being choked to death by the half-witted relatives and touts of the financiers who censure them if they don’t publish what the financier wants them to.
 Your college professors have to teach you a lot of lies or they lose their jobs. They’ve got to say it’s all right to collect interest from the people or they will be put out by those parasites who collect it and use part of it as donations to the colleges.
 Just recently a big financier donated five million dollars to a university on condition that his man was put in as head of the physics department although I'll swear that the fellow knows nothing about fundamental physics. But the people must have the financier’s heroes to rave over whether they know anything or not.
 The financiers control all political parties; they nominate their own men and then educate you in their newspapers and magazines to vote for them and holler for them as if they were your heroes. I know a fellow they have been grooming for ten years as your hero and pretty soon they will put him up for you to vote for and you will rave over him like wild maniacs. They have touted him so much during the past ten years in their publications that every time he blows his nose you read about it.
 In 1919 the financiers told me who was going to be made president in 1920. In fact, they had his picture taken standing next to me and said that I ought to feel proud to have him stand next to me.
 They said, “He’s going to be the next president.”
 What they told me was true. The next year they put him in as president of the United States. Few people had ever heard of him before. As the convention started they talked about everybody else but him and I began to think they did not tell me the truth until the financiers got too hot from waiting and then one of them said, “I am tired of sweating; bring in the dark horse.”
 So they trotted in the dark horse, and it was the same fellow who stood next to me in the picture a year previously. Who nominated him? The financier. Who yelled for him? The people.
 That is how you get your heroes. You get them out of newspapers that are controlled by financiers. They will never boost a man who fights for the people. They make your heroes for you. They train you. They get you at home and pour into your skull over the radio, poisonous mental concoctions until you feel like a drunken man and finally you get upon your hind legs and after staggering about a bit both physically and mentally you mutter through your own vocal chords, “Yes, he is my hero — he is my hero forever.”
 When the Direct Credits Society wins this contest for the people, we are going to call every financier an alien and we are going to send him out of the country. Any man who will steal a poor widow’s home from her and throw her and her children out after her husband has worked a lifetime to earn it for her is the meanest sort of a creature and he should not be called an American.