Postal Riders and Raiders. W. H. Gantz
kilted Scots put it, quoting Bulwer Lytton, we are rapidly reaching that view of life which leads men, in the heat of a justified anger, to say “Happy is the man whose father went to the devil;” meaning thereby that our sons can be happy if we manage to steal and loot enough from the government, or from our fellow citizens through governmental favor and protection, to build for those sons stone fronts on “Easy street” and leave a bank balance and “vested interests” sufficient to maintain them.
People happy in the enjoyment of unearned wealth seldom make good, safe or dependable judges or lawmakers for people who are unhappy.
There may be, of course, some rare exceptions to that statement. The history of twenty centuries, however—yes, of forty centuries—has shown very few of them. This may appear to some as a digression from my subject. Well, so count it, if you will. I have made it as a “foreword” for three statements I wish to make—statements cogently asserted in support of an assertion made some paragraphs back.
Mr. Hitchcock, in both action and advocacy, has not only been a conspicuous member, as newspapers and other reports show, but a leading factor, in the gang of “influenced” mercenaries and aspiring politicians who sought to “submerge” certain periodicals which for ten or more years have been telling the people the truth—the truth about crooked corporation practices and about crooked public officials.
I am here going to make those three statements. I believe them statements of fact. Think them over. Study them. If, after, you think I am wrong or overstate the facts, then—well, then, that is your affair, not mine. Remember, I write with a club—not a pencil.
The first of the three statements I wish here to make is: The social and political polity which patriotic and liberty-loving progenitors gave us, established for us, has been adroitly led from its prescribed way. Today our governmental and social organizations are rich in policemen, soldiers, prisons, poorhouses, organized charities, charity balls, owners of unearned wealth and in politicians who helped those owners to acquire that unearned wealth and who furthermore continue to protect them in its possession.
The second statement I wish my readers to consider is: The periodical monthlies and weeklies (and a few “yellow” newspapers), which Mr. Hitchcock and his coterie of conspirators would muzzle or, by laying an excessive mail rate upon them, suppress or ruin—and incidentally, make the Postmaster General an unrestrained censor of the country’s periodical literature——
Those periodicals, I started to say, have given more real educational benefit to the adult population of this country during the past ten years than has been given by all the “little red school houses,” colleges, universities, and churches combined.
I do not, as you will notice, include the “political stump.” I do not care to comment on its peculiar didactic value or fascination for fools. That means both you and me, reader. We each, occasionally, go to hear the political “stumper” tell us a lot of “influenced” lies.
The third statement I wish to make is: Postmaster General Hitchcock is, so far as the writer has been able to learn, a politician. Not only is he a politician, the reports read, but he is a wise, smooth and “ambitious” politician.
That is bad. “Why?” Well, because an “ambitious” politician is about as useful to us, to you and to me, as are bugs in our potato patch, or dry rot in our sheep herd. The “ambitious” politician is a disease, attacking either our kitchen garden or our mutton supply.
“What’s the answer?”
Here is one answer: It is a long way between “three rooms rear and a palace.” But even they who crawl about the earth, begging for leave to live, see things, hear things, feel things, and read things. They are beginning to understand much of what they see, hear, feel and read.
Is that, Mr. Hitchcock, a reason, one of the reasons, why you who have so energetically, likewise offensively, tried to shut us out from our main source of information, from our mental commissary?
Arise, please, and answer.
There are still other remarks which I must make about Mr. Hitchcock’s peculiar recent action and talk. It may not be at all pleasant to him. Yet the statements I shall make, I am ready to support by a “cloud of witnesses.”
As before stated, this attempt to muzzle the press of the country, for that appears to be the ultimate, likewise the ulterior, purpose of Mr. Hitchcock and his coterie of senatorial and other abettors in their recent attempt to outrage the constitutional rights of our people, the constitutional rights of the Lower House and the rules of both Senate and House, as Senator Robert L. Owen, in brief but pertinent remarks in the recent closing days of the late session (February 25, 1911), pointed out—remarks rife with the cogency of truth.
In a previous paragraph I stated, in effect, that Postmaster General Hitchcock is an “influenced” man or a densely ignorant one. That he is densely ignorant on matters pertaining to periodical publications has been amply evidenced by subsequent quotations from his own reports and letters. That he at least shares the prevailing ignorance as to the methods, and the result of methods, for handling the vast business of the federal Postoffice Department, I have already pointed out.
Possibly I am in error here, but when Senators and Congressmen who have studied for years the methods of handling business in the Postoffice Department were—and are—convinced that it is impossible for the most expert accountants to collect and collate dependable information, relating either to any of its divisions of service or to the department in general; when old and tried students of the loose, wasteful methods of this department, of its utter lack of business system, yes, of its crooks and crookedness—when, I say, such experienced students frankly and bluntly state their complete inability to gather any dependable data as to the business done by Mr. Hitchcock’s department, I am in doubt as to the correctness, or lack of correctness, in my previous intimation that Mr. Hitchcock is ignorant of his departmental affairs and practices, as well as of matters pertaining to periodical publication and distribution.
Mr. Hitchcock has been at the head of his department something like three years, I believe. He has talked so much and written so much about postal “deficits,” about the cause of those deficits and how to remedy them by holding up periodical publishers, that, maybe, he has learned more about his department, more about deficits and the cause of them—learned more about these things in three years than older and more experienced men have learned in ten years—yes, twenty.
Maybe he has. If so, then I was in error when I intimated that his ignorance extended to departmental matters as well as to periodical publishing. If, however, I was in error as to Mr. Hitchcock’s knowledge of his departmental matters, I find myself in a multitudinous and growing company of intelligent and informed people to whom he will have to talk and write much more, and to talk and write far more eloquently, persuasively and wisely than he has thus far talked and written, to convince them that he has accumulated more departmental wisdom in three years than numerous older students of the subject gathered in ten.
What training or opportunity Mr. Hitchcock had, previous to his installation in his present position, to qualify him for the office—training and opportunity which enabled him to grasp so comprehensively, as he would have it appear, the duties, functions, faults in accounting, frailties in the service personnel—in short, all the essentials of knowledge and information pertaining to a competent administration of the department, general, divisional and in detail, I do not know.
Of course, Mr. Frank H. Hitchcock was chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1908, which committee, with the aid of “a very limited campaign fund,” as one colossally profound “stumper” put it, steered the votes to Judge Taft and himself to his present exalted position. Now, this experience of Mr. Hitchcock may or may not have especially qualified him for ready, quick and comprehensive understanding of all that the Postoffice Department needs to make it yield even a half of what the people of this country are today paying for.