The end of the economically progressive left

The saddest part about watching the OWS protests is that even though they have articulated their grievances, they are masters at symbolic behavior, and HAVE the new media down cold, they don't seem to have a clue about the basic issues surrounding money.  This is NOT their fault.

But it is is practically un-american.  Besides Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Lincoln who had strong opinions on the nature of money (perhaps that is why their pictures are on the currency), this issue dominated political discussions for most of this nation's history and spawned several political parties including the Greenback and People's parties.

This memory loss relating to banking and monetary issues was not an accident.  Not surprisingly, money played a big role in the left's turn from these issues to social ones.

Remember When People Got Pissed At Wall Street And Bombed Morgan Bank?
Gus Lubin and Eric Goldschein | Oct. 7, 2011 

With Occupy Wall Street and the country at large seeing greater inequality than ever, it's time to look back on what happened in the Roaring 20s. 

During this period anarchists and socialists held protests on Wall Street out of a similar sense of frustration and rage at the banking system. The movement culminated in what was known as the greatest act of terrorism on American soil: the 1920 bombing outside J.P. Morgan and Company. 

Thirty eight people were killed when the horse and wagon bomb went off at noon on Sept 16, 1920. The perpetrators, thought to be anarchists, were never caught, but their exploits and the aftermath were captured by photographers. more

Carroll Quigley may be one of the more interesting historians USA has ever produced.  He taught at Georgetown in Washington DC for most of his career and had as one of his pupils the future President Bill Clinton.  Georgetown is a Jesuit school and that order has long prided itself on cranking out the sort of scholars that governments rely on for sound advice.  Not surprisingly, this mission produces many in the Society of Jesus who are dreadfully curious about who actually has power and how governments really work.  Quigley was a professional historian in an institution that treats a discussion of the most convoluted power politics as dinner chatter.

In this passage from his magnum opus published just two years before his death Tragedy and Hope, A History of the World in Our Time pp 679- 681 (1975), Quigley explains how the House of Morgan was able direct the intense criticism of the financial community by the Liberal, Progressive, Populist Left into issues less threatening to their ability to skim their profits at the expense of everyone else.

To gauge how successful this and other similar efforts have been over the years, just look out the window.

• A left economic critique has disappeared from the debate
• Wall Street runs the country
• Folks can march on Wall Street without even a rudimentary grasp of the issues involved

The J. P. Morgan Firms Infiltrate and Control Left-Wing Political Movements in U.S. 

More than fifty years ago the Morgan firm decided to infiltrate the Left-wing political movements in the United States. This was relatively easy to do, since these groups were starved for funds and eager for a voice to reach the people. Wall Street supplied both. The purpose was not to destroy ... or take over but was really threefold: 

1. to keep informed about the thinking of Leftwing or liberal groups; 
2. to provide them with a mouthpiece so that they could "blow off steam," and 
3. to have a final veto on their publicity and possibly on their actions, if they ever went "radical." 

There was nothing really new about this decision, since other financiers had talked about it and even attempted it earlier. What made it decisively important this time was the combination of its adoption by the dominant Wall Street financier, at a time when tax policy was driving all financiers to seek tax-exempt refuges for their fortunes, and at a time when the ultimate in Leftwing radicalism was about to appear under the banner of the Third International. 

The New Republic 

The best example of this alliance of Wall Street and Left-wing publication was The New Republic, a magazine founded by Willard Straight, using Payne Whitney money, in 1914. Straight, who had been assistant to Sir Robert Hart (Director of the Chinese Imperial Customs Service and the head of the European imperialist penetration of China) and had remained in the Far East from 1901 to 1909, became a Morgan partner and the firm's chief expert on the Far East. He married Dorothy Payne Whitney whose names indicate the family alliance of two of America's greatest fortunes. She was the daughter of William C. Whitney, New York utility millionaire and the sister and co-heiress of Oliver Payne, of the Standard Oil "trust." One of her brothers married Gertrude Vanderbilt, while the other, Payne Whitney, married the daughter of Secretary of State John Hay, who enunciated the American policy of the "Open Door" in China. In the next generation, three first cousins, John Hay ("Jock") Whitney, Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney, and Michael Whitney ("Mike") Straight, were allied in numerous public policy enterprises of a propagandist nature, and all three served in varied roles in the late New Deal and Truman administrations. In these they were closely allied with other "Wall Street liberals," such as Nelson Rockefeller. 

