Give Me Liberty

XI

Only once have any large number of Americans wanted to distribute wealth, and they did not intend to raise the standard of living. The standard of living had already risen too high and crashed too deplorably. They wanted to return to the prosperity of the 80’s.

This happened forty years ago. I remember it well. Hard times had ended forever an age of enormous expansion in finance, invention and wealth. Within the memory of my parents, who were not old, living conditions had been utterly transformed.

The kerosene lamp had replaced candles and the work of candlemaking; the spinning wheel was gone, the loom was used now only for making rag carpets. Machine-made cloth, machine-made shoes, factory-made brooms had thrown men out of work, but with boughten soap and baking powder they had revolutionized housekeeping. Wire nails, wire fence, riding plows, mowing machines and binders, eight-horse threshers, had made farming easy—easier, in fact, than it has ever been yet in any other country.

Railroads ran from coast to coast, postal service was fast and cheap, base-burners warmed the parlors, the telegraph had gone almost everywhere. In those piping days, business boomed. On Fifth Avenue rose the gas-lit palaces of—almost incredible but true—of millionaires. In the Middle West women wore silks on Sundays; men smoked good cigars and drove fast teams. Then suddenly, crash! the Panic.

Some blamed the tariff, more blamed the railroads. (In 1860, a majority at the polls had demanded subsidies for railroads. It would have been better for the railroads if they had had no government help; in 1890 and thereafter they were bitterly hated because they were subsidized. The hatred lasted until those enemies of the people were curbed, regulated and controlled by the Interstate Commerce Commission.)

Everyone was in debt, of course. There had been no time since the founding of this republic when Americans were not deeply in debt. Mortgages were foreclosed, banks failed, factories shut down, farm prices slumped. Charitable ladies opened soup kitchens in the cities. Farmers, after creditors took the cow, could live on potatoes and turnips until the mortgage took the farm.

A population shaken from the soil moved along the roads in covered wagons drawn by hungry horses. Organized bands of unemployed swarmed from the cities, shouting, “We have the bone and sinew! We demand our rights as working men!” City police and the militia had driven them from the closed factories and the city streets. They terrorized small towns.

From the Pacific to the Mississippi they captured trains, crowded the cars, and cheered unemployed train crews taking them full-speed eastward. Traffic was demoralized. From the Mississippi eastward, dispatchers cleared all trains off their divisions. From the Mississippi, Coxie’s army of the unemployed marched on foot to Washington. Federal troops guarded government buildings.

It is all in the files of old newspapers, for those who do not remember so long ago. I was riding in a covered wagon and listening by the campfires, and I remember.

Meanwhile most families went on living undramatically, as most families always do everywhere, through depression, inflation, revolution and war. Very few persons starved to death. Someone in America will always divide food with the desperately hungry. It may be that American kindness had grown from each American’s sense of insecurity.

But starvation, or even the general malnutrition during those years which semi-starved so many children, is not the worst of poverty among an individualistic people. In this country poverty is not the chronic state of certain classes, to be borne as animals bear cold, so that it is a physical thing. Normal Americans feel an individual responsibility, a necessity to think, act, achieve; poverty from which we can find no escape is an agony of mind and spirit. We blame ourselves, we feel our self-respect mortally wounded, we suffer.

After three years of such suffering, most Americans knew what they wanted. They wanted to destroy The Trusts.

The Trusts were the grandparents of our present huge corporations. We saw them as combinations in restraint of trade. Trade, business, had been good in the 80’s; now it was stagnant, it had stopped; obviously something was stopping it, and all our bright, popular economists saw that our enemy was The Trusts. Statistics proved this, and so did our experience, for everyone had been prosperous while The Trusts were forming, and now that The Trusts were solidly there, everyone was poor.

Everyone, that is, was poor, except the few men who owned The Trusts. A few men did actually own and control them, for they were new and the melting-away of ownership had hardly begun. These few men actually owned or appeared to own, as much as a million dollars apiece. In a word, they had all the money in the country.

There was no more free land. Farmers could not make money enough to pay taxes. There were no jobs; the factories were closed. And less than 10 per cent of the population owned more than 90 per cent of the wealth. Rich women were pampering pug dogs, while children were starving. Something must be done.

“Bust the Trusts!” we shouted. Our champion against them was the silver-tongued boy-orator from the Platte, William Jennings Bryan.

William Jennings Bryan fearlessly came out of the West to fight for The Common Man. He faced the intrenched cohorts of selfishness whose only thought was their bloated money-bags, and defied them in the name of suffering Humanity.

“You shall not press down upon the brow of Labor this crown of thorns!” he thundered. “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”

He was an economist. He proposed to curb and restrain The Trusts by the free coinage of silver, at a ratio to gold of 16-to-1. The arguments were involved and difficult to follow, but Bryan’s heart was in the right place and, with all sincerity, it was bleeding for the suffering people and the dangerous state of our country.

That was the fiercest political battle in the history of this republic. The masses of the people were furiously determined to destroy The Trusts, and it was quite true that currency inflation would have ruined them; also, of course, it would have destroyed utterly the value of all money, no matter whose.

Rich men had actual power then and naturally they defended their money. They fought for it openly and fiercely, and by the narrowest margin they saved it. They defeated Bryan. The multitudes of Americans had made their one effort to distribute wealth, and had failed.

Yet wealth has so increasingly been created and distributed that today few Americans would think of refusing help from public funds to any family as destitute of proper food, clothing, shelter, medical care and financial safety as the majority of American families were in 1896.