_Its Effect on Industry and Trade_
_Address before Nineteenth Century Club at Delmonico’s, New York City,
March 21st, 1899._
In my early years I stood before the open door of a blazing furnace and
piled in the fuel to create steam to speed a locomotive along the iron
track of progress and civilization. In the costume of the craft, through
the grime of mingled sweat and smoke and dust I was initiated into the
great brotherhood of labor. The locomotive was my alma mater. I mastered
the curriculum and graduated with the degree of D. D., not, as the
lexicons interpret the letters, “Doctor of Divinity,” but that better
signification, “Do and Dare”—a higher degree than Aristotle conferred in
his Lyceum or Plato thundered from his academy.
I am not in the habit of telling how little I know about Latin to those
who have slaked their thirst for learning at the Pierian springs, but
there is a proverb that has come down to us from the dim past which
reads “Omnia vincit labor” and which has been adopted as the shibboleth
of the American labor movement because, when reduced to English, it
reads “Labor overcomes all things.” In a certain sense this is true.
Labor has built this great metropolis of the new world, built it as
coral insects build the foundations of islands—build and die; build from
the fathomless depth of the ocean until the mountain billows are dashed
into spray as they beat against the fortifications beneath which the
builders are forever entombed and forgotten.
Here in this proud city where wealth has built its monuments grander and
more imposing than any of the seven wonders of the world named in
classic lore, if you will excavate for facts you will find the remains,
the bones of the toilers, buried and imbedded in their foundations. They
lived, they wrought, they died. In their time they may have laughed and
sung and danced to the music of their clanking chains. They married,
propagated their species, and perpetuated conditions which, growing
steadily worse, are today the foulest blots the imagination can conceive
upon our much vaunted civilization.
And from these conditions there flow a thousand streams of vice and
crime which have broadened and deepened until they constitute a
perpetual menace to the peace and security of society. Jails,
workhouses, reformatories and penitentiaries have been crowded with
victims, and the question how to control these institutions and their
unfortunate inmates is challenging the most serious thought of the most
advanced nations on the globe.
The particular phase of this grave and melancholy question which we are
to consider this evening is embodied in the subject assigned the
speakers: “Prison Labor, Its Effects on Industry and Trade.”
I must confess that it would have suited my purpose better had the
subject been transposed so as to read: “Industry and Trade, Their Effect
on Labor,” for, as a Socialist, I am convinced that the prison problem
is rooted in the present system of industry and trade, carried forward,
as it is, purely for private profit without the slightest regard to the
effect upon those engaged in it, especially the men, women and children
who perform the useful, productive labor which has created all wealth
and all civilization.
Serious as is the problem presented in the subject of our discussion, it
is yet insignificant when compared with the vastly greater question of
the effect of our social and economic system upon industry and trade.
The pernicious effect of prison contract labor upon “free labor,” so
called, when brought into competition with it in the open market, is
universally conceded, but it should not be overlooked that prison labor
is itself an effect and not a cause, and that convict labor is recruited
almost wholly from the propertyless, wage-working class and that the
inhuman system which has reduced a comparative few from enforced
idleness to crime, has sunk the whole mass of labor to the dead level of
industrial servitude.
It is therefore with the economic system, which is responsible for, not
only prison labor, but for the gradual enslavement and degradation of
all labor, that we must deal before there can be any solution of the
prison labor problem or any permanent relief from its demoralizing
influences.
But we will briefly consider the effect of prison labor upon industry
and then pass to the larger question of the cause of prison labor and
its appalling increase, to which the discussion logically leads.
From the earliest ages there has been a prison problem. The ancients had
their bastiles and their dungeons. Most of the pioneers of progress, the
haters of oppression, the lovers of liberty, whose names now glorify the
pantheon of the world, made such institutions a necessity in their day.
But civilization advances, however slowly, and there has been some
progress. It required five hundred years to travel from the inquisition
to the injunction.
In the earlier days punishment was the sole purpose of imprisonment.
Offenders against the ruling class must pay the penalty in prison cell,
which, not infrequently, was equipped with instruments of torture. With
the civilizing process came the idea of the reformation of the culprit,
and this idea prompts every investigation made of the latter-day
problem. The inmates must be set to work for their own good, no less
than for the good of the state.
