The Original 1%--The Myth of the Golden Age
We have long been led to believe that the people of the country, the so-called founders were of a different breed and that the country once experienced a gold en age when there was a leveling of some sort and there was little difference betweent eh rich and poor and that what we are seeing here with the huge gap between the rich and poor today is something new and that we are somehow supposed to remember that golden age when there was no such thing in this country as the rich and the poor. When I ask repeatedly here when was that golden age I seldom get even a guess. Yet, a careful or perhaps even cursory review of this country’s history seldom reveals any period when the class struggle, and the wealth gap between the rich and the poor that sustains it, did not exist.
During the waning years of John Adams’ administration the rhetoric between the rich and the poor heated up. One Federalist wrote that; “If some means were not adopted to prevent the indiscriminate admission of wild Irishmen and others to the right of suffrage, there will soon be an end to liberty and property.” Of course, such rhetoric always prompts the question: whose liberty and whose property?
One doesn’t have to look far to discover the answer to this question. This quotation—like the one above—comes from The History of The Labor Movement in The United States, Vol. 1: From Colonial Times to the Founding of the American Federation of Labor (1947) by Philip S. Foner, who in his career produced an incredible list of works on labor and African American history. The following quotation comes from a pamphlet printed and posted by David Brown who in November 1798, led a group that protested the concentration of wealth and ownership of property in the hands of a few. As Foner writes Brown was an “itinerant mechanic” living in Massachusetts, who the Federalists of the day named the “Wandering Apostle of Sedition” for his opinions on the disparity and wealth concentration, which included this statement:
Here is the 1,000 out of 5,000,000 that receive all the benefits of public property and all the rest no share in it. Indeed all our administration is as fast approaching to the Lords and Commons as possible—that a few men should possess the whole Country and the rest be tenants to the others. There [always] has been an actual struggle between the labouring part of the community and those lazy rascals that have invented every means that the Devil has put into their heads to destroy the labouring part of the community….I never knew a Government supported long after the confidence of the people was lost, for the people are the Government. (brackets and ellipses in original)
David Brown was given 18 months in prison and fined $400 under the Alien and Sedition Acts for erectying a liberty pole in Dedham, Massachusetts on which he posted a leaflet that contained this statement and these sentiments. So when was this Golden Age of equality and liberty, please point to it! Evidently sometime before 1798! It must have been a doozy because it certainly didn’t last long, did it?
There are no bans on this thread because I encourage all modern day Tories, rascals and other defenders of the rich and wealth in this country to step forward and identify yourselves.
We have long been led to believe that the people of the country, the so-called founders were of a different breed and that the country once experienced a gold en age when there was a leveling of some sort and there was little difference betweent eh rich and poor and that what we are seeing here with the huge gap between the rich and poor today is something new and that we are somehow supposed to remember that golden age when there was no such thing in this country as the rich and the poor. When I ask repeatedly here when was that golden age I seldom get even a guess. Yet, a careful or perhaps even cursory review of this country’s history seldom reveals any period when the class struggle, and the wealth gap between the rich and the poor that sustains it, did not exist.
During the waning years of John Adams’ administration the rhetoric between the rich and the poor heated up. One Federalist wrote that; “If some means were not adopted to prevent the indiscriminate admission of wild Irishmen and others to the right of suffrage, there will soon be an end to liberty and property.” Of course, such rhetoric always prompts the question: whose liberty and whose property?
One doesn’t have to look far to discover the answer to this question. This quotation—like the one above—comes from The History of The Labor Movement in The United States, Vol. 1: From Colonial Times to the Founding of the American Federation of Labor (1947) by Philip S. Foner, who in his career produced an incredible list of works on labor and African American history. The following quotation comes from a pamphlet printed and posted by David Brown who in November 1798, led a group that protested the concentration of wealth and ownership of property in the hands of a few. As Foner writes Brown was an “itinerant mechanic” living in Massachusetts, who the Federalists of the day named the “Wandering Apostle of Sedition” for his opinions on the disparity and wealth concentration, which included this statement:
Here is the 1,000 out of 5,000,000 that receive all the benefits of public property and all the rest no share in it. Indeed all our administration is as fast approaching to the Lords and Commons as possible—that a few men should possess the whole Country and the rest be tenants to the others. There [always] has been an actual struggle between the labouring part of the community and those lazy rascals that have invented every means that the Devil has put into their heads to destroy the labouring part of the community….I never knew a Government supported long after the confidence of the people was lost, for the people are the Government. (brackets and ellipses in original)
David Brown was given 18 months in prison and fined $400 under the Alien and Sedition Acts for erectying a liberty pole in Dedham, Massachusetts on which he posted a leaflet that contained this statement and these sentiments. So when was this Golden Age of equality and liberty, please point to it! Evidently sometime before 1798! It must have been a doozy because it certainly didn’t last long, did it?
There are no bans on this thread because I encourage all modern day Tories, rascals and other defenders of the rich and wealth in this country to step forward and identify yourselves.
