Theodore Roosevelt: Master Reformer

0:00Shork shortage has finally manifested itself. I just came back from Europe, so I haven't had a chance to mark the test yet, but by Thursday I will have marked it, so I'll give it back to you. I was at a conference in Poland and it was heartwarming because the Polish scholars there were all very much against the government. They were all completely courageous, lashed out at the government at all times with no respect for any of its pronouncements, and very feisty. I think that's really heartwarming. None of them believe anything the government says. Good healthy attitude, Carl. As I said, Teddy Roosevelt had been the Morgan candidate for Vice President, he replaced Garrett Hobart who had died in office. McKinley hated and Mark Hanna hated Roosevelt and tried to get other Morgan people to accept the Vice Presidential nomination, they refused to do it. They were stuck with Teddy, but they figured after all, Teddy was the Vice Presidential candidate and a few years ago. The plan was that after McKinley's two terms, Mark Hanna

1:08and then that would run for president, Rockefeller was backing him to the hilt and something happened on the way to the White House of course, namely that McKinley was assassinated by one of the many lone nuts that have appeared in American history, the assassination date, September 1901, early in those days the president took office in March instead of in January, so essentially McKinley was only in for about eight months or so in 1901. Interesting, sort of an interesting thing about assassinations, if you notice in the history of the United States, there have been many assassinations of American presidents and American politics. There have been many assassinations in the world and in all the rest of the world, Europe, Asia, Africa, whenever somebody is assassinated, it's always assumed there was some political motivation for this thing, some political group was doing it.

2:01And the police, the police tactics, when any individual is murdered, you look for means This is motive and opportunity, the famous triad, and motive becomes the key thing, it doesn't mean the person who had the motive was the guilty person, but the person you look at first, in other words, some millionaire dies, is murdered, you look to the grieving widow, was the grieving widow responsible, doesn't mean she was responsible, she inherited five million dollars, she becomes the first suspect. This is never done in the United States, for some reason, an American president, a big shot is assassinated, nobody ever talks about political motivation, it's always some lone nut. You find the guy very quickly and you've caught him away as being a nut. And it seems to me rather peculiar that the usual police work has never applied to American presidents.

2:51You don't look at who's the beneficiary, who benefited when, for example, McKinley is assassinated? Obviously, Teddy Roosevelt benefited, the vice president. Somehow he was never suspected, he was never put on the police griddle, police grilling, were suspected, or the Morgan people, of course, didn't take over, because Morgan all of a sudden becomes, the Morgan's now have a president, which they were not likely to have in any other situation. Doesn't mean the Morgan's did it, doesn't mean that Teddy Roosevelt did it, but at least he should have been, at least historians, people of the time, historians should at least have a certain suspicion, at least investigate the possibility that this was a Morgan set up job. Said it was a lone nut, some guy named Charles Gudge, they dispose of Charles Gudge quickly, they try him as a lone nut, they execute him and that's the end of it. When Huey Long was assassinated in 1936 or 35, it was going to be a very powerful challenge

3:43to Franklin Roosevelt's second term Democratic ticket. He was assassinated and his guards immediately, of course, killed the guy and that was the end of it. It's never considered to be any kind of political plan or conspiracy at work, so it's kind of odd. In the United States, you have this sort of official innocence applied to assassinations. It never has to be a lone nut. You never even think of the possibility of maybe other people involved, maybe political motivations or whatever. The case of President Kennedy, of course, our most recent assassinee, obviously the major recipient was Lyndon Johnson. Doesn't mean Lyndon Johnson was behind it. It just means the police should have been entertained as a possibility by the media and by the police and by the Department of Justice or whatever. Because it becomes difficult if the vice president is really responsible and assumes office, it's difficult for the Department of Justice to undertake a serious investigation of the person who is now president and therefore the boss of the Department of Justice.

4:40As we saw with Watergate, it becomes very difficult. You have to have special counselors and all the rest of the... But the lone nut scheme has always been operative in the United States. At any rate, as a matter of fact, there had been several assassinations before. President Garfield was assassinated by a lone nut in 1881, succeeded by Chester Arthur. Garfield was hated by so many types of the official forces. Before that, of course, Lincoln was assassinated. Again, with Lincoln, even though obviously they had to admit there was a conspiracy involved, even though the focus of historians was always on John Wilkes Booth, but obviously there were many people involved. There have also been mysterious deaths in the presidency.

5:40Zachary Taylor became president in 1848, was elected as a Whig and even though he was a He was a slave holder himself. He came from Virginia. He suddenly became anti-slavery. He led the fight against expansion of slavery in the West. He died in mysterious circumstances after a July 4th picnic. He died of gastrointestinal poisoning. The thing is, he was the only one who was poisoned. You know, 200 people at a picnic, you know, poisoned, you know, whatever it is, anchovies or mayonnaise sandwiches, several people got food poisoning. Why did only one guy, the president, get food poisoning and nobody else? This has never been seriously investigated. The death of Harding was kind of peculiar, too. There was a contention by one of the Secret Service people who wrote a book after Harding died and his wife was responsible, poisoned them because of the Harding scandal.

6:33I'm not taking this as official, that's probably eccentric. But the point is that there have been, none of these contentions have been seriously investigated. At any rate, we have a lone nut and he kills McKinley and all of a sudden Morgan gets a president. President. And Teddy Roosevelt starts using this to the hilt. It's not as if he was passive. He took full use of this golden opportunity to get a true Morgan presidency in office. What does he do? As soon as he begins to be president, he assumes the presidency in November, In January, I'd say his first speech, I think in December, his first message to Congress, yeah.

7:20From the vehicle to the humanity to not let in? Oh yeah, absolutely. With the mafia, with the CIA and all, yeah. There's a lot of stuff that's been written on that. It's pretty conclusive, I think, that the mafia is largely responsible. But the thing is that the media hasn't really accepted it. There's been a lot of books on it, but the official media, the CBS, NBC, the New York Times, et cetera, never accepted this. The Congressional investigation said there were at least three shots and it gets buried on page 85 or something. The paper is never really taken seriously. I think most of the public agrees with this revisionist view. There's a lot of stuff that's been written on it, some good books on it. Anthony Summer's, probably the best two Anthony Summer's conspiracy, which sums up the latest mafia stuff. And a book by David Lifton called Best is evidence, it's deals with the bullet, the whole bullet problem, you focus on the bullet.

