by
Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Recently
by Thomas DiLorenzo: When
Americans Understood the Declaration of Independence

For the
past century and a half the Republican Party has gratuitously labeled
itself as “The Party of Great Moral Ideas.” The Party
of Great Moral Frauds is more like it. The party began as the party
of mercantilism, corporate welfare, protectionist tariffs, constitutional
subterfuge, central banking, and imperialism. Its 1860 presidential
platform promised not to disturb Southern slavery; its first
president supported the Fugitive Slave Act and the proposed “Corwin
Amendment” to the Constitution that would have prohibited the
federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery;
the party committed treason by “levying war upon the states”
(the precise definition of treason in the Constitution) and murdering
hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens in order to destroy
the voluntary union of the states that was established by
the founding fathers. It refused to do what Britain, Spain, France,
the Dutch, Denmark, Sweden, and the Northern states in the U.S.
had done about slavery and end it peacefully. Instead, it used the
slaves as pawns in a war that was about consolidating all political
power in Washington, D.C. in general, and in the hands of the Republican
Party in particular.

Three months
after the War to Prevent Southern Independence ended the Republican
Party commenced a twenty-five year war of genocide against the Plains
Indians, killing as many as 60,000 of them, including thousands
of women and children, and putting the rest in concentration camps.
It did this, according to General Sherman who orchestrated this
horribly immoral crusade, to “make way for the railroads”
that were being heavily subsidized by the Republican Party. It also
plundered the conquered South with exorbitant taxes and the legalized
theft of vast tracts of property by party hacks for a decade after
the war (so-called “reconstruction”), while doing virtually
nothing for the freed slaves. It did nothing while as many as 1
million former slaves died of disease shortly after the war in the
worst public health disaster in American history.

The Grant administrations
were most known for the colossal corruption associated with the
building of the government-subsidized transcontinental railroads
that was finally made public during the Credit Mobilier scandal.

The Republican
Party has always been about disguising a lust for economic plunder
with phony ideas about “freedom,” “Christianity,”
“equality,” “civilization,”and other nice-sounding
words. The War to Prevent Southern Independence allowed it to finally
usher in the Hamiltonian “American System” of high protectionist
tariffs for the benefit of Northern manufacturers at the expense
of everyone else; a nationalized money supply with its Legal Tender
and National Currency Acts; and vast amounts of corporate welfare,
starting with the government-subsidized railroad corporations. It
created the internal revenue system, invented dozens of new taxes,
created the military/industrial complex, ran up historically high
levels of debt, and destroyed the founders’ system of federalism
or states’ rights as a check on centralized governmental power.

The war
of genocide against the Plains Indians was a way of socializing
the cost of building the government-subsidized railroads. Having
succeeded in eradicating the Indians, the Republican Party next
turned to tiny little countries like Cuba and the Philippines to
plunder under the usual phony excuse of spreading “freedom”
and “the American way” around the globe. The Republican
Party claimed to embrace the message of Reverend Josiah Strong’s
1885 book, Our Country, which proclaimed a supposedly sacred
American duty to “civilize and Christianize inferior peoples.”
They portrayed themselves as one big gang of Mother Theresas, selflessly
sacrificing endlessly for the benefit of strangers in foreign lands.

A particularly
galling example of this spectacular hypocrisy and dishonesty is
the conquest of the Kingdom of Hawaii. By the early 1890s American
businessmen had been in Hawaii for many years as corporate sugar
and pineapple growers. Encouraged by the Republican Party’s aggressive
and imperialistic foreign policy, they sought to get the Party to
overthrow the government of Hawaii and make it an American province
under their political control. They wanted to turn it into
the perfect Hamiltonian corporate welfare state, in other words.
As described by Gregg Jones in Honor
in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the
Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream (p. 23):

On January
14, [1893] Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani attempted to curb the power
of U.S. commercial interests in the kingdom’s legislature by promulgating
a new constitution. A thirteen-member coalition of Americans called
the Committee of Safety angrily resisted. Two members, Judge Sanford
Dole and businessman Lorrin Thurston, met secretly with U.S. envoy
John Stevens and plotted to overthrow the monarchy. The committee’s
armed militia promptly seized key buildings, triggering the landing
of American troops. The group set up an ad hoc government headed
by Dole . . .

