Pioneers of Freedom

BY MCALISTER COLEMAN

With an Introduction by

NORMAN THOMAS

Grade Level and Copyright

Grade Level is 10.7 using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test in Microsoft Word.

First edition published by The Vanguard Press, 1929.

Second edition published by Ebooks for Students Ltd., 2020.

This ebook is in the public domain, and is free of all copyright restrictions. It is also free of digital rights management protection so you can distribute copies to your students.

See our other biographies, novels and popular histories at ebooksforstudents.org.

Comments or questions to support@ebooksforstudents.org or (202) 464-9126

Publisher’s Note

It is enjoyable finding an older book which still works. In these snapshots of American leaders, the writer provides good stories of each. He does not get stuck in laundry lists of the most important facts and dates about each leader. He must have realized that laundry lists were not going to appeal to his audience of high school students.

The author, McAlister Coleman, was an experienced journalist when he began “Pioneers of Freedom.” According to Wikipedia, he was “was an American journalist, author, and political activist on behalf of socialism and organized labor.”

Like all of us, Coleman was influenced by what he saw. By what he personally witnessed.  “During the course of his work as a New York journalist, Coleman covered the New York garment workers strike of 1909-1910 as well as the catastrophic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1912.  These experiences had a radicalizing effect and not long after the Triangle fire he joined the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and — while still working for the Sun — Coleman began contributing articles to the SPA's New York daily newspaper, the New York Call.”

From the choices of leaders he wrote about, you will see that he was an advocate of such radical causes as forcing companies to recognize unions and bargain with unions after employees had voted to form a union. This did not become law until the Wagner Act of 1935, some six years after the publication of this book in 1929. 

In addition to his journalism in New York City, he also spent time in West Virginia writing about the organizing that was going on the mines there. You will see details about the lives of miners in his chapter on John Mitchell, a president of the United Mine Workers of America.

Coleman’s support of workers went beyond journalism as you will see in the flyer on the left. He also ran for political office. And in the flyer you will see the names of his associates who were challenging the status quo in race relations and in the distribution of wealth in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. 

Finally as you will see in the book, Coleman was very fond of Eugene V. Debs, one of the most important American labor leaders of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His biography of Debs, titled Eugene V. Debs, A Man Unafraid is accessible and dramatic. We are happy to bring it back to readers as an ebook on Amazon in May 2020. It provides a good look at not only the life of Debs, but also the struggle of American workers to organize before the Wagner Act. It is the work of a journalist not a scholar or historian. In a review of Debs in The American Mercury,  H.L. Mencken said that "Mr. Coleman has told his story very well."

Jim McCabe

Ebooksforstudents.org

Introduction

This book was written to meet a definite need—the need for new heroes for the young people of America.

Pioneer Youth of America is an organization devoted to instilling in the sons and daughters of those who are active in the labor and liberal movement of this country the ideals which first gave birth to that movement and now give it such vitality as it has.

When those in charge of the activities of Pioneer Youth looked about for biographical and historical material which might capture the imagination of youth they found practically nothing of any real popular appeal.

Our children know all about the politicians, business men and warriors who stride through the pages of every school textbook. But the names of Tom Paine, Wendell Phillips, Altgeld and the others whose life stories are here sketched are strange to them. Indeed in many instances there is evidence that this ignorance is deliberately cultivated by the writers of our standard histories.

So the Pioneer Youth Literature Committee asked McAlister Coleman to prepare a number of short biographies of men and women who have fought for the freedom of the workers of this country after their own manner. Mr. Coleman has had intimate and extensive contacts with the labor and liberal movement in America and is well qualified for the task he has completed in this book. He makes no claim to original research. He tells in straight-forward fashion the important incidents in the lives of his subjects which give those lives significance to us today. I am glad that he makes no attempt unduly to glorify his “Pioneers.” I am also glad that he has not been lured by the temptation to “psycho-biograph” his subjects.

I recommend this book to that vast army of Americans, young and old, who are struggling for the things which these pioneers had at heart. In reading of their brave battles we may renew our determination to carry through our own struggles to successful conclusions.

Norman Thomas

— THOMAS PAINE —

PRESS AGENT FOR REVOLUTION

When the men in the tap-room talked of “Merrie England,” he shot a quick sidelong glance at them out of his dark eyes. He knew something about that merriment; how far it went and how deep. For he had been first a manual worker, bending over the making of corsets at a stitching-bench in the drab little town of Thetford where he lived with his Quaker parents. And then he had gone about collecting taxes from the bottom to keep the top merry and had sickened of that sorry job and thrown it up in disgust and now at the age of thirty-seven he was a failure in the eyes of all his little world. A tutor of dull boys, spending most of his time in coffee-houses railing against tyranny and talking science and a strange philosophy of freedom and fraternity.

Most of the “respectables” kept well away from Paine; he had a way of blurting out shocking things: stories of poor people whom he had met while collecting taxes, painful anecdotes of mean streets and people who lived in them, far from merrily. But there was a certain group of hard-thinking, realistic men who liked to put Paine at the head of the table and listen to him talk about science and what it could do to liberate the soul of man and what man could do politically to free himself. These had formed a sort of coffee-with-conversation club. Quite a lot of this was done in 1774 when men, still practiced the long-forgotten art of good talk.

Here the seeming failure blossomed out, assumed easy leadership. The face that at first glance seemed ugly with its long nose over a large, loose mouth lighted into compelling animation as Paine talked.

His mind ranged brilliantly. His education had been happily haphazard.

“My parents,” wrote Paine, “were not able to give me a shilling beyond what they gave me in education; and to do this they distressed themselves. My father being of the Quaker profession, it was my good fortune to have an exceedingly good moral education, and a tolerable stock of useful learning. Though I went to grammar school ... I did not learn Latin, not only because I had no inclination to learn languages, but because of the objection the Quakers have against the books in which that language is taught. But this did not prevent me from being acquainted with the subjects of all the Latin books used in the school. The natural bent of my mind was to science. I had some turn, and I believe some talent, for poetry, but this I rather repressed than encouraged as leading too much into the field of imagination.’’

One night Paine and his friends stood up at the table as through a smoke-hung room there came the genial figure of the unofficial ambassador from the American colonies, Benjamin Franklin, the old, shrewd scholar, inventor, philosopher, diplomat and man-of-the-world. Franklin gratefully took a seat among men who could talk his own scientific and political language, understand his present perplexities. For “Poor Richard” was finding rough going in London. With all his great heart and active brain he was trying to compose what began to look like irreconcilable differences between a stubborn people overseas and a stupid king and a blundering cabinet on the English side of the Atlantic.

English society was turning up its collective nose at this always unexpected old gentleman. What a relief now and then to slip away from the hypocrisies of a fantastic diplomacy to the smacking realities of science and philosophy. Franklin, grunting happily, slipped into a seat next to Paine and urged him to go on with his sparkling talk.

The keen eyes of the old philosopher were quick to detect the spark that burned beneath Paine’s shabby coat. Franklin had read stray bits of Paine’s political writing. Fie knew something of the man’s reputation for independent thinking and his power of expression. “A man we need,” thought Franklin as he listened.

Truth is, Franklin, whose name is associated with so many discoveries and inventions, was then and there discovering America’s first professional press-agent. He had fallen in love with Paine’s swift-paced mind. Like was calling to like across the smoke of a London coffee-house.

Back in Philadelphia, Franklin’s daughter had married Richard Bache, a capable and energetic publisher, devoted to the American cause, and to Bache, Franklin forthwith sent Paine, with this letter of introduction:

“The bearer, Mr. Thomas Paine, is very well recommended to me as an ingenious worthy young man. He goes to Pennsylvania with a view to settling there. I request you to give him your best advice and countenance, as he is quite a stranger there. If you can put him in the way of obtaining employment as a clerk, or assistant tutor in a school, so that he may procure subsistence at least, till he can make acquaintance and obtain knowledge of the country, you will do well, and much oblige your affectionate father.”

This letter was about all that Paine had when he arrived in Philadelphia, but it got him employment as an editor of the “Pennsylvania Magazine” and gave him an opportunity for the use of his brilliant pen, which had been so long denied him in his native land. He found that he had arrived in America at a crucial hour. All along the Atlantic seaboard the colonists were chafing under the oppressive rule of the mother country; but as yet there was no concerted drive for an open break with England. To speak disrespectfully of the King was still a serious offence, and to plead for American independence was sheer blasphemy. It is true that the Revolution was just around the corner, but as yet only a few brave spirits could see its inevitable approach. The great mass of American colonists, disgruntled as they were with the rule of George the Third, were in no mood for anything approaching a real revolution, a complete severance of the ties which still held them loyal to Mother England.

More than any other one man, it was this newly arrived immigrant, with no past performance to boast of, no social position, no formal learning, for that matter, who created the mood that finally led to the great overthrow. And he did this by use of a pen which soon proved itself a far more effective weapon than all the clanking swords of empire. It was Napoleon, after a famous victory on the battlefield, who once exclaimed to his generals, “Do you know what amazes me more than all else? The impotence of force to organize anything. There are only two powers in the world: the spirit and the sword. In the long run, the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.”

In the case of Thomas Paine, it was the spirit calling for the unsheathing of the sword. He sat down and with words that fairly flamed he wrote one of the most famous pamphlets of all time. It was called Common Sense. Common Sense was published in February, 1776. Of it Theodore Parker said, “Every living man in America who could read, read Common Sense.” Within a remarkably short time, the work of this obscure immigrant had gone up and down through all the colonies. Three months after its first appearance, 120,000 copies had been sold, and it is estimated that over half a million were distributed before the demand ceased. On everyone’s lips there was praise for “the unknown Englishman.”

Paine had done a miraculous thing. He had transferred to paper the fire of indignation that burned within him at the thought of English oppression. Using all the arguments that economists from that time on have marshalled against tyranny, Paine raked the corruption of King George’s court fore and aft. He showed the folly of the theory of the divine right of kings. “A king,” said he, “is a political superfluity.” Men should be loyal to a society of their own creation, not to a government that is forced upon them. “Society,” wrote Paine, “is produced by our wants, government by our wickedness.” Let the American colonists rise as one man, and independence would be theirs.

“We have it in our power,” said the author of Common Sense, “to begin the world over again. A situation similar to the present hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.....wherefore, instead of gazing at each other with suspicion and doubtful curiosity, let each of us hold out to his neighbor the hearty hand of fellowship, which, like an act of oblivion, shall bury in forgetfulness every former dissention. Let the name of whig and tory be extinct; and let none other be heard among us than that of good citizen; an open and resolute friend; and a virtuous supporter of the rights of mankind, and of the free and independent states of America.”

Franklin had chosen well indeed when he selected Paine as spokesman for the American cause. For Paine made articulate what countless Americans had only dared to think. Here was a revolutionary message open and unabashed. It struck dismay in the hearts of the British ruling classes, even as it gave hope and inspiration to the rebellious colonists. The moment that it arrived in England, where it was widely read, Paine became a marked man, and from that day on was everywhere considered one of monarchy’s most dangerous enemies. On this side of the Atlantic, George Washington, who but a few months before the appearance of Common Sense had decried the idea of American independence, was quick to recognize the storm which Paine’s little pamphlet had aroused. He and the other leaders of the colonists moved swiftly now to the final break with Great Britain. The Declaration of Independence, written by the masterly pen of Jefferson, put into formal shape the fervent appeal of Paine. The war which had been begun beneath the elms of Lexington and Concord now received the support of all the colonists, and British armies were soon landing on American soil.

Paine, distinguished writer that he was, was not content to confine his activities to propaganda. He enlisted with the American forces, walking for miles at one time to become aide-de-camp to General Greene. When the American army was forced to retreat in what seemed to be a disastrous rout, across New Jersey, Paine took up his pen again, and in another famous document, which he called The Crisis, he came to the defence of the harassed Washington. The story runs that he penned The Crisis on a drumhead by feeble candlelight after his day’s work in the field had been done. Paine pointed out to his countrymen the tremendous advantage in numbers which the British enjoyed. Opposed by eight thousand British foot soldiers, in addition to artillery and cavalry, the American army, he said, had dwindled at one time to less than a thousand effective men. It was nothing short of miraculous, exclaimed Paine, that with such a handicap the army should be able to maintain itself at all. “The names of Washington and Fabius will run parallel to all eternity,” he said in a prophetic moment. And then, with a phrase which was destined to become immortal, he summed up the desperate situation of the colonists as follows: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot, will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly: ’tis dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its good, and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.”

Month after dark month, when the American cause seemed indeed lost, Paine kept at his writing, denouncing the Tories, and putting hope into the supporters of the Revolution. Washington ordered that his pamphlets be read aloud to the troops by every officer, and many a would-be deserter had his loyalty to the great General reaffirmed by listening to Paine’s words.

The war dragged on, and always Paine was in the heart of it, living still in a state of poverty, but warmed by the thought that he was one of the central figures in the making of the Revolution. There is a touching story to the effect that Washington, coming upon Paine one night as the latter was writing away, in a barren hut, with his fingers numbed by the cold, took off his own greatcoat and spread it across the shoulders of the writing man. The General recognized the true greatness of this first American propagandist and was quick to acknowledge it when York-town brought down the curtain on the Revolution.

But here was a glutton for revolution who had temporarily worked himself out of a job. Like the war-horses in the Bible, Paine seemed to sniff the battle from afar. There were stirrings abroad and in 1787 Paine went back to England ostensibly to visit his mother, but actually to do a little of his favorite mining and sapping beneath the monarchist foundations.

While in England he wrote The Rights of Man, the third of his great works, and once more stirred up the Tory lion. The book was dedicated to Washington. It has been called “the plainest statement ever written of the principles upon which the United States was founded.” Of this exciting book, 120,000 copies were sold at once and the author was immediately sought by the police. The sale of Paine’s book was forbidden and his arrest ordered.

He slipped out of England, the jeers of hostile crowds at Dover ringing in his ears, to set foot at Calais amid the cheers of French revolutionists who promptly elected him Deputy to the insurgent Constitutional Convention in Paris.

Then Paine settled down to the well-beloved work of revolution-making. He wrote and spoke. With the Girondist, or more conservative, leaders, he hammered out basic laws which he hoped would consolidate the revolutionary gains.

But Robespierre, that Puritan terrorist, loomed suddenly on the scene with the sharp shadows of the guillotine at his shoulder. The milder voices of the Girondists were drowned in the death rattle of the tumbrils. The King’s head was demanded, against the sentence of the fumbling Louis, Paine spoke out from his place in the Chamber of Deputies:—

“Kill the King but spare the man.”

But Louis went up the fatal steps and Paine and the other Girondist leaders went to the Bastille. There, for a year, with men and women in surrounding cells being led away daily to their deaths, Paine worked at his famous The Age of Reason.

It was this book, a slashing attack on bigotry, superstition and miracle-mongering, which was to give Paine, an almost fanatically religious man, his reputation as an “atheist.” Today the most devout churchman would hardly lift an eyebrow over the doctrines in The Age of Reason. Paine was talking of God in “modernistic” language— the worship of God in terms of love to our fellow-man. But the “atheist” label stuck and, in some circles, still sticks today.

It was James Monroe, our Ambassador to France at the time of Paine’s imprisonment, who finally secured the release of one of the most distinguished citizens of the United States. The final pages of Paine’s fourth book were written in Monroe’s Paris home.

The French Revolution soon blazed out in Napoleonic grandeur. The Little Corporal, become Emperor, looked with no favor on Paine’s activities. Things became warmly uncomfortable for genuine revolutionists.

Our Congress had not been as quick as Washington to recognize Paine’s genius. The notorious slowness of Republics to reward their makers so worked in Paine’s case that it was not until Washington had made the most strenuous demands that Congress in 1785 gave to this man who had given every cent of the profits from his writings to the Revolutionary cause, a paltry grant of three thousand dollars. The State of New York gave him two hundred and seventy-seven acres of land at New Rochelle.

Thither Paine came back from France. And between New Rochelle and a house in New York where now stands number 59 Grove Street, Paine spent his remaining days.

He died in obscurity in the Grove Street house in 1809, only six people following him to his grave.

— THOMAS JEFFERSON —>

FIRST OF THE DEMOCRATS

Three men sit around a table in a house in Philadelphia. It is the summer of 1792. In the center is George Washington looking uneasily from one to the other of his cabinet officers, Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State, and Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury. President Washington has reason to be troubled. He senses the enmity that has grown up between the two strong men he has chosen as his lieutenants.

When he looks at Hamilton, there comes into the eyes of the President a light of real affection. Was not this brilliant and very charming young man his dependable aide in the darkest days of the Revolution? Had he not seen Hamilton riding recklessly into battle at Monmouth ? Had not the writings of this red headed young genius been of more service to Washington and the Revolutionary cause than ten regiments ? Small wonder that between Washington and Hamilton there was almost the relation of father and beloved son.

When Washington turned to the tall form of Jefferson, and looked into that face crowned with hair even redder than Hamilton’s, with broad forehead, mild, blue eyes and generous mouth, there was more of respect than affection in Washington’s glance. He knew, did Washington, that here in the author of the Declaration of Independence was a man to be reckoned with. He knew that there sat before him in the person of Jefferson, a philosopher, a man of the world and at the same time one in whom burned a real passion for democracy. He knew too that between the democratic Jefferson and the aristocratic Hamilton, a gulf had suddenly opened. If he could, how gladly Washington would have spanned that gulf. Deeply he longed for peace, hating political controversy, and always yearning to be back amidst the green lawns and gracious surroundings of the Mount Vernon estate.

But peace was not to be. There could be no compromise until those two, Jefferson and Hamilton, representing widely conflicting ideas, had come to grips in a struggle which as it touches the happiness of those who work with hand or brain today, is far more significant than any clash of opposing armies.

Presently at Hamilton’s invitation, the three arise and go out by coach across the rough cobbled streets of Philadelphia into the open country until at last they come beside the thunders of the Passaic Palls in northern New Jersey. Here where the textile towns of Paterson and Passaic now stand, here where capital and labor in these later days have waged many a bitter struggle, Hamilton planned to harness the mighty power of the falls to run factories for the production of cotton goods. Enthusiastically he explained to Jefferson and Washington his plans for setting up a million dollar company to establish cotton and paper mills and start a great national industrial center. A short time before he had presented to Congress his famous “Report on Manufacture.” In this he expressed the greatest admiration for the factory system that was rapidly spreading over Great Britain. He packed that report with facts and figures. He urged his countrymen to awaken to the possibilities of factory production. He pointed out how cheaply goods could be made by following the example of the Mother Country and employing, as Great Britain employed, young men and women, and children of “tender age.” He pointed to the fact that in the factories of England more than one half of the workers were women and children. He knew that the farmers would be hostile to his proposition, so for them he saved his cleverest arguments, saying that industry would need more of the products of the farms and that farm help could be drawn from immigration, while if America maintained her own factories, goods would be far cheaper than if they were brought in from abroad.

All these things he repeated to his silent companions on that summers’ day when the new United States was still so largely a country of farmers, when only here and there in widely scattered spots were faint beginnings of our modern factories. The Government, Hamilton went on, must do all in its power to encourage the manufacturers. It must not tax the factories that were to be erected here. It must show that indeed Hamilton was right when he said, some years before, that the ideal government was the rule of “gentlemen” supported by a strong military force. Two years later he was to break out in rage against democracy, the rule of the people, and exclaim to Washington that he had “long since learned to hold public opinion of no value.”

Hamilton talked on, full of his vision of a great industrial autocracy where the workers of “tender age” should toil from dawn to dark for the benefit of the manufacturers and the bankers. And Washington, who had little interest in such affairs, with his thoughts always on land and still more land, listened courteously but with secret indifference. For Jefferson this was an unhappy business. The United States that he saw in his dreams was no such factory-ridden nation as was being prophesied by Hamilton. Jefferson saw a collection of loosely bound states, each with its local traditions and self-governments and customs held together by common love for the rule of the people. In the center of the picture was the producer, the man who worked with hand or brain in the fields or small workshops. For him, rather than for Hamilton’s bankers and manufacturers and speculators, government existed.

But already that dream of a true agricultural democracy had become impossible of realization. The work that Hamilton and his followers had done at the Constitutional Convention could not now be undone, and over and above that, was the great drive of the Industrial Revolution taking more and more of the workers away from the land, both in England and America, and sending them into the cities and factory life.

Everywhere a tremendous change was going on in the manner in which people worked for a living. Everywhere the machine was beginning to displace the hand-worker. Instead of weaving cloth at home, weaving in England was being done in factories by a distinct class of skilled workers.

In 1764 James Hargreaves, an English weaver, had noticed that his wife’s spinning wheel, which had tipped over on the floor, went on whirling for a surprisingly long time. This gave him the idea that instead of placing the wheel in an upright position as had been done, more work could be had from it, if it were laid horizontally, and he invented a machine where one wheel turned eight spindles and spun eight threads at the same time. He named this Jenny after his wife and soon the spinning Jenny, so familiar today, was working on sixteen threads at a time. When you realize that in modern textile mills, machinery with one or two workers to attend it, can wind twelve thousand spools at once, Hargreave’s Jenny seems a crude instrument. But it started a revolution in clothes making.

A few years after Hargreaves perfected his invention, Richard Arkwright, an English peddler, invented a new sort of spinner which used no spindles. He drove his machine by water-power, and when in 1779 Samuel Crompton combined the advantages of the Jenny and Arkwright’s water frame, which he called the Mule because of its mixed parentage, one spinner could spin two hundred threads at a time.

The very year when the group stood there by the waterfall a young Connecticut Yankee named Eli Whitney was thinking about a machine which later was to be known as the cotton gin. With the gin, when it finally came to perfection, one man could separate as much cotton from the fibre as could three hundred handworkers. As soon as the Southern manufacturers saw the importance of Whitney’s invention, the amount of cotton sent abroad to English factories increased one hundred times.

So Hamilton who had studied all these changes in making his report to Congress was in step with the march of the times. Jefferson's theories were already becoming a bit “old-fashioned.”

It is one of the curious twists of fate that Jefferson, who could trace his family far back into English history, should turn out the democrat, and that Hamilton, who was born in the West Indies and about whose parentage there is still much doubt, should have turned out the aristocrat. Jefferson, brought up in Virginia with a thoroughgoing classical education, had come into contact with the frontiersmen of the days before the Revolution. All the time he was reading and studying books of philosophy and law he was mingling with men in buckskin breeches who wore Indian moccasins and rough hunting shirts, who stood squarely on their own feet and had little use for government of any sort. Jefferson’s father was a farmer. “Physically a giant, he was big in mind and strong in character. By the light of the log fire in the evenings, he was wont to read Shakespeare, Swift, and Addison to his family. An ardent Whig with advanced democratic ideas, he as a magistrate manifested sympathy for the plain people. His thousand acres at Shadwell [Virginia] were in the wilderness and on the frontier, and his son was as much a Westerner in his boyhood as is the boy of Idaho today, for the West is a relative term.”

When he went to Williamsburg, the capital of colonial Virginia, to enter the College of William and Mary at the age of seventeen, young Jefferson brought with his books all his democratic leanings, his robust faith in the wisdom of the common man. Small wonder that he flung himself so eagerly into the struggle of the colonists for self-expression; small wonder that it was he, the man who had wielded his pen so forcibly in behalf of liberty, who was chosen to write the Declaration of Independence. He knew very well from what he had seen in England and France what might happen to his own countrymen. From England he had written, “The aristocracy of England, which comprehends the nobility, the wealthy commoners, the high grades of priesthood and the officers of government, have the laws and government in their hands and have so managed them as to reduce the eleemosynary class, or paupers, below the means of supporting life, even by labor. They have forced the laboring class, whether employed in agriculture or the arts, to the maximum of labor which the construction of the human body can endure and to the minimum of food, and of the meanest kind, which will preserve it in life and strength sufficient to perform its functions.” “The paupers,” he said, “are used as tools to maintain their own wretchedness, and to keep down the laboring portion by shooting them whenever the desperation produced by the cravings of their stomachs drives them into riots.” They “furnish materials for armies and navies to defend their country, exercise piracy on the ocean, and carry conflagration, plunder and devastation to the shores of all those who endeavor to withstand their aggressions. Such is the happiness of scientific England.”

In France he again saw aristocracy at work and cried out in despair, “What a cruel reflection, that a rich country can not long be a free one!” Everywhere he saw Government hand in glove with those who lived by the work of the “common people” until at last he concluded that European governments are “governments of wolves over sheep” and that “as for France and England, with all their progress in science, the one is a den of robbers, and the other of pirates.” At the age of thirty he had written, “the whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.”

And here was Hamilton, the brilliant, dashing favorite of Washington, leader of all the powerful forces in the new nation, with frank contempt for the common man, urging that America bring overseas a system which had caused the far-flung misery and despair that Jefferson had seen with his own eyes in the working-class quarters of Paris and London.

Well, it might be that Jefferson was “old-fashioned,” and behind the times in his care for human rather than property rights, but by his very nature he could not sit by idly while Hamilton and his high and mighty friends ran the nation to suit themselves. Jefferson knew far more about the feelings of the average mechanic and artisan and farmer than Hamilton. He could speak their language, sympathize with their hopes and aspirations. He would go to the people themselves and tell them what was happening in this country for whose liberty they had struggled so bravely. He would show them how Hamilton and his followers had so arranged the financial affairs of the nation as to favor the speculators who lived by their wits rather than by any honest work. He would show them the dangers that faced the common man whenever he let government fall into the hands of a favored few. He would tell them that the Constitution which Hamilton had had so large a part in framing was a two-edged sword, and that while it was drawn up for the benefit of the big land-holders of the South and the merchants of the North, there was nevertheless, in amending it, the chance for the expression of popular opinion. He would explain very simply and patiently to the men at the crossroads in the country and at the coffee-houses in the cities that the Hamilton group, having failed in their attempt to write a property qualification into the Constitution which would have robbed the majority of the workers of their vote, now proposed to throw all the power of government on the side of property through the use of the courts.

