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The idea that a person's desire for self-fulfillment is shaped by their perception of themselves in relation to others. The author argues that seeing oneself as separate from others may lead to a life of dissatisfaction, while seeing oneself as connected to others can lead to supreme fulfillment. The text also touches upon the themes of work, slavery, and the role of God in shaping one's life.
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By
William Simpson as a student preacher in 1913, at the beginning of a very long journey of self-liberation from false prophets and other incompetents or exploiters whose poisonous propa- ganda has terribly sickened the West. WILLIAM SIMPSON In the early 1940's
This seven part series from the unpublished autobiography of William Simpson, was originally published in the March, June, and August 1983 and March, August, and December 1984 issues of National Vanguard magazine. This is a deeply moving, hard- hitting, no-holds-barred personal growth odyssey that makes Somerset Maugham's "soul voyage" classics The Razer's Edge and Of Human Bondage pale by comparison. William Simpson evolved from a liberal Christian minister and co-founder of the leftist ACLU to eventually find enlightenment in a much more realistic and scientific world view.
The deepest desire in everything that has breath is to live - to fulfill itself, to become what it.was meant to become. Every man who, with sincerity and earnestness, begins to seek to know his destiny and the direction his next steps should take receives clear leadings, which become clearer the more he follows them. The needed intimations and intuitions are contained in his own deepest desire. He may call this "the will of God" and believe it comes from outside and beyond him, as I did in the beginning; or he may remember hearing its voice within himself and give it the authority of the abysmal will of his own being, as I do now. But always, at bottom, it is what he himself wants most; that in him for which he is willing to let everything else in life go; that in him apart from whose satisfaction life holds no meaning. What he wants, what he is able to want, will depend entirely on the stage he has reached in the development of his perception: how he sees, what he values. According to the meaning he finds, on the one hand, in physical pleasure, material possession, power over people; or, on the other hand, in the contemplation and creation of beauty, the discovery of truth, or the conquest of himself and the devotion of his powers to the realization of a nobler human life on this earth, so must he strive. His desire will be shaped, above all, by how he sees himself: as a separate entity, to be satisfied, therefore, apart from and even at the expense of other people; or, as one with other men, their deepest life so constituting an extension of his own that he may come to his supreme fulfillment in laying down his life for them. Yet what he thinks he wants may be very different from what he really wants. At one time or another the former may even seem quite opposed to that wanting hid in the profoundest depths of his being, on the realization of which hangs the entire meaning of all his days on the earth. Finding out what one really wants is one of the most difficult, most costly, and, therefore, one of the last things most of us ever attain. Usually it takes long years, much suffering, and repeated experience of disillusionment. Nevertheless, the desires born of the vision, the adoration, and the conviction of each dedicated moment as we come to it contain clues to our destiny, the intended meaning of our life both to ourselves and to society, and the next steps toward accomplishing it. Our whole hope of taking shape and becoming an ordered and organic whole depends upon our yielding ourselves to these intimations, while we strive to put off all concern for manifest results in the external world and all fear of consequences. The alternative to a way of such inner honesty is a relapse into the confused, fluid, uncertain, and chaotic state in which we began, amounting to spiritual betrayal, paralysis, and disintegration. If we are to live we must take what we were born with, begin where we are, and struggle to follow the best light we have. Our heredity we cannot escape. Our environment we cannot greatly change. Either we
