equal justice against the rich; it seems to me absurd to imagine such
a thing happening. The existence of riches in the world, at the same
time as poverty, is in itself the sum of all injustices; and so, if we
really care about justice, we must either make the rich as poor as the
poor, or else make the poor as rich as the rich, or else strike a happy
medium between the two. This last is my solution and I hope to show you
how it can be done.
LETTER X
MY DEAR JUDD:
We have seen the poor struggling to protect themselves against the rich
in the field of politics, and meeting with no great success. There is
another place where they struggle--in the labor market. Let us see what
happens to them there.
Seeing the employers combining into larger and larger organizations, it
naturally occurred to the workers to combine, and sell their labor as
a unit. At first the employers made this action a crime, and a great
many working men went to jail, before the right of labor combination
was granted. Even now, it is only grudgingly granted; the employers
in their hearts are still certain that anything which reduces their
profits is a crime, and through their courts they hedge the labor
unions about with all sorts of restrictions. The doctrine of the
present hour is briefly this: that labor organization is all right,
provided it does not accomplish anything.
You, Judd, are a non-union man. You grew up in small places, and live
now in a suburban neighborhood which is like a small place, in that
everybody knows everybody else, and the people you work for are not
much better off than you are. You can leave your job any time you don’t
like it, and that gives you a sense of freedom. But suppose, Judd, you
had been raised in the slums of a city, and had to do your carpentering
on great buildings, under a firm of contractors; and suppose you found
that your freedom to leave your job involved the necessity of hunting
another job, under some contractor who belonged to the same employers’
association, and paid the same scale, and followed the same working
rules as your previous boss? You must see that this would make quite a
difference in your sense of “freedom.”
Or suppose you had grown up in some industrial center, and worked for
the coal trust, or the steel trust, or the beef trust. You have read
“The Jungle,” and know how the wage-slaves of Packingtown lived twenty
years ago. Well, Judd, they are living exactly the same way today. I
said concerning “The Jungle” that “I aimed at the public’s heart, and
by accident I hit it in the stomach”; the public insisted that some
pretense be made that their meat was better, but no one even pretended
that the workers were helped. And the same thing is true of the slaves
of “King Coal”; it did not trouble the American people to learn that
the men who dug their coal were living in privately-owned empires,
where the elemental rights of American citizens, and even of human
beings, had no existence.
In such places the only hope of the workers is to organize, and present
a solid front to their masters, and extort better terms by the threat
of withholding their labor. For a hundred years the workers have
been forging that weapon, and trying it out. There are about four
million of them organized, out of the forty-two million wage-earners
of the country, and that seems a pitiful few; but you know about
the leaven in the dough, Judd. Perhaps it never occurred to you to
realize the influence which the organized carpenters--some 315,000 of
them--exercise upon the lives of unorganized carpenters like yourself.
They set a standard, that would otherwise be unknown in the carpenter
world; they make it certain that no boss can get a really big job done
at lower than the union scale--first, because it is hard to get a lot
of skilled men together except through the unions, and second, because
of the constant threat that a union organizer will get in among them.
It is strange to see a man like yourself, rather suspicious of unions,
because of all the poison you absorb from the capitalist press--and yet
at the same time profiting every working hour of your life from the
sacrifices made by union men! Also it is strange to see employers who
fight the unions, and denounce them, and boast of the contentment of
their non-union workers--and make that contentment by paying the union
scale, which otherwise neither the employer nor the men would ever have
dreamed of! Once let the “open shop” bosses have their way, Judd, and
then see how a “free” carpenter’s wages will drop!
We have seen that there is in America a law for the rich, and quite a
different law for the poor; and that state of affairs is well known to
organized labor, you may be sure. The unions never get far in their
effort to raise their members’ standards, without encountering the iron
fist of the government. I have shown you how the rich defy the laws
they do not like; but let no workingman, union or non-union, ever make
the mistake of trying that! There are jails and prisons, and also there
is the hideous “third degree,” with torture-chambers where workingmen
are taught their “place”--of subjection and impotence.
