O Shepherd, Speak!

by Upton Sinclair

  “That is something worth watching by the rest of the world,” said the speaker—he didn’t say “by Americans.” He explained that the future of the workers’ movement depended upon it; the advantage of co-operation over competition lay precisely in that mental change. Peace depended upon it, for peace was international co-operation replacing international competition. Peace depended upon the nations learning to trust and help one another, instead of trying to exploit and plunder one another. Peace meant willingness to work and produce wealth instead of trying to get it away from somebody else. The hope of peace lay in the mood of Labor rather than in the mood of speculators, profiteers, and collectors of rent and interest.

  “Then you think, Sir Eric, that world peace depends upon the awakening Labor movement?”

  “I wouldn’t confine it to one class. We in Britain set out upon a definite program to win over the middle classes; to convince them that they would have more happiness and security in a co-operative world. We have also won over members of the upper class, so-called. It happens that I myself, through no merit of my own, am a member of that class. The title means nothing to me, and the only reason I use it is because I have sadly learned that the people in my homeland will pay more attention to what Sir Eric says than to any possible wisdom from plain Rick, which is what my friends call me. I hope the same thing is not true in democratic America.” There might have been a tiny bit of irony in that, but Sir Eric tried not to show it in his tone.

  It was the announcer’s turn, and he told about the Peace Program, and named Hansi Robin as the guest for the following week. He told about the paper, and how it was booming; they had managed to get all the copies into the mail but had pretty nearly broken their backs. He told about the encouraging mail and thanked all the writers. It was much more effective to refer to triumphs than it was to beg or even to hint. They had engaged additional help, being sure that people would be eager to have Sir Eric’s instructive talk in print. “Remember the address: Box One Thousand, Edgemere, New Jersey.”

  They weren’t really so sure, by any means. Rick himself was afraid of a bad reaction, for he had got the impression that America was very conservative-minded since the end of the war. He had avoided using the word Socialism in his talk, and he thought they ought to leave it out of the paper, at least until they had taught their readers what the word meant. He was even dubious about the suggestion Lanny had made, that they should follow the printed version of his talk with a poem which had been a part of the British Labour movement since its earliest days. It had been written by a humble poet named Ebenezer Elliott, called “the Corn-Law Rhymer.” It had been sung at tens of thousands of meetings during more than a hundred years. It was called “The People’s Anthem,” and these timid friends of peace debated anxiously and finally compromised by printing no more than the first stanza:

  When wilt Thou save the people?

  O God of mercy! when?

  Not kings and lords, but nations!

  Not thrones and crowns, but men!

  Flowers of thy heart, O God, are they!

  Let them not pass, like weeds, away!

  Their heritage a sunless day!

  God save the people!

  IV

  Rick’s fears were not justified; the flood of orders continued. Apparently Americans approved of an Englishman, provided he was modest and recognized the social position of America. They knew that England was their “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” and they surely wanted to keep it afloat. They were troubled by the experiment in Socialism which the British were making, thought it was a dangerous precedent, and were sure it couldn’t succeed; but meantime they couldn’t let staunch allies starve. Nobody objected to the first stanza of “The People’s Anthem,” because it was against kings and thrones, and that was according to American traditions; the school books taught how we had got rid of them. If the anthem had said landlords and capitalists, that would have been something else again.

  One immediate result of the broadcast was the coming of that invitation which Comrade Tipton had foretold. It was brought by a rotund gentleman, Mr. Puckett, who kept one of the town’s two hardware stores. He was secretary of the Kiwanis, a “service club,” and they wanted the honor of having Sir Eric and Mr. Burns as guests at their weekly luncheon; Sir Eric was to be the speaker. Rick, forewarned, accepted the invitation for both; it was indeed important to be on friendly terms with the people in their new place of residence, and this was a quick and easy way. Also, it was a way to learn about America, one of Rick’s principal aims.

  “You will find them a bunch of Babbitts,” said Philip Edgerton, and that sounded forbidding. But really it wasn’t so; they were very nice fellows, and put on an air of elaborate good fellowship which served all purposes for a couple of hours. The weekly luncheon was held in the banquet room of the town’s best hotel, and they assembled in the lobby, each man with a round cardboard disk on which his first name was printed; it was etiquette to call him by that name. There was Edgemere’s druggist, its department-store manager, its dentist, its town clerk; a garage proprietor, a doctor, the Methodist minister, and so on, some thirty men, all of the white-collar class. The main purpose was intergroup business—you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours; but incidentally they appointed committees and chipped in money and looked after small local improvements. Good fellowship was the motto, and of course they did everything to make a guest feel at home.

  The meal was very American: chicken, mashed potatoes, peas, apple pie, and coffee. As he ate, Lanny couldn’t help recalling that it was the same meal the American Army had served to Hermann Göring on the day he had surrendered. The menu had been published and had caused something of a flurry; people had said we were pampering that gross creature. The Army’s answer had been that that was what the quartermaster had provided for that day, and you ate that or you ate nothing. It was the same here at Switzer’s Inn—you weren’t asked what you wanted, your plate was put before you.

