[Continued from above.]

John D Rockefeller Jr before the Commission on Industrial Relations.
Rockefeller, unidentified, Commissioner Weinstock, Commissioner Mrs. J Borden Harriman,
Commissioner Lennon, Chairman Frank P Walsh, Secretary Manley, Commissioner OConnell.
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How much have you got? Two per cent of the people of this country own sixty per cent of the wealth of this country. They are the Rich. Thirty-three per cent of the people of this country own thirty-five per cent of the wealth of this country. They are the Middle Class. Sixty-five per cent of the people of this country own five per cent of the wealth of this country. They are the Poor. Of course, these are only statistics and some wise guy hit it right when he said there are three kinds of lies (1) plain lies ,(2) damn lies, (3) statistics. There's a real smash, however, about this one fact from the books of the United States Income Tax officers: Forty-four families in this country have each one of them one million dollars or more pouring in to them every year. Altogether fifty millions a year is dumped into the hands and laps of these fifty-four families each year. This means that these fifty-four families get as much money in a year as 100,000 working men who get $500 a year apiece in their pay envelopes.

What about it? Some say pass laws. If the fat man who runs a factory doesn't run it right, pass a law and make him run it right. That's the notion in the heads of some working men. Well, this is all right, only it doesn't work in most cases.

When Gene Debs went to making speeches after he got out of Woodstock' jail, he said, "You can no more regulate a corporation with laws than you can tangle an elephant with cobwebs." There are good laws that labor unions got passed in different states. In all these states these laws have been wiped out by the Supreme Courts. Judges of Supreme Courts pulled long faces and spoke in solemn voices and said that these laws are "unconstitutional."

Can the state force an employer to give a statement explaining why he discharges a worker? Hardly. An employer can hire or fire anybody he pleases. He can fire a red-headed man because he doesn't like red hair. He can fire a Jew because he doesn't like Jews or an Irishman because he doesn't like the Irish. He can fire a union man because he is a union man. He can fire a girl or a woman if she says a union will win higher wages and a shorter work day.

The employer can kick out anybody and everybody he is suspicious of. If he thinks you are going to organize a union, or if he thinks you are going to be any thing else than a good sheep ready for shearing, it's "get out" for you.

If you look a foreman or a straw boss straight in the eye and he gets a hunch that you are a rebel, then out you go.

And what can you do? The law says, "Nothing."

The law says the boss has a clear and clean right to put you out and he doesn't have to make any explanations to any body. It's "constitutional."

Laws have been passed to stop the boss from this power over you. These laws said the boss would have to give you a statement explaining why he fired a man. The courts—the wheezy, bald-headed, sour-faced Supreme Court judges—say the law is "unconstitutional." And so it's wiped off the books. The case is down in the law books as Wallace v. G. C. & N. R. Co., 94 Ga. 732.

Ever blacklisted? Ever know a man who went from one shop to another, one railroad to another, and after they looked at their books they wouldn't give him a job?

Do you know thousands of men in this country have left their old homes, traveled hundreds of miles and changed their names in order to get jobs?

That is exactly what has happened. Now to help out on this, laws have been passed. These laws say no boss or corporation can blacklist a working man. The law ain't any good. It's "unconstitutional."

Any boss can blacklist any workman he wants to. And the Supreme Court says to the boss the same thing the Paris Garter company says to its customers, "No metal can touch you." On the law books the case is down as Wabash R. Co. v. Young, 162, Ind. 102.

Does the law say you can belong to a labor union? The law does. Is the law any good? It is not.

The courts—the wheezy, bald-headed, solemn-faced judges—say the law is "unconstitutional."

There are at least seven cases where workmen tried to buck their bosses in court and get for themselves the right to hold their jobs while at the same time holding union cards. In these seven cases all that the workmen found out was that the law is no good.

The boss fires any worker, union card or no union card, and the worker is wasting time to go into the courts about it.

When he gets into court, the cards are stacked, the dice loaded, the game framed.

The more a workingman learns in the law books the more he falls back on his organization and the power of direct action to help him.

Injunctions. In California, Indiana, and other states, labor men got a law onto the books that said employers couldn't get injunctions. When the supreme courts—the wheezy, bald-headed, solemn-faced judges—got through with the job, the employers or the bosses had a clear and clean right to get all the injunctions they wanted against workmen on strike, in boycott or sabotage.

The boss guesses you are going to do something. He goes to a judge and gets a written court order telling you that you can not do what he guesses maybe you will do. On the law books the boss is wrong. In the minds of the judges the law is wrong and so it is not a law and the boss gets his injunction.

Labor laws get in wrong with supreme courts over and over again. There's a law on the Illinois books about public employment offices. It says when a boss comes to such an office and asks for names of men who want jobs, the office shall not give him those names if there is a strike on in the shop of such a boss. This law, says the Supreme Court of Illinois, is "unconstitutional."

In Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Colorado, miners got laws fixing it up so they would get paid for all the coal they mined. A weighman with scales should stand with every mine gang and weigh and write down how many pounds of coal each man was digging. In these four states the supreme courts all say this law is no good and the mine operators don't have to have a check weighman.

Suppose a workman gets cheated out of wages. Suppose he goes into court and beats the employer in court and wins the wages he was cheated of. Who pays his lawyer? He pays the lawyer himself. In some states the law says the boss must pay the lawyer because the lawyer did nice work getting back for the workman what was stolen from him. But the law is no good. Supreme Court judges say it's "unconstitutional."

