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1 he jury voted eight to four for acquittal

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4   The Triumph of American Labor

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THE LIBERATOR

Vol. 1, No. 9   November, 1918

The Trial of

By Max

AT a Russian Socialist convention held in Stockholm in 1907 it was estimated that the delegates-14o of them-had spent, collectively, one hundred and thirty-eight years, three months and fifteen days in prison. They had been in exile one hundred and forty-eight years, six months

and fifteen days. The length of time the convention whole had been active in Socialist propaganda was years.

" It follows," says Trotsky in a preface to one of his books, " that the time spent in prison and exile is about one-third of the time a Social-Democrat is active." Reading that preface on my way west to attend the trial of Eugene Debs, I was struck by Trotsky's unconscious assertion that the time spent in prison is part of the time that a Socialist is " active." It is often the time that his influence is most active. And though the government may succeed in accelerating the immediate war program by imprisoning Debs, they will also accelerate the effect of his life-long service to the social revolution.

Whatever else he may be, Debs is the spiritual chief and hero of American Socialism, and I find myself in a very real perplexity in trying to report his trial on a charge of obstructing the war program. I believe that the postal authorities will recognize the necessity I am under, as a Socialist editor, of giving this news to the readers of the LIBERATOR. And, of course, I cannot write the news with-out some special appreciation of his life and character and the elevation of his motives. Yet, on the other hand, I recognize the necessity that the postal authorities are under of keeping out of circulation anything designed to obstruct the war program of the government. Therefore I assure the reader in advance, not only that I shall not quote or refer to anything that Debs said about the war, but that I shall not in any indirect way imply any such quotation or reference, or any discussion of what he said. As a Socialist, bidding a kind of temporary hail and farewell to a companion who is dear to the hearts and minds of millions of Americans-whether pro-war or anti-I write the news of his trial for Socialists.

When I slipped into the court-room at Cleveland a pretty

Eugene Debs

Eastman

young man in a pressed suit and a bow tie was reading Debs' speech at Canton to the jury. He was manifestly embarrassed to find so much eloquence in his mouth. Debs was never younger, more spirited, more full of love and irony, than he was in that speech of June 16th.

" It appears," he was saying as I came in-and this bears no relation whatever to the grounds of his indictment-" It appears that the Socialists of Ohio are very much alive this year. The party has been killed recently, which no doubt accounts for its extraordinary activity. (Laughter.) There is nothing that helps the Socialist party so much as receiving an occasional death blow. (Laughter and cheers.) The oftener it is killed, the more boundless, the more active, the more energetic it becomes... .

"Are we opposed to Prussian militarism? (Laughter. Shouts from the crowd of `Yes, Yes.'). Why, we have been fighting it since the day the Socialist movement was born (applause) ; and we are going to continue to fight it, day and night, until it is wiped from the face of the earth. (Thunderous applause and cheers). Between us there is no truce-no compromise.

" In 1869 that grand old warrior of the Socialist revolution, the elder Liebknecht, was arrested and sentenced to prison for three months, because of his war, as a Socialist, on the Kaiser and on the Junkers that rule Germany. In the meantime the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Liebknecht and Bebel were the Socialist members in the Reichstag. They were the only two who had the courage to protest against taking Alsace-Lorraine from France and annexing it to Germany. And for this they were sent two years to a prison fortress charged with high treason; because, even in that early day, almost fifty years ago, these leaders, these forerunners of the international Socialist movement, were fighting the Kaiser and fighting the Junkers of Germany. (Great applause and cheers). They have continued to fight them from that day to this. (Applause). Multiplied thousands of them have languished in the jails of Germany because of their heroic warfare upon the ruling lass of that country. (Applause).

" Let us come down the line a little further. You re-

as a 942

6   THE LIBERATOR

member that at the close of Theodore Roosevelt's second term as President he went over to Africa (laughter) to make war on some of his ancestors. (Laughter-continued shouts, cheers, laughter and applause). You remember that, at the close of his expedition, he visited all of the capitals of Europe, and he was wined and dined, dignified and glorified by all of the Kaisers and Czars and Emperors of the old world. (Applause.) He visited Potsdam while the Kaiser was there; and, according to the accounts published in the American newspapers, he and the Kaiser were soon on the most familiar terms. (Laughter). They were hilariously intimate with each other, and slapped each other on the back. (Laughter). After Roosevelt had reviewed the Kaiser's troops, and, according to the same accounts, he became enthusiastic over the Kaiser's troops, and said: ' If I had that kind of an army I would conquer the world ! (Laughter). He knew the Kaiser then just as well as he knows him now. (Laughter). He knew that he was the Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin. And yet he permitted himself to be entertained by the Beast of Berlin (applause) ; had his feet under the mahagony of the Beast of Berlin; was cheek by jowl with the Beast of Berlin. (Applause). And, while Roosevelt was being entertained royally by the German Kaiser, that same Kaiser was putting the leaders of the Socialist party in jail for fighting the Kaiser and the Junkers of Germany. (Applause). Roosevelt was the guest of honor in the white house of the Kaiser, while the Socialists were in the jails of the Kaiser, for fighting the Kaiser. (Applause). Who was fighting for Democracy? Roosevelt? (Shouts of 'No!') Roosevelt, who was honored by the Kaiser, or the Socialists, who were in jail by the order of the Kaiser? (Applause)."

There was no doubt as to the correctness of the young man's report. He had been hired by the Socialist party to take down Debs' speech, but now he was concerned to make it evident that he was respectable and favored the prosecution. He would try to express indignation by looking up with compressed lips at the jury after what he thought must be a particularly traitorous passage in Debs' speech, but the passage would not turn out very traitorous, nor he very indignant. He wore little lobes of hair down in front of his ears, and perfume, I think, on his handkerchief, and the wealth of Debs' personality shone through him as he read, so that he became in the eyes of the jury a very small speck.

Another report of the speech had been taken by an agent of the Department of Justice, but he had been too warmly interested to write down more than about half of it. The two reports were printed in parallel columns, agreeing fairly well where they collided, and they constituted the main evidence of the prosecution. Two or three newspaper reporters -now clad in khaki in spite of what they had heard-were also introduced to corroborate the general impression that Debs had made a speech at Canton, and that he had made it 'to a crowd. Estimates of the crowd varied from 200 to 1,500. At least he had made it out loud, and from a band-stand not decorated with a flag, and just after a reading of the Declaration of Independence. These reporters were re-

spectful of Debs, and they were tlB Z'ery happy on the stand. One of them, recounting an interview, remembered that after answering some questions very emphatically Debs had courteously added : " Now you may be right about this, and I may be wrong. I don't claim to be infallible, but that is the way I see it."

Another courteous person that came into the court-room, with some expectant mystery as to why he came, was C. E. Ruthenberg, who made the sensational run for mayor of Cleveland at the last election. He came from an Ohio work-house, where he is serving a term in prison, and he was introduced by the prosecution for the sole function of identifying the St. Louis platform and proclamation of the Socialist party. His coming there from the prison cell was designed to impress the jury, I suppose, with an idea that all Socialists ought to be in jail; but I doubt if it had that effect. His quietness, his gracious demeanor, his thin, keen, agile face-he is like a smiling hawk-seemed to testify to the absurdity of sending any of them to jail.

One other stranger, a dark young man, a professional, although not very cute, detective was introduced by the prosecution. He recited three sentences that he had heard Debs utter at a conference of Socialist state secretaries in Chicago. After the recitation Seymour Stedman, the chief counsel for Debs, asked him to pull them out of his pocket and see if he had recited them right. He did, and he hadn't. But it didn't matter much.

Nothing matters much in these cases but the indictment. After they have dragged a man into court in the present high state of patriotic tension and announced to a jury that the government believes this man guilty of inciting a mutiny in the United States Army, of stirring up disloyalty in his countrymen, of obstructing the enlistment of soldiers, of encouraging resistance to the United States of America, and promoting the cause of the enemy-it is about all done but the verdict. If the man is in every respect a perfect crystal of conventional Americanism, and can prove it, he may get away with his liberty. But if he ever had an opinion that diverged the hair's breadth from those of his regular Republican or Democratic ancestors, all of whom fought in the Civil War, and the War of the Revolution, and the French and Indian War, his chances are small. You might think that this would make the government hesitate to sling these slanderous accusations around among thoughtful people.

In one point of view, of course, Debs' trial was but an incident in the general subordination of social impulses to military expediency. And yet this was not his first trial; the scene had been enacted before, and in times of inter-national peace. And I could not but feel that something else was symbolized here in the contrast between this man and his judges. There was symbolized the conflict of the main trends of two ages in the world's history-the age of industrial despotism and the political apparition of democracy, and the age in which industrial despotism is over-thrown and democracy exists.

The chamber of contemporary justice in Cleveland is of

7

Drawn by Art Young

"Are you a Socialist?" "Certainly."

"Show your indictment."

a   THE LIBERATOR

oak and marble, with windows two stories high and a ceiling of gold; the judge sits high up and his desk is as wide as a counter; and behind and above him the full width of the wall is filled with a splendorous painting. It is a painting of angels with beautiful bodies, and stern faces and swords of flame, guarding the tablets of stone upon which are in-scribed the ten commandments of Israel-guarding them against the approach, as it seemed to me, of a lawyer, a man on the model of Elihu Root, in a business suit and a black gown, trying to read something clever out of a book. . . . A kind of flamboyant solemnity of space in all that end of the room, and at the other end, a solid crowd of poor people, standing up, eager, their eyes shining like children's on every-thing that happens. . . .

I always want to like the judge when I go into a court-room. It is such an opportunity for human nature to be beautiful. Anyone to whom life is a sacred art must envy a judge his opportunities. But those to whom life is sacred-even their own lives-are not so frequently elevated into that position as they used to be. Judge Westenhaver has the broad jowl and tightly gripped mouth of the dominant, magisterial man of affairs. His lips are so well clamped down at the corners that they remain taut when he speaks, keeping his aspect as stern as though he were silent. And yet his words come rather courteous-softly, and with a precise lilt that trails off through long sentences into silence and grammatical uncertainty. I do not think he is quite,so magisterial as he looks. If one could break through a certain declivitous front that he has built out before his character one might discover the soul of a small-town lawyer, still privately nursing the dread that he may not prove equal to the dignity of his place. Thus, at least, I explain the hysterical violence with which he defends the externals of that dignity.

