Who We Are - Volume 2 - Chapter 12: America and the World - Part 1
By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin
Who We Are - Volume 2 - Chapter 12: America and the World - Part 1
By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin
The 1865 Union victory had ended the South’s power to sabotage industrial progress and other national objectives. Despite Lincoln’s murder, the American people expected that a burst of liberated energy would now bring the country into an era of high living standards.
Boston and New York financiers, though missing the defeated Confederates from their anti-national coalition, rushed to prevent Lincoln’s policies from surviving his murder. In a brazen alliance with imperial London, they demanded tight money and continuation of cheap labor in the South. The 1873 crash strengthened the hand of Anglo-American banking partners, who began imposing their will over U.S. industry and politics.
With economic depression and restricted credit, the nationalist side could not continue to invest in enormous new manufacturing and transport projects.[1] And there was to be no new leader like Lincoln to guide the country to a higher destiny, until Franklin Roosevelt emerged from the disasters and despair of the next century.
But America’s best thinkers were still alive to humanity’s urgent needs. They understood the awe-inspiring powers for improvement that science had provided, capabilities that only imperial strangulation prevented Man from using to his own benefit.
Beginning in the 1870s, Americans initiated bold plans to aid their allies abroad, to lift their people out of backwardness and secure their national sovereignty. The ideals of Lincoln’s America would inspire heroic anti-imperial leadership well into the 20th century, even after the U.S. itself had been submerged under pro-imperial financiers.
Carey and the Centennial
The United States celebrated the 100th anniversary of its 1776 Declaration of Independence by magnificently displaying the republic’s new productive powers.
Philadelphia, the capital of the Revolution, was made the site for the “Centennial Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine.” Congress called for
an exhibition of the natural resources of the country and their development, and of its progress in those arts which benefit mankind, in comparison with those of older nations; and whereas, no place is so appropriate for such an exhibition as the city in which occurred the event it is designed to commemorate . . . [2]
President Grant proclaimed the exhibition to be
in the interest of peace, civilization, and domestic and international friendship and intercourse.[3]
The mammoth 1876 event was in many respects the particular project of Henry C. Carey and his disciples.
Carey’s main newspaper representative Morton McMichael had been Philadelphia’s mayor (1866-1869) and chaired the commission running Fairmont Park, the Exhibition site. McMichael successfully organized the city to prepare this world’s fair.
Representative William D. (“Pig-Iron”) Kelley brought the Pennsylvania legislature’s petition before Congress. Representative Daniel Morrell, leader of the Iron and Steel Association, introduced the bill for the United States government to sponsor the exhibition.
Visitors from across the world (about 10 million admissions were recorded) came to the Exhibition from May to November 1876, riding special Pennsylvania Railroad tour trains to 200 buildings representing all the states and many nations. They saw the greatest array of inventions and industrial and agricultural devices ever shown, from ingenious models, to gorgeous locomotives, to giant machines propelling the exhibits.
From these American displays, visiting foreigners, wheels and axles spinning in their minds, went home to help their reform-minded leaders elevate their nations’ power, as the Americans were doing. The world was suddenly on a course of progress never before imaginable.
Henry Carey set the tone. He was there to meet and confer, with the Centennial Exhibition’s unofficial “battle manual.” His famous 1876 pamphlet unmasked the British cheap labor “free trade” system as an imperial repudiation of Christianity and civilization, contrasting it to the protected American high-wage system of industrial success. The pamphlet sharply denounced the Empire’s starvation of India and mass addiction of China through the smuggling of East India Company opium.[4]
Carey’s political lieutenant Wharton Barker had created the Penn Club in 1869 and made it a locus for entertaining and private discussions with distinguished visitors to the Centennial.[5]
Carey was still brilliant at age 82. The Penn Club continued, for a younger generation, his famous weekly strategy discussions known as the “Carey Vespers.”
Over the next few years, especially until his 1879 death, the Philadelphia Carey circle was a driving force behind the world’s strategic developments:
They shaped the spectacular policy revolutions in Germany and Japan, resulting in those nations’ modernization and rise to world power status.
They revived and reorganized Ireland’s political war for independence from British tyranny.
They created the Greenback-Labor Party to fight for U.S. financial independence and the people’s purchasing power.
They made the Knights of Labor the most effective mass workers’ movement.
Carey and Germany
A stunning reversal in strategy in the late 1870s changed Germany into an industrial giant. Otto von Bismarck’s military and political leadership had earlier formed a unified German nation out of smaller princely states, in the 1860s and early 1870s. But under British-directed “Free Trade,” the country was relatively weak and backward—until Chancellor Bismarck adopted the protectionist outlook of the United States of America.
Mathew Carey, Henry’s father, had laid the groundwork for the 1870s American-German initiative by sponsoring the Philadelphia career of anti-imperial economist Friedrich List, an 1820s émigré from tyranny in a German principality. As Mathew Carey’s political partner, List returned to Europe in the 1830s to promote the American System against British influence. List’s Zollverein (tariff union) of small German states prepared the way for Bismarck’s unification. But Bismarck did not go beyond political unity to the Carey-List program of economic nationalism until Mathew Carey’s son Henry, in his old age, personally led the way.
