Will the United States Survive Until 2084?

By Dale T. La Belle

The present study treats the practices of Western banking and contrasts them broadly with Islamic banking. It illumines the "invisible treads" uniting war and capitalism, following the lead of Werner Sombart. An example of money inflation is adduced from the sixteenth century precedent of bullion inflation and its economic consequences. For long-term analysis as well as predictive value the author adopts the "long cycle" hypothesis of the Russian economist K.D. Dmitriev and as expounded by contemporary Russian economists. The author concludes that the operation of the sixth "long wave" of economic acceleration may well necessitate the collapse and transformation of the current American political regime during the third quarter of the twenty-first century.
Subsequent chapters in the Afterward trace the path of revolutionary Puritan colonists into the Pioneer Valley in central Massachusetts, before entering and forming a significant ethnic portion of the banking industry. Later chapters illumine the aspirations of a later Puritsn descendent to establish a military dictatorship in America, after a second invasion of Mexico, thus illustrating the contnuity of Puritan military aspirations from Philip Dru: Administrator to the border vigilantes of the present day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jun 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466944732

Dale T. La Belle

Dale T. LaBelle graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1959. He received his M.A. from The University of Chicago in 1962, and his Ph.D. from the same institution in 1973. He studied advanced Russian at Middlebury Summer School. Later, he conducted research into Men'shevik history at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, 1962-1963. On returning he taught summer school at the Baruch School of Business in New York City, substituted for one year at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, taught three years at California State University at Long Beach, and three years at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. Thereafter he was a Fellow at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University priior to passing a year at A.A. Zhdanov State University in Leningrad. Subsequently he initiated a petition criticical of Russian non-compliance with the terms of the cultural exchange. Thereafter he could not obtain academic employmeht. For fifteen years he labored as an Administrative Assistant at high-tech firms around Boston, inclulding ADP, Polaroid, and a half year at Hanscom AFB, while honing sales skills and store management capabilities. He contributed position papers for the presidential campaign for Sen. Frank Church, and later volunteered to work in the press department for the last campaign of Sen. Edward Brooke.He continued to audit economics courses at Harvard Extension School and Boston University, and to write book reviews for the publlic press and scholarly journals. A selection may be accessed at http://iblueradicals.blogspot.com. This is his first book.

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Copyright 2012 Dale T. La Belle, Ph.D.

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Contents

Dedication Boris Ivanovich Nikolaevskii 1887 – 1966

Synopsis

In Place Of A Preface A Modest Disclaimer

The Sage Of Singapore

Prolegomena The Wave And The Fed —Epigraphs—

Preface

Part I. The Banks And The Long Cycle

Background: Europeans And Banking

The Banker’s Panic

Jekyll Island Duck Hunt

Background Puritan Immigrants Into The Pioneer Valley

The Mysterious Stranger

The Silent Introvert Or The Young Obsessive

Chapter One The Banks And The Money

Chapter Two The Banks Take On The Government

Chapter Three War And Capitalism

Chapter Four Spanish Steps Examples Of A Money Pump In Action

Chapter Five The Cycle Concept

Chapter Six Russians Return To The Cycle

Chapter Seven The Long Wave Forecasts Our Future

Afterword The Path To Creative Destruction

Part II To The Reader

Chapter One Shark Attack: The New Leviathan

Chapter Two William Mandell House: Puritan Author

Chapter Three John B. Magruder Conventional Identity

Chapter Four Historical Mystery ---A Radio Serial---

Afterword Knights Of The Golden Circle

Suggestions For Further Readings

Will The United States Survive Until 2084?

Dale T. LaBelle, Ph.D. (University of Chicago, 1973)

The bitter truth is better than the sweet lie.

--Boris Yeltsin

Their foot shall slide in due time.

Text for Jonathan Edwards,

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

Government being instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security, of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, whenever the ends of the government are perverted and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.

Constitution of New Hampshire, Article 10

June 2, 1784

Labor Day 2008

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Socialist International Resistence–Écrasez L’Infâme!

