-rebels, in other words, the Democrats, Southern Democrats, they were also flourishing new patriotic secret societies or anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic, the Junior Order of United American Mechanics, which begins in the 1880s,
1889 had 60,000 people, 1890 had 160,000 people, big organizations, the United Order of Deputies which had 15,000 workers and their plea was to all employers, fire all Catholics, no Catholics should have a job, that was their shtick, that of course did not succeed, anyway that's the sort of pressure constantly, finally in the late 1880s a very powerful anti-Catholic group called the American Protective Association
the Dread APA
When I was growing up in the 1930s, Catholics were still
talking about the APA, and I think it had faded away by that time. It was an extremely powerful
loss-pressure group
to protect American institutions from the Dread Catholics.
And they were founded in Iowa in 1887.
It was a secret order, and their secret pledge was never to vote ever to vote for a Catholic for any position
in any position of any sort. It spread through the upper Mississippi Valley towns, it swept
Omaha and all sorts of mid-western states. In 1894 it had 500,000 members. This is enormous.
This would be equivalent now to at least several million. I'm not sure what the population
was. It was obviously much smaller than now.
So that was, what happened in the APA was that they were, of course again, almost completely
Republican, they had nothing to do with the Democratic Party, but they had a problem.
Their problem was, what do we, what do you do about McKinley?
They hated McKinley's guts, because McKinley was actually, actually, you know, appointed
Catholics a job and stuff like that.
McKinley broke very early with this thing, it was part of his moderation, or part of
his giving up of his biases, they tried their best to stop McKinley from being nominated
1896, we'll see about that later, and they finally, when he was nominated, they didn't
know what to do, they really sort of fell apart in 1896, they didn't know whether to
oppose him, they couldn't vote for the hated Democrats, because they were all kind of Republicans,
they finally sort of began to dissolve, but they were very, very powerful for about 10
years.
Another thing was this, Republicans were and continue to be completely committed to protective
power, very high protective power, keep out cheap foreign goods.
One of the reasons they go in for immigration restrictions is a quid pro quo with the workers.
In other words, okay, we recognize if we have a protective power, if you have to cost the
living, it would be much more expensive.
In return for that, we'll keep out cheap immigrants.
In other words, we'll increase wage rates of domestic workers by keeping out, so sort
of a quid pro quo, okay, we'll get our goods, goods of our competitors prohibited from coming
to the United States.
In return for that, we'll give you, we'll prohibit Italians, Chinese, whatever coming
in the United States.
What are the biggest guys doing on all of this?
They are lawless, that there were two parties that built the two points of equal rights to make general injections.
The Republican Party was in a deep crisis. They were trying to do something about the growth of, seemingly inevitable growth of liturgical parties.
And one way to do it was to keep out immigrants. They tried that during the 1890s. They finally dropped it, as we'll see, after 1896.
But they were trying to figure out what to do, what to do to redress the balance, what to do to get pietists to win at the polls.
The other thing was that they tried to restrict, once another law they passed in 1891, Congress
passed, again it was during Republican administration, to force steamships, these steamships are
Bringing Immigrants Here. The force of steamships, if the immigrant is considered
undesirable, if they're likely to be a public charge or whatever, the force of
steamships carry the immigrant back free. In other words, at their own expense.
Obviously, it means the steamships are less likely to carry immigrants
because they think that, you know, a lot of these people have to carry back, ship back
on their own power. So they pass this. Also, they excluded illegal aliens,
reporting illegally, excuse me, to deport them, excluding people with contagious diseases,
excluding polygamists, if there were such.
The big drive on the part of the pietists in Congress came with Senator Chandler of
New Hampshire, Republican of New Hampshire, who was so the big anti-immigrant, and Henry
Mary Cabot Lodge in Massachusetts was originally a congressman and then a senator, a Bluffton
Brahman type, their big push for several years was to outlaw illiterate immigrants, to make
immigrants pass a literacy test, a big drive on that in 1893 and later, and of course it's
This is kind of peculiar since Native Americans don't have to pass literacy tests at any rate
and they set up four Boston Brahmins in 1894, set up the Immigration Restriction League,
devoted enormous propaganda to keep out illiterate immigrants, I mean illiterate English of course.
They said these immigrants coming from Eastern and Southern Europe are either illiterates
or criminals or both, therefore they should be excluded.
