America’s Got Fascists

Now reader since the true mission statement of this blog (if you’d taken time to read it. Slacker!) is to highlight the people who made up the Old Right in America, I think it’s safe to say that far too often it’s been mission un-accomplished on my part. As you know my posts are pretty much free range as I graze over the political, social, and economic landscape and share my thoughts and concerns all at no additional cost to you. I’ve talked about things as disparate as the NFL, Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD), (perhaps a group for NFL players against destructive decisions should be formed. We’ll call it NADD.) How fitting. I have also discussed crossing guards, Ronald Reagan’s relationship with the Black Panthers and Monks making coffins. Those are all great posts and I encourage you to read them and click on my sponsors. Which should be easy since I have none. But anyway, in this post we’re going to bring it back around a bit and talk a little about the Old Right but in an oblique way which is coincidental because I think I tore my oblique in a most embarrassing way over the weekend. Yet I soldier on!

The Old Right as we know it, or don’t know it as is usually the case, reached its pinnacle in the first third of the twentieth century (first third of the twentieth? WTH?) in opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal. These individuals looked at the New Deal and pointed out that it was more or less Let’s Make a Deal with your liberty. Guys like Albert J Nock, Garet Garrett, John T. Flynn, (good God, I’m getting flushed just talking about these guys! Is it getting hot in here?) Robert Taft, Frank Chodorov and a host of others looked at what was coming at them and tried to yell stop but to no avail. The New Deal came upon us and as Chodorov said turned our relationship with the State from one of citizens into clients. Okay you say, those were the dissenting voices, but surely there were plenty of people from both America and around the world who were all for this thing. Turns out you’re right for a change reader. There were plenty of FDR fanboys who were just wetting themselves with joy for the chance to let the experts run the country for a change and set things right.

So there’s a tsunami of literature cataloging how many people were really into this New Deal (apparently including every text-book writer in America) and these people wanted the dissenting voices to stop being buzzkills and get in line and let things happen. “He’s only trying to help us after all” and in the depths of the Depression people were obviously willing to give up some liberty for what they thought was economic security. I mean, a starving man will even reach for a 7-11 hot dog. (I really need to work on my metaphors) A great deal of the pro-New Deal voices came from America though there were also interested foreigners who were watching the events in the New World with a monocled eye and they had some things to say about it too. I’ll give you some for instances by some unnamed politicians.

One noted European statesmen stated to certain men that he was:

1. in accord with the President in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people. These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of my nation’s state philosophy, which finds its expression in the slogan “The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual”

Further his political party’s main news outlet characterized Roosevelt as the following:

2. “irreproachable, extremely responsible character and immovable will,” and as a “warmhearted leader of the people with a profound understanding of social needs.”

Furthermore,

3…the development toward an authoritarian state” based on the “demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest.

Another top political leader said about Roosevelt:

4. I am very interested in social developments in America. I believe that President Roosevelt has chosen the right path. We are dealing with the greatest social problems ever known. Millions of unemployed must get their jobs back and this cannot be left to private initiative. It is the government that must tackle the problem.

Yes! Millions across the land shout. Finally some people speaking truth to power! High school history teachers unite! “We love it when someone breaks things down to their essential parts and allow us to inculcate our students thusly.”

What about these quotes from another Euro-suit who was far enough from the scene to allow him to objectively view the New Deal with none of the American partisan political baggage? In the first he states that FDR was:

5…destroying the anachronistic notion that democracy and liberalism were “immortal principles.”

Further noting that:

6. America itself is abandoning [these principles]. Roosevelt is moving, acting, giving orders independently of the decisions or wishes of the Senate or Congress. There are no longer intermediaries between him and the nation. There is no longer a parliament but an ‘état majeur.’ (group of military-like officers) There are no longer parties, but a single party. A sole will silences dissenting voices.”

Well, that’s all perfectly creepy. Now reader if you’ve been reading carefully by now you would have sussed out the fact that I’ve been fooling you here a bit. All these quotes above are in fact glowing recommendations of Roosevelt and his New Deal and they did in fact come from European statesmen and their parties. But. Well there’s a fascist in the woodpile. You see quote 1. came from a guy named Adolf Hitler. Numbers 2. and 3. were from the Nazi’s chief newspaper the Volkischer Beobachter. Staying in theme, number 4. was from that twitchy little prick, Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Finally 5. and 6. were from that guy that the New Dealers just couldn’t get enough of, one of the fathers of fascism and proto-rapper, the “Ill Douche” Benito Mussolini. And as a side note, in case you think the Gross Man is just pulling a few quotes out of context, this post completes a set, the first of which came way back in January 2013 and spoke of the New Dealers and their love of fascism. So it truly was a two-way, trans-Atlantic, circle jerk. Politically speaking of course. That post can be read here.

You see when it’s all said and done and you have a group of technocrats and do-gooders who gain political power, nothing annoys them and gets in their way more than Constitutional government and separation of powers. “Why can’t people just get out of the way and let our leaders do what’s right for us?” For a recent example we need to look no further than the well read, articulate actress Gwyneth Paltrow who in one of her more scholarly moods said to our current O’President:

You’re so handsome that I can’t speak properly

and……….wait for it…………..

It would be wonderful if we were able to give this man all of the power that he needs to pass the things that he needs to pass.

And there it is! The money shot! So sometimes people do stupid things. Other times people are just stupid. And granted, this is only a single example of this type of thinking and it comes from some dim- bulb actress but the idea can be pervasive and when connected to the power of the State (which her types often are) can lead to no small amount of misery and great losses of life and liberty.

H.R. Gross

 

The Kids are Old Right

You know reader, back when I set up this blog my idea was to put forth a concise statement as part of the masthead so that someone who showed up at my site by accident say, after searching for “least read blogs on the internet”, could check out that masthead and decide whether this site was something they’d be interested in reading. So look to your left there reader and you’ll see the blog description as Libertarian, Old Right, Austrian Economic, Anti-War. Since the blog is advertised as such I figured I’d talk again about the Old Right for those of you who have never taken the time to go back and read the archives. There’s plenty of old posts there reader with so much Free Cheese goodness that I can’t believe you’re still holding out. I’ve linked to a few of my old posts about the Old Right. Here, here, here, here and here. So if you’re looking to kill a half hour have a go at them and you may enjoy some classic Free Cheese. We were both younger when those posts were written reader, far more innocent, with better muscle tone. It will be like reliving your high school days without the hassle of taking a girl thirty years younger than yourself to her prom. “She turned 18 in March! What are you all looking at? Come on Reese, we’re outta here!”

