New Deal – Memphis Flyer

Forbes did its first ranking of our country’s richest people in 1981. The top of the list was a shipping magnate named Daniel L. Ludwig with a fortune of more than $2 billion.

I discovered that fact in a thought-provoking New York Times article by Willy Staley about the impact our current crop of multi-billionaires is having on our society.

Adjusted for inflation, that $2 billion would be around $5.8 billion in today’s dollars. That sum made Ludwig the richest man in the United States. Today $5.8 billion would put someone in a seven-way tie for number 182 on the list.

Most people know someone they consider rich. Maybe it is someone with a business they’ll sell for several million dollars when they get ready to retire. Or a professional athlete who makes millions a year. When people talk about “the rich” in terms of the wealth-hoarding oligarchs who control industries and media companies and buy politicians, this isn’t who we’re talking about.

We live in an oligarchy. Most Americans would agree with that fact, and agree it is a problem. From the left to the QAnon folks who believe the world is ruled by ultra-wealthy, demon-worshiping pedophile cannibals yet also insist the rich should have lower taxes and less regulation of their business dealings.

Historically, we’ve generally avoided using the word “oligarch” to describe America’s ultra-rich. That changed as the war in Ukraine caused condemnation of Russian oligarchs, and people noticed how men here like Jeff Bezos, Charles Koch, Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and Peter Thiel perfectly fit the definition as well.

They didn’t become oligarchs through hard work. No one does. They needed a lot of family wealth and connections before they ever worked a day in their lives. A large pile of money easily turns into a larger pile of money. Our tax laws have been rewritten over the past 40 years to help bigger and bigger piles of money shift to be possessed by an increasingly small number of people.

Any attempt to rein in our billionaires gets denounced as socialism, but we have had capitalism with much higher taxation of the ultra-rich. That is how we created a large middle-class in this country, which didn’t exist before the New Deal and has been steadily losing ground since the early ’80s when the Forbes list was topped by a guy with $2 billion.

The beauty of a high tax rate for top earners was that it didn’t even require government to redistribute wealth. Anything you make over your first $500,000 in annual income will be taxed at 90 percent? Might as well spend those additional profits on hiring more people and giving them more pay and better benefits and working conditions. If inflation means there is too much money chasing too few goods, worry about the people who have more money than they know what to do with, not the people who are struggling.

I don’t envy our oligarchs. They don’t seem to be leading happy lives. When I think of people who seem genuinely happy, to me, they are people who seem grateful they have enough, not people who always want more. We’ve created a society where most people feel like they need more, whether they have nothing or everything. The result has been skyrocketing rates of depression, suicide, addiction, and overdoses.

Oligarchs are natural enemies of democracy. A clear majority of Americans want things like universal health insurance. Our ruling class doesn’t want that, and has made sure we don’t get it. Universal health insurance allows normal people to leave big companies to start their own businesses.

Unfortunately the elite have mastered the reverse psychology of telling people, “Here is what the elite don’t want you to think …” They control both sides of the argument. They tell people “the elite” are teachers, professors, beat journalists, and scientists. They get to frame corporate media like CNN as “the left” and the far-right as the alternative. They love giving money to centrist Democrats. They can always count on them to advance right-wing economics when Democrats are in power, while giving Republicans a chance to say, “Look what the radical socialists are doing to you.”

Our oligarchs don’t want young people learning about the amount of racism embedded in our society since our country’s founding. Racism was and still is a valuable tool for keeping poor white workers in their place. The Old South was a terrible place for white workers. But racism was so effective that impoverished white Southerners got duped into dying for plantation owners in the Civil War. Men who never owned an inch of land were willing to waste their lives to protect the fortunes of aristocrats who looked down on them. So don’t be surprised that someone buried in debt today will take five minutes to dash out a tweet in defense of whichever billionaire is currently masquerading as their champion against the elite.

Craig David Meek is a Memphis writer, barbecue connoisseur, and the author of Memphis Barbecue: A Succulent History of Smoke, Sauce & Soul.

It could be the perfect set for a horror film.

A rustic old lodge cabin is situated along a steep bluff deep in the woods. Its tan paint and natural wood is chipping away. Some of its windows are cracked or busted out. The lodge is surrounded by smaller cabins, which are also falling into disrepair. A few of them have literally crumbled into the autumn-leaf-covered earth, with only their roofs and parts of windows sticking out of the ground.

That’s the scene at the Mississippi River Group Camp at Meeman-Shelby Forest. The group camp, which was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s, has been closed to campers for about 12 years, and since then, no maintenance has been done to preserve the cabins.

But one local man is trying to raise awareness about the historical significance of the campsite, and he’s hoping some environmental or preservation groups will step in and offer to help the state fund the campsite’s repair.

“It’s not just important because it’s old or because Depression-era guys built it by hand. It’s also the political and social history. It’s from a time when politicians were bolder and had a vision of wanting to help people,” said Lance Blevins, who has been speaking out about the site as of late, in the hopes of stirring up interest.

The Mississippi River Group Camp is one of many such campsites constructed by out-of-work men in the 1930s, thanks to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s CCC program under the New Deal.

“They called it ‘three hots and a flop’ because they were out of work, and they got three hot meals and a place to sleep,” Blevins said. “My granddad worked for them when he was out of work. He worked for $1 a day building roads, and they kept 75 cents of his dollar to send back to his family.”

Each CCC camp ground across the country was built with a similar set-up — central dining hall, first aid cabin, lodge cabins, bunk cabins, and a swimming pool.

Tennessee State Archives/Bianca Phillips

Above: People using the group camp in its heyday; Below: Lodge cabin in disrepair today

Because the campsite was constructed in the 1930s, the stones used for the dining hall and lodge cabin fireplaces were cut by hand. The bunk beds, which still sit in many of the abandoned cabins, are made of solid oak.

When contacted about the site, Eric Ward, a spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, said the state is currently exploring options to save some of the dilapidated structures, but he said no decisions had been made yet.

In St. Louis, a group of volunteers, including members of the local Sierra Club, convinced the state of Missouri to begin restoration on their CCC campsite in 2012.

“Tennessee State Parks is always open to conversations with people or groups who may be interested in preserving historical sites, especially those that exist on state park properties,” Ward said.

Old black-and-white photos in the Tennessee State Archives show the campsite (and the pool, which was built a few years after the cabins) bustling with life. The cabins were grouped into separate areas for men and women and were often used by scouts and church groups. An old National Park Service newsletter from May 1939 said the Shelby Forest campsite was getting the most of use out of 12 camps that were compared at the time.

Allison Hancock, who helps organize an annual womens-only camping retreat called Daughters of the Moon, was among the last group of campers to use the site before it closed in the early 2000s.

“By the time we started having events there, the place was already run down,” Hancock said. “The main hall was in good shape, but the cabins that were still standing had big holes in the screens and places where the floors were falling in.”

Today, Hancock’s group and many others that once held their events at the Mississippi River Group Camp use the cabins at nearby Piersol Group Camp, also in Shelby Forest. Those cabins were built in 1978, and Ward confirmed that the state performs regular maintenance on that site.

But Blevins is holding out hope that the Mississippi River Group Camp will see new life again someday.

“Bike riders want to extend a greenline from Memphis to Shelby Forest. I can envision a day when Shelby Forest is connected by a greenline to Shelby Farms,” Blevins said. “It seems a shame to let the hard work of the CCCs rot away when it is sitting in such a great spot.”