The Rich Don't Always Win - Excerpt

SEVE N STORIE S PRE SSwww.sevenstories.com

COVER ART Pyramid of Capitalism, Speldwright, © 2012 Speldwright, used under a Creative Commons Attribution license

P O L I T I C A L S C I E N C E / E C O N O M I C C O N D I T I O N S

S A M P I Z Z I G AT I

“Only 50 years ago, America ‘soaked’ the rich with

a 91 percent income tax. And guess what? America

prospered! Not just the rich, but ordinary families.

With colorful detail, Sam Pizzigati tells us why we

should revisit that policy of prosperity for ALL,

rather than for the plutocratic few.” — JIM HIGHTOWER, national radio commentator and

New York Times best-selling author

“Bold, thorough, and above all inspiring—an energizing

and spirited reminder of what it took, and what it will

take, to once again make ours a nation of equals.” —GAR ALPEROVITZ, author of America Beyond Capitalism

A CENTURY AGO, JUST LIKE TODAY, THE RICH

dominated America, but by the 1950s the rich no longer

ruled. The United States had become the first middle-

class nation the world had ever seen.

What brought about this extraordinary transforma-

tion? In The Rich Don’t Always Win, seasoned labor

journalist Sam Pizzigati recounts the half-century-

long pitched battle against plutocracy that turned

grand estates into college campuses, the wealth of

the few into opportunity for the many.

Painstakingly researched and joyfully told, The Rich

Don’t Always Win digs deep into the historical record

and unearths the seldom-remembered struggles that

would eventually trim America’s rich down to demo-

cratic size, everything from the “conscription of wealth”

movement during World War I to the drive a genera-

tion later for a cap on the incomes of America’s most

financially favored.

The Rich Don’t Always Win tells the little-known

history of average Americans and their advocates

who dared to challenge wealth and power. Along

the way, it deftly exposes the bogus rationalizations

the rich trotted out to justify their enormous privi-

lege. In the deeply unequal America of today, those

half-truths once more plague us. We beat them back

once, The Rich Don’t Always Win reminds us. We can

beat them back again.

TheRichDon’t

AlwaysWin

THE FORGOTTEN TRIUMPH OVER PLUTOCRACY THAT CREATED THE AMERICAN

MIDDLE CLASS, 1900–1970

PIZ

ZIG

AT

I

“ Make room for The Rich Don’t Always Win on your bookshelf right next to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. ”

— BARBARA EHRENREICH, author of Nickel and Dimed

The Rich D

on’t Always Win

$18.95 US / $18.95 CAN

ISBN 978-1-60980-434-3

CONTENTS

Preface+,

Introduction#

Chapter OnePlutocracy Triumphant

#%

Chapter TwoEnter a New Opposition

%)

Chapter ThreeWorld War and the Wealthy

)%

Chapter Four!e Rich Muck Up Modernity

''

Chapter FiveGreat Depression and Grand Confusion

#!%

Chapter SixA Tidal Wave of Popular Protest

#$*

Chapter SevenFighting Fascists, Capping Incomes

#))

viii The Rich Don’t Always Win

Chapter EightRed Scare, Red Rival

!"'

Chapter NineLabor and the Treaty of Detroit

!!'

Chapter TenA Nation Soaks the Rich

!$)

Chapter ElevenA Middle-Class Golden Age

!&'

Chapter TwelveCracks in the Middle-Class Foundation

!('

Chapter ThirteenWhat If the Rich Never Stop Getting Richer?

%#'

Acknowledgments%%#

Notes%%%

Index%&)

About the Author%)#

About Seven Stories Press%)%

1

INTRODUCTION

In #'*!, one of America’s most beloved social historians set out to write the story of the tumultuous "rst half of the twentieth century. Fred-erick Lewis Allen, the in&uential editor of Harper’s magazine, would call his book !e Big Change. Allen wanted to describe the awesome transformation that he personally—and Americans collectively—had witnessed since #'"". He certainly had plenty to write about.

