By BENJAMIN DeCASSERES
AFTER one hundred and fifty years of upbuilding an epidemic of destruction evidently has taken possession of the American people—or at least of that part of them that now pretends to represent them.
“DOWN WITH EVERYTHING!”
Among professional Communists, direct-action anarchists and that vast horde of “social innovators” who are born with ants in their bones and bats in their belfrey, this is quite understandable.
But, both officially and among a crowd of demagogues and their followers, a demoniacal spirit, totally foreign to the conservative instincts of the American, has suddenly seized the country.
Is this mania to revolutionize all our traditions, to tear up all our safeguards to liberty and to trample on all that we once boasted of—our ingenuity, our individualism, our competitive joy—NARROWLY LINKED TO THE RISE AND DOMINANCE IN OUR LIFE OF RACKETEERING AND GANGSTERISM?
There is a close connection, psychologically and actually, between the professional politician and the gangster.
Their methods differ, but their object is the same—SPOLIATION.
One uses a gun. The other uses the weapons of taxes, bureaucratic tyranny and sappings and mining the edifice of free institutions under the guise of “going forward to better things.”
DOWN WITH EVERYTHING!
Down with profits!
Down with the rich!
Down with savings!
Down with free competition!
Down with incomes!
Down with independdence!
Down with the Constitution!
Down with private business!
Down with criticism!
Down with capital!
Down with over-production!
Down with under-production!
Down with the law of supply and demand
etc., etc., etc.
DOWN WITH EVERYTHING—EXCEPT the jobs of politicians, the right to confiscate personal wealth, the right to build up a tyrannous bureaucracy, the right to play fast-and-lose with every crack-brained theory that has made Europe a shambles and a stench.
THESE things are made safe for the mob-masters and the Utopian racketeers.
Look back from 1935 to 1932. Here is a three-year perspective for solid thought.
IT LOOKS NOW AS IF THERE HAD BEEN A PLOT HATCHED BEFORE THE LAST ELECTION WHICH IS ONLY NOW COMING TO LIGHT.
If the national program that is now undermining the traditional American Republic had ever been hinted at in the Democratic platform adopted in the summer of 1932, HERBERT HOOVER WOULD NOW BE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
The Socialists who now rule at Washington are bent on a program of DOWN WITH EVERYTHING!
They are doing precisely as the dictator-tyrants of Europe are doing—everything to dig themselves in indefinitely.
The “forgotten man” is today more completely forgotten than ever—HE IS NOW JUST A NUMBER ON A DOLE CARD.
The “remembered man”—that is, the man of wealth, the business man, the capitalist—is the big target of the “down with everything!” program.
Economic atheism is another reason for this destructive business.
We no longer believe in natural law. We no longer believe that business and normal human beings, who are left alone, more certainly attain their ends than when they are harried and hamstrung.
When we have as rulers men of the “down with everything!” school we have turned to strange gods.
Especially are these new, strange gods a menace when they and their actual character and opinion never were elected by the people, but swooped down on us in the Trojan horse of a perfectly conventional and traditionally American political platform.
Original publication
Benjamin DeCasseres, “Down With EVERYTHING!,” Syracuse Journal, May 29, 1935, editorial page (number unresolved).