Great Fortunes from Railroads Part 4

The strongest argument against this measure is, that by licensing any man or set of men to manufacture money, instead of earning it, we virtually license them to take so much of the property of the community as they may happen to fancy, without contributing to it at all--an injustice so enormous that it is incapable of any defense and therefore needs no comment.

... That the profits of capital are abstracted from the earnings of labor, and that these deductions, like any other tax on industry, tend to diminish the value of money by increasing the price of all the fruits of labor, are facts beyond dispute; it is equally undeniable that there is a point which capitalists cannot exceed without injuring themselves, for when by their exertions they so far depreciate the value of money at home that it is sent abroad, many are thrown out of employ, and are not only disabled from paying their tribute, _but are forced to betake to dishonest courses or starve_.

This memorial was full of iron and stern truths, although much of its political economy was that of its own era; a very different pet.i.tion, it will be noticed, from the appealing, cringing pet.i.tions sent timidly to Congress by the conservative, truckling labor leaders of later times. The memorial continued;

The remaining laborers are then loaded with additional burdens to provide laws and prisons and standing armies to keep order; expensive wars are created merely to lull for a time the clamors for employment; each new burden aggravates the disease, and national death finally ends it.

The power of capital, was, the memorial read on, "in the nature of things, regulated by the proportion that the numbers of, and compet.i.tion among, capitalists bears to the number and dest.i.tution of laborers." The only sure way of benefiting labor, "and the way best calculated to benefit all cla.s.ses," was to diminish the dest.i.tution among the working cla.s.ses. And the remedy proposed in the memorial? A settled principle of national policy should be laid down by Congress that the whole of the remaining of the public lands should forever continue to be the public property of the nation "and accordingly, cause them to be laid out from time to time, as the wants of the population might require, in small farms with a suitable proportion of building lots for mechanics, for the free use of any native citizen and his descendants who might be at the expense of clearing them." This policy "would establish a perpetual counterpoise to the absorbing power of capital." The memorial concluded:

These lands have been bought with public money every cent of which is in the end derived from the earnings of the laboring cla.s.ses.

And while the public money has been liberally employed to protect and foster trade, Government has never, to our knowledge, adopted but one measure (the protective tariff system) with a distinct view to promote the interests of labor; and all of the advantages of this one have been absorbed by the preponderating power of capital. [Footnote: Executive Doc.u.ments, First Session, Twenty-third Congress, 1834, Doc.

No. 104.]

EMPLOYMENT OF MILITIA AGAINST THE WORKERS.

But it was not only the National Government which used the entire governing power against the workers. State and munic.i.p.al authorities did likewise. In 1836 the longsh.o.r.emen in New York City struck for an increase of wages. Their employers hurriedly subst.i.tuted non-union men in their places. When the union men went from dock to dock, trying to induce the newcomers to side with them, the shipping merchants pretended that a riot was under way and made frantic calls upon the authorities for a subduing force. The mayor ordered out the militia with loaded guns. In Philadelphia similar scenes took place.

Naturally, as the strikers were prevented by the soldiers from persuading their fellow workers, they lost the strikes.

Although labor-saving machinery was constantly being devised and improved to displace hand labor, and although the skilled worker was consequently producing far more goods than in former years, the masters--as the capitalists were then often termed--insisted that employees must work for the same wages and hours as had long prevailed.

By 1840, however, the labor unions had arrived at a point where they were very powerful in some of the crafts, and employers grudgingly had to recognize that the time had pa.s.sed by when the laborer was to be treated like a serf. A few enlightened employers voluntarily conceded the ten-hour day, not on any humane grounds, but because they reasoned that it would promote greater efficiency on the part of their workers. Many capitalists, perforce, had to yield to the demand. Other capitalists determined to break up the unions on the ground that they were a conspiracy. At the instigation of several boot and shoe manufacturers, the officials of Boston brought a suit against the Boston Journeymen Bootmakers' Society. The court ruled against the bootmakers and the jury brought in a verdict of guilty.

On appeal to the Supreme Court, Robert Rantoul, the attorney for the society, so ably demolished the prosecution's points, that the court could not avoid setting aside the judgment of the inferior court.

[Footnote: Commonwealth vs. Hunt and others; Metcalf's Supreme Court Reports, iv: III. The prosecution had fallen back on the old English law of the time of Queen Elizabeth, making it a criminal offence for workingmen to refuse to work under certain wages. This law, Rantoul argued, had not been specifically adopted as common law in the United States after the Revolution.]

