America’s Third Great Awakening — Part II
1886 to 1928
Joseph F. McCormick and David A. Palmer, Ph.D.
Continued from Part I:
Evolving “conflict system”
An American “conflict system” had been evolving from the start. The fight, flight or freeze reactions to the experience of conflict is known to be addictive. It produces chemicals in the body that can, in a perverse way, make you feel more alive than a life free of conflict which may otherwise seem boring and dull.
In the beginning it was between the unique Northern and Southern social contracts in the context of power struggles between Britain and France, the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Following Washington’s terms in office it became between the party that stood for the rights of property and “the other” that stood for the rights of people.
The conflict system was more simple in the beginning, however. Its dynamic tensions were held among, primarily, Northern European men who had similiar ways of resolving conflict, ultimately deferring to the “strongest man” in the final decision (i.e. strong man model…see one point of view of this phenomenon.)
In contrast, however, some viewed the disunity of the conflict system as antithetical of the principle of unity. This view was held among those who most closely identified with the original mission of the “City on a Hill” as preparing a place for the millenarian “Return of Christ,” including the lineage of Enlightenment philosophers and statesmen beginning with Dee/Bacon and extending to Franklin, Washington, Madison and even Adams and Jefferson.
The conflict system began to evolve in the 1840’s with the “awakening of the political feminine.” All of a sudden the rules of conflict began to change. The “strong man model” is not respected by women who are determined to make their voices heard. Women are less confrontational, more relational, view “hot” or “range weapons” for what they are (psychological symbols), and take a longer view. Archetypally women are more like the feminine natures of water and earth — flowing around or organically overgrowing obstacles— rather than the masculine qualities of fire and air — overpowering or out-smarting adversaries.
By the end of the 19th century the conflict system began to spread to social change movements which took a range of approaches: conciliatory and inclusive on the one hand, like the family oriented, community educational Chautauqua gathering (see Part I) where all points of view were welcomed, to, on the other hand, violent strikes, industrial sabotage, bombings and other anarchical tactics which became associated with “radical” elements of the Socialist, Communist, Populist, Democracy and Progressive movements.
In this period — 1886 to 1928 — two distinct approaches to social change arose: one non-violent and one violent. These strategic approaches would be refined by places like the Highlander Folk School in the 1930’s and applied in the 1960’s. Ultimately, however, both violent and non-violent methods were within the conflict system, differing simply about the nature of the tactics to be used. Either way, they attracted equal and opposing counter strategies and backlash from their opponents, thus perpetuating a drama triangle.
The late 19th and early 20th century saw a flourishing of third parties seeking to open up the process to a wider range of voices and policy choices. None however were ever able to break the two party monopoly. The Socialist Party succeeded in electing hundreds of mayors and local council people in the 1920’s and in 1924 Robert La Follete running as a socialist, progressive, farm labor candidate got 17% of the national presidential vote, the high water mark of the electoral progress of third parties (until Ross Perot in 1992 received 19%.) The electoral game was rigged, however, to keep the attention narrowly focused on the scripted red-blue conflict.
This suppression of free expression about “who decides who benefits” — the central question of governance — created great frustration, and in the extreme, rage. In the face of a rigged electoral game some chose alternative means of making their voices heard.
The IWW, Socialist and Community Party organized hundreds of labor strikes and incidents of industrial sabotage. Women demonstrated, organized sit-in’s, and participated in jail hunger strikes. These became widespread and by the 1920’s increasingly violent including veterans of WWI who were on the receiving end of German shrapnel manufactured in munitions plants financed by J.P. Morgan.
The more radical elements of the social movements did everything within their ability to disrupt the industrial system. The defenders of “the system” did everything within their power to disrupt the “anarchists.”
Unity movement
At the same time as the “conflict system” was evolving a unity movement beyond, or rather, transcending identification with any of the matriarchal/patriarchal, centralized/decentralized polarities was also emerging, yet a third axis we have labeled material/spiritual.
This approach was embodied and advocated by Abdu’l-Baha on his 239 day visit to America during the highly contentious 1912 presidential election where his coast to coast travels and speaking engagements brought him into relationship with many of the leading politicians, industrialists, men of science as well as social reformers and spiritual seekers of the day. Detachment and transcendence, withdrawing energy from the conflict system to build a higher-order unity, had been advocated and practiced already for decades in Persia by the heavily persecuted followers of Baha’u’llah, Abdu’l-Baha’s father. (Interestingly, at nearly the same time in South Africa Ghandi was pioneering a related spiritual approach known as satyagraha, or “truth force,” albeit within the conflict system.) We will discuss this approach in greater detail in a future essay.
