THE REVOLUTION
One is at a great disadvantage just at present in picturing an
industrial crisis. We are at the very flood-tide of prosperity; the
railroads are paralysed by the volume of the country’s business; the
coal mines cannot furnish the coal, and the farmers are burning their
grain because they cannot get it to market; the steel trust has orders
for two years ahead—and so on without limit. I have to ask the reader to
picture interest rates going down to zero, at a time when they are
higher than they have been in a decade; I have to ask him to picture too
much of everything in the country, at a time when there is not enough of
anything. And yet all this excess of “prosperity” is an integral part of
the phenomenon we are studying.
If the process of wealth-concentration and overproduction of capital
went on unmodified by any other factor, we should witness a gradual rise
in the price of commodities, a gradual increase in the number of
unemployed, and a gradual fall in the rates of interest. As it happens,
however, the movement proceeds in rhythmic pulses, like the swinging of
a pendulum, or the ebbing and flowing of the tide. This is owing to the
factor of credit-expansion, which we have still to interpret.
We have pictured Capital, ubiquitous, endlessly resourceful, incessantly
alert—“clamouring for dividends.” Competition is a forcing-process by
which every device that will increase profits is driven into general
use, and subjected to its maximum strain. The most obvious of these
devices is that of credit.
A business man has a certain amount of capital. If he makes his “turn
over” once a year, he gains, say, ten per cent. profit; if he can make
the “turn over” twice a year, he gains twenty per cent. He sees the
business ahead, and so he goes into debt. And of course this step gives
an impulse to the business of the man who manufactures his machinery,
and to the man who raises his raw material, and to the railroads which
handle both. The effect of that condition, prevailing throughout a whole
community, is to accelerate enormously the industrial process; under it
the capital of the community becomes, exactly as in the case of the
railroads, not the actual definite cost of the instruments of production
existing, but an altogether hypothetical thing, a function of
anticipated earnings.
So it is that you have a “boom”—a period of furious and fevered
activity, in which everyone sees fortunes springing up about him; and
then comes some disturbing factor, which suggests to a number of men the
advisability of realising on their expectations; and a chill settles
upon the community, and there is a wild rush to collect, and the
discovery is made that most of the anticipated profits are not in
existence.
There is one more consideration which has to be touched upon before we
are prepared to consider the concrete problem in America. The process
which has been outlined is an industrial one; events have been pictured
here as they would take place in a community given altogether to
manufacturing, mining, and transportation. But as a matter of fact we
have not only to reckon with thirteen billions a year of manufactured
products, but also with four billions a year of farm products. The
importance of this new element lies in the fact that the ownership of
the farms is still largely in the hands of the masses; which means that
once every year the process we have been picturing is stayed while the
American people get rid of four billion dollars of spending money, which
comes to them outside of and independent of the wage-fund. Thus, strange
as it may seem, abundant crops tend to mitigate an “overproduction”
crisis, while a failure of crops would do more than anything else in the
world to precipitate one.
With these facts in mind we are now in position to interpret our recent
industrial history. We have generally had our hard times in America at
ten year intervals, with especially severe crises at twenty year
intervals. We had our last severe attack in 1893, and we were due to
have one of the lesser sort in 1903. What happened then was very
interesting to watch, in the light of the views just explained. In the
early winter and spring of 1904, the avalanche was well under way. Here,
for instance, is an item clipped from the Chicago _Tribune_ in April of
that year:
“Organised labour is facing the greatest wage crisis since the panic of
1893, if the forecast of its leaders is correct. It is estimated that
before the close of the year the greatest employing concerns of the
country will have dismissed nearly one million men, most of them
labourers and general-utility workers. Of this number the railroads are
expected to discharge two hundred thousand employees; the mine
operators, fifty thousand; the machine shops, iron, steel, and tin plate
plants, two hundred and fifty thousand; and the building trades, forty
thousand. The railroads and the steel mills have already begun the work
of reducing their forces, and the wage liquidation threatens to become
as sensational as was the recent liquidation in stocks.”
And then on May 25th following, the New York _Herald_ reported that the
railroads of the country had laid off seventy-five thousand men; and
quoted the following in an interview with James J. Hill:
“The whole question falls back primarily upon decreasing business and
the reason for it. Why are the railroads carrying less freight than they
were a year or two years ago? Because the demand for the products of the
United States is not commensurate with the supply. We manufacture and we
grow and we mine more than we can consume in the United States. Hence we
are dependent upon foreign markets in order to sell the surplus.”
The reasons why we got over this period of liquidation with only a
severe scare are two: First, because there came in the fall a “bumper”
crop of unprecedented proportions, which gave the railroads a new start;
and second, and most important, because it happened that at the precise
hour of our stress, there broke out one of the greatest military
struggles of all history.