Let me give you an illustration, Judd, right here at home, in this
paradise of the “open shop.” We have a group of employers’ federations,
with an iron-clad policy of class warfare. An employer who “panders to
the union element” cannot get any business, he cannot get credit with
the banks--they smash him as you would a louse. And, of course, they
keep a card list of men who belong to unions, they follow a man up--the
grim device known as the “blacklist.” And all this quite openly, it is
the industrial policy of Los Angeles, and its boast. And do you hear
anything about its being a violation of law? Do you see the publisher
of the Los Angeles “Times” being sent to jail for advising employers
not to hire members of the carpenters’ union? No, Judd, you do not see
that!
So, naturally, the idea occurred to the workers that two could play
at this game. If the employers could refuse to do business with
them, obviously they could refuse to do business with the employers.
So they tried it; and then what happened? Why then there appeared
suddenly a new crime in the calendar of the law; a monstrous form of
wickedness known as the “boycott!” It was a “conspiracy,” a plot to
ruin a business man and deprive him of his property; and the judges
were called upon to forbid it, and they did so. For violation of
such a judge-made “law,” the Danbury hatters--union workingmen of
Connecticut--were fined $240,000; and the United States Supreme Court
upheld that decision. Afterwards union labor succeeded in getting a
law in their favor through Congress, and now the courts are engaged
in paring that down to nothing. Workingmen may boycott their own
employers, but not other employers! But do you ever see employers
limited to blacklisting their own workingmen?
I have shown you the judges taking by force the right to annul laws of
Congress. Confronting the emergencies of labor strife, these judges
proceeded to invent another weapon, known as the “injunction”; which
means in brief that any ex-corporation-lawyer on the bench will issue
an order forbidding workingmen to do anything that the corporations do
not want them to do; and the workingmen have to obey that order, or
else the judge will send them to jail for any length of time that the
corporation may desire; and there is no jury trial, and no defense, and
no redress--the workingmen just go to jail!
What these injunction judges have forbidden labor to do makes a catalog
over which you might have a good laugh, if you could forget all the
heartbreak and agony of the poor that is summed up in the preposterous
sentences. All the hopes that were blasted, the pitiful hopes of a
little better food for a sick wife, of a chance to keep the children
in school! Such things are the meaning of a strike to workingmen; and
suddenly a grim personage in a black silk robe lifts a club and smashes
these hopes over the head! As I write, some clothing workers of New
York are on strike, and a judge has issued an injunction, forbidding
them, not merely to picket the shops of their boss, but to go within
ten blocks of the place! In the West Virginia coal fields, they are now
forbidding mass-meetings, forbidding the use of money in unionizing the
mines, and even the use of tent-colonies for the families of miners
who have been ejected from company houses! In Oklahoma they recently
forbade miners to pray! In Minneapolis I talked with a labor man who
had spent six months in jail for violating an injunction, and he gave
me the thing to read, a list of prohibitions that would fill a couple
of pages of this book; as the man said, “I’d have broken the law if I’d
waked up in the night and disliked my boss.”
And every year they are encroaching a little farther on the rights
of the workers, and of all citizens. They are trying to set up the
principle that it is a conspiracy against the public welfare to
interfere with “essential industries.” Thirty years ago, when Grover
Cleveland sent in Federal troops over the head of Governor Altgeld of
Illinois, and smashed the strike of the railwaymen, and threw Gene Debs
into jail, it was considered quite a startling action. But now we have
got used to things like that, and in 1922 they imprisoned eight railway
leaders in Los Angeles, calling their strike “a conspiracy to interfere
with the mail.” Now President Coolidge, in his message to Congress,
is calling for a law to forbid all such strikes, and take off the
shoulders of the judges the embarrassment of having to create the law!