The prosecution, in opening their case with a little flavor of the Scriptures, had declared that Debs should be " judged by his own words, by his own words condemned," and Stedman at the conclusion of his opening accepted that challenge with passion. " Yes," he declared, " ye shall judge him by his own words, and not by his words only, but by his works-the works of his whole life!" A motion of applause followed---a few spontaneous hands forgetting. It was inevitable, and as a relief it was delightful. But the relief was short-lived. Rising to the stature of Caesar Augustus, His Honor extended a frightful, accusing arm, and shouted : "Arrest that man! " conveying the impression that the man was armed with a bomb and waiting five seconds while the fuse burned -" and that woman!   and arrest everybody else that you saw clapping their hands!"

It was a terrible moment, and everybody felt a little foolishly sick, the way you feel in school when some dreadful sinner is hauled up before the teacher. Especially this, be-cause one of the sinners was Rose Pastor Stokes, who has just the steady mischievous twinkle in her eyes that is characteristic of an absolutely unregenerate pupil. The teacher was livid. I don't know but the whole court-room would have been sentenced to go to jail, or stay in at recess, or some-

thing, if it hadn't been for the tact of one Irishman, Cunnea, of counsel for the defense, who stepped forward and began to remind His Honor of the very wide distribution of the frailties of human nature.

" Are you representing these defendants? " said His Honor with asperity.

" I never decline to represent anybody who needs me," said Cunnea. And I don't know why it is that the Irish are always permitted to say what nobody else can hint at without getting his head bit off, but he added that he didn't want to see the judge sit up there and " play God to his fellow men," and the judge accepted the rebuke and postponed the hearing until the next day, when he might be a little less " unduly vexed." The next day he fined a few of them a little, and admonished the rest of the roomful as to the well-known in-compatibility between human appreciation and the processes that prevail in a court of law.

There is a special interest in the personality of this judge, because he was compelled to listen to some remarks about himself which, if true, must have caused him some effort to resist their penetrating into his mind.

" Who appoints the Federal judges?" Debs was quoted as saying at Canton; " the people? In all of the history of the country the working class have never named a Federal judge. There are one hundred and twenty-one, and every solitary one of them holds his position, his tenure, through the influence and power of corporate capital. The corporations and trusts dictate their appointment. And when they go to the bench, they go, not to serve the people, but to serve the interests that placed them where they are."

Now that statement is not historically true of judge Westenhaver, and of others it is not historically true-and to him it must have seemed, I suppose, merely a wanton gibe. And yet it was anything but that-it was a careless way of stating something that is quite accurately true, I think, even of judge Westenhaver-namely, that he will in a broad way behave as a representative of corporate capital in a land in which corporate capital is the thing of supreme power and prestige.

Judge Westenhaver was a young lawyer in the farmer-town of Martinsburg, West Virginia. He was Newton Baker's partner there, and probably owes his appointment to the Secretary of War. He could not go to college, but he aspired to be educated, to be citified, to be " correct," to pass in any company as a " man of culture and attainment "-in short, to get away as far as possible from the small-town lawyer that he was. So he came to Cleveland, came-so it happened-as a member of the law firm that defended Tom Johnson in his fight for democracy in that city against the big corporate interests. For five or six years Westenhaver conducted this anti-trust litigation, and conducted it well. But it never satisfied his aspiration-which is only the normal human aspiration to sit high. He didn't like Tom Johnson's economic interpretation of the motives of prominent men, and he didn't like Tom Johnson's lawless democratism. His heart wasn't in the job with his head. His heart was still

November, 1918   9

trying to get away from that uncollege-bred Martinsburg lawyer, reading omnivorously the " best " literature, learning assiduously the " correct " thing, striving in the childlike way that men strive for contemporary distinction.

And with that striving still central in him-still uncertain and unsatisfied-Judge Westenhaver arrived at the Federal bench-and at the one more-than-contemporary distinction that will fall to him, the distinction of sitting at the trial of Eugene Debs. And while Debs expounded the economic interpretation both of him and of all the kind of prestige that he aspires to, while Debs gave the picture of contemporary life that is not intellectual, or cultivated, or " correct," but true, he sat there wagging his head a little with an amused, attentive, patronizing smile, sure of his superior position-the one thing he has always determined to make sure of. And that very smile, and that attitude, revealed the intimate truth of the blunt thing that Debs had said about him. He will behave-in general and for broad practical purposes-as a representative of corporate capital, not because of any direct servitude or corruption, but spontaneously and with unconscious alacrity, because the power and prestige of corporate capital occupies the height toward which he aspires. The power and prestige of capital determines the standards of " cultivation," and decides what is " correct " and citified, and even what is " intellectual " in these unhappy times.

As to the jury-though they were more numerous, their character and probable reaction to a prophet of proletarian revolt was more simple to predict. They were about seventy-two years old, worth fifty to sixty thousand dollars, retired from business, from pleasure, and from responsibility for all troubles arising outside of their own family. An investigator for the defense computed the average age of the entire venire of loo men; it was seventy years. Their average wealth was over $50,000. In the jury finally chosen every man was a retired farmer or a retired merchant, but one, who was a contractor still active. They were none of them native to leisure, however, but men whose faces were bitterly worn and wearied out of all sympathy with a struggle they had individually surmounted. Debs expressed their aspect better than I can.

" There is something pathetic," he said, in the little hotel room after his speech, " about dressed up faces-smug bodies. If they had been dressed in rags it would have been all right." And then with that instinctive gravitation toward something he can love, " What a contrast to turn toward the back of the court-room, and find a little group of beautiful Socialists, with stars for eyes-you can always tell them ! "

Debs is the sweetest strong man in the world. He is a poet, and even more gifted of poetry in private speech than in public oratory. Every instant and incident of life is keen and sacred to him. He handles his body-and his mind, too -all the time, as though it were an extremely delicate instrument. He is present with entire spirit and concentration in every minutest motion that he makes. His tongue dwells upon a " the," or an " and," with a kind of earnest affection for the humble, that throws the whole accent of his sentences

out of the conventional mould, and makes each one seem a special creation of the moment. He is tall and Iong-offinger, like a New Hampshire farmer, and yet just as vivid, intense and exuberant with amiability as the French-a kind of French Yankee, the finest picture of what we would have American. And the motions of his hands and body are more beautiful, and his spirit is more beautiful, than anything that I have seen in any man of my time.

The religion of Socialism is compounded of the passions both of fighting and of love. And Debs knows how to fight. He knows how to scourge with a vitriol tongue those characters with " face o' flint and bowels of brass," whose enormous passive greed obstructs and strangles the movement of humanity toward freedom. He knows how to fight. But that is not his genius. His genius is for love-the ancient, real love, the miracle love, that utterly identifies itself with the emotions and the needs and wishes of others. That is why it is a sacrament to meet him, to have that warm rapier-like attention concentrated on you for a moment. And that is why Debs has so much greater power than many who are more astute and studious of the subtleties of politics and oratory. And that is why Debs was convicted of a crime-he was convicted because he could not open his mouth without declaring his solidarity and inward identity with his comrades who are in prison. All through the testified record of the prosecution, and all through his own speech in defense, and through his final quiet utterance before the judge condemned him, there saunded the same refrain, the same eloquence of one who suffers in his own breast the pain of everyone who suffers.

I see him sitting there before his judges, with detached emotion, but vivid intellectual attention, his head high, with high wrinkles, William LIoyd Garrison spectacles-something saint-like, infinitely uncompromising, infinitely undisturbed-and I am undisturbed too. I am happy. And when the clumsy-thumbed prosecutor, with his round jowl and sharp nose, is through laboring forth what he has in proof that Debs said what he said, there is a pause. Debs looks up at Stedman. Stedman looks over at the prosecutor.

" Let's see-you rest? " he says. " 117e rest."

A kind of numb surprise affects the court. Nothing is said for a while. The prosecutor is disappointed. He is to be deprived of his sport of bulldozing witnesses for the defense. He will make up for it, however, by bulldozing the defendant later on. Finally the judge declares a recess of ten minutes, and everybody with a good seat settles to wait.

" Mr. Debs will conduct his own defense," said Stedman when the court assembled again, and he went over to the press table and sat down. The other attorneys sat down. And everybody waited, watching intently, as though for lightning. But Debs got up very deliberately, gathering some papers, and he looked in the eyes of his judge a full minute, while the room grew very still, before he began, courteously and quietly, but with that intense magnetic precision, to discuss the only question that could possibly en-

10   THE LIBERATOR

gage his. fervent interest-the question whether or not what he had said in his speech at Canton was true.

" For the first time in my Iife I appear before a jury in a court of law to answer to an indictment for crime. I am not a lawyer. I know little about court procedure, about the rules of evidence or legal practice. I know only that you gentlemen are to hear the evidence brought against me, that the Court is to instruct you in the law, and that you are then to determine by your verdict whether I shall be branded with criminal guilt and be consigned, perhaps, to the end of my life in a felon's cell.

" Gentlemen, I do not fear to face you in this hour of accusation, nor do I shrink from the consequences of my utterances or my acts. Standing before you, charged as I am with crime, I can yet look the Court in the face, I can look you in the face, I can look the world in the face, for in my con-science, in my soul, there is festering no accusation of guilt.

" I wish to admit the truth of all that has been testified to in this proceeding. I have no. disposition to deny any-thing that is true. I would not, if I could, escape the results of an adverse verdict. I would not retract a word that I have uttered that I believe to be true to save myself from going to the penetentiary for the rest of my days."

It was dark when Debs began speaking, though only two o'clock in the afternoon, and as he continued it grew steadily darker, the light of the chandeliers prevailing, and the windows looking black as at night-time with gathering thunder-clouds. His utterance became more clear and piercing against that impending shadow, and it made the simplicity of his faith seem almost like a portent in this time of terrible and dark events. It was as though love and the very essence of light were inspired to lead the world straight on into the black heart of storm and destruction. . . .

