THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC
BOOKS BY UPTON SINCLAIR
THE JUNGLE
MANASSAS
THE JOURNAL OF ARTHUR STIRLING
PRINCE HAGEN
KING MIDAS
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of Everybody’s Magazine_
“VOORUIT”
Home of the Socialist Societies of Ghent
]
The Industrial Republic
A Study of the America of Ten Years Hence
By
UPTON SINCLAIR
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1907
COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
PUBLISHED, MAY, 1907
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES
INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
TO H. G. WELLS
“THE NEXT MOST HOPEFUL”
INTRODUCTION
The thought of the time has familiarised us with the evolutionary view
of things; we understand that life is the product of an inner impulse,
labouring to embody itself in the world of sense; and that the product
is always changing—that there is nothing permanent save the principles
and laws in accordance with which development goes on. We understand
that the universe of things was evolved by slow stages into what it is
to-day, that all life has come into being in the same way. We have
traced this process in the far-distant suns and in the strata of the
earth; we have traced it in the vegetables and in the animals, in the
seed and in the embryo; we have traced it in all of man’s activities,
his ways of thinking and acting, of eating and dressing and working and
fighting and praying.
This book is an attempt to interpret in the light of evolutionary
science the social problem of our present world; to consider American
institutions as they exist at this hour—what forces are now at work
within them, and what changes they are likely to produce. The
subject-matter dealt with is not abstract speculation, but rather the
everyday realities of the world we know—our present political parties
and public men, our present corporations and captains of industry, our
present labour unions and newspapers, colleges and churches. The thing
sought is an answer to a concrete and definite question: _What will
America be ten years from now?_
Inasmuch as the people who are most interested in practical affairs are
very busy people, I judge it to be a common-sense procedure to set forth
my ideas in miniature at the outset; so that one may learn in two or
three minutes exactly what my book contains, and judge whether he cares
to read it.
It is my belief that the student of a generation from now will look back
upon the last two centuries of human history and interpret them as the
final stage of a long process whereby man was transformed from a
solitary and predatory individual to a social and peaceable member of a
single world community. He will see that men, pressed by the struggle
for existence, had united themselves into groups under the discipline of
laws and conventions; and that the last two centuries represented the
period when these laws and conventions, having done their unifying work,
and secured the survival of the group, were set aside and replaced by
free and voluntary social effort.
The student will furthermore perceive that this evolutionary process had
two manifestations, two waves, so to speak; the first political, and the
second industrial; the first determined by man’s struggle to protect his
life, and the second by his struggle to amass wealth. The culmination of
the first occurred successively in the English revolutions, the American
and French revolutions, and the other various efforts after political
freedom. After each of these achievements the historian notices a period
of bitterness and disillusionment, a sense of failure, it being
discovered that the expected did not occur, that Liberty, Equality and
Fraternity did not become the rule of men’s conduct. After that,
however, succeeds a period of enlightenment, it having been realised
that the work has only been half done, that man has been made only half
free. The political sovereignty has been taken out of the possession of
private individuals and made the property of the whole community, to be
shared in by all upon equal terms; but the industrial sovereignty still
remains the property of a few. A man can no longer be put in jail or
taxed by a king, but he can be starved and exploited by a master; his
body is now his own, but his labour is another’s—and there is very
little difference between the two. So immediately there begins a new
movement, the end of which is a new revolution, and the establishment of
THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC.
What do I mean by an Industrial Republic? I mean an organisation for the
production and distribution of wealth, whose members are established
upon a basis of equality; who elect representatives to govern the
organisation; and who receive the full value of what their labour
produces. I mean an industrial government of the people, by the people,
for the people; a community in which the means of production have been
made the inalienable property of the State. My purpose in writing this
book is to point out the forces which are now rapidly developing in
America; and which, when they have attained to maturity, will usher in
the Industrial Republic by a process as natural and as inevitable as
that by which a chick breaks out of its shell or a child comes forth
from the womb at the proper hour. I believe that the economic process is
whirling us on with terrific momentum toward the crisis; and I look to
see the most essential features of the great transformation accomplished
in America within one year after the Presidential election of 1912.