The unity movement saw all “sides” as simply archetypal aspects of a larger integrating whole. There began to arise in the America political body a distinction between those who were emotionally hooked by the drama/trauma of the conflict system (war), and those who were not, those who stood at or near the center of the storm of opinion unwilling to take sides, and those caught up in the conflict whose identity was primarily one of “not them.”
The best example of this phenomenon was the Chautauqua Movement which was really a movement for creating safe, healthy spaces for resolution of conflict and search for truth that integrated all polarity. It was a highly informal, family friendly place in hundreds of communities, large and small, coast to coast where all points of view were welcome. In communities like Ashland, Oregon, a small western railroad community, for example, they had as many as three “Chautauqua domes” the size of a football field, each to host weekend, “whole system” gatherings rain or shine, hot or cold.
In these gatherings a topic emerged, like, for instance, what to included in a local City Charter, a local constitution, and often taken up and discussed over a series of weekends. There was no formal committee structure and no one was “in charge” but there were always those who took careful notes and took responsibility for digesting and circulating them within the community between meetings.
After a number of weeks the central themes and something of a group mind could begin to be discerned. From a highly unstructured, divergent process a time arrived for convergence and everyone somehow knew it. As the native Americans say, “we talk until there’s nothing left but the obvious truth.” No one was driving the agenda in one direction or the other. The process was organic. It was rooted in a deeper quality of listening, listening for themes and sentiments and then seeking to capture and express them with as much integrity as possible. If the words truly reflected the group sentiment everyone understood it, there was a nodding of heads, a collective, “Yes, that’s it! That’s what we want.” Or conversely there was a “No, not quite…something doesn’t feel/seem right here, let’s keep on talking.” It was a process that relied on a different form of intelligence. A more feminine, intuitive sense, even a sixth sense, of what “fit” rather than a logical, reasonable articulation of a policy that engaged mainly the head and resonated little with the heart.
This form of small and large group collective intelligence process became widespread. It opened up everything for examination and reexamination and its wisdom bubbled up into official conversations among decision makers. This was the original intention of the founders of America. A system where decisions were informed by high levels of public engagement where the decision makers responsibility was to be patient enough to wait until the “correct policy” emerged from the public engagement and then choose it and implement it.
Imperial Response to Utopian Awakening
Naturally, in the face of all these decentralized shades of awakening some became defensive. Some viewed the situation as a competition between the ideals of economic progress and the ideals of social progress and in such a competition strategic thinking was called for.
If the social reform movements were here to stay, their criticisms of the Imperial Project would need to be addressed more skillfully. To this end a number of strategies were unfolded:
One strategy was the invention of the field of Public Relations to organize communications professionals to carefully listen to the concerns of average people. The products and services of corporations could then be presented in a skillful way as to cause people to believe that the industrial culture was bringing them, or would bring their children, the social benefits they sought. After the turn of the 20th century cars became “freedom,” a Frigidaire became “prosperity,” a college education a “ticket to success.”
From the outset some saw through PR for what it was, an orchestrated effort to “burnish images.” One was the 1905 author of the Wizard of Oz says by L. Frank Baum who put the unforgettable words “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” in the mouth of the Wizard. He no doubt had developed his allegorical story with the influence of suffragette activist housemate Matilda Gage and singing quartet friend James Kyle, the Populist Party Senator from South Dakota.
Another strategic reaction to the progressive movements was the academic field of International Relations to professionalize the education and training of those who would be needed to assist in managing the international interests of the, by now, multinational successor corporations to the British East India Company.
A way was needed to make it acceptable and palatable for America to intervene abroad to open markets and gain access to resources. Early 20th century resource conflicts in Latin America, Cuba, Mexico, Philippines, and China in the future had to be more skillfully presented to the public and more professionally managed abroad, such that the otherwise isolationist American people would continue to provide the needed military and budgetary support. (One highly decorated veteran of these conflicts, Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, years later wrote and spoke harshly about about “who he had been actually fighting for” when he won both of his Medals of Honor. His speech and book: War is a Racket.)
By the end of World War I and the founding of the League of Nations, U.S. corporations had “interests” in dozens of countries across the globe. The School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University (founded 1919) and books like The Control of International Relations (Quincy Wright, 1922), and the Committee on International Relations (CIR) at the University of Chicago (University founded by J.D. Rockefeller in 1889, CIR co-founded by Quincy Wright, 1928) helped advance a point of view that nascent International Law — an emerging, informal body of law with no supreme sovereign — was superior to U.S. Consitutional Law. In short: International Law gave much freer range to the ambitions of international business than the more confining U.S. Constitutional Law.
