* F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about this period: "It was borrowed time ... the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls." Op. cit
What LaGuardia asked for was comprehensive legislation establishing national regulation of transportation, marketing, and money. "You have protected the dollar and disregarded the producers. You have protected property and forgotten the human being, with the result that we have legalized a cruel system of exploitation. Now we are approaching the time when a real change is necessary."
In early 1926, LaGuardia told the House about the rise in meat prices in New York City, and of his request for aid from the Department of Agriculture. "This is the help I got," he said, holding up a pamphlet on the economical use of meat. The Department had also sent him a pamphlet on "Lamb and Mutton and Their Uses in the Diet," despite the fact, he said, that 90 percent of the people in New York could not afford lamb chops.
"Why, I have right here with me..." LaGuardia said, and pulled out of his vest pocket a rather scrawny lamb chop. This had cost thirty cents in New York, he said. Then he reached into another pocket and pulled out a steak, saying: "There is $1.75 worth of steak." Then out of another pocket, a roast, commenting: "Now here is a roast—three dollars worth of roast. What working man's family can afford to pay three dollars for a roast that size?"
The cattle grazer, he noted, was getting two and one half to five cents a pound, while the consumer paid seventy-five to eighty cents a pound. This meant, he concluded, that the packinghouse monopolies were making unjustifiably large profits and could afford to cut prices substantially.
LaGuardia appeared on a dozen different sectors of the labor front throughout the Twenties, wherever he thought his voice could have some effect. He walked the picket line and then spoke at a Madison Square Garden meeting supporting the 1926 garment strike in New York, and several months later aided striking paper-box makers. He denounced the use of "kidnapped" Chinese strikebreakers to replace striking American sailors and attacked the Pullman Company for preventing the organization of twelve thousand Pullman porters. He fought for pay raises for government workers and even made the sports pages by denouncing "baseball slavery" and calling for the unionization of baseball players.
Testifying before the House Civil Service Committee, LaGuardia declared that women earning $1,200 a year in government service could not attend church on Sunday because they had to stay home to do their own washing. "They talk of Andrew Mellon being a great financier," he said, "Gentlemen, it is easy to play with hundreds of millions of dollars, but a woman who can keep her family clean and decent on $1,200 a year is a real financier."
When anthracite miners in eastern Pennsylvania went on strike in August 1925, LaGuardia called for government ownership of the mines:
There seems to be one solution only. This country is blessed with a rich supply of coal. It is not the invention of any one man, it is God's gift to the people of America. It requires human labor to dig the coal, bring it back from the bowels of the earth so it may be used for the benefit of mankind. The American people all have an interest in this coal. The government should...take such actions as eventually will put the government in possession of the gift of God that surely was intended to be used for the benefit of all American people.
Two years later, when another strike, this time against a series of wage cuts, tied up the Pennsylvania coal fields, LaGuardia visited the strike area. He interviewed strikers, their wives, and children, and his anger reached the boiling point. Once again he saw the labor injunction in action when a group of men and women were arrested by state police for mass picketing in violation of a federal court injunction. He watched children hide under their beds in miners' shacks because the day before strikebreakers had poured volley after volley of bullets through the windows of the school at Broughton just before 350 children were to be dismissed. He told newspapermen:
I have never seen such thought-out, deliberate cruelty in my life as that displayed against the unfortunate strikers by the coal operators and their army of coal and iron police. Imagine, gentlemen, a private army, with its private jail, where the miners are unlawfully detained and viciously assaulted!... I have been preaching Americanism as I understand it, where justice and freedom and law and order prevail, but these miners and their families don't even get a shadow of it.... Asbestos will not hold the statements I shall make on the floor of the House.
Throughout the decade, LaGuardia clashed with the seventyyear-old Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew W. Mellon, the man described by Wiliam Allen White as the "guardian angel of all that the Chamber of Commerce held sacred in its white marble palace." The vast Mellon empire included coal, coke, gas, oil, and aluminum. "No other Croesus," a biographer of Mellon wrote, "had levied toll on so many articles and services." War contracts boosted the already considerable Mellon fortune, which one day would reach two billion dollars. One hundred Mellon companies were connected through a two hundred and fifty million-dollar banking institution, Union Trust.
Mellon's various tax proposals in the Twenties had one basic theme: to lower taxes on high incomes. For instance, his first report to Congress, in 1921, recommended tax cuts, but only on incomes over $66,000 a year. Attacked by Bob LaFollette of Wisconsin, Mellon replied:
Any man of energy and initiative in this country can get what he wants out of life. But when that initiative is crippled by a tax system which denied him the right to receive a reasonable share of his earnings, then he will no longer exert himself, and the country will be deprived of the energy on which its continued greatness depends.
