Mismanagement of the Capitalist Class (A US History Essay by Amanda Best)

This is an essay that I was required to write in my US History class that I took during the Spring 2012 Semester. I had a hard time writing this essay because it took me a while to formulate exactly what I wanted to put into my essay before I wrote it all down. Sadly my computer decided that it wanted to be a stupid and before I had a chance to save my essay, it shutdown on me, and I had to type everything out again. When I started my essay over again, I put everything in it that I could remember from my very first essay, along with some of the things that had come to my mind as I was kicking myself for not saving my essay sooner. The paper that I turned in resulted in a grade of A+ so I couldn't have been happier, and I realized that I had probably turned in an essay that was ten times better than the essay that I had written the first time around. This post is that essay and I hope that you can understand everything.

ENJOY!

Amanda

Amanda Best

02/21/12

History 18

Nobile

Essay #1



In Jack London’s The Iron Heel, Ernest Everhard made the claim that,

"The capitalist class has mismanaged. In face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the cave-man, and that his producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, no other conclusion is possible that that the capitalist class has mismanaged, that you have mismanaged, my masters, that you have criminally and selfishly mismanaged." (London 86)

With all the technological advances of the last 150 to 200 years, it can be hard to comprehend why the “modern man lives more wretchedly than the cave-man” especially if “his producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave man.” At the present time we live in a society where we want everything, but are not willing to give anything in return for the things we want. We live in the “me” generation.
            With the invention of the iron plow and the mechanical reaper, “farms were becoming mechanized. Iron plows cut plowing time in half; by the 1850s John Deere Company was turning out ten thousand plows a year. Cyrus McCormick was making a thousand mechanical reapers a year in his factory in Chicago. A man with a sickle could cut half an acre of wheat in a day; with a reaper he could cut ten acres” (Zinn 36). Because of this, less time was needed to plow or harvest a field of wheat. Although this may seem like a good thing, it is essentially part of what led to the downfall of American society. Another claim Ernest Everhard made in The Iron Heel, was that
"Five men...can produce bread for a thousand. One man can produce cotton cloth for two hundred and fifty people, woollens for three hundred, and boots and shoes for a thousand. One would conclude from this that under a capable management of society modern civilized man would be a great deal better off than the cave-man." (London 85)
But is the modern man better off than the cave-man when the modern man has to deal with a much more complex and complicated system when it comes to work, marriage and family.  For work there are many more opportunities to succeed, and also as many to fail.  Whereas the cavemen only hunted and foraged, modern men must decide on a career, and then get extra schooling for the majority of it, plus on the job training, Cavemen learned from their fathers and from experience.  Modern men have a complicated dance to woo a female.  The female now has more opportunities and no longer needs to be with a man to succeed in life, therefore the modern man must increase his earnings, looks, and property to entice the female.  After marriage there are more difficulties for the modern man as he must provide for his family, and be there emotionally as well, something the cavemen left the to the mothers.  For family, the father must be more involved with children of both genders, as the cavemen mostly dealt with children of their own gender, as they trained them to be able to do what the parents do.  The modern man must also find shelter for his family, and pay rent, and utilities, and other consequential items necessary for a home.  Cavemen have much cheaper rent, as in no rent.
With all the things that that modern man must do to be considered a productive member of society, it is any wonder why there is so much discontentment in American society. If a cave-man went out hunting and didn’t come back with any food, his family would not go hungry because there would always be the food gathered from the plant life surrounding his place of dwelling. If a modern man lost his job and was unable to provide for his family, he is considered to be a failure. When The Iron Heel was published in 1908, Ernest Everhard said that:
"In the United States to-day there are fifteen million people living in poverty; and by poverty is meant that condition in life in which, through lack of food and adequate shelter, the mere standard of working efficiency cannot be maintained. In the United States to-day, in spite of all your so-called labor legislation, there are three millions of child laborers." (London 85)
Howard Zinn wrote that:
"The crisis of 1837 led to rallies and meetings in many cities. The banks had suspended specie payments—refusing to pay hard money for the bank notes they had issued. Working people, already hard-pressed to buy food, found that prices of flour, pork, [and] coal became impossibly high. In Philadelphia, twenty thousand people assembled…In New York, members of the Equal Rights party…announced a meeting: “Bread, Meat, Rent, and Fuel! Their prices must come down." (Zinn 40)
            If there is one main example of capitalist mismanagement giving rise to the claim “that modern man lives more wretchedly than the cave-man, and that his producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man” it can been seen in the following example:
"In the thirty years leading up to the Civil War, the law was increasingly interpreted in the courts to suit the capitalist development of the country. Mill owners were given legal right to destroy other people’s property by flood to carry on their business. The law of “eminent domain” was used to take farmers’ land and give it to canal companies or railroad companies as subsidies.
It was a time when the law did not even pretend to protect working people—as it would in the next century. Health and safety laws were either nonexistent or unenforced. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1860, on a winter day, the Pemberton Mill collapsed, with nine hundred workers inside, mostly women. Eighty-eight died, and although there was evidence that the structure had never been adequate to support the heavy machinery inside, and that this was known by the construction engineer, a jury found “no evidence of criminal intent.” (Zinn 49)
These are just a few of the examples that support the claim made by Ernest Everhard in Jack London’s, The Iron Heel, “that the capitalist class has mismanaged…[both] criminally and selfishly mismanaged” itself. Having no concern for the safety of the workers in their factories, mills, mines, and other places where working conditions were extremely dangerous, the capitalist class can only be considered as extremely mismanaged.
Morton Horwitz (The Transformation of American Law) sums [it] up [best with] what happened in the courts of law by the time of the Civil War:
"By the middle of the nineteenth century the legal system had been reshaped to the advantage of men of commerce and industry at the expense of farmers, workers, consumers, and other less powerful groups within soctiey…[I]t actively promoted a legal redistribution of wealth against the weakest groups in the society.
            In premodern times, the maldistribution of wealth was accomplished by simple force. In modern times, exploitation is disguised—it is accomplished by law, which has the look of neutrality and fairness." (Zinn 49)
When Ernest Everhard, in Jack London’s The Iron Heel, said “that the capitalist class has mismanaged…[both] criminally and selfishly mismanaged” itself, he wasn’t lying.



Works Cited

London, Jack. The Iron Heel. New York: Macmillan, 1908. 85 – 86. Print.

Zinn, Howard. "The Other Civil War." A People's History of the United States. Abridged Teaching Edition ed. Vol. 2. New York City: New York, 2003. 36+. Print.