Gustavus Myers

“ Of the whole number of workers, few realize that the money that capitalists pay them in wages is a depreciated, swindling currency in more than one sense. A dollar to-day brings less than half in commodities of what it could purchase ten years ago. The enormous, exorbitant advances in the prices of every necessity have so reduced the buying power of a dollar, that it is equal in value to less than what half a dollar was a decade ago. In no case have wages been adequately increased to meet this increase in the cost of living. ”

“ This time it was the laboring masses preparing for the most vigorous and comprehensive attack that they had ever made upon capitalism's intrenchments. Long exploited, oppressed and betrayed, starved or clubbed into intervals of apathy or submission, they were again in motion, moving forward with a set deliberation and determination which disconcerted the capitalist class. No mere local conflict of class interests was it on this occasion, but a general cohesive revolt of the workers against some of the conditions and laws under which they had to labor. ”

“ In stating this fact, McKenney was unwittingly enunciating a profound truth, the force of which mankind is only now beginning to realize, that the pursuit of profit will transform natures inherently capable of much good into sordid, cruel beasts of prey, and accustom them to committing actions so despicable, so inhuman, that they would be terrified were it not that the world is under the sway of the profit system and not merely excuses and condones, but justifies and throws a glamour about, the unutterable degradations and crimes which the profit system calls forth. ”

“ Nothing is so effective, as was remarked of old, to divert attention from scoundrelism as to make a brilliant show of patriotism. In the very act of looting Government and people and devastating the army and navy, the capitalists did the most ghastly business under the mask of the purest patriotism. Incredible as it may seem, this pretension was invoked and has been successfully maintained to this very day. You can scarcely pick up a volume on the Civil War, or a biography of the statesmen or rich men of the era, without wading in fulsome accounts of the untiring patriotism of the capitalists. ”

“ In most men’s minds a certain spell of wonder attaches to the career and character of the Tammany Society and Tammany Hall. The long continuance of this dual power; its control of the city, infrequently interrupted, throughout the century; the nature of its principles, the method of its practices and the character of its personnel—all these combine to furnish a spectacle which exerts over the general mind a peculiar and strong fascination. ”

“ THIS, of all times, is the time when wage-earners should support any economic movement in their behalf which promises to conserve the power of their wages. Of this there is the most imperative need. The purchasing power of money is not only constantly falling, but a gigantic conspiracy is already successfully under way to impose upon the workers a fiat currency which has not even an artificial basis of value, as capitalists reckon value in relation to money. ”

“ Yet in this bewildering jumble of fortune-snatching, an extraordinary circumstance failed to impress itself upon the class which took over to itself the claim to superior intelligence and virtue. The workers, for the most part, instinctively, morally and intellectually, knew that this system was wrong, a horror and a nightmare. But even the capitalist victims of the competitive struggle, which awarded supremacy to the knave and the trickster, went to their doom praising it as the only civilized, rational system and as unchangeable and even divinely ordained. ”

“ Merely to narrate the acts of the capitalists of the period is of no enduring value unless it be accompanied by a necessary contrast of how Government and capitalist acted toward the worker. It was the worker who tilled the ground and harvested the produce nourishing nations; whose labor, mental or manual, brought forth the thousand and one commodities, utensils, implements, articles and luxuries necessary to the material wants of civilization. Verily, what of the great hosts of toilers who have done their work and shuffled off to oblivion? ”

“ Where the prairie land once stretched in solitude, a huge, roaring, choking city now stands, black with factories, the habitat of nearly two millions of human beings, living in a whirlpool of excitement and tumult, presenting extremes of wealth and poverty, the many existing in dire straits, the few rolling in sovereign luxury. A saying prevails in Chicago that the city now holds more millionaires than it did voters in 1840. ”

“ After declaring that the Workingmen’s party would oppose all exclusive privileges, monopolies and exemptions, the resolutions proceeded:
“We consider it an exclusive privilege for one portion of the community to have the means of education in colleges while another is restricted to common schools, or perhaps, by extreme poverty, even deprived of the limited education to be acquired in those establishments. Our voice, therefore, shall be raised in favor of a system of education which shall be equally open to all, as in a real republic it should be.” ”

