The People, Yes
Page 22
The trail leads straight to those in the possession of grease, the big shots of bespoken and anointed interests.
When violence is hired
and murder is paid for
and tear gas, clubs, automatics,
and blam blam machine guns
join in the hoarse mandate,
“Get the hell out of here,”
why then reserve a Sabbath
and call it a holiness day
for the mendon of Jesus Christ
and why drag in the old quote,
“Thou shalt love thy neighbor
as thyself’?
Said a lady wearing orchids
for a finality they betoken
disdnct from cabbages
aloof from potatoes
and speaking with a white finality
from a face molded in half-secrets:
“Some things go unspoken in our circle:
no one has the bad grace to bring them up:
they exist and they don’t:
when you belong you don’t mention them.”
Between highballs at the club amid the commodious leather chairs, only the souse, the fool, would lift a glass with the toast:
“Here’s to the poor! let ’em suffer, they’re used to it.”
And if a boy fresh from college and the classics offers the point, “Money sometimes rots people,”
He’ll hear from someone: “Maybe so but you can’t have too big a surplus to take care of the future.”
“There are men who can be hired
for work that must be done
and I would rather hire them
than do the work myself.”
Thus in the front office
the big fellow in charge,
hired by absentee owners,
hired for work that must be done,
has an alibi and good reasons:
unless he keeps out of the red
he too goes: he hires and fires:
he is the overseer: in his ears
one droning iron murmur:
“We want results, re-sults.
“You’ll show results or else.”
So he hires and fires:
new names go on the payroll,
old names are dropped:
personnel, production, outlet, sales,
each has its own heebie-jeebies,
each brings its special jitters:
the picture always changes:
one little innocent new idea
one harmless looking patent
can wreck the works, the payrolls,
the mahogany front office,
the absentee owners:
unless the competitor is watched
and met and handled,
either killed off or satisfied,
the works go to rust,
to the weavers of cobwebs
weaving in iron and mahogany:
Thus in the front office amid the desk buttons
and the switchboard phone and the private line,
amid slips holding safe-combination-numbers,
amid the keys to safe-deposit-vaults
and the documents known to associates and attorneys
besides other documents held in reserve,
written communications private and confidential,
spoken messages not to be put in writing,
memoranda in low tone to Jones for immediate attention
and withheld from Abemathy for definite reasons
Abernathy having plenty enough to do as it is,
items touching rivals real and potential,
competitors ruthless with a jungle cunning,
competitors fighting in the open with a decent code,
competitors in the red and dazed by the graph
of volume and sales sliding down always down,
telegrams to be sent in cipher strictly and see to it,
telegrams for the press, for Congress, for the public,
quarterly earnings report for investors,
fully detailed report for the Chairman of the Board,
information sheets to be scanned and tom up,
other notations to be read closely and filed
in a fireproof private vault with a time-lock,
signed agreements hardly worth the public eye,
schedules, rebates, allowances working arrangements—
amid these props
of time and circumstance
a big shot executive sits
with an eye on the board of directors first of all,
next the stockholders owning control,
next the vast eggheaded investing public,
and after these the men who run the works
from the engineers, chemists, geologists, intelligentsia
on to the white collar clerks and bookkeepers
and the overall crews who take whatever weather comes,
in fumes and dust, in smoke, slag and cinders
meeting production and delivery demands—
and finally the buyers, the consumers, the customers,
the people, yes, what will we let them have?
Around a big table—decisions—
wages up, wages down, wages as is—
prices up, prices down, prices as is—
this is the room and the big table
of the high decisions.
They may consider lower prices
for the benefit of the consumer
or again to wreck a competitor.
They may hold prices down
because it’s worth something to have
the good-will of the public, the mass buyers.
Or they may raise prices and get all they can
while the getting is good, explaining,
“We are not in business for our health,
what we lose or win is our business.”
Some of them trail with Marshall Field:
“The customer is always right,” others with
Cornelius Vanderbilt: “The public be damned.”
Others say one thing and do another.
And what have we here? what is this huddle?
Shall we call them scabs on their class?
Or are they talking to hear themselves talk?
They say Yes to Ford, to Filene, to Johnson,
to the Brookings Institution: one little idea:
After allowing for items to protect future operation
every cut in production cost should be shared
with the consumers in lower prices
with the workers in higher wages
thus stabilizing buying power
and guarding against recurrent collapses.
“What is this? Is it economics, poetry or what?
“Do you think you can run my business?
“Are you trying to fly the flag
of Soviet Russia over my office?”
You’re in a room now where you hear
anything you want to hear
and the advice often runs:
You can do anything you want to
unless they stop you.
