(Excerpt from The Passing Show of Capitalism
Well, don't ...)
Excerpt from The Passing Show of Capitalism
Well, don't you think that to increase the world's store of beauty is a worthy object for a life? Says he.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
(From the preface: "The outline of this magical and anomal...)
From the preface: "The outline of this magical and anomalous story that seems so far out of our time and psychology, may be gaged between two adjacent facts. On March 23, 1917, all the persons in all the world that had ever heard of Bolshevism as a doctrine may have numbered a thousand. On January 23, 1919, when the chief apostles of the new faith issued their call for the first international Bolshevic congress these were the groups that were summoned: 1. The Spartacus League of Germany. 2. The Communist (or Bolshevist) party of Russia. 3. The Communist party of German Austria. 4. The Communist party of Hungary. 5. The Communist party of Finland. 6. The Communist party of Poland. 7. The Communist party of Esthonia. 8. The Communist party of Lettonia. 9. The Communist party of Lithuania. 10. The Communist party of White Russia. 11. The Communist party of Ukrainia. 12. The Revolutionary Element among the Tchecko-Slovaks. 13. The Social Democratic party of Bulgaria. 14. The Social Democratic party of Roumania. 15. The Left Wing of the Social Democratic party of Serbia. 16. The Left Wing of the Social Democratic party of Sweden. 17. The Social Democratic party of Norway. 18. A Revolutionary group in Denmark. 19. The Communist party of Holland. 20. The Revolutionary element of the Labor party of Belgium. 21. The Revolutionary group in the Socialist party of France. 22. The Revolutionary element of the Syndicalists of France. 23. The Left Wing of the Social Democratic party of Switzerland. 24. The Socialist party of Italy. 25. The Left Wing of the Socialist party of Spain. 26. The Left Wing of the Socialist party of Portugal. 27. The Socialist party of Great Britain (Glasgow movement). 28. The Independent Social Revolutionary party of Great Britain. 29. The I. W. W. K. of England. 30. The I. W. W. of England. 31. The Revolutionary elements in Ireland. 32. The Revolutionary elements among the Shop Stewards of Great Britain. 33. The Socialist Labor party of the United States. 34. The Left Wing of the Socialist party of the United States, represented by Debs and the Socialist Propaganda League. 35. The I. W. W. of the United States. 36. The I. W. W. of Australia. 37. The American Workers' International Industrial Union of the United States. 38. The Socialist groups of Tokio and Samoa. 39. The Young People's International Socialist League. From what might be called a student's cell in the city of Cracow, Austria, to the utmost Orient and the islands of the South Seas, taking in much territory between, and all in these few months—wonderful is the flight, all must admit it to be so! The creed of one man become already the creed of millions and still going on to other millions and to others—it is plain as day that about the new faith is something powerfully appealing to the latent inclinations of a part of each community. It has something that formulates what many men feel or wish to feel or are willing to feel. He has struck a new chord somewhere, this Nicolai Lenine; he is entitled to the credit. Let him die even now and he will have an enduring place in history. He said something new and caused millions to believe it and thousands to be ready to die for it."
The Story of the Nonpartisan League; a Chapter in American Evolution
(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.
The American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas
...)
Excerpt from The American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas
Without sounding the ever-ready pipe of vainglory, we may justly affirm that in one division of representative art the Amer ican achievement has gone beyond debate. The grand orchestra is now' more than our foremost cultural asset; it has become our Sign Of honor among the nations. Even if sceptical or scorn-f ful about our other endeavors, the world assigns to this a verity of excellence. Starting so much later than the rest and starting handicapped, we seem, despite shortcomings and our own in credulities, to have developed the orchestra above the average attainment. If we lag about other arts, we lead in this.
Forty years or so have set down most of the visible signs of this gracious growth. Only so far back as 1876 they were not known to mortal sight, certainly, and otherwise had been scouted as impossible. Two bands, one leader, and an interest so small it seemed to pessimist's' a'higher power of nothing may be counted as the sorry whole of our performance in that year. In many places were small groups of instrumentalists that played together unstably and were regarded by most of their fellow townsmen as partly insane; in many-places there was for vocal music a large, sincere, and always expanding devotion. But beyond two bands and one leader, the thing we know now as the grand or symphony orchestra functioned chiefly to the ear of hope.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
(Excerpt from The Uprising of the Many
From all this dish...)
Excerpt from The Uprising of the Many
From all this disheartening and intolerable situation wrought in a free country by money madness and organized greed - what shall come?
