Could we realistically have expected anything even a bit more socially redeeming from a media mogul as powerful as Murdoch? Well, actually, history does offer up some models for media moguls interested in something besides maximizing their mega millions. Take, for instance, E.W. Scripps, the famed newspaper publisher who passed away nearly a century ago in 1926.
The youngest of 13 children, Scripps borrowed $10,000 to launch his first newspaper in 1878. He would spend the next quarter-century building a chain of dailies and a national news service that would evolve into the United Press International. His papers, Scripps pledged, would “always be devoted to the service of the 95%, namely the working man and the poor and unfortunate.”
By 1917 and America’s entry into the First World War, Scripps and a handful of other socially conscious men of means had come to realize that the war in Europe had opened up an opportunity to cut our Gilded Age rich down to something approximating democratic size. To meet the cost of waging world war, the nation would either have to tax the rich at significant rates or borrow from the rich, by selling war bonds, a choice that would leave the United States even more plutocratic.
“The country will be the gainer by tapping and reducing the great fortunes,” Scripps wrote to a similarly minded man of means, “and once the people learn how easy it is, and how beneficial to all parties concerned it is to get several billions a year by an Income Tax, the country hereafter may be depended upon to raise most, if not all, of the revenues for the Nation, and the States, and the cities from this source.”
The Scripps-backed American Committee on War Finance would soon be demanding a cap on annual income, what the Committee would call “a conscription of wealth.” No American, the Committee’s tax plan for the war proposed, ought to be able to retain after taxes “an annual net income in excess of $100,000,” about $2.4 million in today’s dollars.
“All income of over one hundred thousand dollars a year should be conscripted,” Scripps telegraphed to President Woodrow Wilson. “Such legislation would cost me much more than half my present income.”
“Some of us have very large incomes,” Scripps would later explain to the House Ways and Means Committee. “We employ servants who produce nothing for the common good and only minister to our vices. We purchase costly and showy clothing, houses, food, furniture, automobiles, jewelry, etc., etc., the production of which has taken the labor of many hundreds of thousands of men and women, who if they were not so employed would be producing other commodities in such quantity as to cheapen them and make them more accessible to the poor.”
“An enormously high rate of Income Tax,” Scripps argued, “would have the effect of diverting all this labor, what is given to practically useless things, into other channels where production would be useful to the whole people.”
Nearly all of the nation’s fabulously wealthy — and their most avid advocates — would respond to the “conscription of wealth” campaign with predictable hysterics. But by mid-1917 the campaign had completely redefined the nation’s tax-the-rich frame of reference.
The result? By the war’s end in 1918, America’s rich faced a top-bracket tax rate of 77 percent, up from 15 percent in 1916.
By 1926, with Scripps passed away, the nation’s wealthy had regrouped enough to get that top rate trimmed all the way down to 25 percent. But the World War I “conscription of wealth” campaign had touched a nerve. In the months after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt renewed the World War I-era call for a 100 percent top-bracket tax rate, and, by the end of World War II, America’s rich faced a 94 percent federal tax on income over $200,000.
That top tax rate would hover around 90 percent for the next two decades, years that would see the United States give birth to the first mass middle class the world had ever seen.
Today, thanks in no small part to the media machinations of Rupert Murdoch, our richest now face — on paper — a top-bracket income tax rate less than half that high. In real life, ProPublica revealed this past spring, our tax code’s incredibly ample and generous current loopholes have America’s 25 wealthiest taxpayers paying a “true tax rate” of less than 4 percent.
What can we now expect from Rupert Murdoch’s successor, his son Lachlan? Don’t hold your breath waiting for Murdock 2.0 to take his family media colossus down a path any less plutocratic. Lachlan doesn’t have much E. W. Scripps in him. Back in 2019, he spent $150 million on an 11-acre estate in L.A. At that time, Lachlan’s new home rated as the second-most expensive U.S. mansion ever purchased.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.
