The children are to me a perpetual source of wonder and delight. How keen they are, how alert, and how comprehending!
The sweet children of the Socialist movement—the little lords of light and love—keep my heart warm and my purpose true. The raggedest and dirtiest of them all is to me an angel of light. I have seen them, the proletarian little folks, swarming up out of the sub-cellars and down from the garrets of the tenements and I have watched them with my heart filled with pity and my eyes overflowing with tears. Their very glee seemed tragic beyond words.
Born within the roar of the ocean their tiny feet are never kissed by the eager surf, nor their wan cheeks made ruddy by the vitalizing breezes of the sea.
Not for them—the flotsam and jetsam upon the social tides—are the rosy hours of babyhood, the sweet, sweet joys of childhood. They are the heirs of the social filth and disease of capitalism and death marks them at what should be the dewy dawn of birth, and they wither and die—without having been born. Their cradle is their coffin and their birth robe their winding sheet.
The Socialist movement is the first in all history to come to the rescue of childhood and to set free the millions of little captives. And they realize it and incarnate the very spirit of the movement and shout aloud their joy as it marches on to victory.
The little revolutionists in Socialist parades know what they are there for, and in our audiences they are wide awake to the very last word. They know, too, when to applaud, and the speaker who fails to enthuse them is surely lacking in some vital element of his speech.
At the close of a recent meeting in a western state the stage was crowded with eager comrades shaking hands and offering congratulations. My hand was suddenly gripped from below. I glanced down and a little comrade just about big enough to stand alone looked straight up into my eyes and said with all the frankness and sincerity of a child: "That was a great speech you made and I love you; keep this to remember me by." And he handed me a little nickle-plated whistle, his sole tangible possession, and with it all the wealth of his pure and unpolluted child-love, which filled my heart and moved me to tears.
In just that moment that tiny proletaire filled my measure to overflowing and consecrated me with increased strength and devotion to the great movement that is destined to rescue the countless millions of disinherited babes and give them the earth and all the fulness thereof as their patrimony forever.
The sweetest, tenderest, most pregnant words uttered by the proletaire of Galilee were: "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me; for of such is the kingdom of heaven."
So wrote William Dean Howells, then a rising young poet and author in Columbus, Ohio, in November, 1859, on the eve of John Brown's execution at Charleston, Va. In the month before, on the night of October 16th, John Brown, at the head of twenty-one men, sixteen of whom were white and five black, marched on Harper's Ferry and delivered the attack that sent his body to the gallows and his soul to immortal glory.
The heroic blood of old Brown himself flowed in the veins of all his twenty-one intrepid young followers. There was not a coward among them. Three of them were Brown's own sons and two others were near relatives.
Brown was fifty-nine; his adjutant general twenty-four. All his followers were young men, some of them barely of age.
When Colonel Richard J. Hinton, who followed John Brown in Kansas, heard of the intended raid on Harper's Ferry, he said to Kagi, the stripling adjutant general: "You'll all be killed." "Yes, I know it, Hinton," was the ready reply, "but the result will be worth the sacrifice."
Kagi was said to resemble "a divinity student rather than a warrior," and when taunted by an adversary, he answered, "We will endure the shadow of dishonor, but not the stain of guilt."
"These words of John Henry Kagi," wrote Hinton, "expressed the spirit of John Brown's men and, in an especial sense, the character of the young and brilliant man who fell riddled with bullets into the Shenandoah. Thirty miles below, the blood-tinged stream flowed through the lands of his father's family."
Spartan souls were these who marched on Harper's Ferry that fateful night, there to strike a blow at the cost of their lives that was destined to make Harper's Ferry more famed than Waterloo—a blow that was to emancipate a race and change abruptly the whole current of American history.
"Down the still road, dim white in the moonlight, and amid the chill of the October night, went the little band, silent and sober."
The twenty-one young heroes who followed old John Brown on that historic night were of the exalted type that Emerson described: "When souls reach a certain clearness of perception, they accept a knowledge and motive without selfishness."
It is related that when Garibaldi was organizing his army of liberation in Italy, he was asked what inducements he had to offer to new recruits. Promptly the rebel chieftain answered: "Poverty, hardships, battles, wounds, and—victory!"
That was all Captain Brown had to offer his devoted followers, with crushing defeat instead of victory at the end, and yet they enlisted with a zeal that could not have been surpassed if the world's most coveted prizes had been their promised reward.
Think of the utter abnegation, unselfishness and loftiness of purpose of that valiant little band who marched deliberately into the jaws of hell that October night to break the fetters of a despised and alien race! How many of their detractors and persecutors were animated by motives so pure and exalted?
No wonder that Victor Hugo protested so eloquently, albeit in vain, against John Brown's execution. "Think of a republic," he indignantly exclaimed, "murdering a liberator!" and when the bloody deed was done the illustrious Frenchman flung back the prophetic challenge: "The time will come when your John Brown will be greater than your George Washington."
Among Brown's men in the attack on Harper's Ferry there were two Quaker brothers, Edwin and Barclay Coppock, stalwart young abolitionists from Iowa, whose unfaltering devotion to the cause, heroic self-sacrifice and tragic death constitute one of the most thrilling and inspiring chapters in American history.
Edwin, the elder brother, was captured with his leader and shared his fate on the gallows. Barclay made good his escape with Owen Brown, to be killed later as a lieutenant, while recruiting a regiment for the war which had then actually begun.
