JUST THE FACTS, MON
BY MARK EVANS
Now that Henry Gonzalez has introduced a measure in Congress to reform the
Federal Reserve along affirmative action (racial and gender) lines, the
left might do well to take another look at the institution itself. Actually
Gonzalez's resolution is very mild compared to the stand taken against the
Fed by the late Congressman from the 12th District of California, (1936-1946),
Jerry Voorhis. A small company of kept journalists, passing themselves off
as progressives, having gained "left cover" by making careers
out of attacking such obvious targets as the Liberty Lobby, Lyndon La Rouche,
and the so-called "Christian" Right, would have us further believe
that everyone who is critical of the Federal Reserve System is somehow a
closet "right-winger." Subtly and obliquely, it has been implied
in any number of articles, that to be critical of the Federal Reserve System
is somehow a function either of dementia, paranoia, anti-semitism, or "right-wing
conspiracy thinking."
This trend of jargon has all the earmarks of propaganda. It is divisive
and bears a distinct and unpleasant resemblance to McCarthyism. It is also
hitorically inaccurate. Such a false rendition of Reality can only be repudiated
by establishing the facts of the opposition by the Old Left in earlier decades
of the Twentieth Century, to the Federal Reserve System.
In an earlier series articles, I have called the reader's attention to the
careers of Senator Robert La Follette, Sr., and Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh,
Sr., whose articulate opposition to the "Money Trust," the "Aldrich
Plan," and the banner's legislation that crystalyzed into the Federal
Reserve Act, is preserved in the Congressional Record.
The two radical, mid-western parties that these men founded, or were associated
with after they departed from the Republican Party (i.e. the Progressive
Party of LaFollette in Wisconsin, and the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota),
stated categorically in their party platforms that the Federal Reserve System
was unconstitutional, and should be repealed. The Socialist Party Platform
of 1932, also called for the ". . . immediate acquisition by the government
of the privately owned Federal Reserve Banks. . . " (see National Party
Platforms, 1856-1960, Univ. Illinois Press, Urbana, Ill.)
The elder Lindbergh and "fighting Bob" LaFollette died in 1924
and 1925, respectively. LaFollette's Progressive Party of 1924, essentially
died with him. La Follette was succeeded in politics by his two sons Robert
Jr. and Phillip who became, respectively, Senator and Governor of Wisconsin.
For a time, in the thirties, from roughly 1936 'til 1944, they tried to
resurrect and continue the Progressive Party in the tradition f their father.
Like him, they also advocated the program of Nationalizing credit, and the
privately-owned Central Bank, the "Fed." In California in 1934,
the E.P.I.C. (End Poverty in California) campaign for governor by the novelist,
and former socialist, Upton Sinclair, on the Democratic ticket, attracted
the attention and the energies of a young educator and history professor,
Jerry Voorhis, also a socialist. Voorhist was galvanized into politics on
the coat-tails of Upton Sinclair's E.P.I.C. platform. In 1936 he ran for
Congress, as a Democrat, for the 12th congressional district (Whitier),
and won. For the next ten years Jerry Voorhis was a progressive voice in
the Congress.
Although he approved and supported much of the F.D.R.'s program and the
New Deal legislation, Voorhisdiffered with F.D.R. on the issue of Keynesian
deficit-financing, and the nature of the National Debt. Voorhis, an honest
and intelligent man, with an unusually high degree of integrity for a politicain,
could not peddle the administration "line," promoted by Franklin
Roosevelt, that the National Debt was something "we owe to ourselves."
Voorhis, in fact initiated a resolution on the floor of the House, calling,
in effect for the dissolution of the private ownership of the Federal Reserve
Bank. In this respect, his position was closer to the Farmer-Labor, and
the Socialist Party platforms of 1932, than the Democratic Party-line.
Voorhis' analysis of the Federal Reserve System, and of banking in general
never descended from the plane of a pure systems-analysis, to the jew-baiting
and racial slurs of the crypto-fascists, who then as now also made an issue
of the Fed. A genuine progressive, he knew that Usury is a matter of class
privilege and class oppression, and can not be termed a function of a "Jewish
bankers' conspiracy." Writing in 1974, in his forward-looking work
Mark Evans
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