Forrest O. Wiggins's speech: The Ideology of Interest

An announcement of Wiggins's speech
Wiggins, Forrest Oran. Correspondence. (Box 1, Folder 3). 1946 - 1951-11. University of Minnesota Libraries, University Archives.

On January 22, 1951, Forrest O. Wiggins delivered his speech "The Ideology of Interest" at the Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota. Wiggins spoke as part of an event held as part of the university's Centennial Lecture Series. The event was titled "Conflict in the Social Order," and it was sponsored by student and professional organizations like Future Teachers of American and the Sociology Club. 

The purpose of the event was to provide students with an opportunity to study ideological problems related to social conflict. In addition to Wiggins, the political science professor Mulford Q. Sibley and the sociologist Benjamin N. Nelson also spoke, and a panel discussion between the three professors was moderated by the sociologist George B. Vold. About 150 to 200 people attended Wiggins's talk, mostly students and a handful of faculty. 

The text of Wiggins's speech is as follows:

In an extremely pessimistic mood at the time preceding the Civil War, when men seemed to be unable to become aroused over the contradiction between the expressed tenets of democracy and human slavery, Thoreau wrote: "What is the price current of an honest man and patriot today? They will wait, well disposed for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote and a feeble countenance and Goodspeed to the right, as it goes them by."

The new world situation which has come into being as a result of the defeat of fascism requires a reorientation in our ways of thinking. There seems to be no doubt that if we are to be entirety pragmatic, we should examine the fundamental ideologies which have led us into two world-embracing wars within a single generation and a situation where we did not get out of the last business depression except by means of war.

This means to say, and I shall repeat it ad nauseum that capitalism did not emerge from the last depression by any natural causes indigenous to capitalism itself.

If we are to examine some of the basic economic political creeds, we would find, I think, that we have accepted capitalism as the best economic system, democracy with its principles of majority-minority divisions, plus as a political and social philosophy bolstering and lending support to these political and economic systems. Furthermore, I think we should assume the hegemony of the white race over the backward and colonial peoples of the world. 

In the space of some thirty or forty years, and with a pace unparalleled in its rapidity since the close of the last war, these four basic assumptions are no longer valid, nor are they held by a majority of mankind throughout the world. At the very outset, let us enunciate in the clearest possible tones:

1. The present conflict in the world today is not a conflict between democracy and communism; the present conflict in the world today is between capitalism and socialism.
2. The proponents of capitalism are in a distinct minority.
3. The domination of the white race over the rest of the world is no longer possible.
4. The most powerful leader of capitalism is the United States; the most powerful leader of socialism is the Soviet Union.

Conflict of interest is telescoped and brought into sharp focus by means of war. We ought to ask ourselves, "Who are the people who want war at the present time?" The Koreans? Their towns and villages and cities and hospitals and schools and huts are reduced to rubble. More than three-fourths of Korea is destroyed. The population has suffered a loss of more than one hundred thousand casualties. The Koreans do not want war. The Chinese in a period of some twenty years, in which they have been struggling for independence, have lost more than ten million lives. They are only one year out of an internal civil war. The great job of the Chinese is that of reconstruction and industrialization. The Chinese do not want war. The German elections show that the German people will not shoulder arms in defense of Western democracies. The Russians don't want war. Who is it, then, who wants war.

The answer is that it is the capitalists and the militarists in the United States who want war.

I shall let the truth come out of the horses's mouth; I shall give you a series of quotations which will prove this thesis. We may lay down the general principle that American business standard for the proposition that the United States economy requires military spending inevitably leads to military action. And here I call upon the spokesmen of capitalism to speak for themselves.

In Barron's Financial Weekly, of August 7, we find this statement: "The United States has inherited an imperial mantle as order-keeper for the world.... In the past this was left to others, notably the British... In this century the task devolves upon United States leadership; there is no other. Wall Street has a part of play in the immediate re-arming of America... It will do so not just by supplying the Treasury with dollars, but supplying as in the part, intelligent and courageous leadership."