Edwin and Barclay Coppock were born of Quaker parents near Salem, Ohio, Edwin on June 30, 1835, and Barclay on January 4, 1839, so that Edwin was 24 and Barclay not quite 21 when the attack was made on Harper's Ferry.
Salem was at that time the center of abolitionism in that section. It was settled by Quakers and they were strongly anti-slavery in sentiment. The headquarters of the "Western Anti-Slavery Society" was located here, and here also was published the "Anti-Slavery Bugle," official organ of the movement, of which Benjamin S. Jones, Oliver Johnson and Warren R. Robertson were editors. They waged uncompromising warfare against slavery, attacked the United States constitution as it was then being interpreted, and denounced the churches that would not come out openly in favor of abolition. They were called "Disunion Abolitionists," "Covenanters" and "Infidels." But nothing daunted, they demanded the unconditional surrender of the slave power.
During one of the annual conventions held at the Hicksite Friends' church in Salem and in the midst of a violent speech that was being delivered against the encroachments of slavery on Northern soil under the fugitive slave law, an excited man entered with a telegram in his hand and announced breathlessly that the four o'clock train, due in thirty minutes, had aboard of it a southern man and his wife and a colored slave girl as a nurse. It was at once proposed that they proceed to the depot in a body and meet the train on arrival. The meeting was hastily adjourned. Intense enthusiasm prevailed. They marched to the depot cheering as they went and when the train pulled in they boarded it, took the slave girl without protest from her master and mistress and marched back to the hall with her in triumph. The liberated girl was christened Abby Kelly Salem, in honor of Abby Kelly Foster, one of the speakers at the convention, and the city of Salem. The girl grew up to splendid womanhood and was highly esteemed by all who knew her.
The old town hall, still standing, is where many an anti-slavery meeting was held in that day. The most stirring and eloquent appeals were made in this old meeting house by such noted abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Susan B. Anthony, Parker Pillsbury, Horace Mann, John Pierpont, Gerrit Smith, Fred Douglas, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Owen Lovejoy, Abby Kelly Foster, George Thompson of England, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Collyer, John P. Hale and many others.
The walls of the old town hall resounded daily and nightly with the patriotism and love of freedom of Quaker Salem.
It was in this atmosphere and under the influence of these impassioned teachings that the Coppock brothers, sons of a nearby Quaker farmer, grew up to young manhood. It had been ingrained into their very nature that all men were created equal and that slavery was a crime against God and man, and with this conviction they resolved to shoulder their muskets and go out and fight to liberate the slaves.
The family moved to Iowa in the meantime and it was here that these young Quaker enthusiasts first met John Brown, who was then waging his warfare against slavery in the free soil conflict in that state. From now on their die was cast. They would follow the grim old chief to victory or death. It proved to be death for them both and when it came they met it with a calmness and resignation possible only to the loftiest heroism.
Barclay Coppock was barely twenty years of age at the time of the attack on Harper's Ferry. His escape was almost a miracle. A heavy reward was offered for him dead or alive. After weeks of the most intense privation and suffering, lying concealed in the brush during the day and moving chiefly by night, he picked his way back to the family home at Springdale, Iowa. The governor of Virginia issued a requisition for his return, which was not granted. The young men at Springdale and that vicinity organized to protect young Coppock and served notice on the Virginia officers who were on his track that "Springdale is in arms and is prepared at a half hour's notice to give them a reception of 200 shots."
In the following spring Barclay returned to Salem and here again the Virginia authorities renewed their efforts to capture him. But Barclay, now among his old neighbors and friends, defied them. He sent word to the officers in pursuit of him as to where he might be found, but they wisely refrained from attempting to take him.
It was at this time that Barclay was a guest of the Bonsall family of Salem, the elder Bonsall being one of the leading abolitionists of that day. Charles Bonsall, his son, who still lives at Salem, knew the Coppock brothers well and has a distinct recollection of Barclay's stay at his father's home.
"During Barclay's sojourn at our home," writes Charles Bonsall in a personal letter, "a detective of Salem heard of his being in our neighborhood and boasted of his intention to arrest Barclay and secure the reward there was on his head. Barclay heard of the boast and wrote a letter to the detective informing him that he might select five other men and he would meet them all single-handed and alone at any point outside the city that he might name, and they could have the privilege of capturing him and securing the reward. The detective did not undertake the job.... Barclay Coppock never knew what fear was. When a boy in his teens he often went to the woods and slept alone all night on the ground, under the trees, from the sheer love of adventure. He was the best shot with his eight-inch Colt I ever saw. On one occasion, in his uncle's woods south of Salem, with his revolver, he shot a grey squirrel from a big oak tree and put two more balls through its body before it reached the ground. His nerves were as calm and steady in a fight as in his sleep, and while with us his trusted "navy" was always strapped under his coat, while in his coat-pocket he carried a small pistol ready for any emergency at close quarters. It would have been impossible to capture him alive."
Barclay Coppock's escape and the execution of his brother but intensified his hatred and horror of slavery. He was now thoroughly aroused and intent upon plunging anew into the fight. Returning to Iowa, and convinced that civil war was now inevitable, he prepared actively for the conflict.
