Let us briefly consider the Republican party from the worker’s
standpoint. It is capitalist to the core. It has not and can not have
the slightest interest in labor except to exploit it.
Why should a workingman support the Republican party?
Why should a millionaire support the Socialist party?
For precisely the same reason that all the millionaires are opposed to
the Socialist party, all the workers should be opposed to the Republican
party. It is a capitalist party, is loyal to capitalist interests and
entitled to the support of capitalist voters on election day.
All it has for workingmen is its “glorious past” and a “glad hand” when
it wants their votes.
The Republican party is now and has been for several years, in complete
control of government.
What has it done for labor? What has it not done for capital?
Not one of the crying abuses of capital has been curbed under Republican
rule.
Not one of the petitions of labor has been granted.
The eight hour and anti-injunction bills, upon which organized labor is
a unit, were again ruthlessly slain by the last congress in obedience to
the capitalist masters.
David M. Parry has greater influence at Washington than all the millions
of organized workers.
Read the national platform of the Republican party and see if there is
in all its bombast a crumb of comfort for labor. The convention that
adopted it was a capitalist convention and the only thought it had of
labor was how to abstract its vote without waking it up.
In the only reference it made to labor it had to speak easy so as to
avoid offense to the capitalists who own it and furnish the boodle to
keep it in power.
The labor platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties are
interchangeable and non-redeemable. They both favor “justice to capital
and justice to labor.” This hoary old platitude is worse than
meaningless. It is false and misleading and so intended. Justice to
labor means that labor shall have what it produces. This leaves nothing
for capital.
Justice to labor means the end of capital.
The old parties intend nothing of the kind. It is false pretense and
false promise. It has served well in the past. Will it continue to catch
the votes of unthinking and deluded workers?
What workingmen had part in the Republican national convention or were
honored by it?
The grand coliseum swarmed with trust magnates, corporation barons,
money lords, stock gamblers, professional politicians, lawyers,
lobbyists and other plutocratic tools and mercenaries, but there was no
room for the horny-handed and horny-headed sons of toil. They built it,
but were not in it.
Compare that convention with the convention of the Socialist party,
composed almost wholly of working men and women and controlled wholly in
the interest of their class.
But a party is still better known by its chosen representatives than by
its platform declarations.
Who are the nominees of the Republican party for the highest offices in
the gift of the nation and what is their relation to the working class?
First of all, Theodore Roosevelt and Charles W. Fairbanks, candidates
for President and Vice-President, respectively, deny the class struggle
and this almost infallibly fixes their status as friends of capital and
enemies of labor. They insist that they can serve both; but the fact is
obvious that only one can be served and that one at the expense of the
other. Mr. Roosevelt’s whole political career proves it.
The capitalists made no mistake in nominating Mr. Roosevelt. They know
him well and he has served them well. They know that his instincts,
associations, tastes and desires are with them, that he is in fact one
of them and that he has nothing in common with the working class.
The only evidence to the contrary is his membership in the Brotherhood
of Locomotive Firemen which seems to have come to him co-incident with
his ambition to succeed himself in the presidential chair. He is a full
fledged member of the union, has the grip, signs and passwords; but it
is not reported that he is attending meetings, doing picket duty,
supporting strikes and boycotts and performing such other duties as his
union obligation imposes.
When Ex-President Grover Cleveland violated the constitution and
outraged justice by seizing the state of Illinois by the throat and
handcuffing her civil administration at the behest of the crime-stained
trusts and corporations, Theodore Roosevelt was among his most ardent
admirers and enthusiastic supporters. He wrote in hearty commendation of
the atrocious act, pronounced it most exalted patriotism and said he
would have done the same himself had he been president.
And so he would and so he will!
How impressive to see the Rough Rider embrace the Smooth Statesman!
Oyster Bay and Buzzard’s Bay! “Two souls with but a single thought, two
hearts that beat as one.”
There is also the highest authority for the statement charging Mr.
Roosevelt with declaring about the same time he was lauding Cleveland
that if he was in command he would have such as Altgeld, Debs and other
traitors lined up against a dead wall and shot. The brutal remark was
not for publication but found its way into print and Mr. Roosevelt,
after he became a candidate, attempted to make denial, but the words
themselves sound like Roosevelt and bear the impress of his savage
visage.
Following the Pullman strike in 1894 there was an indignant and emphatic
popular protest against “government by injunction,” which has not yet by
any means subsided.
Organized labor was, and is, a unit against this insidious form of
judicial usurpation as a means of abrogating constitutional restraints
of despotic power.
