Free North Carolina: Mar 27, 2012

Brock Townsend · at Tuesday, March 27, 2012

The age of big business was ushered in with the War Between the States and Ulysses S. Grant was the perfect ornament to crown the victorious Republican party in 1868, though he narrowly won the presidency and only through the votes of newly-enfranchised slaves in the subjugated Southern States. Grant and future Republican presidents were selected to keep the marriage of government and big business in power, and at all costs.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"

Republicans and Their Chief Stockholders:

“The new captains of industry who now headed great corporate groups organized for manufacture and transport were little concerned with the majesty of government. They asked only that it guarantee them the right to embrace whatever opportunity they chose and whenever the opportunity presented itself. The “weakness” of the government – save for its military strength in the South – was a boon, making for a capitalist paradise, while the increasing strength of the [Republican] party organization, for all its bureaucratic corruption, cost little and was an immense convenience.

To be sure, the expansion of capitalist enterprise more and more touched points where the general interest was involved, where matters of special public privilege, franchises, or rights of way entered into the speculative designs of the rising class of super-businessmen. At these points, the highly centralized party institution, with its branches in each State, could be turned quickly to account; the big enterpriser need not concern himself with masses of voters, but could go directly to the managers of the party institution and treat with them plainly, or ever speak “sharply” to them. For though they did not partake of the active management of parties, the industrial barons were more than ever, as [William H.] Seward had said, “chief stockholders in the concern.”

The ruling party, when on March 4, 1873, its titular head and chief ornament, Ulysses S. Grant, delivered his [second] inaugural address, was more powerful than ever as a vote-gathering and patronage organization. It was also more disposed to use this power without stint. The more affluent and successful a party, the less it heeds its most conservative counselors. Disturbing rumors suggested nowadays that the senatorial oligarchy intended to keep “Caesar” Grant perpetually on the throne.

Emboldened by long rule, the professionals committed excesses and crimes, whose costs were chiefly borne by the wealthiest patrons of the party itself. Certain public frauds [as in] the affair of the Tweed Ring in New York, would go too far and bring retribution. Then, this done, a new series of frauds would sprout quickly: Post Office rings, in place of Whiskey rings, or land-jobbing operations in place of post-office schemes. Prominent citizens who made complaint Senator [Roscoe] Conkling or Senator [Simon] Cameron would encounter only a shrug of the shoulders, a laugh.

Important business groups were also irked by the political compromises of the Republicans upon the harassing currency question, and by their misrule in the South, which was “bad for business” and kept the whole region in poverty. Yet the Republican managers insisted upon these tactics, lest they lose their legislative majority – and what then would befall the Pacific railroads or the protected iron trade?

The great financiers and industrial captains who were “silent partners” of the ruling party, though profiting from the complaisance of their allies, often groaned at their wasteful blunderings; other moneyed groups in the competitive society, who were less privileged, were tormented by the rankling sense of the injustice they suffered from the political friends of their rivals. Coveting similar privileges, rather than an end of the corrupt system, they too created friction.”

(The Politicos, 1865-1896, Matthew Josephson, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938, pp. 174-177)