We are republishing W.E.B. Du Bois’s speech at the American People’s Congress and Exposition for Peace, held in Chicago in June 1951. Between 5,000 and 7,000 people attended the Congress, traveling from all parts of the United States at a time when a ceasefire had just been announced in the Korean War. Among the featured speakers were Paul Robeson (see Robeson’s speech here) and W.E.B. Du Bois. On May 25, 2023, the people of Chicago will honor the legacy of Paul Robeson and his tireless fight for peace and justice with an event organized by the Saturday Free School for Philosophy & Black Liberation at the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center.
Let us tonight speak frankly as men and women who face the greatest crisis of modern culture and stand before the judgment of our children and at the bar of impartial history. We are here to declare that peace on earth is the only way to the solution of the pressing problems of our world.
These problems are the organization of work, democratic government and human rights.
Viewing our plight as a whole, it is clear that the fundamental problem which underlies all others is that of organized industry. There are many of us who would prefer not to discuss American Business, feeling that all such criticism is based on envy of wealth and success.
Our criticism, however, does not stem from jealousy of the rich but from sympathy for the poor; from the firm belief that poverty, disease and ignorance are not inevitable but preventable, and that the object of industry is this prevention and cure.
On the other hand we are convinced that Big Business in the United States is forcing this nation into war, transforming our administration into a military dictatorship, paralyzing all democratic controls and depriving us of knowledge we need.
The United States is ruled today by great industrial corporations controlling vast aggregations of capital and wealth. The acts and aims of this unprecedented integration of power, employing some of the best brain and ability of the land, are not and never have been under democratic control. Its dictatorship has varied from absolute monarchy to oligarchy, limited by organized labor and by often ineffective public opinion, trying repeatedly and desperately to express itself through free elections.
Today this industrial oligarchy controls our government. The officials dominate our foreign relations and our internal affairs. Since the end of the Second World War, the most powerful offices of the nation have been held largely by officials, or former officials of the 100 great corporations whose total profit in the last decade was 145 thousand million dollars.
These corporations, with 70% of government contracts, are pushing shops and small businesses to the wall, stifling competition, discouraging free enterprise and individual initiative, so completely that often these very phrases are mockery. This is the reason that in the three years since World War II, American Business, helped by the Marshall Plan, has invested 3 billions of capital abroad.
Today we dominate the economy of the Union of South Africa — the worst modern Slave State; we hold increasing domination in East, West and Central Africa; in the economy of most of Latin America; of West Germany, Japan and much of the Near East. America has become the greatest power on earth for restoring colonial imperialism.
Back of this concentrated industrial control of our government are ranged four enemies of democracy: militarism; the loss of civil rights; secret police; and a huge effort at propaganda which denies knowledge of the truth to the average citizen.
Throughout the land, increasing unrest and opposition to this program of war, has been met by an unprecedented denial of the rights of American citizens as embodied in the Bill of Rights: free speech, the right of public assembly, the right of association, the right to work, have been curtailed slowly by judicial edict, federal and state law and city ordinance, helped by police action. Our present Supreme Court condones decisions which it admits transgress the clear words of the Constitution. Public protest against the course of government even in elections has been made difficult and dangerous, as the campaign of 1948 showed.
Evidence to supply excuse for such denial of human rights and democratic action, is supplied by the largest body of secret police the modern world has known and whose annual cost in the last decade has risen from 2 million to 53 million dollars.
Finally, and this is of greatest importance for the Peace Movement: truth and sources of knowledge are being systematically kept from the American People by organized industry, through its control of news gathering and news distributing agencies.
There are on this platform tonight, five persons who stand indicted by the Federal Department of Justice as agents of a foreign principal because through the Peace Information Center they distributed news of peace movements through the world, which the press ignored, including distribution of the Stockholm Appeal against the atomic bomb. They are:
Elizabeth Moos, a teacher
Kyle Elkin, a business man
Sylvia Soloff, a clerk and stenographer
Abbot Simon, a veteran and organizer of this Congress
and Myself
The basic hope of democracy is the power of the people eventually to decide great issues of state by fair elections. But the effective use of this power depends on the knowledge of conditions which this electorate possesses. If they cannot know the truth; if they cannot ascertain the real facts, then the whole meaning and efficiency of the democratic process fall to the ground.
Today it is clear to all who know the facts that American industry has launched in this country, the greatest effort at propaganda the world has ever witnessed. In comparison, Hitler and Mussolini fade to insignificance. Our daily press with few exceptions is controlled in presentation of fact and expression of opinion by the organized industrial interests of the United States. These interests want war. They want war because only by war can China, Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East be kept in their control, as the source of the greatest profit for industrial enterprise.
But even an industrial dictatorship could not admit profit as the sole end of work, and increase of profit as the cause of world war. So in the United States we are told over radio, in cinema, on the platform and in newspaper, magazine and book, that our way of life is in grave and imminent danger. That no matter if democracy dies and human rights disappear; no matter how the cost of living soars, and taxes increase; no matter how housing lags, and schools disintegrate; no matter how much we need medical care and social security; we are said to be threatened by an enemy so great and ruthless that we must drop all and throw our total energy into a war effort which surpasses anything the world has ever attempted.
This is a terrible prospect. If it be true that the Soviet Union, the Chinese Republic; the new Poland and Czechoslovakia and the Balkan States; together with, in a lesser degree, the socialists of Britain, Scandinavia, Italy and France, are threatening the very existence of the United States, even then war is not inevitable.
Conference and understanding; patience and not threat, are ways to peace, and peace alone can save civilization.