"Now comes one of those remarkable facts of super-epochal history," continues Bonsall, "which go to show that when revolutionary periods focalize, revolutions in public sentiment are brought about in almost a twinkling. In the spring of 1861, just about one year from the time the United States Government was offering a reward of one thousand dollars for Barclay Coppock, dead or alive, the same government lifted its hat and humbly bowed to him, and begged him to accept a first lieutenant's commission in Company C, Third Kansas volunteers. He accepted the commission and at once proceeded to organize his company. Captain Allen of Ashtabula of the same company, came to Salem to recruit volunteers and the writer, together with half a score of other abolition boys, enlisted in Coppock's company.... Soon after Lieutenant Coppock was on his way from Springdale to Fort Leavenworth to join his regiment there. The rebels in Missouri, hearing of his coming, burned the railroad bridge across the Little Platte river near St. Joseph, and the train carrying the troops was precipitated into the river in the darkness of night and brave Lieutenant Coppock was killed in the wreck."
Thus perished, still in his boyhood, as heroic a heart, as noble a soul, as ever gave up his life in the cause of freedom. Had he been spared he would without doubt have become one of the famed heroes of the war of the rebellion.
Edwin Coppock was executed from the same gallows as his old chief, but two weeks later. His trial, like that of Brown, was a farce. Conviction, sentence and execution of all of Brown's men that were captured was a foregone conclusion.
While awaiting the execution of his sentence, Edwin wrote to Mrs. Brown, wife of his dead leader:
"I was with your sons when they fell. Oliver lived but a very few moments after he was shot. He spoke no word, but yielded calmly to his fate. Watson was shot at ten o'clock Monday morning and died about three o'clock Monday afternoon.... After we were taken prisoners he was placed in the guardhouse with me. He complained of the hardness of the bench on which he was lying. I begged hard for a bed for him, or even a blanket, but could obtain none. I took off my coat and placed it under him and held his head in my lap, in which position he died without a groan or struggle."
In a letter to friends in Iowa, under date of November 22d, three weeks before his execution, he wrote:
"Eleven of our little band are sleeping now in their bloody garments with the cold earth above them. Braver men never lived; truer men to their plighted word never banded together."
Rigidly true to their convictions were all these young heroes. Not one showed the white feather in the last hour. Serenely and without a quiver each of them met his cruel fate.
John Brown had trained up his men in the strictest discipline. Not a drop of liquor was allowed in his camp. Tobacco was tabooed. Profane language was forbidden.
These men were in deadly earnest and their asceticism attested their single-hearted fidelity to their cause. They were profoundly convinced that slavery was a national crime and that it was their patriotic duty, at whatever cost, to wipe that insufferable stigma from the land.
And who shall say that they were not right; or that they forfeited their brave lives in vain?
A few days before the gallows claimed him, John Brown wrote to his family, "I feel no consciousness of guilt and I am perfectly certain that very soon no member of the family will feel any possible disposition to blush on my account."
The Coppock brothers were typical of all the brave young abolitionists who banded together to strike a blow that rocked this nation as if Jehovah in his wrath had laid hold on it. Quaker lads, "grave, quiet, reserved, even rustic in their ways," they lived bravely up to their convictions and sealed their devotion to the cause of freedom with their precious young life blood.
The noble character of Edwin Coppock is revealed in the following pathetic letter written to his uncle on the eve of his execution. There is no bitterness in his heart at the last hour. Like the great Galilean who also perished for sympathizing with the lowly and oppressed, he was calm and resigned in the presence of his fate. Like all such souls he was gifted with prophetic vision, as his letter shows:
Charleston, December 13, 1859.
Joshua Coppock:
My Dear Uncle—I seat myself by the stand to write for the first and last time to thee and thy dear family. Though far from home and overtaken by misfortune, I have not forgotten you. Your generous hospitality towards me, during my short stay with you last spring, is stamped indelibly upon my heart, and also the generosity bestowed upon my brother who now wanders, an outcast from his native land. But thank God, he is free. I am thankful it is I who has to suffer instead of him.
The time may come when he will remember me. And the time may come when he may still further remember the cause in which I die. Thank God the principles of the cause in which we were engaged will not die with me and my brave comrades. They will spread wider and wider and gather strength with each hour that passes. The voice of truth will echo through our land, bringing conviction to the erring and adding members to the glorious army who will follow its banner. The cause of everlasting truth and justice will go on conquering and to conquer until our broad and beautiful land shall rest beneath the banner of freedom. I had fondly hoped to live to see the principles of the Declaration of Independence fully realized. I had hoped to see the dark stain of slavery blotted from our land, and the libel of our boasted freedom erased, when we can say in truth that our beloved country is the land of the free and the home of the brave; but that cannot be.
I have heard my sentence passed; my doom is sealed. But two more short days remains for me to fulfill my earthly destiny. But two brief days between me and eternity. At the expiration of those two days I shall stand upon the scaffold to take my last look of earthly scenes. But that scaffold has but little dread for me, for I honestly believe I am innocent of any crime justifying such punishment. But by the taking of my life and the lives of my comrades, Virginia is but hastening on that glorious day, when the slave will rejoice in his freedom and say, "I, too, am a man, and am groaning no more under the yoke of oppression."
But I must now close. Accept this short scrawl as a remembrance of me. Give my love to all the family. Kiss little Joey for me. Remember me to all my relatives and friends. And now farewell for the last time.
From thy nephew, EDWIN COPPOCK.
Two days later the slave state of Virginia hung Edwin Coppock by the neck until he was dead. The gallant John E. Cook went to the scaffold with him. The account says:
"After the cap had been placed on their heads, Coppock turned toward Cook and stretched forward his hand as far as possible. At the same time Cook said, 'Stop a minute—where is Edwin's hand?' They then shook hands cordially and Cook said, 'God bless you.' The calm and collected manner of both was very marked.... They both exhibited the most unflinching firmness, saying nothing, with the exception of bidding farewell to the ministers and the sheriff."