But anyway, enough about my weekend and the Free Cheese archives. Let’s talk about this current post. You see political labels are always tricky. What we nowadays call conservatives were really just liberals from hundreds of years ago when those classical liberals were fighting for the freedom of individuals against the ancien régime of king and church. Liberals now are progressives except for the neo-liberals, oh and don’t forget neo-conservatives in comparison to Old Right conservatives, sometimes known as paleo-conservatives. Then there’s the New Left, the New Right, well, you get the picture. Without getting bogged down in that, which we already have, let’s just talk about the right on the American scene and how much it has changed in the last hundred years and how most people have no idea that there was an Old Right much less what it stood for.

The major point of departure for political labels came with the rise of FDR and his New Deal. Reaction to the New Deal, either for or against, clearly marked the lines between liberal and conservative. Liberals saw FDR as the second coming and felt that a strong executive spreading around some of the wealth of the nation to those in need was exactly what was called for as a response to the Depression. (The original one. Not the one we’re in now.) Conservatives (the Old Right) viewed the New Deal with great skepticism as they saw the power of the State coming to its zenith with the personal liberties of Americans taking a back seat. Side note* Speaking of back seats, these Old Right conservatives were far more open to being socially liberal than the social conservative offshoot of conservatism that rose to prominence in the mid to late 20th century, though has now started to fade dramatically.

Besides being anti-New Deal the Old Right had an aversion to intervention in the business of other nations and viewed warfare with a particular stink eye. This being the case, they stood against the U.S. involving itself in World War I and World War II thus leading many to point to them and scream Isolationists! like it’s a dirty word, while looking like this guy. We all know that it has become taboo to even mention any resistance to America fighting in the Second World War. Granted, it was tough to avoid after Pearl Harbor and Germany declaring war on us but in the lead up to our entrance many on the Old Right were certainly clamoring for us to stay home and let the Europeans finish the civil war they had started in 1914, and taking that stance should not qualify anyone as a Hitler-lovin’, sausage-eatin’, goose-steppin’ fool. Or worse yet, someone who goes for the extra Nazi double bonus points and eats sausage made from a goose.

 

So now that I’ve gone through this long-winded explanation of what the Old Right was let’s prance over and see what has happened to the right in the U.S. since the end of the Second World War because I, and by I, I mean you, find this stuff so damn interesting. You see reader, very few people within the sound of this blog realize that “the Right” in America today is a totally different “Right” from the one that existed just within the last fifty or so years. To most Americans The Right=Fox News. It really is that simple. Occasionally you’ll have a politician on the right swerve into some Old Right talk but then they usually go back dutifully to the belief system of……wait for it…….the Neo-cons. Cue the scary music, Bumm, bum, bahhhh! For you see, neo-conservatism is what has more or less taken over the right in America lo’ these many decades. For the neo-cons the main concern for America was destruction of communism and if that meant enlarging the government or intervening militarily in far off places well then so be it. And it’s strange because the original neo-cons, the founding fathers as it were, were leftist anti-Stalinists who grew disillusioned with the left-wing in America and viewed conservatism as the best vehicle to get America where it needed to be going. Except with this shift came a twist, conservatism to them was too, uh, conservative when it came to promoting America’s interest abroad so they beefed up the foreign policy of the movement in order to allow conservatives to feel just fine about cracking a few skulls overseas and voila, neo-conservatism.

You see where the right originally stood for smaller government, personal liberty, non interventionism, the new Right decided that unless we fought “the commies” anywhere and everywhere they were going to march down Broadway and bollocks up the entire American dream which had been in existence for some several hundred years. Never mind that the communist system is so obviously and inherently rotten that it would only be able to be implemented in America at the point of a gun. Soft socialism? Well that’s another matter, that seems to be an easy sell if you just look around but we’re talking bread line, gulag, let’s kill the class enemies communism here and so were the members of the neo-conservative movement back at the time the Cold War started.

The Old Right began to splinter like an old rotten couch on a front porch in rural Kentucky. People like Irving Kristol (Bill’s dad) Norman Podhoretz (John’s dad) Daniel Patrick Moynihan (probably someone’s dad) and Jean Kirkpatrick (hopefully no one’s dad) were early torch bearers for neo-conservatism along with their intellectual guru and all around bon-vivant William Buckley. The Old Right began to look, you guessed it, Old (the jokes can’t all be gold. I have a deadline with these posts!) and the once strong and mighty Old Right began to slink into the shadows of the political retirement home where bad food, creepy sponge baths, and bed sores awaited.

Well communism has been defeated right? You ask. Or should have been asking by now. Come on reader do your part. And yes, the giant we know as world communism directed from Moscow has in fact been laid to waste only to have its ideas settle comfortably into relative pockets of obscurity in the brain of just about every pony tailed, co-ed chasing political science teacher in every university across the country. Thankfully college students aren’t paying one bit of attention to what’s going on in school so none of that fellow traveling flim-flam is going to penetrate their booze and pot clogged cerebellums. But with the defeat of communism came a new enemy that fit just as easily into the framework of neo-conservatism and that is militant Islam. This enemy allows us to carry on with all the foreign intervention but with an even greater emphasis on surveillance (only of the enemy, wink, wink) and continues with the dictum that if we don’t stop the terrorists no one will and again they’ll be marching down Broadway closing all those wonderful smut shops and Jewish delis that we love so much.

So where does this leave the Old Right? Well, not in a very good state but there are a few hold outs around who are trying to keep the fire burning hoping that one day the kids will in fact be Old Right and America will shake itself free of neo-conservatism and return to a more traditional, and perhaps practical, version of conservatism. I don’t know where to come down on this one because anytime I think the tide may be turning I’ll do something like flip on cable news and note that they’re discussing a story about, say, social and political unrest in a country in Central Africa. My eyes will immediately go down to the bottom of the screen and there it says in bold letters WHAT SHOULD THE U.S. DO? Oh my. When that is the baseline of where the discussion begins it’s hard to see a return to normalcy anytime soon.

