Left-Wing Talk Show Host Slams Author of 14th Amendment As Crooked Con Man of Railroad Industry

Left-wing talk show host Thom Hartmann takes on the author of the 14th Amendment , John Bingham of Ohio:

It was in this milieu that an American history book first published in 1927, but largely ignored, suddenly became a hot topic. In The Rise of American Civilization, Columbia history professor Charles Beard and woman's suffrage movement activist Mary Beard suggested that the rise of corporations on the American landscape was the result of a grand conspiracy that reached from the boardrooms of the nation's railroads all the way to the Supreme Court.

They fingered two Republicans: former Senator (and railroad lawyer) Roscoe Conkling; and former Congressman (and railroad lawyer) John A. Bingham. The theory, in short form, was that Conkling, when he was part of the Senate committee that wrote the Fourteenth Amendment back in 1868, had intentionally inserted the word 'person' instead of the correct legal phrase 'natural person' to describe who would get the protections of the Amendment. Bingham similarly worked in the House of Representatives to get the language passed.

Once that time bomb was put into place, Conkling and Bingham left elective office to join in litigating on behalf of the railroads, with the goal of exploding their carefully worded amendment in the face of the Supreme Court.

Thus 'Republican lawmakers,' the Beards said, conspired in advance to give full human constitutional rights to corporate legal fictions. 'By a few words skillfully chosen,' they wrote, 'every act of every state and local government which touched adversely the rights of [corporate] persons and property was made subject to review and liable to annulment by the Supreme Court at Washington.'

Oddly, this conspiracy theory was widely accepted because the supposed conspirators themselves had said, very publicly, 'We did it!'

Earlier, in an 1882 case pitting the railroads against San Mateo County, Conkling testified (as a paid witness for the railroads) that he'd slipped the 'person' language into the amendment to ensure that corporations would one day receive the same civil rights Congress was giving to freed slaves. Bingham made similar assertions when appropriate during his turns as a paid witness for the railroads. As a result of these assertions, through the late years of the 1800s both were the well-off darlings of the railroads, basking in the light of their successful appropriation of human rights for corporations.

What hasn't the 14th Amendment not been accused of? The infamous footnote situation in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. has got people thinking...