More than half a century has passed since John Brown and his faithful followers gave up their lives to set the black men free, but history has yet to do them justice. Some day the hatred and prejudice will all have died away and then these men, summoned to the bar of enlightened judgment, will be crowned as the greatest heroes in American history.
We need to grow out of the selfish, sordid, brutal spirit of individualism which still lurks even in Socialists and is responsible for the strife and contention which prevail where there should be concord and good will. The social spirit and the social conscience must be developed and govern our social relations before we shall have any social revolution.
If there are any among whom the social spirit should find its highest expression and who should be bound fast in its comradely embrace and give to the world the example of its elevating and humanizing influence, it is the Socialists. They of all others have come to realize the hardening and brutalizing effect of capitalist individualism in the awful struggle for existence and it is to them a cause of unceasing rejoicing that they live at a time in the world's historic development when the very conditions which resulted from this age-long struggle forbid its continuance and proclaim its approaching termination.
The rule of individualism which has governed society since the days of primitive communism has effectually restrained the moral and spiritual development of the race. It has brought out the baser side of men's nature and set them against each other as if the plan of creation had designed them to be mortal enemies.
* * * *
Typical capitalists are barren of the social spirit. The very nature of the catch-as-catch-can encounter in which they are engaged makes them wary and suspicious, if not downright hateful of each other, and the latent good that is in them dies for the want of incentive to express itself.
The other day I saw two such capitalists shake hands. It was pitiable. Their hearts had no part in the purely perfunctory ceremony. They happened to meet and could not avoid each other. And so they mechanically touched each other's reluctant hands, standing at right angles to each other for a moment—not face to face—and then passing on without either looking the other in the eyes.
This cold and heartless ceremony typified the relation begotten of capitalist individualism in which men's interests are competitive and antagonistic and in which each instinctively looks out for himself and is on the alert to take every possible advantage of his fellow-man.
The result of this system is inevitably a race of Ishmaelites.
How differently two Socialist comrades shake hands! Their hearts are in their palms and the joy of greeting is in their eyes. They have the social spirit. Their interests are mutual and their aspirations kindred. If one happens to be strong and the other weak, the stronger shares the weakness and the weaker shares the strength of his comrade. The base thought of taking a mean advantage, one of the other, does not darken their minds or harden their hearts. They are joined together in the humanizing bonds of fellowship. They multiply each other and they rejoice in their comradely kinship. The best there is in each, and not the worst, as in the contact of individualism, is appealed to and brought forth for the benefit of both.
What an elevating, enlarging and satisfying relation!
And this is the "dead level" of mediocrity and servitude to which we are to sink when this relation becomes universal among men as it will in the International Socialist Republic!
So at least we are told by those who in the present system have acquired the instincts and impulses of animals of prey in the development of their imagined superiority by draining the veins and wrecking the lives of their vanquished competitors, but we are not impressed by the virtues of the system of which they stand as the shining examples.
* * * *
Thru all the ages past men, civilized men, so-called, have been at each other's throats in the struggle for existence, and the spirit of individualism this struggle has begotten, the spirit of hard, sordid, brutal selfishness, has filled this world with unutterable anguish and woe.
But at last the end of the reign of anarchistic individualism is in sight. The social forces at work are undermining and destroying it and soon its knell will be sounded to the infinite joy of an emancipated world.
The largest possible expression of the social spirit should be fostered and encouraged in the Socialist movement and among Socialists themselves. In spite of the hindrances which beset us in our present environments and relations, we may yet cultivate this spirit assiduously to our increasing mutual good and to the good of our great movement.
In our propaganda, in the discussion of our tactical and other differences and in all our other activities, the larger faith that true comradeship inspires should prevail between us. We need to be more patient, more kindly, more tolerant, more sympathetic, helpful and encouraging to one another, and less suspicious, less envious, and less contentious, if we are to educate and impress the people by our example, and by the effect of our teachings upon ourselves win them to our movement, and realize our dream of universal freedom and social righteousness.
The only time in my life I ever saw Theodore Roosevelt was years before he became president of the United States. I was aboard of a train in the far west, where Roosevelt was then said to be following ranch life, and as he and several companions in cowboy costume entered the car at a station stop, he was pointed out to me. I did not like him. The years since have not altered that feeling of aversion except to accentuate it.
I have since seen the nation mad with hero worship over this man Roosevelt, but I have not been impressed by it. Very "great" men sometimes shrivel into very small ones and finally vanish in oblivion in the short space of a single generation.
The American people are more idolatrous than any "heathen" nation on earth. They worship their popular "heroes," while they last, with passionate frenzy, and with equal madness do they hunt down the sane "fools" who vainly try to teach them sense. Theodore Roosevelt and George Dewey as "heroes" and Wendell Phillips and John Brown as "fools" are notable illustrations. American history is filled with them.
But my personal dislike of the cowboy in imitation who has since become president, however justifiable, would scarcely warrant a public attack upon his official character, and this review, being of such a nature, is inspired, as will appear, by entirely different motives.
There are those, and they constitute a great majority of the American people, who stand in awe of their president, supposedly their servant, but in fact their master; they speak of him with a kind of reverential adulation as a lordly personage, a superior being to be looked up to and worshiped rather than a fellowman to be respected and loved. There are others who betray equal ignorance in a more vulgar fashion by coarse tirades for which there is often as little excuse as there is for the extreme adulation.
