The Liberties of the People

William L. Chenery

Lord Valiant. The exercise of such tyranny over the minds of men has been productive, in a great degree, of the miseries that have fallen upon mankind. We have been happy in England since every man has been at liberty to speak his mind.

Medroso. And we are very quiet at Lisbon, where nobody is permitted to say anything.

Lord Valiant. You are quiet but you are not happy. Your tranquility is that of galley slaves who tug the oar, and keep time in silence. * * *

Medroso. But what if I find myself quite at ease in galleys?

Lord Valiant. Nay, in that case, you deserve to continue there.

—Voltaire.

Sunday afternoon, January 17, Chicago was given a vivid picture of the liberties allowed the people. On that occasion the freedom of assemblage and the right of free speech were ruthlessly and brutally denied a great host of people because forsooth they were poor and unemployed.

Men and women whose crime was that they could not find work had assembled at Hull House. After the meeting, it was suggested that a parade would impress their needs upon the city. Immediately they were attacked by the police, some of whom had been disguised in the tatters of unemployed men and scattered into the crowd. Young girls were beaten, women were knocked down, men were assaulted, and all in the name of law.

The assistant chief of police, Herman F. Schuettler, directed the official lawlessness. This exponent of anarchy detailed fifty mounted police to charge the assemblage of hungry men and women. And here is the explanation given by Schuettler:

“We expected something like this to happen. We had refused these people a permit and they took it upon themselves to violate the law. I have no fault to find with the conduct of the policemen. Of course they may have been a bit rough but I am sure they acted within their rights. They were obeying orders.”

And then, poltroon fashion, the anarchistic police attempted to conceal their stupid crimes and cruelties by stressing the fact that Mrs. Lucy Parsons, one of the philosophical anarchists of Chicago, was a speaker at the Hull House meeting! Could bureaucracy go further?

The episode is important because it is typical of what is going on all over the United States. It is a by-product of our undigested industrial order and also a promise of what the future has in store for us; it is the prophecy of a future feudalism which is rising like a flood and which will sweep us into impotency if we are not wise enough and strong enough to plan a sound reconstruction. From San Diego to Portland, from Los Angeles to New York, the fight is raging. In places the people have definitely lost all the rights and privileges of a supposed democracy. In Lead, S. D., in the Colorado coal fields, in parts of Montana, in parts of the Michigan copper country, in West Virginia, in Pennsylvania, and in Massachusetts, whole sections of the population have been degraded by forces too strong for them to a condition of servility. A servile people is not a threat of the future; it is a comment upon the present. And among the servile peoples, the liberties have perished. The question which now remains is only: “Is the remnant strong enough or disciplined sufficiently to regain the fundamentals of freedom which slipped away while we slept?”

It is not only the poor unemployed who have been battered about and made to cringe. Preachers and professors have also felt the stultifying constraint exercised by tired business men in moods of irritation. Howard Crosby Warren gave an appallingly lengthy list of professors who have been discharged from universities all over the land within the last two or three years because they exercised the most commonplace latitude in the choice of their sentiments and their pronouncements. A Florida professor had to forego his position because he doubted the finality of the wisdom of the ante-bellum teachers in the South. A professor at Marietta College, Ohio, was forced to resign because his political opinions were displeasing to his masters. A professor at Wesleyan was driven out on account of his opinion concerning the observance of the Sabbath. But why go on? The number is tediously inclusive.

So great has this evil become among teachers that an association of University professors was organized in New York in early January. From it college presidents and deans were expressly excluded. The members of the association, actuated no doubt by motives of middle-class respectability, announced that they were not to be considered a trade union; but, for all their dislike of the dignity of labor, they have found it necessary to fight as a body for the retention of the liberties essential to self-respect.

The attack on the Chicago unemployed, who made nothing like so much of a parade as the visitors to a ball park any summer afternoon, nor so much of a street jam as the fashionable attendants at a Mary Garden opera, illustrated the direction in which the attack is being made. The real government of men is industrial, and not political, as every one knows. Consequently the genuine tyrannies, or abuses of government, can be discovered naturally among the incidents of industry.