Back in #'"", Americans lived without airplanes and automobiles, without TV and radio, without high-rises and suburbs. No Ameri-cans laughed and cried with family and friends at local movie theaters when the twentieth century dawned, or stu%ed clothes into wash-ing machines. Hardly anyone—outside the nation’s most southerly climes—even ate fresh fruit in the winter.

So what did Frederick Lewis Allen, amid all these colossal changes, end up citing as the twentieth century’s single most important change of all? Simply put: equality.

“Of all the contrasts between American life in #'"" and half a century or more later,” Allen wrote, “perhaps the most signi"cant is in the distance between rich and poor.”#

Over the century’s "rst half, the popular historian marveled, the mansions and estates of “the rich and fashionable” had become museums and hospitals and college campuses. !e super rich, an over-bearing presence in America circa #'"", had essentially disappeared.

All sorts of midcentury observers celebrated that disappearance. Stuart Chase, a MIT-trained engineer and a nationally respected social critic since the #'!"s, began a #'&( memoir by noting that he had lived through an “era of shattering change.” How shattering?

“I can remember as a small boy,” wrote the then eighty-year-old

2 The Rich Don’t Always Win

Chase, “the "rst electric light installed in my grandfather’s house in New England, and the "rst automobile on the street outside, and I have recently watched on television a space capsule with men aboard coming down on target in the ocean.”!

Yet for Stuart Chase, as for Frederick Lewis Allen, the technological miracles of their new midcentury age paled against America’s remark-able economic transformation, “the achievement of an economy of abundance, an a$uent society, where for the "rst time in history poor people are in a minority.” % And rich people? !eir “gracious planta-tions, estates, and mansions,” Chase related, had gone “up for sale to innkeepers and rest homes, if not carved into subdivisions.”$

!e grand rich who had somehow managed to dodge the sub-divisions, the New Yorker writer Kenneth Lamott observed in #'&', amount to archaic “survivals” from “an earlier epoch,” nothing more,

“not men of our own time” and unquestionably “not the men of the future.”* !e fortunes of these remaining wealthy, Lamott added, have the same long-range prospects as “sand castles that stand against an incoming tide.”&

Lamott and other observers were not experiencing some social mirage. America had indeed become more equal. In #'!(, before the Great Depression, America’s most a$uent # percent were taking in nearly one of every four dollars in national income. By the early #'*"s, they were grabbing a mere one dollar in ten.) !e contrast higher up America’s economic summit ran even starker. In #'!(, nearly half the income the nation’s top # percent collected settled in the pockets of the top # percent’s top tenth. !is top ".# percent of Americans—in e%ect, the richest one of every thousand—pulled in nearly #! percent of the nation’s income in the late #'!"s. !e comparable share for #'*%’s top one in a thousand: just % percent.

!e shape of America’s income distribution, Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills would note in #'*&, had become “less a pyramid with a &at base than a fat diamond with a bulging middle.”(

What explained this middle-class bulge, this massive tilt away from the top? One of midcentury America’s most eminent economists, Simon Kuznets, saw the nation’s growing equality as a natural conse-quence of economic maturation. Any industrializing society, Kuznets argued in his #'** American Economic Association presidential address, will see income divides widen dramatically as industrializing

Introduction 3

upsets “long-established pre-industrial economic and social institu-tions.”' But those divides, Kuznets believed, will always narrow as societies stabilize and mature.

!e takeaway from Kuznets for America’s midcentury lay public: In the United States, we’ve outgrown those barbaric robber-baron gaps between rich and poor. We really don’t have to worry much about inequality anymore. !ose vast fortunes, those grandiose man-sions and estates, have left us—and they’re never coming back.

“Never” would last about a generation. By #'(*, the year the Nobel Prize–winning Simon Kuznets died, American economists had begun tracking an entirely new phenomenon: A mature, developed economy—our economy—was growing markedly more unequal.