The war, you understand, was a new world-market. All at once a million
or two of men were set to work at destroying manufactured articles; and
at the same time several millions more were taken from their regular
tasks to provide and maintain them while they did it; and the greater
part of the surplus capital of civilisation was drawn off to pay the
bills. It was not merely that during the first four months of the
conflict Japan and Russia bought fifty million dollars’ worth of our
spare products, or that they took hundreds of millions of our spare
cash. It made no real difference where the money was raised, or where it
was spent; the man who got it spent it again, and sooner or later the
bulk of it came to us, because we had the things to sell. Under the
conditions of modern Capitalism, all the world is one; and when a nation
goes to war, whoever has a spare dollar lends it to pay the bills, and
wherever in the world there is an idle labourer, he is put to work to
help support the fighters of both nations. In return, the world gets
from the warring governments a paper promise to wring an equivalent
amount of service out of their people at some future date.
Before going on I ought to mention that there is another view of the
events of 1904. I have heard Mr. Arthur Brisbane maintain that we are to
have no more overproduction crises, for the reason that, competition
having been abolished in all our principal industries, our trust
magnates can so adjust supply to demand as to mitigate the stress, and
give instead periods of partial idleness in widely scattered industries.
[Illustration:
_Diagram prepared by Wilshire’s Magazine_
DIAGRAM SHOWS HOW HIGH PRICES FOLLOW WARS
Range of average prices of 25 leading Railway Stocks for the past 22
years
]
If this is true, it is very important, for it means a long continuance
of Trust government; but I do not believe that it is true. The trusts
have, of course, put an end to blind production without any assurance of
a market; but even assuming that our industry were so far systematised
and our management so conservative that we never manufactured goods
except upon a definite order—how would that be able to hold in check a
community gone mad with prosperity-drunkenness? For instance, the steel
trust now has orders enough ahead for two years; and upon the basis of
these orders, its administrators are going ahead building a new “steel
city.” Yet does the steel trust know what proportion of its orders for
steel rails are intended for the transportation of purely speculative
freight? Does it know what proportion of its orders for structural steel
is intended for buildings for imaginary tenants? Does it concern itself
with the problem whether its customers are going to be able to find any
use for the materials which they have bought?
There might be more plausibility in the argument, if our trust magnates
were men of conscience and a keen sense of responsibility; but as a
matter of fact their attitude toward their work is purely predatory.
They are not administrators of production at all, but parasites upon
production, exploiters and wreckers. Far from striving to regulate the
madness of the public, they are competing among themselves to fan it to
a flame, so that they may capitalise the expectations of their own
properties.[5]
Footnote 5:
Anyone who wishes to make a scientific study of the true functions of
modern finance is advised to read Professor Veblen’s last book, “The
Theory of Business Enterprise,” a most extraordinary study of the
whole field of present-day economics. In my opinion this book,
together with its author’s other masterpiece, “The Theory of the
Leisure Class,” constitutes the greatest contribution to social
science ever made in America, and perhaps the greatest in the world
since Carl Marx. It might be worth while to add in passing that
Professor Veblen was turned out of Mr. Rockefeller’s University of
Chicago for writing it.
The ebb of the tide is coming; the only question is, when? According to
precedent, it should come in 1913; but I expect it much sooner, partly
because I do not believe that we had anything like a thorough
liquidation in 1904, and partly because of the extreme violence of the
present activity. During the last year the “boom” has reached real
estate, and that always means that other avenues of investment are
clogged.
I anticipate the storm in 1908 or 1909; but I do not predict it, because
it depends upon uncertain factors. Another great war might put it off
ten years; and on the other hand, crop failures might precipitate it
this summer. What I do believe that I can predict—for reasons which I
stated in the introduction to this argument—is the course which
political events in this country will take from the hour when the “hard
times” arrive.
As we saw from the Chicago _Tribune_ item, the first sign of trouble is
the turning out of work of a million workingmen; and what are the
consequences—the economic consequences—of the turning out of work of a
million men? According to the census the average yearly wage of the
factory employee is four hundred and thirty-seven dollars. Dr. Peter
Roberts says that the average wage in the anthracite coal district is
less than five hundred dollars. In the Middle States a third of all the
workers get less than three hundred a year, and in the South nearly
sixty per cent. get less. It was proven before the Industrial Commission
that the maximum wage of the hundred and fifty thousand railroad and
track hands and the two hundred thousand carmen and shopmen, was a
hundred and fifty dollars in the South, and less than three hundred and
seventy-five in the North. And this to feed and clothe a family, and
provide against sickness, accident, and old age! The meaning of it is
simply that when a million men are laid off, in a month or two they and
their families are starving.