If I had been a tactful person I should have kept that last statement
until far on in my argument. For I find many people who are interested
in the idea of an Industrial Republic, and some few who are willing to
think of it as a possibility; but I find none who do not balk when I
presume to set the day. Yet the setting of the day is a vital part of my
conviction, and I should play the reader false if I failed to mention it
in this preliminary statement of my argument. It is a conviction to
which I have come with the diligent use of the best faculties I possess,
and after a preparation of a sort that is certainly unusual, and
possibly even quite unique.
Perhaps I cannot do better by way of introduction than to explain just
what I mean. Our country has passed through two great crises, when
important political and social changes came with startling suddenness. I
refer to the Revolution and the Civil War; and to the latter of these
crises, or rather the period of its preparation—1847 to 1861—I once had
occasion to give two years of an interesting kind of study. I read
everything which I could find in the two largest special collections in
the country; not merely histories and biographies, but the documents of
the time, speeches and sermons and letters, newspapers and magazines and
pamphlets. I literally lived in the period; I knew it more intimately
than the world that was actually about me. My purpose was to write a
novel which should make the crisis real to the people of the present;
and so I had to read creatively, I had to get into the very soul of what
I read. I had to struggle and to suffer with the people of that time, to
forget my knowledge of the future, and to watch through their eyes the
hourly unfolding of the mighty drama of events.
There were so many kinds of men—statesmen and business men, lawyers and
clergymen, heroes and cowards; and I had to study them all, and see the
thing through the eyes of each of them. And of course, I could only play
at ignorance, for I knew the future; and I saw all their mistakes, and
the reasons for them, and the pity and the folly and the tragedy of it
all. Knowing, as I did, the great underlying forces which were driving
behind the events, I saw all these people as puppets, moved here and
there by powers of whose existence they never dreamed.
And, of course, all the while I was also reading my morning newspaper,
and watching the world of to-day; and inevitably I found myself testing
the people of the present by these same methods. I would find myself
seeking for the forces which were at work to-day, and striving to reach
out to the future to which they were leading. I would find myself, by
the way of helping in this interpretation, comparing and balancing the
two eras, and transposing its figures back and forth. This famous
educator or this newspaper editor of to-day—what would he have been
saying had he lived in 1852? And this clergyman friend of mine, this
politician—where would he fit into that period? Or if Yancey had been
alive to-day, what would he have been doing? Where should I have found
Seward—what parts would Edward Everett and Wendell Phillips and
Jefferson Davis have been playing?
It was really a fascinating problem in proportion. The men of fifty
years ago stood thus and so to a known crisis; similar men of the
present stand thus to an unknown crisis—and now find the crisis. When I
had finished “Manassas” I took up the writing of “The Jungle”; which is
simply to say that I was drawn on irresistibly to seek for this latter
crisis, and to try to understand it—to get into the heart of it, and
live it and follow it to its end, just as I had done with the earlier
one. So now I feel that I have much the same sort of power as Cuvier,
the naturalist, who could construct a prehistoric animal from a bit of
its bone. I have far more than the bone of this monster—I have his tail,
beginning far back in the seventies; and I have the whole of his huge
body—the present. I have counted his scales and measured his limbs; I
have even felt his pulse and had his blood under the microscope. And now
you ask me—How many more vertebræ will there be in the neck of this
strange animal? And what will be the size and the shape of his head?