Henry Carey first travelled to Europe as a young man in 1825, and returned twice more, in 1857 and in 1859, after studying the German language for the first time when he was past the age of 60. As the American crisis of secession boiled over, Carey was solidifying the international ties that would aid national survival and development on both sides of the Atlantic. He met with Germany’s science strategist, the pro-American Alexander von Humboldt. He conferred with and greatly encouraged Germany’s Justus Liebig, the pioneer of biochemical science. He deliberated with Count Camillo Cavour, then leading the struggle for Italian national unification against the intrigues of the British, the Austrian Hapsburgs, and France’s Napoleon III.
Carey’s activities in Europe were highly confidential; from his surviving correspondence (at the Pennsylvania Historical Society), we know only a few of his German contacts of the 1850s, and nothing of his possible time in Russia.
But he built a foundation for the nationalist movement in America, that transformed the world. Prussia[6] and Russia both supported the Union during the Civil War; and both later acted to adopt American System economics through the influence of Henry Carey.
Throughout the Civil War (1861-65), and continually until Carey’s death in 1879, Carey’s nationalist written works were being translated into German, and distributed by his associates among politically active circles in Germany.
U.S. Minister to Germany George Bancroft notified Carey in an 1873 letter that he had put into Bismarck’s hands Carey’s book (perhaps The Unity of Law, published 1872), after explaining Carey’s “high position” to the Chancellor.
In December, 1875, Bismarck met with industrialist Wilhelm von Kardorff, the leader of Carey’s followers in Germany, who were all spreading Carey’s works there. (Kardorff was the neighbor and friend of General Helmut von Moltke, Bismarck’s military chief of staff.) Bismarck invited Kardorff to proceed with organizing industrialists, agricultural interests, and others.[7]
A series of 1876 letters from Baron Kardorff and other Careyites describe their intense push for a German policy change, as they guided the development of a parliamentary majority supporting protectionism. Their main weapon was Carey’s devastating Centennial pamphlet, Letters in Reply to the London Times, which arraigned the Empire for lecturing the world on liberal economics while slaughtering the colored races and running the global opium trade. [8]
Meanwhile Bismarck had sent the German machine builders’ representatives to Philadelphia to participate in the Exhibition. The head of the delegation, Professor Franz Reuleaux, spent three months studying the startling recent U.S. engineering accomplishments, and conferring with the entire Carey faction of industrial and scientific leadership. Reuleaux’s reports from Philadelphia, printed in the German newspapers with a profound public impact, demanded a sharp upgrading of German industry along the lines of the American protectionist system, for high wages and superior productivity.[9]
Bismarck Shifts National Policy
Beginning in 1878, Germany under Bismarck effected a top-down change in its political-economic strategy, ending conformance with British Free Trade policy that had been hegemonic since the London-Paris “Cobden” treaty of 1860, and ending the financial speculation and looting that had crippled Germany. In 1879, Bismarck conferred over the ongoing programmatic shift with the visiting Congressman William D. “Pig-Iron” Kelley of Philadelphia, Henry Carey’s most faithful adherent within the U.S. government.[10]
A protective tariff, particularly for iron and steel manufacturing, was adopted as a permanent German national policy. This was seen as a return to the full national idea of Friedrich List.
A system of state welfare protection for workers was enacted, with unemployment compensation and pensions.
Industries were cartelized for greater productivity, as in the pooling of laboratory facilities. Large banks, interlocking with the state-sponsored cartels, were created to finance national (and international) development programs.
The government intensified state sponsorship of education, and of physical infrastructure—railroads, canals, ports, merchant ships, and a modern navy.
In the resulting leap of productivity, Germany’s cities and industries were electrified. The nation’s machine tool capability, which was enhanced by this combined policy program, was supported by the newly great electrical, chemical, and metallurgical industries.
Although Germany’s princely oligarchy was not crushed, and remained a pivot for future disaster, Bismarck and the Carey-led American faction had created a new pro-nationalist ruling elite structure, with a lasting commitment to technological progress strikingly similar to that of the Americans.
As the U.S.A. vaulted past Britain to world industrial leadership, Germany was suddenly rushing past Britain towards number-two rank.
A remarkable change in the Catholic Church’s leadership aided the of Bismarck’s Germany. Pope Leo XIII was installed in 1878 and ended a virulent conflict between the emerging German nation and the country’s Catholics. Leo emphasized the connection between Christianity and compassion in the political-economic sphere (see Appendix: “Bismarck, the Pope, and the Birth of Catholic Social Doctrine”).
The British lords, the Catholic Hapsburgs, and other imperial leaders panicked as they saw America’s nationalist upsurge spreading and threatening the rout of oligarchism.
Intrigues by the British King Edward VII and his foolish cousin the German Kaiser would lead to world war and the political catastrophes that broke up America’s international alliances. But Britain’s permanent hysteria over the post-Civil War U.S. outreach is shown by its purging of Lincoln-Carey politics from historical accounts of the period.
One can still see the shadow of these events in the so-called “Austrian School” of economics, concocted by the British and the Hapsburgs in the 1880s, in reaction to Germany’s radical policy reversal. In this ultra-Free Market dogma—the doctrine of Friedrich von Hayek and of today’s neo-conservatives—Otto von Bismarck and Abraham Lincoln are made into the twin bogeymen of modern history,[11] the supposed originators of authoritarianism.
