comments_image Comments

Occupy Wall Street and the History of Democratic Finance Protest



That absence is pretty much undeniable. Still, in Salon, Glenn Greenwald has shrewdly criticized liberal-Democrat scorn for Occupy Wall Street. On the other hand, Mother Jonescriticizes the movement on bases other than those that Greenwald attacks. . . .





Like it or not, though, it is Occupy Wall Street that has the most in common, ideologically, not with those Boston merchants and their supporters but with the less well-known, less comfortably acknowledged people who, throughout the founding period, cogently proposed and vigorously agitated for an entirely different approach to finance and monetary policy than that carried forward by the famous founders. Amid horrible depressions and foreclosure crises, from the 1750′s through the 1790′s, ordinary people closed debt courts, rescued debt prisoners, waylaid process servers, boycotted foreclosure actions, etc. (More on that here and here.) They were legally barred from voting and holding office, since they didn’t have enough property, so they used their power of intimidation to pressure their legislatures for debt relief and popular monetary policies. Their few leaders in legit politics included the visionary preacher Herman Husband, the weaver William Findley, and the farmer Robert Whitehill.

They had high hopes for American independence. In the 1770′s, their “out-of-doors” collaboration with the famous elites was critical to enabling the Declaration of Independence — even though none of their names appears there (well, Benjamin Rush’s does, but by then he’d become unradicalized). Their democratic, egalitarian hopes dashed, in the 1780′s, in western Massachusetts, they marched on the state’s armory in Springfield to reverse regressive finance policies that had again plunged ordinary people into debt peonage and foreclosure while bailing out rich creditors (elites called that populist action, reductively, Shays’s Rebellion). In the 1790′s, with the Constitution in force, and Hamilton’s economics the law of a powerful new nation (partly in direct reaction to the Shays action), populists took over the militia and debt-court system throughout western Pennsylvania and western counties of neighboring states, flew their own flag, and tried to secede from the United States and form an economically egalitarian country. Hamilton dubbed that action, again in a successful effort to reduce it, the Whiskey Rebellion, and he and President Washington responded, naturally enough, by occupying western Pennsylvania with federal troops.



The problem for Occupy Wall Street is that their founding-period political ancestors, who were indeed good at “occupying,” almost always accompanied their efforts with, for one thing, published resolutions registering specific demands and objections (not “this situation sucks” — which of course it does —  but “replace a regressive tax with a progressive one,” “give us access to the franchise,”  ”issue paper money,” “take away Robert Morris’s bank charter,” etc.). On Twitter I’ve tried to collect some specific goals from Occupy people. Generally those who respond seem interested not in anarchist dismantling of government or sweeping stuff like ending capitalism but, say, real regulation. Which is cool if only because my early American democratic-finance activists called themselves “regulators”!



Hysteriography / By William Hogeland | Sourced from

Posted at October 1, 2011, 5:06am

See more stories tagged with: