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- From: nyxfer%panix.com@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu (N.Y. Transfer)
- Subject: HIST:How Capitalists Rule/Pt.13
- Message-ID: <1992Sep4.184040.12842@mont.cs.missouri.edu>
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- Resent-From: "Rich Winkel" <MATHRICH@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu>
- Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 18:40:40 GMT
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-
- Via The NY Transfer News Service ~ All the News that Doesn't Fit
-
- The Republocrats, Part 13:
- The farmer-labor upsurge
-
- By Vince Copeland
-
- Cleveland shows his teeth
-
- It was in the atmosphere of a farmer and labor revolt that the
- Democrat Grover Cleveland began his second term in 1893. Cleveland
- was not one to compromise with the new politics or bend even
- slightly to the new wind.
-
- There was a long, bitter depression in the early 1890s. And in
- those days there was no unemployment insurance, no social security,
- no Medicare, Medicaid, SSI, or Aid to Dependent Children. The very
- low wages of those still working could hardly bridge the gap for
- more unfortunate relatives.
-
- Then, as now, the corporations were cutting back and cracking down
- hard on the industrial workers--and many white collar workers, too.
- The railroad workers, who were in the best position to fight back,
- organized an exceedingly well-run strike at the Pullman Company,
- centered in Chicago. The main organizer and inspirer of the workers
- was Eugene Debs, by then in his early 40s but not yet interested in
- the socialism for which he became famous.
-
- The strike was so effective that the Eastern establishment
- practically foamed at the mouth, branding it as anarchy, communism,
- rioting in the streets, etc. But all that was happening was that
- the workers had withdrawn their labor and were deserting the
- railroad yards.
-
- Cleveland and his attorney general, Richard Olney, put their heads
- together to figure a way to get the U.S. Army involved so as to
- intimidate and/or shoot the strikers and end the strike. But the
- Constitution stood in their way. The governor would have to call in
- federal troops, and this John Altgeld of Illinois refused to do.
-
- Olney, like Cleveland, was a former railroad lawyer. He was also a
- director of several railroads. He advised Cleveland to use his
- power to "protect the mails"--which did not really need any
- protecting at this point--as a cover for using the troops. A bloody
- battle ensued. Debs and other leaders were arrested and sent to
- jail. And of course the Pullman strike was broken.
-
- This created a national crisis and an outpouring of sympathy for
- the workers from middle-class elements, including especially the
- great farm population. Governor Altgeld, a Democrat, wrote private
- letters to Cleveland condemning his actions. Getting no
- satisfaction, he went public and broke with his party chief.
-
- There were big protest meetings in New York City. Several famous
- Populists and well-known Democrats also condemned Cleveland's
- actions.
-
- A watershed election
-
- The fallout and the protest came well ahead of the election of
- 1896, allowing the rebels plenty of time to prepare. It would prove
- to be another watershed election that changed the face of U.S.
- politics, although without stopping or even appreciably slowing
- down the growth of monopoly and the mad rush of imperialism abroad.
- It was even accompanied by increased repression in the South.
-
- There was a great rebellion of the mass membership of the
- Democratic Party, especially in the West and South, against the
- party's Wall Street leadership. It was one of those attempts to
- take the power for the rank and file that we have seen several
- times since, but far more conscious and far more effective at that
- time than today.
-
- Whitney forces outgunned
-
- When the time for the Democratic national convention rolled around,
- William C. Whitney, the "kingmaker," chartered a railroad train of
- three luxurious cars and headed the route of the Empire State
- Special, passing from New York to Albany to Buffalo on the way to
- the Chicago gathering.
-
- Loaded with the usual champagne and smoked oysters, if not
- hummingbirds' tongues, and the best 12-year-old scotch and bourbon,
- the train picked up the leading New York, New England, New Jersey
- and Midwest bigwig politicians. There were even a few men of great
- wealth who deigned to be seen along with Whitney at these displays
- of democratic decision-making.
-
- Almost from the moment they arrived in the Windy City, the freeze
- was on. The scenes around the convention hall were reminiscent,
- said one, "of the Great French Revolution." An exaggeration, but an
- understandable one.
