crooked work as this, continued over a long period, is not done for
nothing. Any magazine writer would know, the instant he saw the Baxter
article, that Baxter was paid by the New Haven, and that the "Outlook"
also was paid by the New Haven. Generally he has no way of proving
such facts, and has to sit in silence; but when his board bill falls
due and his landlady is persistent, he experiences a direct and
earnest hatred of the crooks of journalism who thrive at his expense.
If he is a Socialist, he looks forward to the day when he may sit on a
Publications' Graft Commission, with access to all magazine books
which have not yet been burned!
In the case of the New Haven, we know a part of the price--thanks to
the labors of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Needless to say, you
will not find the facts recorded in the columns of the Outlook; you
might have read it line by line from the palmy days of Mellen to our
own, and you would have got no hint of what the Commission revealed
about magazine and newspaper graft. Nor would you have got much more
from the great metropolitan dailies, which systematically "played
down" the expose, omitting all the really damaging details. You would
have to go to the reports of the Commission--or to the files of
"Pearson's Magazine", which is out of print and not found in
libraries!
According to the New Haven's books, and by the admission of its own
officials, the road was spending more than four hundred thousand
dollars a year to influence newspapers and magazines in favor of its
policies. (President Mellen stated that this was relatively less than
any other railroad in the country was spending). There was a professor
of the Harvard Law School, going about lecturing to boards of trade,
urging in the name of economic science the repeal of laws against
railroad monopolies--and being paid for his speeches out of railroad
funds! There was a swarm of newspaper reporters, writing on railroad
affairs for the leading papers of New England, and getting twenty-five
dollars weekly, or two or three hundred on special occasions. Sums had
been paid directly to more than a thousand newspapers--$3,000 to the
Boston "Republic", and when the question was asked "Why?" the answer
was, "That is Mayor Fitzgerald's paper." Even the ultra-respectable
"Evening Transcript", organ of the Brahmins of culture, was down for
$144 for typing, mimeographing and sending out "dope" to the country
press. There was an item of $381 for 15,000 "Prayers"; and when asked
about that President Mellen explained that it referred to a pamphlet
called "Prayers from the Hills", embodying the yearnings of the
back-country people for trolley-franchises to be issued to the New
Haven. Asked why the pamphlet was called "Prayers", Mr. Mellen
explained that "there was lots of biblical language in it."
And now we come to the "Outlook"; after five years of waiting, we
catch our pious editors with the goods on them! There appears on the
pay-roll of the New Haven, as one of its regular press-agents, getting
sums like $500 now and then--would you think it possible?--Sylvester
Baxter! And worse yet, there appears an item of $938.64 to the
"Outlook", for a total of 9,716 copies of its issue of Dec. 25th,
nineteen hundred and nine years after Christ came to bring peace on
earth and good will towards Wall Street!
The writer makes a specialty of fair play, even when dealing with
those who have never practiced it towards him. He wrote a letter to
the editor of the "Outlook", asking what the magazine might have to
say upon this matter. The reply, signed by Lawrence F. Abbott,
President of the "Outlook" Company, was that the "Outlook" did not
know that Mr. Baxter had any salaried connection with the New Haven,
and that they had paid him for the article at the usual rates. Against
this statement must be set one made under oath by the official of the
New Haven who had the disbursing of the corruption fund--that the
various papers which used the railroad material paid nothing for it,
and "they all knew where it came from." Mr. Lawrence Abbott states
that "the New Haven Railroad bought copies of the 'Outlook' without
any previous understanding or arrangement as anybody is entitled to
buy copies of the 'Outlook'." I might point out that this does not
really say as much as it seems to; for the President of every magazine
company in America knows without any previous understanding or
arrangement that any time he cares to print an article such as Mr.
Baxter's, dealing with the affairs of a great corporation, he can sell
ten thousand copies to that corporation. The late unlamented Elbert
Hubbard wrote a defense of the Rockefeller slaughter of coal-miners,
published it in "The Fra," and came down to New York and unloaded
several tons at 26 Broadway; he did the same thing in the case of the
copper strike in Michigan, and again in the case of "The Jungle"--and
all this without the slightest claim to divine inspiration or
authority!
Mr. Abbott answers another question: "We certainly did not return the
amount to the railroad company." Well, a sturdy conscience must be a
comfort to its possessor. The President of the "Outlook" is in the
position of a pawnbroker caught with stolen goods in his
establishment. He had no idea they were stolen; and we might believe
it, if the thief were obscure. But when the thief is the most
notorious in the city--when his picture has been in the paper a
thousand times? And when the thief swears that the broker knew him?
And when the broker's shop is full of other suspicious goods? Why did
the "Outlook" practically take back Mr. Spahr's revelations concerning
the Powder barony of Delaware? Why did it support so vigorously the
Standard Oil ticket for the control of the Mutual Life Insurance
Company--and with James Stillman, one of the heads of Standard Oil,
president of Standard Oil's big bank in New York, secretly one of its
biggest stockholders!
