A NECESSARY CONTRAST
If the whole might of Government was used in the aggrandizement and
perpetuation of a propertied aristocracy, what was its specific
attitude toward the working class? Of the powerful few, whether
political or industrial, the conventional histories hand down grossly
biased and distorted chronicles. These few are isolated from the
multitude, and their importance magnified, while the millions of
obscure are nowhere adequately described. Such sterile historians
proceed upon the perfunctory plan, derived from ancient usage in the
days when kingcraft was supremely exalted, that it is only the mighty
few whose acts are of any consequence, and that the doings of the
masses are of no account.
GOVERNMENT BY PROPERTY INTERESTS.
Hence it is that most histories are mere registers of names and
dates, dull or highly-colored hackneyed splurges of print giving no
insight into actual conditions.
In this respect most of the prevailing histories of the United States
are the most egregious offenders. They fix the idea that this or that
alleged statesman, this or that President or politician or set of
politicians, have been the dominating factors in the decision and
sway of public affairs. No greater error could be formulated. Behind
the ostentatious and imposing public personages of the different
periods, the arbiters of laws and policies have been the men of
property. They it was who really ruled both the arena and the arcana
of politics.
It was they, sometimes openly, but more usually covertly, who
influenced and manipulated the entire sphere of government.
It was they who raised the issues which divided the people into
contesting camps and which often beclouded and bemuddled the popular
mind. It was their material ideals and interests that were engrafted
upon the fabric of society and made the prevailing standards of the
day.
From the start the United States Government was what may be called a
regime swayed by property.
The Revolution, as we have seen, was a movement by the native
property interests to work out their own destiny without interference
by the trading classes of Great Britain. The Constitution of the
United States, the various State Constitutions, and the laws, were,
we have set forth, all reflexes of the interests, aims, castes and
prejudices of the property owners, as opposed to the non-propertied.
At first, the landholders and the shipping merchants were the
dictators of laws. Then from these two classes and from the tradesmen
sprang a third class, the bankers, who, after a continuous orgy of
bribery, rose to a high pitch of power. At the same time, other
classes of property owners were sharers in varying degrees in
directing Government. One of these was the slaveholders of the South,
desperately increasing their clutch on government administration the
more their institutions were threatened. The factory owners were
likewise participants. However bitterly some of these propertied
interests might war upon one another for supremacy, there was never a
time when the majority of the men who sat in Congress, the
legislatures or the judges did not represent, or respond to, either
the interests or the ideals of one or more of these divisions of the
propertied classes.
Finally, out of the landowners, slaveowners, bankers, shippers,
factory masters and tradesmen a new class of great power developed.
This was the railroad-owning class. From about the year 1845 to 1890
it was the most puissant governing class in the United States, and
only ceased being distinctly so when the industrial trusts became
even mightier, and a time came when one trust alone, the Standard Oil
Company, was able to possess itself of vast railroad systems.
These different components of the railroad-owning class had gathered
in their money by either outright fraud or by the customary
exploitative processes of the times. We have noted how many of the
landholders secured their estates at one time or another by bribery
or by invidiously fraudulent transactions; and how the bankers, who
originally were either tradesmen, factory owners or landowners, had
obtained their charters and privileges by widespread bribery. A
portion of the money thus acquired was often used in bribing Congress
and legislatures for railroad charters, public funds, immense areas
of land including forests and mines, and special laws of the most
extraordinary character.
CONDITIONS OF THE NON-PROPERTIED.
Since Government was actually, although not avowedly or apparently, a
property regime, what was the condition of the millions of non-
propertied?
In order to get a correct understanding of both the philosophy and
the significance of what manner of property rule was in force, it is
necessary to give an accompanying sketch of the life of the millions
of producers, and what kind of laws related to them. Merely to
narrate the acts of the capitalists of the period is of no enduring
value unless it be accompanied by a necessary contrast of how
Government and capitalist acted toward the worker. It was the worker
who tilled the ground and harvested the produce nourishing nations;
whose labor, mental or manual, brought forth the thousand and one
commodities, utensils, implements, articles and luxuries necessary to
the material wants of civilization. Verily, what of the great hosts
of toilers who have done their work and shuffled off to oblivion?
What were their aspirations, difficulties, movements and struggles?
While Government, controlled by both the men and the standards of
property, was being used as a distributing instrument for centering
resources and laws in the hands of a mere minority, what were its
methods in dealing with the lowly and propertyless?
Furthermore, this contrast is indispensable for another reason.
Posterity ever has a blunt way of asking the most inquisitive
questions. The inquirer for truth will not be content with the simple
statement that many of the factory owners and tradesmen bribed
representative bodies to give them railroad charters and bountiful
largess. He will seek to know how, as specifically as the records
allow, they got together that money. Their nominal methods are of no
weight; it is the portrayal of their real, basic methods which alone
will satisfy the delver for actual facts.
This is not the place for a voluminous account of the industrial
development of the United States. We cannot halt here to give the
full account of the origin and growth of that factory system which
has culminated in the gigantic trusts of to-day. Nor can we pause to
deal with the manifold circumstances and methods involved in that
expansion. The full tale of the rise and climax of industrial
establishments; how they subverted the functions of government to
their own ends; stole inventions right and left and drove inventors
to poverty and to the grave; defrauded the community of incredible
amounts by evading taxation; oppressed their workers to a degree that
in future times will read like the acts of a class outsavaging the
savage; bribed without intermission; slaughtered legions of men,
women and children in the pursuit of profit; exploited the peoples of
the globe remorselessly--all of this and more, constituting a weird
chapter of horrors in the progress of the race, will be fully
described in a later part of this work. [Footnote: See "Great
Fortunes from Industries."]
But in order to contribute a clear perspective of the methods and
morals of a period when Government was but the mannikin of property--
a period even more pronounced now--and to give a deeper insight into
the conditions against which millions had to contend at a time when
the railroad oligarchy was blown into life by Government edict, a few
important facts will be presented here.