What a mighty task was ahead of this lover of democracy, as side by side with his political enemy he bumped along the roads back to Philadelphia! Against him was lined up the world of finance and manufacturing. Against him were the newspapers of the day, the most influential of the preachers, the most brilliant of the politicians. With him were, to be sure, the workers and farmers, but they were sadly disorganized; they had no experience in politics, having left that sort of thing entirely in the hands of a few aristocrats. They were hard to reach, difficult to persuade.

The Constitution makes no mention of political parties of the sort we have today, and indeed, the idea of organized opposition to the government in the shape of party division had hardly been thought of by the framers of the Constitution. Nor at this time, did Jefferson think of such a device. He was not so much interested in forming a political party as in gathering together through all the colonies voters who would show their united opposition to the Hamiltonian aristocratic philosophy.

He began to rally his forces as soon as he returned to Philadelphia; “he set out to arouse the masses, mobilize, drill, and lead them.” In New York he found a rallying point for the principles of democracy in the Society of Tammany (the Tammany Hall of today). The Society was composed of what the Hamilton group at that time dubbed as “riff-raff,” but this riff-raff had votes and knew very well the business of organizing. In Philadelphia, Jefferson found a helpful ally in the shape of Phillip Freneau, called the “Poet of the Revolution.” Freneau had given all that he had to the Revolutionary cause. He had built a ship called the Aurora and had gone forth to do battle with the British. He had put every cent that he had into the building of that ship. In its first battle, the Aurora and its gallant commander were captured and Freneau had suffered tortures on a British prison ship. The poems he wrote later about his experiences in that floating hell did almost as much as the writings of Thomas Paine to enflame the spirits of Washington’s troops. Gladly Freneau threw in his lot with the democrats and enthusiastically attacked the Hamiltonians. While the majority of influential persons in New England were solid for Hamilton and his defense of property rights, nevertheless here and there Jefferson was able to find a few brave spirits who would spread his doctrines among the small farmers of the North. It was in the South, however, that he had his greatest strength. In the Southern states manufacturing had made no headway to speak of. The land was the source of all wealth, and those who tilled it had little use for the ideas of the wealthy city dwellers who rallied behind Hamilton. And the artisans and mechanics living obscurely tucked away out of sight in the wretched side streets of all the cities, could join with the farmers in a protest against the ever rising tide of the new Capitalism.

That Jefferson was able, in the course of eight crowded years, to assemble a political staff, organize the people into a strong party of opposition and eventually reach the highest office in the land, is an accomplishment that has few equals in the history of the country. It is difficult to realize the bitterness with which Jefferson and his “riff-raff” followers who were called Republican-Democrats, were attacked by the cohorts of Hamilton, who took the title of Federalists. Through letters signed and unsigned in all the Hamilton papers, Jefferson was held up as the arch enemy of law and order.

The French Revolution came to a head during the years in which Jefferson was gathering together his forces. The Jeffersonians naturally sympathized with the aspirations of the French people while deploring their use of violence. They realized that peasants driven to the point of starvation by the excesses of their overlords could not be expected to act the part of gentility. But for Hamilton that tremendous overturn in France was the rearing of the head of what he called “that great beast—the people,” and he and his merchant friends threw all their energies and influence into attacking every friend of the French Revolution. There was a deliberate attempt to make Jefferson a hated outcast. The doors of Philadelphia society were closed to him. Mobs marched past his home shrieking threats. Night after night, cut off from all contacts with his intellectual equals, Jefferson sat alone in the reading room of the Philadelphia Philosophical Society absorbed in his books and in his plans for educating the “commoners” as to their political responsibility. When he went to the quiet of his estate at Monticello for much needed rest, he still kept in touch with his lieutenants (the chief of whom was the able James Madison), urging them to fresh efforts on behalf of the exploited farmers and workers. If they had dared, the men about Hamilton would gladly have thrown this country into an alliance with England against the French Revolutionists. They made every effort to bring about this end and in this they were aided by the blundering tactics of the French representatives in this country.

The Jefferson group, however, was strong enough to avert what would have been a most disastrous war. They prevailed upon the eccentric John Adams, Washington’s successor as President, to keep the peace, but they could not prevent the coming of an American reign of terror whose counterpart can only be found in this country in that reign of terror which existed during and after the Great War. Everywhere, so-called patriotic societies were attacking the artisans and small farmers who were following Jefferson’s teachings. Everywhere the papers were spewing out their poison against Jefferson, longing for the day when, as one paper put it, “Jefferson’s head will be rotting cheek by jowl with that of some toil-killed negro slave.” In cartoons the quiet-spoken Virginian was pictured as “mad Tom in a rage,” pulling down the pillars of the Federal government with the devil behind him urging him on. Mobs raided the printing plants of the few editors brave enough to speak for Jefferson. All sorts of wild stories of conspiracies were spread about in the drawing rooms of New York and Philadelphia. Jefferson was plotting, according to these stories, with the French who were to invade the country, arm the slaves in the South, murder men and women in their beds, burn down churches, and turn the government over to a foreign power. Up and down Philadelphia marched men in uniform howling derisively when they passed Jefferson’s home, beating up and terrorizing every worker they came upon, making life miserable for all who did not agree with them that everything French was to be wiped out.

They succeeded, these merchants and financiers and speculators, gathered together under the banner of Hamilton, in rushing through two laws, known as the Alien and Sedition laws. The Alien law was aimed principally at the Irish and French immigrants whose outspoken support of Jefferson’s policies scared the guardians of the money bags of the country. The Sedition law was aimed to suppress all democrats who in any way attacked the government in the public prints.

Armed with these two powerful weapons the Hamiltonians went out to the hunt with more zest than ever before. They had trusted and powerful allies in the judges of the Federal Courts. Practically everywhere, from Maine to Georgia, the magistrates were on the side of property and against the producers of wealth. Especially in New England did they impose cruel sentences upon all who were hailed before them on the least suspicion of holding democratic ideals. The victims of this judicial tyranny were, for the most part, obscure men, workers and farmers and editors of small newspapers, with little money and few influential friends. They were thrown into dark and disease-breeding cells; they were dragged through the streets as object lessons for the people; they were hunted down by zealous followers of Hamilton. Their meetings were broken up, their printing plants destroyed, their lives constantly threatened.

Along with their propaganda against democracy, the Hamiltonians carried on a propaganda for a large standing army. They rarely came out in the open and told the people why they wanted so large and expensive an army. There was no war. No enemy except the dream enemy conjured up by the nightmares of the Federalists was threatening to invade this country. Why then, such elaborate “preparedness?” Against whom were they preparing? There were many among the workers and farmers who thought they saw in all this sword flourishing a new menace to liberty. The capitalists, it was evident, wanted a large standing army not so much for the defense of “national honor” as for the defense of their bank deposits. They wanted this army to be ready in case the people should “get out of hand.” Jefferson was distressed to see the manner in which this militaristic propaganda had taken hold even on those against whom the troops would be used in case of any trouble; and “trouble” in all such instances means that the workers are rising in defense of their rights. While he was moving toward the repeal of the Alien and Sedition laws Jefferson was using all his great talent to point out to the people the dangers inherent in a large standing army. The taxes which the war party had imposed for the upkeep of such armed forces aroused the people to anger, and among the Germans in Pennsylvania, there was even an insurrection against the tax assessors led by John Fries. President Adams himself became alarmed and explained to Hamilton who was begging him to expend more and yet more money upon the army;

“This damned army will be the ruin of this country; if it must be so, it must; I cannot help it. Issue your proposals as you please.”

With all their war dancing, with all their powerful friends screaming hatred from the pulpits and in the columns of their kept newspapers, the Hamilton group was painfully ignorant of what the mass of the people were thinking. They were drunk with power and looked forward eagerly to the complete routing of the Jeffersonians and the setting up of an even more autocratic government than any which they had been able to erect. They knew that they had in the courts a powerful ally. They knew that the courts would invariably rule in favor of wealth against poverty and so long as they could persuade the lawyers and judges to pass upon the constitutionality of their acts, they felt safe. But they were riding for a fall.

All across the country, the ideas and philosophy of Jefferson had been quietly spreading. No armies, no law courts could prevail against the idea that this country was essentially a country where the majority of people worked for their living and where that majority should eventually have the right to rule themselves. The scattered few upon whose courage and intelligence Jefferson had built his opposition, had grown into a compact political body. In New York in the state elections which were held in the spring of 1800, Aaron Burr, whose brilliancy in political matters was every bit as shining as Hamilton’s, fought the Federalists to a standstill and with the support of Tammany Hall won an outstanding victory for the Jeffersonians. In that election Hamilton had gone so far as to try to have the votes of citizens thrown out saying, “in times like these it will not do to be over scrupulous.” He felt that no one could object to “taking legal and constitutional steps to prevent an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics from getting possession of the helm of state.”

These terms, “fanatic” and “atheist,” were applied, of course, to Jefferson. As a matter of fact, Jelferson was a deeply religious man, if by religion one means more than mere lip service to an organized church.

Burr’s victory in New York should have been a warning to the Federalists of what was to follow, for New York was by no means a progressive community and the bankers were firmly intrenched there. Still blind, however, as to what was happening in New York and in other communities, the Federalists rode on to disastrous defeat. In the fall of 1800 the voters went to their polling places. When the ballots were counted, it was found that the majority of the people of this country had voted for Jefferson, the mild-mannered, great-hearted philosopher, who believed that government should be for all the people instead of the “rich and well-born.” For eight years Jefferson gave this nation an administration which has set standards for all others. He had won the first great fight for the common man. He was the people’s president and they loved him. From that day when he stood at the side of the autocratic little Hamilton with the thunder of Passaic Falls in his ears, he had so wrought, that the revolutionary character of this nation was preserved for the time being against all the onslaughts of privileged wealth.

— FRANCES WRIGHT —

DREAMER OF NEW DREAMS

Utopia is a Greek word meaning “nowhere.” It is also the word used by those who have dreamed of a better order of life to describe an ideal society where men, women, and children will be free and happy. Ever since man began to think of something beyond mere food and shelter, he has made Utopias. Centuries ago, in Athens, the great Greek philosopher, Plato, set down his blueprints of a social order in a stirring book which he called The Republic. From time to time, all through the ages, there have been those who have taken leaves from Plato’s book, and like him have had visions of a society in which philosophers would be kings, and kings, philosophers.

Small wonder that a people who had come through the storm and stress of an heroic struggle for liberty and had then gone forth to settle an entire continent, should have great-hearted dreamers, who saw in the new forces set loose in America the chance for creating a new world; not only a world of cities and towns, of roads and canals, but a new world of the spirit. We have quoted Thomas Paine as saying that not since the time of Noah had such an opportunity been offered to mankind as was opened up in America.

“I am come to this country,” said Robert Owen, one of the pioneer Utopians, “to introduce an entire new state of society; to change it from an ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened, social system, which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all causes for contest between the individuals.”

This was the ideal of all those who attempted to set up communities in America between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. Very naturally these new community builders looked to the American workers for support and active sympathy. We have seen how the workers, without any strength of organization, were brutally oppressed by the rising merchant classes, who herded men, women and children into their factories that were everywhere springing up, and forced them to labor at back-breaking tasks for long hours at low pay. The ideas first set forth by Hamilton were slowly coming to full flower in these dark days of American labor, and anything that promised a better order of life was of vital interest to the factory workers.

One of the most colorful and interesting figures among the pioneer Utopians was that of Frances Wright, an Englishwoman, radical in her thinking, and given over wholeheartedly to the cause of freedom.

Frances and her sister Camilla first came to this country in 1818, and what the two young girls saw here filled them with youthful enthusiasm for all things American. Unlike so many foreign visitors of those days, they were able to look beneath the crude frontier surfaces of American life, and to find there a certain sturdy independence and spacious freedom that they had not known abroad. In writing of this visit in later years, Frances Wright summed it up thus:

“Delighted with the sound of political liberty, the absence of bayonets, and constrained taxation, I spake and published, as I felt, in praise of American institutions; and called, and, I believe, first generally awakened the attention of the European public to their study and appreciation.”

News of the rising of the English workers against the oppressions of their masters sent the girls hurrying back to their native country. But the revolt there came to nothing, and presently we find Frances head over heels in affairs in France, where, as the friend of General Lafayette, she assisted that elderly defender of liberty in his fight against the reactionary French Bourbons. Again she was present at the collapse of a revolt. But she was learning valuable lessons as to the meaning of the struggle for liberty, and when General Lafayette came to America to receive the grateful plaudits of the entire nation, Frances Wright returned to the country that had first charmed her, and accompanied the general on several of his triumphant tours.

This time the eyes of the Englishwoman looked a bit more deeply into the stern realities of American life, and all that they saw was not as rosy-hued as before. While in Washington she met the famous English Utopian and economist, Robert Owen. Owen is generally regarded as a forerunner of modern Socialism. He was one of the first of the “liberal manufacturers,” and at his mill at New Lanark, England, he set up, what for those times, was a model industrial plant. He built decent houses for his workers, he established schools for the children, and even while his mills were closed down, he kept on paying wages in full. From all parts of the world reformers visited New Lanark. It was Owen’s theory in life, which ran very much against the generally accepted religious theories of those days, that “any general character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means; which means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence over the affairs of men.”

In another place he had written, “the primary and necessary object of all existence is to be happy . . . But happiness cannot be obtained individually; it is useless to expect isolated happiness; all must partake of it, or the few will never enjoy it; man can, therefore, have but one real and genuine interest, which is to make all of his race as peaceful in character and happy in feeling as the individual organization and nature of each will permit.”

It was a man with such vision that the energetic Frances Wright met in the fast-growing Washington of 1824. Owen had come to America to work out his ideas by starting a colony at Harmony, Indiana, where he hoped to prove to the world that man was really not the sinful creature the theologians said he was, but could be moulded by his surroundings.

Frances Wright was greatly attracted by Owen’s plans. She visited Harmony, and studied the methods of cooperation in force there. What she saw convinced her that this sort of thing would work, that free men and women, living in communities, sharing in the hard work and the profits as well, with no property belonging to any individual, could find real happiness. In such a Utopia, the making of money would be considered more or less of a disgrace, as indeed it is considered in Russia today by those who still hold to the pure principles of communism. Production would be for the service of all, and not the private profits of a few, and men and women, freed of the fears and hatreds that the possession of private property gives rise to, could go on together to the good life.

One may well imagine what dauntless courage the mere proposal for such a community required in those days. While it is true that out through the continent of North America there were pioneers who stood on their own feet and did their own thinking, we must remember that the social, intellectual and economic life of the country was governed largely by New Englanders who preached a gloomy religion of original sin, who were concerned passionately with the piling up of profits and the grabbing of private property, and who set their faces sternly against new ideas of any sort. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great New England philosopher, wrote of those times, “To write a history of Massachusetts, I confess, is not inviting to an expansive thinker . . . From 1790 to 1820 there was not a book, a speech, a conversation, in the State.”

In the face of the most powerful sort of opposition, Owen, Frances Wright, and other Utopians went ahead with their ambitious schemes for a better order of things, and it is to the everlasting glory of these pioneers that little by little they succeeded in winning over to their side some of the most important men and women in America. Throughout the entire history of the Utopian movement in this country we are constantly coming upon great names. And the influence that this movement left upon progressive American thought should not be minimized. To be sure, most of the Utopian colonies failed. Some of them failed tragically. But nevertheless they were beacon lights in the darkness of superstition and reaction. Those who first set them afire deserve the everlasting gratitude of all liberals.

One of the problems that most troubled Frances Wright on her return to this country was that of Negro slavery. While she was travelling about with the aged Lafayette, she had many opportunities to see the evils of this institution. The plans for cooperative labor set on foot by Robert Owen at New Harmony probably inspired Frances Wright to try some such experiment with a group of Southern slaves. With the help of some well-to-do friends, she purchased a few slaves at Nashville, Tennessee, and bought three hundred acres of land where she planned to set up an industrial colony, and there enable the slaves to free themselves by gradually working out their purchase price. In conjunction with this she planned to run a school for colored children. She maintained that her ideas would bring no losses to the Southern planters, as the labor of the slaves would pay for their cost and keep, plus interest on the capital invested. The further objection of the planters to having free Negro labor side by side with slaves would be met by keeping Negroes who had freed themselves by their own labor, in cooperative colonies.

Just as Owen’s colony at New Harmony was broken up because of quarrels among its members and lack of practical qualities on the part of the management, so Frances Wright’s experiment at Neshoba in the backwoods of Tennessee came to an unhappy end. However, Neshoba was the first serious step made towards the emancipation of the Negro in America. It caused the public to think about the Negro problem. And into the active mind of Frances Wright it introduced the idea that long-haul education may be more effective in the fight for freedom than short-cut ultra-radical experiment. She wrote, “I finally became convinced, that there are but two remedies for all our evils—for those of the North as those of the South; for those of the South as those of the North. These remedies, slow working indeed, but sure in their effects, are—the rational training of youth, and, so far as possible, the instructional improvement of the present generation. All other panaceas but these I distinguished clearly for quack nostrums, and determined to forsake all practical experiments for the great work of national regeneration. . .”

Not a bit dismayed by the failure of Neshoba, Frances Wright went up and down through the country advocating all sorts of ideas which at that time were considered wildly radical, but which nowadays would attract little attention. She dwelt on the rights of women; she advocated birth control; she insisted on equal education for men and women. And of course she was everywhere attacked as an atheist and free thinker, until “Fanny Wrightism” became an expression for the radicalism of those times.

Very shortly she discovered that the wage slavery of the Northern workers was a cause that called as strongly to her liberty-loving heart as the chattel slavery of the Southern Negro. She was the leading spirit in a group called The Free Enquirers, who published a paper advocating the abolition of capital punishment and imprisonment for debts, the maintaining of equal civil and legal rights for women, and the adoption of a national system of free education. When angry crowds yelled at her, as crowds will, to “hire a hall,” she went out and did just that. She bought the old Ebenezer Church, in Broome Street near the Bowery, in New York City, remodeled the place, called it the Hall of Science, and there lectured in an auditorium seating twelve hundred people. Her paper, called The Free Enquirer, was edited in the basement of that hall.

In the meantime, throughout the ranks of America’s workers there was a stirring. There were hard times in the country. Everywhere there was unemployment. The laborer of those days was either being driven almost to the breaking point in wretched factories or he was tramping the streets looking for a job. He had no chance to participate in the political and social life of the country, and he was forced to watch his children growing up without any formal education, as the free public school system did not exist in those days. At a meeting of New York workers, held in 1829, resolutions were passed demanding a ten-hour day, and calling upon workers to boycott employers who violated the ten-hour principle. Frances Wright was warmly interested in this movement. “It makes the heart bleed,” she wrote in her paper, “to look at the hundreds and thousands of shivering, hungry applicants for charity who have thronged the old Arms House in the Park this forenoon, pleading their cause in the most woeful and supplicating terms.” She and her associates went about among the workers urging a scheme for a system of “State guardianship education.” By this plan the State was to take over all children from the age of two on, through childhood and early youth, treat them as equals, and in general assume the duties of the parent. Any sort of plan whereby their children might receive a better education found favor with the workers, and while the rank and file undoubtedly did not trouble to learn of the details of Frances’s program, the influence of the Free Enquirers was widespread. When the Workingman’s Advocate, the second labor paper to be published in the United States, appeared, on October 31, 1829, it had for its slogan, “All children are entitled to equal education; all adults to equal property; and all mankind to equal privileges.” George H. Evans, a mechanic, and an enthusiastic follower of Frances Wright, was editor of the Advocate. In his announcement of the publication of the paper, he said:

“We shall oppose the establishment of all exclusive privileges, all monopolies, and all exemptions of one class more than another from an equal share of the burdens of society; all of which, to whatever class or order of men they are extended, we consider highly anti-republican, oppressive and unjust. We consider it an exclusive privilege for one portion of the community to have the means of education in colleges, while another is restricted to common schools, or perhaps, by extreme poverty, even deprived of the limited education to be acquired in those establishments. Our voice therefore shall be raised in favor of a system of education which shall be open to all, as in a real republic it should be.”

Under the leadership of a Committee of Fifty, representing the workers, and with the active assistance of the Free Enquirers, the Workingmen’s Party was formed, which entered the New York City election of 1829. The old-line papers, which had paid but little attention to the revolt of the workers, suddenly woke up and began denouncing Frances Wright as “the Priestess of Beelzebub.” The workers were referred to in these papers as “poor, deluded followers of a crazy, atheistical woman.” Elections in those times lasted for three days, and on the first day the Workingmen’s Party, running in opposition to four other tickets, swept the polls. On the next two days, the outcry against Frances Wright had its effect, but the workers made a good showing. In all they cast six thousand out of twenty thousand votes, and sent one of their men to the legislature at Albany.

Encouraged by the election, the Free Enquirers worked harder than ever at spreading their educational ideas. So bitter, however, were the attacks on Frances Wright from all quarters, and so shrewd the tactics of those who were succeeding in splitting the labor movement into various factions, that finally Frances felt that to stay any longer in America would injure the cause. She sailed for France, after giving a series of lectures encouraging the workers to continue their fight.

This was in 1830, and in that year the Workingmen’s Party collapsed.

Frances Wright was married to a Frenchmen named D’Arusmont. However, five years after she left America, she returned and kept up her attacks against oppression of all sorts. She died in Cincinnati in 1852, soon after she had finished a book outlining her plans, for an ideal state.

Many Utopian projects more famous than those of Frances Wright’s were to have their little days in America. One of the best known of these, the Brook Farm experiment, attracted widespread attention, and drew to its support such leading men and women as William Ellery Channing, the great Unitarian minister; Horace Greeley and Charles A. Dana, two of America’s most noted editors; Albert Brisbane, the father of Arthur Brisbane of the Hearst papers; Margaret Fuller, pioneer fighter for woman suffrage; and Bronson Alcott, whose daughter, Louisa May, was to write those most charming of children’s books, Little Men and Little Women. These Utopias were soon to be swept away by the more practical philosophies of the German immigrants who arrived in this country in the late ’forties, with their theories of Socialism as preached by Karl Marx. It might well have been that out of such undertakings as those of Frances Wright, Robert Owen, and the later Utopians, there would have grown a movement essentially American in its outlook and idealism. Sooner or later this movement might have captured the imagination of the American workers, and they could have given to the idealism of its founders a practical direction. The forces behind the movement for international Socialism were, however, too vigorous to be resisted by the rather vague and misty Utopians, and the latter drifted away from all connections with the labor movement. For a time, however, they did give to the movement a great impetus and vitality. They provided an interlude full of color. They gave it certain ideals which even to this day are still full of life, and many of which are as yet unrealized.

It was the slender, energetic figure of Frances Wright, with her flashing eyes, close-cropped hair, and brave bearing, that was in the forefront of the first Utopian army in America. It is thrilling to think of her facing hooting mobs of men and women, fighting for the rights of labor and women at a time when the worker was looked on as a human beast of burden and the chief business of women was thought to be the bearing of children. There were those who followed Frances Wright both in the labor movement and the struggle for woman suffrage who had greater organizing ability and more practical plans for emancipation, but there were few of wider vision and more heart-lifting courage.

— WENDELL PHILLIPS — 

HE SLEW A GIANT

A young lawyer was sitting beside an open window in his offices on Court Street, Boston, on a drowsy afternoon in the fall of 1835. He had just come out of the Harvard Law School with high honors. At Harvard he had won membership, by virtue of his scholarship, in the honorary society of Phi Beta Kappa. He had been president of the “Porcellian” and of the Gentleman’s Club and a member of the Hasty Pudding Club, organizations of young aristocrats, membership to which was granted only to the exclusive few. His people had come to this country in 1630. They had always been well off and had moved in the most cultured Boston society. The youth who sat at the window on that autumn afternoon, was the last person in the world that you would ever take for a “radical” of any sort. Exceptionally charming, with a future that all agreed would be outstanding, he had been selected by the leaders of the Massachusetts Bar to carry on the traditions of Conservatism. Indeed, one of his first public utterances at Harvard was made against the proposed establishment of a Temperance Society in his class, and at that time Temperance Societies were regarded as “radical” undertakings.

The man at the window was Wendell Phillips. As he looked down into a street, dreaming under a mild September sun, he suddenly noticed a crowd surging towards a little building a half block away. The crowd grew rapidly, and he saw that there was something threatening about their actions. Men were shouting and waving their arms. Others were trying to push their way up the narrow stairs and into the hall of the Anti-Slavery Office, whose headquarters the little building housed. Phillips noted with surprise that in the mob were men of his own acquaintance, some of them classmates of his at college. Here were well-dressed, eminently “respectable” people, evidently bent on some active violence. By no means the sort of persons you would expect to find rioting on street corners.

There is a break in the crowd, and Phillips, leaning far out of the window, sees that through it there is being dragged a man, bare-headed, with a rope around his waist. At his appearance, a great shout rises. “Kill him,” “Lynch him,” “Hang the Abolitionist.”

Phillips shouts down to a friend of his on the street:    “Whom have they got there?” “Why that’s Garrison, the damned Abolitionist, and they’re going to hang him.” In the crowd Phillips distinguishes Colonel John C. Park, the commander of the Boston Regiment of which Phillips himself is a member. Phillips runs out of his office, and going up to Park, says, “Colonel, why doesn’t the Mayor call for the guns ? This is outrageous.” Park looks at Phillips with an amused smile. “Wendell,” he says, “don’t you see that the regiment is in the mob ?” The crowd had gone tumultuously away while Park and Phillips were talking, and it was not until the next morning that the young lawyer learned that William Lloyd Garrison—“the damned Abolitionist”—had narrowly escaped being hanged in front of Boston City Hall. He had been hurried into a cab and rushed off to jail where he was locked up as a disturber of the peace, while the well-dressed members of the mob were permitted to saunter off without any attempt at their arrest.

