American Minute with Bill Federer LABOR DAY: Railroad Strikes, Grover Cleveland, Eugene Debs, Socialist Party of America, Outsourcing

Labor Day. The history is a little more interesting than just picnics and hot dogs.

To appreciate it, some background is necessary.

At the time the United States was founded, most people were self-employed, working as either farmers or in trades, such as:

• baker,
• butcher,
• carpenter,
• cabinetmaker,
• upholsterer,
• tailor,
• milliner (clothes merchant),
• cobbler (shoe maker),
• chandler (candle maker),
• cooper (barrel maker),
• wheelwright (wheel craftsman).
• blacksmith,
• gunsmith,
• printer, and
• apothecary … continue reading …

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Where Ireland burned peat from bogs, Britain burned coal from mines.

The problem was that mines kept filling up with water.

This led to the creation of factories which could mass produce items inexpensively.

Workers moved from farms to factories. The products they manufactured were imported into America.

During the colonial era, Britain prevented factories from being built in America.

After the Revolution, Samuel Slater built the first factory in America in 1790, a cotton spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

The first union in America was a shoe makers union in Philadelphia in 1794.

President Washington signed a bill putting a tariff tax on European-manufactured products making them more expensive in order to encourage people to purchase American-manufactured products.

Tariffs were the main source of income for the Federal government, as there was no income tax till Lincoln’s temporary one during the Civil War.

Most of America’s factories were located in Northern states.

Tariff taxes that helped the Northern states hurt the Southern states, as the South was agricultural with few factories.

At one point, nearly 90 percent of the Federal budget came from tariff taxes collected at Southern ports.

This fueled animosity between the North and South prior to the Civil War.

After the Civil War, more tariff taxes were passed allowing Northern factories to grow enormous.

Women were freed up from tedious daily tasks, such as hand-weaving thread, hand-sewing cloth, and hand-washing clothes.

Instead of carrying water from a well, pumps and pipes brought water directly into homes.

New ways of making stronger iron and steel helped build bridges, skyscrapers, steamboats, and mining machinery.

Railroads began taking people safely and inexpensively across the entire nation, opening up unprecedented mobility and opportunity.

Inventions and advances in manufacturing made more goods available at cheaper prices.

Americans experienced the fastest rise in the standard of living of any people in world history.

President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty in 1886 to welcome immigrants, who were mostly English, Irish, Scandinavian, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Russian, Jews, and Germans.

Most immigrants were hard workers, as noted by German sociologist Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904-1905.

It was a foundational textbook in economic sociology, listed as the 4th most important sociological book of the 20th century by the International Sociological Association.

Weber documented how modern capitalism evolved out of the Protestant Calvinism in Northern Europe, which emphasized self-discipline, hard work, frugality, thrift, and avoidance of all forms of indulgence for religious reasons.

Weber described Calvinists, Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, traditional Lutherans, pietist Lutherans, and Moravians from Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf’s Herrnhut community.

Religious adherents established private secular enterprises, engaged in trade, and accumulated wealth to support charitable missionary activity.

In 1867, Horatio Alger began publishing a best-selling novels, such as:

Ragged Dick;

Strong and Steady, Or, Paddle Your Own Canoe; and

Shifting for Himself: Or Gilbert Greyson’s Fortune.

These were stories were about immigrants, impoverished orphans, or homeless street boys, who sold newspapers, polished shoes or sold apples, demonstrating the Protestant work ethic, and rose from humble beginnings to achieving success.

In 1894, Orison Swett Marden wrote “Pushing to the Front”, and in 1897, he founded SUCCESS magazine, publishing inspirational stories of success in life through common-sense principles and well-rounded virtues.

Immigrants were not a financial burden on the government, as there were no government welfare programs.

Extended family, churches, and generous individuals who gave to charity were the welfare net.

These ideas only found limited acceptance in America, as wealth could be achieved in one lifetime if one was innovative and worked hard. This era was referred to as The Gilded Age.

The situation was different in Europe, where wealthy elites owned most of the property, passing it from generation to generation for centuries, leaving little for commoners.

Socialist ideas created labor tensions, with some workers even embracing the anarchist goal of tearing down the capitalist system, naively hoping a utopian socialist economy would take its place.