So it is that I write in all seriousness that the revolution will take
place in America within one year after the Presidential election of
1912; and, in saying this, I claim to speak, not as a dreamer nor as a
child, but as a scientist and a prophet.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction vii
CHAPTER
I. The Coming Crisis 3
II. Industrial Evolution 27
III. Markets and Misery 72
IV. Social Decay 103
V. Business and Politics 138
VI. The Revolution 179
VII. The Industrial Republic 215
ILLUSTRATIONS
“Vooruit,” Home of the Socialist societies of Ghent _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
A Socialist view of the Trusts 48
Reaping by hand and by machinery 92
Child labor in glass factories and coal mines 114
The Social contrast in New York 126
Coxey’s Army on the march and in Washington 206
The competitive vs. coöperative distribution of information 220
Helicon Hall 274
THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC
CHAPTER I
THE COMING CRISIS
The thing which most impresses the student of the Civil War struggle, is
how generally and completely the people who lived through it failed to
understand it themselves. We of the present day know that the War was a
clash between two incompatible types of civilisation; between an
agricultural and conservative aristocracy, and a commercial and
progressive democracy. We can see that each society developed in its
people a separate point of view, separate customs and laws, ideals and
policies, literatures and religions. We can see that their differing
interests as to tariffs, police regulations, domestic improvements and
foreign affairs, made political strife between them inevitable; and that
finally the expansion which was necessary to the life of each brought
them into a conflict which could only end with the submission of one or
the other. Yet, plain as this seems to us now, the people of that time
did not grasp it; through the whole long process they were dragged, as
it were, by the hair of their heads, and each event as it came was a
separate phenomenon, a fresh source of astonishment, alarm, and
indignation. Even after the war had broken out, the vast majority of
them would not be enlightened as in regard to it—a few of them have not
been enlightened yet. I talked recently with an old Confederate naval
officer, who said to me: “Oh, yes; it was the politicians who made the
war.” I recall the astonished look which crossed the old gentleman’s
face when I ventured the opinion that the politicians of this country
had never yet made anything except their own livings.
It seemed not merely that they _could_ not understand the thing; they
_would_ not. The truth did not please them, and the best and wisest of
them appeared to have the idea that they had only not to see it, and it
would cease to be the truth; after the manner of the learned men of
Galileo’s time, who declined to look through his telescope, or to watch
him drop weights from the Tower of Pisa. They made it a matter of
offence that anyone should understand; the ability to predict political
events was held to imply some collusion with them. When Lincoln, just
before the crash, ventured to doubt the stability of “a house divided
against itself,” his enemies fell upon him precisely as if he had
declared, not that such a house would fall, but that he intended to
knock it down. And this was the established view of all the conservatism
of the country, only two or three years before there burst upon it one
of the most fearful cataclysms of history.
Let us endeavour to place ourselves in the position of the average man
of 1860, and see now the whole matter appeared to him.
Way back in the early thirties, eight or ten more or less insane
fanatics—“apostate priests and unsexed women,” as one writer described
them—had got together and begun an agitation for a wholly impossible and
visionary (to say nothing of revolutionary and unconstitutional)
programme—“the immediate and unconditional emancipation of the slaves.”
They formed a society and started a paper called the _Liberator_. When
governors of Southern states protested concerning it, the Hon. Harrison
Gray Otis, Mayor of Boston, wrote as follows: “It appeared upon inquiry
that no member of the city government, nor any person of my
acquaintance, had ever heard of the publication. Sometime afterward it
was reported to me by the city officers that they had ferreted out the
paper and its editor; that his office was an obscure hole, his only
visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few ignorant
persons of all colours. This information, with the consent of the
Aldermen, I communicated to the above named governors, with an utterance
of my belief that the new fanaticism had not made, nor was likely to
make, proselytes among the respectable classes of the people.”
Nevertheless, the danger of this propaganda was recognised, and before
long the Abolitionists were being stoned and shot, their presses
smashed, and their meetings broken up; a “broadcloth mob” put a rope
round the neck of the editor of the _Liberator_ and dragged him through
the streets of the city. And still, in spite of this, the agitation went
on. All the “cranks” of the country gradually rallied about the
movement. Their leader was a woman’s suffragist, an infidel, a
prohibitionist, and a vegetarian; he denounced the Constitution as “an
agreement with Death, and a covenant with Hell.” There was one man among
them who addressed meetings with clanking chains about his wrists, and a
three-pronged iron slave-collar about his neck; and who declared to the
people of a town that they “had better establish among them a hundred
rum-shops, fifty gambling-houses and ten brothels, than one church.”
They allowed Negroes to speak on the platform with them, and they opened
schools for Negro girls, or tried to, until these were broken up. One of
them refused to pay taxes to a slave-holding government, and went to
jail for it.
