Great Fortunes from Railroads

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Finally, out of the landowners, slaveowners, bankers, shippers,
factory masters and tradesmen a new class of great power developed.
This was the railroad-owning class. From about the year 1845 to 1890
it was the most puissant governing class in the United States, and
only ceased being distinctly so when the industrial trusts became
even mightier, and a time came when one trust alone, the Standard Oil
Company, was able to possess itself of vast railroad systems.

These different components of the railroad-owning class had gathered
in their money by either outright fraud or by the customary
exploitative processes of the times. We have noted how many of the
landholders secured their estates at one time or another by bribery
or by invidiously fraudulent transactions; and how the bankers, who
originally were either tradesmen, factory owners or landowners, had
obtained their charters and privileges by widespread bribery. A
portion of the money thus acquired was often used in bribing Congress
and legislatures for railroad charters, public funds, immense areas
of land including forests and mines, and special laws of the most
extraordinary character.

CONDITIONS OF THE NON-PROPERTIED.

Since Government was actually, although not avowedly or apparently, a
property regime, what was the condition of the millions of non-
propertied?

In order to get a correct understanding of both the philosophy and
the significance of what manner of property rule was in force, it is
necessary to give an accompanying sketch of the life of the millions
of producers, and what kind of laws related to them. Merely to
narrate the acts of the capitalists of the period is of no enduring
value unless it be accompanied by a necessary contrast of how
Government and capitalist acted toward the worker. It was the worker
who tilled the ground and harvested the produce nourishing nations;
whose labor, mental or manual, brought forth the thousand and one
commodities, utensils, implements, articles and luxuries necessary to
the material wants of civilization. Verily, what of the great hosts
of toilers who have done their work and shuffled off to oblivion?
What were their aspirations, difficulties, movements and struggles?
While Government, controlled by both the men and the standards of
property, was being used as a distributing instrument for centering
resources and laws in the hands of a mere minority, what were its
methods in dealing with the lowly and propertyless?

Furthermore, this contrast is indispensable for another reason.
Posterity ever has a blunt way of asking the most inquisitive
questions. The inquirer for truth will not be content with the simple
statement that many of the factory owners and tradesmen bribed
representative bodies to give them railroad charters and bountiful
largess. He will seek to know how, as specifically as the records
allow, they got together that money. Their nominal methods are of no
weight; it is the portrayal of their real, basic methods which alone
will satisfy the delver for actual facts.

This is not the place for a voluminous account of the industrial
development of the United States. We cannot halt here to give the
full account of the origin and growth of that factory system which
has culminated in the gigantic trusts of to-day. Nor can we pause to
deal with the manifold circumstances and methods involved in that
expansion. The full tale of the rise and climax of industrial
establishments; how they subverted the functions of government to
their own ends; stole inventions right and left and drove inventors
to poverty and to the grave; defrauded the community of incredible
amounts by evading taxation; oppressed their workers to a degree that
in future times will read like the acts of a class outsavaging the
savage; bribed without intermission; slaughtered legions of men,
women and children in the pursuit of profit; exploited the peoples of
the globe remorselessly--all of this and more, constituting a weird
chapter of horrors in the progress of the race, will be fully
described in a later part of this work. [Footnote: See "Great
Fortunes from Industries."]

But in order to contribute a clear perspective of the methods and
morals of a period when Government was but the mannikin of property--
a period even more pronounced now--and to give a deeper insight into
the conditions against which millions had to contend at a time when
the railroad oligarchy was blown into life by Government edict, a few
important facts will be presented here.

The sonorous doctrines of the Declaration of Independence read well,
but they were not meant to be applied to the worker. The independence
so much vaunted was the independence of the capitalist to do as he
pleased. Few, if any, restrictions were placed upon him; such pseudo
restrictions as were passed from time to time were not enforced. On
the other hand, the severest laws were enacted against the worker.
For a long time it was a crime for him to go on a strike. In the
first strike in this country of which there is any record--that of a
number of sailors in New York City in 1803, for better wages--the
leader was arrested, indicted and sent to prison. The formidable
machinery of Government was employed by the ruling commercial and
landed classes for a double purpose. On the one hand, they insisted
that it should encourage capital, which phrase translated into action
meant that it should confer grants of land, immense loans of public
funds without interest, virtual immunity from taxation, an extra-
legal taxing power, sweeping privileges, protective laws and clearly
defined statute rights.

