Chapter I
THE ACTORS ON THE REVOLUTIONARY STAGE
Dear Mr. President:
I am in
sympathy with the Soviet form of government as that best suited for the Russian
people...
Letter to President Woodrow Wilson (October 17, 1918) from
William Lawrence Saunders, chairman, Ingersoll-Rand Corp.; director,
American
International Corp.; and deputy chairman, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.The frontispiece in this book was drawn by cartoonist Robert Minor in 1911 for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Minor was a talented artist and writer who doubled as a Bolshevik revolutionary, got himself arrested in Russia in 1915 for alleged subversion, and was later bank-rolled by prominent Wall Street financiers. Minor's cartoon portrays a bearded, beaming Karl Marx standing in Wall Street with Socialism tucked under his arm and accepting the congratulations of financial luminaries J.P. Morgan, Morgan partner George W. Perkins, a smug John D. Rockefeller, John D. Ryan of National City Bank, and Teddy Roosevelt — prominently identified by his famous teeth — in the background. Wall Street is decorated by Red flags. The cheering crowd and the airborne hats suggest that Karl Marx must have been a fairly popular sort of fellow in the New York financial district.
Was Robert Minor dreaming? On the contrary, we shall
see that Minor was on firm ground in depicting an enthusiastic alliance of Wall
Street and Marxist socialism. The characters in Minor's cartoon — Karl Marx
(symbolizing the future revolutionaries Lenin and Trotsky), J. P. Morgan, John
D. Rockefeller — and indeed Robert Minor himself, are also prominent characters
in this book.
The contradictions suggested by Minor's cartoon have
been brushed under the rug of history because they do not fit the accepted
conceptual spectrum of political left and political right. Bolsheviks are at
the left end of the political spectrum and Wall Street financiers are at the
right end; therefore, we implicitly
reason, the two groups have nothing in common and any alliance between the two
is absurd. Factors contrary to this neat conceptual arrangement are usually
rejected as bizarre observations or unfortunate errors. Modern history
possesses such a built-in duality and certainly if too many uncomfortable facts
have been rejected and brushed under the rug, it is an inaccurate history.
On the other hand, it may be observed that both the
extreme right and the extreme left of the conventional political spectrum are
absolutely collectivist. The national socialist (for example, the fascist) and
the international socialist (for example, the Communist) both recommend
totalitarian politico-economic systems based on naked, unfettered political
power and individual coercion. Both systems require monopoly control of
society. While monopoly control of industries was once the objective of J. P.
Morgan and J. D. Rockefeller, by the late nineteenth century the inner sanctums
of Wall Street understood that the most efficient way to gain an unchallenged
monopoly was to "go political" and make society go to work for the
monopolists — under the name of the public good and the public interest. This
strategy was detailed in 1906 by Frederick C. Howe in his Confessions of a Monopolist.1 Howe, by the way, is also a figure in
the story of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Therefore, an alternative conceptual packaging of
political ideas and politico-economic systems would be that of ranking the
degree of individual freedom versus the degree of centralized political control.
Under such an ordering the corporate welfare state and socialism are at the
same end of the spectrum. Hence we see that attempts at monopoly control of
society can have different labels while owning common features.
Consequently, one barrier to mature understanding of
recent history is the notion that all capitalists are the bitter and unswerving
enemies of all Marxists and socialists. This erroneous idea originated with
Karl Marx and was undoubtedly useful to his purposes. In fact, the idea is nonsense.
There has been a continuing, albeit concealed, alliance between international
political capitalists and international revolutionary socialists — to their
mutual benefit. This alliance has gone unobserved largely because historians —
with a few notable exceptions — have an unconscious Marxian bias and are thus
locked into the impossibility of any such alliance existing. The open-minded
reader should bear two clues in mind: monopoly capitalists are the bitter
enemies of laissez-faire entrepreneurs; and, given the weaknesses of socialist
central planning, the totalitarian socialist state is a perfect captive market
for monopoly capitalists, if an alliance can be made with the socialist power
brokers. Suppose — and it is only hypothesis at this point — that American
monopoly capitalists were able to reduce a planned socialist Russia to the
status of a captive technical colony? Would not this be the logical
twentieth-century internationalist extension of the Morgan railroad monopolies
and the Rockefeller petroleum trust of the late nineteenth century?
Apart from Gabriel Kolko, Murray Rothbard, and the
revisionists, historians have not been alert for such a combination of events.
