← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 12277 | Posts: 7 | Started: 2004-02-12
2004-02-12 08:46 | User Profile
[I]John Bloom is a [B]lot [/B] better known as his alter-ego, trash movie reviewer Joe Bob Briggs. While I can take "Joe Bob" or leave him, his street-clothes persona writes a sharply observant and informative column: his website's "John Bloom" archive is well worth a visit. While there are witty moments aplenty here, he [thankfully] saves his broader humor for his Joe Bob stuff. Of course, he genuflects before the usual holies that every writer with a six-figure income does nowadays, but at least he doesn't make a habit out of it. (For the record, he's a gentile, so don't be fooled by the "Bloom".) This is a particularly interesting one and eminently representative of his approach. I wouldn't mind seeing more of John and less of Joe Bob, but as he replied to a reader asking him why he writes under the Joe Bob name, "When I try to use any other name, I don't make as much money."[/I]
[url]http://www.joebobbriggs.com/specialreports/20030519.html[/url]
Big Gorilla Capitalism May 19, 2003 by John Bloom
NEW YORK, May 19 (UPI) -- The Big Gorilla Theory of Capitalism goes like this:
We need selfish monomaniacal bulldog businessmen because they will keep the markets honest. We need their relentless tunnel vision. We need their combative natures. We even need their willingness to cheat in order to knock other people out of their way. Business should be a big brawling jungle so that the Paul Bunyans will emerge, and with them will emerge new and better industries that aren't based on sentiment.
In other words, both Kenneth Lay and Bill Gates are our friends.
But in these days of cynicism about corporate America, is it possible to make even the robber barons fashionable again? Thomas Kessner, a historian at the City University of New York, is giving it a shot in a new book on the subject that reads like a Horatio Alger throwback: those guys in the 19th century, he says, were [B]bold[/B], [B]vigorous[/B], [B]self-sufficient[/B], and [B]they made us strong[/B]. You can almost hear Marv Albert saying "Yes!"
You certainly can't accuse Kessner of trying to be trendy.
In the 1990's, it suddenly became fashionable among American businessmen to quote Adam Smith again--which doesn't say much for Adam Smith, since the decade ended with dot-com bubbles, Enrons and recession. But there was one Big Gorilla philosopher, Kessner points out, who was even more uncompromising than Smith.
Nobody much reads him anymore, but there was a 19th century English philosopher named Herbert Spencer who applied Charles Darwin's theories of evolution to morality. Actually he decided that there was no morality, only "survival of the fittest," and that when people are too weak to survive, or the unemployed starve to death, well, too bad, that's the way the universe works and it's nature's way of keeping humanity strong.
The businessmen of America's Gilded Age--Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt, Gould--weren't the kind of guys who normally read philosophy, but they loved Herbert Spencer, and they feted him like a king when he showed up in New York in 1873, the panic year, when a lot of the unfit ended up on the scrap heap of history. Andrew Carnegie, who wasn't known as a bookish man at the time, idolized Spencer and said his writings proved that anyone who tampers with society--or, heaven forbid, the markets!--is trying to turn us back to the dark ages.
In other words, greed is the engine of our salvation. So they believed, so they acted, and so, remarkably, Kessner pretty much backs them up in his new book, "Capital City: New York City and the Men Behind America's Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860- 1900" (Simon & Schuster, $27, 396 pp.).
In a way it's refreshing to find someone who is willing to boldly sing the praises of the old coots in the swallow-tail coats. It hasn't been fashionable to do that for about, oh, 90 years now. But Kessner is convinced that J. Pierpont Morgan, the architect of the modern monopoly, is the savior of the country. He makes a good case for the modern Wall Street corporation being basically Morgan's invention and says the rules haven't changed very much. He goes even further to say that, if Morgan had not stepped in with various schemes to combine industries and prop up the gold supply, the whole edifice of American capitalism might have come tumbling down. (No matter that Morgan's commissions on all those deals were exorbitant even by the standards of contemporary CEOs. This is the man who built ships for the Spanish-American War that he sold to his country at breathtaking markups.)