In 1896, they passed a law, they finally passed a law, in 1896, Luther Chandler and Lodge's pressure, the outlaw will force the literacy test on all immigrants, it was then vetoed by Cleveland, it was almost the last act in Congress, just about ready to be kicked out, Cleveland heroically vetoed it and it didn't pass over as veto, and also of course the drive came to prevent aliens from voting, as I said before, a lot of states permitted aliens to vote, they managed to reduce it,
not by much, there was, in early 1890s, 18 southern and western states committed only to vote, by 1900 only 11 did, but still it was a slow process, in other words, they put on a big push to keep out immigrants and Catholics, they were slightly successful but not much,
looking over the decades work, they didn't get very too far, they also tried something else, okay, if you try to, there was one drive to try to exclude immigrants from voting, or then later vote,
Another drive was to put, to make, to expand the suffrage to people whom you knew would be pietists, namely women.
In other words, the women's suffrage drive now comes in as a purely pietist measure.
The reason is this, the pietists knew very well that if women voted, if women were given, of course, women were not voting in this period, except for a few of the western states,
if women were allowed to vote, almost all the voters would be pietists.
because the Catholic culture was such, the Catholic women would not vote
or they stayed home. While the men were at the saloon, the women stayed home and did all this stuff.
It's true. It's hard to picture it now. Good or bad, whatever it is. I'm not passing a value judgment.
Anyway, the culture was such that the Catholic homes women would not vote.
and so the and the pious is knowing this push for women's suffrage and the
Catholics knowing the other things but voted against it so this was one of the
one of the big reasons for this the so for example professor Grimes has written
a very good book on the subject says I'm arguing that the evidence indicates is a
large extent least in the West the constituency granting women's suffrage
was composed those who also supported prohibition and immigration restriction
The Prohibition Party and the Greenback Party very early came out of the women's suffrage.
We'll see later that the Progressive Party in 1912 was the first group to have women
delegates at the National Convention, also a woman elector.
And most of the early feminist leadership, the early women's suffrage leaders came out
of the Prohibitionist Movement, Susan Anthony and Francis Willard and people like that and
they began in other words as leaders in Women's Christian Temperance Union and they shifted
over to the Women's Suffrage Movement.
The Women's Christian Temperance Union for example was involved in the following, Women's
Women's Suffrage Movement, Prohibition, curfew laws, anti-gambling laws, anti-smoking laws,
and anti-sex laws, for example, Susan Anthony and Ida Harper, in their definitive history
of the Women's Suffrage Movement, wrote the following about the Women's Christian Temperance
Women's Christian Temperance Union has been a chief factor in state campaigns for statutory
prohibition, that means prohibition of alcohol, constitutional amendment, reform laws in general,
and those for the protection of women and children in particular, and securing anti-gambling,
anti-cigarette laws.
It's been instrumental in raising the age of protection for girls in many states, obtaining
curfew laws in 400,000 cities.
The association protests against the legalization of all crimes, especially those of prostitution
and liquor selling.
All of these things were grouped together by the Women's Christian Temporary Union and the Women's Suffrage Movement.
The Women's Christian Temporary Union, as I said, emerged out of women's prayer, anti-liquor prayer meetings.
It began in Ohio and swept the nation.
The leading spirit of the Women's Christian Temporary Union, Frances Willard, was sort of typical.
She was born of New England stock parents who had moved westward to study at Oberlin
College in Ohio which was the center of pietism for decades, center of ultra-pietist leadership.
Later settled in Wisconsin, she became corresponding secretary of the WCTU and then became the
president a couple of years later and then became a women's suffrage person and moved
There was a movement in the women's suffrage movement, almost as one and the same.
And so whenever, many western states, some western states, had women's suffrage in the very beginning.
And they were almost all put in by, these were pieter states, put in by pieters.
This is one charming thing, there was a vote for a Colorado referendum about women's suffrage in 1877.
16,007 was defeated. Susan Anthony is testifying before Congress and testifying why it was defeated.
She says, in Colorado, 6,666 men voted yes. I mean, what? Yes, women suffrage.
Now, I'm going to describe the men who voted yes, she said. They were native-born white men, temperance men, cultivated, broad, generous, just men, men who think.
Those are the good guys.
The other hand, 16,007 voted no. Now, I'm going to describe that class of voters.
In the southern part of that state, there were Mexicans who speak the Spanish language.
The vast population of Colorado is made up of that class of people.
I was sent out to speak in a voting precinct having 200 voters.
150 of those voters were Mexican greasers.
40 of them foreign-born citizens.
Just 10 of them were born in this country.
It was a bitter attack on Mexican Americans, of course, again, being Catholic,
voted against women's suffrage.
