HUMAN NATURE & RAILROADS: The robber barons, the muckrakers, public relations, and the management of reality
The bosses seized control of your reality LONG AGO
“I grew up in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. … [W]hen I went into the media, everybody was unanimous in believing in absolutely unfettered free speech. … But when Donald Trump came around, I think that’s when there was suddenly a brand-new belief system, particularly in the news media.”
—Matt Taibbi
“During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries … there were no external algorithms that could actually monitor me effectively. States and markets may have wished to do exactly that, but they lacked the necessary technology.”
—Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus, p.329)
There is today a lot more skepticism of the Extended Fourth Estate—Big Media and established academia—than there was back in 2001, when I began doing this work. I am glad for that.
But still…
I have noticed that most of the people who now suspect clandestine control of our meaning-making and reality-creating institutions seem to think that the problem is recent. And they are wont to lament the disappearance of a mythical Golden Age of press freedom in the United States.
The same people often bewail the manner in which our private information is weaponized against us. But, again, they consider it a recent phenomenon made possible, they say, only by the modern technologies that spawned the internet, smartphones, social networks, the freemium business model, and the all-powerful algorithms. In consequence they imagine, as Yuval Noah Harari does (above), that Western citizens of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not being manipulated in this exquisite and targeted manner.
Yet, back in the second half of the 19th century, not fifteen years after the European revolutions of 1848 that spawned the modern world, the political theorist Maurice Joly was already saying that modern democracy was doomed to become a simulation, with the bosses clandestinely seizing control of the press and conducting deep and widespread intelligence gathering on democratic citizens.
According to Joly, the revolutions of 1848 had made the autocratic and totalitarian bosses think. The medieval torch in the head had finally become an Edison light bulb: they understood now that they needed to seem more democratic and adapt quickly in order to keep power long enough to contain and then to destroy modern democracy.
The linchpin of their strategy, said Joly, was unobtrusive control of the meaning-making and reality-creating institutions: newspapers, book publishing, and academia. Why? Because if the masses were going to be making the choices, then the bosses would at least control the menu: they would manage the reality of the masses. (Never underestimate the bosses, is the lesson.)
Was Joly speculating? Was he a madman? Was he a conspiracy theorist?
Joly was certainly a conspiracy theorist. But he was not a madman. And he was hardly speculating. Joly was describing what Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s intelligence services were already doing before Joly’s keen eyes: corrupting the entire French system with their clandestine agents. Bonaparte didn’t appreciate this frank explanation of his methods, so he threw Joly in jail and confiscated all copies of his book. Joly and his book were soon forgotten.
It is well documented that something similar was happening in oûtre-mer, on the other side of the Atlantic. This piece will consider the intelligence operations mounted by the US robber barons as they strove to match Louis Napoleon’s stealth-totalitarian achievement in France.
Since, at the time, the railroads were the most important industry, the corrupt basics of the simulated democracy that the United States would soon become were learned first by the railroad magnates and their retainers. That will be my focus.
The economic and political context: the Industrial Revolution
To libertarians like myself the principle of non-aggression is fundamental. Fighting oppression is therefore quintessentially libertarian. So don’t tell me that I sound like I Marxist for pointing out that, after the US Civil War ended in 1865, the country became a kind of playground where the great industrialists could oppress their workers with impunity. Every libertarian should be offended by that.
I have sought to give us a quick portrait of that oppression in my piece on The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s novel about the suffering of meatpackers in Chicago’s stockyards.
In no small measure, the robber barons could get away with oppressing their workers because there was no police enforcement as we understand it. The only ‘police forces’ in existence were hired, directly managed, or influenced by the large corporations themselves.
