Letting yourself be robbed is Americanism; defending yourself against robbery is Socialism!
LETTER VIII
My dear Judd:
You read about the rich growing richer and the poor poorer, and you wonder why the poor have stood it. Why didn’t they “do something.”
The answer is, they tried to, but the rich wouldn’t let them. It is of the nature of wealth to be powerful, and to use its power to protect and perpetuate itself. Jesus said: “Whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have.” You have there the whole of political and economic science, and no professor in any capitalist university can say it any better. The history of our country is a record of incessant struggles on the part of the poor, continually repressed and brought to naught by the rich. The most powerful weapon in this conflict has been, of course, the government; the rich have had it, and the poor have been trying to take it away from them, and have failed.
In their battle the rich have had four lines of defense. First, the elections; they put up the money, and subsidize a political party, and carry on a campaign of falsehood and abuse, and buy votes and stuff ballot-boxes, and so defeat the poor at the polls. Second, assuming they fail in this, comes the legislative line of defense; they sow discord in the ranks of their opponents, they buy up some of their representatives, they delay action and confuse the public and plant “jokers” in the bills which are passed. And then comes the third line, the courts; the rich have named as judges their own retainers and corporation attorneys, their fellow club-members and table-companions, thoroughly trained in reference for property; and these judges discover the “jokers” in the laws, and declare them unconstitutional, null and void. Fourth, assuming these three lines fail, the rich simply defy the laws; resting upon the certainty that their government will not punish them; and it does not.
Do these seem to you extreme statements? Each one can be proved a thousand times over by the well-established facts of our history. In a previous letter I made the assertion that out of fifteen presidential elections since the civil war, fourteen were carried by the party which had the biggest campaign fund. Here are the figures, direct from headquarters—the “Wall Street Journal.” The winning party is listed first:
1868, Rep. $150,000, Dem. $75,000; 1872, R. $250,000, D. $50,000; 1876, R. $950,000, D. $900,000; 1880, R. $1,100,000, D. $355,000; 1884, D. $1,400,000, R. $1,300,000; 1888, R. $1,350,000, D. $855,000; 1892, D. $2,350,000, R. $1,850,000; 1896, R. $16,500,000, D. $675,000; 1900, R. $9,500,000, D. $425,000; 1904, R. $3,500,000, D. $1,250,000; 1908, R. $1,700,000, D. $750,000; 1912, D. $850,000, R. $750,000, Prog. $325,000; 1916, D. $1,400,229, R. $2,012,535; 1920, R. $3,986,383, D. $2,891,252; 1924, R. $3,359,478, D. $845,520, Prog. $225,936. Total of winning party, $49,683,369; of losing party, $14,797,001.