Editorial in the Los Angeles “Record” May 26, 1923, during the free speech fight at San Pedro harbor, in the course of which Prince Hopkins, Hugh Hardyman, Hunter Kimbrough, and Upton Sinclair were arrested for trying to read the Constitution of the United States:
ARE WE AMERICANS BREAKING AWAY FROM THE “GOOSE-STEP”?
Are we Americans, as a whole, too standardized, too intolerant, too short-sighted and narrow-minded, for our own good?
Some of the best minds in this country think so. They have written learned books deploring our tendency toward the “goose-step”—the habit of letting somebody do our thinking for us.
ARE WE BREAKING AWAY
In other words, America is divided into narrow-minded groups and the members of each group are as alike, in attitude, as peas in a pod. There is the intolerant small town attitude, of looking with suspicion on every human being who is not a product of the same environment. There is the “Babbitt” type that the city produces—men who are chiefly concerned with making money and who don’t like to be seen with anyone who doesn’t wear the same kind of a collar, cut his hair the same way, and live in the same kind of a house.
It is this regimentation of ideas and ideals that prevents us from understanding each other. It makes for class hatred, injustice toward other groups, narrow lives and woe—just as Germany’s “goose-step” attitude brought grief to the whole world.
Often the barriers of misunderstanding are accidentally broken down. Men of sharp contrast get around a table and discover that after all, they are not so far apart.
The most hopeful sign in America today is the gradual realization of mutual understanding.
Men and women who have never had to do a day’s useful work in their lives suddenly stirred with sympathy for toilers, are driven with a passion to make this a better world for all of us.
Over in Altadena there lives a clubwoman whom they call a millionairess. She has a beautiful home behind a fringe of tall, restful evergreen trees. There are servants in that home. There is ease and comfort and even luxury there.
The other night 5000 strikers and their wives and children down at San Pedro harbor cheered that woman wildly and by that act a bit of the bitterness of class strife was relegated to the eternal limbo.
The next day that woman, whose name by the way is Kate Crane Gartz, came into the Record office with her secretary and dictated a letter to this newspaper.
Read this letter whether you agree with it or not. Read this letter and get a peep at the intense drama of the twentieth century.
There’s a new breath stirring on the waters. And it augurs good for all of us.
Here is the letter:
Editor, The Record: Yours is the only newspaper in Los Angeles that dare to tell the truth.
The meeting Wednesday night on Liberty Hill at San Pedro was the most thrilling of my life. To gaze upon that sea of faces, realizing that they are the staunchest, truest class of people in the United States today, being sent to jail by the car load because they want the criminal syndicalist law repealed, this law which is nothing more than the continuation of the espionage law, which we were obliged to endure during the war, but is now directed solely against the migratory worker, certainly this is against the Constitution—the Constitution which they glorify in words, while in action they use the iron hand.
Another thing these workers want is the release of their comrades, confined in the penitentiary five years after the war, a condition which is unparalleled in the history of the world. What other organization of men would starve and go to jail for a principle?
They call us wild-eyed radicals and agitators. Well, so long as the necessity exists for us we will be here. And until we have high-minded, trained men in our public places and do not leave justice in the hands of ordinary politicians we will have just this condition which exists in Los Angeles today.
Grant said that “a bad law should be broken.” Surely this is a bad law. But these men think that “it is better to be in jail laying the foundations of liberty than at liberty laying the foundations for jails.” They also realize that unemployment and persecution make radicals faster than anything else.
The other day Senator Huber of Wisconsin introduced a. bill for unemployment insurance, saying that “if there is to be loyalty to industry there must be more security for labor.”
I was present at a banquet of the Chamber of Commerce of Hollywood the other evening where they were raising money for the bowl, which they did very easily and which is a very estimable thing to do. But I cannot sing nor listen to music so long as there is a great suffering humanity in our midst. For them it is very difficult to raise money.
So few people care. But for me to receive three cheers by the masses, and to be lambasted by the classes is the most thrilling adventure imaginable. It far transcends the usual occupation of the so-called leisure class.
Wednesday night was the climax of this great adventure, news of which has resounded around the world (the fact that we cannot read the Constitution on Liberty Hill) and the sound, of those three cheers will forever echo in my memory as the finest thing that ever happened to me.
I wish to pay my tribute to the great spirit of the crowd and to condemn the authorities who permit wholesale arrests of men who have committed no overt act, and are threatened in a manner that belongs to the dark ages.
This whole fight is between humanity and property. On which side are you willing to take your stand?
EPILOGUE
A last word to all who have read these pages.
You must have learned that the one thing I desire in this world is a full, free life for every human being as his innate right.