This was a different world; you haven’t seen this. These police forces did not exist to fight crime; rather, as historian Robert P. Weiss explains,
“the municipal police in America originated as part of a larger class control apparatus designed to regulate working class social and political activities, including ‘subversive’ speeches, strikes, riots, and daily breaches of the ‘public order.’ ”1
The most prominent seller of police services, in those early days, was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a private company founded by Allan Pinkerton, who had been Abraham Lincoln’s spymaster during the Civil War and now peddled his skills to big companies who wanted Pinkerton to spy on their workers.
What were the bosses worried about?
“Throughout the 1860s,” in a context of “periodic depressions” and an industrial policy of “sweating of the labour force,” as Weiss obliquely refers to the policy of treating workers worse than animals, “there were fears of unionizing and danger of strikes.”2
“By the early 1870s, Pinkerton’s ‘testing’ programmes had been implemented in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City. Operatives were instructed to make detailed reports on the daily conduct of employees, noting expressions of discontent as well as dishonesty. In moving beyond the detection of criminal behaviour, Pinkerton was able to greatly expand his business. This new service of revealing ‘dissatisfied’ workers, and more importantly, those who were recruiting members for ‘secret labour societies,’ was explained in a circular addressed to a variety of fearful employers by the ‘Pinkerton Preventative Patrol, connected with Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency.’ ”3 (original emphases)
The skittishness of industrial employers, which had instantly turned them into totalitarians, as we can see above, had a lot to do with developments in Europe.
The suffering in European factories had led to widespread dissatisfaction with a rapidly industrializing Western world, and that dissatisfaction united socialists, communists, anarchists, and trade unionists in a broad-based movement. This was the International Workingman’s Association, also called the First International, founded in the year 1864 in St. Martin’s Hall, London. Its first congress, in Geneva, was held two years later.
The First International quickly grew in influence and soon had hundreds of affiliated societies all over France. It became powerful. This power was in evidence in 1867, when an International-organized strike defeated an attempt to de-unionize the Paris bronze workers. In response, later that year the group was declared illegal. And when the internationalists elected a new, more radical committee, the French leaders were imprisoned.
But, as explained by Yuri Mikhailovich Steklov, a Bolshevik revolutionary turned historian, those French court trials badly backfired
“thanks to the brilliant defence put forward by the accused and thanks to their exposition of the fundamental principles of the International, [which] aroused among the workers much sympathy for the organisation and led to a notable increase in membership.”
Another consequence of those court trials was to further radicalize the aims of the International at its 1868 congress, held in Brussels, when, “For the first time, the International openly declared in favour of communism, even agrarian communism” (original emphasis). As observed at the time by the liberal economist Emile de Laveleye:
“ ‘Originally, the organisation had merely been intended to be a huge society for mutual defence, for keeping up or raising wages—a sort of universal trade union. Now it dreamed of completely transforming society by … collective ownership of all the means of production.’ ”
And that, as Steklov remarks, considerably unsettled “the upholders of the capitalist system and of private property,” who understood in that “a menace to the integrity of capitalist society.” (It had not occurred to those robber barons, however, that oppressing their own workers might have created this menace).
Two years later, in 1870, communist worker ferment found a political opportunity in the city of Paris.
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated at the Battle of Sedan in September, followed by his capitulation to Otto von Bismarck. The Franco-Prussian war, however, was not quite over. Angry crowds in Paris took to the streets, forcing the French imperial government to flee, and republican and radical deputies in the National Assembly proclaimed a new French Republic under a Government of National Defense that chose to continue the war. So the Prussians, who’d already won the war, just marched on Paris and laid siege.
During that siege, industrial activity was severely dampened when many who could flee—those in the middle and upper classes—indeed fled the city, and the conditions for industrial workers—whether Paris natives or immigrants fleeing Prussian-occupied France—became tough.
The most radical among these workers repeatedly pressured for and tried to impose the creation of a worker’s Commune to run Paris. After the final armistice, they finally succeeded on 18 March, 1871. This Paris Commune existed in a state of war with Adolph Thiers’ National Assembly, stationed at Versailles, until 28 May of that year, when the Commune was finally defeated.