Dr. Palyi, former banker and professor of finance at the University of Chicago, writing in the Commercial and Financial Chronicle of August 12, 1950, states, "We have underwritten Europe's colonial empires as well as the highly artificial semi-totalitarian structures which grew out of them."

Dr. Virgil Jordan, president of the National Industrial Conference Board, says, "America has embarked upon a career of imperialism, both in world affairs and in every aspect of her life... At best, England will become a junior partner of the new Anglo-Saxon imperialism, in which the economic resources and military and naval strength of the United States will be the center of gravity. Southward in our Hemisphere and Westward in the Pacific the path of empire takes its way, and in modern terms of economic power as well as political prestige, the sceptre  [rec scepter] passes to the United States...

"We have no alternative, in truth than to move along the road we have been traveling in the past quarter century, in the direction we took with the conquest of Cube and the Philippines, and our participation in World War I."

Austin Kiplinger, in the Chicago Journal of Commerce, March 2, 1949, writes, "In ABC's, the facts are these: The United States can produce more than its present capacity to consume. Increased consumption at home will sop up some of this excess, but still more excess will remain.

"We sell this excess abroad. And since the rest of the world is not up to our standard of production, we must decide what to take in payment. We can let the deficit stand as a debt which will probably never be paid. Or... and this is where imperialism comes in... we can't take ownership of properties throughout the world, and help to run them. 

"And if we do this, we shall have to cooperate with our own government and foreign governments to arrange the political weather under which American ownership abroad will be carried out...

"Since we are going to be stuck with the role of the imperialists, let us dramatize the new imperialism as an extension of the American way of life, and the American productive system..."

But we could use our productive resources at home. United States News and World Report of April 22, 1949, says "Official planners estimate that a shelf of needed public works at this time could total as much as 127 billion dollars." A few of the things talked about in Washington include such items as road building, 60 billion; floor control, 13 billion; schools, 10,5 billion; waterworks, 9.5 billion; hospitals, 8.5 billion. In the same issue, it states, "Armaments is the new great program for pump priming."

But let us continue. Justice Douglas made this statement: "War is the only divide the government can design to give maximum production and full employment."

David Lawrence, editor of the United States News and World Report, wrote on January 1, 1949, "Present prosperity is underwritten by billions being spent for armaments. Ending the cold war could bring economic upheaval in the United States."

In the Los Angeles Times, October, 1950, speaking of the Koreans and speaking rather prematurely, I think we will agree now, we find this statement: "The United States has won another war... Despite the fiction of carrying out a United Nations police action [and of course that's completely inaccurate], we have a clearer claim to write out our own ticket than in 1918, or even in 1945. For we have not only become the mightiest of military nations, we also stand as the fountainhead of the world's diplomatic leadership, of the world's wealth... Who else dominates the seven seas and the air above them?... We truthfully bestride the world like a colossus. Well, somebody's got to be boss. What are we waiting for?"

Now, of course, a United States Senator will not speak with such bluntness, but the worlds of Senator Sparkman of Alabama before the United Nations Economic Committee on October 25, 1950, echo the same sentiments. Quoting from Senator Sparkman:

"I wonder how many people appreciate the significance of the war in Korea on the international investment picture. It is possible that the long-range effect of the Korean War will be beneficial to the international flow of private capital."

This country has embarked upon a career of Marshall Plan aid, Atlantic Pacts, and the arming of the free nations. After five years of a spending spree, which again has been unparalleled in the history of the world, Scott Nearing says that these are the two results:

1. "In various countries grabbers and exploiters threatened by popular movements have turned to the Truman administration for help. Many of them have got the money and arms they asked for. Each Washington grant of support to a minority of grabbers and exploiters has alienated the exploited majority. Are the Marshall Plan countries ready to stand by the U.S.A. in an atomic war against the U.S.S.R.? Britain, improbably. France and Italy, emphatically not.

2. "Since 1945, the United States has taken part in half a dozen undeclared wars in which imperialist landlords and capitalists were financed, armed, organized and directed by U.S. interests and personnel. This happened in Indonesia, Greece and China. Four other such wars are still in progress – in the Philippines, South Korea and Formosa. In each of these four wars, United States money, arms, equipment, and military advisers are helping to suppress popular movements. Such a policy could not win the support of the people, but only their masters and exploiters. Most notable among the examples of the outcomes which ultimately follows such a policy was the 1949 debacle for the Nationalists in China.

