By Paul Weiser
From after the Civil War to now, America has had a politically-approved criminal class. Unsurprisingly, given America's tendency to co-opt, today's is not that of 130 years ago; ironically, the oldest lags' descendants feel the bite of the latest.
American populism surged (from older beginnings) when farmers started to feel the oppression of post-bellum industrial concentration. They needed railroads to carry their products to market; the railroads (also involved in swindling their stockholders) charged monopoly prices. The result was the Grange, terrorism, and eventually populist politics culminating in William Jennings Bryan and the failed "Cross of Gold" movement which moderated into Progressivism.
The same cycle played itself out within industry: workers organized into unions, engaged in terrorism such as the Pullman strike, and suffered corporate reactionary terrorism by Pinkerton and scab. In the end, to the Department of Agriculture (for the Grange) was added a Department of Labor to keep union thugs from suffering legal penalties they earned for their crimes. In time, like overly influential farmers, the cosseted unionists faded away - shuttered factories echoing abandoned farms.
Blacks tried, but were too few and obvious to form secret societies; they became the new Irish, merely corrupting city and county governments in the worst of places. No, today's cosseted criminal class is, of course, illegal aliens resident in America - proffered unearned benefits and effective immunity (like union goons and Grange night-riders past) from law.
The irony is, all that's left of the union movement is government employees - mainly police - and truckers. And they, committed to enforcing and obeying the law evenhandedly, are on the anvil to be hammered by illegal-loving politicians and judges... for trying to do their jobs. Of farmers, aside from taskmasters for illegals and cultivators of ethanol for one last surge of patronage, little but lonely memories remain.
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