To hear Republicans, President Barack Obama distrusts American businesses and corporations. This, of course, makes the president an un-American socialist or, worse, a communist. I seriously doubt Obama is anti-corporation, but if it were true, historically he would be in good company.
Our Founding Fathers were no fans of corporations. The Boston Tea Party, after all, was not a reaction to high taxation, as right-wing myth contends, but to the Tea Act’s nearly tax-free status it gave to the British East India Company, the largest corporation of its time, which threatened to destroy smaller colonial businesses.
So abhorrent was the idea of large corporate interests to our Founders, that they purposefully left any mention of them out of the Constitution. Yet, even in the earliest days of our nation, many of our Founders were already growing appalled by the growth of corporations.
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations,“ wrote Thomas Jefferson, “which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
Loathsome Bankers
Financial institutions were particularly loathsome to Jefferson. "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies," he said.
Jefferson’s foresight was eerily precise when he predicted that “the banks, and corporations that will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
Wow. It’s like the author of the Declaration of Independence was looking into the future and saw how banks and corporations destroyed the U.S. economy in the 1930s and again in 2007.
John Adams, Jefferson’s long-time friend and sometime political adversary, was also wary of financial institutions. "Banks,” he said, “have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good."
Hard to believe Adams was the founder of what is today the Republican Party.
President Andrew Jackson was well known for his distrust of financial institutions and corporate monopolies. “Unless you become more watchful in your states,” he warned, “and check the spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges you will in the end find that … the control over your dearest interests has passed into the hands of these corporations.”
Enemy at the Rear
As president, Abraham Lincoln had many things on his mind. He was fighting a war to preserve the nation. But Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee weren’t his only concerns.
“The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity,” he said. “The banking powers are more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. They denounce as public enemies all who question their methods or throw light upon their crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe."
Let’s see, “denounce as public enemies all who question their methods.” Would that be the same as the Republicans calling Obama a socialist, a communist, or a secret radical Muslim?
As the Civil War drew to a close, Lincoln was eyeing his “greatest foe” as the next major threat to the country.
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country,” he said. “As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
Unfortunately, Lincoln’s fears were well grounded. In the decades following the Civil War, the country saw the growth of the Republican “Gilded Age,” when most of the country’s wealth was held by a handful of so-called “barons,” most of whom acquired that wealth by corrupting government officials.
Citizens United
President Teddy Roosevelt came into office at the height of the Gilded Age. From his bully pulpit, he saw the same threat to the country Lincoln did four decades earlier. That pulpit must have been awfully high, because Roosevelt was able to see all the way to 2012.
Like a man prescient of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision giving corporations “citizen hood” and all the free speech money could buy, Teddy warned: "The Constitution does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty Commercial forces which they have called into being."
Unlike any Republican you’ll hear today, Roosevelt also said, “Laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes. Corporate expenditures for political purposes have supplied one of the principle sources of corruptions in our political affairs."
Roosevelt, of course, went on to break up the “trusts” – large corporations – to reduce their political power, and gave Americans the “Square Deal, which helped create the middle class in this country.
TR’s distant cousin, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, took this further, with legislation that controlled how financial institutions and corporations can operate and, of course, the “New Deal,” the greatest expansion of the middle class in U.S. history.
So I wonder how TR would respond to see his former party, the GOP, running a corporate multi-millionaire as their 2012 presidential nominee? Or if he knew that corporate interests like the Koch brothers or the pro-corporate American Legislative Exchange Council were financing Republican candidates and writing their policies and legislation? Would he agree with current members of the Republican Party that President Obama is too distrusted of Big Business?
Let’s let TR speak for himself: "… [T]o befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."
