Great Fortunes from Railroads

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Surveying historical events in a large way, however, it is by no
means to be regretted that capitalism had its own unbridled way, and
that its growth was not checked. Its development to the unbearable
maximum had to come in order to prepare the ripe way for a newer
stage in civilization. The capitalist was an outgrowth of conditions
as they existed both before, and during, his time. He fitted as
appropriate a part in his time as the predatory baron in feudal days.

But in this sketch we are not dealing with historical causes or
sequences as much as with events and contrasts. The aim is to give a
sufficient historical perspective of times when Government was
manipulated by the capitalist class for its own aggrandizement, and
to despoil and degrade the millions of producers.

The imminence of working-class action was an ever present and
disturbing menace to the capitalists. To give one of many instances
of how the workers were beginning to realize the necessity of this
action, and how the capitalists met it, let us instance the
resolutions of the New England Workingmen's Association, adopted in
1845. With the manifold illustrations in mind of how the powers of
Government had been used and were being increasingly used to
expropriate the land, the resources and the labor and produce of the
many, and bond that generation and future generations under a
multitude of law-created rights and privileges, this association
declared in its preamble:

Whereas, we, the mechanics and workingmen of New England are
convinced by the sad experience of years that under the present
arrangement of society labor is and must be the slave of wealth; and,
whereas, the producers of all wealth are deprived not merely of its
enjoyment, but also of the social and civil rights which belong to
humanity and the race; and, whereas, we are convinced that reform of
those abuses must depend upon ourselves only; and, whereas, we
believe that in intelligence alone is strength, we hereby declare our
object to be union for power, power to bless humanity, and to further
this object resolve ourselves into an association.

One of the leading spirits in this movement was Charles A. Dana, a
young professional man of great promise and exceptional attainments.
Subsequently he was bought off with a political office; he became not
only a renegade of the most virulent type, but he leagued himself
with the greatest thieves of the day--Tweed and Jay Gould, for
example--received large bribes for defending them and their interests
in a newspaper of which he became the owner--the New York _Sun_
--and spent his last years bitterly and cynically attacking,
ridiculing and misrepresenting the labor movement, and made himself
the most conspicuous editorial advocate for every thieving plutocrat
or capitalist measure.

The year 1884 about marked the zenith of the era of the capitalist
seizing of the public domain. By that time the railroad and other
corporations had possessed themselves of a large part of the area now
vested in their ownership. At that very time an army of workers,
estimated at 2,000,000, was out of employment. Yet it was not
considered a panic year; certainly the industrial establishments of
the country were not in the throes of a commercial cataclysm such as
happened in 1873 and previous periods. The cities were overcrowded
with the destitute and homeless; along every country road and
railroad track could be seen men, singly or in pairs, tramping from
place to place looking for work.

Many of those unemployed were native Americans. A large number were
aliens who had been induced to migrate by the alluring statements of
the steamship companies to whose profit it was to carry large
batches; by the solicitations of the agents of American corporations
seeking among the oppressed peoples of the Old World a generous
supply of cheap, unorganized labor; or by the spontaneous prospect of
bettering their condition politically or economically.

Millions of poor Europeans were thus persuaded to come over, only to
find that the promises held out to them were hollow. They found that
they were exploited in the United States even worse industrially than
in their native country. As for political freedom their sanguine
hopes were soon shattered. They had votes after a certain period of
residence, it was true, but they saw--or at least the intelligent of
them soon discerned--that the personnel and laws of the United States
Government were determined by the great capitalists. The people were
allowed to go through the form of voting; the moneyed interests, by
controlling the machinery of the dominant political parties, dictated
who the candidates, and what the so-called principles, of those
parties should be. The same program was witnessed at every election.
The electorate was stimulated with excitement and enthusiasm over
false issues and dominated candidates. The more the power and wealth
of the capitalist class increased, the more openly the Government
became ultra-capitalistic.

WEALTH AND THE SWAY OF DIRECT POWER

It was about this time that the Senate of the United States was
undergoing a transformation clearly showing how impatient the great
capitalists were of operating Government through middlemen
legislators. Previously, the manufacturing, railroad and banking
interests had, on the whole, deemed it wise not to exercise this
power directly but indirectly. The representatives sent to Congress
were largely lawyers elected by their influence and money. The people
at large did not know the secret processes back of these legislators.
The press, advocating, as a whole, the interests of the capitalist
class, constantly portrayed the legislators as great and patriotic
statesmen.

