clergymen of the Protestant Church appeared and bore testimony to the
outrages which were being committed against the strikers; but of all
the Catholic priests in the district not one appeared--not one!
Several Protestant clergymen testified that they had been driven from
the coal-camps--not because they favored the unions, but because the
companies objected to having their workers educated at all; but no one
ever heard of the Catholic Church having trouble with the operators.
To make sure on this point I wrote to a former clergyman of Trinidad
who watched the whole strike, and is now a first lieutenant in the
First New Mexico Infantry. He answered:
The Catholic Church seemed to get along with the companies
very cordially. The Church was permitted in all the camps.
The impression was abroad that this was due to favoritism. I
honor what good the Church does, but I know of no instance,
during the Colorado coal-strike or at any other time or
place, when the Catholic Church has taken any special
interest in the cause of the laboring men. Many Catholics,
especially the men, quit the church during the coal-strike.
#The Unholy Alliance#
Everywhere throughout America today the ultimate source of all power,
political, social, and religious, is economic exploitation. To all
other powers and all other organizations it speaks in these words:
"Help us, and you will thrive; oppose us, and you will be destroyed."
It has spoken to the Catholic Church, for sixteen hundred years the
friend and servant of every ruling class; and the Church has hastened
to fit itself into the situation, continuing its pastoral role as
shepherd to the wage-slave vote.
In New York and Boston and Chicago the Church is "Democratic"; so in
the Elaine campaign it was possible for a Republican clergyman to
describe the issue as "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." But the Holy
Office was shrewd and socially ambitious, and the Grand Old Party was
desperately in need of votes, so under the regime of Mark Hanna, the
President-Maker, there began a rapprochement between Big Business and
the New Inquisition. Under Hanna the Catholic Church got
representation in the Cabinet; under him the Cardinal's Mass became a
government institution, a Catholic College came to the fore in
Washington, and Catholic prelates were introduced in the role of
eminent publicists, their reactionary opinions on important questions
being quoted with grave solemnity by a prostitute press. It was Mark
Hanna himself who founded the National Civic Federation, upon whose
executive committee Catholic cardinals and archbishops might work hand
in glove with Catholic labor-leaders for the chloroforming of the
American working-class. Hanna's biographer naively calls attention to
the President-maker's popularity among Catholics, high and low, and
the support they gave him. "Archbishop Ireland was in frequent
correspondence with him, and used his influence in Mr. Hanna's
behalf."
And this tradition, begun under Hanna, was continued under Roosevelt,
and reached its finest flower in the days of Taft, the most pliant
tool of the forces of evil who has occupied the White House since the
days of the Slave Power. President Taft was himself a Unitarian; yet
it was under his administration that the Catholic Church achieved one
of its dearest ambitions, and broke into the Supreme Court. Why not?
We can imagine the powers of the time in conference. It is desired to
pack the Court against the possibility of progress; it is desired to
find men who will stand like a rock against change--and who better
than those who have been trained from childhood in the idea of a
divine sanction for doctrine and morals? After all, what is it that
Hereditary Privilege wants in America? A Roman Catholic code of
property rights, with a supreme tribunal to play the part of an
infallible Pope!
Under this Taft administration the country was governed by the
strangest legislative alliance our history ever saw; a combination of
the Old Guard of the Republican Party with the leaders of the Tammany
Democracy of New York. "Bloody shirt" Foraker, senator from Ohio,
voting with the sons of those Irish Catholic mob-leaders whom the
Federal troops shot down in the draft-riots! By this unholy
combination a pledge to reduce the tariff was carried out by a bill
which greatly increased its burdens; by this combination the public
lands and resources of the country were fed to a gang of vultures by a
thievish Secretary of the Interior. And of course under such an
administration the cause of "Religion" made tremendous strides.
