The People, Yes Read online

  The trail leads straight to those in the possession of grease, the big shots of bespoken and anointed interests.

  When violence is hired

  and murder is paid for

  and tear gas, clubs, automatics,

  and blam blam machine guns

  join in the hoarse mandate,

  “Get the hell out of here,”

  why then reserve a Sabbath

  and call it a holiness day

  for the mendon of Jesus Christ

  and why drag in the old quote,

  “Thou shalt love thy neighbor

  as thyself’?

  Said a lady wearing orchids

  for a finality they betoken

  disdnct from cabbages

  aloof from potatoes

  and speaking with a white finality

  from a face molded in half-secrets:

  “Some things go unspoken in our circle:

  no one has the bad grace to bring them up:

  they exist and they don’t:

  when you belong you don’t mention them.”

  Between highballs at the club amid the commodious leather chairs, only the souse, the fool, would lift a glass with the toast:

  “Here’s to the poor! let ’em suffer, they’re used to it.”

  And if a boy fresh from college and the classics offers the point, “Money sometimes rots people,”

  He’ll hear from someone: “Maybe so but you can’t have too big a surplus to take care of the future.”

  “There are men who can be hired

  for work that must be done

  and I would rather hire them

  than do the work myself.”

  Thus in the front office

  the big fellow in charge,

  hired by absentee owners,

  hired for work that must be done,

  has an alibi and good reasons:

  unless he keeps out of the red

  he too goes: he hires and fires:

  he is the overseer: in his ears

  one droning iron murmur:

  “We want results, re-sults.

  “You’ll show results or else.”

  So he hires and fires:

  new names go on the payroll,

  old names are dropped:

  personnel, production, outlet, sales,

  each has its own heebie-jeebies,

  each brings its special jitters:

  the picture always changes:

  one little innocent new idea

  one harmless looking patent

  can wreck the works, the payrolls,

  the mahogany front office,

  the absentee owners:

  unless the competitor is watched

  and met and handled,

  either killed off or satisfied,

  the works go to rust,

  to the weavers of cobwebs

  weaving in iron and mahogany:

  Thus in the front office amid the desk buttons

  and the switchboard phone and the private line,

  amid slips holding safe-combination-numbers,

  amid the keys to safe-deposit-vaults

  and the documents known to associates and attorneys

  besides other documents held in reserve,

  written communications private and confidential,

  spoken messages not to be put in writing,

  memoranda in low tone to Jones for immediate attention

  and withheld from Abemathy for definite reasons

  Abernathy having plenty enough to do as it is,

  items touching rivals real and potential,

  competitors ruthless with a jungle cunning,

  competitors fighting in the open with a decent code,

  competitors in the red and dazed by the graph

  of volume and sales sliding down always down,

  telegrams to be sent in cipher strictly and see to it,

  telegrams for the press, for Congress, for the public,

  quarterly earnings report for investors,

  fully detailed report for the Chairman of the Board,

  information sheets to be scanned and tom up,

  other notations to be read closely and filed

  in a fireproof private vault with a time-lock,

  signed agreements hardly worth the public eye,

  schedules, rebates, allowances working arrangements—

  amid these props

  of time and circumstance

  a big shot executive sits

  with an eye on the board of directors first of all,

  next the stockholders owning control,

  next the vast eggheaded investing public,

  and after these the men who run the works

  from the engineers, chemists, geologists, intelligentsia

  on to the white collar clerks and bookkeepers

  and the overall crews who take whatever weather comes,

  in fumes and dust, in smoke, slag and cinders

  meeting production and delivery demands—

  and finally the buyers, the consumers, the customers,

  the people, yes, what will we let them have?

  Around a big table—decisions—

  wages up, wages down, wages as is—

  prices up, prices down, prices as is—

  this is the room and the big table

  of the high decisions.

  They may consider lower prices

  for the benefit of the consumer

  or again to wreck a competitor.

  They may hold prices down

  because it’s worth something to have

  the good-will of the public, the mass buyers.

  Or they may raise prices and get all they can

  while the getting is good, explaining,

  “We are not in business for our health,

  what we lose or win is our business.”

  Some of them trail with Marshall Field:

  “The customer is always right,” others with

  Cornelius Vanderbilt: “The public be damned.”

  Others say one thing and do another.

  And what have we here? what is this huddle?

  Shall we call them scabs on their class?

  Or are they talking to hear themselves talk?

  They say Yes to Ford, to Filene, to Johnson,

  to the Brookings Institution: one little idea:

  After allowing for items to protect future operation

  every cut in production cost should be shared

  with the consumers in lower prices

  with the workers in higher wages

  thus stabilizing buying power

  and guarding against recurrent collapses.

  “What is this? Is it economics, poetry or what?

  “Do you think you can run my business?

  “Are you trying to fly the flag

  of Soviet Russia over my office?”

  You’re in a room now where you hear

  anything you want to hear

  and the advice often runs:

  You can do anything you want to

  unless they stop you.