shape it (or, at least, take a shape in the face of it), or it shapes us. For well over 60 years I have believed that for a man to take his own shape and direction and to hold it even though it be in the face of a world that does not understand it --indeed, despises and hates it -- is the greatest joy of which his life is capable; it is, at the same time, to meet in full his duty to society and to render to it his farthest-reaching contribution. Wittingly or unwittingly, in so many words or in other words, with one philosophy or another, for well over half a century I have said, "Be what you are. Make your outside match your inside. Be true to your deepest self." I have believed it is right to do this even though it removes a man so far from the life and thought of his day that he seems doomed to die without having made any mark upon it, as long seemed true of Thoreau. I have believed it right to do this even though, for all the love there is in him, he can find no way to go without bringing grief to those who love him. Not only have I believed such a course right, and justifiable at last by the obvious contribution such integrity has made to the unfolding life of men, but I have believed any other course to be wrong, a flight from life, a betrayal of the ultimate meaning of existence not only in oneself but in all other men. This has been not only my philosophy and my religion: it has also been my practice. Probably even my severest critics would concede this. Before I had anything to say to other people, I struggled to put my deepest conviction and surest insight into my own life. This has taken me ways I little expected to go when I first began to listen and to obey. I started very much like any ordinary young man: conventional of the conventional and orthodox of the orthodox. But more and more I found my face set in a direction counter to all my age believed in. While the scientist has seen life as struggle for existence, I have seen no meaning in existence unless it had elevation; and for the sake of elevation and quality of life I have striven to be ready even to sacrifice my existence. While the psychologist has talked much of happiness and has seen life as a matter of "adjustment" to one's environment, commonly meaning concession to it, I have thrown my "happiness" away again and again for the sake of an intangible I couldn't see or lay my hands on or prove: I have preferred to exhaust myself or to be broken in an attempt to transcend my environment, rather than surrender to it. Editor's Note: As William Simpson states above, he did not begin his life with the full understanding of its meaning he now has. Instead he started in a very orthodox way, intending from the age of 20 to devote his life to the Christian ministry. With that aim in mind he entered Union Theological Seminary, in New York City, as a scholarship student in the fall of 1912. After graduating magna cum laude three years later, he was offered a position as assistant minister at a prestigious church with a wealthy congregation in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. He chose instead to begin preaching at a very poor, run-down Presbyterian church in Carteret, New Jersey, a drab mill town. Very early in his ministerial career he realized that there were important differences between his own faith and the official doctrine of his church.
I had forced myself and spoken with a show of feeling I did not really have; or perhaps because I had allowed myself to speak at all when in fact I had nothing to say, and my real need was rather to commune with my own soul. There is nothing upon which a man's spiritual growth and vitality depend more than upon the uttermost sincerity. For him to speak when he does not feel that his God has given him something to say, or to speak with a show of conviction greater than he actually feels, is to do violence to himself. In his soul he lies. The lie may be great or it may be small, but spiritual growth and vigor and significance do not develop in the man who lies in this way at all. For this is lying in relation to his God, in relation to his own innermost being. And that is "the sin against the Holy Ghost," for which there is no forgiveness. The man who violates his own being begins to die. No man ever escapes it. I am convinced that trifling at this point is the chief reason why ministers as a whole are so dead. I shall never forget the impression that stabbed into me one day, years later, when I walked onto the platform to address a meeting of all the Methodist ministers of Greater New York. As I turned and looked at my audience I seemed to see a crowd of men without faces, of faces covered with masks. Those masks were the outgrowth of their year-round habit of not saying what they really meant, of constantly allowing themselves to say what they did not mean. Praying in public offended me in the same sort of way. There were times when I felt like praying, and there were times when I did not feel like praying. And to stand up and go through the motions of praying, just because that was the next thing on the program, seemed to me, if anything, even worse than forcing myself to speak in a way that did not come out of my heart. Moreover, in those days, at least, I yielded a supreme authority to Jesus' mere word, and by all that I could make of what Jesus said about prayer in the Sermon on the Mount the kind of praying I was expected to do in my church