-
- The majority of the 900 delegates, like the 20,000 spectators, had
- a "lean and hungry" look that contrasted starkly with the sleek,
- slightly overfed jowls of the members of the Whitney pageant. Their
- general behavior was not that of patient, carefully maneuvering
- politicals, but of horny-handed sons of toil wearing unaccustomed
- suits and ties and spoiling for a good fight.
-
- Among other angry measures taken by the unruly body was a
- resolution condemning the actions of their own party chief, Grover
- Cleveland. This was unprecedented but it only half-expressed the
- bitterness of the occasion.
-
- William Jennings Bryan
-
- It was a stormy convention indeed. It nominated a man who owed
- nothing to the easterners, that is, to the Wall Street capitalists
- or their immediate political servants. This was William Jennings
- Bryan of Nebraska.
-
- The nomination surprised the whole country, including most of the
- political leaders of the Democratic Party. If elected, Bryan at 36
- would have been the youngest person ever to hold the office. He
- might also have been the most uncontrollable.
-
- Bryan has had a bad press in recent years, pictured as a demagogue
- and opportunist who tried to be all things to all people. His
- personality is made to seem quite ridiculous in the play "Inherit
- the Wind," for example. At the end of his life, in the 1920s, he
- took on the defense of the Christian Bible in the famous Scopes
- "monkey trial" in Tennessee (in which a school teacher was
- pilloried for teaching the theory of evolution). Bryan said he
- believed that God made the sun stand still. He expressed a literal
- belief in the Monday to Saturday creation of the universe.
-
- But at the time of his prime in 1896, this would not have seemed
- ridiculous to most people. Much of the city population, as well as
- his great farm constituency, was as hypnotized by Biblical
- quotations and references as he was. Unlike the fundamentalists of
- today, this part of the population was fighting for social justice
- as they saw it.
-
- Bryan's concentration on just a few issues in the Democratic
- platform--especially the silver issue--was part of an
- all-encompassing delusion shared by millions upon millions of
- voters and leaders. He himself fervently believed in the efficacy
- of silver as a payment for debts and the medium by which an economy
- of abundance and liberation would be achieved. He spent many days
- and nights of his life studying the subject.
-
- He made what is thought to be the greatest party convention speech
- of all time in his "Cross of Gold" oration. Whatever it lacked in
- great historical substance, it was a brave defiance of the Eastern
- rulers of the country and set the moneybags' teeth on edge.
-
- "We have petitioned and our petitions have been scorned," he
- declared. "We have entreated and our entreaties have been
- disregarded; we have begged and they have mocked when our calamity
- came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more."
- And after a long and dramatic pause: " We defy them." (Quoted in
- Louis Koenig, "Bryan," G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1971)
-
- While the subsequent campaign concentrated far too much on the
- silver question and tended to soft-pedal some of the most radical
- of the populist demands, it was generally understood to be an
- attempt to steer the country back on the old course of (at least
- occasionally) representing the "little" folk.
-
- It was silver against gold--the silver proletariat against the
- golden bourgeoisie. Naturally, this was not a real polar
- opposition. Nor did it comprehend the scientific truth about
- money--on either side. But it was a class struggle, even though
- distorted and in electoral form, with the oppressed classes
- handicapped and stifled in several ways.
-
- Red revolution in the Democratic Party?
-
- In the East the word went out that Red revolution had taken over
- the Democratic Party. Nearly every large newspaper (except the
- Hearst chain) condemned Bryan as a dangerous fanatic and came out
- for electing the Republican, William McKinley. This was all the
- more meaningful because they knew it was not a call for communism
- or revolution, but only a democratic challenge to the absolute rule
- of big capital.
-
- "Torrents of abuse poured forth from the clergy who beheld Bryan
- and the Chicago platform as equivalents in evil to the Devil and
- the Great Temptation. `That platform,' cried the Rev. Cortland
- Myers in Brooklyn, `was made in Hell,' and he promised to denounce
- it each Sunday until election. The Rev. Thomas Dixon Jr. spoke of
- Bryan at the Academy of Music in New York as a `mouthing,
- slobbering demagogue, whose patriotism was all in his jawbone.' His
- listeners howled their agreement. Other clergy likened the silver
- movement to theft. `Free coinage,' cried one, `will wipe out about
- half of every existing promise to pay.' Another saw a Bryan victory
- as inaugurating `a revolution the destructive consequences of which
- no man can picture.' And the congregation applauded. Distinguished
- clergymen everywhere ... joined the attack, although with a trifle
- more forbearance." ("Bryan")
-
- Whitney and the so-called "gold bugs" did a walkout from the
- convention--and, temporarily, from the party. About 250 of the 900
- delegates left with them. They set up the Gold Democrats, running
- a separate candidate to help the Republican McKinley win the
- election.
