Rhode Island Republicans are celebrating the robber barons.
The American is a newish restaurant in the old ALCO building on the west side and it played host to ceremonial announcements for Republican Rhue Reis, who is running against Congressman Jim Langevin, back in January, and today for Mark Zaccaria, the GOP challenger going up against Senator Jack Reed.
The food, I’m sure, is great. But it’s also a sort-of culinary homage to the early American industrialists who made huge fortunes by extracting natural resources and exploiting their employees.
“The American is dedicated to those that made our country great, the turn of the century industrialists that were able to think beyond their years and create businesses, companies and philanthropic efforts which still benefit us all today,” according to its website.
Here’s how Providence Monthly’s Linda Beaulieu led her 2012 review of the upscale eatery:
I wonder what J.P. Morgan and John Jacob Astor would think of The American, one of the newer establishments on the Providence restaurant scene. Their portraits hang high on the olive green walls of this stylish eatery, and they look down at people eating food bearing their names. The J.P. Morgan is a fancy roast beef sandwich, and the John Jacob Astor is a gourmet burger. Both items are on the lunch menu at The American.
The American is dedicated to those turn-of-the-century industrialists (and we’re talking 1900, not the most recent turn of the century) who made our country great.
There’s some debate as to whether the Astor, a fur trader and real estate developer, and Morgan, an industrialist and financier, and their contemporaries made our country great. Perhaps they just made themselves very rich at a time when our country desperately needed new transportation and energy infrastructure?
“These capitalist titans held great industrial monopolies and unprecedented wealth,” according to Business Insider in a list of the best-known robber barons. “Meanwhile children worked in factories and whole regions of the country were stuck in poverty after the Civil War.”
Merriam-Webster’s describes robber baron as “a wealthy person who tries to get land, businesses, or more money in a way that is dishonest or wrong.” The term was popularized by muckraking journalist Mathew Josephson’s book “The Robber Barons” and – fair or not – it stuck.
Here’s how a 2011 New York Times book review described the railroad robber barons: “To finance their risky endeavors, they routinely bribed politicians and borrowed money they could not pay back — while publishing mendacious financial reports. To insure friendly coverage, railroad executives bankrolled local newspapers and arranged to kill or delay the publication of stories that might damage their interests. At the helm of a dangerous industry where workplace accidents were common, they resisted installing air brakes and other devices that would have sharply reduced the toll of maimings and deaths.”
The American’s menu celebrates these men.
There’s a rib dish named after the legendary oilman John D. Rockefeller, a ham sandwich named after steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and railroad tycoons Leland Stanford and Cornelius Vanderbilt each got a chicken sandwich in their name. There are burgers for land speculators Jim Fisk and Jay Gould. There are even four versions of “the President’s Club” sandwich – the Ronald Reagan, the Calvin Coolidge, the Abe Lincoln and the John Adams.
We can debate the greed or benevolence of the robber barons, but they certainly aren’t indicative of the Rhode Islanders Rhue Reis and Mark Zaccaria hope to entice. Are they?
When the decision came down Monday morning, I can’t say I was surprised.
And lest you think not being a woman somehow protects you, lawyers are already moving to expand this decision in ways that might have us yearning for the simplicity of Sharia.
I decided to hold a rally outside the only Hobby Lobby location in Rhode Island and call for a national boycott of all Hobby Lobby stores. The rally had two purposes. The first was to send a message from Rhode Island, the birthplace of religious liberty and freedom of conscience so loud that even the Supreme Court would hear it. Our little rally, and 
We want specific changes, 
So at the rally we announced a permanent, never ending boycott against Hobby Lobby. The 125 people who came out to our protest Saturday afternoon and the hundreds more who support us are all committed to never spending so much as a penny at any Hobby Lobby, ever. Further, these women and men have friends, families and distant Facebook contacts across the nation and across the world. They will convince most everyone they know to follow their lead.
The accepted wisdom is that there is no bad publicity, except there is. Hobby Lobby is the corporation that led the way on this kind of lawsuit, and as a result, it will be the first to reap the economic consequences of its decision.
I had informed the Warwick Police Dept of our intentions, and their asks were well in line with our intentions: Don’t block traffic and don’t trespass on private property. Keep it peaceful and be careful. The police had a car parked nearby, but this wasn’t a lawless crowd. We had people on our line aged 13 to 83. Some of the women had fought for women’s rights in the 1950s and 60s and were wondering why they were forced to fight the same old battles again, in the 21st Century. The only danger we presented was to Hobby Lobby’s bottom line.
My friends from the Humanists of Rhode Island were in attendance, and stuff like this is never a solo effort. So many people contributed to putting this together. If I list all their names I’ll leave someone out by accident, so I won’t even try, but you all know you are great. Friends from other groups, especially Carolyn Mark or RI-NOW and Lauren Niedel of the RI Progressive Democrats were fantastic. Also, my friends from Unite Here! allowed me to borrow their bullhorn, which I will return soon, promise! I made new friends as well. Thank you Julie! And so many more.
However, while we were underway, only about four people who disagreed with us showed up, and they engaged in forceful, if not always cogent debate with various members of the protest. Their complaints were mostly of the “abortion is against the will of God” kind which is a bit off topic. This is about religious freedom, not about one group’s particular theology. I recognized two of the women as members of Barth Bracy’s Right to Life group, and it was immediately obvious that they did not actually understand what the Supreme Court had decided. They simply wanted to argue about abortion.
In all, the counter protest was a fizzle, if any such thing was actually in the works. And it’s hard to see what a counter-protest would look like. Would these people be arguing for more corporate control over employee health-care decisions? Would they argue for less freedom, less autonomy and less human rights?
