"Yes, that is true. The past half century has been a period of steady development with no spectacular changes but rather a slow growth and steady social progress. We appear to have reached a period of dynamic equilibrium in which mankind can develop his arts and perfect his sciences in reasonable comfort and safety. It might surprise you to see all the change since the end of the New Crusade, but it would be impossible for me to put my finger on any one thing and say 'Here the change occurred'. However, it is not necessary. You will gradually see for yourself now that you have the general framework. Do you have any questions about this period?"
"Yes, two things are bothering me. I don't understand the economic reforms under Holmes, and I don't see what this New Crusade was all about. It sounds screwy."
Cathcart grinned. "It's a good thing my professional research gives me some knowledge of the idiom of your period. It was screwy. But let's take 'em in order. We discussed before the cause of economic depressions and I asked you to take on faith the idea that the only thing that caused depressions was a financial system that automatically caused a spread between goods to be bought and money to buy them, or 'over-production' as it was euphemistically called. I'm not going into the mathematical theory even now. You can take it up later with an economist or in several books I can recommend. But President Holmes was one of the few men to occupy the White House who had sufficient insight and mathematical ability to see the trouble, the reasons behind it, and to devise a cure. He had a powerful weapon to work with, the Bank of the United States, and he had the free intellect necessary to do what needed to be done without clouding the issue with a lot of moralistic tape. In fact he helped to formulate a realistic social ethic that justified his new departure. To begin with he saw the 'over-production' or, as he looked at it, under-consumption or shortage of purchasing power. He directed a staff of actuaries to supply him with approximate figures showing the percentage of under-consumption and its dollar value for the past year. Then he undertook to make up the missing purchasing power by literally giving away through the Bank of the United States the necessary amount of money. He was aware that to do so without some control over prices would result in inflated prices and a new spread between production and consumption. So he held back about half of the newly created purchasing power and used it to control prices in the following manner: All of the retailers of consumption goods in the country were invited to join in the New Economic Cycle. If a dealer joined he agreed not to raise his prices over what they were when the new regime started. On the contrary he was to sell all his goods at a ten per cent discount, and the Bank of the United States would hand him the difference on presentation of his sales records. Then Holmes proceeded to give away through the Bank twenty-five dollars per month to anybody who would take it. Naturally business boomed. Prices didn't go up because all of the business went to the merchants who had joined the agreement.
Presently all the other merchants joined, too, in order to get in on the rush of business. Factories re-opened, labor was needed and unemployment disappeared like snow in July. The country hummed. And that is a thumbnail sketch of the present situation, Perry. No unemployment, plenty of well paid work for anybody that wants a job, and enough credit issued every month to anybody that wants it to keep body and soul together in decency."
Perry looked bewildered. "Wait a minute. It looks fine at first glance, but where did he get the money? Not from taxes, surely, with the country already broke. And not from the private bankers. They were ruined in the war."*
[*For the benefit of the reader who is arithmetically inclined:
(A) Value (Price) of consumption goods produced in 2010 $540,000,000,000.00
Average income per person $2,413.33
(B) Total of personal income (Wages, dividends, insurance, pensions, etc.) $434,400,000,000.00
(C) Difference or under-consumption $105,600,000,000.00
Practical check:
(D) Value of estimated excess in inventories (under-consumption) $110,400,000,000.00 Error $4,800,000,000 or ±4.45%
(E) Empirical control figure (C±D) $108,000,000,000.00
Divide by population of 180,000,000 to obtain under-consumption per person per year of 2010 $600.00
Divide by 12 to obtain under-consumption per person per month $50.00 Issue one-half of this directly $25 per month per person Ratio to (A) all consumption goods produced of (E) unconsumed consumption goods is one to five or 20%. Discount is to handle one-half of this. Therefore discount is 20%.
Q.E.D.
I have taken the liberty of using round numbers. The exact figures from the Washington Archives show $27.813 per month and discount of 11.87%.
The Author]
Cathcart grinned. "He got the cash money the same way we have gotten all cash money since Roosevelt put the gold back in the ground—right off the printing presses. But he didn't have to print much of it. The checks were issued at the Bank and the merchant and a great many others had accounts at the Bank and very little cash money changed hands. The bulk of it was mere bookkeeping entries, made by the bank clerks. Holmes had implemented what the bankers had known for centuries but were barred by LaGuardia from doing—taking money out of an inkwell. What's the matter, son? Still not satisfied?"
"Well, I don't know. Everything you have said seems okay, but how about this? If you keep pouring money into a country indefinitely, you are bound to get inflation, fixed prices or no fixed prices."
"You don't pour it in. You add just enough to keep it running. Each fiscal period the additional amount is the closest possible approximation of the amount necessary to prevent a spread between consumption and production, based on the value of the nation's inventories."
"But why do you have to keep adding money all the time?"
