Democracy was a dream that never materialized in fact, it had remained as a semi-religious faith that the public was encouraged to embrace but was never actualized in law or custom. The country’s founders were so frightened of popular votes that they invented the concept of an electoral college, where propertied white male voters would ostensibly cast their vote for a candidate, but in reality they were voting for hand-picked political stooges who could change their minds (if the threats or bribes were sufficiently large enough) and throw the election to the candidate who had lost the popular vote. The poll tax and the requirements of property ownership for voting had only been part of the first shots across the bow of the free ship of state. The wealthy of young America had more potent weapons at their disposal. With the lubrication of money, the wheels of state could be turned in their direction. The military could act as a proxy for the rich and execute their murderous wishes without breaking any laws. George Washington himself broke the backs of the farmers who dared to store their corn crops without paying the whiskey tax. The whiskey tax was an ill-disguised attempt to control the annual output of farmers by siphoning part of their annual income through an excise tax. Before the invention of storage silos, American farmers had to convert their surplus crops to the only commodity that couldn’t be attacked by insects or didn’t rot in the heat, i.e., whiskey. Once government proved it could reduce the populace to subsistence level at the point of a gun, the stage was set for the next lesson in political reality.
The Pullman strike in the late eighteen hundreds proved that government had even less concern for the welfare of railroad workers that it had shown earlier for American farmers. Slavery by race was illegal, but wage slavery by social class was part of the American economy and was heavily defended by the United States government. The army was employed again after WWII to control the striking mine workers of the insanely dangerous coal mines of West Virginia with machine guns and put the last nail in freedom’s coffin. After all, the government felt, it wasn’t as if the slaves hadn’t been warned. National Guard armories had been built in every major city to provided storage depots for military weapons in the event of civil insurrection against the tyranny of the rich. During President Eisenhower’s reign, a system of Interstate highways was constructed to facilitate the transport of tanks and artillery to population centers if the mailed fist of government had to be used to quell rioting among the justly outraged citizenry.