Page:Bertram David Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, William Francis Dunne - Our Heritage from 1776 (1926).pdf/14

 12 What it did not do, it is needless to recount, except by way of debunking the nonsense of the capitalist apologists who pretend that it did everything that any "sane" man can desire. It did not do what a bourgeois revolution can not be expected to do. It did not free the wage slaves. It did not even free the chattel slaves. It did not keep all its fine promises. It did not introduce even "complete" bourgeois democracy (there is no such thing as complete bourgeois democracy). It did not abolish classes. It did not introduce socialism. It was only the first American revolution.

Whose revolution is it? The master class of today rejects it. They shudder at its revolutionary methods and conceal them. They reject its revolutionary traditions. They violate the Bill of Rights, calumniate or falsify its most advanced leadership, distort and disfigure its men and its acts. They are ashamed of its methods and its traditions.

A socialist speaker in New York was arrested in 1918 for publicly reading the provisions of the Constitution which guarantee freedom of speech and press. A Communist speaker in Pittsburgh who tried to read the Declaration of Independence was pulled in. "I didn't write that," he protested to the policeman, "Thomas Jefferson wrote it."

"Well, I'll pull you in first," answered the cop, "and then I'll go back and get this here guy Thomas Jefferson."

The bourgeoisie is arresting the revolutionists of 1776 and rejecting its heritage!

Whose revolution is it? I maintain that it is our revolution. The working class of today is the inheritor of all past ages. It does not reject the past. It takes what is good from the past and upon it builds the future. We need not go abroad for all of our revolutionary traditions, Some of them at least we can find in a body of American tradition. We are the inheritors and defenders of the Bill of Rights today. The bourgeoisie does not need, does not desire freedom of press, freedom of speech, freedom of assemblage. We as a revolutionary class struggling for power become defenders of those freedoms. We are the inheritors and defenders of the right of revolution to change a government that has become