"I said I would stay away from theory but I'll give you this hint to chew over: the amount necessary to add each period is theoretically equal to the amount of savings invested as capital in the preceding period. And one more hint: Doesn't it take more money to run the country's industry now than it did when George Washington was President? But now let's pass on to the New Crusade. It's getting late."
"OK."
"It is difficult to assay the causes of any religious movement. There appear to be mass movements of the human spirit that we do not fully understand. Karl Marx attempted to interpret all history in terms of a rigid materialistic causation, but how does that account for the Children's Crusade? Carlysle would have us believe that history is no more than the acts of certain great men, heroes. I find that equally hard to believe. Would George Washington have been more than a gentleman planter if England's rule of the colonies had been more liberal? It is my belief that history is a story of the action of individuals, acting according to their characters in the environments in which they find themselves. A change either in character or in environment would change the resulting action. In the interplay of lives there are strong characters—Carlysle's Heroes—who exert powerful influences of personality and intellect on their fellow men, and thereby shape the environment in which less dominant creatures act. If these strong characters are born in a period and are able to reach an environment in which their peculiar talents find maximum expression, they will write their names large on the pages of history. 'There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.'
"Such a dominant character was Nehemiah Scudder, founder of the New Crusade and leader of the Neo-Puritans. He found the opportunity to use his exceptional talents in the Middle West in the third decade of this century. He was first heard of about 2030 as an itinerant evangelist of an obscure fundamentalist sect. He preached over most of the Mississippi valley, and although not prominent enough to make a splash in the news of the day, he had a reputation in his denomination for the forcefulness of his preaching, and the virulence with which he called the vengeance of the Lord upon the erring brother. But his fortunes took no great change until the death in 2023 of a Mrs. Rachel Biggs, the septuagenarian relict
of a wealthy shoe manufacturer. Mrs. Biggs left four million dollars outright and that much more in trust to establish and maintain a tabernacle and television station to be used by the Reverend Scudder. We have had our radio priests and our political preachers many times before, but while most divines are tuned out at once, Brother Nehemiah was able to project his magnetic personality through the broadcaster and those who heard him once were thereafter his followers, if they were temperamentally ready for his brand of fire and brimstone. He was able, also, to choose and inspire other preachers to help him in the organization of his rapidly growing spiritual following. About 2024 he interpreted certain passages in the Apocalypse to mean that the new Jerusalem was here and now, that Armageddon was at hand, that his followers were called on to take up the fight. He organized the Knights of the New Crusade to implement him for Armageddon. This organization was modeled in nearly every respect after the Ku Klux Klan of the previous century, even to many details of ritual, uniform and constitution, which Brother Nehemiah had not bothered to change.
"In order to understand what happened subsequently and to appreciate the great power which Scudder wielded, it is necessary to understand the man and the people among whom he worked. He was a man of tremendous physical vitality and nervous energy, of middle height but powerfully built. His manner and speech suggested his backwoods origin. Deep set eyes under bony brows burned and gleamed and glared. His voice was normally low and mellow, but could scream and shout praise if need be. His mouth was large, his lips full and loose. In rest they were sensuous but in speaking they expressed a sadistic delight in his work. As to his private life, not much is known. He was married and his wife accompanied him and served him, but from time to time other female acolytes were added to his staff. The obvious conclusion is possibly not true, as there is a persistent story that the man, in spite of his great strength, was actually sexually impotent.
"A large portion of the population was ripe for such a leader. In the New World, since it was first settled, there have been two strongly dissident elements in the social body. One was anarchistic, and tolerant; the other sternly authoritarian and fanatically moralistic. It is a mistake to believe that our forefathers came to this continent in search of religious freedom. On the contrary they sought a place in which to exercise their own brand of religious totalitarianism. It is probable that the religious persecutions and moralistic intolerances practiced on dissenters by the colonists of New England were more severe than any from which they had fled. It is surprising that the Constitution contained an apparent guarantee of religious freedom. This seeming oversight may be attributed to two things, the mutual suspicion with which each colony viewed the other, and the staunch feeling for liberty felt by Thomas Jefferson who wrote the provision. It is very significant to note that the religious freedom clause was an injunction to the federal government. It did not limit the states. At one time the State of Virginia had an established church, and religious intolerance had been practiced, under the law, in every state in the Union. In addition to the puritanical factor in the American culture, there was the Roman Catholic strain, strong in some parts of the country, which supported many of the same intolerances as the Protestant churches.
"All forms of organized religion are alike in certain social respects. Each claims to be the sole custodian of the essential truth. Each claims to speak with final authority on all ethical questions. And every church has requested, demanded, or ordered the state to enforce its particular system of taboos. No church ever withdraws its claims to control absolutely by divine right the moral life of the citizens. If the church is weak, it attempts by devious means to turn its creed and discipline into law. If it is strong, it uses the rack and the thumbscrew. To a surprising degree, churches in the United States were able, under a governmental form which formally acknowledged no religion, to have placed on the statutes the individual church's code of moral taboos, and to wrest from the state privileges and special concessions amounting to subsidy. Especially was this true of the evangelical churches in the middle west and south, but it was equally true of the Roman Church on its strongholds. It would have been equally true of any church; Holy Roller, Mohammedan, Judaism, or headhunters. It is a characteristic of all organized religion, not of a particular sect."