It was at this point that the convict labor problem began and it has
steadily expanded from that time to this and while there have been some
temporary modifications of the evil, it is still an unmitigated curse
from which there can be no escape while an economic system endures in
which labor, that is to say the laborer, man, woman and child, is sold
to the lowest bidder in the markets of the world.
More than thirty years ago Prof. E. C. Wines and Prof. Theodore W.
Dwight, then commissioners of the Prison Association of New York, made a
report to the legislature of the state on prison industry in which they
said:
“Upon the whole it is our settled conviction that the contract
system of convict labor, added to the system of political
appointments, which necessarily involves a low grade of official
qualification and constant changes in the prison staff, renders
nugatory, to a great extent, the whole theory of our penitentiary
system. Inspection may correct isolated abuses; philanthropy may
relieve isolated cases of distress; and religion may effect isolated
moral cures; but genuine, radical, comprehensive, systematic
improvement is impossible.”
The lapse of thirty years has not affected the wisdom or logic of the
conclusion. It is as true now as it was then. Considered in his most
favorable light, the convict is a scourge to himself, a menace to
society and a burden to industry, and whatever system of convict labor
may be tried, it will ultimately fail of its purpose at reformation of
the criminal or the relief of industry as long as thousands of “free
laborers,” who have committed no crime, are unable to get work and make
an honest living. Not long ago I visited a penitentiary in which a
convict expressed regret that his sentence was soon to expire. Where was
he to go, and what was he to do? And how long before he would be
sentenced to a longer term for a greater crime?
The commission which investigated the matter in Ohio in 1877 reported to
the legislature as follows:
“The contract system interferes in an undue manner with the honest
industry of the state. It has been the cause of crippling the
business of many of our manufacturers; it has been the cause of
driving many of them out of business; it has been the cause of a
large percentage of reductions which have taken place in the wages
of our mechanics; it has been the cause of pauperizing a large
portion of our laborers and increasing crime in a corresponding
degree; it has been no benefit to the state; as a reformatory
measure it has been a complete, total and miserable failure; it has
hardened more criminals than any other cause; it has made total
wrecks morally of thousands and thousands who would have been
reclaimed from the paths of vice and crime under a proper system of
prison management, but who have resigned their fate to a life of
hopeless degradation; it has not a single commendable feature. Its
tendency is pernicious in the extreme. In short, it is an
insurmountable barrier in the way of the reformation of the
unfortunates who are compelled to live and labor under its evil
influences; it enables a class of men to get rich out of the crimes
committed by others; it leaves upon the fair escutcheon of the state
a relic of the very worst form of human slavery; it is a bone of
ceaseless contention between the state and its mechanical and
industrial interests; it is abhorred by all and respected by none
except those, perhaps, who make profit and gain out of it. It should
be tolerated no longer but abolished at once.”
And yet this same system is still in effect in many of the states of the
Union. The most revolting outrages have been perpetrated upon prison
laborers under this diabolical system. Read the official reports and
stand aghast at the atrocities committed against these morally deformed
and perverted human creatures, your brothers and my brothers, for the
private profit of capitalistic exploiters and the advancement of
Christian civilization.
What a commentary on the capitalist competitive system! First, men are
forced into idleness. Gradually they are driven to the extremity of
begging or stealing. Having still a spark of pride and self-respect they
steal and are sent to jail. The first sentence seals their doom. The
brand of Cain is upon them. They are identified with the criminal class.
Society, whose victims they are, has exiled them forever, and with this
curse ringing in their ears they proceed on their downward career,
sounding every note in the scale of depravity until at last, having
graduated in crime all the way from petit larceny to homicide, their
last despairing sigh is wrung from them by the hangman’s halter. From
first to last these unfortunates, the victims of social malformation,
are made the subjects of speculation and traffic. The barbed iron of the
prison contractor is plunged into their quivering hearts that their
torture may be coined into private profit for their exploiters.
In the investigation in South Carolina, where the convicts had been
leased to railroad companies, the most shocking disclosures were made.