-
- Bryan was known in the East as the leading exponent (outside of the
- Populists) of a tax on the income of the wealthy. This was felt to
- be a direct attack upon Wall Street. Amounts of as much as 2
- percent of income (!) were mentioned as an adequate tax on the
- rich.
-
- When such a law was actually passed, a group of very expensive
- lawyers pleaded for the untaxable rich before the Supreme Court.
- The court declared the tax unconstitutional. Only in 1916 was an
- amendment to the Constitution passed in order to make it possible
- for Congress to enact an income tax law. Of course, this law has
- been turned around so that today the workers pay the brunt of this
- "graduated" tax.
-
- `Let's shoot a few of them'
-
- One of the most vigorous campaigners for McKinley and against Bryan
- was Theodore Roosevelt. He told a huge crowd at Soldiers Field in
- Chicago:
-
- "A certain Democratic leader" (he most probably meant Altgeld) was
- "one who would connive at wholesale murder" and "would substitute
- for the government of Washington and Lincoln a red welter of
- lawlessness and dishonesty as fantastic and vicious as the Paris
- Commune."
-
- Roosevelt had been one of the Republican observers at the earlier
- Democratic convention. Riding home, he told a reporter from
- Hearst's New York Journal that ~"the sentiment now animating a
- large portion of our people can only be suppressed as the Commune
- of Paris was suppressed, by taking ten or a dozen of their leaders
- out and standing them against a wall and shooting them dead."
-
- Roosevelt's estimate of how many rebellious Paris workers had been
- massacred was off by several thousand. In his book "The Paris
- Commune of 1871" (Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1965), Frank Jellinek
- wrote: "According to the latest unbiased authorities, the number
- [of the dead] is somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand men,
- women and children in 10 days. There were about 18,000 communards
- slaughtered, most of them put in common graves."
-
- Roosevelt later denied have prescribed such measures for
- disciplining the Democrats, but the reporter stuck to his story.
-
- Indeed Roosevelt was only expressing the general feeling of the
- money crowd in New York. Much of their vituperation was reserved
- for Governor Altgeld, whose forthright defiance of the President
- put his governorship, his career, and ultimately his fortune on the
- line, sacrificing them all for his principles. More and more
- vilified in the East and among the tops of the Democratic Party, he
- was idolized among the workers and farmers of his own Illinois and
- throughout the West and Midwest in particular.
-
- `The most dangerous influence'
-
- "His sharply chiseled French Revolution face," said one critic of
- Altgeld, "his high, ringing voice, his bitter vehemence of manner
- and his facility for epithet" all added up to anarchy and mayhem.
-
- Harper's magazine said he was "the most dangerous influence in the
- convention [having] the stamp of the agitator, who, when the
- bludgeon had failed of its full work, would be ready with the
- poisoned knife and who, in leading a victory-drunken mob, would not
- hesitate to follow pillage with the torch."
-
- This not exactly objective reporting was printed on July 18, 1896.
- It corresponded to the new hysteria being generated in the East and
- accurately expressed the feelings and opinions of the big rich who
- controlled the magazine.
-
- Roosevelt's later estimate was that Bryan was partly a youthful
- innocent while Altgeld was the real firebrand. Perhaps TR would
- have preferred that Bryan be shot together with his political
- manager, regardless of his relative innocence.
-
- On the other hand, the great Populist poet, Vachel Lindsay,
- immortalized Altgeld in his work "The Forgotten Eagle."
-
- "It is better," wrote Lindsay, "far, far better to live in mankind
- than live in a name.
-
- (Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if
- source is cited. For more info contact Workers World,46 W. 21 St.,
- New York, NY 10010; "workers@igc.apc.org".)
-
- -----
- NY Transfer News Service
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