cities and towns. No matter by what bribery their franchises may have
been gained, no matter how many oceans of water may have been pumped
into their stocks, these values are sacred, and no legislature may pass
a law reducing prices below a “fair return.” We have public service
commissions which are supposed to put a stop to future stock-waterings
and fraud, and to protect the public against unjust rates; but what
are these commissions doing? The answer is, they are selling us out;
and the proof is published daily, in the stock market quotations for
the securities of these corporations. That is one kind of proof to
which there is no answer, Judd; other people may be fooled about money
matters, but the men who buy and sell in Wall Street are not fooled
for long; they watch earnings, and, automatically every stock takes
the ranking to which its dividends entitle it. If public service
commissions are protecting you and me in our rights, then the stocks of
public service corporations are of no use for purposes of speculation
in Wall Street; on the other hand, if Wall Street is scrambling for
them, and boosting the prices of them, it means one thing and one
only--the big thieves have broken down the defenses we built up against
them.
And what are the facts? Here are the “high” quotations for some of our
biggest public utility corporations, the first figure for the year
1921, and the second for the year 1925; the gains speak for themselves:
American Gas, 49, 79; American Light and Traction, 112, 249; Middle
West Utilities, 24, 112; Public Service Company of N. Illinois, 82,
126; Standard Gas and Electric, 17, 59; Western Power, 30, 86.
And incredible as it may seem, Judd, here is our old friend the “stock
dividend!” Yes, even in public utilities, they are getting away with
so much that they have to hide it! American Water Works gave five new
shares for one old share; Cities Service Co. the same! Western Power
declared a 50% stock dividend; Columbia Gas and Electric gave three
new shares “of no par value” for one old share. Here is a new trick,
Judd--no par value any more, so you will never be able to say what that
corporation ought to earn! You will never be able to raise the awkward
question how much real money was put into the concern at the start!
They won’t have to declare any more stock dividends, for the old ones
will serve to infinity; as the cheerful phrase has it, the sky is the
limit!
Look, Judd; three years ago we had a big “power fight” in Southern
California. It was proposed by public-spirited people that the state
should issue bonds for $500,000,000 and develop its own water power.
Our big newspapers raved at the wicked idea; they told you that would
be “Socialism,” and you believed them, and voted down the proposal. So
now the great power companies have the field without a rival; they are
spending the money--and where are they getting it? Selling stocks and
bonds in Wall Street, of course; and on what basis? What basis could
there be--except the fancy prices they intend to charge you for power,
with the permission of the corrupt public authorities of this state?
And one thing more, Judd; when they come to present their bills--with
the permission of the public service commission--they are going to
include in the items the amount of $501,605.68 which they paid in the
political campaign to bamboozle you! Yes, Judd, they will do that, and
you will never know it, because it will be classified as “organizing
expenses,” or “advertising,” or something like that; and how carefully
do you go into the reports of the public service corporations which
supply you with power? Six power companies admitted before the
legislative investigating committee that they had paid that sum in the
campaign; the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the old established
rulers of this community, the purchasers of our local government, put
in the tidy sum of $133,933.80. And so here is a sentence to paste in
your hat, Judd:
_Not only do they rob you; they make you want to be robbed, and
they make you pay them for teaching you to want to be robbed!_
And one more, Judd--a “slogan” for the next campaign:
_Letting yourself be robbed is Americanism; defending yourself
against robbery is Socialism!_
LETTER VIII
MY DEAR JUDD:
You read about the rich growing richer and the poor poorer, and you
wonder why the poor have stood it. Why didn’t they “do something.”
The answer is, they tried to, but the rich wouldn’t let them. It is of
the nature of wealth to be powerful, and to use its power to protect
and perpetuate itself. Jesus said: “Whosoever hath, to him shall be
given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which
he seemeth to have.” You have there the whole of political and economic
science, and no professor in any capitalist university can say it any
better. The history of our country is a record of incessant struggles
on the part of the poor, continually repressed and brought to naught
by the rich. The most powerful weapon in this conflict has been, of
course, the government; the rich have had it, and the poor have been
trying to take it away from them, and have failed.