And the same thing happened in California, where the ultra-opiacists
were in favor of women's suffrage, so forth and so on.
some of it also the idea and the part of pious women is a terrible thing to have
low-type men voting where they can vote. It was really great upon them. Here they were
wealthy and upper-class wasp women. Here were the evil, greasy foreigners,
Mexicans or whatever, who could vote even because they were men. That was part of
the drive here. Women's suffrage comes in early and mid-90s and mountain
states, we'll talk about that in a minute, mountain states that were Wyoming and Utah
Utah and Idaho and Colorado I guess, yeah, these are all mountain states and they're
all mostly pietas. The special thing in Utah was this, kind of interesting, Utah of course
was heavily Mormon and the Mormons were a favorite women's suffrage because then the
Mormons could outvote the other people, because the Mormons, every Mormon had eight wives
or something, you have to then multiply the mormon vote by 8 votes.
So it was their schtick.
Another thing about the West in general, a lot of single men tended to be sort of grifters
that you see from western movies, sort of gripped in and out of town, sort of unwholesome
types.
These figures that women can vote and have a more subtle family type voters against the
Frederick Jackson Turner, I've already mentioned him as the historian who popularized the frontier thesis.
You have to realize about him that he was very much in favor of the frontier ethic, including pietism and everything else.
To sum that up, he said, there's a great quote from Turner, he said,
in the arid west, that means the prairie states and so forth, he said,
So these pioneers, from New England, in other words, originally New England stock, have halted and have turned to perceive an altered nation and change social ideals.
If you follow back the line of March of the pre-written farmer, you should see how responsive he's always been to isms.
He's a favorite of those, remember.
He is the prophet of the higher law in Kansas before the Civil War.
He is the prohibitionist of Iowa and Wisconsin, crying out against German customs as an invasion of traditional ideals.
He is the granger of Wisconsin, passing restrictive railroad legislation.
He is the abolitionist, the anti-Mason, the Millerite, the Millerites were...
I shouldn't say crazy, but the Millerites people believed that the world would come...
Jesus would return on March 1843, and he was first centered in western New York.
When March 1843 came and went, there wasn't...
no Jesus return attended to the spread of the Millerites.
And they learned from that, by the way, the pre-millennialists, that you shouldn't make precise predictions of that sort,
because you might be wrong. The women suffragists, the spiritualists, the Mormon of western New York.
of New York. That really sums it up. This is the WASP pioneer, the WASP, Piatus Frontiersman.
If they tried women's suffrage, it would pass in a couple of mountain states, but not
very much. These were gradual measures. They tried immigration restrictions, it worked
a little bit, but not much. They tried women's suffrage, it worked a little bit, but not
much. And another thing they did, which was more important in the long run, is they put
put in, the Republicans put in during 1890, a bunch of crummy mountain states as states.
Here are these mountain states. For example, in 1890, 1889, 1890, in those two years, the
and Legislature puts in as states Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Washington, and Utah makes it
a few years later, 1896, there were no people there, you have to realize, there are hardly
any people in Montana and Idaho now, much less 1890, there were no people, how can they
be qualified as states, notice what happens with the states, each of these crummy one
The Golden Horse States has two senators. They're fully in a situation where there are two senators from states with almost no people in them.
Why do the Republicans do this? Republicans did it because these were all pietists.
There were very few Catholics or Lutherans in any of these states. These were pietists.
They were doing well. These would add to the pietist strength in Congress and the two parties.
And these were all free silver states. They were inflationist states. They all had silver mines.
and silver was the big cry of the inflationist in this period in other words we should have silver as money and not just gold
or stress silver because silver is more abundant than gold, we have more higher prices
so this, pietist free silverism plus pietist social values that comes into this picture
so the republicans were able to fold these four states into the picture
this had a longer run more importance than the other stuff
even though it seemed to be unimportant
I'm going to take a ten minute break and then I can celebrate.
It happened in 1896, a big cataclysmic event that the entire political party system changes.
In other words, the party system I've been talking about, the so-called third party system,
last date from 1854 approximately, ends very abruptly in 1896 and the whole party system
changes, the whole ideology changes and the whole ethno-religious support for the party
changes.
what happened what's the story here the basically what happens this is the
something happens the Democratic Party but first of all Republican Party is
getting more moderate in other words they've been to realize these other
things women's suffrage was only a long-term thing prohibition is dropping
anyway immigration restriction was only long-term they're beginning to get much
are much more moderate, really retaining basically the protective power of their key plank, giving
up social issues, one of the things even in the early 80s for example, in 1990 when the
republicans were still in, they passed the silver purchase law, the Sherman silver purchase
law, subsidizing silver miners of the mountain states, and also of course contributing as
an inflationary law.
When Cleveland gets in, one of his first acts is the Repeal of the Silver Purchase Act,
and we're to go back to a gold, solid gold standard.
And one of the things he was supposed to do, Cleveland, was to eliminate the National Banking
Banking Act, to permit free banking, to permit state bank notes, which were existing before
the Civil War.
