10. Defending American Ideals.
A chorus of protest sounds, "This preparedness is to defend American ideals, American homes, and American lives against the invader."
Therefore, we must increase our navy and our army. Therefore, we must spend more billions on war though we were, at the beginning of the European war, spending a larger portion of our national revenue on war than any other great nation. Still we are "defenseless" and "utterly at the mercy of a foreign foe."
If that is true, it might be sensible to ask what has become of the four and a quarter billions that we have spent during the past twenty years on the navy and the army, but that is incidental]. The real question is whether the most threatening enemies of American ideals are in Berlin or in New York.
No one has yet invaded the United States. Those worthy citizens who have looked under their beds for the Kaiser each night during the past eighteen months have not seen him once. The Japanese are thousands of miles from our shores. England and France have not attacked us. Why then this chorus of protest?
Why Lawrence?
Why Paterson?
Why Little Falls?
Why West Virginia?
Why Colorado?
Why Youngstown, and the copper strike, and the clothing strikes, and the machinists strikes?
Why this dissatisfaction? this unrest? this embryo revolution? Can it be that the noisome tenement rookeries; the squalid back alleys; the toiling children; the exploited women; the long hours of high pressure work; and the grinding tyranny of unlimited industrial power, have aroused the American people to revolt?
Note these biting phrases:
"1. Jobs uncertain; strikes; lay-offs and sickness.
"2. Promotion and advancement uncertain and slow.
"3. Favoritism and partiality are frequently shown.
"4. Pay small and limited while learning a trade.
"5. Same old, monotonous, tiresome grind every day.
"6. Stuffy, gloomy and uninteresting working-place.
"7. When sick, your pay stops and doctor's bill starts.
"8. If disabled or injured, you receive little or no pay.
"9. If you die, your family gets only what you have saved from your small wages.
"10. Little CLEAR MONEY; nearly all you pay goes for your living expenses.
"11. Old age, sickness, little money saved, your job goes to a younger and more active man."
Do you know where they came from? They were printed on a circular issued by Uncle Sam, to explain why young men should join the navy, and work for seventeen dollars a month and board.
American ideals? No. They are not included in that description. That is not a picture of democracy, of opportunity, of liberty, and of justice. It does tell the story of exploitation, and hopeless, intolerable human degradation.
The Kaiser did not do that to us. No, nor did the Mexicans, or the Japanese. Those unspeakable conditions of American life, that may be met with in every great center of industry, commerce and finance, from New York to San Francisco, and from Chicago to New Orleans, are the product of that same system of exploitation that we are now patriotically preparing to defend in its policy of foreign aggression.