Open letter to the P-List

[Robin Landseadel]

On May 20, 2009, at 10:57 AM, The Dude wrote:

> . . . Hardly a geezer is now alive who remembers how vigorously old  
> JDR was
> hated.  As John T. Flynn opened his biography, God’s Gold (1932); “For
> forty years–from 1872 to 1914–the name of John D. Rockefeller was the
> most execrated name in American life.  It was associated with greed,
> rapacity, cruelty, hypocrisy, and corruption.  Upon it was showered
> such odium as has stained the name of no other American.  Theodore
> Roosevelt denounced Rockefeller as a law-breaker.  William J. Bryan,
> his fellow Christian, went up and down the land demanding that he be
> put in jail.  The attorney-generals of a half a dozen states clamored
> for his imprisonment.  La Follette called him the greatest criminal of
> the age. [my italics] Tolstoi said no honest man should work for him.
> Ministers of the gospel called the money he showered upon churches and
> colleges ‘tainted.’  For years no man spoke a good word for John D.
> Rockefeller, save the sycophant and the time-server.”
>
> I think those attitudes were also shared by anyone who was associated
> in any way with the Old Dynasty (built on coal, steel, railroads, and
> shipping money), as opposed to the New Dynasty, (built on oil,
> aluminum, airlines, and defense contracts); the Old Dynasty whose
> financier was J.P. Morgan through his banks, and whose closely related
> ally was the brokerage Pynchon & Co.  And that’s the way I think we
> have to read Pynchon.  And, I forgot to mention, in real life
> Pynchon’s wife, Melanie Jackson, is the great-grand-daughter of
> Theodore Roosevelt.
>
>                       Charles Hollander
>
>                       Baltimore, MD


Thank you so much for that. I will have to look into the Teddy  
Roosevelt connection.

I wonder if the Dude has any thoughts on the recent fall of Bear  
Stearns?