The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government by Mike Lofgren (Audiobook)
From chapter 07:
The Historical Roots of Wealth Worship
That wealth worship and a consequent special status for the wealthy should have arisen in the United States is unsurprising in view of the peculiar sort of Protestantism transplanted here from the British Isles: a Christianity that regarded wealth in a different way from older Christian traditions. Starting with the Puritanism of New England, there has been a long and intimate connection between the sanctification of wealth and America’s political structure.
A crucial political debate of the young republic was what to do about the rising financial power in the country. Andrew Jackson defined the populist nature of his presidency by his relentless opposition to the wealthy elites who controlled the Second Bank of the United States. But in the long run Jackson’s efforts did not succeed. At the beginning of the Civil War, financier Jay Cooke wangled the franchise to sell war bonds for the U.S. Treasury and made a fortune on the commissions, vindicating Cicero’s quip that the sinews of war are infinite money.
Wall Street’s first period of real ascendancy began just after the Civil War. Most present-day Americans, if they think about the historical roots of our wealth worship at all, will say something about free markets, rugged individualism, and the Horatio Alger myth—a literary construct of the post–Civil War era. But perhaps the most notable nineteenth-century exponent of wealth as virtue and poverty as the mark of Cain was Russell Herman Conwell, a canny Baptist minister, founder of the first tabernacle large enough that it could be called a megachurch, and author of the immensely famous “acres of diamonds” speech of 1890 that would make him a rich man. This is what he said:
I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich. . . . The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community. Let me say here clearly . . . ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. . . . I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins . . . is to do wrong . . . let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings.
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