Alright y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio I'm Scott Horton So In order to move back to Texas from California I did a little fundraising drive on my blog stress and on my Facebook page And I probably have not said thank you nearly enough to all the people who helped Donate to that and part of the deal was if you gave me 50 bucks, then I promise you a copy of Philip drew Administrator a story of tomorrow by Colonel Edward Mandel house with a forward by William Norman Grigg autographed by William Norman Grigg and myself And if you're one of those people that sent me that 50 bucks and got the promise of Phil drew you still haven't got it and you probably think I'm a jerk, but Actually, I'm blaming the US mail Boxes of books have to go all different directions and they charge all this money and okay, we're kind of a disorganized mess, but I have the books and they're going out very soon and In honor of the fact that I have the books and that they're going out very soon to all those people who so graciously Donated to my efforts to move back to Texas I now I'm happy to welcome Will Grigg back to the show in order to discuss this book Which he wrote the fascinating forward to welcome back Will, how are you Scott?
I'm always doing well when I have the opportunity to be on your program.
Thanks so much Well, very nice of you to say I really appreciate you joining us here today and especially on this topic It's such an interesting thing to me It seems like if one were to read the book Philip drew Administrator the novel sort of Philip drew administrator a story of tomorrow written back just about 100 years ago Really they might come away with a brand new understanding of how the United States of America Came to be the place it is now What do you think how we became the United State of America if you will this yeah?
Unitary monolithic entity that's perpetually at war abroad and perpetually regimenting our lives at home in order to understand how we Finish the transformation from being a relatively decentralized and reasonably free Confederated Constitution Republican to what we are right now reading this nearly century-old Manifesto as novel I think it'd be a good place to start Yeah, what's so important about this book?
Well the really important facet of this book is the author the author Who called himself Colonel Edward Mandel house colonel was an honorific he assigned to himself He was a colonel in the same sense.
I suppose the Colonel Sanders was a colonel he was The power behind the throne the gray eminence behind Woodrow Wilson Mr..
Mahouse had Grown up in Houston, Texas ironically enough and he was the scion of a family that was very wealthy and influential become something of a kingmaker and He began to feel an ambition toward remaking the entire country and so as his Ambition started to fill sort of a national compass he spied this austere figure of Woodrow Wilson Who was somebody who was possessed of a certain messianic self-concept and at one point in his diary?
He wrote that his generation would write his political autobiography through him so he considered himself to be if you will sort of a vessel anointed by history and These two people came into contact with each other around 1911 or 1912 It really is a Bush Cheney story, and it is it is the in a very Incredible way you could say this is a prefiguration of the Bush Cheney story.
Yeah, this is the second time as far as kind of thing Bloody farce, I mean it's a farce with elements of tragedy to be certain But the novel itself was written in about a six-week period if I'm not mistaken at a time when house was convalescing from an illness He's somebody who had no discernible literary ability But a great deal of ambition and in the style that was sort of popular in the late 19th century He set out his ambition in the form of this romance that is to say a novel that was Not particularly interesting in terms of its narrative, but was an active sort of didactic Literary exposition he wanted to talk about what he would do if he were made king of the world and Philip drew the West Point graduate who is his figure his his literary stand-in if you will Staged a coup against the United States to impose a new system that he described as one being derivative of Marxism with a spiritual leavening and one of the really important component of this new system that House by way of drew wanted to impose on the United States was that it would be built on a fusion of corporate and state power rather than Trying to cut all the ears of corn down to a general level The way that Marxism would become notorious for he devised this system where you would bring Certain elements of the cornfield if you will into the barn with the farmer.
It's a rather awkward analogy I suppose the point is that you would bring the corporations into a marriage with the government and they would be an administrator Co-administrators rather of this new socialist order quasi socialist order and that of course is the form of that was followed a few years later By Benito Mussolini and house in a moment of self-revelation shortly after FDR came to power shortly before his inauguration I think it was 1932 FDR wasn't inaugurated until the following March But during that interregnum if you will house wrote an essay for a now defunct Magazine called Liberty in which he took credit for elements of Mussolini's agenda He pointed out that he in 1912 wrote this so-called novel that was a political manifesto in which he talked about the Creation of this ruling corporatist body for a new a newly reconfigured United States.