8:13There's also a charming thing which I don't, which I've no proof for, it's never been published, I haven't seen the manuscript, it's obvious why it wasn't published, this is a book by Fred Richmond, some other guy, Fred Richmond, some sort of libertarian, and the book focused on the, the only book that I know of, I'm a sort of Kennedy assassination buff, the only book I know of was I want to focus on the entourage, on the cars, the presidential, vice-presidential cars. He, his viewers, the Secret Service killed Kennedy in the car, probably, on sound. The interesting thing about this, he focused on the cars, the entourage, and how the route changed in the last minute, like the night before, they suddenly changed the route, go through the D. Lee Plaza instead of right on the freeway, that you could easily be shot at.

9:00He claims that Kennedy's head, as they turn the corner, apparently the back seat could be raised so he could make the big shot in the back seat more visible. He measures the distance in the back seat, he's the only one who ever did this, and shows that Kennedy's seat goes up by several inches to make him a better target, and he rounds the corner, and the Secret Service guy in the front of the guy who manipulated the lever, the only one who had the lever, he assumes that Kennedy was assassinated and destroyed

9:58We know that Johnson dies for the floorboards, as soon as the shots ring out, of course. But he claims that Johnson dies for the front of the car two and a half seconds before the first shot. Those are great moments. This never got published. Anyway, that's a charming doctrine. He also claimed, he said, well, up until now, nobody has said who the killer was. In any case, Teddy Roosevelt revives an old proposal for a new cabinet department of commerce and labor.

10:44Before that, there was no commerce department, there was no labor department. Service of means of subsidizing and regulating commerce and industry immediately starts in very quickly. He also urged the Federal Board, like the ICC, to supervise industrial combinations, in other words, like the ICC for the railroad, this is a Morgan position now, an official Morgan position, which most big businessmen now adopt in the next few years, that we need, and I keep repeating this on and on, we need to do for industry in general, what the ICC did for the railroad, not as for and not to, they did for the railroad, they helped the railroad by cartelizing them, regulating them, by keeping out, by raising rates, by keeping out competition. Just as we needed an ICC for the railroads, we also need now a Federal Trade Commission or a Federal Commerce Commission or whatever for general industry, in other words to cartelize industry in general like the ICC did for the railroads.

11:38So Roosevelt starts talking about that immediately. Before he writes his speech, he clears it with two friends, two good friends and advisors, George W. Perkins, Morgan Portner, and Robert Bacon, Morgan Portner. These are two guys, yes, yes, great stuff, petty, far away. So from the very beginning, it starts with Morgan Portner. As a matter of fact, as soon as the election of 1900 was over, I should say before the assassination, As soon as the election is over in late November, Teddy Roosevelt, now Vice President, gives a lavish dinner in honor of who? JP Morgan. Without JP Morgan, he would never have achieved his stature, which of course is true.

12:25No gift was ever more deserved. So, as I say, his first message to Congress after McKinley assassinated, he calls for checking with Perkins and Bacon, two top Morgan partners, he calls for federal regulation for Corporations, a Federal Commerce Commission of some sort to regulate an industry, to investigate corporations. The first thing he pushes is what he pushed, remember I said on the tape, Jeremiah W. Jankes, Cornell University economist, one of the so-called new greed economists, compulsory publicity. Corporations should have to open their books to federal regulations so that we know, everybody knows what their prices are, you know, what their prices are charging, what they're doing And notice what this means, again, you know from cartels, cartels break up, one of the things that breaks up cartels is because secret price cutting, so what the cartelists, those who want a compulsory cartel, this is a Morgan interest, they want a first of foremost, a first step, compulsory publicity, don't let them have secret price cutting, this is one

13:31way to do it. So it sounds very democratic, it sounds great, publicity is good, secrecy is bad, but what What it really means is to break up cartels, keep cartels from being broken up by not allowing secret price cutting. So Jencks was the first economist theoretician of proposer of publicity and this of course was the Morgan line. And throughout the summer of 1902, Roosevelt was first summer in office, he peppered his and his speeches constantly recalls what was supposed to be publicity in order to curb what he called business evils. He found a strong ally in the attorney general who he inherited from McKinley, but he had just become attorney general a few months before, a very important figure named Philander Knox. Philander Knox was a Pittsburgh corporate lawyer and Pittsburgh corporate lawyer and therefore of course a tool of Mellon interests and Mellon National Bank was a major financier of Pittsburgh, very closely tied in with Frick in Carnegie, Carnegie Steel, Frick, Carnegie Frick steel interests.

14:44What happened in 1901, just about this time you see, is that Carnegie Frick merged into to the U.S. Steel, in other words, version of the Great Morgan Empire. Carnegie decided he wanted to retire and sold out to the U.S. Steel Corporation. So, in other words, Mellon was tied in with Morgan. So, Philander Knopf becomes a Morgan tool by virtue of his connection with Mellon Carnegie and Mellon Carnegie Frick interests. So, he was very happy to start This fantastic campaign of Teddy Roosevelt, which I'll mention in a second. Frick, by the way, was now a major shareholder, of course. Frick and Cardy, major shareholders in U.S. Steel. They were tied in through, was he who owned a business, you're a big shot in the business, you sell out of the big holding company, you become a major shareholder in the holding company. So you're tied in with a Morgan interest more or less permanently.

15:42And Frick, Frick is now, Knox is now urging, he's now urging Teddy Roosevelt to establish a commission of compulsory powers to obtain information, subpoena information from corporations and to report to the President. And Roosevelt then submits this proposal to Congress early 1903, a new Department of Commerce and Labor, which he already proposed, plus this new compulsory publicity power and something called the Bureau of Corporations, which will be attached to this new department. So, this I'd say was the Morgan line, there had been a previous U.S. Industrial Commission which late McKinley had launched, late in his administration, where Jenks was again running the thing, also calling for a post-break publicity, it all fits into this new trend.