Another strategy was the creation of the field of “Philanthropy.” The Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie Foundations along with hundreds of other second and third tier foundations were organized as a means of funneling a small percentage of corporate profits back into “humanitarian” causes. In many cases when the corporation was still run by a family or an ethical founder, truly philanthropic work was accomplished. Andrew Carnegie, for example, funded a nationwide network of libraries in hundreds of towns across America.
This strategy has been remarkably successful. In the past century bonafide philanthropic work supported by skillful PR and mixed with philanthropic control of the non-profit sector (which we will address in a later essay) has rescued the image of “monopolistic robber barons.” Today these same dynasties are viewed with admiration rather than targets of populist ire.
Yet another strategy was the invention of the field of “public health.”
With the growth of the oil economy and the resultant new field of chemistry the petrochemical pharmaceutical industry was born in the late 19th century. Domestically, the Carnegie Foundation sponsored research to map all the decentralized medical schools in the nation that produced local doctors and naturopathic physicians. With a comprehensive map in hand these schools — many of whom taught natural wisdom of plant medicines well known in the culture for generations — were purchased by Rockefeller and Carnegie associates and closed or re-organized to support a new model of medicine based on petrochemical pharmaceuticals distributed through a hospital and insurance system (see one version of this account that bears further investigation.)
Internationally, the Rockefeller Foundation organized the International Health Division in 1915, which, along with the Health Organization of the League of Nations, became the World Health Organization in 1948.
Thus began the entrance of business ethics and motives into public health both domestically and internationally. This “economic sector” now represents over 1/5th of the U.S. GDP and is the largest employer in most states with profit being derived from shortly after the moment of human conception to final interment after physical death. (From an actuarial standpoint, death often occurs after a lengthy period of petrochemical and invasive surgery-induced decline that ends with the predictable exhaustion of a person’s life savings.)
Central Bank finally achieved
By far, however, the most consequential “defensive strategy” of the Imperial Project to “better manage” the rise of the progressive movement was the final completion of the effort to take over control of the nation’s mechanism for creating money by finally forming a privately held central bank.
As far back as Alexander Hamilton, the “men of wealth” sought to control the creation of national money. It was well known from the Bank of England’s experience with the earlier phases of the Imperial Project that if the government was indebted to your financial syndicate, your financial syndicate de facto had a seat at the table of governance, a central voice in public policy.
The British Imperial Project required massive amounts of financing that extended far beyond the capacity of the crown treasury. The king or queen turned to private financial syndicates, “Square Mile” banking houses to organize its financing.
America was highly suspicious of financial centralization during Hamilton’s time and each successive generation successfully disrupted efforts to organize such a powerful institution. Most famously the “bank war” of the Jacksonian era of the late 1830's.
The efforts to disrupt the creation of such a potentially ungovernable entity were finally overcome the day before Christmas Eve in 1913 — i.e. few paying attention due to impending holiday — in creating the Federal Reserve Bank, a network of twelve regional banks, privately owned by its member banks. The controlling interest and majority ownership was to be held by a small number of the oldest banking houses of New York and London. These handful of family dynasties in fact governed “the independent” board of governors, nominated by member banks. The entire system beyond the oversight or regulation of the U.S. government and people which it was to serve.
Among the majority shareholders of American and English banking houses that are reputed to control the whole system, and therefore, the creation of money in America are: N.M. Rothschild & Sons, The Bank of England, J. Henry Schroder Banking Corp., Brown, Shipley & Company, Morgan Grenfell & Company, Lazard Brothers, Chase Manhattan Bank, Brown Bros. Harriman, Alex Brown & Son, J.P. Morgan & Company, Morgan Guaranty Co., Drexel & Company, Morgan Stanley Co., Kuhn Loeb Co., Lehman Brothers N.Y, National City Bank — N.Y., National Bank of Commerce N. Y.