Perhaps the growing power of the labor unions had its effect upon those n.o.ble minds, the judiciary. The worker was no longer detached from his fellow workmen: he could no longer be scornfully shoved aside as a weak, helpless individual. He now had the strength of a.s.sociation and organization. The possibility of such strength transferred to politics affrighted the ruling cla.s.ses. Where before this, the politicians had contemptuously treated the worker's pet.i.tions, certain that he could always be led blindly to vote the usual partisan tickets, it now dawned upon them that it would be wiser to make an appearance of deference and to give some concessions which, although of a slight character, could be made to appear important. The Workingmen's party of 1829 had shown a glimmer of what the worker could do when aroused to cla.s.s-conscious action.

CAJOLING THE LABOR VOTE.

Now it was that the politicians began the familiar policy of "catering to the labor vote." Some rainbow promises of what they would do, together with a few sc.r.a.ps of legislation now and then-- this const.i.tuted the bait held out by the politicians. That adroit master of political chicanery, President Van Buren, hastened to issue an executive order on April 10, 1840, directing the establishment of a ten-hour day, between April and September, in the navy yards. From the last day of October, however, until March 31, the "working hours will be from the rising to the setting of the sun"--a length of time equivalent, meal time deducted, to about ten hours.

The political trick of throwing out crumbs to the workers long proved successful. But it was supplemented by other methods. To draw the labor leaders away from a hostile stand to the established political parties, and to prevent the ma.s.sing of workers in a party of their own, the politicians began an insidious system of bribing these leaders to turn traitors. This was done by either appointing them to some minor political office or by giving them money. In many instances, the labor unions in the ensuing decades were grossly betrayed.

Finally, the politicians always had large sums of election funds contributed by merchants, bankers, landowners, railroad owners--by all parts of the capitalist cla.s.s. These funds were employed in corrupting the electorate and legislative bodies. Caucuses and primaries were packed, votes bought, ballot boxes stuffed and election returns falsified. It did not matter to the corporations generally which of the old political parties was in power; some manufacturers or merchants might be swayed to one side or the other for the self-interest involved in the reenactment of the protective tariff or the establishment of free trade; but, as a rule, the corporations, as a matter of business, contributed money to both parties.

THE BASIS OF POLITICAL PARTIES.

However these parties might differ on various issues, they both stood for the perpetuation of the existing social and industrial system based upon capitalist ownership. The tendency of the Republican party, founded in 1856, toward the abolition of negro chattel slavery was in precise harmony with the aims and fundamental interests of the manufacturing capitalists of the North. The only peril that the capitalist cla.s.s feared was the creation of a distinct, disciplined and determined workingmen's party. This they knew would, if successful, seriously endanger and tend to sweep away the injustices and oppressions upon which they, the capitalists, subsisted. To avert this, every ruse and expedient was resorted to: derision, undermining, corruption, violence, imprisonment--all of these and other methods were employed by that sordid ruling cla.s.s claiming for itself so pretentious and all-embracing a degree of refinement, morality and patriotism.

Surveying historical events in a large way, however, it is by no means to be regretted that capitalism had its own unbridled way, and that its growth was not checked. Its development to the unbearable maximum had to come in order to prepare the ripe way for a newer stage in civilization. The capitalist was an outgrowth of conditions as they existed both before, and during, his time. He fitted as appropriate a part in his time as the predatory baron in feudal days.

But in this sketch we are not dealing with historical causes or sequences as much as with events and contrasts. The aim is to give a sufficient historical perspective of times when Government was manipulated by the capitalist cla.s.s for its own aggrandizement, and to despoil and degrade the millions of producers.

The imminence of working-cla.s.s action was an ever present and disturbing menace to the capitalists. To give one of many instances of how the workers were beginning to realize the necessity of this action, and how the capitalists met it, let us instance the resolutions of the New England Workingmen's a.s.sociation, adopted in 1845. With the manifold ill.u.s.trations in mind of how the powers of Government had been used and were being increasingly used to expropriate the land, the resources and the labor and produce of the many, and bond that generation and future generations under a mult.i.tude of law-created rights and privileges, this a.s.sociation declared in its preamble:

Whereas, we, the mechanics and workingmen of New England are convinced by the sad experience of years that under the present arrangement of society labor is and must be the slave of wealth; and, whereas, the producers of all wealth are deprived not merely of its enjoyment, but also of the social and civil rights which belong to humanity and the race; and, whereas, we are convinced that reform of those abuses must depend upon ourselves only; and, whereas, we believe that in intelligence alone is strength, we hereby declare our object to be union for power, power to bless humanity, and to further this object resolve ourselves into an a.s.sociation.

One of the leading spirits in this movement was Charles A. Dana, a young professional man of great promise and exceptional attainments.

