THE “CLASS-WARFARE CARD”

THE CLASS-WARFARE CARD

(c) 2009 Craig Chereek, all rights reserved
2:03 PM 12/8/2009

In the run-up to the last election, I heard Fox  cable “news” anchor Larry Kudlow accuse a guest (who was being slightly critical of the Republican’s “hands-off business-no-matter-what” policies) of “playing the class-warfare card“. It got me thinking, just how many rich men are there who have no rational economic opportunity after High School but to enlist in the Armed forces? Just how many poor people control editorial boards? How many poor people set corporate policies? Investment strategies? Just how many rich men died digging the gold and copper out of other mens’s mines? How many rich men died building the mighty railroads that criss-cross America’s mountains and deserts?

The old ad hominem defense,  accusing your critics of “playing the class-warfare card” just isn’t gonna work, Larry. When what you are trying to defend are self-serving deceptions, byzantine frauds, massive greed, selfish motives, predatory reflexes, evasive accounting and PAC behavior that smells exactly like plain old-fashioned bribery. the jury is gonna want to hear a whole lot more than that. http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html

Do I hear you right, Larry? Two plus two isn’t four because my shoes need a shine? That’s no defense at all, it’s a simple logical fallacy, Dr. Aristotle.  It doesn’t take an economist to tell a dairyman from his cow. The one ending up with all the milk is… not the cow. Even more revealing, your remark marginalizes the glaring fact that there truly is a class war furiously raging, but it’s been pretty one-sided so far, with one side doing all the warring, and the other? All the dying.

What do the wealthy say about themselves and each other? What do their own behaviors and statements say about their true motives, and those whose interests they serve? So we don’t make anyone still alive too defensive, or get any silly hackles up, let’s start with what the rich had to say a hundred years ago. It’s real easy,  because the “Class-Warfare Card” has been on the table for a long, long time, fruit of “the root of all evil…”

From Teddy Roosevelt: ”…the most dangerous members of the criminal class, the malefactors of great wealth…”. Asked how a meeting went, “It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions to be worth hearing, but as a rule, they don’t know anything outside their own business.” Of railroad magnate E. H. Harriman: “…he said he could buy a sufficient number of Senators and Congressman to protect his interests, and when necessary, could buy the Judiciary.”

From Idaho Senator William A. Clark: Defending himself against bribery allegations, “I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale.” Responding to calls to leave something behind for the future, “Those who succeed us can well take care of themselves.”

House Tyrant "Uncle Joe" Gurney

Congressman Gurney “Uncle Joe” Cannon of Illinois: Opposing the creation of public land, “Not one cent for scenery.” (Cannon signed the 16th Amendment which established Congress’ right to impose a Federal income tax.)

Senator Weldon Heyburn of Idaho: In opposition to the eight-hour workday, “People should toil from sunrise to sundown and to hell with the clock.” On calls to regulate lumber and mining interests in the West, “It is revolutionary to insist that the rights of the public to the national resources outweigh private rights.” Idaho’s Fred Dubois, Heyburn’s Democratic colleague in the Senate from 1903-07, said of him: ”You and I both know his faults, but at the same time he has virtues,” Dubois wrote to mine owner Harry Day. ” One of these is that he will be outspoken and fearless in protecting all the industries of Idaho …”

James J. Hill, greatest killer in Idaho history

Northern Pacific Railroad magnate James J. Hill: When told that building a railroad line through Idaho’s rugged Bitterroot Mountains in winter would kill every Chinaman in his employ, “Then I’ll get Swedes. Give me enough Swedes and whiskey and I’ll build a railroad through hell.”

This last one turns out to have a personal connection. No, it’s not the whiskey, it’s the Swedes (and no, I’m not Swedish). Although the traffic to hell would surely support it, Congress hasn’t yet awarded the contract for the railroad through hell. The dead have been known to vote, but they are not big on campaign contributions.

