“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who are hungry and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
When, in 1870, the steel exoskeleton of the Brooklyn Bridge began rising out of some of the Western Hemisphere’s most crowded and lethal tenements, there was a popular backlash. What sort of man, citizens asked, pisses away his paycheck in a saloon while his children go hungry? We had just fought a murderous Civil War in order to reaffirm our fraternity and indivisibility, had we not? Was there any shortage of war widows and orphans trapped in the teeming industrial slums potmarking this bloodstained land? Are the helpless to be left to their own means and, if so, upon whose word? If such be the case, how safe is any man, woman or child? Who among us can swear before God that he or she will never break a leg, or fall desperately ill? What, pray tell, distinguishes liberty from slavery, civilization from savagery? Is America now the Queen’s England? Shall we hang little boys for stealing apples?
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