FORTY-EIGHTERS SEE MONOPOLY AS FOE
Starr, Western
Forty-Eighters See Monopoly As Foe Public Ownership of 7reimportation, Including Stockyards, Large Abattoirs, Grain Elevators, And Other Reforms Are Demanded In Platform By WESTERN...
...Another Great Issue SINCE the close of the Civil War, another great monopoly has grown up in the United States, bringing with its growth another great economic issue...
...j. The conference lasted foar days, held eleven cessions, and spent two days in discussing reports prepared by carefully selected committees...
...Single taxers were there, socialists, labor leaders, farmers, prohibitionists, free silverites...
...We demand the abolition of injunctions in labor cases...
...As one result of this procedure, every question presented was thoroughly discussed, passed on to the committees, reported, and debated before a final vote was taken...
...The outcome of the meeting lies "on the lap of the Gods...
...Louis from December 9th to 12th, at the call of the Committee of Forty-Eight...
...With this principle as a working basis, evd^y special group, without exception, resolved to join with the other groups in concentrating on the most fundamental and most obvious salient in the structure of monopoly for a united assault...
...One finger has stood against the clenched fist...
...Btrt is not that only an additional argument for immediate action...
...Yet it was effectively presented in its full economic significance for the first time in 1860...
...3. Equal economic, political, and legal rights for all, irrespective of speech or color...
...PROGRAM ADOPTED AT ST...
...Early in the conference it was discovered that every proposition submitted, in its economic phase, at least, was reducible to a single word...
...We endorse the effort of labor to share in the management of industry and labor's right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of its own choosing...
...The issue he represented had been agitated for many ye-irs...
...Time alone will tell whether 1856 or 1860 is at hand...
...Louis conference was that it takes a leaf out of monopoly's book: the lesson that in its solidarity lies its strength...
...Forty-Eighters See Monopoly As Foe Public Ownership of 7reimportation, Including Stockyards, Large Abattoirs, Grain Elevators, And Other Reforms Are Demanded In Platform By WESTERN STARR AUNIQUE—if not an historic—national conference was held in St...
...Its enemies are known, their methods understood, their secret abodes discovered...
...The immediate and absolute restoration of free speech, free press, peaceable assembly, and all civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution...
...Slavery was destroyed when it was seen to be economically as well as politically and morally unsound, and the slave power, the great monopoly of its day, crumbled...
...Virtually every profession and business was represented, but among the delegates were no candidates for public office...
...2. No land, (including natural resources) and no patents to be held out of use for speculation to aid monopoly...
...The one, striking fact of the St...
...Public ownership of other utilities and of the principal natural resources, such as coal, oil, natural gas, mineral deposits, large water powers, and large commercial lumber tracts...
...The Tower ranks of society have been pressed down to the level of a bare subsistence...
...The St...
...It remains only to be seen whether the people can be longer misled by empty phrases, insincere speech, and divided by tha trickery of shrewd political manipulators...
...Louis Conference is probably the first assembly of constructive radicals that ever met where bread was broken instead of heads...
...Louis can be so widely disseminated and understood within the few months before the opening of the national campaign that the results will be apparent in She November elections...
...LOUIS CONFERENCE 1. Public ownership of transportation, including stockyards, lai'ge abattoirs, grain elevators, terminal warehouses, pipe lines and tanks...
...No member of the Conference ventures to make claims or prophecies: but there is basis fox the hope that the lessons learned at St...
...That one note—struck by the Committee of Forty-eight —is the bugle call for the coming conflict...
...In the committees there was the most complete freedom of expression...
...With slight modifications, however, the platform or declaration of principles was adopted as recommended by the committees...
...Louis that liberalism can unite and that it must unite—on a coordinate constructive program...
...Each of these groups selected one of its number to" present its recommendations and many arguments of genuine logic and eloquence were heard...
...We favor taxes to force idle land into use...
...Grievance on Monopoly TRACKED to its final lair, it was at once observed that every grievance was the reflection of some one of the many forms of monopoly: monopoly of credits, of resources, of transportation, of public utilities, of lands, minerals, forests, etc., on the economic side, and control of the political machinery by which public opinion finds—or should find legislative expression...
...Each group through its spokesman announced to the full conference a decision to refrain from insisting upon the adoption of the special program it had come to demand, and to unite in the common battle against monopo'yMonopoly was dramatically characterized in the opening sessions as a clenched fist, while its opponents are the outspread fingers of an open hand, reaching in different directions and weakened by division of purpose and method...
...There were numerous groups, each of which was devoted to a particular program...
...It was dem'onstrated at St...
...Organized wealth has reduced the masses of the people to a condition approaching economic serfdom...
...The delegates to the conference, like the members of the Committee of Forty-Eight, proved to be men and women of convictions rather than ambitions...
...The seed is planted...
...It is true that there was a Fremont before there was a Lincoln...
...It will be remembered that sixty years ago next summer, Abraham Lincoln was one of four candidates for the presidency...
...Human freedom needs friends now as in a previous generation...
...It is this condition which has engendered unrest among the people...
...To attack any one form of monopoly singly draws to the point of attack the combined resources of defense at the command of every great aggregation of capital...
...Monopoly acts as a unit,—always...
...The strength of the monopolists has been the weakness, the lcJck of common purpose among their victims...
...Greenbackers, advocates of amnesty for political prisoners, proportional representation, and friends of Irish freedom—all having a profound conviction that unless the conference incorporated their particular plank in its platform, it must collapse...
Vol. 12 • January 1920 • No. 1