But the magnates saw that the time had arrived when some empty
democratic forms of Government could be waved aside, and the power
exercised openly and directly by them. Presently we find such men as
Leland Stanford, of the Pacific railroad quartet, and one of the
arch-bribers and thieves of the time, entering the United States
Senate after debauching the California legislature; George Hearst, a
mining magnate, and others of that class.

More and more this assumption of direct power increased, until now it
is reckoned that there are at least eighty millionaires in Congress.
Many of them have been multimillionaires controlling, or representing
corporations having a controlling share in vast industries,
transportation and banking systems--men such as Senator Elkins, of
West Virginia; Clark, of Montana; Platt and Depew, of New York;
Guggenheim, of Colorado; Knox, of Pennsylvania; Foraker, of Ohio, and
a quota of others. The popular jest as to the United States Senate
being a "millionaires' club" has become antiquated; much more
appropriately it could be termed a "multimillionaires' club." While
in both houses of Congress are legislators who represent the almost
extinguished middle class, their votes are as ineffective as their
declamations are flat. The Government of the United States, viewing
it as an entirety, and not considering the impotent exceptions, is
now more avowedly a capitalist Government than ever before. As for
the various legislatures, the magnates, coveting no seats in those
bodies, are content to follow the old plan of mastering them by
either direct bribery or by controlling the political bosses in
charge of the political machines.

Since the interests of the capitalists from the start were acutely
antagonistic to those of the workers and of the people in general
from whom their profits came, no cause for astonishment can be found
in the refusal of Government to look out, even in trifling ways, for
the workers' welfare. But it is of the greatest and most instructive
interest to give a succession of contrasts. And here some complex
factors intervene. Those cold, unimpassioned academicians who can
perpetuate fallacies and lies in the most polished and dispassionate
language, will object to the statement that the whole of governing
institutions has been in the hands of thieves--great, not petty,
thieves. And yet the facts, as we have seen (and will still further
see), bear out this assertion. Government was run and ruled at basis
by the great thieves, as it is conspicuously to-day.

THE PASSING OF THE MIDDLE CLASS.

Yet let us not go so fast. It is necessary to remember that the last
few decades have constituted a period of startling transitions.

The middle class, comprising the small business and factory men,
stubbornly insisted on adhering to worn-out methods of doing
business. Its only conception of industry was that of the methods of
the year 1825. It refused to see that the centralization of industry
was inevitable, and that it meant progress. It lamented the decay of
its own power, and tried by every means at its command to thwart the
purposes of the trusts. This middle class had bribed and cheated and
had exploited the worker. For decades it had shaped public opinion to
support the dictum that "competition was the life of trade." It had,
by this shaping of opinion, enrolled on its side a large number of
workers who saw only the temporary evils, and not the ultimate good,
involved in the scientific organization and centralization of
industry. The middle class put through anti-trust laws and other
measure after measure aimed at the great combinations.

These great combinations had, therefore, a double fight on their
hands. On the one hand they had to resist the trades unions, and on
the other, the middle class. It was necessary to their interests that
centralization of industry should continue. In fact, it was
historically and economically necessary. Consequently they had to
bend every effort to make nugatory any effort of Government, both
National and State, to enforce the anti-trust laws. The thing had to
be done no matter how. It was intolerable that industrial development
could be stopped by a middle class which, for self-interest, would
have kept matters at a standstill. Self-interest likewise demanded
that the nascent combinations and trusts get and exercise
governmental power by any means they could use. For a while
triumphant in passing certain laws which, it was fatuously expected,
would wipe the trusts out of existence, the middle class was
hopelessly beaten and routed. By their far greater command of
resources and money, the great magnates were able to frustrate the
execution of those laws, and gradually to install themselves or their
tools in practically supreme power. The middle class is now becoming
a mere memory. Even the frantic efforts of President Roosevelt in its
behalf were of absolutely no avail; the trusts are mightier than ever
before, and hold a sway the disputing of which is ineffective.

