Manufacturers' Association is to justify the processes of trade, and
to preach to clerks and employees the slave-virtues of frugality,
humility, and loyalty to the profit system. The depths of sociological
depravity to which some of the agents of this Association have sunk is
difficult of belief. Twelve years ago I was invited to address the
book-sellers of New York, in company with a well-known clergyman of
the city, the Reverend Madison C. Peters. This gentleman's address
made such an impression upon me that I recall it even at this
distance: a string of jokes spoken with an effect of rapid-fire
smartness, and simply reeking with commercialism. I could not describe
it better than to say that it was on the ethical level of the "Letters
of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son". Again, I attended a debate on
Socialism, in which the capitalist end was taken by another famous
clergyman, pastor of the Metropolitan Temple, the Rev. J. Wesley Hill.
He was so ignorant that when he wished to prove that Socialism means
free love, he quoted a writer by the name of "Herr Beeble"; he was so
dishonest that he garbled the writings of this "Herr Beeble", making
him say something quite different from what he had meant to say. I
could name several clergymen of various denominations who have stooped
to that device against the Socialists; including the Catholic Father
Belford, who says that we are mad dogs and should be stopped with
bullets.
Or consider the Reverend Thomas Dixon. This gentleman's pulpit-slang
used to be the talk of New York when I was a boy; and when I grew up,
and came into the Socialist movement--behold, here he was, chief
inquisitor of the capitalist Holy Office. I had a friend, a man who
saved my life at a time when I was practically starving, and to whom
therefore I owe my survival as a writer; this friend had been a
clergyman in a Middle Western state, and had preached Jesus as he
really was, and so was hated and feared like Jesus. It happened that
he was unhappily married, and permitted his wife to divorce him so
that he might marry the woman he loved; for which unheard of crime the
organized hypocrisy of America fell upon him like a thousand devils
with poisoned whips. The Reverend Dixon's holy rage was fired; he
applied his imagination to my friend's story, producing a novel under
the title of "The One Woman"; and it is as if you were reading the
story of Jesus and the Magdalen transmitted through the personality of
a he-goat. Of late years this clerical author has turned his energies
to negrophobia and militarism, making millions out of motion-picture
incitements to hatred and terror. The pictures were made here in
Southern California, and friends in the business have described to me
the pious propagandist in the position of St. Anthony surrounded by
swarms of cute and playful little movie-girls.
Or take the Rev. James Roscoe Day, D.D., S.T.D., LL.D., D.C.L.,
L.H.D., a leading light of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who offers
himself as comic relief in our Clerical Vaudeville. Dr. Day is
Chancellor of Syracuse University, a branch of the Mental Munitions
Department of the Standard Oil Company; his function being to
manufacture intellectual weapons and explosives to be used in defense
of the Rockefeller fortune. It is generally not expected that the
makers of ruling-class munitions should face the dirty and perilous
work of the trenches; but ten years ago, during a raid by an active
squad of muckrake-men, Chancellor Day astonished the world by rushing
to the front with both arms full of star-shells and bombs. He
afterwards put the history of this gallant action into a volume, "The
Raid on Prosperity"; and if you want the real thrill of the class-war,
here is where to get it!
The Chancellor is a quaint and touching figure; an enthusiast and
dreamer, idealist and martyr, in whom the ordinary human virtues have
been fused, absorbed, transformed and sublimated into a new supreme
virtue of loyalty to Exploitation, patriotism for Profiteering. He
began life as a working-man, he tells us, in the good old American
fashion of hustle for yourself; but he differed from other Americans
in that he had an instant, intuitive recognition of the intellectual
and moral excellence of Plutocracy. The first time he met a rich man,
he quivered with rapture, he burst into a hymn of appreciation. So
very quickly he was recognized as a proper person to have charge of a
Mental Munition Works; and the ruling classes proceeded to pin medals
upon the bosom of his academic robes--D.D., S.T.D., L.L.D., D.C.L.,
L.H.D.
The Chancellor knows the masters of our Profit System, those
"consummate geniuses of manufacture and trade by which the earth has
yielded up her infinite treasures." And having been at the same time
in intimate daily communion with the Almighty, he can tell us the
Almighty's attitude towards these prodigies. "God has made the rich of
this world to serve Him.... He has shown them a way to have this
world's goods and to be rich towards God....God wants the rich men....
