In his book, Croly lays out a plan to regain a political and economic balance through strong federal regulations and social programs. Arguing only programs administered by the federal government make it possible for America to fulfill the promise of a positive and fair democracy for the greatest number of citizens, he began the use of the term, --New Nationalism,'' taken up by Roosevelt as the label for his own political reforms.
Through carefully placed donations corporate interests built working relationships with Progressives and Fabian Socialists. In effect, Progressivism built the vehicle for fascism, launching the design in 1913. Using the Progressive's vehicle, Corporations took the driver's seat and stole America.
During the same period corporate interests, including Rockefeller, began covert funding the Revolution in Russia to further their own interests. Both Trotsky and Lenin were well aware of who was providing their funding. The most cursive study of history painfully reveals whose agenda was achieved.
CHAMPIONS OF INDIVIDUALISM
Arthur C. Pillsbury continued to uphold the ideas of individualism, held by his ancestors, while facing a world which was moving in exactly the wrong direction. Pillsbury had personally witnessed the failure of politics, its easy corruption and profiteering. He saw this play out in the aftermath of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, where an incompetent and corrupt city government caused enormous destruction of property and citizens were shot with impunity by troops. He saw it in the failure to give women their full rights, instead settling for having the right to vote. This was an issue for which his beloved mother, Dr. Harriet Foster Pillsbury, struggled all of her life. He saw it in the thumb fingered, arrogant and self-serving network of bureaucratic elitists who became the increasingly centralized Federal government from Woodrow Wilson on. He saw it in courts, which sold decisions, allowing the theft of his brother's estate in 1911. He saw it in the move by Stephen T. Mather to convert the National Parks to a resort for the 'elite' in 1915.
Academia was becoming, not a resource for the inquiring mind, but a priesthood dedicated to limiting inquiry. When Pillsbury began his studies of science in the late 1800s, knowledge was still open to anyone willing to learn from available information and apply themselves. Alexander Graham Bell, Luther Burbank, George Washington Carver, Thomas Alva Edison, and Nikola Tesla were among the huge number of inventors who were largely self-educated. The move towards institutionalizing knowledge ran in absolute contradiction to what was proven to have worked. Those years had provided astonishing leaps in human knowledge.
INVENTIONS
Pillsbury's first invention was a specimen slicer for the microscope while still a student at Stanford in 1895. His senior project, designed while majoring in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford, was the first circuit panorama camera, built in 1897 over the objections of a senior adviser who told him the design could not work.
Over the course of his life Pillsbury produced a series of cameras each of which extended our vision into worlds formerly closed to us. The first lapse-time camera for plants came in 1912. Pillsbury built the camera to persuade the Park Service to stop the mowing of the meadows in Yosemite and begin the preservation of the wild flowers, a problem he had seen growing ever worse since his first visit there in 1895.
THE OPENING WEDGE OF AMERICAN FASCISM
In December of 1913 a cabal of bankers, promising election to Woodrow Wilson, managed to pass through Congress a central bank for the United States. In parallel, corporate interests worked for and succeeded in passing a Federal Income Tax and granted a monopoly for the practice of medicine to the American Medical Association, this motivated by the desire to profit from holdings in pharmaceutical companies. The move to centralize control through government brought into existence the alphabet agencies which reversed the relationship between government and Americans. The installation of Stephen Mather as head of National Parks was just one of these.
Grants from corporations to academia began to provide the bulk of the funds available to previously independent, academic institutions. Sun Oil, which funded and controls today the tens of thousands of yearly grants, amounting to millions of dollars to individuals, began installing the means to manufacture opinions useful to them. By determining who would, and who would not teach, write, and provide opinions for policy under consideration by Congress. Pew, and other corporations, began reformatting America's colleges and, by extrapolation, which ideas would shape our world.
Unlike the majority of his contemporaries Pillsbury neither bought in to the opportunities for personal gain or gave up on the ideas of freedom. Instead, he chose another course. Identifying a problem he could solve, he applied himself to providing the means for individuals to see and know the world with their own eyes. He called this the Knowledge Commons, an early version of today's Open Source.
Through the 20th Century awareness of the diametrically oppositional viewpoints for human organization, hierarchical vs. networked cooperation, would remake the world as the fascism of corporations grew expert in using the power of government to negate opportunities, choices, and a free market, manipulating academia, founding 'think tanks' to enforce their streams of income, and a media they had purchased to justify the whole.
Pillsbury, in 1913 raising his three adopted children, supporting his wife, and now caring for his invalid mother, refocused his life as he watched these events began to unfold.
In 1922 he lowered his costs by 75%, increasing his profits, by inventing the first mass production postcard machine, Patent No. 1,574,687. He was, through those years, the largest producer of post cards on the West Coast. He identified more products to sell and worked on enlarging his catalog of images. These included packets of small photos for tourists and gold backed glass photos known as d'orotones. He also began producing short films for Hollywood as he designed a microscopic motion picture camera, remembering the problems his parents and brother had faced along with other scientists.
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