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papermoonloveslucy · 4 years ago

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A GIRL, A GUY, AND A GOB

March 14, 1941

Directed by Richard Wallace

Produced by Harold Lloyd for RKO Radio Pictures

Written by Bert Granet and Frank Ryan, based on a story by Grover Jones

Synopsis ~ A shy, quiet executive for a shipping firm who finds himself with a dilemma: he’s become smitten with his young temporary secretary but she’s the girlfriend of his Navy buddy - and the buddy is scheduled to be discharged in only a few days.

Note: “Gob” is a slang word for a sailor. This term first showed up in regard to sailors around 1909 and may have come from the word gobble. Reportedly, some people thought that sailors gobbled their food. The term also may come from the word gob, which means to spit, something sailors also reportedly do often.

PRINCIPAL CAST

Lucille Ball as (Dorothy ‘Dotty’ Duncan aka ‘The Girl’) is in her 52nd film since coming to Hollywood in 1933.

George Murphy (Claudius ‘Coffee’ Cup aka ‘The Gob’) was in four films with Lucille Ball between 1934 and 1941. In 1959, Murphy served as guest host of “The Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse” when Desi Arnaz took a role in his own anthology series. He was also a performer in “The Desilu Revue” aired in December 1959. As the host of “MGM Parade”, he interviewed Lucy and Desi in February 1956.

Edmond O'Brien (Stephen Herrick aka ‘The Guy’) won an Oscar in 1955 for The Barefoot Contessa. He was nominated a second time in 1965.

Henry Travers (Abel Martin) was nominated for an Oscar for Mrs. Miniver in 1943. He is best remembered for playing Clarence the Angel in It’s A Wonderful Life (1946).

Franklin Pangborn (Pet Shop Owner) did four films with Lucille Ball between 1937 and 1946.

George Cleveland (Pokey Duncan) did four more films with Lucille Ball till 1949.

Kathleen Howard (Jawme) makes her only appearance with Lucille Ball.

Marguerite Chapman (Cecilia Grange) makes her only appearance with Lucille Ball.

Lloyd Corrigan (Pigeon) did Two Smart People with Lucille Ball in 1949. He played the minister in “The Milton Berle Lucy-Desi Special” in 1959. He also did three episodes of “The Lucy Show.”

Mady Correll (Cora) makes her only appearance with Lucille Ball.

Frank McGlynn, Sr. (Pankington) makes his only appearance with Lucille Ball.

Doodles Weaver (Eddie) makes his only appearance with Lucille Ball.

Frank Sully (Salty) did four films with Lucille Ball before playing the man who delivers “The Freezer” on “I Love Lucy.”

Nella Walker (Mrs. Grange) also appeared with Lucille Ball in Fugitive Lady (1934).

Richard Lane (Recruiting Officer) previously appeared in three films with Lucille Ball in 1937 and 1938.

Irving Bacon (Mr. Merney) did seven films with Lucille Ball before playing Mr. Willoughby in in “The Marriage License” (1952) and Will Potter in “Ethel’s Hometown” (1955).

Rube Demarest (Ivory) makes his only appearance with Lucille Ball.

Charles Smith (Messenger) makes her only appearance with Lucille Ball.

Bob McKenzie (Porter) appeared in three other films with Lucille Ball.

Nora Cecil (Charwoman) makes her only appearance with Lucille Ball.

UNCREDITED CAST

SAILORS

James Bush (Sailor Taking Address Book), Charles Flynn (Thin Sailor), Jack Lescoulie, George Ford, Art Rowlands, *Bernard Sell

HUSTLERS

Tom Quinn, Cyril Ring, Ralph Brooks

AT THE OPERA

Edward Peil Sr. (Assistant Manager), Eddie Arden (Opera Page Boy), Warren Ashe (Ticket Taker), Blue Washington (Doorman), Jimmy Cleary (Program Boy), Tom Costello (Floor Manager), William A. Boardway (Patron), Walter Byron (Patron), James Carlisle (Patron), Jean Fowler (Patron), Kenneth Gibson (Patron), Carl M. Leviness (Patron), John George (Newsboy Outside Opera House)

AT THE DANCE HALL

Carolyn Hughes (Girl), Charles Irwin (Emcee), Eddie Borden (Man), Eddie Hart (Ticket Taker #2), Dewey Robinson (Bouncer), Ronald R. Rondell (Ticket Taker)