Dale La Belle

Dedication

Boris Ivanovich Nikolaevskii

1887 – 1966

The present volume is respectfully dedicated to Boris Ivanovich Nikolaevskii --revolutionary, Social Democrat, and historian. Boris Ivanovich was a man of enormous stature, resembling in size alone the late Russian president, Boris Yeltsin. Unlike Yeltsin, however, he was an enormously gifted scholar, prolific journalist and indefatigable collector of archives. After the Bol’shevik coup of November, 1917 (and after losing a public debate with Lenin), Boris Ivanovich joined a significant stream of Russian refugees to Berlin, where he functioned as the foreign representative of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow under the control of its director, Dmitri Ryazanov. He collaborated on the journals Katorga i ssylka [Hard Labor and Exile] until the Society was closed by Joseph Stalin in 1931, and Letopis’ Marksisma [Marxist Chronicle] from 1926-1930. In February of 1932 his Soviet citizenship was voided. In 1933 he migrated to Paris, where he administered the Paris branch of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. As editor of the Sotsialisticheski Vestnik [Socialist Courier] he published anonymously the famous Letter of an Old Bol’shevik in which he conveyed the substance of his conversations (without attribution) with Nikolai Bukharin regarding the preparation or stage-managing of the Moscow Trials. He corresponded with N. Vol’skii-Valentinov, and was a consultant for L. D. Trotsky (Bronstein) as he prepared his History of the Russian Revolution.

In 1940 Boris Ivanovich and the other Russian Social Democratic (Men’shevik) leaders, including Fedor Dan (Gurvich), Lydia Dan (Tsederbaum), and Rafael Abramovich migrated once again to New York City in anticipation of the Nazi invasion of France. Here he collaborated on the literary publication Novyi Zhurnal [New Journal] and the daily Novoe russkoe slovo [New Russian Word], founded as a newspaper for émigrés in 1910. The Sotsialisticheskii vestnik [Socialist Courier], which had been forced to flee from Berlin to Paris and from Paris to New York, continued to publish with Nikolaevskii as an editor. He and other Men’shevik leaders later dictated their memoirs for the American Inter-University Project on the History of the Men’shevik Movement in a New York basement a few blocks south of Columbia University under the direction of Professor Leopold Haimson, formerly of the University of Chicago and teaching at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University until his death in December 2010.

Nikolaevskii continued his self-assigned mission to collect the archives of Russian revolutionaries. In 1963 he sold his collection of 250 archival funds to the independent Hoover Institution for the Study of War, Revolution and Peace on the grounds of the H. Leland Stanford, Jr. University in Stanford, California. Together with his long-time companion Anna Mikhailovna Bourgina he moved to a cottage in near-by Menlo Park.

The author still recalls the shock and awe he experienced at his first encounter with Boris Nikolaevich. Access to the small, sparcely furnished basement meeting room at 116th Street off Broadway in New York was gained by crossing the street-level foyer, detouring around the elevator and descending by a narrow stairwell to the underground Men’shevik Project. When Boris Ivanovich thrust himself through the doorway it seemed as if a mountain was avalanching toward you. Even the permanent secretary, Julia Abramova Kamermakher (widow of the former head of the Men’shevik Typesetter’s Union), ever ready with a kindly word, had not prepared one for the sight.

In distinction from many Russians of his generation and several other Man’sheviks, Boris Ivanovich was not addicted to long-winded perorations (razguly). On the contrary, he tended toward the parsimonious in his conversation, as with his correspondence with me (in all, perhaps four or five notes). These notes were written when I was conducting research during 1962-63 under a Foreign Area Training Fellowship grant at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. At that time the Institute was directed by Dr. J. M. Meijer, while the Russlands Kabinet was supervised by a young blond scholar, Leo van Rossum (1938-1999), born the same year as myself. Dr. Meijer and his wife invited me to their home on a few occasions, and on one visit pointed out to me the former Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam, directing my attention to a visual image symbolizing the loathing which foreign military occupation inevitable arouses in an occupied state. Here I received my sparse correspondence from Boris Ivanovich, and to this day I recall my astonishment at being addressed at Uvazhaemyi kollega [Esteemed Colleague] when only a graduate student, or, as the Dutch preferred to designate us, Drs. (Doctorandus), that is, one writing a doctorate.

