I've been trying to catch up to the TL over the last week or two, so I'm very happy to finally get up to date. I've loved reading this, it's made me angry, it's made me sad, and above all it has impressed me. This TL is gold.
Lodge, in a state of shock and disbelief, recalled the president whispering, "By God's graces, be sure the devil is hanged."
Doctors soon discovered that Beveridge had stopped breathing along route to Springfield Hospital. Once the man arrived and was prepped for emergency surgery, the medical staff hurriedly began operating on the president to save his life. Fearing the worst, they incessantly worked to resuscitate the executive, but were ultimately unsuccessful. Surgeons found a bullet lodged in his right lung and determined the shot undoubtedly fatal. Just like that, in the span of an otherwise ordinary afternoon, Albert Beveridge, at only 40 years old, became the third president to be felled by an assassin's bullet.
Blood spilled for blood spilled.
Beveridge seems like what would happen with a president with Woodrow Wilson's sensibilities but with a Roosevelt's bellicosity. Equal parts self-righteous, sordid and wholly immovable from their chosen course. It's very fitting that this sort of man would end up lionized and celebrated. It's like the Imperial Disease in the shape of a man.
The miners were not dealing with your average, everyday hubris. This was advanced hubris.
Welcome to the Class War, how tough are ya?
Around the autumn of 1906, President Roosevelt completing his reading of The Jungle, a novel authored by muckraker and anti-corruption advocate Upton Sinclair. The Jungle was a contemporaneous story of a Lithuanian immigrant as he strives to establish a promising life for himself and his family in the United States. The protagonist, Jurgis Rudkis, works in the meat industry, and it through his viewpoint that the reader is taught the unsanitary and gruesome conditions of the Chicago meatpacking plants. Rudkis endures rancid wage slavery, workplace accidents, and frequent mistreatment by the factory employers until he is driven to homelessness and addiction.
Sinclair believed that the readership, numbering in the millions by the end of 1906, would arrive to a similar anti-capitalist conclusion.
Spoilers for The Jungle: If you haven't actually read it yet.
If there were ever an example of why long-form reading is an awful way to communicate politics to wider society, it would be The Jungle.
The book isn't subtle at all about the sheer depravity and pain that people go through just to survive under Capitalism. Everyone in Jurgis' family starts off healthy and optimistic, little children in the family, old people, young people, every bit the massive old world family as you'd imagine it. And by the end of the book, if I'm remembering it correctly, they're whittled down to just
3.
Everyone else died sick, died in childbirth, drowned, succumbed to the elements, or disappeared. The only one's left are Jurgis, his prostituting sister (no judgement against her, it's just the debasement of having been reduced to doing that with no other options), and
I think their aunt.
They go through
hell, hell, hell and hell again.
And the takeaway at the time, and how it's taught about in school, is that
the beef industry was kind of gross.
It's a really a testament to the ideological conditioning and the cultural values of a people that can ignore and excuse that much pain,
assuming they read the whole thing at all.
I'm assuming there was a very minor "Draft Taft" movement that didn't have any legs.
. All throughout the Hearst presidency, whenever economic conditions seemed unsteady or trust reorganizers implanted their consolidations on American industry, the prime target of the Journal would remain Roosevelt and his presidential shortcomings.
Art imitates life. Or is there actually an older precedent for this kind of oppositional press tactic?
To accomplish the permanent destruction of all bosses it is necessary to attack and eliminate the system under which bosses thrive.
Someone is definitely going to be quoted down the line by people they don't agree with.
@PyroTheFox Are you going to martyr this man?
Cause that kind of rhetoric can only add gas for a socialist movement in the future once there's some historical distance between Hearst as he is and Hearst as he's remembered.