More on the Ulster County Railroad Dispute

Yesterday, I blogged about the Catskill Mountain Railroad dispute. This is an email that I sent to Senator James Seward:

Dear Senator Seward:

There has been an ongoing dispute between County Executive Mike Hein and the Catskill Mountain Railroad, which leases a railroad right of way that Ulster County bought about thirty years ago.  I have blogged about the dispute at  http://www.mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com/2015/06/an-open-bidding-process-is-needed-to.html  .  The best way out of the conflict is to introduce open bidding so that the party that can most efficiently use the right of way can acquire it through privatization at optimal gain to the county.  That can be accompanied with a tax credit to businesses local to the track, which have been hurt for a century by the Ashokan Reservoir and New York City’s predatory policies. 

The possible bidders are New York City, the existing railroad, and the railroad’s competitors, one of which has told me that it wishes to acquire the track.  The city has already offered a grant to fund removal of the track and replacement with a trail, but it is far from clear that the $2.5 million offer contemplates losses due to the ensuing depression in tourism.  In 2014, the existing railroad’s first good year, about 40,000 visitors came to the railroad.  This meant a million dollars in revenue. At three percent interest, the present value of lost [railroad] revenue of one million dollars per year into infinity is $33 million, but costs need to be subtracted. [In the email I omitted to mention that there may be as much as a $1 million annual loss-- an additional $33 million present value--to local diners, stores, and restaurants; that would reflect $25  in spending per visitor. The present value of the total loss may be closer to $20 million.]  A more complex estimate would need to determine what the value added to the county is; value added includes local wages and purchases of supplies from local businesses.  A $10 million price is probably closer to the value that the city should pay to remove the track.  The city has long exploited Ulster County through one-sided, manipulative deals, as David Soll’s Empire of Water makes clear.

The conflict has reached the point at which a Republican insurgent candidate, Terry Bernardo, has stepped forward.  The solution set of both sides has heretofore been limited to two artificial poles:  (1) the city and  the Catskill Mountainkeeper’s proposal for a trail, which makes artificial projections about the extent of potential use and is indifferent to the effects on small businesses, and (2)  the existing Catskill Mountain Railroad’s proposal to extend the existing arrangement, possibly through a rail plus trail. The Catskill Mountain Railroad  has failed to live up to its 25-year agreement to rebuild the track and has refused to make its financial statements public.  Its business plan does not contemplate its ability to raise the appropriate level of financing.  To be competitive, the city’s bid would need to add say $10 million to the bid that the CMRR or other railroads make to compensate the region for the loss of tourism.  That amount of money could be used, if the city’s bid is successful, to fund tax credits that will enable existing businesses to expand and develop alternative tourist attractions.

Although this issue is not in your direct domain, Senator Seward, I would like to suggest that you offer to procure expertise at the state level to help the county structure public hearings and a public bidding process that will enable the diverse interests to make competitive bids for the property so that it can be privatized and used for the best benefit of the people of Ulster County.  The competition between secretive lobbyists at the DEP and the Mountainkeepers versus the secretive lobbyists at the CMRR is no way to resolve a public debate.  I am copying the Ulster County Legislature with respect to this idea.

Thanks,

Mitchell Langbert

Thoughts on the Mugwumps

I just sent the following email to a colleague who was talking about the Mugwumps. The Mugwumps were a group of elite Republicans who switched sides and voted for Grover Cleveland in 1884.  The name derives from a bastardization of a Native American word for chief, but the above cartoon suggests a different interpretation.

I don't consider them moderates. They switched party because of strong political belief, specifically in rational government. They were laissez faire Republicans, and many had been abolitionists. There was nothing moderate about them even though they switched sides.

The confusion many people have about today's two extremist parties leads to the mistaken impression that if you don't favor either party you are in between.  The crank TV newscaster Bill O'Reilly makes a similar claim.  He is moderate because he splits the opinions of the two big parties.  

The two parties are close, and they are both extreme in their support for big government. By historical standards, today's America occupies the extreme Whig end of the spectrum, and that's true of both parties. Only an extremist can call two parties that both advocated lending as much as $29 trillion to Wall Street to be moderate.  Today's America is an extremist, authoritarian state. There is no Aristotelian mean here.