Carey and the Irish Underground
One hundred years after Mathew Carey had become an Irish revolutionary, his son, Henry Carey, plunged in and took responsibility for reviving the Irish struggle for independence from Britain. Carey’s disciple, Philadelphia Irish immigrant physician William Carroll, was designated head of the American wing of the Irish revolutionary underground -- called the Fenians, or their new name, Clan na Gael.[12] Dr. Carroll was chairman of the Clan na Gael executive committee from 1875 to 1880.
William Carroll was backed in the movement's leadership by other Carey allies, notably
Knights of Labor chief Terence V. Powderly (discussed below), and
University of Pennsylvania economics Professor Robert Ellis Thompson.
Dr. Carroll's main partner in this work was Irish revolutionary John Devoy, who had become foreign editor for James Gordon Bennett, Jr.'s New York Herald. Several others of the Irish nationalist movement joined Devoy in guiding the Herald—a newspaper that we recall was quite useful to Thomas Edison.
Carroll and his colleagues sent cash and guns to Ireland, and in 1878 Carroll toured the British Isles, reuniting the bickering Irish underground into a cohesive force of 20,000 members. Carroll and Devoy outmaneuvered the British spies and dupes who pressed for dynamiting and other provocations. The American leaders guided the underground movement into cooperation with Charles Stewart Parnell’s Land League and electoral politics.
Twenty years later this Carey initiative would result in the formation of the Sinn Fein party, which went on to free most of Ireland from British rule.
Perhaps Dr. Carroll's most spectacular enterprise was the invention of the submarine. The Clan na Gael "skirmishing fund" paid Irish immigrant John Holland approximately $60,000 to build prototype underwater warships. Carroll justified the expenditure by reference to Robert Fulton's similar craft in the 1790s.
The three-man submarine Fenian Ram was tested in New York harbor in May 1881; the British embassy protested, but then-President James Garfield refused to interfere with the Irish operation. Garfield was soon afterwards assassinated.
The U.S. Navy in the 1890s decided to revive the Clan na Gael’s maritime project, for American national purposes, and paid John Holland to build the Navy's first battle submarines.
The World-Shaping Russian-American Friendship: Industrial . . .
Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev (1834-1907) was among the celebrated foreign visitors to the Centennial Exhibition.
Seven years before coming to Philadelphia, Mendeleyev had fired scientific imaginations and re-ordered the world’s chemical ideas with his Periodic Table of the Elements.
His world outlook could be aptly summed up with his response to a peasant, who asked the meaning of the word “scientist.”
A scientist is a man who does something where no question of making money is involved. Understand? And two scientists who deal with each other are dealing about something, about anything which does not concern money.[13]
Why had he crossed the ocean? He wrote that
sympathy towards the Americans has long been urging me to their country . . . [When] it became known ... that the exhibition in 1876 would be in America, I decided to travel there . . . Everyone expected to see many original, purely American mechanical inventions in Philadelphia . . . the products of American technological genius . . .
European civilization has been expressed in its strongest and best manifestations in the United States, discarding many of the old harmful traditions, and exerting an effort to develop the individuality, and . . . social freedom . . .
The fame of America ... increased especially in the period [of its Civil War], because slavery was a strong stain on the free institutions of the States. I wanted to see myself... the peculiarities created by American institutions ... (and I desired) to get to know first-hand the development of the oil industry in America, especially in Pennsylvania, which is supplying the whole world with its lighting oil.”[14]
J. Peter Lesley guided Mendeleyev’s technical consultations. A researcher in oil, coal, and steelmaking for the nationalists, Lesley ran the American Philosophical Society in that era, and was a kindred soul to Mendeleyev’s genius. The Russian met American scientists, toured new refineries, and scouted the oil fields.
Mendeleyev wrote that he was briefed on the situation of the oil industry by a representative of the Empire Transportation Company – the instrument of the Philadelphia nationalists for driving forward the new industry (see above, chapters 8 and 9). In Empire’s own building at the Exhibition, beautiful working models—ships, pipelines, the railroad tank car (their invention)—illustrated how the company had organized America’s oil transport. Their briefing for Mendeleyev reflected the impending full-scale war for survival against Rockefeller.
Mendeleyev, like Czar Alexander II, saw America and Russia as sharing a common destiny of leadership for mankind’s benefit.
He wrote:
A large part of [the world’s] petroleum is extracted in the state of Pennsylvania in America. The Caucasus alone could compete with America in natural riches....
Separated by history and distance, the North American States and Russia diverged in much—whence, however, is also their mutual sympathy. In the future these countries, therefore, would need to divide among themselves the benefits of the oil field and the right to illuminate the darkness of the whole world.[15]
He warned of the danger posed by anti-national forces (led at that time by Rockefeller):
[At] the beginning of 1872, The South Improvement Company[ES8] [16] became a monopolist not only at home, but also on markets abroad, undermining the activity of other oil producers....”[17]
Returning to Russia to begin its petroleum development, Mendeleyev pushed for full-scale industrialization—a fight over Russia’s future which would grow increasingly hot over the next five years.