H.R. Gross

Cause We are Living in an Imperial World

Where did it all go wrong reader? I get asked that question a lot. Usually it’s about my effort to bring pear flavored soda to the masses. Today though we’re discussing bigger issues than my inability to succeed as an entrepreneur, unless you count this blog (which you shouldn’t) which generates exactly zero dollars of income, but takes up a whole bunch of my time as if it were in fact a business, just without the business part of it. Come to think of it reader you’re getting all this for free, though unlike a goody handed out by the State, this blog won’t crush your soul and hollow out your life and leave you loose to roam the land, a burnt out husk of a human being, looking to someone else for sustenance. It may leave you hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL in an effort to make the hurt stop as quickly as possible but it won’t do any of those other things I mentioned. Anyway we’re here today to discuss where it all went wrong with the American republic we used to live under and exactly when it became the empire that we have the privilege to cower beneath today.

There are a lot of pivot points in history where ideas, movements, events, and people played a giant game of naked Twister with unforeseen results being the result that resulted. <— Under a speech code with any kind of teeth that last sentence would be verboten but there it is. So which of these pivot points was the place where the U.S. no longer looked like it did the day before? Some point to the Mexican War where the future participants in the Civil War all fought on the same side and got to do a little practicing on the hapless Mexicans while also gaining ownership of the place where the Beach Boys would later be able to surf. Others say it was the Civil War itself, World War One, or the New Deal. Some even think things changed the day Scott Baio first got paid to act. As for me I like to focus on an event that took place right at the end of the 19th century and at the dawn of the 20th. Prior to this point in time the United States was a growing power no doubt, but mostly in the economic realm with no real global military presence and certainly no colonies like the great powers of Europe. We had a small standing army and a relatively small navy when compared to the other naval powers. So with as little apologies to Babs Streisand as possible, that was “the way we were” before the event I’m about to talk about.

As an aside, I find it intriguing that so many pivotal moments in U.S. history concern ships, not the least of which is Ted McGinley joining the cast of the Love Boat and thereby helping to send the S.S. Pacific Princess into the dry dock of syndication. For more information on the Ted McGinley Curse please click here  and immediately admit that your life is lacking direction. For the rest of you please read on. Seriously though, look at all the “ship” moments in U.S. history: The sinking of the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor where a whole lot of ships went down, the Cuban missile crises, the Gulf of Tonkin incident which I frelequently (freakin’ eloquently) wrote about here, and an event that helped spark the event that I eventually was going to get to, eventually, the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine. Remember the Maine? Of course you don’t, but Remember the Maine! with the exclamation point helped to lead us into the Spanish-American War which for my money is the event that sent us into the dressing room as a big, lanky republic and had us come out all gussied up and dressed as a leviathan empire.

You see, back in the late 1900’s Spain was just a shadow of its former empire and basically running on the fumes of past glory. Like say, Antonio Banderas, the Spanish were just trying to hang on based on their name without really offering much new or exciting. They still had some colonies scattered around though and in an effort to keep them in line the Spanish had to act like major league capullos hoping that fear and repression would keep the natives quiet while the Spanish governors and the Catholic friars continued to try to line their pockets. At the same time there was a change in the America psyche led by a jingoistic media, guys like Teddy Roosevelt, the closing of the American frontier, and a feeling that Protestantism’s duty was to spray hell-bound non-believers with the fire extinguisher of religion. This led to Americans now looking beyond their borders for little brown brothers to “save” and as a bonus possibly acquire a few colonies during all the evangelism. These colonies, along with a big navy and kickass army, argued Roosevelt and others like Henry Cabot Lodge, would show the world that America had arrived on the scene and was prepared to dish out knuckle sandwiches to anyone with an appetite for said sandwiches.

So you have the Spanish still in charge of places like Cuba and Puerto Rico that are tantalizingly close to the U.S. which had pined to be in charge of Cuba way back to the founding of the republic. Even relative peaceniks like Jefferson thought we should take Cuba to have and to hold and to love and squeeze. Tensions began to build around the island as many Cubans grew sick of the Spanish and decided they would fight them in a war for Cuba’s independence. This dovetailed nicely with the elements in America that I spoke of in the last paragraph and next thing you know we’re seriously interested in the island and send down a ship to “monitor” the situation. Remember the Maine? We talked about it early on in this post. Well for one reason or another in the middle of the night the Maine exploded in Havana harbor. To this day the cause of the explosion is unknown but has been narrowed down to a Spanish mine, an undetected fire in its coal bunker, or sabotage by rebel Cubans in an effort to get the U.S. to enter the war. The theory that the cocky bartender on the ship lost control of a flight of a dozen Flaming Lemon Drops at the bar has finally been debunked. For my research on this theory send me $9.99 through Pay Pal and I’ll email you the documents. The press in the U.S. was sure who it was though, the papers of Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer pointed directly at the Spanish and the phrase, “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” became the cry that pushed us into the Spanish-American War.

Now if anyone knows anything at all about this war it’s the image of Teddy Roosevelt, this mustachioed crazy dude with pop bottle glasses riding up San Juan hill and cementing his place in history. I’ll give the guy this, he had a set of stones. He may have been enamored with warfare but he wasn’t the kind of commander who sent out others to do the killing while he stayed behind the lines and safely screwed the pooch. The war though didn’t only take place on the island of Cuba which was more or less a cake walk for the Americans.

The part of the war I really want to discuss is what went on in the Philippines. America moved into the area and hammered the Spanish pretty well with the help of Philippine independence fighters who were tired of the Spanish and wanted to set up a Philippine nation ruled by Filipinos. Uh, little problem there because as mentioned already America at that time saw it as its duty to export its might abroad, granted for often well-meaning, lofty ideals, but by doing so it was coming in direct conflict with the Filipino independence movement. So after the Spanish were defeated American and Philippine interests began to part ways and armed conflict ensued. So let’s see, you had a powerful western nation embroiled in a dirty, asymmetrical war in Southeast Asia against people who could melt into the population and enjoyed the knowledge of the countryside and assistance from a sympathetic population. Glad we never fell into that trap again!

The Filipino resistance realized that it could not stand toe to toe with the American military and decided that it must carry out guerilla warfare which it did with varying degrees of success. This in turn fed into the American belief that a total war strategy was what was needed to win since the rules of warfare known at that time didn’t seem to apply. Civilians were herded up and relocated into concentration camps, yes they were called that, in order to keep them from aiding the guerillas. Atrocities piled up on both sides and spiraled into a whirlpool of blood with civilians especially taking a serious beating with hundreds of thousands, possibly over a million killed.

Eventually the United States was able to pacify the Philippines but a line had clearly been crossed. The old republic of the first 125 years of the nation no longer existed and had instead been replaced by a muscular, outward looking nation that felt it was its duty to spread its version of democracy. Perhaps it was inevitable and that it is simply the natural evolution of great powers but there can be no doubt that history shows that as a people slip into imperialism they lose a part of their soul, tend to bankrupt themselves, and start down the road of destruction.

