My Zayde Was One Yr-Old and McKinley was Just Elected

From the pages of our THE SPADE IN THE DARK LOAM (in case you missed it and you probably did)


The country was in "another economic crisis" and the Republicans had just won control of both houses of Congress two years before ( not that it pertains to anything that goes today I just like to say that):
 

Richard Franklin Pettigrew, Senator from South Dakota 1889-1901

(From THE COURSE OF EMPIRE- An Official Record by Sen. R.F. Pettigrew, South Dakota: Page 581- an excerpt from a speech made by Senator Pettigrew in Sioux Falls, SD on Nov. 14, 1896.)

“I remember a millionaire told me not long ago that no man ought to complain because one man had accumulated an enormous fortune. He said nature was an inexhaustible store house and any man could draw from it whatever he chose. He said, “why don’t they go and by toil and industry and self-denial accumulate as we have accumulated?” I said to him let us carry this illustration a little farther. I said, suppose a thousand men were engaged in drawing from nature’s storehouse and in their number there was an additional one-a thousand and one. They delved and toiled each day to acquire a little wealth until each one’s pile had become perceptible. But they noticed this one man never toiled. They noticed that he was idle. That he slept mostly in the day time and that his pile of wealth was becoming enormous, towering above theirs. I said, suppose after while it was discovered that he went about in the night after their piles had-become sufficiently large so that by the taking of a hundredth part of each day’s produce from each one and adding it to his they would not notice it was gone. They had lost one hundredth part of what they had accumulated that day and they didn’t miss it from the pile, and he had got ten times as much as any other one. So his pile grew ten times while theirs grew once and it became ten times as great as either of theirs. Then I said, what would you think of your theory? I said that the great fortunes of this country, and yours among them, have been accumulated in that way. You, by legislation, have been able to take from each citizen a little sum of what he has earned each day, so small that he did not discover it that night, but only discovered it as time rolled by, and added it to yours until it is mountain high, without having produced one element of the wealth itself. That is exactly what has occurred and is happening, and it is exactly what the Republican party has decreed shall continue to happen. Now, fellow citizens I have talked longer than I intended to. I simply wanted to state again the issues in this contest.