And that of course was the model that was followed extensively by by Wilson and it was copied by Mussolini and it was also of course a Copied with more vigor by FDR and FDR his brain trust drew not only on Phil of drew administrated there was a correspondence between house and FDR But this time Wilson was no longer alive and Wilson and house for all their closeness had had a falling out after the failure of the Senate to ratify the League of Nations Charter, which of course was the one of the fondest aspirations of both the house and Wilson and There was there were some disagreements in terms of how to proceed on that front If I remember correctly house wanted to be more pragmatic in pursuing elements of the League of Nations agenda and Wilson was more adamant that he had to get the whole thing or nothing and house had proven the pragmatism worked in terms of advancing the philip drew administrator because he was willing to see some modifications made on the Aldridge plan for the Federal Reserve System which was something that was a dumb rated and philip drew administrator and probably the most important and consequential of the Elements of the philip drew revolutionary agenda was the creation of the Federal Reserve but by 1932 FDR had gone on to his or forgive me Wilson had gone into his reward FDR was being enthroned and so there this correspondence that sprung up between house and FDR and In creating this 100-day agenda in this brain trust for the revolutionary transformation of America FDR drew on the philip drew template, but he also drew on the writings of Mussolini's advisors such as Giovanni Gentile and so in FDR yet a fully realized version of The fascist template or based on the fascist template that have been created by The philip drew author by Edward Mandel house, and that's the origins of the contemporary establishment Democratic Party and Republican Party they really do operate within these narrowly circumscribed boundaries the the 40-yard lines on the football field if you will Where one skews slightly to the left and one skew slightly to the right, but they're both joined on the common bipartisan ground Of what you could call corporate socialism or corporatism or fascism It's highly nationalistic in terms of its foreign policy and very Regimented in terms of domestic policy the welfare warfare state is sort of the dialectical fusion of those two very very closely kindred strains of collectivism and You and I had this conversation before Scott about how ironic it is that many people who are Democratic or democratically aligned peace activists who are critics of the warfare state don't understand the fact that Everything they abhor is an outgrowth of what Woodrow Wilson and that means of course Colonel house have done by way of enacting this Philip drew agenda and It's important that they understand that the origins of this this whole movement that they despise this this whole warfare state That they intermittently oppose go back to this obscure, but very important novel in the agenda that it contained Yeah, all right more about this when we get back with William Norman Grigg We're talking about right-wing commie banker types and the Walter Wilson administration Philip drew administrators the book All right y'all welcome back to the show It's anti-war radio I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Will Grigg.
He wrote the book of Liberty in Eclipse, and he keeps the excellent blog Pro libertate at freedom in our time blog spot calm and we're talking about this book Philip drew administrator a story of tomorrow was written by Woodrow Wilson's Cheney Colonel Edward Mandel house right before the election of 1912 Really and it lays out what you'll recognize as the Woodrow Wilson and certainly Franklin Roosevelt administration's New Deal ish policies the wartime government of Woodrow Wilson and And of course the whole New Deal and and all of that basically comes out of here and and will as you're talking about this is a Marxism as delivered to us by a bunch of born millionaires a bunch of basically conservatives who have decided that they're Revolutionaries, but they're not giving up what they want That's how the story plays out in the book of course is that everyone who's already in elitist is Empowered and this is a very much a top-down right-wing communism if it's communism at all It's a revolution from above if you will Early in the book.
I mean we're talking about page five or so just after Philip drew graduates from West Point There's this lengthy soliloquy and these soliloquies of course are florid and overwritten turgid completely unreadable except of course for Hints as to the political ideology of the author somebody reads this book in search of a worthwhile literary experience is going to be sorely Disappointed because there's no merit to this book in terms of the artistic value of it but Philip drew goes off on a lengthy harangue talking about the Impregnable selfishness of the corporate elite of his day And then after he acquires power what he says is that it will be the educated and the rich in fact the ones That are now the most selfish that will be in the vanguard of the procession They will be the first to realize the joy of it all and in this way They will they will redeem the sins of their ancestors Then in outlining the agenda with more detail He said that it would be more to the advantage to have business conducted by corporations than by individuals in the private capacity in other words, they liaise better with the state and He's drawing on an idea that Adam Smith a critique way back in the 18th century of the man of system which is to say a certain type of capitalist as opposed to an entrepreneur who profits by Managing his relations with the state by cuddling up to power and doing its bidding and of course that defines the system We're living under right now.
We do not have anything remotely resembling free market capitalism we have a type of corporate socialism where you have the profits that are kept private, but the risks such as they are and the investments are Subsidized and the losses are socialized and that explains how a creature like Dick Cheney can make himself a millionaire.
He has no Valuable skills as an entrepreneur and no insight as a capitalist.
He's very good at managing power You know, he's very much the spawn of this whole Philip drew Union between government and business and then later on Drew once again says that the people would be asked to curb their prejudice against corporations It was promised that in the future Corporations would be honestly run now that sounds like something that might have come from the White House in the Barack Obama era When you have this person who's a community organizer, I'm sort of a vaguely Marxist background who very comfortably Finds himself in the company of the same type of corporate talent corporate Pangeandrums that been excoriated by his chief constituency during the 2008 campaign I mean, he's very much a corporatist rather than being the the wide-eyed Third world anti-colonial Marxist of the familiar right-wing caricature You see the guy but I love the way you talk about this being sort of a right-wing communism this progressivist proto-fascist Vision that's described in Philip drew really in a way I think that house was sort of synthesizing elements of the progressive movement that had actually begun I think under McKinley you can make a very good case that McKinley sort of Anticipated Philip drew in terms of the way that he brought Corporate honchos who were very much part of the Republican constituency at a time Into his administration that went out and found a war to get involved in a war that Democrat predecessor Grover Cleveland is ardently tried to keep out of I mean Grover Cleveland is to be commended for a number of things He's the last American president for whom I have anything remotely approaching even qualified respect He kept the United States out of the foreign wars.
