Excerpt From Howard Fast's 1946 Essay On Literary Classism

In a May 7, 1946 New Masses article, titled "Toward People's Standards in Art," the then-20th-century proletarian writer Howard Fast indicated why most of the U.S. literature created by U.S. upper-middle-class writers, published by the subsidiaries of global corporate media conglomerates or praised by U.S. upper middle-class academic literary critics doesn't generally accurately portray the reality of U.S. working-class lives or promote the liberation of U.S. working-class people from institutional classism in the 21st-century:

"What shall we say of the standards of the literary esthetes who rule the highest level of our `modern culture?' I think the best one can say is that in most cases they have no standards at all. Their approach to art has taken on all the aspects of a retreat from life, and avoiding life as carefully as they do, they have a moral fear of putting standards into operation.

"They are at a point now where they are entranced by sound. They worship style. Like children, they cavort at cunning phraseology, and their idea of a high intellectual achievement...is the creation of a second-rate pun. They have adopted a canting and formalized literary phraseology, and they are endowing it with a sacredness very like the ritual of a church. They delight in the resultant confusion because confusion does not place upon them the responsibility of sifting facts for the truth. They are enraged if, perchance, progressive critics should point out that Swinburne wrote revolutionary odes; they value only that part of Swinburne which is sound without meaning, and they value Shelley that way, and Keats too.

"One cannot deny that these critical czars have vast material means at their disposal. Each week they coin hundreds of thousands of words of so-called criticism, and with that criticism they establish their own hierarchy of the great, both in practitioners of art and in works of art.

"But are their great the people's heroes? ...I think not...We have accepted too uncritically too many bourgeois idols...

"We today, in the midst of the struggle, must not forget that the bulk of modern writing is not created by the working class or by friends of the working class. We very often have reason to remember that much of it is created by enemies of the people, enemies of progress, enemies of all that we believe in, and by and large those enemies control the critical standards of today.

"Are their standards our standards? Can they ever wholly be our standards? Today, our standards and their standards occasionally will coincide--on a Walt Whitman, for example. But what was the attitude of those people toward Walt Whitman in his day, during his life? They attacked him and slandered him, and even today you cannot read critical journals without finding regular attacks on Whitman, supercilious and snide commentaries on Whitman, and scholarly investigations of the `dubious worth' of Whitman.

"Did these makers of standards approve of Uncle Tom's Cabin?...Did they not malign Dreiser and say that he was a buffoon presuming to art? Did they not condemn Jack London to the hall of mediocrity? Did they not fairly successfully expunge Frank Norris from our literary memory? Did they not deride Upton Sinclair, the early Sinclair whose socialist novels were so magnificent?...

"What is their attitude toward the social writer of today? What will be their attitude toward the social novelists of tomorrow?

"We cannot depend on them, on their concept of artistic truth or worth...,Before art can be wholly a weapon for us we must understand art, both the art of the people and the art which the enemies of the people create and use in one fashion or another to keep the people in subjugation. And, so long as we confuse these two, the people's art and the art created by the enemies of the people, so long as we bow to the decadents, to the mystics, to the cheap literary frauds, art will not be the weapon we want it to be, and the great people's art...will not come into being...

"The art we embrace comes from the people and, at the same time, it is a gift to the people. The people are not grateful for gifts from fascists and other enemies of mankind. Such gifts are not art by our standards... Only death or the seeds of death are sown by such gifts. Even as the people must some day destroy the last seeds of fascism, so must they reject `art' which leads away from life and toward stagnation.

"And when they do so, a new art will emerge, a people's art, judged by people's standards."

Mike Gold

Michael Gold's 1941 Address to the Fourth Congress of American Writers: An Excerpt

In a 1941 speech to the Fourth Congress of American Writers, U.S. working-class writer and literary critic Mike Gold said the following:

“…From 1930 to 1940, our literature set forth on a second discovery of America. As in a famous decade in czarist Russia, the inverted, book-proud intellectuals `went to the people.’ Whole new areas of American life were opened up—the deep South, the daily life in factories, mills and mines, the struggle of the farmer, the souls of black folk, the problems of the recent immigrant and his children.

