TheMillerCircle.org

It took me many years after my father’s death to realize that he was a genetic Democrat. By that I mean someone who had a natural proclivity for thinking about the health of society as a whole, rather than his own narrow interests, as Adam Smith told him he should do. And, although he tolerated me growing up as a Mormon when we lived in Salt Lake City Utah (perhaps for social reasons as we eventually lived in a new suburban, high percentage Mormon community), I later came to appreciate how much he disliked the Mormon Church and even later, as I underwent an early separation from the church, I was able to resonate more deeply with his disinterest in religion in general and Mormonism in particular. Although he never counseled me about religion, his personal emphasis focused on a higher plane of human social interaction, much higher than those we would generally hear about in Sunday school, which were mostly a kind of "do good or loose an organ" type of instructional emphasis. Sunday school was like the installation of a fear policy in 12 not so easy lessons: too many don’ts. But, what really did me in was the Book of Mormon, about which I later came to appreciate the conclusions of Mark Twain, who visited with Brigham Young in Salt Lake and wrote about his experience in "Roughing it–A Personal Narrative." In that hilarious book, Twain read the Book of Mormon and wrote about its structure and the author [Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church]. From the Salamander Website: "Whenever he found his [Joseph Smith's] speech growing too modern, which was about every sentence or two, he labeled in a few such scriptural phrases as, "exceedingly sore," "and it came to pass," etc. and made things satisfactory again. "And it came to pass," was his pet. If he had left that out, his bible would have been only a pamphlet ." I used to develop some kind of vague rash just trying to read that book, which I found to be utterly incomprehensible and silly, although it took a while for the silliness part to sink in. Until then, I thought there must be something wrong with me.

The alternative to religious indoctrination when I was growing up was my father, who was transfixed on ideas about social equality and justice, especially racial equality, which in Utah was easy to think about without taking much action, because there were virtually no blacks in the state at the time. I was probably 10 or 12 before I ever saw a black person in Utah and my very first encounter was with two blacks, a husband and wife who had joined the Mormon church and who worked as servants in the home of a rather well to do neighbor.

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FDR

I have always believed, more so now than ever before, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was far and away the best President we have ever had. We don’t discuss him much these days because the Conservative Republicans, who seem to control our political dialogue, are afraid that if we review what he did for this country, we just might insist on doing it all over again. FDR’s solutions seem to have a currency that applies to many of our present circumstances, especially those that seem to be unraveling the core of our country’s stability and values. America’s problems today would be a no-brainer for FDR: he would know exactly what to do and have sage advice on getting some of these things done before the bottom drops any further. But, the Republicans would rather talk about the Founding Fathers and Thomas Jefferson, all of whom are completely irrelevant for today’s problems. The great Founders of our Nation, including Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence, and the other luminary statesmen who fashioned our Constitution and the Bill of Rights, found themselves in the enviable position of forming a new government based more on high hopes and a theory for good government, as opposed to concrete experience with the type of government they were trying to create. But give them credit. They launched a noble, if flawed experiment. The government they conceived was more of a high calling and a hope that good people would be energized by the new government and prove generous of spirit and high minded enough to solve social problems on their own, rather than requiring government intervention–a kind of moral version of Adam Smith. But, it was Adam Smith’s version of Adam Smith that showed up in America.

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According to Aurthur M. Schlesinger,jr. , in his book "Crisis of the Old Order," he points out that before the New Deal of FDR, the United States experienced a severe depression about every twenty years, including 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907 and 1929. But in the seventy plus years since then, there have been no major depressions. But wait you say, what about the Savings and Loan Scandal in the 1980s during the Reagan administration? According to Arthur Levitt, the former chairman of the SEC, as he addressed Congress, he said, "what has failed is nothing less than the system for overseeing our capital markets." The system failed because the regulatory commissions were too often taken over by the very business interests they were supposed to regulate. This has been one of the great gifts of Reaganism and Bushism, to put control of the regulatory commissions into the hands of the very people who detest regulation and whose business concerns and business colleagues benefitted from their absence. But the Democrats, the modern ones, are not without complicity in this transition to an unregulated business economy and environment.

John Kenneth Galbraith, in his famous book, "The Great Crash" (regarded by many as the most authoritative account of the 1929 crash) remarked that "the memory of the financial mind lasts about ten years," meaning that it only takes a short time before the financially minded who have political interests want to once again pursue the very kinds of business models that produced the previous depression. Before and during WW I, progressive liberals imagined a world in which business would serve the public needs and not the private interests of a few. There was broad discussion of nationalizing important industries like electric power and the train system which was put under government regulation during WW I. This progressive movement was stirred by the great social workers, like Jane Addams of Hull-House in Chicago and other centers like Henry Street in New York, staffed by women who were powerful forces in drawing national attention to conditions of poverty and homelessness. National disgust with poor pay, childhood labor, substandard housing and the writings of muckrakers like Sinclair Lewis, all converged onto political leadership who listened to these stirrings and responded by shaping new political movements. Great progressive liberals like Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, Charles Evans Hughes of New York, Hiram Johnson of California were all notable progressive governors who emphasized government’s responsibility to elevate and protect the middle class. La Follette was unflinching in his commitment to a democratic form of socialism. In Wisconsin he established the first modern income tax law, the first effective workmen’s compensation law, modern labor legislation, He talked of increased inheritance taxes, excess profits tax, public ownership of railroads and water power and abolition of all labor injunctions. He even wanted Congress to enact legislation to overturn Supreme Court rulings that went against a more progressive viewpoint about government. The greatest of them all in terms of visibility and action was Theodore Roosevelt of New York, who was steadfastly committed to conservation, in addition to reducing the dominance of corporate America. The idea that business should function to serve people rather than exploit them was new and flourished right up until the time that Russia pulled out of WW I and the war ended. Up until that event, the threat of communism was not taken very seriously, even though it alarmed some lawmakers. But, for an imperial country like Russia and an ally against the Axis to boot, to be subdued by the Bolsheviks seemed more threatening to business America than any ofther force imagineable. So we invaded Russia and fought on the side of the White Russians, killing thousands of poor Russians who were rising up against the conditions that led to massive public starvation and deprivation. For the American business model makers, the revolution in Russia elevated communism from a nuisance to a palpable threat. It was that event, more seismic than any other, which changed the progressive liberal talk of nationalization of key industries into perceived threats from the "Bolsheviks of America." As a result, the business model for America seemed like a safer bet as it began to emerge and dominate as it had never done before. The old suspicions about business motivations began to fade away. The 1920s saw a complete reversal of fortune for the progressive liberal party and the stunning defeat of Al Smith by Herbert Hoover in the 1928 election seemed to seal the fate of the progressive liberal movement as irrelevant, going the way of the dodo bird.

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