These people were trying to contrive You know, although he intervened pretty badly in South America.
That's true.
That's that's true Well, and then, you know Gabriel Kolko calls this whole era the triumph of Conservatism and Gabriel Kolko being some sort of post Marxist leftist historian Great interview to a great author and he says, you know in his book the triumph of conservatism a reinterpretation of his of American History from 1900 through 1919 that basically this whole thing was a right-wing plot It was JP Morgan and all his buddies going out there and bankrolling and riling up the left in order to get them to believe that empowering the national government was how to check the power of the evil private interest that they had their problems with and Meanwhile, it was big business that wanted the national government empowered so they could use it to protect themselves From us from the market which wanted to to not allow for these giant conglomerates Which wanted to not allow for one giant cartel running all the railroads or whatever the market kept saying otherwise And so these guys wanted to team up with the national government and and this is why it's all in Philip Drew who of course was very close with the Morgan Board of Directors and whatever that they have the Integration of the corporations with the state bureaucrats sitting on the boards of directors they have the income tax the Federal Reserve Bank the empowerment of the unions by the National government and and then of course the League of Nations the Bank for International Settlements Social Security pensions and everything.
I mean, this is the Democratic Party platform of the 20th century.
It was written by these Conservatives these conservatives who as you said at the beginning of this thing Bragged that I anticipated Mussolini by several years.
He's just copying me Exactly.
He wanted to get the patent on it.
If you will.
He wanted to collect royalties But when you talk about this type of conservatism, of course You're talking about a highly nationalist arrangement in which the entire economy is cartelized through the government on behalf of these nominally private interests and this idea of the public-private partnership, which was the Nexus on which Mussolini built his corporatist system the public-private partnership idea is ubiquitous today in the United States It did start with Philip drew or you could say it He started once again with McKinley's adventures in the Spanish-American War in Cuba and the Philippines and such such like We probably read Walter McCoy's book or Alfred McCoy's book Alfred W McCoy's book on policing the Empire and how what happened in the Philippines between about 1899 and 1902 sort of set the template.
There's that word again for America's police state that was very much a part of the Woodrow Wilson agenda and very much a part of the philip drew agenda Well militarism to I mean in the book Yeah he invades Mexico to teach them to elect good men and then here comes Woodrow Wilson does exactly the same thing and even today when You take a look at the ongoing absurdity of the Libyan War Which is a you want to talk about a beautiful example of a philip drew type war Congress didn't have any role in this now After the fact they're being asked to rubber-stand months after the fact this completely patently illegal war that's being conducted in 1935 Mr. House wrote an essay an op-ed Saying the tension in Europe will lead to new disasters unless the imperial urge of Mussolini has the opportunity to spend itself on African soil the legions of Mussolini marching into Africa may lay the foundation for a new Roman Empire great enough to give the Italian people a chance To breathe if Mussolini succeeds Italy will expand in Africa without exploding in Europe I mean he was defending the Abyssinian aggression being conducted by Mussolini in the 1930s And so I see a certain or feel of certain resonance between that what's going on right now with this Libyan war which?
Makes sense only as an imperial venture for the benefit of these entrenched corporate elites Who were supposedly the bane enemies of Barack Obama, but really they're part of the same Progressivist coalition that goes back all the way to Philip drew, and I do not want to let the Contemporary right that criticizes progressivism off the hook as well I don't want to sound like Jonah Goldberg talking about liberal fascism or Glenn Beck bashing Progressivism without pointing out that those two people promote Progressivism because they are ardent supporters of the most important ongoing progressive initiative Which is open-ended foreign war and you can actually go back to the era of high progressivism and see and and We're possible to even listen to sermons that were being preached by contemporary Clergymen who are extolling the state as the agency that should be shaping and molding The mind and the soul of the subjects of the American regime Well, I mean you know Beck and now them also like to leave out that the reason the progressives were so bad is because oops They were accidentally doing the agenda of their enemies.
Yeah, the conservatives are the real evil They're the ones who want the old order at any cost Yes, you know Collectivist nationalist even takes a revolution to keep it.
That's exactly right.
That's that's what Philip drew is all about Yeah, all right well geez I'm so sorry that we're all out of time because I wanted to talk about governor Rockland and all kinds of fun stuff Oh, well some other time everybody.
That's William Norman Greg He wrote the forward to Philip drew administrator a story of tomorrow.
You can read his great blog at freedom in our time blogspot.com Thanks so much.
Will you take care Scott?
