Thursday, April 12, 2018

J.P.Morgan, The Establishment, And The Episcopal Church

I've long been interested in the American "robber barons" of the 19th and early 20th centuries. At various times, I've read biographies of J Pierpont Morgan, Edward H Harriman, John D Rockefeller and his associates, Jay Gould, and others. Part of my interest has been in the development of what's now called the "deep state", rather clearly controlled by unelected interest centers that at least in part are dominated by wealthy coroprate aggregations, many originally assembled by these figures.

I've also been interested in what's often called the "Establishment", which has tradtionally been represented by elite universities (their administrations and trustees more than their faculties), corporate boards (which often reflect the interests of the financial power brokers), and at least in the past, The Episcopal Church. The Morgan and Harriman families have been closely associated with TEC, for instance, although other robber barons were members of other main line denominations. Although the Roosevelt family had a Reforned background, both Theodore and Franklin attended Episcopal parishes. The Bushes were an Episcopalian family, although Bush fils became a Methodist as an adult.

An author on the Establishment that I found inluential in my early thinking on the subject -- in my late 20s -- is Ferdinand Lundberg. The Wikipedia piece summarizes his views accurately in saying that he describes the US as an oligarchy run by prominent families, inclding Rockefellers and Hearsts, although the influence of such families (as in the case of the Hearsts, who appeared almost comically feckless by the 1970s kidnapping of Patricia) waxes and wanes, and his 1937 America's 60 Families never listed precisely which those 60 families were.

My experience at an elite university, though (not Harvard), turned my thinking to examine influences reflected by another conspiracy theorist, Theodore Kaczynski, who many commentators have suggested was influenced by his experience at Harvard:

During Kaczynski’s sophomore year at Harvard, in 1959, he was recruited for a psychological experiment that, unbeknownst to him, would last three years. . . . The Harvard study aimed at psychic deconstruction by humiliating undergraduates and thereby causing them to experience severe stress. Kaczynski’s anti-technological fixation and his critique itself had some roots in the Harvard curriculum, which emphasized the supposed objectivity of science compared with the subjectivity of ethics.
The fact was that by the time I left formal academic training, I had definitely been psychically deconstructed, and it took me several years to get my bearings. I remember at some point in the process realizing that, no matter what one might say about conventional religious belief, things seemed to go better in my life when I went to church on Sundays. So that was something I gradually resumed. Although my parents had sent me to Presbyterian Sunday school, by the time I left for college, they'd become Episcopalians, and having studied Trollope in English class, I decided TEC might be the best choise.

I was also trying to make another run at stability, the elite-school deconstruction I'd undergone not having provided this the first time around. Beyond that, in the process of resuming church attendance, I found myself going to mass at St Thomas Episcopal New York while on a work assignment there, a Ralph Adams Cram commission, the site of many Harriman family funerals, and no doubt financed by both the Morgan and Harriman families. So once I retuned to LA, I began to get involved at an equivalent TEC parish here.