THE SUPREMACY OF EMPLOYERS.

At the same time, while enriching themselves in every direction by
transferring, through the powers of Government, public resources to
themselves, the capitalists declared it to be a settled principle
that Government should not be paternalistic; they asserted that it
was not only not a proper governmental function to look out for the
interests of the masses of workers, but they went even further.

With the precedents of the English laws as an example, they held that
it devolved upon Government to keep the workers sternly within the
bounds established by employers. In plain words, this meant that the
capitalist was to be allowed to run his business as he desired. He
could overwork his employees, pay them the lowest wages, and kill
them off by forcing them to work under conditions in which the
sacrifice of human life was held subordinate to the gathering of
profits, or by forcing them to work or live in disease-breeding
places. [Footnote: The slum population of the United States increased
rapidly. "According to the best estimates," stated the "Seventh
Special Report of the U. S. Commissioner of Labor--The Slums of Great
Cities, 1894," "the total slum population of Baltimore is about
25,000; of Chicago, 162,000; of New York, 360,000; of Philadelphia,
35,000" (p. 12). The figures of the average weekly wages per
individual of the slum population revealed why there was so large a
slum population. In Baltimore these wages were $8.65-1/2 per week; in
Chicago, $9.88-1/2; in New York, $8.36, and in Philadelphia, $8.68
per week (p. 64).

In his "Modern Social Conditions," Bailey, basing his statements upon
the U. S. Census of 1900, asserted that 109,750 persons had died from
tuberculosis in the United States in 1900. "Plenty of fresh air and
sunlight," he wrote, "will kill the germs, and yet it is estimated
that there are eight millions of people who will eventually die from
consumption unless strenuous efforts are made to combat the disease.
Working in a confined atmosphere, and living in damp, poorly
ventilated rooms, the dwellers in the tenements of the great cities
fall easy victims to the great white plague." (p. 265).]

The law, which was the distinct expression of the interests of the
capitalist, upheld his right to do all this. Yet if the workers
protested; if they sought to improve their condition by joining in
that community of action called a strike, the same code of laws
adjudged them criminals. At once, the whole power of law, with its
police, military and judges, descended upon them, and either drove
them back to their tasks or consigned them to prison.

The conditions under which the capitalists made their profits, and
under which the workers had to toil, were very oppressive to the
workers. The hours of work at that period were from sunrise to
sunset. Usually this rule, especially in the seasons of long days,
required twelve, and very often fourteen and sixteen, hours a day.
Yet the so-called statesmen and the pretentious cultured and refined
classes of the day, saw nothing wrong in this exploitation. The
reason was obvious. Their power, their elegant mansions, their silks
and satins, their equipage and superior opportunities for enjoyment
all were based upon the sweat and blood of these so-called free white
men, women and children of the North, who toiled even harder than the
chattel black slave of the South, and who did not receive a fraction
of the care and thought bestowed, as a corrollary of property, upon
the black slave. Already the capitalists of the North had a slavery
system in force far more effective than the chattel system of the
South--a system the economic superiority of which was destined to
overthrow that of black slavery.

Most historians, taking their cue from the intellectual subserviency
demanded of them by the ruling propertied classes, delight in
picturing those times as "the good old times," when the capitalists
were benevolent and amiable, and the workers lived in peace and
plenty.

AN INCESSANT WARFARE.

History in the main, thus far, has been an institution for the
propagation of lies. The truth is that for thousands of years back,
since the private property system came into existence, an incessant,
uncompromising warfare has been going on between oppressors and
oppressed. Apart from the class distinctions and the bitterness
manifested in settlement and colonial times in this country--
reference to which has been given in earlier chapters--the whole of
the nineteenth century, and thus far of this century, has been a
continuous industrial struggle. It has been the real warfare of
modern times.