3. "In 1950, United States influence, based on the assumption that this country is a progressive force, has been all but dissipated. Particularly among the colonial people, the United States today is looked upon as imperialist and reactionary.

4. "Even though present United States policy may not guarantee peace, its advocates insist that it will surely bring victory – (a) victory by imperialists in an age which has repudiated imperialism; (b) victory by exploiters in an age which has repudiated exploitation; (c) victory by proponents of competition in an age which can survive only the basis of cooperation; (d) victory by an isolated,  even though industrialized, nation based upon military operations across two oceans and directed against the Eurasian heartland of the planet....

"... The Truman administration is making war on the emerging social order. Any such program is foredoomed to defeat."

That's the international picture. What is the domestic picture? For you cannot understand the international picture unless you see it as the reverse side of the coin of the domestic picture. If we look for persons who profit from the present war scares and hysteria as well as those that pay for the way, the answer becomes rather obvious. 

Corporation profits in 1939 were 6 1/2 billion dollars. Corporation profits in 1950 were 50 billion dollars. The working capital of United States corporations has increased 185 per cent since World War II began. From 1945 to 1949, in a space of four years, the corporations had piled up 135 billions in profits before taxes, and 78 billions after taxes. The farm income is down 2 billion dollars from last year. By a strange coincidence, Truman's defense war budget for 1950 was 50 billion dollars, which is exactly the estimated profits of corporations for the same year.

Now, where do these profit increases come from? First, they come from increased worker productivity. Worker productivity is 32 per cent greater than in 1939 and 65 per cent greater than in 1929. Secondly, it comes from a rise in prices. Profit after taxes rose 27 per cent in the first half of 1950 over the similar period in 1949, which was the highest in the history of our country. Although profits rose 27 per cent, sales rose only 8 per cent. In steel, the profit increase was 19 per cent over the corresponding period last year, and the sale rose only 3 per cent. I hope this gives a lie to the statement that increased profits are due to increased sales.

Here is a nice juicy item, and I will be through with quoting statistics for awhile, I hope. Today's report of the Standard Oil Company was really something. The company broke all records and with gross revenue of $3,322,000,000.00, it turned in a new profit of 365 million dollars which was obviously commented on as meaning that the Standard Oil Company had a profit of a million dollars a day throughout the year. Possibly prices could be lowered without hiring profits very much, in view of the big gross revenue. Possibly the directors may be thinking some time of splitting the stock.. for there would be an advantage... if profits per share do not look so large.

I shall not bore you with what is going on too much; this is an economic age, and I shall give you just a few more figures: Over the third quarter, profits after taxes (I shall give you just a few here) from 1949 to 1950 in food and baking goods have gone up 31 per cent; in iron and steel, 68 percent; in chemicals, 83 percent; in paper and paper pulp, 116 per cent; in textiles, 205 per cent; in mining and minerals, 563 per cent over last year. [Footnote cites "Wall Street Journal, November 8, 1950.]

What happened? The 1939 dollar is now only worth 59 cents in terms of purchasing power. The retail prices of consumers goods is 70 per cent higher than 1939.

Who profits by this? General Foods is owned by Morgan-Rockefeller interests, Standard Brands by Morgan, Continental Can by Morgan-Goldman-Sachs, American Can by Morgan, National Dairy by Morgan, National Biscuit Company by Morgan, Swift and Company by Kuhn, Loeb, Morgan, ad infinitum.

Each of these large financial empires has its representatives in key policy-making positions in the United States government. At the same time that these financial giants are systematically looting the country in the name of patriotism, the government is clamoring for controls and wage freezes, for the passage of an income tax which places the highest increases on the lowest incomes, and refuses to hold down rents and prices. Dewey says we must become like Spartans, give up conveniences. And Truman tells us we must tighten our belts, and, to give us a good example, according to Drew Pearson, within the last month he went on a diet and lost eleven pounds.

