“The result of this tendency,” he says, “will be fatal. Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again by State intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify.[2]Click to see. Society will have to live for the State, man for the governmental machine. And as after all it is only a machine, whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it,[3]Click to see. the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism. Such was the lamentable fate of ancient civilization.”

II

The revolution of 1776-1781 converted thirteen provinces, practically as they stood, into thirteen autonomous political units, completely independent, and they so continued until 1789, formally held together as a sort of league, by the Articles of Confederation. For our purposes, the point to be remarked about this eight-year period, 1781- 1789, is that administration of the political means was not centralized in the federation, but in the several units of which the federation was composed. The federal assembly, or congress, was hardly more than a deliberative body of delegates appointed by the autonomous units. It had no taxing-power, and no coercive power. It could not command funds for any enterprise common to the federation, even for war; all it could do was to apportion the sum needed, in the hope that each unit would meet its quota. There was no coercive federal authority over these matters, or over any matters; the sovereignty of each of the thirteen federated units was complete.

Thus the central body of this loose association of sovereignties had nothing to say about the distribution of the political means. This authority was vested in the several component units. Each unit had absolute jurisdiction over its territorial basis, and could partition it as it saw fit, and could maintain any system of land-tenure that it chose to establish.[4]Click to see. Each unit set up its own trade-regulations. Each unit levied its own tariffs, one against another, in behalf of its own chosen beneficiaries. Each manufactured its own currency, and might manipulate it as it liked, for the benefit of such individuals or economic groups as were able to get effective access to the local legislature. Each managed its own system of bounties, concessions, subsidies, franchises, and exercised it with a view to whatever private interest its legislature might be influenced to promote. In short, the whole mechanism of the political means was non-national.

The federation was not in any sense a State; the State was not one, but thirteen. Within each unit, therefore, as soon as the war was over, there began at once a general scramble for access to the political means. It must never be forgotten that in each unit society was fluid; this access was available to anyone gifted with the peculiar sagacity and resolution necessary to get at it. Hence one economic interest after another brought pressure of influence to bear on the local legislatures, until the economic hand of every unit was against every other, and the hand of every other was against itself. The principle of “protection,” which as we have seen was already well understood, was carried to lengths precisely comparable with those to which it is carried in international commerce today, and for precisely the same primary purpose – the exploitation, or in plain terms the robbery, of the domestic consumer. Mr. Beard remarks that the legislature of New York, for example, pressed the principle which governs tariff-making to the point of levying duties on firewood brought in from Connecticut and on cabbages from New Jersey – a fairly close parallel with the octroi that one still encounters at the gates of French towns.

The primary monopoly, fundamental to all others – the monopoly of economic rent – was sought with redoubled eagerness.[5]Click to see. The territorial basis of each unit now included the vast holdings confiscated from British owners, and the bar erected by the British State’s proclamation of 1763 against the appropriation of Western lands was now removed. Professor Sakolski observes drily that “the early land-lust which the colonists inherited from their European forebears was not diminished by the democratic spirit of the revolutionary fathers.” Indeed not! Land-grants were sought as assiduously from local legislatures as they had been in earlier days from the Stuart dynasty and from colonial governors, and the mania of land-jobbing ran apace with the mania of land-grabbing.[6]Click to see. Among the men most actively interested in these pursuits were those whom we have already seen identified with them in pre-revolutionary days, such as the two Morrises, Knox, Pickering, James Wilson and Patrick Henry; and with their names appear those of Duer, Bingham, McKean, Willing, Greenleaf, Nicholson, Aaron Burr, Low, Macomb, Wadsworth, Remsen, Constable, Pierrepont, and others which now are less well remembered.

There is probably no need to follow out the rather repulsive trail of effort after other modes of the political means. What we have said about the foregoing two modes – tariffs and rental-value monopoly – is doubtless enough to illustrate satisfactorily the spirit and attitude of mind towards the State during the eight years immediately following the revolution. The whole story of insensate scuffle for State-created economic advantage is not especially animating, nor is it essential to our purposes. Such as it is, it may be read in detail elsewhere. All that interests us is to observe that during the eight years of federation, the principles of government set forth by Paine and by the Declaration continued in utter abeyance. Not only did the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty[7]Click to see. remain as completely out of consideration as when Mr. Jefferson first lamented its disappearance, but the idea of government as a social institution based on this philosophy was likewise unconsidered. No one thought of a political organization as instituted “to secure these rights” by processes of purely negative intervention – instituted, that is, with no other end in view than the maintenance of “freedom and security.” The history of the eight-year period of federation shows no trace whatever of any idea of political organization other than the State-idea. No one regarded this organization otherwise than as the organization of the political means, an all-powerful engine which should stand permanently ready and available for the irresistible promotion of this-or-that set of economic interests, and the irremediable disservice of others; according as whichever set, by whatever course of strategy, might succeed in obtaining command of its machinery.

III

It may be repeated that while State power was well centralized under the federation, it was not centralized in the federation, but in the federated unit. For various reasons, some of them plausible, many leading citizens, especially in the more northerly units, found this distribution of power unsatisfactory; and a considerable compact group of economic interests which stood to profit by a redistribution naturally made the most of these reasons. It is quite certain that dissatisfaction with the existing arrangement was not general, for when the redistribution took place in 1789, it was effected with great difficulty and only through a coup d’+tat, organized by methods which if employed in any other field than that of politics, would be put down at once as not only daring, but unscrupulous and dishonourable.

The situation, in a word, was that American economic interests had fallen into two grand divisions, the special interests in each having made common cause with a view to capturing control of the political means. One division comprised the speculating, industrial-commercial and creditor interests, with their natural allies of the bar and bench, the pulpit and the press. The other comprised chiefly the farmers and artisans and the debtor class generally. From the first, these two grand divisions were colliding briskly here and there in the several units, the most serious collision occurring over the terms of the Massachusetts constitution of 1780.[8]Click to see. The State in each of the thirteen units was a class-State, as every State known to history has been; and the work of manœuvring it in its function of enabling the economic exploitation of one class by another went steadily on.

General conditions under the Articles of Confederation were pretty good. The people had made a creditable recovery from the dislocations and disturbances due to the revolution, and there was a very decent prospect that Mr. Jefferson’s idea of a political organization, which should be national in foreign affairs and non-national in domestic affairs might be found continuously practicable. Some tinkering with the Articles seemed necessary – in fact, it was expected – but nothing that would transform or seriously impair the general scheme. The chief trouble was with the federation’s weakness in view of the chance of war, and in respect of debts due to foreign creditors. The Articles, however, carried provision for their own amendment, and for anything one can see, such amendment as the general scheme made necessary was quite feasible. In fact, when suggestions of revision arose, as they did almost immediately, nothing else appears to have been contemplated.

But the general scheme itself was as a whole objectionable to the interests grouped in the first grand division. The grounds of their dissatisfaction are obvious enough. When one bears in mind the vast prospect of the continent, one need use but little imagination to perceive that the national scheme was by far the more congenial to those interests, because it enabled an ever-closer centralization of control over the political means. For instance, leaving aside the advantage of having but one central tariff-making body to chaffer with, instead of twelve, any industrialist could see the great primary advantage of being able to extend his exploiting operations over a nation-wide free-trade area walled-in by a general tariff; the closer the centralization, the larger the exploitable area. Any speculator in rental-values would be quick to see the advantage of bringing this form of opportunity under unified control.[9]Click to see. Any speculator in depreciated public securities would be strongly for a system that could offer him the use of the political means to bring back their face-value.[10]Click to see. Any shipowner or foreign trader would be quick to see that his bread was buttered on the side of a national State which, if properly approached, might lend him the use of the political means by way of a subsidy, or would be able to back up some profitable but dubious freebooting enterprise with “diplomatic representations” or with reprisals.

The farmers and the debtor class in general, on the other hand, were not interested in these considerations, but were strongly for letting things stay, for the most part, as they stood. Preponderance in the local legislatures gave them satisfactory control of the political means, which they could and did use to the prejudice of the creditor class, and they did not care to be disturbed in their preponderance. They were agreeable to such modification of the Articles as should work out short of this, but not to setting up a national[11]Click to see. replica of the British merchant-State, which they perceived was precisely what the classes grouped in the opposing grand division wished to do. These classes aimed at bringing in the British system of economics, politics and judicial control, on a nation-wide scale; and the interests grouped in the second division saw that what this would really come to was a shifting of the incidence of economic exploitation upon themselves. They had an impressive object-lesson in the immediate shift that took place in Massachusetts after the adoption of John Adams’s local constitution of 1780. They naturally did not care to see this sort of thing put into operation on a nation-wide scale, and they therefore looked with extreme disfavour upon any bait put forth for amending the Articles out of existence. When Hamilton, in 1780, objected to the Articles in the form in which they were proposed for adoption, and proposed the calling of a constitutional convention instead, they turned the cold shoulder; as they did again to Washington’s letter to the local governors three years later, in which he adverted to the need of a strong coercive central authority.

Finally, however, a constitutional convention was assembled, on the distinct understanding that it should do no more than revise the Articles in such a way, as Hamilton cleverly phrased it, as to make them “adequate to the exigencies of the nation,” and on the further understanding that all the thirteen units should assent to the amendments before they went into effect; in short, that the method of amendment provided by the Articles themselves should be followed. Neither understanding was fulfilled. The convention was made up wholly of men representing the economic interests of the first division. The great majority of them, possibly as many as four-fifths, were public creditors; one-third were land-speculators; some were money-lenders; one-fifth were industrialists, traders, shippers; and many of them were lawyers. They planned and executed a coup d’+tat, simply tossing the Articles of Confederation into the waste-basket, and drafting a constitution de novo, with the audacious provision that it should go into effect when ratified by nine units instead of by all thirteen. Moreover, with like audacity, they provided that the document should not be submitted either to the Congress or to the local legislatures, but that it should go direct to a popular vote![12]Click to see.

The unscrupulous methods employed in securing ratification need not be dwelt on here.[13]Click to see. We are not indeed concerned with the moral quality of any of the proceedings by which the constitution was brought into being, but only with showing their instrumentality in encouraging a definite general idea of the State and its functions, and a consequent general attitude towards the State. We therefore go on to observe that in order to secure ratification by even the nine necessary units, the document had to conform to certain very exacting and difficult requirements. The political structure which it contemplated had to be republican in form, yet capable of resisting what Gerry unctuously called “the excess of democracy,” and what Randolph termed its “turbulence and follies.” The task of the delegates was precisely analogous to that of the earlier architects who had designed the structure of the British merchant-State, with its system of economics, politics and judicial control; they had to contrive something that could pass muster as showing a good semblance of popular sovereignty, without the reality. Madison defined their task explicitly in saying that the convention’s purpose was “to secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction [i.e., a democratic faction], and at the same time preserve the spirit and form of popular government.”

Under the circumstances, this was a tremendously large order; and the constitution emerged, as it was bound to do, as a compromise- document, or as Mr. Beard puts it very precisely, “a mosaic of second choices,” which really satisfied neither of the two opposing sets of interests. It was not strong and definite enough in either direction to please anybody. In particular, the interests composing the first division, led by Alexander Hamilton, saw that it was not sufficient of itself to fix them in anything like a permanent impregnable position to exploit continuously the groups composing the second division. To do this – to establish the degree of centralization requisite to their purposes – certain lines of administrative management must be laid down, which, once established, would be permanent. The further task therefore, in Madison’s phrase, was to “administration” the constitution into such absolutist modes as would secure economic supremacy, by a free use of the political means, to the groups which made up the first division.

This was accordingly done. For the first ten years of its existence the constitution remained in the hands of its makers for administration in directions most favourable to their interests. For an accurate understanding of the newly-erected system’s economic tendencies, too much stress can not be laid on the fact that for these ten critical years “the machinery of economic and political power was mainly directed by the men who had conceived and established it.”[14]Click to see. Washington, who had been chairman of the convention, was elected President. Nearly half the Senate was made up of men who had been delegates, and the House of Representatives was largely made up of men who had to do with the drafting or ratifying of the constitution. Hamilton, Randolph and Knox, who were active in promoting the document, filled three of the four positions in the Cabinet; and all the federal judgeships, without a single exception, were filled by men who had a hand in the business of drafting, or of ratification, or both. Of all the legislative measures enacted to implement the new constitution, the one best calculated to ensure a rapid and steady progress in the centralization of political power was the judiciary Act of 1789.[15]Click to see. This measure created a federal supreme court of six members (subsequently enlarged to nine), and a federal district court in each state, with its own complete personnel, and a complete apparatus for enforcing its decrees. The Act established federal oversight of state legislation by the familiar device of “interpretation”, whereby the Supreme Court might nullify state legislative or judicial action which for any reason it saw fit to regard as unconstitutional. One feature of the Act which for our purposes is most noteworthy is that it made the tenure of all these federal judgeships appointive, not elective, and for life; thus marking almost the farthest conceivable departure from the doctrine of popular sovereignty.

The first chief justice was John Jay, “the learned and gentle Jay,” as Beveridge calls him in his excellent biography of Marshall. A man of superb integrity, he was far above doing anything whatever in behalf of the accepted principle that est boni judicis ampliare jurisdictionem. Ellsworth, who followed him, also did nothing. The succession, however, after Jay had declined a reappointment, then fell to John Marshall, who, in addition to the control established by the judiciary Act over the state legislative and judicial authority, arbitrarily extended judicial control over both the legislative and executive branches of the federal authority;[16]Click to see. thus effecting as complete and convenient a centralization of power as the various interests concerned in framing the constitution could reasonably have contemplated.[17]Click to see.

We may now see from this necessarily brief survey, which anyone may amplify and particularize at his pleasure, what the circumstances were which rooted a certain definite idea of the State still deeper in the general consciousness. That idea was precisely the same in the constitutional period as that which we have seen prevailing in the two periods already examined – the colonial period, and the eight-year period following the revolution. Nowhere in the history of the constitutional period do we find the faintest suggestion of the Declaration’s doctrine of natural rights; and we find its doctrine of popular sovereignty not only continuing in abeyance, but constitutionally estopped from ever reappearing. Nowhere do we find a trace of the Declaration’s theory of government; on the contrary, we find it expressly repudiated. The new political mechanism was a faithful replica of the old disestablished British model, but so far improved and strengthened as to be incomparably more close-working and efficient, and hence presenting incomparably more attractive possibilities of capture and control. By consequence, therefore, we find more firmly implanted than ever the same general idea of the State that we have observed as prevailing hitherto – the idea of an organization of the political means, an irresponsible and all-powerful agency standing always ready to be put into use for the service of one set of economic interests as against another.

IV

Out of this idea proceeded what we know as the “party system” of political management, which has been in effect ever since. Our purposes do not require that we examine its history in close detail for evidence that it has been from the beginning a purely bipartisan system, since this is now a matter of fairly common acceptance. In his second term Mr. Jefferson discovered the tendency towards bipartisanship,[18]Click to see. and was both dismayed and puzzled by it. I have elsewhere[19]Click to see. remarked his curious inability to understand how the cohesive power of public plunder works straight towards political bipartisanship. In 1823, finding some who called themselves Republicans favouring the Federalist policy of centralization, he spoke of them in a rather bewildered way as “pseudo-Republicans, but real Federalists.” But most naturally any Republican who saw a chance of profiting by the political means would retain the name, and at the same time resist any tendency within the party to impair the general system which held out such a prospect.[20]Click to see. In this way bipartisanship arises. Party designations become purely nominal, and the stated issues between parties become progressively trivial; and both are more and more openly kept up with no other object than to cover from scrutiny the essential identity of purpose in both parties.

Thus the party system at once became in effect an elaborate system of fetiches, which, in order to be made as impressive as possible, were chiefly moulded up around the constitution, and were put on show as “constitutional principles.” The history of the whole post-constitutional period, from 1789 to the present day, is an instructive and cynical exhibit of the fate of these fetiches when they encounter the one only actual principle of party action – the principle of keeping open the channels of access to the political means. When the fetich of “strict construction,” for example, has collided with this principle, it has invariably gone by the board, the party that maintained it simply changing sides. The anti- Federalist party took office in 1800 as the party of strict construction; yet, once in office, it played ducks and drakes with the constitution, in behalf of the special economic interests that it represented.[21]Click to see. The Federalists were nominally for loose construction, yet they fought bitterly every one of the opposing party’s loose-constructionist measures – the embargo, the protective tariff and the national bank. They were constitutional nationalists of the deepest dye, as we have seen; yet in their centre and stronghold, New England, they held the threat of secession over the country throughout the period of what they harshly called “Mr. Madison’s war,” the War of 18l2, which was in fact a purely imperialistic adventure after annexation of Floridan and Canadian territory, in behalf of stiffening agrarian control of the political means; but when the planting interests of the South made the same threat in 1861, they became fervid nationalists again. Such exhibitions of pure fetichism, always cynical in their transparent candour, make up the history of the party system. Their reductio ad absurdum is now seen as perhaps complete – one can not see how it could go further – in the attitude of the Democratic party towards its historical principles of state sovereignty and strict construction. A fair match for this, however, is found in a speech made the other day to a group of exporting and importing interests by the mayor of New York – always known as a Republican in politics – advocating the hoary Democratic doctrine of a low tariff!

Throughout our post-constitutional period there is not on record, as far as I know, a single instance of party adherence to a fixed principle, qua principle, or to a political theory, qua theory. Indeed, the very cartoons on the subject show how widely it has come to be accepted that party platforms, with their cant of “issues,” are so much sheer Quackery, and that campaign-promises are merely another name for thimblerigging. The workaday practice of politics has been invariably opportunist, or in other words, invariably conformable to the primary function of the State; and it is largely for this reason that the State’s service exerts its most powerful attraction upon an extremely low and sharp-set type of individual.[22]Click to see.

The maintenance of this system of fetiches, however, gives great enhancement to the prevailing general view of the State. In that view, the State is made to appear as somehow deeply and disinterestedly concerned with great principles of action; and hence, in addition to its prestige as a pseudo-social institution, it takes on the prestige of a kind of moral authority, thus disposing of the last vestige of the doctrine of natural rights by overspreading it heavily with the quicklime of legalism; whatever is State-sanctioned is right. This double prestige is assiduously inflated by many agencies; by a State-controlled system of education, by a State-dazzled pulpit, by a meretricious press, by a continuous kaleidoscopic display of State pomp, panoply and circumstance, and by all the innumerable devices of electioneering. These last invariably take their stand on the foundation of some imposing principle, as witness the agonized cry now going up here and there in the land, for a “return to the constitution.” All this is simply “the interested clamours and sophistry,” which means no more and no less than it meant when the constitution was not yet five years old, and Fisher Ames was observing contemptuously that of all the legislative measures and proposals which were on the carpet at the time, he scarce knew one that had not raised this same cry, “not excepting a motion for adjournment.”

In fact, such popular terms of electioneering appeal are uniformly and notoriously what Jeremy Bentham called impostor-terms, and their use invariably marks one thing and one only; it marks a state of apprehension, either fearful or expectant, as the case may be, concerning access to the political means. As we are seeing at the moment, once let this access come under threat of straitening or stoppage, the menaced interests immediately trot out the spavined, glandered hobby of “state rights” or “a return to the constitution,” and put it through its galvanic movements. Let the incidence of exploitation show the first sign of shifting, and we hear at once from one source of “interested clamours and sophistry” that “democracy” is in danger, and that the unparalleled excellences of our civilization have come about solely through a policy of “rugged individualism,” carried out under terms of “free competition”; while from another source we hear that the enormities of laissez-faire have ground the faces of the poor, and obstructed entrance into the More Abundant Life.[23]Click to see.

The general upshot of all this is that we see politicians of all schools and stripes behaving with the obscene depravity of degenerate children; like the loose-footed gangs that infest the railway-yards and purlieus of gas-houses, each group tries to circumvent another with respect to the fruit accruing to acts of public mischief. In other words, we see them behaving in a strictly historical manner. Professor Laski’s elaborate moral distinction between the State and officialdom is devoid of foundation. The State is not, as he would have it, a social institution administered in an anti-social way. It is an anti-social institution, administered in the only way an anti-social institution can be administered, and by the kind of person who, in the nature of things, is best adapted to such service.

Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

Chapter 5 Footnotes

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Consider, for example, the present situation. Our natural resources, while much depleted, are still great; our population is very thin, running something like twenty or twenty-five to the square mile; and some millions of this population are at the moment “unemployed,” and likely to remain so because no one will or can “give them work.” The point is not that men generally submit to this state of things, or that they accept it as inevitable, but that they see nothing irregular or anomalous about it because of their fixed idea that work is something to be given.


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The present paralysis of production, for example, is due solely to State intervention, and uncertainty concerning further intervention.


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It seems to be very imperfectly understood that the cost of State intervention must be paid out of production, this being the only source from which any payment for anything can be derived. Intervention retards production; then the resulting stringency and inconvenience enable further intervention, which in turn still further retards production; and this process goes on until, as in Rome, in the third century, production ceases entirely, and the source of payment dries up.


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As a matter of fact, all thirteen units merely continued the system that had existed throughout the colonial period – the system which gave the beneficiary a monopoly of rental-values as well as a monopoly of use-values. No other system was ever known in America, except in the short-lived state of Deseret, under the Mormon polity.


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For a brilliant summary of post-revolutionary land-speculation, cf. Sakolski, op. cit., ch. 11.


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Mr. Sakolski very justly remarks that the mania for land-jobbing was stimulated by the action of the new units in offering lands by way of settlement of their public debts, which led to extensive gambling in the various issues of “land-warrants.” The list of eminent names involved in this enterprise includes Wilson C. Nicholas, who later became governor of Virginia; “Light Horse Harry” Lee, father of the great Confederate commander; General John Preston, of Smithfield; and George Taylor, brother-in-law of Chief Justice Marshall. Lee, Preston and Nicholas were prosecuted at the instance of some Connecticut speculators, for a transaction alleged as fraudulent; Lee was arrested in Boston, on the eve of embarking for the West Indies. They had deeded a tract, said to be of 300,000 acres, at ten cents an acre, but on being surveyed, the tract did not come to half that size. Frauds of this order were extremely common.


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The new political units continued the colonial practice of restricting the suffrage to taxpayers and owners of property, and none but men of considerable wealth were eligible to public office. Thus the exercise of sovereignty was a matter of economic right, not natural right.


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This was the uprising known as Shays’s Rebellion, which took place in 1786. The creditor division in Massachusetts had gained control of the political means, and had fortified its control by establishing a constitution which was made to bear so hardly on the agrarian and debtor division that an armed insurrection broke out six years later, led by Daniel Shays, for the purpose of annulling its onerous provisions, and transferring control of the political means to the latter group. This incident affords a striking view in miniature of the State’s nature and teleology. The rebellion had a great effect in consolidating the creditor division and giving plausibility to its contention for the establishment of a strong coercive national State. Mr. Jefferson spoke contemptuously of this contention, as “the interested clamours and sophistry of speculating, shaving and banking institutions”; and of the rebellion itself he observed to Mrs. John Adams, whose husband had most to do with drafting the Massachusetts constitution, “I like a little rebellion now and then. . . . The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.” Writing to another correspondent at the same time, he said earnestly, “God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.” Obiter dicta of this nature, scattered here and there in Mr. Jefferson’s writings, have the interest of showing how near his instinct led him towards a clear understanding of the State’s character.


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Professor Sakolski observes that after the Articles of Confederation were supplanted by the constitution, schemes of land-speculation “multiplied with renewed and intensified energy.” Naturally so, for as he says, the new scheme of a national State got Strong support from this class of adventurers because they foresaw that rental-values “must be greatly increased by an efficient federal government.”


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More than half the delegates to the constitutional convention of 1787 were either investors or speculators in the public funds. Probably sixty per cent of the values represented by these securities were fictitious, and were so regarded even by their holders.


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It may be observed that at this time the word “national” was a term of obloquy, carrying somewhat the same implications that the word “fascist” carries in some quarters today. Nothing is more interesting than the history of political terms in their relation to the shifting balance of economic advantage – except, perhaps, the history of the partisan movements which they designate, viewed in the same relation.


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The obvious reason for this, as the event showed, was that the interests grouped in the first division had the advantage of being relatively compact and easily mobilized. Those in the second division, being chiefly agrarian, were loose and sprawling, communications among them were slow, and mobilization difficult.


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They have been noticed by several recent authorities, and are exhibited fully in Mr. Beard’s monumental Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.


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[14]Click to return. Beard, op. cit., p. 337.


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The principal measures bearing directly on the distribution of the political means were those drafted by Hamilton for funding and assumption, for a protective tariff, and for a national bank. These gave practically exclusive use of the political means to the classes grouped in the first grand division, the only modes left available to others being patents and copyrights. Mr. Beard discusses these measures with his invariable lucidity and thoroughness, op. cit., ch. VIII. Some observations on them which are perhaps worth reading are contained in my Jefferson, ch. V.


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The authority of the Supreme Court was disregarded by Jackson, and overruled by Lincoln, thus converting the mode of the State temporarily from an oligarchy into an autocracy. It is interesting to observe that just such a contingency was foreseen by the framers of the constitution, in particular by Hamilton. They were apparently well aware of the ease with which, in any period of crisis, a quasi-republican mode of the State slips off into executive tyranny. Oddly enough, Mr. Jefferson at one time considered nullifying the Alien and Sedition Acts by executive action, but did not do so. Lincoln overruled the opinion of Chief Justice Taney that suspension of the habeas corpus was unconstitutional, and in consequence the mode of the State was, until 1865, a monocratic military despotism. In fact, from the date of his proclamation of blockade, Lincoln ruled unconstitutionally throughout his term. The doctrine of “reserved powers” was knaved up ex post facto as a justification of his acts, but as far as the intent of the constitution is concemed, it was obviously a pure invention. In fact, a very good case could be made out for the assertion that Lincoln’s acts resulted in a permanent radical change in the entire system of constitutional “interpretation” – that since his time “interpretations” have not been interpretations of the constitution, but merely of public policy; or, as our most acute and profound social critic put it, “th’ Supreme Court follows th’ iliction rayturns.” A strict constitutionalist might indeed say that the constitution died in 1861, and one would have to scratch one’s head pretty diligently to refute him.


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Marshall was appointed by John Adams at the end of his Presidential term, when the interests grouped in the first division were becoming very anxious about the opposition developing against them among the exploited interests. A letter written by Oliver Wolcott to Fisher Ames gives a good idea of where the doctrine of popular sovereignty stood; his reference to military measures is particularly striking. He says, “The steady men in Congress will attempt to extend the judicial department, and I hope that their measures will be very decided. It is impossible in this country to render an army an engine of government; and there is no way to combat the state opposition but by an efficient and extended organization of judges, magistrates, and other civil officers.” Marshall’s appointment followed, and also the creation of twenty-three new federal judgeships. Marshall’s cardinal decisions were made in the cases of Marbury, of Fletcher, of McCulloch, of Dartmouth College, and of Cohens. It is perhaps not generally understood that as the result of Marshall’s efforts, the Supreme Court became not only the highest law-interpreting body, but the highest law-making body as well; the precedents established by its decisions have the force of constitutional law. Since 1800, therefore, the actual mode of the State in America is normally that of a small and irresponsible oligarchy! Mr. Jefferson, regarding Marshall quite justly as “a crafty chief judge who sophisticates the law to his mind by the turn of his own reasoning,” made in 1821 the very remarkable prophecy that “our government is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence. The engine of consolidation will be the federal judiciary; the other two branches the corrupting and corrupted instruments.” Another prophetic comment on the effect of centralization was his remark that “when we must wait for Washington to tell us when to sow and when to reap, we shall soon want bread.” A survey of our present political circumstances makes comment on these prophecies superfluous.


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He had observed it in the British State some years before, and spoke of it with vivacity. “The nest of office being too small for all of them to cuddle into at once, the contest is eternal which shall crowd the other out. For this purpose they are divided into two parties, the Ins and the Outs.” Why he could not see that the same thing was bound to take place in the American State as an effect of causes identical with those which brought it about in the British State, is a puzzle to students. Apparently, however, he did not see it, notwithstanding the sound instinct that made him suspect parties, and always kept him free from party alliances. As he wrote Hopkinson in 1789, “I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”


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Jefferson, p. 274. The agrarian-artisan-debtor economic group that elected Mr. Jefferson took title as the Republican party (subsequently renamed Democratic) and the opposing group called itself by the old preconstitutional title of Federalist.


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An example, noteworthy only because uncommonly conspicuous, is seen in the behaviour of the Democratic senators in the matter of the tariff on sugar, in Cleveland’s second administration. Ever since that incident, one of the Washington newspapers has used the name “Senator Sorghum” in its humorous paragraphs, to designate the typical venal jobholder.


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Mr. Jefferson was the first to acknowledge that his purchase of the Louisiana territory was unconstitutional; but it added millions of acres to the sum of agrarian resource, and added an immense amount of prospective voting-strength to agrarian control of the political means, as against control by the financial and commercial interests represented by the Federalist party. Mr. Jefferson justified himself solely on the ground of public policy, an interesting anticipation of Lincoln’s self-justification in 1861, for confronting Congress and the country with a like fait accompli – this time, however, executed in behalf of financial and commercial interests as against the agrarian interest.


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Henry George made some very keen comments upon the almost incredible degradation that he saw taking place progressively in the personnel of the State’s service. It is perhaps most conspicuous in the Presidency and the Senate, though it goes on pari passu elsewhere and throughout. As for the federal House of Representatives and the state legislative bodies, they must be seen to be believed.


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Of all the impostor-terms in our political glossary these are perhaps the most flagrantly impudent, and their employment perhaps the most flagitious. We have already seen that nothing remotely resembling democracy has ever existed here; nor yet has anything resembling free competition, for the existence of free competition is obviously incompatible with any exercise of the political means, even the feeblest. For the same reason, no policy of rugged individualism has ever existed; the most that rugged individualism has done to distinguish itself has been by way of running to the State for some form of economic advantage. If the reader has any curiosity about this, let him look up the number of American business enterprises that have made a success unaided by the political means, or the number of fortunes accumulated without such aid. Laissez-faire has become a term of pure opprobrium; those who use it either do not know what it means, or else wilfully pervert it. As for the unparalleled excellences of our civilization, it is perhaps enough to say that the statistics of our insurance-companies now show that four-fifths of our people who have reached the age of sixty-five are supported by their relatives or by some other form of charity.


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Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

CHAPTER 6

I

SUCH has been the course of our experience from the beginning, and such are the terms in which its stark uniformity has led us to think of the State. This uniformity also goes far to account for the development of a peculiar moral enervation with regard to the State, exactly parallel to that which prevailed with regard to the Church in the Middle Ages.[1]Click to see. The Church controlled the distribution of certain privileges and immunities, and if one approached it properly, one might get the benefit of them. It stood as something to be run to in any kind of emergency, temporal or spiritual; for the satisfaction of ambition and cupidity, as well as for the more tenuous assurances it held out against various forms of fear, doubt and sorrow. As long as this was so, the anomalies presented by its self-aggrandizement were more or less contentedly acquiesced in; and thus a chronic moral enervation, too negative to be called broadly cynical, was developed towards its interventions and exactions, and towards the vast overbuilding of its material structure.[2]Click to see.

A like enervation pervades our society with respect to the State, and for like reasons. It affects especially those who take the State’s pretensions at face value and regard it as a social institution whose policies of continuous intervention are wholesome and necessary; and it also affects the great majority who have no clear idea of the State, but merely accept it as something that exists, and never think about it except when some intervention bears unfavourably upon their interests. There is little need to dwell upon the amount of aid thus given to the State’s progress in self-aggrandizement, or to show in detail or by illustration the courses by which this spiritlessness promotes the State’s steady policy of intervention, exaction and overbuilding.[3]Click to see.

Every intervention by the State enables another, and this in turn another, and so on indefinitely; and the State stands ever ready and eager to make them, often on its own motion, often again wangling plausibility for them through the specious suggestion of interested persons. Sometimes the matter at issue is in its nature simple, socially necessary, and devoid of any character that would bring it into the purview of politics.[4]Click to see. For convenience, however, complications are erected on it; then presently someone sees that these complications are exploitable, and proceeds to exploit them; then another, and another, until the rivalries and collisions of interest thus generated issue in a more or less general disorder. When this takes place, the logical thing, obviously, is to recede, and let the disorder be settled in the slower and more troublesome way, but the only effective way, through the operation of natural laws. But in such circumstances recession is never for a moment thought of; the suggestion would be put down as sheer lunacy. Instead, the interests unfavourably affected – little aware, perhaps, how much worse the cure is than the disease, or at any rate little caring – immediately call on the State to cut in arbitrarily between cause and effect, and clear up the disorder out of hand.[5]Click to see. The State then intervenes by imposing another set of complications upon the first; these in turn are found exploitable, another demand arises, another set of complications, still more intricate, is erected upon the first two;[6]Click to see. and the same sequence is gone through again and again until the recurrent disorder becomes acute enough to open the way for a sharking political adventurer to come forward and, always alleging “necessity, the tyrant’s plea,”to organize a coup d’d'état.[7]Click to see.

But more often the basic matter at issue represents an original intervention of the State, an original allotment of the political means. Each of these allotments, as we have seen, is a charter of highwaymanry, a license to appropriate the labour-products of others without compensation. Therefore it is in the nature of things that when such a license is issued, the State must follow it up with an indefinite series of interventions to systematize and “regulate”its use. The State’s endless progressive encroachments that are recorded in the history of the tariff, their impudent and disgusting particularity, and the prodigious amount of apparatus necessary to give them effect, furnish a conspicuous case in point. Another is furnished by the history of our railway-regulation. It is nowadays the fashion, even among those who ought to know better, to hold “rugged individualism”and laissez-faire responsible for the riot of stock-watering, rebates, rate-cutting, fraudulent bankruptcies, and the like, which prevailed in our railway-practice after the Civil War, but they had no more to do with it than they have with the precession of the equinoxes. The fact is that our railways, with few exceptions, did not grow up in response to any actual economic demand. They were speculative enterprises enabled by State intervention, by allotment of the political means in the form of land-grants and subsidies; and of all the evils alleged against our railway-practice, there is not one but what is directly traceable to this primary intervention.[8]Click to see.

So it is with shipping. There was no valid economic demand for adventure in the carrying trade; in fact, every sound economic consideration was dead against it. It was entered upon through State intervention, instigated by shipbuilders and their allied interests; and the mess engendered by their manipulation of the political means is now the ground of demand for further and further coercive intervention. So it is with what, by an unconscionable stretch of language, goes by the name of farming.[9]Click to see. There are very few troubles so far heard of as normally besetting this form of enterprise but what are directly traceable to the State’s primary intervention in establishing a system of land-tenure which gives a monopoly-right over rental-values as well as over use-values; and as long as that system is in force, one coercive intervention after another is bound to take place in support of it.[10]Click to see.

II

Thus we see how ignorance and delusion concerning the nature of the State combine with extreme moral debility and myopic self-interest – what Ernest Renan so well calls la bassesse de l’homme intéressé – to enable the steadily accelerated conversion of social power into State power that has gone on from the beginning of our political independence. It is a curious anomaly. State power has an unbroken record of inability to do anything efficiently, economically, disinterestedly or honestly; yet when the slightest dissatisfaction arises over any exercise of social power, the aid of the agent least qualified to give aid is immediately called for. Does social power mismanage banking-practice in this-or-that special instance – then let the State, which never has shown itself able to keep its own finances from sinking promptly into the slough of misfeasance, wastefulness and corruption, intervene to “supervise”or “regulate”the whole body of banking-practice, or even take it over entire. Does social power, in this-or-that case, bungle the business of railway-management – then let the State, which has bungled every business it has ever undertaken, intervene and put its hand to the business of “regulating”railway-operation. Does social power now and then send out an unseaworthy ship to disaster – then let the State, which inspected and passed the Morro Castle, be given a freer swing at controlling the routine of the shipping trade. Does social power here and there exercise a grinding monopoly over the generation and distribution of electric current – then let the State, which allots and maintains monopoly, come in and intervene with a general scheme of price-fixing which works more unforeseen hardships than it heals, or else let it go into direct competition; or, as the collectivists urge, let it take over the monopoly bodily. “Ever since society has existed,”says Herbert Spencer, “disappointment has been preaching, ‘Put not your trust in legislation’; and yet the trust in legislation seems hardly diminished.”

But it may be asked where we are to go for relief from the misuses of social power, if not to the State. What other recourse have we? Admitting that under our existing mode of political organization we have none, it must still be pointed out that this question rests on the old inveterate misapprehension of the State’s nature, presuming that the State is a social institution, whereas it is an anti-social institution; that is to say, the question rests on an absurdity.[11]Click to see. It is certainly true that the business of government, in maintaining “freedom and security,”and “to secure these rights,”is to make a recourse to justice costless, easy and informal; but the State, on the contrary, is primarily concerned with injustice, and its function is to maintain a regime of injustice; hence, as we see daily, its disposition is to put justice as far as possible out of reach, and to make the effort after justice as costly and difficult as it can. One may put it in a word that while government is by its nature concerned with the administration of justice, the State is by its nature concerned with the administration of law – law, which the State itself manufactures for the service of its own primary ends. Therefore an appeal to the State, based on the ground of justice, is futile in any circumstances,[12]Click to see. for whatever action the State might take in response to it would be conditioned by the State’s own paramount interest, and would hence be bound to result, as we see such action invariably resulting, in as great injustice as that which it pretends to correct, or as a rule, greater. The question thus presumes, in short, that the State may on occasion be persuaded to act out of character; and this is levity.

But passing on from this special view of the question, and regarding it in a more general way, we see that what it actually amounts to is a plea for arbitrary interference with the order of nature, an arbitrary cutting-in to avert the penalty which nature lays on any and every form of error, whether wilful or ignorant, voluntary or involuntary; and no attempt at this has ever yet failed to cost more than it came to. Any contravention of natural law, any tampering with the natural order of things, must have its consequences, and the only recourse for escaping them is such as entails worse consequences. Nature recks nothing of intentions, good or bad; the one thing she will not tolerate is disorder, and she is very particular about getting her full pay for any attempt to create disorder. She gets it sometimes by very indirect methods, often by very roundabout and unforeseen ways, but she always gets it. “Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why, then, should we desire to be deceived?”It would seem that our civilization is greatly given to this infantile addiction – greatly given to persuading itself that it can find some means which nature will tolerate, whereby we may eat our cake and have it; and it strongly resents the stubborn fact that there is no such means.[13]Click to see.

It will be clear to anyone who takes the trouble to think the matter through, that under a regime of natural order, that is to say under government, which makes no positive interventions whatever on the individual, but only negative interventions in behalf of simple justice – not law, but justice – misuses of social power would be effectively corrected; whereas we know by interminable experience that the State’s positive interventions do not correct them. Under a regime of actual individualism, actually free competition, actual laissez-faire – a regime which, as we have seen, can not possibly coexist with the State – a serious or continuous misuse of social power would be virtually impracticable.[14]Click to see.

I shall not take up space with amplifying these statements because, in the first place, this has already been thoroughly done by Spencer, in his essays entitled The Man versus the State; and, in the second place, because I wish above all things to avoid the appearance of suggesting that a regime such as these statements contemplate is practicable, or that I am ever so covertly encouraging anyone to dwell on the thought of such a regime. Perhaps, some aeons hence, if the planet remains so long habitable, the benefits accruing to conquest and confiscation may be adjudged over-costly; the State may in consequence be superseded by government, the political means suppressed, and the fetiches which give nationalism and patriotism their present execrable character may be broken down. But the remoteness and uncertainty of this prospect makes any thought of it fatuous, and any concern with it futile. Some rough measure of its remoteness may perhaps be gained by estimating the growing strength of the forces at work against it. Ignorance and error, which the State’s prestige steadily deepens, are against it; la bassesse de l’homme intéressé, steadily pushing its purposes to greater lengths of turpitude, is against it; moral enervation, steadily proceeding to the point of complete insensitiveness, is against it. What combination of influences more powerful than this can one imagine, and what can one imagine possible to be done in the face of such a combination?

To the sum of these, which may be called spiritual influences, may be added the overweening physical strength of the State, which is ready to be called into action at once against any affront to the State’s prestige. Few realize how enormously and how rapidly in recent years the State has everywhere built up its apparatus of armies and police forces. The State has thoroughly learned the lesson laid down by Septimius Severus, on his death-bed. “Stick together,”he said to his successors, “pay the soldiers, and don’t worry about anything else.”It is now known to every intelligent person that there can be no such thing as a revolution as long as this advice is followed; in fact, there has been no revolution in the modem world since 1848 – every so-called revolution has been merely a coup d’état.[15]Click to see. All talk of the possibility of a revolution in America is in part perhaps ignorant, but mostly dishonest; it is merely “the interested clamours and sophistry”of persons who have some sort of ax to grind. Even Lenin acknowledged that a revolution is impossible anywhere until the military and police forces become disaffected; and the last place to look for that, probably, is here. We have all seen demonstrations of a disarmed populace, and local riots carried on with primitive weapons, and we have also seen how they ended, as in Homestead, Chicago, and the mining districts of West Virginia, for instance. Coxey’s Army marched on Washington – and it kept off the grass.

Taking the sum of the State’s physical strength, with the force of powerful spiritual influences behind it, one asks again, what can be done against the State’s progress in self-aggrandizement? Simply nothing. So far from encouraging any hopeful contemplation of the unattainable, the student of civilized man will offer no conclusion but that nothing can be done. He can regard the course of our civilization only as he would regard the course of a man in a rowboat on the lower reaches of the Niagara – as an instance of Nature’s unconquerable intolerance of disorder, and in the end, an example of the penalty which she puts upon any attempt at interference with order. Our civilization may at the outset have taken its chances with the current of Statism either ignorantly or deliberately; it makes no difference. Nature cares nothing whatever about motive or intention; she cares only for order, and looks to see only that her repugnance to disorder shall be vindicated, and that her concern with the regular orderly sequences of things and actions shall be upheld in the outcome. Emerson, in one of his great moments of inspiration, personified cause and effect as “the chancellors of God”; and invariable experience testifies that the attempt to nullify or divert or in any wise break in upon their sequences must have its own reward.

“Such,”says Professor Ortega y Gasset, “was the lamentable fate of ancient civilization.”A dozen empires have already finished the course that ours began three centuries ago. The lion and the lizard keep the vestiges that attest their passage upon earth, vestiges of cities which in their day were as proud and powerful as ours – Tadmor, Persepolis, Luxor, Baalbek – some of them indeed forgotten for thousands of years and brought to memory again only by the excavator, like those of the Mayas, and those buried in the sands of the Gobi. The sites which now bear Narbonne and Marseilles have borne the habitat of four successive civilizations, each of them, as St. James says, even as a vapour which appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away. The course of all these civilizations was the same. Conquest, confiscation, the erection of the State; then the sequences which we have traced in the course of our own civilization; then the shock of some irruption which the social structure was too far weakened to resist, and from which it was left too disorganized to recover; and then the end.

Our pride resents the thought that the great highways of New England will one day lie deep under layers of encroaching vegetation, as the more substantial Roman roads of Old England have lain for generations; and that only a group of heavily overgrown hillocks will be left to attract the archaeologist’s eye to the hidden débris of our collapsed skyscrapers. Yet it is to just this, we know, that our civilization will come; and we know it because we know that there never has been, never is, and never will be, any disorder in nature – because we know that things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be.

But there is no need to dwell lugubriously upon the probable circumstances of a future so far distant. What we and our more nearly immediate descendants shall see is a steady progress in collectivism running off into a military despotism of a severe type. Closer centralization; a steadily growing bureaucracy; State power and faith in State power increasing, social power and faith in social power diminishing; the State absorbing a continually larger proportion of the national income; production languishing, the State in consequence taking over one “essential industry”after another, managing them with ever-increasing corruption, inefficiency and prodigality, and finally resorting to a system of forced labour. Then at some point in this progress, a collision of State interests, at least as general and as violent as that which occurred in 1914, will result in an industrial and financial dislocation too severe for the asthenic social structure to bear; and from this the State will be left to “the rusty death of machinery,”and the casual anonymous forces of dissolution will be supreme.

III

But it may quite properly be asked, if we in common with the rest of the Western world are so far gone in Statism as to make this outcome inevitable, what is the use of a book which merely shows that it is inevitable? By its own hypothesis the book is useless. Upon the very evidence it offers, no one’s political opinions are likely to be changed by it, no one’s practical attitude towards the State will be modified by it; and if they were, according to the book’s own premises, what good could it do?

Assuredly I do not expect this book to change anyone’s political opinions, for it is not meant to do that. One or two, perhaps, here and there, may be moved to look a little into the subject-matter on their own account, and thus perhaps their opinions would undergo some slight loosening – or some constriction – but this is the very most that would happen. In general, too, I would be the first to acknowledge that no results of the kind which we agree to call practical could accrue to the credit of a book of this order, were it a hundred times as cogent as this one – no results, that is, that would in the least retard the State’s progress in self-aggrandizement and thus modify the consequences of the State’s course. There are two reasons, however, one general and one special, why the publication of such a book is admissible.

The general reason is that when in any department of thought a person has, or thinks he has, a view of the plain intelligible order of things, it is proper that he should record that view publicly, with no thought whatever of the practical consequences, or lack of consequences, likely to ensue upon his so doing. He might indeed be thought bound to do this as a matter of abstract duty; not to crusade or propagandize for his view or seek to impose it upon anyone – far from that! – not to concern himself at all with either its acceptance or its disallowance; but merely to record it. This I say, might be thought his duty to the natural truth of things, but it is at all events his right; it is admissible.

The special reason has to do with the fact that in every civilization, however generally prosaic, however addicted to the short-time point of view on human affairs, there are always certain alien spirits who, while outwardly conforming to the requirements of the civilization around them, still keep a disinterested regard for the plain intelligible law of things, irrespective of any practical end. They have an intellectual curiosity, sometimes touched with emotion, concerning the august order of nature; they are impressed by the contemplation of it, and like to know as much about it as they can, even in circumstances where its operation is ever so manifestly unfavourable to their best hopes and wishes. For these, a work like this, however in the current sense impractical, is not quite useless; and those of them it reaches will be aware that for such as themselves, and such only, it was written.

The End

“There is nothing hidden that will not be seen.”

Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

Chapter 6 Footnotes

[1]Click to return.

Not long ago Professor Laski commented on the prevalence of this enervation among our young people, especially among our student-population. It has several contributing causes, but it is mainly to be accounted for, I think, by the unvarying uniformity of our experience. The State’s pretensions have been so invariably extravagant, the disparity between them and its conduct so invariably manifest, that one could hardly expect anything else. Probably the protest against our imperialism in the Pacific and the Caribbean, after the Spanish War, marked the last major effort of an impotent and moribund decency. Mr. Laski’s comparisons with student-bodies in England and Europe lose some of their force when it is remembered that the devices of a fixed term and an irresponsible executive render the American State peculiarly insensitive to protest and inaccessible to effective censure. As Mr. Jefferson said, the one resource of impeachment is “not even a scarecrow.”


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As an example of this overbuilding, at the beginning of the sixteenth century one-fifth of the land of France was owned by the Church; it was held mainly by monastic establishments.


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It may be observed, however, that mere use-and-wont interferes with our seeing how egregiously the original structure of the American State, with its system of superimposed jurisdictions and reduplicated functions, was overbuilt. At the present time, a citizen lives under half-a-dozen or more separate overlapping jurisdictions, federal, state, county, township, municipal, borough, school-district, ward, federal district. Nearly all of these have power to tax him directly or indirectly, or both, and as we all know, the only limit to the exercise of this power is what can be safely got by it; and thus we arrive at the principle rather nanvely formulated by the late senator from Utah, and sometimes spoken of ironically as “Smoot’s law of government”- the principle, as he put it, that the cost of government tends to increase from year to year, no matter which party is in power. It would be interesting to know the exact distribution of the burden of jobholders and mendicant political retainers – for it must not be forgotten that the subsidized “unemployed”are now a permanent body of patronage – among income-receiving citizens. Counting indirect taxes and voluntary contributions as well as direct taxes, it would probably be not far off the mark to say that every two citizens are carrying a third between them.


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For example, the basic processes of exchange are necessary, non-political, and as simple as any in the world. The humblest Yankee rustic who swaps eggs for bacon in the country store, or a day’s labour for potatoes in a neighbour’s field, understands them thoroughly, and manages them competently. Their formula is: goods or services in return for goods or services. There is not, never has been, and never will be, a single transaction anywhere in the realm of “business”- no matter what its magnitude or apparent complexity – that is not directly reducible to this formula. For convenience in facilitating exchange, however, money was introduced; and money is a complication, and so are the other evidences of debt, such as cheques, drafts, notes, bills, bonds, stock-certificates, which were introduced for the same reason. These complications were found to be exploitable; and the consequent number and range of State interventions to “regulate”and “supervise”their exploitation appear to be without end.


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It is one of the most extraordinary things in the world, that the interests which abhor and dread collectivism are the ones which have most eagerly urged on the State to take each one of the successive single steps that lead directly to collectivism. Who urged it on to form the Federal Trade Commission; to expand the Department of Commerce; to form the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Federal Farm Board; to pass the Anti-trust Acts; to build highways, dig out waterways, provide airway services, subsidize shipping? If these steps do not tend straight to collectivism, just which way do they tend? Furthermore, when the interests which encouraged the State to take them are horrified by the apparition of communism and the Red menace, just what are their protestations worth?


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The text of the Senate’s proposed banking law, published on the first of July, 1935, almost exactly filled four pages of the Wall Street Journal! Really now – now really – can any conceivable absurdity surpass that?


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As here in 1932, in Italy, Germany and Russia latterly, in France after the collapse of the Directory, in Rome after the death of Pertinax, and so on.


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Ignorance has no assignable limits; yet when one hears our railway-companies cited as specimens of rugged individualism, one is put to it to say whether the speaker’s sanity should be questioned, or his integrity. Our transcontinental companies, in particular, are hardly to be called railway-companies, since transportation was purely incidental to their true business, which was that of land-jobbing and subsidy-hunting. I remember seeing the statement a few years ago – I do not vouch for it, but it can not be far off the fact – that at the time of writing, the current cash value of the political means allotted to the Northern Pacific Company would enable it to build four transcontinental lines, and in addition, to build a fleet of ships and maintain it in around-the-world service. If this sort of thing represents rugged individualism, let future lexicographers make the most of it.


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A farmer, properly speaking, is a freeholder who directs his operations, first, towards making his family, as far as possible, an independent unit, economically self-contained. What he produces over and above this requirement he converts into a cash crop. There is a second type of agriculturist, who is not a farmer, but a manufacturer, as much so as one who makes woolen or cotton textiles or leather shoes. He raises one crop only – milk, corn, wheat, cotton, or whatever it may be – which is wholly a cash crop; and if the market for his particular commodity goes down below cost of production, he is in the same bad luck as the motor-car maker or shoemaker or pantsmaker who turns out more of his special kind of goods than the market will bear. His family is not independent; he buys everything his household uses; his children can not live on cotton or milk or corn, any more than the shoe-manufacturer’s children can live on shoes. There is still to be distinguished a third type, who carries on agriculture as a sort of taxpaying subsidiary to speculation in agricultural land-values. It is the last two classes who chiefly clamour for intervention, and they are often, indeed, in a bad way; but it is not farming that puts them there.


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The very limit of particularity in this course of coercive intervention seems to have been reached, according to press-reports, in the state of Wisconsin. On 31 May, the report is, Governor La Follette signed a bill requiring all public eating-places to serve two-thirds of an ounce of Wisconsin-made cheese and two-thirds of an ounce of Wisconsin-made butter with every meal costing more than twenty-four cents. To match this for particularity one would pretty well have to go back to some of the British Trade Acts of the eighteenth century, and it would be hard to find an exact match, even there. If this passes muster under the “due process of law”clause – whether the eating-house pays for these supplies or passes their cost along to the consumer – one can see nothing to prevent the legislature of New York, say, from requiring each citizen to buy annually two hats made by Knox, and two suits made by Finchley.


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Admitting that the lamb in the fable had no other recourse than the wolf, one may none the less see that its appeal to the wolf was a waste of breath.


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This is now so well understood that no one goes to a court for justice; he goes for gain or revenge. It is interesting to observe that some philosophers of law now say that law has no relation to justice, and is not meant to have any such relation. In their view, law represents only a progressive registration of the ways in which experience leads us to believe that society can best get along. One might hesitate a long time about accepting their notion of what law is, but one must appreciate their candid affirmation of what it is not.


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This resentment is very remarkable. In spite of our failure with one conspicuously ambitious experiment in State intervention, I dare say there would still be great resentment against Professor Sumner’s ill-famed remark that when people talked tearfully about “the poor drunkard lying in the gutter,”it seemed never to occur to them that the gutter might be quite the right place for him to lie; or against the bishop of Peterborough’s declaration that he would rather see England free than sober. Yet both these remarks merely recognize the great truth which experience forces on our notice every day, that attempts to interfere with the natural order of things are bound, in one way or another, to turn out for the worse.


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[14]Click to return.

The horrors of England’s industrial life in the last century furnish a standing brief for addicts of positive intervention. Child-labour and woman-labour in the mills and mines; Coketown and Mr. Bounderby; starvation wages; killing hours; vile and hazardous conditions of labour; coffin ships officered by ruffians – all these are glibly charged off by reformers and publicists to a regime of rugged individualism, unrestrained competition, and laissez-faire. This is an absurdity on its face, for no such regime ever existed in England. They were due to the State’s primary intervention whereby the population of England was expropriated from the land; due to the State’s removal of the land from competition with industry for labour. Nor did the factory system and the “industrial revolution”have the least thing to do with creating those hordes of miserable beings. When the factory system came in, those hordes were already there, expropriated, and they went into the mills for whatever Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Plugson of Undershot would give them, because they had no choice but to beg, steal or starve. Their misery and degradation did not lie at the door of individualism; they lay nowhere but at the door of the State. Adam Smith’s economics are not the economics of individualism; they are the economics of landowners and mill-owners. Our zealots of positive intervention would do well to read the history of the Enclosures Acts and the work of the Hammonds, and see what they can make of them.


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[15]Click to return.

When Sir Robert Peel proposed to organize the police force of London, Englishmen said openly that half a dozen throats cut in Whitechapel every year would be a cheap price to pay for keeping such an instrument of potential tyranny out of the State’s hands. We are all beginning to realize now that there is a great deal to be said for that view of the matter.


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+ On Doing the Right Thing; and other essays

+ The Theory of Education in the United States, (The Page-Barbour Lectures for 1930)

+ The Urquhart-Le Motteux Translation of the Works of Francis Rabelais, with introduction, critical notes and documentary illustrations (Edited, with Catherine Rose Wilson)

+ A Journal of These Days

+ A Journey into Rabelais’s France

+ Our Enemy, the State Paperback Reprint Edition, Hallberg Pub Corp; ISBN: 0873190238 try Amazon.com

Chapter 3 Footnotes

[1]Click to return. Among these institutions are: our system of free public education; local self-government as originally established in the township system; our method of conveying land; almost all of our system of equity; much of our criminal code; and our method of administering estates.


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[2]Click to return. Throughout Europe, indeed, up to the close of the eighteenth century, the State was quite weak, even considering the relatively moderate development of social power, and the moderate amount of economic accumulation available to its predatory purposes. Social power in modern France could pay the flat annual levy of Louis XIV’s taxes without feeling it, and would like nothing better than to commute the republican State’s levy on those terms.


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[3]Click to return. During the reign of Elizabeth the Puritan contention, led by Cartwright, was for what amounted to a theory of jure divino Presbyterianism. The Establishment at large took the position of Archbishop Whitgift and Richard Hooker that the details of church polity were indifferent, and therefore properly subject to State regulation. The High Church doctrine of jure divino episcopacy was laid down later, by Whitgift’s successor, Bancroft. Thus up to 1604 the Presbyterians were objectionable on secular grounds, and afterwards on both secular and ecclesiastical grounds.


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[4]Click to return. So were the kaleidoscopic changes that took place in France after the revolution of 1789. Throughout the Directorate, the Consulship, the Restoration, the two Empires, the three Republics and the Commune, the French State kept its essential character intact; it remained always the organization of the political means.


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[5]Click to return. In 1629 the Massachusetts Bay colony adopted the Plymouth colony’s model of congregational autonomy, but finding its principle dangerously inconsistent with the principle of the State, almost immediately nullified their action; retaining, however, the name of Congregationalism. This mode of masquerade is easily recognizable as one of the modern State’s most useful expedients for maintaining the appearance of things without the reality. The names of our two largest political parties will at once appear as a capital example. Within two years the Bay colony had set up a State church, nominally congregationalist, but actually a branch of the civil service, as in England.


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[6]Click to return. Probably it was a forecast of this state of things, as much as the greater convenience of administration, that caused the Bay Company to move over to Massachusetts, bag and baggage, in the year following the issuance of their charter.


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[7]Click to return. Thomas Robinson Hazard, the Rhode Island Quaker, in his delightful Jonnycake Papers, says that the Great Swamp Fight of 1675 was “instigated against the rightful owners of the soil, solely by the cussed godly Puritans of Massachusetts, and their hell-hound allies, the Presbyterians of Connecticut; whom, though charity is my specialty, I can never think of without feeling as all good Rhode Islanders should, . . . and as old Miss Hazard did when in like vein she thanked God in the Conanicut prayer-meeting that she could hold malice forty years.” The Rhode Island settlers dealt with the Indians for rights in land, and made friends with them.


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[8]Click to return. Mr. Parrington (Main Currents in American Thought, vol. I, p. 24) cites the successive steps leading up to this, as follows: the law of 1631, restricting the franchise to Church members; of 1635, obliging all persons to attend Church services; and of 1636, which established a virtual State monopoly, by requiring consent of both Church and State authority before a new church could be set up. Roger Williams observed acutely that a State establishment of organized Christianity is “a politic invention of man to maintain the civil State.”


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[9]Click to return. Bicknell says that the formation of Williams’s proprietary was “a landholding, land-jobbing, land-selling scheme, with no moral, social, civil, educational or religious end in view”; and his discussion of the early land-allotments on the site where the city of Providence now stands, makes it pretty clear that “the first years of Providence are consumed in a greedy scramble for land.” Bicknell is not precisely an unfriendly witness towards Williams, though his history is avowedly ex parte for the thesis that the true expounder of civil freedom in Rhode Island was not Williams, but Clarke. This contention is immaterial to the present purpose, however, for the State system of land-tenure prevailed in Clarke’s settlements on Aquidneck as it did in Williams’s settlements farther up the bay.


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Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

CHAPTER 4

I

AFTER conquest and confiscation have been effected, and the State set up, its first concern is with the land. The State assumes the right of eminent domain over its territorial basis, whereby every landholder becomes in theory a tenant of the State. In its capacity as ultimate landlord, the State distributes the land among its beneficiaries on its own terms. A point to be observed in passing is that by the State-system of land-tenure each original transaction confers two distinct monopolies, entirely different in their nature, inasmuch as one concerns the right to labour-made property, and the other concerns the right to purely law-made property. The one is a monopoly of the use-value of land; and the other, a monopoly of the economic rent of land. The first gives the right to keep other persons from using the land in question, or trespassing on it, and the right to exclusive possession of values accruing from the application of labour to it; values, that is, which are produced by exercise of the economic means upon the particular property in question. Monopoly of economic rent, on the other hand, gives the exclusive right to values accruing from the desire of other persons to possess that property; values which take their rise irrespective of any exercise of the economic means on the part of the holder.[1]Click to see.

Economic rent arises when, for whatsoever reason, two or more persons compete for the possession of a piece of land, and it increases directly according to the number of persons competing. The whole of Manhattan Island was bought originally by a handful of Hollanders from a handful of Indians for twenty-four dollars’ worth of trinkets. The subsequent “rise in land-values,” as we call it, was brought about by the steady influx of population and the consequent high competition for portions of the island’s surface; and these ensuing values were monopolized by the holders. They grew to an enormous size, and the holders profited accordingly; the Astor, Wendel, and Trinity Church estates have always served as classical examples for study of the State-system of land-tenure.

Bearing in mind that the State is the organization of the political means – that its primary intention is to enable the economic exploitation of one class by another – we see that it has always acted on the principle already cited, that expropriation must precede exploitation. There is no other way to make the political means effective. The first postulate of fundamental economics is that man is a land-animal, deriving his subsistence wholly from the land.[2]Click to see. His entire wealth is produced by the application of labour and capital to land; no form of wealth known to man can be produced in any other way. Hence, if his free access to land be shut off by legal preemption, he can apply his labour and capital only with the land-holder’s consent, and on the landholder’s terms; in other words, it is at this point, and this point only, that exploitation becomes practicable.[3]Click to see. Therefore the first concern of the State must be invariably, as we find it invariably is, with its policy of land-tenure.

I state these elementary matters as briefly as I can; the reader may easily find a full exposition of them elsewhere.[4]Click to see. I am here concerned only to show why the State system of land-tenure came into being, and why its maintenance is necessary to the State’s existence. If this system were broken up, obviously the reason for the State’s existence would disappear, and the State itself would disappear with it.[5]Click to see. With this in mind, it is interesting to observe that although all our public policies would seem to be in process of exhaustive review, no publicist has anything to say about the State system of land-tenure. This is no doubt the best evidence of its importance.[6]Click to see.

Under the feudal State there was no great amount of traffic in land. When William, for example, set up the Norman State in England after conquest and confiscation in 1066-76, his associate banditti, among whom he parcelled out the confiscated territory, did nothing to speak of in the way of developing their holdings, and did not contemplate gain from the increment of rental-values. In fact, economic rent hardly existed; their fellow-beneficiaries were not in the market to any great extent, and the dispossessed population did not represent any economic demand. The feudal regime was a regime of status, under which landed estates yielded hardly any rental-value, and only a moderate use-value, but carried an enormous insignia-value. Land was regarded more as a badge of nobility than as an active asset; its possession marked a man as belonging to the exploiting class, and the size of his holdings seems to have counted for more than the number of his exploitable dependents.[7]Click to see. The encroachments of the merchant-State, however, brought about a change in these circumstances. The importance of rental-values was recognized, and speculative trading in land became general.

Hence in a study of the merchant-State as it appeared full-blown in America, it is a point of utmost consequence to remember that from the time of the first colonial settlement to the present day, America has been regarded as a practically limitless field for speculation in rental-values.[8]Click to see. One may say at a safe venture that every colonial enterpriser and proprietor after Raleigh’s time understood economic rent and the conditions necessary to enhance it. The Swedish, Dutch and British trading-companies understood this; Endicott and Winthrop, of the autonomous merchant-State on the Bay, understood it; so did Penn and the Calverts; so did the Carolinian proprietors, to whom Charles II granted a lordly belt of territory south of Virginia, reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific; and as we have seen, Roger Williams and Clarke understood it perfectly. Indeed, land-speculation may be put down as the first major industry established in colonial America. Professor Sakolski calls attention to the fact that it was flourishing in the South before the commercial importance of either negroes or tobacco was recognized. These two staples came fully into their own about 1670 – tobacco perhaps a little earlier, but not much – and before that, England and Europe had been well covered by a lively propaganda of Southern landholders, advertising for settlers.[9]Click to see.

Mr. Sakolski makes it clear that very few original enterprisers in American rental-values ever got much profit out of their ventures. This is worth remarking here as enforcing the point that what gives rise to economic rent is the presence of a population engaged in a settled exercise of the economic means, or as we commonly put it, “working for a living” – or again, in technical terms, applying labour and capital to natural resources for the production of wealth. It was no doubt a very fine dignified thing for Carteret, Berkeley, and their associate nobility to be the owners of a province as large as the Carolinas, but if no population were settled there, producing wealth by exercise of the economic means, obviously not a foot of it would bear a pennyworth of rental-value, and the proprietors’ chance of exercising the political means would therefore be precisely nil. Proprietors who made the most profitable exercise of the political means have been those – or rather, speaking strictly, the heirs of those – like the Brevoorts, Wendels, Whitneys, Astors, and Goelets, who owned land in an actual or prospective urban centre, and held it as an investment rather than for speculation.

The lure of the political means in America, however, gave rise to a state of mind which may profitably be examined. Under the feudal State, living by the political means was enabled only by the accident of birth, or in some special cases by the accident of personal favour. Persons outside these categories of accident had no chance whatever to live otherwise than by the economic means. No matter how much they may have wished to exercise the political means, or how greatly they may have envied the privileged few who could exercise it, they were unable to do so; the feudal rTgime was strictly one of status. Under the merchant-State, on the contrary, the political means was open to anyone, irrespective of birth or position, who had the sagacity and determination necessary to get at it. In this respect, America appeared as a field of unlimited opportunity. The effect of this was to produce a race of people whose master-concern was to avail themselves of this opportunity. They had but the one spring of action, which was the determination to abandon the economic means as soon as they could, and at any sacrifice of conscience or character, and live by the political means. From the beginning, this determination has been universal, amounting to monomania.[10]Click to see. We need not concern ourselves here with the effect upon the general balance of advantage produced by supplanting the feudal State by the merchant-State; we may observe only that certain virtues and integrities were bred by the regime of status, to which the regime of contract appears to be inimical, even destructive. Vestiges of them persist among peoples who have had a long experience of the regime of status, but in America, which has had no such experience, they do not appear. What the compensations for their absence may be, or whether they may be regarded as adequate, I repeat, need not concern us; we remark only the simple fact that they have not struck root in the constitution of the American character at large, and apparently can not do so.

II

It was said at the time, I believe, that the actual causes of the colonial revolution of 1776 would never be known. The causes assigned by our schoolbooks may be dismissed as trivial; the various partisan and propagandist views of that struggle and its origins may be put down as incompetent. Great evidential value may be attached to the long line of adverse commercial legislation laid down by the British State from 1651 onward, especially to that portion of it which was enacted after the merchant-State established itself firmly in England in consequence of the events of 1688. This legislation included the Navigation Acts, the Trade Acts, acts regulating the colonial currency, the act of 1752 regulating the process of levy and distress, and the procedures leading up to the establishment of the Board of Trade in 1696.[11]Click to see. These directly affected the industrial and commercial interests in the colonies, though just how seriously is perhaps an open question – enough at any rate, beyond doubt, to provoke deep resentment.

Over and above these, however, if the reader will put himself back into the ruling passion of the time, he will at once appreciate the import of two matters which have for some reason escaped the attention of historians. The first of these is the attempt of the British State to limit the exercise of the political means in respect of rental-values.[12]Click to see. In 1763 it forbade the colonists to take up lands lying westward of the source of any river flowing through the Atlantic seaboard. The dead-line thus established ran so as to cut off from preemption about half of Pennsylvania and half of Virginia and everything to the west thereof. This was serious. With the mania for speculation running as high as it did, with the consciousness of opportunity, real or fancied, having become so acute and so general, this ruling affected everybody. One can get some idea of its effect by imagining the state of mind of our people at large if stock-gambling had suddenly been outlawed at the beginning of the last great boom in Wall Street a few years ago.

For by this time the colonists had begun to be faintly aware of the illimitable resources of the country lying westward; they had learned just enough about them to fire their imagination and their avarice to a white heat. The seaboard had been pretty well taken up, the free-holding farmer had been pushed back farther and farther, population was coming in steadily, the maritime towns were growing. Under these conditions, “western lands” had become a centre of attraction. Rental-values depended on population, the population was bound to expand, and the one general direction in which it could expand was westward, where lay an immense and incalculably rich domain waiting for preemption. What could be more natural than that the colonists should itch to get their hands on this territory, and exploit it for themselves alone, and on their own terms, without risk of arbitrary interference by the British State? – and this of necessity meant political independence. It takes no great stretch of imagination to see that anyone in those circumstances would have felt that way, and that colonial resentment against the arbitrary limitation which the edict of 1763 put upon the exercise of the political means must therefore have been great.

The actual state of land-speculation during the colonial period will give a fair idea of the probabilities in the case. Most of it was done on the company-system; a number of adventurers would unite, secure a grant of land, survey it, and then sell it off as speedily as they could. Their aim was a quick turnover; they did not, as a rule, contemplate holding the land, much less settling it – in short, their ventures were a pure gamble in rental-values.[13]Click to see. Among these pre-revolutionary enterprises was the Ohio Company, formed in 1748 with a grant of half a million acres; the Loyal Company, which like the Ohio Company, was composed of Virginians; the Transylvania, the Vandalia, Scioto, Indiana, Wabash, Illinois, Susquehannah, and others whose holdings were smaller.[14]Click to see. It is interesting to observe the names of persons concerned in these undertakings; one can not escape the significance of this connexion in view of their attitude towards the revolution, and their subsequent career as statesmen and patriots. For example, aside from his individual ventures, General Washington was a member of the Ohio Company, and a prime mover in organizing the Mississippi Company. He also conceived the scheme of the Potomac Company, which was designed to raise the rental-value of western holdings by affording an outlet for their produce by canal and portage to the Potomac River, and thence to the seaboard. This enterprise determined the establishment of the national capital in its present most ineligible situation, for the proposed terminus of the canal was at that point. Washington picked up some lots in the city that bears his name, but in common with other early speculators, he did not make much money out of them; they were appraised at about $20,000 when he died.

Patrick Henry was an inveterate and voracious engrosser of land lying beyond the deadline set by the British State; later he was heavily involved in the affairs of one of the notorious Yazoo companies, operating in Georgia. He seems to have been most unscrupulous. His company’s holdings in Georgia, amounting to more than ten million acres, were to be paid for in Georgia scrip, which was much depreciated. Henry bought up all these certificates that he could get his hands on, at ten cents on the dollar, and made a great profit on them by their rise in value when Hamilton put through his measure for having the central government assume the debts they represented. Undoubtedly it was this trait of unrestrained avarice which earned him the dislike of Mr. Jefferson, who said, rather contemptuously, that he was “insatiable in money.”[15]Click to see.

Benjamin Franklin’s thrifty mind turned cordially to the project of the Vandalia Company, and he acted successfully as promoter for it in England in 1766. Timothy Pickering, who was Secretary of State under Washington and John Adams, went on record in 1796 that “all I am now worth was gained by speculations in land.” Silas Deane, emissary of the Continental Congress to France, was interested in the Illinois and Wabash Companies, as was Robert Morris, who managed the revolution’s finances; as was also James Wilson, who became a justice of the Supreme Court and a mighty man in post-revolutionary land-grabbing. Wolcott of Connecticut, and Stiles, president of Yale College, held stock in the Susquehannah Company; so did Peletiah Webster, Ethan Allen, and Jonathan Trumbull, the “Brother Jonathan,” whose name was long a sobriquet for the typical American, and is still sometimes so used. James Duane, the first mayor of New York City, carried on some quite considerable speculative undertakings; and however indisposed one may feel towards entertaining the fact, so did the “Father of the Revolution” himself – Samuel Adams.

A mere common-sense view of the situation would indicate that the British State’s interference with a free exercise of the political means was at least as great an incitement to revolution as its interference, through the Navigation Acts, and the Trade Acts, with a free exercise of the economic means. In the nature of things it would be a greater incitement, both because it affected a more numerous class of persons, and because speculation in land-values represented much easier money. Allied with this is the second matter which seems to me deserving of notice, and which has never been properly reckoned with, as far as I know, in studies of the period.

It would seem the most natural thing in the world for the colonists to perceive that independence would not only give freer access to this one mode of the political means, but that it would also open access to other modes which the colonial status made unavailable. The merchant-State existed in the royal provinces complete in structure, but not in function; it did not give access to all the modes of economic exploitation. The advantages of a State which should be wholly autonomous in this respect must have been clear to the colonists, and must have moved them strongly towards the project of establishing one.

Again it is purely a common-sense view of the circumstances that leads to this conclusion. The merchant-State in England had emerged triumphant from conflict, and the colonists had plenty of chance to see what it could do in the way of distributing the various means of economic exploitation, and its methods of doing it. For instance, certain English concerns were in the carrying trade between England and America, for which other English concerns built ships. Americans could compete in both these lines of business. If they did so, the carrying-charges would be regulated by the terms of this competition; if not, they would be regulated by monopoly, or, in our historic phrase, they could be set as high as the traffic would bear. English carriers and shipbuilders made common cause, approached the State and asked it to intervene, which it did by forbidding the colonists to ship goods on any but English-built and English-operated ships. Since freight-charges are a factor in prices, the effect of this intervention was to enable British shipowners to pocket the difference between monopoly-rates and competitive rates; to enable them, that is, to exploit the consumer by employing the political means.[16]Click to see. Similar interventions were made at the instance of cutlers, nailmakers, hatters, steelmakers, etc.

These interventions took the form of simple prohibition. Another mode of intervention appeared in the customs-duties laid by the British State on foreign sugar and molasses.[17]Click to see. We all now know pretty well, probably, that the primary reason for a tariff is that it enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery.[18]Click to see. All the reasons regularly assigned are debatable; this one is not, hence propagandists and lobbyists never mention it. The colonists were well aware of this reason, and the best evidence that they were aware of it is that long before the Union was established, the merchant-enterprisers and industrialists were ready and waiting to set upon the new-formed administration with an organized demand for a tariff.

It is clear that while in the nature of things the British State’s interventions upon the economic means would stir up great resentment among the interests directly concerned, they would have another effect fully as significant, if not more so, in causing those interests to look favourably on the idea of political independence. They could hardly have helped seeing the positive as well as the negative advantage that would accrue from setting up a State of their own, which they might bend to their own purposes. It takes no great amount of imagination to reconstruct the vision that appeared before them of a merchant-State clothed with full powers of intervention and discrimination, a State which should first and last “help business,” and which should be administered either by mere agents or by persons easily manageable, if not by persons of actual interests like to their own. It is hardly presumable that the colonists generally were not intelligent enough to see this vision, or that they were not resolute enough to risk the chance of realizing it when the time could be made ripe; as it was, the time was ripened almost before it was ready.[19]Click to see. We can discern a distinct line of common purpose uniting the interests of the merchant-enterpriser with those of the actual or potential speculator in rental-values – uniting the Hancocks, Gores, Otises, with the Henrys, Lees, Wolcotts, Trumbulls – and leading directly towards the goal of political independence.

The main conclusion, however, towards which these observations tend, is that one general frame of mind existed among the colonists with reference to the nature and primary function of the State. This frame of mind was not peculiar to them; they shared it with the beneficiaries of the merchant-State in England, and with those of the feudal State as far back as the State’s history can be traced. Voltaire, surveying the debris of the feudal State, said that in essence the State is “a device for taking money out of one set of pockets and putting it into another.” The beneficiaries of the feudal State had precisely this view, and they bequeathed it unchanged and unmodified to the actual and potential beneficiaries of the merchant-State. The colonists regarded the State as primarily an instrument whereby one might help oneself and hurt others; that is to say, first and foremost they regarded it as the organization of the political means. No other view of the State was ever held in colonial America. Romance and poetry were brought to bear on the subject in the customary way; glamorous myths about it were propagated with the customary intent; but when all came to all, nowhere in colonial America were actual practical relations with the State ever determined by any other view than this.[20]Click to see.

III

The charter of the American revolution was the Declaration of Independence, which took its stand on the double thesis of “unalienable” natural rights and popular sovereignty. We have seen that these doctrines were theoretically, or as politicians say, “in principle,” congenial to the spirit of the English merchant-enterpriser, and we may see that in the nature of things they would be even more agreeable to the spirit of all classes in American society. A thin and scattered population with a whole wide world before it, with a vast territory full of rich resources which anyone might take a hand at preempting and exploiting, would be strongly on the side of natural rights, as the colonists were from the beginning; and political independence would confirm it in that position. These circumstances would stiffen the American merchant-enterpriser, agrarian, forestaller and industrialist alike in a jealous, uncompromising, and assertive economic individualism.

So also with the sister doctrine of popular sovereignty. The colonists had been through a long and vexatious experience of State interventions which limited their use of both the political and economic means. They had also been given plenty of opportunity to see how these interventions had been managed, and how the interested English economic groups which did the managing had profited at their expense. Hence there was no place in their minds for any political theory that disallowed the right of individual self-expression in politics. As their situation tended to make them natural-born economic individualists, so also it tended to make them natural-born republicans.

Thus the preamble of the Declaration hit the mark of a cordial unanimity. Its two leading doctrines could easily be interpreted as justifying an unlimited economic pseudo-individualism on the part of the State’s beneficiaries, and a judiciously managed exercise of political self-expression by the electorate. Whether or not this were a more free-and-easy interpretation than a strict construction of the doctrines will bear, no doubt it was in effect the interpretation quite commonly put upon them. American history abounds in instances where great principles have, in their common understanding and practical application, been narrowed down to the service of very paltry ends. The preamble, nevertheless, did reflect a general state of mind. However incompetent the understanding of its doctrines may have been, and however interested the motives which prompted that understanding, the general spirit of the people was in their favour.

There was complete unanimity also regarding the nature of the new and independent political institution which the Declaration contemplated as within “the right of the people” to set up. There was a great and memorable dissension about its form, but none about its nature. It should be in essence the mere continuator of the merchant-State already existing. There was no idea of setting up government, the purely social institution which should have no other object than, as the Declaration put it, to secure the natural rights of the individual; or as Paine put it, which should contemplate nothing beyond the maintenance of freedom and security – the institution which should make no positive interventions of any kind upon the individual, but should confine itself exclusively to such negative interventions as the maintenance of freedom and security might indicate. The idea was to perpetuate an institution of another character entirely, the State, the organization of the political means; and this was accordingly done.

There is no disparagement implied in this observation; for, all questions of motive aside, nothing else was to be expected. No one knew any other kind of political organization. The causes of American complaint were conceived of as due only to interested and culpable mal-administration, not to the essentially anti-social nature of the institution administered. Dissatisfaction was directed against administrators, not against the institution itself. Violent dislike of the form of the institution – the monarchical form – was engendered, but no distrust or suspicion of its nature. The character of the State had never been subjected to scrutiny; the coöperation of the Zeitgeist was needed for that, and it was not yet to be had.[21]Click to see. One may see here a parallel with the revolutionary movements against the Church in the sixteenth century – and indeed with revolutionary movements in general. They are incited by abuses and misfeasances, more or less specific and always secondary, and are carried on with no idea beyond getting them rectified or avenged, usually by the sacrifice of conspicuous scapegoats. The philosophy of the institution that gives play to these misfeasances is never examined, and hence they recur promptly under another form or other auspices,[22]Click to see. or else their place is taken by others which are in character precisely like them. Thus the notorious failure of reforming and revolutionary movements in the long-run may as a rule be found due to their incorrigible superficiality.

One mind, indeed, came within reaching distance of the fundamentals of the matter, not by employing the historical method, but by a homespun kind of reasoning, aided by a sound and sensitive instinct. The common view of Mr. Jefferson as a doctrinaire believer in the stark principle of “states rights” is most incompetent and misleading. He believed in states’ rights, assuredly, but he went much farther; states’ rights were only an incident in his general system of political organization. He believed that the ultimate political unit, the repository and source of political authority and initiative, should be the smallest unit; not the federal unit, state unit or county unit, but the township, or, as he called it, the “ward.” The township, and the township only, should determine the delegation of power upwards to the county, the state, and the federal units. His system of extreme decentralization is interesting and perhaps worth a moment’s examination, because if the idea of the State is ever displaced by the idea of government, it seems probable that the practical expression of this idea would come out very nearly in that form.[23]Click to see. There is probably no need to say that the consideration of such a displacement involves a long look ahead, and over a field of view that is cluttered with the debris of a most discouraging number, not of nations alone, but of whole civilizations. Nevertheless it is interesting to remind ourselves that more than a hundred and fifty years ago, one American succeeded in getting below the surface of things, and that he probably to some degree anticipated the judgment of an immeasurably distant future.

In February, 1816, Mr. Jefferson wrote a letter to Joseph C. Cabell, in which he expounded the philosophy behind his system of political organization. What is it, he asks, that has “destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian senate.” The secret of freedom will be found in the individual “making himself the depository of the powers respecting himself, so far as he is competent to them, and delegating only what is beyond his competence, by a synthetical process, to higher and higher orders of functionaries, so as to trust fewer and fewer powers in proportion as the trustees become more and more oligarchical.” This idea rests on accurate observation, for we are all aware that not only the wisdom of the ordinary man, but also his interest and sentiment, have a very short radius of operation; they can not be stretched over an area of much more than township-size; and it is the acme of absurdity to suppose that any man or any body of men can arbitrarily exercise their wisdom, interest and sentiment over a state-wide or nation-wide area with any kind of success. Therefore the principle must hold that the larger the area of exercise, the fewer and more clearly defined should be the functions exercised. Moreover, “by placing under everyone what his own eye may superintend,” there is erected the surest safeguard against usurpation of function. “Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic, or of some of the higher ones, and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day; . . . he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power wrested from him by a Cæsar or a Bonaparte.”

No such idea of popular sovereignty, however, appeared in the political organization that was set up in 1789 – far from it. In devising their structure, the American architects followed certain specifications laid down by Harington, Locke and Adam Smith, which might be regarded as a sort of official digest of politics under the merchant-State; indeed, if one wished to be perhaps a little inurbane in describing them – though not actually unjust – one might say that they are the merchant-State’s defence-mechanism.[24]Click to see. Harington laid down the all-important principle that the basis of politics is economic – that power follows property. Since he was arguing against the feudal concept, he laid stress specifically upon landed property. He was of course too early to perceive the bearings of the State-system of land-tenure upon industrial exploitation, and neither he nor Locke perceived any natural distinction to be drawn between law-made property and labour-made property; nor yet did Smith perceive this clearly, though he seems to have had occasional indistinct glimpses of it. According to Harington’s theory of economic determinism, the realization of popular sovereignty is a simple matter. Since political power proceeds from land-ownership, a simple diffusion of land-ownership is all that is needed to insure a satisfactory distribution of power.[25]Click to see. If everybody owns, then everybody rules. “If the people hold three parts in four of the territory,” Harington says, “it is plain there can neither be any single person nor nobility able to dispute the government with them. In this case therefore, except force be interposed, they govern themselves.”

Locke, writing a half-century later, when the revolution of 1688 was over, concerned himself more particularly with the State’s positive confiscatory interventions upon other modes of property-ownership. These had long been frequent and vexatious, and under the Stuarts they had amounted to unconscionable highwaymanry. Locke’s idea therefore was to copper-rivet such a doctrine of the sacredness of property as would forever put a stop to this sort of thing. Hence he laid it down that the first business of the State is to maintain the absolute inviolability of general property-rights; the State itself might not violate them, because in so doing it would act against its own primary function. Thus in Locke’s view, the rights of property took precedence even over those of life and liberty; and if ever it came to the pinch, the State must make its choice accordingly.[26]Click to see.

Thus while the American architects assented “in principle” to the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty, and found it in a general way highly congenial as a sort of voucher for their self-esteem, their practical interpretation of it left it pretty well hamstrung. They were not especially concerned with consistency; their practical interest in this philosophy stopped short at the point which we have already noted, of its presumptive justification of a ruthless economic pseudo-individualism, and an exercise of political self-expression by the general electorate which should be so managed as to be, in all essential respects, futile. In this they took precise pattern by the English Whig exponents and practitioners of this philosophy. Locke himself, whom we have seen putting the natural rights of property so high above those of life and liberty, was equally discriminating in his view of popular sovereignty. He was no believer in what he called “a numerous democracy,” and did not contemplate a political organization that should countenance anything of the kind.[27]Click to see. The sort of organization he had in mind is reflected in the extraordinary constitution he devised for the royal province of Carolina, which established a basic order of politically inarticulate serfdom. Such an organization as this represented about the best, in a practical way, that the British merchant-State was ever able to do for the doctrine of popular sovereignty.

It was also about the best that the American counterpart of the British merchant-State could do. The sum of the matter is that while the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty afforded a set of principles upon which all interests could unite, and practically all did unite, with the aim of securing political independence, it did not afford a satisfactory set of principles on which to found the new American State. When political independence was secured, the stark doctrine of the Declaration went into abeyance, with only a distorted simulacrum of its principles surviving. The rights of life and liberty were recognized by a mere constitutional formality left open to eviscerating interpretations, or, where these were for any reason deemed superfluous, to simple executive disregard; and all consideration of the rights attending “the pursuit of happiness” was narrowed down to a plenary acceptance of Locke’s doctrine of the predminent rights of property, with law-made property on an equal footing with labour-made property. As for popular sovereignty, the new State had to be republican in form, for no other would suit the general temper of the people; and hence its peculiar task was to preserve the appearance of actual republicanism without the reality. To do this, it took over the apparatus which we have seen the English merchant-State adopting when confronted with a like task – the apparatus of a representative or parliamentary system. Moreover, it improved upon the British model of this apparatus by adding three auxiliary devices which time has proved most effective. These were, first, the device of the fixed term, which regulates the administration of our system by astronomical rather than political considerations – by the motion of the earth around the sun rather than by political exigency; second, the device of judicial review and interpretation, which, as we have already observed, is a process whereby anything may be made to mean anything; third, the device of requiring legislators to reside in the district they represent, which puts the highest conceivable premium upon pliancy and venality, and is therefore the best mechanism for rapidly building up an immense body of patronage. It may be perceived at once that all these devices tend of themselves to work smoothly and harmoniously towards a great centralization of State power, and that their working in this direction may be indefinitely accelerated with the utmost economy of effort.

As well as one can put a date to such an event, the surrender at Yorktown marks the sudden and complete disappearance of the Declaration’s doctrine from the political consciousness of America. Mr. Jefferson resided in Paris as minister to France from 1784 to 1789. As the time for his return to America drew near, he wrote Colonel Humphreys that he hoped soon “to possess myself anew, by conversation with my countrymen, of their spirit and ideas. I know only the Americans of the year 1784. They tell me this is to be much a stranger to those of 1789.” So indeed he found it. On arriving in New York and resuming his place in the social life of the country, he was greatly depressed by the discovery that the principles of the Declaration had gone wholly by the board. No one spoke of natural rights and popular sovereignty; it would seem actually that no one had ever heard of them. On the contrary, everyone was talking about the pressing need of a strong central coercive authority, able to check the incursions which “the democratic spirit” was likely to incite upon “the men of principle and property.”[28]Click to see. Mr. Jefferson wrote despondently of the contrast of all this with the sort of thing he had been hearing in the France which he had just left “in the first year of her revolution, in the fervour of natural rights and zeal for reformation.” In the process of possessing himself anew of the spirit and ideas of his countrymen, he said, “I can not describe the wonder and mortification with which the table-conversations filled me.” Clearly, though the Declaration might have been the charter of American independence, it was in no sense the charter of the new American State.

Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

Chapter 4 Footnotes

[1]Click to return.

The economic rent of the Trinity Church estate in New York City, for instance, would be as high as it is now, even if the holders had never done a stroke of work on the property. Landowners who are holding a property “for a rise” usually leave it idle, or improve it only to the extent necessary to clear its taxes; the type of building commonly called a “taxpayer” is a familiar sight everywhere. Twenty-five years ago a member of the New York City Tax Commission told me that by careful estimate there was almost enough vacant land within the city limits to feed the population, assuming that all of it were arable and put under intensive cultivation!

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As a technical term in economics, land includes all natural resources, earth, air, water, sunshine, timber and minerals in situ, etc. Failure to understand this use of the term has seriously misled some writers, notably Count Tolstoy.

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Hence there is actually no such thing as a “labour-problem,” for no encroachment on the rights of either labour or capital can possibly take place until all natural resources within reach have been preempted. What we call the “problem of the unemployed” is in no sense a problem, but a direct consequence of State-created monopoly.

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For fairly obvious reasons they have no place in the conventional courses that are followed in our schools and colleges.

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The French school of physiocrats, led by Quesnay, du Pont de Nemours, Turg(t, Gournay and le Trosne – usually regarded as the founders of the science of political economy – broached the idea of destroying this system by the confiscation of economic rent; and this idea was worked out in detail some years ago in America by Henry George. None of these writers, however, seemed to be aware of the effect that their plan would produce upon the State itself. Collectivism, on the other hand, proposes immeasurably to strengthen and entrench the State by confiscation of the use-value as well as the rental-value of land, doing away with private proprietorship in either.

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[6]Click to return.

If one were not aware of the highly explosive character of this subject, it would be almost incredible that until three years ago, no one has ever presumed to write a history of land-speculation in America. In 1932, the firm of Harpers published an excellent work by Professor Sakolski, under the frivolous catch-penny title of The Great American Land Bubble. I do not believe that anyone can have a competent understanding of our history or of the character of our people, without hard study of this book. It does not pretend to be more than a preliminary approach to the subject, a sort of path-breaker for the exhaustive treatise which someone, preferably Professor Sakolski himself, should be undertaking; but for what it is, nothing could be better. I am making liberal use of it throughout this section.

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Regard for this insignia-value or token-value of land has shown an interesting persistence. The rise of the merchant-State, supplanting the rTgime of status by the rTgime of contract, opened the way for men of all sorts and conditions to climb into the exploiting class; and the new recruits have usually shown a hankering for the old distinguishing sign of their having done so, even though the rise in rental-values has made the gratification of this desire progressively costly.

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[8]Click to return.

If our geographical development had been determined in a natural way, by the demands of use instead of the demands of speculation, our western frontier would not yet be anywhere near the Mississippi River. Rhode Island is the most thickly-populated member of the Union, yet one may drive from one end of it to the other on one of its “through” highways, and see hardly a sign of human occupancy. All discussions of “over-population” from Malthus down, are based on the premise of legal occupancy instead of actual occupancy, and are therefore utterly incompetent and worthless. Oppenheimer’s calculation made in 1912, to which I have already referred, shows that if legal occupation were abolished, every family of five persons could possess nearly twenty acres of land, and still leave about two-thirds of the planet unoccupied. Henry George’s examination of Malthus’s theory of population is well known, or at least, easily available. It is perhaps worth mention in passing that exaggerated rental-values are responsible for the perennial troubles of the American single-crop farmer. Curiously, one finds this fact set forth in the report of a farm-survey, published by the Department of Agriculture about fifty years ago.

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[9]Click to return.

Mr. Chinard, professor in the Faculty of Literature at Johns Hopkins, has lately published a translation of a little book, hardly more than a pamphlet, written in 1686 by the Huguenot refugee Durand, giving a description of Virginia for the information of his fellow-exiles. It strikes a modern reader as being very favourable to Virginia, and one is amused to read that the landholders who had entertained Durand with an eye to business, thought he had not laid it on half thick enough, and were much disgusted. The book is delightfully interesting, and well worth owning.

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It was the ground of Chevalier’s observation that Americans had “the morale of an army on the march,” and of his equally notable observations on the supreme rule of expediency in America.

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For a most admirable discussion of these measures and their consequences, cf. Beard, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 191-220.

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In principle, this had been done before; for example, some of the early royal land-grants reserved mineral-rights and timber-rights to the Crown. The Dutch State reserved the right to furs and pelts. Actually, however, these restrictions did not amount to much, and were not felt as a general grievance, for these resources had been but little explored.

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There were a few exceptions, but not many; notably in the case of the Wadsworth properties in Western New York, which were held as an investment and leased out on a rental-basis. In one, at least, of General Washington’s operations, it appears that he also had this method in view. In 1773 he published an advertisement in a Baltimore newspaper, stating that he had secured a grant of about twenty thousand acres on the Ohio and Kanawha rivers, which he proposed to open to settlers on a rental-basis.

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Sakolski, op. cit., ch. 1.

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[15]Click to return.

It is an odd fact that among the most eminent names of the period, almost the only ones unconnected with land-grabbing or land-jobbing, are those of the two great antagonists, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Mr. Jefferson had a gentleman’s distaste for profiting by any form of the political means; he never even went so far as to patent one of his many useful inventions. Hamilton seems to have cared nothing for money. His measures made many rich, but he never sought anything from them for himself. In general, he appears to have had few scruples, yet amidst the riot of greed and rascality which he did most to promote, he walked worthily. Even his professional fees as a lawyer were absurdly small, and he remained quite poor all his life.

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Raw colonial exports were processed in England, and re-dxported to the colonies at prices enhanced in this way, thus making the political means effective on the colonists both going and coming.

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[17]Click to return.

Beard, op. cit., vol. I, p. 195, cites the observation current in England at the time, that seventy-three members of the Parliament that imposed this tariff were interested in West Indian sugar-plantations.

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[18]Click to return.

It must be observed, however, that free trade is impracticable so long as land is kept out of free competition with industry in the labour-market. Discussions of the rival policies of free trade and protection invariably leave this limitation out of account, and are therefore nugatory. Holland and England, commonly spoken of as free-trade countries, were never really such; they had only so much freedom of trade as was consistent with their special economic requirements. American free-traders of the last century, such as Sumner and Godkin, were not really free-traders; they were never able – or willing – to entertain the crucial question why, if free trade is a good thing, the conditions of labour were no better in free-trade England than, for instance, in protectionist Germany, but were in fact worse. The answer is, of course, that England had no unpreempted land to absorb displaced labour, or to stand in continuous competition with industry for labour.

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[19]Click to return.

The immense amount of labour involved in getting the revolution going, and keeping it going, is not as yet exactly a commonplace of American history, but it has begun to be pretty well understood, and the various myths about it have been exploded by the researches of disinterested historians.

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[20]Click to return.

The influence of this view upon the rise of nationalism and the maintenance of the national spirit in the modern world, now that the merchant-State has so generally superseded the feudal State, may be perceived at once. I do not think it has ever been thoroughly discussed, or that the sentiment of patriotism has ever been thoroughly examined for traces of this view, though one might suppose that such a work would be extremely useful.

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[21]Click to return.

Even now its coöperation seems not to have got very far in English and American professional circles. The latest English exponent of the State, Professor Laski, draws the same set of elaborate distinctions between the State and officialdom that one would look for if he had been writing a hundred and fifty years ago. He appears to regard the State as essentially a social institution, though his observations on this point are by no means clear. Since his conclusions tend towards collectivism, however, the inference seems admissible.

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As, for example, when one political party is turned out of office, and another put in.

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[23]Click to return.

In fact, the only modification of it that one can foresee as necessary is that the smallest unit should reserve the taxing-power strictly to itself. The larger units should have no power whatever of direct or indirect taxation, but should present their requirements to the townships, to be met by quota. This would tend to reduce the organizations of the larger units to skeleton form, and would operate strongly against their assuming any functions but those assigned them, which under a strictly governmental rTgime would be very few – for the federal unit, indeed, extremely few. It is interesting to imagine the suppression of every bureaucratic activity in Washington today that has to do with the maintenance and administration of the political means, and see how little would be left. If the State were superseded by government, probably every federal activity could be housed in the Senate Office Building – quite possibly with room to spare.

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[24]Click to return.

Harington published the Oceana in 1656. Locke’s political treatises were published in 1690. Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776.

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[25]Click to return.

This theory, with its corollary that democracy is primarily an economic rather than a political status, is extremely modern. The Physiocrats in France, and Henry George in America, modified Harington’s practical proposals by showing that the same results could be obtained by the more convenient method of a local confiscation of economic rent.

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[26]Click to return.

Locke held that in time of war it was competent for the State to conscript the lives and liberties of its subjects, but not their property. It is interesting to remark the persistence of this view in the practice of the merchant-State at the present time. In the last great collision of competing interests among merchant-States, twenty years ago, the State everywhere intervened at wholesale upon the rights of life and liberty, but was very circumspect towards the rights of property. Since the principle of absolutism was introduced into our constitution by the income-tax amendment, several attempts have been made to reduce the rights of property, in time of war, to an approximately equal footing with those of life and liberty; but so far, without success.

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[27]Click to return.

It is worth going through the literature of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century to see how the words “democracy” and “democrat” appear exclusively as terms of contumely and reprehension. They served this purpose for a long time both in England and America, much as the terms “bolshevism” and “bolshevist” serve us now. They were subsequently taken over to become what Bentham called “impostor-terms,” in behalf of the existing economic and political order, as synonymous with a purely nominal republicanism. They are now used regularly in this way to describe the political system of the United States, even by persons who should know better – even, curiously, by persons like Bertrand Russell and Mr. Laski, who have little sympathy with the existing order. One sometimes wonders how our revolutionary forefathers would take it if they could hear some flatulent political thimblerigger charge them with having founded “the great and glorious democracy of the West.”

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[28]Click to return.

This curious collocation of attributes belongs to General Henry Knox, Washington’s secretary of war, and a busy speculator in land-values. He used it in a letter to Washington, on the occasion of Shays’s Rebellion in 1786, in which he made an agonized plea for a strong federal army. In the literature of the period, it is interesting to observe how regularly a moral superiority is associated with the possession of property.

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Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

CHAPTER 5

I

IT IS a commonplace that the persistence of an institution is due solely to the state of mind that prevails towards it, the set of terms in which men habitually think about it. So long, and only so long, as those terms are favourable, the institution lives and maintains its power; and when for any reason men generally cease thinking in those terms, it weakens and becomes inert. At one time, a certain set of terms regarding man’s place in nature gave organized Christianity the power largely to control men’s consciences and direct their conduct; and this power has dwindled to the point of disappearance, for no other reason than that men generally stopped thinking in those terms. The persistence of our unstable and iniquitous economic system is not due to the power of accumulated capital, the force of propaganda, or to any force or combination of forces commonly alleged as its cause. It is due solely to a certain set of terms in which men think of the opportunity to work; they regard this opportunity as something to be given. Nowhere is there any other idea about it than that the opportunity to apply labour and capital to natural resources for the production of wealth is not in any sense a right, but a concession.[1]Click to see. This is all that keeps our system alive. When men cease to think in those terms, the system will disappear, and not before.

It seems pretty clear that changes in the terms of thought affecting an institution are but little advanced by direct means. They are brought about in obscure and circuitous ways, and assisted by trains of circumstance which before the fact would appear quite unrelated, and their erosive or solvent action is therefore quite unpredictable. A direct drive at effecting these changes comes as a rule to nothing, or more often than not turns out to be retarding. They are so largely the work of those unimpassioned and imperturbable agencies for which Prince de Bismarck had such vast respect – he called them the imponderabilia – that any effort which disregards them, or thrusts them violently aside, will in the long-run find them stepping in to abort its fruit.

Thus it is that what we are attempting to do in this rapid survey of the historical progress of certain ideas, is to trace the genesis of an attitude of mind, a set of terms in which now practically everyone thinks of the State; and then to consider the conclusions towards which this psychical phenomenon unmistakably points. Instead of recognizing the State as “the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men,” the run of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as a final and indispensable entity, but also as, in the main, beneficent. The mass-man, ignorant of its history, regards its character and intentions as social rather than anti-social; and in that faith he is willing to put at its disposal an indefinite credit of knavery, mendacity and chicane, upon which its administrators may draw at will. Instead of looking upon the State’s progressive absorption of social power with the repugnance and resentment that he would naturally feel towards the activities of a professional-criminal organization, he tends rather to encourage and glorify it, in the belief that he is somehow identified with the State, and that therefore, in consenting to its indefinite aggrandizement, he consents to something in which he has a share – he is, pro tanto, aggrandizing himself. Professor Ortega y Gasset analyzes this state of mind extremely well. The mass-man, he says, confronting the phenomenon of the State,

“sees it, admires it, knows that there it is. . . . Furthermore, the mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem, presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. . . . When the mass suffers any ill-fortune, or simply feels some strong appetite, its great temptation is that permanent sure possibility of obtaining everything, without effort, struggle, doubt, or risk, merely by touching a button and setting the mighty machine in motion.”

It is the genesis of this attitude, this state of mind, and the conclusions which inexorably follow from its predominance, that we are attempting to get at through our present survey. These conclusions may perhaps be briefly forecast here, in order that the reader who is for any reason indisposed to entertain them may take warning of them at this point, and close the book.

The unquestioning, determined, even truculent maintenance of the attitude which Professor Ortega y Gasset so admirably describes, is obviously the life and strength of the State; and obviously too, it is now so inveterate and so widespread – one may freely call it universal – that no direct effort could overcome its inveteracy or modify it, and least of all hope to enlighten it. This attitude can only be sapped and mined by uncountable generations of experience, in a course marked by recurrent calamity of a most appalling character. When once the predominance of this attitude in any given civilization has become inveterate, as so plainly it has become in the civilization of America, all that can be done is to leave it to work its own way out to its appointed end. The philosophic historian may content himself with pointing out and clearly elucidating its consequences, as Professor Ortega y Gasset has done, aware that after this there is no more that one can do.

Our Enemy, The State
by Albert J. Nock – 1935

Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

Our Enemy, The State
by Albert J. Nock – 1935

His Classic Critique Distinguishing ‘Government’ from the ‘STATE’.

This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention, the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State; that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long-run sustains, nourishes and impels human destinies. — Jose Ortega y Gasset, 1922.

It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men. — Henry L. Mencken, 1926.

When OUR ENEMY, THE STATE appeared in 1935, its literary merit rather than its philosophic content attracted attention to it. The times were not ripe for an acceptance of its predictions, still less for the argument on which these predictions were based. Faith in traditional frontier individualism had not yet been shaken by the course of events. Against this faith the argument that the same economic forces which in all times and in all nations drive toward the ascendancy of political power at the expense of social power were in operation here made little headway. That is, the feeling that “it cannot happen here” was too difficult a hurdle for the book to overcome.

By the time the first edition had run out, the development of public affairs gave the argument of the book ample testimony. In less than a decade it was evident to many Americans that their country is not immune from the philosophy which had captured European thinking. The times were proving Mr. Nock’s thesis, and by irresistable word-of-mouth advertising a demand for the book began to manifest itself just when it was no longer available. And the plates had been put to war purposes.

