{"id":26734,"date":"2014-07-09T07:46:55","date_gmt":"2014-07-09T11:46:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=26734"},"modified":"2020-08-07T09:36:33","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T13:36:33","slug":"justin-raimondo-reviews-new-biography-of-the-koch-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/07\/09\/justin-raimondo-reviews-new-biography-of-the-koch-family\/","title":{"rendered":"Justin Raimondo reviews new biography of the Koch family"},"content":{"rendered":"

The archvillains of capitalism, Charles and David Koch, are the subjects of a recent book by Mother Jones<\/em> writer Daniel Schulman. Justin Raimondo<\/a> reviews Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America\u2019s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty<\/em>.<\/p>\n

According to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Koch brothers are responsible for global warming and much else that\u2019s wrong with the world. This is part of a strategy to demonize Charles and David Koch \u2014 the principals behind the country\u2019s largest privately-held company \u2014 and make them the issue come Election Day. There\u2019s a big problem with this strategy, however: a recent poll shows that most of Reid\u2019s own constituents haven\u2019t the slightest idea who the Brothers Koch are.<\/p>\n

Daniel Schulman\u2019s much anticipated book, the first biography of the Koch family, may help voters bridge the knowledge gap \u2014 but Democrats are going to be disappointed if they think it will help their smear campaign. Indeed, it is likely to do the opposite. It\u2019s hard to write a biography of someone you hate, and Schulman, a writer for Mother Jones<\/em>, clearly came to admire his subjects.<\/p>\n

The story starts with Fred Koch, a son of Dutch immigrants who settled in the \u201cpoor but plucky\u201d town of Quanah, east of the Texas panhandle. Ambitious, single-minded, and tough as nails, Fred made his fortune helping Joe Stalin extract oil from the Russian steppes \u2014 learning in the process that the rosy picture of a \u201cworkers\u2019 paradise\u201d drawn by the likes of Walter Durante was the exact opposite of the truth.<\/p>\n

Driven to seek overseas markets by an onslaught of patent-infringement lawsuits from a Rockefeller-connected oil consortium, Fred Koch arrived in Russia in 1930 and \u201cfound it a land of hunger, misery, and terror,\u201d as he would later recall. When he left that autumn, his Soviet minder \u2014 who had spent the whole time capitalist-baiting him \u2014 bid adieu with this warning: \u201cI\u2019ll see you in the United States sooner than you think.\u201d What Fred had seen in Stalin\u2019s Russia set him on a course that landed him in the ranks of the John Birch Society.<\/p>\n

Robert Welch, the society\u2019s founder, recruited him early on: Fred was at the 1958 meeting where Welch first laid out his plan to fight the Communist menace and roll back the New Deal. The John Birch Society was a hybrid of Old Right libertarian economics and the McCarthyite paranoia of the 1950s, and Fred \u2014 by this time a tycoon \u2014 relentlessly lectured his four sons on the evils of collectivism and the value of hard work. He had no intention of raising a brood of \u201ccountry-club bums\u201d who would coast along on the family fortune. The 1950s were almost over before he bought the kids a television, and even then they had little time to watch it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The archvillains of capitalism, Charles and David Koch, are the subjects of a recent book by Mother Jones writer Daniel Schulman. Justin Raimondo reviews Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America\u2019s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty. According to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Koch brothers are responsible for global warming and much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,831,7,28,13],"tags":[1391,433,315],"class_list":["post-26734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-business","category-history","category-media","category-usa","tag-biography","tag-sovietunion","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6Xc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26734"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59390,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26734\/revisions\/59390"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}