So with many other laws in different states. "You must pay wages twice a month; you shall not pay in scrip; you shall not charge higher than common market prices in company stores"—that's what the laws said as they were written on the books. The wheezy, bald-headed, solemn-faced Supreme Court judges—the cheesy and rotten panhandlers, who talk about "justice" as though they know "justice" when they see it-have stopped these laws from counting for anything by calling them "unconstitutional." About the best sample of a fake law is the 8-hour day law in Colorado. For twenty years the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company slipped away and outside this law. The 12,000 miners supposed to have the 8-hour day, according to law, never had it.

Letters from L. M. Bowers, chairman of the Board of Directors of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., show that the company bosses got afraid that the law might be put into action. Just what it was that threw the scare into them on this point is not clear.

Anyhow, they tried the 8-hour day. It paid them. They found they could skin the workers out of just as big profits with an 8-hour day as with a ten or twelve-hour day.

Why do the workers get the dirty end of the stick from judges? Some people say it's because the rich have more money to hire crackerjack lawyers than the poor. This is true, but it isn't the worst of it.

Year after year the cry comes from workers that the judges who decide on cases of freedom and of wages naturally think and feel with the bosses and against the workers. It is charged that judges lean so far toward the bosses that they tip over. Prof. Henry R. Seager, of Columbia University, says the job of a lawyer is to protect property most of the time; the corporation lawyer is the big fellow in the law game; and a majority of judges were one time corporation lawyers.

Tenant farmer Levi Thomas Stewart, his wife Beulah Stewart and children, who testified at a hearing about agricultural issues before the Walsh Commission in Dallas, Texas on March 17, 1915.
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Property first and human rights second. That's the way the Constitution of the United States reads to the eyes of most judges.

Look over language of the United States Constitution and the Constitutions of the States, and as you glance at the words and think the words over, the feeling comes to you that whoever wrote them had the idea that there are some human rights that are sacred.

Take such language as this for a sample: "Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law."

Then read what the Constitution says about trial by jury, unwarranted arrest and search, free speech, free assembly, writ of habeas corpus, bearing of arms.

Read these words out loud, pronouncing them to yourself as they are written in the Constitution. You get then a pretty sure hunch that the Constitution was supposed to mean something.

Men with much land and much money and machinery, capitalists, have come along with one trick and then another and made all of this good, straight, simple language of the Constitution mean nothing.

Trial by jury—how does it work? First of all, there is only a small percentage of real working class men that gets called for jury duty. The middle class and the small business men and professional jurors and court room hangers-on get onto juries more often than real working class men.

There is a bunch of rebels against the Chicago Bar Association, who have what they call the Lawyers' Association of Illinois. They looked into the jury system of Cook County to find out where jurors come from. They found that these occupations led all others in the make up of juries: managers, superintendents, foremen, presidents and owners of companies, secretaries of companies, merchants, agents, salesmen, clerks, and bookkeepers.

They showed 76,000 mechanics belong ing to the Building Trades Council of Chicago, and yet out of 3,440 jurors looked up, there were only 200 mechanics drawn from the 76,000 in the Building Trades Council.

The right to organize—what about it?

When you run back from all these wrongs and these fakes and frame-ups of law, you find that one of the worst wrongs of all is the police and the soldiers and the judges joining with the bosses in the terrible command, "You shall not organize."

One way or another the workers must have this right to organize or they don't make headway.

Any freedom that comes to the workers without organization is only a joke worth a horse-laugh.

This point is backed up by history.

Where a thousand workers stand together, organized, they are a power.

One working man alone going into the office of a boss to ask for higher wages or better conditions is a nut and a loon, and the best he gets is a swift kick.

The bosses laugh at one working man and it costs nothing to get him out of the way.

A thousand working men who know what they want and will take action to get it are hard and costly for any boss to handle.

[Photographs added.]

SOURCE
International Socialist Review
(Chicago, Illinois)
 -Nov 1915
https://books.google.com/...
"That Walsh Report"
https://books.google.com/...

IMAGES
Frank P. Walsh
   from Harpers Weekly of Sept 27, 1913
http://books.google.com/...
JDR Jr before CIR from the
   NY Tribune of Jan 27, 1915
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/...
Tenant farmer Levi Thomas Stewart,
   his wife Beulah Stewart and children,
    before CIR, Dallas, Texas on March 17, 1915.
http://www.loc.gov/...

See also:
Industrial relations: final report and testimony
United States. Commission on Industrial Relations
 -ed by Francis Patrick Walsh, Basil Maxwell Manly
D.C. Gov. Print. Office, 1916
-Volume 1: 1-1024
https://books.google.com/...
"Report of Basil M. Manly
-Director of Research and Investigation Embodying the Findings of Fact, Conclusions, and Recommendations of the Staff, based upon their Investigations and the Testimony of Public Hearings
-SIGNED BY Commissioners Walsh, Lennon, O'Connell, and Garretson
[Lennon, O'Connell and Garretson were the three members on the Commission representing labor's interest.]
-TOGETHER WITH Supplemental Statements by Chairman Walsh, Commissioners Garretson, Lennon, and O'Connell"
https://books.google.com/...

CIR learns of the extreme poverty of tenant farmers:
http://www.dailykos.com/...

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The Workers Song - Dropkick Murphys

But when the sky darkens
And the prospect is war
Who's given a gun
And then pushed to the fore
And expected to die
For the land of our birth
When we've never owned
One handful of earth?
         -Ed Pickford