Catholic officials were appointed to public office, Catholic
ecclesiastics were accorded public honors, and Catholic favor became a
means to political advancement. You might see a hard-swearing old
political pirate like "Uncle Joe" Cannon, taking his cigar out of the
corner of his blasphemous mouth and betaking himself to the
"Cardinal's Day Mass", to bend his stiff knees and bow his hoary
unrepentant head before a jeweled prelate on a throne. You might see
an emissary of the United States government proceeding to Rome,
prostrating himself before the Pope, and paying over seven million
dollars of our taxes for lands which the filthy and sensual friars of
the Philippine Islands had filched from the wretched serfs of that
country and which the wretched serfs had won back by their blood in a
revolution.
#Secret Service#
This Taft administration, urged on by the Catholic intrigue, made the
most determined efforts to prevent the spread of radical thought.
Because the popular magazines were opposing the plundering of the
country, a bill was introduced into Congress to put them out of
business by a prohibitive postal tax; the President himself devoted
all his power to forcing the passage of this bill. At the same time
the Socialist press was handicapped by every sort of persecution. I
was at that time in intimate touch with the "Appeal to Reason", and I
know that scarcely a month passed that the Post Office Department did
not invent some new "regulation" especially designed to limit its
circulation. I recall one occasion when I met the editor on his way to
Washington with a trunkful of letters from subscribers who complained
that their postmasters refused to deliver the paper to them; and later
on this same editor was prosecuted by a Catholic Attorney General and
sentenced to prison for seeking to awaken the people concerning the
Moyer-Haywood case.
From my personal knowledge I can say that under the administration of
President Taft t the Roman Catholic Church and the Secret Service of
the Federal Government worked hand in hand for the undermining of the
radical movement in America. Catholic lecturers toured the country,
pouring into the ears of the public vile slanders about the private
morality of Socialists; while at the same time government detectives,
paid out of public funds, spent their time seeking evidence for these
Catholic lecturers to use. I know one man, a radical labor-leader,
whose morals happened to approach those of the average capitalist
politician, and who was prevented by threats of exposure and scandal
from accepting the Socialist nomination for President. I know a dozen
others who were shadowed and spied upon; I know one case--myself--a
man who was asking a divorce from his wife, and whose mail was opened
for months.
This subject is one on which I naturally speak with extreme
reluctance. I will only say that my opponent in the suit made no
charge of misconduct against me; but those in control of our political
police evidently thought it likely that a man who was not living with
his wife might have something to hide; so for months my every move was
watched and all my mail intercepted. In such a case one might at first
suspect one's private opponent; but it soon became evident that this
net was cast too wide for any private agency. Not merely was my own
mail opened, but the mail of all my relatives and friends--people
residing in places as far apart as California and Florida. I recall
the bland smile of a government official to whom I complained about
this matter: "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear."
My answer was that a study of many labor cases had taught me the
methods of the agent provocateur. He is quite willing to take real
evidence if he can find it; but if not, he has familiarized himself
with the affairs of his victim, and can make evidence which will be
convincing when exploited by the yellow press. In my own case, the
matter was not brought to a test, for I went abroad to live; when I
made my next attack on Big Business, the Taft administration had been
repudiated at the polls, and the Secret Service of the government was
no longer at the disposal of the Catholic machine.
#Tax Exemption#
Today the Catholic Church is firmly established and everywhere
recognized as one of the main pillars of American capitalism. It has
some fifteen thousand churches, fourteen million communicants, and
property valued at half a billion dollars. Upon this property it pays
no taxes, municipal, state or national; which means, quite obviously,
that you and I, who do not go to church, but who do pay taxes, furnish
the public costs of Catholicism. We pay to have streets paved and
lighted and cleaned in front of Catholic churches; we pay to have
thieves kept away from them, fires put out in them, records preserved
for them--all the services of civilization given to them gratis, and
this in a land whose constitution provides that Congress (which
includes all state and municipal legislative bodies) "shall make no
law respecting an establishment of religion." When war is declared,
and our sons are drafted to defend the country, all Catholic monks and
friars, priests and dignitaries are exempted. They are "ministers of
religion"; whereas we Socialists may not even have the status of
"conscientious objectors." We do not teach "religion"; we only teach
justice and humanity, decency and truth.
