PROFITING FROM ORGANIZED MURDER. It would be quite puerile and a poor extenuation to say that they were not fully conscious of the disastrous consequences to the nation flowing from their acts. They knew the baleful results to the soldiery of imposing fraudulent army and navy supplies upon the Government. Yet, spurred by the certainty of extortionate profits, they went eagerly ahead, and when their frauds were discovered, sought to block every attempt at investigation. In the one item of shoes alone, the shoe manufacturers sold to the Government from 1861 to 1862 five million pairs of shoes for the army, as to which transaction a Government commission reported that at least $3,000,000 had been defrauded ; that supplies of shoes which were so bad that they could not be sold privately had been palmed off upon the Government.12 But the one equipment which the army most urgently needed was rifles. We have already, in a previous chapter, related how Marcellus Hartley and other prominent capitalists swindled the Government, and imperiled the Union Army, by importing the refuse of European arms and unloading them upon the United States Government. Also, we have adverted to the fact that it was greatly because of the great profits made in these transactions that Hartley was able to build enormous factories at Bridgeport, Conn.— factories that his descendants now own. J. Pierpont Morgan was profiting from the same methods at the same time. He was, in 1861, a robust young man, just turned twenty-four years old. “ He inherited from his parents,” says one of his biographers, “ their purity of character and exceptional abilities.”13 Those attributed lofty virtues were not in evidence. At a critical juncture when the Union Government was most in need of soldiers, Morgan chose not only to stay at home, but to profit from the sale of worthless rifles for the arming of the men who responded to the call to arms. Abraham Lincoln was sending out his proclamations calling for volunteers. The contest was a momentous struggle not merely between sections, but between two kinds of conflicting capitalist institutions. The so-called common people — the factory and shop workers, the slum dwellers, the professionals and the farmers — heroically poured in for enlistment. Hundreds of thousands went forth to the camps and battlefields, never to return. Although well qualified physically and mentally for military service, Morgan avoided any kind of duty interfering with money making and comfort. He differed in nowise from almost all the men of position and property. They restricted their exuberant patriotism to talk and the waving of bunting, but took great care to keep away from the zone of personal danger. The rich, for whose interests the Northern armies were at basis fighting, not only as a class evaded enlistment, but proceeded to demoralize, spread disability and sow death among their own armies. While doing this, and at the same time swindling the Government, States and cities out of vast sums in army contracts, they caused the Draft Act to be so amended that it gave men of property the easy opportunity of escaping conscription by permitting them to hire substitutes.
Posted on: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 21:20:06 +0000
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