Regarding the president of the United States, as I do, simply as a citizen and fellowman, the same as any other, I shall speak of him and his acts free alike from awe and malice, and if I place him in the public pillory, where he has placed so many others, to be seen and despised of men, it will be from a sense that his official acts, so often in flat denial of his profession, merit the execration of honest men.
In arraigning President Roosevelt and his administration I have no private spite nor personal grudge to satisfy, but an obligation to redeem and a principle to vindicate.
I shall go about it as I would any other moral duty, asking no favors and prepared to accept all consequences.
In the first place, I charge President Roosevelt with being a hypocrite, the most consummate that ever occupied the executive seat of the nation. His profession of pure politics is false, his boasted moral courage the bluff of a bully and his "square deal" a delusion and a sham.
Theodore Roosevelt is mainly for Theodore Roosevelt and incidentally for such others as are also for the same distinguished gentleman, first, last and all the time. He is a smooth and slippery politician, swollen purple with self-conceit; he is shrewd enough to gauge the stupidity of the masses and unscrupulous enough to turn it into hero worship. This constitutes the demagogue, and he is that in superlative degree.
Only a few days ago he appeared in a characteristic role. Rushing into the limelight, as necessary to him as breath, he shrieked that he and "Root" were "horrified" because of certain scandalous and revolting charges made by one of his own former political chums. Of course, he and "Root" of Tweed fame, the foxiest "fixer" of them all, were "horrified" because of the shock to their political virtue, but it so happened that the horror took effect only when they found themselves uncovered. The taking of Harriman's boodle for corruptly electing him president and the use of the stolen insurance funds for the same criminal purpose did not "horrify" the president and "Root," nor would they be "horrified" yet if they had not been caught red-handed in the act with the booty upon their persons.
The cry of the exposed malefactor and all his pack of yelpers that he is the victim of a "plot" by his own friends and supporters, the very gentlemen (sic) who furnished him with free special trains, paid his campaign expenses and in fact bought the presidency for him, is so palpably false as to be absolutely ridiculous and only brings into bolder relief the hypocrisy and fraud it was designed to conceal.
This much is preliminary to the extraordinary official conduct of the president which has "horrified" not only its victims but millions of others, and now prompts this review and protest.
Something over a year ago Charles Moyer, William Haywood and George Pettibone, of Colorado, leading officials of the Western Federation of Miners, were overpowered and kidnaped by a gang of thugs and torn from their families at night by conspiracy of two degenerate governors and another notorious criminal acting for the Mine and Smelter Trust, one of the most stupendous aggregations of force and plunder in all America.
Every decent man and woman was "horrified" by this infamy and the whole working class of the nation cried out against it.
Was Roosevelt also "horrified"?
Yes!
Because the Mine and Smelter Trust had kidnaped three citizens of the republic?
Oh, no!
The three citizens were only working cattle and he never had any other conception of them.
He was "horrified" because the Mine and Smelter Trust, unclean birds that feather their nests, especially in Colorado, with legislatures and United States senatorships, had not killed instead of kidnaping their victims.
Then and there Theodore Roosevelt disgraced himself and his high office, and his cruel and cowardly act will load his name with odium as long as it is remembered.
The Mine and Smelter Trust had put up the funds and used its vast machinery for Roosevelt, and now Roosevelt must serve it even to the extent of upholding criminals, approving kidnaping and murdering its helpless victims.
When Roosevelt stepped out of the White House and called Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone murderers, men he had never seen and did not know; men who had never been tried, never convicted and whom every law of the land presumed innocent until proven guilty, he fell a million miles beneath where Lincoln stood, and there he grovels today with his political crimes, one after another, finding him out and pointing at him their accusing fingers.
No president of the United States has ever descended to such depths as has Roosevelt to serve his law-defying and crime-inciting masters.
The act is simply scandalous and without a parallel in American history.
What right has Theodore Roosevelt to prejudge American citizens, pronounce their guilt and hand them over to the hangman? In a pettifogging lawyer such an act would be infamous; in the president of the nation it becomes monstrous and staggers belief.
All that Roosevelt knows about Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone he knows from his friends, their kidnapers.
The millions of working men and women, embracing practically every labor union in America, count for nothing with him. He is not now standing for their votes. He is fulfilling his obligation to the gentlemen (!) who put up the coin that elected him; paying off the mortgage they hold upon his administration.
Theodore Roosevelt is swift to brand other men who even venture to disagree with him as liars. He, according to himself, is immaculate and infallible.
The greatest liar is he who sees only liars in others.
When Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States, denounced Charles Moyer, William Haywood and George Pettibone as murderers, he uttered a lie as black and damnable, a calumny as foul and atrocious as ever issued from a human throat. The men he thus traduced and vilified, sitting in their prison cells for having dutifully served their fellow-workers and having spurned the bribes of their masters, transcend immeasurably the man in the White House, who, with the cruel malevolence of a barbarian, has pronounced their doom.
A thousand times rather would I be one of those men in Ada county jail than Theodore Roosevelt in the White House at Washington.
Had these men accepted, with but a shadow of the eagerness Roosevelt displayed, the debauching funds of the trust pirates, they would not now languish in felons' cells.
The same brazen robbers of the people and corrupters of the body politic who put Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone in jail, also put Theodore Roosevelt in the White House.
This accounts for his prostituting the high office Lincoln honored and resorting to methods that would shame a Bowery ward-heeler.
Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone are not murderers; it is a ghastly lie, and I denounce it in the name of law and in the name of justice. I know these men, these sons of toil; I know their hearts, their guileless nature and their rugged honesty. I love and honor them and shall fight for them while there is breath in my body.
Here and now I challenge Theodore Roosevelt. He is guilty of high crimes and deserves impeachment.
Let him do his worst. I denounce him and defy him.
During my recent visit at Washington I learned from those who know him what they think of Roosevelt. Among newspaper men he is literally despised. Their true feeling is not apparent in what they write, for they know that the slightest offense to the president is lese majeste and means instantaneous decapitation.
For the second time, Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States, has now publicly convicted Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone. He has not pronounced condemnation upon Harry Thaw, or any rich man charged with murder. He has, however, made a postmaster of a man at Chicago charged by the Chicago Tribune with having shot another man in a midnight brawl over disreputable women, and then used his influence to make the same man mayor of that city.
Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone, the three workingmen kidnaped by the Mine and Smelter Trust, have now been in jail fourteen months; they have not been tried, but twice condemned by President Roosevelt, the last time but a few days ago, in connection with Harriman, his former political pal and financial backer. These men are in prison cells, their bodies in manacles and their lips sealed. They cannot speak for themselves. They are voiceless and at the mercy of calumny. No matter how grossly outraged, they must submit.
For a man clothed with the almost absolute power of a president to strike down men gagged and bound, as these men are, he must have an unspeakably brutal and cowardly nature, just such a nature as the governor of an empire state must have to turn a deaf ear to the agonizing entreaties of a shrieking, shuddering woman and see her dragged into the horrors of electrocution.
The true character of this man is being gradually revealed to the American people. He has never been anything but an enemy of the working class. He joined a labor organization purely as a demagogue. In all his life he never associated with working people. His writings, before he became a politician, show that he held them in contempt. When he entered political life he soon learned how to shake hands with a fireman for the camera and have his press agent do the rest, and it was this species of demagoguery, the very basest conceivable, that idolized him with the ignorant mass and gave him the votes of the millions he in his heart despised as an inferior race.
In his book on "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail," page 10, written long before he entered politics, Roosevelt reveals his innate contempt for those who toil. After describing cowboys when "drunk on the villainous whiskey of the frontier towns," he closes with this comparison, which needs no comment: "They are much better fellows and pleasanter companions than small farmers or agricultural laborers; nor are the mechanics and workmen of a great city to be mentioned in the same breath."
The pretended friendship for the great body of workingmen who are not to be compared to drunken cowboys has served its demagogical purpose, but the final chapter is not yet written. There will be an awakening, and every official act of Theodore Roosevelt will be subjected to its searching scrutiny. He has always been on the side of capital wholly, while pretending the impossible feat of serving both capital and labor with equal fidelity, and only the deplorable ignorance of his dupes has applauded him in that hypocritical role.
The anthracite miners, or their children at least, will some day know that it was President Theodore Roosevelt who handed them over to the coal trust with a gold brick for a souvenir, labeled "Arbitration."
Theodore Roosevelt is an aristocrat and an autocrat. His affected democracy is spurious and easily detected. He belongs to the "upper crust" and at the very best he can conceive of the working class only as contented wage-slaves. And no one knows better than he how easily these slaves are duped and how madly they will cheer and follow a cheap and showy "hero."
The simple fact is that Theodore Roosevelt was made president by the industrial captains and the robbers in general of the working class. They picked him for a winner and he has not failed them. Elected by the trusts and surrounded by trust attorneys as cabinet advisers, Roosevelt is essentially the monarch of a trust administration.
If this be denied, Roosevelt is challenged to answer if it was not the railroad trust that furnished him gratuitously with the special trains that bore him in royal splendor over all the railways of the nation. He is challenged to publish the list of contributors to his political sewer funds, amounting to millions of dollars, and freely used to buy the votes that made him president.
Did, or did not, the men known as trust magnates put up this boodle? Boodle drawn from the veins of labor?
Will Mr. Roosevelt deny it?
Did he not know at the time that his man Cortelyou was holding up the trusts for all they would "cough up" for his election?
Will he dare plead ignorance to intelligent persons as to who put up the money that debauched the voters of the nation?
It is true that a spasm of virtuous indignation seized him when he found that the trusts had slipped the lucre into his slush funds when he was not looking, but this was only after he saw the people looking behind the curtain. Then he bounded to the foot-lights and denounced Alton B. Parker as a liar for charging that the trusts were furnishing the boodle to make him president, but no man not feeble-minded was deceived as to who was the liar.
Read the Washington press dispatch in the Kansas City Journal of April 4th: "It was declared in banking circles that light could be shed on the question of campaign contributions in 1904 if the books of the national Republican committee were thrown open."
The books will not be thrown open. Roosevelt will not allow it; he knows they contain the damning evidence of his guilt.
The case is clearly stated in the platform of the Democratic state convention of Missouri, adopted in 1906, which reads as follows:
"We believe Theodore Roosevelt insincere. Pretending to inveigh against the crimes of trusts and corporations, he openly defended Paul Morton, when, as manager of the Santa Fe railroad, he was compelled to confess enormous rebates to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. It was Roosevelt who advanced the pernicious doctrine that you must punish the corporation, not its officials who cause it to commit crime. It was Roosevelt who denounced large campaign contributions, while his secretary of commerce and labor was fleecing the corporations out of one of the biggest slush funds ever known in the history of American politics."