The sonorous doctrines of the Declaration of Independence read well,
but they were not meant to be applied to the worker. The independence
so much vaunted was the independence of the capitalist to do as he
pleased. Few, if any, restrictions were placed upon him; such pseudo
restrictions as were passed from time to time were not enforced. On
the other hand, the severest laws were enacted against the worker.
For a long time it was a crime for him to go on a strike. In the
first strike in this country of which there is any record--that of a
number of sailors in New York City in 1803, for better wages--the
leader was arrested, indicted and sent to prison. The formidable
machinery of Government was employed by the ruling commercial and
landed classes for a double purpose. On the one hand, they insisted
that it should encourage capital, which phrase translated into action
meant that it should confer grants of land, immense loans of public
funds without interest, virtual immunity from taxation, an extra-
legal taxing power, sweeping privileges, protective laws and clearly
defined statute rights.
THE SUPREMACY OF EMPLOYERS.
At the same time, while enriching themselves in every direction by
transferring, through the powers of Government, public resources to
themselves, the capitalists declared it to be a settled principle
that Government should not be paternalistic; they asserted that it
was not only not a proper governmental function to look out for the
interests of the masses of workers, but they went even further.
With the precedents of the English laws as an example, they held that
it devolved upon Government to keep the workers sternly within the
bounds established by employers. In plain words, this meant that the
capitalist was to be allowed to run his business as he desired. He
could overwork his employees, pay them the lowest wages, and kill
them off by forcing them to work under conditions in which the
sacrifice of human life was held subordinate to the gathering of
profits, or by forcing them to work or live in disease-breeding
places. [Footnote: The slum population of the United States increased
rapidly. "According to the best estimates," stated the "Seventh
Special Report of the U. S. Commissioner of Labor--The Slums of Great
Cities, 1894," "the total slum population of Baltimore is about
25,000; of Chicago, 162,000; of New York, 360,000; of Philadelphia,
35,000" (p. 12). The figures of the average weekly wages per
individual of the slum population revealed why there was so large a
slum population. In Baltimore these wages were $8.65-1/2 per week; in
Chicago, $9.88-1/2; in New York, $8.36, and in Philadelphia, $8.68
per week (p. 64).
In his "Modern Social Conditions," Bailey, basing his statements upon
the U. S. Census of 1900, asserted that 109,750 persons had died from
tuberculosis in the United States in 1900. "Plenty of fresh air and
sunlight," he wrote, "will kill the germs, and yet it is estimated
that there are eight millions of people who will eventually die from
consumption unless strenuous efforts are made to combat the disease.
Working in a confined atmosphere, and living in damp, poorly
ventilated rooms, the dwellers in the tenements of the great cities
fall easy victims to the great white plague." (p. 265).]
The law, which was the distinct expression of the interests of the
capitalist, upheld his right to do all this. Yet if the workers
protested; if they sought to improve their condition by joining in
that community of action called a strike, the same code of laws
adjudged them criminals. At once, the whole power of law, with its
police, military and judges, descended upon them, and either drove
them back to their tasks or consigned them to prison.
The conditions under which the capitalists made their profits, and
under which the workers had to toil, were very oppressive to the
workers. The hours of work at that period were from sunrise to
sunset. Usually this rule, especially in the seasons of long days,
required twelve, and very often fourteen and sixteen, hours a day.
Yet the so-called statesmen and the pretentious cultured and refined
classes of the day, saw nothing wrong in this exploitation. The
reason was obvious. Their power, their elegant mansions, their silks
and satins, their equipage and superior opportunities for enjoyment
all were based upon the sweat and blood of these so-called free white
men, women and children of the North, who toiled even harder than the
chattel black slave of the South, and who did not receive a fraction
of the care and thought bestowed, as a corrollary of property, upon
the black slave. Already the capitalists of the North had a slavery
system in force far more effective than the chattel system of the
South--a system the economic superiority of which was destined to
overthrow that of black slavery.
Most historians, taking their cue from the intellectual subserviency
demanded of them by the ruling propertied classes, delight in
picturing those times as "the good old times," when the capitalists
were benevolent and amiable, and the workers lived in peace and
plenty.
AN INCESSANT WARFARE.
History in the main, thus far, has been an institution for the
propagation of lies. The truth is that for thousands of years back,
since the private property system came into existence, an incessant,
uncompromising warfare has been going on between oppressors and
oppressed. Apart from the class distinctions and the bitterness
manifested in settlement and colonial times in this country--
reference to which has been given in earlier chapters--the whole of
the nineteenth century, and thus far of this century, has been a
continuous industrial struggle. It has been the real warfare of
modern times.
In this struggle the propertied classes had the great advantage from
the start. Centuries of rulership had taught them that the control of
Government was the crux of the mastery. By possession of Government
they had the power of making laws; of the enforcement or non-
enforcement of those laws; of the directorship of police, army, navy,
courts, jails and prisons--all terrible instruments for suppressing
any attempt at protest, peaceful or otherwise. Notwithstanding this
massing of power and force, the working class has at no time been
passive or acquiescent. It has allowed itself to be duped; it has
permitted its ranks to be divided by false issues; it has often been
blind at critical times, and has made no concerted effort as yet to
get intelligent possession of the great strategic point,--
governmental power. Nevertheless, despite these mistakes, it has been
in a state of constant rebellion; and the fact that it has been so,
that its aspirations could not be squelched by jails, prisons and
cannon nor by destitution or starvation, furnishes the sublimest
record in all the annals of mankind.
THE WORKERS' STRUGGLE FOR BETTER CONDITIONS.