!is growing inequality would continue into the #''"s and then, early in the new twenty-"rst century, would pick up even more momentum. America’s most a$uent had once again become a super rich. By !""), on the eve of the Great Recession, the nation’s top # percent was raking in !%.* percent of the nation’s income. Back in #'!(, on the eve of the Great Depression, this top # percent share grabbed a nearly identical !%.' percent.#"

We had become since midcentury a di%erent nation, a staggeringly unequal nation. In !""), the four hundred American taxpayers with the highest incomes averaged an incredible $%$$.( million each, the equivalent of over $# million of income per day, assuming they took Sundays o%.## In #'**, the nation’s top four hundred had averaged, in dollars in&ation-adjusted to !"") levels, only $#!.( million each.#!

Shall we put some human faces—some rich human faces—on this stunning surge of dollars to America’s economic upper reaches? In #'*$, George Romney became the chief executive of American Motors, the maker of the mighty little Rambler, the "rst successful American compact car. Romney would go on to become one of the nation’s most celebrated CEOs. By #'&(, he had emerged as a top contender for the GOP presidential nomination. !anks to this presidential bid, we know exactly how much George Romney earned over his high-pro-"le CEO years. His tax returns, voluntarily released to Look magazine, revealed that Romney had been averaging about $!)*,""" a year as the American Motors top executive, the in&ation-adjusted equivalent of less than $! million in !""(, the year Mitt Romney, George’s son, made his "rst bid for the Republican presidential nomination.#%

Mitt hadn’t followed his father into the car business. He chose instead to wheel and deal his way to fortune, as a private-equity


executive. !at fortune came. Mitt’s fourteen years as the CEO of Bain Capital, the New York Times reported late in !""), had left him with a personal net worth near $%*" million.#$ Mitt’s father George would have had to work over two hundred years, after taxes and living expenses, to amass a fortune that size.

!e super rich of our early twenty-"rst century have no trouble ratio-nalizing their good fortune. !ey consider their megamillions a just reward for their free-market success. By succeeding, their story goes, they create jobs and "ll bellies. Any move to share the wealth of the fabulously wealthy, their &acks assure us, would be downright silly—and fail to redistribute anything except disappointment. Anyone who argues otherwise deserves our society’s deepest contempt.

Among cheerleaders for grand fortune, this contempt has a long-standing—and bipartisan—political history.

“Soaking the rich,” as Representative William Robert Wood, the chairman of the Republican National Congressional Committee, opined in a #'!* address, “has been a favorite pastime of political charlatans since the dawn of history.”

“Heavy taxes upon the man of wealth and upon corporations,” Wood added, “strangle business, act as a deadweight to commerce, and slow down the wheels of Industry,” leaving hard times for all, poor included, “the logical and inevitable result.”#*

Senator Joseph Robinson from Arkansas, the Democratic Party’s Senate &oor leader in the Great Depression’s early days, would echo the Republican Wood.

“In my humble opinion,” the powerful Democrat told reporters in #'%#, “taxes should not be levied for the purpose of distributing wealth or reducing fortune, but solely with the view of obtaining revenue. Taxation on any other principle approaches con"scation.”

!e year Robinson made that comment, wealthy taxpayers faced a !* percent federal tax on income over $#"",""". Robinson could not envision the top tax rate on any income of the wealthy ever safely going higher.

“It is generally understood,” he explained, “that there is a limit to the rate which may be imposed without discouraging investment and production.”#&

!e middle decades of the twentieth century would prove Senator Robinson and his fellow friends of fortune embarrassingly mistaken.

Introduction 5

Levels of “investment and production” would remain robust, even record-breaking, throughout the decades right after World War II—at the same time the top federal tax rate hovered around '" percent, well over triple the !* percent top rate Robinson considered the pru-dent tax-the-rich “limit.”

No wealthy taxpayers after World War II, to be sure, ever actually paid '" percent of their total income in taxes. Midcentury Ameri-ca’s stunningly high tax rates only applied to dollars above speci"ed income thresholds. In #'&#, for instance, a married couple’s income over $$"",""" faced a '# percent tax rate. On income below that "gure, tax rates declined steadily, from '" percent on dollars between $%"",""" and $$"",""" to !" percent on any income under $$,""" left over after standard deductions.#) And the rich, then as now, also enjoyed a variety of tax code loopholes that lowered their actual paid tax rate further still.

