Alfange Calls for National Labor Party to Fight Tory Reaction
ALfANGE, DEAN
AWange Calls for National Labor Party to Fight Tory Reaction New Political Force Needed To Aid U. S. at Peace Table By DEAN ALfANGE AS the warn*in its military aspects, has entered a stage in...
...Sweezy has this to say about such bills: "Public works and armament needs were financed by special bills which represented short-term borrowing on the part of the government The volume of auch bills was kept secret in order to prevent other countries from realizing the strength of Germany's long years of rearmament effort...
...Mrs...
...Furthermore the full extent of the debt was never known by the people, and since 1940 no pretense has even been made of keeping them informed about it...
...By 1918 and the end of World War I, the House of Morgan, however, was supreme...
...They want jobs—and health—and education--—and decency—and liberty and, above all, a way of life, all over the wor^ld...
...Soon after 1929 the road was all downhill...
...It is no wonder this is so since this whole financial cycle depends on a continual increase in the holdings of interest-bearing government securities by the wealthy upon which the people as a whole must pay the interest...
...This, of course/was equivalent to a command...
...But a serious crisis came up—and J. P. Morgan II, efficient if not domineering, weathered it The burial rites had scarcely ended when $180,000,000 of railroad stock crashed...
...The record of...
...If the reactionaries should succeed in wrecking the peace...
...The persistent exertion of the National Association of Manufacturers to enlist teachers and clergymen in its war against the New Deal and the future is a well-known fact...
...if in their mad fanaticism to restore tbe past, they send another Harding to the White House...
...Because this was true the government could go on issuing new...
...Let us .examine, then, what methods the Nazis have used to bring about their one^great and admitted accomplishment—namely, the forcing of the German economy -to the .fullest productive effort, the marshaling of every resource'and the employment of all her people as a preparation for tot» war...
...But the demon would dance...
...an inspired press-agent had slipped her on to him, and the squire thought the little lady was trace bis ancestry back to Henry Morgan, tne i;tn century Caribbean pirate (H was even whispered that Pierpont sailed the Union Jack above the Stars and Striepes,and the Jolly Roger above both...
...Old John Pierpont, in an era when "you couldn't run a coal mi...
...To prevent inflation of prices, however, they imposed rigid price regulations on all commodities and levied taxes that fell with especial weight upon people in the middle and lower income groups...
...J. P. was being constantly assured that his ancestry was royal...
...a strong political organization of liberal and labor forces in every industrial state...
...John Pierpont was a robber baron, a buccaneer, a magnificently hated man...
...We could, and did...
...f>In 1933 it was reduced to 4bb% by means of a conversion of tbe governmental debt into new bonds...
...With true Morgan sensitivity, . Librarian Belle Da Costa Green added: "Could we afford to pay the price and then destroy our investment...
...Nor was the world of American education and culture free from Morgan connections...
...Harold Nicolson) lyriciz-ing a highly benevolent institution, actuated solely by love of humanity and devotion to the progress of civilization...
...of his.twenty partners ever got around to paying income taxes...
...J. P. spoke quietly of the "honesty" and "integrity" and "community service" of the banking interests...
...Tiere Were some ashes in the dossier . . . ashes of important letters of George Washington which J. P. Morgan, bought and destroyed...
...Inheritance taxes, for example, have averaged &% on bequests of 10,000 marks (about *2,000) and only 37<fr at the maximum rate on bequests of over 10,000,000 marks however large they may be...
...And they had one sound principle which they applied at the start...
...And one financial historian could write: "J...
...It ? meat difficult, of course, to secure absolutely reliable' Information about events in Germany under the Nazis'and this article must be read with that thought in mind...
...Under the Nazi system savings have increased...
...international cooperation and the idealism of the Atlantic Charter is ascendant...
...Then they proceeded to force the investment of practically all surplus funds of the people in government bonds so that what they really had was a system whereby they were constantly taking out of the consumers buying power stream just about as much money as was being created...
...First, borrowing from banks, including the Reichsbank, by the government...