Out of 285 prisoners employed by one company, 128, or more than 40 per
cent, died as the result, largely, of brutal treatment.
It is popular to say that society must be protected against its
criminals. I prefer to believe that criminals should be protected
against society, at least while we live under a system that makes the
commission of crime necessary to secure employment.
The Tennessee tragedy is still fresh in the public memory. Here, as
elsewhere, the convicts, themselves brutally treated, were used as a
means of dragging the whole mine-working class down to their
crime-cursed condition. The Tennessee Coal and Iron Company leased the
convicts for the express purpose of forcing the wages of miners down to
the point of subsistence. Says the official report: “The miners were
compelled to work in competition with low-priced convict labor, the
presence of which was used by the company as a scourge to force free
laborers to its terms.” Then the miners, locked out, their families
suffering, driven to desperation, appealed to force and in a twinkling
the laws of the state were trampled down, the authorities overpowered
and defied, and almost five hundred convicts set at liberty.
Fortunately the system of leasing and contracting prison labor for
private exploitation is being exposed and its frightful iniquities laid
bare. Thanks to organized labor and to the spirit of prison reform, this
horrifying phase of the evil is doomed to disappear before an
enlightened public sentiment.
The public account system, though subject to serious criticism, is far
less objectionable than either the lease, the contract or the
piece-price system. At least the prisoner’s infirmities cease to be the
prey of speculative greed and conscienceless rapacity.
The system of manufacturing for the use of state, county and municipal
institutions, adopted by the state of New York, is an improvement upon
those hitherto in effect, but it is certain to develop serious
objections in course of time. With the use of modern machinery the
limited demand will soon be supplied and then what? It may be in order
to suggest that the prisoners could be employed in making shoes and
clothes for the destitute poor and school books for their children and
many other articles which the poor sorely need but are unable to buy.
Developing along this line it would be only a question of time until the
state would be manufacturing all things for the use of the people, and
then perhaps the inquiry would be pertinent: If the state can give men
steady employment after they commit crime, and manufacturing can be
carried forward successfully by their labor, why can it not give them
employment before they are driven to that extremity, thereby preventing
them from becoming criminals?
All useful labor is honest labor, even if performed in a prison. Only
the labor of exploiters, such as speculators, stock gamblers,
beef-embalmers and their mercenary politicians, lawyers and other
parasites—only such is dishonest labor. A thief making shoes in a
penitentiary is engaged in more useful and therefore more honest labor
than a “free” stonemason at work on a palace whose foundations are laid
in the skulls and bones, and cemented in the sweat and blood of ten
thousand victims of capitalistic exploitation. In both cases the labor
is compulsory. The stonemason would not work for the trust-magnate were
he not compelled to.
In ancient times only slaves labored. And as a matter of fact only
slaves labor now. The millions are made by the magic of manipulation.
The coal miners of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and
Illinois receive an average wage of less than seventy-five cents a day.
They perform the most useful and necessary labor, without which your
homes, if possible at all, would be cheerless as caves and the great
heart of industry would cease to throb. Are they free men, or are they
slaves? And what is the effect of _their_ labor on trade and industry
and upon themselves and their families? Dante would search the realms of
inferno in vain for such pictures of horror and despair as are to be
found in the mining regions of free America.
To the student of social science the haggard fact stands forth that
under the competitive system of production and distribution the prison
problem will never be solved—and its effect upon trade and industry will
never be greatly modified. The fact will remain that whatever labor is
performed by prison labor could and should be performed by free labor,
and when in the march of economic progress the capitalist system of
industry for private profit succumbs to the socialist system of industry
for human happiness, when the factory, which is now a penitentiary
crowded with life convicts, among whom children often constitute the
majority—when this factory is transformed into a temple of science, and
the machine, myriad-armed and tireless, is the only slave, there will be
no prison labor and the problem will cease to vex the world, and to this
it is coming in obedience to the economic law, as unerring in its
operation as the law of gravitation.
