Evil Always Consumes Everything

While a century of time separates Trotskyite Betty Glan and CEO killer Luigi Mangione, they remain as connected as sister and brother.

Betty Glan

I was reorganizing my bookshelves yesterday to accommodate some new additions and picked up a book that originally came out in 2007, Amity Schlaes revisit of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man.

Schlaes’ use of the term of “the forgotten man” more mirrors that of the Yale professor, William Graham Sumner. Sumner was a liberal in the classical sense, an unabashed supporter of the free markets and an ardent foe of the socialistic impulses that were becoming so Avant Garde during his time. Sumner had a different meaning of the forgotten man. In his The Forgotten Man and Other Essays, he explains:

“As soon as A observes something which seems to him wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or, in better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X… What I want to do is to look up C… I call him the forgotten man… He is the man who never is thought of. He is the victim of the reformer, the social speculator, and philanthropist, and I hope to show you before I get through that he deserves your notice both for his character and for the many burdens which are laid upon him.”

About Schlaes’ account, a favorite author and commentator of mine, James Piereson, noted:

“What emerges from these stories is a New Deal that was more experimental in its policies, more hostile to business, more vindictive toward its foes, and far less successful in reviving the economy than previous writers have acknowledged. The sluggish economic response to New Deal policies, Schlaes suggests, was due partly to Roosevelt’s need to bait businessmen and bankers for their supposed role in bringing about the crisis. They were “economic royalists” who had hoarded profits, exploited workers, fixed prices, and grown rich by speculation. FDR even egged on Morgenthau, his Treasury Secretary, to initiate tax-evasion cases against Mellon and Thomas Lamont (the head of J.P. Morgan), going as far as to urge prosecution for their having taken deductions that were perfectly legal when their tax returns were filed.”

It is not surprising to me how little we have changed. Our political battles are the same today as they were a century ago. As it was in 1927, there are still forces that believe that for man to truly experience freedom, his existence must be planned into productivity and controlled behaviorally. Of course, this Orwellian “Freedom is Slavery” idea is the very essence of cognitive dissonance. It is also completely antithetical to the beliefs of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and our Founders.

Since the late 1800’s, it seems that we are forced by this battle into alternating 50-year cycles of dipping our toes into Marxism and then spending the next cycle unwinding the damage that those forays do. Then, just as today, “progressives” were so enamored with the Marxist approach to economics and society they simply could not acknowledge the carnage such a state must vest on its people to make it “work.” Roger Nash Baldwin, the founder of the ACLU, was part of a junket of very influential men who travelled to Russia in 1927 to experience the glory of the Marxist revolution. Ninety-five people paid the regal sum of $1,000 to take part and all were associated with liberal causes and ideas. These individuals would come to significantly influence American policy and politicians and along with Baldwin, included people like Stuart Chase, Rexford Tugwell, John Brophy and Paul Howard Douglas.

Perhaps unintentionally ironic, Baldwin, in support of the “successes” that he saw, wrote:

“Everybody is poor together. There is much discontent, much regulation of life, but not much terrorism or repression except of the old upper classes.”

Shared misery. A less ideological observer would not have seen “being poor together” as harbinger of success – but that really isn’t the objective of a “progressive.”

In the early 1900’s, these “progressives” marveled at the “efficiency” of the post Bolshevik Russian state as journalists like Walter Duranty of the New York Times hid the ravages and savagery required to concoct these “successes”. Reading the New York Times, one would never know how Russia starved six million Ukrainians to death, forced collectivization of agriculture, nationalized industry, and actively engaged in persecution of individuals to eradicate the free exercise of their rights.

Roger Nash Baldwin expressed joy in the fact that there were no individual successes and those who had power and affluence were now being persecuted.

Nearing the end of the group’s trip to Russia, Paul Howard Douglas spoke at a factory gathering in Russia, and afterwards he asked Betty Glan, a prominent Trotskyite activist, where were the rights of the accused to assemble witnesses, to engage counsel, to argue their case, and, if convicted, to appeal. Glan responded:

"You talked only about individual justice. This is a bourgeois idea. History will prove us right and you wrong."

Glan was wrong. About a year after their interaction, Douglas would pick up a copy of the Times and read that Betty Glan was rounded up by Russian Secret Police and executed.

Glan is certainly an obscure footnote in history as very few people will ever know she existed, but she represents a cautionary tale. Glan clearly harbored no sympathy for the bank clerks who were summarily executed because, of course, it was done for the "noble" cause of communism, which she believed would bring Utopia.

This is happening today.

If any of this sounds and feels familiar, it should. The ignorant spirit of Betty Glan lives on in the supporters of CEO murderer Luigi Mangione who celebrate the killing of a corporate CEO and call for more executions.

Those of us who read history know it records a litany of people who openly support and promote the very evil that will ultimately consume them.