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Born: Karl Marx, 190 years ago today (1818 in Prussia).

Harry Truman made the first recorded public mention of Marx in a 1950 speech to the Better Business Bureau:

The most persuasive argument the Communists have is not anything Marx or Lenin ever wrote, or anything Stalin ever said–but the depression which began in the United States in 1929. And the Russians have been waiting for another one ever since Potsdam. That depression weakened the faith of many men throughout the world in the ability of our democratic institutions to meet the needs of our people. That depression is still used by the Communists to shake the faith of millions in the way of life that this Nation represents.

Note the date: 1950, just at the beginning of one of the great expansions of the US economy (see Vatter’s The U. S. Economy in the 1950s: An Economic History). But change was uneven and helped different people in different ways.

And economic interests saw the role of government in the economy in very different ways. In a 1952 speech to the Electric Consumers Conference, Truman talked about big electric companies and their treatment of consumers:

First, they started out with a public opinion survey. They asked a lot of people what they thought of TVA. And most people said it was a wonderful thing. Then they asked people what they thought of public power, and most people said that was all right, too.

Well, this surprised the power companies, but it didn’t surprise me, and I don’t suppose it surprised anyone here. It simply meant that most people know what is good for them, when they have the facts in front of them.

Then the company agents asked people what they thought of socialism and of course most people said we are “agin” it. Naturally, they would say that.

Of course, the TVA was a high-profile government intervention. Truman remarked that “socialism” was relative in the view of some:

You of course know the tale about a couple of men discussing socialism. One of them was a socialist and the other one was not.

The first man said, “Sam, if you had a million dollars, would you divide it with me?”
“Sure,” said Sam.
“Well,” said John, “if you had two pigs, would you give me one of them?”

Sam said, “Now John, you know I’ve got a couple of pigs.”

Truman saw such economic interests as trying to connect socialism to what government was doing - as “all part of some big plot to socialize the country”. This, he claimed, was no different from what the proponents of socialism (in different flavors) were doing in propaganda about economic hardship:

What these private power companies are actually doing is deliberately and in cold blood setting out to poison the minds of the people. They make no bones about it. Their own manuals say that their purpose is to influence the mass mind in this country by playing on people’s emotions.

The “mass mind”–what a horrible phrase. I think it’s one of the most horrible phrases in the language. They think of the individual human beings in this great country as parts of a mass mind. They set out to play upon the emotions of churchgoers, Boy Scouts, and schoolchildren. They try to control people’s thoughts by using slogans and scare words.

They have taken a leaf right out of the books of Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. They are following the Soviet and the fascist lines.

This is nothing less than an attack on the fundamental principles of our democratic country. Instead of letting people make up their own minds on the basis of the facts and the truth, this private power company propaganda is deliberately designed to conceal the facts, and to manipulate people’s opinions by appealing to their emotions and not to their reason.

[Cf. complaints that the coming trillion-dollar meltdown in the credit markets is really government's fault.]