For the threat of a moneyed autocracy, the passing of wealth, and the power for which wealth stands, into the hands of a few; for the lawless and grasping Corporation; for Beef Trusts that control the nation's food supplies and Standard Oil Companies that seize upon its financial energies; for the perils of Frenzied Finance, the imminent ruin of democratic ideals, and the lowering of national standards of morality - what cure?
For the wanton waste and criminal recklessness revealed by the insurance scandals, for the growth here of a Power able to nullify laws and defy government, for the trusts that are utterly prohibited and still thrive, for financial buccaneering, for huge and unpunished swindles like the Shipbuilding Company and great confidence games like Amalgamated Copper, for the accumulation of fortunes by public plunder - what shall we do?
For the failure of our municipal government through the bribe-giving of corporations, for the corrupt control of state and national legislation, for such humiliating scan dals, brought about by corporation influence, as the misrule of Philadelphia and the rottenness of New Jersey - what?
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Charles Edward Russell was an American journalist, author, reformer, and socialist. He was an editorial writer for social democratic magazine "The New Leader".
Background
Charles Edward Russell was born in Davenport, Iowa, one of at least four children (three of them girls) of Edward and Lydia (Rutledge) Russell. Both of his grandfathers were natives of England, where William Russell had worked as a clerk in a distillery and then become a temperance lecturer; William Rutledge, also a temperance reformer, was a Baptist clergyman. Both had emigrated to the United States in the 1840's and eventually settled in Iowa. Charles's father, after working in his youth as a carpenter and builder, became the editor of the Davenport Gazette. An ardent abolitionist in the face of threats from the town's strong proslavery element, he was later a steadfast Republican. After the Civil War he defended the small farmer and attacked the corrupt practices of Western railroads, until one of them bought a controlling interest in the Gazette and forced him out of his job. Charles recalled his mother as "a modest, sensitive woman whose interests in life were her family, her church and her music. " Despite the family's reform tradition, Charles Russell arrived at his mature social views gradually, drawing from his own reading and observations.
Education
He was sent by his father to the St. Johnsbury (Vt. ) Academy for a proper Eastern education.
Career
The cultural shock administered by the pious village and its semifeudal social structure (St. Johnsbury was dominated by the Fairbanks Scale family and factory) sent him searching for a philosophy of social reconstruction. He read Henry George and Wendell Phillips and discussed social problems with a literate local mechanic. Soon he came to see free trade as the panacea he sought, and upon his return to Iowa after graduation (1881) he founded the Iowa Free Trade League.
For the next twenty years Russell combined journalism and reform. He held a succession of jobs as reporter or editor in Davenport, Minneapolis, Detroit, and New York City (through the 1880's and early '90's) and then as city editor of the New York World (1894 - 97), managing editor of the New York American (1897 - 1900), and publisher of William Randolph Hearst's Chicago American (1900 - 02). In off hours he lectured on free trade or worked for the Populists. Although these were busy years, with frequent moves and a postgraduate education on the police beat in New York's slums, they could hardly have been entirely satisfying, for Russell had deep urges to participate in the cause of human betterment and creative drives for which reportorial writing was scant outlet.
When his health broke in 1902, he settled down to write a book on American music, a lifetime interest. He abandoned this project in 1905 when Erman J. Ridgway of Everybody's magazine recruited him for an apparently routine article on Chicago meat-packing. Russell produced an electrifying series of articles on the "Beef Trust"; his talents and his social views meshed, and he became a leading muckraker. He wrote for Everybody's, Hampton's and Cosmopolitan, on themes such as railroad accidents and financing, child labor, electoral fraud, and great fortunes. Industrious, eclectic in interest, a lucid writer with a popular touch, he became, along with men like Ray Stannard Baker, Upton Sinclair, and Lincoln Steffens, one of the best-known journalists of exposure.
He widened his audience with frequent books (twenty-seven in all), among them The Greatest Trust in the World (1905), The Uprising of the Many (1907), and Lawless Wealth (1908). Like the best of the muckrakers, Russell mastered difficult subjects, such as railroading and banking, and learned to communicate the abstruse with clarity and controlled passion.
