Labor and Freedom
^The Voice and Pen
of Eugene V. Debs
Wkile {here is a lower class I am in it;
While {here is a criminal class I am of it;
While {here is a soul in prison I am not free.
Published by
PHIL WAGNER
St. Louis
1916
115
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CONTENTS
MISCELLANY '
Page
The Old Umbrella Mender ’ 9
The Secret of Efficient Expression 15
Jesus, the Supreme Leader 22
Susan B. Anthony 29
Louis Tikas 33
The Little Lords of Love 37
The Coppock Bros 39
The Social Spirit 61
Roosevelt and His Regime 55
Industrial and Social Democracy *. 73
A Message to the Children 76
Social Reform 89
Danger Ahead 89
Pioneer Women in America 95
SPEECHES
Unity and Victory 107
Political Appeal to American Workers 132
The Fight for Freedom 152
Capitalism and Socialism 167
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Introduction
I think if I had been aiked to name thii work
that comes to us from the rare mind and tender
heart of 'Gene Debs, I would have called it “The
Old Umbrella Mender It was this tragic, touch-
ing tale that I first read in the manuscript; and it
is the memory of this that will always return to me
when I think of the book . It is the perfect paint -
ing from the artist's brush — the sculptured monu-
ment from the master's chisel — that makes one
lowly, loyal soul to live forever in the hearts of
humanity's lovers .
Not but that every line in the book is a treasure,
and every sentiment brought forth an appeal to all
that makes for justice, and equality, and freedom;
nor will it detract from, but rather add to, the
beauty and inestimable value of the entire collection
if others, likewise, carry with them the image and
memory of the old umbrella mender, as they travel
with Debs the struggling, storm-tossed way of
Labor and Freedom .
Henry M. Tichenor.
St. Louis, March 1, 1916.
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MISCELLANY
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THE OLD UMBRELLA MENDER.
Coming Nation, March 1, 1918.
It was on a cold morning late in November
last, just after the national election, and I was
walking briskly toward my office. A stiff wind
was blowing and a drizzling rain was falling.
The threads in one of the ribs of my umbrella
snapped asunder and the cover flew upward, as
it has a way of doing, and I was about to lower
my disabled shower-stick when I ran slapdash into
an old itinerant umbrella mender with his outfit
slung across his back and shuffling along in the
opposite direction. He had noticed the ill-behavior
of my umbrella. It snapped from its bearing even
as he had his eyes upon it. Perhaps it under-
stood. Anyway he had not a cent in his pocket
and he had not yet breakfasted that cold and wet
November morning.
He was about 65. His clothes had evidently
weathered many a storm and besides b»ing worn
and shabby were too light for that season. Over-
coat he had none. Nor gloves, nor overshoes.
Mine embarrassed me.
His hat had been brushed to a standstill. His
shoes were making their last stand and a pro-
truding toe, red with the cold, seemed to have
been shoved out as a signal of distress.
The outfit of the old fellow, carried on his back,
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10 LABOR AND FREEDOM.
was sorry enough to fit his general makeup, and
if he had offered himself for sale just as he stood,
including his earthly belongings and his immortal
soul, he would have found no bidder nor brought
acent.
The face of the old umbrella mender lighted
up with a kindly smile as he commented on the
strange conduct of my umbrella in slipping a
cog just as he happened to come along. I asked
him by what evil magic he did the trick and he
laughed in a half-hearted way just to be polite,
but it was plain that he had long since forgotten
how to laugh.
As we stepped into the shelter of an adjoining
store he sat down on the steps and drawing a
threaded needle from beneath the lapel of his
thin and faded coat, he began to sew the cover
back into its proper place. His fingers were red
and numb. A discolored nail partly hid a badly
bruised thumb.
He had difficulty in doing this bit of sewing,
and it plainly distressed him. His eyesight was
failing and his fingers were stiff in the joints.
Yet he strove eagerly and intently to master their
dumb protest. And he hoped, as he remarked,
that he would be able to make an extra bit of
money to provide himself with a pair of specta-
cles, now that favorable weather had set in for
his trade.
Poor human soul, I thought to myself, as I
looked down upon the weatherbeaten brother at my
feet! A vagabond dog among his kind would
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 11
fare better than this worn-out old umbrella mender
in a civilized human community.
The warm clothes I had on made me uncom-
fortable as I saw him sitting there in rags mend-
ing my umbrella. The overcoat I wore made me
ashamed of myself. Every time the umbrella
mender looked up out of his rags I winced.
What crime had he committed that condemned
him to go through the world in tatters to be lashed
by the merciless blasts of winter and tormented by
hunger-pangs, and of what rare virtue was I pos-
sessed that entitled me to wear the best of clothes
and eat the choicest food !
Dared I call him brother? And could I call
him brother without insulting him?
These were the reflections that agitated my mind
and troubled my heart.
“Good morning!” was the cheery greeting of
a man who passed on the sidewalk, calling me
by name.
The old umbrella mender fairly started at the
mention of my name. He had just completed his
bit of sewing and the threaded needle fell from
his fingers.
“Excuse me!” he said timidly, “is this Mr.
Debs?” 3 ;]
“Yes,” I answered.
“Eugene Y. Debs ?”
“Yes, brother.”
“Thank God,” exclaimed the old umbrella
mender asrTie fairly bounded to his feet and seized
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12 LABOR AND FREEDOM.
my extended hand with both of his. There were
tears in his eyes and his face was flushed.
"Of course I know you now/’ he went on. “This
is your home and I have often seen your picture.
But this is the first time I have ever seen you
and if it hadn’t been for your umbrella snapping
just as I came along, I would have passed you
by and the chances are that I never would have
seen you. God must have tipped off your um-
brella to give me a stop-signal.”
"Say, Gene,” he continued, still holding me
with both hands, "I am pretty well down, ain’t
I ? ‘ About all in and making my last stand before
shuffling off.”
"But say. Gene, I never scabbed. Look at these
hands ! I’m an old rail and I followed the busi-
ness for twenty-seven years. I broke and ran a
freight train most of that time. Never got a
passenger run because I was too active on griev-
ance committees and called a firebrand by the of-
ficials. I wouldn’t stand for any of their dirty
work. If I’d been like some of ’em I’d had a
passenger train years ago and been saved lots of
grief. But I’d rather be a broken down old um-
brella-fixer without a friend than to be a scab
and worth a million.”
A gleam of triumph lighted up his seamed and
weatherbeaten countenance.
"Did you belong to the A. E. TJ. ?” I asked.
"Did I?” he answered with peculiar and assur-
ing emphasis. "I was the first man on our di-
vision to sign the list, and my name was first on
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
13
the charter. Look it up and you’ll find me there.
My card I lost in Ohio where I was run in as a
vag. The deputy that searched me at the jail
took my card from my pocket and I never saw
it again. It was all I had left. I raised a row
about it and they threatened to lock me up again.
I was told afterwards that the deputy had scabbed
in the A. R. TJ. strike.”
“Did I belong to the A. R. U. ? Well, I should
say I did and I am proud of it even if they did
put me on the hummer and pull me down to where
I am today. But I never scabbed. And when I
cross the big divide I can walk straight up to the
bar of judgment and look God in the face with-
out a flicker.”
“We had the railroads whipped to a standstill,”
he said, warming up, “but the soldiers, the courts
and the army of deputy United States marshals
that scabbed our jobs were too much for us. It
was the government and not the railroads that put
us out, and it was a sorry day for the railroad men
of this country. Mark what I tell you, the time
will come when they will have to reorganize the
A. R. U. It was tiie only union that all could
join and in which all got a square deal, and it
was the only union the railroad managers ever
feared ”
And then he told me the melancholy story of
his own persecution and suffering after the strike.
His job was gone and his name was on the black-
list. Five jobs he secured under assumed names
were lost to him as soon as he was found out
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
Poverty began to harass him. He picked up odd
jobs and when he managed to get a dollar ahead
he sent it to his family. His aged mother die<Lo*f
privation and worry and his wife soon followed
her to the grave. Two boys were left, but what-
ever became of them and whether they are now
alive or dead, he could never learn.
The old fellow grew serious and a melancholy .
sigh escaped him. But he was not bitter. He bore
no malice toward any one. He had suffered much,
but he had kept the faith, and his regrets were at
least free from reproach.
He was a broken down old veteran of the in-
dustrial army. He had paid the penalties of his
protest against privately owned industry and the
slavery of his class, and now in his old age he was
shuffling along in his rags toward a nameless
grave in the pottersfield.
Had he been an obedient corporation lackey; had
he scabbed on his fellow-workers; had he been
mean and selfish and cold-blooded, he would have
been promoted instead of blacklisted by the cor-
poration and honored instead of hounded by so-
ciety. His manhood and self-respect cost him dear-
ly, but he paid the price to the last farthing. His
right to work and live, his home, his family and
his friends were all swept away because he refused
to scab on his fellowmen.
The old umbrella mender stood before mie proud
and erect and looked me straight in the eyes as
he finished his pathetic story.
The shabby clothes he wore were to him capi-
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
15
talist society’s reward of manhood and badge of
honor.
There was something peculiarly grand about the
scarred old veteran of the industrial battlefield.
His shabbmess was all on the outside, and he
seemed transfigured to me and clad in garments
of glory. He loomed before me like a forest-mon-
arch the tempests had riven and denuded of its
foliage but could not lay low.
He had lcept the faith and had never scabbed!
£ £ &
THE SECRET OF EFFICIENT EXPRESSION.
Coming Nation. July 8, 1911.
The following was written for the Depart-
ment of Education of the University of Wis-
consin, under whose direction there is being
conducted an investigation of the subject of
“Distinguished Contemporary Orators or Lec-
turers— With special reference to fertility and
efficiency of expression . What is the key to
their ability as masters of language? What
school subjects, or what kinds of training
have entered into their lives that have given
them power to express themselves effectively V*
The secret of efficient expression in oratory — if
secret it can properly be called — is in having some-
thing efficient to express and being so filled with it
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
that it expresses itself. The choice of words is not
important since efficient expression, the result of
efficient thinking, chooses its own words, moulds
and fashions its own sentences, and creates a dic-
tion suited to its own purposes.
In my own case the power of expression is not
due to education or to training. I had no time for
either and have often felt the lack of both. The
schools I attended were primitive and when I left
them at fourteen to go to work I could hardly write
a grammatical sentence; and to be frank I am not
quite sure that I can do so now. But I had a re-
tentive memory and was fond of committing and
declaiming such orations and poems as appealed to
me. Patrick Henry’s revolutionary speech had first
place. Bobert Emmet’s immortal oration was a
great favorite and moved me deeply. Drake’s
“American Flag” stirred my blood as did also Schil-
ler’s “Burgschaft.” Often I felt myself thrilled un-
der the spell of these, recited to myself, inaudibly
at times, and at others declaimed boldly and dra-
matically, when no one else was listening.
Everything that was revolutionary appealed to
me and it was this that made Patrick Henry one of
my first heroes; and my passion for his eloquent
and burning defiance of King George inspired the
first speech I ever attempted in public, with Patrick
himself as the theme. This was before the Occi-
dental Literary Club of Terre Haute, Ind., of which
I was then a member, and I still shudder as I recall
the crowded little club-room which greeted me, and
feel again the big drops of cold sweat standing out
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 17
ail over me as I realized the plight I was in and the
utter hopelessness of escape.
The spectacle I made of myself that evening will
never be effaced from my memory, and the sympa-
thetic assurances of my friends at the close of the
exhibition did not relieve the keen sense of hu-
miliation and shame I felt for the. disgrace I had
brought upon myself and my patron saint. The
speech could not possibly have been worse and my
mortification was complete. In my heart I hoped
most earnestly that my hero’s spiritual ears were
not attuned to the affairs of this earth, at least
that evening.
It was then I realized and sorely felt the need
of the education and training I had missed and
then and there I resolved to make up for it as best
I could. I set to work in earnest to learn what I
so much needed to know. While firing a switch-
engine at night I attended a private school half a
day each day, sleeping in the morning and attend-
ing school in the afternoon. I bought an encyclo-
pedia on the installment plan, one volume each
month, and began to read and study history and
literature and to devote myself to grammar and
composition.
The revolutionary history of the United States
and France stirred me deeply and its heroes and
martyrs became my idols. Thomas Paine towered
above them all. A thousand times since then I have
found inspiration and strength in the thrilling
words, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
Here I should say, for the purpose of this writ-
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
ing, that from the time I began to read with a
serious mind, feeling keenly as I did my lack of
knowledge, especially the power of proper expres-
sion, both oral and written, I observed the structure
and studied the composition of every paragraph and
every sentence, and when one appeared striking to
me, owing to its perfection of style or phrasing, I
read it a second time or perhaps committed it to
memory, and this became a fixed habit which I
retain to this day, and if I have any unusual com-
mand of language it is because I have made it a
life-long practice to cultivate the art of expression
in a sub-conscious study of the structure and phras-
ing of every paragraph in my readings.
It was while serving an apprenticeship in a rail-
road shop and in later years as a locomotive fire-
man and as a wage worker in other capacities that
I came to realize the oppressions and sufferings of
the working class and to understand something of
the labor question. The wrongs existing here I
knew from having experienced them, and the irre-
sistible appeal of these wrongs to be righted deter-
mined my destiny. I joined a labor union and
from that time to this the high ambition, the con-
trolling purpose of my life has been the education,
organization and emancipation of the working
class. It was this passionate sympathy with my
class that gave me all the power I have to serve it
l felt their suffering because I was one of thenr
and I began to speak and write for them for the
same reason. In this there was no altruism, no
self-sacrifice, only duty. I could not have done
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
19
otherwise. Had I attempted it I should have
failed. , Such as I have been and am, I had to be.
I abhorred slavery in every form. I yearned to
see all men and all women free. I detested the
idea of some men being ruled by others, and of
women being ruled by men. I believed that women
should have all the rights men have, and I looked
upon child labor as a crime. And so I became an
agitator and this ruling passion of my life found
larger expression.
In the clash of conflict which followed and the
trials incident to it I grew stronger. The notoriety
which came in consequence enlarged my hearing
with the people and this in turn demanded more
efficient means of expression. The cause that was
sacred to me was assailed. My very life and honor
were on trial. Falsehood and calumny played their
part. I was denounced and vilified. Everything
was at stake. I simply had to speak and make the
people understand, and that is how I got my train-
ing in oratory, and all the secret there is in what-
ever power of expression I may have.
In reading the history of slavery I studied the
character of John Brown and he became my hero.
I read the speeches of Wendell Phillips and was
profoundly stirred by his marvelous powers. Once
I heard him and was enthralled by his indescribable
eloquence. He was far advanced in years, but I
could see in his commanding presence and mellow
and subdued tones how he must have blazed and
flashed in the meridian of his powers.
At about the same time I first heard Robert 0.
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. N
Ingersoll. He was in my opinion the perfect mas-
ter of the art of human speech. He combined all
the graces, gifts and powers of expression, and
stood upon the highest pinnacle of oratorical
achievement.
Eobert G. Ingersoll and Wendell Phillips were
the two greatest orators of their time, and proba-
bly of all time. Their power sprang from their
passion for freedom, for truth, for justice, for a
world filled with light and with happy human be-
ings. But for this divine passion neither would
have scaled the sublime heights of immortal
achievement. The sacred fire burned within them
and when they were aroused it flashed from their
eyes and rolled from their inspired lips in torrents
ofeloquence.
f No man ever made a great speech on a mean
^subject. Slavery never inspired an immortal
| thought or utterance. Selfishness is dead to every
j art. The love of truth and the passion to serve it
(light every torch of real eloquence.
Had Ingersoll and Phillips devoted their lives to
the practice of law for pay the divine fire within
them would have burned to ashes and they would
have died in mediocrity.
The highest there is in oratory is the highest
there is in truth, in honesty, in morality. All the
virtues combine in expressing themselves in beau-
tiful words, poetic phrases, glowing periods, and
moving eloquence.
The loftiest peaks rise from the lowest depths
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 21
and their shining summits glorify their hidden
foundations.
The highest eloquence springs from the lowliest
sources and pleads trumpet-tongued for the chil-
dren of the abyss.
Wendell Phillips was inspired by the scarred
back, the pleading eyes, and the mute lips of chat-
tel slavery and his tongue, eloquent with the light-
ning of Jehovah’s wrath, became an avenging flame
to scourge the horror of slavery from the earth.
Denial of one’s better self seals the lips or pol-
lutes them. Fidelity to conviction opens them and
truth blossoms in eloquence.
The tongue is tipped with the flame that leaps
from the alt&r-fire of the soul.
Ingersoll and Phillips were absolutely true to
their convictions. They attacked monstrous evils
and were hated and denounced. Had they yielded
to the furies which assailed them they would have
perished. But the fiercer the attacks upon them
the stauncher they stood and the more eloquent and
powerful they became. The truth fired their souls,
flashed from their eyes, and inspired their lips.
There is no inspiration in evil and no power
except for its own destruction.
He who aspires to master the art of expression
must first of all consecrate himself completely to
some great cause, and the greatest cause of all is
the cause of humanity. He must learn to feel
deeply and think clearly to express himself elo-
quently. He must be absolutely true to the best
there is in him, if he has to stand alone.
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
Such natural powers as he may have should be
cultivated by the study of history, science and lit-
terature. He must not only keep close to the peo-
ple but remember that he is one of them, and not
above the meanest. He must feel the wrongs of
others so keenly that he forgets his own, and re-
solve to combat these wrongs with all the power at
his command.'
The most thrilling and inspiring oratory, the
most powerful and impressive eloquence is the voice
of the disinherited, the oppressed, the suffering and
submerged; it is the voice of poverty and misery,
of rags and crusts, of wretchedness and despair;
the voice of humanity crying to the infinite; the
voice that resounds throughout the earth and
reaches heaven; the voice that awakens the con-
science of the race and proclaims the truths that
fill the world with light and liberty and love.
Ji Jl J
JESUS, THE SUPREME LEADER.
Coming Nation (Formerly Progressive Woman). March. 1914.
It matters little whether Jesus was bora at Naz-
areth or Bethlehem. The accounts conflict, but the
point is of no consequence.
It is of consequence, however, that He was born
in a stable and cradled in a manger. This fact of
itself, about which there is no question, certifies
conclusively the proletarian character of Jesus
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 28
Christ. Had His parents been other than poor
working people — money-changers, usurers, mer-
chants, lawyers, scribes, priests or other parasites —
He would not have been delivered from His
mother’s womb on a bed of straw in a stable
among asses and other animals.
Was Jesus divinely begotten? Yes, the same as
every other babe ever born into the world. He was
of miraculous origin the same as all the rest of
mankind. The scriptural account of his “immacu-
late conception” is a beautiful myth, but scarcely
more of a miracle than the conception of all other
babes.
- — Jjegus^wasunot divine because he was less human
than his fellowmen but for the opposite reason that
he was supremely human, and it is this of which
his divinity eonsistsi”the^unhess and perfection of
him as an intellectual, moral and spiritual human
„ being.
/ The chronicles of his time and of later days are
/ filled with contradictory and absurd stories about
/ him and he has been disfigured and distorted by
/ cunning priests to serve their knavish ends and by
I ignorant idolaters to give godly sanction to their
j blind bigotry and savage superstition, but there is
j no impenetrable myth surrounding the personality
of Jesus Christ. He was not a legendary being or
an allegorical figure, but as Bouck White and others
have shown us, a flesh and blood Man in the ful-
ness of his matchless powers and the completeness
of his transcendent consecration.
To me Jesus Christ is as real, as palpitant and
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
pervasive as a historic character as John Brown,
Abraham Lincoln or Karl Marx. He has persisted
in spite of two thousand years of theological emas-
culation to destroy his revolutionary personality,
and is today the greatest moral force in the world.
The vain attempt persisted in through twenty \
centuries of ruling class interpolation, interpreta- i
I tion and falsification to make Jesus appear the \
divinely commissioned conservator of the peace and
soother of the oppressed, instead of the master
proletarian revolutionist and sower of the social
whirlwind — the vain attempt to prostitute the
name and teachings and example of the martyred
Christ to the power of Mammon, the very power,
which had murdered him in cold blood, vindicates,
his transcendent genius and proclaims the immor-
tality of his work.
Nothing is known of Jesus Christ as a lad except
that at twelve his parents took him to Jerusalem,
where he confounded the learned doctors by the
questions he asked them. We have no knowledge
as to what these questions were, but taking his
lowly birth, his poverty and suffering into account,
in contrast with the riches of Jerusalem which now
dazzled his vision, and in the light of his subsequent
career we are not left to conjecture as to the
nature of the interrogation to which the inquisitive
lad subjected the smug doctors in the temple.
There are but meagre accounts of the doings of
Jesus until at a trifle over thirty he entered upon
his public “ministry” and began the campaign of
agitation and revolt he had been planning and
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
\
\ /
\ 25
dreaming through all the years^rf^hift^earmiig
and burning adolescence. He was of the working
class and loyal to it in every drop of his hot blood
to the very hour of his death, ffp Wed alidade
jlQunced the rich and ^ruel- exploiter m passion-
atelyisl^laY^ed and sympathized with his poor and
suffering victirga^
“I speak not of you all; I know whomTTiave '
chosen/’ was his class-conscious announcement to
his disciples, all of whom were of the proletariat,
not an exploiter or desirable citizen among them.
No, not one ! It was a working class movement he
was organizing and a working class revolution he
was preparing the way for. N
“A new commandment I give unto you : That ye
love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also
love one another.” This was the pith and core of
all his pleading, all his preaching, and all his teach-
ing— love one another, be brethren, make common
cause, stand together, ye who labor to enrich ttye
parasites and are yourselves in chains, and ye shall
, be free!
These words were addressed by Jesus not to the
money-changers, the scribes and pharisees, the rich
and respectable, but to the ragged undesirables of
his own enslaved and suffering class. This appeal
was to their class spirit, their class loyalty and
-their_cla?s solidarity. - - — "" -
Centuries later Karl Marx embodies the appeal in
his famous manifesto and today it blazes forth in
letters of fire as the watchword of the world-wide
revolution: “Workers of all countries unite : you
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
26
have nothing to lose but your chains . You have a
world to gain .**
During the brief span of three years, embracing
the whole period of his active life, from the time
he began to stir up the people until "the scarlet
robe and crown of thorns were put on him and he
was crucified between two thieves/’ . J esus devoted
all his time and all his matchless ability and ener-
gies to the suffering poor, and it would have been
passing strange if they had not "heard him gladly.”
He himself had no fixed abode and like the
wretched, motley throng to whom he preached and
poured out his great and loving heart, he was a
poor wanderer on the face of the earth and “had not
where to lay his head.”
Pure communism was the economic and social
gospel preached by Jesus Christ, and every act and
/ utterance which may properly be^ascribed to him
/ conclusively affirms it. Private property was to his
/ elevated mind and exalted'-soujj a sacrilege and a
'hojTorj an insult to God and a crime against man.
The economic basfe-of his doctrine of brother-
hood and love is clearly demonstrated in the fact
that under his leadership and teaching all his dis-
ciples “sold their possessions and goods, and parted
them to all men, as every man had need** and that
they “had all things in common.”
“And they, continuing daily with one accord in
the temple, and breaking bread from house to
house, did eat their meat with gladness and single-
ness of heart.”
This was the beginning of the mighty movement
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
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Jesus had launched for j;he overthrow of the empire
of the Caesars and the emancipation of the crushed
and miserable masses from the bestial misrule of
the Roman tyrants.
It was above all a working class movement and
was conceived and brought forth for no other pur-
pose than to destroy class rule and set up the com-
mon people as the sole and rightful inheritors of
the earth.
“Happy-acc the lowly for they shall inherit the
earth/^-> < - V
Three short years of agitation by the incompar-
able Jesus was sufficient to stamp the proletarian
movement he had inaugurated as the most formid-
able and portentous revolution in the annals of
time. The ill-fated author could not long survive
his stupendous mischief. The aim and inevitable
outcome of this madman’s teaching and agitation
was too clearly manifest to longer admit of doubt.
The sodden lords of misrule trembled in their
stolen finery, and then the word went forth that
they must “get” the vagabond who had stirred up
the people against them. The prototypes of Pea-
body, McPartland, Harry Orchard, et. al., were all
ready for their base and treacherous performance
and their thirty pieces of blood-stained silver. The
priest of the Mammon worshipers gave it out that
the Nazarene was spreading a false religion and
that his pernicious teachings would corrupt the peo-
ple, destroy the church, uproot the old faith, dis-
rupt the family, break up the home, and overthrow
society.