16:41And then Roosevelt submits this bill to Congress, he should have a bureau of corporations with the power to investigate all subpoena corporations' books and so forth and so on. The first big regulatory agency for the business in general, the major guy pushing it of course is George W. Perkins, Morgan's partner, Morgan's main guy in politics who's lobbying this thing through Congress. And Perkins by the way was the main guy who helped Morgan form U.S. Steel and International of the Federal Harvester, the two big Morgan Industrial Trusts in 1901. Perkins and Roosevelt, Roosevelt's formulating his famous doctrine, which Perkins also was formulated for him.

17:28There are two kinds of trusts, they said, very famous, even the orthodox historians The Good Trusts and the Bad Trusts Good Trusts are great and they should be sponsored and helped. Bad Trusts or Bad should be broken up. What is the criterion for Good Trusts and Bad Trusts? Well, there's no criterion. It's all subjective. Whether Teddy Rosa likes them or not, and in practice what it meant, the Good Trusts are the Morgan Trusts. Morgan Good, it means General Electric, it means U.S. Steel, International Lobster, etc. The bad trust or anything connected with Rockefeller and Harriman. Now we get back to the, by definition, this is the moral criterion of business and badness.

18:14Morgan Good, Rockefeller bad. Now Harriman, I don't know if I mentioned this or not yet, but I did, I repeat it. Herman was a bring in Wall Street broker who started, I guess he marries this girl and gets to inherit this small railroad in upstate New York and builds up from that, from financial genius, no question about that, becomes a big railroad owner and starts and really starts running Central Pacific, gets control of Central Pacific and Southern Pacific and moves in on Union Pacific, excuse me, on Northern Pacific and moves in on Northern Pacific and this and Morgan has been controlling it as a tremendous fight around 1902, around this whole period you see, a tremendous fight, stock fight between Morgan and Hill on the one hand, Hill of Great Northern, they form an alliance to keep control of the Northern Pacific, versus Harriman who's trying to get a hold of it, becomes a big railroad tycoon.

19:19The German joined up with Rockefeller pouring in a lot of money, and Kuhn-Loeb is the investment banker. Kuhn-Loeb is coming up fast. There's a big cultural problem between Morgan and Kuhn-Loeb. Kuhn-Loeb were German Jewish investment bankers in New York. I'm headed by Jacob Schiff. These forms of titanic struggle, titanic fight, stock fight, between the Morgan Hill forces versus the Harriman Rockefeller-Kuhn-Willis forces. The interesting thing is Harriman and Rockefeller-Kuhn-Willis have been aligned almost ever since. In other words, this alliance continued from about 1901 until the 1940s, let's say. And Morgan and Hill finally won out. They formed after a big struggle.

20:08By the way, Morgan of course hated Rockefeller and also hated Harriman, a bitter hatred of Harriman. Harriman was challenging Morgan in the railroads. Morgan had run practically every railroad. All of a sudden this young whippersnapper was challenging the great Morgan. He referred to him as a little punk, because that was one of the many references to Harriman by Morgan. Also there's a cultural problem here, Harriman being short and thin and Morgan being big, tall, strapping figures. So the cultural clash between short people and tall people. Some people might think this is insignificant, but it all works in. It all worked out great for the picture. At any rate, the personal hatred between the two in addition to their economic struggle, financial struggle. At any rate, what finally happens by 1902 is that Morgan wins that but they come to an agreement where they form a Northern Securities Corporation, which is a holding company for both Great Northern, which was Hill's railroad, remember the one going up around a Canadian border with Seattle,

21:16and Northern Pacific, which went to Portland, and combining both of them, in other words, the shareholders combine their shares and they all become shareholders in one great northern securities corporation, they worked it out to about 2 to 1 for Morgan, in other words, I think there were 15 members of the board of directors and 10 of them were Morgan people and five of them were Harriman Rockefeller people. So, anyway, around 1902, let me get this,

21:48the, oh by the way, I thought I'd just mention that. In 1903, when Teddy Roosevelt was driving through the Bureau of Corporations bill through Congress, Rockefeller, Rockefeller was all in favor of this new trend toward business government cooperation. However, problem was that he now, Morgan and Rockefeller now have big odds, hated each other. So Rockefeller lobbied against it. In other words, Rockefeller and his standard oil argued, but the only big business group that argued against the Bureau of Cooperation's bill set up this Bureau to eventually regulate industry. And Teddy Roosevelt then really blashes out, says that, apparently what happened was that John D. Rockefeller Jr. sent a telegram to various congressmen urging them not to pass the bill, Teddy Roosevelt holds a press conference and says John D. Rockefeller Sr. did it, of course John D. Rockefeller Sr. is generally hated by almost everybody, nobody ever heard of John D. Rockefeller Jr., so Teddy Roosevelt just sort of escalated it, lied about who actually sent the telegram, and the bill passed.

22:57Before he appointed a commissioner of corporations named James Garfield, he checked with Francis Lynn Stetson who was an attorney for the House of Morgan to make sure this guy was okay. In other words, he got another one of his top advisors. Remember, Stetson was the same guy who was Grover Cleveland's top advisor and also law partner. So he had the Morgan connection moving in here, even though both of those were Republican and Cleveland was a Democrat and they were pretty different ideologically, they all boiled about the Morgan Domination, around 1903, after he passes this, a strange thing happens, namely that Penny Roosevelt, after having a cozy arrangement with the U.S. Steel, Frost, and International Harvest and all that, starts, takes the Sherman Act out of the closet, which has been unused since Sherman passed it, dead letter, nobody cared about it. The only effect The only thing they could have was, instead of having cartels, they had mergers.