In defense of this tax-exemption graft, the stock answer is that the
property is being used for purposes of "education" or "charity". It is
a school, in which children are being taught that "liberty of
conscience is a most pestiferous error, from which arises revolution,
corruption, contempt of sacred things, holy institutions, and laws."
(Pius IX). It is a "House of Refuge", to which wayward girls are
committed by Catholic magistrates, and in which they are worked twelve
hours a day in a laundry or a clothing sweat-shop. Or it is a
"parish-house", in which a celibate priest lives under the care of an
attractive young "house-keeper". Or it is a nunnery, in which young
girls are held against their will and fed upon the scraps from their
sisters' plates to teach them humility, and taught to lie before the
altar, prostrate in the form of a cross, while their "Superiors" walk
upon their bodies to impress the religious virtues. "I was a teacher
in the Catholic schools up to a very recent period," writes the woman
friend who tells me of these customs, "and I know about the whole
awful system which endeavors to throttle every genuine impulse of the
human will."
Concerning a large part of this church property, the claim of
"religious" use has not even the shadow of justification. In every
large city of America you will find acres of land owned by the
Catholic machine, and supposed to be the future site of some
institution; but as time goes on and property values increase, the
church decides to build on a cheaper site, and proceeds to cash in the
profits of its investment, precisely as does any other real estate
speculator. Everywhere you turn in the history of Romanism you find it
at this same game, doing business under the cloak of philanthropy and
in the holy name of Christ. Read the letter which the Catholic Bishop
of Mexico sent to the Pope in 1647, complaining of the Jesuit fathers
and their boundless graft. In McCabe's "Candid History of the Jesuits"
appears a summary:
A remarkable account is given of the worldly property of the
fathers. They hold, it seems, the greater part of the wealth
of Mexico. Two of their colleges own 300,000 sheep, besides
cattle and other property. They own six large sugar
refineries, worth from half a million to a million crowns
each, and making an annual profit of 100,000 crowns each,
while all the other monks and clergy of Mexico together own
only three small refineries. They have immense farms, rich
silver mines, large shops and butcheries, and do a vast
trade. Yet they continually intrigue for legacies--a woman
has recently left them 70,000 crowns--and they refuse to pay
the appointed tithe on them. It is piquant to add to this
authoritative description that the Jesuit congregation at
Rome were still periodically forbidding the fathers to
engage in commerce, and Jesuit writers still gravely
maintain that the society never engaged in commerce. It
should be added that the missionaries were still heavily
subsidized by the King of Spain, that there were (the Bishop
says) only five or six Jesuits to each of their
establishments, and that they conducted only ten colleges.
#"Holy History"#
And if you think this tax-exemption privilege should be taken away
from the church grafters, let me suggest a course of procedure. Write
a letter about it to your daily newspaper; and if the letter is not
published, go and see the editor and ask why; so you will learn
something about the partnership between Superstition and Big Business!
It is not too much to say that today no daily newspaper in any large
American city dares to attack the emoluments of the Catholic Church,
or to advocate restrictions upon the ecclesiastical machine. As I
write, they are making a new Catholic bishop in Los Angeles, and all
the newspapers of that graft-ridden city herald it as an important
social event. Each paper has the picture of the new prelate, with his
shepherd's crook upraised, his empty face crowned with a rhomboidal
fool's cap, and enough upholstery on him to outfit a grand opera
company. The Los Angeles "Examiner", the only paper in the city with a
pretense to radicalism, turns loose its star-writer--one of those
journalist virtuosos who will describe you a Wild West "rodeo" one
day, and a society elopement the next, and a G.O.P. convention the
next; and always with his picture, one inch square, at the head of his
effusion. He takes in the Catholic festivity; and does it phaze him?
It does not! He is a newspaper man, and if his city editor sent him to
hell, he would take the assignment and write like the devil. To read
him now you might think he had been reared in a convent; his soul is
uplifted, and he bursts forth in pure spontaneous ecstacy:
Solemnly magnificent, every brilliant detail symbolically
picturing the holy history of the Roman Catholic Church in
the inexorable progress of its immense structure, which
rises from the rock of Peter, with its beacons of faith and
devotion piercing the fog of doubt and fear which surround
the world and the worldly, was the ceremony yesterday at the
Cathedral of St. Vibiana, whereby Bishop John J. Cantwell
was installed in his diocese of Monterey and Los Angeles.