AT THE MARRIAGE BUREAU & WEDDING CHAPEL

Wade Boteler (Uniformed Attendant), Homer Dickenson (Wedding Chapel Attendant), Harry "Snub" Pollard (Attendant), Wade Boteler (Uniformed Attendant), Fern Emmett (Middle-Aged Woman at Marriage Bureau), Henry Roquemore (Middle-Aged Man at Marriage Bureau), Effie Anderson (Marriage Bureau Clerk), Hal K. Dawson (Photographer)

IN THE STREETS: PEDESTRIANS, BYSTANDERS, OBSERVERS

Mary Field (Woman on Street), Vince Barnett (Pedestrian), Leon Belasco (Taxi Driver), George Lloyd (Bystander Smoking Cigar), Joe Bernard (Tattoo Artist), George McKay (Joe - Counterman), Vince Barnett (Bystander with Packages), Victor Potel (Bystander Eating Popcorn), *Leon Belasco (First Taxi Driver), *Mike Lally (Second Taxi Driver), George Chandler (Bystander Betting Five Bucks), Irene Coleman (Bystander Watching Eddie Grow), Tom Coleman (Pedestrian), Andrew Tombes (Bus Conductor), Hal K. Dawson (Photographer), Edgar Dearing (Policeman), Fern Emmett (Middle-Aged Woman), Mary Field (Woman on Street), Bud Jamison (Tall Bystander), Tiny Jones (Passerby), Bert Moorhouse (Pedestrian), Bud Osborne (Bystander), Frank Mills (Laborer in Manhole), Andrew Tombes (Bus Conductor)

OTHERS

Sally Conlin (Little Girl)

Joe Geil (Boy)

Steve Pendleton (Mr. Adams)

Earle Hodgins (Sylvester P. Wurple)

Lloyd Ingraham (Announcer of Piano Winner)

Alex Pollard (Butler)

George Lollier (Grange's Chauffeur)

Alexander Pollard (Grange's Butler)

* actors who later did background work on Lucille Ball’s sitcoms.

3G TRIVIA

The film was dramatized for radio on “The Screen Guild Radio Theatre” on October 9, 1944, also starring Lucille Ball and George Murphy. They rerpised their roles on radio once again for “Old Gold Comedy Theatre” on February 11, 1945.

Maureen O'Hara was initially slated for the role played by Lucille Ball. Ball and O’Hara had done the 1940 film Dance, Girl, Dance together.

This film came towards the end of Lucille Ball's RKO days. She had already achieved leading lady status and would only make four more films for RKO before moving to MGM. She couldn’t know that she would one day own the studio with her husband, Desi Arnaz. Interestingly, RKO borrowed George Murphy from MGM for this film.

This film's earliest documented telecast took place in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Sunday June 3, 1956 over TV station WFBG. That same week, Lucille Ball began filming season six of “I Love Lucy” in Hollywood.

In 1971, “The Carol Burnett Show” spoofed the film with “A Gob, a Girl and Her Galoshes".

The movie was referenced in the Emmy-winning documentary “Lucy and Desi: A Home Movie”.

#Lucille Ball #A Girl A Guy and a Gob #RKO #George Murphy #Edmond O'Brien #Irving Bacon #Henry Travers #Franklin Pangborn #Lloyd Corrigan #Mike Lally #Leon Belasco #1941

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spartasanks · 4 years ago

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“Though widespread bitterness against the concentration of economic power led to the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890, that law likewise remained a paper tiger while the trusts continue to grow. ‘Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty,’ Henry Demarest Lloyd wrote in Wealth against Commonwealth, and influential 1902 indictment of the trusts. ‘The flames of the new economic evolution run around us, and we turn to find that competition has killed competition, that corporations are grown greater than the state and that the naked issue of our time is with property becoming master instead of servant.’” - Doris Kearns Goodwin, chapter seven, The Invention of McClure’s, page 192 of “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism” (at Boston, Massachusetts) https://www.instagram.com/p/CGk7hpHntQ-/?igshid=qtp85zu8orwo

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lifejustgotawkward · 6 years ago

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365 Day Movie Challenge (2019) - #76: A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob (1941) - dir. Richard Wallace

On a whim, I tuned into TCM to see the romantic comedy A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob, which I had never heard of before checking the TCM schedule on a Tuesday night a couple of weeks back. Seeing that Edmond O’Brien was one of the leads (”the guy” in the title) was an encouragement to check the film out; having just seen White Heat on the same channel a few days earlier, I realized I was in a bit of an Edmond O’Brien mood and therefore had extra incentive to dig into his filmography. I also love Lucille Ball, the “girl” of this motion picture, and although I have never cared much for “gob” George Murphy, outside of his performance in Anthony Mann’s noir almost-classic Border Incident (1949), I figured two of three ain’t bad.