Christ's doctrines have made the world rich, and provide adequate uses
for its riches." Also the Chancellor knows our great corporations, and
gives us the Almighty's views about them; they mean that "the forces
with which God built the universe have been put into the hands of
man." Likewise by divine authority we learn that "the sympathy given
to Socialism is appalling. It is insanity." We learn that the income
tax is "a doctrine suited to the dark ages, only no age ever has been
dark enough." Somebody raises the issue of "tainted money", and the
Chancellor disposes of this matter also. As a Deputy of Divinity, he
settles it by Holy Writ: "Paul permitted meat offered to idols to be
eaten in the fear of God." And then, to make assurance doubly sure, he
settles it with plain human logic; and you are astonished to see how
simple, under his handling, the complex problem becomes--how clear and
clean-cut is the distinction he draws for you:
Every boy knows that one cannot take stolen goods without
being a partaker with the thief. But the proceeds of
recognized business are quite a different thing.
#Holy Oil#
And here is Billy Sunday, most conspicuous phenomenon of Protestant
Christianity at the beginning of the twentieth century. For the
benefit of posterity I explain that "Billy" is a baseball player
turned Evangelist, who has brought to the cause of God the crowds and
uproar of the diamond; also the commercial spirit of America's most
popular institution. He travels like a circus, with all the
press-agent work and newspaper hurrah; he conducts what are called
"revivals", in an enormous "tabernacle" built especially for him in
each city. I cannot better describe the Billy Sunday circus than in
the words of a certain Sidney C. Tapp, who brought suit against the
evangelist for $100,000 damages for the theft of the ideas of a book.
Says Mr. Tapp in his complaint:
The so-called religious awakening or "trail-hitting" is
produced by an appeal to the emotions and in stirring up the
senses by a combination of carrying the United States flag
in one hand and the Bible in the other, singing, trumpeting,
organ playing, garrulous and acrobatic feats of defendant,
by defendant in his talk leaping from the rostrum to the top
of the pulpit, lying prone on the floor of the rostrum on
his stomach in the presence of the vast audience and from
thence into a pit to shake hands with the so-called
"trail-hitters" and the vulgar use of plaintiff's thoughts
contained in said books. Said harangues and vulgarisms of
said defendant and horns, drums, organs and singing by said
choir and vast audience which are assembled by means of said
newspaper advertisements for the purpose of inducing a habit
of free and copious flow of money through religious and
patriotic excitement produced by and through the vulgarisms,
scurrility, buffoonery, obscenity and profanity of defendant
pretending to be in the interest of the cause of religion
through what he denominates "hitting the trail", the real
object being to induce a religious frenzy and enthusiasm
which he announces in advance is to result in large
audiences composed of thousands of people generously
contributing vast sums of money on the last day and night of
the so-called revival which is invariably appropriated by
the defendant and through which scheme and device defendant
has become enormously wealthy.
As I write, the evangelist is in Los Angeles, and twice each day he
holds forth to a crowd of ten or fifteen thousand; in addition the
newspapers print literally pages of his utterances. The entire
Protestant clergy for a score of miles around has been hitched to his
triumphal chariot, and driven captive through the streets. Here in
this dignified city of Pasadena, home of millionaire brewers and
chewing-gum kings, all the churches have been plastered for weeks with
cloth signs: "This Church is Cooperating in the Sunday Campaign." To
give a sample of the intellectual level of the performance, here is
what Billy has to say about modern thought:
All this blasphemy against God and Jesus Christ, all this
sneering, highbrow, rotten, loathesome, higher criticism,
wriggling its dirty, filthy, stinking carcass out of a
beer-mug in Leipzig or Heidelberg!
Whether willingly or reluctantly, the preachers sit upon the platform
and smile while Billy thus slangs the devil; and being themselves,
poor fellows, at their wits end to draw the crowd, they watch and see
how he does it, and then return to their own churches and try the same
stunt; so the manners of the baseball diamond spread like a contagion.