Again and again the workers attempted to throw off some of their
shackles, and every time the whole dominant force of society was
arrayed against them. By 1825 an agitation developed for a ten-hour
workday. The politicians denounced the movement; the cultured classes
frowned upon it; the newspapers alternately ridiculed and abused it;
the officials prepared to take summary action to put it down. As for
the capitalists--the shipping merchants, the boot and shoe
manufacturers, the iron masters and others--they not only denied the
right of the workers to organize, while insisting that they
themselves were entitled to combine, but they inveighed against the
ten-hour demand as "unreasonable conditions which the folly and
caprice of a few journeymen mechanics may dictate." "A very large sum
of money," says McNeill, "was subscribed by the merchants to defeat
the ten-hour movement." [Footnote: "The Labor Movement": 339.] And as
an evidence of the intense opposition to the workers' demands for a
change from a fourteen to a ten-hour day, McNeill quotes from a
Boston newspaper of 1832:
Had this unlawful combination had for its object the enhancement of
daily wages, it would have been left to its own care; but it now
strikes the very nerve of industry and good morals by dictating the
hours of labor, abrogating the good old rule of our fathers and
pointing out the most direct course to poverty; for to be idle
several of the most useful hours of the morning and evening will
surely lead to intemperance and ruin.
These, generally speaking, were the stock capitalists arguments of
the day, together with the further reiterated assertion that it was
impossible to conduct business on a ten-hour day system. The effect
of the fourteen-hour day upon the workers was pernicious. Having no
time for reading, self-education, social intercourse or acquainting
themselves with refinement, they often developed brutal propensities.
In proportion to the length of time and the rigor with which they
were exploited, they degenerated morally and intellectually. This was
a well-known fact, and was frequently commented upon by
contemporaneous observers. Their employers could not fail to know it,
yet, with few exceptions, they insisted that any movement to shorten
the day's labor was destructive of good morals.
This pronouncement, however, need not arouse comment. Ever has the
propertied class set itself up as the lofty guardian of morals
although actuated by sordid self-interest and nothing more. Many
workers were driven to drink, crime and suicide by the exasperating
and deteriorating conditions under which they had to labor. The
moment that they overstepped the slightest bounds of law, in rushed
the authorities with summary punishment. The prisons of the period
were full of mechanics whom serfdom or poverty had stung on to commit
some crime or other. However trifling the offence, or whatever the
justifiable provocation, the law made no trades-union memorialized
Congress to limit the hours of labor of those employed on the public
works to ten hours a day. The pathos of this petition! So unceasingly
had the workers been lied to by politicians, newspapers, clergy and
employers, that they did not realize that in applying to Congress or to
any legislature, that they were begging from men who represented
the antagonistic interests of their own employers. After a short debate
Congress laid the petition on the table. Congress at this very time was
spinning out laws in behalf of capitalist interests; granting public
lands, public funds, protective tariffs and manifold other measures
demanded or lobbied for by existing or projected corporations.
A memorial of a "Portion of the Laboring Classes of the City of New
York in Relation to The Money Market" complained to Congress in 1833
that the powers of the Government were used against the working
class.
"You are not ignorant," they petitioned,
That our State Legislatures have, by a usurpation of power which is
expressly withheld by our Federal Constitution, chartered many
companies to engage in the manufacture of paper money; and that the
necessities of the laboring classes have compelled them to give it
currency.
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 petition,
it will be noticed, from the appealing, cringing petitions 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
competition among, capitalists bears to the number and destitution of
laborers." The only sure way of benefiting labor, "and the way best
calculated to benefit all classes," was to diminish the destitution
among the working classes. 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 classes.
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 Documents, 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 municipal authorities
did likewise. In 1836 the longshoremen in New York City struck for an
increase of wages. Their employers hurriedly substituted 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 passed 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 noble 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
association and organization. The possibility of such strength
transferred to politics affrighted the ruling classes. Where before
this, the politicians had contemptuously treated the worker's
petitions, 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 class-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 scraps of legislation now and then--
this constituted 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 massing 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 class. 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 class 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 class 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 class for its own aggrandizement, and
to despoil and degrade the millions of producers.
The imminence of working-class 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 Association, adopted in
1845. With the manifold illustrations 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
multitude of law-created rights and privileges, this association
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 association.
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 destitute 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 class 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
class, 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 class.
More and more this assumption 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 class, 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, unimpassioned academicians who can
perpetuate fallacies and lies in the most polished and dispassionate
language, will object to the statement that the whole of governing
institutions 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 assertion. Government was run and ruled at basis
by the great thieves, as it is conspicuously to-day.
THE PASSING OF THE MIDDLE CLASS.
Yet let us not go so fast. It is necessary to remember that the last
few decades have constituted a period of startling transitions.
The middle class, 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 class had bribed and cheated and
had exploited the worker. For decades it had shaped public opinion to
support the dictum that "competition 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 class 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 class. 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 class 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 passing certain laws which, it was fatuously expected,
would wipe the trusts out of existence, the middle class 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 class 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 class whose interest it was not to
allow any measure to be passed 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 assuredly would not
suffer themselves to undergo even the farce of prosecution. Such few
prosecutions as were started with suspicious bluster 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 mass meetings to
urge the Government to start a series of public works to relieve the
unemployed, their meetings were broken up and the assembled 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 class.
This running sketch, which is to be supplemented by the most specific
details, gives a sufficient insight into the debasement and
despoiling of the working class while the capitalists were using the
Government as an expropriating machine. Meanwhile, how was the great
farming class 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 class, 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.
A comparatively few of the whole were able to get land direct from
the Government. Naturally the course of this extensive migration
followed the path of transportation, that is to say, of the
railroads. This was exactly what the railroad corporations had
anticipated. As a rule the migrating farmers found the railroads or
cattlemen already in possession of many of the best lands. To give a
specific idea of how vast and widespread were the railroad holdings
in the various States, this tabulation covering the years up to 1883
will suffice: In the States of Florida, Louisiana, Alabama and
Mississippi about 9,000,000 acres in all; in Wisconsin, 3,553,865
acres; Missouri, 2,605,251 acres; Arkansas, 2,613,631 acres;
Illinois, 2,595,053 acres; Iowa, 4,181,929 acres; Michigan, 3,355,943
acres; Minnesota, 9,830,450 acres; Nebraska, 6,409,376 acres;
Colorado, 3,000,000 acres; the State of Washington, 11,700,000 acres;
New Mexico, 11,500,000 acres; in the Dakotas, 8,000,000 acres;
Oregon, 5,800,000 acres; Montana, 17,000,000 acres; California,
16,387,000; Idaho, 1,500,000, and Utah, 1,850,000. [Footnote: "The
Public Domain," House Ex. Doc. No. 47, Third Session, Forty-sixth
Congress: 273.]