And that, you understand, means a loss of a _market_—of a market of five
million people—a population equal to that of the Dominion of Canada. And
of course, therefore, those whose work it has been to supply these
people, will be out of work, and likewise those who supply the
suppliers. And even this is by far the least of the consequences; for
another part of our domestic market depends upon the fact that our
workingmen too have been able to form trusts. And when this period of
depression comes, their trusts will fall to pieces, and competition will
begin again—a process which they will find all the brickbats and
dynamite in the country cannot check. The employers will, of course, be
straining every nerve to make ends meet; and so wages will go down, and
when strikes are declared, the starving workingman will “scab” and the
strikes will fail. We shall have riots, and perhaps gatling guns in our
streets, but the wages will go down; and step by step as the wages go
down, consumption goes down, with the loss of another Dominion of
Canada. When the thing is once started, it will be an avalanche that no
power upon earth can stop; and it will be the beginning of the
Revolution.
The word has an ominous sound. The reader thinks of street battles and
barricades. By a Revolution I mean the complete transfer of the economic
and political power of the country from the hands of the present
exploiting class to the hands of the whole people; and in the
accomplishment of this purpose the people will proceed, as in everything
else they do, along the line of least resistance. It is very much less
trouble to cast a ballot than it is to go out in the streets and shoot:
and our people are used to the ballot method. However, the staid and
respectable _Harper’s Weekly_, which calls itself a “Journal of
Civilisation,” suggested in 1896 that if Mr. Bryan were elected, it
might be necessary for the propertied classes to keep him out of office.
If anything of that sort is attempted in this coming crisis, why then
there will be violence—just as there will be in such countries as
Germany and Russia, which have yet to learn to let the people have their
own way. The worst feature of the situation with us is that we have
gotten into the habit of letting our elections be carried by bribery;
and that is likely to play us some ugly tricks in this new emergency.
The reader perhaps objects to my theory that this change must come with
suddenness. It is such a tremendous change—and would it not be better if
it were brought about little by little? Undoubtedly it would have been a
great deal better; but the time to begin was ten or twenty years ago.
Now the horse is stolen, and we are venting all our energies, and cannot
even succeed in getting the stable-door locked afterward.
They are bringing it about gradually in Australia and New Zealand—the
only countries in the world in which the people are effectually
regulating the progress of the Juggernaut of Capitalism. That is because
these countries are very young, with comparatively little capital, no
slums, and an intelligent working-class. I have an idea—I do not know
whether there is anything in it—that the extraordinary success of New
Zealand may in part be due to the fact that it was a convict-settlement;
the men whom capitalism makes into criminals being for the most part a
very superior class of people, active, independent, and impatient of
injustice. Transported to a new land, and given a fair chance, I should
think that a burglar or a highwayman ought to make a very excellent
Socialist.
You ask, perhaps, if the thing is not also being accomplished gradually
in England and on the Continent; you point to “Municipal trading,” to
the London County Council, to the state-owned railroads and telephones
of Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, etc. You have been accustomed to hear
these things referred to as State Socialism, and you have accepted the
statement—not understanding that the essence of Socialism is democracy,
and that it is fundamentally opposed to paternalism in every conceivable
form. Municipal and State ownership is not State Socialism at all, but
State Capitalism. Under it, the government buys certain franchises, pays
for them with bonds, and then runs the roads to pay the bondholders.
Undoubtedly it is a better system for the people than private
Capitalism, for the reason that it fixes the exploiters’ tax, instead of
letting stock-watering go on indefinitely. But, unfortunately,
economical administration by the State is possible at present only in
such countries as have an aristocratic governing-class, jealous of the
power of the capitalist. In this country the holders of the municipal
bonds, who also own the street-car factories and the steel mills and the
coal mines, would use the interest they got from the city to bribe the
city’s servants to pay exorbitant prices for all the street-cars and
steel rails and coal and other supplies which the city would have to
have in order to operate the roads. You have seen that perfectly
illustrated in the case of our Post Office. For example, we pay the
railroads in rent for our mail-cars twice as much per year as it costs
to build the cars; and the cars are so flimsy that the insurance
companies, which own a large share of the railroads and the cars, refuse
to insure the lives of the mail-clerks who work in them!
However, the advisability of Municipal Ownership under present
conditions is a purely academic question, for the reason that the
capitalist will never give us a chance to try it. The capitalist is in
possession, and he “stands pat.” When you talk about “reform,” he will
make you as many fine speeches and deliver you as many moral discourses
as you wish; but when it comes to giving up any dollars—he has spent all
his lifetime learning to hold on to his dollars.
