7. I Register in the College of Hard Knocks
Fifteen eventful years after entering Wharton School as a student in September 1902,1 found myself out of school, out of work and on my own. Academic circles call commencement exercises "graduation time." Graduation marks the official end of an educational stage. "Commencement" is an introduction into a new and presumably higher life. Since graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and Temple College I had been part and parcel of an educational establishment. Now I had graduated from the academic world into the competitive struggle for existence, survival, and mastery which goes by the grandiose title of western civilization. Mayor Sam Jones had called it the College of Hard Knocks.
What had these fifteen years done to me and for me? What had they taught me? They had roughed me up and eventually made me an outcast because I had insisted on exposing the woeful discrepancy between riches and poverty, the inequity of exploitation and the wickedness of deliberate, wholesale destruction and killing. On the strength of this experience, I made three related decisions: I became a pacifist, a vegetarian, and a socialist.
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I became a pacifist because I respect life. I believe that life is an important part of the manifested universe. I am one expression of life as I am also part of the universe. As I respect the universe in all its parts, so I respect myself and all the other living beings who inhabit it.
I observe that the universe is in balance or equilibrium. Living beings are part of the universal equilibrium. Any act which interferes with the life cycle of any other living being or form will have consequences, serious in proportion to the seriousness and extent of the act. If I am to act as a thinking being I must consider those consequences.
Life, as an aspect of the universe, is worthy of respect. To a living, conscious, aware, creative, aspiring human being life must be protected, ennobled, prolonged; not frustrated, down-graded, or cut short. Cruelty and hatred curtail, degrade, and destroy life. Human beings who tolerate such emotions within themselves, and act on them, pay a high price in the profound changes which such emotions, thoughts, and actions make in their own characters. They also upset the universal balance.
I regard violence, hate, fear, and coercion as the most costly way of bringing about social changes. They usually result in heavy losses, and they make no forward moves. I will therefore do all that I can to prevent violence and all that goes with it. I will try to persuade my fellow humans, but I will not harm or kill them.
I became a vegetarian because I was persuaded that life is as valid for other creatures as it is for humans. I do not need dead animal bodies to keep me alive, strong, and healthy. Therefore, I will not kill for food.
Human beings make up one form of life on the planet. There are many others. Together these life forms compose the living pattern that exists on the earth. Each of them is the expression of a force, and has a purpose. All are here to grow, develop, contribute. They live their own lives; they also live more or less harmoniously with other life forms.
Man, with his tools and weapons, is in a position to harm his less powerful fellow creatures, using them for his sport, his pleasure, for his own benefit and to their detriment. Specifically, man enslaves, buys and sells, works, kills, and eats his fellow animals. He also uses them for experiments that may result in saving human lives.
I assume that my fellow creatures have as much right to live as I. I would like to help them to live and develop, not hinder, or harm them. Armed with weapons, I am stronger than they are and therefore responsible to help them. As a vegetarian I do the least possible harm to the least numbers of other living entities. Recognizing that all forms of life are worthy of respect, I disturb the life process as little as I can.
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I became a socialist in order to plan and work for a cooperative social pattern that will give maximum opportunity for human life at its most constructive and creative levels. Social relations have a profound effect on the character and development of every individual. Improvements in society will improve and develop all of its members. The conscious improvement of society thus assumes a first priority in every community. I am convinced that the social changes called socialism can make a large contribution to human well-being.
As a socialist, I believe that the community should own and administer those parts of the economy which are of concern to the community as a whole. Highways, post offices, schools, and forest reserves are publicly operated for public benefit. Railways, telephones, electric power, factories, oil reserves, mineral deposits -all such collective enterprises should be owned by and operated for the benefit of the people.
Second, by political power, American big businessmen retain possession of vast property holdings and fantastic profits derived from collective production techniques. The invisible empire of profit seekers which dominates capitalist countries can be liquidated only by the social ownership and operation of the social productive apparatus-mines, factories, railroads, and means of mass distribution. To do so, the country's workers must gain political power.
The third reason why I am a socialist is sociological. Individualistic, private enterprise society has exalted competition all through the nineteenth century. During the past half century it has reaped a frightful harvest of destruction and murder on the highest competitive level-war. Sociologically, there is no escape from this situation short of a sharp reversal of policy which will put cooperation in the forefront of social thought and action, and subordinate competition to the requirements of effective cooperation. Socialism proposes precisely this substitution of cooperation for competition.