And so, once more, Judd, do you see why the rich are growing richer
and the poor poorer? Do you see why the index figures of a university
professor revealed that the wage-earners of America, taken as a
whole, were five per cent poorer today than in 1890? I told you that
riches and poverty are not caused by the Will of God, nor yet by any
implacable Economic Law, but purely and simply by the actions of
men, driven by the basest of all human impulses, which is greed. And
here you see, Judd, exactly what these actions are. Every time an
ex-corporation-lawyer on the bench issues an injunction which smashes
a strike, he is reducing the average real wages of the workers of
America; he is taking away a little more from the poor, and handing
it to the rich--and that is the job for which the rich set him up in
office, and bought him his black silk robe!
LETTER XI
MY DEAR JUDD:
I don’t know whether you ever played poker, but I did a few times in
my naughty youth. I recall a game known as “freeze-out”; you played
till you lost all your money, and the game ended entirely when one
man got all the chips. That is our social system--a colossal game of
“freeze-out,” with winter and disease and death to clear the players
from the board. Those who lose at the game are the workers of the world.
You, Judd, must realize that you are in an unusual position for a
worker grown old; you own two lots and three houses, and can live
partly on the rent. But how many others are there like that? Consider
the statement given out this month by the Industrial Accident
Commission of California: “One million men and women of America
suffered disabling accidents in industries this year.” Assuming that a
workingman puts in forty years, as you have done, what are his chances
of getting off without a disabling accident? There being forty-two
million people gainfully employed, the chances would appear to be one
in twenty; but of course only part of the disabling is permanent--the
victims get well, and go back to be disabled again. The number of
accidents increased 30 per cent in 1924, so you see your chances grow
less and less.
The worst you got, Judd, was a rupture. But suppose you had been one
of the 21,232 to be killed; or suppose you were of the 105,629 who
suffered “permanent partial disability” last year; or suppose that you
had eight or ten children, instead of one or two; or that your wife,
instead of dying in an accident as she did, had been crippled, and left
upon your hands for life. Do you think you or your heirs would still
have the two lots, and the three houses, and the fine American sense of
security?
Look, old friend, here are some figures worked out from insurance
tables by the National City Bank of New York, the richest bank in the
country. They are trying to persuade people to take out insurance, so
that the money will come back to Wall Street for them to use in stock
gambling. Taking 100 people 25 years old, they ask what will be the
position of these same people at the age of 65; and they say 1 will
be independent, 4 will be well to do, 5 will be working for a meagre
living, 36 will be dead, “many of them for want of attention that money
would have secured,” and 54 will be dependent upon others. “Out of the
entire 100, only 5 will be in satisfactory circumstances.” There you
have a picture of what the richest nation in the world has been able to
achieve in the way of sound human happiness!
Our Mother Nature is a wasteful parent, who creates many millions of
salmon eggs in order to produce one salmon. It is the same way with
human life also in its dark beginnings; history is a tale of mighty
empires arising only to be destroyed again, and of populations wiped
out by plague and famine and slaughter. But now the light of reason is
beginning to dawn; a few of us have the idea that human energies might
be rationally guided, and that men might cease to spend their time
digging holes in the sand and filling them up again.
Consider war. Women bear children with much pain, and raise them with
loving care, and then send them out, at the very prime of their lives,
to be blown to pieces by shot and shell. Other men in factories, who
might be making the means of human happiness--automobiles and radio
sets and books and music--these men are making explosives to wipe out
whole cities, and gases to poison the inhabitants. In the late war
we destroyed 30,000,000 human beings and $300,000,000,000 worth of
treasure, the product of a whole generation of useful toil.
They promised us that this war was to be the last, but what are the
prospects? In 1912 our government spent for defense nearly a quarter
of a billion dollars, and our 1926 budget for the same purpose is more
than three times that amount. In 1920 the Bureau of Standards analyzed
our budget and found that expenses for wars, past and future, composed
93 per cent thereof. Think of it, Judd, a great government spending one
dollar to save life and property, and thirteen dollars to destroy it!
Of course, the military men will say that the thirteen dollars are to
prevent other nations from destroying us, but the obvious fact is that
when we spend this money on armaments we cause other nations to do the
same, so we might as well do our own destruction and have it over with.
