Who runs America?
There are a lot of theories about this, and the faces have changed from time to time. You can look at political influence. You can look at who has the most money. You should assume that it is an oligarchy. It is not a tyranny. The trappings of democracy must be honored in this country.
If an oligarchy really does run it, as people on the far right and the far left have long argued, then who represents them? Every oligarchy has to have a supreme representative. There has to be somebody who has this sign on his desk: the buck stops here.
It is not somebody in politics. This is because the presidency is available only for eight years.
The only politician in the 20th century who could plausibly be identified as the chairman of the American Establishment was Franklin Roosevelt. He was re-elected four times. He was President during the two greatest crises since the Civil War: the Great Depression and World War II. He had enormous power. Under him, the federal government took its modern form. So, I think it is accurate to argue that he had a legitimate claim as being the chairman, at least during the period of the Great Depression. But as soon as World War II broke out, the focus of his concern shifted to winning the war. This took his concern away from the economic and social issues on which he had built his political career.
There is another thing to consider. Roosevelt was part of the social class which has supplied the American Establishment. He attended Harvard University. From 1921 until 1929, he was basically a bond salesman at the highest level of the financial industry. This is not well-known, and his biographers ignore it, but Antony Sutton provided the evidence in his classic book, Wall Street and FDR.
If politicians are not the incarnations of the American Establishment, then who is? Anyway, who in the past have been the chief representatives of the American Establishment? This is not the kind of question that gets asked in graduate school. You are not even supposed to mention this question. Certainly, nobody in academia has ever sat down to identify these men. Yet these men are identifiable. There has never been a one-volume biography of all of them. But those of us who have spent 40 years in the far Right know who they are.
When do you date the establishment of the American Establishment? When did big money, first families, New York City lawyers, and political power come together? It is fairly easy to date: 1899. It was in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, when the American Empire first began to be put together with Puerto Rico and the Philippines. There were hints of it before, in the Harrison administration (John Foster). But the basic outline has not changed since the first decade of the 20th century.
So, where do we look for the chairman? This would be the first chairman.
We know who he is. Elihu Root. If this name is unfamiliar to you, then you have not spent time studying the American Establishment.
I don't need to go into the background. You can get this on Wikipedia.
Root trained a successor. We know who that was, and of all of the chairman of the American Establishment, this one is most widely recognized: Henry L Stimson. He was known as the Colonel.
Within elite circles in the 1960's, the chairman's identity was pretty well agreed on: John J. McCloy. He succeeded Stimson. The man who publicly identified him was the gadfly of academia, John Kenneth Galbraith. In his classic book on the American Establishment, Richard Rovere begins with the story of how he talked with Galbraith. In a 1962 article for Esquire, Rovere wrote this.
I am not sure who the chairman of the Establishment is today, although I would not be altogether surprised to learn that he is Dean Rusk. By a thrust of sheer intuition, though, I did get the name of the 1958 chairman and was rather proud of myself for doing so. In that year, I discovered that J. K. Galbraith had for some time been surreptitiously at work in Establishment studies, and he told me that he had found out who was running the thing. He tested me by challenging me to guess the man's name. I thought hard for a while and was on the point of naming Arthur Hays Sulzberger, of the New York Times, when suddenly the right name sprang to my lips. "John J. McCloy," I exclaimed. "Chairman of the Board of the Chase Manhattan Bank; once a partner in Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, and also in Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine 8c Wood, as well as, of course, Milbank, Tweed, Hope, Hadley fc McCloy; former United States High Commissioner in Germany; former President of the World Bank; liberal Republican; chairman of the Ford Foundation and chairman my God, how could I have hesitated of the Council on Foreign Relations; Episcopalian." "That's the one," Galbraith said. He congratulated me for having guessed what it had taken him so much patient research to discover.
This incident is acknowledged by the biographer of McCoy, Kai Erikson, who says that the whole thing was a spoof.
One of the ways that the insiders reveal the true nature of what is going on is to present the case in terms of a spoof. Probably the most successful of all of these spoofs is the book, Report from Iron Mountain (1967). Galbraith was part of this spoof. He did a fake book review with a fake name, in which he said he would support the truth of the book's findings, and stake his reputation on it. The book basically did reveal what was going on in 1966, and what is still going on today. For example, it set forth the case that, if war is no longer the basic engine of social change used by the government to centralize the economy and bail out capitalism, then the ecology movement could replace it.
Wikipedia reports:
John Jay McCloy (March 31, 1895 -- March 11, 1989, was a Wall Street lawyer and banker who served as Assistant Secretary of War during World War II, where he made many major decisions. After the war he served as president of the World Bank, U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, and chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. He later became a prominent United States presidential advisor, served on the Warren Commission, and was a member of the foreign policy establishment group of elders called "The Wise Men."Stimson trained McCloy.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson hired McCloy as a consultant in September 1940, and he became immersed in war planning, even though he was a Republican and voted against Roosevelt in the November 1940 presidential election. He was made Assistant Secretary of War, reporting to Secretary of War Henry Stimson. He had only civilian responsibilities, especially the purchase of war materials for the Army, Lend Lease, the draft, and issues of intelligence and sabotage.
McCloy was the brains behind the internment of Japanese citizens in concentration camps. He learned about power.
Following this, he served as chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank from 1953 to 1960, and as chairman of the Ford Foundation from 1958 to 1965; he was also a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1946 to 1949, and then again from 1953 to 1958, before he took up the position at Ford.From 1954 to 1970, he was chairman of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations in New York, to be succeeded by David Rockefeller, who had worked closely with him at the Chase Bank. McCloy had a long association with the Rockefeller family, going back to his early Harvard days when he taught the young Rockefeller brothers how to sail.
Here is the list so far: Elihu Root, [Franklin Roosevelt?], Henry L. Stimson, John J. McCloy. McCloy was chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1953 to 1970. Who succeeded McCloy as chairman pf the CFR? David Rockefeller. He had joined in 1946. He held the chairman's position until 1985. McCloy specifically trained him at Chase Manhattan Bank.
Most people do not know this. Rockefeller has a Ph.D. in economics (University of Chicago, 1940).
Because Rockefeller is 98. It is possible that he still retains the title, but I doubt it. After Rockefeller left the CFR's chairmanship in 1985, it becomes far less clear that one man who best represents the system. His replacement held the CFR position for 22 years: Peter G. Peterson, a billionaire investment banker. He is devoted to warning Americans about the Great Default of the federal government's old age programs, Medicare and Social Security. I don't think he represents the Establishment today, if he ever did.
There is no book on the board chairman of the American Establishment. There ought to be such a book. It ought to devote about 50 pages to each of the chairmen. It ought to discuss what the American Establishment is.
This oligarchy is invisible. Yet it is clearly in charge. It has been in charge since at least 1900. Textbooks never mention it. Anyone who raises the issue is regarded as a conspiracy theorist, unless he does it in the form of a spoof. It is not a spoof. It is the real deal.
Despite all of the evidence on the World Wide Web, there is still almost no widespread understanding of how the system works. It has never gotten into the textbooks. It is not allowed into the textbooks. The fact that it is not discussed is indicative of just how powerful the system is. You can trace the major figures on Wikipedia. This is hidden in plain site. It literally would be possible to piece together the history of the American Establishment by using nothing except texts from various articles published on Wikipedia. But no one does it. I am too busy, and there's not much incentive for younger historians to pursue such a task. It would ruin their careers, assuming that they ever got into a position in academia where they could have a career worth ruining.
If you don't understand the problem, you cannot devise a solution.
Americans do not understand the problem.
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