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Updated: May 16, 2025
They seemed to be losing their own control of the workingmen, and a few tonguey vagrants and convicts from the city and from neighboring towns, who had come to the surface from nobody knew where, were beginning to exercise a wholly unexpected authority. They were going from place to place, haranguing the workmen, preaching what they called socialism, but what was merely riot and plunder.
Von Ochsenstein, the eldest of the three brothers whom I have mentioned above as our neighbors, had not been remarkable during his lifetime, in consequence of his recluse habits, but became the more remarkable after his death, by leaving behind him a direction that common workingmen should carry him to the grave, early in the morning, in perfect silence, and without an attendant or follower.
My somewhat intimate association with workingmen for the last three months enables me to say that, so far as I have been able to observe, workingmen often have a precious poor opinion of one another. The plumbers talk of the carpenters as lazy and shiftless, the painters speak ill of the plumbers, the carpenters regard the tinners with derision, and so it goes through the whole category.
Representative trade unionists have been appointed as government inspectors and other officials, and as members of government investigating commissions. Many changes in the law in which as workingmen the trade unionists are interested have been carried through Parliament or impressed upon the ministry through the influence of the organized bodies or their officers.
In Tampa, Florida, in Columbus, Ohio, in Birmingham, Alabama, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in the mining districts of West Virginia, and in innumerable other places many workingmen have been murdered, not by officers of the law, but by privately paid assassins.
On an invitation to come in, I entered a badly lit room where workingmen sat at a long black scratched table. In the empty chair at the end of the table opposite the chairman, I was invited to sit down. As I asked my questions, every head was turned down towards me as if the strike committee was having its picture taken and everybody wanted to get in it.
The National Guard was turned into a Capitalist Guard. The force was generally reorganized, increased in numbers, improved in discipline, and trained with especial reference to the business of shooting riotous workingmen. The drill in street firing a quite new feature in the training of the American militiaman, and a most ominous one became the prominent test of efficiency.
In New York the laborers' union association had demanded a dollar a day, made out a political program, which involved opposition to any candidate who did not support the interests of workingmen. Sometimes the militia had to be called out, as in 1846 when some Irish workers on a strike were supplanted by Germans. Horace Greeley had naturally taken a hand in this movement.
We can never forget the generosity of the workingmen in England in giving their aid to the Irish farmers, especially when it is remembered that they had no sanguine anticipations for the success of our efforts and no prospect of advantages to themselves if we did succeed. It must be admitted that the outlook was not altogether rosy.
"French and English workingmen have to be shown how their miserable condition may be improved; but you have first to be shown that you are in a miserable condition. So long as you have a piece of bad sausage and a glass of beer, you do not notice that you want anything. That is a result of your accursed absence of needs. What, you will say, is this, then, a virtue?
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