Paris was taken in a very bloody fight that involved summary executions on both sides, and then a very prolonged series of executions by the victorious National Assembly of Thiers. Paris had burned.
Across the Atlantic, the staggering cost of the fratricidal conflict in Paris had produced considerable worry. But the US industrial bosses did not possess the instinct of reform that might have alleviated the oppressive conditions of their own benighted workers. Rather, they sought to perfect their methods of repression to make sure that the workers could not, would not, rise.
“Shortly after the Paris Commune, Allan Pinkerton added a second espionage service. This one went beyond the shop-floor. His secret operatives could gather damaging legal information by infiltrating radical political groups and the ‘inner circle’ of labour organizations, an especially helpful service during strikes.”4
The robber barons were confident that they could get away with more and more repression because, fueled by their spectacular new wealth, political capitalism—crony capitalism—had quickly established itself in the United States. So quickly, in fact, that by 1877, when Rutherford B. Hayes was inaugurated as 19th US president, he was already remarking that
“ ‘This is a government of the people by the people and for the people no longer; it is a government of corporations, by corporations and for corporations.’ ”5
Because the robber barons essentially owned the government, they could act with impunity, and quite often, indeed, with the support of the coercive powers of the State.
The Pinkerton Detective Agency, for instance, sold its services to big companies who needed Pinkerton to spy on workers, lest they organize, and to fire guns at them if they did. And though Pinkerton was the most important such outfit, it was far from alone. It was rather the symptom, as historian Robert Weiss explains, of a broader phenomenon: in the latter decades of the 19th century, companies would form private police forces to impose their will on workers with the blessing of state and federal governments.
No other police forces existed!
When these gunmen were not equal to the task, state and federal troops—soldiers—would be sent against striking workers. And then, under military escort, and with false promises, strikebreaking laborers (‘scabs’) would be brought from other states. With time, a professional corps of strikebreaking workers recruited from the criminal element was formed. Eventually, too, state police forces were created that functioned precisely as the private forces had (it couldn’t be otherwise, because the industrial bosses and the State were functionally intertwined).6
In 1877, the same year that President Hayes lamented his status as a prisoner of the great industrialists, the first pitched battles between US capital and labor erupted.
The root cause was that, in the middle of a punishing depression, wage cuts as high as 50% had been decreed for workers on the railroads—the great industry of the time—even as enormous added dividends were approved for stockholders. Railroad bosses thought they could act with impunity because they controlled the state legislatures and the regulatory agencies.7 They had formed a rent-seeking cartel, colluding with each other to cut wages simultaneously. But the bosses hadn’t counted on the resolve that comes from desperation, as this was the last straw on top of a large bale of abuses that led frustrated and hungry workers to decide that enough was enough.
And so began the Great Railroad Strike, the first major strike in US history.
It began on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The initial efforts by the company and the authorities to break the strike and get these people back to work backfired completely and provoked other workers, who also knew suffering and could sympathize with railroad laborers, to strike as well. Soon, employees of other companies, miners, and even sailors had joined a truly monumental strike.
The State militia was sent to put down the problem. In some places, however, soldiers fraternized with strikers. In other places, they nervously fired on the multitude, provoking revolts and growing the protest. Things got worse from there. Whole towns burned.
“In the wake of the 1877 general strike … old wealth and new, manufacturers, merchants, and bankers, all called on their elected officials to construct new armories, equip and train militias and ‘national guards,’ and rebuild the army that had been decommissioned at the end of the Civil War. Thomas Scott, whose Pennsylvania Railroad had suffered perhaps the greatest property loss in 1877, suggested that troops be garrisoned in those cities which might in the future be the sites of strike activity.”8
When the railroad magnate and financial speculator Jay Gould was “asked by the Senate investigating committee about the danger posed to the people by the newly developing ‘aristocracy of wealth,’ ” which of course included people such as himself, Gould replied:
“ ‘what you have to fear in a republican government like ours … is large masses of uneducated, ignorant people.’ Although Gould did not specifically mention the events of July 1877 [the Great Railroad Strike] in his testimony, there could be no doubt that this was what he was referring to.”9
Once again, it didn’t occur to the bosses that the root of the problem was their own oppression of these workers; the problem, to them, was that the workers were “uneducated” and “ignorant.”