“ Little it mattered that he did not hold all of the stock; he owned a preponderance enough to rule the railroad as despotically as he pleased. Not a foot it had he surveyed or constructed; this task had been done by the mental and manual labor of thousands of wage workers not one of whom now owned the vestige of an interest in it. For their toil these wage workers had nothing to show but poverty. But Vanderbilt had swept in a railroad system by merely using in cunning and unscrupulous ways a few of the millions he had defrauded from the national treasury. ”

“ In a thousand disingenuous ways, backed by nimble sophistry, the whole ruling class, with its clouds of retainers, turned out either an increasing flood of praise of these conditions, or masses of misinforming matter which tended to reconcile or blind the victim to his pitiful drudgery. The masters of industry, who reaped fabulous riches from such a system, were covered with slavish adulation, and were represented in flowery, grandiloquent phrases as indispensable men, without whom the industrial system of the country could not be carried on. ”

“ Capital had the wealth, resources and tools of the country; the workers their labor power only. As it stood, it was an uneven contest, with every advantage in favor of capital. The workers could decline to work, but capital could starve them into subjection. These, however, were but the apparent differences. The real and immense difference between them was that capital was in absolute control of the political governing power of the nation, and this power, strange to say, it secured by the votes of the very working class constantly fighting it in the industrial arena. ”

“ It would be biassed, in fact, ridiculous to say that the privileges and exemptions enjoyed by the rich were altogether the outcome of corruption by bribes. There is a much more subtle and far more effective and dangerous form of corruption. This is corruption of the mind. For innumerable centuries all government had proceeded, perhaps not avowedly, but in reality, upon the settled and consistent principle that the sanctity of property was superior to considerations [Pg 190] of human life, and that a man of property could not very well be a criminal and a peril to the community. ”

“ Centuries of rulership had taught them that the control of Government was the crux of the mastery. By possession of Government they had the power of making laws; of the enforcement or non- enforcement of those laws; of the directorship of police, army, navy, courts, jails and prisons—all terrible instruments for suppressing any attempt at protest, peaceful or otherwise. Notwithstanding this massing of power and force, the working class has at no time been passive or acquiescent. It has allowed itself to be duped; it has permitted its ranks to be divided by false issues ”

“ If we are to accept the superficial, perfunctory accounts of Astor's real estate investments in New York City, then he will appear in the usual eulogistic light of a law-loving, sagacious man engaged in a legitimate enterprise. The truth, however, lies deeper than that—a truth which has been either undiscerned or glossed over by those conventional writers who, with a panderer's instinct, give a wealth-worshipping era the thing it wants to read, not what it ought to know. ”

“ When he entertained it was in a vast drawing- room, palatially equipped, its walls hung with flowing masses of pale red velvet, embroidered with foliage flowers and butterflies, and set with crystals and precious stones.
It was his art gallery, however, which flattered him most. He knew nothing of art, and underneath his pretentions cared less, for he was a complete utilitarian; but it had become fashionable to have an elaborate art gallery, and he forthwith disbursed money right and left to assemble an aggregation of paintings. ”

“ They were the owners of railroads that slaughtered thousands of human beings every year, because of the demands of profit; of factories which sucked the very life out of their toilers, and which filled the hospitals, slums, brothels and graveyards with an ever-increasing assemblage; every man in that conclave, as a beneficiary of the existing system, had drained his fortune from the sweat, sorrow, miseries and death agonies of a multitude of workers. ”

“ But, such was the destructive, intestinal character of competitive warfare, that even this class was continually in the throes of convulsive struggles. Each had to fight, not merely to get the wealth of others, but to keep what he already possessed. If he could but frustrate the attempts of competitors to take what he had, he was fortunate. As he preyed upon the laborer, so did the rest of his class seek to prey upon him. If he were less able, less cunning, or more scrupulous than they, his ruination was certain. ”