I open my morning paper, and find a picture of an intense-looking
clerical gentleman, the Rev. J. Whitcomb Brougher, pastor of the
Baptist Temple. He is discussing certain slanderous rumors which he
has heard about Billy Sunday, and he offers ten thousand dollars
reward to anyone who can prove these things; though, as he says,
The dirty, low-down, contemptible, weazen-brained,
impure-hearted, shrivelled-souled, gossipping devils do not
deserve to be noticed.... Scandal-mongers, gossip-lovers,
reputation-destroyers, hypocritical, black-hearted,
green-eyed slanderers.... Corrupt, devil-possessed, vile
debauches.... Immoral, sin-loving, vice-practicing,
underhanded sneaks.... Carrion-loving buzzards and
foul-smelling skunks.
You will be prepared after this to hear that when the Socialists were
near to carrying Los Angeles, this clergyman preached a sermon in
support of the candidate of "Booze, Gas and Railroads".
In so far as Billy Sunday is trying to keep the neglected youth of our
streets from drinking, gambling and whoring, no one could wish him
anything but success; but his besotted ignorance, his childish crudity
of mind, make it impossible that he could have any success except of a
delusive nature. He is utterly devoid of a social sense; utterly
unaware of the existence of the forces of capitalism which are causing
depravity ten times as fast as all the evangelists in creation can
remedy it. So he is precisely like the Catholics with their "charity",
cleaning up loathsome and unsightly messes for a thousand years, and
never stopping to ask why such messes continue to come into existence.
More than that, I question whether the spirit of commercialism which
he fosters does not help the development of evil more than his
preaching hinders it. The newspapers always report the cost of the
tabernacle, and of the "free-will offering", which amounts to hundreds
of thousands of dollars in each "campaign". In each city the expenses
are guaranteed by men who are generally the most sinister exploiting
forces of the community; they welcome and fete him, and he visits
their homes, and is in every way one of the crowd. After the big silk
strike in Paterson, N.J., the employers, Jews and Catholics included,
all subscribed a fund to bring Billy Sunday to that city; and it was
freely proclaimed that the purpose was to undermine the radical union
movement. This was never denied by Sunday himself, and his whole
campaign was conducted on that basis.
Later Billy came to New York, where he met a certain rich young man,
perhaps a thousand times as rich as any that lived in Palestine. This
young man came to Billy and said: "What shall I do to inherit eternal
life?" And Billy told him to keep the commandments--"Do not commit
adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor
thy father and thy mother." The young man answered; "All these have I
kept from my youth up." And Billy said: "Yet lackest thou one thing;
sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt
have treasure in heaven; and come follow me." And when he heard this
he was very sorrowful, for he was very rich.
--No, I have got the story mixed up. That is what happened in
Palestine. What happened in New York is that Billy said, "I am
delighted to meet you, Mr. Rockefeller." And Mr. Rockefeller said,
"Come be my guest at my palace in the Pocantico Hills; and then we
will go together and you may preach submission to my wage-slaves in
the oil-factories at Bayonne and elsewhere." And Billy went to the
palace, and went and preached to the wage-slaves, telling them to
beware the "stinking Socialists", and to concentrate their attention
on the saving of their souls; so the rich young man was delighted, and
he sent for all the newspaper reporters to come to his office at 26
Broadway, and told them what a great and useful man Billy Sunday is.
As the New York "Times" tells about it:
Mr. Rockefeller seldom gives interviews and certainly he has
never been charged with having an excess of verbally
expressed enthusiasm on any subject. But he talked for an
hour and a half about the evangelist. He was full of the
subject of Billy Sunday. "Billy did New York a lot of good,"
he said. He went on to tell of 187 meetings held in 100
different factories, attended by 50,000 men. "That's good
work." And he expressed his satisfaction with Sunday's
theology: "He believes the Bible from cover to cover and
that is good enough for me." The Sunday campaign had cost
$200,000, and "If it had stopped here, if it was not kept
up, it would be poor business; a poor dividend on the
$200,000 and the work invested. But we expect to get
dividends in the next year."
Again you note the symbolism of the counting-house!
#Rhetorical Black-hanging#
It is the duty of the clergy, not merely to defend large-scale
merchants while they live, but to bury them when they die, and to
place the seal of sanctity upon their careers. Concerning this aspect
of Bootstrap-lifting I quote the opinion of an earnest hater of shams,
William Makepeace Thackeray:
I think the part which pulpits play in the death of kings is
the most ghastly of all the ceremonial: the lying eulogies,
the blinking of disagreeable truths, the sickening
flatteries, the simulated grief, the falsehood and
sycophancies--all uttered in the name of Heaven in our State
churches: these monstrous Threnodies which have been sung
from time immemorial over kings and queens, good, bad,
wicked, licentious. The State parson must bring out his
commonplaces; his apparatus of rhetorical black-hanging....