Now, since the railroad bosses owned some of the most important newspapers, they could portray the desperate and hungry workers as revolutionary ‘agitators.’10 And, to a point, this had the desired effect on the news-reading middle classes. But such portrayals would soon become more difficult with the emergence of the ‘muckrakers,’ socially minded journalists who allied with socially minded publishers to tell the other side of the story and inform a democratic public.
Muckraking vs. publicity and public relations
The public? “The public be damned!”, thundered railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, world’s richest man, and “literally richer than the US government” in the phrase of novelist Eric Leif Davin (The Great Strike of 1877, p.80). Competing versions have sought to explain this outburst from Vanderbilt, which he intoned only a few years after the Great Strike of 1877. But the point here is that Vanderbilt paid a price.
“Within twenty-four hours of its escaping his lips, the phrase had become one of the great public relations disasters in American business history and appeared on the front page of hundreds of newspapers. It provoked editorials, sermons, cartoons, and political speeches by the thousands.”11
The public be damned? The public mattered.
And that reality, assessed from the point of view of Power, was clearly conveyed later in a book bearing the amazing title Human Nature and Railroads, written by one Ivy Ledbetter Lee.
As Lee put it, “The people now rule. We have substituted for the divine right of kings, the divine right of the multitude. The crowd is enthroned.” It was a dangerous situation for the railroad owners because “this new sovereign” could be manipulated by scheming “courtiers” who showed up daily to “flatter and caress” him, “precisely as did those who surrounded medieval emperors.”12
Who were these assiduous “courtiers” of public opinion? The troublesome muckrakers, of course.
Right where the middle classes could read them, these muckrakers were “sedulously cultivating,” accused Lee, “the doctrine that to be weak is to be good, and that to be strong is to be bad. The demagogue is abroad in the land, and there are omens that cannot be disregarded.”13
I must correct Lee. The muckrakers were not teaching “that to be weak is to be good, and that to be strong is to be bad.”14 That’s the nonsense that our universities teach today. The muckrakers were teaching that the workers were being mercilessly oppressed, and this was creating a potentially revolutionary situation, because revolutions happen when the middle classes join the lower classes, and the middle classes were reading the muckrakers.
Yes, revolution might come—it was a constant worry. But Ivy Lee had invented a new discipline, ‘public relations,’ and PR professionals could appeal to the public too. So the railroads, awake to their problem, put Lee on a lucrative retainer.
“ ‘Our plan,’ ” explained Lee in his Declaration of Principles, “ ‘is, frankly and openly, on behalf of business concerns and public institutions, to supply to the press and public of the United States prompt and accurate information.’ ”15 That boast was a clever move, for “while Lee’s Declaration may have proved factually correct, he was, in fact, ‘adept at creating dishonest impressions from factual statements.’ ” And he was, moreover, a genius at using his ‘frank and open’ pose to exploit the principle of reciprocity.
For instance, after a train wreck on the Pennsylvania Railroad, which had contracted his services, Lee dragged the company into adopting his ‘frank and open’ policy, which “provided reporters with factual information and answered all their questions.” Just how effective that strategy was became evident after another train wreck, this time on the New York Central Railroad. “The New York Central stuck to its policy of saying nothing and avoiding the press: the press was infuriated by this attitude, having had their jobs made easier, with Lee’s help, at the Pennsylvania wreck.” Lee’s careful ministrations to reporters had made them grateful, and they discharged the implied obligation by going relatively easy on the company he represented: reciprocity.