Both the Dutch scholars I have mentioned exhibited overwhelming joy when boxes of archives looted by the Nazi occupation were returned at irregular intervals, or even dumped at the front door of the Institute from states as far distant as Rumania. And it was more than enlightening for the education of young American scholars to walk a couple of blocks along the Kaisergracht to lunch at Felix Meritis, the restaurant that also served as the headquarters building for the Dutch Communist Party. Here one could order baked chicken and potatoes and knock back a shot-glass of Dutch gin (Genever) while paging through Die Waarheid, conceivably the world’s only Communist paper to carry the comic strip Cisco Kid, in Dutch. As we picked up our halting command of the Dutch language on the street, here we learned that Op paarde meant Mount up. After lunch we would return to the fortress of democratic Socialism for further research, or, in my case, agonizing through the excruciatingly tortured handwriting of Pavel’ Borisovich Aksel’rod, scribbled on the reverse side of old menus, movie ads and other miscellaneous paper scraps.

On returning to New York (formerly New Amsterdam) from Amsterdam, this writer took the train from Paris to Le Havre where he boarded the great trans-Atlantic liner France. On viewing the disheveled graduate student, lean and exhausted after a year in a nation whose culture is an in-bred ethnic mystery, whose cuisine is basic and whose language is unpronounceable, the cabin steward summed up his appearance in two words, Sans sous. This proved to be an augury for the most trying passage of the Atlantic since either of the two World Wars or, indeed, the voyages of Columbus.

For the week of my return trip was the week of November 11, 1963. The sea was tranquil as the captain guided the France out of harbor on the calm Atlantic waves. But after some 48 hours the waves became angry and towering as the captain headed bow-first into a monumental hurricane. Many passengers declined to appear at table for meals, dishes slid across the dinner tables as the ship lurched from side to side and as it mounted the hurricane waves or slid sickenly downwards into a trough this writer saw at least one steward loose his footing in a corridor and slide into the opposite wall. As the captain steered determinedly forward into the teeth of the blast, the ship’s internal radio, which transmitted news broadcasts twice a day, began to circulate both rumors and information concerning the appalling events in America. On November 11, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. The gray-faced passenger contingent was appalled. The same passengers grew, if possible, even paler when, tossed along the ship’s corridors like marbles tossed by a distraught boy, we were informed the following day that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had also been assassinated. Many agonizing hours were passed between these rationed broadcasts, when the rumors of the airwaves were multiplied and embroidered in wild conjectures if we were to land amid a prosperous, organized society in New York, or were destined to disembark into total anarchy. In retrospect, this ghastly episode can only be interpreted as the strongest possible argument for the desirability, or rather, indispensability, of a broadly diffused theory of crises, as later advocated by M.G. Latysheva in contemporary Russian scholarship.

After my return, I began teaching on a permanent basis at California State University at Long Beach. At the end of my first year I moved to Palo Alto for the summer to consult the Okhrana (Secret Police) archives at Hoover. I was invited to meet Boris Ivanovich a couple of time in Menlo Park where he lived after his heart attack in New York. He was never capable of speaking English, except, delightedly, the word canyon. I was told by others that he was capable of reading the New York Times. After his cardiac attack he had to curtail or abstain from hard liquor, but enjoyed inviting me to share a glass of Dubonnet.

It was at Menlo Park that Boris Ivanovich once counseled me, American historians do not pay sufficient attention to theory. In response to that advice, and challenge, after a quarter-century’s absence from the historical discipline, I have returned to scholarship to produce the slim volume that is now in the reader’s hands. It is planned to be the first of three. The second volume will treat American (or Anglo-Saxon) expansion across the Pacific in a race to join European imperialist powers in the exploitation of China and Korea. The third volume will discuss the formality of the Federal Reserve System as a condition sine qua non for a nascent national imperialism and significant alteration in its ethnic, economic and military composition through the twentieth century.