23:55In the late 1890s, there was a great merger boom. They figured cartels might violate the Sherman Act, but mergers certainly won't. So mergers are really worse than cartels, from the point of view of the consumer, because they're more permanent. You know, cartel can dissolve and break up. Merger is very difficult to break up. So the result of the Anti-Trust Act was to enforce a stronger trust, so to speak, and it would have been without it. But anyway, it was a dead letter. It had never been used. all of a sudden Teddy Roosevelt picks that out of the closet and uses it savagely to break up Standard Oil in other words, Teddy Roosevelt breaks the informal... before that the Rockefeller-Morgan competition was much more polite, was much more... was within certain rules of the game. Morgan was running the Democratic Party he was in favor of the gold standard and pre-trade and Rockefellers were in favor of tariffs and inflation but really it wasn't that... it wasn't a savage war to the knife. All of a sudden Rockefeller breaks the...

24:44I mean, Roosevelt breaks the rules and goes for the jugular To break up standard oil is a bad trust, you have to smash it, and this is very, this is really sort of going for broke. You start a savage attack on standard oil. You also try to break up Northern Securities Corporation. Most historians say that this shows he's also against Morgan. But the result of the judicial decision was to benefit the Morgan forces. In other words, they broke it up, they had a new arrangement and the result of the arrangement was to reinforce Morgan's control for Northern Securities and Northern Pacific. So this is really a pro-Morgan action, even though historians say, well, Morgan didn't like it and so forth, but it really amounted to a pro-Morgan act. But the key thing in this warfare was to open up, to try to break up standard oil as being evil and monopolistic.

25:35Secretary, 20th General Knox was happy to do it, being a Morgan person. And, but the question is here, Why does, it has not been satisfactorily dealt with by historians. Why do they do this? Why do the Morgan's decide to go all out? I should also talk about Teddy Roosevelt's cabinet. In addition to Knox, okay, Teddy Roosevelt appoints

26:02Ella Hugh Root, Secretary of War, and becomes Secretary of State. Secretary of State Ella Hugh Root, who had been Secretary of War of the McKinley, but a minor figure. Elijah Hewroot was a Wall Street lawyer, a very important Wall Street lawyer, he was a top lawyer for Thomas Fortune Ryan, a New York City financier, and then for Morgan. As a matter of fact, he resigned as Secretary of War in order to help Morgan, defend Morgan in order to secure his corporation, also to help Morgan invest in China. He was a personal attorney for JP Morgan. He then comes back as Secretary of State to Teddy Roosevelt, one of his top advisors. Originally, he was supposed to be Roosevelt's successor as president. As a matter of fact, the reason Root turned it down, he said, well, I can't really run for president in 1908 because I'm a Morgan's lawyer.

26:54I can't run as a Morgan. I mean, it has to be a bigger, better front than that. Nobody's going to elect me. I'm openly known as a Morgan's personal lawyer. Assistant Secretary of State, here's L.A. Root, Secretary of State, his assistant. Remember, in those days, there was only one assistant. And they didn't have a whole fleet of deputies and undersecretaries and all that sort of stuff now, as they do now. It was Robert Bacon, Morgan partner. So we have total Morgan control of the government now. Teddy Roosevelt comes in. Secretary of State, Eleanor Ruth, undersecretary Robert Bacon, Morgan partner. Postmaster General is a guy named George von Meyer. who was a Morgan agent, an agent of the House of Morgan. Secretary of the Navy was a guy named Paul Morton, who was an industrialist and a Morgan president of the Equitable Life Insurance Company, which was a Morgan company, former vice president of Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, Elahue Ruth, Robert Bacon, assistant secretary.

27:56So we have postmaster general as a morgan person, secretary of the navy as a morgan person, which is more important than the secretary of the war because the navy was the major military arm those days, assistant secretary of the navy, navy was Paul Morton, of the Morton-Morgan financial interests, and assistant secretary of the navy was Herbert Satterley, With Morgan's son-in-law, they get much closer than that, he was the assistant secretary. The total, frankly, dominant Morgan administration. Also, in addition to that, Root was extremely important. From Root comes most of our foreign policy establishment ever since.

28:44Right now, we're almost still being run by Root disciples. For example, Root's major disciple was a guy named Henry Stimson, Teddy Roosevelt was a law partner and disciple of Cotagy of Root, becomes district attorney of New York and then gets the Republican nomination for governorship of New York due to Teddy Roosevelt's intervention. And Simpson was the mentor of Atchison, Dean Atchison who becomes a very important person of Roosevelt's Truman administration and Atchison was the mentor of Bundy, the two Bundy brothers The School sort of, they're now sort of the older statesmen, but they're basically running the, at least the democratic wing of the foreign policy establishment. So it all stems, it's a total genealogy stemming from Ruth, Ruth Stimpson-Acheson, or Morgan.

29:33When you say Ruth Stimpson-Acheson, it's very Morgan. The Morgan, by the way, was so satisfied with Teddy Roosevelt's performance in office that he personally donated $150,000 to Teddy Roosevelt's re-election campaign in 1904. In 1904, after here he's trying to savagely break up standard oil, poor Rockefeller, almost all the big business groups supported Teddy Roosevelt's re-election, he won on the landslide, except for Rockefeller who supported the Democratic choice, Judge George Parker, that's a white dad, some unknown figure. So the question is, why did Teddy Roosevelt do this, and my contention is, which I guess I said on the tape, is like, I think it seems to be related to the international oil war that developed around 1900.

30:23That was the fact that Standard Oil, which had been dominant in the foreign oil markets in Asia and Europe, is now being challenged by the Nobel Oil Dutch Shell, a group, Dutch This is an Indonesian English group, financed by the Rothschild, and it has a mighty international oil war. It starts around 1900, continues really for about 40 years, at least, between the Royal Dutch Shell Group, Rothschild Royal Dutch Shell Group, and the Standard Oil. And so what you have is a titanic struggle covering the entire world, really, and influencing politics in Persia and God knows where else, everywhere, South America, Asia, and what between Standard Oil and Rothschild interests.