. . . and Military
Czar Alexander II had sent Russian warships during America’s Civil War to stay for months in the ports of New York and San Francisco, to warn the British and French that they would have to fight Russia if they intervened on the side of the Southern slave-owners. Seeing that the British were arming Confederate cruisers for attacks on American merchant vessels, Russian officers in New York had drawn up their own plan for “privateering” against the British.
In November 1876, the last month of the Centennial Exhibition, Britain began threatening war against Russia over a crisis in the Balkans. The Czar’s brother Grand Duke Constantine, Russia’s admiral in chief, sought to revive the privateering idea and consulted with his aide-de-camp, Capt. Leonid Semetschkin, who had co-authored the 1863 privateering plan.
Semetschkin was then in Philadelphia, having been sent to conduct Russia’s naval exhibit at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition. The Russian consulted with his hosts at the Centennial – he had become friends with Wharton Barker -- and drew up a new plan, congenial to American laws and strategy. It was approved by the Czar, but the Balkans crisis cooled and it was shelved.
Two years later, put into action by American and Russian strategists, the plan would cause a political earthquake.
In the Spring of 1878, as Russia had defeated the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish war (1877-78), the British press was flooded with alarms about the Russian Menace. A London Times correspondent telegraphed from St. Petersburg on March 25, 1878,
It appears that England must either declare war for the purpose of diminishing Russian prestige, or inflict upon her some humiliation . . .[18]
Czar Alexander II decided to proceed with the purchase of several advanced warships built in the United States; they must be out of port before war commenced with Britain. The Czar met with Captain Semetschkin on April 8 and ordered him to go ahead immediately.
The story of the purportedly secret mission leaked out. On April 20, Wickham Hoffman, the American chargé d’affaires in St. Petersburg, reported to Washington:
[The] Hamburg steamer Cimbria chartered by the Russian government, left Port Baltic ... with 66 officers and 600 sailors of the Russian Navy to man the steamers built for the Russian government at Philadelphia. I know of no reason why Russia or any other power should not build war vessels in the United States, if it sees fit, but in view of the present threatening relations between Russia and Great Britain, I have thought you might wish to be advised of this circumstance....”[19]
Commissioned by Russia, Wharton Barker created a make-believe Alaskan steamship company and ordered four ships to be built for it at Philadelphia’s William Cramp & Sons shipyard.[20] Barker was to take the ships when completed out beyond U.S. territorial waters and turn them over to Russian commanders, who would install the guns and ammunition bought by Barker and ferried out by other vessels.
American and British newspapers exploded with coverage as the Cimbria arrived on April 28 in Southwest Harbor, Maine. British naval attaché Admiral William Gore Jones came up from the U.K. Embassy in Washington; he was repulsed in two attempts to board the Cimbria and inspect its manifest. The British nervously watched the ship from the dock until it departed for Philadelphia.[21]
John Devoy and William Carroll leaked to the New York and British press that thousands of Irish-Americans had pledged to join the Russian service, were drilling at the Canadian border, and would march on Nova Scotia or New Brunswick in the event of war. The nationalist press in Ireland followed the progress of the Semetschkin episode and exulted in Britain’s distress.
Amid mounting British hysteria, Admiral William Gore Jones got himself into the Cramp & Sons shipyard disguised as a workman, affecting an Irish brogue. But a Russian officer spied him out, and he was ejected by the shipyard watchman; the incident was publicly mocked in Washington.[22]
The State of California, the Columbus, the Saratoga, and a fourth ship expressly built for the Russians, were commissioned as warships in the Russian service on July 15, 1878, under the names Europe, Asia, Africa, and Zabiaka (the last, whose name means “mischief-maker,” was the fastest cruiser in the world at that time).
Soon after Russia got the cruisers, the British backed down from their war threat. It was the British, not the Russians, who had been humiliated.
Wharton Barker was in Russia in summer 1879. With Alexander II and Grand Duke Constantine, he reviewed the Russian fleet, including the new ships he had put into their service, and they decorated him with the Order of St. Stanislaus. The Czar told Barker that during the Civil War he had protected America by sending the Navy to U.S. ports,
because I understood that Russia would have a more serious task to perform if the American Republic, with advanced industrial development, was broken up and Great Britain left in control of most branches of modern industrial development.[23]
The American-Russian development partnership would be in full flower later in the 19th century with the Trans-Siberian Railway – another project of the progressive nationalists of both countries.
America, Britain and Japan: Triumph and Tragedy
1852: The U.S. naval officer prepares to open up Japan, countering Britain’s “unconscionable” domination of Asia:
Great Britain is already in possession of the most important points in the East India and China seas . . . Fortunately the Japanese and many other islands of the Pacific are still left untouched by this unconscionable government . . .[24]
1880: The U.S. ambassador to Japan reports on what that nation has done in one decade, with U. S. help:
abolished the feudal system . . . assured the freedom of conscience . . . introduced the press, the telegraph, the railway, steam navigation [and] free . . . compulsory education for . . . all the children . . .[25]
1941: The U.S. President announces the attack in the Pacific:
Yesterday, December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.[26]
In the 19th century, Japan suddenly rose out of isolated backwardness; excited wonderment with the country’s new industrial powers and potential to promote world progress; and then plunged into imperial aggression, on the road to fascism – all in the span of a single generation.