“ ‘Columns and editorials poured forth chastising the Central and praising the Pennsylvania. Lee’s efforts resulted in positive publicity, increased credibility, comparative advantages over the Central, and good, constructive press coverage and relations.’ ”16
All of this was quite independent, notice, of whether the Pennsylvania Railroad deserved such treatment for its responsibility in the train wreck. Lee was a genius.
The most pressing challenge for the railroads, however, was not explaining occasional train wrecks but winning the public over to the ‘proper’ interpretation of incessantly desperate labor conditions and the consequent labor unrest. Lee’s “omens that cannot be disregarded”—omens of what might happen if the middle classes, egged on by the muckrakers, came to sympathize too much with the workers—gave the railroad bosses and other industrialists night terrors.
Adding fuel to that mental fire was Gustave Le Bon, a French social psychologist who published, as the 19th c. closed, a work on crowd behavior that was “haunted by the traumas of the Paris Commune and the French Revolution a full century after the events.” Without attribution, Ivy Lee “filched” Le Bon’s ideas and “listed four elements” of crowd psychology: “crowds do not reason, crowds are led by symbols and phrases, crowds possess a will to believe, and strong leaders can organize this will.”17
But this could work both ways. If unreasoning crowds could be led by “symbols and phrases” into revolution, they might also, by skillful application of the same, be contained—deprived of the middle-class allies they needed. Thus, rather than improve the conditions of industrial workers, the robber barons and their retainers invested in efforts to manage middle-class ‘public opinion.’
Such efforts were denounced by Ray Stannard Baker in “one of the most important muckraking essays” of the 1910s, titled ‘How the Railroads Make Public Opinion.’ There, Baker accused that newspapers were publishing paid corporate advocacy as news.
Baker’s analysis, which detailed “the surreptitious methods of corporate public relations,” centered on the Boston Publicity Bureau, created by erstwhile newspaper men. These former journalists,
“hired by the railroads to represent their interests..., had recently embarked on what Baker called ‘the most sweeping campaign for reaching and changing public thought ever undertaken in this country.’ ”18
The term ‘campaign,’ as Jonathan Auerbach points out in Weapons of Democracy, was “a resonant word suggesting military, political, and marketing strategies all at once.” Auerbach’s summary of Baker’s presentation is worth quoting at some length, for it illustrates the degree to which the battle for middle-class ‘public opinion’ stimulated innovation in the gathering, processing, and delivering of targeted information.
“Baker proceeded step-by-step to deconstruct the ‘machine’ or ‘engine of publicity’ that the [Boston Publicity] bureau had built ‘for shaping public opinion’ on the crucial national issue of railroad reform …
The first step was to collect data, clipping every article about railroads published in ‘every little village paper’ in the region … The second step was to employ ‘traveling agents’ to visit the newspapers’ editors, recording in ‘an extensive card-catalog’ facts about circulation, the character of the paper, its finances, and the editor’s views on a variety of issues (trusts, religion, politics). In reading these detailed records, Baker remarked, ‘I could almost . . . see the country editor in his small office, and understand all his hopes, fears, ambitions.’
… Once such information was compiled and organized, the next step … was to precisely target these newspapers one by one, keeping track of the number of ‘volleys’ mailed out, with each shot ‘carefully aimed.’ In this way, tailoring its messages for each specific town, the bureau commanded its own centralized organ of publication, a mega- or meta-newspaper overseeing the local ones, national (or at least regional) in scope and yet carefully attuned to provincial concerns. As Baker characterized the content provided, ‘It is really interesting material often mingled with valuable matter on other subjects, and the country editor, like every editor, is eager for the good things.’ Because the editor sometimes ‘has no idea where this material comes from,’ this ‘masked material’ favoring the railroad corporations ends up in the local newspapers, but unidentified as such, since ‘these publicity agents are careful not to advertise the fact that they are in any way connected with the railroads.’ ”19
It is striking how similar these methods are in essence—though employing 19th-century technology—to those of intelligence agencies today. There are also striking formal similarities to the methods of certain internet companies that segment us into narrow categories and target us with carefully tailored information.