Or consider child labor. We take a million children out of school and
put them into factories and mines, thus stunting them in body and
spirit, and when they grow up into cripples, defectives, criminals
and grafters, we pay ten or a hundred times what we got out of their
childhood labor! Or consider crime, which is caused by the presence of
extreme poverty alongside extreme wealth. Including criminals and those
who catch them, this factor of waste keeps more than 700,000 persons
out of productive work. Or take prostitution, caused by poverty and low
wages of women in industry. There are over a quarter of a million women
in our country who live by spreading vice and disease, and the American
Social Hygiene Association estimates that this costs us $628,000,000
every year.
Or consider adulteration, the putting of worthless goods and poisonous
foods upon the market, all for profits, of course. Or the wastes of
advertising--the seekers of profits spending a billion and a quarter
dollars a year, and keeping more than 600,000 people busy all the time,
in order to persuade us to stop buying the worthy products of Jones and
to buy the unworthy products of Smith. This is civil war within our
industry, and one of its weapons is fashion, the making of imbecile
changes in our goods every season, in order that we may be ashamed to
wear our perfectly good clothes after the first year.
Or take the wastes of mismanagement of industry. The so-called “Hoover
Committee” of the American Engineering Societies made an elaborate
study of this field, and it is interesting to notice that this
employers’ body attributes 50 per cent of the blame to management and
only 25 per cent to labor. They estimate the percentage of waste in a
few great industries: Metal trades, 28 per cent; boots and shoes, 40
per cent; textiles, 49 per cent; building, 53 per cent; printing, 57
per cent; men’s clothing, 63 per cent. Notice that figure for building,
Judd, and be sure you get what it means: out of 40 years you put in at
carpentering, 21 years went to no purpose, because those who directed
your labor were making money instead of making houses!
One great form of industrial waste is men and women willing to work,
and able to work but unable to find work to do. I regard this as the
basic evil, the cause of most of the others, and I believe that it is
an essential part of our present profit system, without which that
system would break down. First, let us see exactly how widespread the
evil is.
I point out, Judd, that nowhere in these letters have I given you
any Socialist figures about anything; in each case I go to the most
“respectable” authorities, those who are least favorable to my point
of view. In this case of unemployment I consult a volume prepared and
published with money derived from the estate of one of the richest
landlords and money-lenders that ever died in the city of New York. I
refer to the Russell Sage Foundation, and here is the sentence in which
they sum up their final figures on unemployment: “To conclude that,
averaging good and bad years, from 10 to 12 per cent of all workers are
idle all of the time, is probably an understatement of the situation.”
The book calculates the number gainfully employed at 42,000,000, and 12
per cent of that is over 5,000,000.
When you talk about five million people out of work it doesn’t mean
much, because we haven’t the mental power to grasp such a thing. Let
us say _one_ person out of work, and see what it means. It so happens
that before I sat down to my typewriter this morning the postman
brought a letter from such a person; twelve miles away from us, in the
great rich city of Los Angeles, a war hero is begging a job, and his
wife and children are starving. This hero encloses a visiting card,
reading, “D. S. C.”--that means “Distinguished Service Cross”--and down
in the corner is “Chevalier Legion d’ Honneur; Croix de Guerre,” the
decorations prized above all things in France. And on the back of the
card he has written: “Ex-soldier, bonus-pest, charity-dependent.” He
encloses newspaper clippings: “Top-sergeant in the suicide squad of
machine gunners,” left for dead on the field, taken to base hospital,
returned to front, made lieutenant, more hospitals and medals--regular
hero stuff, you see, and here he has been hunting any sort of job for
months, and tells me how it goes:
“Louise the baby is low from malnutrition. Virginia, the oldest, the
invalid around whom my book is written, coughs all night incessantly.
We are making our last stand. As completely isolated as though in the
heart of the Sahara. Today I received my first offer of a good job in
weeks, but it necessitates my providing at least $22 of special tools.
