Carl Sandburg

“ The workers simply must have their own political party. "If labor will not help itself, then God help labor." The workers must agitate and educate. They must raise their own campaign funds and work out their own salvation. They must organize. They will have to know that without organization, industrial and political, they are damned and helpless, tied and gagged and laughed at. When Marx said, "Workingmen of the world, unite!" he meant: "Get together! Organize!" Alone and apart, some of you Republicans, some Democrats and some Independents, you are divided and powerless. ”

“ All these things trace back finally to the industrial and political worlds for causes. If nobody gets too much everybody will get enough. Modern society is mob at the top and mob at the bottom. The rich have their gilded hells and folly; the poor have their slums and vice. Between the two, as the only saving force in modern civilization, stands the working class organization, the producers, who by mental and manual labor hold a balance of sanity and give a promise of a better day for humanity. ”

“ Who makes the quitters, Bill? Society. Who and what is society? You and me and the man across the street and around the corner and the people uptown and downtown and out in the suburbs and on the farms, all of us together make up society. We elect the men who write the laws and pass the laws, we elect the men who are supposed to enforce the laws. And now you see that if the laws are such that they allow social conditions that produce quitters, then the society that elects men who make such laws is responsible for having made those quitters, and society ought to be ashamed of the job. ”

“ Our industrial soldiers we make into beggars. Choked and suffocated in mine explosions, mangled by flying projections of machinery, caught under car wheels, toppling headlong from scaffoldings, they are brave, useful men—heroes of the industrial army. Some have provided insurance, some have friends, some are able to work, though crippled, but ten pef cent are made beggars, and in desperation hold out their hands for charity and learn the shame of alms. ”

“ If a job is a good thing you ought to do everything you can to hold your job. You may do your work right and satisfy your boss. But you know, and everybody else knows, that many a good man who does his work right and pleases his boss gets laid off, loses his job.
The boss says, "Hard times—no orders—we have to shut down." Then the man who is out of a job says, "But I have to live! I and my children have to eat, and the grocer wants cash." But the boss only answers, "I can't help it. Business is business."
If you can't get another job when you're laid off, you can do three things. ”

“ What is a beautiful building worth if there isn't anybody to look at it? How could the gay and prosperous children of fortune go shooting over the roadways in an automobile unless ten thousand men had mined the ore and smelted and welded and stood at machines and assembled the parts, and made it into a thing of cunning and wonder? ”

“ The workers, as a class, do not know what they want, are not conscious of their own best interests.
The working class will have to educate and organize itself for its own salvation. Any salvation passed cut on a platter by the capitalists is charity and can be taken away as it was given.
All of this I am giving you has a historical and scientific basis. The Socialist, the class-conscious workingman, has generally read and thought much; he has let the alarm clock in his brain go off; he is awake to the great, throbbing human drama staged around him. ”

“ It's a sickening, tiresome, disheartening business, Bill, to be out of a job and go from one place to another asking if you can sell your labor power and have people look suspiciously at your, shabby clothes and tired face, and tell you there's nothing doing. Into shop and store and hotel and factory you go, and the answer is always. ”

“ There is no such thing as a "self-made man." He is as impossible as a perpetual motion machine. He is forty miles from land and forty miles from sea! A man can get an education without going to college, but the man who gets an education without going to college owes a debt of gratitude to the men who cheered him, women who inspired him, enemies who goaded him ”

“ Why, just this, Bill: The quitter has no childhood; he is put to work in his young days when he ought to be in school, and battered and beaten and torn and worn in the gray air and grime of mine or mill or shop, so when the time comes that he ought to be a man of ability and power, he is just a wreck. a miserable, fumbling, stumbling, played-out and done-for wreck of a man. ”

“ Do you see, Bill, how your interests and mine and everybody else's are all tangled up and woven in with each other? Do you see how society, all of us together, produced Rockefeller, Thaw, and the one-legged man on the corner selling lead pencils? What would the world be without people? Solitary confinement is the cruelest punishment you can give a man—the chances are he will go crazy and try to kill himself when enough hours have passed during which he has heard no human voice and known no human touch. What does a singer or a poet or an actor amount to without listeners? ”

“ A scientific Socialist calls a man out of a job "an industrial reserve." This means, Bill, that if the man who has a job won't behave himself and take what the boss gives him, the idle hungry man at his elbow will be used. The man who is out of a job is very useful for breaking a strike and forcing down wages—that's one reason trade unionists and Socialists everywhere fight side by side to get laws passed requiring the government to guarantee work to every man who is willing to work. ”

“ A modern locomotive of the latest model is said to represent ideas contributed by more than eleven thousand men. The first hairy, primeval creature who carved a wheel in the dusk of the jungle did his part while he sang, cheerfully, "Every Little Bit Helps." Our tools, our houses, our food and clothing, our very manners and customs and songs and arts, are all things that trace far back—far back into the hazy beginnings of history. ”

“ The big business men have the money. But we have the votes. You workingmen must learn to become proud of your power and think how you can use your power. If we stand together and elect men who come out clean and square for what we want, the result will be a better, sweeter, fairer life for all, both rich and poor.
I ask you to get acquainted with the Socialists and find out for yourself what we are planning to do. We may be dreamers, but we are mighty hard-headed dreamers on this question of jobs and work, and bread for all. Learn all you can about the Socialist party. ”