Wendell Phillips, for whom the ways of life had been luxurious, who had gone gracefully through the drawing-rooms of exclusive Boston homes, Phillips, who was the pet of the older intellectuals and for whom a glorious future had been time and again foretold, had suddenly come square up against a jolting reality. Always he had been taught to believe in the old, powerful forces of law and order. Always he had been taught to despise mobs and the mob-mind. And now, suddenly, there crashed into this sheltered existence this ugly business where friends of his were part and parcel of a disgraceful attempt at lynching. It often happens that those who are fortunate enough, by accident of birth, to be born outside of the heat and dust of everyday living, and who, consequently, are indifferent to the doings of the common man, are only awakened to the grim facts of life by some such rough contact as that of Phillips’. At all events, the assault on Garrison set Phillips’ keen mind turning over and over the reasons for such a happening in broad daylight, on Boston’s usually peaceful streets. From time to time, there had come into Phillips’ sheltered world, word of the doings of a strange people called “Abolitionists.” The newspapers which Phillips read had hooted and jeered and thrown insults at these “radicals,” and Phillips and his set had taken it for granted that here were men and women, sincere, perhaps, but a little “cracked.”

After the affair of the mob, Phillips instantly decided to find out what the “Abolitionists” were all about, and particularly what manner of man was this William Lloyd Garrison. He discovered that Garrison had been born of poor people in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1805. He had begun life as a printer’s apprentice, and had soon developed a marked liking for writings on moral and political questions. Two things most concerned young Garrison: one, temperance, and the other, the abolition of slavery in America. In Boston, where Garrison had made his way to establish the first newspaper in America devoted to the cause of temperance, he fell in with a middle-aged Quaker who had come up from the slave-holding state of Maryland to raise funds for a newspaper to be devoted to the cause of Abolition. These two found that they had much in common, and for a while they worked together, living from hand to mouth, getting up meetings, writing pamphlets and distributing them at their own expense, and everywhere finding complete indifference to the slavery question among the wealthy classes of the North.

In 1831 Garrison established one of the most famous publications that this country has known. He called it The Liberator. Thinking that of course he would find a strong support among the churches, he visited minister after minister, begging them to line up behind his paper. One of the leaders of the Boston Church, the Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher, turned Garrison away, saying, “I have too many irons in the fire already.” “Then,” retorted Garrison, “you had better take all the rest out and put this in.” But as has happened time and again throughout the history of the Church in this country, those who professed to follow the teachings of Jesus, when put to the test, found it more convenient to obey the commands of their wealthy pew-holders. One by one, the Church people made excuse. They realized, they assured Garrison, that slavery was a bad business, that it was contrary to all the fine phrases written in the Declaration of Independence, but because of business relations with the Southern slave-holders, it would be impossible to interfere with the system on which the entire economic structure of the South was built. Why couldn’t Garrison write about something else in his paper? Why did he have to go around stirring up trouble ?

Garrison went back to his garret office, surprised to find that those whom he had sought as allies, were worse than enemies. He set his teeth and his type at the same time. One of the editors of The Liberator wrote of the office, “Everything about it had an aspect of slovenly decay and Harrison Gray Otis well characterized it as 'an obscure hole’—‘yet there the freedom of a race began.’ The dingy walls; the small windows bespattered with printers’ ink; the press standing in one corner, the composer’s stand opposite; the long editorial and mailing table, covered with newspapers; the bed of the editor and publisher on the floor—all these make a picture never to be forgotten.”

The little sheet that came from such poverty-stricken surroundings was at first the laughingstock of all Boston. The conservatives were loud in their glee over the appearance of what they called a Don Quixote in their midst, and they bought the paper week after week through sheer curiosity. But in the South, the more alert of the larger slave-holders saw nothing amusing in its pages. They realized the grim contradiction of slavery in a land supposedly free, and they were highly sensitive to the slightest criticism coming from above the Mason and Dixon line. As Garrison somehow miraculously went on, gathering here and there a few brave souls who were willing to risk what amounted to exile, in order to stand up for their principles (Garrison could find only eleven other men to join with him in the organization of a New England Anti-Slavery Society) there began to appear official protests from the Southern states against the activities of the Northern Abolitionists. These were sent up to the Governors of Northern states and in two cases, those of New York and Massachusetts, the Governors recommended that it be made a penal offense to speak or write against slavery. “With such a domineering spirit at the South and with such servility in high places at the North, it is not surprising that the sidewalks were unsafe for Abolitionists to tread; that public halls were denied to them for their meetings; that their publications were excluded from the mails; that it became increasingly difficult for them to earn a livelihood in any line of trade; that they were marked men, under the frown of State and Church, moral pariahs, inviting abuse and regarded as fit for death. To be an Abolitionist in free America was, in popular estimation, what it was to be a Christian in the days of Nero. The very word embodied contempt and rage beyond expression. Anybody, everybody, felt free to kick and cuff, to damn and hang an Abolitionist.”

Very soon Boston stopped laughing at Garrison and began to murmur uneasily instead. He went back and forth, through a city whose people looked darkly at him. Hardly a day passed but what he was threatened with physical assault. A price of $5,000 was set upon his head by the State of Georgia, a standing offer to any gang of thugs to kidnap him. Every meeting place of any importance was closed to him and his few followers. But while the men who should have been his allies stood hypocritically aside, Garrison found unexpected help from the women of Boston. On the day that the mob which Phillips had witnessed came to Garrison’s office to lynch the courageous editor, it was a group of women, among them one who was later to be the wife of Wendell Phillips, who stood by Garrison’s side and dared the mob to lay hands on him. Again, it was the women who furnished the sinews of war and stood in the front-line trenches in the long fight for the abolition of slavery that was to go on from those days until it was settled by the Civil War.

Such was the situation into which young Wendell Phillips was so unexpectedly thrust, when he made up his mind that Garrison had justice and righteousness on his side, and that from now on the young aristocratic lawyer would throw in his lot with the despised Abolitionists. It was on the fourteenth of June, 1837, that Phillips rode out to Lynn, ten miles away, to attend his first Anti-Slavery meeting, and to make his first speech as a champion of the oppressed blacks. No sooner had word of this speech gotten out, than all of Boston society was outraged at what they regarded as a desertion from their ranks of one of their most respected members. These old families resented keenly anyone who refused to keep step with their conservative march. Doors to houses in which Phillips had formerly been a respected guest, were shut in his face. No more wealthy clients came to his law office. He was looked on as a “social Benedict Arnold.” He was an outcast in his own city. His former friends called him “a friend of the niggers” and turned away from him in disdain. These things might have broken a weaker man than Phillips. They only served to strengthen his already strong spirit, and shortly, he was called on to go even farther in his defense of the under-dog.

Out in Illinois, in a state where slavery had been abolished, there was a Presbyterian minister, named Elijah P. Lovejoy. He was running a little, local paper called The Observer. In St. Louis, where Lovejoy lived, a Negro had been chained to a tree by a gang of hoodlums and burned to death. In his paper, Lovejoy protested against this outrage and instantly brought down upon his head the wrath of the community. Although Illinois was supposedly “free soil,” it was close enough to the South and Southern sentiment to despise anyone suspected of sympathy with the slaves. Lovejoy himself was not an Abolitionist, but the lynching of the Negro had roused him and he continued to cry out against it. His printing office was destroyed by a mob. He set up another press in Alton, Illinois, and again a mob broke in and destroyed it. Then he appealed to the Mayor of Alton for police protection but the Mayor told him that there could be no help from that quarter. Lovejoy gathered around him a few friends and sent for a third press. The night that it came, a great crowd, armed with muskets and waving torches, milled about in front of the print shop and when Lovejoy’s figure was outlined in the door, he was shot down dead by a volley, and his press thrown, for the third time, into the Mississippi.

The killing of Lovejoy brought to the attention of the country the stark realities of the extent to which Southern sympathizers would go to suppress all discussion of slavery. In Boston, a meeting of protest was called in the famous old Faneuil Hall, where, in Revolutionary days, James Otis and other colonial orators had thundered against English oppression. There were three factions at this meeting: those who were indignant at the brutal killing of Lovejoy but who were by no means as far advanced in their opinions as the Abolitionists; a scattering of the Abolitionists; and a group of thugs gathered together by the politicians to make trouble. Everything went along quietly enough until the burly figure of the Attorney General of Massachusetts—James T. Austin—elbowed its way to the platform. Austin started a speech, violently assaulting Lovejoy, who, he said, “died as the fool dieth,” and applauding the mob that killed him. Austin’s followers roared their approval and apparently carried the meeting with them. But they had not reckoned on young Phillips. No sooner had Austin come down to receive the congratulations of his friends than Phillips was on the platform, his eyes flashing with indignation, his wonderful speaking voice whipping the crowd into silence.

At first they tried to stop him, as he asked whether, indeed, the sentiments expressed by Austin could be regarded as American. But as he went on, they fell under the spell of his eloquence, and when he had finished one of the most masterful pleas for the essential American tradition that this country has heard, the crowd cheered and cheered again; and in a whirlwind of applause, resolutions denouncing the murderers of Lovejoy were carried by an overwhelming vote. Phillips had been put to the test and not found wanting. From that moment on, he was to be the chief spokesman for the cause of all those who suffer or are oppressed under whatever name. For years to come men who were exploited by other men, could turn to Phillips, confident of finding in him a powerful champion.

He went away from all the secluded life he had known and loved in Boston, and gave himself, body and spirit, to the cause of the Abolitionists. All through the North, in small towns and in great cities, he rallied to him the forces that soon were to make themselves felt in striking the chains from the limbs of the Southern Negroes. No matter how small or how large the crowd, how difficult the journey in days when travel was no easy matter, Phillips’ voice was always lifted against the infamy of slavery. One night he would speak to a few workers, gathered together in some little village hall, then next, he would address a great audience in a city miles away. His wife, who saw eye to eye with him on all important matters, was his constant companion. He became the outstanding leader of the Abolitionists, cut off from his old friends, finding new ones in radical groups. He shared the dangerous life that was the lot of all the reformers of those days. Often he had to leave a hall, surrounded by friends who held tight to the revolvers in their pockets as they pushed through hostile crowds. Always he was slandered and maligned by newspapers which are now loud in praise of his memory.

It was not only slavery that enlisted his generous sympathy. He was one of the first agitators for woman’s suffrage; he bitterly attacked England’s oppression of the Irish; he defended the Russian Nihilists; he spoke out in a thrilling speech honoring John Brown who had been hanged by Southern authorities, following his desperate raid on Harpers’ Ferry, where, almost single-handed, the old man had attempted an invasion of the South.

From the time of Brown’s raid until the firing on Fort Sumpter, the whole North was in a state of turmoil. Everywhere that Phillips and his friends appeared, they were threatened by hostile mobs. Three times in two months he was in danger of violent death. At one meeting where a crowd roared so loudly as to drown his voice, he leaned forward and spoke to the newspaper reporters sitting directly below him. “While I speak to these pencils,” he said, “I speak to a million of men. We have got the press of the country in our hands; whether they like it or not, they know that our speeches sell their papers.” And by this time, the effect of the Abolitionist agitation could not be questioned by their worst enemies. Started by a few pioneering spirits, that agitation had made its steady way throughout all the North. Now the respectables were hurrying to denounce slavery. Even the most timid of ministers found that it was safe to preach anti-slavery sermons.

One reason for this change of front, and perhaps the principal reason, was an economic one. As we have seen, the South was mainly an agricultural country, depending on the work of slaves to gather its huge cotton crops. The nine million whites of the slave-holding states composed some 1,800,000 families. One-fifth of these owned slaves, but only eight or ten thousand families owned more than fifty apiece. There existed thus a little aristocracy, which had, of course, a certain leisurely charm about its life. It was a charm, however, that was tarnished by the ugly fact of slavery. The slaves, whether they knew it or not, were avenging themselves upon their masters. For such a system degraded not only those at the bottom of it but those at the top as well. Cotton was the main crop of the South, but she could not raise her own full supply of food, and manufactures were almost totally lacking as slaves could not be entrusted to run machines.

At the eve of the Civil War, we had a North given over to manufacturing, whose commercial interests conflicted with the Southern plantation owners, and a North, furthermore, whose people were finally being awakened to the horrors of slavery by the agitation of such men as Phillips and Garrison, and by the reading of such books as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

When that lean, lank offspring of pioneering parents, Abraham Lincoln, imbued with a deep hatred for slavery, came out of his Western obscurity to carry every Northern state in the Presidential election of 1860, the sides were already lining up. Lincoln said good-bye to his friends and neighbors in Springfield, Illinois, and got on the train to Washington, with a sad premonition, as is evidenced from his farewell speech, of the terrible events that were at hand. Soon after he had entered the White House, the South announced that it would secede from the Union and the bloody conflict that we know as the Civil War was on, to last for four momentous years.

When the war ended, the slaves set free and the Union maintained, one might have expected that Phillips would have retired from active life and enjoyed a well-deserved rest. He had given his best years to the cause that was now won. He was entering the afternoon of a tremendously vital existence and no one would have blamed him for seeking rest and quiet.

But it was not in the man to quit the field whenever he saw oppression of any sort. He had always been interested in labor’s struggle for better wages and conditions. Now he stepped boldly forward as the champion of the workers. He was received with wild enthusiasm. The workers in Massachusetts had organized as a separate political party and in September, 1870, at the State Convention of the Labor Party, Mr. Phillips was nominated as the candidate for Governor. He presided over the convention and wrote the platform, which he regarded as his confession of faith in the larger aims of labor.

Here are the principles for which Phillips and his followers struggled and for which labor still struggles in many instances today.

“We affirm as a fundamental principle, that labor, the creator of wealth, is entitled to all it creates.

“Affirming this, we avow ourselves willing to accept the final results of the operation of a principle so radical, such as the overthrow of the whole profit-making system, the extinction of all monopolies, the abolition of privileged classes, universal education and fraternity, perfect freedom of exchange, and, best and grandest of all, the final obliteration of that foul stigma upon our so-called Christian civilization, the poverty of the masses. Holding principles as radical as these, and having before our minds an ideal condition so noble, we are still aware that our goal cannot be reached at a single leap. We take into account the ignorance, selfishness, prejudice, corruption, and demoralization of the leaders of the people, and, to a large extent, of the people themselves; but still, we demand that some steps be taken in this direction: therefore, 

“Resolved, That we declare war with the wage system, which demoralizes alike the hirer and the hired, cheats both, and enslaves the workingman; war with the present system of finance, which robs labor, and gorges capital, makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer, and turns a republic into an aristocracy of capital; war with these lavish grants of the public lands to speculating companies, and, whenever in power, we pledge ourselves to use every just and legal means to resume all such grants heretofore made; war with the system of enriching capitalists by the creation and increase of public interest-bearing debts. We demand that every facility, and all encouragement, shall be given by law to cooperation in all branches of industry and trade, and that the same aid be given to cooperative efforts that has heretofore been given to railroads and other enterprises. We demand a ten-hour day for factory-work as a first step, and that eight hours be the working-day of all persons thus employed hereafter. We demand, that, whenever women are employed at public expense to do the same kind and amount of work as men perform, they shall receive the same wages. 

We demand that all public debts be paid at once in accordance with the terms of the contract, and that no more debts be created. Viewing the contract importation of coolies as only another form of the slave-trade, we demand that all contracts made relative thereto be void in this country, and that no public ship, and no steamship which receives public subsidy, shall aid in such importation.”

Phillips polled over twenty thousand votes in the election, a fine showing for a young and inexperienced party.

Although at this time nearly seventy years old, Phillips was constantly on the go, speaking to meetings of workers, writing articles on behalf of woman’s suffrage, debating the issues of his day with such famous friends as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Julia Ward Howe and Henry James. Now he would address a meeting called to extend further freedom to the Negroes or to relieve the suffering of the Indians who were outrageously treated by this government. Now he would be denouncing English imperialism or attacking the corporations, as when he said:

“The great question of the future is money against legislation. My friends, you and I will be in our graves long before that battle is ended; and unless our children have more patience and courage than saved this country from slavery, republican institutions will go down before moneyed corporations. Rich men die; but banks are immortal, and railroad corporations never have any diseases. In the long run with the legislatures they are sure to win.”

It was a time of widespread political corruption when Phillips uttered those remarks. His clear vision could see the coming of even greater corruption when the corporations would be more firmly established. The Government had given away millions of acres of public lands to the railroads and the roads in turn were getting a firm grip on so-called “public servants.” The long struggle of farmers and workers on one side and Big Business on the other was coming on rapidly. There was a national epidemic of graft and sickening corruption in high places and low from 1870 to 1890. Phillips and his followers saw that by giving over public lands to railroads and timber and oil corporations, the people were giving up their most precious possessions. Everywhere these possessions were being ruthlessly looted by speculators and get-rich-quick gamblers. In one year twenty million acres were handed over to the railroads, with few conditions attached to the gift. And Phillips said:

“Our fathers when they forbade entail and provided for the distribution of estates, thought they had erected a barrier against the money power that ruled England. They forgot that money could combine; that a moneyed corporation is like the papacy, a succession of persons with a unity of purpose. Now, as the land of England in the hands of thirty thousand land-owning families has ruled it for six hundred years, so the corporations of America mean to govern; and unless some power more radical than ordinary politics is found, will govern inevitably. The survival of republican institutions here depends upon a successful resistance of this tendency. The only hope of any effectual grapple with the danger lies in rousing the masses, whose interests lie permanently in the opposite direction.”

He was seventy years old and he had on him the wounds of many fierce battles for freedom.

One of the last speeches he made just before his death was characteristic of the courage of the man. He had belonged to Phi Beta Kappa, the honorary scholarship society of Harvard, but his Harvard classmates had been none too friendly because of his stand for the slaves and for labor. And he had never been invited to speak, although he stood head and shoulders above most of the Phi Beta Kappa orators. In 1881, however, apparently feeling that much of the fire had gone out of the old agitator, the conservatives asked Phillips to be their orator and he delivered a historic address called, The Scholar in a Republic. He was outspoken in his criticism of men of learning who refused to do what they can to help the mass of the people, of so-called intellectuals who stand aside on such vital issues as the rights of minorities, civil liberties and the spread of democracy. He ended the speech with this eloquent plea:

“To be as good as our fathers we must be better. They silenced their fears and subdued their prejudices, inaugurating free speech and equality with no precedent on the file. Europe shouted ‘Madmen!’ and gave us forty years for the shipwreck. With serene faith they persevered. Let us rise to their level. Crush appetite and prohibit temptation if it rots great cities. Intrench labor in sufficient bulwarks against that wealth, which, without the tenfold strength of modern incorporation, wrecked the Grecian and Roman States; and, with a sterner effort still, summon women into civil life as reenforcement to our laboring ranks in the effort to make our civilization a success.

“Sit not, like the figure on our silver coin, looking ever backward.

“New occasions teach new duties;

Time makes ancient good uncouth;

They must upward still, and onward,

Who would keep abreast of Truth.

Lo! before us gleam her camp-fires!

We ourselves must Pilgrims be,

Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly 

Through the desperate winter sea,

Nor attempt the Future’s portal 

With the Past’s blood-rusted key.”

While few of these sentiments were at all to the liking of the respectable clergymen, lawyers and merchants of the Harvard aristocracy, Phillips’ audience was forced, against its will, to applaud him to the echo. He was mildly surprised at the sensation his speech caused, as he was accustomed to speak out what was in his mind and heart, and when someone referred to the rumpus that had been raised, Phillips said, “I thought they wanted me to bring myself.”

In January, 1884, Phillips was seized with a mortal illness. He lingered on for a few days and just before his death, he said, “I have no fear of death. I have long foreseen it. My only regret is for poor Anne” (his wife), and on the second of February, he sighed gently, closed his eyes, “and passed away as calmly as though going to sleep.” So there died one of the greatest of America’s Pioneers of Freedom, a man of brilliant intelligence and high courage, whose sympathies were always with the workers, and in whose life the American worker of today may find true inspiration.

— JOHN P. ALTGELD — 

"EAGLE FORGOTTEN"

It has been the tragic fate of the labor and liberal movement the world over, time and again to devote its energy, its monies, all its resources, to the election to high office of those who have turned and betrayed the plain people. So common has this experience been that it is difficult to interest many intelligent workingmen in politics in any shape. With great justice, the worker shrugs his shoulders and asks, “What’s the use?” This growing indifference of the workers to the use of the ballot, this suspicion of almost all those in political life, is one of the greatest hindrances to the forming of an independent political Labor Party of any real strength in this country, such as the British Labor Party.

Here and there, however, we find men who never lost their touch with the rank and file, no matter how far up they went in political life. One of such Pioneers of Freedom was John Peter Altgeld. Born in Germany, struggling in the midst of terrible poverty in this country for a mere existence, and coming to be one of the outstanding figures in America, he was always a tried and true friend of every worker. Because he stood firm to his conviction, because he refused to bow before the influence of those who would harm the workers’ cause, he was most bitterly attacked throughout his lifetime. And even today, like so many others of these Pioneers of Freedom, his name is rarely mentioned in any text book of American history.

The father of Altgeld was a wagon-maker by trade and came to this country with his wife and little John Peter, their first child, at the time when the distressful conditions in Germany were causing so many of those sturdy folk to search for what they thought would be a real freedom in America. Around 1854, the Altgelds settled in the north central part of Ohio. As soon as the little boy was barely able to walk, he was put to work on the farm which his father had rented, and the years of his childhood were spent in the heaviest sort of manual labor. “I was taught to work,” he said later on, “from daylight until dark and to do the chores afterwards.” The boy was a great leader, however, and he educated himself in the few spare moments that he had by delving eagerly into every English book upon which he could lay hands. Like the young Lincoln he would spend hours when the family was in bed, poring over history, biography, poetry, philosophy, theology and political works. In winter, when the farm work let up a bit, he had a chance to go to school, but his life there was not happy. “In school,” said Altgeld years afterward, “the boys all picked on me. No one of them ever thought of protecting me from abuse. It was the crowd on one side and John Peter Altgeld on the other. And it has always been the same.”

Although he was only fifteen years old, Altgeld enlisted in a northern regiment during the Civil War, and nearly died from a fever he contracted in the swamps around Richmond, Virginia. When he was mustered out, he resolved that he would no longer live the life of drudgery on the farm but would secure a teacher’s certificate, which he proceeded to do with the greatest difficulty. But school teaching proved not at all to his liking. He had a decided leaning towards the law and when he was twenty-one, he set out on what he called his “wander year” making his way south and westward to Cincinnati, from there across southern Indiana and Illinois to East St. Louis, a weary distance of five hundred miles, nearly all of which he made on foot, working out his meals and night’s lodging in the best way he could. He slaved by day and studied at night. At one time he worked as a common laborer with a railway crew and graded railroads through one summer and autumn so that he could save enough for a winter of law study. The fever that had stricken him down in the army, returned, however, and it became impossible for him to continue the strenuous work of pick and shovel.

Finally, in 1871, he was admitted to the Bar and three years later made his first entrance into politics. Every one who came in contact with this hard-working, intelligent, courageous youngster respected him, whether or not, as he later said, they were friends. It is typical of Altgeld that he had the backing of the middle western farmers who were organized in what was then called The Granger Party, a party of protest against the ruthless oppression of the farmers by the banking classes. He was elected States Attorney for Andrew County, Missouri, and served as public prosecutor for a year. But the job was too small for the expanding ambitions of Altgeld. He was soon heading towards Chicago and his real career in that fast-growing city. He had few delusions about office holders or politicians. Soon after he had settled down to practice law in Chicago and had married a school teacher whom he had known in his youth, he wrote about politicians that they were “a cowardly, hanging-on class, always careful to see how the wind blows before daring either to have or to express an opinion, and therefore a negative class. It does not lead in public opinion or in the formation of a public sentiment on any question.” And those who have had to do with politicians of the present day are, for the most part, in full agreement with what Altgeld said of them around 1886.

Soon we find that Altgeld, endorsed by the newly formed Labor Party of Chicago, as well as by the Democrats, was elected to a judgeship in Cook County of which Chicago is the principal city. But again, after years of experience as a judge, he found that his growth was being stopped. He said of judges, “In the first place, his active life ceases. He literally and figuratively sits down. Growth, strength and greatness come from contest. The judge, being relieved of contest, of life’s fierce struggle, naturally becomes phlegmatic and development is impossible. And then he ceases to create, to shape and to originate.” He went back to his law practice, which was now more prosperous, but could not keep away from public affairs. He was one of the first to attack the prison system of the United States. This was as far back as 1884 when there was practically no agitation to end the barbarous methods with which we treated our criminals. He favored the eight-hour day for workers and wrote articles for magazines and newspapers criticizing the methods employed by local journalists, urging better conditions for the working women in Chicago factories and the settlement of strikes by arbitration. He became known as a fearless and vigorous supporter of radical views. The sympathy he showed for the common man and his problems made him known throughout that part of the country as a champion of the under-dog. He stood bravely on his own feet. Once when some one asked him for advice, he replied, “Ask no man. Go out into the night and look straight up to the stars. Take comfort and counsel of them.”

