In reality the North also has an aristocratic government, an oligarchy based upon wealth and property, which dominates politics and governs the country more or less completely. Roosevelt has been fighting some of the more boisterous aspects of the rule of this oligarchy—and has showed the country how powerful it is!
The Underman Fighting All Over the World
It is curious, indeed, when one’s attention is awakened to the facts, how strong the parallel is between the South and the North. I mean here a parallel not in laws or even in customs, but in spirit, in the living reality which lies down deep under institutions, which is, after all, the only thing that really counts.
The cause of all the trouble in the North is similar to what it is in the South: the underman will not keep his place. He is restless, ambitious, he wants civil, political, and industrial equality. Thus we see the growth of labour organisations, and the spread of populists and socialists, who demand new rights and a greater share in the products of labour. They will not, as Hoke Smith says of the Negroes, “content themselves with the place of inferiority.” The essential feature of the history of the last five years in this country, and it will go down in history as the beginning of great things, has been the vague, crudely powerful effort of the underman (half his strength wasted because he is blind) to limit in some degree the power of this moneyed aristocracy. Such is the meaning of the demand for trust and railroad legislation, such the significance of the insurance investigation, such the effort to curb the power of men like Rockefeller, Harriman, Morgan.
So the North, in spirit, also disfranchises its lower class. It does it by the purchase at elections in one form or another of its “poor whites” and its Negroes. What else is the meaning of Tammany Hall and the boss and machine system in other cities? Tammany Hall is our method of disfranchisement: it is our cunning machine for nullifying the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. While the South is disfranchising by legislation, the North is doing it by cash.
The Question We Are Coming To
I have spoken of the lack of free speech in the South; but that is not peculiar to the South. Though there is undoubtedly a far greater intellectual freedom to-day in the North than in the South, yet the North has disciplined more than one professor for his utterances on the trust or railroad questions. South or North, it is dangerous to attack the entrenched privilege of those in control.
We criticise the frankness of Vardaman in advocating different standards of justice for white men and Negroes, but do we not have the same custom in the North? How extremely difficult it is sometimes to get a rich criminal into jail in the North!
In short, we are coming again face to face in this country with the same tremendous (even revolutionary) question which presents itself in every crisis of the world’s history:
“What is democracy? What does democracy include? Does democracy really include Negroes as well as white men? Does it include Russian Jews, Italians, Japanese? Does it include Rockefeller and the Slavonian street-sweeper? And Tillman and the Negro farmhand?”