...But where were new !af;,';*scalc promotions and mergers to be had...
...At the end of this war, they want a peace that will actualize the four freedoms...
...and the peace, again, will be a tragic mockery of the death and sac-rifces that preceded it...
...But, said J. P., "a man would be a fool not to avail himself of every technical loophole in the tax laws...
...The total amount of the public' debt of Germany has not been known to the people generally since the Nazis took over and figures on it have not been published at' all since 1940...
...In a decade the net worth of J. P. Morgan & Co...
...J. P. (in 1933 before a Senate committee) tickled and bounced on his knee a Ringling Circus midget...
...And finally our Herald Tribune suggests "a just epitaph" for J. P. Morgan—the lines from Charles Lamb for his comrade, Martin Burney:— Free from self-seeking, envy, low design, I have not found a whiter soul than thine...
...Reform legislation split its banking and investment functions...
...One Broadway musical hit of his day presented a red-, hot griddle in Hades, tended by a chorus of devils, who blew the flames and sang— "This seat's reserved for Morgan, That great financial Gorgon...
...University trustees on a dozen great campuses took their cues from the House and from Thomas W. Lamont, at once its diplomat, its editor, its politician—Wall Street's one-man brain-trust Lament's fine hand worked overtime to preserve the fair name of J. P. Morgan and Company...
...The promoter, financier and bond salesman sat on the throne of economic empire in the em of dynamic capitalist growth...
...Untouched by the hands of Government for" fifteen years, the House of Morgan was now rocked by investigation after investigation...
...Nor has that interest been small...
...And, yet, of course, genealogists were hired to search for coronets...
...And when the scandal of "Morgan's war guilt" cut across the American conscience, scholars like Charles Seymour were on hand to straighten public opinion out Even Walter Millis* forthright account of The Road to War omits the famous cablegram from Ambassador Walter Hines Page to Wilson in 1917 warning of economic collapse if Morgan's financing failed of national military support...
...Generally the Nazi plan for financing Germany has been to raise about half the government income from taxes and half from borrowing...
...It is not recorded that he ever changed his mind...
...Yet labor has been larger...
...Taw WorU Colossus VET the House the Morgans built was no easy, * finished affair when John Pierpont died in Rome, at the age of 76, on March 30, 1913...
...When his son, whose girth was not so wide and whose nose was not so red, died last week at the age of 75, the great New York Times knew not how to mourn for him, and its historic editorial mumbled only that "interest in a great career was being revived...
...We must create, now...
...I do not know," came his reply, "bot if that is all he can get and he-takes it, I should think it was enough...
...To quote Mr...
...The inequality between rich and poor has increased under the Nazi'regime, according to Maxine Y. Sweezy, whose book, The Structure of the...
...Following the billion-dollar bond flotations for the Allies—Morgan, Thomas W. Lamont and H. P. Davidson, each personally profited more than a million dollars a year during the w«r—it could once again be said, as John Moody wrote after the organization of the billion-dollar Steel Trust in 1900: that "directly or indirectly the House of Morgan and its ' dose associates practically control the financial destinies of America.** Bestriding the world like a colossus, the House welcomed J. P. home from Europe in 1919 and threw its weight behind the Versailles Treaty...
...At home, patron of the Republican party, it held (as the Pecora investigators discovered) 167 directorships in 89 corporations, with aggregate assets of about $20,000,000,000...
...j "His passion for beauty was matched by his passion ./or tke truth...
...the people, can place out confidence.* The only other alternative is a third party, and we must prepare ourselves for that contingency...
...freely and often predicted that Germany was on the verge of bankruptcy—when she wasn't...
...A ? Old Man...
...They operate on a sound psychological pre...
...J. P. thought some of them improper and "smutty," and had them burned...
...One-doesnH speak lightly of the menace of an impending American fascism...
...And by the leisure-class I mean the families who employ one servant, 25,000,006 or 30,000,000 families...
...a strong and ariculate liberal front, of all enlightened persons, whose united voices and organiser exertions shall insure the attainment of our minimal objective: the nomination by at least one of he two old parties of a candidate in whose domestic and world outlook, we...