Assuredly, no common-sense person would have thought that here was
anything save a madness that might be allowed to run its course. Yet the
Abolitionists kept at it. In the election of 1840, a wing of them split
off, and nominated a candidate for the Presidency, who received seven
thousand votes out of a total of two or three millions. Four years
later, when the Democratic Party was on the verge of forcing the country
into a war with Mexico, they raised a hue and cry that this was a
“slave-driver’s enterprise,” with the result that their vote went up to
sixty-two thousand. And by keeping up the ceaseless agitation all
through the war, and taking advantage of a factional quarrel in New York
state to nominate a politician who came into their camp for the sake of
revenge, they cast, in 1848, a vote of two hundred and ninety-one
thousand.
And also they had by this time succeeded in colouring a great mass of
the popular thought with their views. They had gotten the country
unsettled; they had made people feel that something was wrong, and all
sorts of anti-slavery measures were beginning to be championed. Some
wanted to exclude slavery from the new Territories; some wanted to
exclude it from the National Capital; some wanted to restrict the
domestic slave-trade. All of these people, of course, denied indignantly
that they were Abolitionists, denied that they had any sympathy with
Abolitionism, or that their measures had anything to do with it. But the
South, whom the matter concerned, understood perfectly well the folly of
such a claim—understood that the institution of Slavery was one which
could not be made war upon, or limited, and that the first hostile move
which was made against it would necessarily mean its downfall. Hence, to
the South, all these people were “Abolitionists.”
Over the California question, there came at last a crisis, and all the
Conservative forces of the nation were scarcely equal to the settling of
it. Edward Everett and Rufus Choate and Calhoun and Clay and Webster,
and a dozen others that one might name, exerted all their influence, and
went about warning their countrymen of the danger, and denouncing what
Webster called “the din and roll and rub-a-dub of Abolition presses and
Abolition lectures.” Under these circumstances the “Compromise” was
adopted, and the vote of the Abolitionist Party fell off to one hundred
and fifty-six thousand.
But then came the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which brought
Lincoln into politics. The Abolition clamour surged up as never
before—here was one proof the more, they said, that Slavery was menacing
American institutions. The whole country seemed suddenly to be full of
their supporters; and the Kansas Raid only added more fuel to the flame.
The Republican Party was formed, the _Black_ Republican Party, as the
slave-holders called it; and at the Presidential election of 1856, they
cast more than one million three hundred thousand votes, about one-third
of the total vote of the country.
After that came, in due course, the attempt of the Supreme Court to put
an end to the Abolitionist agitation, declaring that Congress could not
restrict slavery in the Territories, which meant that the Republican
Party had no right to exist. To “cheerfully acquiesce” in the decision
of the Supreme Court, was the duty of “all good citizens,” according to
President Buchanan; yet the only result of the action of the Supreme
Court was to cause the agitation to burst out afresh. In Illinois,
Abraham Lincoln ran for senator in flat defiance of the Supreme Court’s
decision, and the Republican Party all over the country went on in its
revolutionary course, precisely as if no Supreme Court had ever existed.
A year or two later an agitator made matters still worse by his attempt
to set free the slaves by force. “It is my firm and deliberate
conviction,” said Senator Douglas, “that the Harper’s Ferry crime was
the natural, logical and inevitable result of the doctrines and
teachings of the Republican Party.” And he was perfectly right.
It was disgraceful, and yet it would not stop. The North had by this
time become so full of Abolitionism, that even the Democrats were not to
be trusted. When the split came, in Charleston, Yancey of Alabama
explained this. “When I was a boy in the Northern States,” he said,
“Abolitionists were pelted with rotten eggs. But now this band of
Abolitionists has spread and grown into three bands—the Black
Republicans, the Free-soilers, and the Squatter-sovereignty men—all
representing the common sentiment that Slavery is wrong.” And when
Abraham Lincoln was elected President by a minority of the people, upon
a platform which declared that the Constitution was to be disregarded,
the party of conservatism and tradition resorted to _force_ to maintain
its rights.