I think there can be no military objection to my quoting that part of his speech which was not pacific, but prophetic purely of socialism, his portrayal of the broad trends of American history in the past, and its sure destiny in the future. He had been accused of "sympathy for the Bolsheviki " in Russia. He declared his sense of solidarity with them, and his knowledge that they are wantonly lied about in our newspapers, as the idealistic few who change the world have always been lied about, as Christ was lied about-and Socrates-accused and persecuted.

"A century and a half ago, when the American colonists were still foreign subjects, and when there were a few men who had faith in the common people and believed that they could rule themselves without a king, in that day to speak against the king was treason. If you read Bancroft, or any other standard historian, you will find that a great majority of the colonists believed in the king and actually believed that he had a divine right to rule over them. They had been taught to believe that to say a word against the king, to question his so-called divine right, was sinful. There were ministers who opened their bibles to prove that it was the patriotic duty of the people to loyally serve and support the king. But there were a few men in that day who said, ' We

don't need a king. We can govern ourselves.' And they began an agitation that has been immortalized in history. . . .

" The revolutionary forefathers were opposed to the form of government of their day. They were opposed to the social system of their time. They were denounced, they were condemned. But they had the moral courage to stand erect and defy all the storms of detraction; and that is why they are in history, and that is why the great respectable majority of their day sleep in forgotten graves. The world does not know they ever lived.

" At a later time there began another mighty agitation in this country. It was against an institution that was deemed a very respectable one in its time, the institution of chattel slavery, that became all-powerful, that controlled the President, both branches of Congress, the Supreme Court, the press, to a very large extent the pulpit. All of the organized forces of society, all the powers of government up-held chattel slavery in that day. And again there were a few appeared. One of them was Elijah Lovejoy. Elijah Lovejoy was as much despised in his day as are the leaders of the I. W. W. in our day. Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in cold blood in Alton, Illinois, in 1837, simply because he was opposed to chattel slavery-just as I am opposed to wage slavery. When you go down the Mississippi River and look up at Alton you see a magnificent white shaft erected there in memory of a man who was true to himself and his convictions of right and duty unto death.

"' It was my good fortune to personally know Wendell Phillips. I heard the story of his persecution, in part at least, from his own eloquent lips just a little while before they were silenced in death.

" William Lloyd Garrison, Gerrit Smith, Thaddeus Stevens-these leaders of the abolition movement, who were regarded as monsters of depravity, were true to the faith and stood their ground. They are all in history. You are teaching your children to revere their memories, while all of their detractors are in oblivion.

" Chattel slavery disappeared. We are not yet free. We are engaged in another mighty agitation today. It is as wide as the world. It is the rise of the toiling and producing masses, who are gradually becoming conscious of their interest, their power, as a class, who are organizing industrially and politically, who are slowly but surely developing the economic and political power that is to set them free. They are still in the minority, but they have learned how to wait and to bide their time.

" It is because I happen to be in this minority that I stand in your presence today, charged with crime. It is because I believe, as the revolutionary fathers believed in their day, that a change was due in the interests of the people, that the time had come for a better form of government, an improved system, a higher social order, a nobler humanity and a grander civilization. This minority, that is so much misunderstood and so bitterly maligned, is in alliance with the forces of evolution, and as certain as I stand before you this afternoon it is but a question of time until this minority

November, 1918   It

shall become the conquering majority and inaugurate the greatest change in all the history of the world. You may hasten the change, you may retard it; you can no more pre-vent it than you can prevent the coming of the sunrise on the morrow."   ,

There is something extremely simple about what is said there. It is the kind of thing that any humble man will understand, and he will know that it must be either true or false. And that was the manner of Debs' defense to the end. He did not offer any argument upon the evidence. He did not once employ his gift of ironic confutation, which might have exposed weak points in the case of the prosecution. He did not even condescend, as his attorneys urged him, to present the outline of a legal argument upon which a -jury-man so disposed might rest his emotional desire to acquit him. With a very genial-and privately almost uproarious-scorn for the whole legal apparatus in which they were trying to tie up his clear-motived intelligence, he simply remained high up in the region of truth and noble feeling, where he Iives, and compelled the court to come up there and listen to him or not listen at all. And they came up, and then after he stopped talking they descended again, a little tearful and uncomfortable, and carried out their business in the routine way. He chose to be sentenced as a prophet, and whatever might be done with his temporary person, to rest the essential argument of his case upon events that have not yet happened. And he chose well, for he is a prophet, and there is more than a chance that events will fulfill his utterance, and make him remembered not only as the most beautiful character in contemporary America, but as one of the most wise.

It is embarrassing to one who writes with a special sympathy to find events too obtrusively favoring his point of view. It is embarrassing to have to characterize the District Attorney, who got up to attack Debs before that jury as soon as he sat down. Assuming there was a single man of sensitive decency among the twelve, this District Attorney, Mr. Wertz, did all that could possibly be done to lose his case with that man. It would not have been very difficult to convict Debs after his own speech-he made it so evident that he would not take it as a personal judgment, that it would not and could not enter into his soul in the slightest degree. He did not ask the jury, not to convict him, but rather assuming they would, sought to make it clear in his own words what it was they were convicting him for. But after that ungainly, greasy wolf, with a high whine through his teeth, had poured raw insults round the room for an hour, so that every one in the court from the judge to the stiff little bailiff was mortified, and his own more clever assistant squirmed in his chair with embarrassment, it became very difficult for the most patriotic jury to do their duty. I credit the prosecuting attorney with at least three of the six hours that this jury had to stay out recovering from the emotional impact of the scene they had witnessed. For as clearly as Debs symbolized in his presence the hope of evolution, this man was the mud from which it moves.

" Now I'll tell you in a nutshell the situation of this man an' all those he assumes to represent," he began. " I knew a farmer out here who had a barn an' the barn caught fire, an' he had a flock of sheep in the barn an' he got 'em out in the. yard all right, but there was one old ewe "-he pronounced it " yo "-"at the head of the flock, an' she bolted around the barn and went back by another door, and the whole flock followed her. And then he got them out again on that side, and this old yo, she bolted round an' come in again on this side. An' that's the way it goes. And if this old yo (pointing to I)ebs) wants to go to the penitentiary I've got no objection, but I object to his taking a whole flock of the people with him. Congress has pledged the resources of the United States to win this war, and the resources of the United States are the body of Eugene Debs just as much as the cattle and crops. Just because he's got a smattering of history, enabling him to lead after him a rabble o' half bakes like that conglomeration over there in Russia, where the American boys have had to go over there to preserve for the Russians their rights against these Bolsheviki-why-why-I tell you these doctrines lead to nothing but trouble and distraction. He says thd, if Kate Richards O'Hare's guilty, he's guilty-if Rose Pastor Stokes is guilty he's guilty. Here's what Rose said (grabbing a paper) and you've heard the record that she got ten years for this job. . . . And here's what Debs says about the Stokes woman. Let's see now what Debs says about Rosie. Here's what Debs says about Rosie. 'Why, they ought to be tried for treason, the whole outfit. If it had been any other country in the world but the United States they'd have faced a firing squad long ago. Internationalism, he says. I'll tell you what internationalism is. Pitch all the nations into one pot with the Socialists on top and you've got internationalism. . . ."

So it flowed out of his mouth for an hour. And the judge adjourned the court until morning, and the jury tottered away, and we all walked over to the hotel with Debs, to en-joy the humor of the situation, and' hear its enjoyable points appreciated as only one with a perfectly imperturbable spirit could appreciate them. Debs had a conference the night be-fore the trial began with his lawyers, a legal conference for the purpose of mapping out his case, and in the course of that conference, which lasted two or three hours, the case was never once mentioned.

I asked him one day if the trial was a strain on him. " No," he said, " it doesn't rest on my mind much. You see, if I'm sent to jail it can't be for a very long time, whereas if you go it may be an important part of your life. That's why my heart has been with you boys all these months."

The next morning the judge instructed the jury-very correctly-in the Iaw, and the defendant and his friends enjoyed a whole day of idle and happy conversation, lively with Debs' stories of Lincoln, and in the evening the jury, hardened up at last to their unwelcome task, tottered back to their seats. Cyrus H. Stoner, aged 58 years, the youngest man among them, rendered the verdict of guilty. Debs was released in custody of his attorneys and the court

12   THE LIBERATOR

adjourned for a day, while the judge should take counsel with himself, and perhaps with other persons of prestige, as to the appropriate length for the sentence.

On Saturday morning Stedman offered argument for a new trial on the ground that the prosecution had made much of the " St, Louis proclamation," which Debs had not mentioned in his speech at Canton. But Debs mentioned the St. Louis proclamation with some affection in his speech be-fore the jury, and so the judge no doubt was justified in denying that there was ground there for a new trial.

The motion was overruled. The District Attorney moved for the imposition of sentence, and the clerk asked, " Eugene V. Debs, have you anything further to say in your behalf be-fore the court passes sentence upon you? " Again Debs rose and walked slowly forward, and even more quietly and with less effort than before, he Iifted them up to listen, while the little routine of particular and personal event suspended, to the very vital truth about the present, and the inexorable bright promise of the future, that were for him symbolized in this otherwise unimportant proceeding.

" Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest of earth. I said then, I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. . . ."

It may be expedient for the Government at war to imprison Eugene Debs. From their point of view it may seem prudent and necessary. But I wonder if there are not some among them who have qualms when it comes to such an act-in a war for liberty. I wonder if they ever sense the danger that when the war is done, they may find left only the name of what they were fighting for. Across the face of the County Court House, as the train pulls out of Cleve-land, you read in great marble letters this motto: " Obedience To Law Is Liberty." And by means of just such fatuous sophisms as that, the powers that want industrial feudalism and bureaucracy perpetuated after this war ends, will get it if they can.

REDEMPTION

GOD sat upon His time-ignoring throne. . . . Blown from the void, a myriad roar of prayer Hurled like vultures' bodies through the air.

From far forgotten worlds, whose watch-fires shone

Dimly from thousand-century-distant zone Rose the deep wail of universal Care. . The kneeling angels trembled in despair

And their struck harps immingled in the moan.