President Roosevelt may shout "liar" until he turns as black in the face as are the cracksmen at heart who burglarized the safes of the New York insurance companies to land him in the White House, while he was toying with the names of "Jimmy" Hyde and Chauncey Depew as pawns in the corrupt game, but the "damned spot" will not out until the whole truth is known and the whole crime expiated.
The publication of the Roosevelt-Harriman correspondence places the president in his true colors before the American people. It explains his hot haste in condemning Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone to the gallows and sending Taft to Idaho to assure the smelter trust and warn the protesting people that the kidnaping of the workingmen was sanctioned by the White House and would have the support of the national administration.
A more shameful perversion of public power never blackened the pages of history.
This national scandal shows up the president's two-faced character so clearly and convincingly that it leaves not so much as a pin-hole for escape. It is a damning indictment of not only the president, but the whole brood of plutocrats, promoters and grafting politicians who have been looting this nation for years.
There is one among these illuminating epistles which I want to burn in the minds of the working class dupes who have been bowing in the dust before this blustering bully of the White House:
"Personal.
"October 1, 1904.—My Dear Mr. Harriman: A suggestion has come to me in a round-about way that you do not think it wise to come to see me in these closing weeks of the campaign, but that you are reluctant to refuse, inasmuch as I have asked you. Now, my dear sir, you and I are practical men, and you are on the ground and know the conditions better than I do.
"If you think there is any danger of your visit to me causing trouble, or if you think there is nothing special I should be informed about, or any matter in which I could give aid, why, of course, give up the visit for the time being, and then, a few weeks hence, before I write my message, I shall get you to come down to discuss certain government matters not connected with the campaign. With great regards, sincerely yours,
(Signed) "THEODORE ROOSEVELT."
Does not this brand the president with the duplicity of a Tweed and the cunning of a Quay?
Would a president who is honest with the people clandestinely consort with the villain he characterizes as a liar and all that is vicious?
The disclosures made in the secret correspondence strip the president of the last shred of deception with which to cloak his perfidy. The mask is lifted and the exposure is complete. It is in the president's own handwriting in a letter to Harriman that would never have seen the light had not circumstances forced it upon the attention of a betrayed people. It is adroitly phrased, but its meaning is not in doubt. He knew Harriman then as he knows him now; wanted his boodle and insinuatingly coaxed him to sneak to the White House when no one was looking, and only after he was discovered did he denounce Harriman as a liar and fall into his usual fit of moral epilepsy.
From now on there will be a sharp decline in the stock of Theodore Roosevelt. The capitalist papers may continue to boom him as the only savior and his corps of press agents at the White House may continue to grind out three-column stories about the awful conspiracy of his "trusty" friends to ruin him, but his bubble is pricked and the cheap glory in which he reveled is departing forever.
The people have been sadly deceived for a time, but the march of events is opening their eyes.
Only the very ignorant and foolish believe that a president who has surrounded himself with Wall Street darlings as cabinet ministers has any serious designs on the trusts.
The Ryan, Root and Roosevelt combination is ideal. It speaks for itself, and with such shining lights as Taft, Cortelyou, Knox and Paul Morton surrounding it, all lingering doubt is removed, and the fools' paradise is in the full blaze of its glory.
Space will not permit a review of the personnel of the president's official family, at least two of whom, had the law been enforced, would now be in penitentiary.
The story of President Roosevelt and Paul Morton, if truthfully told, would make a luminous chapter in railroad rascality and political jobbery. It was to this notorious strike-breaker and self-confessed criminal that Roosevelt issued a bill of moral rectitude long as Pope's essay that landed him into the eighty-thousand-dollars-a-year insurance graft he now holds down.
There is in this "promotion" the very climax of the irony of boodle.
Paul Morton, who began as a strike-breaker on the C. B. & Q., and reared a monument to theft at Hutchinson, Kan., and left his trail of crime all the way from the Mississippi to the Pacific, is fit, indeed, to be the cabinet associate and confidential chum of a president who puts him at the head of the company whose funds were stolen to buy his election.
William H. Taft is another of the elect, and it is easy to understand why Roosevelt has decided to make this illustrious son his successor as president of the United States and is now grooming him with the patronage of the national administration. Taft is a man after Roosevelt's own heart. Among his early acts as a judge he fined the bricklayers of Cincinnati two thousand dollars for going on a strike; he was next whirled to Toledo by special train and ordered by the Toledo, Ann Arbor and North Michigan railroad to issue an injunction binding and gagging its striking engineers and firemen and locking their leader up in jail and he complied with alacrity. From that time on it has been smooth sailing for the accommodating judge and there is not a bloated plutocrat in the land who would not hail with joy the election of William Taft as president; he would be almost as acceptable to these vultures as Roosevelt himself.
The manner in which President Roosevelt manipulates the supreme court by bestowing lucrative offices upon the sons and other relatives and friends of its dignitaries can only be hinted at here, but will receive due attention later on. The case of ex-Senator Burton is an instance in point. Other senators had taken thousands in similar cases to Burton's paltry few hundred dollars, but Burton was marked by Roosevelt for refusing to crook the knee to the sugar trust and pursued with merciless ferocity until he was lodged behind prison bars.
The president did not have a call to "go after" his old friends, Chauncey Depew and Thomas Platt, with the same virtuous passion to see crime punished and criminals jailed.
