Letters To Judd, An American Workingman - free ebook by Upton Sinclair

Letters to Judd

An American Workingman By UPTON SINCLAIR Published by the Author PASADENA, CALIFORNIA LETTERS TO JUDD BY Upton Sinclair...

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INTRODUCTION

Judd is an old carpenter who has done odd jobs on our place for the past ten years. Just how old he is I don’t know, but he’s pretty old; his hands are gnarled and calloused and his finger nails chewed up and broken by hammer blows; there are knotted veins in his forehead and his hair is grey and thin. But he works like a beaver, and don’t you ever hint that he should slow up—he will hoot at you, and say that he can lick any young feller with one hand. He will hitch his harness into place—he has

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LETTER I

My dear Judd : There are some things which you and I and all Americans take for granted, and don’t have to argue about. For example, every man has a right to get to heaven in his own way, if he can; we are not going to meddle with any one’s religion. Also, we believe that all men should be equal before the law. We don’t mean they all have equal abilities—for that would be a foolish thing to say; but they all have equal rights “to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Also, every man has a

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LETTER II

My dear Judd : The Bible tells us that “man does not live by bread alone.” To hear some people talk, you would think the Bible said that “man does not live by bread.” You and I know that he does; and if he is to be decent and civilized, he needs many other things, a home with several rooms in it, and clean clothing, and books, and recreation. There is nothing more destructive of health and happiness than extreme poverty; the inability to get for yourself and your loved ones the common necessitie

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LETTER III

My dear Judd : How does it happen that, in this our land of liberty and prosperity, the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer. When you talk about the matter with an economist, he uses many long words, and tells you about natural processes, controlled by inexorable laws. Well, Judd, it all depends upon how you look at it, from the inside or the outside. If you look from the outside, you see economic processes; but if you look from the inside, you see the actions of men. Wealth is produced

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LETTER IV

My dear Judd : We are studying our money system, with the idea of understanding how it causes the rich to grow richer and the poor poorer. Money, in its relation to the price of goods, is like a pair of scales in balance. If you add to the weight in the right-hand pan, it will go down; also, the same thing will happen if you take away the weight in the other pan. A bushel of wheat is worth, let us say, one dollar; and if anything should happen to double the quantity of wheat in the world, the pr

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LETTER V

My dear Judd : The next thing we want to understand is the tariff, and how that works to take money out of the pockets of the poor and put it into the pockets of the rich. The government has to have money, like any other business. We all desire government services, and should pay our proper share, honestly and openly calculated. But we haven’t an honest government, nor an honest social system; nobody wants to pay his share of anything, and taxes are unpopular; therefore the politicians put their

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LETTER VI

My dear Judd : Figure to yourself a man pumping water from the ground, filling a tank to supply his house. There is an abundance of water, and the pump is big and powerful, and every time the man pushes the handle many gallons go rushing towards the tank. The man works all day, yet when he goes to the house in the evening, he discovers there are only a few drops of water in his tank. Some men have tapped the pipe, all along the way, and have diverted the water to their own tanks; so the man has

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LETTER VII

My dear Judd : When I was a youth, trying to find out about my country, one of the first things I learned was that its politics were corrupt. I lived in New York City, and saw that corruption all about me, and the hideous ruin of human lives; naturally I tried to figure out why these things had to be. The explanation given me in school was that it was the ignorant foreigners who crowded into our cities; they didn’t understand our institutions, they sold their votes, and delivered our political p

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LETTER VIII

My dear Judd : You read about the rich growing richer and the poor poorer, and you wonder why the poor have stood it. Why didn’t they “do something.” The answer is, they tried to, but the rich wouldn’t let them. It is of the nature of wealth to be powerful, and to use its power to protect and perpetuate itself. Jesus said: “Whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have.” You have there the whole of political and economic

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LETTER IX

My dear Judd : We know by now what the word “privilege” means. Hundreds of thousands of people do not have to do useful labor in our society; they draw off the profits of other people’s labor, and the good things of life flow to them in a stream so great as sometimes to overwhelm them. And this flow is guaranteed them for life, and to their descendants to the end of time. All our political teachings, all our economic calculations, are based upon the idea that this state of affairs is permanent;