One after one the reeling flames expired;

Worlds dropt, suns flared a final instant long;

The shriek of prayer grew thin and high. . . , His head God bowed; all Heaven rocked dizzily, time-tired.

-Dim as a star at noon, a Rebel's song

Flamed through the roar.-"The worlds shall live Y' God said.

Ernest J. Hopkins.

The Chinese Basket

You know Chinese things so well.

Do you know their little paper covered bulbs in dusty baskets? Then you know me.

Like onions or potatoes they lie .for months so quietly in a basket in a dark corner-all compact and dry, no roots, no stem, no perfume, no intimation of spring, dry and dead and brown. So I have lain long in a basket in a dark corner, dark and quiet and still, just a bulb in a frail brown paper tissue. And the dark and the quiet were just my consciousness of being a bulb-with the secret of a bulb held beneath the frail brown paper tissue. And the bulbs all look alike in the basket in the Chinaman's shop, and the secret of each is only a flower. And some will sprout dank and tall in a narrow slit of musty sunlight on a cellar window sill. And some will flower in a saucer full of pebbles on an office desk.

You have taken me out of my basket in the dark, you have turned me to the light, you have torn open the frail brown tissue paper cover. And eager white roots and eager green tips will burst with mushroom quickness at the stirring of your hand. Put me back in the dark. For the lush strong leaves will all turn yellow, the tall buds will never open, they will be shrivelled empty pods of nothingness. Oh put me back in the dark! The Chinaman knows his bulbs so well-he knows the secret of each. Put me hack in the dark again.

For all the months I have lain in the dark I have longed to be planted in an open meadow-where I could come up year after year, and little children would hunt to find me in the Spring, and grab funny little short-stemmed clusters of me, and laugh and tumble in the long grasses there. I could come up year after year forever in a little corner of open meadow.

I want the forest loam and very sand of you. I want the early happy out-doors dawn of you. I want the light wind and soaking rain and busy working sun of you and quiet starlight night of you. I am afraid of the cold white saucer on your window sill. The smooth little pebbles are hard and they terrify me. I will starve for earth. I will die in a saucer of pebbles on your window sill.

So I ask you to put me back in the brown basket in the Chinaman's quiet cellar. It is a kindly brown basket, and I understand the smile of the Chinaman, and the dark is only a promise forever that there is sunlight.

LILLIAN Fox.

HUMILIATION

H OW nakedly an animal Lies down on earth to die, Unmindful of the shining air, And unashamed of sky.

But men and women under roofs

Draw shades and hush the floor,
And furtively they lay their dead

Behind a darkened door.

Winifred Welles.

13

i

Repartee

I N the New York campaign for the governorship the arguments for Smith and Whitman seem to simmer down to this: neither of them can possibly be any worse than the other.

«~ /1AINE Vote Revives Republican Hopes." It will IV. be remembered that it also revived them two years ago.

S ENATOR PENROSE has bitterly assailed the gasless Sunday order. Penrose's favorite song is " Keep the Home Tires Turning."

THE Germans have belittled the loss pf St. Mihiel, thus carrying out the sound military tradition that what-ever you lose is of no importance.

THE controversy about the condemned book, "Two Thousand Questions and Answers About the War," may be summed up as follows: It was published inadvertently, indorsed by Creel hastily and denounced by the National Security League mendaciously. Nobody seems to have read the book except the printer.

THE Department of Labor says that food prices have increased 55 per cent. during the past year, while the Food Administration says it was only 3% per cent. The puzzled householder would probably settle the controversy by adding the two numbers together.

THE New York Nation is the latest magazine to be burlesoned; but there seems to be a widespread impression that the mail service has been suppressed.

T H OOVER tells us that we must tighten our belts again. Saving leather to use on the Kaiser? HE Bulgarian surrender is said to be due to the spread of Bolshevism. It has been a long time since anybody has said anything good about that movement.

THE New York Times, which has been warning us for months against the impending peace offensive, could not resist the Austrian plea. Lock the door and dicker, is the Times's idea of a peace conference.

S ECRETARY McADOO says that in the last loan drive there were far too few subscriptions of over $io,ooo. The eight billion dollar revenue bill is good repartee for men of wealth.

I F you won't lend it, give it.   HOWARD BRUBAKER.

"Are these good seats?" "Ninth row, madam." "How far back is that?" " Nine rows.

R. T. P.

WHILE I falter, she roams the world Gathering beauty as suits her need;

The old are fools, but when she was a child, Somebody gave her the stars to read.

Young as the dawn and old as the hills-

The little green hills that clap their hands-Rare and fragrant, pensive, bold,

How deeply she understands.

Anne Herendeen.

14

On Intervention in Russia

By John Reed

M Y arrest and indictment by the Federal authorities because of a speech opposing Allied intervention in Russia raises a more important question than that of Russian intervention itself. It directly involves the conduct of the war by the Governments of the United States and of the Allies for democratic aims.

My point is, that the American people are misinformed about conditions in Europe. and especially in Russia, and that in the case of Russia our Government is acting upon false information. Moreover, people who are in a position to in-form the public concerning the Russian situation are either ordered to keep silent, or, if they speak in public, arrested by the Department of Justice, and if they write in the press, barred from the mails by the Post Office Department.

In these conditions it is impossible for the public to form a clear opinion of the necessities of effective action abroad, and the sovereign American people cannot rightly dictate a democratic foreign policy to their servants in Congress and the White House.

The kind of Russian news usually fed the public is illustrated by the frequent newspaper reports stating that the Soviet Government has fallen, that Lenin and Trotsky have fled to Germany, and that chaos and anarchy are universal in Russia-statements which the very reports of the Allied commanders in Russia have again and again demonstrated to be false. An example of what I mean is the series of dispatches, supported by no competent evidence, stating that thousands of people, especially foreigners, are being massacred by the Bolsheviki. The uncertainty of the newspapers them-selves concerning the real situation in Russia was strikingly shown the other day, for example, by a story in the New York Tunes about the wholesale killing of British, French and Americans; which was followed by another item to the effect that arrangements have been completed by the Soviet Government and the Government of Finland for the safe conduct of all foreigners who wish to leave Russia.

The gravity of the situation is intensified by the recent re-lease for publication by the Committee on Public Information of a series of documents purporting to prove that the leaders of the Russian Soviet Government were in the pay of the Imperial German Government, and that their actions were directed from Berlin. The fact is, that the authenticity of many of these documents is very doubtful. And the documents have been in the hands of the United States Government for more than six months. Why were they not given out before this time? Or, more pertinently, why have they now been released? Was it to give color or excuse to an uninvited intervention in the affairs of a friendly people, and, moreover, a people which has appealed to us for help against Germany?

There is definite evidence now in the United States sufficient, I believe, to prove that the leaders of the Soviets have not been pro-German, but, on the contrary, if anything, pro-Ally. Strangely enough, this evidence is not allowed to reach the public. Colonel Raymond Robbins, former chief of the American Red Cross Mission to Russia and unofficial diplomatic agent of the United States Government in contact with the Russian Soviets, who has more information on the subject than any foreigner alive, has such evidence. So has Colonel William Boyce Thompson and Major Thomas Thacher-both of the Red Cross Mission. All these men have been ordered to remain silent.

I, myself, and certain other Americans, who have had the opportunity to observe closely the character and actions of the Soviet Government, have been shut up by the simple expedient of taking away all documents and corroborative papers which we brought back with us from Russia, on the pre-text of " examination." Only those officials and correspondents who are opposed to the Soviets, for one reason or an-other, are allowed freely to speak or write their erroneous facts and their baseless opinions.

Besides these prejudiced observers almost all the news sources concerning Russia are German sources, whose object it is to discredit the Soviet Government. For instance, the complete Russian version of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations has never been published in this country, although it is available; the American people must go to the version given out by Berlin, which was patently altered for both domestic and foreign consumption.

History will prove that, instead of plotting in the interest of Imperial Germany, the leaders of the Soviets attempted to enlist Allied aid in their hopeless resistance to the German advance. Some days before the ratification of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk the Soviet leaders summoned the lmerican representatives, and made an offer of co-operation with the fillies, asking for supplies and technical assistance, stating definitely that if the aid were granted the Soviets would re-fuse to ratify the Brest-Litovsk treaty, and that Russia would continue the war against Germany. This appeal was cabled to Washington, but never answered by the United States Government. And not only were the people of the United States kept in ignorance of this communication, but I am told that the President himself was not informed until long afterward, if at all.

Similar offers of co-operation were made by the Soviets to the Governments of France and England, and either ignored or refused.

Five months later, without addressing those Soviet leaders with whom the Allied Governments had been in constant communication from November, 1917, without making any

November, 1918   15

complaint or any demands upon the responsible officials of the Russian Republic, the Allied troops invaded the territory of Russia, shot Russian citizens and gave armed support to a series of " governments " whose lack of popular backing was shown by their extreme instability; in sharp contrast to the Soviet Government, which, after ten months of " unrecognized " existence, stands unchallenged by any effective Russian opposition.

Besides the questionable evidence adduced by the Commit-tee on Public Information, is there any other adequate proof that the Soviet leaders were influenced by the German Government in word or act? The words of Lenin and Trotsky speak for themselves ; they are available to any American publication which desires to print them. Yet they are not, and have not been, printed, except in Socialist papers of limited circulation. Their acts, too, may be known to any one who cares to read the authentic 'accounts of them. True, they have not always believed implicitly in the " democratic " pronouncements of the Allied leaders; true, they do not admire our form of government; true, they have not, in the heat of a great revolution, been absolutely and unalterably consistent with their principles; true, the German Government probably did all in its power to encourage the disintegration of Russia. But the paint is that the Bolshevik revolution was a revolution against all imperialism, German imperialism included; and the Soviet Government was and still is the most powerful menace to Imperial Germany, and all it implies, in the world; and the Russian leaders, whatever the Germans may have thought they would do, have consistently labored to break up the German power, and to reorganize Russia industrially and in a military way, so.as to turn again into open war the secret war they have been conducting so effectively.