  Sometimes they fight among themselves

  iri a dog-eat-dog struggle

  for control and domination,

  sending an opponent to the Isles of Greece,

  leaving him not even a shirt,

  or letting him leap from a tenth-floor fire-escape.

  What is to be said

  of those rare and suave swine

  who pay themselves a fat swag of higher salaries

  in the same year they pay stockholders nothing,

  cutting payrolls in wage reductions and layoffs?

  What of those payday patriots

  who took three hundred millions of profit dollars

  from powder and supply contracts

  in the same years other men by thousands

  died with valor or took red wounds in a gray rain

  for the sake of a country, a flag?

/>   Lincoln had a word for one crew: “respectable scoundrels.”

  They reaped their profits from the government’s necessity in money, blankets, guns, contracts,

  And when they gambled on defeat in May of ’64 and sent gold prices to new peaks

  Lincoln groaned, “I wish every one of them had his devilish head shot off.”

  One by one they will pass

  and be laid in numbered graves,

  one by one lights out

  and candles of remembrance

  and rest amid silver handles and heavy roses

  and forgotten hymns sung to their forgotten names.

  101

  The unemployed

  without a stake in the country

  without jobs or nest eggs

  marching they don’t know where

  marching north south west—

  and the deserts

  marching east with dust

  deserts out of howling dust-bowls

  deserts with winds moving them

  marching toward Omaha toward Tulsa—

  these lead to no easy pleasant conversation

  they fall into a dusty disordered poetry

  “What was good for our fathers is good enough

  for us—let us hold to the past and keep it

  all and change it as little as we have to.”

  Since when has this been a counsel and light

  of pioneers? of discoverers? of inventors?

  of builders? of makers?

  Who should be saying,

  “We can buy anything, we always have,

  we can fix anything, we always have,

  we’re not in the habit of losing,

  on the main points we have our way,

  we always have”?

  who should be saying that and why?

  As though yesterday is here today

  and tomorrow too will be yesterday

  and change on change is never hammered

  on the deep anvils of transition

  the words may be heard:

  “Every so often these sons of the wild jackass

  have to be handled. Let them come.

  We’ve got the arguments, the propaganda machinery,

  the money and the guns. Let them come.

  What was good for our fathers is good enough for

  us. We fight with the founding fathers.”

  What is the story of the railroads and banks,

  of oil, steel, copper, aluminum, tin?

  of the utilities of light, heat, power, transport?

  what are the balances of pride and shame?

  who took hold of the wilderness and changed it?

  who paid the cost in blood and struggle?

  what will the grave and considerate historian

  loving humanity and haring no one dead or alive

  have to write of wolves and people?

  what are the names to be remembered with thanks?

  Now they justify themselves to themselves:

  we took things as we found them:

  we never tried to shoot the moon:

  we never pretended to be angels:

  industry and science are slowly

  making the world a better place to live in:

  the weak must go under before the strong:

  we’ll always have the poor and the incompetent.

  What then of those odd numbers

  who have pretended to be angels

  while using the fangs of wolves?

  and what of the strong ones

  who sat high and handsome

  till they met stronger ones

  till they were tom asunder

  and outwolfed by bigger wolves?

  And who plucked marvels

  of industry and science

  out of unexpected corners

  unless it was the moon shooters

  taking their chances

  out in the great sky of the unknown?

  who but they have held to a hope

  poverty and the poor shall go

  and the struggle of man for possessions

  of music and craft and personal worth

  lifted above the hog-trough level

  above the animal dictate:

  “Do this or go hungry”?

  102

  “Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious

  debauching of the public mind . . . they have

  been drugging the public mind.”

  What was this debauchery? what this drugging?

  and how did Abraham Lincoln mean it July 4, 1861?

  The public has a mind?

  Yes.

  And men can follow a method

  and a calculated procedure

  for drugging and debauching it?

  Yes.

  And the whirlwind comes later?

  Yes.

  Can you bewilder men by the millions

  with transfusions of your own passions,

  mixed with lies and half-lies,

  texts tom from contexts,

  and then look for peace, quiet, good-will

  between nation and nation, race and race,

  between class and class?

  Who are these so ready

  with a hate they are sure of,

  with a prepared and considered hate?

  who are these forehanded ones?

  Before the boys in blue and gray

  took the filth and gangrene

  along with the glory,

  Little Aleck Stephens, hazel-eyed

  and shrunken, saw it coining:

  “When I am on one of two trains coining in

  opposite directions on a single track,

  both engines at high speed—and both

  engineers drunk—I get off at the first

  station.”

  Is there a time to counsel,

  “Be sober and patient while yet saying Yes

  to freedom for cockeyed liars and bigots”?

  Is there a time to say,

  “The facts and guide measurements are yet

  to be found and put to work: there are

  dawns and false dawns read in a ball of

  revolving crystals”?

  Is there a time to repeat,

  “The living passion of millions can rise

  into a whirlwind: the storm once loose

  who can ride it? you? or you? or you?