Bullies

by Ben Shapiro

  And they had to be taken down a peg. “We all need to take responsibility,” said Obama in a February 2009 speech. “And this includes executives at major financial firms who turned to the American people, hat in hand, when they were in trouble, even as they paid themselves their customary lavish bonuses. . . . That’s shameful. And that’s exactly the kind of disregard for the costs and consequences of their actions that brought about this crisis: a culture of narrow self-interest and short-term gain at the expense of everything else.”6

  Since his inauguration, the threat of the pitchforks has never been too far away. From the Occupy Wall Street movement, coordinated and organized with the help of Obama’s allies and with Obama’s explicit approval, to the union movement, which pours hundreds of millions of dollars into Obama’s campaign machine, President Obama has never—not for a single moment—let up on his class bullying. When he says that he wants people to pay their “fair share,” he never means that he wants all Americans to pay a fair share. He just means that those who earn should continue to pay for those who don’t. And if you disagree, he’ll target you. Personally.

  Just ask Joe the Plumber. Now, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher wasn’t rich. As it turned out, he earned $40,000 per year. But he made one big mistake that put him on the Obama radar: he asked Obama a question about class warfare. On October 12, 2008, just a few days before John McCain was scheduled to debate Barack Obama for the last time in the election cycle, Obama stumbled on Wurzelbacher while wandering around his Ohio neighborhood. “I’m getting ready to buy a company that makes about $250,000 . . . $270–280,000 a year,” said Wurzelbacher. “Your new tax plan’s gonna tax me more, isn’t it?”

  This was like waving a red flag before a bull. Obama just couldn’t help himself. “I’m going to cut taxes a little bit more for the folks who are most in need, and for the 5 percent of the folks who are doing very well, even though they’ve been working hard. . . . I just want to make sure that they’re paying a little bit more in order to pay for those other tax cuts. Now, I respect your disagreement, but I just want you to be clear. It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success, too.”

  Except, of course, that Obama did want to punish success—or at least, spread it around—as he made clear moments later: “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”7

  Now, this was a stupid line—an insanely stupid line, as it turned out. It was a line so stupid that even the insipid McCain campaign wasn’t dumb enough to squander it. But that was the extent of the exchange with Wurzelbacher. You’d imagine that Wurzelbacher would have faded off the stage.

  But he didn’t.

  Within hours, the media was digging on this nefarious Wurzelbacher character. They dug up information about his income, his family, his profession. Meanwhile, state employees at the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services were illegally using state computers to make inquiries about Wurzelbacher. Helen Jones-Kelley, the director of the department, later insisted that the checks had been done not as dirt-digging on Wurzelbacher, but rather because he said he wanted to buy a business. This did not pass the smell test, particularly since Jones-Kelley had also donated $2,500 to the Obama campaign.8 She later resigned her position, and two of her coworkers were fired.

  Was this connected to the Obama administration? It’s hard to imagine it wasn’t. Since the Joe the Plumber incident, the Obama camp has gone out of its way to wage class warfare by bulling wealthy individuals, suggesting that any political involvement by them is evil and retrograde. It’s one thing to sleep in a park and fling feces at passersby, say the class bullies—that’s just political discourse. It’s another to ask the president a question about taxes or spend money on political advertising. That’s living on the back of the poor, and must be stopped at all costs.

  This class bullying is aided and abetted by the mainstream media, which constantly calls for greater wealth redistribution, portraying the rich as greedy fat cats rather than job creators. And, shockingly enough, it’s also backed by many corporate bigwigs themselves, who may disdain nasty class bully rhetoric but are all too happy to buy their way into the favor of the class bullies (see Buffett, Warren). There’s a reason that Wall Street gave heavily to Obama in 2008. They caved to the class bullies. They figured that if they couldn’t beat ’em, they should join ’em.

  THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN CLASS BULLYING

  Teddy Roosevelt is widely respected and admired by Americans on both sides of the political aisle.

  He shouldn’t be.

