WALL STREET AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION
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
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.
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
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