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
The lineal descendants of Caiaphas and Judas
and the pharisees and money-changers of old are
still parroting the same miserable falsehood to serve
the same miserable ends, the only difference being
that the brood of pious perverts now practice their
degeneracy in the name of the Christ they betrayed
and sold into crucifixion twenty centuries ago.
Jesus, after the most farcical trial and the mos^
shocking travesty upon justice, was spiked to thjfe
cross at the gates of Jerusalem and his followers i
subjected to persecution, torture^ exile and death. 1
/ The movementhe had inaugurated, firedT~Jbjr1ns^
/ unconquerable revolutionary spirit, persisted, how- 1
ever, through fire and slaughter, for three centuries j
j and until the master class, realizing the futility of !
f their efforts to stamp it out, basely betrayed it by \
pretending conversion to its teachings and rever- \
ence for its murdered founder, and from that time \
j t
forth Christianity became the religion, so-called, of
the pagan ruling class and the dead Christ was
( metamorphosed from the master revolutionist who
\ was ignominiously slain, a martyr to his class, into
the pious abstraction, the harmless theological di-
vinity who died that John Pierpont Morgan could
be “washed in the blood of the lamb” and countless
generations of betrayed and deluded slaves kept
blinded by superstition and content in their pov- /
erty and degradation.
Jesus was the grandest and loftiest of human
souls — sun-crowned and God-inspired; a full-stat-
ured man, red-blooded and lion-hearted, yet sweet
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 29
and gentle as the noble mother who had given him
birth.
He had the majesty and poise of a god, the pro-
phetic vision of a seer, the great, loving heart of a
woman, and the unaffected innocence and simplicity
V
(A^jSbSSL. — ~~ —
This was and is the martyred Christ of the work:t
j ing class^the inspired evangel of the downtrodden
masses, the world’s supreme revolutionary leader,
whose love for the poor and the children of the
poor hallowed all the days of his consecrated life,
lighted up and made forever holy the dark tragedy
of his death, and gave to the ages his divine inspir-
ation and his deathless name.
j» Ji j»
SUSAN B. ANTHONY: A REMINISCENCE
Socialist Woman, January, 1900.
Twice only did I personally meet Susan B.
Anthony, although I knew her well. The first
time was at Terre Haute, Indiana, my home, in
1880, and the last time shortly before her death
at her home at Rochester, New York. I can
never forget the first time I met her. She im-
pressed me as being a wonderfully strong charac-
ter, self-reliant, thoroughly in earnest, and utterly
indifferent to criticism.
There was never a time in my life when I was
opposed to the equal suffrage of the sexes. I could
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
never understand why woman was denied any right
or opportunity that man enjoyed. Quite early,
therefore, I was attracted to the woman suffrage
movement. I had of course read of Susan B.
Anthony and from the ridicule and contempt with
which she was treated I concluded that she must
be a strong advocate of, and doing effective work
for, the rights of her sex. It was then that I de-
termined, with the aid of Mrs. Ida 'Husted Harper,
the brilliant writer, who afterward became her
biographer, to arrange a series of meetings for
Miss Anthony at Terre Haute.
In due course of time I received a telegram
from Miss Anthony from Lafayette announcing
the time of her arrival at Terre Haute and asking
me to meet her at the station. I recognized the*
distinguished lady or, to be more exact, the no-
torious woman, the instant she stepped from the
train. She was accompanied by Lily Devereaux
Blake and other woman suffrage agitators and I
proceeded to escort them to the hotel where I had
arranged for their reception.
I can still see the aversion so unfeelingly ex-
pressed for this magnificent woman. Even my
friends were disgusted with me for piloting such
an "undesirable citizen” into the community. It
is hard to understand, after all these years, how
bitter and implacable the people were, especially
the women, toward the leaders of this movement.
As we walked along the street I was painfully
aware that Miss Anthony was an object of derision
and contempt, and in my heart I resented it and
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LABOR ANb FREEDOM. 31
later I had often to defend my position, which, of
course, I was ever ready to do.
The meetings of Miss Anthony and her co-
workers were but poorly attended and all but bar-
ren of results. Such was the loathing of the com-
munity for a woman who dared to talk in public
about "woman’s rights” that people would not go
to see her even to satisfy their curiosity. She
was simply not to be tolerated and it would not
have required any great amount of egging-on to
have excited the people to drive her from the com-
munity.
To all of this Miss Anthony, to all appearance,
was entirely oblivious. She could not have helped
noticing it for there were those who thrust their
insults upon her but she gave no sign and bore
no resentment.
I can see her still as she walked along, neatly
but carelessly attired, her bonnet somewhat awry,
mere trifles which were scarcely noticed, if at
all, in the presence of her splendid womanhood.
She seemed absorbed completely in her mission.
She could scarcely speak of anything else. The
rights and wrongs of her sex seemed to completely
possess her and to dominate all her thoughts and
acts.
On the platform she spoke with characteristic
earnestness and at times with such intensity as
to awe her audience, if not compel conviction. She
had an inexhaustible fund of information in re-
gard to current affairs, and dates and data for
all things. She spoke with great rapidity and
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
forcefulness ; her command of language was re-
markable and her periods were all well-rounded
and eloquently delivered. No thoughtful person
could hear her without being convinced of her
honesty and the purity of her motive. Her face
fairly glowed with the spirit of her message and
her soul was in her speech.
But the superb quality, the crowning virtue she
possessed, was her moral heroism.
Susan B. Anthony had this quality in an emi-
nent degree. She fearlessly faced the ignorant
multitude or walked unafraid among those who
scorned her. She had the dignity of perfect self-
reliance without a shadow of conceit to mar it.
She was a stem character, an uncompromising per-
sonality, but she had the heart of a woman and
none more tender ever throbbed for the weak
and the oppressed of earth.
No leader of any crusade was ever more fear-
less, loyal or uncompromising than Susan B. An-
thony and not one ever wrought more unselfishly
or under greater difficulties for the good of her
kind and for the progress of the race.
I did not see Miss Anthony again until I shook
hands with her at the close of my address in
Rochester, but a short time before she passed to
other realms. She was the same magnificent wom-
an, but her locks had whitened and her kindly
features bore the traces of age and infirmity.
Her life-work was done and her sun was set-
ting!
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 33
How beautiful she seemed in the quiet serenity
of her sunset !
Twenty-five years before she drank to its dregs
the bitter cup of persecution, but now she stood
upon the heights, a sad smile lighting her sweet
face, amidst the acclaims of her neighbors and the
plaudits of the world.
Susan B. Anthony freely consecrated herself
to the service of humanity; she was a heroine in
the highest sense and her name deserves a place
among the highest on the scroll of the immortals.
J» <2*
LOUIS TIKAS— LUDLOW’S HERO AND
MARTYR.
Appeal to Reason, September 4, 1915.
“And now that the cloud settled upon Saint Antoine
which a momentary gleam had driven from his sacred
countenance, the darkness of it was heavy — cold, dirt,
sickness, ignorance and want, were the lords in waiting
on the saintly presence — nobles of great power all of
them; but most especially the last. Samples of a people
that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in
the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous miU which
ground old people young, shivered at every corner. . . .
The mill which had worked them down was the mill that
grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces
and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown
faces, and plowed into every furrow of age and coming
up afresh, was the sign. Hunger. It was prevalent every-
where. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in
the wretched clothing that hung upon the poles and
lines; hunger was patched into them with straw and rags
and wood and paper; hunger was repeated in every
modicum of Are- wood that the man sawed off; hunger
stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started
up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its
refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription
on the baker’s shelves, written in every small loaf of his
scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage -shop, in every
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34
dead -dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger
rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in
the turned cylinder; hunger was shred into atoms in
every farthing of husky, chips of potato, fried with some
reluctant drops of oil.
"Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A
narrow winding street, full of offense and stench, with
other narrow winding streets diverging, all peopled by
rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags and night-
caps, and all visible things with a brooding look upon
them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the people
there was yet some wild- beast thought of the possibility
of turning at bay. Depressed and slinking though they
were, eyes of fire were not wanting among them; nor
compressed lips, white with what they suppressed; nor
foreheads knitted into the likeness of the gallows-rope
they mused about enduring or inflicting." — A Tale of Two
Cities.
In these ghastly colors Charles Dickens painted
the picture of poverty and its starving victims in
France on the eve of the French revolution, and
yet, “every wind that blew over France shook the
rags of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine
of song and feather took no warning.” Then the
storm broke and the pent-up furies were unleashed ;
the day of reckoning had come at last and the
crimes of the centuries, inflicted without mercy
upon the long-suffering people, were wiped out in
the hearts’ blood of their aristocratic and profligate
oppressors and despoilers.
The bloody revolution of a century and a quarter
ago in France fills uncounted pages in the world’s
history, but its terrible warning to the lords of mis-
rule and despoilers of the people has been in vain.
Today as ever the greed and avarice of the ruling
class blind them to their impending fate and drive
them to their inevitable doom.
In the state of Colorado in “our own free Amer-
ica” the conditions that make for savage and bloody
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 35
revolution are ripening with incredible rapidity
and the lurid handwriting of fate is already upon
the wall, but the Kockefellers and their capitalist
cohorts, stricken blind as the penalty of their in-
satiate greed, are unable to see it.
That the monstrous crime of Ludlow, the fiend-
ish destruction of the tented village, the wanton
killing of the homeless, hunted, hopeless victims
— half -clad, famishing, terror-stricken and defense-
less— bludgeoned, bullied, shot down like dogs, and
their wives and suckling babes roasted in pits be-
fore their eyes — that this appalling massacre, with-
out a parallel in history, did not infuriate the suf-
fering and persecuted victims of capitalism’s worse
than satanic ferocity, fire their blood with the tiger-
thirst for revenge, and drench the despotic and
shameless state with blood is one of the miracles,
of patience and submissiveness of the exploited,
downtrodden, suffering masses.
The tragic 6tory of Ludlow, the hideous night-
mare of the infernal regions of the Rocky(feller)
Mountains — written in the violated wombs of
shrieking mothers and the spattered life-drops of
their murdered babes — has yet to be traced on his-
tory’s ineffaceable pages. The blood of the twenty-
three innocents who perished there will be the
holy fount of the writer’s inspiration whose fire-
tipped pen will give to the world this tragic and
thrilling epic of the embattled miners in the moun-
tain ramparts of Hockefellerado.
In the story of Ludlow, Louis Tikas, the in-
trepid leader, the loyal comrade, the noble-hearted
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S6 LABOR AND FBUDOM.
Greek who fell the victim of gunmen-brutes in mili-
tary uniform while pleading that the women and
children be spared, takes on the robes of deity and
joins the martyrs and heroes of history. The rifle*
butt that crushed his noble head and silenced his
brave and tender heart gave his soul to the cause
he loved and his name to the ages.
The lion-hearted Greek is at rest, but the cause
he lived and died for goes on forever !
Louis Tikas was educated, cultured and refined,
a graduate of the University of Athens; yea, he
was more than that, he was a MAN! His heart
was true as his brain was clear; he followed the
truth and he loved justice ; he sided with the weak
and ministered to the suffering, even as his elder
brother had in the days when other pharisees cruci-
fied the Son of Man for loving his despoiled and
despised fellow-men.
Louis Tikas made Ludlow holy as Jesus Christ
made Calvary l
He was the loyal leader of the persecuted colony;
the trusted keeper of the tented village. He was
loved by every man, woman and child, and feared
only by the fanged wolves and hyenas that threat-
ened to ravage the flock.
Strong as a giant yet gentle as a child; utterly
fearless yet without bravado, this great and loving
soul cast his lot with the exiled slaves of the pits
and kept his vigil over the defenseless women and
children of the village as a loving mother might
over the fledglings of her brood.
Is it strange that they loved him, trusted him.
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
37
and that in the hour of their deadly peril they
looked to him to shield them from their brutish
ravishers ?
In this tragic hour Louis Tikas measured up to
the supreme stature of his noble manhood. He
knew his time had come and with a smile upon
his lips and without a tremor in his sinews, he
faced his cruel fate. He asked no quarter for
himself, but only begged that mothers and babes
be spared; and with this touching plea upon his
lips and the love of his people in his soul and beam-
ing from his eyes, he was struck down by the hired
assassins of the Arch-Pharisee and passed to mar-
tyrdom and immortality.
j» j» j»
THE LITTLE LORDS OF LOVE.
Progressive Woman, December, 1910.
The children are to me a perpetual source of
wonder and delight. How keen .they are, how alert,
and how comprehending !
The sweet children of the Socialist movement —
the little lords of light and love — keep my heart
warm and my purpose true./ The raggedest and
dirtiest of them all is to me an angel of light. I
have seen them, the proletarian little folks, swarm-
ing up out of the sub-cellars and down from the
garrets of the tenements and I have watched them
with my heart filled with pity and my eyes over-
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
58
flowing with tears. Their very glee seemed tragic
beyond words.
Born within the roar of the ocean their tiny feet
are never kissed by the eager surf, nor their wan
cheeks made ruddy by the vitalizing breezes of the
sea.
Not for them — the flotsam and jetsam upon the
social tides — are the rosy hours of babyhood, the
sweet, sweet joys of childhood. They are the heirs
of the social filth and disease of capitalism and
death marks them at what should be the dewy dawn
of birth, and they wither and die — without having
been born. Their cradle is their coffin and then-
birth robe their winding sheet.
The Socialist movement is the first in all history
to come to the rescue of childhood and to set free
the millions of little captives. And they realize it
and incarnate the very spirit of the movement and
shout aloud their joy as it marches on to victory.
The little revolutionists in Socialist parades
know what they are there for, and in our audiences
they are wide awake to the very last word. They
know, too, when to applaud, and the speaker whi.
fails to enthuse them is surely lacking in some vital
element of his speech.
At the close of a recent meeting in a western
state the stage was crowded with eager comrades
shaking hands and offering congratulations. My
hand was suddenly gripped from below. I glanced
down and a little comrade just about big enough
to stand alone looked straight up into my eyes and
said with all the frankness and sincerity of a child :
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
30
“That was a great speech you made and I love you ;
keep this to remember me by.” And he handed
me a little nickle-plated whistle, his sole tangible
possession, and with it all the wealth of his pure
and unpolluted child-love, which filled my heart
and moved me to tears.
In just that moment that tiny proletaire filled
my measure to overflowing and consecrated me
with increased strength and devotion to the great
movement that is destined to rescue the countless
millions of disinherited babes and give them the
earth and all the fulness thereof as their patrimony
forever.
The sweetest, tenderest, most pregnant words ut-
tered by the proletaire of Galilee were: “Suffer
little children, and forbid them not, to come unto
me ; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”
& &
THE COPPOCK BROTHERS: HEROES OF
HARPER’S FERRY.
Appeal to Reason, May 23, 1914.
“O, patience, felon of the hour!
Over thy ghastly gallows-tree
Shall climb the vine of Liberty,
With ripened fruit and fragrant flower.”
So wrote William Dean Howells, then a rising
young poet and author' in Columbus, Ohio, in
November, 1859, on the eve of John Brown’s ex-
ecution at Charleston, Ya. In the month before,
on the night of October 16th, John Brown, at
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
the head of twenty-one men, sixteen of whom were
white and five black, marched on Harper's Ferry
and delivered the attack that sent his body to the
gallows and his soul to immortal glory.
The heroic blood of old Brown himself flowed
in the veins of all his twenty-one intrepid young
followers. There was not a coward among them.
Three of them were Brown's own sons and two
others were near relatives.
Brown was fifty-nine ; his adjutant general
twenty-four. All his followers were young men,
some of them barely of age.
When Colonel Richard J. Hinton, who followed
John Brown in Kansas, heard of the intended raid
on Harper’s Ferry, he said to Kagi, the stripling
adjutant general: “You’ll all be killed.” “Yes,
I know it, Hinton,” was the ready reply, “but the
result will be worth the sacrifice.”
Kagi was said to resemble “a divinity student
rather than a warrior,” and when taunted by an
adversary, he answered, “We will endure the
shadow of dishonor, but not the stain of guilt.”
“These words of John Henry Kagi,” wrote
Hinton, “expressed the spirit of John Brown's men
and, in an especial sense, the character of the
young and brilliant man who fell riddled with bul-
iets into the Shenandoah. Thirty miles below, the
blood-tinged stream flowed through the lands of
his father’s family.”
Spartan souls were these who marched on Har-
per's Ferry that fateful night, there to strike a
blow at the cost of their lives that was destined to
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41
make Harper’s Ferry more famed than Waterloo
— a blow that was to emancipate a race and change
abruptly the whole current of American history.
“Down the still road, dim white in the moon-
light, and amid the chill of the October night,
went the little band, silent and sober.”
The twenty-one young heroes who followed old
John Brown on that historic night were of the
exalted type that Emerson described : “When souls
reach a certain clearness of perception, they accept
a knowledge and motive without selfishness.”
It is related that when Garibaldi was organizing
his army of liberation in Italy, he was asked what
inducements he had to offer to new recruits.
Promptly the rebel chieftain answered: “Poverty,
hardships, battles, wounds, and — victory !”
That was all Captain Brown had to offer his
devoted followers, with crushing defeat instead of
victory at the end, and yet they enlisted with a
zeal that could not have been surpassed if the
world’s most coveted prizes had been their prom-
ised reward.
Think of the utter abnegation, unselfishness and
loftiness of purpose of that valiant little band who
marched deliberately into the jaws of hell that
October night to break the fetters of a despised
and alien race ! How many of their detractors and
persecutors were animated by motives so pure and
exalted ?
No wonder that Victor Hugo protested so elo-
quently, albeit in vain, against John Brown’s ex-
ecution. “Think of a republic,” he indignantly
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
exclaimed, “murdering a liberator !” and when the
bloody deed was done the illustrious Frenchman
flung back the prophetic challenge: ‘“The time
will come when your John Brown will be greater
than your George Washington.”
Among Brown’s men in the attack on Harper’s
Ferry there were two Quaker brothers, Edwin and
Barclay Coppock, stalwart young abolitionists from
Jowa, whose unfaltering devotion to the cause, he-
roic self-sacrifice and tragic death constitute one
of the most thrilling and inspiring chapters in
American history.
Edwin, the elder brother, was captured with his
leader and shared his fate on the gallows. Barclay
made good his escape with Owen Brown, to be
killed later as a lieutenant, while recruiting a
regiment for the war which had then actually be-
gun.
Edwin and Barclay Coppock were born of
Quaker parents near Salem, Ohio, Edwin on June
30, 1835, and Barclay on January 4, 1839, so that
Edwin was 24 and Barclay not quite 21 when the
attack was m&de on Harper’s Ferry.
Salem was at that time the center of abolition-
ism in that section. It was settled by Quakers
and they were strongly anti-slavery in sentiment.
The headquarters of the “Western Anti-Slavery
Society” was located here, and here also was pub-
lished the “Anti-Slavery Bugle,” official organ of
the movement, of which Benjamin S. .Jones, Oliver
Johnson and Warren B. Bobertson were editors
They waged uncompromising warfare against slav-
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48
ery, attacked the United States constitution as it
was then being interpreted, and denounced the
churches that would not come out openly in favor
of abolition. They were called “Disunion Aboli-
tionists,” “Covenanters” and “Infidels.” But noth-
ing daunted, they demanded the unconditional
surrender of the slave power.
During one of the annual conventions held at
the Hicksite Friends* church in Salem and in the
midst of a violent speech that was being delivered
against the encroachments of slavery on Northern
soil under the fugitive slave law, an excited man
entered with a telegram in his hand and announced
breathlessly that the four o’clock train, due in
thirty minutes, had aboard of it a southern man
and his wife and a colored slave girl as a nurse.
It was at once proposed that they proceed to the
depot in a body and meet the train on arrival.
The meeting was hastily adjourned. Intense en-
thusiasm prevailed. They marched to the depot
cheering as they went and when the train pulled
in they boarded it, took the slave girl without pro-
test from her master and mistress and marched
back to the hall with her in triumph. The liber-
ated girl was christened Abby Kelly Salem, in
honor of Abby Kelly Foster, one of the speakers
at the convention, and the city of Salem. The
girl grew up to splendid womanhood and was high
ly esteemed by all who knew her.
The old town hall, still standing, is where many
an anti-slavery meeting was held in that day. The
most stirring and eloquent appeals were made in
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
this old meeting house by such noted abolitionists
as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips,
Susan B. Anthony, Parker Pillsbury, Horace
Mann, John Pierpont, Gerrit Smith, Fred Doug-
las, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Owen
Love joy, Abby Kelly Foster, George Thompson of
England, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Collyer,
John P. Hale and many others.
The walls of the old town hall resounded daily
and nightly with the patriotism and love of free-
dom of Quaker Salem.
It was in this atmosphere and under the in-
fluence of these impassioned teachings that the
Coppock brothers, sons of a nearby Quaker farmer,
grew up to young manhood. It had been in-
grained into their very nature that all men were
created equal and that slavery was a crime against
Godl and man, and with this conviction they re-
solved to shoulder their muskets and go out and
fight to liberate the slaves.
The family moved to Iowa in the meantime and
it was here that these young Quaker enthusiasts
first met John Brown, who was then waging his
warfare against slavery in the free soil conflict
in that state. From now on their die was cast.
They would follow the grim old chief to victory
or death. It proved to be death for them both
and when it came they met it with a calmness
and resignation possible only to the loftiest hero-
ism.
Barclay Coppock was barely twenty years of age
at the time of the attack on Harper’s Ferry. His
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
45
escape was almost a miracle. A heavy reward was
offered for him dead or alive. After weeks of the
most intense privation and suffering, lying con-
cealed in the brush during the day and moving
chiefly by night, he picked his way back to the
family home at Springdale, Iowa. The governor
of Virginia issued a requisition for his return,
which was not granted. The young men at Spring-
dale and that vicinity organized to protect young
Coppock and served notice on the Virginia officers
who were on his track that “Sp" ingdale is in arms
and is prepared at a half hour’s notice to give
them a reception of 200 shots.”
In the following spring Barclay returned to
Salem and here again the Virginia authorities re-
newed their efforts to capture him. But Barclay,
now among his old neighbors and friends, defied
them. He sent word to the officers in pursuit of
him as to where he might be found, but they wisely
refrained from attempting to take him.
It was at this time that Barclay was a guest
of the Bonsall family of Salem, the elder Bonsall
being one of the leading abolitionists of that day.
Charles Bonsall, his son, who still lives at Salem,
knew the Coppock brothers well and has a distinct
recollection of Barclay’s stay at his father’s home.
"During Barclay’s sojourn at our home,” writes
Charles Bonsall in a personal letter, "a detective of
Salem heard of his being in our neighborhood and
boasted of his intention to arrest Barclay and se-
cure the reward there was on his head. Barclay
heard of the boast and wrote a letter to the de-
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46 LABOR AND FRBBDOM.
tective informing him that he might select five
other men and he would meet them all single-
handed and alone at any point outside the city that
he might name, and they could have the privilege
of capturing him and securing the reward. The
detective did not undertake the job. . . . Bar- j
clay Coppock never knew what fear was. When a
boy in his teens he often went to the woods and
slept alone all night on the ground, under the
trees, from the sheer love of adventure. He was
the best shot with his eight-inch Colt I ever saw.
On one occasion, in his uncle’s woods south of
Salem, with his revolver, he shot a grey squirrel
from a big oak tree and put two more balls through
its body before it reached the ground. His nerves
were as calm and steady in a fight as in his sleep,
and while with us his trusted “navy” was always
strapped under his coat, while in his coat-pocket
he carried a small pistol ready for any emergency
at close quarters. It would have been impossible
to capture him alive.”
Barclay Coppock’s escape and the execution of
his brother but intensified his hatred and horror of
slavery. He was now thoroughly aroused and in-
tent upon plunging anew into the fight. Return-
ing to Iowa, and convinced that civil war was now
inevitable, he prepared actively for the conflict.