In their battle the rich have had four lines of defense. First, the
elections; they put up the money, and subsidize a political party, and
carry on a campaign of falsehood and abuse, and buy votes and stuff
ballot-boxes, and so defeat the poor at the polls. Second, assuming
they fail in this, comes the legislative line of defense; they sow
discord in the ranks of their opponents, they buy up some of their
representatives, they delay action and confuse the public and plant
“jokers” in the bills which are passed. And then comes the third line,
the courts; the rich have named as judges their own retainers and
corporation attorneys, their fellow club-members and table-companions,
thoroughly trained in reference for property; and these judges discover
the “jokers” in the laws, and declare them unconstitutional, null and
void. Fourth, assuming these three lines fail, the rich simply defy the
laws; resting upon the certainty that their government will not punish
them; and it does not.
Do these seem to you extreme statements? Each one can be proved a
thousand times over by the well-established facts of our history. In a
previous letter I made the assertion that out of fifteen presidential
elections since the civil war, fourteen were carried by the party
which had the biggest campaign fund. Here are the figures, direct from
headquarters--the “Wall Street Journal.” The winning party is listed
first:
_1868_, Rep. $150,000, Dem. $75,000; _1872_, R. $250,000, D. $50,000;
_1876_, R. $950,000, D. $900,000; _1880_, R. $1,100,000, D. $355,000;
_1884_, D. $1,400,000, R. $1,300,000; _1888_, R. $1,350,000, D.
$855,000; _1892_, D. $2,350,000, R. $1,850,000; _1896_, R. $16,500,000,
D. $675,000; _1900_, R. $9,500,000, D. $425,000; _1904_, R. $3,500,000,
D. $1,250,000; _1908_, R. $1,700,000, D. $750,000; _1912_, D. $850,000,
R. $750,000, Prog. $325,000; _1916_, D. $1,400,229, R. $2,012,535;
_1920_, R. $3,986,383, D. $2,891,252; _1924_, R. $3,359,478, D.
$845,520, Prog. $225,936. Total of winning party, $49,683,369; of
losing party, $14,797,001.
As to ballot-box stuffing, Judd I am not making any guesses, but
telling you what I have seen with my own eyes. In my ardent youth I
gave my services as election-watcher for the “reform” ticket in New
York City, and came very close to getting my head stove in, for trying
to prevent the counting of illegal ballots by Tammany heelers; the
thing that saved me was the fact that as the returns came in, the
heelers perceived that they had won anyhow, and didn’t need the extra
ballots! Lincoln Steffens, in his book, “The Shame of the Cities,”
tells how in Philadelphia the machine used to vote “dead dogs and
negro babies”; the title of that chapter was “Philadelphia Corrupt
and Contented,” and today you can take out the name Philadelphia, and
insert the name of any big American city you please.
The poor have never carried a national election in this country since
the civil war, and the reason is simple, they have been too poor.
It costs a million dollars to put a single piece of literature into
the hands of all the voters in our country; and when you figure the
cost of the speakers and the halls and the advertising and the bands
and the red fire and the rockets and the flags and the bunting and
the bunk, you have a total of several times as many millions as ever
got acknowledged in the reports of campaign expenditures turned in
according to law. The poor cannot produce these millions; and even
if they had the money, they could not get the publicity, because the
capitalist papers will not print the arguments of the poor, even as
advertisements--I know, because I have tried it; the radio will not
accept speakers for the poor--I know, because I have tried that also.
As for the second line of defense, the breaking up of popular movements
and the bedeviling of popular legislation, the proof is the story of
every “reform” movement that has taken office anywhere in the United
States. Never once since the Civil War have the people succeeded in
making effective a major piece of legislation in their own interest;
the proof of which extreme statement lies in the statistics of real
wages in the United States--the fact that in the richest nation in the
world, for the period of its greatest productivity and expansion, the
poor have been growing poorer. We have had campaigns of “muckraking,”
yes; I remember how, many years ago, “Everybody’s Magazine” printed
a boastful editorial, listing all the crusades they had carried on
for the benefit of the people; and I wrote, challenging them to point
out one single practical result which had come of all their efforts,
to show where they had been able to divert a single dollar from the
pockets of the rich into the pockets of the poor; and “Everybody’s” did
not take up that challenge, nor even print it. To complete the story,
note that “Everybody’s” has long since forgotten that it ever had any
interest in social justice, and so has every other magazine of big
circulation in the United States.
