Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology
But we also learn that at certain times in history, surprising, unpredicted victories became
possible when ordinary people organized, risked, sacrificed, and persisted.
Those victories for social justice did not come through the normal workings of the political
system. It is useful, even necessary, to work through the regular channels as far as they
can take you. But they have never taken us very far. The very poor seem to understand
that. In 1969 a Senate committee was investigating hunger in the South. A black woman
was on the stand and Senator El ender of Louisiana was questioning her. She suddenly said
to him, "I want to ask you a few questions."
senator: Don't get smart with me!
woman: How come you can't do anything for us?
senator: We just make the laws.
woman: What good is the laws?
senator: It is up to the Executive Branch to enforce them. There are three
branches of government, Executive, Legislative, Judicial, and …
woman (interrupting): You got al those branches of government to go
through before something gets done. No wonder we starving!
However, the establishment of representative government, voting for Congress and for the
president, created the possibility (although the political system itself would be control ed by
money) of a legislative response to public pressure. And it was such pressure—coming out
of social struggle—that brought about whatever economic reforms we see now in our
economic system. Indeed, there is no country in the world that can match the United States
in the number and intensity of labor struggles.
Take the eight-hour day. It was achieved for most workers, not through the legislative
process, but through many years of bitter struggle. Hundreds of thousands of workers won
the eight-hour day by going on strike long before it was enacted into law in the 1930s. In
the year 1886 when the labor movement decided to make its big push to reduce the
working day to eight hours, there were 1,400 strikes, involving 500,000 workers.
The period between 1877 and 1914 saw a series of bitter labor struggles take place
throughout the country in rebel ion against intolerable working conditions and starvation
wages. In 1877 there was a wave of railroad strikes in the east, suppressed final y by state
militia and federal troops at the cost of a hundred lives.
142
In 1894 the Pul man Strike tied up the nation's railroads until it was crushed by court injunctions and soldiers. In 1892 and again in 1902 there were strikes in the steel industry.
In 1913-1914 there was the long, violent strike in the coal country of southern Colorado.
The workers were almost always defeated by the power of the corporation, with the
col aboration of the government.
In 1912, however, came a rare labor victory, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the strike of
mostly immigrant textile workers, many of them women, against the powerful American
Woolen Company. Strikers were beaten, jailed, and kil ed. Their children went hungry. But
they organized mass picketing, chains of 7,000 and 10,000 men and women in endless
picket lines. The company final y surrendered and agreed to give higher wages and overtime
pay.
In the 1880s and 1890s farmers al over the United States, pushed to the wal by banks,
railroads, and merchants, organized a vast network of al iances that became the Populist
Movement, involving in one way or another several mil ion farm families, north and south.
They elected candidates to state legislatures and to Congress.
In response to these movements and out of the desire of the establishment to make its
control more secure, certain reforms took place in the twentieth century. Congress passed
laws to regulate the railroads. It set up a Federal Trade Commission supposedly to control
the growth of monopolies. There was a constitutional amendment to enable the rich to be
taxed more heavily through a graduate income tax. A number of states passed laws
regulating wages and hours and providing for safety inspection of factories and
compensation for injured workmen.
In the 1930s, in the midst of economic crisis, the country was in turmoil. There were
general strikes tying up San Francisco and Minneapolis; riots of the unemployed;
organizations of tenants al over the country stopping evictions; and massive strikes in the
steel, rubber, and auto industries. There were more than 500 sit-down strikes in 1937
alone.64
The reform legislation of the New Deal—unemployment compensation, Social Security, work
programs, minimum wages—was very much a reaction, not only to the economic situation,
but to that wave of strikes and the threat of growing radicalism in the country. It is clear
that the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, which for the first time gave trade
unions legal standing and an official machinery for dealing with work grievances, was a
response to the widespread disruption of labor struggles, an attempt to pacify the class
conflict in the workplace.65
Frances Piven and Richard Cloward, in their book Poor People's Movements, look at the
workers' movements of the thirties and explain the last-minute decision to support the
National Labor Relations Act:
Roosevelt and his advisors had original y thought of labor concessions
primarily in terms of unemployment relief and insurance, old age pensions,
and wages and hours protections. But rank-and-file agitation set new terms,
and the terms would have to be met if labor was to be kept in line.66
Under the Social Security Act of 1935 the program Aid to Families with Dependent Children
(AFDC) was created. But the states made it difficult for families to get this help. It was not
until a disruptive, threatening welfare rights movement developed in the 1960s that AFDC
began to give significant help to desperately poor families, most of them consisting of single
mothers taking care of their children.67
143
Americans often point with pride to the high standard of living of the working class—the families that own their own homes, a car, and a television and can afford to go away on
vacation. Al of this—the eight-hour day, a fairly decent wage, and vacations with pay—did
not come about through the natural workings of the market, or through the kindness of
government. It came about through the direct action of workers themselves in their labor
struggles or through the response of state and national governments to the threat of labor
militancy.
