In the Shadow of 1937

Not since 1937 have the richest 1% of Americans been so far above the average citizen in assets and earning power as today. More, these one percenters are not coupon-clipping, Palm Beach-squatting heirs. They are wage earners and entrepreneurs, and their prospects just get grander as globalization grows the market capitalization of all enterprises. Further, the one percenters are pulling away not only from everyone in general but also from the richest of the rest. Their income has doubled since Ronald Reagan, while in the same time frame the merely rich, the 90th to 95th percentiles, have flatlined.What this means today, brooding on George Santayana’s drollery that you are doomed to repeat the history you don’t learn from, is that it is useful to travel back to New York City in 1937 to see what severe and, truth be told, grotesque income disparity might mean in the world of affairs ahead.January 1937 was a savage landscape of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. New Yorkers awoke on a cold, fair morning to learn that the national economy was rocked by more than 33,000 men on a sit-down strike at General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan. The United Auto Workers demanded company-wide collective bargaining. General Motors responded that it wanted to negotiate separately with each plant. Strikers took command of the entrance to the Buick plant while intimidated company cops stood by. Fighting broke out between factions of strikers. One man was hospitalized for whipping wounds.Seventy years later it is not just irony that General Motors and Ford have paid off up to half their workforce and are confronting a longer period of decline in the face of swelling auto manufacturing by Asia and the troubled future of the gasoline engine. The men and women who are idle today in the troubled states of Michigan and Ohio can search their scrapbooks for Brownie snapshots of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers who were beggared in 1937 by the powerlessness of collective bargaining by the very same United Auto Workers that once fought in the streets.New Yorkers in the fresh 1937 also learned that big oil was ever resourceful in its quest to avoid paying taxes to the people’s collectors. Depressed and desperate Newark and Essex County, N.J., won a settlement from Standard Oil of New Jersey of nearly $2 millions for back taxes and interest for 1936. Standard Oil had long maintained its registered office at 185 Washington St. in Newark but had never before been assessed on the basis of what the Newark taxman, A. F. Minisi, said was a company worth $300 million. In response to the creative thinking of Newark and Essex, Standard Oil immediately transferred its registered office to the friendlier environment of Linden, N.J., where no such tax appetite applied.Today, we have the same Standard Oil of New Jersey, now known as Exxon, reporting Jupiter-scale profits, such as $10 billion from the gasoline price spike of last summer. And we have the same creative taxmen in the pending 110th Congress. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, spearheading a Democratic campaign against the middle-class squeeze, have indicated their first priorities include axing the “tax-breaks” to the windfall profits of big oil.The rich got richer in 1937 not only because of their assets but also because of a deepening worldwide deflation that, destabilizing democracies, favored strongmen on all continents. In Spain, in the proxy war between communist Russia and capitalist Europe, leftist rebels claimed that two “Reich Divisions” were en route to aid the government forces under Francisco Franco. In Moscow, the mood was drunken self-denial, the crammed Metropol Hotel charging 115 rubles for half a bottle of foul Soviet champagne. In Berlin the mood was grim ambition. Propagandist Joseph Goebbels’s official newspaper, Angriff, asked, “Will War Come Automatically?” Four-Year Plan boss Hermann Goering proclaimed, “Full steam ahead to assure German honor and German rights.” And Hitler admonished, “Fulfill in the new year the eternal watchword, ‘Everything for Germany’.”Meanwhile, in Tokyo, already at war in famished, plague-ridden China, the Japanese economy was experiencing a bubble of an armaments boom. The Imperial Japanese navy minister, Osami Nagano, greeted the 2,597th year of the empire with a warning, “Both East and West are in chaos. Japan has overcome the 1936 crisis but our people have more difficulties to face in the future. In 1936, Japan’s foreign relations have not been satisfactory, but the Berlin Pact strengthens our position.”Today, despite the booming economies of East and West, it is easy to see the rogue states, and the opportunists called terrorist leaders, taking advantage of the hesitations of the democratic states. Iran, Syria, Sudan, and North Korea create messianic cults and project imperial threats that are as intimidating to the United Nations today as Russia, Germany, and Japan were to the League of Nations 70 years ago.The year 1937 closed with a display of grandiosity that New Yorkers must have found both dreamy and toxic. One of the richest men in the world, J. P. Morgan Jr., was scheduled to depart in his yacht, Corsair, from Jekyll Island off Georgia on to Haiti, the Panama Canal, and the Society Islands. Before leaving, Morgan distributed bonuses of several hundred dollars each to the ex-Marines who guarded his estates. It was the first bonus the men had received in three years.Today there are reports of the sybaritic holiday parties in Greenwich, Conn., where billionaire hedge fund bosses decorate their estates with Christmas lights, distribute bonuses to the staff, and then depart in their private aircraft for Africa or South America. Dark history, repeating itself in displays of colossal riches and mass fear that have taught us nothing about proportion or avarice or want, 1937 to 2007,could not seem more familiar or dooming.Mr. Batchelor is host of “The John Batchelor Show,” now on hiatus.

In the Shadow of 1937

In the Shadow of 1937

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