You are thinking, perhaps, of President Roosevelt, who is hailed as a
successful reformer. In the first place, it is of importance to point
out that President Roosevelt is a complete anomaly in our political
life; he was probably the last Republican in the country who would have
been selected to rule us. He made himself governor by a shrewd device
called “the Rough Riders;” he was made President for the first time by
the bullet of an assassin, and the second time by the death of Mark
Hanna. By a series of such blind chances as these the people have been
given a chance to vote for what they want, and they of course have
seized the chance. But assuredly it was no part of the “System’s” plan
to ask them what they wanted, nor even to let them find out what they
wanted themselves.
Under the peculiar circumstances, there has been nothing for the
“System” to do but make sure that the President accomplishes nothing;
and that it has done as a matter of course. In saying this, let me
remind the reader once more of my distinction between moral revolt and
economic remedy. I have no wish to under-estimate the tremendous
importance of President Roosevelt’s services in awakening the people;
but I say that so far as actual concrete accomplishment is concerned, he
might just as well never have lifted a finger. In one case, that of the
suit against the Paper Trust, he did effect a lowering of prices; but in
that case he was simply a pawn in the struggle between two trusts—of
which the Newspaper Trust proved to be the stronger. In no case where
the people alone were concerned has he effected any economic change
whatever. The Northern Securities decision was evaded by another device;
the Beef Trust and the Standard Oil suits ended with nominal fines. Over
the rate regulation question we had two years’ agitation—and not one
single rate has been lowered. In the struggle for life-insurance reform,
to which the President gave all his moral support, a few grafting
officials were hounded to death; but the real and vital evil, the
exploitation of the surplus for purposes of stock-manipulation, was
scarcely even touched upon. And then came the Chicago packing-house
scandals—and I can speak with some knowledge of them. Sometimes, when I
look back upon them, it seems like a dream—I can hardly believe that I
ever played my part in that cosmic farce. Only think of it—we had the
President and Congress and all the newspapers of the country discussing
it—we had this entire nation of eighty million people literally thinking
about nothing else for months—nay, more, we had the attention of the
whole civilised world riveted upon those filthy meat-factories. We
uncovered crimes for which the condemnation of every dollar’s worth of
property in Packingtown would have been a nominal punishment; and then
we settled back with a sigh of contentment, because we had put a few
more inspectors at work and forced the whitewashing of some
slaughter-house walls. And we left the monster upas-tree of
commercialism to flourish untouched—to go on year after year bearing its
fruit of corruption and death!
There is nothing whatever to be got from the capitalist. I used to think
that the same thing was true of the politician. In common with most
Socialists, I thought that the Revolution would have to wait until the
people had come to full consciousness of their purpose, and had elected
a Socialist president and a Socialist congress. But at the time of the
coal-strike, when Dave Hill came out for government ownership of the
coal mines, I realised that the politician is the jackal and not the
lion. Of course we have amateur politicians—capitalists who play at the
game—and they will not give way; but the professional politician is not
a rich man—the competition has been too keen. He has served the
capitalist because it paid; and when the people get ready to have their
way, it will pay to serve the people. This is really a very important
matter, for our political machinery is complicated, and the people have
got used to it. It would be a frightful waste of energy to create new
machinery—in fact, I do not think that our Constitution could stand the
strain.
We will now assume that the industrial crisis has come. What will be the
political consequences? It takes two or three years for industrial
conditions to get themselves translated into political acts in this
country; it means an immense amount of agitating—tens of thousands of
meetings have to be held and hundreds of thousands of speeches made; and
then there is all the machinery of conventions and elections. The panic
of 1893, for instance, resulted in the Bryan movement of 1896. That
movement was a revolt of the debtor class; if it had succeeded it would
have precipitated a panic, and that would have been a misfortune, for
the reason that both the people and their leaders were ignorant, and
instead of the Industrial Republic, we should have had a severe
reaction. Mark Hanna was a cunning man; but if he had been still more
cunning, he would never have raised six million dollars to buy the
presidency for William McKinley—he would have let the people have free
silver, and then he would have had the people.
We came to the election of 1900 on the crest of a prosperity wave; but
prosperity too takes its time to be realised, and so Hanna took the
precaution to raise four million dollars and buy the election again.[6]
And then came 1904, which, I think, was the most interesting election of
them all. With the politicians the prosperity boom still held sway. Mark
Hanna had Roosevelt all ready for the shelf; and the old-time
“state-rights” Democrats arose and buried Mr. Bryan in the deepest vault
of their party catacombs. But then came the people—with the country
trembling on the verge of another “hard times.” They gave President
Roosevelt the most tremendous majority ever recorded in America; and
incidentally, as if this were not enough to show how they felt, they
gave nearly half a million votes to Eugene V. Debs!
Footnote 6:
Figures quoted, evidently upon inside information, by the Washington
_Post_, in 1906.
