The Profits of Religion
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Upton Sinclair >> The Profits of Religion
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Nor is this a solitary instance. The Catholic military societies,
with their uniforms and their armories, are not maintained for
nothing. As Archbishop Quigley declared before the German
Catholic Central Verein:
We have well ordered and efficient organizations, all at the beck
and nod of the hierarchy and ready to do what the church
authorities tell them to do. With these bodies of loyal Catholics
ready to step into the breach at any time and present an unbroken
front to the enemy we may feel secure.
And so, on the evening of April 15th, 1914, a group of Catholics
entered the Pierce Hotel in Denver, Colorado, overpowered a
police guard and seized the Rev. Otis L. Spurgeon, an
anti-Catholic lecturer. They bound and gagged him, took him to a
lonely woods, and beat him to insensibility. The same thing
happened to the Rev. Augustus Barnett, at Buffalo; the Rev.
William Black was killed at Marshall, Texas. In each case the
assailants avowed themselves Knights of Columbus, and efforts to
punish them failed, because no jury can be got to convict a
Catholic, fighting for his Pope against a godless state. The most
pious Leo XIII has laid down:
It is an impious deed to break the laws of Jesus Christ for the
purpose of obeying the magistrates, or to transgress the law of
the Church under the pretext of observing the civil law.
There are papers published to warn Americans against the plotting
of this political Church. One of them, "The Menace," has a
circulation of more than a million; and naturally the Knights of
Slavery do not enjoy reading it. Year after year they have
marshalled their power to have this paper barred from the
mails--so far, in vain. They caused an obscenity prosecution,
which failed; so finally the press rooms of the paper were blown
up with dynamite. At the present time there is a "Catholic Truth
Society" with a publication called "Truth", to oppose the
anti-Catholic campaign; and that is all right, of course--except
when the agents who collect the two-dollar subscriptions to this
publication make use of Untruth in their labors--promising
absolution and salvation to the families, dead and living, of
those who "come across" with subscriptions. In the "Bulletin of
the American Federation of Catholic Societies" for September,
1915, I find a record of the ceaseless plotting to bar criticism
of the Catholic Church from the mails. Fitzgerald, a Tammany
Catholic congressman, proposes a bill in Washington; and Judge
St. Paul, of New Orleans, a member of the Federation's "law
committee", points out the difficulties in the way of such
legislation. You cannot pass a law against ridiculing religion,
because the Catholics want to ridicule Christian Science,
Mormonism, and the "Holy Ghost and Us" Society! The Judge thinks
the purpose of the Papal plotters will be accomplished if they
can slip into the present law the words "scurrilous and
slanderous"; he hopes that this much can be done without the
American people catching on!
You read these things for the first time, perhaps, and you want
to start an American "Kultur-kampf." I make haste, therefore, to
restate the main thesis of this book. It is not the New
Inquisition which is our enemy today; it is hereditary Privilege.
It is not Superstition, but Big Business which makes use of
Superstition as a wolf makes use of sheep's clothing.
You remember how, when Americans first awakened to the universal
corruption of our politics, we used to attribute it to the
"ignorant foreign vote." Turn to Lecky's "Democracy and Liberty"
and you will see how reformers twenty years ago explained our
political depravity. But we probed deeper, and discovered that
the purely American communities, such as Rhode Island, were the
most corrupt of all. It dawned upon us that wherever there was a
political boss paying bribes on election day, there was a captain
of industry furnishing the money for the bribes, and taking some
public privilege in return. So we came to realize that political
corruption is merely a by-product of Big Business.
And when we come to probe this problem of the spread of
Supersition in America, this amazing renascence of Romanism in a
democracy, we find precisely the same phenomenon. It is not the
poor foreigner who troubles us. Our human magic would win
him--our easy-going trust, our quiet certainty of liberty, our
open-handed and open-homed and hail-fellow-well-met democracy. We
should break down the Catholic machine, and not all the priests
in the hierarchy could stop us--were it not for the Steel Trust
and the Coal Trust and the Beef Trust, the Liquor Trust and the
Traction Trust and the Money Trust--those masters of America who
do not want citizens, free and intelligent and self-governing,
but who want the slave-hordes as they come, ignorant, inert,
physically, mentally and morally helpless!