But is it true that these nations and their economics threaten us? What are the real facts? It is here that the methods of our present industrial dictatorship show its hand most clearly. It refuses to permit a real and honest appraisal of the world situation. It overwhelms us by a continuous barrage of propaganda on only one side, from only one point of view; and with but one object: that the mass of honest citizens unconsciously assume that imminent attack on this nation calls for hiding our school children under desks, and blaring false alarms.
Just as in the dark ages, we are letting ourselves be stampeded by witch-words. In that day, a veiled and awesome figure could rear itself in the shadows and by yelling “Abracadabra,” turn strong men into gibbering idiots. Today by yelling “Communist,” we can shut the mouths of nearly all who want peace, not war; of scientists and artists who want freedom to search for truth and beauty; of anxious mothers who want healthy sons and not cripples nor corpses; of honest fathers who want jobs and homes; of youth who want education; of citizens who want flood control, social medicine, ownership of public utilities; of Negroes who want to be free, and of Jews who want escape from centuries of calumny.
Men have a perfect right to disagree with communism, with its objects and methods; men may honestly believe that the United States has a better method of industrial organization than the Soviet Union; but men have no right to assert in the face of overwhelming testimony that no honesty and sincerity of effort; no hard work and sacrifice; no intelligent leadership, has occurred in the Soviet Union; and that disagreement with it must involve painting 200 million people as inhuman devils, and assuming that we are God’s own angels. In that direction lies unending hate and war; while civilization needs sympathy, understanding and world peace, with the right of men to differ and of nations to work as each will.
We cannot thrive on hatred of a nation or of a system of economy. We must be willing to face facts and examine them. Whether we like it or not, most of the people of the world today live under socialism or communism.
We cannot stop this by force and should not if we could. We can so improve our own system of economy that the world will see the advantage of it over all others if this prove true. The way to start this, is not by war nor slander. It is stupid to abolish democracy among ourselves in order to prove the blessings of democracy to others. We cannot call ourselves free, when we are enslaving the thought and action of our own citizens.
You know the reasons for your coming to this Congress; you know what the communities think which sent you. You also know, or soon will learn, that the truth about this meeting, what it wants and what it says, will not appear in most newspapers in this city, nor in the vast majority of newspapers in the nation. That on the contrary, on radio, in magazine and in the daily and weekly press, you will be caricatured as traitors and crackpots and not as Americans who want peace; and who believe that the vast majority of all other nations also want peace so desperately, that fear of aggression is practically groundless.
More than this, nearly all social questions and reforms which we must discuss and answer are matters which science has already discussed, experimented with and offered solutions, years before the Soviet Union was born. Yet when we dare touch these matters, we are denied freedom of speech. Subjects like wealth production and distribution; the role of the state in industry and the causes of poverty, are being thrown out of our school curricula and we are accused of radicalism if we dare mention these matters. Yet we must discuss them. We must ask why is it that this rich world is poor? Why is it, that with all the wealth nature furnishes free, and all the power lying at our fingertips, the men who work hardest get the lowest income? Why is it that the men who think most clearly and constructively have often the hardest time making a decent living, while thousands who lie and cheat and steal get power and wealth? Why is it those who own the land and crops; the machines and capital; the buildings and clothing and food, are not always those who work and save and sacrifice, but too often those who scheme and contrive and rig the market; or sit at ease spending what somebody else earned?
None will deny that many of the rich have earned their income or that some of the poor deserve their poverty, but all will admit that the distribution of wealth in this world has no earthly relation to reason nor right, and that the history of the accumulation of many great fortunes and stories of theft, cheating, gambling and murder.
There are fundamental questions as to work and wealth which all men must face; all schools teach and all honest pulpits discuss. Does a man’s income consist of what he makes? No. Not even in primitive times was this true. And today the simplest work of production from catching a fish to building Boulder Dam is a complicated social effort involving from 10 to 10,000 workers, planners, managers and thinkers, and using even so-called “unemployed” housewives and mothers; it lasts so long in time and is so intricate and complicated in techniques that no mathematical formula can possibly show exactly what each worker contributes to the final value. By what yardstick then is individual income measured? No man takes what he makes; he shares in what all men make; and the size of that share cannot in any civilized state be left to chance, monopoly or to those who happen at any time to control capital and power.
Only reason and justice can in the end determine income; to each according to his need and from each what he best can do, is the high ideal, enunciated before the Russian Revolution was thought of. This ideal the Soviet Union admits it has not yet attained, but declares its firm purpose to reach it. While the United States not only denies the justice of this aim but bluntly orders that it must not even be attempted.
We have got our economy upside down, our reward for work backside foremost and our brains so addled that if anyone dares question this insanity of our modern civilization we yell “subversive” and scare all fools out of their few wits.
If sincere dislike of this state of affairs is Communism, then by the living God, no force of arms, nor power of wealth, nor smartness of intellect will ever stop it. Denial of this right to think will manufacture communists faster than you can jail or kill them. Nothing will stop such communism but something better than communism. If our present policies are examples of free enterprise and individual initiative, they initiate crime and suffering as well as wealth; if this is the American way of life, God save America!
There is no way in the world for us to preserve the ideals of a democratic America, save by drastically curbing the present power of concentrated wealth; by assuming ownership of some natural resources, by administering many of our key industries and by socializing our services for public welfare. This need not mean the adoption of the communism of the Soviet Union; nor the socialism of Britain; nor even of the near-socialism of France, Italy or Scandinavia; but either in some way or to some degree, we socialize our economy, restore the New Deal and inaugurate the welfare state, or we descend into a military fascism which will kill all dreams of Democracy, or the abolition of poverty and ignorance; or of peace instead of war.
There must come vast social change in the United States; a change not violent, but by the will of the people certain and inexorable; carried out “with malice toward none but charity for all”; with meticulous justice to the rich and thrifty and complete sympathy for the poor, the sick and the ignorant; with freedom and democracy for America, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
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