services stood condemned. He said, in effect, "Don't be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street comers, that they may be seen of men; but when you pray, go into your own room, and having shut the door pray to your heavenly Father secretly. And your Father who seeth in secret shall recompense you." We professed to believe that "your heavenly Father knoweth what things you have need of before you ask him." But if we really believed that, I could not see why we said prayers in publicexcept "to be heard of men." At any rate, more than once I caught myself in the subtle insincerity of preaching at my congregation under the form of a prayer to God! Also, I was beginning to feel strongly about the moral enormity, as it seemed to me, of our economic system. I saw that the Church in relation to this system was like a "kept woman." In the world of time and space the Church was an institution, which, like any institution, had to pay bills. To get money it catered to those who had money, to those who were getting their money out of "things as they are" and who wanted to keep things that way. To get money for new and larger buildings, for stained-glass windows, surplices, choirs, and larger salaries for ministers, the Church had sold its soul. It was emphasizing things Jesus never talked about. It was almost entirely silent about the things he lived and died for. The cash connection between the Church's need
of money and the kind of men she got her money from had helped to make her one of the worst enemies of the good of mankind. And the professional minister was its paid retainer. Increasingly I disliked getting my livelihood from an institution of this sort. There were still other difficulties. But it will be enough to point out, finally, that I simply did not hold the orthodox theological convictions. It is hard to be strictly honest with yourself when you stand to lose by it so much as a minister usually does. Not till I was altogether out did I realize how much of a cast had been put in my eye by my half-subconscious realization that every unorthodox conclusion I reached would damage my prospects for advancement in my profession. Nevertheless, I came to the place where I not only rejected the dogma of the virgin birth but was very sceptical about the so-called miracles, and I positively did not believe that the body of Jesus the Roman soldiers nailed to the cross ever walked the earth again. Above all, I did not believe that Jesus' death made any difference whatever in the attitude of God toward man. To be sure, in seminary we had been given an interpretation of the significance of Jesus' death that enabled us to go on talking about "the atonement." But it was simply a bald fact that the doctrine thus revised and revamped bore no resemblance to, and had no connection with, the doctrine known down through the centuries as The Atonement. According to the view of things I had reached, Jesus did not pay any price to God. No price was needed. My God was no Shylock. He did not demand the money on the counter before he delivered the goods of forgiveness. My God was like the sun. He shone upon the good and upon the evil equally. We could turn our backs upon him and walk in the dark if we wanted to, but he was ever ready to flood us again with his light the moment we turned back to him. My God bore no resentment. He forgave not only "seventy times seven," but always - as Jesus evidently believed even man could do, and as I certainly knew I must try to do. Moreover, no one can answer for another or pay the price for another. I am, of course, not denying that what happens to, anyone of us affects at least many others of us. I am not forgetting the extent to which we all are one. But my living, my growing, my dying, are my own. Also I see, or I do not see; and no other man's seeing can possibly make up to me for my own blindness. The kind of teaching we have had in the orthodox doctrine of the Atonement, to which men's minds I and spirits have been exposed through long centuries, has simply cut the taproot of all moral and spiritual endeavor. Jesus is our substitute. He makes up for our shortcomings. He pays the price of admission. He "fixes it up" with God. In consequence men have ' tended to leave it all to him. The most striking thing about the life of the Christian Church today is the almost complete absence of any wholehearted attempt to put the teaching of Jesus into practice. For the most part, Christians are content merely to cry, "Lord, Lord." I saw the effect of this in my own preaching. Much of the idealism and moral ardor that came out even more fully in my life some years later was quite apparent even then in my sermons. Sunday after Sunday I would pour out my faith, my hope, and my conviction; and not uncommonly the people would come up and tell me what a fine sermon it was. But they did nothing about it. And naturally
"following Jesus."