There were some voices who tried to hold the line and spoke out against the march towards empire including plenty of Midwestern populists as well as the Anti Imperialist League  which at its peak numbered around 25,000 somber members including Andrew Carnegie, Grover Cleveland, Sam Gompers and probably its most famous member, a writer named Mark Twain. The tide though had turned, these voices of dissent were viewed as coming from an older, smaller America and the new outlook was summed up well by Senator Albert J. Beveridge when in a speech before the Senate he stated:

God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish systems where chaos reigns…He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savages and senile people.

And further, you have to admire his honesty when he stated in the same speech,

Mr. President, the times call for candor. The Philippines are ours forever, “territory belonging to the United States,” as the Constitution calls them. And just beyond the Philippines are China’s illimitable markets.

H.R. Gross

An Umpire Not an Empire

Alright folks. Let’s talk Old Right America in a way only a sparsely read, non-income generating blog can do. We’re going to discuss a cat who started out on the left, moved right/libertarian, and then got himself promptly disowned and forgotten by all of those in the mainstream who did their best to finish him like a cheesecake. John T. Flynn is the guy in the flickering 40 watt spotlight we’re going to focus on here.

Flynn had an interesting journey in that he started as a progressive lefty and was a major contributor to that left liberal mag the New Republic. He was an early backer of FDR and had a lot of big hopes for that cigarette holder on wheels. FDR was swept into office making, get this, promises like he was going to clean up Washington and reduce the size of government after the free spending ways of the Republicans under Hoover. Flynn was all warm and gooey for that stuff so he was more than a little disappointed when FDR changed course in the first hundred days and decided to spend the daylights out of the mother.

Soon Flynn began to sound some alarm bells as he had one eye on FDR and the other on Europe where a major clash looked inevitable. By that time it was clear that the New Deal wasn’t bringing the U.S. out of the Depression and here’s where Flynn came into his own as a prognosticator. Flynn pointed out that with the New Deal failing to prime the pump FDR and the Brain Trust would start to sink money into a military buildup as a means of forcing money into the economy via military Keynesianism and thus in a way that would be more palatable to the right than blowing a lot of money on social programs. He noted that in Italy and Germany at that very moment,

…the dictators there have made vast arms operations the medium of spending money and creating employment. You can’t build battleships and make guns and war materials without putting great industries to work. The support of the economic system of both Hitler and Mussolini is the employment they have created and the income they initiate by means of the armament industry…but the continuation of these war preparations requires the ceaseless unloosening of war alarms upon the people. The war scare is an essential implement to the war-preparation program.

So the left, many of whom were previously anti-war, sided with their boy Roosevelt in his march to war while those on the right were far more willing to spend money on military expenditures especially when they were being told that the Axis powers were an existential threat to the United States. Even the communists and socialists in America, violently pacifist (they were strange enough to be both) eventually went all in when Hitler turned on their huckleberry Stalin.

Flynn clearly saw these trends and pointed them out though he went well beyond the scope of World War II. He took on the militarization of America that would reach far beyond the Second World War and into the Cold War and the wars in southeast Asia. He noted:

You cannot prepare for war without doing something to yourselves. You cannot have a war industry without a war scare; and having built it and made it the basis of work for several million men you cannot demobilize it and you will have to keep on inventing reasons for it.

In a sense, he was stating that when it came to war hysteria and military gear “you gotta’ use it or lose it” decades before some guy with a hairy chest, leg warmers, and a white man’s fro’ used that phrase. By the way, I still have two out of the three items I just mentioned. Call me and I’ll slowly tell you which. (*11.99 per minute.)

So Flynn unabashedly made clear that the system coming to fruition in America had a resemblance to those at that time in Germany and Italy. Bellicosity would soon be running at an all time high. The State claimed and the people mostly believed that we were building up to fight fascism but in reality we needed to look at ourselves and note the creeping fascism that was beginning to take hold in America. There was a massive centralization of power in the Federal government, bureaucrats who were in the mood to take charge, conscription, a public prepared to give up their power and liberties, and a juicy and all too willing target for our wrath in the form of Germany and Japan. And of course Italy.

And so around this time the giant whirlpool began to form. And it is a whirlpool that exists to this day and is centered on Washington D.C. You can picture it, I sometimes have nightmares about it. It captures money, talent, world improving do-gooders of all stripes, liberty, and apparently millions of tourists, and drags them inexorably towards its center. Flynn, a man of the left, saw this, reported it, and got blackballed for it much like another alarm bell-ringer and target of my affections written about in another fine post here, Garet Garrett. Flynn was removed from the New Republic and Garrett was asked to clean out his desk and take down his girlie photo calendar at the Saturday Evening Post, because of their anti-militarism and anti-statism. They fought the good fight and lost only to be remembered in a blog by a guy who isn’t worthy to change their typewriter ribbons even if he knew how. But such is the fate of people of courage trying to swim against a tide.

Flynn laid out his case in one broadside aimed squarely at the warfare/welfare state in As We Go Marching a book that came out in 1944 and is as incisive now as it was then. But you’ll have to do some reading on that yourself or wait for a future post on it because I’m at my word limit for this post-a-rino. Plus I always like to leave you wanting more and when I’m on top of my game just like Jefferson Starship and…..checking notes……well, I’m out of words good day.

H.R. Gross

Kellem with Kindness

We all talk about taxes. We all talk about women. Even women talk about women but not the way men talk about women….. Sometimes women are taxing. Today we’ll talk about taxes and women, or at least one woman in particular. I want to discuss a certain Vivien Kellems whose name sort of sounds like she should be the wacky neighbor on a 1950’s sitcom. She was around in the 50’s but was not on an early television program unless there was a show called “Great Anti-Establishment Women”. Of course who knows? There were shows called Leave it to Larry, Honestly Celeste!, and Too Young to go Steady…..Wait….what? If she was too young to go steady what was she old enough to do?

So who was this Vivien Kellems? She was born in Iowa in 1896 and went on to get a serious education rarely attained by women at that time. She along with her brother patented what came to be known as the Kellems cable grip. It was a device that, you hopefully guessed it, gripped cables and was used in major construction projects like the Chrysler Building and that George Washington Bridge thingy among many others. You can see her picture here  holding her cable grip and, well, the look on her face and the shape of the apparatus are certainly a bit intimidating in a Nordic/ice maiden/dominatrix kind of way. After all, you’ve been very, very bad. Haven’t you? “Oh no, what’s that damn safety word?”……….(clearing throat)……………. So anyway, she took the cable grip and founded the rather mundanely named Kellems Cable Grip Company. What else were they going to call it fool? All this is pretty impressive I guess but what the Viv’ster did later is what she’s known for here in the Free Cheese universe. The Freecheesiverse.