No, do not let yourself be lured into a Kultur-kampf. It is not
the pennies of the servant-girls which build the towering
cathedrals; it is not the two-dollar contributions for the
salvation of souls which support the Catholic Truth Society and
the Knights of Columbus and the Holy Name Society and the Mary
Sodality and the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and
all the rest of the machinery of the Papal propaganda. These
help, of course; but the main sources of growth are, first, the
subsidies of industrial exploiters, the majority of whom are
non-Catholic, and second, the privilege of public plunder granted
as payment for votes by politicians who are creatures and puppets
of Big Business.
King Coal
The proof of these statements is written all over the industrial
life of America. I will stop long enough to present an account of
one industry, asking the reader to accept my statement that if
space permitted I could present the same sort of proof for a
dozen other industries which I have studied--the steel-mills of
Western Pennsylvania, the meat-factories of Chicago, the
glass-works of Southern Jersey, the silk-mills of Paterson, the
cotton-mills of North Carolina, the woolen-mills of
Massachusetts, the lumber-camps of Louisiana, the copper-mines of
Michigan, the sweat-shops of New York.
In a lonely part of the Rocky Mountains lies a group of
enormously valuable coal-mines owned by the Rockefellers and
other Protestant exploiters. The men who work these mines, some
twelve or fifteen thousand in number, come from all the nations
of Europe and Asia, and their fate is that of the average
wage-slave. I do not ask anyone to take my word, but present
sworn testimony, taken by the United States Commission on
Industrial Relations in 1914. Here is the way the Italian miners
live, as described in a doctor's report:
Houses up the canyon, so-called, of which eight are habitable,
and forty-six simply awful; they are disreputably disgraceful. I
have had to remove a mother in labor from one part of the shack
to another to keep dry.
And here is the testimony of the Rev. Eugene S. Gaddis, former
superintendent of the Sociological Department of the Colorado
Fuel and Iron Company:
The C. F. & I. Company now own and rent hovels, shacks and
dug-outs that are unfit for the habitation of human beings and
are little removed from the pig-sty make of dwellings. And the
people in them live on the very level of a pig-sty. Frequently
the population is so congested that whole families are crowded
into one room; eight persons in one small room was reported
during the year.
And here is what this same clergyman has to say about the bosses
whom the Rockefellers employ:
The camp superintendents as a whole impressed me as most uncouth,
ignorant, immoral, and in many instances, the most brutal set of
men that I have ever met. Blasphemous bullies.
Sometimes the miner grows tired of being robbed of his weights,
and applies for the protection which the law of the state allows
him. What happens then?
"When a man asked for a checkweighman, in the language of the
super he was getting too smart."
"And he got what?"
"He got it in the neck, generally."
And when these wage-slaves, goaded beyond endurance, went on
strike, in the words of the Commission's report:
Five strikers, one boy, and thirteen women and children in the
strikers' tent colony were shot to death by militiamen and guards
employed by the coal companies, or suffocated and burned to death
when these militiamen and guards set fire to the tents in which
they made their homes.
And now, what is the position of education in such camps? The
Rev. James McDonald, a Methodist preacher, testified that the
school building was dilapidated and unfit. One year there were
four teachers, the next three, and the next only two. The teacher
of the primary grade had a hundred and twenty children enrolled,
ninety per cent of whom could not speak a word of English.
Every little bench was seated with two or three. It was
over-crowded entirely, and she could hardly get walking room
around there.
And as to the political use made of this deliberately cultivated
ignorance, former United States Senator Patterson testified that
the companies controlled all elections and all nominations:
Election returns from the two or three counties in which the
large companies operate show that in the precincts in which the
mining camps are located the returns are nearly unanimous in
favor of the men or measures approved by the companies,
regardless of party.
And now comes the all-important question. What of the Catholic
Church and these evils? The majority of these mine-slaves are
Catholics, it is this Church which is charged with their
protection. There are priests in every town, and in nearly every
camp. And do we find them lifting their voices in behalf of the
miners, protesting against the starving and torturing of thirty
or forty thousand human beings? Do we find Catholic papers
printing accounts of the Ludlow massacre? Do we find Catholic
journalists on the scene reporting it, Catholic lawyers defending
the strikers, Catholic novelists writing books about their
troubles? We do not!
