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

by Upton Sinclair

A revolution is a serious thing, Mr. Steffens. A man should not talk about a “revolution” except with a thorough realisation of what the word implies. A revolution means that the social contract has been broken, that rights have been violated and justice defied—that, in a word, the game of life has not been fairly played, that those who have lost may possibly have had the right to win. And the game of life is a pretty stern game for many of us, Mr. Steffens.

You and your friends, I and my friends, belong to a class whom this “system” touches only through our ideals. Editors and authors, clergymen and lawyers, we are pained to know that corruption is eating out the heart of our country—but still, if the problem be not solved to-day, we can put it off till to-morrow, and not realise what a difference it makes. But there are some in our country whom the System touches far more intimately and directly than this—some to whom the difference between to-day and to-morrow is simply a difference between life and death. I happened only yesterday to be reading a letter from a man who, I think, knows that “System,” which is our new government, in this personal and intimate way. I will quote a few words from his letter:

“I have been arrested, put in jail, prosecuted and persecuted. I have had my customers driven away; I have been boycotted to the extent that men who dared to trade with me have lost their jobs; I have had my home broken into at night; been beaten with guns and abused by vile and foul-mouthed thugs; been torn, partly dressed and bleeding, from the side of my wife, who was driven from her bedroom and roughly handled; and finally I have been shipped out and told that if I returned to my home I would be hung. Not satisfied with this they have twice deported my brother, who was conducting the business in which we were both earning our living, so that it became necessary for an adjuster to take charge, of our store.” All this was, needless to say, in Colorado; the writer is Mr. A. H. Floaten, a storekeeper of Telluride, but now of Richmond County, Wisconsin, where he was working in a hayfield when he wrote. He goes on to add that the charge upon which he was “deported” was that of selling goods to members of the Western Federation of Miners. “As for my brother and myself,” he states, “I defy any and all persons to show a single instance where either of us have ever violated any law or even been suspected of crime, or have ever wronged any person.”

Here is your “revolution,” Mr. Steffens, in full swing. One of the questions which I have for some months found myself longing to ask you is, how clearly you recognised in the Colorado civil war the natural and inevitable consequences of a continuation of your “government of the people, by the rascals, for the rich?” Here is an unequivocal declaration, by a vote of two to one, by the people in one of the states of this free country, in favour of a constitutional amendment permitting an eight-hour law; and here are representatives of both the majority parties pledging themselves to enact it, and then openly and shamelessly selling themselves out to the predatory corporations of the state. The people then resort to a strike to secure their rights; and when they are seen to be winning, the militia is summoned, criminals are hired to commit a dynamite outrage and afford the necessary pretext, and then every tradition of American liberty and every safeguard of free institutions is overthrown, and the strike crushed and the striker’s organisation exterminated with a ruthlessness and a recklessness which no police official in Russia could have surpassed. And then the party of “law and order”—that is the “System”—sat enthroned in Colorado, and the guileless reader of newspaper despatches believed that an “election” took place in that state last November! The “System” suspended the Habeas Corpus Act, censored newspapers and telegrams, opened mails, entered houses without warrant and drove women from their beds at dead of night, deported men, defied and threatened judges, shut down mines in spite of their owners’ will—and finally haled a score or two of elected officials before it and put ropes around their necks and compelled them to resign. And then the “rebellion,” that is, the agitation for an eight-hour law, attempted to reassert itself in the form of ballots; and by means of a threat of deposition it compelled the newly elected governor to accede in everything to its will—and in particular to retain in office the infamous militia official who was its agent in these crimes!

But we, as I said before, are touched by these things only through our ideals. We are sorry to see American institutions overthrown in an American state; but we do not live in Colorado, and we are quite sure that there is no danger of our being turned out of our homes. And yet we know that the system exists in our own city and state, and sits just as surely intrenched there as in Colorado. And we know also that it exists for a purpose—that it exists to rule. And are we to imagine that it exists to rule the people of Patagonia, of Greenland and Afghanistan? Do we not know that it exists to rule us?