Factory working conditions were often unsafe, as noted in Charles Dicken’s Hard Times, 1854, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, 1905.

Though immigrants were not forced to work in factories, many joined in organizing unions push for better working conditions, an 8-hour work day, and income taxes on the rich.

Union organizing flyers were printed in English and German languages.

Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper, built a factory in Chicago. A Presbyterian, McCormick felt his reaper would help to fulfill a religious mission to feed the world.

In 1869, McCormick donated $10,000 to Dwight L. Moody to build the Chicago Young Men’s Christian Assoication.

Beginning in 1882, there was an economic downturn in America.

In German immigrants holding socialist ideas organized a protest on May 4, 1886, near the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant in Chicago.

The “peaceful” protest turned into the Haymarket Riot. A protestor threw a dynamite bomb at the police.

The blast, and the violence that followed, killed seven police officers, four civilians, and wounded dozens more.

To commemorate the incident, socialist workers made May 1st “International Workers Day.”

George Pullman founded the Pullman Railroad Sleeping Car Company.

Pullman saw that workers needed a place to live, so he built them houses in a safe little village around the factory, with rent deducted from paychecks.

To save them the trouble of traveling to the markets, he located stores on site.

Workers were paid company “scrip,” similar to food stamps, which were redeemable at the company-owned grocery stores.

It was considered a utopian workers’ paradise community, in the vein of Sir Thomas More’s Island of Utopia, published in 1516; and Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, published in 1626.

The Pullman community worked for over a decade until there was a nationwide economic depression in 1893, resulting in orders for railroad sleeping cars dropping off.

To keep the company afloat, George Pullman had to make cuts in wages and lay off hundreds of employees, though, for the time being, rents and groceries stayed the same price.

Employees were distraught, as they had grown dependent on the company.

Some employees walked off their jobs, demanding higher pay and lower rents, being unaware that the reason for the cuts was that the company needed to stay in business during the economic crash.

A high school drop out named Eugene Debs got a job cleaning grease from freight engines.

He was promoted to locomotive fireman and joined the Brotherhood of Locomotive Fireman.

He briefly served as a Terre Haute city clerk and one-term Indiana state representative.

When the 1893 economic downturn occurred, Debs organized a railroad workers strike in 1894.

Union workers across the nation joined in boycotting trains carrying Pullman cars.

Then rioters pillaged and burned railroad cars, destroying an estimated $80 million worth of property in 27 states.

A New York Times editorial, July 9, 1894, called Debs “a lawbreaker at large, an enemy of the human race.”

“Debs’ Rebellion” became a national issue because it interrupted delivery of mail.

President Grover Cleveland declared the strike a federal crime and deployed 12,000 U.S. Army troops to break up the strike.

More violence erupted, and two were killed.

After the riots, Americans blamed the Democrat Administration.

Democrat advisor Francis Lynde Stetson warned Cleveland regarding the upcoming mid-term elections of 1894:

“We are on the eve of very dark night, unless a return of commercial prosperity relieves popular discontent with what they believe is Democratic incompetence to make laws, and consequently with Democratic Administrations anywhere and everywhere.”

Cleveland thought it might improve his Party’s election chances if workers were given a day off, so support grew for a national “LABOR DAY.”

Workers wanted Labor Day to be on May 1st to coincide with the “International Workers Day” and the anniversary of the bloody Chicago’s Haymarket Riot.

Instead, Grover Cleveland chose the FIRST MONDAY in SEPTEMBER to celebrate LABOR DAY.

What happened to May 1st?

Patriotic Americans celebrated May 1st as “Loyalty Day,” officially recognized by Congress, April 27, 1955, and proclaimed an annual holiday by President Eisenhower with Public Law 85-529.

What happened in the 1894 elections?

It did not help the Democrat Party as it had the biggest mid-term loss in decades.

What happened to Eugene Debs?

He was arrested, because the railroad strike obstructed delivery of United States mail, and he was put in prison for six months.

In prison, Debs “ravenously” read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

Socialist progressives demanded the redistribution of wealth, resulting in the passage of:

* corporate income tax, 1894;

* personal income tax, 1914; and

* inheritance estate tax, 1916.

Debs and socialist rioters were defended by the attorney Clarence Darrow.

Darrow later defended evolution in the Scope’s Monkey Trial.

After six months in prison, Eugene Debs was released.