A certain version of the story of Japan’s ascent to a high rank among nations has come down to us in the 21st century. It has been tailored to fit in with the world-affairs narrative of our contemporary Anglo-American leadership.
This distorted history
omits the impassioned anti-imperial activism shared by the USA and Japan of the 1860s and 1870s, the progressive nationalist faith that was the driving force for the amazing industrialization of both countries in that era;
neglects the burning political war between the nation-builders and the British-allied imperial faction to determine the internal politics and thus the direction and character of America and Japan – for peace and a better life, or for war and conquest; and
completely censors Henry C. Carey’s authorship of the American System ideas adopted by the Meiji revolutionaries who directed Japan’s industrial transformation, the same notions of national-sovereign economics that have reemerged in today’s “multi-polar” challenge to the Anglo-American globalists.
Commodore Matthew C. Perry led the 1852-54 U.S. naval expeditions to Japan, his warships carrying as gifts technological implements (telegraph system, a model train, tools) demonstrating the advantages of joining in the advancement of civilization. Perry negotiated a treaty opening Japan to the outside world after 200 years of isolation.[27]
The first U.S. minister to Japan, Townsend Harris, negotiated an 1858 U.S.-Japan friendship treaty banning the import of opium into Japan. At that time, Britain was waging its second Opium War to force Chinese acceptance of the additive drug.
Immediately following the successful outcome of America’s fight to preserve its Union, Japanese revolutionaries fought to overturn the warlords’ decentralized rule. They established a strong national government under the Emperor Meiji (then a teenager, a figurehead to retain popular loyalty).[28] The Constitution of 1868 paid homage to the U.S. Constitution’s division of powers.[29]
The new government's ambassador in Washington, Mori Arinori, and consul in New York, Tomita Tetsunosuke, worked closely with Henry C. Carey and sent his works to Japan. Tomita later commissioned the first Japanese translations of Carey and of Friedrich List; the Japanese government published Carey's Principles of Social Science.[30] Ambassador Mori created the Meirokusha (or Meiji 6 Society) in Japan, to promote the American System of political economy.
The pro-American leaders sent a delegation, headed by Prince Iwakura Tomomi, on a tour of the United States and other nations from 1871 to 1873.
Visiting Philadelphia in 1872, they inspected industrial sites and shipbuilders. At the Baldwin Locomotive Works, they poured over machine tools, metal foundries, engine parts, plans and models, so that they could either buy locomotives or build their own, with U.S. credit.[31]
President Ulysses Grant sent Henry Carey's disciple, economist Erasmus Peshine Smith, to Japan in 1871. Smith was the first foreign adviser hired by the Meiji government. He served officially as counselor to the foreign ministry on international law; otherwise, as economic adviser to the government.[32]
On Peshine Smith's advice, Okubo Toshimichi -- the first Meiji finance minister -- in 1873 created the Interior Ministry and within it the Industrial Promotion Board, to steer Japan's industrialization. Okubo's successor as finance minister, Okuma Shigenobu, set up the First National Bank, choosing Lincoln's national banking arrangements as opposed to the Bank of England model.
On August 1, 1873, the doors of the newly founded First National Bank of Japan opened its doors for business headed by Ōkuma Shigenobu. Those measures were modeled on Alexander Hamilton’s First National Bank of the United States which had allowed the advancement and industrialization of America – what became known as the American System. Japan now had the vehicle by which to develop, and the Asian banking monopoly controlled principally by Britain’s opium-dominated Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation was seriously threatened.[33]
In 1873, President Grant sent former Ohio Congressman John A. Bingham as U.S. Minister to Japan; he served until 1885. Bingham's previous record as a Whig and Republican economic nationalist made him ideal for the struggle to build up modern Japan, against efforts to make it a militaristic British puppet.
Early in the Civil War, James Gallatin and other British-affiliated Wall Street bankers had demanded control over U.S. currency (see Chapter 4, above). Bingham had attacked
"efforts made to lay the power of the American people to control their currency, a power essential to their interests, at the feet of the brokers and of city bankers who have not a tittle of authority save by the assent or forbearance of the people to deal in their paper as money."[34]
Later Bingham had been a member of the military court which tried Lincoln's assassins, concluding there had been a plot hatched in Britain's Canada colony. During Reconstruction, Bingham was instrumental in the drafting and adoption of both the 14th Amendment (which provided citizenship for free slaves, and guaranteed due process and equal protection of the law to all citizens), and the 15th Amendment (intended to guarantee the right to vote to former slaves).
Minister John Bingham sought to free up Japan to exercise national sovereignty. He pushed to overturn “unequal” treaty arrangements that had prohibited Japan from imposing seriously protective duties on its imports. He moved to pull out of the traditional “cooperative policy” by which all resident foreign diplomats worked together in any disputes with the Japanese.
Bingham aided the determined struggle of leading Meiji industrializers for a peaceful foreign policy. The British-allied faction schemed to divert Japan away from internal development into aggressive conflict with China over control of Korea and other areas.[35]
In his strategy wars, Minister Bingham was seconded by American journalist Edward House, proprietor of the Tokio Times. House’s paper, in turn, championed the work of Careyite E. Peshine Smith, who advised the Japanese government on foreign and economic policy.
