The History Channel just completed an eight hour series, The Men Who Built America, about five influential capitalists that almost single-handedly transformed a broken, tired post-Civil War America into a global super power: Vanderbilt (Shipping/Railroads), Rockefeller (Oil), Carnegie (Steel), JP Morgan (Finance), and Ford (Autos). Capitalists will cheer and communists will jeer these men but all will enjoy this extraordinarily interesting story of their lives, their deals and their interactions with each other as they propelled America into the world's top economy and amassed unsurpassed personal fortunes. During the height of their careers Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan were collectively worth in today's currency some $1 Trillion.
This is an excellent series that everyone should see. However, it is particularly curious that its finale was scheduled to air two days before Election Day but was postponed at the last minute until November 11th because of "unforeseen circumstances." After viewing the finale, one must wonder if those "unforeseen circumstances" included the potential for that episode to inadvertently help republicans during the elections two days later. The 50-year period depicted in the series touches upon many themes relevant to the election narrative this year, including the role of capitalism, class struggle (99% vs. 1%), labor unions, the role of government regulation, to name a few.
The first six hours of the series, which aired repeatedly during October, clearly made the case for the incumbent president and democrats. Those "robber barons" were depicted as greedy and ruthless and were reviled by nearly everyone in their time; they screwed their customers, their workers, their partners and each other, a pattern that supports the democrat agenda to expand the role of government to reign in and regulate the wealth and influence of the rich and powerful. Given the relentless and slanderous attacks against Bain Capital, Mitt Romney and republicans generally as self serving, greedy capitalists, viewers are likely to draw comparisons between those men and today's republicans.
However, by delaying the finale, viewers must wait until after the election to find out that those titan figures set up foundations to distribute much of that wealth for the benefit of mankind, through charitable organizations that survive to this day. Additionally, despite all the brutality and hardship inflicted by those men, those men made America the unrivaled economic and military superpower of the 20th century; a nation positioned and destined to defend the free world against tyranny during two world wars.
Our entire way of life today began with the achievements of those men; railroads unified the nation and along with steel made our dense cities possible. Oil and autos made subsequent suburbanization inevitable. Those men also gave us companies that today are known as General Electric, Exxon, Chevron, U.S. Steel, Ford and scores more. The series also makes the point that brutality and ruthlessness was the by-product of the speed with which those industries were expanded and consolidated. We can never know whether a slower, more genteel, less disruptive evolution would have ultimately yielded similar prosperity. Series closing commentary underscores the point that those men and their entrepreneurial spirit "built" modern America, despite our president's claim about today's entrepreneurs to the contrary. All of those mitigating factors must weigh into the evaluation of the critics of capitalism.
Was the finale's postponement an unfortunate coincidence or a deliberate attempt to influence the election? We may never know. If finding politics in a seemingly innocuous postponement of a TV series sounds far-fetched, it is at least consistent with other seemingly innocuous delays by this administration, including and most recently the stonewalled investigation into the Libya attack (Sept 11), the attempted Iranian attack on our drone (Nov 1), and most recently the resignation of CIA Director (Nov 9) for transgressions obviously known well before the election. The American people still wait for adequate answers by this administration. In that light, questioning the motivation for postponing the finale of this politically relevant series is probably not as far-fetched as it might initially seem.
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