AMERICAS SEVENTH SATURN RETURN

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As the war dragged on, the government—again in the name of defending liberty—took extraordinary measures in subjugating the nearly conquered Confederacy and punishing its allies abroad. The blockades and tariffs imposed at the time contributed to the mass unemployment and severe depression. Nevertheless, Lincoln did much to realize the posi tive side of Saturn's return to Libra with his Emancipation Proclamation, which rivals the Declaration of Independence as a statement of "freedom and justice for all".

THE FOURTH CYCLE

After the horrors of the Civil War, many crimes were committed "in the defense of liberty". Greed became the virtue of the Robber Barons . . . and the freedom to be greedy was being defended. In an essay included in The National Experience: A History of the United States (Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., New York, 1968), David Schuster states: "In one of the strangest reversals in history, man became economic man, democracy became identified with capitalism, liberty with property and the use of it, equality with opportunity for gain, and progress with economic change and the accumulation of capital."

When Grover Cleveland was President in 1893, some of the major schools of thought presented in universities held that businessmen were "selected by nature" over politicians . . . that the state existed only to protect property . . . and that poverty was inevitable. But when Saturn returned that autumn, President Cleveland couldn't sell the exclusive and isolationist "Gospel of Wealth" to our foreign neighbors. In fact, the Europeans influenced Far East currencies and helped create a panic in the gold market, which contributed to a severe depression in the United States. Cleveland's defense of "economy above justice" added nothing to the peaceful coexistence of the international community. Rather, it helped create some of the instability that eventually involved the United States in the First World War.

LESSON NUMBER FIVE

Warren Harding was President when Saturn returned a fifth time, in November 1922. The wealthy constituency of his administration blatantly used the government to manipulate the national and international marketplace. Land and oil scandals filled the news media . . . while the Ku Klux Klan was so powerfully violent that martial law had to be declared in Oklahoma.

Tariffs and trade blockades were instigated to protect private interests. In fact, the withdrawal of the United States into economic and political isolationism threw some postwar governments into severe crisis. As you'll recall, that international depression eventually caught up with our country in the last days of the 1920's.

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