Dale T. LaBelle, Ph.D.

(University of Chicago, 1973)

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Boris Ivanovich Nikolaevskii (1887-1966) Collage

With relative Boris Yel'tsin

SYNOPSIS

Part I.

The Banks and the Long Cycle

Numerous Asian commentators desire to restructure the Atlantic-dominated New World Order. At present the Federal Reserve System controls currency output and supervises American banking procedures. The Russian economist K.D. Dmitriev first identified the long wave business cycle encompassing 48-60 years. The bankers’ panic of 1907 led to the Aldrich-Vreeland Act, led by a Rockefeller in-law, which foreshadowed the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The centralized structure of the Fed was modeled on the great Jewish banks of imperial Germany. A scion of rebellious immigrant Puritan stock stood in the background. One of the descendents of the fugitive Cromwellians who intermarried with the German Rockefellers founded National City Bank, the ancestor of today’s Citigroup.

The history of relations between the profit-oriented Federal Reserve System and the constitutional order through the twentieth century has been a history of struggle for dominance. The Glass-Steagal Act, which interposed a Chinese Wall between deposit banking and investment speculation, was abolished by President William Clinton in 1999. By way of contrast, Islamic banks are prohibited from generating purely fiat currency without the solid backing of some form of physical property.

The international credit industry acts as a global money pump generating a never-ending variety of newly-formed credit instruments. In the later medieval period profit replaced morality as defined by Catholic theology as the supreme end of being. Americans such as E.H. Harriman and John D. Rockefeller symbolized the apogee of the new amoral business ethos. As portrayed by Werner Sombart, Jews embodied the spirit of a type of pariah capitalism, separated in a financial ghetto from the prevailing culture of their host country. Christian Protestants contributed the forms of rational organization of capital and labor. As John Wesley preached, Christians should gain all they could with the new supreme goal of self-enrichment. In early modern Europe war created the main financial stimulus for developing capitalist forms of business enterprise. War and commercial enterprise were bound together by invisible threads. Werner Sombart concluded that German militarism and Jewish business sense collaborated together. Now American militarism is subordinated to the financial institutions in Manhattan such as Goldman-Sachs, Citigroup, and in New York Federal Reserve Bank. The apogee of commercial-military speculation is the

ignis fatuus of global conquest.

The first significent example of an international money pump in action is furnished by the diffusion of silver from American mines into northwestern Europe and the Baltic, producing increasing inflation and budgetary deficits. The purchasing power of silver from South American mines declined progressively with devasting effect. Consumer prices in Istanbul increased 500% from 1499 to 1699, dictating currency devaluations in 1584 and 1586. These economic developments contributed to military uprisings in Turkey and Spain as well as a mass popular revolt along the southern Volga in Russia.

It was the Russian legal Marxist M.I. Tugan-Baranovskii who pioneered a cyclical view of business cycles in 1894. Ten years later K.D. Kondratiev enunciated his observation of wave-like business cycles and concluded in 1923 his hypothesized long waves lasted approximately 48-60 years. No economist was a greater enthusiast than the Texan Walt Whitman Rostow, who also agreed with Kondratiev’s inference that economic upswings were related to war. The triumph of the economists’ struggle to achieve recognition for Kondratiev’s long wave cycle theory was finally celebrated in 2005 at a NATO advanced workshop in Portugal, where the participants indulged in incredible exaggerations. The sixth Kondratiev wave is projected to terminate after 2030 in the form of severe depression. It may be hypothesized that with the conjuncture of the long wave cycle, accelerating negative phenomena associated with accelerating climate change and the advance of minority ehnicities to majority status vis-à-vis the white, English-language East Coast plutocracy, the current constitutional structure will be terminated.