Unfortunately, it went back on this pledge, probably due to Morgan supporters.
Morgan obviously did not want to have a free banking system.
But so we have a very different party, a very different party system.
What happens in the convention of 1896, it was a democratic convention, is that suddenly,
and this was brewing for a couple of years at this point, suddenly the democratic party
is captured by a very different group.
And what we have to see is how come this happened, what was the, what paved the way for this?
Democratic Party is suddenly captured by an ultra-apriatist group, in other words by people
who are much more apriatist than Republicans and who are very much in favor of pure status,
in favor of inflation, free silver, government regulation, etc. and prohibition of almost
everything.
So, all of a sudden, the democratic, the German, Catholic Lutheran who would consider who had grown up in the democratic party, were loyal to the democratic party, would never vote Republican under any circumstances, all of a sudden find, they find the democratic party, the party of their fathers, as it's called, has been captured by a monstrous group of extreme pietists. In the meantime, the Republican party had gotten more moderate, under McKinley, Rockefeller influence. How could the democrats have been captured by pietists?
when the whole thing the whole history of democratic party was just the opposite it was a tremendous ship in the July 1896 convention at Chicago where the fighters headed by the famous and or notorious William Jennings Brian of Nebraska captured the democratic party well we can see certain things that happen the first place the well one thing the mountain states have become states as I said last time in the
in the last hour, in other words, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, and Utah, and Washington
become state.
These are all pietists, so they added to the Democratic, pietist strength of the Democratic
Party and the Senate and all that sort of stuff, the leadership.
Another thing that happens is that the, in the panic of 1893, well, before I get to that,
So when you have a new mountain state with all the pietists, then you have the South,
which has been democratic since the Civil War, the southern pietists who were not evangelical,
they were sort of quiet pietists, they believed that everybody should be born again but you
don't bother anybody else, they were now converted to the Yankee position where they were increasingly
become prohibitionists, the southern Methodists which had held back from this sort of thing
for fifty, forty, fifty years and now get converted to the evangelical position.
And now you have, the South now becomes pietist, in other words, so the Democrats
become pietists.
So this is a big change, of course, it means a whole block.
The South is increasingly a one-party state.
After the Civil War, blacks in the South were almost all Republican and whites were almost all Democratic.
After the 1880s, the Blacks were systematically disenfranchised in the South by the so-called progressive movement in the South.
You wind up by about 1900 or so with no Blacks voting, almost literally, in the Southern States.
Now you have a one-party region. In other words, the South now becomes a fully democratic region.
And all now becoming pious. This of course shifts the balance within the democratic party.
Excuse me, if you have a south, a southern mountain, a so-called west, which really means mountain states, a pietist.
Another thing that happens is the panic of 1893, which occurs just after poor Cleveland.
Cleveland gets to be president. In those days, the presidents are inaugurated in March, I think March 1st.
and I think just before he's nominated, just before he takes office, the panic of 1893 begins with a bankruptcy of some railroad and then a month or so later the whole, you know, the bank panic.
He just had the bad luck to come in at the beginning of a bank panic and general depression, brought about of course by the bank, previous bank credit expansion and all that, which occurs every 10 years or 5 years or so.
do again to this nationalized banking system which was set up in civil war
but of course the people didn't realize that they blamed Cleveland, okay, for the panic
so the result of that, you know, the Democrats had swept in in 1892
in 1894 they lost the House of Representatives, I think they even lost the Senate
there was a big shift because of the Depression, it was a temporary thing
in other words the Democratic Party gets discredited for a while
It didn't have to be permanent, but what happens is the people who lose their seats, in other words, in this temporary 1894 shift of the Republicans,
the people who lose their seats are the Cleveland leadership, in other words, the Libertarian Democrats, so to speak,
the big shots in the East, the governors and senators in the East and the Middle West, who are so-called Cleveland Democrats,
lose their seats, which creates a power vacuum in the Democratic Party
because it means the Democratic Party leadership is deprived of Eastern and Midwestern liturgical types
people who are laissez-faire, hard-money, pre-trade Democrats, alright?
This means that there's a power vacuum open for the Southern Mountain people to take over
It just so happens that the bad luck was that the 1894 collapse of the Democrats because of the Depression
which was purely temporary, leaves the path open for the Brianites to take over
in 1896. So the result in 1895 and 1896 in the democratic individual states of
So Brian and I begin to take over the different state parties.
This is not really, so what happens is Brian begins to put together this coalition, ultra-pilots,
Southern pietists, mountain state pietists, there's a vacuum in leadership in the eastern
middle west, and it takes over the convention in 1896, it was a big blow, but you could
see it was coming, and it was beginning to be able to predict it by the early 1896, that
something, a catacosmic change was going to happen in the democratic party.