31:10Morgan's being associated with Rothschild's, it seems to me it makes a lot of sense that the Morgan savage attack on Rockefeller is not a coincidence that it happened just about the time when the international oil competition became really serious between Rothschild's and the Rockefeller's. So that's my hypothesis, I can't prove it because nobody really investigated this, it seems to me it makes a lot of sense. Why does Teddy Roosevelt suddenly break the rules and go all out for the jugular, go for This is the last of the throat, it seems to me it's connected with the international oil war.

31:48Anyway, so Teddy Roosevelt is re-nominated and re-elected and begins this whole progressive era, progressive era in politics, in federal politics really begins with Teddy. I should say, I'm going to give you one in the next hour, I have in my briefcase, readings for the next block, next period, next few weeks, essentially the rest of the Cocoa and Weinstein books with a couple of exceptional chapters which are exempt on banking and things which are all esoteric, but the Weinstein and Cocoa book goes through one of its whole progressive periods at some length and it's a key aspect of the whole thing, because this is the beginning This is the beginning of a modern warfare state in the United States and really throughout the Western world, because the same things are beginning to happen in Western Europe, too.

32:43What we have is the big business, as I say, Morgan's, and even the Rockefellers, at least in the abstract, although they don't like the way it's being run, essentially saying, look, we try to monopoly in the free market, it doesn't work, we try cartels, we try mergers, they don't work, therefore we have to turn to the federal government to impose it for us, to enforce cartels. also state and local governments as we'll see too, supplement it, we have to sell it to the public, we can't say we want a monopoly, we have to sell it to the public on the basis of attacking big business, big business is a threat, we need the federal and state regulatory commissions to guide the general welfare, to curb big business, to have democracy and that sort of stuff, and they turn as allies, big business turns to intellectuals who are coming up, intellectuals, technocrats, etc.

33:33who are rising in this period with their own agenda, and they have the importance of a one-size-chapter one of the National Civic Federation, which is an alliance of big business and progressive intellectuals, and intellectuals are coming up in many fields, various groups are becoming professions, engineers, for example, used to be tool-and-dime men, they didn't University, on the job types. They then become professional engineers, civil engineers, electrical engineers and all that. They all want part of the pod, they want to run the system, they want privileges, they want to keep out competition. So the government, it says they set up an alliance, such as engineers, psychiatrists, doctors, we'll go into many of this stuff, physicians, economists, historians, social scientists, all these guys are getting PhDs. For example, there had been no PhDs before.

34:31The only PhDs were essentially in Germany, in the United States there were no PhDs until about the 1880s, 70s, 80s, I think John Hopkins started it. He didn't have the idea that everybody had to go to college either, a very small portion of the people went to college, 3% of the population, everybody else started working. So, the idea of being professional graduate school people and professional political scientists and whatever, it's only started in the 1880s and since there were no American school giving PhDs, The German School of Giving PhDs, they all went to Germany, they went to the University of Berlin and Göttingen and so forth and so on. And in Germany they imbibed the German ideological set up, which in those days had become welfare, warfare, state oriented. They imbibed the sort of statism and collectivism in Germany.

35:17They came back fired up with enthusiasm. This is great stuff. Because it meant for one thing, these intellectuals, one could help plan the system. If the government's planning the system, they've got to have some people to do it. Who's going to do it? Experts in the field. Engineers will help plan industry, economists will help plan everything, historians will help do something, political scientists will help plan stuff. So they become planners, they also become apologists for the system. They become hired as court apologists. Explaining to the public why you have to have government planning, government war, government racial experimentation, all sorts of other stuff. So intellectuals become apologists for the system and also planners. And also the government can supply intellectuals with guild restrictions, monopoly restrictionism, keeping out competition, licensing the field, licensing doctors, licensing hospitals, licensing engineers, whatever it is, to keep out the restricted supply of the people in the field, right?

36:14This is the price, the wage rate on the y-axis, the quantity on the x-axis, this is the number of engineers or physicists or wherever you can license them to restrict the supply and and Raise the Wage Rate, so in other words, government can help intellectuals by providing them the job, status, helping plan the system, apologizing to the system, and also restricting entry, restricting the field, cartelizing, in other words, and what can intellectuals do for government? Well, it's very simple, they can tell the government, they can tell the people why the government intervention is necessary and just and correct and modern and all sorts of other things, in other words, what happens here is that in 1900 or so, they begin the reach and the age-forging of alliance which had been the standard alliance all through history, really. In other words, from the dawn of civilization until, say, the 17th century or 18th century, the world was run by governments which were essentially alliances of the king,

37:06which was a state, the king and his nobles were state apparatus, intellectuals would apologize for the state, tell the public why the state has to be obeyed, the king rules by divine right, the king is just and wise and good and necessary, etc., etc. The king was even divine himself. In oriental civilizations, when intellectuals could get away with it, they came to think the king was divine, the king was God himself. The king is God, you have to obey him, even though he might be a turkey, and still God himself. So intellectuals then provide the ideology, engineering the consent of the public to the rule of the government, and in return for that, they get cut in on the feudal, part of a cut of the loot. Of course, before the 17th and 18th century, almost all intellectuals were churchmen. There were no priests, there were ministers, whatever you want to call them, there were no lay intellectuals, there were no pamphleteers, professors or whatever, outside of the church.

37:56And so what you have is a state domination by state and church, or a throne and altar, is another way to put it. A grand alliance between throne, the king, and the priest and altar. And the American idea of separation of church and state is very extremely important, not just because of the slogan. The idea is you prevent a link-up between these two powerful institutions, between the government and intellectuals to organize opinion, so to speak, opinion molding. Because if they're aligned together, the average citizen is going to be screwed, they're going to be dominated by this alliance. If you prevent the alliance, you'll have independent judgment, room for independent judgment for checking on the king, for example. You don't allow separation. You prevent this kind of alliance or merger in state and church.