PART II

The Cromwellian Obsession with Mexico

The future of an authoritarian military régime in the United States may have been prematurely adumbrated at the turn of the last century by the anonymous author of Philip Dru: Administrator. Young Dru, a West Point graduate turned volunteer social activist, exploited a fortuitious political shock to organize a popular military uprising. Basing his insurrection in Madison, Wisconsin, Dru moved victoriously on Chicago. Later General Dru overwhelmingly defeated the army of the president in a victory that resembled a holocaust. The new American Administrator reorganized the Washington bureaucracy. An agent of the new centralized administration was emplanted in the boardrooms of every major corporation. General Dru also extended universal suffrage to the female voters. Reacting to a perpetual cycle of of instability in Mexico, Dru dispatched 100,000 Anglo-Saxon troops across the Rio Grande at Larado, Texas, defeated the Mexican president, and promised land redistribution and modern educational institutions. In the novel’s afterward, Dru and his new bride sailed from San Francisco, perhaps to infect Asia with the Cromwellian cancer.

The ever-reclusive author, following Puritan refugee precedent, was Edward Mandell House, later reknowned as a political tutor and diplomatic spokesman in 1919 at the Versailles Peace Conference for President Woodrow Wilson. Later, House claimed he had shepherded the Federal Reserve Act into existence, and that he and Wilson had hand-picked the first Federal Reserve Board.

Philip Dru’s visit to an imaginary Fort Magruder in Texas recalls the enigmatic military career of John Bankhead Magruder as a Confederate general, despite his obvious European past and fictitious American identity. The role of early German colonization in Texas, ranging from ranching to a failed communistic collective is discussed illuminating the context in which Jefferson Davis reassigned Magruder from Virginia to Texas.

Und texanische Luft is freie Luft

Das wollen wir freudig bedanken.

Further, the efforts of the conspiratorial Knights of the Golden Circle to prepare and implement an invasion of Mexico in the later 1850’s is discussed as a possible precedent for Philip Dru’s aggressive decision to establish a military protectorate over Central America.

The Alptraum, or obsessive delusion, of a second American invasion of Mexico, whether to expand slavery, establish a military protectorate over the Caribbean basin, or to safeguard the border against population migration, has remained a continual Leitmotif in Texas politics. If Kondratiev’s long wave cycle develops as predicted, a new US-Mexican conflict may erupt in the middle of the 21st century.

In Place of a Preface

A Modest Disclaimer

The present study, perhaps best characterized as a revisionist reinterpretation of modern European and American economic history, treats several interlocking subjects. This introductory esquisse, however, shall attempt to broach only two or three of them, namely, the major theme of a cyclic interpretation of the observed historical process based on a compelling variant of economic determinism, and, as an obligatto, the inexorable shift of the political center of gravity from the Euro-American axis of financial expansion to the future dominant powers of the Asian-Pacific rim.

To introduce the themes of this historical symphony, I have selected a pair of works which I shall exploit selectively, but by no means exhaustively. The first was published by the American historian Brooks Adams in 1895, and the second by an Asian diplomat from Singapore, Kishore Mahbubani, in 2008.

Cyclicism, Socialism, and the Adams Brothers

It was Brooks Adams (1848-1927), son of Charles Francis Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams, who first ventured the theory, broad in ambit yet modest in focus, of a cyclical pattern in European history in his epochal study, The Law of Civilization and Decay, in 1895, just one year after Tugan-Baranovskii discovered the business cycle in England. It was his pioneering work that inspired his brother Henry Adams (1838-1918) to embark on his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), and his later attempt to marry the laws of physics to the historical process in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919) published posthumously, with an introduction by Brooks Adams.¹

One concept that the two brothers shared was that history could be viewed and measured as movements of energy. Brooks asserted that as societies develop from anarchic or primitive diffusion to concentration, energy is diverted from the imagination to assume the form of financial capital. As Brooks summarized his law, …As human movement is accelerated, societies centralize. In the earlier stages of concentration, fear appears to be the channel through which energy finds the readiest outlet…. As consolidation advances, fear yields to greed, and the economic organism tends to supersede the emotional and martial.² As civilizations advance, the imaginative temperament tends to disappear, while the economic instinct is strengthened.³ Thus, he wrote somewhat lugubriously, religions are preached and are forgotten, empires will rise and fall, art and poetry bloom and fade, as societies pass from the disintegrations wherein the imagination kindles, to the concentration whose pressure ends in death.⁴ To illustrate his argument he adverted to sixteenth-century Europe (as this study shall later) and the consequences of the failure of the Armada of 1599 for subsequent Spanish society. With that supreme effort, Adams wrote, the great imaginative empire began to fail, and in the ruins of Spain rose the purely economic centralization of Great Britain.⁵

