Samuel Edward Konkin, 3rd
Revisionism Today
Briefly summarized, the study of revisionism should teach us this:
1. The raison d’être of the State is theft; that is, acquiring wealth by political rather than economic means.
2. Those individuals whose wealth depends on coercion rather than free trade will use all their wealth necessary to control as much of the State apparatus as other groups also competing for such power allow them.
3. Such individuals (the power elite, plutocracy, “conspiracy,” or “ruling class”) maintain a common front for statism, but must inherently divide when some of their interests are attacked by the state mechanism for the gains of other plutocrats.
In the past, the railway companies supported the regulation of transport for cartelization. As cartelization grew, “progressives” advocated govt. intervention to correct the original statist intrusion. The Morgan financial-industrial Eastern interests supported Theodore Roosevelt and ousted the McKinley regime so that Roosevelt could institute antitrust action against the Midwestern Rockefeller interests. Rockefeller backed fellow Ohioan William Howard Taft, who used the same weapon against the Morgans. Morgan then used Roosevelt to split the Republicans and backed Wilson.
World War 1 saw Morgan interests heavily invested on the Allied side and in danger of bankruptcy. Against Rockefeller opposition, the Morgan-Warburg-Rothschild grouping of international financiers brought the U.S. into the war to bail out their investments. Rockefeller backed “isolationists” such as Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., and with the support of the quasi-libertarian populace ousted the Warmongers in Congress in 1918, and Wilson in 1920.
During the war, the intellectual community split, with proto-libertarians such as Albert J. Nock and Oswald Garrison Villard attacking Wilson and his new “court intellectuals” for selling out “liberalism.”
Robert M. LaFollette lead the Progressives against the Morgan-interest war. He went down to crushing defeat in his 1924 presidential race, dying finally a true enemy of the power elite.
Rapidly running down a list of presidential contenders and the foreign policy each stood for, we find in the Rockefeller-interest camp: Harding, Coolidge, Hoover (and Pacific warmonger Stimson in his cabinet), Wilkie, Dewey, and, of course, Ike.
In the Morgan-interest camp were the following: Cox, Davis, Al Smith, Roosevelt, Truman, Stevenson, and Kennedy. Two of the latter were “coalition” candidates with support from people outside the Eastern-Midwestern “higher circles.”
World War 2 was fought when the Rockefellers were bought off by a Pacific war by the Morganites, who were pursuing an interventionist European policy. With the “Cold War” setting up Imperial colonies for all the major statist corporations of the U.S., the Morgan/Rockefeller split was “rationalized” (Gabriel Kolko’s term).
In the 1950’s, new money emerged in Texas (oil and computers), South Florida (land and Space), Southern California (entertainment and aircraft), and the Pacific Northwest (aircraft and munitions). These nouveau-riche were termed the “Cowboys” by Carl Oglesby in contrast to the Eastern “Yankees.”
John F. Kennedy was a Morgan Yankee, with LBJ his Cowboy running mate. Richard Nixon was a Calif. Cowboy with Henry Cabot Lodge his Rockefeller-Yankee running mate.
The power of the Yankees was most blatantly exhibited between 1964 and 1974, the decade in which they were most threatened. During this time, Cowboys ran the U.S. presidency but Yankees ran the country and literally drove from office every Cowboy contender. When Johnson acquired the presidency through Cowboy assassination (the CIA is Yankee-run at the top via the State Dept. and appointed directors, but the agents.are largely Cowboy-leaning), the Morgans were toppled. Then Goldwater’s defeat of Nelson Rockefeller and Scranton put the Cowboys in control of both major parties.
The Texas Cowboys, as Ralph Fucetola of N.J. has pointed out to me, are the most established, socially acceptable Cowboys. So the Yankees joined forces with them, using their Media-University-Bureaucracy Complex (MUBC) to crush Goldwater.
This is the place to recall the FDR use of ideology to topple his opponents (also, Roosevelt’s running mate in 1932 & 1936. Cactus Jack Garner, was archetypically Cowboy). It brought about a near-coup by Morgan-DuPont interests, who backed a fascist plot (See “The Cellophane Conspiracy,” by David Rosinger in NEW LIBERTARIAN NOTES #28). Franklin aborted the move and mended his fences with his backers.
Goldwater’s major sin was an appeal to ideology. As was often explicitly stated in the “intellectual” attacks on him in 1964, Goldwater was unleashing “radicals” who would overturn the existing social order—the same sin the Morganites accused FDR of in 1934.
The ousting of Dean.Burch as GOP national chairman, ending Goldwaterite control of the party machinery, put the Rockefeller Yankees back in control of the Republicans. In 1968 the humbled Cowboys accepted Yankee Spiro Agnew as running mate for tame Cowboy Nixon.
