COAL LANDS EXPROPRIATED
Not merely were the capitalist interests allowed to plunder the public domain from the people under these various acts, but another act was passed by Congress, the "Coal Land Act," purposely drawn to permit the railroads to appropriate great stretches of coal deposits. "Already," wrote President Roosevelt in a message to Congress urging the repeal of the Stone and Timber Act, the Desert Land Law, the Coal Land Act and similar enactments, "probably one-half of the total area of high-grade coals in the West has passed under private control. Including both lignite and the coal areas, these private holdings aggregate not less than 30,000,000 acres of coal fields." These urgings fell flat on a Congress that included many members who had got their millions by reason of these identical laws, and which, as a body, was fully under the control of the dominant class of the day— the Capitalist class. The oligarchy of wealth was triumphantly, gluttonously in power; it was ingenuous folly to expect it to yield where it could vanquish, and concede where it could despoil. [Footnote: Nor did it yield. Roosevelt's denunciations in no way affected the steady expropriating process. In the current seizure (1909) of vast coal areas in Alaska, the long-continuing process can be seen at work under our very eyes. A controversy, in 1909, between Secretary of the Interior Ballinger and U. S. Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot brought a great scandal to a head. It was revealed that several powerful syndicates of capitalists had filed fraudulent claims to Alaskan coal lands, the value of which is estimated to be from $75,000,000 to $1,000,000,000. At the present writing their claims, it is announced, are being investigated by the Government. The charge has been made that Secretary of the Interior Ballinger, after leaving the Land Commissioner's office—a post formerly held by him—became the attorney for the most powerful of these syndicates.
At a recent session of the Irrigation Congress at Spokane, Washington, Gov. Pardee of California charged that the timber, the minerals and the soil had long since become the booty of corporations whose political control of public servants was notorious.]
The thefts of the public domain have continued, without intermission, up to this present day, and doubtless will not cease until every available acre is appropriated.
A recent report of H. H. Schwartz, chief of the field service of the Department of the Interior, to Secretary Garfield, of that Department, showed that in the two years from 1906 to 1908 alone, approximately $110,000,000 worth of public land in States, principally west of the Mississippi River, had been fraudulently acquired by capitalist corporations and individuals. This report disclosed more than thirty-two thousand cases of land fraud. The frauds on the part of various capitalist corporations in obtaining vast mineral deposits in Alaska, and incalculably rich water power sites in Montana and elsewhere, constitute one of the great current public scandals. It will be described fully elsewhere in this work.
Overlooking the petty, confusing details of the last seventy years, and focusing attention upon the large developments, this is the striking result beheld: A century ago no railroads existed; to-day the railroads not only own stupendous natural resources, expropriated from the people, but, in conjunction with allied capitalist interests, they dictate what the lot, political, economic and social, of the American people shall be. All of this transformation has come about within a relatively short period, much of it in our own time. But a little while ago the railroad projectors begged and implored, tricked and bribed; and had the law been enforced, would have been adjudged criminals and consigned to prison. And now, in the blazing power of their wealth, these same men or their successors are uncrowned kings, swaying the full powers of government, giving imperial orders that Congress, legislatures, conventions and people must obey.