I, myself, as well as several other Americans now in this country, can testify to this secret war and to its effects. I was employed by the Soviet Goverment, in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. Among other things, I assisted in the preparation of revolutionary propaganda to spread among the German troops and the German war-prisoners, and helped to get it to them. From the Commissariat we sent out every day more than half a million newspapers, in German, Hungarian, Polish, Croatian, Tchecho-Slovak and other languages, besides translations in those languages of the decrees and proclamations of the Soviet Government, and the pamphlets of the revolutionary leaders;we sent speakers into the German lines to harrangue the soldiers; we organized conventions of war-prisoner delegates and dispatched hundreds of agitators to the prison camps. This propaganda was so effective that the German and Austrian Governments took the most energetic means to stamp it out, protesting and threatening, putting their troops under the most rigid control, and arranging " quarantine camps " for returning prisoners, who were forced to remain isolated from their own people for several months, during which time they were thoroughly " educated " by patriotic speeches and literature. It was so effective that when the time came to advance into Russia many regiments refused to move and had to be replaced by other units drawn

from the western front, where the soldiers were not " contaminated." It was so effective that tens of thousands of war-prisoners made application to become citizens of Soviet Russia, and thousands joined the Red army, in whose ranks they resisted the advance of the German and Austrian armies as best they could.

The Brest-Litovsk peace brought Germany nothing from the Russia that remained. Neither food nor raw material nor any rest from the flood of propaganda. The workers in factories manufacturing goods for Germany struck; so did the miners getting out ore and coal for Germany; so did the railway workers on trains carrying materials to Germany. Rather than let Germany have grain the peasants burned their crops. And these are the same people who, election after election, in town after town, voted more and more for the representatives of the political parties which make up the Soviet Government. The Brest-Litovsk peace was never referred to by the Soviet leaders except as the " Brigands' Peace," and never regarded by them except as workmen regard the settlement of a lost strike-as a respite in which to reorganize for another strike.

The outstanding and misunderstood fact of the matter is that the Soviet Republic, based on the dictatorship of the working class, and the expropriation of the propertied classes, could not and cannot exist side by side with Imperial Germany; and even more so, Imperial Germany cannot hope to survive side by side with the Russian Soviets. It was to the interest of the Russian Soviets to enlist our aid in the destruction of their closest and most dangerous enemy. They attempted to do this-and we rejected their plea. But do not forget that it is also to the interest of Imperial Germany to prejudice the Allies against the Russian Soviets. And nothing can be so satisfactory to the Imperial German Government as Allied hostility to the Soviets, and Allied intervention in Russia, which might drive the Soviets, in sheer self-defense, desperately to seek an ally in Germany.

After all, the American people are entitled to know the real reasons for Allied intervention in Russia. The liberal European press-especially that of Great Britain-is out-spoken in the opinion that it is dictated by the desire of the French Government to set up a Government in Russia which will guarantee the payment of Russian obligations, repudiated by the Soviets.

The American statement concerning intervention justifies military action in Russia upon the grounds that the Tchecho-Slovak troops-who were supposed to be leaving Russia by way of Siberia to join the Allied armies on the western front -were attacked by " armed German and Austrian war-prisoners."

Several months ago that same story of " armed German and Austrian war-prisoners in Siberia " reached Moscow, and at the request of Trotsky, members of the American and British military missions were given a special train to make an investigation of the charge. And they reported to their Governments that the story was without foundation. Other observers tell the same tale.

16   THE LIBERATOR

It is true that these former German and Austrian deserters and prisoners, most of them International Socialists, many of whom laid down their lives in battle against Imperial Germany and Austria, fought and are still fighting in the ranks of the Soviet army. The commander and most of the staff of the Soviet army combating the Tchecho-Slovaks in Siberia are themselves Tchecho-Slovaks.

As for the accusation that the Tchecho-Slovaks were at-tacked by these mythical Teutons-there is no competent evidence to that effect from any disinterested quarter; and there is evidence that the Tchecho-Slovaks themselves obstructed unarmed German and Austrian war-prisoners who were being returned to their homes under the treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

It is a fact that these Tchecho-Slovaks were armed, equipped and given transportation across Siberia by order and permission of the Soviet Government at the request of the Allied embassies, upon the understanding that they were to be transported to France to fight the Germans. On their way to Vladivostok they marked their journey by upsetting local Soviet governments, and, in some cases, upholding the- anti-Soviet elements while they massacred their political opponents. Those who arrived at Vladivostok executed an armed rising in that city, in which they overthrew the Soviet, killing almost all the defenders of the Soviet headquarters.

It was not until the Governments of Japan and the United States issued their statements, in the first week of August, that it was publicly admitted that the Tchecho-Slovaks were " westward-moving," and that it was the aim of the Allies to protect their " rear," as well as to " guard military stores " in the neighborhood of Murmansk and Archangel.

The statement of our Government was profuse in its professions of good-will toward the Russian people, and of entire disinterestedness.

" In taking this action," it says, " the Government of the United States wishes to announce to the people of Russia in the most public and solemn manner that it contemplates no interference with the political sovereignty of Russia, no intervention in her internal affairs-not even in the local affairs of the limited areas which her military forces may be obliged to occupy   and no impairment of her territorial integrity, either now or hereafter. . . ."

The British Government is, however, more candid. Lloyd George speaks frankly of the Tchecho-Slovaks as " the center of activities hostile to the Bolshevik Government."

But whatever the phrasing of intention the Governments of the Allies, our own included, stand sponsor to an expedition which has interfered with the political sovereignty of Russia, intervened in her internal affairs-even to the extent of supporting Governments hostile to the Soviet Government-and are considered by the Soviet Government to be waging war upon it.

With what aim? Merely to assist some sixty thousand Tchecho-SIovaks in their efforts to reach France? Is it for this that tens of thousands of troops have been diverted from the western front and shipped around to the ends of the world? Our own press speaks of the " reconstitution of the

eastern front." But the American statement says specifically that " such military intervention as has been most frequently proposed, even supposing it to be efficacious in its ostensible object of delivering an attack upon Germany from the east, would, in its judgment, be more likely to turn out to be merely a method of making use of Russia, than to be a method of saving her."

Were it reconstruction of the eastern front that is wanted, the Russians themselves were willing to accomplish that, but the Allies refused to accept their offer. No, the attitude of the official press of the Allied countries shows plainly, if, the actions of Allied troops are not convincing enough, that the purpose of intervention in Russia is the overthrow of the Russian Soviet Republic. And in this adventure, against its expressly stated will, the Government of the United States finds itself involved.

The opportunity for such a perversion of purpose is found in the fifth paragraph of the statement:

" No conclusion that the Government of the United States has arrived at in this important matter is intended, however, as an effort to restrict the actions or interfere with the independent judgment of the governments with which we are now associated in the war."

Pertinent at this point is the controversy which, according to press dispatches, has arisen in Japan over the two versions of the Japanese statement on intervention. One version, for foreign consumption, says that a few thousand troops are to be dispatched to Vladivostok " forthwith "; while the version published in Japan has it, a few thousand " to begin with."

A Tokio dispatch of Tuesday, September loth, is significant:

" A contingent of Japanese calvary, together with troops belonging to the command of General Semionov, the Cossack leader, entered the town of Chita, in the Transbaikal, on September 6th.

" The formation of a Russo-Japanese economic organization for the commercial and industrial development of Siberia virtually has been completed. Russia is represented by twelve wealthy residents of Siberia and Japan by the Bank of Chosen, the Oriental Development Company and the Sino-Japanese Industrial Company. The organization will be capitalized at from 10,000,000 to 20,000,000 rubles."

A Washington dispatch, dated October 7, says:

" The War Trade Board, in a new ruling, has announced that, beginning today, applications will be considered for the exportation of all commodities to Russia.

" There has been practically no trade between Russia and the United States since Germany, through the treachery of the Bolshevik chiefs, Lenin and Trotsky, gained control of the Russian army and complete domination of the internal affairs of that betrayed country.

" The significance of the announcement by the War Trade Board lies in the fact that it evinces a determination of the Government to begin, at the earliest possible moment, the opening up of general trade with Siberia and the 4rchangel

Nov em ber,' 191$   17

districts, which have successfully resisted German influence."

I have charged that Allied representatives in Russia encouraged and supported counter-revolutionary movements in Russia. That is true, as it is also true that German agents have supported similar counter-revolutionary attempts. From the days of the Kornilov attempt, at the end of August, 1917, when the British were involved, throughout the Kaledine movement, the separatist action of Ukraine and Finland, the " revolts " of Semionov, Horvata, the Tchecho-Slovaks, the " Northern Government " headed by Tschaikovsky and all the little " republics " set up by renegades and Tzarist officials-this has been true. Our Government alone had clean hands; our Government alone acted as if it intended really to be the " friend of the Russian people," which President Wilson described it to he.

And the Russian people appreciated that fact; the Russian Soviet leaders trusted America; when repressive measures were taken against the citizens of other countries Americans were privileged. Under direction of American diplomatic representatives, I myself have spoken with the Soviet leaders about co-operation with America, and I know what I am talking about. And I know, as I know myself, that this discrepancy between America's acts and America's words is 'destroying faith in America and hope in America, as Russia's faith and hope in the other nations has been destroyed.

In June, the Tchecho-Slovaks in Vladivostok, with the open co-operation of the British consulate, executed a bloody coup d'etat, shooting down unarmed workingmen on the streets, and jailing the members of the local Soviet. On the 4th of July twenty thousand workers marched in funeral pro-cession, and Iaying down the rough, unpainted coffins of their dead before the American Consulate, called upon America, on this, the day of the celebration of our freedom, to recognize Russia's struggle for liberty.

It is a fact that certain of. the Allied Governments recognized the anti-Bolshevik Governments in Finland and in the Ukraine and loaned them money, and that these Governments then proceeded to call in German and Austrian troops to sup-port them in power, and that so far as I know, the Allied Governments did not withdraw their recognition; even when, as in the case of Ukraine, a dictator was put in power by German bayonets; even when, as in the case of Finland, a German Prince was called to the throne. It is a fact that in all the Allied capitals, in Washington, as well, there are at present either official or unofficial representatives of these " Germanized " Governments, who pursue their activities practically unmolested, while the representatives of the revolutionary Finnish and Russian Governments opposed to Germany are spied upon, hounded and jailed.