He left the ministry in September 1918, not only having found his own theology incompatible with that of his church, but also having become impatient with the church's hypocrisy in refusing to practice the social doctrine which Jesus had preached. He had taken a strong stand against America's participation in the war (much to the distress of the elders of his church), and he had formed close friendships during the war with other leading pacifists, among them Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. When Baldwin offered him a position in the falI of 1918 as associate director of that organization (then known as the National Civil Liberties Bureau), he accepted it. While serving in this position he read a copy of Sabatier's Life of St. Francis of Assissi, and he was greatly moved by it. He felt a strong urge to folIow the footsteps of St. Francis and devote his life to serving the poor, but he needed more thought before making such a move. Other Christians were also searching for a new path, and there were numerous discussion meetings and conferences among them. William Simpson helped organize one of these in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, in December 1918, where he also was one of the principal speakers. But his questions about his own role remained unanswered. He tells of his effort to find his way in the months which followed:
Upon my return to New York [from Swarthmore] my thought began to work fast, and to a conclusion. That I was not yet ready to act upon either the challenge that had come to me from St. Francis or the one from Muste, [2] I was sure. But I was not running away from either. On the contrary, I found
[2] A.J. Muste (1885-1967) had been a fellow student of Simpson's at Union Theological Seminary. He began as a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in America but became a Quaker in 1918. He later turned to labor organizing and went on to become one of the leading spokesmen and activists for America's radical Left. He was one of the speakers at the Swarthmore meeting, and his challenge had been to organize a lay Christian order whose task would be the reconstitution of society along Christian lines.
myself wanting to do something to obtain the experience I needed to make decisions wisely. One thing I had to get cleared up was the part I should take in regard to the whole economic situation. I wanted to find out what people had to do in this country to make a living. I wanted to find out what kind of people they were, just ordinary working people, and how they lived. And I needed to know much more about the organized labor movement. It had occurred to me sometimes that perhaps I might here find the field of action I was
looking for, and become a labor organizer or propagandist. But I did not want to do any more reading about it, at least not just then; nor did I want to get my impressions as a mere visitor to industrial situations, looking on safely and comfortably from the outside. I decided to become a laborer myself, and to do my best to get a thorough taste of the typical experience of an ordinary American workingman. Thereupon I handed in my resignation to the Civil Liberties Bureau .... I decided to begin with coal mining. On the morning of March 9th, 1919, with five dollars in my pocket, I set out from my home in Elizabeth to hitchhike to Scranton, Pennsylvania .... Immediately upon my arrival I began to hunt for work in some coal mine, arid for labor leaders with whom I could discuss the social situation in which the close of the war had plunged us. Unemployment and consequent suffering were acute. All the shouting about democracy during the world-convulsion had made many workers think that a little democracy in industry wouldn't be a bad thing. Revolution was in the air. A man as well-informed as Scott Nearing, [3] once a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was
[3] Scott Nearing (1883- ) taught economics at the University of Pennsylvania from 1906 until 1915, when he was fired for injecting militant Marxism into his lectures at a time when it was not yet fashionable to do so. He became a propagandist and organizer for dozens of Communist organizations and contributed his writings to their publications. In 1928 he was the Communist Party's candidate for governor of New York. Although he was later expelled from the Communist Party for his excessive individualism, he has remained active on behalf of the Marxist cause to the present. He is now in his 100th year. Simpson came into contact with Nearing through Norman Thomas (1884-1968), the leader of the Socialist Party from 1926 until his death and the U.S. presidential candidate of that party six times. Thomas had graduated from Union Theological Seminary in 1911, the year before Simpson matriculated, and was ordained a Presbyterian minister. He was the minister of the East Harlem Presbyterian Church and the director of the Friendship Neighborhood House, in an Upper East Side slum, in the summer of 1915 when Simpson graduated from Union Theological Seminary. Simpson worked for Thomas that summer and met many of the Christian activists who were to play a prominent role in the politics of the Left in coming years.