“ That the profits of capital are abstracted from the earnings of labor, and that these deductions, like any other tax on industry, tend to diminish the value of money by increasing the price of all the fruits of labor, are facts beyond dispute; it is equally undeniable that there is a point which capitalists cannot exceed without injuring themselves, for when by their exertions they so far depreciate the value of money at home that it is sent abroad, many are thrown out of employ, and are not only disabled from paying their tribute, but are forced to betake to dishonest courses or starve. ”

“ What the agitated masses, for the most part, of that period could not comprehend was that they who hold the possession of the economic resources will indubitably sway the politics of a country, until such time as the proletariat, no longer divided but thoroughly conscious, organized, and aggressive, will avail itself of its majority vote to transfer the powers of government to itself. The Bank of New York injected itself virulently into politics and fought the spread of democratic ideas with sordid but effective weapons. ”

“ Why, quite palpably over the division of wealth that masses of working men, women and children were laboriously producing, too often amid sorrow and death. While elsewhere pinioned labor was humbly doing the world's real work, here in this "Gold Room," greed contested furiously with greed, cunning with cunning over their share of the spoils. Without their structure of law, and Government to enforce it, these men would have been nothing; as it was, they were among the very crests of society; the makers of law, the wielders of power, the pretenders to refinement and culture. ”

“ His sons, grandsons, his descendants down to remotest posterity need do even less; they could leisurely hold on to their inheritance, enlarge it, hire the necessary ability of superintendence and vast and ever vaster riches would be theirs. Society worked feverishly for the landowner. Every street laid and graded by the city; every park plotted and every other public improvement; every child born and every influx of immigrants; every factory, warehouse and dwelling that went up;—all these and more agencies contributed toward the abnormal swelling of his fortune. ”

“ The State as an institution, while supported by the toil of the producers, was wholly a capitalist State with the capitalists in complete supremacy to fashion and use it as they chose. They used the State political machinery to plunder the masses, and then, at the slightest tendency on the part of the workers to resist these crushing injustices and burdens, called upon the State to hurry out its armed forces to repress this dangerous discontent. ”

“ Yet, viewing society as a whole and measuring the results by the standards and ideas then prevailing, it was undoubtedly true that those who did the world's real services were the lowly, despoiled and much discriminated-against mass of mankind. Their very poverty was a crime, for after they were plundered and expropriated, either by the ruling classes of their own country or of the United States, the laws regarded them as semi-criminals, or, at best, as excrescences to whom short shrift was to be given. ”

“ The moment a genuine investigation is begun into the facts, the glamour of superior ability and respectability evaporates, and the Vanderbilt fortune stands out, like all other fortunes, as the product of a continuous chain of frauds. ”

“ A PROLIFIC BREEDER OF WEALTH.
Under such a system land was the one great auspicious, facile and durable means of rolling up an overshadowing fortune. Its exclusive possession struck at the very root of human necessity. At a pinch people can do without trade or money, but land they must have, even if only to lie down on and starve. The impoverish, jobless worker, with disaster facing him, must first perforce give up his precious few coins to the landlord and take chances on food and the remainder. ”

“ Poverty was virtually prescribed as a crime. The impoverished were regarded in law as paupers, and so repugnant a term of odium was that of pauper, so humiliating its significance and treatment, that great numbers of the destitute preferred to suffer and die in want and silence rather than avail themselves of the scanty and mortifying public aid obtainable only by acknowledging themselves paupers.
Sickness, disability, old age, and even normal life, in poverty were a terrifying prospect. The one sure way of escaping it was to get and hold wealth. ”

“ Their success as possessors of riches at once, by the automatic processes of a society which enthroned wealth, elevated them to be commanding personages in trade, politics, orthodoxy and the highest social spheres. The cropped convict, released from prison, was followed everywhere by the jeers and branding of a society which gloated over his downfall and which forever reminded him of his infamy. ”

