A Message from President Brooke Rollins
Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN, Texas – Just over a century and a half ago, in September 1859, the members of the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society gathered in Milwaukee for their annual convention. Among the speakers present was a well-known but recently defeated politician from their own Midwestern region. Abraham Lincoln had just the year before lost the contest for U.S. Senate in Illinois, and was then in the political wilderness—seeking his way in the coming fights for America’s future, but not yet firmly on the path to the Presidency. Lincoln chose to address the assembled farmers, citizens, and worthies of Wisconsin about labor.
And what he said then about the value of work—of free labor—was nothing less than a description of the American Dream:
“[T]here is not, of necessity, any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life … The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor—the just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all, gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.”
This declaration of simple truth, affirming the dignity of labor for all—even “educated people must labor,” said Lincoln—was also a radical truth, for his time and ours. In 1859, of course, the question of free labor and its fruits were not merely academic: nearly the entire American South was organized around the primacy of slave labor, and it was an open question as to which system, liberty or slavery, was superior
In our own time we see the dignity of labor, with its promises and its necessary perils alike, under an assault the more insidious for its pretenses to accommodate the freedom of the working American—with just a few small impositions around the edges. Liberty in the “progressive” era is eroded by a thousand small cuts, culminating in a few big ones—ObamaCare looming largest in our near future—that inevitably sap the vitality from American life and endeavor. “The power of hope,” said Lincoln just two weeks before his Milwaukee address, “upon human exertion, and happiness, is wonderful.” Washington, D.C., has for generations now sought to alleviate the exertion—and thereby managed to extinguish the hope.
As you read this Labor Day edition of TPPN, please take a moment to reflect upon the pride and achievement of American labor—not as the “progressive” left conceives it, as a cartel of a fixed class, but as the endeavor of a whole people, and the purpose of our entire nation. “There is no permanent class of hired laborers amongst us,” declared Lincoln, “Twenty-five years ago, I was a hired laborer. The hired laborer of yesterday, labors on his own account today; and will hire others to labor for him tomorrow. Advancement—improvement in condition—is the order of things in a society of equals.”
That is the glory of American labor, American work, and American life. That is the American Dream. And if it proves its case best in Texas now, it is because the Dream flourishes only where liberty does—and it is our task in the Lone Star State to remind our country of that enduring truth. Thank you for your support of liberty and the American Dream.