The problem with ALL books about the robber-baron era, though, is that there's just no way to make any of these guys sympathetic. In a way, Kessner proves as much by making the absolute best case for the achievements of the business titans-- they brought us back from the devastation of the Civil War, they brought order out of chaos by inventing new kinds of securities, bonds, futures and corporate paper, they propelled us past Europe in manufacturing and finance, and they created capital in such vast amounts that the country was able to leap forward in one generation from provincial backwater to world economic leader. And yet . . .
Okay, fine, all of that's true. But how do you get around the fact that the biggest liars, cheats and charlatans tended to win all these "survival of the fittest" battles? Some indication of just how suspicious and conniving they were is that none of them were friends. Morgan disliked Rockefeller, and vice versa. Vanderbilt hated everybody. Carnegie was so aloof he referred to other companies as "the enemy." Jay Gould was probably a sociopath.
When they went to the legislature, or the city council, they took satchels full of greenbacks to pay for whatever legislation they needed. When they were challenged in court, they bought the judges. Jay Gould, when he was trying to corner the gold market, paid The New York Times for a series of editorials that supported his views. (And they say Jayson Blair was a low point.)
By strict Spencerian principle, I suppose all this is perfectly fine. They win because they're more devious than the next guy. They spoke publicly of the virtues of competition, but in back rooms they fixed prices. (Kessner somehow manages to praise the practices of the 1860's and 1870's, when there was more or less unbridled cut-throat competition, and the 1890's, when Morgan started corraling every industry into trusts in order to maintain high prices. It seems to me you have to be in favor or either one or the other.)
I'll use just one example, though, of why I think it's wrong-headed to glamorize that pugilistic era. Kessner mentions it in passing, but I think it goes to the essence of why that sort of monopoly capitalism ultimately undermines us. Before the railroad came to the Midwest, the United States produced the greatest wheat in the world. We didn't just produce one type of wheat. Every farm produced different varieties of wheat, from different seeds, which had to be bagged in individual sacks and labeled precisely as to its type, quality and cleanliness before being shipped through the river systems to national and international markets.
The railroads changed all that. One train could carry more wheat than a hundred riverboats. So when the farmer took his grain to market, he took it, not to the river port, but to the rail terminal--and because of those titans of industry back in New York, the railroad refused to transport it in little individually marked sacks. They decreed that henceforth there would be just a few grades of grain, and once yours was weighed and assessed, it would be assigned a grade and dumped into a rail car with all the other grains of the same grade, and you'd be given a receipt for the amount and quality. The receipt no longer had anything to do with your own grain. It's essentially a futures contract, entitling you to grain of a certain grade. You, Mr. Farmer, now own a certificate of exchange value that has nothing to do with what you sold.
Here's how Kessner describes this miracle of commerce:
"Separating the value of the wheat from its clumsy, hard-to- handle physical reality and creating paper proxies for these cereals brought wheat into the orbit of capital. No longer confined to its physical form, grain could be easily sold and transferred in a new economic world where railroads and the telegraph brought together goods, buyer, and seller in a virtual market of shared information and instantaneous exchange. Grain became a paper commodity, bid upon, traded, and speculated over."
The problem here is that the "hard-to-handle physical reality" of the grain is what creates its quality. Before the Civil War we had hundreds of thousands of varieties of bread in the United States. The cereals of one farm might not even taste the same as the neighboring farm. After the war we had several "grades" and a single commodity. It might be the most efficient way to generate money, but it's not the best way to grow wheat. Kessner neglects to point out that most native varieties of American wheat had disappeared forever by the turn of the century. The seeds are extinct. This seems to me a paradigmatic example of the tail wagging the dog so vigorously that the pooch becomes a stuffed animal. (Ever taste Wonder Bread?)
Even though New York was a manufacturing center, and a refining center, and a railroad center, those weren't the things that made it the financial capital of the country. New York was the place where people weren't afraid to use the brutal power of capital itself as an end in itself. The far-flung industries affected by various Wall Street speculations, then as now, had no meaning to New York except their relative value as paper trades. Morgan would simply wait until a company--any company--had cash flow problems, then buy it at a fire sale, combine it with another company or sell its assets, and pocket the change. That's still the way it's done, but it doesn't result in better corn in Illinois.