According to Wikipedia: “Before the establishment of the Federal Reserve, the banking system had dealt with periodic crises (such as in the Panic of 1907) by suspending the convertibility of deposits into currency. In 1907, the system nearly collapsed and there was an extraordinary intervention by an ad-hoc coalition assembled by J. P. Morgan. In the years 1910–1913, the bankers demanded a central bank to address this structural weakness. An early version of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act was drafted in 1910 on Jekyll Island, Georgia, by Republican Senator Nelson Aldrich, chairman of the National Monetary Commission, and several Wall Street bankers. The final version, with provisions intended to improve public oversight and weaken the influence of the New York banking establishment, was drafted by Democratic Congressman Carter Glass of Virginia. The structure of the Fed was a compromise between the desire of the bankers for a central bank under their control and the desire of President Woodrow Wilson to create a decentralized structure under public control.”
It is quite reasonable to be suspicious of the imperial motives of the small group behind the creation of the Federal Reserve. The result was in fact a permanent financial-political dynasty that has lasted to this day. The relationship networks can be traced across generations. The means of consolidation was through merger and acquisition on the one hand and intermarriage between old and new money on the other.
John D. Rockefeller, for example, whose personal net worth, including stock ownership in the thirty four successor companies to the original Rockefeller Trust, represented nearly 2% of the U.S. GDP, a percentage many times higher than the billionaires of today, married his son, John D. Jr to the daughter of the author of the Federal Reserve Plan, one of the “big four” Republican senators who controlled the senate, Nelson Aldrich. He married one of his four daughters to the chairman of the International Harvester Corporation from the McCormick family of Chicago. One of his grandchildren married the grandchild of Fredrick Billings, the president of the largest railroad in America. Another grandchild, David Rockefeller, partnered with the son of maternal grandfather Nelson Aldrich in taking over in 1946 the now J.P. Morgan Chase Bank (founded originally in 1799 as the Manhattan Bank, the rival to Hamilton’s Bank of New York), the single institution most responsible for facilitating the organization of the current international financial system.
These financial institutions choose the winners and losers in America. They decide which corporations, projects and ideas get funding and which don’t. In material terms they have near “god power,” they control the life blood — the fiction of fiat money — that animates our national and now global life.
An example of their influence from the late 19th century was their shaping of the method of electrification:
Edison was a national hero for inventing the light bulb and bringing light to the eastern seaboard cities. He founded the General Electric Company with the financing of J.P. Morgan and his associates. His heavy capital investment was in direct current, D/C , transmission technology.
Tesla, a former employee of Edison’s for about six months in 1886 after coming to America and later inventor of a significant percentage of the current electrical transmission infrastructure — as well as about 1000 other devices — favored alternating current, A/C.
After a long PR war Tesla’s clearly superior technology (the induction motor/generator) won the war and A/C current was adopted by Westinghouse.
J.P. Morgan and his associates, however, saw long distance copper wire transmission infrastructure using 60hz A/C current as an opportunity for yet another massive infrastructure investment opportunity. For generations prior their predecessors were the lead investors in canals, railroads, and telegraphs networks (asphalt highways would soon follow.) Control of infrastructure provided centralized influence over the basic services of life — transportation, communication, heating, cooling, lighting, refrigeration, etc.
Tesla’s inventions offerred a chance to balance centralization with decentralization. He experimented with electrical transmission over a range of frequencies, either very high frequency power — 3 to 5 thousand hertz — which could be transmitted “freely” through the air like radio (which he invented and received the patent for after his death) or very low frequency — 3 to 7 hertz — which could be transmitted through the earth and oceans (Extremely Low Frequencies, ELF).
When he built a demonstration site for transatlantic wireless communication — i.e. the first radio — his lead investor J.P. Morgan withdrew funding when Tesla added the functionality of wireless terrestrial power transmission causing the demonstration project to go into foreclosure. The result is what we have today: metered electricity distrubted by centralized authorities rather than decentralized generation and terrestrial or atmospheric transmission (Tesla’s “taboo” ideas are now being taken much more seriously around the world.)
This situation was indicative of the relationship between finance and massive innovation. Growth in the number of patents issued per year went from 44 in 1800 to over 20,000 per year in 1900. The inventions and businesses that attracted the greatest investment capital tended to be ones that aligned with the economic vision of the largest, most well established investors. Numerous technologies were explored but were shelved because they threatened earlier investment.
Electric vehicles first successfully deployed in the 1890’s, for example, threatened the oil industry. Not only was Tesla’s wireless power defunded, but things like industrial hemp fibre and hemp oil that competed with the oil industry; alternative fuel research like splitting the water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen to run engines; practical anti-gravity research based on high rpm horizontal spinning that competed with the prop and later jet aircraft; the entire field of natural medicine that competed with the petrochemical pharmaceutical industry; the American street car industry that competed with the automobile industry; overunity generators which produce more energy than they take to run because of their competition public utilities heavily invested in low efficiency generation; long lasting light bulbs that-threatened the monopolies of GE and Phillips. The list is actually much longer.