And what happened then? Why, simply this: a group of fanatical
visionaries who had for thirty years been jeered at for demanding of the
country something that was revolutionary and inconceivable—the
destruction of an institution which had stood for centuries, and was
built into the very framework of the nation—suddenly began to see the
mighty structure totter, to see cracks open in it, to see its pillars
crumble, its roof fall in; and at last, before they had fairly time to
realise what was happening, the whole heaven-defying colossus lay a heap
of dust and ruins at their feet!
I have said that I believe that our country is now only a few years away
from a similar great transformation. In order to maintain that thesis,
it will be necessary to show, first, a great underlying economic cause,
working irresistibly to force the issue; and second, a consequent
movement of protest, slowly making headway and ultimately permeating the
whole thought of the country.
What was the cause of the Civil War? To put it into a phrase, it was the
need under which Slavery laboured of securing new territory. The reader
may find a contemporary exposition of the situation in Olmstead’s
“Cotton Kingdom.” Slave labour was a very wasteful means of
cultivation—only the top of the soil was used, and ten or fifteen crops
exhausted it. Virginia was once a great exporting state, but in the
forties and fifties it had become simply a slave-breeding ground for the
younger generation, which had moved to the Far South. And then, when the
Far South began to prove insufficient, there was another move, into
Texas; and finally an attempt at still a third, into Kansas—which
brought on the clash with the free states.
At the present day we have a society, industrial instead of
agricultural; and the struggle which we are witnessing is that between
capital and labour. It is a struggle, not for land, but for profits; and
if we are to show that it is, like the Civil War, “an irrepressible
conflict between opposing and enduring forces,” we must show in this
case also that the thing struggled for is limited in quantity, and
ultimately insufficient to satisfy the needs of both the contending
parties.
That our industrial system is based upon profits, and that a failure of
profits would lead to its collapse, will be admitted by anyone. But how
could profits ever fail? the reader asks. Will not the soil always
produce? And does not every man who comes into the world bring a pair of
hands with him, to produce things and earn his living? And so, can there
not always be profitable exchange? There could, I answer, provided that
the various pairs of hands were to remain upon equal terms. But suppose
that one pair were to get some advantage over the other pairs, and use
that advantage to get constantly increasing advantage; might there not
then come a time when the other pairs, having less and less, were
finally unable to furnish as much profits as were necessary?
We began the economic battle in this country upon equal terms. Some got
the advantage and became masters, the others becoming wage-workers. This
advantage—that is, capital—brought constantly increasing
advantage—profit, rent, interest; and those who had not the advantage
stayed meanwhile just where they were—they got enough to live on, and no
more. Numerous exceptions to this do not in the least disturb the main
facts—that as a class the wage-workers stayed wage-workers, and the
masters stayed masters. Neither does the fact that wages rose constantly
in the least disturb the main fact, for the cost of living rose also;
the wage-worker got his living then, and he gets it now. And meanwhile,
according to the way of nature, and in spite of the outcry of moralists
and old-fashioned statesmen, the strong went on growing stronger, and
fighting among each other, the victors growing ten times stronger yet;
until now we have come to a stage where, industrially speaking, we are a
nation of eighty million pygmies and a dozen giants. Nor is the work
quite done yet—it is going straight on, in spite of anti-trust decisions
and the labour of the “muckrake man”—and within a very few more years
the dozen giants will be but one giant.
The dozen, meanwhile, are giants, and they are that because the
industrial opportunities of the nation are their property. They are the
nation, economically speaking; they own its railroads and telegraphs,
its coal mines, oil fields, factories and stores. And they grant to the
eighty millions of the nation the right to these opportunities and a
chance to earn their living upon one certain definite condition—that of
what they produce, they receive only a part, yielding up the balance to
be “profits.”
It is also important to notice that these profits are not taken “in
kind”—the product must first be sold, so that both wages and profits can
be paid in money. It thus follows that the amount of profits is strictly
limited by the amount of _market_ that can be found; in other words,
that a society whose income is limited, is also limited as to its
profit-yielding capacity—that, for instance, a society of eighty
millions of people receiving a mere living wage will be able to yield
just so much rent, interest and dividends, and not any more.
But what it yields has in the past been enough, says the reader. Why
will it not be enough for the future?