Kessner also gives short shrift to labor movements. He talks of Samuel Gompers and the cigar factories and the Haymarket riot, but he doesn't really look into the reasons that the robber barons were so callous toward workers. As one of them once said, there was no difference between wages paid to a laborer and money spent on a shipment of pig iron; in both cases, the corporation just wants the lowest price. That, too, is unchanged today, but most CEOs would be afraid to say it out loud. The fruit of that attitude was labor unrest and violence that lasted well into the 1950's and created a legacy of mistrust that caused many Americans to flirt with Communism in the twenties and thirties.
Another thing Kessner fails to speculate about is, why did Rockefeller and Carnegie suddenly turn to philanthropy in their old age? Why would you spend a lifetime insisting that anyone who gets in your way deserves to be crushed by the force of your money, and then use the last few years of your life figuring out new and inventive ways to give all your money away to people who, if given a chance, would probably get in your way? How many foundations, libraries, buildings and schools still have the names Rockefeller and Carnegie on them? Were they just building Egyptian-style mausoleums for their mummified remains?
Judged by the standards of this book, the businessman par excellence is actually Cornelius Vanderbilt. The Commodore was a profane anti-social womanizer who didn't much care for his own family, never gave away a nickel, and believed charity was for wimps. (For some reason he did give money at the end of his life for one thing and one thing only: he founded and endowed my alma mater, Vanderbilt University, in Nashville. His reasons for doing so remain mysterious. During my tenure there, I was a part of a student movement to rename the team mascot "The Robber Barons," but we were blocked by the administration and denied a referendum. The teams remain "The Commodores.")
Finally, as Kessner ties up his 40-year history into a neat bundle, with J.P. Morgan amalgamating and consolidating all the industries of the nation into trusts and combinations and monopolies, you have to ask the question: Okay, to what end?
If the answer is, "So that J.P. Morgan could prosper," then they were deals well conceived, even as members of his immediate staff were dropping dead all around him from the stress of their jobs. But shouldn't we look deeper than that?
What happened to U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar monopoly? Faded into oblivion on world markets because it refused to compete, and now asks for tariff protection.
What happened to the railroad trust? Mostly all bankrupt by the sixties.
What happened to the Standard Oil trust? Broken up into four companies by 1912, and those four companies later recombine in various ways in the 1970's and 1980's to avoid competing with one another. (How is that even legal? Why were they broken up in the first place if they're allowed to merge back together?)
What happened to the sugar trust? A pathetic non-player today.
What happened to the Duke tobacco trust? This is one that Morgan didn't have much to do with, but it survives to the present despite almost constant harassment for the past 40 years by government regulators, taxing authorites, punitive legislation, lawsuits and public opinion. The one trust that did work, in other words, is the one America is trying to destroy.
Then there's Jay Gould, the universally hated speculator and shyster. He's not much remembered today, except as a sort of cartoon villain, but he could actually be said to be the ultimate Spencerian capitalist. He died rich and despised. Just a Big Gorilla doing his job, like Nature intended.
2004-02-12 15:25 | User Profile
[I][B]they brought us back from the devastation of the Civil War[/B][/I]
...the same Civil War that they instigated; the one that ultimately lined their own pockets. God, it makes my stomach hurt.
[I][B]The railroads changed all that. ...They decreed that henceforth there would be just a few grades of grain, and once yours was weighed and assessed, it would be assigned a grade and dumped into a rail car with all the other grains of the same grade, [/B] [/I]
This reminds me of Ygg's writings about inflation. It's not only a monetary phenomenon. It's symptoms exist all around us - from the filler in our foods to the thread count in our textiles (which are no longer made here).
2004-02-12 17:13 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno] Big Gorilla Capitalism May 19, 2003 by John Bloom
Another thing Kessner fails to speculate about is, why did Rockefeller and Carnegie suddenly turn to philanthropy in their old age? Why would you spend a lifetime insisting that anyone who gets in your way deserves to be crushed by the force of your money, and then use the last few years of your life figuring out new and inventive ways to give all your money away to people who, if given a chance, would probably get in your way? How many foundations, libraries, buildings and schools still have the names Rockefeller and Carnegie on them? Were they just building Egyptian-style mausoleums for their mummified remains?[/QUOTE]
The answer, of course, is that elite International Jewry again showed their goyische proteges how to manipulatively protect their fortunes from the raging Populists with a little more of the political and PR jiu-jitsu earlier demonstrated in the founding of the "Federal Reserve".