In his colorful autobiography called, Forty Years of It, Brand Whitlock, who said of Altgeld that he was “one of the most daring pioneers of the new-democratic movement in America, and the most courageous spirit of our times,” tells of meeting Altgeld in his dingy little office room on Adams Street, Chicago. Whitlock says of Altgeld:

“The figure was not prepossessing; he wore his hair close-clipped in ultimate surrender to an obstinate cowlick; his beard was closely trimmed, too, and altogether the countenance was one made for the hands of the cartoonist, who in the brutal fury that was so soon to blaze upon him and to continue to blaze until it had consumed him quite, could easily contort the features to the various purposes of an ugly partisanship. They gave it a peculiarly sinister quality, and it is one of the countless ironies of life that a face, sad with all the utter woe of humanity, should have become for a season, and in some minds remained forever, the type and symbol of all that is most abhorrent. There was a peculiar pallor in the countenance, and the face was such a blank mask of suffering and despair that, had it not been for the high intelligence that shone from his eyes, it must have impressed many as altogether lacking in expression. Certainly it seldom or never expressed enthusiasm, or joy, or humor, though he had humor of a certain mordant kind, as many a political opponent was to know.

“He had been a judge of the Circuit Court, and was known by his occasional addresses, his interviews and articles, as a publicist of radical and humanitarian tendencies. He was known especially to the laboring classes and to the poor, who, by that acute sympathy they possess, divined in him a friend, and in the circles of sociological workers and students, then so small and obscure as to make their views esoteric, he was recognized as one who understood and sympathized with their tendencies and ideals.”

Altgeld was nominated for Governor by the Democrats of Illinois and made a vigorous campaign, going about through all the little towns of the state, talking with the common people, showing himself to be one of their true friends. He received 425,497 votes at the election as against 402,659 cast for his Republican rival, Governor Fifer. For the first time in four years, Illinois, always counted a safe Republican state, had gone Democratic. And for the first time in her history, she had chosen a citizen of foreign birth as Governor. The plain people of the state were amazed and exultant. The corporations, and their newspapers that spoke for them, were dismayed. Even then, they started a campaign of slander and abuse against Altgeld the like of which has not been carried on against any other man of high public life in this country. No sooner had Altgeld gone to the State House at Springfield to take up his duties as Governor than he found himself everywhere opposed in his attempt to help the cause of the workers. He had been Governor but a few months when a serious strike among certain quarry workers occurred, in the course of which shots were fired and several strikers killed or wounded. Altgeld himself hurried to the scene of the trouble and succeeded in stopping further violence. In a report which he submitted to the Legislature, he severely criticized the local authorities for their handling of the situation and clearly showed his sympathy with the workers.

But the great outburst against him, which came from all parts of capitalist America, was caused by an act of his which history has shown to be based on justice as well as mercy. On the night of May 4, 1886, a crowd of some one thousand to three thousand persons had gathered in Haymarket Square, on the west side of Chicago, to denounce the actions of the police in their brutal assaults on the striking workers of the McCormick Harvester Plant. These workers had joined with a general, nation-wide movement for the eight-hour day. There had been trouble in Chicago before because of this movement. Some of its leaders had given vent to highly inflammatory remarks concerning the treatment of the workers by the Pinkerton detectives and the police. In scores of the strikes that had preceded the one at the McCormick plant, the police had charged into defenseless crowds of men and women, beating them down with their clubs much as they have done more recently in Passaic, New Jersey. The workers had retaliated by big parades of protest, and the meeting in the Haymarket Square was called to pass resolutions regarding the police.

Several speakers addressed the crowd from a truck but there was no disorder. Half a block away, in the police station, was Captain Bonfield, a man despised by the workers for his brutal tactics. The meeting was breaking up under a downfall of rain when the Mayor of Chicago went to Bonfield’s office and told him that the meeting had been peaceable and that there was no need for the large force of reserves he had gathered. Paying no heed, however, to what the Mayor had told him, Bonfield marched his men into the Square where less than two hundred persons were left. He ordered the crowd to disperse. From somewhere a bomb was thrown which exploded with a deafening roar, killing seven policemen and wounding about fifty others. The police immediately drew their revolvers and fired, with tragic effect, into the crowd which ran. This affair, which lasted altogether some five minutes, has gone down into history as the famous Haymarket Riot, and for years afterward the stories told of it did much to weaken the entire American Labor Movement.

The police, furious at the death of their comrades and urged on by the newspapers and spokesmen for the corporations, started a series of wholesale arrests. They put their prisoners, who were mostly foreigners, through the horrors of the third degree, and pieced together from these stories an account of a huge, revolutionary plot which aimed at the destruction of all Chicago—if not the United States—on the part of what they called “anarchists.” Although there was no evidence that could connect any one of them with the actual throwing of the Haymarket Bomb, eight persons were placed on trial. Their trial was based on the charge that they had publicly advised the use of violent methods in class warfare, although it is doubtful if one out of fifty of those who were connected with the eight-hour movement had any anarchistic leanings whatever. The case soon narrowed down to one of Anarchism against Law and Order. Seven of the men were sentenced to death and the eighth was sent to prison for fifteen years after an eight-weeks trial before Judge Joseph E. Gary. All those who were at the trial realized that the entire atmosphere of the place was filled with poison against the workers. The public demanded revenge, and judge and jury were there to see that they got it. Despite the almost unanimous prejudice against the Haymarket prisoners, however, there were some in this country brave enough to speak out in their behalf,—among them, Robert G. Ingersoll, whose life story is written elsewhere in this series, Henry Demarest Lloyd, William Dean Howells, the author, and Charles Francis Train. Meetings were held and petitions circulated, but on November 11, 1887, four of the prisoners (their names were Parsons, Spies, Fischer and Engel) were hanged from the gallows of the county jail in Chicago. The day before, Louis Lingg, another prisoner, had committed suicide in his cell and so five lives were taken by the state in behalf of an hysterical public. Two of the prisoners had been saved from the gallows at the last moment by commutation of their sentences to life imprisonment and the other had received but fifteen years.

When Altgeld became Governor, the liberals in Chicago and elsewhere, who were aroused by the injustice of the Haymarket Trial, felt that they had a friend in the State House. The three men had suffered seven years of imprisonment. Sixty thousand persons, most of them workers, had signed a petition that the Governor pardon them. Altgeld went long and thoroughly into the case. He examined every bit of the evidence, considered the background of the Haymarket affair, the attitude of the police towards the strikers, and finally, on a memorable day, the twenty-sixth of June, 1893, he granted absolute pardon to Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe and Michael Schwab, the three living Haymarket prisoners. He did this not because he felt that it was an act of mercy, pure and simple, but because he felt in his heart that these men had been unjustly convicted. When he told some of his close friends that he was going to pardon the “anarchists” he said, “Make no mistake about its being a popular move; if I do it, I will be a dead man politically.” And again he said, “The storm will break now. I am prepared for that. It was merely doing right.”

And what a storm did break around the noble head of the little man in the Springfield State House! A great cry went up from the capitalist papers from coast to coast, calling Altgeld a “foreigner,” an “anarchist” and a “demagogue.” One paper printed a cartoon of Altgeld, sneaking up on the figure of Miss Columbia with a lighted torch behind his back. Friends like Henry Demarest Lloyd, Brand Whitlock, Jane Addams of Hull House and Clarence Darrow stuck sturdily to the Governor, but for the few remaining years of his life, “Altgeld was the most reviled and hated figure in America. The attacks on him left him poor and broken in body and spirit. But they could not break his firm resolve to do what he thought was right.” He never said much about the slanders that were heaped on him. Once he did remark, “Remember this about any slander, denial only emphasizes and gives added importance to falsehood. Let it alone and it will die for want of nourishment.” But his enemies never let up, and a year after the signing of the pardons they were again howling against Altgeld.

This time it was because of his action in connection with the historic Pullman strike.

On the southern edge of the city of Chicago was a town of workers’ houses that rejoiced in the name of Pullman. There, were manufactured the cars which carry those who can afford to pay the price for being uncomfortably exclusive. In June, 1894, the workers in these factories, revolting against what they regarded as unfair conditions, went out on strike. At that time, a great number of railway workers had been organized into the American Railway Union, headed by young Eugene Victor Debs, who had won his spurs in the labor movement by leading a victorious strike of the Great Northern Railway Line. That strike had been the first sign since the Haymarket troubles of a revived spirit in the ranks of labor.

The Pullman employees struck two months after the Great Northern victory, and very naturally they turned to Debs and his loyal workers to help them in their struggles against the Pullman aristocracy. The officials of the Pullman Company had always looked upon their workers in the way in which barons of old looked upon their serfs. They called their town a model town, and boasted of the nice, paternalistic way in which they treated their “help.” Of course when the “help” suggested that they might get better wages and hours if they had a Union of their own, the Pullman owners were terribly shocked. From the beginning, it was evident that they would do anything in their power to break this revolt. Again the thugs of the Pinkerton Detective Agency were called in to break the workers’ heads. Again spies were sent to union meetings and again the Courts were called on to help the cause of property. Debs and the American Railway Union officials had not been anxious to enter into the strike, but once it was called, there was nothing for the older and stronger union to do but to help the weaker brother. By an overwhelming vote of the American Railway Union, it was decided that no members of this union should work on trains which carried Pullman cars. Immediately twenty-three leading railroads were involved. The managers of these roads had tremendous influence upon public officials everywhere. There was one man, however, high in public life, whom they could not reach and his name was John Peter Alt-geld. The effects of the strike were immediately noticeable all through the country, but the strike’s storm center was in Chicago. During the first week of the strike, Eugene Debs issued an order in which he said, “The contest is now on between the railway corporations united solidly on the one hand and the labor forces on the other ... I appeal to the strikers everywhere to refrain from any act of violence. A man who will destroy property or violate law is an enemy and not a friend of the cause of labor.” Everywhere this appeal was responded to by his followers. Only those trains which carried Pullman cars had no crews. But the determined corporation officials resolved to get the forces of the Government on their side. On the trumped-up plea that the strike was interfering with the handling of the United States Mails and was a conspiracy against interstate commerce, great pressure was brought upon President Grover Cleveland in Washington to send Federal troops into Chicago to crush the strike. At the same time, a comparatively new weapon and a powerful one was brought up against organized labor. This was the injunction, a device common enough today in all labor disputes, whereby the employers go before a friendly judge and obtain from him an order restraining striking workers from persuading others to quit work. Of course the workers themselves do not appear in court and have no voice in the proceeding. The injunction is mostly a one-sided affair. The excuse for granting an injunction is the fear that in some time to come the strikers might commit acts of violence. It is evident that if they did commit these acts of violence, they would be subject to arrest and punishment just as everyone else. But those who apologize for the injunction, carefully avoid mentioning this fact. Capital has found no one single force more effective than the paper upon which injunctions are written. As a rule, the workers are terrified by the high-flown legal language of injunctions and they know that if they violate the orders of the court, they are liable to be imprisoned for almost any length of time for contempt of the very court which has issued the injunction.

By calling for Federal troops, then, and through the use of the injunction rather than through any fair means of open warfare, the railroad managers launched a vicious attack upon the strikers. In the corporation-owned newspapers, the strikers, as usual, were pictured as “armed mobs” and the strike itself was called “Deb’s Rebellion.” The events of the Haymarket Riot were trotted out again. Again the public began to look under its collective bed for bomb-making anarchists and again, the corporations were able to rally behind them enough public sentiment to persuade panic-stricken officials that a “red revolution” was going on in Chicago.

And again, Governor Altgeld preferred rather to do right than to do that which was easy. Although the Constitution of the State of Illinois provided that either the sheriff or the mayor of Chicago could call for troops when they thought the situation warranted it, neither of these officials raised their voices. Altgeld, himself, from the very outset of the strike, had been in constant touch with the situation. He knew the truth about it far better than any editorial writer. He knew that if there was any rioting, it was done not by the strikers but by hoodlums and hangers-on in the slums of Chicago. He saw that the Pullman Company was steadfastly refusing all offers to arbitrate the question of wages and hours and, as a matter of fact, he himself ordered troops to go to the assistance of passengers who were stalled on the trains at Decatur, Illinois, and ordered troops sent as well to Danville, in another part of the state. His chief anxiety was for the preservation of law and order. Whatever he thought of the Pullman Company methods, he could not, as the Governor, show any favoritism, and while at heart he may well have sympathized with the strikers, at all events he did his full duty as Governor of the State. Henry Demarest Lloyd, writing of Altgeld’s conduct at that time said, “I happened to be in Springfield at the time of the strike, and spent an evening with Governor Altgeld. He entertained me in the Executive Office and showed me a huge map ... of Illinois, on which was marked, with tacks and pins, the position of every company of militia while a great sheet lay on the desk, showing exactly what companies were under arms, what railroads would be most efficient in taking them to Chicago, and what provisions were made for sustenance. The Governor had the troops of the whole state practically under arms, and ready to throw into Chicago, when request should be made for them.”

Out of a clear sky, despite Altgeld’s opposition, on July 3, 1894, President Cleveland ordered all the Federal soldiers at Fort Sheridan, north of Chicago, to enter the city. They were put under command of the veteran General Miles, and no sooner had they arrived than instantly serious rioting started. More than a dozen persons were killed, many were wounded, freight cars were burned or looted. Two days after the Federal soldiers had arrived, the Mayor of Chicago sent a frantic telegram to Altgeld asking for help from the state militia. Altgeld at once sent three regiments of Illinois militia and followed this up with others. Within a day or two, practically the entire military force of the state was in or about Chicago, and by the thirteenth of July the situation had quieted down. The Federal soldiers were withdrawn a week later and the last of the state troops went out of town on August sixth.

Looking back on those exciting days, it is plain to any fair-minded observer, that the railroad officials had become desperate in their attempts to break the strikers’ ranks. They realized, as do the employers of large numbers of workers today, that nothing is surer to crush a strike than the calling in of United States troops. They knew that the state militia would not be nearly as active against the strikers as members of the regular army. As soon as Federal troops come on the scene, the public immediately takes the view that the strike is a struggle between the United States Government and workers. It was this attitude of the public which did much to break the great general strike of 1926 in England. And it was this attitude, too, which broke the Pullman strike. The administration at Washington at that time was distrustful of Altgeld because of his supposedly radical views and his sympathy with labor. Furthermore, the administration felt that it was its duty to do all in its power to uphold the hands of the railway corporation. Throughout the history of the Government’s relations with labor, we find it again and again acting as strike breaker. It is interesting to note, in passing, that while Grover Cleveland was elected by the Democratic Party and is one of their heroes today, by sending troops into Illinois over the protest of its Governor, he violated every principle of local self-government.' In his letter of protest against the sending of the troops, Altgeld pointed this out in no uncertain manner. He wrote to President Cleveland, “To absolutely ignore a local government in matters of this kind, when the local government is ready to furnish assistance needed, and is amply able to enforce the law, not only insults the people of this State by imputing to them an inability to govern themselves, or an unwillingness to enforce the law, but is in violation of a basic principle of our institutions. The question of Federal supremacy is in no way involved. No one disputes it for a moment; but, under our Constitution, Federal supremacy and local self-government must go hand in hand, and to ignore the latter is to do violence to the Constitution.”

Having succeeded in awing the strikers by the show of arms, the Pullman owners called in the courts and had arraigned before Judge Peter S. Grosscup of the Federal District Court in Chicago, Debs and three other officers of the American Railway Union. They were at first released on bail but a week later were re-arrested and judged in contempt of court for violation of one of the most disgraceful injunctions ever handed down by an American court. All four refused bail and were sent to jail for six months. This practically ended the Pullman strike. With their leaders behind the bars, with all the forces of Government against them, the strikers were forced to go back to work at the same low wages they had been receiving when they came out. In the story of Eugene Victor Debs, you will read of the wonderful reception the plain people gave to their ’Gene when he was released from prison. Just now, we go back to Altgeld and the fresh storm of criticism, abuse and hatred that was breaking about him. As in the case of the Hay-market disorders, the newspapers shouted “anarchist” and “radical” and the man who had done what he thought right was lonelier than ever.

He went on, however, disregarding the abuse that arrived with every mail, working out a program of intelligent administration for the state of Illinois which has not been equalled since his time. Wherever abuses arose, Altgeld was quick to strike at them. He put through many of his cherished prison reforms, got the State Legislature of 1895 to pass a law adopting a parole system and the indeterminate sentence plan. He did much to end the brutality of prison officials and to abolish the striped costumes worn by prisoners. He never forgot that it was the loyal support of the organized workers of the state that had brought him to the Governor’s chair and he put through a great body of legislation helping the laborer towards better conditions. One of the laws which he helped pass made it a misdemeanor for an employer to forbid his employees the privilege of belonging to any lawful labor organization. When Altgeld left the Governor’s chair, this law was laid conveniently away and, so far as the writer knows, has never been enforced to this day. It was largely through Altgeld’s suggestion that a State Industrial Board was set up, consisting of three members, one an employer of labor, one a workingman, and the third, a representative of the public, to sit in arbitration in industrial disputes.

Nor did Altgeld forget the difficulties of securing an education he had encountered as a poor boy on the farm. When he was elected, Illinois had a state university little better than a “cow college.” Immediately, Altgeld saw to it that the state appropriation for the University of Illinois received an appropriation of $295,700, or more than twice the amount of any former state grant. He was the first Governor to visit the University frequently, to express a keen interest in all that went on within the college walls, to get lectures in law and medicine started at the University—in short, as one of the ex-presidents of the University of Illinois once said, “He raised this institution from a comparatively insignificant country college to the rank of a great school of learning, the foundations of which are broad and deep ... He marked an epoch in the educational life and interest in this commonwealth.” Just as Robert M. LaFollette, when he was Governor of Wisconsin, allied the activities of the state government with that of the state university and made the University of Wisconsin one of the foremost educational centers in this country, so Altgeld, had he had time to work out his plans, would have taken the University of Illinois out of the rut of an educational factory to the heights of a real temple of learning. As it is, no sooner had Altgeld’s stalwart figure left the stage, than the old gang got hold of the University and today the country knows it more as the Alma Mater of Red Grange than as the source of wisdom for American youth.

At this time Altgeld’s first term as Governor came to an end. The Republicans, in their convention at St. Louis in June, 1896, selected the reactionary and timid William McKinley for their Presidential candidate. The Democrats, meeting at Chicago, at once split on the question of “sound money” and nominated young William J. Bryan, the “silver-tongued orator” from Nebraska. Altgeld was one of the leading figures at this convention and instantly the Republican papers pounced on this fact to link Altgeld’s name with that of Bryan and to announce to the frightened public that there was a “communist democratic plot against the nation,” much as they announced these things during the late LaFollette campaign. Altgeld had again received the nomination for Governorship of Illinois but he gave very little thought to his own election but went out and took the stump for Bryan and the Democratic ticket. Wherever he spoke he was received by great crowds of the common people and the hissings of the capitalist press. At the election, Bryan went down to defeat on the Free Silver issue and while Altgeld ran far ahead of Bryan in Illinois, he was defeated by the combined efforts of banks, trusts, syndicates and corporations and an Old Guard Governor once more ruled in the Springfield State House.

“Exit Altgeld,” exulted Harper’s Weekly, one of his most vindictive journalistic foes, “the most dangerous enemy to American institutions of all the ruffianly gang which has broken out of the forecastle of the Ship of State and attempted to occupy the quarterdeck and seize the helm.”

But despite Harper’s Weekly, Altgeld had not gone from the American scene, and as a matter of fact his spirit still lives in the hearts of his followers and their children. He left politics with a great sense of relief. He said:    “I have given Illinois four of my best years and have brought all my offerings to her altar. Had it been necessary to do so, I should have considered life itself but a small sacrifice in her interest, and I retire from her service and from the high office to which her people elected me without any sense of bitterness or disappointment. I have tried to further the best interests of my country, and while I erred in many cases, they were errors of judgment and I go forth with a peaceful conscience. I have endeavored to carry out those principles that form the basis of free government, and I have acted on the conviction that it would be better to be Governor but for one day than to hold office for fifty years by winking at wrong. In my judgment no epitaph can be written upon the tomb of a public man that will so surely win the contempt of the ages as to say of him that he held office all his life and never did anything for humanity.”

If any man was entitled to speak thus, it was surely John Peter Altgeld. When he came into office he was reported to have been a millionaire. When he left it, he was practically a poor man. When he came into office his health, never good in the general sense of the word, was not shattered; and shattered it was when he left. The persecution, the slander, the viciously violent attacks on the part of his political and economic enemies had crushed everything in the man but his spirit. Though he had been thrown out of politics by the corporation gang, to his last day he kept up his interest in the fight for the common man. He entered into law partnership with Clarence Darrow and kept up an interest in public affairs that brought him many times onto the platform and into the columns of the papers. His last speech was a summary of his life’s philosophy. It was made at Joliet, Illinois, on behalf of the Boers, the brave South African farmers who were waging an unequal battle with the British Empire. Those who heard that speech said that it was one of the most eloquent of his career. After pleading for the Boer women and children who were being herded into British concentration camps, he concluded ; “I am not discouraged. Things will right themselves. The pendulum swings one way and then another. But the steady pull of gravitation is toward the center of the earth. Any structure must be plumbed if it is to endure, or the building will fall. So it is with nations. Wrong may seem to triumph, right may seem to be defeated, but the gravitation of eternal justice is toward the throne of God. Any political institution which is to endure must be plumb with that line of justice.”

He stood there for a moment, looking out through those clear blue eyes of his beyond the crowd that was cheering him to some vision that only he could see. Then he sighed and started to walk unsteadily across the platform. In the wings he staggered and would have fallen had not a friend caught him in his arms. His last illness had come. He died the next morning in a bare little bedroom in the Joliet hotel. This was on March 12, 1902. His body was taken to his home in Chicago and there Jane Addams and Clarence Darrow, fellow fighters in the cause to which Alt-geld had given his life, spoke a few simple words over the body of their dead leader. When his body was laid in state in the Public Library building in Chicago, all day long thousands of working men and women and their children stood in line for a last look at what was left of their steadfast friend.

Vachel Lindsay, the American poet and devoted follower of Altgeld, wrote these lines in his memory:

“Sleep softly . . . eagle forgotten . . . under the stone.

Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.

“We have buried him now,” thought your foes, and in secret rejoiced.

They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred unvoiced.

They had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you day after day,

Now you were ended. They praised you . . . and laid you away.

The others that mourned you in silence and terror and truth,

The widow bereft of her crust, and the boy without youth,

The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame and the poor

That should have remembered forever . . . remember no more.

Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they call,

The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall?

They call on the names of a hundred high-valiant ones,

A hundred white eagles have risen, the sons of your sons; The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began, The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man.

Sleep softly . . . eagle forgotten . . . under the stone, Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own; Sleep on, O brave-hearted, O wise man, that kindled the flame—

To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name, To live in mankind, far, far more . . . than to live in a name.”

— HENRY GEORGE —

A LITTLE MAN AND A BIG BOOK

A topsail schooner was working her way up the Pacific Coast from San Francisco to Victoria. On the deck a slender youth was talking to an old miner about the importation of Chinese laborers on the coast. The youth asked the miner what harm the Chinese workers were doing if they were only employed at the cheap diggings. “No harm now,” said the old miner, “but wages will not always be as high as they are today in California. As the country grows, as people come in, wages will go down, and some day or other white men will be glad to get those diggings that the Chinamen are now working.” In speaking of that conversation, Henry George, who was the youth on the little schooner’s deck, said in after years, “I well remember how it impressed me, the idea that as the country grew, in all that we are hoping that it might grow, the condition of those who have to work for their living must become, not better, but worse.”

At the time he had this talk and the idea which was to govern him for the rest of his life first came to birth in the young man’s mind, George’s financial situation could not have been much worse. He had been born, on September 2, 1839, in a quaint little two-story brick house in Philadelphia. His people were middle class, of English Scotch blood. His father was in the book publishing business, and was able to give the boy a good preparatory school education. He evidently intended that George should go into business with him, but the boy was a dreamer, who had a deep love for the sea in him, and in his fifteenth year he shipped aboard the schooner Hindoo as foremast boy, bound for Melbourne, Australia, and Calcutta. The dreams of a romantic India that led George to ship aboard the Hindoo were soon dispelled by what he saw of the shocking conditions of the working classes. Their misery roused all of George’s crusading spirit. Pie said later that in India the very carrion birds were more sacred than human life, and it was with a sense of deep relief that after an absence of more than a year he finally returned to Philadelphia. George’s parents did not want him to go to sea again, and soon after his return home his father got the boy a position in a large Philadelphia printing shop, where he learned to set type, the trade that he was to pursue all up and down the west coast in later years.

The wanderlust was not to be denied, however, and we soon find him shipping again, this time bound for California. The ship was nearly sunk in a storm off the Hatteras coast. So severe was the hurricane that it was necessary to throw almost everything movable overboard, and George played a heroic part in lightening the cargo of coal. In San Francisco George heard of the discovery of gold at Victoria, but when he had arrived there with the other prospectors, he found that it was impossible to get back into the gold-bearing country, and in search of employment he became practically a tramp. He was set on getting to the mines, and he says, “Having no other way of reaching them, I started out to walk. I was, in fact, what would now be called a tramp. I had a little money, but I slept in barns to save it. I had a rough time generally.” These were desperate days for the youth, who was frail of stature, and found great difficulty keeping alive by doing farm work and other manual labor. He came back to San Francisco, and went to work at type-setting. He joined the printers’ union, and for a time made good wages, as union rates were high in those days. Wherever he went, he talked over industrial conditions with his fellow workers, and soon developed a highly original philosophy. He was perfecting himself in writing, and was called on now and then to deliver speeches to workingmen. An article that he wrote on the land question in California attracted considerable attention. He sent a copy of it to John Stuart Mill, the great English economist, who answered with a letter speaking highly of George’s economic viewpoint. While he was not working at his machine, he was deep in what books he could obtain on what was then the comparatively new science of political economy. George’s keen mind went literally to the very roots of things. He felt that the source of the country’s future greatness was in the land. It was nothing short of criminal, in George’s mind, that men should hold land out of use for speculation. He put his thoughts into shape in the form of rough notes for his life work, the book that was to be called Progress and Poverty and was to make him one of the most famous American economists. He had married, and was now the father of four children. Life had not dealt well with him from a financial standpoint. His progress had been made from one poverty to another, but always he kept his goal very much in sight. You would come upon him in the library of his little home, with books piled up all about him, a man with a fine large head, kindly eyes, and a reddish beard.