^Now comes one of those remarkable facts of su-
per-epochal history,” continues Bonsall, “which go
to show that when revolutionary periods focalize,
revolutions in public sentiment are brought about
in almost a twinkling. In the spring of 1861, just
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about one year from the time the United States
Government was offering a reward of one thousand
dollars for Barclay Coppock, dead or alive, the
same government lifted its hat and humbly bowed
to him, and begged him to accept a first lieuten-
ant’s commission in Company C, Third Kansas
volunteers. He accepted the commission and at
once proceeded to organize his company. Captain
Allen of Ashtabula of the same company, came to
Salem to recruit volunteers sfnd the writer, to-
gether with half a score of other abolition boys, en-
listed in Coppock’s company. . . . Soon after
Lieutenant Coppock was on his way from Spring-
dale to Fort Leavenworth to join his regiment
there. The rebels in Missouri, hearing of his com-
ing, burned the railroad bridge across the Little
Platte river near St. Joseph, and the train carry-
ing the troops was precipitated into the river in
the darkness of night and brave Lieutenant Cop-
pock was killed in the wreck.”
Thus perished, still in his boyhood, as heroic a
heart, as noble a soul, as ever gave up his life in
the cause of freedom. Had he been spared he
would without doubt have become one of the famed
heroes of the war of the rebellion.
Edwin Coppock was executed from the same gal-
lows as his old chief, but two weeks later. His
trial, like that of Brown, was a farce. Conviction,
sentence and execution of all of Brown’s men that
were captured was a foregone conclusion.
While awaiting the execution of his sentence,
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
Edwin wrote to Mrs. Brown, wife of his dead
leader :
“I was with your sons when they fell. Oliver
lived but a very few moments after he was shot. He
spoke no word, but yielded calmly to his fate.
Watson was shot at ten o’clock Monday morning
and died about three o’clock Monday afternoon.
. . . After we were taken prisoners he was
placed in the guardhouse with me. He complained
of the hardness of the bench on which he was ly-
ing. I begged hard for a bed for him, or even a
blanket, but could obtain none. I took off my coat
and placed it under him and held his head in my
lap, in which position he died without a groan or
struggle.”
In a letter to friends in Iowa, under date of No-
vember 2 2d, three weeks before his execution, he
wrote:
“Eleven of our little band are sleeping now in
their bloody garments with the cold earth above
them. Braver men never lived ; truer men to their
plighted word never banded together.”
Rigidly true to their convictions were all these
young heroes. Not one showed the white feather
in the last hour. Serenely and without a quiver
each of them met his cruel fate.
John Brown had trained up his men in the
strictest discipline. Not a drop of liquor was al-
lowed in his camp. Tobacco was tabooed. Profane
language was forbidden.
These men werr in deadly earnest and their as-
ceticism attested their single-hearted fidelity to
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
49
their cause. They were profoundly convinced that
slavery was a national crime and that it was their
patriotic duty, at whatever cost, to wipe that insuf-
ferable stigma from the land.
And who shall say that they were not right; or
that they forfeited their brave lives in vain ?
A few days before the gallows claimed him, John
Brown wrote to his family, “I feel no conscious-
ness of guilt and I am perfectly certain that very
soon no member of the family will feel any possible
disposition to blush on my account.”
The Coppock brothers were typical of all the
brave young abolitionists who banded together to
strike a blow that rocked this nation as if Jehovah
in his wrath had laid hold on it. Quaker lads,
“grave, quiet, reserved, even rustic in their ways,”
they lived bravely up to their convictions and
sealed their devotion to the cause of freedom with
their precious young life blood.
The noble character of Edwin Coppock is re-
vealed in the following pathetic letter written to
his uncle on the eve of his execution. There is no
bitterness in his heart at the last hour. Like the
great Galilean who also perished for sympathizing
with the lowly and oppressed, he was calm and re-
signed in the presence of his fate. Like all such
souls he was gifted with prophetic vision, as his
letter shows :
Charleston, December 13, 1859.
Joshua Coppock:
My Dear Uncle — I seat myself by the stand to
write for the first and last time to thee and thy
dear family. Though far from home and over-
taken by misfortune, I have not forgotten you.
Your generous hospitality towards me, during my
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
short stay with you last spring, is stamped in-
delibly upon my heart, and also the generosity
bestowed upon my brother who now wanders, an
outcast from his native land. But thank God, he
is free. I am thankful it is I who has to suffer
instead of him.
The time may come when he will remember me.
And the time may come when he may stilb further
remember the cause in which I die. Thank God
the principles of the cause in which we were
engaged will not die with me and my brave com-
rades. They will spread wider and wider and
gather strength with each hour that passes. The
voice of truth will echo through our land, bring-
ing conviction to the erring and adding members
to the glorious army who will follow its banner.
The cause of everlasting truth and justice will go
on conquering and to conquer until our broad and
beautiful land shall rest beneath the banner of
freedom. I had fondly hoped to live to see the
principles of the Declaration of Independence fully
realized. I had hoped to see the dark stain of
slavery blotted from our land, and the libel of our
boasted freedom erased, when we can say in truth
that our beloved country is the land of the free
and the home of the brave; but that cannot be.
I have heard my sentence passed; my doom is
sealed. But two more short days remains for me
to fulfill my earthly destiny. But two brief days
between me and eternity. At the expiration of
those two days I shall stand upon the scaffold to
take by last look of earthly scenes. But that
scaffold has but little dread for me, for I hon-
estly believe I am innocent of any crime justify-
ing such punishment. But by the taking of my
life and the lives of my comrades, Virginia is
but hastening on that glorious day, when the slave
will rejoice in his freedom and say, “I, too, am a
man, and am groaning no more under the yoke
of oppression.”
But I must now close. Accept this short scrawl
as a remembrance of me. Give my love to all the
family. Kiss little Joey for me. Remember me
to all my relatives and friends. And now fare-
well for the last time.
Prom thy nephew. EDWIN COFPOCK.
Two days later the slave state of Virginia hung
Edwin Coppock by the neck until he was dead. The
gallant John E. Cook went to the scaffold with
him. The account says :
“ After the cap had been placed on their heads,
Coppock turned toward Cook and stretched for-
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
51
ward his hand as far as possible. At the same time
Cook said, ‘Stop a minute — where is Edwin's
hand?' They then shook hands cordially and
Cook said, ‘God bless you.' The calm and collected
manner of both was very marked. . . . They
both exhibited the most unflinching firmness, say-
ing nothing, with the exception of bidding fare-
well to the ministers and the sheriff."
More than half a century has passed since John
Brown and his faithful followers gave up their
lives to set the black men free, but history has yet
to do them justice. Some day the hatred and
prejudice will all have died away and then these
men, summoned to the bar of enlightened judg-
ment, will be crowned as the greatest* heroes in
American history.
THE SOCIAL SPIRIT.
Appeal to Reason.
We need to grow out of the selfish, sordid, brutal
spirit of individualism which still lurks even in
Socialists and is responsible for the strife and con-
tention which prevail where there should be con-
cord and good will. The social spirit and the so-
cial conscience must be developed and govern our
social relations before we shall have any social revo-
lution.
If there are any among whom the social spirit
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
should find its highest expression and who should
be bound fast in its comradely embrace and give to
the world the example of its elevating and human-
izing influence, it is the Socialists. They of all
others have come to realize the hardening and bru-
talizing effect of capitalist individualism in the
awful struggle for existence and it is to them a
cause of unceasing rejoicing that they live at a
time in the world’s historic development when the
very conditions which resulted from this age-long
struggle forbid its continuance and proclaim its
approaching termination.
The rule of individualism which has governed
socieiy since the days of primitive communism has
effectually restrained the moral and spiritual de-
velopment of the race. It has brought out the
baser side of men’s nature and set them against
each other as if the plan of creation had designed
them to be mortal enemies.
* * * *
Typical capitalists are barren of the social spirit.
The very nature of the catch-as-catph-can encounter
in which they are engaged makes them wary and
suspicious, if not downright hateful of each other,
and the latent good that is in them dies for the
want of incentive to express it^lf.
The other day I saw two such capitalists shake
hands. It was pitiable. Their hearts had no part
in the purely perfunctory ceremony. They hap-
pened to meet and could not avoid each other. And
so they mechanically touched each other’s reluctant
hands, standing at right angles to each other for
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 53
a moment — not face to face — and then passing on
without either looking the other in the eyes.
This cold and heartless ceremony typified the
relation begotten of capitalist individualism in
which men's interests are competitive and antago-
nistic and in which each instinctively looks out
for himself and is on the alert to take every pos-
sible advantage of his fellow-man.
The result of this system is inevitably a race
of Ishmaelites.
How differently two Socialist comrades shake
hands! Their hearts are in their palms and the
joy of greeting is in their eyes. They have the
social spirit. Their interests are mutual and their
aspirations kindred. If one happens to be strong
and the other weak, the stronger shares the weak-
ness and the weaker shares the strength of his
comrade. The base thought of taking a mean ad-
vantage, one of the other, does not darken their
minds or harden their hearts. They are joined
together in the humanizing bonds of fellowship.
They multiply each other and they rejoice in
their comradely kinship. The best there is in each,
and not the worst, as in the contact of individual-
ism, is appealed to and brought forth for the bene-
fit of both. **
What an elevating, enlarging and satisfying re-
lation !
And this is the /‘dead level" of mediocrity and
servitude to which we are to sink when this rela-
tion becomes universal among men as it will in the
International Socialist Republic !
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
So at least we are told by those who in the pres-
ent system have acquired the instincts and impulses
of animals of prey in the development of their
imagined superiority by draining the veins and
wrecking the lives of their vanquished competitors,
but we are not impressed by the virtues of the sys-
tem of which they stand as the shining examples.
* * * *
Thru all the ages past men, civilized men,
so-called, have been at each other’s throats in the
struggle for existence, and the spirit of individul-
ism this struggle has begotten, the spirit of hard,
sordid, brutal selfishness, has filled this world with
unutterable anguish and woe.
But at last the end of the reign of anarchistic
individualism is in sight. The social forces at
work are undermining and destroying it and soon
its knell will be sounded to the infinite joy of an
emancipated world.
The largest possible expression of the social
spirit should be fostered and encouraged in the So-
cialist movement and among Socialists themselves.
In spite of the hindrances which beset us in our
present environments and relations, we may yet cul-
tivate this spirit assiduously to our increasing mu-
tual good and to the good of our great movement.
In our propaganda, in the discussion of our
tactical and other differences and in all our other
activities, the larger faith that true comradeship
inspires should prevail between us. We need to be
more patient, more kindly, more tolerant, more
sympathetic, helpful and encouraging to one an-
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
55
other, and less suspicious, less envious, and less con-
tentious, if we are to educate and impress the peo-
ple by our example,, and by the effect of our teach-
ings upon ourselves win them to our movement,
and realize our dream of universal freedom and
social righteousness.
ROOSEVELT AND HIS REGIME.
Appeal to Reason, April 20, 1207.
The only time in my life I ever saw Theodore
Roosevelt was years before he became president
of the United States. I was aboard of a train
in the far west, where Roosevelt was then said to
be following ranch life, and as he and several
companions in cowboy costume entered the car
at a station stop, he was pointed out to me. I
did not like him. The years since have not altered
that feeling of aversion except to accentuate it.
I have since seen the nation mad with hero
worship over this man Roosevelt, but I have not
been impressed by it. Very “great” men some-
times shrivel into very small ones and finally van-
ish in oblivion in the short space of a single gen-
eration.
The American people are more idolatrous than
any “heathen” nation on earth. They worship
their popular “heroes,” while they last, with pas-
sionate frenzy, and with equal madness do they
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
hunt down the sane “fools” who vainly try to
teach them sense. Theodore Roosevelt and George
Dewey as “heroes” and Wendell Phillips and John
Brown as “fools” are notable illustrations. Amer-
ican history is filled with them.
But my personal dislike of the cowboy in imita-
tion who has since become president, however
justifiable, would scarcely warrant a public attack
upon his official character, and this review, being
of such a nature, is inspired, as will appear, by
entirely different motives.
There are those, and they constitute a great
majority of the American people, who stand in
awe of their president, supposedly their servant,
but in fact their master; they speak of him with
a kind of reverential adulation as a lordly per-
sonage, a superior being to be looked up to and
worshiped rather than a fellowman to be respected
and loved. There are others who betray equal
ignorance in a more vulgar fashion by coarse ti-
rades for which there is often as little excuse as
there is for the extreme adulation.
Regarding the president of the United States,
as I do, simply as a citizen and fellowman, the
same as any other, I shall speak of him and his
acts free alike from awe and malice, and if I place
him in the public pillory, where he has placed so
many others, to be seen and despised of men, it will
be from a sense that his official acts, so often in
flat denial of his profession, merit the execration
of honest men.
In arraigning President Roosevelt and his ad-
k
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57
ministration I have no private spite nor personal
grudge to satisfy, but an obligation to redeem and
a principle to vindicate.
I shall go about it as I would any other moral
duty, asking no favors and prepared to accept all
consequences.
In the first place, I charge President Roosevelt
with being a hypocrite, the most consummate that
ever occupied the executive seat of the nation.
His profession of pure politics is false, his boasted
moral courage the bluff of a bully and his “square
deal” a delusion and a sham.
Theodore Roosevelt is mainly for Theodore
Roosevelt and incidentally for such others as are
also for the same distinguished gentleman, first,
last and all the time. He is a smooth and slippery
politician, swollen purple with self-conceit; he is
shrewd enough to gauge the stupdity of the masses
and unscrupulous enough to turn it into hero wor-
ship. This constitutes the demagogue, and he is
that in superlative degree.
Only a few days ago he appeared in a charac-
teristic role. Rushing into the limelight, as nec-
essary to him as breath, he shrieked that he and
“Root” were “horrified” because of certain scandal-
ous and revolting charges made by one of his own
former political chums. Of course, he and “Root”
of Tweed fame, the foxiest “fixer” of them all,
were “horrified” because of the shock to their po-
litical virtue, but it so happened that the horror
took effect only when they found themselves un-
covered. The taking of Harriman's boodle for
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
corruptly electing him president and the use of
the stolen insurance funds for the same criminal
purpose did not “horrify” the president and
“Boot,” nor would they be “horrified” yet if they
had not been caught red-handed in the act with
the booty upon their persons.
The cry of the exposed malefactor and all his
pack of yelpers that he is the victim of a “plot”
by his own friends and supporters, the very gentle-
men (sic) who furnished him with free special
trains, paid his campaign expenses and in fact
bought the presidency for him, is so palpably false
as to be absolutely ridiculous and only brings into
bolder relief the hypocrisy and fraud it was de-
signed to conceal.
This much is preliminary to the extraordinary
official conduct of the president which has “hor-
rified” not only its victims but millions of others,
and now prompts this review and protest.
Something over a year ago Charles Moyer, Wil-
liam Haywood and George Pettibone, of Colorado,
leading officials of the Western Federation of Min-
ers, were overpowered and kidnaped by a gang of
thugs and torn from their families at night by
conspiracy of two degenerate governors and an-
other notorious criminal acting for the Mine and
Smelter Trust, one of the most stupendous aggre-
gations of force and plunder in all America.
Every decent man and woman was “horrified”
by this infamy and the whole working class of the
nation cried out against it.
Was Boosevelt also “horrified”?
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Yes!
Because the Mine and Smelter Trust had kid-
naped three citizens of the republic?
Oh, no!
The three citizens were only working cattle and
he never had any other conception of them.
He was “horrified” because the Mine and Smel-
ter Trust, unclean birds that feather their nests,
especially in Colorado, with legislatures and United
States senatorships, had not killed instead of kid-
naping their victims.
Then and there Theodore Roosevelt disgraced
himself and his high office, and his cruel and cow-
ardly act will load his name with odium as long as
it is remembered.
The Mine and Smelter Trust had put up the
funds and used its vast machinery for Roosevelt,
and now Roosevelt must serve it even to the extent
of upholding criminals, approving kidnaping and
murdering its helpless victims.
When Roosevelt stepped out of the White House
and called Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone mur-
derers, men he had never seen and did not know;
men who had never been tried, never convicted and
whom every law of the land presumed innocent
until proven guilty, he fell a million miles beneath
where Lincoln stood, and there he grovels today
with his political crimes, one after another, find-
ing him out and pointing at him their accusing
fingers.
No president of the United States has ever de-
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
scended to such depths as has Roosevelt to serve
his law-defying and crime-inciting masters.
The act is simply scandalous and without a par-
allel in American history.
What right has Theodore Roosevelt to prejudge
American citizens, pronounce their guilt and hand
them over to the hangman ? In a pettif ogging law-
yer such an act would be infamous; in the presi-
dent of the nation it becomes monstrous and stag-
gers belief.
All that Roosevelt knows about Moyer, Haywood
and Pettibone he knows from his friends, their
kidnapers.
The millions of working men and women, em-
bracing practically ever labor union in America,
count for nothing with him. He is not now stand-
ing for their votes. He is fulfilling his obligation
to the gentlemen ( !) who put up the coin that
elected him; paying off the mortgage they hold
upon his administration.
Theodore Roosevelt is swift to brand other men
who even venture to disagree with him as liars.
He, according to himself, is immaculate and in-
fallible.
The greatest liar is he who sees only liars in
others.
When Theodore Roosevelt, president of the
United States, denounced Charles Moyer, William
Haywood and George Pettibone as murderers, he
uttered a lie as black and damnable, a calumny as
foul and atrocious as ever issued from a human
throat . The men he thus traduced and vilified.
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 61
sitting in their prison cells for having dutifully
served their fellow-workers and haping spurned the
bribes of their masters, transcend immeasurably the
man in the White House, who, with the cruel mal-
evolence of a barbarian, has pronounced their doom .
A thousand times rather would I be one of those
men in Ada county jail than Theodore Roosevelt
in the White House at Washington.
Had these men accepted, with but a shadow of
the eagnerness Roosevelt displayed, the debauching
funds of the trust pirates, they would not now
languish in felons* cells.
The same brafcen robbers of the people and cor-
rupters of the body politic who put Moyer, Hay-
wood and Pettibone in jail, also put Theodore
Roosevelt in the White House.
This accounts for his prostituting the high office
Lincoln honored and resorting to methods that
would shame a Bowery ward-heeler.
Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone are not mur-
derers ; it is a ghastly lie, and I denounce it in the
name of law and in the name of justice. I know
these men, these sons of toil ; I know their hearts,
their guileless nature and their rugged honesty.
I love and honor them and shall fight for them
while there is breath in my body.
Here and now I challenge Theodore Roosevelt.
He is guilty of high crimes and deserves impeach-
ment.
Let him do his worst. I denounce him and defy
him.
During my recent visit at Washington I learned
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
from those who know him what they think of
Roosevelt. Among newspaper men he is literally
despised. Their true feeling is not apparent in
what they write, for they know that the slightest
offense to the president is lese majeste and means
instantaneous decapitation.
For the second time, Theodore Roosevelt, presi-
dent of the United States, has now publicly con-
victed Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone. He has
not pronounced condemnation upon Harry Thaw,
or any rich man charged with murder. He has,
however, made a postmaster of a man at Chicago
charged by the Chicago Tribune with having shot
another man in a midnight brawl over disreputa-
ble women, and then used his influence to make the
same man mayor of that city.
Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone, tjie three work'
ingmen kidnaped by the Mine and Smelter Trust,
have now been in jail fourteen months ; they have
not been tried, but twice condemned by President
Roosevelt, the last time but a few days ago, in con-
nection with Harriman, his former political pal
and financial backer. These men are in prison
cells, their bodies in manacles and their lips sealed.
They cannot speak for themselves. They are voice-
less and at the mercy of calumny. No matter how
grossly outraged, they must submit.
For a man clothed with the almost absolute pow-
er of a president to strike down men gagged and
bound, as these men are, he must have an unspeak-
ably brutal and cowardly nature, just such a nature
as the governor of an empire state must have to
#
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turn a deaf ear to the agonizing entreaties of a
shrieking, shuddering woman and see her dragged
into the horrors of electrocution.
The true character of this man is being gradu-
ally revealed to the American people. He has
never been anything but an enemy of the working
class. He joined a labor organization purely as a
demagogue. In all his life he never associated with
working people. His writings, before he became
a politician, show that he held them in contempt.
When he entered political life he soon learned how
to shake hands with a fireman for the camera and
have his press agent do the rest, and it was this
species of demagoguery, the very basest conceiv-
able, that idolized him with the ignorant mass and
gave him the votes of the millions he in his heart
despised as an inferior race.
In his book on “Ranch Life and the Hunting
Trail,” page 10, written long before he entered
politics, Roosevelt reveals his innate contempt for
those who toil. After describing cowboys when
“drunk on the villainous whiskey of the frontier
towns,” he closes with this comparison, which
needs no comment: “They are much better fel-
lows and pleasanter companions than small farmers
or agricultural laborers ; nor are the mechanics and
workmen of a great city to be mentioned in the
same breath.”
The pretended friendship for the great body of
workingmen who are not to be compared to drunken
c6wboys has served its demogogical purpose, but
the final chapter is not yet written. There will be
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
an awakening, and every official act of Theodore
Roosevelt will be subjected to its searching scru-
tiny. He has always been on the side of capital
wholly, while pretending the impossible feat of serv-
ing both capital and labor with equal fidelity, and
only the deplorable ignorance of his dupes has
applauded him in that hypocritical role.
The anthracite miners, or their children at least,
will some day know that it was President Theodore
Roosevelt who handed them over to the coal trust
with a gold brick for a souvenir, labeled “Arbi-
tration.”
Theodore Roosevelt is an aristocrat and an auto-
crat. His affected democracy is spurious and easily
detected. He belongs to the “upper crust” and at
the very best he can conceive of the working class
only as contented wage-slaves. And no one knows
better than he how easily these slaves are duped
and how madly they will cheer and follow a cheap
and showy “hero.”
The simple fact is that Theodore Roosevelt was
made president by the industrial captains and the
robbers in general of the working class. They
picked him for a winner and he has not failed
them. Elected by the trusts and surrounded by
trust attorneys as cabinet advisers, Roosevelt is es-
sentially the monarch of a trust administration.
If this be denied, Roosevelt is challenged to an-
swer if it was not the railroad trust that furnished
him gratuitously with the special trains that bore
him in royal splendor over all the railways of the
nation. He is challenged to publish the list of
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contributors to his political sewer funds, amount-
ing to millions of dollars, and freely used to buy
the votes that made him president.
Did, or did not, the men known as trust mag-
nates put up this boodle? Boodle drawn from the
veins of labor?
Will Mr. Roosevelt deny it?
Did he not know at the time that his man Cor-
telyou was holding up the trusts for all they would
"cough up” for his election?
Will he dare plead ignorance to intelligent per-
sons as to who put up the money that debauched
the voters of the nation ?
It is true that a spasm of virtuous indignation
seized him when he found that the trusts had
slipped the lucre into his slush funds when he was
not looking, but this was only after he saw the
people looking behind the curtain. Then he
bounded to the foot lights and denounced Alton B.
Parker as a liar for charging that the trusts were
furnishing the boodle to make him president, but
no man not feeble-minded was deceived as to who
was the liar.
Read the Washington press dispatch in the Kan-
sas City Journal of April 4th: "It was declared
in banking circles that light could be shed on the
question of campaign contributions in 1904 if the
books of the national Republican committee were
thrown open.”
The books will not be thrown open. Roosevelt
will not allow it ; he knows they contain the damn-
ing evidence of his guilt.
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
The case is clearly stated in the platform of the
Democratic state convention of Missouri, adopted
in 1906, which reads as follows:
“We believe Theodore Roosevelt insincere. Pre-
tending to inveigh against the crimes of trusts and
corporations, he openly defended Paul Morton,
when, as manager of the Santa Fe railroad, he was
compelled to confess enormous rebates to the Colo-
rado Fuel and Iron Company. It was Roosevelt
who advanced the pernicious doctrine that you
must punish the corporation, not its officials who
cause it to commit crime. It was Roosevelt who
denounced large campaign contributions, while his
secretary of commerce and labor was fleecing the
corporations out of one of the biggest slush funds
ever known in the history of American politics”
President Roosevelt may shout “liar” until he
turns as black in the face as are the cracksmen at
heart who burglarized the safes of the New York
insurance companies to land him in the White
House, while he was toying with the names of
“Jimmy” Hyde and Chauncey Depew as pawns in
the corrupt game, but the “damned spot” will not
out until the whole truth is known and the whole
crime expiated.
The publication of the Roosevelt-Harriman cor-
respondence places the president in his true colors
before the American people. It explains his hot
haste in condemning Moyer, Haywood and Petti-
bone to the gallows and sending Taft to Idaho to
assure the smelter trust and warn the protesting
people that the kidnaping of the workingmen was
\
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 67
sanctioned by the White House and would have the
support of the national administration.
