.
Peter Alexander Speek on the Single
Tax |
[The Introduction to the book, The
Singletax and the Labor Movement, a thesis submitted for the
degree of doctor of philosophy, University of Wisconsin, 1915;
published as a Bulletin of the Univeristy of Wisconsin, No. 878,
1917] |
INTRODUCTION
To Americans it is instructive to have our political and economic
movements studied and described for us by foreigners. It is equally
instructive to have our radical and revolutionary movements described by
one who has taken part in those movements abroad. We get not only an
objective judgment on ourselves, but also a view of the way in which
American institutions affect a foreign revolutionary.
As a student in the Imperial University of Juriev, a teacher, then an
investigator of rural conditions for the Zemstvo of the Government
Pskof, then editor and proprietor of a socialistic, paper preceding the
revolution of 1905, Mr. Speek was forced to leave Russia after the
suppression of his paper by the reactionary government that followed. In
Denmark he organized a cooperative society among the refugees, and
started in New York, in 1909, a newspaper for the people of his own
nationality, the Esthonians, which is still existing and developing.
With this background of experience in revolutionary socialism, as well
as in practical efforts to help his own people, he sets himself to get
an understanding of the most dramatic crisis that has occurred in this
country between the two schools of radical labor philosophy, the German
socialism of Karl Marx and the American individualism of Henry George.
The crisis is affected somewhat by remnants of the American Greenbackism
of Edward Kellogg.
In substance Mr. Speek finds that the economic, political and social
conditions of Europe produce certain theories and philosophies of reform
which the immigrants, with their unaccustomed civic liberties, try to
realize in America. But the conditions here are different and they
produce, accordingly, different theories and philosophies, such as the
singletax and Greenbackism. As a result, sharp conflicts occur between
the European and the American theories.
Yet the mass movements of labor originate and develop, not out of
speculative theories or philosophies, but under the force of immediate
and practical labor demands. This work shows, by analyzing both the
philosophies and the demands, why it was that neither socialism nor the
singletax, notwithstanding the fervent efforts of both schools, became
the issue of the mass movement of labor in the decade of the eighties.
Yet Mr. Speek holds that, even if philosophies and theories have but
little weight for the direct and practical ends of the labor movement,
they are nevertheless necessary and immeasurably important for the sake
of education. The singletax and socialism stirred up the labor leaders,
the reformers, and even the academies.
This great contest of the eighties has not hitherto been studied by our
economic or political historians, and Mr. Speek, by centering his
attention on the Central Labor Union of New York, picks out the spot
where the decisive battle was fought, and thereby fills a gap in the
history of American labor. Incidentally, from a theoretical
revolutionist he seems to have become a practical reconstructionist.
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