Prospective farmers had to pay the railroads exorbitant prices for
land. Very often they had not sufficient funds; a mortgage or two
would be signed; and if the farmer had a bad season or two, and could
no longer pay the interest, foreclosure would result. But whether
crops were good or bad, the American farmer constantly had to compete
in the grain markets of the world with the cheap labor of India and
Russia. And inexorably, East or West, North or South, he was caught
between a double fire.
On the one hand, in order to compete with the immense capitalist
farms gradually developing, he had to give up primitive implements
and buy the most improved agricultural machines. For these he was
charged five and six times the sum it cost the manufacturers to make
and market them. Usually if he could not pay for them outright, the
manufacturers took out a mortgage on his farm. Large numbers of these
mortgages were foreclosed.
In addition, the time had passed when the farmer made his own clothes
and many other articles. For everything that he bought he had to pay
excessive prices. He, even more than the industrial working classes,
had to pay an enormous manufacturer's profit, and additionally the
high freight railroad rate.
On the other hand, the great capitalist agencies directly dealing
with the crops--the packing houses, the gambling cotton and produce
exchanges--actually owned, by a series of manipulations, a large
proportion of his crops before they were out of the ground. These
crops were sold to the working class at exorbitant prices. The small
farmer labored incessantly, only to find himself getting poorer. It
served political purpose well to describe glowingly the farmer's
prosperity; but the greater crops he raised, the greater the profit
to the railroad companies and to various other divisions of the
capitalist class. His was the labor and worry; they gathered in the
financial harvest.
METHODS OF THE GREAT LANDOWNERS.
While thus the produce of the farmer's labor was virtually
confiscated by the different capitalist combinations, the farmers of
many States, particularly of the rich agricultural States of the
West, were unable to stand up against the encroachments, power, and
the fraudulent methods of the great capitalist landowners.
The land frauds in the State of California will serve as an example.
Acting under the authority of various measures passed by Congress--
measures which have been described--land grabbers succeeded in
obtaining possession of an immense area in that State. Perjury,
fraudulent surveys and entries, collusion with Government officials--
these were a few of the many methods.
Jose Limantour, by an alleged grant from a Mexican Governor, and
collusion with officials, almost succeeded in stealing more than half
a million acres. Henry Miller, who came to the United States as an
immigrant in 1850, is to-day owner of 14,539,000 acres of the richest
land in California and Oregon. It embraces more than 22,500 square
miles, a territory three times as large as New Jersey. The stupendous
land frauds in all of the Western and Pacific States by which
capitalists obtained "an empire of land, timber and mines" are amply
described in numerous documents of the period. These land thieves, as
was developed in official investigations, had their tools and
associates in the Land Commissioner's office, in the Government
executive departments, and in both houses of Congress. The land
grabbers did their part in driving the small farmer from the soil.
Bailey Millard, who extensively investigated the land frauds in
California, after giving full details, says:
When you have learned these things it is not difficult to understand
how one hundred men in the great Sacramento Valley have come to own
over 17,000,000 acres, while in the San Joaquin Valley it is no
uncommon thing for one man's name to stand for 100,000 acres. This
grabbing of large tracts has discouraged immigration to California
more than any other single factor. A family living on a small holding
in a vast plain, with hardly a house in sight, will in time become a
very lonely family indeed, and will in a few years be glad to sell
out to the land king whose domain is adjacent. Thousands of small
farms have in this way been acquired by the large holders at nominal
prices. [Footnote: "The West Coast Land Grabbers." Everybody's
Magazine, May, 1905.]
SEIZURE OF IMMENSE AREAS BY FRAUD.
Official reports of the period, contemporaneous with the original
seizure of these immense tracts of land, give far more specific
details of the methods by which that land was obtained. Of the
numerous reports of committees of the California Legislature, we will
here simply quote one--that of the Swamp Land Investigating Committee
of the California Assembly of 1873. Dealing with the fraudulent
methods by which huge areas of the finest lands in California were
obtained for practically nothing as "swamp" land, this committee
reported, citing from what it termed a "mighty mass of evidence,"
"That through the connivance of parties, surveyors were appointed who
segregated lands as 'swamp,' which were not so in fact. The
corruption existing in the land department of the General Government
has aided this system of fraud."
Also, the committee commented with deep irony, "the loose laws of the
State, governing all classes of State lands, has enabled wealthy
parties to obtain much of it under circumstances which, in some
countries, where laws are more rigid and terms less refined, would be
termed fraudulent, but we can only designate it as keen foresight and
wise (for the land grabbers) construction of loose, unwholesome
laws." [Footnote: Report of the Swamp Land Investigating Committee,
Appendix to California Journals of Senate and Assembly. Twentieth
Session, 1874, Vol. iv, Doc. No. 5:3. ]
After recording its findings that it was satisfied from the evidence
that "the grossest frauds have been committed in swamp matters in
this State, "the committee went on:
Formerly it was the custom to permit filings upon real or alleged
swamp lands, and to allow the applications to lie unacted upon for an
indefinite number of years, at the option of the applicants. In these
cases, parties on the "inside" of the Land Office "ring" had but to
wait until some one should come along who wanted to take up these
lands in good faith, and they would "sell out" to them their "rights"
to land on which they had never paid a cent, nor intended to pay a
cent.