In 1943 he had a second edition in mind. I talked with him several times about it, urging him to elaborate on the economic ideas, since these, it seemed to me, were inadequately developed for the reader with a limited knowledge of political economy. He agreed that this ought to be done, but in a separate book, or in a second part of his book, and suggested that I try my hand at it. Nothing came of the matter because of the war. He died on August 19, 1945.

This volume is an exact duplication of the first edition. He intended to make some slight changes, principally, as he told me, in the substitution of current illustrations for those which might carry less weight with the younger reader. As for the sequel stressing economics, this will have to be done. At any rate, OUR ENEMY THE STATE needs no support.

Frank Chodorov
New York City, May 28th, 1946

Our Enemy, The State by Albert J. Nock – 1935

CHAPTER 1

[It must be remembered that Mr. Nock was writing this shortly after the Coup d'état of Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats - What he saw happening HAS HAPPENED! - We are very much closer as we enter the 21st Century to a Dictatorial Socialist State.]

“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance —- that principle is contempt prior to investigation.” — Herbert Spencer

I

IF WE look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can discern one fundamental fact, namely: a great redistribution of power between society and the State. This is the fact that interests the student of civilization. He has only a secondary or derived interest in matters like price-fixing, wage-fixing, inflation, political banking, “agricultural adjustment,” and similar items of State policy that fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these can be run up under one head. They have an immediate and temporary importance, and for this reason they monopolize public attention, but they all come to the same thing; which is, an increase of State power and a corresponding decrease of social power.

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power. There is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.

Moreover, it follows that with any exercise of State power, not only the exercise of social power in the same direction, but the disposition to exercise it in that direction, tends to dwindle. Mayor Gaynor astonished the whole of New York when he pointed out to a correspondent who had been complaining about the inefficiency of the police, that any citizen has the right to arrest a malefactor and bring him before a magistrate. “The law of England and of this country,” he wrote, “has been very careful to confer no more right in that respect upon policemen and constables than it confers on every citizen.” State exercise of that right through a police force had gone on so steadily that not only were citizens indisposed to exercise it, but probably not one in ten thousand knew he had it.

Heretofore in this country sudden crises of misfortune have been met by a mobilization of social power. In fact (except for certain institutional enterprises like the home for the aged, the lunatic-asylum, city-hospital and county-poorhouse) destitution, unemployment, “depression”and similar ills, have been no concern of the State, but have been relieved by the application of social power. Under Mr. Roosevelt, however, the State assumed this function, publicly announcing the doctrine, brand-new in our history, that the State owes its citizens a living. Students of politics, of course, saw in this merely an astute proposal for a prodigious enhancement of State power; merely what, as long ago as 1794, James Madison called “the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government”; and the passage of time has proved that they were right. The effect of this upon the balance between State power and social power is clear, and also its effect of a general indoctrination with the idea that an exercise of social power upon such matters is no longer called for.

It is largely in this way that the progressive conversion of social power into State power becomes acceptable and gets itself accepted.[1]Click to see. When the Johnstown flood occurred, social power was immediately mobilized and applied with intelligence and vigour. Its abundance, measured by money alone, was so great that when everything was finally put in order, something like a million dollars remained. If such a catastrophe happened now, not only is social power perhaps too depleted for the like exercise, but the general instinct would be to let the State see to it. Not only has social power atrophied to that extent, but the disposition to exercise it in that particular direction has atrophied with it. If the State has made such matters its business, and has confiscated the social power necessary to deal with them, why, let it deal with them. We can get some kind of rough measure of this general atrophy by our own disposition when approached by a beggar. Two years ago we might have been moved to give him something; today we are moved to refer him to the State’s relief-agency. The State has said to society, you are either not exercising enough power to meet the emergency, or are exercising it in what I think is an incompetent way, so I shall confiscate your power, and exercise it to suit myself. Hence when a beggar asks us for a quarter, our instinct is to say that the State has already confiscated our quarter for his benefit, and he should go to the State about it.

Every positive intervention that the State makes upon industry and commerce has a similar effect. When the State intervenes to fix wages or prices, or to prescribe the conditions of competition, it virtually tells the enterpriser that he is not exercising social power in the right way, and therefore it proposes to confiscate his power and exercise it according to the State’s own judgment of what is best. Hence the enterpriser’s instinct is to let the State look after the consequences. As a simple illustration of this, a manufacturer of a highly specialized type of textiles was saying to me the other day that he had kept his mill going at a loss for five years because he did not want to turn his workpeople on the street in such hard times, but now that the State had stepped in to tell him how he must run his business, the State might jolly well take the responsibility.

The process of converting social power into State power may perhaps be seen at its simplest in cases where the State’s intervention is directly competitive. The accumulation of State power in various countries has been so accelerated and diversified within the last twenty years that we now see the State functioning as telegraphist, telephonist, match-peddler, radio-operator, cannon-founder, railway-builder and owner, railway-operator, wholesale and retail tobacconist, shipbuilder and owner, chief chemist, harbour-maker and dockbuilder, housebuilder, chief educator, newspaper-proprietor, food-purveyor, dealer in insurance, and so on through a long list.[2]Click to see.

It is obvious that private forms of these enterprises must tend to dwindle in proportion as the energy of the State’s encroachments on them increases, for the competition of social power with State power is always disadvantaged, since the State can arrange the terms of competition to suit itself, even to the point of outlawing any exercise of social power whatever in the premises; in other words, giving itself a monopoly. Instances of this expedient are common; the one we are probably best acquainted with is the State’s monopoly of letter-carrying. Social power is estopped by sheer fiat from application to this form of enterprise, notwithstanding it could carry it on far cheaper, and, in this country at least, far better. The advantages of this monopoly in promoting the State’s interests are peculiar. No other, probably, could secure so large and well-distributed a volume of patronage, under the guise of a public service in constant use by so large a number of people; it plants a lieutenant of the State at every country-crossroad. It is by no means a pure coincidence that an administration’s chief almoner and whip-at-large is so regularly appointed Postmaster-general.

Thus the State “turns every contingency into a resource” for accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power; and with this it develops a habit of acquiescence in the people. New generations appear, each temperamentally adjusted – or as I believe our American glossary now has it, “conditioned” – to new increments of State power, and they tend to take the process of continuous accumulation as quite in order. All the State’s institutional voices unite in confirming this tendency; they unite in exhibiting the progressive conversion of social power into State power as something not only quite in order, but even as wholesome and necessary for the public good.

II

In the United States at the present time, the principal indexes of the increase of State power are three in number. First, the point to which the centralization of State authority has been carried. Practically all the sovereign rights and powers of the smaller political units – all of them that are significant enough to be worth absorbing – have been absorbed by the federal unit; nor is this all. State power has not only been thus concentrated at Washington, but it has been so far concentrated into the hands of the Executive that the existing regime is a regime of personal government. It is nominally republican, but actually monocratic; a curious anomaly, but highly characteristic of a people little gifted with intellectual integrity. Personal government is not exercised here in the same ways as in Italy, Russia or Germany, for there is as yet no State interest to be served by so doing, but rather the contrary; while in those countries there is. But personal government is always personal government; the mode of its exercise is a matter of immediate political expediency, and is determined entirely by circumstances.

This regime was established by a coup d’état of a new and unusual kind, practicable only in a rich country. It was effected, not by violence, like Louis-Napolèon’s, or by terrorism, like Mussolini’s, but by purchase. It therefore presents what might be called an American variant of the coup d’état.[3]Click to see.

Our national legislature was not suppressed by force of arms, like the French Assembly in 1851, but was bought out of its functions with public money; and as appeared most conspicuously in the elections of November, 1934, the consolidation of the coup d’état was effected by the same means; the corresponding functions in the smaller units were reduced under the personal control of the Executive.[4]Click to see.

This is a most remarkable phenomenon; possibly nothing quite like it ever took place; and its character and implications deserve the most careful attention.

A second index is supplied by the prodigious extension of the bureaucratic principle that is now observable. This is attested prima facie by the number of new boards, bureaux and commissions set up at Washington in the last two years. They are reported as representing something like 90,000 new employees appointed outside the civil service, and the total of the federal pay-roll in Washington is reported as something over three million dollars per month.[5]Click to see.

This, however, is relatively a small matter. The pressure of centralization has tended powerfully to convert every official and every political aspirant in the smaller units into a venal and complaisant agent of the federal bureaucracy. This presents an interesting parallel with the state of things prevailing in the Roman Empire in the last days of the Flavian dynasty, and afterwards. The rights and practices of local self-government, which were formerly very considerable in the provinces and much more so in the municipalities, were lost by surrender rather than by suppression. The imperial bureaucracy, which up to the second century was comparatively a modest affair, grew rapidly to great size, and local politicians were quick to see the advantage of being on terms with it. They came to Rome with their hats in their hands, as governors, Congressional aspirants and such-like now go to Washington. Their eyes and thoughts were constantly fixed on Rome, because recognition and preferment lay that way; and in their incorrigible sycophancy they became, as Plutarch says, like hypochondriacs who dare not eat or take a bath without consulting their physician.

A third index is seen in the erection of poverty and mendicancy into a permanent political asset. Two years ago, many of our people were in hard straits; to some extent, no doubt, through no fault of their own, though it is now clear that in the popular view of their case, as well as in the political view, the line between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor was not distinctly drawn. Popular feeling ran high at the time, and the prevailing wretchedness was regarded with undiscriminating emotion, as evidence of some general wrong done upon its victims by society at large, rather than as the natural penalty of greed, folly or actual misdoings; which in large part it was. The State, always instinctively “turning every contingency into a resource” for accelerating the conversion of social power into State power, was quick to take advantage of this state of mind. All that was needed to organize these unfortunates into an invaluable political property was to declare the doctrine that the State owes all its citizens a living; and this was accordingly done. It immediately precipitated an enormous mass of subsidized voting-power, an enormous resource for strengthening the State at the expense of society.[6]Click to see.

III

There is an impression that the enhancement of State power which has taken place since 1932 is provisional and temporary, that the corresponding depletion of social power is by way of a kind of emergency-loan, and therefore is not to be scrutinized too closely. There is every probability that this belief is devoid of foundation. No doubt our present regime will be modified in one way and another; indeed, it must be, for the process of consolidation itself requires it. But any essential change would be quite unhistorical, quite without precedent, and is therefore most unlikely; and by an essential change, I mean one that will tend to redistribute actual power between the State and society.[7]Click to see.

In the nature of things, there is no reason why such a change should take place, and every reason why it should not. We shall see various apparent recessions, apparent compromises, but the one thing we may be quite sure of is that none of these will tend to diminish actual State power.

For example, we shall no doubt shortly see the great pressure-group of politically-organized poverty and mendicancy subsidized indirectly instead of directly, because State interest can not long keep pace with the hand-over-head disposition of the masses to loot their own Treasury. The method of direct subsidy, or sheer cash-purchase, will therefore in all probability soon give way to the indirect method of what is called “social legislation”; that is, a multiplex system of State-managed pensions, insurances and indemnities of various kinds. This is an apparent recession, and when it occurs it will no doubt be proclaimed as an actual recession, no doubt accepted as such; but is it? Does it actually tend to diminish State power and increase social power? Obviously not, but quite the opposite. It tends to consolidate firmly this particular fraction of State power, and opens the way to getting an indefinite increment upon it by the mere continuous invention of new courses and developments of State-administered social legislation, which is an extremely simple business. One may add the observation for whatever its evidential value may be worth, that if the effect of progressive social legislation upon the sum-total of State power were unfavourable or even nil, we should hardly have found Prince de Bismarck and the British Liberal politicians of forty years ago going in for anything remotely resembling it.

When, therefore, the inquiring student of civilization has occasion to observe this or any other apparent recession upon any point of our present regime,[8]Click to see. he may content himself with asking the one question, What effect has this upon the sum-total of State power? The answer he gives himself will show conclusively whether the recession is actual or apparent, and this is all he is concerned to know.

There is also an impression that if actual recessions do not come about of themselves, they may be brought about by the expedient of voting one political party out and another one in. This idea rests upon certain assumptions that experience has shown to be unsound; the first one being that the power of the ballot is what republican political theory makes it out to be, and that therefore the electorate has an effective choice in the matter. It is a matter of open and notorious fact that nothing like this is true. Our nominally republican system is actually built on an imperial model, with our professional politicians standing in the place of the prætorian guards; they meet from time to time, decide what can be “got away with,”and how, and who is to do it; and the electorate votes according to their prescriptions. Under these conditions it is easy to provide the appearance of any desired concession of State power, without the reality; our history shows innumerable instances of very easy dealing with problems in practical politics much more difficult than that. One may remark in this connexion also the notoriously baseless assumption that party-designations connote principles, and that party-pledges imply performance. Moreover, underlying these assumptions and all others that faith in “political action” contemplates, is the assumption that the interests of the State and the interests of society are, at least theoretically, identical; whereas in theory they are directly opposed, and this opposition invariably declares itself in practice to the precise extent that circumstances permit.

However, without pursuing these matters further at the moment, it is probably enough to observe here that in the nature of things the exercise of personal government, the control of a huge and growing bureaucracy, and the management of an enormous mass of subsidized voting-power, are as agreeable to one stripe of politician as they are to another. Presumably they interest a Republican or a Progressive as much as they do a Democrat, Communist, Farmer-Labourite, Socialist, or whatever a politician may, for electioneering purposes, see fit to call himself. This was demonstrated in the local campaigns of 1934 by the practical attitude of politicians who represented nominal opposition parties. It is now being further demonstrated by the derisible haste that the leaders of the official opposition are making towards what they call “reorganization” of their party. One may well be inattentive to their words; their actions, however, mean simply that the recent accretions of State power are here to stay, and that they are aware of it; and that, such being the case, they are preparing to dispose themselves most advantageously in a contest for their control and management. This is all that “reorganization” of the Republican party means, and all it is meant to mean; and this is in itself quite enough to show that any expectation of an essential change of regime through a change of party-administration is illusory. On the contrary, it is clear that whatever party-competition we shall see hereafter will be on the same terms as heretofore. It will be a competition for control and management, and it would naturally issue in still closer centralization, still further extension of the bureaucratic principle, and still larger concessions to subsidized voting-power. This course would be strictly historical, and is furthermore to be expected as lying in the nature of things, as it so obviously does.

Indeed, it is by this means that the aim of the collectivists seems likeliest to be attained in this country; this aim being the complete extinction of social power through absorption by the State. Their fundamental doctrine was formulated and invested with a quasi-religious sanction by the idealist philosophers of the last century; and among peoples who have accepted it in terms as well as in fact, it is expressed in formulas almost identical with theirs. Thus, for example, when Hitler says that “the State dominates the nation because it alone represents it,” he is only putting into loose popular language the formula of Hegel, that “the State is the general substance, whereof individuals are but accidents.” Or, again, when Mussolini says, “Everything for the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State,” he is merely vulgarizing the doctrine of Fichte, that “the State is the superior power, ultimate and beyond appeal, absolutely independent.”

It may be in place to remark here the essential identity of the various extant forms of collectivism. The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concern of journalists and publicists; the serious student[9]Click to see. sees in them only the one root-idea of a complete conversion of social power into State power. When Hitler and Mussolini invoke a kind of debased and hoodwinking mysticism to aid their acceleration of this process, the student at once recognizes his old friend, the formula of Hegel, that “the State incarnates the Divine Idea upon earth,” and he is not hoodwinked. The journalist and the impressionable traveler may make what they will of “the new religion of Bolshevism”; the student contents himself with remarking clearly the exact nature of the process which this inculcation is designed to sanction.

IV

This process – the conversion of social power into State power – has not been carried as far here as it has elsewhere; as it has in Russia, Italy or Germany, for example. Two things, however, are to be observed. First, that it has gone a long way, at a rate of progress which has of late been greatly accelerated. What has chiefly differentiated its progress here from its progress in other countries is its unspectacular character. Mr. Jefferson wrote in 1823 that there was no danger he dreaded so much as “the consolidation [i.e., centralization] of our government by the noiseless and therefore unalarming instrumentality of the Supreme Court.” These words characterize every advance that we have made in State aggrandizement. Each one has been noiseless and therefore unalarming, especially to a people notoriously preoccupied, inattentive and incurious. Even the coup d’état of 1932 was noiseless and unalarming. In Russia, Italy, Germany, the coup d’état was violent and spectacular; it had to be; but here it was neither. Under cover of a nationwide, State-managed mobilization of inane buffoonery and aimless commotion, it took place in so unspectacular a way that its true nature escaped notice, and even now is not generally understood. The method of consolidating the ensuing regime, moreover, was also noiseless and unalarming; it was merely the prosaic and unspectacular “higgling of the market,” to which a long and uniform political experience had accustomed us. A visitor from a poorer and thriftier country might have regarded Mr. Farley’s activities in the local campaigns of 1934 as striking or even spectacular, but they made no such impression on us. They seemed so familiar, so much the regular thing, that one heard little comment on them. Moreover, political habit led us to attribute whatever unfavourable comment we did hear, to interest; either partisan or monetary interest, or both. We put it down as the jaundiced judgment of persons with axes to grind; and naturally the regime did all it could to encourage this view.

The second thing to be observed is that certain formulas, certain arrangements of words, stand as an obstacle in the way of our perceiving how far the conversion of social power into State power has actually gone. The force of phrase and name distorts the identification of our own actual acceptances and acquiescences. We are accustomed to the rehearsal of certain poetic litanies, and provided their cadence be kept entire, we are indifferent to their correspondence with truth and fact. When Hegel’s doctrine of the State, for example, is restated in terms by Hitler and Mussolini, it is distinctly offensive to us, and we congratulate ourselves on our freedom from the “yoke of a dictator’s tyranny.” No American politician would dream of breaking in on our routine of litanies with anything of the kind. We may imagine, for example, the shock to popular sentiment that would ensue upon Mr. Roosevelt’s declaring publicly that “the State embraces everything, and nothing has value outside the State. The State creates right.” Yet an American politician, as long as he does not formulate that doctrine in set terms, may go further with it in a practical way than Mussolini has gone, and without trouble or question. Suppose Mr. Roosevelt should defend his regime by publicly reasserting Hegel’s dictum that “the State alone possesses rights, because it is the strongest.” One can hardly imagine that our public would get that down without a great deal of retching. Yet how far, really, is that doctrine alien to our public’s actual acquiescences? Surely not far.

The point is that in respect of the relation between the theory and the actual practice of public affairs, the American is the most un-philosophical of beings. The rationalization of conduct in general is most repugnant to him; he prefers to emotionalize it. He is indifferent to the theory of things, so long as he may rehearse his formulas; and so long as he can listen to the patter of his litanies, no practical inconsistency disturbs him – indeed, he gives no evidence of even recognizing it as an inconsistency.

The ablest and most acute observer among the many who came from Europe to look us over in the early part of the last century was the one who is for some reason the most neglected, notwithstanding that in our present circumstances, especially, he is worth more to us than all the de Tocquevilles, Bryces, Trollopes and Chateaubriands put together. This was the noted St.-Simonien and political economist, Michel Chevalier. Professor Chinard, in his admirable biographical study of John Adams, has called attention to Chevalier’s observation that the American people have “the morale of an army on the march.” The more one thinks of this, the more clearly one sees how little there is in what our publicists are fond of calling “the American psychology” that it does not exactly account for; and it exactly accounts for the trait that we are considering.

An army on the march has no philosophy; it views itself as a creature of the moment. It does not rationalize conduct except in terms of an immediate end. As Tennyson observed, there is a pretty strict official understanding against its doing so; “theirs not to reason why.” Emotionalizing conduct is another matter, and the more of it the better; it is encouraged by a whole elaborate paraphernalia of showy etiquette, flags, music, uniforms, decorations, and the careful cultivation of a very special sort of comradery. In every relation to “the reason of the thing,” however – in the ability and eagerness, as Plato puts it, “to see things as they are” – the mentality of an army on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence; it remains persistently, incorrigibly and notoriously infantile.

Past generations of Americans, as Martin Chuzzlewit left record, erected this infantilism into a distinguishing virtue, and they took great pride in it as the mark of a chosen people, destined to live forever amidst the glory of their own unparalleled achievements wie Gott in Frankreich . Mr. Jefferson Brick, General Choke and the Honourable Elijah Pogram made a first-class job of indoctrinating their countrymen with the idea that a philosophy is wholly unnecessary, and that a concern with the theory of things is effeminate and unbecoming. An envious and presumably dissolute Frenchman may say what he likes about the morale of an army on the march, but the fact remains that it has brought us where we are, and has got us what we have. Look at a continent subdued, see the spread of our industry and commerce, our railways, newspapers, finance-companies, schools, colleges, what you will! Well, if all this has been done without a philosophy, if we have grown to this unrivalled greatness without any attention to the theory of things, does it not show that philosophy and the theory of things are all moonshine, and not worth a practical people’s consideration? The morale of an army on the march is good enough for us, and we are proud of it.

The present generation does not speak in quite this tone of robust certitude. It seems, if anything, rather less openly contemptuous of philosophy; one even sees some signs of a suspicion that in our present circumstances the theory of things might be worth looking into, and it is especially towards the theory of sovereignty and rulership that this new attitude of hospitality appears to be developing. The condition of public affairs in all countries, notably in our own, has done more than bring under review the mere current practice of politics, the character and quality of representative politicians, and the relative merits of this-or-that form or mode of government. It has served to suggest attention to the one institution whereof all these forms or modes are but the several, and, from the theoretical point of view, indifferent, manifestations. It suggests that finality does not lie with consideration of species, but of genus; it does not lie with consideration of the characteristic marks that differentiate the republican State, monocratic State, constitutional, collectivist, totalitarian, Hitlerian, Bolshevist, what you will. It lies with consideration of the State itself.

V

There appears to be a curious difficulty about exercising reflective thought upon the actual nature of an institution into which one was born and one’s ancestors were born. One accepts it as one does the atmosphere; one’s practical adjustments to it are made by a kind of reflex. One seldom thinks about the air until one notices some change, favourable or unfavourable, and then one’s thought about it is special; one thinks about purer air, lighter air, heavier air, not about air. So it is with certain human institutions. We know that they exist, that they affect us in various ways, but we do not ask how they came to exist, or what their original intention was, or what primary function it is that they are actually fulfilling; and when they affect us so unfavourably that we rebel against them, we contemplate substituting nothing beyond some modification or variant of the same institution. Thus colonial America, oppressed by the monarchical State, brings in the republican State; Germany gives up the republican State for the Hitlerian State; Russia exchanges the monocratic State for the collectivist State; Italy exchanges the constitutionalist State for the “totalitarian” State.

It is interesting to observe that in the year 1935 the average individual’s incurious attitude towards the phenomenon of the State is precisely what his attitude was towards the phenomenon of the Church in the year, say, 1500. The State was then a very weak institution; the Church was very strong. The individual was born into the Church, as his ancestors had been for generations, in precisely the formal, documented fashion in which he is now born into the State. He was taxed for the Church’s support, as he now is for the State’s support. He was supposed to accept the official theory and doctrine of the Church, to conform to its discipline, and in a general way to do as it told him; again, precisely the sanctions that the State now lays upon him. If he were reluctant or recalcitrant, the Church made a satisfactory amount of trouble for him, as the State now does. Notwithstanding all this, it does not appear to have occurred to the Church-citizen of that day, any more than it occurs to the State-citizen of the present, to ask what sort of institution it was that claimed his allegiance. There it was; he accepted its own account of itself, took it as it stood, and at its own valuation. Even when he revolted, fifty years later, he merely exchanged one form or mode of the Church for another, the Roman for the Calvinist, Lutheran, Zuinglian, or what not; again, quite as the modern State-citizen exchanges one mode of the State for another. He did not examine the institution itself, nor does the State-citizen today.

My purpose in writing is to raise the question whether the enormous depletion of social power which we are witnessing everywhere does not suggest the importance of knowing more than we do about the essential nature of the institution that is so rapidly absorbing this volume of power.[10]Click to see. One of my friends said to me lately that if the public-utility corporations did not mend their ways, the State would take over their business and operate it. He spoke with a curiously reverent air of finality. Just so, I thought, might a Church-citizen, at the end of the fifteenth century, have spoken of some impending intervention of the Church; and I wondered then whether he had any better-informed and closer-reasoned theory of the State than his prototype had of the Church. Frankly, I am sure he had not. His pseudo-conception was merely an unreasoned acceptance of the State on its own terms and at its own valuation; and in this acceptance he showed himself no more intelligent, and no less, than the whole mass of State-citizenry at large.

It appears to me that with the depletion of social power going on at the rate it is, the State-citizen should look very closely into the essential nature of the institution that is bringing it about. He should ask himself whether he has a theory of the State, and if so, whether he can assure himself that history supports it. He will not find this a matter that can be settled offhand; it needs a good deal of investigation, and a stiff exercise of reflective thought. He should ask, in the first place, how the State originated, and why; it must have come about somehow, and for some purpose. This seems an extremely easy question to answer, but he will not find it so. Then he should ask what it is that history exhibits continuously as the State’s primary function. Then, whether he finds that “the State” and “government” are strictly synonymous terms; he uses them as such, but are they? Are there any invariable characteristic marks that differentiate the institution of government from the institution of the State? Then finally he should decide whether, by the testimony of history, the State is to be regarded as, in essence, a social or an anti-social institution?

It is pretty clear now that if the Church-citizen of 1500 had put his mind on questions as fundamental as these, his civilization might have had a much easier and pleasanter course to run; and the State-citizen of today may profit by his experience.

Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

Chapter 1 Footnotes

[1]Click to return.

The result of a questionnaire published in July, 1935, showed 76.8 per cent of the replies favourable to the idea that it is the State’s duty to see that every person who wants a job shall have one; 20.1 per cent were against it, and 3.1 per cent were undecided.


Click to return.

[2]Click to return.

In this country, the State is at present manufacturing furniture, grinding flour, producing fertilizer, building houses; selling farm-products, dairy-products, textiles, canned goods, and electrical apparatus; operating employment-agencies and home-loan offices; financing exports and imports; financing agriculture. It also controls the issuance of securities, communications by wire and radio, discount rates, oil-production, power-production, commercial competition, the production and sale of alcohol, and the use of inland waterways and railways.


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[3]Click to return.

There is a sort of precedent for it in Roman history, if the story be true in all its details that the army sold the emperorship to Didius Julianus for something like five million dollars. Money has often been used to grease the wheels of a coup d’état, but straight over-the-counter purchase is unknown, I think, except in these two instances.

Click to return.

[4]Click to return.

On the day I write this, the newspapers say that the President is about to order a stoppage on the flow of federal relief-funds into Louisiana, for the purpose of bringing Senator Long to terms. I have seen no comment, however, on the propriety of this kind of procedure.

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[5]Click to return.

A friend in the theatrical business tells me that from the box-office point of view, Washington is now the best theatre-town, concert-town and general-amusement town in the United States, far better than New York.

Click to return.

[6]Click to return.

The feature of the approaching campaign of 1936 which will most interest the student of civilization will be the use of the four-billion-dollar relief-fund that has been placed at the President’s disposal – the extent, that is, to which it will be distributed on a patronage-basis.

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[7]Click to return.

It must always be kept in mind that there is a tidal-motion as well as a wave-motion in these matters, and that the wave-motion is of little importance, relatively. For instance, the Supreme Court’s invalidation of the National Recovery Act counts for nothing in determining the actual status of personal government. The real question is not how much less the sum of personal government is now than it was before that decision, but how much greater it is normally now than it was in 1932, and in years preceding.

Click to return.

[8]Click to return.

As, for example, the spectacular voiding of the National Recovery Act.

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[9]Click to return.

This book is a sort of syllabus or prTcis of some lectures to students of American history and politics – mostly graduate students – and it therefore presupposes some little acquaintance with those subjects. The few references I have given, however, will put any reader in the way of documenting and amplifying it satisfactorily.

Click to return.

[10]Click to return.

An inadequate and partial idea of what this volume amounts to, may be got from the fact that the American State’s income from taxation is now about one third of the nation’s total income! This takes into account all forms of taxation, direct and indirect, local and federal.

Click to return.

Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

CHAPTER 2

I

AS FAR back as one can follow the run of civilization, it presents two fundamentally different types of political organization. This difference is not one of degree, but of kind. It does not do to take the one type as merely marking a lower order of civilization and the other a higher; they are commonly so taken, but erroneously. Still less does it do to classify both as species of the same genus – to classify both under the generic name of “government,” though this also, until very lately, has always been done, and has always led to confusion and misunderstanding.

A good example of this error and its effects is supplied by Thomas Paine. At the outset of his pamphlet called Common Sense, Paine draws a distinction between society and government. While society in any state is a blessing, he says, “government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” In another place, he speaks of government as “a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world.” He proceeds then to show how and why government comes into being. Its origin is in the common understanding and common agreement of society; and “the design and end of government,” he says, is “freedom and security.” Teleologically, government implements the common desire of society, first, for freedom, and second, for security. Beyond this it does not go; it contemplates no positive intervention upon the individual, but only a negative intervention. It would seem that in Paine’s view the code of government should be that of the legendary king Pausole, who prescribed but two laws for his subjects, the first being, Hurt no man, and the second, Then do as you please; and that the whole business of government should be the purely negative one of seeing that this code is carried out.

So far, Paine is sound as he is simple. He goes on, however, to attack the British political organization in terms that are logically inconclusive. There should be no complaint of this, for he was writing as a pamphleteer, a special pleader with an ad captandum argument to make, and as everyone knows, he did it most successfully. Nevertheless, the point remains that when he talks about the British system he is talking about a type of political organization essentially different from the type that he has just been describing; different in origin, in intention, in primary function, in the order of interest that it reflects. It did not originate in the common understanding and agreement of society; it originated in conquest and confiscation.[1]Click to see.

Its intention, far from contemplating “freedom and security,” contemplated nothing of the kind. It contemplated primarily the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another, and it concerned itself with only so much freedom and security as was consistent with this primary intention; and this was, in fact, very little. Its primary function or exercise was not by way of Paine’s purely negative interventions upon the individual, but by way of innumerable and most onerous positive interventions, all of which were for the purpose of maintaining the stratification of society into an owning and exploiting class, and a propertyless dependent class. The order of interest that it reflected was not social, but purely antisocial; and those who administered it, judged by the common standard of ethics, or even the common standard of law as applied to private persons, were indistinguishable from a professional-criminal class.

Clearly, then, we have two distinct types of political organization to take into account; and clearly, too, when their origins are considered, it is impossible to make out that the one is a mere perversion of the other. Therefore, when we include both types under a general term like government, we get into logical difficulties; difficulties of which most writers on the subject have been more or less vaguely aware, but which, until within the last half-century, none of them has tried to resolve. Mr. Jefferson, for example, remarked that the hunting tribes of Indians, with which he had a good deal to do in his early days, had a highly organized and admirable social order, but were “without government.” Commenting on this, he wrote Madison that “it is a problem not clear in my mind that [this] condition is not the best,” but he suspected that it was “inconsistent with any great degree of population.” Schoolcraft observes that the Chippewas, though living in a highly-organized social order, had no “regular” government. Herbert Spencer, speaking of the Bechuanas, Araucanians and Koranna Hottentots, says they have no “definite” government; while Parkman, in his introduction to The Conspiracy of Pontiac, reports the same phenomenon, and is frankly puzzled by its apparent anomalies.

Paine’s theory of government agrees exactly with the theory set forth by Mr. Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. The doctrine of natural rights, which is explicit in the Declaration, is implicit in Common Sense;[2]Click to see. and Paine’s view of the “design and end of government” is precisely the Declaration’s view, that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men”; and further, Paine’s view of the origin of government is that it “derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.” Now, if we apply Paine’s formulas or the Declaration’s formulas, it is abundantly clear that the Virginian Indians had government; Mr. Jefferson’s own observations show that they had it. Their political organization, simple as it was, answered its purpose. Their code-apparatus sufficed for assuring freedom and security to the individual, and for dealing with such trespasses as in that state of society the individual might encounter – fraud, theft, assault, adultery, murder. The same is as clearly true of the various peoples cited by Parkman, Schoolcraft and Spencer. Assuredly, if the language of the Declaration amounts to anything, all these peoples had government; and all these reporters make it appear as a government quite competent to its purpose.

Therefore when Mr. Jefferson says his Indians were “without government,” he must be taken to mean that they did not have a type of government like the one he knew; and when Schoolcraft and Spencer speak of “regular” and “definite” government, their qualifying words must be taken in the same way. This type of government, nevertheless, has always existed and still exists, answering perfectly to Paine’s formulas and the Declaration’s formulas; though it is a type which we also, most of us, have seldom had the chance to observe. It may not be put down as the mark of an inferior race, for institutional simplicity is in itself by no means a mark of backwardness or inferiority; and it has been sufficiently shown that in certain essential respects the peoples who have this type of government are, by comparison, in a position to say a good deal for themselves on the score of a civilized character. Mr. Jefferson’s own testimony on this point is worth notice, and so is Parkman’s. This type, however, even though documented by the Declaration, is fundamentally so different from the type that has always prevailed in history, and is still prevailing in the world at the moment, that for the sake of clearness the two types should be set apart by name, as they are by nature. They are so different in theory that drawing a sharp distinction between them is now probably the most important duty that civilization owes to its own safety. Hence it is by no means either an arbitrary or academic proceeding to give the one type the name of government, and to call the second type simply the State.

II

Aristotle, confusing the idea of the State with the idea of government, thought the State originated out of the natural grouping of the family. Other Greek philosophers, labouring under the same confusion, somewhat anticipated Rousseau in finding its origin in the social nature and disposition of the individual; while an opposing school, which held that the individual is naturally anti-social, more or less anticipated Hobbes by finding it in an enforced compromise among the anti-social tendencies of individuals. Another view, implicit in the doctrine of Adam Smith, is that the State originated in the association of certain individuals who showed a marked superiority in the economic virtues of diligence, prudence and thrift. The idealist philosophers, variously applying Kant’s transcendentalism to the problem, came to still different conclusions; and one or two other views, rather less plausible, perhaps, than any of the foregoing, have been advanced.

The root-trouble with all these views is not precisely that they are conjectural, but that they are based on incompetent observation. They miss the invariable characteristic marks that the subject presents; as, for example, until quite lately, all views of the origin of malaria missed the invariable ministrations of the mosquito, or as opinions about the bubonic-plague missed the invariable mark of the rat-parasite. It is only within the last half-century that the historical method has been applied to the problem of the State.[3]Click to see. This method runs back the phenomenon of the State to its first appearance in documented history, observing its invariable characteristic marks, and drawing inferences as indicated. There are so many clear intimations of this method in earlier writers – one finds them as far back as Strabo – that one wonders why its systematic application was so long deferred; but in all such cases, as with malaria and typhus, when the characteristic mark is once determined, it is so obvious that one always wonders why it was so long unnoticed. Perhaps in the case of the State, the best one can say is that the coöperation of the Zeitgeist was necessary, and that it could be had no sooner.

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.[4]Click to see. On the negative side, it has been proved beyond peradventure that no primitive State could possibly have had any other origin.[5]Click to see. Moreover, the sole invariable characteristic of the State is the economic exploitation of one class by another. In this sense, every State known to history is a class-State. Oppenheimer defines the State, in respect of its origin, as an institution “forced on a defeated group by a conquering group, with a view only to systematizing the domination of the conquered by the conquerors, and safeguarding itself against insurrection from within and attack from without. This domination had no other final purpose than the economic exploitation of the conquered group by the victorious group.”

An American statesman, John Jay, accomplished the respectable feat of compressing the whole doctrine of conquest into a single sentence. “Nations in general,” he said, “will go to war whenever there is a prospect of getting something by it.” Any considerable economic accumulation, or any considerable body of natural resources, is an incentive to conquest. The primitive technique was that of raiding the coveted possessions, appropriating them entire, and either exterminating the possessors, or dispersing them beyond convenient reach. Very early, however, it was seen to be in general more profitable to reduce the possessors to dependence, and use them as labour-motors [economic slaves]; and the primitive technique was accordingly modified. Under special circumstances, where this exploitation was either impracticable or unprofitable, the primitive technique is even now occasionally revived, as by the Spaniards in South America, or by ourselves against the Indians. But these circumstances are exceptional; the modified technique has been in use almost from the beginning, and everywhere its first appearance marks the origin of the State. Citing Ranke’s observations on the technique of the raiding herdsmen, the Hyksos, who established their State in Egypt about B.C. 2000, Gumplowicz remarks that Ranke’s words very well sum up the political history of mankind.

Indeed, the modified technique never varies.

“Everywhere we see a militant group of fierce men forcing the frontier of some more peaceable people, settling down upon them and establishing the State, with themselves as an aristocracy. In Mesopotamia, irruption succeeds irruption, State succeeds State, Babylonians, Amoritans, Assyrians, Arabs, Medes, Persians, Macedonians, Parthians, Mongols, Seldshuks, Tatars, Turks; in the Nile valley, Hyksos, Nubians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks; in Greece, the Doric States are specific examples; in Italy, Romans, Ostrogoths, Lombards, Franks, Germans; in Spain, Carthaginians, Visigoths, Arabs; in Gaul, Romans, Franks, Burgundians, Normans; in Britain, Saxons, Normans.”

Everywhere we find the political organization proceeding from the same origin, and presenting the same mark of intention, namely: the economic exploitation of a defeated group by a conquering group.

Everywhere, that is, with but the one significant exception. Wherever economic exploitation has been for any reason either impracticable or unprofitable, the State has never come into existence; government has existed, but the State, never. The American hunting tribes, for example, whose organization so puzzled our observers, never formed a State, for there is no way to reduce a hunter to economic dependence and make him hunt for you.[6]Click to see. Conquest and confiscation were no doubt practicable, but no economic gain would be got by it, for confiscation would give the aggressors but little beyond what they already had; the most that could come of it would be the satisfaction of some sort of feud. For like reasons primitive peasants never formed a State. The economic accumulations of their neighbours were too slight and too perishable to be interesting;[7]Click to see. and especially with the abundance of free land about, the enslavement of their neighbours would be impracticable, if only for the police-problems involved.[8]Click to see.]

It may now be easily seen how great the difference is between the institution of government, as understood by Paine and the Declaration of Independence, and the institution of the State. Government may quite conceivably have originated as Paine thought it did, or Aristotle, or Hobbes, or Rousseau; whereas the State not only never did originate in any of those ways, but never could have done so. The nature and intention of government, as adduced by Parkman, Schoolcraft and Spencer, are social. Based on the idea of natural rights, government secures those rights to the individual by strictly negative intervention, making justice costless and easy of access; and beyond that it does not go. The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.[9]Click to see. So far from encouraging a wholesome development of social power, it has invariably, as Madison said, turned every contingency into a resource for depleting social power and enhancing State power.[10]Click to see.

As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime. In Russia and Germany, for example, we have lately seen the State moving with great alacrity against infringement of its monopoly by private persons, while at the same time exercising that monopoly with unconscionable ruthlessness. Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class.

III

Such are the antecedents of the institution which is everywhere now so busily converting social power by wholesale into State power.[11]Click to see. The recognition of them goes a long way towards resolving most, if not all, of the apparent anomalies which the conduct of the modern State exhibits. It is of great help, for example, in accounting for the open and notorious fact that the State always moves slowly and grudgingly towards any purpose that accrues to society’s advantage, but moves rapidly and with alacrity towards one that accrues to its own advantage; nor does it ever move towards social purposes on its own initiative, but only under heavy pressure, while its motion towards anti-social purposes is self-sprung.

Englishmen of the last century remarked this fact with justifiable anxiety, as they watched the rapid depletion of social power by the British State. One of them was Herbert Spencer, who published a series of essays which were subsequently put together in a volume called The Man versus the State. With our public affairs in the shape they are, it is rather remarkable that no American publicist has improved the chance to reproduce these essays verbatim, merely substituting illustrations drawn from American history for those which Spencer draws from English history. If this were properly done, it would make one of the most pertinent and useful works that could be produced at this time.[12]Click to see.

These essays are devoted to examining the several aspects of the contemporary growth of State power in England. In the essay called Over-legislation, Spencer remarks the fact so notoriously common in our experience,[13]Click to see. that when State power is applied to social purposes, its action is invariably “slow, stupid, extravagant, unadaptive, corrupt and obstructive.” He devotes several paragraphs to each count, assembling a complete array of proof. When he ends, discussion ends; there is simply nothing to be said. He shows further that the State does not even fulfil efficiently what he calls its “unquestionable duties” to society; it does not efficiently adjudge and defend the individual’s elemental rights. This being so – and with us this too is a matter of notoriously common experience – Spencer sees no reason to expect that State power will be more efficiently applied to secondary social purposes. “Had we, in short, proved its efficiency as judge and defender, instead of having found it treacherous, cruel, and anxiously to be shunned, there would be some encouragement to hope other benefits at its hands.”

Yet, he remarks, it is just this monstrously extravagant hope that society is continually indulging; and indulging in the face of daily evidence that it is illusory. He points to the anomaly which we have all noticed as so regularly presented by newspapers. Take up one, says Spencer, and you will probably find a leading editorial “exposing” the corruption, negligence or mismanagement of some State department. Cast your eye down the next column, and it is not unlikely that you will read proposals for an extension of State supervision.[14]Click to see. . . . Thus while every day chronicles a failure, there every day reappears the belief that it needs but an Act of Parliament and a staff of officers to effect any end desired.[15]Click to see. Nowhere is the perennial faith of mankind better seen.”

It is unnecessary to say that the reasons which Spencer gives for the anti-social behaviour of the State are abundantly valid, but we may now see how powerfully they are reinforced by the findings of the historical method; a method which had not been applied when Spencer wrote. These findings being what they are, it is manifest that the conduct which Spencer complains of is strictly historical. When the town-dwelling merchants of the eighteenth century displaced the landholding nobility in control of the State’s mechanism, they did not change the State’s character; they merely adapted its mechanism to their own special interests, and strengthened it immeasurably.[16]Click to see. The merchant-State remained an anti-social institution, a pure class-State, like the State of the nobility; its intention and function remained unchanged, save for the adaptations necessary to suit the new order of interests that it was thenceforth to serve. Therefore in its flagrant disservice of social purposes, for which Spencer arraigns it, the State was acting strictly in character.

Spencer does not discuss what he calls “the perennial faith of mankind” in State action, but contents himself with elaborating the sententious observation of Guizot, that “a belief in the sovereign power of political machinery” is nothing less than “a gross delusion.” This faith is chiefly an effect of the immense prestige which the State has diligently built up for itself in the century or more since the doctrine of jure divino rulership gave way. We need not consider the various instruments that the State employs in building up its prestige; most of them are well known, and their uses well understood. There is one, however, which is in a sense peculiar to the republican State. Republicanism permits the individual to persuade himself that the State is his creation, that State action is his action, that when it expresses itself it expresses him, and when it is glorified he is glorified. The republican State encourages this persuasion with all its power, aware that it is the most efficient instrument for enhancing its own prestige. Lincoln’s phrase, “of the people, by the people, for the people” was probably the most effective single stroke of propaganda ever made in behalf of republican State prestige.

Thus the individual’s sense of his own importance inclines him strongly to resent the suggestion that the State is by nature anti-social. He looks on its failures and misfeasances with somewhat the eye of a parent, giving it the benefit of a special code of ethics. Moreover, he has always the expectation that the State will learn by its mistakes, and do better. Granting that its technique with social purposes is blundering, wasteful and vicious – even admitting, with the public official whom Spencer cites, that wherever the State is, there is villainy – he sees no reason why, with an increase of experience and responsibility, the State should not improve.

Something like this appears to be the basic assumption of collectivism. Let but the State confiscate all social power, and its interests will become identical with those of society. Granting that the State is of anti-social origin, and that it has borne a uniformly anti-social character throughout its history, let it but extinguish social power completely, and its character will change; it will merge with society, and thereby become society’s efficient and disinterested organ. The historic State, in short, will disappear, and government only will remain. It is an attractive idea; the hope of its being somehow translated into practice is what, only so few years ago, made “the Russian experiment” so irresistibly fascinating to generous spirits who felt themselves hopelessly State-ridden. A closer examination of the State’s activities, however, will show that this idea, attractive though it be, goes to pieces against the iron law of fundamental economics, that man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion. Let us see how this is so.

IV

There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man’s needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means.[17]Click to see. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means. The primitive exercise of the political means was, as we have seen, by conquest, confiscation, expropriation, and the introduction of a slave-economy. The conqueror parceled out the conquered territory among beneficiaries, who thenceforth satisfied their needs and desires by exploiting the labour of the enslaved inhabitants.[18]Click to see. The feudal State, and the merchant-State, wherever found, merely took over and developed successively the heritage of character, intention and apparatus of exploitation which the primitive State transmitted to them; they are in essence merely higher integrations of the primitive State.

The State, then, whether primitive, feudal or merchant, is the organization of the political means. Now, since man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion, he will employ the political means whenever he can – exclusively, if possible; otherwise, in association with the economic means. He will, at the present time, that is, have recourse to the State’s modern apparatus of exploitation; the apparatus of tariffs, concessions, rent-monopoly, and the like. It is a matter of the commonest observation that this is his first instinct. So long, therefore, as the organization of the political means is available – so long as the highly-centralized bureaucratic State stands as primarily a distributor of economic advantage, an arbiter of exploitation, so long will that instinct effectively declare itself. A proletarian State would merely, like the merchant-State, shift the incidence of exploitation, and there is no historic ground for the presumption that a collectivist State would be in any essential respect unlike its predecessors; [19]Click to see. as we are beginning to see, “the Russian experiment” has amounted to the erection of a highly-centralized bureaucratic State upon the ruins of another, leaving the entire apparatus of exploitation intact and ready for use. Hence, in view of the law of fundamental economics just cited, the expectation that collectivism will appreciably alter the essential character of the State appears illusory.

Thus the findings arrived at by the historical method amply support the immense body of practical considerations brought forward by Spencer against the State’s inroads upon social power. When Spencer concludes that “in State-organizations, corruption is unavoidable,” the historical method abundantly shows cause why, in the nature of things, this should be expected – vilescit origine tali. When Freud comments on the shocking disparity between State-ethics and private ethics – and his observations on this point are most profound and searching – the historical method at once supplies the best of reasons why that disparity should be looked for.[20]Click to see. When Ortega y Gasset says that “Statism is the higher form taken by violence and direct action, when these are set up as standards,” the historical method enables us to perceive at once that his definition is precisely that which one would make a priori.

The historical method, moreover, establishes the important fact that, as in the case of tabetic or parasitic diseases, the depletion of social power by the State can not be checked after a certain point of progress is passed. History does not show an instance where, once beyond this point, this depletion has not ended in complete and permanent collapse. In some cases, disintegration is slow and painful. Death set its mark on Rome at the end of the second century, but she dragged out a pitiable existence for some time after the Antonines. Athens, on the other hand, collapsed quickly. Some authorities think that Europe is dangerously near that point, if not already past it; but contemporary conjecture is probably without much value. That point may have been reached in America, and it may not; again, certainty is unattainable – plausible arguments may be made either way. Of two things, however, we may be certain: the first is, that the rate of America’s approach to that point is being prodigiously accelerated; and the second is, that there is no evidence of any disposition to retard it, or any intelligent apprehension of the danger which that acceleration betokens.

Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

Chapter 2 Footnotes


[1]Click to return.

Paine was of course well aware of this. He says, “A French bastard, landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original.” He does not press the point, however, nor in view of his purpose should he be expected to do so.


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In Rights of Man, Paine is as explicit about this doctrine as the Declaration is; and in several places throughout his pamphlets, he asserts that all civil rights are founded on natural rights, and proceed from them.


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By Gumplowicz, professor at Graz, and after him, by Oppenheimer, professor of politics at Frankfort. I have followed them throughout this section. The findings of these Galileos are so damaging to the prestige that the State has everywhere built up for itself that professional authority in general has been very circumspect about approaching them, naturally preferring to give them a wide berth; but in the long-run, this is a small matter. Honourable and distinguished exceptions appear in Vierkandt, Wilhelm Wundt, and the revered patriarch of German economic studies, Adolf Wagner.


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An excellent example of primitive practice, effected by modern technique, is furnished by the new State of Manchoukuo, and another bids fair to be furnished in consequence of the Italian State’s operations in Ethiopia.


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The mathematics of this demonstration are extremely interesting. A rTsumT of them is given in Oppenheimer’s treatise Der Staat, ch. I, and they are worked out in full in his Theorie der Reinen und Politischen Oekonomie.


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Except, of course, by preemption of the land under the State-system of tenure, but for occupational reasons this would not be worth a hunting tribe’s attempting. Bicknell, the historian of Rhode Island, suggests that the troubles over Indian treaties arose from the fact that the Indians did not understand the State-system of land-tenure, never having had anything like it; their understanding was that the whites were admitted only to the same communal use of land that they themselves enjoyed. It is interesting to remark that the settled fishing tribes of the Northwest formed a State. Their occupation made economic exploitation both practicable and profitable, and they resorted to conquest and confiscation to introduce it.


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It is strange that so little attention has been paid to the singular immunity enjoyed by certain small and poor peoples amidst great collisions of State interest. Throughout the late war, for example, Switzerland, which has nothing worth stealing, was never raided or disturbed.


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Marx’s chapter on colonization is interesting in this connexion, especially for his observation that economic exploitation is impracticable until expropriation from the land has taken place. Here he is in full agreement with the whole line of fundamental economists, from Turg(t, Franklin and John Taylor down to Theodor Hertzka and Henry George. Marx, however, apparently did not see that his observation left him with something of a problem on his hands, for he does little more with it than record the fact.


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John Bright said he had known the British Parliament to do some good things, but never knew it to do a good thing merely because it was a good thing.


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Reflections, 1.


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[11]Click to return.

In this country the condition of several socially-valuable industries seems at the moment to be a pretty fair index of this process. The State’s positive interventions have so far depleted social power that by all accounts these particular applications of it are on the verge of being no longer practicable. In Italy, the State now absorbs fifty per cent of the total national income. Italy appears to be rehearsing her ancient history in something more than a sentimental fashion, for by the end of the second century social power had been so largely transmuted into State power that nobody could do any business at all. There was not enough social power left to pay the State’s bills.


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It seems a most discreditable thing that this century has not seen produced in America an intellectually respectable presentation of the complete case against the State’s progressive confiscations of social power; a presentation, that is, which bears the mark of having sound history and a sound philosophy behind it. Mere interested touting of “rugged individualism” and agonized fustian about the constitution are so specious, so frankly unscrupulous, that they have become contemptible. Consequently collectivism has easily had all the best of it, intellectually, and the results are now apparent. Collectivism has even succceded in foisting its glossary of arbitrary definitions upon us; we all speak of our economic system, for instance, as “capitalist,” when there has never been a system, nor can one be imagined, that is not capitalist. By contrast, when British collectivism undertook to deal, say with Lecky, Bagehot, Professor Huxley and Herbert Spencer, it got full change for its money. Whatever steps Britain has taken towards collectivism, or may take, it at least has had all the chance in the world to know precisely where it was going, which we have not had.


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Yesterday I passed over a short stretch of new road built by State power, applied through one of the grotesque alphabetical tentacles of our bureaucracy. It cost $87,348.56. Social power, represented by a contractor’s figure in competitive bidding, would have built it for $38,668.20, a difference, roughly, of one hundred per cent!


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All the newspaper-comments that I have read concerning the recent marine disasters that befell the Ward Line have, without exception, led up to just such proposals!


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Our recent experiences with prohibition might be thought to have suggested this belief as fatuous, but apparently they have not done so.


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This point is well discussed by the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, ch. XIII (English translation), in which he does not scruple to say that the State’s rapid depletion of social power is “the greatest danger that today threatens civilization.” He also gives a good idea of what may be expected when a third, economically-composite, class in turn takes over the mechanism of the State, as the merchant class took it over from the nobility. Surely no better forecast could be made of what is taking place in this country at the moment, than this: “The mass-man does in fact believe that he is the State, and he will tend more and more to set its machinery working, on whatsoever pretext, to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it – disturbs it in any order of things; in politics, in ideas, in industry.”


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Oppenheimer, Der Staat, ch. I. Services are also, of course, a subject of economic exchange.


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In America, where the native huntsmen were not exploitable, the beneficiaries – the Virginia Company, Massachusetts Company, Dutch West India Company, the Calverts, etc. – followed the traditional method of importing exploitable human material, under bond, from England and Europe, and also established the chattel-slave economy by importations from Africa. The best exposition of this phase of our history is in Beard’s Rise of American Civilization, vol. 1, pp. 103-109. At a later period, enormous masses of exploitable material imported themselves by immigration; Valentine’s Manual for 1859 says that in the period 1847-1858, 2,486,463 immigrants passed through the port of New York. This competition tended to depress the slave-economy in the industrial sections of the country, and to supplant it with a wage-economy. It is noteworthy that public sentiment in those regions did not regard the slave-economy as objectionable until it could no longer be profitably maintained.


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Supposing, for example, that Mr. Norman Thomas and a solid collectivist Congress, with a solid collectivist Supreme Court, should presently fall heir to our enormously powerful apparatus of exploitation, it needs no great stretch of imagination to forecast the upshot.


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[20]Click to return.

In April, 1933, the American State issued half a billion dollars’ worth of bonds of small denominations, to attract investment by poor persons. It promised to pay these, principal and interest, in gold of the then-existing value. Within three months the State repudiated that promise. Such an action by an individual would, as Freud says, dishonour him forever, and mark him as no better than a knave. Done by an association of individuals, it would put them in the category of a professional-criminal class.


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Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

CHAPTER 3

I

IN CONSIDERING the State’s development in America, it is important to keep in mind the fact that America’s experience of the State was longer during the colonial period than during the period of American independence; the period 1607-1776 was longer than the period 1776-1935. Moreover, the colonists came here full-grown, and had already a considerable experience of the State in England and Europe before they arrived; and for purposes of comparison, this would extend the former period by a few years, say at least fifteen. It would probably be safe to put it that the American colonists had twenty-five years’ longer experience of the State than citizens of the United States have had.

Their experience, too, was not only longer, but more varied. The British State, the French, Dutch, Swedish and Spanish States, were all established here. The separatist English dissenters who landed at Plymouth had lived under the Dutch State as well as under the British State. When James I made England too uncomfortable for them to live in, they went to Holland; and many of the institutions which they subsequently set up in New England, and which were later incorporated into the general body of what we call “American institutions,” were actually Dutch, though commonly – almost invariably – we accredit them to England. They were for the most part Roman-Continental in their origin, but they were transmitted here from Holland, not from England.[1]Click to see. No such institutions existed in England at that time, and hence the Plymouth colonists could not have seen them there; they could have seen them only in Holland, where they did exist.

Our colonial period coincided with the period of revolution and readjustment in England, referred to in the preceding chapter, when the British merchant-State was displacing the feudal State, consolidating its own position, and shifting the incidence of economic exploitation. These revolutionary measures gave rise to an extensive review of the general theory on which the feudal State had been operating. The earlier Stuarts governed on the theory of monarchy by divine right. The State’s economic beneficiaries were answerable only to the monarch, who was theoretically answerable only to God; he had no responsibilities to society at large, save such as he chose to incur, and these only for the duration of his pleasure. In 1607, the year of the Virginia colony’s landing at Jamestown, John Cowell, regius professor of civil law at the University of Cambridge, laid down the doctrine that the monarch “is above the law by his absolute power, and though for the better and equal course in making laws he do admit the Three Estates unto Council, yet this in divers learned men’s opinions is not of constraint, but of his own benignity, or by reason of the promise made upon oath at the time of his coronation.”

This doctrine, which was elaborated to the utmost in the extraordinary work called Patriarcha, by Sir Robert Filmer, was all well enough so long as the line of society’s stratification was clear, straight and easily drawn. The feudal State’s economic beneficiaries were virtually a close corporation, a compact body consisting of a Church hierarchy and a titled group of hereditary, large-holding landed proprietors. In respect of interests, this body was extremely homogeneous, and their interests, few in number, were simple in character and easily defined. With the monarch, the hierarchy, and a small, closely-limited nobility above the line of stratification, and an undifferentiated populace below it, this theory of sovereignty was passable; it answered the purposes of the feudal State as well as any.

But the practical outcome of this theory did not, and could not, suit the purposes of the rapidly-growing class of merchants and financiers. They wished to introduce a new economic system. Under feudalism, production had been, as a general thing, for use, with the incidence of exploitation falling largely on a peasantry. The State had by no means always kept its hands off trade, but it had never countenanced the idea that its chief reason for existence was, as we say, “to help business.” The merchants and financiers, however, had precisely this idea in mind. They saw the attractive possibilities of production for profit, with the incidence of exploitation gradually shifting to an industrial proletariat. They saw also, however, that to realize all these possibilities, they must get the State’s mechanism to working as smoothly and powerfully on the side of “business” as it had been working on the side of the monarchy, the Church, and the large-holding landed proprietors. This meant capturing control of this mechanism, and so altering and adapting it as to give themselves the same free access to the political means as was enjoyed by the displaced beneficiaries. The course by which they accomplished this is marked by the Civil War, the dethronement and execution of Charles I, the Puritan protectorate, and the revolution of 1688.

This is the actual inwardness of what is known as the Puritan movement in England. It had a quasi-religious motivation – speaking strictly, an ecclesiological motivation – but the paramount practical end towards which it tended was a repartition of access to the political means. It is a significant fact, though seldom noticed, that the only tenet with which Puritanism managed to evangelize equally the non-Christian and Christian world of English-bred civilization is its tenet of work, its doctrine that work is, by God’s express will and command, a duty; indeed almost, if not quite, the first and most important of man’s secular duties. This erection of labour into a Christian virtue per se, this investment of work with a special religious sanction, was an invention of Puritanism; it was something never heard of in England before the rise of the Puritan State. The only doctrine antedating it presented labour as the means to a purely secular end; as Cranmer’s divines put it, “that I may learn and labour truly to get mine own living.” There is no hint that God would take it amiss if one preferred to do little work and put up with a poor living, for the sake of doing something else with one’s time. Perhaps the best witness to the essential character of the Puritan movement in England and America is the thoroughness with which its doctrine of work has pervaded both literatures, all the way from Cromwell’s letters to Carlyle’s panegyric and Longfellow’s verse.

But the merchant-State of the Puritans was like any other; it followed the standard pattern. It originated in conquest and confiscation, like the feudal State which it displaced; the only difference being that its conquest was by civil war instead of foreign war. Its object was the economic exploitation of one class by another; for the exploitation of feudal serfs by a nobility, it proposed only to substitute the exploitation of a proletariat by enterprisers. Like its predecessor, the merchant-State was purely an organization of the political means, a machine for the distribution of economic advantage, but with its mechanism adapted to the requirements of a more numerous and more highly differentiated order of beneficiaries; a class, moreover, whose numbers were not limited by heredity or by the sheer arbitrary pleasure of a monarch.

The process of establishing the merchant-State, however, necessarily brought about changes in the general theory of sovereignty. The bald doctrine of Cowell and Filmer was no longer practicable; yet any new theory had to find room for some sort of divine sanction, for the habit of men’s minds does not change suddenly, and Puritanism’s alliance between religious and secular interests was extremely close. One may not quite put it that the merchant-enterprisers made use of religious fanaticism to pull their chestnuts out of the fire; the religionists had sound and good chestnuts of their own to look after. They had plenty of rabid nonsense to answer for, plenty of sour hypocrisy, plenty of vicious fanaticism; whenever we think of seventeenth-century British Puritanism, we think of Hugh Peters, of Praise-God Barebones, of Cromwell’s iconoclasts “smashing the mighty big angels in glass.” But behind all this untowardness there was in the religionists a body of sound conscience, soundly and justly outraged; and no doubt, though mixed with an intolerable deal of unscrupulous greed, there was on the part of the merchant-enterprisers a sincere persuasion that what was good for business was good for society. Taking Hampden’s conscience as representative, one would say that it operated under the limitations set by nature upon the typical sturdy Buckinghamshire squire; the mercantile conscience was likewise ill-informed, and likewise set its course with a hard, dogged, provincial stubbornness. Still, the alliance of the two bodies of conscience was not without some measure of respectability. No doubt, for example, Hampden regarded the State-controlled episcopate to some extent objectively, as unscriptural in theory, and a tool of Antichrist in practice; and no doubt, too, the mercantile conscience, with the disturbing vision of William Laud in view, might have found State-managed episcopacy objectionable on other grounds than those of special interest.

The merchant-State’s political rationale had to respond to the pressure of a growing individualism. The spirit of individualism appeared in the latter half of the sixteenth century; probably – as well as such obscure origins can be determined – as a by-product of the Continental revival of learning, or, it may be, specifically as a by-product of the Reformation in Germany. It was long, however, in gaining force enough to make itself count in shaping political theory. The feudal State could take no account of this spirit; its stark rTgime of status was operable only where there was no great multiplicity of diverse economic interests to be accommodated, and where the sum of social power remained practically stable. Under the British feudal State, one large-holding landed proprietor’s interest was much like another’s, and one bishop’s or clergyman’s interest was about the same in kind as another’s. The interests of the monarchy and court were not greatly diversified, and the sum of social power varied but little from time to time. Hence an economic class-solidarity was easily maintained; access upward from one class to the other was easily blocked, so easily that very few positive State-interventions were necessary to keep people, as we say, in their place; or as Cranmer’s divines put it, to keep them doing their duty in that station of life unto which it had pleased God to call them. Thus the State could accomplish its primary purpose, and still afford to remain relatively weak. It could normally, that is, enable a thorough-going economic exploitation with relatively little apparatus of legislation or of personnel.[2]Click to see.

The merchant-State, on the other hand, with its ensuing rTgime of contract, had to meet the problem set by a rapid development of social power, and a multiplicity of economic interests. Both these tended to foster and stimulate the spirit of individualism. The management of social power made the merchant-enterpriser feel that he was quite as much somebody as anybody, and that the general order of interest which he represented – and in particular his own special fraction of that interest – was to be regarded as most respectable, which hitherto it had not been. In short, he had a full sense of himself as an individual, which on these grounds he could of course justify beyond peradventure. The aristocratic disparagement of his pursuits, and the consequent stigma of inferiority which had been so long fixed upon the “base mechanical,” exacerbated this sense, and rendered it at its best assertive, and at its worst, disposed to exaggerate the characteristic defects of his class as well as its excellences, and lump them off together in a new category of social virtues – its hardness, ruthlessness, ignorance and vulgarity at par with its commercial integrity, its shrewdness, diligence and thrift. Thus the fully-developed composite type of merchant-enterpriser-financier might be said to run all the psychological gradations between the brothers Cheeryble at one end of the scale, and Mr. Gradgrind, Sir Gorgius Midas and Mr. Bottles at the other.

This individualism fostered the formulation of certain doctrines which in one shape or another found their way into the official political philosophy of the merchant-State. Foremost among these were the two which the Declaration of Independence lays down as fundamental, the doctrine of natural rights and the doctrine of popular sovereignty. In a generation which had exchanged the authority of a pope for the authority of a book – or rather, the authority of unlimited private interpretation of a book – there was no difficulty about finding ample Scriptural sanction for both these doctrines. The interpretation of the Bible, like the judicial interpretation of a constitution, is merely a process by which, as a contemporary of Bishop Butler said, anything may be made to mean anything; and in the absence of a coercive authority, papal, conciliar or judicial, any given interpretation finds only such acceptance as may, for whatever reason, be accorded it. Thus the episode of Eden, the parable of the talents, the Apostolic injunction against being “slothful in business,” were a warrant for the Puritan doctrine of work; they brought the sanction of Scripture and the sanction of economic interest into complete agreement, uniting the religionist and the merchant-enterpriser in the bond of a common intention. Thus, again, the view of man as made in the image of God, made only a little lower than the angels, the subject of so august a transaction as the Atonement, quite corroborated the political doctrine of his endowment by his Creator with certain rights unalienable by Church or State. While the merchant-enterpriser might hold with Mr. Jefferson that the truth of this political doctrine is self-evident, its Scriptural support was yet of great value as carrying an implication of human nature’s dignity which braced his more or less diffident and self-conscious individualism; and the doctrine that so dignified him might easily be conceived of as dignifying his pursuits. Indeed, the Bible’s indorsement of the doctrine of labour and the doctrine of natural rights was really his charter for rehabilitating “trade” against the disparagement that the rTgime of status had put upon it, and for investing it with the most brilliant lustre of respectability.

In the same way, the doctrine of popular sovereignty could be mounted on impregnable Scriptural ground. Civil society was an association of true believers functioning for common secular purposes; and its right of self-government with respect to these purposes was God-given. If on the religious side all believers were priests, then on the secular side they were all sovereigns; the notion of an intervening jure divino monarch was as repugnant to Scripture as that of an intervening jure divino pope – witness the Israelite commonwealth upon which monarchy was visited as explicitly a punishment for sin. Civil legislation was supposed to interpret and particularize the laws of God as revealed in the Bible, and its administrators were responsible to the congregation in both its religious and secular capacities. Where the revealed law was silent, legislation was to be guided by its general spirit, as best this might be determined. These principles obviously left open a considerable area of choice; but hypothetically the range of civil liberty and the range of religious liberty had a common boundary.

This religious sanction of popular sovereignty was agreeable to the merchant-enterpriser; it fell in well with his individualism, enhancing considerably his sense of personal dignity and consequence. He could regard himself as by birthright not only a free citizen of a heavenly commonwealth, but also a free elector in an earthly commonwealth fashioned, as nearly as might be, after the heavenly pattern. The range of liberty permitted him in both qualities was satisfactory; he could summon warrant of Scripture to cover his undertakings both here and hereafter. As far as this present world’s concerns went, his doctrine of labour was Scriptural, his doctrine of master-and-servant was Scriptural – even bond-service, even chattel-service was Scriptural; his doctrine of a wage-economy, of money-lending – again the parable of the talents – both were Scriptural. What especially recommended the doctrine of popular sovereignty to him on its secular side, however, was the immense leverage it gave for ousting the rTgime of status to make way for the rTgime of contract; in a word, for displacing the feudal State and bringing in the merchant-State.

But interesting as these two doctrines were, their actual application was a matter of great difficulty. On the religious side, the doctrine of natural rights had to take account of the unorthodox. Theoretically it was easy to dispose of them. The separatists, for example, such as those who manned the Mayflower, had lost their natural rights in the fall of Adam, and had never made use of the means appointed to reclaim them. This was all very well, but the logical extension of this principle into actual practice was a rather grave affair. There were a good many dissenters, all told, and they were articulate on the matter of natural rights, which made trouble; so that when all was said and done, the doctrine came out considerably compromised. Then, in respect of popular sovereignty, there were the Presbyterians. Calvinism was monocratic to the core; in fact, Presbyterianism existed side by side with episcopacy in the Church of England in the sixteenth century, and was nudged out only very gradually.[3]Click to see. They were a numerous body, and in point of Scripture and history they had a great deal to say for their position. Thus the practical task of organizing a spiritual commonwealth had as hard going with the logic of popular sovereignty as it had with the logic of natural rights.

The task of secular organization was even more troublesome. A society organized in conformity to these two principles is easily conceivable – such an organization as Paine and the Declaration contemplated, for example, arising out of social agreement, and concerning itself only with the maintenance of freedom and security for the individual – but the practical task of effecting such an organization is quite another matter. On general grounds, doubtless, the Puritans would have found this impracticable; if, indeed, the times are ever to be ripe for anything of the kind, their times were certainly not. The particular round of difficulty, however, was that the merchant-enterpriser did not want that form of social organization; in fact, one can not be sure that the Puritan religionists themselves wanted it. The root-trouble was, in short, that there was no practicable way to avert a shattering collision between the logic of natural rights and popular sovereignty, and the economic law that man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion.

This law governed the merchant-enterpriser in common with the rest of mankind. He was not for an organization that should do no more than maintain freedom and security; he was for one that should redistribute access to the political means, and concern itself with freedom and security only so far as would be consistent with keeping this access open. That is to say, he was thoroughly indisposed to the idea of government; he was quite as strong for the idea of the State as the hierarchy and nobility were. He was not for any essential transformation in the State’s character, but merely for a repartition of the economic advantages that the State confers.

Thus the merchant-polity amounted to an attempt, more or less disingenuous, at reconciling matters which in their nature can not be reconciled. The ideas of natural rights and popular sovereignty were, as we have seen, highly acceptable and highly animating to all the forces allied against the feudal idea; but while these ideas might be easily reconcilable with a system of simple government, such a system would not answer the purpose. Only the State-system would do that. The problem therefore was, how to keep these ideas well in the forefront of political theory, and at the same time prevent their practical application from undermining the organization of the political means. It was a difficult problem. The best that could be done with it was by making certain structural alterations in the State, which would give it the appearance of expressing these ideas, without the reality. The most important of these structural changes was that of bringing in the so-called representative or parliamentary system, which Puritanism introduced into the modern world, and which has received a great deal of praise as an advance towards democracy. This praise, however, is exaggerated. The change was one of form only, and its bearing on democracy has been inconsiderable.[4]Click to see.

II

The migration of Englishmen to America merely transferred this problem into another setting. The discussion of political theory went on vigorously, but the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty came out in practice about where they had come out in England. Here again a great deal has been made of the democratic spirit and temper of the migrants, especially in the case of the separatists who landed at Plymouth, but the facts do not bear it out, except with regard to the decentralizing congregationalist principle of church order. This principle of lodging final authority in the smallest unit rather than the largest – in the local congregation rather than in a synod or general council – was democratic, and its thorough-going application in a scheme of church order would represent some actual advance towards democracy, and give some recognition to the general philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty. The Plymouth settlers did something with this principle, actually applying it in the matter of church order, and for this they deserve credit.[5]Click to see.

Applying it in the matter of civil order, however, was another affair. It is true that the Plymouth colonists probably contemplated something of the kind, and that for a time they practised a sort of primitive communism. They drew up an agreement on shipboard which may be taken at its face value as evidence of their democratic disposition, though it was not in any sense a “frame of government,” like Penn’s, or any kind of constitutional document. Those who speak of it as our first written constitution are considerably in advance of their text, for it was merely an agreement to make a constitution or “frame of government” when the settlers should have come to land and looked the situation over. One sees that it could hardly have been more than this – indeed, that the proposed constitution itself could be no more than provisional – when it is remembered that these migrants were not their own men. They did not sail on their own, nor were they headed for any unpreempted territory on which they might establish a squatter sovereignty and set up any kind of civil order they saw fit. They were headed for Virginia, to settle in the jurisdiction of a company of English merchant-enterprisers, now growing shaky, and soon to be superseded by the royal authority, and its territory converted into a royal province. It was only by misreckonings and the accidents of navigation that, most unfortunately for the prospects of the colony, the settlers landed on the stern and rockbound coast of Plymouth.

These settlers were in most respects probably as good as the best who ever found their way to America. They were bred of what passed in England as “the lower orders,” sober, hard-working and capable, and their residence under Continental institutions in Holland had given them a fund of politico-religious ideas and habits of thought which set them considerably apart from the rest of their countrymen. There is, however, no more than an antiquarian interest in determining how far they were actually possessed by those ideas. They may have contemplated a system of complete religious and civil democracy, or they may not. They may have found their communist practices agreeable to their notion of a sound and just social order, or they may not. The point is that while apparently they might be free enough to found a church order as democratic as they chose, they were by no means free to found a civil democracy, or anything remotely resembling one, because they were in bondage to the will of an English trading-company. Even their religious freedom was permissive; the London company simply cared nothing about that. The same considerations governed their communistic practices; whether or not these practices suited their ideas, they were obliged to adopt them. Their agreement with the London merchant- enterprisers bound them, in return for transportation and outfit, to seven years’ service, during which time they should work on a system of common-land tillage, store their produce in a common warehouse, and draw their maintenance from these common stores. Thus whether or not they were communists in principle, their actual practice of communism was by prescription.

The fundamental fact to be observed in any survey of the American State’s initial development is the one whose importance was first remarked, I believe, by Mr. Beard; that the trading-company – the commercial corporation for colonization – was actually an autonomous State. “Like the State,” says Mr. Beard, “it had a constitution, a charter issued by the Crown . . . like the State, it had a territorial basis, a grant of land often greater in area than a score of European principalities . . . it could make assessments, coin money, regulate trade, dispose of corporate property, collect taxes, manage a treasury, and provide for defense. Thus” – and here is the important observation, so important that I venture to italicize it – “every essential element long afterward found in the government of the American State appeared in the chartered corporation that started English civilization in America.” Generally speaking, the system of civil order established in America was the State-system of the “mother countries” operating over a considerable body of water; the only thing that distinguished it was that the exploited and dependent class was situated at an unusual distance from the owning and exploiting class. The headquarters of the autonomous State were on one side of the Atlantic, and its subjects on the other.

This separation gave rise to administrative difficulties of one kind and another; and to obviate them – perhaps for other reasons as well – one English company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, moved over bodily in 1630, bringing their charter and most of their stock-holders with them, thus setting up an actual autonomous State in America. The thing to be observed about this is that the merchant-State was set up complete in New England long before it was set up in Old England. Most of the English immigrants to Massachusetts came over between 1630 and 1640; and in this period the English merchant-State was only at the beginning of its hardest struggles for supremacy. James I died in 1625, and his successor, Charles I, continued his absolutist rTgime. From 1629, the year in which the Bay Company was chartered, to 1640, when the Long Parliament was called, he ruled without a parliament, effectively suppressing what few vestiges of liberty had survived the Tudor and Jacobean tyrannies; and during these eleven years the prospects of the English merchant-State were at their lowest.[6]Click to see. It still had to face the distractions of the Civil War, the retarding anomalies of the Commonwealth, the Restoration, and the recurrence of tyrannical absolutism under James II, before it succeeded in establishing itself firmly through the revolution of 1688.

On the other hand, the leaders of the Bay Colony were free from the first to establish a State-policy of their own devising, and to set up a State-structure which should express that policy without compromise. There was no competing policy to extinguish, no rival structure to refashion. Thus the merchant-State came into being in a clear field a full half-century before it attained supremacy in England. Competition of any kind, or the possibility of competition, it has never had. A point of greatest importance to remember is that the merchant-State is the only form of the State that has ever existed in America. Whether under the rule of a trading-company or a provincial governor or a republican representative legislature, Americans have never known any other form of the State. In this respect the Massachusetts Bay colony is differentiated only as being the first autonomous State ever established in America, and as furnishing the most complete and convenient example for purposes of study. In principle it was not differentiated. The State in New England, Virginia, Maryland, the Jerseys, New York, Connecticut, everywhere, was purely a class-State, with control of the political means reposing in the hands of what we now style, in a general way, the “business-man.”

In the eleven years of Charles’s tyrannical absolutism, English immigrants came over to join the Bay colony, at the rate of about two thousand a year. No doubt at the outset some of the colonists had the idea of becoming agricultural specialists, as in Virginia, and of maintaining certain vestiges, or rather imitations, of semi-feudal social practice, such as were possible under that form of industry when operated by a slave-economy or a tenant-economy. This, however, proved impracticable; the climate and soil of New England were against it. A tenant-economy was precarious, for rather than work for a master, the immigrant agriculturist naturally preferred to push out into unpreempted land, and work for himself; in other words, as Turg(t, Marx, Hertzka, and many others have shown, he could not be exploited until he had been expropriated from the land. The long and hard winters took the profit out of slave-labour in agriculture. The Bay colonists experimented with it, however, even attempting to enslave the Indians, which they found could not be done, for the reasons that I have already noticed. In default of this, the colonists carried out the primitive technique by resorting to extermination, their ruthless ferocity being equaled only by that of the Virginia colonists.[7]Click to see.

They held some slaves, and did a great deal of slave-trading; but in the main, they became at the outset a race of small freeholding farmers, shipbuilders, navigators, maritime enterprisers in fish, whales, molasses, rum, and miscellaneous cargoes; and presently, moneylenders. Their remarkable success in these pursuits is well known; it is worth mention here in order to account for many of the complications and collisions of interest subsequently ensuing upon the merchant-State’s fundamental doctrine that the primary function of government is not to maintain freedom and security, but to “help business.”

III

One examines the American merchant-State in vain for any suggestion of the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty. The company-system and the provincial system made no place for it, and the one autonomous State was uncompromisingly against it. The Bay Company brought over their charter to serve as the constitution of the new colony, and under its provisions the form of the State was that of an uncommonly small and close oligarchy. The right to vote was vested only in shareholding members, or “freemen” of the corporation, on the stark State principle laid down many years later by John Jay, that “those who own the country should govern the country.” At the end of a year, the Bay colony comprised perhaps about two thousand persons; and of these, certainly not twenty, probably not more than a dozen, had anything whatever to say about its government. This small group constituted itself as a sort of directorate or council, appointing its own executive body, which consisted of a governor, a lieutenant-governor, and a half-dozen or more magistrates. These officials had no responsibility to the community at large, but only to the directorate. By the terms of the charter, the directorate was self-perpetuating. It was permitted to fill vacancies and add to its numbers as it saw fit; and in so doing it followed a policy similar to that which was subsequently recommended by Alexander Hamilton, of admitting only such well-to-do and influential persons as could be trusted to sustain a solid front against anything savouring of popular sovereignty.

Historians have very properly made a great deal of the influence of Calvinist theology in bracing the strongly anti-democratic attitude of the Bay Company. The story is readable and interesting – often amusing – yet the gist of it is so simple that it can be perceived at once. The company’s principle of action was in this respect the one that in like circumstances has for a dozen centuries invariably motivated the State. The Marxian dictum that “religion is the opiate of the people” is either an ignorant or a slovenly confusion of terms, which can not be too strongly reprehended. Religion was never that, nor will it ever be; but organized Christianity, which is by no means the same thing as religion, has been the opiate of the people ever since the beginning of the fourth century, and never has this opiate been employed for political purposes more skilfully than it was by the Massachusetts Bay oligarchy.

In the year 311 the Roman emperor Constantine issued an edict of toleration in favour of organized Christianity. He patronized the new cult heavily, giving it rich presents, and even adopted the labarum as his standard, which was a most distinguished gesture, and cost nothing; the story of the heavenly sign appearing before his crucial battle against Maxentius may quite safely be put down beside that of the apparitions seen before the battle of the Marne. He never joined the Church, however, and the tradition that he was converted to Christianity is open to great doubt. The point of all this is that circumstances had by that time made Christianity a considerable figure; it had survived contumely and persecution, and had become a social influence which Constantine saw was destined to reach far enough to make it worth courting. The Church could be made a most effective tool of the State, and only a very moderate amount of statesmanship was needed to discern the right way of bringing this about. The understanding, undoubtedly tacit, was based on a simple quid pro quo; in exchange for imperial recognition and patronage, and endowments enough to keep up to the requirements of a high official respectability, the Church should quit its disagreeable habit of criticizing the course of politics; and in particular, it should abstain from unfavourable comment on the State’s administration of the political means.

These are the unvarying terms – again I say, undoubtedly tacit, as it is seldom necessary to stipulate against biting the hand by which one is fed – of every understanding that has been struck since Constantine’s day, between organized Christianity and the State. They were the terms of the understanding struck in the Germanies and in England at the Reformation. The petty German principality had its State Church as it had its State theatre; and in England, Henry VIII set up the Church in its present status as an arm of the civil service, like the Post-office. The fundamental understanding in all cases was that the Church should not interfere with or disparage the organization of the political means; and in practice it naturally followed that the Church would go further, and quite regularly abet this organization to the best of its ability.

The merchant-State in America came to this understanding with organized Christianity. In the Bay colony the Church became in 1638 an established subsidiary of the State,[8]Click to see. supported by taxation; it maintained a State creed, promulgated in 1647. In some other colonies also, as for example, in Virginia, the Church was a branch of the State service, and where it was not actually established as such, the same understanding was reached by other means, quite as satisfactory. Indeed, the merchant-State both in England and America soon became lukewarm towards the idea of an Establishment, perceiving that the same modus vivendi could be almost as easily arrived at under voluntaryism, and that the latter had the advantage of satisfying practically all modes of credal and ceremonial preference, thus releasing the State from the troublesome and profitless business of interference in disputes over matters of doctrine and Church order.

Voluntaryism pure and simple was set up in Rhode Island by Roger Williams, John Clarke, and their associates who were banished from the Bay colony almost exactly three hundred years ago, in 1636. This group of exiles is commonly regarded as having founded a society on the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty in respect of both Church order and civil order, and as having launched an experiment in democracy. This, however, is an exaggeration. The leaders of the group were undoubtedly in sight of this philosophy, and as far as Church order is concerned, their practice was conformable to it. On the civil side, the most that can be said is that their practice was conformable in so far as they knew how to make it so; and one says this much only by a very considerable concession. The least that can be said, on the other hand, is that their practice was for a time greatly in advance of the practice prevailing in other colonies – so far in advance that Rhode Island was in great disrepute with its neighbours in Massachusetts and Connecticut, who diligently disseminated the tale of its evil fame throughout the land, with the customary exaggerations and embellishments. Nevertheless, through acceptance of the State system of land-tenure, the political structure of Rhode Island was a State-structure from the outset, contemplating as it did the stratification of society into an owning and exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class. Williams’s theory of the State was that of social compact arrived at among equals, but equality did not exist in Rhode Island; the actual outcome was a pure class-State.

In the spring of 1638, Williams acquired about twenty square miles of land by gift from two Indian sachems, in addition to some he had bought from them two years before. In October he formed a “proprietary” of purchasers who bought twelve-thirteenths of the Indian grant. Bicknell, in his history of Rhode Island, cites a letter written by Williams to the deputy-governor of the Bay colony, which says frankly that the plan of this proprietary contemplated the creation of two classes of citizens, one consisting of landholding heads of families, and the other, of “young men, single persons” who were a landless tenantry, and as Bicknell says, “had no voice or vote as to the officers of the community, or the laws which they were called upon to obey.” Thus the civil order in Rhode Island was essentially a pure State order, as much so as the civil order of the Bay colony, or any other in America; and in fact the landed-property franchise lasted uncommonly long in Rhode Island, existing there for some time after it had been given up in most other quarters of America.[9]Click to see.

By way of summing up, it is enough to say that nowhere in the American colonial civil order was there ever the trace of a democracy. The political structure was always that of the merchant-State; Americans have never known any other. Furthermore, the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty was never once exhibited anywhere in American political practice during the colonial period, from the first settlement in 1607 down to the revolution of 1776.

Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

Chapter 3 Footnotes

[1]Click to return. Among these institutions are: our system of free public education; local self-government as originally established in the township system; our method of conveying land; almost all of our system of equity; much of our criminal code; and our method of administering estates.


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[2]Click to return. Throughout Europe, indeed, up to the close of the eighteenth century, the State was quite weak, even considering the relatively moderate development of social power, and the moderate amount of economic accumulation available to its predatory purposes. Social power in modern France could pay the flat annual levy of Louis XIV’s taxes without feeling it, and would like nothing better than to commute the republican State’s levy on those terms.


Click to return.

[3]Click to return. During the reign of Elizabeth the Puritan contention, led by Cartwright, was for what amounted to a theory of jure divino Presbyterianism. The Establishment at large took the position of Archbishop Whitgift and Richard Hooker that the details of church polity were indifferent, and therefore properly subject to State regulation. The High Church doctrine of jure divino episcopacy was laid down later, by Whitgift’s successor, Bancroft. Thus up to 1604 the Presbyterians were objectionable on secular grounds, and afterwards on both secular and ecclesiastical grounds.


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[4]Click to return. So were the kaleidoscopic changes that took place in France after the revolution of 1789. Throughout the Directorate, the Consulship, the Restoration, the two Empires, the three Republics and the Commune, the French State kept its essential character intact; it remained always the organization of the political means.


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[5]Click to return. In 1629 the Massachusetts Bay colony adopted the Plymouth colony’s model of congregational autonomy, but finding its principle dangerously inconsistent with the principle of the State, almost immediately nullified their action; retaining, however, the name of Congregationalism. This mode of masquerade is easily recognizable as one of the modern State’s most useful expedients for maintaining the appearance of things without the reality. The names of our two largest political parties will at once appear as a capital example. Within two years the Bay colony had set up a State church, nominally congregationalist, but actually a branch of the civil service, as in England.


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[6]Click to return. Probably it was a forecast of this state of things, as much as the greater convenience of administration, that caused the Bay Company to move over to Massachusetts, bag and baggage, in the year following the issuance of their charter.


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[7]Click to return. Thomas Robinson Hazard, the Rhode Island Quaker, in his delightful Jonnycake Papers, says that the Great Swamp Fight of 1675 was “instigated against the rightful owners of the soil, solely by the cussed godly Puritans of Massachusetts, and their hell-hound allies, the Presbyterians of Connecticut; whom, though charity is my specialty, I can never think of without feeling as all good Rhode Islanders should, . . . and as old Miss Hazard did when in like vein she thanked God in the Conanicut prayer-meeting that she could hold malice forty years.” The Rhode Island settlers dealt with the Indians for rights in land, and made friends with them.


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[8]Click to return. Mr. Parrington (Main Currents in American Thought, vol. I, p. 24) cites the successive steps leading up to this, as follows: the law of 1631, restricting the franchise to Church members; of 1635, obliging all persons to attend Church services; and of 1636, which established a virtual State monopoly, by requiring consent of both Church and State authority before a new church could be set up. Roger Williams observed acutely that a State establishment of organized Christianity is “a politic invention of man to maintain the civil State.”


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[9]Click to return. Bicknell says that the formation of Williams’s proprietary was “a landholding, land-jobbing, land-selling scheme, with no moral, social, civil, educational or religious end in view”; and his discussion of the early land-allotments on the site where the city of Providence now stands, makes it pretty clear that “the first years of Providence are consumed in a greedy scramble for land.” Bicknell is not precisely an unfriendly witness towards Williams, though his history is avowedly ex parte for the thesis that the true expounder of civil freedom in Rhode Island was not Williams, but Clarke. This contention is immaterial to the present purpose, however, for the State system of land-tenure prevailed in Clarke’s settlements on Aquidneck as it did in Williams’s settlements farther up the bay.


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Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

CHAPTER 4

I

AFTER conquest and confiscation have been effected, and the State set up, its first concern is with the land. The State assumes the right of eminent domain over its territorial basis, whereby every landholder becomes in theory a tenant of the State. In its capacity as ultimate landlord, the State distributes the land among its beneficiaries on its own terms. A point to be observed in passing is that by the State-system of land-tenure each original transaction confers two distinct monopolies, entirely different in their nature, inasmuch as one concerns the right to labour-made property, and the other concerns the right to purely law-made property. The one is a monopoly of the use-value of land; and the other, a monopoly of the economic rent of land. The first gives the right to keep other persons from using the land in question, or trespassing on it, and the right to exclusive possession of values accruing from the application of labour to it; values, that is, which are produced by exercise of the economic means upon the particular property in question. Monopoly of economic rent, on the other hand, gives the exclusive right to values accruing from the desire of other persons to possess that property; values which take their rise irrespective of any exercise of the economic means on the part of the holder.[1]Click to see.

Economic rent arises when, for whatsoever reason, two or more persons compete for the possession of a piece of land, and it increases directly according to the number of persons competing. The whole of Manhattan Island was bought originally by a handful of Hollanders from a handful of Indians for twenty-four dollars’ worth of trinkets. The subsequent “rise in land-values,” as we call it, was brought about by the steady influx of population and the consequent high competition for portions of the island’s surface; and these ensuing values were monopolized by the holders. They grew to an enormous size, and the holders profited accordingly; the Astor, Wendel, and Trinity Church estates have always served as classical examples for study of the State-system of land-tenure.

Bearing in mind that the State is the organization of the political means – that its primary intention is to enable the economic exploitation of one class by another – we see that it has always acted on the principle already cited, that expropriation must precede exploitation. There is no other way to make the political means effective. The first postulate of fundamental economics is that man is a land-animal, deriving his subsistence wholly from the land.[2]Click to see. His entire wealth is produced by the application of labour and capital to land; no form of wealth known to man can be produced in any other way. Hence, if his free access to land be shut off by legal preemption, he can apply his labour and capital only with the land-holder’s consent, and on the landholder’s terms; in other words, it is at this point, and this point only, that exploitation becomes practicable.[3]Click to see. Therefore the first concern of the State must be invariably, as we find it invariably is, with its policy of land-tenure.

I state these elementary matters as briefly as I can; the reader may easily find a full exposition of them elsewhere.[4]Click to see. I am here concerned only to show why the State system of land-tenure came into being, and why its maintenance is necessary to the State’s existence. If this system were broken up, obviously the reason for the State’s existence would disappear, and the State itself would disappear with it.[5]Click to see. With this in mind, it is interesting to observe that although all our public policies would seem to be in process of exhaustive review, no publicist has anything to say about the State system of land-tenure. This is no doubt the best evidence of its importance.[6]Click to see.

Under the feudal State there was no great amount of traffic in land. When William, for example, set up the Norman State in England after conquest and confiscation in 1066-76, his associate banditti, among whom he parcelled out the confiscated territory, did nothing to speak of in the way of developing their holdings, and did not contemplate gain from the increment of rental-values. In fact, economic rent hardly existed; their fellow-beneficiaries were not in the market to any great extent, and the dispossessed population did not represent any economic demand. The feudal regime was a regime of status, under which landed estates yielded hardly any rental-value, and only a moderate use-value, but carried an enormous insignia-value. Land was regarded more as a badge of nobility than as an active asset; its possession marked a man as belonging to the exploiting class, and the size of his holdings seems to have counted for more than the number of his exploitable dependents.[7]Click to see. The encroachments of the merchant-State, however, brought about a change in these circumstances. The importance of rental-values was recognized, and speculative trading in land became general.

Hence in a study of the merchant-State as it appeared full-blown in America, it is a point of utmost consequence to remember that from the time of the first colonial settlement to the present day, America has been regarded as a practically limitless field for speculation in rental-values.[8]Click to see. One may say at a safe venture that every colonial enterpriser and proprietor after Raleigh’s time understood economic rent and the conditions necessary to enhance it. The Swedish, Dutch and British trading-companies understood this; Endicott and Winthrop, of the autonomous merchant-State on the Bay, understood it; so did Penn and the Calverts; so did the Carolinian proprietors, to whom Charles II granted a lordly belt of territory south of Virginia, reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific; and as we have seen, Roger Williams and Clarke understood it perfectly. Indeed, land-speculation may be put down as the first major industry established in colonial America. Professor Sakolski calls attention to the fact that it was flourishing in the South before the commercial importance of either negroes or tobacco was recognized. These two staples came fully into their own about 1670 – tobacco perhaps a little earlier, but not much – and before that, England and Europe had been well covered by a lively propaganda of Southern landholders, advertising for settlers.[9]Click to see.

Mr. Sakolski makes it clear that very few original enterprisers in American rental-values ever got much profit out of their ventures. This is worth remarking here as enforcing the point that what gives rise to economic rent is the presence of a population engaged in a settled exercise of the economic means, or as we commonly put it, “working for a living” – or again, in technical terms, applying labour and capital to natural resources for the production of wealth. It was no doubt a very fine dignified thing for Carteret, Berkeley, and their associate nobility to be the owners of a province as large as the Carolinas, but if no population were settled there, producing wealth by exercise of the economic means, obviously not a foot of it would bear a pennyworth of rental-value, and the proprietors’ chance of exercising the political means would therefore be precisely nil. Proprietors who made the most profitable exercise of the political means have been those – or rather, speaking strictly, the heirs of those – like the Brevoorts, Wendels, Whitneys, Astors, and Goelets, who owned land in an actual or prospective urban centre, and held it as an investment rather than for speculation.

The lure of the political means in America, however, gave rise to a state of mind which may profitably be examined. Under the feudal State, living by the political means was enabled only by the accident of birth, or in some special cases by the accident of personal favour. Persons outside these categories of accident had no chance whatever to live otherwise than by the economic means. No matter how much they may have wished to exercise the political means, or how greatly they may have envied the privileged few who could exercise it, they were unable to do so; the feudal rTgime was strictly one of status. Under the merchant-State, on the contrary, the political means was open to anyone, irrespective of birth or position, who had the sagacity and determination necessary to get at it. In this respect, America appeared as a field of unlimited opportunity. The effect of this was to produce a race of people whose master-concern was to avail themselves of this opportunity. They had but the one spring of action, which was the determination to abandon the economic means as soon as they could, and at any sacrifice of conscience or character, and live by the political means. From the beginning, this determination has been universal, amounting to monomania.[10]Click to see. We need not concern ourselves here with the effect upon the general balance of advantage produced by supplanting the feudal State by the merchant-State; we may observe only that certain virtues and integrities were bred by the regime of status, to which the regime of contract appears to be inimical, even destructive. Vestiges of them persist among peoples who have had a long experience of the regime of status, but in America, which has had no such experience, they do not appear. What the compensations for their absence may be, or whether they may be regarded as adequate, I repeat, need not concern us; we remark only the simple fact that they have not struck root in the constitution of the American character at large, and apparently can not do so.

II

It was said at the time, I believe, that the actual causes of the colonial revolution of 1776 would never be known. The causes assigned by our schoolbooks may be dismissed as trivial; the various partisan and propagandist views of that struggle and its origins may be put down as incompetent. Great evidential value may be attached to the long line of adverse commercial legislation laid down by the British State from 1651 onward, especially to that portion of it which was enacted after the merchant-State established itself firmly in England in consequence of the events of 1688. This legislation included the Navigation Acts, the Trade Acts, acts regulating the colonial currency, the act of 1752 regulating the process of levy and distress, and the procedures leading up to the establishment of the Board of Trade in 1696.[11]Click to see. These directly affected the industrial and commercial interests in the colonies, though just how seriously is perhaps an open question – enough at any rate, beyond doubt, to provoke deep resentment.

Over and above these, however, if the reader will put himself back into the ruling passion of the time, he will at once appreciate the import of two matters which have for some reason escaped the attention of historians. The first of these is the attempt of the British State to limit the exercise of the political means in respect of rental-values.[12]Click to see. In 1763 it forbade the colonists to take up lands lying westward of the source of any river flowing through the Atlantic seaboard. The dead-line thus established ran so as to cut off from preemption about half of Pennsylvania and half of Virginia and everything to the west thereof. This was serious. With the mania for speculation running as high as it did, with the consciousness of opportunity, real or fancied, having become so acute and so general, this ruling affected everybody. One can get some idea of its effect by imagining the state of mind of our people at large if stock-gambling had suddenly been outlawed at the beginning of the last great boom in Wall Street a few years ago.

For by this time the colonists had begun to be faintly aware of the illimitable resources of the country lying westward; they had learned just enough about them to fire their imagination and their avarice to a white heat. The seaboard had been pretty well taken up, the free-holding farmer had been pushed back farther and farther, population was coming in steadily, the maritime towns were growing. Under these conditions, “western lands” had become a centre of attraction. Rental-values depended on population, the population was bound to expand, and the one general direction in which it could expand was westward, where lay an immense and incalculably rich domain waiting for preemption. What could be more natural than that the colonists should itch to get their hands on this territory, and exploit it for themselves alone, and on their own terms, without risk of arbitrary interference by the British State? – and this of necessity meant political independence. It takes no great stretch of imagination to see that anyone in those circumstances would have felt that way, and that colonial resentment against the arbitrary limitation which the edict of 1763 put upon the exercise of the political means must therefore have been great.

The actual state of land-speculation during the colonial period will give a fair idea of the probabilities in the case. Most of it was done on the company-system; a number of adventurers would unite, secure a grant of land, survey it, and then sell it off as speedily as they could. Their aim was a quick turnover; they did not, as a rule, contemplate holding the land, much less settling it – in short, their ventures were a pure gamble in rental-values.[13]Click to see. Among these pre-revolutionary enterprises was the Ohio Company, formed in 1748 with a grant of half a million acres; the Loyal Company, which like the Ohio Company, was composed of Virginians; the Transylvania, the Vandalia, Scioto, Indiana, Wabash, Illinois, Susquehannah, and others whose holdings were smaller.[14]Click to see. It is interesting to observe the names of persons concerned in these undertakings; one can not escape the significance of this connexion in view of their attitude towards the revolution, and their subsequent career as statesmen and patriots. For example, aside from his individual ventures, General Washington was a member of the Ohio Company, and a prime mover in organizing the Mississippi Company. He also conceived the scheme of the Potomac Company, which was designed to raise the rental-value of western holdings by affording an outlet for their produce by canal and portage to the Potomac River, and thence to the seaboard. This enterprise determined the establishment of the national capital in its present most ineligible situation, for the proposed terminus of the canal was at that point. Washington picked up some lots in the city that bears his name, but in common with other early speculators, he did not make much money out of them; they were appraised at about $20,000 when he died.

Patrick Henry was an inveterate and voracious engrosser of land lying beyond the deadline set by the British State; later he was heavily involved in the affairs of one of the notorious Yazoo companies, operating in Georgia. He seems to have been most unscrupulous. His company’s holdings in Georgia, amounting to more than ten million acres, were to be paid for in Georgia scrip, which was much depreciated. Henry bought up all these certificates that he could get his hands on, at ten cents on the dollar, and made a great profit on them by their rise in value when Hamilton put through his measure for having the central government assume the debts they represented. Undoubtedly it was this trait of unrestrained avarice which earned him the dislike of Mr. Jefferson, who said, rather contemptuously, that he was “insatiable in money.”[15]Click to see.

Benjamin Franklin’s thrifty mind turned cordially to the project of the Vandalia Company, and he acted successfully as promoter for it in England in 1766. Timothy Pickering, who was Secretary of State under Washington and John Adams, went on record in 1796 that “all I am now worth was gained by speculations in land.” Silas Deane, emissary of the Continental Congress to France, was interested in the Illinois and Wabash Companies, as was Robert Morris, who managed the revolution’s finances; as was also James Wilson, who became a justice of the Supreme Court and a mighty man in post-revolutionary land-grabbing. Wolcott of Connecticut, and Stiles, president of Yale College, held stock in the Susquehannah Company; so did Peletiah Webster, Ethan Allen, and Jonathan Trumbull, the “Brother Jonathan,” whose name was long a sobriquet for the typical American, and is still sometimes so used. James Duane, the first mayor of New York City, carried on some quite considerable speculative undertakings; and however indisposed one may feel towards entertaining the fact, so did the “Father of the Revolution” himself – Samuel Adams.

A mere common-sense view of the situation would indicate that the British State’s interference with a free exercise of the political means was at least as great an incitement to revolution as its interference, through the Navigation Acts, and the Trade Acts, with a free exercise of the economic means. In the nature of things it would be a greater incitement, both because it affected a more numerous class of persons, and because speculation in land-values represented much easier money. Allied with this is the second matter which seems to me deserving of notice, and which has never been properly reckoned with, as far as I know, in studies of the period.

It would seem the most natural thing in the world for the colonists to perceive that independence would not only give freer access to this one mode of the political means, but that it would also open access to other modes which the colonial status made unavailable. The merchant-State existed in the royal provinces complete in structure, but not in function; it did not give access to all the modes of economic exploitation. The advantages of a State which should be wholly autonomous in this respect must have been clear to the colonists, and must have moved them strongly towards the project of establishing one.

Again it is purely a common-sense view of the circumstances that leads to this conclusion. The merchant-State in England had emerged triumphant from conflict, and the colonists had plenty of chance to see what it could do in the way of distributing the various means of economic exploitation, and its methods of doing it. For instance, certain English concerns were in the carrying trade between England and America, for which other English concerns built ships. Americans could compete in both these lines of business. If they did so, the carrying-charges would be regulated by the terms of this competition; if not, they would be regulated by monopoly, or, in our historic phrase, they could be set as high as the traffic would bear. English carriers and shipbuilders made common cause, approached the State and asked it to intervene, which it did by forbidding the colonists to ship goods on any but English-built and English-operated ships. Since freight-charges are a factor in prices, the effect of this intervention was to enable British shipowners to pocket the difference between monopoly-rates and competitive rates; to enable them, that is, to exploit the consumer by employing the political means.[16]Click to see. Similar interventions were made at the instance of cutlers, nailmakers, hatters, steelmakers, etc.

These interventions took the form of simple prohibition. Another mode of intervention appeared in the customs-duties laid by the British State on foreign sugar and molasses.[17]Click to see. We all now know pretty well, probably, that the primary reason for a tariff is that it enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery.[18]Click to see. All the reasons regularly assigned are debatable; this one is not, hence propagandists and lobbyists never mention it. The colonists were well aware of this reason, and the best evidence that they were aware of it is that long before the Union was established, the merchant-enterprisers and industrialists were ready and waiting to set upon the new-formed administration with an organized demand for a tariff.

It is clear that while in the nature of things the British State’s interventions upon the economic means would stir up great resentment among the interests directly concerned, they would have another effect fully as significant, if not more so, in causing those interests to look favourably on the idea of political independence. They could hardly have helped seeing the positive as well as the negative advantage that would accrue from setting up a State of their own, which they might bend to their own purposes. It takes no great amount of imagination to reconstruct the vision that appeared before them of a merchant-State clothed with full powers of intervention and discrimination, a State which should first and last “help business,” and which should be administered either by mere agents or by persons easily manageable, if not by persons of actual interests like to their own. It is hardly presumable that the colonists generally were not intelligent enough to see this vision, or that they were not resolute enough to risk the chance of realizing it when the time could be made ripe; as it was, the time was ripened almost before it was ready.[19]Click to see. We can discern a distinct line of common purpose uniting the interests of the merchant-enterpriser with those of the actual or potential speculator in rental-values – uniting the Hancocks, Gores, Otises, with the Henrys, Lees, Wolcotts, Trumbulls – and leading directly towards the goal of political independence.