He finished the book when he was forty. “Henry George had written a book,” writes his son, Henry George, Jr., “which he was confident would some day become famous; but in writing it he had chosen the hard road of the social pioneer, and in the fall of 1879 ... he was beginning to realize, with secret bitterness, the difficult task he would have from now forward in making a living; for the world regards as an impractical man and a dreamer him who was in advance of his time.” He had written a book, to be sure, but he could at first find no one to read it, and worse yet, no publisher. He was determined, however, that the book should be brought out in the East, where he had some friends in the newspaper business. Leaving his family behind him, he set out across the continent with a few copies of Progress and Poverty which he had persuaded a publisher to make from plates that George himself had provided. He arrived in New York in 1880, as poor as any immigrant who ever set foot in the city. It was not for nearly a year that the public began to notice George’s book. Then several favorable reviews appeared, in papers both here and abroad. The sale of the book soon began to pick up, and within a short period more than twenty thousand copies had been sold, and its central theme, the land question, was being discussed everywhere.

Leaders of the labor movement of the day became interested in the man and his ideas, and he was soon being called upon to lecture on the land movement before organizations of workingmen both here and in England, where George had gone to take part in the Irish Land League movement. A huge meeting of workers was held in Cooper Union, New York, upon his return from England. He had well mastered the art of public speaking, and presented his arguments against land speculation in the most stirring manner. He was dealing with a difficult subject, strange to most of his auditors, but he had a way of putting fire into his listeners, even when discussing such cold matters as taxation and land values. If taxation were removed from the shoulders of those who do the actual productive work of the world, and were confined solely to taxation on idle land, everyone except the speculators would thereby profit. This theory soon became known as the Single Tax, and the followers of George have been called Single Taxers, though of late years those active in the movement have called their political organization the Commonwealth Land Party.

It was in 1886 when the American labor movement was first feeling its strength, in what has been called “Labor’s great upheaval,” that Henry George was approached by a group of workers who were tired of the corruptions of both old political parties, and wanted George to be their candidate for Mayor. The workers of the city had no political machinery of their own. Elections were not then decided by the present method of the Australian ballot, and there was open bribery at all the polling places. George had gathered about him, however, a group of ardent supporters, and he immediately began a red-hot campaign against Abram S. Hewitt, who was the candidate of the Democratic Party, and the young and aristocratic Theodore Roosevelt, the “silk-stocking” Republican candidate. George went up and down the town, speaking from the backs of trucks, before factory gates at the noon hour, and in crowded halls. This is the sort of thing that George was telling the workers:

“We have hordes of citizens living in want and in vice born of want, existing under conditions that would appall heathen. Is this by the will of our Divine Creator? No. It is the fault of men; and as men and citizens, on us devolves the duty of removing this wrong; and in that platform which the convention has adopted and on which I stand the the first step is taken. Why should there be such abject poverty in this city? There is one great fact that stares in the face any one who chooses to look at it. That fact is that the vast majority of men and women and children in New York have no legal right to live here at all. Most of us—ninety-nine per cent at least—must pay the other one per cent by the week or month or quarter for the privilege of staying here and working like slaves. . . .

“Now, is there any reason for such overcrowding? There is plenty of room on this island. There are miles and miles and miles of land all around this nucleus. Why cannot we take that land and build houses upon it for our accommodations? Simply because it is held by dogs in the manger who will not use it themselves nor allow anybody else to use it, unless he pays an enormous price for it—because what the Creator intended for the habitation of the people whom He called into being is held at an enormous rent or an enormous price. . . .

“But what do we propose to do about it? We propose, in the first place, as our platform indicates, to make the buildings cheaper, by taking the tax off buildings. We propose to put that tax on land exclusive of improvements, so that a man who is holding land vacant will have to pay as much for it as if he was using it, just upon the same principle that a man who should go to a hotel and hire a room and take the key and go away would have to pay as much for it as if he had occupied the room and slept in it. In that way we propose to drive out the dog in the manger who is holding from you what he will not use himself. We propose in that way to remove this barrier and open the land to the use of labor in putting up buildings for the accommodation of the people of the city. . .

It soon became evident to the alarmed managers of both old parties that George’s campaign was making an amazing headway. What his followers lacked in political experience they made up for in hot enthusiasm for the man and his cause. Such labor leaders and prominent liberals as Samuel Gompers of the Cigarmakers’ Union, Daniel DeLeon, who was then teaching at Columbia College, Grand Master Workman Powderly, of the Knights of Labor, and many active Socialists, all joined in working for George’s election. The old line newspapers supported by the great real estate interests were bitter in their attacks on George. He was called, “a revolutionist,” “an apostle of anarchy and destruction,” “a man who attacks the sacred foundations of property.” The campaign closed with a huge street parade. Through a cold rainstorm, holding up their trade union banners, the followers of George, led by William MacKay, a journeyman printer, marched for two hours past a reviewing stand in Union Square, calling out greetings to their candidate.

When Election Day came, the superiority of the old party machinery was made evident. The workers’ party had no inspectors of election. At that time the different organizations had to print and distribute their own ballots, and in many instances there were no ballots for George’s followers at the polling places. When the final result was announced, George had received officially more than 68,000 votes, running second to Hewitt, who led with 90,000. Roosevelt received only 60,000. Veterans of that campaign still insist that George was counted out by the old party inspectors. He was not dismayed, however, by the results. To a reporter who interviewed him about his plans the day after election, he said, “I shall buy a bottle of ink and a box of pens and again go to writing.” He regarded the campaign as a skirmish in the great battle for human freedom. The old line papers were frankly dismayed by the strength that George had developed. The New York Times said “That a new party should suddenly have been called into existence in this city, and without an existing organization, without a party fund, and under the leadership of men inexperienced in political work, should have given its candidate a vote nearly equaling that cast in recent years by any of the existing political parties is at once seen to be an event demanding the most serious attention and study.”

Then, as is so often the case with reform parties, dissensions sprang up among George’s followers. Men who were willing to forego all their differences in the heat of the campaign found that their political philosophies could not mingle for any long period. George, who was insistent that the land question should be made practically the only issue in his program, broke with the Socialists, and held a historical debate with Sergius E. Shevitch, a prominent representative of the Socialists, who taxed George with having ousted members of the Socialist Labor Party from his own party, which had taken the name of United Labor Party. Henry George was nominated with a group of labor men for Secretary of New York State the year after his mayoralty campaign. Although he was as active as usual, speaking throughout the state, he received a disappointingly small vote. He had hoped to interest people in the land question, but his second campaign had failed miserably. Louis F. Post, an ardent Single Taxer, says that on the night when the returns indicating George’s defeat were coming into the Labor Party headquarters, George said that he had thought a way of bringing back the people to the land had opened in the labor campaign of the preceding year, but now that way had closed. Yet another way would open, and “when that closed, still another, until the Lord’s will on earth would be done.”

George went back to editorial writing on his paper, The Standard, after the campaign, and was busied with work for the propaganda of his single tax ideas until the day of his death. He consented to run again for mayor of New York under the standard of a new party, calling itself “The Party of Thomas Jefferson.” Once more he found enthusiastic supporters among the workers of the city, but his strength had been undermined by the privations of the poverty he had suffered as a youth, and the strenuous campaign told on him. He made his last speech to a great crowd in the Central Opera House, on the Thursday night before election. Whereas his speeches had always been marked with great clearness, now the candidate was evidently worn out with the strain of the battle. He rambled in his talk, and seemed confused. His friends took him to the old Union Square Hotel, where shortly after midnight he died. He was fifty-eight years old, and he had given all that was in him to the cause that he believed just. “All his life long,” said a New York paper, which had attacked him while he was alive, “he spoke and wrote and thought and prayed and dreamed of one thing only—the cause of the plain people against corruption and despotism . . . He died as he lived. He died a hero’s death. He died as he would have wished to die—on the battlefield, spending his last strength in a blow at the enemies of the people. Fearless, honest, unsullied, uncompromising Henry George!”

All across the country today are men and women who regard George’s Progress and Poverty as their political bible. Its distribution has been world-wide and steady since the days when George first published it. It presents a theory of taxation that has met with the warmest enthusiasm and the most violent abuse. It is a big piece of constructive and original thinking, and the figure of the man who penned it will always loom large in any history of the American labor and liberal movement.

—SAMUEL GOMPERS — 

ORGANIZER

He came from the East Side of London to the East Side of New York, this son of Jewish-Dutch parents. Poverty was at the side of Samuel Gompers from the very beginning. One of the earliest recollections of the lad was hearing the bitter cry of the unemployed weavers, walking the streets outside his home in London, crying, “God, I’ve no work to do! Lord strike me dead—my wife, my kids want bread, and I’ve no work to do!”

America, for the Gompers family, held high hopes of freedom. In those days English workers were singing:—

“To the west, to the west, to the land of the free Where mighty Missouri rolls down to the sea;

Where a man is a man if he’s willing to toil,

And the humblest may gather the fruits of the soil.

Where children are blessings and he who hath most Has aid for his fortune and riches to boast.

Where the young may exult and the aged may rest, Away, far away, to the land of the west.

Away, far away, let us hope for the best And build up a home in the land of the west.”

Westward went the family, father, mother, and five sons, to arrive at Castle Garden in New York on July 29, 1863. No sooner had little Samuel landed on American soil than he plunged head foremost into the full currents of New York life. By day he worked at the cigarmaking trade, and three or four evenings a week found him eagerly debating American institutions and politics or listening to lectures at the famous Cooper Union, the workingmen’s institute founded by Peter Cooper. At one time or another he had registered for courses in history, biography, music, mechanics, measurement of speed, elocution, economics, electric power, geography, astronomy and travel. It was at Cooper Union that he first met a quick-minded young Irishman named Peter J. Maguire, who like himself was later to become a leader of American labor.

Young Gompers was a great “joiner.” He soon became a member of the Rising Star Social and Debating Club, the Arion Baseball and Social Club, the Court Empire City of the Ancient Order of Foresters, and other organizations with similar high-sounding titles. But the one organization he joined at that time which had most significance in developing the boy’s character was the Cigar-makers’ International Union. This he joined a year after arriving in this country, and in it he held Union Card No. 1 until his death.

Gomper’s union was not a strong one, and indeed the unions of those days were, to a great extent, informal affairs. There was little organized effort to secure uniform wages. As a general rule the employer fixed the wages until he had shoved them down to a point where human nature revolted. Then some worker, more courageous than the rest, would rise from his bench, gather up his tools, and announcing in a loud voice, “I am going on strike. Anyone who doesn’t come out with me is a scab!” would march defiantly out of the factory. Sometimes the other workers would follow him, sometimes not, but there was no sign of the discipline which marks the strikers of today. Even in those early years, this hit-or-miss method of striking troubled young Gompers. He began to think then of an organized, disciplined way of enforcing the demands of labor.

In love with discussion of all sorts, Gompers was forever hanging about those East Side meeting places where the labor question was so heatedly debated. He attended meetings of the Socialists, who at that time were working under the name of the International Workingmen’s Association, the organization founded by Karl Marx. He became thoroughly familiar with the doctrines of Socialism, and after the formal meetings, he and a group of friends would get together in the old Tenth Ward Hotel, where late into the night they would talk over the problems of radicalism, revolution, and the trade union movement in this country. P. J. Maguire was one of this group, as was MacDonald, whose heart was afire with enthusiasm for the cause of Irish freedom, and who had worked in Karl Marx’s office. Now and then Gompers’ great friend and adviser, Karl Malcolm Ferdinand Laurrell, would drop in and listen quietly to the discussion. Laurrell was a Swede who had been active in the revolutionary movement in his own country, and after the collapse of that movement had escaped to this country. While he knew all about revolution, Laurrell, nevertheless, was a firm exponent of well-disciplined and organized trade unionism, and his teachings had a profound effect upon young Gompers.

Gompers’ activities were not confined to the discussions of the little group in the old hotel. He was busy talking unionism to his fellows, attending meetings, at some of which he spoke, and working out plans for a more compact organization of labor. One day he was present at a workers’ demonstration on Tompkins Square. The demonstration had been planned to provide relief for the unemployed, who were everywhere tramping the city streets. It had hardly gotten under way when mounted police and patrolmen charged the crowd, swinging their clubs and cracking the heads of men, women, and children. Gompers was caught in a rush of frightened and defenseless workers, and barely saved himself from serious injury by jumping down a cellarway. His friend Laurrell was badly beaten, and Gompers’ indignation over the brutality of the police was intense.

Among those who had arranged for the meeting were many radicals whose activities had aroused the enmity of the police, and in thinking over the events when he got home, young Gompers came to the conclusion that while extreme methods might be valuable for publicity purposes, they were of little use in the forwarding of the labor movement. In speaking of that formative time, he said, “As the fundamentals came to me, they became guide-posts for my understanding of the labor movement for years to come. I saw how professions of radicalism and sensationalism concentrated all the forces of organized society against a labor movement, and nullified in advance normal, necessary activity. I saw that leadership in the labor movement could be safely entrusted only to those into whose hearts and minds had been woven the experiences of earning their bread by daily labor. I saw that betterment for working men must come primarily through working men.” In those sentences you have the summing up of the philosophy that was eventually to give Gompers his triumph over those who advocated more extreme methods, and to give direction, too, to the American labor movement until this day.

We have seen how the railway men’s strike of 1877 gave heart to the American workers. Its effects were evident even in the miserably lighted, overcrowded lofts where the poorly paid cigar-makers of New York were at work. It was in that year that Gompers and his friends decided to call a strike for higher wages for these workers. In the first shop that was struck, the rebels were successful, and soon other workers walked out and joined the little union. While the strike was in progress, the International Union of Cigar-makers met, with Gompers as a delegate for New York. The convention elected his friend Adolph Strasser as President, at the princely salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a year. When Gompers came back to New York, he found that not only had the workers who were making cigars in the factories of the city gone out on strike, but that they had been joined by the unskilled home workers in the miserable tenement houses of the East Side. This caused an influx of new members into the union, with new and tremendous demands for relief which the union was sorely pressed to meet, although at one time it was paying out twelve hundred dollars a day in the shape of relief and strike benefits, an unprecedented sum for that time. The union could not keep up the fight, and soon the strike faded away.

The employers’ association forthwith blacklisted all the active leaders in the strike, foremost among them Gompers. The next four months were the blackest in the young labor leader’s life. He was married and had five children, with another expected. His wife, despite her condition, stuck to Samuel, and indignantly spurned an offer that was indirectly made to her that if her husband would give up his union organizing and return to work, he could be assured of a wage of thirty dollars a week. Night after night, after tramping the streets all day in torn shoes, Gompers would come home to find that there was nothing in the house but a soup made of water, salt, pepper, and flour.

Once, he said later, he was ready to commit murder. He had left his wife in the morning, and after a day of vain search for work, he had returned to find she was about to give birth to his sixth child. There was not a cent in the house to pay any doctor, and he could not find the union’s physician, who had been attending his wife. Desperately, he rang the bell of a doctor on the next block. The latter refused to attend Mrs. Gompers unless he were paid in advance. Gompers walked up to him and said, “I have got no money. I have been out of work, but I will promise to pay you everything I can gather tonight. You come along with me, or I will not be responsible for what I will do to you.” The doctor came, and that day there was born A1 Gompers, whom father Samuel called his “strike baby.”

In the course of time, the enmities caused by the strike died out, and Gompers went back to the bench, and resumed his organizing work. Always in the back of his mind was the compelling idea of a strong national federation of workers which should concentrate on the matter of wages and hours, and keep pretty much out of the fields of general economics, in which such organizations as the then powerful Knights of Labor were moving. Gompers understood, and to a certain degree sympathized with, the philosophy of Socialism, but he felt that the labor movement was wasting its energy by its emphasis on cooperative enterprises, currency problems, and taxation. Everywhere he went, he talked over his idea of a new “pure and simple trade unionism.” He had firm allies in Strasser and in other workers who had dabbled in all sorts of philosophies, and found that none of them had the exact formula for economic salvation for the workers. Strasser had a little office on Chatham Street, and from that office letters promoting the cause of federation were constantly sent out. The cigarmakers’ union was the nucleus for what was later to be the American Federation of Labor, and the driving spirit in that union was Samuel Gompers.

The leaders of the Knights of Labor, who about this time were calling strikes on every occasion, looked with lively suspicion upon the Gompers group, and by the year 1886, when the apostles of federation had gained great headway, the fight between the pure and simple trade unionists and the more idealistically minded Knights had come out into the open. That year marks a turning point in the history of American labor. Five years before a loose federation of trade and labor unions, mainly devoted to legislative measures in favor of labor, had been formed. Gompers was a member of this federation, but it was evident to him that it was not the sort of organization he was after. In the meantime, the Knights had grown so rapidly that their leaders threatened to absorb the entire labor movement. They had the vision, these officials of an order which had begun in secrecy, and which still retained much of its mystical origin, of forming all the workers of America, skilled and unskilled alike, into One Big Union. In this union the interests of the skilled workers seemed likely to be subordinated to those of the unskilled. Upon this fact the new trade unionists like Gompers eagerly pounced, pointing out that a unionism of the various crafts would accomplish far more for the workers in bargaining with the employers, than a mixed organization, held back by the economic weakness of the unskilled workers. At a convention held in Columbus, Ohio, in December, dominated by Gompers and his friends, a new organization, called the American Federation of Labor, was born; Gompers was elected President, at a salary of one thousand dollars a year, and with the exception of one year, he held that office until his death in 1924. Bitterly the Knights fought the newcomer. But they fought in vain and within a few years they had drifted off the scene. The practical philosophy of Gompers, his insistence on results in the shape of better hours and higher wages had an irresistible appeal for the American workers.

From now on, the story of Gompers is the story of the official labor movement in this country. He had at his command an organization which granted self-government to the various unions connected with it, which had not the power of directly calling strikes in the various crafts, but which acted as spokesman for American labor in one crisis after another. The American Federation of Labor, essentially an organization for the benefit of skilled workers, has been the object of the highest praise and the bitterest criticism. Compared with trade union organizations in other countries, it is still in its infancy, and time alone can tell whether it will continue along the lines laid down by its founders. That it has had an all-powerful influence in shaping the attitude of the public toward labor questions is beyond all debate.

Despite the attempts of other organizations to break the power of Federation, it remains today the official expression of American labor in the minds of the majority of our citizens. At one time, directly after the great war, its membership fell slightly short of five million. Since then it has declined, until today dues-paying members of the Federation number around three million.

Before he died, Samuel Gompers was the confidant of Presidents and European rulers. He had become an outstanding figure in the world beyond labor. But while those who remember him at the height of his fame are wont to think of him as one favored by fortune, the man himself never forgot his working-class origins and those dark days when as a blacklisted cigarmaker he tramped the slushy streets of New York, searching in vain for a job that would keep body and soul together.

— EUGENE DEBS — 

THE BELOVED

The writer was riding in a Pullman train one day with a salesman when a porter put his head through the curtains in the smoking compartment and shouted, “Terre Haute, Indiana.” The salesman tilted his cigar and looked out over the bleak line of frame and brick houses, marching away from the railroad yard.

“Nice little town,” he remarked. “I used to sell socks there.”

To me Terre Haute meant but one thing,—that it was the home of Eugene Victor Debs, one of the greatest of all the American Pioneers of Freedom, so I asked him, “Did you ever meet Debs there?”

He pondered for a moment over the name, and finally said, “Debs? I don’t believe I ever ran into him. What line did he sell ?”

For seventy crowded years Debs sold a line for which there is no money equivalent, a line that might be branded, “Love and Liberty,” for these are the two words that come instantly into the mind of any man who has ever had contact with that great spirit. It is difficult to write about Eugene V. Debs without allowing a bit of sentiment to get between the lines. And nowadays sentiment is supposed to be old-fashioned. But just how to put down in cold black and white the warmth of affection that this man kindled in the hearts of millions who never even saw him face to face remains a problem. When Debs was in prison during the war, I spoke about him to a hard-boiled sergeant in my regiment who had been a brick-layer in peace times but who was not a Socialist and who had never seen Debs. Sudden tears came into his eyes. “There’s a real man,” he said; “I wish I had him for a friend.” Coal miners in West Virginia, fishermen “out o’ Gloucester,” cow punchers in Wyoming, steel riveters on New York skyscrapers, men and women everywhere who have in them the least bit of human sentiment, have time and again echoed the lines of James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier poet who wrote:

“Go, search the earth from end to end,

And where’s a better all-round friend 

Than Eugene Debs?—a man that stands 

And jest holds out in his two hands 

As warm a heart as ever beat 

Betwixt here and the Mercy Seat!”

Beloved as no other man in the American labor movement, with the beautiful gift for making and keeping loyal friends, there was a side to Eugene Victor Debs that glowed as fiercely as any hearth furnace and flashed as a cutting sword. It was this side that he showed when he struck out against oppression, against the crime of war, against the enslavement of man by man. And because of his fierce refusal to say “yes” to any of these injustices, all his life long Debs was hated and reviled by that little group of greedy men and their hangers-on who are the real rulers of America.

He was born on November 5, 1855, in Terre Haute. He was one of ten children born to Jean Daniel Debs and Marguerite Bettrich Debs, both natives of the French part of Alsace. His father came to this country on a sailing ship which arrived at New York in 1849. In that city he met and married Debs’ mother. The Debs family lived in a little frame house in Terre Haute in a working-class district. The house was not well furnished with anything except books. Of these there seems to have been plenty. Jean Debs had a well-equipped library of French history and the classics, and little ’Gene used to spend hours poring over Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables which he remembers as having made a tremendous impression on his youthful mind. The character of Jean Valjean came alive for him from Hugo’s pen, and the struggle of man with his fellow men and with his surroundings, as depicted in that book, gave the boy a viewpoint on life and a warm sympathy with suffering. There was poverty in the Debs home, where there were so many children to support and, at the age of fourteen, it was necessary for Eugene to look for work. He found it in the shops of the railroads that come into Terre Haute. He finally became a locomotive fireman on the Terre Haute and Indianapolis Railway Company, now a part of the Pennsylvania Railroad. He worked at night, at first, receiving a dollar a day. Later on, as a fireman, he was paid on a mileage basis. He took time that should have been devoted to sleep to reading everything that came to hand. He was aware of the defects of his schooling and from his earnings he bought an Encyclopaedia on the installment plan, a volume a month, and began to read and study history and biography, and to improve his grammar and English composition. Especially was he stirred by the revolutionary history of the United States and France. He told David Karsner, his biographer, that it was Thomas Paine who was his special hero. He liked to get away in his room and recite Patrick Henry’s revolutionary speech and in a cracked, boyish voice shout out Robert Emmet’s famous oration. Between his mother and himself, there was a deep and abiding love that was to make tender his relations with all humanity; a love, no doubt, that translated into larger terms, was reflected in ’Gene Deb’s tremendous sensitiveness to suffering and in his unusual capacity for sympathy..

It was with great foreboding that his mother used to stand on the stoop of their home in the Terre Haute side street and watch the youngster trudging off to work with his railroad lantern swinging at his side. She knew that he was going into the face of danger and she hated to think of her ’Gene riding across the prairies through the night. It was because of her insistence, perhaps, that he accepted a position as clerk in a grocery firm. He spent five years clerking, but always in the back of his mind was the thought of his railroad days and the contacts he had made as a fireman. Even then, he was concerned with the conditions of labor on the railroads. It may have been at this time that he came upon the idea of bringing all the railroad workers together in one big union. Debs saw that while there were a number of strong organizations among the railroad workers, these so-called “craft organizations” had the great weakness of being scattered and sometimes hostile to one another’s interests. It was easy for the powerful railroad corporations to set one group against another. Divided, the various unions would fall. Debs thought that if they were united, they would stand. At all events, the youth saw that his place was not clerking in a store but serving the organized labor movement to the very best of his ability. He went about among his former friends in the railroad yards, and on the evening of February 27, 1875, he was the principal figure in the organization of the local Terre Haute Lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. His ability was instantly recognized and he was quickly elected secretary of the local. Never did an organization have a more devoted servant. Debs was proud of the fact and put it into his biography in The American Labor Who’s Who that, “in spite of other business he never missed a meeting of the local in ten years.” In Karsner’s book, Debs tells of those early days as follows:

“My first step was thus taken in organized labor and a new influence fired my ambition and changed the whole current of my career. I was filled with enthusiasm and my blood fairly leaped in my veins. Day and night I worked for the brotherhood. To see the watchfires glow and observe the increase of its sturdy members were the sunshine and shower of my life. To attend the ‘meeting’ was my supreme joy, and for ten years I was not once absent when the faithful assembled.

“With all the fire of youth I entered upon the crusade which seemed to fairly glitter with possibilities. For eighteen hours at a stretch I was glued to my desk, reeling off the answers to my many correspondents. Day and night were one. Sleep was time wasted. Oh, what days! And what quenchless zeal and consuming vanity! All the firemen everywhere—and they were all the world— were straining:

‘To catch the beat

Of my tramping feet.’