The practice of technology suppression has become an economic reality in many sectors and one that is applied to slow the pace of disruptive technologies. U.S. registered patents are now over 350,000 per year, many of which threaten the investment in earlier technologies (think of the touch screen phone’s impact on the Blackberry.) It often makes more economic sense, if possible, to purchase and shelve them than to develop and deploy.
Imperial wars, red scare and the rise of the surveillance state
In the face of the rapidly expanding populist movement-of-movements whose disruptive violent and non-violent approaches fed the conflict system, the final “defensive strategy” of the Imperial Project was, it seems, the simple patriarchal logic: “the best defense is a good offense.”
As was learned in the U.S. Civil War and argued in our previous essay, war — allowed or precipitated through aggravation of grievances among conflicting parties — can serve a number of ends: 1. distraction and disruption of progressive social movements, 2. economic re-organization and consolidation, and 3. investment in all phases of war from build-up to re-construction.
One interpretation of America’s involvement in World War I was an effort to finally “put a halt to all of this spiritual and social foment!”
Like the Civil War sixty years prior, the Imperial Project needed a distraction. It was on the defensive and needed a great patriotic event that would divert the attention and energy of the country away from social organizing and spiritual awakening. Most urgently it needed to stop the galloping momentum of socialism which had spread rapidly through Europe as well. It needed — maybe desperately, if the fate of the Czar was any indication — to do what anxious governors had often been advised to do, “change the channel.”
It took the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat in 1915, killing 2,000 people including 128 Americans, to begin to change public opinion. This however was not enough. After “isolationist” Woodrow Wilson ran in 1916 on the pledge to keep the US out of the European war, public opinion was supposedly swayed by a single telegram. The “Zimmerman telegram,” intercepted by British intelligence and forwarded to American government officials, seemed to threaten an alliance between Germany and Mexico. History records that this was the “final straw” that swayed Wilson to ask Congress for a declaration of war.
The war had both domestic and international consequences that were far reaching.
The international consequence of World War I was America’s new role in shaping the emerging world order (we will explore this consequence in greater depth in our next essay, America’s Third Great Test, 1928–1948.) A domestic consequence, maybe the most lasting, was the birth of what many now refer to as the surveillance state, or security state.
As far back as the birth of the Imperial and Utopian Projects in Elizabethan London — see our essay about their origins— “Spymaster” Francis Walsingham who worked for William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s Prime Minister and the creator of the British Secret Intelligence Services (see Patrons in of recent 500th anniversary to guage his lasting influence), understood that aristocracy required intelligence to maintain control. To maintain control required information on potential adversaries: “Who is with us and who is against us? Who is an enemy and who is a friend?”
In this regard the Imperial Project is inherently insecure. It is often looking over its shoulder not knowing who to trust (an aristocratic wound that begins early through the separation of vulnerable children from the mother at an early age by turning them over to the household nanny and the boarding school.) Not trusting anyone, those who often rise to the peak of governing hierarchies become obsessed with who’s doing what with whom. Their mistaken belief is that if they “know everything and forget nothing” they will feel safer. In reality it’s the opposite. The processing and digesting of all the surveillance data only makes one more insecure.
As the American Imperial Project began to share, then eventually take over the imperial mission from the British following the demise of the East India Company in the 1860’s they seem to have been “educated” on the most effective methods for conducting sophisticated intelligence operations. With the exception of a small network of spies run by Lafayette Baker that worked for Lincoln during the Civil War, never prior to the First Red Scare (1917–1923) and the accompanying “anarchist” rebellions did the U.S. government form an institution with the express purpose of systematically gathering information and conducting surveillance on its own citizens.
Between the Civil War and WWI spying in America was primarily conducted in the field of business. The most effective domestic commercial spy network was established by Allan Pinkerton primarily on behalf of railroad clients. Internationally it seems to have been established by men like John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan through “gentleman agents” like John Dulles and Thomas Lamont circulating in the global network of men’s clubs (like the Shanghai Club where no doubt the resources of Asia were assessed and assigned.)
Reliable information about competitors and adversaries was the means by which men like this were uniquely successful in highly competitive fields of industrial giants to consolidate power through well timed merger, acquisition and takeover. Its was said of Rockefeller that “he was never in the room, but was always there” when any important conversation about business of public affairs took place.