I would like to name a few of the men who control the political and economic destiny of this country. Number one is Mr. Charles E. Wilson, to whom Truman has given all of his powers granted under the emergency act. Who is Mr. Wilson. He is president of General Electric, one of the greatest monopolistic anti-labor corporations in the country.

General Lucius Clay, chairman of the board of Continental Can Company and former military governor of United States Occupied Germany, a many who was most instrumental in scrapping the decartelization programs for Germany.

William H. Harrison, president of International Telephone and Telegraph, who is now administrator of the National Production Authority. 

John D. Small, president of Maxson Food Systems, Inc., vice-president of Emerson Radios, now heads the Munitions Board. 

Winthrop W. Aldrich, brother-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., board chairman of Rockefeller's Chase National Bank, chairman of the National Advisory Committee on International Finance, which counsels the Secretary of the Treasury. He is now at the head of the President's Committee on International Trade with dominant influence on Mr. Truman's Point Four Program.

Paul Henry Nitze, vice-president of Dillon-Read, investment banks, head of the State Department Policy Planning Board since December, 1949.

General William Draper, vice-president of Dillon-Read, investment bankers. Dillion-Read [sic Dillon-Read] was closely associated with the German cartels. General Draper was chief economic officer in Germany from 1945 to 1947. He was the Under-Secretary of the Army from 1947 to 1949. [A footnote cites "James Stewart Martin, All Honorable Men, pp. 190ff."]

Dillon-Read is really something. Along with Brown Brothers and Harriman, they placed more than 86 per cent of the two billion dollars which the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis borrowed from the United States investors before the last war.

I shall not bore you any more with the listing of the connections between big business and the policy making positions in the government of the United States. But the Matthews, the Symingtons, the Perkins, the Johnsons, the Webbs – all of these are representatives of ig, monopolistic industries in the financial houses of American.

It was Woodrow Wilson who told us that if you wanted to understand modern wars, you would have to look at them in terms of their economic origin. In Taft's last speech before the Senate, he urges us to drop all pretense of idealism in our international affairs, and I would like to quote him. Mr. Taft says, "Its purpose [he means American foreign policy] is not to reform the entire world or to spread sweetness and light and economic prosperity to people who have lived and worked our their own salvation for centuries."

The war program is possibly only if American people are convinced that we are threatened from outside by an invasion by the Soviet Union and, more recently, we have added China. President Truman's message on the State of the Union said, "Our homes, our nation, all the things we believe in, are in grave danger." And although he explicitly names the Soviet Union as the aggressor in this conflict of interests, no Soviet armed forced have appeared anywhere on the scene.

The President and the Secretary of State have repeatedly given voice to the claim that the Soviet Union recognizes only force and, by implication, that the United States only recognizes only mercy, righteousness and justice. The President says that his policies will bring peace, security and prosperity to the world and freedom at the same time. He implements his peace policy by forcing a reluctant Europe to rearm, lay down plans for the re-militarization of Germany and Japan, calls for the draft of eighteen-year-old boys, and through the passage of the McCarran law, transforms the United States into a police state.

How real is the threat to our homes and to our way of life by the Soviet Union? Let me repeat the remark of a few minutes ago. The Soviet Union has not had a single soldier engaged in war since the cessation of hostilities. This is the only major power in the world of which this may be said.

Ehrenburg, speaking at the Warsaw Peace Conference[,] said, [sic omit comma] "Never has a single political leader, a single deputy, a single journalist or teacher in the Soviet Union called for war against the United States or any other power."

I would like to give you one more quotation from Senator Taft's recent speech, as reported in the Minneapolis Morning Tribute, January 6, of this year: "I do not myself see any conclusive evidence that (the Russians) expect to start a war with the United States. I see no reason for a general panic bn [sic "based"] the assumption that they will do so."

Mr. Dulles, along with Mr. Acheson, and perhaps even more than Mr. Acheson, is a director of a foreign policy of the United States. I would like to give you one or two quotations of Mr. Dulles. At the Federal Council of Churches Conferences on March 9, 1949, Mr. Dulles says, "I do not know any responsible official, military or civilian, in this or any other government, who believes that the Soviet Union now plans conquest by open military aggression."