Or, if the nature of the land was doubtful, they would postpone all
investigation until the height of the floods during the rainy season,
when surveyors, in interest with themselves, would be sent out to
make favorable reports as to the "swampy" character of the land. In
the mountain valleys and on the other side of the Sierras, the lands
are overflowed from melting snow exactly when the water is most
wanted; but the simple presence of the water is all that is necessary
to show to the speculators that the land is "swamp," and it therefore
presents an inviting opportunity for this grasping cupidity.
[Footnote: Report of the Swamp Land Investigating Committee, etc.,
5.]
In his exhaustive report for 1885, Commissioner Sparks, of the
General Land Office, described at great length the vast frauds that
had continuously been going on in the granting of alleged "swamp"
lands, and in fraudulent surveys, in many States and Territories.
[Footnote: House Documents, First Session, Forty-ninth Congress,
1885-86, Vol. ii.] "I thus found this office," he wrote, "a mere
instrumentality in the hands of 'surveying rings.'" [Footnote: Ibid.,
166] "Sixteen townships examined in Colorado in 1885 were found to
have been surveyed on paper only, no actual surveying having been
done. [Footnote: Ibid., 165 ] In twenty-two other townships examined
in Colorado, purporting to have been surveyed under a "special-
deposit" contract awarded in 1881, the surveys were found wholly
fraudulent in seven, while the other fifteen were full of fraud."
[Footnote: House Documents, etc., 1885-86, ii: 165]
These are a very few of the numerous instances cited by Commissioner
Sparks. Although the law restricted surveys to agricultural lands and
for homestead entries, yet the Land Office had long corruptly allowed
what it was pleased to term certain "liberal regulations." Surveys
were so construed as to include any portion of townships the "larger
portion" of which was not "known" to be of a mineral character. These
"regulations," which were nothing more or less than an extra-legal
license to land-grabbers, also granted surveys for desert lands and
timber lands under the timber-land act. By the terms of this act, it
will be recalled, those who entered and took title to desert and
timber lands were not required to be actual settlers. Thus, it was
only necessary for the surveyors in the hire of the great land
grabbers to report fine grazing, agricultural, timber or mineral land
as "desert land," and vast areas could be seized by single
individuals or corporations with facility.
Two specific laws directly contributed to the effectiveness of this
spoliation. One act, passed by Congress on May 30, 1862, authorized
surveys to be made at the expense of settlers in the townships that
those settlers desired surveyed. Another act, called the Deposit Act,
passed in 1871, provided that the amounts deposited by settlers
should be partly applied in payment for the lands thus surveyed.
Together, these two laws made the grasping of land on an extensive
scale a simple process. The "settler" (which so often meant, in
reality, the capitalist) could secure the collusion of the Land
Office, and have fraudulent surveys made. Under these surveys he
could lay claim to immense tracts of the most valuable land and have
them reported as "swamp" or "desert" lands; he could have the
boundaries of original claims vastly enlarged; and the fact that part
of his disbursements for surveying was considered as a payment for
those lands, stood in law as virtually a confirmation of his claim.
ACTUAL SETTLERS EXCLUDED FROM PUBLIC DOMAIN.
"Wealthy speculators and powerful syndicates," reported Commissioner
Sparks,
covet the public domain, and a survey is the first step in the
accomplishment of this desire. The bulk of deposit surveys have been
made in timber districts and grazing regions, and the surveyed lands
have immediately been entered under the timber land, preŽmption,
commuted homestead, timber-culture and desert-land acts. So
thoroughly organized has been the entire system of procuring the
survey and making illegal entry of lands, that agents and attorneys
engaged in this business have been advised of every official
proceeding, and enabled to present entry applications for the lands
at the very moment of the filing of the plots of survey in the local
land offices.
Prospectors employed by lumber firms and corporations seek out and
report the most valuable timber tracts in California, Oregon,
Washington Territory or elsewhere; settler's applications are
manufactured as a basis for survey; contracts are entered into and
pushed through the General Land Office in hot haste; a skeleton
survey is made... entry papers, made perfect in form by competent
attorneys, are filed in bulk, and the manipulators enter into
possession of the land. . . . This has been the course of proceeding
heretofore. [Footnote: House Documents, etc., 1885-86, ii: 167.]
Commissioner Sparks described a case where it was discovered by his
special agents in California that an English firm had obtained
100,000 acres of the choicest red-wood lands in that State. These
lands were then estimated to be worth $100 an acre. The cost of
procuring surveys and fraudulent entries did not probably exceed $3
an acre. [Footnote: House Ex. Docs., etc., 1885-86, ii: 167.]
"In the same manner," Commissioner Sparks continued, "extensive coal
deposits in our Western territory are acquired in mass through
expedited surveys, followed by fraudulent pre-emption and commuted
homestead entries." [Footnote: Ibid.] He went on to tell that nearly
the whole of the Territory (now State) of Wyoming, and large portions
of Montana, had been surveyed under the deposit system, and the lands
on the streams fraudulently taken up under the desert land act, to
the exclusion of actual settlers. Nearly all of Colorado, the very
best cattle-raising portions of New Mexico, the rich timber lands of
California, the splendid forest lands of Washington Territory and the
principal part of the extensive pine lands of Minnesota had been
fraudulently seized in the same way. [Footnote: Ibid., 168.] In all
of the Western States and Territories these fraudulent surveys had
accomplished the seizure of the best and most valuable lands. "To
enable the pressing tide of Western immigration to secure homes upon
the public domain," Commissioner Sparks urged, "it is necessary...
that hundreds of millions of acres of public lands now appropriated
should be wrested from illegal control." [Footnote: Ibid.] But
nothing was done to recover these stolen lands. At the very time
Commissioner Sparks--one of the very few incorruptible Commissioners
of Public Lands,--was writing this, the land-grabbing interests were
making the greatest exertions to get him removed. During his tenure
of office they caused him to be malevolently harassed and assailed.