38:45So, but then, in the 18th and 19th centuries, basically, intellectuals were, religion was more or less separated from government. There were also lay intellectuals, secular intellectuals, they were not churchmen, they were just independent types. And what you begin to have now as a progressive period is a re-emergence in a different form of the old church-state alliance. The Alliance, the Thronewalls Alliance, the alliance of government and intellectuals, of the king, the president, whatever you want to call them, the Fuhrer, whatever the term is, and the intelligentsia, each one getting the old position, the old cozy position of the alliance, the church telling the state, telling the public why they have to obey the king, and the king cutting the church into part of the swag, the same thing is now happening in a different form with secular intellectuals and religious intellectuals too. The pietest ministers come in here too, of course, in a big way.

39:35in a way, as we'll see with the Progressive Party. So what you begin to have then is a new form, a secularized version of this thrown-over concept. And many of these intellectuals, by the way, this links us with a whole pietous liturgical stuff. Many of these guys, the progressive political scientists, economists, historians, et cetera, were originally extreme pietous, this happens in almost every case, I'll give you a case study of it today, and it happens in almost every case. These guys were born in a Yankee farm country, upstate New York in most cases, or upstate Northern Indiana or something like that. They're born in extreme pious Protestant sects, a Campbellite sect, for example, things like that. They then go to college, they become atheists, they drop their religion, they come to the conclusion that science is the outlaw's religion, or science shows that religion is ridiculous or whatever.

40:29And they become secularized pious, in other words, instead of saying we need the government In order to have salvation, we have to stamp out sin. Now they say we have to stamp out sin, quote unquote, for the benefit of the public welfare of general good, etc. We have to stamp out capitalism or private property, whatever it happens to be. And when they have a government crusade, a sort of secularized version of a religious pious, usually by the same guy, so just transferring their imagery of their allegiance from the church or from Salvation Through Being Born Again, Salvation Through Government As Richard W. Ely, a major figure in the economics profession shifting economics from laissez-faire to progressive government intervention Richard W. Ely said he started out as a government, as a pietist minister And one quote from Aelius, I think, magnificent, it sums up this whole thing. He says, Government is God's major instrument of redemption. I'll underline that again.

41:34Government is God's major instrument of redemption. In other words, the way to redeem through salvation is through use of government power to the utmost, to fix everything up, to cure everything, to run everything and so forth and so on. He was a major progressive economist with a progressivism His assistant, he went to the University of Wisconsin, he was the founder of the so-called Wisconsin Idea, and his assistant in Wisconsin became big shots in Teddy Roosevelt Organizations and the New National Civic Federation and the rest of it. Yeah. What? What might it be? Union? The labor unions? Or organizations? Union, the labor unions, or organizations? Well, they form all sorts of stuff, the National Civic Federation is one clear example, which founded by big business groups, includes progressive intellectual, social workers, a few labor union leaders, technocrats, whatever.

42:33Oh, you mean the, I'm not talking about the individual labor union, I'm talking about These are ideological organizations, in other words, National Civic Federation is a big business group, including economists, intellectual, social workers and things like that, push for government regulation of all sorts, welfare state or government regulation in general. I'm not talking about labor unions, I'm talking about organizations to organize for government intervention. So there's all sorts of, there's the Progressive Party, there's all sorts of clubs and lobbying The leading groups, things like that, think tanks, where all these people get together. I'll mention a couple, the National Civic Federation is a famous case. It's a leading group from up until World War I. That's in a Weinstein book.

43:26It has Morgan in it, it has all the Morgan people, it has all the big business people, plus a whole bunch of economists, historians, political scientists, blah, blah, blah. Blah Blah Blah, AFL, a couple of AFL representatives, things like that. The labor unions were craft until the 1930s. So, anyway, when we get back from the break, I will talk about two things in particular, two examples of Teddy Roosevelt government regulation which have been misunderstood. One is the meatpacking paper, meatpacking regulation, the other is the sugar trust, The Food and Drug Act comes in, finally with Teddy Roosevelt, let's take a 10 minute break. Before the term is over, an update, current update of the Rockefeller-Morgan situation.

44:16I have two examples here of Petty Roosevelt regulation, important regulation, both of which were passed in the same month in June 1906 as the second Petty Roosevelt term. What is the Meatpacking Act? It's called the Federal Meat Inspection Act. Coco has a discussion of this. Oh damn, I wanted to bring in the chapters to read here. Wait a minute, I'll be right back. What you should read next is essentially the rest of the book.

45:03Weinstein. I'm already inside chapter one, which is the National Civic Federation. Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. We'll end up with 8, which is World War I, but at least this is the Einstein chapters. Dealing with progressivism, national civic courage and also local progressivism, it's very important, local government. and COCO, chapters, we already dealt with, I've already signed one and two dealing with the merger movement, chapters three, four, five, seven, eight and ten, I'm just omitting the banking stuff, it's a little too technical, I think so, although very important, if you want to read it, great, but I just want to concentrate on the industrial stuff, so my side deals with intellectual, national civic federation and local government and COCO was and national industrial regulation, including the meatpacking.

46:00The usual myth, the standard myth in historical books, at least until the 60s, is that the meatpacking was in terrible shape, the so-called beef trust of the large meatpackers, Armour, Smith, Cudahy and the other one, Swift, in Chicago. and then a lot of local meat packers all over the place. Local slaughterhouses and the usual myth was that progressive myth so to speak is you have this meat which is being produced, meat was diseased, it was terrible shaped, people were dying from it or whatever and And Optin Sinclair wrote a novel called The Jungle, Optin Sinclair was a socialist intellectual, luck-breaking novel called The Jungle, and exposed the evil conditions of the diseased meat in the meatpacking industry and so forth and so on, and because of that, the public rose up and demanded a federal meat inspection, federal regulation of meat inspection, which which was then passed by Teddy Roosevelt over the objection of the meatpacking interests, the Ormer, Swift and Cudahy, opposing federal control, federal regulation.