The main conclusion, however, towards which these observations tend, is that one general frame of mind existed among the colonists with reference to the nature and primary function of the State. This frame of mind was not peculiar to them; they shared it with the beneficiaries of the merchant-State in England, and with those of the feudal State as far back as the State’s history can be traced. Voltaire, surveying the debris of the feudal State, said that in essence the State is “a device for taking money out of one set of pockets and putting it into another.” The beneficiaries of the feudal State had precisely this view, and they bequeathed it unchanged and unmodified to the actual and potential beneficiaries of the merchant-State. The colonists regarded the State as primarily an instrument whereby one might help oneself and hurt others; that is to say, first and foremost they regarded it as the organization of the political means. No other view of the State was ever held in colonial America. Romance and poetry were brought to bear on the subject in the customary way; glamorous myths about it were propagated with the customary intent; but when all came to all, nowhere in colonial America were actual practical relations with the State ever determined by any other view than this.[20]Click to see.

III

The charter of the American revolution was the Declaration of Independence, which took its stand on the double thesis of “unalienable” natural rights and popular sovereignty. We have seen that these doctrines were theoretically, or as politicians say, “in principle,” congenial to the spirit of the English merchant-enterpriser, and we may see that in the nature of things they would be even more agreeable to the spirit of all classes in American society. A thin and scattered population with a whole wide world before it, with a vast territory full of rich resources which anyone might take a hand at preempting and exploiting, would be strongly on the side of natural rights, as the colonists were from the beginning; and political independence would confirm it in that position. These circumstances would stiffen the American merchant-enterpriser, agrarian, forestaller and industrialist alike in a jealous, uncompromising, and assertive economic individualism.

So also with the sister doctrine of popular sovereignty. The colonists had been through a long and vexatious experience of State interventions which limited their use of both the political and economic means. They had also been given plenty of opportunity to see how these interventions had been managed, and how the interested English economic groups which did the managing had profited at their expense. Hence there was no place in their minds for any political theory that disallowed the right of individual self-expression in politics. As their situation tended to make them natural-born economic individualists, so also it tended to make them natural-born republicans.

Thus the preamble of the Declaration hit the mark of a cordial unanimity. Its two leading doctrines could easily be interpreted as justifying an unlimited economic pseudo-individualism on the part of the State’s beneficiaries, and a judiciously managed exercise of political self-expression by the electorate. Whether or not this were a more free-and-easy interpretation than a strict construction of the doctrines will bear, no doubt it was in effect the interpretation quite commonly put upon them. American history abounds in instances where great principles have, in their common understanding and practical application, been narrowed down to the service of very paltry ends. The preamble, nevertheless, did reflect a general state of mind. However incompetent the understanding of its doctrines may have been, and however interested the motives which prompted that understanding, the general spirit of the people was in their favour.

There was complete unanimity also regarding the nature of the new and independent political institution which the Declaration contemplated as within “the right of the people” to set up. There was a great and memorable dissension about its form, but none about its nature. It should be in essence the mere continuator of the merchant-State already existing. There was no idea of setting up government, the purely social institution which should have no other object than, as the Declaration put it, to secure the natural rights of the individual; or as Paine put it, which should contemplate nothing beyond the maintenance of freedom and security – the institution which should make no positive interventions of any kind upon the individual, but should confine itself exclusively to such negative interventions as the maintenance of freedom and security might indicate. The idea was to perpetuate an institution of another character entirely, the State, the organization of the political means; and this was accordingly done.

There is no disparagement implied in this observation; for, all questions of motive aside, nothing else was to be expected. No one knew any other kind of political organization. The causes of American complaint were conceived of as due only to interested and culpable mal-administration, not to the essentially anti-social nature of the institution administered. Dissatisfaction was directed against administrators, not against the institution itself. Violent dislike of the form of the institution – the monarchical form – was engendered, but no distrust or suspicion of its nature. The character of the State had never been subjected to scrutiny; the coöperation of the Zeitgeist was needed for that, and it was not yet to be had.[21]Click to see. One may see here a parallel with the revolutionary movements against the Church in the sixteenth century – and indeed with revolutionary movements in general. They are incited by abuses and misfeasances, more or less specific and always secondary, and are carried on with no idea beyond getting them rectified or avenged, usually by the sacrifice of conspicuous scapegoats. The philosophy of the institution that gives play to these misfeasances is never examined, and hence they recur promptly under another form or other auspices,[22]Click to see. or else their place is taken by others which are in character precisely like them. Thus the notorious failure of reforming and revolutionary movements in the long-run may as a rule be found due to their incorrigible superficiality.

One mind, indeed, came within reaching distance of the fundamentals of the matter, not by employing the historical method, but by a homespun kind of reasoning, aided by a sound and sensitive instinct. The common view of Mr. Jefferson as a doctrinaire believer in the stark principle of “states rights” is most incompetent and misleading. He believed in states’ rights, assuredly, but he went much farther; states’ rights were only an incident in his general system of political organization. He believed that the ultimate political unit, the repository and source of political authority and initiative, should be the smallest unit; not the federal unit, state unit or county unit, but the township, or, as he called it, the “ward.” The township, and the township only, should determine the delegation of power upwards to the county, the state, and the federal units. His system of extreme decentralization is interesting and perhaps worth a moment’s examination, because if the idea of the State is ever displaced by the idea of government, it seems probable that the practical expression of this idea would come out very nearly in that form.[23]Click to see. There is probably no need to say that the consideration of such a displacement involves a long look ahead, and over a field of view that is cluttered with the debris of a most discouraging number, not of nations alone, but of whole civilizations. Nevertheless it is interesting to remind ourselves that more than a hundred and fifty years ago, one American succeeded in getting below the surface of things, and that he probably to some degree anticipated the judgment of an immeasurably distant future.

In February, 1816, Mr. Jefferson wrote a letter to Joseph C. Cabell, in which he expounded the philosophy behind his system of political organization. What is it, he asks, that has “destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian senate.” The secret of freedom will be found in the individual “making himself the depository of the powers respecting himself, so far as he is competent to them, and delegating only what is beyond his competence, by a synthetical process, to higher and higher orders of functionaries, so as to trust fewer and fewer powers in proportion as the trustees become more and more oligarchical.” This idea rests on accurate observation, for we are all aware that not only the wisdom of the ordinary man, but also his interest and sentiment, have a very short radius of operation; they can not be stretched over an area of much more than township-size; and it is the acme of absurdity to suppose that any man or any body of men can arbitrarily exercise their wisdom, interest and sentiment over a state-wide or nation-wide area with any kind of success. Therefore the principle must hold that the larger the area of exercise, the fewer and more clearly defined should be the functions exercised. Moreover, “by placing under everyone what his own eye may superintend,” there is erected the surest safeguard against usurpation of function. “Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic, or of some of the higher ones, and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day; . . . he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power wrested from him by a Cæsar or a Bonaparte.”

No such idea of popular sovereignty, however, appeared in the political organization that was set up in 1789 – far from it. In devising their structure, the American architects followed certain specifications laid down by Harington, Locke and Adam Smith, which might be regarded as a sort of official digest of politics under the merchant-State; indeed, if one wished to be perhaps a little inurbane in describing them – though not actually unjust – one might say that they are the merchant-State’s defence-mechanism.[24]Click to see. Harington laid down the all-important principle that the basis of politics is economic – that power follows property. Since he was arguing against the feudal concept, he laid stress specifically upon landed property. He was of course too early to perceive the bearings of the State-system of land-tenure upon industrial exploitation, and neither he nor Locke perceived any natural distinction to be drawn between law-made property and labour-made property; nor yet did Smith perceive this clearly, though he seems to have had occasional indistinct glimpses of it. According to Harington’s theory of economic determinism, the realization of popular sovereignty is a simple matter. Since political power proceeds from land-ownership, a simple diffusion of land-ownership is all that is needed to insure a satisfactory distribution of power.[25]Click to see. If everybody owns, then everybody rules. “If the people hold three parts in four of the territory,” Harington says, “it is plain there can neither be any single person nor nobility able to dispute the government with them. In this case therefore, except force be interposed, they govern themselves.”

Locke, writing a half-century later, when the revolution of 1688 was over, concerned himself more particularly with the State’s positive confiscatory interventions upon other modes of property-ownership. These had long been frequent and vexatious, and under the Stuarts they had amounted to unconscionable highwaymanry. Locke’s idea therefore was to copper-rivet such a doctrine of the sacredness of property as would forever put a stop to this sort of thing. Hence he laid it down that the first business of the State is to maintain the absolute inviolability of general property-rights; the State itself might not violate them, because in so doing it would act against its own primary function. Thus in Locke’s view, the rights of property took precedence even over those of life and liberty; and if ever it came to the pinch, the State must make its choice accordingly.[26]Click to see.

Thus while the American architects assented “in principle” to the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty, and found it in a general way highly congenial as a sort of voucher for their self-esteem, their practical interpretation of it left it pretty well hamstrung. They were not especially concerned with consistency; their practical interest in this philosophy stopped short at the point which we have already noted, of its presumptive justification of a ruthless economic pseudo-individualism, and an exercise of political self-expression by the general electorate which should be so managed as to be, in all essential respects, futile. In this they took precise pattern by the English Whig exponents and practitioners of this philosophy. Locke himself, whom we have seen putting the natural rights of property so high above those of life and liberty, was equally discriminating in his view of popular sovereignty. He was no believer in what he called “a numerous democracy,” and did not contemplate a political organization that should countenance anything of the kind.[27]Click to see. The sort of organization he had in mind is reflected in the extraordinary constitution he devised for the royal province of Carolina, which established a basic order of politically inarticulate serfdom. Such an organization as this represented about the best, in a practical way, that the British merchant-State was ever able to do for the doctrine of popular sovereignty.

It was also about the best that the American counterpart of the British merchant-State could do. The sum of the matter is that while the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty afforded a set of principles upon which all interests could unite, and practically all did unite, with the aim of securing political independence, it did not afford a satisfactory set of principles on which to found the new American State. When political independence was secured, the stark doctrine of the Declaration went into abeyance, with only a distorted simulacrum of its principles surviving. The rights of life and liberty were recognized by a mere constitutional formality left open to eviscerating interpretations, or, where these were for any reason deemed superfluous, to simple executive disregard; and all consideration of the rights attending “the pursuit of happiness” was narrowed down to a plenary acceptance of Locke’s doctrine of the predminent rights of property, with law-made property on an equal footing with labour-made property. As for popular sovereignty, the new State had to be republican in form, for no other would suit the general temper of the people; and hence its peculiar task was to preserve the appearance of actual republicanism without the reality. To do this, it took over the apparatus which we have seen the English merchant-State adopting when confronted with a like task – the apparatus of a representative or parliamentary system. Moreover, it improved upon the British model of this apparatus by adding three auxiliary devices which time has proved most effective. These were, first, the device of the fixed term, which regulates the administration of our system by astronomical rather than political considerations – by the motion of the earth around the sun rather than by political exigency; second, the device of judicial review and interpretation, which, as we have already observed, is a process whereby anything may be made to mean anything; third, the device of requiring legislators to reside in the district they represent, which puts the highest conceivable premium upon pliancy and venality, and is therefore the best mechanism for rapidly building up an immense body of patronage. It may be perceived at once that all these devices tend of themselves to work smoothly and harmoniously towards a great centralization of State power, and that their working in this direction may be indefinitely accelerated with the utmost economy of effort.

As well as one can put a date to such an event, the surrender at Yorktown marks the sudden and complete disappearance of the Declaration’s doctrine from the political consciousness of America. Mr. Jefferson resided in Paris as minister to France from 1784 to 1789. As the time for his return to America drew near, he wrote Colonel Humphreys that he hoped soon “to possess myself anew, by conversation with my countrymen, of their spirit and ideas. I know only the Americans of the year 1784. They tell me this is to be much a stranger to those of 1789.” So indeed he found it. On arriving in New York and resuming his place in the social life of the country, he was greatly depressed by the discovery that the principles of the Declaration had gone wholly by the board. No one spoke of natural rights and popular sovereignty; it would seem actually that no one had ever heard of them. On the contrary, everyone was talking about the pressing need of a strong central coercive authority, able to check the incursions which “the democratic spirit” was likely to incite upon “the men of principle and property.”[28]Click to see. Mr. Jefferson wrote despondently of the contrast of all this with the sort of thing he had been hearing in the France which he had just left “in the first year of her revolution, in the fervour of natural rights and zeal for reformation.” In the process of possessing himself anew of the spirit and ideas of his countrymen, he said, “I can not describe the wonder and mortification with which the table-conversations filled me.” Clearly, though the Declaration might have been the charter of American independence, it was in no sense the charter of the new American State.

Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

Chapter 4 Footnotes

[1]Click to return.

The economic rent of the Trinity Church estate in New York City, for instance, would be as high as it is now, even if the holders had never done a stroke of work on the property. Landowners who are holding a property “for a rise” usually leave it idle, or improve it only to the extent necessary to clear its taxes; the type of building commonly called a “taxpayer” is a familiar sight everywhere. Twenty-five years ago a member of the New York City Tax Commission told me that by careful estimate there was almost enough vacant land within the city limits to feed the population, assuming that all of it were arable and put under intensive cultivation!

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[2]Click to return.

As a technical term in economics, land includes all natural resources, earth, air, water, sunshine, timber and minerals in situ, etc. Failure to understand this use of the term has seriously misled some writers, notably Count Tolstoy.

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[3]Click to return.

Hence there is actually no such thing as a “labour-problem,” for no encroachment on the rights of either labour or capital can possibly take place until all natural resources within reach have been preempted. What we call the “problem of the unemployed” is in no sense a problem, but a direct consequence of State-created monopoly.

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[4]Click to return.

For fairly obvious reasons they have no place in the conventional courses that are followed in our schools and colleges.

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The French school of physiocrats, led by Quesnay, du Pont de Nemours, Turg(t, Gournay and le Trosne – usually regarded as the founders of the science of political economy – broached the idea of destroying this system by the confiscation of economic rent; and this idea was worked out in detail some years ago in America by Henry George. None of these writers, however, seemed to be aware of the effect that their plan would produce upon the State itself. Collectivism, on the other hand, proposes immeasurably to strengthen and entrench the State by confiscation of the use-value as well as the rental-value of land, doing away with private proprietorship in either.

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[6]Click to return.

If one were not aware of the highly explosive character of this subject, it would be almost incredible that until three years ago, no one has ever presumed to write a history of land-speculation in America. In 1932, the firm of Harpers published an excellent work by Professor Sakolski, under the frivolous catch-penny title of The Great American Land Bubble. I do not believe that anyone can have a competent understanding of our history or of the character of our people, without hard study of this book. It does not pretend to be more than a preliminary approach to the subject, a sort of path-breaker for the exhaustive treatise which someone, preferably Professor Sakolski himself, should be undertaking; but for what it is, nothing could be better. I am making liberal use of it throughout this section.

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[7]Click to return.

Regard for this insignia-value or token-value of land has shown an interesting persistence. The rise of the merchant-State, supplanting the rTgime of status by the rTgime of contract, opened the way for men of all sorts and conditions to climb into the exploiting class; and the new recruits have usually shown a hankering for the old distinguishing sign of their having done so, even though the rise in rental-values has made the gratification of this desire progressively costly.

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[8]Click to return.

If our geographical development had been determined in a natural way, by the demands of use instead of the demands of speculation, our western frontier would not yet be anywhere near the Mississippi River. Rhode Island is the most thickly-populated member of the Union, yet one may drive from one end of it to the other on one of its “through” highways, and see hardly a sign of human occupancy. All discussions of “over-population” from Malthus down, are based on the premise of legal occupancy instead of actual occupancy, and are therefore utterly incompetent and worthless. Oppenheimer’s calculation made in 1912, to which I have already referred, shows that if legal occupation were abolished, every family of five persons could possess nearly twenty acres of land, and still leave about two-thirds of the planet unoccupied. Henry George’s examination of Malthus’s theory of population is well known, or at least, easily available. It is perhaps worth mention in passing that exaggerated rental-values are responsible for the perennial troubles of the American single-crop farmer. Curiously, one finds this fact set forth in the report of a farm-survey, published by the Department of Agriculture about fifty years ago.

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[9]Click to return.

Mr. Chinard, professor in the Faculty of Literature at Johns Hopkins, has lately published a translation of a little book, hardly more than a pamphlet, written in 1686 by the Huguenot refugee Durand, giving a description of Virginia for the information of his fellow-exiles. It strikes a modern reader as being very favourable to Virginia, and one is amused to read that the landholders who had entertained Durand with an eye to business, thought he had not laid it on half thick enough, and were much disgusted. The book is delightfully interesting, and well worth owning.

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[10]Click to return.

It was the ground of Chevalier’s observation that Americans had “the morale of an army on the march,” and of his equally notable observations on the supreme rule of expediency in America.

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For a most admirable discussion of these measures and their consequences, cf. Beard, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 191-220.

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[12]Click to return.

In principle, this had been done before; for example, some of the early royal land-grants reserved mineral-rights and timber-rights to the Crown. The Dutch State reserved the right to furs and pelts. Actually, however, these restrictions did not amount to much, and were not felt as a general grievance, for these resources had been but little explored.

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There were a few exceptions, but not many; notably in the case of the Wadsworth properties in Western New York, which were held as an investment and leased out on a rental-basis. In one, at least, of General Washington’s operations, it appears that he also had this method in view. In 1773 he published an advertisement in a Baltimore newspaper, stating that he had secured a grant of about twenty thousand acres on the Ohio and Kanawha rivers, which he proposed to open to settlers on a rental-basis.

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[14]Click to return.

Sakolski, op. cit., ch. 1.

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[15]Click to return.

It is an odd fact that among the most eminent names of the period, almost the only ones unconnected with land-grabbing or land-jobbing, are those of the two great antagonists, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Mr. Jefferson had a gentleman’s distaste for profiting by any form of the political means; he never even went so far as to patent one of his many useful inventions. Hamilton seems to have cared nothing for money. His measures made many rich, but he never sought anything from them for himself. In general, he appears to have had few scruples, yet amidst the riot of greed and rascality which he did most to promote, he walked worthily. Even his professional fees as a lawyer were absurdly small, and he remained quite poor all his life.

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[16]Click to return.

Raw colonial exports were processed in England, and re-dxported to the colonies at prices enhanced in this way, thus making the political means effective on the colonists both going and coming.

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[17]Click to return.

Beard, op. cit., vol. I, p. 195, cites the observation current in England at the time, that seventy-three members of the Parliament that imposed this tariff were interested in West Indian sugar-plantations.

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[18]Click to return.

It must be observed, however, that free trade is impracticable so long as land is kept out of free competition with industry in the labour-market. Discussions of the rival policies of free trade and protection invariably leave this limitation out of account, and are therefore nugatory. Holland and England, commonly spoken of as free-trade countries, were never really such; they had only so much freedom of trade as was consistent with their special economic requirements. American free-traders of the last century, such as Sumner and Godkin, were not really free-traders; they were never able – or willing – to entertain the crucial question why, if free trade is a good thing, the conditions of labour were no better in free-trade England than, for instance, in protectionist Germany, but were in fact worse. The answer is, of course, that England had no unpreempted land to absorb displaced labour, or to stand in continuous competition with industry for labour.

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[19]Click to return.

The immense amount of labour involved in getting the revolution going, and keeping it going, is not as yet exactly a commonplace of American history, but it has begun to be pretty well understood, and the various myths about it have been exploded by the researches of disinterested historians.

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[20]Click to return.

The influence of this view upon the rise of nationalism and the maintenance of the national spirit in the modern world, now that the merchant-State has so generally superseded the feudal State, may be perceived at once. I do not think it has ever been thoroughly discussed, or that the sentiment of patriotism has ever been thoroughly examined for traces of this view, though one might suppose that such a work would be extremely useful.

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[21]Click to return.

Even now its coöperation seems not to have got very far in English and American professional circles. The latest English exponent of the State, Professor Laski, draws the same set of elaborate distinctions between the State and officialdom that one would look for if he had been writing a hundred and fifty years ago. He appears to regard the State as essentially a social institution, though his observations on this point are by no means clear. Since his conclusions tend towards collectivism, however, the inference seems admissible.

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[22]Click to return.

As, for example, when one political party is turned out of office, and another put in.

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[23]Click to return.

In fact, the only modification of it that one can foresee as necessary is that the smallest unit should reserve the taxing-power strictly to itself. The larger units should have no power whatever of direct or indirect taxation, but should present their requirements to the townships, to be met by quota. This would tend to reduce the organizations of the larger units to skeleton form, and would operate strongly against their assuming any functions but those assigned them, which under a strictly governmental rTgime would be very few – for the federal unit, indeed, extremely few. It is interesting to imagine the suppression of every bureaucratic activity in Washington today that has to do with the maintenance and administration of the political means, and see how little would be left. If the State were superseded by government, probably every federal activity could be housed in the Senate Office Building – quite possibly with room to spare.

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[24]Click to return.

Harington published the Oceana in 1656. Locke’s political treatises were published in 1690. Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776.

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[25]Click to return.

This theory, with its corollary that democracy is primarily an economic rather than a political status, is extremely modern. The Physiocrats in France, and Henry George in America, modified Harington’s practical proposals by showing that the same results could be obtained by the more convenient method of a local confiscation of economic rent.

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[26]Click to return.

Locke held that in time of war it was competent for the State to conscript the lives and liberties of its subjects, but not their property. It is interesting to remark the persistence of this view in the practice of the merchant-State at the present time. In the last great collision of competing interests among merchant-States, twenty years ago, the State everywhere intervened at wholesale upon the rights of life and liberty, but was very circumspect towards the rights of property. Since the principle of absolutism was introduced into our constitution by the income-tax amendment, several attempts have been made to reduce the rights of property, in time of war, to an approximately equal footing with those of life and liberty; but so far, without success.

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[27]Click to return.

It is worth going through the literature of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century to see how the words “democracy” and “democrat” appear exclusively as terms of contumely and reprehension. They served this purpose for a long time both in England and America, much as the terms “bolshevism” and “bolshevist” serve us now. They were subsequently taken over to become what Bentham called “impostor-terms,” in behalf of the existing economic and political order, as synonymous with a purely nominal republicanism. They are now used regularly in this way to describe the political system of the United States, even by persons who should know better – even, curiously, by persons like Bertrand Russell and Mr. Laski, who have little sympathy with the existing order. One sometimes wonders how our revolutionary forefathers would take it if they could hear some flatulent political thimblerigger charge them with having founded “the great and glorious democracy of the West.”

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[28]Click to return.

This curious collocation of attributes belongs to General Henry Knox, Washington’s secretary of war, and a busy speculator in land-values. He used it in a letter to Washington, on the occasion of Shays’s Rebellion in 1786, in which he made an agonized plea for a strong federal army. In the literature of the period, it is interesting to observe how regularly a moral superiority is associated with the possession of property.

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Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

CHAPTER 5

I

IT IS a commonplace that the persistence of an institution is due solely to the state of mind that prevails towards it, the set of terms in which men habitually think about it. So long, and only so long, as those terms are favourable, the institution lives and maintains its power; and when for any reason men generally cease thinking in those terms, it weakens and becomes inert. At one time, a certain set of terms regarding man’s place in nature gave organized Christianity the power largely to control men’s consciences and direct their conduct; and this power has dwindled to the point of disappearance, for no other reason than that men generally stopped thinking in those terms. The persistence of our unstable and iniquitous economic system is not due to the power of accumulated capital, the force of propaganda, or to any force or combination of forces commonly alleged as its cause. It is due solely to a certain set of terms in which men think of the opportunity to work; they regard this opportunity as something to be given. Nowhere is there any other idea about it than that the opportunity to apply labour and capital to natural resources for the production of wealth is not in any sense a right, but a concession.[1]Click to see. This is all that keeps our system alive. When men cease to think in those terms, the system will disappear, and not before.

It seems pretty clear that changes in the terms of thought affecting an institution are but little advanced by direct means. They are brought about in obscure and circuitous ways, and assisted by trains of circumstance which before the fact would appear quite unrelated, and their erosive or solvent action is therefore quite unpredictable. A direct drive at effecting these changes comes as a rule to nothing, or more often than not turns out to be retarding. They are so largely the work of those unimpassioned and imperturbable agencies for which Prince de Bismarck had such vast respect – he called them the imponderabilia – that any effort which disregards them, or thrusts them violently aside, will in the long-run find them stepping in to abort its fruit.

Thus it is that what we are attempting to do in this rapid survey of the historical progress of certain ideas, is to trace the genesis of an attitude of mind, a set of terms in which now practically everyone thinks of the State; and then to consider the conclusions towards which this psychical phenomenon unmistakably points. Instead of recognizing the State as “the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men,” the run of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as a final and indispensable entity, but also as, in the main, beneficent. The mass-man, ignorant of its history, regards its character and intentions as social rather than anti-social; and in that faith he is willing to put at its disposal an indefinite credit of knavery, mendacity and chicane, upon which its administrators may draw at will. Instead of looking upon the State’s progressive absorption of social power with the repugnance and resentment that he would naturally feel towards the activities of a professional-criminal organization, he tends rather to encourage and glorify it, in the belief that he is somehow identified with the State, and that therefore, in consenting to its indefinite aggrandizement, he consents to something in which he has a share – he is, pro tanto, aggrandizing himself. Professor Ortega y Gasset analyzes this state of mind extremely well. The mass-man, he says, confronting the phenomenon of the State,

“sees it, admires it, knows that there it is. . . . Furthermore, the mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem, presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. . . . When the mass suffers any ill-fortune, or simply feels some strong appetite, its great temptation is that permanent sure possibility of obtaining everything, without effort, struggle, doubt, or risk, merely by touching a button and setting the mighty machine in motion.”

It is the genesis of this attitude, this state of mind, and the conclusions which inexorably follow from its predominance, that we are attempting to get at through our present survey. These conclusions may perhaps be briefly forecast here, in order that the reader who is for any reason indisposed to entertain them may take warning of them at this point, and close the book.

The unquestioning, determined, even truculent maintenance of the attitude which Professor Ortega y Gasset so admirably describes, is obviously the life and strength of the State; and obviously too, it is now so inveterate and so widespread – one may freely call it universal – that no direct effort could overcome its inveteracy or modify it, and least of all hope to enlighten it. This attitude can only be sapped and mined by uncountable generations of experience, in a course marked by recurrent calamity of a most appalling character. When once the predominance of this attitude in any given civilization has become inveterate, as so plainly it has become in the civilization of America, all that can be done is to leave it to work its own way out to its appointed end. The philosophic historian may content himself with pointing out and clearly elucidating its consequences, as Professor Ortega y Gasset has done, aware that after this there is no more that one can do.

“The result of this tendency,” he says, “will be fatal. Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again by State intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify.[2]Click to see. Society will have to live for the State, man for the governmental machine. And as after all it is only a machine, whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it,[3]Click to see. the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism. Such was the lamentable fate of ancient civilization.”

II

The revolution of 1776-1781 converted thirteen provinces, practically as they stood, into thirteen autonomous political units, completely independent, and they so continued until 1789, formally held together as a sort of league, by the Articles of Confederation. For our purposes, the point to be remarked about this eight-year period, 1781- 1789, is that administration of the political means was not centralized in the federation, but in the several units of which the federation was composed. The federal assembly, or congress, was hardly more than a deliberative body of delegates appointed by the autonomous units. It had no taxing-power, and no coercive power. It could not command funds for any enterprise common to the federation, even for war; all it could do was to apportion the sum needed, in the hope that each unit would meet its quota. There was no coercive federal authority over these matters, or over any matters; the sovereignty of each of the thirteen federated units was complete.

Thus the central body of this loose association of sovereignties had nothing to say about the distribution of the political means. This authority was vested in the several component units. Each unit had absolute jurisdiction over its territorial basis, and could partition it as it saw fit, and could maintain any system of land-tenure that it chose to establish.[4]Click to see. Each unit set up its own trade-regulations. Each unit levied its own tariffs, one against another, in behalf of its own chosen beneficiaries. Each manufactured its own currency, and might manipulate it as it liked, for the benefit of such individuals or economic groups as were able to get effective access to the local legislature. Each managed its own system of bounties, concessions, subsidies, franchises, and exercised it with a view to whatever private interest its legislature might be influenced to promote. In short, the whole mechanism of the political means was non-national.

The federation was not in any sense a State; the State was not one, but thirteen. Within each unit, therefore, as soon as the war was over, there began at once a general scramble for access to the political means. It must never be forgotten that in each unit society was fluid; this access was available to anyone gifted with the peculiar sagacity and resolution necessary to get at it. Hence one economic interest after another brought pressure of influence to bear on the local legislatures, until the economic hand of every unit was against every other, and the hand of every other was against itself. The principle of “protection,” which as we have seen was already well understood, was carried to lengths precisely comparable with those to which it is carried in international commerce today, and for precisely the same primary purpose – the exploitation, or in plain terms the robbery, of the domestic consumer. Mr. Beard remarks that the legislature of New York, for example, pressed the principle which governs tariff-making to the point of levying duties on firewood brought in from Connecticut and on cabbages from New Jersey – a fairly close parallel with the octroi that one still encounters at the gates of French towns.

The primary monopoly, fundamental to all others – the monopoly of economic rent – was sought with redoubled eagerness.[5]Click to see. The territorial basis of each unit now included the vast holdings confiscated from British owners, and the bar erected by the British State’s proclamation of 1763 against the appropriation of Western lands was now removed. Professor Sakolski observes drily that “the early land-lust which the colonists inherited from their European forebears was not diminished by the democratic spirit of the revolutionary fathers.” Indeed not! Land-grants were sought as assiduously from local legislatures as they had been in earlier days from the Stuart dynasty and from colonial governors, and the mania of land-jobbing ran apace with the mania of land-grabbing.[6]Click to see. Among the men most actively interested in these pursuits were those whom we have already seen identified with them in pre-revolutionary days, such as the two Morrises, Knox, Pickering, James Wilson and Patrick Henry; and with their names appear those of Duer, Bingham, McKean, Willing, Greenleaf, Nicholson, Aaron Burr, Low, Macomb, Wadsworth, Remsen, Constable, Pierrepont, and others which now are less well remembered.

There is probably no need to follow out the rather repulsive trail of effort after other modes of the political means. What we have said about the foregoing two modes – tariffs and rental-value monopoly – is doubtless enough to illustrate satisfactorily the spirit and attitude of mind towards the State during the eight years immediately following the revolution. The whole story of insensate scuffle for State-created economic advantage is not especially animating, nor is it essential to our purposes. Such as it is, it may be read in detail elsewhere. All that interests us is to observe that during the eight years of federation, the principles of government set forth by Paine and by the Declaration continued in utter abeyance. Not only did the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty[7]Click to see. remain as completely out of consideration as when Mr. Jefferson first lamented its disappearance, but the idea of government as a social institution based on this philosophy was likewise unconsidered. No one thought of a political organization as instituted “to secure these rights” by processes of purely negative intervention – instituted, that is, with no other end in view than the maintenance of “freedom and security.” The history of the eight-year period of federation shows no trace whatever of any idea of political organization other than the State-idea. No one regarded this organization otherwise than as the organization of the political means, an all-powerful engine which should stand permanently ready and available for the irresistible promotion of this-or-that set of economic interests, and the irremediable disservice of others; according as whichever set, by whatever course of strategy, might succeed in obtaining command of its machinery.

III

It may be repeated that while State power was well centralized under the federation, it was not centralized in the federation, but in the federated unit. For various reasons, some of them plausible, many leading citizens, especially in the more northerly units, found this distribution of power unsatisfactory; and a considerable compact group of economic interests which stood to profit by a redistribution naturally made the most of these reasons. It is quite certain that dissatisfaction with the existing arrangement was not general, for when the redistribution took place in 1789, it was effected with great difficulty and only through a coup d’+tat, organized by methods which if employed in any other field than that of politics, would be put down at once as not only daring, but unscrupulous and dishonourable.

The situation, in a word, was that American economic interests had fallen into two grand divisions, the special interests in each having made common cause with a view to capturing control of the political means. One division comprised the speculating, industrial-commercial and creditor interests, with their natural allies of the bar and bench, the pulpit and the press. The other comprised chiefly the farmers and artisans and the debtor class generally. From the first, these two grand divisions were colliding briskly here and there in the several units, the most serious collision occurring over the terms of the Massachusetts constitution of 1780.[8]Click to see. The State in each of the thirteen units was a class-State, as every State known to history has been; and the work of manœuvring it in its function of enabling the economic exploitation of one class by another went steadily on.

General conditions under the Articles of Confederation were pretty good. The people had made a creditable recovery from the dislocations and disturbances due to the revolution, and there was a very decent prospect that Mr. Jefferson’s idea of a political organization, which should be national in foreign affairs and non-national in domestic affairs might be found continuously practicable. Some tinkering with the Articles seemed necessary – in fact, it was expected – but nothing that would transform or seriously impair the general scheme. The chief trouble was with the federation’s weakness in view of the chance of war, and in respect of debts due to foreign creditors. The Articles, however, carried provision for their own amendment, and for anything one can see, such amendment as the general scheme made necessary was quite feasible. In fact, when suggestions of revision arose, as they did almost immediately, nothing else appears to have been contemplated.

But the general scheme itself was as a whole objectionable to the interests grouped in the first grand division. The grounds of their dissatisfaction are obvious enough. When one bears in mind the vast prospect of the continent, one need use but little imagination to perceive that the national scheme was by far the more congenial to those interests, because it enabled an ever-closer centralization of control over the political means. For instance, leaving aside the advantage of having but one central tariff-making body to chaffer with, instead of twelve, any industrialist could see the great primary advantage of being able to extend his exploiting operations over a nation-wide free-trade area walled-in by a general tariff; the closer the centralization, the larger the exploitable area. Any speculator in rental-values would be quick to see the advantage of bringing this form of opportunity under unified control.[9]Click to see. Any speculator in depreciated public securities would be strongly for a system that could offer him the use of the political means to bring back their face-value.[10]Click to see. Any shipowner or foreign trader would be quick to see that his bread was buttered on the side of a national State which, if properly approached, might lend him the use of the political means by way of a subsidy, or would be able to back up some profitable but dubious freebooting enterprise with “diplomatic representations” or with reprisals.

The farmers and the debtor class in general, on the other hand, were not interested in these considerations, but were strongly for letting things stay, for the most part, as they stood. Preponderance in the local legislatures gave them satisfactory control of the political means, which they could and did use to the prejudice of the creditor class, and they did not care to be disturbed in their preponderance. They were agreeable to such modification of the Articles as should work out short of this, but not to setting up a national[11]Click to see. replica of the British merchant-State, which they perceived was precisely what the classes grouped in the opposing grand division wished to do. These classes aimed at bringing in the British system of economics, politics and judicial control, on a nation-wide scale; and the interests grouped in the second division saw that what this would really come to was a shifting of the incidence of economic exploitation upon themselves. They had an impressive object-lesson in the immediate shift that took place in Massachusetts after the adoption of John Adams’s local constitution of 1780. They naturally did not care to see this sort of thing put into operation on a nation-wide scale, and they therefore looked with extreme disfavour upon any bait put forth for amending the Articles out of existence. When Hamilton, in 1780, objected to the Articles in the form in which they were proposed for adoption, and proposed the calling of a constitutional convention instead, they turned the cold shoulder; as they did again to Washington’s letter to the local governors three years later, in which he adverted to the need of a strong coercive central authority.

Finally, however, a constitutional convention was assembled, on the distinct understanding that it should do no more than revise the Articles in such a way, as Hamilton cleverly phrased it, as to make them “adequate to the exigencies of the nation,” and on the further understanding that all the thirteen units should assent to the amendments before they went into effect; in short, that the method of amendment provided by the Articles themselves should be followed. Neither understanding was fulfilled. The convention was made up wholly of men representing the economic interests of the first division. The great majority of them, possibly as many as four-fifths, were public creditors; one-third were land-speculators; some were money-lenders; one-fifth were industrialists, traders, shippers; and many of them were lawyers. They planned and executed a coup d’+tat, simply tossing the Articles of Confederation into the waste-basket, and drafting a constitution de novo, with the audacious provision that it should go into effect when ratified by nine units instead of by all thirteen. Moreover, with like audacity, they provided that the document should not be submitted either to the Congress or to the local legislatures, but that it should go direct to a popular vote![12]Click to see.

The unscrupulous methods employed in securing ratification need not be dwelt on here.[13]Click to see. We are not indeed concerned with the moral quality of any of the proceedings by which the constitution was brought into being, but only with showing their instrumentality in encouraging a definite general idea of the State and its functions, and a consequent general attitude towards the State. We therefore go on to observe that in order to secure ratification by even the nine necessary units, the document had to conform to certain very exacting and difficult requirements. The political structure which it contemplated had to be republican in form, yet capable of resisting what Gerry unctuously called “the excess of democracy,” and what Randolph termed its “turbulence and follies.” The task of the delegates was precisely analogous to that of the earlier architects who had designed the structure of the British merchant-State, with its system of economics, politics and judicial control; they had to contrive something that could pass muster as showing a good semblance of popular sovereignty, without the reality. Madison defined their task explicitly in saying that the convention’s purpose was “to secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction [i.e., a democratic faction], and at the same time preserve the spirit and form of popular government.”

Under the circumstances, this was a tremendously large order; and the constitution emerged, as it was bound to do, as a compromise- document, or as Mr. Beard puts it very precisely, “a mosaic of second choices,” which really satisfied neither of the two opposing sets of interests. It was not strong and definite enough in either direction to please anybody. In particular, the interests composing the first division, led by Alexander Hamilton, saw that it was not sufficient of itself to fix them in anything like a permanent impregnable position to exploit continuously the groups composing the second division. To do this – to establish the degree of centralization requisite to their purposes – certain lines of administrative management must be laid down, which, once established, would be permanent. The further task therefore, in Madison’s phrase, was to “administration” the constitution into such absolutist modes as would secure economic supremacy, by a free use of the political means, to the groups which made up the first division.

This was accordingly done. For the first ten years of its existence the constitution remained in the hands of its makers for administration in directions most favourable to their interests. For an accurate understanding of the newly-erected system’s economic tendencies, too much stress can not be laid on the fact that for these ten critical years “the machinery of economic and political power was mainly directed by the men who had conceived and established it.”[14]Click to see. Washington, who had been chairman of the convention, was elected President. Nearly half the Senate was made up of men who had been delegates, and the House of Representatives was largely made up of men who had to do with the drafting or ratifying of the constitution. Hamilton, Randolph and Knox, who were active in promoting the document, filled three of the four positions in the Cabinet; and all the federal judgeships, without a single exception, were filled by men who had a hand in the business of drafting, or of ratification, or both. Of all the legislative measures enacted to implement the new constitution, the one best calculated to ensure a rapid and steady progress in the centralization of political power was the judiciary Act of 1789.[15]Click to see. This measure created a federal supreme court of six members (subsequently enlarged to nine), and a federal district court in each state, with its own complete personnel, and a complete apparatus for enforcing its decrees. The Act established federal oversight of state legislation by the familiar device of “interpretation”, whereby the Supreme Court might nullify state legislative or judicial action which for any reason it saw fit to regard as unconstitutional. One feature of the Act which for our purposes is most noteworthy is that it made the tenure of all these federal judgeships appointive, not elective, and for life; thus marking almost the farthest conceivable departure from the doctrine of popular sovereignty.

The first chief justice was John Jay, “the learned and gentle Jay,” as Beveridge calls him in his excellent biography of Marshall. A man of superb integrity, he was far above doing anything whatever in behalf of the accepted principle that est boni judicis ampliare jurisdictionem. Ellsworth, who followed him, also did nothing. The succession, however, after Jay had declined a reappointment, then fell to John Marshall, who, in addition to the control established by the judiciary Act over the state legislative and judicial authority, arbitrarily extended judicial control over both the legislative and executive branches of the federal authority;[16]Click to see. thus effecting as complete and convenient a centralization of power as the various interests concerned in framing the constitution could reasonably have contemplated.[17]Click to see.

We may now see from this necessarily brief survey, which anyone may amplify and particularize at his pleasure, what the circumstances were which rooted a certain definite idea of the State still deeper in the general consciousness. That idea was precisely the same in the constitutional period as that which we have seen prevailing in the two periods already examined – the colonial period, and the eight-year period following the revolution. Nowhere in the history of the constitutional period do we find the faintest suggestion of the Declaration’s doctrine of natural rights; and we find its doctrine of popular sovereignty not only continuing in abeyance, but constitutionally estopped from ever reappearing. Nowhere do we find a trace of the Declaration’s theory of government; on the contrary, we find it expressly repudiated. The new political mechanism was a faithful replica of the old disestablished British model, but so far improved and strengthened as to be incomparably more close-working and efficient, and hence presenting incomparably more attractive possibilities of capture and control. By consequence, therefore, we find more firmly implanted than ever the same general idea of the State that we have observed as prevailing hitherto – the idea of an organization of the political means, an irresponsible and all-powerful agency standing always ready to be put into use for the service of one set of economic interests as against another.

IV

Out of this idea proceeded what we know as the “party system” of political management, which has been in effect ever since. Our purposes do not require that we examine its history in close detail for evidence that it has been from the beginning a purely bipartisan system, since this is now a matter of fairly common acceptance. In his second term Mr. Jefferson discovered the tendency towards bipartisanship,[18]Click to see. and was both dismayed and puzzled by it. I have elsewhere[19]Click to see. remarked his curious inability to understand how the cohesive power of public plunder works straight towards political bipartisanship. In 1823, finding some who called themselves Republicans favouring the Federalist policy of centralization, he spoke of them in a rather bewildered way as “pseudo-Republicans, but real Federalists.” But most naturally any Republican who saw a chance of profiting by the political means would retain the name, and at the same time resist any tendency within the party to impair the general system which held out such a prospect.[20]Click to see. In this way bipartisanship arises. Party designations become purely nominal, and the stated issues between parties become progressively trivial; and both are more and more openly kept up with no other object than to cover from scrutiny the essential identity of purpose in both parties.

Thus the party system at once became in effect an elaborate system of fetiches, which, in order to be made as impressive as possible, were chiefly moulded up around the constitution, and were put on show as “constitutional principles.” The history of the whole post-constitutional period, from 1789 to the present day, is an instructive and cynical exhibit of the fate of these fetiches when they encounter the one only actual principle of party action – the principle of keeping open the channels of access to the political means. When the fetich of “strict construction,” for example, has collided with this principle, it has invariably gone by the board, the party that maintained it simply changing sides. The anti- Federalist party took office in 1800 as the party of strict construction; yet, once in office, it played ducks and drakes with the constitution, in behalf of the special economic interests that it represented.[21]Click to see. The Federalists were nominally for loose construction, yet they fought bitterly every one of the opposing party’s loose-constructionist measures – the embargo, the protective tariff and the national bank. They were constitutional nationalists of the deepest dye, as we have seen; yet in their centre and stronghold, New England, they held the threat of secession over the country throughout the period of what they harshly called “Mr. Madison’s war,” the War of 18l2, which was in fact a purely imperialistic adventure after annexation of Floridan and Canadian territory, in behalf of stiffening agrarian control of the political means; but when the planting interests of the South made the same threat in 1861, they became fervid nationalists again. Such exhibitions of pure fetichism, always cynical in their transparent candour, make up the history of the party system. Their reductio ad absurdum is now seen as perhaps complete – one can not see how it could go further – in the attitude of the Democratic party towards its historical principles of state sovereignty and strict construction. A fair match for this, however, is found in a speech made the other day to a group of exporting and importing interests by the mayor of New York – always known as a Republican in politics – advocating the hoary Democratic doctrine of a low tariff!

Throughout our post-constitutional period there is not on record, as far as I know, a single instance of party adherence to a fixed principle, qua principle, or to a political theory, qua theory. Indeed, the very cartoons on the subject show how widely it has come to be accepted that party platforms, with their cant of “issues,” are so much sheer Quackery, and that campaign-promises are merely another name for thimblerigging. The workaday practice of politics has been invariably opportunist, or in other words, invariably conformable to the primary function of the State; and it is largely for this reason that the State’s service exerts its most powerful attraction upon an extremely low and sharp-set type of individual.[22]Click to see.

The maintenance of this system of fetiches, however, gives great enhancement to the prevailing general view of the State. In that view, the State is made to appear as somehow deeply and disinterestedly concerned with great principles of action; and hence, in addition to its prestige as a pseudo-social institution, it takes on the prestige of a kind of moral authority, thus disposing of the last vestige of the doctrine of natural rights by overspreading it heavily with the quicklime of legalism; whatever is State-sanctioned is right. This double prestige is assiduously inflated by many agencies; by a State-controlled system of education, by a State-dazzled pulpit, by a meretricious press, by a continuous kaleidoscopic display of State pomp, panoply and circumstance, and by all the innumerable devices of electioneering. These last invariably take their stand on the foundation of some imposing principle, as witness the agonized cry now going up here and there in the land, for a “return to the constitution.” All this is simply “the interested clamours and sophistry,” which means no more and no less than it meant when the constitution was not yet five years old, and Fisher Ames was observing contemptuously that of all the legislative measures and proposals which were on the carpet at the time, he scarce knew one that had not raised this same cry, “not excepting a motion for adjournment.”

In fact, such popular terms of electioneering appeal are uniformly and notoriously what Jeremy Bentham called impostor-terms, and their use invariably marks one thing and one only; it marks a state of apprehension, either fearful or expectant, as the case may be, concerning access to the political means. As we are seeing at the moment, once let this access come under threat of straitening or stoppage, the menaced interests immediately trot out the spavined, glandered hobby of “state rights” or “a return to the constitution,” and put it through its galvanic movements. Let the incidence of exploitation show the first sign of shifting, and we hear at once from one source of “interested clamours and sophistry” that “democracy” is in danger, and that the unparalleled excellences of our civilization have come about solely through a policy of “rugged individualism,” carried out under terms of “free competition”; while from another source we hear that the enormities of laissez-faire have ground the faces of the poor, and obstructed entrance into the More Abundant Life.[23]Click to see.

The general upshot of all this is that we see politicians of all schools and stripes behaving with the obscene depravity of degenerate children; like the loose-footed gangs that infest the railway-yards and purlieus of gas-houses, each group tries to circumvent another with respect to the fruit accruing to acts of public mischief. In other words, we see them behaving in a strictly historical manner. Professor Laski’s elaborate moral distinction between the State and officialdom is devoid of foundation. The State is not, as he would have it, a social institution administered in an anti-social way. It is an anti-social institution, administered in the only way an anti-social institution can be administered, and by the kind of person who, in the nature of things, is best adapted to such service.

Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

Chapter 5 Footnotes

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Consider, for example, the present situation. Our natural resources, while much depleted, are still great; our population is very thin, running something like twenty or twenty-five to the square mile; and some millions of this population are at the moment “unemployed,” and likely to remain so because no one will or can “give them work.” The point is not that men generally submit to this state of things, or that they accept it as inevitable, but that they see nothing irregular or anomalous about it because of their fixed idea that work is something to be given.


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The present paralysis of production, for example, is due solely to State intervention, and uncertainty concerning further intervention.


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It seems to be very imperfectly understood that the cost of State intervention must be paid out of production, this being the only source from which any payment for anything can be derived. Intervention retards production; then the resulting stringency and inconvenience enable further intervention, which in turn still further retards production; and this process goes on until, as in Rome, in the third century, production ceases entirely, and the source of payment dries up.


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As a matter of fact, all thirteen units merely continued the system that had existed throughout the colonial period – the system which gave the beneficiary a monopoly of rental-values as well as a monopoly of use-values. No other system was ever known in America, except in the short-lived state of Deseret, under the Mormon polity.


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For a brilliant summary of post-revolutionary land-speculation, cf. Sakolski, op. cit., ch. 11.


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Mr. Sakolski very justly remarks that the mania for land-jobbing was stimulated by the action of the new units in offering lands by way of settlement of their public debts, which led to extensive gambling in the various issues of “land-warrants.” The list of eminent names involved in this enterprise includes Wilson C. Nicholas, who later became governor of Virginia; “Light Horse Harry” Lee, father of the great Confederate commander; General John Preston, of Smithfield; and George Taylor, brother-in-law of Chief Justice Marshall. Lee, Preston and Nicholas were prosecuted at the instance of some Connecticut speculators, for a transaction alleged as fraudulent; Lee was arrested in Boston, on the eve of embarking for the West Indies. They had deeded a tract, said to be of 300,000 acres, at ten cents an acre, but on being surveyed, the tract did not come to half that size. Frauds of this order were extremely common.


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The new political units continued the colonial practice of restricting the suffrage to taxpayers and owners of property, and none but men of considerable wealth were eligible to public office. Thus the exercise of sovereignty was a matter of economic right, not natural right.


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This was the uprising known as Shays’s Rebellion, which took place in 1786. The creditor division in Massachusetts had gained control of the political means, and had fortified its control by establishing a constitution which was made to bear so hardly on the agrarian and debtor division that an armed insurrection broke out six years later, led by Daniel Shays, for the purpose of annulling its onerous provisions, and transferring control of the political means to the latter group. This incident affords a striking view in miniature of the State’s nature and teleology. The rebellion had a great effect in consolidating the creditor division and giving plausibility to its contention for the establishment of a strong coercive national State. Mr. Jefferson spoke contemptuously of this contention, as “the interested clamours and sophistry of speculating, shaving and banking institutions”; and of the rebellion itself he observed to Mrs. John Adams, whose husband had most to do with drafting the Massachusetts constitution, “I like a little rebellion now and then. . . . The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.” Writing to another correspondent at the same time, he said earnestly, “God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.” Obiter dicta of this nature, scattered here and there in Mr. Jefferson’s writings, have the interest of showing how near his instinct led him towards a clear understanding of the State’s character.


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Professor Sakolski observes that after the Articles of Confederation were supplanted by the constitution, schemes of land-speculation “multiplied with renewed and intensified energy.” Naturally so, for as he says, the new scheme of a national State got Strong support from this class of adventurers because they foresaw that rental-values “must be greatly increased by an efficient federal government.”


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More than half the delegates to the constitutional convention of 1787 were either investors or speculators in the public funds. Probably sixty per cent of the values represented by these securities were fictitious, and were so regarded even by their holders.


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It may be observed that at this time the word “national” was a term of obloquy, carrying somewhat the same implications that the word “fascist” carries in some quarters today. Nothing is more interesting than the history of political terms in their relation to the shifting balance of economic advantage – except, perhaps, the history of the partisan movements which they designate, viewed in the same relation.


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The obvious reason for this, as the event showed, was that the interests grouped in the first division had the advantage of being relatively compact and easily mobilized. Those in the second division, being chiefly agrarian, were loose and sprawling, communications among them were slow, and mobilization difficult.


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They have been noticed by several recent authorities, and are exhibited fully in Mr. Beard’s monumental Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.


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[14]Click to return. Beard, op. cit., p. 337.


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The principal measures bearing directly on the distribution of the political means were those drafted by Hamilton for funding and assumption, for a protective tariff, and for a national bank. These gave practically exclusive use of the political means to the classes grouped in the first grand division, the only modes left available to others being patents and copyrights. Mr. Beard discusses these measures with his invariable lucidity and thoroughness, op. cit., ch. VIII. Some observations on them which are perhaps worth reading are contained in my Jefferson, ch. V.


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The authority of the Supreme Court was disregarded by Jackson, and overruled by Lincoln, thus converting the mode of the State temporarily from an oligarchy into an autocracy. It is interesting to observe that just such a contingency was foreseen by the framers of the constitution, in particular by Hamilton. They were apparently well aware of the ease with which, in any period of crisis, a quasi-republican mode of the State slips off into executive tyranny. Oddly enough, Mr. Jefferson at one time considered nullifying the Alien and Sedition Acts by executive action, but did not do so. Lincoln overruled the opinion of Chief Justice Taney that suspension of the habeas corpus was unconstitutional, and in consequence the mode of the State was, until 1865, a monocratic military despotism. In fact, from the date of his proclamation of blockade, Lincoln ruled unconstitutionally throughout his term. The doctrine of “reserved powers” was knaved up ex post facto as a justification of his acts, but as far as the intent of the constitution is concemed, it was obviously a pure invention. In fact, a very good case could be made out for the assertion that Lincoln’s acts resulted in a permanent radical change in the entire system of constitutional “interpretation” – that since his time “interpretations” have not been interpretations of the constitution, but merely of public policy; or, as our most acute and profound social critic put it, “th’ Supreme Court follows th’ iliction rayturns.” A strict constitutionalist might indeed say that the constitution died in 1861, and one would have to scratch one’s head pretty diligently to refute him.


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Marshall was appointed by John Adams at the end of his Presidential term, when the interests grouped in the first division were becoming very anxious about the opposition developing against them among the exploited interests. A letter written by Oliver Wolcott to Fisher Ames gives a good idea of where the doctrine of popular sovereignty stood; his reference to military measures is particularly striking. He says, “The steady men in Congress will attempt to extend the judicial department, and I hope that their measures will be very decided. It is impossible in this country to render an army an engine of government; and there is no way to combat the state opposition but by an efficient and extended organization of judges, magistrates, and other civil officers.” Marshall’s appointment followed, and also the creation of twenty-three new federal judgeships. Marshall’s cardinal decisions were made in the cases of Marbury, of Fletcher, of McCulloch, of Dartmouth College, and of Cohens. It is perhaps not generally understood that as the result of Marshall’s efforts, the Supreme Court became not only the highest law-interpreting body, but the highest law-making body as well; the precedents established by its decisions have the force of constitutional law. Since 1800, therefore, the actual mode of the State in America is normally that of a small and irresponsible oligarchy! Mr. Jefferson, regarding Marshall quite justly as “a crafty chief judge who sophisticates the law to his mind by the turn of his own reasoning,” made in 1821 the very remarkable prophecy that “our government is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence. The engine of consolidation will be the federal judiciary; the other two branches the corrupting and corrupted instruments.” Another prophetic comment on the effect of centralization was his remark that “when we must wait for Washington to tell us when to sow and when to reap, we shall soon want bread.” A survey of our present political circumstances makes comment on these prophecies superfluous.


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He had observed it in the British State some years before, and spoke of it with vivacity. “The nest of office being too small for all of them to cuddle into at once, the contest is eternal which shall crowd the other out. For this purpose they are divided into two parties, the Ins and the Outs.” Why he could not see that the same thing was bound to take place in the American State as an effect of causes identical with those which brought it about in the British State, is a puzzle to students. Apparently, however, he did not see it, notwithstanding the sound instinct that made him suspect parties, and always kept him free from party alliances. As he wrote Hopkinson in 1789, “I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”


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Jefferson, p. 274. The agrarian-artisan-debtor economic group that elected Mr. Jefferson took title as the Republican party (subsequently renamed Democratic) and the opposing group called itself by the old preconstitutional title of Federalist.


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An example, noteworthy only because uncommonly conspicuous, is seen in the behaviour of the Democratic senators in the matter of the tariff on sugar, in Cleveland’s second administration. Ever since that incident, one of the Washington newspapers has used the name “Senator Sorghum” in its humorous paragraphs, to designate the typical venal jobholder.


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[21]Click to return.

Mr. Jefferson was the first to acknowledge that his purchase of the Louisiana territory was unconstitutional; but it added millions of acres to the sum of agrarian resource, and added an immense amount of prospective voting-strength to agrarian control of the political means, as against control by the financial and commercial interests represented by the Federalist party. Mr. Jefferson justified himself solely on the ground of public policy, an interesting anticipation of Lincoln’s self-justification in 1861, for confronting Congress and the country with a like fait accompli – this time, however, executed in behalf of financial and commercial interests as against the agrarian interest.


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Henry George made some very keen comments upon the almost incredible degradation that he saw taking place progressively in the personnel of the State’s service. It is perhaps most conspicuous in the Presidency and the Senate, though it goes on pari passu elsewhere and throughout. As for the federal House of Representatives and the state legislative bodies, they must be seen to be believed.


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[23]Click to return.

Of all the impostor-terms in our political glossary these are perhaps the most flagrantly impudent, and their employment perhaps the most flagitious. We have already seen that nothing remotely resembling democracy has ever existed here; nor yet has anything resembling free competition, for the existence of free competition is obviously incompatible with any exercise of the political means, even the feeblest. For the same reason, no policy of rugged individualism has ever existed; the most that rugged individualism has done to distinguish itself has been by way of running to the State for some form of economic advantage. If the reader has any curiosity about this, let him look up the number of American business enterprises that have made a success unaided by the political means, or the number of fortunes accumulated without such aid. Laissez-faire has become a term of pure opprobrium; those who use it either do not know what it means, or else wilfully pervert it. As for the unparalleled excellences of our civilization, it is perhaps enough to say that the statistics of our insurance-companies now show that four-fifths of our people who have reached the age of sixty-five are supported by their relatives or by some other form of charity.


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Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

CHAPTER 6

I

SUCH has been the course of our experience from the beginning, and such are the terms in which its stark uniformity has led us to think of the State. This uniformity also goes far to account for the development of a peculiar moral enervation with regard to the State, exactly parallel to that which prevailed with regard to the Church in the Middle Ages.[1]Click to see. The Church controlled the distribution of certain privileges and immunities, and if one approached it properly, one might get the benefit of them. It stood as something to be run to in any kind of emergency, temporal or spiritual; for the satisfaction of ambition and cupidity, as well as for the more tenuous assurances it held out against various forms of fear, doubt and sorrow. As long as this was so, the anomalies presented by its self-aggrandizement were more or less contentedly acquiesced in; and thus a chronic moral enervation, too negative to be called broadly cynical, was developed towards its interventions and exactions, and towards the vast overbuilding of its material structure.[2]Click to see.

A like enervation pervades our society with respect to the State, and for like reasons. It affects especially those who take the State’s pretensions at face value and regard it as a social institution whose policies of continuous intervention are wholesome and necessary; and it also affects the great majority who have no clear idea of the State, but merely accept it as something that exists, and never think about it except when some intervention bears unfavourably upon their interests. There is little need to dwell upon the amount of aid thus given to the State’s progress in self-aggrandizement, or to show in detail or by illustration the courses by which this spiritlessness promotes the State’s steady policy of intervention, exaction and overbuilding.[3]Click to see.

Every intervention by the State enables another, and this in turn another, and so on indefinitely; and the State stands ever ready and eager to make them, often on its own motion, often again wangling plausibility for them through the specious suggestion of interested persons. Sometimes the matter at issue is in its nature simple, socially necessary, and devoid of any character that would bring it into the purview of politics.[4]Click to see. For convenience, however, complications are erected on it; then presently someone sees that these complications are exploitable, and proceeds to exploit them; then another, and another, until the rivalries and collisions of interest thus generated issue in a more or less general disorder. When this takes place, the logical thing, obviously, is to recede, and let the disorder be settled in the slower and more troublesome way, but the only effective way, through the operation of natural laws. But in such circumstances recession is never for a moment thought of; the suggestion would be put down as sheer lunacy. Instead, the interests unfavourably affected – little aware, perhaps, how much worse the cure is than the disease, or at any rate little caring – immediately call on the State to cut in arbitrarily between cause and effect, and clear up the disorder out of hand.[5]Click to see. The State then intervenes by imposing another set of complications upon the first; these in turn are found exploitable, another demand arises, another set of complications, still more intricate, is erected upon the first two;[6]Click to see. and the same sequence is gone through again and again until the recurrent disorder becomes acute enough to open the way for a sharking political adventurer to come forward and, always alleging “necessity, the tyrant’s plea,”to organize a coup d’d'état.[7]Click to see.

But more often the basic matter at issue represents an original intervention of the State, an original allotment of the political means. Each of these allotments, as we have seen, is a charter of highwaymanry, a license to appropriate the labour-products of others without compensation. Therefore it is in the nature of things that when such a license is issued, the State must follow it up with an indefinite series of interventions to systematize and “regulate”its use. The State’s endless progressive encroachments that are recorded in the history of the tariff, their impudent and disgusting particularity, and the prodigious amount of apparatus necessary to give them effect, furnish a conspicuous case in point. Another is furnished by the history of our railway-regulation. It is nowadays the fashion, even among those who ought to know better, to hold “rugged individualism”and laissez-faire responsible for the riot of stock-watering, rebates, rate-cutting, fraudulent bankruptcies, and the like, which prevailed in our railway-practice after the Civil War, but they had no more to do with it than they have with the precession of the equinoxes. The fact is that our railways, with few exceptions, did not grow up in response to any actual economic demand. They were speculative enterprises enabled by State intervention, by allotment of the political means in the form of land-grants and subsidies; and of all the evils alleged against our railway-practice, there is not one but what is directly traceable to this primary intervention.[8]Click to see.

So it is with shipping. There was no valid economic demand for adventure in the carrying trade; in fact, every sound economic consideration was dead against it. It was entered upon through State intervention, instigated by shipbuilders and their allied interests; and the mess engendered by their manipulation of the political means is now the ground of demand for further and further coercive intervention. So it is with what, by an unconscionable stretch of language, goes by the name of farming.[9]Click to see. There are very few troubles so far heard of as normally besetting this form of enterprise but what are directly traceable to the State’s primary intervention in establishing a system of land-tenure which gives a monopoly-right over rental-values as well as over use-values; and as long as that system is in force, one coercive intervention after another is bound to take place in support of it.[10]Click to see.

II

Thus we see how ignorance and delusion concerning the nature of the State combine with extreme moral debility and myopic self-interest – what Ernest Renan so well calls la bassesse de l’homme intéressé – to enable the steadily accelerated conversion of social power into State power that has gone on from the beginning of our political independence. It is a curious anomaly. State power has an unbroken record of inability to do anything efficiently, economically, disinterestedly or honestly; yet when the slightest dissatisfaction arises over any exercise of social power, the aid of the agent least qualified to give aid is immediately called for. Does social power mismanage banking-practice in this-or-that special instance – then let the State, which never has shown itself able to keep its own finances from sinking promptly into the slough of misfeasance, wastefulness and corruption, intervene to “supervise”or “regulate”the whole body of banking-practice, or even take it over entire. Does social power, in this-or-that case, bungle the business of railway-management – then let the State, which has bungled every business it has ever undertaken, intervene and put its hand to the business of “regulating”railway-operation. Does social power now and then send out an unseaworthy ship to disaster – then let the State, which inspected and passed the Morro Castle, be given a freer swing at controlling the routine of the shipping trade. Does social power here and there exercise a grinding monopoly over the generation and distribution of electric current – then let the State, which allots and maintains monopoly, come in and intervene with a general scheme of price-fixing which works more unforeseen hardships than it heals, or else let it go into direct competition; or, as the collectivists urge, let it take over the monopoly bodily. “Ever since society has existed,”says Herbert Spencer, “disappointment has been preaching, ‘Put not your trust in legislation’; and yet the trust in legislation seems hardly diminished.”

But it may be asked where we are to go for relief from the misuses of social power, if not to the State. What other recourse have we? Admitting that under our existing mode of political organization we have none, it must still be pointed out that this question rests on the old inveterate misapprehension of the State’s nature, presuming that the State is a social institution, whereas it is an anti-social institution; that is to say, the question rests on an absurdity.[11]Click to see. It is certainly true that the business of government, in maintaining “freedom and security,”and “to secure these rights,”is to make a recourse to justice costless, easy and informal; but the State, on the contrary, is primarily concerned with injustice, and its function is to maintain a regime of injustice; hence, as we see daily, its disposition is to put justice as far as possible out of reach, and to make the effort after justice as costly and difficult as it can. One may put it in a word that while government is by its nature concerned with the administration of justice, the State is by its nature concerned with the administration of law – law, which the State itself manufactures for the service of its own primary ends. Therefore an appeal to the State, based on the ground of justice, is futile in any circumstances,[12]Click to see. for whatever action the State might take in response to it would be conditioned by the State’s own paramount interest, and would hence be bound to result, as we see such action invariably resulting, in as great injustice as that which it pretends to correct, or as a rule, greater. The question thus presumes, in short, that the State may on occasion be persuaded to act out of character; and this is levity.

But passing on from this special view of the question, and regarding it in a more general way, we see that what it actually amounts to is a plea for arbitrary interference with the order of nature, an arbitrary cutting-in to avert the penalty which nature lays on any and every form of error, whether wilful or ignorant, voluntary or involuntary; and no attempt at this has ever yet failed to cost more than it came to. Any contravention of natural law, any tampering with the natural order of things, must have its consequences, and the only recourse for escaping them is such as entails worse consequences. Nature recks nothing of intentions, good or bad; the one thing she will not tolerate is disorder, and she is very particular about getting her full pay for any attempt to create disorder. She gets it sometimes by very indirect methods, often by very roundabout and unforeseen ways, but she always gets it. “Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why, then, should we desire to be deceived?”It would seem that our civilization is greatly given to this infantile addiction – greatly given to persuading itself that it can find some means which nature will tolerate, whereby we may eat our cake and have it; and it strongly resents the stubborn fact that there is no such means.[13]Click to see.

It will be clear to anyone who takes the trouble to think the matter through, that under a regime of natural order, that is to say under government, which makes no positive interventions whatever on the individual, but only negative interventions in behalf of simple justice – not law, but justice – misuses of social power would be effectively corrected; whereas we know by interminable experience that the State’s positive interventions do not correct them. Under a regime of actual individualism, actually free competition, actual laissez-faire – a regime which, as we have seen, can not possibly coexist with the State – a serious or continuous misuse of social power would be virtually impracticable.[14]Click to see.

I shall not take up space with amplifying these statements because, in the first place, this has already been thoroughly done by Spencer, in his essays entitled The Man versus the State; and, in the second place, because I wish above all things to avoid the appearance of suggesting that a regime such as these statements contemplate is practicable, or that I am ever so covertly encouraging anyone to dwell on the thought of such a regime. Perhaps, some aeons hence, if the planet remains so long habitable, the benefits accruing to conquest and confiscation may be adjudged over-costly; the State may in consequence be superseded by government, the political means suppressed, and the fetiches which give nationalism and patriotism their present execrable character may be broken down. But the remoteness and uncertainty of this prospect makes any thought of it fatuous, and any concern with it futile. Some rough measure of its remoteness may perhaps be gained by estimating the growing strength of the forces at work against it. Ignorance and error, which the State’s prestige steadily deepens, are against it; la bassesse de l’homme intéressé, steadily pushing its purposes to greater lengths of turpitude, is against it; moral enervation, steadily proceeding to the point of complete insensitiveness, is against it. What combination of influences more powerful than this can one imagine, and what can one imagine possible to be done in the face of such a combination?

To the sum of these, which may be called spiritual influences, may be added the overweening physical strength of the State, which is ready to be called into action at once against any affront to the State’s prestige. Few realize how enormously and how rapidly in recent years the State has everywhere built up its apparatus of armies and police forces. The State has thoroughly learned the lesson laid down by Septimius Severus, on his death-bed. “Stick together,”he said to his successors, “pay the soldiers, and don’t worry about anything else.”It is now known to every intelligent person that there can be no such thing as a revolution as long as this advice is followed; in fact, there has been no revolution in the modem world since 1848 – every so-called revolution has been merely a coup d’état.[15]Click to see. All talk of the possibility of a revolution in America is in part perhaps ignorant, but mostly dishonest; it is merely “the interested clamours and sophistry”of persons who have some sort of ax to grind. Even Lenin acknowledged that a revolution is impossible anywhere until the military and police forces become disaffected; and the last place to look for that, probably, is here. We have all seen demonstrations of a disarmed populace, and local riots carried on with primitive weapons, and we have also seen how they ended, as in Homestead, Chicago, and the mining districts of West Virginia, for instance. Coxey’s Army marched on Washington – and it kept off the grass.

Taking the sum of the State’s physical strength, with the force of powerful spiritual influences behind it, one asks again, what can be done against the State’s progress in self-aggrandizement? Simply nothing. So far from encouraging any hopeful contemplation of the unattainable, the student of civilized man will offer no conclusion but that nothing can be done. He can regard the course of our civilization only as he would regard the course of a man in a rowboat on the lower reaches of the Niagara – as an instance of Nature’s unconquerable intolerance of disorder, and in the end, an example of the penalty which she puts upon any attempt at interference with order. Our civilization may at the outset have taken its chances with the current of Statism either ignorantly or deliberately; it makes no difference. Nature cares nothing whatever about motive or intention; she cares only for order, and looks to see only that her repugnance to disorder shall be vindicated, and that her concern with the regular orderly sequences of things and actions shall be upheld in the outcome. Emerson, in one of his great moments of inspiration, personified cause and effect as “the chancellors of God”; and invariable experience testifies that the attempt to nullify or divert or in any wise break in upon their sequences must have its own reward.

“Such,”says Professor Ortega y Gasset, “was the lamentable fate of ancient civilization.”A dozen empires have already finished the course that ours began three centuries ago. The lion and the lizard keep the vestiges that attest their passage upon earth, vestiges of cities which in their day were as proud and powerful as ours – Tadmor, Persepolis, Luxor, Baalbek – some of them indeed forgotten for thousands of years and brought to memory again only by the excavator, like those of the Mayas, and those buried in the sands of the Gobi. The sites which now bear Narbonne and Marseilles have borne the habitat of four successive civilizations, each of them, as St. James says, even as a vapour which appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away. The course of all these civilizations was the same. Conquest, confiscation, the erection of the State; then the sequences which we have traced in the course of our own civilization; then the shock of some irruption which the social structure was too far weakened to resist, and from which it was left too disorganized to recover; and then the end.

Our pride resents the thought that the great highways of New England will one day lie deep under layers of encroaching vegetation, as the more substantial Roman roads of Old England have lain for generations; and that only a group of heavily overgrown hillocks will be left to attract the archaeologist’s eye to the hidden débris of our collapsed skyscrapers. Yet it is to just this, we know, that our civilization will come; and we know it because we know that there never has been, never is, and never will be, any disorder in nature – because we know that things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be.

But there is no need to dwell lugubriously upon the probable circumstances of a future so far distant. What we and our more nearly immediate descendants shall see is a steady progress in collectivism running off into a military despotism of a severe type. Closer centralization; a steadily growing bureaucracy; State power and faith in State power increasing, social power and faith in social power diminishing; the State absorbing a continually larger proportion of the national income; production languishing, the State in consequence taking over one “essential industry”after another, managing them with ever-increasing corruption, inefficiency and prodigality, and finally resorting to a system of forced labour. Then at some point in this progress, a collision of State interests, at least as general and as violent as that which occurred in 1914, will result in an industrial and financial dislocation too severe for the asthenic social structure to bear; and from this the State will be left to “the rusty death of machinery,”and the casual anonymous forces of dissolution will be supreme.

III

But it may quite properly be asked, if we in common with the rest of the Western world are so far gone in Statism as to make this outcome inevitable, what is the use of a book which merely shows that it is inevitable? By its own hypothesis the book is useless. Upon the very evidence it offers, no one’s political opinions are likely to be changed by it, no one’s practical attitude towards the State will be modified by it; and if they were, according to the book’s own premises, what good could it do?

Assuredly I do not expect this book to change anyone’s political opinions, for it is not meant to do that. One or two, perhaps, here and there, may be moved to look a little into the subject-matter on their own account, and thus perhaps their opinions would undergo some slight loosening – or some constriction – but this is the very most that would happen. In general, too, I would be the first to acknowledge that no results of the kind which we agree to call practical could accrue to the credit of a book of this order, were it a hundred times as cogent as this one – no results, that is, that would in the least retard the State’s progress in self-aggrandizement and thus modify the consequences of the State’s course. There are two reasons, however, one general and one special, why the publication of such a book is admissible.

The general reason is that when in any department of thought a person has, or thinks he has, a view of the plain intelligible order of things, it is proper that he should record that view publicly, with no thought whatever of the practical consequences, or lack of consequences, likely to ensue upon his so doing. He might indeed be thought bound to do this as a matter of abstract duty; not to crusade or propagandize for his view or seek to impose it upon anyone – far from that! – not to concern himself at all with either its acceptance or its disallowance; but merely to record it. This I say, might be thought his duty to the natural truth of things, but it is at all events his right; it is admissible.

The special reason has to do with the fact that in every civilization, however generally prosaic, however addicted to the short-time point of view on human affairs, there are always certain alien spirits who, while outwardly conforming to the requirements of the civilization around them, still keep a disinterested regard for the plain intelligible law of things, irrespective of any practical end. They have an intellectual curiosity, sometimes touched with emotion, concerning the august order of nature; they are impressed by the contemplation of it, and like to know as much about it as they can, even in circumstances where its operation is ever so manifestly unfavourable to their best hopes and wishes. For these, a work like this, however in the current sense impractical, is not quite useless; and those of them it reaches will be aware that for such as themselves, and such only, it was written.

The End

“There is nothing hidden that will not be seen.”

Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

Chapter 6 Footnotes

[1]Click to return.

Not long ago Professor Laski commented on the prevalence of this enervation among our young people, especially among our student-population. It has several contributing causes, but it is mainly to be accounted for, I think, by the unvarying uniformity of our experience. The State’s pretensions have been so invariably extravagant, the disparity between them and its conduct so invariably manifest, that one could hardly expect anything else. Probably the protest against our imperialism in the Pacific and the Caribbean, after the Spanish War, marked the last major effort of an impotent and moribund decency. Mr. Laski’s comparisons with student-bodies in England and Europe lose some of their force when it is remembered that the devices of a fixed term and an irresponsible executive render the American State peculiarly insensitive to protest and inaccessible to effective censure. As Mr. Jefferson said, the one resource of impeachment is “not even a scarecrow.”


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As an example of this overbuilding, at the beginning of the sixteenth century one-fifth of the land of France was owned by the Church; it was held mainly by monastic establishments.


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It may be observed, however, that mere use-and-wont interferes with our seeing how egregiously the original structure of the American State, with its system of superimposed jurisdictions and reduplicated functions, was overbuilt. At the present time, a citizen lives under half-a-dozen or more separate overlapping jurisdictions, federal, state, county, township, municipal, borough, school-district, ward, federal district. Nearly all of these have power to tax him directly or indirectly, or both, and as we all know, the only limit to the exercise of this power is what can be safely got by it; and thus we arrive at the principle rather nanvely formulated by the late senator from Utah, and sometimes spoken of ironically as “Smoot’s law of government”- the principle, as he put it, that the cost of government tends to increase from year to year, no matter which party is in power. It would be interesting to know the exact distribution of the burden of jobholders and mendicant political retainers – for it must not be forgotten that the subsidized “unemployed”are now a permanent body of patronage – among income-receiving citizens. Counting indirect taxes and voluntary contributions as well as direct taxes, it would probably be not far off the mark to say that every two citizens are carrying a third between them.


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For example, the basic processes of exchange are necessary, non-political, and as simple as any in the world. The humblest Yankee rustic who swaps eggs for bacon in the country store, or a day’s labour for potatoes in a neighbour’s field, understands them thoroughly, and manages them competently. Their formula is: goods or services in return for goods or services. There is not, never has been, and never will be, a single transaction anywhere in the realm of “business”- no matter what its magnitude or apparent complexity – that is not directly reducible to this formula. For convenience in facilitating exchange, however, money was introduced; and money is a complication, and so are the other evidences of debt, such as cheques, drafts, notes, bills, bonds, stock-certificates, which were introduced for the same reason. These complications were found to be exploitable; and the consequent number and range of State interventions to “regulate”and “supervise”their exploitation appear to be without end.


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It is one of the most extraordinary things in the world, that the interests which abhor and dread collectivism are the ones which have most eagerly urged on the State to take each one of the successive single steps that lead directly to collectivism. Who urged it on to form the Federal Trade Commission; to expand the Department of Commerce; to form the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Federal Farm Board; to pass the Anti-trust Acts; to build highways, dig out waterways, provide airway services, subsidize shipping? If these steps do not tend straight to collectivism, just which way do they tend? Furthermore, when the interests which encouraged the State to take them are horrified by the apparition of communism and the Red menace, just what are their protestations worth?


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The text of the Senate’s proposed banking law, published on the first of July, 1935, almost exactly filled four pages of the Wall Street Journal! Really now – now really – can any conceivable absurdity surpass that?


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As here in 1932, in Italy, Germany and Russia latterly, in France after the collapse of the Directory, in Rome after the death of Pertinax, and so on.


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Ignorance has no assignable limits; yet when one hears our railway-companies cited as specimens of rugged individualism, one is put to it to say whether the speaker’s sanity should be questioned, or his integrity. Our transcontinental companies, in particular, are hardly to be called railway-companies, since transportation was purely incidental to their true business, which was that of land-jobbing and subsidy-hunting. I remember seeing the statement a few years ago – I do not vouch for it, but it can not be far off the fact – that at the time of writing, the current cash value of the political means allotted to the Northern Pacific Company would enable it to build four transcontinental lines, and in addition, to build a fleet of ships and maintain it in around-the-world service. If this sort of thing represents rugged individualism, let future lexicographers make the most of it.


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A farmer, properly speaking, is a freeholder who directs his operations, first, towards making his family, as far as possible, an independent unit, economically self-contained. What he produces over and above this requirement he converts into a cash crop. There is a second type of agriculturist, who is not a farmer, but a manufacturer, as much so as one who makes woolen or cotton textiles or leather shoes. He raises one crop only – milk, corn, wheat, cotton, or whatever it may be – which is wholly a cash crop; and if the market for his particular commodity goes down below cost of production, he is in the same bad luck as the motor-car maker or shoemaker or pantsmaker who turns out more of his special kind of goods than the market will bear. His family is not independent; he buys everything his household uses; his children can not live on cotton or milk or corn, any more than the shoe-manufacturer’s children can live on shoes. There is still to be distinguished a third type, who carries on agriculture as a sort of taxpaying subsidiary to speculation in agricultural land-values. It is the last two classes who chiefly clamour for intervention, and they are often, indeed, in a bad way; but it is not farming that puts them there.


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The very limit of particularity in this course of coercive intervention seems to have been reached, according to press-reports, in the state of Wisconsin. On 31 May, the report is, Governor La Follette signed a bill requiring all public eating-places to serve two-thirds of an ounce of Wisconsin-made cheese and two-thirds of an ounce of Wisconsin-made butter with every meal costing more than twenty-four cents. To match this for particularity one would pretty well have to go back to some of the British Trade Acts of the eighteenth century, and it would be hard to find an exact match, even there. If this passes muster under the “due process of law”clause – whether the eating-house pays for these supplies or passes their cost along to the consumer – one can see nothing to prevent the legislature of New York, say, from requiring each citizen to buy annually two hats made by Knox, and two suits made by Finchley.


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Admitting that the lamb in the fable had no other recourse than the wolf, one may none the less see that its appeal to the wolf was a waste of breath.


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This is now so well understood that no one goes to a court for justice; he goes for gain or revenge. It is interesting to observe that some philosophers of law now say that law has no relation to justice, and is not meant to have any such relation. In their view, law represents only a progressive registration of the ways in which experience leads us to believe that society can best get along. One might hesitate a long time about accepting their notion of what law is, but one must appreciate their candid affirmation of what it is not.


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This resentment is very remarkable. In spite of our failure with one conspicuously ambitious experiment in State intervention, I dare say there would still be great resentment against Professor Sumner’s ill-famed remark that when people talked tearfully about “the poor drunkard lying in the gutter,”it seemed never to occur to them that the gutter might be quite the right place for him to lie; or against the bishop of Peterborough’s declaration that he would rather see England free than sober. Yet both these remarks merely recognize the great truth which experience forces on our notice every day, that attempts to interfere with the natural order of things are bound, in one way or another, to turn out for the worse.


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The horrors of England’s industrial life in the last century furnish a standing brief for addicts of positive intervention. Child-labour and woman-labour in the mills and mines; Coketown and Mr. Bounderby; starvation wages; killing hours; vile and hazardous conditions of labour; coffin ships officered by ruffians – all these are glibly charged off by reformers and publicists to a regime of rugged individualism, unrestrained competition, and laissez-faire. This is an absurdity on its face, for no such regime ever existed in England. They were due to the State’s primary intervention whereby the population of England was expropriated from the land; due to the State’s removal of the land from competition with industry for labour. Nor did the factory system and the “industrial revolution”have the least thing to do with creating those hordes of miserable beings. When the factory system came in, those hordes were already there, expropriated, and they went into the mills for whatever Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Plugson of Undershot would give them, because they had no choice but to beg, steal or starve. Their misery and degradation did not lie at the door of individualism; they lay nowhere but at the door of the State. Adam Smith’s economics are not the economics of individualism; they are the economics of landowners and mill-owners. Our zealots of positive intervention would do well to read the history of the Enclosures Acts and the work of the Hammonds, and see what they can make of them.


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When Sir Robert Peel proposed to organize the police force of London, Englishmen said openly that half a dozen throats cut in Whitechapel every year would be a cheap price to pay for keeping such an instrument of potential tyranny out of the State’s hands. We are all beginning to realize now that there is a great deal to be said for that view of the matter.


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+ On Doing the Right Thing; and other essays

+ The Theory of Education in the United States, (The Page-Barbour Lectures for 1930)

+ The Urquhart-Le Motteux Translation of the Works of Francis Rabelais, with introduction, critical notes and documentary illustrations (Edited, with Catherine Rose Wilson)

+ A Journal of These Days

+ A Journey into Rabelais’s France

+ Our Enemy, the State Paperback Reprint Edition, Hallberg Pub Corp; ISBN: 0873190238 try Amazon.com

The AMA campaign was stepped up in 1864, decrying abortion’s evils, eventually calling abortionists murderers and executioners.  It worked, as between 1875 and 1900, every state but Kentucky passed laws banning all abortions.  Hundreds of thousands of American women died during the years that abortion was illegal, as they had back alley abortions and died from the complications.  Not only was the AMA campaigning to ban abortion, it also actively discouraged contraception and even information on fertility.  While the AMA clothed itself in righteousness, an examination of the internal record revealed that the AMA’s motivation had nothing whatsoever to do with the sanctity of life.  Their war was waged to wipe out female healers.  Midwives were the traditional administers of abortion and contraception.[132]  It would take nearly a hundred years before abortion was made legal again, and today the right is under siege once again in America, although the effort is unlikely to succeed. 

The effort is about controlling and punishing women, and has little to do with a reverence toward life, as evidenced by most anti-abortionists’ support of capital punishment (their attitude epitomized by today’s American president, George Bush the Second), as well as murdered doctors and blown-up clinics.

Also in the 1850s, the AMA began campaigning against homeopaths.  As with most inquisitional behavior, the early campaign was relatively gentle.  Books were written to ridicule
“alternative” medicine, AMA members were forbidden from associating with homeopaths, and AMA pressure began getting homeopaths expelled from medical societies.  The Thomsonian school of medicine also came under fire, but as they were generally laypeople, they were not as much of a threat as homeopaths were. 

Although it would be a mistake to chalk it all up to a conspiracy, there is a familiar pattern when rival movements are attacked and destroyed.  For instance, the Catholic Inquisition got its start in the early 1200s, as a response to internal corruption that left the Catholic Church’s religious monopoly in Europe vulnerable to challenges from reformists.  By the early 1200s, the Catholic Church was holding ecumenical councils that attempted to curb the corruption in its priestly ranks.  Christian Europe’s most socially progressive and cosmopolitan region was France’s Languedoc region.  Returning from the Balkans with Crusading soldiers was Catharism,
a dualistic sect whose roots predated Christianity.  The Cathars lived the austere lives that people imagined
Jesus lived, and the pious example of the Cathars’ spiritual practice was a marked
contrast to the Catholic Church’s priests’.  The Cathars took vows of poverty,
fasted, and apparently the most advanced of them could heal with a touch.  Catharism
spread like wildfire throughout Languedoc, and by the early 1200s, about half
of the Languedoc region was Cathar.  The Church had to deal with other threats
in those days.  The followers of Peter Waldo comprised an internal challenge to
the Church’s corruption.  Waldo’s attempts to reform the Church and bring Christianity
back to its humble roots got him excommunicated. 

The
early attempts to curb Catharism were largely restricted to counter-preaching,
with Dominic leading the effort to bring the Languedoc citizens back to the fold. 
He had little success, and Pope Innocent III crafted an effective solution.  In
businessmen’s parlance, it consisted of putting cement shoes on the competition
while marketing an ersatz version of their product.  Innocent called a Crusade
on Languedoc and simultaneously sanctioned the mendicant orders, the Dominicans
and Franciscans, who imitated the austere practices of the Cathars.  The Albigensian
Crusade was waged over decades, completely depopulating parts of France and killing
about one million people.  The Cathar threat to the Catholic Church’s monopoly
was wiped out in a prodigious bloodbath, and the Church enjoyed another three
hundred years of religious racketeering, until Martin Luther came along.  The
Dominicans and Franciscans became the Inquisition’s
foot soldiers, enforcing the faith with the rack, hot tongs and flaming stakes.

In
significant ways, the offensive mounted by orthodox medicine is reminiscent of
how the Catholic Church operated.  Orthodox medicine abandoned its more egregious
practices.  The public rightly feared the heroic bleedings and large doses of
“medicines” such as calomel.  The highly dilute doses administered by homeopaths
had great appeal.  During its crusade against the competition, American orthodox
medicine curtailed its heroic bleeding practices, as well as its heroic doses
of calomel and other “medicines.”  It began co-opting homeopathic medicines into
its pharmacopoeia.  There was a trend ever since the 1830s, when the alternative
movements began in earnest, to begin trusting nature again.  Orthodox doctors
began allowing the body to heal itself, or at least assist it, instead of bludgeoning
it with heroic medicine.  Orthodox medicine was raiding the alternatives for what
it deemed useful, so it could offer a competing product.  At the same time, orthodox
medicine tried putting cement shoes on its competition.  Getting homeopaths kicked
out of medical societies were some of the early AMA successes in the 1850s. 

The spiritual, political and social perspectives often
have parallel in one’s scientific and professional orientation.  The homeopathic
movement was not only revolutionary in the medical field.  Most American homeopaths
in the 1850s were also abolitionists and members of the nascent Republican Party. 
When Abraham Lincoln came into office in 1861, his Secretary of State, William
Seward, had a homeopath as his personal physician.  Homeopathy enjoyed political
support in Washington in the 1860s, helping to blunt the orthodox assault. 

The 1860s through 1880s were the
period of greatest influence for homeopathic practitioners.  The press and public
were fairly unanimous in their criticisms of the orthodox medical establishment,
and sympathetic toward homeopathy.  By the 1870s, about a million American families
were loyal to homeopathy.  In 1878, a yellow-fever epidemic swept from New Orleans
into the Mississippi Valley.  There were about 20,000 deaths.  Yellow fever was
the most feared disease in the South, and official commissions were launched to
investigate the 1878 epidemic.  One commission investigated the records of homeopathic
physicians where the epidemic raged.  It turned out that people treated by homeopaths
had a yellow-fever death rate of less than 7%, which was less than half the death
rate of the general public.  When the results were announced to the U.S. Congress,
they were impressed.[133]  The attacks on homeopathy by orthodoxy relaxed
during those years, although homeopathy had been so demonized in the AMA’s ranks
that many orthodox practitioners would go berserk at the mere mention of it. 
There were various factors that doomed homeopathy.  Orthodox medicine’s alliance
with the drug companies loomed largely, but the seeds of its destruction came
largely from within its ranks. 

Hahnemann’s system
was developed through experience with patients, and his practice made the homeopath
both diagnostician and pharmacist.  The homeopathic pharmacopoeia was vast, and
the proper application of it took years of careful study.  Homeopathy was not
for quick study artists.  There was no one-size-fits-all treatment, no universal
“medicine” such as calomel, no assembly line to run the patients through.  Not
surprisingly, a movement arose in homeopathy that tried making homeopathy easier
to learn and use.  Its practitioners were influenced by the universal prescriptions
that orthodox practitioners were handing out.  With the relaxation of attacks
from orthodox medicine, the internal division of homeopathy became evident.  In
1880, it divided into the “purists” who followed Hahnemann’s teachings to the
letter, and the revisionists who tried making homeopathy easier to learn and apply. 
The subsequent internecine warfare was the major reason the homeopathic movement
began disintegrating in the late 19^th century.  The homeopaths that
I have dealt with or been aware of in my life have usually been from the “purist”
school. 

Another factor deserves mention.  Although
the heroic treatments of orthodox medicine were feared by millions of people,
and rightfully so, they were by no means the majority of Americans, at least to
the point of refusing to submit to them.  Heroic medicine enjoyed the benefit
of being spectacular.  When a patient ingested calomel, the effect was
dramatic.  Something happened, even if it nearly killed the patient.  I
have experienced and watched homeopathy produce instant and dramatic results,
for many ailments.  For chronic conditions, however, the treatment could take
many months, as the body gradually healed itself, in subtle, feminine fashion. 
There was often self-discipline involved with homeopathic treatment, and most
people preferred to take a quick-acting pill for their afflictions.  That dynamic
can readily be seen today.  True health in today’s United States comes from taking
care of one’s self.  Eating well, exercising, refraining from tobacco, alcohol
and other stimulants/depressants, and other aspects of a healthy regimen require
some self-discipline, the kind that most people do not exercise.  Most people
would rather take a pill to make their symptoms disappear, so they can continue
to pursue their addictions and deadly lifestyles.  Symptom suppression is the
essence of Western medicine today, and its appeal is largely to people who refuse
to take responsibility for their health.  Most want a pill or spectacular intervention,
such as surgery, to make the problem “go away.” 

The
homeopathic movement largely had itself to blame for its demise, but its internal
weakness was also exploited by other competitors, the most damaging among them
orthodox doctors, who teamed up with the burgeoning pharmaceutical empires.  The
homeopathic remedies administered by the “purists” were highly dilute and never
mixed with other substances.  It was the opposite approach to the polypharmacy
of the proprietary medicine craze that gripped orthodoxy during the Gilded Age. 

The final blow to homeopathy, however, was dealt by
diversifying robber barons, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie in particular. 
Rockefeller and Carnegie amassed enormous fortunes during the Gilded Age, through
ingenuity and ruthlessness.  As they came to dominate their respective industries,
they branched out and became “philanthropists.”  Their “philanthropy” was more
directed toward social engineering than humanitarian activity.  Rockefeller and
Carnegie exercised “institutional control” over American medicine. 

By
1900, homeopathic schools had largely abandoned Hahnemann’s methods, and the “make
homeopathy easy” faction dominated.  That “short cut” school of homeopathy was
close in spirit and practice to orthodox medicine, and both pumped great numbers
of graduates into the medical marketplace.  Homeopathy suffered from the internal
division, and its colleges relied almost solely upon student fees.  Homeopathy
also probably lost its effectiveness as Hahnemann’s methods were abandoned.  The
same economic situation in relation to student fees existed in orthodox medical
schools until 1910 and the Flexner Report, which was funded by the Carnegie Endowment. 
Medical schools that received Flexner’s approval received Carnegie and Rockefeller
funding, while those that failed to gain approval did not.  Not surprisingly,
the favored paradigm prevailed, with the AMA and drug industry allying itself
with Rockefeller and Carnegie, forming a power structure that dominates Western
medicine to this day. 

The AMA worked hand-in-hand
with Flexner, and government was soon a player.  State boards refused to license
doctors that did not come from AMA-approved schools.  That interlocking institutional
control spelled the death knell for homeopathy.  In 1900, there were 22 homeopathic
colleges.  In 1918, there were only seven.  Homeopathic colleges were not the
only casualties of the institutional control that Rockefeller, Carnegie, the AMA,
licensing boards and drug companies would exercise over medicine.  That process
also closed most medical schools for women and blacks.  The alleged strategy was
bringing science and education to medicine, but it was also obviously a power
play to consolidate wealth and power.  Ironically, Rockefeller would not take
the drugs that his empire promoted.  His personal physician was a homeopath, and
John D. lived to be nearly 100 years old.  To gain some insight into Rockefeller’s
motivation, a quote from Medical Dark Ages is appropriate:

“…a
surgeon told John D. (Rockefeller) that everyone should have an appendectomy before
the age of 16 as a preventative.  The oil wizard saw the point at once.  ‘Why,
you’ve got a better thing than Standard Oil!’, he exclaimed.” – In Nat
Morris, The Cancer Blackout.

Rockefeller
was creating paradigms in Western society, using his ill-gotten money to shape
and dominate institutions that he funded, and it goes far beyond the drugs and
knives paradigm that rules Western medicine.  Soon before he began taking over
medicine, he was reshaping the University of Chicago, remaking it to his liking. 
The University of Chicago would spawn social control ideologies.  John
Taylor Gatto, one of America’s finest teachers, noted that today’s grade schools
were designed by theorists from the University of Chicago, where they where honed
their “instruments of scientific management of a mass population.”  Gatto’s thesis
is that our educational system “dumbs us down,” so we can be controlled.  From
1990 through 1997, in the wake of the Soviet Empire’s collapse, in every year
but two, the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to a University of Chicago
economist, their work generally concerned with scientific, capitalistic, means
of managing the world economy.  There was about zero humanitarian impulse in Rockefeller’s
“philanthropy.”  He only became excited when pondering how rich he would become. 

The knives and drugs paradigm prevailed
due to considerations of wealth and power, not because it works.  In 1913, a few
years after the publication of Flexner’s report, Rockefeller strikebreakers turned
machine guns on a camp of striking miners in Colorado, killing forty people, including
women and children.  Exploiting workers was always the way the capitalists
primarily amassed their fortunes.  Several years ago, a member of Dennis Lee’s
organization had lunch with a Rockefeller heir.  The heir said that he knew of
no rich American family (at the level of dynastic wealth) that made its fortune
honestly.  In America at least, behind every great fortune is a great crime. 
Even the “radical” Carnegie was a crafty strikebreaker, the bloody Homestead Strike
staining his reign.  Machine-gunning one’s employees could be effective, but was
a crude method of exerting control.  Rockefeller and the other robber barons pioneered
and refined methods of manipulating public opinion and shaping the public mind. 
Rockefeller’s image in the wake of the Ludlow Massacre, especially as it became
evident that he authorized it, was at about the level of Attila the Hun, and Rockefeller
then waged one of history’s first public relations campaigns.  He hired Ivy Lee
in 1914 to help manage the Rockefeller Empire’s image.  Lee is considered the
leading pioneer of today’s public relations industry,
working first for J.P. Morgan, then for Rockefeller.[134] 
John D. Rockefeller soon engaged in the charade of carrying around a bag of dimes,
handing one to everyone he met. 

Before
Rockefeller and Carnegie became involved, the AMA was getting its act together. 
In 1899, the AMA hired George Simmons as the new editor for its Journal of
the American Medical Association (JAMA).  Harris Coulter described
Simmons as one who had considerable “political abilities.”[135]  JAMA
was a deeply hypocritical publication.  Its primary source of revenue was drug
ads, and the ads it ran for “secret ingredient” and “proprietary” medicines violated
the AMA’s code of ethics.  In the 1890s, the AMA came under fire from state boards
and other organizations for its unethical ads, and was on its way to becoming
a laughingstock.  Simmons rescued the AMA, largely by turning JAMA into
a money machine by closely allying itself with the drug industry.  Drug ads bankrolled
the AMA, especially after Simmons became involved in 1899.  Coulter did not delve
into Simmons’ credentials in his work, but Eustace Mullins did, in his Murder
by Injection. 

An Englishman, Simmons settled
in the Midwest in 1870 and began a journalism career.  After several years as
editor of the Nebraska Farmer, Simmons opened a medical practice, advertising
that he specialized in homeopathy and the “diseases of women.”[136] 
He apparently was an abortionist when the AMA was campaigning to ban abortion. 
Simmons advertised that he received his training and diploma at Rotunda Hospital
in Dublin, Ireland.  That hospital never issued diplomas.  There is no evidence
that Simmons ever received any medical training.  Simmons then got a diploma from
Rush Medical School.  There is no evidence that Simmons ever set foot on the medical
school campus.  He apparently received a mail order degree.  Simmons appears to
have been the classic “quack.” 

Simmons
was ambitious and resourceful.  He organized a Nebraska chapter of the AMA.  In
1899, he was invited to Chicago to take over the editorship of JAMA.  Simmons
saw that the AMA was not properly seizing its opportunities.  He quickly named
himself the AMA’s secretary and general manager.  Simmons then found a capable
assistant, a man who had been arrested for embezzlement as the Secretary of the
Kentucky Board of Health, who may have bought his way to a pardon, and was then
encouraged to leave the state.  He became Simmons’ right hand man.[137]

Simmons
turned the AMA into a gold mine when he initiated an approval racket.  For a price,
the AMA gave its “Seal of Approval” to drugs.  It was a form of extortion,
and the AMA engaged in no real research.  Their “research” was a form
of “green research.”  Simmons, like a shrewd horse trader, would set
his price based on how badly a drug company wanted the AMA’s Seal of Approval. 
The racket soon led to a troubled situation with Wallace Abbott, the founder of
Abbott Laboratories.  Abbott refused to knuckle under to Simmons’ blackmail, and
therefore the AMA never approved Abbott’s drugs.  One day, so the story goes,
Abbott went to see Simmons and showed him the investigative file that he had built
on Simmons’ “career.”  Simmons had sex charges brought by some of his
patients, and charges of negligence in the deaths of others.  That, combined with
the fact that Simmons had no credible medical credentials, caused a sudden change
of heart at the AMA.  Abbott’s drugs were suddenly approved every time, and Abbott
did not have to pay for them.[138]

Simmons
was soon raking it in hand over fist.  JAMA’s advertising revenue rose
from $34,000 per year in 1899 to $89,000 in 1903.  By 1909, JAMA was making
$150,000 per year, becoming the AMA’s cash cow.  Other racketeering strategies
involved threatening firms that advertised anywhere except in the pages of JAMA. 
Simmons was ingenious in making JAMA the icon it became, exerting institutional
control over the up and coming industry.  Simmons’ efforts made the AMA and drug
companies into natural allies of the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations. 

Simmons recruited Morris Fishbein
to the AMA in 1913.  Simmons was a wealthy man by the 1920s, sitting at the AMA’s
helm.  He openly had a mistress, and attempted to get rid of his wife.  A standard
technique in those days was having one’s wife committed to an insane asylum. 
Simmons heavily drugged his wife and then tried convincing her that she was going
insane.  His strategy backfired.  Mrs. Simmons took her husband to court in 1924,
and the sensational trial ruined Simmons’ image.  The trial inspired numerous
books, plays and movies, the most famous of which was Gaslight, starring
Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman.  Simmons stepped down at the AMA and his protégé,
Morris Fishbein, took over.  Fishbein ran American medicine with an iron fist
for the next twenty-five years, becoming a household name and a rich man. 

Fishbein soon extended the drug approval racket to food,
where for a price a food would garner the AMA’s Seal of Acceptance.  The testing
involved seemed limited to seeing how much money was in the bank account of the
companies seeking AMA approval.  At the same time Fishbein was announcing the
Seal of Approval and citing two tuna companies as meeting the AMA’s stringent
requirements, the FDA was seizing shipments of those very brands because “they
consisted in whole or in part of decomposed animal substance.”[139]  Fishbein’s
first customer for his food approval racket was Land O’Lakes Butter Company, a
company that had been criminally prosecuted many times for adulterating its product
to hide spoilage and watering it down.[140]  It widely advertised its new,
AMA-approved, status.  The AMA’s Seal of Approval racket for food lasted until
the 1940s, and it always teetered on the verge of damage lawsuits, as it performed
virtually no testing on its “approved” foods.  The drug Seal of Approval
racket, however, proved long lasting, but drugs comprised only one pillar of the
developing racket.  The other was surgery.  When anesthesia and antiseptics made
surgery respectable, the surgeons sought to make surgery into a monopoly. 

Surgery was not rescued from its barbaric status in the United
States until the 1880s.  Keen was not the only American pioneer of antiseptic
procedures.  The most famous is William Halsted.  Germany, with its focus on laboratory
science, became the center of medical research and training during the last half
of the 19^th century, not France or England.  Halsted was a rich boy
from Yale who studied in Germany and brought back the German philosophy of medical
practice.  Halsted pioneered sterile surgical procedures in Baltimore.  As happened
often in those days, Halsted became a cocaine and morphine addict, and never beat
his addiction.  Along with pioneering sterile surgery, Halsted also refined the
practice of invasive surgery.  Halsted invented the radical mastectomy. 

This essay will now largely concern itself with the
development of today’s cancer racket.  With Halsted’s innovations helping it along,
surgery became the favored, even sole, way to treat cancer in the late 19^th
century.  Cancer is a disease of civilization, and the greatest doctors of history
knew that treating cancer by attacking the tumor was futile.  Cancer was also
seen long ago as a disease of the “humors,” the body’s fluids.  Western medicine
gradually abandoned the humoral perspective to adopt the “solidist” one.  Studying
and treating the humors (blood, lymph, bile) was largely abandoned in favor of
treating the body’s “solids.”  Such a change was partly based on the cell theories
of Virchow and others, but the rise of surgery also contributed greatly, because
it is impossible to use a scalpel on blood. 

The world’s most influential cancer research institution is Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.  Its “spiritual founder” was J. Marion
Sims.  Sims received minimal training during the 1840s before he began performing
experimental surgeries on slave women.  Slave women were at the bottom of America’s
social hierarchy, and as such made ideal subjects for human experiments.  Performed
without anesthesia, Sims’ surgeries were accomplished by having friends hold down
the slaves as he operated.  According to his sympathetic biographer, his operations
were “little short of murderous.”  Sims’ friends could only endure about one stint
of holding down his experimental subjects, as the subjects’ thrashing and shrieking
were too much for them to endure.  When local plantation owners refused to lend
Sims any more subjects for his experiments, he bought a slave woman for $500 and
performed 30 operations on her in a few months.  After a few years of his experimental
surgeries, he may have been run out of town, as he had the reputation of being
some kind of Dr. Frankenstein. 

