A Bit of Honest History of America --- Episode 5

    IMMIGRANTS AND REBELLION AGAINST THE RICH 

   How the immigration of different ethnic groups contributed to the fragmentation of the working class, how conflicts developed among groups facing the same difficult conditions, is shown in an article in a Bohemian newspaper Svornost, of February 27, 1880. A petition of 258 parents and guardians at the Throop School in New York, signed by over half the taxpayers of the school district, said "the petitioners have just as much right to request the teaching of Bohemian as have the German citizens to have German taught in the public schools. . . In opposition to this, Mr. Vocke claims that there is a great deal of difference between Germans and Bohemians, or in other words, they are superior." 
   The Irish, still recalling the hatred against them when they arrived, began to get jobs with the new political machines that wanted their vote. Those who became policemen encountered the new Jewish immigrants. On July 30, 1902, New York's Jewish community held a mass funeral for an important rabbi, and a riot took place, led by Irish who resented Jews coming into their neighborhood. The police force was dominantly Irish, and the official investigation of the riot indicated the police helped the rioters : ". . . it appears that charges of unprovoked and most brutal clubbing have been made against policemen, with the result that they were reprimanded or fined a day's pay  and were yet retained upon the force." 
   There was desperate economic competition among the newcomers. By 1880, Chinese immigrants, brought in by the railroads to do the backbreaking labor at pitiful wages, numbered 75,000 in California, almost one-tenth of the population. They became the objects of continuous violence. The novelist Bret Harte wrote an obituary for a Chinese man named Wan Lee : 

"Dead, my revered friends, dead. Stoned to death in the streets of San Francisco, in the year of grace 1869 by a mob of halfgrown boys and Christian school children."

In Rock Springs, Wyoming, in the summer of 1885, whites attacked five hundred Chinese miners, massacring twenty-eight of them in cold blood. 
   The new immigrants became laborers, housepainters, stonecutters, ditchdiggers. They were often imported en masse by contractors. One Italian man, told he was going to Connecticut to work on the railroad, was taken instead to sulfate mines in the South, where he and his fellows were watched over by armed guards in their barracks and in the mines, given only enough money to pay for their railroad fare and tools, and very little to eat. He and others decided to escape. They were captured at gunpoint, ordered to work or die ; they still refused and were brought before a judge, put in manacles, and, five months after their arrival, finally dismissed. "My comrades took the train for New York. I had only one dollar, and with this, not knowing either the country or the language, I had to walk to New York. After forty-two days I arrived in the city utterly exhausted." 

   Their conditions led sometimes to rebellion. A contemporary observer told how "some Italians who worked in a locality near Deal Lake, New Jersey, failing to receive their wages, captured the contractor and shut him up in the shanty, where he remained a prisoner until the county sheriff came with a posse to his rescue."

   A traffic in immigrant child laborers developed, either by contract with desperate parents in the home country or by kidnapping. The children were then supervised by "padrones" in a form of slavery, sometimes sent out as beggar musicians. Droves of them roamed the streets of New York and Philadelphia. 

   As the immigrants became naturalized citizens, they were brought into the American two-party system, invited to be loyal to oe party or the other, their political energy thus siphoned into elections. An article in L'Italia, in November 1894, called for Italians to support the Republican party : 

     When American citizens of foreign birth refuse to ally themselves with the Republican Party, they make war upon their own welfare. The Republican Party stands for all that the people fight for in the Old World. It is the champion of freedom, progress, order, and the law. It is the steadfast foe of monarchial class rule. 

   There were 5 1/2 million immigrants in the 1880s, 4 million in the 1880s, creating a labor surplus that kept wages down. The immigrants were more controllable, more helpless than native workers ; they were culturally displaced, at odds with one another, therefore useful as strikebreakers. Often their children worked, intensifying the problem of an oversized labor force and joblessness ; in 1880 there were 1,118,000 children under sixteen [ one out of six] at work in the United States.  With everyone working long hours, families often became strangers to one another. 

   Women immigrants became servants, prostitutes, housewives, factory workers, and sometimes rebels. Leonora Barry was born in Ireland and brought to the United States. She got married, and when her husband died she went to work in a hosiery mill in upstate New York to support three young children, earning 65 cents her first week. She joined the Knights of Labor, which had fifty thousand women members in 192 women's assemblies by 1886. She became "master workman" of her assembly of 927 women, and was appointed to work for the Knights as a general investigator, to "go forth and educate her sister workingwomen and the public generally as to their needs and necessities." She described the biggest problem of women workers : "Through long years of endurance they have acquired, as a sort of second nature, the habit of submission and acceptance without question of any terms offered them, with the pessimistic view of life in which they see no hope." Her report for the year 1888 showed : 537 requests to help women organize, 100 cities and towns visited, 1,900 leaflets distributed. 