I became a Socialist because I brooded over the tragic contrast of the sorrows of the poor and the luxuries of the rich. Those who created everything had nothing while those who had everything created nothing—and as long as there is that widespread breach between rich and poor, we are not civilized.
Our social structure is chaotic, haphazard—no well-defined plan for the “pursuit of happiness.” Our industrial system is built upon exploitation. Our government is run in the interest of property; legislation for the benefit of human beings is of minor importance. Men are con scripted for legalized murder; 85% of our income is spent for destructive purposes, leaving very little for constructive work. In times of peace human beings are forgotten and neglected and left to shift for themselves, driven hither and yon, oft-times to crime and to suicide, unable to cope with our hideous “don’t care” system.
Just now we are at the height of the struggle for the emancipation of the working class, and while this is going on we cannot think of anything else. Of course every forward ‘looking movement is called “revolutionary.” Well, perhaps it is; why not? It seems to me that we need something revolutionary in the face of the evils which confront us.
A moment’s reflection should convince anyone that such a state of affairs is unjustifiable—that all this cruelty and barbarism of the present system of society is man-made and can be changed by man. We must realize that we are all the same under the surface, and that we cannot do things that make others suffer without hurting ourselves the most; also that not until all people are happy can we be happy.
Governments must be made to understand that the function of Government is to try to solve the problems of the people—not to waste and squander in general devastation, not to conspire with vested interests to manipulate prices, but devote themselves to the welfare of all. It can be done, it must be done, so let us try. We are indeed living in crucial times, when a man can be arrested for reading the Constitution, another for reading the Declaration of Independence, and another for saying: “It’s a pleasant evening.” All that has just happened in Los Angeles!
ANSWERS CRITICS
Editor, The Record: I have been accused in a recent issue of a Los Angeles newspaper, not the Record, of financing the marine tie-up.
That is more credit than I deserve. I would gladl
y finance the workers of the world against their exploiters, who have all the money to spread lying propaganda against men who make all their money for them. They drive the men to strike in desperation, the only way they can be heard.
Now they are striking to get their comrades out of jail, where they have been for five years, for being pacifists!
The rest of us have tried every known method of appeal to the sense of justice of the powers that be, only to be met with subterfuge, rebuffs. We, too, are being driven desperate and do not know which way to turn, nor what the next step will be. So if these men can accomplish by the general strike what we have not been able to do by petitions, letters, interviewing and picketing, then we must thank them for their self-sacrifice in upholding constitutional rights for the rest of us.
In the same paper we read, “Pasadena high school boy wins $1500 prize in oratorical contest in ‘The Constitution, Our Citadel of Freedom.’”
Yes, that is what it should be—but when any constructive or humane welfare legislation (such as the abolishment of child labor and minimum wage for women) can conveniently and technically be declared unconstitutional, then it is our business to inquire into these unjust manipulations of its supposed munificence.
The constitution is all right, but it is the people we elect to office, to interpret it, that are fallible—very fallible.
Mr. Shortridge at this same meeting, in introducing the young man said, “Our flag is the emblem of law, order, safety, righteousness and peace.”
Does he know how the criminal syndicalism law in Los Angeles permits anybody walking on the streets, speaking on the soap box or in their own halls to be arrested on “suspicion” and cast into our filthy jails where men are beaten into insensibility, in an effort to extract confessions from them? Does he know that our chief of police calls it a “wanton insult” when we dare to protest, that our district attorney’s office hires self-confessed criminals to hound innocent high-minded men (for such I have found the I. W. W.’s with whom I have come in contact) fighting for a principle—repeal of the infamous law, and release of political and class war prisoners?
The daily papers, too, try to make the world think than an I. W. W, is some sort of a being—or a bug—not quite human. Well I have yet to find one (except the three that the district attorney loves so well) who is not so far above the average “Better American” in intelligence, sympathy and kindness as to put to shame those people who want only a bigger city at the expense of the human equation.
California is called the Prussia of America, the most reactionary of the states. I would like to change that reputation to the MOST PROGRESSIVE, in fact the leader; to show the world that we have something besides climate and scenery, that we have a heart and a soul. Such is the wish of every radical and for that we are feared and condemned by those who think only of gaining their ends over the prostrate bodies of their victims.
Such also is the controversy over the school board. The Better Americans (they have decided to change their, name now though not their spots) are interested only in the expenditure of the millions in the buildings, while the other group headed by Mr. Oxnam desires to pay some attention to the child’s mind and character development; wishes him to have an OPEN mind, wishes him to read such enlightening publications as the Nation, and New Republic, instead of swallowing whole the distorted news of our daily papers.
Yes, let us work for a really better city and not just a bigger one.
KATE CRANE-GARTZ.
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{1} Crane Company, Chicago, house-organ.
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