...general methods of securing the borrowed funds * have been used...
...It was this:' that as long as production of goods can be increased, money in circulation can and should be in-reased too" and in the same ratio as the goods...
...The plain people, the people who have most at stake in this conflict, must now awaken to the fact that the war must be fought and won on two fronts: On the military front against the Axis, and on the political front against the forces of reaction and isolationism...
...Unless the liberal-labor forces unite in each state and organise on a national scale to counteract the menacing growth of Toryism with its powerful lobbies, pressure groups and paid publicists, the plain millions who yearn for an enduring peace and freedom from fear and insecurity will be betrayed as in the last war...
...it was -also a means of preventing an inflation of bank deposit money...
...In February...
...without machine-guns" (Mellon) and "ay men colli-', do whatever he pleased with his own prop-" erty" (Morgan), wrecked r.nd rebuilt railroad systems for profit and power...
...The simple over-all plan is to destroy the power of Labor, of the common people, and to restore the normalcy and isolationism of the era of Warren G. Harding...
...What was clear, however, was that the amounts were precedented...
...Germany was working ab something pr other and until'all' machinery and equipment were going at full speed...
...To be concluded.] "THE record of this 78th * Congress nearly realises the black prophecies of the liberals when it opened its session...
...Contrary to a widespread idea that Hitler has nationalized the financial system of Germany, or sap-plied the monetary needs of the nation by means of governmental issue, the exact opposite appears to be the case...
...mise: the inveterate tendency of the American people to become-, conservative with returning prosperity...
...And while it is true that Hitler got along largely without gold, it is a]so true that he grabbed as much of it as he could lay his hands on in Czechoslovakia ami elsewhere...
...Interest rates in America and in England have been substantially less than those in Germany...
...They were discountable at any bank and at the Reichebank...
...The House of Morgan was beginning to look a little run-down...
...Eveji the war did not lead Germany to levy taxes upon the rich to anything like the extent done in the United States...
...We of the American Labor Party are determined to preserve these, the people's liberties, against any threat, whether from outside or within our borders...
...A careful examination of such facts as we are able to get'dees not bear out the legend of new and magical methods on Hitler's part...
...It has, .been...
...But let us also set forth clearly the-'inherent advantages that Hitler or a like dictator win always erljoy over a'free people and their government so long as debt money rules Ihe economy of men...
...It reveals the use of the power of the Gestapo as well as other means-to siphon the savings of the people back into the hands'of the government thence to be spent on armaments...
...An unassailable rectitude shone forth through hie gentle and modest demeanor...
...TTHE Nazis wanted, first of all, to achieve full produc-* tion in Germany—primarily for war...
...He was a great gentleman, and all that he did . t was touched by a delicate sensitiveness...
...In both major parties the movement away from post-war...
...It is the only means of averting a catastrophic political reaction that will wreck the peace...
...This, in turn, has meant the' necessity for further increases in the national debt—especially since the government wanted to channel as much investment as possible into armament...
...According to Wallace R. Deuel in his book, People Under Hitler, the debt of the Central Government alone was 11,000,000,000 marks when the Nazis took over in 1933 and 37,000,000,000 at the outbreak of the war...
...Thereafter, since the Nazis desired to devote a greater^aad greater proportion of production to preparation for war, they undertook to continue to have additional credits created to be spent largely upon armament...
...Third, there have been the special bills which the government has used to pay contractors, especially, of course, for armaments...
...The reason savings have increased is because the whole financial system has favored the well-to-do at the expense of the people generally...
...you destroy the leisure class," J. P. Morgan warned a decade ago, "you destroy civilization...
...And*perhaps, efter:all, J. P. Morgan, grandson of Jiinius Spencer Morgan (who left 10 million dollars), son of John Pierpont Morgan (who left 69 million dollars V was not the man the New York Herald-Tribune said he was...
...Thejf include, apart from political propaganda and the usual means of mass persuasion, the subtle exploitation of prejudice, sacrifice and even human suffering...