But America’s midcentury rich, even with these loopholes, paid a substantial share of their total incomes in federal tax. In #'&#, the taxpayers who "led the nation’s four hundred highest-income returns reported, in today’s dollars, an average $#$ million in income. !ey paid, on average, $!.$ percent of this $#$ million in federal income tax.#( Let’s give this "gure some perspective: In the Great Recession year of !""', the most recent year with IRS "gures, our top four hun-dred averaged $!"!.$ million in income and paid just #'.' percent of that in federal income tax.#' In other words, after adjusting for in&a-tion, today’s top four hundred are taking home nearly "fteen times more income than their wealthy counterparts a half century ago and paying over two times less of their income in federal tax.

In American political life today, no major national political leader is advocating that we double current federal tax rates on our nation’s megarich. No top elected leader is even advocating that we raise taxes on the rich by as much as a half. !ose higher tax rates that wealthy Americans paid back in the #'*"s and #'&"s have receded into his-tory’s hoary mist. Our economy would surely tank, our contemporary conventional wisdom holds, if our rich faced tax rates as stratospheri-cally high as '" percent.

But America’s economy did not tank back at midcentury. Amer-ica’s economy did just "ne, especially for average Americans. In the #'*"s, these average Americans became something the world had never before seen, a mass middle class. !ey lived in a society where a majority of the population could a%ord comfort and security.


Before World War II, these basics had belonged only to those who worked in traditional middle-class occupations. Doctors, law-yers, shopkeepers, clergy, and the like occupied a narrow demographic strata between the rich at America’s economic summit and the vast mass of Americans in the economic basement. !is poor majority had virtually no discretionary income. Most of the dollars these Ameri-cans earned went for food and shelter, for elemental survival.

Families in the early twentieth century’s relatively small middle class, by contrast with the poor majority, could a%ord to take vaca-tions. !ey could eat at restaurants. !eir children had college as a viable option. !ey had ample and regular leisure time. !ey had enough savings set aside to ensure a somewhat comfortable old age. Most Americans before the #'$"s enjoyed none of these middle-class comforts. !eir labor enriched the already rich, not their own fami-lies. !at injustice, that inequality, simply seemed the way things had always been. And always would be.

In the late #'%"s few Americans knew life at the summit of their dis-tinctly unequal nation more intimately than Herbert Claiborne Pell Jr. !e blue-blood Pell could trace his family—and its fortune—back a dozen generations. Pell had turned sixteen in #'"" and spent a good chunk of that landmark year on grand tour in Europe, a standard rite of passage for young men of his age and means. In #'%(, Pell would look back on his formative years for an essay in the North American Review, the nation’s most venerable literary magazine.

“I can remember going to a ball in New York given in a private house where at supper three hundred people were each given a perfectly pre-pared wild duck and the entire meal from soup to ice-cream was made in the house,” he wrote. “Such things were not rare in those days.”!"

But such things, Pell predicted, would be exceedingly rare in the new age he saw coming. Pell, by then a diplomat and a former congressman, would deem it “mere madness to imagine that we will be able to main-tain a society with the enormous di%erence between the poor and the rich that has existed.” In the future, he predicted, the “more prosperous” Americans would only be able to maintain their “material comfort” by moving “rapidly” to raise the living standards of the poor.

“!is cannot be done,” he warned his comfortable readers, “without the sacri"ce of some personal and private luxuries.”

But that sacri"ce, Pell immediately added, would be well worth any

Introduction 7

discomfort the well heeled might have to endure. A “more equal dis-tribution” of society’s wealth “will make for a higher outlook on life.”

“Life in a few years will be a di%erent thing from what it is or has been,” Pell advised. “People anxious to shine before their friends will "nd that they cannot do it with champagne, yachts, or seven-course dinners.”

