This cartoon seeks to stigmatize the Fremont campaign and the Republican party (which was the first broadly-successful political party in United States history to firmly and unyieldingly oppose all attempts at the geographical expansion of slavery) by associating them with the "Isms", most of which were politically very controversial (and some of which were considered to be offensively immoral by many) at the time. The advocates of the Isms are shown making demands on Fremont:
- Advanced Fourierist/Transcendentalist thinker
- "The first thing we want is a law making the use of Tobacco, Animal food [i.e. meat], and Lager-bier a Capital Crime --"
- Woman wearing an extremely masculinized version of the Bloomer costume (with straight pants instead of harem pants, and extremely short skirts over them), and also smoking (which was considered a masculine prerogative at the time)
- "We demand, first of all, the recognition of Woman as the equal of man, with a right to Vote and hold Office. --"
- Roughly-dressed character, holding liquor bottle
- "An equal division of property, that is what I go in for --"
- Ugly woman (from Oneida?) wearing a dress with poorly-constructed narrow hoops (at a time when fashionable belles wore very broad hoops, while women who declared their relative independence from ephemeral fashion trends didn't wear hoops at all)
- "Col., I wish to invite you to the next meeting of our Free Love association, where the shackles of marriage are not tolerated, & perfect Freedom exists in love matters, and you will be sure to enjoy yourself, for we are all Freemounters. --" [this last word a double entendre]
- Catholic prelate
- "We look to you, Sir, to place the power of the Pope on a firm footing in this Country--"
- Black man in exaggerated faux-dandy attire (representing abolitionism)
- "De Poppylation ob Color comes in first -- arter dat [after that], you may do wot you pleases--"
- Fremont
- "You shall all have what you desire -- and be sure that the Glorious Principles of Popery, Fourierism, Free Love, Woman's Rights, the Maine law [alcohol prohibition], & above all the Equality of our Colored Brethren shall be maintained if I get into the Presidential Chair".
via:Naked Capitalism/Yves Smith/Wikipedia
Posted: 08 Mar 2011 01:43 AM PST
By William Hogeland, the author of the narrative histories Declaration and The Whiskey Rebellion and a collection of essays, Inventing American History who blogs at http://www.williamhogeland.comOrdinary 18th-century Americans fought for fair access to small-scale credit and usable currencies. Big finance fought back.
Calling modern banking “a widespread fraud,” Rob Burns wants to push the finance industry out of everyday lending. A candidate for Congress in the fourth district of Illinois, Burns proposes using federally insured savings as a public fund for mortgages, student loans, consumer credit, business bridge loans — the kind of borrowing engaged in by ordinary Americans, not entrepreneurs. On a different finance reform front, the technology pioneer and culture critic Douglas Rushkoff has been exploring complementary currencies. Rushkoff envisions new monetary units, exchanged via handheld devices, helping to break what he calls “the money monopoly.”
Far-reaching ideas for getting money, currency, and credit to flow more democratically through the American economy would probably draw all-purpose condemnations like “socialism!” from the rightists led by Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. Liberal high finance experts too might find such proposals dangerously chaotic. But regardless of practicalities and politics, it’s useful to recognize that ideas like Burns’ and Rushkoff’s have deep roots in the American founding period. The Tea Party has done such a successful job of associating anti-government, free-market politics with essential American values — and historians have been so eager to ignore the economic activism of ordinary, founding-era Americans in favor of assessing and re-assessing the elite founders’ republican philosophies — that it can be startling to confront the democratic theories about popular finance that prevailed in 18th-century America.
And “theories” is the right word. People of the founding period put forth their economic ideas in resolutions, petitions, and actions. In an earlier post in this series, I discussed traditional rioting in the context of struggles between American debtors and creditors. Long before the Stamp Act riots of Revolutionary fame, crowd action — rowdy, creepy, theatrical, sometimes violent — played an important role in American social life. Crowds dismissed by the upscale as “the mob” called their movements “regulations.” From the North Carolina Regulation of the 1760’s to Shays’ Rebellion of the 1780’s and beyond, American debtors, barred from fair representation in politics, engaged in obstruction, boycott, court closing, jury nullification, building teardown, and physical intimidation. They wanted their legislatures to restrain the power of wealth.
Just like Rushkoff and Burns today, 18th-century popular regulators focused on small-scale credit and readily negotiable currencies. Scarcities of cash gave merchants a monopoly on gold and silver coin, enabling them to dominate small farmers, artisans, and laborers through loan shark-style lending terms: debtors, in constant danger of foreclosure, could effectively become merchants’ laborers. Hoping to elude the money monopoly’s clutches, people looked to their colonial governments to create “land banks,” where small operators could take small loans on reasonable terms. Spent by holders on purchases, land bank notes found their way into circulation, becoming a kind of currency that at times came even into the hands of the landless.