Also, why does the magazine refuse to give its readers a chance to
judge its conduct? Why is it that a search of its columns reveals no
mention of the revelations concerning Mr. Baxter--not even any mention
of the $400,000 slush fund of its paragon of transportation virtues? I
asked that question in my letter, and the president of the "Outlook"
Company for some reason failed to notice it. I wrote a second time,
courteously reminding him of the omission; and also of another,
equally significant--he had not informed me whether any of the editors
of the "Outlook", or the officers or directors of the Company, were
stockholders in the New Haven. His final reply was that the questions
seem to him "wholly unimportant"; he does not know whether the
"Outlook" published anything about the Baxter revelations, nor does he
know whether any of the editors or officers or directors of the
"Outlook" Company are or ever have been stockholders of the New York,
New Haven and Hartford Railroad Company. The fact "would not in the
slightest degree affect either favorably or unfavorably our editorial
treatment of that corporation." Caesar's wife, it appears is above
suspicion--even when she is caught in a brothel!
#Clerical Camouflage#
I have seen a photograph from "Somewhere in France", showing a wayside
shrine with a statue of the Virgin Mary, innocent and loving, with her
babe in her arms. If you were a hostile aviator, you might sail over
and take pictures to your heart's content, and you would see nothing
but a saintly image; you would have to be on the enemy's side, and
behind the lines, to make the discovery that under the image had been
dug a hole for a machine-gun. When I saw that picture, I thought to
myself--#there# is capitalist Religion!
You see, if cannon and machine-guns are out in the open, they are
almost instantly spotted and put out of action; and so with magazines
like "Leslie's Weekly", or "Munsey's", or the "North American Review",
which are frankly and wholly in the interest of Big Business. If an
editor wishes really to be effective in holding back progress, he must
protect himself with a camouflage of piety and philanthropy, he must
have at his tongue's end the phrases of brotherhood and justice, he
must be liberal and progressive, going a certain cautious distance
with the reformers, indulging in carefully measured fair play--giving
a dime with one hand, while taking back a dollar with the other!
Let us have an illustration of this clerical camouflage. Here are the
wives and children of the Colorado coal-miners being shot and burned
in their beds by Rockefeller gun-men, and the press of the entire
country in a conspiracy of silence concerning the matter. In the
effort to break down this conspiracy, Bouck White, Congregational
clergyman, author of "The Call of the Carpenter", goes to the Fifth
Avenue Church of Standard Oil and makes a protest in the name of
Jesus. I do not wish to make extreme statements, but I have read
history pretty thoroughly, and I really do not know where in nineteen
hundred years you can find an action more completely in the spirit and
manner of Jesus than that of Bouck White. The only difference was that
whereas Jesus took a real whip and lashed the money-changers, White
politely asked the pastor to discuss with him the question whether or
not Jesus condemned the holding of wealth. He even took the precaution
to write a letter to the clergyman announcing in advance what he
intended to do! And how did the clergyman prepare for him? With the
sword of truth and the armor of the spirit? No--but with two or three
dozen strong-arm men, who flung themselves upon the Socialist author
and hurled him out of the church. So violent were they that several of
White's friends, also one or two casual spectators, were moved to
protest; what happened then, let us read in the New York "Sun", the
most bitterly hostile to radicalism of all the metropolitan
newspapers. Says the "Sun's" report:
A police billy came crunching against the bones of Lopez's
legs. It struck him as hard as a man could swing it eight
times. A fist planted on Lopez's jaw knocked out two teeth.
His lip was torn open. A blow in the eye made it swell and
blacken instantly. A minute later Lopez was leaning against
the church with blood running to the doorsill.
And now, what has the clerical camouflage to say on this proceeding?
Does it approve it? Oh no! It was "a mistake", the "Outlook" protests;
it intensifies the hatred which these extremists feel for the church.
The proper course would have been to turn the disturber aside with a
soft answer; to give him some place, say in a park, where he could
talk his head off to people of his own sort, while good and decent
Christians continued to worship by themselves in peace, and to have
the children of their mine-slaves shot and burned in their beds. Says
our pious editor:
The true way to repress cranks is not to suppress them; it
is to give them an opportunity to air their theories before
any who wish to learn, while forbidding them to compel those
to listen who do not wish to do so.