And this, of course, applies not merely to kings of England, but to
kings of Steel, kings of Coal, kings of Oil, kings of Wall Street.
Leland Stanford, son of a great king of Western railroads, died; and
standing over his coffin, a Methodist clergyman, afterwards Bishop,
preached a sermon of fulsome flattery, wherein he likened young Leland
to the boy Christ. In the year 1904 there passed from his earthly
reward in Pennsylvania a United States senator who had been throughout
his lifetime a notorious and unblushing corruptionist. Matthew Stanley
Quay was his name, and the New York "Nation", having no clerical
connections, was free to state the facts about him:
He bought the organization, bribed or intimidated the press,
got his grip on the public service, including even the
courts; imposed his will on Congress and Cabinet, and upon
the last three Presidents--making the latter provide for the
offal of his political machine, which even Pennsylvania
could no longer stomach--and all without identifying his
name with a single measure of public good, without making a
speech or uttering a party watchword, without even
pretending to be honest, but solely because, like Judas, he
carried the bag and could buy whom he would.
Such was the lay opinion; and now for the clerical. It was expressed
by a Presbyterian divine, the Reverend Dr. J.S. Ramsey, who stood over
the coffin of "Matt", and without cracking a smile declared that he
had been "a statesman who was always on the right side of every moral
question!"
In that same year of 1904 died the high priest of our political
corruption, Mark Hanna. He had belonged to no church, but had backed
them all, understanding the main thesis of this book as clearly as the
writer of it. In his home city of Cleveland the eulogy upon him was
pronounced by Bishop Leonard, in St. Paul's Episcopal Church; while in
the United States Senate the service was performed by the Chaplain,
the Rev. Edward Everett Hale. This is a name well-known in American
letters, as in American religious life; it was borne by a benevolent
old gentleman, a Unitarian and a liberal, who organized "Lend-a-Hand
Clubs" and such like amiabilities. "Do You Love This Old Man?" the
signs in the street-cars used to ask when I was a boy; and I promptly
answered "Yes"--for my mother took the "Ladies' Home Journal", and I
swallowed the sentimental dish-water set out for me. But when I read
the Rev. Edward's funeral oration over the Irrev. Mark, I loved
neither of them any longer. "This whole-souled child of God," cried
the Rev. Edward, "who believed in success, and knew how to succeed by
using the infinite powers!" You perceive that the Chaplain of the
Millionaires' Club agrees with this book, that the "infinite powers"
in America are the powers that prey!
#The Great American Fraud#
Among the most loathesome products of our native commercial greed is
the patent medicine industry, "The Great American Fraud," as its
historian has called it. In 1907 this historian wrote:
Gullible America will spend this year some seventy-five
millions of dollars in the purchase of patent medicines. In
consideration of this sum it will swallow huge quantities of
alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a
wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and
dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants;
and, far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted
fraud. For fraud, exploited by the skillfullest of
advertising bunco men, is the basis of the trade.
One by one Mr. Adams tells about these medical fakes: habit-forming
laxatives, head-ache powders full of acetanilid, soothing-syrups and
catarrh-cures full of opium and cocaine, cock-tails subtly disguised
as "bitters", "sarsaparillas", and "tonics". He shows how the fake
testimonials are made up and exploited; how the confidential letters,
telling the secret troubles of men and women, are collected by tens
and hundreds of thousands and advertised and sold--so that the victim,
as he begins to lose faith in one fake, finds another at hand, fully
informed as to his weakness. He quotes the amazing "Red Clause" in the
contracts which the patent-medicine makers have with thousands of
daily and weekly papers, whereby the makers are able to control the
press of the country and prevent legislation against the "Great
American Fraud."
There are a thousand religious papers in America, weekly and monthly;
and what is their attitude on this question? Mr. Adams tells us:
Whether because church-going people are more trusting, and
therefore more easily befooled than others, or from some
more obscure reason, many of the religious papers fairly
reek with patent medicine fakes.
