Empires Apart
Page 41
By achieving a commanding position in foreign markets, American firms established the basis for a new type of imperialism, but an imperialism rooted firmly in the imperialism of earlier centuries. Spanish Louisiana in the quarter century after the American Revolution provides striking parallels to modern corporate imperialism: American settlers moved in and took over much of the commerce of the colony producing and exporting such staples as tobacco, wheat, corn, whiskey and beef. Once in command of the economy the colony would almost inevitably become part of the formal American empire. The same happened time after time until, after the annexation of Hawaii, corporatism entered into the nation’s ideological mix.
As corporations like Ford and GM became an established part of global commerce, the ideology of corporatism continued to evolve. The next philosophical development came in the form of a long series of stealthy steps that with hindsight appear as the most gigantic leap of all: the assertion that corporations not only have rights but have the same rights as human beings. Corporations, having been set up precisely to avoid the responsibilities attached to real people, and therefore being given only very limited rights to match their limited liabilities, have in America today assumed the whole panoply of rights guaranteed in the American constitution.
Again the seeds for this development first sprouted in the era of booming railroads. When they were created the railway companies were frequently given massive state support, including grants of public land or the right to compulsorily purchase private land. The quid pro quo was often that the rail corporations had to pay a special tax on that land. In a series of cases before the notoriously biased California courts in the 1870s the companies successfully argued that their ‘rights’ were being infringed by having to pay a higher rate of tax on their land than human beings. From this small beginning, known as the Santa Clara case, American business over the next century grew a whole array of quasi-human rights, many of which, to Europeans, appear quite bizarre.
To take just one example: on the afternoon of 25 March 1911 fire broke out in a shirt factory on Greene Street, New York; 275 young female workers, most of them recent immigrants, some just thirteen years old, were trapped inside. Passers-by were horrified to see girls leaping to their deaths from ninth-floor windows on to the street below; 146 charred and smashed bodies were eventually taken away. The fire precautions had been virtually non-existent, but in the subsequent trial the factory owners were found to have done nothing illegal. The enormous public outrage that followed led to the first serious attempts to impose safety regulations on American business. The policing of such regulations became increasingly effective over the decades, until sixty-seven years later the doctrine of corporatism halted the trend. In 1978 the Supreme Court held that raids on factories by health and safety inspectors contravened the US Constitution, and in particular the Fourth Amendment, which protected citizens from having their homes searched without a judicial warrant. The Supreme Court held that the health and safety of human beings had to take second place to the constitutional ‘rights’ of abstract corporate entities.
The fusion of the ideologies of democracy and corporatism is most clearly seen in the way corporations have been able to acquire political rights. One of the most startling features of US politics to Europeans is the vast amount of money that corporate America devotes to political campaigning. There is nothing new in this. In the 1880s and 1890s manufacturers’ associations and individual oligarchs spent enormous sums lobbying to maintain and increase tariffs. Woodrow Wilson complained that ‘The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States.’ Dwight Eisenhower warned in his farewell address, in January 1961, against the influence wielded by the ‘military-industrial complex’. Today there are 60,000 professional corporate lobbyists in Washington DC, outnumbering the elected representatives a hundredfold. In campaigns on social issues, such as the environment and health, as well as on imperial political issues, including tariffs and protectionism, corporations have massively outspent opponents who rely on individual donors. Some states have tried to redress the balance by enacting laws regulating campaign finance, only to see their legislation struck down by the US Supreme Court on the grounds that corporations are merely exercising their ‘right’ to free speech under the First Amendment – an assertion that would have had the nation’s Founding Fathers writhing in their graves.
In the topsy-turvy world of American jurisprudence the First Amendment right of free speech, designed to ensure that the voice of every citizen could be heard, had been turned on its head through what Nace calls a process of ‘judicial yoga’, to allow corporations to drown out the voices of their opponents in a sea of echoing dollars. Attempts to redress the balance have been repeatedly thwarted. When the Pacific Gas & Electricity Corporation included pamphlets with its monthly bills promoting the political views of its senior management, the state regulator instructed it to be more balanced by once a quarter also including pamphlets from consumer or environmental groups; the Supreme Court ruled that this violated the corporation’s ‘right’ to free speech. In reality it was ruling not only that it was possible for a legal construct like a corporation to have human rights but that senior management had the exclusive authority to determine how those rights were exercised.
Just as the substance of tsarist autocracy re-emerged in the reigns of Lenin and Stalin, so the substance of early colonial feudalism reemerged in the corporation. People often speak about ‘corporations’ or ‘multinationals’ as if the legal fiction that they are independent persons was real, but of course they are not; it is not legal constructs that wield corporate power but a very small number of people at the very top – feudal lords closer in spirit to Russian autocrats than American democrats, and who, at best, treat their serfs with the benevolent paternalism of the Tsar Liberator, Alexander II.
