A Liberal
Dose
January 16,
2025
Troy D.
Smith
“Monopoly
but with Your Money”
In my last couple of columns, I have discussed, in some
detail, the Gilded Age and the “robber barons” associated with it. I briefly
mentioned the Populist Movement and the Progressive Age. This week I’ll give a
little more detail on those.
As previously noted, middle-and-working-class people pushed
back against the robber barons by forming farmers’ alliances and unions. Those
groups joined forces and began to move from protests to political action that
appealed to regular people -hence the term “populist.” The Populist Party was
formed in the early 1890s, and in the 1892 election took several western states
in the presidential elections, as well as several governorships and seats in
Congress. They only grew in popularity (pun intended) after that, though they
were not popular enough to win the White House. What did they want? Put simply,
government regulation of big businesses like banks and railroads, safety
regulations in factories, an eight-hour workday, an end of child labor, and
direct election of senators (until the 17th Amendment in 1913, each
state’s two U.S. Senators were appointed by the state legislature, not elected
by the people).
When a third party has some measure of success, one or both
of the two main parties make some adjustment to get those voters back. In this
case, both Democrats and Republicans moved somewhat to the left in an effort to
get those Populist voters. This led to the beginning of the Progressive Era,
when Republican Teddy Roosevelt (initially VP) became president after the
recently re-elected William McKinley was assassinated. For the next twenty
years, presidents from both parties would follow the Progressive agenda.
What was that agenda? More regulation of businesses, more
focus on the good of the general public, more reliance on experts rather than
ideologues (especially in the fields of technology and science), and more
conservation of natural resources. Roosevelt also called for “social insurance,”
or social security, and nationalized health care. The interests of
corporations, paramount in the Gilded Age, were reined in. Teddy Roosevelt
became known as the great trust-buster (in this context, trust is another word
for monopoly). He broke up an effort by J.P. Morgan to consolidate all the
midwestern railroads under his control. He promised workers a “square deal” in
which the deck was not stacked against them. Safety regulations began to be
implemented (especially after the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in
New York in 1911), underage children were no longer allowed to be used as
workers (women also got the vote in this era). The FDA was established under
Roosevelt. His Republican successor William Howard Taft broke up Rockefellers’
Standard Oil into 30 smaller companies, and the American Tobacco Company into
four.
Roosevelt divided corporations into the “good ones” and the
“bad ones.” The good ones, to Teddy, were those that offered a valuable good to
the public at a reasonable price, and who showed some concern for the good of
the public and of their workers. The “bad ones” were motivated solely by profit
to the exclusion of all other concerns, and these were the ones he sought to
restrict. He very much wanted to get big business out of government. He said
that “to destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance
between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the
statesmanship of the day.”
The third Progressive president, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, ushered
in the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Trade Commission, and laws
protecting striking unions. Twenty years later, Teddy’s Democratic cousin
Franklin Roosevelt would usher in many more Progressive programs and laws,
including the social security Teddy had worked for.
All those corrective measures to the Gilded Age mindset of
unfettered, unrestrained big business, income inequality, and virtually royal
powers of the super-rich… all those laws and programs to protect the rights of
regular, working people… are all now in danger of being rolled back by the new
robber barons. Republicans are champing at the bit to put social security and
Medicare on the chopping block, to cut taxes on themselves at the expense of
the rest of the country, and some are even calling for the end of child labor
laws. They’ve already admitted they can’t bring prices back down, and in fact
most of them are clueless about what grocery prices even are, because they
don’t live like you and me. They’re running the biggest scam in the history of
this country, and they think we are the easy mark they’ve been dreaming of.
They’re monopolists -they have a get-out-of-jail-free card,
and have no intention of letting you and me pass go and collect our $200. They
want it all.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee
Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE
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