WAKING UP WALL STREET
Waking Up Wall Street EVER since the farmers of North Dakota rose in their political might and broke the shackles, for once, of Monopoly Extortions, the press in the East has been printing start...
...They will never look upon it as their country, in the sense that the German people feel, until we change the present order of things...
...Give us social insurance, which protects the working man against Hie calamities of accident, sickness, old age...
...They know perfectly well, sir, that the raw material is now seized by automatic hands, and that it passes from machine to machine with but a small fraction of the hand labor that was in it twenty-flve years ago, and finally comes out, with the direction of a skilled workman hero and there, a finished product at not 25 per cent, the cost of hand labor of a quarter of a century ago...
...It works as well the other way...
...For years the argument has had some force with me that women should be discouraged from working in factories and stores, and hence they have been discriminated against in wages, but I have slowly come to the settled conviction that this practice has been unfair, because equal work deserves equal pay...
...They know perfectly well that this most progressive nation of all the world, this most inventive nation of all the world, is producing more cheaply today than ever before in the history of mankind...
...The people, the common people, believe in La Follette...
...He asks why it is that Germany is strong in this war...
...Waking Up Wall Street EVER since the farmers of North Dakota rose in their political might and broke the shackles, for once, of Monopoly Extortions, the press in the East has been printing start led comments upon their courage and their combined efficiency...
...It was a speech of Senator La Follette of Wisconsin...
...Not all the waving of flags nor the giving of lectures nor the taking of oaths will make America what we want her to be...
...but, Mr...
...Perhaps in this instance the writer reflects sympathy for the North Dakota farmers' gameness, while maintaining "business office'' traditions of "writing what the readers want...
...Let that be the first step...
...They are not at all alike in climate, in natural resources, or in the make-up of the population...
...They know that...
...The only wisdom is collective wisdom, and Wilson's great strength lies in the fact that in spite of the handicap of the class room, ho can usually perceive which way the mind of the country is turning about big things and can do what ought to be done...
...They find it run for the benefit of special interests...
...Hear what he...
...THE ETGHT-HOUR DAY should be extended to all our industries whore possible...
...Whichever side you may have been for in the late mix-up, you can't help feeling that this is a pretty good sin.—Charles Edward Russell...
...What laboring man but finds his own experience summarized in these words: "They have had a little advance in wages, but while they were getting it they have seen the combination of manufacturers advance the cost of living 100 per cent...
...The new administration has just taken office...
...How are we to Americanize America, to make it a country of the people...
...Massachusetts and California have made the country see that health insurance is a desirable measure of human betterment— and needed EVERYWHERE...
...The Farmers Non-Partisan League alone elected the Governor and all other State officers except the State Treasurer, to whose victory Democratic votes contributed...
...Yet both give official recognition to the need of health insurance...
...President, when you grind the faces of the poor, when you force the parents to put their children into the factories in order that they may exist, when you have little care for the death rate in the homes where children of the poor are born, you are sowing the seeds of a disregard and resentment against this government of professed equality for all that may bring upon us at some time that which we would most deprecate, which we would most of everything in life wish to put from us...
...What was the occasion of Senator La Fol-i.ette's speech...
...The nation has understood that when all was said and done here was a man that tried to do his best according to American standards of civilization and American thought, and has declined to pass him up...
...says: "If there be any man on this floor who has addressed in campaigns gatherings of wage earners, and it has sometimes fallen to me to do it, he cannot help, as I have, to have seen the difference with which wage earners in this country respond to appeals to glorify our government and the flag...
...It is a mournful reflection that that political party whose main tenet was socialization of the American state—his political party was allowed to be throttled while its leaders of little vision stood idly by...
...Let no man have any delusion as to that...
...Under whatever conditions men and women labor, vast benefits come to worker, employer and society at large by a lessening of suffering and dependency and an improvement of the public health...
...The farmers live apart and vote together: the city folks live together and vote any old way...
...Women should be given the rights which, in justice belong to them...
...THERE ISN'T any such tiling as superior wisdom...
...They differ widely in industrial conditions...
...This recognition has come not only from the state authorized commissions that made long and searching study, but also from the governors of these two states, who have been spokesmen for different political policies...
...His labor was successful...
...Senator La Follette does not find the same unswerving loyalty in America...
