Editor’s Note: With our July 4, 1776 Declaration as its model, the Declaration of Workers’ and Farmers’ Rights and Purposes was the fruit of the inaugural convention of the National Unemployed Leagues, organized in Columbus, Ohio, by Dutch-born clergyman and political activist A.J. Muste, who spearheaded the Conference on Progressive Labor Action, and sparked as well by other leaders of the movement. Progressive historian Philip Foner notes in We, The Other People that this declaration “combined radical ideas with the patriotic language of the original manifesto.”
Declaration of Workers’ and Farmers’ Rights and Purposes
National Unemployed Leagues, July 4, 1933, Columbus, OH
When, in a nation possessing unlimited resources, along with the greatest industrial and transportation equipment the world has ever known, there develops a condition wherein millions of citizens are forced into dire destitution and starvation through being denied to have access to the tools of production, then it becomes their duty to organize to change these conditions.
A new tyranny has developed through the control of our great industrial system by a few who manipulate the affairs of the nation selfishly and ruthlessly. The suffering and misery of millions of victims is of no consequence or weight in the operation of their affairs. Their only objective is more gold, more power. The motive behind all their actions is greed, while their technic is cunning.
Coldly indifferent to the consequences to future generations, helpless children are denied the elementary things necessary to their proper physical and mental development.
The home, the corner-stone of the American nation, is being destroyed by the economic anarchy throughout the land.
The youth of the nation are being turned into vagrants by the denial of the right to work and the destruction of the protecting influence of the home. Young boys and girls are forced into conditions which cause their moral and physical decay.
Millions of men and women after years of toil, broken in spirit and health, are thrown ruthlessly aside without proper provisions for their declining years.
Driven by heartless masters to the performance of greater tasks, countless thousands of workers are ruined in health and hurried to an early grave.
Throughout the land thousands of farmers are being dispossessed of their farms, evicted from their homes and brutally set into the highway; while millions more are struggling hopelessly under overwhelming burden of debt, awaiting the same fate.
Helpless against the aggression of concentrated wealth, large numbers of business men are being ruined and forced into the army of starvation.
Denied employment, the workers are given as a relief from the consequences of the anarchistic system under which they live an inadequate and degrading charity.
Private ownership and control have built a wall between the machines of production and the workers that keep the machines idle and the workers starving.
We hold that all children are entitled to conditions of health and happiness that will permit their proper development of race, color, creed or nationality.
That the interests of all workers are identical and that they should not be divided by religion, racial, political or national prejudices:
That all useful members of society are entitled to adequate sustenance without the stigma of charity:
That it is the first duty of government to provide for the health and happiness of the people of the nation:
That all persons have the duty and the right to work.
In order that these evils may be remedied and these ends accomplished, we determine and declare that the profit system with its meaningless depressions, its needless miseries, its suicidal wars and its gross injustices must come to an end, and we furthermore declare that that it is the solemn duty of every worker and farmer to bend every effort through organization and through determined action in unity with all workers and farmers to fight to destroy this system and to set up a workers’ and farmers’ republic in America.
When our forefathers crushed the tyranny of kings, America was born. When the men of 1860 destroyed chattel slavery, America’s development as a great industrial state was made possible. And when the men and women of today shall finally crush the tyranny of bankers and bosses, America shall at last be free.
Signed: COMMITTEE ON THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
Published in Voice of the Unemployed, August 1, 1933
Image Source:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Tennessee-valley-farmer-1930s-tva1.jpg
Further reading:
The Fight for Four Freedoms, Harvey J. Kaye, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014 (see p. 30)