“ One per cent of the people in this country own fifty-four per cent of the wealth. Fifty per cent have no property at all. And ten millions are sunken and mired in a poverty rotten and beastly, where hope sickens and the password is a curse. An officer of the Indiana state, board of health says that sixty-five per cent of the deaths of infants below two years of age are due to poisoned and adulterated food. Ninety per cent of all children who enter the public schools of America do not enter high schools. ”

“ We had hard times under the Democrats. The Republican party is not the workingman's party. Three million desperate, hungry men are out of work in this country now, and every one of them is after your job if he can get it. And you may be next. The way things are now, you can't swear that next month you will be safe at work, getting steady pay. You are not sure, and nobody else is.
The Republicans and Democrats in Congress could help out on this terrible problem of work for every man who wants work. But the truth is that the Republicans and Democrats are really one party. ”

“ One reason I'm a Socialist is because the Socialists were the first to fight to abolish child labor, and to-day the Socialist party is the only one that has dared to declare in its platform that it is unalterably opposed to child labor, and that it will do all in its power to remove all conditions that make it possible for human beings anywhere to be underfed and overworked. ”

“ But if a daring and resourceful fighting man, such as Jacob Riis has proven himself, could even for a moment be tempted to give up the struggle for existence, how about the millions of others not so young, not so hardy and enduring, not so rich with hope and health? ”

“ Cities and temples have fallen into decay and ruin. Where the rain washes on crumbled pillars, and sunbeams and shadows play about silent crevice and wall, once was the clamor and tumult of surging human life. ”

“ When the last United States census was taken, an army of 1,700,000 child laborers, all under fifteen years of age, was at work in this country. If, from the time you were twelve years of age, until you were eighteen, Bill, you had been forced to stand at a loom in a cotton mill, or had picked slate as a breaker-boy in a mine, or had been a "carryin' in boy" in a glass factory, you would have been ready to quit! You would have been shot to pieces, just a runt of a man, and if you had heard some Shakespearean reader recite, "What a piece of work is man! ”

“ You say that the fellow who is always kicking about his Job and his pay and the way he's treated is among the first to be given the merry release. You're right there, too, Bill. It's the agitator, the man who is not satisfied, the man who wants more and always more, who is the first to get it, and he gets it where the Thanksgiving Turkey gets the bright and shining edge of the farmer's ax. ”

“ I believe in men. I believe if you give men a decent chance they will do the decent thing. A man will generally go the right way if he isn't pushed and pulled in wrong directions by forces he can't control. When I see millions of men out of work, and more tramps and criminals coming on every year, I know better than to blame the men. I know there is a plan, a system of forces back of it all, acting as a cause. The Socialist says, "Remove the cause."
Bill, I'm going to quote some figures to you, and I ask you to be patient through the figures, and then I'll quote some poetry. ”

“ The one clear and established fact, however, which the capitalists do not like to have agitated is the fact that the capitalist class is, as a class, conscious of its best interests. The capitailsts know what they want and get what they want. ”

“ The extremes of wealth and poverty in America are as sad and serious as those of Europe. Stables for blooded race horses are fitted with mahogany and marble, and each horse has his special groom; a few miles away men jostle each other to get room to sleep on the filthy floor of an insanitary 5-cent lodging house. A woman takes her poodle with her to the opera to hear Caruso sing; babies die in the slums for lack of food. A bulldog of specialized type sells for $8,000; at foundling asylums infants may be had for the asking. Small families live in large houses ”

“ One man at a linotype machine does the work formerly done by eight men. One horseshoe machine displaces 500 men working by hand. This displacement of men, and this increased producing power, is found in almost every industry. Along with this improvement in production has come improvement in transportation and communication, so that with railroads, steamships, electric lines, telegraphs and telephones, the distribution of goods after they are produced is faster and easier than ever in history.
Now, all these new things are owned and held by a small class of people, the capitalist class. ”

“ You will hear of different kinds of Socialists, but there is one belief by which you can always locate the real Socialist, the type of man who has played a part in welding the working class into a restless, fighting, discontented, intelligently meddlesome revolutionary force. This man, the true Socialist, realizes the class-struggle. He sees a war going on between two classes, the capitalist class and the working class. Strikes, boycotts, demands for higher wages and better factory conditions on the part of the toilers ”

“ You don't want to do any of these things, do you? You want to do all you can to make your job safe, don't you? You want work all the time. And in exchange for that work you want a decent, comfortable living. You are not a keg of fish nor a lump of coal, to be juggled in the markets. ”

“ You get jokes and speeches, free beer and torch-light processions before election day, but after election day, when you ask for legislation that will help you, you are kicked away like beggars who don't know where they belong. The brass bands and the hurrah business is only to get your vote. ”

“ Senator Dolliver says poverty is an advantage. He may have believed in underfeeding when he was a boy, but when I last saw the distinguished advocate of poverty, the fat clung to him in heavy collops and round flanks. ”