Page:Bertram David Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, William Francis Dunne - Our Heritage from 1776 (1926).pdf/24



HE FOURTH OF JULY is the anniversary of the decision of the American colonists to secure by any and all means, at the price of war and death if need be, their freedom from the English monarchy and establish themselves as a nation.

The tradition of the United States of America in this respect is a revolutionary tradition. More than that, it is a revolutionary tradition of which the workers and farmers of America are the bearers because it was the oppressed, descendants of the English, Irish, Scotch and Dutch peasantry which had been beggared first by the breakdown of feudalism and on whose backs were laid the unbearable burdens of a rising capitalism, who made up the revolutionary armies, who fought, starved and died for American independence only to be thrown into debtors' prisons and have the felon's brand placed on them when the revolutionary war had ended.

The "founding fathers" were the early aristocrats who took to themselves the fruits of the revolutionary struggle and representatives of the landlord, trading and commercial groups who held and drove to labor from sunup to sundown black and white slaves—the nucleus of the modern American workingclass.

The farmers and workers got nothing from the war for independence. What progress they have made as a class since that time has been made in the face of the most determined resistance on the part of the exploiting class which seeks now to disguise and distort the history of the revolutionary struggle.

As in France, where the fall of the Bastile marked the rise of the third estate—the trading and commercial class to power—but was achieved by the bloody sacrifices which the young workingclass laid on the altar of freedom, so in America the revolutionary war, fought by workers and farmers, marks the opening of what appears as an endless lane of opportunity for the exploiters of the masses to consolidate and increase their wealth and power.

We are proud of the part our class played in the stern struggle for independence and we say that the truth about 1776, the truth