Like many other screwball comedies, this RKO film directed by Richard Wallace is overflowing with absurdity, but the plot fails to generate the kind of electricity that you need for such a silly story to work. As TCM host Alicia Malone noted in her introduction to the film, it’s refreshing to see a lack of duplicity in the depiction of this love triangle - the three characters are friends and they genuinely want what’s best for each other, even if someone’s heart must inevitably be broken in the process - but the script does not offer sufficient development to explore either of the Ball-Murphy and Ball-O’Brien relationships. Six different writers can be blamed for that problem: Grover Jones and Gerald Drayson Adams came up with the premise, Frank Ryan and Bert Granet penned the screenplay and Victor Heerman and Sarah Y. Mason supplied additional dialogue. Oddest of all, the film was produced by Harold Lloyd; reportedly, he gave Edmond O’Brien the idea for a funny physical comedy gag that appears in the film, but otherwise there is no trace of the silent screen comedy genius’s cleverness.

Since the bulk of the humor in A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob is a foolish affair, the best reason to see the film is for its cast. Edmond O’Brien is so youthful here, and his character is so often shocked and befuddled by the madness going on around him, that he resembles a lamb or perhaps a deer in the headlights (examples here and here); supporting actors Henry Travers, Franklin Pangborn, Kathleen Howard, Marguerite Chapman, Lloyd Corrigan, Doodles Weaver (uncle of Sigourney), Nella Walker, Rube Demarest (older brother of one of my favorite character actors, William Demarest), Charles Smith, Vince Barnett and George Chandler attempt to lend further credibility to the proceedings. I will literally never want to rewatch A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob, but it put me on the right track for watching more Edmond O’Brien movies, so for that alone it was worth my time.

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coolhandlook · 8 years ago

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2017:48 — Dressed to Kill

(1941 - Eugene Forde) **

#film #1941 #Dressed to Kill #Eugene Forde #Lloyd Nolan #Mary Beth Hughes #Sheila Ryan #William Demarest #Henry Daniell #Ben Carter #Virginia Brissac #Erwin Kalser #Michael Shayne #two stars

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charring58 · 5 months ago

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Henry Demarest Lloyd (May 1, 1847 – September 28, 1903) was an American journalist and political activist who was a prominent muckraker during the Progressive Era. He is best known for his exposés of Standard Oil which were written before Ida Tarbell's series for McClure's on the same topic.

#henry demarest lloyd #progressive era

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dailyanarchistposts · 1 month ago

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Section II: Poverty and Waste (Historical)

In a society which has the wherewithal to cover, fatten, and cheer every one, Lords of Industry are acquiring the power to pool the profits of scarcity and to decree famine. They cannot stop the brook that runs the mill, but they can chain the wheel; they cannot hide the coal mine, but they can close the shaft three days every week. To keep up gold-digging rates of dividends, they declare war against plenty. -- Henry Demarest Lloyd [458]

In 1662, William Petty wrote, “Causes of Civil War are also, that the Wealth of the Nation is in too few mens hands, and that no certain means are provided to keep all men from a necessity either to beg, or steal, or be Souldiers.” [459] In 1683, Matthew Hale writes...

In the Execution of the Law already made; for let any man look over most of the Populous Parishes in England, indeed there are rates made for the relief of the Impotent Poor, and it may be the same relief is also given in a narrow measure unto some others, that have great Families, and upon this they live miserably and at best from hand to mouth, and if they cannot get work to make out their livelyhood they and their Children set up a trade of Begging at best. [460]

