AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT Keith E. Whittington

Supplementary Material

Chapter 8: The Progressive Era – Democracy and Liberty

Thomas E. Watson, The True Brotherhood of Man (1904)1

Tom Watson grew up in Georgia amidst the Civil War and Reconstruction. In the 1870s, he developed a thriving practice as a criminal defense attorney. In 1890, he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as a populist Democrat, but he soon broke from the party and helped found the People’s Party, which he argued would be the true heir to the Jeffersonian principles that the Democratic Party had abandoned. He joined the fusion Populist–Democrat ticket with William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and spent the beginning of the twentieth century trying to build the Populist Party. In the 1910s, he returned to the Democratic Party and gained new political influence in Georgia, eventually winning a seat in the U.S. Senate.

. . . Whoever admits the fact of the brotherhood of man must go one step farther and admit that no brotherhood is consistent with inequality or slavery. If we are brothers, we must recognize equality, we must recognize liberty. Not equal mentally, physically, morally, we separate ourselves into different groups—social, religious, political—but the Government which does not grant equal protection to all, equal justice to all, prostitutes its power, and is false to its mission. In this land, each of you is clothed by law with an equal voice, an equal right to rule. With your ballot, and through your representatives, you are supposed to govern yourself. If our system is all that it should be you have but done your duty: you have but proven yourselves worthy of the privileges and powers you inherited from the hero-martyrs of the past. If your system is not what is should be, yours is the fault, for the responsibility was on you, and you had within your own hands the weapon with which it was intended you should forever defend your liberties—the ballot. . . . Is it true or not that millions of human beings among us never have enough to eat—never know what it is to have sufficient warmth and food and raiment and shelter? Is it true that children perish for lack of air? That women stitch their lives out in filthy sweat-shops, or are driven by unmerciful poverty into the hopeless caverns of vice? That men toil and moil all the days of their lives at heavy tasks, never knowing what it is to have a rest from the yoke, never out of sight of the yawning pit of pauperism—and are turned out at last, when bent and spent, all broken in mind and heart and body, into the waste basket of humanity, called Potter’s Field? Is it true that the great part of the wealth of this wealthiest land on the globe was made by the oil of unprivileged millions? With his rifle the plain citizen of the United States won this land in which we live; with his axe he conquered the marsh; with his plow he made the seed-bag for the harvest; with his trowel, or his saw and plane and hammer, he built your houses; with his pick and his shovel he ripped open the very bowels of the earth and tore out the precious metal hidden there from the foundations of

1 Excerpt taken from Thomas E. Watson, The Life and Speeches of Thos. E. Watson (Nashville: n.p., 1908).

1 the world. Who can dispute this recital of the deeds by the plan common people of the land? Nobody can do it; nobody tries to do it. Where is the greater part of all this wonderful production of wealth which has taken place here for the last one hundred years? Who has got it? Not the men whose toil created it. No. Almost entirely it is in the hands of men who never created one dollar of it; almost entirely is in the hands of men who never in all their lives did an honest day’s work. How did they get it? Mainly by the operation of laws which violate every principle of common sense, common justice, common right. Certain men have been granted privileges not enjoyed by others; certain men have been exempted from the burdens of Government; certain men have been given the right to tax their fellow citizens. These unnatural, irresistible and immensely important inequalities in law have during the long period of a century bene operating silently, consistently and persistently in favor of their beneficiaries at the expense of their victims. There can only be one fault. Those who had the advantage used it—reaping where they had not sown. Those to whose disadvantage the special privileges had been granted had to bear the loss. Under forms of law their property, the produce of their labor, was annually taken from them and given to those whom the law specially favored. What laws are these? 1. Our system of taxation, which burdens the wage-worker, the farmer and the merchant in order that a few mill owners shall enjoy a monopoly of the home market. . . . 2. A financial system which allows the national bankers to do business for their private benefit upon the credit of the Government, to use in their private business the funds of the Government without payment of interest, to create and issue the paper currency of the nation at an immense profit, enjoying at the same time the power to absolutely dictate values by the expansion of the contraction of the currency. 3. The land legislation which had either given away to private corporations a heritage which belonged to all the people, or allowed it to become a great measure monopolized for speculative purposes. 4. The corporation laws, which have granted sovereign powers to money making combinations, whose sole purpose was selfish gain. They have granted exemptions from taxation; they have been given the tremendous power to tax every person who wishes to travel, and every package of merchandise which seeks a market...... Every fortune in this land, or any other, which has been built upon privilege is a dishonest fortune. To the extent that it grew out of special favors, it grew at the expense of somebody else. And to the extent that it did this, the law forcibly confiscated one man’s goods and gave them to another. To take from him who made, and give to him who did not make, is one of the worst forms of tyranny. Our own Government has been doing it since the Civil war, with a callous indifference to correct principle. . . . Had the Government governed justly, the probability is that we would never have had a labor question in this young republic...... When Government presents pictures like this, Government is not doing what it ought to do, what it was meant to do. Who is responsible for the wrongs which I have described? The People’s party is not, for it never had opportunity to do that which it professes a purpose to do. If only one of “the two great political parties” has been in power, then the party is responsible and deserves condemnation. If both of these great parties had alternately been in power, both had the opportunity to correct these abuses, then both the two great political parties are responsible and should be condemned. . . .

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The party which I have the honor to represent in this campaign is the only one which stands for Jeffersonian principles; is the only one which wages war upon the principles of the Republican party; is the only one which plainly, distinctly and positively tells the people wherein it differs in essential principles from the party of Roosevelt. . . . Every man shall have the right to labor on the earth and make his living out of the common estate, or shall have work for himself, and not for a master, in some other avocation. Every man shall have the equal protection of the law, and no more; equal advantages under the law, and no more. In other words, we mean to have legislation recognize the fact that God made the world for all of us, and not for a few of us. No man shall draw more from the common stock than is represented by the sum- total of his labor or the greater value of is work. Monopoly shall not be allowed to oppress the living and then transmit the wrong and the oppression to future generations. . . . Instead of competition and conflict between labor and capital there should be cooperation and concord. Capital is not to be hated for itself. Labor produced it; labor is always producing it. As long as each day’s product is consumed, and we never have the accumulated surplus called capital, we can never be more than barbarians. The comfortable clothing, the comfortable houses which every workingman deserves and should have, is not labor. It is capital. . . . Let no man be ashamed of being in the minority. Let him be ashamed only in being in the wrong. To the extent that we allow our liberties encroached upon, we have been cowards, renegades to principle, recreants to duty. We can restore our government to right principles if we will, but we have no time to lose. Liberty, civil liberty as we know it, did not happen by accident. Your ballot, your right to vote, was not picked up in the highway. Every privilege we enjoy has been wrested from the oppressor, cost lives of brave men, has been drenched with martyr blood. What we call Christian civilization was once the protest of a despised minority, the vision of men who were in advance of their time. . . . Jeffersonians! . . . I have picked up your flag from the ground where it lay, and I call upon you to rally to it. Refuse, and you have done violence to your own sense of right. Refuse, and you have put party above principle. . . . [R]estore the rule of the people and bring back to us once more the rule of nobly patriotic men under wise and equitable laws.

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