Just as muckraking began to wane, Russell started a long career as a Socialist, joining the party in 1908 and writing Why I Am a Socialist in 1910. He was a welcome convert, not only because of his reputation but also because of a rare and transparent sincerity that gave him access to men of divergent views and cast him often in the role of peacemaker. Although more interested in ideas than in politics, Russell ran as the Socialist candidate for governor of New York in 1910 and 1912, for mayor of New York City in 1913, and for United States Senator in 1914. He was advanced by New York Socialists as a presidential candidate at the party's convention in 1912, where he ran third behind Eugene V. Debs. The presidential nomination of 1916 apparently could have been his had he not previously antagonized party opinion by advocating military preparedness.
When the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Russell was an enthusiastic supporter, and over this issue he broke with the movement, along with other right-wing Socialists like William English Walling, John Spargo, William J. Ghent, Upton Sinclair, and Robert Hunter. The loss of these former progressives, men who were able to influence native, middle-class Americans, was a stunning blow to the Socialist party. Russell was formally expelled from the party in 1917 when he accepted President Wilson's invitation to join the mission to Russia headed by Elihu Root.
In 1919 he became commissioner to Great Britain and Ireland for the wartime Committee on Public Information, and later the same year he was named a member of the President's Industrial Commission. Unlike Spargo and Hunter, however, Russell remained a socialist, just as he remained a reformer: for him they had always been the same thing. Although most reform journalists had dropped social problems by 1912, Russell wrote a series of articles in Pearson's magazine in 1914 explaining how advertiser pressure had put an end to muckraking.
In 1915 he moved to North Dakota and joined the Non-Partisan League as editor of its Leader. Although less active after 1920, he lent his support to countless campaigns for the underdog: the Negro (he was one of five founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909), the Irish and Philippine independence movements, penal reform, an end to capital punishment, and civil liberties. As he took up the cause of the Jews in Germany in the late 1930's, he had few peers in length of service on behalf of those who suffered.
Russell's enthusiasm sometimes carried him to questionable positions. During World War I he reportedly used the word "traitor" in describing the antiwar socialists from whom he had separated; and his sympathy with the cause of Ireland-abetted, perhaps, by his old ties with the Hearst press in Chicago--induced him to lend his support in 1928 to the shoddy campaign of Mayor William Hale Thompson against a "pro-British" school superintendent. It is true, too, that Russell was prone to panaceas, embracing in turn (and always uncritically) the single tax, free trade, and socialism. Lincoln Steffens condemned this trait as a religious style of thought, and reported that Russell confessed to him: "I had to have something to believe" (Steffens, Autobiography, 1931, II, 632).
Yet Russell did not follow other reformers into the comfortable extremes of left or right. He kept working at the small things, declined to hate capitalist or communist even as he condemned their systems (in Why I Am a Socialist, 1910, and Bolshevism and the United States, 1919), admitted the evils of the world without letting the existence of evil poison his humanism or his faith in progress.
In his final years Russell turned to poetry and biography, writing The American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas (1927, a Pulitzer Prize winner) and biographies of Julia Marlowe, Charlemagne, and Haym Salomon, along with a number of poems and travel books. His autobiography, Bare Hands and Stone Walls (1933), brought together the recollections of an eyewitness to fifty years of American and international reform. Russell died of a coronary occlusion at his home in Washington, D. C. , in 1941; his remains were cremated.
Charles Edward Russell was not and never pretended to be an original or profound thinker. He was a reporter, and his strengths were a wide-ranging curiosity, a passion for facts, and an unflagging optimism. He reached a large audience and exercised an undetermined but surely not inconsiderable influence upon his generation. All who knew Russell reported him the most genial and sincere reformer in that idealistic, contentious collection of individualists. In a parochial era he was a cosmopolitan, widely traveled and acutely aware of the importance to America of worldwide events. Yet he was always a man of the American plains, egalitarian, preferring facts to theory, holding to gradualism through disappointments that turned other men to despair or to advocacy of violence.
Achievements
Russell was known as one of a group of journalists at the turn of the 20th century who were called muckrakers. He investigated and reported about the horrors of capitalism. This type of reporting became known as "Yellow journalism" that helped to jumpstart numerous reforms that included: prison conditions, railroads, church building conditions and other practices. The State of Georgia instituted penal reforms after his articles on her convict camps, and Trinity Church in New York went out of the business of tenement management in large part because of another exposure series.
Russell was remembered as one of three co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The author of a number of books of biography and social commentary, he won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for The American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas.
In 1884 Russell married Abby Osborn Rust of St. Johnsbury. They had one child, John Edward. His wife died in 1901. He was survived by his son and by his second wife, Theresa Hirschl of Chicago, whom he had married on July 5, 1909.
