REPRESSION BY STARVATION.
These repressive tactics took on a variety of forms, some of which are not ordinarily included in the definitions of repression.
The usual method was that of subsidizing press and pulpit in certain subtle ways. By these means facts were concealed or distorted, a prejudicial state of public opinion created, and plausible grounds given for hostile interference by the State. But a far more powerful engine of repression was the coercion exercised by employers in forcing their workers to remain submissive on instant peril of losing their jobs. While, at that time, manufacturers, jobbers and shopkeepers throughout the country were rising in angry protest against the accumulation of plundering power in the hands of such men as Vanderbilt, Gould and Huntington, they were themselves exploiting and bribing on a widespread scale. Their great pose was that of a thorough commercial respectability; it was in this garb that they piously went to legislatures and demanded investigations into the rascally methods of the railroad magnates. The facts, said they, should be made public, so as to base on them appropriate legislation which would curtail the power of such autocrats. Contrasted with the baseness and hypocrisy of the trading class, Vanderbilt's qualities of brutal candor and selfishness shine out as brilliant virtues. [Footnote: No observation could be truer. As a class, the manufacturers were flourishing on stolen inventions. There might be exceptions, but they were very rare. Year after year, decade after decade, the reports of the various Commissioners of Patents pointed out the indiscriminate theft of inventions by the capitalists. In previous chapters we have referred to the plundering of Whitney and Goodyear. But they were only two of a vast number of inventors similarly defrauded.
In speaking of the helplessness of inventors, J. Holt, Commissioner of Patents, wrote in his Annual Report for 1857: "The insolence and unscrupulousness of capital, subsidizing and leading on its minions in the work of pirating some valuable invention held by powerless hands, can scarcely by conceived by those not familiar with the records of such cases as I have referred to. Inventors, however gifted in other respects, are known to be confiding and thriftless; and being generally without wealth, and always without knowledge of the chicaneries of law, they too often prove but children in those rude conflicts which they are called on to endure with the stalwart fraud and cunning of the world." (U. S. Senate Documents, First Session, Thirty-fifth Congress, 1857-58, viii: 9-10). In his Annual Report for 1858, Commissioner Holt described how inventors were at the mercy of professional perjurers whom the capitalists hired to give evidence.
The bribing of Patent office officials was a common occurrence. "The attention of Congress," reported Commissioner of Patents Charles Mason in 1854, "is invited to the importance of providing some adequate means of preventing attempts to obtain patents by improper means." Several cases of "attempted bribery" had occurred within the year, stated Commissioner Mason. (Executive Documents, First Session, Thirty-third Congress, 1853-54, Vol. vii, Part I: 19-20.) Every successive Commissioner of Patents called upon Congress to pass laws for the prevention of fraud, and for the better protection of the inventor, but Congress, influenced by the manufacturers, was deaf to these appeals.]
These same manufacturers objected in the most indignant manner, as they similarly do now, to any legislative investigations of their own methods. Eager to have the practices of Vanderbilt and Gould probed into, they were acrimoniously opposed to even criticism of their factory system. For this extreme sensitiveness there was the amplest reason. The cruelties of the factory system transcended belief. In, for instance, the State of Massachusetts, vaunting itself for its progressiveness, enlightenment and culture, the textile factories were a horror beyond description. The Convention of the Boston Eight Hour League, in 1872, did not overstate when it declared of the factory system that "it employs tens of thousands of women and children eleven and twelve hours a day; owns or controls in its own selfish interest the pulpit and the press; prevents the operative classes from making themselves felt in behalf of less hours, through remorseless exercise of the power of discharge; and is rearing a population of children and youth of sickly appearance and scanty or utterly neglected schooling."…
As the factory system was in Massachusetts, so it was elsewhere. Any employee venturing to agitate for better conditions was instantly discharged; spies were at all times busy among the workers; and if a labor union were formed, the factory owners would obtain sneak emissaries into it, with orders to report on every move and disrupt the union if possible. The factory capitalists in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois and every other manufacturing State were determined to keep up their system unchanged, because it was profitable to work children eleven and a half hours a day in a temperature that in summer often reached 108 degrees and in an atmosphere certain to breed immorality; [Footnote: "Certain to breed immorality." See report of Carrol D. Wright, Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, 1881. A cotton mill operative testified: "Young girls from fourteen and upward learn more wickedness in one year than they would in five out of a mill." See also the numerous recent reports of the National Child Labor Committee.] it was profitable to compel adult men and women having families to work for an average of ninety cents a day; it was profitable to avoid spending money in equipping their factories with life-saving apparatus. Hence these factory owners, forming the aristocracy of trade, savagely fought every move or law that might expose or alter those conditions; the annals of legislative proceedings are full of evidences of bribery.
Having no illusions, and being a severely practical man, Vanderbilt well knew the pretensions of this trading class; with many a cynical remark, aptly epitomizing the point, he often made sport of their assumptions. He knew (and none knew better) that they had dived deep in bribery and fraud; they were the fine gentlemen, he well recalled, who had generally obtained patents by fraud; who had so often bribed members of Congress to vote for a high tariff; the same, too, who had bribed legislatures for charters, water rights, exemptions from taxation, the right to work employees as long as, and under whatever conditions, they wanted to. This manufacturing aristocracy professed to look down upon Vanderbilt socially as a coarse sharper; and in New York a certain ruling social element, the native aristocracy, composed of old families whose wealth, originating in fraud, had become respectable by age, took no pains to conceal their opinion of him as a parvenu, and drew about their sacred persons an amusing circle of exclusiveness into the rare precincts of which he might not enter.
Vanderbilt now proceeded to buy social and religious grace as he had bought laws. The purchase of absolution has ever been a convenient and cheap method of obtaining society's condonation of theft. In medieval centuries it took a religious form; it has become transposed to a social traffic in these superior days. Let a man steal in colossal ways and then surrender a small part of it in charitable, religious and educational donations; he at once ceases being a thief and straightway becomes a noble benefactor. Vanderbilt now shed his life-long irreverence, and gave to Deems, a minister of the Presbyterian Church, as a gift, the Church of the Strangers on Mercer street, and he donated $1,000,000 for the founding of the Vanderbilt University at Nashville, Tenn. The press, the church and the educational world thereupon upon hailed him as a marvel of saintly charity and liberality.