Their nemesis was the famed, tempestuous Sir Harry Parkes, Britain’s Minister to Japan from 1865 to 1883. Parkes’ authorized biography complains of these three Yankees, Bingham above all:
There is no doubt . . . that Sir Harry Parkes’ detractors derived support from the factious opposition uniformly offered by the American Minister to whatever proposals emanated from the British legation . . .
The biography blames “the childish jealousies of Mr. Bingham and the American communities in Japan” and their “prejudice against British subjects and the British Minister” on hostile reporting about Americans in the Japan Mail,[36] a British-owned and British-run newspaper.[37]
The American-allied Japanese government moved swiftly to break up feudalism. They freed the serfs,[38] following the examples of Russia (1861) and America (1865). They compelled war lords and great landlords to sell their lands, and loaned them money to become industrialists. The initial government strategy deliberately avoided building up the already large British-aligned merchants like Mitsui.
From 1873 to 1882, government loans and other encouragement resulted in creating 200 new corporations for ship building, construction, cement fertilizer, salt works, textile mills and other production.
The government hired Horace Capron, former head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to develop the large Japanese island of Hokkaido. From 1871 to 1875, Capron and other American experts helped organize the pioneer farming, industry, railroadsa and immigration to integrate the northern island into the nation.
Japan's government itself operated most heavy industries, often advised by American System economists. In 1875, 56 per cent of all Japanese factories were government-operated, accounting for 75 per cent of the total energy throughput in factories and 88 per cent of the manufacturing employees. The government built a nationwide railway system, a chemical industry, and a shipbuilding industry. Meanwhile protected private industries sprang up and flourished in the major lines of production.
Okubo financially sponsored the creation of the Mitsubishi shipping enterprise, and the government in 1874 bought 13 steamers and gave them to Mitsubishi.
The 1877 Satsuma samurai rebellion of was put down with the crucial transport of Japanese troops on Mitsubishi transports.
But the following year, the rebels assassinated Okubo, to the great shock and grief of Minister Bingham and the Japanese people.[39]
After Ulysses Grant retired from the presidency, he took off on a world tour ending in China and Japan. He pleaded for peace between the two nations and denounced European imperialist bullying. The hero of the American Union was received with immense joy by the Japanese people and their government during a two-month visit in Summer, 1879.[40]
Grant’s intervention in China and Japan temporarily staved off conflict. But over the coming years, the militarists gradually gained ground. The British empire nurtured Japan’s darkest feudal elements. Support for peace waned as assassins took down Russia’s “Czar Liberator” (1881) and two more U.S. pro-national Presidents (1881 and 1901).
Philadelphian Charles Cramp, a keen observer of late 19th century strategic shifts, was able to document Britain’s direct hand in steering Japan’s tragic turn, while it was happening.
Cramp, whose shipyard had built the cruisers for Russia in 1879, did a daring job of espionage inside England two decades later.
In the summer of 1897, Cramp penetrated shipbuilding facilities and bluffed his way into the confidence of leading men. He discovered that England was covertly building an entire naval fleet for Japan; building, in fact, far more ships for the Japanese than for their own Royal Navy.
Cramp immediately published a blistering account of this immense clandestine naval construction program, warning America and the world of Japan’s new capabilities for mayhem, including the possibility of a Japanese attack on the USA in the Pacific.[41]
The United Kingdom and the Japanese Empire officially cemented a military alliance with the Treaty of 1902. Two years later, as Russia neared completion of their Trans-Siberian Railway to the Pacific, built with enormous U.S. assistance, Japan attacked, defeated and badly destabilized Russia in a war of 19 months.
Charles Cramp then published the complete story of his earlier adventures as a spy, stating clearly what he had understood about Britain’s purpose.
I ascertained while in London . . . that the construction of these ships was undertaken in consequence of a secret alliance between Great Britain and Japan to prevent the United States from securing possession of the Sandwich Islands [Hawaii] and to head off the Russians in the Pacific.[42]
End of Part One of Chapter 12
Next Week, in Part Two:
The Careyite Labor Movement
The Carey Circle Selects a U.S. President
The U.S. Government in American Hands
Confronting Britain in South America ...
... and in New York
The Dimming of the Universal Spirit
Blaine, McKinley, and the Last Years of Lincoln’s America
[1] As noted above, Carnegie’s giant steelworks were an exception to this dismal picture. The Westinghouse company also surged ahead with new transmission technology, after Edison had pioneered the electrical industry.
[2] Act of congress March 3, 1871, quoted in James D. McCabe, The Illustrated History of the Centennial Exhibition (Philadelphia: The National Publishing Company, 1876), P. 171.
[3] Ibid., p. 184.
[4] Henry C. Carey, Commerce, Christianity and civilization: Letters in Reply to the London Times (Philadelphia: Collins, Printer, 1876). Carey responded to a January 22, 1876 London Times report expressing outrage that Canadian opinion followed the “ignorant” and “imbecilic” lead of “the late [sic] Mr. Carey, of Philadelphia” in favor of protectionism. When the Times refused to print Carey’s letters to the editor, he had them made into a pamphlet which gained worldwide circulation.