This election, according to my schedule, corresponds with the election
of 1852 in the Civil War crisis. The “safe and sane” Democracy, which
received its death-blow in 1904, corresponds with the old Whig party. It
will probably make independent nominations in 1908 and 1912, exactly as
did the Whigs, and will receive the votes of all those who believe in
dealing with new conditions according to old formulas.
In the meantime, the real contestants of the coming crisis are forming
their lines. Under ordinary circumstances the Republican party would
have been the party of disguised but unrelenting conservatism; and our
Presidents in 1904 and 1908 would have been either figureheads like
Fairbanks and Shaw, or shrewd beguilers of the people like Cannon and
Root. As it is, it looks now if President Roosevelt were to remain the
master of his party, in which case we shall have in 1908 a mild reformer
like Taft, or possibly even Governor Hughes. The one thing certain is
that whoever receives the Republican nomination will be the next
President. If it is a Roosevelt man, the President’s prestige will elect
him; or if the “System” concludes to have its own way, he will be put in
by bribery. In any case, he will go in, and it is best that he should go
in. So long as we are to have Capitalism, it is proper that the
capitalist should have a free hand. Personally I should consider the
election of a radical in 1908 a calamity; for “hard times” will be just
about to break, and I greatly desire to see Cannon and Aldrich and the
rest of them “caught with the goods on.”
Who will be the Democratic candidate? Will it be the champion of the
Western farmers, or of the proletariat of our Eastern cities? I do not
know, but I am inclined to think that it will be Mr. Bryan; and I am
sorry, in a way, because that will put him out of the race in 1912. I
conceived an intense admiration for Mr. Bryan after his last speech in
New York City.
Never in our history did a public man face a greater temptation than he
did after his two years of travel; everything in the country seemed to
have turned conservative, and the money-power, frightened by Roosevelt,
was ready to throw itself into his arms. What he did was to take his
stand upon the great issue over which the battle of the next six years
will be fought out—the nationalisation of the railroads; and in doing it
he placed his name upon the roll of our statesmen.
THE TYPE. CHATTEL SLAVERY. WAGE SLAVERY
(1846–1863.) (1893–1914.)
The Conservative Daniel Webster. Grover Cleveland
Reformer
The Unwilling Prophet John C. Calhoun Marcus A. Hanna
The Great Compromiser Henry Clay Theodore Roosevelt
The Timid Conservative Edward Everett. Alton B. Parker.
The Editor of Horace Greeley. Arthur Brisbane
Radicalism
The Statesman of Charles Sumner. Wm. J. Bryan.
Radicalism
The Politician of Wm. H. Seward. Robt. M. LaFollette.
Radicalism
The Agitator of the Wm. Lloyd Garrison. Eugene V. Debs.
Revolt
The Orator of the Wendell Phillips. Geo. D. Herron.
Revolt
The Martyr of the John Brown. Charles H. Moyer ( ?).
Revolt
The Voice of the Victim Frederick Douglass. Jack London.
The Compromising Stephen A. Douglas. John C. Spooner.
Reactionist
The Aggressive Jefferson Davis. Nelson W. Aldrich.
Reactionist
The Organiser of Wm. Lownds Yancey. David M. Parry.
Reaction
The Last Figurehead James Buchanan (1856). William H. Taft (1908).
The Untried Hope Abraham Lincoln (1860). Wm. Randolph Hearst
(1912).
A couple of years ago I was sketching out my comparison of the Civil War
crisis and our own, in conversation with an English gentleman, who asked
me to make him a table showing the parallel between the men of the two
periods. This table was afterwards published in the _Independent_, with
an explanatory letter, (in the course of which I pointed out that one
must not take it too literally, or look for a resemblance in external
details).[7]
Footnote 7:
See table on page 199.
In the course of its editorial comment, the _Independent_ suggested
another parallel, that between “The Jungle” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; and
then it went on to express its perplexity at my venturing to compare
Hearst with Lincoln.
There is no man in our public life to-day who interests me so much as
William Randolph Hearst. I have been watching him for ten years, during
the last half-dozen of them weighing and testing him as the man of the
coming hour. I do not say that he will be the man; all that I can say is
that he stands the best chance of being the candidate of the Democratic
party in 1912; and that the man who secures that nomination will, if he
does his work (and for him to fail to do it is almost inconceivable)
write his name in our history beside the names of Washington and
Lincoln.
Mr. Hearst is one of the by-products of the industrial process—a member
of the “second generation.” You are to picture many thousands of young
men, heirs of the enormous fortunes of our captains of industry; they
are brought up in luxury, and in complete idleness—the world gives them
_carte blanche_, with the result that at an early age they are sated
with all the ordinary pleasures of human beings. And at the same time
they have big, healthy bodies, and they crave excitement.