                 MUCH MORE TO COME. STAY TUNED. 

   
   

   

A Bit of Honest History of America --- Episode 4

      Controlling the Working People With False Information 

   Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is. And so, the schools, the churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck. 
   In those years after the Civil War a man named Russell Conwell, a graduate of Yale Law School, a minister, and author of best-selling books, gave the same lecture, "Acres of Diamonds," more than five thousand times to audiences across the country, reaching several million people in all. His message was that anyone could get rich if he tried hard enough, if people looked closely enough, were "acres of diamonds." A sampling : 

     I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich . . . The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community. Let me say here clearly . . . ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. That is why they carry on great enterprises and find plenty of people to work with them. It is because they are honest men. 
   . . . I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins . . . is to do wrong . . . let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings . . . 

    Conwell was a founder of Temple University. Rockefeller was a donor to colleges all over the country and helped found the University of Chicago. Huntington, of the Central Pacific, gave money to two Negro colleges, Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute. Carnegie gave money to colleges and libraries. Johns Hopkins was founded by a millionaire merchant, and millionaires Cornelius Vanderbilt, Ezra Cornell, James Duke, and Leland Stanford created universities in their own names. 
   The rich, giving part of their enormous earnings in this way, became known as philanthropists. These educational institutions did not encourage dissent ; they trained the middlemen in the American system --- the teachers, doctors, lawyers, administrators, engineers, technicians, politicians----those who would be paid to keep the system going, to be loyal buffers against trouble.
   In the meantime, the spread of public school education enabled the learning of reading, writing, and arithmetic for a whole generation of workers skilled and semiskilled, who would be the literate labor force of the new industrial age. It was important that these people learn obedience to authority.  A journalist observer of the schools in the 1890s wrote :"The unkindly spirit of the teacher is strikingly apparent ; the pupils, being completely subjugated to her will, are silent and motionless, the spiritual atmosphere of the classroom is damp and chilly."
   Back in 1859, the desire of mill owners in the town of Lowell that their workers be educated was explained to the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education : 

     The owners of factories are more concerned than other classes and interests in the intelligence of their laborers. When the latter are well-educated and the former are disposed to deal justly, controversies and strikes can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factious considerations.  

     Joel Spring, in his book Education and the Rise of the Corporate State, says : "The development of a factory-like system in the nineteenth-century schoolroom was not accidental." 

   This continued into the twentieth century, when William Bagley's Classroom Management became a standard teacher training text, reprinted thirty times. Bagley said :"One who studies the educational theory aright can see in the mechanical routine of the classroom the educative forces that are slowly transforming the child from a little savage into a creature of law and order, fitfor the life of civilized society."
   It was in the middle and late nineteenth century that high schools developed as aids to the industrial system, that history was widely required in the curriculum to foster patriotism. Loyalty oaths, teacher certification, and the requirement of citizenship were introduced to control both the educational and the political quality of teachers. Also, in the latter part ofthe century, school officials --- not teachers --- were given control over textbooks. Laws passed by the states barred certain kinds of textbooks. Idaho and Montana, for instance, forbade textbooks propagating "political" doctrines, and the Dakota territory ruled that school libraries could not have "partisan political pamphlets or books."
   Against this gigantic organization of knowledge and education for orthodoxy and obedience, there arose a literature of dissent and protest, which had to make its way from reader to reader against great obstacles. Henry George, a self-educated workingman from a poor Philadelphia family, who became a newspaperman and an economist, wrote a book that was published in 1879 and sold millions of copies, not only in the United States , but all over the world. His book Progress and Poverty argued that the basis of wealth was land, that this was becoming monopolized, and that a single tax on land, abolishing all others, would bring enough revenue to solve the problems of poverty and equalize wealth in the nation. Readers may not have been persuaded of his solutions, but they could see in their own lives the accuracy of his observations : 


 It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised ; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not share . . . This association of poverty with the progress is the great enigma of our times. . . There is a vague but general feeling of disappointment ; an increased bitterness among the working classes ; a widespread feeling of unrest and brooding revolution . . . The civilized world is trembling on the verge of a great movement. Either it must be a leap upward, which will open the way to advances yet undreamed of, or it must be a plunge downward which will carry us back toward barbarism . . . 