[5] Wharton Barker chaired the Penn Club until 1880. Reflecting Carey’s influence over relations with Russia, Barker was the banker for the Russian government group organizing that country’s participation in the Exhibition, and would engage in national security and industrial projects on behalf of Czar Alexander II. Wharton Barker directed the banking enterprise founded by his father, Abraham Barker, and served as banker for his uncle, industrialist Joseph Wharton.
[6] Prussia, led by Bismarck, gathered in smaller German principalities to form unified Germany (the “German Empire”) in 1871.
[7] Lothar Gall, Bismarck: The White Revolutionary 1871-1898, translated by J. A. Underwood (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986) p. 75.
[8] On May 15, 1876, Kardorff wrote to Carey, describing the rapid progress of the Carey circle in Germany:
Dear Sir ! Returning from a meeting of a union of gentlemen of the protective party at Leipzig to my parliamentary duties, I was rejoiced by the 'Letters to the London Times' and the portrait you were so kind to send me. Wishing to give the full knowledge and use of your brilliant little pamphlet to my own countrymen, I began on the spot the translation of the letters, with the intention of publishing it in a separate little volume with a preface written by myself in reference to the ideas about the necessity of self-defense against the theories and the agitation of the radical Manchester free trade men . . . We have had a great triumph, Mr. [Rudolf] Delbruck, a vehement free trade man and till now chief of the trade department of the German empire, having been induced to take his leave; but the battle is not yet won, the daily journals nearly all writing in obedience to the instructions of the Cobden Club, and public opinion vacillating between the two sides of the question . . .
[9] See excerpts from Reuleaux’s reports in Anton Chaitkin, “The 'Land-Bridge': Henry Carey's Global Development Program,” Executive Intelligence Review, May 2, 1997, p. 40.
In this period, a brilliant Irish engineer who had emigrated to Germany aided the Careyites in giving leverage to Bismarck for his nationalist coup. William T. Mulvany had arranged jobs for thousands of Irish threatened with starvation in the 1840s, until enraged landlords drove him from his native land. Mulvany implemented advanced mining methods in the Ruhr region, increasing productivity and greatly adding to national revenues from coal and steel. Mulvany organized these industrial interests in the Rhineland and Westphalia on a pro-national basis. He wrote, “England, as I foretold, is giving up free trade and even Gladstone begins to open his eyes. It is full time for Germany to awake.” -- Mulvany to Axel Bueck, December 1, 1878, quoted in John J. O’Sullivan, Breaking Ground: The Story of William T. Mulvany (Cork, Ireland: Mercier Press, 2004), p. 91.
[10] Kelley met in Germany with the leaders of the German Carey network. Kelley conferred with Kardorff just prior to his audience with Chancellor Bismarck -- William D. Kelley, Letters from Europe (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, no date), p. 22. Kelley describes his interview with the Chancellor:
Nothing in the interview surprised me so much as the freedom with which Bismarck spoke of men still in positions of influence. His contempt is intense for the arrogant pretenders who regard the doctrines of the British school of free trade as absolute and indisputable propositions. He characterized them as doctrinaires and closet men, and said, “Doctors, clergymen and lawyers, but few of whom know anything of the details of public affairs are generally on that side, and they are led by those who know nothing on the question but what they have learned from the books of men who have plausibly. formulated impracticable nonsense.”
[11]Adam Young, “Lincoln and Bismarck, Enemies of Liberalism,” August 19, 2002, Mises Institute, https://mises.org/mises-daily/lincoln-and-bismarck-enemies-liberalism
[12] In Ireland and internationally, the same movement was called the “Irish Republican Brotherhood.”
[13] Paraphrased in Daniel Q. Posin, Mendeleyev: The Story of a Great Scientist (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948), p. 180
[14] Dmitri Mendeleyev, The Oil Industry in Pennsylvania and the Caucasus (St. Petersburg: 1877), quotations translated for Anton Chaitkin by Pavel Penev.
[15] Ibid.
[16] This short-lived Pennsylvania corporation was a Rockefeller instrument to squeeze out competition in the petroleum industry.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Quoted in Frederick Douglas How, The Marquis of Salisbury (London: Isbister & Co., 1901), p. 127.
[19] Wickham Hoffman to Secretary of State William M. Evarts, April 20, 1878, quoted in Leonid Strakhovsky, “Russia’s Privateering Projects of 1878,” Journal of Modern History, VII (1935), footnote p. 26.
[20] Shipbuilder Charles H. Cramp was a seasoned American strategist and a brilliant intelligence-gatherer. Years later, Cramp would discover and analyze British secret strategy to build up Japan as a Pacific Ocean naval power versus the USA and Russia.
Cramp grew up in the Philadelphia nationalists’ industrial/science/political complex. A son of the shipyard’s founder William Cramp, Charles attended
Central High School, which was then presided over by Alexander Dallas Bache, the most consummate master of the science of applied mathematics and the physical sciences of his time in this country, if not in the world. While at the High School, Mr. Bache was appointed to take charge of the appropriation of a million dollars by Congress [for] a series of observations on terrestrial magnetism in cooperation with similar observations along the same lines in Europe . . . Professor Bache took his observers at Philadelphia from among the pupils of the High School for night work, and . . . Charles H. Cramp [was] among the number . . .
Charles was for three and a half years under Bache’s tutorship before beginning work in one of his family’s Philadelphia shipyards.