It would be interesting to compile a list of some of the things they
have done. Of course, a great many simply follow in the footsteps of
their fathers, and become commercial buccaneers; some devote themselves
to automobiles and race-horses, some to society and gossip, some to mere
brutal dissipation—such as the scions of the now extinct line of
Pullman, who used to smash up the saloons of Chicago, and now and then
amuse themselves by hurling brickbats through the windows of their
father’s home. Now and then there is one who goes in for big game, or
for monkey-dinners, or for Sunday-schools, or for Socialism, or for
flying-machines; and there was one who went in for newspapers!
His father was reluctant to humour the whim—he thought that a million
dollar racing-stable would cost less in the end than a forty thousand
dollar newspaper: which of course put the young man upon his mettle—made
him set out to make the paper pay, and “show the old man.” To make it
pay he had to get circulation; and to get circulation he had to get
something new—there was no use doing things like the old newspapers,
which were not paying, but had to be funded by the political powers
which used them. So once more you see capital, as I have pictured
it—“like a wild beast in a cage, pacing about, watching for an opening
here and there.”
And where is the opening? Why, the people! The people, whom the
merciless machinery of exploitation beats down and tramples upon, and
pushes out of the way and forgets. They are brutalised and ignorant,
they are stupid with toil—but yet they are human beings, they crave
life. They never read newspapers—but give them what they want, and they
will learn to read. Give them big head-lines, and a shock on every page;
give them royalty and “high life,” scandal and spice, battle, murder and
sudden death—and then they will buy your paper.
It was good fun for Mr. Hearst to do this. Watching his newspapers, what
has struck me most is the sheer audacity of them. Audacity is his
characteristic quality, and it is a characteristic American quality—it
places him among our national treasures, along with Mark Twain, and P.
T. Barnum, and Buffalo Bill, and the Mississippi steamboats with the
“nigger on the safety-valve.”
I am told by friends of Mr. Hearst that his instinct from the start was
for democracy. If so, so much the better; but it is not necessary to my
hypothesis. A newspaper has to have editorial opinions; and they had
best be opinions that please its readers. If we are to publish a paper
for the masses to read, we must also voice the hopes and the longings of
the masses.
So Mr. Hearst turned traitor to his class. He seems to have done this
instinctively, and without pangs. I find, what is very singular and
striking, that the members of his own class hate him, not only publicly,
but personally. It seems to have pleased him to defy _all_ their
conventions. I was told, for example, that when he first came to New
York, he made himself a scandal in the “Tenderloin.” I was perplexed
about that, for the members of our “second generation” are generally
well known in the Tenderloin, and nobody calls it a scandal. But one
young society man who had known Hearst well gave me the reason—and he
spoke with real gravity: “It wasn’t what he did—we all do it: but it was
the way he did. He didn’t take the trouble to hide what he did.”
I have made clear in this book my belief that the masses are driven to
revolt by the pressure of stern and ruthless economic force. They were
ignorant and helpless, and among our men of wealth and power there was
no one to help them—there was no one among all our intellectual leaders
to voice their wrongs. They were left to help themselves—so what more
natural than that it should occur to some enterprising young millionaire
to leap into the breach? There was endless excitement and notoriety to
be won—and at the end, perhaps, power of a new and quite incredible
sort.
You will observe that I am taking, deliberately, the lowest possible
view. I am dealing with material conditions and picturing a material
remedy for them. My point is, that whatever he may be personally, Mr.
Hearst is mortgaged, body and soul, to the course to which he has given
himself; not only his public reputation, but his entire fortune, is in
his newspapers, and the public is the master of his newspapers. He has
conjured a storm which he cannot possibly control—he must play out to
the end the part he has chosen.
It is very curious to observe how his rôle has taken hold of him and
changed him. I am told that when he first came to New York he wore
checked trousers and fancy ties; and now he wears the traditional soft
hat and frock coat of our statesmen. And also, I think, the rôle has
changed his character. For this struggle is a real one, it is a struggle
of the people for life; the cause is a cause of truth and justice, and
the man does not live who can do battle for it as Mr. Hearst has done,
and not come to take fire with the passion of it. The man does not live
who can make the enemies Mr. Hearst has made, and not take a real and
vital interest in the task of bringing them to their knees. I believe
that Mr. Hearst is to-day as sincere a man as we have in political life.
It may be, of course, that some one else will get the Democratic
nomination in 1912; that matters not at all in my thesis—the one thing
certain is that it will be some man who stands pledged to put an end to
class-government. Following it there will be a campaign of an intensity
of fury such as this country has never before witnessed in its history.
Let us outline in a few words the situation as it will then exist.