Just this is the crux of the whole matter. Rent, interest, dividends, it
must be understood, are fractions; and fractions may be decreased as
well by increasing the denominator, as by decreasing the numerator. A
man, for instance, who invested a hundred dollars and made six, would
receive six per cent. interest; but if he invested the second year one
hundred and six dollars, and was able still to gain only six, his profit
would be, not six per cent., but only five and a fraction. If he wished
to make six, he would have to squeeze out a little more than six
dollars; would have to compel the man who paid it to him to work just a
little harder. And that, in miniature, is a representation of what is
going on in our society to-day. You, the well-meaning reader, who are
struggling to make the world better, and failing—whether the thing which
you are trying to reform be politics or literature or religion, New York
or Colorado or the Philippines, Fifth Avenue or Wall Street or Hell’s
Kitchen—you are meeting with failure because of that little arithmetical
difficulty which has just been set forth.
Consider our millionaire fortunes, how they grow. Consider, for
instance, that Mr. John D. Rockefeller makes fifty per cent. a year upon
his holdings in the Standard Oil Company. The stock of the Standard Oil
Company is now at five hundred, and has been as high as eight hundred in
the market. This is assuming that Mr. Rockefeller invested in the stock
at par—though as a matter of fact, he put in only about twenty dollars a
share, which would make his profit two hundred and fifty per cent. His
income is at least fifty million dollars a year.
What does he do with it? Of course, he can’t spend it—if he treated
himself to a St. Louis Exposition every year, he couldn’t spend it. What
he does with it is to take it promptly, and reinvest it in the form of
new capital; he employs a staff of thirty-two trained experts to aid him
in this work. The effect of this is, of course, to make his income fifty
per cent., _compound_ interest, instead of simple; and what it will be
in the course of time is a problem for those who like figures. While he
is doing this, all the other capitalists are doing the same—the American
millionaire lets his wife and daughters spend as much of his money as
they can, but he seldom spends any himself; he is more interested in
“doing things.” The consequence is, therefore, that year after year we
are paying the vast mass of our people mere living wages, and all the
surplus product of our toil we are selling, and devoting to the creation
of new instruments of production. We have, mark you, machinery that
creates products for hundreds of times as many men as it employs, and
still we skim off the surplus and devote it to making new machines. Is
it not obvious that this cannot go on forever? And that the time must
come that we make all that we need—or rather that our people have money
to buy, wages being what they are? And if that ever happens, then of
course the factories will have to shut down. We shall have millions of
men out of work, and starving on our streets; and when they form
processions and begin agitating, demanding that we give them work, then
we say—that is, our newspapers, our preachers, our politicians,
everybody says—
“But, my good man, there is no more work to be done!”
“But I am starving,” insists the workingman, “we are _all_ starving.
_Why_ is there no work?”
“The reason there is no work is ‘overproduction.’ The market is clogged
with products, you must understand, and we can’t sell them. What is your
trade?”
“I work in a shoe-factory.”
“But the shoe market is already glutted—there are twice as many shoes as
there is any use for.”
“Twice as many shoes! But my feet are on the ground!”
“Well, we can’t help that, my good man; that’s because you have no money
to buy them with.”
“And my friend here,” goes on the workingman—“he is a tailor, and he is
naked because there are too many coats on the market?”
“Exactly.”
“And the baker here is starving because we are both too poor to buy his
bread?”
“Exactly.”
“And then this druggist is sick because we have no money to buy
medicine?”
“Exactly.”
After which, the workingman stands and scratches his head for a moment.
“There is too much of everything,” he reflects. “There is no more work
to be done.” And suddenly the light breaks. “Oh, I see!” he cries, “we
have finished our work for the capitalists!” And you answer, “Exactly!
Everything is complete, and of course there is no more room for you.
Therefore you had best be off to another planet!”
So it would be, if the workingman were content to take his doctrines
from the other side—from the retainers of those “to whom God in His
Infinite Wisdom has entrusted the care of the property interests of the
country.” But, meantime, the workingman has been thinking for
himself—and evolving a quite new doctrine, all his own, concerning the
property interests of the country. This doctrine is, in a word, that the
means of production of wealth belong of right to no individual, but to
the whole people; and that in the hour of the collapse of the
profit-making system, the thing for the people to do is to take
possession of the machinery, and use it to produce goods, no longer for
those who own, but for those who work.