Finally, I favor socialism for a fourth reason, which concerns the purpose of human life. Perhaps this reason may be called ethical. Why are human beings on this earth? What must they do in order to fulfil their destiny? For our purposes here, let us assume that the chief end of man's life on earth is to develop his faculties, to live as far as possible according to the pattern of his destiny, and to do everything he can to give an equal chance to his fellows to do so.
Such a perspective, applied to present day development of the arts and sciences, leads to a simple working formula:
1. Feeding, clothing, and housing the physical body is incomparably less important than the struggle to express, unfold, create.
2. Therefore, let the community provide the necessities and decencies of life-food, clothing, shelter, education, health services-just as it now provides highways, street lights, libraries, and parks-open to all on the basis of need.
3. Let each individual do his daily chore of labor necessary to replace the goods and services which he consumes, and to provide support for the old, the sick, and the immature. Meanwhile, let him concentrate his chief energies on his major task of expression, unfoldment, improvement, creation.
This formula would shift the emphasis of human life from acquisition to creativity and would subordinate the competitive struggle for wealth and power, which is now eating the heart of the western world, to a cooperative effort to live and help live.
Periodically, in human history, men have faced decisions that involve a total change in their ways of life. The decisions to abandon cannibalism, and to abolish chattel slavery were of this nature. The decision to forego exploitation is equally significant. This underlies the change-over from capitalism to socialism.
Today's society in the United States is based on the private ownership of land, mines, factories, and the like, and on the right of the private owner to live in parasitic idleness upon the rent, interest, and dividends provided by the labor of his nonowning fellow humans. Such a system is unethical and unjust. It is also unworkable-as the depressions and wars of the past half century clearly indicate.
If western civilization survives, it will be on a basis of cooperation, with each for all and all for each. The community must own, plan and administer those common enterprises which under present collective techniques provide the necessities and decencies of life. Goods and services, socially produced, must be equitably rationed while scarce, and offered freely when abundant, in accordance with the foundation principle of a workable social order-to each according to his need.
Men and women brought up under the "mine for me" formula of private enterprise, will have some difficulty in adjusting to the "ours for us" formula of socialism. Those who have been living parasitically on the labor of others will have particular difficulty in making the changeover. Despite such obstacles, I believe that the time has come for humanity to take its next great forward step-from individual to collective enterprise, from capitalism to socialism.
Peoples in various parts of the world are deliberately taking this step. The people of North America are taking the step technically but are opposing it politically. It will be a happy day for humanity when the die-hard reactionaries of North America, who are leading the drive against socialism, are brushed aside by an aroused and indignant public which has come to its senses in time to adopt socialism in place of the waste and wickedness of depression, military spending, and war devastation.
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These important decisions put me on my own, in deep water, swimming against a tide of conformity, intolerance, fear, hate, and organized violence that became a tidal wave which has carried me sometimes upstream and sometimes downstream for more than half a century. The story of the last two-thirds of my life is the story of that tidal wave. I was a personality with a job I wanted to do, swimming against the tide and being dashed about by its angry waves.
What had happened to the Van Hise formula: seek out the facts, teach them to the rising generation, build them into the life of the community? Our Wharton School Eight had worked enthusiastically and tirelessly in accord with the Van Hise formula and were convinced of the reasonableness and practicality of the concept. Had we been wrong?
The answer was simple. The Van Hise formula was a rule of thumb related to peaceful human relations. War makers tore the formula to bits and threw the pieces into the wastebasket or out of the window. Peacetime life respected the Van Hise formula and believed in its possibilities. Most war makers had never heard of the formula; those who had, dismissed it as irrelevant or subversive.
Van Hise's Wisconsin bureaucrats had tolerated the formula while they transformed a backward frontier and farm state into a rich, prosperous industrial commonwealth, nibbling at Robert LaFollette reform and Victor Berger social democracy, but ruled by the same industrial-military complex that dictated broad United States policy. When war came, they slipped the Van Hise formula into a folder marked "Open after war's end," and tucked it away in the files where they hoped that no one would find it and report its contents to the snoopers and investigators.
