The daily Nome industrial worker. [volume] (Nome, Alaska) 19??-1918, 1913-08-19
When you listen to pOlitica

When you llSIeH W pOl1tlCdl
candidate Grating, and when he
comes to that eloquent period when
he winds up his oratorical master
piece with something about the
country, and the flag, and the peo-
pie, one begins to think, and be par
doned for the thinking, that there
is something holy and religious and
sacred and moral about politics, and
the stiffs yell their Threats sore
while they think that the man who
seeks their votes is just the right
kind of man with the right kind Of
sentiment to place in the position he
seeks. And the band has played
national airs between whites, and
the boosters have waved flags and
there is a general feeling Of heart
stirring emotion which is splendid
and a noble thing.
Comes now one Governor Foss of
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,
Foss was one of those who could
identify their politics with their re-
ligion and their patriotism, with
much and fervent eloquence. When
he appeared on the platform and the
band after whirling away for a
breathing while at the Star Spangled
Banner, tromboned out See the Con-
quering Hero Comes, he usually
wore a flag in the lapels of his
coat, and he rolled his eyes heaven
wards as he apostrophized Liberty
and the Flag and Love OF Country.
And they elected him because he
was a patriot who had sunk every
thing sordid in the love of his coun-
try and his state as a self-sacrifcing
patriot to whom the nation and the
state was as the apple Of his eye.
Comes now Governor Foss, we
say, but in an entirely different role.
He is now no longer the democratic
candidate seeking Office. He is a
business man who has business in
terests. He is an industrial chief
interested in industrial concerns
which will be affected by the tariff
revision. Foss employs women, in
the foundries wherein he is interest
ed, and they, semi-nude, by the
heated furnaces work for as many
hours as the law, not their health
or their strength, but as the law and
their poverty allow and compel. Foss
has been looking at things in a
different light as business man to
that which he pretended to see
through when seeking the votes of
the people of Massachusetts. In
deed, yes. He is no longer solicitious
for the glory of the flag, even on
paper, nor for the honor Of the ma
ton, even in speech, nor for the
sacredness of motherhood even in
theory nor the uplifting of humanity
at all, at all, in fact. He is now
profit-monger and always was profit
monger as we'll as Governor Foss,
and he is concerned with the fact
that the democratic principles that
have landed him in Office are about
to give his business solar plexus
blow. He has not been without loud
voiced protest in his own fashion
against the pauper labor of Europe,
and demanding that they be pro-
tected against it in the common
wealth wherein he presides, and yet
he is. the chief shareholder in some
of the commonwealth boundaries
wherein women, the sacred mother
hood of the nation, by the way, are
compelled to work before hot fun
aces in a state of semi-nudity and
with dishevelled and dust laden
hair, while the grimy sweat streams
down the almost unsexed persons of
his female employees, according to
official reports. He demanded pro-
lection for those conditions of labor,
and he got them, took advantage of
them to the full, and now here he is
when there seems a probability of
like conditions of labor confronting
him in the market, he growls and
declares that he is no longer a
democrat-he is again a republican.
Thus it is that now Governor Foss
with one sweep of his voice reveals
what actually this whole political
bag of tricks amounts to-what the
patriotism, what the love of coun-
try, the honor to the flag and all
the rest of the political frills that
ornate political speech in truth and
fact, amount to.
But Foss has done something
more. It is not sufficient that he has
declared that he Is now republic
can. Tnsa saws and saws It 40 that