Gustavus Myers

“ 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 varying degrees, now in outright abuse and again in sneering and ridicule, the working class was held up as an ignorant, discontented, violent aggregation, led by dangerous agitators, and arrogantly seeking to upset all business by seeking to dictate to employers what wages and hours of labor should be.
And, after all, little it mattered to the capitalists what the workers thought or said, so long as the machinery of government was not in their hands. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Corporations always have their lobby members in and around the halls of legislation to watch and secure their interests. Not so with the people—they cannot act with that directness and system that a corporation can. No individual will take it upon himself to go to the Capitol at his own expense, to watch the representatives of the people, and to lobby against the potent influences of the corporation. But corporations have the money, and it is to their interest to expend it to secure the passage of partial laws. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If indomitable enterprise assured permanency of wealth then many of Vanderbilt's competitors would have become and remained multimillionaires. Vanderbilt, by no means possessed a monopoly of acquisitive enterprise; on every hand, and in every line, were men fully as active and unprincipled as he. Nearly all of these men, and scores of competitors in his own sphere—dominant capitalists in their day—have become well-nigh lost in the records of time; their descendants are in the slough of poverty, genteel or otherwise. Those times were marked by the intensest commercial competition ”

“ Precisely as mercantile society bestowed no attention upon the crushed and slain, except to advance roughshod over their stricken bodies while throwing out a pittance in charity here and there, so Vanderbilt embodied in himself the qualities that capitalist society in mass practiced and glorified. "It was strong men," says Croffut, "whom he liked and sympathized with, not weak ones; the self-reliant, not the helpless. He felt that the solicitor of charity was always a lazy or drunken person, trying to live by plundering the sober and industrious." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Rockefeller can look back and smile with superior disdain at the commotion raised by the contemplation of Cornelius Vanderbilt's $6,000,000.
Each period to itself, however. Cornelius Vanderbilt was the golden luminary of his time, a magnate of such combined, far-reaching wealth and power as the United States had never known. Indeed, one overruns the line of tautology in distinguishing between wealth and power. The two were then identical not less than now. Wealth was the real power. ”

“ But it was during the Civil War that Northern capitalists of every kind coined fortunes from the national disasters, and from the blood of the very armies fighting for their interests shown how Commodore Vanderbilt and other shipping merchants fraudulently sold or leased to the Government for exorbitant sums, ships for the transportation of soldiers—ships so decayed or otherwise unseaworthy, that they had to be condemned. ”

“ Where, however, the industrial corporation has but one form of taxation the railroad has many forms. The trust in oil or any other commodity can tax the whole nation at its pleasure, but inherently only on the one product it controls. That single taxation is of itself confiscatory enough, as is seen in the $912,000,000 of profits gathered in by the Standard Oil Company since its inception. The trust tax is in the form of its selling price to the public. But the railroad puts its tax upon every product transported or every person who travels. ”

“ While in both houses of Congress are legislators who represent the almost extinguished middle class, their votes are as ineffective as their declamations are flat. The Government of the United States, viewing it as an entirety, and not considering the impotent exceptions, is now more avowedly a capitalist Government than ever before. As for the various legislatures, the magnates, coveting no seats in those bodies, are content to follow the old plan of mastering them by either direct bribery or by controlling the political bosses in charge of the political machines. ”

“ These are but a very few of the immensity of extravagant powers conferred by the ownership of these railroad bonds and stocks. Bonds they assuredly are, incomparably more so than the clumsy yokes of olden days. Society has improved its outwards forms in these passing centuries. Clanking chains are no longer necessary to keep slaves in subjection. Far more effective than chains and balls and iron collars are the ownership of the means whereby men must live. ”

“ Millions have gone hungry or lived on an attenuated diet while elsewhere harvests rotted in the ground; between their needs and nature's fertility lay the railroads. Organized and maintained for profit and for profit alone, the railroads carry produce and products at their fixed rates and not a whit less; if these rates are not paid the transportation is refused. And as in these times transportation is necessary in the world's intercourse, the men who control it have the power to stand as an inflexible barrier between individuals, groups of individuals, nations and international peoples. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That their extortions reach hundreds of millions of dollars every year is a patent enough fact. Some of the accompaniments of this process of extortion have been referred to;— the confiscation, on the one hand, of the labor of the whole consuming population by taxing from them more and more of the products of their labor by repeated increases in the price of coal, and, on the other, the confiscation of the labor of the several hundred thousand miners who are compelled to work for the most precarious wages, and in conditions worse, in some respects, than chattel slavery. ”

“ Out of their own ranks were rising men, trained in their own methods, who were amplifying and intensifying those methods to shatter the class from which they had sprung. The different grades of the propertied class, from the merchant with his fortune of $250,000 to the retail tradesman, felt very comfortable in being able to look down with a conscious superiority upon the working class from whom their money was wrung. Scoffing at equality, they delighted in setting themselves up as a class infinitely above the toilers of the shop and factory ”

“ Instead of now being the superior of the corporation the Government has long since definitely surrendered to private corporations a tremendous taxing power amounting virtually to a decree authorizing enslavement. Upon every form of private corporation—railroad, industrial, mining, public utility—is conferred a peculiarly sweeping and insidious power of taxation the indirectness of which often obscures its frightful nature and effects. ”

“ Realizing it to be at basis the first national awakening of the proletariat, progressive men and women of every shade of opinion hastened forward to support it and direct it into one of opposition, not merely to a few of the evils of wage slavery, but to what they considered the fundamental cause itself—the capitalist system. ”