Still, it would
be equally foolish to dismiss the powerful American tradition the
demonstrators of this moment have tapped into. In the past, Wall
Street has functioned as an icon of revulsion, inciting anger,
stoking up energies and summoning visions of a new world that might
save the New World.
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The only thing really surprising about
the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it didn’t happen sooner.
The United States has a long history of friction over policies that
enable an elite to thrive at the expense of ordinary
people.
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The earliest tensions emerged soon after
the Revolutionary War, when Jeffersonian raised alarms about the
money rats” and their counter-revolutionary intrigues. They were
referring to Alexander Hamilton and his confederates, who favored a
British-style system of merchant capitalism that the Jeffersonian
feared, would undo the democratic and egalitarian promise of the
Revolution. The fissure opened by that post-Revolutionary
confrontation has never been entirely repaired.
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In the first half of the 19th
century, followers of Andrew Jackson inveighed against the Second
Bank of the United States, otherwise known as “the monster bank.”
They feared the bank was part of a systematic monopolizing of
financial resources by politically privileged elite.
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That tradition was embraced again just
after the Civil War, when the Farmer-Labor and Greenback political
parties were formed out of a determination to break the
stranglehold on credit exercised by the big banks back
East.
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Later in the 19th century, Populists
decried the overweening power of the Wall Street “devil fish.” The
tentacles of finance, they insisted, not only reached into every
part of the economy but also corrupted churches, the press and
institutions of higher learning, destroying the family and
suborning public officials from the president on down.
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When Democratic Party candidate William
Jennings Bryan vowed during his campaign for the presidency in 1896
that mankind would not be “crucified on a cross of gold,” the
Populist-inspired “Boy Orator of the Platte” was taking aim at Wall
Street, and everyone knew it.
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Around the turn of the 20th
century, the antitrust movement captured the imagination of small
businessmen, consumers and working people in towns and cities
across America. The trust they worried most about was “the money
trust.” Captained by J.P. Morgan, “the financial Gorgon,” the money
trust was skewered in court and in print by future Supreme Court
Justice Louis Brandeis, subjected to withering congressional
investigations, excoriated in the exposes of “muckraking”
journalists and depicted by cartoonists as a cabal of prehensile
Visigoths in death-heads.
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As the new century began, condemnation
of the money trust came from disparate groups that included
reformers in statehouses and city halls, socialists in industrial
cities, strikebound workers from coast to coast, working-class
feminists and antiwar activists. Financial interests were blamed
for turning the whole country into a closely held system of
financial pillage and labor exploitation while practicing imperial
adventuring abroad. As the movements made clear, everyone but Wall
Street was suffering the consequences of a system of proliferating
abuses perpetrated by “the Street.”
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The long tradition of protest that the
Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have tapped into had perhaps its
fi nest hour during the Depression. Then as now, there was no
question in the minds of the “99 percent” that Wall Street was
principally to blame for the country’s crisis.
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In addition to rallies and marches of
the unemployed, there were hundreds of sit-down strikes of workers
inside industrial plants, foreclosures forestalled by infuriated
neighbors and occupations even seizures of private property. There
was a pervasive sense that the old order needed to be buried. In
response, the New Deal was launched, and President Franklin D.
Roosevelt announced his determination to unseat “economic
royalists” who were growing rich off “other people’s money” while
the country suffered its worst trauma since the Civil
War.
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In recent years, protest by ordinary
people against the culture of wealth accumulation and the powerful
financial institutions Marx referred to as “the Vatican of
capitalism” had largely died off. We had grown fearful of using
nasty phrases like “class warfare,” “plutocracy,” “robber baron”
and “ruling class” to identify the sources of economic exploitation
and oppression.
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Now that spirit of protest is back, and
just in time. Never before has “the Vatican of capitalism” captured
quite so perfectly the specific nature of the oligarchy that has
run the country for a generation and has now run it into the
ground.
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At a march I recently attended, the
signs spoke to a reemerging willingness to combat the economic
divide. “The Middle Class is Too Big to Fail,” one proclaimed. “Eat
the Rich, Feed the Poor,” read another. During the march, a
pervasive chant “We are the 99 Percent” resoundingly reminded the
Wall Street titans just how isolated and vulnerable they might
become.
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It would be foolish to predict how
lasting this Occupy Wall Street moment will be and just where (if
anywhere) it’s heading.
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Some observers have worried that the
movement is too diffuse, that it doesn’t have a clear-cut set of
demands and that its anger is unfocused. It is far too soon to
conclude that, with the protests on Wall Street, our pitiful age of
acquiescence has ended.
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Still, it would be equally foolish to
dismiss the powerful American tradition the demonstrators of this
moment have tapped into. In the past, Wall Street has functioned as
an icon of revulsion, inciting anger, stoking up energies and
summoning visions of a new world that might save the New
World.
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It could play that role again today. In
1932, three years into the Depression, most Americans were more
demoralized than mobilized.
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A few years later, all that had changed
and the political class had to scurry to keep up. Occupy Wall
Street may indeed prove the opening act in an unfolding drama of
renewed resistance to and rebellion against “the Vatican of
capitalism.”
- Steve Fraser, MCT Campus