47:20So this is the general, and this all happened within about a year, in other words I think the jungle came out by 1905 or so and then the law was passed in 1906, this whole thing is a lie from start to finish. Every part of this myth is incorrect. So if you've heard or read it in our high school textbooks, it's all wrong. The actual situation was very different, the actual situation was that the big meat packers were calling for federal inspection for 20, 30 years, since the 1880s. They were asking for it, they wanted it. Why did they want it? Because they wanted to screw their competitor, the small meat packers. In other words, they wanted, if you have a costly federal regulation, let's say the federal government says you have to fill out 20 forms and have an inspector, it's costly, it means it imposes a high fixed cost on operation, which means a small businessman, a small competitor are shafted and to the advantage of the big one. In other words, if you have a big business

48:11man can hire one guy to sit on the desk and fill out the forms. A small business man can't do that. It might have only three employees. You can't have one guy doing a full-time form fill out. So for these various reasons, what you're doing is you're shafting your small competitors. And so the meat packers have been calling for government inspections since in the 1880s. For one thing, also, they wanted to get European governments started to prohibit meat imports because they wanted to protect their own farmers. And the excuse was that foreign meat is a disease. We can't import American meat because it's a disease. The same thing now with Argentina. We can't import Argentinian beef because it's a disease. You use a specter of disease and most people are hypochondriacs because it can be induced in becoming hypochondriacs. Disease, therefore, you shouldn't import it. You should have and Meat.

48:59So the Europeans are doing the same thing. So the meat packers want to have a U.S. government imprimatur saying, this meat has been inspected by the U.S. government, therefore the European governments would allow the import of that meat. So it's sort of like using the government to socialize your costs, to give you a stamp of approval. And also, of course, as I say, to keep out the smaller competitors. So you're doing two things here, the U.S. government, by labeling the meat as safe, so to speak, is pushing exports and also restricting the supply of American meat, so you're doing two things for the benefit of the large meat packers. So Chicago, the large meat packers being concentrated as I say in Chicago, Armour, Swift and Cudahy, they got the Chicago city government to have inspections from the 1880s on, but this did not keep out the southern meat packers, the small meat packers in the south, small slaughterhouses in the West and that sort of thing. So they wanted to have a federal government do it.

49:57In other words, the major meat packers, the Omer, Smith and Cudahy was behind, they were the ones pushing the federal meat inspection. As I say, for many years, for about 20-25 years, and Congress in 1891 began to do that, began to have federal meat inspection. So So the problem was that the, as a matter of fact, they passed a, say, 1891 federal meat inspection law, so by, and in a few years the federal government was inspecting about 75% of American beef. The problem was that the smaller competitors were able to avoid the inspection, they were able to get around it, they were not visible, so they were able to get through the gate, so to speak.

50:43So the idea was, in order for this cartel to succeed, you had to force the small meat packers to be inspected. And that was the whole idea. I stepped up the enforcement procedures just to screw the small meat packers. Not that the small meat packers are diseased meat, but just that they... you make them fill out all sorts of forms and regulations and whatever. There's all sorts of stuff. By the way, probably the single most hated government agency right now is obviously IRS. We know, coming up April 15th. We all know that. The second most hated outside of New York, where everything is visible, is OSHA. The Office of Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, which inspects all small businesses and has all sorts of crazy safety regulations and my brother-in-law, for example, is a printer in West Virginia.

51:30He said, if OSHA ever came there to try and enforce regulation, he'd just hand him the keys, he couldn't operate. There are all sorts of crazy things, the wires have to be, you know, see, whatever it is, it costs about three times as much as a non-OSHA-inspected plan. It's no more safe, it's just regulations imposed by bureaucrats. For example, they're always trying to kill the sheep herding industry in the West because they want the force of the sheep herders, the ranchers, to have portable toilets for every sheep herder. The whole thing is absurd, you walk around with a big cabin, a portable cabin for toilets. And it's extremely costly and idiotic, I know that the sheep herders don't want it, they They think it's idiotic, it's just somebody in Washington is imposing this. At any rate, so the large meatpackers were one of the spread of the enforcement to the small competitors, especially because small competitors were growing.

52:26The competitive pressure, there were about a thousand meatpackers in 1900, by 1909 there were 1600, because as they were getting more cartelization, getting higher profits, new New businesses came in, new smaller meatpackers came in, Alcafete, Swift and Armour, etc., lower cost and all the rest of it. So at any rate what happened was that the, and also another thing is that opposite Sinclair's

52:55jungle had nothing to do with diseased meat, nothing to do with it, he wasn't concerned with that, he was worried about working conditions, he said the workers aren't getting paid enough, not getting enough light, he didn't talk about the meat that was coming off the meatpack, and he was talking about the conditions of the workers in the meat packing plants and he said the whole thing is, he wasn't interested in the Federal Meat Inspection thing he said the whole thing is a racket from his point of view anyway, when Ticlayer's Jungle came out in early 1906 remember this is, the novel comes out in early 1906 the whole, the law was passed in June 1906, only took about three months when the book came out, J. Ogden Armour, who was the head of, the owner of Armour He's a meatpacker, and still is one of the biggest meatpacking firms in the country.

53:40He wrote an article in the Saturday Evening Post, which was the biggest weekly magazine at the time, popular magazine. He defends government inspection of meat, and he calls for more inspection. And he said that large packers had always favored inspection, always pushed for it, which is true. Here's what he writes. Quote, this is from J. Ogden Ormer, March 1906, it's quoted in Coco. There's a very good discussion on this. He says, To attempt to evade government inspection would be, from the purely commercial viewpoint, suicidal. No packer can do an interstate or export business without government inspection. Self-interest forces him to make use of it. Self-interest likewise demands that he shall not receive meats or byproducts from any small packer, either for export or other use, unless that small packer's plan is also official, that is, under U.S. government inspection.