The growing economic ascendancy of Britain was originally based on three abhorrent practices: the looting of the Spanish treasure fleets from the Americas by English pirates, the African slave trade, and the despoiling of India. As Francis Drake was the ideal English corsair, Adams summarized, so John Hawkins was the ideal slaver.⁶ In the late sixteenth century, an able Negro was valued at about £600, so that a cargo of 500 slaves would have brought in between £70,000 and £80,000. Thus, both slavers and pirates imported bullion for Britain.⁷ In the eighteenth century, Clive and Warrant Hastings wrought wide depredations upon India through conquest, duplicity, plunder and spoliation by irresponsible and rapacious British officials.⁸ To these common (and applauded) practices were later superadded slaughter, butchery and torture, for the extraction of bullion that had been transferred from the Americas to India through the trading mechanism which represented, we may say, the first form of what is today recognized as globalization. By acts such as these, Adams concluded, the treasure which had flowed to Europe through the extermination of the Peruvians, was returned again to England from the hordes of captured Hindoos.⁹ Following the battle of Plassey in 1757, which consolidated the British hold over India, a complex system of credit based on metallic treasure sprang up. Credit represents the intangible vehicle of energy in centralized societies. Adams, as were some British critics, was struck by shock and awe at the dimensions of European looting. Possibly since the world began, he observed, no investment has ever yielded the profit reaped from the Indian plunder.¹⁰

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Brooks Adams. Undergraduate years. In the old age.

03.pdf

Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Warrior.

But what is investment or profit, but capital? As a departure point, Brooks Adams adopted John Stuart Mill’s (1806-1873) definition of capital as the accumulated stock of human labour. He thereupon developed Mill’s somewhat static concept of stock by redefining capital as stored energy. Technology alone cannot cause economic acceleration. A store of force must set humanity to work, and that force is money, for money alone is capable of being instantaneously transmuted into any form of human activity.¹¹

In ancient and mediaeval times, Adams continued, the producer had learned that in order to prosper, his products should rise in value relative to money. But with the rise of banking, Western civilization underwent a profound change. For the usurers (those who charge interest) acted under the impulse of a dialectically contradictory concept. The bankers enriched themselves when money appreciated in value, rather than the products designed for use. An example of this new civil aristocracy was provided by the Rothschild, or Red-Shield, family.¹²

With the adoption of the Bank Act in London in 1844, the usurers, or bankers, became supreme because of the implementation of a gold standard. It was with dejection that Adams described the transition in Western society from domination by the military to the domination of bankers who alone could exercise control over the social energy stored in currency. When the mints had been closed to silver, he wrote in summation, the currency being inelastic, the value of money could be manipulated like that of any article limited in quantity, and thus the human race became the subject of a new aristocracy.¹³ The consequences of this momentous transition could only be viewed as dire to the scion of a family devoted to reasoning together in Congregational churches, or arguing to a common understanding in New England town meetings. Adams’ prescient words could just as easily characterize contemporary electoral carnivals and the economic dominance of the Federal Reserve Board as they were to characterize the all-male political struggles following the Panic of 1893 which effectively brought termination to the Gilded Age. Although the conventions of popular government are still preserved, Brooks Adams concluded, capital is at least as absolute as under the Caesars… Although the volume of credit is gigantic, the basis on which it rests is so narrow that it may be manipulated by a handful of men…. The aristocracy which wields this autocratic power is beyond attack… For the first time in history, revolt is hopeless and is not attempted. The only question which preoccupies the ruling class is whether it is cheaper to coerce or to bribe.¹⁴