And that brings me to the second of my tasks. I have shown the “great
underlying economic cause, working irresistibly to force the issue”;
there remains to show the consequent “movement of protest.”
I have before me, as I write, a little pamphlet published by the
“Standard Publishing Company,” of Terre Haute, Indiana, and entitled,
“The American Movement,” by Eugene V. Debs. It opens with the statement
that “The twentieth century, according to the prophecy of Victor Hugo,
is to be the century of humanity,” and will witness “the crash of
despotism and the rise of world-wide democracy, freedom and
brotherhood.” The reader, continuing, soon discovers that the “American
movement,” with which this pamphlet deals, is the American Socialist
movement. The writer tells of its early “Utopian” forms, the Owenites
and the Brook-farmers, and names the exiles who came from abroad in
1848, bringing the Marxian doctrine, and influencing such men as Horace
Greeley and Parke Godwin. “The first large society to adopt and
propagate Socialism in America,” he writes, “was composed of the German
Gymnastic Unions. Through the sixties and seventies the agitation
steadily increased, local organisations were formed in various parts of
the country. Following the Paris Commune of 1871, and its tragic ending,
many French radicals came to our shores and gave new spirit to the
movement. In 1876 the Workingman’s Party was organised, and in 1877, at
the convention held in Newark, it became the Socialist Labour Party. The
Socialists were intent upon building up a working-class party for
independent political action.” This party, “composed of thoughtful,
intelligent men, aggressive and progressive, of rugged honesty and
thrilled with the revolutionary spirit and aspiration for freedom,
became from its inception a decided factor in the labour movement. The
busy, ignorant world about the revolutionary nucleus knew little or
nothing about it; had no conception of its significance, and looked upon
its adherents as foolish fanatics whose antics were harmless and whose
designs would dissolve like bubbles on the surface of a stream. In
March, 1885, was inaugurated the strike of the Knights of Labour. On May
1st of the same year, the general strikes for the eight-hour work-day
broke out in various parts of the country. In 1884, Laurence Gronlund
published his “Coöperative Commonwealth.” In 1888 Edward Bellamy
published his “Looking Backward,” and it had a wonderful effect upon the
people. The editions ran into hundreds of thousands.”
The author then goes on to narrate his version of the Pullman strike of
1893. He declares that the American Railway Union, of which he was
president, had won, when the General Managers’ Association caused the
swearing in of “an army of deputies,” whom the Chief of Police of
Chicago declared to be “thieves, thugs and ex-convicts,” and that it was
these men who caused the violence which led to President Cleveland’s
action, and the breaking of the strike. He then continues the story of
the Socialist movement. _The Coming Nation_, started at Greensburg,
Indiana, by J. A. Wayland, in 1893, was the first popular propaganda
paper to be published in the interests of Socialism in this country. It
reached a large circulation, and the proceeds were used in founding and
developing the Ruskin coöperative colony in Tennessee. Later Mr. Wayland
began the publication of the _Appeal to Reason_, and it now numbers its
subscribers by the hundreds of thousands. It is not saying too much for
the _Appeal_ that it has been a great factor in preparing the American
soil for the seed of Socialism. Its enormous editions have been and are
being spread broadcast, and copies may be found in the remotest recesses
and the most inaccessible regions. The periodical and weekly press, so
necessary to any political movement, is now developing rapidly, and
there is every reason to believe that within the next few years there
will be a formidable array of reviews, magazines, illustrated journals,
and daily and weekly papers to represent the movement and do battle for
its supremacy. The last convention of the American Railway Union was the
first convention of the Social Democracy of America, and this was held
in Chicago, in June, 1897, the delegates voting to change the railway
union into a working-class political party. _The Railway Times_, the
official paper of the union, became the _Social-Democrat_, and later the
_Social-Democratic Herald_, and is now published at Milwaukee in the
interest of the Socialist Party. Since the election of 1900, there has
been greater activity in organising, and a more widespread propaganda
than ever before. In the elections of the past, it can scarcely be
claimed that the Socialist movement was represented by a national party.
