‘But you competed among yourselves?’ Ernest interrupted.
‘Yes, that was what kept the profits down. We did try to organise, but independent dairymen always broke through us. Then came the Milk Trust.’
‘Financed by surplus capital from Standard Oil,’3 Ernest said.
‘Yes,’ Mr Calvin acknowledged. ‘But we did not know it at the time. Its agents approached us with a club. “Come in and be fat”, was their proposition, “or stay out and starve.” Most of us came in. Those that didn’t starved. Oh, it paid us…at first. Milk was raised a cent a quart. One-quarter of this cent came to us. Three-quarters of it went to the trust. Then milk was raised another cent, only we didn’t get any of that cent. Our complaints were useless. The trust was in control. We discovered that we were pawns. Finally the additional quarter of a cent was denied us. Then the trust began to squeeze us out. What could we do? We were squeezed out. There were no dairymen, only a Milk Trust.’
‘But with milk two cents higher, I should think you could have competed,’ Ernest suggested slyly.
‘So we thought. We tried it.’ Mr Calvin paused a moment. ‘It broke us. The trust could put milk upon the market more cheaply than we. It could sell still at a slight profit when we were selling at actual loss. I dropped fifty thousand dollars in that venture. Most of us went bankrupt.4 The dairymen were wiped out of existence.’
‘So the trust took your profits away from you,’ Ernest said, ‘and you’ve gone into politics in order to legislate the trust out of existence and get the profits back?’
Mr Calvin’s face lighted up. ‘That is precisely what I say in my speeches to the farmers. That’s our whole idea in a nutshell.’
‘And yet the trust produces milk more cheaply than could the independent dairymen?’ Ernest queried.
‘Why shouldn’t it, with the splendid organisation and new machinery its large capital makes possible?’
‘There is no discussion,’ Ernest answered. ‘It certainly should, and, furthermore, it does.’
Mr Calvin here launched out into a political speech in exposition of his views. He was warmly followed by a number of the others, and the cry of all was to destroy the trusts.
‘Poor simple folk,’ Ernest said to me in an undertone. ‘They see clearly as far as they see, but they see only to the ends of their noses.’
A little later he got the floor again, and in his characteristic way controlled it for the rest of the evening.
‘I have listened carefully to all of you,’ he began, ‘and I see plainly that you play the business game in the orthodox fashion. Life sums itself up to you in profits. You have a firm and abiding belief that you were created for the sole purpose of making profits. Only there is a hitch. In the midst of your own profit-making along comes the trust and takes your profits away from you. This is a dilemma that interferes somehow with the aim of creation, and the only way out, as it seems to you, is to destroy that which takes from you your profits.
‘I have listened carefully, and there is only one name that will epitomise you. I shall call you that name. You are machine-breakers. Do you know what a machine-breaker is? Let me tell you. In the eighteenth century, in England, men and women wove cloth on hand-looms in their own cottages. It was a slow, clumsy, and costly way of weaving cloth, this cottage system of manufacture. Along came the steam-engine and labour-saving machinery. A thousand looms assembled in a large factory, and driven by a central engine, wove cloth vastly more cheaply than could the cottage weavers on their hand-looms. Here in the factory was combination, and before it competition faded away. The men and women who had worked the hand-looms for themselves now went into the factories and worked the machine-looms, not for themselves, but for the capitalist owners. Furthermore, little children went to work on the machine-looms, at lower wages, and displaced the men. This made hard times for the men. Their standard of living fell. They starved. And they said it was all the fault of the machines. Therefore they proceeded to break the machines. They did not succeed, and they were very stupid.
‘Yet you have not learned their lesson. Here are you, a century and a half later, trying to break machines. By your own confession the trust machines do the work more efficiently and more cheaply than you can. That is why you cannot compete with them. And yet you would break those machines. You are even more stupid than the stupid workmen of England. And while you maunder about restoring competition, the trusts go on destroying you.
‘One and all you tell the same story—the passing away of competition and the coming on of combination. You, Mr Owen, destroyed competition here in Berkeley when your branch store drove the three small groceries out of business. Your combination was more effective. Yet you feel the pressure of other combinations on you, the trust combinations, and you cry out. It is because you are not a trust. If you were a grocery trust for the whole United States, you would be singing another song. And the song would be, “Blessed are the trusts.” And yet again, not only is your small combination not a trust, but you are aware yourself of its lack of strength. You are beginning to divine your own end. You feel yourself and your branch stores a pawn in the game. You see the powerful interests rising and growing more powerful day by day; you feel their mailed hands descending upon your profits and taking a pinch here and a pinch there—the railroad trust, the oil trust, the steel trust, the coal trust; and you know that in the end they will destroy you, take away from you the last per cent of your little profits.
‘You, sir, are a poor gamester. When you squeezed out the three small groceries here in Berkeley by virtue of your superior combination, you swelled out your chest, talked about efficiency and enterprise, and sent your wife to Europe on the profits you had gained by eating up the three small groceries. It is dog eat dog, and you ate them up. But, on the other hand, you are being eaten up in turn by the bigger dogs, wherefore you squeal. And what I say to you is true of all of you at this table. You are all squealing. You are all playing the losing game, and you are all squealing about it.
‘But when you squeal you don’t state the situation flatly, as I have stated it. You don’t say that you like to squeeze profits out of others, and that you are making all the row because others are squeezing your profits out of you. No, you are too cunning for that. You say something else. You make small-capitalist political speeches such as Mr Calvin made. What did he say? Here are a few of his phrases I caught: “Our original principles are all right.” “What this country requires is a return to fundamental American methods—free opportunity for all,” “The spirit of liberty in which this nation was born,” “Let us return to the principles of our fore-fathers.”
‘When he says “free opportunity for all,” he means free opportunity to squeeze profits, which freedom of opportunity is now denied him by the great trusts. And the absurd thing about it is that you have repeated these phrases so often that you believe them. You want opportunity to plunder your fellowmen in your own small way, but you hypnotise yourselves into thinking you want freedom. You are piggish and acquisitive, but the magic of your phrases leads you to believe that you are patriotic. Your desire for profits, which is sheer selfishness, you metamorphose into altruistic solicitude for suffering humanity. Come on now, right here amongst ourselves, and be honest for once. Look the matter in the face and state it in direct terms.’
There were flushed and angry faces at the table, and withal a measure of awe. They were a little frightened at this smooth-faced young fellow, and the swing and smash of his words, and his dreadful trait of calling a spade a spade. Mr Calvin promptly replied:
‘And why not?’ he demanded. ‘Why can we not return to the ways of our fathers when this republic was founded? You have spoken much truth. Mr Everhard, unpalatable though it has been. But here amongst ourselves let us speak out. Let us throw off all disguise and accept the truth as Mr Everhard has flatly stated it. It is true that we smaller capitalists are after profits, and that the trusts are taking our profits away from us. It is true that we want to destroy the trusts in order that our profits may remain to us. And why can we not do it? Why not? I say, why not?’