The as a result of that, the republicans begin to see the handwriting on the wall, of course,
The democrats, it looks like the democrats, the brianites are going to take over, the republicans have systematically started dropping, even more so, all the pious stuff that they were established with, prohibitionism and anti-Catholicism and anti-Germanism and all the rest of it, and they start, and the morgans, who were, had been first practically running the democratic party, begin to realize the brianites are taking over, the morgans are committed to the gold standard at this point, and so the morgan forces in the republican party start dickering with McKinley, the Rockefeller forces,
The Morgans were pushing, the Republicans had their convention I think in June, in other words a month before, in St. Louis, and the Morgans were pushing for Levi P. Morton to become president, presidential nomination.
Levi P. Morton had been the vice president of the Democratic ticket, in other words in the Cleveland administration, he was the vice, I think the first one, New York Democrat, head of the Morton Trust Company,
and a very close friend and buddy of J.P. Morgan, who later became, the Morton Trust
Company later becomes part of the Morgan Guaranteed Trust, which is now of course the big Morgan
Bank, commercial bank. Anyway, a very close buddy of Morgan. He then, he shifts parties
in 1896, so they see the handwriting on the wall, the more, the conservative Democrats,
the libertarian Democrats, see that the Brianites are taking over, and they push him for a Republican
nomination when McKinley, the Rockefeller people behind McKinley, okay, so they have
have a big, high level of negotiations, Mark Hanna and McKinley go on Morgan's Yacht,
I think they had two meetings on Morgan's Yacht, but he had a big yacht, you might expect,
and they're discussing the whole situation, and Henry Cabot Lodge was one of Morgan's
top people in this thing, anyway, they strike a deal, the deal is this, Morgan said, look,
you got to adopt the gold standard, you got to be committed to the gold standard, if you're
If you're committed to the gold standard, then we'll back McKinley for the presidency, because we can't, of course, take Brian.
If, on the other hand, you don't accept the gold standard, nothing to you.
We'll either perform a third party or drop out or whatever.
And so, the deal was then struck.
The Republicans, for the first time, in the 1896 convention, adopt the gold standard as a commitment, a basic commitment.
In other words, they accept the anti-inflation plan, which the Democrats have been fighting for now for 70 years, virtually.
We could say 50 years, and this is a big thing. It's also a big thing of the Germans. Remember, the Germans, German-Americans, both Catholic and Lutheran placed their greatest, two things they're mostly interested in.
One is stopping prohibition, and two is the gold standard. Here the Republicans finally are committed to dropping the prohibition stuff, they're saying, how with it, and they're pushing the gold standard.
Now the silver republicans who really committed to free silver split from the party, I think
the split was organized by Senator William Teller of Colorado, who was himself one of
the founders of the Republican Party, who was, he and his mountain state republicans
built the convention, they formed their own party called the National Silver Ticket, Teller
Gold, by the way, himself was owned $2 million worth of silver, silver mining stock, and
so forth.
He particularly is interested in silver more than just abstract.
Anyway, so the silver forces did leave the Republican Party, they supported Brian from
their own fourth party ticket, but these were a small price to pay for German Lutheran support.
And as a matter of fact, when the silver Republicans gone, the McKinley people could say, we are
the gold standard party.
Interestingly enough, most historians, when they deal with this period, talk about the Republicans as being the gold standard party, not realizing this only happened in 1896, before that it was just the opposite.
So McKinley, in other words, gives out prohibition, adopts the gold standard. In the meantime, Brian takes over the Democratic party as an ultra-populist, ultra-prohibitionist person, ultra-inflationist.
So, as a matter of fact, the first step of the Chicago Convention of Democrats, the first
vote was, should we honor Cleveland?
Well, Cleveland's still the president, okay, he had two terms in office, it's an anti-third
term tradition, so he's not going to run, but the first vote was, should we honor Cleveland?
Which is sort of a thing, you almost always do that, but it was voted down by the Brian
Eye Convention, when that happened, of course, Cleveland people knew the jig was up.
As a matter of fact, the Cleveland people, from then on, Cleveland and its supporters kept saying the Democratic Party is dead as we know it.
The party of our fathers, they would put it, is dead.
Brian was a Southern stock, Southern stock pietist born in Southern Illinois. He was a Southern Baptist.
He was of course a great believer in compulsory immorality and safe social atmosphere, and the righteous, and prohibition and all the rest of it.
The, so of course to say, then the question is what do the laissez-faire Democrats do?
What do they do about this?
Brian is taking over the party.
Now it seems to me if they had any guts they would have formed a third party.