The “Committee
of Safety” employed a paramilitary organization called the
“Honolulu Rifles” who were allied with its puppet political
party in Hawaii known as the “Missionary Party.” (Sanford
Dole was the son of New England Yankee missionaries who migrated
to Hawaii from Maine). The Honolulu Rifles forced the king of Hawaii
to sign a new constitution that was known as the “bayonet constitution”
because the King was literally threatened with being gutted by bayonets
unless he signed the document, “Godfather” style. The
new constitution disenfranchised all Asians (considered part of
an “inferior race” by the Republican business elite) and
most everyone else except for affluent landowners, most of whom
were Americans and their business associates. It imposed Sanford
Dole as puppet president. His cousin James Dole shortly thereafter
founded the Dole Fruit Company which prospers to this day.

But before
the Republican Party could get the U.S. Congress and the president
to formally annex Hawaii, Democrat Grover Cleveland took office
(in March of 1893) and killed their proposal, condemning “the
lawless landing of the United States force at Honolulu.” Grover
Cleveland was the last Jeffersonian president of the United States
and the last good Democrat. This, however, led to the political
rise of the bloviating idiot and Master Race theorist Theodore Roosevelt
(TR), the favorite president of today’s neo-conservatives. “It’s
difficult to write a bad book about Theodore Roosevelt,” neocon
Charles Kessler of the Claremont Institute wrote in that organization’s
book review tabloid in 1998. To fellow neocons William Kristol and
David Brooks, Kessler wrote approvingly, TR “figures as a patron
saint of American nationalism and energetic government.”

In October
of 1895 TR proclaimed to the Republican Club of Massachusetts that
“I feel that it was a crime not only against the United States,
but against the white race, that we did not annex Hawaii three years
ago” (Jones, p. 24). He said this in response to the complaints
made by his close friend and fellow Republican, Henry Cabot Lodge,
that the Spanish and British empires had been conquering “all
the waste places of the earth” and Americans were missing out
on the fun since they were not yet sufficiently imperialistic.

As president,
TR perfected the Republican Party’s policy of economic plunder through
imperialism disguised by humanitarian rhetoric. He denounced the
Jeffersonian-minded advocates of peace as “senile,” “idiots,”
and “unhung traitors” (Green, p. 162). As discussed in
Jim Powell’s excellent book, Bully
Boy: The Truth About Theodore Roosevelt’s Legacy, TR essentially
declared the U.S. government to be the world’s policeman; warned
against what he called “the menace of peace”; and targeted
for war Cuba, Hawaii, Venezuela, China, the Philippines, Panama,
Chile, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Canada. None of these
military interventions or planned interventions had anything to
do with national defense. “He asserted that the United States
must intervene . . . when a nation failed to behave,” wrote
Powell. “All the great master races have been fighting races,”
Teddy Roosevelt the master race theorist proclaimed. It was in this
way, writes Powell, that Teddy Roosevelt reinvigorated the “Party
of Lincoln.” I was Lincoln’s secretary of state William Seward,
Powell reminds us, who wanted the U.S. to intervene if not conquer
Canada,, Mexico, parts of Asia, the Caribbean, Cuba, Haiti, Culebra,
French Guiana, Peurto Rico, and St. Batholomew.

U.S. Marine
Corps Major General Smedley Butler knew what he was talking about
when he wrote in his famous monograph, War
is a Racket, that “War is a racket. It always has been.”

July
9, 2012

Thomas
J. DiLorenzo [send him mail]
is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the
author of The
Real Lincoln; Lincoln
Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe
and How
Capitalism Saved America. His latest book is Hamilton’s
Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution
– And What It Means for America Today. His next book is entitled
Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.

Copyright
© 2012 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in
part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

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