Ralph Chaplin

“ Each ruling class knows these facts,—knows that the old must give place to the new; knows that the living, ruling culture of to-day will be the history of the day after tomorrow, yet because of the vested interests which they rely upon for their power, and because they are satisfied to have the deluge come after them, they oppose each manifestation of the new culture and strain every nerve to make the temporary organization of the world permanent. ”

“ The old world holds power—economic, social, political. It holds in its hands income, respectability and preferment, with which it seeks first to buy, and later to destroy all who oppose its will.
Buying is the easiest, the safest, and in the long run the cheapest method of gaining the desired end.
Each generation contains some men and women possessed of unusual endowments—as organizers and enterprisers, as spokesmen, as singers, as seers and prophets. These gifted ones the old order sets out to win—lavishing upon them gratitudes, favors, rewards ”

“ The reader of Chaplin's prison poems unavoidably makes three mental comments:
1. When poems so reserved, so vigorous; so penetrating, so melodious, so beautiful, come from behind jail bars, it is high time that thinking men and women awoke to the fate that awaits bold dreamers and singers under the present order in the United States.
2. Men are not silenced when steel doors clang behind them. Free spirits are as free behind the bars as they are under the open sky. The jail, as a gag, is impotent. While it may master the body, it cannot contain the soul. ”

“ Ralph Chaplin was guilty of the most serious social offense that a man can commit. While living in an old and shattered social order, he had championed a new order of society and had expounded a new culture. Socrates and Jesus, for like offenses, lost their lives. Thousands of their followers, guilty of no greater crime than that of denouncing vested wrong and expounding new truths, have suffered in the dungeon, on the scaffold and at the stake. ”

“ Most men and women go where income promises and social preferment beckons. But not all! There are some whose love of justice, truth and beauty; whose yearning for betterment and increased social opportunity, outweighs the tempting bait of ease and respectability. Them the established order smites.
The strength of the old order is measured superficially by the extent of its control over the means of common livelihood and by the generalness of the satisfaction or discontent with which the masses receive its administration. ”

“ The new culture, growing at first under the shadow of the old, gradually assumes larger and larger proportions until it takes all of the sunlight for itself, throwing the old culture into the shadow of oblivion. ”

“ This culture is respected, admired, applauded, and sometimes even worshipped by those who benefit from it most directly. Civilization—even life itself seems bound up with its continuance. When the advocates of the established culture cry "Long live the King!" they are really shouting approval of royalty, aristocracy, landlordism, vassalage, exploitation and of all the other attributes of divine right. The world as it is becomes in their minds, synonymous with the world as it should be. For them the old culture is the best culture. ”

“ During the twenty years that elapsed between the Homestead and Pullman strikes and the beginning of the world war, the pages of American industrial history are crowded with stories of the labor conflict—on an ever vaster and vaster scale, between nationally organized employers, using the power of the police, the courts and, where necessary, the army; and the nationally organized workers, backed by some show of public sentiment, and armed with the strength of numbers. ”

“ The strength of the new order, at any stage in its development may be gauged by the solidarity of its organization, the efficacy of its propaganda, and the tone of its art. These forms of expression are necessary to the maintenance of any phase of culture, old or new, and by the last of the three, the esthetic expression of the culture, its morale may best be judged. It is for this reason that artists, musicians, dramatists and poets are so important a part of any order of society. ”

“ On the other hand there is the new culture, comprising the hopes, beliefs, ideas and ideals of those who feel that the present is but a transition-stage, leading from the past into the future—a future that they see radiant with the best that is in man, developing soundly against the bounties that are supplied by the hand of nature. ”

“ The culture of any age consists of the feelings, habits, customs, activities, thoughts, ambitions and dreams of a people. It is a composite picture of their homes, their work, their arts, their pleasures and the other channels of their life-expression.
The culture of each age has two aspects. On the one hand there is the established or accepted culture of those who dominate and control,—the culture of the leisure or ruling class. ”