Augustus C. Buell, Memoirs of Charles H. Cramp (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1906), p. 45-47. Chaitkin, Who We Are, Vol. 1, pp. 368-375, for Bache, the magnetic observations, the Navy, and related topics.
[21] On May 16, Semetschkin gave Barker a formal purchase order of $400,000 for another steamship, the State of California, whose refitting from commercial vessel to war cruiser was then being completed. The next day, Admiral Gore Jones offered Cramp & Sons $500,000 for the California, and soon futilely raised his offer to $600,000. British Ambassador Edward Thornton advised the Foreign Office and the British Navy that Wharton Barker had arranged the ship’s sale to the Russians.
[22] Buell, Memoirs of Charles H. Cramp, carries the entire episode of the Russian cruisers. An article hilariously jeering at the hapless British naval intelligence man, from the Washington Sunday Capital, is in the Memoirs, pp. 217-219.
https://archive.org/details/memoirscharlesh01buelgoog/page/n264/mode/2up?q=gore&view=theater
[23] Wharton Barker, “The Secret of Russia’s Friendship,” The Independent, March 24, 1904, p. 648.
[24] Perry letter to John P. Kennedy
[25] Bingham letter to Evarts
[26] FDR speech to Congress
[27] Commodore Perry’s actions to head off British domination of the Pacific were in line with family experience. His father had fought the British in the American Revolution; his older brother, naval hero Oliver Hazard Perry, defeated the British on Lake Erie, turning the tide in America’s War of 1812.
[28] The new leaders subscribed to the Charter Oath, proclaiming these objectives:
Deliberative assemblies shall be widely established and all matters decided by open discussion.
All classes, high and low, shall be united in vigorously carrying out the administration of affairs of state.
The common people, no less than the civil and military officials, shall all be allowed to pursue their own calling so that there may be no discontent.
Evil customs of the past shall be broken off and everything based upon the just laws of Nature.
Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule.
--- William Theodore de Bary, editor, Sources of Japanese Tradition, Second Edition, Volume 2, Abridged, Part Two (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) p. 8.
[29] The Constitution’s second clause declares,
The power and authority of the council of state shall be threefold, legislative, executive, and judicial. Thus the imbalance of authority among the different branches of government shall be avoided.
Ibid., p. 9.
[30] Mark Calney, Japan’s Historic Mission: Completing Fukuzawa’s Revolution -- The Forgotten History of Japan and the American System. Written March 22, 2009. https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/educ/hist/eiw_this_week/2014/calney_japan_history.pdf
On p. 60 of the Calney work is a translation by Saito Asuka of Tomita’s introduction to the Japanese version of Carey’s Principles of Social Science.
[31] The city’s establishment published an anonymous pamphlet, explaining why Japan had been closed to world commerce before the U.S. went to aid Japan’s development: “the least concession ... to the foreign trader” had brought in “that aggressive policy, that arrogance, and grasping spirit of monopoly which have ever followed the British footfall on foreign soil,” forcing Japan to close up “to preserve its national and political autonomy.” Diary of the Japanese Visit to Philadelphia in 1872 (Philadelphia: Henry B. Ashmead, printer, 1872), pp. 3-4. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Diary_of_the_Japanese_Visit_to_Philadelp/TC5HAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=diary+of+the+japanese+visit&printsec=frontcover
[32] Michael Hudson, A Study in Protectionist Growth Theory and American Sectionalism, 1969 PhD dissertation for New York University, pp. 31-33. Smith reported to Carey throughout his Japanese employment. In 1874, the foreign ministry renewed Smith’s tenure in for 3 more years.
https://michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Hudson-Michael-E-Peshine-Smith-A-Study-in-Protectionist-Growth-Theory-American-Sectionalism.pdf
[33] Calney, op. cit., p. 57.
[34] Speech of John Bingham, Feb. 4, 1862, Spaulding, p. 67.
[35] Kidder, Sam. Of One Blood All Nations: John Bingham: Ohio Congressman’s Diplomatic Career in Meiji Japan (1873-1885), Kindle Edition. Author Kidder, a career policy hand associated with American diplomacy, devotes his chapter five to Bingham’s work with the Okubo Toshimichi, Prince Iwakura and others to defeat militarist intrigues by the warlord-British combination.
[36] Frederick V. Dickins and Stanley Lane-Poole, Life of Sir Harry Parkes, Vol. 2 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1894), p. 183 for E. Peshine Smith, p. 304 for Edward House, pp. 304-305 for John Bingham.
[37] Kidder, Kindle edition, p. 148.
[38] Emancipation Edict, October, 1871
[39] Bingham compared the conspiracy to murder Okubo, his friend, with that of Lincoln, whose assassins Bingham had prosecuted. -- Kidder, Kindle edition, p. 97.
[40] When Grant’s delegation entered the port of Yokohama, Britain’s Royal Navy petulantly refused to join in the naval salute. – Kidder, Kindle edition, p. 102,
[41] Charles Cramp, “The Coming Sea Power,” North American Review, October, 1897.
[42] Buell, Memoirs of Charles Cramp, op. cit., pp. 236-237. A detailed account of the English warship construction program in 1897 is given in the Memoirs, pp. 239-241.
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