...That pressing need is told here by Dean Alfange, ALP Gubernatorial candidate...
...Once the'House of * Morgan could smash the international Rothschilds...
...The exposure of Charles E. Mitchell, the bankruptcy of the Van Sweringens, the jailing of Richard Whitney,' all" tarnished its golden record of "character" and "integrity...
...As Ferdinand Lundberg records in his America's 60 Families, this omission was made after a meeting with Lamont...
...J. P. cruised in the ancestral Corsair, and cherished the yacht with his rare, original manuscript of Lord Byron's celebrated poem...
...By 1942 the Morgan bank had dropped to the nation's - eighteenth position...
...A Windy House ? ET hard days were ahead...
...And let us see not only the kind of thing we must compete against if we are to come off victorious...
...This is the opportune time for our nation's labor, progressive, and liberal forces to serve a fair and early-warning on the Democratic Party that they must nominate a liberal Presidential candidate in 1944...
...What he would have done had he had access to gold is an open question...
...They had been saying—"Morgan used to float better than he knew, and now he sinks better than he ever floated...
...Books and articles were written (cf...
...census showed that in all of the United States there were less than 30 million families altogether, and...
...The potential American fascist, unlike the German and Italian fascist, believes in liberty but conceives of liberty only as the right to have and to hold, to fire and to hire without restriction...
...The point is that the debt-money system—the system of securing the medium of exchange of *· rtataor...
...There is a growing awareness among our people of the kind of peace—and that means the kind of future—for which we are fighting this greatest of all wars...
...Even the exploitation of the returning soldiers as a conservative anti-labor force is in the calculation of the Tories...
...Opinion-making agencies are chief focal points of operation...
...John Pierpont roared, "I owe the public nothing...
...the right to develop into one's best, the right to equal justice, the right to inquire and to criticize, the right to worship according to one's conscience, the right to advance according to one's merit and...
...Plerpontifex Maximus," was...
...P. Morgan & Company has lost its brilliant plumage...
...It would have been too mach to expect -that the scholarship which found him, in one case, deriving from King David of Scotland, and in another from a dynasty of Welsh Kings, would seem "assailable...
...At this very moment when victory on the military front seems assured, defeat on the political front looms imminent...
...or expect a nation-wide third party movement and a national third party ticket, organized to prevent monopoly in government and dishonest political collusion...
...For years during the Great Depression neither Morgan nor-any...
...John Pierpont scowled fiercely past big, black smoky cigars...
...J. P. once postponed a business trip to Europe in order to await the blooming of a special rose *in his favorite garden...
...Thus the Nazis were not only continually paying the German bankine svstem for creatine Additional deposits for the government to spend just as we have been doing here, but they were able to recapture through bond sales to the public as well as by taxes any proportion of this new money which the government desired to recover...
...by paying financial houses to create it in the form of book credits to be loaned into circulation at interest—will work if price and v?age controls can be enforced by decree, if all savings can be continually forced back into the investment stream and if the size of the public debt can be com-, pletely disregarded...
...The Housewives League of America rubbed its eyes...
...The construction of the Lend-Lease machinery with the outbreak of World War ? gave it a kind of symbolic disposses...
...Alex Rose, , State Secretary of the American Labor Party...
...apathetic, and only lately has it stirred to organize against the reactionary danger...
...So far as can be discovered this has been an entirely orthodox procedure with the banks creating the "money" on their books and the government paying them interest for so doing...
...bonds and notes and selling them for new-bonds and notes and selling them for new bank deposits on the books of the German banks, so long as no limit was set to the increase in the public debt...
...Do you think," J. P. once was asked, "that $10 a. week is enough for a working man to earn...
...J; P. Morgan commands unbounded respect for its integrity and sagacity em well for its public spirit" The demon and the dossier began to drag a mean, bleck, debunking trail across the white-worded eulogy...
...And on the other hand some American advocates of "monetary reform'' appear to^iiave let themsejves believe that the things they hoped for were being practiced in Germanyj^Hitler,' of,course, has demonstrated that it is not necessary, for a nation to have gold to back its money...