Perry interrupted. "All this may have been true in 2020 but I saw no particular evidence of it in my day. There were churches of course and I went to Sunday School when I was a kid and chapel when I was a midshipman, but Lord, I didn't notice them after I grew up. They didn't bother me and I didn't bother them."
Cathcart smiled wryly. "What one has never had one doesn't miss. It might be instructive if I were to name over a number of the laws, and customs having the effect of law, prevalent in your period whose origins may be traced directly to some powerful organized church or churches."
"Please do."
Cathcart ticked them off on his fingers. "Sunday closing laws; tax exemption for church property; practically all laws relating to marriage and the relations between the sexes—including laws forbidding divorce, country-wide rule permitting only monogamous marriages, laws against fornication and other taboo sexual relationships, and laws forbidding birth control; laws prohibiting the teaching of certain scientific doctrines, especially man's kinship to other animals; all laws of censorship, for moral reasons, of the press, stage, radio, or speech; certain taboos of word and speech forms; laws prohibiting certain parts of the body being exposed to view; laws prohibiting the drinking of alcohol per se; laws against smoking cigarettes; any law which takes a paternalistic attitude toward the citizen with the purpose of ensuring his moral perfection rather than the purpose of regulating his conduct to prevent him from damaging other persons and, vice versa, prevent others from damaging him."
"But surely most of the laws that you mention arise from common sense rather than from religion?"
"You believe so because you were reared in the environment that the churches created. You were conditioned to regard them as the natural order of things. But it is a matter of historical record that in cultures where the organized religion held different views on morals, the exact opposite of every law I have referred to has had its day. But again we are getting away from the Reverend Scudder and his band of holy fanatics. In spite of what I have said the American churches fought a rear guard action for four hundred years. It is a far cry from the blue laws of early day Massachusetts to the tolerance and easy morals of the period under discussion. The libertarian spirit had great hold especially in the cities. With the perfection of technique for controlling conception and the elimination of contagious diseases associated with sexual intercourse, the sexual customs of the people were undergoing a rapid metamorphosis. The New Economic Regime produced more changes in moral relationships and made divorce easier. It produced another effect, too, in destroying the moralistic nature of work for work's sake. All of these things were offensive to a person of an old fashioned point of view, and none found them more distasteful than the Reverend Nehemiah Scudder. He preached against them, predicting Hell's fire and brimstone for the ungodly people of the United States! He denounced the pleasures of the flesh, all frivolities, the scandalous clothing, the demon rum, dancing, gambling, worldly music, light minded literature, and vanities of every sort. He called on his followers to stamp it out, fight the battle of Armageddon, and be led at once into the New Jerusalem, where the godly would never die, but live forever, singing hymns and praising God. Furthermore he advised his flock as to just how they might accomplish this happy end. He had a genius for organization and used it to weld together the most effective minority group ever seen in American politics. In the first place he claimed to represent the whole population and claimed a majority of the population as his personal following.
"Such was the effect of his organized agitation that he convinced the easy-going unorganized mass that his adherents were in the majority. In particular he convinced the politicians that he controlled enough votes to turn an election. In
response to this belief, which may or may not have been justified, he began to accomplish through political means many of the changes in law which he desired, and what he could not get legally was obtained by his night riders, the terrorist Knights of the New Crusade or Angels of the Lord as they were variously known. There is a latent streak of sadism in the best of us. The Reverend Scudder turned it loose.
"During the period from 2025 to 2030 no man was safe in his home. The night riders might come knocking at his door and spirit him away to be flogged and perhaps tarred and feathered for such crimes as neglecting to attend church or a disrespectful attitude toward the movement or any fancied slip from the stern moral code of the brethren which might occur to the fanatical intolerant mind of a Crusader. Or his daughter might be torn from her parents, stripped naked and branded with a hot iron as punishment for some innocent frivolity regarded by the brethren as mortal sin. Or a merchant might find his store windows broken and his stock vandalized for the crime of employing an ungodly man. By 2028 Scudder had an iron grip on the Mississippi Valley and was a strong force throughout the country. Blue laws controlled the whole life of the valley. Not a vehicle moved on Sunday. Churchgoing was obligatory in many places, and it was safer to do so in any case. Women wore somber clothing which completely hid their bodies. Dancing, singing other than hymns, games and other vanities were verboten. Higher education was discouraged. Idleness was dubbed vagrancy and treated as a crime. Scudder was looking forward to two national changes, the abolition of the distribution of the credit checks without work in return, and the open establishment of the church.
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