“Now, at last, American literature came to grips with its own enormous and wonderful continent. Scores of gifted young `depression’ authors appeared during each publishing season. There appeared a host of little magazines no longer filled with the usual poetic dewdrops, but proletarian in tone. The older writers were affected, too; many tried to come out of their introspective skins or warm little nests of sophisticated comfort. Some failed, but all were shaken and changed.

“A sign of the renaissance was the furious literary controversies that set in. Literature was alive and dangerous, a social factor in the national life such as it had not been since the days of the Civil War. The Federal Arts Projects were created, a veritable revolution in popular culture such as America had never known.

“Yes, it was a great and fruitful decade, one that burned much of the shoddy opportunism and adolescent fear and hesitation out of our literature. It taught American authors to be proud of their craft, because through it they could lead the people to great goals. It taught them to act and write like…citizens, not like mere entertainers or perpetual Harvard…mystic outcasts from the national life. No longer was the writer an alien; he had rooted himself in the soil of the American people…

“In America, our people’s movement of the Thirties was felt in many directions. The proletarian seed sown in a few first novels about strikes and unemployment grew by a hundred branches until it brought new dignity even to Hollywood…

“A prolific Southern literature arrived, deeply progressive in tone. Faulkner’s picture had been only an upper class truth; it described only the demoralized and defeated feudalism still lingering among the ruins of the Civil War. A new class, the discovery of new social hopes, was needed to rejuvenate this region of broken Attic columns and moldering customs and prejudices…

“I cannot hope to describe at this point the battle over Marxism which raged in all the literary journals of America, pro and con; it would need a bibliographer to trace. I cannot refrain, however, from recalling one amusing tactic of the enemy critics. Whenever a new proletarian novel or play appeared, possessing enough quality and virtuosity not to be ignored, these critics would hail it as `an exception to the Marxist rule.’ Their dogmatic prejudice assured them all proletarian literature was schematic, monotonous, coarsely materialist, obviously didactic and narrow. But here was a novel rich in human nature, dramatic and not didactic, and broad and free as life itself. So what? So they hailed it as a delightful revolt against Marxism, as a welcome exception to the rule of the Moscow literary dictatorship, etc. etc. Thus, in time, the exceptions grew and grew until there was a new exceptional literature; proletarian literature itself, not an exception or accident, but the thing itself…

“…Democracy was dead in our literature in the Twenties. It was Marxism that revived it, and that saved the intellectuals from fascism by giving a democratic form and method for their inchoate protests…

“One might venture to outline roughly the steps by which the decade of the Thirties unfolded:

“1. The economic crisis and the Wall Street crash.

“2. The misery grows of twenty million disinherited and unemployed Americans…

“3. On March 6, 1930, a million unemployed American men and women…demonstrate in all the cities, demanding not the wretched bones of private charity, but unemployment insurance as the democratic right of every citizen and worker.

“4. This mighty demonstration set the tone of the decade. It became a decade of social struggle, instead of defeatism and despair, in literature a Maxim Gorky decade, instead of a T.S. Eliot or lost generation decade.

“5. Thousands of professionals, intellectuals and other middle-class people found themselves attracted to Marxism and communism as an adequate answer to their own problems and despairs.

“6. Many writers changed rapidly in the furnace fires of those first bewildering years of the depression. A Congress of such writers was called by an organizing committee in 1935.

“7. Other congresses took place among artists, dancers, musicians, the various arts and professions…

“8. It is a pioneering movement, comparatively small yet able to join its pressure with that of the economic problems of unemployment upon the government, until the great Federal Arts Projects are forced upon Washington, just as works projects and home relief were similarly won for the American masses…

Michael Gold's 1930 `Proletarian Realism' `New Masses' Editorial: An Excerpt

In an article that appeared in the September 1930 issue of New Masses magazine, U.S. working-class writer and literary critic Mike Gold wrote the following:

“…The intellectuals sneer at the idea of a proletarian literature. They will acknowledge the possibility of nationalist cultures; but they have not reached the understanding that the national idea is dying, and that the class ideologies are alone real in the world today.