In conclusion
Let us now return to the Taibbi and Harari epigraphs at the top, which got us started.
I can understand why they make such comments. I do. They are not too familiar with the history of Western intelligence work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yes, Taibbi is a journalist, and moreover one who brought to our attention The Twitter Files, which documents how the US government became one intertwined beast with social media in order to manage our reality. And Harari is a historian famously worried about the self-same social media and the totalitarian tendencies therein. But nobody can be expected to know everything. We all become victims, all of us, of the dominant narratives that we hear in school, unless we undertake to study a given subject specifically.
But considering that they are both interested in the corruption of modern institutions, Taibbi and Harari should both brush up on this. The following pieces will help:
For once we take the plunge and begin to study what historians have documented about the intelligence-based strategies of the Western bosses after 1848, you begin to suspect that we’ve never had a real democratic moment.
The model I defend is the following: we have been in the type of system that Maurice Joly described—counterfeit democracies, sophisticated simulations—since 1848.
The simulation has had some real benefits, granted, because the bosses cannot let the system deviate beyond a certain point from what people reasonably expect from their democracies, lest the simulation be rejected. But we are now being transitioned into something less like a simulated democracy and more like China. Or perhaps North Korea. Or perhaps it’ll be more like Iran or Qatar. So many possibilities.
Can we still recover our freedoms? Sure. But first you need to see the system. And you need to help others see it too. That’s step one. So…
And if you’d like to read more about muckrakers vs. robber barons, then we recommend:
Weiss, R. P. (1986). Private detective agencies and labour discipline in the United States, 1855–1946. The Historical Journal, 29(1), 87-107. (p.87)
Ibid. (p.87-89)
Ibid. (p.89)
Ibid. (p.89)
Quoted in The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, By John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge, p.xiv
Private detective agencies (op. cit.) pp.87-92
Fraser, S. & Gerstle, G. (2005). Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy. United Kingdom: Harvard University Press.
Fraser, S. & Gerstle, G. (2005). Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy. United Kingdom: Harvard University Press. (p.135)
Ibid. (p.133)
Debouzy, M. (1978). Greve et violence de classe aux Etats-Unis en 1877. Le Mouvement social, 41-66.
‘The Public Be Damned’; American Heritage; September/October 1989; Volume 40, Issue 6; by John Steele Gordon.
https://www.americanheritage.com/content/%E2%80%9C-public-be-damned%E2%80%9D
Lee, I. L. (1915). Human Nature and Railroads. United States: E.S. Nash & Company. (p.8)
https://archive.org/details/humannatureandr00leegoog/mode/2up?
Ibid.
Ibid.
quoted in Harrison, S., & Moloney, K. (2004). Comparing two public relations pioneers: American Ivy Lee and British John Elliot. Public Relations Review, 30(2), 205-215. (p.210)
Ibid,. (p.209)
Auerbach, J. (2015). Weapons of Democracy: Propaganda, Progressivism, and American Public Opinion. United States: Johns Hopkins University Press. (pp.29, 135)
Ibid. (p.44)
Ibid. (pp.44-45)
Excellent post, as always, Francisco.
It occurs to me that the simulation of democracy that Joly warned about is actually the common and most perfect form of democracy; a system rightly criticized by Socrates, Plato, and other Greeks as degenerate. For has it not always been the most eloquent and persuasive rhetoricians who convince the majority to do what they most want? And why should the most important issues of the day be decided by a mere counting of noses?
It is a shame so much energy is spent trying to “fix” democracy when it is operating entirely as to be expected, as a tyranny. It is also a shame that the robber barons/bosses are deluded enough to believe that they are the “best” and therefore have right to rule; but more the shame that the masses go blindly along with the very system which allows them to get away with it.