America would one day help the world realize an “increased hap-piness for mankind,” he concluded, but only if our leaders moved “to promote the distribution of material products far more widely than they have ever been distributed in the past.”

Pell wrote these words nearly a decade into the Great Depres-sion. At that time, few of Pell’s fellow rich shared his preference for greater equality. And not many Americans, at any income level, shared Pell’s optimism about the “increased happiness” he saw ahead. Depression had come to seem a permanent "xture of mod-ern American economic life. Yet Pell’s prediction for a more equal, stronger, happier America would largely come true—and within a single generation.

How could such a fundamental transformation ever take place so quickly? Some thoughtful observers would later credit this phenom-enal social shift to the jolt that World War II gave the US economy. !is costly con&ict, coming right on the heels of the Great Depres-sion, knocked America’s wealthy o% their stride—and left previously inconceivable political options, like heavy taxes on the rich, both con-ceivable and unavoidably necessary.

But great shocks to an unequal social system, we now know, don’t automatically translate into setbacks for society’s wealthiest. We Americans have experienced shocks aplenty since the twenty-"rst century began: deadly terrorist attacks, trillion-dollar wars, and the greatest "nancial crash since the Great Depression. Yet we have become less equal as a nation, not more. In fact, we have become a nation that almost exactly mirrors the America that existed before Frederick Lewis Allen’s “big change,” a nation where average families struggle for security while the wealthy bob and weave their way to ever-greater fortune.

So where does that leave us? If the sheer shock of Great Depres-sion followed by global war didn’t generate Allen’s big change, then what did?

!ese pages will posit that a movement engineered this enormous change, a movement of men and women of varied political stripes


and economic backgrounds that took root in the early #'""s. !e activists behind this movement shared little more than revulsion at the concentrated wealth and power they saw amassing all around them. !ey would struggle over half a century to clip that wealth and limit that power. In the #'$"s and #'*"s, they triumphed.

Depression and world war certainly did create an opportunity for greater equality. But we as a nation had the capacity to seize that opportunity only because America’s egalitarians had battled, decade after decade, to place and keep before us a compelling vision of a more equal—a better—society. !e United States would never become a truly decent society, this vision held, so long as some Americans had too little and others too much. A good society had to both level up the poor and level down the rich. If we wanted decency, we had to attack inequality at both ends. We had to challenge, as famed news-paper publisher Joseph Pulitzer would put it in #'"), both “predatory poverty” and “predatory plutocracy.”!#

Millions of Americans over the "rst half of the twentieth century would take this vision to heart. And out of the street protest and legislative action this vision animated, as economist Robert Kuttner points out, would come a set of “equalizing institutions that moder-ated the tendency of a laissez-faire economy to produce an income distribution of extremes.”!! !ese institutions would be “equalizing” at full blast by midcentury: Social Security and unemployment com-pensation, FHA loans and banking regulation, the Tennessee Valley Authority and statewide networks of public colleges and universities. All these institutions and more helped fashion a new middle-class America. But two particular institutions would stand out in impor-tance and impact.

!e "rst of this mighty institutional pair: a system of steeply graduated progressive tax rates that placed the lion’s share of the tax burden on those most able to bear it. !e second: a vital trade union presence in workplaces all across the United States. !e tax system bankrolled the public services that enabled entry into America’s new mass middle class. !e union presence forced employers to share the wealth the postwar economy was creating. Together, complementing each other, unions and progressive taxes prevented the accumulation of private fortunes powerful enough to sabotage the nation’s new middle-class order.

!is egalitarian triumph would not be con"ned to the United States. Dominant middle classes would emerge in the mid-twentieth

Introduction 9

century throughout the world, in Japan, Canada, and all over Europe. But the United States led the way. We set the pace on standards for social decency. Not anymore. By nearly every major benchmark, from life expectancy to social mobility, the United States today ranks substantially behind every other major developed nation. In much of Europe, details global social analyst Steven Hill, average families enjoy paid leave after the birth of a child, free university education, and cash payments for home caregivers of the elderly, all luxuries almost nonexistent in the United States.!%

Hill lectures widely in Europe. On one recent tour, he found him-self talking with an Austrian in the picture-book city of Salzburg.!$

“I wonder if you can even imagine,” the Austrian asked him, “what it must be like to live in a country where every person has health care. And a decent retirement. And day care, parental leave, and sick leave, education, vacation, job retraining. For every plumber, carpenter, taxi driver, waitress, executive, sales clerk, scientist, musician, poet, nurse, of all ages, income, race, sex, whatever, not worrying about those basic arrangements.”

