Already by the time of this writing, an ecological apocalypse enacted for the profits and speculations of the Lumber Barons had destroyed much of the United States’ irreplaceable forests.

‘The Devastation of Our Forests’ from The Comrade. Vol. 4 No. 3. March, 1905.

BOURGEOIS economists would have us believe that the possessions of the capitalist represent the fruit of his honest toil, and are the result of his having developed, in a marvelous degree, the ability to save. We know better. We know that what makes his capital grow from day to day is the confiscation of the surplus value produced by the wage worker. And as to the accumulation of the capital necessary for exploitation, why, America offers many an instance of “primitive capitalist accumulation.” Just now Mr. Arthur Ruhl furnishes such an instance in an article in Collier’s, where he describes how the thrifty accumulators of capital are “Walking off with the United States,” intent upon saving it for themselves. He shows how our forest lands are stolen by some of these respectable gentlemen possessed with the saving mania. He says:

“More than three millions of acres of timber land, the greater part of it the magnificent timber land of the Northwest, has been practically given away by the government in the past two years. Probably nine-tenths of this was grabbed either by actual fraud or by violating the spirit of an absurd and impotent law. There is nothing particularly new in this except that the land grabbed has been particularly valuable, the destruction of timber particularly ruthless. Respectable citizens have always thought it proper to cheat the government. Were it not that such men as Senator Mitchell, Congressman Binger Hermann, Surveyor-General Meldrum of Oregon, and Frederick Hyde, President of the San Francisco School Board, are under indictment, the blasé East would not even now take any interest. The West takes land grabbing for granted. The whole history of our public lands is one of ruthless grabbing, and still more of idiotic laws and farcical attempts to enforce them. The manner in which the government has given away its public lands makes the dealings of Mrs. Chadwick’s bankers look like the apex of conservative and astute finance. We have thrown away and are throwing away such an empire as was never given to any other nation under the sun. Under the altruistic theory that the public land should be given to the people for homesteads and farms, domains vast enough to constitute separate States have been tossed away to speculators, railroads, ranchmen, and lumber corporations. To the States, for the avowed purpose of providing for education, we once gave thirty thousand acres of land for each senator and representative in congress. The States which had no public land received scrip which eventually found its way into the open market. Wall Street speculators at one time advertised the college. scrip of nine States. The entire scrip of one university was offered at one time for thirty-seven and a half cents an acre. The greater part of this land, the income of which was intended to be used for education, has long since been squandered and lost forever. Under the old Swamp Lands act thousands of acres in the Sierra Nevada Mountains were seized as swamp-lands five thousand feet above the level of the sea, actually requiring irrigation to make anything grow on them. Vast areas were surveyed when flooded and grabbed or included, because some far-off corner of them had a mud hole in it. They tell a story of a man who put a boat on a wagon and had his mule draw him across a stretch of fertile prairie. Then he went to the land office and entered his claim for swamp land, producing several witnesses who were quite willing to swear, orally, that he rowed over the claim in a boat. Railroads, by juggling the “alternate sections” they received when first running their lines through new country, have acquired tracts of twenty or even fifty miles, which they have held unimproved, waiting for values to rise, while the homesteaders beyond these belts were driven back, compelled to content themselves with the imaginary advantages of a railroad perhaps fifty miles distant. The government has not always even kept faith. with its own children. It has invited settlers into a country, and after they had built houses and started farms in good faith, has sold out the whole area to a railroad or speculative corporation at, for example, $1 an acre. The homesteaders were then ejected or obliged to buy back their own land from their new masters at, for instance, $6 an acre, paying for the improveents that they themselves had made. And so on, and so on. It’s an old story now–one that makes appear respectable the average performances of pickpockets and thieves.”

The Comrade began in 1901 with the launch of the Socialist Party, and was published monthly until 1905 in New York City and edited by John Spargo, Otto Wegener, and Algernon Lee amongst others. Along with Socialist politics, it featured radical art and literature. The Comrade was known for publishing Utopian Socialist literature and included a serialization of ‘News from Nowhere’ by William Morris along work from with Heinrich Heine, Thomas Nast, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Edward Markham, Jack London, Maxim Gorky, Clarence Darrow, Upton Sinclair, Eugene Debs, and Mother Jones. It would be absorbed into the International Socialist Review in 1905.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/comrade/v04n03-mar-1905-The-Comrade.pdf