2004-02-12 18:50 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Marlowe][I][B]they brought us back from the devastation of the Civil War[/B][/I]
...[COLOR=Red]the same Civil War that they instigated; the one that ultimately lined their own pockets. God, it makes my stomach hurt[/COLOR].[/QUOTE] Prior to the Civil War Charles Dickens observed the North hates the Negro quite as heartily as the South, but uses slavery as a pretext for domination. Lincoln of all northern politicians was aware of this.
[QUOTE]In the 1990's, it suddenly became fashionable among American businessmen to quote [COLOR=Red]Adam Smith [/COLOR] again--which doesn't say much for Adam Smith, since the decade ended with dot-com bubbles, Enrons and recession. But there was one Big Gorilla philosopher, Kessner points out, who was even more uncompromising than Smith[/QUOTE]
Adam Smith should be read. He was not the single-minded lunatic his present-day acolytes would have you believe. He was a wise man who fully understood that capitalism had to be underlaid with a solid base of ethics and morality.
[QUOTE]Nobody much reads him anymore, but there was a 19th century English philosopher named [COLOR=Red]Herbert Spencer [/COLOR] who applied Charles Darwin's theories of evolution to morality. Actually he decided that there was no morality, only "survival of the fittest," and that when people are too weak to survive, or the unemployed starve to death, well, too bad, that's the way the universe works and it's nature's way of keeping humanity strong..[/QUOTE]
From the American Civil War onward the American wealthy of the North and Jews, with both sitting out the war to make money, have followed the sentiments of [COLOR=Red]Herbert Spencer[/COLOR], an English apostle of individualistic greed with little or no obligations to society. Spencer affirmed his moral high ground by observing that if men hired themselves out to shoot others on orders without questioning the justness of the cause, Spencer did not care if they got shot. This sentiment, so vile it is in a libertarian anthology, has long represented the most deeply held beliefs of their class. J.P. Morgan got his start in the Civil War financing the sale of defective rifles to the Union. Jews were chased out by U.S. Grant for trading with the enemy and endangering his men.
2004-02-12 19:34 | User Profile
[QUOTE=NeoNietzsche]The answer, of course, is that elite International Jewry again showed their goyische proteges how to manipulatively protect their fortunes from the raging Populists with a little more of the political and PR jiu-jitsu earlier demonstrated in the founding of the "Federal Reserve".[/QUOTE]
So right. Not only protect their fortunes, but promote other institutions whose purpose is to enslave and impoverish the US citizen. Compulsory schooling and the teachers colleges are one example (see [URL=http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm]John Taylor Gatto[/URL] ). The medical school / drug-approval racket is another.
All this AND tax-exempt status to boot! Vhat a country!
O'Sullivan's Law (John O'Sullivan - National Review) states that any organization that is not explicitly right wing will eventually become left wing. He's close. I think it's more accurate to state that any organization that doesn't explicitly and permanently exclude all JEWs from its decision-making ranks will eventually be subverted by same.
This dynamic can be seen in the [URL=http://www.vdare.com/francis/pbs.htm]Ford Foundation[/URL] , the [URL=http://www.vdare.com/francis/west_suicide.htm]Rhodes Foundation[/URL] , and, come to think of it...National Review. Go figure.
2004-02-12 22:09 | User Profile
[QUOTE]Jews were chased out by U.S. Grant for trading with the enemy and endangering his men.[/QUOTE]
Three cheers for some rediscovered American heros: Marsh & Tuttle!
[QUOTE]http://www.jewish-history.com/go11.htm
GENERAL ORDERS No. 11. HDQRS. 13TH A. C., DEPT. OF THE TENN., Holly Springs, December 17, 1862.
The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order. Post commanders will see that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and any one returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with permit from headquarters. No passes will be given these people to visit headquarters for the purpose of making personal application for trade permits.