You see back in 1943 during the Second World War the United States instituted payroll tax withholding setting up the system that we more or less recognize today. You go in, put in your hours working (plus whatever time you spend fannying around on the clock) and your employer deducts whatever amount the State deems necessary that you pay in tribute. Voila! You never even see your money as it’s whisked away to some undisclosed location much like what happens to the contents of a toilet when you give it a flush. You don’t know where it goes but you know it’s a bad place and a place that you don’t want to be in.

So imagine for a moment, instead of running around your place of employment gushing about your “take home pay” each week, you instead are running around your office in April croaking about how you have to send the IRS a check for $6,500 because it’s time to send in your tax payments. Think people would be a little more conscious of how much they pay in taxes? Rather than the death of 26 cuts (52 if you get paid weekly) it would be one short, sharp, shock delivered right to your flabby breadbasket that would certainly make you sit up and take notice; and if you worked for Vivien Kellems this is the system you lived under for some time because Kellems decided that she was done withholding federal taxes for her employees on a paycheck by paycheck basis and because of this, well, Uncle Sucker was less than pleased.

Mr. Libertarian himself, Murray Rothbard does a nice job of summing this situation up in his book For a New Liberty when he wrote this:

Connecticut industrialist Vivien Kellems argued years ago, the employer is forced to expend time, labor, and money in the business of deducting and transmitting his employees’ taxes to the federal and state governments-yet the employer is not recompensed for this expenditure. What moral principle justifies the government’s forcing employers to act as its unpaid tax collectors?

The withholding principle, of course, is the linchpin of the whole federal income tax system.  Without the steady and relatively painless process of deducting the tax from the worker’s paycheck, the government could never hope to raise the high levels of tax from the workers in one lump sum. Few people remember that the withholding system was only instituted during World War II and was supposed to be a wartime expedient. Like so many other features of State despotism, however, the wartime emergency measure soon became a hallowed part of the American system.

Well said Mr. Rothbard. Another great source of information about the swindle that is the income tax is Frank Chodorov‘s book with the subtle title  Income Tax: Root of all Evil. Keep in mind too, at the time Kellems was refusing to do the unpaid work for the government it truly was work to keep track of income withholding. It wasn’t an electronic transaction but actual labor hours that were needed to do these things and the government clearly didn’t care about who had to pay for that labor. “Hey, pass it on to your consumers. Mwaa Haa Haa.”

So how did this turn out? By now if you read Free Cheese very often you realize that most of my posts don’t have happy endings (sadly similar to most of my trips to “Here’s the Rub” the Chinese massage joint downtown) And this one’s no different. She fought a lengthy battle with the federales and all but begged them to indict her so that the constitutionality of withholding could be challenged in court. Instead they simply confiscated from her personal bank account the amount of money that they felt should have been witheld from her employee’s paychecks. She then sued for the money and eventually won her suit and got her dough back but the constitutionality of the withholding never got its challenge and Kellems passed away in 1975. She wasn’t done with her cattyness towards the IRS though when she stated shortly before her death, “Our tax law is a 1,598-page hydra-headed monster and I’m going to attack and attack and attack until I have ironed out every fault in it.” As cool as that sounds I’m not sure where Kellems got her figures for the page numbers because in actuality the tax code was not 1,598 pages in 1975 it was actually 20,000 pages but her anti-tax heart was in the right place. Oh, as of 2012 it’s a slim 73,608 pages so we can certainly say that Kellems effort was less than succesful but many of the people I write about are simply holding the pass and hoping a few more people can sneak through and be saved from the inevitable massacre. You can check out a graphic of the tax code’s growth here. So the next time you get your pay take a look at your Federal withholding and spare a moment to think about Vivien Kellems. If you want to do this while envisioning that photo of her and her “apparatus” well, that’s your business you freaky Free Cheeser.

H.R. Gross

You Believed in Miracles, when you came along, You Rexy Thing

You know, I write a lot about people who made up the Old Right in America and indirectly I thus write about their nemeses (nemesaii?) In this post we’re going to discuss one of those opposed by the Old Right and one of the leading members of FDR’s Brain Trust. If you’re a little foggy on who these cats were they were basically a group made up of………. Columbia educated lawyers, (If you possess a red flag raise it here) consisting of a bunch of brains that many people didn’t trust. The doode we’re talking about in particular is Rex Tugwell, and not the ultra suave, black tied, pencil thin mustachioed, 1930’s British actor Tux Regwell. Speaking of which I can’t think of a better, more suggestive name for a buxom Bond Girl than Miss Tugwell. The glories of scattershot quasi-intellectual thought.

Most Americans know something about FDR and the Brain Trust. The standard story is pretty much the accepted one and people tend to take it for granite, or granted: The Depression hit, FDR rose to power, he assembled his Brain Trust and they threw a veritable pant-load full of programs at the American public (each one more brilliant than the next) in an effort to cure the Depression. The public had lost hope, the story goes, and they wanted politicians to “do something” which is almost always the worst type of impetus. This all sounds rotten enough but it gets even worse when you start looking at the individuals who made up FDR’s inner circle and their motivations. Turn over the rock known as The New Deal and you see some pretty unsavory characters and an elitist, dark side to what most court historians consider the shining moment of activist government. What makes this even more difficult is that FDR’s circle were all more or less affluent, educated bounders including FDR himself who was so rich he’d buy a new boat each time one got wet. Now if you’d like we can discuss sometime how the New Deal did not get us out of the Depression but that will have to wait for another post. I’m simply going to look at Rex Tugwell and his ideas which are creepy enough in their own right.

First off, Tugwell seemed to have some type of messiah complex from a young age and he penned this poem as a youth.

I am strong.

I am big and well made.

(Alright, so far so good. At least the ladies are interested)

I am sick of a nation’s stenches.

I am sick of propertied czars.

I have dreamed my great dream of their passing.

I have gathered my tools and my charts.

My plans are finished and practical.

I shall roll up my sleeves- and make America over.

This isn’t good. Dude is planning on making America over and making it sound as easy as Johnny Depp reapplying eye liner. I think we can all agree it’s pretty difficult to “make over” anything as big as America without demolishing personal liberties.