LaGuardia fought the Mellon Plan in Congress. When a stenographer wrote to him in complaint, he replied: "I readily understand your anxiety and that of your co-workers on the taxes over $200,000 a year. I was a stenographer once and I remember how much I had to worry about my income over $200,000 a year."
Despite LaGuardia and a few others, the Mellon principles won out in the tax bills passed by Congress, and the business community celebrated. The president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler wrote happily to a Republican leader: "I am just back from Pittsburgh where on Saturday night there took place at the Chamber of Commerce dinner the most magnificent demonstration in favor of Secretary Mellon that is possible to imagine.... It was really a great occasion."
The nation's economic nationalism—its insistence on war debt payments and towering tariff barriers—was a reflection, not of isolation
ism, but of an intervention in world affairs based on cash returns rather than democratic ideals. The State Department, throughout the Twenties, exercised strong influence on private loans to other nations, partly in order to ensure political "stability" in certain areas like the Caribbean. Herbert Feis writes that in this period: "We acted as banker to the whole needy world. Private capital provided the funds. But the American Government concerned itself with the lending operations."
Despite the Wilsonian cry for self-determination in the peace treaties, the United States was established as a dominant power in the Caribbean, having purchased the Virgin Islands during the war, possessing a naval base in Cuba, and exercising such control over the Republic of Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic as to make them "virtual protectorates." Furthermore, American influence in the Far East extended from the Aleutian Islands to Hawaii and across the western Pacific to the Philippines.
The United States was cautious about the League of Nations, but at the same time the Coolidge Administration was acting with force and determination to protect American investments and political power in the Caribbean area. By 1924 the finances of half of the twenty Latin American States were being directed to some extent by the United States. When other tactics did not work, marines were dispatched—to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. The realities did not match Coolidge's promise in his inaugural address: "America seeks no earthly empire built on blood and force.... The legions which she sends forth are arme
d, not with the sword, but with the cross."
Nicaragua was a vivid example of marine diplomacy at work. Her proximity to Panama, and the ever-present possibility of a transNicaraguan canal, gave Nicaragua a special place in the plans of the State Department, while fruit and lumber investments gave American private business groups a sphere of interest there. Ever since 1909, when a United States-aided revolution had overthrown the Liberal Zelaya government, a pattern of Yankee intervention was established, with bank credits and marines standing guard alternately over shaky conservative
* Elihu Root said in 1915 that "the present government with which we are making this treaty is really maintained in office by the presence of the United States marines in Nicaragua." Council on Foreign Relations, Survey of American Foreign Relations, 1929, pp. 167-197.
On January 8, 1927, American marines were ordered to station themselves in Fort Loma, commanding the Nicaraguan capital, and two days later Coolidge sent a special message to Congress,
I am sure it is not the desire of the United States to intervene in the internal affairs of Nicaragua or of any other Central American republic. Nevertheless, it must be said, that we have a very definite and special interest in the maintenance of order and good government in Nicaragua at the present time.
In the next six weeks, five thousand United States troops landed, and the United States gave the Nicaraguan government three thousand rifles, two hundred machine guns, and three million rounds of ammunition. Later, the State Department said:
In entering into the transaction the United States government followed its customary policy of lending encouragement and moral support to constitutional governments beset by revolutionary movements intended to overthrow the established order. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg explained to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the threat of Communist influences in Nicaragua had brought on American intervention.
LaGuardia, asked to comment on Kellogg's statement, called it "aldermanic stuff." There was no proof of Communist activity in Nicaragua, he said, adding : "The protection of American life and property in Nicaragua does not require the formidable naval and marine forces operating there now. Give me fifty New York cops and I can guarantee full protection."
LaGuardia wrote a constituent that Kellogg, back in November, had planted the story of Communist activities in the press by asking various wire services to print such a story. The Associated Press had complied. When LaGuardia made this accusation publicly, the State Department denied it, and when LaGuardia said that he had conferred with Kellogg and had gotten the impression that no forces would be sent to Nicaragua, Kellogg denied the conference had taken place.
In April 1927, Coolidge, harassed by a nationwide barrage of criticism, ordered Colonel Henry L. Stimson to negotiate peace between the rival factions in Nicaragua. Stimson reported later how he met rebel leader Moncada under "a large black thorn tree" and in thirty minutes reached an agreement on peace terms. This included American supervision of elections to be held in 1929, the appointment of Liberal governors in six of the country's thirteen departments, and the maintenance of marines in
* Ruhl J. Bartlett, The Record of American Diplomacy, p. 546. Graham H. Stuart, Latin America and the United States, Appleton-Century-Crofts. 1955, says: "The first landing of troops was declared to be solely for the protection of American lives and property, but there was little evidence that American lives and property were in jeopardy." p. 332.
