Seventy-five years ago this month, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act, which said that collective bargaining was in the national interest of the United States. FDR is just one in a long line of patriots whose actions today would get them attacked as liberals, socialists, heathens or worse.
As greater Peoria enjoys or reflects on the free Independence Day fireworks on the riverfront sponsored by the Peoria Area Convention and Visitors Bureau (“Methodist Red, White and Boom” is downstate Illinois’ biggest 4th of July celebration), it’s worth returning to the lessons offered by the nation’s Founders and other historic heroes – especially in light of conservative extremists’ criticisms of taxation or other government “usurpations” of citizens’ rights. After all, a strong government representing the people has had such powers since the ratification of the Constitution that today’s Tea Partiers claim to hold dear.
The U.S. Constitution in Article I, Sec. 8 reads in part: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; to borrow money on the credit of the United States; to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes; to establish an uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States; to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin…”
In the Progressive Populist magazine this summer, Joseph Kuciejczyk of St. Louis wrote, “Those who know U.S. history may realize that we may wisely be returning to the ‘socialism’ of the framers of our Constitution.”
Of course, the Founders included slaveholders, wealthy merchants and leaders who didn’t see women as equals, which shows how the American Revolution celebrated this month remains a work in progress. Such “unfinished business” was put into stark context in 1852, when the brave African-American abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass that Independence Day weekend addressed the Rochester, N.Y., Ladies Anti-Slavery Society.
His remarks focused on the “peculiar institution” of slavery, but should echo in today’s offices and factory floors, farm fields and retailers large and small, mines and fisheries, schools and, yes, homes, where few Americans consider themselves “wage slaves.”
That’s a term not used as much as it used to be. Wage slavery is given to mean the circumstance where someone’s livelihood depends on wages paid by another who controls the work. Similarities between wage labor and outright slavery were noted as far back as Aristotle and Cicero. So the parallel between Americans held in the bondage of slavery until the Emancipation Proclamation and the common situation of laboring for others whose power determines destiny unless collective bargaining affects the relationship can be drawn.
Douglass said, “Fellow citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this Republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too, great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.
“They were peace men,” Douglass continued. “But they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men, but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance, but they knew its limits. They believed in order, but not the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was ‘settled’ that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were ‘final,’ not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation.
But “the blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common,” Douglass added. “Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
However, Douglass concluded, “I do not despair of this country. ‘The arm of the Lord is not shortened. ‘I, therefore, leave off with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe.
“The fiat of the Almighty, ‘Let there be Light,’ has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light.”
Happy Independence Day.
Bill Knight is a Peoria journalist who teaches at Western Illinois University. Contact him at bill.knight@hotmail.com.