Sidebilder
PDF
ePub

Twenty-four years have passed since the blessed Sherman anti-trust law was passed and cackling reformers said we had come to the end of our trust troubles. To-day there are easily ten times as many trusts in the United States as when the law was passed and they are a hundred times more powerful and arrogant. The law so far as these powerful combinations of capital are concerned, has been merely a joke,

or worse.

Three years

Whenever a trust has been prosecuted under this law, even when a trust has been ordered by the Supreme Court of the United States to be "dissolved" it has merely advanced to greater profits and greater power. after the Standard Oil trust had been "dissolved " under the Sherman act, the value of its securities had exactly doubled and its prosperity was the greatest in its history. The American Tobacco Company seems to have received similar advantages from its "dissolution" by the same august body. Proceedings have been pending for years against the United States Steel Corporation and other great trusts, but even when these have been investigated and specifically denounced by committees of Congress the cases against them have never gotten anywhere. There is a punishment of

penal servitude provided by this law, but not a trust magnate has ever gone to prison under it. In spite of the fact that the supplies of every great necessity of life in this country are now controlled by a trust.

Very different, it will be recalled, has been the experiences of labor unions and labor leaders under the same law. It was never designed by the men that drew it, to be applied to labor unions. It has been enforced against them vigorously on more than one occasion. It was designed against combinations of capital and against such combinations it has been a dead letter.

Men are now under sentence of imprisonment in New Jersey for agitating against one of these trusts at a time of a strike; the gentlemen that conduct the trust have never at any time been in danger of jail for violating the anti-trust law.

To show now what has been the situation of the working class in all these reforming activities I cite a piece of history that ought to be familiar to all citizens of the United States and I still is but little known.

In 1907 the Supreme Court handed down its famous decision in the Danbury Hatters case, the essence of which was that a labor union

could be held financially liable for damages to business resulting from a strike.

Ever since the unions have been trying to have the Sherman law amended so that it will no longer be possible for courts to read into it a construction that was never intended by the framers of the act; in other words to amend the law so as to exclude in so many words all labor unions and farmers' associations.

For years Congress contemptuously refused to so much as listen to the plea of the unions for this elemental justice. I remember that in 1908 the House Committee on Labor refused to give Mr. Gompers so much as one minute in which to state his case. At last the unions succeeded in compelling the Democratic party to pledge itself in its national platform to make the desired change in the law. When the Democrats obtained control of the government the unions asked for the fulfillment of that pledge. President Wilson prepared a new anti-trust law, being another experiment in feeble reform, and the unions desired to have an amendment added that would save labor from persecution under the Sherman law. They drew up one that would have had such a result. The Democratic leaders cried out against it as too drastic and revolutionary; the President, also, was unalter

ably opposed to it. A contest was precipitated, ending in a long conference and a compromise. The result was that an amendment was adopted pretending to exclude the unions, but in reality doing no such thing, while under cover an adroit provision was slipped over to make injunctions in labor cases easier and more oppressive than ever.

This has been the universal history of labor in all these legislative experiments. While the working class has all these years been the overwhelming majority of the population, and while every bad condition that was complained of bore far more heavily upon the workers than upon any other class, the workers have never been considered for a moment until their complaints and grievances became in the single instance of the Sherman law too threatening to be longer ignored.

Whereupon they were recognized to the extent of being outrageously fooled, defrauded and humbugged.

It is evident, therefore, that there is no more hope of relief in regulation than there was found to be in tariff tinkering. All of these things are mere devices to distract the working class from its wrongs and their real remedy.

There has been no relief to the worker and

there will be none so long as he remains unrepresented in the affairs of his nation.

Two-thirds of the voters of the United States belong to the working class; nine-tenths of the members of Congress belong exclusively to the parasite class. That is where the trouble comes in. If the working class does not wish to be represented it need not be; but in that position it stands alone among all the working classes of the world. Everywhere else the truth is being recognized that it is utterly impossible for the workers to have justice from a government conducted by and for the exploiters. Consequently, elsewhere the working class is moving on toward what belongs to it. We need not join that procession unless we wish; but if we resolutely refuse to use the means we have in our hands to secure justice we ought not to complain if the government and the courts seem organized against us and meantime the cost of living continues to increase but there is no corresponding increase in wages and salaries.

« ForrigeFortsett »