Judicial Activism - Part II

The American Civil War, from 1861 through 1865, was both an expression of the power of the industrial revolution and the spark for development of interstate corporations larger than ever before seen.

Apart from the fact that northern states had larger populations than the Confederate states, it was their great capacity to produce all the weapons and materiel of war that enabled Union victory. The war was an impetus for heavy investments in factory equipment in the civilian sector that put the American industrial revolution into high gear.

In the decades following the war, which came to be known as the Gilded Age, huge interstate railroads, mining companies, steel mills, and other industrial enterprises exploded into being. They were continental in scale and required huge amounts of capital. Most of them were controlled from the great cities: New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Nearly all the capital to fund these giant enterprises flowed through and from Wall Street bankers, notably J.P. Morgan & Co.

By the end of the 19th century, the United States was replacing Great Britain as the greatest manufacturing nation in the world.

Industrialists like Andrew Carnegie continuously sought more efficient production techniques, and they relentlessly pressured the labor-cost component of their products downward. This meant both low wages and sometimes brutal working conditions.

To satisfy their need for more workmen, they supported liberal immigration policies. Between 1865 and 1917 the United States experienced one of the largest percentage influxes of immigration in its history. Twenty million or more immigrants flooded into the nation, for the first time mostly from non-English-speaking nations. Most of them were from the the southern Mediterranean (primarily Italy and Greece) and central and eastern Europe (Hungary, Poland, and Russia).

Unlike the earlier immigrants from the UK who had fanned out across the country, moving always westward, these immigrants tended to cluster in the large cities. They lived under increasingly squalid conditions, with unhealthy environments, limited medical care, and low-wage poverty. In short, they became perfect incubators of socialism and anarchism, which they had brought with them from Europe.

At the same time, farmers in the Midwest and the South rebelled against the monopoly power of the railroads, their only means of getting farm products to Eastern markets, and against the Wall Street bankers who had financed their farms and farm equipment. The result was the Populist Party, which championed quasi-socialistic collectivization of regulatory controls, along with currency inflation.

Social and political attitudes were beginning to change in the Northeast among university graduates, who increasingly populated the great Wall Street banks and corporate law firms. These university graduates had absorbed the doctrines espoused by the two most influential works of socialism in England, both of them published in 1859 through 1871: John Stuart Mill’s advocacy of socialism and Charles Darwin’s atheistic and materialistic hypotheses of evolution.

The new paradigm was of a nation being shaped entirely by the human mind in a Godless world that could be perfected by the rationalism of socialism.

Social reformers in the large cities, who tended by the 1890s to be recent university graduates and therefore socialists, became agitators for municipal reform, then transferred their campaigns to the Federal level. There, under Teddy Roosevelt’s administrations from 1901 to 1908, they encountered receptivity. Teddy appointed fellow Harvard graduate Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to the Supreme Court. Holmes, as detailed here, was the first socialist to serve on the high Court.

With the forces of secular and materialistic social justice beginning to struggle for the reins of power, the stage was set for the start of the judicial activism game after World War I.