We are told daily that the Russian Soviet Government is crumbling, that the forces of the Tchecho-Slovaks, the Allies and the Russian counter-revolutionists are victoriously advancing, that the " insurgent " Governments of Northern Russia, of Eastern Siberia, of Samara, are rapidly attracting the support of the Russian masses. The truth is, that these so-called " Governments," composed of anti-Soviet elements,

are absolutely unsupported except by the propertied classes and foreign bayonets; that cities like Vladivostok, which be-fore Allied intervention were anti-Bolshevik, have overwhelmingly voted the Bolsheviki into power; that the Soviet forces are every day growing stronger, and the resistance to the Allied and Tchecho-Slovak advance more bitter. Maxim= Gorky's acceptance of a post in the Soviet Cabinet and the reported return of Maria Spiridonov4 to the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, are significant of the fact that all revolutionary Russia, the enemies as well as the friends of Bolshevism, are joining together to resist what they consider an unwarranted attack by the Allies upon Russia.

The conditions 'which produced Napoleon out of the French Revolution are being almost exactly duplicated in Russia today, except for the important difference that the Russian Government is not only revolutionary, but constructive, workable, and rooted in the hearts of a considerable section of the working class of all countries. It is even possible that, instead of keeping a million German troops engaged in Russia, which might be done if the Allied Governments cooperated with the Soviet Government, continuance of our present policy in Russia will mean that by rg19 a million Allied troops will be so diverted from the western front. In that event, thousands of American fathers and mothers, sisters and wives and sweethearts, are going to want to know if the lives of their men shall be sacrificed in another and bitterer Gallipoli on the plains of Russia. And thousands of Americans who really believe in freedom will some day want to know why America, instead of leading the liberal world, joined with those whose faces are set against the tides of history.

It is time that we knew the truth about Russia.

To Nicolai Lenin

MEN that have stood like mountains in the flood Of change that runs like ruin through the earth, When murder seems the purpose of all birth, When food is fire, and harvest-treasure blood, Men that like fixed eternal stars have stood, Their faith clear-shining sadly, and their mind Unmaddened with the madness of their kind, They are the godlike, they the great and good.

With light, and mountain steadiness of power, And faith like theirs in this all-fluid hour, You to the dreadful depth of change descend, And with its motion, moving it, you blend Your conquering purpose, as blue rivers roll Through all the ocean's waters toward the pole.

Max Eastman.

-I

0

18   THE LIBERATOR

Drawn )y Maurice Sterne

A Pueblo Indian

November, €914   19

Hellenica

A ULA, whose dreams were honey dripping softly, Stirs in her slumber here, For the sound of her lover pausing Brings to her heart

The fragrance of star-haunted valleys.

ii

C HARA loosed her zone In the woven sunlight, And the grasses trembled for fear of her sacred fairness. But breast to breast

She turned to her mother earth,

And now when the swallows flutter around her pillow Only the wind

Remembers the flower of her bosom.

T HE song in her heart is mute, But ancient music Lingers stilled in the light of the patterned woodways.

iv

G REEN boughs stirring in slumber Sigh at the lost remembrance Of Aulon,

Golden-thighed, in the heart of the forest.

v

H ERE, where the dripping leaves Whisper of passing feet To the fragrant woodways,

The moonlight floods the forsaken tangled boughs With loneliness

For Melinna, gone from the evening.

vi

O VER the meadow-ways to the heart of Glaucon, They honey-dreaming bees Wing their murmurous flight,

For flame-tinged violets

Have woven over his bed

The fragrant dream that he guarded Many summers.

vii

H ERE, on the windy hill, The sunlight calls her, But under the dreaming grass Only the warm-stirred earth Answers the golden summons.

viii

HERE by the rocky shore Of grass-strewn Aulis, White sheep crop the herbage of salt pastures. Under this gentle mound of -watered earth Their shepherd dreams softly beside them.

ix

S TIR not the grasses here, 0 wandering zephyr, For Phaon travelled far over alien foam

Before his footsteps turned in soft contentment Home to the green threshold

He had forgotten.

x

D OWN the way to Acheron In the twilight, Flutes blow softly

Bearing the memory

Of Myrtis, lonely-breasted,

Who wanders through the shades on her wedding day.

xi

H IGH on the rhododendron-crested summits Conon followed the stars To their home in the east.

Now the south wind over the storm-bowed valley Sings of the centaur who passed

Through the gates of the morning.

xii

U NDER an olive tree by the banks of Ilyssus Nossis lies, who loved her husband dearly, Waiting his gentle coming with her children.

Edward J. O'Brien.

Old Men Hoeing

D AWN draws away from these last laborers. More than the moist brown earth has been revealed By their crude tools; the blood of April stirs Beneath their blades, like secret springs unsealed.

The blood of April. They forget so much . . . It is well for them. The roots of weeds go deep-So deep these ancients know not what they-touch. From row to row, unquestioning, they creep.

But Life is pitiless, asking even of these

That they once more lay open wounds long healed.

There are no meanings left, no mysteries For the old men hoeing in a turnip field.

Leslie Nelson Jennings.

A Morning

A GAIN this morning the bold Autumn, Spreading through the woods her sacred firc, Brings the rich color of your presence Warmly luminous to my desire,

Brings to my heart the dear wild worship High and wayward as the windy air, And to my pulse the hot sweet passion Burning crimson like a poison there.

Max Eastman.

20

Were You Ever a ChIld?

A Discussion of Education by Floyd Dell
IV

J ADIES and Gentlemen: 1 The Amercan public school system failed to work. And why?

Because-

At this point there seems to be an interruption from somebody at the back of the hall. . Louder, please! What's that you say?

" I thought," says the voice, " that this was to be a discussion of education. It sounds to me more like a monologue. When do we get a chance to talk?"

Oh, very well! If you think you can do this thing better than I can, go ahead. Suppose you tell us why the American public school system failed to work! . . . One at a time, please. Mr.-er-Smith has the floor. He will be followed in due order by Mr. Jones and Mr. Robinson. And then I hope everybody will be satisfied. Yes, Mr. Smith?

MR. SMITH: " I am one of the so-called victims of our American public school system. I went to grammar school, to high school, and then to college. You say that is what the system is for-to lead up to college. Well, it worked in my case. My parents were poor, but I studied hard and got a free scholarship, and I worked my way through college by tending furnaces in the morning and tutoring at night. You say college is designed to impart a gentleman's sons' education. Well, I got that kind of education. And what I want to know is, what's wrong with me? I can't stay I feel particularly stultified by my educational career!"

[ME: " No, no, Mr. Smith, don't stop. Go right on!"]

MR. SMITH (continuing) : " I will admit that I have sometimes wished I had taken some kind of technical course instead of the straight classical. But didn't want to be an engineer or chemist, so why should I? In fact I didn't know exactly what I wanted to be. . . . I suppose my education might not unreasonably have been expected to help me understand myself better. And I confess that when I came out into the world with my A.B. I did feel a bit help-less. But I managed to find a place for myself, and I get along very well. I can't say that I make any definite use of my college education, but I rather think it's been an ad-vantage."

ME: "Thank you for being so explicit. Mr. Jones next. Mr. Jones, you have just heard Mr. Smith's splendid testimonial to the value of a college education-how it has unlocked for him the ages' accumulated wealth of literature, of science, of art--how it has put him in vivid touch with the world in which he lives-how it has made him realize his own powers, and given him a serene confidence in his

ability to use them wisely-how fully it has equipped him to live in this complex and difficult age-in a word, how it has helped him to become all that a twentieth century American citizen should be ! Have you, Mr. Jones, anything to add to his account of these benefits? "

MR. JONES: " Your coarse sarcasm, if aimed at me, is misdirected. I never went to college. I didn't want to tend furnaces, so when I finished high school I got a job. But there's something to this gentleman's sons' stuff. I had four years' start of Smith, but I feel that he's got a certain ad-vantage over me just because he is a college man. Now why is that, I'd like to know? I could have gone to college too, if I had cared enough about it. But studying didn't interest me. I was bored with high school."

Ma: " Exactly. And some hundreds of thousands of others were also so bored with high school that even the prestige which a college education confers, could not tempt them to further meaningless efforts? You have explained a large part of the breakdown of our public school system. In theory-hut I forgot! Mr. Robinson wishes to speak."

MR. ROBINSON:" Theory-theory-theory! I think it's about time a -few facts were injected into this alleged discussion! The fact I'm interested in is just this: I quit school when I was twelve years old. I had just finished grammar school. I couldn't go to high school. I had to go to work. What have your theories of education got to do with me? "

Everything, Mr. Robinson! You smashed one theory to pieces, you were about to be condemned to a peculiar kind of slavery by another theory, and you were rescued after a fashion by a third theory. You are, to begin with, the rock upon which the good ship Education foundered. As I was about to say when I was interrupted: the grandiose ideal of a gentleman's sons' education for every American boy, failed-because there were some miIIions of American boys like you who could not go to college, and some hundreds of thousands of others like Mr. Jones here, who would not-who did not feel that it was worth the necessary effort. And these vast hordes of you going out into the world at the age of twelve to sixteen with only the precarious beginnings of a leisure class culture, became the educational problem which the last generation has been trying to solve.

Wage-Slave Education

It was the American Business Man who proposed the first " practical" reform; and if you have any doubt of the validity of the Caste theory, note what happened. The

November, 1918   21

American Business Man knew that these millions of youths were going to enter his shops and factories; they were not going to be members of a leisure class, they were going to be wage-slaves; and so he proposed to educate them to be efficient wage-slaves.

And he might have succeeded in imposing his capitalistic version of the Caste theory of education upon our public schools, had it not been for the trade unions, who perceived in these capitalist plans a means of breaking down their own apprentice system. " What! turn the schools into training-schools for strikebreakers? No! " they said-and they bitterly opposed every attempt to introduce industrial training into the schools, and mustered to their aid the old notions of the Magic of Books. " Let the children have an education "-meaning book-learning; " it will be time enough for them to learn to work when they leave school," was the general verdict. And so in this clash of economic interests, one theory warred with another, and the theory of Education as a mysterious communion with the Magic of Books happily won.