Mr. Roosevelt with his usual zeal to serve the ruling class and keep
their slaves in subjection, vaulted into the arena and launched his
tirade upon the “mob” that dared oppose the divine rule of a corporation
judge.
“Men who object to what they style ‘government by injunction,’” said he,
“are, as regards the essential principles of government, in hearty
sympathy with their remote skin-clad ancestors, who lived in caves,
fought one another with stone-headed axes and ate the mammoth and woolly
rhinoceros. They are dangerous whenever there is the least danger of
their making the principles of this ages-buried past living factors in
our present life. They are not in sympathy with men of good minds and
good civic morality.”
In direct terms and plain words Mr. Roosevelt denounces all those who
oppose “Government by Injunction” as cannibals, barbarians and
anarchists, and this violent and sweeping stigma embraces the whole
organized movement of labor, every man, woman and child that wears the
badge of union labor in the United States.
It is not strange in the light of these facts that the national
congress, under President Roosevelt’s administration, suppresses
anti-injunction and eight-hour bills and all other measures favored by
labor and resisted by capital.
No stronger or more convincing proof is required of Mr. Roosevelt’s
allegiance to capital and opposition to labor, nor of the class struggle
and class rule which he so vehemently denies; and the workingman who in
the face of these words and acts, can still support Mr. Roosevelt, must
feel himself flattered in being publicly proclaimed a barbarian, and
sheer gratitude, doubtless, impels him to crown his benefactor with the
highest honors.
If the working class are barbarians, according to Mr. Roosevelt, this
may account for his esteeming himself as having the very qualities
necessary to make himself Chief of the Tribe.
But it must be noted that Mr. Roosevelt denounced organized labor as
savages long before he was a candidate for president. After he became a
candidate he joined the tribe and is today, himself, according to his
own dictum, a barbarian and the enemy of civic morality.
The labor union to which President Roosevelt belongs and which he is
solemnly obligated to support, is unanimously opposed to “Government by
Injunction.” President Roosevelt knew it when he joined it and he also
knew that those who oppose injunction rule have the instincts of
cannibals and are a menace to morality, but his proud nature succumbed
to political ambition, and his ethical ideas vanished as he struck the
trail that led to the tribe and, after a most dramatic scene and
impressive ceremony, was decorated with the honorary badge of
international barbarism.
How Theodore Roosevelt, the trade-unionist, can support the presidential
candidate who denounced him as an immoral and dangerous barbarian, he
may decide at his leisure, and so may all other union men in the United
States who are branded with the same vulgar stigma, and their ballots
will determine if they have the manhood to resent insult and rebuke its
author, or if they have been fitly characterized and deserve humiliation
and contempt.
The appointment of Judge Taft to a cabinet position is corroborative
evidence, if any be required, of President Roosevelt’s fervent faith in
Government by Injunction. Judge Taft first came into national notoriety
when, some years ago, sitting with Judge Ricks, who was later tried for
malfeasance, they issued the celebrated injunction during the Toledo,
Ann Arbor & North Michigan railroad strike that paralyzed the
Brotherhoods of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen and won for them the
gratitude and esteem of every corporation in the land. They were hauled
to Toledo, the headquarters of the railroad, in a special car, pulled by
a special engine, on special time, and after hastily consulting the
railroad magnates and receiving instructions, let go the judicial
lightning that shivered the unions to splinters and ended the strike in
total defeat. Judge Taft is a special favorite with the trust barons and
his elevation to the cabinet was ratified with joy at the court of St.
Plutus.
Still again did President Roosevelt drive home his arch-enmity to labor
and his implacable hostility to the trade-union movement when he made
Paul Morton, the notorious union hater and union wrecker, his secretary
of the navy. That appointment was an open insult to every trade-unionist
in the country and they who lack the self-respect to resent it at the
polls may wear the badge, but they are lacking wholly in the spirit and
principles of union labor.
Go ask the brotherhood men who were driven from the C. B. & Q. and the
striking union machinists on the Santa Fe to give you the pedigree of
Mr. Morton and you will learn that his hate for union men is equalled
only by his love for the scabs who take their places.
Such a man and such another as Sherman Bell, the military ferret of the
Colorado mine owners, are the ideal patriots and personal chums of Mr.
Roosevelt, and by honoring these he dishonors himself and should be
repudiated by the ballot of every working man in the nation.
Mr. Fairbanks, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, is a
corporation attorney of the first class and a plutocrat in good and
regular standing. He is in every respect a fit and proper representative
of his party and every millionaire in the land may safely support him.