Dr. Annie Marion MacLean of Adelphi College, Brooklyn, read a living document upon this phase of the question at a conference held by the economic and sociological associations at Princeton during Christmas week. In the course of her investigation, says Paul U. Kellogg in his report of the meetings in The Survey, Dr. MacLean had been told by girls how their foremen had warned them against telling what their pay was, of loft building doors locked, of foul air, and what not. The head of an employer’s utopia had told her he would keep out unionism by making examples of the talk leaders. How? By firing them. She told of strikers suppressed by the police for what they said, while strikebreakers inside the factory, hurling insults at them from the windows, went unmolested. “Working women have the right to state the beliefs they hold without forfeit of their livelihood,” said she. “They need reassurance that liberty is more than a catch word. The box-maker, the bobbin girl, and the doffer have the right not only to life but to liberty and free speech in a land which is supposed to be the home of freedom.”

Professors are denied the right of free speech because colleges and universities are organized on business principles. Scholars and teachers are deprived of the franchise in all vital matters affecting university life. They are clerks. Tired business men are the masters of education, and tired business men have but one great principle: loyalty to the organization. Criticism seems sacrilege. Incidentally, that accounts for the fact that the great inventions in business have been made by outsiders; but that is not my story.

The same tired business men operating through the police take away the essential liberties from trade unionists, from the unemployed, from socialists, and from the I. W. W.’s when the occasion arises. The police acquire the habit of tyranny and then set to work to practice it on their own account. What reason under heaven could have persuaded Herman F. Schuettler to order an attack on hungry men and women, inoffensive, armed only with banners bearing fragments of the Lord’s Prayer? Surely a Christian litany is not an incitement to riot. “Give us this day our daily bread”—if this be treason, we may well pray for annihilation at the touch of some vagrant comet.

But the police are pawns in the great game of the modern world, the game of hide and seek for sovereignty. Blind and stupid, they do the occasional desires of their masters and then, filled by a lust for repression, go on to satiate their unwholesome appetites.

Hitherto I have assumed that the somewhat constitutional guaranties of free speech and free assemblage—the two go hand in hand—were actual rights. Theodore Schroeder, leader among the libertarians, has been prominent long among the small group which has ceaselessly stressed our fading freedom. Schroeder has an article in The Forum in which he makes a witty attack upon Comstockery and upon the censorship which has grown up in the Post Office Department—a censorship prudish and powerful enough to exclude the Chicago Vice Report from the mails. This censorship of the imagined obscene is puerile and petty in sufficiency for any appetite, but it is useless to discuss it here. The reaction is always more potent than the action where obscenity is charged, as witness our own September Morn. Schroeder, albeit, announces his freedom of speech to be “a natural and a constitutional right.”

Society, so far as I know, recognizes no natural rights and modern philosophy seems to sanction none. As for constitutional rights, every constitution, unless it be dead, is subject to amendment. The real foundation for the liberties of speech and assemblage is discovered in the social need for them. Without freedom the common weal withers and perishes. That, then, is the basis and incidentally it affords a rod by which any attempt at censorship, by the police, by factory foremen, by the post office, by university trustees, and even by a sluggish popular taste, may be measured.

If the powers of Olympus would lend to men some creature of infinite wisdom and taste, some creature versed in the weary evolutions of the past, and pregnant with the unformulated tendencies of the future through which an increasing happiness may be attained by men, then well might that creature assume a censorship of human thought and speech. But salvation cannot be won so lightly, for the seed of happiness is with men. No one lives, or has lived, with the power to say what idea was valuable to the world and what idea was baneful. The human substitutes which have been commissioned during the absence of this all-wise and all-prophetic authority have been uniformly dull, limited, and poisonous to the best hopes of the future.

Since, then, we may not have a wise authority, why not frankly face the situation? We blame the police, and justly, for their cruelties; yet upon them American society has imposed an impossible task. We have demanded free speech and free assemblage by our fundamental law, and privately we have told the police not to obey the constitution. Who’s at fault? New York knows. Last winter at Madison Square Garden the same sort of folly was enacted as that which disgraced Chicago on Sunday, January 17. Then Arthur Woods, police commissioner, saw a great light. He made an experiment in freedom. It worked hugely to his credit and, parenthetically, to the discredit of some of those most noisy in demanding the right. The emptiness of many of the speakers was exhibited and that was all. The existing order was unruffled.

As a result of his enlightenment Commissioner Woods made a request at the conference on the old freedoms held at Princeton: “Policemen are entitled to definite orders,” said the commissioner. “People in this country have the constitutional right to freedom of assemblage and freedom of speech. The police have not only the responsibility to permit it—but to protect them in its exercise, and the police should be so instructed.”

The police should be so instructed; the welfare of the race demands it. But they won’t get instructions until powerful organized groups of citizens find expression. Upon this organization rests the future.