Discussing this poem and do-good planners in general, John T. Flynn quipped in 1954 “here is the egghead literally on fire”, and further he notes “This bursting egotism of the young intellectual who feels his diploma confers upon him authority to seize the world by the scruff of the neck and shake it into good behavior.” We all know someone who fits this description, perhaps personally or maybe we know them as someone in elected office, maybe numerous individuals, and they should all make us squeamish.

So you give a guy like Tugwell this massive amount of power and turn him loose and sinister things begin to happen. Amazingly, Tugwell never held a major position in the FDR administration beyond Undersecretary of the Department of Agriculture but hung around for four years and was one of the main policy drivers in the Brain Trust. Now it has been well established that FDR and the boys had a certain affinity for Mussolini and his policies, you can read about that here, and Tugwell himself certainly admired “The Ill Douche” which is clearly evidenced when you read quotes from Tugwell like this when he’s discussing Italy’s Fascist system:  “It’s the cleanest. . .most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious.” The New Dealers saw no problem with the State working in close coordination with business in order to establish what they viewed as a sane, coherent system and if a few businesses, the public, and the free enterprise system have to get muscled in the process well then that’s too bad. Tugwell was also clearly comfortable with many of the ideas being tried at that time by the Soviet Union and like many intellectuals of his day showed a certain naiveté when it came to his infatuation with bigness and planning. And believe me, Tugwell and his buddies were planners of the first degree and as such they tended to trample on the Constitution and take America in a direction that it had never fully gone though one it had clearly been pushed towards by turn of the century Progressives and Herbert Hoover of all people. The same Herbie Hoover who somehow years later washed his hands of the whole thing and took on the posture of “Mr. laissez-faire” when nothing could be further from the truth. Tugwell himself tipped his hat to Hoover when he said, “We didn’t admit it at the time, but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.” Now whether that was a bit of hyperbole is up for interpretation but clearly Hoover was not the non-interventionist President that history has portrayed him as but we’ll deal with “The Hoove” in another post.

*Note Bene, in the above paragraph I stated that Hoover washed his hands of his tendencies as a planner but in reality I would say he had his hands washed for him by FDR fan boy historians. By portraying Hoover as a do nothing President along the lines of Harding, (see my post here, I mean if you want to, no pressure) they could put FDR out there as a caring, activist, dynamic, executive which is exactly what they believe was needed in their statist worldview.

In the words of Garet Garrett it truly was a revolution within the form. The New Dealers were given their chance, thanks to the Depression and a desperate populace, to put all their wonky ideas, that never would have made it out of the faculty lounge under normal circumstances, into actual practice. Tugwell was a rabid disciple of that loathsome character Thorstein Veblen who is beyond the scope of this post. Read a little about the V Man and you’ll understand why Rexy carried the nickname Rex the Red.

H.R. Gross

The Wrongful Wickard of Laws

Who is Roscoe Filburn? Though I tweaked the opening line from Rand’s Atlas Shrugged for my post I promise I won’t have you read 1100 pages, though in deference to Rand I may have to just once eschew my masculinity and caper around town in some cute little number and maybe do the Charleston while looking all hawt wearing one of Rand’s fab hats with matching cigarette holder as an accessory even though I don’t even smoke, and then immediately  check those testosterone pills the doc pushed on me to see if they’re placebos.

But who is Roscoe Filburn? Small town Southern lawyer? Bit player on Hee Haw? Maintenance man from my high school who slept in the boiler room? None of the above reader. In fact, Roscoe Filburn has a place in American Supreme Court history that makes him far more influential than even Mr. Ford, high school janitor par excellence. In fact one could argue Filburn’s flirtation with the Supreme Court is one of the most important legal cases in U.S. history in the sense that it allowed the Federal government to take a much larger role in our lives. (And isn’t that what we all want?) There’s a foundation with a website that is devoted to educating people about the case and you can check it out here. If you want to be a layabout and have me do that work for you and give you my interpretation of the whole thing then by all means keep reading. I’ll be your huckleberry.

Roscoe Filburn owned a 95 acre farm in Montgomery County, Ohio near Dayton and he came butt up against FDR and his overreaching Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1938, which was implemented as an Attitude Adjustment Act with Filburn and the like being on the receiving end of said attitude adjustment. Under the AAA strict guidelines were set up that kept farmers from utilizing all the capacity of their land and livestock in an effort to restrict the amount of produce on the market and thus drive up prices.

Now the Constitution, that old grey lady, allowed Congress to regulate interstate commerce. Fair enough I suppose, but what it didn’t allow was for Congress to mess with commerce that took place within a state. So where does Filburn come in? Well here’s what happened. Filburn was allowed by the AAA to plant 11.1 acres of wheat based on the size of his farm but he planted 23 acres in the fall of 1940 which in turn yielded 239 bushels of wheat the following summer. Since Filburn overplanted he was fined 49 cents per bushel or one hundred seventeen dollars and eleven cents. “Well hell Gross, you’ve dropped that much in one four-hour encounter at the Brass Flamingo!” Not the point reader, not even close. It wasn’t the money it was about the principle. Some would argue that Filburn knew the rules and he broke them anyway and for the law-and-order types sometimes the legitimacy of the law is irrelevant. A law is a law, change it don’t break it. Okay I get that, I may even partially agree with that. But how do you change a law unless you challenge it and that’s what Filburn did. Oh, and one little thing I left out. Filburn wasn’t selling the extra wheat he grew. He was using it for his family and to feed his livestock. Hmm. (One eyebrow should be raised now with a look of inquisitiveness reader. I really shouldn’t have to keep cueing you for this kind of stuff.) So even though Congress was given the power to regulate interstate commerce, the AAA felt that it should be able to regulate Filburn’s activities based on his overplanted wheat that was neither commerce, nor traveling between states.

So who is the Wickard in the post title? Claude R. Wickard was the Secretary of Agriculture under FDR and he was the Wickard in the strange case of Wickard versus Filburn that was settled by the Supreme Court in 1942. The government’s argument basically went like this: Yes, Philburn is growing this wheat for his own use in order to feed his family and/or livestock (in some families they can be hard to tell apart) but, and it’s a big ol’ butt here, the fact that he doesn’t have to go on the open market and buy the wheat to feed his family and livestock does in fact affect interstate commerce and the Congress has the right to regulate that activity. The Feds admitted that the amount of wheat grown by Filburn was trivial but if a large number of farmers followed the same path as Filburn then they would adversely affect interstate commerce. If Filburn didn’t grow the excess wheat he would be forced to buy it on the open market and that wheat could possibly have crossed state lines, or perhaps not, but they felt safe making that argument. Now as we’ve already covered Filburn’s activity was neither technically interstate nor commerce but merely consumption. So Congress was aiming to regulate consumption that they believed could affect interstate commerce. Pretty twisted right? Never gonna fly right? Hang on.

