The Beautiful Trans-Mississippi Commemoratives of 1898. TigerSoft asks:" Are We All Just Cattle in A Second Gilded Age Economic Storm?"

    wpe50.jpg (1913 bytes)       TigerSoft News Service        7/4/2011       www.tigersoft.com

The Beautiful TRANS-MISSISSIPPI U.S.
          COMMEMORATIVES of 1898:

                   This series of remarkable stamps was issued in 1898 to celebrate the 1898
                   Trans-Missippi Exposition held in Omaha, Nebraska. Many stamp collectors
                   feel that the $1.00 stamp in this series is America's prettiest stamp.


   wpe11.jpg (10880 bytes) I want also today to look back at 1898
                     and the Gilded Age, many feel America is now returning to.

           For many Americans in 1898 and now, life was
                like being one of the "Cattle in a Storm"


                                            America's Most Beautiful Stamp?

      Though the 1898 $1 "Western Cattle in Storm" was meant to represent to the rugged vitality
            of the American West, the design actually depicted winter cattle in Scotland.
            The original painting was by John MacWhirter and called "The Vanguard".

             Only 56, 900 such $1 stamps were printed. Many consider this the most beautiful
             stamp the US has ever issied. Collectors quickly discover that most stamps in this
             series were poorly centered with the perforations cutting into the design of the stamp.
             20% had a straight edge on the left or right side. Fraudulent perforations were
             often added to these to dupe naive collectors. Most of the stamps were used
             as postage for registered parcels. These bear big blurry cancellations.


            Those that found their way into collections, were usually glued or hinged to a
            stamp album.    As a result, there are probably less than 250 of these $1 denomination
            Trans-Mississippi stamps in the world with as perfect centering as those shown above
            and only a handful of these are in what is called "MINT" with undisturbed original gum.
            Look closely at a sheets of the $2.00 Transmissippi to see this..
                    http://www.stampnewsnow.com/generateditems/PDF%20Files/Manual%20NEW%20230-Pgs35-40.pdf

            Even leaving these stamps in the sunlight for a few hours can make their orginal
            colors fade. As investments, they have gradually appreciated in value over the
            last 60 years. During the Depression some of the ones that might have survived
            were used instead for simple postage. Stamps are not as popular now as they were
            when President Franklin Roosevelt collected them. Without young people becoming
            collectors, demand will surely dimminish for all but the rarest. These are so scarce,
            they will certainly hold up well, if only because the super rich are always looking
            for unique and special items.     Because of the big difference between the bid and
            ask prices when bought from and sold to stamp dealers, it is probably best to buy
            rare stamps like these only at stamp auctions. Siegel Stamp Auctions is the premier
            auction house for rare American stamps.

                                                              Stamps and Patriotism

          The US Post Office issued some of its most beautiful stamps ever in 1898.
          It was a way to create patriotism, to recognize the growth of the US into the
          West and the Rocky Mountains States far beyond the Mississippi. It was a time
          of national self-awareness.

      John Phillip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever" was
          first heard by the public just a year before.

The US would soon declare war
          on Spain for sinking its battle ship, Maine, in Havana harbor. And this was seen as
          a way to take the public's mindoff of the difficulties of life for working people and
          the growing gap between the very rich and the poor in this the Gilded Age at the
          turn of century.

                              "The Breakers", a Gilded Age mansion in Newport, Rhode Island built by
                              Cornelius Vanderbilt II as a summer home. It has 70 rooms and about 65,000 sq feet
                              of living space.

               It is said America "redeemed Democracy in the Civil War" and then
                 "betrayed it in the Gilded Age". Slavery has been abolished, but for
                 most Blacks in the rural south, it was replaced by share-cropping
                 and voting disenfranchisement. Wealth corrupted politicans and
                 turned state and federal authorities brutally against working men
                 who wanted to unionize or go on strike time and time again. Violence
                 against workers was the most violent in the world.

                 Jack Beatty of NPR in New Hampshire passionately exclaimed:

                 "It was an era when government held the keys to corporate and
                  private fortunes—land and subsidies for railroads, tariff protection for
                  manufacturers, mountains for mining companies, timber lands for lumber
                  kings, court orders to prevent strikes, and state militia and federal lawmen
                  and U.S. Army regulars to break strikes and shoot strikers."

               "Fifteen years after emancipation, the party of Lincoln betrayed the
                  nearly four million former slaves in the South. Following the tied Hayes-Tilden
                  election of 1876, the Republicans kept the presidency in return for ending
                  Reconstruction. And the Lincoln-appointed justices of the Supreme Court
                  effectively gelded the protections for the freed people that Congress had
                  written into the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead of using the amendment
                  as Congress intended—to strike down state laws abridging the rights of s
                  outhern blacks—the court granted those protections to corporations, using
                  the due-process clause of the amendment to strike down regulatory and labor laws."
                  ( Source. )



                In despair, former President Rutherford B. Hayes wrote, government
                was not democratic. In the Gilded Age, it was "government of the
                corporation, by the corporation and for the corporation."    After using
                Federal troops to quell strikes by railroad workers in many US cities,
                he wrote in his diary:
                      "The strikes have been put down by force; but now for the real remedy.
                      Can't something [be] done by education of strikers,
                      by judicious control of capitalists, by wise general policy to end or diminish
                      the evil? The railroad strikers, as a rule, are good men, sober, intelligent, and
                      industrious."^[^source^]