Or take another case. Twelve years ago the writer made an effort to
interest the American people in the conditions of labor in their
packing-plants. It happened that incidentally I gave some facts about
the bedevilment of the public's meat-supply, and the public really did
care about that. As I phrased it at the time, I aimed at the public's
heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach. There was a terrible
clamor, and Congress was forced to pass a bill to remedy the evils. As
a matter of fact this bill was a farce, but the public was satisfied,
and soon forgot the matter entirely. The point to be noted here is
that so far as concerned the atrocious miseries of the working-people,
it was not necessary even to pretend to do anything. The slaves of
Packingtown went on living and working as they were described as doing
in "The Jungle", and nobody gave a further thought to them. Only the
other day I read in my paper--while we are all making sacrifices in a
"War for Democracy"--that Armour and Company had paid a dividend of
twenty-one per cent, and Swift and Company a dividend of thirty-five
per cent.
This prosperity they owe in good part to their clerical camouflage.
Listen to our pious "Outlook", engaged in countermining "The Jungle".
The "Outlook" has no doubt that there are genuine evils in the
packing-plants; the conditions of the workers ought of course to be
improved; BUT--
To disgust the reader by dragging him through every
conceivable horror, physical and moral, to depict with lurid
excitement and with offensive minuteness the life in jail
and brothel--all this is to overreach the object.... Even
things actually terrible may become distorted when a writer
screams them out in a sensational way and in a high pitched
key.... More convincing if it were less hysterical.
Don't you see what these clerical crooks are for?
#The Jungle#
A four years' war was fought in America, a million men were killed and
half a continent was devastated, in order to abolish chattel slavery
and put wage slavery in its place. I have made a thorough study of
both these industrial systems, and I freely admit that there is one
respect in which the lot of the wage slave is better than that of the
chattel slave. The wage slave is free to think; and by squeezing a few
drops of blood from his starving body, he may possess himself of
machinery for the distribution of his ideas. Taking his chances of the
policeman's club and the jail, he may found revolutionary
organizations, and so he has the candle of hope to light him to his
death-bed. But excepting this consideration, and taking the
circumstances of the wage slave from the material point of view alone,
I hold it beyond question that the average lot of the chattel slave of
1860 was preferable to that of the modern slave of the Beef Trust, the
Steel Trust, or the Coal Trust. It was the Southern master's real
concern, his business interest, that the chattel slave should be kept
physically sound; but it is nobody's business to care anything about
the wage slave. The children of the chattel slave were valuable
property, and so they got plenty to eat, and a happy outdoor life, and
medical attention if they fell ill. But the children of the sweat-shop
or the cotton-mill or the canning-factory are raised in a city slum,
and never know what it is to have enough to eat, never know a feeling
of security or rest--
We are weary in our cradles
From our mother's toil untold;
We are born to hoarded weariness
As some to hoarded gold.
The system of competitive commercialism, of large-scale capitalist
industry in its final flowering! I quote from "The Jungle":
Here in this city tonight, ten thousand women are shut up in
foul pens, and driven by hunger to sell their bodies to
live. Tonight in Chicago there are ten thousand men,
homeless and wretched, willing to work and begging for a
chance, yet starving, and fronting with terror the awful
winter cold! Tonight in Chicago there are a hundred thousand
children wearing out their strength and blasting their lives
in the effort to earn their bread! There are a hundred
thousand mothers who are living in misery and squalor,
struggling to earn enough to feed their little ones! There
are a hundred thousand old people, cast off and helpless,
waiting for death to take them from their torments! There
are a million people, men and women and children, who share
the curse of the wage-slave; who toil every hour they can
stand and see, for just enough to keep them alive; who are
condemned till the end of their days to monotony and
weariness, to hunger and misery, to heat and cold, to dirt
and disease, to ignorance and drunkenness and vice! And then
turn over the page with me, and gaze upon the other side of
the picture. There are a thousand--ten thousand, maybe--who
are the masters of these slaves, who own their toil. They do
nothing to earn what they receive, they do not even have to
ask for it--it comes to them of itself, their only care is
to dispose of it. They live in palaces, they riot in luxury
and extravagance--such as no words can describe, as makes
the imagination reel and stagger, makes the soul grow sick
and faint. They spend hundreds of dollars for a pair of
shoes, a handkerchief, a garter; they spend millions for
horses and automobiles and yachts, for palaces and banquets,
for little shiny stones with which to deck their bodies.
Their life is a contest among themselves for supremacy in
ostentation and recklessness, in the destroying of useful
and necessary things, in the wasting of the labor and the
lives of their fellow-creatures, the toil and anguish of the
nations, the sweat and tears and blood of the human race! It
is all theirs--it comes to them; just as all the springs
pour into streamlets, and the streamlets into rivers, and
the rivers into the ocean--so, automatically and inevitably,
all the wealth of society comes to them. The farmer tills
the soil, the miner digs in the earth, the weaver tends the
loom, the mason carves the stone; the clever man invents,
the shrewd man directs, the wise man studies, the inspired
man sings--and all the results, the products of the labor of
brain and muscle, are gathered into one stupendous stream
and poured into their laps!