They said, okay, the Democratic Party is taking over, we form here by a laissez-faire party,
whatever you want to call it.
They didn't have the guts to do it.
Some of them wanted to do it.
Others said, well, we don't know.
Maybe we should be pro-McKinley.
They did, some of them did form the National Democratic Party called the Gold Democrats.
But only a few of them, and they didn't have the guts, they didn't want to, the Eastern
Democrats wanted to keep their control of the Eastern Democratic Party, which they lost anyway,
and so the whole thing sort of fell apart.
But basically what happened was the most liturgical Democrats, Cleveland Democrats, voted for
McKinley.
The bargain was struck, McKinley's not so bad anymore, he's given out prohibition, he's
pro-gold, and so there was a big enormous shift by German Catholic and Lutherans to
to the Republican ticket for the first time.
Polish Catholics, even Polish Catholics and dedicated Catholics, many of them voted Republican,
huge shift,
a huge shift both ways. There was a huge shift out of the Democratic Party by Catholics and Lutherans,
and a big shift
into the Republican Party by,
into the Democratic Party by pietists,
Scandinavians,
all sorts of stuff. The shift was more pronounced
because the Republican Party change was more gradual in the Democratic Party, the shift
out of the democrats was more severe, in other words, a big enormous shift, there was also
a counter shift of pietists, prohibitionists, in fact the prohibitionists more like liquidated
themselves into the democratic party, as the populists did too, they just became democrats
basically, so the whole s-no religious thing shifted, and something else happened, see
the old days, the rural, there was no rural-rural-urban split, in other words, there were lots of
The most historians talk about the Brianite movement as if it was an upsurge of the rate of all the farmers in the country against the rich.
If it was really true that it was a big upsurge against the rich, how come Brian was crushed in the general election?
He was crushed three times as a matter of fact, 1896, 1900, 1908.
If you had a mass popular uprising, because most historians tend to be pro-Brian, being left liberals, they identify with Brian.
If Brian represented an upsurge against the rich, against big business, how come Brian was always crushed every year?
There's something wrong, peculiar about this. Also, farmers did not vote for Brian, particularly.
Again, the breakdown is Catholic and Lutheran farmers voted for Republican, and pious farmers voted for Brian.
It's a very simple breakdown. That's no religious breakdown, except now it's just the opposite from the old days.
So, what happens to the Democratic Party from now on is, from then on, it begins to become
the ethnic group which is least defected from the Catholic is the Irish.
In other words, the Germans defected on mass, the German Catholics and the Lutheran and
the Bohemian Catholics and whatever.
The ones who really stuck to the Democratic Party are the Irish.
Basically the reason the Irish essentially went into civil service, in other words, the
Irish immigrants that came to the United States, for some reason became civil servants, they became sanitation workers, public school teachers, policemen, and firemen, okay, and so they were states, they were, in those days, they were very little civil servants, in other words, most of the jobs were patronage jobs, if you're left the democratic party, it means you're out of a job, you couldn't afford to leave it, so the Irish stuck to the democratic party, as a result of that, the democratic party, from now on, after 1897,
in 1936 begins to become a two-wing party, one the South and two urban Irish machines
in the city.
In other words, essentially the Northern Democratic Party gets taken over by the Irish and becomes
governors, mayors, senators, etc.
So the WASP Democrats, previous WASP or Cleveland types, get kicked out and the Irish take over.
As a result of this, this tended to alienate other successive ethnic groups, like Italian Catholics, who didn't particularly like Irish, so they began to be tempted by Republicans.
In other words, over the years from then on, Italians were no longer solidly democratic, as Catholics would have been, you know, before 1896.
So you have a strange situation, you have the Democratic, we begin to get then, in other words, after 1896, a completely new party system, the Republican Party becomes the majority party, as long as we're a big, very close race, except for Woodrow Wolf's, yeah.
The gold standard has been given up by all the power elite at this point, and the Germans
The Rockefeller-Morgan types essentially run the establishment of both parties, establishment
for Democrats, established for Republicans, whereas say Reaganites are more the sunbelts
south and west, let's say Texas and Southern California, the sunbelt type, this is post-World
War II development, before World War II the Rockefeller-Morgan breakdown more or less holds,
since World War II it's very different, the Morgans have become junior, quiet plays, hey,
quiet plays, before World War II the, I mean right now since World War II the Morgans have
The oil has become a junior partner to the Rockefellers, and not nearly as strong, the oil has become predominant in the Eastern establishment.
Well, before World War II it was very different.
Oh yeah, there's certainly some more in the Rockefellers, absolutely, oh yeah, my goodness.