Meanwhile the war makers, whose profession is wholesale destruction and mass murder, had taken over control of the United States and its policies, were writing the words, calling the tune, and helping to wreck the structure of western civilization.
The United States of my youth was slipping from under my feet and vanishing from my sight. The Mayflower Covenant, William Penn's charter of love and good human relations, Thomas Jefferson's Bill of Rights, the Constitution of 1789 which as a schoolboy I had learned word for word, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural had become obsolete scraps of paper. They were appropriate and valid to a degree three score and seven years ago. As the pages of history were turned, one by one, the doctrine of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" propounded by the founders of the Republic became irrelevant, annoying, obstructive verbiage. We had become part and parcel of another kind of social procedure. We had begun beating our plowshares into swords and our pruning hooks into spears, transforming tools into weapons and techniques of destruction and murder.
What so proudly we hailed in my school and college days was gone. In its place was a new nation, not as Lincoln had envisaged it "under God" but under Mammon, under arms, one of a group of warfare states, struggling for wealth and power. It had become a nation that was making sport of the Bill of Rights, trampling on the Constitution, squandering its rich economic and political heritage in frantic efforts to mark out and destroy all who stood in the way or even questioned its mad race to affluence, conquest, power, and destruction.
Could this be the country I had loved, honored, worked for, believed in? The general welfare was forgotten. The land had become a happy hunting ground for adventurers, profiteers, and pirates who called history "bunk" and used their privileged positions to promote their careers and fill their pockets at public expense. Peace, progress, and prosperity had become scraps of raw meat, thrown to a pack of venal, military minded ravenous wolves. Inquiry, education, legislation, reconstruction, improvement, betterment, progress were words strung together by prewar liberals. Now, in the era of the Great War, all such ideas were obsolete. In their places appeared America's unmatched wealth, American interests, national security, the American Way, to be forced down the throats of mankind in the American Century.
My own career lay in ruins; my experience and competence as a professional teacher were brushed aside, but these personal frustrations, disappointments and disasters were only straws in a whirlwind that was starting to blow through the whole country. The significant wreckage resulted from the abandonment of the American dream and the replacement of American idealism by the hard-headed, hard-fisted policy of the American Century imposed on mankind by hucksters and their strong-arm squads operating on land and sea and in the air.
The higher education for which I was now prepared could be obtained in only one existing institution-the College of Hard Knocks. The University of Pennsylvania had conferred on me the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Economics. Since then I have been working for two additional degrees: Doctorate of Imperialism and of Civilization. Needless to say, these degrees will not be conferred by any existing university.
More than half a century has passed since I was fired from my last academic post. For me the years 1917 to 1971 have provided a satisfying and richly rewarding higher education. At first from state to state in the United States, then from nation to nation and from continent to continent I have had an opportunity to observe, record, report, and draw my own conclusions.
Since I was born, in 1883, mankind has been supplied with a series of inventions and discoveries so revolutionary in character that one now duplicates in 'a few hours the planet-girdling tour on which Marco Polo, Magellan, and their contemporaries spent years or even lifetimes. With telescope, microscope, spectroscope, and spacecraft one can now enter realms of nature, modify and refurbish levels of society that have been opened to detailed inspection only during my adult lifetime.
In this period, mankind has learned not only to unmake many aspects of nature but to unmake and remake human society and human beings. I could not adopt a doctrinaire attitude toward this problem. The science and art of association (sociology) and the science and art of man's understanding, redirection, and reconstruction of himself (psychology in the West and yoga in the East) were opening new vistas and blazing new trails in what had been a wilderness.
More specifically, in the social field, an obsolete social pattern, generalized as western civilization, was rapidly reaching the end of its tether in "the twilight's last gleaming" at the same time that an alternative social pattern, presently called socialism, syndicalism, communism, was emerging in "the dawn's early light." It is quite coincidental, but the year I was fired from my last academic post, my twilight's last gleaming, was 1917, the first year of the Russian Bolshevik's attempt to provide a "dawn's early light" in the socialist alternative to a disintegrating capitalist-imperialist pattern. Thus, the fifty years of socialist exploration, planning and experimentation (1917-67) were the fifty years during which I received the "light" of my higher education.