Sims abruptly
moved to New York City from the South, and in 1855 helped found Women’s Hospital,
a charity hospital.  He again began performing experimental surgeries, that time
on immigrant women, and the Dr. Frankenstein rumors began anew.  In the 1870s,
he began performing experimental cancer surgeries.  His brutal experiments, called
life threatening by the hospital trustees, combined with his open contempt of
his women subjects, got him expelled from the hospital.  Sims cultivated wealthy
women as his professional clientele (his specialty was operating on vesico-vaginal
fistulas), and those contacts got him reinstated.  An Astor heir died of cancer,
and the Astor family offered the Women’s Hospital $150,000 if they would open
a cancer treatment wing of the hospital.  The trustees associated cancer treatment
and research with Sims’ barbarities, and hesitated to accept the money.  Sims
double-crossed the trustees and negotiated directly with the Astors to set up
a new hospital with the money.  His negotiation worked, although he died before
New York Cancer Hospital opened in 1884.  He would have been its first director
had he lived.  The name was changed to Memorial Hospital in the 1890s, and to
its current name in the 1950s.[141]

Cancer treatment
by surgery grew during the late 19^th century and well into the 20^th. 
Ever more drastic surgeries were devised to treat cancer.  Using war terminology
and imagery, one cancer treatment that removed the entire jaw was known as the
“commando” because it reminded the doctors of the slashing attacks of World War
I commandos.  Memorial Hospital surgeons invented procedures that virtually hollowed
out the entire body, trying to get every last potential piece of cancerous flesh. 
Another innovative surgery at Memorial Hospital was called a hemicorporectomy,
where half the body would be carved away (everything below the pelvis) as a way
to treat advanced pelvic region malignancy.  Many patients elected to die rather
than submit to such surgeries.[142] 

James Douglas, who owned the world’s largest copper mine, also
owned large pitchblende deposits, from which come radium and uranium.  Douglas
began experimenting with radium as a cure all, and not long before World War I
became the leading “philanthropist” of Memorial Hospital.  His $100,000 donation
was attached to the condition that Memorial Hospital would begin using radium
treatments for cancer.  With the adoption of radium as “medicine,” the price of
radium instantly increased by more than 1000%.  Douglas died in 1913, probably
from radiation poisoning.  By the 1920s, Memorial Hospital’s radium treatments
constituted its single largest source of income. 

In
1927, John D. Rockefeller and his son began contributing millions of dollars to
Memorial Hospital, including money and land to build a new hospital in the 1930s. 
The same year that the Rockefellers began “donating” to Memorial Hospital, Standard
Oil of New Jersey signed its first agreement with I.G. Farben.  Farben was Europe’s
largest and most notorious cartel.  Farben ran the rubber works at Auschwitz,
and invented Sarin, Tabun and the Zyklon B used in the gas chambers.  In 1934,
the Rockefeller Empire sent its PR wizard Ivy Lee to Germany to help improve Farben
and the Third Reich’s image.[143]  The Rockefeller
Empire worked hand-in-hand with Nazi Germany, as did many
other American industrialists, including Hitler’s hero, Henry
Ford.  The Rockefellers even renewed their contract with Farben in 1939, the
contract stating that they would continue doing business even if the United States
and Germany went to war, an agreement that was kept clear until 1942, after Germany
had declared war on the United States.  It was not until the American government
investigated the Rockefeller companies, one investigator calling their relationship
with Germany bordering on “treason,” with a resultant publicity black eye, that
the Rockefellers discontinued their open support of Nazi Germany, although they
apparently kept dealing with Hitler’s regime clear to the end of World War II. 

The Rockefeller/Farben connection influenced Memorial
Hospital to begin pursuing chemotherapy research before World War II broke out,
with Standard Oil executive Frank Howard sitting on Memorial Hospital’s Research
Committee.  Before World War II was over, Howard recruited two General Motors
executives, Alfred P. Sloan and Charles Kettering, into becoming donors for an
ambitious plan to make Memorial Hospital into a research and treatment center. 
Kettering also bankrolled Kettering Laboratories in Cincinnati, which was notable
for producing “research” that proved the “benign” properties of industrial substances
such as lead, fluoride and aluminum.  Sloan was a long-time representative of
the Morgan family interests, and the Rockefeller and Morgan interests shared power
in running Memorial Sloan-Kettering.[144]  Today more
than ever, Wall Street runs Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering
dominates the direction of Western cancer research and treatment.  “Corporate
philanthropy” is an oxymoron.  Corporations “give” money with an eye toward the
benefits that might accrue in the end.  Everything a corporation does is ultimately
designed to increase its profits.  Earning a profit
is about the only reason that corporations exist, but few will ever state
it that baldly. 

Today’s cancer treatment paradigm
attacks the tumor as a way to eradicate cancer.  What did the great doctors of
history have to say about attacking cancer tumors?  From Medical Dark Ages I obtained these quotes:

“It
is better not to apply any treatment in cases of occult cancer; for if treated
(by surgery), the patients die quickly; but if not treated, they hold out for
a long time.” – Hippocrates, (460-370 BC).

(Advanced cancer is)” irritated by treatment; and
the more so the more vigorous it is.”

“Some
have used caustic medicaments, some the cautery, some excision with a scalpel;
but no medicament has ever given relief; the parts cauterized are excited immediately
to an increase until they cause death.”

“After
excision, even when a scar has formed, nonetheless the disease has returned, and
caused death; while …the majority of patients, although no violent measures
are applied in the attempt to remove the tumor, but only mild applications in
order to sooth it, attain a ripe old age in spite of it.” – Celsus, (1st
century AD).

“When
[a tumor] is of long standing and large, you should leave it alone.  For myself
have never been able to cure any such, nor have I seen anyone else succeed before
me.” – Abu’l Qasim, (936-1013 AD).

“It should be forbidden and severely punished to
remove cancer by cutting, burning, cautery, and other fiendish tortures.  It is
from nature that the disease comes, and from nature comes the cure, not from physicians.”
- Paracelsus, (1493-1541 AD).

The
same mentality was held by the Hawaiian kahunas.  The kahuna lore stated that
“If it is (cancer), do not treat it.”[145] 

The heroic medicine of Benjamin Rush was diametrically opposed to such a sentiment. 
He wrote that one of the “Vulgar Errors in Medicine” was to “let tumors alone.”[146]

With surgery coming into vogue, it became a monopoly as a way
to treat cancer.  Today, there are basically three legal ways to treat cancer
in America: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.  The second legal way to treat
cancer was discovered in the 1890s.  How was that pioneer treated?  Again, from
Medical Dark Ages:

“The
surgeons.  They controlled medicine, and they regarded the X-ray as a threat to
surgery.  At the time surgery was the only approved method of treating cancer. 
They meant to keep it the only approved method by ignoring or rejecting
any new methods or ideas.  This is why I was called a ‘quack’ and nearly ejected
from hospitals where I had practiced for years.” – Dr. Emil Grubbé. 
Dr. Emil Grubbé, …discovered…X-ray therapy (for cancer) in 1896…X-ray was
not recognized as an agent for treating cancer by the American College of Surgeons
until 1937…Dr. Grubbé…still was not recognized as late as 1951.” – in
Herbert Bailey, Vitamin E, Your Key to a Healthy Heart

The third legal way, chemotherapy, came directly from World
War II chemical warfare experiments.  Using chemicals to treat cancer had been
around since Paracelsus, but the chemicals killed the patients more often than
not, since they were based on arsenic, lead and other deadly substances.  In the
early 20^th century, chemical treatments and finding the “magic bullet”
(more masculine imagery) to kill cancer cells became an intensive area of study. 
In the 1930s, chemotherapy research was noted for its deadly and barbaric effects,
and those who used surgery and radiation battled against chemotherapy.  World
War II was a watershed in the use of chemicals.  DDT
was first used during World War II, the Nazis invented nerve gases, the allies
invented napalm and nuclear
weapons, and the notion of “better living through chemistry” became entrenched
due to the experience of World War II.[147] 

The racketeering impulse has been with Western medicine
for many years and is deeply embedded today.  The rise of the Western medical
paradigm coincided with the rise of the corporation and new kinds of empires. 
The reason that American medical doctors are the highest-paid professionals on
earth is not because they perform valuable work.  They are technicians in what
is arguably the West’s greatest racket, where the power of life and death is in
the hands of the world’s most lucrative professions and industries.  The fact
that only violent methods of cancer treatment are legal is no accident.  Here
are two quotes from Medical Dark Ages. 

“The
thing that bugs me is that people think the FDA is protecting them.  It isn’t. 
What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it’s doing are as different as
night and day.” Dr. Herbert Ley, Commissioner of the FDA. (San Francisco
Chronicle, 1-2-70). 

(In
response to above quote) “What is the FDA doing? As will be shown
by the material that follows, the FDA is “doing” three things:

“First,
it is providing a means whereby key individuals on its payroll are able to obtain
both power and wealth through granting special favors to certain politically influential
groups that are subject to its regulation.  This activity is similar to the ‘protection
racket’ of organized crime: for a price, one can induce FDA administrators to
provide ‘protection’ from the FDA itself.

“Secondly,
as a result of this political favoritism, the FDA has become a primary factor
in that formula whereby cartel-oriented companies in the food and drug industry
are able to use the police powers of government to harass or destroy their free-market
competitors.

“And thirdly, the FDA occasionally
does some genuine public good with whatever energies it has left over after serving
the vested political and commercial interest of its first two activities.” 
- G. Edward Griffin, World Without Cancer.

Ley
was the commissioner of the FDA in the 1960s.  That quote of Ley has some history
and previously incorrect reporting, including in earlier versions of my work,
and its tale is told at this footnote.[148]  The FDA apparently acts as Mr. Deputy, Ms. Prosecutor
and Ms. Deputy Attorney General did in protecting
the turf of its patrons. 

The insurance companies
are an integral part of the racket, keeping the money from the alternatives because
they are “not approved.”  “Not approved” becomes a self-fulfilling
Catch-22 by mainstream medicine, as they refuse to investigate alternatives, so
therefore they are not approved.  It goes even further, as laws are passed making
it a criminal offense for a doctor to use an “unapproved” treatment.[149] 
It is an impressive use of circular logic to produce an insulated racket.  Evidence
for that bold charge will be presented in this essay. 

Continue with part 2.

 

Footnotes

[1] See that quote in Cremo and Thompson’s
Forbidden Archeology, p. 23.

[2] See Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, p. 151.

[3] See Heisenberg, Encounters with
Einstein, p. 121.  Einstein made his remark regarding Heisenberg’s quantum
theories that introduced randomness to the mechanics of atoms. 

[4] See their mystical writings in Ken
Wilber’s Quantum Questions. 

[5] See Ken Wilber’s Quantum Questions,
pp. 101-104.

[6] See Woodhouse’s Paradigm Wars,
pp. 41-44.

[7] See Eisler’s The Chalice and the
Blade.

[8] For some reading relating to that idea,
see Merlin Stone’s When God was a Woman, Riane Eisler’s The Chalice
and the Blade, and for a more conservative investigation see Margaret Ehrenberg’s
Women in Prehistory.  For a broad summary of that issue, see Michael Parenti’s
History as Mystery, chapters two and three.  The issue of matriarchal societies
in prehistory is a heated issue, with the firestorm generally centering around
the pioneering work of Marija Gimbutas.  While there may be no “solid” evidence
for there ever being a true matriarchal society, there is good evidence that many
ancient societies and religions had women holding a high place, and women’s status
degenerated along with a society’s decline.  When men and warriors held unchallenged
supremacy, the societies were violent and declining, with women living in some
form of bondage.  When women had higher status, violence was less prevalent and
society was healthier.  That does not hold true for only prehistoric investigations. 
Elizabeth I was the first woman English sovereign, and the Elizabethan Era was
the most culturally auspicious era that England ever had, with its literature
hitting a high point that is still unsurpassed.  Nobody is arguing that women
are the source of violence in the ancient world or today’s.  The furor surrounding
the work of Gimbutas and others like her is obviously at least partly an issue
of gender bias, with the West’s patriarchical academic system fighting back against
a challenge to its power and privilege.  The issue has been extremely politicized,
but when the dust settles, if it does in my lifetime, I think it will be acknowledged
that societies have been much healthier when women had higher status, and when
their status was reduced, that society was in decline, and often on its way to
extinction. 

[9] See Campbell, Occidental Mythology,
pp. 3-92.

[10] See Campbell, Occidental Mythology,
pp. 3-92.  See Stone, When God was a Woman, pp. 198-241.

[11] See a brief discussion of that fact
in Jeanne Achterberg’s Woman as Healer, pp. 18-19.  See, for instance,
the nearly complete absence of women in Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to
Mankind and Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography of Medicine.  Even
though they are recent works, they typify how infrequently women appear in the
standard histories of medicine. 

[12] See Jeanne Achterberg’s Woman
as Healer, pp. 106-109.  For more on women healers, see Elizabeth Brooke’s
Women Healers.

[13] See Jeanne Achterberg’s Woman
as Healer, p. 90.  See Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History,
pp. 134-135.

[14] For instance, read about the war-based
paradigm that has guided modern male doctors in Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors, The
Biography of Medicine, pp. 429-430.  Nuland wrote that he and his fellow male
doctors thought of themselves as “Spitfire” pilots, and the patient’s body was
merely the theater of their glorious battles against disease.  That indoctrination
was partly so the doctors would not become “emotionally involved” with their patients. 
Nuland rightfully calls such boyish attitudes what they were: anti-feminine. 
They were also anti-human. 

[15] Achterberg, Woman as Healer,
p. 136.  See Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 364.

[16] See Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, The
Metaethics of Radical Feminism.

[17] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health,
pp. 51-52.  

[18] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health,
pp. 15-57.   See Mendelsohn, Confessions of a Medical Heretic.

[19] Examples of arguably worse-than-worthless
prevention can be found in vaccination, mammograms
(may cause as much cancer as they find, and are useless anyway, with orthodox
therapies, if increased life expectancy means that it “works”) and other high-tech
and/or drug-related treatments.

[20] Whitaker, Health and Healing,
November 1994, p.1.

[21] See Clark, Randolph Lee and Comley,
Russell, Eds. The Book of Health, Third Edition.  New York: Van Nostrand
Rheinhold Company, 1973.  On page 212: “Blood pressure reaches 120 at 17 years
of age…With age, the pressure gradually rises until at 60 years it is about 140/87.”
Apparently, the rule of thumb used to be as bad as “100 plus your age.”  See Rosenfeld,
Dr. Isadore.  “Don’t be Blasé about Your Blood Pressure.”  Parade Magazine,
September 13, 1998.

[22] See Ornish, Dr. Dean.  Dr. Dean
Ornish’ Program for Reversing Heart Disease.  New York: Ballantine, 1990.

[23] In 2006, for the first time ever, I influenced somebody to change
his diet, to save his life.  It was an old friend who recently had a cancerous
kidney removed and had further, deeply invasive, surgery.  He has adopted a holistic
regimen, with a live food diet, meditation and other holistic, preventive practices. 
In May 2007, a friend of mine was looking into adding more live food to his diet,
partly due to my influence.  I told him that, as with my vegetarian ways and free energy,
I really did not keep up much on the “state-of-the art” of such practices.  I
explored those health habits many years ago, they worked for me, and I did not
do much further research into those areas.  It is not difficult to understand
that humans, as with all animals, are designed to eat live food and that dead
food is less nutritious.  As my friend was asking about books on live foods, I
thought I might buy him a copy of Paul Bragg’s The Miracle of Fasting. 
As I searched for the book on the Internet, I came upon evidence that Bragg lied
about his age and other aspects of his life’s story.  He was eighty-one
when he died, not ninety-five.  Not only that, but his accounts of his ancestry,
being cured of tuberculosis as a teenager and wrestling
in the Olympics were image-making fabrications.  His “daughter”
is really his former daughter-in-law.

Bragg
spent many years in Southern California, and Jack
La Lanne lives a short drive from the university that I graduated from.  I
have friends and family members who have met both men, as well as Patricia Bragg,
who is carrying on Paul’s work as his “daughter.”  Patricia once spent the evening
at a friend’s house, regaling them with Bragg tales.  According to La Lanne, Paul
Bragg believed that diet was the most important part of the health regimen (including
fasting), with exercise less important.  La Lanne switched the priorities, with
exercise as his regimen’s most important factor.  It is hard to argue with somebody
who is one of earth’s most fit nonagenarians. 

In
light of the recently adduced evidence, Bragg appears to have been a charlatan,
but Jack La Lanne really is living evidence of the benefits of exercise
and proper nutrition.  Will Jack live to be 110?  Time will tell, but I believe
the enlightening essence of Jack’s philosophy is in an interview that I read many
years ago.  Jack was asked how old he thought he would live to be.  Jack responded
that he did not know how old he would live to be, and did not much care.  He said
that what was important to him was, “while I am alive, I am living.” 

Bragg recommended water
fasts, and from age seventeen to twenty-four I performed water fasts.  However,
my longest water fast lasted only six days, and it was the weakest I ever felt. 
I read other works on holistic health practices in those days, including Paavo
Airola’s Are You Confused?  Airola recommended juice fasting, as did others. 
At age twenty-four, I tried a juice fast.  I did a weeklong fast, and it was easy. 
A few days later, I did a thirty-two-day juice fast, and it also was easy.  My
longest juice fast was for forty-five days, in Boston, but was done partly because it was cheaper
than eating.  I have encountered people who greatly exceeded my personal fasting
record.  One friend did a ninety-day juice fast, and said he looked like a concentration
camp inmate when he finished it (he may have taken it a little too far).  Another
friend cured his bladder cancer with a seventy-day juice fast.  Steve Meyerowitz
cured his allergies and asthma, after orthodox medicine had failed him, through
diet and fasting.  His longest fast was one hundred days, which is the longest
I have heard of (see his Juice Fasting and Detoxification, which is a better
reference book than Bragg’s works).  My fasting habits have waxed and waned over
the years.  I have often fasted while backpacking, and my life’s best backpacking
experience was while alone, fasting, and so deep into the trailless wilderness
that if I had died out there, it would have been many years before my remains
would have been discovered.  I went about fifteen years without fasting longer
than a week, but in 2004 rediscovered longer fasts (twenty-to-forty days), and
plan to keep longer fasts as a permanent part of my health regimen.  The effects
of long fasts can be profound.  I discovered for myself that while water fasting
may be the “best” fast, it is often incompatible with modern life’s demands. 
I could not perform my job duties if I water fasted.  While juice fasting, I can
perform at levels above what I am normally capable of – working fifteen-hour
days and still feeling energetic when I go home.  I also need one-to-two hours
less sleep each night, along with increased mental alertness and a spiritual high
that is unique to fasting.  I am on day thirteen of a fast as I write this.  Fasting
can be a truly miraculous process, but juice fasting works best for the vast majority
of people.  I have skepticism about Bragg’s water fasting advice and other
parts of his regimen.

[24] Ralph’s book is a gold mine of information,
but is not in an easily readable format.  It takes effort to decipher his cancer
treatment tables.  The book is one of a kind, and I have spent many hours riveted
to its pages.  It was very influential to me.  Ralph is a friend, and a kind and
eccentric soul who has performed epic labors on humanity’s behalf.

[25] The studies were the Veteran’s Administration
study published in 1977, the Coronary Artery Surgery Study, published in 1990,
and the report of the European Coronary Surgery Study Group, published in 1983. 
See Charles T. McGee, M.D.’s Heart Frauds, pp. 24-28.

[26] See Charles T. McGee, M.D.’s Heart
Frauds, pp. 12-13, 23.

[27] See Charles T. McGee, M.D.’s Heart
Frauds, p. 28.

[28] See Charles T. McGee, M.D.’s Heart
Frauds, p. 33.

[29] See Charles T. McGee, M.D.’s Heart
Frauds, pp. 161-165.

[30] Milloy, Steven.  “Relax…You Might
Not Be Doomed” Public Risk.  February 1997. 

[31] There is no inherent contradiction
between evolution and the notion of a creator, or the role that consciousness
can play in it.  The battle between creationists and evolutionists is partly a
false dichotomy.  The Creator’s handiwork can also
evolve.  Evolution does not happen haphazardly, but in accordance with consciousness,
which is ultimately in charge of the process.  The material world is the manifestation of consciousness, and there is interplay between
consciousness and its material manifestation, in my opinion.  That is a large
and controversial subject, and not one for this essay. 

[32] See discussions of the various theories
regarding the megafauna extinctions in Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel,
Goudie’s The Human Impact on the Natural Environment, and Clive Ponting’s
A Green History of the World.

[33] See Roy Porter’s The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind, p. 17.  Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, pp. 104-113,
provides a more thorough survey of the issue, but still gives the main impetus
to the decline in available hunter-gatherer foods.  See discussion in Clive Ponting’s
A Green History of the World, pp. 37-67.

[34] See Diamond’s Guns, Germs and
Steel, pp. 166-168.  Diamond’s work is very useful as far an marshalling the
evidence.  As to his thesis, I do not entirely agree with it (it is too materialistic
for me, among other issues), and to read a fairly thorough critique of his overall
thesis, see J.M. Blaut’s Eight Eurocentric Historians, pp. 149-172.

[35] See Roy Porter’s The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind, p. 45.

[36] See Goudie, The Human Impact on
the Natural Environment, 5^th Edition, pp. 161-173.

[37] See Brooke, Women Healers,
pp. 28-39. 

[38] See Angus Armitage’s Copernicus,
The Founder of Modern Astronomy, p. 61.

[39] See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds
in Medicine, pp. 1-18.  See Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography of
Medicine, pp. 120-144.

[40] See Edward Burman’s The Inquisition,
The Hammer of Heresy, p. 160.

[41] See Schwartz’ The Creative Moment.

[42] See Brooke, Women Healers,
pp. 80-93.  See also Jeanne Achterberg’s Woman as Healer, pp. 99-112

[43] See Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors,
The Biography of Medicine, p. 204. 

[44] I have seen that quote in many places
for many years.  Nobody that I know of, however, had ever cited the direct quote
from a publication.  I hunted for it.  I obtained three volumes of Rush’s writings:
The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, edited by George Corner; Letters
of Benjamin Rush, Volume 1, edited by L.H., Butterfield, and The Selected
Writings of Benjamin Rush, edited by Dagobert D. Runes.  I did not find the
exact quote, but found one close enough that I am sure his famous quote can be
found somewhere in his vast correspondence.  Rush was a prolific writer.  He was
also a remarkable man.  He was an early campaigner against slavery, capital punishment,
alcohol and tobacco.  Although his medical practice and philosophy would have
disastrous effects on American medicine, his overall philosophy had much to recommend
it. 

In a lecture
he gave regarding the progress of medicine, he enumerated the causes that retarded
the progress of medicine.  Some of his points are relevant even today.  His 19^th
point: “The attempts which have been made to establish regular modes of practice
in medicine, upon experience without reasoning, and upon reasoning without experience.” 
His 21^st point: “The interference of governments in prohibiting the
use of certain remedies, and enforcing the use of others by law.  The effect of
this mistaken policy has been as hurtful to medicine, as a similar practice with
respect to opinions, has been to the Christian religion.”  Here is the relevant
quote, the 22^nd point: “Conferring exclusive privileges upon bodies
of physicians, and forbidding men, of equal talents and knowledge, under severe
penalties, from practicing medicine within certain districts of cities and countries. 
Such institutions, however sanctioned by ancient charters and names, are the bastiles
[prisons - ed.] of our science.”  His 23^rd point was: “The refusal
in universities to tolerate any opinions, in the private or public exercises of
candidates for degrees in medicine, which are not taught nor believed by their
professors, thus restraining a spirit of inquiry in that period of life which
is most distinguished for ardor and invention in our science.  It was from a view
of the prevalence of this conduct, that Dr. Adam Smith, has called universities
the ‘dull repositories of exploded opinions.’  I am happy in being able to exempt
the University of Pennsylvania, from this charge.  Candidates for degrees are
here not only permitted to controvert the opinions of their teachers, but to publish
their own, providing they discover learning and ingenuity in defending them.” 
However, not all of Rush’s observations are necessarily something to subscribe
to, in my opinion.  His 12^th point was: “An undue reliance upon the
powers of nature in curing diseases.  I have elsewhere endeavored to expose this
superstition in medicine, and shall in another place, mention some additional
facts to show its extensive mischief in our science.”  Those points were taken
from The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, edited by Dagobert D. Runes,
pp. 227-234. 

Here
is another observation that was less than salutary: “Mercury was prescribed empirically
for many years in the cures of several diseases, in which it often did great mischief;
but since it has been discovered to act as a general stimulant and evacuant, such
a ratio has been established between it, and the state of diseases, as to render
it a safe and nearly an universal medicine.”  From The Selected Writings of
Benjamin Rush, edited by Dagobert D. Runes, p. 249.  In fairness to Rush,
his general medical philosophy was to warn of blind adherence to orthodoxy.  Just
as Christians betrayed the spirit of the Christ, just as capitalists and communists
betrayed the spirits of Smith and Marx, so did orthodox American medicine betray
the spirit of Benjamin Rush.  Rush was certain that medical science was in its
infancy, and he would be the first today to react in horror to the universal practice
of administering mercury to patients, which he initiated in the United States,
as well as his heroic bloodletting.  The enemy of science, reason, spirituality
and enlightenment is dogma; it always has been and always will be, because its
root is fear.  Those who enforce adherence to dogma are those who profit by it. 

[45] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 63. 

[46] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 55. 

[47] See a discussion of that issue in
Stannard’s American Holocaust, pp. 103-105.

[48] See Friedrich Engels’ The Origin
of the Family, Private Property and the State, Penguin Classics version, introduction
by Michèle Barrett. 

[49] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 92. 

[50] A brief overview of homeopathic principles
is in Harris L. Coulter’s Homeopathic Science and Modern Medicine. 

[51] Much of my material dealing with
orthodox medicine and the challenge posed by homeopathy and other modalities comes
from Harris Coulter’s superb Divided Legacy.

[52] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 98. 

[53] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 215. 

[54] See Achterberg, Woman as Healer,
p. 137.

[55] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
pp. 466-472.

[56] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 468.

[57] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 58. 

[58] See Roy Porter’s The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind, pp. 294-295.

[59] See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds
in Medicine, p. 34.

[60] See photographs of Semmelweis’ rapid
decline in Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography of Medicine, p. 259. 

[61] See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds
in Medicine, published in 2001, the same year I am writing this.

[62] Written by K. Codell Carter, a Semmelweis
specialist, writing in 1983.  See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds in Medicine,
p. 47.

[63] See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds
in Medicine, p. 49-50.

[64] Morton did, and Wells botched a public
demonstration of his discovery in 1845, leading to his demise. 

[65] See Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography
of Medicine, pp. 263-303.  See a brief account in Roy Porter’s The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind, pp. 366-368.

[66] See Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography
of Medicine, pp. 343-385.  See a brief account in Roy Porter’s The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind, pp. 370-374.

[67] See Matthew Josephson’s The Robber
Barons. 

[68] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
pp. 402-410.

[69] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous
Generation Controversy, p. 9.

[70] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous
Generation Controversy, p. 45.

[71] In the history profession, there is a concept
known as present-mindedness, also called presentism.  It is writing history from
the perspective of the present, which is impossible to completely avoid.  The
greatest sin of presentism is writing about the past in a way that justifies the
present, rather than helping to explain it.  Presentism is practiced in the heroification
of Junípero Serra, Christopher
Columbus and George Washington because their
efforts led to the American civilization that exists today.  They were all fanatical
and bloody conquerors, obsessed with wealth, fame and building empires, largely
at the expense of Native Americans.  Their legacies are not much to cheer about,
and research into their feats can create revulsion toward those “heroes.”  American
high-school history books are prominent examples of the presentism phenomenon,
portraying United States history as one grand tale of state as hero.  The many dark
chapters of United States history are swept under the carpet or polished up and
sold as glory stories, turning night into day, focusing on the few “winners,”
not the multitudes of losers.  The point of the story as taught to American high
school students is glorifying the state and its heroes, not gaining a useful understanding
of the American nation’s past.  The past is only seen in terms of how it contributed
to today, that best of all possible outcomes.  Events and trends that led to other
possible outcomes are treated as “errors” or otherwise disparaged. 

American
history as taught in high school is far from the only place that presentism is
practiced.  The mainstream histories of capitalism portray it as mankind’s natural
state.  The history of capitalism’s triumph is seen as merely the removal of obstacles
to mankind’s highest state.  Competing ideologies such as communism (never really
practiced in the Soviet Union or China, as Adam Smith’s ideology was never really
practiced either) or socialism are rejected as systems that do not honor human
nature.  In reality, the salient feature of “human nature” that today’s capitalism honors is greed, which is one
of the seven deadly sins.  Capitalistic ideologists have transformed greed into
a virtue, turning reality upside down.  In history circles, the practice of presentism
is called “Whig history.”  In that light, both Christian theology and the theory
of evolution can be seen as Whiggish interpretations.  Men are the apple of God’s
eye in Genesis, and the human race being the current flower of evolution.  “Whig
history” has always been a pejorative appellation, and can be seen in many history
texts describing the histories written by others.  At times, it has seemed
that in describing certain histories as Whiggish, the author was unconsciously
telling the reader that his/her work is not Whiggish. 

[72] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous
Generation Controversy, p. 2.

[73] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 28.

[74] See Morrison and Boyd’s Organic
Chemistry, Third Edition, p. 120.

[75] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 55.

[76] René Vallery-Radot, The Life of
Pasteur, p. 58.  A slightly different version is in Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 57, where Pasteur said he would lead her to “prosperity.”

[77]
See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur, p. 57.

[78] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 86. 

[79] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 88.

[80] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 59.

[81] See Christine Russell’s “Louis Pasteur
and Questions of Fraud” in the Townsend Letter for Doctors, October 1993,
p. 960.

[82] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous
Generation Controversy, p. 65.

[83] See Ethel Douglas Hume’s Béchamp
or Pasteur, A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology,” p, 37.  It is cited
from Pasteur’s work. 

[84] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
pp. 116-123.

[85] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous
Generation Controversy, pp. 92-120.

[86] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 169.

[87] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 128.

[88] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 151. 

[89] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 174. 

[90] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 204. 

[91] See Patrice Debré, Louis Pasteur,
p. 434. 

[92] See Patrice Debré, Louis Pasteur,
p. 434. 

[93] See Patrice Debré, Louis Pasteur,
p. 435.

[94] See Hellman, Great Feuds in Medicine,
p. 89.

[95] See Microbiology, An Introduction,
Second Edition, by Tortora, Funke and Case, published in 1986.  See The
Microbial World, Fifth Edition, by Stanier, Ingraham, Wheelis and Painter,
published in 1986.  See Microbiology, Fifth Edition, by Pelczar, Chan and
Krieg, published in 1986.  See Bernard Dixon’s Power Unseen: How Microbes Rule
the World, published in 1994.

[96] See Dubos, Pasteur and Modern
Science, p. 71.

[97] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 275. 

[98] Béchamp, Les Microzymas, pp.
50-51, quoted in E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the
History of Biology, p. 47.

[99] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, pp. 12-13.

[100] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 14.

[101] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 48.

[102] William James, Lecture 6, in “Pragmatism’s
Conception of Truth,” from, Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.

[103] Pasteur, (his paper had a long
French name I will not burden the reader with here), quoted in E. Douglas Hume,
Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 37.

[104] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 40.

[105] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 60.

[106] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 61.

[107] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 65.

[108] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 77.

[109] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 78.

[110] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 47.

[111] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 191.

[112] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 68-75.

[113] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 92-93.

[114] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 100-117.

[115] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 113.

[116] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 113-114.

[117] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 110-112.

[118] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 144-164.

[119] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 45.

[120] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 47.

[121] See data and analysis on Pasteur’s
work on anthrax and rabies in E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter
in the History of Biology, pp. 203-237.

[122] See Appleton, The Curse of Louis
Pasteur, pp. 112-114.  See Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health, pp. 330-334. 
See Viera Scheibner’s Vaccination, p. 257.

[123] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 189-221 and 238-287.

[124] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 183.

[125] Although Pasteur’s defenders claimed
that he was sensitive to the animals he was experimenting on, an incident where
Pasteur kicked the bars of a caged dog that Pasteur pronounced would die the next
day, taunting it, gives another view.  See Hume, Béchamp or Pasteur, p.
283.

[126] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 6, 94-95.

[127] See, Roberts, The Nature of
Personal Reality, session 631, December 18, 1972, pp. 125-128.

[128] See Paul Kennedy’s The Rise
and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 149.

[129] See one of those photos in James
Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, p. 167.

[130] See Kennedy, The Rise and Fall
of the Great Powers, pp. 200-202.

[131] See Collier and Horowitz, The
Rockefellers.  See Josephson, The Robber Barons.  See Allen, The
Rockefeller File. 

[132] See John Robbins’ Reclaiming
Our Health, pp. 95-99.

[133] See Harris Coulter’s Divided
Legacy, pp. 298-305.

[134] See Stauber and Rampton’s Toxic
Sludge is Good for You! and Stuart Ewen’s PR!

[135] See Harris Coulter’s Divided
Legacy, p. 419.

[136] See copies of Simmons’ ads in Mullins,
Murder by Injection, p. 6, 17.

[137] Mullins, Murder by Injection,
p. 18.

[138] Mullins, Murder by Injection,
pp. 19-21.

[139] Mullins, Murder by Injection,
p. 26.

[140] See Kenny Ausubel’s When Healing
Becomes a Crime, pp. 88-89.

[141] See Ralph Moss’ The Cancer Industry,
pp. 46-47.  See Mullins, Murder by Injection, pp. 60-62.

[142] See Moss, The Cancer Industry,
pp. 48-49. 

[143] See Collier and Horowitz, The
Rockefellers, pp. 225-226.

[144] See Moss, The Cancer Industry,
pp. 390-394. 

[145] See Bushnell, The Gifts of Civilization,
p. 99.

[146] See The Autobiography of Benjamin
Rush, edited by George Corner, Princeton University Press, 1948, p. 354.

[147] See Moss, Questioning Chemotherapy,
pp. 15-34.

[148] I discovered Ralph Hovnanian’s
Medical Dark Ages in 1990 by reading Barry Lynes’ The Healing of Cancer
(pp. 162-163).  Ralph’s book was my big wake up call on how the medical racket
works.  In 1993, I spent days keying in those quotes that are in the Medical
Dark Ages section of this site.  Probably my favorite quote from Medical
Dark Ages was the quote by Ley.  As I discovered, however, the quote as presented
in Medical Dark Ages is inaccurate.  Ralph is a friend of mine, and he
conscientiously called me in the spring of 2002 to tell me that his quote of Ley
was inaccurate, and that if he ever published another edition of Medical Dark
Ages, he would correct it.  He said that Lynes was the first person to tell
him that he quoted Ley in error.  It was an honest mistake by Ralph.  This situation
is an example of the hazards of relying on secondary scholarship, a problem I
have had to deal with continually.  I have tried to mitigate those potential errors,
and have sought primary sources whenever I can, and I have often gone to great
lengths to try finding the primary evidence, such as that famous quote by Benjamin
Rush.  Ralph originally combined the quote by Ley with the quote by Griffin, making them both appear to be Ley’s.  The combined
quote made for a great impact.  Correctly attributing them definitely takes some
of the wind out of its sails.  The Rush and Ley quotes were
the two from Medical Dark Ages that related the most directly to this essay,
and last winter I hunted for the original source for the Rush quote, as I have
seen it quoted across the Internet dozens of times, but nobody ever gave its source,
accurately. 

I
had been queried about the Ley quote before, by people who found it hard to believe,
and running down the original Ley quote was on my list of things to do, before
I really took my site “public,” and then Ralph called me.  So in May 2002 I descended
into the University of Washington’s microfilm archives and located that San
Francisco Chronicle article.  The Ley quote that this footnote ties to is
accurate, and the Griffin quote is also accurate, but Griffin
is obviously not an FDA official, although he does credibly demonstrate why his
sentiment is probably correct.  The Ley interview was given to Richard Lyons of
the New York Times, given in Ley’s home, soon after he was sacked as the
FDA commissioner, after three years of service.  Ley was a Harvard professor before
being tapped to head the FDA.  The article is sobering.  Ley said that he was
under “constant, tremendous, sometimes unmerciful pressure” from the drug industry. 
Ley said, “Some days I spent as many as six hours fending off representatives
of the drug industry.”  Ley commented that the FDA staff was a poor one to effectively
protect the American consumer, its ranks being full of “retreads” and others who
were not motivated to do their jobs effectively, and that “there has been total
lack of topside support from the current administration.”  Ley admitted that his
former boss, the HEW head, was a Republican Party fundraiser, but it was not his
boss’ fault, as the Nixon administration was “a business-oriented administration.” 
Every administration since Carter’s has been even more so.  Ley said that the
drug company lobbyists, combined with the politicians who worked on behalf of
their patrons, could bring “tremendous pressure” to bear on him and his staff,
to try preventing FDA restrictions on their drugs.  The interview concluded with
Ley stating that the entire issue was about money, “pure and simple.”  The situation
has become much worse since Ley’s day, him being the last commissioner who tried
standing up to them. 

[149] Many states have those criminal
laws on the books.  For example, California Health and Safety Code Sect. 1701.1,
makes it a crime punishable by five years in prison to administer or prescribe
an unapproved cancer treatment.  California is the worst state of all in persecuting
alternative cancer treatments.  The only treatments approved are surgery, radiation
and chemotherapy.  My wife’s doctor endured fifteen years of persecution in California
for curing cancer using an “unapproved” treatment that worked.

[150] See Hovnanian’s Medical Dark
Ages, p. 19.  See Ellen Brown’s Forbidden Medicine, p. 165.

[151] See Moss, The Cancer Industry,
pp. 21-42.

[152] See Moss, The Cancer Industry,
pp. 32-33.

[153] She challenges the notion of a
cancer epidemic in Toxic Terror.  536,900 Americans died of cancer in 1994,
for 23.5% of all deaths, up from 17.2% in 1970, and up from 4% in 1909.

[154] Moss, Questioning Chemotherapy,
pp. 56, 57, 97, 98, 103, 110, 113, 117, etc. to page 150.

[155] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our
Health, p. 96.

[156] Moss, Questioning Chemotherapy,
p. 35.

[157] See Stuart Troy, “The AMA’s
Charge on the Light Brigade,” Nexus, December 1997-January 1998, pp.
35-40, 75-76.

[158] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 34-36. 

[159] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 17-26 and 41-52.

[160] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 50.

[161] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 60-61.

[162] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 80.

[163] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 88.

[164] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 29.

[165] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 29.

[166] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 96.

[167] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 97.

[168] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 98.

[169] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 98-99.

[170] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 99.

[171] Mullins, Murder by Injection,
p. 31.

[172] Mullins, Murder by Injection,
pp. 31-33.

[173] See Stauber and Rampton, Toxic
Sludge is Good for You!, pp. 1, 25-32.

[174] See Robert Proctor’s The Nazi
War on Cancer, pp. 126-128.

[175] See Robert Proctor’s The Nazi
War on Cancer, p. 184.

[176] See Lee and Solomon, Unreliable
Sources, p. 331.

[177] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, pp. 144-147 and Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health,
pp. 204-207.

[178] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, p. 146.

[179] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, p. 146.

[180] See Ausubel, When Healing Becomes
a Crime, p. 109.

[181] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, p. 147.

[182] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, p. 148-150.

[183] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, p. 147.

[184] See Fishbein, Morris Fishbein,
M.D., An Autobiography, pp. 368-369.

[185] Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health,
p. 208.

[186] Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health,
p. 212.

[187] See a brief description of Gerson’s
fate in Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health, pp. 279-281.  See also Lynes, The
Healing of Cancer, pp. 32-33.

[188] You can also see a brief summary
of what happened to them in the Hoxsey documentary, Hoxsey: How Healing Becomes
a Crime.

[189] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
pp. 389-390.

[190] Gardner, Fads and Fallacies,
p. 191. 

[191] Gardner, Fads and Fallacies,
p. 197.

[192] Gardner, Fads and Fallacies,
p. 324.

[193] A particularly disturbing aspect
of the JFK assassination milieu is that critical
conclusions regarding Kennedy’s wounds do not jibe with the testimony of the doctors
who treated Kennedy in Dallas.  The back of Kennedy’s head was blown out, consistent
with a frontal shot, and completely at odds with the “lone nut” theories
involving Lee Harvey Oswald.  Gerald Poser’s Case Closed is establishment
apologetics at its most strained.  Posner is a Wall Street lawyer.  The establishment
lined up in praise of his Case Closed, and he was so “successful”
at debunking the conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination, so the
story goes, that he then published a book debunking any government-involved conspiracy
theory surrounding the Martin Luther King assassination.  I wonder if his next
work will be on the Bobby Kennedy assassination, completing his debunker trilogy. 

[194] See an account of this incident
in Fetzer, ed., Assassination Science.

[195] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 431.

[196] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 183.

[197] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 98.

[198] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 99.

[199] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 108.

[200] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 117.

[201] See Sharaf, Fury on Earth, p.
461.

[202] The definitive work on Reich is
Myron Sharaf’s Fury on Earth, A Biography of Wilhelm Reich, from which
most of this narrative is taken from.  Regarding the FDA’s burning of Reich’s
books, see pp. 459-461.

[203] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 17-26.  See also Brown, AIDS, Cancer and the Medical Establishment,
pp. 126-153.

[204] Moss, The Cancer Chronicles,
Volume 5, Numbers 5 and 6.

[205] The narrative of Naessens’ adventures
is in Christopher Bird’s The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens,
originally published in 1990 as The Life and Times of Gaston Naessens, The
Galileo of the Microscope.

[206] Naessens describes this dynamic
without my anthropomorphic flourishes in a paper he wrote which is reproduced
in Bird’s The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 294-304.

[207] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 37-38 and 75-76.

[208] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, p. 132.

[209] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 129-131.

[210] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 39-40.

[211] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 14-15.

[212] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 16-17 and 97-105.

[213] See Ralph Moss, “The War on Cancer,”
Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, January 2002, pp. 30-31

[214] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 240.

[215] See Appleton, The Curse of Louis
Pasteur, p. 47.

[216] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 197.

[217] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 198.

[218] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 220-221.

[219] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our
Health, p. 334.

[220] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? pp. 34-35.

[221] See Scheibner, Vaccination:
100 Years of Orthodox Research Shows that Vaccines Represent a Medical Assault
on the Immune System, p. xiv. 

[222] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? pp. 36-37.

[223] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? p. 23.

[224] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? p. 20.

[225] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? p. 24.

[226] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? p. 45.

[227] See Scheibner, Vaccination,
pp. 205-224.

[228] See Scheibner, Vaccination,
p. 260.

[229] See Jane Roberts’ The Individual
and the Nature of Mass Events, p. 31.

[230] See Levi Dowling’s The Aquarian
Gospel of Jesus the Christ, chapter 23, pp. 41-42. 

[231] See Scheibner, Vaccination,
pp. 239-253.

[232] See Hovnanian, Medical Dark
Ages, p. 55, section A.2.11.

[233] See Dostoyevsky, The Brothers
Karamazov, book five, chapter five.

[234] See John Fink’s Third Opinion
for listings of those alternative clinics. 

[235] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our
Health, pp. 240-241.

[236] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our
Health, pp. 257-259.

[237] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our
Health, p. 242.

[238] See Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 144.

[239] Whitaker, Health and Healing,
March 1995, p. 2.

[240] Whitaker, Health and Healing,
Supplement, July 1994, p. 2.

[241] See Chomsky, Year 501, p.
153.  In 1995, Presidential Directive 39, signed by Bill Clinton, makes the U.S.’
kidnapping of “terrorists” in foreign nations a government policy, stating
that “Return of suspects by force may be effected without the cooperation
of the host government.”  See Blum, Rogue State, p. 85

[242] See also Ellen Brown’s Forbidden
Medicine. 

[243] See Blum, Rogue State, pp.
210-211.  The ruling is posted to the Internet
at this time (January 2002)

[244] See Ellen Brown’s Forbidden
Medicine, pp. 284-286.

[245] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, p. 107-109

[246] Once in awhile a great soul comes
to earth, on special assignment from the Creator, and I believe that John Robbins
is one of them.  His Reclaiming Our Health may be the most important book
on this list.  His gentle and enlightened voice is easier reading than this essay’s
tour of the dark side of the force.  Here is a list of books to help find out
what is going on, and can also provide ideas on how to heal the mess.  Wolinksy
and Brune, The Serpent on the Staff; Moss, The Cancer Industry;
Robert Mendelsohn, Confessions of a Medical Heretic (an excellent and easily
readable book on the medical racket); Fink, Third Opinion; Brown, AIDS,
Cancer and the Medical Establishment; Mullins, Murder by Injection;
Moss, Questioning Chemotherapy; Hovnanian, Medical Dark Ages; Lynes,
The Healing of Cancer; Lynes, The Cancer Cure that Worked!; Lynes,
Helping the Cancer Victim; Bird, The Persecution and Trial of Gaston
Naessens; Carter, Racketeering in Medicine; Moss, Cancer Therapy,
The Independent Consumer’s Guide to Non-Toxic Treatment and Prevention; Thomas,
The Essiac Report; Brown, Forbidden Medicine; Goldberg, An Alternative
Medicine Definitive Guide to Cancer.

[247] See The Sun, January 2002,
p. 48.

[248] What the FDA did to L-tryptophan
is well known and well documented.  For one place of many, see Carter, Racketeering
in Medicine, pp. 171-175.

[249] For instance, the body mistakes
strontium 90, one of the many radioactive isotopes introduced into the environment
by modern “progress,” for calcium.  If a human being ingests strontium
90, the body will incorporate the strontium into the body, where it can become
part of the bone or teeth.  The strontium will not do the job of calcium, and
will eventually radioactively disintegrate, harming the body with radiation and
particles as it decays.  Strontium 90 is a component of radioactive fallout, which
is partly why nuclear bombs have such devastating long-term consequences.

[250] See Moss, “The War on Cancer,”
Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, August/September 2002, pp. 36-37.

[251] Lynes, Helping the Cancer Victim,
p. 38.

 

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]]> http://viajesdelmundo.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/med-01c/feed/ 1 viajesdelmundo http://viajesdelmundo.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/med-01b-who-was-bechamp/ http://viajesdelmundo.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/med-01b-who-was-bechamp/#comments Sun, 22 Nov 2009 04:10:25 +0000 viajesdelmundo http://viajesdelmundo.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/med-01b-who-was-bechamp/ ]]> med-01b – Who was Béchamp?

med-01b – Who was Béchamp?

Who was Béchamp, and what plagiarism was Pasteur accused of? 

Pierre
Jacques Antoine Béchamp lived from 1816 to 1908.  Béchamp, a physician, unlike
Pasteur, had plenty of biological and medical training.  He was also a doctor
of science, a pharmacist and a college chemistry, physics, pharmacology and toxicology
professor.  He is a known figure in industrial science, as he developed an economical
process to produce aniline and the many dyes and drugs based on it.  Regarding
his life’s work, however, he is virtually unknown today.  He was a leading figure
in his time, but today his name is all but unknown in the orthodox histories of
biology and medicine.  I first heard of Béchamp in 1990 as I began my education
in alternative media, history, medicine and related areas.  His story is worth
telling, and the rest of this medical essay will deal at length with the idea
that Béchamp was only the first in a long line of researchers whose work pointed
toward a different paradigm in biology and medicine, a paradigm that still may
be adopted one day. 

In the
1850s, Béchamp was one of many scientists investigating fermentation.  By 1854,
the chemical explanation of fermentation was the prevailing one, the work of Cagniard-Latour
and Schwann disregarded by the mainstream.  It was known that yeast initiated
fermentation, and was seen as a chemical reagent by the mainstream and chemists
such as Liebig.  As such, yeast was called a “ferment,” since it initiated fermentation. 
However, Cagniard-Latour and Schwann’s theory that yeast was a living organism
was not altogether discarded.  Yeast was not the only focus of research into fermentation. 
In May of 1854, Béchamp performed an experiment investigating a phenomenon known
as the inversion of sugar.  If cane sugar (sucrose) were put into water and left
to sit, the sugar would slowly transform into glucose and fructose (which is also
called grape sugar).  That process was called the inversion of sugar, and was
thought to be a strictly chemical transformation.  The transformation could be
detected by using polarized light and a polarimeter, seeing if the angle of rotation
changed.   If the angle changed, it meant that inversion took place. 

In
Béchamp’s 1854 experiment, he took four flasks and filled them with a sucrose
solution, sealed them, and left a small amount of air in the flasks.  One flask
held distilled water and cane sugar.  The other three solutions held calcium and
zinc chlorides and cane sugar.  The first flask had inversion while the other
three did not.  Also, mold appeared in the distilled water solution and not the
others.  Béchamp published the result of that experiment in February 1855 in the
French Academy of Sciences’ official record, the Comptes Rendus.  It was
the first in a series of experiments now known as the Beacon Experiment.  Another
researcher published similar results to his in 1856, and Béchamp considered two
questions:

1. Are molds
   endowed with chemical activity?

2. What is the
   origin of the molds that appear in the sugared water?[98]

As
Pasteur did in 1854, Béchamp moved on from Strasbourg to greener academic pastures,
Béchamp taking a position at the university at Montpellier in southern France,
where he spent many happy years.  For an eighteen-month period, beginning in June
1856, Béchamp performed a new set of experiments designed to answer those two
questions.  Pasteur had yet to involve himself in fermentation when Béchamp began
publishing his Beacon Experiment findings.  Béchamp’s new round of experiments
introduced several substances into cane-sugar solutions, including creosote and
several metallic salts.  Creosote is a close cousin of carbolic acid, the substance
that Lister would make famous with his sterile surgical
procedures.  The zinc, calcium and mercury chlorides prevented inversion, while
other substances seemed to promote inversion, with some inverted solutions becoming
very moldy.  Béchamp also performed a litmus test and found the inverted solutions
acidic.

In March 1857, Béchamp set out to investigate
the role of creosote more fully.  He prepared several cane-sugar solutions.  In
some, he boiled the water, and the air was passed through a sulfuric acid solution
before introduction to the flasks.  In others, he allowed no air and the flasks
were completely filled with boiled water and cane sugar.  In others, he added
creosote, both with filtered and unfiltered air.  Two of his filtered-air flasks
with only sugar and water displayed inversions.  Béchamp noted that those two
flasks were imperfectly manipulated and contaminated by unfiltered air.  He also
noted that the more mold seen, the greater the rotation of light, hence greater
inversion.  The perfectly sealed flasks of boiled water and filtered air had no
change in light rotation, and no mold.  It became obvious to Béchamp that inversion
was not a strictly chemical process.  Béchamp deduced two conclusions from those
experiments. 

1. Boiled water and cane sugar,
   when put into an airless flask, will not undergo inversion.
2. The
   same solution, boiled or not, enclosed with air, would invert, with mold forming
   and the solution becoming acidic.  To prove that air alone could not account for
   the inversion, no matter its volume, a little added creosote would prevent it
   whether the flask was sealed or not.[99]

It
was common knowledge in those days that nitrogen was present in albuminoid matter. 
Albumin is a simple protein.  There is no nitrogen in sugar or water.  In those
days, the prevailing view was that fermentation could not occur in the absence
of albuminoid matter, which was why Pasteur worked with sour milk.  Because mold
accompanied the inversions, Béchamp reasoned that they were responsible for them,
because his work had shown that air alone did not do it, although air was a required
component of inversion and mold formation.  Schwann was the first to perform experiments
to prove that the organisms that accompanied fermentation, seen through microscopes,
were introduced through the atmosphere.  Béchamp analyzed the mold and discovered
that they had nitrogen in them.  The only place the nitrogen could have come from
was the air in the flask.  Béchamp’s conclusions from his Beacon Experiment were
firm, and he first submitted them to the French Academy of Sciences in December
1857.  An extract of his findings was published by the Academy in January 1858,
with the full paper included in Annales de Chimie et de Physique, published
in September 1858.  Béchamp’s conclusion was very clear, writing that the,

 

“germs
brought by the air found in the sugared solution a favorable medium for their
development.” 

 

Béchamp
wrote that the,

 

“new
organism, making use of the materials present, effects the synthesis of the nitrogenized
and non-nitrogenized materials of its substance.”[100]

 

With his Beacon Experiment,
Béchamp was the first to prove that not only could fermentation take place without
the presence of albuminoid matter, but also that the organisms responsible for
the fermentation actually created them by incorporating nitrogen from the air. 
When Béchamp submitted his findings to the French Academy of Sciences in late
1857, Pasteur was still experimenting with sour milk and calling fermentation
a spontaneous process.  Béchamp was far more interested in investigating nature’s
mysteries than becoming rich and famous.  Béchamp sought no fanfare, and after
submitting his seminal experimental results, pursued the implications of them. 
Béchamp had conclusively demonstrated that fermentation was not due to spontaneous
processes in 1857. 

Most official stories of
Pasteur do not even mention Béchamp, and Geison’s quick dismissal is misleading. 
Ethel Douglas Hume published under the names E. Douglas Hume and Douglas Hume,
to hide the fact that she was a woman, to further demonstrate Western civilization’s
ingrained misogyny.  Geison disparaged and dismissed Hume’s work, also stating
that Hume’s book did not persuade him that Pasteur had “plagiarized” Béchamp. 
In reading Geison’s brief account, the impression is easily received that Hume
was about the only person making the case.  Béchamp makes the case for Pasteur’s
plagiarism in his work, notably in the preface to his The Blood and its Third
Anatomical Element.  Hume’s work was largely based on Béchamp’s account of
events, and he did not mince words, describing in detail four instances where
Pasteur apparently plagiarized him, then Pasteur added indignity to injury when
he led a campaign against Béchamp.  Béchamp noted the fate of Galileo and others who run up against the establishment,
and he finished his summary of the issue of Pasteur with,

 

“It
is that part of mankind which allows the plagiarist to calumniate and vilify the
victim whose work he has plagiarized.”[101]

 

In dealing with Pasteur and Béchamp, a quote from William James
is pertinent. 

 

“First…a new theory
is attacked as absurd.  Then it is admitted to be true but obvious and insignificant. 
Finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves
discovered it.”[102]

 

Pasteur’s alleged plagiarisms of Béchamp were not innocuous:
they may have marched biology and medicine off in the wrong direction.  When Béchamp
had proven that fermentation in sugared water was initiated by the “germs brought
by the air,” Pasteur was still adhering to his sponteparist view.  Pasteur
observed the lactic ferment created by one of his experiments, and wrote that
the ferment “takes birth spontaneously as easily as beer-yeast every time
that the conditions are favorable.”[103]  An extract of Béchamp’s work
appeared in the Academy’s Reports on January 4, 1858, while Pasteur’s report appeared
in April 1858.  It appears that Pasteur was aware of Béchamp’s discovery when
he published his paper.  Accompanying the sentence “takes birth spontaneously
as easily as beer-yeast every time that the conditions are favorable” is
a footnote stating that he used the word “spontaneously” as “the
expression of a fact,” but he backpedaled on its truly spontaneous nature. 
Pasteur then threw in some platitudes about his results that others had discovered
earlier.  There was nothing original in Pasteur’s work to that time.  Pasteur
was badly out of his field in interpreting his experimental results, partly because
he had no biological training.  He was a chemist.  By 1857, Pasteur had made no
original statements about the nature of fermentation, and hewed toward the sponteparist
position. 

In December 1857, Pasteur published
the results of his experiment with putting yeast into sugared water and observing
the fermentation.  In his conclusion, Pasteur stated, “Fermentation then
takes place as it does in a natural sugared liquid, juice of the grape, or sugar
cane, etc., that is to say, spontaneously…”[104] 

Pasteur
adhered to the sponteparist position long after Béchamp had produced his
enlightening results.  In 1859, Pasteur seems to have glimpsed the importance
of Béchamp’s work.  He performed an experiment but omitted the yeast, and described
the origin of the yeast as coming from the air.  Pasteur persisted in giving the
phenomenon a spontaneous-generation explanation.  He wrote, “As to the origin
of the lactic yeast in the experiments, it is solely due to the atmospheric air:
we fall back here upon the facts of spontaneous generation…On this point the question
of spontaneous generation has made progress.”[105] 
In an 1860 memoir, Pasteur still referred to the spontaneous generation of yeasts
and fermentations.  Béchamp would later criticize Pasteur’s experimental conclusions,
stating that Pasteur’s deductions proved that he did not understand “the
chemico-physiological phenomena of transformation, called fermentation, which
are processes of nutrition, that is to say, of digestion, followed by absorption,
assimilation, excretion, etc,”[106]

In
1860, Pasteur finally grasped the importance of Béchamp’s work.  Instead of acknowledging
Béchamp’s trumping of the whole field, Pasteur seemingly labored to make Béchamp’s
discoveries his own. 

In September 1860, Pasteur
performed the experiment that put him in the history books.  Two German scientists
had already performed the experiment he proposed, but not so flamboyantly.  Working
quietly in a laboratory, filtering air into flasks to prove that “germs”
were in the air, had already been done.  Pasteur embarked on a tour of France,
carrying 73 vials with him.  He opened and sealed the vials at different locations
and altitudes, ending with the famous opening and sealing of 20 vials on a French
Alp, above Chamonix.  Pasteur was “proving” that germs existed in the
air.  He was also making a radical U-turn from his sponteparist convictions. 

The campaign that Pasteur waged to claim credit for
the work of others began soon thereafter.  In a meeting at the Sorbonne in 1861,
Pasteur, in the presence of Béchamp, tried claiming credit for proving that living
organisms can appear in a medium devoid of albuminoid matter.  Since that claim
was a direct theft from Béchamp, Béchamp did something he was not accustomed to:
he spoke up regarding Pasteur’s attempted theft.  Béchamp did not accuse Pasteur
of plagiarism in that meeting, but merely recounted the results of his Beacon
Experiments and his published conclusions derived from them.  As he returned to
his seat (Pasteur sat next to him), he asked Pasteur to be so kind as to admit
his knowledge of the Beacon Experiment work.  Pasteur hastily admitted his knowledge
of Béchamp’s work, and stated that the results Béchamp put forth were of the “most
rigid exactness.”[107] 

Years later, Pasteur would attack Béchamp’s work, calling
his conclusions “an enormity.”  In what appears to be an instance of
opportunism, Pasteur quickly abandoned a theory that he had held for years (spontaneous
generation), did a complete about face based upon the work of others, then tried
to claim credit for the discovery. 

Béchamp was
not immediately hailed for his breakthrough.  Because his results and conclusions
were so novel and far ahead of his day, scientists attempted to explain his results
as due to impurities in the sugar he used.  Even when that was disproved, they
continued to question Béchamp’s work. 

As late
as 1872, Pasteur was still woefully ignorant about what fermentation really was. 
He wrote “That which separates the chemical phenomenon of fermentation from
a crowd of other acts and especially from the acts of ordinary life is the fact
of the decomposition of a weight of fermentative matter much superior to the weight
of the ferment.”[108] 
Pasteur was repeating the day’s misunderstanding that many scientists subscribed
to.  Béchamp put forth a simple explanation of fermentation that should have made
it clear why a ferment could affect a medium of vastly larger proportion than
itself.  Béchamp proposed the following analogy:

 

“Suppose
an adult man to have lived for a century, to weigh on an average 60 kilograms;
he will have consumed in that time, besides other foods, the equivalent of 20,000
kilograms of flesh and produced about 800 kilograms of urea.  Shall it be said
that it is impossible to admit that this mass of flesh and of urea could at any
moment of his life form part of his being?  Just as a man consumes all that food
by repeating the same act a great many times, the yeast cell consumes a great
mass of sugar only by constantly assimilating and disassimilating it bit by bit. 
Now, that which only one man will consume in a century, a sufficient number of
men would absorb and form in a day.  It is the same in yeast; the sugar that a
small number of cells would only consume in a year, a greater number would destroy
in a day; in both cases, the more numerous the individuals, the more rapid the
consumption.”[109]

 

Jonathan Swift wrote
that the way to spot a genius was by the dunces who unite in confederation against
him/her.  Pasteur used his position, with imperial patronage and help from his
friends, to begin a campaign to discredit and suppress Béchamp’s work, organizing,
in Béchamp’s words, a “conspiracy of silence.”[110]  

After
Pasteur’s failed 1861 attempt to claim credit for his “germs in the air” theory,
his public speech in 1864 at the Sorbonne apparently completed his plagiarism. 
While Béchamp is not mentioned in any microbiology or biology textbook I could
find, Pasteur’s “discovery” of “germs in the air” is supposedly what overturned
spontaneous-generation theory.  Geison is not convinced of Pasteur’s plagiarism
in that matter, but at this time, I am. 

In the
wake of his 1864 speech, Pasteur became the toast of Parisian intellectual life,
and by invitation he spent a week at the Emperor’s palace in 1865.  Pasteur eagerly
lapped it up.  His imperial patronage gave him the “Teflon effect” for
the rest of his life.  Many scientists, particularly French ones, became decidedly
timid in confronting or criticizing a man who had blessings from French society’s
highest levels.  While Pasteur was realizing his lifelong ambition to rub shoulders
with the rich and powerful, as a ticket to wealth and fame for himself, Béchamp
had unceasingly continued his investigations into life’s mysteries. 

Pasteur
took the position that life was in the air, and that bacteria came from the air. 
Although Pasteur would deny that flesh could be alive independently of the organism
that housed it, Charlton Bastian was producing experimental results that had no
easy answer, particularly in light of Pasteur’s germs-in-the-air evangelizing. 
Bastian found bacteria on the inside of animal organs and fruits and vegetables. 
Pasteur’s air-germ theory did not account for them.  In fact, Pasteur’s air-germ
theory misled scientists for some time.  Lister encountered
Pasteur’s germs-in-the-air theory, and sprayed his carbolic acid spray into the
air around his patients, trying to kill those germs in the air.  That led to many
unnecessary deaths.  Lister would later reject that idea, and admit that the only
germs of consequence were the ones introduced by “other than atmospheric
sources.”[111] 

Béchamp
took his fermentation studies much further, and the microscope became a source
of revelation in Béchamp’s hands.  Preceding Béchamp, other scientists had noticed
minute “granulations” that appeared to be organized and perhaps alive. 
They were smaller than cells.  Rudolf Virchow postulated in 1858 that cells were the primary
unit of life, which Béchamp’s findings contradicted.  In Béchamp’s early experiments,
he noted the granulations and movements, and called them “little bodies.” 
He had nothing further to add in those early days, so the little bodies were merely
noted. 

During Béchamp’s fermentation experiments,
he added various salts to the sugar solutions.  In one experiment, he substituted
calcium carbonate for potassium carbonate.  The calcium carbonate’s source was
a form of chalk.  When he added creosote to the sugared water, inversion still
took place.  Béchamp had already proven that creosote inhibited the formation
of mold from exterior sources.  The experiment with chalk was a contradiction. 
Béchamp believed the results were due to some faultiness in his procedures, left
out the chalk results from his published work, and resolved to investigate them
further. 

Béchamp then began a series of intensive
investigations into chalk that should have shaken the foundations of biology,
but today few know his name.  He undertook many experiments with chalk and fermentation. 
Béchamp performed numerous experiments where he created an air-free environment. 
When chemically pure calcium carbonate was added, no inversion took place.  Ordinary
chalk inverted the sugar.  Béchamp took elaborate precautions to ensure that atmospheric
germs could not gain access to the flasks, yet chalk still inverted the sugared
water. 

Béchamp then obtained chalk, and subsequently
a block of limestone from a quarry, where he engaged in great precautions to ensure
they did not contact the air.  The limestone inverted the sugar, even when creosote
was added.  Béchamp was shocked to find that a mineral such as limestone would
invert the sugar.  It became obvious that there was a difference between chalk
and pure calcium carbonate.  Béchamp then began his epochal observations with
his microscope.  He was amazed to find the same “little bodies” in the
chalk as he had earlier seen in living cells.  The little bodies moved rapidly,
similar to what was known as Brownian movement, but Béchamp noticed a difference
between Brownian movement and what the “little bodies” were doing. 
The little bodies refracted light from their surroundings differently from particles
agitated by Brownian movement.  Béchamp determined that the “little bodies”
were inducing the fermentation.  Although they were much smaller than Virchow‘s
cell, they were more powerful at inducing fermentation than anything else Béchamp
had seen. 

There were two tenets that guided
Béchamp’s work at that time, based on his experiences.  One was that no chemical
change takes place without a cause.  The other was that there is no spontaneous
generation of living organisms.  Béchamp concluded that if the little bodies were
truly alive, then he should be able to isolate them, prove them to be insoluble
in water, and find them composed of organic matter.  Through rigorous procedures,
Béchamp proved those notions.  He also was able to “kill” the little
bodies by heating them.  When he heated chalk to 300° C (572°
F) it no longer inverted the sugar, and the little bodies no longer made their
characteristic movements. 

His experimental results
brought him to strange musings.  If the little bodies were alive, as Béchamp had
proven to his own satisfaction, how did they get into limestone and chalk?  The
limestone block that Béchamp obtained was considered to be millions of years old,
and was a powerful fermentative agent.  How could something survive in limestone
for millions of years?  He experimented with tufa limestone, coal deposits, peat
bogs and the dust of cities.  Ancient peat bogs and city dust proved to be powerful
fermentative agents, while the coal and tufa proved weak. 

The
pursuit of his “error” in observing chalk initiate fermentation took
him into territory never trod by science before.  Béchamp discovered new realms
of investigation and left his contemporaries far, far behind.  What Béchamp discovered
was that the little bodies were indeed alive, and apparently capable of lying
dormant for millions of years.  Furthermore, they were far smaller than Virchow’s
cell, and seemed to be building blocks and the organizers of cells.  Béchamp’s
microscopic investigations of chalk, limestone, peat and the like showed him that
the little bodies might be the living remnants of ancient cells.  Béchamp recalled
that Jacob Henle had earlier (1841) observed that the little bodies were structured,
and suspected that they might be the cells’ building blocks.  Béchamp was not
much given to speculation, but built his theories upon what he observed.  His
experiments took place in the late 1850s and early 1860s.  Béchamp soon bestowed
his own term to the little bodies, calling them microzymas, which meant
“tiny ferment” in Greek. 

Alfred Estor,
a physician and surgeon at Montpellier’s hospital, was captivated by Béchamp’s
discoveries.  Estor wrote enthusiastically about Béchamp’s work, and the two men
became partners in further investigating the microzyma.  Béchamp also discovered
the cause of fermentation in beer yeast, and called it zymase.  Although
Béchamp coined the term zymase and its purpose in 1864, credit was given to E.
Büchner for “discovering” it in 1897.[112] 

In 1863, Pasteur’s
most powerful patron, Napoleon III, gave him his first task: researching the disease
that was decimating France’s vineyards.  The year before, in 1862, Béchamp was
already investigating the vineyard disease, on his own.  Through his experiments
he concluded that the disease’s cause was a mold that was found on the leaves
and stalks of the grapes.  He thoroughly published his results in 1864, while
Pasteur had barely begun his investigation.[113] 

In 1865, Pasteur
was assigned another task: discovering the cause of the disease of silkworms,
which was destroying France’s silk industry.  Pasteur was handsomely paid by the
state for his efforts in the vineyard problem and silkworm disease, known at the
time as pébrine.  Again, before Pasteur had even laid eyes on a silkworm,
Béchamp, working on his own and unpaid, had solved the riddle of pébrine. 
Béchamp’s experimentation yielded the fact that pébrine was a parasitical
disease, and could be prevented with an application of creosote.  Béchamp spoke
before the agricultural society in 1865 about his findings.  Pasteur, again demonstrating
his misunderstanding of life processes, performed his own experiments and in 1865
announced that pébrine was neither animal or vegetable, but something akin
to pus or starch.  Pasteur’s understanding was abysmal, but he had imperial patronage
and France’s ear. 

While Béchamp was explaining
the parasitical nature of pébrine and how to prevent it, Pasteur stated
that thinking of the disease as parasitic “would be an error.”  Béchamp
called the disease the result of a vegetative ferment, transmitted by spore. 
Béchamp differentiated pébrine from another silkworm disease called flacherie. 
He discovered that flacherie was not due to an outside disease, but was
related to ill health in the silkworm’s microzymas, and appeared to be hereditary. 
In other words, flacherie was a degenerative disease of the silkworms’
constitutions, and pébrine was a parasitical disease that attacked the
silkworms.  Béchamp solved those problems in his spare time at his own
expense, while Pasteur was blindly wandering on behalf of the Emperor.  In 1866,
Pasteur admitted that his earlier conclusion of pébrine resembling starch
or pus was badly mistaken.[114]  

Because Béchamp understood the diseases, he also suggested
treatments: use creosote to prevent infection of pébrine and do not breed
moths with flacherie.  Here is where Pasteur apparently began inflicting
damage on Western science and medicine due to his lust for fame, wealth and power. 
The ingenious investigations of Béchamp were far ahead of his time, and although
they were clear and precise, the bureaucracies of the day looked to the oracle
of Napoleon III for his pronouncement.  Pasteur demonstrated his complete misunderstanding
of the disease, stating that pébrine was contagious and hereditary, and
his preventive was finding eggs free of the disease, and only breeding those. 
Although the history books today credit Pasteur with saving the silkworm industry
(called sericulture), the numbers tell a different story.  When the troubles began
with sericulture in about 1850, France produced about 30 million kilograms of
cocoons annually.  By 1866-67, the production had fallen to 15 million kilograms. 
After Pasteur’s “preventive” was introduced, it fell to 8 million kilograms
in 1873 and as low as 2 million kilograms in subsequent years.[115]

After
summarizing the plunge in silkworm production, apparently accelerated by Pasteur’s
“preventive,” here is what Dr. Lutaud, the one-time editor of Paris’
journal of medicine, had to say about Pasteur’s “miracle.”

 

“This
is the way in which Pasteur saved sericulture!  The reputation, which he still
preserves in this respect among ignoramuses and short-sighted savants, has been
brought into being, (1) by himself, by means of inaccurate assertions, (2) by
the sellers of microscopic seeds on the Pasteur system, who have realized big
benefits at the expense of the cultivators, (3) by the complicity of the Academies
in the Public Bodies, which, without any investigation, reply to the complaints
of the cultivators – ‘But sericulture is saved!  Make use of Pasteur’s system!’ 
However, everybody is not disposed to employ a system that consists of enriching
oneself by the ruination of others.”[116]

 

Hume
observed that perhaps the greatest harm that Pasteur inflicted on science was
deflecting notice from Béchamp’s discoveries, marching biology and medicine off
in the wrong direction as he continued claiming credit for Béchamp’s discoveries,
while being so ignorant that he did not understand what he stole.  Pasteur tried
taking credit for Béchamp’s silkworm discoveries, particularly Béchamp’s explanation
of flacherie, which was founded on his microzyman investigations, of which
Pasteur knew literally nothing, and had done no original work on.[117] 
When Pasteur tried taking credit for Béchamp’s silkworm discoveries at the Academy
of Sciences, Béchamp was once more compelled to make reference to his earlier
publications, and even told of how a French bureaucrat had quietly approached
him about his solution to the problem. 

In the
meantime, Béchamp was continuing his investigations into the world of the microzyma. 
Béchamp and Estor labored long and hard at Montpellier, microscopes in hand. 
Their discoveries were startling.

Microzymas
could be seen moving about inside cells.  In healthy cells the microzymas looked
one way, and appeared to be vital for the cells’ healthy functioning.  It seemed
that microzymas were required for cells to form, and were essential building blocks
of life.  When tissue was diseased, microzymas seemed related to the bacteria
they were seeing.  The microzymas in chalk and limestone appeared to be surviving
remnants of the creatures that became the rock, and incredibly came alive after
millions of years of dormancy. 

Béchamp and Estor
tirelessly performed experiments that lasted for years.  When a freak frost hit
Montpellier in the winter of 1867-1868, Béchamp obtained a large cactus that had
frozen.  It was a cactus with a large, thick skin, impervious to invasion by organisms. 
Béchamp sectioned the cactus and looked deep within its interior.  He found it
teeming with destructive bacteria.  They concluded that the bacteria they saw
in damaged tissue, as in the frostbitten cactus, came from the microzymas. 

Béchamp held that microzymas were both the beginning
and end of life, in a category all their own.  Microzymas initiated the formation
of cells, and also initiated the cells’ destruction.  Béchamp stated that nothing
is the prey of death, but everything is the prey of life.  When animals and plants
decay, organisms are nourished by consuming them.  The organisms that live inside
them are apparently responsible for their life in the first place.  The decay
initiated by the microzymas when cells die is identical to the fermentation process
in wine, beer, and the inversion of sugar.  Microzymas exist at the beginning
of life, and when the cell dies, microzymas are eventually the only organized
material left, and the rest is broken down into its constituent elements.  The
microzymas can survive in limestone for millions of years.  The recent “revival”
of ancient bacteria by today’s scientists is more confirmation of Béchamp’s work. 
Microzymas, not the cell, appear to be the smallest unit of life, and its building
block.  A cell is a higher level of organization of life processes, similar to
the manner in which a multicellular creature is another, higher level. 

Béchamp and Estor were discovering a dynamic that has
profound implications for today’s medicine.  They set forth a theory known today
as pleomorphism.  What it meant was this: one day a microbiologist looks through
his microscope, seeing a rod-shaped bacterium; the next day he sees a spherical-shaped
bacterium; with his microbiology training, based in large measure upon Pasteur’s
germ theory of disease, those bacteria are considered separate species; according
to pleomorphic theory, that rod-shaped bacterium one day and spherical-shaped
bacterium the next is the same organism, but has “mutated.” 

That might seem a minor difference, but it has profound
implications for the entire foundation of modern medicine.  In the view of Béchamp,
a bacterium was not the cause of disease, but one of its effects. 
Béchamp noted otherwise healthy microzymas going through pathological mutations
when cells were ill or dying, mutating into bacterial and other forms. 

Pasteur apparently unsuccessfully tried plagiarizing
Béchamp’s microzyman work when he tried taking credit for Béchamp’s explanation
of the wine-grape problem.  Béchamp was eight years ahead of Pasteur, and provided
a much fuller explanation than Pasteur’s terse explanation.[118] 
Pasteur’s 1872 attempt at plagiarizing Béchamp’s analysis of the wine-grape problem,
was in Béchamp’s words, “his boldest plagiarism; he discovered all of a sudden,
eight years after my discovery thereof, that the ferment of vinous fermentation
exists naturally upon the grape.”  Béchamp said that Pasteur’s announcement of
his “new discoveries,” and his claim that he “has opened a new path to physiology
and medical pathology” was “too much: up until that time I had treated the man
with consideration; but now he must be properly exposed.”[119] 

When Pasteur’s
alleged attempted plagiarism of Béchamp’s microzyman work was thwarted, Pasteur
used his considerable powers to banish microzyman theory from French science,
and he largely succeeded.  Maybe Pasteur’s appropriation of Béchamp’s work was
not as consciously dishonest as Béchamp averred.  Maybe Pasteur was right and
Béchamp wrong.  The case is not that Béchamp’s evidence and theories were carefully
researched and found wanting.  It is not that today’s microbiology students are
introduced to the subject in a way that develops the history of the germ theory
and deals with rival theories and why they may be incorrect.  Béchamp’s work has
never been pursued by mainstream microbiology, and Pasteur led an effort to erase
Béchamp’s name from the history books, and it largely succeeded.  Estor was greatly
grieved at Pasteur’s plagiarism and corruption of their discoveries, and Béchamp
wrote that Estor died with a broken heart over what Pasteur had done.[120] 
I have tried for several years to obtain an English language copy of Bechamp’s
magnum opus, Les Microzymas, without success.  If Béchamp’s work is never
investigated or reproduced, how can anybody tell if it is wrong?  It looks as
if Pasteur did investigate Béchamp’s work to steal what he deemed useful,
and then buried the rest.  The good news is that many scientists have pursued
the line of Béchamp’s research, sometimes independently.  They are still at it. 
Béchamp’s paradigm may yet prevail, and if we want to be healthy, it probably
should. 

Today’s germ theory of disease guides
every medical student from the first day of class.  Béchamp’s work has shown the
shaky foundation that the germ theory may rest upon.  Pasteur later applied his
germ theory to diseases such as anthrax and rabies.  While the history books laud
Pasteur’s achievements, along with his “saving” of the silkworm industry,
an analysis of the original data from Pasteur’s treatments of anthrax and rabies
not only show that he arguably did not cure anybody of anything, his treatments
caused their death rates to go up.[121]

Pasteur’s
germ theory of disease and the vaccination paradigm
it inspired are examples of male-oriented medicine in action.  Vaccination proceeds
from a premise that there are particular organisms that cause disease by attacking
the host body, and by injecting weakened organisms through vaccination, the body
builds up immunity to the real thing.  It is based upon Pasteur’s germ theory. 
There is an impressively large body of evidence that shows that vaccination does
not really work.  Furthermore, it creates new diseases while making the disease
it supposedly fights more deadly.  Just as fluoridation’s
proponents cannot realistically claim credit for a decrease in tooth decay
in America during the past generation, or as Benjamin Rush
could hardly claim today that his calomel and bleedings really helped his patients,
vaccination can claim little credit, if any, for eradicating diseases.  What deserves
most and maybe all the credit for the elimination of mass diseases such as tuberculosis
and whooping cough is the introduction of public sanitation, a healthier diet
and a reduction in absolute poverty.[122]  Vaccination just might be a
major component in the great increase of cancer in the West, because it harms
the immune system, and cancer and other degenerative diseases are related to immune-system
failures. 

Is there such a thing as infectious
disease?  Sure, but what is it, and how is it really transmitted?  Is there really
a species of disease organism that induces the disease, or is it a pleomorphic
stage that any diseased tissue will eventually manifest under certain conditions? 
The early data from vaccination research shows it was a disaster, arguably never
preventing one instance of disease, and causing endless death and suffering for
millions of people.[123]  Whatever benefits vaccination may appear to convey
may be outweighed by other disease dynamics that vaccination sets in motion. 
Vaccination may help make one disease “disappear,” but another takes
its place.  Many respected scientists have believed that vaccination is responsible
for the increase in cancer rates in this century.  Many think that AIDS was born
via vaccination.  When one understands how poorly the current disease theories
may be founded, those ideas do not seem farfetched. 

There
is a major obstacle to challenging the dogma, however: a multi-trillion-dollar
industry has grown up around it, and it fiercely protects itself, as all power
structures do.  In Hume’s book, her main lament is that Pasteur pioneered the
corruption of modern medicine.  Dubos was not being ironic when he described Pasteur’s
legacy and how the corporate world is heavily invested in Pasteurian medicine. 
There may be no greater enemy of the public’s health than the collective effort
of those corporations, working hand-in-hand with Western physicians. 

Hume
noted with irony that Pasteur was not even a doctor, but he was the first to prostitute
modern medicine by commercializing it.  Vaccines became a big money maker.  His
“preventive” for silkworm disease was lucrative, even though it probably
did not work.  Pasteur founded institutes bearing his name, in order to further
his work.  Nobody knows where medicine may have led if Béchamp’s discoveries had
been given their due.  All the Whiggish presentations do not even address that
possibility. 

A scientist at
the Pasteur Institute performed one of the first modern confirmations of Béchamp’s
pleomorphic theory.  In 1914, Madame Victor Henri subjected bacteria to ultraviolet
light, and created a new species of bacteria from a species already known, transforming
a rod-shaped bacterium into a spheroid bacterium.[124]  With great
irony, a woman at the Pasteur Institute confirmed the accuracy of Antoine Béchamp’s
theories, pariah that he was.

One problem with
microscopic investigation into biology is the microscope itself.  The wavelength
of visible light is the theoretical limiting factor in optical microscopes.  The
smaller the wavelength of light shined upon something, the finer the image resolution. 
Resolution of optical microscopes is traditionally described in terms of diameters. 
The limit of optical microscopes has been around 2000-2500 diameters for many
years.  It does not matter how fine your lenses are, and it does not matter how
hard you look, 2000-2500 diameters is the limit of optical microscopes, because
of the wavelength of visible light, which is about 4000 angstroms.  I doubt they
attained 2000 diameters in Béchamp’s time.  Microzymas existed at the limits of
resolution back then, and even today, optical microscopes have difficulty viewing
the microzyman world. 

A dynamic surrounding
Béchamp played itself out repeatedly in succeeding generations of microbiologists. 
Béchamp seemed to be a man of high spiritual attainment.  He sought to prevent
cruelty to animals, while Pasteur engaged in numerous cruel animal experiments
with dogs, rabbits and other mammals.[125]  Pasteur pioneered
a process whereby a dog’s skull would be opened while it was alive, and the brain
studied.  Pasteur’s trephination practices were merely one more instance of his
spiritual perspective and the degeneracy of scientific practices that do not respect
life.  Pasteur’s animal experiments, like those of his colleague Claude Bernard,
became the target of animal-rights groups in the 1800s, even Bernard’s wife and
daughters campaigned against his experimentation on live animals.

Béchamp
seemed to have a spiritual affinity with the microzyma, which was quite possibly
related to his discoveries.  That offends the scientific notion of objectivity,
but other microbiologists had similar proclivities.  Barbara McClintock won the
Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1983 for her work on corn genetics.  For many years
she worked in obscurity, and was even derided for seeing things in her microscope
that others could not.  She later said that she “had a feeling for the organism.”[126] 

One
thing that primed me for Béchamp’s revelations was that many years earlier I had
read Jane Robert’s Seth state the facts of pleomorphism. 
Seth said that viruses were constantly “mutating” according to what
the host body told them to do.  Seth said that a scientist would look through
a microscope one day and see Virus A, and the next day he would see Virus B, and
little did he know that it was the same virus, but it had “mutated.”[127] 
It is a harmless virus one day, and harmful the next, depending the conditions
it is subject to.  Seth wove a fascinating tale regarding the interrelationship
between body, mind and spirit, making the case that to study one without taking
the others into account was a dead end, similar to sawing the legs off a chair,
thinking it would serve as well with two legs as four.

 

The
Developing American Medical Racket

During
the first half of the 19^th century, Great Britain was the world’s leading
industrial nation.  Its per capita level of industrialization was more than twice
as high as France’s and nearly twice the United States’ in 1830, and its gross
industrial output was significantly larger than France’s and the United States’
combined.  American industrialization per capita increased by 50 percent between
1830 and 1860, while British industrialization nearly tripled.  In 1860, the United
States had a per capita industrialization greater than every nation but Great
Britain’s, which was three times higher.  In gross industrial output, the United
States’ was about a third of Britain’s in 1860.[128] 
The American economy was a dichotomy of an industrialized north and an agricultural
south.  Although the reasons for the American Civil
War were multiple, with the slavery issue and European influence receiving
nods of recognition, my perception is that the overriding issue was holding the
empire together, a motivation of every nation and empire in history.  Lincoln
even said that he would allow slavery if it would keep the “union” whole. 

The United States still bears the scars of the Civil
War, the bloodiest war it has fought, as far as domestic casualties are concerned. 
Disparagement of “Yankees” still can be heard in Southern conversation.  Although
the slaves were freed, they were in near-slave status for a long-time.  At the
dawn of World War II, black income per capita was only about 30% of white America’s,
an even lower ratio than it was in 1900.  Lynching blacks was an American pastime
well into the 20^th century, where entire communities would assemble
to celebrate the murder of people whose crime was having black skin.  Women would
pose in their Sunday best in front of the burning or hanging corpse, while the
local newspaper reporter would take pictures of the
event suitable for framing.[129] 
It was common for those “dead nigger” photographs to be made into postcards and
mailed to family and friends, commemorating America’s civilized ways.  While the
North was supposedly fighting to free the South’s slaves, the genocide of Native
Americans in Western North America was at about its zenith.  American women would not obtain voting
rights until after World War I.  The humanitarian impulse was muted at best, and
the veneer of American civilization thin. 

Beginning
with the Civil War, the United States rapidly caught up and surpassed Great Britain
in industrialization.  By 1928, the United States’ industrialization per capita
was 50% higher than Great Britain’s, and its gross industrial output was higher
than Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy and Japan combined.[130]  Industry dominated the United
States, and what is known as the medical-industrial complex was well on the way
to its current hegemony. 

If
that milieu is considered, it is not surprising that a class of men largely took
over American industry, beginning during the Civil War.  They all bought their
way out of military service, and not because they were pacifists.  They then began
building industrial empires, and war profiteering during the Civil War was where
they got their start.  Of the big name robber barons, it is generally acknowledged
that the most ingenious, ruthless and successful of them all was John D. Rockefeller.  The first American oil
well was drilled in 1859 in Pennsylvania.  After carefully sizing up the new industry,
Rockefeller joined it in 1863.  He quickly realized that if he could control the
industry’s refining arm, he could control it all.  All oil production would have
to pass through his hands if he controlled refining.  His strategy was diabolically
ingenious.  He used the business of his competitors to get kickbacks from the
railroads.  He then marched through the new industry, giving his competitors two
options: sell out or be wiped out.  Those who resisted his offer were quickly
run out of business.  There were mysterious refinery explosions and deaths in
those days for those who refused to sell out.  By 1880, Rockefeller controlled
95% of U.S. refining.  When he wiped out or bought out a competitor, if his prey
put up a vigorous and talented fight, he would try to hire them.  He soon amassed
a team of the most capable and ruthless businessmen around.[131]  Once he controlled the oil industry, he began
diversifying.  Through direct investment and “philanthropy,” Rockefeller would
eventually cast a long shadow over mining, banking,
government, the media, education, and 
- what concerns this essay – medicine.  Rockefeller’s father was a genuine snake
oil salesman and con man who sold cancer “cures.”  John D. learned the business
at his father’s knee, when he was around.  His father funded his early ventures.

While
Rockefeller and the other robber barons built their empires, the AMA was also
building its monopoly.  The AMA charter stated that one of its goals was “eliminating
the competition.”  In the 1850s, the AMA launched its first political campaign,
which sought to ban abortion.  Before the AMA’s campaign, abortions were legal
if they were performed before the baby could be felt kicking, and even the Catholic
Church did not oppose it.  The AMA campaign was stepped up in 1864, decrying abortion’s
evils, eventually calling abortionists murderers and executioners.  It worked,
as between 1875 and 1900, every state but Kentucky passed laws banning all abortions. 
Hundreds of thousands of American women died during the years that abortion was
illegal, as they had back alley abortions and died from the complications.  Not
only was the AMA campaigning to ban abortion, it also actively discouraged contraception
and even information on fertility.  While the AMA clothed itself in righteousness,
an examination of the internal record revealed that the AMA’s motivation had nothing
whatsoever to do with the sanctity of life.  Their war was waged to wipe out female
healers.  Midwives were the traditional administers of abortion and contraception.[132]  It would take
nearly a hundred years before abortion was made legal again, and today the right
is under siege once again in America, although the effort is unlikely to succeed. 
The effort is about controlling and punishing women, and has little to do with
a reverence toward life, as evidenced by most anti-abortionists’ support of capital
punishment (their attitude epitomized by today’s American president, George
Bush the Second), as well as murdered doctors and blown-up clinics.

Also
in the 1850s, the AMA began campaigning against homeopaths.  As with most inquisitional
behavior, the early campaign was relatively gentle.  Books were written to ridicule
“alternative” medicine, AMA members were forbidden from associating with homeopaths,
and AMA pressure began getting homeopaths expelled from medical societies.  The
Thomsonian school of medicine also came under fire, but as they were generally
laypeople, they were not as much of a threat as homeopaths were. 

Although
it would be a mistake to chalk it all up to a conspiracy, there is a familiar
pattern when rival movements are attacked and destroyed.  For instance, the Catholic
Inquisition got its start in the early 1200s, as a response to internal corruption
that left the Catholic Church’s religious monopoly in Europe vulnerable to challenges
from reformists.  By the early 1200s, the Catholic Church was holding ecumenical
councils that attempted to curb the corruption in its priestly ranks. 
Christian Europe’s most socially progressive and cosmopolitan region was France’s
Languedoc region.  Returning from the Balkans with Crusading soldiers was Catharism,
a dualistic sect whose roots predated Christianity.  The Cathars lived the austere lives that people imagined
Jesus lived, and the pious example of the Cathars’ spiritual practice was a marked
contrast to the Catholic Church’s priests’.  The Cathars took vows of poverty,
fasted, and apparently the most advanced of them could heal with a touch.  Catharism
spread like wildfire throughout Languedoc, and by the early 1200s, about half
of the Languedoc region was Cathar.  The Church had to deal with other threats
in those days.  The followers of Peter Waldo comprised an internal challenge to
the Church’s corruption.  Waldo’s attempts to reform the Church and bring Christianity
back to its humble roots got him excommunicated. 

The
early attempts to curb Catharism were largely restricted to counter-preaching,
with Dominic leading the effort to bring the Languedoc citizens back to the fold. 
He had little success, and Pope Innocent III crafted an effective solution.  In
businessmen’s parlance, it consisted of putting cement shoes on the competition
while marketing an ersatz version of their product.  Innocent called a Crusade
on Languedoc and simultaneously sanctioned the mendicant orders, the Dominicans
and Franciscans, who imitated the austere practices of the Cathars.  The Albigensian
Crusade was waged over decades, completely depopulating parts of France and killing
about one million people.  The Cathar threat to the Catholic Church’s monopoly
was wiped out in a prodigious bloodbath, and the Church enjoyed another three
hundred years of religious racketeering, until Martin Luther came along.  The
Dominicans and Franciscans became the Inquisition’s
foot soldiers, enforcing the faith with the rack, hot tongs and flaming stakes.

In
significant ways, the offensive mounted by orthodox medicine is reminiscent of
how the Catholic Church operated.  Orthodox medicine abandoned its more egregious
practices.  The public rightly feared the heroic bleedings and large doses of
“medicines” such as calomel.  The highly dilute doses administered by homeopaths
had great appeal.  During its crusade against the competition, American orthodox
medicine curtailed its heroic bleeding practices, as well as its heroic doses
of calomel and other “medicines.”  It began co-opting homeopathic medicines into
its pharmacopoeia.  There was a trend ever since the 1830s, when the alternative
movements began in earnest, to begin trusting nature again.  Orthodox doctors
began allowing the body to heal itself, or at least assist it, instead of bludgeoning
it with heroic medicine.  Orthodox medicine was raiding the alternatives for what
it deemed useful, so it could offer a competing product.  At the same time, orthodox
medicine tried putting cement shoes on its competition.  Getting homeopaths kicked
out of medical societies were some of the early AMA successes in the 1850s. 

The spiritual, political and social perspectives often
have parallel in one’s scientific and professional orientation.  The homeopathic
movement was not only revolutionary in the medical field.  Most American homeopaths
in the 1850s were also abolitionists and members of the nascent Republican Party. 
When Abraham Lincoln came into office in 1861, his Secretary of State, William
Seward, had a homeopath as his personal physician.  Homeopathy enjoyed political
support in Washington in the 1860s, helping to blunt the orthodox assault. 

The 1860s through 1880s were the
period of greatest influence for homeopathic practitioners.  The press and public
were fairly unanimous in their criticisms of the orthodox medical establishment,
and sympathetic toward homeopathy.  By the 1870s, about a million American families
were loyal to homeopathy.  In 1878, a yellow-fever epidemic swept from New Orleans
into the Mississippi Valley.  There were about 20,000 deaths.  Yellow fever was
the most feared disease in the South, and official commissions were launched to
investigate the 1878 epidemic.  One commission investigated the records of homeopathic
physicians where the epidemic raged.  It turned out that people treated by homeopaths
had a yellow-fever death rate of less than 7%, which was less than half the death
rate of the general public.  When the results were announced to the U.S. Congress,
they were impressed.[133]  The attacks on homeopathy by orthodoxy relaxed
during those years, although homeopathy had been so demonized in the AMA’s ranks
that many orthodox practitioners would go berserk at the mere mention of it. 
There were various factors that doomed homeopathy.  Orthodox medicine’s alliance
with the drug companies loomed largely, but the seeds of its destruction came
largely from within its ranks. 

Hahnemann’s system
was developed through experience with patients, and his practice made the homeopath
both diagnostician and pharmacist.  The homeopathic pharmacopoeia was vast, and
the proper application of it took years of careful study.  Homeopathy was not
for quick study artists.  There was no one-size-fits-all treatment, no universal
“medicine” such as calomel, no assembly line to run the patients through.  Not
surprisingly, a movement arose in homeopathy that tried making homeopathy easier
to learn and use.  Its practitioners were influenced by the universal prescriptions
that orthodox practitioners were handing out.  With the relaxation of attacks
from orthodox medicine, the internal division of homeopathy became evident.  In
1880, it divided into the “purists” who followed Hahnemann’s teachings to the
letter, and the revisionists who tried making homeopathy easier to learn and apply. 
The subsequent internecine warfare was the major reason the homeopathic movement
began disintegrating in the late 19^th century.  The homeopaths that
I have dealt with or been aware of in my life have usually been from the “purist”
school. 

Another factor deserves mention.  Although
the heroic treatments of orthodox medicine were feared by millions of people,
and rightfully so, they were by no means the majority of Americans, at least to
the point of refusing to submit to them.  Heroic medicine enjoyed the benefit
of being spectacular.  When a patient ingested calomel, the effect was
dramatic.  Something happened, even if it nearly killed the patient.  I
have experienced and watched homeopathy produce instant and dramatic results,
for many ailments.  For chronic conditions, however, the treatment could take
many months, as the body gradually healed itself, in subtle, feminine fashion. 
There was often self-discipline involved with homeopathic treatment, and most
people preferred to take a quick-acting pill for their afflictions.  That dynamic
can readily be seen today.  True health in today’s United States comes from taking
care of one’s self.  Eating well, exercising, refraining from tobacco, alcohol
and other stimulants/depressants, and other aspects of a healthy regimen require
some self-discipline, the kind that most people do not exercise.  Most people
would rather take a pill to make their symptoms disappear, so they can continue
to pursue their addictions and deadly lifestyles.  Symptom suppression is the
essence of Western medicine today, and its appeal is largely to people who refuse
to take responsibility for their health.  Most want a pill or spectacular intervention,
such as surgery, to make the problem “go away.” 

The
homeopathic movement largely had itself to blame for its demise, but its internal
weakness was also exploited by other competitors, the most damaging among them
orthodox doctors, who teamed up with the burgeoning pharmaceutical empires.  The
homeopathic remedies administered by the “purists” were highly dilute and never
mixed with other substances.  It was the opposite approach to the polypharmacy
of the proprietary medicine craze that gripped orthodoxy during the Gilded Age. 

The final blow to homeopathy, however, was dealt by
diversifying robber barons, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie in particular. 
Rockefeller and Carnegie amassed enormous fortunes during the Gilded Age, through
ingenuity and ruthlessness.  As they came to dominate their respective industries,
they branched out and became “philanthropists.”  Their “philanthropy” was more
directed toward social engineering than humanitarian activity.  Rockefeller and
Carnegie exercised “institutional control” over American medicine. 

By
1900, homeopathic schools had largely abandoned Hahnemann’s methods, and the “make
homeopathy easy” faction dominated.  That “short cut” school of homeopathy was
close in spirit and practice to orthodox medicine, and both pumped great numbers
of graduates into the medical marketplace.  Homeopathy suffered from the internal
division, and its colleges relied almost solely upon student fees.  Homeopathy
also probably lost its effectiveness as Hahnemann’s methods were abandoned.  The
same economic situation in relation to student fees existed in orthodox medical
schools until 1910 and the Flexner Report, which was funded by the Carnegie Endowment. 
Medical schools that received Flexner’s approval received Carnegie and Rockefeller
funding, while those that failed to gain approval did not.  Not surprisingly,
the favored paradigm prevailed, with the AMA and drug industry allying itself
with Rockefeller and Carnegie, forming a power structure that dominates Western
medicine to this day. 

The AMA worked hand-in-hand
with Flexner, and government was soon a player.  State boards refused to license
doctors that did not come from AMA-approved schools.  That interlocking institutional
control spelled the death knell for homeopathy.  In 1900, there were 22 homeopathic
colleges.  In 1918, there were only seven.  Homeopathic colleges were not the
only casualties of the institutional control that Rockefeller, Carnegie, the AMA,
licensing boards and drug companies would exercise over medicine.  That process
also closed most medical schools for women and blacks.  The alleged strategy was
bringing science and education to medicine, but it was also obviously a power
play to consolidate wealth and power.  Ironically, Rockefeller would not take
the drugs that his empire promoted.  His personal physician was a homeopath, and
John D. lived to be nearly 100 years old.  To gain some insight into Rockefeller’s
motivation, a quote from Medical Dark Ages is appropriate:

 

“…a
surgeon told John D. (Rockefeller) that everyone should have an appendectomy before
the age of 16 as a preventative.  The oil wizard saw the point at once.  ‘Why,
you’ve got a better thing than Standard Oil!’, he exclaimed.” – In Nat
Morris, The Cancer Blackout.

 

Rockefeller
was creating paradigms in Western society, using his ill-gotten money to shape
and dominate institutions that he funded, and it goes far beyond the drugs and
knives paradigm that rules Western medicine.  Soon before he began taking over
medicine, he was reshaping the University of Chicago, remaking it to his liking. 
The University of Chicago would spawn social control ideologies.  John
Taylor Gatto, one of America’s finest teachers, noted that today’s grade schools
were designed by theorists from the University of Chicago, where they where honed
their “instruments of scientific management of a mass population.”  Gatto’s thesis
is that our educational system “dumbs us down,” so we can be controlled.  From
1990 through 1997, in the wake of the Soviet Empire’s collapse, in every year
but two, the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to a University of Chicago
economist, their work generally concerned with scientific, capitalistic, means
of managing the world economy.  There was about zero humanitarian impulse in Rockefeller’s
“philanthropy.”  He only became excited when pondering how rich he would become. 

The knives and drugs paradigm prevailed
due to considerations of wealth and power, not because it works.  In 1913, a few
years after the publication of Flexner’s report, Rockefeller strikebreakers turned
machine guns on a camp of striking miners in Colorado, killing forty people, including
women and children.  Exploiting workers was always the way the capitalists
primarily amassed their fortunes.  Several years ago, a member of Dennis Lee’s
organization had lunch with a Rockefeller heir.  The heir said that he knew of
no rich American family (at the level of dynastic wealth) that made its fortune
honestly.  In America at least, behind every great fortune is a great crime. 
Even the “radical” Carnegie was a crafty strikebreaker, the bloody Homestead Strike
staining his reign.  Machine-gunning one’s employees could be effective, but was
a crude method of exerting control.  Rockefeller and the other robber barons pioneered
and refined methods of manipulating public opinion and shaping the public mind. 
Rockefeller’s image in the wake of the Ludlow Massacre, especially as it became
evident that he authorized it, was at about the level of Attila the Hun, and Rockefeller
then waged one of history’s first public relations campaigns.  He hired Ivy Lee
in 1914 to help manage the Rockefeller Empire’s image.  Lee is considered the
leading pioneer of today’s public relations industry,
working first for J.P. Morgan, then for Rockefeller.[134] 
John D. Rockefeller soon engaged in the charade of carrying around a bag of dimes,
handing one to everyone he met. 

Before
Rockefeller and Carnegie became involved, the AMA was getting its act together. 
In 1899, the AMA hired George Simmons as the new editor for its Journal of
the American Medical Association (JAMA).  Harris Coulter described
Simmons as one who had considerable “political abilities.”[135]  JAMA
was a deeply hypocritical publication.  Its primary source of revenue was drug
ads, and the ads it ran for “secret ingredient” and “proprietary” medicines violated
the AMA’s code of ethics.  In the 1890s, the AMA came under fire from state boards
and other organizations for its unethical ads, and was on its way to becoming
a laughingstock.  Simmons rescued the AMA, largely by turning JAMA into
a money machine by closely allying itself with the drug industry.  Drug ads bankrolled
the AMA, especially after Simmons became involved in 1899.  Coulter did not delve
into Simmons’ credentials in his work, but Eustace Mullins did, in his Murder
by Injection. 

An Englishman, Simmons settled
in the Midwest in 1870 and began a journalism career.  After several years as
editor of the Nebraska Farmer, Simmons opened a medical practice, advertising
that he specialized in homeopathy and the “diseases of women.”[136] 
He apparently was an abortionist when the AMA was campaigning to ban abortion. 
Simmons advertised that he received his training and diploma at Rotunda Hospital
in Dublin, Ireland.  That hospital never issued diplomas.  There is no evidence
that Simmons ever received any medical training.  Simmons then got a diploma from
Rush Medical School.  There is no evidence that Simmons ever set foot on the medical
school campus.  He apparently received a mail order degree.  Simmons appears to
have been the classic “quack.” 