In his intended context, Mr. James J. Hill may have been right, but it was at great and tragic human expense. Before the next winter passed, that railroad had indeed killed a whole lot of Chinamen, so he got Swedes. When the Swedes got scarce, he got Norwegians, and killed a bunch of them, too. After five winters, the line was completed. The only reason it isn’t lined with their graves is because the forest was so thick and the granite so hard, that it was cheaper to ship them back down the line for burial in softer ground than to dig that ground any more than absolutely required for the rails.

Were the Swedes a top-of-the-head choice? Hardly. James J. Hill had brought in “Norski” workers before, at the end of the last century, building his Northern Pacific Railroad through Minnesota and North Dakota.

Karl Skarnes, 1880?

My great-grandfather Karl Skarnes, a Norwegian shipwright, son of a shipwright, sailed to America in James J. Hill’s employ, having signed on the Northern Pacific’s indentured line in Oslo. He spent seven years living outside in the mosquitoes and the heat in summer, and in winter endured the sleet and and ice,  felling trees, cutting tie and building trestle through the thickly-wooded land of a thousand lakes and points west. When the seven years was finally up, he returned to make a new life in a little town he’d seen along the tracks,  where the glacial till was deep and the crop was world-class potatoes. Across the street from the new train depot, the co-op, silos and brokers exchange were being built, and soon  he was finally working  for himself . Saving his pay, Karl helped build the local Lutheran Church and then bought a bare plot of land a block away. There,  he built a little hotel, which he and his new wife operated. There, they raised a family.

Their son, Carl, became a carpenter and an electrician, and after serving in France during WWI, returned to Minnesota, and went to work himself. He married, raised a family, eventually moving them to a rented house in sunny Culver City, California. Carl, too old now for WWII, worked as a carpenter for Hughes Aircraft, building the Spruce Goose, with his pretty young daughter Peggy waiting, like so many others, for some sailor to return from the Pacific. After the war, Carl returned to home-building, bought a little home in Northridge, California. Right across the street he built a Lutheran Church, like his father, and an elementary school where my Grandmother, Nellie Skarnes, taught. Nellie was also the Organist and led the choir.

Nellie and Carl’s pretty young daughter Peggy is my mother. The sailor she waited for was my late father, Charles Chereek.

In 1949 he finally came back, they courted and married, eventually buying a home in Glendale, where they, too, raised a family. With the Lutheran Church figuring so prominently in my grandparent’s background, I have no idea why I was raised in the Methodist Church, unless it was to get me into Mrs. Alford’s Children’s choir. My Grandmother Nellie, still directing a choir 40 miles away, may have played a role in that. Did the directors of church choirs network in the mid ’50′s?

Bear with me, now, this just seems like the long way around.

So I sang in choirs through high school, where I used to do my homework at the Glendale Public Library (because it was only a block away from Church and choir practice). It was a beautiful, classical stone building with columns and carved friezes, 30 foot ceilings, artisan cast-iron chandeliers, Illinois limestone, Italian marble stairs, no expense spared.  That Library was built by the Carnegie Foundation.  the charitable vehicle through which robber baron and steel giant Andrew Carnegie tried to give away an inflation-adjusted wealth estimated at four times that of Microsoft’s Bill Gates. That same  Carnegie Foundation built 2509 libraries, all around the world, not even denting his accumulated lucre.

2509 libraries, land, books, all free? Well, not really

OK, we’re back.

Now, Andrew Carnegie was half-partner in the Northern Pacific Railroad with: that’s right, James J. Hill… the same.

The next time you drive by your town’s beautiful old public Library, consider this:

If it’s a “Carnegie Library,” it is only looks like it’s made of stone, iron and glass, and is really built out of the bones of immigrants.

Through the clear eye of history, the real “class-warfare card” looks just like a funeral invitation.

For more on the public/private conflict of 100 years ago, I enthusiastically recommend Timothy Egan’s outstanding book “The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America”  http://www.amazon.com/Big-Burn-Jeanette-Ingold/dp/0152164707 , reviewed in http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-timothy-egan25-2009oct25,0,7852974.story

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