“In America, you are so rich,” the exasperated Austrian continued. “Why don’t you have these things for your people?”

We ought to feel even more exasperated than that Austrian. We remain a fabulously rich nation. Our overall economic output has doubled over the last thirty years.!* Yet our middle-class families are reeling, and our numbers of desperately poor families are rising. In California, once our middle-class holy land, prisons account for a greater share of the state budget than higher education.!&

What went wrong? We have let ourselves become unconscionably unequal.

A half century ago, we shared our wealth and prospered in the sharing. !is sharing slowed in the #')"s and then stopped in the #'("s. Wealth has been cascading into our nation’s most privileged pockets ever since.

In #')", a new teacher in the New York City public schools took home only $!,""" a year less than a starting lawyer on Wall Street. Four decades later, that starting lawyer is averaging, says a McKinsey business consulting group study, $##*,""" more than that new teacher.!)

!e titans of Wall Street who keep that lawyer’s palms greased are, in the meantime, amassing fortunes that have no historical precedent. In !""#, a top Wall Street trade journal began tracking the annual earnings of hedge fund managers. !ese managers run what amount


to mutual funds open only to extremely wealthy investors. !ey typi-cally charge these investors a ! percent fee on the invested dollars they manage and claim an additional !" percent of any investment pro"ts they generate.

In !""!, a hedge fund manager needed to make $%" million to enter the ranks of the industry’s twenty-"ve most lavishly compen-sated executives.!( By !"#", the entry level for the hedge fund top twenty-"ve had leaped to $!#" million. All combined, the top twenty-"ve grabbed $!.( billion in !""%. In !""), the year before the "nancial industry meltdown, the top twenty-"ve walked o% with $!!.% billion, an average of nearly $'"" million each. !at average would dip to under $*"" million in !""(, but quickly bounced back. In !"#", a year that saw unemployment in the double digits, the hedge fund indus-try’s top twenty-"ve executives averaged $((!.( million.

Most of America’s rich, not just hedge fund managers, have bounced back rather neatly from the Great Recession. In #'&!, notes Economic Policy Institute analyst Sylvia Allegretto, the wealthiest # percent of American households held #!* times more “net worth”—assets minus debts—than the typical American household. In !""', that gap between top and typical reached !!* times “the highest ratio on record.”!'

America’s rich have never been richer in the lifetime of any American now living, or more dominant politically. Our pundits seldom play up this dominance. !ey tend instead to prattle endlessly about gridlock. But the rich never seem to have much of a problem getting our alleg-edly gridlocked political system to swing sprightly into action.

Back in !""%, for instance, pharmaceutical industry CEOs were charging so much for prescription drugs that senior citizens simply couldn’t a%ord to buy them. !e Big Pharma CEO solution to this dilemma: have the federal government give seniors tax dollars to buy drugs, ban Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices, and pre-vent Americans from importing lower-cost drugs from Canada or anywhere else. Lawmakers considered this package a swell idea. !ey passed it.

In !""*, banks and credit card companies needed a similar politi-cal "x. Average Americans couldn’t a%ord to pay o% the sti% rates the "nancial industry was charging on loans and credit card debt. !ey were declaring bankruptcy at record rates and denying banks usuri-ous interest in the process. !e "nancial industry’s better idea: have

Introduction 11

Congress make bankruptcy harder for average Americans to declare. To Congress, this seemed another swell notion. !e gridlocked waters parted. Bankruptcy “reform” became law.