This is the email to my colleague:

A classic in the study of the Gilded Age is Edward Wiebe, The Search for Order http://www.amazon.com/Search-Order-1877-1920-Robert-Wiebe/dp/0809001047/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1427393497&sr=8-1&keywords=wiebe .

The first book I read on the Mugwumps was Nancy Cohen’s Reconstruction of American Liberalism 1865-1914, which is an intellectual history that gives a good overview. You can piece together a libertarian perspective from it.  See http://www.amazon.com/Reconstruction-American-Liberalism-1865-1914/dp/0807853542/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1427393591&sr=8-1&keywords=nancy+cohen+progressivism .

The third book I recommend is a little different. It is Burton Bledstein’s Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. http://www.amazon.com/culture-professionalism-development-education-America/dp/0393055744/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1427393672&sr=8-3&keywords=bledstein . It traces the creation of professionalism in a host of fields.  Professionalism was intimately connected to the Mugwumps’ interest in civil service reform. The impetus for rationalization led directly to Progressivism. Once the commitment to organized professions took hold, it was a small step to building legal standards and regulations for the professions.  That, in turn, was linked to the development of universities. Hence, big government, the organized professions, and universities have always been linked.

The institution of the modern university in 1876 via the founding of Johns Hopkins came near the heart of the Mugwump era, which was in 1884, during the election of Grover Cleveland.  I don’t think historians have a clear understanding of why the Mugwumps opposed James Blaine and turned against their own Republican Party to support Cleveland.  [My colleague] may be right that there was a laissez faire impetus, but showing that would require a new, or at least clearer,  historical treatment of it.  Among the interesting Mugwump figures (see Cohen) were EL Godkin, David Ames Wells, and William Graham Sumner.

I also don’t believe that historians have a clear understanding of the role of the greenbacks in stimulating the expansion of industry in the Civil War era and what the economic effects were on bondholders, so the post-1873 gold deflation, which harmed other asset holders (likely Western and Southern farmers as well as stockholders) and generated Populism and Bryan (and which Friedman calls “the crime of 1873” in an article that was published in the Journal of Economic History), may have been a reaction to the post-Civil War inflation. Godkin writes about his anger at the effects of inflation on redistributing wealth to Jay Gould and others. 

One question that no one has asked is whether there was a relationship between Wall Street and Bryan or the Populists.  Mark Hanna, a high school friend of John D. Rockefeller,  was, of course, McKinley’s close adviser. On the other hand, it may be that the election of McKinley (as propped by Wall Street) was not really opposition to silver, but rather it may have been preemptive and done in the hope for the central bank that was recommended fourteen years later, in 1910, by the same Rockefeller (with Morgan and Kuhn Loeb) interests.  It is unlikely that there is much public information on something like this.

In any case the 1896 election had an opposite dynamic from what today’s pro-inflation banking community offers, and I suspect that something is not being said about who the Populists were and, more importantly, who their opponents were.  Was a central bank being quietly considered by ‘96? 

The same is true of the conflict within the Democratic Party between Bryan and the Bourbon Democrats,* of whom Cleveland was the chief representative. Wilson had been a Bourbon Democrat, and I think that he voted for a third party, the Gold Democrats, in 1896.  His connection to Morgan is mentioned in my paper on colleges, and I suspect that his signing of the Federal Reserve Act came from his relationship with Morgan.  An interesting point in the biography of Frank Vanderlip is that Wilson dropped him as a friend, and Wilson would have nothing to do with Vanderlip once Wilson was elected. Wilson did not want to seem to be linked to bankers.  I wonder who thought up that plan of action.  Wilson went from voting for gold in 1896 to refusing to have to do with bankers so he could propose the Federal Reserve Bank.  As a result of secrecy, it may be hard to get data. But was the opposition of the banking community to silver a strategic one?
  