  Very probably they had never had a baronet before, and perhaps had never seen one. They were curious about him but wouldn’t show it; they were playing the game of democracy, American style. His card read “Rick,” and no “sir,” no sir! They patted him on the back and told him he was welcome to the town. They gave him a slip with a printed version of the songs they would sing, so that he could join in. When he got up to speak they gave him a good round of applause, and they listened attentively to what he had to say.

  He didn’t mention his business here; he would have thought that bad taste. They would want to know about England; what was the meaning of the Labour victory, why had the British people kicked out Churchill, and what were they going to do now. He spoke briefly, and then they plied him with questions; they all seemed to be informed and were not blind to the meaning of British precedents for America. If a nationalized coal industry could be made to work, how long would it be before the United Mine Workers would be demanding the same thing? At present the British project didn’t seem to be working very well; the young miners wouldn’t go back into the pits. But Rick said that was a temporary phase, the British people were known for their common sense. He told what the Labour party was doing to keep the whole working class informed as to their position and their needs.

  Altogether it was a pleasant occasion, a part of that “hands across the seas” movement which had been cultivated for half a century. They would have liked to stay all afternoon and ask questions, first about Britain, then about Russia, France, Germany, and the rest of Europe. But their rule was an hour and a half; they were businessmen and had to get back to work, and the same thing must be true of a guest. They shook hands all round, and the baronet and his unassuming friend Billy were assured that Edgemere was proud of having been put on the radio map.

  V

  Having accepted the invitation of the white-collar class, of course they couldn’t turn down the working class; they came to one of Mrs. Tipton’s bean suppers. This was America too; it was democratic, and
couldn’t have been anything else if it had wanted to. Also it was bisexual, and couldn’t have been anything else, since it was a woman who cooked the beans. There was a steaming bowl of them, ladled out on paper plates, and there were sandwiches made of whole wheat bread, peanut butter, and leaves of lettuce. Also, something out of the ordinary, there was grape juice served in paper cups, because Lanny had remembered to send round a case.

  All these supplies had been ordered from the People’s Co-operative of Edgemere, an institution which the Tiptons had founded several years ago, and which they ran as a sort of adjunct to the Socialist party, and of the Methodist Church and the Model Laundry. Needless to say, the town grocers didn’t like this and had complained to the proprietor of the laundry, who hadn’t dared to fire Tipton for fear that he might take the business to a rival.

  All that was a part of the class struggle, which you could read about in any Socialist textbook or copy of the Call. You could hear innumerable stories about it at the bean supper—indeed, the only way you could avoid hearing was not to come. The Tiptons knew this town inside out and washed its dirty linen in more than one sense of the words. They had constituted themselves a center of disaffection and preached the gospel of social change day and night, wherever they went. The coming of the Peace Program and its adjuncts was the most exciting event of their lives, and a large stout grandmotherly laundrywoman welcomed it quite literally with open arms. She was a somewhat unusual laundry-woman, in that she belonged to the Daughters of the American Revolution and spoke her mind even in that ultraconservative atmosphere. That revolution, a hundred and seventy years old, was respectable.

  Present were the town’s three intellectuals, previously mentioned by Tipton; the elderly lawyer, the stationer, and the refugee bootblack. There was a Swedish carpenter who had worked fixing up the Peace office; there was a history teacher from the local high school, and there were half a dozen students, one of them a daughter of Mr. Puckett, the Kiwanis hardware merchant. So it is that ideas get spread in a town. You can never be sure who will be the one to take them up; it can be the town’s garbage collector, or it can be a son of the town’s leading banker. There was a rich lady in Edgemere who sometimes came and ate beans when she might have been eating caviar; the wife of Philip Edgerton would come and eat beans because she was hoping to meet this elegant Mrs. Parmenter—the department-store Parmenters, you must understand.

  VI

  It was on this occasion that Comrade Tipton had his promised argument with Mary Morrow. You couldn’t keep them apart, for the laundryman had been saving up ammunition for weeks, and an author of Tendenz novels wasn’t the one to dodge a clash of opinion. Most of the company were with her, for this was a gathering of the Socialist local; Tipton was the lone individualist, or “libertarian,” as he called himself, but that didn’t worry him in the least. He distrusted politics because it used compulsion; he glorified the co-op because it was an exemplar of free association, the way to end the profit system without risk of setting up a police state.

  He told the company about a recent experience of the co-ops in Kansas. The business crowd had proposed a law providing for the taxation of undistributed savings held by the co-operative wholesales. The individual co-operator would have been taxed again on these savings when they were added to his income. This law would have spelled the ruin of all the co-ops in Kansas and was designed for that purpose. The proposal raised a storm of protest from both the co-ops and their individual members, and the law did not pass. Said Tipton, “When one-third of all the people are banded together in co-operative enterprises they hold the balance of power in any state, and they can have their demands granted without dirtying themselves in political campaigns, where they are sold down the river by politicians they helped to elect.”