In 1767, James Steuart wrote, “It is computed that one half of mankind die before the age of puberty in countries where numbers do not augment; from this I conclude, that too many are born.” [461] In the 1700’s, as well as earlier and later, perpetual famines were so commonplace in the nation of China, that an entire profession was committed to ending the lives of children — lest they starve. Thomas Malthus wrote, “...by the custom of exposing children, which, in times of distress, is probably more frequent than is ever acknowledged to Europeans. Relative to this barbarous practice, it is difficult to avoid remarking, that there cannot be a stronger proof of the distresses that have been felt by mankind for want of food, than the existence of a custom that thus violates the most natural principle of the human heart. It appears to have been very general among ancient nations, and certainly tended rather to increase population.” [462] It was just at the brink of the 1800’s when Malthus wrote, “But I believe it has been very generally remarked by those who have attended to bills of mortality that of the number of children who die annually, much too great a proportion belongs to those who may be supposed unable to give their offspring proper food and attention, exposed as they are occasionally to severe distress and confined, perhaps, to unwholesome habitations and hard labour.” [463] and “If the accounts we have of it are to be trusted, the lower classes of people are in the habit of living almost upon the smallest possible quantity of food and are glad to get any putrid offals that European labourers would rather starve than eat. The law in China which permits parents to expose their children has tended principally thus to force the population” [464] In a much longer section, Malthus describes the situation at his time as it appears in England...

In times of very limited demand for labour, it is truly lamentable to witness the distress which arises among the industrious for want of regular employment and their customary wages. In these periods, innumerable applications are made to the superintendents of extensive manual operations, to obtain any kind of employment, by which a subsistence may be procured. Such applications are often made by persons who, in search of work, have traveled from one extremity of the island to the other! During these attempts to be useful and honest, in the common acceptation of the terms, the families of such wandering individuals accompany them, or remain at home; in either case they generally experience sufferings and privations which the gay and splendid will hesitate to believe it possible that human nature could endure.

Yet, after this extended and anxious endeavor to procure employment, the applicant often returns unsuccessful; he cannot, by his most strenuous exertions, procure an honest and independent existence; therefore, with intentions perhaps as good, and a mind as capable of great and benevolent actions as the remainder of his fellow men, he has no other resources left but to starve, apply to his parish for relief, and thus suffer the greatest degradation, or rely on his own native exertions, and, to supply himself and family with bread, resort to what are termed dishonest means. [465]

In another essay written in 1815, Thomas Malthus writes, “...it is very possible for a people to be miserably poor, and some of them starving, in a country where the money price of corn is very low. Of this the histories of Europe and Asia will afford abundant instances.” [466] In that same year, Simonde de Sismondi writes, “The Irish peasants are ready to revolt, and plunge their country into the horrors of civil war; they live each in a miserable hut, on the produce of a few beds of potatoes, and the milk of a cow...” [467] In 1893, Ida M. Van Etten describes the condition of immigrants in the United States: “...most of the Russian Jews are dirty, cannot speak the English language, and live closely crowded in unwholesome, ill- smelling tenement quarters...” [468] Immigration to the United States had increased in this era. But, the workers held strong together, as Van Etten describes, “I remember going from house to house during the last fearful days of the strike and seeing men gaunt from hunger, women and little children unable to stand from want and exhaustion, with the threat of eviction hanging over their heads, and still I heard not one word of complaint, not to speak of surrender to the ‘boss.’” [469] A year later, Florence Kelley would write, “...the workingman’s home, where bath-tubs seem to be unknown...” [470] In 1896, Jacob Riis describes the condition of Jewish immigrants to New York City...

At the rate of 5.71 members to the average Jewish family, the census gives a total of 745,132 Jews as living in the country five years ago, and 200,335 in New York city. Allowing for the natural increase in five years (13,700) and for additions made by immigration, it is probable that the Jewish population of the metropolis reaches to-day very nearly a total of 250,000, in which the proportion of orthodox is practically as above, nearly 2 1/2 old school Jews to every 1 who has been swayed or affected by his Christian environment. The Jew-baiter has them at what he would call their worst.

Everyday observation suggests a relationship of orthodoxy and prosperity in this instance that is not one of dependence. Roughly put, the 2 1/2 are of the tenements... [...]

