Lessons From the Last Gilded Age

[phantom power]

That was how LaFollette began. He was just warming up.

But what do we find has occured in the last few years since the money power has gained control of our industry and government? It controls the newspaper press. The people know this. Their confidence is weakened and destroyed. No longer are the editorial columns of newspapers a potent force in educating public opinion The newspapers, of course, are still patronized for news. But even as to news, the public is fast coming to understand that wherever news items bear in any way upon the control of government by business the news is colored; so confidence in the newspaper as a newspaper is undermined. Cultured and able men are still to be found upon the editorial staffs of all great dailies, but the public understands them to be hired men who no longer express honest judgments and sincere conviction, who write what they are told to write and whose judgments are salaried. To the subserviency of the press to special interests in no small degree is due the power and influence and prosperity of the weekly and monthly magazines. A decade ago, young men trained in journalism came to see this control of the newspapers of the country. They saw this unoccupied field. And they went out and built great periodicals and magazines. They were free.

As you can imagine, this was not received well. The New York Times all but called LaFollette crazy. It blew up any remaining chance LaFollette had of getting his party's nomination. Roosevelt, strong as a bull moose, was the Progressive candidate and Wilson became president. But, as historian Matthew Josephson says of LaFollette's Philadelphia tirade, it may have been politically suicidal, but it wasn't altogether wrong.

"It was not the weakness of LaFollette that led to his proscription," Josephson writes, "but his alarming strength, the positive, aggressive character of the movement he led, the very capacity he showed for linking together all the dissident factions, among farmers and laborers and the intellligent middle class into a united party of concrete principles and programs."

LaFollette was right, of course. The spirit of oligarchy and of monopoly had entered publishing. (Within three decades, behind "Colonel" Robert McCormick, for whom Herbert Hoover was insufficiently conservative, the Chicago Tribune would be one of the strongest voices of reactionary opposition to the New Deal measures proposed by Roosevelt's distant cousin.) It has never left. Now, as we are in the second gilded age, one that camouflages effectively all it has in common with the first one, we should all be wary of that spirit as consumers of the political news brought to us mainly by even larger and more powerful -- and more heavily concentrated -- corporate enterprises.

In related news: Hillary Clinton has all but wrapped up the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

Everybody says so.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Lessons_From_The_Last_Gilded_Age