That prison labor is demoralizing in its effect on trade and industry
whenever and wherever brought into competition with it, especially under
the various forms of the contract system, is of course conceded, but
that it has been, or is at present, a great factor in such
demoralization is not admitted. There is a tendency to exaggerate the
blighting effects of prison labor for the purpose of obscuring the one
overshadowing cause of demoralized trade and impoverished industry.
Prison labor did not reduce the miner to a walking hunger-pang, his wife
to a tear-stained rag, and his home to a lair. Prison labor is not
responsible for the squares of squalor and miles of misery in New York,
Chicago and all other centers of population. Prison labor is not
chargeable with the sweating dens in which the victims of capitalistic
competition crouch in dread and fear until death comes to their rescue.
Prison labor had no hand in Cœur d’Alene, Tennessee, Homestead,
Hazleton, Virden, Pana, that suburb of hell called Pullman and other
ensanguined industrial battle fields where thousands of workingmen after
being oppressed and robbed were imprisoned like felons, and shot down
like vagabond dogs; where venal judges issued infamous injunctions and
despotic orders at the behest of their masters, enforcing them with
deputy marshals armed with pistols and clubs and supported by troops
with gleaming bayonets and shotted guns to drain the veins of workingmen
of blood, but for whose labor this continent would still be a
wilderness. Only the tortures of hunger and nakedness provoked protest,
and this was silenced by the bayonet and bullet; by the club and the
blood that followed the blow.
Prison labor is not accountable for the appalling increase in insanity,
in suicide, in murder, in prostitution and a thousand other forms of
vice and crime which pollute every fountain and contaminate every stream
designed to bless the world.
Prison labor did not create our army of unemployed, but has been
recruited from its ranks, and both owe their existence to the same
social and economic system.
Nor are the evil effects confined exclusively to the poor working class.
There is an aspect of the case in which the rich are as unfortunate as
the poor. The destiny of the capitalist class is irrevocably linked with
the working class. Fichte, the great German philosopher said,
“Wickedness increases in proportion to the elevation of rank.”
Prison labor is but one of the manifestations of our economic
development and indicates its trend. The same cause that demoralized
industry has crowded our prisons. Industry has not been impoverished by
prison labor, but prison labor is the result of impoverished industry.
The limited time at my command will not permit an analysis of the
process.
The real question which confronts us is our industrial system and its
effects upon labor. One of these effects is, as I have intimated, prison
labor. What is its cause? What makes it necessary? The answer is, the
competitive system, which creates wage-slavery, throws thousands out of
employment and reduces the wages of thousands more to the point of bare
subsistence.
Why is prison labor preferred to “free labor?” Simply because it is
cheaper; it yields more profit to the man who buys, exploits and sells
it. But this has its limitations. Capitalist competition that throngs
the streets with idle workers, capitalist production that reduces human
labor to a commodity and ultimately to crime—this system produces
another kind of prison labor in the form of child labor which is being
utilized more and more to complete the subjugation of the working class.
There is this difference: The prison laborers are clothed and housed and
fed. The child laborers whose wage is a dollar a week, or even less,
must take care of themselves.
Prison labor is preferred because it is cheap. So with child labor. It
is not a question of prison labor, or of child labor, but of _cheap_
labor.
Tenement-house labor is another form of prison labor.
The effects of cheap labor on trade and industry must be the same,
whether such labor is done by prisoners, tenement house slaves, children
or starving “hoboes.”
The prison laborer produces by machinery in abundance but does not
consume. The child likewise produces, but owing to its small wages, does
not consume. So with the vast army of workers whose wage grows smaller
as the productive capacity of labor increases, and then society is
afflicted with overproduction, the result of under-consumption. What
follows? The panic. Factories close down, wage-workers are idle and
suffer, middle-class business men are forced into bankruptcy, the army
of tramps is increased, vice and crime are rampant and prisons and
work-houses are filled to overflowing as are sewers when the streets of
cities are deluged with floods.
Prison labor, like all cheap labor, is at first a source of profit to
the capitalist, but finally it turns into a two-edged sword that cuts
into and destroys the system that produced it.
First, the capitalist pocket is filled by the employment of cheap
labor—and then the bottom drops out of it.
In the cheapening process, the pauperized mass have lost their consuming
power.