By order of Maj. Gen. U.S. Grant: JNO. A. RAWLINS, Assistant Adjutant-General.
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol. 17, Part II, p. 424.
Plea from deported Jewish citizens
PADUCAH, KY., December 29, 1862.
Hon. ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President of the United States:
General Orders, No. 11, issued by General Grant at Oxford, Miss., December the 17th, commands all post commanders to expel all Jews, without distinction, within twenty-four hours, from his entire department. The undersigned, good and loyal citizens of the United States and residents of this town for many years, engaged in legitimate business as merchants, feel greatly insulted and outraged by this inhuman order, the carrying out of which would be the grossest violation of the Constitution and our rights as good citizens under it, and would place us, besides a large number of other Jewish families of this town, as outlaws before the whole world. We respectfully ask your immediate attention to this enormous outrage on all law and humanity, and pray for your effectual and immediate interposition. We would respectfully refer you to the post commander and post adjutant as to our loyalty, and to all respectable citizens of this community as to our standing citizens and merchants. We respectfully ask for immediate instructions to be sent to the commander of this post.
D. WOLFF & BROS. C. F. KASKELL. J. W. KASWELL.
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol. 17, Part II, p. 506.
The Order is Rescinded
WAR DEPARTMENT, Washington, January 4, 1863.
Major-General GRANT, Holly Springs, Miss.:
A paper purporting to be General Orders, No. 11, issued by you December 17, has been presented here. By its terms it expels all Jews from your department. If such an order has been issued, it will be immediately revoked.
H. W. HALLECK, General-in-Chief.
[CIRCULAR.] HDQRS. 13TH ARMY CORPS, DEPT. OF THE TENN., Holly Springs, Miss., January 7, 1863.
By direction of General-in-Chief of the Army, at Washington, the general order from these headquarters expelling Jews from the department is hereby revoked.
By order of Maj. Gen. U.S. Grant:
JNO. A. RAWLINS, Assistant Adjutant-General.
Article from THE JEWISH RECORD, New York, Jan.13,1863. DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE
HOW GENERAL GRANT'S ORDER DID WORK BEFORE IT WAS REVOKED.
A chapter of outrages committed against a co-religionist and his lady, in the West Tennessee Department—How Israelites are treated by military officers of the U.S.
An Israelite, formerly largely engaged in the Southern trade, and who at the outbreak of the war was a resident of the State of Georgia, has just returned to this city [New York] on important family business. He has furnished our reporter with the following incidence of his travel through the Union lines.
He left his late residence on the 12th ult. In company with a young lady, to whom he is engaged to be married, and three [other] gentlemen, and after passing the Confederate lines, arrived at Oxford, Miss., on the 18th of last month. Here he was conducted to the headquarters of Col. [sic. Brigadier-General Leonard F.] Ross, of Ill., who received him very courteously and directed the party to the Provost Marshal of the Department, who would undoubtedly grant them passes. This official at once handed them the passports, but before the party could leave the office he took the passports back and tore them up. [I]He then had the whole party conducted before Colonel, now Brigadier-General, [C. Carroll] Marsh, of Illinois, who immediately ordered the party under arrest, when the following conversation ensued between our informant and the Colonel: [/I]
[B]Gentleman.—"I should like to know the cause of our detention." Colonel.—"I do not feel inclined to give any.—in about half an hour you will leave for Cairo and Alton." Gentleman.—"Colonel, can I sell my horse and buggy?" Colonel.—"No, sir. You have nothing to sell. You have to leave on the next train under guard." [/B]
[I]No time was given to either gentlemen or lady to change their clothing, notwithstanding they were soaking wet, or to refresh themselves, permission being refused by Col. Marsh, amidst a volley of oaths.
Four horses, for which the gentleman paid $650, and the buggy, worth $250, were seized,[/I] [B]and when a receipt was asked, Col. Marsh replied, "I will see you d—-d first." [/B] The whole party was then placed in charge of Lieut. Wital, of a Chicago regiment, and, in the midst of a piercing cold, conveyed by railroad to Holly Springs.
