Towards the beginning of the week I wrote a little number under the title The More Things Change the More They Remain the Same.  In it, I promised something more extensive on the theme of the piece, which was that the struggle between the finance party and the rest of the nation was as American as Apple Pie.  This is it-or maybe a part of it, depending on whether people yawn audibly and commence to snore.

The United States is not a particularly historically conscious nation.  This explains, I think, the constant references to situations without precedent, or uncharted waters.  My view is that there is a confusion between similarity and identity.  No two historical situations are identical, but one can almost always find something similar enough to keep one from the brink of panic over every thing which seems "new".  We claim to be the land of the free and the home of the brave, but because our sense of historical analogy is so terribly undeveloped we get timid and hesitant in situations we can't immediately link to past experiences.  Of course we can go too far the other way: but that's also a confusion of identity and similarity.  But right now I think we're not hearing "just the same" as often as we're hearing "totally different."

From the preamble to my topic.  Large numbers of Americans don't like the Captains of Finance very much-and haven't for a very long time.  Thomas Jefferson's views might be a good place to start-remembering his "Republican" party is the party of yeomen farmers and laborers-an ancestor of today's Democratic party.

 Jefferson, writing to William Branch Giles in 1795, said:

The Anti-republicans consist of

     1. The old refugees & tories.       
     2. British merchants residing among us, & composing the main body of our merchants.
     3. American merchants trading on British capital. Another great portion.
     4. Speculators & Holders in the banks & public funds.
     5. Officers of the federal government with some exceptions.
     6. Office-hunters, willing to give up principles for places. A numerous & noisy tribe.
     7. Nervous persons, whose languid fibres have more analogy with a passive than active state of things.

The Republican [i.e. Democratic] part of our Union comprehends
     1. The entire body of landholders throughout the United States.
     2. The body of labourers, not being landholders, whether in husbanding or the arts.

    The latter is to the aggregate of the former party probably as 500 to one; but their wealth is not as disproportionate, tho' it is also greatly superior, and is in truth the foundation of that of their antagonists. Trifling as are the numbers of the Anti-republican party, there are circumstances which give them an appearance of strength & numbers. They all live in cities, together, & can act in a body readily & at all times; they give chief employment to the newspapers, & therefore have most of them under their command.

We might have to strike one or two from the list of anti-s and perhaps modify one or two others, but Speculators and Holders in the banks could certainly remain.  I confess my favorite is the last: I can't wait to have an opportunity to accuse the Minority Leader of having Languid Fibres.

Jefferson is anything but inconsistent in his mistrust of the banking establishment.  Writing to Albert Gallatin in 1803, he says:

    because the Legislature having deemed rotation useful in the principal bank constituted by them, there would be the same reason for it in the subordinate banks to be established by the principal. It breaks in upon the esprit de corps so apt to prevail in permanent bodies; it gives a chance for the public eye penetrating into the sanctuary of those proceedings & practices, which the avarice of the directors may introduce for their personal emolument, & which the resentments of excluded directors, or the honesty of those duly admitted, might betray to the public; and it gives an opportunity at the end of the year, or at other periods, of correcting a choice, which, on trial, proves to have been unfortunate; an evil of which themselves complain in their distant institutions

Shades of bogus "compensation committees" and salary reviews rewarding bad performance as if it were stellar performance.  Far too much esprit de corps among the Lehman Bros. alumni, if you ask me.

In the same letter he vents his wrath on the Bank of the United States:  

    This institution is one of the most deadly hostility existing, against the principles & form of our Constitution....That it is so hostile we know, 1, from a knowledge of the principles of the persons composing the body of directors in every bank, principal or branch; and those of most of the stockholders: 2, from their opposition to the measures & principles of the government, & to the election of those friendly to them: and 3, from the sentiments of the newspapers they support.....But, in order to be able to meet a general combination of the banks against us, in a critical emergency, could we not make a beginning towards an independent use of our own money, towards holding our own bank in all the deposits where it is received, and letting the treasurer give his draft or note, for payment at any particular place, which, in a well-conducted government, ought to have as much credit as any private draft, or bank note, or bill, and would give us the same facilities which we derive from the banks?

Nationalizing the banks? Sorta, kinda.  Foreshadowing the Federal Reserve System, not really, but with some similar object in mind.

Perhaps one of the Mediums to which I referred in my last could conjure up the Shade of Jefferson while he or she was at it.  Not to tell us what to do, but to give us lessons in elegant invective.  He ranted with the best:

    That we are overdone with banking institutions which have banished the precious metals and substituted a more fluctuating and unsafe medium, that these have withdrawn capital from useful improvements and employments to nourish idleness, that the wars of the world have swollen our commerce beyond the wholesome limits of exchanging our own productions for our own wants, and that, for the emolument of a small proportion of our society who prefer these demoralizing pursuits to labors useful to the whole, the peace of the whole is endangered and all our present difficulties produced, are evils more easily to be deplored than remedied.

While all of this was going on, banks were using democratic symbolism in the form of Greek Revival architecture to project an image of probity and respectability.  Three orders of columns and capitals marked the American Greek Temple Style.   Of the three, the Doric was the most austere-suitable for government buildings and military installations.   The Ionic was an intermediary order, suitable for institutions of justice and learning-courts, universities, and the like.  The most elaborate order, the Corinthian, was appropriate for institutions of culture: libraries, museums, concert halls, and the like.  But when we take a look at one "Temple of Mammon,"   The First Bank of the United States (1795)(I had to get my title in someplace) we see the full-blown Roman corruption of the Corinthian. 

Banks a little more reticent to make extravagant displays of their wealth on the exterior, were less modest once one entered the banking halls themselves. 

Consider the Bank of Louisville (1837).  A prim and proper Doric exterior, and on the interior an exercise in the Corinthian suitable for a bordello catering to exiled French aristocrats.  (I exaggerate a wee bit, perhaps).

So we see very early in the history of the country the establishment of a contest between the forces of high finance and the rest of us.  Jefferson is just the first to vent his spleen.  Politicians and editorial cartoonists weighed in with every financial crisis from 1837 on.  If this is amusing anyone, I may explore some of them later.