In the first place there will be two or three million—perhaps five or
ten million—men out of work. They will have been out for a year or two,
and have had plenty of time to work up excitement. They may have forced
Congress to provide them some temporary employment—which will, of
course, be the first taste of blood to the tiger. They will certainly
have been waging strikes of a violence never before known—they will have
been shot down in great numbers, and they may have done a great deal of
burning and dynamiting. That some particularly conspicuous individual
like Mr. Rockefeller or Mr. Baer may have been assassinated, seems more
than likely; that a “Coxey’s Army” of much larger size will have marched
on Washington, seems quite certain.
When I was in Chicago, just after the last “Beef Strike,” I met half a
dozen labour leaders who told me an interesting story. Chicago has the
most thoroughly revolutionary working-class of any city in the country,
and towards the end of this strike they were deeply stirred, and there
had been several conferences in which a complete program had been laid
out for an “anti-rent strike.” On a certain day, all the working people
of Chicago were to refuse to pay rent until the meat-packers gave in.
The project was nipped by the settlement of the strike, but it only
waits a new occasion to be put into effect. By the time which we are
picturing here, it will quite certainly have spread east and west to the
two oceans, so that not half our city population will be paying any rent
for their homes at this time.
[Illustration:
_Copyright, 1894, Leslie’s Weekly_
]
[Illustration:
_Copyright, 1894, Leslie’s Weekly_
COXEY’S ARMY ON THE MARCH AND IN WASHINGTON
]
And also, of course, there will have been processions in the streets,
and unemployed demonstrations every day. There will be a Socialist
meeting round every corner—all through this period of stress, you are to
picture the Socialists working like bees at swarming time. That is the
function of the Socialist party all through this crisis, to stir up and
organise the proletariat, to make certain that in the crisis the people
are not ignorant of the way. They will be heading the hunger-parades,
carrying the banners and making the speeches, circulating tracts and
five-million-copy editions of the “Appeal to Reason.” They will be
polling unheard of votes—in one or two cities they will be carrying the
elections, and Socialist mayors will be confiscating street-railroads,
and clapping obstructive judges into jail. The Socialist party is a
party of agitation rather than administration; but it is of vital
importance that it should everywhere exist, as a party of the last
resort, a club held over Society. Everywhere the cry will be: Do this,
and do that, or the Socialists will carry the country.
So will be ushered in the election campaign and the death-grapple. You
will try to beat the people back, as you have done before—but you will
not succeed this time. Before this, the people were ignorant—but now
they will know. They will have had the whole of the festering ulcer of
commercialism laid open before their eyes. You will not be able to blame
it on the labour unions, nor on the Rate Bill, nor on Roosevelt, nor on
the Negro, nor on the Esquimau. You will not be able to awe the people
with any great names, nor to fool them with respectability. They will
have been taught to regard the leaders of our business affairs as
convicted and unpunished criminals; and if you were to propose such a
thing as a “business man’s parade,” you would be greeted with a scream
of fury.
You will be utterly terrified at the state of affairs. Credit will be
failing, and the business of the country will be holding its breath. You
will subscribe a campaign fund of ten—fifteen—twenty millions of
dollars—but there will be Mr. Hearst with his extras in a dozen cities,
and his twenty million free copies a day, and he will tell how much you
are raising and a whole lot more. So there will be committees of safety
to guard the ballot—and a few more good campaign cries. There will be
frenzied conferences among our political millionaires, and a week or two
before election day Mr. Hearst’s opponent—quite probably ex-President
Roosevelt—will come out favouring nearly all of his radical proposals,
but declaring that they ought not to be carried into effect by a
Socialist like Mr. Hearst. Mr. Hearst will reply with his ten thousand
and tenth declaration that he is not a Socialist, and has no sympathy
with Socialism—a statement which the Socialists, who will not understand
in the least the meaning of events, will cordially substantiate. Mr.
Hearst will declare that he stands upon a platform of Americanism, and
that he seeks only equal rights for all—and therefore Federal ownership
of all criminal monopolies.
So election day will come, and Mr. Hearst will be elected; and within
the next week the business of the country will have fallen into heaps.
Banks will have closed, mills will be idle—there will be no freight, and
railroads will be failing. The people of New York will be reminded that
if the railroads stop the city will starve to death in a couple of
weeks; and so, perhaps even before Mr. Hearst takes office, government
ownership of the railroads will be realised.
How will it be accomplished? It is a charmingly simple process—I could
do it all myself. Have you ever heard the inside story of how the last
coal strike was settled? The operators were standing upon their rights
as the persons to whom God in His infinite wisdom had entrusted the care
of the property interests of the country; and all winter long the people
had been lacking coal. Then suddenly President Roosevelt, who is a
master of the art of feeling the public pulse, made the discovery that
government ownership of coal mines was about to crystallise into an
issue of practical politics. So he sent Secretary Root to see Morgan,
and tell him that the coal operators must give in. Morgan saw the
operators, and they insisted upon their rights, and so Root went back to
Washington, and came again to say that, as Mr. Morgan well knew, the
coal roads were doing business in flat violation of the law; and that
unless within twenty-four hours they gave their consent to the
appointment by the President of a board of arbitration, the whole power
of the United States Attorney General’s office would be turned upon an
investigation of their business methods. And so the strike was settled
in a day.
