I’ve been reading a biography of the celebrated American
poet Carl Sandburg—winner of two Pulitzers for his verse and another for his
biography of Abraham Lincoln. I hadn’t
realized that Sandburg was a committed Socialist, who stumped and campaigned
tirelessly for the party in the presidential elections of 1908.
According to his biographer Penelope Niven, there were over
3,000 socialist organizations in the United States at that time. The Communist Party wouldn’t be founded for
another decade. Instead, socialists
comprised an enormous range of working Americans whose labor was undervalued by
the system, from tenant farmers in Oklahoma to miners in the coal fields of
Pennsylvania to sweatshop seamstresses in New York.
Sandburg was one of them, his father a Swedish immigrant who
toiled ceaselessly and saved unsparingly but steadily lost ground—particularly
after a home he purchased turned out to have a hidden lien, hitting him heavily
with unexpected debt.
Before turning to poetry, his son Carl turned out political tracts
hoping to convince readers that wealth and poverty were both social creations—neither
the achievement of independent entrepreneurs nor shiftless shirkers but rather results
of impersonal economic forces. A series
titled “Letters to Bill” that he wrote were epistles addressed to an imaginary
manual laborer:
Do you see, Bill, how your
interests and mine and everybody else’s are all tangled up and woven in with each
other? Do you see how society, all of us
together, produced Rockefeller, Thaw, and the one-legged man on the corner
selling pencils? A modern locomotive of
the latest model is said to represent ideas contributed by more than eleven
thousand men …
Yet just a handful profited from owning the railroads, which
ought to serve the interests of all.
Sandburg’s own convictions were expressed in the words of
another fictional character he created, a white-haired old man in a country
village:
I have been reading history and
science for forty years and from all that I have studied as to how nations are
born and grow and then die, it seems to me that just as soon as a nation gets
to the point where a small part of the people are rich and a large part of the
people are poor—then that nation is starting to die, the death of it is
beginning.
What would Sandburg’s sentiments be today, when the gulf
between rich and poor has reached an extreme not seen since the 1920s? Sandburg never lost his faith in the capacity
of the masses of people to eventually arise and organize on their own behalf, as expressed in his famous poem "The People, Yes!"
The people
will live on.
The learning
and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again
sold
And go back
to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and
comeback …
Men like
Sandburg make me think that socialism is just another word for democracy, which
should include not only popular government, but an economy of the people, by the
people, and for the people ... not for a monied few.
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