In this struggle the propertied classes had the great advantage from
the start. Centuries of rulership had taught them that the control of
Government was the crux of the mastery. By possession of Government
they had the power of making laws; of the enforcement or non-
enforcement of those laws; of the directorship of police, army, navy,
courts, jails and prisons--all terrible instruments for suppressing
any attempt at protest, peaceful or otherwise. Notwithstanding this
massing of power and force, the working class has at no time been
passive or acquiescent. It has allowed itself to be duped; it has
permitted its ranks to be divided by false issues; it has often been
blind at critical times, and has made no concerted effort as yet to
get intelligent possession of the great strategic point,--
governmental power. Nevertheless, despite these mistakes, it has been
in a state of constant rebellion; and the fact that it has been so,
that its aspirations could not be squelched by jails, prisons and
cannon nor by destitution or starvation, furnishes the sublimest
record in all the annals of mankind.

THE WORKERS' STRUGGLE FOR BETTER CONDITIONS.

Again and again the workers attempted to throw off some of their
shackles, and every time the whole dominant force of society was
arrayed against them. By 1825 an agitation developed for a ten-hour
workday. The politicians denounced the movement; the cultured classes
frowned upon it; the newspapers alternately ridiculed and abused it;
the officials prepared to take summary action to put it down. As for
the capitalists--the shipping merchants, the boot and shoe
manufacturers, the iron masters and others--they not only denied the
right of the workers to organize, while insisting that they
themselves were entitled to combine, but they inveighed against the
ten-hour demand as "unreasonable conditions which the folly and
caprice of a few journeymen mechanics may dictate." "A very large sum
of money," says McNeill, "was subscribed by the merchants to defeat
the ten-hour movement." [Footnote: "The Labor Movement": 339.] And as
an evidence of the intense opposition to the workers' demands for a
change from a fourteen to a ten-hour day, McNeill quotes from a
Boston newspaper of 1832:

Had this unlawful combination had for its object the enhancement of
daily wages, it would have been left to its own care; but it now
strikes the very nerve of industry and good morals by dictating the
hours of labor, abrogating the good old rule of our fathers and
pointing out the most direct course to poverty; for to be idle
several of the most useful hours of the morning and evening will
surely lead to intemperance and ruin.

These, generally speaking, were the stock capitalists arguments of
the day, together with the further reiterated assertion that it was
impossible to conduct business on a ten-hour day system. The effect
of the fourteen-hour day upon the workers was pernicious. Having no
time for reading, self-education, social intercourse or acquainting
themselves with refinement, they often developed brutal propensities.
In proportion to the length of time and the rigor with which they
were exploited, they degenerated morally and intellectually. This was
a well-known fact, and was frequently commented upon by
contemporaneous observers. Their employers could not fail to know it,
yet, with few exceptions, they insisted that any movement to shorten
the day's labor was destructive of good morals.

This pronouncement, however, need not arouse comment. Ever has the
propertied class set itself up as the lofty guardian of morals
although actuated by sordid self-interest and nothing more. Many
workers were driven to drink, crime and suicide by the exasperating
and deteriorating conditions under which they had to labor. The
moment that they overstepped the slightest bounds of law, in rushed
the authorities with summary punishment. The prisons of the period
were full of mechanics whom serfdom or poverty had stung on to commit
some crime or other. However trifling the offence, or whatever the
justifiable provocation, the law made no trades-union memorialized
Congress to limit the hours of labor of those employed on the public
works to ten hours a day. The pathos of this petition! So unceasingly
had the workers been lied to by politicians, newspapers, clergy and
employers, that they did not realize that in applying to Congress or to
any legislature, that they were begging from men who represented
the antagonistic interests of their own employers. After a short debate
Congress laid the petition on the table. Congress at this very time was
spinning out laws in behalf of capitalist interests; granting public
lands, public funds, protective tariffs and manifold other measures
demanded or lobbied for by existing or projected corporations.

