The Senator's Son

What are the ingredients necessary to preserve the American Dream?  Do they include equal access to the American economic opportunity structure?  ...

How does an ordinary citizen become Commissioner of the National Football League?  Does he have to know or be related to Bill Gates?  Or Warren Buffett?  Or the Koch brothers?  Not even a few of us can be fortunate enough to have the opportunity to grow up the privileged child of the rich man.  As a matter of pure numbers, it’s just not reality.  Unfortunately.

And how about the US Senators?  Very few of us are the Senator’s son, either.  Is it any wonder that we seem to know very little of the sons and daughters of our US Senators?  Or of other historically noteworthy citizens?  Perhaps this is because, typically, born with the silver spoon, as the song goes, the house looks like a rummage sale.  That is to say, they don’t amount to much.  Call it human nature.

But a few notable exceptions come to mind in our own lifetime.  Roger Goodell, the current and only 3^rd commissioner in NFL history, is one.  Mr. Goodell has picked up where his predecessor left off, growing rather nicely into the job he landed in 2006, and leading the NFL to new heights of prosperity.  He is the son of Charles Goodell, the late US Senator, R-NY, appointed to his seat by then Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to fill the vacancy upon the assassination of US Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-NY in 1968.  Did the connection assist the commissioner in obtaining his first NFL position, an administrative internship in the league offices in 1982?  Did it assist him in being named commissioner?  It certainly couldn’t hurt.

Another is Al Gore, the former two term Vice President to Pres. Bill Clinton and the winner of the consolation prize in the hotly, and legally, contested presidential election of 2000.  Gore’s father had been a US Senator from Tennessee, as was Mr. Gore at one time.  Before beginning his years of public service, however, Mr. Gore served time in Vietnam in 1969, having enlisted in the army.  He reasoned that he did not want someone with fewer options than he to go in his place.  A 1969 graduate of Harvard University, he would become one of only about a dozen of the 1,115 members of his class who went to Vietnam.

Since the election of 2000, Mr. Gore has been involved mostly in environmental causes, founding and serving as the current chair of the Alliance for Climate Protection.  He has also been on a campaign to educate citizens about global warming via a comprehensive slide show that, by his own estimate, he has given more than a thousand times.  The slide show is the subject of the 2006 documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, winner of an Academy Award in 2007.  He was also the subject of a joint award with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the Nobel Peace Prize, also in 2007.  He has championed the idea of stewardship of the environment as a moral issue, more than anything else.

Yet another is President George H. W. Bush/“41,” who was the son of US Sen. Prescott Bush, R-CT, a Wall Street banker.  That makes Prescott a pretty distinguished fellow.  He was the father of one president, the grandfather of another president (George W. Bush/“43”) and the grandfather of the Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, who many believe is also presidential material.

And although he was not the son of a US Senator, Gen. William T. Sherman had friends in high places looking out for him, too, among the politicians in Washington, D.C.  His brother, John, was a political mover and US Senator from Ohio during the General’s time.  Subsequently, John Sherman would become a future Secretary of State and the primary sponsor of major federal anti-monopoly legislation, which dates back to the 1890s.

Two of our 44 US Presidents were the sons of presidents: John Quincy Adams was the son of John Adams, and the aforementioned Bush/“43” the son of Bush/“41.”  As distinguished was the career of each son of a president, the question for the ordinary citizen remains: Would either have had the remote chance to become President of the United States if his respective father weren’t?

Put another way, who holds the keys to the video room?  Who among us commands access to the American economic opportunity structure?  An ordinary citizen who dismisses these questions would be well served to consider the following proposition.  Understanding this complicated dynamic may provide the essential force in identifying what is necessary to preserve the American Dream.  The stakes cannot be fairly understated.

-Michael D'Angelo

The True Conservative & the Triumph of Conservatism

(Editor’s note: This is the second and concluding segment in a two part series.  The first segment introduced readers to traditional notions of conservatism.)

Does change mean destruction?  What happens when there is no change? …

Against the traditional definition of the term “conservative,” Theodore Roosevelt, however, identified what he referred to as the “true conservative:”

The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it.  The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains.

…

We must have complete and effective publicity (disclosure) of corporate affairs, so that the people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public.  It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced.  Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption on our political affairs.

In the first decade of the 20^th century, a time when 1% of families possessed 7/8 of all wealth, the reform agenda of T.R.’s Republican Party called for efficient government run by competent, able people with a need for expanded government action.  The ground-breaking work of Ida Tarbell, “muckraking” progressive journalist, provided the impetus to take on and ultimately succeed in breaking up the gargantuan oil monopoly, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.

Utilizing a previously toothless, obscure federal law known as the 1891 Sherman Anti-Trust Act, T.R.’s administration rejected the previous Republican policy of laissez-faire and passive, limited government.  Henceforth, and for the very first time, the government would reject the principles of Social Darwinism and recognize labor (i.e.: the ordinary citizen) as a necessary ingredient, if not equal partner, in its struggle with entrenched businesses (i.e.: ranging from finance to railroads to steel to coal mines).  It was then labeled as the “triumph of conservatism.”

T.R.’s program of reform exemplified an activist government to combat the various ills plaguing society as a result of the Industrial Revolution.  Noteworthy legislative achievements on behalf of the ordinary citizen included the enactment of workers’ compensation, child labor and compulsory education laws, as well as laws to ameliorate excessively long shifts and unsafe work conditions.

In short, T.R. used his presidency to make laws to protect people “on the make” as opposed to those “already made,” in the attempt at “making an Old Party Progressive.”  It was in line with the Jackson-Lincoln view of the presidency: to act when it is your duty to act as the steward of the people, unless explicitly forbidden by the US Constitution.  His program would inspire much of the social agenda of the future New Deal a generation later.

Conservatives, said T.R., “are taught to believe that change means destruction.  They are wrong.  ...  Life means change; where there is no change, death comes.”

If I could ask but one thing of my fellow countrymen, my request would be that, whenever they go in for reform, they remember the two sides, and that they always exact justice from one side as much as from the other.

…

But we must be ready to face temporary disaster, whether or not brought on by those who will war against us to the knife.  Those who oppose reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism.

These are strong words to ponder, as wealth disparity and concentration in the hands of the few are again acute problems in the second decade of the 21^st century.  But amid society’s growing unrest, there is an enlightened path to follow.  Thanks in no small part to Theodore Roosevelt.

-Michael D’Angelo