Through the long agony of the fourteen months strike, I know of
just one Catholic priest, Father Le Fevre, who had a word to say
for the strikers. One of the first stories I heard when I reached
the strike-field was of a priest who had preached on the text
that "Idleness is the root of all evil," and had been reported as
a "scab" and made to shut up. "Who made him?" I asked, naively,
thinking of his church superiors. My informant, a union miner,
laughed. "We made him!" he said.
I talked with another priest who was prudently saving souls and
could not be interested in questions of worldly greed. Max
Eastman, reporting the strike in the "Masses", tells of an
interview with a Catholic sister.
"Has the Church done anything to try to help these people, or to
bring about peace?" we asked. "I consider it the most useless
thing in the world to attempt it," she replied.
The investigating committee of Congress came to the scene, and
several clergymen of the Protestant Church appeared and bore
testimony to the outrages which were being committed against the
strikers; but of all the Catholic priests in the district not one
appeared--not one! Several Protestant clergymen testified that
they had been driven from the coal-camps--not because they
favored the unions, but because the companies objected to having
their workers educated at all; but no one ever heard of the
Catholic Church having trouble with the operators. To make sure
on this point I wrote to a former clergyman of Trinidad who
watched the whole strike, and is now a first lieutenant in the
First New Mexico Infantry. He answered:
The Catholic Church seemed to get along with the companies very
cordially. The Church was permitted in all the camps. The
impression was abroad that this was due to favoritism. I honor
what good the Church does, but I know of no instance, during the
Colorado coal-strike or at any other time or place, when the
Catholic Church has taken any special interest in the cause of
the laboring men. Many Catholics, especially the men, quit the
church during the coal-strike.
The Unholy Alliance
Everywhere throughout America today the ultimate source of all
power, political, social, and religious, is economic
exploitation. To all other powers and all other organizations it
speaks in these words: "Help us, and you will thrive; oppose us,
and you will be destroyed." It has spoken to the Catholic Church,
for sixteen hundred years the friend and servant of every ruling
class; and the Church has hastened to fit itself into the
situation, continuing its pastoral role as shepherd to the
wage-slave vote.
In New York and Boston and Chicago the Church is "Democratic"; so
in the Blaine campaign it was possible for a Republican clergyman
to describe the issue as "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." But the
Holy Office was shrewd and socially ambitious, and the Grand Old
Party was desperately in need of votes, so under the regime of
Mark Hanna, the President-Maker, there began a rapprochement
between Big Business and the New Inquisition. Under Hanna the
Catholic Church got representation in the Cabinet; under him the
Cardinal's Mass became a government institution, a Catholic
College came to the fore in Washington, and Catholic prelates
were introduced in the role of eminent publicists, their
reactionary opinions on important questions being quoted with
grave solemnity by a prostitute press. It was Mark Hanna himself
who founded the National Civic Federation, upon whose executive
committee Catholic cardinals and archbishops might work hand in
glove with Catholic labor-leaders for the chloroforming of the
American working-class. Hanna's biographer naively calls
attention to the President-maker's popularity among Catholics,
high and low, and the support they gave him. "Archbishop Ireland
was in frequent correspondence with him, and used his influence
in Mr. Hanna's behalf."
And this tradition, begun under Hanna, was continued under
Roosevelt, and reached its finest flower in the days of Taft, the
most pliant tool of the forces of evil who has occupied the White
House since the days of the Slave Power. President Taft was
himself a Unitarian; yet it was under his administration that the
Catholic Church achieved one of its dearest ambitions, and broke
into the Supreme Court. Why not? We can imagine the powers of the
time in conference. It is desired to pack the Court against the
possibility of progress; it is desired to find men who will stand
like a rock against change--and who better than those who have
been trained from childhood in the idea of a divine sanction for
doctrine and morals? After all, what is it that Hereditary
Privilege wants in America? A Roman Catholic code of property
rights, with a supreme tribunal to play the part of an infallible
Pope!
Under this Taft administration the country was governed by the
strangest legislative alliance our history ever saw; a
combination of the Old Guard of the Republican Party with the
leaders of the Tammany Democracy of New York. "Bloody shirt"
Foraker, senator from Ohio, voting with the sons of those Irish
Catholic mob-leaders whom the Federal troops shot down in the
draft-riots! By this unholy combination a pledge to reduce the
tariff was carried out by a bill which greatly increased its
burdens; by this combination the public lands and resources of
the country were fed to a gang of vultures by a thievish
Secretary of the Interior. And of course under such an
administration the cause of "Religion" made tremendous strides.