Simmons
was ambitious and resourceful.  He organized a Nebraska chapter of the AMA.  In
1899, he was invited to Chicago to take over the editorship of JAMA.  Simmons
saw that the AMA was not properly seizing its opportunities.  He quickly named
himself the AMA’s secretary and general manager.  Simmons then found a capable
assistant, a man who had been arrested for embezzlement as the Secretary of the
Kentucky Board of Health, who may have bought his way to a pardon, and was then
encouraged to leave the state.  He became Simmons’ right hand man.[137]

Simmons
turned the AMA into a gold mine when he initiated an approval racket.  For a price,
the AMA gave its “Seal of Approval” to drugs.  It was a form of extortion,
and the AMA engaged in no real research.  Their “research” was a form
of “green research.”  Simmons, like a shrewd horse trader, would set
his price based on how badly a drug company wanted the AMA’s Seal of Approval. 
The racket soon led to a troubled situation with Wallace Abbott, the founder of
Abbott Laboratories.  Abbott refused to knuckle under to Simmons’ blackmail, and
therefore the AMA never approved Abbott’s drugs.  One day, so the story goes,
Abbott went to see Simmons and showed him the investigative file that he had built
on Simmons’ “career.”  Simmons had sex charges brought by some of his
patients, and charges of negligence in the deaths of others.  That, combined with
the fact that Simmons had no credible medical credentials, caused a sudden change
of heart at the AMA.  Abbott’s drugs were suddenly approved every time, and Abbott
did not have to pay for them.[138]

Simmons
was soon raking it in hand over fist.  JAMA’s advertising revenue rose
from $34,000 per year in 1899 to $89,000 in 1903.  By 1909, JAMA was making
$150,000 per year, becoming the AMA’s cash cow.  Other racketeering strategies
involved threatening firms that advertised anywhere except in the pages of JAMA. 
Simmons was ingenious in making JAMA the icon it became, exerting institutional
control over the up and coming industry.  Simmons’ efforts made the AMA and drug
companies into natural allies of the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations. 

Simmons recruited Morris Fishbein
to the AMA in 1913.  Simmons was a wealthy man by the 1920s, sitting at the AMA’s
helm.  He openly had a mistress, and attempted to get rid of his wife.  A standard
technique in those days was having one’s wife committed to an insane asylum. 
Simmons heavily drugged his wife and then tried convincing her that she was going
insane.  His strategy backfired.  Mrs. Simmons took her husband to court in 1924,
and the sensational trial ruined Simmons’ image.  The trial inspired numerous
books, plays and movies, the most famous of which was Gaslight, starring
Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman.  Simmons stepped down at the AMA and his protégé,
Morris Fishbein, took over.  Fishbein ran American medicine with an iron fist
for the next twenty-five years, becoming a household name and a rich man. 

Fishbein soon extended the drug approval racket to food,
where for a price a food would garner the AMA’s Seal of Acceptance.  The testing
involved seemed limited to seeing how much money was in the bank account of the
companies seeking AMA approval.  At the same time Fishbein was announcing the
Seal of Approval and citing two tuna companies as meeting the AMA’s stringent
requirements, the FDA was seizing shipments of those very brands because “they
consisted in whole or in part of decomposed animal substance.”[139]  Fishbein’s
first customer for his food approval racket was Land O’Lakes Butter Company, a
company that had been criminally prosecuted many times for adulterating its product
to hide spoilage and watering it down.[140]  It widely advertised its new,
AMA-approved, status.  The AMA’s Seal of Approval racket for food lasted until
the 1940s, and it always teetered on the verge of damage lawsuits, as it performed
virtually no testing on its “approved” foods.  The drug Seal of Approval
racket, however, proved long lasting, but drugs comprised only one pillar of the
developing racket.  The other was surgery.  When anesthesia and antiseptics made
surgery respectable, the surgeons sought to make surgery into a monopoly. 

Surgery was not rescued from its barbaric status in the United
States until the 1880s.  Keen was not the only American pioneer of antiseptic
procedures.  The most famous is William Halsted.  Germany, with its focus on laboratory
science, became the center of medical research and training during the last half
of the 19^th century, not France or England.  Halsted was a rich boy
from Yale who studied in Germany and brought back the German philosophy of medical
practice.  Halsted pioneered sterile surgical procedures in Baltimore.  As happened
often in those days, Halsted became a cocaine and morphine addict, and never beat
his addiction.  Along with pioneering sterile surgery, Halsted also refined the
practice of invasive surgery.  Halsted invented the radical mastectomy. 

This essay will now largely concern itself with the
development of today’s cancer racket.  With Halsted’s innovations helping it along,
surgery became the favored, even sole, way to treat cancer in the late 19^th
century.  Cancer is a disease of civilization, and the greatest doctors of history
knew that treating cancer by attacking the tumor was futile.  Cancer was also
seen long ago as a disease of the “humors,” the body’s fluids.  Western medicine
gradually abandoned the humoral perspective to adopt the “solidist” one.  Studying
and treating the humors (blood, lymph, bile) was largely abandoned in favor of
treating the body’s “solids.”  Such a change was partly based on the cell theories
of Virchow and others, but the rise of surgery also contributed greatly, because
it is impossible to use a scalpel on blood. 

The world’s most influential cancer research institution is Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.  Its “spiritual founder” was J. Marion
Sims.  Sims received minimal training during the 1840s before he began performing
experimental surgeries on slave women.  Slave women were at the bottom of America’s
social hierarchy, and as such made ideal subjects for human experiments.  Performed
without anesthesia, Sims’ surgeries were accomplished by having friends hold down
the slaves as he operated.  According to his sympathetic biographer, his operations
were “little short of murderous.”  Sims’ friends could only endure about one stint
of holding down his experimental subjects, as the subjects’ thrashing and shrieking
were too much for them to endure.  When local plantation owners refused to lend
Sims any more subjects for his experiments, he bought a slave woman for $500 and
performed 30 operations on her in a few months.  After a few years of his experimental
surgeries, he may have been run out of town, as he had the reputation of being
some kind of Dr. Frankenstein. 

Sims abruptly
moved to New York City from the South, and in 1855 helped found Women’s Hospital,
a charity hospital.  He again began performing experimental surgeries, that time
on immigrant women, and the Dr. Frankenstein rumors began anew.  In the 1870s,
he began performing experimental cancer surgeries.  His brutal experiments, called
life threatening by the hospital trustees, combined with his open contempt of
his women subjects, got him expelled from the hospital.  Sims cultivated wealthy
women as his professional clientele (his specialty was operating on vesico-vaginal
fistulas), and those contacts got him reinstated.  An Astor heir died of cancer,
and the Astor family offered the Women’s Hospital $150,000 if they would open
a cancer treatment wing of the hospital.  The trustees associated cancer treatment
and research with Sims’ barbarities, and hesitated to accept the money.  Sims
double-crossed the trustees and negotiated directly with the Astors to set up
a new hospital with the money.  His negotiation worked, although he died before
New York Cancer Hospital opened in 1884.  He would have been its first director
had he lived.  The name was changed to Memorial Hospital in the 1890s, and to
its current name in the 1950s.[141]

Cancer treatment
by surgery grew during the late 19^th century and well into the 20^th. 
Ever more drastic surgeries were devised to treat cancer.  Using war terminology
and imagery, one cancer treatment that removed the entire jaw was known as the
“commando” because it reminded the doctors of the slashing attacks of World War
I commandos.  Memorial Hospital surgeons invented procedures that virtually hollowed
out the entire body, trying to get every last potential piece of cancerous flesh. 
Another innovative surgery at Memorial Hospital was called a hemicorporectomy,
where half the body would be carved away (everything below the pelvis) as a way
to treat advanced pelvic region malignancy.  Many patients elected to die rather
than submit to such surgeries.[142] 

James Douglas, who owned the world’s largest copper mine, also
owned large pitchblende deposits, from which come radium and uranium.  Douglas
began experimenting with radium as a cure all, and not long before World War I
became the leading “philanthropist” of Memorial Hospital.  His $100,000 donation
was attached to the condition that Memorial Hospital would begin using radium
treatments for cancer.  With the adoption of radium as “medicine,” the price of
radium instantly increased by more than 1000%.  Douglas died in 1913, probably
from radiation poisoning.  By the 1920s, Memorial Hospital’s radium treatments
constituted its single largest source of income. 

In
1927, John D. Rockefeller and his son began contributing millions of dollars to
Memorial Hospital, including money and land to build a new hospital in the 1930s. 
The same year that the Rockefellers began “donating” to Memorial Hospital, Standard
Oil of New Jersey signed its first agreement with I.G. Farben.  Farben was Europe’s
largest and most notorious cartel.  Farben ran the rubber works at Auschwitz,
and invented Sarin, Tabun and the Zyklon B used in the gas chambers.  In 1934,
the Rockefeller Empire sent its PR wizard Ivy Lee to Germany to help improve Farben
and the Third Reich’s image.[143]  The Rockefeller
Empire worked hand-in-hand with Nazi Germany, as did many
other American industrialists, including Hitler’s hero, Henry
Ford.  The Rockefellers even renewed their contract with Farben in 1939, the
contract stating that they would continue doing business even if the United States
and Germany went to war, an agreement that was kept clear until 1942, after Germany
had declared war on the United States.  It was not until the American government
investigated the Rockefeller companies, one investigator calling their relationship
with Germany bordering on “treason,” with a resultant publicity black eye, that
the Rockefellers discontinued their open support of Nazi Germany, although they
apparently kept dealing with Hitler’s regime clear to the end of World War II. 

The Rockefeller/Farben connection influenced Memorial
Hospital to begin pursuing chemotherapy research before World War II broke out,
with Standard Oil executive Frank Howard sitting on Memorial Hospital’s Research
Committee.  Before World War II was over, Howard recruited two General Motors
executives, Alfred P. Sloan and Charles Kettering, into becoming donors for an
ambitious plan to make Memorial Hospital into a research and treatment center. 
Kettering also bankrolled Kettering Laboratories in Cincinnati, which was notable
for producing “research” that proved the “benign” properties of industrial substances
such as lead, fluoride and aluminum.  Sloan was a long-time representative of
the Morgan family interests, and the Rockefeller and Morgan interests shared power
in running Memorial Sloan-Kettering.[144]  Today more
than ever, Wall Street runs Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering
dominates the direction of Western cancer research and treatment.  “Corporate
philanthropy” is an oxymoron.  Corporations “give” money with an eye toward the
benefits that might accrue in the end.  Everything a corporation does is ultimately
designed to increase its profits.  Earning a profit
is about the only reason that corporations exist, but few will ever state
it that baldly. 

Today’s cancer treatment paradigm
attacks the tumor as a way to eradicate cancer.  What did the great doctors of
history have to say about attacking cancer tumors?  From Medical Dark Ages I obtained these quotes:

 

“It
is better not to apply any treatment in cases of occult cancer; for if treated
(by surgery), the patients die quickly; but if not treated, they hold out for
a long time.” – Hippocrates, (460-370 BC).

           

(Advanced cancer is)” irritated by treatment; and
the more so the more vigorous it is.”

“Some
have used caustic medicaments, some the cautery, some excision with a scalpel;
but no medicament has ever given relief; the parts cauterized are excited immediately
to an increase until they cause death.”

“After
excision, even when a scar has formed, nonetheless the disease has returned, and
caused death; while …the majority of patients, although no violent measures
are applied in the attempt to remove the tumor, but only mild applications in
order to sooth it, attain a ripe old age in spite of it.” – Celsus, (1st
century AD).

           

“When
[a tumor] is of long standing and large, you should leave it alone.  For myself
have never been able to cure any such, nor have I seen anyone else succeed before
me.” – Abu’l Qasim, (936-1013 AD).

           

“It should be forbidden and severely punished to
remove cancer by cutting, burning, cautery, and other fiendish tortures.  It is
from nature that the disease comes, and from nature comes the cure, not from physicians.”
- Paracelsus, (1493-1541 AD).

 

The
same mentality was held by the Hawaiian kahunas.  The kahuna lore stated that
“If it is (cancer), do not treat it.”[145] 

The heroic medicine of Benjamin Rush was diametrically opposed to such a sentiment. 
He wrote that one of the “Vulgar Errors in Medicine” was to “let tumors alone.”[146]

With surgery coming into vogue, it became a monopoly as a way
to treat cancer.  Today, there are basically three legal ways to treat cancer
in America: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.  The second legal way to treat
cancer was discovered in the 1890s.  How was that pioneer treated?  Again, from
Medical Dark Ages:

 

“The
surgeons.  They controlled medicine, and they regarded the X-ray as a threat to
surgery.  At the time surgery was the only approved method of treating cancer. 
They meant to keep it the only approved method by ignoring or rejecting
any new methods or ideas.  This is why I was called a ‘quack’ and nearly ejected
from hospitals where I had practiced for years.” – Dr. Emil Grubbé. 
Dr. Emil Grubbé, …discovered…X-ray therapy (for cancer) in 1896…X-ray was
not recognized as an agent for treating cancer by the American College of Surgeons
until 1937…Dr. Grubbé…still was not recognized as late as 1951.” – in
Herbert Bailey, Vitamin E, Your Key to a Healthy Heart

 

The third legal way, chemotherapy, came directly from World
War II chemical warfare experiments.  Using chemicals to treat cancer had been
around since Paracelsus, but the chemicals killed the patients more often than
not, since they were based on arsenic, lead and other deadly substances.  In the
early 20^th century, chemical treatments and finding the “magic bullet”
(more masculine imagery) to kill cancer cells became an intensive area of study. 
In the 1930s, chemotherapy research was noted for its deadly and barbaric effects,
and those who used surgery and radiation battled against chemotherapy.  World
War II was a watershed in the use of chemicals.  DDT
was first used during World War II, the Nazis invented nerve gases, the allies
invented napalm and nuclear
weapons, and the notion of “better living through chemistry” became entrenched
due to the experience of World War II.[147] 

The racketeering impulse has been with Western medicine
for many years and is deeply embedded today.  The rise of the Western medical
paradigm coincided with the rise of the corporation and new kinds of empires. 
The reason that American medical doctors are the highest-paid professionals on
earth is not because they perform valuable work.  They are technicians in what
is arguably the West’s greatest racket, where the power of life and death is in
the hands of the world’s most lucrative professions and industries.  The fact
that only violent methods of cancer treatment are legal is no accident.  Here
are two quotes from Medical Dark Ages. 

 

“The
thing that bugs me is that people think the FDA is protecting them.  It isn’t. 
What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it’s doing are as different as
night and day.” Dr. Herbert Ley, Commissioner of the FDA. (San Francisco
Chronicle, 1-2-70). 

 

(In
response to above quote) “What is the FDA doing? As will be shown
by the material that follows, the FDA is “doing” three things:

“First,
it is providing a means whereby key individuals on its payroll are able to obtain
both power and wealth through granting special favors to certain politically influential
groups that are subject to its regulation.  This activity is similar to the ‘protection
racket’ of organized crime: for a price, one can induce FDA administrators to
provide ‘protection’ from the FDA itself.

“Secondly,
as a result of this political favoritism, the FDA has become a primary factor
in that formula whereby cartel-oriented companies in the food and drug industry
are able to use the police powers of government to harass or destroy their free-market
competitors.

“And thirdly, the FDA occasionally
does some genuine public good with whatever energies it has left over after serving
the vested political and commercial interest of its first two activities.” 
- G. Edward Griffin, World Without Cancer.

 

Ley
was the commissioner of the FDA in the 1960s.  That quote of Ley has some history
and previously incorrect reporting, including in earlier versions of my work,
and its tale is told at this footnote.[148]  The FDA apparently acts as Mr. Deputy, Ms. Prosecutor
and Ms. Deputy Attorney General did in protecting
the turf of its patrons. 

The insurance companies
are an integral part of the racket, keeping the money from the alternatives because
they are “not approved.”  “Not approved” becomes a self-fulfilling
Catch-22 by mainstream medicine, as they refuse to investigate alternatives, so
therefore they are not approved.  It goes even further, as laws are passed making
it a criminal offense for a doctor to use an “unapproved” treatment.[149] 
It is an impressive use of circular logic to produce an insulated racket.  Evidence
for that bold charge will be presented in this essay. 

Continue with part 2.

 

 

Footnotes

[1] See that quote in Cremo and Thompson’s
Forbidden Archeology, p. 23.

[2] See Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, p. 151.

[3] See Heisenberg, Encounters with
Einstein, p. 121.  Einstein made his remark regarding Heisenberg’s quantum
theories that introduced randomness to the mechanics of atoms. 

[4] See their mystical writings in Ken
Wilber’s Quantum Questions. 

[5] See Ken Wilber’s Quantum Questions,
pp. 101-104.

[6] See Woodhouse’s Paradigm Wars,
pp. 41-44.

[7] See Eisler’s The Chalice and the
Blade.

[8] For some reading relating to that idea,
see Merlin Stone’s When God was a Woman, Riane Eisler’s The Chalice
and the Blade, and for a more conservative investigation see Margaret Ehrenberg’s
Women in Prehistory.  For a broad summary of that issue, see Michael Parenti’s
History as Mystery, chapters two and three.  The issue of matriarchal societies
in prehistory is a heated issue, with the firestorm generally centering around
the pioneering work of Marija Gimbutas.  While there may be no “solid” evidence
for there ever being a true matriarchal society, there is good evidence that many
ancient societies and religions had women holding a high place, and women’s status
degenerated along with a society’s decline.  When men and warriors held unchallenged
supremacy, the societies were violent and declining, with women living in some
form of bondage.  When women had higher status, violence was less prevalent and
society was healthier.  That does not hold true for only prehistoric investigations. 
Elizabeth I was the first woman English sovereign, and the Elizabethan Era was
the most culturally auspicious era that England ever had, with its literature
hitting a high point that is still unsurpassed.  Nobody is arguing that women
are the source of violence in the ancient world or today’s.  The furor surrounding
the work of Gimbutas and others like her is obviously at least partly an issue
of gender bias, with the West’s patriarchical academic system fighting back against
a challenge to its power and privilege.  The issue has been extremely politicized,
but when the dust settles, if it does in my lifetime, I think it will be acknowledged
that societies have been much healthier when women had higher status, and when
their status was reduced, that society was in decline, and often on its way to
extinction. 

[9] See Campbell, Occidental Mythology,
pp. 3-92.

[10] See Campbell, Occidental Mythology,
pp. 3-92.  See Stone, When God was a Woman, pp. 198-241.

[11] See a brief discussion of that fact
in Jeanne Achterberg’s Woman as Healer, pp. 18-19.  See, for instance,
the nearly complete absence of women in Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to
Mankind and Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography of Medicine.  Even
though they are recent works, they typify how infrequently women appear in the
standard histories of medicine. 

[12] See Jeanne Achterberg’s Woman
as Healer, pp. 106-109.  For more on women healers, see Elizabeth Brooke’s
Women Healers.

[13] See Jeanne Achterberg’s Woman
as Healer, p. 90.  See Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History,
pp. 134-135.

[14] For instance, read about the war-based
paradigm that has guided modern male doctors in Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors, The
Biography of Medicine, pp. 429-430.  Nuland wrote that he and his fellow male
doctors thought of themselves as “Spitfire” pilots, and the patient’s body was
merely the theater of their glorious battles against disease.  That indoctrination
was partly so the doctors would not become “emotionally involved” with their patients. 
Nuland rightfully calls such boyish attitudes what they were: anti-feminine. 
They were also anti-human. 

[15] Achterberg, Woman as Healer,
p. 136.  See Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 364.

[16] See Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, The
Metaethics of Radical Feminism.

[17] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health,
pp. 51-52.  

[18] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health,
pp. 15-57.   See Mendelsohn, Confessions of a Medical Heretic.

[19] Examples of arguably worse-than-worthless
prevention can be found in vaccination, mammograms
(may cause as much cancer as they find, and are useless anyway, with orthodox
therapies, if increased life expectancy means that it “works”) and other high-tech
and/or drug-related treatments.

[20] Whitaker, Health and Healing,
November 1994, p.1.

[21] See Clark, Randolph Lee and Comley,
Russell, Eds. The Book of Health, Third Edition.  New York: Van Nostrand
Rheinhold Company, 1973.  On page 212: “Blood pressure reaches 120 at 17 years
of age…With age, the pressure gradually rises until at 60 years it is about 140/87.”
Apparently, the rule of thumb used to be as bad as “100 plus your age.”  See Rosenfeld,
Dr. Isadore.  “Don’t be Blasé about Your Blood Pressure.”  Parade Magazine,
September 13, 1998.

[22] See Ornish, Dr. Dean.  Dr. Dean
Ornish’ Program for Reversing Heart Disease.  New York: Ballantine, 1990.

[23] In 2006, for the first time ever, I influenced somebody to change
his diet, to save his life.  It was an old friend who recently had a cancerous
kidney removed and had further, deeply invasive, surgery.  He has adopted a holistic
regimen, with a live food diet, meditation and other holistic, preventive practices. 
In May 2007, a friend of mine was looking into adding more live food to his diet,
partly due to my influence.  I told him that, as with my vegetarian ways and free energy,
I really did not keep up much on the “state-of-the art” of such practices.  I
explored those health habits many years ago, they worked for me, and I did not
do much further research into those areas.  It is not difficult to understand
that humans, as with all animals, are designed to eat live food and that dead
food is less nutritious.  As my friend was asking about books on live foods, I
thought I might buy him a copy of Paul Bragg’s The Miracle of Fasting. 
As I searched for the book on the Internet, I came upon evidence that Bragg lied
about his age and other aspects of his life’s story.  He was eighty-one
when he died, not ninety-five.  Not only that, but his accounts of his ancestry,
being cured of tuberculosis as a teenager and wrestling
in the Olympics were image-making fabrications.  His “daughter”
is really his former daughter-in-law.

Bragg
spent many years in Southern California, and Jack
La Lanne lives a short drive from the university that I graduated from.  I
have friends and family members who have met both men, as well as Patricia Bragg,
who is carrying on Paul’s work as his “daughter.”  Patricia once spent the evening
at a friend’s house, regaling them with Bragg tales.  According to La Lanne, Paul
Bragg believed that diet was the most important part of the health regimen (including
fasting), with exercise less important.  La Lanne switched the priorities, with
exercise as his regimen’s most important factor.  It is hard to argue with somebody
who is one of earth’s most fit nonagenarians. 

In
light of the recently adduced evidence, Bragg appears to have been a charlatan,
but Jack La Lanne really is living evidence of the benefits of exercise
and proper nutrition.  Will Jack live to be 110?  Time will tell, but I believe
the enlightening essence of Jack’s philosophy is in an interview that I read many
years ago.  Jack was asked how old he thought he would live to be.  Jack responded
that he did not know how old he would live to be, and did not much care.  He said
that what was important to him was, “while I am alive, I am living.” 

Bragg recommended water
fasts, and from age seventeen to twenty-four I performed water fasts.  However,
my longest water fast lasted only six days, and it was the weakest I ever felt. 
I read other works on holistic health practices in those days, including Paavo
Airola’s Are You Confused?  Airola recommended juice fasting, as did others. 
At age twenty-four, I tried a juice fast.  I did a weeklong fast, and it was easy. 
A few days later, I did a thirty-two-day juice fast, and it also was easy.  My
longest juice fast was for forty-five days, in Boston, but was done partly because it was cheaper
than eating.  I have encountered people who greatly exceeded my personal fasting
record.  One friend did a ninety-day juice fast, and said he looked like a concentration
camp inmate when he finished it (he may have taken it a little too far).  Another
friend cured his bladder cancer with a seventy-day juice fast.  Steve Meyerowitz
cured his allergies and asthma, after orthodox medicine had failed him, through
diet and fasting.  His longest fast was one hundred days, which is the longest
I have heard of (see his Juice Fasting and Detoxification, which is a better
reference book than Bragg’s works).  My fasting habits have waxed and waned over
the years.  I have often fasted while backpacking, and my life’s best backpacking
experience was while alone, fasting, and so deep into the trailless wilderness
that if I had died out there, it would have been many years before my remains
would have been discovered.  I went about fifteen years without fasting longer
than a week, but in 2004 rediscovered longer fasts (twenty-to-forty days), and
plan to keep longer fasts as a permanent part of my health regimen.  The effects
of long fasts can be profound.  I discovered for myself that while water fasting
may be the “best” fast, it is often incompatible with modern life’s demands. 
I could not perform my job duties if I water fasted.  While juice fasting, I can
perform at levels above what I am normally capable of – working fifteen-hour
days and still feeling energetic when I go home.  I also need one-to-two hours
less sleep each night, along with increased mental alertness and a spiritual high
that is unique to fasting.  I am on day thirteen of a fast as I write this.  Fasting
can be a truly miraculous process, but juice fasting works best for the vast majority
of people.  I have skepticism about Bragg’s water fasting advice and other
parts of his regimen.

[24] Ralph’s book is a gold mine of information,
but is not in an easily readable format.  It takes effort to decipher his cancer
treatment tables.  The book is one of a kind, and I have spent many hours riveted
to its pages.  It was very influential to me.  Ralph is a friend, and a kind and
eccentric soul who has performed epic labors on humanity’s behalf.

[25] The studies were the Veteran’s Administration
study published in 1977, the Coronary Artery Surgery Study, published in 1990,
and the report of the European Coronary Surgery Study Group, published in 1983. 
See Charles T. McGee, M.D.’s Heart Frauds, pp. 24-28.

[26] See Charles T. McGee, M.D.’s Heart
Frauds, pp. 12-13, 23.

[27] See Charles T. McGee, M.D.’s Heart
Frauds, p. 28.

[28] See Charles T. McGee, M.D.’s Heart
Frauds, p. 33.

[29] See Charles T. McGee, M.D.’s Heart
Frauds, pp. 161-165.

[30] Milloy, Steven.  “Relax…You Might
Not Be Doomed” Public Risk.  February 1997. 

[31] There is no inherent contradiction
between evolution and the notion of a creator, or the role that consciousness
can play in it.  The battle between creationists and evolutionists is partly a
false dichotomy.  The Creator’s handiwork can also
evolve.  Evolution does not happen haphazardly, but in accordance with consciousness,
which is ultimately in charge of the process.  The material world is the manifestation of consciousness, and there is interplay between
consciousness and its material manifestation, in my opinion.  That is a large
and controversial subject, and not one for this essay. 

[32] See discussions of the various theories
regarding the megafauna extinctions in Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel,
Goudie’s The Human Impact on the Natural Environment, and Clive Ponting’s
A Green History of the World.

[33] See Roy Porter’s The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind, p. 17.  Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, pp. 104-113,
provides a more thorough survey of the issue, but still gives the main impetus
to the decline in available hunter-gatherer foods.  See discussion in Clive Ponting’s
A Green History of the World, pp. 37-67.

[34] See Diamond’s Guns, Germs and
Steel, pp. 166-168.  Diamond’s work is very useful as far an marshalling the
evidence.  As to his thesis, I do not entirely agree with it (it is too materialistic
for me, among other issues), and to read a fairly thorough critique of his overall
thesis, see J.M. Blaut’s Eight Eurocentric Historians, pp. 149-172.

[35] See Roy Porter’s The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind, p. 45.

[36] See Goudie, The Human Impact on
the Natural Environment, 5^th Edition, pp. 161-173.

[37] See Brooke, Women Healers,
pp. 28-39. 

[38] See Angus Armitage’s Copernicus,
The Founder of Modern Astronomy, p. 61.

[39] See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds
in Medicine, pp. 1-18.  See Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography of
Medicine, pp. 120-144.

[40] See Edward Burman’s The Inquisition,
The Hammer of Heresy, p. 160.

[41] See Schwartz’ The Creative Moment.

[42] See Brooke, Women Healers,
pp. 80-93.  See also Jeanne Achterberg’s Woman as Healer, pp. 99-112

[43] See Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors,
The Biography of Medicine, p. 204. 

[44] I have seen that quote in many places
for many years.  Nobody that I know of, however, had ever cited the direct quote
from a publication.  I hunted for it.  I obtained three volumes of Rush’s writings:
The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, edited by George Corner; Letters
of Benjamin Rush, Volume 1, edited by L.H., Butterfield, and The Selected
Writings of Benjamin Rush, edited by Dagobert D. Runes.  I did not find the
exact quote, but found one close enough that I am sure his famous quote can be
found somewhere in his vast correspondence.  Rush was a prolific writer.  He was
also a remarkable man.  He was an early campaigner against slavery, capital punishment,
alcohol and tobacco.  Although his medical practice and philosophy would have
disastrous effects on American medicine, his overall philosophy had much to recommend
it. 

In a lecture
he gave regarding the progress of medicine, he enumerated the causes that retarded
the progress of medicine.  Some of his points are relevant even today.  His 19^th
point: “The attempts which have been made to establish regular modes of practice
in medicine, upon experience without reasoning, and upon reasoning without experience.” 
His 21^st point: “The interference of governments in prohibiting the
use of certain remedies, and enforcing the use of others by law.  The effect of
this mistaken policy has been as hurtful to medicine, as a similar practice with
respect to opinions, has been to the Christian religion.”  Here is the relevant
quote, the 22^nd point: “Conferring exclusive privileges upon bodies
of physicians, and forbidding men, of equal talents and knowledge, under severe
penalties, from practicing medicine within certain districts of cities and countries. 
Such institutions, however sanctioned by ancient charters and names, are the bastiles
[prisons - ed.] of our science.”  His 23^rd point was: “The refusal
in universities to tolerate any opinions, in the private or public exercises of
candidates for degrees in medicine, which are not taught nor believed by their
professors, thus restraining a spirit of inquiry in that period of life which
is most distinguished for ardor and invention in our science.  It was from a view
of the prevalence of this conduct, that Dr. Adam Smith, has called universities
the ‘dull repositories of exploded opinions.’  I am happy in being able to exempt
the University of Pennsylvania, from this charge.  Candidates for degrees are
here not only permitted to controvert the opinions of their teachers, but to publish
their own, providing they discover learning and ingenuity in defending them.” 
However, not all of Rush’s observations are necessarily something to subscribe
to, in my opinion.  His 12^th point was: “An undue reliance upon the
powers of nature in curing diseases.  I have elsewhere endeavored to expose this
superstition in medicine, and shall in another place, mention some additional
facts to show its extensive mischief in our science.”  Those points were taken
from The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, edited by Dagobert D. Runes,
pp. 227-234. 

Here
is another observation that was less than salutary: “Mercury was prescribed empirically
for many years in the cures of several diseases, in which it often did great mischief;
but since it has been discovered to act as a general stimulant and evacuant, such
a ratio has been established between it, and the state of diseases, as to render
it a safe and nearly an universal medicine.”  From The Selected Writings of
Benjamin Rush, edited by Dagobert D. Runes, p. 249.  In fairness to Rush,
his general medical philosophy was to warn of blind adherence to orthodoxy.  Just
as Christians betrayed the spirit of the Christ, just as capitalists and communists
betrayed the spirits of Smith and Marx, so did orthodox American medicine betray
the spirit of Benjamin Rush.  Rush was certain that medical science was in its
infancy, and he would be the first today to react in horror to the universal practice
of administering mercury to patients, which he initiated in the United States,
as well as his heroic bloodletting.  The enemy of science, reason, spirituality
and enlightenment is dogma; it always has been and always will be, because its
root is fear.  Those who enforce adherence to dogma are those who profit by it. 

[45] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 63. 

[46] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 55. 

[47] See a discussion of that issue in
Stannard’s American Holocaust, pp. 103-105.

[48] See Friedrich Engels’ The Origin
of the Family, Private Property and the State, Penguin Classics version, introduction
by Michèle Barrett. 

[49] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 92. 

[50] A brief overview of homeopathic principles
is in Harris L. Coulter’s Homeopathic Science and Modern Medicine. 

[51] Much of my material dealing with
orthodox medicine and the challenge posed by homeopathy and other modalities comes
from Harris Coulter’s superb Divided Legacy.

[52] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 98. 

[53] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 215. 

[54] See Achterberg, Woman as Healer,
p. 137.

[55] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
pp. 466-472.

[56] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 468.

[57] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 58. 

[58] See Roy Porter’s The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind, pp. 294-295.

[59] See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds
in Medicine, p. 34.

[60] See photographs of Semmelweis’ rapid
decline in Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography of Medicine, p. 259. 

[61] See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds
in Medicine, published in 2001, the same year I am writing this.

[62] Written by K. Codell Carter, a Semmelweis
specialist, writing in 1983.  See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds in Medicine,
p. 47.

[63] See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds
in Medicine, p. 49-50.

[64] Morton did, and Wells botched a public
demonstration of his discovery in 1845, leading to his demise. 

[65] See Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography
of Medicine, pp. 263-303.  See a brief account in Roy Porter’s The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind, pp. 366-368.

[66] See Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography
of Medicine, pp. 343-385.  See a brief account in Roy Porter’s The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind, pp. 370-374.

[67] See Matthew Josephson’s The Robber
Barons. 

[68] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
pp. 402-410.

[69] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous
Generation Controversy, p. 9.

[70] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous
Generation Controversy, p. 45.

[71] In the history profession, there is a concept
known as present-mindedness, also called presentism.  It is writing history from
the perspective of the present, which is impossible to completely avoid.  The
greatest sin of presentism is writing about the past in a way that justifies the
present, rather than helping to explain it.  Presentism is practiced in the heroification
of Junípero Serra, Christopher
Columbus and George Washington because their
efforts led to the American civilization that exists today.  They were all fanatical
and bloody conquerors, obsessed with wealth, fame and building empires, largely
at the expense of Native Americans.  Their legacies are not much to cheer about,
and research into their feats can create revulsion toward those “heroes.”  American
high-school history books are prominent examples of the presentism phenomenon,
portraying United States history as one grand tale of state as hero.  The many dark
chapters of United States history are swept under the carpet or polished up and
sold as glory stories, turning night into day, focusing on the few “winners,”
not the multitudes of losers.  The point of the story as taught to American high
school students is glorifying the state and its heroes, not gaining a useful understanding
of the American nation’s past.  The past is only seen in terms of how it contributed
to today, that best of all possible outcomes.  Events and trends that led to other
possible outcomes are treated as “errors” or otherwise disparaged. 

American
history as taught in high school is far from the only place that presentism is
practiced.  The mainstream histories of capitalism portray it as mankind’s natural
state.  The history of capitalism’s triumph is seen as merely the removal of obstacles
to mankind’s highest state.  Competing ideologies such as communism (never really
practiced in the Soviet Union or China, as Adam Smith’s ideology was never really
practiced either) or socialism are rejected as systems that do not honor human
nature.  In reality, the salient feature of “human nature” that today’s capitalism honors is greed, which is one
of the seven deadly sins.  Capitalistic ideologists have transformed greed into
a virtue, turning reality upside down.  In history circles, the practice of presentism
is called “Whig history.”  In that light, both Christian theology and the theory
of evolution can be seen as Whiggish interpretations.  Men are the apple of God’s
eye in Genesis, and the human race being the current flower of evolution.  “Whig
history” has always been a pejorative appellation, and can be seen in many history
texts describing the histories written by others.  At times, it has seemed
that in describing certain histories as Whiggish, the author was unconsciously
telling the reader that his/her work is not Whiggish. 

[72] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous
Generation Controversy, p. 2.

[73] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 28.

[74] See Morrison and Boyd’s Organic
Chemistry, Third Edition, p. 120.

[75] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 55.

[76] René Vallery-Radot, The Life of
Pasteur, p. 58.  A slightly different version is in Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 57, where Pasteur said he would lead her to “prosperity.”

[77]
See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur, p. 57.

[78] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 86. 

[79] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 88.

[80] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 59.

[81] See Christine Russell’s “Louis Pasteur
and Questions of Fraud” in the Townsend Letter for Doctors, October 1993,
p. 960.

[82] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous
Generation Controversy, p. 65.

[83] See Ethel Douglas Hume’s Béchamp
or Pasteur, A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology,” p, 37.  It is cited
from Pasteur’s work. 

[84] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
pp. 116-123.

[85] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous
Generation Controversy, pp. 92-120.

[86] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 169.

[87] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 128.

[88] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 151. 

[89] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 174. 

[90] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 204. 

[91] See Patrice Debré, Louis Pasteur,
p. 434. 

[92] See Patrice Debré, Louis Pasteur,
p. 434. 

[93] See Patrice Debré, Louis Pasteur,
p. 435.

[94] See Hellman, Great Feuds in Medicine,
p. 89.

[95] See Microbiology, An Introduction,
Second Edition, by Tortora, Funke and Case, published in 1986.  See The
Microbial World, Fifth Edition, by Stanier, Ingraham, Wheelis and Painter,
published in 1986.  See Microbiology, Fifth Edition, by Pelczar, Chan and
Krieg, published in 1986.  See Bernard Dixon’s Power Unseen: How Microbes Rule
the World, published in 1994.

[96] See Dubos, Pasteur and Modern
Science, p. 71.

[97] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 275. 

[98] Béchamp, Les Microzymas, pp.
50-51, quoted in E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the
History of Biology, p. 47.

[99] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, pp. 12-13.

[100] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 14.

[101] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 48.

[102] William James, Lecture 6, in “Pragmatism’s
Conception of Truth,” from, Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.

[103] Pasteur, (his paper had a long
French name I will not burden the reader with here), quoted in E. Douglas Hume,
Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 37.

[104] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 40.

[105] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 60.

[106] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 61.

[107] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 65.

[108] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 77.

[109] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 78.

[110] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 47.

[111] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 191.

[112] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 68-75.

[113] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 92-93.

[114] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 100-117.

[115] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 113.

[116] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 113-114.

[117] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 110-112.

[118] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 144-164.

[119] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 45.

[120] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 47.

[121] See data and analysis on Pasteur’s
work on anthrax and rabies in E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter
in the History of Biology, pp. 203-237.

[122] See Appleton, The Curse of Louis
Pasteur, pp. 112-114.  See Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health, pp. 330-334. 
See Viera Scheibner’s Vaccination, p. 257.

[123] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 189-221 and 238-287.

[124] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 183.

[125] Although Pasteur’s defenders claimed
that he was sensitive to the animals he was experimenting on, an incident where
Pasteur kicked the bars of a caged dog that Pasteur pronounced would die the next
day, taunting it, gives another view.  See Hume, Béchamp or Pasteur, p.
283.

[126] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 6, 94-95.

[127] See, Roberts, The Nature of
Personal Reality, session 631, December 18, 1972, pp. 125-128.

[128] See Paul Kennedy’s The Rise
and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 149.

[129] See one of those photos in James
Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, p. 167.

[130] See Kennedy, The Rise and Fall
of the Great Powers, pp. 200-202.

[131] See Collier and Horowitz, The
Rockefellers.  See Josephson, The Robber Barons.  See Allen, The
Rockefeller File. 

[132] See John Robbins’ Reclaiming
Our Health, pp. 95-99.

[133] See Harris Coulter’s Divided
Legacy, pp. 298-305.

[134] See Stauber and Rampton’s Toxic
Sludge is Good for You! and Stuart Ewen’s PR!

[135] See Harris Coulter’s Divided
Legacy, p. 419.

[136] See copies of Simmons’ ads in Mullins,
Murder by Injection, p. 6, 17.

[137] Mullins, Murder by Injection,
p. 18.

[138] Mullins, Murder by Injection,
pp. 19-21.

[139] Mullins, Murder by Injection,
p. 26.

[140] See Kenny Ausubel’s When Healing
Becomes a Crime, pp. 88-89.

[141] See Ralph Moss’ The Cancer Industry,
pp. 46-47.  See Mullins, Murder by Injection, pp. 60-62.

[142] See Moss, The Cancer Industry,
pp. 48-49. 

[143] See Collier and Horowitz, The
Rockefellers, pp. 225-226.

[144] See Moss, The Cancer Industry,
pp. 390-394. 

[145] See Bushnell, The Gifts of Civilization,
p. 99.

[146] See The Autobiography of Benjamin
Rush, edited by George Corner, Princeton University Press, 1948, p. 354.

[147] See Moss, Questioning Chemotherapy,
pp. 15-34.

[148] I discovered Ralph Hovnanian’s
Medical Dark Ages in 1990 by reading Barry Lynes’ The Healing of Cancer
(pp. 162-163).  Ralph’s book was my big wake up call on how the medical racket
works.  In 1993, I spent days keying in those quotes that are in the Medical
Dark Ages section of this site.  Probably my favorite quote from Medical
Dark Ages was the quote by Ley.  As I discovered, however, the quote as presented
in Medical Dark Ages is inaccurate.  Ralph is a friend of mine, and he
conscientiously called me in the spring of 2002 to tell me that his quote of Ley
was inaccurate, and that if he ever published another edition of Medical Dark
Ages, he would correct it.  He said that Lynes was the first person to tell
him that he quoted Ley in error.  It was an honest mistake by Ralph.  This situation
is an example of the hazards of relying on secondary scholarship, a problem I
have had to deal with continually.  I have tried to mitigate those potential errors,
and have sought primary sources whenever I can, and I have often gone to great
lengths to try finding the primary evidence, such as that famous quote by Benjamin
Rush.  Ralph originally combined the quote by Ley with the quote by Griffin, making them both appear to be Ley’s.  The combined
quote made for a great impact.  Correctly attributing them definitely takes some
of the wind out of its sails.  The Rush and Ley quotes were
the two from Medical Dark Ages that related the most directly to this essay,
and last winter I hunted for the original source for the Rush quote, as I have
seen it quoted across the Internet dozens of times, but nobody ever gave its source,
accurately. 

I
had been queried about the Ley quote before, by people who found it hard to believe,
and running down the original Ley quote was on my list of things to do, before
I really took my site “public,” and then Ralph called me.  So in May 2002 I descended
into the University of Washington’s microfilm archives and located that San
Francisco Chronicle article.  The Ley quote that this footnote ties to is
accurate, and the Griffin quote is also accurate, but Griffin
is obviously not an FDA official, although he does credibly demonstrate why his
sentiment is probably correct.  The Ley interview was given to Richard Lyons of
the New York Times, given in Ley’s home, soon after he was sacked as the
FDA commissioner, after three years of service.  Ley was a Harvard professor before
being tapped to head the FDA.  The article is sobering.  Ley said that he was
under “constant, tremendous, sometimes unmerciful pressure” from the drug industry. 
Ley said, “Some days I spent as many as six hours fending off representatives
of the drug industry.”  Ley commented that the FDA staff was a poor one to effectively
protect the American consumer, its ranks being full of “retreads” and others who
were not motivated to do their jobs effectively, and that “there has been total
lack of topside support from the current administration.”  Ley admitted that his
former boss, the HEW head, was a Republican Party fundraiser, but it was not his
boss’ fault, as the Nixon administration was “a business-oriented administration.” 
Every administration since Carter’s has been even more so.  Ley said that the
drug company lobbyists, combined with the politicians who worked on behalf of
their patrons, could bring “tremendous pressure” to bear on him and his staff,
to try preventing FDA restrictions on their drugs.  The interview concluded with
Ley stating that the entire issue was about money, “pure and simple.”  The situation
has become much worse since Ley’s day, him being the last commissioner who tried
standing up to them. 

[149] Many states have those criminal
laws on the books.  For example, California Health and Safety Code Sect. 1701.1,
makes it a crime punishable by five years in prison to administer or prescribe
an unapproved cancer treatment.  California is the worst state of all in persecuting
alternative cancer treatments.  The only treatments approved are surgery, radiation
and chemotherapy.  My wife’s doctor endured fifteen years of persecution in California
for curing cancer using an “unapproved” treatment that worked.

[150] See Hovnanian’s Medical Dark
Ages, p. 19.  See Ellen Brown’s Forbidden Medicine, p. 165.

[151] See Moss, The Cancer Industry,
pp. 21-42.

[152] See Moss, The Cancer Industry,
pp. 32-33.

[153] She challenges the notion of a
cancer epidemic in Toxic Terror.  536,900 Americans died of cancer in 1994,
for 23.5% of all deaths, up from 17.2% in 1970, and up from 4% in 1909.

[154] Moss, Questioning Chemotherapy,
pp. 56, 57, 97, 98, 103, 110, 113, 117, etc. to page 150.

[155] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our
Health, p. 96.

[156] Moss, Questioning Chemotherapy,
p. 35.

[157] See Stuart Troy, “The AMA’s
Charge on the Light Brigade,” Nexus, December 1997-January 1998, pp.
35-40, 75-76.

[158] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 34-36. 

[159] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 17-26 and 41-52.

[160] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 50.

[161] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 60-61.

[162] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 80.

[163] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 88.

[164] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 29.

[165] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 29.

[166] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 96.

[167] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 97.

[168] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 98.

[169] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 98-99.

[170] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 99.

[171] Mullins, Murder by Injection,
p. 31.

[172] Mullins, Murder by Injection,
pp. 31-33.

[173] See Stauber and Rampton, Toxic
Sludge is Good for You!, pp. 1, 25-32.

[174] See Robert Proctor’s The Nazi
War on Cancer, pp. 126-128.

[175] See Robert Proctor’s The Nazi
War on Cancer, p. 184.

[176] See Lee and Solomon, Unreliable
Sources, p. 331.

[177] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, pp. 144-147 and Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health,
pp. 204-207.

[178] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, p. 146.

[179] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, p. 146.

[180] See Ausubel, When Healing Becomes
a Crime, p. 109.

[181] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, p. 147.

[182] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, p. 148-150.

[183] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, p. 147.

[184] See Fishbein, Morris Fishbein,
M.D., An Autobiography, pp. 368-369.

[185] Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health,
p. 208.

[186] Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health,
p. 212.

[187] See a brief description of Gerson’s
fate in Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health, pp. 279-281.  See also Lynes, The
Healing of Cancer, pp. 32-33.

[188] You can also see a brief summary
of what happened to them in the Hoxsey documentary, Hoxsey: How Healing Becomes
a Crime.

[189] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
pp. 389-390.

[190] Gardner, Fads and Fallacies,
p. 191. 

[191] Gardner, Fads and Fallacies,
p. 197.

[192] Gardner, Fads and Fallacies,
p. 324.

[193] A particularly disturbing aspect
of the JFK assassination milieu is that critical
conclusions regarding Kennedy’s wounds do not jibe with the testimony of the doctors
who treated Kennedy in Dallas.  The back of Kennedy’s head was blown out, consistent
with a frontal shot, and completely at odds with the “lone nut” theories
involving Lee Harvey Oswald.  Gerald Poser’s Case Closed is establishment
apologetics at its most strained.  Posner is a Wall Street lawyer.  The establishment
lined up in praise of his Case Closed, and he was so “successful”
at debunking the conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination, so the
story goes, that he then published a book debunking any government-involved conspiracy
theory surrounding the Martin Luther King assassination.  I wonder if his next
work will be on the Bobby Kennedy assassination, completing his debunker trilogy. 

[194] See an account of this incident
in Fetzer, ed., Assassination Science.

[195] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 431.

[196] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 183.

[197] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 98.

[198] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 99.

[199] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 108.

[200] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 117.

[201] See Sharaf, Fury on Earth, p.
461.

[202] The definitive work on Reich is
Myron Sharaf’s Fury on Earth, A Biography of Wilhelm Reich, from which
most of this narrative is taken from.  Regarding the FDA’s burning of Reich’s
books, see pp. 459-461.

[203] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 17-26.  See also Brown, AIDS, Cancer and the Medical Establishment,
pp. 126-153.

[204] Moss, The Cancer Chronicles,
Volume 5, Numbers 5 and 6.

[205] The narrative of Naessens’ adventures
is in Christopher Bird’s The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens,
originally published in 1990 as The Life and Times of Gaston Naessens, The
Galileo of the Microscope.

[206] Naessens describes this dynamic
without my anthropomorphic flourishes in a paper he wrote which is reproduced
in Bird’s The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 294-304.

[207] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 37-38 and 75-76.

[208] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, p. 132.

[209] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 129-131.

[210] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 39-40.

[211] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 14-15.

[212] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 16-17 and 97-105.

[213] See Ralph Moss, “The War on Cancer,”
Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, January 2002, pp. 30-31

[214] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 240.

[215] See Appleton, The Curse of Louis
Pasteur, p. 47.

[216] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 197.

[217] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 198.

[218] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 220-221.

[219] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our
Health, p. 334.

[220] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? pp. 34-35.

[221] See Scheibner, Vaccination:
100 Years of Orthodox Research Shows that Vaccines Represent a Medical Assault
on the Immune System, p. xiv. 

[222] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? pp. 36-37.

[223] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? p. 23.

[224] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? p. 20.

[225] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? p. 24.

[226] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? p. 45.

[227] See Scheibner, Vaccination,
pp. 205-224.

[228] See Scheibner, Vaccination,
p. 260.

[229] See Jane Roberts’ The Individual
and the Nature of Mass Events, p. 31.

[230] See Levi Dowling’s The Aquarian
Gospel of Jesus the Christ, chapter 23, pp. 41-42. 

[231] See Scheibner, Vaccination,
pp. 239-253.

[232] See Hovnanian, Medical Dark
Ages, p. 55, section A.2.11.

[233] See Dostoyevsky, The Brothers
Karamazov, book five, chapter five.

[234] See John Fink’s Third Opinion
for listings of those alternative clinics. 

[235] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our
Health, pp. 240-241.

[236] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our
Health, pp. 257-259.

[237] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our
Health, p. 242.

[238] See Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 144.

[239] Whitaker, Health and Healing,
March 1995, p. 2.

[240] Whitaker, Health and Healing,
Supplement, July 1994, p. 2.

[241] See Chomsky, Year 501, p.
153.  In 1995, Presidential Directive 39, signed by Bill Clinton, makes the U.S.’
kidnapping of “terrorists” in foreign nations a government policy, stating
that “Return of suspects by force may be effected without the cooperation
of the host government.”  See Blum, Rogue State, p. 85

[242] See also Ellen Brown’s Forbidden
Medicine. 

[243] See Blum, Rogue State, pp.
210-211.  The ruling is posted to the Internet
at this time (January 2002)

[244] See Ellen Brown’s Forbidden
Medicine, pp. 284-286.

[245] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, p. 107-109

[246] Once in awhile a great soul comes
to earth, on special assignment from the Creator, and I believe that John Robbins
is one of them.  His Reclaiming Our Health may be the most important book
on this list.  His gentle and enlightened voice is easier reading than this essay’s
tour of the dark side of the force.  Here is a list of books to help find out
what is going on, and can also provide ideas on how to heal the mess.  Wolinksy
and Brune, The Serpent on the Staff; Moss, The Cancer Industry;
Robert Mendelsohn, Confessions of a Medical Heretic (an excellent and easily
readable book on the medical racket); Fink, Third Opinion; Brown, AIDS,
Cancer and the Medical Establishment; Mullins, Murder by Injection;
Moss, Questioning Chemotherapy; Hovnanian, Medical Dark Ages; Lynes,
The Healing of Cancer; Lynes, The Cancer Cure that Worked!; Lynes,
Helping the Cancer Victim; Bird, The Persecution and Trial of Gaston
Naessens; Carter, Racketeering in Medicine; Moss, Cancer Therapy,
The Independent Consumer’s Guide to Non-Toxic Treatment and Prevention; Thomas,
The Essiac Report; Brown, Forbidden Medicine; Goldberg, An Alternative
Medicine Definitive Guide to Cancer.

[247] See The Sun, January 2002,
p. 48.

[248] What the FDA did to L-tryptophan
is well known and well documented.  For one place of many, see Carter, Racketeering
in Medicine, pp. 171-175.

[249] For instance, the body mistakes
strontium 90, one of the many radioactive isotopes introduced into the environment
by modern “progress,” for calcium.  If a human being ingests strontium
90, the body will incorporate the strontium into the body, where it can become
part of the bone or teeth.  The strontium will not do the job of calcium, and
will eventually radioactively disintegrate, harming the body with radiation and
particles as it decays.  Strontium 90 is a component of radioactive fallout, which
is partly why nuclear bombs have such devastating long-term consequences.

[250] See Moss, “The War on Cancer,”
Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, August/September 2002, pp. 36-37.

[251] Lynes, Helping the Cancer Victim,
p. 38.

 

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My
entire family changed eating habits, and I was a willing participant.  It was
not a complete change to live food with no looking back, but it was radical. 
We ate junk food from time to time, and I know firsthand how hard it is to swim
against the current of society in something as fundamental as eating.  My father
was trying to save his life, however, and followed it to the letter.  It worked. 
Results were seen almost immediately, and in two years my father’s health made
a complete turnaround.  He lost forty pounds.  The angina and arthritis disappeared. 
His blood pressure went from abnormally high to “abnormally” low.  It was not
really abnormally low, but according to the inflated blood pressure tables of the day, where arteriosclerosis was considered normal, it was.  He turned himself into a superman.  He later said it was the healthiest he had ever felt.  He spread the news of his cure to all who would listen.  He began preaching the virtues of live food to relatives, friends and coworkers. 

That was 1970, and it was radical talk to state that your diet could make you well. 
To a degree, it still is.  The mainstream medical doctrine of the day stated that hardening of the arteries was irreversible.  That belief is still entrenched today, even though they now admit that when they said that hardening of the arteries was a normal aging process, they did not know what they were talking about. 
The issue of irreversibility is a medical dogma even today.  I just reviewed my Mayo Clinic Family Health 1996 Edition CD ROM, and regarding vascular disease and diet there was virtually no mention, and no mention at all of diet as a way of treating it.  The Mayo Clinic’s advice was solely devoted to drugs and surgical procedures. 

To date, I know of nobody who radically changed their diet to live food and did not benefit immensely from it.  The problem is that very few people do it.  Hardening of the arteries is indeed reversible. 
Modern medical doctrine aside, Dr. Dean Ornish
has had success in reversing heart disease with his health regimen, which is mainly about eating a live food diet.[22] 

My father convinced some of his coworkers to try out a live food diet, and one man lost more than fifty pounds while eating more than ever, and reversed his health problems.  A few coworkers and his immediate family were about the only people that my father ever persuaded to change their diets.  The most common reaction was to call it all “crazy.”  The term “health nut” came into use around that time. 
That my father was living proof that it worked made no difference to people addicted to processed food.  They looked to the pronouncements of the medical establishment for guidance, and there was nearly complete silence on the issue of diet.  I talked to people about it, and was amazed at the hostile reactions I received.  At age 12 I learned that few want to hear that their addictions are harmful, and it was no different with processed food. 

I learned to be cautious about voicing unpopular opinions.  I only give health advice to those around me when it appears it will be received, which is rarely.  I have watched numerous people die at the hands of Western medicine over the years, and it has not been easy to watch.  American physicians receive almost zero nutritional training, and what little they do receive is often propaganda from the food processing industry.  Consequently, they cannot have an informed opinion on
the issue. 

When I was 17,
my father brought home Paul Bragg’s The Miracle of Fasting, which was his magnum opus.  Today, evidence points to Bragg lying about his age and other things.  I present the evidence in this essay, with the background at this footnote.[23]  With the fraudulent misrepresentations aside, Jack LaLanne was one of Bragg’s pupils (he was the classic 98-pound weakling when he met Bragg as a teenager), and Jack is still going strong in his 90s.  Bragg promoted other health ideas such as regular fasting, which has been part of my health regimen for more than thirty years.  His charlatanry aside, Bragg’s advice is about all I have ever needed, and I doubt that anybody will come along and improve on it much. 
The ways of health are quite simple: eat live food, exercise, fast, drink pure
water, have pure thoughts, get out in nature.  That is about all anybody needs
to know.  It is the essence of Hygeia’s role in medicine.  There is nothing of
significance to add, except perhaps realizing that humans are poorly designed
to eat animal flesh.  I have been a vegetarian for many
years, with no ill effects and many positive ones. 

The
medical paradigm regarding the biggest killer in America is obviously false. 
Prevention is the only answer worth talking about, and what prevents heart disease
also cures it. 

The same kind of gangsterism
that we encountered in the energy industry is possibly
worse in medicine.  In 1990, I obtained a book titled Medical Dark Ages,
by Ralph Hovnanian.[24]  The book chronicled the studies that have been
performed with alternative cancer treatments, and their success rates.  They nearly
all had higher batting averages than surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.  They
are, nearly without exception, harmless.  They are nearly all vastly cheaper than
mainstream methods, and they are all illegal in the United States.  In
many states, doctors have gone to prison for prescribing them to their patients. 
Medical Dark Ages listed the results of hundreds of studies that covered
dozens of treatments.  I had already been obtaining other material about alternative
cancer treatments, but Medical Dark Ages was my wake-up call. 

For
all the information involving alternative cancer treatments, what bowled me over
in Medical Dark Ages were the more than 100 pages of
quotations.  I would read the quotes for an hour or so and get a kind of intellectual
vertigo, overwhelmed by the quotes.  With Ralph’s enthusiastic permission, I reproduce
many of them on this web site, organized slightly more
than Ralph has.  Ralph spent years collecting a vast array of quotes from various
sources about the medical industry, the cancer industry in particular.  Before
I deal with the cancer industry, here is a quote that lays out another aspect
of the medical establishment.  Here it is.

 

“Although
I found that the booklet (Stale Food vs. Fresh Food) contained some helpful
suggestions and its author, Mr. Robert Ford, is a knowledgeable and sincere person
(i.e. no intent to defraud), I found the representations in the Respondent’s booklet
to be unproven and contrary to the weight of informed medical and scientific opinion. 
As indicated by Dr.___, (the only U.S. Post Office medical witness) a danger of
this publication is that it will deceive people who have arterio-sclerotic problems
into believing that they can cure these problems by diet alone instead of seeking
medical (AMA) help.  Because the ads and this booklet contain materially false
representations, they violate the provisions of 39 US Code Section 3005.  Therefore…a
mail stop order…should be issued…” – E.S. Bernstein, Administrative
Law Judge, (1982).

 

That booklet saved
my father’s life.  The mail stop order made it illegal to send it through the
U.S. mail system, effectively banning it in America.  In effect, it was similar
to the Nazi/Catholic book burnings.  Using the U.S. Post office is an effective tactic
to wipe out alternative health practitioners.  It is only one weapon in the medical
establishment’s arsenal, but it is an effective one.  Here
is a link to a full account of the banning of Stale
Food vs. Fresh Food.

One million people per
year in America die of vascular disease, and our dietary and health habits are
nearly solely responsible for it.  The most obvious factors are things such as
smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol, but diet may be responsible for most of
it. 

In short, our bodies are designed to eat
live food, as are all animals.  We are the only animal that eats dead food, and
the diseases we fall prey to are almost unique in the animal kingdom, particularly
in their frequency.  Living processes provide the nutrition that we get from food. 
When food is killed, those life processes cease, and it begins decomposing.  Enzymes,
vitamins and other vital substances can rapidly decompose.  When humanity ventured out of its natural range in the
tropics, we eventually learned to domesticate plants and animals and preserve
food in order to survive the seasons.  We have done it so long that it is taken
for granted, yet it is not a natural or ideal process. 

We
have huge industries based upon food processing, and through their wealth and
power they have completely obscured the issue of how harmful dead food is to human
biology.  It is related to the corruption of medical science discussed in this
site’s fluoridation essay.  In the materialistic and
reductionistic way that modern science has defined nutrition, a bowl of shredded
cardboard sprayed with vitamins (which is close to describing most breakfast cereals)
can be more nutritious than a bowl of fresh strawberries. 

Pets
also suffer from the degenerative diseases that humans manifest, because they
are the only non-human animals to eat processed food.  It can be argued that we
get degenerative disease (degenerative disease kills two-thirds of all Americans)
because we live so long, but the experiences with the Hunzas and other “primitive”
societies, demonstrate that age may have little to do with it. 

Degenerative
diseases are cumulative chronic conditions, so they largely show up in later ages,
although there has recently been a great increase in cancers in American children,
for instance.  The medical profession incredibly still advocates drugs and surgery
to “correct” heart disease.  That is arguably not because it is the
best answer, or even really works, but because they make big money from providing
their “treatment.” 

In
the 1970s and 1980s, three major studies were published on the effects of coronary
bypass surgery, and they are the only studies published to date.  None of them
demonstrated a significantly higher survival rate for the group that had bypass
surgery versus those who did not.[25] 
Even the angiogram that supposedly diagnoses people who “need” bypass surgery
is virtually worthless, as attested to by all the studies published to date.[26]  Even though the diagnosis and
treatment are worthless, the coronary bypass business is among earth’s most lucrative,
raking in more than $50 billion per year in America.  When Dr. Henry McIntosh
at the Baylor College of Medicine, where the first bypass surgery was performed,
published an assessment of the first ten years of bypass surgery results, he stated
that there were virtually no measurable benefits from bypass surgery.  Soon after
publishing his paper, he was forced to leave Baylor.[27] 
His is not an unusual fate.  People with private
insurance are 80% more likely to have an angiogram than a Medicaid (welfare) patient,
and are 40% more likely to have bypass surgery.[28]  In his book, Heart
Frauds, after Charles T. McGee, M.D. exposes the scam that American medicine
is regarding artery and heart disease, he then recommends what people should do
to prevent those diseases.  His advice is almost all about eating live food, just
as in Stale Food vs. Fresh Food.[29] 
Fortunately, his book has not yet been banned. 

The
medical profession is not alone in its anti-scientific methods.  The food processors,
similar to the fluoride polluters, have been busily buying up scientists who will
tell Americans that processed food is good for them.  The food processors, chemical
companies and agribusiness companies all have a mutual self-interest
in making their products appear safe and beneficial to the public eye.  They are
not really safe or beneficial, but people such Frederick
Stare, Elizabeth Whelan or Steve
Milloy, who are scientists in their employ, will tell us that most of what
they produce is healthy.  Tobacco company front man Milloy then has the gall to
turn around and state that, “One in three Americans develops cancer as a function
of being alive.”[30] 
Those overlapping areas of self-interest form what can be variously called a “power
structure,” an “industrial complex” or an “establishment.” 

 

Early
Western Medicine

The study of anthropology
impinges directly on the issue of medicine.  As a science, anthropology is multifaceted,
multidisciplinary, and has come a long way from its Victorian-era roots.  The
aspect of anthropology that deals with the distant human past is fascinating,
replete with controversy, competing theories, new tools (such as DNA testing of
fossils), and varying degrees of agreement regarding the human past.  Again, as
Kuhn observed, agreement does not mean that anthropologists as a whole are “right,”
but that they agree.  Nevertheless, there are areas of general agreement that
appear to conform to the evidence adduced thus far, when the evidence has not
been suppressed, such as how the findings of Dr. Virginia Steen-McIntyre apparently were,
when they suggested a far earlier date of human habitation of the New World than
the prevailing theories.  Such suppression of anomalous data is far more common
in the sciences than most think.  Dr. Phyllis
Mullenix encountered similar career destruction when she discovered that the
fluorine ion damaged the brain.  There is evidence that can argue for technologically
advanced civilizations long ago, extraterrestrial genetic intervention in evolving
humanity, greatly shortened or lengthened timelines, and room for the use of such
tools as psychometry.  Reintroducing a creator and consciousness into the framework
is necessary if humankind is to escape the materialistic orientation that threatens it with self-extinction.[31] 
Anthropology has a long way to go, but with all those caveats, there is a generally
agreed upon story of the human past.

According
to today’s prevailing theories, humankind on earth evolved in Africa long ago,
as an evolutionary offshoot of the tropical apes that lived there.  Homo erectus,
the first erect, large-brained protohuman, appeared on the evolutionary scene
more than two million years ago.  Homo erectus migrated beyond Africa and
the tropics more than one million years ago.  Homo sapiens also likely
first appeared in Africa, eventually displacing all other hominid species.  As
Homo erectus migrated beyond the tropics, the year-round supply of fruits,
blossoms and seeds that make up about 80% of today’s great-ape diet could not
be found in the harsher climates, with their seasons.  Homo
erectus had poor plant-scavenging prospects beyond the tropics for most of
the year, mainly because they could not digest cellulose the way that ruminant
animals can.  Cellulose makes up the majority of plant structure
(it forms the cell walls), and most animals cannot digest it.  Gorillas have that
ability, to a degree (chimpanzees also, to a lesser extent), and can thus adapt
to leafier diets better than other apes.  Dormant plants cannot provide much of
the starch, sugar and fat that hominids use to fuel their bodies in their native
habitats.  In order to survive beyond the tropics, early humans adapted their
behavior.  They hunted and ate animals, and wore the fur of their prey.  They
sought shelter from the elements, as in caves.  They developed tools to help them
hunt and eat, made of stone, wood and bone.  Early humans learned how to control
and use fire.  Some of those behaviors originated in Africa, but they were refined
to an art form in order to survive beyond the tropics. 

Life
was far from easy, and early humans died from injuries, starvation, infections,
parasites, and some diseases.  Also, those early hunter-gatherer humans invented
a new behavior, nearly unknown in the animal world: as humans learned to kill
large animals, they also killed each other. 
What are called modern humans appeared on the evolutionary scene perhaps around
100,000 years ago.  They learned other adaptive behaviors, such as building dwellings
and boats.  Those innovations enabled humankind to migrate further than before. 
The arrival of humans to the continents known today as Australia and North and
South America is commonly thought to have coincided with the extinction
of large mammals.  Humans may have caused the so-called megafauna extinctions. 
The issue is not settled, but the “overkill” hypothesis is persuasive.[32] 
Humans are poorly designed to eat flesh.  For one thing,
true carnivores have high acid concentrations in their stomachs, which not only
digest the rotting flesh rapidly, but the high concentrations kill parasites and
deadly bacteria in the meat.  Carnivores produce ten times as much hydrochloric
acid as humans, cows, horses and other herbivorous species do, at twice the concentration,
for twenty times the amount.  A carnivore has a stomach pH of between one and
two while the stomach is full, while a human stomach has a pH of between four
and five.  Humans do not enjoy the carnivorous stomach’s protection, and parasitic
and bacterial infection was one effect of eating flesh, particularly in the large
quantities that the early hunter-gatherers could ingest. 

As humans pursued the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, their
numbers grew as they migrated across the planet.  What led humans to domesticate
plants and animals?  The Victorian era’s dominant hypothesis was that the domestication
revolution of about ten thousand years ago was merely part of humankind’s endless
progress.  Today, it is more generally thought that population pressures forced
the issue, in Malthusian fashion.[33]  The big, easily killed game was
extinct, hunter-gatherer methods cannot sustain dense human populations, and domestication
may have been more a child of necessity than progressive invention, although there
was probably interplay of those factors.  So, beginning around ten thousand years
ago, most earthly animals and plants that could be effectively domesticated were. 
There have been few species of plants or animals domesticated in recorded history. 
The last large mammal productively domesticated was the camel, about 4500 years
ago.  In modern times, moose, bison and other large mammals have been subjected
to domestication attempts, with limited success.[34]  Strawberries, raspberries, pecans
and some other plants have been domesticated during history, but nearly all human
plant consumption is of species domesticated before history was recorded.  However,
the fossil record does not tell a healthy story about the transition from hunter-gatherer
to shepherd and farmer.  Human skeletons became significantly smaller when the
domestication revolution happened. 

Violence
is apparently proportionally greater in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle than in
“civilization,” even including civilization’s innumerable wars.  Civilization
spawned many things both beneficial and disastrous for the human species.  Permanent
dwellings, writing, specialized professions and other “advancements” were part
of civilization’s seeming benefits.  Their companions, however, were organized
warfare, environmental degeneration, social hierarchies, exploitation on a
grand scale, and – what concerns this essay – epidemic and degenerative disease. 
Hunter-gatherers ate living food.  They had to constantly move around, because
there was little vegetation that humans could eat, especially during periods of
plant dormancy.  Although chimpanzees are the most carnivorous of the great apes,
flesh only amounts to about 1 to 2% of their diet, and they do not eat carrion. 
The mountain gorilla eats insects sometimes, and that is the most carnivorous
part of its diet. 

The
great apes subsist mainly on live fruit, not hunter-gatherer fare, and the domestication
revolution further altered the human diet.  Not only were great amounts of flesh
eaten, but grasses were domesticated for their seeds, hence wheat, corn, barley,
millet, oats, etc.  Legumes (mainly beans) were domesticated, as well as root
crops.  Domestic grains, legumes and root crops are relatively new innovations
in the human diet, yet they make up the majority of it today, and humans have
not evolved to ideally eat them.  In addition, fruits
are designed to be eaten by animals, as a way of dispersing the seeds.  Fruit’s
sweetness is attractive to great apes and other animals, hence the human sweet
tooth.  Such is not the case with grains, legumes, roots and much of what are
called vegetables.  That is why a sweet dessert rewards eating an unsweet and
often disagreeable main course. 

Flowering
plants appeared on the evolutionary scene about 135 million
years ago, about 70 million years before primates did.  When flowers are fertilized,
they grow into fruit, which is an evolutionary adaptation where the plant is not
eaten to satisfy animal hunger, but the fruit provides the animal with energy,
and the plant a means to distribute its seed.  Primates are primarily tree dwellers,
and fruit comprises 65% of the great ape diet.  It is a perfect symbiosis of plant
and animal.  That symbiosis is not evident in roots, for instance, as eating a
plant’s root kills the plant.  The same goes for vegetables.  Grains and legumes
are seeds, and are not ideal foods, and many are highly toxic, and even through
domestication, there are toxic and other properties of grains and legumes that
make them difficult to digest.  Humans eat only about 2% of all legume species. 
The natives of California used acorns as a staple food.  However, they had to
leach the tannic acid from the acorns in order to eat them.  Seeds rarely have
symbiotic relationships with animals, and plants have many adaptations to minimize
animal predation, such as thorns, thick husks, etc.  The castor bean is toxic
to all animals, even insects.  Some insects eat toxic seeds and use the seed’s
toxic properties to make themselves toxic to animals that would otherwise
eat them.  Those non-fruit plant parts are not ideal foods, which is partly why
organs such as livers and kidneys exist, to deal with the toxins.  Those crops
have not had all their toxic and non-digestive properties bred from them, and
it may not be entirely possible. 

Cooking
and other food processing can minimize certain toxic chemicals (such as acid in
acorns and the cassava root), make more of certain substances digestible (such
as protein in grains), and kill parasites and bacteria in flesh, but such processing
also destroys enzymes, vitamins and other nutritious substances.  Domesticating
and growing those plant parts that humans can digest (largely non-cellulose parts)
is a mixed bag.  The same goes for the domestication of animals and eating large
quantities of flesh and milk products.  Also, our food animals are often raised
on grain diets, which they are not suited for, and they become fatter than normal
(among other health problems) also by design
(feed, genetics, drugs, hormones, etc.), but obviously not ideal for those consuming
their flesh.  Most of adult humanity (about 70%) is lactose-intolerant, which
means that they cannot effectively digest milk products.  There has been some
evolutionary adaptation in adults who can digest milk, but as somebody who has
eliminated milk products from his diet more than once, I can say that even descendants
of pastoral societies are far from ideally adapted to consume milk products. 
We are the only creatures on earth that consume milk as adults, and it is not
from our species.  Less than one percent of humanity is gluten-intolerant, which
is a protein found in wheat.  I cannot comfortably digest quinoa, a New World
grain.  Many people have allergic reactions to corn, peanuts, eggs, milk, meat,
the nightshade family, etc. (although some of those reactions are undoubtedly
due to how the food was raised and prepared, or attendant chemicals such as pesticides). 
Those are some of the prices humanity has paid for leaving its natural habitat. 

Civilized
people developed methods to survive the seasons, which were largely based upon
food preservation.  Cooking, grinding, salting and other methods were used to
preserve food.  What is largely overlooked is that preserving food means preventing
further decay.  Food preservation is often a method of decaying food to a level
where it takes a long time to decay further.  Cooking destroys enzymes and robs
food of its nutritional value.  Grinding food destroys its structure and hence
creates a rapid deterioration in what remains.  Modern methods of bleaching flour
further rob it of nutritional value, and are performed by design.  Bleached flour
is far less inviting to insects that eat unbleached flour, because there is little
nutritional value left.  One way to kill the mice that infest mills is to let
them eat all the bleached flour they want.  They then quickly die.  Spicing, salting
and drying are other methods of food preservation, but living food is obviously
far more nutritious than the cooked, spiced, salted, or dried versions.  With
animals, domesticating them allowed humans to keep living food around during the
winter, killing the animals as needed.  The prevailing theories today hold that
nearly every epidemic disease is a consequence of domesticating animals, civilization’s
dense human populations, and civilization’s filth.  Accordingly, measles came
from dogs or cattle, bubonic plague from rodents, influenza from pigs and ducks,
smallpox from cattle, the common cold from horses, and so on.  Infectious disease
needed dense human populations in order to spread to epidemic proportions.  The
sparse, relatively clean hunter-gatherer populations did not experience epidemic
disease. 

With the rise
of civilization, humanity began soiling its nest.  In the early days of civilization,
there were no sewers, dumps and other measures for keeping civilization clean. 
Filth accumulated and disease flourished.  The filth was closely related to “germs,”
and improving sanitation and nutrition ended most epidemic disease, with vaccination
receiving little or no credit (perhaps even negative credit). 

Civilization
began before history, as it took time for writing to develop.  The first known
writings were the cuneiform tablets used in Sumeria, and of the 30,000 surviving
cuneiform clay tablets discovered in Mesopotamia (literally “land between the
rivers,” today’s Iraq, part of the Fertile Crescent), about 1,000 dealt with medicine.[35]  Women’s status
declined during the Sumerian centuries, reflecting not only the culture’s degeneration,
but also the conflict between masculine and feminine principles.  In addition,
the agricultural methods, relying on irrigation, eventually degraded
and salinated the soil, making it infertile.[36]  Filthy urban conditions, undernutrition and malnutrition
lead to susceptibility to epidemic and degenerative disease, and in conjunction
with Old World civilization.  The earliest medical professionals undoubtedly noted
the contribution of filthiness and poor nutrition to disease.  While the historical
record of long ago is sparse, and was written to favor the victors (men and masculine
principles), the notion of sanitation and nutrition as disease prevention survives
in the mythological Greek figure of Hygeia, a woman. 

By
the time of Hippocrates, when the foundations of Western medicine (and modern
democracy) were supposedly laid, men had taken over the medical profession.  Aristotle
theorized that women were inherently inferior because of their biology.  In ancient
Rome, women were treated relatively better and were better represented in the
healing arts.  Even though Rome had sewers (they first showed up in Assyria and
Crete, as far as today’s archeological evidence suggests, but they also may have
existed earlier in civilization) epidemic disease swept through ancient Greece
and Rome, and is thought of as partly a consequence of their imperialism, bringing
new diseases back with the soldiers, slaves and imperial commerce. 

One
problem with historical investigation of early medicine or any ancient culture
is that the analysis is often of stones, bones, the writings of the elite, the
lives of kings and so on.  It is difficult to get an intimate sense of the times,
and what life was really like back then.  My paranormal
experiences showed me that there is far more to consciousness than the West
admits.  When modern commentators scoff at ancient “superstitions” and “witch
doctors,” how much of that is a self-serving projection?  Psychic healing is real,
and the “placebo effect” only hints at the potential of human consciousness to
create disease or health.  People used to be much more connected to their dreams,
and they had importance in their waking lives.  Some of today’s scientists pass
off dreams as some kind of garbage that the mind sheds during sleep.  The most
open-minded of them may have little appreciation for the inter-dimensional doorway
that dreams could represent.  What were the dreams of ancient humans like?  Studying
stone axes, pottery fragments and bones provides little evidence. 

While
the West has “advanced” in some important ways, it is also evident that
even though there surely was superstition in ancient healing, and a poor understanding
of anatomy, in some ways those “primitive” doctors are still ahead of Western
medicine.  Socrates could well have been speaking of today’s medical establishment
when he said, “The cure of many diseases remains unknown to the physicians of
Hellos because they do not study the whole person.”  Holistic medicine is
still marginalized in Western medicine, more than two thousand years later.  The
feminine-oriented (they did not have to be women to be feminine-oriented) healers
of an earlier era may have had a better grasp of the role of the patient’s personality
and spirit in healing than those Hellos doctors, or today’s. 

Today’s
books about Western medicine’s history largely focus on two men from ancient times:
Hippocrates and Galen.  Their work formed the foundation of Western medicine. 
Hippocrates lived during Greece’s classic period, about 400 years before Jesus
was born.  Many works attributed to Hippocrates are not his, but from the school
of thought he came to represent.  The Hippocratic method was founded upon observation
and reason, and its primary dictum was “first, do no harm.”  Western doctors take
the Hippocratic oath today. 

Galen was also Greek,
lived during the second century AD, but made his mark in Rome.  Galen was a prolific
writer, and he furthered the Hippocratic notion of observation.  Galen dissected
animals and applied his findings to human anatomy.  Unfortunately for the West,
Hippocrates’ work fell victim to Roman Catholic hostility toward all things Greek,
and Galen’s work became dogmatized.  The principle of observing nature was abandoned,
Galen’s works ironically became a bulwark against observing nature, and
medical authorities uncritically repeated his work for more than a millennium.

The
Catholic Church, which largely took over the healing profession when the Western
Roman Empire collapsed, helped dogmatize Galen’s work.  The Church was a misogynistic
institution, the Western healing profession largely passed into its control, and
women were shut out.  Early Christian theorists denied that women, being made
from Adam’s rib, had souls.  There were still plenty of women midwives and herbalists,
but they were rarely part of the Church-dominated healing profession.  During
the Middle Ages men dominated professional medicine, with some women healers,
such as Trotula of Salerno and Hildegard of Bingen becoming prominent in the late
Middle Ages, although many male doctors today cannot believe that Trotula could
have been a woman, as prominent as “she” was.[37] 

The
Catholic Church had all the classic Greek texts burned as pagan, and about the
only reason the West knows much about Hippocrates, Socrates, Pythagoras and friends
is that Islamic scholars translated their works into Arabic, to finally come back
to Europe in Latin after 1000 AD.  The “Reconquest“
of the Iberian Peninsula opened the great Islamic libraries to European Christians,
and the logic and reason of the Greeks began “infecting” Italy and elsewhere in
Europe during the High Middle Ages. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman
Turks in 1453 helped further the revival of Greek scholarship in the West.  The
fall of Constantinople also set in motion Portuguese
and Spanish attempts to find another route to gain Asian spices and goods, followed by the Portuguese
sailing around Africa and Columbus’ fateful voyage. 

In the healing arts and science, the
Islamic culture far outstripped Church-dominated Europe.  Around 1200 AD, the
Islamic culture had perhaps the world’s highest standard of living.  Islamic medicine
expanded the West’s pharmacopoeia, kept the classic Greek teachings alive, and
Jewish doctors such as Maimonides were influential in European medicine.  The
Renaissance era saw a European revival of interest in ancient Greek teachings,
and discoveries across the Atlantic Ocean spurred genocides,
gold rushes, massive population movements and empire building.  The printing
press and widespread literacy, instead of becoming a tool of a proselytizing
Catholic Church, became a tool of the Protestant Reformation and political revolutions. 
From the ferment of renaissance and imperial Europe came the rise of modern science
and medicine. 

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus lay on his deathbed and happily
examined an advance copy of his newly published book, a work that ultimately overturned
more than a millennium of Ptolemaic theory that made earth the center of the universe.[38]  Copernicus, although he was a
devout Catholic, eventually defeated Catholic dogma with his book, a work so influential
that it is widely considered to have initiated the rise of Western science.  Although
Giordano Bruno was burned alive for holding to Copernicus’ view (and other radical
notions) and Galileo Galilee was forced to recant (which dissuaded
people such as René Descartes from further considering heliocentric theory), Copernicus’
work eventually prevailed.  

Galen’s
work guided “knowledge” of the human body until Andreas Vesalius appeared.  A
native of Brussels, Vesalius published another work that overturned a millennium
of dogma.  It was published in the same year as Copernicus’ seminal work.  As
with Galen, Vesalius dissected animals, but he also dissected human beings (by
raiding gallows and other grim places) in a way the West had never seen before.
 He eventually discovered that hundreds of Galen’s findings were incorrect, largely
because Galen extrapolated findings on dissected animals to humans.  Vesalius’
book, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, is considered the first work of modern
scientific medicine. 

Galen and
Vesalius had important similarities.  Galen parlayed his work into becoming the
personal physician to the West’s most powerful men: Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius
and his heir Commodus.  Vesalius also used his work to become the personal physician
to the West’s most powerful man: Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain
during the peak of Spain’s power.  Although Galen and Vesalius’ names are hallowed
in the annals of medicine, there are other parallels less savory.  Both men not
only dissected animals, they both dissected living animals.  Those men
were the West’s first vivisectionists.  That fact demonstrates the life-taking,
masculine paradigm, and it is also spiritually primitive.  The spiritual
probably cannot be effectively divorced from the material, and Western science
has eliminated the spiritual to its detriment. 

Spiritual
perspectives will be presented throughout this medical essay.  My first major
mystical influence, Seth, once said that when a scientist robs a frog of
its life in order to dissect it, the scientist ends up knowing less about
life, not more, when the dissection is complete.  Dissecting an animal while
it still lives is far more degenerate.  When Western science justified the
sacrifice of “lesser” life forms in its quest for knowledge, it was taking large
steps backwards in its understanding of life and reality, although such
a sentiment is largely unrecognized even today, while tens of millions of animals
are killed in experiments in the United States
each year, in the name of science and medicine.  Taking a life to “save” a
life, in the long run, is arguably taking two steps backwards to take one step
forward, and the step “forward” may be in the wrong direction. 

With
the works of Copernicus and Vesalius, Western science began its fitful rise, and
religion gradually lost its grip over the masses.  In the 1600s, William Harvey
further proved Galen’s work wrong.  Although Chinese writings from nearly 5000 years ago stated
that the human heart was a pump that circulated blood throughout the body, that
understanding in the West did not occur until William Harvey’s work appeared. 
Just as Copernicus did not immediately overturn Ptolemaic dogma regarding an earth-centered
universe, Vesalius did not immediately overturn all Galenic dogma.  In 1628, Harvey
published his research into the heart and its function.  Similar to Galen and
Vesalius, Harvey was a court physician, in his case to England’s King James I. 
In addition (and this is a central concern of this medical essay), Galen, Vesalius
and Harvey were all viciously attacked by their colleagues, who defended
the day’s dogma.  Vesalius became so disgusted by the attacks that he lit
a bonfire, destroying his notes and works, and got out of anatomy altogether. 
Harvey endured years of attacks, to finally see his theories vindicated before
he died.[39]  Not
coincidentally, that warfare over those theories and dogma was entirely waged
by men, and Harvey was another vivisectionist. 

 

The
Beginnings of Today’s Medical Establishment

The
rise of Western science is inextricably connected to the rise of Western medicine,
as is European imperialism, the decline of the Catholic
Church, the Industrial Revolution, modern
warfare, political-economic ideologies such as capitalism and communism, and other factors. 
When studying the development of medical science and its attendant establishment,
the interplay of scientists, their nations of origin, dominant religious sects
and other factors can be seen to influence the course of scientific theory as
well as the data.  There is no such thing as “pure science.”

It
is no coincidence that Copernicus and Vesalius both published their works in 1543. 
Long-standing dogma was challenged on many fronts, not least of which was the
Protestant Reformation.  In 1543, the Catholic Church, although it had burned
books many times in the past, dramatically toughened its policy and levied heavy
penalties for selling books that the Church had banned.  Cardinal Carafa went
so far as to declare that no books could be published without permission from
the Inquisition.[40] 
In 1559, the infamous Index Auctorum et Librorum Prohibitorum was first
published, a list of banned books that would endure until the 1960s. 

Harvey
was not the first European to describe the heart’s circulation of the blood. 
In 1553, Michael Servetus anonymously published The Restoration of Christianity. 
In his work, he challenged Galenic dogma and correctly described the pulmonary
circulation between the heart and lungs, although it was in the context of how
the Holy Spirit enters man.  He escaped the Spanish Inquisition only to land in
Calvin’s Geneva, where both he and his work were burned.  Burning the heretic
and his books ensured that his theory about the heart and circulation would not
influence European science. 

Joseph Schwartz
persuasively made the case that Galileo and Newton
couched their work in mathematics to make it less susceptible to the Church’s
attacks.  Those strategic decisions helped send science awry, making it too reliant
on mathematics, and more occult than it needed to be.[41]  I have virtually never needed to use mathematics
to explain a scientific theory.   

Ambroise
Paré, a contemporary of Vesalius, advanced the science of surgery, honing his
craft in battlefield hospitals, introducing the practice of binding arteries to
reduce hemorrhage, and ending the practice of pouring boiling oil on wounds to
cauterize them.  That was discovered accidentally when one day he ran out of oil
and used soothing lotions instead.  Paré brought to Western surgery the notion
of gentle treatment of wounds, and he engaged in the customary academic fisticuffs
with his rivals.  As with the others, Paré became the surgeon to several kings
of France. 

During the next three centuries,
Western science made its advances.  Vivisection became the norm in medical research. 
Witches and heretics burned across Europe, and devastating wars endlessly raged
back and forth, often over religion.  The distinction between saint, heretic and
witch was largely a political-economic one. 

The
gradual elimination of the spiritual perspective was a complex affair, with various
schools of thought rising and falling.  The writings of Francis Bacon (1561-1626),
an English statesman and philosopher, were influential in their materialistic
perspective.  Bacon argued for relying on what our senses tell us, using reason
to interpret it, and staying within that framework.  The materialism of Bacon
would influence the materialism of Marx and others.  Newton explained the effect
of gravity with equations, and he, along with Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo helped
initiate the science of celestial mechanics.  Seeking the mechanism behind everything
became science’s Holy Grail.  The world of the spirit gradually fell away, and
Western science put nature “on the rack,” torturing her secrets out of her (vivisection
being an obvious example of that approach).  A wide array of scientific and medical
theories proliferated.  Bacon, Descartes and other philosophers initiated an age
of rational thought, although the outright rejection of religion would not occur
until the Enlightenment, during the 18^th century.   Materialist and
spiritualist theories vied with one another, some explaining life as a mechanism,
others denying that mechanics could ever explain the ineffable spark of life. 

The new lens-making technologies that made telescopes
possible also made microscopes possible, exploration of the previously invisible
world began, as well as exploration of the earth’s farthest corners (usually in
the name of conquest).  Midwives and herbalists still practiced, although they
were increasingly subject to repression.  Disease was studied by the new science
of medicine.  The practice of Western medicine, however, did not change much during
the 16^th through 18^th centuries.  While women specialized
in the gentle medicine of herbs and nutrition, the male-dominated medical profession
used leeches, purgatives, emetics, surgery and other violent methods.  European
women healers found it increasingly difficult to work from the time of Vesalius
onward.[42]  Epidemic
disease swept through Europe regularly.  European cities were hellish arenas of violence, filth and disease.  With
numbing regularity, famine, disease or warfare (or all three) would march through,
carrying off vast numbers of souls.  The only way that Europe’s cities kept their
populations stable was through a constant influx of “surplus population” from
the countryside, to replace those who died off in the cities.  As Europeans sailed
the high seas, natives in the New World, Australia, the South Pacific and elsewhere
died off from European-introduced disease in stupefying numbers.  Fifty million
Native Americans may have died off from European-introduced disease during the
16^th century, with perhaps another twenty million being worked to death,
in the greatest single demographic catastrophe in history,
killing off 90% of a hemisphere’s human population. 

The
Enlightenment era, with its egalitarian ideals, a faith in science, reason and
a promotion of humane principles, was the fruit of centuries of ferment.  That
era saw the creation of the greatest music that humanity has yet produced.  Medicine
for the masses became popular.  To be sure, there were men who subscribed to the
principles of Hygeia, such as William Buchan, John Wesley, Johann Frank and others
of the Enlightenment era.  Also, the age of quackery largely coincided with those
days.  While “quack” may have described many folk healers and their seemingly
nonsensical medicine, the notion has also been greatly abused ever since to suppress
medical innovation.  Less than a month before I wrote these words, a “skeptic”
challenged me about Dennis Lee and alternative energy’s
plight.  He stated that the unmistakable mark of a quack, medical or otherwise,
was the claim of being persecuted.  As we shall see, it is also the unmistakable
mark of a pioneer.  In 1761, the German physician Leopold
Auenbrugger invented the method of rapping on a person’s chest, listening to the
sound produced, a method familiar to any American who has ever had a physical
examination.  An amateur musician, Auenbrugger began cataloguing what the various
sounds might mean.  He realized the importance of his work, but had no illusions
of becoming a medical hero.  He wrote,

 

“In
making public my discoveries I have not been unconscious of the dangers I must
encounter, since it has always been the fate of those who have illustrated or
improved the arts and sciences by their discoveries to be beset by envy, malice,
hatred, destruction and calumny.”[43]

 

In
North America’s colonial settlements, women had a freer hand to practice medicine. 
The restrictive atmosphere of European medicine could not entirely prevail an
ocean away.  The Enlightenment also helped spawn political revolutions, beginning
with the American Revolution.  Also, finally,
Western medicine began understanding how to cure some diseases. 

When
Europeans began sailing the high seas, scurvy attended their voyages.  In 1498,
Arab traders cured Vasco de Gama’s crew of scurvy
by feeding them oranges.  In 1535, Jacques
Cartier’s crew came down with scurvy on the Saint Lawrence River.  Twenty-five
members of his crew died before a local Indian showed them how to make bark and
evergreen needles into a drink.  The drink was high in vitamin C, and his men
were cured.  When Cartier reported the incident to the medical authorities upon
his return, they laughed at the ignorant practices of the “savages,” and never
followed up on it.  In 1593, Richard Hawkins, Francis
Drake’s relative and fellow pirate-explorer, sailed to the South Pacific and
noted that the natives used citrus fruit to cure scurvy, something that also cured
his men.  His observation was also not acted upon by the day’s medical profession. 
In 1601, Captain James Lancaster sailed his fleet of four ships, and gave lemon
juice to the crew on the ship he sailed.  The other three vessels’ crews came
down with scurvy.  In 1636, John Woodall published The Surgeon’s Mate,
where he unequivocally wrote that scurvy could be prevented by eating fresh vegetables
and citrus fruit.  The medical establishment ignored those findings, while an
estimated million sailors lost their lives to scurvy (5000 per year, from 1600
to 1800).  It was not until the Scottish James Lind performed an experiment that
Western medicine began considering the cure.  His experiments aboard the HMS Salisbury
in 1754 proved that citrus fruit cured scurvy, although he did not know why. 
In the 1760s, James Cook sailed around the world, embracing hygienic principles,
and he used citrus fruit to cure scurvy in his crew.  Cook only lost one man from
disease during the three-year voyage, and it was to tuberculosis.  Many thousands
more sailors died on the high seas, and it was not until 1795, largely due to
the efforts of Gilbert Bane, that the British began issuing citrus juice to its
sailors, and “limeys” soon ruled the high seas.  Establishment histories of medicine,
such as Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, often do not mention
anything about people curing scurvy before Lind’s work.  That is always a hazard
of reading mainstream history.  The official story can leave plenty out, incidents
that can cast an importantly different light on the story. 

The
Enlightenment came to an end with the French Revolution and Napoleon.  The Industrial
Revolution was underway, capitalism was evolving in ways that Adam Smith did not
foresee, and the world of Charles Dickens came to pass.  The early years of the
19^th century are typically considered the beginning of the modern era. 
In the early 19^th century the stethoscope was invented.  Auenbrugger’s method, neglected for more than forty years,
was finally used.  Diagnosis finally began being earnestly practiced in Western
medicine.  Again, was that a step forward?  Seth
said that cataloguing disease is not dealing with the issue in the most enlightened
way.  He said that focusing on health and how to be healthy (Hygeia’s principles
once again) is far preferable to studying and treating disease.  Studying disease
has helped lead to today’s medicine refining the art of symptom management, instead
of the underlying cause.  Also, any treatment that does anything other than suppress
symptoms (with male-oriented knives and drugs) has largely been outlawed in the
United States.

In the United
States, one of the Declaration of Independence’s signers, Dr. Benjamin Rush, became
America’s most famous doctor.  He taught at the University of Pennsylvania for
more than forty years, and his impact on American medicine can still be felt today. 
Rush represented the early medical establishment in the United States.  He did,
however, write this prescient paragraph,

 

“Unless
we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine
will organize into an undercover dictatorship…To restrict the art of healing
to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille
of medical science.  All such laws are un-American and despotic… and have no place
in a republic…The Constitution of this Republic should make special provisions
for medical freedom as well as religious freedom.”[44]

 

Rush’s
friend Thomas Jefferson wrote,

 

“If
people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take,
their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls who live under
tyranny.”

 

Although
Rush warned against a medical racket taking shape in the United States, his work
was the epitome of masculine medicine.  Rush began using mercury in large doses
to “cure” patients during a yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793.  Rush
patented his “cure,” and his Rush’s Pills became a mainstay of American medicine. 
Rush’s pills were a violent purgative made from calomel (mercury chloride) and
jalap.  A person’s bowels would virtually explode after ingesting Rush’s cure-all. 
Rush’s pills were informally known as “Thunderclappers.”  Rush believed that nearly
every disease condition could be cured with Rush’s Pills. 

The
deadly effects of mercury have been well known since ancient times.  Mercury poisoning
may have killed Isaac Newton as well as destroyed his mind, as he worked with
it in alchemical experiments, probably trying to make gold.  Rush’s logic was
that the ingestion of mercury and jalap would blast out any diseased matter in
the intestines.  If that failed to provide the cure, the patient would also get
mercury poisoning, which “altered” the original disease, somehow combining it
with the mercury poisoning.  The logic was that if patients survived the mercury
poisoning, their recovery would also cure their original disease.[45] 
That type of treatment, in typical masculine fashion, became known as “heroic”
medicine.  In those years of heroic mercury therapy, there were instances of cadavers
being dissected, and mercury would run from their bodies. 

Using
large doses of mercury was not the only innovation that Rush blessed America with. 
He was probably the person who initiated “heroic” bleeding.  The bleeding practices
of the past were not enough.  Rush believed in bleeding the better part of a gallon
(the adult human body only holds about five quarts) of blood from his sicker patients. 
Not only adults were bled under Rush’s ministrations, but also infants as young
as three months old.  Because newborns are so small, the jugular vein was often
the only one large enough to be opened for bleeding.  Rush noticed that newborns
could not survive being bled as much and as often as adults, so he could not be
quite as heroic with infants.

Calomel was not
banned as “medicine” until my lifetime, to demonstrate how influential Rush was
to Western medicine.  Mercury, bleeding and other “heroic” methods clearly reflected
masculine medicine’s principles.  Rush distrusted nature.  He saw disease as a
failure of nature, so heroic intervention was the only effective approach.  Rush’s
outlook became the orthodox American medical paradigm of the 19^th century,
and that medical establishment had the audacity to call alternative practitioners
“quacks.” 

Rush, the physician general to George
Washington’s revolutionary army, subscribed to warfare ideology in his medical
approach.  Said Rush, “It is necessary that (the remedies) be
so – that is, more powerful than the disease, or they cannot overcome it.”[46]  Washington was
probably bloodlet to death by doctors practicing
“heroic” medicine. That heroic philosophy is still prevalent in today’s American
medicine.  Rush pointed to surviving patients as proof that his treatments worked,
but millions of people paid the price of his certitude.  Rush was hostile toward
plant-based remedies, but believed in metallic medicine.  Highly toxic heavy metals
such as mercury, lead and antimony (in the same chemical family as arsenic) found
their way into the day’s orthodox medicine.  Rush’s methods were in keeping with
the assembly-line strategies that accompanied the Industrial Revolution.  Orthodox
doctors could treat up to thirty patients in an average morning, prescribing nearly
the same treatment to every one, no matter their condition.  It was a “one-size-fits-all”
medicine. 

The Enlightenment began in France,
and in no small measure had the European experience in North America to thank. 
Although the Enlightenment looked back to ancient Greece’s democracy for political
inspiration, in major ways classical Greece was a poor example: slaves outnumbered
citizens in Athens, and women were nearly prisoners in their homes.  When the
Enlightenment began, humanity’s only functioning democracy was the Iroquois
Confederation, in the area of present-day New York State.  Iroquoian women
elected the chiefs, ran village life and cast their children’s vote in proxy,
for a balance of power between the sexes that no Western society has yet approached. 
History being the ultimate ironist, George Washington led the effort to eliminate
Iroquois society.  The Iroquois saw Washington
in much the same way as 1940s Jews saw Adolf Hitler.  The largely classless societies
among the North American natives, and the freedom that was such a natural part
of native life, were attractive to Europeans, which led to a long-standing colonial
problem: colonists running off and “going native.”[47] 
Later theorists such as Friedrich Engels drew upon the Iroquoian example.[48]  The Iroquoian government was
very democratic with decentralized power and had no executive branch, something
that monarchical Europe could not countenance, so the framers of the United States
Constitution invented the executive branch, which has undermined the other branches
ever since, amassing power to itself (so those who control the president control
the government).  Ben Franklin, the American ambassador to France, was
profoundly influenced by the Iroquoian form of government. 

One
Enlightenment outcome was the improvement of women’s lives.  Gone were the days
of being burned alive as a “witch,” although full citizen rights for American
women would not come until the 20^th century, on paper at least.  Victorian
prudery would soon appear, transforming women’s sexuality from something to be
feared into something to be repressed.  Chattel slavery was transformed into wage
slavery, communism would appear as a challenge to capitalism (although both movements
would betray the spirit of their founding theorists), and revolutionary activities
characterized the nineteenth century, as well as European imperial land grabs
throughout the world.  Throughout the chaos, social movements grew, counterattacks
by various establishments were waged, and the 19^th century was humanity’s
most tumultuous…until the 20^th. 

What
happened in Western medicine parallels what happened in Western politics.  While
the divine right of kings was challenged, to more violent effect in France than
in Britain, male-dominated heroic medicine was also challenged.  Understandably,
people feared the day’s orthodox medicine, with their bleedings, mercury, lead
and other deadly methods that passed for medicine.  The foundation of orthodox
medical practice and philosophy came under fire from several quarters, largely
motivated by disgust with orthodox medical practice.  In the early 19^th
century, there were three major challenges to American orthodox medicine.  One
was a revival of herbal medicine, largely based upon Native American remedies. 
Those practitioners became known as “Indian Doctors.” 

Samuel
Thomson mounted another challenge to orthodox medicine.  Thomson was a New Hampshire
farmer who devised a medical system for the masses that utilized Native American
steam baths and an herbal pharmacopoeia that eventually encompassed 65 herbal
remedies.  Thomson learned his herbal medicine from a woman herbalist.  Thomson’s
system created an army of folk healers, where the ideal was “every man his own
doctor.”  By 1839, one-sixth of the United States (three million people) used
his system of medicine.[49] 
Orthodox doctors saw Thomson as such a dire threat that they had a law passed
that named Thomson specifically.  What did the law state?  Thomson was forbidden
to treat people without charging them.  Those challenges to orthodox medicine
were nearly the antithesis of heroic medicine.

The
third challenge to American orthodox medicine came from within its ranks, from
Europe.  It was the most substantial challenge to American orthodox medicine,
as it was the most professional.  In the late 18^th century a German
physician, Samuel Hahnemann, developed a system of medicine wholly at variance
with orthodox medical theory.  He rejected the materialistic perspective of science
and medicine, and saw disease and health as spiritual conditions.  Hahnemann thought
that dissection and attempts to describe the mechanics of the human body, as a
way to guide treatment, was a useless undertaking.  Hahnemann borrowed from the
ancient Greeks and Paracelsus in developing a “law of similars.”  Hahnemann’s
theory was that if a healthy person were given a medicine that produced certain
symptoms, an ill person with those same symptoms would be cured by the same medicine. 
It was a case of “paradoxical” therapy.  It was not the first, and not the last,
paradoxical therapy.  Ericksonian therapy in psychology, for instance, is used
today with great success.  Hahnemann’s style of medicine became known as homeopathy. 
While purgatives and other violent medicines were given by orthodoxy, and the
more concentrated the better, Hahnemann took the opposite approach, based on
his experience with treating patients. 

Hahnemann’s
medicines were highly dilute, and the more dilute, the more powerful the apparent
healing properties, even when so dilute that not even one molecule remained of
the original substance.  It might seem like nonsense, but it worked, and there
is experimental data to support the notion.  The effect and philosophy of homeopathy
markedly differs from drug therapy.  Homeopathy uses dilute substances to help
stimulate the body to heal itself, a helpful reminder of sorts.  Drug therapy,
on the other hand, overwhelms the body, taking over its chemistry, manipulating
it to “health.”  Whereas homeopathy stimulates the body to heal itself and to
correct the underlying condition, which is classic feminine medicine, drug therapy
reflects masculine principles of warfare and domination, taking over the body’s
processes, usually acting by suppressing disease symptoms. 

I
have used homeopathy to dramatic effect, and have seen it work miracles.  It is
similar in some ways to the concept of vaccination, stimulating the body to ward
off disease.  In the attacks against homeopathy that continue to this day, the
orthodox assailants always say how “absurd” homeopathy is, while the homeopathists
respond, “OK, it may seem that way to our conditioned minds, but it works, and
nobody is harmed by it.”  In fact, there is a theoretical basis for homeopathy,
which is largely unchanged from Hahnemann’s day, but it is radically different
from orthodox theory.[50] 
Hahnemann was banned from practicing in Germany.  He had to keep moving his place
of residence because of the attacks, and homeopathy was introduced to the United
States in 1825.[51] 

During
the early 19^th century, the United States’ citizenry began abandoning
orthodox medicine.  Monopolistic medical laws were overturned across America,
and orthodox doctors had to compete with the alternative movements.  As far as
millions of Americans were concerned, abandoning orthodox medicine was an exercise
in freedom.  In the words of one senator who introduced a law that helped overturn
the orthodox medical monopoly,

 

“A people
accustomed to govern themselves and boasting of their intelligence are impatient
of restraint.  They want no protection but freedom of inquiry and freedom of action.”[52]

 

That
statement was similar in spirit to Ben Franklin’s observation that people who
give up freedom for security will get (and deserve) neither.  Orthodox medicine
had plenty going against it.  For one thing, their “medicine” was widely considered
to be deadly.  Another factor was the minimal training that orthodox doctors received. 
Orthodox training was so poor that between 1853 and 1873 only about a third of
all applicants, with medical school diplomas in hand, passed the examination to
become a naval doctor.[53]  The director of
naval medicine thought another ten percent could have passed an easier examination,
but the remaining majority of applicants were hopelessly unqualified. 