Although it is indisputable that both Brooks and Henry Adams inquired if a science of history were possible, it is surely an exaggeration to assert, as did Charles A. Beard (1874-1949), that Brooks had arrived at a general theory of cosmic dynamics.¹⁵ Certainly there was nothing constrained in his intellectual ambition, for he observed that ….Animal life is one of the outlets through which solar energy is dissipated…. Human societies are forms of animal life.¹⁶ But Adams’ law of civilization and decay, which is alone relevant to our interests, was characterized by Beard as a formula which purports to describe the movement of human society in history from barbarism to civilization and back again….¹⁷ One may conclude that Brooks’ insight was intuitive rather than mathematical (as exemplified by the Russian theorists discussed at the conclusion of Part I), and that it is perilously close to mere compliment to assert that it is an adaptation of the cyclical theory developed by Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). Beard did well later to restrict his adulation by noting, correctly, that Brooks did not pretend to assert mathematical precision for his modest two-cycle historical engine. He presented it only as a hypothesis.¹⁸

In 1899 Henry Adams made an association between Brooks’ modest cycle theory and Marxism. But as Brooks never denominated his work as the product of an economic interpretation of history, Beard did well to refute that proposition. Thus we are presented with a paradox in assessing the Adams brothers’ views, for Brooks, who inveighed against the autocratic control of society by a bankers’ camarilla but decried Socialism, is not considered to have adopted an economic interpretation of history, while Henry, a non-Marxist, wrote him in 1898, One need not love Socialism in order to point out the logical necessity for society to march that way, and the wisdom of doing it intelligently, if it is to do so at all.¹⁹ Paradoxically, it was Brooks who introduced a motion at the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1917-1918 that would have empowered the legislature to organize and administer agricultural, commercial or industrial undertakings deemed to be …conducive to the general welfare. To the skeptical legislators on Beacon Hill he declared, It is the question of the protection of the whole… It is State Socialism. State Socialism means that the State is the property and instrument of all of us…²⁰

In his 1897 review, Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) expressed an elitist condescension toward merchants and bankers when he wrote of Adams’s …impatient contempt of the deification of the stock-market, the trading-counter, and the factory…²¹ It is therefore certainly correct to conclude, as Charles A. Beard did, that Brooks Adams’ study represented another link in …the long line of American protests against plutocratic tendencies in American development… And as evidence toward the novel thesis that Brooks was an unconscious economic materialist, one need look no further his refutation of the possibility of that Socialism that his brother Henry had unenthusiastically advocated. In the beginning, he wrote only for the French edition of his history, Christianity was socialist, but socialism was only a transitional phase, and it disappeared when the monetary value of miracle grew which augmented the wealth of the Church.²² In this view the two brothers were united, as one may readily be convinced by reading the remarkable chapter entitled The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900) in The Education of Henry Adams, which sets forth the argument that man, a power-worshipping animal, transferred his allegiance from the questionable miracles attributed to the intervention of saints to the dynamo and electricity as more reliable and more effective power sources.²³ The post-1945 Western-dominated world would witness further developments symbolized most effectively by the harnessing of the atom, the launch of rockets to the moon, and the progressive deciphering of the double helix in genetics. In this sense the two brothers might well be united in approbation of a simple variation of Charles Péguy’s (1873-1914) classic summation of social transformation, Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique, as Tout commence en un rêve et finit dans un banque. Certainly one may agree with Beard, that the interest Brooks Adams aroused with his modest and intuitive cyclical theory continues to provoke further research²⁴ into the problems now becoming manifest at the dawn of the Pacific Epoch in the 21st century of the Common Era. Perhaps Brooks Adams had voiced a prophesy after he wrote in August, 1898, Competition has entered a period of greater stress; and competition in its acutest form is war. Two years later, at the end of the nineteenth century, he had envisaged a possible scenario in which the United States would enter into conflict with France, Germany and Russia over the control of China, for he felt that whoever controlled China would dominate the world.²⁵

The Sage of Singapore

The tectonic shift