The third line of defense, the courts: that is the most shameful story
of all, and for it I reserve a separate letter. For the moment let me
make just one statement: there is not in the Constitution of the United
States one line which entitles the courts to throw out or to annul an
act of Congress. Such action is pure and absolute usurpation, a power
which the courts have seized; and they have got away with it for one
reason and one only--because it has served the interests of the rich.
On that basis they have vetoed law after law, culminating in the
recent decision which sentenced a million little children to slave out
their lives in cotton mills and coal mines.
And then, the last line of defense: I say that when the rich do not
like the law, they simply defy it. The proof of that statement is
written on the front pages of our newspapers day by day. The rich are
making no pretense of obeying the prohibition law; I have had drinks
offered to me, in defiance of law, in the offices of leading senators
and government officials. The big bootleggers today are eminent
citizens, on terms of equality with bankers and judges and corporation
attorneys; and yet we speculate about the spread of the crime wave!
But the crimes that interest me, Judd, are not house-breaking and
safe-cracking, nor even bootlegging; for these take only a few lives,
and destroy only a few characters. What I am after are those crimes
which degrade whole populations, beating down their standards of
life, and depriving them of hope and self-respect; those crimes which
sap the foundations of free institutions. And those are the crimes
of big business--in other words, the crimes committed by bankers and
judges and corporation attorneys. I remind you of the report of a
United States Comptroller of the Currency, published in 1916--to the
effect that out of 7,613 national banks, 2,743, or 36% were “guilty
of usury”--and this “according to sworn reports, made by the banks
themselves!” But do you see any procession of national bankers going to
the federal penitentiaries for robbing the poor? You do not!
Or take the Sherman Anti-trust law; the most flagrant case in our
history of the nullification of a major statute by the will of the
rich. This was a law forbidding combination in restraint of trade;
it stood in the way of the profits of big business, and big business
simply refused to give those profits up. The trust magnates fought
the government--for thirty-one years that fight has been going on, in
the courts, at the polls, in the kept press, and secretly by intrigue
and bribery. Those public officials who could not be bought have been
slandered and driven out of public life--Theodore Roosevelt, for
example; and the result is that today the law is an absolute dead
letter. The great combinations are being formed, all the way down the
line--the power trust, the bread trust, the radio trust, the movie
trust; they are establishing monopolies and holding up prices and
watering stocks a thousand or ten thousand per cent; and what is the
state of public opinion on the subject? One of the most conspicuous of
the law-breakers, Secretary Mellon of the Aluminum trust, sits in our
cabinet at Washington, and dictates a law cutting his own income taxes
in half, and another law keeping his income taxes secret!
Or take what happened in the case of the Standard Oil trust. In 1911
the Supreme Court ordered it to “dissolve,” the purpose being to
restore competition. The concern made a paper “dissolution,” into
thirty-two separate companies, but for some reason these little
companies remained in complete and brotherly harmony: so much so
that in ten years they increased the market value of their stocks
_thirty-five times_, and the dividends paid, including of course the
stock dividends, amounted to _eighteen times the total capital when the
dissolution took place_! In other words, what Standard Oil did was to
make a joke of the law, obeying it on paper and defying it in reality.
Yet, are the securities of this criminal organization any the less
valid, any the less sacred under the law? Are its dollars any the less
real? To ask such a question is to be a “Bolshevik.”
Throughout our history, ever since the Civil War, we have had scandals,
and government officials have been caught selling out the people to big
business thieves. The “credit mobilier,” the Tweed ring, the railroad
land steals, the Ballinger land steals, the airplane steals, the
war-contract frauds, the Sinclair and Doheny oil steals--one could name
scores of such. Here and there efforts were made to punish the thieves;
but in no case was the stolen money recovered. All those billions of
fraudulent dollars exist today in Wall Street, in the form of perfectly
sound and respectable securities, standing on a par with all other
vested property rights. You, and the rest of our toiling masses,
continue to pay dividends and interest upon them; as the system stands,
and so long as it stands, you must pay tribute to all that mass of
stolen wealth, before ever you can have one penny in your own pocket,
one morsel of food in your own mouth!