Well it may break your crayon to learn this but the Court sided against Filburn. They stated in the Court’s words that yes,

Congress can regulate trivial local, intrastate activities that have an aggregate effect on interstate commerce via the commerce power, even if the effect is indirect.

So there it is. If that isn’t a massive State imposing itself upon its citizens then nothing is. Keep in mind, this post of mine here says nothing about the whole idea of the Federal Government deciding how much of anything someone is allowed to produce or what they should be able to charge to sell their product. That in itself is ridiculous enough but that was the original function of the AAA before later morphing into a swell organization that provides road side assistance, travel planning, and great discounts to drivers.

So are we to believe that the framers of the Constitution, in all their powdered wig and buckled shoe foppish glory, intended for Congress to regulate activity that was neither interstate nor commerce and do so by calling it interstate commerce?

You know, framers like James Madison who said,

Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.

And with that I’ll give Jimbo the last word.

H.R. Gross

Good Guys Finish Taft

I think most of us know the old saw that the victors get to write the history. That’s not entirely true, you see the losers also write their histories but nobody reads them, but it’s true enough to make it worthwhile to mention. I can give concrete evidence of this by talking a little bit about two separate monuments located in Washington D.C. Now you know that place is downright polluted with monuments but I want to discuss two in particular because they are a good example of how the political victors get to write the history and get their faces stamped on coins and get huge, sprawling monuments.

The first is the monument to that most political of politicians, none other than Big Daddy himself, Franklin Roosevelt. Now the FDR fanboys would have it no other way than to have their guy up there with the giants, so the monument is roughly half way between the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials. (To his credit, FDR stated that he wanted a memorial no larger than his desk but who cares what he wanted, this is about us!)

When you first enter the FDR monument you’re not really sure how big it is. It looks modest enough at first glance but Jesus Franklin Christ you soon come to realize that this thing is a monster and at 7.5 acres it is roughly the size of  a small college campus. The memorial (or maybe park?) is constructed of four different outdoor “rooms” each one representing one of FDR’s four terms. There’s some cool looking waterfalls and some statues naturally, including his dog Fala for the PETA crowd and the bored kiddies. It’s truly an homage to big government done on a grand scale. FDR was after all the guy in charge when the New Deal was foisted upon our country. He was the guy who did as much as he could to maneuver our country into the Second World War. He was the guy who allowed the internment of U.S. citizens on the grounds that they were some type of fifth column in service to the Japanese Imperial Government. He was the doode who when realizing many of his programs weren’t going to pass Constitutional muster came up with a scheme to add a bunch of Justices to the Supreme Court in order to rubber stamp his agenda. The man simply saw the big State as the answer to our needs whether we even had needs, and whether or not we wanted government help, or whether the State actually could or should help. In a classic line from the warm-inside, feel good, nanny staters, “He gave us Hope.”

Perhaps the greatest nod that the memorial gives to the massive bureaucratic State is the history of its construction. Here’s a big government timeline for you:  Concepts for the memorial began to come forth in the late 1950’s. With lightning speed, by 1969 the area had been designated FDR Memorial Park. Alright, let’s get started then right? Wrong. Around 1982 the design was finalized and authorized by Congress. Then the dirt started to fly. Well not actually until 1991 but look out. By 1997 this baby was ready for action. I can give no better example of the efficiency of government bureaucracy than that my friend.

But FDR won. He was able to simultaneously appeal to the hoi polloi and the hoidy- toidy. Court historians, pundits, history textbooks, and common schlubs all know that FDR and his ideas were the way of the future.  I mean, look where they’ve gotten us. Isn’t it obvious? Keynesian economics have come to be the dominant school of economic thought as well as the guiding principle of our dear leaders. And big government programs aimed at alleviating whatever is “leviating” us are the status quo. So the victor gets a palace next door to Lincoln and Jefferson.

Believe it or not, the Washington Post has an architecture critic and they said the memorial was designed,

 to give people as many options as possible to go this way or that, to reverse directions, to pause, to start over, to be alone, to meet others, and to experience as many different sights, smells and sounds as the sight permits.

Uh…. okay. Since the memorial is pinched in there between the Tidal Basin and the Potomac I think I know what those smells are going to be and as for the sounds, it’s mostly those of jets taking off or landing at Reagan airport. To meet others? For what, to score some blow?

Before we go any further, just for fun,  pose yourself this question. “Why do people go into politics?” Now, read that above description by the Post writer as your answer.

One more. “Why do people go to college?” Read it again.

Alright, enough fun. Let’s turn to the next memorial.

Now it’s natural that nearly everyone has heard of FDR. I guess that would make it unnatural that so few have heard of Senator Robert Taft. I’m not going to give you a long synopsis of his life (by nature can a synopsis be long anyway?) but I’ll give you a few highlights. Click the link above to read the rest.

First off, you know I’m wary about lists of any kind, especially when politicians are involved, but a Senate panel that included John F. Kennedy chose Taft as one of the five greatest Senators of all time. Taft was from the Republican political family from Cincinnati that included his father, President William Taft. Taft was the epitome of the Pre-Cold War, Old Right, Republican. He was a staunch opponent of the New Deal and a strong anti-interventionist who believed that the U.S. should not involve itself in the problems of other nations unless absolutely necessary. He was wary of unions and along with others in the movement was comfortable  with people having a great deal of personal liberty as well as curtailment of government power and spending. He was not perfect however and being a politician he naturally had to make deals but for the most part the man stood his ground against the New Dealers and/or world improvers.

So, with all that said, where does his statue stand in D.C.? Well honey, it ain’t on the mall. It’s a block north of the Capitol on New Jersey Avenue across a triangle from Hamilton’s Bar and Grill. You can check it out on a map here if you want to stroll over after a few Apple-tinis. The statue itself is somewhat impressive with a stiff looking 10 foot statue of Taft looking a bit constipado in front of a bell tower that stands 100 feet high, which conveniently is just the right height if you find yourself fed up with D.C. and want to take the plunge. So it’s solid, no-nonsense, but well off the trendy pathways of D.C. and not the kind of place you would linger to take in the smells, sights, etc. Although the Charlie Palmer Steakhouse is also across the street as well as the Beer Institute. So maybe ol’ Tafty isn’t in such a bad neighborhood after all. Stick that in your Phyllis Diller cigarette holder FDR!