Meanwhile, the Yankees went after Johnson and dumped him for Yankees HHH and Ed Muskie. Morgan interests, as usual, Opposed Pacific Front imperialism while supporting NATO-European interventionism. Rockefeller interests were pro-Pacific Front (hence Nelson’s support of the Indochina war down the line), but anti-Johnson Cowboy domestic control.
Nixon’s victory in 1968 led to immediate attack by the Trustbusters on Ling-Temco-Vought, a major Texas Cowboy conglomerate. However, the Southwestern (Haldeman and Ehrlichman) and Florida (Rebozo) Cowboys rode high in the first Nixon administration.
McGovern’s victory in the 1972 Democratic convention veered the party too far to the “radical” (which, to the Establishment, means “those-who-threaten-our-rule” and is applied to left, right, and libertarian regardless of other views). The most liberal Morganites hung on with Sargent Shriver’s replacement of Tom Eagleton, but others defected.
Once again, after crushing defeat of semi-radical candidates, Yankees sabotaged a Cowboy president. Using local political payoff records and tax dodging which are usually forgotten when a politico moves up to a higher office, the MUBC actually drove out Agnew and replaced him with Rockefeller Yankee Gerald Ford (Agnew himself was originally a Rockefeller Yankee but was acquiring a new Cowboy base). The remarkableness of this feat is not that they managed to find and publicize Such records and evidence but that the MUBC Suppressed all the available counter-revelations which existed for every other politician.
Whether or not Watergate was in fact set up by Yankee agents to entrap Cowboy operatives is really irrelevant, though interesting. Such activities are always going on, and again, it was the revelation and constant hammering away at the Cowboys’ culpability and the Suppression of Yankee malfeasance which is the notable achievement of the MUBC. Bringing Nixon to the point of impeachment was the greatest exhibition of Yankee power, and contrasted with the Cowboy crudity of relying on assassination.
At the point that this article is written, the Yankees are about to confirm Rockefeller as vice president. With David Rockefeller running the financial system of the U.S. and much of the world, and Nelson as president (after Ford’s predictable removal) and commander in chief, separation of power ends in the United States.
The Cowboys are on the run. Howard Hughes, who controlled Nevada Republicans through Governor Laxalt, was driven out of the state and out of the country. Texas oil is threatened by throttling of oil depletion allowances (acceptable to the entrenched Eastern “old money” oil interests); The Space Program cancellation broke several Cowboy companies and Lockheed is on the dole. H.L. Hunt is dead, his Libya venture seized by a coup.
Still, George Wallace is alive thought not kicking, and he remains a Cowboy hope for second spot. And Boeing’s Senator, Scoop Jackson, has a coalition with organized labour.
The Cowboys are also considering a Reagan/Buckley third party.
For the first time in U.S. history since 1864, the question of whether or not there will be future elections becomes debatable. In fact, the scenarios to Step the Rockefeller Yankee power consolidation seem more “far out” than the takeover.
One scenario is a Libertarian Party/Reagan Republican/Wallacite-Bircher coalition (exactly analogous to the Free Soil Party/Abolitionist Whigs/American Party coalition that formed the GOP in 1856) for a radical/Cowboy attack on the Yankees.
With Kennedy’s withdrawal, the Morgans seem strangely quiescent and willing to let the Rockefellers run the Yankee show. If the Democrats put up a Jackson/Wallace ticket, it will either be bought out (Jackson at least seems purchasable) or crushed by the MUBC. Or will it? Can even Such a huge propaganda syndicate overwhelm the average American’s innate distrust of the Rockefellers? The present indications are that around 80% of the country opposes the Rockefeller takeover. So will Rocky allow an election in 1976, after, as I believe: he ousts Ford?
The answer will be, if he thinks he can win, there Will be an election. If David Rockefeller estimates that cancelling the Constitution would incite the populace to back radicals, he will force Nelson to face election.
Who would oppose him? Jackson/Wallace would be a Cowboy ticket. On the other hand, another McGovern-type semi-radical would split the Democrats and probably win it for Rocky. A Democrat Split also gives a Reagan Conservative Cowboy group a chance.
If you are wondering who is in ascendancy at a given time, observe what industries are getting govt. contracts, Subsidies, quotas, and tariffs. Who is “Out”? The interests losing govt. contracts, being trustbusted, receiving bad press, or attacked as “threats to the ecology.”
Read the newspapers and newsmagazines, and work out the games the “higher circles” are playing.
Libertarian economic and moral theory are necessary to understand the option of a free society, and revisionism is necessary to understand the nature of the state, its class support, and its mechanics. To complete the integrated outlook, a rounded libertarian must apply his morality, economics, revisionist history, and.other fields to a goal-directed strategy. But that’s another article!
Samuel Edward Konkin, III, is one of N. America’s leading anarcho-capitalists. Sam edits NEW LIBERTARIAN NOTES, a leading Movement publication.
Southern Libertarian Review
Volume 1 Number 6 / December 18, 1974
Pages 5-6