LETTER XIX
My dear Judd:
We have come to the end of our task. I have tried to show you what is going on in our country, and the job you have to do.
We are moving towards a new American revolution. That does not mean riot and tumult, as our enemies try to represent; but neither does it mean slavish submission to every repression of government. There is the best American precedent for resistance to tyranny, and those good ladies who call themselves “Daughters of the American Revolution” would be shocked speechless if I were to quote to them the authentic words of Sam Adams and Patrick Henry and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson on the right of the people to overthrow unjust governments. Said Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address: “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.” There can be no question that those words come precisely under the specifications of the California “criminal syndicalism” law, and a man who said them today would be sent up for fourteen years, to cough out his lungs in the jute-mill of San Quentin prison.
We have to get rid of the capitalist system. It is close to breaking down, and will soon be unable to run the factories it has built, or to bring food to the people in its giant cities. We have got to stop producing goods for profit, and learn to produce them for the use of those who work. I have pointed out the way to make that change under our Constitution. I say: if there is violence, let the capitalists start it—and then you, Judd, and the rest of the workers, can finish it!
Abraham Lincoln hated the slave power, just as I hate the capitalist power; but he moved carefully, keeping the mass of the people with him, and pushed the slave power against the wall, until presently it revolted and began the fighting; then Lincoln called for seventy thousand men to put down the rebellion, and presently he called for a million, and before he got through he had freed the slaves, and put an end to that evil forever. And maybe that is going to happen again; maybe when we get seriously to work, the capitalists are going to organize their armed bands of rowdies, as they did in Italy, and as they are now doing in France and Germany and England, and set out to thwart the people’s will as expressed at the polls. If that happens, Judd, let us have the traditions of America, and the moral forces of America, on our side.
I am one who believes in those traditions; coming, as I do, of a line of naval ancestors. My great-grandfather once commanded the frigate “Constitution,” and I am standing by the old ship—while our money-masters and their hired political servants are trying to torpedo it. When I try to read the Constitution of my country in a public place, and a drunken chief of police throws me into jail, and drunken newspaper publishers shout with approval—well, Judd, I bide my time. I once spent two years reading the history of the period prior to the Civil War, and I know what the moral forces of America are. I know how long they wait, and how slow they seem to be in getting into motion; nevertheless, they are there, and I make my appeal to them, and I expect to hear it answered. I am taking care of my health, with the idea of living to sing once more the Battle Hymn of the Republic: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”
I have written these letters as an act of service to my country. I personally am not suffering, as you know; I have won my fight, to the extent that I am an independent man, and no one can muzzle me. But how can I be happy in this so-called civilization, where I see on every hand about me war and the preparation for war, poverty and the despair which poverty brings, crime and prostitution, suicide and insanity—such a mass of misery that I cannot face the thought of it, and all those beauties of nature and art which in my youth set me a-thrill from top to toe, now mean hardly anything to me, because of the wrongs I see about me—and all so needless, Judd, so utterly, utterly needless!
And something just as bad as the misery of the poor, the decay in the souls of the rich! To see a whole society chasing false ideals, vanity and luxury and waste; admiring and imitating wretched parasites, who have millions of dollars and not one useful thing to do! I know a few of these people, Judd, their lives touch mine here and there, and the truth is they are just as unhappy as the poor, and just as much to be wept over, with their jazz and their bootleggers and their petting parties and their pitiful empty heads. A brief little hour of excitement and display—and then so much suffering, and bewilderment, despair about life, and cynicism about everything sound and true. I think of the millionaire youth I know, drinking himself to death; and the gay young society matron with a venereal disease in her blood and terror in her heart—I feel like calling upon the useful workers of America to organize and save the rich from the misery of being out of work!
What we want, Judd, is a world with neither rich nor poor, but with people who live by producing, and not by taking what others have produced. We want to make that sort of world, and we call to our aid all men and women who are willing to work for it. We want to study this problem, and fill our minds with real information, and stop reading the poison press of our enemies. Indeed, Judd, it is not too much to say that we want to make over our moral and mental life, so that we cease to admire the ideals of our exploiters—waste and the display of waste, plundering and the power to plunder. We want to teach ourselves and our children to admire useful labor, and social vision, and loyalty to the cause of those who produce. We who serve that cause call one another “comrade,” or “brother,” or “fellow-worker”; and we invite you to join our ranks.