Walter Lippman Was a Member of the Mysterious Round Table Group 

The New Republic was founded by Willard and Dorothy Straight, using her money, in 1914, and continued to be supported by her financial contributions until March 23, 1953. The original purpose for establishing the paper was to provide an outlet for the progressive Left and to guide it quietly in an Anglophile direction. This latter task was entrusted to a young man, only four years out of Harvard, but already a member of the mysterious Round Table group, which has played a major role in directing England's foreign policy since its formal establishment in 1909. 

This new recruit, Walter Lippmann, has been, from 1914 to the present, the authentic spokesman in American journalism for the Establishments on both sides of the Atlantic in international affairs. His biweekly columns, which appear in hundreds of American papers, are copyrighted by the New York Herald Tribune which is now owned by J. H. Whitney. It was these connections, as a link between Wall Street and the Round Table Group, which gave Lippmann the opportunity in 1918, while still in his twenties, to be the official interpreter of the meaning of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points to the British government. 

Mike Straight Appointed to State Department 

Willard Straight, like many Morgan agents, was present at the Paris Peace Conference but died there of pneumonia before it began. Six years later, in 1925, when his widow married a second time and became Lady Elmhirst of Dartington Hall, she took her three small children from America to England, where they were brought up as English. She herself renounced her American citizenship in 1935. Shortly afterward her younger son, "Mike," unsuccessfully "stood" for Parliament on the Labour Party ticket for the constituency of Cambridge University, an act which required, under the law, that he be a British subject. This proved no obstacle, in 1938, when Mike, age twenty-two, returned to the United States, after thirteen years in England, and was at once appointed to the State Department as Adviser on International Economic Affairs. In 1937, apparently in preparation for her son's return to America, Lady Elmhirst, sole owner of The New Republic, shifted this ownership to Westrim, Ltd., a dummy corporation created for the purpose in Montreal, Canada, and set up in New York, with a grant of $1.5 million, the William C. Whitney Foundation of which Mike became president. This helped finance the family's interest in modern art and dramatic theater, including sister Beatrix's tours as a Shakespearean actress. 

Mike Straight Takes Over The New Republic 

Mike Straight served in the Air Force in 1943-1945, but this did not in any way hamper his career with The New Republic. He became Washington correspondent in May 1941; editor in June 1943; and publisher in December 1946 (when he made Henry Wallace editor). During these shifts he changed completely the control of The New Republic, and its companion magazine Asia, removing known liberals (such as Robert Morss Lovett, Malcolm Cowley, and George Soule), centralizing the control, and taking it into his own hands. This control by Whitney money had, of course, always existed, but it had been in abeyance for the twenty-five years following Willard Straight's death. 

The New Republic Was a Vehicle for Advancing the Designs of International Bankers. 

The first editor of The New Republic, the well-known "liberal" Herbert Croly, was always aware of the situation. After ten years in the job, he explained the relationship in the "official" biography of Willard Straight which he wrote for a payment of $25,000. "Of course they [the Straights] could always withdraw their financial support if they ceased to approve of the policy of the paper; and, in that event, it would go out of existence as a consequence of their disapproval." Croly's biography of Straight, published in 1924, makes perfectly clear that Straight was in no sense a liberal or a progressive, but was, indeed, a typical international banker and that The New Republic was simply a medium for advancing certain designs of such international bankers, notably to blunt the isolationism and anti-British sentiments so prevalent among many America progressives, while providing them with a vehicle for expression of their progressive views in literature, art, music, social reform, and even domestic politics. In 1916, when the editorial board wanted to support Wilson for a second term in the Presidency, Willard Straight took two pages of the magazine to express his own support for Hughes. The chief achievement of The New Republic, however, in 1914-1918 and again in 1938-1948, was for interventionism in Europe and support of Great Britain. 

Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, A History of the World in Our Time  679- 681