A more shameful perversion of public power
never blackened the pages of history.
This national scandal shows up the president’s .
two-faced character so clearly and convincingly
that it leaves not so much as a pin-hole for escape.
It is a damning indictment of not only the presi-
dent, but the whole brood of plutocrats, promoters
and grafting politicians who have been looting this
nation for years.
There is one among these illuminating epistles
which I want to burn in the minds of the work-
ing class dupes who have been bowing in the dust
before this blustering bully of the White House:
“Personal.
“October 1, 1904. — My Dear Mr. Harriman : A
suggestion has come to me in a round-about way
that you do not think it wise to come to see me
in these closing weeks of the campaign, but that
you are reluctant to refuse, inasmuch as I have
asked you. Now, my dear sir, you and I are prac-
tical men, and you are on the ground and know
the conditions better than I do.
“If you think there is any danger of your visit
to me causing trouble, or if you think there is noth-
ing special I should be informed about, or any mat-
ter in which I could give aid, why, of course, give
up the visit for the time being, and then, a few
weeks hence, before I write my message, I shall
get you to come down to discuss certain govern-
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68 LABOR AND FREEDOM.
ment matters not connected with the campaign.
With great regards, sincerely yours,
(Signed) “THEODORE ROOSEVELT.”
Does not this brand the president with the du-
plicity of a Tweed and the cunning of a Quay?
Would a president who is honest with the peo-
ple clandestinely consort with the villain he char-
acterizes as a liar and all that is vicious?
The disclosures made in the secret correspond-
ence strip the president of the last shred of decep-
tion with which to cloak his perfidy. The mask
is lifted and the exposure is complete. It is in
the president’s own handwriting in a letter to
Harriman that would never have seen the lignt had
not circumstances forced it upon the attention of
a betrayed people. It is adroitly phrased, but its
meaning is not in doubt. He knew Harrimon then
as he knows him now; wanted his boodle and in-
sinuatingly coaxed him to sneak to the White
House when no one was looking, and only after he
was discovered did he denounce Harriman as a
liar and fall into his usual fit of moral epilepsy.
From now on there will be a sharp decline in
the stock of Theodore Roosevelt. The capitalist
papers may continue to boom him as the only savior
and his corps of press agents at the White House
may continue to grind out three-column stories
about the awful conspiracy of his “trusty” friends
to ruin him, but his bubble is pricked and the cheap
glory in which he reveled is departing forever.
The people have been sadly deceived for a time,
but the march of events is opening their eyes.
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
69
Only the very ignorant and foolish believe that
a president who has surrounded himself with Wall
Street darlings as cabinet ministers has any serious
designs on the trusts.
The Ryan, Root and Roosevelt combination !s
ideal. It speaks for itself, and with such shining
lights as Taft, Cortelyou, Knox and Paul Morton
surrounding it, all lingering doubt is removed, and
the fools’ paradise is in the full blaze of its glory.
Space will not permit a review of the personnel
of the president’s official family, at least two of
whom, had the law been enforced, would now be
in penitentiary.
The story of President Roosevelt and Paul Mor-
ton, if truthfully told, would make a luminous
chapter in railroad rascality and political jobbery.
It was to this notorious strike-breaker and self-
confessed criminal that Roosevelt issued a bill of
moral rectitude long as Pope’s essay that landed
him into the eighty-thousand-dollars-a-year insur-
ance graft he now holds down.
There is in this “promotion” the very climax
of the irony of boodle.
Paul Morton, who began as a strike-breaker on
the C. B. & Q., and reared a monument to theft
ats Hutchinson, Kan., and left his trail of crime
all the way from the Mississippi to the Pacific,
is fit, indeed, to be the cabinet associate and con-
fidential chum of a president who puts him at the
head of the company whose funds were stolen to
buy his election.
William H. Taft is another of the elect, and it
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70 LABOR AND FREEDOM.
is easy to understand why Roosevelt has decided to
make this illustrious son his successor as president
of the United States and is now grooming him
with the patronage of the national administration.
Taft is a man after Roosevelt’s own heart. Among
his early acts as a judge he fined the bricklayers of
Cincinnati two thousand dollars for going on a
strike; he was next whirled to Toledo by special
train and ordered by the Toledo, Ann Arbor and
North Michigan railroad to issue an injunction
binding and gagging its striking engineers and
firemen and locking their leader up in jail and he
complied with alacrity. Prom that time on it has
been smooth sailing for the accommodating judge
and there is not a bloated plutocrat in the land
who would not hail with joy the election of William
Taft as president ; he would be almost as acceptable
to these vultures as Roosevelt himself.
The manner in which President Roosevelt ma-
nipulates the supreme court by bestowing lucrative
offices upon the sons and other relatives and friends
of its dignitaries can only be hinted at here, but
will receive due attention later on. The case of
ex-Senator Burton is an instance in point. Other
senators had taken thousands in similar cases to
Burton’s paltry few hundred dollars, but Burton
was marked by Roosevelt for refusing to crook the
knee to the sugar trust and pursued with merciless
ferocity until he was lodged behind prison bars.
The president did not have a call to “go after”
his old friends, Chauncey Depew and Thomas
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 71
Platt, with the same virtuous passion to see crime
punished and criminals jailed.
When Roosevelt was making his continental
campaign in the palatial special trains furnished
free by the railroad trust he stopped at Abilene,
Kan., the home of the then Senator Burton, and
opened his speech there in these words: “I am
glad to be at the home of the senior senator from
Kansas and am delighted to meet and greet his
neighbors and friends. I want to say that no
man in this world has done more, and I had almost
said, as much, to place me where I am now, than
your distinguished senator.”
Fine way the president had of showing his grati-
tude. Burton should have known better and taken
warning. Whenever Roosevelt gets that near to
a man something is going to happen. “My dear”
is then due to be metamorphosed with startling
suddenness into an “atrocious liar.”
Roosevelt can brook no rivalry. He is the self-
appointed central luminary in the solar system. All
others must be contented with being fire-flies. He
must violate all traditions and smash all precedents.
He is spectacular beyond the wildest dreams. He
must have the center of the stage and hold the un-
divided attention of the audience. Any stunt will
do when the interest lags. A familiar turn with a
prize-fighter or a “gun-man” is always good for
an encore. Nothing is overlooked. A dash to
Panama with a fleet of battle-ships and a battery
of cameras and a squad of artists and reporters is
good for thousands of columns about the marvel-
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
ous virility and fertility of the greatest president
since Washington. He is followed with minute
and eager details as he darts from cellar to roof,
inspects every shingle, wears a solemn expression,
throws a shovelful of coal into the furnace, snatches
a bite from a workingman’s pail, shakes hands with
a startled section man and is off like a flash to look
after some other section of the planet that it may
not drop out of its shining orbit.
Mighty savior of the human race!
Such is Theodore Roosevelt, the president who
condemns workingmen as murderers when they are
objectionable to the trusts that control his admin-
istration.
Archbishop Ireland, the plutocratic prelate, will
cheerfully certify to Roosevelt as the anointed of
the Lord. And this will make another interesting
chapter for a later review ; a chapter that will deal
with Ireland as the political as well as spiritual
adviser of “Jim” Hill and the Great Northern, and
of court decisions awarding him thousands of acres
of land and making of the alleged follower of the
Tramp of Galilee a multi-millionaire; a chapter
that will tell of a high priest sounding the political
keynote to his benighted followers in exchange for
a promised voucher for a red hat to be worn in a
land of freedom in which the state and church are
absolutely divorced.
Only a few of the facts about Roosevelt and his
regime have been here stated, but enough to satisfy
all honest men that Theodore Roosevelt is the
Friend of the Enemies and the Enemy of the
Friends of this Republic.
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 73
INDUSTRIAL AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.
American Socialist, May 27, 1016.
First of all, allow me to quote with approval the
following paragraph from “An Introduction to
Sociology” by Arthur Morrow Lewis: “* * *
the greatest single achievement of the science of so-
ciology is the concept of society, not as a collection
of institutions, and sociology as an explanatory
catalog or inventory — after the fashion of Spen-
cer, but as a process of development, and the sci-
ence of sociology as the analysis and explanation of
the process.”
Also the following from an essay on Revolution
by George D. Herron : “Every revolution or true
reform, every new and commanding faith, is in
the direction of man's becoming his own evolver
and creator. Every uplifting light or law perforces,
in the place of the evolution that is blind and
chanceful, an evolution that is chosen and hu-
manly directed.”
There is still room for reform and betterment in
the present social system, but this is of minor con-
sequence compared to the world's crying need for
industrial and social reorganization.
The next great change in history will be, must
be, the socialization of the means of our common
life.
Privately owned industry and production for in-
dividual profit are no longer compatible with social
progress and have ceased to work out to humane
and civilized ends.
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
With all its marvelous progress through inven-
tion and discovery and all its monumental achieve-
ments in the arts and sciences, this poor world of
our? has not yet learned how to feed itself. That
is the problem of problems now confronting us
more and more insistently and until that is solved
the world is halted and it will either resume its
march toward industrial and social democracy or
be shaken to its foundations and into possible
chaos by violent explosion.
There is no longer the shadow of an excuse for
a hungry being. All the laws, all the materials
and all the forces are at hand and easily available
for the production of all things needed to provide
food, raiment and shelter for every man, woman
and child, thus putting an end to the poverty and
misery, widespread and appalling, which now shock
and sicken humanity and impeach our vaunted
civilization. But these tools and materials and
forces must be released from private ownership and
control, socialized, democratized, and set in opera-
tion for the common good of all instead of the pri-
vate profit of the few.
It is well stated, “that civilization is at present
rudimentary, and that it is to develop indefinitely.”
Now, in view of the fact that the crops this year
(1914) are the most abundant ever produced, that
there is no market for the almost sixteen million
bales of cotton lying in the warehouses, while at the
same time there are millions of unemployed in the
land who are without food and without clothing
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 75
and who, with their wives and children, are doomed
to indescribable suffering; in view of this solemn
and indisputable fact it would seem that there could
be but one opinion among students and thinkers
as to the one great, vital and essential thing to
do for the relief of our common humanity and for
the promotion of the world’s progress and civiliza-
tion, and that that one thing is the one to be
emphasized with all the power at our command.
A privately owned world can never be a free
world and a society based upon warring classes
cannot stand.
Such a world is a world of strife and hate and
such a society can exist only by means of militarism
and physioal force.
The education of the people, not the few alone,
but the entire mass in the principles of industrial
democracy and along the lines of social develop-
ment is the task of the people to be emphasized
and that task — let it be impressed upon them — can
be performed only by themselves.
The cultured few can never educate the uncul-
tured many. All history attests the fact that all
the few have ever done for the many is to keep
them in ignorance and servitude and live out of
their labor.
To stir the masses, to appeal to their higher,
better selves, to set them thinking for themselves,
and to hold ever before them the ideal of mutual
kindness and good will, based upon mutual inter-
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
ests, is to render real service to the cause of hu-
manity.
To quote Herron once more:
"Socialism is a deliberate proposal to lay the
will of man upon the unfolding processes and ends
of nature and history. It invokes the faith that
shall be equal to the acceptance of its proposal —
of its supreme challenge to the universe.”
jt jt
A MESSAGE TO THE CHILDREN.
Campaign Leaflet, National Campaign, 1912.
The Socialist party is the only party that has the
children at heart; the only party that takes them
into its confidence ; the only party that has a mes-
sage for them in a campaign year.
In my travels about the country I have met
many thousands of little children and their fresh
and eager faces have always given me joy and their
merry voices have filled me with delight and made
me stronger for my work.
These children are not yet old enough to join the
Socialist party and have an active part in its
great work, but they are old enough to understand
why their parents belong to it, and why they are
pround of their card of membership, and of the red
button they wear, to show that they are socialists
and that as socialists they are working hand in
hand with thousands and thousands of others to
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 77
change things so that this world may be a better,
kinder and sweeter world for us all to live in.
Now let me talk directly as I may to the more
than thirty millions of children and young folks
in our country who are less than eighteen years of
age. I fancy I can see them all spread out in all
directions, far as the eye can reach, and farther and
farther still to the very shores of the seas and lakes
and gulf that bound our western continent.
What a wonderful audience I am about to ad-
dress ! Not a grown person in it. Only children.
Millions of them and all eager to hear the message
that socialism has to offer to the child-world.
My dear little children, I am sure you will un-
derstand me when I say that in speaking to you
of socialism I feel very near to all of you and I
know you will believe me when I tell you that 1
would if I could make you all happy and keep you
sweet and loving toward each other all your lives.
Most of you are the children of the poor, some
of the well-to-do, and a few of the rich, but all of
you are the children of the same Father and all of
you are sisters and brothers in the same great
family of humankind.
If any of you feel that you are better than others
because you wear better clothes or live in better
houses or go in what you think is abetter society,”
it is because your young minds and hearts have
been tainted by wrong example and wrong educa-
tion. It is this wicked feeling that corrupts the
conscience and hardens the heart and begets the
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
envy and hate of our fellow-beings, instead of their
love and good will.
When that best friend the children ever had on
earth said, “Suffer little children and forbid them
not, to come unto me ; for such is the kingdom of
heaven” he meant all children, poor and rich, but
especially the poor. He loved and pitied them be-
cause of their poverty and suffering.
He himself had been born in a manger and when
he was grown up he said sorrowfully that “he had
not where to lay his head.” He did not despise
little children because they were poor and neg-
lected and shabbily dressed but he loved them all
the more; and as he looked down upon them his
heart melted with compassion and the tears of ten-
derness filled his eyes ; and then he became grave
and his fair brow grew dark with wrath as he
thought of those who sat in rich church pews and
piously thanked the Lord that they were not as
other people. He denounced them as hypocrites for
pretending to be religious while they robbed the
poor and turned the little children into the street
to suffer hunger and fall into evil ways.
Nearly twenty centuries have passed since the
suffering poor heard with gladness the message of
the Lowly Nazarene and since he was moved to
tears by the sight of the little children of the
street, but the world has not yet learned the mean-
ing of his tender and touching words, “Suffer little
children, and forbid them not, to come unto me;
for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” If he were
to walk the streets of New York or Chicago, or
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LABOB AND FREEDOM.
79
Lawrence, Massachusetts, or any of the cities where
the mills and sweatshops are filled with child slaves
— as he once walked the streets of Jerusalem — he
would grow sick at heart as he saw the little ones
he so loved, pale and wan and worn, harnessed to
monstrous machines and slowly put to death to
swell the profits of the greedy mill owners who sit
in the rich pews of the synagogue, as did the phari-
sees he scourged without mercy twenty centuries
ago.
The children of the working people have always
been poor because the world has never been just.
For ages and ages those who have builded the
houses, cultivated the fields, raised the crops, spun
the wool, woven the cloth, supplied the food we
eat and the clothes we wear, and furnished the
homes we live in, have been the poor and despised,
while those who profited by their labor and con-
sumed the good things they produced, have been
the rich and respectable.
Jesus himself was a carpenter's son and suffered
the poverty of his class and when he grew up it
was not the rich and respectable, but the poor and
despised who loved him, and opened their arms to
receive him, and heard gladly his tender and com-
forting ministrations. He was one of them in pov-
erty and suffering and in all his loving and selv
denying life he never forgot them. Had he de-
serted the poor from whom he sprang, had he gone
over to the rich as their preacher, or their judge,
or their lawyer or teacher or scribe — as so many
of his pretended followers have done and are still
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
doing — he never would have been crucified, nor
would the world today know that he had ever lived.
It was because, and only because, J esus loved and
served the poor and rebuked the rich who robbed
them, and threatened to array them against their
rich despoilers, that he was condemned to die and
that the cruel nails were driven into his hands and
feet on the cross at Calvary.
Jesus taught that the earth and the air and the
sea and sky and all the beauty and fulness thereof
were for all the children of men ; that they should
all equally enjoy the riches of nature and dwell to-
gether in peace, bear one another's burdens and
love one another, and that is what socialism teaches
and why the rich thieves who have laid hold of the
earth and its bounties would crucify the socialists
as those other robbers of the poor crucified Jesus
two thousand years ago.
Now let us see what message the Socialist party
has for the children and why all children should be
socialists and help to speed the day when the
brotherhood of socialism shall prevail throughout
the earth.
But first let me say that the Socialist party has
reason to know that the children have great influ- #
ence when they become interested in a given work
and set their hearts on doing that work. The So-
cialist party knows better than to ignore the chil-
dren as if they were china dolls or stuffed teddy
bears, as all the other parties do, for it knows by
what they have already done that when once they
get fairly started they will make the air hum like
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 81
6frarms of bees with the glad tidings of socialism.
The little boys and girls who have already be-
come socialists are among the busiest workers for
our party and they love so well to work for social-
ism that it is play to them and fills their hearts
with joy. They wear the red button and they know
why it is red and what its meaning is; they tack
up bills and distribute dodgers advertising our
meetings ; they sell tickets, take up collections, act
as ushers, provide the soap-box for the corner
speaker, carry chairs for the women so they may
sit in comfort after their day’s work, go around
among the neighbors and remind them of the meet-
ing and not to forget to attend, sell socialist books,
papers and pamphlets, and do a score of other
things which are just as useful in their way as the
speech of the orator that wins the applause of the
people.
Nhw the Socialist party is the only party in the
world that wants to put an end once and forever
to all kinds of child labor and to have it so that all
children, white and black, without a single excep-
tion, shall be allowed to grow up in the free air,
with plenty of time for mirth and play; that they
shall all have decent homes to live in, comfortable
beds to sleep in, plenty of good food to eat, plenty
of good clothes to wear and that when they reach
the proper age they shall go to school and college
and continue their course until they have obtained
a sound and practical education. Then they will
have strong, healthy bodies, trained minds and
skilled hands, and not only enter cheerfully upon
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
the duties of life, but be certain of making it a suc-
cess.
If you listen to the old fogies who still belong
to the partifes their grandfathers did and who have
not moved an inch from their grandfathers* graves,
they will tell you that socialists are foolish people
and that what they propose never can be done.
That is what the fogies of every age have always
said. They are the “wise” people who do things in
the same way that their dead grandparents did be-
fore them, who never change their minds, never
accept a new idea, never grow, and who are always
dead long before they are buried and forgotten the
day after the funeral. Whatever you may be I beg
of you not to be a fogy, nor to follow a fogy’s
solemn advice. His brain has ceased to work — if
it ever did work. He is mentally stagnant and
moss-covered and votes the same old ticket with no
more idea of what he is voting for than a wooden
Indian.
The Socialist party says there have got to be
some changes and has set about making them, or at
least getting ready to make them. It says that the
world is big enough for all the people that are in
it, with plenty of room to spare for groves and
parks and playgrounds ; that there is land enough
to go around without crowding; that there are
farms enough, or can be easily provided, to raise
all we can eat, so that no child in all the world
need to go hungry ; that there is plenty of coal and
iron, oil and gas, gold and silver and other min-
erals and metals, stored in the earth ; that there are
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
88
forests and mountains and water courses galore;
that there are mills and mines and factories and
ships and railways and telegraphs, and the power
supplied free by nature to run them all ; that there
are millions of men and women ready to do all the
work that may be required to build homes, raise
crops, bake bread — and cake too — weave cloth,
make clothes and everything else that is necessary
for everybody, and have time enough besides to
build schools and provide playgrounds for every
last one of the children, with plenty of toys thrown
in to make this earth a children’s paradise.
Now why should not just these things come to
pass and why should not you children help us
speed the day when they shall come to pass ?
Everything you can possibly think of to make
this earth sweet and beautiful and to make life a
blessed joy for us all is within our reach. The
raw materials are at our feet; the forces to fashion
them into forms of beauty and use are at our
finger tips. We have but to put ourselves in har-
mony with nature and with one another to spread
far and wide the gospel of life and love and once
more hear “the sons of God shout for joy.”
Socialists not only dream of the good day com-
ing when the world shall know that men are broth-
ers and that women are sisters to each other, but
they are at work with all their hearts and all their
heads and hands to make that dream come true.
If you want to know what the plans of the so-
cialists are in detail read their platform, attend
their lectures and study their literature.
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84 LABOR AND FREEDOM.
Socialism is the greatest thing in all the world
today and the boys and girls of this generation
who will be remembered in the next are those who
are clear-eyed enough to see that socialism is com-
ing and are at the battle-front fighting bravely to
overcome the prejudice against it and to pave the
way for it so that it may come soon and in j)eace
and order.
Many of us who have been long in service will
not be here when the bells peal forth the joyous
tidings that socialism has triumphed and that the
people are free, but the children that now are will
live to see it and in the day of their rejoicing they
will not forget those who toiled without recom-
pense that they might live without dread of pov-
erty or fear of want.
As we look about us today we see that the world
is filled with suffering and despair and when we
come to look into the cause of it we find that it is
a reproach to us all. As I write the news comes
of the fierce battle that is being fought between ten
thousand hungry miners in West Virginia and the
thugs and ex-convicts and murderers armed by the
coal corporations to force the strikers back into
their dismal and hopeless pits. The battle has al-
ready lasted two days. Many on both sides have
been killed, but the capitalist papers are doing all
they can to hush it up.
Long ago the miners were evicted from the com-
pany’s wretched hovels. They and their wives and
children live in tented fields and the brutal guards
have even driven the women and children from
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
85
there into the wilderness to starve that the strike
may be broken and the miners compelled to go back
to work at the terms of their greedy and heartless
masters.
And why is this awful battle raging and human
beings murdering each other as if they were wild
beasts? ^Because a few gluttonous slave owners
like Henry Gassaway Davis and the Watsons and
Elkinses who dwell in gorgeous palaces on vast
estates occupying whole mountain ranges, privately
own the mines and minerals which were intended
for all, and consequently the thousands of miners
and their wives and children are at their mercy,
and when they meekly asked for five per cent more
wages so their families would not suffer for bread
the brutal lords of the mines sent out their private
army of assassins to hunt them down and kill them
as if they were mad dogs.
The Socialist party says that those mines should
be owned by all the pople and that is what will
come to pass when the socialists get into power, and
then the green hills of West Virginia and other
states will no longer echo with the rifle shots of
corporation assassins, nor run red with the blood
of honest workingmen slain to appease the greed
of their soulless masters.
In February last, four boys were hanged in Chi-
cago. The oldest was twenty-one, the youngest
barely out of his childhood. They had held up and
robbed and murdered a poor truck fanner for the
little money he had on his person. Not one of
these boys ever had a decent home. They were
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86 LABOR AND FREEDOM.
born in poverty, reared in ignorance, and sur-
rounded by vice and filth.
This is cultivating crime and reaping the har-
vest. We socialists weep as we think of the cruel
fate of those four poor, friendless boys who died on
the gallows while they were still in their childhood,
because the world has not yet learned that there is
greater profit in raising children than there is in
raising hogs.
The frightful stories of the little children in the
mills of Lawrence and the cruel suffering they en-
dured is still fresh in the public memory. When
the poor and despairing mothers, their hearts
wrung with agony and their eyes blinded with
tears, attempted to save their children from starva-
tion by placing them in the keeping of sympathiz-
ing friends, they were beaten, insulted, and with
babies at their breasts thrown into jail, bleeding
and stunned, by the brutal police acting under or-
ders from the far more brutal mill owners.
The world will never know the suffering and ter-
ror these poor working people — especially the
women and children — had to endure for daring to
ask the millionaire mill owners for a pittance more
in return for their labor to keep the wolf of hunger
from their gloomy hovels.
When the Socialist party gets into power those
mills at Lawrence and all others like them will be
taken over by the people and operated for the good
of all, and then the workers will keep the wealth
they produce for themselves, instead of turning it
over to the greedy mill bosses ; they will have decent
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87
homes to live in, food in plenty on their tables, and
their children will go to school to be properly edu-
cated instead of to the mills to be ground into
profits to gorge their idle owners.
In March last, Mrs. L. F. J ellson of Salem, Ore-
gon, gave poison to each of her four little children,
her own offspring, because they were starving and
she? was poor and had no way to get them bread.
She then poisoned herself and all she asked in the
note she left was that she and her darling children
be buried together. This poor heart-broken soul
was driven to destroy herself and her precious babes
because the world as it now is would not allow them
to live.
Think for just a moment of all the food there is
in the world and all there might be and then tell
me if socialists are wrong and foolish and wicked
for saying that the self-murder of this poor woman
and the murder of her children is a terrible crime
of which society is guilty and for which there is no
excuse on earth or in heaven.
