The American Empire Part 11

There are three princ.i.p.al channels of surplus. First of all there is the surplus laid aside by business concerns, reinvested in the business, spent for new equipment and disposed of in other ways that add to the value of the property. Second, there are the 19,103 people in the United States with incomes of $50,000 or more per year; the 30,391 people with incomes of $25,000 to $50,000 per year and the 12,502 people with incomes of $10,000 to $25,000 per year. (Figures for 1917.) Many, if not most of these rich people, carry heavy insurance, invest in securities, or in some other way add to surplus. In the third place there are the small investors, savings-bank depositors, insurance policy holders who, from their income, have saved something and have laid it aside for the rainy day. The masters of economic life--bankers, insurance men, property holders, business directors--are in control of all three forms of surplus.

The billions of surplus wealth that come each year under the control of the masters carry with them an immense authority over the affairs of the community. The owners of wealth owe much of their immediate power to the fact that they control this surplus, and are in a position to direct its flow into such channels as they may select.

8. _The Channels of Public Opinion_

No one can question the control which business interests exercise over the jobs, the industrial product, and the economic surplus of the community. These facts are universally admitted. But the corollaries which flow naturally from such axioms are not so readily accepted. Yet given the economic power of the business world, the control over the channels of public opinion and over the machinery of government follows as a matter of course.

The channels of public opinion--the school, the press, the pulpit,--are not directly productive of tangible economic goods, yet they depend upon tangible economic goods for their maintenance. Whence should these goods come? Whence but from the system that produces them, through the men who control that system! The plutocracy exercises its power over the channels of public opinion in two ways,--the first, by a direct or business office control; and second, by an indirect or social prestige control.

The business office control is direct and simple. Schools, colleges, newspapers, magazines and churches need money. They cannot produce tangible wealth directly, and they must, therefore, depend upon the surplus which arises from the productive activities of the economic world. Who controls that surplus? Business men. Who, then, is in a position to dictate terms in financial matters? Who but the dominant forces in business life?

The facts are incontrovertible. It is not mere chance that recruits the overwhelming majority of school-board members, college trustees, newspaper managers, and church vestrymen, from the ranks of successful business and professional men. It is necessary for the educator, the journalist, and the minister to work through these men in order to secure the "sinews of war." They are at the focal points of power because they control the sources of surplus wealth.

The second method of maintaining control--through the control of social prestige--is indirect, but none the less effective. The young man in college; the young graduate looking for a job; the young man rising in his profession, and the man gaining ascendancy in his chosen career are brought into constant contact with the "influential" members of the business world. It is the business world that dominates the clubs and the vacation spots; it is the business world that is met in church, at the dinner tables and at the social gathering.

The man who would "succeed" must retain the favor of this group. He does so automatically, instinctively or semi-consciously--it is the common, accepted practice and he falls in line.

The masters need not bribe. They need not resort to illegal or unethical methods. The ordinary channels of advertising, of business acquaintance and patronage, of philanthropy and of social intercourse clinch their power over the channels of public opinion.

9. _The Control of Political Machinery_

The American government,--city, state and nation--is in almost the same position as the schools, newspapers and churches. It does not turn out tangible, economic products. It depends, for its support, upon taxes which are levied, in the first instance, upon property. Who are the owners of this property? The business interests. Who, therefore, pay the bills of the government? The business interests.

Nowhere has the issue been stated more clearly or more emphatically than by Woodrow Wilson in certain pa.s.sages of his "New Freedom." As a student of politics and government--particularly the American Government--he sees the power which those who control economic life are able to exercise over public affairs, and realizes that their influence has grown, until it overtops that of the political world so completely that the machinery of politics is under the domination of the organizers and directors of industry.

"We know," writes Mr. Wilson in "The New Freedom," "that something intervenes between the people of the United States and the control of their own affairs at Washington. It is not the people who have been ruling there of late" (p. 28). "The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States.... Suppose you go to Washington and try to get at your government. You will always find that while you are politely listened to, the men really consulted are the men who have the biggest stakes--the big bankers, the big manufacturers, the big masters of commerce, the heads of railroad corporations and of steamship corporations.... Every time it has come to a critical question, these gentlemen have been yielded to and their demands have been treated as the demands that should be followed as a matter of course. The government of the United States at present is a foster-child of the special interests" (p. 57-58). "The organization of business has become more centralized, vastly more centralized, than the political organization of the country itself" (p. 187). "An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy" (p. 35). "We are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless" (p. 10).

This is the direct control exercised by the plutocracy over the machinery of government. Its indirect control is no less important, and is exercised in exactly the same way as in the case of the channels of public opinion.

Lawyers receive preferment and fees from business--there is no other large source of support for lawyers. Judges are chosen from among these same lawyers. Usually they are lawyers who have won preferment and emolument. Legislators are lawyers and business men, or the representatives of lawyers and business men. The result is as logical as it is inevitable.

The wealth owners control the machinery of government because they pay the taxes and provide the campaign funds. They control public officials because they have been, are, or hope to be, on the payrolls, or partic.i.p.ants in the profits of industrial enterprises.

10. _It is "Their United States"_

The man fighting for bread has little time to "turn his eyes up to the eternal stars." The western cult of efficiency makes no allowances for philosophic propensities. Its object is product and it is satisfied with nothing short of that sordid goal.

The members of the wealth owning cla.s.s are relieved from the food struggle. Their ownership of the social machinery guarantees them a secure income from which they need make no appeal. These privileges provide for them and theirs the leisure and the culture that are the only possible excuse for the existence of civilization.

The propertied cla.s.s, because it owns the jobs, the industrial products, the social surplus, the channels of public opinion and the political machinery also enjoys the opportunity that goes with adequately a.s.sured income, leisure and culture.

