The Zinn Reader (21 page)

* Part of it, however, was the sound of violence, which seems to scar every age of high living. F . Scott Fitzgerald wrote: "A classmate killed his wife and himself on Long Island, another tumbled 'accidentally' from a skyscraper in New York. One was killed in a speakeasy in Chicago; another was beaten to death in a speakeasy in New York and crawled home to the Princeton Club to die; still another had his skull crushed by a maniac's axe in an insane asylum where he was confined. These are not catastrophes that I went out of my way to look for—these were my friends; moreover, these things happened not during the depression but during the boom." From his article "Echoes of the Jazz Age,"
Scribner's,
November 1931.

** Unemployment declined, 1921-27, from 4,270,000 to 2,055,000. Real wages rose. The number of prosperous farmers grew, so that by 1929, 25,000 farms had gross incomes over $20,000 a year.
Recent Social Trends: Report of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends,
McGraw-Hill, 1933, Vol. II, p. 820.

After a detailed study of economic conditions in the twenties, George Soule concluded that while production and profits rocketed in bursts of happy speculation, "the American people did not all enjoy the ride." From 1919-28, productivity grew 40 percent, compared to a 26 percent rise in real earnings so that "business did not fully share its productive gains with earners and consumers by a combination of wage increases and price reduction." This led to a "tremendous growth of profits for the more fortunately situated sectors of business and for the big corporations that dominated them." From 1922-29, while real wages per capita in manufacturing advanced at a rate of 1.4 percent a year, common stockholders gained 16.4 percent a year.

The classic sociological study of the Twenties, that of Muncie, Indiana, in the Lynds'
Middletown,
shows graphically that ordinary working people did not share the prosperity of that time and went about their mundane lives day to day never free from "the long arm of the job." In Middletown, whose thirty thousand people lived much like people in the hundreds of other industrial towns scattered across the nation, there were two clearly defined groups: "the Working Class and the Business Class."

The Lynds reported: "As one prowls Middletown streets about six o'clock of a winter morning one notes two kinds of homes: the dark ones where the people still sleep, and the ones with a light in the kitchen where the adults of the household may be seen moving about, starting the business of the day." A speaker urging parents to help children by making a breakfast a "leisurely family reunion" did not realize that for two-thirds of the city's families "the father gets up in the dark in the winter, eats hastily in the kitchen in the gray dawn, and is at work from an hour to two and a quarter hours before his children have to be at school."

When some people looked behind the facade to catch a glimpse of suffering, their voices were either shouted down or ignored.*

Merle Curti wrote:

It was, in fact, only the upper ten percent of the population that enjoyed a marked increase in real income. But the protests which such facts normally have evoked could not make themselves widely or effectively felt. This was in part the result of the grand strategy of the major political parties. In part it was the result of the fact that almost all the avenues to mass opinion were now controlled by large-scale publishing industries.

Not all voices were stilled. There were some too eloquent, too powerful, or simply too insistent to be ignored: Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, H.L. Mencken, Oswald Garrison Villard, Lewis Mumford. They spoke to their generation with kindliness or with cynicism, with anger or with irony. They probed into the vitals of the social structure, sometimes crudely, sometimes delicately, but in any case deriding the cult of material wealth and the deification of orthodoxy.

And in Congress, a small group of Progressives and Socialists tried to jab at the conscience of their age. Among them the most vociferous, the most colorful, the most radical was Fiorello LaGuardia, the Congressman from East Harlem.

When the issue of extending the wartime rent controls rose, LaGuardia argued in Congress for the rights of tenants. Landlords had used college professors and legal experts to support their arguments, LaGuardia said:

...but gentlemen, with all of their experts, with all of their professors, with all of their legal talent, there is no argument that can prevail when a man with a weekly income and a family to support is compelled to pay out of his income such a large proportion that there is not sufficient left to properly care for and nourish his children. That is the condition in New York City; that is the condition in Washington, DC...

LaGuardia was aware that the farmer was getting little for his work, and the consumer was paying too much for his food. He told congress:

Some of my friends sometimes refer to me as a radical. If by that they mean that I am seeking radical changes in the very conditions which brought about the disparity between the exorbitant retail prices of food and the starvation prices paid to the farmer, I am not at all shocked by being called a radical.... Something is radically wrong when a condition exists that permits the manipulation of prices, the creation of monopolies on food to the extent of driving the farmer off his farm by foreclosures and having thousands of underfed and ill-nourished children in the public schools of our cities.

* 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 armed, 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