BUSH BY THE NUMBERS:
# 1837 -- Of course, in America we are much more civilized about dealing with the rich.
In the 1830s, a small handful of Baltimore worthies got together and founded a few banks, issuing currency and taking in deposits. Everything went well for a couple of years, but then, as the Panic of 1837 set in, the banks collapsed, with currency holders and depositors both being ruined while the bankers remained rich and lived in fine new mansions recently built on the hills surrounding old town. Efforts to get these crooks to disgorge their ill-gotten gains were to no avail in the corrupted court system, so the dispossessed and defrauded took matters into their own hands. The vigilante committee marched en masse up to the mansion district and proceded to burn down the fine new homes, tar and feather the occupants and run them out of a town on a rail.
And that's how Texas got founded. Some things never change. |