“My grip was always packed; and I was darting in all directions. To tramp through a railroad yard in the rain, snow or sleet half the night, or till daybreak, or to be ordered out of the roundhouse for being an ‘agitator/ or put off a train, sometimes passenger, more often freight, while attempting to deadhead over the division, were all in the program, and served to whet the appetite to conquer.

“One night in mid-winter at Elmira, N. Y., a conductor on the Erie kindly dropped me off in a snowbank, and as I clambered to the top I ran into the arms of a policeman, who heard my story and on the spot became my friend.

“I rode on the engines over mountain and plain, slept in the cabooses and bunks, and was fed from their pails by the swarthy stokers who still nestle close to my heart, and will until it is cold and still.

“. . . And so I was spurred on in the work of organizing, not the firemen merely, but the brakemen, switchmen, telegraphers, shop men, track hands, all of them in fact, and as I had now become known as an organizer, the calls came from all sides and there, are but few trades I have not helped to organize and less still in whose strikes I have not at some time had a hand.”

He helped organize the Switchmen’s Mutual Aid Association, the Brotherhood of Railway Brakemen, now the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen and the Order of Railway Telegraphers. His outstanding ability is evidenced by the fact that when Debs took charge of the affairs of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, the Order had only sixty lodges and a $6,000 debt. Within a short time, Debs and some of his loyal comrades had added 226 lodges and wiped out the debt. Soon he was made treasurer of the Brotherhood and everywhere recognized as an up and coming leader of labor. But Debs never liked the term, “labor leader.” A few years ago he said to a group of workers, “I am not a labor leader; I da not want you to follow me on anyone else. If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of the capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into this promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands and get yourselves out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands.”

Busied as he was with his duties as organizer, Debs nevertheless found time to interest himself in the political world. In 1878 he made his first political speech and was tendered the nomination for a seat in Congress by the Democratic Party of Indiana. This he declined. But the politicians, recognizing in him a true leader of men, nominated him for the State Legislature of Indiana on the Democratic ticket and he was elected in 1885. By this time his horizons had immensely widened. He had come into touch with other pioneers such as Wendell Phillips, Robert G. Ingersoll and Susan B. Anthony, one of the most courageous fighters for woman’s suffrage in the country. Of Phillips, Debs said:

“Wendell Phillips was a perfect aristocrat; a royal man who instantly challenged respect and admiration. Wendell Phillips was treated as if he had been the worst felon on earth. They went to his house to mob him and why? Because he protested against sending a fugitive Negro back into the hell of slavery.”

’Gene was the moving spirit among such progressives as Terre Haute could boast at the time. They had formed the Occidental Literary Club and they invited the leading liberals and radicals of the day to come and speak to them. It was thus that Debs came to meet Susan B. Anthony. He had asked her to address the club and of that incident he says that he and a few friends met Miss Anthony at the railroad station and walked with her to a hotel. He wrote:

“I can still see the aversion so unfeelingly expressed for this magnificent woman. Even my friends were disgusted with me for piloting such an ‘undesirable citizen’ into the community. As we walked along the street, I was painfully aware that Miss Anthony was an object of derision and contempt, and in my heart I resented it and later I had often to defend my position, which, of course, I was ready to do.”

There is an illuminating sidelight on the sort of opposition the early suffragists had constantly to endure. It must not be forgotten that next to agitating against injustices to the workers, agitating on behalf of votes for women was, in those early days, a mighty dangerous occupation.

As the young Debs grew in mental stature, so his opportunities for service to the labor movement grew. From all sides requests poured in on him to organize new groups of workers. He responded to all of them but his early conviction that organization by crafts alone as advocated by the Gompers group was not enough, was steadily strengthened. He determined to make real his dream of one big railroad union. He went before the convention of his brotherhood in 1892 to hand in his resignation. At that time he was receiving $4,000 a year. The convention unanimously refused to accept his resignation and he was pressed to stay with the brotherhood. He insisted, however, that he must go on to a bigger work. He said that he wanted to give all his time and energy to the building up of an organization that would include all the railroad workers. The convention reluctantly took him at his word and accepted his resignation, voting to give him, as a mark of appreciation, $2,000 for a trip to Europe. This, characteristically enough, he declined to accept.

So this long, gaunt, young pioneer left his $4,000 a year job to start on a gallant attempt to draw all the railroad men into one organization to be called the American Railway Union. In June, 1893, Debs and his labor friends organized the American Railway Union at Chicago. Debs’ salary was to be $75 a month. As a matter of fact, during the last two years of the American Railway Union’s existence, he took no salary at all.

This new venture was born at a time when a spirit of desolation and hopelessness hung over the entire labor movement in America. There had been a great financial panic in 1893, and thousands of workers were thrown out of employment by the closing of factories and wholesale bankruptcies. These despairing men were roaming up and down the country in little groups, seeking work in vain. Of a sudden, they found a leader. This was one Jacob Coxey, a man with little background or training in economics but with an ability to gather up the threads of the growing discontent. At the head of a number of unemployed workers, “General” Coxey, as his followers soon learned to call him, started a march on Washington as a protest to the national government against conditions in the labor market. All up and down the “jungles” (the camps where the unemployed gather) word spread of the march of Coxey’s army on the Capitol. Soon the “General” found himself at the head of a remarkable assortment of humanity. There were young workers out of a job and looking for adventure, more substantial middle-aged men driven to desperation by their long search for employment, hoboes, plain tramps and all the hangers-on that such a picturesque crusade would naturally gather. The newspapers, of course, saw in Coxey’s army another of the perennial “revolutions” and there was the wildest excitement as Coxey’s men converged upon Washington. The climax was tame enough. Coxey and one or two of his lieutenants were arrested by the Washington police for walking on the grass in the park and the army drifted away.

Coxey’s army had, to be sure, its humorous aspects, but it was an indication of a serious unrest that was tearing at the vitals of America. After the Haymarket affair, the labor movement had lain stunned and dormant. Now it was awakening again. Foremost among those who were giving it new life and go was the energetic young Debs. The year after Coxey marched on Washington, the Great Northern Railroad announced a fresh cut in the wages of its men. Here was Debs’ opportunity. The American Railway Union, of which he was the leading spirit, had done much effective organization work among the employees of the road; and had built up a strong fallowing. The strike which followed was a success. Debs loomed large in the labor world.

Then came the great Pullman strike. Although Debs was averse to having a strike called, the workers of the Pullman Palace Car Company at South Chicago, Illinois, were insistent that the new union lead them out on strike. The second American Railway Union strike was widespread and it attracted attention in all parts of the country. In a biographical note Debs wrote, “Defeated in Pullman strike by Federal Courts, the regular troops and 3,600 deputy marshalls.” In the story of the life of John P. Altgeld, who was then Governor of Illinois, you can read how, against Altgeld’s protests, President Grover Cleveland poured Federal troops into Chicago, with the result that the men were driven back to work. By this time the Pullman managers were thoroughly aroused and resolved to break up the American Railway Union with every weapon they had. Debs and three other officers of the Union were indicted and arrested on July 17 for contempt of court, the charge against them being that they had ignored a restraining injunction. Neither President Debs nor his three colleagues would consent to have bail furnished for them and they were sent to Cook County jail, denied jury trial at first and finally brought to trial in a case that was to become famous. Debs was brilliantly defended by the ever-dependable Clarence Darrow. On the witness stand, ’Gene testified that he had urged the workers to commit no violence of any sort. He said that he had made a thorough investigation of living conditions and wages in the so-called “model” town of Pullman and was satisfied that the men had justice on their side. During the trial, an attempt was made to bring George M. Pullman, head of the company, into court. But Mr. Pullman mysteriously disappeared. None of his secretaries could get in touch with him and suddenly the whole court proceedings came to an end when it was announced that one of the jurors was sick.

The case was never brought to trial again. Debs was released from jail on November 22, 1895. He took a train to Chicago where he was met by a great crowd of cheering workers who carried him on their shoulders through the streets. They then held a rousing mass meeting in a Chicago armory, into which all who could, had jammed their way. There Debs made an impassioned speech in defense of the workers’ cause.

It was while he found himself in jail with the press of the nation railing against him, that Debs also found the ideals that were to be his for the rest of his life. He found Socialism. He writes of those thrilling days while he was behind the bars for standing by his principles, that:

“Books and pamphlets and letters from Socialists came by every mail and I began to read and think and dissect the anatomy of the system in which workingmen, however organized, could be shattered and battered and splintered at a single stroke. The writings of Bellamy and Blatchford early appealed to me. The Cooperative Commonwealth of Gronlund also impressed me, but the writings of Kautsky were so clear and conclusive that I readily grasped, not merely his argument, but also caught the spirit of his Socialist utterance—and I thank him and all who helped me out of darkness into light.

“It was at this time, when the first glimmerings of Socialism were beginning to penetrate, that Victor L. Berger—and I have loved him ever since—came to Woodstock, as if a providential instrument, and delivered the first impassioned message of Socialism I had ever heard—the very first to set ‘the wires humming in my system.’ As a souvenir of that visit there is in my library a volume of Capital by Karl Marx, inscribed with the compliments of Victor L. Berger, which I cherish as a token of priceless value.

“The American Railway Union was defeated but not conquered—overwhelmed but not destroyed. It lives and pulsates in the Socialist movement, and its defeat but blazed the way to economic freedom and hastened the dawn of human brotherhood.”

From that time on, Debs came to the front as America’s most courageous and diligent exponent of Socialist philosophy. The modern type of Socialism was introduced into this country in the late ’forties and ’fifties when German Socialists, escaping from the persecution of their Prussian Government, brought with them the theories of Karl Marx. The first important political party was called the Socialist Labor Party. It nominated its first candidate in 1892, declaring for government ownership of railroads and communications, municipal ownership of public utilities, progressive income and inheritance taxes, free school books, universal suffrage, the recall and referendum. The first Socialist candidate polled about twenty-one thousand votes. At the following election this vote was slightly enlarged and the Party became more radical. By 1898, there was decided dissatisfaction with the tactics of the old Socialist Labor Party, which split. A new organization was formed in 1900 which called itself simply, the Socialist Party. This is the party that four times running selected Eugene Victor Debs as its candidate for President. He was nominated in 1900, 1904, 1908 and 1912. In his first campaign Debs polled some ninety-six thousand votes. The new party declared:

“The supreme issue in America today is the contest of the working class and the capitalist class for the possession of the powers of government.” At each election since 1900, the party has gone to the polls with candidates and a platform, stressing two things; first, what is called the “immediate demand,” for public ownership, industrial democracy, etc., and secondly, urging a change in the entire system of private profits and ownership. In 1912, Debs polled the amazing total of nine hundred and one thousand votes, and in 1920 he got one million votes!

The life history of Debs now becomes one with the progress of Socialism. He went everywhere up and down the land, helping to organize Socialist locals, speaking before large and small gatherings, and in general devoting all his great talents to the cause that had won his heart. He was on the editorial staffs of several of the Socialist papers and he wrote countless leaflets and pamphlets on the subject.

The attention of the entire world became focused on the lean, kindly figure of ’Gene when the war broke out in Europe. Instantly, the labor movement was split into two opposing camps. On one side was the group led by Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, who supported the war with all his heart and soul. On the other side were Debs and the more radical among the laborites, who could see no good for the workers coming out of the bloody contest.

On June 16, 1918, in Canton, Ohio, before the Ohio State Socialist Convention, ’Gene made a speech on the war which resulted in his being tried and sentenced to jail for violation of the Espionage Law, a war-time measure believed by many liberals to have violated every vestige of freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. Debs had just returned from a visit to some of his comrades who had been in jail for their opposition to the war, and his spirit was flaming with indignation. Although he knew that the hall was filled with agents from the Department of Justice who had been sent there for the purpose of taking down everything he said, he spoke out plainly,—and with his usual high courage. He denounced militarism of all sorts, Prussian as well as native. He praised the Bolsheviki of Russia, asserted his right to say what he thought about the war and concluded, “And now for all of us to do our duty. The call is ringing in your ears. Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters but be concerned about the treason that involves yourself . . . We Socialists are the builders of the world that is to be. We are inviting you this afternoon to join the Party. Join it and it will help you. In due course of time, we will proclaim the emancipation of the brotherhood of all mankind.”

When this speech was reported, those who were supporting the war instantly construed it as being hostile to the success of America’s armed forces. Public opinion was quickly fanned into white heat against Debs. Four days after the speech appeared, a Federal Grand Jury indicted Debs on September 9, 1918. He stood trial in the city of Cleveland before Judge D. C. Westenhaver. Hours before he went into court, he received friends who had come from far distances and assured them all: “This is but another mile-post along the pathway of progress.” He entered the courtroom surrounded by a group of fellow-Socialists, and watched with the keenest interest all the proceedings leading up to what was to be the climax of his long career. Through the trial, Debs stuck to his guns, denying that he had advocated force or violence and insisting on his right to express sympathy for his fellow-Socialists who were in jail. He denounced the Espionage Law and said that if he had his way, he would wipe militarism from the whole world. He addressed the jury for the better part of two hours, giving his entire viewpoint on life and at the end, he was deluged with congratulations from his host of friends. But it was evident throughout the trial that the minds of the jurymen had become so filled with propaganda for the war that Debs would be convicted.

And so it was, for after a day of deliberation, the jury reached the verdict that ’Gene was guilty as charged in the indictment. The court then sentenced Debs to serve ten years in the West Virginia State Penitentiary at Moundsville. He appealed the case and was freed on bail but on March 10, 1919, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld his conviction. In the meantime, he had been addressing countless Socialist meetings at every one of which he said practically the same things about the war as he had said at Canton. On the day he started to jail, ’Gene made a statement saying, “I stand by every word of the Canton speech. The Supreme Court to the contrary notwithstanding, the Espionage Law is perfectly infamous, and a disgrace as well, to the capitalist despotism at whose behest it was enacted ... I despise the Espionage Law with every drop of blood in my veins, and I defy the Supreme Court and all its powers of capitalism to do their worst.

“All hail to the workers of America and the world. The day of emancipation is dawning.”

So with head held high and spirit “firm as granite,” Eugene Victor Debs went through the jail doors as free a man as was ever a prisoner. He was soon transferred from the Moundsville Penitentiary to the Atlanta Federal Prison. There, in his prison clothes, he had several long talks with David Karsner. In one of them, he said:

“Repent! Repent! Repent for standing like a man! For having a conviction about a public question and standing by it and for the Cause! Why, before I would don the sackcloth and get down into the ashes before the Attorney-General or any man on earth for having a principle, I would gladly walk to the gallows or the stake.” Although Debs was sixty-four years old, at a time of life when a man who had been as active as he might well think of retirement, his stay in prison was as full of activity for the Socialist cause as any other period. The Socialists had a saying of him at that time: “Though jailed, he speaks,” and it did seem as though the spirit of the man behind bars in a Southern prison was reaching out through every channel of radical thought. His devoted brother, Theodore, was kept busy for all that time answering the great piles of correspondence Debs was not allowed to receive in prison. Time and again, there came rumors that if he would withdraw his Canton remarks, ’Gene might obtain a pardon. Debs’ answer to all hints of this nature is contained in his talk with Karsner.

The war was drawing to a close, but nevertheless, public opinion was still kept inflamed against any who had dared to denounce it. No sooner had the Armistice been signed, than under the leadership of the notorious Attorney-General, A. Mitchell Palmer, a concerted governmental attack was made on any who were supposed to have “radical viewpoints.” Shiploads of deported men and and women, in many instances torn ruthlessly from their families, were sent abroad. There were wholesale raids upon the headquarters of Socialists and Communists. For these, there was no thought of due processes of law. A veritable Reign of Terror set in. The result was to destroy much of the effectiveness of Socialist propaganda.

People were frightened from expressing their opinion. Spies from the Department of Justice and volunteer snoopers from all sorts of so-called patriotic organizations were everywhere looking for “plots against the Government.”

Of course these tactics brought reaction against them. Little by little, the public, when they realized that most of the force and violence and anarchy of the time was being deliberately practiced by agents of the Government and others, returned a more tolerant viewpoint. All this time, there had been constant agitation on the part of the Socialists for Debs’ release. Finally, in 1921, President Harding, an essentially kind although weak man, sent for Debs. The full details of the meeting between the two in the White House, have never been disclosed. There were reports that Harding broke down and wept when he saw what manner of man was before him. In the face of much opposition from such bodies as the American Legion and other groups who wanted to keep up the war spirit, Harding commuted Debs’ sentence just before Christmas Day, 1921. He did not, however, restore ’Gene’s citizenship rights. ’Gene returned to his beloved Terre Haute, broken in health though never in spirit. Much of the time he was an invalid in a sanitarium. He was so ill during the election campaign of 1926, that it was necessary to carry him on a stretcher to the polling place in order that he might register. Although officially not a citizen, because of his prison term, no objection was entered to his registering for the election.

In the course of his busy life, Debs won the friendship of some of the most outstanding figures in the literary as well as in the liberal and labor world. However much they may have disagreed with his principles, men of heart and intelligence were invariably drawn to him. Among his dearest friends was James Whitcomb Riley, whose poem on Debs has been already quoted. Riley summed up his impression of Debs in one line when he wrote:

“God was feeling mighty good when he made ’Gene Debs, and he didn’t have anything else to do all day.”

To few men of our times have come such touching tributes from those in all walks of life. The words “love and brotherhood” and the name Debs have come to be linked together in the minds of all who appreciate the true greatness of the man. For however loosely the word great may be used, it is certainly one adjective that can be applied with justice to ’Gene Debs, the Beloved.

When at length his great spirit went out in the autumn of 1926, it seemed to countless Americans as though something precious indeed were gone from the life of the Nation. Everywhere the workers came together to pay their last sad respects to the memory of one who had given his life for their cause. In a huge meeting held in Madison Square Garden, New York, they wept openly while one sang Debs’ favorite song with its stirring command to the soul of man:

“Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be 

For my unconquerable soul.

It matters not how strait the gate 

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.”

— JOHN MITCHELL — 

THE RISE OF THE MINERS

“Step by step the longest march 

Can be won; can be won;

Single stones will form an arch 

One by one, one by one.

And by union, what we will

Can be all accomplished still.

Drops of water turn a mill

Singly none, singly none.”

SONG OF THE MINERS

Here is a coal mine. Three hundred feet beneath waving corn on an Illinois prairie, men at work in a soft velvet darkness hewing out the precious black stuff that heats and lights our homes, that brings us food and clothing, that turns the wheels of our railroads and the belts of our factories, that more than any one single thing makes us the sort of people that we are.

Come along then to the shaft house of this mine and get aboard the shaft elevator or cage, as the men call it. For we are going down together to see how it is with the hundreds of human beings who spend one-half of their working hours far under-ground in a world of strange whisperings, of shifting rocks, of dripping black waters, of faint and flickering lights.

Eight or ten miners with safety lamps in their caps, with lunch baskets swinging from their elbows, big men for the most part, their faces marked with the blue of powder burns, come on to the cage platform with us. With a great clattering, the elevator starts downward on what seems a never-ending trip. The miners do not speak, the lights from their lamps shine on the wet walls of the shaft and now and then the men turn them on you, to see how you are taking this first breath-catching trip. For you have read of the thousands of disasters that overtake those who go down into the earth and you cannot help thinking what there is in store when the cage finally comes to rest at the main haulage way beneath you. You are grateful to the man in the engine-room for refraining from the practical joke that is often played on tender feet who first go down into a coal mine. This consists of letting the cage drop with shocking suddenness for a great number of feet, then stopping it short and dropping it again; all of this remember, in a half dark shaft box whose sides are swimming in filthy water and from the top of which there falls on you masses of wet coal dust.

But at length the trip is done and you step off the platform onto the tracks of the haulage way that have their terminal at the shaft bottom. It is as if you were on the main street of a great underground city whose side streets run off like the ribs of a fan for several miles. To you it is a “City of Dreadful Night.” Never have you dreamed that there could be such darkness as this. It is as though you could reach out your hand and feel of it, this soft thing that has so successfully put out your eyes that you stumble at the first step and are grateful for the helping hand of your amused guide. The miners who came down in the cage with you, walk away freely enough and you begin to wonder if there is anything about them of the nature of the cat, so surely do they go ahead through this velvet smother.

Along the main tracks you grope. Here is a carpenter at work in his shop cut out at the side of the track. Bratticemen who make the props and the ties for the track are sawing away farther on. Around the next corner you come upon a repair shop and presently a strong light looms up ahead and you squeeze close against the wall to permit the passage of a train of cars drawn by an electric motor these days instead of the patient mule you had expected. Presently you come to the face of the coal itself. Down a side entry in a “room” supported by pillars of coal and props of wood, a pick miner and his buddy are loading the cars that have come to the entrance. Dynamite was used the night before to blow down the coal they are loading. For the most part the coal is cut out of its bed by an ingenious machine driven by an electric motor and consisting of sharp cutting chains that fairly tear their way into the solid face of the coal. In some mines coal is being cut today by use of compressed air. In others it is loaded on huge conveyors that move along at uniform speed and take the coal up to the surface as though it were on a succession of elevators. More and more coal is being mined by the use of machinery. Naturally the old-time miners resent this. They realize that every improvement in mining machinery means that there will be still less work for the miners. But nothing they can do will stop the progress of the inventors who already say that in a few years from now machines will make it possible for one miner to do the work that requires three or four today. This has always been the way with the introduction of machinery, and while coal is one of the last of our great industries to go to machinery it must surely follow the others. The veterans may grumble as loud as they please about making “Ford factories out of coal-mines. That is exactly what is going to happen.

But don’t think for one moment that because machines are widely used the work of the miner is any soft snap. He must use his head all the time as well as every muscle in his body to get out this precious “buried sunshine.” He has to be a combination of mechanic, engineer, carpenter, strong man and geologist to be a practical miner. His is skilled labor that still requires a vast amount of hand-work and the miners know this and are proud of their skill.

Then too it is dangerous work. Every year some two thousand miners are killed and hundreds of thousands wounded in America. No telling when you go down into a mine what sort of dreadful death may be yours. You may be buried under a fall of rock, or torn to pieces by a gas explosion or burned to death by what is called a dust explosion when the dust from the coal accumulates so thickly, due to improper ventilation and lack of simple means of precaution, that the slightest thing sets it off.

All through the mining regions you see the victims of these mining disasters; men blinded, crippled in arms and legs, dragging through a miserable existence, the casualties of industry left for the most part to shift for themselves. Disasters in our mines are so common that unless a great number are killed the newspapers pay practically no attention to them. They are taken for granted. It has been their history that after some particularly terrible disaster, laws have been passed requiring the owners of mines to put in devices looking to the safety of their workers. But all too often these laws are evaded. Because it costs money to provide modern methods of ventilation—“rock dusting” that takes the explosive qualities out of coal dust and other things that protect the miners—the coal operators will tell you frankly that “they are not in business for their health” and that in coal mining everything that cuts down profits of the private owners must be set aside for the main concern, the making of money. Year by year we, the public, you and I and the hundred million of us Americans, let a little group of men run the coal that was put down by natural processes millions of years before these operators ever saw the light of day. And year by year men are blown up or horribly maimed, families are desolated and the lives of thousands are darkened because some one miles and miles away from the coal fields must have his profits and have them quick.

Although of all industrial workers the coal miners are probably the hardest driven and have to face the greatest number of dangers every day, since the beginning of mining in this country the diggers have very well understood their situation, and have had the courage and intelligence to struggle for better conditions. It is the tradition of the American coal miner that he is a natural rebel. For one thing, the method of his work tends to make him independent. The miner works without the supervision that is constantly placed over the average factory worker. He has, as he puts it, “no foreman blowing down his neck.” He digs coal with his buddy in a room which is rarely visited by representatives of the company, and as he is paid by the ton, it is up to him to get as much coal as possible out of the “face.” Furthermore, he realizes that he is aligned against a peculiarly ruthless class of employer. For the most part, he accepts the philosophy “once a miner, always a miner,” and he seldom dreams of climbing out of his class, as do the workers in so many other fields. As a consequence, you find among the miners a spirit of solidarity that is all too rare in the American labor movement. The United Mine Workers of America, the miners’ national union, reflects this spirit in the very nature of its organization. In an organized district, such as Illinois for example, everyone below the rank of foreman who works in or about a mine, is a member of the union, and the grievance of a youthful mule-driver receives as much attention from the union as the complaints of a veteran digger.

The United Mine Workers, which, despite a falling off of membership in the last few years, is still a strong unit in the American Federation of Labor and has been called “the shock troop of the American labor movement,” has been in existence for thirty-seven years, and almost every one of those years has seen some long and protracted struggle for better wages and conditions for its members. Indeed, the history of the miners since the far distant ’sixties, when under the leadership of Daniel Weaver the first national union among coal miners was founded, in the Belleville district of Illinois, has been one of constant warfare, which in some instances has actually approached the status of civil strife.

In turning over the pages of this history, we constantly come upon scenes filled with marching men, with armed encounters between mine guards and strikers, with the calling out of troops, with a barely hinted epic of heroism on the part of the miners, their wives and children. Generally these encounters have been too far removed from the centers of industrial life in this country to receive much attention on the part of the public.

When Daniel Weaver stood up to advocate the first national union of miners, in January, 1861, he spoke in idealistic terms of the helplessness of the miners of those days without some form of organization, urged legislative protection, and ended up with a poetical quotation and this appeal:

“Union is the great fundamental principle by which every object of importance is to be accomplished. Man is a social being, and if left to himself, in an isolated condition, would be one of the weakest creatures; but, associated with his kind, he works wonders. Men can do jointly what they cannot do singly; and the union of minds and hands, the concentration of their power, becomes almost omnipotent. Nor is this all; men not only accumulate power by union, but gain warmth and earnestness. There is an electric sympathy kindled, and the attractive forces inherent in human nature are called into action, and a stream of generous emotion, of a friendly regard for each other, binds together and animates the whole. . . .