  Teddy Roosevelt was the first American president to truly embrace class bullying. He didn’t understand economics particularly well. What he did understand was terrible European progressive philosophy. He believed that anyone who earned a lot of money had entered the realm of evil. “The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means,” he said in 1910 while labeling himself a “New Nationalist.” It didn’t matter if you made your fortune creating bandages for impoverished children. If you made a lot of money, you were a bad guy, and you deserved to have your money taken away from you.

  The government, said Teddy, would allow rich folks to make money only if they didn’t make money in doing so.9

  Because Teddy didn’t like guys who made a lot of money, he felt it necessary to break up their businesses. Antitrust legislation soon became the order of the day. Teddy wanted a “square deal” for the little guy—but he wanted a raw deal for those who actually hired the little guy.

  And he didn’t care if he had to enable the world’s worst people to make his attacks on capitalists happen. During Teddy’s presidency, socialist Upton Sinclair took it upon himself to expose the meatpacking industry in The Jungle. “I wished to frighten the country by a picture of what its industrial masters were doing to their victims,” he wrote. The book itself claimed that the meatpacking industry was “the incarnation of blind and insensate greed . . . the Great Butcher . . . the spirit of capitalism made flesh.” His book sold 150,000 copies and made him rich (but he was a class bully, so he was allowed to be rich).

  Now, Teddy knew this was bunk. He actually wrote that he had “utter contempt” for Sinclair, that Sinclair was “hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful,” and that “three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods.”10 But why would the truth stop a class bully?

  It wouldn’t. Teddy rammed through the Pure Food and Drug Act, dramatically regulating the meatpacking industry, as well as the pharmaceutical industry. This despite the fact that there were already hundreds of meat inspectors policing plants across the country. The result was a dramatic decrease in medical patents, laying the groundwork for today’s slow and ineffective Food and Drug Administration.11

  That’s how Teddy ran his administration. Prosperous individuals could be bullied and branded; the lower classes needed protection from them. No matter that many men of property hadn’t been born to the purple, as Teddy had—Teddy grew up in a four-story home in Manhattan where his parents hired tutors for him, then went to Harvard—the rich were the victimizers. As for the Constitution, that guardian of individual liberty and freedom of wealth creation, Teddy didn’t want to hear about it. “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!” he said.

  Teddy’s class bullying had one unintended consequence—it brought some corporate quislings out of the woodwork. One of them was Thomas Edison, perhaps the most successful inventor and entrepreneur in American history. Recognizing that the class bullies were in ascendance, he decided that he could be either the bully or the bullied—and he wasn’t going to be the guy shoved into the locker. Instead, he decided that he would run all industry. “What is wanted is some person familiar with the selling and buying, the technical as well as the financial end of all industries, to devise some ge
neric scheme that business can work on,” Edison said with himself in mind. Edison wanted to run the economy for the benefit of all. As his model, he used the ultimate class bully, protofascist Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany.

  But Teddy was just the beginning of class bullying in America. Woodrow Wilson, who was elected president in 1912, was fond of posing false choices between wealth and happiness—as though only by making America poor could anyone truly experience the joy of life. “Property as compared with humanity, as compared with the vital red blood in the American people, must take second place, not first place,” said the pointy-headed Princeton professor. Why property had to be compared with humanity, or with blood, or with rainbow unicorns, Woodrow didn’t explain. He just placed money in opposition to humanity, and that was that.

  Of course, it didn’t help that Woodrow was basically a socialist. “Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals,” he said. No greater recipe for bullying has ever been created.

  To that end, he emboldened labor unions.

  Wilson saw unions as the chief tool for stripping the wealthy of their power. He was truly the first president to run a Department of Labor, and his department was explicitly dedicated “in the interest of the wage earners.” He was such an ideologue that in the middle of World War I, when war production was paramount, he insisted on strengthening rights of collective bargaining. Not surprisingly, after World War I, with the influx of young men coming home, the very unions Wilson created went ballistic, striking against their employers.12

  And so the American people fell out of love, for a time, with the class bullies. Republicans dominated politics for the next decade after Wilson left the White House. And because of that, the economy boomed. The rich got richer, and so did everybody else.