Happily-for though the controversy had its unfortunate results, in the fixing of a prejudice in the minds of the working people against industrial education, we should not fail to realize that in that controversy the trade unions were right. We do not want to educate the children of the poor in this twentieth century to be a human sub-species; it would be better to give them fragments of a leisure class education than fix them into the wage-slave mould ; it would be better that they learned Greek and Latin (or, for that matter, Sanscrit!) than merely a trade. It would be better to turn them out as they came in, helpless and ignorant, than to make them into efficient machines. Happily, such a choice is not necessary. It is possible to have an education which produces human beings who are neither out of touch with their age nor hopelessly confined within it-a generation which will be the masters and not the slaves of its environment.   -

The outlines of such an educational system were already being drawn, in theory and even experimentally in fact. But these radical proposals threatened to cost more money than governments are accustomed to expend on peaceful and constructive enterprises. Yet something had to be done in response to a popular sense of the imperfections of our system.

The Goose Step

Something was done accordingly. Bear in mind that the necessities of the case required something which would not cost any money, which would leave the system really intact, and yet which would impress beholders with the fact of Progress.

The device which answered to this description was copied from Prussia and informed with the essence of the Prussian spirit-a quasi-military Uniformity. There is nothing, in-deed, so impressive to the observer as the sight of everybody doing exactly the same thing at the same time. And when

that thing is totally unnecessary and very difficult, the effect is to stun the mind into a bewildered admiration. Hence the preposterously military aspect of the schools of yesterday-the marching in line out to recess and back again. Hence the drillmaster airs of the teaching force-as, for in-stance, the New York teacher who boasted, " I said to my pupils, ' All who live on Blank street raise their hands,' and then I turned to talk to the superintendent, forgetting to say ' Hands down '-and five minutes later, when I looked around, those Blank street children still had their hands up. That's what I call discipline." And the other New York teacher, who was reprimanded because when she came back from a visit to Italy, she told the geography class about her journey and passed around picture postcards instead of hearing the children recite the appointed Lesson from the appointed Book at the appointed Hour. Think how it sounds for a city superintendent to be able to pull out his watch and say to a visitor: " At this moment every pupil in Grade 6 is opening his geography! " That is System, and it must not be deranged in order to interest a mere roomful of children in the realities of geography for half an hour!

I experienced some of the benefits of the Goose-Step System myself, back in Illinois-and I know just how a child feels about it. He feels just as you would feel if, at the conclusion of a theatrical performance you were commanded to " Rise! Turn! Pass! " He feels humiliated and ridiculous. He feels that he is being made a fool of. The Goose-Step System is not intended to make its little victims feel happy; it is only intended to impress beholders with the fact of Progress.

And this kind of Systematization, this fake reform, has been the only serious contribution to American educational practice in the public schools during the life of the generation to which you and I belong---until within the last few years.

Fortunately, another crisis arose. In every large city the attendance at the public schools outgrew the school capacities, and it became necessary to put many children on a " half-time " basis. And this scandal demanded relief. It still demands relief. And at present we are faced with a choice between two methods of relief.

One method is familiar-to turn the grammar schools into adjuncts of capitalist shops and factories. It is the system now approved by the educational authorities of most of the large cities, including New York. The other is a sane and democratic proposal for education on scientific principles, for the benefit of the child and of the race.

The Gary Plan

It is in the nature of a happy incident that this second proposal is now actually a practical alternative to the capitalist scheme just described. For it is by virtue of its extrinsic and not its real merits that it has its chance to-day. It happened that a man named Wirt had solved in the schools of Gary, Indiana, the problem of accommodating

22   THE LIBERATOR

two pupils with a desk built for one. He did this by the simple means of abolishing the private and exclusive character of the desks. By having one-half the pupils come a little later and leave a little later than the other half, and use the desks which the others had just vacated for the gymnasium or workshop or assembly room, it was found that there were desks enough for all. And because this plan made it unnecessary to spend some millions of dollars on new school-buildings, he was invited to come to New York and put his plan in practice here.

If that had been all there was to the Gary system, it would have been adopted peacefully enough. But the Gary system was a real and hence a revolutionary kind of education, and so it met with immediate and bitter hostility.

It made the child and his needs the center of the whole process oT education. It undertook to give him a chance to learn how to live. ' It made the school to a large extent a replica of the world outside. It gave him machinery and gardens and printing presses to play with and learn from. And right there it aroused the suspicions of working-class parents, who were afraid their children were not going to get enough Book-learning. It demanded something of teachers besides routine and discipline and stoic patience; and though they came with experience to be its most enthusiastic advocates, they were in prospect roused to angry opposition. It abolished the semi-sacerdotal dignities of the school-building, and thus offended a deep-lying superstitious reverence in a public which regarded education as something set apart from life. It clashed with the bureaucratic fads of the higher educational authorities, and provoked them to financial sabotage.

In brief, it made enemies. Most of these enemies would in course of time have as inevitably become its friends, except for the mayoralty campaign, and the necessity of finding some popular grounds for attacking the well-intentioned but unpopular administration then in power. In these circumstances the Gary plan was dragged into politics and lied about most egregiously. It was unfortunate that the Gary plan should ever have had to cast in its lot, even in appearance, with any party or administration. But the results have by no means been so disastrous as might have been feared. The Gary system, as a pet project of an administration of bureaucratic reform politicians, received a black eye. But the ideal of education which is implicit in the Gary plan has not been defeated. Mayor Hylan's rash pre-election promises to the contrary notwithstanding, the Gary plan is still alive and at work in New York City. Like Copernicus' theory that the earth revolves around the sun, it has received only a temporary setback. Freed from political entanglements, the Gary plan is now gathering adherents where such a democratic plan must needs gather them-among the people, in growing bodies of enthusiasts organized as neighborhood sections of the Gary School Association. And these neighborhood sections will be the nucleus of the resistance presently to 4)e offered to the undemocratic capitalist plans for educational reform.

The Coming Struggle

For this is the situation as it stands. Our education is out of relation to the time in which we live. It is breaking down through the pressure of economic forces which demand that it turn out people who do not have to be re-educated by modern industry, It cannot remain as it is. It will either fall into the hands of capitalist reformers, who will make it a training school for wage slaves, as they are already planning quite definitely to do ;* or it will be made the instrument of a democratic culture which accepts the present but foresees the future. There is no doubt on which side all revolutionary minded people will find themselves in the coming struggle.

A School for Revolutionists

I have not drawn any detailed picture of the Gary plan in operation, either under friendly auspices in Gary, or amidst hostilities and difficulties in New York City, for such information is fully available to any one who wants to go to the nearest public library. But I do want to make clear some of the revolutionary implications of the new ideal of education. In doing so I prefer not to implicate the Gary plan as such in my account, since its excellences should be described in more temperate and expedient terms than I can find it in my heart to employ when I write of the future of education. Let me then be solely held responsible for the picture which follows.

I am going to be Utopian, after the fashion of H. G. Wells and Plato, and present you with a brief account of a public school in the village of Pershing, N. Y., in the year 1947. .

" But which," I asked my guide, " is the school-building? "

He laughed. " In the files of our historical research department," he said, " I once came across a faded copy of a quaint old war-time publication called the LIBERATOR. It attracted my attention because it appeared to have been edited by a gray-haired old fire-eater that I recently met, Major-General Eastman. He was a pacifist then, I think."

" Ah, yes-Max Eastman! " I said. " I remember him well. But what has that got to do   "

" In that curious little magazine was an article on education. Do you remember what you wrote? Didn't you believe what you said? Why, then, do you ask me which is the school-building? There isn't any school-building."

We were standing in the midst of a little park, about the size of a city block, bordered by a theater, a restaurant, an office building, several factories, a library, a newspaper plant

' " Three years ago the elimination of pupils from the upper grades of our elementary schools and the demands of industry led us to experiment with industrial education in the grades. As a contrast experiment numerous schools were organized on a fraudulent Gary Plan.

"Our controlling idea was, that adolescent boys and girls standing on the threshold of industrial life should be grouped in prevocational schools in which they would receive in addition to instruction in formal subjects, such instruction and training in constructive activities, as would develop aptitudes and abilities of distinct economic value. At present the opportunity to rotate term by term through various shops is afforded in seven schools to approximately 3000 boys and girls in the 7th, Sth, and 9th years."-Dr. William L. Ettinger, Superintendent of Schools, New York city.

November, 1918   23

and a church. My companion pointed to one of the buildings. " That," he said, " is the children's theater. There they pre-sent their own plays and pageants. In connection with the work there they learn singing and dancing, scene painting, and costume. Of course they also learn about plays-I sup-pose from your primitive point of view you would say that we conduct a course in dramatic literature. But all those antique phrases of early educational practice have passed out of use. We would say that the children are learning to develop their creative impulses. We consider our theater very important in that respect. It is the beginning of everything.

" Next in importance, perhaps, are those factories. They include a carpenter shop, a pottery, and a machine shop. Here is made everything which is used throughout the school. And there is the power house which furnishes the electric current for the whole establishment. You under-stand, of course, that the boys and girls get a complete theoretical as well as practical grasp of the facts they are dealing with-there is no neglect of what I suppose you would call book-learning, here.

" Over there is the textile and garment factory, which de-signs and makes the costumes for the plays and pageants. You will not be surprised to learn that the garment-makers at any given period are the most active supporters of the propaganda for an outdoor theater. It would give them a chance to do more costumes! . . .

" Yes, we have politics here. The question of an outdoor theater is being agitated very warmly just now. The pupils have complete control of the school budget of expenditure. There is only so much money to spend each year, you see, at present, though there is a movement on foot to make the institution self-supporting, but I'm afraid that will depend on industrial conditions outside. It wouldn't do as yet to extend the school age and enter into productive competition with out-side enterprises   But I'm afraid that's going too deeply into a situation you could hardly be expected to under-stand. At any rate, the opposition to the outdoor theater is from the scientific groups, who want an enlargement of their laboratories. . . . The architectural and building groups are neutral-they are working on plans for both projects, and all they want is that the question should be settled one way or the other at once, so they can go to work. There will be a meeting tonight, at which a preliminary vote will be taken. Yes, our politics are quite old-fashioned-Greek, in fact.