*Wikipedia: Bourbon Democrat was a term used in the United States from 1876 to 1904 to refer to a conservative or classical liberal member of the Democratic Party, especially one who supported Charles O'Conor in 1872, Samuel J. Tilden in 1876, President Grover Cleveland in 1884–1888/1892–1896 and Alton B. Parker in 1904. After 1904, the Bourbons faded away. Woodrow Wilson, who had been a Bourbon, made a deal in 1912 with the leading opponent of the Bourbons, William Jennings Bryan; Bryan endorsed Wilson for the Democratic nomination, and Wilson named Bryan Secretary of State. The term "Bourbon" was mostly used disparagingly, by critics complaining of old-fashioned viewpoints.

My Radio Interview with Dan Elmendorf on Redeemer Broadcasting

My friend Dan Elmendorf, who lives in nearby Olivebridge, runs Redeemer Broadcasting,  a Christian radio network that airs locally and in a couple of other states. The stations are FM WFSO Olivebridge, 88.3, Kingston, 105.3 Catskill, 101.1, Newburgh, 90.3 WNEQ, Taylortown, New Jersey 90.3, and WXMD California, Maryland 89.7.  

Dan interviewed me last Friday, and the interview aired today. The subject was the United Nations and its Agenda 21, which Olive residents know from the town plan battles of the past few years.  The link is http://www.redeemerbroadcasting.org/podcasts/apa_030715_Agenda_21--M_Langbert.mp3

Mary Margaret McBride in West Shokan

Ray Faiola of Ellenville has uploaded to Youtube a pilot of a 1951 television program with Mary Margaret McBride, who interviews Ed Dowling.  Dowling was the director of the first major Tennessee Williams play, The Glass Menagerie.   The interview takes place in her West Shokan home, which is a two-minute drive from mine. The panoramas of the reservoir and the mountains look as they do today.  McBride's house is still there; I've met the owner. 

McBride was a personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. Roosevelt frequently visited the same West Shokan home in which the interview takes place. According to Wikipedia, during World War II McBride was among the first to break the color barrier in radio.  She broadcast on all the major networks until 1960. She was known as the first lady of radio.  One of the old timers in West Shokan told me that he recalls Mrs. Roosevelt's visits.  In this 1960 newspaper article, Roosevelt writes about an afternoon at one of McBride's local radio broadcasts:

On Monday of this week I went from Hyde Park to West Shokan, where Mary Margaret McBride lives in a house on the side of a mountain. The house is built of redwood, and the porch looks out on the reservoir.

Mary Margaret McBride was her charming self, sounding as though she had really never thought till that minute of the things she was about to say, and yet never forgetting the thread of what she said or of what she wanted the person she was interviewing to say. I think she is one of the most expert interviewers I have ever known.

She had about 50 of her neighbors as an audience, and she does this local broadcast, with local commercials, just as she once did her New York broadcasts. I just have a lovely time talking to her, so I enjoyed every minute with her and was delighted to have lunch with her afterwards, sitting on her porch and drinking in the beautiful view.

She is one person who accumulates books just the way I do, so everywhere you go in every room of her house, there are books and more books. I was encouraged, for I never have enough room for my books and I felt I could now go on building shelves in many places I had not thought of before.

Someday I hope I will have the time to read the books I now have on my shelves, besides all those I know I will accumulate in the next year or so.

Wikipedia describes her last years, which were spent in West Shokan: 

As time went on, she appeared in smaller radio media markets, in upstate New York, and toward the end of her life hosted "Your Hudson Valley Neighbor" three times a week on WGHQ Kingston, NY from the living room of her home. Her longtime companion and business partner, Stella Karn, died in 1957.^[2]

She died at the age of 76 on April 7, 1976 at West Shokan, New York. McBride's ashes were placed in her former rose garden. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her work in radio.^[3]

 Her name was spoofed on the classic CBS-TV sitcom I Love Lucy in Episode # 79, "The Million Dollar Idea", which aired on January 11, 1954. In that installment, Lucy (Lucille Ball) comes up with an ambitious idea to make money. She decides to appear on television selling her Aunt Martha's salad dressing. Assisting her on the program is her best friend Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance) as "Mary Margaret McMertz."

McBride's celebrity was hardly a secret confined to daytime radio listeners, either: her 15th anniversary celebration in 1949 was held in Yankee stadium, the only facility large enough to hold the 75,000 people who filled every seat and formed huge crowds outside. Her magazine show was on the air continuously for 25 years.