  Then the Great Depression hit.

  The Great Depression—not unlike today’s Great Recession—was the greatest single event in history for the Democratic Party. The Democrats, who had been largely tied down to the South and the legacy of Jim Crow, finally found what they had been looking for: a class war.

  They moved quickly to exploit it.

  In spring and summer of 1932, with the economy deeply depressed thanks to the stock market crash of 1929 and the interventionism of President Herbert Hoover, an enormous mass of World War I veterans began crowding the streets of Washington, D.C. They had been promised war bonuses years before that were not due for delivery until 1945. Now they were showing up to collect early. The press quickly dubbed the event the Bonus March.

  The earliest protesters were Pennsylvanian veterans led by Father James Renshaw Cox, a labor organizer; he wanted to soak the rich by introducing a 70 percent inheritance tax and a huge government hiring program. Over time, their numbers grew. They set up tents and small hovels in the Anacostia Flats; by this time, such encampments had been dubbed “Hoovervilles.”

  And there they stayed. They marched every day. One observer called them “an immense hobo jungle.” Their leader was one Walter W. Waters, an unemployed soldier from World War I.13

  Waters was anticommunist; he had been helped to leadership by the local police chief.14 But soon enough, the Communist Party saw their opportunity. John T. Pace, a member of the Communist Party, testified in 1951 about what happened next: “Well, we were using Almen [a Bonus March leader and rival to Waters] to get control of the rank and file. It was the plan of the party to use Almen as a front for gaining control of the entire bonus expeditionary forces. . . . It is my candid opinion that had this thing gone on for another week, the Communists would have gained the leadership of the bonus expeditionary forces . . .”15 Pace’s orders from Moscow, he said simply, were “to provoke riots.” The riots, it was hoped, would provoke revolution.16

  The Democratic Party, too, was eager to jump into the Bonus Army fray. Bullying the wealthy—and bullying Hoover with extralegal force—certainly didn’t bother one particular governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This, Roosevelt knew, was an army of “Forgotten Men.” And FDR would manipulate those Forgotten Men into doing whatever he wanted them to do.17 It was something he had been contemplating for a long time—in April 1932, he had called on Americans to form the “infantry of our economic army . . . the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power.”18 He planned a radio address for shortly after his inauguration that would call for Americans to become his foot soldiers. Literally: “I reserve to myself the right to command you in any phase of the situation which now confronts us,” he would tell his subjects.19

  Governor Roosevelt played the benevolent father to the Bonus Marchers, sending Nels Anderson of the New York Temporary Emergency Relief Administration to visit the encampment. He then told the Bonus Army that they’d get jobs and free transportation to New York if they dispersed. When the army turned him down, Anderson publicly declared that Hoover ought to leave them be.20

  The battle lines were drawn. And with the communist infiltration now at crisis levels, according to communist sources including Pace, President Hoover had no choice but to act. That became especially clear when, on July 28, 1932, two Washington, D.C., policemen were forced to shoot two veterans who rushed them. Hoover saw it the same way. So did General Douglas MacArthur, who headed the troops sent to put down the Bonus March. He forced the shutdown of the Bonus March, at the cost of fifty-five injured and 135 arrested—in other words, a typical day in a major city. One of the members of the Bonus March burned down the Hooverville. MacArthur said that night that he had saved the nation from “incipient revolution” by “insurrectionists.”21 He had probably saved the city from a bunch of ragtag veterans being misled by communists. But the Democrats couldn’t wait to jump in and condemn Hoover as though he’d herded veterans into the Anacostia River itself.

  “Well, Felix,” FDR apparently said to future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter upon hearing of the events, “this will elect me.”

