AMERICAN SYNDICALISM
I
THE SOCIALIST INVASION
Until within some half dozen years, the sturdiest Americans were at most tepidly amused that any one should speak seriously of socialism. I have preserved an impatient letter from a very masterful financier, in which he asks a little querulously what good reason can be given for talking and writing "in this country" about a thing so unreal and freakish. He knew that some leading nations in Europe were at their wit's end to circumvent this propaganda. He thought the future very dark for some of those countries, especially for England. But what had all this to do with our own country? Did any one doubt the prosperity of the United States? Were not opportunities so ample that the whole world rushed in to seize them? He had examined the savings banks in New York City, "with their half million of depositors, mostly among poor people." Were there not four thousand millions in the Savings Banks of the Nation? He had at his finger tips the great army of stockholders in our railroads and leading corporations. Who could question that these beneficent agencies were distributing property to an ever widening proportion of our population? These were indeed "our democratic institutions." He believed that the coming census would prove that economic opportunity never was so great for the common man. It was upon observations like these that he based his protest. It was to him a criminal folly to keep these disturbing speculations alive.
I do not here put in question his views about the spread of property, but the main thought in this strong man's mind was that our American conditions so differed from those in Europe, that we were snug and secure from collectivist taints, if only this irresponsible prattle about socialism could be hushed up.
For quite thirty years, I have heard this view uttered with every variation of emphasis. Blind as it is, it had one excuse. From 1848, German socialists came here in such numbers as to give color to the statement that the mischief was merely an affair of disgruntled and whimpering foreigners. It pleased us to think of these unhappy strangers, fleeing from sombre tyrannies to a land so dazzling with freedom that the very excess of light caused them to blink and stumble. With good-natured tolerance, we humored and despised them. For some forty years they were the active center of such socialism as we knew.
All this has changed. No one can now examine with any care the socialist leadership as it appears in political and other activities, without seeing that we have to do with a movement that is in no proper sense "foreign." One of our most commanding figures in the railroad world says that the only practical issue now is to "stave socialism off as long as possible." He is convinced that the first chill of the shadow has fallen upon us. There is much reason to believe that socialism in its more revolutionary character is from now on to have its most fruitful field in the United States. The conditions and the mechanism through which it develops are in many ways more favorable here than in any country of Europe. Our prosperities, our higher wages, the mobility of the labor class, the immediate effect of our freer ways upon the incoming peasant all work to this end. Armies of these simple folk pass violently to the tense and unwonted excitements of city life or to industrial centers charged with hostilities between capital and labor. There is no saving transition between the habits and traditions which they bring and the new life to which they come. Of all that is deepest in these habits and traditions, our own ignorance is so elaborate and complete as to constitute a danger no less threatening. We have long sought comfort in thinking of our country as immune from really serious social agitations. German socialism used to be accounted for as "a reaction against the monarchy." English "landlord monopoly" was given as an explanation of the collectivist uprising in that country. But France is a republic and her land is largely in the hands of small farmers, yet socialists sit in her cabinet and a socialist has been Prime Minister. Denmark is a nation of small farmers who own most of the land and are not oppressed by their monarch, but there has developed there one of the most powerful socialist parties in Europe. In the North of Italy (as in the regions round about Mantua) there is a vigorous and growing socialism among agricultural workers quite as aggressive as any that the towns can show.
Thus socialism steadily wins its way underneath all these differences. Language, religion, forms of government set no barrier to its growth, because the causes of socialism underlie all these. The causes have their roots in the discovered excesses of a competitive system that fails to meet the minimum of equality which powerful sections in these communities now demand. In no part of the world have these excesses been more riotous than in the United States. Nowhere have they been brought more widely or more directly home to the masses than in this country. The magnitude of our area and of our economic resources have concealed and delayed the exposure. With the opening of the twentieth century the exposure has come.
After three decades of obscure and fitful struggle socialism becomes part and parcel of our political and social structure. It no longer stammers exclusively in a tongue half learned. It is at home in every American dialect. It no longer apologizes, it defies. Almost suddenly it wins a congressman, fifty mayors, and nearly a thousand elected officials.