Historical reporting, with rare exceptions, has been forced into a dichotomy of
capitalists versus socialists. George Kennan's monumental and readable study of
the Russian Revolution consistently maintains this fiction of a Wall
Street-Bolshevik dichotomy.2 Russia Leaves the War has a single
incidental reference to the J.P. Morgan firm and no reference at all to
Guaranty Trust Company. Yet both organizations are prominently mentioned in the
State Department files, to which frequent reference is made in this book, and
both are part of the core of the evidence presented here. Neither self-admitted
"Bolshevik banker" Olof Aschberg nor Nya Banken in Stockholm is
mentioned in Kennan yet both were central to Bolshevik funding. Moreover, in
minor yet crucial circumstances, at least crucial for our argument, Kennan is factually in error. For example, Kennan
cites Federal Reserve Bank director William Boyce Thompson as leaving Russia on
November 27, 1917. This departure date would make it physically impossible for
Thompson to be in Petrograd on December 2, 1917, to transmit a cable request
for $1 million to Morgan in New York. Thompson in fact left Petrograd on
December 4, 1918, two days after sending the cable to New York. Then again,
Kennan states that on November 30, 1917, Trotsky delivered a speech before the
Petrograd Soviet in which he observed, "Today I had here in the Smolny
Institute two Americans closely connected with American Capitalist elements
"According to Kennan, it "is difficult to imagine" who these two
Americans "could have been, if not Robins and Gumberg." But in [act
Alexander Gumberg was Russian, not American. Further, as Thompson was still in
Russia on November 30, 1917, then the two Americans who visited Trotsky were
more than likely Raymond Robins, a mining promoter turned do-gooder, and
Thompson, of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The Bolshevization of Wall Street was known among
well informed circles as early as 1919. The financial journalist Barron
recorded a conversation with oil magnate E. H. Doheny in 1919 and specifically
named three prominent financiers, William Boyce Thompson, Thomas Lamont and
Charles R. Crane:
Aboard S.S. Aquitania, Friday Evening, February 1,
1919.
Spent the evening with the Dohenys in their suite.
Mr. Doheny said: If you believe in democracy you cannot believe in Socialism.
Socialism is the poison that destroys democracy. Democracy means opportunity
for all. Socialism holds out the hope that a man can quit work and be better
off. Bolshevism is the true fruit of socialism and if you will read the
interesting testimony before the Senate Committee about the middle of January
that showed up all these pacifists and peace-makers as German sympathizers,
Socialists, and Bolsheviks, you will see that a majority of the college
professors in the United States are teaching socialism and Bolshevism and that
fifty-two college professors were on so-called peace committees in 1914.
President Eliot of Harvard is teaching Bolshevism. The worst Bolshevists in the
United States are not only college professors, of whom President Wilson is one,
but capitalists and the wives of capitalists and neither seem to know what they
are talking about. William Boyce Thompson is teaching Bolshevism and he may yet
convert Lamont of J.P. Morgan & Company. Vanderlip is a Bolshevist, so is
Charles R. Crane. Many women are joining the movement and neither they, nor
their husbands, know what it is, or what it leads to. Henry Ford is another and
so are most of those one hundred historians Wilson took abroad with him in the
foolish idea that history can teach youth proper demarcations of races,
peoples, and nations geographically.3
In brief, this is a story of the Bolshevik Revolution
and its aftermath, but a story that departs from the usual conceptual
straitjacket approach of capitalists versus Communists. Our story postulates a
partnership between international monopoly capitalism and international
revolutionary socialism for their mutual benefit. The final human cost of this
alliance has fallen upon the shoulders of the individual Russian and the
individual American. Entrepreneurship has been brought into disrepute and the
world has been propelled toward inefficient socialist planning as a result of
these monopoly maneuverings in the world of politics and revolution.
This is also a story reflecting the betrayal of the
Russian Revolution. The tsars and their corrupt political system were ejected
only to be replaced by the new power brokers of another corrupt political
system. Where the United States could have exerted its dominant influence to
bring about a free Russia it truckled to the ambitions of a few Wall Street
financiers who, for their own purposes, could accept a centralized tsarist
Russia or a centralized Marxist Russia but not a decentralized free Russia. And
the reasons for these assertions will unfold as we develop the underlying and,
so far, untold history of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath.4
Footnotes:
1"These are the rules of big business. They have
superseded the teachings of our parents and are reducible to a simple maxim:
Get a monopoly; let Society work for you: and remember that the best of all
business is politics, for a legislative grant, franchise, subsidy or tax
exemption is worth more than a Kimberly or Comstock lode, since it does not
require any labor, either mental or physical, lot its exploitation"
(Chicago: Public Publishing, 1906), p. 157.
2George F.
Kennan, Russia Leaves the War (New
York: Atheneum, 1967); and Decision to
Intervene.. Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920 (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1958).
3Arthur
Pound and Samuel Taylor Moore, They Told
Barron (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1930), pp. 13-14.
4There is a
parallel, and also unknown, history with respect to the Makhanovite movement
that fought both the "Whites" and the "Reds" in the Civil
War of 1919-20 (see Voline, The Unknown
Revolution [New York: Libertarian Book Club, 1953]). There was also the
"Green" movement, which fought both Whites and Reds. The author has
never seen even one isolated mention of the Greens in any history of the
Bolshevik Revolution. Yet the Green Army was at least 700,000 strong!
No comments:
Post a Comment