The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12

by William Cowper Brann

And what is true of Texas is true in greater or less degree of every State in the Union. Development, so dear to the heart of the patriotic and public-spirited citizen, has a tendency to transform an independent and moderately prosperous people into masters and slaves. But this is not the fault of labor-saving machinery, nor of capital, nor of development by itself considered. The more wealth labor creates, the more it should enjoy. When the reverse is the case distribution is at fault.

The substitution of expensive machinery for hand-labor eliminated the independent artisan. His productive power was multiplied; but his independence—his ability to care for himself without the cooperation of large capital— was gone. The wheelwright could not return to his shop nor the shoemaker to his last and live in comfort. Competition with the iron fingers of the great factory were impossible. Labor must now await the pleasure of capital— the creature has become lord of its creator. The fierce competition of idle armies forces wages down, and slowly but surely the workman is sinking back to the level occupied before the cunning brain of genius harnessed the lightning to his lathe and gave him nerves of steel and muscles of brass with which to fight his battle for bread.

With the improved machinery with which he is provided, the American workman can create as much wealth in a week as he need consume in a month; but he goes down on his knees and thanks God and the plutocracy for an opportunity to toil 300 days in the year for a bare subsistence.

. . .

Unfortunately, I have no catholicon for every industrial ill—but the political drug-stores are full of 'em. All you've got to do is to select your panacea, pull the cork and let peace and plenty overflow a grateful land—so we're told. Instead of the cure-me-quicks prescribed by the economic M.D.'s, I believe that our industrial system has been doped with entirely too many drugs. I'd throw physic to the dogs, exercise a little common-sense and give nature a chance. There's an old story of an Arkansaw doctor who invariably threw his patients into fits because he was master of that complaint; but the economic M.D.'s can't even cure fits. When they attempt it the patient goes into convulsions.

Instead of going to so much trouble to bar out cheap goods by means of tariff walls, I'd bar out cheap men. If you're making monkey-wrenches at $2 a day and some fellow abroad is building 'em for 50 cents, your boss comes to you and says:

"Jim, we've got to have a tariff to keep out the product of pauper labor or our nether garment's ripped from narrative to neck-band. I can't pay you $2 and compete with an employer who pays but 50 cents."

That sounds reasonable and you swing back on the G.O.P. tow-line and lay a tariff-tax on monkey-wrenches that looms up like an old-time Democratic majority in Texas. And while you are burning ratification tar-barrels and trying to shake hands with yourself in the mirror at the Mechanic's Exchange, that 50 cent fellow crosses the briny and robs you of your bench. Your old employer is protected all right, but where do you come in? You don't come in; you simply stand out in the industrial norther. You count the railroad ties from town to town while your wife takes in washing, your daughter goes to work in a factory at two dollars a week and your son grows up an ignorant Arab and gets into ward politics or the penitentiary. You can't compete with the importation, because you've been bred to a higher standard of living. You must have meat three times a day, a newspaper at breakfast and a new book—or the ICONOCLAST —after supper. You must have your plunge bath and spring bed, your clean shave and Sunday shirt. How can you hope to hold your job when a man is bidding for it who takes up his belly-band for breakfast, dines on slum- gullion and sucks his breath for supper; to whom literature is an unknown luxury, a bath a deplorable accident, and a crummy old blanket a comfortable bed? You can't do it, and if you'll take the Apostle's advice you'll quit trying.

No; I wouldn't prevent the immigration of worthy Europeans—men of intelligence, who dignify labor. We have millions such in America, and they are most estimable citizens. Our ancestors were all Europeans, and that man who is not proud of his parentage should have been born a beast. But I'd knock higher than Gilderoy's kite the theory that America should forever be the dumping- ground for foreign filth—that people will be warmly welcomed here whom no other country wants and the devil wouldn't have.

We have made American citizenship entirely too cheap. We permit every creature that can poise on its hind legs and call itself a man, to sway the scepter of American Sovereignty—to become an important factor in the formation of our public polity; and then, with this venal vote on the one hand, eager to be bought, and the plutocrat on the other anxious to buy, we wonder why it is that the invariable tendency of our laws is to make the rich man a prince and the poor man a Populist—why we are "great only in that strange spell, a name."