...In it he indicated the way toward the real Americanization of America, toward the creation of that unity between citizens and state which is the only sound ingredient in patriotism...
...They do not require senators and economists to teach them that...
...The farmer are bent upon having state-owned terminal elevators, packing-plants, flour mills, cold storage plants and warehouses...
...They propose exemption of farm Improvements from taxation, a rural credit bank operated at cost, and—most millennial of changes—the abolition of political parties...
...It means, sir, that they have a government over there that takes care of the German people from birth to the time when they aro able to enter the armies of the Kaiser...
...And Governor McCall made compulsory health insurance legislation his principal recommendation to the present legislature, saying, "There is no form of social insurance that is more humane, sounder in principle, and that would confer a greater benefit upon large groups of our population and upon the commonwealth as a whole, than health insurance...
...The power of the German nation in this world war, Mr...
...while they were getting 15 or 16 per cent, advance in wages...
...One of these editorials we print, just following...
...It is a terrible arraignment of the social policy of this country, whose, government leaves solely to the beneficent working of so-called economic laws the distribution of the income derived from the joint labor of society...
...The Farmers Capture A State Pale inmate of the prisoning town, turn your anxious and overweary eyes to the State of North Dakota, the government of which has been taken over for a term of two years or longer by the farmer...
...He spoke in defense of an item of $72,000 asked for the Children's Bureau for the purpose of ascertaning the cause of the awful mortality among the children of those who work for wages in this country...
...Patriotism is an exalted form of the bond of self-interest...
...Hence all women in our employment who do equal work shall have equal pay.—Henrt Fokd...
...It is from the New York Sun...
...Let the government take thought for the people, and they will take thought for it...
...and they know perfectly well that with this enormous increase in the cost of living piled upon their bended backs they find it next to" impossible to make income meet expenses...
...The need for health insurance is really universal...
...In it...
...He concludes : "I am not entirely a novrce in public affairs...
...Why should not Rent Payers Leagues arise and sweep the cities on a platform calling for municipally owned apartment houses and corner groceries, an urban credit bank operated at cost, free circuses every Saturday night in municipally owned Madison Square Gardens, and the abolition of after-dinner speeches...
...These states are at opposite extremes of the continent...
...there not a lesson for the city dweller here...
...What does it signify...
...Governor Johnson in his message declared, "I believe in health insurance...
...The Strength of Nations (Editorial From the New York Evening Mail) IN THE MIDST or our preoccupation with the issues of war and peace, a great speech has been made in the Congress of the United States, and has passed unnoticed...
...Sickness among wage earners, and consequent distress, arc found everywhere...
...President, the loyalty of the German people to that nation, has amazed the world...
...That, he says, is because the laboring men of this country, the masses, do not find the government run for them...
...invalidity, and protects his family against the certain calamity of his death...
...The league also elected SI of the 113 members of the State House of Representatives, eighteen of twenty-five members of the State Senate who were to be chosen, and filled with its men all three vacancies on the Supreme Court bench...
...Suppose farmers everywhere—and city folks everywhere—actually did "get together" to break down the extortions of private monopolies that underpay the producer at one end and overcharge the consumer at the other...
...Would that be any more "un-American," or amazing, than to permit private "exploitation of public needs to run its course unchecked...
...A Universal Need COMING out almost simultaneously in favor of compulsory health insurance, the reports of the legislative investigating commissions in California and Massachusetts have unusual significance...
...They know that perfectly well, because they work with these machines that almost talk...
...Whose country is this...
...I have spent almost my whole life in dealing with these questions, and I am constrained to believe that it behooves the statesmanship of this country to give consideration to these things that concern the millions of the toilers of our country...
...he told what it is that makes nations strong...
...Twenty-five years ago you could bring an audience of laboring men to their feet cheering for Old Glory and what it did for liberty, freedom, for emancipation...
...One and all, as one people—socialists who hate the name war, imperialists, agrarians, clerics—all are ready to go into the trenches of hell and death to be buried there for the German government...
...It is not a kaiser's war so far as Germany is concerned, whatever we may think about it...
...But it was not successful until ho and a few of his associates had spent an entire day opposing a reduction of this item, the reduction being fathered by the Senate committee that had charge of the appropriation...
Vol. 9 • February 1917 • No. 2
