Letters to Judd, an American Workingman

by Upton Sinclair

If a fellow won’t work, he has no right to anything—we agree to that, and we will shed no tears over shirkers and loafers. We are defending the real workers, and we say that such are entitled to the fruits of their own labor. Let us set that down for the corner-stone of our thinking; let us make it our test of a sensible and decent world. I ask you: Are the workers getting what they produce today? Or is some other fellow getting part of it? Put it the other way about, and ask: Are there any people in our country getting wealth without producing it, without doing any useful work? It is obvious that if any man gets a thing he hasn’t produced, some other man must have produced that thing and not got it.

I choose a case which lies nearest to your own heart, Judd—those three houses that are the security for your old age! You paid your good money for materials, and you put them together with your own hands, and you say those houses belong to you. If a fellow came with skids and a truck and tried to cart one of them off, you would surely stop him. If a fellow moved into one of them, and refused to move out, you would surely put him out. The law would back you—and so you believe in the law! But suppose I were to tell you, Judd, there are ways by which some fellow might take your houses away from you, and the law would not move a finger to help you, but on the contrary, would come and turn you out for the other fellow’s benefit?

Watch your step, now! Suppose that some man had the power to fix the prices of the things you have to buy day by day, your food and clothing and gasoline; and suppose he boosted the prices, so that you found yourself running short; then you’d have to put a mortgage on one of the houses; and when the mortgage fell due, if you were still short, your house would be sold by an auctioneer at a foreclosure sale, and the law would turn you out. Or let us suppose this man had the power to dilute the currency of the country, so that every dollar of yours became worth only half as much as it was before; don’t you see that he might deprive you of your three houses, one after another? There are a dozen different ways in which the trick might be worked; and strange and startling as the idea may seem to you, I assure you that it has been done many times, and will be done many times more. The world you live in is full of devices by which your pockets are emptied, without your ever feeling the touch of the thief’s fingers.

If a fellow comes along and tries to sell you a gold brick, you laugh at him; that’s an old one, and you are “on.” If he tries to sell you a gold mine in Kamchatka, or shares of stock in an oil well—come to think of it, Judd, I believe you told me you did take some shares in the Somebody-or-Other Oil Syndicate—twelve hundred dollars, you said it was! But you’ve learned your lesson now, and nobody can play you for a sucker again.

But, Judd, these things I am talking about here are not called swindling, they are entirely respectable things, with such beautiful names that you go to the polls and vote for them on election day, and for some of them you would give your life on the battlefield. For example, that thing called the “protective tariff”; such a lovely name, “protective,” it makes you think of a mother watching over an infant in a cradle! The economists call this tariff a form of “indirect taxation”; and what do these words mean? Exactly that thing which I said a minute ago—a device for emptying your pockets without your feeling the touch of the thief’s fingers!

Or take that thing called “inflation”; that is, the diluting of the currency, so that the money in your pocket is less money than it was before. The bankers all tell you that “inflation” is a most wicked thing, and you believe them, and are quite sure it couldn’t happen; while the plain fact is, the bankers have been doing it to you right along! They have deprived your money of about forty per cent of its value in the last ten years—and you, my good old friend, thought it was fine, because the value of your lots went up, and of your houses, too. It never occurred to you that the price of everything you bought was going up also; and that the value of your money in the savings-bank was going down; and also the value of your liberty bonds!

Judd, you get up by an alarm clock at dawn every morning, and boil yourself some coffee, and gulp down a couple of slices of bread, and maybe a fried egg, and give your chickens and rabbits their water and feed, and then you hustle off to work. For forty years that has been your rule, six days out of seven; you worked like an old mule, eight or nine hours of it, and then come home and worked till dark on your own place. There are forty-two million Americans doing much the same thing, and the total of what they produce is a thumping pile of wealth. And who is to get it, Judd? How shall it be divided? In the great cities, in many-storied office buildings, sit white-handed gentlemen at flat-topped mahogany desks, and these gentlemen have no idea of ever crawling around in the muck, or sweating in the heat, or freezing their fingers in the cold, or soiling their white collars and breaking the crease in their trousers—no, Judd, they have not an idea of it!

While you are working, these gentlemen have nothing to do but think; and the subject of their thoughts is one thing and one alone, how can they get away from you the largest possible share of that wealth which you are producing by your labor. They call themselves “great executives,” Judd; and what they execute is the American workingman. They have devised the most subtle and perfect machine of exploitation—that is, for getting you to produce wealth while they consume it—which has ever existed in the history of mankind. I am going to show that machine to you; I am going to take it apart, just as if it were an automobile, and let you see exactly how it is built. I will show you the thing called “stock-watering,” and how it takes away from you the greater part of your day-by-day earnings. I will show you the thing called “rigging the market,” and how that conjures the coins out of your purse—and mind you, old friend, not when you go to gamble in Wall Street, for you have never done that; but when you go round the corner to the store and buy a loaf that is made of wheat, or a shirt that is made of cotton, or any other article that is produced by machinery and shipped on a railroad.

Above all I am going to show you that most fascinating piece of wizardry, our banking system. You were a rancher in your youth; and some of your relatives are farmers back East. Well, Judd, we have a thing called the Federal Reserve Bank, and three years ago that bank reached down into the pockets of the farmers of America, and took out—how much, do you think? Just about four billions of dollars! And gave it to whom, do you think? Why, to the big bankers of Wall Street, and the manufacturers and trust magnates with whom they work hand in glove. Soon after that I traveled through the Northwest, and in state after state I found whole counties in which every single farm had been sold for taxes. Do you think I am claiming too much, Judd, when I tell you that you really ought to understand how such things can happen?