After he left office they resumed complete domination of the Land
Commissioner's Bureau. [Footnote: The methods of capitalists in
causing the removal of officials who obstructed or exposed their
crimes and violent seizure of property were continuous and long
enduring. It was a very old practice. When Astor was debauching and
swindling Indian tribes, he succeeded, it seems, by exerting his
power at Washington, in causing Government agents standing in his way
to be dismissed from office. The following is an extract from a
communication, in 1821, of the U. S. Indian agent at Green Bay,
Wisconsin, to the U. S. Superintendent of Indian Trade:
"The Indians are frequently kept in a state of intoxication, giving
their furs, etc., at a great sacrifice for whiskey.... The agents of
Mr. Astor hold out the idea that they will, ere long be able to break
down the factories [Government agencies]; and they menace the Indian
agents and others who may interfere with them, with dismission from
office through Mr. Astor. They say that a representation from Messrs.
Crooks and Stewart (Mr. Astor's agents) led to the dismission of the
Indian agent at Mackinac, and they also say that the Indian agent
here is to be dismissed...."--U.S. Senate Documents, First Session,
Seventeenth Congress, 1821-22, Vol. i, Doc. No. 60:52-53.]
THE GIGANTIC PRIVATE LAND CLAIM FRAUDS.
The frauds in the settlement of private land claims on alleged grants
by Spain and Mexico were colossal. Vast estates in California, New
Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and other States were obtained by collusion
with the Government administrative officials and Congress. These were
secured upon the strength of either forged documents purporting to be
grants from the Spanish or Mexican authorities, or by means of
fraudulent surveys.
One of the most notorious of these was the Beaubin and Miranda grant,
otherwise famous thirty years ago as the Maxwell land grant. A
reference to it here is indispensable. It was by reason of this
transaction, as well as by other similar transactions, that one of
the American multimillionaires obtained his original millions. This
individual was Stephen B. Elkins, at present a powerful member of the
United States Senate, and one of the ruling oligarchy of wealth. He
is said to possess a fortune of at least $50,000,000, and his
daughter, it is reported, is to marry the Duke of the Abruzzi, a
scion of the royal family of Italy.
The New Mexico claim of Beaubin and Miranda transferred to L. B.
Maxwell, was allowed by the Government in 1869, but for ninety-six
thousand acres only. The owner refused to comply with the law, and in
1874 the Department of the Interior ordered the grant to be treated
as public lands and thrown open to settlement. Despite this order,
the Government officials in New Mexico, acting in collusion with
other interested parties, illegally continued to assess it as private
property. In 1877 a fraudulent tax sale was held, and the grant,
fraudulently enlarged to 1,714,764.94 acres, was purchased by M. M.
Mills, a member of the New Mexico Legislature. He transferred the
title to T. B. Catron, the United States Attorney for New Mexico.
Presently Elkins turned up as the principal owner. The details of how
this claim was repeatedly shown up to be fraudulent by Land
Commissioners and Congressional Committees; how the settlers in New
Mexico fought it and sought to have it declared void, and the law
enforced; [Footnote: "Land Titles in New Mexico and Colorado," House
Reports First Session, Fifty-second Congress, 1891-92, Vol. iv,
Report No. 1253. Also, House Reports, First Session, Fifty-second
Congress, 1891-92, Vol. vii, Report No. 1824. Also, House Reports,
First Session, Forty-ninth Congress, 1885-86, ii: 170.] and how
Elkins, for some years himself a Delegate in Congress from New
Mexico, succeeded in having the grant finally validated on technical
grounds, and "judicially cleared" of all taint of fraud, by an
astounding decision of the Supreme Court of the United States--a
decision contrary to the facts as specifically shown by successive
Government officials--all of these details are set forth fully in
another part of this work. [Footnote: See "The Elkins Fortune," in
Vol. iii.]
The forgeries and fraudulent surveys by which these huge estates were
secured were astoundingly bold and frequent. Large numbers of private
land claims, rejected by various Land Commissioners as fraudulent,
were corruptly confirmed by Congress. In 1870, the heirs of one
Gervacio Nolan applied for confirmation of two grants alleged to have
been made to an ancestor under the colonization laws of New Mexico.
They claimed more than 1,500,000 acres, but Congress conditionally
confirmed their claim to the extent of forty-eight thousand acres
only, asserting that the Mexican laws had limited to this area the
area of public lands that could be granted to one individual. In 1880
the Land Office re-opened the claim, and a new survey was made by
surveyors in collusion with the claimants, and hired by them. When
the report of this survey reached Washington, the Land Office
officials were interested to note that the estate had grown from
forty-eight thousand acres to five hundred and seventy-five thousand
acres, or twelve times the legal quantity. [Footnote: House Reports,
First Session, Forty-ninth Congress, 1885-86, ii: 171.] The actual
settlers were then evicted. The romancer might say that the officials
were amazed; they were not; such fraudulent enlargements were common.
The New Mexico estate of Francis Martinez, granted under the Mexican
laws restricting a single grant to forty-eight thousand acres, was by
a fraudulent survey, extended to 594,515.55 acres, and patented in
1881. [Footnote: Ibid., 172.] A New Mexico grant said to have been
made to Salvador Gonzales, in 1742, comprising "a spot of land to
enable him to plant a cornfield for the support of his family." was
fraudulently surveyed and enlarged to 103,959.31 acres--a survey
amended later by reducing the area to 23,661 acres. [Footnote: House
Reports, etc, 1885-86, ii: 172.] The B. M. Montaya grant in New
Mexico, limited to forty-eight thousand acres, under the Mexican
colonization laws, was fraudulently surveyed for 151,056.97 acres.
The Estancia grant in New Mexico also restricted under the
colonization act to forty-eight thousand acres, was enlarged by a
fraudulent survey to 415,036.56 acres. [Footnote: Ibid., 173.] In
1768, Ignacio Chaves and others in New Mexico petitioned for a tract
of about two and one-fourth superficial leagues, or approximately a
little less than ten thousand acres. A fraudulent survey magnified
this claim to 243,036.43 acres. [Footnote: Ibid.]