Catholic officials were appointed to public office, Catholic
ecclesiastics were accorded public honors, and Catholic favor
became a means to political advancement. You might see a
hard-swearing old political pirate like "Uncle Joe" Cannon,
taking his cigar out of the corner of his blasphemous mouth and
betaking himself to the "Cardinal's Day Mass", to bend his stiff
knees and bow his hoary unrepentant head before a jeweled prelate
on a throne. You might see an emissary of the United States
government proceeding to Rome, prostrating himself before the
Pope, and paying over seven million dollars of our taxes for
lands which the filthy and sensual friars of the Philippine
Islands had filched from the wretched serfs of that country and
which the wretched serfs had won back by their blood in a
revolution.
Secret Service
This Taft administration, urged on by the Catholic intrigue, made
the most determined efforts to prevent the spread of radical
thought. Because the popular magazines were opposing the
plundering of the country, a bill was introduced into Congress to
put them out of business by a prohibitive postal tax; the
President himself devoted all his power to forcing the passage of
this bill. At the same time the Socialist press was handicapped
by every sort of persecution. I was at that time in intimate
touch with the "Appeal to Reason", and I know that scarcely a
month passed that the Post Office Department did not invent some
new "regulation" especially designed to limit its circulation. I
recall one occasion when I met the editor on his way to
Washington with a trunkful of letters from subscribers who
complained that their postmasters refused to deliver the paper to
them; and later on this same editor was prosecuted by a Catholic
Attorney General and sentenced to prison for seeking to awaken
the people concerning the Moyer-Haywood case.
From my personal knowledge I can say that under the
administration of President Taft the Roman Catholic Church and
the Secret Service of the Federal Government worked hand in hand
for the undermining of the radical movement in America. Catholic
lecturers toured the country, pouring into the ears of the public
vile slanders about the private morality of Socialists; while at
the same time government detectives, paid out of public funds,
spent their time seeking evidence for these Catholic lecturers to
use. I know one man, a radical labor-leader, whose morals
happened to approach those of the average capitalist politician,
and who was prevented by threats of exposure and scandal from
accepting the Socialist nomination for President. I know a dozen
others who were shadowed and spied upon; I know one
case--myself--a man who was asking a divorce from his wife, and
whose mail was opened for months.
This subject is one on which I naturally speak with extreme
reluctance. I will only say that my opponent in the suit made no
charge of misconduct against me; but those in control of our
political police evidently thought it likely that a man who was
not living with his wife might have something to hide; so for
months my every move was watched and all my mail intercepted. In
such a case one might at first suspect one's private opponent;
but it soon became evident that this net was cast too wide for
any private agency. Not merely was my own mail opened, but the
mail of all my relatives and friends--people residing in places
as far apart as California and Florida. I recall the bland smile
of a government official to whom I complained about this matter:
"If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear." My answer
was that a study of many labor cases had taught me the methods of
the agent provocateur. He is quite willing to take real evidence
if he can find it; but if not, he has familiarized himself with
the affairs of his victim, and can make evidence which will be
convincing when exploited by the yellow press. In my own case,
the matter was not brought to a test, for I went abroad to live;
when I made my next attack on Big Business, the Taft
administration had been repudiated at the polls, and the Secret
Service of the government was no longer at the disposal of the
Catholic machine.
Tax Exemption
Today the Catholic Church is firmly established and everywhere
recognized as one of the main pillars of American capitalism. It
has some fifteen thousand churches, fourteen million
communicants, and property valued at half a billion dollars. Upon
this property it pays no taxes, municipal, state or national;
which means, quite obviously, that you and I, who do not go to
church, but who do pay taxes, furnish the public costs of
Catholicism. We pay to have streets paved and lighted and cleaned
in front of Catholic churches; we pay to have thieves kept away
from them, fires put out in them, records preserved for them--all
the services of civilization given to them gratis, and this in a
land whose constitution provides that Congress (which includes
all state and municipal legislative bodies) "shall make no law
respecting a religious establishment." When war is declared, and
our sons are drafted to defend the country, all Catholic monks
and friars, priests and dignitaries are exempted. They are
"ministers of religion"; whereas we Socialists may not even have
the status of "conscientious objectors." We do not teach
"religion"; we only teach justice and humanity, decency and
truth.