Medical schools flooded America with those unqualified doctors,
dispensing their “medicine.”  Homeopaths made far more money per practitioner
than orthodox doctors, because demand for them was relatively higher.  The “Indian
Doctors” and Thomsonian practitioners merged in the 1840s to form the “eclectic”
school of medicine.  About one-sixth of America’s homeopathic practitioners were
converted orthodox doctors.  In 1844, homeopaths formed the American Institute
of Homeopathy.  Orthodox medicine was being rapidly abandoned.  Accordingly, it
mounted a counterattack.  The first blast came from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who
published Homeopathy and its Kindred Delusions in 1842.  Holmes led the
attack on feminine-oriented medicine and its, “nature-trusting heresy.”[54]  It is no accident
that Holmes invoked the Inquisition’s terminology.  To this day, the American
medical establishment has never performed any scientific investigation
into homeopathy or its results.[55]  A quote from Herbert
Spencer is appropriate here, as it will apply to the medical establishment in
dozens of instances before this essay is finished.

 

“There
is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against
all argument, and which cannot fail to keep man in everlasting ignorance.  That
principle is condemnation without investigation.” 

 

One
of the greatest minds in American history, William James, said in 1898 to the
Massachusetts legislature, as he argued against a law that would make psychology
into a monopoly run by orthodox medical doctors,

 

“When
I was a medical student I feel sure that any one of us would have been ashamed
to be caught looking into a homeopathic book by a professor.  We had to sneer
at homeopathy by word of command.  Such was the school opinion at that time, and
I imagine that similar encouragement to superficiality in various directions exist
in the medical schools of today.”[56]

 

More than a century later, the situation
is identical.  A couple of months before writing this, an orthodox doctor gave
me his opinion that homeopathy and alternative cancer treatments were worthless
scams, as they did not have solid science behind them.  He stated that the very
principle of homeopathy, of dilute medicines, was absurd on its face and not worthy
of serious consideration.  Had he performed any investigation himself?  Had he
even read the results of a scientific investigation that found homeopathy wanting? 
I believe that the answer was no, although my homeopathist lived in the same town. 
What was the basis for his opinion?  As far as I could tell, he was reciting the
fairy tales that American orthodox doctors have been indoctrinated into for the
past 150 years.  In kind, it was nearly identical to the fairy
tales I was told about capitalism in business school. 

In 1845, in direct response to the threat of alternative medicine,
the American Medical Association (AMA) was formed.  As has been the case with
probably every professional group in world history, the AMA was primarily concerned
with serving the well-being of its members.  They couched their public image as
coming together to serve the public, which is the standard modus operandi
of EVERY self-serving operation.  The AMA is
the doctor’s union, and protecting the public is the world’s biggest protection
racket.  Nathan Smith Davis formed the AMA, and although one of his goals
was improving medical education and training, it was politically inexpedient to
push for it.  Davis needed allies in the war against feminine-oriented medicine,
and few of the day’s orthodox practitioners would have met Smith’s proposed standard
of medical training and competence.  One early AMA strategy was banning consultation
with non-orthodox doctors.  This helped stanch the bleeding of orthodox conversions
to homeopathy.  Using standard business strategy, in order to compete with the
homeopaths and other gentle medical approaches, orthodox medicine had to abandon
some of its more egregious practices such as bloodletting.  The gigantic doses
of calomel and other “medicines” continued late into the 19^th century. 
Davis was about the first great American crusader against “quacks,” although somehow
the practice of administering calomel did not qualify as quackery. 

As
orthodox medicine waged its war against competition from alternative therapies,
surgery was not really part of the battle.  That is because surgery was not held
in high esteem, although some successful surgeons could command hefty sums in
Europe.  Many people considered surgery a last resort, fit mainly for battlefield
hospitals; to try putting soldiers back together.  The surgery of Rush’s time
was similarly heroic, with doctors vying to see who could remove the greatest
portion of a patient’s body without causing death.[57] 
No life insurance company would insure a surgeon’s
wife in those days.  If patients did not die from the pain or too many removed
organs, they would likely die from infection.  Sanitation was not a concept in
orthodox medical practice, and surgery was the ultimate in pain, surpassing even
explosive purgatives and the ghastly effects of mercury poisoning.  Events in
the 19^th century would eventually rescue surgery from its disrepute.
 

 

Science,
Medicine and Money in the 19^th Century

The
life-giving and life-taking aspects of Western medicine are in strange juxtaposition
regarding the first breakthrough that would change Western interventional medicine
for the better.  Sanitation, Hygeia’s principle, was first practiced in places
where life begins and ends: maternity wards and battlefield hospitals. 

John Pringle, the physician-general of the British army
and physician to the royal family, studied infection, disease and antisepsis and
in 1752 strongly recommended that cleanliness and hygiene were the best preventives.[58]  His observation did not become
a universal practice, far from it, but battlefield hospitals were real-world laboratories
that have led to a great deal of today’s emergency medicine. 

The
earliest Western medical doctor to establish sanitary practices was Hungarian
obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis, who made his discovery at the Vienna General Hospital
in 1847.  Vienna was the heart of the Austrian empire and Europe’s most progressive
city, and the Vienna General Hospital was a teaching hospital.  Men and women
were both trained there, men to be doctors, women to be midwives.  Semmelweis
was a bright young doctor from Hungary, but being from the imperial hinterland,
with foreign dress and speech, he was subjected to numerous harassments.  He weathered
those difficulties and was appointed as assistant to the director of obstetrics
at the Vienna hospital.  Although obstetrics was not a glamorous branch of medicine,
Semmelweis was doing well for a foreigner.  In that era, pathology was popular
and male medical students learned their craft by dissecting cadavers and handling
diseased organs.  In those days, puerperal fever raged through maternity wards. 
Puerperal fever was killing off great numbers of women who gave birth in European
hospitals, especially its teaching hospitals.  At times it galloped across swaths
of Europe.  In the Lombardy region of today’s Italy, not one woman survived a
teaching hospital-delivered childbirth for an entire year, during the 1770s.[59] 

Two maternity wards were in the Vienna General Hospital. 
The male medical students served the first ward; midwives-in-training serviced
the other.  The maternity wards of the teaching hospital only attracted desperate
patients, the poor women of Dickens’ Europe.  Semmelweis witnessed cases where
expectant women would be admitted to the hospital when only the first ward was
open.  Women got on their knees and begged to be admitted to the second ward. 
Semmelweis once watched a woman leave the hospital to give birth in an alley rather
than be admitted to the first ward.  What did those desperate women fear?  It
turned out that the death rate from puerperal fever was more than 20% in the first
ward, served by the medical students.  The ward served by the midwives-in-training
had about a 2% mortality rate.  What those desperate women obviously knew, Semmelweis
eventually noticed. 

As he began wondering why,
one of his favorite teachers accidentally cut himself during an autopsy and died
in the same fashion that those poor mothers did.  Semmelweis then theorized that
something was passing from the cadavers in the autopsy rooms to the mothers in
the first ward.  In those days, surgeons gloried in the gore they became coated
in as they performed their heroic labors.  The Vienna medical students would go
straight from the autopsy room to perform pelvic examinations on the women in
the first ward.  Their hands smelled cadaverous.  Semmelweis theorized that there
were “invisible cadaver particles” that clung to the medical students’ skin. 
Semmelweis had his medical students thoroughly wash and scrub their hands, then
rinse them in a chlorine solution until the cadaverous smell was gone.  During
the first month of that program, the mortality rate in the first ward fell to
2%.  Semmelweis was on his way to making the history books. 

Although
the initial reception to his work by his superiors was positive, Semmelweis’ tale
is one of medical history’s more tragic.  Probably at least partly because of
impediments he had already encountered because he was foreign, he did not immediately
approach the Viennese medical establishment with his findings.  An immediate realization
of Semmelweis’ findings was that the doctors were inadvertently killing their
patients.  Not surprisingly, many doctors contemptuously dismissed his findings. 
Also, those were the days before the germ theory of disease, and the idea that
invisible “particles” could cause death were laughed out of medical meetings. 
Semmelweis was also part of the revolutionary movement that swept Europe in 1848,
and his political views helped get him shut out of any employment opportunities
in Vienna.  He lost his job at the Vienna General Hospital and went back to Hungary. 
His findings and preventive method fell into obscurity.  In 1843, Oliver Wendell
Holmes suggested that hospital attendants might transmit childbirth fever to the
mothers, but his theory was quickly dismissed by orthodox medicine. 

Many
subsequent observers have blamed Semmelweis for not promoting his findings as
vigorously and properly as he might have.  Semmelweis obviously deserved some
of the responsibility, but the greater share probably rests with the medical establishment. 
There was an anti-Semmelweis movement among European orthodoxy, with even a luminary
such as Rudolf Virchow chiming in with his negative view. 
Semmelweis did not weather the opposition well.  In 1861, he finally published
his great work on his findings.  He was only about 43 years old, but aged greatly
during those years of attacks from his professional brethren.[60] 

Although
he is a major figure in Western medicine’s history, his 1861 magnum opus receives
negative reviews even today.  The most recent treatment of the Semmelweis affair
is Hal Hellman’s.[61]  Hellman is more sympathetic than
other recent writers, and rounded up doctors of Semmelweis’ day and medical historians
of the 20^th century who thought that his work was epochal, one recent
specialist calling Semmelweis’ book one of the “most moving, persuasive and revolutionary
works in the history of science.”[62] 
Semmelweis came to a dismal end, dying in an insane asylum in 1865.  His mental
faculties rapidly diminished during his last years.  An investigation into his
final days has unearthed harsh facts.  His body was exhumed and examined in 1963,
and further research was undertaken in the 1970s, with a summary published in
1995.  Semmelweis was lured to one of Vienna’s shabbier asylums under false pretenses,
and then involuntarily committed by three physicians who had no psychiatric training. 
He soon died of infection that apparently resulted from severe and untreated beatings
administered by the asylum staff.[63] 
Semmelweis was a forgotten figure for many years, with his “crazy” treatment abandoned. 
In 1891, in the wake of the successes of sanitary practices, his body was exhumed
and moved to Hungary, and he was honored in 1906 by a statue in Budapest.  Semmelweis’
theories went beyond “cadaver particles.”  Before there was a germ theory, Semmelweis
had broadened his theory to include any putrid and decaying matter, which will
have relevance later in this essay. 

It would
not be until Joseph Lister’s work became embraced, Lister beginning to pioneer
sanitary surgical techniques soon after Semmelweis died, that Semmelweis’ discovery
would begin recovering from its neglect. 

From
the earliest days of the New World’s invasion by Europe, the quest
for riches and fame would characterize the West, especially the United States. 
The quest for riches and fame casts a dark shadow over the story of the first
great innovation to rescue surgery from its barbaric status: anesthesia. 

Dentists, not surgeons, brought
anesthesia to medicine.  Painless dentistry and tooth extraction would also rescue
dentistry from its reputation.  One of mercury poisoning’s chief effects is damage
to and loss of the teeth.  Rush’s medicine created business for dentists.  Mercury
is put into dental fillings even today, and its toxic effects are minimized by
the same kinds of scientific groups that have minimized the damage that lead and fluoride do to
the human body.  At nearly the same time that Semmelweis was watching women begging
to be admitted to the Vienna General Hospital’s midwife-served maternity ward,
general anesthesia was discovered in the United States.  Humphry Davy experimented
in England during the 1790s on the intoxicating effects of nitrous oxide, and
recommended that it might be used for painless surgery.  His discovery was quickly
forgotten. 

Nitrous oxide would eventually become
famous as “laughing gas,” a party favorite among the educated class.  In 1844,
a young dentist named Horace Wells attended a laughing gas show in Connecticut
and saw one of the inebriants wound himself, which he did not feel until the gas’
effects wore off.  The point was not lost on Wells, who arranged to have a tooth
painlessly extracted that same evening while under a nitrous-oxide-induced stupor. 
As he regained consciousness, Wells envisioned a new era of tooth extraction. 
Wells enlisted the assistance of William Morton, a former student of his, in gaining
an introduction to Boston’s surgical community.[64]  Morton successfully used ether
in 1846 to anesthetize a patient for a leg amputation.  Unlike the statistical
and theoretical case made by Semmelweis, the effects of anesthesia were dramatically
obvious to any observer, and anesthesia quickly became an integral part of Western
medicine.  Its pioneers, however, received no benefit.  The battle for priority
and money over the discovery of anesthesia is a sordid tale. 

Morton
studied chemistry under Charles Jackson, who gave Morton some important information
and suggestions about using ether.  Subsequently, Wells, Morton and Jackson became
embroiled in the battle of who had precedence in discovering anesthesia.  Wells
became a chloroform addict and committed suicide in prison in 1848, after throwing
acid on two prostitutes.  Morton engaged in many fruitless legal battles over
his rights to anesthesia, and died in 1868.  Jackson also tried cashing in, lost
his mind, and spent his last years in a psychotic state, dying in 1880.  Crawford
Long, a country doctor, used ether successfully in 1842, but did not engage in
the self-promotion of the others.  He died in obscurity, and his discovery was
not vindicated until after his death in 1878.[65] 

It was not until Joseph Lister began
experimenting with the sterilization of surgical implements that surgery became
relatively painless and safe.  Before Lister, death rates from post-surgical infection
ranged from 25% to 60% in Western Europe’s hospitals.  Lister came upon Pasteur’s
work and his germ theory, and invented a carbolic acid treatment of surgical implements,
wounds and dressings.  In 1870, he published the first results of his new technique:
death from infection quickly fell from 45% to 15%.  Lister was also spraying the
air with his acid, however, a misdirection that came from Pasteur’s work, which
did not help his patients much, but still the death rate fell.  Lister taught
in Scotland during the years of his great advances.  Similar to Semmelweis, Lister’s
findings were not immediately embraced by surgeons, although he did not receive
the vociferous attacks that Semmelweis’ work did.  Doctors proposed other theories
to explain his findings.  Lister himself thought it would take a generation for
orthodox medicine to wake up and embrace his findings.  He was right.  In the
late 1880s, Lister’s discoveries were still held in contempt by many in the medical
establishment, although he had many successes and converts.[66]  The early reception in the United
States was also poor.  A quote from Medical Dark Ages, about one of America’s most famous
surgeons, is appropriate here:

 

“I spent a part of …1923 with…Dr. W.W. Keen…In the…Civil
War…he was a surgeon…and had seen many men die from suppuration of wounds
after he had operated. …He would hold the sutures in his teeth and sharpen his
knife on the sole of his boot, after he had raised up his boot from the muddy
ground.  That was the accepted practice at the time.”

“…He
went to Scotland and studied under Lister…(“Lister was persecuted by the
British Medical Association.  He was threatened with having his license revoked.”)
Yet in Lister’s hospital virtually no one died as a result of operations because
Lister had developed a carbolic acid wash and disinfectant.  Dr. Keen came back
from Scotland…He was referred to as a crazy Listerite…He was denied an opportunity
to practice in every hospital in Philadelphia.”

“Finally
there was one open-minded surgeon in the great Pennsylvania General Hospital. 
He said, ‘Let us give this young fellow a chance.’  So they let him operate.”

“…No
one died from infection under Keen. …He (Keen) began to chronicle the results
in statistical articles.  He was threatened with expulsion from the Pennsylvania
Medical Association…This was in the 1890′s…Finally was accepted as the greatest
surgeon in the US.  The old man told me – and he started to cry…’I nearly went
under.  I was nearly shut off.” – US Senator Paul Douglas, Congressional
Record, 1963.

 

There have been three great watershed events in United States history,
and they have been wars: the American Revolution,
the American Civil War and World War II.  Each marked the beginning of an epoch in
American history.  One effect of those wars was that great fortunes were made. 
George Washington became the richest man in
America, partly from native land that his armies helped steal.  World War II was
the greatest era of war profiteering, even worse than during World War I, but
the Civil War was when war profiteering became an American science.  A group of
young men seized the initiative during the Civil War.  They all bought their way
out of military service (an option in all American wars), and then engaged in
war profiteering on a vast scale.  The Civil War kicked the American Industrial
Revolution into high gear, initiated The Gilded Age and made vast sums for a group
of men who became known as robber barons.[67] 
Their legacies can be felt today, with men such as John
Rockefeller, James Mellon, J.P. Morgan, Philip Armour and Andrew Carnegie
beginning their empire building during the Civil War.  American empires in railroads,
steel, oil, banking and other industries were
founded during the Civil War.  They became the great trusts that the American
government tried breaking up in the early 20^th century. 

The
American pharmaceutical industry also got its start during the Civil War.  Pharmaceutical
empires such as Squibb’s and Stearns’ received their starts making pharmaceuticals
during the Civil War, to be soon joined by Lilly, Merck, Abbott, and others.[68] 
The specter of Benjamin Rush loomed over the Civil War, as
the major “medicine” vended to the Union Army was calomel,
the cure-all.  Along with vending calomel, the new pharmaceutical companies vied
with one another, each vending its own “patent medicine,” which was a misnomer,
because not only were the formulas not patented, they were secret, which was officially
frowned upon by the AMA.  In 1876, Frederick Stearns invented the concept of proprietary
medicine, which solved the problem of divulging ingredients yet retaining monopoly
rights, which unleashed a flood of mixed drugs and other substances, designed
to cure one malady or another.  Thousands of those proprietary “medicines” were
on the market by 1880.  Many items in the eclectic and homeopathic pharmacopoeia
were adopted directly into the new proprietary medicines. 

The
AMA also condemned the proprietary-medicine craze, but was economically subservient
to it, allowing proprietary and “secret ingredient” medicine ads in the Journal
of the American Medical Association (JAMA).  Prescription medicine
also got its start in those days, with doctors prescribing proprietary medicines
to their patients.  The doctors had almost no idea about the efficacy of the drugs
pumped into the marketplace.  Prescribing the new medicines was an American fad,
and drug stores began dotting the landscape.  That dynamic still dominates today’s
orthodox medical paradigm.  Financial incentives were waved under doctors’ noses
to prescribe certain drugs, and true “medicine” was the last thing being practiced. 
A handful of “cure-all” drugs (fever reducers) became standard ingredients, used
by orthodox doctors for nearly every disease condition.  Assembly-line medicine
continued to be practiced by orthodoxy, as it is today.  American orthodox doctors
eventually became highly paid marketing and administration conduits for the pharmaceutical
companies.

 

Investigating
Life’s Mysteries

While
heated battles were waged by American orthodox medicine against alternative practitioners
from the 1840s onward, events in Europe would initiate big changes in medical
practice.  Although Semmelweis would endure many attacks for his work, as is typical
for medical pioneers, there was great scientific ferment in Europe.  Science and
industry helped transform the West in the 1800s, and medicine was not immune to
its march.  Paris, the hotbed of political revolution, became the center of a
revolution in Western medicine in the early 19^th century.  Hospitals
became laboratories in France, and the science of pathology was established, with
autopsy results compared to bedside diagnoses.  The Enlightenment ideals of empirical
investigation took root in medical research, although that was relative.  Medical
students flocked from across the West to Paris to learn the new medicine.  In
Germany, laboratory science began its rise, partly due to improvements in microscopes,
and by 1850, laboratory science was an important part of medical research, which
used chemistry, dissection, vivisection, microscopes and other empirical techniques
to learn about life and nature. 

The 1850s were
a time of radical new theories and discoveries in European science and medicine. 
There were distinct schools of German, English and French thought and practice. 
In England, clinical medicine and private medical practice dominated, with little
emphasis on research that was not directly applicable to medicine.  England and
the United States were considered relatively backward with respect to research
and the application of science to the medical arts.  German science and medicine
was publicly institutionalized, locally supported, with emphasis on the laboratory. 
Germany was the center of “pure” research.  France had a centralized system that
focused on Paris.  Their hospitals were the center of treatment and research,
but it was mainly concerned with training doctors.  The French, however, have
long been renowned among Europeans for their creativity.  All three imperial rivals
played their role in dealing with a hot issue in the 1850s: what is life, and
how did it come to be? 

With the ascendance of
Western science, those issues were earnestly addressed.  Paracelsus and Descartes
taught that the spontaneous appearance of life from dead matter was a normal chemical
occurrence.  In those days, many considered such a materialistic understanding
to be common sense.  Eels came from mud, parasites formed inside humans, rotting
meat created flies.  The idea had been around since antiquity (see Genesis and
the creation of Adam from mud).  As experimental science became established, the
source of life became the focus of a debate that continues to this day, although
today’s scientific establishment generally subscribes to a materialistic interpretation
of evolution. 

In the 1600s, Robert Boyle was
impressed with the experiments of Jean-Baptiste van Helmont.  Van Helmont put
a 5-pound willow shoot into a pot of soil.  After five years, the willow tree
weighed 168 pounds but the soil weighed the same, leading van Helmont to conclude,
“All vegetables do materially arise whole out of the element of water.”[69] 

Microscopes
made possible the discovery of an amazingly complex microscopic world, and sexual
reproduction in the smallest insects.  English and French philosophers in the
late 1600s rejected Descartes’ notion of the spontaneous emergence of life from
laws of motion acting on inanimate matter.  Antoine Lavoisier eventually demonstrated
in the late 18^th century, before his neck met the business end of a
guillotine, that water was only nourishment for the plants, not its source.  Lavoisier
was the first to describe plant and animal respiration, and his work with oxygen,
respiration and combustion became the foundation of modern chemistry, and was
one of Kuhn’s examples of revolutionary, paradigm-founding work.  Religious philosophy
was also involved in the spontaneous-generation debate, as life coming from random
processes, by mere “chance,” was directly opposed to the day’s theology.  In the
late 17^th century, the pre-existence of souls and the seeds of life
were popular ideas.  William Harvey wrote Generation
of Animals, and was concerned with sexual reproduction, but he was rather
neutral about the ultimate spontaneity of life.  The issue was a chicken-or-egg
argument, with the egg position prevailing at times. 

By
the end of the 18^th century, spontaneous-generation theory was again
in vogue.  Its rehabilitation was mainly due to evidence and theory involving
parasitic worms.  Largely because the parasitic life cycle had yet to be understood,
the prevailing theory was that parasitic worms must spontaneously manifest within
the host organism.  In the 19^th century’s early decades, spontaneous
generation was largely accepted, and there were different schools of thought. 
Germany, led by its parasitologists, accepted spontaneous generation.  In France
it was also largely accepted.  In Britain during the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, there was open hostility to the notion, as it was “atheistic” and “contrary
to an unerring law of nature.”[70] 

Beginning around 1830, spontaneous-generation theory
was subject to challenges in France and Germany.  Experiments were showing that
the organisms associated with decay were not spontaneously generated, and chemical
and biological theories vied for supremacy. 

During
1835-36, the Frenchman Charles Cagniard-Latour studied beer yeast and determined
that fermentation was the result of the yeast’s biological processes.  He concluded
that yeast was a living organism.  His conception of fermentation was original,
and was confirmed at about the same time and taken further by Theodor Schwann. 
Schwann, a German, is today considered the father of histology, the study of plant
and animal tissues.  Schwann investigated cellular structure, putrefaction and
fermentation, and concluded that yeast was a living fungus.  He also demonstrated
that vacuum-sealed boiled meat did not rot or produce the microscopic organisms
associated with rotting.  With Cagniard-Latour and Schwann’s work, the notion
of fermentation as a purely chemical process was challenged.  There were counterattacks
to that idea, most prominently from the German chemist Justus von Liebig.  Liebig
refused to look through microscopes.  He did not subscribe to spontaneous-generation
theory, but also saw fermentation as a purely chemical process, with no life involved. 
During the 1840s and 1850s, there was a plethora of confused theories about fermentation
and spontaneous generation.  

The Whigs were a British political party, and what was called ”Whig
history” was writing history as a tale of progress, a linear story beginning in
a primitive past to climax with humanity’s crowning achievement: modern Western
civilization.[71]  About thirty years ago, John
Farley took a sabbatical from his teaching position at Harvard.  His sabbatical
produced The Spontaneous Generation Controversy, published in 1974.  Farley
partly wrote his book because many episodes in science history were still written
in Whiggish terms.[72]  Farley thought that the textbook treatment of
the spontaneous-generation controversy was a “paradigmatic” case of Whig history
in science.  His book sought to help curtail spontaneous generation’s Whiggish
treatment, particularly in how its major figure, Louis Pasteur, has been seen
by history.  The standard histories of the spontaneous-generation issue have it
slowly discredited by scientific experiments until Pasteur came along and ended
the controversy for all time with his “brilliant” experiments, winning a public
contest to resolve the issue.  Pasteur will be a focus of this medical essay,
not because of his unique virtue, but because his triumph may have placed modern
biology and medicine on a false foundation. 

In
the 1850s, the spontaneous-generation controversy was contested in three areas. 
One dealt with parasites, another was the area of fermentation, and the third
was an overarching theory that largely ended the controversy in the scientific
community, not in the 1850s, but in the 20^th century.  The new overarching
theory was Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which exploded onto the scene
with the Origin of the Species, published in 1859.  Darwin was influenced
by the gradualist theory of geology produced by fellow British citizen Charles
Lyell (as contrasted with catastrophic theory)
and the theories of the British economist Thomas Malthus,
which posited that humanity would always be struggling to survive because of its
uncontrolled breeding.  Darwin’s work would bring Britain back to the spontaneous-generation
issue because the logical outcome of evolutionary theory was that life somehow
came into being by a gradual evolution from non-living matter.  That theory would
not be more fully worked out until the 20^th century, however. 

In the early 1850s Western scientists, largely German, discovered
the life cycles of parasitic worms.  The pleomorphic (it means “changing shape,”
the way a caterpillar and butterfly are the same species, but in different “morphic”
stages) properties of parasitic worms were not discovered until the 1850s.  That
discovery was a severe blow to spontaneous-generation theory.  Similar to Semmelweis
in Vienna, Rudolf Virchow lost his job in Berlin because of his revolutionary
activities in the late 1840s.  Virchow performed extensive work with parasitic
worms in the 1850s, which further justified his belief that spontaneous generation
was an invalid theory.  In 1858 Virchow published his Cellular Pathology,
which theorized that the cell was the smallest unit of life.  Where Schwann theorized
that cells could “crystallize” from a disorganized “mother” medium, Virchow firmly
stated that cells only arise from the division of existing cells.  Cells have
largely been seen ever since by orthodox science as the elementary unit of life,
although it somehow evolved from protoplasm (today called cytoplasm).  Virchow
theorized that the health of an organism was dependent on the health of its cells. 
Today’s study of healthy and diseased cells, such as Pap smears and biopsies,
grew from his work. 

Darwin’s evolutionary theory
and the findings in parasitology created more debate about spontaneous generation. 
The logical conclusion of evolutionary theory would demand an abiogenetic (life
coming from inanimate material) explanation of the ultimate source of life, although
parasite research discovered that they do not spontaneously form within host organisms. 
In the 1860s, both Germany and England grappled with the issue of spontaneous
generation, generally agreeing with it.  As Farley notes, their stance may seem
at odds with the textbook story of Pasteur’s work sounding the death knell to
spontaneous-generation theory in the 1860s.  Pasteur battled for many years against
the spontaneous-generation theorists after his work supposedly gave spontaneous-generation
theory its fatal blow. 

A
brief summary of Louis Pasteur’s life is in order.  Born in 1822 in a French village
to a tanner who served in Napoleon’s army, Pasteur came from humble roots.  A
morally rigid young man, Pasteur did well in school and had artistic talent. 
He took the academic route, going to school in Paris.  He had some major academic
failures early in his collegiate career, but through extra effort was able to
get into college and eventually earn his doctorate.  As with the men who discovered
anesthesia, Pasteur was consumed with ambition to become rich and famous.  In
1844, Pasteur the chemistry student performed his first experiment, isolating
phosphorous from cattle bones.  It was successful, and Pasteur advertised his
feat by putting a big blue label on the flask that held his result.[73] 

In
1848, Pasteur was working in crystallography, a subdiscipline of geology.  During
1848, revolution gripped Paris, and Pasteur left his laboratory for a few moments
to show some of his patriotism (he must be categorized as a political conservative). 
If he lived in the United States today, he would probably be a George
Bush supporter, or perhaps lean even further to the right.  In
1848, Pasteur made his first discovery, and it was a worthy one.  Solutions of
dissolved substances could evidence optical activity, which meant that if polarized
light were shined through it, the light would become rotated from its original
orientation when it came out the other side.  French physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot
discovered the phenomenon in 1815.  Nobody knew why some substances rotated light. 
Pasteur discovered why in 1848.  He was making crystals of sodium ammonium tartrate,
which is not an optically active solution.  As the crystals formed in solution,
Pasteur noticed that some crystals were mirror images of each other.  He picked
them out by using tweezers, and separated them into two piles.  He then made solutions
of them.  One solution rotated light to the right, and one to the left.  It was
a major discovery, and Pasteur immediately rushed out and dragged a physics instructor
who was passing by into his laboratory, and explained his discovery to him.  Pasteur
would later theorize that the rotation of the light was due to the molecule’s
structure.  He was correct. 

My organic chemistry
textbook gave Pasteur high praise for his finding.[74]  Pasteur’s discovery
had profound implications for the life sciences.  It turns out that stereoisomers
(molecules that are identical except for being mirror images of each other) are
one of life’s mysteries that remain unresolved.  Optically active substances only
come from living organisms.  They use one version of a substance, but will not
use its mirror image, because of the way it fits with the other molecules.  To
imagine the situation, try shaking a person’s left hand with your right hand. 
Nobody can really shake hands that way.  Try right hand to right hand, and it
works. 

How living organisms came to incorporate
chiral (right and left handed) molecules into their chemistry is a mystery to
evolutionary theorists today.  Nevertheless, optically active solutions are only
made from living organisms (or, as in Pasteur’s fortunate case, he was able to
pick out the right handed and left handed crystals).  Solutions derived from chiral
molecules not produced by life processes will have equal distributions of right-handed
and left-handed molecules, making the solutions optically inactive.  Pasteur correctly
theorized that optical activity was related to life processes.  He successfully
repeated the experiment for the skeptical, elderly Biot, and gained an academic
patron. 

Unable to land a suitable position in
Paris upon completing his doctoral studies, in January 1849 Pasteur moved to Strasbourg
to take a position as a chemistry teacher.  Within three weeks of his arrival,
Pasteur proposed to marry the college rector’s daughter, a move that may have
reflected his ambition more than his ardor.[75]  The college head was cautious, but Pasteur was
persistent and married the woman in May of that year.  Pasteur worked hard in
his laboratory with his crystals, and an insight into his motivation may be reflected
in an incident early in his marriage.  He told his wife, who scolded him about
his long hours in the laboratory, that he would make it up to her by “lead(ing)
her to fame.”[76] 
His wife anticipated that fame and the benefits it brought, writing to Louis’
father one day that, “Louis always worries a little too much about his experiments. 
You know that those he is planning for this year will give us, if they succeed,
a Newton or Galileo.”[77] 

Pasteur
is a controversial figure.  During the 1990s, Gerald Geison, a history professor
at Princeton, spent a year reading Pasteur’s experimental notebooks.  In 1995
he published The Private Science of Louis Pasteur.  In the final analysis,
Geison respected Pasteur’s contributions to science and medicine, but he found
a disparity between Pasteur the public scientist and Pasteur the experimenter. 
Geison’s book created an uproar in France, and he received plenty of scorn.  One
irony of Geison’s work is that Pasteur tried to ensure that his laboratory notes
were never made public, partly because a row erupted over the posthumous publication
of Claude Bernard’s notes.  Bernard, Pasteur’s friend, was shown to subscribe
to a more chemical theory of fermentation.  Pasteur published a devastating critique
of Bernard’s notes, and Pasteur then made his family promise to never make his
notebooks public, a promise that his grandson eventually betrayed. 

Geison
presents several events where the public and private science of Pasteur were at
odds, the first of which was Pasteur’s discovery of chirality.  Pasteur made public
presentations about his discovery of crystal chirality, and Geison shows that
they were highly abbreviated versions that were in part self-serving.  Geison’s
central figure of Pasteur’s presentation of his discovery is Auguste Laurent. 
Laurent was a major figure in the early days of crystallography, and Pasteur studied
under his tutelage.  Pasteur changed the subject of his doctoral chemistry thesis
at Laurent’s suggestion, which set him on his path of discovery. 

By
analyzing Pasteur’s notes, Geison could find little evidence in Pasteur’s early
work that suggested how he came upon his discovery of chirality.  Pasteur was
treading down paths that Laurent and others had blazed for him.   He was dealing
with complicated issues regarding crystal formation, and he was not focused on
the optical activity of crystals for most of his doctoral work.  He was researching
anomalies that arose from Laurent’s work.  Pasteur’s discovery was unexpected,
and his laboratory notes do not show how he stumbled onto it.  It is a mystery. 
Nevertheless, nobody has suggested that Pasteur’s discovery was not his own. 
However, when it came time to present his findings, Pasteur wrote Laurent completely
out of the picture.  His wallpapering over Laurent not only happened during his
future talks about his discovery, but Pasteur began minimizing Laurent’s contributions
to his work in the early drafts of his papers.[78] 
By the time Pasteur published the first major paper about his discovery, Laurent’s
contributions had been completely eliminated.  Pasteur went further than that,
making clear his low opinion of Laurent’s work in private correspondence with
one of Laurent’s chief rivals, Jean-Baptiste Dumas. 

Geison
speculates that Pasteur’s disavowal of Laurent likely had much to do with his
maneuvering in the day’s fierce political climate.  Laurent was a political radical. 
Jean-Baptiste Dumas was Laurent’s rival in matters of molecular theory, and Dumas
was the epitome of the establishment scientist, holding high positions in France’s
academic establishment, eventually parlaying his activities into being named a
senator by Napoleon III, the autocrat of France, a man who named himself emperor,
just as his uncle did.[79] 

Pasteur sought
the fame and prosperity that he promised his wife.  When a promised medal from
Dumas did not arrive quickly enough for his liking, Pasteur complained.[80]  While it would be a mistake to
say that Pasteur did not have friends, he was not a particularly likeable fellow. 
In interviews and speeches, Geison stated that Pasteur “was by no means always
humble, selfless, ethically superior…Quite the opposite.”  Geison found Pasteur’s
“behavior and conduct in general unlikable through much of his career.”[81]  

Pasteur cultivated patronage and fame while he worked
with crystals.   His theory of the relationship between chirality and life led
him into the spontaneous-generation controversy.  Pasteur gained a prestigious
appointment to the University of Lille in 1854, and became involved with fermentation
in 1856 due to his position as a chemistry instructor and the industrial problems
of the local beet sugar industry. 

A few years
earlier, parasite research had shown that intestinal worms do not spontaneously
manifest.  Regarding the issue of intestinal worms, an unfortunate dynamic was
evident in the practice of science.  The French Academy of Sciences held contests
to decide the truth of scientific matters.  In 1852 it offered a prize for the
best explanation of how intestinal worms are transmitted.  The winner, P.J. van
Beneden, held a powerful university position in Belgium, and John Farley thinks
that van Beneden’s political connections, more than his scientific efforts, may
have won him his prize.  In addition, van Beneden made claims of priority of discovery
that were obviously false, the true credit due to German scientists.[82]  When scientific
truth is decided by contest, objectivity can easily go flying out the window. 
The practice continues today and further underscores Kuhn’s point that paradigms
prevail because scientists believe in them, not because they are more accurate
than other paradigms. 

With discoveries in parasitology
disproving the notion that parasitic worms were generated spontaneously, fermentation
was the last great, unresolved area of contest.  Pasteur was one of many scientists
investigating the area, and Pasteur had about zero training in biology.  He originally
subscribed to the notion of spontaneous generation, those theorists called sponteparists. 

According to the official stories, Pasteur quickly discovered
that yeast was alive, and he published his first results in 1857.  In his 1857
writings, Pasteur described the yeast and its associated fermentation products
as taking “birth spontaneously…every time that the conditions are favorable.”[83] 
While Pasteur theorized that the yeast was alive, he also thought the yeast had
spontaneously generated, reflecting his early sponteparist position.  Pasteur’s
position was far from original.  There was a strong minority position that yeast
was alive, and Pasteur’s position was merely a rehash of Cagniard-Latour’s work
a generation earlier.  Although Pasteur campaigned heavily to be admitted to the
French Academy of Sciences in 1857, he failed.  His residency in Lille weighed
against him.  Paris was the center of French academic life, and Pasteur knew that
he would not realize his ambitions in the relative hinterland of Lille.  He received
a promotion and moved to Paris in 1857.  In the classroom, Pasteur was notoriously
unpopular with his students and academic colleagues.  He was a humorless martinet,
running the classroom as if it were a boot camp.[84] 

As late as 1860, Pasteur was describing yeast and the
products of fermentation as spontaneously produced.  In 1862 he finally gained
admittance to the French Academy of Sciences, in its mineralogy section.  In all
the accounts of Pasteur’s career I have read, he clearly was a showman and self-promoter. 
Around 1860, Pasteur began theorizing that there were germs in the air, and that
they were responsible for fermentation.  In late 1860, he performed a theatrical
experiment where he traveled across France and into the high Alps, sampling the
air, his experiment proving that germs exist in the air.  The history books portray
the issue as one in which Pasteur had a conflict with Felix-Archimède Pouchet,
who had a theory of heterogenesis, as opposed to abiogenesis.  Heterogenetic theory
states that life arose from life or organic matter, and abiogenetic theory avers
that life ultimately came from non-living substances.  The distinction was vitally
important in the debate on spontaneous generation. 

In
France, spontaneous-generation theory was unpopular by the time Pasteur became
embroiled in it, and Pasteur was considered to have only delivered spontaneous-generation
theory’s deathblow.  The French Academy of Sciences held contests on the issue,
in 1862 and 1864.  As Farley pointed out, both the 1862 and 1864 juries were composed
of men hostile to spontaneous generation.  The 1864 jury was even more biased
than the 1862 jury, with Pasteur patrons Dumas and Antoine Balard presiding. 
History books have told of Pasteur’s triumph, but Farley’s account portrays them
as shamelessly rigged.[85] 

Before the 1864 jury convened,
Pasteur gave a public speech about his findings and the mortal blow it gave to
spontaneous-generation theory.  It was given at the Sorbonne, and was attended
by the Parisian literati, including Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, and Princess
Mathilde.  It was an educated audience, but not really a scientific one.  Pasteur
was embarking on his career as a popularizer.  Pasteur gave a brief account of
the controversy, as well as its religious and philosophical implications.  Then
he delivered his coupe de grâce, announcing that his experimental findings had
shown that when he was able to keep airborne organisms from touching a nutrient-rich
medium, no life was seen to take place, because, “I have kept away from it the
germs that are floating in the air, I have kept it away from life, for life is
the germ, and the germ is life.”[86] 
The largely lay audience greeted his pronouncement with thunderous applause. 
Pasteur’s reputation was thereby made.  He became the savant of germs in the air. 
In Pasteur’s work at the time, he failed to even mention the role of parasitic
worms in the controversy, and he regularly assailed rival scientists.  He became
famous for his thunderous orations at meetings of the French Academy of Sciences. 

Even sympathetic historians and biographers admit that
Pasteur’s fame was due in no small part to his efforts at self-promotion and his
rhetorical talent.  In 1863, soon after his election to the French Academy of
Sciences, Pasteur was introduced to Napoleon III, and he told Napoleon of his
ambition to understand and cure disease.  Pasteur was realizing his ambition,
and was subsequently seen hobnobbing regularly with French royalty, Pasteur “always
being receptive to flattery from high places…”[87] 
While exhibiting artistic talent in his youth, Pasteur was aghast at innovation
in art, and consistently supported the old school, being highly contemptuous of
Manet and the Impressionists. 

With
imperial patronage under his belt and his avowal to cure disease (even though
he still had no medical or biological training), Pasteur was asked to look into
diseases that were plaguing French industries.  Pasteur’s germs-in-the-air philosophy
led to the germ theory of disease.  In 1863, Pasteur was asked to look into a
disease that was harming French grapes and their wine industry, and in 1865, he
was commissioned to look into a disease that was devastating silkworms and the
French silk industry.  The history books give Pasteur full credit for resolving
those issues and saving those industries, to later take on such diseases as anthrax
and rabies.  For his entire career, Pasteur battled his rivals and critics.  Even
his friends were not immune, as with his posthumous attack on Bernard’s notes. 

Pasteur’s germ theory led to
introducing those germs to people as a way of preventing disease, hence his anthrax
and rabies vaccines.  Geison presented cases where Pasteur “cooked” his data,
getting the data to conform to his theories.  In dealing with his anthrax work,
Geison crosses the line and accuses Pasteur of outright fraud, telling his readers
that, “Pasteur deliberately deceived the public and scientific community about
the nature of the vaccine actually used…” in his famous demonstration of his anthrax
vaccine in 1881.[88]  Pasteur misrepresented how his
vaccine was prepared, apparently to triumph over his rival Jean-Joseph Henri Toussaint
over the anthrax vaccine.  Pasteur’s public victory over the anthrax issue appears
to have been the final blow for Toussaint, who lost his mind the next year and
never recovered.  Geison notes that one must consider the financial considerations
that may have prompted Pasteur’s deception.  Pasteur soon began building a financial
empire on his work, and by the mid-1880s his laboratory earned a 130,000-franc
profit from anthrax-vaccine sales.[89] 

Pasteur
ventured into outright human experimentation, using his rabies treatment on humans
before he had used it on animals.[90] 
His private notebooks yielded that finding, but it comes as no surprise to those
who have read a letter that Pasteur wrote to the emperor of Brazil.  In 1884,
Pasteur wrote that people condemned to death should become subjects of human experiments,
given the option on the eve of their planned executions.  The choice presented
would be execution or becoming subjects for rabies vaccine testing, injecting
them with rabies and seeing if the vaccine would cure them.  Pasteur predicted
that the condemned would all consent to becoming experimental subjects, as a “person
condemned to death only fears death.”[91] 
Pasteur performed his experiments on his patients after he wrote his letter to
the Brazilian emperor.  Patrice Debré, who authored a sympathetic biography of
Pasteur, wrote that one could not read Pasteur’s letter to the emperor without
thinking of the Nazi’s death-camp experiments.[92] 
Even one of Pasteur’s disciples said about Pasteur’s human rabies experiments,
“The scientist’s conscience smothered the conscience of the man.”[93] 

It
should be made clear that Geison, Debré, Rene Dubos, John Farley and others have
generally praised Pasteur’s contributions to science and medicine, even if their
work has removed some of the luster from Pasteur’s heroic journey.

Geison’s
book created quite a splash when published, as Pasteur is in science’s Pantheon
of the great, and a French national hero.  Not everybody agreed with Geison’s
assessment of Pasteur’s work, both public and private.  Hal Hellman wrote that
while Geison’s work was careful and not easily dismissed, it “does much to smudge
a shining image of a real medical hero.”[94]  Hellman felt that there were
few true “heroes” in science’s history, and he did not like to see Pasteur’s image
deconstructed. 

Unfortunately,
Farley’s work had little impact on the Whiggish history that first-year microbiology
students are taught.  All the microbiology books I obtained, written long after
Farley’s book was published, all told the same utilitarian fairy tale of Pasteur
and spontaneous generation.[95]  The spontaneous-generation
debate was not finally settled in scientific circles until Aleksandr Oparin and
the 1936 publication of his The Origin of Life on Earth.  Oparin was a
Russian biochemist whose work was influenced by the dialectical materialism of
Karl Marx and friends.  Marx’s influence went far beyond political-economic theory,
which may surprise most Americans, as Marx is a discredited, even demonized, figure
in the West.  Oparin theorized that the primordial soup of the young earth gave
rise to higher orders of molecular organization, leading eventually to an abiogenetic
origin of life.  The scientific community has embraced Oparin’s work as completing
the theory of how life arose on earth, and there the matter rests…for now.

Pasteur’s
legacy is enormous.  Today’s germ theory grew from his work.  Pasteurization wears
his name.  He pioneered vaccination.  Robert Lister based his carbolic-acid treatment
on Pasteur’s work, making surgery largely free of infection.  Pasteur industrialized
science, applying scientific findings to industry, and helped create the academic
institutions that feed industry with scientists.  Before Pasteur died, Pasteur
Institutes dotted France, becoming major institutions of science and medicine. 
René Dubos wrote a number of books about Pasteur, his work and legacy.  Under
a heading of “The Benefits of Precise Knowledge,” Dubos listed dozens of major
corporations that are primary beneficiaries of Pasteur’s legacy.  All the major
oil companies headed Dubos’ list, followed by food-processing, pharmaceutical
and biomedical companies.[96] 

This essay is not intended to assassinate Pasteur’s
character.  He was human, as with all of us.  Hellman noted that Geison’s critics
stated that his critique veered from purely scientific matters, taking Pasteur’s
legacy to task perhaps unfairly.  Hellman is convinced that Pasteur fudged his
data, but it was understandable given the circumstances.  This essay’s point is
that if he fudged the data, how accurate were his findings?  We go back to Kuhn
here.  Pasteur prevailed, but was he right?  Probably more than any other
single figure, Pasteur’s work founded the paradigm under which today’s medicine
operates.  Is our health better because of his work?  Was there another
paradigm that could have been adopted?  That is a major crux of this essay.  What
if Pasteur was wrong?  Not just a little wrong, but profoundly wrong, so wrong
that his legacy has killed far more people than it has helped?  Are microbiology
textbooks understandably expedient in telling the Whiggish tale of the germ theory’s
foundation, or do they march students off in the wrong direction on their first
day of class?

There is a large and impressive
body of evidence that suggests that the Pasteurian paradigm prevailed due to considerations
of money and power more than the accuracy of his science.  This essay will now
explore that allegation. 

 

A
Paradigm Lost?

In
the several biographies of Pasteur I have read through, as well as works such
as Farley’s, there is an obscure figure who receives little mention, and the only
place I saw his work dealt with at all was in Geison’s book.  While dealing with
the Pasteur myth, Geison spent a paragraph dealing with a book by Ethel Douglas
Hume titled Béchamp or Pasteur.  It was originally published in 1923. 
Geison felt that the book was plagued with a “ludicrous incomprehension” of the
true nature of Pasteur’s work and science.  Geison, while admitting that Pasteur
probably treated Béchamp poorly, did not feel that Pasteur plagiarized him.[97] 
Who was Béchamp, and what plagiarism was Pasteur accused of? 

]]> http://viajesdelmundo.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/med-01a/feed/ 0 viajesdelmundo http://viajesdelmundo.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/med-01/ http://viajesdelmundo.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/med-01/#comments Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:37:36 +0000 viajesdelmundo http://viajesdelmundo.wordpress.com/?p=26 ]]> The Medical Racket part 1.

The
Medical Racket

 

By
Wade Frazier

Disclaimer

Timeline
to 1491

Timeline
from 1492

Introduction    

Masculine, Feminine and “Modern”
Medicine

Lessons
in Reversing Heart Disease

Early
Western Medicine

The Beginnings of Today’s Medical
Establishment

Science, Medicine and Money in the
19^th Century

Investigating Life’s Mysteries

A
Paradigm Lost?

The
Developing American Medical Racket

The
Cancer Racket Begins

Royal
Rife and Morris Fishbein

The
“War on Quacks”

Béchamp’s
Professional Descendants

Pasteur’s
Germ Theory, Vaccines and Alternate Paradigms

The
March of the Lemmings

Why
the System Works the Way it Does

My
Early Experience with the Medical Racket

Modern
American “Justice”

Are
They Really That Blind?

Are
We Really That Free?

My
Personal Encounters with 714X

Footnotes

           

Disclaimer:
I am a layman, and do not give medical advice.  Please do not take my word, or
anybody else’s, regarding your health.  Take responsibility for your health, and
do not give it to “experts” or anybody else.  Your life is your life,
and giving the responsibility for your health to others is a dangerous path. 
Talk to your doctor, read this essay, research the areas presented here if you
feel inclined, but in the end, please make your own decisions.  Doctors only know
what they are taught, and if they are taught incorrectly, their advice can be
less than helpful, and their treatments can kill you.  Please do nothing simply
because an “expert” or other authority figure tells you to. 

Timeline

                                    

This
essay is overflowing with names, dates and events, and takes an iconoclastic look
at today’s medical establishment and how it came to be, while also arguing that
legitimate alternative paradigms exist, and far preferable to today’s.  Early
readers informed me that it could be an overwhelming amount of information to
digest, as well as emotionally trying.  This timeline is designed to make the
reading experience easier, so readers can refer to names, dates and events in
the larger scheme of this essay.  The early human data is controversial in many
quarters, and this timeline hews more toward today’s orthodox theories.  The early
population estimates, until the modern age, are probably within 25% of the actual
population, at least as far as orthodoxy is concerned.  The timeline is broken
into two pieces, to 1491, directly below, and from 1492 onward. 
There are far more links to this medical essay from the 1492
onward piece.  This timeline is an abbreviated version of the site
timeline. 

	This timeline relates to the rise of today’s Western/American medical establishment and its prevailing paradigm
Date	Event	Human Population Statistics
> 4 million BC	First erect protohumans appear in Africa, differentiating from their great ape cousins.	Human population = 0
> 2 million BC	Large-brained bipedal hominids, of the genus homo, appear in Africa.
< 2 million BC	Homo erectus begins migrating from Africa, and fire was first used as a tool.  The African ape diet was partly abandoned as fruit, blossoms, seeds and leaves were less available beyond the tropics, meaning more meat eating.	Human population <100,000
c. 400,000 BC	Fire consistently used.  First regular food processing practiced – cooking.	>100,000
c. 130,000 – 100,000 BC	First anatomically modern humans appear in Africa and migrate across Asia, eventually displacing other hominid species.
c.  40,000 BC	Advances in hunting skill and technology allow humans to hunt larger animals.  Boats invented.  Modern humans first appear in Europe and Australia.
c. 30,000 BC	Extinction of most large animals in Australia possibly caused by human over-hunting.  Humans probably first appear in North and South America.  Cave murals are first drawn, in European caves.  One of the earliest artistic works, and possibly a religious artifact, the Venus of Willendorf, is made in central Europe.  It, and many works like it, is evidence that goddess-based religion flourished from humanity’s earliest days.
c. 25,000 BC	Pottery first appears, in Europe.
c.  23,000 BC	Bow and arrow invented, probably in Europe.
c. 11,000 BC	Methods for processing and storing food appear in Fertile Crescent.
c. 10,000 BC	Extinction of most large mammals in the Americas, also possibly caused by human over-hunting, probably also influenced by climate changes.  Dogs are the first domestic animals, appearing in the Fertile Crescent region.
c. 8500 – 8000 BC	Hunter-gatherer lifestyle is increasingly unsustainable.  Domestication revolution begins in Fertile Crescent and the Americas.  Wheat, peas and olives domesticated in Fertile Crescent.  Squash and pumpkins first domesticated in Mesoamerica.	4 million
c. 7500 BC	Domestication revolution begins in east Asia.
c. 7000 BC	Sheep and goats begin domestication in Fertile Crescent region.
c. 6500 BC	First large human communities, such as Catal Huyuk, appear in present-day Turkey.  The clearing of forest to make farm fields, and the resultant puddles, led to the spread of malaria, probably originating in Africa.
c. 6000 BC	Cattle and pigs begin domestication in Fertile Crescent region.  Chicken and rice begin domestication in east Asia.
c. 5500 BC	Agricultural communities appear along the Nile river.
c. 5000 BC	Civilization begins forming in the Fertile Crescent.  Early societies are egalitarian.  The agricultural societies have goddess-based religions, while the pastoral, herd-tending societies develop male-based religions.  The mobile pastoral societies begin invading the sedentary agricultural societies.  Irrigation is first used in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and in Nile river valley.  Metallurgy first practiced near mountains of Eastern Europe.  Copper weapons developed by herder societies of steppe regions.  People of Greece and the southern Balkans adopt agricultural practices.	5 million
c. 4500 BC	First large religious facilities built at site of today’s Iraq.  Stratification of early society begins, with elites – priest class, craftsmen, rulers and probably the first medical doctors.
c. 4000 BC	Horse domesticated in steppe region north of Black Sea.  Llama and Alpaca domesticated in South America.  Camel first domesticated near Fertile Crescent.  Invasions from steppe regions wash across Europe, Fertile Crescent and Middle East.  Warfare practiced on large scale.
c. 3500 BC	Migrating farmers from Fertile Crescent settle Indus valley in present day Pakistan.  Bronze age begins in Fertile Crescent, and plow agriculture begins there.  Soil salination begins affecting Mesopotamian agriculture, and salt resistant barley is raised in place of wheat, comprising half of southern Mesopotamian grain production.  Siltation of river water from upstream deforestation also contributes to environmental degradation.  The wheel is invented in Mesopotamia.  By this time, corn, potatoes, manioc, beans and turkeys are domesticated in the Americas.
c. 3000 BC	Sumeria becomes the world’s first literate society.  History begins.  State bureaucracy and military establishment are developed.  The earth-based Mother Goddess begins being replaced by thunderous, male, sky gods in Middle Eastern mythology.	14 million
c. 2600 BC	Imhotep is credited with building the world’s first large stone building, a step pyramid in Egypt.  Imhotep was also a physician.  He was later deified, and was probably the model for the Greek god of medicine, Asclepius.
c. 2400 BC	Crop yields continue declining in Sumerian fields.  Wheat yields decline by 42% between 2400 and 2100 BC.
c. 2100 BC	Ur abandons wheat cultivation.  Wheat comprises only 2% of Sumerian crops.
c. 2000 BC	Great migration wave of pastoral societies from steppe regions (generally between the Caspian and Black Seas) into the Fertile Crescent, India and Europe.  Third Dynasty of Ur collapses.  Violent, male, sky-god religion accompanies the invaders.  Feminine, earth-based religion and mythology in the Fertile Crescent, Mediterranean region and Europe are eventually overthrown by the invaders, replaced with male, sky-god religions.  Helen of Troy becomes a famous female healer and mythological figure, but female healers begin disappearing from medicine at this time.  Intense deforestation of the region from Morocco to Afghanistan commences.  Today, only about 10% of that forest remains; much has turned to desert.
c. 1900 BC	Indus valley society collapses.  Declining food production due to soil salination probably led to population decline and internal collapse, combined with foreign invasion.
c. 1700 BC	Wheat yields in Sumeria decline by 65% since 2400 BC.  Fields turn white from salt.  Sumer declines as a power, and the center of Mesopotamian civilization shifts north.
c. 1500 BC	A four hundred year period of chaos and warfare begins to sweep Europe, the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean region.  The violent, male sky-gods come to dominate religion, including one named Jehovah.	38 million
c. 1400 BC	Iron first smelted by Hittite civilization in present-day Turkey.  Agriculture begins in Japan.
c. 1200 BC	Iron made into weaponry.  Iron weapons rapidly replace bronze and become common throughout Europe, the Fertile Crescent, Egypt and elsewhere.  The feminine-friendly Minoan civilization on Crete collapses, as does Mycenaean civilization.
c. 1000 BC	Agriculture collapses in central Mesopotamia due to soil salination.  In 1990, Iraq imported 70% of its food.  The anti-feminine culture of ancient Greece develops, known as Greece’s “dark age.”  Women are gradually excluded from public life.  Although male gods dominated Greek mythology, women were also present, if subservient.	50 million
c. 900 BC	Asclepius lives at this time, and eventually became “sainted” in Greek culture and became the Greek god of healing during its classical period.  The mythological Asclepius was the son of Apollo, who was the son of Zeus.  Hygeia and Panacea were Asclepius’ daughters.
c. 700 BC	A village that began with shepherd’s huts, eventually known as Rome, is growing.
c. 650 BC	Expanding Greek settlements begin causing noticeable environmental degradation.
590 BC	Solon argues against agriculture on steep slopes in Greece because of rapid erosion.
560 BC	Peisistratus becomes tyrant of Athens, and pays bounty for farmers to plant olive trees, as they can survive on the badly eroded land, and put down roots to penetrate the exposed rock.
c. 500 BC	Celts begin invading the British Isles, absorbing the Iberians.  Women enter the healing profession in Danish Celtic culture.  Pythagoras, the world’s first mathematician and the West’s first vegetarian, dies.  His followers taught that the earth orbited the sun.  Etruscan civilization is at its peak influence, to eventually fall to neighboring states.
432 BC	Peak of the Greek classic period.  Hippocrates, Socrates, Thucydides and Aristophanes are alive.  During Peloponnesian War (begun in 431 BC), war-crowded Athens is afflicted with a plague (probably smallpox or typhus) in 430 that lasts three years, killing about a third of the population and leading to Athens’ decline.
c. 400 BC	Centuries of Greek deforestation and agricultural practices devastate the environment and soils, remarked upon by Plato and other observers.  The degraded environment led to falling crop yields and Greece’s decline, as had been happening to other empires for thousands of years.  Rome begins rising as a power, eventually defeating the Etruscans of today’s northern Italy, and incorporate Etruria’s cultural and technical achievements.  By the time of Jesus, Etruscan culture was almost entirely absorbed into Roman culture.
334 BC	Alexander the Great of Macedonia conquers Persia and tries uniting East and West.  The short-lived Macedonian Empire helps pave the way for the Roman Empire.  Alexander supposedly said that he “died by the help of too many physicians.”
264 BC	After subduing Italy, Rome engages in its first war against Carthage.  Italy and Sicily are rapidly deforested to meet Rome’s needs.
202 BC	Rome defeats the forces of Carthaginian general Hannibal, ending the second Punic War.
197 BC	Rome invades Greece and conquers them.  Rome would incorporate much of Greek culture into its own, borrowing its gods and technology, although denigration of Greek physicians and medicine was typical.
146 BC	Greek resistance to Roman rule leads to the complete destruction of Corinth and the sale of its inhabitants into slavery.  That same year, Rome does the same to Carthage.  The Roman Republic begins expanding across Europe, northern Africa and the Middle East.
58 BC	Rome begins handing out free food.  Eventually, hundred of thousands of Rome’s citizens received free food for political reasons.  Intensive agricultural exploitation of imperial lands are undertaken to feed the empire.  Places such as today’s Libya are forced to become farms for Rome, with the agricultural practices eventually turning Libya into the desert nation it is today.
1 AD	Jesus is alive.  Much of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and surrounding regions are deforested by Rome, eventually turning it into desert.	World population: 170 million.
C. 30 AD	Roman writer Celsus translates works of Hippocrates, writes a mammoth series of books, and the eight devoted to medicine have survived.	Roman Empire’s population: 50 million
66 AD	First Jewish revolt against Roman rule.  Rome responds with typical brutality, the revolt ending with the mass suicide at Masada in 73 AD.  Jews begin their dispersal from Palestine.
132 AD	Jews revolt against Roman rule again.  Rome responds in standard fashion, completely destroying the Jewish state in 135 AD and laying waste to the entire region.  Hundreds of thousands of Jews die, the survivors sold into slavery, and dispersed across the Roman Empire and beyond.
165 AD	The Antonine plague, probably smallpox, sweeps through the Roman Empire, brought back by returning soldiers from Syria.  It rages for 15 years, killing about five million people, or about a quarter to a third of all of those exposed to the disease, including Emperor Marcus Aurelius in 180, as it did his predecessor in 169.
c. 169 AD	Marcus Aurelius appoints Galen to be personal physician to his heir, Commodus.  Galen writes prodigiously, his work guiding Western medicine until the 1500s.
c. 200 AD		200 million
251 AD	An epidemic again sweeps through the Roman Empire until 270, killing 5000 of Rome’s citizens each day during the epidemic’s peak, including the Emperor Claudius in 270.  Rome was forced by the population loss to recruit barbarian troops.  The first mass conversions to Christianity were apparently a consequence of the epidemic.
476 AD	Western Roman Empire falls.  Germanic peoples invade the Roman Empire’s lands in Europe during the late 400s, including the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain.  The Eastern Roman Empire lasts nearly continually for the next 1000 years, with Constantinople (earlier named Byzantium and later Istanbul) as its capital city.  Europe, however, fell into its Dark Ages.  Ancient Greek texts were burned as pagan, including Hippocrates’ works.  The Roman Catholic Church largely took over medicine, and Galen’s work became dogmatized by the Church.  That situation would dominate Western medicine for more than 1000 years.
541	First recorded instance of bubonic plague, beginning in Egypt and racing to Constantinople, where it killed off as many as 10,000 people per day and 40% of the population.  Epidemic diseases would periodically sweep Europe and Asia, with cites such as Rome suffering greatly.
562	32-year drought begins to afflict the Moche culture in South America.  El Niño cycles regularly affect South American civilization, and elaborate food production and storage systems are designed to cope with them, as well as other environmental challenges.  That region’s people become the world’s greatest agricultural experimenters.	250 million
711	Islamic armies invade the Iberian Peninsula.  Jews live under Moorish rule in Iberia, and it is their golden age in Europe, lasting for 300 years.  Learning was an Islamic ideal, and Islamic scholars kept the teachings of the ancient Greeks alive in the West.  Influential doctors such as Abu’l Qasim (936-1013) and Maimonides (1135-1204) came from Moorish Iberia.
C. 800	Mayan civilization begins its collapse.  It attained a peak population of several million, before its overtaxed environment failed to support the population.  Famine, war and disease accompanied the collapse of the Mayan population to perhaps a million before 1000 AD, similar to Fertile Crescent dynamics.  The forest recovers and covers the Mayan ruins.
c. 1050	Northern and central Europe, especially the Germanic lands, engage in great age of deforestation, making way for civilization, clearing about a third of the forest in a couple of centuries.  By 1900, about 25% of the forest remains.
1056	Ferdinand I, who proclaimed himself the Emperor of Spain, undertakes “Reconquest” of the Iberian peninsula.
1066	William the Conqueror leads the Norman invasion of Britain.
1096	Christian Europe makes its first united act: the first Crusade to Palestine.  The first wide-scaled Jew slaughters in Europe take place as a warm-up for the first Crusade, in France and Germany.  Jews would no longer be safe in Europe, and warfare would be the European way of life until World War II ended.
c. 1200	Polynesian people begin colonizing New Zealand.  The Islamic culture attains the world’s highest standard of living.
1244	Massacre at Montségur, the last stronghold of the Cathars.  The Catholic Church eliminates the greatest threat to its religious monopoly, until Martin Luther posts his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517.	360 million
1314	Europe is gripped by major famine that lasts until 1317.
1346	The Black Death probably originated in China.  In 1347 it swept across Asia to Europe.  The death toll for Europe and Asia was about 50 million people by 1351, wiping out one quarter to one-third of Europe’s population, and periodically recurring for the next three centuries.  Epidemiology being what it was in those days, Jews were accused throughout Europe of causing the plague, and 50,000 Jews were consequently killed.  War and death imagery would become prevalent in European art.	Europe’s population declines from about 75 million to 50 million.  It would not regain 1345 levels until the 16th century.
c. 1385	Turkish ruler Tamerlane’s armies catapult plague victims into cities they are besieging, in perhaps history’s first instance of biological warfare.
Late 1300s	Beginning in northern Italy’s city-states, a multifaceted phenomenon begins which is now called the Renaissance.  Humanism takes root, which eventually undermines the Catholic Church’s influence.
1399	The Black Death makes a final visit to Europe, and then disappears for many years.
1400	After a century of unrelenting epidemics, warfare and calamity, Europe’s population is about half of what it had been in 1300.	400 million.
1418	Portugal begins colonizing the Madeira Islands, the Azores in 1427 and the Cape Verde Islands in 1450.  The prominent cash crop is sugar, which played to the biological predisposition of humans to sweet food, reflecting the distant ape past in Africa, when fruit comprised most of the diet.  Settlers to Madeiran island of Santo Porto introduce two rabbits, and soon they rapidly reproduce and denude the entire island.
1444	Portugal enters the African slave trade.
c. 1450	“Little Ice Age” begins, and runs for four centuries, until about 1850.
1453	Ottoman armies capture Constantinople, which puts an end to the Eastern Roman Empire, controls Europe’s trade route to the Orient, and inspires effort to find another European route.
1474	Paolo Toscanelli of Florence suggests to Prince Alfonso V of Portugal that the quickest way to the Indies (spice trade) is sailing across the Atlantic.  Toscanelli was wrong.  Christopher Columbus eventually obtains the letter from Toscanelli that makes the suggestion.
1479	Portugal cedes Canary Islands to Castile, and Queen Isabella I mounts their invasion.  The conquest of the Guanche was complete in 1496, and the Guanche became an extinct culture by 1600.
1488	Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias rounds the southern tip of Africa, and Portugal abandons the idea of reaching Asia by crossing the Atlantic Ocean.  Columbus, who made a living in the Portuguese slave trade, takes his plan to sail across the Atlantic Ocean to Castile, which the experts thought was an impossible plan because the distance to Asia would be too great.  Columbus had badly miscalculated the earth’s circumference.  His early attempts to convince the Castilian court fail.

                       

Timeline
from 1492 Onward

1492	The Spanish “Reconquest” of the Iberian peninsula ends in January with the conquest of Granada, the last city held by the Moors.  Jews are given the options of conversion, expulsion or death.  In April, Columbus finally gets authorization for his doomed plan to reach Asia via the Atlantic Ocean.  He stumbles into the New World in October, enslaving the first humans he meets.	World population: 470 million, at least half in East Asia and India.  Population in the Americas: 50 to 100 million (this site uses 80). Europe’s population: 70 to 80 million.  Taino population: 2 to 10 million. At least one million on Española (this site uses 2)
1496	The genocide of the Taino is well underway on Española.
1497	Vasco da Gama sails from Portugal to India around Africa; Arab traders cure his crew of scurvy in 1498, and he returns in 1499 with trade specimens, including valuable spices.
1511	Portuguese traders capture Malacca, in today’s Malaysia, establishing themselves in the spice trade.
1517	Martin Luther publishes his Ninety-Five Theses, which leads to the Protestant Reformation.
1518	First New World smallpox epidemic begins, wiping out most of the surviving Taino on Española, who were already only about 1% of their 1492 population.
1520	Smallpox epidemic that began on Española in 1518 comes across with the Cuban governor’s army, probably killing several million people in Mesoamerica.
1525	European epidemic sweeps through Incan Empire, kills emperor and ignites civil war.
1535	Native American medicine man cures Jacques Cartier’s crew of scurvy on Saint Lawrence River with evergreen foliage and tree bark tea, which was high in vitamin C.
1537	Ambroise Paré accidentally ends the practice of pouring boiling oil on battlefield wounds and initiates more gentle treatment.
1543	Nicolas Copernicus’ posthumously published work theorizes that the earth orbits the sun, re-establishing what Pythagoras thought 2000 years earlier.  Considered the first work of the scientific revolution.  Andreas Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis Fabrica is considered the first work of modern scientific medicine.  It challenges a thousand years of dogma based on Galen’s work.  The Catholic Church increases its efforts to ban books.	Taino population on Española: 200
1553	Michael Servetus publishes an accurate description of pulmonary circulation.  Escapes Spanish Inquisition to only be burned at the stake in Calvin’s Geneva for his heresies.
1559	Catholic Church publishes its index of banned books.  Index survives until the 1960s.  Tristán de Luna expedition goes where de Soto’s went, hoping to find rich lands to plunder as de Soto did, and finds the region depopulated from aftermath of de Soto expedition.
c. 1570	Hiawatha and Deganawidah form the Great Law of Peace and the Iroquois Confederation, which influences the creation of the U.S. Constitution.
1585	Walter Raleigh establishes the ill-fated Roanoke colony, to try growing tobacco for export.
1593	South Pacific islanders cure Richard Hawkins’ crew of scurvy with citrus fruit.
1599	Bubonic plague visits Spain, carrying off 10% of its population.  Spain ends the 16th century probably worse off than it began it.	Native population of the Americas: 8 million
1600	Giordano Bruno burned at the stake for his heresies, notably for stating that the earth orbits the sun.
1604	King James I publishes A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco, and tours England to warn of its dangers.
1610	Galileo Galilee publishes his discovery of Jupiter’s moons, using the newly invented telescope.
1614	Squanto is captured by John Smith’s men.
1618	Thirty Years’ War, Europe’s last great religious war, begins.
1619	Squanto returns as interpreter with English, and discovers that his entire tribe had been wiped out by European disease.  The Puritans would settle on that tribe’s land.
1620	Puritans land at Plymouth, and Squanto teaches them how to survive in the New World.  Squanto dies in 1622 of disease.
1628	William Harvey publishes his research on function of human heart.
1638	Three million pounds of tobacco per year are exported from present-day Virginia, reaching 17 million in 1672.  Caribbean sugar growing becomes a business on Barbados, the great period of New World sugar growing begins.
1650	By this time, the Dutch have taken the Asian spice trade from the Portuguese.
1668	Antoni van Leeuwenhoek invents the microscope.
1682	Frenchman La Salle explores Mississippi river, finds it deserted, depopulated by disease left by de Soto’s expedition.
1687	Isaac Newton’s Principia is published.
1750	The Enlightenment begins in France at about this time.
1754	James Lind’s experiments aboard HMS Salisbury prove that citrus fruit cures scurvy.
1763	Lord Jeffrey Amherst suggests deliberately introducing smallpox amongst the Native Americans who resisted the English invasion.  The subsequent epidemic kills more than 100,000 natives.
1769	James Cook visits New Zealand and claims it in the name of Great Britain.  The Maoris had eliminated about a third of New Zealand’s forests by that time, and large animals, such as the Moa, were about extinct.  In the first century after the European invasion, more than 75% of the Maori population dies off.  Similar population collapse accompanies the Europeans wherever they appear in the South pacific.  James Watt patents the modern steam engine.
1770	British exploitation of Bengal leads to a great famine that killed one-third of Bengal’s peasantry.  Famines always greatly increased wherever Europe had colonial dominance.
1776	American Revolution begins.  Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations.
1778	James Cook “discovers” the Hawaiian Islands.  His crew’s venereal disease rapidly spreads through the islands, quickly depopulating Hawaii.  The Hawaiian population possibly approaches one million inhabitants.  Within 100 years, fewer than 50,000 Hawaiians were alive.
1881	William Halsted begins his surgical career in the United States.
1786	Because of the American Revolution, England can no longer ship its criminals to North American penal colonies.  Australia is picked as the next English penal colony.  The population of the aborigines in southeastern region of Australia (site of the penal colony) declines by about 95% in 60 years.
1788	Britain claims Tasmania, and the 5000 aboriginal inhabitants are rendered extinct in only 40 years.
1789	French Revolution begins.
1793	Benjamin Rush begins era of “heroic” medicine in U.S. during yellow-fever epidemic.
1794	Antoine Laurent Lavoisier is beheaded in France.  His work with oxygen, combustion and respiration founds modern chemistry.
1795	260 years after Jacques Cartier’s crew is cured of scurvy, and more than one million preventable deaths later, the British navy begins issuing citrus juice to its sailors.
1796	Samuel Hahnemann first uses the term homeopathy to describe a new system of medicine that he was developing.  Edward Jenner performs first smallpox inoculation.
1825	Homeopathy comes to the United States.	Humanity passes 1 billion
1835	Charles Cagniard-Latour works with yeast, and theorizes that it is alive.  Theodor Schwann, the father of histology, confirms Cagniard-Latour’s work at about the same time and takes it further.
1839	Three million Americans use Samuel Thomson’s brand of medicine.
1844	American Institute of Homeopathy founded.  Anesthetic properties of nitrous oxide first used by American dentist Horace Wells.
1845	American Medical Association (AMA) founded.  Irish potato famine begins.
1847	Ignaz Semmelweis invents Western medicine’s first sterile practices, used in maternity wards.
1848	Louis Pasteur discovers molecular chirality, beginning his career.  Revolution sweeps Europe.  Marx presents his Communist Manifesto.
1854	Antoine Béchamp begins his Beacon Experiments.  German parasitologists have documented parasitic pleomorphic life cycles, ending the spontaneous-generation controversy regarding parasites.
1858	Rudolf Virchow publishes his Cellular Pathology.
1859	First American oil well drilled.  Charles Darwin publishes his Origin of the Species.
1861	American Civil War begins.  Calomel is the standard medicine for the troops.  Antiseptic surgery is not yet invented.  Pasteur tried taking credit for discovery of Béchamp.  Semmelweis publishes his great work on sanitary practices.
1863	John Rockefeller enters the oil industry and concentrates on taking over oil refining.
1864	Pasteur publicly takes credit for overturning spontaneous-generation theory.  The germ theory of disease follows from his work.  The AMA steps up its anti-abortion campaign.
1866	Béchamp calls the sub-cellular life forms that he discovered microzyma.
1870	Joseph Lister produces his first report of the success of sterile surgical procedures.
1876	El Niño-caused drought that lasts three years, combined with European export crop imperialism, devastates India, China and Brazil, causing as many as 30 million deaths from starvation and disease.  William W. Keen begins using Joseph Lister’s sterile surgical procedures at the St. Mary’s Hospital in Philadelphia.
1878	Yellow-fever epidemic begins in New Orleans.  People treated with homeopathy have less than half the death rate of the general population.  Congress is impressed.  One million American families use homeopathy.
1880	Homeopathy movement splits in United States, leading to its demise.  John Rockefeller’s empire controls 95% of U.S. oil refining.
1881	William Halsted begins his surgical career in the United States.
1884	New York Cancer Hospital opens.  Later named Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the world’s most influential cancer research organization.
1887	John Rockefeller begins rebuilding a Baptist seminary into the University of Chicago.
1896	Emil Grubbé invents X-Ray treatment of cancer.
1899	George Simmons hired by the AMA.  He soon takes it over.	1.6 billion
1910	Flexner Report is issued, and directs Carnegie and Rockefeller “philanthropic” funding of medical schools.
1913	Ludlow Massacre committed by Rockefeller strikebreakers.  Rockefeller founds American Cancer Society predecessor organization.  Morris Fishbein is recruited to the AMA by Simmons.
1914	Pasteur Institute confirms bacterial pleomorphism.
1924	Divorce scandal forces Simmons to step down at AMA.  Fishbein takes over.  He tries to buy out Hoxsey’s cancer treatment and begins persecuting Dinshah Ghadiali.
1927	John Rockefeller begins funding the Memorial Hospital, later named Sloan-Kettering.  Rockefeller’s Empire enters into its first cartel agreement with I.G. Farben.
1929	American Tobacco Company begins campaign to addict American women to tobacco.  Wall Street collapses later that year.
1930		2.0 billion
1931	The findings of Royal Rife’s microscopes begin generating great scientific interest, and Thomas Rivers of the Rockefeller Institute tries discouraging it.  Three independent studies conclude that the fluorine ion is responsible for tooth mottling.
1935	Under Fishbein’s guidance, Phillip Morris launches an ad campaign for its cigarettes, making a health claim to do so, quickly becoming the biggest U.S. cigarette seller.  JAMA’s pages are filled with cigarette ads for a generation.
1939	After hearing of miraculous success with Rife’s treatment, Fishbein tries buying into Rife’s company.  When that fails, the AMA wages lawsuit, destroying Rife’s company.  Nazi Germany is in midst of anti-smoking campaign led by Hitler, as well as beginning World War II.
1942	The FDA has Dr. William Koch thrown into jail.
1946	Dr. Max Gerson presents recovered cancer patients using his treatment to a U.S. Senate committee.
1947	Oscar Ewing, ALCOA’s lead counsel and the world’s largest fluoride polluter, heads government effort to fluoridate America’s water supplies.
1949	In the wake of Harry Hoxsey’s victory in court, Morris Fishbein is dumped from the AMA, ending his 25-year reign.  Fishbein goes to work for cigarette-maker Lorillard.
1950	Right after Fishbein’s fall, JAMA publishes its first report on the link between smoking and cancer.  ALCOA is selling its sodium fluoride refining waste to municipal water districts in the most profitable hazardous waste disposal program in history.
1952	With Fishbein’s well-paid help, Lorillard begins an ad blitz promoting its asbestos cigarette filter, using research that Fishbein helped design.
1953	Fitzgerald Report finds that organized medicine wiped out a dozen alternative cancer treatments, including Krebiozen and Hoxsey’s treatment.
1954	JAMA finally discontinues running cigarette ads, because the drug advertisers complained.
1957	Wilhelm Reich dies in a U.S. federal penitentiary.  His work was burned, in U.S. and Nazi Germany.
1960	John Crane thrown into prison for pursuing Rife’s work.	3.0 billion
1964	American Surgeon General releases report that makes smoking hazard clear.  The AMA and tobacco companies produce their own “research” that attempts to counter the Surgeon General’s report.  Gaston Naessens is run out of France.
1977	Sloan-Kettering rejects laetrile as a cancer treatment, although its famous chemotherapy researcher Kanematsu Sugiura found positive results.  It fires Ralph Moss for making that contradiction public.
1983	Dr. Ernst Krebs, the discoverer of laetrile, goes to jail.
1984		5.0 billion
1989	Gaston Naessens is put on trial.
1991	Jimmy Keller is kidnapped by U.S. Justice Department from Mexico.
1996	Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski is put on trial.
1998	Charles Pixley is released from prison.  His crime was trying to make 714X a legal import.  Jimmy Keller is put back into prison.
1999		6.0 billion
2001	714X treatment making news in the U.S.  Keller gets outs of prison again, has stroke.

                                   

Introduction

Thomas
Kuhn coined the modern definition of the word “paradigm” in The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962.  A paradigm, according to Kuhn,
is a conceptual model that explains a set of scientific observations, creating
a framework to fit the observations.  Paradigms are structures that scientists
use to order information, and are similar to what we call “worldviews.”  Kuhn
described how paradigms changed.  Scientists perform “normal science,” staying
within their paradigm as they perform experiments.  When observations occur that
fail to fit into their paradigm, those stray observations are often discarded
as experimental error, or the prevailing paradigm is patched up to account for
them.  When the prevailing paradigm becomes increasingly unable to explain the
strange observations piling up, eventually somebody would see that those stray
observations pointed to a different paradigm.  Kuhn presented several instances
of that happening, and the most famous was the paradigm shift that Einstein ushered
in. 

The oddity of the Michelson-Morley
experiment’s results – that the speed of light was independent of the speed of
the light’s source – was a classic instance of an anomalous result while pursuing
normal science.  Physicists wrestled with the meaning of the Michelson-Morley
experiment for a generation.  Then a young clerk in the Swiss patent office proposed
a theory that accounted for the experimental results, although Einstein said he
was only indirectly aware of them.  He proposed his relativity theory, and the
Newtonian paradigm was subsequently overturned by the Einsteinian paradigm, and
20^th century physics was born.  Einstein challenged Newton’s assumptions
of absolute time and absolute space, instead seeing them as relative.  Previous
assumptions were challenged and replaced, which overturned the paradigm.

Einstein
realized that his theories would fall by the wayside one day, stating that every
theory is eventually killed by a fact.  Einstein also realized the limitations
of scientific theories.  He wrote that a theory “determines what we can observe.”[1]  A paradigm can illuminate, but it can also blind.  The trick is keeping one’s
eyes and mind open, and not become captive to one’s point of view.  In science, unfortunately, scientists are rarely able to see beyond
the paradigm they were inculcated with.  Max Planck best put it when he wrote,

 

“a new scientific truth does not triumph
by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because
its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with
it.”[2] 

 

It
is no accident that the greatest theoretical breakthroughs in scientific history
were usually made by men less than thirty years of age, such as Newton, Einstein,
Heisenberg, Maxwell and Bohr.  They saw the old paradigms with fresh eyes, and
proposed new ones.  Even Einstein could become dogmatic, as late in his life,
as he “reproached” Heisenberg, saying that he surely could not believe that “God
plays at dice.”[3]

Kuhn
argued that scientists adopt new paradigms not because the new one is more accurate,
but because it becomes something they believe in.  Kuhn’s observations helped
ignite raging controversies about science, truth and reality.  Those debates will
not end anytime soon.  Today, a materialistic paradigm rules the scientific
establishment.  Everything is seen as a mechanism.  There is no role for consciousness
to play. 

Ironically, the very men whose
shoulders modern physics rides on – Einstein, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Bohr,
and others – did not subscribe to the scientific establishment’s materialism. 
They were all, to one degree or another, mystics.[4] 
That has not stopped the various “skeptical” societies from mounting holy wars against
anything not conforming to scientific materialism.  There are striking similarities
between the views of the scientific fundamentalists and the religious fundamentalists,
as their worldviews have little to do with the visions of their prophets, and
can be inversions of it.  The members of skeptical societies often operate from
a faith, a faith known today as scientism, which is the worship of science,
believing its methods to be the only valid path to knowledge.  Einstein wrote
that “cosmic religious feeling” motivated the greatest religious and scientific
heretics of history.[5]

Today,
paradigms are being challenged across the entire spectrum
of human thought.  Mark Woodhouse’s Paradigm Wars is a formidable introduction
and review of the current state of paradigm challenge and defense.  Woodhouse
discussed paradigm challenges in the areas of: environment, education, society,
patriarchy, economics, religion, personal identity, science, and extraterrestrials.[6]  The paradigms often center around dualities, such
as patriarchy/matriarchy, but there is also seen a third way that attempts to
integrate the polarities, such as Riane Eisler’s conception of gylany, which posits
a harmonious co-existence of male and female principles.[7] 
Dualities being examined these days include: male/female, fear/love, destroy/create,
objectivity/subjectivity, control/freedom, victim/creator, competition/cooperation
and materialism/spiritualism. 

One trap
can be falling into the either/or false dichotomy
regarding the dualities.  One can be for neither patriarchy nor matriarchy, but
gylany, which honors both genders.  During the Cold War, Americans were fed the
false dichotomy of choosing capitalism or communism, and falsely calling capitalism
the “free” system, and communism the one that imprisons people.  When the United
States overthrew the elected Marxist government of Chile (and many others
like it), the false dichotomy the United States purveyed of free/unfree about
capitalism/communism was laid bare.  Any attempt by the colonized peoples to shed Western domination was rubber-stamped “communism,” thus demonized, then subjected
to military and covert attack by the United States, with millions of people dying in the colonized world. 
Some dichotomies appear to have little middle ground, such as love/fear. 
Various paradigms have become entrenched, with great economic, political and sociological
consequences attending the adherence to paradigms, or challenging them.  Each
of the prevailing ideologies, whether it is capitalism,
nationalism, materialism or consumerism,
has its foot soldiers, defending the paradigm that puts food on their table. 

In medicine, there is a broad picture to see,
which has numerous facets, some of which will be presented in this essay. 

 

Masculine,
Feminine and “Modern” Medicine

As
Riane Eisler and others have made clear, two powers have been worshipped throughout
human history: the power to make life, and the power to take it.  Their correspondence
to female and male principles is obvious.  There is substantial evidence of goddess-based
religions in the past, and evidence that the male, sky-god Judeo-Christian religions
are ideological successors to a time when male-based religion wiped out female-based
religion.[8]  Although
feminists write about that issue at length, so did Joseph Campbell, the United
States’ greatest mythologist.[9] 
Campbell wrote that ancient mythology in west Asia (today’s Middle East, Fertile
Crescent region, etc.) evolved from female-dominated creation myths to male-dominated
creation myths.  It reflected the power struggles of the day, when herd-tending
warrior societies, with their violent, male, sky-god deities invaded and conquered
the agricultural societies with their feminine, earth-based, life-giving deities. 
The mythology eventually reflected who was in charge. 

A
prominent instance of the male-based corruption of feminine mythology was the
evolution of the snake in symbology.  Snakes were associated with women, healing
and the regeneration of life (related to how snakes shed their skin) in ancient
times.  The Adam and Eve story in the book of Genesis turned feminine mythology
upside down.  Instead of being the source of life, Eve and the serpent were relegated
to inferior, even malevolent, roles as they ruined the paradise deal that the
Jewish god dictated to humankind.[10] 
Even though such refashioning of ancient myths to favor men persists to this day,
the feminine symbolism persists in less obvious ways.  Asclepius was the Greek
god of medicine.  His staff was entwined with a serpent, and the serpent-entwined
caduceus is the symbol of today’s American Medical Association (AMA).  Among Asclepius’
offspring were Hygeia and Panacea, the goddesses of health and healing.  The word
hygiene derives from the same word that Hygeia does.  Hygeia represented
the principles of prevention, sanitation, nutrition and healthy living.  Hygeia
represented the gentle principles of feminine-oriented medicine.  They have largely
been denigrated or ignored by male-dominated medicine for thousands of years,
coming back into vogue only recently.  They are largely minimized in medical circles
even today, as there is no money in preventing disease.  The current paradigm
provides funding for treating diseases, not for preventing them.  “Cure” can be
sold by the pound, while prevention is only needed by the ounce, as Ben Franklin
observed. 

Below are some images related
to the evolution of the serpent in Western mythology and iconography. 

                       
Click
on image to enlarge

The West has engaged
in a war against women for thousands of years; women are history’s most consistently
oppressed group.  The power to give life is a decidedly feminine undertaking,
but in the war against women, men have dominated and have exalted the power to
take life as the ultimate power, hence our wars against each other, mother earth,
our bodies, etc.  Healing the human body is the province of the feminine principle,
but men have taken it over.  In a might-makes-right world, the mightiest rule. 

Historically, women have dispensed most health
care, but it was usually done for family members, and those women were not financially
compensated.  Even when saint-like figures such as Florence Nightingale brought
women into the modern healing profession, along with the principle of sanitation,
they initially had to work for free, and had to be completely subservient to the
male doctors.  In the standard, male-written histories of medicine, women are
so scarce that they stand out as remarkable when mentioned.[11] 
There are debates about how many women died in the witch hunts (likely several
tens of thousands, at least – and about 75% of all witch executions); how many
were healers and midwives is also a source of debate, but what is not debatable
is that when the Catholic Church’s ideological dominance eventually gave way to
the rise of Western science, the baton passed from one male-dominated establishment
to another.  When science rose in the West, generally considered to have begun
with Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, women were conspicuously
absent.  That was partly due to women often being forbidden formal education. 
Western religion and science were united in their misogyny.  The conquest-of-nature
attitude that still dominates Western thinking also reflected the denigration
of all things feminine. 

The witch-hunting
centuries nearly wiped out herbal medicine in Western Europe, even though Paracelsus,
the great Renaissance medical iconoclast, claimed that the best medicines he had
seen came from women healers.[12]  Medicine evolved from the gentle
medicine of women healers to the leeches, purgatives, bleedings, mercury and other
barbarities of male-based medicine.  Even men of the day knew that women’s medicine
worked vastly better than the male-based tortures that masqueraded as medicine,
but that did not stop the burning of “witches” and other suppressions
of women healers.  The archbishop of Saint Andrews summoned a woman healer to
cure him, which she did.  He then had her burned to death for practicing “witchcraft”
on him, partly to prevent having to pay her bill.[13]

Feminine
medicine operates from the principle that prevention is best, that well treated
bodies take care of themselves, being their own best medicine.  When the body
needs healing, feminine medicine is gentle.  Remedies such as herbs and nutrition
coax the body back to health. 

Masculine
medicine sees the body as a soldier on a battlefield.  Not gentle, masculine medicine
does not see the body as able to care for itself.  As in cowboy movies, it is
always riding to the rescue.  It is the body versus the hostile world, or even
against itself.  The body becomes a battlefield, needing the intervention of medical
violence.[14]  It is life-taking, instead of life-giving.  It
uses antibiotics to kill off “invading” microorganisms.  It violates
the body with knives.  It uses powerful drugs that violently manipulate the body’s
chemistry.  It does not give the body what it needs to heal itself.  It does not
trust the body’s wisdom, certain that it is clever and powerful enough to manipulate
the body into health.  It operates from the victim principle. 

In
the case of cancer and vascular disease, masculine medicine sees the body itself
as the enemy.  With cancer, parts of the body “turn traitor” and the
goal of masculine medicine is annihilation.  Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation
all operate under the paradigm of attacking the body, asserting that it is discerning
enough to kill the “bad guys” while sparing the “good guys.” 

The issue of masculine versus feminine medicine
is a conflict between paradigms.  That mentality can be seen throughout Western
Medicine, from childbirth interventions (and even before, as with amniocentesis)
until a patient’s deathbed. 

The masculine
medical paradigm has waged war specifically against women’s bodies.  Women used
to give birth in a squatting position, which is by far the most effective method. 
Louis XIV changed the practice from women squatting to them lying on their backs. 
It was done so he could have a good look at one of his mistresses giving birth. 
The birthing stools of the day did not afford him a clear and salacious view,
and he had the practice changed so he could peek from behind a curtain at the
festivities.  Giving birth on one’s back is much harder on the mother than letting
gravity help.  Fortunately, that practice is waning somewhat.  It has taken “medicine”
three centuries to begin undoing the damage of a perverse king. 

Changing
the childbirth position is the least of it.  Male, Western doctors devised fiendish
methods of “treating” women’s problems.  Clitoridectomy was used in
the nineteenth century, prescribed for maladies such as hysteria.  The Greek word
hysterikós meant womb, and is the root of the word hysteria, a decidedly
misogynistic word.  If a woman was insufficiently obedient to her husband, a diagnosis
of hysteria could be obtained, and a clitoridectomy was performed.  In the 1870s,
a London doctor specialized in performing clitoridectomies without obtaining informed
consent from his patients, which got him kicked out of the business, not for performing
the operation, but for doing them without consent, and also because he was a self-promoter. 
He simply moved to the lax regulatory atmosphere of the United States and continued
practicing his treatments.  Suspicion of the vile behavior of masturbation was
grounds for the operation.  If a woman was too orgasmic during sexual intercourse,
the operation was also the recommended “cure.”[15] 
Part of that practice’s justification was contraception, as the day’s theory stated
that if a woman did not attain orgasm, she could not conceive.  Male Western doctors
have never advocated castration or penisectomies for “curing” male maladies.

In
the 20^th century, lobotomy was one method of “curing” many
maladies, prominently used on women.  Hysterectomy and mastectomy have been very
“popular” over the past century, invented and performed almost exclusively
by male doctors.  They operate from the principle of “when in doubt, cut it out.” 
From foot binding in China, to Suttee in India, to hunting witches in Europe,
to clitoridectomy in Africa, to the “enlightened” practices of modern
medicine, the record is long and grim.[16]

In
America, Caesarean section “childbirth” is performed in about a quarter
of all births.  In Europe, where they did not wipe out all the midwives, the rate
is half of America’s, and in Japan, the rate is only 7%.  In profit-making hospitals,
the rate in America is more than a third, and some doctors warn that it will go
over 50% in the current legal climate, where the “when in doubt, cut it out”
philosophy guides hospital doctors.  It already is 50% in some hospitals, if the
woman is white with medical insurance.  As America’s Caesarian rate has gone up,
its infant mortality ranking among the world’s nations has correspondingly dropped. 
The Caesarian rate in the United States is more than three times Japan’s, and
its infant mortality rate is nearly twice as high, and is higher than that of
any nation in Western Europe. 

When
a Kansas insurance company began paying doctors the same amount for delivering
a child, whether the birth was Caesarean or not, Caesarean sections declined by
over half within one year.  In a hospital in Pithiviers, France, supervised for
many years by an enlightened male obstetrician, where they do not induce labor
or unduly interfere, the Caesarian rate is less than 7%, substantially less than
nearly any Western hospital.  At a home birth community in Tennessee known as
The Farm, the Caesarean rate was less than 2%.  The stress on the infant and mother
is enormously higher with Caesarean birth, as well as “complications”
that risk their lives.  Even with “normal” births, the episiotomy rate in U.S.
hospitals approaches 100%, where it is about 6% in Scandinavian hospitals.[17]  Episiotomy is a painful and dangerous
practice that causes severe complications with mothers, but in the rush to cut,
the practice is standard in American hospitals.  Midwifed births have a far lower
infant mortality rate than doctor-supervised hospital births.  Women report far
more satisfaction with the childbirth process if they can deliver it outside of
a hospital environment, particularly in America, where women are often seen as
little more than packages to be opened to remove the prize.  A mother’s complication
rate is many times higher with Caesarian section births than vaginal delivery,
and their death rate much higher.[18] 

There
have been some victories in the area of childbirth.  After the medical profession
nearly rendered them extinct, midwives have staged a comeback in America.  In
Washington State in the year 2000, House Bill 2031 was passed, and my medical
insurance company was forced to provide coverage for midwifed births. 

Western
medicine is a money machine.  America spends more than one trillion dollars a
year ($1.3 trillion in 2001) on health care.  A tiny fraction is spent on prevention,
and the prevention is worse than the disease in many instances, and even causes
disease.[19]  Instead, nearly all the money
goes to dramatic interventions, dominated by drugs and surgery.  Dr. Julian Whitaker
once challenged his readers to try naming a common mainstream medical treatment
in America that was not a drug or surgical procedure.  Whitaker bet that
they could not.[20] 
The entire Western medical paradigm may be built on a shaky foundation.

 

Lessons
in Reversing Heart Disease

During
my father’s career, he gradually gained weight.  He was an exceptional athlete
in his youth, but by age 34 the American diet combined with his desk job took
its toll.  He went from about 155 muscular pounds in his youth to more than two
hundred.  He also drank heavily.  Early in 1970, he began having kidney problems,
quit drinking cold turkey, and has not had a drop since.  He quit smoking around
1960 the same way. 

In June of 1970, although
he had stopped drinking, he weighed about 200 pounds, had high blood pressure
and incipient angina.  He was developing arthritis.  His father had similar problems,
and soon had a string of heart attacks that forced him into retirement.  The naval
base where my father worked was a high-stress environment, and the coronary care
unit in nearby Oxnard was filled with professionals from the base.  My father
was obviously heading for a heart attack, and he wanted to prevent it. 

My father was suffering from
arteriosclerosis.  Arteriosclerosis, like atherosclerosis, is a disease of the
blood vessels.  Those and related diseases kill one million Americans annually
today.  What happens is that the blood becomes “polluted” with matter that helps
form deposits on the blood vessel walls.  A deposit breaks off from the wall,
or the turbulence created by the rough cell walls allows a blood clot to form,
which eventually lodges in a blood vessel supplying the heart, brain or other
vital organ, which often kills the person.  The process of arterial clogging and
hardening begins very early with Americans. Recent research has found that the
process can even begin in the womb.  In 1970, Western medicine considered hardening
of the arteries to be a normal aging process.  The blood pressure tables of the
day had the ideal blood pressure steadily increasing as one got older.  When I
told that to an uncle recently, he said, “Yes, the formula we were taught was
80 plus your age.”  I was able to look that advice up in The Book of Health,
published in 1973.[21] 

Since arteriosclerosis was considered a normal part of the aging
process, my father was told that the hardening and clogging of his arteries was
normal, and that the only hope of avoiding a future heart attack was taking some
pills.  That was the best that “medicine” could do.  Essentially, my father was
given his death sentence, to be executed at some future date, perhaps before long. 
In those days, medical doctors in America were a short step below God in the hierarchy
of existence, yet my father sought a second opinion, and not from another physician. 

He obtained a booklet titled Stale
Food vs. Fresh Food: The Cause and Cure of Arteriosclerosis.  It was the result
of research by American biologists from Arkansas.  It presented the theory that
arteriosclerosis was a disease of civilization, particularly the consumption of
“civilized” food.  Wild animals and “primitive” humankind had virtually no hardening
of the arteries.  Only modern man “preserves” his food. 
The booklet stated that the process of “preserving” food robbed it of its nutritional
value.  More than that, the process of “preserving” food created the substances
responsible for hardening the arteries. 

According
to Stale Food vs. Fresh Food, dead food, particularly flour products, caused
hardening of the arteries, and live food was its cure.  The vast majority of Americans
are so addicted to processed food that they cannot imagine changing their diets. 
I have seen only a few people significantly change their diets, even when their
eating habits were killing them and they knew it.  I have never seen an adult
change his/her diet when their spouse and/or family did not support it.  People
are creatures of habit, and the eating habit is perhaps the most ingrained one
we have, but my father was trying to save his life.  When he stopped smoking and
drinking, and when he decided to eat live food, he just did it.  Nobody else in
the family smoked or drank, but we ate like the average American family.  In California,
there was more fresh produce available than in other states, so we already ate
more fresh food than most Americans, but our family diet was not otherwise remarkable. 

At that time, my breakfast consisted of a huge bowl
of Cornflakes, drowned in sugar.  My culinary specialty was making inch-thick
peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, eaten with a soft drink.  Twelve-year-old
boys can eat like there is no tomorrow.  I was the average American kid, diet-wise. 
One memorable day in June 1970, as I sat at the kitchen counter, eating my bowl
of Cornflakes, my mother walked into the kitchen and said, “Do you know those
Cornflakes are bad for you?” 

My father embraced
Stale Food vs. Fresh Food’s findings and was determined to try it, and
decided the family would follow suit.  I read Stale Food vs. Fresh Food
and was impressed.  The booklet laid out its thesis and research clearly.  It
presented numerous case histories of health miracles attending the change of diet
from processed food to live food.  Old people suddenly began acting and looking
twenty years younger when put onto live-food diets. 

The
booklet had photos of cadavers’ arteries sliced open and laid flat.  The photos
were of arteries at various ages, from age three to seventy, of average
Americans.  At age three, the plaque could be seen beginning to finely coat the
artery wall.  By age twenty, the process had begun in earnest.  As the person
aged, the artery became distorted, no longer running straight.  The artery walls
got thicker and thicker with the deposits, and instead of running straight they
began looking serpentine, like question marks.  By age seventy, the artery was
almost unrecognizable.  They were some of the most obscene pictures I have ever
seen, and those were average American arteries. 

My
entire family changed eating habits, and I was a willing participant.  It was
not a complete change to live food with no looking back, but it was radical. 
We ate junk food from time to time, and I know firsthand how hard it is to swim
against the current of society in something as fundamental as eating.  My father
was trying to save his life, however, and followed it to the letter.  It worked. 
Results were seen almost immediately, and in two years my father’s health made
a complete turnaround.  He lost forty pounds.  The angina and arthritis disappeared. 
His blood pressure went from abnormally high to “abnormally” low.  It was not
really abnormally low, but according to the inflated blood pressure tables of
the day, where arteriosclerosis was considered normal, it was.  He turned himself
into a superman.  He later said it was the healthiest he had ever felt.  He spread
the news of his cure to all who would listen.  He began preaching the virtues
of live food to relatives, friends and coworkers. 

That
was 1970, and it was radical talk to state that your diet could make you well. 
To a degree, it still is.  The mainstream medical doctrine of the day stated that
hardening of the arteries was irreversible.  That belief is still entrenched today,
even though they now admit that when they said that hardening of the arteries
was a normal aging process, they did not know what they were talking about. 
The issue of irreversibility is a medical dogma even today.  I just reviewed my
Mayo Clinic Family Health 1996 Edition CD ROM, and regarding vascular disease
and diet there was virtually no mention, and no mention at all of diet as a way
of treating it.  The Mayo Clinic’s advice was solely devoted to drugs and surgical
procedures. 

To date, I know of nobody who radically
changed their diet to live food and did not benefit immensely from it.  The problem
is that very few people do it.  Hardening of the arteries is indeed reversible. 
Modern medical doctrine aside, Dr. Dean Ornish
has had success in reversing heart disease with his health regimen, which is mainly
about eating a live food diet.[22] 

My
father convinced some of his coworkers to try out a live food diet, and one man
lost more than fifty pounds while eating more than ever, and reversed his health
problems.  A few coworkers and his immediate family were about the only people
that my father ever persuaded to change their diets.  The most common reaction
was to call it all “crazy.”  The term “health nut” came into use around that time. 
That my father was living proof that it worked made no difference to people addicted
to processed food.  They looked to the pronouncements of the medical establishment
for guidance, and there was nearly complete silence on the issue of diet.  I talked
to people about it, and was amazed at the hostile reactions I received.  At age
12 I learned that few want to hear that their addictions are harmful, and it was
no different with processed food. 

I learned
to be cautious about voicing unpopular opinions.  I only give health advice to
those around me when it appears it will be received, which is rarely.  I have
watched numerous people die at the hands of Western medicine over the years, and
it has not been easy to watch.  American physicians receive almost zero nutritional
training, and what little they do receive is often propaganda from the food processing
industry.  Consequently, they cannot have an informed opinion on
the issue. 

When I was 17,
my father brought home Paul Bragg’s The Miracle of Fasting, which was his
magnum opus.  Today, evidence points to Bragg lying about his age and other things. 
I present the evidence in this essay, with the background
at this footnote.[23]  With the fraudulent misrepresentations
aside, Jack LaLanne was one of Bragg’s pupils
(he was the classic 98-pound weakling when he met Bragg as a teenager), and Jack
is still going strong in his 90s.  Bragg promoted other health ideas such as regular
fasting, which has been part of my health regimen for more
than thirty years.  His charlatanry aside, Bragg’s advice is about all I have
ever needed, and I doubt that anybody will come along and improve on it much. 
The ways of health are quite simple: eat live food, exercise, fast, drink pure
water, have pure thoughts, get out in nature.  That is about all anybody needs
to know.  It is the essence of Hygeia’s role in medicine.  There is nothing of
significance to add, except perhaps realizing that humans are poorly designed
to eat animal flesh.  I have been a vegetarian for many
years, with no ill effects and many positive ones. 

The
medical paradigm regarding the biggest killer in America is obviously false. 
Prevention is the only answer worth talking about, and what prevents heart disease
also cures it. 