And then, a month later, conies another occasion of state--the
twenty-third Annual Banquet. the Merchants' and Manufacturers'
Association of Los Angeles. I should have to write a little essay to
make clear the sociological significance of that function; explaining
first, a nation-wide organization which has been proven by
congressional investigation and by the publication of its secret
documents to be a machine for the corruption of our political life;
and then exhibiting our "City of the Angels", from which all Angels
have long since fled; a city in the first crude stage of land
speculation, without order, dignity or charm; a city of real estate
agents, who exist by selling climate to new arrivals from the East; a
city whose intellectual life is "boosting", whose standards of truth
are those of the horse-trade. Its newspapers publish a table of
temperatures, showing the daily contrast between Southern California
and the East. This device is effective in the winter-time; but last
June, when for five days the temperature went to over 110, and several
times 114--the Los Angeles space was left empty!
In the same way, there is a rule that our earth-quake shocks are never
mentioned, unless they destroy whole towns. On the afternoon of Jan.
26th, 1918, a cyclone hit Pasadena, of violence sufficient to lift a
barn over a church-steeple and deposit it in the pastor's front yard.
That evening a friend of mine in Los Angeles called up the office of
the "Times" to make inquiry; and although they are only thirteen miles
away, and have a branch office and a special correspondent in
Pasadena, the answer was that they had heard nothing about the
cyclone! And next morning I made a careful, search of their columns.
On the front page I read: "Fourth Blizzard of Season Raging in East";
also: "Another Earthquake in Guatemala". But not a line about the
Pasadena cyclone. That there was plenty of space in that issue, you
may judge from the fact that there were twenty headlines like the
following--many of them representing full page and half page
illustrated "write-ups":
Where Spring is January; Wealth Waits in California; The
Bright Side of Sunshine Land; Come to California:
Southland's Arms Outstretched in Cordial Invitation to the
East; Flower Stands Make Gay City Streets; Southland Climate
Big Manufacturing Factor; Joy of Life Demonstrated in Los
Angeles' Beautiful Homes; Nymphs Knit and Bathe at Ocean's
Sunny Beach; etc.
Now we are in the War and our business is booming, we are making money
hand over fist. It is all the more delightful, because we are putting
our souls into it, we are lending our money to the government and
saving the world for Democracy! Our labor unionists have been driven
to other cities, and our Mexican agitators and I.W.W.'s are in jail;
so, in the gilt ball-room of our palatial six-dollar-a-day hotel the
four hundred masters of our prosperity meet to pat themselves on the
back, and they invite the new Catholic bishop to come and confer the
grace of God upon their eating.
The Bishop comes; and I take up the "Times"--the labor-hating,
labor-baiting, fire-and-slaughter-breathing "Times"--and here is the
episcopal picture on the front page, the arms stretched four columns
wide in oratorical beneficence. How the shepherd of Jesus does love
the Merchants and Manufacturers! How his eloquence is poured out upon
them! "You represent, gentlemen, the largest and the most civilizing
secular body in the country. You are the pioneers of American
civilization.... I am glad to be among you; glad that my lines have
fallen in this glorious land by the sunset sea, and honored to meet in
intimate acquaintance the big men who have raised here in a few years
a city of metropolitan proportions."
