Always those in possession of the powers of government use the Government to protect themselves—that is, to protect their interests; and they never fail to shrewdly shout, “Patriotism!” and teach “patriotism”; nor do they ever fail to shout, “Unpatriotic!” at any group or class who seek to reorganize government in self-defense.
“Patriotism!” “Love of our country!” Yes, indeed! But, doesn’t the average American working class man look ridiculous shouting, “Hurrah for our country—our land of the free”? He has no voice in the control of the factory where he works; has no voice as to the use of the militia and the soldiers; has no right to demand a job and thus defend his life; he could not have the service of one petty village marshal, to open up a “shut-down” factory, even though the opening of the factory would save him and five thousand other men and their twenty-five thousand women and children from starvation; in the mill and mine and factory he has no voice as to who shall be his foreman or superintendent any more than black chattel slaves in Georgia cotton fields in 1850.
Our country! Land of the free! Where the president of the American Federation of Labor could be clapped into jail if he should use the “freedom of the press” to publish even a short list of boycotted industrial tyrants; where the officers of the Western Federation of Miners were kidnapped and the kidnapping was declared to be constitutional by the highest court in the land, and the untried prisoners (constitutionally entitled to all the presumptions of innocence) were declared guilty by the cheap President of the political mockery called a “free republic.”
(11) Mothers and fathers are not permitted to learn of many of the foul things happening at barracks or far away whither their sons have been “flimflammed” for bullet-stoppers.
For President William H. Taft’s official testimony on the sexual degradation of the soldier sons of loving mothers, see Chapter Four, Section One, of the present volume.
“On the 17th of July, 1899, the staff correspondents of American newspapers stationed in Manila stated unitedly in public protest:
“‘The [Press] censorship has compelled us to participate in this misrepresentation by excising or altering uncontroverted statements of fact, on the plea, as General Otis said, that “they would alarm the people at home,” or “have the people of the United States by the ears.”’”[[255]]
Some things, you know, must be concealed. President D. S. Jordan (Leland Stanford University) writes:[[256]]
“Does the Outlook [editor] know what Manila is becoming under military rule? We hear of four hundred saloons on the Escolta, where two were before; that twenty-one per cent. of our soldiers are attacked with venereal disease, that according to the belief of the soldiers, ‘even the pigs and dogs have the syphilis.’”
Following the Spanish war, venereal diseases as cause of ineffectiveness and cause for discharge from the army increased two and a half fold; that is, two hundred and fifty per cent.[[257]] The statement by the Secretary of War, Mr. Dickinson (Report for 1909, p. 17) is sufficient to disgust and anger every woman in the land with the entire filthy business of militarism. For the startling statement see Chapter Four, Section One, of present volume.