Another thing governments could do: issue paper currency. Government notes represented amounts in metal; their value depended on people’s belief that they’d be worth roughly what was printed on them. A commonplace of American history has it that early paper currencies depreciated disastrously, but the reality is far more varied. New England had difficulty making paper finance work, but Pennsylvania successfully alleviated economic crunches using both land banks and its own paper. The trick to encouraging confidence and controlling depreciation was to issue limited amounts of the paper and then to retire it through scheduled taxes, payable in the notes themselves. Depreciation did occur, as it does today. But popular finance activists saw mild depreciation as a natural and democratic effect, benefiting debtors.
Improvised popular currencies existed, too, complementary in Rushkoff’s sense. A craft commodity like whiskey — not a mere instrument of barter but always exchangeable for gold somewhere down the line — held value well.
Merchant lenders, however, wanted to be paid in coin. They wanted the gold that, they believed, held perfect value in imperial trade and which ordinary people could rarely come up with. The people countered by pressuring governments to make paper currencies legal tender, forcing merchants to accept paper at face value for payments and principal — a kind of government program to prevent foreclosure and debt peonage. Lenders forced to take payments worth less, against gold, than when loans were made disdained paper currencies as confiscatory, rotten, mobbish, and vile, “the curse of pulp.”
Lenders may actually have contributed to financial crises by recoiling so violently from any hint of depreciation. Yet their philosophy had a certain consistency. American merchants were already calling the English government tyrannical for violating ancient rights to security in property. Now merchants feared that American governments, vulnerable to what they saw as another kind of tyranny, that of the mob, would take property in another way, through legal tender legislation and state enforced devaluation. The debtor class, for its part, had little interest in what merchants defined as the big picture.
So even as the country moved toward climactic conflict with England, a great social battle raged between American merchants and American working people over credit and currency. We’ve been distracted from that battle’s significance by historians’ relentless focus on merchants’ frustration over Parliament’s trade acts. Those acts included currency laws, which restricted paper emissions in the colonies: sometimes American merchants too had advocated issuing paper. But merchants came to hate paper’s democratizing, socially equalizing tendencies in American society. By the time American elites began relying on ordinary people for help in opposing England — especially on the people’s facility with organized protest! — working Americans’ desire for economic, social, and political equality was driving the merchants’ anxiety to a nearly hysterical pitch.
Our current financial crisis reflects those deep-seated American economic disagreements, wired into events and philosophies that gave birth to our country, were never resolved during that period, and glossed over in certified stories of our origins for more than two centuries. Many people today, of various political persuasions, will want to dismiss thinking like Rushkoff’s and Burns’, which goes far beyond finance reform and asks fundamental questions about how, and for whose benefit, we want credit and money to work in American society. To our little known 18th-century ancestors, the founding activists for democratic finance, those questions would be among the most important we could be asking.
Wikipedia-
The charter of the Second Bank of the United States (B.U.S.) was for 20 years and therefore up for renewal in 1836. The B.U.S. was in no sense a national bank but rather a privately held banking corporation.[citation needed] The bank had a unique relationship with the federal government that gave it access to substantial profits. Its role as the depository of the federal government's revenues made it a political target of banks chartered by the individual states which either objected to, or envied, the B.U.S.'s relationship with the central government. Partisan politics came heavily into play in the debate over the renewal of the charter. "The classic statement by Arthur Schlesinger was that the partisan politics during the Jacksonian period was grounded in class conflict. Viewed through the lens of party elite discourse, Schlesinger saw inter-party conflict as a clash between wealthy Whigs and working class Democrats"(Grynaviski). President Andrew Jackson strongly opposed the renewal of its charter, and built his platform for the election of 1832 around doing away with the Second Bank of the United States. Jackson's political target was Nicholas Biddle, financier, politician, and president of the Bank of the United States.
Apart from a general hostility to banking and the belief that specie (gold and/or silver) was the only true money, Jackson's reasons for opposing the renewal of the charter revolved around his belief that bestowing power and responsibility upon a single bank was the cause of inflation and other perceived evils.
During September 1833, President Jackson issued an executive order that ended the deposit of government funds into the Bank of the United States. After September 1833, these deposits were placed in the state chartered banks. While six of the seven initial depositories were controlled by Jacksonian Democrats, the later depositories, such as the ones in North Carolina, South Carolina and Michigan, were run by managers who opposed Jacksonian politics.
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