Let me tell you a curious detail, in connection with that incident. The day after I came out of jail I happened to meet on the street one of the highest judges in this state—I know him because I play in tennis tournaments with his son. The old gentleman patted me on the back and said: “Go to it, my boy, you are absolutely right!” But when I asked him to say that publicly, he didn’t think it would be proper; and when I asked him to join the Civil Liberties Union, and help to protect all citizens in such rights, he didn’t think that would be proper, either. You see how even the most liberal of judges is bound by red-tape and precedent, and leaves it to others to defend the law.
I have seen in Los Angeles a magazine office raided without warrant of law, and the editor, a war veteran, manhandled and thrown into jail—all because the authorities objected to what this editor was publishing. And not only did the courts permit this, they tried the man, and would have convicted him if he had not run away. All over the country such things were done, with the full sanction of the courts. In New York City federal agents arrested a man and held him in a room in an office building for three weeks “incommunicado,” and tortured him until he flung himself out of the window and was smashed on the pavement below. Two other men began holding meetings of protest against this outrage, and they were “framed” on a charge of murder, and the labor movement has so far raised and spent about a quarter of a million dollars to keep them from being hanged. That is the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and you may learn about many as bad or worse from the American Civil Liberties Union, 100 Fifth Avenue, New York.
And how it is with ordinary civil litigation, in which the poor seek justice against the rich? Here I do not have to ask you to take my word, for the scandal is so notorious that even capitalist authorities have been forced to admit it. You see, there are eminent legal gentlemen, occupied in crushing the poor in major ways—the tariff, the trusts, the banking graft, “tight money,” child labor, and so on—but when it comes to a poor widow seeking justice against an employer who withholds her wages, these gentlemen think that the law ought to preserve an aspect of impartiality; it ought not be too obvious that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. For example, a majestic plutocrat like ex-president Taft, now chief justice of our Supreme Court; when such a weighty personage denounces capitalist justice, you surely will believe what he says! Here he is, speaking before the Virginia Bar Association: “We must make it so that the poor man will have as nearly as possible an equal opportunity in litigating as the rich man, and, under present conditions, ashamed as we may be of it, this is not the fact.”
Notice the delicacy of the phrasing, Judd: “as nearly as possible!” There is nothing “utopian” about our chief justice! Just how possible it is for impotence to be equal to power, is something which has not yet been shown to us; but evidently there is some limit to the possibility, for Dean Pound of the Harvard Law School speaks of the attitude of the law to the poor as “this neglect which disgraces American justice.”
For my part, you understand, I do not expect the poor ever to get equal justice against the rich; it seems to me absurd to imagine such a thing happening. The existence of riches in the world, at the same time as poverty, is in itself the sum of all injustices; and so, if we really care about justice, we must either make the rich as poor as the poor, or else make the poor as rich as the rich, or else strike a happy medium between the two. This last is my solution and I hope to show you how it can be done.
LETTER X
My dear Judd:
We have seen the poor struggling to protect themselves against the rich in the field of politics, and meeting with no great success. There is another place where they struggle—in the labor market. Let us see what happens to them there.