None of this has been sufficient to bring about economic justice in this country of wealth
and poverty, gigantic production and colossal waste, glittering luxury and miserable slums.
If we are going to make the radical changes to produce a situation we can cal economic
justice, much more wil be required. People wil have to organize and struggle, to protest, to
strike, to boycott, to engage in politics, to go outside of politics and engage in civil
disobedience, to act out (as blacks did when they simply went into places where they were
excluded) the equalization of wealth.
Only when wealth is equalized (at least roughly) wil liberty be equalized. And only then wil
justice be possible in this country. Only then can we final y make real the promise of the
Declaration of Independence, to giv
e al men—and women and children—the equal right to
"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
1 New York Times, July 13, 1969.
2 New York Times, May 16, 1986.
3 Boston Globe, Feb. 26, 1985. This Physicians Task Force on Hunger had spent two years
traveling to fourteen states and going into hundreds of homes, and made their estimates on
the basis of their observations along with official reports from the Census Bureau and the
U.S. Department of Agriculture. They said their estimate was a conservative one.
4 New York Times, Aug. 17, 1984.
5 UPI dispatch, Apr. 3, 1984.
6 New York Times, Jan. 12, 1990.
7 For more information on the class distinctions of early America, see Howard Zinn, The
Politics of History (Il inois University Press, 1990), "Inequality."
8 It should be pointed out that the word property was defined by John Locke more broadly a
century before the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. He said that people leave the state of
nature and join in society "for the mutual Preservation of their Lives, Liberties and Estates, which I cal by the general Name, Property." Two Treatises of Government. But that broader definition of the word was not used in the Constitution or later in the courts of the United
States. C. B. Macpherson in his essay "A Political Theory of Property" suggests that the
definition of the word be expanded to give not just corporations but individuals "a right of
access to the means of labor" and that in some future society of abundance property wil
also mean "a right to a share in political power to control the uses of the amassed capital
and the natural resources of the society, and beyond that, a right to a kind of society, a set
of power relations throughout the society, essential to a ful y human life." He says that "up to now, property has been a matter of a right to a material revenue. With the conquest of
scarcity that is now foreseen, property must become rather a right to an immaterial
revenue, a revenue of enjoyment of the quality of life." Democratic Theory (Oxford
University Press, 1973), 139.
144
9 Louis Hartz, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought, shows how the state of
Pennsylvania played an important role in the development of its economy in the years
between the Revolution and the Civil War. Frank Bourgin, The Great Chal enge: The Myth of
Laissez-Faire in the Early Republic (Brazil er, 1989), shows in detail how the strong hand of government was involved in the economy.
10 For the relations between government and the wealthy, there are a number of good
sources. Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States
(Macmil an, 1935), shows how the Constitution responded to the needs of the upper
classes. Thomas Cochran and Wil iam Mil er, The Age of Enterprise (Macmil an, 1942), deal
with government aid to business in the nineteenth century, as does Gustavus Myers, History
of the Great American Fortunes (Modern Library, 1936).
11 Harvey O'Connor, Mel on 's Mil ions (John Day, 1933).
12 Harper's Magazine, 1931.
13 New York Times, Oct. 16, 1984.
14 Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law (Harvard University Press, 1977).
15 Philosopher Morris Cohen in the 1920s lectured at Cornel University on property and
sovereignty: "The extent of the power over the life of others which the legal order confers
on those cal ed owners is not ful y appreciated by those who think of the law as merely
protecting men in their possession. Property law does more. It determines what men shal
acquire. Thus, protecting the property rights of a landlord means giving him the right to
col ect rent, protecting the property of a railroad or a public-service corporation means
giving it the right to make certain charges." Morris Cohen, "Property and Sovereignty,"
Cornel! Law Quarterly (1927), reprinted in Virginia Held, ed., Property, Profits, and
Economic Justice (Wadsworth, 1980).
16 Locbner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905).
17 West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937).
18 San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (411 U.S. 1) 1973. Two years
earlier, a court in California (Serrano v. Priest) had ruled that the accident of school district wealth was not a legitimate basis for fixing the limits of a child's education.