“ ‘All men are brethren—how the watch-words run!

And when men act as such justice is won.’

“Come, then, and rally around the standard of union—the union of States and the unity of miners—and with honesty of purpose, zeal and watchfulness—the pledge of success—unite for the emancipation of our labor, and the regeneration and elevation physically, mentally, and morally, of our species.”

Daniel Weaver, like so many of the pioneers among the American mine union organizers, came to this country from England, where he had worked in the mines and had been active in movements to improve the lot of his fellow workers. The barbarous conditions that prevailed in the mines in England, Scotland and Wales in the early half of the nineteenth century, are almost past belief. Women and little children worked for fourteen hours at a stretch, under the driving of cruel foremen, who treated them with as little consideration as they did the mine animals. Half naked, crawling on their hands and knees through narrow passageways, they dragged the heavy cars laden with coal behind them, by means of belts tied around their waists. When an English government report appeared in the ’forties describing the horrors of the life of the miners of those days, the so-called civilized world was shocked, and some reforms were immediately put into effect.

Weaver and the other English immigrants, who had come to this country thinking to find a new freedom overseas, discovered that in many cases the American miners, unorganized and so without a clearing house for their demands, were almost as much at the mercy of their masters as the English workers. In answer to Weaver’s call, an organization known as the American Miners’ Association was founded, with Weaver as President and Thomas Lloyd as Secretary. Through the persistent organizing efforts of Weaver, Lloyd, and an eloquent Irishman named Martin Burke, the association soon spread. Too soon, however, its officers called the disastrous strikes of 1867 and 1868, and at the end of them the usual internal dissensions arose. By 1870, little trace remained of the organization, but the principles which it had embodied, and the need for unity which its officials had taught remained fresh in the minds of the miners everywhere.

Very shortly another organization appeared in the anthracite region, headed by the courageous John Siney, one of the outstanding labor leaders of his time. Siney’s organization conducted a vigorous campaign, bringing in miners from all parts of the country. At its second convention, the Miners’ National Association, as this new union was called, had a membership of twenty-two thousand, was publishing an official paper, and seemed well on the road to bringing about better conditions for its members.

However, there was a widespread financial panic about this time, and the miners suffered with the rest of the American workers in the general drive to cut wages and destroy union organization. Siney, John James of Illinois, and an organizer named Xingo Parks, went through the mining regions, everywhere urging the workers to stand fast. But almost everywhere they met defeats in their attempts to conduct successful strikes. There were practically no funds in the treasury; it was easy for the operators to find among the thousands of unemployed, who in these days were drifting all across the country, men willing to take the places of the strikers. At the mines of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, from Pittsburg to Connellsville, imported strike-breakers were armed with breech-loading rifles and ordered to shoot any strikers on sight. A riot followed, in which two union men were killed and others wounded. The neighborhood was indignant. Miners and farmers joined in protest against this practice of bringing armed men into a peaceful community. The matter was finally brought into the courts, and the grand jury found true bills of murder against the strike-breakers and Armstrong, the operator of the mine. The strike-breakers, who were ignorant immigrants acting under orders, were promptly thrown into jail, but the man who employed them was let off with a fine of five dollars and costs.

Emboldened by their success in using force against the miners and their leaders, the operators now resolved to imprison Siney and Parks. Siney was arrested in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, charged with attempting to dissuade scabs from entering the mines in that region. Parks, who was in another county at the time of the trouble, was also arrested, and the trial of the two organizers attracted nationwide attention. Siney was eventually acquitted, but Parks was sentenced to a year in the penitentiary. This show of force had the effect of completely destroying Siney’s organization. The man who had, like Weaver, dreamed of a better day for the American miners, went back to his home brokenhearted. It was not until after his death that the workers realized Siney’s true devotion to their cause. His name today ranks high among those pioneers who wrought well in the cause of freedom.

Now came a new element to the mine field, in the shape of organizers for the Knights of Labor, the predecessor of the American Federation of Labor, and the strongest organization of workers in America in the middle ’eighties. Originally the Knights were a secret organization, with an elaborate and mystic ritual and a far-flung program of social reform that went far beyond the hours and wage demands of the conventional unions. Their tactics made a strong appeal to the miners who had lost faith in old line organization, and they soon flocked to the banners of the Knights in great numbers. All up and down the coal regions of Pennsylvania there was great excitement over the arrival of the Knights. Although the operators employed countless spies, they could find nothing of what was going on behind the closed doors of meeting halls in the remote little mining camps. The miners were learning a new language. They were taking their first lesson in the principles of the cooperative movement, which was one of the fundamental planks of the Knight’s platform. They were listening to the philosophies brought from overseas by English, Scotch and German reformers. They were meeting in secret places, using passwords, and all the trappings of fraternal organization. Those were indeed stirring days, and the Knights of Labor were everywhere finding new converts. Pinkerton detectives, armed with rifles and revolvers, were poured into the district. Anti-labor juries and judges dealt out harsh sentences to anyone suspected of sympathy with the miners’ union. A group of desperate young Irishmen, who boasted that they had belonged to a secret organization in the mother country, called the Molly Maguires, waged a guerilla warfare against the Pinkertons, and there was much sniping from ambush on both sides. The Molly Maguires have come down in history as a particularly lawless band, with tactics very similar to the night riders of the Klan in the South after the Civil War. But the impartial observer must admit a wide provocation for their existence. They came into being only after the arrival of the Pinkertons, who were everywhere attempting to bribe miners’ leaders and government officials alike. They were finally broken up through the testimony of a Pinkerton detective who, professing a sympathy with their cause, had joined their organization and discovered their secrets.

While the miners were willing to join the Knights of Labor and while they listened with enthusiasm to the elaborate philosophies of that order, they soon discovered that the Knights were in no position to force the coal operators to come to terms. If that were to be done, it must be done by the miners themselves. In 1885, John McBride, President of the Ohio miners, who had commenced work in a coal mine at the tender age of nine, and who later on was to be President of the American Federation of Labor for a single term, sent out a call to the miners of the United States to meet in a national convention at Indianapolis. At this convention, the National Federation of Miners and Mine-Laborers was organized. The executive board of this body invited the mine operators to meet with the workers for the purpose of adjusting wages and prices so as to avoid strikes and lockouts. Only one operator, the far-visioned W. P. Rend of Chicago, responded. He urged the miners to keep on and eventually, at a convention in Columbus, Ohio, in 1886, seventy-seven representatives of the operators sat down with the miners’ leaders to adopt a national wage scale. The success of the National Federation of Miners convinced the rank and file that straight trade union tactics were preferable to the more idealistic but less practical program of the Knights. The Knights of Labor, however, fought the miners’ organization, seeing in it a serious rival, and it was not until 1890, at a joint meeting of the two organizations, that a strong national union of the miners was organized. Andrew Roy, the historian of the miners, tells us of the thrilling scenes at that meeting. “The officers of the rival organizations,” he says, “sat on the platform beside the president and the secretary, listening with breathless interest to the speeches of the delegates, and dreading lest some rash orator should destroy the attempt at unity.” When it was finally decided to consolidate, Mr. Roy says, “The scene that follows beggars description. Delegates shouted themselves hoarse; threw their hats aloft; and tears coursed down the cheeks of gray-haired men.” Thus was born the United Mine Workers of America, the present national organization of the miners.

When the organizers of the United Mine Workers came into the camps of Spring Valley, in Northern Illinois, a famous battlefield in the struggles between miners and operators, one of the first workers to join the new organization was a youth named John Mitchell. Mitchell had been born in a British miner’s family at Braidwood, fifty miles from Spring Valley, on February 4, 1870. His boyhood had been typical of that of the sons of miners all through the fields of Indiana, Ohio, Illinois and Pennsylvania. The family was barely able to make both ends meet, and little John’s days were filled with the hardest sort of physical work. At ten years he was earning a dollar a week and board carrying water for harvest hands on a farm near his home. Two years later he trudged along beside his father to go down to the mine, where he worked for long hours as a trapper-boy. His biographer, Elsie Gluck, has written of these dreary days:

“One can visualize young John Mitchell at the age of twelve, going down to his first day in the mine, stepping on to the ‘cage’ with other men and boys, being lowered suddenly several hundred feet into utter darkness, the light in his miner’s cap blown out by the sudden gust of air. At the bottom of the mine, there would be here and there faint lights in the caps of the men who hoisted cars of coal onto the platform. Then he would be taken some distance, perhaps a mile, and left alone in the terrific darkness and silence, to open and shut the trap doors which controlled the ventilation of the mine in order to let cars go by; ‘eyes blanketed by the absence of light, the whole mind smothered and crushed’; hearing only the strange noises of the mine, a driver swearing at his mule, the sound of the pick. ‘It is not the loading nor the long hours with the shovel and pick that grind into the brain, but it is the silence and the waiting; the silence and then the sounds and then the silence again.’ ”

Mitchell had gone through the terrible strike of the Spring Valley miners in 1889, a strike which Henry Demarest Lloyd, the great Chicago liberal, had called “a strike of millionaires against miners.” He had seen men, women and children, evicted from company houses, forced to return to work by the sheer drive of hunger, and there was bred in his bone a fierce resentment against the misery of the miners’ lives. He resolved to educate himself and found a friend in the shape of Father Powers, a Catholic priest who had attempted to mediate between the miners and their employers. Mitchell spent hours browsing among⁻ the books in the kindly priest’s library, and other hours in union halls, discussing the plight of the miners and the way out. He soon became a factor in the community, and was elected secretary-treasurer of the district union. Next he entered into politics, and as a representative of the miners on their legislative committee, he worked valiantly for the passage of a child-labor law in the Illinois Legislature. But union affairs interested him more than politics. He was one of the younger men who stood in the fore-front of the great strike of 1897, and when, three years later, the anthracite miners of Pennsylvania walked out of the mines in protest against the practice of the operators of docking their wages and compelling them to load more than two thousand two hundred and forty pounds for a ton, Mitchell had risen high in the national organization. The strike of 1900 compelled the operators to make some concessions, but they still refused to recognize the union. For the next two years, the miners built up a war-chest for the inevitable struggle that was coming.

John Mitchell had been elected President of the United Mine Workers, and in February, 1902, he sent a circular letter to the Presidents of the anthracite railroads, who owned the majority of the mines in the whole hard-coal region, inviting them to a conference with the United Mine Workers. This invitation was bluntly ignored.

The hard-coal miners at that time were facing conditions almost as intolerable as those faced by the miners in the soft-coal field. They were forced to live in company houses, and to purchase their food, clothing and most of their working equipment at the company stores, appropriately enough called “Pluck-Me Stores,” by the workers. Lloyd said that the corporations lived “not only by mining coal, but by mining miners.” On a sunny May morning in 1902, in obedience to the call of Mitchell, eight thousand union men took their tools away from the mines, and one of the most thrilling and certainly, up to that time, the most significant, struggle in the history of labor in this country was started. Within a short time, millions of dollars had been lost, and the hard coal supply in the industrial cities of the East had been practically exhausted. Through the long summer, both sides stood fast. The men refused to go back to work without recognition of their union, and for their part the operators refused any form of arbitration. In answer to a protest signed by prominent citizens, George F. Baer, President of the Philadelphia and Reading Railway Company, one of the largest owners of coal mines, wrote:

“The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God, in His infinite wisdom, has given the control of the property interests of the country, and upon the successful management of which so much depends.”

This amazing letter helped to swing public sympathy to the side of the miners, sympathy which had so long been withheld from all sorts of union organizations. Up to this time the American middle classes had pretty generally regarded trade unions as foreign importations, and had been on the side of the employers against the workers. Now, however, it was evident that the coal operators, at any rate, regarded their employees as little less than feudal slaves. There was a nationwide demand that the miners be recognized. Theodore Roosevelt was President at the time, and in the fall of that year, when the demand for coal became most acute, he called both parties to the dispute to meet him at the White House. He found the operators obstinate and sullen. John Mitchell, on the other hand, impressed him with his sincerity and tolerance. Roosevelt determined to force arbitration. He set up a coal strike commission composed of impartial members, and before this commission both sides presented their evidence. The hearings were dramatic in the extreme. The miners were represented by Mitchell, Clarence Darrow, the brilliant Chicago lawyer who all his life long had fought for freedom, and Henry Demarest Lloyd. On the other side of the table, opposing these “Big Three” of the miners, were the high-priced lawyers and propagandists of the operators. On the witness chair there was threshed out, while the entire nation looked on, the fundamentals of the struggle between Labor and Capital. For the miners, scarred veterans of many underground disasters were followed as witnesses by little trapper-boys, who showed to the interested members of the commission proof of their pitiful wages and long hours. Very calmly and clearly, Mitchell explained the principles of unionism, the necessity for strikes when all other means had failed, and the impression he created, both upon the commissioners and the public, was tremendous. The proceedings resulted in an award favorable to the miners. All across the country, at huge mass meetings of workers, Mitchell, Darrow and Lloyd were hailed as doughty champions of labor’s cause, and everywhere unionism took heart over this great victory. Now at last the nation had recognized the right of the workers to organize; had come to some realization of the daily struggle of the workers for a bare existence. From that time on, it is true, there have been innumerable assaults upon this fundamental right of the workers to form unions of their own choosing. But once the issue has been made clear, the sympathy of the mass of Americans has usually been with labor. By his downright sincerity, his singleness of purpose, and his great intelligence, Mitchell had won for the American labor movement its most outstanding victory since the beginnings of that movement in the early eighties.

The award of the Roosevelt Commission, while not granting all that the miners had demanded, succeeded in setting up so efficient a machinery for collective bargaining, that for seventeen years there was peace in the hard-coal region.

In startling contrast, however, to the peaceful conditions which prevailed in the unionized field, was the state of war which existed, and still exists, for that matter, in the non-union fields south of the Ohio River. Even today a non-union mining camp in West Virginia resembles more closely a besieged city than a peaceful working community. Every attempt of the United Mine Workers of America to organize these districts and obtain for these workers human conditions of employment and decent American wages, is met with a brutal show of force by the operators. The majority of these non-union camps are located at the ends of almost inaccessible valleys. As a rule there is but one road leading into camp, and this is patrolled day and night by armed guards employed by the company. If the visitor is suspected of being in any way connected with the union, he is immediately arrested, taken to the company offices, and there either questioned or unmercifully beaten up and run out of town. Hundreds of union organizers have been beaten in this manner, and to complicate matters, all the powerful forces in the state have sided with the operators. In West Virginia the newspapers are so subservient to the interests of the mine-owners that even during a strike involving thousands of native workmen, no mention of the matter appears in their columns. The courts are always eager to grant injunctions against officials and organizers of the miners’ union, so that, as an organizer has grimly put it, "according to injunctions issued in West Virginia, all that it is legal for a representative of the United Mine Workers of America to do in West Virginia is to take off his shoes, sneak quietly up to his room, bolt the door, and, kneeling by his bed, pray to Almighty God that the workers may join the union.”

Everywhere you go throughout these regions, you find grim preparations for war afoot. Around many of the company-owned houses, in which the workers are compelled to live, are stretched lengths of barbed wire, such as were used during the great war. More often than not, on the roofs of the company buildings are mounted searchlights, whose long white fingers feel out into the night across the roads approaching the camp. And it is no unusual thing to find beneath the searchlight, a menacing machine-gun.

In spite of all these precautions, however, the miners of West Virginia and other non-union states have from time to time risen against this tyranny. There have been strikes of as long as three years duration in West Virginia, and they have all followed pretty much the same course. Within a short while after the strike has started, deputy sheriffs, armed with revolvers and high-powered rifles, have swooped down upon the homes of the strikers, and evicted men, women and children.

The eviction of a miner’s family under these circumstances makes the blood run cold. In order to break the spirits of the strikers, and particularly to terrorize the women, the hour chosen for eviction is usually just at dawn, and if a storm is raging, as storms can rage in these remote mountain regions, so much the better. Suddenly before the door of the little shack where the striker and his family have been living, appear men waving guns and ordering all within to throw up their hands and march out into the rain. Men, women and children are piled out into the height of the tempest, and their household goods are thrown out after them. Desperately the women try to preserve some of their more treasured possessions, while the men run off in search of any sort of shelter. In most cases the union attempts to have army tents or hastily erected wooden barracks ready for the reception of these wretched outcasts, but often there is no previous warning of an eviction, and it is no uncommon sight to see the workers wandering desperately through the rain, glad for any sort of shelter under trees, in caves on the mountainside, or some friendly farmer’s barn. Such relief as the union can provide is given in the shape of just enough food to keep body and soul together. The able-bodied members of the family seek work on farms or at roadmending. The women are hard put to it to keep house in leaking army tents, and as often as not there is insufficient clothing for the children so that they cannot attend the few schools in the community.

Amazing, indeed, is the courage with which these miners’ families wage their battles for freedom. Long before sun-up men and women walk long miles over frozen roads to stand on the picket lines at the entrances to the mines. Soon the armed company guards appear, and begin shoving the strikers back to make way for the scabs who are taking their places. The non-union workers march between the silent lines of the pickets. Their heads are hung low, and they give every indication of being ashamed of their treachery to labor’s cause. Sometimes, the wives of the union men kneel down by the roadside and pray aloud that God will soften the hearts of the scabs. While there is no evidence of heavenly intervention, these impromptu prayer meetings do have a demoralizing effect upon men who realize that they are taking bread out of the mouths of their fellow workers; so demoralizing, in fact, that the courts of Oklahoma recently issued an injunction forbidding members of the United Mine Workers to hold prayer meetings on roads leading to non-union mines. If it appears that this picketing, carried on by scantily-clad men and women, shivering in the early morning cold, is having its effect in winning the strike, company guards and state police, armed with high-powered rifles, and tear-gas bombs, will swoop down upon the entire union forces and place them all under arrest. Off they go, herded by the anxious guards like cattle, but with their heads held high, chanting their union song:

“Just like a mule

 A goldarn fool 

Will scab until he dies.”

In the long run, then, the heroes of this story of the miners are not any of their leaders, courageous and far-sighted as so many of them have been, but rather the rank and file. And especially the miners’ wives. It is they who have to bear the brunt of the long struggle for unionism. It is they who win or lose strikes. For more strikes are won over the kitchen stove than in the union hall. The men have the excitement of their meetings, of listening to the speeches of the organizer, of denouncing the scabs, to carry them through. For the women, kept to what homes they can hold together, there is the daily grind of watching the children running wild or suffering from undernourishment, the difficult business of keeping the “old man’s” courage to the sticking point, or refusing to allow him to go back, even though to do so would once more give him enough to feed and clothe the family.

In miners’ homes, all across the coal-fields today, are the obscure and unsung pioneers of freedom, veterans of a long and bitter warfare, whose end is not yet in sight. When finally the complete history of the fight for independence in this country comes to be written, surely there must be a chapter devoted to the glorious battle waged since its beginning by the rank and file of the United Mine Workers of America.

— CHARLES STEINMETZ — 

A VISITOR FROM OLYMPUS

On the top floor of a large industrial plant in Schenectady, New York, a group of men are talking excitedly. Some of them have cameras, others pencils and copy paper. For they are newspaper men come from all parts of the country, to witness one of the most spectacular feats that ever a modern scientist was to perform. Now and then one of the group goes over to examine with intense curiosity a strange-looking apparatus in one corner. This thing of racks and glass slabs, wires and bulbs, is the famous Lightning Generator created by Charles Proteus Steinmetz, chief engineer of the General Electric Company, and his associates. While the public outside had heard the distant rumbling of what sounded like man-made thunder-storms echoing around the walls of the General Electric building, none but a few scientists had as yet seen the generator at work.

Presently the door to the big laboratory opens, and there comes through it a strange-appearing little man. His finely modelled head, with its kindly eyes behind spectacles, its growth of graying beard, close-cropped hair, and mighty forehead, is set upon a tragically distorted body. For the man is a cripple. Almost a dwarf physically, surely a giant mentally and spiritually. This is the great Steinmetz, leader of the world’s electrical engineers, who is to demonstrate the workings of a machine which can reproduce in that laboratory, in miniature, the effects of all the artilleries of the skies.

What a variety of high-sounding titles the feature-writers for the newspapers have devised for this modest scientist! “The Wizard of Schenectady”; “The Tamer of Lightning”; “The Latter-Day Jove.” And how perversely does the appearance of the man in the uncreased sack suit, holding a long, thin cigar in his hands, and answering with courteous patience a hundred and one questions, fail to live up to these sensational titles!

Now the photographers have set their lenses on a large piece of wood, fastened at the end of a wire leading from the generator. Now, with no ceremony whatsoever, Steinmetz goes over to the corner, pulls a switch, and a second later there is a terrific clap of thunder, a blinding flash, and the wood is shattered even as though it had been struck by a sky-born thunderbolt, when it was part of the tree from which it came upon some lonely mountainside.

Everyone presses forward to look at the splintered pieces which Steinmetz holds in his hand. In simple language he explains what has happened, and the reason for this titan play with lightning. But bf course, for the sake of the newspaper story, the scientific explanation is not enough, and to this day when the name of Steinmetz is mentioned there are thousands of newspaper readers who think of him as a little gnome up in Schenectady, throwing thunderbolts around his laboratory for the benefit of Sunday editions.

A few minutes later, Steinmetz is back in his office, kneeling on a square bench in front of his work table, over which he bends in absorbed contemplation of a problem in higher mathematics.

When that is done, he goes downstairs to mingle with the hundreds of employees who are leaving the big building. He swings aboard a trolley-car, settling comfortably down on the front seat behind the motorman. He and the motorman are old friends, and during the long ride to the other side of town they talk together about recent happenings in the life of the city, the condition of the weather, and the state of the motorman’s second child, who has had chicken-pox and consequently has not been able to get around to the last Steinmetz children’s party.

Steinmetz leaves the car and walks up Wendell Avenue to the large red-brick house of his, surrounded by wide lawns and a bit of woodland, with a border of blue flowers running along the sidewalk. As he turns in at the entrance, there is a loud whooping, and three children, Marjorie, Joe and Bill, the children of Joseph LeRoy Hayden, the foster-son of the great scientist, come on the run to greet their idol. He chuckles contentedly at the sight of them. From his coat he fishes out one of the Tarzan books, a bloodcurdling narrative of the adventures of primitive times, which he has picked up in the corner drug-store. Both scientist and children think the Tarzan books are great, and Steinmetz could never understand why it was that the School Board of Schenectady, of which he was long an honored and an active member, refused to recommend them for juvenile consumption. “Anyhow,” said he once, “all the children around here read them because I get ’em for them.”

With the youngsters in tow, he goes through the dining-room of the big house to his office, which is also a museum. All around the room in glass cases is a collection of strange and fascinating objects, which he has picked up throughout his crowded life. The Hayden children simply adore this room, and they spend many hours with their loved foster-father, their noses pressed close against the glass, gazing at the exhibits.

The office window looks out into a conservatory which contains as fine a collection of cacti as is to be found in the East. There seems to be some sort of affinity between the spirit of the man who had overcome such obstacles as faced Steinmetz and these strange and rugged growths which remain alive despite the most disheartening environment.

Now Steinmetz goes from his office to his laboratory in the rear, filled with a forest of test-tubes and retorts, and dominated by a sign reading:

“THINK WHICH-THEN SWITCH.”

Again there is some work with brain and pencil at another large flat-topped table with the inevitable square stool in front of it, and then it is dinner-time, and there is Mrs. Hayden asking anxiously whether Steinmetz has been good all day and has stuck to his strict diet, which forbids the use of salt of any sort. She can always tell, can Mrs. Hayden, when the Doctor has deviated from this diet, and when she detects a guilty gleam in his eye, she scolds him lovingly.

Dinner is a happy meal, with talk between Hayden and Steinmetz of doings at the plant, for Hayden is also an electrical engineer of no small accomplishment; discussions of the new curriculum which the Board of Education is considering on Steinmetz’s recommendation; comment on the latest word from revolting Russia—and always the side remarks of the children.

After dinner, everyone goes into the big living-room, in the center of which is another desk for Steinmetz. There in his kneeling posture he goes on with his work of exploration into fields as yet penetrated by few mortal minds, while all about him the family talk keeps up. Ordinary conversation never disturbs him one bit. But let someone whisper, and instantly the scientist drops his pencil, wheels around, and demands to be let in on the secret. For he cannot bear to be left out of anything.

The door-bell rings, and the word comes that someone wants to see Dr. Steinmetz. He trots off, and presently returns looking a bit sheepish. Mrs. Hayden, who has eavesdropped at the conversation at the front door, says reprovingly, “You’ve been giving away some more money.” Steinmetz mumbles something like a trapped small boy. Finally comes confession. The caller had said that he, too, was named Steinmetz, and on the strength of this had borrowed twenty-five dollars. “But the man needed it,” is Steinmetz’s only defense.

And now someone at the branch office of the local Schenectady Socialists calls up to ask if Comrade Steinmetz will submit to an interview on Socialism and water-power. And when that has been arranged, the man who at the touch of a switch made lightning jump through a hoop, who first postulated the law of hysteresis loss, who more than any other one scientist made possible the long-distance transmission of electrical energy, goes off to bed as obediently as any six-year-old.

“When Daddy Steinmetz passed away,” said Mrs. Hayden, “one message we received was ‘a tribute of respect to the memory of the brilliant intellect, the big and loving heart and the white soul of Dr. Steinmetz.’

“Chapters have been written of his greatness intellectually; as many more could be filled with his generosities and kindnesses to others. Dwarfed, perhaps, in body, but with a heart as big as the universe and a soul as white as a child’s.”