THE TRUSTS AND THE UNEMPLOYED.

With this newer organization and centralization of industry the
number of unemployed tremendously increased. In the panic of 1893 it
reached about 3,000,000; in that of 1908 perhaps 6,000,000, certainly
5,000,000. To the appalling suffering on every hand the Government
remained indifferent. The reasons were two-fold: Government was
administered by the capitalist class whose interest it was not to
allow any measure to be passed which might strengthen the workers, or
decrease the volume of surplus labor; the second was that Government
was basically the apotheosis of the current commercial idea that the
claims of property were superior to those of human life.

It can be said without exaggeration that high functionary after high
functionary in the legislative or executive branches of the
Government, and magnate after magnate had committed not only one
violation, but constant violations, of the criminal law. They were
unmolested; having the power to prevent it they assuredly would not
suffer themselves to undergo even the farce of prosecution. Such few
prosecutions as were started with suspicious bluster by the
Government against the Standard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the
Tobacco Trust and other trusts proved to be absolutely harmless, and
have had no result except to strengthen the position of the trusts.
The great magnates reaped their wealth by an innumerable succession
of frauds and thefts. But the moment that wealth or the basis of that
wealth were threatened in the remotest by any law or movement, the
whole body of Government, executive, legislative and judicial,
promptly stepped in to protect it intact.

The workers, however, from whom the wealth was robbed, were regarded
in law as criminals the moment they became impoverished. If homeless
and without visible means of support, they were subject to arrest as
vagabonds. Numbers of them were constantly sent to prison or, in some
States, to the chain-gang. If they ventured to hold mass meetings to
urge the Government to start a series of public works to relieve the
unemployed, their meetings were broken up and the assembled brutally
clubbed, as happened in Tompkins square in New York City in the panic
of 1873, in Washington in 1892, and in Chicago and in Union square,
New York City, in the panic of 1908. The newspapers represented these
meetings as those of irresponsible agitators, inciting the "mob" to
violence. The clubbing of the unemployed and the judicial murder of
their spokesman, has long been a favorite repression method of the
authorities. But as for allowing them freedom of speech, considering
the grievances, putting forth every effort to relieve their
condition,--these do not seem to have come within the scope of that
Government whose every move has been one of intense hostility--now
open, again covert--to the working class.

This running sketch, which is to be supplemented by the most specific
details, gives a sufficient insight into the debasement and
despoiling of the working class while the capitalists were using the
Government as an expropriating machine. Meanwhile, how was the great
farming class faring? What were the consequences to this large body
of the seizure by a few of the greater part of the public domain?

THE STATE OF THE FARMING POPULATION.

The conditions of the farming population, along with that of the
working class, steadily grew worse. In the hope of improving their
condition large numbers migrated from the Eastern States, and a
constant influx of agriculturists poured in from Europe.

A comparatively few of the whole were able to get land direct from
the Government. Naturally the course of this extensive migration
followed the path of transportation, that is to say, of the
railroads. This was exactly what the railroad corporations had
anticipated. As a rule the migrating farmers found the railroads or
cattlemen already in possession of many of the best lands. To give a
specific idea of how vast and widespread were the railroad holdings
in the various States, this tabulation covering the years up to 1883
will suffice: In the States of Florida, Louisiana, Alabama and
Mississippi about 9,000,000 acres in all; in Wisconsin, 3,553,865
acres; Missouri, 2,605,251 acres; Arkansas, 2,613,631 acres;
Illinois, 2,595,053 acres; Iowa, 4,181,929 acres; Michigan, 3,355,943
acres; Minnesota, 9,830,450 acres; Nebraska, 6,409,376 acres;
Colorado, 3,000,000 acres; the State of Washington, 11,700,000 acres;
New Mexico, 11,500,000 acres; in the Dakotas, 8,000,000 acres;
Oregon, 5,800,000 acres; Montana, 17,000,000 acres; California,
16,387,000; Idaho, 1,500,000, and Utah, 1,850,000. [Footnote: "The
Public Domain," House Ex. Doc. No. 47, Third Session, Forty-sixth
Congress: 273.]

