Shall it be Again ?


by

John Kenneth Turner




New York B.W. Heubsch, Inc.
MCMXXII


Copyright, 1922, by B.W. Heubsch, Inc.
Printed in U.S.A.
D619 .T9

So long as a handful of men in Wall Street control the credit and industrial processes of the country, they will continue to control the press, the government, and, by deception, the people.  They will not only compel the public to work for them in peace, but to fight for them in war.

America is a financial oligarchy, in which the President is the willing, though pretendedly reluctant, servant of the financial powers.


John K. Turner and Ethel E. Duffy John Kenneth Turner was born in Portland, Oregon, on April 5, 1879, of old American stock.  His maternal grandfather, a Methodist minister, had led a wagon train of pioneers across the continent from Kentucky to Oregon in 1849.  Turner’s father was a printer on the Portland Oregonian, and later had his own printing shop in Stockton, California.  There Turner passed his youth and learned the printer’s trade.  At sixteen he became interested in socialism and at seventeen he was publishing his own newspaper, a muckraking weekly called the Stockton Saturday Night, which was devoted to exposing corrupt politicians and businessmen.  He drifted into school-teaching and eventually into his proper field, journalism.  While a special student at the University of California, he met his future wife, Ethel E. Duffy, a senior at the university.  They were married in 1905 and made their home in San Francisco until driven out by the earthquake of 1906.  For a while they lived in Portland but soon moved to Los Angeles, California, where Turner obtained a position as a reporter on the Los Angeles Express.

He wrote much for the Socialist New York Call, the Appeal to Reason, and various other periodicals.  In the spring of 1915 he returned to Mexico to report on the United States occupation of Veracruz, a move which he bitterly condemned.  On this trip he had an exclusive interview with Venustiano Carranza.  Shortly thereafter he published two books on Mexico : Quién es Pancho Villa ? and La intervención en México y sus nefandos factores.  The following year he made two more trips to Mexico and wrote articles opposing the Pershing Punitive Expedition.

In April 1917, as a guest of Senator Robert M. LaFollette, Turner heard President Wilson deliver his war message to Congress.  From this time on he opposed United States participation in the war.  His views on Wilson were expressed in his highly critical book Shall It Be Again ?

Following the war, when there was still danger of United States intervention in Mexico, the Rand School of Social Science published Turner’s Hands Off Mexico.  He was greatly interested in agrarian reform and in 1921 went to Cuernavaca where he interviewed Genevevo de la O, a noted zapatista general.

He continued to make his home in Carmel but the reaction of the 1920s discouraged him profoundly and he did little writing.  His last book came after a lapse of many years in 1941, when he published his Challenge to Karl Marx.  He died in 1948.