At Holly Springs the prisoners were taken to a hotel, where, during the night, they were visited by a Polish co-religionist named Black, married to a Miss Hirsch, of [New York], who stated that he was authorized by Captain Hogan, the chief detective of the place, to promise them free [sic] passes, provided they would pay $100 each.
Four of the parties signed the obligation to pay, when Captain Hogan took the paper and cried out, "You intend to bribe a U.S. officer!" He locked the door until the next morning at 4 o'clock, when he returned, stating that each of the parties were fined $100, which was paid, when they were sent under guard to Bolivar, where they remained two days. [B]On the road Col. Marsh was on the train, when he again commenced his abuse of the party in the most ungentlemanly manner, using opprobrious names and oaths in unlimited number[/B], for which the young lady took him so severely to task that he left the car.
They left Bolivar on the 21st for Jackson, Tenn., on a soldiers' train, which was pushed forward with great celerity, as the commander feared an attack, but they arrived safely at their destination, where they had to take quarters at their own expense and remained ten days, when they were sent to Cairo, Ill.
Here they were handed the following order:
HEADQUARTERS DIV. OF CAIRO, Cairo, Ill., Jan.4,1863.
Mr. B.:
Sir,—In accordance with instructions from Headquarters Dept. of West Tenn., you are hereby ordered to leave the Department forthwith, and not return during the continuance of this Rebellion.
By order of Brig. Gen. J[ames].M. Tuttle, J.B. Sample, Capt. And Adj.
[B]Our informant asked Gen. Tuttle why he was expelled from the Department. The only reply was: "Because you are Jews, and they are neither a benefit to the Union or Confederacy." [/B]
While at Holly Springs, the trunk of the lady, with its contents, valued at $800, was wantonly burnt by the soldiers, and the pockets of the whole party were picked while at the Provost Marshal's office and on the way to the hotel and cars.
The gentleman also informed our reporter that the lady had been rudely treated and insulted by many officers.
Comment is unnecessary.[/QUOTE]
Another take, this one from an unsigned author: shot through [of course] with grovelling philoSemitism if gentile, or the usual rehearsed outrage if Jewish.
[QUOTE]http://www.mscomm.com/~ulysses/page67.html
Ulysses Grant has never been obvious material for a biography because he behaved too well. Writing about his virtues can quickly turn into homilies about what a gentleman he was. Some care to concentrate their energies into proving he was a butcher, a drunkard or a racist. Let's examine the third charge, specifically that U.S. Grant was an anti-Semite.
Those who claim he was anti-Jewish have ready ammunition, which Grant provided with his own hands. It is his infamous "General Orders Number 11," written in Oxford, Mississippi, on December 17, 1862. This document essentially excluded Jews from his department and its racist content has earned him censure ever since. The offensive portion of the order was in the initial paragraph: "The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department." The actual order was signed by the General's chief of staff, John Rawlins, and zealous supporters of Grant sometimes use this to absolve their man from blame. Unfortunately, this doesn't wash. Whether Grant's signature was on the order or not, he was responsible for both the prevailing sentiment and the order itself.
Authors favorable to Grant have bent over backwards in placing the blame on someone else's shoulders. Even Lloyd Lewis, one of the most capable of Grant's biographers, fell into this trap. He mused, "The order wasn't like him; (it was) utterly foreign to everything I'd found out about him." Lewis quoted Grant's father, Jesse, as saying the order was originally received by Grant from Washington and he merely passed it along as an official order under his own name. Jesse Grant figures prominently in the entire quagmire. He maintained at the time that his son's orders "were issued on express instructions from Washington," though these supposed orders have never been unearthed, despite punctilious record keeping by both Grant's staff and officials in the capitol. John Rawlins echoed Jesse Grant's sentiments, though he also was vague in his protests and offered no concrete proof that Washington was behind the racist edict.
The order is utterly unlike Grant, and he was obviously a man at the end of his tether when he wrote it. Some of this is due to his forced inactivity in the Western theatre for 6 months, some is due to his power struggle with the insubordinate McClernand, but most of it was due to his father. Grant's relationship with Jesse Grant is a fascinating psychological contradiction, and there is little doubt the elder Grant drove his son to fits of despair. Grant desperately wanted his father's approval, but the cantankerous old man was so different from his son that intimacy was impossible. Jesse disliked the General's wife, openly played favorites among the four Grant children and was an indiscreet braggart. Grant, normally an even tempered and gentle soul, was uncharacteristically harsh to his father in his correspondence. He frequently rebuked him, though the scoldings did no good. His father's behavior exasperated and embarrassed him, but it did not change.