“I believe I was the first writer in America to herald the advent of a world proletarian literature as a concomitant to the rise of the world proletariat. This was in an article published in the Liberator in 1921, called ` Towards Proletarian Art.’ Mine was a rather mystic and intuitive approach; nothing had yet been published in English on this theme; the idea was not yet in the air, as it is today; I was feeling my way…


“Thousands of books and articles on the theories of proletarian literature have been published in…Russia, in Germany, Japan, China, France, England, and other countries. There is not a language in the world today in which a vigorous bold youth is not experimenting with the materials of proletarian literature. It is a world phenomenon;; and it grows, changes, criticizes itself, expands without the blessing of all the official mandarins and play-actor iconoclasts and psalm-singing Humanists of the moribund bourgeois culture. It does not need them any longer; it will soon boot them into their final resting places in the museum.

“No, the bourgeois intellectuals tell us, there can be no such thing as a proletarian literature. We answer briefly: There is…


“We have only one magazine in America, the New Masses, dedicated to proletarian literature. And there is no publishing house of standing and intelligent direction to help clarify the issues. Nearest is the International Publishers perhaps, but this house devotes itself solely to a rather academic approach to economics and makes little attempt to influence either the popular mind or our intellectuals. It is as stodgy and unenterprising…as the Yale University Press, and similar organizations.


“If there were a live publishing house here, such as the Cenit of Madrid, for instance, it could issue a series of translations of proletarian novels, poetry, criticism that might astound some of our intellectuals…


“For proletarian literature is a living thing. It is not based on a set of fixed dogmas…


“In proletarian literature, there are several laws which seem to be demonstrable. One of them is that all culture is the reflection of a specific class society. Another is, that bourgeois culture is in process of decay, just as bourgeois society is in a swift decline.


“The class that will inherit the world will be the proletariat, and every indication points inevitably to the law that this proletarian society will, like its predecessors, create its own culture.


“…Proletarian literature will reflect the struggle of the workers in their fight for the world. It portrays the life of the workers…with a clear revolutionary point…

“My belief is that a new form is evolving, which one might name `Proletarian Realism.’ Here are some of its elements, as I see them:


“…Proletarian realism deals with the real conflicts of men and women who work for a living…Proletarian realism is never pointless. It does not believe in literature for its own sake, but in literature that is useful, has a social function. Every major writer has always done this in the past; but is necessary to fight the battle constantly, for there are more intellectuals than ever who are trying to make literature a plaything…

“As few words as possible. We are not interested in the verbal acrobats—this is only another form for bourgeois idleness. The Workers live too close to reality to care about these literary show-offs, these verbalist heroes…

“Away with all lies about human nature…Everyone is a mixture of motives; we do not have to lie about our hero in order to win our case…No straining or melodrama…”

(New Masses, September, 1930)

Michael Gold's 1929 `Go Left, Young Writers!' New Masses' Essay: An Excerpt

In an article that appeared in the January 1929 issue of New Masses magazine, U.S. working-class writer and literary critic Mike Gold wrote the following:

“Literature is one of the products of a civilization like steel or textiles. It is not a child of eternity, but of time. It is always the mirror of its age. It is not any more mystic in its origin than a ham sandwich… 


“There is…a left wing, led…in literature by the New Masses…


“…The great mass of America is not `prosperous’ and it is not being represented in the current politics of literature…


“By default, the liberals have presented us writers and revolutionists of the left wing with a monopoly on the basic American mass. We have a wonderful virgin field to explore; titanic opportunities for creative work.


“Let us be large, heroic and self-confident at our task.