Charles Proteus Steinmetz was a great American. Great in intelligence and wisdom, great in inventiveness, and greatest of all, perhaps, in his sheer courage and love for his fellow-man.

Steinmetz was one of the pioneers in the mysterious world of electrical research. He opened up for us a new civilization, with manifold possibilities for the liberation of the human spirit. And all his life long he held fast to his belief that only through cooperation along Socialist lines could this liberation be effected.

This one of the greatest Americans was born in the German town of Breslau. His mother died a year after his birth, and he was brought up by a loving grandmother, who recognized the genius in the lad, and encouraged him in his youthful experiments with lamps and lighting generally. He lived in a drab, middle-class neighborhood, and much of his child life was given over to dreams of going to America. He and the doting “grossmutter” played a game which centered around a little red chest, on which they pretended to be sailing to the promised land across the water. Today that little red chest is in the attic of the Schenectady home where Steinmetz died. His father, who was a lithographer, was a kindly man who encouraged the youth in all his expanding interests in whatever had to do with invention, and watched eagerly his rapid advancement, first in the little school near his home, and later at the “Gymnasium,” where he was graduated at the head of his class, and where young Charles was always asking questions about the whys and wherefores of life about him. The youth had rigged up a laboratory in his home, where he worked over elaborate chemical experiments, aided with a miscellaneous collection of books on science from his father’s library.

He entered the University of Breslau in 1882, and soon stood out among his fellows as a remarkably talented student. While he was an honor man, never skipping lectures and always taking careful notes, Steinmetz was no dull grind. He had a passionate love for the society of his fellows, and joined heartily in all the activities of the university.

It was while he was still a student, absorbed now in the problems presented by the emergence of that new force that was electricity, that Steinmetz’s active mind was seized with the ideals and principles of Socialism. It was a dangerous thing, in those days when Bismarck of blood and iron fame was building the German empire. Secret agents of the police were everywhere, and they hounded the young Breslau Socialists from one meeting-place to another. One of Steinmetz’s best friends was a youth named Heinrich Lux, who was most active in the distribution of propaganda and the calling of secret conferences. One day, while Lux and Steinmetz were chattering together in Lux’s home, the police broke in, arrested Lux, and forthwith threw him into jail. Steinmetz and Lux managed to correspond by using invisible ink on the fly-leaves of text-books which Lux was allowed to have brought to him in jail. The Socialists published a little paper called The People’s Voice, and to this Steinmetz was a loyal and lively contributor. His articles hotly defending the rights of Socialists to self-expression soon attracted the attention of the police. One article which was written by Steinmetz caused the prompt suppression of the paper. But while the police suspected the young electrical engineer of being the author of the article, they had no proofs, and could not arrest him, as they did so many of his friends. He kept on with his work at the University, and wrote his Doctor’s thesis, which had the foreboding title of On Involuntary Self-Reciprocal Correspondence in Space Which Are Defined by a Three-Dimensional Linear System of Surfaces of the nth Order.

Here was a man who could move swiftly from one field of thought to another, from the most involved mathematical calculations, from research into electrical engineering problems to Socialism and world affairs. Obviously a mighty annoying-man to have around, from the standpoint of the police. In fact, the name of Proteus, which he later adopted as his middle name, and which means ability to shift rapidly, was given to him by his fellow-students because of this expansive characteristic.

He had to make one very rapid shift indeed. On the dawn of a May morning in 1888, when he discovered that the police had finally enough evidence to cause his arrest, he took a train across the border to Switzerland, and settled in Zurich, writing a series of articles on scientific matters, talking Socialism at nights with a company of young idealists, and finally, after a year, actually setting out for that American promised land of his childhood dreams, with a young friend and fellow Socialist named Oscar Asmussen. The two youths arrived in this country in June, 1889, with no money, and with no very hopeful prospects of obtaining work. They came in the steerage of a French immigrant liner, and what few words of English Steinmetz had, he picked up on the eight-day voyage.

The immigration officials were most reluctant to admit Steinmetz to the United States. His distorted, frail body, his poverty and lack of friends here made him liable to become a “public charge.” But with Asmussen’s assurances that he would care for his friend, Steinmetz was finally admitted.

The electrical industry at that time was just beginning to find itself, and there were more applicants than jobs to be filled. Steinmetz had heard of a concern in Yonkers headed by a grand spirit named Rudolph Eickemeyer, who recognized the spirit that burned beneath the distorted body of the man, gave Steinmetz his first job, two weeks after he had landed. He was a draughtsman, working for two dollars a day, and he and Asmussen had a tough time of it scraping along on their slender earnings. Steinmetz lived for a while in the home of Edward Mueller, a kindly Socialist in Yonkers, where the immigrant quickly picked up American customs. He made application for membership in the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, to which he was admitted in 1889, and before which body, a year later, he delivered a remarkable address on some electrical devices which he had been studying. He was only twenty-four years old at the time, but he soon won local fame as mathematician, physicist, and engineer. Eickemeyer, Steinmetz’s employer, who had also been a social revolutionist in Germany, was manufacturing motors and dynamos for electrical railway work. And there were many long talks upon Science and Socialism between employer and employee. Steinmetz used to go out to Eickemeyer’s home, where he entered into the congenial life of the place with great zest. Soon Steinmetz was working in a little laboratory which Eickemeyer had set up for him, and where he was given full charge, and where, with one man under him, he started on a “research magnificent” which won him his first national renown. He was working on the reasons for the loss of power in magnetic transformers, a loss which had the technical name of hysteresis. And he evolved from that great brain of his what was known as the “law of hysteresis loss.” He appeared before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1892, when he was twenty-seven years old, and read a two hundred page paper explaining his law which made him famous among scientists almost overnight. A year later, he presented a paper to the International Electrical Congress which was so daring in its theories and its symbolic calculations of alternating current that, like Einstein’s relativity theory, it was not grasped by his audience.

In that same year, the Eickemeyer concern was purchased by a new company called the General Electric Company, with headquarters at Lynn, Massachusetts. One of the officials of the company describes his first impression of Steinmetz as follows:

“I shall never forget our first meeting at Eickemeyer’s workshop in Yonkers. I was startled, and somewhat disappointed, by the strange sight of a small, frail body, surmounted by a large head, with long hair hanging to the shoulders, clothed in an old cardigan jacket, cigar in mouth, sitting cross-legged on a laboratory work-table.

“My disappointment was but momentary, and completely disappeared the moment he began to talk. I instantly felt the strange power of his piercing but kindly eyes, and as he continued, his enthusiasm, his earnestness, his clear conceptions and marvelous grasp of engineering problems convinced me that we had indeed made a great find. It needed no prophetic insight to realize that here was a great man, who spoke with the authority of accurate and profound knowledge, and one who, if given the opportunity, was destined to render great service to our industry.”

In spite of his protean nickname, Steinmetz had no love for leaving old associations and friends. And it was with a particularly heavy heart that he departed from his beloved Eickemeyer, whom he had come to regard as a father. At Lynn, however, he soon made himself the center of a group of admirers. He was in charge of the calculating department, which had to do with alternating current. His system of symbols, which he had described some years before, and which caused so much mystification at the time, now turned out to be most practical. But only Steinmetz could teach this system, and he soon found himself in the position of schoolmaster to the engineering brains of the growing corporation.

In about a year it was decided to move the headquarters of the General Electric to Schenectady, New York. But this time a close friend whom he had made at Lynn, and his assistant in the calculating department, E. J. Berg, came along with him. And the two set up one of the most remarkable bachelor halls that the staid town of Schenectady has ever seen. One of the passions of Steinmetz’s life was the love for flowers and exotic plants, and another was for all sorts of animals. Soon a conservatory and a zoo were built onto the back of the house which the two engineers had rented. There were two jet-black crows, whom Steinmetz had named John and Mary, who would sit on the edge of the window of Steinmetz’s bedroom and engage in lengthy discourse with the great scientist, who would sometimes say that it was no trick at all to learn crow language. Then there were a number of raccoons, a highly intelligent monkey named Jenny, some owls whose hootings during the night upset the neighbors, several cranes, some young eagles, a dog named Buck, who smoked a pipe and wore a rakish cap, and a three-foot alligator, whose actions Steinmetz loved to observe.

The conservatory was largely given over to cacti, with an oddly contrasting collection of orchids. And of course there was the inevitable laboratory, full of retorts and test tubes and any number of coiled wires. This was the scene of frequent explosions, which caused deep distress to Steinmetz’s housekeeper but which never ruffled the philosophic calm of the experimenter.

Weekends, Berg and Steinmetz would go exploring along the beautiful Mohawk River in a boat which was especially built for them, and so struck were they by the loveliness of the stream that they organized the Mohawk River Aerial Navigation, Transportation, and Exploration Company, Unlimited. The Aerial part of the company consisted in the manufacture of gliders, which unfortunately never did glide, but the practical result of the undertaking was the construction of a camp on Viele’s Creek, a tributary of the Mohawk, which was to become the social and intellectual center of that part of the country. There on Saturdays and Sundays America’s most distinguished scientist and Schenectady’s most noted citizen would receive his guests, clad in a bathing suit, and set them to work building a dam across the creek, or helping prepare the meals for which the camp was famous.

All the while Steinmetz was working on a more efficient type of street lamp. He was looking for a better material than the carbon which was then used in street lighting. And he found it in Magnetite, an oxide of iron, which gave forth a brilliant blue illumination, and which later on he perfected so that the magnetic arc lamp came into general use. For this he received the award of the Franklin Institute.

And soon other rewards began to be heaped upon him. He was made Doctor of Philosophy at Union College, in his home town of Schenectady, and in 1902, Dr. Eliot, President of Harvard, conferred the degree of Master of Arts upon him, saying, “I confer this degree upon you as the foremost electrical engineer in the United States, and therefore in the world.”

From 1900 to 1910 Steinmetz’s active mind was principally engaged with the problem of transmitting electricity across high-power lines. And in the long run, it will be the contributions that he made to that art which will give him his chief claim to lasting fame. Here was truly a pioneering enterprise. In 1880, Edison had sent current for the distance of about a mile. Today, according to Power Control, a book by H. S. Rauschenbush and Harry Laidler, “we have gone far from the days of thirty-five years ago when the generation and transmission of multiphase alternating currents on a large scale was first successfully demonstrated at Niagara Falls, and when on the Pacific Coast they found it possible to transmit current over two hundred miles. Yet, as men have pointed out, these were once Rubicons to cross, and engineers in the industry live today who were among those to make the crossing. Now in times of need power can be shot across watersheds and divides from state to state. In November, 1926, the closing of a switch in the Clarion River Station tied together interconnected transmission lines stretching from Boston to Milwaukee. No great amount of power was transmitted. It was a symbol, a challenging boast as to who indeed would have the temerity 'to place a limit to the giant’s unchained strength.’ ”

Everywhere along the line of this progress we find written the name of Charles Proteus Steinmetz. There are one hundred and ninety-five patents for electrical devices in his name. It was perhaps his feats of harnessing lightning which proved the most spectacular in his career, and brought him the title conferred on him by newspaper men of “the Wizard of Schenectady,” that title, which he heartily disliked as being much too sensational. His study of the effects of lightning and its generation followed naturally from his earlier studies of hysteresis and alternating current. He said:

“When alternating currents had finally been conquered, and alternating current transmission-lines began to spread all over the country, an old enemy became more and more formidable—lightning. And for many years the great problem upon which depended the further successful development of electrical engineering was that of protection from lightning.

“But before this could be undertaken with reasonable hope of success, we had to know a great deal more about lightning, and the phenomena which are centered in lightning.”

To accomplish his purpose, and to ward off interference with electrical transmission, Steinmetz and other engineers devised the lightning arrestor, which has been called “the sentinel of the transmission system.” Then Steinmetz and his associates went a step further and devised his lightning generator, which with an energy of a million horsepower, hurled thunderbolts across his laboratory.

To Steinmetz belongs the credit for being one of the first electrical engineers to foresee the coming of electrical super-power, with all its manifold benefits. And day in and day out he spoke with unbounded enthusiasm about the possibility for a more expansive life for all of us, which the then emerging super-power system held. It was his concern with the good life which led him into another colorful phase of his most colorful career —namely, his activities as a Socialist.

From Steinmetz’s student days in Breslau, when he and Lux and the other young Socialists were eagerly discussing the writings of Marx, Engels, and LaSalle in obscure rooms hidden away from Bismarck’s prying police, to the time when the name of Charles Proteus Steinmetz stood for the highest achievement in the scientific world, is a long call. But through all these crowded days, Steinmetz tenaciously held those principles of the brotherhood of man and the coming of the cooperative commonwealth which he had first learned in his native land. In the introduction to his book, America and the New Epoch, published in 1916, Steinmetz wrote:

“As a Socialist, I took an active part in the ten years’ political war of the German social democracy against Bismarck, succeeded in escaping to Switzerland, when the Government tried to arrest me, and, after continuing my studies there, came to America. I have always retained my interest in public welfare and politics, have held and am holding political office in my home town, and am still dues-paying member of the Socialist Party organization.

When I landed at Castle Garden, from the steerage of a French liner, I had ten dollars and no job, and could speak no English. Now, personally, I have no fault to find with existing society; it has given me everything I wanted; I have been successful professionally, in engineering, and have every reason to be personally satisfied, and the only criticism which I can make is that I would far more enjoy my advantages if I knew that everybody else could enjoy the same.”

Five years before he put these words on paper, there had been a miniature revolution in Stein-metz’s home town, and the country awoke the morning after election day to read that Schenectady had elected George R. Lunn as Mayor on the Socialist ticket.

Here was the opportunity for Steinmetz, who had long been yearning for the chance to get back into active service for his beloved cause, to show his fidelity to Socialist principles. He went from the laboratories of the great corporation direct to the offices of the Socialist Mayor, and there offered his services in any capacity which Lunn might name. The Mayor, knowing of Steinmetz’s love for children, and his passion for education, promptly made him a member of the Board of Education. And the Board, in turn, immediately elected him President. There was a general idea among the more conservative elements of the town that Steinmetz would regard this as a perfunctory job, and that he was much too engrossed in his mathematical and engineering pursuits to have any time left for the routine of elementary education. Steinmetz, however, took his job very seriously indeed. He began a survey of the school situation in Schenectady, and soon discovered that there was a woeful lack of accommodations for the children. At that time there were no seats in the schools for at least three thousand boys and girls. With the struggles that he had undergone for an education at the back of his mind, the scientist-engineer set out to give every child in Schenectady a seat.

Three new schools were built in the Steinmetz regime, and provisions made for two more. After his two years of office, plans were under way for giving every child in town a place in a school. He secured an increase in the number of school playgrounds, set up a system of medical supervision of school children, and worked on a plan for stamping out epidemics among the youth of the town.

Of course he met opposition on the part of the conservatives. Many bitter things were said about his Socialistic “fads.” It was with great perplexity that this gentle spirit received these personal attacks. He could not get it through his head that men and women in our time should resort to unkindness and untruth to win their end. “Man’s inhumanity to man” was simply out of the Steinmetz picture. No one loved an argument on social affairs more than he, and no one was more astonished than this simple-hearted man when that argument became vindictive. He went along with his work, however, in laboratory and school, without deigning to reply to his critics, and after completion of his term as President of the Board of Education, he ran for President of the Common Council, again on the Socialist ticket headed by Lunn.

The Socialists in 1913 were defeated by the old-time ruse of a “fusion” of both old parties. Steinmetz wanted the position on the Common Council because there he would be able to vote on the appropriations for the schools, which were close to his heart. And in 1915, without making a single speech, attending a single meeting, or spending one cent for his election, he was carried into office along with Lunn and the other Socialists. Then he went quietly on with his work of reorganizing the school system, and fighting for measures for the betterment of his children.

Because of his own physical deformities, it was natural that he should have concern for the weak and handicapped. And under his supervision classes for children of tubercular tendencies were taught in glass-enclosed rooms on the roofs of the school building, anemic children were given special care, and a system of ungraded classes for immigrant children unfamiliar with the American language and customs was set up. From then until he died, Steinmetz was always either a member of or the head of the Board of Education, and what progressive elements there are in the school system of Schenectady today are mainly due to his work.

The Socialists the country over were not slow to recognize that in Steinmetz they had their ideal of the scientist with social vision. In 1922 they nominated Steinmetz for State Engineer on the New York State ticket of the Socialist Party.

William Feigenbaum, a prominent Socialist of New York City, who was one of the members of the committee which notified Steinmetz of his nomination, tells how he and the other members came upon the little man hard at work in his laboratory in his Schenectady home. On the floor near Steinmetz’s work-bench were several models of battleships, and Feigenbaum, knowing Steinmetz’s pacifist beliefs, asked curiously what the Doctor was doing with these. Steinmetz half-apologetically said that he had made them for the children of the household. “Because,” he explained, “when they grow up there won’t be any such things left in the world, and I wanted them to see what these terrible things look like.”

The campaign which followed was a remarkable one. Steinmetz’s opponent was an unknown Democratic Party hack. The people of the state had the opportunity to elect one of the world’s greatest scientists for the management of their engineering affairs. Steinmetz made but one or two public appearances, and confined his campaign largely to newspaper interviews. In everything he said or wrote during those months, he stressed the issue of the development of the water power of New York State for the benefit of all the people in the state. He talked issues that are very much to the fore today, seven long years after the campaign—issues, by the way, not yet settled. He spoke of the harnessing of Niagara; of the development of water power on the St. Lawrence, the upper Hudson and the Delaware Rivers. Time and again he reverted to the tragic waste in burning raw coal, with no attempts to capture its valuable by-products. He was among the first to speak of the coming of Giant Power—that is, the formation of great pools of power in and about the coal mines and the waterways of the country, and the drawing from these pools of cheap and abundant electricity. But the fetish of the party label was still too strong upon the people. They voted blindly and they voted Democratic. While Steinmetz was defeated, he received a total vote of more than 290,000, and was the leading candidate on his own ticket. The election was no defeat for Steinmetz; it was a bitter defeat for democracy.

When the election returns came in, Steinmetz puffed away at the long thin cigar which was his inevitable companion, and turned back to his mathematical calculations in regard to high voltage behavior. But he still was true to Socialism. He was tremendously interested in the Russian experiment. He wrote to Nicolai Lenin offering to come to Russia if necessary to help in the work of developing Russia’s water power, a project with which that other great mind across the ocean was deeply concerned. Lenin courteously acknowledged the letter but did not ask for any definite assistance. Steinmetz subscribed for tractors for farm development in Russia, and was a member of the American Advisory Committee for the Kuzbas project in Russia, which was undertaking to develop coal mining on a grand cooperative scale.

With a small group of friends in Schenectady, Steinmetz was wont to gather for long discussions of matters economic and political. It is a tragedy that no formal record was ever made of these discussions. There, no doubt, originated many of those daring speculations as to the future of industrial society for which Steinmetz was noted. There too, no doubt, Steinmetz preached his doctrine of international industrial cooperation, which is summed up in the conclusion of his above-mentioned book as follows:

“There is no standstill; either you swim or sink; either we enter the coming cooperative era of the world’s history and take our place as one of the leading industrial nations organized for the highest efficiency possible under cooperative industrial production, or 219 we fall by the wayside, cease to be one of the world’s leading nations, and merely become a field of exploitation, a sphere of European influence, to be parcelled out like China.”

The last years of his life, spent with his adopted family, the Haydens, were the happiest Steinmetz had ever known. Hayden, who was an engineer, in the General Electric Company, had been a frequent visitor at Steinmetz’s camp on the Mohawk. From the beginning, the two, the young engineer and the veteran scientist, had been profoundly attracted towards each other. When the other guests left the camp, Hayden stayed behind with Steinmetz and helped clean up the mess that was left after the big week-end parties.

Hayden was an interested partner of Steinmetz in the building of the quaint house on Wendell Avenue. Instead of breaking up the friendship, as is so often the case, Hayden’s marriage merely brought into Steinmetz’s life a new and very dear friend. As a matter of fact, the Haydens cut their honeymoon short in order not to be too long away from their adored scientist, and on their return they moved into the Wendell Avenue home, bag and baggage.

Steinmetz’s life there, as described at the opening of this chapter, was one of varied and delightful activity. It was during this time that he said to Charles W. Wood, who was editing a labor paper in Schenectady, “I have succeeded in getting my actual work down to thirty minutes a day. That leaves me eighteen hours for engineering.”

Steinmetz was fortunate in that he lived to know the profound admiration of his fellow-men for his accomplishments. With the Haydens, he took a trip to the Coast, stopping off to address various public meetings. So great were the crowds at every stop that in many cases it was necessary to hire larger halls for their accommodation than had originally been provided for. Steinmetz spoke with refreshing clarity. While his German accent was pronounced, it added to rather than detracted from the charm of his delivery. He could make the most complicated scientific subject seem easy of understanding. He would pace up and down the platform, hitching up his shabby trousers, and with eyes fixed on some distant object, speak “large, divine, and comfortable words” about his ideal America—a land freed of intolerance and hatred, full of happy men and women working together in the noble task of building here a true democracy.

While he revelled in the acclaim of the crowd, for he was naively avid of praise, the trip was a severe strain on his frail physique. He had been living for many years on sheer spiritual courage, and in 1923 the end came.

When word went through Schenectady that their greatest citizen had died, the people of that city were stricken with a mighty grief. Stein-metz’s body was laid in state in the city hall. And from early evening until six o’clock the following morning, thousands upon thousands, from all walks of life, but the majority of them working men and women, filed past the bier to give sincere and heart-broken tribute to what was Charles Proteus Steinmetz, scientist, prophet, and most lovable human being.

For Students and Teachers

You will see on our web site that many of our ebooks are free. For the ebooks still in copyright which are not free, we offer very inexpensive district-wide, school-wide, and classroom-wide licenses. Please call us with questions about  licenses for concurrent use by all your students in a building or school district at 202-464-9126.

(Samples of all the ebooks below are available on Amazon.)

Young Adult Books
(with Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level)

Flight to Freedom-The Story of the Underground Railroad

by Henrietta Buckmaster (4.7)

Revolt on the Amistad 

by Emma Gelders Sterne (5.1)

Patrick Henry: Firebrand of the Revolution

by Nardi Campion (5.6)

Benito Juarez-Builder of a Nation

by Emma Gelders Sterne (6.3)

Juarez-Hero of Mexico

by Nina Brown Baker (6.0)

Malcolm X: Another Side of the Movement

by Mark Davies (6.1)

Mary McLeod Bethune

by Emma Gelders Sterne. (7.6)

The Life of W.E.B. Du Bois: His Was the Voice

by Emma Gelders Sterne (6.5)

Michael Faraday

by Harry Sootin (6.4)

He Wouldn't be King: The Story of Simon Bolivar

by Nina Brown Baker (6.3)

Edward Jenner and Smallpox Vaccination

by Irmengarde Eberle (7.3)

Lenin with a Study Guide

by Nina Baker Brown (9.0)

Thomas Edison

by Roselyn and Ray Eldon Hiebert (9.1)

Revolts, Resistance and Emancipation

by Dorothy Sterling (9.1)

Bayard Rustin: Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movement

by James Haskin (11.0)

Power to the People: The Rise and Fall of the Black Panther Party

by Jim Haskins (11.3)

Military/Political Memoirs

The ebook to the left is our bestseller with over 1,000 positive reviews on Amazon. It was the source for the HBO series on "War in the Pacific."

Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific with Maps

By Robert Leckie (7.4)

Leatherhead in Korea: On the Front Lines with a U.S. Marine Combat Artist

by Norval E. Packwood (mostly illustrations) (3.0)

Serenade to the Big Bird

by Bert Stiles (6.2)

Agent in Italy with a Study Guide

by S.K. (6.4)

The New Legions

by Donald Duncan (6.7)

U.S. Marines in Vietnam: Small Unit Action in 1966

by Captain Francis J. "Bing" West (6.2)

Runaway Russia

by Florence McLeod Harper (6.4)

Last Flight from Singapore

by Arthur Gerald Donahue, D.F.C. (8.7)

Escape from Corregidor

by Edgar Whitcomb (7.7)

An Army of Amateurs

By Philippe De Vomécourt (7.1)

Journalism and Biographies

Mrs. R: The Life of Eleanor Roosevelt

by Alfred Steinberg (8.3)

War in Korea: the Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent

by Marguerite Higgins (Pulitzer Prize Winner for International Reporting) (8.4)

Mississippi Notebook: Freedom Summer June-August 1964

by Nicholas Von Hoffman (8.7)

Freedom Ride: Civil Rights and Non-Violent Resistance with a Forward by James Baldwin

by James Peck (9.4)

Abraham Lincoln

by James Daugherty (8.8)

Revolution in Mexico-Death is Incidental

by Heath Bowman and Sterling Dickinson (8.8).

Benjamin Franklin: The First Civilized American

by Philips Russell (9.5)

Thurgood Marshall: From His Early Years to Brown

by Hunter R. Clark and Michael D. Davis (10.1)

Thurgood Marshall: His Triumph in Brown, His Years on the Supreme Court

by Hunter R. Clark and Michael D. Davis (10.2)

Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life, an Autobiography

by Diego Rivera with Gladys March (10.7)

The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott, Founder of the Chicago Defender

by Roi Ottley (11.0)

Harlem: People, Power, and Politics 1900-1950

by Roi Ottley, previously published as New World A-Coming for which Ottley won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (9.5)

A Stranger in My House: Jews and Arabs in the West Bank

by Walter Reich (14.5)

The Legend of John Brown

by Richard O. Boyer (15.9)

Fiction

So Big

by Edna Ferber (5.9)

Pulitizer Prize Winner for Fiction 1924

The Underdogs

by Mariano Azuela (4.9)

One of Ours

by Willa Cather (6.0)

Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction 1923