LETTER IX
MY DEAR JUDD:
We know by now what the word “privilege” means. Hundreds of thousands
of people do not have to do useful labor in our society; they draw off
the profits of other people’s labor, and the good things of life flow
to them in a stream so great as sometimes to overwhelm them. And this
flow is guaranteed them for life, and to their descendants to the end
of time. All our political teachings, all our economic calculations,
are based upon the idea that this state of affairs is permanent; the
right of property to draw interest, dividends and profits is inviolable.
It is easy to understand that the favored ones of privilege believe in
the sacredness of such rights. Once upon a time the priests protected
them, and then the kings; now it is the judges, and here is our modern
form of superstition, the worship of the Dead Hand. Our newspapers know
nobody more wicked than the man who assails the courts; he is a demagog
and an incendiary, and now and then some court reaches out its mighty
hand and claps him into jail.
Nevertheless, Judd, I take the risk, and point out to you that judges
are men like other rich men. I have never seen statistics as to how
many are ex-corporation-lawyers, but the percentage must be close to
one hundred; for what else is there for a would-be judge to be, except
a corporation lawyer? He must be a “big” lawyer, before he is fit for
the bench; and how else can you be “big”--that is, earn a great deal
of money--except by serving those who have the money? And how are you
going to get your nomination, except by going to see the political
boss who has the giving of nominations? And will the boss give you
this honor, without asking what use you are going to make of it after
you get it? When there are so many millions upon millions of dollars
at stake, depending upon your judicial decisions? Really, Judd, if
you expect things like that to happen, you are as big a dunce as your
industrial masters think you!
It happens that I once knew intimately a very “big” judge; he was a
member of the Court of Appeals of the State of New Jersey, which is
to say he was one of the five highest judges in a state which was
extremely important, because many of our biggest corporations were
formed under its safe and easy laws. At the same time the “big” judge
was a “big” corporation lawyer on the other side of the Hudson River,
in New York state; in fact, he was the highest paid corporation lawyer
in the city, which was surely going some; he was the author of “Dill
on Corporations,” the standard text-book in every law-school in the
country. I have sat in James B. Dill’s library many an evening, and
watched him smoke big black cigars, and listened to him pour out his
soul. I will tell you the first story of his career, and then I will
tell you the last.
A young law-graduate, he got a job in the law department of a big
railroad, I think he said the New York Central; he was to defend
accident suits, and the lawyer who took him in charge pulled open a
drawer in his desk and took out a list of the judges of the state. “You
will notice that some of these names are checked,” said the man. “When
we have cases, get them before one of those judges. Those are _our_
judges.” Said Dill to me: “That was a young man’s first introduction to
the law.” I asked: “Is it as bad as that now?” He answered, “There are
twenty-two judges of the supreme court in New York state, and nineteen
of them are crooked. I can say to each one, ‘I know whose man you are,’
and not one will dare contradict me.”
And then the last story. Dill had just been appointed to his high post
in New Jersey, and the day after the news was published, one of his
old college friends came to see him, and brought him an offer from E.
H. Harriman, railroad magnate, to retain his services in New York for
fifty thousand dollars a year, “and you needn’t do any work.” Dill said
to his friend, “What case has Harriman got before the Jersey courts?”
The friend replied that it was just general principles, the great
magnate liked to have friends on the bench. Dill answered, “You tell
Harriman--being a fisherman you can explain what I mean--that a fat
trout does not rise to a fly.”
