Just as Classical culture spread westward from the Greeks
who created it to the Roman peoples who adopted and changed it, so
Europe's culture spread westward to the New World, where it was
profoundly modified while still remaining basically
European.
The central fact of American history is that people of
European origin and culture came to occupy and use the immensely
rich wilderness between the Atlantic and the Pacific...
...The structure of financial controls created by the
tycoons of "Big Banking" and "Big Business" in the period 1880-1933
was of extraordinary complexity, one business fief being built on
another, both being allied with semi-independent associates, the
whole rearing upward into two pinnacles of economic and financial
power, of which one, centered in New York, was headed by J. P.
Morgan and Company, and the other, in Ohio, was headed by the
Rockefeller family.
When these two cooperated, as they generally did, they could
influence the economic life of the country to a large degree and
could almost control its political life, at least on the Federal
level. The former point can be illustrated by a few
facts...
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/02.html#6
The character of any society is determined less by
what it is actually like than by the picture it has of itself and
of what it aspires to be.
From this point of view, American society of the 1920's was
largely middle class. Its values and aspirations were middle class,
and power or influence within it was in the hands of middle-class
people...
...In American politics we have several parties included
under the blanket words "Democratic" and "Republican." In
oversimplified terms, as I have said, the Republicans were the
party of the middle classes, and the Democrats were the party of
the fringes.
Both of these were subdivided, each with a Congressional and
a National Party wing. The Republican Congressional Party
(representing localism) was much farther to the Right than the
National Republican Party, and as such was closer to the
petty-bourgeois than to the upper-middle-class outlook. The
Democratic Congressional Party was much more clearly of the fringes
and minorities (and thus often further to the Left) than the
Democratic National Party...
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/20.html#75