Subsequently he was bought off with a political office; he became not only a renegade of the most virulent type, but he leagued himself with the greatest thieves of the day--Tweed and Jay Gould, for example--received large bribes for defending them and their interests in a newspaper of which he became the owner--the New York _Sun_ --and spent his last years bitterly and cynically attacking, ridiculing and misrepresenting the labor movement, and made himself the most conspicuous editorial advocate for every thieving plutocrat or capitalist measure.

The year 1884 about marked the zenith of the era of the capitalist seizing of the public domain. By that time the railroad and other corporations had possessed themselves of a large part of the area now vested in their ownership. At that very time an army of workers, estimated at 2,000,000, was out of employment. Yet it was not considered a panic year; certainly the industrial establishments of the country were not in the throes of a commercial cataclysm such as happened in 1873 and previous periods. The cities were overcrowded with the dest.i.tute and homeless; along every country road and railroad track could be seen men, singly or in pairs, tramping from place to place looking for work.

Many of those unemployed were native Americans. A large number were aliens who had been induced to migrate by the alluring statements of the steamship companies to whose profit it was to carry large batches; by the solicitations of the agents of American corporations seeking among the oppressed peoples of the Old World a generous supply of cheap, unorganized labor; or by the spontaneous prospect of bettering their condition politically or economically.

Millions of poor Europeans were thus persuaded to come over, only to find that the promises held out to them were hollow. They found that they were exploited in the United States even worse industrially than in their native country. As for political freedom their sanguine hopes were soon shattered. They had votes after a certain period of residence, it was true, but they saw--or at least the intelligent of them soon discerned--that the personnel and laws of the United States Government were determined by the great capitalists. The people were allowed to go through the form of voting; the moneyed interests, by controlling the machinery of the dominant political parties, dictated who the candidates, and what the so-called principles, of those parties should be. The same program was witnessed at every election.

The electorate was stimulated with excitement and enthusiasm over false issues and dominated candidates. The more the power and wealth of the capitalist cla.s.s increased, the more openly the Government became ultra-capitalistic.

WEALTH AND THE SWAY OF DIRECT POWER

It was about this time that the Senate of the United States was undergoing a transformation clearly showing how impatient the great capitalists were of operating Government through middlemen legislators. Previously, the manufacturing, railroad and banking interests had, on the whole, deemed it wise not to exercise this power directly but indirectly. The representatives sent to Congress were largely lawyers elected by their influence and money. The people at large did not know the secret processes back of these legislators.

The press, advocating, as a whole, the interests of the capitalist cla.s.s, constantly portrayed the legislators as great and patriotic statesmen.

But the magnates saw that the time had arrived when some empty democratic forms of Government could be waved aside, and the power exercised openly and directly by them. Presently we find such men as Leland Stanford, of the Pacific railroad quartet, and one of the arch-bribers and thieves of the time, entering the United States Senate after debauching the California legislature; George Hearst, a mining magnate, and others of that cla.s.s.

More and more this a.s.sumption of direct power increased, until now it is reckoned that there are at least eighty millionaires in Congress.

Many of them have been multimillionaires controlling, or representing corporations having a controlling share in vast industries, transportation and banking systems--men such as Senator Elkins, of West Virginia; Clark, of Montana; Platt and Depew, of New York; Guggenheim, of Colorado; Knox, of Pennsylvania; Foraker, of Ohio, and a quota of others. The popular jest as to the United States Senate being a "millionaires' club" has become antiquated; much more appropriately it could be termed a "multimillionaires' club." While in both houses of Congress are legislators who represent the almost extinguished middle cla.s.s, their votes are as ineffective as their declamations are flat. The Government of the United States, viewing it as an entirety, and not considering the impotent exceptions, is now more avowedly a capitalist Government than ever before. As for the various legislatures, the magnates, coveting no seats in those bodies, are content to follow the old plan of mastering them by either direct bribery or by controlling the political bosses in charge of the political machines.

Since the interests of the capitalists from the start were acutely antagonistic to those of the workers and of the people in general from whom their profits came, no cause for astonishment can be found in the refusal of Government to look out, even in trifling ways, for the workers' welfare. But it is of the greatest and most instructive interest to give a succession of contrasts. And here some complex factors intervene. Those cold, unimpa.s.sioned academicians who can perpetuate fallacies and lies in the most polished and dispa.s.sionate language, will object to the statement that the whole of governing inst.i.tutions has been in the hands of thieves--great, not petty, thieves. And yet the facts, as we have seen (and will still further see), bear out this a.s.sertion. Government was run and ruled at basis by the great thieves, as it is conspicuously to-day.

THE Pa.s.sING OF THE MIDDLE CLa.s.s.

Yet let us not go so fast. It is necessary to remember that the last few decades have const.i.tuted a period of startling transitions.