A memorial of a "Portion of the Laboring Classes of the City of New
York in Relation to The Money Market" complained to Congress in 1833
that the powers of the Government were used against the working
class.

"You are not ignorant," they petitioned,

That our State Legislatures have, by a usurpation of power which is
expressly withheld by our Federal Constitution, chartered many
companies to engage in the manufacture of paper money; and that the
necessities of the laboring classes have compelled them to give it
currency.

The strongest argument against this measure is, that by licensing any
man or set of men to manufacture money, instead of earning it, we
virtually license them to take so much of the property of the
community as they may happen to fancy, without contributing to it at
all--an injustice so enormous that it is incapable of any defense and
therefore needs no comment.

... That the profits of capital are abstracted from the earnings of
labor, and that these deductions, like any other tax on industry,
tend to diminish the value of money by increasing the price of all
the fruits of labor, are facts beyond dispute; it is equally
undeniable that there is a point which capitalists cannot exceed
without injuring themselves, for when by their exertions they so far
depreciate the value of money at home that it is sent abroad, many
are thrown out of employ, and are not only disabled from paying their
tribute, _but are forced to betake to dishonest courses or
starve_.

This memorial was full of iron and stern truths, although much of its
political economy was that of its own era; a very different petition,
it will be noticed, from the appealing, cringing petitions sent
timidly to Congress by the conservative, truckling labor leaders of
later times. The memorial continued;

The remaining laborers are then loaded with additional burdens to
provide laws and prisons and standing armies to keep order; expensive
wars are created merely to lull for a time the clamors for
employment; each new burden aggravates the disease, and national
death finally ends it.

The power of capital, was, the memorial read on, "in the nature of
things, regulated by the proportion that the numbers of, and
competition among, capitalists bears to the number and destitution of
laborers." The only sure way of benefiting labor, "and the way best
calculated to benefit all classes," was to diminish the destitution
among the working classes. And the remedy proposed in the memorial? A
settled principle of national policy should be laid down by Congress
that the whole of the remaining of the public lands should forever
continue to be the public property of the nation "and accordingly,
cause them to be laid out from time to time, as the wants of the
population might require, in small farms with a suitable proportion
of building lots for mechanics, for the free use of any native
citizen and his descendants who might be at the expense of clearing
them." This policy "would establish a perpetual counterpoise to the
absorbing power of capital." The memorial concluded:

These lands have been bought with public money every cent of which is
in the end derived from the earnings of the laboring classes.

And while the public money has been liberally employed to protect and
foster trade, Government has never, to our knowledge, adopted but one
measure (the protective tariff system) with a distinct view to
promote the interests of labor; and all of the advantages of this one
have been absorbed by the preponderating power of capital. [Footnote:
Executive Documents, First Session, Twenty-third Congress, 1834, Doc.
No. 104.]

EMPLOYMENT OF MILITIA AGAINST THE WORKERS.

But it was not only the National Government which used the entire
governing power against the workers. State and municipal authorities
did likewise. In 1836 the longshoremen in New York City struck for an
increase of wages. Their employers hurriedly substituted non-union
men in their places. When the union men went from dock to dock,
trying to induce the newcomers to side with them, the shipping
merchants pretended that a riot was under way and made frantic calls
upon the authorities for a subduing force. The mayor ordered out the
militia with loaded guns. In Philadelphia similar scenes took place.
Naturally, as the strikers were prevented by the soldiers from
persuading their fellow workers, they lost the strikes.

Although labor-saving machinery was constantly being devised and
improved to displace hand labor, and although the skilled worker was
consequently producing far more goods than in former years, the
masters--as the capitalists were then often termed--insisted that
employees must work for the same wages and hours as had long
prevailed.