The poverty they have brought us is black and bitter; they crowd as do no other living beings to save space, which is rent, and where they go they make slums. Their customs are strange, their language unintelligible. They slave and starve to make money, for the tyranny of a thousand years from which freedom was bought only with gold has taught them the full value of it. It taught them, too, to stick together in good and evil report since all the world was against New York’s ghetto; it is clannish. [471]

Famine struck Russia in the late 1800’s, as described by one author, “Before 1882 the emigration of Russian Jews to America was restricted to the provinces lying about the Niemen and the Dwina, notably to the government of Souvalki, where economical conditions caused Catholic peasants as well as Jewish tradesmen and artisans to go elsewhere ‘in search of bread.’” [472] Describing the condition of Jewish immigrants, Abraham Cahan writes, “...cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston have each a Ghetto rivaling in extent of population the largest Jewish cities in Russia, Austria, and Roumania.” [473] Speaking specifically of those immigrants in New York City, he writes, “The greatest density (57.2 tenants to a house) is in the tenth ward...” and “The sweating system and its political ally the “ward heeler” are accountable for ninety-nine percent of whatever vice may be found in the Ghetto...” [474] Lawrence Veiller writes on the poverty of the tenement-housing tenants...

Upon the poverty maps are stamped black dots, each of which indicates that five different families from the building marked have applied for charity to one of the large charitable societies of the city within a definite period of years. It seems beyond belief, yet is its a fact, that there is hardly a tenement house in the entire city that does not contain a number of these dots, and many contain as many as fifteen of them, meaning that seventy-five different families have applied for charity from that house. Similarly, on the disease maps, which are placed directly below the poverty maps, district by district, so that a comparative study of them may be made, there are stamped black dots, each indicating that from this house there has been reported to the Board of Health one case of tuberculosis within the last five years. While these dots do not cover the building to the same extent at they are covered in the poverty maps, it is appalling to note the extent of this disease. nearly every tenement house has one dot on it, many have three or four, and there are some houses in Cherry street that contain as many as twelve. Other colored dots indicate the prevalence of typhoid, diphtheria, etc. The maps also contain, stamped upon each block a statement of the number of people living in that block, so that the student thus has opportunity of weighing all the conditions that help to produce the epidemics of poverty and disease. The maps, as they appear in the exhibition, might well earn for New York city the title of the city of living death. No other words so accurately and graphically describe the real conditions as these. [475]

The housing problem by now was attracting a great deal of attention. Models were drawn up to show just how bad it was, just how massive it was. Jacob Riis would pioneer in the muckracking field before it would come to be defined as that — he would estimate that at least half of the world’s population lived in absolute poverty, while we can be rest assured today that the number is enormously higher. E.R.L. Gould describes a housing model in 1899, “Some were amazed, some saddened, and probably all were impressed with the unanswerable demonstrations, by means of models, photographs, and charts, of the close relations between bad housing, bad health, bad morals, and bad citizenship.” [476] Again, we see the chronic appearance of disease, “Charts at the Tenement House Exhibition showed the intimate relation between overcrowded, ill-lighted, and ill-ventilated houses and certain forms of disease, notably tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid and scarlet fever.” [477] At length, Gould writes...

The Working Women’s Society would investigate tenements in 1900’s, reporting “Committee found six persons assorting old rags and paper in the yard and twelve children playing in the rubbish.” and “Committee saw an old woman open the door of a dilapidated building on the yard disclosing rubbish dangerous in case of fire.” [479] In 1901, Robert Alston Stevenson describes the summers as it is for the poor...

Poverty is not just an American or Western attribute, though. But when American imperialism began to spread around the globe, poverty went with it. George S. Boutwell writes, “Foreign merchants, residents of China, are less numerous and less prosperous than the same class were a half century ago.” [481] Writing further on American poverty in the pre-“depression” era... In 1903, child labor has swelled to the millions, with author Ernest Poole writing on the conditions of newsies, “In New York today there are some five thousand newsboys. Hundreds are homeless, and of these some are constantly wandering — to Chicago, San Francisco, and New Orleans, to London and the cities of the Continent, wandering always — but returning always, sooner or later, to what they think the greatest town on earth, to the home that taught them to be homeless.” [483] and, “Mike and ‘Whitey’ lit fine stout cigars and described for my especial benefit the ride they had once enjoyed on top of a baggage car in Texas, where it seems the conductor, the brakeman, the engineer, and the fireman constantly used them as targets for pistol practice.” [484]