declaring that we should have a revolution within six months. And all the way across the country I found labor leaders who would have agreed with Steve McDonald, the labor leader of Scranton, who told me, "Revolution is sure, and not far off." It was in this atmosphere of bitter discontent and eager hope of some great change for the better that all my experiences of the next few months were cast. Interesting talks with labor leaders were far easier to find than jobs. Hunt as I would I found nothing. The mines were running only part time, some of them only one or two days in a fortnight, so that for every job there were many applicants, most of them men
lives, and therefore to their comfort, health, and peace of mind .... This job I first found myself doing, keeping rolls of rubber sheeting unwound across a table so that the workers could take what they needed readily, was itself enough to put a man to sleep. I felt that a cow would have had brains enough to be trained to do it. Doubtless by now it has all been made automatic. I tried to keep myself awake by watching the men around me. The thing that struck me was the monotony of it. Each man had some little operation to add to the construction of a tire. Over and over again, the same little operation for eight hours. One man with a pair of dividers went around the "tread room" marking a line parallel to the rim on each side of each of 400 rotating tires, and he did this four times in eight hours. For his whole working day he did nothing but hold a pair of dividers against first one side and then the other of 1,600 tires -- one simple motion repeated 3,200 times a day: day after day, week after week, month after month, till he could endure it no longer, and quit. Presently I noted what subsequent obervation amply confirmed, that all the men on the floor were young. There was not one I should have guessed to be over 35, and most of them were between 20 and 30. And no wonder: older men could never have stood the pace. They soon would have been weeded out. Perhaps they were never even taken on. After all, there was no need to hire them. There were plenty of young ones to choose from. This pace! I After all the loafing I had seen in the steel mill, I could hardly believe my eyes as I watched how the men all about me worked. The tempo over the entire floor was snap, jerk, jump. Never before had I seen men work under such nervous tension. It was uncanny. I could but wonder what made them do it. Presently I found out. It was the "speed up" system. I was myself caught up in it for the first time when I got my job "finishing" tires in the Goodrich plant. The methods used varied to some extent from factory to factory, but everywhere it was a device for making the workers race with a machine, with one another, or with both. By a stop watch, measuring to the fraction of a second, the employers would take the time required by one of their fastest workers to go through a certain operation, or "piece." That was made the standard for all the workers, and all the workers were pressed to come up to it. Or they would increase the amount of work involved in the piece, without raising the piece wage rate. This made it necessary for the men to work with greater intensity in order to earn the same income. One man told me that whereas 32 cents had once been paid for "finishing" alone, 32 cents was then being paid for making the whole tire .... I could hardly find a single man who liked his job. Almost invariably they spoke of its monotony. Occasionally a man would say, "Aah, I don't mind so long as I'm kept busy," though that was hardly the same as saying he liked it. And the men's reactions were to more than the nervous tension and the inhuman tedium. There were also the fumes of the benzene and the rubber cement used in building up the tires. The air reeked with them. Nearly all the men, I discovered, had been there only two to six months and had not yet had time to feel the effects of these poisons. The one man I found who had been there five years was yellow ("almost looked like a tire," as an I.W.W. [4] member put it) .... "Piece work kills!" That is what a little group of I.W.W.s said about it one night that I spent talking with them in a small tenement room far into the morning. The general belief seemed to be that three years in the rubber business finishes a man. The speed-up system was a diabolically ingenious device for turning the blood of the workers into gold.
The rubber companies picked the best men, sucked the life out of them, and then threw them onto the scrap pile. They did not need to worry about what happened to them after that. The men might starve, or their children might starve or grow up stunted and weakly from malnutrition. But that did not
[4] Industrial Workers of the World ("Wobblies"): a radical, syndicalist labor union which flourished between 1905 and the early 1920's and was noted for its extreme militance.