He then founded:

* the Social Democracy of America, 1897;

* the Social Democratic Party of America, 1898; and

* the Socialist Party of America, 1901.

Debs ran five time for United States President as a socialist, 1900 till 1920. He won zero electoral votes, so he wanted to get rid of America’s electoral process.

When World War One started, Debs urged resistance to the draft.

One draft-dodger was Roger Baldwin, who later founded the A.C.L.U. – American Civil Liberties Union – to help defend those who were accused of being socialist agitators.

Roger Baldwin wrote:

“I am for socialism … I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.”

Eugene Deb’s reputation spread around the world to Russia, where he influenced socialist leader Vladimir Lenin.

Lenin organized the Bolshevik Revolution overthrowing Tsar Nicholas II and killing an estimated 12 million.

Lenin cited Debs in “An Open Letter to Boris Souvarine,” published January 27, 1918, in La Vente, No. 48:

“Look at America—apart from everything else a neutral country. Haven’t we the beginnings of a split there, too: Eugene Debs, the ‘American Rebel’, declares in the socialist press that he recognizes only one type of war, civil war for the victory of socialism, and that he would sooner be shot than vote a single cent for American war expenditure ”

Eugene Deb’s Appeal to Reason, “When I Shall Fight,” Number 1032, September 11, 1915).

Lenin wrote “On the Appeal of the German Independents,” February 1919, Lenin Miscellany 24, 1933; Lenin Collected Works, 1971, Moscow.

“I quoted the statement of the ‘American Rebel,’ Eugene Debs, to the effect that he would rather be shot than agree to vote for imperialist war loans, and that he would agree to fight only in a war of the workers against the capitalists.”

Debs gave an anti-government speech in Canton, Ohio, June 16, 1918, resulting in his arrest.

He was charged with ten counts of sedition and sentenced to ten years in prison.

A May Day parade in was organized in Cleveland, Ohio, to support Debs, led by union members, socialists, and anarchists.

Their peaceful parade broke out into Antifa-style violence — the May Day Riots of 1919.

Debs’ attorney asked for a Presidential pardon, but Woodrow Wilson wrote “denied” across the paperwork, stating that during World War One:

“While the flower of American youth was pouring out its blood to vindicate the cause of civilization, this man, Debs, stood behind the lines sniping, attacking, and denouncing them …

This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration.”

The next President, Warren Harding, also did not pardon Debs, and the White House released the statement:

“There is no question of his guilt … He is … a dangerous man calculated to mislead the unthinking and affording excuse for those with criminal intent.”

Theodore Roosevelt had criticized Debs for fomenting “bloodshed, anarchy, and riot,” calling him one of the nation’s most “undesirable citizens.”

In 1979, Bernie Sanders produced a documentary praising Eugene Debs. He hung a portrait of Debs in the City Hall of Burlington, Vermont, and dedicated a plaque to him in his Congressional office.

After the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin decided to take his revolution global, forming the Communist International in 1919.

Members of Debs’ Socialist Party of America followed suit and formed the Communist Party USA on September 1, 1919.

The Communist Party USA ran candidates for United States President every year from 1924 till 1940.

That is when they decided to support Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt for his New Deal welfare programs during the Great Depression and for his treaty with the Soviet leader Josef Stalin during World War Two.

Reagan commented on communist infiltration of the Democrat Party:

“I didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me.”

Party infiltration was listed as one of the communist goals for America, read into the Congressional Record by Representative Albert S. Herlong, January 10, 1963:

“Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.”

Former Democrat United States Senator Zell Miller stated in an interview for his book Deficit of Decency, 2005:

“Unfortunately, the national Democratic Party has lost its way … and they’ve been taken over by the very liberal, left-wing leaning special interest groups that you have in Washington.”

In Chicago, a statue was erected to honor the police officers killed in the 1886 Haymarket Riot.

That statue was blown up on October 6, 1969, by the anarchist “Weatherman Underground” during their Days of Rage.

Chicago rebuilt the Haymarket statue, only see it blown up again by the Weatherman Underground, October 6, 1970.

Weatherman Underground member Bill Ayers later helped launch the political career of a young Illinois State Senator Barack Obama.