These are a very few of the large number of forged or otherwise
fraudulent claims.
Some were rejected by Congress; many, despite Land Office protests,
were confirmed. By these fraudulent and corrupt operations, enormous
estates were obtained in New Mexico, Colorado and in other sections.
The Pablo Montaya grant comprised in all, 655,468.07 acres; the Mora
grant 827,621.01 acres; the Tierra Amarilla grant 594,515 acres, and
the Sangre de Cristo grant 998,780.46 acres. All of these were
corruptly obtained. [Footnote: See Resolution of House Committee on
Private Land Claims, June, 1892, demanding a thorough investigation.
The House took no action.--Report No. 1824, 1892.] Scores of other
claims were confirmed for lesser areas. During Commissioner Sparks'
tenure of office, claims to 8,500,000 acres in New Mexico alone were
pending before Congress. A comprehensive account of the operations of
the land-grabbers, giving the explicit facts, as told in Government
and court records, of their system of fraud, is presented in the
chapter on the Elkins fortune.
FORGERY, PERJURY AND FRAUDULENT SURVEY.
Reporting, in 1881, to the Commissioner of the General Land Office,
Henry M. Atkinson, U. S. Surveyor-General of New Mexico, wrote that
"the investigation of this office for the past five years has
demonstrated that some of the alleged grants are forgeries." He set
forth that unless the court before which these claims were
adjudicated could have full access to the archives, "it is much more
liable to be imposed upon by fraudulent title papers." [Footnote:
"The Public Domain," etc. 1124. Also see next Footnote.] In fact, the
many official reports describe with what cleverness the claimants to
these great areas forged their papers, and the facility with which
they bought up witnesses to perjure for them. Finding it impossible
to go back of the aggregate and corroborative "evidence" thus
offered, the courts were frequently forced to decide in favor of the
claimants. To use a modern colloquial phrase, the cases were "framed
up." In the case of Luis Jamarillo's claim to eighteen thousand acres
in New Mexico, U. S. Surveyor-General Julian of New Mexico, in
recommending the rejection of the claim and calling attention to the
perjury committed, said:
When these facts are considered, in connection with the further and
well-known fact that such witnesses can readily be found by grant
claimants, and that in this way the most monstrous frauds have been
practiced in extending the lines of such grants in New Mexico, it is
not possible to accept the statement of this witness as to the west
boundary of this grant, which he locates at such a distance from the
east line as to include more than four times the amount of land
actually granted. [Footnote: Senate Executive Documents, First
Session, Fiftieth Congress, 1887-88, Vol. i, Private Land Claim No.
103, Ex. Doc. No. 20:3. Documents Nos. 3 to 11, 13 to 23, 25 to 29
and 38 in the same volume deal with similar claims.]
"The widespread belief of the people of this country," wrote
Commissioner Sparks in 1885, "that the land department has been
largely conducted to the advantage of speculation and monopoly,
private and corporate, rather than in the public interest, I have
found supported by developments in every branch of the service.... I
am satisfied that thousands of claims without foundation in law or
equity, involving millions of acres of public land, have been
annually passed to patent upon the single proposition that nobody but
the Government had any _adverse_ interest. The vast machinery of
the land department has been devoted to the chief result of conveying
the title of the United States to public lands upon fraudulent
entries under loose construction of law." [Footnote: House Ex. Docs.,
1885-86, ii: 156.] Whenever a capitalist's interest was involved, the
law was always "loosely construed," but the strictest interpretation
was invariably given to laws passed against the working population.
It was estimated, in 1892, that 57,000,000 acres of land in New
Mexico and Colorado had, for more than thirty years, been unlawfully
treated by public officers as having been ceded to the United States
by Mexico. The Maxwell, Sangre de Cristo, Nolan and other grants were
within this area. The House Committee on Private Land Claims reported
on April 29, 1892: "A long list of alleged Mexican and Spanish grants
within the limits of the Texas cession have been confirmed, or quit
claimed by Congress, under the false representation that said alleged
grants were located in the territory of New Mexico ceded by the
treaty; an enormous area of land has long been and is now held as
confirmed Mexican and Spanish grants, located in the territory of
Mexico ceded by the treaty when such is not the fact." [Footnote:
House Report, 1892, No. 1253:8.]
In Texas the fraudulent, and often, violent methods of the seizure of
land by the capitalists were fully as marked as those used elsewhere.
Upon its admittance to the Union, Texas retained the disposition of
its public lands. Up to about the year 1864, almost the entire area
of Texas, comprising 274,356 square miles, or 175,587,840 acres, was
one vast unfenced feeding ground for cattle, horses and sheep. In
about the year 1874, the agricultural movement began; large numbers
of intending farmers migrated to Texas, particularly with the
expectation of raising cattle, then a highly profitable business.
They found huge stretches of the land already preempted by individual
capitalists or corporations. In a number of instances, some of these
individuals, according to the report of a Congressional Committee, in
1884, dealing with Texas lands, had each acquired the ownership of
more than two hundred and fifty thousand acres.
"It is a notorious fact," this committee reported, "that the public
land laws, although framed with the special object of encouraging the
public domain, of developing its resources and protecting actual
settlers, have been extensively evaded and violated. Individuals and
corporations have, by purchasing the proved-up claims, or purchases
of ostensible settlers, employed by them to make entry, extensively
secured the ownership of large bodies of land." [Footnote: House
Reports, Second Session, Forty-eighth Congress, 1884-85, Vol. xxix,
Ex. Doc. No. 267:43.] The committee went on to describe how, to a
very considerable extent, "foreigners of large means" had obtained
these great areas, and had gone into the cattle business, and how the
titles to these lands were se-cured not only by individuals but by
foreign corporations. "Certain of these foreigners are titled
noblemen. Some of them have brought over from Europe, in considerable
numbers, herdsmen and other employees who sustain to them a dependent
relationship characteristic of the peasantry on the large landed
estates of Europe." Two British syndicates, for instance, held
7,500,000 acres in Texas. [Footnote: House Reports, etc., 1884-85,
Doc. No. 267:46.]