“The best and newest thing a young writer can now do in America…is to go leftward. If he gets tangled up in the other thing he will make some money, maybe, but he will lose everything else. Neither the Saturday Evening Post or The Nation can any longer nourish the free heroic soul. Try it and see…


“The old Masses was a more brilliant but a more upper class affair. The New Masses is working in a different field. It goes after a kind of flesh and blood reality, however crude, instead of the smooth perfect thing that is found in books.


“The America of the working class is practically undiscovered. It is like a lost continent. Bits of it come above the surface in our literature occasionally and everyone is amazed…The young writer can find all the…material he needs working as a wage slave around the cities and prairies of America.


“In the past eight months the New Masses has been slowly finding its path toward the goal of a proletarian literature in America…”

(New Masses, January, 1929)

Michael Gold's 1928 Reflections On Upton Sinclair

In an article that appeared in the November 1928 issue of New Masses magazine, U.S. working-class writer and literary critic Mike Gold wrote the following about the early 20th century U.S. novelist and muckraker Upton Sinclair:

“Sinclair is a surprise to all who first meet him. One expects to meet a solemn bearded Tolstoy, but finds instead a brisk American youth who is quite a star at the game of tennis…


“He is never relaxed…He works. His whole life has been narrowed down to a stiletto point; he is a writing machine. Nothing else matters...He keeps his body in a chair twelve to sixteen hours a day and writes novels, plays, articles, manifestoes, for the Social Revolution. I wish I were like that.


“Every literary youth just out of Harvard…has written at least one superior article…pointing out the stylistic shortcomings of Upton Sinclair…


“Upton has faults….I do not object to what is called his sentimentality….


"Upton has written 40 books about poverty, the class struggle, the revolution. And everyone of them is written with passion, observation, and a smooth beautiful skill that reminds one of Defoe, of Dickens, of Tolstoy, all the giants of fiction whose pens flowed with large, easy grandeur…


“…He is the best known American writer in the world today. American writers marvel at this, but the answer is easy. Upton, with all his faults, has one virtue; he knows there is a class struggle in America, and writes about it. Europe and Asia read him to learn about the America that counts, the workers’ America, not the America of murder trials, boudoirs, and snappy stories.


“Yes, bourgeois critics say Upton Sinclair is not sophisticated…But it all comes down to this; they don’t like him because he takes the social revolution seriously.


“They can understand dead revolutions, and dead revolutionary writers. They can `place’ the revolutionary writings of Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, they can overlook the lack of style and `behavioristic’ psychology in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

“But Upton has written a long string of novels, some good, some bad, in each of which one finds the same faults, and the same virtue and necessity and revolutionary usefulness of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.


“He is our only pioneer writer since Whitman. He is the bard of industrial America.


“…Upton, with his social passion and muckraking, is out of fashion with the American `intelligentsia.’ I think he feels this. He has really been neglected in America and faintly sneered at for twenty-five years. He has felt it. But he writes every day. He persists. He is one of few giants among a scramble of lapdogs. He works on. His very persistence in America is an act of faith, and a form of genius.


“George Sterling told me Jack London did not really die of natural causes, but killed himself with an overdose of morphine tablets…He had been defeated by the American environment. He was a success, and had to earn $40,000 [in early 20th-century money] every year writing Hearst slop. This money was needed for a show ranch, a string of saddle horses, and other means of impressing weekend parties of Babbitts. Jack got to hate himself and his false bourgeois life; then he tried to hate and forget his splendid proletarian youth. He drank like a fish and tried to drown his revolutionary emotions, his real self. Result: suicide…


“But Upton Sinclair will never dream of such a thing; he is too busy. He is too useful…

“...I have never understood Upton Sinclair’s politics. [But] I will repeat, despite everything, he is our great American pioneer in revolutionary fiction, he is, to my mind, the most important writer in America.”