Bill Ayers stated:

“I am a radical, leftist, small ‘c’ communist … Maybe I’m the last communist who is willing to admit it … The ethics of communism still appeal to me. I don’t like Lenin as much as the early Marx.”

Weatherman Underground member Eric Mann helped train Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matters.

Cullors stated in 2015:

“Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers … We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories.”

In America, laborers work hard for wages with which they can buy things, trucks, houses, cars, boats, guns, and other personal possessions.

They also can give away some of their possessions to those in need in charity.

In socialist countries, laborers work hard, but own no possessions.

People with no possessions have nothing with which to be charitable.

Marx and Engles wrote in the Communist Manifesto, 1848:

“The theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”

Lenin stated:

“The goal of socialism is communism.”

Marx described socialism as a transition phase from capitalism to communism, in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, Part Four:

“Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation.”

Author Ayn Rand wrote:

“There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force; socialism – by vote.

It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.”

Socialists believe that when governments finally succeed in taking away all the private possessions from everyone in the entire world, then the world will magically become a wonderful utopia called communism.

The term “communism” comes from the Latin word “communis,”meaning everything held in common.

Communist goals are not just to end private property, but to end privacy. People will not even have control over their own children.

The government will control everything, on both the production side and the consumption side.

In 1971, John Lennon and his second wife, Yoko Ono, co-wrote the song “Imagine,” with socialist-themed lyrics: “Imagine no possessions … And no religion too.”

Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum stated that by 2030: “You will own nothing but be happy.”

The term “socialism” was coined by French political philosopher Henry de Saint-Simon, 1760–1825, to mean the opposite of the “individual.”

Use of the term socialism was popularized by mid-to-late 1800s European theorists, such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Leon Trotsky, and Antonio Gramsci.

In contrast to the socialism is Judeo-Christian Western Civilization, which promotes the concept of the individual — that each person has worth and an identity apart from belonging to any group, simply by virtue of being made in the image of God, who is not a respecter of persons.

John F. Kennedy stated in his Inaugural Address, 1961:

“The Rights of man Come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.”

Harry Truman stated in his Inaugural Address, 1949:

“We believe that all men are created equal, because they are created in the image of God.”

Individuals can also earn money with which they can buy things – the consumption side.

Socialist Antonio Gramsci explained that the Judeo-Christian idea of “individual” must be replaced by group identity, as he wrote in “Audacia e Fede,” printed in the Avanti! newspaper, May 1916:

“Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity.”

James Wardner summarized Gramsci’s views in Unholy Alliances, 1996:

“In the new order, socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”

Marx and Friedrich Engels explained in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 10, page 318:

“Conspirators by no means confine themselves to organizing the revolutionary proletariat – working class. Their business consists in … spurring it in to artificial crises …

For them the only condition required for the revolution is a sufficient organization of their own conspiracy. They are the alchemists of the revolution.”

It should be acknowledged that Unions did help to bring about:

an end of child labor;

an 8-hour work day;

a 40-hour work week;

minimum wages;

safer working conditions; and

more benefits for workers.

These benefits, as good as they are, came with a cost.

Companies began to look for ways to cut expenses and limit the power of unions.

A story circulated that Henry Ford wanted to break union control by recruiting Muslims to work in his factories.

Ford was said to have met a Yemeni sailor at port.

Witnessing his hard work, Ford told him if he showed up at his auto factory he would give him a job that paid five dollars a day.

The sailor spread the word, leading to chain migration from Yemen and other Middle Eastern countries to Detroit.

ArabAmerica.com reported, September 5, 2020:

“The origin story of how the Yemeni community in Michigan is an interesting one.

Way back in the early 1900s, Henry Ford started recruiting Yemeni workers to work at Ford’s factories.

After a few years, Ford sent for more workers and the Yemeni American community began to grow.

People who gained citizenship during their time working for Ford brought family over and started lives in Michigan while remaining close to their family back in Yemen.”

Henry Ford may have thus initiated the mass immigration of Middle Easterners to Dearborn and Hamtramck in order to counter unions.

Unions were anti-immigrant, as cheaper immigrant labor undercut union wages.

Another unanticipated consequence of the cost of workers’ benefits was automation and out-sourcing as ways companies could stay competitive in the global marketplace.

After World War Two, America helped rebuild Germany and Japan with new factories.