And in very similar ways will the future problems be settled. There will
be similar conferences; and then some fine day a duly-accredited
commissioner from the President will travel, say to Philadelphia, and
enter the offices of the Pennsylvania Railroad, arch-corrupter of the
great Keystone state. The directors of the company will receive him with
bows and smiles, and will spread their books before him and his staff,
and place themselves and their office at his disposal. He will hear a
brief account of the situation, and will then give his orders to the
president and other officials of the road: to the effect that schedules
are to be continued as previously; that all salaries will remain
unaltered until further notice; and that passenger and freight rates are
to be dropped to a point where net profits will be wiped out. Then he
will shake hands with the directors and thank them for their services in
building up the road, adding that their services are now at an end. And
that, for all practical purposes, will be the application of Socialism
to the Pennsylvania Railroad.
But, you say, by my hypothesis the road could not run; how will it be
able to run now? The reason it couldn’t run before was that there were
no profits; but now it will not be run for profits, but for service,
like the Post Office. To help it over its momentary embarrassment, of
course, the credit of the government may be needed: but even that is not
likely. For exactly the same thing which happens to the Pennsylvania
Railroad will be happening to the Steel Trust and the Oil Trust and the
Coal Trust and the Beef Trust; and all these industries will be starting
into activity, and so there will be plenty of freight. With the captains
of each of these trusts there will have been secret Presidential
conferences, at which these gentlemen will have been told that since
they can no longer run their business, they must allow the Government to
take possession and run it—the price to be paid for their stock being a
matter for future negotiation, and a matter of no great importance to
them in any case, because of the income and inheritance tax laws just
then being rushed through Congress.
Such will be the Revolution—and the gateway into the Industrial
Republic. Precisely as in France we saw that the peasant who was
starving because he could not pay his taxes, began to till the land and
grow rich without any taxes, so in the midst of universal destitution,
it will suddenly be discovered that the farmer who could not sell his
grain, and therefore had no hat to wear, may now exchange his grain with
the operative in the hat factory who had produced so many hats for his
master that he was himself out of a job, and could not get any bread.
And all the cotton mills which were shut because we could no longer sell
shirts to the Chinamen, will now start merrily to work making shirts for
all the shirtless wretches the length and breadth of America. And the
shoe operatives of Massachusetts, who were making shoes for the
Filipinos, which the poor Filipinos had to be forced at the point of the
bayonet to buy, will begin making shoes for their own children, and for
the unhappy people of the tenements who were before going barefooted.
And the Steel Trust will suddenly leap into action, because those
misery-smitten four hundred thousand families in the “dark rooms” of the
New York City tenements will now earn money to build themselves decent
habitations. And the tens of thousands of little boys and girls who are
now being ground up in the glass factories of New Jersey and the cotton
mills of Georgia and the coal mines of Pennsylvania, will come out into
the sunlight and play, while their parents are building schools to which
they can be sent. And the young girl who stands shuddering on the brink
of prostitution, working ten hours a day in an East Side sweatshop for a
wage of forty cents a week, will receive the full value of her product,
and be able to maintain herself by two hours of work a day.
I know what is the attitude of the medical profession towards a
“cure-all”; and yet it is but the sober truth that for nearly every evil
that troubles our age there is one remedy and only one—the
democratisation of our industry. If you were to take a growing boy and
rivet an iron band about his chest, there would come sooner or later a
time when the boy would show symptoms of distress—and for every symptom
there would be but one remedy. Is the boy cross and complaining? Break
the band! Is he pale and sickly? Break the band! Does he gasp and cry
out? Break the band! Do you not know that in the monarchy of France, in
the year 1780, a man who set out to find a remedy for this or that evil
of the hour would have found but one remedy for all of them—the
overthrowing of the aristocracy? And similarly all the diseases of this
period, which are the despair of the moralist and the patriot, are
consequences of the fact that our society is gasping in a last desperate
agony of effort to maintain its system of competitive industry. We are
like a man running on a railroad track pursued by a train. The train is
increasing its speed, and do what he will, it gains upon him; he cries
out, he gasps for breath, he is agonised, wild with terror, making his
last leap with the engine at his very heels—and then suddenly it occurs
to him to leap to one side, and so the train flashes by, and he sits
down and mops his brow and thinks how very stupid it was of him!