matter. The far-flung advertisement of "work in the tire factories" had not failed of its aim. The streets of Akron were full of young men. From these the companies could continue to pick what they wanted. Somebody else could worry about those whom they had wrecked. Yes, the words of the young I.W.W.s were full of venom. They hated the tire factories and all their works. They hated the hours hunger compelled them to spend inside their walls, and they looked upon each shift as eight hours in which they were forced every day to relinquish their freedom and go into a penitentiary. They hated the system of spies by which the owners attempted to ferret out every labor organizer, that they might get rid of him -- by which, in fact, they had sometimes wormed their way into the very head office of the local union. But, above all, they hated the speed-up system, which forced them, for the sake of a paltry subsistence, to race at an inhuman pace not only with the machine but against their fellow workers. They saw things through inflamed eyes, I allow. I realized that before I had left Akron. Things were not so bad as they pictured them -- not quite. But nearly. Their attitude, on the whole, represented only the natural and healthy reaction of any human being with intelligence and a sense of his worth against being used, treated as a commodity -- against being harnessed to a machine in a way that violated every instinct in him. They hated, and they did well to hate, having their very life coined into another's gold .... In Cleveland I found 30,000 to 50,000 men out of work. As there seemed little chance of a job, I pressed on to Toledo. But Toledo was even worse. In this smaller city 20,000 men and women were out on strike. To look for a job was declared futile. What depressed me more than this was the conversation I had with some Socialists at their Toledo headquarters. I.had been talking with labor leaders and going to labor meetings ever since I first reached Scranton, to see what they revealed as to the workers' aims and methods, their view of the situation that confronted them, and of life in general, for I was wondering if I should cast in my lot with them. One of the questions I unvaryingly asked was, ''What do you think of violence?" For upon their answer to this I believed my ability to work with them must largely depend. Almost without exception the reply had been, in effect, "We don't like it. We'll never be the ones to start it. But if it is used against us, we'll use it in return." There was little evidence of principle in the attitude; it was primarily a matter of expediency. But even the militant I.W.W.s in Akron, while they declared themselves ready to use violence, were only girding themselves for what they believed the capitalists' inevitable use of it against
Then, too, I had a purpose in the work, whereas they were doing it merely to get a pay envelope. In any case, I doubt if there were more than a handful of men in the whole factory, with its huge army of employees, who did not resent every hour they spent in such subjection to a machine. Onedily I asked the man beside me how he liked his job. "Oh," he said, "when I was in the Army I thought I could never come back to it. But here I am." "Well, how do you like it?" I persisted. "Oh, it's not so bad -- no worse than it used to be." "But that isn't what I asked you," I still persisted, "how do you like it?" "Like it? Of course, nobody likes it, but ... ," with a shrug of the shoulders that said, "You've got to earn a living somehow, and there's nothing for it but to take what you can get." Evenings that my shift did not require me to be at work I often spent with Chet Emerson [5] and his friends. Commonly we discussed my venture; and I made much the same criticism of the capitalist system and held up much the same kind of society to take its place as might have been expected from a
[5] Chet Emerson was a friend of Simpson of several years' standing, with whom he stayed during his time working for Ford. In 1919 Emerson was the minister of a large Congregational church in Detroit. Later he became dean of the cathedral in Cleveland.
Socialist or an I.W.W. My social philosphy at the time inclined to be strongly collectivist. Yet I had my doubts and questions. And some of these were strengthened by the answers of Chet's friends .... One day Chet and I, and a couple he had taken out to dinner, had a violent argument about the new social order. And afterwards the wife, who at first had almost scoffed at my venture, said to me quietly, "I am beginning to get your point of view. I don't agree entirely, but I am beginning to understand." And another day I drove straight at Chet with the question, "How can you fairly condemn the violence of the working class in their efforts to attain their ideals and what they believe to be justice, when for ends certainly no more noble you have sanctioned the violence of war?" When I returned home a couple of hours later, he was still in a brown study over that question. Nevertheless, my own answers to a great many of the problems were far from certain; and as I at last found myself rolling on toward Chicago, I too was lost in thought about where the truth and the right really lay. Not about the capitalist system. In my rejection of that, thus far, I never wavered. But how to get rid of it without violence? And how to get a really beautiful social order when the overwhelming mass of the people, at the bottom, at the top, and throughout, were so full of greed and fear and hate -- in general, so self- centered? ...
