Rhetorical Question

WHO RULES AMERICA?--John McConaughy--Longmans ($3).

Last October Author John McConaughy dropped dead on a Manhattan street, leaving behind him, as all men must, unfinished business. But this particular work in progress was far enough along to be given a posthumous issue. Whether or not Author McConaughy meant to answer his own rhetorical question, his indignant replies have gone far enough to show that there is more than one way of looking at U. S. history. Subtitle of Who Rules America? is A Century of Invisible Government. McConaughy's thesis: the real rulers of the U. S. from the beginning have been malefactors of great wealth.

No praiser of times past, McConaughy thinks U. S. reverence for the Founding Fathers much out of place, dubs them the "Funding Fathers." When Congress decided, during Alexander Hamilton's treasuryship, to redeem at par value the nearly worthless certificates with which the Revolutionary Army had been paid, fortunes were made by many a businessman and politician who got to backwoods scrip-owners before the news did. Twenty-nine of the 64 members of the House of Representatives got a share of the pickings. Few great names (Washington's is an exception) escape McConaughy's scorn. Few schoolboys who remember that Patrick Henry asked for liberty or death have been told that he later made his pile in the Yazoo land swindle. Famed Chief Justice John Marshall is yanked from his niche, called the rock on which the Funding Fathers "rested secure in the enjoyment of special privileges."

A Jacksonian Democrat, McConaughy has few heroes besides Old Hickory. One of them is Aaron Burr, another his creature, the original Tammany Hall. "The picture of a Tammany victory as a beneficent act of God, with an Aaron Burr as the Divine instrument, is somewhat startling to us today. But it was accepted with delirious joy by a majority of our forefathers a hundred and thirty-odd years ago. . . ." Strict-interpretationist, McConaughy thinks the Constitution has never been given a trial, says it has been warped from the start by the Supreme Court into a shield for special privilege. He starts an elusive hare when he points out that banksters are no new phenomenon. In 1819 the combined "borrowings" of directors and employes of the City Bank of Baltimore exceeded the entire capital of the bank by $100,000. John Jacob Astor used $5,000,000 of Government money for 20 years, paid no interest. When the Union Bank of Florida failed (1837) it had $76 in foreign banknotes to cover more than $100,000 in deposits and more than twice as much circulating paper.

When he gets down to post-Civil War times, which even milder historians characterize as financially scandalous, McConaughy's progress becomes a dervish-whirl in a mist of vituperative facts. An index of his malefactors would read like the Social Register. Too over-violent throughout to be persuasive, Who Rules America? chokes over its own too-choleric mixture of fact and fanaticism.

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