In 1905, Annie S. Daniel writes, “As it requires more than two weeks’ wages to pay one month’s rent, it is very evident that the women must work or the family go hungry.” [485] Since the poverty level was so great in the United States, and remains so today, she writes further, “The average number of persons in the apartments, due largely to this cause, was 6.4 persons. The average number of rooms occupied by such groups was 2.6. In order to make the income reach the out-go, boarders, lodgers, two and three families huddle together, until not even the ghost of decency remains.” [486] Unemployment in 1905 soared, as written by John Daniels, “Though very few cases of long-continued and absolute lack of work have come to the writer’s attention, there are certain facts respecting the industrial situation of the Negro here which may well lead us to conclude that much temporary idleness exists.” [487] R.R. Wright Jr. comments on the same situation, “The question of earning a living — how to get a job and how to hold a job — is the most serious and most difficult question now confronting the Chicago Negro. He must work where he can rather than where he will.” [488] In 1906, a church leader spoke to his group, “The children who are not properly housed, clothed and fed, and who have not the vitality to carry them through the bitter cold of winter and the heat of summer are just as certainly murdered as are the victims of the riots.” [489] In a 1906–1907 article, by Mary Van Kleeck, it describes working security in the new era, “When it was suggested to one of them that she find a position with another firm, she replied that, while she knew that other places treated you less “like a slave,” the hours were like this everywhere in her trade,--that a girl never knew when she would be “laid off” one day, and forced to work day and night the next.” [490] In another article by Van Kleeck, written in 1908, it claims...

In 1909, the women’s rights and labor rights advocate Jane Addams writes, “...the modern city wastes this most valuable moment in the life of the girl, and drives into all sorts of absurd and obscure expressions her love and yearning towards the world in which she forecasts her destiny, so it often drives the boy into gambling and drinking in order to find his adventure.” [492] In a longer sections, she writes... [...]

An English moralist has lately asserted that “much of the evil of the time may be traced to outraged imagination. It is the strongest quality of the brain and it is starved. Children, from their earliest years, are hedged in with facts; they are not trained to use their minds on the unseen.” [...]

It goes without saying that every tenement house contains women who for years spend their hurried days in preparing food and clothing and pass their sleepless nights in tending and nursing their exigent children, with never one thought for their own comfort or pleasure or development save as these may be connected with the future of their families. We all know as a matter of course that every shop is crowded with workingmen who year after year spend all of their wages upon the nurture and education of their children, reserving for themselves but the shabbiest clothing and a crowded place at the family table. [493]

Monopolies, corporations that have organized into one whole body, have taken control over the working people in this era. They refused to employ workers, they refused to produce goods, they refused to transport materials, until prices rose and wages fell. Unemployment soared along side profit, proportionally. That is the nature of the Capitalist system. “The Standard, through its pipe line, had refused to run oil, unless sold to them, and then declared it could not buy, because the railroads could furnish it no cars in which to move away the oil. Hundreds of wells were stopped, to their great damage. Thousands more, whose owners were afraid to close them for fear of injury by salt water, were pumping the oil on the ground.” [494] In 1876, there were 21 oil refineries idle in one city. Over 3,000 men lost their jobs to increase the cost of the product. In 1867, 28 oil refineries were shut down. In total, of the nation, 76 were shut down, to increase the cost of oil, and decrease wages. [495] To quote Henry Lloyd, “The thousands of men thrown out of employment in Pittsburgh between 1872 and 1877...” [496] Poverty rose: “...one hundred wedding-rings were pawned in one town in a single week for money to bread...” [497] In the 1800’s, for over two months, three out of every four flouring mills was shut down — of which legislators estimated to cost the country more than three hundred million dollars, in 1800’s money. [498] The cost of living increased dramatically, forcing workers to strike for better pay — some strikes nearly shutting down the entire nation, and costing over ten million dollars. [499] Mega-corporations in this time threw away wheat, “as the Dutch threw away the spices of the Moluccas,” even when people were starving. [500] In England: “With the machinery of the Liverpool Cotton Exchange a year ago they stopped fifteen million spindles and took away the livelihood of thousands of men, women, and children.” [501] In Chicago: “The commercial reports of the Chicago papers show that, during the corner of 1881, shipments were stopped, elevators gorged, the lake marine paralyzed, sailors and laborers thrown out of work, and a blockade of the entire grain business threatened.” [502] The response this all had on society was clear...