A recent investigation showed that in the City
of St. Louis there are 16,000 young women who
receive as wage-earners less than $8 per week and
over 3,000 who receive from $3 to $4 per week.
It is easy to see from this why so many little
girls and younger women are forced to enter upon
the path which leads to shame and sorrow and
which seldom bears the impress of returning foot-
steps.
When the giant Titanic met her fate, fifty little
bellboys went down with her to the bottom of the
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88
sea. They were ordered, according to the account,
to their regular posts in the main cabin and warned
by their captain not to get into the way of the
escaping passengers. James Humphries, as quar-
termaster and eye witness said, “throughout the
first hour of confusion and terror these lads sat
quietly on their benches. Not one of them at-
tempted to enter a lifeboat. Not one of them was
saved.”
Can you read this without being moved to tears ?
Brave, noble little lads ! I almost feel as if it had
been a privilege to go down with these great little
souls to their watery grave.
The little boys who perished here were poor boys,
many of them without fathers, and others obliged
to support widowed mothers and little brothers and
sisters younger than themselves.
What a lesson this touching, deeply pathetic in-
cident teaches and what a world of meaning there
is in the sad circumstances of their tragic death !
Had they not been poor children, little waifs,
they would not have been locked in the cabin to
perish like rats. They would not, in fact, have
been there at all, and had it not been for the pride
and pomp, the greed and luxury that paraded the
upper deck, the Titanic never would have gone to
the bottom of the sea.
And now, my children, I must come to a close.
I have taken up much of your time, but I have only
been able to trace in barest outline what the So-
cialist party is organized for, what it aims to do,
and will do, and why the children, above all, should
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 89
vie with each other in helping it to grow and speed-
ing the happy day of its success.
When that day comes the rejoicing people will
realize that the kingdom of heaven, so long prayed
for, has been set up here on earth in the social
brotherhood of all mankind.
J*
SOCIAL REFORM.
While there is a lower class I am in it ;
While there is a criminal class I am of it ;
While there is a soul in prison I am not free.
j* J* J*
DANGER AHEAD.
International Socialist Review, January, 191L
The large increase in the Socialist vote in the
late national and state elections is quite naturally
hailed with elation and rejoicing by party mem-
bers, but I feel prompted to remark, in the light
of some personal observations made during the
campaign, that it is not entirely a matter of jubila-
tion. I am not given to pessimism, or captious
criticism, and yet I cannot but feel that some of
the votes placed to our credit this year were ob-
tained by methods not consistent with the prin*
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
90
ciples of a revolutionary party, and in the long
run will do more harm than good.
I yield to no one in my desire to see the party
grow and the vote increase, but in my zeal I do not
lose sight of the fact that healthy growth and a
substantial vote depend upon efficient organization,
the self-education and self-discipline of the mem-
bership, and that where these are lacking, an in-
flated vote secured by compromising methods, can
only be hurtful to the movement.
The danger I see ahead is that the Socialist parly
at this stage, and under existing conditions, is apt
to attract elements which it cannot assimilate, and
that it may be either weighted down, or torn
asunder with internal strife, or that it may become
permeated and corrupted with the spirit of bour-
geois reform to an extent that will practically de-
stroy its virility and efficiency as a revolutionary
organization.
To my mind the working class character and the
revolutionary integrity of the Socialist party are
of first importance. All the votes of the people
would do us no good if our party ceased to be a
revolutionary party, or came to be only incidentally
so, while yielding more and more to the pressure
to modify the principles and program of the party
for the sake of swelling the vote and hastening the
day of its expected triumph.
It is precisely this policy and the alluring prom-
ise it holds out to new members with more zeal
than knowledge of working class economics, that
constitutes the danger we should guard against
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91
in preparing for the next campaign. The truth is
that we have not a few members who regard vote-
getting as of supreme importance, no matter by
what method the votes may be secured, and this
leads them to hold out inducements and make rep-
resentations which are not at all compatible with
the stern and uncompromising principles of a revo-
lutionary party. They seek to make the Socialist
propaganda so attractive — eliminating whatever
may give offense to bourgeois sensibilities — that it
serves as a bait for votes rather than as a means of
education, and votes thus secured do not properly
belong to us and do injustice to our party as well
as to those who cast them.
These votes do not express socialism aijd in the
next ensuing election are quite as apt to be turned
against us, and it is better that they be not cast
for the Socialist party, registering a degree of
progress the party is not entitled to and indicating
a political position the party is unable to sustain.
Socialism is a matter of growth, of evolution,
which can be advanced by wise methods, but never
by obtaining for it a fictitious vote. We should
seek only to register the actual vote of socialism, no
more ancl^ no less. In our propaganda we should
state our principles clearly, speak the truth fear-
lessly, seeking neither to flatter nor to offend, but
only to convince those who should be with us and
win them to our cause through an intelligent un-
derstanding of its mission.
There is also a disposition on the part of some
to join hands with reactionary trade-unionists in
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
92
local emergencies and in certain temporary situa-
tions to effect some specific purpose, which may or
may not be in harmony with our revolutionary
program. No possible good can come from any
kind of a political alliance, express or implied,
with trade-unions or the leaders of trade unions
who are opposed to socialism and only turn to it
for use in some extremity, the fruit of their own
reactionary policy.
Of course we want the support of trade-unionists,
but only of those who believe in socialism and are
ready to vote and work with us for the overthrow
of capitalism.
The American Federation of Labor, as an organi-
zation, with its Civic federation to determine its
attitude and control its course, is deadly hostile to
the Socialist party and to any and every revolu-
tionary movement of the working class. To kow-
tow to this organization and to join hands with its
leaders to secure political favors can only result
in compromising our principles and bringing dis-
aster to the parly.
Not for all the vote of the American Federation
of Labor and its labor-dividing and corruption
breeding craft-unions should we compromise one
jot of our revolutionary principles; and if we do
we shall be visited with the contempt we deserve
by all real Socialists, who will scorn to remain in
a party professing to be a revolutionary party of
the working class while employing the crooked and
disreputable methods of ward-heeling politicians to
attain their ends.
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labor and freedom.
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Of far greater importance than increasing the
vote of the Socialist party is the economic organiza-
tion of the working class. To the extent, and only
to the extent, that the workers are organized and
disciplined in their respective industries can the
Socialist movement advance and* the Socialist party
hold what is registered by the ballot. The election
of legislative and administrative officers, here and
there, where the party is still in a crude state and
the members economically and politically unfit to
assume the responsibilities thrust upon thein as the
result of popular discontent, will inevitably bring
trouble and set the party back, instead of advanc-
ing it, and while this is to be expected and is to an
extent unavoidable, we should court no more of that
kind of experience than is necessary to avoid a
repetition of it. The Socialist party has already
achieved some victories of this kind which proved
to be defeats, crushing and humiliating, and from
which the party has not even now, after many
years, entirely recovered.
We have just so much socialism that is stable and
dependable, because securely grounded in econom-
ics, in discipline and all else that expresses class-
conscious solidarity, and this must be augmented
steadily through economic and political organiza-
tion, but no amount of mere votes can accomplish
this in even the slightest degree.
A vote for socialism is not socialism any more
than a menu is a meal.
Socialism must be organized, drilled, equipped,
and the place to begin is in the industries where
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
94
the workers are employed. Their economic power
has got to be developed through efficient organiza-
tion, or their political power, even if it could be de-
veloped, would but react upon them, thwart their
plans, blast their hopes, and all but destroy them.
Such organization to be effective must be ex-
pressed in terms of industrial unionism. Each in-
dustry must be organized in its entirety, embrac-
ing all the workers, and all working together in
the interests of all, in the true spirit of solidarity,
thus laying the foundation and developing the
superstructure of the new system within the old,
from which it is evolving, and systematically fitting
the workers, step by step, to assume entire control
of the productive forces when the hour strikes for
the impending organic change.
Without such economic organization and the
economic power with which it is clothed, and with-
out the industrial co-operative training, discipline
and efficiency which are its corollaries, the fruit
of any political victories the workers may achieve
will turn to ashes on their lips.
Now that the capitalist system is so palpably
breaking down, and in consequence its political
parties breaking up, the disintegrating elements
with vague reform ideas and radical bourgeois ten-
dencies will head in increasing numbers toward
the Socialist party, especially since the greatly en-
larged vote of this year has been announced and the
party is looming up as a possible dispenser of the
spoils of office. There is danger, I believe, that
the party may be swamped by such an exodus and
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
95
the best possible means — and, in fact, the only ef-
fectual means — of securing the party against such
a fatality is the economic power of the industrially-
organized workers.
The votes will come rapidly enough from now
on without seeking them and we should make it
clear that the Socialist party wants the votes only
of those who want socialism, and that, above all, as
a revolutionary party of the working class, it dis-
countenances vote-seeking for the sake of votes and
holds in contempt office-seeking for the sake of
office. These belong entirely to capitalist parties
with their bosses and their boodle and have no place
in a party whose shibboleth is emancipation.
With the workers efficiently organized indus-
trially, bound together by the common tie of their
enlightened self-interest, they will just as naturally
and inevitably express their economic solidarity in
political terms and cast a united vote for the party
of their class as the forces of nature express obedi-
ence to the law of gravitation.
j* j* &
PIONEER WOMEN IN AMERICA.
Progressive Woman, April, 1912.
In looking over some old letters a day or two ago
I found a postal card which Susan B. Anthony had
written to me over thirty years ago, and, strangely
enough, it was held fast by a letter that was writ-
ten to me about the same time by Wendell Phillips,
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96 LABOR AND FREEDOM.
as if these two epistles had been attracted to each
other and held together in the bonds of mutualism
as were the great souls who had written them in
their heroic struggle for human enfranchisement.
The faded and time-worn old card carried me
back to the day I met Miss Anthony at the depot on
her arrival at Terre Haute, where she was to speak
in public for her sex. At that time Mrs. Ida
Husted Harper, who afterward became Miss An-
thony’s confidential friend and authorized biogra-
pher, and I, and two or three others, were about the
only people in Terre Haute who believed that
woman was a human being and entitled to the
rights of citizenship. We had arranged these meet-
ings for Miss Anthony and her three active coad-
jutors in woman’s cause at that time, and they ar-
rived according to the schedule.
I shall never forget how Miss Anthony impressed
me. She had all the charm of a real woman and all
the strength of a perfect man. Style, personal
adornment, she did not know; vanity found no
lodgment in her great soul. She was born with a
heroic purpose, and she set out in fulfillment of
that purpose with a spirit of dauntless valor and
determination which knew “no variableness or
shadow of turning” to the day that ended her con
secrated life and she passed from the scenes of
men.
The trials, privations, insults borne by this grand
old pioneer will never be known by those who are
in the ranks today. An event characteristic of the
struggle in which she engaged almost single-handed
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
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for so many years was her arrest and trial for vot-
ing in the presidential election of 1872. A fine of
one hundred dollars and costs was imposed upon
her, which she vowed she would not pay, even if
she were sent to jail. When Miss Anthony said a
thing she meant it. That fine was never paid.
It was, after all, a stroke of good fortune that
Miss Anthony was the victim of this barbarous
indignity. It inspired one of the greatest speeches
of her life. In opening this dramatic plea and pro-
test she said :
“Friends and Fellow-Citizens: I stand before
you tonight under indictment for the alleged
crime of having voted at the last presidential elec-
tion, without having a lawful right to vote. It
shall be my work this evening to prove to you that
in thus voting I not only committed no crime, but,
instead, simply exercised my citizen’s rights, guar-
anteed to me and all United States citizens by the
National Constitution, beyond the power of any
State to deny.”
She then quoted from the preamble of the Fed-
eral Constitution: “We, the people of the United
States,” etc., and proceeded :
“It was we, the people ; not we, the white male
citizens ; nor yet we the male citizens ; but, we the
whole people, who formed the union. And we
formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but
to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and
the half of our posterity, but to the whole people —
women as well as men. And it is a downright mock-
ery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the
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98
blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of
the only means of securing them provided by this
democratic-republican government— the ballot. The
early journals of Congress show that when the com-
mittee reported to that body the original articles of
confederation, the very firsj; article which became
the subject of discussion was that respecting equal-
ity of suffrage. Article 4 said: ‘The better to se-
cure and perpetuate mutual friendship and inter-
course between the people of the different States
of the Union, the free inhabitants of each of the
States (paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from jus-
tice excepted) shall be entitled to all the privileges
and immunities of the free citizen of the several
States/
“Thus, at the very beginning did the fathers see
the necessity of the universal application of the
great principle of equal rights to all, in order to
produce the desired results — a harmonious union
and a homogeneous people.”
Miss Anthony then quoted the New York State
Constitution : “No member of this State shall be
disfranchised or deprived of the rights or privileges
secured to any citizen thereof, unless by the law of
the land or the judgment of its peers.”
She then proceeded with her argument, which
has never been and never will be answered. It is
to be regretted that space forbids more ample quota-
tion in this article. Here is a glowing paragraph
from her impassioned plea which is characteristic
of the entire address :
“To them (women) this government has no just
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
99
powers derived from the consent of the governed.
To them this government is not a democracy. It
is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a
hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristo-
cracy ever established on the face of the globe; an
oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor.
An oligarchy of learning, where the educated gov-
ern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race,
where the Saxon rules the African, might be en-
dured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes
father, brothers, husband, sons the oligarch over
the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of
every household ; which ordains all men sovereigns,
all women subjects ; carries dissension, discord and
rebellion into every home of the nation.”
There has never been a more logical unanswer-
able argument for the political enfranchisement of
women than was here made by Miss Anthony. And
yet only a very few of the people were fair enough
to listen, intelligent enough to understand, or can-
did enough to give approval, if they did.
Susan B. Anthony's whole career was one tem-
pestuous struggle for the rights of her sex. She
never wavered and she never wearied in the conflict.
She had the moral courage of a martyr, and such
she was as certainly as any that ever perished at
the stake.
On my visit to Johnstown, N. Y., recently, the
comrades pointed out the spot where Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, another pioneer heroine of the move-
ment, was born. Mrs. Stanton has long since been
gathered to her fathers, but her work remains an *
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
imperishable monument in memory of her achieve-
ments.
It was at the first Woman’s Eights convention
ever held in the United States, July 19, 1848, that
Mrs. Stanton delivered an oration that will forever
have a place in the literature of woman’s struggle
for freedom. The doctrine she advocated was at
that time little less than treason, but she knew it
was true, and she boldly took her stand and main-
tained it to the end. In her speech at this first con-
vention she said:
“Now is the time for the women of this country,
if they would save our free institutions, to defend
the right, to buckle on the armor that can best re-
sist the keenest weapons of the enemy — contempt
and ridicule. The same religious enthusiasm that
nerved Joan of Arc to her work nerves us to ours.
In every generation God calls some men and women
for the utterance of the truth, a heroic action, and
our work today is the fulfilling of what has long
since been foretold by the prophet. * * * We do
not expect our path will be strewn with the flowers
of popular applause, but over the thorns of bigotry
and prejudice will be our way, and on our banner
will beat dark storm-clouds of opposition from
those who have entrenched themselves behind the
stormy bulwarks of custom and authority, and who
have fortified their position by every means, holy
and unholy. But we will steadfastly abide the re-
sult. Unmoved we will bear it aloft. Undauntedly
we will unfurl it to the gale, for we know that the
storm cannot rend from it a shred, that the electric
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LABOR ANjff J&EEDOM.
flash will but more clearly show .to us the glorious
words inscribed upon it : ‘Equ&iityof Rights/ ”
There was thrilling power in the* burning elo-
quence of Mrs. Stanton, but only they who. had a
part in the struggle at that time could havs ^ny
conception of what bitter hatred, blind prejudice,
and malign persecution there were to overcome. - :
In February, 1854, Mrs. Stanton made a notable
plea for the political rights of women to the legisla-
ture of New York. In mentally invoicing an aver-
age legislature today one gets some idea of the self-
imposed task of this brave old pioneer, and the
indomitable spirit required to undertake it, of
arousing a body of sodden bourgeois legislators,
ward politicians, to recognize the right of women
to breathe the air of civilized citizenship and be-
long to themselves. In this thoroughly militant
and inspiring appeal she said :
“The tyrant. Custom, has been summoned before
the bar of Common Sense. His majesty no longer
awes the multitude; his scepter is broken; his
crown is trampled in the dust; the sentence of
death is pronounced upon him. All nations, ranks
and classes have, in turn, questioned and repudiated
his authority ; and now, that the monster is chained
and caged, timid woman, on tiptoe, comes to look
him in the face, and to demand of her brave sires
and sons, who have struck stout blows for liberty,
if, in this change of dynasty, she, too, shall find
relief. * * *
“We demand the full recognition of all our rights
as citizens of the Empire State. We are persons ;
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labor ANly Freedom.
natives, free-born citizens ; property holders, tax-
payers, yet we an* denied the exercise of our right
to the elective franchise. We support ourselves,
and, in.pai% your schools, colleges, churches, your
poor-houses, jails, prisons, the army, the navy, the
who!©, machinery of government, and yet we have
no voice in your councils. We have every qualifi-
cation required by the constitution necessary to the
legal voter but the one of sex. We are moral, vir-
tuous and intelligent, and in all respects quite equal
to the proud white man himself, and yet by your
laws we are classed with idiots, lunatics and ne-
groes.”
These two sturdy pioneers in woman’s struggle
present a magnificent picture in the perspective.
They did not know the meaning of discouragement.
x They were strangers to weakness and fear.
Both were of heroic mould. Both were born and
endowed for great service and both made their
names synonymous with the struggle of their sex
to shake off the fetters of the centuries.
Mts. Stanton was born in 1815, ante-dating Miss
Anthony by five years. They were inseparable
friends, and they who saw them together say that
their love and fealty toward each other was so beau-
tiful and touching that it was an inspiration to all
their co-workers and shamed to silence all their
bickerings and petty jealousies.
They both lived to be over eighty years. After
full half a century of unrelaxing fidelity to their
principles and unceasing battle for their cause they
saw but the beginning of the glorious fruition of
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 103
their consecrated service. Such has been the fate
of all who, like these great souls, loved principle
better than popularity and humanity more than
themselves.
The women who are in the ranks today may well
rejoice that these grand women and others who
shared in their bitter persecution blazed the way
through the dense wilderness of ignorance, prejud-
ice and hatred for what is now a world movement,
with millions proudly bearing its banner, inscribed
with the conquering shibboleth: Equal Freedom
and Equal Opportunities for All Mankind.
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SPEECHES
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UNITY AND VICTORY.
Speech Before State Convention of American Federation of
Labor. Pittsburg, Kansas, August 12, 1908.
Introduction by Chairman Cable.
Gentlemen of the Convention : I assure you it is
a great privilege on my part to present to you at
this time a gentleman who needs no introduction at
my hands ; a gentleman who is known to you and
who is known to the workingmen throughout the
length and breadth of this country as a true and
tried trade unionist and the candidate of the So-
cialist party for President of the United States. I,
therefore, take great pleasure in presenting to you
Brother Eugene V. Debs.
Mr. Chairman, Delegates and Fellow Workers:
It is with pleasure, I assure you, that I embrace
this opportunity to exchange greetings with you in
the councils of labor. I have prepared no formal
address, nor is any necessary at this time. You
have met here as the representatives of organized
labor and if I can do anything to assist you in the
work you have been delegated to do I shall render
that assistance with great pleasure.
To serve the working class is to me always a duty
of love. Thirty-three years ago I first became a
member of a trade union. I can remember quite
well under what difficulties meetings were held and
with what contempt organized labor was treated
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
at that time. There has been a decided change.
The small and insignificant trade union has ex-
panded to' the proportions of a great national or-
ganization. The few hundreds now number mil-
lions and organized labor has become a recognized
factor in the economics and politics of the nation.
There has been a great evolution during that
time and while the power of the organized work-
ers has increased there has been an industrial de-
velopment which makes that power more necessary
than ever before in all the history of the working
class movement.
This is an age of organization. The small em-
ployer of a quarter of a century ago has practically
disappeared. The workingman of today is con-
fronted by the great corporation which has its iron-
clad rules and regulations, and if they don’t suit
he can quit.
In the presence of this great power, workingmen
are compelled to organize or be ground to atoms.
They have organized. They have the numbers.
They have had some bitter experience. They have
suffered beyond the power of language to describe,
but they have not yet developed their latent power
to a degree that they can cope successfully with the
great power that exploits and oppresses them.
Upon this question of organization, my brothers,
you and I may differ widely, but as we are reason-
able men, we can discuss these differences candidly
until we find common ground upon which we can
stand side by side in the true spirit of solidarity —
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 109
and work together for the emancipation of our
n class.
Until quite recently the average trade unionist
was opposed to having politics even mentioned in
the meeting of his union. The reason for this is
self-evident. Workingmen have not until now
keenly felt the necessity for independent working
class political action. They have been divided be-
tween the two capitalist parties and the very sug-
gestion that the union was to be used in the interest
of the one or the other was in itself sufficient to
sow the seed of disruption. So it isn’t strange that
the average trade unionist guarded carefully
against the introduction of political questions in
his union. But within the past two or three years
there have been such changes that workingmen have
been compelled to take notice of the fact that the
labor question is essentially a political question,
and that if they would protect themselves against
the greed and rapacity of the capitalist class they
must develop their political power as well as their
economic power, and use both in their own interest.
Workingmen have developed sufficient intelligence
to understand the necessity for unity upon the
economic field. All now recognize the need for
thorough organization. But organization of num-
bers of itself is not sufficient. You might have all
the workers of the country embraced in some vast
organization and yet they would be very weak if
they were not organized upon correct principles;
if they did not understand, and understand clearly.
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what they were organized for, and what their or-
ganization expected to accomplish.
I am of those who believe that an organization
of workingmen, to be efficient, to meet the demands
of this hour, must be organized upon a revolution-
ary basis ; must have for its definite object not only
the betterment of the condition of workingmen in
the wage system, but the absolute overthrow of
wage slavery that the workingman may be emanci-
pated and stand forth clothed with the dignity and
all other attributes of true manhood.
Now let me briefly discuss the existing condition.
We have been organizing all these years, and there
are now approximately three millions of American
workingmen who wear union badges, who keep step
to union progress. At this very time, and in spite
of all that organized labor can do to the contrary,
there is a condition that prevails all over this coun-
try that is well calculated to challenge the serious
consideration of every workingman. To begin
with, according to the reports furnished us, twenty
per cent of the workingmen of this country are now
out of employment. I have here a copy of the New
York World containing a report of the labor com-
missioner of the State of New York who shows that
during the quarter ending June 30 there were in
that state an army of union men out of employment
approximating thirty-five per cent of the entire
number; that is to say, in the State of New York
today, out of every one hundred union men (these
reports are received from the unions themselves,
verified by their own officers, so there can be no
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Ill
question in regard to them), out of every 100 union
men in New York, 35 are out of employment. The
percentage may not be so large in these western
states where the industrial development has not
reached the same point, but go where you may, east
or west, north or south, you will find men, union
men, who are begging for the opportunity to work
for just enough to keep their suffering souls within
their famished bodies. A system in which such a
condition as this is possible has fulfilled its mis-
sion, stands copdemned, and ought to be abolished.
According to the Declaration of Independence,
man has the inalienable right to life. If that be
true it follows that he has also the inalienable right
to work.
If you have no right to work you have no right
to life because you can only live by work. And if
you live in a system that deprives you of the right
to work, that system denies you the right to live.
Now man has a right to life because he is here.
That is sufficient proof, and if he has the right to
life, it follows that he has the right to all the
means that sustain life. But how is it in this out-
grown capitalist system ? A workingman can only
work on condition that he finds somebody who will
give him permission to work for just enough of
what his labor produces to keep him in working
order.
No matter whether you have studied this econ-
omic question or not, you cannot have failed to
observe that during the past half century society
has been sharply divided into classes — into a cap-
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
italist class upon the one hand, into a working class
upon the other hand. I shall not take the time
to trace this evolution. I shall simply call your
attention to the fact that half a century ago all a
man needed was a trade and having this he could
supply himself with the simple tools then used,
produce what he needed and enjoy the fruit of his
labor. But this has been completely changed. The
simple tool has disappeared and the great machine
has taken its place. The little shop is gone and the
great factory has come in its stead. The worker
can no longer work by and for himself. He has
been recruited into regiments, battalions and arm-
ies and work has been subdivided and specialized ;
and now hundreds and thousands and tens of thou-
sands of workingmen work together co-operatively
and produce in great abundance, not for themselves,
however, for they no longer own the tools they
work with. What they produce belongs to the
capitalist class who own the tools with which they
work. A man fifty years ago who made a shoe
owned it. Today it is possible for that same
worker, if still alive, to make a hundred times as
many shoes, but he doesn’t own them now. He
works today with modern machinery which is the
property of some capitalist who lives perhaps a
thousand miles from where the factory is located
and who owns all the product because he owns the
machinery.
