Our Presidents and how we make them

by Alexander K. McClure

Contract Labor.—We demand the strict enforcement of laws prohibiting the importation of subjects of foreign countries under contract.

Chinese.—We demand the passage and enforcement of such legislation as will absolutely exclude the Chinese from the United States.

Woman Suffrage.—The right to vote is inherent in citizenship, irrespective of sex, and is properly within the province of State legislation.

Paramount Issues.—The paramount issues to be solved in the interests of humanity are the abolition of usury, monopoly, and trusts, and we denounce the Democratic and Republican parties for creating and perpetuating these monstrous evils.

The United Labor party had a limited attendance at its convention. William B. Ogden was made president, and Rev. Edward McGlynn, of New York, a priest noted for his discussion of labor problems, prepared and reported the platform. Robert H. Cowdrey, of Illinois, was nominated for President, and W. H. T. Wakefield, of Kansas, for the second place on the ticket without the formality of a ballot. The following platform was unanimously adopted:

We, the delegates of the United Labor party of the United States, in national convention assembled, hold that the corruptions of Government and the impoverishment of the masses result from neglect of the self-evident truths proclaimed by the founders of this Republic, that all men are created equal and are endowed with inalienable rights. We aim at the abolition of the system which compels men to pay their fellow-creatures for the use of the common bounties of nature, and permits monopolizers to deprive labor of natural opportunities for employment.

We see access to farming land denied to labor, except on payment of exorbitant rent or the acceptance of mortgage burdens, and labor, thus forbidden to employ itself, driven into the cities. We see the wage-workers of the cities subjected to this unnatural competition, and forced to pay an exorbitant share of their scanty earnings for cramped and unhealthful lodgings. We see the same intense competition condemning the great majority of business and professional men to a bitter and often unavailing struggle to avoid bankruptcy; and that, while the price of all that labor produces ever falls, the price of land ever rises.

We trace these evils to a fundamental wrong—the making of the land on which all must live the exclusive property of but a portion of the community. To this denial of natural rights are due want of employment, low wages, business depressions, that intense competition which makes it so difficult for the majority of men to get a comfortable living, and that wrongful distribution of wealth which is producing the millionaire on one side and the tramp on the other.

To give all men an interest in the land of their country; to enable all to share in the benefits of social growth and improvement; to prevent the shutting out of labor from employment by the monopolization of natural opportunities; to do away with the one-sided competition which cuts down wages to starvation rates; to restore life to business, and prevent periodical depressions; to do away with that monstrous injustice which deprives producers of the fruits of their toil while idlers grow rich; to prevent the conflicts which are arraying class against class, and which are fraught with menacing dangers to society—we propose so to change the existing system of taxation that no one shall be taxed on the wealth he produces, nor any one suffered to appropriate wealth he does not produce by taking to himself the increasing values which the growth of society adds to land.

What we propose is not the disturbing of any man in his holding or title; but, by taxation of land according to its value and not according to its area, to devote to common use and benefit those values which arise, not from the exertion of the individual, but from the growth of society, and to abolish all taxes on industry and its products. This increased taxation of land values must, while relieving the working farmer and small homestead owner of the undue burdens now imposed upon them, make it unprofitable to hold land for speculation, and thus throw open abundant opportunities for the employment of labor and the building up of homes. We would do away with the present unjust and wasteful system of finance which piles up hundreds of millions of dollars in treasury vaults while we are paying interest on an enormous debt; and we would establish in its stead a monetary system in which a legal tender circulating medium should be issued by the Government, without the intervention of banks.