“ So imperfect does the present seem to them, and so obvious are the possibilities of the future, that they look forward confidently to the overthrow of the old social forms, and the establishment, in their places, of a new society, the embryo of which is already germinating within the old social shell. ”

“ Despite the extreme youth of the capitalist system in the United States, there are already many signs that those who profit by it must be prepared to defend it at no distant date. The Russian Revolution of 1917 sounded the loudest note of warning, but even before that occurred, the industrial capitalists had entered upon a struggle which they believed to be of the greatest importance to their future. ”

“ At the outset, while the old order is still relatively strong, and the new relatively weak, the spokesmen of the old order can afford to ignore the champions of the new. But as the established order grows more senile and the new order more vigorous, the defenders of the old order, by force or by guile, set themselves to root out the new, even though they should be compelled to destroy themselves in the process. ”

“ The old culture was joining battle with the new. "America is the land of opportunity. It was good enough for my father: it is good enough for me" was the slogan of the capitalists. "The world for the workers," answered the vanguard of the exploited masses.
The advocate of a labor state is as unpopular in a capitalist society as the abolitionist was in the Carolinas before the Civil War. He sees a vision that the stalwarts of the existing order do not care to see; he speaks a language that they cannot comprehend ”

“ By these means the rulers succeed in bringing under their control the strong thinkers, the capable executives, the sensitive, the talented—all in fact who are worth buying, and who can be bought for income and for social preferment, even though they may have been born into the families of the humblest and most oppressed of the workers. ”

“ They voice its deepest sentiments and express its most sacred faiths and longings. When the time arrives that a new social order can boast its permanent art and music and literature, it is already far advanced on the path that leads to stability and power. ”

“ The old order may undergo a process of gradual transformation. In that case the change is slow, as it was when Feudalism gave place to Capitalism in England. Again, the old order may be exterminated as it was when Feudalism gave place to Capitalism in France. In one case the masters of life loosens the reins of power to ease the straining team; in the other case the masters hold the reins taut till they are jerked from their hands, as masters and team go together over the precipice. ”

“ The poems which appear in this volume are a contribution to the propaganda and the art of the new culture. "Above all things," writes Chaplin, "I don't want anyone to try to make me out a 'poet'—because I'm not. I don't think much of these esthetic creatures who condescend to stoop to our level that we may have the blessings of culture. We'll manage to make our own—do it in our own way, and stagger through somehow. ”

“ The more vigorously the new culture thrives, the more eagerly do the representatives of the old order strive to destroy it.
IV.
During three eventful centuries, the part of North America that is now the United States has witnessed two fierce culture-survival struggles. In the first of these struggles—that between the American Indians and the whites, the culture of Western Europe supplanted the culture of primitive America. ”

“ The old culture relies on tradition, custom, and the normal conservatism of the masses of mankind, The new culture relies on concepts of justice, truth, liberty, love, brotherhood. Eighteenth century, Feudal France was filled with the prophecies of a form of society that would supplant Feudalism. ”

“ And the whole grey world grew dark.
I. W. W. PRISON SONG (Tune: "The Red Flag")
The pale and dismal daylight falls
Through iron bars on prison walls.
In chains we came from far and near,
And in dark cells they hold us here.
CHORUS
Defiant 'neath the Iron Heel ”

“ In the second struggle—that between the slave holders of the South and the rising business interests of the North, the slave oligarchy was swept from power, and in its place there was established the new financial imperialism that dominates the public life of the nation at the present time. ”

“ The calm, sweet earth that mothers all who die
As all men must;
Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell—
Too strong to strive—
Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell,
Buried alive;
But rather mourn the apathetic throng—
The cowed and the meek—
Who see the world's great anguish and its wrong
And dare not speak! ”

“ Fundamentally its strength is determined by the direction in which its life is tending. The structure of the Roman Empire was apparently sound before it buckled and disintegrated. The French aristocracy was never surer of itself than in the gala days that preceded 1789. ”