Men do not change their skins when they put on black silk robes and
mount the judicial bench. A hard-boiled, hard-fisted attorney for
labor-smashing employers’ associations, such as Butler of Minneapolis,
whose whole political career was an expression of the hateful arrogance
of class-greed--when such a man is raised to the United States Supreme
Court, he does not alter his nature a particle, but goes right on at
his old fighting job and in his old fighting spirit; only now he has
the terrible power to say that acts of Congress are null and void. The
Constitution gives no such power to nullify the will of the people; and
you don’t have to be a “big” lawyer to verify that--you can read the
Constitution for yourself, and see. And then watch the use which these
ex-corporation-lawyers make of this stolen power! To protect the sacred
right of great manufacturing corporations to employ child slaves! And
likewise the right of employers to underpay their women slaves! And
likewise the right of stock dividends to escape taxation! And likewise
the right of judges’ salaries to escape taxation!
But on the other hand, when the rich pass laws in their own interest,
and these laws are in contradiction to the Constitution, what happens
then? The answer is that the courts uphold these laws--and it matters
not how explicit the provisions of the Constitution may be. The
supposed-to-be sacred Constitution of the United States provides that
“the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”;
and yet the legislature of New York state passed a law forbidding a
man to keep a revolver in his home, and a New York lawyer fought that
law to the highest courts, and was beaten. Here in California the
Constitution provides that “every citizen may freely speak, write, and
publish his sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse
of that right; and no law shall be passed to restrain or abridge the
liberty of speech or of the press.” How could words be more explicit?
And yet we have a “criminal syndicalism” law, under which seventy
men are now in jail for their political opinions, no other offense
having been even charged against them. I personally, as you know, was
arrested and held “incommunicado” under that law; my offense being
that I started to read the Constitution of the United States, while
standing upon private property with the written permission of the
owner, and after notice to the authorities that I intended to exercise
my constitutional right.
Let me tell you a curious detail, in connection with that incident. The
day after I came out of jail I happened to meet on the street one of
the highest judges in this state--I know him because I play in tennis
tournaments with his son. The old gentleman patted me on the back and
said: “Go to it, my boy, you are absolutely right!” But when I asked
him to say that publicly, he didn’t think it would be proper; and when
I asked him to join the Civil Liberties Union, and help to protect all
citizens in such rights, he didn’t think that would be proper, either.
You see how even the most liberal of judges is bound by red-tape and
precedent, and leaves it to others to defend the law.
I have seen in Los Angeles a magazine office raided without warrant
of law, and the editor, a war veteran, manhandled and thrown into
jail--all because the authorities objected to what this editor was
publishing. And not only did the courts permit this, they tried the
man, and would have convicted him if he had not run away. All over the
country such things were done, with the full sanction of the courts.
In New York City federal agents arrested a man and held him in a room
in an office building for three weeks “incommunicado,” and tortured
him until he flung himself out of the window and was smashed on the
pavement below. Two other men began holding meetings of protest against
this outrage, and they were “framed” on a charge of murder, and the
labor movement has so far raised and spent about a quarter of a million
dollars to keep them from being hanged. That is the Sacco-Vanzetti
case, and you may learn about many as bad or worse from the American
Civil Liberties Union, 100 Fifth Avenue, New York.
And how it is with ordinary civil litigation, in which the poor seek
justice against the rich? Here I do not have to ask you to take my
word, for the scandal is so notorious that even capitalist authorities
have been forced to admit it. You see, there are eminent legal
gentlemen, occupied in crushing the poor in major ways--the tariff, the
trusts, the banking graft, “tight money,” child labor, and so on--but
when it comes to a poor widow seeking justice against an employer
who withholds her wages, these gentlemen think that the law ought to
preserve an aspect of impartiality; it ought not be too obvious that
there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. For example,
a majestic plutocrat like ex-president Taft, now chief justice of our
Supreme Court; when such a weighty personage denounces capitalist
justice, you surely will believe what he says! Here he is, speaking
before the Virginia Bar Association: “We must make it so that the poor
man will have as nearly as possible an equal opportunity in litigating
as the rich man, and, under present conditions, ashamed as we may be of
it, this is not the fact.”
Notice the delicacy of the phrasing, Judd: “as nearly as _possible_!”
There is nothing “utopian” about our chief justice! Just how possible
it is for impotence to be equal to power, is something which has
not yet been shown to us; but evidently there is some limit to the
possibility, for Dean Pound of the Harvard Law School speaks of the
attitude of the law to the poor as “this neglect which disgraces
American justice.”