Prospective farmers had to pay the railroads exorbitant prices for
land. Very often they had not sufficient funds; a mortgage or two
would be signed; and if the farmer had a bad season or two, and could
no longer pay the interest, foreclosure would result. But whether
crops were good or bad, the American farmer constantly had to compete
in the grain markets of the world with the cheap labor of India and
Russia. And inexorably, East or West, North or South, he was caught
between a double fire.

On the one hand, in order to compete with the immense capitalist
farms gradually developing, he had to give up primitive implements
and buy the most improved agricultural machines. For these he was
charged five and six times the sum it cost the manufacturers to make
and market them. Usually if he could not pay for them outright, the
manufacturers took out a mortgage on his farm. Large numbers of these
mortgages were foreclosed.

In addition, the time had passed when the farmer made his own clothes
and many other articles. For everything that he bought he had to pay
excessive prices. He, even more than the industrial working classes,
had to pay an enormous manufacturer's profit, and additionally the
high freight railroad rate.

On the other hand, the great capitalist agencies directly dealing
with the crops--the packing houses, the gambling cotton and produce
exchanges--actually owned, by a series of manipulations, a large
proportion of his crops before they were out of the ground. These
crops were sold to the working class at exorbitant prices. The small
farmer labored incessantly, only to find himself getting poorer. It
served political purpose well to describe glowingly the farmer's
prosperity; but the greater crops he raised, the greater the profit
to the railroad companies and to various other divisions of the
capitalist class. His was the labor and worry; they gathered in the
financial harvest.

METHODS OF THE GREAT LANDOWNERS.

While thus the produce of the farmer's labor was virtually
confiscated by the different capitalist combinations, the farmers of
many States, particularly of the rich agricultural States of the
West, were unable to stand up against the encroachments, power, and
the fraudulent methods of the great capitalist landowners.

The land frauds in the State of California will serve as an example.
Acting under the authority of various measures passed by Congress--
measures which have been described--land grabbers succeeded in
obtaining possession of an immense area in that State. Perjury,
fraudulent surveys and entries, collusion with Government officials--
these were a few of the many methods.

Jose Limantour, by an alleged grant from a Mexican Governor, and
collusion with officials, almost succeeded in stealing more than half
a million acres. Henry Miller, who came to the United States as an
immigrant in 1850, is to-day owner of 14,539,000 acres of the richest
land in California and Oregon. It embraces more than 22,500 square
miles, a territory three times as large as New Jersey. The stupendous
land frauds in all of the Western and Pacific States by which
capitalists obtained "an empire of land, timber and mines" are amply
described in numerous documents of the period. These land thieves, as
was developed in official investigations, had their tools and
associates in the Land Commissioner's office, in the Government
executive departments, and in both houses of Congress. The land
grabbers did their part in driving the small farmer from the soil.
Bailey Millard, who extensively investigated the land frauds in
California, after giving full details, says:

When you have learned these things it is not difficult to understand
how one hundred men in the great Sacramento Valley have come to own
over 17,000,000 acres, while in the San Joaquin Valley it is no
uncommon thing for one man's name to stand for 100,000 acres. This
grabbing of large tracts has discouraged immigration to California
more than any other single factor. A family living on a small holding
in a vast plain, with hardly a house in sight, will in time become a
very lonely family indeed, and will in a few years be glad to sell
out to the land king whose domain is adjacent. Thousands of small
farms have in this way been acquired by the large holders at nominal
prices. [Footnote: "The West Coast Land Grabbers." Everybody's
Magazine, May, 1905.]

SEIZURE OF IMMENSE AREAS BY FRAUD.

Official reports of the period, contemporaneous with the original
seizure of these immense tracts of land, give far more specific
details of the methods by which that land was obtained. Of the
numerous reports of committees of the California Legislature, we will
here simply quote one--that of the Swamp Land Investigating Committee
of the California Assembly of 1873. Dealing with the fraudulent
methods by which huge areas of the finest lands in California were
obtained for practically nothing as "swamp" land, this committee
reported, citing from what it termed a "mighty mass of evidence,"
"That through the connivance of parties, surveyors were appointed who
segregated lands as 'swamp,' which were not so in fact. The
corruption existing in the land department of the General Government
has aided this system of fraud."