But the swellest idea of all—from America’s rich and power-ful—would come three years later. In !""(, the "nancial industry deregulation that Wall Street had shoved through Congress a decade earlier would trigger a "nancial industry collapse that crushed two Wall Street banking giants out of existence and threatened to wipe out a good chunk of the remaining survivors. !e industry’s preferred solution: a taxpayer bailout that would keep Wall Street above water and let average homeowners drown. Congress would give Wall Street’s bankers almost everything they demanded. By !"#", high-"nance bonuses and corporate pro"ts were running back at pre-collapse levels. Mainstream economists would hail the rebound as the end of the Great Recession.

“Making the richest people richer is not a recovery,” riposted pro-gressive political commentator Jim Hightower. “It’s a robbery.”%"

Robbery would turn into extortion in !"#"’s "nal days when con-gressional Republicans demanded a two-year extension of the tax cuts for wealthy taxpayers originally enacted in !""# and !""% in exchange for a one-year extension of federal supplemental unemploy-ment bene"ts. Democrats in Congress, prodded along by President Obama, agreed. We had no choice, the deal’s Democratic supporters explained. We had to protect the jobless.

But the jobless would soon see that protection shredded. Early in !"##, Michigan lawmakers voted to slash the length of time any jobless person could receive unemployment checks from twenty-six weeks to twenty.%# In Florida, lawmakers pushed for a twelve-week limit.%! !e wealthy, meanwhile, would enjoy the December bargain’s full bene"ts. For taxpayers making over $# million a year, the deal would mean an average $!,&(& a week in personal tax savings.%% !e maximum weekly unemployment check in Michigan: $%&!.

In the middle of all this disheartening deal making on Capitol Hill, journalist William Greider—a close observer of the games rich people play ever since he covered the Reagan White House for the Washington Post in the early #'("s—asked a friend what she made of “the current mess in Washington.”

“Whatever the issue,” she responded, “the rich guys win.”%$

But they don’t. Not always. !e rich guys didn’t win the epic strug-gle that consumed the "rst half of the twentieth century. Average


Americans won. !ey triumphed over plutocracy. !e pages ahead will tell their story.

!at tale begins on the eve of the twentieth century, at the moment of plutocracy’s greatest triumph. In #'"", America’s plutocrats "nally seemed to have everything under control. We’ll explore the savagely unequal world these plutocrats fashioned as they consolidated their power—and expanded their fortunes—at the expense of average Americans.

!e pushback from these average Americans would come swiftly. We’ll look at how and why the opposition to grand concentrations of private wealth gained ever-increasing momentum in the years before World War I. !en we’ll turn to the war itself, a global con&ict that both buttressed the assault against plutocracy and undercut it. We’ll trace this turbulent trajectory through the war years and into the #'!"s, a decade of resurgent plutocratic privilege that would drive America into economic cataclysm.

Out of the resulting devastation would emerge in the #'%"s still another grand charge against plutocratic power. We’ll delve into the strategies and the psyches of those who waged class-war battle during the Great Depression years. We’ll detail how they ultimately fell short until still another world war opened new opportunities for challenging America’s wealthy more profoundly than ever before.

In the aftermath of World War II, average Americans seized these new opportunities. !ey shaped a postwar world where the rich no longer held the nation’s economy—or polity—in a vise grip. !ese average Americans would have help from an unexpected source: an appreciable number of the rich themselves. We’ll introduce these egali-tarian a$uent and probe behind their commitment to a much more equal America.

!at more equal America, a middle-class America, would rise up from a foundation built by trade unions and progressive taxes. We’ll pro"le the new lives America’s emerging middle class would build upon this foundation. We’ll render this new middle-class America in all its glory—and all its internal contradictions. We’ll show how these contradictions would eventually crack America’s middle-class base and usher in what would become an astonishingly thorough plu-tocratic restoration.

And what if this restoration lingers, if our rich keep getting richer? What then for America? Our story will end with these questions—and some answers that the history in these pages seems to so strongly suggest.

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The Rich Don't Always Win - Excerpt