By 1840, however, the labor unions had arrived at a point where they
were very powerful in some of the crafts, and employers grudgingly
had to recognize that the time had passed by when the laborer was to
be treated like a serf. A few enlightened employers voluntarily
conceded the ten-hour day, not on any humane grounds, but because
they reasoned that it would promote greater efficiency on the part of
their workers. Many capitalists, perforce, had to yield to the
demand. Other capitalists determined to break up the unions on the
ground that they were a conspiracy. At the instigation of several
boot and shoe manufacturers, the officials of Boston brought a suit
against the Boston Journeymen Bootmakers' Society. The court ruled
against the bootmakers and the jury brought in a verdict of guilty.
On appeal to the Supreme Court, Robert Rantoul, the attorney for the
society, so ably demolished the prosecution's points, that the court
could not avoid setting aside the judgment of the inferior court.
[Footnote: Commonwealth vs. Hunt and others; Metcalf's Supreme Court
Reports, iv: III. The prosecution had fallen back on the old English
law of the time of Queen Elizabeth, making it a criminal offence for
workingmen to refuse to work under certain wages. This law, Rantoul
argued, had not been specifically adopted as common law in the United
States after the Revolution.]

Perhaps the growing power of the labor unions had its effect upon
those noble minds, the judiciary. The worker was no longer detached
from his fellow workmen: he could no longer be scornfully shoved
aside as a weak, helpless individual. He now had the strength of
association and organization. The possibility of such strength
transferred to politics affrighted the ruling classes. Where before
this, the politicians had contemptuously treated the worker's
petitions, certain that he could always be led blindly to vote the
usual partisan tickets, it now dawned upon them that it would be
wiser to make an appearance of deference and to give some concessions
which, although of a slight character, could be made to appear
important. The Workingmen's party of 1829 had shown a glimmer of what
the worker could do when aroused to class-conscious action.

CAJOLING THE LABOR VOTE.

Now it was that the politicians began the familiar policy of
"catering to the labor vote." Some rainbow promises of what they
would do, together with a few scraps of legislation now and then--
this constituted the bait held out by the politicians. That adroit
master of political chicanery, President Van Buren, hastened to issue
an executive order on April 10, 1840, directing the establishment of
a ten-hour day, between April and September, in the navy yards. From
the last day of October, however, until March 31, the "working hours
will be from the rising to the setting of the sun"--a length of time
equivalent, meal time deducted, to about ten hours.

The political trick of throwing out crumbs to the workers long proved
successful. But it was supplemented by other methods. To draw the
labor leaders away from a hostile stand to the established political
parties, and to prevent the massing of workers in a party of their
own, the politicians began an insidious system of bribing these
leaders to turn traitors. This was done by either appointing them to
some minor political office or by giving them money. In many
instances, the labor unions in the ensuing decades were grossly
betrayed.

Finally, the politicians always had large sums of election funds
contributed by merchants, bankers, landowners, railroad owners--by
all parts of the capitalist class. These funds were employed in
corrupting the electorate and legislative bodies. Caucuses and
primaries were packed, votes bought, ballot boxes stuffed and
election returns falsified. It did not matter to the corporations
generally which of the old political parties was in power; some
manufacturers or merchants might be swayed to one side or the other
for the self-interest involved in the reenactment of the protective
tariff or the establishment of free trade; but, as a rule, the
corporations, as a matter of business, contributed money to both
parties.

THE BASIS OF POLITICAL PARTIES.

However these parties might differ on various issues, they both stood
for the perpetuation of the existing social and industrial system
based upon capitalist ownership. The tendency of the Republican
party, founded in 1856, toward the abolition of negro chattel slavery
was in precise harmony with the aims and fundamental interests of the
manufacturing capitalists of the North. The only peril that the
capitalist class feared was the creation of a distinct, disciplined
and determined workingmen's party. This they knew would, if
successful, seriously endanger and tend to sweep away the injustices
and oppressions upon which they, the capitalists, subsisted. To avert
this, every ruse and expedient was resorted to: derision,
undermining, corruption, violence, imprisonment--all of these and
other methods were employed by that sordid ruling class claiming for
itself so pretentious and all-embracing a degree of refinement,
morality and patriotism.

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