Politics and Religion 2

From its inception in the 1830s, the Democratic Party was the party of big business. I know, you are thinking that wait a minute, the Republicans have always been the party of big business. Maybe 20th Century big business, but not 19th Century big business. In the 19th Century, what we consider big business, today, were still gleams in their inventors’ eyes or fledgling companies just struggling to get the venture capital to get off the ground. Railroads were regional and men like Cornelius Vanderbilt were working at monopolizing them. But that was to come after the Civil War.

Prior to the Civil War, big business was cotton. Cotton ruled the world and American Southern planters ruled cotton. In fact, as people were beginning to contemplate a Civil War, the Southern politicians thought secession a done deal because they thought that England would not allow the supply of southern cotton to be disrupted to their mills. If the English mills did not get southern cotton, the British economy would collapse.

Well, the dearth of southern cotton played right into the hands of a small number of wealthy mill owners. Fearing a civil war in America, these men began growing cotton in Egypt along the Nile and in the blossoming British Raj in India. What was once too expensive to import economically suddenly became the rage when Lincoln blockaded the southern ports and the supply of American cotton began to dry up.

This also allowed the British mill owners a chance to kill off their competition. Much of Britain’s cotton product were produced by small, home industries. When the supply of American cotton dried up, these small businesses went out of business and the workers had to leave their homes and go to the manufacturing centers looking for work. These underpaid wage-slaves became the hunting ground for a new philosophy coined in Germany by a young man named Karl Marx.

Europe had one thing that America did not: a class-based society. It was exactly the thing that the early Americans had run away from. In America, a longshoreman like Cornelius Vanderbilt could work their way up the economic ladder and become one of the wealthiest men in the country by sheer force of will and fists. In Europe, that would not be possible. A man born in one social-economic class was fated to stay in that class. Marx became preoccupied with an attempt to understand his contemporary capitalist mode of production, as driven by a remorseless pursuit of profit. According to Marx, that profit was derived from the exploitation of the workers whom he called the proletariat. (Think of the British cotton workers in the example above who lost their home businesses and then had to work for the men who had destroyed them.) According to Marx, this class struggle would eventually lead mankind to Communism as the fairest and most equitable means of distributing the wealth earned from a class’s common labor.

During the course of the 19th Century, the Marxist philosophy began to take hold among the down-trodden of Europe’s lower classes. The most famous expression of his socialism was the Paris Commune of 1871 when a radical socialist, anti-religious and revolutionary government took control of the city of Paris when the French government collapsed during the Franco-Prussian war. When France surrendered to Prussia and a new government was formed, the Paris Commune refused to recognize it. Eventually, the new government sent in the French army and the commune came to a bloody end.

Marx’ writings had a deep impact on those people who felt that the system had marginalized them, slipped them into categories from which they could not get out of. And there was not country where that was more apparent than in Russia.

Russia was ruled by the Tsar. The Tsar was more than a king or an emperor. He was the owner. Basically, the Tsar owned Russia and everyone there lived there by his sufferance. He gave out property for the nobles to live on. If the Tsar gave an estate, that estate included everyone and everything on it. The people were not allowed to leave the estate without the owner’s permission. It was a form of slavery that made America’s slavery look like a walk in the park. Whereas many American states had laws as to the treatment of slaves, there were no such laws in Russia. An estate owner could beat one of his serfs to death without consequence. The Romanov family ruled Russia as Tsars from 1613 to 1917.

In 1917 there was a revolution in Russia, followed by a series of mini-revolutions and coups the result of which was the establishment of a Communist government under the control of a triumvirate, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. When Lenin died, Stalin maneuvered for control and became the sole ruler in Russia. Trotsky fled to Mexico where he was eventually assassinated.

The Russian Revolution attracted many Americans. Remember, this was the height of the Jim Crow period. Racism was rampant. Big business, Republican style was King, Workers were being exploited and living in dirt poor conditions while the corporation owners were living in the mansions on top of Nob Hill. Marx’s socialist ideas found a home with a small group of people who felt the need to rectify this exploitation. Unions were formed and struck for fair wages. At the Ford Motor Company, striking workers were machine gunned by the Nation Guard which was established to keep this “Red” terror in check.

Coal miners struck. Pullman train porters struck. And all strikes were met with an iron fist. Since the company owners tended to be Republican, their workers began to find a welcome mat spread for them with the Democratic Party. As time went on and the 20th Century progressed, more and more Marxist ideas became enshrined in Democratic platforms. Minimum wage. Fare wage. Social Security. Workers had rights. Workers had the right to be protected. Workers had the right to safety measures. Then in 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt created the first National Welfare program that had nothing to do with workers, but rather with those who did not work.

And the exact thing that Marx warned against happened.

End of Part 2