He gives us many pages of specific instances:
Dr. Smith belongs to the brood of cancer vampires. He is a
patron and prop of religious journalism. It is his theory
that the easiest prey is to be found among readers of church
papers. Moreover he has learned from his father-in-law (who
built a small church out of blood-money) to capitalize his
own sectarian associations, and when confronted recently
with a formal accusation he replied, with an air of injured
innocence, that he was a regular attendant at church, and
could produce an endorsement from his minister.
And here is the "Church Advocate", of Harrisburg, Pa., which publishes
quack advertisements disguised as editorials. One of them Mr. Adams
paraphrases:
As Dr. Smith is, on the face of his own statements, a
self-branded swindler and rascal, you run no risk in
assuming that the Rev. C.H. Forney, D.D., L.L.D., in acting
as his journalistic supporter for pay, is just such another
as himself!
And again:
Will the editor of the "Baptist Watchman" of Boston explain
by what phenomenon of logic or elasticity of ethics he
accepts the lucubrations of Dr. Bye, of Oren Oneal, of
Liquozone, of Actina, that marvelous two-ended mechanical
appliance which "cures" deafness at one terminus and
blindness at the other, and all with a little oil of
mustard?
And again:
The "Christian Observer" of Louisville replied to a
protesting subscriber, suggesting that the "Collier"
articles were written in a spirit of revenge, because
"Collier's" could not get patent medicine advertising. When
I asked the Rev. F. Bartlett Converse for his foundation for
the charge, he said that one of the typewriters must have
written the letter! Doubtless also the same highly
responsible typewriter imitated the signature with startling
fidelity to Dr. Converse's handwriting!
And here is--would you think it possible?--our "Church of Good
Society"! It has an organ in Chicago called the "Living Church", most
dignified and decorous. You have to study quite a while to ascertain
what denomination it belongs to; it will not tell you directly, for
the Anglician pose is that it is #the# church
Elect from every nation,
Yet one o'er all the earth,
Her charter of salvation,
One Lord, one Faith, one Birth;
One holy name she blesses,
Partakes one holy food,
And toward one Hope she presses,
With every grace endued.
And this one holy institution was found setting at its peak the black
flag of the trader, the "Jolly Roger" of the modern commercial
pirate--"Caveat emptor!" To quote the precise words:
The editors and publishers of the "Living Church" assume no
responsibility for the assertions of advertisers.
And so it threw open its columns to the claims of America's champion
labor-baiter, the late C.W. Post, that his "Grapenuts" would prevent
appendicitis, and obviate the need of operations in such cases!
And here is the "Christian Endeavor World", organ of one of the most
powerful non-sectarian religious bodies in the country. Some one wrote
complaining of its medical advertising, and the answer was:
To the best of our knowledge and belief, we are not
publishing any fraudulent or unworthy medical
advertising.... Trusting that you will be able to understand
that we are acting according to our best and sincerest
judgment, I remain, yours very truly, The Golden Rule
Company, George W. Coleman, Business Manager.
Whereupon the historian of "The Great American Fraud" remarks:
Assuming that the business management of the "Christian
Endeavor World" represents normal intelligence, I would like
to ask whether it accepts the statement that a pair of
"magic foot drafts" applied to the soles of the feet will
cure any and every kind of rheumatism in any part of the
body? Further, if the advertising department is genuinely
interested in declining "fraudulent and unworthy" copy, I
would call their attention to the ridiculous claims of Dr.
Shoop's medicines, which "cure" almost every disease; to two
hair removers, one an "Indian Secret", the other an
"accidental discovery", both either fakes or dangerous; to
the lying claims of Hall's Catarrh Cure, that it is "a
positive cure for catarrh", in all its stages; to "Syrup of
Figs", which is not a fig syrup, but a preparation of senna;
to Dr. Kilmer's Swamp Root, of which the principal medical
constituent is alcohol; and, finally, to Dr. Bye's Oil Cure
for cancer, a particularly cruel swindle on unfortunates
suffering from an incurable malady. All of these, with other
matter, which for the sake of decency I do not care to
detail in these columns, appear in recent issues of the
"Christian Endeavor World".
#Riches in Glory#
There came recently to Los Angeles a "world-famous evangelist", known
as "Gipsy" Smith. There was a shirt-waist strike at the time, and the
girls were starving, and they sent a delegation to this evangelist to
ask for help. They told him how they were mistreated, exposed to
insults, driven to sell their virtue because their wage would not
support life; and to their plea he made answer: "Get Jesus in your
hearts, and these questions will take care of themselves!"