The industrial republic: a study of the America of ten years hence

by Upton Sinclair

We have moved on to another kind of struggle—to the kind which is known as industrial competition. And we are to come to the end of that in precisely the same way. We are to see the fittest survive, and grow, and establish themselves impregnably; and so long as there is room for competition they will compete; and when they find there is no longer room for competition, that by continuing it they are doing as much harm to themselves as to their rivals, they will put an end to competition, and no power on earth can prevent their putting an end to it. Any power which really tried to prevent their putting an end to it would simply destroy them, as two civilised nations would be destroyed if they could be compelled to keep on making war against each other.

The great task of civilisation is the leading of men to recognise when these mighty changes have taken place. For so far I have spoken of only one side of the evolutionary process; I have shown the victory—but there are also defeats. Sometimes in the struggle between the individual and his environment, it is the environment that conquers. Sometimes the man or the society is not equal to the new task, and falls back; and the law of this is death. The stag which can run swiftly enough escapes, and is able to run all the more swiftly as the result of the race; the stag which cannot run quite swiftly enough becomes venison. The tiny shoot which can grow high enough finds the light, and becomes a mighty tree; its neighbour which could not grow quite so high, turns to mould. There comes now and then in the history of every living thing some moment when its future hangs in the balance; when it summons all its forces, and lives or dies. The butterfly faces such a crisis when it emerges from the chrysalis; the child when it is born. You have known such fateful hours in your own moral life; and you can go through history and put your finger upon them—here when the Greeks drove back the Persians, here when the Franks drove back the Saracens, here on the field of Waterloo, on the hills of Gettysburg.

You would like to stay as you are, of course; for that is the least trouble. You have your routine and your habits, your old well-worn paths in which your thoughts move—you would like to stay as you are. But the curse of life is upon you—you cannot stay as you are. You have to go forward, or else to go back. When the crisis comes there is no escaping it—it comes. When the birth-pangs begin, either the child is born, or the mother dies; when the throes of revolution seize a nation, either the old forms are shattered, or the life of the people is crushed. There was once a reformation and a revolution in France; there was no reformation and no revolution in Spain. So in one case you have new life and abounding vigour—literatures and philosophies and sciences, and impulse after impulse without end; and on the other hand you have stagnation and ruin.

The task was simply too hard for the Spanish nation; they had lived for centuries in imminent proximity to an enemy of an alien faith, and the result was the fastening upon the people of a system of military despotism and religious bigotry. And when the danger was by, when the work of these forces was done, and the time came for the people of Spain to throw them off, their efforts were of no avail; their kings and their priests tortured them and burned them at the stake; and so the impulse died, and never afterwards did they lift their heads. In the same way consider the “Negro question,” as we have it in the United States. Here also we are dealing with a defeated race; a race which was bred where nature proved too strong for man—where savage beasts fell upon him, and deadly diseases smote him, and the swift powers of the jungle balked his every effort to rise. So for centuries and ages he was trampled upon and crushed, until every spark of genius was extinguished in him; and now we strive with all the resources of our civilisation—our noblest and best have given their lives to the task; and we do not know yet if we are to win or lose.

Let the reader of this book get a clear understanding upon at least one point—that no Socialist expects to abolish competition, and the survival of the fittest; all that any Socialist expects to do is to change the kind of competition and the standard of the fitness. The purpose of industrial competition is to raise up the industrially fit, and to establish a system for the feeding and clothing of men. The sign that the former task is done is the outcry against the money-madness of the time; the sign that the latter is done is “overproduction” and the “trust.”

The purpose of this little book is to lay before candid and truth-seeking Americans the overwhelming evidence which exists of the fact that industrial competition, as an evolutionary force, has done its work in our society: that it has disciplined our labourers in diligence and skill, and our leaders in foresight, enterprise and administrative capacity; that it has built us up a machine for the satisfying of all the material needs of civilisation, a machine that has only to be used; and that until we have found out how to use it, our national life must remain at a standstill, stagnation must take the place of progress, and in every portion of our body politic, the symptoms of disease and decay must multiply and grow more and more alarming.