(New Masses, November 1928)

Michael Gold On Ernest Hemingway: Excerpts from 1928 `New Masses' article

In an article that appeared in the March 1928 issue of New Masses magazine, U.S. working-class writer and literary critic Mike Gold wrote the following about the early 20th century U.S. novelist Ernest Hemingway (who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound nearly 51 years ago in July 1961):

“…Fashion is as whimsical as a butterfly, neurotic as a race horse with hives, crazy as the New York weather.


“What causes the cycles of fashion? The average `literary critic’ can’t tell you; the world is all accident to him. He is as incompetent as the average university `economist’ who describes perfectly the cycles of economic expansion and depression, but knows…little of their basic laws…


“Ernest Hemingway is the newest young writer to leap into fashion among American intellectuals. He deserves recognition; he is powerful, original, would be noticed anywhere, and at any time. He has a technical control of his material as sure as a locomotive engineer’s. He sees and feels certain things for himself, for 1928.

“Hemingway became a best seller with his novel The Sun Also Rises. He had already published a volume of short stories, and a satirical novel. Neither was very popular. Hemingway was considered a member of a cult. The advance guard of American writing, most of whom live in Paris, looked upon Hemingway as one of their bannermen. He expressed their mood of irony, lazy despair, and old-world sophistication.


“Suddenly this esoteric mood became popular. Thousands of simpler male and female Americans, not privileged to indulge in café’ irony and pity in Paris, but rising to alarm clocks in New York and Chicago, discovered and liked Hemingway. Why? His novel was an upper-class affair, concerned with the amours and drinking bouts of Americans with incomes who rot in European cafés; self-pitying exiles and talkers…Why did the hard-working Babbitt Americans accept…the gilded sorrows in Hemingway?


“It was no accident.


“…America is the land where the businessman is the national hero. A big section of the middle-class youth, however, hates in its heart the rapacities, the meanness, the dollarmanias of business.


“American business simply cannot satisfy the mind and the heart. A thousand voices rise every day to testify against it…The war was a profound shock to all the youth…And now they can sense the next war, and they have no illusions about the past or present, and they have no hopes for the imperialist future.


“Mencken, Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, all the bourgeois modern American writers, whom do they write for? Not for workingmen, and not for the bankers of Wall Street. They write for, and they express the soul of, the harried white-collar class.


“I know a hundred…haggard, witty, hard-drinking woman-chasing advertising men, press agents, dentists, doctors, engineers, technical men, lawyers, office executives. They go to work every morning and plough their weary brains eight hours a day in the fiercest scramble for a living the world has ever known…


“Hemingway offers the daydreams of a man. Liquor, sex and sport are his three chief themes, as they are in the consciousness of the American white-collar slave today…


“The young American `liberal’ writes advertising copy meekly all day, then at night dreams of Hemingway’s irresponsible Europe, where everyone talks literature, drinks fine liqueurs, swaggers with a cane, sleeps with beautiful and witty British aristocrats, is well informed in the mysteries of bullfighting, has a mysterious income from home.
“That is why Hemingway is suddenly popular. He has become the sentimental storyteller to a whole group of tired, sad, impotent young Americans, most of whom must work in offices every day--`white collar slaves.’…


“Ten years ago Hemingway could not have written in this mood; he would not have felt the mood , and no one else would have understood him, in this mood. His mood is that of the betrayed young idealist.


“There is no humanity in Hemingway, as there is in Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, all the men of the earlier decade. He is heartless as a tabloid. He describes the same material as do tabloids, and his sole boast is his aloofness, last refuge of a scoundrel. What one discerns in him as in those younger writers close to his mood, is an enormous self-pity….


“…Hemingway…has led American writing back to the divine simplicities of the prosaic; he has made a great technical contribution.


“The revolutionary writers of the future will be grateful to him; they will imitate his style. But they will have different things to say. A new wave of social struggle is moving on the ocean of American life. Unemployment is here; hints of a financial depression; the big conservative unions are breaking up; another world war is being announced by Admirals and Generals.