He remained in Chicago only until he had earned enough money -- at three dollars a day in the stockroom of a department store -- to be able to travel further. His next stop was the open-pit iron mines of the Mesabi Range. During his work at a mine in Eveleth, Minnesota, he came to know his fellow workers better than he had in his previous stops:
Here as everywhere, all the way across the country, I could not find a single man who liked his job. One day I asked a brakeman about it -- and braking is one of the easiest jobs in the "open pit." "Like my job? No! But yo' gotta work anywhere you go. Hell! What's the difference!" Another day I asked Aleck, who talking about quitting and how often he quit his jobs, "Why do you change jobs so often?" His mind worked slowly, especially at finding reasons and making generalizations, but finally he blurted out, "Why do I quit? Well, I'll tell you. I just get so gosh darned sick of my job that I can't stand it another minute! That's why I quit!" Thus also Gus, another one of the men, who had just quit. So I felt. So did Tom, a Greek from Athens trying in vain to save enough money to bring his wife and child to America. He had just "blown" a whole year's savings on "wine, women, and song" and was resigned to his fate as a perpetual victim. To me it was appalling that so few men should have any joy in their work. My experience seemed to give evidence that for most of the working people of the country life had become one long endurance: work, eat, and sleep was almost all they had time for. Their work, on which they used up the best they had in them, they loathed. It was no wonder the older ones had become numb and leathery. When I thought of Tom and the fate that seemed ahead of him, my heart ached. In a little while I should be getting out of it. But he would go on -- had to go on -- in utter hopelessness. "Tom," I said to him once, in rather a weak move to give him some heart, "it may be only 20 years till we have a revolution." "Jesus Christ," he exclaimed, " years? Too long! I dead by that time!" It was that "had to go on," I discovered, that utter inability to get out of it, that constituted the essence of "wage slavery." When I first set out on my venture, though I had used the phrase, I had not really known what it meant. The slavery was not in the fact that the work was hard: it was in the fact that in order to exist men like those about me had to sell themselves into the will and hand of another, for his profit. The machine was fast destroying the last remnants of the old craftsmanship, which in an earlier period had meant not only livelihood, but dignity, responsibility, self-expression, a free space for the development of personality. But now all that was gone. The machines, generally too costly to be owned by individuals, were owned by corporations or by a few rich men. Most men had become mere "hands," with nothing to sell but their labor, and no means of living without selling it. Their "freedom" was no more than a freedom to choose which master they would slave for. They might work for A or they might work for Z, but they could work for neither A nor Z except on the condition that they let him exploit them. There was no way to escape. There was no way to exist without a job; and the jobs were in the hands of men who owned; and their ownership was maintained by all the organized violence of society: laws, courts, prisons, police, and if necessary even the militia, with its bayonets, poison gas, and bombing planes. In one way this new slavery, wage slavery, was even worse than chattel slavery. When a man owned a slave outright, it paid him to take care of that slave, even as he took care of any other piece of property, even as he took care of his horse and cow. But the wage slave the modern employer could work under conditions that ruined him, and when there was no longer any more to be got out of him he could fire him and let him live or die on
my true place might not be between the lines. I wanted to do something that would make for increased understanding and sympathy on both sides ....
After he left the Iron Range he laid track for the Northern Pacific Railroad, worked in a copper mine in Montana, and cut trees in Washington. And as 1919 drew to a close he began drawing a few conclusions:
How far my thinking had taken me by this time is revealed in the letter which, following the practice I had begun at the time of my first serious departures from the beaten track, I sent out to friends and relatives under date of December 31st, 1919. [6] It was essentially an analysis of the industrial situation and an announcement of my earliest conclusions as to the part I should take in relation to it. I reminded my friends that when I set out to work my way across the country I had thought I might find my place in the organized labor movement; and I declared that the I.W.W.s especially had called forth my admiration, not only for the economic soundness that lay behind their attempt, in an industrial society, to organize the workers by industries rather than by crafts, but also for their devotion to their cause; their openness to toilers of any class, color, or creed; and for the reliance they placed on education and organization rather than on naked violence. But I could not close my eyes to the fact that, nevertheless, between workers and employers, it was an issue of power, in which each side was trying to impose its will on its foe by one or another kind of force. This was the very essence of the class war, and I believed it had arisen out of and was an inextricable part of the capitalist system. Unequivocally I declared "that the class war exists whether I like it or not, that class consciousness arises out of the motives and antagonism engendered by the capitalist system, and
6 A slightly revised version of the letter was published anonymously in the March 18, 1920, issue of the Quaker journal The Friend, under the title "View of the New World."
