On the 150th anniversary of July 4, 1776 Harrison George steps back to take the wide view and sees a hemisphere producing of enormous wealth, drenched in native and African blood with the last century-and-a-half defined by the the fall of the Spanish, the rule and fall of the British, and the rise of an American Empire. He ends noting nothing lasts forever.

‘The American Continent’ by Harrison George from the Daily Worker Saturday Magazine. Vol. 3 No. 147. July 3, 1926.

WHOLE libraries have been written on the events of the last 150 years, years which have changed the face of the world, let alone the aspects of American life, in a way that would unquestionably strike dumb with amazement those who a century and a half ago believed their own puny power and their own social arrangements to be the last word in civilization.

Nothing can give us the sense of the transitory nature of social systems and governments better than a peek at the past. Our space allows only a little peek, however. But, projecting ourselves back to 1776, our first gasp. of astonishment comes at the realization of the dissolution of the old Spanish empire.

Spain claimed the great bulk of the western hemisphere, though it must be said that Spain, France and England, all claimed, some at the same time, that immense territory laying west of the Mississippi River in the North American section of the American continent. Land grants from the British crown often provided that the “grantees” could begin to claim land on the Atlantic seaboard and go as far as they liked, the grants reading “from ocean to ocean,” there being the general idea that the land stopped somewhere and ran up against an ocean. But it didn’t make much difference then, because Teapot Dome had not yet been discovered and the Indians, the 100 per centers of those days, had the idea they owned it, too.

The Indians of both North and South were generally hospitable and kindly people, but when the white man began to enslave them, to drive them to work in mines with whips and hot irons, as did the Spanish conquerors, or to steal their lands on a claim that some European monarch had given the white men a piece of paper, and to massacre them without mercy for trespassing. the Indians fought with marvelous heroism. The year of 1776 falls only in the third quarter of the four hundred years of time that the Indian forced the heralds of capitalism to walk abroad with rifles.

The thirteen colonies on the Atlantic seaboard were, of course, British in 1776. England had ousted France from Canada, claimed by France on the ground of Cartier’s voyage. The great Mississippi valley, then called Louisiana, had changed hands, as usual, by exchange between the European monarchs, but was at the time claimed by France. Mexico stretched clear up to Oregon and still belonged to Spain, as did Florida.

Spain held her empire under the same iron hand with which she seized it. The territory was divided in four vice-royalties, Mexico, Peru, La Plata and New Granada. Besides these Spain had five so-called “captain generalships,” something like modern Wall Streets’ hold on Porto Rico and Haiti. These five were Yucatan, Guatemala, Chile, Venezuela and Cuba. Brazil was still a colony of Portugal.

The most ghastly massacres and tortures were visited upon the Indians by Spaniards to make them efficient slaves. Spain demanded gold and raw materials, and that everything manufactured be for Spain. Colonial governorships were well paid absolutions, stained with the blood of countless Indian slaves. Colonists were not even allowed to grow vines or olive trees, and everything cost six times its price in Spain. No books but religious ones were allowed in the New World. The Indians who were not slaves in mines were serfs, bound to the soil, Over this spectacle of blood and empire the same church which only last month produced the Eucharistic Congress in Chicago spread the halo of divine approval.

ENGLAND had the monopoly by agreement with Spain for furnishing still more slaves, Negroes, hunted down like animals in Africa, to New Spain. But England, moved by France’s alliance with Spain, aided New Spain when it began its fight for independence, which continued from 1810 to 1826.

“If France has Spain,” cried Canning in parliament, “at least it shall be Spain without the Indies. We have called a New World into existence to redress the balance of the old.” It was the twilight of Spain in the New World.

But England, too, had her “mercantile imperialism.” Her governors sent to the American colonies in the North different only in degree from those of Spain, and were–be it said–almost as bad as the fathers of our country. These latter gentry were the rising capitalist element whose interests were conflicting with those of British business. The mercantile theory of England was that the colonies should not produce finished commodities, but should buy these from England, and send over raw materials and receive all goods, in British bottoms.

The ship-building class of New England, the manufacturing and trading class in the northern and middle colonies, and the big plantation owners in the south were the real owners and bosses of the colonies and, summoning the small landlords, wage slaves, bond slaves and chattel slaves behind them, “proclaimed liberty thruout the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof” just 150 years ago.

It needs no specially discerning eye to discover that we in 1926 have not yet caught up with that proclamation of 150 years ago. “Liberty” to the rising capitalist class meant free trade; equality,” their right to share the robbery of the toilers with the nobility; and “fraternity” was to be defined as the great brotherhood of stockholders.

THE United States today is, so far as wealth is concerned, in the hands of a few. Nobody but some incurable liberals and sections of the middle class really believe in democracy, for the good reason that there is none. More than forty families have in excess of $100,000,000 each. More than one hundred other families have over $50,000,000 each. More than three hundred families have in excess of $20,000,000 each. Even the “B. & O. plan” and the Watson-Parker law can’t advance democracy a hair’s breadth in the face of this sort of thing, this real oligarchy.

There are men richer than Solomon ever dreamed in every industry of this country. In oil, steel, coal, beef, copper, railroads, traction, telephones, radio, power, tobacco, rubber, sugar, flour, armaments and shipping a handful of men rule the destinies of tens of millions.

The average wage of the factory workers is less than $25 a week. The cost of living for a family of five is a minimum, for health, of $2,200. A great percentage of farmers are tenants, another great percentage are mortgaged. The majority barely make ends meet–and sometimes they don’t meet. New combines of already great corporations are of daily occurrence. Tho machinery constantly improves, the conditions of the ones who make it and use it grow steadily worse. There’s an awful swag being made away with by the capitalist class as a whole. Like a spider in the center of a web of modern industry, the financial imperialists, the credit monopoly, rules over all, units all, lives upon all.

Wall Street has taken the place of Cortes in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru. It bosses with cruel fist the little republics of Central America. It is steadily driving British imperialism, which had built up its power in Latin America for a hundred years, into a subordinate position. It has but recently, in Brazil’s withdrawal from the (British) league of nations, shown its probably final hegemony in that country of marvelous wealth. It has made Canada dependent upon New York instead of London, and is reaching over the whole world to claim the prize of financial overlordship.

One hundred and fifty years is not a long time, yet it is long enough to have shown how ephemeral are the powers of a ruling class. In that short space the mercantile imperialism of Spain has vanished utterly. That of the British has changed to financial imperialism and it, too, is being crushed. United States financial imperialism, which is giving its British rival the coup de grace, is flourishing over a volcano, a volcano now dormant and inactive it is true, but filled with explosive millions of wage workers who must sooner or later, overthrow it or perish.

It will not need another 150 years, either; nor fifty.

The Saturday Supplement, later changed to a Sunday Supplement, of the Daily Worker was a place for longer articles with debate, international focus, literature, and documents presented. The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

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