The same kind of gangsterism
that we encountered in the energy industry is possibly
worse in medicine.  In 1990, I obtained a book titled Medical Dark Ages,
by Ralph Hovnanian.[24]  The book chronicled the studies that have been
performed with alternative cancer treatments, and their success rates.  They nearly
all had higher batting averages than surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.  They
are, nearly without exception, harmless.  They are nearly all vastly cheaper than
mainstream methods, and they are all illegal in the United States.  In
many states, doctors have gone to prison for prescribing them to their patients. 
Medical Dark Ages listed the results of hundreds of studies that covered
dozens of treatments.  I had already been obtaining other material about alternative
cancer treatments, but Medical Dark Ages was my wake-up call. 

For
all the information involving alternative cancer treatments, what bowled me over
in Medical Dark Ages were the more than 100 pages of
quotations.  I would read the quotes for an hour or so and get a kind of intellectual
vertigo, overwhelmed by the quotes.  With Ralph’s enthusiastic permission, I reproduce
many of them on this web site, organized slightly more
than Ralph has.  Ralph spent years collecting a vast array of quotes from various
sources about the medical industry, the cancer industry in particular.  Before
I deal with the cancer industry, here is a quote that lays out another aspect
of the medical establishment.  Here it is.

 

“Although
I found that the booklet (Stale Food vs. Fresh Food) contained some helpful
suggestions and its author, Mr. Robert Ford, is a knowledgeable and sincere person
(i.e. no intent to defraud), I found the representations in the Respondent’s booklet
to be unproven and contrary to the weight of informed medical and scientific opinion. 
As indicated by Dr.___, (the only U.S. Post Office medical witness) a danger of
this publication is that it will deceive people who have arterio-sclerotic problems
into believing that they can cure these problems by diet alone instead of seeking
medical (AMA) help.  Because the ads and this booklet contain materially false
representations, they violate the provisions of 39 US Code Section 3005.  Therefore…a
mail stop order…should be issued…” – E.S. Bernstein, Administrative
Law Judge, (1982).

 

That booklet saved
my father’s life.  The mail stop order made it illegal to send it through the
U.S. mail system, effectively banning it in America.  In effect, it was similar
to the Nazi/Catholic book burnings.  Using the U.S. Post office is an effective tactic
to wipe out alternative health practitioners.  It is only one weapon in the medical
establishment’s arsenal, but it is an effective one.  Here
is a link to a full account of the banning of Stale
Food vs. Fresh Food.

One million people per
year in America die of vascular disease, and our dietary and health habits are
nearly solely responsible for it.  The most obvious factors are things such as
smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol, but diet may be responsible for most of
it. 

In short, our bodies are designed to eat
live food, as are all animals.  We are the only animal that eats dead food, and
the diseases we fall prey to are almost unique in the animal kingdom, particularly
in their frequency.  Living processes provide the nutrition that we get from food. 
When food is killed, those life processes cease, and it begins decomposing.  Enzymes,
vitamins and other vital substances can rapidly decompose.  When humanity ventured out of its natural range in the
tropics, we eventually learned to domesticate plants and animals and preserve
food in order to survive the seasons.  We have done it so long that it is taken
for granted, yet it is not a natural or ideal process. 

We
have huge industries based upon food processing, and through their wealth and
power they have completely obscured the issue of how harmful dead food is to human
biology.  It is related to the corruption of medical science discussed in this
site’s fluoridation essay.  In the materialistic and
reductionistic way that modern science has defined nutrition, a bowl of shredded
cardboard sprayed with vitamins (which is close to describing most breakfast cereals)
can be more nutritious than a bowl of fresh strawberries. 

Pets
also suffer from the degenerative diseases that humans manifest, because they
are the only non-human animals to eat processed food.  It can be argued that we
get degenerative disease (degenerative disease kills two-thirds of all Americans)
because we live so long, but the experiences with the Hunzas and other “primitive”
societies, demonstrate that age may have little to do with it. 

Degenerative
diseases are cumulative chronic conditions, so they largely show up in later ages,
although there has recently been a great increase in cancers in American children,
for instance.  The medical profession incredibly still advocates drugs and surgery
to “correct” heart disease.  That is arguably not because it is the
best answer, or even really works, but because they make big money from providing
their “treatment.” 

In
the 1970s and 1980s, three major studies were published on the effects of coronary
bypass surgery, and they are the only studies published to date.  None of them
demonstrated a significantly higher survival rate for the group that had bypass
surgery versus those who did not.[25] 
Even the angiogram that supposedly diagnoses people who “need” bypass surgery
is virtually worthless, as attested to by all the studies published to date.[26]  Even though the diagnosis and
treatment are worthless, the coronary bypass business is among earth’s most lucrative,
raking in more than $50 billion per year in America.  When Dr. Henry McIntosh
at the Baylor College of Medicine, where the first bypass surgery was performed,
published an assessment of the first ten years of bypass surgery results, he stated
that there were virtually no measurable benefits from bypass surgery.  Soon after
publishing his paper, he was forced to leave Baylor.[27] 
His is not an unusual fate.  People with private
insurance are 80% more likely to have an angiogram than a Medicaid (welfare) patient,
and are 40% more likely to have bypass surgery.[28]  In his book, Heart
Frauds, after Charles T. McGee, M.D. exposes the scam that American medicine
is regarding artery and heart disease, he then recommends what people should do
to prevent those diseases.  His advice is almost all about eating live food, just
as in Stale Food vs. Fresh Food.[29] 
Fortunately, his book has not yet been banned. 

The
medical profession is not alone in its anti-scientific methods.  The food processors,
similar to the fluoride polluters, have been busily buying up scientists who will
tell Americans that processed food is good for them.  The food processors, chemical
companies and agribusiness companies all have a mutual self-interest
in making their products appear safe and beneficial to the public eye.  They are
not really safe or beneficial, but people such Frederick
Stare, Elizabeth Whelan or Steve
Milloy, who are scientists in their employ, will tell us that most of what
they produce is healthy.  Tobacco company front man Milloy then has the gall to
turn around and state that, “One in three Americans develops cancer as a function
of being alive.”[30] 
Those overlapping areas of self-interest form what can be variously called a “power
structure,” an “industrial complex” or an “establishment.” 

 

Early
Western Medicine

The study of anthropology
impinges directly on the issue of medicine.  As a science, anthropology is multifaceted,
multidisciplinary, and has come a long way from its Victorian-era roots.  The
aspect of anthropology that deals with the distant human past is fascinating,
replete with controversy, competing theories, new tools (such as DNA testing of
fossils), and varying degrees of agreement regarding the human past.  Again, as
Kuhn observed, agreement does not mean that anthropologists as a whole are “right,”
but that they agree.  Nevertheless, there are areas of general agreement that
appear to conform to the evidence adduced thus far, when the evidence has not
been suppressed, such as how the findings of Dr. Virginia Steen-McIntyre apparently were,
when they suggested a far earlier date of human habitation of the New World than
the prevailing theories.  Such suppression of anomalous data is far more common
in the sciences than most think.  Dr. Phyllis
Mullenix encountered similar career destruction when she discovered that the
fluorine ion damaged the brain.  There is evidence that can argue for technologically
advanced civilizations long ago, extraterrestrial genetic intervention in evolving
humanity, greatly shortened or lengthened timelines, and room for the use of such
tools as psychometry.  Reintroducing a creator and consciousness into the framework
is necessary if humankind is to escape the materialistic orientation that threatens it with self-extinction.[31] 
Anthropology has a long way to go, but with all those caveats, there is a generally
agreed upon story of the human past.

According
to today’s prevailing theories, humankind on earth evolved in Africa long ago,
as an evolutionary offshoot of the tropical apes that lived there.  Homo erectus,
the first erect, large-brained protohuman, appeared on the evolutionary scene
more than two million years ago.  Homo erectus migrated beyond Africa and
the tropics more than one million years ago.  Homo sapiens also likely
first appeared in Africa, eventually displacing all other hominid species.  As
Homo erectus migrated beyond the tropics, the year-round supply of fruits,
blossoms and seeds that make up about 80% of today’s great-ape diet could not
be found in the harsher climates, with their seasons.  Homo
erectus had poor plant-scavenging prospects beyond the tropics for most of
the year, mainly because they could not digest cellulose the way that ruminant
animals can.  Cellulose makes up the majority of plant structure
(it forms the cell walls), and most animals cannot digest it.  Gorillas have that
ability, to a degree (chimpanzees also, to a lesser extent), and can thus adapt
to leafier diets better than other apes.  Dormant plants cannot provide much of
the starch, sugar and fat that hominids use to fuel their bodies in their native
habitats.  In order to survive beyond the tropics, early humans adapted their
behavior.  They hunted and ate animals, and wore the fur of their prey.  They
sought shelter from the elements, as in caves.  They developed tools to help them
hunt and eat, made of stone, wood and bone.  Early humans learned how to control
and use fire.  Some of those behaviors originated in Africa, but they were refined
to an art form in order to survive beyond the tropics. 

Life
was far from easy, and early humans died from injuries, starvation, infections,
parasites, and some diseases.  Also, those early hunter-gatherer humans invented
a new behavior, nearly unknown in the animal world: as humans learned to kill
large animals, they also killed each other. 
What are called modern humans appeared on the evolutionary scene perhaps around
100,000 years ago.  They learned other adaptive behaviors, such as building dwellings
and boats.  Those innovations enabled humankind to migrate further than before. 
The arrival of humans to the continents known today as Australia and North and
South America is commonly thought to have coincided with the extinction
of large mammals.  Humans may have caused the so-called megafauna extinctions. 
The issue is not settled, but the “overkill” hypothesis is persuasive.[32] 
Humans are poorly designed to eat flesh.  For one thing,
true carnivores have high acid concentrations in their stomachs, which not only
digest the rotting flesh rapidly, but the high concentrations kill parasites and
deadly bacteria in the meat.  Carnivores produce ten times as much hydrochloric
acid as humans, cows, horses and other herbivorous species do, at twice the concentration,
for twenty times the amount.  A carnivore has a stomach pH of between one and
two while the stomach is full, while a human stomach has a pH of between four
and five.  Humans do not enjoy the carnivorous stomach’s protection, and parasitic
and bacterial infection was one effect of eating flesh, particularly in the large
quantities that the early hunter-gatherers could ingest. 

As humans pursued the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, their
numbers grew as they migrated across the planet.  What led humans to domesticate
plants and animals?  The Victorian era’s dominant hypothesis was that the domestication
revolution of about ten thousand years ago was merely part of humankind’s endless
progress.  Today, it is more generally thought that population pressures forced
the issue, in Malthusian fashion.[33]  The big, easily killed game was
extinct, hunter-gatherer methods cannot sustain dense human populations, and domestication
may have been more a child of necessity than progressive invention, although there
was probably interplay of those factors.  So, beginning around ten thousand years
ago, most earthly animals and plants that could be effectively domesticated were. 
There have been few species of plants or animals domesticated in recorded history. 
The last large mammal productively domesticated was the camel, about 4500 years
ago.  In modern times, moose, bison and other large mammals have been subjected
to domestication attempts, with limited success.[34]  Strawberries, raspberries, pecans
and some other plants have been domesticated during history, but nearly all human
plant consumption is of species domesticated before history was recorded.  However,
the fossil record does not tell a healthy story about the transition from hunter-gatherer
to shepherd and farmer.  Human skeletons became significantly smaller when the
domestication revolution happened. 

Violence
is apparently proportionally greater in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle than in
“civilization,” even including civilization’s innumerable wars.  Civilization
spawned many things both beneficial and disastrous for the human species.  Permanent
dwellings, writing, specialized professions and other “advancements” were part
of civilization’s seeming benefits.  Their companions, however, were organized
warfare, environmental degeneration, social hierarchies, exploitation on a
grand scale, and – what concerns this essay – epidemic and degenerative disease. 
Hunter-gatherers ate living food.  They had to constantly move around, because
there was little vegetation that humans could eat, especially during periods of
plant dormancy.  Although chimpanzees are the most carnivorous of the great apes,
flesh only amounts to about 1 to 2% of their diet, and they do not eat carrion. 
The mountain gorilla eats insects sometimes, and that is the most carnivorous
part of its diet. 

The
great apes subsist mainly on live fruit, not hunter-gatherer fare, and the domestication
revolution further altered the human diet.  Not only were great amounts of flesh
eaten, but grasses were domesticated for their seeds, hence wheat, corn, barley,
millet, oats, etc.  Legumes (mainly beans) were domesticated, as well as root
crops.  Domestic grains, legumes and root crops are relatively new innovations
in the human diet, yet they make up the majority of it today, and humans have
not evolved to ideally eat them.  In addition, fruits
are designed to be eaten by animals, as a way of dispersing the seeds.  Fruit’s
sweetness is attractive to great apes and other animals, hence the human sweet
tooth.  Such is not the case with grains, legumes, roots and much of what are
called vegetables.  That is why a sweet dessert rewards eating an unsweet and
often disagreeable main course. 

Flowering
plants appeared on the evolutionary scene about 135 million
years ago, about 70 million years before primates did.  When flowers are fertilized,
they grow into fruit, which is an evolutionary adaptation where the plant is not
eaten to satisfy animal hunger, but the fruit provides the animal with energy,
and the plant a means to distribute its seed.  Primates are primarily tree dwellers,
and fruit comprises 65% of the great ape diet.  It is a perfect symbiosis of plant
and animal.  That symbiosis is not evident in roots, for instance, as eating a
plant’s root kills the plant.  The same goes for vegetables.  Grains and legumes
are seeds, and are not ideal foods, and many are highly toxic, and even through
domestication, there are toxic and other properties of grains and legumes that
make them difficult to digest.  Humans eat only about 2% of all legume species. 
The natives of California used acorns as a staple food.  However, they had to
leach the tannic acid from the acorns in order to eat them.  Seeds rarely have
symbiotic relationships with animals, and plants have many adaptations to minimize
animal predation, such as thorns, thick husks, etc.  The castor bean is toxic
to all animals, even insects.  Some insects eat toxic seeds and use the seed’s
toxic properties to make themselves toxic to animals that would otherwise
eat them.  Those non-fruit plant parts are not ideal foods, which is partly why
organs such as livers and kidneys exist, to deal with the toxins.  Those crops
have not had all their toxic and non-digestive properties bred from them, and
it may not be entirely possible. 

Cooking
and other food processing can minimize certain toxic chemicals (such as acid in
acorns and the cassava root), make more of certain substances digestible (such
as protein in grains), and kill parasites and bacteria in flesh, but such processing
also destroys enzymes, vitamins and other nutritious substances.  Domesticating
and growing those plant parts that humans can digest (largely non-cellulose parts)
is a mixed bag.  The same goes for the domestication of animals and eating large
quantities of flesh and milk products.  Also, our food animals are often raised
on grain diets, which they are not suited for, and they become fatter than normal
(among other health problems) also by design
(feed, genetics, drugs, hormones, etc.), but obviously not ideal for those consuming
their flesh.  Most of adult humanity (about 70%) is lactose-intolerant, which
means that they cannot effectively digest milk products.  There has been some
evolutionary adaptation in adults who can digest milk, but as somebody who has
eliminated milk products from his diet more than once, I can say that even descendants
of pastoral societies are far from ideally adapted to consume milk products. 
We are the only creatures on earth that consume milk as adults, and it is not
from our species.  Less than one percent of humanity is gluten-intolerant, which
is a protein found in wheat.  I cannot comfortably digest quinoa, a New World
grain.  Many people have allergic reactions to corn, peanuts, eggs, milk, meat,
the nightshade family, etc. (although some of those reactions are undoubtedly
due to how the food was raised and prepared, or attendant chemicals such as pesticides). 
Those are some of the prices humanity has paid for leaving its natural habitat. 

Civilized
people developed methods to survive the seasons, which were largely based upon
food preservation.  Cooking, grinding, salting and other methods were used to
preserve food.  What is largely overlooked is that preserving food means preventing
further decay.  Food preservation is often a method of decaying food to a level
where it takes a long time to decay further.  Cooking destroys enzymes and robs
food of its nutritional value.  Grinding food destroys its structure and hence
creates a rapid deterioration in what remains.  Modern methods of bleaching flour
further rob it of nutritional value, and are performed by design.  Bleached flour
is far less inviting to insects that eat unbleached flour, because there is little
nutritional value left.  One way to kill the mice that infest mills is to let
them eat all the bleached flour they want.  They then quickly die.  Spicing, salting
and drying are other methods of food preservation, but living food is obviously
far more nutritious than the cooked, spiced, salted, or dried versions.  With
animals, domesticating them allowed humans to keep living food around during the
winter, killing the animals as needed.  The prevailing theories today hold that
nearly every epidemic disease is a consequence of domesticating animals, civilization’s
dense human populations, and civilization’s filth.  Accordingly, measles came
from dogs or cattle, bubonic plague from rodents, influenza from pigs and ducks,
smallpox from cattle, the common cold from horses, and so on.  Infectious disease
needed dense human populations in order to spread to epidemic proportions.  The
sparse, relatively clean hunter-gatherer populations did not experience epidemic
disease. 

With the rise
of civilization, humanity began soiling its nest.  In the early days of civilization,
there were no sewers, dumps and other measures for keeping civilization clean. 
Filth accumulated and disease flourished.  The filth was closely related to “germs,”
and improving sanitation and nutrition ended most epidemic disease, with vaccination
receiving little or no credit (perhaps even negative credit). 

Civilization
began before history, as it took time for writing to develop.  The first known
writings were the cuneiform tablets used in Sumeria, and of the 30,000 surviving
cuneiform clay tablets discovered in Mesopotamia (literally “land between the
rivers,” today’s Iraq, part of the Fertile Crescent), about 1,000 dealt with medicine.[35]  Women’s status
declined during the Sumerian centuries, reflecting not only the culture’s degeneration,
but also the conflict between masculine and feminine principles.  In addition,
the agricultural methods, relying on irrigation, eventually degraded
and salinated the soil, making it infertile.[36]  Filthy urban conditions, undernutrition and malnutrition
lead to susceptibility to epidemic and degenerative disease, and in conjunction
with Old World civilization.  The earliest medical professionals undoubtedly noted
the contribution of filthiness and poor nutrition to disease.  While the historical
record of long ago is sparse, and was written to favor the victors (men and masculine
principles), the notion of sanitation and nutrition as disease prevention survives
in the mythological Greek figure of Hygeia, a woman. 

By
the time of Hippocrates, when the foundations of Western medicine (and modern
democracy) were supposedly laid, men had taken over the medical profession.  Aristotle
theorized that women were inherently inferior because of their biology.  In ancient
Rome, women were treated relatively better and were better represented in the
healing arts.  Even though Rome had sewers (they first showed up in Assyria and
Crete, as far as today’s archeological evidence suggests, but they also may have
existed earlier in civilization) epidemic disease swept through ancient Greece
and Rome, and is thought of as partly a consequence of their imperialism, bringing
new diseases back with the soldiers, slaves and imperial commerce. 

One
problem with historical investigation of early medicine or any ancient culture
is that the analysis is often of stones, bones, the writings of the elite, the
lives of kings and so on.  It is difficult to get an intimate sense of the times,
and what life was really like back then.  My paranormal
experiences showed me that there is far more to consciousness than the West
admits.  When modern commentators scoff at ancient “superstitions” and “witch
doctors,” how much of that is a self-serving projection?  Psychic healing is real,
and the “placebo effect” only hints at the potential of human consciousness to
create disease or health.  People used to be much more connected to their dreams,
and they had importance in their waking lives.  Some of today’s scientists pass
off dreams as some kind of garbage that the mind sheds during sleep.  The most
open-minded of them may have little appreciation for the inter-dimensional doorway
that dreams could represent.  What were the dreams of ancient humans like?  Studying
stone axes, pottery fragments and bones provides little evidence. 

While
the West has “advanced” in some important ways, it is also evident that
even though there surely was superstition in ancient healing, and a poor understanding
of anatomy, in some ways those “primitive” doctors are still ahead of Western
medicine.  Socrates could well have been speaking of today’s medical establishment
when he said, “The cure of many diseases remains unknown to the physicians of
Hellos because they do not study the whole person.”  Holistic medicine is
still marginalized in Western medicine, more than two thousand years later.  The
feminine-oriented (they did not have to be women to be feminine-oriented) healers
of an earlier era may have had a better grasp of the role of the patient’s personality
and spirit in healing than those Hellos doctors, or today’s. 

Today’s
books about Western medicine’s history largely focus on two men from ancient times:
Hippocrates and Galen.  Their work formed the foundation of Western medicine. 
Hippocrates lived during Greece’s classic period, about 400 years before Jesus
was born.  Many works attributed to Hippocrates are not his, but from the school
of thought he came to represent.  The Hippocratic method was founded upon observation
and reason, and its primary dictum was “first, do no harm.”  Western doctors take
the Hippocratic oath today. 

Galen was also Greek,
lived during the second century AD, but made his mark in Rome.  Galen was a prolific
writer, and he furthered the Hippocratic notion of observation.  Galen dissected
animals and applied his findings to human anatomy.  Unfortunately for the West,
Hippocrates’ work fell victim to Roman Catholic hostility toward all things Greek,
and Galen’s work became dogmatized.  The principle of observing nature was abandoned,
Galen’s works ironically became a bulwark against observing nature, and
medical authorities uncritically repeated his work for more than a millennium.

The
Catholic Church, which largely took over the healing profession when the Western
Roman Empire collapsed, helped dogmatize Galen’s work.  The Church was a misogynistic
institution, the Western healing profession largely passed into its control, and
women were shut out.  Early Christian theorists denied that women, being made
from Adam’s rib, had souls.  There were still plenty of women midwives and herbalists,
but they were rarely part of the Church-dominated healing profession.  During
the Middle Ages men dominated professional medicine, with some women healers,
such as Trotula of Salerno and Hildegard of Bingen becoming prominent in the late
Middle Ages, although many male doctors today cannot believe that Trotula could
have been a woman, as prominent as “she” was.[37] 

The
Catholic Church had all the classic Greek texts burned as pagan, and about the
only reason the West knows much about Hippocrates, Socrates, Pythagoras and friends
is that Islamic scholars translated their works into Arabic, to finally come back
to Europe in Latin after 1000 AD.  The “Reconquest“
of the Iberian Peninsula opened the great Islamic libraries to European Christians,
and the logic and reason of the Greeks began “infecting” Italy and elsewhere in
Europe during the High Middle Ages. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman
Turks in 1453 helped further the revival of Greek scholarship in the West.  The
fall of Constantinople also set in motion Portuguese
and Spanish attempts to find another route to gain Asian spices and goods, followed by the Portuguese
sailing around Africa and Columbus’ fateful voyage. 

In the healing arts and science, the
Islamic culture far outstripped Church-dominated Europe.  Around 1200 AD, the
Islamic culture had perhaps the world’s highest standard of living.  Islamic medicine
expanded the West’s pharmacopoeia, kept the classic Greek teachings alive, and
Jewish doctors such as Maimonides were influential in European medicine.  The
Renaissance era saw a European revival of interest in ancient Greek teachings,
and discoveries across the Atlantic Ocean spurred genocides,
gold rushes, massive population movements and empire building.  The printing
press and widespread literacy, instead of becoming a tool of a proselytizing
Catholic Church, became a tool of the Protestant Reformation and political revolutions. 
From the ferment of renaissance and imperial Europe came the rise of modern science
and medicine. 

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus lay on his deathbed and happily
examined an advance copy of his newly published book, a work that ultimately overturned
more than a millennium of Ptolemaic theory that made earth the center of the universe.[38]  Copernicus, although he was a
devout Catholic, eventually defeated Catholic dogma with his book, a work so influential
that it is widely considered to have initiated the rise of Western science.  Although
Giordano Bruno was burned alive for holding to Copernicus’ view (and other radical
notions) and Galileo Galilee was forced to recant (which dissuaded
people such as René Descartes from further considering heliocentric theory), Copernicus’
work eventually prevailed.  

Galen’s
work guided “knowledge” of the human body until Andreas Vesalius appeared.  A
native of Brussels, Vesalius published another work that overturned a millennium
of dogma.  It was published in the same year as Copernicus’ seminal work.  As
with Galen, Vesalius dissected animals, but he also dissected human beings (by
raiding gallows and other grim places) in a way the West had never seen before.
 He eventually discovered that hundreds of Galen’s findings were incorrect, largely
because Galen extrapolated findings on dissected animals to humans.  Vesalius’
book, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, is considered the first work of modern
scientific medicine. 

Galen and
Vesalius had important similarities.  Galen parlayed his work into becoming the
personal physician to the West’s most powerful men: Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius
and his heir Commodus.  Vesalius also used his work to become the personal physician
to the West’s most powerful man: Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain
during the peak of Spain’s power.  Although Galen and Vesalius’ names are hallowed
in the annals of medicine, there are other parallels less savory.  Both men not
only dissected animals, they both dissected living animals.  Those men
were the West’s first vivisectionists.  That fact demonstrates the life-taking,
masculine paradigm, and it is also spiritually primitive.  The spiritual
probably cannot be effectively divorced from the material, and Western science
has eliminated the spiritual to its detriment. 

Spiritual
perspectives will be presented throughout this medical essay.  My first major
mystical influence, Seth, once said that when a scientist robs a frog of
its life in order to dissect it, the scientist ends up knowing less about
life, not more, when the dissection is complete.  Dissecting an animal while
it still lives is far more degenerate.  When Western science justified the
sacrifice of “lesser” life forms in its quest for knowledge, it was taking large
steps backwards in its understanding of life and reality, although such
a sentiment is largely unrecognized even today, while tens of millions of animals
are killed in experiments in the United States
each year, in the name of science and medicine.  Taking a life to “save” a
life, in the long run, is arguably taking two steps backwards to take one step
forward, and the step “forward” may be in the wrong direction. 

With
the works of Copernicus and Vesalius, Western science began its fitful rise, and
religion gradually lost its grip over the masses.  In the 1600s, William Harvey
further proved Galen’s work wrong.  Although Chinese writings from nearly 5000 years ago stated
that the human heart was a pump that circulated blood throughout the body, that
understanding in the West did not occur until William Harvey’s work appeared. 
Just as Copernicus did not immediately overturn Ptolemaic dogma regarding an earth-centered
universe, Vesalius did not immediately overturn all Galenic dogma.  In 1628, Harvey
published his research into the heart and its function.  Similar to Galen and
Vesalius, Harvey was a court physician, in his case to England’s King James I. 
In addition (and this is a central concern of this medical essay), Galen, Vesalius
and Harvey were all viciously attacked by their colleagues, who defended
the day’s dogma.  Vesalius became so disgusted by the attacks that he lit
a bonfire, destroying his notes and works, and got out of anatomy altogether. 
Harvey endured years of attacks, to finally see his theories vindicated before
he died.[39]  Not
coincidentally, that warfare over those theories and dogma was entirely waged
by men, and Harvey was another vivisectionist. 

 

The
Beginnings of Today’s Medical Establishment

The
rise of Western science is inextricably connected to the rise of Western medicine,
as is European imperialism, the decline of the Catholic
Church, the Industrial Revolution, modern
warfare, political-economic ideologies such as capitalism and communism, and other factors. 
When studying the development of medical science and its attendant establishment,
the interplay of scientists, their nations of origin, dominant religious sects
and other factors can be seen to influence the course of scientific theory as
well as the data.  There is no such thing as “pure science.”

It
is no coincidence that Copernicus and Vesalius both published their works in 1543. 
Long-standing dogma was challenged on many fronts, not least of which was the
Protestant Reformation.  In 1543, the Catholic Church, although it had burned
books many times in the past, dramatically toughened its policy and levied heavy
penalties for selling books that the Church had banned.  Cardinal Carafa went
so far as to declare that no books could be published without permission from
the Inquisition.[40] 
In 1559, the infamous Index Auctorum et Librorum Prohibitorum was first
published, a list of banned books that would endure until the 1960s. 

Harvey
was not the first European to describe the heart’s circulation of the blood. 
In 1553, Michael Servetus anonymously published The Restoration of Christianity. 
In his work, he challenged Galenic dogma and correctly described the pulmonary
circulation between the heart and lungs, although it was in the context of how
the Holy Spirit enters man.  He escaped the Spanish Inquisition only to land in
Calvin’s Geneva, where both he and his work were burned.  Burning the heretic
and his books ensured that his theory about the heart and circulation would not
influence European science. 

Joseph Schwartz
persuasively made the case that Galileo and Newton
couched their work in mathematics to make it less susceptible to the Church’s
attacks.  Those strategic decisions helped send science awry, making it too reliant
on mathematics, and more occult than it needed to be.[41]  I have virtually never needed to use mathematics
to explain a scientific theory.   

Ambroise
Paré, a contemporary of Vesalius, advanced the science of surgery, honing his
craft in battlefield hospitals, introducing the practice of binding arteries to
reduce hemorrhage, and ending the practice of pouring boiling oil on wounds to
cauterize them.  That was discovered accidentally when one day he ran out of oil
and used soothing lotions instead.  Paré brought to Western surgery the notion
of gentle treatment of wounds, and he engaged in the customary academic fisticuffs
with his rivals.  As with the others, Paré became the surgeon to several kings
of France. 

During the next three centuries,
Western science made its advances.  Vivisection became the norm in medical research. 
Witches and heretics burned across Europe, and devastating wars endlessly raged
back and forth, often over religion.  The distinction between saint, heretic and
witch was largely a political-economic one. 

The
gradual elimination of the spiritual perspective was a complex affair, with various
schools of thought rising and falling.  The writings of Francis Bacon (1561-1626),
an English statesman and philosopher, were influential in their materialistic
perspective.  Bacon argued for relying on what our senses tell us, using reason
to interpret it, and staying within that framework.  The materialism of Bacon
would influence the materialism of Marx and others.  Newton explained the effect
of gravity with equations, and he, along with Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo helped
initiate the science of celestial mechanics.  Seeking the mechanism behind everything
became science’s Holy Grail.  The world of the spirit gradually fell away, and
Western science put nature “on the rack,” torturing her secrets out of her (vivisection
being an obvious example of that approach).  A wide array of scientific and medical
theories proliferated.  Bacon, Descartes and other philosophers initiated an age
of rational thought, although the outright rejection of religion would not occur
until the Enlightenment, during the 18^th century.   Materialist and
spiritualist theories vied with one another, some explaining life as a mechanism,
others denying that mechanics could ever explain the ineffable spark of life. 

The new lens-making technologies that made telescopes
possible also made microscopes possible, exploration of the previously invisible
world began, as well as exploration of the earth’s farthest corners (usually in
the name of conquest).  Midwives and herbalists still practiced, although they
were increasingly subject to repression.  Disease was studied by the new science
of medicine.  The practice of Western medicine, however, did not change much during
the 16^th through 18^th centuries.  While women specialized
in the gentle medicine of herbs and nutrition, the male-dominated medical profession
used leeches, purgatives, emetics, surgery and other violent methods.  European
women healers found it increasingly difficult to work from the time of Vesalius
onward.[42]  Epidemic
disease swept through Europe regularly.  European cities were hellish arenas of violence, filth and disease.  With
numbing regularity, famine, disease or warfare (or all three) would march through,
carrying off vast numbers of souls.  The only way that Europe’s cities kept their
populations stable was through a constant influx of “surplus population” from
the countryside, to replace those who died off in the cities.  As Europeans sailed
the high seas, natives in the New World, Australia, the South Pacific and elsewhere
died off from European-introduced disease in stupefying numbers.  Fifty million
Native Americans may have died off from European-introduced disease during the
16^th century, with perhaps another twenty million being worked to death,
in the greatest single demographic catastrophe in history,
killing off 90% of a hemisphere’s human population. 

The
Enlightenment era, with its egalitarian ideals, a faith in science, reason and
a promotion of humane principles, was the fruit of centuries of ferment.  That
era saw the creation of the greatest music that humanity has yet produced.  Medicine
for the masses became popular.  To be sure, there were men who subscribed to the
principles of Hygeia, such as William Buchan, John Wesley, Johann Frank and others
of the Enlightenment era.  Also, the age of quackery largely coincided with those
days.  While “quack” may have described many folk healers and their seemingly
nonsensical medicine, the notion has also been greatly abused ever since to suppress
medical innovation.  Less than a month before I wrote these words, a “skeptic”
challenged me about Dennis Lee and alternative energy’s
plight.  He stated that the unmistakable mark of a quack, medical or otherwise,
was the claim of being persecuted.  As we shall see, it is also the unmistakable
mark of a pioneer.  In 1761, the German physician Leopold
Auenbrugger invented the method of rapping on a person’s chest, listening to the
sound produced, a method familiar to any American who has ever had a physical
examination.  An amateur musician, Auenbrugger began cataloguing what the various
sounds might mean.  He realized the importance of his work, but had no illusions
of becoming a medical hero.  He wrote,

 

“In
making public my discoveries I have not been unconscious of the dangers I must
encounter, since it has always been the fate of those who have illustrated or
improved the arts and sciences by their discoveries to be beset by envy, malice,
hatred, destruction and calumny.”[43]

 

In
North America’s colonial settlements, women had a freer hand to practice medicine. 
The restrictive atmosphere of European medicine could not entirely prevail an
ocean away.  The Enlightenment also helped spawn political revolutions, beginning
with the American Revolution.  Also, finally,
Western medicine began understanding how to cure some diseases. 

When
Europeans began sailing the high seas, scurvy attended their voyages.  In 1498,
Arab traders cured Vasco de Gama’s crew of scurvy
by feeding them oranges.  In 1535, Jacques
Cartier’s crew came down with scurvy on the Saint Lawrence River.  Twenty-five
members of his crew died before a local Indian showed them how to make bark and
evergreen needles into a drink.  The drink was high in vitamin C, and his men
were cured.  When Cartier reported the incident to the medical authorities upon
his return, they laughed at the ignorant practices of the “savages,” and never
followed up on it.  In 1593, Richard Hawkins, Francis
Drake’s relative and fellow pirate-explorer, sailed to the South Pacific and
noted that the natives used citrus fruit to cure scurvy, something that also cured
his men.  His observation was also not acted upon by the day’s medical profession. 
In 1601, Captain James Lancaster sailed his fleet of four ships, and gave lemon
juice to the crew on the ship he sailed.  The other three vessels’ crews came
down with scurvy.  In 1636, John Woodall published The Surgeon’s Mate,
where he unequivocally wrote that scurvy could be prevented by eating fresh vegetables
and citrus fruit.  The medical establishment ignored those findings, while an
estimated million sailors lost their lives to scurvy (5000 per year, from 1600
to 1800).  It was not until the Scottish James Lind performed an experiment that
Western medicine began considering the cure.  His experiments aboard the HMS Salisbury
in 1754 proved that citrus fruit cured scurvy, although he did not know why. 
In the 1760s, James Cook sailed around the world, embracing hygienic principles,
and he used citrus fruit to cure scurvy in his crew.  Cook only lost one man from
disease during the three-year voyage, and it was to tuberculosis.  Many thousands
more sailors died on the high seas, and it was not until 1795, largely due to
the efforts of Gilbert Bane, that the British began issuing citrus juice to its
sailors, and “limeys” soon ruled the high seas.  Establishment histories of medicine,
such as Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, often do not mention
anything about people curing scurvy before Lind’s work.  That is always a hazard
of reading mainstream history.  The official story can leave plenty out, incidents
that can cast an importantly different light on the story. 

The
Enlightenment came to an end with the French Revolution and Napoleon.  The Industrial
Revolution was underway, capitalism was evolving in ways that Adam Smith did not
foresee, and the world of Charles Dickens came to pass.  The early years of the
19^th century are typically considered the beginning of the modern era. 
In the early 19^th century the stethoscope was invented.  Auenbrugger’s method, neglected for more than forty years,
was finally used.  Diagnosis finally began being earnestly practiced in Western
medicine.  Again, was that a step forward?  Seth
said that cataloguing disease is not dealing with the issue in the most enlightened
way.  He said that focusing on health and how to be healthy (Hygeia’s principles
once again) is far preferable to studying and treating disease.  Studying disease
has helped lead to today’s medicine refining the art of symptom management, instead
of the underlying cause.  Also, any treatment that does anything other than suppress
symptoms (with male-oriented knives and drugs) has largely been outlawed in the
United States.

In the United
States, one of the Declaration of Independence’s signers, Dr. Benjamin Rush, became
America’s most famous doctor.  He taught at the University of Pennsylvania for
more than forty years, and his impact on American medicine can still be felt today. 
Rush represented the early medical establishment in the United States.  He did,
however, write this prescient paragraph,

 

“Unless
we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine
will organize into an undercover dictatorship…To restrict the art of healing
to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille
of medical science.  All such laws are un-American and despotic… and have no place
in a republic…The Constitution of this Republic should make special provisions
for medical freedom as well as religious freedom.”[44]

 

Rush’s
friend Thomas Jefferson wrote,

 

“If
people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take,
their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls who live under
tyranny.”

 

Although
Rush warned against a medical racket taking shape in the United States, his work
was the epitome of masculine medicine.  Rush began using mercury in large doses
to “cure” patients during a yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793.  Rush
patented his “cure,” and his Rush’s Pills became a mainstay of American medicine. 
Rush’s pills were a violent purgative made from calomel (mercury chloride) and
jalap.  A person’s bowels would virtually explode after ingesting Rush’s cure-all. 
Rush’s pills were informally known as “Thunderclappers.”  Rush believed that nearly
every disease condition could be cured with Rush’s Pills. 

The
deadly effects of mercury have been well known since ancient times.  Mercury poisoning
may have killed Isaac Newton as well as destroyed his mind, as he worked with
it in alchemical experiments, probably trying to make gold.  Rush’s logic was
that the ingestion of mercury and jalap would blast out any diseased matter in
the intestines.  If that failed to provide the cure, the patient would also get
mercury poisoning, which “altered” the original disease, somehow combining it
with the mercury poisoning.  The logic was that if patients survived the mercury
poisoning, their recovery would also cure their original disease.[45] 
That type of treatment, in typical masculine fashion, became known as “heroic”
medicine.  In those years of heroic mercury therapy, there were instances of cadavers
being dissected, and mercury would run from their bodies. 

Using
large doses of mercury was not the only innovation that Rush blessed America with. 
He was probably the person who initiated “heroic” bleeding.  The bleeding practices
of the past were not enough.  Rush believed in bleeding the better part of a gallon
(the adult human body only holds about five quarts) of blood from his sicker patients. 
Not only adults were bled under Rush’s ministrations, but also infants as young
as three months old.  Because newborns are so small, the jugular vein was often
the only one large enough to be opened for bleeding.  Rush noticed that newborns
could not survive being bled as much and as often as adults, so he could not be
quite as heroic with infants.

Calomel was not
banned as “medicine” until my lifetime, to demonstrate how influential Rush was
to Western medicine.  Mercury, bleeding and other “heroic” methods clearly reflected
masculine medicine’s principles.  Rush distrusted nature.  He saw disease as a
failure of nature, so heroic intervention was the only effective approach.  Rush’s
outlook became the orthodox American medical paradigm of the 19^th century,
and that medical establishment had the audacity to call alternative practitioners
“quacks.” 

Rush, the physician general to George
Washington’s revolutionary army, subscribed to warfare ideology in his medical
approach.  Said Rush, “It is necessary that (the remedies) be
so – that is, more powerful than the disease, or they cannot overcome it.”[46]  Washington was
probably bloodlet to death by doctors practicing
“heroic” medicine. That heroic philosophy is still prevalent in today’s American
medicine.  Rush pointed to surviving patients as proof that his treatments worked,
but millions of people paid the price of his certitude.  Rush was hostile toward
plant-based remedies, but believed in metallic medicine.  Highly toxic heavy metals
such as mercury, lead and antimony (in the same chemical family as arsenic) found
their way into the day’s orthodox medicine.  Rush’s methods were in keeping with
the assembly-line strategies that accompanied the Industrial Revolution.  Orthodox
doctors could treat up to thirty patients in an average morning, prescribing nearly
the same treatment to every one, no matter their condition.  It was a “one-size-fits-all”
medicine. 

The Enlightenment began in France,
and in no small measure had the European experience in North America to thank. 
Although the Enlightenment looked back to ancient Greece’s democracy for political
inspiration, in major ways classical Greece was a poor example: slaves outnumbered
citizens in Athens, and women were nearly prisoners in their homes.  When the
Enlightenment began, humanity’s only functioning democracy was the Iroquois
Confederation, in the area of present-day New York State.  Iroquoian women
elected the chiefs, ran village life and cast their children’s vote in proxy,
for a balance of power between the sexes that no Western society has yet approached. 
History being the ultimate ironist, George Washington led the effort to eliminate
Iroquois society.  The Iroquois saw Washington
in much the same way as 1940s Jews saw Adolf Hitler.  The largely classless societies
among the North American natives, and the freedom that was such a natural part
of native life, were attractive to Europeans, which led to a long-standing colonial
problem: colonists running off and “going native.”[47] 
Later theorists such as Friedrich Engels drew upon the Iroquoian example.[48]  The Iroquoian government was
very democratic with decentralized power and had no executive branch, something
that monarchical Europe could not countenance, so the framers of the United States
Constitution invented the executive branch, which has undermined the other branches
ever since, amassing power to itself (so those who control the president control
the government).  Ben Franklin, the American ambassador to France, was
profoundly influenced by the Iroquoian form of government. 

One
Enlightenment outcome was the improvement of women’s lives.  Gone were the days
of being burned alive as a “witch,” although full citizen rights for American
women would not come until the 20^th century, on paper at least.  Victorian
prudery would soon appear, transforming women’s sexuality from something to be
feared into something to be repressed.  Chattel slavery was transformed into wage
slavery, communism would appear as a challenge to capitalism (although both movements
would betray the spirit of their founding theorists), and revolutionary activities
characterized the nineteenth century, as well as European imperial land grabs
throughout the world.  Throughout the chaos, social movements grew, counterattacks
by various establishments were waged, and the 19^th century was humanity’s
most tumultuous…until the 20^th. 

What
happened in Western medicine parallels what happened in Western politics.  While
the divine right of kings was challenged, to more violent effect in France than
in Britain, male-dominated heroic medicine was also challenged.  Understandably,
people feared the day’s orthodox medicine, with their bleedings, mercury, lead
and other deadly methods that passed for medicine.  The foundation of orthodox
medical practice and philosophy came under fire from several quarters, largely
motivated by disgust with orthodox medical practice.  In the early 19^th
century, there were three major challenges to American orthodox medicine.  One
was a revival of herbal medicine, largely based upon Native American remedies. 
Those practitioners became known as “Indian Doctors.” 

Samuel
Thomson mounted another challenge to orthodox medicine.  Thomson was a New Hampshire
farmer who devised a medical system for the masses that utilized Native American
steam baths and an herbal pharmacopoeia that eventually encompassed 65 herbal
remedies.  Thomson learned his herbal medicine from a woman herbalist.  Thomson’s
system created an army of folk healers, where the ideal was “every man his own
doctor.”  By 1839, one-sixth of the United States (three million people) used
his system of medicine.[49] 
Orthodox doctors saw Thomson as such a dire threat that they had a law passed
that named Thomson specifically.  What did the law state?  Thomson was forbidden
to treat people without charging them.  Those challenges to orthodox medicine
were nearly the antithesis of heroic medicine.

The
third challenge to American orthodox medicine came from within its ranks, from
Europe.  It was the most substantial challenge to American orthodox medicine,
as it was the most professional.  In the late 18^th century a German
physician, Samuel Hahnemann, developed a system of medicine wholly at variance
with orthodox medical theory.  He rejected the materialistic perspective of science
and medicine, and saw disease and health as spiritual conditions.  Hahnemann thought
that dissection and attempts to describe the mechanics of the human body, as a
way to guide treatment, was a useless undertaking.  Hahnemann borrowed from the
ancient Greeks and Paracelsus in developing a “law of similars.”  Hahnemann’s
theory was that if a healthy person were given a medicine that produced certain
symptoms, an ill person with those same symptoms would be cured by the same medicine. 
It was a case of “paradoxical” therapy.  It was not the first, and not the last,
paradoxical therapy.  Ericksonian therapy in psychology, for instance, is used
today with great success.  Hahnemann’s style of medicine became known as homeopathy. 
While purgatives and other violent medicines were given by orthodoxy, and the
more concentrated the better, Hahnemann took the opposite approach, based on
his experience with treating patients. 

Hahnemann’s
medicines were highly dilute, and the more dilute, the more powerful the apparent
healing properties, even when so dilute that not even one molecule remained of
the original substance.  It might seem like nonsense, but it worked, and there
is experimental data to support the notion.  The effect and philosophy of homeopathy
markedly differs from drug therapy.  Homeopathy uses dilute substances to help
stimulate the body to heal itself, a helpful reminder of sorts.  Drug therapy,
on the other hand, overwhelms the body, taking over its chemistry, manipulating
it to “health.”  Whereas homeopathy stimulates the body to heal itself and to
correct the underlying condition, which is classic feminine medicine, drug therapy
reflects masculine principles of warfare and domination, taking over the body’s
processes, usually acting by suppressing disease symptoms. 

I
have used homeopathy to dramatic effect, and have seen it work miracles.  It is
similar in some ways to the concept of vaccination, stimulating the body to ward
off disease.  In the attacks against homeopathy that continue to this day, the
orthodox assailants always say how “absurd” homeopathy is, while the homeopathists
respond, “OK, it may seem that way to our conditioned minds, but it works, and
nobody is harmed by it.”  In fact, there is a theoretical basis for homeopathy,
which is largely unchanged from Hahnemann’s day, but it is radically different
from orthodox theory.[50] 
Hahnemann was banned from practicing in Germany.  He had to keep moving his place
of residence because of the attacks, and homeopathy was introduced to the United
States in 1825.[51] 

During
the early 19^th century, the United States’ citizenry began abandoning
orthodox medicine.  Monopolistic medical laws were overturned across America,
and orthodox doctors had to compete with the alternative movements.  As far as
millions of Americans were concerned, abandoning orthodox medicine was an exercise
in freedom.  In the words of one senator who introduced a law that helped overturn
the orthodox medical monopoly,

 

“A people
accustomed to govern themselves and boasting of their intelligence are impatient
of restraint.  They want no protection but freedom of inquiry and freedom of action.”[52]

 

That
statement was similar in spirit to Ben Franklin’s observation that people who
give up freedom for security will get (and deserve) neither.  Orthodox medicine
had plenty going against it.  For one thing, their “medicine” was widely considered
to be deadly.  Another factor was the minimal training that orthodox doctors received. 
Orthodox training was so poor that between 1853 and 1873 only about a third of
all applicants, with medical school diplomas in hand, passed the examination to
become a naval doctor.[53]  The director of
naval medicine thought another ten percent could have passed an easier examination,
but the remaining majority of applicants were hopelessly unqualified. 

Medical schools flooded America with those unqualified doctors,
dispensing their “medicine.”  Homeopaths made far more money per practitioner
than orthodox doctors, because demand for them was relatively higher.  The “Indian
Doctors” and Thomsonian practitioners merged in the 1840s to form the “eclectic”
school of medicine.  About one-sixth of America’s homeopathic practitioners were
converted orthodox doctors.  In 1844, homeopaths formed the American Institute
of Homeopathy.  Orthodox medicine was being rapidly abandoned.  Accordingly, it
mounted a counterattack.  The first blast came from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who
published Homeopathy and its Kindred Delusions in 1842.  Holmes led the
attack on feminine-oriented medicine and its, “nature-trusting heresy.”[54]  It is no accident
that Holmes invoked the Inquisition’s terminology.  To this day, the American
medical establishment has never performed any scientific investigation
into homeopathy or its results.[55]  A quote from Herbert
Spencer is appropriate here, as it will apply to the medical establishment in
dozens of instances before this essay is finished.

 

“There
is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against
all argument, and which cannot fail to keep man in everlasting ignorance.  That
principle is condemnation without investigation.” 

 

One
of the greatest minds in American history, William James, said in 1898 to the
Massachusetts legislature, as he argued against a law that would make psychology
into a monopoly run by orthodox medical doctors,

 

“When
I was a medical student I feel sure that any one of us would have been ashamed
to be caught looking into a homeopathic book by a professor.  We had to sneer
at homeopathy by word of command.  Such was the school opinion at that time, and
I imagine that similar encouragement to superficiality in various directions exist
in the medical schools of today.”[56]

 

More than a century later, the situation
is identical.  A couple of months before writing this, an orthodox doctor gave
me his opinion that homeopathy and alternative cancer treatments were worthless
scams, as they did not have solid science behind them.  He stated that the very
principle of homeopathy, of dilute medicines, was absurd on its face and not worthy
of serious consideration.  Had he performed any investigation himself?  Had he
even read the results of a scientific investigation that found homeopathy wanting? 
I believe that the answer was no, although my homeopathist lived in the same town. 
What was the basis for his opinion?  As far as I could tell, he was reciting the
fairy tales that American orthodox doctors have been indoctrinated into for the
past 150 years.  In kind, it was nearly identical to the fairy
tales I was told about capitalism in business school. 

In 1845, in direct response to the threat of alternative medicine,
the American Medical Association (AMA) was formed.  As has been the case with
probably every professional group in world history, the AMA was primarily concerned
with serving the well-being of its members.  They couched their public image as
coming together to serve the public, which is the standard modus operandi
of EVERY self-serving operation.  The AMA is
the doctor’s union, and protecting the public is the world’s biggest protection
racket.  Nathan Smith Davis formed the AMA, and although one of his goals
was improving medical education and training, it was politically inexpedient to
push for it.  Davis needed allies in the war against feminine-oriented medicine,
and few of the day’s orthodox practitioners would have met Smith’s proposed standard
of medical training and competence.  One early AMA strategy was banning consultation
with non-orthodox doctors.  This helped stanch the bleeding of orthodox conversions
to homeopathy.  Using standard business strategy, in order to compete with the
homeopaths and other gentle medical approaches, orthodox medicine had to abandon
some of its more egregious practices such as bloodletting.  The gigantic doses
of calomel and other “medicines” continued late into the 19^th century. 
Davis was about the first great American crusader against “quacks,” although somehow
the practice of administering calomel did not qualify as quackery. 

As
orthodox medicine waged its war against competition from alternative therapies,
surgery was not really part of the battle.  That is because surgery was not held
in high esteem, although some successful surgeons could command hefty sums in
Europe.  Many people considered surgery a last resort, fit mainly for battlefield
hospitals; to try putting soldiers back together.  The surgery of Rush’s time
was similarly heroic, with doctors vying to see who could remove the greatest
portion of a patient’s body without causing death.[57] 
No life insurance company would insure a surgeon’s
wife in those days.  If patients did not die from the pain or too many removed
organs, they would likely die from infection.  Sanitation was not a concept in
orthodox medical practice, and surgery was the ultimate in pain, surpassing even
explosive purgatives and the ghastly effects of mercury poisoning.  Events in
the 19^th century would eventually rescue surgery from its disrepute.
 

 

Science,
Medicine and Money in the 19^th Century

The
life-giving and life-taking aspects of Western medicine are in strange juxtaposition
regarding the first breakthrough that would change Western interventional medicine
for the better.  Sanitation, Hygeia’s principle, was first practiced in places
where life begins and ends: maternity wards and battlefield hospitals. 

John Pringle, the physician-general of the British army
and physician to the royal family, studied infection, disease and antisepsis and
in 1752 strongly recommended that cleanliness and hygiene were the best preventives.[58]  His observation did not become
a universal practice, far from it, but battlefield hospitals were real-world laboratories
that have led to a great deal of today’s emergency medicine. 

The
earliest Western medical doctor to establish sanitary practices was Hungarian
obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis, who made his discovery at the Vienna General Hospital
in 1847.  Vienna was the heart of the Austrian empire and Europe’s most progressive
city, and the Vienna General Hospital was a teaching hospital.  Men and women
were both trained there, men to be doctors, women to be midwives.  Semmelweis
was a bright young doctor from Hungary, but being from the imperial hinterland,
with foreign dress and speech, he was subjected to numerous harassments.  He weathered
those difficulties and was appointed as assistant to the director of obstetrics
at the Vienna hospital.  Although obstetrics was not a glamorous branch of medicine,
Semmelweis was doing well for a foreigner.  In that era, pathology was popular
and male medical students learned their craft by dissecting cadavers and handling
diseased organs.  In those days, puerperal fever raged through maternity wards. 
Puerperal fever was killing off great numbers of women who gave birth in European
hospitals, especially its teaching hospitals.  At times it galloped across swaths
of Europe.  In the Lombardy region of today’s Italy, not one woman survived a
teaching hospital-delivered childbirth for an entire year, during the 1770s.[59] 

Two maternity wards were in the Vienna General Hospital. 
The male medical students served the first ward; midwives-in-training serviced
the other.  The maternity wards of the teaching hospital only attracted desperate
patients, the poor women of Dickens’ Europe.  Semmelweis witnessed cases where
expectant women would be admitted to the hospital when only the first ward was
open.  Women got on their knees and begged to be admitted to the second ward. 
Semmelweis once watched a woman leave the hospital to give birth in an alley rather
than be admitted to the first ward.  What did those desperate women fear?  It
turned out that the death rate from puerperal fever was more than 20% in the first
ward, served by the medical students.  The ward served by the midwives-in-training
had about a 2% mortality rate.  What those desperate women obviously knew, Semmelweis
eventually noticed. 

As he began wondering why,
one of his favorite teachers accidentally cut himself during an autopsy and died
in the same fashion that those poor mothers did.  Semmelweis then theorized that
something was passing from the cadavers in the autopsy rooms to the mothers in
the first ward.  In those days, surgeons gloried in the gore they became coated
in as they performed their heroic labors.  The Vienna medical students would go
straight from the autopsy room to perform pelvic examinations on the women in
the first ward.  Their hands smelled cadaverous.  Semmelweis theorized that there
were “invisible cadaver particles” that clung to the medical students’ skin. 
Semmelweis had his medical students thoroughly wash and scrub their hands, then
rinse them in a chlorine solution until the cadaverous smell was gone.  During
the first month of that program, the mortality rate in the first ward fell to
2%.  Semmelweis was on his way to making the history books. 

Although
the initial reception to his work by his superiors was positive, Semmelweis’ tale
is one of medical history’s more tragic.  Probably at least partly because of
impediments he had already encountered because he was foreign, he did not immediately
approach the Viennese medical establishment with his findings.  An immediate realization
of Semmelweis’ findings was that the doctors were inadvertently killing their
patients.  Not surprisingly, many doctors contemptuously dismissed his findings. 
Also, those were the days before the germ theory of disease, and the idea that
invisible “particles” could cause death were laughed out of medical meetings. 
Semmelweis was also part of the revolutionary movement that swept Europe in 1848,
and his political views helped get him shut out of any employment opportunities
in Vienna.  He lost his job at the Vienna General Hospital and went back to Hungary. 
His findings and preventive method fell into obscurity.  In 1843, Oliver Wendell
Holmes suggested that hospital attendants might transmit childbirth fever to the
mothers, but his theory was quickly dismissed by orthodox medicine. 

Many
subsequent observers have blamed Semmelweis for not promoting his findings as
vigorously and properly as he might have.  Semmelweis obviously deserved some
of the responsibility, but the greater share probably rests with the medical establishment. 
There was an anti-Semmelweis movement among European orthodoxy, with even a luminary
such as Rudolf Virchow chiming in with his negative view. 
Semmelweis did not weather the opposition well.  In 1861, he finally published
his great work on his findings.  He was only about 43 years old, but aged greatly
during those years of attacks from his professional brethren.[60] 

Although
he is a major figure in Western medicine’s history, his 1861 magnum opus receives
negative reviews even today.  The most recent treatment of the Semmelweis affair
is Hal Hellman’s.[61]  Hellman is more sympathetic than
other recent writers, and rounded up doctors of Semmelweis’ day and medical historians
of the 20^th century who thought that his work was epochal, one recent
specialist calling Semmelweis’ book one of the “most moving, persuasive and revolutionary
works in the history of science.”[62] 
Semmelweis came to a dismal end, dying in an insane asylum in 1865.  His mental
faculties rapidly diminished during his last years.  An investigation into his
final days has unearthed harsh facts.  His body was exhumed and examined in 1963,
and further research was undertaken in the 1970s, with a summary published in
1995.  Semmelweis was lured to one of Vienna’s shabbier asylums under false pretenses,
and then involuntarily committed by three physicians who had no psychiatric training. 
He soon died of infection that apparently resulted from severe and untreated beatings
administered by the asylum staff.[63] 
Semmelweis was a forgotten figure for many years, with his “crazy” treatment abandoned. 
In 1891, in the wake of the successes of sanitary practices, his body was exhumed
and moved to Hungary, and he was honored in 1906 by a statue in Budapest.  Semmelweis’
theories went beyond “cadaver particles.”  Before there was a germ theory, Semmelweis
had broadened his theory to include any putrid and decaying matter, which will
have relevance later in this essay. 

It would
not be until Joseph Lister’s work became embraced, Lister beginning to pioneer
sanitary surgical techniques soon after Semmelweis died, that Semmelweis’ discovery
would begin recovering from its neglect. 

From
the earliest days of the New World’s invasion by Europe, the quest
for riches and fame would characterize the West, especially the United States. 
The quest for riches and fame casts a dark shadow over the story of the first
great innovation to rescue surgery from its barbaric status: anesthesia. 

Dentists, not surgeons, brought
anesthesia to medicine.  Painless dentistry and tooth extraction would also rescue
dentistry from its reputation.  One of mercury poisoning’s chief effects is damage
to and loss of the teeth.  Rush’s medicine created business for dentists.  Mercury
is put into dental fillings even today, and its toxic effects are minimized by
the same kinds of scientific groups that have minimized the damage that lead and fluoride do to
the human body.  At nearly the same time that Semmelweis was watching women begging
to be admitted to the Vienna General Hospital’s midwife-served maternity ward,
general anesthesia was discovered in the United States.  Humphry Davy experimented
in England during the 1790s on the intoxicating effects of nitrous oxide, and
recommended that it might be used for painless surgery.  His discovery was quickly
forgotten. 

Nitrous oxide would eventually become
famous as “laughing gas,” a party favorite among the educated class.  In 1844,
a young dentist named Horace Wells attended a laughing gas show in Connecticut
and saw one of the inebriants wound himself, which he did not feel until the gas’
effects wore off.  The point was not lost on Wells, who arranged to have a tooth
painlessly extracted that same evening while under a nitrous-oxide-induced stupor. 
As he regained consciousness, Wells envisioned a new era of tooth extraction. 
Wells enlisted the assistance of William Morton, a former student of his, in gaining
an introduction to Boston’s surgical community.[64]  Morton successfully used ether
in 1846 to anesthetize a patient for a leg amputation.  Unlike the statistical
and theoretical case made by Semmelweis, the effects of anesthesia were dramatically
obvious to any observer, and anesthesia quickly became an integral part of Western
medicine.  Its pioneers, however, received no benefit.  The battle for priority
and money over the discovery of anesthesia is a sordid tale. 

Morton
studied chemistry under Charles Jackson, who gave Morton some important information
and suggestions about using ether.  Subsequently, Wells, Morton and Jackson became
embroiled in the battle of who had precedence in discovering anesthesia.  Wells
became a chloroform addict and committed suicide in prison in 1848, after throwing
acid on two prostitutes.  Morton engaged in many fruitless legal battles over
his rights to anesthesia, and died in 1868.  Jackson also tried cashing in, lost
his mind, and spent his last years in a psychotic state, dying in 1880.  Crawford
Long, a country doctor, used ether successfully in 1842, but did not engage in
the self-promotion of the others.  He died in obscurity, and his discovery was
not vindicated until after his death in 1878.[65] 

It was not until Joseph Lister began
experimenting with the sterilization of surgical implements that surgery became
relatively painless and safe.  Before Lister, death rates from post-surgical infection
ranged from 25% to 60% in Western Europe’s hospitals.  Lister came upon Pasteur’s
work and his germ theory, and invented a carbolic acid treatment of surgical implements,
wounds and dressings.  In 1870, he published the first results of his new technique:
death from infection quickly fell from 45% to 15%.  Lister was also spraying the
air with his acid, however, a misdirection that came from Pasteur’s work, which
did not help his patients much, but still the death rate fell.  Lister taught
in Scotland during the years of his great advances.  Similar to Semmelweis, Lister’s
findings were not immediately embraced by surgeons, although he did not receive
the vociferous attacks that Semmelweis’ work did.  Doctors proposed other theories
to explain his findings.  Lister himself thought it would take a generation for
orthodox medicine to wake up and embrace his findings.  He was right.  In the
late 1880s, Lister’s discoveries were still held in contempt by many in the medical
establishment, although he had many successes and converts.[66]  The early reception in the United
States was also poor.  A quote from Medical Dark Ages, about one of America’s most famous
surgeons, is appropriate here:

 

“I spent a part of …1923 with…Dr. W.W. Keen…In the…Civil
War…he was a surgeon…and had seen many men die from suppuration of wounds
after he had operated. …He would hold the sutures in his teeth and sharpen his
knife on the sole of his boot, after he had raised up his boot from the muddy
ground.  That was the accepted practice at the time.”

“…He
went to Scotland and studied under Lister…(“Lister was persecuted by the
British Medical Association.  He was threatened with having his license revoked.”)
Yet in Lister’s hospital virtually no one died as a result of operations because
Lister had developed a carbolic acid wash and disinfectant.  Dr. Keen came back
from Scotland…He was referred to as a crazy Listerite…He was denied an opportunity
to practice in every hospital in Philadelphia.”

“Finally
there was one open-minded surgeon in the great Pennsylvania General Hospital. 
He said, ‘Let us give this young fellow a chance.’  So they let him operate.”

“…No
one died from infection under Keen. …He (Keen) began to chronicle the results
in statistical articles.  He was threatened with expulsion from the Pennsylvania
Medical Association…This was in the 1890′s…Finally was accepted as the greatest
surgeon in the US.  The old man told me – and he started to cry…’I nearly went
under.  I was nearly shut off.” – US Senator Paul Douglas, Congressional
Record, 1963.

 

There have been three great watershed events in United States history,
and they have been wars: the American Revolution,
the American Civil War and World War II.  Each marked the beginning of an epoch in
American history.  One effect of those wars was that great fortunes were made. 
George Washington became the richest man in
America, partly from native land that his armies helped steal.  World War II was
the greatest era of war profiteering, even worse than during World War I, but
the Civil War was when war profiteering became an American science.  A group of
young men seized the initiative during the Civil War.  They all bought their way
out of military service (an option in all American wars), and then engaged in
war profiteering on a vast scale.  The Civil War kicked the American Industrial
Revolution into high gear, initiated The Gilded Age and made vast sums for a group
of men who became known as robber barons.[67] 
Their legacies can be felt today, with men such as John
Rockefeller, James Mellon, J.P. Morgan, Philip Armour and Andrew Carnegie
beginning their empire building during the Civil War.  American empires in railroads,
steel, oil, banking and other industries were
founded during the Civil War.  They became the great trusts that the American
government tried breaking up in the early 20^th century. 

The
American pharmaceutical industry also got its start during the Civil War.  Pharmaceutical
empires such as Squibb’s and Stearns’ received their starts making pharmaceuticals
during the Civil War, to be soon joined by Lilly, Merck, Abbott, and others.[68] 
The specter of Benjamin Rush loomed over the Civil War, as
the major “medicine” vended to the Union Army was calomel,
the cure-all.  Along with vending calomel, the new pharmaceutical companies vied
with one another, each vending its own “patent medicine,” which was a misnomer,
because not only were the formulas not patented, they were secret, which was officially
frowned upon by the AMA.  In 1876, Frederick Stearns invented the concept of proprietary
medicine, which solved the problem of divulging ingredients yet retaining monopoly
rights, which unleashed a flood of mixed drugs and other substances, designed
to cure one malady or another.  Thousands of those proprietary “medicines” were
on the market by 1880.  Many items in the eclectic and homeopathic pharmacopoeia
were adopted directly into the new proprietary medicines. 

The
AMA also condemned the proprietary-medicine craze, but was economically subservient
to it, allowing proprietary and “secret ingredient” medicine ads in the Journal
of the American Medical Association (JAMA).  Prescription medicine
also got its start in those days, with doctors prescribing proprietary medicines
to their patients.  The doctors had almost no idea about the efficacy of the drugs
pumped into the marketplace.  Prescribing the new medicines was an American fad,
and drug stores began dotting the landscape.  That dynamic still dominates today’s
orthodox medical paradigm.  Financial incentives were waved under doctors’ noses
to prescribe certain drugs, and true “medicine” was the last thing being practiced. 
A handful of “cure-all” drugs (fever reducers) became standard ingredients, used
by orthodox doctors for nearly every disease condition.  Assembly-line medicine
continued to be practiced by orthodoxy, as it is today.  American orthodox doctors
eventually became highly paid marketing and administration conduits for the pharmaceutical
companies.

 

Investigating
Life’s Mysteries

While
heated battles were waged by American orthodox medicine against alternative practitioners
from the 1840s onward, events in Europe would initiate big changes in medical
practice.  Although Semmelweis would endure many attacks for his work, as is typical
for medical pioneers, there was great scientific ferment in Europe.  Science and
industry helped transform the West in the 1800s, and medicine was not immune to
its march.  Paris, the hotbed of political revolution, became the center of a
revolution in Western medicine in the early 19^th century.  Hospitals
became laboratories in France, and the science of pathology was established, with
autopsy results compared to bedside diagnoses.  The Enlightenment ideals of empirical
investigation took root in medical research, although that was relative.  Medical
students flocked from across the West to Paris to learn the new medicine.  In
Germany, laboratory science began its rise, partly due to improvements in microscopes,
and by 1850, laboratory science was an important part of medical research, which
used chemistry, dissection, vivisection, microscopes and other empirical techniques
to learn about life and nature. 

The 1850s were
a time of radical new theories and discoveries in European science and medicine. 
There were distinct schools of German, English and French thought and practice. 
In England, clinical medicine and private medical practice dominated, with little
emphasis on research that was not directly applicable to medicine.  England and
the United States were considered relatively backward with respect to research
and the application of science to the medical arts.  German science and medicine
was publicly institutionalized, locally supported, with emphasis on the laboratory. 
Germany was the center of “pure” research.  France had a centralized system that
focused on Paris.  Their hospitals were the center of treatment and research,
but it was mainly concerned with training doctors.  The French, however, have
long been renowned among Europeans for their creativity.  All three imperial rivals
played their role in dealing with a hot issue in the 1850s: what is life, and
how did it come to be? 

With the ascendance of
Western science, those issues were earnestly addressed.  Paracelsus and Descartes
taught that the spontaneous appearance of life from dead matter was a normal chemical
occurrence.  In those days, many considered such a materialistic understanding
to be common sense.  Eels came from mud, parasites formed inside humans, rotting
meat created flies.  The idea had been around since antiquity (see Genesis and
the creation of Adam from mud).  As experimental science became established, the
source of life became the focus of a debate that continues to this day, although
today’s scientific establishment generally subscribes to a materialistic interpretation
of evolution. 

In the 1600s, Robert Boyle was
impressed with the experiments of Jean-Baptiste van Helmont.  Van Helmont put
a 5-pound willow shoot into a pot of soil.  After five years, the willow tree
weighed 168 pounds but the soil weighed the same, leading van Helmont to conclude,
“All vegetables do materially arise whole out of the element of water.”[69] 

Microscopes
made possible the discovery of an amazingly complex microscopic world, and sexual
reproduction in the smallest insects.  English and French philosophers in the
late 1600s rejected Descartes’ notion of the spontaneous emergence of life from
laws of motion acting on inanimate matter.  Antoine Lavoisier eventually demonstrated
in the late 18^th century, before his neck met the business end of a
guillotine, that water was only nourishment for the plants, not its source.  Lavoisier
was the first to describe plant and animal respiration, and his work with oxygen,
respiration and combustion became the foundation of modern chemistry, and was
one of Kuhn’s examples of revolutionary, paradigm-founding work.  Religious philosophy
was also involved in the spontaneous-generation debate, as life coming from random
processes, by mere “chance,” was directly opposed to the day’s theology.  In the
late 17^th century, the pre-existence of souls and the seeds of life
were popular ideas.  William Harvey wrote Generation
of Animals, and was concerned with sexual reproduction, but he was rather
neutral about the ultimate spontaneity of life.  The issue was a chicken-or-egg
argument, with the egg position prevailing at times. 

By
the end of the 18^th century, spontaneous-generation theory was again
in vogue.  Its rehabilitation was mainly due to evidence and theory involving
parasitic worms.  Largely because the parasitic life cycle had yet to be understood,
the prevailing theory was that parasitic worms must spontaneously manifest within
the host organism.  In the 19^th century’s early decades, spontaneous
generation was largely accepted, and there were different schools of thought. 
Germany, led by its parasitologists, accepted spontaneous generation.  In France
it was also largely accepted.  In Britain during the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, there was open hostility to the notion, as it was “atheistic” and “contrary
to an unerring law of nature.”[70] 

Beginning around 1830, spontaneous-generation theory
was subject to challenges in France and Germany.  Experiments were showing that
the organisms associated with decay were not spontaneously generated, and chemical
and biological theories vied for supremacy. 

During
1835-36, the Frenchman Charles Cagniard-Latour studied beer yeast and determined
that fermentation was the result of the yeast’s biological processes.  He concluded
that yeast was a living organism.  His conception of fermentation was original,
and was confirmed at about the same time and taken further by Theodor Schwann. 
Schwann, a German, is today considered the father of histology, the study of plant
and animal tissues.  Schwann investigated cellular structure, putrefaction and
fermentation, and concluded that yeast was a living fungus.  He also demonstrated
that vacuum-sealed boiled meat did not rot or produce the microscopic organisms
associated with rotting.  With Cagniard-Latour and Schwann’s work, the notion
of fermentation as a purely chemical process was challenged.  There were counterattacks
to that idea, most prominently from the German chemist Justus von Liebig.  Liebig
refused to look through microscopes.  He did not subscribe to spontaneous-generation
theory, but also saw fermentation as a purely chemical process, with no life involved. 
During the 1840s and 1850s, there was a plethora of confused theories about fermentation
and spontaneous generation.  

The Whigs were a British political party, and what was called ”Whig
history” was writing history as a tale of progress, a linear story beginning in
a primitive past to climax with humanity’s crowning achievement: modern Western
civilization.[71]  About thirty years ago, John
Farley took a sabbatical from his teaching position at Harvard.  His sabbatical
produced The Spontaneous Generation Controversy, published in 1974.  Farley
partly wrote his book because many episodes in science history were still written
in Whiggish terms.[72]  Farley thought that the textbook treatment of
the spontaneous-generation controversy was a “paradigmatic” case of Whig history
in science.  His book sought to help curtail spontaneous generation’s Whiggish
treatment, particularly in how its major figure, Louis Pasteur, has been seen
by history.  The standard histories of the spontaneous-generation issue have it
slowly discredited by scientific experiments until Pasteur came along and ended
the controversy for all time with his “brilliant” experiments, winning a public
contest to resolve the issue.  Pasteur will be a focus of this medical essay,
not because of his unique virtue, but because his triumph may have placed modern
biology and medicine on a false foundation. 

In
the 1850s, the spontaneous-generation controversy was contested in three areas. 
One dealt with parasites, another was the area of fermentation, and the third
was an overarching theory that largely ended the controversy in the scientific
community, not in the 1850s, but in the 20^th century.  The new overarching
theory was Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which exploded onto the scene
with the Origin of the Species, published in 1859.  Darwin was influenced
by the gradualist theory of geology produced by fellow British citizen Charles
Lyell (as contrasted with catastrophic theory)
and the theories of the British economist Thomas Malthus,
which posited that humanity would always be struggling to survive because of its
uncontrolled breeding.  Darwin’s work would bring Britain back to the spontaneous-generation
issue because the logical outcome of evolutionary theory was that life somehow
came into being by a gradual evolution from non-living matter.  That theory would
not be more fully worked out until the 20^th century, however. 

In the early 1850s Western scientists, largely German, discovered
the life cycles of parasitic worms.  The pleomorphic (it means “changing shape,”
the way a caterpillar and butterfly are the same species, but in different “morphic”
stages) properties of parasitic worms were not discovered until the 1850s.  That
discovery was a severe blow to spontaneous-generation theory.  Similar to Semmelweis
in Vienna, Rudolf Virchow lost his job in Berlin because of his revolutionary
activities in the late 1840s.  Virchow performed extensive work with parasitic
worms in the 1850s, which further justified his belief that spontaneous generation
was an invalid theory.  In 1858 Virchow published his Cellular Pathology,
which theorized that the cell was the smallest unit of life.  Where Schwann theorized
that cells could “crystallize” from a disorganized “mother” medium, Virchow firmly
stated that cells only arise from the division of existing cells.  Cells have
largely been seen ever since by orthodox science as the elementary unit of life,
although it somehow evolved from protoplasm (today called cytoplasm).  Virchow
theorized that the health of an organism was dependent on the health of its cells. 
Today’s study of healthy and diseased cells, such as Pap smears and biopsies,
grew from his work. 

Darwin’s evolutionary theory
and the findings in parasitology created more debate about spontaneous generation. 
The logical conclusion of evolutionary theory would demand an abiogenetic (life
coming from inanimate material) explanation of the ultimate source of life, although
parasite research discovered that they do not spontaneously form within host organisms. 
In the 1860s, both Germany and England grappled with the issue of spontaneous
generation, generally agreeing with it.  As Farley notes, their stance may seem
at odds with the textbook story of Pasteur’s work sounding the death knell to
spontaneous-generation theory in the 1860s.  Pasteur battled for many years against
the spontaneous-generation theorists after his work supposedly gave spontaneous-generation
theory its fatal blow. 

A
brief summary of Louis Pasteur’s life is in order.  Born in 1822 in a French village
to a tanner who served in Napoleon’s army, Pasteur came from humble roots.  A
morally rigid young man, Pasteur did well in school and had artistic talent. 
He took the academic route, going to school in Paris.  He had some major academic
failures early in his collegiate career, but through extra effort was able to
get into college and eventually earn his doctorate.  As with the men who discovered
anesthesia, Pasteur was consumed with ambition to become rich and famous.  In
1844, Pasteur the chemistry student performed his first experiment, isolating
phosphorous from cattle bones.  It was successful, and Pasteur advertised his
feat by putting a big blue label on the flask that held his result.[73] 

In
1848, Pasteur was working in crystallography, a subdiscipline of geology.  During
1848, revolution gripped Paris, and Pasteur left his laboratory for a few moments
to show some of his patriotism (he must be categorized as a political conservative). 
If he lived in the United States today, he would probably be a George
Bush supporter, or perhaps lean even further to the right.  In
1848, Pasteur made his first discovery, and it was a worthy one.  Solutions of
dissolved substances could evidence optical activity, which meant that if polarized
light were shined through it, the light would become rotated from its original
orientation when it came out the other side.  French physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot
discovered the phenomenon in 1815.  Nobody knew why some substances rotated light. 
Pasteur discovered why in 1848.  He was making crystals of sodium ammonium tartrate,
which is not an optically active solution.  As the crystals formed in solution,
Pasteur noticed that some crystals were mirror images of each other.  He picked
them out by using tweezers, and separated them into two piles.  He then made solutions
of them.  One solution rotated light to the right, and one to the left.  It was
a major discovery, and Pasteur immediately rushed out and dragged a physics instructor
who was passing by into his laboratory, and explained his discovery to him.  Pasteur
would later theorize that the rotation of the light was due to the molecule’s
structure.  He was correct. 

My organic chemistry
textbook gave Pasteur high praise for his finding.[74]  Pasteur’s discovery
had profound implications for the life sciences.  It turns out that stereoisomers
(molecules that are identical except for being mirror images of each other) are
one of life’s mysteries that remain unresolved.  Optically active substances only
come from living organisms.  They use one version of a substance, but will not
use its mirror image, because of the way it fits with the other molecules.  To
imagine the situation, try shaking a person’s left hand with your right hand. 
Nobody can really shake hands that way.  Try right hand to right hand, and it
works. 

How living organisms came to incorporate
chiral (right and left handed) molecules into their chemistry is a mystery to
evolutionary theorists today.  Nevertheless, optically active solutions are only
made from living organisms (or, as in Pasteur’s fortunate case, he was able to
pick out the right handed and left handed crystals).  Solutions derived from chiral
molecules not produced by life processes will have equal distributions of right-handed
and left-handed molecules, making the solutions optically inactive.  Pasteur correctly
theorized that optical activity was related to life processes.  He successfully
repeated the experiment for the skeptical, elderly Biot, and gained an academic
patron. 

Unable to land a suitable position in
Paris upon completing his doctoral studies, in January 1849 Pasteur moved to Strasbourg
to take a position as a chemistry teacher.  Within three weeks of his arrival,
Pasteur proposed to marry the college rector’s daughter, a move that may have
reflected his ambition more than his ardor.[75]  The college head was cautious, but Pasteur was
persistent and married the woman in May of that year.  Pasteur worked hard in
his laboratory with his crystals, and an insight into his motivation may be reflected
in an incident early in his marriage.  He told his wife, who scolded him about
his long hours in the laboratory, that he would make it up to her by “lead(ing)
her to fame.”[76] 
His wife anticipated that fame and the benefits it brought, writing to Louis’
father one day that, “Louis always worries a little too much about his experiments. 
You know that those he is planning for this year will give us, if they succeed,
a Newton or Galileo.”[77] 

Pasteur
is a controversial figure.  During the 1990s, Gerald Geison, a history professor
at Princeton, spent a year reading Pasteur’s experimental notebooks.  In 1995
he published The Private Science of Louis Pasteur.  In the final analysis,
Geison respected Pasteur’s contributions to science and medicine, but he found
a disparity between Pasteur the public scientist and Pasteur the experimenter. 
Geison’s book created an uproar in France, and he received plenty of scorn.  One
irony of Geison’s work is that Pasteur tried to ensure that his laboratory notes
were never made public, partly because a row erupted over the posthumous publication
of Claude Bernard’s notes.  Bernard, Pasteur’s friend, was shown to subscribe
to a more chemical theory of fermentation.  Pasteur published a devastating critique
of Bernard’s notes, and Pasteur then made his family promise to never make his
notebooks public, a promise that his grandson eventually betrayed. 

Geison
presents several events where the public and private science of Pasteur were at
odds, the first of which was Pasteur’s discovery of chirality.  Pasteur made public
presentations about his discovery of crystal chirality, and Geison shows that
they were highly abbreviated versions that were in part self-serving.  Geison’s
central figure of Pasteur’s presentation of his discovery is Auguste Laurent. 
Laurent was a major figure in the early days of crystallography, and Pasteur studied
under his tutelage.  Pasteur changed the subject of his doctoral chemistry thesis
at Laurent’s suggestion, which set him on his path of discovery. 

By
analyzing Pasteur’s notes, Geison could find little evidence in Pasteur’s early
work that suggested how he came upon his discovery of chirality.  Pasteur was
treading down paths that Laurent and others had blazed for him.   He was dealing
with complicated issues regarding crystal formation, and he was not focused on
the optical activity of crystals for most of his doctoral work.  He was researching
anomalies that arose from Laurent’s work.  Pasteur’s discovery was unexpected,
and his laboratory notes do not show how he stumbled onto it.  It is a mystery. 
Nevertheless, nobody has suggested that Pasteur’s discovery was not his own. 
However, when it came time to present his findings, Pasteur wrote Laurent completely
out of the picture.  His wallpapering over Laurent not only happened during his
future talks about his discovery, but Pasteur began minimizing Laurent’s contributions
to his work in the early drafts of his papers.[78] 
By the time Pasteur published the first major paper about his discovery, Laurent’s
contributions had been completely eliminated.  Pasteur went further than that,
making clear his low opinion of Laurent’s work in private correspondence with
one of Laurent’s chief rivals, Jean-Baptiste Dumas. 

Geison
speculates that Pasteur’s disavowal of Laurent likely had much to do with his
maneuvering in the day’s fierce political climate.  Laurent was a political radical. 
Jean-Baptiste Dumas was Laurent’s rival in matters of molecular theory, and Dumas
was the epitome of the establishment scientist, holding high positions in France’s
academic establishment, eventually parlaying his activities into being named a
senator by Napoleon III, the autocrat of France, a man who named himself emperor,
just as his uncle did.[79] 

Pasteur sought
the fame and prosperity that he promised his wife.  When a promised medal from
Dumas did not arrive quickly enough for his liking, Pasteur complained.[80]  While it would be a mistake to
say that Pasteur did not have friends, he was not a particularly likeable fellow. 
In interviews and speeches, Geison stated that Pasteur “was by no means always
humble, selfless, ethically superior…Quite the opposite.”  Geison found Pasteur’s
“behavior and conduct in general unlikable through much of his career.”[81]  

Pasteur cultivated patronage and fame while he worked
with crystals.   His theory of the relationship between chirality and life led
him into the spontaneous-generation controversy.  Pasteur gained a prestigious
appointment to the University of Lille in 1854, and became involved with fermentation
in 1856 due to his position as a chemistry instructor and the industrial problems
of the local beet sugar industry. 

A few years
earlier, parasite research had shown that intestinal worms do not spontaneously
manifest.  Regarding the issue of intestinal worms, an unfortunate dynamic was
evident in the practice of science.  The French Academy of Sciences held contests
to decide the truth of scientific matters.  In 1852 it offered a prize for the
best explanation of how intestinal worms are transmitted.  The winner, P.J. van
Beneden, held a powerful university position in Belgium, and John Farley thinks
that van Beneden’s political connections, more than his scientific efforts, may
have won him his prize.  In addition, van Beneden made claims of priority of discovery
that were obviously false, the true credit due to German scientists.[82]  When scientific
truth is decided by contest, objectivity can easily go flying out the window. 
The practice continues today and further underscores Kuhn’s point that paradigms
prevail because scientists believe in them, not because they are more accurate
than other paradigms. 

With discoveries in parasitology
disproving the notion that parasitic worms were generated spontaneously, fermentation
was the last great, unresolved area of contest.  Pasteur was one of many scientists
investigating the area, and Pasteur had about zero training in biology.  He originally
subscribed to the notion of spontaneous generation, those theorists called sponteparists. 

According to the official stories, Pasteur quickly discovered
that yeast was alive, and he published his first results in 1857.  In his 1857
writings, Pasteur described the yeast and its associated fermentation products
as taking “birth spontaneously…every time that the conditions are favorable.”[83] 
While Pasteur theorized that the yeast was alive, he also thought the yeast had
spontaneously generated, reflecting his early sponteparist position.  Pasteur’s
position was far from original.  There was a strong minority position that yeast
was alive, and Pasteur’s position was merely a rehash of Cagniard-Latour’s work
a generation earlier.  Although Pasteur campaigned heavily to be admitted to the
French Academy of Sciences in 1857, he failed.  His residency in Lille weighed
against him.  Paris was the center of French academic life, and Pasteur knew that
he would not realize his ambitions in the relative hinterland of Lille.  He received
a promotion and moved to Paris in 1857.  In the classroom, Pasteur was notoriously
unpopular with his students and academic colleagues.  He was a humorless martinet,
running the classroom as if it were a boot camp.[84] 

As late as 1860, Pasteur was describing yeast and the
products of fermentation as spontaneously produced.  In 1862 he finally gained
admittance to the French Academy of Sciences, in its mineralogy section.  In all
the accounts of Pasteur’s career I have read, he clearly was a showman and self-promoter. 
Around 1860, Pasteur began theorizing that there were germs in the air, and that
they were responsible for fermentation.  In late 1860, he performed a theatrical
experiment where he traveled across France and into the high Alps, sampling the
air, his experiment proving that germs exist in the air.  The history books portray
the issue as one in which Pasteur had a conflict with Felix-Archimède Pouchet,
who had a theory of heterogenesis, as opposed to abiogenesis.  Heterogenetic theory
states that life arose from life or organic matter, and abiogenetic theory avers
that life ultimately came from non-living substances.  The distinction was vitally
important in the debate on spontaneous generation. 

In
France, spontaneous-generation theory was unpopular by the time Pasteur became
embroiled in it, and Pasteur was considered to have only delivered spontaneous-generation
theory’s deathblow.  The French Academy of Sciences held contests on the issue,
in 1862 and 1864.  As Farley pointed out, both the 1862 and 1864 juries were composed
of men hostile to spontaneous generation.  The 1864 jury was even more biased
than the 1862 jury, with Pasteur patrons Dumas and Antoine Balard presiding. 
History books have told of Pasteur’s triumph, but Farley’s account portrays them
as shamelessly rigged.[85] 

Before the 1864 jury convened,
Pasteur gave a public speech about his findings and the mortal blow it gave to
spontaneous-generation theory.  It was given at the Sorbonne, and was attended
by the Parisian literati, including Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, and Princess
Mathilde.  It was an educated audience, but not really a scientific one.  Pasteur
was embarking on his career as a popularizer.  Pasteur gave a brief account of
the controversy, as well as its religious and philosophical implications.  Then
he delivered his coupe de grâce, announcing that his experimental findings had
shown that when he was able to keep airborne organisms from touching a nutrient-rich
medium, no life was seen to take place, because, “I have kept away from it the
germs that are floating in the air, I have kept it away from life, for life is
the germ, and the germ is life.”[86] 
The largely lay audience greeted his pronouncement with thunderous applause. 
Pasteur’s reputation was thereby made.  He became the savant of germs in the air. 
In Pasteur’s work at the time, he failed to even mention the role of parasitic
worms in the controversy, and he regularly assailed rival scientists.  He became
famous for his thunderous orations at meetings of the French Academy of Sciences. 

Even sympathetic historians and biographers admit that
Pasteur’s fame was due in no small part to his efforts at self-promotion and his
rhetorical talent.  In 1863, soon after his election to the French Academy of
Sciences, Pasteur was introduced to Napoleon III, and he told Napoleon of his
ambition to understand and cure disease.  Pasteur was realizing his ambition,
and was subsequently seen hobnobbing regularly with French royalty, Pasteur “always
being receptive to flattery from high places…”[87] 
While exhibiting artistic talent in his youth, Pasteur was aghast at innovation
in art, and consistently supported the old school, being highly contemptuous of
Manet and the Impressionists. 

With
imperial patronage under his belt and his avowal to cure disease (even though
he still had no medical or biological training), Pasteur was asked to look into
diseases that were plaguing French industries.  Pasteur’s germs-in-the-air philosophy
led to the germ theory of disease.  In 1863, Pasteur was asked to look into a
disease that was harming French grapes and their wine industry, and in 1865, he
was commissioned to look into a disease that was devastating silkworms and the
French silk industry.  The history books give Pasteur full credit for resolving
those issues and saving those industries, to later take on such diseases as anthrax
and rabies.  For his entire career, Pasteur battled his rivals and critics.  Even
his friends were not immune, as with his posthumous attack on Bernard’s notes. 

Pasteur’s germ theory led to
introducing those germs to people as a way of preventing disease, hence his anthrax
and rabies vaccines.  Geison presented cases where Pasteur “cooked” his data,
getting the data to conform to his theories.  In dealing with his anthrax work,
Geison crosses the line and accuses Pasteur of outright fraud, telling his readers
that, “Pasteur deliberately deceived the public and scientific community about
the nature of the vaccine actually used…” in his famous demonstration of his anthrax
vaccine in 1881.[88]  Pasteur misrepresented how his
vaccine was prepared, apparently to triumph over his rival Jean-Joseph Henri Toussaint
over the anthrax vaccine.  Pasteur’s public victory over the anthrax issue appears
to have been the final blow for Toussaint, who lost his mind the next year and
never recovered.  Geison notes that one must consider the financial considerations
that may have prompted Pasteur’s deception.  Pasteur soon began building a financial
empire on his work, and by the mid-1880s his laboratory earned a 130,000-franc
profit from anthrax-vaccine sales.[89] 

Pasteur
ventured into outright human experimentation, using his rabies treatment on humans
before he had used it on animals.[90] 
His private notebooks yielded that finding, but it comes as no surprise to those
who have read a letter that Pasteur wrote to the emperor of Brazil.  In 1884,
Pasteur wrote that people condemned to death should become subjects of human experiments,
given the option on the eve of their planned executions.  The choice presented
would be execution or becoming subjects for rabies vaccine testing, injecting
them with rabies and seeing if the vaccine would cure them.  Pasteur predicted
that the condemned would all consent to becoming experimental subjects, as a “person
condemned to death only fears death.”[91] 
Pasteur performed his experiments on his patients after he wrote his letter to
the Brazilian emperor.  Patrice Debré, who authored a sympathetic biography of
Pasteur, wrote that one could not read Pasteur’s letter to the emperor without
thinking of the Nazi’s death-camp experiments.[92] 
Even one of Pasteur’s disciples said about Pasteur’s human rabies experiments,
“The scientist’s conscience smothered the conscience of the man.”[93] 

It
should be made clear that Geison, Debré, Rene Dubos, John Farley and others have
generally praised Pasteur’s contributions to science and medicine, even if their
work has removed some of the luster from Pasteur’s heroic journey.

Geison’s
book created quite a splash when published, as Pasteur is in science’s Pantheon
of the great, and a French national hero.  Not everybody agreed with Geison’s
assessment of Pasteur’s work, both public and private.  Hal Hellman wrote that
while Geison’s work was careful and not easily dismissed, it “does much to smudge
a shining image of a real medical hero.”[94]  Hellman felt that there were
few true “heroes” in science’s history, and he did not like to see Pasteur’s image
deconstructed. 

Unfortunately,
Farley’s work had little impact on the Whiggish history that first-year microbiology
students are taught.  All the microbiology books I obtained, written long after
Farley’s book was published, all told the same utilitarian fairy tale of Pasteur
and spontaneous generation.[95]  The spontaneous-generation
debate was not finally settled in scientific circles until Aleksandr Oparin and
the 1936 publication of his The Origin of Life on Earth.  Oparin was a
Russian biochemist whose work was influenced by the dialectical materialism of
Karl Marx and friends.  Marx’s influence went far beyond political-economic theory,
which may surprise most Americans, as Marx is a discredited, even demonized, figure
in the West.  Oparin theorized that the primordial soup of the young earth gave
rise to higher orders of molecular organization, leading eventually to an abiogenetic
origin of life.  The scientific community has embraced Oparin’s work as completing
the theory of how life arose on earth, and there the matter rests…for now.

Pasteur’s
legacy is enormous.  Today’s germ theory grew from his work.  Pasteurization wears
his name.  He pioneered vaccination.  Robert Lister based his carbolic-acid treatment
on Pasteur’s work, making surgery largely free of infection.  Pasteur industrialized
science, applying scientific findings to industry, and helped create the academic
institutions that feed industry with scientists.  Before Pasteur died, Pasteur
Institutes dotted France, becoming major institutions of science and medicine. 
René Dubos wrote a number of books about Pasteur, his work and legacy.  Under
a heading of “The Benefits of Precise Knowledge,” Dubos listed dozens of major
corporations that are primary beneficiaries of Pasteur’s legacy.  All the major
oil companies headed Dubos’ list, followed by food-processing, pharmaceutical
and biomedical companies.[96] 

This essay is not intended to assassinate Pasteur’s
character.  He was human, as with all of us.  Hellman noted that Geison’s critics
stated that his critique veered from purely scientific matters, taking Pasteur’s
legacy to task perhaps unfairly.  Hellman is convinced that Pasteur fudged his
data, but it was understandable given the circumstances.  This essay’s point is
that if he fudged the data, how accurate were his findings?  We go back to Kuhn
here.  Pasteur prevailed, but was he right?  Probably more than any other
single figure, Pasteur’s work founded the paradigm under which today’s medicine
operates.  Is our health better because of his work?  Was there another
paradigm that could have been adopted?  That is a major crux of this essay.  What
if Pasteur was wrong?  Not just a little wrong, but profoundly wrong, so wrong
that his legacy has killed far more people than it has helped?  Are microbiology
textbooks understandably expedient in telling the Whiggish tale of the germ theory’s
foundation, or do they march students off in the wrong direction on their first
day of class?

There is a large and impressive
body of evidence that suggests that the Pasteurian paradigm prevailed due to considerations
of money and power more than the accuracy of his science.  This essay will now
explore that allegation. 

 

A
Paradigm Lost?

In
the several biographies of Pasteur I have read through, as well as works such
as Farley’s, there is an obscure figure who receives little mention, and the only
place I saw his work dealt with at all was in Geison’s book.  While dealing with
the Pasteur myth, Geison spent a paragraph dealing with a book by Ethel Douglas
Hume titled Béchamp or Pasteur.  It was originally published in 1923. 
Geison felt that the book was plagued with a “ludicrous incomprehension” of the
true nature of Pasteur’s work and science.  Geison, while admitting that Pasteur
probably treated Béchamp poorly, did not feel that Pasteur plagiarized him.[97] 
Who was Béchamp, and what plagiarism was Pasteur accused of? 

Pierre
Jacques Antoine Béchamp lived from 1816 to 1908.  Béchamp, a physician, unlike
Pasteur, had plenty of biological and medical training.  He was also a doctor
of science, a pharmacist and a college chemistry, physics, pharmacology and toxicology
professor.  He is a known figure in industrial science, as he developed an economical
process to produce aniline and the many dyes and drugs based on it.  Regarding
his life’s work, however, he is virtually unknown today.  He was a leading figure
in his time, but today his name is all but unknown in the orthodox histories of
biology and medicine.  I first heard of Béchamp in 1990 as I began my education
in alternative media, history, medicine and related areas.  His story is worth
telling, and the rest of this medical essay will deal at length with the idea
that Béchamp was only the first in a long line of researchers whose work pointed
toward a different paradigm in biology and medicine, a paradigm that still may
be adopted one day. 

In the
1850s, Béchamp was one of many scientists investigating fermentation.  By 1854,
the chemical explanation of fermentation was the prevailing one, the work of Cagniard-Latour
and Schwann disregarded by the mainstream.  It was known that yeast initiated
fermentation, and was seen as a chemical reagent by the mainstream and chemists
such as Liebig.  As such, yeast was called a “ferment,” since it initiated fermentation. 
However, Cagniard-Latour and Schwann’s theory that yeast was a living organism
was not altogether discarded.  Yeast was not the only focus of research into fermentation. 
In May of 1854, Béchamp performed an experiment investigating a phenomenon known
as the inversion of sugar.  If cane sugar (sucrose) were put into water and left
to sit, the sugar would slowly transform into glucose and fructose (which is also
called grape sugar).  That process was called the inversion of sugar, and was
thought to be a strictly chemical transformation.  The transformation could be
detected by using polarized light and a polarimeter, seeing if the angle of rotation
changed.   If the angle changed, it meant that inversion took place. 

In
Béchamp’s 1854 experiment, he took four flasks and filled them with a sucrose
solution, sealed them, and left a small amount of air in the flasks.  One flask
held distilled water and cane sugar.  The other three solutions held calcium and
zinc chlorides and cane sugar.  The first flask had inversion while the other
three did not.  Also, mold appeared in the distilled water solution and not the
others.  Béchamp published the result of that experiment in February 1855 in the
French Academy of Sciences’ official record, the Comptes Rendus.  It was
the first in a series of experiments now known as the Beacon Experiment.  Another
researcher published similar results to his in 1856, and Béchamp considered two
questions:

1. Are molds
   endowed with chemical activity?

2. What is the
   origin of the molds that appear in the sugared water?[98]

As
Pasteur did in 1854, Béchamp moved on from Strasbourg to greener academic pastures,
Béchamp taking a position at the university at Montpellier in southern France,
where he spent many happy years.  For an eighteen-month period, beginning in June
1856, Béchamp performed a new set of experiments designed to answer those two
questions.  Pasteur had yet to involve himself in fermentation when Béchamp began
publishing his Beacon Experiment findings.  Béchamp’s new round of experiments
introduced several substances into cane-sugar solutions, including creosote and
several metallic salts.  Creosote is a close cousin of carbolic acid, the substance
that Lister would make famous with his sterile surgical
procedures.  The zinc, calcium and mercury chlorides prevented inversion, while
other substances seemed to promote inversion, with some inverted solutions becoming
very moldy.  Béchamp also performed a litmus test and found the inverted solutions
acidic.

In March 1857, Béchamp set out to investigate
the role of creosote more fully.  He prepared several cane-sugar solutions.  In
some, he boiled the water, and the air was passed through a sulfuric acid solution
before introduction to the flasks.  In others, he allowed no air and the flasks
were completely filled with boiled water and cane sugar.  In others, he added
creosote, both with filtered and unfiltered air.  Two of his filtered-air flasks
with only sugar and water displayed inversions.  Béchamp noted that those two
flasks were imperfectly manipulated and contaminated by unfiltered air.  He also
noted that the more mold seen, the greater the rotation of light, hence greater
inversion.  The perfectly sealed flasks of boiled water and filtered air had no
change in light rotation, and no mold.  It became obvious to Béchamp that inversion
was not a strictly chemical process.  Béchamp deduced two conclusions from those
experiments. 

1. Boiled water and cane sugar,
   when put into an airless flask, will not undergo inversion.
2. The
   same solution, boiled or not, enclosed with air, would invert, with mold forming
   and the solution becoming acidic.  To prove that air alone could not account for
   the inversion, no matter its volume, a little added creosote would prevent it
   whether the flask was sealed or not.[99]

It
was common knowledge in those days that nitrogen was present in albuminoid matter. 
Albumin is a simple protein.  There is no nitrogen in sugar or water.  In those
days, the prevailing view was that fermentation could not occur in the absence
of albuminoid matter, which was why Pasteur worked with sour milk.  Because mold
accompanied the inversions, Béchamp reasoned that they were responsible for them,
because his work had shown that air alone did not do it, although air was a required
component of inversion and mold formation.  Schwann was the first to perform experiments
to prove that the organisms that accompanied fermentation, seen through microscopes,
were introduced through the atmosphere.  Béchamp analyzed the mold and discovered
that they had nitrogen in them.  The only place the nitrogen could have come from
was the air in the flask.  Béchamp’s conclusions from his Beacon Experiment were
firm, and he first submitted them to the French Academy of Sciences in December
1857.  An extract of his findings was published by the Academy in January 1858,
with the full paper included in Annales de Chimie et de Physique, published
in September 1858.  Béchamp’s conclusion was very clear, writing that the,

 

“germs
brought by the air found in the sugared solution a favorable medium for their
development.” 

 

Béchamp
wrote that the,

 

“new
organism, making use of the materials present, effects the synthesis of the nitrogenized
and non-nitrogenized materials of its substance.”[100]

 

With his Beacon Experiment,
Béchamp was the first to prove that not only could fermentation take place without
the presence of albuminoid matter, but also that the organisms responsible for
the fermentation actually created them by incorporating nitrogen from the air. 
When Béchamp submitted his findings to the French Academy of Sciences in late
1857, Pasteur was still experimenting with sour milk and calling fermentation
a spontaneous process.  Béchamp was far more interested in investigating nature’s
mysteries than becoming rich and famous.  Béchamp sought no fanfare, and after
submitting his seminal experimental results, pursued the implications of them. 
Béchamp had conclusively demonstrated that fermentation was not due to spontaneous
processes in 1857. 

Most official stories of
Pasteur do not even mention Béchamp, and Geison’s quick dismissal is misleading. 
Ethel Douglas Hume published under the names E. Douglas Hume and Douglas Hume,
to hide the fact that she was a woman, to further demonstrate Western civilization’s
ingrained misogyny.  Geison disparaged and dismissed Hume’s work, also stating
that Hume’s book did not persuade him that Pasteur had “plagiarized” Béchamp. 
In reading Geison’s brief account, the impression is easily received that Hume
was about the only person making the case.  Béchamp makes the case for Pasteur’s
plagiarism in his work, notably in the preface to his The Blood and its Third
Anatomical Element.  Hume’s work was largely based on Béchamp’s account of
events, and he did not mince words, describing in detail four instances where
Pasteur apparently plagiarized him, then Pasteur added indignity to injury when
he led a campaign against Béchamp.  Béchamp noted the fate of Galileo and others who run up against the establishment,
and he finished his summary of the issue of Pasteur with,

 

“It
is that part of mankind which allows the plagiarist to calumniate and vilify the
victim whose work he has plagiarized.”[101]

 

In dealing with Pasteur and Béchamp, a quote from William James
is pertinent. 

 

“First…a new theory
is attacked as absurd.  Then it is admitted to be true but obvious and insignificant. 
Finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves
discovered it.”[102]

 

Pasteur’s alleged plagiarisms of Béchamp were not innocuous:
they may have marched biology and medicine off in the wrong direction.  When Béchamp
had proven that fermentation in sugared water was initiated by the “germs brought
by the air,” Pasteur was still adhering to his sponteparist view.  Pasteur
observed the lactic ferment created by one of his experiments, and wrote that
the ferment “takes birth spontaneously as easily as beer-yeast every time
that the conditions are favorable.”[103]  An extract of Béchamp’s work
appeared in the Academy’s Reports on January 4, 1858, while Pasteur’s report appeared
in April 1858.  It appears that Pasteur was aware of Béchamp’s discovery when
he published his paper.  Accompanying the sentence “takes birth spontaneously
as easily as beer-yeast every time that the conditions are favorable” is
a footnote stating that he used the word “spontaneously” as “the
expression of a fact,” but he backpedaled on its truly spontaneous nature. 
Pasteur then threw in some platitudes about his results that others had discovered
earlier.  There was nothing original in Pasteur’s work to that time.  Pasteur
was badly out of his field in interpreting his experimental results, partly because
he had no biological training.  He was a chemist.  By 1857, Pasteur had made no
original statements about the nature of fermentation, and hewed toward the sponteparist
position. 

