Category: History, Politics || By jt3y

Above: United Mine Workers Vice President Philip Murray, Allegheny County Common Pleas Court Judge Michael Musmanno, railroad fireman Clinton S. Golden and other backers of the Steel Workers' Organizing Committee lead the union's first mass meeting from atop a coal truck at the McKeesport city garbage dump, June 21, 1936.

Mayor George H. Lysle had forbid the union organizers from meeting anywhere else in town.

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"The enormous concern of the future is to divide its profits, not among hundreds of idle capitalists who contribute nothing to its success, but among hundreds of its ablest employees, among whose abilities and exertions success greatly depends." --- Andrew Carnegie, 1902

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"It is important to this people to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes, and the use of those fortunes, both corporate and individual, in business.

"We should discriminate in the sharpest way between fortunes well-won and fortunes ill-won; between those gained as an incident to performing great services to the community as a whole, and those gained in evil fashion by keeping just within the limits of mere law-honesty. ...

"More important then aught else is the development of the broadest sympathy of man for man. The welfare of the wage-worker, the welfare of the tiller of the soil, upon these depend the welfare of the entire country; their good is not to be sought in pulling down others; but their good must be the prime object of all our statesmanship.

"Materially we must strive to secure a broader economic opportunity for all men, so that each shall have a better chance to show the stuff of which he is made.

"Spiritually and ethically we must strive to bring about clean living and right thinking. We appreciate also that the things of the soul are immeasurably more important.

"The foundation-stone of national life is, and ever must be, the high individual character of the average citizen." --- Theodore Roosevelt, 1906

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"The problem of wealth will not down. It is obviously so unequally distributed that the attention of civilized man must be attracted to it from time to time. He will ultimately enact the laws needed to produce a more equal distribution." --- Andrew Carnegie, 1906

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"We will try not only to secure a better economic position in life through processes of collective bargaining, but we will strive to supplement those efforts through the usages of improved social legislation and measures that will be of material value to our people as well." --- Philip Murray, 1936

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"You express sympathy for a wage raise. I am sure the men appreciate the 'sympathy of management.' But when a steel worker goes to the clothing store, he is unable to cash the sympathy of management for a new suit of clothes, a dress for his wife, or shoes for his children to go to school." --- Philip Murray letter to Benjamin Fairless, president of Carnegie-Illinois Steel, 1936

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"We are not communistic in theory, practice or deed. We are ordinary citizensÑmembers of a trade unionÑassuming the responsibility of trying to help our country and the people living in this country. This is our task.

"The SWOC has neither the time for, nor is interested in, any 'isms' other than unionism and Americanism. We are dedicated to American institutions. We are organizing American workmen into American unions. When that is done, America will be able to function for the benefit of all the people." --- Philip Murray, 1938

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"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.

"With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: 'This is not just.'" --- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 1967

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"You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." --- George W. Bush, 2005

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Sources: George Swetnam and Helene Smith, The Carnegie Nobody Knows (Greensburg, Pa: McDonald-Sward Publishing Co., 1989); Theodore Roosevelt, letter to Elihu Root, May 20, 1904; Roosevelt, The Man with the Muck-Rake, speech of April 14, 1906; Vincent Sweeney, The United Steelworkers of America: Twenty Years Later (Pittsburgh: United Steelworkers of America, 1956); Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, speech of April 4, 1967; George W. Bush, President Discusses Strengthening Social Security in Nebraska, speech of February 4, 2005.