AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT Keith E. Whittington

Supplementary Material

Chapter 7: The Gilded Age – Liberty and Democracy

Burnette G. Haskell, Why I Am a Nationalist (1890)1

Burnette G. Haskell grew up in Gold Rush era northern California. He was educated but indecisive. He was eventually given control of a small newspaper owned by a relative, which he converted into a mouthpiece of the International Workingmen’s Association, the umbrella for a variety of communist, socialist, and anarchist groups. From there, he plotted a socialist revolution. The IWA could only boast a few hundred members in California, and by the mid-1880s, Haskell had lost interest in Communism and had turned his attention to labor union activism. In 1886, he helped found the Kaweah Colony, a utopian commune in central California, but the colony only lasted a few years. After the publication of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Haskell embraced the nationalist movement based on its principles. The general aim of the nationalist movement was government ownership and management of all productive units of the economy for the common benefit of the nation. As the nationalist movement lost steam at the end of the twentieth century, Haskell began to practice law and working once again with labor unions. He died in 1907.

. . . I could tell you philosophically why I am one as a follower of Hegel, or morally why as a believer in the Golden Rule, or patriotically so as an American and a Red Republican; but this is the dawning of the age of science, and I prefer to tell you why I am a “Nationalist” in the light of science. Being a believer in evolution, I affirm that I must also be a believer in “Nationalism.” As an evolutionist I must hold that the millions of complex causes surrounding and operating upon our social organism will produce certain results; that it becomes my duty to so shape my individual life that I shall fit in as one piece of the future social mechanism if I would survive. The only question is, then, what is this future form to be? I believe it will be the perfected State. . . . It is not a belief in God nor a belief in the State that causes the present misery. That misery is far less than it was a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand years ago. What exists now exists solely because it is a survival from barbaric conditions. The State is developing out of these conditions into perfection. Four hundred years ago it dared no interfere to punish murder, if done by a man who could read and write. . . . We shall live, I believe, to see Jay Gould set to honest labor, making shoes, and reactionaries [Johann] Most and [Benjamin] Tucker to studying evolution in the schools. The State now is in process of change and adjustment to democratic ideals. It must, in my judgment, pass through “Nationalism” to reach the goal. I believe the State is an organism; that it has all of the characteristics of such; that it being developed just as our physical bodies are. Half of the prevalent diseases of that body come because our physical structure has not yet thoroughly adapted itself to the upright position. But because of this pain and disease, are we anarchistically to affirm that the body ought to be destroyed?

1 Excerpt taken from Burnette G. Haskell, “Why I Am a Nationalist,” Twentieth Century 4:20 (May 15, 1890): 5.

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. . . It has taken ages piled upon ages to develop the marvelous functions of the physical body, its bones, cartilage, ligaments, ganglia, organs, blood, lymph, nerves, and brain. Its central seat of government, the brain, is connected with every atom of the organism by two lines of government telegraph, one the sensory nerves that bring the news of disaster, and the other the motor nerves that carry the orders for relief. Two government railroad lines, the blood and lymph, do the work of transportation and reach to every point. A great central food-processing machine manufactures the means of life, of repair, of health or succor that even the humblest cell may need. The ptyalin of the saliva, the pepsin of the gastric juice, by division of labor, do what no living chemist has yet accomplished, transforming raw material into manufactured goods, make up the chlorophyll and protoplasm of the foods into chime. . . . If there is pain (an injustice) the atom-cell does not have to turn Anarchist and travel around himself with a shotgun, nor, “competitively,” hire a lawyer to obtain relief; he has only to call out and the whole force of the entire organism responds if necessary. Now, nature thus developed these functions and this marvelous simplicity of complexity, through natural selection and heredity, because the atoms set up a cry for life, and kept crying until their call was heard. The human atoms who starve and suffer and die, have now set up a similar cry, and they also will be heard. Nature will perfect the State so it shall heed and reach the needs of every unit of its whole. And this is the most inevitable of inevitable things. It is coming. It will come. Oh, yes, but then “good-bye to the individuality of the units.” Alas, and is it so? All the original units were alike; each had in itself the potentialities of all succeeding forms. All were Anarchists. But now, since one is specialized particularly in the stomach, another in the skin, another in the brain—now, since labor is divided, and through its division because expert and useful, each to its brother—now, originality is lost, forsooth! Yea, give us back the brains we had as jelly-dots that we may comprehend this subtle truth. Imagine an individual atom of the pancreas saying, “Why must I work in order to pay for the education of the children-cells of Mr. Ptyalin Atom, so that by reflex-action they may learn to work (making chime for me to box up) without the supervision of Mr. Will Atom? You have no right to tax me to teach his frothy progeny their duty.” Let us not tie selfish strings of “individual right” around our fingers to impede the collective circulation; let us reverently study nature and seek to help and not to hinder her beneficent work. Let us sink self in the State; let us toil that our children may be free from pain; let us do as the red disks of blood do when duty calls, for we ought to be here in America the reddest of the reds. These disks are independent cells, instinct with life, and so small that a million of them lie upon a needle’s point. They dance with helpful joy through every artery of the body. But let their State be threatened; let the skin be broken and the body cut, and they crystallize into army line; they hasten to the point of danger; they throw themselves in uncounted millions into the breach. The clot of blood that forms and bars death out from your bleeding body is made up of literal dead, who have immolated themselves to save their fellows and the State. . . . The silver voices of heroic bugles, the sweep of collective armies, with “broadening front clearing to the outer file,” the million gleaming bayonet points of the marching hosts of heaven above, the orderly pulse of the unseen atom, the absolute harmony of universal law; all these teach me that I am myself too little to be an “Anarchist” and boss the world; and so, perforce—or no! by choice—I whisper: “Not rights, but duties,” and behold, I am a “Nationalist.”

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