This is the system. It is the crown and culmination of all the wrongs
of the ages; and in proportion to the magnitude of its exploitation,
is the hypocrisy and knavery of the clerical camouflage which has been
organized in its behalf. Beyond all question, the supreme irony of
history is the use which has been made of Jesus of Nazareth as the
Head God of this blood-thirsty system; it is a cruelty beyond all
language, a blasphemy beyond the power of art to express. Read
the man's words, furious as those of any modern agitator that
I have heard in twenty years of revolutionary experience: "Lay
not up for yourselves treasures on earth!--Sell that ye have
and give alms!--Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of
Heaven!--Woe unto you that are rich, for ye have received your
consolation!--Verily, I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly
enter into the kingdom of Heaven!--Woe unto you also, you lawyers!--Ye
serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of
hell?"
"And this man"--I quote from "The Jungle" again--"they have made into
the high-priest of property and smug respectability, a divine sanction
of all the horrors and abominations of modern commercial civilization!
Jewelled images are made of him, sensual priests burn insense to him,
and modern pirates of industry bring their dollars, wrung from the
toil of helpless women and children, and build temples to him, and sit
in cushioned seats and listen to his teachings expounded by doctors of
dusty divinity!"
* * * * *
#BOOK FIVE#
#The Church of the Merchants#
Mammon led them on--
Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific.... Let none admire
That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane.
Milton.
* * * * *
#The Head Merchant#
Ours is the era of commerce, as its propagandists never weary of
telling us. Business is the basis of our material lives, and
consequently of our culture. Business men control our politics and
dictate our laws; business men own our newspapers and direct their
policy; business men sit on our school boards, and endow and manage
our universities. The Reformation was a revolt of the newly-developing
merchant classes against the tyrannies and abuses of feudal
clericalism: so in all Protestant Christianity one finds the spirit,
ideals, and language of Trade. We have shown how the symbolism of the
Anglican Church is of the palace and the throne; in the same way that
of the non-conformist sects may be shown to be of the counting-house.
In the view of the middle-class Britisher, the nexus between man and
man is cent per cent; and so in their Sunday services the worshippers
sing such hymns as this:
Whatever, Lord, we lend to Thee,
Repaid a thousand fold shall be;
Then gladly will we give to Thee,
Who givest all.
The first duty of every man under the competitive system is to secure
the survival of his own business; So on the Sabbath, when he comes to
deal with eternity, he is practical and explicit:
Nothing is worth a thought beneath
But how I may escape the death
That never, never dies;
How make mine own election sure,
And when I fail on earth secure
A mansion in the skies.
Just as the priest of the aristocratic caste figures God as a mighty
Conqueror--
Marching as to war
With the cross of Jesus
Going on before--
so the preacher to the trader figures the divinity as a glorified
Merchant keeping books. This Head Merchant has a monopoly in His line;
He knows all His rivals' secrets, so there is no getting ahead of Him,
and nothing to do but obey His Word, as revealed through His clerical
staff. The system is oily with protestations of divine love; but when
you read the comments of Luther upon Calvin and of Calvin upon Luther,
you understand that this love is confined to the inside of each
denomination. And even so restricted, there is not always enough to go
around. Recently I met a Presbyterian clergyman, to whom I remarked,
"I see by the papers that you have just finished a church building."
"Yes," he answered; "and I have had three offers of a new church." I
did not see the connection, and asked, "Because you were so successful
with this one?" The reply was, "They always take it for granted that
you want to change when you've finished a new building, because you
make so many enemies!"
The business man puts up the money to build the church, he puts up the
money to keep it going; and the first rule of a business man is that
when he puts up the money for a thing he "runs" that thing. Of course
he sees that it spreads his own views of life, it helps to maintain
his tradition. In the days of Anu and Baal we heard the proclamation
of the divine right of Kings; in these days of Mammon we hear the
proclamation of the divine right of Merchants. Some fifteen years ago
the head of our Coal Trust announced during a great strike that the
question would be settled "by the Christian men to whom God in His
Infinite Wisdom has given control of the property interests of this
country". And on that declaration all pious merchants stand; whatever
their denominations, Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist,
Presbyterian or Hebrew, their Sabbath doctrines are alike, as their
week-day practices are alike; whether it is Rockefeller shooting his
Bayonne oil-workers and burning alive the little children of his
miners; or smooth John Wanamaker, paying starvation wages to
department-store girls and driving them to the streets; or that
clergyman who, at a gathering of society ladies, members of the "Law
and Order League" of Denver, declared in my hearing that if he could
have his way he would blow up the home of every coal-striker with
dynamite; or the Rev. R.A. Torrey, Dean of the Bible institute of Los
Angeles, who refused to employ union labor on the million dollar
building of the Institute, declaring that "the Church cannot afford to
have any dealings with a band of fire-bugs and murderers!"
#"Herr Beeble"#