It entered these contests with but few states organised, and with no
resources worth mentioning to sustain it during the campaign. It is far
different to-day. The Socialist Party is organised in almost every state
and territory in the American Union. Its members are filled with
enthusiasm and working with an energy born of the throb and thrill of
revolution. The party has a press supporting it that extends from sea to
sea, and is as vigilant and tireless in its labours as it is steadfast
and true to the party principles.
“Viewed to-day from any intelligent standpoint, the outlook of the
Socialist movement is full of promise—to the capitalist, of struggle and
conquest; to the worker, of coming freedom. It is the break of dawn upon
the horizon of human destiny, and it has no limitation but the walls of
the universe.”
Whatever the reader may think about the foregoing narrative, there is
one part of it which he cannot dismiss; the statements concerning the
growth of the American Socialist Party. In 1888 the Socialist vote was
two thousand. In 1892, it was twenty-one thousand. In 1896, it was
thirty-six thousand. In 1900, it was one hundred and thirty-one
thousand. In 1904, it was four hundred and forty-two thousand.
The Socialist Party has some twenty-seven thousand subscribing members,
who pay monthly dues. It has over eighteen hundred “locals,” or centres
of agitation; the members of these “locals” are for the most part
workingmen, who give their spare hours to the cause, holding meetings
and debates, and circulating the literature of Socialism. In the larger
cities, there are generally several lectures each week, and there are a
score of “national organisers,” who travel about, speaking night after
night in various towns, forming new “locals,” and taking subscriptions
to the Socialist publications. Of these there are four monthlies and
about thirty-five weeklies. Since 1892, Wayland’s paper, _The Appeal to
Reason_ (Girard, Kansas), has increased its paid circulation from one
hundred and twenty-six thousand to over two hundred and seventy-five
thousand, and last year it printed one edition of two millions and a
half, and another of over three millions. Another Socialist paper,
_Wilshire’s Magazine_ (New York), has increased its circulation from
fifty-five thousand to two hundred and seventy thousand in a single
year. In addition to this, there are many publishing companies, which
distribute books, leaflets and pamphlets, at little more than cost. I
have before me a treatise, the price of which is one cent, of which over
five million copies have been sold since its publication some years ago.
Its title is “Why Workingmen Should Be Socialists,” by Gaylord Wilshire.
And in giving the figures of the Socialist growth, it is worth while to
point out that this is not merely a local movement, but a world
movement; that the United States is one of the most backward of the
civilised nations in respect to Socialism. In Australia the labour
unions have adopted a full Socialist program, and the labour unions hold
the balance of power. In England, they have just elected twenty-seven
members of Parliament; they have now members in the Cabinet of France,
and in Italy they have turned out ministries. In Belgium, the vote of
the party is half a million, and in Austria it is nearly a million,
while in Germany it has grown from thirty thousand in 1870, to five
hundred and forty-nine thousand in 1884, one million, eight hundred and
seventy-six thousand in 1893, three million and eight thousand in 1903
and three million two hundred and fifty thousand in 1907. The Socialists
are electing representatives in Argentina and South Africa; in spite of
government persecution, the movement is now growing rapidly in Japan.
Including all languages, the Socialist journals number nearly seven
hundred, and the Socialist vote of the world is figured at nearly eight
million. Allowing for women, and for the disfranchised proletariat of
such nations as Russia, Austria, and Italy, there are estimated to be
thirty million class-conscious Socialists in the world.
To overlook the significance of a movement such as this, is but to
repeat upon a larger scale the error of half a century ago, and to pay
with blood and anguish for blundering and indifference. The processes of
time have their laws, which can be studied; and all the waste and ruin
of history, which make its records scarcely to be read, are consequences
of the fact that man has to be lashed to his goal through the darkness,
instead of marching to it in the light. You take but a shallow view of
the problems of our present time, if you do not realise that when thirty
million people, in every corner of the civilised world, organise
themselves into a political party, they do it because of some
fundamental and tremendous motive, and that they will not be apt to
abandon their efforts until they have accomplished some proportionately
significant result.