How does it rule us? How does it rule the people of Colorado? Whatever is it that is wanted of the people of Colorado? Why, simply that they should go into the mines and factories and work, not eight hours a day, as they wished to, but twelve hours a day, the time the “System” bade them to. And what is it that it wants everywhere else—in California, in Maine and in Texas? What, save that those who have labour to sell shall sell it at the price the “System” is paying, and that those who have goods to buy shall buy them at the price the “System” asks? If this be so, is not the only difference between us and the people of Colorado that they went on strike against the “System,” whereas we are not on strike—we pay?

Let us deal with facts. Here is a corporation which runs a street-railroad in a city. It gives an abominable service, its cars are cold and filthy, its employees are underpaid wretches who work thirteen and fifteen hours a day—and the fare is just double that of the splendid government service of Berlin. And the public-spirited men of the city have for ten or twenty years been trying to do something with that corporation at the state capital; but the corporation has its lobby and continues to pay pig dividends upon its watered stock year after year. And then do the people of the city organise and go on strike against that corporation? No indeed—they pay.

You know of the agitation for a parcels post; you know that under the parcels-post system an Englishman can send a package to California for one-third of what it costs us to send one from New York. In Germany a ten-pound package may be sent anywhere in the Empire for twelve cents; and our post office pays the railroads more for its service than all the rest of the civilised world combined, though the quantity of mail matter carried is less than that of Great Britain, France and Germany alone! Yet we know that it is a waste of ink setting these facts forth. Is not the president of the United States Express Company the United States senator from your own state? The railroad systems of this country have, of course, their lobby in every state capital, and in Washington as well; and every single year the railroad systems of this country slaughter and maim the equivalent of a Gettysburg campaign—there were as many people killed in the last three years as the British lost in the entire Boer war. Yet there is not the least reason for this; the railroads could, if they chose, build cars which will not crumble up like matchboxes—they have proven it by killing only six Pullman-car passengers in the same three years. But of course you have to pay a large sum extra to ride in a Pullman car. If you cannot pay with money, you pay with your bones—in either case, of course, you pay.

And then there is the tariff. You, Mr. Steffens, are a man who has both the ability and the honesty to think, and you know what the tariff is. You know that it is a device to keep out foreign competition and thus enable home manufacturers to charge higher prices. You know that in the early days its effect was to make manufacturing possible by keeping prices at a level where a fair profit was paid. Above this level they could not go, because there was free domestic competition. The tariff was thus a tax, self-imposed by every man in the country, for the purpose of building up the country’s home industries; exactly as if the owner of a sugar-plantation should conclude it would pay him to grind his own cane, and should set aside his gains for a few years to buy the machinery. Now I might stop to argue the socialistic implications of such a procedure—involving as it does the doctrine that the manufactures are the interest and concern of the whole people, to the advantages of which, when completed, they all have a right. (No plantation master, I take it, would expect to furnish himself with machinery out of the wages of his hands.) Continuing, however, to discuss facts and not theories, you see that these industries which we have “encouraged” have now become the mightiest power in the land. It is they who have accomplished the revolution and set up the “System”; it is they who use the money which the people have turned over to them, to maintain and perpetuate the old arrangement—an arrangement which now enables them, since they have become monopolies, to charge for their products from thirty to fifty per cent. more than a fair price, as is proven by what they charge abroad.

The workingman, you know, Mr. Steffens, has all this justified to him by the fact that he gets his share of this “prosperity”; but of late the workingman has been finding that he does not get his share. He has brought the industrial machinery of the country to such a pitch of perfection that he produces more than the country needs; and so when foreign markets fail he is out of work part of the time; and the mass of unemployed labour operates by the “iron law” to beat down wages and to break strikes, and to make his share less and less. And all the time, to pay interest on the constantly increasing capital of the country, the prices of trust products are being raised yet higher, and the cost of living is rising, year by year.