It is not clear if men like this were directly responsible for establishing the institutions within the U.S. government that were to conduct the surveillance operations against those who were trying to violently or non-violently disrupt their business empires, but its is clear they were central figures at least indirectly responsible in establishing what some now refer to as the “surveillance state.”
The seed of the “surveillance state” seems to have been the Committee on Public Information (CPI), the government propaganda office established to promote patriotic support for WWI.
The CPI, established on April 13, 1917 and headed by journalist George Creel applied the latest developments of political science and mass psychology (Univeristy of Chicago research) to generating support for the war. It used many different forms such as posters, pamphlets, magazines, billboards, movies, photographs, as well as public speakers — called the “Four Minute Men” — and daily press releases to skillfully shape public opinion.
Charles Merriam, a professor at the University of Chicago and later director of the Rockefeller Foundation, was a member of the CPI also tasked with censorship and suppression of criticism of not only the war effort but of the industrial system more broadly. It worked brilliantly. By Armistice Day, November 11, 1918 the country was fully convinced in the righteousness of the cause of making the world “safe for democracy.” The war and the CPI were successful in slowing the movements, chilling public dissent, and labeling anti-industrial voices as un-American and seditious.
With the overthrow of the Russian Czar, however, the international Socialist, Communist and Workers movements were emboldened. The CPI and another new government office, the Radical Division of the Bureau of Investigation, headed by young lawyer J. Edgar Hoover — founder of the FBI and its director through 1972 — turned their attention to the “Red Scare.”
The First Red Scare, which occurred immediately after World War I, according to wikipedia revolved around a perceived threat from the American labor movement, anarchist revolution and political radicalism. It was marked by a widespread fear of far-left extremism, including but not limited to Bolshevism and anarchism, due to real and imagined events including the October Revolution and anarchist bombings directed against Wall Street, political and business leaders (i.e. J.P. Morgan Jr. shot in his home in 1915 shortly after his family bank signed a contract to serve as the leading American supplier of war material to Britain and France.)
The strategy that emerged out of WWI was carrot/stick, good cop/bad cop. The FBI became the stick. Young J. Edgar Hoover and his new army of federal agents were empowered to track down and arrest, kill or intimidate anyone who was considered a threat to good order. Before the public, in media and films, FBI activity was positioned as crime fighting, cleaning up anti-prohibitionist gangsters.
In addition to this, however, the FBI was also arresting and interrogating anyone whose name showed up on the Radical’s Division’s 1919 list. The list included labor leaders, members of the Socialist and Communist Party, social democracy advocates, ardent progressives and anyone criticizing the abuses of Imperial Project. This was the stick, the bad cop. It would give way a generation later to the Second Red Scare and today, the Third Red Scare.
False American Dream
The carrot or good cop side of the strategy was a re-definition of the American Dream in materialistic terms. As a starting point for our next essay — America’s Third Great Test, 1928 to 1948 — we will analyze this carrot that came in the form of an outstretched hand offerred to the social movements: “Rather than fight us (we’re too powerful anyhow), why not just join us?” Hence the invention of a new, materialized version of the American Dream — highly distinct from the “City on a Hill,” the ideal commonwealth that would welcome the return of Christ.
Immediately following WWI came the influenza epidemic that devastated America with over three times the cost in lives than the war. The country was again in shock. A similar percentage of the population as the Civil War had died. The social movements had been significantly disrupted, but not completely. It would take the collapse of the stock market a decade later followed by yet another bank panic and the rapid decline into economic depression to final kill them completely.
This false “American Dream” emerging out of the pain of the war/influenza/Red Scare crises would be founded on (1) the extention of consumer credit, known in the 1920’s as purchasing a car, refrigerator, or dining room set “on time,” (2) the marketing of industrial “penny stocks” to working class people who had the “hope” of one day becoming a “millionaire” too, and (3) the significant expansion of credit, backed by the newly established Federal Reserve syndicate, to the corporate and eventually the government sector (U.S. debt rising 40 fold from 1929–1945).
It was Calvin Coolidge who began to re-defined “the business of America” as “business.” He was followed shortly thereafter by Herbert Hoover at the 1928 Republican National Convention who crystallized the new Dream as “a chicken in every pot, a car in every garage.” This was the de-spiritualized version of America, the cropped definition of the “City on a Hill,” the one which was losing touch with its heart and soul and reason for being.
Within a couple years this false dream had turned to a nightmare that would take yet another generation to awaken from.