“Babbitt was one of the evidences of the desperation and pessimism of the middle-class idealists during the Judas decade, Hemingway was another sign…Upton Sinclair is coming back in popularity in his own land. There is surely something brewing. Hemingway is not the herald of a new way of feeling, but the last voice of a decade of despair.”

(New Masses, March 1928)

Michael Gold On John Reed: Excerpts from 1927 `New Masses' article

In an article that appeared in the November 1927 issue of New Masses magazine, U.S. working-class writer and literary critic Mike Gold wrote the following about the early 20th century U.S. writer and journalist John Reed (whose life was dramatized, somewhat, in Warren Beatty’s early 1980s Hollywood movie, Reds):

“John Reed was a cowboy out of the west, six feet high, steady eyes, boyish face; a brave, gay, open-handed young giant; you meet thousands of him on the road, in lumber camps, on the ranges,...in the mines.


“I used to see Jack Reed swimming at Provincetown with George Cram Cook, that other Socialist and great-hearted adventurer now dead too. I went out a mile with them in a catboat, and they raced back through a choppy sea, arm over arm, shouting bawdy taunts at each other, whooping with delight. Then we all went to Jack’s house and ate a big jolly supper.


“He loved every kind of physical and mental life; the world flowed through him freely…And Jack wrote the most vivid book on the Bolshevik Revolution that has yet appeared in any language. After ten years it is as sound and fresh as at first. It was written white-hot, almost at the scene of the event. It is the greatest piece of reporting in history. It is a deathless book that sells by the million.


“The Revolution is the romance of tens of millions of men and women in the world today. This is something many American intellectuals never understand about Jack Reed. If he had remained romantic about the underworld, or about meaningless adventure-wandering, or about women or poem-making, they would have continued admiring him. But Jack Reed fell in love with the Revolution, and gave it all his generous heart’s blood. This the pale, rootless intellectuals could never understand. When he died they said he had wasted his life. It is they who lead wasted, futile lives in their meek offices, academic sanctums, and bootleg parlors.

“Jack Reed lived the fullest and grandest life of any young man in our America…


“He burst into American writing like a young genius. Everyone followed his work eagerly, waiting for the inevitable masterpiece. At the outbreak of war Jack Reed was the best paid and most brilliant war correspondent in America. He had written some of the best short stories. Everyone waited for the masterpiece…


“Jack Reed’s life was not wasted; he did write his masterpiece, Ten Days That Shook The World. But the `intellectuals’ haven’t yet recognized this.


“The role of the intellectual in the revolutionary labor movement has always been a debating point. In the I.W.W. the fellow-workers would tar and feather (almost) any intellectual appeared among them. The word `intellectual’ became a synonym for the word `bastard,’ and in the American Communist movement there is some of this feeling.


“It is part of the American hard-boiled tradition, shared by revolutionists here who believe it is unproletarian and unmanly to write a play, or study politics, or discuss the arts. Mr. Babbitt feels the same way.


“This tradition is dying in the American revolutionary movement. Jack Reed was one of the `intellectuals’ who helped destroy the prejudice. He identified himself so completely with the working class; he undertook every danger for the revolution; he forgot his Harvard education, his genius, his popularity, his gifted body and mind so completely that no one else remembered them any more; there was no gap between Jack Reed and the workers any longer.


“…He was on trial during the war for sedition. He rose in the courtroom, hitched up his pants, looked the Judge squarely in the eye, and testified boldly and frankly, like a revolutionist.


“It is a difficult career being an active revolutionist, It takes all one’s nerves, energy and character. It is almost as difficult to be a pioneer revolutionary writer. Jack Reed, in his short life, managed to combine both careers…


“…I am sure that the best elements of Jack Reed’s spirit will be preserved in any revolutionary writers who will appear in this country. They will have the bigness to be humane. They will laugh, but they will not sneer. Jack Reed was a fierce enemy to capitalism, but in all his books you will never find a sneer at humanity. And this is difficult to refrain from, too…


“…Jack Reed went through the Paterson strike, and the Lawrence strike, and the Bayonne strike, and understood their significance. And he understood the economic basis of the World War, and refused to be a tool of J.P. Morgan, like Walter Lippman and many other wise men who knew so much about Bergson, and so little about the inevitable treaty at Versailles.