Also, the committee commented with deep irony, "the loose laws of the
State, governing all classes of State lands, has enabled wealthy
parties to obtain much of it under circumstances which, in some
countries, where laws are more rigid and terms less refined, would be
termed fraudulent, but we can only designate it as keen foresight and
wise (for the land grabbers) construction of loose, unwholesome
laws." [Footnote: Report of the Swamp Land Investigating Committee,
Appendix to California Journals of Senate and Assembly. Twentieth
Session, 1874, Vol. iv, Doc. No. 5:3. ]

After recording its findings that it was satisfied from the evidence
that "the grossest frauds have been committed in swamp matters in
this State, "the committee went on:

Formerly it was the custom to permit filings upon real or alleged
swamp lands, and to allow the applications to lie unacted upon for an
indefinite number of years, at the option of the applicants. In these
cases, parties on the "inside" of the Land Office "ring" had but to
wait until some one should come along who wanted to take up these
lands in good faith, and they would "sell out" to them their "rights"
to land on which they had never paid a cent, nor intended to pay a
cent.

Or, if the nature of the land was doubtful, they would postpone all
investigation until the height of the floods during the rainy season,
when surveyors, in interest with themselves, would be sent out to
make favorable reports as to the "swampy" character of the land. In
the mountain valleys and on the other side of the Sierras, the lands
are overflowed from melting snow exactly when the water is most
wanted; but the simple presence of the water is all that is necessary
to show to the speculators that the land is "swamp," and it therefore
presents an inviting opportunity for this grasping cupidity.
[Footnote: Report of the Swamp Land Investigating Committee, etc.,
5.]

In his exhaustive report for 1885, Commissioner Sparks, of the
General Land Office, described at great length the vast frauds that
had continuously been going on in the granting of alleged "swamp"
lands, and in fraudulent surveys, in many States and Territories.
[Footnote: House Documents, First Session, Forty-ninth Congress,
1885-86, Vol. ii.] "I thus found this office," he wrote, "a mere
instrumentality in the hands of 'surveying rings.'" [Footnote: Ibid.,
166] "Sixteen townships examined in Colorado in 1885 were found to
have been surveyed on paper only, no actual surveying having been
done. [Footnote: Ibid., 165 ] In twenty-two other townships examined
in Colorado, purporting to have been surveyed under a "special-
deposit" contract awarded in 1881, the surveys were found wholly
fraudulent in seven, while the other fifteen were full of fraud."
[Footnote: House Documents, etc., 1885-86, ii: 165]

These are a very few of the numerous instances cited by Commissioner
Sparks. Although the law restricted surveys to agricultural lands and
for homestead entries, yet the Land Office had long corruptly allowed
what it was pleased to term certain "liberal regulations." Surveys
were so construed as to include any portion of townships the "larger
portion" of which was not "known" to be of a mineral character. These
"regulations," which were nothing more or less than an extra-legal
license to land-grabbers, also granted surveys for desert lands and
timber lands under the timber-land act. By the terms of this act, it
will be recalled, those who entered and took title to desert and
timber lands were not required to be actual settlers. Thus, it was
only necessary for the surveyors in the hire of the great land
grabbers to report fine grazing, agricultural, timber or mineral land
as "desert land," and vast areas could be seized by single
individuals or corporations with facility.

Two specific laws directly contributed to the effectiveness of this
spoliation. One act, passed by Congress on May 30, 1862, authorized
surveys to be made at the expense of settlers in the townships that
those settlers desired surveyed. Another act, called the Deposit Act,
passed in 1871, provided that the amounts deposited by settlers
should be partly applied in payment for the lands thus surveyed.
Together, these two laws made the grasping of land on an extensive
scale a simple process. The "settler" (which so often meant, in
reality, the capitalist) could secure the collusion of the Land
Office, and have fraudulent surveys made. Under these surveys he
could lay claim to immense tracts of the most valuable land and have
them reported as "swamp" or "desert" lands; he could have the
boundaries of original claims vastly enlarged; and the fact that part
of his disbursements for surveying was considered as a payment for
those lands, stood in law as virtually a confirmation of his claim.

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