I have stated that society has been divided into
two warring classes. The capitalist owns the tool
in modern industry, but he has nothing to do with
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113
its operation. By virtue of such ownership he has
the economic power to appropriate to himself the
wealth produced by the use of that tool. This ac-
counts for the fact that the capitalist becomes rich.
But how about the working class? In the first
place they have to compete with each other for the
privilege of operating the capitalist’s tool of pro-
duction. The bigger the tool and the more gen-
erally it is applied, the more it produces, the
sharper competition grows between the workers for
the privilege of using it and the more are thrown
out of employment. Every few years, no matter
what party is in power, no matter what our domes-
tic policy is, how high the tariff or what the money
standard, every few years the cry goes up about
“over-production” and the working class is dis-
charged by the thousands and thousands, and are
idle, just as the miners have been in this field for
many weary months.
No work, no food, and after a while, no credit,
and all this in the shadow of the abundance these
very workers have created.
Don’t you agree with me, my brothers, that this
condition is an intolerable and indefensible one,
and that whatever may be said of the past, this
system no longer answers the demands of this time ?
Why should any workingman need to beg for work ?
Why forced to surrender to anybody any part of
what his labor produces?
Now, I ask this question, and it applies to the
whole field of industry : If a hundred men work in
a mine and produce a hundred tons of coal, how
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
much of that coal are they entitled to? Are they
not entitled to all of it? And if not, who is en- t
titled to any part of it? If the man who produces
wealth is not entitled to it, who is ? You say the
capitalist is necessary and I deny it. The capitalist
has become a profit-taking parasite. Industry is
now concentrated and operated on a very large
scale; it is co-operative and therefore self -operative.
The capitalists hire superintendents, managers and
workingmen to operate their plants and produce
wealth. The capitalists are absolutely unnecessary ;
they have no part in the process of production —
not the slightest.
Now I insist that it is the workingman’s duty
to so organize economically and politically as to
put an end to this system ; as to take possession in
his collective capacity of the machinery of produc-
tion and operate it, not to create millionaires and
multi-millionaires, but to produce wealth in plenty
for all. That is why the labor question is also a
political question. It makes no difference what
you do on the economic field to better your condi-
tion, so long as the tools of production are pri-
vately owned, so long as they are operated for the
private profit of the capitalist, the working class
will be exploited, they will be in enforced idleness,
thousands of them will be reduced to want, some
of them to vagabonds and criminals, and this con-
dition will prevail in spite of anything that or-
ganized labor can do to the contrary.
The most important thing for the workingman
to recognize is the class struggle. Every capitalist,
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
115
every capitalist newspaper, every capitalist attor-
ney and retainer will insist that we have no classes
in this country and that there is no class struggle.
President Boosevelt himself has declared that class-
consciousness is a foul and evil thing. Now, what
is class-consciousness? It is simply a recognition
of the fact on the part of the workingman that his
interest is identical with the interest of every other
workingman. Class-consciousness points out the
necessity for working-class action, economic and
political.
What is it that keeps the working class in sub-
jection? What is it that is responsible for their
exploitation and for all of the ills they suffer?
Just one thing; it can be stated in a single word.
It is Ignorance . The working class have not yet
learned how to unite and act together. There are
relatively but few capitalists in this country ; there
are perhaps twenty millions of wage workers, but
the capitalists and their retainers have contrived
during all these years to keep the working class
divided, and as long as the working class is divided
it will be helpless. It is only when the working
class learn — and they are learning daily and by
very bitter experience — to unite and to act together,
especially on election day, that there is any hope
for emancipation.
The workingmen you represent, my brothers, are
in an overwhelming majority in every township,
county and state of this nation. You declare you
are in favor of united action, but still you don’t
unite. You unite under certain conditions within
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LABOK AND FREEDOM.
your union, you get together upon the economic
held to a limited extent, but you have yet to learn
that before you can really accomplish anything you
have got to unite in fact as well as in name. The
time is coming when workingmen will be forced
into one general organization. The time is coming
when they will be compelled to organize on the basis
of industrial unionism.
At this very hour there is a strike on the Canadian
Pacific. Eight thousand workingmen who are more
or less organized and who have been wronged in
many ways, have finally gone but on strike. There
are other thousands remaining at their posts and
non-union men flowing in there will be hauled to
their destination by union men, and union men will
continue to work until their eight thousand broth-
ers have lost their jobs and many of them have be-
come tramps. That is called organization, but it
is not so in fact. It is at best organization of a
vefy weak and defective character. Now, the right
kind of organization on the Canadian Pacific would
embrace all the workers. They should all be in-
cluded within the same organization and then have
one general working agreement with the company
so that if there was a violation of it, it would con-
cern every man in the service. But how is it at
present ? The engineers, conductors, trainmen and
switchmen are in separate unions and after they
have been signed up, the company can treat the
rest just as they please, for they know that if they
strike and the others remain in their service, as
they are bound to do under their agreement, they
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117
can very easily supplant them and remain in per-
fect control of the system. We have had enough
of that kind of experience and we ought to profit
by it. We ought to realize that there is but one
form of organization that answers completely, one
in which all subscribe to the same rules and act to-
gether in all things, and you will have to organize
upon that basis or see your unions become prae
tically worthless.
Now let us consider another line briefly for the
benefit of those who have opposed political action.
We are all aware of the trend of the decisions re-
cently rendered by the United States supreme
court. Three decisions have been rendered in rapid
succession which strike down the rights of labor
and virtually strip organized labor of its power.
Under these decisions organized labor has been out-
lawed, and while upon this question I want to sug-
gest that this body at the proper time in its de-
liberations put the following questions to the can-
didates for the United States senate and house of
representatives in the State of Kansas and request
them to answer :
In view of the fact that the United States su-
preme court has rendered a number of decisions
placing the working class at a tremendous disad-
vantage in its struggle with the employing class for
better conditions, we respectfully submit to the
candidates for the United States senate and house
of representatives the following questions :
1. Are yon in favor of issuing injunctions
against trade union members because they refuse
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to patronize a non-union employer and advise their
friends to do likewise?
2. Will you introduce and vote for a measure
setting aside the decision of the supreme court of
the District of Columbia in the case of Buck Stove
and Kange Company against officers of the A. F. of
L., making it a criminal act for a labor union to
place an employer on its unfair list?
3. Are you in favor of classifying trade unions
as “trusts in restraint of trade,” as was done by the
supreme court in the case of Lowe vs. Lawler, and
will you introduce a measure, should you be elected,
providing for the exemption of trade unions from
the operation of the anti-trust law under this court
decision?
4. Do you endorse the supreme court decision
making it lawful for a corporation to discharge a
man because of his membership in a labor union?
If you do not, will you introduce and vote for a
bill setting aside this decision of the supreme court
and making it unlawful for a corporation to dis-
charge a man because he is a member of a trade
union?
Here are these candidates in the State of Kansas
for the United States senate and house of represen-
tatives and if they are elected they will have the
power to control legislation, and it is perfectly
proper that you, as the representatives of the work-
ers, should put these questions squarely to these
candidates and demand that they answer them.
They are very simple questions. The United States
court has rendered a decision to the effect that a
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trade union is a trust and that if it exercises iis
legitimate powers it is a criminal conspiracy in re-
straint of trade. That decision of the court con
gress has the power to set aside, and if a man stands
as a candidate for congress, in the upper or lower
branch, and appeals to you for your vote — and bear
in mind he can only be elected by your vote — it is
right and proper that you should know if he is in
favor of the decision or opposed to it. And if he
is in favor of this decision he is your enemy.
Now, these candidates are trying to carry water
on both shoulders. They declare they will give both
labor and capital a square deal, and I want to say
that is impossible. No man can be for labor with-
out being against capital. No man can be for capi-
tal without being against labor.
Here is the capitalist ; here are the workers. Here
is the capitalist who owns the mines ; here are the
miners who work in the mines. There is so much
coal produced. There is a quarrel between them
over a division of the product. Each wants all he
can get. Here we have the class struggle. Now. is
it possible to be for the capitalist without being
against the worker. Are their interest not diamet-
rically opposite?
If you increase the share of the capitalist don’t
you decrease the share of the workers ? Can a door
be both open and shut at the same time ? Can you
increase both the workers’ and the capitalist’s share
at the same time ? There is just so much produced,
and in the present system it has to be divided be-
tween the capitalists and the workers, and both
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
sides are fighting for all they can get. and this is
the historic class struggle.
We have now no revolutionary organization of
the workers along the lines of this class struggle,
and that is the demand of this time. The pure and
simple trade union will no longer answer. I would
not take from it the least credit that belongs to it.
I have fought under its banner for thirty years. I
have followed it through victory and defeat, gen-
erally defeat. I realize today more than ever before
in my life the necessity for thorough economic or-
ganization. It must be made complete. Organiza-
tion, like everything else, is subject to the laws of
evolution. Everything changes, my brothers. The
tool you worked with twenty-five years ago will no
longer do. It would do then; it will not do now.
The capitalists are combined against you. They
are reducing wages. They have control of the
courts. They are doing everything they can to
destroy your power. You have got to follow their
example. You have got to unify your forces. You
have got to stand together shoulder to shoulder on
the economic and political fields and then you will
make substantial progress toward emancipation.
I am not here, my brothers, to ask you, as an
economic organization, to go into politics. Not at
all. If I could have you pass a resolution to go
into politics I would not do it. If you were in-
clined to go into active politics as an organization
I would prevent such action if I could. You repre-
sent the economic organization of the working class
and this organization has its own clearly defined
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121
functions. Your economic organization can never
become a political machine, but your economic or-
ganization must recognize and proclaim the neces-
sity for a united political party. You ought to pass
a resolution recognizing the class struggle, declar-
ing your opposition to the capitalist system of pri-
vate ownership of the means of production, and
urging upon the working class the necessity for
working class political action. That is as far as
the economic organization need to go. If you were
to Use your economic organization for political pur-
poses you would disrupt it, you would wreck it.
But I would not have you renounce politics,
nor be afraid to discuss anything. Who is it that
is so fearful you will discuss politics? It is the
ward-heeling politician, and isn't it because he
knows very well that if you ever get into politics in
the right way he will be out of a job ? He is afraid
you will get your eyes open.
Why should a union man be afraid to discuss
politics? He belongs to a certain party; his father
belonged to that party and his grandfather be-
longed to that party, and perhaps his great-grand-
father belonged to the same party, and that is
probably the only reason he can give for belonging
to that party. He don't want anybody to suggest
to him the possibility of being lifted out of that
party and into some other.
Parties change. The party that was good forty
years ago is completely outgrown and corrupt and
has now no purpose but the promotion of graft and
other vicious practices.
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
Workingmen in their organized capacity must
recognize the necessity for both economic and poli-
tical action. I would not have you declare in favor
of any particular political party. That would be
another mistake which would have disastrous re-
sults. If I could have you pass a resolution to sup-
port the Socialist party I would not do it. You
can’t make Socialists by passing resolutions. Men
have to become Socialists by study and experience,
and they are getting the experience every day.
There is one fact, and a very important one, that
I would impress upon you, and that is the necessity
for revolutionary working class political action.
No one will attempt to dispute the fact that our
interests as workers are identical. If our interests
are identical, then we ought to unite. We ought to
unite within the same organization, and if there is
a strike we should all strike, and if there is a boy-
cott all of us ought to engage in it. If our interests
are identical, it follows that we ought to belong to
the same party as well as to the same economic
organization. What is politics? It is simply the
reflex of economics. What is a party ? It is the ex-
pression politically of certain material class inter-
ests. You belong to that party that you believe will
promote your material welfare. Is not that a fact ?
If you find yourself in a party that attacks your
pocket do you not quit that party?
Now, if you are in a party that opposes your
interests it is because you don’t have intelligence
enough to understand your interests. That is
where the capitalists have the better of you. As a
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128
rule, they are intelligent, and shrewd. They under-
stand their material interests and how to protect
them. You find the capitalists as a rule belonging
only to capitalist parties. They don’t join a work-
ing-class party and they don’t vote the Socialist
ticket. They know enough to know that Socialism
is opposed to their economic interests. Now, both
republican and democratic parties are capitalist
parties. There is not the slightest doubt about it.
It can be proved in a hundred different ways. You
know how the republican party treated the demands
of labor in its recent national convention. You
know, or ought to know, what has taken place un-
der the present administration. You know, or ought
to know, something about the democratic party, na-
tional, state and municipal. If there are those who
say that the democratic party is more favorable to
labor than the republican party it is only necessary
to point to the southern states where it has ruled
for a century. In no other part of the nation are
workingmen in so wretched a condition. In no
other part are working people so miserably housed,
so wretchedly treated as they are in the southern
states where the democratic party rules supreme.
At this very hour miners in Alabama are on
strike under a democratic administration. I know
the condition there, for I have been in the mines.
I know many of those men personally. I know
under what conditions they have had to work. I
have been in the shacks in which they live and have
seen their unhappy wives and ill-fed children. I
know whereof I speak. Only in the last extremity
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124 LABOR AND FREEDOM.
have those men gone out on strike. They bore all
these cruel wrongs for years and were finally forced
out on strike. And then what happened? The
very first thing the democratic governor did was
to send the soldiers to scab the mines. It doesn’t
make any difference to you, if workingmen are
starved and shot down, which party is in power. It
occurs under both republican and democratic ad-
ministration. There will be no change as long as
you continue to support the, prevailing capitalist
system, based upon the private ownership of the
tools with which workingmen work and without
which they are doomed to slavery and starvation.
Now, I repeat that this body should declare
against this system of private ownership and in
favor of the collective ownership by the workers of
the tools of production. This will give you a clear
aim and definite object. This will make your move-
ment revolutionary in its ultimate purpose, as it
ought to be, and as for immediate concessions in
the way of legislation by capitalist representatives
and more favorable working conditions, you work-
ingmen have only to poll two million Socialist votes
this fall, and you will get those concessions freely
and you will not get them in any other way. You
will not frighten, you will not move the great cor-
porations by dividing your votes between the re-
publican and democratic parties. It doesn’t make
any difference which of these two parties wins, you
lose ! They are both capitalist parties and I don’t
ask you to take my mere word for it. I simply ask,
my brothers, that you read and study the platforms
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for yourself. I beg of you not to have an ignorant,
superstitious reverence for any political party. It
is your misfortune if you are the blind follower of
any political leader, or any other leader. It is your
duty as a workingman, your duty to yourself, your
family, to quit a party the very instant you find
that that party no longer serves you; and if you
continue to adhere to a party that antagonizes your
interests, if you continue to support a system in
which you are degraded, then you have no right to
complain. You must submit to what comes, for
you yourself are responsible. .
Let me impress this fact upon your minds : the
labor question, which is really the question of all
humanity, will never be solved until it is solved
by the working class. It will never be solved for
you by the capitalists. It will never be solved for
you by the politicians. It will remain unsolved un-
til you yourselves solve it. As long as you can
stand and are willing to stand these conditions,
these conditions will remain; but when you unite
all over the land, when you present a solid class-
conscious phalanx, economically and politically,
there is no power on this earth that can stand be-
tween you and complete emancipation.
As individauls you are helpless, but united you
represent an irresistible power.
Is there any doubt in the mind of any thinking
workingman that we are in the midst of a class
struggle? Is there any doubt that the workingman
ought to own the tool he works with ? You will
never own the tool you work with under the present
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system. This whole system is based upon the pri-
vate ownership by the capitalist of the tools and
the wage-slavery of the working class, and as long
as the tools are privately owned by the capitalists
the great mass of workers will be wage-slaves.
You may, at times, temporarily better your con-
dition within certain limitations, but you will still
remain wage-slaves, and why wage-slaves ? For just
one reason and no other — you have got to work. To
work you have got to have tools, and if you have
no tools you have to beg for work, and if you have
got to beg for work the man who owns the tools you
use will determine the conditions under which you
shall work. As long as he owns your tools he owns
your job, and if he owns your job he is the master
of your fate! You are in no sense a free man. You
are subject to his interest and to his will. He de-
cides whether you shall work or not. Therefore, he
decides whether you shall live or die. And in that
humiliating position any one who tries to persude
you that you are a free man is guilty of insulting
your intelligence. You will never be free, you will
never stand erect in your own manly self-reliance
until you are the master of the tools you work with,
and when you are you can freely work without the
consent of any master, and when you do work you
will get all your labor produces.
As it is now the lion’s share goes to the capitalist
for which he does nothing, while you get a small
fraction to feed, clothe and shelter yourself, and
reproduce yourself in the form of labor power.
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That is all you get out of it and all you ever will
get in the capitalist system.
Oh, my brothers, can you be satisfied with your
lot ? Will you insist that life shall continue a mere
struggle for existence and one prolonged misery
to which death comes as a blessed relief?
How is it with the average workingman today?
I am not referring to the few who have been fa-
vored and who have fared better than the great
mass, but I am asking how it is with the average
workingman in this system? Admit that he has
a job. What assurance has he that it is his in
twenty-four hours ? I have a letter from an expert
glass worker saying that the new glass machine
which has recently been tested, has proven conclu-
sively that bottles can be made without a glass
blower. Five or six boys with these machines can
make as many bottles as ten expert blowers could
make. Machinery is conquering every department
of activity. It is displacing more and more work-
ingmen and making the lot of those who have em-
ployment more and more insecure. Admit that a
man has a job. What assurance has he that he is
going to keep it ? A machine may be invented. He
may offend the boss. He may engage in a little
agitation in the interest of his class. He is marked
as an agitator, he is discharged, and then what is
his status?
The minute he is discharged he has to hunt for a
new buyer* for his labor power. He owns no tools ;
the tools are great machines. He can’t compete
against them with his bare hands. He has got to
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
work. There is only one condition under which he
can work and that is when he sells his labor power,
his energy, his very life currents, and thus disposes
of himself in daily installments. He is not sold
from the block, as was the chattel slave. He sells
ten hours of himself every day in exchange for just
enough to keep himself in that same slavish condi-
tion.
The machine he works with has to be oiled, and
he has to be fed, and the oil sustains the same rela-
tion to the machine that food does to him. If he
could work without food his wage would be reduced
to the vanishing point. That is the status of the
workingman today.
What can the present economic organization do
to improve the condition of the workingman? Very
little, if anything. If you have a wife and two or
three children, and you take the possibilities into
consideration, this question ought to give you grave
concern. You know that it is the sons of working-
men who become vagabonds and tramps, and who
are sent to jail, and it is the daughters of working-
men who are forced into houses of shame.
You are a workingman, you live in capitalism,
and you have nothing but your labor power, and
you don’t know whether you are going to find a
buyer or not. But even if you do find a master, if
you have a job, can you boast of being a man among
men?
No man can rightly claim to be a man unless he
is free. There is something godlike about man-
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 129
hood. Manhood doesn’t admit of ownership. Man-
hQod scorns to be regarded as property.
Do you know whether you have a job or not?
Do you know how long you are going to have one ?
And when you are out of a job what can your union
do for you ? I was down at Coalgate, Oklahoma, on
the Fourth of July last, where six hundred miners
have been out of work for four long months. They
are all organized. There are the mines and machin-
ery, and the miners are eager to work. But not a
tap of work is being done, and the miners and
their families are suffering, and most of them lm
in houses that are unfit for habitation. This awful
condition is never going to be changed in capital-
ism. There is one way only and that is to wipe out
capitalism, and to do that we have to get together,
and when we do that we will find the way to eman-
cipation.
You may not agree with me now, but make note
of what I am saying. The time is near when you
will be forced into economic and political solidarity.
The republican and democratic parties are alike
capitalist parties. Some of you may think that Mr.
Bryan, if elected, will do great things for the work-
ers. Conditions will remain substantially the same.
We will still be under capitalism. It will not mat-
ter how you many tinker with the tariff or the cur-
rency. The tools are still the property of the
capitalists and you are still at their mercy.
Now let me show you that Mr. Bryan is no more
your friend than is Mr. Taft. You remember when
the officials of the Western Federation of Miners
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
were kidnaped in Colorado, and when it was said
they should never leave Idaho alive. It was the
determination of the Mine Owners’ Association that
these brave and loyal union leaders should be foully
murdered. When these brothers of ours were bru-
tally kidnaped by the collusion of the capitalist gov-
ernors of two states, every true friend of the work-
ing class cried out in protest. Did Mr. Bryan utter
a word? Mr. Bryan was the recognized champion
of the working class. He was in a position to be
heard. A protest from him would have tremendous
weight with the American people. But his labor
friends could not unlock his lips. Not one word
would he speak. Not one.
Organized labor, however, throughout the length
and breadth of the land, took the matter in hand
promptly and registered its protest in a way that
made the nation quake. The Mine Owners’ Asso-
ciation took to the tall timber. Our brother union-
ists were acquitted, vindicated, and stood forth
without a blemish upon their honor, and after they
were free once more, Mr. Bryan said, “I felt all the
time that they were not guilty.”
Now if your faithful leaders are kidnaped and
threatened to be hanged, and you call upon a man
who claims to be your friend, to come to the rescue
and he refuses to say a word, to give the least help,
do you still think he is your friend ? Mr. Bryan
had his chance to prove his friendship at a time
when labor sorely needed friends, when organized
labor cried out in agony and distress. But not a
word escaped his lips.
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Why did not Mr. Byran speak ? He did not dare.
Mr. Bryan knew very well that the kidnapers of
those men were his personal f riends, the association
of rich mine owners, who had largely furnished his
campaign funds. For Mr. Bryan personally I have
always had a high regard. I am not attacking him
in any personal sense at all.
But the extremity to which a man is driven who
tries to serve both capital and labor ! It can’t be
done. Mr. Bryan did not dare to speak for labor
because if he had he would have turned the mine
owning capitalists against him. He is afraid to
speak out very loudly for capitalists for fear the
workers will get after, him. %He has compromised
all around for the sake of being president.
You have heard him denounce Roger Sullivan.
Mr. Bryan, four years ago, in denouncing this cor-
ruptionist, at the time of the nomination of Alton
B. Parker, said he was totally destitute of honor
and compared him to a train robber. Notwith-
standing this fact, Mr. Bryan recently invited Sul-
livan to his home in Lincoln, took him by the hand
and introduced him to his family. Mr. Bryan
also invited Charley Murphy, the inexpressibly
rotten Tammany heeler of New York. Mr. Bryan
had him come to Lincoln so as to conciliate Tam-
many, and they were photographed together shak-
ing hands.
No man can serve both capital and labor at the
same time.
You don’t admit the capitalists to your union.
They organize their union to fight you. You or-
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132 LABOR AND FREEDOM.
ganke your union to fight them. Their union con-
sists wholly of capitalists; your union consists
wholly of workingmen. It is along the same line
that you have got to organize politically. You
don’t unite with capitalists on the economic field ;
why should you politically?
You have got to extend your class line. You
can declare yourselves in this convention and make
your position clear to the world. You can give
hope and inspire confidence throughout the state.
And now in closing, I wish to thank you, each of
you, from my heart, for your kindness. I appre-
ciate the opportunity you have given me to address
you and whether you agree with me or not, I leave
you wishing you success in your deliberations and
hoping for the early triumph of the labor move-,
ment.
The convention passed a unanimous rising vote
of thanks at the close of the address.
& & *
POLITICAL APPEAL TO AMERICAN
WORKERS.
Opening Speech of National Campaign, Riverview Park,
Chicago, June 16, 1912.
Friends, Comrades and Fello w- Workers : We
are today entering upon a national campaign of
the profoundest interest to the working class and
the country. In this campaign there are but two
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133
parties and but one issue. There is no longer
even the pretense of difference between the so-called
Republican and Democratic parties. They are sub-
stantially one in what they stand for. They are
opposed to each other on no question of principle
but purely in a contest for the spoils of office.
To the workers of the country these two parties
in name are one in fact. They, • or rather, it,
stands for capitalism, for the private ownership of
the means of subsistence, for the exploitation of
the workers, and for wage-slavery.