19 New York Times, Sept. 28, 1969.
20 New York Times, May 27, 1969.
21 New York Times, July 28, 1978.
22 This appears in a speech by Adam Smith made in the 1760s, reprinted in F. L. Meek, ed.
Lectures on Jurisprudence: Adam Smith (Oxford University Press, 1978)
23 Canadian television film Struggle for Democracy, Public Broadcasting Corporation.
24 Quoted from Thomas Malthus, On Population, in an article by John Hess, "Malthus. Then and Now," The Nation, Apr. 18, 1987. Hess notes that Malthus is stil admired by
conservatives. He takes note of Gertrude Himmelfarb, who, in her introduction to a new
edition of Malthus's book, talks about the benefits of the Poor Law, adopted in England in
1834, which ended home relief but set up workhouses for the poor that were "so appal ing
as to discourage even the most determined malingerers, and the sexes being separated so
as to prevent the population increase Malthus had warned against."
145
25 Conservative writer Irving Kristol argued this way in his article "About Equality,"
Commentary, Nov. 1972. Michael Walzer tackles his argument in an essay "In Defense of Equality," Radical Principles (Basic Books, 1980).
26 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
27 This is from a survey conducted by Columbia University's Center for the Social Sciences.
New York Times, Jan. 23, 1986.
28 Walzer, Radical Principles, 240, says, "In a capitalist world money is the universal medium of exchange; it enables the men and women who possess it to purchase virtual y
every other sort of social good… . Now isn't it odd, and moral y implausible and unsatisfying,
that al these things should be distributed to people with a talent for making money?"
29 George Bernard Shaw, The Intel igent Woman's Guide to Socialism, (Brentano's, 1928),
71.
30 A. M. Honore, of Oxford University, in his essay "Property, Title, and Redistribution,"
points to the many older societies in which property was communal in various degrees. The
ways include family or clan ownership, public ownership, rotating individual use, individual
ownership coupled with compulsory sharing, etc. He cites these to show there is "nothing
unnatural" about these departures from the "private property" idea that many people in capitalist society take to be "natural." Virginia Held, ed., Property, Profits, and Economic Justice.
31 Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (1875).
32 Walzer, Radical Principles, 242-243.
33 These data are from a study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a private group
that analyzes government data. New York Times, July 30, 1089.
34 Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974) does introduce a
"principle of rectification" (p. 231). He acknowledges that past injustices may have led to a certain present distribution of wealth. He then says, "These issues are very complex and are
best left to a ful treatment of the principle of rectification." And then in the two concluding sentences of his chapter on distributive justice, he seems to suddenly throw over the
whole
truckload of arguments he has given against transfer payments to the poor. In the absence
of such a treatment applied to a particular society, one cannot use the analysis and theory presented here to condemn any particular scheme of transfer payments, unless it is clear
that no considerations of rectification of injustice could apply to justify it. Although to
introduce socialism as the punishment for our sins would be to go too far, past injustices
might be so great as to make necessary in the shortrun a more extensive state in order to
rectify them.
This is a surprising retreat from his entitlement theory, but he then goes on as if this were
an aside. In the very next chapter, discussing equality of opportunity, he worries that if you
are going to increase opportunity for people who haven't had much, you wil have to take
away something [he means taxes, I suppose] from those who have been "more favored
with opportunity." He says, "But holdings to which these people are entitled may not be
seized [a scare word like seized helps Nozick's argument more than a word like taxed] even to provide equality of opportunity for others," p. 235.
35 Quoted by Virginia Held, ed., Property, Profits, and Economic Justice (Wadsworth, 1980).
36 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 1981).
146
37 New York Times, Aug. 3, 1986. In its feature story on the death of Roy Cohn, who had
been counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin when McCarthy was on his famous
hunt for Communists in government, the Times said,
A lifelong bachelor, he lived extremely wel . To avoid high taxes, he drew a comparatively
low salary of $100,000 a year from his law firm, which compensated him further, and
regal y, by giving him a rent-free Manhattan apartment, paying part of the rent on his
Greenwich home, supplying him with the use of a chauffeured Rol s-Royce and other fine
cars and paying al his bil s at expensive restaurants such as Le Cirque, "21" and many
others. These expenses were said to run to $1 mil ion a year.
38 New York Times, Mar. 3, 1989.
39 Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 14-15. His argument here is dissected neatly by
Macpherson, Democratic Theory, 143-156.
40 Macpherson criticizes Friedman, saying, "What distinguishes the capitalist economy from