The members of the dominant economic cla.s.s hold a key--property ownership--which opens the structure of social wealth. Those who have access to this key are the blessed ones. Theirs are the things of this world.

The property owners enjoy the fleshpots. They hold the vantage points.

The vital forces are in their hands. Economically, politically, socially, they are supreme.

If the control of material things can make a group secure, the wealth owners in the United States are secure. They hold property, prestige, power.

The phrase "our United States" as used by the great majority of the people is a misnomer. With the exception of a theoretically valuable but practically unimportant right called "freedom of contract," the majority of the wage earners in the United States have no more excuse for using the phrase "our United States" than the slaves in the South, before the war, for saying "our Southland."

The franchise is a potential power, making it theoretically possible for the electorate to take possession of the country. In practice, the franchise has had no such result. Quite the contrary, the masters of American life by a policy of chicanery and misrepresentation, advertise and support first one and then the other of the "Old Parties," both of which are led by the members of the propertied cla.s.s or by their retainers. The people, deluded by the press, and ignorant of their real interests, go to the polls year after year and vote for representatives that represent, in all of their interests, the special privileged cla.s.ses.

The economic and social reorganization of the United States during the past fifty years has gone fast and far. The system of perpetual (fee simple) private ownership of the resources has concentrated the control over the natural resources in a small group, not of individuals, but of corporations; has created a new form of social master, in the form of a land-tool-job owner; has thus made possible a type of absentee-landlordism more effective and less human than were any of its predecessors and has decreased the responsibility at the same time that it has augmented the power of the owning group. These changes have been an integral part of a general economic transformation that has occupied the chief energies of the ablest men of the community for the past two generations.

The country of many farms, villages and towns, and of a few cities, with opportunity free and easy of access, has become a country of highly organized concentrated wealth power, owned by a small fraction of the people and controlled by a tiny minority of the owners for their benefit and profit. The country which was rightfully called "our United States"

in 1840, by 1920 was "their United States" in every important sense of the word.

FOOTNOTES:

[39] "Estimated Valuation of National Wealth, 1850-1912," Bureau of the Census, 1915, p. 15.

[40] "Addresses of President Wilson," House Doc. 803. Sixty-fourth Congress, 1st Session (1916), p. 13.

IX. THE DIVINE RIGHT OF PROPERTY

1. _Land Ownership and Liberty_

The owners of American wealth have been molded gradually into a ruling cla.s.s. Years of brutal, compet.i.tive, economic struggle solidified their ranks,--distinguishing friend from enemy; clarifying economic laws, and demonstrating the importance of coordination in economic affairs.

Economic control, once firmly established, opened before the wealth owning cla.s.s an opportunity to dominate the entire field of public life.

Before the property owners could feel secure in their possessions, steps must be taken to trans.m.u.te the popular ideas regarding "property rights"

into a public opinion that would permit the concentration of important property in the hands of a small owning cla.s.s, at the same time that it held to the conviction that society, without privately owned land and machinery, was unthinkable.

Many of the leading spirits among the colonists had come to America in the hope of realizing the ideal of "Every man a farm, and every farm a man." Upon this principle they believed that it would be possible to set up the free government which so many were seeking in those dark days of the divine right of kings.

For many years after the organization of the Federal Government men spoke of the public domain as if it were to last indefinitely. As late as 1832 Henry Clay, in a discussion of the public lands, could say, "We should rejoice that this bountiful resource possessed by our country, remains in almost undiminished quant.i.ty." Later in the same speech he referred to the public lands as being "liberally offered,--in exhaustless quant.i.ties, and at moderate prices, enriching individuals and tending to the rapid improvement of the country."[41]

The land rose in price as settlers came in greater numbers. Land booms developed. Speculation was rife. Efforts were made to secure additional concessions from the Government. It was in this debate, where the public land was referred to as "refuse land" that Henry Clay felt called upon to remind his fellow-legislators of the significance and growing value of the public land. He said, "A friend of mine in this city bought in Illinois last fall about two thousand acres of this refuse land at the minimum price, for which he has lately refused six dollars per acre....

It is a business, a very profitable business, at which fortunes are made in the new states, to purchase these refuse lands and without improving them to sell them at large advances."[42]

A century ago, while it was still almost a wilderness, Illinois began to feel the pressure of limited resources--a pressure which has increased to such a point that it has completely revolutionized the system of society that was known to the men who established the Government of the United States.

This early record of a mid-western land boom, with Illinois land at six dollars an acre, tells the story of everything that was to follow. Even in 1832 there was not enough of the good land to go around. Already the community was dividing itself into two cla.s.ses--those who could get good land and those who could not. A wise man, understanding the part played by economic forces in determining the fate of a people, might have said to Henry Clay on that June day in 1832, "Friend, you have p.r.o.nounced the obituary of American liberty."

Some wise man might have spoken thus, but how strange the utterance would have sounded! There was so much land, and all history seemed to guarantee the beneficial results that are derived from individual land ownership. The democracies of Greece and Rome were built upon such a foundation. The yeomanry of England had proved her pride and stay. In Europe the free workers in the towns had been the guardians of the rights of the people. Throughout historic times, liberty has taken root where there is an economic foundation for the freedom which each man feels he has a right to demand.

2. _Security of "Acquisitions"_

Feudal Europe depended for its living upon agriculture. The Feudal System had concentrated the ownership of practically all of the valuable agricultural land in the hands of the small group of persons which ruled because it controlled economic opportunity. The power of this cla.s.s rested on its ownership of the resource upon which the majority of the people depended for a livelihood.

The Feudal System was transplanted to England, but it never took deep root there. When in 1215 A. D. (only a century and a half after the Great William had made his effort to feudalize England) King John signed the Magna Carta, Feudalism proper gave way to landlordism--the basis of English economic life from that time to this.