Well, let's put it this way, in the Eisenhower administration, the Secretary of State was John Foster Dulles,
The head of the CIA, which in those days had almost equal power, it was a secret organization, no accounting of anybody, was Alan W. Dulles, his brother, and the head of the Berlin desk of the State Department was Eleanor Lansing Dulles, sister.
Who are the Dulles family? Is it really true that the whole United States was a lot of talent?
One lousy family should run the entire foreign policy of the United States. Who are they?
In addition to being beloved people, who are they? Well, both Dulles brothers were lawyers for Sullivan and Comba, which was founded by a lawyer, Rockefeller lawyers.
Also, the Undersecretary of State, which is the number two position in the State Department,
held by an extremely beloved representative, Christian Herter, of Massachusetts.
By beloved, I mean the sort of person who was beloved by New York Times, Newsweek and Time Magazine,
so people praised by this sort of group.
So Christian Herter, the Undersecretary of State, who was Christian Herter?
He was a former Republican congressman of Massachusetts who had a lot of charisma,
I don't know, 6'6 or something, had a bad foot, so he limped, made him a romantic figure.
Anyway, what was really important was he was married to a Pratt, and his wife was a member of the Pratt family,
which had been a Rockefeller family since 1880, so he was a family.
So the whole Eisenhower foreign policy was Rockefeller foreign policy from the beginning to the end.
Now that's, of course, a fairly bold example.
Her administration was also a solid Rockefeller from the Trilateral Commission, so it doesn't
have to be both parties now, so the Rockefellers felt very strong, much stronger than Morgan.
Morgan's an absolute, let's say, junior partner at the Rockefellers at this point, post-World
War II oil.
I mean, it's a big thing.
At any rate, if we get back to 1896, where gold becomes a key, indeed a key point, the
So what happens then, the Democratic Party after that becomes a one-horse party, basically
a minority party, Republicans become the majority party, no longer close elections, this lasts
from 1896 until 1932, except for the Wilson administration where the Republican Party
was split down the middle for Rockefeller-Morgan reasons, by the way, we'll see, and the Democrats
New York has become a minority party consisting only of the South and Irish, New York, you know, big city machines, in other words, New York, Wisconsin, whatever, which are essentially Irish, an Irish party, so we have the South plus Irish big city, by the way, the one funny thing was the Democratic convention in 1924, which was held in New York City in the summer, first they had to realize there was no air conditioning then, they had 104 ballots, I mean, it went on for weeks,
very hot old Madison Square Garden, Southern Baptist and Methodist pious coming up and confronting New York Irish types,
scared stiff of the Jesuits because the Jesuits were behind every tapestry, every hour, thinking the Jesuits would knife them at any moment,
unbelievable culture clash between the Southern Democrats and the New York and the big city Irish Democrats, arguing about prohibition and lots of other forms,
Irish never accepted prohibition obviously.
By the way, Prohibition comes in in the Democratic administration during World War I, it looks
like that, all this women's suffrage comes in the Democratic Party, immigration restriction
comes in with the Democrats, and Prohibition comes in, the Republicans in other words drop
it, after they get in, they figure we're the majority party, we have to putz around Prohibition
and the other nonsense, what the heck with that, we're in, and we're going to be in
from now on, so that was the, the Republicans then as they become the majority party, except
So these fringe groups, really, as I've announced it, the Democrats become, so we have the Republicans as a centrist party, in other words, not ideologically strong, so sort of middle-of-the-road party in general, except committed to protective power, and the Democratic party, after a fling with an ultra-opiatist, sort of begin to drop that, they both become progressive, in other words, after 1900, they both become statist parties,
The first status, we want to call it, so-called progressive, becomes, in other words, very little difference after about 1900 or so between the republicans and democrats, except for this lingering ethnic or southern, you know, regional orientation.
This is the so-called fourth party system, 1896, 1832.
And the thing about the fourth party system, which continues to this day in the fifth or sixth party system, wherever we're in, is the parties are no longer ideological.
The parties now become like we know and love today, with very little choice, I put love
in quotation marks, becomes non-ideological, people begin to lose interest, in other words
the turnout rate means eligible voters have turned out to vote, which is very high in
the late 19th century, very high in 1896, very high before that, like 90% of presidential
elections begins to drop.
People don't really care that much, it gets to the point that two parties become very
People lose interest. As the people lose interest, this explains why there was no laissez-faire party after 1896.
There was no body of people fighting for free trade, free markets, and all that sort of stuff.
And this leaves a power vacuum open for progressivism of the welfare state, warfare state, whatever you want to call it.
In other words, after the takeover of 1896, the laissez-faire people lose their party.
If you lose a party in those days, it means you lose politically, period.