“ AND EXERCISE UNRESTRAINED POWER. Visualizing this power one begins to get a vivid perception of the comprehensive sway of the Vanderbilts and of other railroad magnates. They levy tribute without restraint—a tribute so vast that the exactions of classic conquerors become dwarfed beside it. If this levying entailed only the seizing of money, that cold, unbreathing, lifeless substance, then human emotion might not start in horror at the consequences. ”

“ No sooner was the Revolution over than in stepped the propertied interests and assumed control of government functions. They were intelligent enough to know the value of class government—a lesson learned from the tactics of the British trading class. They knew the tremendous impact of law and how, directly and indirectly, it worked great transformations in the body social. While the worker was unorganized, unconscious of what his interests demanded, deluded by slogans and rallying-cries which really meant nothing to him, the propertied class was alert in its own interests. ”

“ The very agencies which should under a rational form of civilization be devoted to promoting the interests of mankind, are used as their capricious self-interest incline them by the few who have been allowed to obtain control of them. What if helpless people are swept off by starvation or by diseases superinduced by lack of proper food? What if in the great cities an increasing sacrifice of innocents goes on because their parents cannot afford the price of good milk—a price determined to a large extent by railroad tariff? ”

“ Once having wrested into their possession the results of all of these and more fraudulent methods in the form of millions of dollars in property, what was their strongest ally? The Law. Yes, the Law, theoretically so impartial and so reverently indued with awe—and with force. From fraud and force the Astor fortune came, and by force, in the shape of law, it was fortified in their control. If a starving man had gone into any one of the Astor houses and stolen even as much as a silver spoon, the Law would have come to the rescue of outraged property by sentencing him to prison. ”

“ The great capitalists, whom the middle-class had denounced as pirates, now became the decorous and orthodox "saviors of society," with the small capitalists trailing behind their leadership, and shouting their praises as the upholders of law and the conservators of order. In Chicago the same men who had bribed legislators and common councils to give them public franchises, and who had hugely swindled and stolen under guise of law, had been the principals in calling for the execution and imprisonment of the group of labor leaders, and this they had decreed in the name of law. ”

“ To fasten upon the advanced leaders of the labor movement the stigma of being sowers of disorder, and then judicially get rid of them, and crush the spirit and movement of the aroused proletariat—this was the plan determined upon. Labor leaders who confined their programme to the industrial arena were not feared so much; but Parsons, Spies and their comrades were not only pointing out to the masses truths extremely unpalatable to the capitalists, but were urging, although in a crude way, a definite political movement to overthrow capitalism. ”

“ The law, which was the distinct expression of the interests of the capitalist, upheld his right to do all this. Yet if the workers protested; if they sought to improve their condition by joining in that community of action called a strike, the same code of laws adjudged them criminals. At once, the whole power of law, with its police, military and judges, descended upon them, and either drove them back to their tasks or consigned them to prison.
The conditions under which the capitalists made their profits, and under which the workers had to toil, were very oppressive to the workers. ”

“ Already the capitalists of the North had a slavery system in force far more effective than the chattel system of the South—a system the economic superiority of which was destined to overthrow that of black slavery.
Most historians, taking their cue from the intellectual subserviency demanded of them by the ruling propertied classes, delight in picturing those times as "the good old times," when the capitalists were benevolent and amiable, and the workers lived in peace and plenty. ”

“ All of the luxury overloading these mansions was, as was well known, the fruit of fraud piled upon fraud; it represented the spoliation, misery and degradation of the many; but none could deny that Vanderbilt was fully entitled to it by the laws of a society which decreed that its rulers should be those who could best use and abuse it. And rulers must ever live imperiously and impressively; it is not fitting that those who command the resources, labor and Government of a nation should issue their mandates from pinched and meager surroundings. ”

“ Government was nothing more or less than a device for the nascent capitalist class to work out its inevitable purposes, yet the majority of the people, on whom the powers of class government severely fell, were constantly deluded into believing that the Government represented them. Whether Federalist or anti-Federalist, Whig, Republican or Democratic party was in power, the capitalist class went forward victoriously and invincibly, the proof of which is seen in its present almost limitless power and possessions. ”