Both of these old capitalist class machines are
going to pieces. Having outlived their time they
have become corrupt and worse than useless and
now present a spectacle of political degeneracy
never before witnessed in this or any other coun-
try. Both are torn by dissension and rife with dis-
integration. The evolution of the forces underly-
ing them is tearing them from their foundations
and sweeping them to inevitable destruction.
We have before us in this city at this hour an
exhibition of capitalist machine politics which
lays bare the true inwardness of the situation in
the capitalist camp. Nothing that any Socialist
has ever charged in the way of corruption is to
be compared with what Taft and Roosevelt have
charged and proven upon one another. They are
both good Republicans, just as Harmon and Bryan
are both good Democrats — and they are all agreed
that Socialism would be the ruination of the coun-
try.
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
Puppets of the Ruling Class .
Taft and Boosevelt in the exploitation of their
boasted individualism and their mad fight for
official spoils have been forced to expose the whole
game of capitalist class politics and reveal them-
selves and the whole brood of capitalist politicians
in their true role before the American people. They
are all the mere puppets of the ruling class. They
are literally bought, paid for and owned, body and
soul, by the powers that are exploiting this nation
and enslaving and robbing its toilers.
What difference is there, judged by what they
stand for, between Taft, Boosevelt, La Follette,
Harmon, Wilson, Clark and Bryan?
Do they not all alike stand for the private own-
ership of industry and the wage-slavery of the
working class ?
What earthly difference can it make to the mil-
lions of workers whether the Republican or Demo-
cratic political machine of capitalism is in com-
mission ?
That these two parties differ in name only and
are one in fact is demonstrated beyond cavil when-
ever and wherever the Socialist party constitutes
a menace to their misrule. Milwaukee is a case in
point and there are many others. Confronted by
the Socialists these long pretended foes are forced
to drop their masks and fly into each other’s arms.
Twin Agencies of Wall Street.
The baseness, hypocrisy and corruption of these
twin political agencies of Wall Street and the rul-
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
135
mg class cannot be expressed in words. The
imagination is taxed in contemplating their
crimes. There is no depth of dishonor to which
they have not descended — no depth of depravity
they have not sounded.
To the extent that they control elections the
franchise is corrupted and the electorate debauched,
and when they succeed in power it is but to exe-
cute the will of the Wall Street interests which
finance and control them. The police, the militia,
the regular army, the courts and all the powers
lodged in class government are- all freely at the
service of the ruling class, especially in suppress-
ing discontent among the slaves of the factories,
mills and mines, and keeping them safely in sub-
jugation to their masters.
How can any intelligent, self-respecting wage-
worker give his support to either of these corrupt
capitalist parties? The emblem of a capitalist
party on a working man is the badge of his ignor-
ance, his servility and shame. .
Marshalled in battle array, against these corrupt
capitalist parties is the young, virile, revolutionary
Socialist party, the party of the awakening work-
ing class, whose red banners, inscribed with the
inspiring shibboleth of class-conscious solidarity,
proclaim the coming triumph of international So-
cialism and the emancipation of the workers of
the world.
The Two Political Forces.
Contrast these two political forces and the par-
ties through which these forces find concrete ex-
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136 LABOR AND FREEDOM.
pression ! On the one side are the trusts, the cor-
porations, the banks, the railroads, the plutocrats,
the politicians, the bribe-givers, the ballot-box stuf-
fers, the repeaters, the parasites, retainers and job-
hunters of all descriptions; the corruption funds,
the filth, slime and debauchery of ruling class poli-
tics ; the press and pulpit and college, all wearing
capitalism’s collar, and all in concert applauding
its “patriotism” and glorifying in its plundering
and profligate regime.
On the other side are the workers and pro-
ducers of the nation coming into consciousness of
their interests and their power as a class, filled
with the spirit of solidarity and thrilled with the
new-born power that throbs within them; scorn-
ing further affiliation with the parties that so long
used them to their own degradation and looking
trustfully to themselves and to each other for re-
lief from oppression and for emancipation from
the power which has so long enslaved them.
Honest toil, useful labor, against industrial rob-
bery and political rottenness!
These are the two forces which are arrayed
against each other in deadly and uncompromising
hostility in the present campaign.
Corrupt Capitalist Politics.
We are not here to play the filthy game of capi
talist politics. There is the same relative differ
ence between capitalist class politics and working
class politics that there is between capitalism and
Socialism.
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Capitalism, having its foundation in the slavery
and exploitation of the masses, can only rule by
corrupt means and its politics are essentially the
reflex of its low and debasing economic character.
The Socialist party as the party of the work
ing class stands squarely upon its principles in
making its appeal to the workers of the nation.
It is not begging for votes, nor seeking for votes,
nor bargaining for votes. It is not in the vote mar-
ket. It wants votes, but only of those who want it
— those who recognize it as their party and come
to it of their own free will.
If, as the Socialist candidate for president, I
were seeking office and the spoils of office I would
be a traitor to the Socialist party and a disgrace
to the working class.
To be sure we want all the votes we can get
and all that are coming to us but only as a
means of developing the political power of the
working class in the struggle for industrial free-
dom, and not that we may revel in the spoils of
office.
Political Power .
The workers have never yet developed or made
use of their political power. They have played the
game of their masters for the benefit of the master
class — and now many of them, disgusted with their
own blind and stupid performance, are renouncing
politics and refusing to see any difference between
the capitalist parties financed by the ruling class
to perpetuate class rule and the Socialist party or-
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138 LABOR AND FREEDOM.
ganized and financed by the workers themselves
as a means of wresting the control of government
and of industry from the capitalists and making
the working class the ruling class of the nation
and the world.
The Socialist party enters this campaign under
conditions that could scarcely be more favorable
to the cause it represents. For the first time every
state in the union is now organized and represented
in the national party, and every state will have
a full ticket in the field; and for the first time
the Socialists of the United States have a party
which takes its rightful place in the great revolu-
tionary working class movement of the world. •
Four years ago with a membership of scarcely
forty thousand we succeeded in polling nearly half
a million votes; this year when the campaign is
fairly opened we shall have a hundred and fifty
thousand dues-paying members and an organiza-
tion in all regards incalculably superior to that
we had in the last campaign.
We are united, militant, aggressive, enthusias-
tic as never before. From the Eastern coast to the
Pacific shore and from the Canadian line to the
Mexican gulf the red banner of the proletarian
revolution floats unchallenged and the exultant
shouts of the advancing hosts of labor are borne
on all the breezes.
There Is But One Issue.
There is but one issue that appeals to this con-
quering army — the unconditional surrender of the
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189
capitalist class. To be sure this cannot be achieved
in a day and in the meantime the party enforces
to the extent of its power its immediate demands
and presses steadily onward toward the goal. It
has its constructive program by means of which
it develops its power and its capacity, step by step,
Beizing upon every bit of vantage to advance and
strengthen its position, but never for a moment
mistaking reform for revolution and never losing
sight of the ultimate goal.
Socialist reform must not be confounded with
Bo-called capitalist reform. The latter is shrewdly
designed to buttress capitalism ; the former to over-
throw it. Socialist reform vitalizes and promotes
the social revolution.
The National Convention .
The national convention of the Socialist party
recently held at Indianapolis was in all respects
the greatest gathering of representative Socialists
ever held in the United States. The delegates
there assembled demonstrated their ability to
deal efficiently with all the vital problems which
confront the party. The convention was permeated
in every fiber with the class-conscious, revolutionary
spirit and was thoroughly representative of the
working class. Every question that came before
that body was considered and disposed of in ac-
cordance with the principles and program of the
international movement and on the basis of its
relation to and effect upon the working class.
The platform adopted by the convention is a
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clear and cogent enunciation of the party’s prin-
ciples and a frank and forceful statement of the
party’s mission. This platform embodies labor’s
indictment of the capitalist system and demands
the abolition of that system. It proclaims the iden-
tity of interests of all workers and appeals to them
in clarion tones to unite for their emancipation.
It points out the class struggle and emphasizes
the need of the economic and political unity of
the workers to wage that struggle to a successful
issue. It declares relentless war upon the entire
capitalist regime in the name of the rising work-
ing class and demands in uncompromising terms
the overthrow of wage-slavery and the inauguration
of industrial democracy.
In this platform of the Socialist party the his-
toric development of society is clearly stated and
the fact made manifest that the time has come for
the workers of the world to shake off their oppres-
sors and exploiters, put an end to their age-long
servitude, and make themselves the masters of the
world.
To this end the Socialist party has been organ-
ized ; to this end it is bending all its energies and
taxing all its resources; to this end it makes its
appeal to the workers and their sympathizers
throughout the nation.
The Capitalist System Condemned .
In the name of the workers the Socialist party
condemns the capitalist system. In the name of
freedom it condemns wage-slavery. In the name
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141
of modern industry it condemns poverty, idleness
and famine. In the name of peace it condemns
war. In the name of civilization it condemns the
murder of little children. In the name of enlight-
enment it condemns ignorance and superstition.
In the name of the future it arraigns the past at
the bar of the present, and in the name of human-
ity it demands social justice for every man, woman
and child.
The Socialist party knows neither color, creed,
sex, nor race. It knows no aliens among the op
pressed and down-trodden. It is first and last the
party of the workers, regardless of their national-
ity, proclaiming their interests, voicing their as-
pirations, and fighting their battles.
It matters not where the slaves of the earth
lift their bowed bodies from the dust and seek
to shake off their fetters, or lighten the burden that
oppresses them, the Socialist party is pledged to en-
courage and support them to the full extent of its
power. It matters not to what union they belong,
or if they belong to any union, the Socialist party
which sprang from their struggle, their oppres-
sion, and their aspiration, is with them through
good and evil report, in trial and defeat, until
at last victory is inscribed upon their banner.
Fighting Labor's Battles.
Whether it be in the textile mills of Lawrence
and other mills of New England where men, wom-
en and children are ground into dividends to gorge
a heartless, mill-owning plutocracy; or whether it
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
be in the lumber and railroad camps of the far
Northwest where men are herded like cattle and
insulted, beaten and deported for peaceably assert-
ing the legal right to organize; or in the conflict
with the civilized savages of San Diego where men
who dare be known as members of the Industrial
Workers of the World are kidnaped, tortured and
murdered in cold blood in the name of law and
order; or in the city of Chicago where that gorgon
of capitalism, the newspaper trust, is bent upon
crushing and exterminating the pressmen's un-
ion ; or along the Harriman lines of railroad where
the slaves of the shops have been driven to the al-
ternative of striking or sacrificing the last vestige
of their manhood and self-respect, in all these bat-
tles of the workers against their capitalist oppres-
sors the Socialist party has the most vital concern
and is freely pledged to render them all the assist-
ance in its power.
These are the battles of the workers in the war
of the classes and the battles of the workers,
wherever and however fought, are always and ev-
erywhere the battles of the Socialist party.
When Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone were
seized by the brutal mine owners of the western
states and by their prostitute press consigned to
the gallows, the Socialist party lost not an hour
in going to the rescue, and but for its prompt and
vigorous action and the resolute work of its press
another monstrous crime against the working class
would have blackened the pages of American his-
tory.
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Persecution of Loyal Leaders .
In the unceasing struggle of the workers with
their exploiters the truly loyal leaders are always
marked for persecution. Joseph Ettor and Arturo
Giovannitti would not now be in jail awaiting trial
for murder had they betrayed the slaves of the
Lawrence mills. They were staunch and true;
their leadership made for industrial unity and
victory, and for this reason alone the enraged
and defeated mill-owners are now bent upon send-
ing them to the electric chair.
These fellow-workers of ours who are now on
trial for murder are not one whit more guilty of
the crime with which they are charged than I am.
The man who committed the murder was a police-
man, an officer of the law ; the victim of the crime
was as usual a striker, a wage-slave, a poor work-
ing girl. Ettor and Giovannitti were two miles
from the scene at the time and when the news came
to them they broke into tears — and these two work-
ingmen who would have protected that poor girl’s
life with their own are now to be tried for her
murder.
Was ever anything in all the annals of heart-
less persecution more monstrous than this? Have
the mill-owners gone stark mad? Have they in
their brutal rage become stone-blind? Whatever
the answer may be, it is certain that the Socialist
party and organized labor in general will never
stfe these two innocent workers murdered in cold
blood, nor will their agitation and protest cease
until they have been given thejr freedom.
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
The Campaign Now Opening .
In the great campaign now pending the people,
especially the toilers and producers, will be far
more receptive to the truths of Socialism than ever
before.
Since the last national campaign they have had
four years more of capitalism, of political corrup-
tion, industrial stagnation, low wages and high
prices, and many, very many of them have come to
realize that these conditions are inherent in the
capitalist system and that it is vain and foolish
to hope for relief through the political parties of
that system. These people have had their eyes
opened in spite of themselves. They have been
made to see what the present system means to them
and to their children, and they have been forced
to turn against it by the sheer instinct of self-
preservation.
They look abroad and they see this fair land
being rapidly converted into the private preserves
of a plutocracy as brutal and defiant as any privi-
leged class that ever ruled in a foreign despotism ;
they see machinery and misery go hand in hand;
they see thousands idle and poverty-stricken all
about them while a few are glutted to degeneracy ;
they see troops of child-slaves ground into luxuries
for the rich while their fathers have become a drug
on the labor market ; they see parasites in palaces
and automobiles and honest workers in hovels or
tramping the ties ; they see the politics of the rul-
ing corporations dripping with corruption and pu-
tridity; they see vice and crime rampant, prosti
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145
tution eating like a cancer, and insanity and dis-
ease sapping the mental and physical powers of the
body social, and involuntarily they cry out in
horror and protest, THIS IS ENOUGH ! THERE
MUST BE A CHANGE! And they turn with
loathing and disgust from the Republican and
Democratic parties under whose joint and several
maladministration these appalling conditions have
been brought upon the country.
The message of Socialism, which a few years
ago was spurned by these people, falls today upon
eager ears and receptive minds. Their prejudice
has melted away. They are now prepared to cast
their fortunes with the only political party that
proposes a change of system and the only party
that has a right to appeal to the intelligence of
the people.
First Socialist Congressman .
The political beginning of the Socialist party
in this country is now distinctly recognized by its
most implacable enemies. A single Socialist con-
gressman has been sufficient to arouse the whole
nation to the vital issue of Socialism which con-
fronts it. Victor L. Berger as the first and until
now the only representative of labor, has had the
power, single-handed and alone, to compel the
respectful consideration of the American congress,
for the first time in its history, of the rights and
interests of the working class. To be sure the
capitalists do not relish this and so they have
consolidated the Republican and Democratic forces
in Berger’s district to defeat him, but the rising
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146 LABOR AND FREEDOM.
tide of Socialism will overwhelm them both and
not only triumphantly re-elect Berger but a score
of others to make the next congress resound with
the demands of the working class.
Now is the time for the workers of this nation
to develop and assert their political as well as
their economic power, to demonstrate their unity
and solidarity.
Back up the economic victory at Lawrence with
an overwhelming victory at the ballot box ! Sweep
the minions of the mill-owners from power and
fill every office from the ranks of the workers;
Deliver a crushing rebuke to the hireling-officials
of San Diego by a united vote of the workers that
will rescue the city from the rule of the degener-
ates and place it forever under a working class
administration.
The Only Democratic Party .
The Socialist party is the only party of the
people, the only party opposed to the rule of the
plutocracy, the only truly democratic party in the
world.
It is the only party in which women have equal
rights with men, the only party which denies mem-
bership to a man who refuses to reeognke woman
as his political equal, the only party that is pledged
to strike the fetters of economic and political slav-
ery from womanhood and pave the way for a race
of free women.
The Socialist party is the only party that stands
a living protest against the monstrous crime of
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child labor. It is the only party whose triumph
will soiled onoe and forever the knell of child
slavery.
There is no hope under the present decaying
system. The worker who votes the Republican or
Democratic ticket does worse than throw his vote
away. He is a deserter of his class and his own
worst enemy, though he may be in blissful ignor-
ance of the fact that he is false to himself and his
fellow-workers and that sooner or later he must
reap what he has sown.
Wages and Cost of Living .
The latest census reports, covering the year 1909,
show that the 6,615,046 workers in manufactories
in the United States were paid an average wage
of $519 for the year, an increase of not quite 9 per
cent in five years, and an increase of 21 per cent in
ten years, but the average cost of living increased
more than 40 per cent during the same time, so
that in point of fact the wages of these workers
have been and are being steadily reduced in the pro-
gressive development of production under the capi-
talist system, and this in spite of all the resistance
that has been or can be brought to bear by the
federated craft unions. Here we are brought face
to face with the imperative need of the revolu-
tionary industrial union, embracing all the work-
ers and fighting every battle for increased wages,
shorter hours and better conditions with a solid
and united front, while at the same time pressing
steadily forward in harmonious co-operation and
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under the restraints of self-discipline, developing
the latent abilities of the workers, increasing their
knowledge, and fitting them for the mastery and
control of industry when the victorious hosts of
labor conquer the public powers and transfer the
title-deeds of the mines and mills and factories
from the idle plutocrats to the industrial workers
to be operated for the common good.
Industrial Unity.
If the printing trades were organized on the
basis of industrial unionism the spectacle of local
unions in the same crafts pitted against each other
to their mutual destruction would not be presented
to us in the City of Chicago, and the capitalist
newspaper trust would not now have its heel upon
the neck of the union pressmen. For this lament-
able state of affairs the craft union and William
Randolph Heart, its chief patron and promoter, are
entirely responsible.
The Socialist party presents the farm workers
as well as the industrial workers with a platform
and program which must appeal to their intelli-
gence and command their support. It points out
to them clearly why their situation is hopeless un-
der capitalism, how they are robbed and exploited,
and why they are bound to make common cause
with the industrial workers in the mills and fac-
tories of the citiefe, along the railways and in the
mines in the struggle for emancipation.
The education, organization and co-operation of
the workers, the entire body of them, is the con-
i
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scious aim and the self-imposed task of the So-
cialist party. Persistently, unceasingly and en-,
thusiastically this great work is being accomplished.
It is the working class coming into consciousness
of itself, and no power on earth can prevail against
it in the hour of its complete awakening.
Socialism Is Inevitable .
The laws of evolution have decreed the down-
fall of the capitalist system. The handwriting is
upon the wall in letters of fire. The trusts are
transforming industry and next will come the
transformation of the trusts by the people. So-
cialism is inevitable. Capitalism is breaking down
and the new order evolving from it is clearly the
Socialist commonwealth.
The present evolution can only culminate in in-
dustrial and social democracy, and in alliance
therewith and preparing the way for the peaceable
reception of the new order, is the Socialist move-
ment, arousing the workers and educating and fit-
ting them to take possession of their own when at
last the struggle of the centuries has been crowned
with triumph.
In the coming social order, based upon the so-
cial ownership of the means of life and the pro-
duction of wealth for the use of all instead of
the private profit of the few, for which the Socialist
party stands in this and every other campaign,
peace will prevail and plenty for all will abound
in the land. The brute struggle for existence will
have ended, and the millions of exploited poor will
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be rescued from the skeleton clutches of poverty
and famine. Prostitution and the white slave traf-
fic, fostered and protected under the old order, will
be a horror of the past.
The social conscience and the social spirit will
prevail. Society will have a new birth, and the
race a new destiny. There will be work for all,
leisure for all, and the joys of life for all.
Competition there will be, not in the struggle
for existence, but to excel in good work and in
social service. Every child will then have an
equal chance to grow up in health and vigor of
body and mind and an equal chance to rise to its
full stature and achieve success in life.
Socialist Ideals.
These are the ideals of the Socialist party and
to these ideals it has consecrated all its energies
and all its powers. The members of the Socialist
party are the party and their collective will is the
supreme law. The Socialist party is organized and
ruled from the bottom up. There is no boss and
there never can be unless the party deserts its
principles and ceases to be a Socialist party.
The party is supported by a dues-paying mem-
bership. It is the only political party that is so
supported. Each member has not only an equal
voice but is urged to take an active part in all
the party councils. Each local meeting place is
an educational center. The party relies wholly
upon the power of education, knowledge, and mu-
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 151
tual understanding. It buys no votes and it makes
no canvass in the red-light districts.
The press of the party is the most vital factor
in its educational propaganda and the workers are
everywhere being aroused to the necessity of build-
ing up a working class press to champion their
cause and to discuss current issues from their point
of view for the enlightenment of the masses.
This Is Our Year .
Comrades and friends, the campaign before us
gives us our supreme opportunity to reach the
American people. They have but to know the true
meaning of Socialism to accept its philosophy and
the true mission of the Socialist party to give it
their support. Let us all unite as we never have
before to place the issue of Socialism squarely be-
fore the masses. For years they have been de-
ceived, misled and betrayed, and they are now
hungering for the true gospel of relief and the
true message of emancipation.
This is our year in the United States ! Social-
ism is in the very air we breathe. It is the grand-
est shibboleth that ever inspired men and women
to action in this world. In the horizon of labor
it shines as a new-risen sun and it is the hope
of all humanity.
Onward, comrades, onward in the struggle, until
Triumphant Socialism proclaims an Emancipated
Race and a New World ! v
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM.
Cunpalrn Speech, Pabst Park, Milwaukee, Wla, July 21, 1212.
Friends, Fellow- Socialists and Fellow-Workers:
The existing order of things is breaking down.
The great forces underlying society are steadily at
work. The old order has had its day and all the
signs point to an impending change. Society is
at once being destroyed and re-created.
The struggle in which we are engaged today is
a struggle of economic classes. The supremacy is
now held by the capitalist class, who are combined
in trusts and control the powers of government.
The middle class is struggling desperately to hold
its ground against the inroads of its trustified and
triumphant competitors.
This war between the great capitalists who are
organized in trusts and fortified by the powers of
government and the smaller capitalists who con-
stitute the middle class, is one of extermination.
The fittest, that is to say the most powerful, will
survive. This war gives rise to a variety of issues
of which the tariff is the principal one, and these
issues are defined in the platforms of the Republi-
can and Democratic parties.
With this war between capitalists for supremacy
in their own class and the issues arising from it,
the working class have nothing to do, and if they
are foolish enough to allow themselves to be drawn
into these battles of their masters, as they have
so often done in the past, they must continue to
suffer the consequences of their folly.
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Parties Express Economic Interests .
Let us clearly recognize the forces that are un-
dermining both of the old capitalist parties, creat-
ing a new issue, and driving the working class
into a party of their own to do battle with their
oppressors in the struggle for existence.
Parties but express in political terms the eco-
nomic interests of those who compose them. This
is the rule. The Republican party represents the
capitalist class, the Democratic party the middle
class and the Socialist party the working class.
There is no fundamental difference between the
Republican and Democratic parties. Their prin-
ciples are identical. They are both capitalist par-
ties and both stand for the capitalist system, and
such differences as there are between them involve
no principle but are the outgrowth of the conflict-
ing interests of large and small capitalists.
The Republican and Democratic parties are
alike threatened with destruction. Their day of
usefulness is past and they among them who see
the handwriting on the wall and call themselves
“Progressives” and “Insurgents,” are struggling in
vain to adjust these old parties to the new condi-
tions.
• Two Economic Classes.
Broadly speaking, there are but two economic
classes and the ultimate struggle will narrow down
to two political parties. To the extent that the
workers unite in their own party, the Socialist par-
ty, the capitalists, large and small, are driven into
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
one and the same party. This has happened al-
ready in a number of local instanced, notably in
the City of Milwaukee. Here there is no longer
a Republican or Democratic party. These have
merged in the same party and it is a capitalist par-
ty, by whatever name it may be known.
Temporarily this united capitalist party, com-
posed of the two old ones, may stem the tide of
Socialist advance, but nothing more clearly reveals
the capitalist class character of the Republican and
Democratic parties to their own undoing and the
undoing of the capitalist system they represent.
The great capitalists are all conservatives,
“standpatters” ; they have a strangle-hold upon the
situation with no intention of relaxing their grip.
Taft and Roosevelt are their candidates. It may
be objected that Roosevelt is a “Progressive.” That
is sheer buncombe. Roosevelt was president almost
eight years and his record is known. When he
was in office and had the power, he did none of
the things, nor attempted to do any of the things
he is now talking about so wildly. On the con-
trary, a more servile functionary to the trusts than
Theodore Roosevelt never sat in the presidential
chair.
La FolleUe vs. Roosevelt .