It’s on tractor transmission; I built them shortly after the armistice,
but when I entered Stanford University I was through with mechanics,
and gave away my kit. I took my D. S. C. and other war junk down to
my favorite pawnbroker Saturday but they wouldn’t bring carfare to
Pasadena now.”
So here, you see, is one of the victims of our great game of
“freeze-out”; and what was his weakness that caused him to lose in the
game? The answer is plain enough--he believed the propaganda of our war
profiteers and went over to France and risked his life and ruined his
health and fortune--while 23,000 able business gentlemen stayed at home
and made themselves into millionaires! “What price Glory,” Judd!
LETTER XII
MY DEAR JUDD:
I have said that unemployment is a disease of the profit system,
incurable under that system. I am now going to show why, and I consider
these facts the most important in the whole world for a workingman to
understand. They are perfectly simple--any child can grasp them; yet
they are never mentioned in any newspaper, and never taught in any
school. The reason is equally simple--any editor who publishes them, or
any teacher who teaches them, immediately loses his job.
I put them into a series of short sentences for you to paste all around
the rim of your hat and study while you are sawing timbers and mixing
cement. First, then:
_The boss is not in business for his health. Ask him!_
And then, equally easy to verify:
_The boss will make no more goods than he can sell at a profit._
And so, plainly enough:
_Profits for the boss, wages for the workingman; no profits for
the boss, starvation and death for the workingman._
So far, every business man will agree; in fact, this is the doctrine
they hammered into your head during the Coolidge campaign, and it got
them seven million plurality. All right, then; and now let us suppose,
just for the sake of arguing, that the Coolidge administration believed
in allowing the rich to charge as high prices as they pleased for
goods, and to break strikes and beat down the wages of the poor; what
would happen then? Why, obviously the poor wouldn’t have the money to
buy so much goods or to furnish so much profits for the bosses; it
would be only the rich who had the money, and goods would be more and
more for the rich, and less and less for the poor. Take notice, Judd,
the Secretary of the Treasury estimated that in 1919 the amount spent
for luxuries in our country was $22,700,000,000--and with millions of
families lacking bread!
But with the flood of goods pouring out from the machines, the rich
find it harder and harder to consume the product; they take to
reinvesting their money, that is, using it to make more machines, to
turn out more goods, to be sold for more profits. But already there
are more goods than can be sold; there are no longer enough profits to
supply the demands of the great mass of heaped-up capital. So comes
a glut of goods, and factories have to shut down, and we have “hard
times.” Just what are “hard times,” Judd? Paste this in your hat now:
_Hard times are tenant farmers starving because they have raised
too much food!_
And again:
_Hard times are weavers in rags, because they have made too much
clothing!_
And again:
_Hard times are carpenters homeless, because they have built too
many houses!_
And finally:
_Hard times are workingmen who have finished making the world for
their masters, and are ordered to move on to some other planet!_
You will say, Judd, that such absurd things could never happen. To that
I answer, very simply:
_They are happening right now to several million Americans who are
hunting jobs and not finding them!_
This insanity of “hard times” comes periodically in our affairs, in
great waves known as “business cycles”; they are due at intervals of
from seven to ten years, and are just as inevitable as the tides of
the sea. Learned economists study the history of these tides of ruin
and make charts and diagrams of them; but if you state the cause, you
become an outcast from the business world; and so naturally nobody does
state it--except a few outcasts like myself.
The professors of economics admit that this trouble is caused by
“over-production,” and we must get straight exactly what that means. It
doesn’t mean that we have produced more than we need; on the contrary,
we have millions living below the wage level of common decency--our
average wage is $1,200 a year, and the cost of keeping a family on the
bare necessities is $2,000. But it doesn’t matter how much people need;
the thing that counts is what they can buy. I give you another slogan,
and next time you meet a professor of economics, ask him about it:
_If you’ve got the price, you’re a consumer; if you haven’t got
the price, you’re a bum._