In an off-the-record speech before the Overseas Writers' Association, January 10th of last year (this was at the time of the Berlin air lift, at the same time when the Senate of the United States was being asked to ratify the Atlantic Pact) , Mr. Dulles said, "There could be a settlement of the Berlin situation at any time on the basis of Soviet currency for Berlin and our right to bring in food, raw materials, and fuel to the Western sectors. The present situation is, however, to United States advantage for propaganda purposes. We are getting credit for keeping the people in Berlin from starving; the Russians are getting the blame for their privation. If we settle Berlin, then we have to deal with Germany as a whole. We will have to deal immediately with a Russian proposal for a withdrawal of all occupation troops and a return of Germany to Germans. Frankly, I do not know what we would say to that."

Let us go back to our fundamental thesis enunciated in the beginning. War is a telescoping and focusing of a conflict of interests. We have been told that interests must necessarily conflict, that man is by nature selfish in looking after his own interests. Suppose we grant this. Can we use the principle of interest as the basis for human organization? We have been following the principle of interest for over 200 years. The mess we are in seems to me to be an adequate answer to this question.

The task of the human race at the present time is to see that interest does not become a principle upon which we organize human society. Our task is to find another, more suitable, principle of human organization before all of us are blown to oblivion.

I can only give you the outline, very briefly, of a new principle of human organization. I call it a new principle, but it is as old as the human race. It has been the principle upon which we have organized our education, our religion, our science, and the family. That is, that goods, things and property[,] shall be used only as instruments in the service of humanity. The family has always been organized on socialistic lines; the same is true of science; the same is true of the president organization of industry as distinguished from business.

In the world today 700 million people have organized their lives according to socialist principles. Beginning at zero in 1917, socialist has brought a third of the human race under that form of social organization. I would like to recall to you that the population of the United States is only roughly 6 per cent fo the world's population.

Both capitalists and socialists agree that the conflict of interests is a thing to be deplored, for it leads to competition and competition is destructive. In the very period when we have been giving the most of our lip service to the doctrine of "free enterprise" and "competition", we have seen the growth of our largest corporations and monopolies. 

For the problem of the conflict of interests between the capitalists and socialist have different solutions. The capitalists say that the social means of production must remain in private hands, roughly, in the United States, in the hands of some 8 per cent of the population. The socialists say that the social means of production must be under social control and directed by the public authorities.

Let us note one thing: that in times of crises, such as depression and war, capitalism must repudiate its own principles. In the first place, it must go in for planning on a national scale and wage-fixing, all of which are contrary to the basic tenets of capitalism. Secondly, it says that its system is predicated on the premise tha 4th public good is enchanted when each unit is at warfare with the other; when each is in competition with the other. It says that the strength of the system depends on each getting as much as he can for himself. But in times of war, the individual is asked to surrender this privilege and innate right on which the strength of the system itself depends, to sacrifice himself for the national interest. I hope I am making ti clear as I go along with the fundamental issues that face mankind today are concerned with the problem of property and they are all reducible to the question of property. There are few indications at the present time in the Western World that we recognize this fact. All the organizations and the political parties which are strong enough to do anything about the problem of property seem oblivious to the fact that it is a problem. Labor in the United States accepts the fundamental tenets of the private property system, so that there is very little shop in that direction. The teaching profession itself stands indicted also. Teachers have become petty business men and accepted the principle of interest. There is perhaps no faculty in the United States that would go to bat on an issue involving the dignity and integrity of the profession. Everywhere a faculty member is a petty business man looking out after his own interest and security with a consequence that the educational function has largely disappeared, lost in the morass of writing articles, book reviews and textbooks and buying groceries. The faculty members do not seem to know enough to see that the integrity of the human race is involved as well as the institutions of culture.

The British and the American people will hold on to the private property system until they are forced to let go. But if it is necessary to fight another war over the system of private property, not only will the capitalist system go but civilization and culture will go down too. But since civilization and culture will go if capitalism survives, the alternatives aren't too happy in any case.

In Britain and in the United States, the business system is winning; socialism is triumphing everywhere else. Any move which threatens the right of legitimate business to profit will be opposed by the gun and the bomb.