As has happened in every known country where Socialism has grown strong, its first victories are followed by defeat. Pecuniary interests once alarmed, drop their differences and act together.
Many times this fusion has triumphed with boisterous self congratulation. For the most part the laughter has been premature. It soon turns out that the routed enemy has gathered again in larger numbers, more firmly entrenched and better equipped. In Milwaukee at the close of Mayor Seidel's first term, he and his socialist following are thrown out by the help of the Catholic Church and by the rapturous union of the two old parties which had fought each other for spoils since the Civil War. Socialism compels this fusion of frightened property interests into one grim phalanx bent upon its own safety. At the first threat of a common peril, the old banners—Republican or Democratic are forgotten. It is now property and privilege—the real forces underlying so much of our pretty political vaporing, that stand there like armored colleagues against the new enemy. Socialists are put to rout by this coalition though the socialist cause meantime has grown apace. The chuckling which echoed far and near over this "Milwaukee defeat" may later excite its own soberer reflections.
With wonted good nature, the public, unalarmed and unrebuked, accepts all these results. In accounting for the socialist capture of so large a city, the press insists that the revolt was not after all very "socialistic." It was mainly "only a protest," gathering to itself all manner of critical ill-humors that have little or nothing to do with the thing called socialism.
There is much truth in this, but also some dangerous reserves of error. In a visit to these "socially captured cities" I found not only in centers like Milwaukee and Butte, but in country towns, of which some of us never heard, that hundreds of the more thoughtful citizens had voted the socialist ticket. Many reasons were given me for this, but two of them have special interest. First, because the cynical corruption and decay of our party politics had reached a stage intolerable to disinterested and self-respecting men. On its economic side, the pinching cost of living had stung these discontents into sharper expression. In larger and in smaller towns, I asked teachers, professional and business men, small shopkeepers and clergymen, why they had cast off allegiance to the Republican or Democratic party. A teacher active in the socialist propaganda gave this answer, which stands fairly enough for many others. "I stuck to the Republican Party for years after I knew it was affiliated with interests which made anything like honest government impossible in this city. Twice I voted for Democrats who, after some moral sputtering, fell down abjectly under machine influence. Once more I tried my old party, until I saw it had just rotted out. I'm not going to be fooled by this socialism. I see it promises a good many things it never can deliver, but I shall stick to it. I shall give it what money and time I can afford, just as long as it shows its present spirit."
When I asked what he meant by this socialist "spirit," he said: "I mean its political disinterestedness. It probably uses a lot of big words it doesn't half understand, but it has none of the palaver of cant and humbug that characterized Republicans and Democrats alike when they addressed the working class. These Socialists really do act as unselfishly as they talk and no big interests are behind them." He then told me the story of unpaid drudgery which hundreds of hard working men and women gave on Sundays and the hours before and after their long working days. It was the tale I had heard or the thing I had seen in several other cities under socialist control. It is a story one may hear in every part of the United States.
In another city, barely escaping socialist majorities, a teacher old enough to remember the Civil War gave me the same record of experience. "I haven't had a political thrill, except of disgust, since those great days of my youth. Two bright boys in my Civics class began to bring me accounts of what local socialists were doing. I had read three or four socialist books of the better sort, but thought of them as stimulating and harmless Utopias. I then set to work on the local programs. I was surprised to find many of my old pupils and teachers consecrated to the movement, though many of them held positions which kept them silent. It has brought to me in my closing years the great emotions of 1860. I had come to believe that concentrating wealth had so fastened upon our political life as to lead us straight toward disaster. We may go there still, but this Socialism has restored my hope. It has made me believe there are moral resources in the community and intellectual capacities among common people which will save us, if we are sane enough to recognize them and work with them."
I have emphasized these final words, because they hold a lesson that we must learn if we are capable of learning anything. Later in this study the lesson will be taken up when further proofs of its significance can be given. It is very important at this point that the reader avoid the error of thinking these two illustrations are merely interesting exceptions. They are selected from a mass of testimony with the same significance, because they express the rebellious attitude with concreteness and lucidity. I found men and women teachers settled in their determinations to resign their positions in order to take active part in socialist work. In no case were these persons failures in their calling. An instructor of natural science in a high school said, "I am only waiting for an opening in the socialist ranks where I can be fairly certain of doing the kind of work that I think would count for the cause." He was prepared to take all the chances in earning a living. He found at every teachers' gathering more and more willing listeners and more readers of socialist literature.