  To which Laurel replied very mildly, “Suppose, Comrade Tipton, that the state legislature had passed that bill in spite of all protest, what would the co-ops have done?”

  “Since they had the balance of power they could have voted those legislators out of office.”

  “But just how do you vote a legislator out of office, Comrade Tipton? You don’t find any place on the ballot where you vote against a man, do you?”

  “No, you vote for some other man for that job.”

  “But suppose the other man was also in favor of the bill?”

  “He wouldn’t be; he would want to get elected.”

  “But how would he know, unless the co-ops made it clear to him? He would have to have an understanding with them; and even then he might turn out to be a crook.”

  “Indeed he might—he probably would.”

  “Then it seems to me the proper recourse of the co-ops would be to put up a man of their own, one whom they knew and could trust. I don’t know the details about Kansas, but I’d venture the guess that the co-ops did just that, or threatened to do it, and that was why the legislators were afraid of them. If they had announced your program of refusing to soil their hands with politics, they would have been in effect disfranchising themselves; the legislators and other politicians wouldn’t have paid the slightest attention to them, knowing that they had thrown away their one powerful weapon.”

  Lanny, watching closely, imagined that he saw the trace of a smile on the face of Mother Tipton. He could guess that she, a Socialist party worker, agreed with Laurel; but being a wise wife, she would let some other woman do the arguing.

  VII

  When you visited that pathetic little grocery store, situated in the poorest quarter of the town, its shelves only half full because it lacked working capital, you might form no high opinion of this form of working-class activity. But that was the way co-ops had begun, all over the world—ever since the time a hundred and two years ago when twenty-eight half-starved weavers in the old English town of Rochdale had put in a few shillings each to establish a business enterprise owned and operated by the people it served. They too had been unable to fill their shelves, but they had stuck to it because they had a principle. Anyone could join, and every member had one vote, regardless of how much money he had put in; the profits of the enterprise were returned to the members in proportion to the amount of each one’s patronage. The business was done at prevailing market prices, and for cash only. The co-ops themselves did not go into politics, but their members were free to do so, and generally they did, for the reason revealed in the argument at the Tiptons’. The business groups resented the co-ops as a menace to what they were pleased to call “the American way,” and presently their lobbyists would show up at the various state capitals with ingenious taxation measures designed to drive the newcomers onto the rocks.

  The business-for-profit men had reason to worry, for the movement in America, slow to start, was now growing fast; it had more than five thousand units, with close to two million member families. In the Middle West it was creeping into one industry after another; the co-operative groceries had established a co-operative wholesale, for greater economy in buying; from there they had gone to producing and processing. A network of service stations had established a refinery, and then had purchased and were operating more than a hundred oil wells. There were rural electric co-ops, telephone co-ops, credit unions, and insurance associations. Comrade Tipton, a mine of information on the subject, would reel off the list: creameries, poultry raisers, fruit and grain marketers, medical and funeral associations, housing associations, campus co-ops, college bookstores—and so on and on. Altogether the amount of such business in the United States was almost a billion dollars a year.

  Rick could tell them about the movement in England, for he had grown up with it; his father, considered an eccentric, had been an enthusiast for the system and had insisted upon buying all the family supplies from the nearest co-op, even though it was not very near. In Britain the co-op wholesale was an enormous institution and had gone in for a great variety of manufactures, from shoes to the catching and canning of fish. The co-ops had nearly ten million members, which was, in proportion to popul
ation, as if America had forty million.

  “An interesting thing to notice,” the baronet told this little company, “how you Americans follow about a generation behind us in social change. You older people will remember Samuel Gompers and his slogan ‘No politics in the unions.’ Your CIO gave that up, since they backed the New Deal. But it appears that your co-ops are still officially clinging to the old English program of political neutrality, which we gave up a generation ago, for the same reason that the people in Kansas did—we had to defend ourselves against the Big Business crowd. We set up a Co-op party and elected members to Parliament. The recent victory was just as much a victory of the co-ops as it was of Labour; the two parties combined on both program and tactics and fought the campaign together.”

  The Swedish carpenter, Comrade Hanson, spoke up. “The change will come fast in this country. Both the CIO and the AFL are setting up co-ops for their members, and you can be sure they aren’t going to be non-political. In my old country one in five of the population is a co-op member, and it would never cross the mind of anybody that the co-ops and the Social-Democratic party were anything but the same movement, one in the economic and the other in the political sphere.”

  After that elementary lesson the Peace people all joined the co-op grocery. They put in some working capital, so that the store could order half a dozen cases of grape juice and as many of pineapple juice for a household which intended to have denatured cocktail parties now and then. There were no dissenting votes, but there was one silent rebel, Alma Edgerton. Catch her ever being seen in that dingy little shop! Of course her defection would soon be noticed—and how Mrs. Tipton would despise that vain and empty-headed woman!