that there can be no brotherhood on this earth with any change that stops short of. a complete abolition of this soulless institution." But to recognize class war as a fact was one thing, to sanction it as a means was quite another. I could not accept the deliberate spread and intensification of class consciousness, by which a man's human sympathies were calloused and his understanding narrowed into a hard, self-righteous set against all those, whether capitalist or fellow worker, who did not stand with him. And I saw that the strike, and especially the general strike, for all it was obviously the revolutionary worker's most effective weapon, was nevertheless a weapon, a means of coercion, a kind of holdup of all society, by which a determined and united minority could force its will upon the real majority. It wasn't even democracy, let alone the
teaching of Jesus. There was no effort toward reconciliation; and its brotherhood, for all it was more inclusive than that of the Church, still stopped short at the capitalist. Its spirit was one of judgment, reprisal, and autocratic self-will. All this raised again the very same question I had had to face in relation to the war. Suddenly I saw that the capitalists were the German Junkers; and the labor movement was the Allies fighting (or claiming to fight) for democracy, the rights of small nations, and an end of the war. The form the issue took was new and different, but the issue itself was the same. It was the old question of means. Be the ends never so good, was it possible to attain such ends by means that were incompatible with them? I could not believe it. I saw that the force a man released upon the world was not so much his ideal, the thing he aimed at, which remained hidden in his head, but the means he chose by which to move toward his ideal, the things he actually did in pursuit of his objective. I had been certain that when the "idealistic American soldier went "over the top" and tried to plunge his bayonet into the Kaiser-supporting German, what the German reacted to was not the ideal but the bayonet. The forces let loose on the world by an immoral means hardened human hearts against the very ideals for which the immoral means was resorted to. As a result the world's idealism had failed to get any real hearing at the Peace Conference. And similarly in the class war, I was convinced that out of all the coercion, the lust for material possessions, the fear and hate and disregard for others that such a struggle involves, there could come no good. The danger was that the change of system, already upon us, would bring only a change of masters, that in some new form the old tyrannies and wrongs that distressed us then would last on to distress us in the future. In short, though I was tremendously concerned that the change should come, I was even more concerned as to how it came. Once more it was that terribly searching question of method, over which, from the beginning, the mounting life of man has fallen. And then I exclaimed: "Is it not plain to all who have been given the eyes of the spirit that another battle is joined: an overhead battle, which overshadows in its significance even the struggle of the classes -- a battle between a Wrong and a Right that have their representatives in the ranks both of Labor and of Capital -- another `death-grapple in the darkness between old systems and the Word': between the way of the world and the way of the Cross? And until this battle is won, until men learn to win their struggles and build their societies by those principles which are the principles of the Sermon on the Mount, the triumphs of the Allied armies, the victories of the working class, and the changes of system, are all futile. They are a mirage of delusion. "In our burning eagerness to reach our goal we are always seeking a shortcut, even if it be by a temporary transgression of the moral order. We think it will pass unnoticed because it is brief, or that we can atone for it by a renewed devotion to the Right in more salubrious days. We would cut the Gordian Knot, and the sword we choose with which to hack it through is the sword of crushing Might. But it will not work. It never has worked. It never can work .... "Nor can there be any exception for the social structure that Labor would build today. What cannot be accomplished now by Love cannot be accomplished now at all .... "None of us can be reminded too often as we begin to line up on the momentous issues of