These overseas factories, with their cheaper labor costs and newer machinery, produced items less expensively and took a larger part of the global market.

They hired lobbyists to push for United States politicians to lower tariffs so they could bring their less expensive products in, gaining a competitive advantage over American factories.

Higher costs of doing business in the United States included:

Higher wages;

Increased taxes;

Expensive lawsuits;

Burdensome regulations;

Environmental restrictions;

Crony capitalism, globalist capitalism, vulture capitalism, and big tech monopolies, where career politicians provide subsidies, contracts, and relax regulations for companies supporting their political agendas and reelection campaigns ;but deny those benefits and even weaponizing government against companies not supporting them.

As American-made products became more expensive in comparison to foreign-made products, consumers bought fewer of them, resulting in American factories needing fewer workers.

“Squeeze the sponge and the water goes out” – as manufacturing costs in America rose, manufacturers moved with their jobs to other countries.

Many companies were sadly put in the position of going out of country or going out of business.

To personalize this, if you needed gas for your car, and the gas station on your side of the street sold it at $4.50 a gallon, but the station on the other side of the street sold it for just $1.99 a gallon, would you cross the street?

Just as water seeks its own level, individuals and businesses are motivated to save money.

President Donald Trump’s tariffs are an attempt to bring factories and jobs back to America, making it more profitable for factories to be located here than there.

Another by-product of companies moving overseas was their loss of patriotism, creating “globalists.”

Globalists are international big businesses whose patriotism is to their profits.

Globalists are happy to work with socialist and communist governments as a means secure monopolies and guarantee profits.

Capitalism is effectively split in two:

“individual” capitalism being patriotic, supporting the countrythat gives equal opportunities for advancement;

and

“globalist” capitalism which squelches competition by supporting one world government socialist politicians who return the favor with profitable government contracts, exception of regulations, and insider trade deals.

Politicians receiving money from globalists are pressured to enact regulations which put smaller competitors out of business.

As unions grew, another situation developed. Union leadership often held values different than rank-and-file workers.

Many workers supported the Second Amendment, traditional marriage, biological male and female definitions of sex, and protection of the unborn, yet union leadership often funneled union dues to support candidates who voted for opposing views.

Ironicaly, socialist strategy includes raising unemployment rates so unemployed workers will sign up for welfare benefits.

Once they become dependent on welfare benefits, they are inclined to vote for politicians who promise to continue them.

More unemployment means more people on welfare, means an increased Democart voter base.

If welfare entitlements are threatened, recipients are primed to be organized into revolutionaries.

Socialist thinker Friedrich Engels wrote in 1844, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, 1844; London: W.O. Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels, 1976:

“Every fresh slump must ruin more small capitalists and increase the workers who live only by their labor.

This will increase the number of the unemployed and this is the main problem that worries economists.

In the end commercial crises will lead to a social revolution far beyond the comprehension of the economists with their scholastic wisdom.”

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushschev reportedly told Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture, in 1959:

“We won’t have to fight you; We’ll so weaken your economy, until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands.”

Union membership has declined in America from a high of 35 percent of the workforce in 1954 to currently less than 9.9 percent.

Instead of attracting manufacturers back to America, many unions have focused on increasing membership by recruiting from other occupations, such as government, education, medical professionals, sports, service industry, and retail.

Warning American workers of the hidden danger of the “social justice” movement, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had spent 11 years in labor camps in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, stated, June 30, 1975:

“I … call upon America to be more careful with its trust …

Prevent those … who are attempting to establish even finer … legal shades of equality — because of their … falsely using the struggle for peace and for social justice to lead you down a false road …

They are trying to weaken you; they are trying to disarm your strong and magnificent country in the face of this fearful threat …

I call upon you: ordinary working men of America … do not let yourselves become weak.”

America’s entrepreneurial spirit was articulated by Booker T. Washington, who founded the National Negro Business League in 1900.

He stated:

“Anyone can seek a job, but it requires a person of rare ability to create a job … What we should do in our schools is to turn out fewer job seekers and more job creators.”

Reagan stated in 1988:

“I believe we really can say that God did give mankind virtually unlimited gifts to invent, produce, and create. And for that reason alone, it would be wrong for governments to devise a tax structure or economic system that suppresses and denies those gifts.”

A spiritual insight is found in First Corinthians 15:58:

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.”

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