We have been taught to think that the institutions of freedom in this country are so secure that we may go about our business and our play, and leave them to take care of themselves. And yet, “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” is the motto our ancestors left us. For the forms of tyranny change from generation to generation, and it is always out of the old freedom that the new slavery is made. You think that you can stay free by clinging to the good old ways, by repeating the good old formulas, by standing by the good old faiths; but you cannot, for freedom is not a thing of institutions, but of the soul. It has always been under the forms of spirituality that men have been chained by priestcraft; and it is with the very pennons and banners of liberty that this land is bound to-day. It always has been so, and it always will be so—that the despot asks nothing save that things should stay as they are. What was it that the slave-holder wanted, but that things should stay as they were? That men should hold by the Constitution as it was, while America was made into a Slave Empire? What is it that our masters want to-day, save that we should stand by the good old traditions of American individualism, freedom of contract and the right of every man to manage his own business as he pleases—the while the Republic of Jefferson and Lincoln is forged into a weapon for the enslaving of mankind?

There is not one single tradition of the early times that is not being used to-day for the betraying of liberty. Take the Monroe Doctrine, for instance. We shout for it every Fourth of July, and we are rushing to completion a score or two of battleships to defend it; whenever it is in peril, our most rabid anti-trust editors and politicians drop everything and take to singing Yankee Doodle. And yet, has never the least suspicion about it come to you? Has it never occurred to you to look who it is that is leading you upon this crusade of freedom—this strange propaganda of civilisation and republican institutions by battleship and rapid-firing gun? This zeal of our captains of industry for the spread of American institutions among the Filipinos and Hawaiians and Porto Ricans and Panamanians and Venezuelans, the while they are so busy crushing American institutions in Rhode Island and Colorado!

There was once a time when all the despotisms of Europe were banded together to destroy republican institutions, and when the threatening gesture of this young republic held them back from half a world. And thus bravely we guarded civilisation with our Monroe Doctrine, until the lesson of freedom had been learned. But now time has passed, and we have come to a new age, with new perils and new duties; there is a new kind of slavery in the world, and a kind in which we lead all civilisation. The control of our Republic has passed out of the hands of the people; by fraud and force our liberties have been overthrown—the very word has been relegated to schoolboy orations and Grand Army reunions. And by this new despotism of greed the people have first been plundered and crushed, and now are to be marshalled and led out to do battle with other peoples, similarly beguiled. In this work every force of reaction and conservatism in civilised society is now enlisted, every tradition of olden time has been called into service. No pretence is too hollow, no blasphemy too abominable to be employed; every national prejudice, every racial hatred, every religious bigotry is made use of—and the starving wretches of the slums and gutters of London are sent into South Africa to capture diamond mines for the glory of free Britannia, while the helpless peasants of Russia are led out with jewelled images of the Virgin in front of them to steal Manchuria in the name of Jesus Christ.

It is with Germany that we Americans are scheduled to battle for the sake of the Monroe Doctrine. And what is the situation in Germany? There is first of all, the degenerate who sits upon its throne, and proclaims himself by grace of God the lord and master of the German people. There is in the second place, the hide-bound mediæval nobility of the Empire, the direct descendants of those robber-knights of whom we read a while ago, some of them living in the very same castles from which their ancestors made their raids. There is in the third place, the aristocracy of the army, whose insolent and dissolute officers beat, kick and maim the helpless country boys and artisans who are herded like sheep under their command. There is in the fourth place, the bigoted seventeenth-century Protestant Church, with its snuffy country parsons and doctors of dusty divinity. There is in the fifth place, the mediæval Roman Catholic Church, with its confessional and other agencies of Darkness. There is in the sixth place, a subsidised “reptile press,” whose opinions are written and whose news is garbled by knavish bureau officials. And every one of these powers, forgetting all past differences, and uniting with brotherly affection, are struggling with every prejudice they can appeal to, and every threat which they can wield, to hold the German people subject to the identical same “System” that rules in America, the industrial aristocracy of cunning and greed; is working them upon starvation wages at home, and driving them to serve in armies and navies, to conquer markets abroad; to threaten Dewey at Manila, and to seize Chinese ports and conduct “punitive expeditions” against Chinamen; to sell bad whiskey and firearms to Hereros and then slaughter them when they rebel; to blockade ports in Venezuela and to sink “pirates” in the West Indies; and to sound and measure channels as a preliminary to the taking of a naval base and the inauguration of a war with the United States!