Don't Wake Us From This Dream
To
their credit and despite the brutal attacks waged against them by workers—often
out of sheer jealousy—the rich continued to make money. The number of
millionaires grew from a mere 50 in 1848 to 5,000 in 1910. Despite a crippling
income tax that stole virtually every dime they made, the number of
millionaires somehow—by hook or by crook—grew to 50,000 in 1958 and 500,000 in
1980. But always in the back of their minds was the notion; how much more money
could they have acquired were taxation not robbing them blind—or at least
making them teary-eyed.
Workers
continued to accuse their bosses of being greedy and indifferent,
some might say insensitive, to the plight of labor. But workers didn’t have to
walk in fine Italian shoes or ride in long limos or fly in company jets and
know that those shoes could have been even shinier, the limos even longer and
the jets bigger and faster. Workers didn’t have to spend every waking moment
burdened by images of how things might have been, could have been—dammit,
should have been.
This
wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. The “Money Movement” that had begun with
so much promise with Taft-Hartley was faltering. Who would deliver the spark
needed to restore dignity to the downtrodden rich man? The young didn’t worry
about the rich the way they had worried about the Vietnam War. Blacks didn’t
concern themselves with the plight of the rich the way they had obsessed about
Civil Rights. And the rich certainly couldn’t count on Feminists, whose concerns
were lagging so far behind that “glass ceiling” wasn’t even in the vernacular
yet.