LaGuardia kept up a constant stream of criticism. He wrote to Kellogg: "Permit me to state, Mr. Secretary, that universal suffrage and the secret ballot are absolutely inconsistent with uniformed marines and fixed bayonets. The two cannot be harmonized."
Stimson, on the other hand, felt that the United States had "no cause to be ashamed" of its effort "to do an unselfish service to a weak and sorely beset Central American State." His argument that the United States had not transgressed upon Nicaraguan sovereignty was based on his belief that every step taken was upon the request of the Nicaraguan government.
The arguments of the Twenties in connection with Nicaragua could be transplanted easily to the Sixties in connection with Vietnam. So could the arguments on poverty, prices, taxation made in that era be transferred to our own. If there is a persistence of policy and rhetoric in American history from that decade to this one (and beyond) we are helped to find it by those few who, like LaGuardia, dug beneath the surface and held up to public view that which had been hidden. This suggests, perhaps, what people with energy, with voices, sensing the suffering beneath the smugness of their age, might do in any time.
Moncada's concession was born of a sense of futility in the face of overwhelming power. He said at the time of his acceptance: "I am not inhuman.... I cannot advise the nation to shed all its patriotic blood for our liberty, because in spite of this new sacrifice, this liberty would succumb before infinitely greater forces and the country would sink more deeply within the claws of the North American eagle." Council on Foreign Relations, op. cit., p. 195.
3
The Wobbly Spirit
I had become conscious, in the Southern movement for equal rights in the early Sixties, how much the struggles of ordinary people were ignored in the recording of history. So, when The Nation asked me, in the spring of 1965, to review Joyce L. Kornbluh's book Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, I happily agreed, realizing how little the general public knew of that extraordinary moment in American history when the Industrial Workers of the World were on the scene. The review appeared in the April 5, 1965 issue, under the title The Wobbly Spirit.
Do we see small signs these days—Selma, Berkeley, and who knows where tomorrow—of the Wobbly spirit, still alive? There is a stirring among the young, and talk of a "new radicalism." The timing could hardly be better then, for the publication of Rebel Voices.
This is a large, handsome, blazing-red book in which Joyce Kornbluh has assembled a treasury of articles, songs, poems, cartoons and photographs, from the Labadie Collection of IWW documents at the University of Michigan. Those who at some point in their lives have been excited by the story of the Wobblies, and wished it might somehow be kept alive for the new generation, will be grateful to Mrs. Kornbluh for her work.
She introduces the collection with a description of a Chicago meeting hall one June morning in 1905, when the thirty-six-year-old former cowboy and miner, "Big Bill" Haywood, walked to the front, picked up a piece of loose board, hammered on the table for silence, and called out:
Fellow Workers: This is the Continental Congress of the Working Class. We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working-class movement in possession of the economic powers, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution without regard to capitalist masters.
On the speakers' platform with Haywood were two of the great figures of American radicalism: white-haired Mother Jones, the seventyfive-year-old organizer for the United Mine Workers of America; and Eugene Debs, leader of the Socialist Party. Also at the meeting was the sharp-tongued polemicist of the Socialist Labor Party, Daniel DeLeon; the renegade Catholic priest, black-bearded Father Hagerty; and Lucy Parsons, widow of the Haymatket Affair martyr Albert Parsons. That day, the Industrial Workers of the World was formed, and for the next decade (until it was crushed in the repression of the war to make the world safe for democracy) gave the nation its first close look at a revolutionary movement.
In those years, the permanent characteristics of the United States in the twentieth century were being hardened. There was the growing power of giant cotporations (United States Steel had been formed in 1901). A minority of the nation's workers were organized into an exclusive trade union with conservative leadership (the A.F. of L., under Samuel Gompers, had almost two million members). And this era saw the inauguration of benign governmental regulation of business, supported by a new consensus of businessmen, Presidents, and reformers, which traditional historians have called "the Progressive Era," but which Gabriel Kolk
o (in his book The Triumph of Conservatism) terms "political capitalism." In retrospect, the IWW appears to have been a desperate attempt to disrupt this structure before its rivets turned cold.
The I WW played for keeps. Where the A.F. of L. called for "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work," the Wobblies wrote, in the preamble to their constitution:
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can he no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes, a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system.
Against the craft union concept (what they called "The American Separation of Labor") the IWW set as their goal: "One Big Union," and in each industry organized the skilled and unskilled, foreign-born and native Americans, Negroes and whites, women and men. They were fiercely militant, opposed to contracts with employers, unyielding in retaining the right to strike at all times. They were suspicious of politics for, as Father Hagerty put it, "Dropping pieces of paper into a hole in a box never did achieve emancipation of the working class.... "The abolition of capitalism would come, they believed through a series of general strikes, after which workers would run the industries themselves. "By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old."