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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday April 26, 1900
“The Song of the Plutocrats…Let Us Gather All”
From the Appeal to Reason of April 21, 1900:
Tag: Plutocracy
Hellraisers Journal: From the Appeal to Reason: Part II-“The Cry of the Poor” by George Howard Gibson of Social Gospel
Whoso stoppeth his ears
at the cry of the poor,
he also shall cry himself,
but shall not be heard.
-Proverbs 21:13
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Hellraisers Journal, Tuesday August 2, 1898
From Commonwealth, Georgia – George Howard Gibson Speaks
From the Appeal to Reason of July 30, 1898:
[Part II of article by George Howard Gibson]
In Italy the bread riots in the last few weeks have been almost general and desperate enough to cast down the throne and government. The uprising in many portions of Italy took the form of looting the homes and business places of the wealthy. A millionaire miller in Minervino named Bantella was killed in a brutal manner after he had offered the mob a fortune for his life. His wife also was reported killed. From his window he scattered a thousand francs among the mob, but they could no longer be placated by charity. They destroyed his warehouses and littered the whole country around with his cornered grain.
They also corner wheat and sugar and oil and coal and lumber and houses and land and everything in America. And the masses here love liberty and their inalienable rights.
Force is no remedy. The torch and bomb may destroy the rich, but they can never emancipate the poor. “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword”—the rich and poor together. Christ-love, brotherhood, unselfish voluntary association is the only way of salvation for both rich and poor. This is the word of prophecy, of warning, of entreaty which we send out today to all classes. Be brothers, live in peace, love one another; or be economic enemies and expect increasing selfishness and poverty that shall ultimate in awful war. It must be the feast of love (Rev. 19:7-9); or the feast of vultures (Rev. 19:17-18).
Hellraisers Journal: From the Appeal to Reason: Part I-“The Cry of the Poor” by George Howard Gibson of Social Gospel
The needy shall not always be forgotten;
the expectation of the poor
shall not forever perish.
-Psalm 9:18
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Hellraisers Journal, Monday August 1, 1898
From Commonwealth, Georgia – George Howard Gibson Speaks
From the Appeal to Reason of July 30, 1898:
[Part I of article by George Howard Gibson]
“When a man finds himself going down and down, without power to mend things, freezing, hungering and dying by inches, he’s sure to get desperate, In the last week I’ve been an atheist, anarchist and devil. I’ve sat here and cried out that there was no God except for the rich. I’ve said that if I could get down stairs I’d burn and kill. I’ve looked at my wife and children with murder In my heart.”
Those words were spoken to a reporter for the New York World by a sick man, living with his wife and children in a dingy room on the third floor of a miserable tenement house in New York City. There are millions in like circumstances, landless, homeless, destitute—and they are wealth producers. They are workers, but they must beg for a job and pay tribute for each day’s work when men choose to hire them.
When products cannot be sold at a net profit, the workers can get nothing to do and have no income to live on.
Read another item clipped from a New York paper of about the same date:
At a dinner party given in New York the other day to thirty-three persons, the bill was $6,500, or $200 a plate.
Hellraisers Journal: Why Workers Walk and Why “Wandering Willies” Tramp While Plutocrats Wallow in Luxury
You pity yourselves,
but you do not pity your brothers,
or you would stand together
to help one another.
-Mother Jones
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Hellraisers Journal, Wednesday July 27, 1898
Chicago, Illinois – Workers Walk in Rain as Street Cars Pass By
From the Appeal to Reason of July 16, 1898:
WHY DO WE WALK?
E. B. Webster in National Tribune.
As I started home from “down town,” when I reached Madison street I noticed hundreds of people walking, all going west.
I was intending to take a car, but seeing so many people walking, I says to myself: “The cars must have stopped.” But, no, the cars were moving right along, one every half minute.
Then why do the people walk? I determined to walk home with the rest and punish myself for having been dormant and letting the street railway company buy up the street for a few thousand dollars from the aldermen who had the power to give away what they never owned and had cost them nothing.
Hellraisers Journal: Appeal to Reason: Victor Hugo speaks to the poor, “after in vain having implored the rich….”
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Hellraisers Journal: Sunday July 10, 1898
Victor Hugo: “Not to be a slave is to Dare and Do.”
From the Appeal to Reason of July 9, 1898:
VICTOR HUGO’S LETTER TO THE POOR
Shall I now speak to the poor, after in vain having implored the rich? Yes, it is fitting. This, then, have I to say to the disinherited: Keep a watch upon your formidable jaw. There is one rule for the rich—to do nothing, and one for the poor—to say nothing. The poor have but one friend, silence. They should use but one monosyllable: Yes. To confess and to concede-this is all the “rights” they have. “Yes” to the judge. “Yes” to the king. The great, if it so please them, give us blows with a stick; I have had them, it is their prerogative, and they lose nothing of their greatness in cracking our bones. Let us worship the sceptre, which is the first among sticks.
If a poor man is happy he is the pickpocket of happiness. Only the rich and noble are happy by right. The rich man is he who being young has the rights of old age; being old, the lucky chances of youth; vicious, the respect of good people; a coward, the command of the stout-hearted; doing nothing, the fruits of labor.
The people fight. Whose is the glory? The king’s. They pay. Whose is the magnificence? The king’s. And the people like to be rich in this fashion. Our ruler, king or croesus, receives from the poor a crown apiece and renders back to the poor a farthing. How generous he is! The colossal pedestal looks up to the pigmy superstructure. How tall the manikin is! He is upon my back. A dwarf has an excellent method of being higher than a giant; it is to perch himself upon the other’s shoulders. But that the giant should let him do it, there’s the odd part of it; and that he should honor the baseness of the dwarf, there’s the stupidity. Human ingenuousness.
Hellraisers Journal: Eugene V. Debs Pleads with Organized Workers of America to Stand Up and Save Life of Tom Mooney
Comrades, the red blood in you
must now prove itself.
I pledge myself to you
in this fight to its finish.
-Eugene Victor Debs
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Hellraisers Journal, Friday April 13, 1917
From the International Socialist Review: Debs Fights for Life of Tom Mooney
TOM MOONEY SENTENCED TO DEATH
An Appeal to the Organized Workers of America!
By EUGENE V. DEBS
A TELEGRAM just received from San Francisco announces the sentence of Tom Mooney. He is to hang by the neck until he is dead. The day set for his murder is May 17th. The capitalist jury and judge have done their foul work, and it is now up to us to do ours.
Tom Mooney is an absolutely innocent man and his conviction an infamous crime. We, the workers of America, are duty bound to challenge the verdict of the capitalists’ jury and set aside the sentence of the capitalist judge. We constitute a court, a jury and a judge of our own.
We sat thru this case from the hour the vile conspiracy was concocted and we knew beyond doubt that Mooney was framed and that he is to be murdered for no other reason than that the corporation criminals, the big capitalist thieves and their official highbinders could not buy him, or silence his agitation.
More than twenty reputable witnesses not only testified to Mooney’s innocence but proved it beyond even the shadow of a doubt. His alibi was without a flaw. He was miles away from the bomb when it exploded in the preparedness parade. He had absolutely no connection with and no knowledge of the affair. Bourke Cockran, the eminent New York lawyer who defended him, is positively convinced of this and so is every other man or woman who attended the trial and is not in the pay or under the influence of the United Railroads, the Manufacturers’ Association, and other red-handed bandits who have for years been plundering San Francisco and have now set themselves up as the autocratic rulers of the Pacific coast.