The middle cla.s.s, comprising the small business and factory men, stubbornly insisted on adhering to worn-out methods of doing business. Its only conception of industry was that of the methods of the year 1825. It refused to see that the centralization of industry was inevitable, and that it meant progress. It lamented the decay of its own power, and tried by every means at its command to thwart the purposes of the trusts. This middle cla.s.s had bribed and cheated and had exploited the worker. For decades it had shaped public opinion to support the dictum that "compet.i.tion was the life of trade." It had, by this shaping of opinion, enrolled on its side a large number of workers who saw only the temporary evils, and not the ultimate good, involved in the scientific organization and centralization of industry. The middle cla.s.s put through anti-trust laws and other measure after measure aimed at the great combinations.

These great combinations had, therefore, a double fight on their hands. On the one hand they had to resist the trades unions, and on the other, the middle cla.s.s. It was necessary to their interests that centralization of industry should continue. In fact, it was historically and economically necessary. Consequently they had to bend every effort to make nugatory any effort of Government, both National and State, to enforce the anti-trust laws. The thing had to be done no matter how. It was intolerable that industrial development could be stopped by a middle cla.s.s which, for self-interest, would have kept matters at a standstill. Self-interest likewise demanded that the nascent combinations and trusts get and exercise governmental power by any means they could use. For a while triumphant in pa.s.sing certain laws which, it was fatuously expected, would wipe the trusts out of existence, the middle cla.s.s was hopelessly beaten and routed. By their far greater command of resources and money, the great magnates were able to frustrate the execution of those laws, and gradually to install themselves or their tools in practically supreme power. The middle cla.s.s is now becoming a mere memory. Even the frantic efforts of President Roosevelt in its behalf were of absolutely no avail; the trusts are mightier than ever before, and hold a sway the disputing of which is ineffective.

THE TRUSTS AND THE UNEMPLOYED.

With this newer organization and centralization of industry the number of unemployed tremendously increased. In the panic of 1893 it reached about 3,000,000; in that of 1908 perhaps 6,000,000, certainly 5,000,000. To the appalling suffering on every hand the Government remained indifferent. The reasons were two-fold: Government was administered by the capitalist cla.s.s whose interest it was not to allow any measure to be pa.s.sed which might strengthen the workers, or decrease the volume of surplus labor; the second was that Government was basically the apotheosis of the current commercial idea that the claims of property were superior to those of human life.

It can be said without exaggeration that high functionary after high functionary in the legislative or executive branches of the Government, and magnate after magnate had committed not only one violation, but constant violations, of the criminal law. They were unmolested; having the power to prevent it they a.s.suredly would not suffer themselves to undergo even the farce of prosecution. Such few prosecutions as were started with suspicious bl.u.s.ter by the Government against the Standard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the Tobacco Trust and other trusts proved to be absolutely harmless, and have had no result except to strengthen the position of the trusts.

The great magnates reaped their wealth by an innumerable succession of frauds and thefts. But the moment that wealth or the basis of that wealth were threatened in the remotest by any law or movement, the whole body of Government, executive, legislative and judicial, promptly stepped in to protect it intact.

The workers, however, from whom the wealth was robbed, were regarded in law as criminals the moment they became impoverished. If homeless and without visible means of support, they were subject to arrest as vagabonds. Numbers of them were constantly sent to prison or, in some States, to the chain-gang. If they ventured to hold ma.s.s meetings to urge the Government to start a series of public works to relieve the unemployed, their meetings were broken up and the a.s.sembled brutally clubbed, as happened in Tompkins square in New York City in the panic of 1873, in Washington in 1892, and in Chicago and in Union square, New York City, in the panic of 1908. The newspapers represented these meetings as those of irresponsible agitators, inciting the "mob" to violence. The clubbing of the unemployed and the judicial murder of their spokesman, has long been a favorite repression method of the authorities. But as for allowing them freedom of speech, considering the grievances, putting forth every effort to relieve their condition,--these do not seem to have come within the scope of that Government whose every move has been one of intense hostility--now open, again covert--to the working cla.s.s.

This running sketch, which is to be supplemented by the most specific details, gives a sufficient insight into the debas.e.m.e.nt and despoiling of the working cla.s.s while the capitalists were using the Government as an expropriating machine. Meanwhile, how was the great farming cla.s.s faring? What were the consequences to this large body of the seizure by a few of the greater part of the public domain?

THE STATE OF THE FARMING POPULATION.

The conditions of the farming population, along with that of the working cla.s.s, steadily grew worse. In the hope of improving their condition large numbers migrated from the Eastern States, and a constant influx of agriculturists poured in from Europe.