As to ballot-box stuffing, Judd I am not making any guesses, but telling you what I have seen with my own eyes. In my ardent youth I gave my services as election-watcher for the “reform” ticket in New York City, and came very close to getting my head stove in, for trying to prevent the counting of illegal ballots by Tammany heelers; the thing that saved me was the fact that as the returns came in, the heelers perceived that they had won anyhow, and didn’t need the extra ballots! Lincoln Steffens, in his book, “The Shame of the Cities,” tells how in Philadelphia the machine used to vote “dead dogs and negro babies”; the title of that chapter was “Philadelphia Corrupt and Contented,” and today you can take out the name Philadelphia, and insert the name of any big American city you please.
The poor have never carried a national election in this country since the civil war, and the reason is simple, they have been too poor. It costs a million dollars to put a single piece of literature into the hands of all the voters in our country; and when you figure the cost of the speakers and the halls and the advertising and the bands and the red fire and the rockets and the flags and the bunting and the bunk, you have a total of several times as many millions as ever got acknowledged in the reports of campaign expenditures turned in according to law. The poor cannot produce these millions; and even if they had the money, they could not get the publicity, because the capitalist papers will not print the arguments of the poor, even as advertisements—I know, because I have tried it; the radio will not accept speakers for the poor—I know, because I have tried that also.
As for the second line of defense, the breaking up of popular movements and the bedeviling of popular legislation, the proof is the story of every “reform” movement that has taken office anywhere in the United States. Never once since the Civil War have the people succeeded in making effective a major piece of legislation in their own interest; the proof of which extreme statement lies in the statistics of real wages in the United States—the fact that in the richest nation in the world, for the period of its greatest productivity and expansion, the poor have been growing poorer. We have had campaigns of “muckraking,” yes; I remember how, many years ago, “Everybody’s Magazine” printed a boastful editorial, listing all the crusades they had carried on for the benefit of the people; and I wrote, challenging them to point out one single practical result which had come of all their efforts, to show where they had been able to divert a single dollar from the pockets of the rich into the pockets of the poor; and “Everybody’s” did not take up that challenge, nor even print it. To complete the story, note that “Everybody’s” has long since forgotten that it ever had any interest in social justice, and so has every other magazine of big circulation in the United States.
The third line of defense, the courts: that is the most shameful story of all, and for it I reserve a separate letter. For the moment let me make just one statement: there is not in the Constitution of the United States one line which entitles the courts to throw out or to annul an act of Congress. Such action is pure and absolute usurpation, a power which the courts have seized; and they have got away with it for one reason and one only—because it has served the interests of the rich. On that basis they have vetoed law after law, culminating in the recent decision which sentenced a million little children to slave out their lives in cotton mills and coal mines.
And then, the last line of defense: I say that when the rich do not like the law, they simply defy it. The proof of that statement is written on the front pages of our newspapers day by day. The rich are making no pretense of obeying the prohibition law; I have had drinks offered to me, in defiance of law, in the offices of leading senators and government officials. The big bootleggers today are eminent citizens, on terms of equality with bankers and judges and corporation attorneys; and yet we speculate about the spread of the crime wave!
But the crimes that interest me, Judd, are not house-breaking and safe-cracking, nor even bootlegging; for these take only a few lives, and destroy only a few characters. What I am after are those crimes which degrade whole populations, beating down their standards of life, and depriving them of hope and self-respect; those crimes which sap the foundations of free institutions. And those are the crimes of big business—in other words, the crimes committed by bankers and judges and corporation attorneys. I remind you of the report of a United States Comptroller of the Currency, published in 1916—to the effect that out of 7,613 national banks, 2,743, or 36% were “guilty of usury”—and this “according to sworn reports, made by the banks themselves!” But do you see any procession of national bankers going to the federal penitentiaries for robbing the poor? You do not!
Or take the Sherman Anti-trust law; the most flagrant case in our history of the nullification of a major statute by the will of the rich. This was a law forbidding combination in restraint of trade; it stood in the way of the profits of big business, and big business simply refused to give those profits up. The trust magnates fought the government—for thirty-one years that fight has been going on, in the courts, at the polls, in the kept press, and secretly by intrigue and bribery. Those public officials who could not be bought have been slandered and driven out of public life—Theodore Roosevelt, for example; and the result is that today the law is an absolute dead letter. The great combinations are being formed, all the way down the line—the power trust, the bread trust, the radio trust, the movie trust; they are establishing monopolies and holding up prices and watering stocks a thousand or ten thousand per cent; and what is the state of public opinion on the subject? One of the most conspicuous of the law-breakers, Secretary Mellon of the Aluminum trust, sits in our cabinet at Washington, and dictates a law cutting his own income taxes in half, and another law keeping his income taxes secret!
Or take what happened in the case of the Standard Oil trust. In 1911 the Supreme Court ordered it to “dissolve,” the purpose being to restore competition. The concern made a paper “dissolution,” into thirty-two separate companies, but for some reason these little companies remained in complete and brotherly harmony: so much so that in ten years they increased the market value of their stocks thirty-five times, and the dividends paid, including of course the stock dividends, amounted to eighteen times the total capital when the dissolution took place! In other words, what Standard Oil did was to make a joke of the law, obeying it on paper and defying it in reality. Yet, are the securities of this criminal organization any the less valid, any the less sacred under the law? Are its dollars any the less real? To ask such a question is to be a “Bolshevik.”
Throughout our history, ever since the Civil War, we have had scandals, and government officials have been caught selling out the people to big business thieves. The “credit mobilier,” the Tweed ring, the railroad land steals, the Ballinger land steals, the airplane steals, the war-contract frauds, the Sinclair and Doheny oil steals—one could name scores of such. Here and there efforts were made to punish the thieves; but in no case was the stolen money recovered. All those billions of fraudulent dollars exist today in Wall Street, in the form of perfectly sound and respectable securities, standing on a par with all other vested property rights. You, and the rest of our toiling masses, continue to pay dividends and interest upon them; as the system stands, and so long as it stands, you must pay tribute to all that mass of stolen wealth, before ever you can have one penny in your own pocket, one morsel of food in your own mouth!