When Roosevelt was making his continental campaign in the palatial special trains furnished free by the railroad trust he stopped at Abilene, Kan., the home of the then Senator Burton, and opened his speech there in these words: "I am glad to be at the home of the senior senator from Kansas and am delighted to meet and greet his neighbors and friends. I want to say that no man in this world has done more, and I had almost said, as much, to place me where I am now, than your distinguished senator."
Fine way the president had of showing his gratitude. Burton should have known better and taken warning. Whenever Roosevelt gets that near to a man something is going to happen. "My dear" is then due to be metamorphosed with startling suddenness into an "atrocious liar."
Roosevelt can brook no rivalry. He is the self-appointed central luminary in the solar system. All others must be contented with being fire-flies. He must violate all traditions and smash all precedents. He is spectacular beyond the wildest dreams. He must have the center of the stage and hold the undivided attention of the audience. Any stunt will do when the interest lags. A familiar turn with a prize-fighter or a "gun-man" is always good for an encore. Nothing is overlooked. A dash to Panama with a fleet of battle-ships and a battery of cameras and a squad of artists and reporters is good for thousands of columns about the marvelous virility and fertility of the greatest president since Washington. He is followed with minute and eager details as he darts from cellar to roof, inspects every shingle, wears a solemn expression, throws a shovelful of coal into the furnace, snatches a bite from a workingman's pail, shakes hands with a startled section man and is off like a flash to look after some other section of the planet that it may not drop out of its shining orbit.
Mighty savior of the human race!
Such is Theodore Roosevelt, the president who condemns workingmen as murderers when they are objectionable to the trusts that control his administration.
Archbishop Ireland, the plutocratic prelate, will cheerfully certify to Roosevelt as the anointed of the Lord. And this will make another interesting chapter for a later review; a chapter that will deal with Ireland as the political as well as spiritual adviser of "Jim" Hill and the Great Northern, and of court decisions awarding him thousands of acres of land and making of the alleged follower of the Tramp of Galilee a multi-millionaire; a chapter that will tell of a high priest sounding the political keynote to his benighted followers in exchange for a promised voucher for a red hat to be worn in a land of freedom in which the state and church are absolutely divorced.
Only a few of the facts about Roosevelt and his regime have been here stated, but enough to satisfy all honest men that Theodore Roosevelt is the Friend of the Enemies and the Enemy of the Friends of this Republic.
First of all, allow me to quote with approval the following paragraph from "An Introduction to Sociology" by Arthur Morrow Lewis: " * * * the greatest single achievement of the science of sociology is the concept of society, not as a collection of institutions, and sociology as an explanatory catalog or inventory—after the fashion of Spencer, but as a process of development, and the science of sociology as the analysis and explanation of the process."
Also the following from an essay on Revolution by George D. Herron: "Every revolution or true reform, every new and commanding faith, is in the direction of man's becoming his own evolver and creator. Every uplifting light or law perforces, in the place of the evolution that is blind and chanceful, an evolution that is chosen and humanly directed."
There is still room for reform and betterment in the present social system, but this is of minor consequence compared to the world's crying need for industrial and social reorganization.
The next great change in history will be, must be, the socialization of the means of our common life.
Privately owned industry and production for individual profit are no longer compatible with social progress and have ceased to work out to humane and civilized ends.
With all its marvelous progress through invention and discovery and all its monumental achievements in the arts and sciences, this poor world of ours has not yet learned how to feed itself. That is the problem of problems now confronting us more and more insistently and until that is solved the world is halted and it will either resume its march toward industrial and social democracy or be shaken to its foundations and into possible chaos by violent explosion.
There is no longer the shadow of an excuse for a hungry being. All the laws, all the materials and all the forces are at hand and easily available for the production of all things needed to provide food, raiment and shelter for every man, woman and child, thus putting an end to the poverty and misery, widespread and appalling, which now shock and sicken humanity and impeach our vaunted civilization. But these tools and materials and forces must be released from private ownership and control, socialized, democratized, and set in operation for the common good of all instead of the private profit of the few.
It is well stated, "that civilization is at present rudimentary, and that it is to develop indefinitely."
Now, in view of the fact that the crops this year (1914) are the most abundant ever produced, that there is no market for the almost sixteen million bales of cotton lying in the warehouses, while at the same time there are millions of unemployed in the land who are without food and without clothing and who, with their wives and children, are doomed to indescribable suffering; in view of this solemn and indisputable fact it would seem that there could be but one opinion among students and thinkers as to the one great, vital and essential thing to do for the relief of our common humanity and for the promotion of the world's progress and civilization, and that that one thing is the one to be emphasized with all the power at our command.
A privately owned world can never be a free world and a society based upon warring classes cannot stand.
Such a world is a world of strife and hate and such a society can exist only by means of militarism and physical force.
The education of the people, not the few alone, but the entire mass in the principles of industrial democracy and along the lines of social development is the task of the people to be emphasized and that task—let it be impressed upon them—can be performed only by themselves.
The cultured few can never educate the uncultured many. All history attests the fact that all the few have ever done for the many is to keep them in ignorance and servitude and live out of their labor.
To stir the masses, to appeal to their higher, better selves, to set them thinking for themselves, and to hold ever before them the ideal of mutual kindness and good will, based upon mutual interests, is to render real service to the cause of humanity.
To quote Herron once more:
"Socialism is a deliberate proposal to lay the will of man upon the unfolding processes and ends of nature and history. It invokes the faith that shall be equal to the acceptance of its proposal—of its supreme challenge to the universe."