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NOTES

 

1. Remarkable — isn't it? — that for the LP chief, his candidate's losing performance against a criminal defendant was a point of pride instead of embarrassment. One likes to think that most people would reassess the value of party activity after something like that — but wishful thinking rules the world, and libertarians are hardly immune.


2. See Chapter 6. The "nine old men" on the Supreme Court were supposedly threatening the most important enactments of the New Deal, including the Social Security Act and the Wagner Act. Actually, the "threatening" votes were all 5-4, except for the 1935 decision that overturned the National Recovery Act (NRA), which was 9-0. Instead of working quietly to persuade one of the aged "reactionary" justices to retire, Roosevelt insisted on passage of a law that would authorize him to name as many as six new justices to the court, four more than necessary to reverse the 5-4 votes but too few to have saved the NRA, which was so explicitly fascist that it was simply doomed, "short of Roosevelt's naming ten flunkies from Tammany Hall to a nineteen-man bench"! (p. 134) Karp notes that, midway through the fight, conservative Justice Willis Van Devanter announced his intention to retire. But Roosevelt persisted.


3. I write of Robert Byrd of Virginia and Richard Byrd of West Virginia, and Ronn Neff in "'Any day is a good day to fight for liberty'" writes of Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Younger readers may suspect that we have gone astray in our political ornithology, but such a flock has actually existed.


4. P. 169. Elsewhere, Karp seemingly contradicts himself in writing that a party controlled by oligarchs "has power and wields power." (p. 21)


5. See Ronn Neff's discussion of Carter in "'Any day is a good day to fight for liberty.'" As for Ford, it is true that he was minority leader of the House for a time, but that seems not to have impressed Karp. We have already considered Karp's differing evaluations of Speaker Rayburn (the oligarch) and Speaker McCormack (the servile hack). Whatever the truth about McCormack's status vis-à-vis Rayburn's, surely there can be no comparison between Ford's importance in Congress and that of his Senate counterpart, Everett Dirksen of Illinois. Karp cites a Dirksen biographer's observation that Democrat "Majority Leader Mike Mansfield 'deferred so totally' to Dirksen ... that Dirksen became, in effect, the acting Senate leader" during the Kennedy regime — all in the interests of more efficient collusion and avoidance of reform. (p. 115) By contrast, in neither edition of Indispensable Enemies does Karp accord Ford a single index entry.


6. Burlingame, Calif.: Center for Libertarian Studies, 1995, p. 29.


7. The Powers That Be: Processes of Ruling-Class Domination in America (New York: Vintage, 1979).


8. P. 164. Lovett was a friend of the old crocodile Joe Kennedy, says Domhoff.


9. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988 (1986).


10. Karp, like most populists, was an admirer of Lincoln. He never subjects Lincoln's War to penetrating analysis, at least not in any book or article of his with which I am familiar. That is our loss — and Karp's.


11. The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991 [1990]), p. 80. That comment is the only mention of the Morgans' attitude toward the war in Chernow's massive and otherwise exhaustive book.


12. See Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963).


13. The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve (Appleton, Wis.: American Opinion, 1994), p. 230.


14. For a discussion of how U.S. entry served the interests of the bigwig "new liberals" — i.e., proto-fascists — associated with the National Civic Federation, see James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State: 1900-1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), Chap. Eight, "War as Fulfillment."


15. See Domhoff, pp. 101-7, for a discussion of how the CFR (with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation) began laying the groundwork — in 1939 — of what would become the IMF and World Bank.


16. New York: Bantam, 1978 (1977).


17. Pp. 157-62. I also recommend Domhoff's Fat Cats and Democrats: The Role of the Big Rich in the Party of the Common Man (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1972). Domhoff stipulates that only very specific, and somewhat narrow, factions of the higher circles financed the Democrats during the period he covers, which is pretty much the same period Karp covers. I strongly suspect that that picture has changed markedly over the past quarter-century, and that a much broader range of corporate and banking moguls bankroll Democrats nowadays. Domhoff is still alive and kicking, and I hope that we can look forward to an updated edition of Fat Cats and Democrats.


18. See Nicholas Strakon, Dark Suits and Red Guards: The Two Pincers of the American Ruling Class (Roanoke, Ind.: WTM Enterprises, 1997), pp. 21-22, for a somewhat different treatment of this issue.

Karp contends that theorists of an extra-regime ruling class such as myself believe that in the absence of such masters, politicians "wish to serve the common interest." (p. 164) I trust I have acquitted myself of that charge.


19. See James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (Washington, D.C.: Gateway Books, 1987 [1943]), especially pp. 266-67.


20. First presented as a paper at the Second Libertarian Scholars Conference in New York in 1974, Grinder and Hagel's article was later published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies 1 (Winter 1977): 59-79.

The article is available on line for downloading as a PDF file, at the JLS Website. Scroll down to the Grinder and Hagel entry to find the link.


21. Lest I make the whole procedure sound too explicit, I will stipulate that it most likely resembles that of the ward heelers described by Karp:

"It was not necessary to give orders," reported a contemporary about Boss Tom Platt's New York Republican organization at the turn of the century. "It was quite sufficient to have it understood by example that the man that stood by the organization benefited because the organization stood by him and that if he did not stand by the organization he got punished." (p. 21)


22. After the 1994 election, the 11 states of the old Confederacy were represented in the House by 64 Republicans and 61 Democrats, and in the Senate by 13 Republicans and nine Democrats. After the 1994 and 1995 elections, Republicans held seven of the 11 governor's mansions.


23. One obvious example of continued collusion in the past few years is the spectacle of Dole and Gingrich's forcing Clinton's World Trade Organization measure through a repudiated Congress just before the arrival of a new class of Republican congressmen who were expected to be less ovine than their seniors. Another example is the "patriotically bipartisan" support for the invasion of Bosnia.