If you’re worried about the increasingly wild stock market
fluctuations, President Obama’s State of the Union Address, the Bitcoin brouhaha,
or the cold weather, don’t worry, we’re on it.
All except for the cold weather.
Today, however, we’re concentrating on this week’s news items, of which
there are a couple of some significance:
• Two professors from Salisbury University in Maryland spent
Tuesday of this week at Mid South Building Supply, Inc., a 100% worker-owned
company headquartered in Springfield, Virginia.
A delegation from the Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ),
Norman G. Kurland and Dawn K. Brohawn, joined the professors and company top
management for a dinner later. The
professors were impressed with the success of the Mid South ESOP.
 |
| Archbishop Corrigan of New York |
• Also on Tuesday we received a copy of a manuscript, cir. 1895, giving Archbishop Michael A.
Corrigan of New York’s firsthand account of the “McGlynn Case” of
1886-1894. The controversies stirred up
by Father Edward McGlynn, a priest of the New York Archdiocese, appear to be
the primary source of the distortions of “distributive justice” that worked
their way into Catholic social teaching.
The situation seems to have been a contributing factor in the issuance
of the first “social encyclical” by Pope Leo XIII in 1891: Rerum Novarum, “On Capital and Labor.”
 |
| Judge Peter S. Grosscup |
• For years CESJ has been aware of the work of Judge Peter
Stenger Grosscup (1852-1921), a justice on the U.S. 7th Circuit
Court of Appeals, one of Theodore Roosevelt’s “trust busters.” A number of Judge Grosscup’s articles are on
the CESJ website. From investigating
newspaper accounts of the early 20th century, we have uncovered many
new details of the relationship between Roosevelt and Grosscup, and why,
possibly, Roosevelt did not stress expanded capital ownership as much as
Grosscup did. It turns out that
Roosevelt disagreed with a legal opinion issued by Grosscup in the Standard Oil
rebate case, which led to a rift that lasted a number of years. Interestingly, we also discovered that
Grosscup and Archbishop John Ireland, a friend of Roosevelt and a progressive
(although often mischaracterized as a populist) who strongly supported Rerum Novarum against populist and
socialist interpretations, seem to have been acquainted — at least they both
served on the Committee on Arrangements of the National Conference on Trusts
and Combinations in 1907.
 |
| Grosscup as a young man |
• We recently obtained a rare copy of Grosscup’s 1908
journal article, “The Government’s Relation to Corporate Construction and
Management” published in the Annals of
the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 32. In the article, Grosscup proposed that
workers be given the opportunity to become part owners of the companies that
employ them and, while not compulsory by any means, that the law should favor
such a move. This is consistent with §
46 of Rerum Novarum, “We have seen
that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle
that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore,
should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible
of the people to become owners.”
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 53 different countries and 49 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from
the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Philippines, and Nigeria.
The most popular postings this past week were “A Brief Course in Banking
Theory, I: Banks of Deposit,” “Raw
Judicial Power, I: ‘The Beginning of the Quarrel’,” “Some Thoughts on Money,
Part II,” “Why Did Nixon Take the Dollar Off the Gold Standard?” and “Aristotle
on Private Property.”
Those are the happenings for this week, at least that we
know about. If you have an accomplishment
that you think should be listed, send us a note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj
[dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into the next “issue.” If you have a short (250-400 word) comment on
a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog — do not send them
to us to post for you. All comments are
moderated anyway, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#