In December 1857, Pasteur published
the results of his experiment with putting yeast into sugared water and observing
the fermentation.  In his conclusion, Pasteur stated, “Fermentation then
takes place as it does in a natural sugared liquid, juice of the grape, or sugar
cane, etc., that is to say, spontaneously…”[104] 

Pasteur
adhered to the sponteparist position long after Béchamp had produced his
enlightening results.  In 1859, Pasteur seems to have glimpsed the importance
of Béchamp’s work.  He performed an experiment but omitted the yeast, and described
the origin of the yeast as coming from the air.  Pasteur persisted in giving the
phenomenon a spontaneous-generation explanation.  He wrote, “As to the origin
of the lactic yeast in the experiments, it is solely due to the atmospheric air:
we fall back here upon the facts of spontaneous generation…On this point the question
of spontaneous generation has made progress.”[105] 
In an 1860 memoir, Pasteur still referred to the spontaneous generation of yeasts
and fermentations.  Béchamp would later criticize Pasteur’s experimental conclusions,
stating that Pasteur’s deductions proved that he did not understand “the
chemico-physiological phenomena of transformation, called fermentation, which
are processes of nutrition, that is to say, of digestion, followed by absorption,
assimilation, excretion, etc,”[106]

In
1860, Pasteur finally grasped the importance of Béchamp’s work.  Instead of acknowledging
Béchamp’s trumping of the whole field, Pasteur seemingly labored to make Béchamp’s
discoveries his own. 

In September 1860, Pasteur
performed the experiment that put him in the history books.  Two German scientists
had already performed the experiment he proposed, but not so flamboyantly.  Working
quietly in a laboratory, filtering air into flasks to prove that “germs”
were in the air, had already been done.  Pasteur embarked on a tour of France,
carrying 73 vials with him.  He opened and sealed the vials at different locations
and altitudes, ending with the famous opening and sealing of 20 vials on a French
Alp, above Chamonix.  Pasteur was “proving” that germs existed in the
air.  He was also making a radical U-turn from his sponteparist convictions. 

The campaign that Pasteur waged to claim credit for
the work of others began soon thereafter.  In a meeting at the Sorbonne in 1861,
Pasteur, in the presence of Béchamp, tried claiming credit for proving that living
organisms can appear in a medium devoid of albuminoid matter.  Since that claim
was a direct theft from Béchamp, Béchamp did something he was not accustomed to:
he spoke up regarding Pasteur’s attempted theft.  Béchamp did not accuse Pasteur
of plagiarism in that meeting, but merely recounted the results of his Beacon
Experiments and his published conclusions derived from them.  As he returned to
his seat (Pasteur sat next to him), he asked Pasteur to be so kind as to admit
his knowledge of the Beacon Experiment work.  Pasteur hastily admitted his knowledge
of Béchamp’s work, and stated that the results Béchamp put forth were of the “most
rigid exactness.”[107] 

Years later, Pasteur would attack Béchamp’s work, calling
his conclusions “an enormity.”  In what appears to be an instance of
opportunism, Pasteur quickly abandoned a theory that he had held for years (spontaneous
generation), did a complete about face based upon the work of others, then tried
to claim credit for the discovery. 

Béchamp was
not immediately hailed for his breakthrough.  Because his results and conclusions
were so novel and far ahead of his day, scientists attempted to explain his results
as due to impurities in the sugar he used.  Even when that was disproved, they
continued to question Béchamp’s work. 

As late
as 1872, Pasteur was still woefully ignorant about what fermentation really was. 
He wrote “That which separates the chemical phenomenon of fermentation from
a crowd of other acts and especially from the acts of ordinary life is the fact
of the decomposition of a weight of fermentative matter much superior to the weight
of the ferment.”[108] 
Pasteur was repeating the day’s misunderstanding that many scientists subscribed
to.  Béchamp put forth a simple explanation of fermentation that should have made
it clear why a ferment could affect a medium of vastly larger proportion than
itself.  Béchamp proposed the following analogy:

 

“Suppose
an adult man to have lived for a century, to weigh on an average 60 kilograms;
he will have consumed in that time, besides other foods, the equivalent of 20,000
kilograms of flesh and produced about 800 kilograms of urea.  Shall it be said
that it is impossible to admit that this mass of flesh and of urea could at any
moment of his life form part of his being?  Just as a man consumes all that food
by repeating the same act a great many times, the yeast cell consumes a great
mass of sugar only by constantly assimilating and disassimilating it bit by bit. 
Now, that which only one man will consume in a century, a sufficient number of
men would absorb and form in a day.  It is the same in yeast; the sugar that a
small number of cells would only consume in a year, a greater number would destroy
in a day; in both cases, the more numerous the individuals, the more rapid the
consumption.”[109]

 

Jonathan Swift wrote
that the way to spot a genius was by the dunces who unite in confederation against
him/her.  Pasteur used his position, with imperial patronage and help from his
friends, to begin a campaign to discredit and suppress Béchamp’s work, organizing,
in Béchamp’s words, a “conspiracy of silence.”[110]  

After
Pasteur’s failed 1861 attempt to claim credit for his “germs in the air” theory,
his public speech in 1864 at the Sorbonne apparently completed his plagiarism. 
While Béchamp is not mentioned in any microbiology or biology textbook I could
find, Pasteur’s “discovery” of “germs in the air” is supposedly what overturned
spontaneous-generation theory.  Geison is not convinced of Pasteur’s plagiarism
in that matter, but at this time, I am. 

In the
wake of his 1864 speech, Pasteur became the toast of Parisian intellectual life,
and by invitation he spent a week at the Emperor’s palace in 1865.  Pasteur eagerly
lapped it up.  His imperial patronage gave him the “Teflon effect” for
the rest of his life.  Many scientists, particularly French ones, became decidedly
timid in confronting or criticizing a man who had blessings from French society’s
highest levels.  While Pasteur was realizing his lifelong ambition to rub shoulders
with the rich and powerful, as a ticket to wealth and fame for himself, Béchamp
had unceasingly continued his investigations into life’s mysteries. 

Pasteur
took the position that life was in the air, and that bacteria came from the air. 
Although Pasteur would deny that flesh could be alive independently of the organism
that housed it, Charlton Bastian was producing experimental results that had no
easy answer, particularly in light of Pasteur’s germs-in-the-air evangelizing. 
Bastian found bacteria on the inside of animal organs and fruits and vegetables. 
Pasteur’s air-germ theory did not account for them.  In fact, Pasteur’s air-germ
theory misled scientists for some time.  Lister encountered
Pasteur’s germs-in-the-air theory, and sprayed his carbolic acid spray into the
air around his patients, trying to kill those germs in the air.  That led to many
unnecessary deaths.  Lister would later reject that idea, and admit that the only
germs of consequence were the ones introduced by “other than atmospheric
sources.”[111] 

Béchamp
took his fermentation studies much further, and the microscope became a source
of revelation in Béchamp’s hands.  Preceding Béchamp, other scientists had noticed
minute “granulations” that appeared to be organized and perhaps alive. 
They were smaller than cells.  Rudolf Virchow postulated in 1858 that cells were the primary
unit of life, which Béchamp’s findings contradicted.  In Béchamp’s early experiments,
he noted the granulations and movements, and called them “little bodies.” 
He had nothing further to add in those early days, so the little bodies were merely
noted. 

During Béchamp’s fermentation experiments,
he added various salts to the sugar solutions.  In one experiment, he substituted
calcium carbonate for potassium carbonate.  The calcium carbonate’s source was
a form of chalk.  When he added creosote to the sugared water, inversion still
took place.  Béchamp had already proven that creosote inhibited the formation
of mold from exterior sources.  The experiment with chalk was a contradiction. 
Béchamp believed the results were due to some faultiness in his procedures, left
out the chalk results from his published work, and resolved to investigate them
further. 

Béchamp then began a series of intensive
investigations into chalk that should have shaken the foundations of biology,
but today few know his name.  He undertook many experiments with chalk and fermentation. 
Béchamp performed numerous experiments where he created an air-free environment. 
When chemically pure calcium carbonate was added, no inversion took place.  Ordinary
chalk inverted the sugar.  Béchamp took elaborate precautions to ensure that atmospheric
germs could not gain access to the flasks, yet chalk still inverted the sugared
water. 

Béchamp then obtained chalk, and subsequently
a block of limestone from a quarry, where he engaged in great precautions to ensure
they did not contact the air.  The limestone inverted the sugar, even when creosote
was added.  Béchamp was shocked to find that a mineral such as limestone would
invert the sugar.  It became obvious that there was a difference between chalk
and pure calcium carbonate.  Béchamp then began his epochal observations with
his microscope.  He was amazed to find the same “little bodies” in the
chalk as he had earlier seen in living cells.  The little bodies moved rapidly,
similar to what was known as Brownian movement, but Béchamp noticed a difference
between Brownian movement and what the “little bodies” were doing. 
The little bodies refracted light from their surroundings differently from particles
agitated by Brownian movement.  Béchamp determined that the “little bodies”
were inducing the fermentation.  Although they were much smaller than Virchow‘s
cell, they were more powerful at inducing fermentation than anything else Béchamp
had seen. 

There were two tenets that guided
Béchamp’s work at that time, based on his experiences.  One was that no chemical
change takes place without a cause.  The other was that there is no spontaneous
generation of living organisms.  Béchamp concluded that if the little bodies were
truly alive, then he should be able to isolate them, prove them to be insoluble
in water, and find them composed of organic matter.  Through rigorous procedures,
Béchamp proved those notions.  He also was able to “kill” the little
bodies by heating them.  When he heated chalk to 300° C (572°
F) it no longer inverted the sugar, and the little bodies no longer made their
characteristic movements. 

His experimental results
brought him to strange musings.  If the little bodies were alive, as Béchamp had
proven to his own satisfaction, how did they get into limestone and chalk?  The
limestone block that Béchamp obtained was considered to be millions of years old,
and was a powerful fermentative agent.  How could something survive in limestone
for millions of years?  He experimented with tufa limestone, coal deposits, peat
bogs and the dust of cities.  Ancient peat bogs and city dust proved to be powerful
fermentative agents, while the coal and tufa proved weak. 

The
pursuit of his “error” in observing chalk initiate fermentation took
him into territory never trod by science before.  Béchamp discovered new realms
of investigation and left his contemporaries far, far behind.  What Béchamp discovered
was that the little bodies were indeed alive, and apparently capable of lying
dormant for millions of years.  Furthermore, they were far smaller than Virchow’s
cell, and seemed to be building blocks and the organizers of cells.  Béchamp’s
microscopic investigations of chalk, limestone, peat and the like showed him that
the little bodies might be the living remnants of ancient cells.  Béchamp recalled
that Jacob Henle had earlier (1841) observed that the little bodies were structured,
and suspected that they might be the cells’ building blocks.  Béchamp was not
much given to speculation, but built his theories upon what he observed.  His
experiments took place in the late 1850s and early 1860s.  Béchamp soon bestowed
his own term to the little bodies, calling them microzymas, which meant
“tiny ferment” in Greek. 

Alfred Estor,
a physician and surgeon at Montpellier’s hospital, was captivated by Béchamp’s
discoveries.  Estor wrote enthusiastically about Béchamp’s work, and the two men
became partners in further investigating the microzyma.  Béchamp also discovered
the cause of fermentation in beer yeast, and called it zymase.  Although
Béchamp coined the term zymase and its purpose in 1864, credit was given to E.
Büchner for “discovering” it in 1897.[112] 

In 1863, Pasteur’s
most powerful patron, Napoleon III, gave him his first task: researching the disease
that was decimating France’s vineyards.  The year before, in 1862, Béchamp was
already investigating the vineyard disease, on his own.  Through his experiments
he concluded that the disease’s cause was a mold that was found on the leaves
and stalks of the grapes.  He thoroughly published his results in 1864, while
Pasteur had barely begun his investigation.[113] 

In 1865, Pasteur
was assigned another task: discovering the cause of the disease of silkworms,
which was destroying France’s silk industry.  Pasteur was handsomely paid by the
state for his efforts in the vineyard problem and silkworm disease, known at the
time as pébrine.  Again, before Pasteur had even laid eyes on a silkworm,
Béchamp, working on his own and unpaid, had solved the riddle of pébrine. 
Béchamp’s experimentation yielded the fact that pébrine was a parasitical
disease, and could be prevented with an application of creosote.  Béchamp spoke
before the agricultural society in 1865 about his findings.  Pasteur, again demonstrating
his misunderstanding of life processes, performed his own experiments and in 1865
announced that pébrine was neither animal or vegetable, but something akin
to pus or starch.  Pasteur’s understanding was abysmal, but he had imperial patronage
and France’s ear. 

While Béchamp was explaining
the parasitical nature of pébrine and how to prevent it, Pasteur stated
that thinking of the disease as parasitic “would be an error.”  Béchamp
called the disease the result of a vegetative ferment, transmitted by spore. 
Béchamp differentiated pébrine from another silkworm disease called flacherie. 
He discovered that flacherie was not due to an outside disease, but was
related to ill health in the silkworm’s microzymas, and appeared to be hereditary. 
In other words, flacherie was a degenerative disease of the silkworms’
constitutions, and pébrine was a parasitical disease that attacked the
silkworms.  Béchamp solved those problems in his spare time at his own
expense, while Pasteur was blindly wandering on behalf of the Emperor.  In 1866,
Pasteur admitted that his earlier conclusion of pébrine resembling starch
or pus was badly mistaken.[114]  

Because Béchamp understood the diseases, he also suggested
treatments: use creosote to prevent infection of pébrine and do not breed
moths with flacherie.  Here is where Pasteur apparently began inflicting
damage on Western science and medicine due to his lust for fame, wealth and power. 
The ingenious investigations of Béchamp were far ahead of his time, and although
they were clear and precise, the bureaucracies of the day looked to the oracle
of Napoleon III for his pronouncement.  Pasteur demonstrated his complete misunderstanding
of the disease, stating that pébrine was contagious and hereditary, and
his preventive was finding eggs free of the disease, and only breeding those. 
Although the history books today credit Pasteur with saving the silkworm industry
(called sericulture), the numbers tell a different story.  When the troubles began
with sericulture in about 1850, France produced about 30 million kilograms of
cocoons annually.  By 1866-67, the production had fallen to 15 million kilograms. 
After Pasteur’s “preventive” was introduced, it fell to 8 million kilograms
in 1873 and as low as 2 million kilograms in subsequent years.[115]

After
summarizing the plunge in silkworm production, apparently accelerated by Pasteur’s
“preventive,” here is what Dr. Lutaud, the one-time editor of Paris’
journal of medicine, had to say about Pasteur’s “miracle.”

 

“This
is the way in which Pasteur saved sericulture!  The reputation, which he still
preserves in this respect among ignoramuses and short-sighted savants, has been
brought into being, (1) by himself, by means of inaccurate assertions, (2) by
the sellers of microscopic seeds on the Pasteur system, who have realized big
benefits at the expense of the cultivators, (3) by the complicity of the Academies
in the Public Bodies, which, without any investigation, reply to the complaints
of the cultivators – ‘But sericulture is saved!  Make use of Pasteur’s system!’ 
However, everybody is not disposed to employ a system that consists of enriching
oneself by the ruination of others.”[116]

 

Hume
observed that perhaps the greatest harm that Pasteur inflicted on science was
deflecting notice from Béchamp’s discoveries, marching biology and medicine off
in the wrong direction as he continued claiming credit for Béchamp’s discoveries,
while being so ignorant that he did not understand what he stole.  Pasteur tried
taking credit for Béchamp’s silkworm discoveries, particularly Béchamp’s explanation
of flacherie, which was founded on his microzyman investigations, of which
Pasteur knew literally nothing, and had done no original work on.[117] 
When Pasteur tried taking credit for Béchamp’s silkworm discoveries at the Academy
of Sciences, Béchamp was once more compelled to make reference to his earlier
publications, and even told of how a French bureaucrat had quietly approached
him about his solution to the problem. 

In the
meantime, Béchamp was continuing his investigations into the world of the microzyma. 
Béchamp and Estor labored long and hard at Montpellier, microscopes in hand. 
Their discoveries were startling.

Microzymas
could be seen moving about inside cells.  In healthy cells the microzymas looked
one way, and appeared to be vital for the cells’ healthy functioning.  It seemed
that microzymas were required for cells to form, and were essential building blocks
of life.  When tissue was diseased, microzymas seemed related to the bacteria
they were seeing.  The microzymas in chalk and limestone appeared to be surviving
remnants of the creatures that became the rock, and incredibly came alive after
millions of years of dormancy. 

Béchamp and Estor
tirelessly performed experiments that lasted for years.  When a freak frost hit
Montpellier in the winter of 1867-1868, Béchamp obtained a large cactus that had
frozen.  It was a cactus with a large, thick skin, impervious to invasion by organisms. 
Béchamp sectioned the cactus and looked deep within its interior.  He found it
teeming with destructive bacteria.  They concluded that the bacteria they saw
in damaged tissue, as in the frostbitten cactus, came from the microzymas. 

Béchamp held that microzymas were both the beginning
and end of life, in a category all their own.  Microzymas initiated the formation
of cells, and also initiated the cells’ destruction.  Béchamp stated that nothing
is the prey of death, but everything is the prey of life.  When animals and plants
decay, organisms are nourished by consuming them.  The organisms that live inside
them are apparently responsible for their life in the first place.  The decay
initiated by the microzymas when cells die is identical to the fermentation process
in wine, beer, and the inversion of sugar.  Microzymas exist at the beginning
of life, and when the cell dies, microzymas are eventually the only organized
material left, and the rest is broken down into its constituent elements.  The
microzymas can survive in limestone for millions of years.  The recent “revival”
of ancient bacteria by today’s scientists is more confirmation of Béchamp’s work. 
Microzymas, not the cell, appear to be the smallest unit of life, and its building
block.  A cell is a higher level of organization of life processes, similar to
the manner in which a multicellular creature is another, higher level. 

Béchamp and Estor were discovering a dynamic that has
profound implications for today’s medicine.  They set forth a theory known today
as pleomorphism.  What it meant was this: one day a microbiologist looks through
his microscope, seeing a rod-shaped bacterium; the next day he sees a spherical-shaped
bacterium; with his microbiology training, based in large measure upon Pasteur’s
germ theory of disease, those bacteria are considered separate species; according
to pleomorphic theory, that rod-shaped bacterium one day and spherical-shaped
bacterium the next is the same organism, but has “mutated.” 

That might seem a minor difference, but it has profound
implications for the entire foundation of modern medicine.  In the view of Béchamp,
a bacterium was not the cause of disease, but one of its effects. 
Béchamp noted otherwise healthy microzymas going through pathological mutations
when cells were ill or dying, mutating into bacterial and other forms. 

Pasteur apparently unsuccessfully tried plagiarizing
Béchamp’s microzyman work when he tried taking credit for Béchamp’s explanation
of the wine-grape problem.  Béchamp was eight years ahead of Pasteur, and provided
a much fuller explanation than Pasteur’s terse explanation.[118] 
Pasteur’s 1872 attempt at plagiarizing Béchamp’s analysis of the wine-grape problem,
was in Béchamp’s words, “his boldest plagiarism; he discovered all of a sudden,
eight years after my discovery thereof, that the ferment of vinous fermentation
exists naturally upon the grape.”  Béchamp said that Pasteur’s announcement of
his “new discoveries,” and his claim that he “has opened a new path to physiology
and medical pathology” was “too much: up until that time I had treated the man
with consideration; but now he must be properly exposed.”[119] 

When Pasteur’s
alleged attempted plagiarism of Béchamp’s microzyman work was thwarted, Pasteur
used his considerable powers to banish microzyman theory from French science,
and he largely succeeded.  Maybe Pasteur’s appropriation of Béchamp’s work was
not as consciously dishonest as Béchamp averred.  Maybe Pasteur was right and
Béchamp wrong.  The case is not that Béchamp’s evidence and theories were carefully
researched and found wanting.  It is not that today’s microbiology students are
introduced to the subject in a way that develops the history of the germ theory
and deals with rival theories and why they may be incorrect.  Béchamp’s work has
never been pursued by mainstream microbiology, and Pasteur led an effort to erase
Béchamp’s name from the history books, and it largely succeeded.  Estor was greatly
grieved at Pasteur’s plagiarism and corruption of their discoveries, and Béchamp
wrote that Estor died with a broken heart over what Pasteur had done.[120] 
I have tried for several years to obtain an English language copy of Bechamp’s
magnum opus, Les Microzymas, without success.  If Béchamp’s work is never
investigated or reproduced, how can anybody tell if it is wrong?  It looks as
if Pasteur did investigate Béchamp’s work to steal what he deemed useful,
and then buried the rest.  The good news is that many scientists have pursued
the line of Béchamp’s research, sometimes independently.  They are still at it. 
Béchamp’s paradigm may yet prevail, and if we want to be healthy, it probably
should. 

Today’s germ theory of disease guides
every medical student from the first day of class.  Béchamp’s work has shown the
shaky foundation that the germ theory may rest upon.  Pasteur later applied his
germ theory to diseases such as anthrax and rabies.  While the history books laud
Pasteur’s achievements, along with his “saving” of the silkworm industry,
an analysis of the original data from Pasteur’s treatments of anthrax and rabies
not only show that he arguably did not cure anybody of anything, his treatments
caused their death rates to go up.[121]

Pasteur’s
germ theory of disease and the vaccination paradigm
it inspired are examples of male-oriented medicine in action.  Vaccination proceeds
from a premise that there are particular organisms that cause disease by attacking
the host body, and by injecting weakened organisms through vaccination, the body
builds up immunity to the real thing.  It is based upon Pasteur’s germ theory. 
There is an impressively large body of evidence that shows that vaccination does
not really work.  Furthermore, it creates new diseases while making the disease
it supposedly fights more deadly.  Just as fluoridation’s
proponents cannot realistically claim credit for a decrease in tooth decay
in America during the past generation, or as Benjamin Rush
could hardly claim today that his calomel and bleedings really helped his patients,
vaccination can claim little credit, if any, for eradicating diseases.  What deserves
most and maybe all the credit for the elimination of mass diseases such as tuberculosis
and whooping cough is the introduction of public sanitation, a healthier diet
and a reduction in absolute poverty.[122]  Vaccination just might be a
major component in the great increase of cancer in the West, because it harms
the immune system, and cancer and other degenerative diseases are related to immune-system
failures. 

Is there such a thing as infectious
disease?  Sure, but what is it, and how is it really transmitted?  Is there really
a species of disease organism that induces the disease, or is it a pleomorphic
stage that any diseased tissue will eventually manifest under certain conditions? 
The early data from vaccination research shows it was a disaster, arguably never
preventing one instance of disease, and causing endless death and suffering for
millions of people.[123]  Whatever benefits vaccination may appear to convey
may be outweighed by other disease dynamics that vaccination sets in motion. 
Vaccination may help make one disease “disappear,” but another takes
its place.  Many respected scientists have believed that vaccination is responsible
for the increase in cancer rates in this century.  Many think that AIDS was born
via vaccination.  When one understands how poorly the current disease theories
may be founded, those ideas do not seem farfetched. 

There
is a major obstacle to challenging the dogma, however: a multi-trillion-dollar
industry has grown up around it, and it fiercely protects itself, as all power
structures do.  In Hume’s book, her main lament is that Pasteur pioneered the
corruption of modern medicine.  Dubos was not being ironic when he described Pasteur’s
legacy and how the corporate world is heavily invested in Pasteurian medicine. 
There may be no greater enemy of the public’s health than the collective effort
of those corporations, working hand-in-hand with Western physicians. 

Hume
noted with irony that Pasteur was not even a doctor, but he was the first to prostitute
modern medicine by commercializing it.  Vaccines became a big money maker.  His
“preventive” for silkworm disease was lucrative, even though it probably
did not work.  Pasteur founded institutes bearing his name, in order to further
his work.  Nobody knows where medicine may have led if Béchamp’s discoveries had
been given their due.  All the Whiggish presentations do not even address that
possibility. 

A scientist at
the Pasteur Institute performed one of the first modern confirmations of Béchamp’s
pleomorphic theory.  In 1914, Madame Victor Henri subjected bacteria to ultraviolet
light, and created a new species of bacteria from a species already known, transforming
a rod-shaped bacterium into a spheroid bacterium.[124]  With great
irony, a woman at the Pasteur Institute confirmed the accuracy of Antoine Béchamp’s
theories, pariah that he was.

One problem with
microscopic investigation into biology is the microscope itself.  The wavelength
of visible light is the theoretical limiting factor in optical microscopes.  The
smaller the wavelength of light shined upon something, the finer the image resolution. 
Resolution of optical microscopes is traditionally described in terms of diameters. 
The limit of optical microscopes has been around 2000-2500 diameters for many
years.  It does not matter how fine your lenses are, and it does not matter how
hard you look, 2000-2500 diameters is the limit of optical microscopes, because
of the wavelength of visible light, which is about 4000 angstroms.  I doubt they
attained 2000 diameters in Béchamp’s time.  Microzymas existed at the limits of
resolution back then, and even today, optical microscopes have difficulty viewing
the microzyman world. 

A dynamic surrounding
Béchamp played itself out repeatedly in succeeding generations of microbiologists. 
Béchamp seemed to be a man of high spiritual attainment.  He sought to prevent
cruelty to animals, while Pasteur engaged in numerous cruel animal experiments
with dogs, rabbits and other mammals.[125]  Pasteur pioneered
a process whereby a dog’s skull would be opened while it was alive, and the brain
studied.  Pasteur’s trephination practices were merely one more instance of his
spiritual perspective and the degeneracy of scientific practices that do not respect
life.  Pasteur’s animal experiments, like those of his colleague Claude Bernard,
became the target of animal-rights groups in the 1800s, even Bernard’s wife and
daughters campaigned against his experimentation on live animals.

Béchamp
seemed to have a spiritual affinity with the microzyma, which was quite possibly
related to his discoveries.  That offends the scientific notion of objectivity,
but other microbiologists had similar proclivities.  Barbara McClintock won the
Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1983 for her work on corn genetics.  For many years
she worked in obscurity, and was even derided for seeing things in her microscope
that others could not.  She later said that she “had a feeling for the organism.”[126] 

One
thing that primed me for Béchamp’s revelations was that many years earlier I had
read Jane Robert’s Seth state the facts of pleomorphism. 
Seth said that viruses were constantly “mutating” according to what
the host body told them to do.  Seth said that a scientist would look through
a microscope one day and see Virus A, and the next day he would see Virus B, and
little did he know that it was the same virus, but it had “mutated.”[127] 
It is a harmless virus one day, and harmful the next, depending the conditions
it is subject to.  Seth wove a fascinating tale regarding the interrelationship
between body, mind and spirit, making the case that to study one without taking
the others into account was a dead end, similar to sawing the legs off a chair,
thinking it would serve as well with two legs as four.

 

The
Developing American Medical Racket

During
the first half of the 19^th century, Great Britain was the world’s leading
industrial nation.  Its per capita level of industrialization was more than twice
as high as France’s and nearly twice the United States’ in 1830, and its gross
industrial output was significantly larger than France’s and the United States’
combined.  American industrialization per capita increased by 50 percent between
1830 and 1860, while British industrialization nearly tripled.  In 1860, the United
States had a per capita industrialization greater than every nation but Great
Britain’s, which was three times higher.  In gross industrial output, the United
States’ was about a third of Britain’s in 1860.[128] 
The American economy was a dichotomy of an industrialized north and an agricultural
south.  Although the reasons for the American Civil
War were multiple, with the slavery issue and European influence receiving
nods of recognition, my perception is that the overriding issue was holding the
empire together, a motivation of every nation and empire in history.  Lincoln
even said that he would allow slavery if it would keep the “union” whole. 

The United States still bears the scars of the Civil
War, the bloodiest war it has fought, as far as domestic casualties are concerned. 
Disparagement of “Yankees” still can be heard in Southern conversation.  Although
the slaves were freed, they were in near-slave status for a long-time.  At the
dawn of World War II, black income per capita was only about 30% of white America’s,
an even lower ratio than it was in 1900.  Lynching blacks was an American pastime
well into the 20^th century, where entire communities would assemble
to celebrate the murder of people whose crime was having black skin.  Women would
pose in their Sunday best in front of the burning or hanging corpse, while the
local newspaper reporter would take pictures of the
event suitable for framing.[129] 
It was common for those “dead nigger” photographs to be made into postcards and
mailed to family and friends, commemorating America’s civilized ways.  While the
North was supposedly fighting to free the South’s slaves, the genocide of Native
Americans in Western North America was at about its zenith.  American women would not obtain voting
rights until after World War I.  The humanitarian impulse was muted at best, and
the veneer of American civilization thin. 

Beginning
with the Civil War, the United States rapidly caught up and surpassed Great Britain
in industrialization.  By 1928, the United States’ industrialization per capita
was 50% higher than Great Britain’s, and its gross industrial output was higher
than Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy and Japan combined.[130]  Industry dominated the United
States, and what is known as the medical-industrial complex was well on the way
to its current hegemony. 

If
that milieu is considered, it is not surprising that a class of men largely took
over American industry, beginning during the Civil War.  They all bought their
way out of military service, and not because they were pacifists.  They then began
building industrial empires, and war profiteering during the Civil War was where
they got their start.  Of the big name robber barons, it is generally acknowledged
that the most ingenious, ruthless and successful of them all was John D. Rockefeller.  The first American oil
well was drilled in 1859 in Pennsylvania.  After carefully sizing up the new industry,
Rockefeller joined it in 1863.  He quickly realized that if he could control the
industry’s refining arm, he could control it all.  All oil production would have
to pass through his hands if he controlled refining.  His strategy was diabolically
ingenious.  He used the business of his competitors to get kickbacks from the
railroads.  He then marched through the new industry, giving his competitors two
options: sell out or be wiped out.  Those who resisted his offer were quickly
run out of business.  There were mysterious refinery explosions and deaths in
those days for those who refused to sell out.  By 1880, Rockefeller controlled
95% of U.S. refining.  When he wiped out or bought out a competitor, if his prey
put up a vigorous and talented fight, he would try to hire them.  He soon amassed
a team of the most capable and ruthless businessmen around.[131]  Once he controlled the oil industry, he began
diversifying.  Through direct investment and “philanthropy,” Rockefeller would
eventually cast a long shadow over mining, banking,
government, the media, education, and 
- what concerns this essay – medicine.  Rockefeller’s father was a genuine snake
oil salesman and con man who sold cancer “cures.”  John D. learned the business
at his father’s knee, when he was around.  His father funded his early ventures.

While
Rockefeller and the other robber barons built their empires, the AMA was also
building its monopoly.  The AMA charter stated that one of its goals was “eliminating
the competition.”  In the 1850s, the AMA launched its first political campaign,
which sought to ban abortion.  Before the AMA’s campaign, abortions were legal
if they were performed before the baby could be felt kicking, and even the Catholic
Church did not oppose it.  The AMA campaign was stepped up in 1864, decrying abortion’s
evils, eventually calling abortionists murderers and executioners.  It worked,
as between 1875 and 1900, every state but Kentucky passed laws banning all abortions. 
Hundreds of thousands of American women died during the years that abortion was
illegal, as they had back alley abortions and died from the complications.  Not
only was the AMA campaigning to ban abortion, it also actively discouraged contraception
and even information on fertility.  While the AMA clothed itself in righteousness,
an examination of the internal record revealed that the AMA’s motivation had nothing
whatsoever to do with the sanctity of life.  Their war was waged to wipe out female
healers.  Midwives were the traditional administers of abortion and contraception.[132]  It would take
nearly a hundred years before abortion was made legal again, and today the right
is under siege once again in America, although the effort is unlikely to succeed. 
The effort is about controlling and punishing women, and has little to do with
a reverence toward life, as evidenced by most anti-abortionists’ support of capital
punishment (their attitude epitomized by today’s American president, George
Bush the Second), as well as murdered doctors and blown-up clinics.

Also
in the 1850s, the AMA began campaigning against homeopaths.  As with most inquisitional
behavior, the early campaign was relatively gentle.  Books were written to ridicule
“alternative” medicine, AMA members were forbidden from associating with homeopaths,
and AMA pressure began getting homeopaths expelled from medical societies.  The
Thomsonian school of medicine also came under fire, but as they were generally
laypeople, they were not as much of a threat as homeopaths were. 

Although
it would be a mistake to chalk it all up to a conspiracy, there is a familiar
pattern when rival movements are attacked and destroyed.  For instance, the Catholic
Inquisition got its start in the early 1200s, as a response to internal corruption
that left the Catholic Church’s religious monopoly in Europe vulnerable to challenges
from reformists.  By the early 1200s, the Catholic Church was holding ecumenical
councils that attempted to curb the corruption in its priestly ranks. 
Christian Europe’s most socially progressive and cosmopolitan region was France’s
Languedoc region.  Returning from the Balkans with Crusading soldiers was Catharism,
a dualistic sect whose roots predated Christianity.  The Cathars lived the austere lives that people imagined
Jesus lived, and the pious example of the Cathars’ spiritual practice was a marked
contrast to the Catholic Church’s priests’.  The Cathars took vows of poverty,
fasted, and apparently the most advanced of them could heal with a touch.  Catharism
spread like wildfire throughout Languedoc, and by the early 1200s, about half
of the Languedoc region was Cathar.  The Church had to deal with other threats
in those days.  The followers of Peter Waldo comprised an internal challenge to
the Church’s corruption.  Waldo’s attempts to reform the Church and bring Christianity
back to its humble roots got him excommunicated. 

The
early attempts to curb Catharism were largely restricted to counter-preaching,
with Dominic leading the effort to bring the Languedoc citizens back to the fold. 
He had little success, and Pope Innocent III crafted an effective solution.  In
businessmen’s parlance, it consisted of putting cement shoes on the competition
while marketing an ersatz version of their product.  Innocent called a Crusade
on Languedoc and simultaneously sanctioned the mendicant orders, the Dominicans
and Franciscans, who imitated the austere practices of the Cathars.  The Albigensian
Crusade was waged over decades, completely depopulating parts of France and killing
about one million people.  The Cathar threat to the Catholic Church’s monopoly
was wiped out in a prodigious bloodbath, and the Church enjoyed another three
hundred years of religious racketeering, until Martin Luther came along.  The
Dominicans and Franciscans became the Inquisition’s
foot soldiers, enforcing the faith with the rack, hot tongs and flaming stakes.

In
significant ways, the offensive mounted by orthodox medicine is reminiscent of
how the Catholic Church operated.  Orthodox medicine abandoned its more egregious
practices.  The public rightly feared the heroic bleedings and large doses of
“medicines” such as calomel.  The highly dilute doses administered by homeopaths
had great appeal.  During its crusade against the competition, American orthodox
medicine curtailed its heroic bleeding practices, as well as its heroic doses
of calomel and other “medicines.”  It began co-opting homeopathic medicines into
its pharmacopoeia.  There was a trend ever since the 1830s, when the alternative
movements began in earnest, to begin trusting nature again.  Orthodox doctors
began allowing the body to heal itself, or at least assist it, instead of bludgeoning
it with heroic medicine.  Orthodox medicine was raiding the alternatives for what
it deemed useful, so it could offer a competing product.  At the same time, orthodox
medicine tried putting cement shoes on its competition.  Getting homeopaths kicked
out of medical societies were some of the early AMA successes in the 1850s. 

The spiritual, political and social perspectives often
have parallel in one’s scientific and professional orientation.  The homeopathic
movement was not only revolutionary in the medical field.  Most American homeopaths
in the 1850s were also abolitionists and members of the nascent Republican Party. 
When Abraham Lincoln came into office in 1861, his Secretary of State, William
Seward, had a homeopath as his personal physician.  Homeopathy enjoyed political
support in Washington in the 1860s, helping to blunt the orthodox assault. 

The 1860s through 1880s were the
period of greatest influence for homeopathic practitioners.  The press and public
were fairly unanimous in their criticisms of the orthodox medical establishment,
and sympathetic toward homeopathy.  By the 1870s, about a million American families
were loyal to homeopathy.  In 1878, a yellow-fever epidemic swept from New Orleans
into the Mississippi Valley.  There were about 20,000 deaths.  Yellow fever was
the most feared disease in the South, and official commissions were launched to
investigate the 1878 epidemic.  One commission investigated the records of homeopathic
physicians where the epidemic raged.  It turned out that people treated by homeopaths
had a yellow-fever death rate of less than 7%, which was less than half the death
rate of the general public.  When the results were announced to the U.S. Congress,
they were impressed.[133]  The attacks on homeopathy by orthodoxy relaxed
during those years, although homeopathy had been so demonized in the AMA’s ranks
that many orthodox practitioners would go berserk at the mere mention of it. 
There were various factors that doomed homeopathy.  Orthodox medicine’s alliance
with the drug companies loomed largely, but the seeds of its destruction came
largely from within its ranks. 

Hahnemann’s system
was developed through experience with patients, and his practice made the homeopath
both diagnostician and pharmacist.  The homeopathic pharmacopoeia was vast, and
the proper application of it took years of careful study.  Homeopathy was not
for quick study artists.  There was no one-size-fits-all treatment, no universal
“medicine” such as calomel, no assembly line to run the patients through.  Not
surprisingly, a movement arose in homeopathy that tried making homeopathy easier
to learn and use.  Its practitioners were influenced by the universal prescriptions
that orthodox practitioners were handing out.  With the relaxation of attacks
from orthodox medicine, the internal division of homeopathy became evident.  In
1880, it divided into the “purists” who followed Hahnemann’s teachings to the
letter, and the revisionists who tried making homeopathy easier to learn and apply. 
The subsequent internecine warfare was the major reason the homeopathic movement
began disintegrating in the late 19^th century.  The homeopaths that
I have dealt with or been aware of in my life have usually been from the “purist”
school. 

Another factor deserves mention.  Although
the heroic treatments of orthodox medicine were feared by millions of people,
and rightfully so, they were by no means the majority of Americans, at least to
the point of refusing to submit to them.  Heroic medicine enjoyed the benefit
of being spectacular.  When a patient ingested calomel, the effect was
dramatic.  Something happened, even if it nearly killed the patient.  I
have experienced and watched homeopathy produce instant and dramatic results,
for many ailments.  For chronic conditions, however, the treatment could take
many months, as the body gradually healed itself, in subtle, feminine fashion. 
There was often self-discipline involved with homeopathic treatment, and most
people preferred to take a quick-acting pill for their afflictions.  That dynamic
can readily be seen today.  True health in today’s United States comes from taking
care of one’s self.  Eating well, exercising, refraining from tobacco, alcohol
and other stimulants/depressants, and other aspects of a healthy regimen require
some self-discipline, the kind that most people do not exercise.  Most people
would rather take a pill to make their symptoms disappear, so they can continue
to pursue their addictions and deadly lifestyles.  Symptom suppression is the
essence of Western medicine today, and its appeal is largely to people who refuse
to take responsibility for their health.  Most want a pill or spectacular intervention,
such as surgery, to make the problem “go away.” 

The
homeopathic movement largely had itself to blame for its demise, but its internal
weakness was also exploited by other competitors, the most damaging among them
orthodox doctors, who teamed up with the burgeoning pharmaceutical empires.  The
homeopathic remedies administered by the “purists” were highly dilute and never
mixed with other substances.  It was the opposite approach to the polypharmacy
of the proprietary medicine craze that gripped orthodoxy during the Gilded Age. 

The final blow to homeopathy, however, was dealt by
diversifying robber barons, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie in particular. 
Rockefeller and Carnegie amassed enormous fortunes during the Gilded Age, through
ingenuity and ruthlessness.  As they came to dominate their respective industries,
they branched out and became “philanthropists.”  Their “philanthropy” was more
directed toward social engineering than humanitarian activity.  Rockefeller and
Carnegie exercised “institutional control” over American medicine. 

By
1900, homeopathic schools had largely abandoned Hahnemann’s methods, and the “make
homeopathy easy” faction dominated.  That “short cut” school of homeopathy was
close in spirit and practice to orthodox medicine, and both pumped great numbers
of graduates into the medical marketplace.  Homeopathy suffered from the internal
division, and its colleges relied almost solely upon student fees.  Homeopathy
also probably lost its effectiveness as Hahnemann’s methods were abandoned.  The
same economic situation in relation to student fees existed in orthodox medical
schools until 1910 and the Flexner Report, which was funded by the Carnegie Endowment. 
Medical schools that received Flexner’s approval received Carnegie and Rockefeller
funding, while those that failed to gain approval did not.  Not surprisingly,
the favored paradigm prevailed, with the AMA and drug industry allying itself
with Rockefeller and Carnegie, forming a power structure that dominates Western
medicine to this day. 

The AMA worked hand-in-hand
with Flexner, and government was soon a player.  State boards refused to license
doctors that did not come from AMA-approved schools.  That interlocking institutional
control spelled the death knell for homeopathy.  In 1900, there were 22 homeopathic
colleges.  In 1918, there were only seven.  Homeopathic colleges were not the
only casualties of the institutional control that Rockefeller, Carnegie, the AMA,
licensing boards and drug companies would exercise over medicine.  That process
also closed most medical schools for women and blacks.  The alleged strategy was
bringing science and education to medicine, but it was also obviously a power
play to consolidate wealth and power.  Ironically, Rockefeller would not take
the drugs that his empire promoted.  His personal physician was a homeopath, and
John D. lived to be nearly 100 years old.  To gain some insight into Rockefeller’s
motivation, a quote from Medical Dark Ages is appropriate:

 

“…a
surgeon told John D. (Rockefeller) that everyone should have an appendectomy before
the age of 16 as a preventative.  The oil wizard saw the point at once.  ‘Why,
you’ve got a better thing than Standard Oil!’, he exclaimed.” – In Nat
Morris, The Cancer Blackout.

 

Rockefeller
was creating paradigms in Western society, using his ill-gotten money to shape
and dominate institutions that he funded, and it goes far beyond the drugs and
knives paradigm that rules Western medicine.  Soon before he began taking over
medicine, he was reshaping the University of Chicago, remaking it to his liking. 
The University of Chicago would spawn social control ideologies.  John
Taylor Gatto, one of America’s finest teachers, noted that today’s grade schools
were designed by theorists from the University of Chicago, where they where honed
their “instruments of scientific management of a mass population.”  Gatto’s thesis
is that our educational system “dumbs us down,” so we can be controlled.  From
1990 through 1997, in the wake of the Soviet Empire’s collapse, in every year
but two, the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to a University of Chicago
economist, their work generally concerned with scientific, capitalistic, means
of managing the world economy.  There was about zero humanitarian impulse in Rockefeller’s
“philanthropy.”  He only became excited when pondering how rich he would become. 

The knives and drugs paradigm prevailed
due to considerations of wealth and power, not because it works.  In 1913, a few
years after the publication of Flexner’s report, Rockefeller strikebreakers turned
machine guns on a camp of striking miners in Colorado, killing forty people, including
women and children.  Exploiting workers was always the way the capitalists
primarily amassed their fortunes.  Several years ago, a member of Dennis Lee’s
organization had lunch with a Rockefeller heir.  The heir said that he knew of
no rich American family (at the level of dynastic wealth) that made its fortune
honestly.  In America at least, behind every great fortune is a great crime. 
Even the “radical” Carnegie was a crafty strikebreaker, the bloody Homestead Strike
staining his reign.  Machine-gunning one’s employees could be effective, but was
a crude method of exerting control.  Rockefeller and the other robber barons pioneered
and refined methods of manipulating public opinion and shaping the public mind. 
Rockefeller’s image in the wake of the Ludlow Massacre, especially as it became
evident that he authorized it, was at about the level of Attila the Hun, and Rockefeller
then waged one of history’s first public relations campaigns.  He hired Ivy Lee
in 1914 to help manage the Rockefeller Empire’s image.  Lee is considered the
leading pioneer of today’s public relations industry,
working first for J.P. Morgan, then for Rockefeller.[134] 
John D. Rockefeller soon engaged in the charade of carrying around a bag of dimes,
handing one to everyone he met. 

Before
Rockefeller and Carnegie became involved, the AMA was getting its act together. 
In 1899, the AMA hired George Simmons as the new editor for its Journal of
the American Medical Association (JAMA).  Harris Coulter described
Simmons as one who had considerable “political abilities.”[135]  JAMA
was a deeply hypocritical publication.  Its primary source of revenue was drug
ads, and the ads it ran for “secret ingredient” and “proprietary” medicines violated
the AMA’s code of ethics.  In the 1890s, the AMA came under fire from state boards
and other organizations for its unethical ads, and was on its way to becoming
a laughingstock.  Simmons rescued the AMA, largely by turning JAMA into
a money machine by closely allying itself with the drug industry.  Drug ads bankrolled
the AMA, especially after Simmons became involved in 1899.  Coulter did not delve
into Simmons’ credentials in his work, but Eustace Mullins did, in his Murder
by Injection. 

An Englishman, Simmons settled
in the Midwest in 1870 and began a journalism career.  After several years as
editor of the Nebraska Farmer, Simmons opened a medical practice, advertising
that he specialized in homeopathy and the “diseases of women.”[136] 
He apparently was an abortionist when the AMA was campaigning to ban abortion. 
Simmons advertised that he received his training and diploma at Rotunda Hospital
in Dublin, Ireland.  That hospital never issued diplomas.  There is no evidence
that Simmons ever received any medical training.  Simmons then got a diploma from
Rush Medical School.  There is no evidence that Simmons ever set foot on the medical
school campus.  He apparently received a mail order degree.  Simmons appears to
have been the classic “quack.” 

Simmons
was ambitious and resourceful.  He organized a Nebraska chapter of the AMA.  In
1899, he was invited to Chicago to take over the editorship of JAMA.  Simmons
saw that the AMA was not properly seizing its opportunities.  He quickly named
himself the AMA’s secretary and general manager.  Simmons then found a capable
assistant, a man who had been arrested for embezzlement as the Secretary of the
Kentucky Board of Health, who may have bought his way to a pardon, and was then
encouraged to leave the state.  He became Simmons’ right hand man.[137]

Simmons
turned the AMA into a gold mine when he initiated an approval racket.  For a price,
the AMA gave its “Seal of Approval” to drugs.  It was a form of extortion,
and the AMA engaged in no real research.  Their “research” was a form
of “green research.”  Simmons, like a shrewd horse trader, would set
his price based on how badly a drug company wanted the AMA’s Seal of Approval. 
The racket soon led to a troubled situation with Wallace Abbott, the founder of
Abbott Laboratories.  Abbott refused to knuckle under to Simmons’ blackmail, and
therefore the AMA never approved Abbott’s drugs.  One day, so the story goes,
Abbott went to see Simmons and showed him the investigative file that he had built
on Simmons’ “career.”  Simmons had sex charges brought by some of his
patients, and charges of negligence in the deaths of others.  That, combined with
the fact that Simmons had no credible medical credentials, caused a sudden change
of heart at the AMA.  Abbott’s drugs were suddenly approved every time, and Abbott
did not have to pay for them.[138]

Simmons
was soon raking it in hand over fist.  JAMA’s advertising revenue rose
from $34,000 per year in 1899 to $89,000 in 1903.  By 1909, JAMA was making
$150,000 per year, becoming the AMA’s cash cow.  Other racketeering strategies
involved threatening firms that advertised anywhere except in the pages of JAMA. 
Simmons was ingenious in making JAMA the icon it became, exerting institutional
control over the up and coming industry.  Simmons’ efforts made the AMA and drug
companies into natural allies of the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations. 

Simmons recruited Morris Fishbein
to the AMA in 1913.  Simmons was a wealthy man by the 1920s, sitting at the AMA’s
helm.  He openly had a mistress, and attempted to get rid of his wife.  A standard
technique in those days was having one’s wife committed to an insane asylum. 
Simmons heavily drugged his wife and then tried convincing her that she was going
insane.  His strategy backfired.  Mrs. Simmons took her husband to court in 1924,
and the sensational trial ruined Simmons’ image.  The trial inspired numerous
books, plays and movies, the most famous of which was Gaslight, starring
Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman.  Simmons stepped down at the AMA and his protégé,
Morris Fishbein, took over.  Fishbein ran American medicine with an iron fist
for the next twenty-five years, becoming a household name and a rich man. 

Fishbein soon extended the drug approval racket to food,
where for a price a food would garner the AMA’s Seal of Acceptance.  The testing
involved seemed limited to seeing how much money was in the bank account of the
companies seeking AMA approval.  At the same time Fishbein was announcing the
Seal of Approval and citing two tuna companies as meeting the AMA’s stringent
requirements, the FDA was seizing shipments of those very brands because “they
consisted in whole or in part of decomposed animal substance.”[139]  Fishbein’s
first customer for his food approval racket was Land O’Lakes Butter Company, a
company that had been criminally prosecuted many times for adulterating its product
to hide spoilage and watering it down.[140]  It widely advertised its new,
AMA-approved, status.  The AMA’s Seal of Approval racket for food lasted until
the 1940s, and it always teetered on the verge of damage lawsuits, as it performed
virtually no testing on its “approved” foods.  The drug Seal of Approval
racket, however, proved long lasting, but drugs comprised only one pillar of the
developing racket.  The other was surgery.  When anesthesia and antiseptics made
surgery respectable, the surgeons sought to make surgery into a monopoly. 

Surgery was not rescued from its barbaric status in the United
States until the 1880s.  Keen was not the only American pioneer of antiseptic
procedures.  The most famous is William Halsted.  Germany, with its focus on laboratory
science, became the center of medical research and training during the last half
of the 19^th century, not France or England.  Halsted was a rich boy
from Yale who studied in Germany and brought back the German philosophy of medical
practice.  Halsted pioneered sterile surgical procedures in Baltimore.  As happened
often in those days, Halsted became a cocaine and morphine addict, and never beat
his addiction.  Along with pioneering sterile surgery, Halsted also refined the
practice of invasive surgery.  Halsted invented the radical mastectomy. 

This essay will now largely concern itself with the
development of today’s cancer racket.  With Halsted’s innovations helping it along,
surgery became the favored, even sole, way to treat cancer in the late 19^th
century.  Cancer is a disease of civilization, and the greatest doctors of history
knew that treating cancer by attacking the tumor was futile.  Cancer was also
seen long ago as a disease of the “humors,” the body’s fluids.  Western medicine
gradually abandoned the humoral perspective to adopt the “solidist” one.  Studying
and treating the humors (blood, lymph, bile) was largely abandoned in favor of
treating the body’s “solids.”  Such a change was partly based on the cell theories
of Virchow and others, but the rise of surgery also contributed greatly, because
it is impossible to use a scalpel on blood. 

The world’s most influential cancer research institution is Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.  Its “spiritual founder” was J. Marion
Sims.  Sims received minimal training during the 1840s before he began performing
experimental surgeries on slave women.  Slave women were at the bottom of America’s
social hierarchy, and as such made ideal subjects for human experiments.  Performed
without anesthesia, Sims’ surgeries were accomplished by having friends hold down
the slaves as he operated.  According to his sympathetic biographer, his operations
were “little short of murderous.”  Sims’ friends could only endure about one stint
of holding down his experimental subjects, as the subjects’ thrashing and shrieking
were too much for them to endure.  When local plantation owners refused to lend
Sims any more subjects for his experiments, he bought a slave woman for $500 and
performed 30 operations on her in a few months.  After a few years of his experimental
surgeries, he may have been run out of town, as he had the reputation of being
some kind of Dr. Frankenstein. 

Sims abruptly
moved to New York City from the South, and in 1855 helped found Women’s Hospital,
a charity hospital.  He again began performing experimental surgeries, that time
on immigrant women, and the Dr. Frankenstein rumors began anew.  In the 1870s,
he began performing experimental cancer surgeries.  His brutal experiments, called
life threatening by the hospital trustees, combined with his open contempt of
his women subjects, got him expelled from the hospital.  Sims cultivated wealthy
women as his professional clientele (his specialty was operating on vesico-vaginal
fistulas), and those contacts got him reinstated.  An Astor heir died of cancer,
and the Astor family offered the Women’s Hospital $150,000 if they would open
a cancer treatment wing of the hospital.  The trustees associated cancer treatment
and research with Sims’ barbarities, and hesitated to accept the money.  Sims
double-crossed the trustees and negotiated directly with the Astors to set up
a new hospital with the money.  His negotiation worked, although he died before
New York Cancer Hospital opened in 1884.  He would have been its first director
had he lived.  The name was changed to Memorial Hospital in the 1890s, and to
its current name in the 1950s.[141]

Cancer treatment
by surgery grew during the late 19^th century and well into the 20^th. 
Ever more drastic surgeries were devised to treat cancer.  Using war terminology
and imagery, one cancer treatment that removed the entire jaw was known as the
“commando” because it reminded the doctors of the slashing attacks of World War
I commandos.  Memorial Hospital surgeons invented procedures that virtually hollowed
out the entire body, trying to get every last potential piece of cancerous flesh. 
Another innovative surgery at Memorial Hospital was called a hemicorporectomy,
where half the body would be carved away (everything below the pelvis) as a way
to treat advanced pelvic region malignancy.  Many patients elected to die rather
than submit to such surgeries.[142] 

James Douglas, who owned the world’s largest copper mine, also
owned large pitchblende deposits, from which come radium and uranium.  Douglas
began experimenting with radium as a cure all, and not long before World War I
became the leading “philanthropist” of Memorial Hospital.  His $100,000 donation
was attached to the condition that Memorial Hospital would begin using radium
treatments for cancer.  With the adoption of radium as “medicine,” the price of
radium instantly increased by more than 1000%.  Douglas died in 1913, probably
from radiation poisoning.  By the 1920s, Memorial Hospital’s radium treatments
constituted its single largest source of income. 

In
1927, John D. Rockefeller and his son began contributing millions of dollars to
Memorial Hospital, including money and land to build a new hospital in the 1930s. 
The same year that the Rockefellers began “donating” to Memorial Hospital, Standard
Oil of New Jersey signed its first agreement with I.G. Farben.  Farben was Europe’s
largest and most notorious cartel.  Farben ran the rubber works at Auschwitz,
and invented Sarin, Tabun and the Zyklon B used in the gas chambers.  In 1934,
the Rockefeller Empire sent its PR wizard Ivy Lee to Germany to help improve Farben
and the Third Reich’s image.[143]  The Rockefeller
Empire worked hand-in-hand with Nazi Germany, as did many
other American industrialists, including Hitler’s hero, Henry
Ford.  The Rockefellers even renewed their contract with Farben in 1939, the
contract stating that they would continue doing business even if the United States
and Germany went to war, an agreement that was kept clear until 1942, after Germany
had declared war on the United States.  It was not until the American government
investigated the Rockefeller companies, one investigator calling their relationship
with Germany bordering on “treason,” with a resultant publicity black eye, that
the Rockefellers discontinued their open support of Nazi Germany, although they
apparently kept dealing with Hitler’s regime clear to the end of World War II. 

The Rockefeller/Farben connection influenced Memorial
Hospital to begin pursuing chemotherapy research before World War II broke out,
with Standard Oil executive Frank Howard sitting on Memorial Hospital’s Research
Committee.  Before World War II was over, Howard recruited two General Motors
executives, Alfred P. Sloan and Charles Kettering, into becoming donors for an
ambitious plan to make Memorial Hospital into a research and treatment center. 
Kettering also bankrolled Kettering Laboratories in Cincinnati, which was notable
for producing “research” that proved the “benign” properties of industrial substances
such as lead, fluoride and aluminum.  Sloan was a long-time representative of
the Morgan family interests, and the Rockefeller and Morgan interests shared power
in running Memorial Sloan-Kettering.[144]  Today more
than ever, Wall Street runs Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering
dominates the direction of Western cancer research and treatment.  “Corporate
philanthropy” is an oxymoron.  Corporations “give” money with an eye toward the
benefits that might accrue in the end.  Everything a corporation does is ultimately
designed to increase its profits.  Earning a profit
is about the only reason that corporations exist, but few will ever state
it that baldly. 

Today’s cancer treatment paradigm
attacks the tumor as a way to eradicate cancer.  What did the great doctors of
history have to say about attacking cancer tumors?  From Medical Dark Ages I obtained these quotes:

 

“It
is better not to apply any treatment in cases of occult cancer; for if treated
(by surgery), the patients die quickly; but if not treated, they hold out for
a long time.” – Hippocrates, (460-370 BC).

           

(Advanced cancer is)” irritated by treatment; and
the more so the more vigorous it is.”

“Some
have used caustic medicaments, some the cautery, some excision with a scalpel;
but no medicament has ever given relief; the parts cauterized are excited immediately
to an increase until they cause death.”

“After
excision, even when a scar has formed, nonetheless the disease has returned, and
caused death; while …the majority of patients, although no violent measures
are applied in the attempt to remove the tumor, but only mild applications in
order to sooth it, attain a ripe old age in spite of it.” – Celsus, (1st
century AD).

           

“When
[a tumor] is of long standing and large, you should leave it alone.  For myself
have never been able to cure any such, nor have I seen anyone else succeed before
me.” – Abu’l Qasim, (936-1013 AD).

           

“It should be forbidden and severely punished to
remove cancer by cutting, burning, cautery, and other fiendish tortures.  It is
from nature that the disease comes, and from nature comes the cure, not from physicians.”
- Paracelsus, (1493-1541 AD).

 

The
same mentality was held by the Hawaiian kahunas.  The kahuna lore stated that
“If it is (cancer), do not treat it.”[145] 

The heroic medicine of Benjamin Rush was diametrically opposed to such a sentiment. 
He wrote that one of the “Vulgar Errors in Medicine” was to “let tumors alone.”[146]

With surgery coming into vogue, it became a monopoly as a way
to treat cancer.  Today, there are basically three legal ways to treat cancer
in America: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.  The second legal way to treat
cancer was discovered in the 1890s.  How was that pioneer treated?  Again, from
Medical Dark Ages:

 

“The
surgeons.  They controlled medicine, and they regarded the X-ray as a threat to
surgery.  At the time surgery was the only approved method of treating cancer. 
They meant to keep it the only approved method by ignoring or rejecting
any new methods or ideas.  This is why I was called a ‘quack’ and nearly ejected
from hospitals where I had practiced for years.” – Dr. Emil Grubbé. 
Dr. Emil Grubbé, …discovered…X-ray therapy (for cancer) in 1896…X-ray was
not recognized as an agent for treating cancer by the American College of Surgeons
until 1937…Dr. Grubbé…still was not recognized as late as 1951.” – in
Herbert Bailey, Vitamin E, Your Key to a Healthy Heart

 

The third legal way, chemotherapy, came directly from World
War II chemical warfare experiments.  Using chemicals to treat cancer had been
around since Paracelsus, but the chemicals killed the patients more often than
not, since they were based on arsenic, lead and other deadly substances.  In the
early 20^th century, chemical treatments and finding the “magic bullet”
(more masculine imagery) to kill cancer cells became an intensive area of study. 
In the 1930s, chemotherapy research was noted for its deadly and barbaric effects,
and those who used surgery and radiation battled against chemotherapy.  World
War II was a watershed in the use of chemicals.  DDT
was first used during World War II, the Nazis invented nerve gases, the allies
invented napalm and nuclear
weapons, and the notion of “better living through chemistry” became entrenched
due to the experience of World War II.[147] 

The racketeering impulse has been with Western medicine
for many years and is deeply embedded today.  The rise of the Western medical
paradigm coincided with the rise of the corporation and new kinds of empires. 
The reason that American medical doctors are the highest-paid professionals on
earth is not because they perform valuable work.  They are technicians in what
is arguably the West’s greatest racket, where the power of life and death is in
the hands of the world’s most lucrative professions and industries.  The fact
that only violent methods of cancer treatment are legal is no accident.  Here
are two quotes from Medical Dark Ages. 

 

“The
thing that bugs me is that people think the FDA is protecting them.  It isn’t. 
What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it’s doing are as different as
night and day.” Dr. Herbert Ley, Commissioner of the FDA. (San Francisco
Chronicle, 1-2-70). 

 

(In
response to above quote) “What is the FDA doing? As will be shown
by the material that follows, the FDA is “doing” three things:

“First,
it is providing a means whereby key individuals on its payroll are able to obtain
both power and wealth through granting special favors to certain politically influential
groups that are subject to its regulation.  This activity is similar to the ‘protection
racket’ of organized crime: for a price, one can induce FDA administrators to
provide ‘protection’ from the FDA itself.

“Secondly,
as a result of this political favoritism, the FDA has become a primary factor
in that formula whereby cartel-oriented companies in the food and drug industry
are able to use the police powers of government to harass or destroy their free-market
competitors.

“And thirdly, the FDA occasionally
does some genuine public good with whatever energies it has left over after serving
the vested political and commercial interest of its first two activities.” 
- G. Edward Griffin, World Without Cancer.

 

Ley
was the commissioner of the FDA in the 1960s.  That quote of Ley has some history
and previously incorrect reporting, including in earlier versions of my work,
and its tale is told at this footnote.[148]  The FDA apparently acts as Mr. Deputy, Ms. Prosecutor
and Ms. Deputy Attorney General did in protecting
the turf of its patrons. 

The insurance companies
are an integral part of the racket, keeping the money from the alternatives because
they are “not approved.”  “Not approved” becomes a self-fulfilling
Catch-22 by mainstream medicine, as they refuse to investigate alternatives, so
therefore they are not approved.  It goes even further, as laws are passed making
it a criminal offense for a doctor to use an “unapproved” treatment.[149] 
It is an impressive use of circular logic to produce an insulated racket.  Evidence
for that bold charge will be presented in this essay. 

Continue with part 2.

 

 

Footnotes

[1] See that quote in Cremo and Thompson’s
Forbidden Archeology, p. 23.

[2] See Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, p. 151.

[3] See Heisenberg, Encounters with
Einstein, p. 121.  Einstein made his remark regarding Heisenberg’s quantum
theories that introduced randomness to the mechanics of atoms. 

[4] See their mystical writings in Ken
Wilber’s Quantum Questions. 

[5] See Ken Wilber’s Quantum Questions,
pp. 101-104.

[6] See Woodhouse’s Paradigm Wars,
pp. 41-44.

[7] See Eisler’s The Chalice and the
Blade.

[8] For some reading relating to that idea,
see Merlin Stone’s When God was a Woman, Riane Eisler’s The Chalice
and the Blade, and for a more conservative investigation see Margaret Ehrenberg’s
Women in Prehistory.  For a broad summary of that issue, see Michael Parenti’s
History as Mystery, chapters two and three.  The issue of matriarchal societies
in prehistory is a heated issue, with the firestorm generally centering around
the pioneering work of Marija Gimbutas.  While there may be no “solid” evidence
for there ever being a true matriarchal society, there is good evidence that many
ancient societies and religions had women holding a high place, and women’s status
degenerated along with a society’s decline.  When men and warriors held unchallenged
supremacy, the societies were violent and declining, with women living in some
form of bondage.  When women had higher status, violence was less prevalent and
society was healthier.  That does not hold true for only prehistoric investigations. 
Elizabeth I was the first woman English sovereign, and the Elizabethan Era was
the most culturally auspicious era that England ever had, with its literature
hitting a high point that is still unsurpassed.  Nobody is arguing that women
are the source of violence in the ancient world or today’s.  The furor surrounding
the work of Gimbutas and others like her is obviously at least partly an issue
of gender bias, with the West’s patriarchical academic system fighting back against
a challenge to its power and privilege.  The issue has been extremely politicized,
but when the dust settles, if it does in my lifetime, I think it will be acknowledged
that societies have been much healthier when women had higher status, and when
their status was reduced, that society was in decline, and often on its way to
extinction. 

[9] See Campbell, Occidental Mythology,
pp. 3-92.

[10] See Campbell, Occidental Mythology,
pp. 3-92.  See Stone, When God was a Woman, pp. 198-241.

[11] See a brief discussion of that fact
in Jeanne Achterberg’s Woman as Healer, pp. 18-19.  See, for instance,
the nearly complete absence of women in Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to
Mankind and Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography of Medicine.  Even
though they are recent works, they typify how infrequently women appear in the
standard histories of medicine. 

[12] See Jeanne Achterberg’s Woman
as Healer, pp. 106-109.  For more on women healers, see Elizabeth Brooke’s
Women Healers.

[13] See Jeanne Achterberg’s Woman
as Healer, p. 90.  See Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History,
pp. 134-135.

[14] For instance, read about the war-based
paradigm that has guided modern male doctors in Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors, The
Biography of Medicine, pp. 429-430.  Nuland wrote that he and his fellow male
doctors thought of themselves as “Spitfire” pilots, and the patient’s body was
merely the theater of their glorious battles against disease.  That indoctrination
was partly so the doctors would not become “emotionally involved” with their patients. 
Nuland rightfully calls such boyish attitudes what they were: anti-feminine. 
They were also anti-human. 

[15] Achterberg, Woman as Healer,
p. 136.  See Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 364.

[16] See Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, The
Metaethics of Radical Feminism.

[17] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health,
pp. 51-52.  

[18] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health,
pp. 15-57.   See Mendelsohn, Confessions of a Medical Heretic.

[19] Examples of arguably worse-than-worthless
prevention can be found in vaccination, mammograms
(may cause as much cancer as they find, and are useless anyway, with orthodox
therapies, if increased life expectancy means that it “works”) and other high-tech
and/or drug-related treatments.

[20] Whitaker, Health and Healing,
November 1994, p.1.

[21] See Clark, Randolph Lee and Comley,
Russell, Eds. The Book of Health, Third Edition.  New York: Van Nostrand
Rheinhold Company, 1973.  On page 212: “Blood pressure reaches 120 at 17 years
of age…With age, the pressure gradually rises until at 60 years it is about 140/87.”
Apparently, the rule of thumb used to be as bad as “100 plus your age.”  See Rosenfeld,
Dr. Isadore.  “Don’t be Blasé about Your Blood Pressure.”  Parade Magazine,
September 13, 1998.

[22] See Ornish, Dr. Dean.  Dr. Dean
Ornish’ Program for Reversing Heart Disease.  New York: Ballantine, 1990.

[23] In 2006, for the first time ever, I influenced somebody to change
his diet, to save his life.  It was an old friend who recently had a cancerous
kidney removed and had further, deeply invasive, surgery.  He has adopted a holistic
regimen, with a live food diet, meditation and other holistic, preventive practices. 
In May 2007, a friend of mine was looking into adding more live food to his diet,
partly due to my influence.  I told him that, as with my vegetarian ways and free energy,
I really did not keep up much on the “state-of-the art” of such practices.  I
explored those health habits many years ago, they worked for me, and I did not
do much further research into those areas.  It is not difficult to understand
that humans, as with all animals, are designed to eat live food and that dead
food is less nutritious.  As my friend was asking about books on live foods, I
thought I might buy him a copy of Paul Bragg’s The Miracle of Fasting. 
As I searched for the book on the Internet, I came upon evidence that Bragg lied
about his age and other aspects of his life’s story.  He was eighty-one
when he died, not ninety-five.  Not only that, but his accounts of his ancestry,
being cured of tuberculosis as a teenager and wrestling
in the Olympics were image-making fabrications.  His “daughter”
is really his former daughter-in-law.

Bragg
spent many years in Southern California, and Jack
La Lanne lives a short drive from the university that I graduated from.  I
have friends and family members who have met both men, as well as Patricia Bragg,
who is carrying on Paul’s work as his “daughter.”  Patricia once spent the evening
at a friend’s house, regaling them with Bragg tales.  According to La Lanne, Paul
Bragg believed that diet was the most important part of the health regimen (including
fasting), with exercise less important.  La Lanne switched the priorities, with
exercise as his regimen’s most important factor.  It is hard to argue with somebody
who is one of earth’s most fit nonagenarians. 

In
light of the recently adduced evidence, Bragg appears to have been a charlatan,
but Jack La Lanne really is living evidence of the benefits of exercise
and proper nutrition.  Will Jack live to be 110?  Time will tell, but I believe
the enlightening essence of Jack’s philosophy is in an interview that I read many
years ago.  Jack was asked how old he thought he would live to be.  Jack responded
that he did not know how old he would live to be, and did not much care.  He said
that what was important to him was, “while I am alive, I am living.” 

Bragg recommended water
fasts, and from age seventeen to twenty-four I performed water fasts.  However,
my longest water fast lasted only six days, and it was the weakest I ever felt. 
I read other works on holistic health practices in those days, including Paavo
Airola’s Are You Confused?  Airola recommended juice fasting, as did others. 
At age twenty-four, I tried a juice fast.  I did a weeklong fast, and it was easy. 
A few days later, I did a thirty-two-day juice fast, and it also was easy.  My
longest juice fast was for forty-five days, in Boston, but was done partly because it was cheaper
than eating.  I have encountered people who greatly exceeded my personal fasting
record.  One friend did a ninety-day juice fast, and said he looked like a concentration
camp inmate when he finished it (he may have taken it a little too far).  Another
friend cured his bladder cancer with a seventy-day juice fast.  Steve Meyerowitz
cured his allergies and asthma, after orthodox medicine had failed him, through
diet and fasting.  His longest fast was one hundred days, which is the longest
I have heard of (see his Juice Fasting and Detoxification, which is a better
reference book than Bragg’s works).  My fasting habits have waxed and waned over
the years.  I have often fasted while backpacking, and my life’s best backpacking
experience was while alone, fasting, and so deep into the trailless wilderness
that if I had died out there, it would have been many years before my remains
would have been discovered.  I went about fifteen years without fasting longer
than a week, but in 2004 rediscovered longer fasts (twenty-to-forty days), and
plan to keep longer fasts as a permanent part of my health regimen.  The effects
of long fasts can be profound.  I discovered for myself that while water fasting
may be the “best” fast, it is often incompatible with modern life’s demands. 
I could not perform my job duties if I water fasted.  While juice fasting, I can
perform at levels above what I am normally capable of – working fifteen-hour
days and still feeling energetic when I go home.  I also need one-to-two hours
less sleep each night, along with increased mental alertness and a spiritual high
that is unique to fasting.  I am on day thirteen of a fast as I write this.  Fasting
can be a truly miraculous process, but juice fasting works best for the vast majority
of people.  I have skepticism about Bragg’s water fasting advice and other
parts of his regimen.

[24] Ralph’s book is a gold mine of information,
but is not in an easily readable format.  It takes effort to decipher his cancer
treatment tables.  The book is one of a kind, and I have spent many hours riveted
to its pages.  It was very influential to me.  Ralph is a friend, and a kind and
eccentric soul who has performed epic labors on humanity’s behalf.

[25] The studies were the Veteran’s Administration
study published in 1977, the Coronary Artery Surgery Study, published in 1990,
and the report of the European Coronary Surgery Study Group, published in 1983. 
See Charles T. McGee, M.D.’s Heart Frauds, pp. 24-28.

[26] See Charles T. McGee, M.D.’s Heart
Frauds, pp. 12-13, 23.

[27] See Charles T. McGee, M.D.’s Heart
Frauds, p. 28.

[28] See Charles T. McGee, M.D.’s Heart
Frauds, p. 33.

[29] See Charles T. McGee, M.D.’s Heart
Frauds, pp. 161-165.

[30] Milloy, Steven.  “Relax…You Might
Not Be Doomed” Public Risk.  February 1997. 

[31] There is no inherent contradiction
between evolution and the notion of a creator, or the role that consciousness
can play in it.  The battle between creationists and evolutionists is partly a
false dichotomy.  The Creator’s handiwork can also
evolve.  Evolution does not happen haphazardly, but in accordance with consciousness,
which is ultimately in charge of the process.  The material world is the manifestation of consciousness, and there is interplay between
consciousness and its material manifestation, in my opinion.  That is a large
and controversial subject, and not one for this essay. 

[32] See discussions of the various theories
regarding the megafauna extinctions in Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel,
Goudie’s The Human Impact on the Natural Environment, and Clive Ponting’s
A Green History of the World.

[33] See Roy Porter’s The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind, p. 17.  Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, pp. 104-113,
provides a more thorough survey of the issue, but still gives the main impetus
to the decline in available hunter-gatherer foods.  See discussion in Clive Ponting’s
A Green History of the World, pp. 37-67.

[34] See Diamond’s Guns, Germs and
Steel, pp. 166-168.  Diamond’s work is very useful as far an marshalling the
evidence.  As to his thesis, I do not entirely agree with it (it is too materialistic
for me, among other issues), and to read a fairly thorough critique of his overall
thesis, see J.M. Blaut’s Eight Eurocentric Historians, pp. 149-172.

[35] See Roy Porter’s The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind, p. 45.

[36] See Goudie, The Human Impact on
the Natural Environment, 5^th Edition, pp. 161-173.

[37] See Brooke, Women Healers,
pp. 28-39. 

[38] See Angus Armitage’s Copernicus,
The Founder of Modern Astronomy, p. 61.

[39] See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds
in Medicine, pp. 1-18.  See Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography of
Medicine, pp. 120-144.

[40] See Edward Burman’s The Inquisition,
The Hammer of Heresy, p. 160.

[41] See Schwartz’ The Creative Moment.

[42] See Brooke, Women Healers,
pp. 80-93.  See also Jeanne Achterberg’s Woman as Healer, pp. 99-112

[43] See Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors,
The Biography of Medicine, p. 204. 

[44] I have seen that quote in many places
for many years.  Nobody that I know of, however, had ever cited the direct quote
from a publication.  I hunted for it.  I obtained three volumes of Rush’s writings:
The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, edited by George Corner; Letters
of Benjamin Rush, Volume 1, edited by L.H., Butterfield, and The Selected
Writings of Benjamin Rush, edited by Dagobert D. Runes.  I did not find the
exact quote, but found one close enough that I am sure his famous quote can be
found somewhere in his vast correspondence.  Rush was a prolific writer.  He was
also a remarkable man.  He was an early campaigner against slavery, capital punishment,
alcohol and tobacco.  Although his medical practice and philosophy would have
disastrous effects on American medicine, his overall philosophy had much to recommend
it. 

In a lecture
he gave regarding the progress of medicine, he enumerated the causes that retarded
the progress of medicine.  Some of his points are relevant even today.  His 19^th
point: “The attempts which have been made to establish regular modes of practice
in medicine, upon experience without reasoning, and upon reasoning without experience.” 
His 21^st point: “The interference of governments in prohibiting the
use of certain remedies, and enforcing the use of others by law.  The effect of
this mistaken policy has been as hurtful to medicine, as a similar practice with
respect to opinions, has been to the Christian religion.”  Here is the relevant
quote, the 22^nd point: “Conferring exclusive privileges upon bodies
of physicians, and forbidding men, of equal talents and knowledge, under severe
penalties, from practicing medicine within certain districts of cities and countries. 
Such institutions, however sanctioned by ancient charters and names, are the bastiles
[prisons - ed.] of our science.”  His 23^rd point was: “The refusal
in universities to tolerate any opinions, in the private or public exercises of
candidates for degrees in medicine, which are not taught nor believed by their
professors, thus restraining a spirit of inquiry in that period of life which
is most distinguished for ardor and invention in our science.  It was from a view
of the prevalence of this conduct, that Dr. Adam Smith, has called universities
the ‘dull repositories of exploded opinions.’  I am happy in being able to exempt
the University of Pennsylvania, from this charge.  Candidates for degrees are
here not only permitted to controvert the opinions of their teachers, but to publish
their own, providing they discover learning and ingenuity in defending them.” 
However, not all of Rush’s observations are necessarily something to subscribe
to, in my opinion.  His 12^th point was: “An undue reliance upon the
powers of nature in curing diseases.  I have elsewhere endeavored to expose this
superstition in medicine, and shall in another place, mention some additional
facts to show its extensive mischief in our science.”  Those points were taken
from The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, edited by Dagobert D. Runes,
pp. 227-234. 

Here
is another observation that was less than salutary: “Mercury was prescribed empirically
for many years in the cures of several diseases, in which it often did great mischief;
but since it has been discovered to act as a general stimulant and evacuant, such
a ratio has been established between it, and the state of diseases, as to render
it a safe and nearly an universal medicine.”  From The Selected Writings of
Benjamin Rush, edited by Dagobert D. Runes, p. 249.  In fairness to Rush,
his general medical philosophy was to warn of blind adherence to orthodoxy.  Just
as Christians betrayed the spirit of the Christ, just as capitalists and communists
betrayed the spirits of Smith and Marx, so did orthodox American medicine betray
the spirit of Benjamin Rush.  Rush was certain that medical science was in its
infancy, and he would be the first today to react in horror to the universal practice
of administering mercury to patients, which he initiated in the United States,
as well as his heroic bloodletting.  The enemy of science, reason, spirituality
and enlightenment is dogma; it always has been and always will be, because its
root is fear.  Those who enforce adherence to dogma are those who profit by it. 

[45] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 63. 

[46] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 55. 

[47] See a discussion of that issue in
Stannard’s American Holocaust, pp. 103-105.

[48] See Friedrich Engels’ The Origin
of the Family, Private Property and the State, Penguin Classics version, introduction
by Michèle Barrett. 

[49] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 92. 

[50] A brief overview of homeopathic principles
is in Harris L. Coulter’s Homeopathic Science and Modern Medicine. 

[51] Much of my material dealing with
orthodox medicine and the challenge posed by homeopathy and other modalities comes
from Harris Coulter’s superb Divided Legacy.

[52] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 98. 

[53] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 215. 

[54] See Achterberg, Woman as Healer,
p. 137.

[55] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
pp. 466-472.

[56] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 468.

[57] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
p. 58. 

[58] See Roy Porter’s The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind, pp. 294-295.

[59] See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds
in Medicine, p. 34.

[60] See photographs of Semmelweis’ rapid
decline in Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography of Medicine, p. 259. 

[61] See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds
in Medicine, published in 2001, the same year I am writing this.

[62] Written by K. Codell Carter, a Semmelweis
specialist, writing in 1983.  See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds in Medicine,
p. 47.

[63] See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds
in Medicine, p. 49-50.

[64] Morton did, and Wells botched a public
demonstration of his discovery in 1845, leading to his demise. 

[65] See Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography
of Medicine, pp. 263-303.  See a brief account in Roy Porter’s The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind, pp. 366-368.

[66] See Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography
of Medicine, pp. 343-385.  See a brief account in Roy Porter’s The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind, pp. 370-374.

[67] See Matthew Josephson’s The Robber
Barons. 

[68] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy,
pp. 402-410.

[69] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous
Generation Controversy, p. 9.

[70] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous
Generation Controversy, p. 45.

[71] In the history profession, there is a concept
known as present-mindedness, also called presentism.  It is writing history from
the perspective of the present, which is impossible to completely avoid.  The
greatest sin of presentism is writing about the past in a way that justifies the
present, rather than helping to explain it.  Presentism is practiced in the heroification
of Junípero Serra, Christopher
Columbus and George Washington because their
efforts led to the American civilization that exists today.  They were all fanatical
and bloody conquerors, obsessed with wealth, fame and building empires, largely
at the expense of Native Americans.  Their legacies are not much to cheer about,
and research into their feats can create revulsion toward those “heroes.”  American
high-school history books are prominent examples of the presentism phenomenon,
portraying United States history as one grand tale of state as hero.  The many dark
chapters of United States history are swept under the carpet or polished up and
sold as glory stories, turning night into day, focusing on the few “winners,”
not the multitudes of losers.  The point of the story as taught to American high
school students is glorifying the state and its heroes, not gaining a useful understanding
of the American nation’s past.  The past is only seen in terms of how it contributed
to today, that best of all possible outcomes.  Events and trends that led to other
possible outcomes are treated as “errors” or otherwise disparaged. 

American
history as taught in high school is far from the only place that presentism is
practiced.  The mainstream histories of capitalism portray it as mankind’s natural
state.  The history of capitalism’s triumph is seen as merely the removal of obstacles
to mankind’s highest state.  Competing ideologies such as communism (never really
practiced in the Soviet Union or China, as Adam Smith’s ideology was never really
practiced either) or socialism are rejected as systems that do not honor human
nature.  In reality, the salient feature of “human nature” that today’s capitalism honors is greed, which is one
of the seven deadly sins.  Capitalistic ideologists have transformed greed into
a virtue, turning reality upside down.  In history circles, the practice of presentism
is called “Whig history.”  In that light, both Christian theology and the theory
of evolution can be seen as Whiggish interpretations.  Men are the apple of God’s
eye in Genesis, and the human race being the current flower of evolution.  “Whig
history” has always been a pejorative appellation, and can be seen in many history
texts describing the histories written by others.  At times, it has seemed
that in describing certain histories as Whiggish, the author was unconsciously
telling the reader that his/her work is not Whiggish. 

[72] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous
Generation Controversy, p. 2.

[73] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 28.

[74] See Morrison and Boyd’s Organic
Chemistry, Third Edition, p. 120.

[75] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 55.

[76] René Vallery-Radot, The Life of
Pasteur, p. 58.  A slightly different version is in Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 57, where Pasteur said he would lead her to “prosperity.”

[77]
See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur, p. 57.

[78] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 86. 

[79] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 88.

[80] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 59.

[81] See Christine Russell’s “Louis Pasteur
and Questions of Fraud” in the Townsend Letter for Doctors, October 1993,
p. 960.

[82] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous
Generation Controversy, p. 65.

[83] See Ethel Douglas Hume’s Béchamp
or Pasteur, A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology,” p, 37.  It is cited
from Pasteur’s work. 

[84] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
pp. 116-123.

[85] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous
Generation Controversy, pp. 92-120.

[86] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 169.

[87] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur,
p. 128.

[88] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 151. 

[89] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 174. 

[90] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 204. 

[91] See Patrice Debré, Louis Pasteur,
p. 434. 

[92] See Patrice Debré, Louis Pasteur,
p. 434. 

[93] See Patrice Debré, Louis Pasteur,
p. 435.

[94] See Hellman, Great Feuds in Medicine,
p. 89.

[95] See Microbiology, An Introduction,
Second Edition, by Tortora, Funke and Case, published in 1986.  See The
Microbial World, Fifth Edition, by Stanier, Ingraham, Wheelis and Painter,
published in 1986.  See Microbiology, Fifth Edition, by Pelczar, Chan and
Krieg, published in 1986.  See Bernard Dixon’s Power Unseen: How Microbes Rule
the World, published in 1994.

[96] See Dubos, Pasteur and Modern
Science, p. 71.

[97] See Geison, The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur, p. 275. 

[98] Béchamp, Les Microzymas, pp.
50-51, quoted in E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the
History of Biology, p. 47.

[99] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, pp. 12-13.

[100] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 14.

[101] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 48.

[102] William James, Lecture 6, in “Pragmatism’s
Conception of Truth,” from, Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.

[103] Pasteur, (his paper had a long
French name I will not burden the reader with here), quoted in E. Douglas Hume,
Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 37.

[104] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 40.

[105] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 60.

[106] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 61.

[107] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 65.

[108] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 77.

[109] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 78.

[110] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 47.

[111] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 191.

[112] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 68-75.

[113] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 92-93.

[114] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 100-117.

[115] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 113.

[116] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 113-114.

[117] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 110-112.

[118] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 144-164.

[119] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 45.

[120] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 47.

[121] See data and analysis on Pasteur’s
work on anthrax and rabies in E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter
in the History of Biology, pp. 203-237.

[122] See Appleton, The Curse of Louis
Pasteur, pp. 112-114.  See Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health, pp. 330-334. 
See Viera Scheibner’s Vaccination, p. 257.

[123] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 189-221 and 238-287.

[124] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 183.

[125] Although Pasteur’s defenders claimed
that he was sensitive to the animals he was experimenting on, an incident where
Pasteur kicked the bars of a caged dog that Pasteur pronounced would die the next
day, taunting it, gives another view.  See Hume, Béchamp or Pasteur, p.
283.

[126] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 6, 94-95.

[127] See, Roberts, The Nature of
Personal Reality, session 631, December 18, 1972, pp. 125-128.

[128] See Paul Kennedy’s The Rise
and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 149.

[129] See one of those photos in James
Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, p. 167.

[130] See Kennedy, The Rise and Fall
of the Great Powers, pp. 200-202.

[131] See Collier and Horowitz, The
Rockefellers.  See Josephson, The Robber Barons.  See Allen, The
Rockefeller File. 

[132] See John Robbins’ Reclaiming
Our Health, pp. 95-99.

[133] See Harris Coulter’s Divided
Legacy, pp. 298-305.

[134] See Stauber and Rampton’s Toxic
Sludge is Good for You! and Stuart Ewen’s PR!

[135] See Harris Coulter’s Divided
Legacy, p. 419.

[136] See copies of Simmons’ ads in Mullins,
Murder by Injection, p. 6, 17.

[137] Mullins, Murder by Injection,
p. 18.

[138] Mullins, Murder by Injection,
pp. 19-21.

[139] Mullins, Murder by Injection,
p. 26.

[140] See Kenny Ausubel’s When Healing
Becomes a Crime, pp. 88-89.

[141] See Ralph Moss’ The Cancer Industry,
pp. 46-47.  See Mullins, Murder by Injection, pp. 60-62.

[142] See Moss, The Cancer Industry,
pp. 48-49. 

[143] See Collier and Horowitz, The
Rockefellers, pp. 225-226.

[144] See Moss, The Cancer Industry,
pp. 390-394. 

[145] See Bushnell, The Gifts of Civilization,
p. 99.

[146] See The Autobiography of Benjamin
Rush, edited by George Corner, Princeton University Press, 1948, p. 354.

[147] See Moss, Questioning Chemotherapy,
pp. 15-34.

[148] I discovered Ralph Hovnanian’s
Medical Dark Ages in 1990 by reading Barry Lynes’ The Healing of Cancer
(pp. 162-163).  Ralph’s book was my big wake up call on how the medical racket
works.  In 1993, I spent days keying in those quotes that are in the Medical
Dark Ages section of this site.  Probably my favorite quote from Medical
Dark Ages was the quote by Ley.  As I discovered, however, the quote as presented
in Medical Dark Ages is inaccurate.  Ralph is a friend of mine, and he
conscientiously called me in the spring of 2002 to tell me that his quote of Ley
was inaccurate, and that if he ever published another edition of Medical Dark
Ages, he would correct it.  He said that Lynes was the first person to tell
him that he quoted Ley in error.  It was an honest mistake by Ralph.  This situation
is an example of the hazards of relying on secondary scholarship, a problem I
have had to deal with continually.  I have tried to mitigate those potential errors,
and have sought primary sources whenever I can, and I have often gone to great
lengths to try finding the primary evidence, such as that famous quote by Benjamin
Rush.  Ralph originally combined the quote by Ley with the quote by Griffin, making them both appear to be Ley’s.  The combined
quote made for a great impact.  Correctly attributing them definitely takes some
of the wind out of its sails.  The Rush and Ley quotes were
the two from Medical Dark Ages that related the most directly to this essay,
and last winter I hunted for the original source for the Rush quote, as I have
seen it quoted across the Internet dozens of times, but nobody ever gave its source,
accurately. 

I
had been queried about the Ley quote before, by people who found it hard to believe,
and running down the original Ley quote was on my list of things to do, before
I really took my site “public,” and then Ralph called me.  So in May 2002 I descended
into the University of Washington’s microfilm archives and located that San
Francisco Chronicle article.  The Ley quote that this footnote ties to is
accurate, and the Griffin quote is also accurate, but Griffin
is obviously not an FDA official, although he does credibly demonstrate why his
sentiment is probably correct.  The Ley interview was given to Richard Lyons of
the New York Times, given in Ley’s home, soon after he was sacked as the
FDA commissioner, after three years of service.  Ley was a Harvard professor before
being tapped to head the FDA.  The article is sobering.  Ley said that he was
under “constant, tremendous, sometimes unmerciful pressure” from the drug industry. 
Ley said, “Some days I spent as many as six hours fending off representatives
of the drug industry.”  Ley commented that the FDA staff was a poor one to effectively
protect the American consumer, its ranks being full of “retreads” and others who
were not motivated to do their jobs effectively, and that “there has been total
lack of topside support from the current administration.”  Ley admitted that his
former boss, the HEW head, was a Republican Party fundraiser, but it was not his
boss’ fault, as the Nixon administration was “a business-oriented administration.” 
Every administration since Carter’s has been even more so.  Ley said that the
drug company lobbyists, combined with the politicians who worked on behalf of
their patrons, could bring “tremendous pressure” to bear on him and his staff,
to try preventing FDA restrictions on their drugs.  The interview concluded with
Ley stating that the entire issue was about money, “pure and simple.”  The situation
has become much worse since Ley’s day, him being the last commissioner who tried
standing up to them. 

[149] Many states have those criminal
laws on the books.  For example, California Health and Safety Code Sect. 1701.1,
makes it a crime punishable by five years in prison to administer or prescribe
an unapproved cancer treatment.  California is the worst state of all in persecuting
alternative cancer treatments.  The only treatments approved are surgery, radiation
and chemotherapy.  My wife’s doctor endured fifteen years of persecution in California
for curing cancer using an “unapproved” treatment that worked.

[150] See Hovnanian’s Medical Dark
Ages, p. 19.  See Ellen Brown’s Forbidden Medicine, p. 165.

[151] See Moss, The Cancer Industry,
pp. 21-42.

[152] See Moss, The Cancer Industry,
pp. 32-33.

[153] She challenges the notion of a
cancer epidemic in Toxic Terror.  536,900 Americans died of cancer in 1994,
for 23.5% of all deaths, up from 17.2% in 1970, and up from 4% in 1909.

[154] Moss, Questioning Chemotherapy,
pp. 56, 57, 97, 98, 103, 110, 113, 117, etc. to page 150.

[155] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our
Health, p. 96.

[156] Moss, Questioning Chemotherapy,
p. 35.

[157] See Stuart Troy, “The AMA’s
Charge on the Light Brigade,” Nexus, December 1997-January 1998, pp.
35-40, 75-76.

[158] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 34-36. 

[159] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 17-26 and 41-52.

[160] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 50.

[161] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 60-61.

[162] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 80.

[163] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 88.

[164] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 29.

[165] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 29.

[166] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 96.

[167] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 97.

[168] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 98.

[169] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 98-99.

[170] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, p. 99.

[171] Mullins, Murder by Injection,
p. 31.

[172] Mullins, Murder by Injection,
pp. 31-33.

[173] See Stauber and Rampton, Toxic
Sludge is Good for You!, pp. 1, 25-32.

[174] See Robert Proctor’s The Nazi
War on Cancer, pp. 126-128.

[175] See Robert Proctor’s The Nazi
War on Cancer, p. 184.

[176] See Lee and Solomon, Unreliable
Sources, p. 331.

[177] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, pp. 144-147 and Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health,
pp. 204-207.

[178] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, p. 146.

[179] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, p. 146.

[180] See Ausubel, When Healing Becomes
a Crime, p. 109.

[181] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, p. 147.

[182] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, p. 148-150.

[183] See Wolinksy and Brune, The
Serpent and the Staff, p. 147.

[184] See Fishbein, Morris Fishbein,
M.D., An Autobiography, pp. 368-369.

[185] Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health,
p. 208.

[186] Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health,
p. 212.

[187] See a brief description of Gerson’s
fate in Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health, pp. 279-281.  See also Lynes, The
Healing of Cancer, pp. 32-33.

[188] You can also see a brief summary
of what happened to them in the Hoxsey documentary, Hoxsey: How Healing Becomes
a Crime.

[189] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
pp. 389-390.

[190] Gardner, Fads and Fallacies,
p. 191. 

[191] Gardner, Fads and Fallacies,
p. 197.

[192] Gardner, Fads and Fallacies,
p. 324.

[193] A particularly disturbing aspect
of the JFK assassination milieu is that critical
conclusions regarding Kennedy’s wounds do not jibe with the testimony of the doctors
who treated Kennedy in Dallas.  The back of Kennedy’s head was blown out, consistent
with a frontal shot, and completely at odds with the “lone nut” theories
involving Lee Harvey Oswald.  Gerald Poser’s Case Closed is establishment
apologetics at its most strained.  Posner is a Wall Street lawyer.  The establishment
lined up in praise of his Case Closed, and he was so “successful”
at debunking the conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination, so the
story goes, that he then published a book debunking any government-involved conspiracy
theory surrounding the Martin Luther King assassination.  I wonder if his next
work will be on the Bobby Kennedy assassination, completing his debunker trilogy. 

[194] See an account of this incident
in Fetzer, ed., Assassination Science.

[195] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 431.

[196] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 183.

[197] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 98.

[198] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 99.

[199] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 108.

[200] Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 117.

[201] See Sharaf, Fury on Earth, p.
461.

[202] The definitive work on Reich is
Myron Sharaf’s Fury on Earth, A Biography of Wilhelm Reich, from which
most of this narrative is taken from.  Regarding the FDA’s burning of Reich’s
books, see pp. 459-461.

[203] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that
Worked!, pp. 17-26.  See also Brown, AIDS, Cancer and the Medical Establishment,
pp. 126-153.

[204] Moss, The Cancer Chronicles,
Volume 5, Numbers 5 and 6.

[205] The narrative of Naessens’ adventures
is in Christopher Bird’s The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens,
originally published in 1990 as The Life and Times of Gaston Naessens, The
Galileo of the Microscope.

[206] Naessens describes this dynamic
without my anthropomorphic flourishes in a paper he wrote which is reproduced
in Bird’s The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 294-304.

[207] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 37-38 and 75-76.

[208] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, p. 132.

[209] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 129-131.

[210] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 39-40.

[211] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 14-15.

[212] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 16-17 and 97-105.

[213] See Ralph Moss, “The War on Cancer,”
Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, January 2002, pp. 30-31

[214] See Béchamp, The Blood and its
Third Anatomical Element, p. 240.

[215] See Appleton, The Curse of Louis
Pasteur, p. 47.

[216] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 197.

[217] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 198.

[218] E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or
Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 220-221.

[219] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our
Health, p. 334.

[220] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? pp. 34-35.

[221] See Scheibner, Vaccination:
100 Years of Orthodox Research Shows that Vaccines Represent a Medical Assault
on the Immune System, p. xiv. 

[222] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? pp. 36-37.

[223] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? p. 23.

[224] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? p. 20.

[225] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? p. 24.

[226] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines:
Are They Really Safe and Effective? p. 45.

[227] See Scheibner, Vaccination,
pp. 205-224.

[228] See Scheibner, Vaccination,
p. 260.

[229] See Jane Roberts’ The Individual
and the Nature of Mass Events, p. 31.

[230] See Levi Dowling’s The Aquarian
Gospel of Jesus the Christ, chapter 23, pp. 41-42. 

[231] See Scheibner, Vaccination,
pp. 239-253.

[232] See Hovnanian, Medical Dark
Ages, p. 55, section A.2.11.

[233] See Dostoyevsky, The Brothers
Karamazov, book five, chapter five.

[234] See John Fink’s Third Opinion
for listings of those alternative clinics. 

[235] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our
Health, pp. 240-241.

[236] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our
Health, pp. 257-259.

[237] See Robbins, Reclaiming Our
Health, p. 242.

[238] See Moss, The Cancer Industry,
p. 144.

[239] Whitaker, Health and Healing,
March 1995, p. 2.

[240] Whitaker, Health and Healing,
Supplement, July 1994, p. 2.

[241] See Chomsky, Year 501, p.
153.  In 1995, Presidential Directive 39, signed by Bill Clinton, makes the U.S.’
kidnapping of “terrorists” in foreign nations a government policy, stating
that “Return of suspects by force may be effected without the cooperation
of the host government.”  See Blum, Rogue State, p. 85

[242] See also Ellen Brown’s Forbidden
Medicine. 

[243] See Blum, Rogue State, pp.
210-211.  The ruling is posted to the Internet
at this time (January 2002)

[244] See Ellen Brown’s Forbidden
Medicine, pp. 284-286.

[245] See Bird, The Persecution and
Trial of Gaston Naessens, p. 107-109

[246] Once in awhile a great soul comes
to earth, on special assignment from the Creator, and I believe that John Robbins
is one of them.  His Reclaiming Our Health may be the most important book
on this list.  His gentle and enlightened voice is easier reading than this essay’s
tour of the dark side of the force.  Here is a list of books to help find out
what is going on, and can also provide ideas on how to heal the mess.  Wolinksy
and Brune, The Serpent on the Staff; Moss, The Cancer Industry;
Robert Mendelsohn, Confessions of a Medical Heretic (an excellent and easily
readable book on the medical racket); Fink, Third Opinion; Brown, AIDS,
Cancer and the Medical Establishment; Mullins, Murder by Injection;
Moss, Questioning Chemotherapy; Hovnanian, Medical Dark Ages; Lynes,
The Healing of Cancer; Lynes, The Cancer Cure that Worked!; Lynes,
Helping the Cancer Victim; Bird, The Persecution and Trial of Gaston
Naessens; Carter, Racketeering in Medicine; Moss, Cancer Therapy,
The Independent Consumer’s Guide to Non-Toxic Treatment and Prevention; Thomas,
The Essiac Report; Brown, Forbidden Medicine; Goldberg, An Alternative
Medicine Definitive Guide to Cancer.

[247] See The Sun, January 2002,
p. 48.

[248] What the FDA did to L-tryptophan
is well known and well documented.  For one place of many, see Carter, Racketeering
in Medicine, pp. 171-175.

[249] For instance, the body mistakes
strontium 90, one of the many radioactive isotopes introduced into the environment
by modern “progress,” for calcium.  If a human being ingests strontium
90, the body will incorporate the strontium into the body, where it can become
part of the bone or teeth.  The strontium will not do the job of calcium, and
will eventually radioactively disintegrate, harming the body with radiation and
particles as it decays.  Strontium 90 is a component of radioactive fallout, which
is partly why nuclear bombs have such devastating long-term consequences.

[250] See Moss, “The War on Cancer,”
Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, August/September 2002, pp. 36-37.

[251] Lynes, Helping the Cancer Victim,
p. 38.

 

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]]> http://viajesdelmundo.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/med-01/feed/ 0 viajesdelmundo http://viajesdelmundo.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/a-j-nock-our-enemy-the-state/ http://viajesdelmundo.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/a-j-nock-our-enemy-the-state/#comments Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:33:50 +0000 viajesdelmundo http://viajesdelmundo.wordpress.com/?p=23 ]]> Our Enemy, The State – by Albert J. Nock – 1935

Our Enemy, The State
by Albert J. Nock – 1935

Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

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Our Enemy, The State
by Albert J. Nock – 1935

His Classic Critique Distinguishing ‘Government’ from the ‘STATE’.

In Memoriam: Albert Jay Nock
1870 – 1945

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In Memoriam
Edmund Cadwalader Evans
A sound economist, one of
the few who understand
the nature of the state

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Be it or be it not true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression, and by aggression. — Herbert Spencer, 1850.

This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention, the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State; that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long-run sustains, nourishes and impels human destinies. — Jose Ortega y Gasset, 1922.

It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men. — Henry L. Mencken, 1926.

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PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

When OUR ENEMY, THE STATE appeared in 1935, its literary merit rather than its philosophic content attracted attention to it. The times were not ripe for an acceptance of its predictions, still less for the argument on which these predictions were based. Faith in traditional frontier individualism had not yet been shaken by the course of events. Against this faith the argument that the same economic forces which in all times and in all nations drive toward the ascendancy of political power at the expense of social power were in operation here made little headway. That is, the feeling that “it cannot happen here” was too difficult a hurdle for the book to overcome.

By the time the first edition had run out, the development of public affairs gave the argument of the book ample testimony. In less than a decade it was evident to many Americans that their country is not immune from the philosophy which had captured European thinking. The times were proving Mr. Nock’s thesis, and by irresistable word-of-mouth advertising a demand for the book began to manifest itself just when it was no longer available. And the plates had been put to war purposes.

In 1943 he had a second edition in mind. I talked with him several times about it, urging him to elaborate on the economic ideas, since these, it seemed to me, were inadequately developed for the reader with a limited knowledge of political economy. He agreed that this ought to be done, but in a separate book, or in a second part of his book, and suggested that I try my hand at it. Nothing came of the matter because of the war. He died on August 19, 1945.

This volume is an exact duplication of the first edition. He intended to make some slight changes, principally, as he told me, in the substitution of current illustrations for those which might carry less weight with the younger reader. As for the sequel stressing economics, this will have to be done. At any rate, OUR ENEMY THE STATE needs no support.

Frank Chodorov
New York City, May 28th, 1946

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Our Enemy, The State by Albert J. Nock – 1935

Introduction, Chap 1, Chap 2, Chap 3, Chap 4, Chap 5, Chap 6

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CHAPTER 1

[It must be remembered that Mr. Nock was writing this shortly after the Coup d'état of Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats - What he saw happening HAS HAPPENED! - We are very much closer as we enter the 21st Century to a Dictatorial Socialist State.]

“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance —- that principle is contempt prior to investigation.” — Herbert Spencer

I

IF WE look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can discern one fundamental fact, namely: a great redistribution of power between society and the State. This is the fact that interests the student of civilization. He has only a secondary or derived interest in matters like price-fixing, wage-fixing, inflation, political banking, “agricultural adjustment,” and similar items of State policy that fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these can be run up under one head. They have an immediate and temporary importance, and for this reason they monopolize public attention, but they all come to the same thing; which is, an increase of State power and a corresponding decrease of social power.

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power. There is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.

Moreover, it follows that with any exercise of State power, not only the exercise of social power in the same direction, but the disposition to exercise it in that direction, tends to dwindle. Mayor Gaynor astonished the whole of New York when he pointed out to a correspondent who had been complaining about the inefficiency of the police, that any citizen has the right to arrest a malefactor and bring him before a magistrate. “The law of England and of this country,” he wrote, “has been very careful to confer no more right in that respect upon policemen and constables than it confers on every citizen.” State exercise of that right through a police force had gone on so steadily that not only were citizens indisposed to exercise it, but probably not one in ten thousand knew he had it.

Heretofore in this country sudden crises of misfortune have been met by a mobilization of social power. In fact (except for certain