Senator La Follette now makes substantially this
same charge against Roosevelt, but by some strange
oversight the senator did not discover that Roose-
velts presidential record was a trust record until
after Roosevelt threw him down in the “Progres-
sive” scramble for the Republican nomination.
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 155
When Senator La Follette supposed he had
Roosevelt’s backing, he pronounced him “the great-
est man in the world/’ and it was only after he
fell victim to Roosevelt’s duplicity that he made
the discovery that Roosevelt had always been the
tool of the trusts and the enemy of the people.
Test of Parties .
There is one infallible test that fixes the status
of a political party and its candidates. Who fi-
nances them ?
With this test applied to Theodore Roosevelt
we have no trouble in locating him. He is above
all “a practical man.” He was practical in allow-
ing the steel trust to raid the Tennessee Coal and
Iron Company ; he was practical when he legalized
the notorious “Alton Steal” ; he was practical when
he had Harriman raise $240,000 for his campaign
fund, and he is practical now in having the steel
trust and the harvester trust, who made an ante-
room of the White House when he was president,
pour out their slush funds by millions to put him
back in the White House and keep him there.
Financed by the Trusts .
Taft and Roosevelt, and the Republican party of
which they are the candidates, are all financed
by the trusts, and is it necessary to add that the
trusts also consist of practical men and that they
do not finance a candidate or a party they do not
control ?
Is the man not foolish, to the verge of being
feeble-minded, who imagines that great trust mag-
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LABOH AND FREEDOM.
nates, such as Perkins, McCormick and Munsey,
are flooding the country with Roosevelt money
because h6 is the champion of progressive prin
ciples and the friend of the common people ?
The truth is that if the Bull Moose candidate
dared to permit an itemized publication of his
campaign contributions in his present mad and dis-
graceful pursuit of the presidency, as he has been
so often challenged to do by Senator La Follette,
it would paralyze him and scandalize the nation.
Roosevelt must stand upon the record he made
when he was president and had the power, and
not upon his empty promises as a ranting dema-
gogue and a vote-seeking politician.
For the very reason that the trusts are pouring
out their millions to literally buy his nomination
and election and force him into the White House
for a third term, and if possible for life, the people
should rise in their might and repudiate him as
they never have repudiated a recreant official who
betrayed his trust.
So much for the Republican party, led by Lin-
coln half a century ago as the party of the people
in the struggle for the overthrow of chattel slav-
ery, and now being scuttled by Taft and Roose-
velt in base servility to the plutocracy.
The Democratic Party .
The Democratic party, like its Republican ally,
is a capitalist party, the only difference being that
it represents the minor divisions of the capitalist
class. It is true that there are some plutocrats
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
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and trust magnates in the Democratic party, but
as a rule it is composed of the smaller capitalists
who have been worsted by the larger ones and are
now demanding that the trusts be destroyed and,
in effect, that the laws of industrial evolution be
suspended.
The Democratic party, like the Republican par-
ty, is financed by the capitalist class. Belmont,
Ryan, Roger Sullivan, Taggart and Hinky Dink
are liberal contributors to its fund. The Tammany
organization in New York, notorious for its cor-
ruption and for its subserviency to the powers that
rule in capitalist society, is one of the controlling
factors in the Democratic party.
Woodrow Wilson is the candidate of the Demo-
cratic party for president. He was seized upon as
a “progressive” ; as a man who would appeal to
the common people, but he never could have been
nominated without the votes controlled by Tam-
many and the “predatory interests” so fiercely de-
nounced in the convention by William Jennings
Bryan.
It is true that Woodrow Wilson was not the first
choice of Belmont, Ryan, Murphy and the Tam-
many corruptionists, but he was nevertheless satis-
factory to them or they would not have agreed to
his nomination, and since the convention it is quite
apparent that Wilson has a working agreement
and a perfect understanding with the predatory
interests which Bryan sought to scourge from the
convention.
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158 LABOfi AND freedom.
Bryan md Wilson .
In his speech before the delegates denouncing
Ryan, Belmont and Murphy, Bryan solemnly de-
clared that no candidate receiving their votes and
the votes of Murphy’s “ninety wax figures” could
have his support. Woodrow Wilson received these
votes and without these and other votes controlled
by “the interests” he could not have been nomi-
nated, and if Bryan now supports him he simply
stultifies himself before the American people.
Mr. Wilson is no more the candidate of the
working class than is Mr. Taft or Mr. Roosevelt.
Neither one of them has ever been identified with
the working class, has ever associated with the
working class, except when their votes were wanted,
or would dare to avow himself the candidate of
the working class.
When the recent strikes occurred at Perth Am-
boy and other industrial centers in New Jersey,
Governor Woodrow Wilson ordered the militia out
to shoot down the strikers just as Governor Theo-
dore Roosevelt ordered out the soldiers to murder
the strikers at Croton Dam, N. Y., for demanding
the enforcement of the state laws against the con-
tractors.
They Reek With Corruption .
Both the Republican and Democratic parties
reek with corruption in their servility to the capi-
talist class, and both are torn with strife in their
mad scramble for the spoils of office.
The Democratic party has had little excuse for
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159
existence since the Oivil War, and its utter impo-
tency to deal with present conditions was made
glaringly manifest during its brief lease of power
under the Cleveland administration. Should this
party succeed to national power once more, seeth-
ing as it is with conflicting elements which are
held together by the prospect of official spoils, its
career as a national party would be brought to
an early close by self-destruction.
The Republican convention at Chicago and the
Democratic convention at Baltimore were com-
posed of professional politcians, office-holders, of-
fice-seekers, capitalists, retainers, and swarms of
parasites and mercenaries of all descriptions.
There were no workingmen in either conven-
tion. They were not fit to be there. All they are
fit for is to march in the mud, yell themselves
hoarse, and ratify the choice of their masters on
election day.
The working class was not represented in the
Republican convention at Chicago or the Demo-
cratic convention at Baltimore. Those were the
political conventions of the capitalist class and
the few flattering platform phrases in reference
to labor were incorporated for the sole purpose of
catching the votes of the working class.
Let the American workers remember that they
are not fit to sit as delegates in a Republican or
Democratic national convention ; that they are not
fit to write a Republican or Democratic national
platform; that all they are fit for is to elect the
candidates of their masters to office so that when
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
they go out on strike against starvation they may
be shot dead in their tracks as the reward of their
servility to their masters and their treason to them-
selves.
Vital Issue Ignored.
The vital issue before the country and the world
is not touched, nor even mentioned in the Repub-
lican or Democratic platforms. Wage-slavery un-
der capitalism, the legalized robbery of the work-
ers of what is produced by their labor, is the funda-
mental crime against modern humanity, but there
is no room for the mention of this vital fact, this
living issue in the platforms of the Republican and
Democratic parties. They continue to babble about
the tariff and other inconsequential matters to
obscure the real issue and wheedle the workers
into voting them into power once more.
These parties have been in power all these years,
why have they not settled the tariff and the cur-
rency and such other matters as make up their
platform pledges?
Let Them Act Now.
While the Republican convention was in session
at Chicago and while the Democratic convention
was in session at Baltimore, the Republican and
Democratic congress was also in session at Wash-
ington. These parties already have the power to
make good their promises, then why do they not
exercise that power to redeem their pledges and
afford relief to the people ?
In other words, why do not the Republican and •
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 161
Democratic parties perform at Washington in-
stead of promising at Chicago and Baltimore?
How many more years of power do they require
to demonstrate that they are the parties of the
capitalist class and that they never intend to legis-
late in the interest of the working class, or provide
relief for the suffering people.
The Republican and Democratic platforms are
filled with empty platitudes and meaningless
phrases, but they are discreetly silent about the
millions of unemployed, about the starvation wages
of factory slaves, about the women and children
who are crushed, debased and slowly tortured to
death by the moloch of capitalism, about the white
slave traffic, about the bitter poverty of the masses
and their hopeless future, and about every other
vital question which is worthy of an instant’s con-
sideration by any intelligent human being.
The Socialist Party.
In contrast with these impotent, corrupt and
senile capitalist parties, without principles and
without ideals, stands the virile young working
class party, the international Socialist party of
the world. The convention which nominated its
candidates and wrote its platform at Indianapolis
was a working class convention.
The Socialist party is the only party which hon-
estly represents the working class in this cam-
paign and the only party that has a moral right
to appeal to the allegiance and support of the work
era and producers of the nation.
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162 LABOR AND FREEDOM.
I am not asking you to give your votes to this
party but only that you read its platform, study
its program, and satisfy yourselves as to what its
principles are, what it stands for, and what it
expects to accomplish. ,
The Socialist party being the political expres-
sion of the rising working class stands for the
absolute overthrow of the existing capitalist sys-
tem and for the reorganization of society into an
industrial and social democracy
Death to Wage-Slavery.
This will mean an end to the private ownership
of the means of life ; it will mean an end to wage-
slavery; it will mean an end to the army of the
unemployed; it will mean an end to the poverty
of the masses, the prostitution of womanhood, and
the murder of childhood.
It will mean the beginning of a new era of civ-
lization; the dawn of a happier day for the chil-
dren of men. It will mean that this earth is for
those who inhabit it and wealth for those who
produce it. It will mean society organized upon a
co-operative basis, collectively owning the sources
of wealth and the means of production, and pro
ducing wealth to satisfy human wants and not to
gorge a privileged few. It will mean that there
shall be work for the workers and that all shall
be workers, and it will also mean that there shall
be leisure for the workers and that all shall en
joy it. It will mean that women shall be the
comrades and equals of men, sharing with them
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
163
on equal terms the opportunities as well as the
responsibilities, the benefits as well as the burdens
of civilized life.
The Socialist party, the first and only inter-
national party, is rising grandly to power all
around the world. In every land beneath the sun
it is the party of the dispossessed, the impover-
ished and the heavy-laden.
It is the twentieth century party of human
emancipation.
It stands for a world-wide democracy, for the
freedom of every man, woman and child, and for
the civilization of all mankind.
The Socialist party buys no votes. It scorns
to traffic in ignorance. It realizes that education,
knowledge and the powers these confer are the only
means of achieving a decided and permanent vic-
tory for the people.
A Clean Campaign.
The campaign of the Socialist party is a clean
campaign ; it is essentially educational ; an appeal
to intelligence, to manliness, to womanliness, and
to all things of good report.
The workers are opening their eyes at last. They
are beginning to see the light. They are taking
heart of hope because they are becoming conscious
of their power.
They are rallying to the standard of the Social-
ist party because they know that this is their party
and that here they are master, and here they sit
at their own political hearthstone and fireside.
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
1M
No longer can the workers be pitted against each
other in capitalist parties by designing politicians
to their mutual undoing. They have made the dis-
covery that they have brains as well as hands, that
they can think as well as work, and that they do
not need politicians to advise them how to vote,
nor masters to rob them of the fruits of their la-
bor.
Slowly but surely there is being established the
economic and political unity and solidarity of the
workers of the world. The Socialist party is the
political expression of that unity and solidarity.
Unity the Keynote .
I appeal to the workers assembled here today in
the name of the Socialist party. I appeal to you
as one of you to unite and make common cause in
this great struggle.
To the extent that you have made progress, to
the extent that you have developed power, and to
the extent that you have achieved victory, to that
extent you are indebted to your own class-conscious
efforts and your own industrial and political or-
ganization. To the extent that you lack power,
to the extent that you are defeated and kept in
bondage, to that extent you lack in economic and
political solidarity.
Rightly organized and soundly disciplined on
both the economic and political fields, the working
class can prevail against the world.
The economic organization and the political par-
ty of the working class must both be revolutionary
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
106
and they must work together hand in hand. In-
dustrial unionism means industrial solidarity, but
craft unionism means division and disaster. The
printing trades pitted against each other in Chi-
cago in their struggle with the newspaper trust
furnish a fatal illustration of the weakness and
treachery of craft division in the present industrial
conflict.
The Workers of Milwaukee.
The workers of Milwaukee have to an exceptional
extent overcome the obstacles to unity and have
worked together with signal success on both the
economic and political fields. I appeal to them in
the name of the future to get closer and closer
together in the bonds of economic and political
solidarity. If they do this their complete and final
victory is assured.
The Socialist party of Milwaukee has marched
steadily to the front since it first began its career.
Its latest defeat was its greatest victory. It
forced the Republicans and Democrats to unmask
and to fly into each other’s arms. There is no
Republican or Democratic parly in Milwaukee.
They are dead, and in the coming election their
remains, masquerading as a party of the people,
will be buried by the Socialist party.
The First Congressman.
The Socialists of Milwaukee will always have
the distinction of having elected the first repre-
sentative of the working class to the congress of
the United States. Victor L. Berger has made
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
good at Washington. For the first time since he
is a member the voice of labor has been distinctly
heard on the floors of congress, and in every
emergency when the working class needed a cham-
pion at the seat of power, they found him ready
and eager to espouse their cause and defend their
interests.
It was to defeat Berger’s re-election that the Re-
publicans and Democrats in Milwaukee combined,
just as they did to defeat Emil Seidel for mayor
and drive the Socialist administration from power.
But Berger is making a record at Washington
and the Socialist administration made a record
in Milwaukee that will stand the test of time, and
if the workers now rally their forces in support
of Berger, he will be triumphantly re-elected against
the combined opposition of the old parties, and in
the next municipal election the City of Milwaukee
will be permanently restored to a Socialist ad-
ministration.
Comrades, you are face to face with the greatest
struggle you have ever had since the Socialist par-
ty was organized. You are now to be tested in
every fiber as to your fitness to hold the ground
you have gained and to press on to greater vic-
tories. May you be permeated to the core with
the spirit of the Socialist movement and enter
the fray resolved that victory shall be inscribed
upon your banners.
Ettor and Qiovannitti.
I must not fail in the presence of all these work-
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
167
ers to speak of Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti,
the leaders of the Lawrence strike, who are in
prison and soon to be tried upon the charge of
murder, of which they are as innocent as if they
had never been born.
This infamous charge has been trumped up
against them by the defeated mill owners for no
other reason than that they stood up bravely and
fought successfully against great odds, the battles
of the wage-slaves of the mills. Unless the work-
ers unite in support of these two leaders they may
be sent to the electric chair. Should we suffer these
brave comrades to fall victims to such a monstrous
crime, it would be a foul and indelible blot upon
the whole labor movement. Let us arouse the
workers of the nation in their behalf and prove to
them when their trial takes place that we are as
true to them as they were to the wage-slaves in
the industrial battle at Lawrence.
Comrades , this is our year! Let us rise to our
full stature, summon our united powers, and
strike a blow for freedom that will be felt around
the world !
CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM.
Campaign Speech, Lyceum Theatre. Fergus Falls, Minn.,
August 27, 1912.
Friends and Fellow-Workers: The spirit of
our time is revolutionary and growing more so
every day. A new social order is struggling into
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
existence. The old economic foundation of society
is breaking up and the social fabric is beginning
to totter. The capitalist system is doomed. The
signs of change confront us upon every hand.
Social changes are preceded by agitation and
unrest among the masses. We are today in the
transition period between decaying capitalism and
growing Socialism. The old system is being shaken
to its foundations by the forces underlying it and
its passing is but a question of time. The new
system that is to succeed the old is developing
within the old and its outline is clearly revealed
in its spirit of mutualism and its co-operative
manifestations.
For countless ages the world has been a vast
battlefield and the struggle for existence a per-
petual conflict. Primitive peoples were compelled
to fight nature to extort from her the.fneans of
livelihood. Since the forces of nature have been
conquered and nations have become civilized the
struggle of men is no longer to overcome nature
but with one another for existence.
In this struggle which has appealed to the basest
and not to the best in man the cunning few have
triumphed and now have the masses at their mercy.
These few are closely allied in their economic mas-
tery as they are also in their control of the politi-
cal machinery. Their money and their mercenaries
controlled the Eepublican convention at Chicago,
wrote its platform and dictated its nominees, and
the same is true of the Democratic convention at
Baltimore.
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 169
As for the so-called Progressive convention/ it is
sufficient to say that there is no attempt to con-
ceal the fact that it was financed and controlled
by three conspicuous representatives of the plu-
tocracy which largely owns and rules the land.
Political parties are responsive to the interests
of those who finance them. This is the infallible
test of their character and applied to the Republi-
can, Democratic and Progressive parties, these par-
ties stand forth as the several political expres-
sions of the several divisions of the capitalist class.
The funds of all these parties are furnished by
the capitalist class for the reason, and only for the
reason, that they represent the interests of that
class.
Professional politicians of whatever party are
very much alike and in one respect at least they
are like workingmen, they serve the interests of
their masters, and for the same reason.
The patriotism of professional politicians is re-
flected in the material interests of the master class
and tliis fact has become so apparent that their
noisy theatricals have lost their magic and now
excite but the scorn and derision of intelligent
working men and women.
The Republican, Democratic and Progressive
conventions were composed in the main and con-
trolled entirely by professional politicians in the
service of the ruling class.
There were no working men and no working
women at the Republican convention, the Demo-
cratic convention, or the Progressive convention.
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170 LABOR AND FREEDOM.
These were clearly not working class conven-
tions. Ladies and gentlemen of leisure were in
evidence at them all. Wage-slaves would not have
been tolerated in their company. They repre-
sented the wealth and culture and refinement of
society and they were there to applaud and smile
approval upon the professional politcians and pa-
triots who were doing their work. '
But there was a fourth convention held this year
which did not attract the wealthy and leisure
classes. It was a convention great in purpose,
though not big in numbers. This convention was
held at Indianapolis and represented the working
class. The delegates who composed this conven-
tion were chosen by the workers and paid by the
workers to represent the interest of the workers
and to clear the way for the workers in the present
campaign.
The Socialist convention was the only demo-
cratic convention and the only progressive con-
vention held this year; the only convention that
represented a dues-paying party membership and
whose acts before becoming effective must be rati-
fied by a referendum vote of the party.
The Socialist party is the only party in this
campaign that stands against the present system
and for the rule of the people ; the only party that
boldly avows itself the party of the working class
and its purpose the overthrow of wage-slavery.
So long as the present system of capitalism pre-
vails and the few are allowed to own the nation’s
industries, the toiling masses will be struggling
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171
in the hell of poverty as they are today. To tell
them that juggling with the tariff will change this
beastly and disgraceful condition is to insult their
intelligence. The professional politicians who
have been harping upon this string since infant
industries have become giant monopolies know bet-
ter. Their stock in trade is the credulity of the
masses.
. The exploited wage-slaves of free trade England
and of the highly protected United States are the
victims of the same capitalism; in England the
politicians tell them they are suffering because
they have no protective tariff and in the United
States they tell them that the tariff is the cause
of their poverty.
And this is the kind of a confidence game the
professional politicians have been playing with the
workers of all nations all these years. To keep
them in subjection by playing upon their ignorance
' is the rule that governs their campaigns for votes
among the workers. The “issues” upon which they
keep the workers divided into hostile camps are
of their own making.
Since the foundation of the government one or
the other of these capitalist parties has been in
power and under their administration the work-
ing and producing millions have been reduced to
poverty and slavery. Professor Scott Nearing has
shown in his work on the wages of American work-
ers that half of the adult males of the United
States are earning less than $500; that three-
quarters of them are earning less than $600 a
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LABOB AND FREEDOM.
172
year; that nine-tenths of them are receiving less
than $900 a year, while 10 per cent only receive
more than that figure.
Professor Nearing also shows the starvation
wages for which women are compelled to work
in the present system. One-fifth of the whole num-
ber of women workers receive less than $200 per
year; three-fifths receive less than $325; nine-
tenths receive less than $500. Only one-twentieth
of the women employed are paid more than $600
per year.
These figures bear out the report of the Chicago
vice commission to the effect that the low wages
of women and girls go hand in hand with prostitu-
tion. Despite all attempts to control the white
slave traffic, which is now organized as one of the
great profit-extorting trusts, along with the rest
of the trusts, prostitution, like a terrible cancer,
is eating out the very heart of our civilization.
And in the presence of this appalling condition
the professional politcians prattle about tariff re-
vision and indulge in silly twaddle about currency
reform and regulation of the trusts.
The Socialist party is absolutely the only party
which faces conditions as they are and declares un-
hesitatingly that it has a definite and concrete plan
and program for dealing with these conditions.
The Socialist party as the party of the exploited
workers in the mills and mines, on the railways
and on the farms, the workers of both sexes and
all races and colors, the working class in a word,
constituting a great majority of the people and in
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LABOR AND FREEDOM.
173
fact THE PEOPLE, demands that the nation’s
industries shall be taken over by the nation and
that the nation’s workers shall operate them for
the benefit of the whole people.
Private ownership and competition have had
their day. The Socialist party stands for social
ownership and co-operation. The one is Capital-
ism ; the other Socialism. The one industrial des-
potism, the other industrial democracy.
The Eepublican, Democratic and Progressive
parties all stand for private ownership and com-
petition. The Socialist party alone stands for so-
cial ownership and co-operation.
The Eepublican, Democratic and Progressive
parties believe in regulating the trusts ; the Socialist
party believes in owning them, so that all the peo-
ple may get the benefit of them instead of a few
being made plutocrats and the masses impover-
ished.
The Eepublican, Democratic and Progressive
parties uphold the wage system ; the Socialist par-
ty demands its overthrow.
It is under the wage system that the 22,000 op-
eratives in the cotton and woolen mills at Law-
rence, Massachusetts, have been compelled to work,
or slave rather, according to Commissioner Neill,
for an average of $8.76 per family. To earn this
average wage, according to the commissioner’s of-
ficial report, requires the combined service of fa-
ther, mother and three children. This is slavery
with a vengeance. The mill is a sweat-hole; the
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174
LABOR AND FREEDOM.
hovel a breeding-pen. Home there is none. And
there never will be under the wage system.
What have the Republican, Democratic and Pro-
gressive parties to offer to the wage-slaves of Law-
rence, to the wage-slaves of the steel trust, to the
wage-slaves of the mines, to the wage-slaves of the
lumber and turpentine camps of the South, the
wage-slaves of the railroads, the millions of them,
male and female, black and white and yellow and
brown, who produce all this nation’s wealth, sup-
port its government and conserve its civilization,
and without whom industry would be paralyzed
and the nation helpless ? What, I ask, has any of
these capitalist parties, or all of them combined,
for the working and producing class in this cam-
paign? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
These parties are bidding stronger than ever
for the labor vote this year. That vote is now not
so easily delivered as in the past. The competi-
tion for the votes of the wage-workers is the dis-
tinguishing feature of the present campaign. Thou-
sands of workers are now doing their own think-
ing. They have discovered that workers are as
much out of place in a capitalist party as capital-
ists are in a workers’ party. They have also found
that politics express class interests and that the
interests of those who make the wealth and those
who take it are ^iot identical. That is where the
Socialist party comes in and where the workers
come in the Socialist party.
The working class is in politics this year. It
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LABOR AND FREEDOM. 175
has always been in politics for its master; this
year it is in politics for itself.
The most promising fact in the world today is
the fact that labor is organizing its power; its eco-
nomic power and its political power.
The workers who have made the world and who
support the world, are preparing to take possession
of the world. This is the meaning of Socialism
and is what the Socialist party stands for in this
campaign.
We demand the machinery of production in the
name of the workers and the control of society in
the name of the people. We demand the abolition
of capitalism and wage-slavery and the surrender
of the capitalist class. We demand the complete
enfranchisement of women and the equal rights
of all the people regardless of race, color, creed
or nationality. We demand that child labor shall
cease once and forever and that all children born
into the world shall have equal opportunity to
grow up, to be educated, to have healthy bodies and
trained minds, and to develop and freely express
the best there is in them in mental, moral and
physical achievement.
We demand complete control of industry by the
workers; we demand all the wealth they produce
for their own enjoyment, and we demand the earth
for all the people.
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CONTENTS
MISCELLANY '
Page
The Old Umbrella Mender ’ 9
The Secret of Efficient Expression 15
Jesus, the Supreme Leader 22
Susan B. Anthony 29
Louis Tikas 33
The Little Lords of Love 37
The Coppock Bros 39
The Social Spirit 61
Roosevelt and His Regime 55
Industrial and Social Democracy *. 73
A Message to the Children 76
Social Reform 89
Danger Ahead 89
Pioneer Women in America 95
SPEECHES
Unity and Victory 107
Political Appeal to American Workers 132
The Fight for Freedom 152
Capitalism and Socialism 167
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