{"id":37713,"date":"2026-01-23T17:21:58","date_gmt":"2026-01-23T22:21:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=37713"},"modified":"2026-01-23T18:13:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T23:13:11","slug":"37713","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=37713","title":{"rendered":"AI to the rescue – reconfiguring a post I convoluted to hell and back"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Post: The Twists and turns of curiosity<\/a>
\nNext Post: The Reader did not have space for my column today<\/a><\/p>\n

NOTE: I GAVE THE PREVIOUS POST TO AI AS ANOTHER TEST OF ITS POWERS. I ASKED IT TO MAKE IT COHERENT AND FRANKLY IT BUILT A SUPERLATIVE IF NOT QUITE PERFECT POST. IT DID NOT PLACE THE URLS OF THE PHOTOS BUT YOU CAN PAGE BACK TO THE ORIGINAL TO SEE THEM<\/strong> Harry Welty (not AI)<\/p>\n

## A Photograph, a Crash, and the Long Shadow of Power<\/p>\n

The photograph at the top of this post shows J. P. Morgan in 1933, waiting to appear before the United States Senate Banking Committee. Its deeper meaning only emerged for me while rereading old books and chasing half-forgotten political threads\u2014threads that run from Wall Street\u2019s greatest collapse, through Cold War politics in Minnesota, and into the present moment.<\/p>\n

### Once in Golconda and the Crash of 1929<\/p>\n

The image is described in *Once in Golconda*, John Brooks\u2019s classic account of the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Brooks\u2019s book has aged remarkably well; it is still treated as a benchmark, including by Andrew Ross Sorkin in his recent bestseller *1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History\u2014and How It Shattered a Nation*. Sorkin spent a decade researching that book, following his earlier *Too Big to Fail* about the 2008 financial crisis.<\/p>\n

I had just read the opening pages of Sorkin\u2019s *1929*, where he lavishes praise on Brooks. The unusual title\u2014*Once in Golconda*\u2014stuck in my head. I thought I owned it but couldn\u2019t find it on my shelves. That sent me digging for something else entirely.<\/p>\n

### Hubert Humphrey, the Popular Front, and a Forgotten Ending<\/p>\n

What I was actually looking for was a detail I\u2019d forgotten: the end of Minnesota\u2019s so-called \u201cPopular Front\u201d in 1947. I had first read about it in 2006 while unraveling a scandal that crippled Minnesota Democrats in 1978. The Popular Front was tied to Stalinists who had supported the U.S.\u2013Soviet alliance against Hitler. Many participants were outright communists, and they never recovered politically once the Soviet Union revealed itself as anything but benign\u2014swallowing up Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the war.<\/p>\n

Hubert Humphrey drove the final nails into that coffin in 1947. It was part of his rise, just before he famously defended President Truman at the Democratic convention with the exhortation that the party should \u201cwalk out of the shadow of states\u2019 rights and into the bright sunshine of human rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

Republicans\u2014my grandfather Robb among them\u2014were gleeful, hoping this internal Democratic turmoil would finally end fifteen years of New Deal dominance. Instead, Humphrey\u2019s speech fractured the party in a different way. Dixiecrats bolted, Strom Thurmond carried four Deep South states and 37 electoral votes, while Henry Wallace\u2019s Progressive Party siphoned off liberal votes without winning a single electoral vote.<\/p>\n

### Finding the Book Again<\/p>\n

So I spent twenty minutes tracking down the Humphrey biography I needed: Carl Solberg\u2019s *Hubert Humphrey*. I still have it bristling with post-it tabs\u2014at least thirty-three\u2014marking passages I wanted to be able to retrieve quickly.<\/p>\n

While searching for it, my eyes landed on another spine: *Once in Golconda*. There it was all along. I pulled it down for a quick look. There were no yellow marker stains, but I found an old bookmark describing the photograph of J. P. Morgan. That sent me down another rabbit hole.<\/p>\n

### J. P. Morgan and the Circus Photograph<\/p>\n

In 1933, the notoriously publicity-shy Morgan was called to testify before the Senate Banking Committee, as lawmakers tried to understand how the 1929 crash had triggered the Great Depression. While Morgan waited in a side room, a publicist for the Ringling Brothers Circus pulled a grotesque stunt: he placed a circus midget on Morgan\u2019s lap and urged the assembled photographers to snap what they hoped would be a humiliating picture.<\/p>\n

Morgan, despised by many as the embodiment of financial power, surprised everyone. He remained composed, spoke politely with the young woman, asked her a few questions, and then gently helped her off his lap. The result was an unexpected image boost for Morgan\u2014a moment of dignity under provocation.<\/p>\n

For the woman, the outcome was tragically different. She became an object of lurid public curiosity. Half Jewish, she eventually returned to Germany, where she was later arrested as both Jewish and \u201cfaulty.\u201d She was deported to Auschwitz.<\/p>\n

### Crashes, Regulation, and Repetition<\/p>\n

Sorkin\u2019s *1929* was what led me back to Brooks in the first place. For investors, there is an uncomfortable through-line here. Anti-regulation Republicans presided over the 1929 crash and again over the 2008 financial crisis. Under Donald Trump, similar forces have been at work, now flirting with another speculative bubble\u2014this time fueled by AI hype and crypto enthusiasm.<\/p>\n

### Unfinished Claims and Loose Threads<\/p>\n

As I tried to explain all this, I realized I was making several claims that deserve fuller treatment. Among them:<\/p>\n

* I think a federal judge\u2014namesake of a federal courthouse\u2014worked behind the scenes to silence Don Boyd by sending him to prison despite his innocence, in order to protect Hubert Humphrey and other Democratic power brokers.
\n* I\u2019m certain that Humphrey tried to prove he could be as ruthless as the ethically challenged Lyndon Johnson by orchestrating a phony scandal to defeat an extremely liberal Republican governor in the early 1960s.
\n* I\u2019ve learned just how noxious the Stalinist wing of the Democratic Party was during the years when Humphrey and his later betrayer, Eugene McCarthy, were reshaping Minnesota\u2019s DFL, even as the FBI tightened the screws on communists.
\n* I\u2019ve better understood the political currents flowing north from Kansas and Missouri into Minnesota\u2014toward what once seemed a Scandinavian social-democratic ideal\u2014during the long era between the Cold War and the eventual collapse of the old Republican Party under Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Those are arguments for another post\u2014or several. For now, they remain notes in the margin, waiting to be fully unpacked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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