Interfused as opinion and hope, these instances stand for a new faith and a new purpose held by two or three millions of our fellow citizens. If the ability and willingness to sacrifice oneself for an ideal are hopeful qualities, this rapidly growing body must be counted among our moral assets. If, in whole or in part, it is to be opposed, for that very reason it should be understood. Every attempt merely to outlaw it, to vilify or browbeat it, will prove the friendliest service its opponents can render to a cause they fear.[1] There is at the present moment in our midst no more dangerous obtuseness than that which constituted authority has been displaying from San Diego to Massachusetts towns. If it is the express object to multiply the agitators' power over labor, not twice or thrice but twenty times, it is easily done. Let an irritated citizenship itself play the anarchist, as in San Diego and in several Eastern communities; let it act in heat and with suspicious disregard for justice and at once a hundred new avenues of influence are opened to men like Ettor and Giovannitti. If they had gone to the electric chair, the incensed imagination of millions of workingmen and women would have crowned them martyrs. Solemn hours would have been set apart to do them honor and the place of their burial would have been a shrine. Even now, as they leave jail, audiences that no hall can hold will greet them rapturously in every industrial center of the United States. It matters little what they say; the sympathy that has been created in their favor supplies all deficiencies. Their lightest word has significance and carrying power that make the jail the shortest, quickest way to influence. A lawyer, himself doubting the justice of their jailing, tells me, "But severity might have worked best, as it did in hanging the Chicago anarchists in '87. There was little enough justice there, but the thing worked. You haven't heard of anarchists in that town since." Even if there were truth in this risky analogy, it is very fatal not to recognize the changes since 1887. Labor has many avenues of expression and influence now which it did not then possess. It has literary organs constantly read by at least four million of men and women. It has its first strategic hold upon our political life. It has a new and deepened sense of solidarity that strengthens month by month as it awakens to the nature of its task. It is an awakening immeasurably stimulated by critical and intensive studies that have become the best stock in trade for a dozen magazines and weeklies of the highest class. These disclosures of things sick and sickening among capitalistic disorders pour their steady current into every socialistic sheet. One of them has it, "We Socialists could discredit the present business and political system if we did nothing but re-edit and popularize what the big magazines are saying. They get a lot of better stuff than we can get."
The fateful note in the Lawrence strike was not in that distracted city. It was in the impression made upon almost every outside investigator. It was in the throb of fellow feeling, not for manager or for stockholder, but for strikers deprived of organization. In more than eighty articles in every variety of publication, from the Atlantic Monthly to the great dailies, this sympathy appeared. To my certain knowledge three persons with large possessions stood ready to help these strikers, if the case had gone too far against them.
I am not here defending this sympathy. I do not pass upon it as fair or even intelligent, I point to it solely as a fact: a fact very momentous because it has become an increasing part of labor's awakening and entry into politics.
All this has brought a new atmosphere with changed perspective, both in its lights and shadows. It is an atmosphere extremely favorable to the growth of socialism. The fear of the word is obviously passing. There is a new hospitality to open and fearless discussion of its proposals. A growing number of editors, legislators, scholars, economists, sympathize with the propaganda to the extent, that they welcome and encourage its discussion. As for the "working classes," in centers of industry, as well as in newer agricultural communities of the West, conditions are such that the socialist vote may at any moment record itself in such force as to disturb profoundly our present party politics. We have now to count upon this as something irreducible. We shall neither stop it nor lessen its pace. Our impending question is one of learning so to adjust ourselves to the new fact that some real part is left us in shaping and guiding these new democratic urgencies toward stability rather than toward confusion and disorder.
- ↑ The judicial part in the trial of Ettor, Giovannitti and Caruso which has just closed at Salem is an auspicious exception. If one could hope that the temper of the presiding judge in this instance would generally prevail throughout the country, the greater safety of every true social interest would be more secure.