“This is not high-way robbery; it can be better called international burglary.”
In 1934, Marcus Garvey wrote a short commentary for The Black Man titled “The American Dollar.” Published at the height of the Great Depression, “The American Dollar” is a short and succinct evisceration of the global financial elite – and an impassioned defense of the international working classes against predatory policies. Garvey argues that financial speculators have been able to enrich themselves through the manipulation of the price of international currencies like the British pound, the French franc, the German mark, and the U.S. dollar. This speculation has created a global economy that enriches the already rich, while furthering impoverishing the already poor. For Garvey, such speculators – he calls them “scientific financiers” – make up the most dangerous class in the world.
Garvey must have held a special bitterness towards this class. In 1923, after years of being hounded by the “Garvey Must Go” campaigners and the FBI, Garvey was convicted of one count of mail fraud in relation to the sale of stock in The Black Star Line. He was fined $1,000 and sentenced to five years in prison, the maximum penalty under the law. He served about half his sentence before he was deported to Jamaica in 1927. Meanwhile, Charles E. Mitchell, the president of the National City Bank of New York, and Albert H. Wiggin, President of the Chase National Bank, engaged in years of fraudulent and illegal stock manipulation that cost the US public millions of dollars and pushed the world to economic collapse. Neither Mitchell nor Wiggin faced any sort of punishment.
The resonances between Garvey’s times and our own are obvious – and Garvey’s “The American Dollar” seems as relevant now as it was in the 1930s. We reprinted it below.
The American Dollar
Marcus Garvey
The American dollar is still low. The Pound Sterling still values more than the $5 bill, and so another world financial situation is at hand. Business people everywhere who have been dealing with the dollar have had to change suddenly their methods either for good or ill. This will affect America toward one way or the other. Some business people had been dealing with the English pound rather than the American dollar for some time, because it was of greater advantage to them. Now that the dollar is gone down, there is a switch from the pound to the dollar, and so there is an up and down in finance; but have we ever stopped to think why this inflation and deflation go on? It is simply because a school of scientific financiers and speculators have worked out a system by which they can upset the pocket-book of every citizen, and take out of it as much change as they want from time to time. Sometimes they take out extract change for the English pound and then at another time they do the same thing for the American dollar and the French franc and the German mark, but when a totalization takes place, the difference of change goes to the financiers and to the speculators and the citizens go back to work again to fill their pocket-books. This is not high-way robbery; it can be better called international burglary.
The financiers are burglarizing the pocket-books of the world’s citizens and they will continue doing it until statesmen like President Roosevelt let loose on them and the people of the world become educated enough to know that nothing is wrong with the pound or dollar, but the thing that is wrong is their upholding certain people to rob them because they are fools. Once upon a time the most dangerous man in the world was the Napoleonic class of soldier, in that they used to lay waste populations and countries with their ammunition of the sword and bullet, but today humanity and the world are being laid waste by the scientific financier who sits at his desk and manipulate not soldiers but the exchanges of the world.
For the peace of the world, and particularly of Europe, they had to send Napoleon to St. Helena and then to Elba. When the people are courageous enough to send some of the bankers either to Siberia, Devil's Island or the North Pole, then they will be able to feel satisfied that there will be no fluctuations in finances to affect their pocket-books on which so many people have their eyes at the present time.
Marcus Garvey, “The American Dollar,” The Blackman: A Monthly Magazine of Negro Thought and Opinion 1 no. 2 (January 1934)
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Isaac Saney is a Cuba and Black studies specialist and historian at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