“And he had read and thought enough to grasp the full political and economic significance of the Bolshevik Revolution for the world…
“…He had loved the Revolution when she was a haggard outlaw fighting for life against the ravening pack of capitalist nations.


“He had lived with the revolution in famine, in civil war, in chaos…He had seen hundreds of frozen corpses of Red Guards piled high in a railroad station and had worked himself to the bone for this Revolution. He wandered through typhus areas, he had been bitten by a louse, and died…


“And what he had died for was the real thing…Walter Lippman’s war to end war did not end war, but was the prelude to a more rapacious capitalistic imperialism and a greater imperialist war….”

(New Masses, November 1927)

Michael Gold's ` Life of John Brown': An Excerpt

U.S. proletarian writer and proletarian critic Mike Gold’s Life of John Brown book of 1960 contained the following interesting passages:

“John Brown’s life is a grand, simple epic that should inspire one to heroism…There are men who have proved their superiority to the pettiness of life, and who seem almost divine. John Brown is one of them. I think he was almost our greatest American. I know that he was the greatest man the common people of America have yet produced.

“He did not become a President, a financier, a great scientist, or artist; he was a plain and rather obscure farmer until his death. That is his greatness. He had no great offices, no recognition or applause of multitudes to spur him on, to feed his vanity and self-righteousness. He did his duty in silence; he was an outlaw. Only after he had been hung like a common murderer, and only after the Civil War had come to fulfill his prophecies, was he recognized as a great figure.

“But in his life he was a common man to the end, a hard-working, honest, Puritan farmer with a large family, a man worried with the details of poverty and obscure as ourselves. Now we are taught as school-children that only those who become Presidents and captains of finance are the successful ones in our democracy. John Brown proved that there is another form of success, within the reach of everyone, and that is to devote one’s life to a great and pure cause.

“John Brown was hung as an outlaw…Some day schoolchildren will be taught that his had been the only sort of success worth striving for in his time. The rest was dross—the personal success of the beetle that rolls itself a huger ball of dung than its fellow-beetles, and exults over it…

“…Working-class Americans, and they are the majority of the nation, did not go to the high schools and universities. Neither did John Brown. But they can read history, as he did at ten years, and they can study and makes themselves proficient in some field, as he made a surveyor of himself by home study. He also read passionately…John Brown never went to school after his childhood; but…he knew how to stir men to great deeds, and lead them in the battle.

“Great men do not need to own a college diploma; they teach themselves, they are taught by Life.

“How meaningless college degrees would sound if attached after the names of…Socrates,…Buddha, Jesus.., Danton, William Lloyd Garrison!

“As for instance: Jesus Christ, D.D.; Robert Burns, M.A.; Victor Hugo, B.S.; John Brown, Ph.D! How superfluous the titles of man’s universities, when Life has crowned the student with real and greener laurels! Yes, there are many things not taught in the colleges!...

“…John Brown saw much farther than his own times. He knew that there were many other things wrong with the social system in America besides slavery….John Brown was one of those early American radicals…who felt that the abolition of slavery was only the first step toward a free America…

“…At first there was a rush of Northern politicians to disavow and condemn John Brown’s deed. Later, there was approval; still later understanding; still later, worship.

“Yes, the old man seemed mad, as all pioneers are mad. Gorky has called it the madness of the brave. But such madness seems necessary to the world; the world would sink into a bog of respectable tyranny and stagnation were there not these fresh, strong, ruthless tempest to keep the waters of life in motion.

“Who knows but that some time in America the John Browns of today will be worshipped in like manner? The outlaws of today, the unknown soldiers of freedom…”