University of Virginia Library

Granny Hoar Grunts

American Nonconformist, May 24, 1894

Senator Hoar the other day, in the midst of a tariff speech, in allusion to the Coxey armies said: "I sympathize deeply with the uneasiness and distress which is manifest in all parts of the country. I lament the folly and the feebleness which has brought the country in 12 months to its present condition." [1]

How absurd to say that a great productive country like this with all its complicated commercial interests, could have been brought to its present condition in the short space of 12 months! It has taken the steady pursuit of a certain financial policy for years to bring about such a condition, and it has come about so gradually that it has been almost unobserved and is now only attaining its climax.

He says also, "these marching armies are anarchists and half-tramps." If they are what made them so? He goes on to say "The eternal law, 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat they bread' will prevail.[2] It will never be repealed. It will punish those who tamper with it. But like every law of divine origin it will bestow on every man who obeys it the richest gifts of God's providence--content, health, wealth, strength, happiness. To the people that obey its austere behest 'length of days is in its right hand and in its left hand riches and honor.'" [3]

Ye thousands of farmers and farmers' wives scattered broadcast over this great land teeming with plenty, who toil from four or five o'clock in the morning till nine or ten at night, with scarcely a moment's rest--how is it with you? Where is your wealth for which you have toiled thus all your lives and expect, if present conditions do not change, to toil thus till you die? Where are the homes many of you have worked for all your lives only to lose at the last? You worked, where is your wealth? You work, where is your content? You work, where is your happiness? And not only you farmers and farmers' wives, think of all the factory hands, the girls with pale, pinched faces who should be replete with life and health and the joy of youth. The children who should be at play in the fields instead of helping to earn barely enough bread and butter to keep them alive and warm.

Senator Hoar, what you have said is not true. You should have said "it ought to be so," not that "it is so."

Hoar was followed by Gray,[4] who attributed the existence of the Coxey armies to the McKinley bill. These men make me "tired."

Hoar has no business in the senate. He is a man who lives in the past and in literature. He is continually trying to fit historical instances of hundreds of years ago to present times and conditions. The world moves. I forgot though, brakes are sometimes useful, Senator Hoar may be useful as a brake in the senate to keep it from going too fast. But some people may think that the senate does not need brakes and what it needs more than anything else is to be made to "move on."

I wish some one would start up a school for the cultivation and practice of "original thinking" and offer a free education in it to Hoar, Hawley,[5] et al. The school for Sherman[6] and one or two others should be a school of morality and inculcation of the great command, "Love thy neighbor as thyself,"[7] and that an injury to one human being in the world is to the hurt of all, and the greatest injury is to the perpetrator of the injury himself.

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