The case may now be summed up as follows:
_First._ Prison labor is bad; it has a demoralizing effect on capitalist
trade and industry.
_Second._ Child labor, tenement house and every other form of cheap
labor is bad; it is destructive of trade and industry.
_Third._ Capitalist competition is bad; it creates a demand for cheap
labor.
_Fourth._ Capitalist production is bad; it creates millionaires and
mendicants, economic masters and slaves, thus intensifying the class
struggle.
This indicates that the present capitalist system has outlived its
usefulness, and that it is in the throes of dissolution. Capitalism is
but a link in the chain of social and economic development. Just as
feudalism developed capitalism and then disappeared, so capitalism is
now developing socialism, and when the new social system has been
completely evolved the last vestige of capitalism will fade into
history.
The gigantic trust marks the change in production. It is no longer
competitive but co-operative. The same mode of distribution, which must
inevitably follow, will complete the process.
Co-operative labor will be the basis of the new social system, and this
will be for use and not for profit. Labor will no longer be bought and
sold. Industrial slavery will cease. For every man there will be the
equal right to work with every other man and each will receive the fruit
of his labor. Then we shall have economic equality. Involuntary idleness
will be a horror of the past. Poverty will relax its grasp. The army of
tramps will be disbanded because the prolific womb which now warms these
unfortunates into life will become barren. Prisons will be depopulated
and the prison labor problem will be solved.
Each labor-saving machine will lighten the burden and decrease the hours
of toil. The soul will no longer be subordinated to the stomach. Man
will live a complete life, and the march will then begin to an ideal
civilization.
There is a proverb which the Latin race sent ringing down the centuries
which reads, “Omnia vincit amor,” or “Love conquers all things.” Love
and labor in alliance, working together, have transforming, redeeming
and emancipating power. Under their benign sway the world can be made
better and brighter.
Isaiah saw in prophetic vision a time when nations should war no
more—when swords should be transformed into plowshares and spears into
pruning hooks. The fulfillment of the prophecy only awaits an era when
Love and Labor, in holy alliance, shall solve the economic problem.
Here, on this occasion, in this great metropolis with its thousand
spires pointing heavenward, where opulence riots in luxury which
challenges hyperbole, and poverty rots in sweat shops which only a
Shakespeare or a Victor Hugo could describe, and the transfer to canvas
would palsy the hand of a Michael Angelo—here, where wealth and want and
woe bear irrefutable testimony of deplorable conditions, I stand as a
socialist, protesting against the wrongs perpetrated upon Les
Miserables, and pleading as best I can for a higher civilization.
The army of begging Lazaruses, with the dogs licking their sores at the
gates of palaces, where the rich are clothed in purple and fine linen
with their tables groaning beneath the luxuries of all climes, make the
palaces on the highland where fashion holds sway and music lends its
charms, a picture in the landscape which, in illustrating disparity,
brings into bolder relief the hut and the hovel in the hollow where
want, gaunt and haggard, sits at the door and where light and plenty,
cheerfulness and hope are forever exiled by the despotic decree of
conditions as cruel as when the Czar of Russia orders to his penal mines
in Siberia the hapless subjects who dare whisper the sacred word
liberty—as cruel as when this boasted land of freedom commands that a
far-away, innocent people shall be shot down in jungle and lagoon, in
their bamboo huts, because they dream of freedom and independence.
These conditions are as fruitful of danger to the opulent as they are of
degradation to the poor. It is neither folly nor fanaticism to assert
that the country cannot exist under such conditions. The higher law of
righteousness, of love and labor will prevail. It is a law which
commends itself to reasoning men, a primal law enacted long before
Jehovah wrote the decalogue amidst the thunders and lightnings of Sinai.
It is a law written upon the tablets of every man’s heart and
conscience. It is a law infinitely above the creeds and dogmas and
tangled disquisitions of the churches—the one law which in its
operations will level humanity upward until men, redeemed from greed and
every debasing ambition, shall obey its mandates and glory in its
triumph.
Love and labor will give us the Socialist Republic—the Industrial
Democracy—the equal rights of all men and women, and the emancipation of
all from the vicious and debasing thraldoms of past centuries.