Newt's Hero

Stephen L. Doll

1995

Published in:

Social Trends Newsletters, July. 1995, No. 137

If choice of heroes is any indication of one's character, Newt Gingrich has left little doubt -- if there was any to leave -- as to where his interests lie.

During a session of his bought-and- paid-for video soapbox, Renewing American Civilization, (mind Extension University, Feb. 4, 1995), Gingrich chose to single out an American who, to him, represents the ultimate meld of American innovation and entrepreneurship: inventor, Thomas Edison. According to Newtonian history, Edison, upon whom Gingrich heaps such accolades as "hardworking" and "generous", symbolizes the spirit of inventiveness and opportunism that helped shape America's ascendency to greatness, and one we sorely need to revive in order to survive.

Has Newt plunged blissfully into laudation, unknowing that inventive as he may have been, Edison, the businessman, was just as ruthless and cutthroat as any entrepreneur ever that tried to corner a market? Or are these the qualities Gingrich sees as the saving grace of America?

Certainly Edison worked hard. His two-hour catnaps between bouts with the ardor of tinkering are legendary. But if he wasn't jumping through hoops for J. Pierpont Morgan, he was working just as hard at protecting his turf, disarming challenges to his vested interests, undermining competition through a highly efficient propaganda machine, and reneging on agreements.

It was this man, for whom Gingrich expresses such admiration, who summed up his working principle and issued an indictment of American business in general when he boasted, "Everybody steals in commerce in industry. I've stolen a lot myself. But I know how to steal."

It was also this captain of industry who for years stonewalled electrical wizard Nikola Tesla and his sponsor George Westinghouse's efforts on the introduction of alternating current, a far more efficient means of providing affordable electricity to millions of Americans, because Edison was heavily invested in direct current. As Tesla biographer Mary Cheney notes in Tesla: Man out of Time, Edison would scour his Menlo Park neighborhood for cats and dogs, which he would then electrocute with alternating current in showy displays, rejoining the demonstrations with the admonition, "Is this what you want the little wife cooking with?"

Tesla might also have argued convincingly about Edison's generosity. Promised $50,000 to redesign Edison's primitive direct current dynamos, Tesla called upon the inventor almost a year later to collect on the completed job. Edison gazed at him open mouthed and expostulated, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor."

At best, Gingrich's admiration of Edison is based on a superficial survey of the man's accomplishments. At worst, if Newt is in possession of the facts as a university professor should be, his praise of Edison is an endorsement of the lowest of American business practice.

To be fair, Edison's tactics bear no substantial difference to corporate intrigue at large. Measured by these standards, Gingrich's Hall of Fame of American enterprise would have to number such luminaries as the Goulds, the Fisks, and the Vanderbilts, whose heroic exploits at railroad building shattered the lives and cultures of thousands of displaced native Americans and low-paid immigrant laborers (and whose efforts have consigned many of the Indians' descendants to the welfare rolls Newt would so dearly love to abolish). And let's not forget the Rockefellers and the Firestones, who did for oil and rubber what Tom did for electricity. Nor can we ignore the depredations of many of these contributors to the fabric of American commercial culture who, through their machinations, were able to command sufficient capital to create financial panics to add to their booty, while bringing the workings of the country to a screeching halt.

America loves its celebrities. All too often the corporate media Kliegs spotlight the Edisons and bypass the bit players, the behind-the-scenes innovators who do the legwork but lack the jugular instinct to enter the entrepreneurial fray. At any rate, the day of the adventurous innovator is over. Government research funding is at a nadir; researchers now merely chattel to corporate masters, hireling paranoiacs toiling away on products not necessarily necessary but products that may be sold to a befuddled public. And the hard work of which Gingrich is so fond culminates in a pink slip for senior employees when their paychecks become liabilities. The hard world of competitive enterprise, which Gingrich and his ilk see as the salvation of America, comes as a cold douche to idealistic researchers reared in an atmosphere of cooperation, who are now forced to work looking over their shoulders.