IV
Manassas was completed in the spring of 1904 and published in August. Meanwhile I was reading the socialist weekly, Appeal to Reason, which was published in Girard, Kansas; it then had a circulation of half a million, and doubled it in the next few years. At that time two Western Miners’ officials, Moyer and Haywood, were being tried for a murder that they probably did not commit. The Appeal was sure of their innocence. I was too, and in general I was becoming a red-hot “radical.” When the twenty thousand workers in the Chicago stockyards had their strike smashed in a most shocking way, I wrote a manifesto addressed to them: “You have lost the strike, and now what are you going to do about it?” This was just the sort of thing the Appeal wanted, and they made it into a shouting first-page broadside and distributed hundreds of thousands of copies. I wrote a second broadside, “Farmers of America, Unite!” The Appeal paid me for this by sending me twenty or thirty thousand copies, which was like a present of a herd of white elephants! I had to hire a boy and a horse and buggy for a couple of weeks to distribute them over the countryside around Princeton. Two years later I ran for Congress on the socialist ticket in that district, and maybe my propaganda got me half a dozen extra votes.
I learned something about the American small farming community during my three and a half years near Princeton. What their fathers had done, they did; as their fathers had voted, so voted they, and thought it was for Lincoln, or perhaps Tilden. They lived in pitiful ignorance and under the shadow of degeneracy. I often thought of writing a book about them—but you would not have believed me, because the facts fitted so perfectly into my socialist thesis that you would have been sure I was making them to order.
In a neighborhood two miles square, which I knew by personal contact and the gossip of neighbors, the only decent families were half a dozen that lived on farms of a hundred acres or more. The families that lived on ten or twenty-acre farms contained drunkards, degenerates, mental or physical defectives, semi-idiots, victims of tuberculosis or of venereal disease, and now and then a petty criminal. You could descend in the scale, according to the size of the farm, until you came to the Jukes—I don’t recall their real name, but students of eugenics will accept that substitute. The Jukes had no farm at all, but squatted in an old barn, and had six half-naked brats, and got drunk on vinegar, and beat each other, and howled and screamed and rioted, and stole poultry and apples from the neighbors.
These small farmers of New Jersey and other eastern states represented what had been left behind from wave after wave of migration—either to the West or to the cities. The capable and active ones escaped, while the weak ones stayed behind and constituted our “farm problem.” Prohibition did not touch them because they made their own “applejack,” with sixty per cent alcohol. Politics touched them only once a year, when they were paid from two to five dollars for each vote the family could produce. They worked their children sixteen hours a day and sent them to school three or four months in winter, where they learned enough to figure a list of groceries, and to read a local weekly containing reports of church “sociables” and a few canned items supplied by the power trust; also a Methodist or Baptist paper, with praises of the “blood of the Lamb” and of patent medicines containing opium and coal-tar poisons. Such was agricultural New Jersey almost sixty years ago. The farms still go on voting for Lincoln and McKinley, and hating the labor unions that force up the prices of the things farmers have to buy.