Reading Eagle (May 27, 1946)
ON THE RECORD —
‘And Crown Thy Good’
By Dorothy Thompson
The government has taken over the coal mines and the railroads, and is, therefore, the employer of the men who mine the fuel which turns the nation’s wheels and of the transport workers who move the nation’s passengers and goods. But their unions will not work for the American people, either. So government has ceased to function. As I write these lines we are living in a condition of anarchy. A few hundred thousand workers have paralyzed the lives of about 132,000,000 Americans, most of whom are other workers.
This happens in a land where every person should offer daily a prayer of gratitude that he is alive, that his cities stand intact, that his children are not starving. In India and throughout the Far East, famine reaps its human harvest. In Europe, children creep from cellars to rifle garbage cans. In Vienna, the sole diet of the masses has been, for months, bread and dried peas. In England, the people find the first postwar year leaner than the lean years of the war. In Russia, peace has brought no fatness. In all the wide world only the people of the Americas have escaped bombings, poverty, hunger, or the bleak misery of gray diets that sustain but do not please.
God has had mercy on this great land. May we never know His wrath! It is rich in coal; oil gushes from its wells; in its factories stand slaves, ready to work for mere subsistence – machines, capable of turning out for all of us what 100 years ago were the luxuries of kings. On 6,000,000 farms, men plough and sow and reap, in climates and soils that produce the tangy apples flavored by frost, and the juicy oranges sweetened by a sub-tropical sun; there is hardly a food grown anywhere which is not producible in this country. And no armies have trampled its corn or devastated its grooves.
Our sons lie under little crosses, row on row, from Burma to Cologne; their bones dissolve on the floor of the sea; in hospitals from Maine to California, they take first trembling steps on legs of steel; they wear new faces pieced on them in pain; they trail their hands along old words in braille. Blind boy, can your fingers find the word “sacrifice?” Dead boy, does a whisper pass your skull that the country from which you fended destruction is destroying herself, while her people scream for Rights! Rights! Rights!?
The rights are all mortgaged. The rights of each are mortgaged, to the rights of all.
A strike is a simultaneous organized laying down of tools. Through the use of tools we live. Should all American workers lay down their tools, all Americans would die.
Does any conceivable right include the right to kill?
Farmers are workers who own their own tools. Farmers have grievances. Though they and their families are 19 percent of the population they have only 13 percent of the income. They work a 70-hour week and bear the burdens of capital, labor, and of nature itself. They suffer many casualties from their occupation and have recreational handicaps. They, too, have the right to organize. Suppose they should propose that the government create a fund for insurance, pensions, recreation, and the education of their children out of a seven percent tax on all farm products to be added to their price, and, until their demands were met. should strike, refusing to send a drop of milk, a grain of wheat, a pound of meat, or a basket of fruit to any market.
Then very soon, miners, railroad men, auto workers, and all the population of America except farmers would die of famine. Would that be the exercise of a right?
Has a surgeon the right to lay down his scalpel in the middle of an operation? Has a kindergarten teacher the right to walk out on a brood of babies? May a fireman refuse to rescue people trapped in a burning building?
The whole concept of “rights” presumes the existence of a code relating rights to righteousness. The most sublime concept of righteousness is expressed in a book, which you. John L. Lewis, are accustomed to quote, and which is more familiar to your miners than to most other workers. And if you will listen to the words of the only one whom you call your Master, you will hear:
“He who loveth his life shall lose it, but he who loseth his life for My sake shall gain it,” and, “Bear ye one another’s burdens and thus fulfill My law.”
This country, as a peaceful family, can produce enough for all, including miners and railroad men. But it cannot produce anything as a warring jungle in which each group is reaching into the pocketbook of every other group and yelling about its rights. The right to live is precedent to all others, the duty to contribute to sustaining life is its logical complement and the life of each depends upon the labor of all.
This is true – absolutely.