Dr. Drysdale, of London, at the last session of the Social Science Congress, pointed out how the deathrate rose with scarcity of food. The mean age of the rich in England, at the time of death, is fifty-five; among the poor it is not thirty. The death-rate among the children of the comfortable classes is eighty in a thousand; among the working people of Manchester and Liverpool it is three hundred in a thousand. Dr. Farr shows that the death-rate of England decreases three per cent, when wheat declines two shillings a quarter. As food grows dear, typhus grows plenty. Scarcer bread means more crime. An increase of one larceny to every hundred thousand inhabitants comes with every rise of two farthings in the price of wheat in Bavaria. The enemies of the men who corner wheat and pork could wish for no heavier burden on their souls than that they should be successful. As wheat rises, flour rises; and when flour becomes dear, through manipulation, it is the blood of the poor that flows into the treasury of the syndicate. Such money costs too much. [503]

“It is said by the local newspapers that the mills which do not belong to the association are hired to stand idle, as there are too many mills, and the association finds it profitable to sustain prices at the cost of thousands of dollars paid out in this way.” [504] The Western Wrapping Association, from 1880 and onward, has curtailed production, refusing to produce as much as it easily could, to inflate the price of wrapping paper. The Western Wooden Ware Association only produced one fifth of what they could from 1884 onward. The owner of Vulcan Mill at St. Louis refused to produce rail, at an income of $400,000 a year from other mills. The Nail Association refused to produce for five weeks, to increase the cost of nails. The price of track was doubled when production was cut in half. Many whisky distillers’ are kept idle, drawing pension from other distillers of up to $500 a day. A milk monopoly was formed, that bought all the milk produced — when producers refused to sell to the monopoly, the milk was forcibly spilled, often with the aid of bribed police officers. [505] Lloyd describes the whole scene as it appeared in the United States at that era...

Other combinations [with the intent of keeping up prices and keeping down production], more or less successful, have been made by ice-men of New York, fish dealers of Boston, Western millers, copper miners, manufacturers of sewer pipe, lamps, pottery, glass, hoop-iron, shot, rivets, sugar, candy, starch, preserved fruits, glucose, vapor stoves, chairs, lime, rubber, screws, chains, harvesting machinery, pins, salt, type, brass tubing, hardware, silk, and wire cloth, to say nothing of the railroad, labor, telegraph, and telephone pools with which we are so familiar. [506]

The cruelty as it appears from the Capitalist class must, in fact, be unwaivering. I am not trying to vilify some unseen creature, some indispensably disposed being, as infinitely brutal thing — I am bringing evidence that suggests this. Lloyd writes, one last time...

Mr. Markle evicted thirteen men against not one of whom does the record show any offence. One of these men had been thirty years in his and his father’s employment. These people occupied “Company houses,” held under the most extraordinary leases perhaps in America. Their tenure was at the will and pleasure of John Markle, and the rent was 15½ cents a day. Nowhere else in the world, so far as I know, do such leases exist, except in one place, and the coincidence is appropriate. In the Whitechapel district in London I have seen houses where the rent is collected every night at ten o’clock. These Markle leases contained a clause by which the tenant made the landlord his agent to confess judgment in any controversy between himself and his landlord. One of these tenants had served the Markles for thirty-one years. There was not one black mark against his name; only a very faithful and very obedient and very competent man could have had that record, but his son had been a member of the relief committee and had fed women and children who were starving during the strike. Others of the thirteen evicted men had been officers and leading men of the union. They had made Mr. Markle’s lawyer their lawyer, and so when the eviction notices were served, judgment was confessed by his lawyer for them and all the requirements of the conscience of the law were satisfied. Mr. Markle’s lawyer went to Wilkesbarre at 12 o’clock at night to get the papers and ordered the sheriff to be there early in the morning. The men had had six days’ notice but they had not moved, not believing it possible that the employer most famous of all in the coal regions for his philanthropy would do this thing. His lawyer said before the Commission that these men had put up a job to get turned out. When the lawyer came in the morning these men begged for time. One of them had a wife who was lying sick in bed, and a mother-in-law a hundred years old, blind and sick in bed. This man, Henry Coll, begged for time,-only two hours’ time-to find a place of refuge. The sheriff went to Mr. Markle. Mr. Markle said, according to one account, “No”; according to another, “Not ten minutes.”

They got some wagons and then carried the household goods of these people out in the highway, the only place they had to lay their heads. It was two miles from any other village; it was a November day, by this time it had grown to be six o’clock at night and a cold rain was coming down. The Superintendent left these people on the road in the rain and the dark,-men, women, and children, the well, the sick, the blind, the infirm, the helpless, two miles from any shelter, and then having done his good work, he drove away, went home, and got his supper.

