To pay interest and dividends on the hundreds of millions of dollars of inflated bonds and stock which three generations of the Vanderbilts had issued, and to maintain and enhance their value, it was necessary to keep on increasingly extorting revenues. The sources of the profits were palpable. Time after time freight rates were raised, as was more than sufficiently proved in various official investigations, despite denials. Conjunctively with this process, another method of extortion was the ceaseless one of beating down the wages of the workers to the very lowest point at which they could be hired. While the Vanderbilts and other magnates were manufacturing law at will, and boldly appropriating, under color of law, colossal possessions in real and personal property, how was the law, as embodied in legislatures, officials and courts acting toward the working class?
THE GOVERNMENT AN ENGINE OF TYRANNY.
The grievances and protests of the workers aroused no response save the ever-active one of contumely, coercion and violent reprisals. The treasury of Nation, States and cities, raised by a compulsory taxation falling heavily upon the workers, was at all times at the complete disposal of the propertied interests, who emptied it as fast as it was filled. The propertiless and jobless were left to starve; to them no helping arm was outstretched, and if they complained, no quarter given. The State as an institution, while supported by the toil of the producers, was wholly a capitalist State with the capitalists in complete supremacy to fashion and use it as they chose. They used the State political machinery to plunder the masses, and then, at the slightest tendency on the part of the workers to resist these crushing injustices and burdens, called upon the State to hurry out its armed forces to repress this dangerous discontent.
In Buffalo, in 1890-1891, thirty-one in every hundred destitutes were impoverished because of unemployment, and in New York City twenty- nine in every hundred. [Footnote: "Encyclopedia of Social Reform," Edition of 1897: 1073.] Hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds were given outright to the capitalists, but not a cent appropriated to provide work for the unemployed. In the panic of 1893, when millions of men, women and children were out of work, the machinery of government, National, State and municipal, proffered not the least aid, but, on the contrary, sought to suppress agitation and prohibit meetings by flinging the leaders into jail. Basing his conclusions upon the (Aldrich) United States Senate Report of 1893—a report highly favorable to capitalist interests, and not unexpectedly so, since Senator Aldrich was the recognized Senatorial mouthpiece of the great vested interests—Spahr found that the highest daily wage for all earners, taken in a mass, was $2.O4 [Footnote: "The Present Distribution of Wealth in The United States.">[
More than three-quarters of all the railroad employees in the United States received less than two dollars a day. Large numbers of railroad employees were forced to work from twelve to fourteen hours a day, and their efficiency and stamina thus lowered. Periodically many were laid off in enforced idleness; and appalling numbers were maimed or killed in the course of duty. [Footnote: The report of the Wisconsin Railway Commissioners for 1894, Vol. xiii., says: "In a recent year more railway employees were killed in this country than three times the number of Union men slain at the battle of Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge and Orchard Knob combined. … In the bloody Crimean War, the British lost 21,000 in killed and wounded— not as many as are slain, maimed and mangled among the railroad men injured [Footnote: of the country in a single year." Various reports of the Interstate Commerce Commission state the same facts.] or slain largely because the railroad corporations refused to expend money in the introduction of improved automatic coupling devices, these workers or their heirs were next confronted by what? The unjust and oppressive provisions of worthless employers' liability laws drafted by corporation attorneys in such a form that the worker or his family generally had almost no claim. The very judges deciding these suits were, as a rule, put on the bench by the railroad corporations.
MACHINE GUNS FOR THE OVERWORKED.
These deadly conditions prevailed on the Vanderbilt railroads even more than on any others; it was notorious that the Vanderbilt system was not only managed in semi-antiquated ways so far as the operation was concerned, but also that its trainmen were terribly underpaid and overworked. [Footnote: "Semi-antiquated ways." Only recently the "Railway Age Gazette," issue of January, 1909, styled the New York Central's directors as mostly "concentrated absurdities, physically incompetent, mentally unfit, or largely unresident and inattentive.">[ In reply to a continued agitation for better hours on the part of the Vanderbilt employees, the New York Legislature passed an act, in 1892, which apparently limited the working hours of railroad employees to ten a day. There was a gleam of sunshine, but lo! when the act was critically examined after it had become a law, it was found that a "little joker" had been sneaked into its mass of lawyers' terminology. The surreptitious clause ran to this effect: That railroad companies were permitted to exact from their employees overtime work for extra compensation. This practically made the whole law a negation.
So it turned out; for in August, 1892, the switchmen employed by various railroad lines converging at Buffalo struck for shorter hours and more pay. The strike spread, and was meeting with tactical success; the strikers easily persuaded men who had been hired to fill their jobs to quit. What did the Vanderbilts and their allies now do? They fell back upon the old ruse of invoking armed force to suppress what they proclaimed to be violence. They who had bought law and had violated the law incessantly now represented that their property interests were endangered by "mob violence," and prated of the need of soldiers to "restore law and order." It was a serviceable pretext, and was immediately acted upon.
The Governor of New York State obediently ordered out the entire State militia, a force of 8,000, and dispatched it to Buffalo. The strikers were now confronted with bayonets and machine guns. The soldiery summarily stopped the strikers from picketing, that is to say, from attempting to persuade strikebreakers to refrain from taking their places. Against such odds the strike was lost.
If, however, the Vanderbilts could not afford to pay their workers a few cents more in wages a day, they could afford to pay millions of dollars for matrimonial alliances with foreign titles. These excursions into the realm of high-caste European nobility have thus far cost the Vanderbilt family about $15,000,000 or $20,000,000. When impecunious counts, lords, dukes and princes, having wasted the inheritance originally obtained by robbery, and perpetuated by robbery, are on the anxious lookout for marriages with great fortunes, and the American money magnates, satiated with vulgar wealth, aspire to titled connections, the arrangement becomes easy. [Footnote: More than 500 American women have married titled foreigners. The sum of about $220,000,000, it is estimated (1909), has followed them to Europe.] Romance can be dispensed with, and the lawyers depended upon to settle the preliminaries.