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Ralph R Reiland Monday, May 2, 2005 "When I was in Alabama 13 years ago, they had no child labor law," wrote labor activist Mary Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones, in 1908. This is the Democratic south, my friends -- t his is a Democratic administration. The "Gompers" that Ms Jones judged to be insufficiently concerned about the subjugation of labor was Samuel Gompers, the 10-year-old who was tak en out of school to become an apprentice shoemaker and then a cigar make r in the sweatshops of New York before becoming the first president of t he American Federation of Labor. "Mr Bryan" was William Jennings Bryan, the Democrats' three-time candida te for president, in 1896, 1900 and 1908, and a three-time loser. Still, he was skilled at tossing around the anti-capitalist rhetoric, such as on Labor Day in Chicago in 1896 when he famously called for "putting rin gs in the noses of hogs," referring to how politicians should be treatin g people like John D Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. In 1921, failing to turn the nation's top industrialists into farm animal s, Bryan began a national campaign to ban the teaching of evolution in p ublic schools. "Under the pretense of teaching science," he warned, "ins tructors who draw their salaries from the public treasury are underminin g the religious faith of students by substituting belief in Darwinism fo r belief in the Bible."
Bryan argued that people "who worship brute ancestors," ie, monkey rela tives, should "build their own colleges and employ their own teachers." There was no room for professors who "regard the discovery of the bones of a five-toed horse as a greater event than the birth of Christ." In 1925, John Scopes, a football coach and 10th-grade science teacher in Tennessee, was arrested and charged with assigning a reading on evolutio n to a biology class. The World's Christian Fundamentals Association wir ed Bryan, offering a spot with the prosecution. Bryan, in his opening statement, characterized the trial as a lethal batt le between good and evil: "If evolution wins, Christianity goes." Reporting from the trial, HL Mencken didn't award Bryan any gold stars: "Once he had one leg in the White House and the nation trembled under h is roars. Now he is a tinpot pope in the Coca-Cola belt and a brother to forlorn pastors who belabor halfwits in galvanized iron tabernacles beh ind the railroad yards. It is a tragedy, indeed, to begin life as a hero and to end it as a buffoon." In the end, neither Gompers nor Bryan was anti-capitalist enough for Ms Jones. "I stand for the overthrow of the entire system that murders chil dhood," she explained, referring to child labor. "I stand for the day wh en this rotten structure will totter of its own vileness. I stand for th e day when the baby will live in God's fair land, enjoy its air, its foo d, its pleasures, when every mother will caress it warmly." Fast-forward 100 years and the kids are at GapKids, not in the mines. Kar l Marx got it wrong about the working class becoming inescapably poorer under capitalism. So much so that Mother Jones -- the magazine, not the activist -- is complaining in its March-April 2005 issue about America's increasing affluence: "Since 1970, the size of the average new home has ballooned by 50 percent. Great rooms, Viking ranges, 10-acre lots -- ca n moats and turrets be far behind?" And the more specific grievances: "In 1950, 1 in 100 homes had 25 baths or more. The lesson, fashioned over several centuries of declining destitution: It 's hard to make a pinko happy. Ralph R Reiland, the B Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise at Ro bert Morris University, is a local restaurateur.
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