Because there's nobody coming in to refuel, you know, to continue the agitation of propaganda, whatever.
and so this is the this in other words explains why it is you know I was always puzzled by the fact I can
understand why statism takes over after 1900s intellectuals become statists big businessmen
become statists as we'll see but what happened to the democratic party what happened to this party
which is a bastion of libertarian laissez-faire sentiment well what happened was they got taken
over and so the party system then loses its point as an ideological spokesman and the whole system
The party voting becomes less important, that means technocrats begin to take over. Administrators, bureaucrats, intellectuals, they begin to take over without the parties being a check on them.
In other words, democracy really loses a lot of its saver because it means you don't have a powerful party system riding herd on the other parties.
If you do have two parties, they collaborate. For example, how come the Queen's Republican Party says nothing about the Queen's Democratic trickery here?
Sam said a word, and he probably won't because they're all in cahoots together anyway, there's no real, there's no antagonism, it's not like the good old days where each party hated each other's guts
Nah, there's nothing to hate them, it's just a bunch of sort of crooks in it together, so why rock the boat?
You don't have the great ideological passions that you did when you have pietism versus laissez-faire, that sort of stuff, it's all shot from 1896 on
Anyway, some marvelous and lovable stuff
I just want to quote one thing here
about the reaction of the Germans to the
take to the Brianites
I think it's extremely lovable here
uh...
where is this?
the uh...
I don't know if it's later, but the...
This is an idea of what happened, for example, in Wisconsin, a heavily German state in 1896.
For example, in a couple of townships, a very heavily German Lutheran in Wisconsin, there
were two townships that were striking. The other parts of the state aren't that striking,
In 1892, one is Hustesford Township, Wisconsin, the other is Carriza Township, and in these
two townships, in 1892, these are all solidly German Lutheran, that's how we can know how
the Lutherans voted, because these were all, people settled here, it was not a melting
pot in the United States, it was a mosaic, every little parish was different, so this
In this township, which was solidly German Lutheran, in 1892, the vote was 85% democratic,
enormous, 91% of Theresa, it was almost unanimous.
In 1894, because of the Depression, it was a slight falling off, 82% Democrat, 81% Democrat,
still very solid.
In 1896, because of the Brianite takeover, the Hustlersford township voted 46% Democrat
and 43% of Theresa, enormous.
I mean dramatic shift, never vote a Republican in their lives, in a state as a whole, a whole state of Wisconsin and the German Lutherans voted 85% Democrat in 1892, in 1894 they voted 59% Democrat because of the Depression,
In 1896, they were a 30% Democrat. Massive ship of the brianism.
One very charming thing is, in Milwaukee, running for Democratic congressman, was a guy named Richard Schilling.
He was a brianite. He had a meeting before the German masses of Milwaukee, trying to explain to them,
what now would be called Freemannite or Keynesian monetary theory, namely, why you don't have to have gold as money.
and he says, you don't have to have gold as money, anything else would do just as well as gold, he said, the German masses in Milwaukee, he said,
you could have silver as money, you could have paper or copper or paper or sauerkraut or sausages,
could do just as well as money, at that point the German masses in Milwaukee put him off the stage, threw eggs and cabbages and all that at him,
drove him off the stage, the Republican Party, now being committed to gold and being very shrewd,
immediately coined the slogan, shilling in sauerkraut, sauerkraut money, and swept Milwaukee for the first time in many years in the Republican Party.
So that's the sort of stuff that happened.
And not only that, but the Johann Most, who was the German head of the communist anarchist movement, which was German.
And don't forget, the communist anarchists were in favor of abolishing all money, period.
I mean, compulsory abolition of all money. He came out in favor of the gold standard in 1896.
In 1896, I think it was Charming, so dedicated to gold with the German masses, he finally
had to come out, he too was in favor of the gold standard.
As the Illinois Stadtzeitung said in 1896, the German-American paper in Illinois said,
looking back on the election, on the German electorate, they said, the Germans have had
many complaints against the Republican Party, which annoyed them continually with prohibition
laws, Sunday school laws, Sunday closing laws and school laws.
The Germans constantly turned their backs upon the Republicans. The result of Cleveland was twice elected.
And if the Democrats had uninscribed repudiation, bankruptcy and dishonor upon their colors as a result of their union with the populace,
I mean, Brian, the Germans would have supported them this time also.
So that was the, I'm going to say, that was the kind of a hallmark of the shift, the democratic shift.
And we get into a fourth party system, a very different, non-ideological party, Republicans winning most of the time.
and this only changes with the new deal, in the thirties when we get a democratic party system, basically
lasting another, you know, until, say, the seventies.
Okay, that's enough for today.