...The results of the recent elections indicated that in many parts of the country there was an indifference, if not utter ignorance as to why we are fighting and a marked renewal of the intellectual and spiritual isolationism of the pre-Pearl Harbor days...
...Mussolini is a very great man," said J. P. Morgan, and proceeded to pour 156 million American dollars, into the founding cornerstone of Italian Fascism . . . and some $248,000,000 into the Japanese Empire . . . both at no inconsiderable profit to his House...
...When the Nazis came to power the total German public debt amounted to 24,300,000,000 marks...
...The House the Morgans Built By UELVIN J. LASKY The 6pm op and the Pouter THE' demon danced, maliciously over the dossier...
...J. P. Morgan was dead, and nihil nisi bonum, nihil nisi bovnrh drummed through our head, as sweet light* stared out at" us from the glowing editorial tributes in the morning papers...
...Economy (published 1941 by Harvard University Press) is probably as authoritative a work on this subject as we have...
...The statistics of the 193...
...These bills have at times been used to pay as much as 40% of the cost of contracts...
...Once it was the life-like example of Ambrose .Bierce's Devil's Dictionary definition of "Impunity, n. Wealth...
...fewer than 2 million maids and cooks to attend them all...
...finally the right: to be secure from want and privation in the midst of plenty...
...At bottom the explanation lay in the general "decline of the investment banker...
...Big, aging J. P. wasn't feeling quite at home any more...
...Methods of financing used in Germany have apparently been the traditional methods of finance-capitalism...
...In a state-capitalist era of slow-moving economic expansion, supported by institutional investment and government financing, the House of Morgan slipped from dizzy heights...
...And our little demon, relentless, indefatigable, offered another epitaph, juster if angrier, truer if less poetic, from the lines of John Dos Passos in UJ5.A.:— (Wars and panics on the stock exchange, machinegvnfire and arson., v bankruptcies, warloans, starvation, lice, cholera and typhus: good growing weather for the House of Morgan,) • * · Father and Son · COR all that, J. P. Morgan was not the man his father...
...The need for labor political action now as a bulwark for 1944 is only yet dimly realised...
...Banks, trust companies, public utilities, whole insurance combines all felt the Morgan touch...
...But as an inducement to bondholders to make this transfer a bonus of 20^ of the nominal value of-tbe bonds was offered them if,-they converted...
...The article here is the text of a speech at the Philadelphia New Leader dinner last Sunday...
...That warning, I submit, must . also be served upon the Republican Party, the majority of whose leaders are utterly callous to the challenge of the times...
...Exploding the Nazi Finance Legend—'Gestapo' Control Harnessed Banks to Hitler War Machine By JERRY VOORHIS ' ' Member of Congress IN the 4srly years of Hitler's rise to power and of his . regime in Germany, he founded a legends among the German people...
...The techniques of implementation, however, are numerous and intricate...
...The legend was that he had tbe answer to unemployment, that he could put.people to\<Kork, that he knew how to overcome the financial barriers and obstacles to full production and employment which were defeating the democratic nations in their attempts to put their people to work...
...in March, 1939, before the outbreak of the war it was 59,000.000,000 marks...
...that will put an end for'centuries to come to the evil thing we call war...
...1941, the Vice-President of the Reichsbank made a speech in Hamburg in which he stated that there was no intention of igoing below 34fr on the nation's medium-term borrowing...
...They had absolute economic as well as political power...
...Social legislation has been wrecked, the National Resources Planning Board abolished, and a damocles sword hung over the heads of labor...
...This demon was a regular little Mephistopheles...
...and today it is probably somewhere near 150,000,-000,000 marks...
...But few really adult minds needed such a demonstration...
...We who place our faith in the common man define liberty as the right to be...
...The Nazis contended they did not constitute part of the public debt but they did bear interest and they were, of course, obligations of the government...
...THERE is the pressing need * for creating, now...
...The things of the mind and the things of the spirit both were united for him,' in the operation of a truly balanced soul, and, instinctively, he made them both his own...
