CHAPTER XXIV
THE GALL OF THE YOKE
“The public be damned!” snarled a successful capitalist some forty or more years ago, a capitalist who himself had been one of the public.
For by the public he meant working people and all who are forced to travel with them. Other capitalists and near-capitalists, imagining that his expression was a formula in some way responsible for his ability to get money from the very class he cursed, adopted it as their business slogan.
As a slogan it enjoyed a long life. It even went into our politics. There are persons who claim that it was for the purpose of changing that habit of thought that Theodore Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party. Be that as it may, the working people, having changed it somewhat, adopted it for their own use.
“Capital be damned!” shouted the working people, and like the author of the slogan they forgot that they cursed the very thing that put bread and butter into their dinner-pails.
That was the condition when I entered the underbrush that November morning way back in 1916. The four most eventful years in the history of this world have passed since then. In no field has the change been so great as with the working people, working men and working women.
When I stepped out of the underbrush, during the last few months of my work and life in the tenements, that slogan had been scrapped, thrown into a waste-basket and forgotten.
“We must have our share” had taken its place with the working man and the working woman. “We will have our share.”
“There ain’t no use of ’em telling us to look at Russia,” a boss carpenter told me about three months before I left New York City. “We are looking at Russia, looking at it close and constant. That’s the reason we workers in the United States is bound to win out. We see the mistakes made in Russia, and we’re going to avoid them.”
I glanced at his wife and saw that she was nodding her head in silent approval. Standing over the roasting-hot cook-stove she was serving her man and their five children their lunch, after having placed a plate for herself in compliment to a woman visitor. That visitor chanced to be myself, an inspector of dog licenses.