Sometimes they fight among themselves
iri a dog-eat-dog struggle
for control and domination,
sending an opponent to the Isles of Greece,
leaving him not even a shirt,
or letting him leap from a tenth-floor fire-escape.
What is to be said
of those rare and suave swine
who pay themselves a fat swag of higher salaries
in the same year they pay stockholders nothing,
cutting payrolls in wage reductions and layoffs?
What of those payday patriots
who took three hundred millions of profit dollars
from powder and supply contracts
in the same years other men by thousands
died with valor or took red wounds in a gray rain
for the sake of a country, a flag?
/> Lincoln had a word for one crew: “respectable scoundrels.”
They reaped their profits from the government’s necessity in money, blankets, guns, contracts,
And when they gambled on defeat in May of ’64 and sent gold prices to new peaks
Lincoln groaned, “I wish every one of them had his devilish head shot off.”
One by one they will pass
and be laid in numbered graves,
one by one lights out
and candles of remembrance
and rest amid silver handles and heavy roses
and forgotten hymns sung to their forgotten names.
101
The unemployed
without a stake in the country
without jobs or nest eggs
marching they don’t know where
marching north south west—
and the deserts
marching east with dust
deserts out of howling dust-bowls
deserts with winds moving them
marching toward Omaha toward Tulsa—
these lead to no easy pleasant conversation
they fall into a dusty disordered poetry
“What was good for our fathers is good enough
for us—let us hold to the past and keep it
all and change it as little as we have to.”
Since when has this been a counsel and light
of pioneers? of discoverers? of inventors?
of builders? of makers?
Who should be saying,
“We can buy anything, we always have,
we can fix anything, we always have,
we’re not in the habit of losing,
on the main points we have our way,
we always have”?
who should be saying that and why?
As though yesterday is here today
and tomorrow too will be yesterday
and change on change is never hammered
on the deep anvils of transition
the words may be heard:
“Every so often these sons of the wild jackass
have to be handled. Let them come.
We’ve got the arguments, the propaganda machinery,
the money and the guns. Let them come.
What was good for our fathers is good enough for
us. We fight with the founding fathers.”
What is the story of the railroads and banks,
of oil, steel, copper, aluminum, tin?
of the utilities of light, heat, power, transport?
what are the balances of pride and shame?
who took hold of the wilderness and changed it?
who paid the cost in blood and struggle?
what will the grave and considerate historian
loving humanity and haring no one dead or alive
have to write of wolves and people?
what are the names to be remembered with thanks?
Now they justify themselves to themselves:
we took things as we found them:
we never tried to shoot the moon:
we never pretended to be angels:
industry and science are slowly
making the world a better place to live in:
the weak must go under before the strong:
we’ll always have the poor and the incompetent.
What then of those odd numbers
who have pretended to be angels
while using the fangs of wolves?
and what of the strong ones
who sat high and handsome
till they met stronger ones
till they were tom asunder
and outwolfed by bigger wolves?
And who plucked marvels
of industry and science
out of unexpected corners
unless it was the moon shooters
taking their chances
out in the great sky of the unknown?
who but they have held to a hope
poverty and the poor shall go
and the struggle of man for possessions
of music and craft and personal worth
lifted above the hog-trough level
above the animal dictate:
“Do this or go hungry”?
102
“Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious
debauching of the public mind . . . they have
been drugging the public mind.”
What was this debauchery? what this drugging?
and how did Abraham Lincoln mean it July 4, 1861?
The public has a mind?
Yes.
And men can follow a method
and a calculated procedure
for drugging and debauching it?
Yes.
And the whirlwind comes later?
Yes.
Can you bewilder men by the millions
with transfusions of your own passions,
mixed with lies and half-lies,
texts tom from contexts,
and then look for peace, quiet, good-will
between nation and nation, race and race,
between class and class?
Who are these so ready
with a hate they are sure of,
with a prepared and considered hate?
who are these forehanded ones?
Before the boys in blue and gray
took the filth and gangrene
along with the glory,
Little Aleck Stephens, hazel-eyed
and shrunken, saw it coining:
“When I am on one of two trains coining in
opposite directions on a single track,
both engines at high speed—and both
engineers drunk—I get off at the first
station.”
Is there a time to counsel,
“Be sober and patient while yet saying Yes
to freedom for cockeyed liars and bigots”?
Is there a time to say,
“The facts and guide measurements are yet
to be found and put to work: there are
dawns and false dawns read in a ball of
revolving crystals”?
Is there a time to repeat,
“The living passion of millions can rise
into a whirlwind: the storm once loose
who can ride it? you? or you? or you?