  As Hoover later wrote, “The Democratic leaders did not organize the Bonus March nor conduct the ensuing riots. But the Democratic organization seized upon the incident with great avidity. Many Democratic speakers in the campaign of 1932 implied that I had murdered veterans on the streets of Washington.”22

  And, of course, FDR won the election in a landslide. He was promptly feted by liberal Hollywood in Gabriel Over the White House, a movie featuring a president who, instead of rushing the camps, simply hired everybody at the camps. FDR essentially did just that the next year when the Bonus Marchers returned.

  Now empowered by his successful seizure of a mass class bully movement, FDR grabbed control of the entire financial infrastructure in pursuit of his antibusiness agenda. This was necessary, he said, because “the train of American business” had “to be loaded more evenly.” He compared financial firms to “kidnappers and bank robbers,” luring “the unsuspecting and the unwary to financial destruction.”23

  One of FDR’s biggest targets was Henry Ford—yes, founder of the all-American car company. Ford didn’t buy into FDR’s view of business. So FDR went after him as though his name were Joe Wurzelbacher. “The Republican campaign management and people like Henry Ford,” he charged, “are guilty of spreading the gospel of fear.” Once in office, FDR quickly moved to regulate the automobile industry and help the unions. His National Recovery Administration (NRA) forced American businesses to sign codes of behavior organizing all companies operating within particular industries. Products produced by NRA signatory companies were branded with the Blue Eagle.

  Public hearings would allow the administration to decide fair work hours, pay, and price of products. FDR announced, “The challenge of this law is whether we can sink selfish interest and present a solid front against a common peril.” Hugh Samuel “Iron Pants” Johnson, an army general who led the effort, was named Time’s 1933 Man of the Year. Johnson was fond of passing out a tract on corporatism titled “The Corporate State,” written by one of Mussolini’s favorite advisors.

  Ford fought back. “I do not think this country is re
ady to be treated like Russia for a while,” Ford wrote. But the FDR administration didn’t stop bullying him. General Johnson announced, “I think maybe the American people will crack down on Mr. Ford when the Blue Eagle is on other cars and he does not have one.” Johnson and FDR actually initiated a government boycott of Ford. In many cases, that meant the taxpayers paid more for cars produced by other manufacturers. FDR basically drove Ford into the ground. According to Life magazine, its market share was over 60 percent after World War I, but was just 20 percent by the beginning of World War II. Its more pliant competitors benefited, with General Motors picking up 50 percent of market share and Chrysler rising to 20 percent.

  But FDR wasn’t done yet.

  In 1935, FDR followed in Wilson’s footsteps and rammed through Congress the National Labor Relations Act. It prohibited companies from doing anything to fight against the formation of labor unions, including firing prospective union members, or most importantly, declining to bargain with a union once it had been formed. The union bullies were now in the industrial henhouse.

  The results were dramatic. With government backing their play, the United Auto Workers, led by communist fellow-traveler Walter Reuther, began implementing sit-down strikes. Government actors, including the governor of Michigan, Frank Murray, stepped in to act as negotiators. Within a few years, the entire automobile workforce was unionized—a welcome change for politicians, who could now use those unions to raise funds and pound pavement on their own behalf. Ford was the last company to break, but in 1941, it did.

  Of course, FDR wasn’t alone in his quest to bully the earners and the investors. He was actually the least offensive of the class bullies. Father Charles Coughlin, an early supporter of FDR, led the charge—and, not unlike his modern liberal descendants, tempered his class warfare with the delightful hint of anti-Semitism. “We have lived to see the day that modern Shylocks have grown fat and wealthy, praised and deified, because they have perpetuated the ancient crime of usury under the modern racket of statesmanship,” he railed in 1930 to millions via radio. Human rights, said Coughlin, should outweigh property rights. And “international bankers”—code for those big-nosed Hebraic folk—were to blame for the Depression.24 Coughlin was one of FDR’s most strident early backers. “If Congress fails to back up the President in his monetary program, I predict a revolution in this country which will make the French Revolution look silly!” he predicted before Congress.25