America Faces The Barricade by John L. Spivak. AFTER talking with all kinds of people throughout the country, I am convinced that the American worker does not want to overthrow the government. All he wants is food. But if the government will not make it possible for him to earn it or will not give it to him, then he will overthrow the government, without realizing that he is doing so. Under the present economic system it is impossible for our farms and factories ever to absorb all the millions of unemployed. The tendency, since the curtailment of the working hours, has been for manufacturers to mechanize their plants more highly in order to make up for the reduced working hours where they cannot be made up by the "speed-up" system. Thus, for years, millions will be permanently on relief rolls, whom the government will have to support, since private charity can no longer do it.
About the Author: John L. Spivak (1897-1981), an investigative reporter and author whom fellow muckraker Lincoln Steffens described as "the best of us," was most concerned with the problems of the working class and the spread of fascism and anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States from the 1920s through the 1940s. As a boy Spivak worked for a variety of factories in his hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, then landed a job as a cub reporter for the New Haven Union. Moving to New York, he worked at the Morning Sun, Evening Graphic, and the Call, the paper of the American Socialist Party. His first major break came when he traveled to West Virginia to cover the coal strikes that broke out after World War I. He then served briefly as a reporter and bureau chief in Berlin and Moscow for the International News Service and upon his return to the U.S. became a feature writer for leftist newspapers and magazines such as the New York Daily Worker, Ken, and the New Masses. Spivak traveled throughout the South in the early 1930s interviewing prison camp officials and photographing camp atrocities and their corresponding punishment records. His novel, Georgia Nigger, depicting the brutality of prison camp chain gangs was serialized in the Daily Worker. His 1935 exposé in the New Masses charged a congressional committee with deliberately suppressing evidence of an offer made to Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler by Wall Street financiers to lead a military coup against the U.S. government and replace it with a fascist regime. He also investigated the anti-Semitic and financial activities of Charles E. Coughlin, the Catholic radio priest who founded the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan. Most of Spivak's work, however, was dedicated to exposing fascism and underground Nazi spy groups in Central America, Europe, and the U.S. He wrote several "muckraking" books about these activities.