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LETTER X

My dear Judd : We have seen the poor struggling to protect themselves against the rich in the field of politics, and meeting with no great success. There is another place where they struggle—in the labor market. Let us see what happens to them there. Seeing the employers combining into larger and larger organizations, it naturally occurred to the workers to combine, and sell their labor as a unit. At first the employers made this action a crime, and a great many working men went to jail, before

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LETTER XI

My dear Judd : I don’t know whether you ever played poker, but I did a few times in my naughty youth. I recall a game known as “freeze-out”; you played till you lost all your money, and the game ended entirely when one man got all the chips. That is our social system—a colossal game of “freeze-out,” with winter and disease and death to clear the players from the board. Those who lose at the game are the workers of the world. You, Judd, must realize that you are in an unusual position for a worke

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LETTER XII

My dear Judd : I have said that unemployment is a disease of the profit system, incurable under that system. I am now going to show why, and I consider these facts the most important in the whole world for a workingman to understand. They are perfectly simple—any child can grasp them; yet they are never mentioned in any newspaper, and never taught in any school. The reason is equally simple—any editor who publishes them, or any teacher who teaches them, immediately loses his job. I put them into

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LETTER XIII

My dear Judd : The essence of our industrial system is the private ownership of the means of production; with profit for the private owner as the motive power of industry. The capitalist produces the goods we need, and in order to get them we pay him everything above the bare means of keeping us alive and enabling us to raise the next generation. If this system should break down, it is obvious that we must change to some form of social ownership of the means of production; instead of having the

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LETTER XIV

My dear Judd : It is an interesting thing to study the development of human society through a long period of history. Men began in small tribes, in which they were very much alike, and stood on an equal footing. These tribes fought, and absorbed one another, and grew more complex, with greater differences among the members; dukedoms and principalities arose, and then kingdoms, and at last great empires, with rulers and subjects ranged in classes, and the class lines rigidly drawn. It was against

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LETTER XV

My dear Judd : We are going to take over the industrial plant of the United States, and run it as one planned enterprise for the benefit of the whole people. Just what do we mean to take? Roughly speaking, all railroads, telegraphs and telephones, all banks, the mines and large factories, the large oil fields with pipe-lines and refineries, the large packing and canning plants, the large warehouses and stores, and what office buildings are necessary for these enterprises. We do not want the home

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LETTER XVI

My dear Judd : We have been discussing the problem of how the workers are to get possession of the industrial machinery of the country. I have proposed to pay for it; but there are some who insist that the workers should seize the plant. It has been built by the workers, and taken from them by fraud; if we purchase it, we merely continue exploitation under another form; the government replaces the owners as task-master, and collects the profits and pays them to the owners in the form of dividend

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LETTER XVII

My dear Judd : The social revolution has already happened over one-sixth of the earth’s surface, and 140,000,000 people are now living in a working class world. Whatever may be our point of view, we cannot afford to misunderstand what has happened in Russia, for capitalism has made the world one, and our efforts to shut ourselves up in our own country are bound to fail. The Russian revolution came as the result of a breakdown in the midst of war. The great empire was rotten with graft, and after

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LETTER XVIII

My dear Judd : Our country today is traveling headlong the road which has led every great empire in history to its doom. And this is no piece of rhetoric, but a summary of statistics to be found in our census reports. What ruined Rome was the spread of capitalist imperialism with its consequences—the undermining of the independent farmers, the growth of tenantry and absentee landlordism, and the turning of the country population into city slum-dwellers, uncertain of their employment and dependen

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LETTER XIX

My dear Judd : We have come to the end of our task. I have tried to show you what is going on in our country, and the job you have to do. We are moving towards a new American revolution. That does not mean riot and tumult, as our enemies try to represent; but neither does it mean slavish submission to every repression of government. There is the best American precedent for resistance to tyranny, and those good ladies who call themselves “Daughters of the American Revolution” would be shocked spe

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UPTON SINCLAIR

PASADENA CALIFORNIA March 15, 1926. Dear Friend : I do not think that since the world began there has ever been a people so lied to as the American people to-day. There are 110,000,000 of us, and at least 105,000,000 are completely befuddled by a campaign of deception, backed by the whole power of American big business, the newspapers, the magazines, the movies, the radio, the vast machinery of government, and the two major political parties. I am supposed to be working on a novel, “Oil,” to the

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