   A different kind of challenge to the economic and social system was given by Edward Bellamy, a lawyer and writer from western Massachusetts, who wrote, in simple, intriguing language, a novel called Looking Backward, in which the author falls asleep and wakes up in the year 2000, to find a socialist society in which people work and live cooperatively. Looking Backward, which described socialism vividly, lovingly, sold a million copies in a few years , and over a hundred groups were organized around the country to make the dream come true. 
   It seemed that despite the strenuous efforts of government, business, the church, the schools, to control their thinking, millions of Americans were ready to consider harsh criticism of the existing system, to contemplate other possible ways of living. They were helped in this by the great movements of workers and farmers that swept the country in the 1880s and 1890s. These movements went beyond the scattered strikes and tenants' struggles of the period of 1830--1877. They were nationwide movements,  more threatening than before to the ruling elite, more dangerously suggestive. It was a time when revolutionary organizations existed in major American cities, and revolutionary talk was in the air. 
   In the 1880sand 1890s, immigrants wrer pouring in from Europe at a faster rate than before. They all went through the harrowing ocean voyage of the poor. Now there were not so many Irish and German immigrants as Italians, Russians, Jews, Greeks ----people from Southern and Eastern Europe, even more alien to native-born Anglo-Saxons than the earlier newcomers. 

              TO BE CONTINUED. STAY TUNED. 

   

A Bit of Honest History Of America --- Episode 3

    Classical Legal Thought in 19th & Early 20th Centuries 

   The Supreme Court of the United States [SCOTUS] , despite its look of somber, black-robed fairness, was doing its bit for the ruling elite. How could it be independent, with its members chosen by the President and ratified by the Senate ? How could it e neutral between rich and poor when its members were often former wealthy lawyers, and almost always came from the upper class ? Early in the nineteenth century the Court laid the legal basis for a nationally regulated economy by establishing federal control over interstate commerce, and the legal basis for corporate capitalism by making the contract sacred.
   In 1895 the Court interpreted the Sherman Act so as to make it harmless. It said a monopoly of sugar refining was a monopoly in manufacturing, not commerce, and so could not be regulated by Congress though the Sherman Act. [ U.S. v. E. C. Knight Co] . The Court also said the Sherman Act could be used against interstate strikes [the railway strike of 1894] because they were in restrain of trade. It also declared unconstitutional a small attempt by Congress to tax high incomes at a higher rate. [Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Company]. In later years it would refuse to break up the Standard Oil and American Tobacco monopolies, saying the Sherman Act barred only "unreasonable" combinations in restraint of trade. 
   A New York banker toasted the SCOTUS in 1895 : "I give you, gentlemen, the Supreme Court of the United States ---guardian of the dollar, defender of private property, enemy of spoliation, sheet anchor of the Republic." 
   Very soon after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, the SCOTUS began to demolish it as a protection for blacks, and to develop it as a protection for corporations. However, in 1877, a SCOTUS decision [ Munn v. Illinois] approved state laws regulating the prices charged to farmers for the use of grain elevators. The grain elevator company argued it was a person being deprived of property, thus violating the Fourteenth Amendment's declaration "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." SCOTUS disagreed, saying that grain elevators were not simply private property but were invested with a "public interest" and so could be regulated. 
   One year after that decision, the American Bar Association, organized by lawyers accustomed to serving the wealthy, began a national campaign of education to reverse the Court decision. Its presidents said, at different times : "If trusts are a defensive weapon of property interests against the communistic trend, they are desirable." And : "Monopoly is often a necessity and an advantage." 
   
   By 1886, they succeeded. State legislatures, under the pressure of aroused farmers, had passed laws to regulate the rates charged farmers by the railroads. SCOTUS that year [ Wabash v. Illinois] said states could not do this, that this was an intrusion on federal power. That year alone, SCOTUS did away with 230 state laws that had been passed to regulate corporations. 
    By this time, SCOTUS had accepted the argument that corporations were "persons" and their money was property protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Supposedly , the Amendment had been passed to protect Negro rights, but of the Fourteenth Amendment cases brought before SCOTUS between 1890 and 1910, NINETEEN dealt with the Negro, 288 dealt with corporations. 
   The justices of the SCOTUS were not simply interpreters of the Constitution. They were men of certain backgrounds, of certain interests. One of them [ Justice Samuel Miller] had said in 1875 :"It is vain to contend with Judges who have been at the bar the advocates for forty years of railroad companies, and all forms of associated capital . . ." In 1893, SCOTUS Justice David J. Brewer, addressing the New York State Bar Association, said : 

     It is the unvarying law that the wealth of the community will be in the hands of the few . . . The great majority of men are unwilling to endure that long self-denial and saving which makes accumulations possible . . . and hence it always has been, and until human nature is remodeled always will be true, that the wealth of a nation is in the hands of a few, while the many subsist upon the proceeds of their daily toil. 

   This was not just a whim of the 1880s and 1890s---it went back to the Founding Brothers, who had learned their law in the era of Blackstone's Commentaries, which said : "So great is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it ; no, not even for the common good of the whole community." 

        MUCH MORE TO COME.