splinternews | Tanton’s individual persistence was at bottom made possible by the
greater persistence of wealth across generations in the United States,
coming to fruition in the hundreds of millions of dollars that Cordelia
Scaife May left to the Colcom Foundation when she died. What endures is
not any individual or personality but capital and institutions. Tanton’s
best political skill was not his analysis or his rhetoric but his
ability to flatter wealthy racists. He was not a great theoretician or
leader or organizer, but an adroit servant of capital’s class interests,
for this is how the capitalist class exerts power—not by engaging in
democratic politics, but by creating a bulwark against it.
Ironically,
Tanton recognized this dynamic himself, however accidentally, in his
striving for an essentially American identity. “I think there is such a
thing as an American culture, however difficult it may be to define,” he
once mused. “For instance, the United States is the most philanthropic
society on the face of the earth, and most of the work that FAIR and our
opponents do is supported by philanthropy. Few, if any, other cultures
have developed the idea of public philanthropy as strongly as we have
here.”
What he failed to recognize is that the very idea of public
philanthropy as it is practiced in the United States of America is
wholly the creation of the American plutocracy—wealthy industrialists
and corporate scions seeking ways to consolidate and protect their money
over time. While the practice of establishing private family trusts and
foundations and of spending copious amounts of money on ostensibly
philanthropic (though in fact political) causes is now commonplace among
the capitalist class, it was not always so. The first of these, the
Rockefeller Foundation, was formed in 1913; a century later, according
to political scientist Robert Reich, there were over 100,000 private
foundations in the United States, controlling over $800 billion. “The
tax code turned many extraordinarily wealthy families, intent upon
preserving their fortunes, into major forces in America’s civic sector,”
Jane Mayer writes in Dark Money. “In order to shelter themselves from taxes, they were required to invent a public philanthropic role.”
Scaife, were the beneficiaries of two charitable trusts of $50
million each, structured such that, after 20 years of donating all net
income from the trusts to nonprofit charities, the siblings would
receive their $50 million principals. Their mother did the same in 1961,
setting up a pair of $25 million trusts, and again in 1963, setting up
another $100 million in trusts for her grandchildren. Mellon Scaife, who
once called a reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review a “fucking Communist cunt,”
would go on to make some $1 billion in political and philanthropic
contributions over a 50-year period, anticipating the Koch brothers’
current reign and shaping the right-wing of American politics for half a
century. In a secret memoir, obtained by Mayer, Mellon Scaife gloated,
“Isn’t it grand how tax law gets written?”
There is deep and
horrible irony in Mellon family money, which powered American
imperialism in Central and South America and which grew as a result of
that imperial expansion, now being spent to denigrate and punish the
children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the men and women
whose countries the Mellons helped to colonize, who now come to the
United States seeking respite from their nations’ ruin. For people like
Tanton and Scaife May or organizations like FAIR and CIS, the point is
not to purge the United States of immigrants wholly but to ensure the
continued immiseration and suffering of the poor and the
dispossessed—the most destitute of whom, it is no accident, are mostly
people of color.
The activity of the Tanton network and the support it has received from
one of America’s oldest imperial families shows above all how one
faction of the ruling class, at least, imagines it can create a
permanent underclass from which to extract value: first, by dehumanizing
migrants in the minds of the citizens; then, by allowing them to sell
their labor to employers across the country; and finally, in the prisons
and detention centers where they are housed until deportation, and the
cycle begins anew. In turn, this contributes to the continued creation
of a massive population of surplus labor, which puts downward pressure
on wages for all workers.
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