Let's trade the stock villains for new ideas

By RICHARD H. EBEL,
Retired administrative engineer

THE ROMANTIC story of "Mother Jones, the Miners' Angel" was told in the November "Rostrum." The writer caressed it with laudatory eulogy 50 years after she was "laid to rest beside her 'boys' who had been killed in the Virden massacre in 1898." As described by History Professor Ralph Stone of Sangamon State University she must have been a paradigm of Fabianisms: "The message Mother Jones delivered to the miners . . . seldom varied; obtain an education — become informed — form industrial unions of masses of workers; maintain democracy within the union — defend yourself by force ... Mother Jones was a socialist who believed in collective ownership of the means of wealth."

With thinking apparently shaped by the 1960's, Dr. Stone could not resist: "More than anything she was an agitator, a peripatetic protestor who gave her life to the cause of poor and oppressed workers." But then, carried away with his sympathy he leaps to undefensible history: "To the coal barons, she was an epithet."

The villainous barons were almost as poor as miners, modest businessmen poorly repaid for their time and investment and the calumny heaped upon them by the miners. No one questions that coal mining conditions in the 40 years between 1880 and 1920 were bad. But there are reasons to suspect that conditions became better as the mine owners acquired more working capital. "... in 1883 only 90,000 tons of coal were taken out [of the mines] for each life lost, 381,000 tons, or more than four times as much coal was mined in 1917 for each man lost" (Centennial History of Illinois, Vol. IV, Bogard & Thompson, 1920).

Thereafter Professor Stone's brief essay resorts to the stock villains on the scene, the "giant corporations" whose "capitalist ideology controls the arena of discourse." After compliments to William Winpisinger "the feisty and avowed socialist who presides over the machinists," he concludes with hope and prayers that the labor movement "will help bring to the fore the Mother Jones of tomorrow."

Let us not fault Dr. Stone for taking a rather one-sided view but rather point to the errors of his nostalgia. The needs of past generations cannot solve the problems of today. It was hoped in 1945 the suicide of Adolph Hitler brought to an ignominious end the long history of charismatic demagogues. Maw Jones and her boys lived and died before the advent of mathematical economic studies where the marginal propensity for individual private greed and corporate aggrandizement alike become mere factors in the indeterminate equations programmed into our computers in ever lengthening chains. H. G. Wells observed in his Outline of History a plea for the restoration of an obsolete idea is the hallmark of its death. Dying ideas can crumble empires to their foundations. The British Labour Party today is the scion of the Fabian Society, unable to progress beyond the ideals of Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Do we wish to increase our industrial blight with this type of dogmatic labor indifference to overall economic welfare?

During the years of Mother Jones' birth and development, the world renowned scientists Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin established the principle that in the evolution of life only the fitter can survive. This is as true of the corps social et politique as it is of the body biologic. Evolution should move not only forward but upward. Having invented the electronic brain and found it useful, we now must develop the society which can use it as the crutch great thinkers require. I am afraid historians who get their kicks painting the past with brighter colors than the present are trailing the perpetual pendulum of action and reaction. Today the elderly campus activists are not only middle-aged but out of phase.

The next time you find yourself hypnotically gazing at the divine political dichotomy which explains everything, try taking another view which may require some thought. Is the dichotomy real? Institutions, be they social or economic, represent a culmination of a specific group of human aspirations. Tautologically, you cannot subtract the humanity from the institution even if you label it "giant corporation," "capitalist" or "socialist." The benign "human aspiration" has an essential equivalence to the polemist's "human avarice" or the scientist's "human propensity." It is no more or less a social force — a mathematical vector.

When two institutions have the same goal, the component of human avarice will tend to be equal in the aggregates of each. Thus a capitalistic giant corporation seeking a larger share of the gross national produt can hardly be more greedy than a labor union enjoying a government granted monopoly of a necessary good.

Instead of remaining stuck in a vise between the forces of reactionary capitalism and equally archaic socialism, both of which historically have demonstrable defects, let us look to the miracles of modern technology for a totally new resolution. For we know that tomorrow we will be able to do things we have only begun to discover today.

This is the Hegelian "Thesis," "Antithesis" and "Synthesis" which is the logic system used by Karl Marx and Friederich Engles. Should one conclude from this that 18th century philosophy is more pertinent today than modern philosophy? □

January 1981/Illinois Issues/39