54:25This government inspection thus becomes an important adjunct of a packer's business from two viewpoints. points. It puts the stamp of legitimacy and honesty upon the packer's product, and so is him a necessity to the public as an insurance against the sale of diseased meats. In other words, the government then puts a stamp of approval for exporting from domestic firms on this meat packer. It doesn't mean the meats are really any better. One of the problems with that government inspection is as low as the public in the thinking that the meat is, the food is good or safe or whatever. Because it has a government stamp of approval, they don't have to worry about competitors looking at it further, which in many cases is a mistake. So what happens is, so Armer writes this article, in May 1906, Senator Beverage of Indiana was a big progressive Republican and an old friend of George W. Perkins Morgan Partner, introduces a bill for meat inspection, compulsory meat inspection. The bill was vigorously

55:18supported by the Secretary of Agriculture, funds a quadruple for inspection, blah, blah, blah, and it passes unanimously both houses of Congress. That's the federal meat inspection The Large Meat Packers, when the bill was passed, were enthusiastically in favor of it because it was designed to bring the small packers under federal inspection. The American Meat Packers Association endorsed a bill. Thomas Wilson, that's the other, the fourth big packer, Armour, Swift, Cudahy and Wilson. Thomas Wilson, the head of the Wilson Meat Packing Company, the hearings of the House Committee of Agriculture on the packing of this bill, puts the whole position of a large Chicago Packers, he says, quote, we are now and always have been in favor of the extension of inspection. We have always called the government inspection under proper regulations an advantage to the livestock and agricultural interests and to the consumer and of course this also means I say that it imposes costs on a small firm much more heavily than on an alleged one.

56:15Any rate, so Perkins, when the bill passes, Perkins is delighted and he writes to Morgan William Salpany says this is great, this new law he says quote, will certainly be a very great advantage when the thing once gets in operation and able to use it all over the world as it will practically give them a government certificate for their goods, in other words government certificate, badge of approval. The only opposition, well the opposition was one of the meat packers to pay more of it, that was the only question of who should pay for the inspection. Some of the leftist opponents of business were clear on this thing, they realized the whole thing was a meatpacker scam. Senator Nelson, for example, said that the law of the meatpackers bonanza. opposite Sinclair, as I said, realized that the law was designed to benefit the packers and was against it, but nobody cared about this as a general approval.

57:09So after the law was passed, Swift and company and the other large packers took out full And he wrote a two-page ad all over the country, hailing the bill, saying it was great, saying the purpose, he says, it said, quote, is to assure the public that only sound and wholesome meat and meat food products may be offered for sale. It is a wise law. It is enforced and must be universal and uniform. Unquote. Okay, so that's the meatpacking. The meatpacking thing had nothing to do with up in the jungle, it was just a cover. It was a law pushed by the meatpackers for 20 or 30 years and they finally used the agitation from the novel to push through a law they'd been always in favor of, namely to sort of screw the small meatpackers and to cartelize the meatpacking industry for their benefit. The next case study, I think it's even more interesting, is the Pure Food and Drug Act, which came in the same month, June 1906.

58:01Allegedly to help the purity of food and all that, which is now, of course the FDA is now regulating the drug industry and all that sort of thing, all over the place, regulates for cancer and all the rest of it. How does this thing start? It starts off with one guy, the main agitator for this thing for many years, his name is Harvey W. Wiley. R.V.W. Wiley, again there's a cocoa to some of us, sort of a prototype, I think he's a fascinating character, sort of a prototype of his whole progressive movement. R.V.W. Wiley was the leading food chemist for the Department of Agriculture, in fact he started off as the only food chemist for the Department of Agriculture. He was born in Indiana, a farm boy of Ulster-Scott, Scottish Presbyterian background, to a father who was a lay preacher in an ultra-pietistic, Campbellite sect, which was even more pietistic than the Presbyterians in general, Campbellite Scottish Presbyterian sect, whose father was a preacher, a lay preacher, a Campbellite movement, and also the whole Wiley home was

59:14Then while he goes to Hanover College, which is a Campbellite college in Indiana, he begins his lifelong obsession with purity, and begins to give lectures to his classmates in the school in general on the purity of body, mind and soul, the importance of purity. He was very early convinced that tobacco and pork were foul impurities and more the perfection of one's body. Remember, the cancer thing of tobacco was only very recent. I mean, nobody had that doctrine. He gives a commencement address, valedictorian, 1867, at Hanover College. He combines the themes of purity, pietism, and value-free medicine, quote-unquote, in ways that would foreshadow his later career.

1:00:06He declared that man must preserve his God-like purity of body and mind. He exalted the nobility of physicians, men who, quote, guard the holy covenant God made with man. Physicians, he concluded, may not be able to make man immortal, but he, quote, he may help to make the probation state a proper place of preparation, the probation state of man's life on earth. Physicians may help to make the probation state a proper place of preparation for the precious life that beckons from beyond the misty hills, I mean, towards heaven. After delivering this medicine address on purity, he went on to tutor languages at Northwestern Christian University, at Kempelite University in Indianapolis. Then he went to Indiana Medical College and got an M.D. in 1871. He became a physician. He then shifted his interest to chemistry, becoming a professor of chemistry at Indiana Medical School, obtaining a B.S. in chemistry at Harvard, and became professor of chemistry at Northwestern Christian, and becomes a professor of chemistry at newly founded Purdue University in 1874.

1:01:02So then five years later he studied medicine, chemistry, and physics at the University of Berlin where he was inspired by Dr. Sell's government laboratory for detecting impurities in food and drink It's not an impurity of soul when you wind up with an impurity of food So Berlin finally picked up his other big lifelong interest, in addition to purity, sugar chemistry big sugar chemistry fan began his permanent alliance with the US sugar industry and with government in the United States Comes back here in 1881, he begins to agitate for the government's protecting the consumer from adulterated sugar products, the state of Indiana, specifically he calls for a state requirement that sugar and syrup products be required to carry labels detailing their composition, beginning of compulsory labeling.

1:01:48Notice this analogy here with compulsory publicity for corporations, compulsory label. So by requiring compulsory publicity, he needs to cripple traits, trait secrets, known as Brand Name Secret, thereby helping to restrict competition in the sugar industry, to cartelize the sugar industry, very similar. Supposed to be labeling, supposed to be ingredients means you can't have, you know, like Coca-Cola can't have its magic syrup or something, you force it with the ingredients. By adulterating sugar, by the way, he didn't mean poison or something like that, he had a very peculiar definition of adulteration of food, etc. By adulteration he meant any change in the name and definition. A very peculiar guy, but it fits in with the progressive doctrine.