And then, bearing in mind his responsibilities as guardian of
Exploitation, the Bishop goes on to tell them about the coming
class-war. "On the one side a statesman preaching patience and respect
for vested rights, strict observance of public faith; on the other a
demagog speaking about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers." And
then, of course, the inevitable religious tag: "How will men obey you,
if they believe not in God, who is the author of all authority?" At
which, according to the "Times", "prolonged applause and cheers" from
the Merchants and Manufacturers! The editor of the "Times" goes back
to his office, and inspired by this episcopal eloquence writes a
"leader" with the statement that: "#We have no proletariat in
America!#"
#Das Centrum#
In order to see clearly the ultimate purpose of this Unholy Alliance,
this union of Superstition and the Merchants' and Manufacturers'
Association, we have to go to Europe, where the arrangement has been
working for a thousand years. In Europe to-day we see the whole world
in conflict with a band of criminals who have been able to master the
minds and lives of a hundred million highly civilized people. As I
write, the Junker aristocracy is at bay, and soon to have its throat
cut; but there comes a Holy Father to its rescue, with the cross of
Jesus uplifted, and a series of pleas for mercy, written in Vienna,
edited in Berlin, and sent out from Rome. The Holy Father loves all
mankind with a tender and touching love; his heart bleeds at the sight
of bloodshed and suffering, and he pleads the sacred cause of peace on
earth and good-will toward men.
But what was the Holy Father doing through the forty-three years that
the Potsdam gang were preparing for their assault on the world? How
was the Holy Father manifesting his love of peace and good will? He
is, you understand, the "sole, last, supreme judge of what is right
and wrong," and his followers obey him with the utmost promptness and
devotion--they express themselves as "prostrate at his feet." And when
the masters of Prussia came to him and said: "Give us the power to
turn this nation into the world's greatest military empire"--what did
the Roman Church answer? Did it speak boldly for the gentle Jesus, and
the cause of peace on earth and good-will towards men? No, it did not.
To Bismarck in Germany it said, precisely as it said to Mark Hanna in
America: "Give us honors and prestige; give us power over the minds of
the young, so that we may plunder the poor and build our cathedrals
and feed fat our greed; and in return we will furnish you with votes,
so that you may rule the state and do what you will."
You think there is exaggeration in that statement? Why, we know the
very names of the prelates with whom the master-cynic of the
Junkerthum made his "deal." He had tried the method of the
Kultur-kampf, and had failed; but before he repealed the anti-Catholic
laws, he made sure that the Church had learned its lesson, and would
nevermore oppose the Prussian ruling caste. We know how this bargain
was carried out; we have the record of the Centrum, the Catholic party
of Germany, whose hundred deputies were the solid rock upon which the
military regime of Prussia was erected. Not a battle-ship nor a
Zeppelin was built for which the Black Terror did not vote the funds;
not a school-child was beaten in Posen or Alsace that the New
Inquisition did not shout its "Hoch!" The writer sat in the visitors'
gallery of the Reichstag when the Socialists were protesting against
the torturing of miserable Herreros in Africa, and he heard the
deputies of the Holy Father's political party screaming their rage
like jaguars in a jungle night. All over Europe the Catholic Church
organized fake labor unions, the "yellows," as they were called, to
scab upon the workers and undermine the revolutionary movement. The
Holy Father himself issued precise instructions for the management of
these agencies of betrayal. Hear the most pious and benevolent Leo
XIII:
"They must pay special and principal attention to piety and
morality, and their internal discipline must be directed
precisely by these considerations; otherwise they entirely
lose their special character, and come to be very little
better than those societies which take no account of
Religion at all."
It is so hard, you see, to keep a man thinking about piety and
morality while he is starving! I am quoting from the Encyclical Letter
on "The Condition of Labor," issued in 1891, and addressed "to our
Venerable Brethren, all Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops and Bishops
of the Catholic World in Grace and Communion with the Apostolic See."
The purpose of the letter is "to refute false teaching," and the
substance of its message is:
This great labor question cannot be solved except by
assuming as a principle that private property must be held
sacred and inviolable.
And again, the purpose of churches proclaimed in language as frank as
any used in the present book:
The chief thing to be secured is the safe-guarding, by legal
enactment and policy, of private property. Most of all it is
essential in these times of covetous greed, to keep the
multitude within the line of duty; for if all may justly
strive to benefit their condition, yet neither justice nor
the common good allows any one to seize that which belongs
to another, or, under the pretext of futile and ridiculous
equality, to lay hands on other peoples' fortunes.