Jesse Grant was an exceptional businessman, something else that separated father and son, since the younger Grant was inept in money matters. In late 1862, Jesse formed a partnership with a firm called Mack and Brothers, and it just so happened the Macks were Jewish. Jesse was keen on going south, gobbling up loads of cheap cotton and selling it for big profits in the north. This was not an uncommon practice and was a lucrative undertaking. In late 1862, Grant's military control extended into West Tennessee and northern Mississippi and he was in a position to assist his father's business schemes. The problem was, Grant wanted no part of profiting through cotton so long as the war raged, and regarded money making during wartime as odious. His only concern, as he frequently stated, was "to put down the Rebellion." When Jesse and the Macks arrived in Mississippi in late 1862, they wanted permits to buy cotton and ship huge cratefuls north. Physically and emotionally drained, Grant lashed out at his father (and the Macks,) by issuing an unenforceable decree. He got rid of his father and his business partners, but at great personal cost to himself.
Even before General Orders 11, Grant had occasionally expressed anti-Semitic sentiments in his correspondence. In November, he had written to General Hurlbut in Jackson, "The Israelites especially should be kept out." The next day he wrote General Webster a dispatch which stated, "Give orders to all the conductors on the road that no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad south from any point... they are such an intolerable nuisance that the department must be purged of them." This communication is equally, if not more offensive than General Orders No. 11.
Grant's decree earned him official censure in Washington and in two weeks, he received orders demanding that he revoke it. General Halleck, who was jealous of Grant's rising fame, wrote: "The President has no objection to your expelling traitors and Jew peddlers, which, I suppose, was the object of your order; but, as it is in terms proscribed an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it." Grant rescinded the decree the following day. Curiously, newspapers made scant comment at the time, and the issue gained notoriety only after Grant's death. The General himself remained strangely mute about this embarrassing and negative event, except to say, "The order was made and sent out without any reflection."
In later years, Grant loyalists scurried to make excuses for the unseemly event. Simon Wolf, in a 1918 book of reminiscences, claimed Grant had told him he had "nothing whatever to do" with General Orders 11, that it was issued by one of his staff officers (presumably Rawlins), and that he had never vindicated himself because it wasn't his style. If the incident is true, the fact that Wolf waited 55 years to tell it cast doubts on its veracity. During the Presidential campaign in 1868, Wolf had a two hour meeting with Grant and specifically asked him about the charges of anti-Semitism. "I know General Grant and his motives," he wrote at the time, "and assert unhesitatingly that he never intended to insult any honorable Jew, that he never thought of their religion... the order never harmed anyone, not even in thought... He is fully aware of the noble deeds performed by thousands of Jewish privates, and hundreds of Jewish officers during the late war."
Jewish politicians made a minor issue of Grant's anti-Semitism during the '68 campaign, but all those who met and conversed with him were unanimous that he was not anti-Semitic and they were mystified by this single lapse of judgment. It did not reflect the inner man. Never again did Grant make the slightest anti-Semitic remark and in fact, invited Jews to the White House and entertained them socially. General Orders No. 11, while certainly obnoxious, does not prove anti-Semitism, but poor judgment. [/QUOTE]
I have always found Grant a complicated, fascinating and sympathetic figure. And it goes without saying [or it should] that he was one of the last US Presidents to have shown actual valor on an actual battlefield, regardless one's opinion of the side he represented.
2004-02-13 00:29 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno]I have always found Grant a complicated, fascinating and sympathetic figure. And it goes without saying [or it should] that he was one of the last US Presidents to have shown actual valor on an actual battlefield, regardless one's opinion of the side he represented.[/QUOTE]His account of his Civil War campaigns was written in concise almost beautiful English. It should be required reading for all would-be American gentlemen. Of course, the schemes and swindles were sanitized by Mark Twain, publisher of Grant's memoirs.