This spoliation of the public domain was one of the chief grievances
of the National Greenback-Labor party in 1880. This party, to a great
extent, was composed of the Western farming element. In his letter
accepting the nomination of that party for President of the United
States, Gen. Weaver, himself a member of long standing in Congress
from Iowa, wrote:
An area of our public domain larger than the territory occupied by
the great German Empire has been wantonly donated to wealthy
corporations; while a bill introduced by Hon. Hendrick B. Wright, of
Pennsylvania, to enable our poor people to reach and occupy the few
acres remaining, has been scouted, ridiculed, and defeated in
Congress. In consequence of this stupendous system of land-grabbing,
millions of the young men of America, and millions more of
industrious people from abroad, seeking homes in the New World, are
left homeless and destitute. The public domain must be sacredly
reserved to actual settlers, and where corporations have not complied
strictly with the terms of their grants, the lands should be at once
reclaimed.
INCREASE OF FARM TENANTRY.
Without dwelling upon all the causative factors--involving an
extended work in themselves--some significant general results will be
pointed out.
The original area of public domain amounted to 1,815,504,147 acres,
of which considerably more than half, embracing some of the very best
agricultural, grazing, mineral and timber lands, was already
alienated by the year 1880. By 1896 the alienation reached
806,532,362 acres. Of the original area, about 50,000,000 acres of
forests have been withdrawn from the public domain by the Government,
and converted into forest reservations. Large portions of such of the
agricultural, grazing, mineral and timber lands as were not seized by
various corporations and favored individuals before 1880, have been
expropriated west of the Mississippi since then, and the process is
still going, notably in Alaska. The nominal records of the General
Land Office as to the number of homesteaders are of little value and
are very misleading. Immense numbers of alleged homesteaders were, as
we have copiously seen, nothing but paid dummies by whose entries
vast tracts of land were seized under color of law. It is
indisputably clear that hundreds of millions of acres of the public
domain have been obtained by outright fraud.
Notwithstanding the fact that only a few years before, the Government
had held far more than enough land to have provided every
agriculturist with a farm, yet by 1880, a large farm tenant class had
already developed. Not less than 1,024,061 of the 4,008,907 farms in
the United States were held by renters. One-fourth of all the farms
in the United States were cultivated by men who did not own them.
Furthermore, and even more impressive, there were 3,323,876 farm
laborers composed of men who did not even rent land. Equally
significant was the increasing tendency to the operating of large
farms by capitalists with the hired labor. Of farms under
cultivation, extending from one hundred to five hundred acres, there
were nearly a million and a half--1,416,618, to give the exact
number--owned largely by capitalists and cultivated by laborers.
[Footnote: Tenth Census, Statistics of Agriculture: 28.]
Phillips, who had superior opportunities for getting at the real
facts, and whose volume upon the subject issued at the time is well
worthy of consideration, thus commented upon the census returns:
It will thus be seen that of the 7,670,493 persons in our country
engaged in agriculture, there are 1,024,601 who pay rent to persons
not cultivating the soil; 1,508,828 capitalist or speculating owners,
who own the soil and employ laborers; 804,522 of well-to-do farmers
who hire part of their work or employ laborers, and 670,944 who may
be said to actually cultivate the soil they own: the rest are hired
workers.
Phillips goes on to remark:
Another fact must be borne in mind, that a large number of the
2,984,306 farmers who own land are in debt for it to the money
lenders. From the writer's observation it is probable that forty per
cent, of them are so deeply in debt as to pay a rent in interest.
This squeezing process is going on at the rate of eight and ten per
cent., and in most cases can terminate in but one way. [Footnote:
"Labor, Land and Law": 353. It is difficult to get reliable
statistics on the number of mortgages on farms, and on the number of
farm tenants. The U.S. Industrial Commission estimated, in 1902, that
fifty per cent, of the homesteads in Eastern Minnesota were
mortgaged. Although admitting that such a condition had been general,
it represented in its Final Report that a large number of mortgages
in certain States had been paid off. According to the "Political
Science Quarterly" (Vol. xi, No. 4, 1896) the United States Census of
1890 showed a marked increase, not only absolutely, but relatively in
the number of farm tenants. It can hardly be doubted that farm
tenantry is rapidly increasing and will under the influence of
various causes increase still more.]
A LARGELY DISPOSSESSED NATION.
These are the statistics of a Government which, it is known, seeks to
make its showing as favorable as possible to the existing regime.
They make it clear that a rapid process of the dispossession of the
industrial working, the middle and the small farming classes has been
going on unceasingly. If the process was so marked in 1900 what must
it be now? All of the factors operating to impoverish the farming
population of the United States and turn them into homeless tenants
have been a thousandfold intensified and augmented in the last ten
years, beginning with the remarkable formation of hundreds of trusts
in 1898. Even though the farmer may get higher prices for his
products, as he did in 1908 and 1909, the benefits are deceptively
transient, while the expropriating process is persistent.
There was a time when farm land in Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota,
Indiana, Wisconsin, and many other States was considered of high
value. But in the last few years an extraordinary sight has been
witnessed. Hundreds of thousands of American farmers migrated to the
virgin fields of Northwest Canada and settled there--a portentous
movement significant of the straits to which the American farmer has
been driven.
Abandoned farms in the East are numerous; in New York State alone
22,000 are registered. Hitherto the farmer has considered himself a
sort of capitalist: if not hostile to the industrial working classes,
he has been generally apathetic. But now he is being forced to the
point of being an absolute dependant himself, and will inevitably
align his interests with those of his brothers in the factories and
in the shops.
With this contrast of the forces at work which gave empires of public
domain to the few, while dispossessing the tens of millions, we will
now proceed to a consideration of some of the fortunes based upon
railroads.