I should like to state one elementary political axiom: Property always has and always will rule the state. From this axiom certain propositions may be deduced:

1. To the degree that interest can be made objective, it will assume the form of property.

2. Political freedom without economic freedom is a myth, since the only way in which the will can assert itself is through property objects. Political democracy which does not embrace economic democracy is empty.

3. The will of the people as expressed in political bodies can find expression only when property is publicly owned.

The people want peace and security, a life of abundance and decency. The monopoly capitalists who run and control the American government want scarcity and profits, a "Cold War" if possibly and a "hot war" if necessary. From a world-wide point of view, the system of capitalism has tottered so much that it would fall completely if it were not supported by the United States. There is no logical, organize or necessary connection between capitalism and democracy. In fact, capitalism reached its highest stage of development in fascist Germany. 

Where there is a sharp, clear-cut conflict between civil rights guaranteed by democracy and the demands of profit made by capitalism, the civil rights will be suppressed. I would like to repeat Judge Douglas' statement: "War is the only device that the government can design to given maximal production and full employment." [A footnote reads "Quoted in Fred Stover's 'Atomic Blessing or Atomic Blasting'."] It is clear that for the continuation for capitalism as an economic system we are paying for it not only in terms of the destruction of our way of life, but also the destruction of our material goods and our conveniences. For we cannot build hospitals and homes, we cannot provide medical care and pay adequate salaries to our teachers, we cannot eat adequately. We have to pay for the continuation of capitalism in terms of our very lives.

Now, the ruling classes in every epoch of the world's history have identified the fate of the family, religion, government and civilization itself with the continuation of their rulership. We must, therefore, look with very hypercritical eyes at the present rulers of American when they announce their pious platitudes. I challenge their claims that their way is the American way. Rather do I identify the American was with abundance, peace, and prosperity. I do not identify it with witch-hunt and oppression, the denial of opportunity, monopoly capitalism, and the continuation of colonialism and war. 

Verify, verify, I say unto you, that this is the hour of decision. A resurgence, a reawakening is taking place all over the world. A new day is aborning. For those o you with the desire to participate, I say unto you: "Be ye not afraid, for you are many."

When this speech was given, Wiggins had been teaching at the University of Minnesota for five years, and university officials had been receiving complaints about his political activities for the past two years. Administrators initially defended Wiggins on free speech grounds, but they had begun to reverse their stance by the time of the speech. 

An administrator's report on Wiggins's speech lends some insight into the administration's views at this time. A staffer in the department of university relations (William T. Harris) attended the talk and then wrote a report for the vice president of academic administration (Malcolm M. Willey). The staffer focused on Wiggins's political beliefs: "Dr. Wiggins may or may not be a member of the communist party, but he certainly is an apologist for Soviet Russian and a devoted apostle of 'socialism'. He made this very clear in his talk and in his answers to questions that were put to him."

On the content of Wiggin's speech, the staffer wrote that Wiggins was "no orator" but his presentation was "fairly effective." The talk, he wrote, was organized by first introducing a "plausible point," documenting the point in detail using reputable citations, and then "[sliding] in a wedge of communist dogma which he implies is related the point just made but for which he offers no substantiation whatsoever." The staffer criticized Wiggins for his "blind devotion to the soviet system." According to the staffer, the talk was received "politely" but with little sympathy or enthusiasm. 

By then end of the year, Wiggins was informed that his contact at the University of Minnesota would not be renewed. Initially no justification was offered, but when pressed on the issue, the administration claimed that Wiggins had not be re-appointed because his scholarship was lacking. Wiggins' speech was used to support this assessment. The negative evaluation of Wiggins' scholarship was made by the dean, and the dean claimed to have analyzed the text of the speech in detail and concluded that it demonstrated a serious lack of the qualities of good scholarship.

Wiggins tried to challenge his dismissal from the university, and he received significant support from students and faculty. They were successful in bringing the matter to the public's attention, but they were unsuccessful in having Wiggins reinstated. He left the university during the summer of 1952 and moved to South Carolina to teach at Allen University.