H.R. Gross

Time to Nock-upy Wall Street

When I use the word Nock in the title I can only mean one guy and that’s Albert Jay Nock. One of the Old School boys of the Old Right. We’ll get to him in a bit.

So I noticed quite a few of the occupy movement, before they got benumbed or city hall moved in with front loaders to bust up their garbage strewn Valley Forges, were balls out  anti-business (mea culpa to occupy-ettes, it’s just jargon) and in some cases anti capitalist. Fair enough. Protest whatever you like. But what hurts me more than my lumbago is that this thing we have now, this thing we call capitalism, well cats, it ain’t laissez-faire  capitalism. However, a large swath of the occupiers and the much dimmer and always late on the scene media seem to think that what we see now in America is just that, and that in itself gives laissez-faire an undeserved bad name. (* Brilliant idea #4 just hit me.) Have a daughter and name her Laissez-Faire thus giving it a good name. Oh, and #5 would be to put a little light bulb symbol on keyboards so I wouldn’t have to stoop to using an asterisk.

Anyhow this is where Nock comes in. In his opus Our Enemy the State, Nock destroys the idea of American big business wanting the government off their backs. On the contrary, big business wants the State on some people’s backs, those some people just happening to be the competitors of those same big businesses. Clearly big business is more than accommodating when it comes to letting Big Guv’ step in and give a metaphorical wedgie to a competitor behind the bleachers at half time of the football game, and then perhaps a good lathering if resistance continues.

In Our Enemy, Nock delves into the idea put forth by Franz Oppenheimer that human needs are met in one of two ways. First, needs can be met through the mutual exchange of the fruits of one’s labor. The division of labor allows us to do what we are best at and exchange goods with others doing what they are best at. This Oppenheimer called the “economic means” of fulfilling our needs. The other path is one where the coercion of the State is used to fulfill needs by appropriating the labor of others. This he called the “political means”. Nock expanded on this by pointing out that as humans we will naturally take the easiest path in order to fulfill our needs and desires and thus will choose the political means whenever possible. This in turn gives rise to the corporate state where business skips giddily, arm in arm with government through a meadow full of daisies. The helpless daisies of course being the taxpaying consumer-citizen and whatever upstart businesses have the nerve to try to get in the way. What a nice way to describe fascism.

So in one sense the occupiers are right. Corporatism is alive and well in America and it is a problem but it does not exist as an island. The occupy gang seem to give the State a free pass when it comes to mucking things up and I feel certain that a large portion of them are doing this because they are in fact statists. For corporatism to truly flourish there must be a muscular State behind it whacking people on the nose with a newspaper when they try to challenge the status quo. Many of these businesses, as we know, are able to play fast and loose with the rules because when they lose money they can look to the government   taxpayers to pick up the tab rather than allowing the business and the shareholders to learn a lesson they should have learned the hard way. But those are simply the most extreme cases of the State/business partnership. What most of us never see are the hundreds of little advantages that businesses receive every day that stifle competition and squeeze the taxpayer. Nor do we ever see, for obvious reasons, the businesses that never come about because of this greasy partnership.

H.R. Gross

When & Why Woody Wilson Wiped With the Constitution

Woodrow Wilson. Isn’t he just the President that keeps on giving? All these years after he left the scene and we can still find reasons to mock him. In this episode we’re going to discuss Wilson’s ridiculous, and even by his standards extra-constitutional, foray into the Mexican Civil War via the invasion of Veracruz.

This incident is nearly forgotten in American history nowadays. “Invasion of Veracruz?”  The average American asks. “Oh, yeah, we did that about three years ago for our anniversary. I think we were on a Carnival cruise ship. What a buffet.  Good time, but I’m not sure I’d call it an invasion. Maybe when I was 21 but not anymore.”

As fun as that sounds dear reader, we’re talking about the 1914 invasion of the Mexican port city by U.S. forces. You see, Mexico was in the middle of one of those pesky civil wars and Wilson just could not help himself but to get involved. No doubt he was practically wetting himself as he watched our southern neighbors set up a government without his approval and one that he didn’t feel rose to the standards of his democracy meter. Clear evidence of this is a line he delivered in the fall of 1913 to Sir William Tyrrell the secretary to the British ambassador to Washington. “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!” And I’ll do so by invading their country and killing their citizens! Oops, he forgot to add that so I tacked it on for him. Really Woodrow, could anyone but a sanctimonious prune like you deliver such a line with no hint of sarcasm?

As for the events behind the debacle they’re  a bit confusing but basically you had a government in Mexico that Wilson had opposed from the start because Huerta, than man in charge, had not come to power in the cleanest fashion. Then, when news came that Huerta was going to allow an arms shipment to arrive in Mexico from Germany (even though they were Remington arms originally shipped from the U.S. to Hamburg) Wilson decided that he simply must intervene on behalf of the Mexican people. I told you this was confusing. The thing is, Britain got a lot of oil at that time from Mexico and the arms were destined to be used by the forces of Huerta  to control the Mexican ports and thus block the oil from reaching Britain. So you have Mexico, the U.S., Germany, and Britain all involved though none of them were at war with one another. Naturally, Wilson saw that what this mix needed was his enormous brain in the middle of this cauldron churning out brilliant missives to be backed up by the U.S. military beating the Mexicans like a giant pinata if necessary.

In case you haven’t noticed yet this whole thing resembled one giant crock of shit. It’s amazing it even happened in retrospect. Wilson’s ham-fisted yanqui adventure makes G.W. Bush’s jaunt in Iraq look like the precision warfare of the 1940 Wehrmacht though thankfully with less killing.

The Marines landed, things quickly spun out of control, and between 150-200 Mexicans were killed  as well as around 20 Americans. Oh, and by the way, the Constitution never really entered the picture on this one. Wilson did a lot of things that weren’t exactly in the swim by Constitutional standards but this one bears examining simply because it’s so blatant and yet so relatively unknown. I suppose it’s natural that the Veracruz event would be overshadowed by Wilson’s overreach during the World War 1 years but to the Americans and Mexicans who died in this little sally it was pretty world-changing nonetheless.

For further reading check out An Affair of Honor by Robert E. Quirk who not only wrote a great book but has a great name.

H.R. Gross