...They have the most articulate and best organised . political sponsorship...
...For if any volume of government expenditures of new money resulted in undue profits or savings in the hands of the public those funds were quickly recovered by the government by the simple process of having some Nazi agent call on the firm or person in question and indicate that it would be "a good idea" if they bought government bonds of a given amount...
...They have organization, money and plans...
...desperate...
...Second, there has been the sale of bonds to corporations and individuals...
...It was a dry season for an old man in a windy, house...
...Such,destruction was justified (it was explained), "even if it only served 'to keep aiive in our schools the fable ??* the cherry tree...
...John Pierpont was gruff, arrogant, rapacious...
...sums up the situation as follows on page 235 of her book above referred to: "The inequality of 'distribution -of wealth and income has increased and wages have been kept at depression levels, while profits have considerably recovered...
...It is true, as Lewis Corey has written in his biography of the money-masters, that "there was no successor to J. Pierpont Morgan—not owing to a scarcity of financial dictators, but because the system of industrial and financial centralization and control nd longer required personal dictatorship, functioning now in terms of the dictatorship of an institutional oligarchy...
...In this way they were able to shift more and more of the production of Germany to war industries...
...An enlightened and good man, indeed, who could, perhaps, recognize similar qualities* in others...
...POWERFUL individuals, associations and groups, people who hate Roosevelt's idealism and who want to crack the whip across the back of Labor, are contriving to rob the people of the kind of victory and peace that is justly theirs...
...A LL this, of course, depended on a continuous expan-gion of the public debt, but since the Nazis enjoyed absolute power there was none to question this or to protest against it...
...AWange Calls for National Labor Party to Fight Tory Reaction New Political Force Needed To Aid U. S. at Peace Table By DEAN ALfANGE AS the warn*in its military aspects, has entered a stage in which ? the United Nations can for the first time anticipate the military future with genuine hope of victory, in its political aspecta the war has retrogressed...
...As has been said, various devices and decrees have practically compelled corporations to invest all earnings above 6'i in government bonds...
...Much,, has been written about Hitler and his financial system...
...Said Lamont: "Do not let us forget that it is the German people— not their rulers alone—who were responsible for the war...
...It is no longer the victory that is in danger, bot the peace...
...The, true, facts about Germany seem to show us the Nazis making it possible for bank stockholders to enjoy a larger income than ever before and requiring the people to bear a burden of debt that mounts faster than the debt of our own country...
...Society was crumbling, government was...
...Instead, it reveals a picture of the'Nazis conducting a gigantic government spending program, Using deficit financing on such a scale as was never Chough of in America until the war came...
...But government debt has not been the only means used by the Nazis to bring debt-money into play as a means of keeping the German economy running at top speed...
...was cut by two-thirds...
...Bqt with this all-important addition that there has been dictatorial power which was strong enough Continuously to recover practically all the savings of corporations and individuals by what amounted to forced sales of government securities...
...We are determined to secure a people's victory for a people's peace...
...We must ask our fellow citizens t* join with us and work with us in this great task, in this truly historic opportunity to help mold the shape of things to come...
...I fear that an American type of fascist state will be established in our own country...
...Reparations, the Dawes committee, the Young plan left the House of Morgan banker for empires, kingdoms, and republics...
...No longer does it finance the governments of Europe, and no longer is it the dominant financial agency in the United States...
...Furthermore, the tax system has been so arranged that the percentage of the wages of the low-paid workers taken in taxes has been greater under the Nazis whereas the percentage of large incomes so taken has been less than it was in Germany before...
...The highest income tax rates were fixed at 6*5%, those on incomes of 5,000 marks (about $1.000) at 157r...
...Through 1933 and 1934 the long-term rate stood at T7r...
...VThs House of Morgan has suffered the loss of an enlightened leadership and a good man...
...The best evidence of this fact is the drastic decline in the New Deal representation in Congress and the emergence throughout' the country of anti-liberal and anti-labor movements and spokesmen...
...This was' the general policy followed up until practically everybody in...
Vol. 26 • March 1943 • No. 12