The ideology of corporatism is now so firmly embedded that people can say ‘IBM believes’ or ‘Exxon’s position is’ without a second thought. But as Supreme Court conservative William Rehnquist said when dissenting from the Pacific Gas & Electricity decision, ‘Extension of the individual’s freedom of conscience decisions to business corporations strains the rationale of those cases beyond the breaking point. To ascribe to such artificial entities an “intellect” or “mind” for freedom of conscience purposes is to confuse metaphor with reality.’ In reality IBM cannot ‘believe’ anything – its chief executive believes. Exxon cannot have a ‘position’ on any issue – but its head of public relations can. To say that a corporation holds a view gives that opinion a stamp of authority that endorsement by a faceless chief executive would never achieve. And yet for the chief executive of Exxon to say that his corporation has a ‘view’ on energy policy because it processes oil is as meaningless as saying that his car has a ‘view’ for the same reason.
Only humans can express opinions, and yet the US Supreme Court clearly thinks otherwise; so in practice do most people. It is taken for granted that corporate executives lobby not on behalf of their own selfish personal interests but on behalf of a wider constituency, their corporation, of which they for the time being are the unelected autocrats.
By the end of the twentieth century the power of oligarchs in Russia and America was not dissimilar, but in America this power was wielded with far more subtlety from behind the corporate burkha. The original robber barons had wielded their power with little finesse, grabbing riches for themselves like the oligarchs who plundered Russia when communism collapsed, but by the time the Soviet Union vanished in an explosion of greed American corporations had become good corporate citizens.
The rhetoric of class struggle, which was such a feature of political debate when the twentieth century began, had vanished by the time the century drew to a close. The fusion of corporatism and democracy had created a society where capitalism and freedom were seen as two sides of the same coin. For that fusion to occur it was necessary not only for the opposing view – tha
t freedom and capitalism were incompatible – to be vanquished in America, but for it to be prevented from becoming the orthodoxy elsewhere. The contagion of socialism needed to be eradicated, if not by argument then by the Polar Bear expedition.
Ideologies in Transition
Those Russians struggling to overthrow the institutions of autocracy were ranged across an enormous political spectrum, from mild liberals to violent anarchists, but nearly all of them were closer to the ideals of the American Revolution than any of the tsars ever were. When the last tsar fell from power it might be supposed that the western world would therefore have joined in celebration. However, by the summer of 1918 new ideological battle lines were being drawn. As Nicholas and his family faced death in a remote town in Siberia they could have had no way of knowing that on the other side of the globe the curiously named Polar Bear expedition, 5,000 troops of the US 85th Division, 339th Infantry, were preparing to leave their base at Fort Custer, Michigan, bound for Archangel on Russia’s Arctic coast. Four hundred of them would be killed as Russian militiamen, in revolution against tyrannical monarchy, battled soldiers of a nation that had been formed in revolution against tyrannical monarchy.
The Polar Bear expedition is one of those odd best-forgotten episodes more typical of British imperial history than American. The US troops tried to fight their way south in the middle of not just a Russian winter but a Russian Arctic winter, in pursuit of an objective nobody really understood. On Armistice Day 1918, when American forces elsewhere were celebrating the end of the First World War, the Polar Bear expedition was battling Bolshevik troops 200 miles south of Archangel. They fought on for another 40 miles until a Russian victory at Ust Padenga signalled the start of the US retreat. The oligarchs at home might have been keen on fighting Bolshevism, but a near mutiny in March 1919 prompted the expedition’s withdrawal from Russia in June.
This was not the first western expedition to the region to end in disaster. In the spring of 1554 Russian fishermen encountered a ghostly ship far larger than any they had seen before. It was the Bona Esparanza, which had left England a year earlier to search for the Northeast Passage to China. On board were the frozen corpses of Sir Hugh Willoughby, a founder of the Muscovy Company, and his whole crew.
The Polar Bear expedition simply reinforced the ancient Russian fear of invasion. In the contest between Russian and American imperialism, which was to dominate the history of much of the twentieth century, round one had gone to Russia.
If the episode has any historical significance it is as a sign of the muddled thinking that characterised the period. The old-style US imperialism, which had been about grabbing territory for the nation’s expansion, had ended with the conquest of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, but America’s foreign policy had yet to evolve anything to replace it. Mexico was racked by civil war, which fifty years earlier would have been seen as an opportunity to annexe more territory, but despite pressure from American business interests, especially American mine owners, there was no appetite in Washington for intervention. The government’s only action was to send General Pershing racing south in pursuit of the Mexican guerrilla leader, Pancho Villa, who had had the audacity to launch an attack across the border. The Polar Bear expedition was the same sort of raid, which gave the impression of action but had no realistic strategic objective.