It was one o’clock in the morning before Henry Coll found a place to go to and a wagon to take him and his wife and his mother-in-law to it. They had to enter their new home through a window as the door could not be opened. Some kind of a bed was made of the wet things they had; Coll got some medicine for his wife who was growing worse; she sat up to take it and as she swallowed it she choked, fell forward-dead! [507]

In February of 1911, Elizabeth C Watson explored the tenement houses of the city. Her discoveries: “Last March, on a bitter cold day with snow falling, while visiting a tenement in which finishing was done, a little shivering group of children was found whimpering and huddling in the second floor hallway. The baby, a tiny scrap of fourteen months, was crying with cold, while the little mother (of seven) cuddled him in her arms, trying to forget her own discomfort in caring for him.” [508] One immigrant told her, “Everybody, all a people, they willow the plumes. It hurts the eyes, too, bad, bad. How we can help it? The man he no work, two days, three days, may be in one week, two weeks. Sundays he no work, no pay. The holidays, no work, no money. Rainy, snowy days, bad days, he no work.” [509] In 1967, an editorial wrote, “Since the turn of the century the cartel has systematically and almost continuously fixed prices, rigged bids, divided territories, artificially curtailed production.” [510] The article was speaking of a medicine production company, that was artificially keep the world in constant fever, under the constant distress of sickness, nausea, and illness.

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st-just · 7 years ago

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Our treatment of "the railroad problem" will show the quality and calibre of our political sense. It will go far in foreshadowing the future lines of our social and political growth. It may indicate whether the American democracy, like all the democratic experiments which have preceded it, is to become extinct because the people had not wit enough or virtue enough to make the common good supreme.

Henry Demarest Lloyd

#quote #history #politics #Henry Demarest Lloyd

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takebackthedream · 7 years ago

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Twenty Quotes for the #Resistance in 2018 by Harvey J Kaye

We who will oppose tyranny in all its guises this year don’t yet have our own Thomas Paine, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, or Martin Luther King, Jr. – but we do have their words. Keep them close. Make them your own. Speak them often. Share with friends and family. Remix at will. And please add to this roster if you feel the urge! The struggle continues.

We have it in our power to begin the world over again.

– Thomas Paine, Common Sense, January 1776

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…

– The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…

– Preamble to the Constitution, 1787

There must be continual additions to our great experiment of how much liberty society will bear.

– Walt Whitman, 1846

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal…

– Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al, The Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca Falls, 1848

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

– Abraham Lincoln, August 1, 1858?

[T]hat this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.

– Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address, 1863

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

– Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus, 1883

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

– Frederick Douglass, “Southern Barbarism,” 1886

The price of liberty is something more than eternal vigilance. There must also be eternal advance. We can save the rights we have inherited from our fathers only by winning new ones to bequeath our children.

– Henry Demarest Lloyd, “The Divinity of Humanity,” 1894

When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool – then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name “The People” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.

– Carl Sandburg, I am the People, The Mob, 1910

A true patriotism urges us to build an even more substantial America where the good things of life may be shared by more of us, where the social injustices will not be encouraged to flourish.

– Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1936

O, let America be America again—

The land that never has been yet—

And yet must be— the land where every man is free.

The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again.

– Langston Hughes, Let America Be America Again, 1936

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power.

– Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Accepting the Democratic Party Nomination, 1936

Freedom is never given. It is won.

– A. Philip Randolph, “The Crisis of the Negro and the Constitution,” 1937

Believe

America is promises to Take!

America is promises to

To take them

Brutally

With love but

Take Them.

Oh believe this!

– Archibald MacLeish, America was Promises, 1939

Every generation needs to know what is fighting against, whom it is fighting with, what it is fighting for.

– Max Lerner, It Is Later than You Think: The Need for a Militant Democracy (1939)

Equality before the law; Equality of Education; Equality of opportunity to earn a living; Equality to express oneself and participate in government.

– Eleanor Roosevelt, The Moral Basis of Democracy, 1940

We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression… The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way… The third is freedom from want… The fourth is freedom from fear.

– Franklin Delano Roosevelt, State of the Union Address, January 1941

I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted n the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr., March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 1963

Harvey J. Kaye is the Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great (Simon & Schuster). He is currently writing Radicals at Heart: Why Americans Should Embrace their Radical History. Follow him on Twitter: @harveyjkaye

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