Wearily the old Union veteran climbed the mountain. When he finally got away from his noble tormentor he sat down to rest—and think—to think of “our free country.”
Long ago that old gray man—when in his excitable youth—had marched proudly under the “Stars and Stripes” on gory battlefields, risking all, all, to defend “his country,” and his dear “Old Glory.” Once, he told me, the flag was reddened with his own blood.... But now “Old Glory” mocked him. Captains of industry, capitalists, industrial Caesars, had captured the flag and with devilish craftiness used that same flag to defend their industrial despotism. Sons and grandsons of veterans of the Civil War were now shrewdly flattered and bribed into the ignoble rôle of Russianizing America. Sons and grandsons were becoming Cossacks, and they cursed his gray hairs for demanding of American capitalists a few more pennies a day for ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-housed women and children in the dismal homes of the miners.... A cursing Cossack wearing khaki and flying the flag virtually spat in the old veteran’s face.
“A cold-blooded organization that [Pennsylvania] State Constabulary.”[[175]]
When Decoration Day comes, when the Fourth of July is to be celebrated, when “patriotic” displays are to be made—at such times—bankers, big business men, politicians and statesmen—many of these—should put on black masks, wrap themselves in black flags, and sneak (blushingly, if possible) down into dark cellars and stay there during the celebration—with their memories crowded with soldiers, widows and orphans brutally wronged,—with their memories crowded with congresses corrupted, treasuries looted, lands stolen, charters, privileges and “good things” shamelessly raped from the unseeing public while brave but deluded working men agonized on bloody battlefields.
And on such days the working class should shout less and think more. “The man on horseback” should have some special thought.
And the working class are thinking today more than ever before. And, thinking, they begin to see that hand-clapping, fife-playing, drum-beating and buncombe from a prostituted orator are neither freedom nor justice, nor even the sign of such; but are, rather, just what Mark Twain called them[[176]]—a “bastard patriotism.”
The motive of the young men who voluntarily join the army or the militia is possibly, in many cases, a good motive. Perhaps they do not see the tricks of the string-pullers behind the scenes, the powerful motives of the industrial masters behind the curtains. It is not always easy for the young man to realize that he is to be used to punish the half-nourished, pale-faced working class baby that vainly tugs weak-lipped at the withered and milkless breasts of the ill-fed, ill-clothed, discouraged working class mother. However, the cheap rôle of the armed protector of industrial parasites is becoming more and more clearly understood, and consequently more and more disgusting to the entire working class—including both the militia and the regulars themselves. Light is breaking in the toilers’ mind. The hideous business of standing ready to bayonet the millions of men and boys and women and girls whose lives are made up of meanly paid drudgery—this vile business is rapidly sinking below the level of contempt. Strong young fellows in the army and the militia and the navy incline more and more to line up with their own class, the working class, and refuse to assassinate their brothers who are struggling for a few pennies advance in wages.
They see the trick.
Some of the militiamen resigned in the anthracite coal strike of 1902, resigned when they realized that they were being used simply as watchdogs for industrial masters who were cheating even the little ten-year-old boys in the coal-breakers, cheating even these little fellows whose fingers, worn through the skin, were bleeding on the coal they sorted with their hands.
That was in Republican Pennsylvania.