A more significant, but in the event just as pointless, incursion occurred at the other end of the Russian empire, and here the influence of corporatism was crucial. Soon after the Polar Bear expedition was dispatched from Michigan a similar force of 5,000 US soldiers, commanded by the macabrely named General Graves, sailed from San Francisco for the Russian Pacific port of Vladivostok. There they joined 3,000 more troops drawn from the US army of occupation in the Philippines. Their objective was far clearer than the Polar Bear expedition’s: they were to control the Trans-Siberian railway. After the United States entered the First World War this railway had gained enormous strategic importance as the most effective way to get American military materiel to the Russian troops in Europe, and in the chaotic weeks before the Bolshevik revolution Kerensky’s provisional government asked for US help to keep the Trans-Siberian railway open.
America’s railroad magnates, who had pushed forward both the ideological frontiers of corporatism and the physical frontiers of their country, were running out of opportunities within the United States. In looking overseas their eyes had first turned south to Latin America, but they were well aware that the world’s greatest prize was in Russia. The scale of the Trans-Siberian far eclipsed anything in North America, and by American standards the Russian technology was primitive; opportunity beckoned. Fired by the happy coincidence of patriotism and profit, the railroad bosses quickly arranged for 285 railway managers and engineers to be commissioned into the US army and sent to Siberia. However, by the time these men could make any contribution to the war effort the Bolsheviks had seized power in Petrograd, and the war was over. The last thing that the outside powers wanted now was for the Trans-Siberian to fall into communist hands, and so in April 1919 the United States, Japan and China carved up the eastern end of the railway between them. The US military contingent was far smaller than the Japanese, who had a much more direct interest in the region and took overall command. American troops found themselves not only fighting alongside the Japanese but under the direct command of Japanese officers as the two great imperial powers fought to crush the avowedly anti-imperialist Bolsheviks.
It would be wrong to paint a picture of a uniformly imperialist America launching the Polar Bear expedition and attacks on the Trans-Siberian railway in an all-out attempt to bring Russia into its own political sphere and destroy the spectre of communism at birth. Americans responded to the Russian Revolution in many different ways. Corporate bosses might have feared a society so clearly dedicated to their elimination, but feelings were equally strong on the other side. When the government chartered ships to carry arms and munitions to the White Army in Siberia, dockers in Seattle and San Francisco refused to load them, and in Seattle they beat up the non-unionised labour brought in to replace them. The innate decency of the American people led to widespread support for a programme of food aid organised by future president Herbert Hoover, and the lives of millions of starving Russians were saved in what Conquest has described as ‘perhaps the most effective humanitarian effort ever launched’. (The programme succeeded despite Bolshevik obstruction; when it was over, Stalin – whom Lenin had instructed to keep an eye on the Americans – had all those Russians who had helped organise the programme arrested.)
To Lenin and his supporters around the world, the American military action in Siberia proved the inherently imperialist nature of the capitalist system in general and the American government in particular. But the picture was far more complicated than that. Despite calls for US troops to intervene more vigorously in what was effectively a Russian civil war, General Graves insisted that his troops were there solely to protect the railway. In resisting calls for an anti-communist crusade from US politicians and businessmen, supported by US diplomats in the field, and from other allied powers, especially Japan and Britain, Graves had one very powerful ally: President Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson epitomised the way in which the currents of democracy, corporatism and imperialism were swirling together to create new patterns in the politics of the day. A former president of Princeton University, he is now remembered as the architect of the League of Nations, predecessor of the UN, and a passionate anti-imperialist; but one of his first actions on taking power was to dispatch US marines to seize the Mexican port of Veracruz. During his presidency women obtained the vote, but apartheid in the south reached its high water mark. He was notoriously partial to the interests of bankers and corporate financiers, but created the Federal Trade Commission to regulate corporations engaging in interstate commerce.
The 1912 presidential election, in which Wilson came to power, was one of the most confused in US history. Former Republican pr
esident Theodore Roosevelt had fallen out with the incumbent Republican president William Howard Taft, when the latter refused to send American troops to intervene in the civil war in progress in Mexico. (Not that Taft was opposed in principle to foreign adventures; just before the election he sent US marines to invade Nicaragua, where they were to stay for eleven years.) Roosevelt stood as a candidate of his own ‘Bull Moose’ party, gaining more votes than Taft but letting in the Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson.
The Democratic party was also split. A populist faction headed by a former presidential candidate demanded legislation to destroy the financial oligarchies of New York and Boston, punitive taxes on corporations and effective action to smash the monopolistic power of the trusts. Wilson had been governor of New Jersey, a state notorious for its corporatist sentiments, and wanted nothing to do with such dangerously anti-American sentiments. Similarly he had no time for those demanding justice for blacks. Brought up in the south during the civil war (his father had been a clergyman with the Confederate army), and owing his electoral success to southern support, he repaid his electoral debt by enforcing apartheid-like measures in large parts of the federal government. Hundreds of black functionaries were fired throughout the south. As Wilson’s collector of internal revenue in Georgia explained, ‘A Negro’s place is in the cornfield.’