In defense of this tax-exemption graft, the stock answer is that
the property is being used for purposes of "education" or
"charity". It is a school, in which children are being taught
that "liberty of conscience is a most pestiferous error, from
which arises revolution, corruption, contempt of sacred things,
holy institutions, and laws." (Pius IX). It is a "House of
Refuge", to which wayward girls are committed by Catholic
magistrates, and in which they are worked twelve hours a day in a
laundry or a clothing sweat-shop. Or it is a "parish-house", in
which a celibate priest lives under the care of an attractive
young "house-keeper". Or it is a nunnery, in which young girls
are held against their will and fed upon the scraps from their
sisters' plates to teach them humility, and taught to lie before
the altar, prostrate in the form of a cross, while their
"Superiors" walk upon their bodies to impress the religious
virtues. "I was a teacher in the Catholic schools up to a very
recent period," writes the woman friend who tells me of these
customs, "and I know about the whole awful system which endeavors
to throttle every genuine impulse of the human will."
Concerning a large part of this church property, the claim of
"religious" use has not even the shadow of justification. In
every large city of America you will find acres of land owned by
the Catholic machine, and supposed to be the future site of some
institution; but as time goes on and property values increase,
the church decides to build on a cheaper site, and proceeds to
cash in the profits of its investment, precisely as does any
other real estate speculator. Everywhere you turn in the history
of Romanism you find it at this same game, doing business under
the cloak of philanthropy and in the holy name of Christ. Read
the letter which the Catholic Bishop of Mexico sent to the Pope
in 1647, complaining of the Jesuit fathers and their boundless
graft. In McCabe's "Candid History of the Jesuits" appears a
summary:
A remarkable account is given of the worldly property of the
fathers. They hold, it seems, the greater part of the wealth of
Mexico. Two of their colleges own 300,000 sheep, besides cattle
and other property. They own six large sugar refineries, worth
from half a million to a million crowns each, and making an
annual profit of 100,000 crowns each, while all the other monks
and clergy of Mexico together own only three small refineries.
They have immense farms, rich silver mines, large shops and
butcheries, and do a vast trade. Yet they continually intrigue
for legacies--a woman has recently left them 70,000 crowns--and
they refuse to pay the appointed tithe on them. It is piquant to
add to this authoritative description that the Jesuit
congregation at Rome were still periodically forbidding the
fathers to engage in commerce, and Jesuit writers still gravely
maintain that the society never engaged in commerce. It should be
added that the missionaries were still heavily subsidized by the
King of Spain, that there were (the Bishop says) only five or six
Jesuits to each of their establishments, and that they conducted
only ten colleges.
"Holy History"
And if you think this tax-exemption privilege should be taken
away from the church grafters, let me suggest a course of
procedure. Write a letter about it to your daily newspaper; and
if the letter is not published, go and see the editor and ask
why; so you will learn something about the partnership between
Superstition and Big Business!
It is not too much to say that today no daily newspaper in any
large American city dares to attack the emoluments of the
Catholic Church, or to advocate restrictions upon the
ecclesiastical machine. As I write, they are making a new
Catholic bishop in Los Angeles, and all the newspapers of that
graft-ridden city herald it as an important social event. Each
paper has the picture of the new prelate, with his shepherd's
crook upraised, his empty face crowned with a rhomboidal fool's
cap, and enough upholstery on him to outfit a grand opera
company. The Los Angeles "Examiner", the only paper in the city
with a pretense to radicalism, turns loose its star-writer--one
of those journalist virtuosos who will describe you a Wild West
"rodeo" one day, and a society elopement the next, and a G. O. P.
convention the next; and always with his picture, one inch
square, at the head of his effusion. He takes in the Catholic
festivity; and does it phaze him? It does not! He is a newspaper
man, and if his city editor sent him to hell, he would take the
assignment and write like the devil. To read him now you might
think he had been reared in a convent; his soul is uplifted, and
he bursts forth in pure spontaneous ecstacy:
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