" The shops? They are managed by shop committees of the workers. Distribution of products to the various groups which use them is effected through a distributing bureau, which has charge of the book-keeping and so forth. There has been a change in distribution recently, however. At first the shops merely made what was ordered by the various groups, and requisitions were the medium of exchange. But the shops became experimental and enterprising, and produced what they liked on the chance of its being wanted. This made a show-place necessary, and as for various reasons ordinary money became the medium of exchange, the show-place became a kind of department store. Then some of the groups

decided to use part of their subsidy in advertising in the school newspaper and magazines. They are working out some very interesting principles in their advertising, too, as you will find. They have to tell the truth. . . .

" There is the printing establishment. No, the paper and the magazines are not self-supporting-though the school advertising helps. They're subsidized. We quite believe in that.

" And there-you can see a glimpse of the greenhouses and gardens. Botany and so forth. . . . The library is the center of the research groups. History, sociology, economics -finding out what and why. Very informal and very ear-nest, as you'll find. . . . The groups? Oh, the time one stays in each varies with the individual. But everyone likes to be able to boast quietly of an M. P.-that means a master-piece ' in the old medieval sense; a piece of work that shows you've passed the apprentice stage-in a reasonable number of departments. Some Admirable Crichtons go in for an M. P. in everything! . . ,

"The restaurant-that's quite important. The cooking groups give a grand dinner every little while, and everybody goes and dines quite in state, with dancing afterward. We learn the best of bourgeois manners-makes it quite impossible to distinguish an immigrant's child from the scions of our old families. The result is that the best families are discarding their manners in order to retain their distinction! Very amusing. . . .

" The church? You mean that building over there, I sup-pose? That isn't a church-not in the sense you mean. It's our meeting place. You see, since your time churches have come to be used so much for meetings that when our architecture group came to plan an assembly hall it was quite natural for them to choose the ecclesiastical style. Anyway, i understand it's a return to their original purpose. . . ."

" But," I said, " this school is just like the world outside! "

" Except," he said, " in one particular. In the world outside we still have class privilege, class exploitation and class government-considerably toned down from its former asperities by President McAdoo the Second, but still recognizable as what you called capitalism. In the school we have play, production and exchange as they would exist in the outside world if these things were to be done and managed with the intention of making better and wiser and happier citizens. The difference, of course, is simply that one is run with an educational and the other with an exploitative intention."

" The difference seems to me," I remarked, " that your school is democratic and your adult world isn't."

" That is one way of putting it," he conceded.

" And I should think," I said warmly, " that after going to these schools, your people would want the rest of the world run on the same plan."

" It does rather have that effect," he admitted cautiously. " In fact, the Educational party, as it is called, is very rapidly rising into power. Since you are unfamiliar with our politics, I should explain that the Educational party was formed not long ago by the amalgamation of the I. X. X. and

24   THE LIBERATOR

Backing the Wrong Horse   e

(It is rumored that Mr. Crimpers has lost favor with the Administration after hi.s debacle abroad
and that Mr. Walsh is now chief labor adviser to the White House)

the Farmers' League. Its chief figure is the sainted Madame Goldman, the organizer of the Women's Battalion in the Antarctic 'War. . . .

" What surprises me," I interrupted, " is that your conservatives allow such schools to exist ! Of course they will revolutionize any society in which they are! "

" Well," said my companion, " but what could they do? (Once you begin making schools for the children, once you start out on the principle that education is learning how to live-and you end here."

I pondered this. " Not necessarily," I said at last. " You might have ended with schools in which the children of the poor were taught how to be efficient wage-slaves."

" Ah, yes," said my friend, " but they smashed that at-tempt away back in 1919-20."

" Did they? I'm very glad to hear it! " I cried. . . . " By the bye, how much do these schools cost-all over the .country?

"

" Less per year than we spent per day on the Second Polar

War. . . . But this is enough of description. You shall see for yourself. Come! " lie said.

We started toward the theater. Something he had said kept teasing my mind.

" What," I demanded, " was the name of that sainted lady who organized the Women's Battalion in the Antarctic War -her first name?"

" Play," he was saying, " is according to our ideas more fundamental and more important in life than work. Consequently the theater. . . . Her first name? Emma, I think. Consequently the theater. . . .

But what he said about play and the theater would take us far from anything which we are now accustomed to consider education. It involves no less a heresy than the calm assumption that the artist type is the highest human type, and that the chief service which education can perform for the future is the deliberate cultivation of the faculty of " creative dreaming." . . .

I venture to quote only one sentence: "Mankind needs more poets."

November, 1918   25

Pro - German ?

D EAR SIR: In the midst of an article on " Mob Violence and War Psychology," in the first paragraph of the left hand column on page 7 of the New Republic of August 3rd, the New Republic makes certain assertions that I desire to comment on: first, that the American socialist organization was practically con-trolled by Germans. As William Hard well says in the New Republic of August moth, on page 40, the middle of the right hand column: "Anybody who calls anybody else pro-German on the ground of German descent [may I interpolate, on any other ground] without further inquiry or information, is a lost outcast from the meaning of America." Therefore, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion, which has been growing on me, that the New Republic is a lost outcast to the spirit of America.

The committee which drafted the War Proclamation adopted by the Socialist Party Convention at St. Louis in April, 1917, was composed of Kate Richards O'Hare, Missouri; Morris Hilquitt, New York; Kate Sadler, Washing-ton; Patrick L. Quinlan, New Jersey; Louis B. Boudin, New York; C. E. Ruthenberg, Ohio; Dan Hogan, Arkansas; Algernon Lee, New York; Job Harriman, California; John Spargo, Vermont; Maynard Shipley, Md.; Frank C. Midney, Ohio; Walter B. Dillon, New Mexico; Victor L. Berger, Wisconsin, and George A. Spiess, Conn. Of these American citizens ten are of English or Irish and two of Russian, antecedents; two, Ruthenberg and Spiess, are of German extraction, though born in America. One only, Victor L. Berger, ex-Congressman, ex-Austrian, is of enemy birth. The make-up of this committee is accurately typical of the ethnological composition of the convention and of the American Socialist Party. Our 70 per cent. native born membership is in sharp contrast to the alien vote which constitutes so large a proportion of the vote of the machine-controlled Republican and Democratic parties. Of the party membership it is those most American-of whom I am one-who are most outspoken and uncompromising in their support of the principles of the $t. Louis platform.

The New Republic knows that the Socialist Party, by means of the right to recall its officers, the right to initiate measures and to approve or reject measures on referendum, is controlled by its membership with a thoroughness and certainty which citizens of few countries exercise, the United States not being such a country; and to maintain that an organization of moo,ooo American citizens is controlled by Germans is simply ridiculous.

The second assertion is that a large amount of propaganda, pro-German in its effect, was being circulated as Socialist Party literature. To be pro-German at the present stage of the game necessitates being pro-Kaiser, as he and his crowd control that country. To assert that a socialist organization would circulate such literature is ludicrous, especially when

*Originally sent to the New Republic, but not printed.

writing in a country where twelve men control the money of the country, where a few more control the railroads, and so on, and the country industrially and politically is under the domination of a small crowd of multi-millionaires.

The slightest intelligent examination of the question would disclose that the socialist organizations here and all over the world are anti-Kaiser, whatever the nationality of the kaisers, and are " anti" simply because they are pro-working class.

The third assertion is that no such conditions as these existed in any European country, an assertion that betrays a depth of ignorance that is astonishing in even a liberal, " forward-looking " magazine such as the New Republic. Has the editing board never heard of the majority Italian Socialists? Has it never heard of the Minority German Socialists, or French Socialists, or English Socialists? Has it never heard of the Majority Russian Socialists who took exactly the same attitude toward the war that the American Socialist Party did, and who now control the government of the Republic of Russia?

The article further states that the rigor of the official cen-'sorship and intolerance of American public opinion was largely due to the indifference to Allied or American victory resulting from the Socialist propaganda; and yet the New Republic must know as well as anybody else and as all people know who really understand what is going on in America to-day, that the capitalist press is knowingly and intention-ally, with the epithet " pro-German," trying to stamp out all opposition to the concentration of economic and political power now accruing to the Capitalist Class. The truth is as a Russian revolutionist stated it to me: that never in Russia, at the height of Czaristic oppression, were there so many political prisoners, sentences so severe and brutal, treatment of political prisoners so unnecessarily heartless and uncivilized -that never in Russia was there such a campaign of espionage, repression, and suppression, as exists in this so-called free country today.   Yours very truly,

Wr s. BROSS LLOYD.

Weather Forecast

UT West they have a proverb: ". When the ground-O hog squeals in October, look out for a hard winter."

Well, the ground-hog has squealed. We append the latest pronouncement of Charles Edward Russell, and confidently look for a deep snow-fall of Socialist votes :

" As far as the Socialist movement in this country is concerned, there is very little to be said. It is absolutely dead. The Socialist movement of this country, under the lead of aliens who cared nothing for the United States, rushed violently down a steep place into the sea. The country will never forgive the Socialists for the position they took. It ought never to forgive their treachery.

" Whatever is good in the Socialistic philosophy, the world is going to have, but it won't endure being under the label of socialism, which the leaders of the movement in this country have made odorous in the nostrils of decent men."

The Mollyc(

"Now, boys, you've been very good, and I'm going to give

27

)ddles' Union

each of you a five cent stick of candy as a weekly bonus.

The flssociation of Western Union Employees . . represents a new idea in the relationship between large employers and employees.. `Our constitution forbids the use of the strike weapon.'"--N. Y. Times.

Drama by Art Young

28   A Symposium on the Creel Documents

I T is unnecessary for us to add anything at present to the discussion of the authenticity of the documents published by the Committee on Public Information, purporting to prove that the Bolsheviki are in the pay of Germany. We quote, however, some representative opinions on both sides of the question.

The New York Evening Post

The plain fact is some of the most important charges in the documents brought forward by Mr. Sisson were published in Paris months ago, and have, on the whole been discredited.

In one important sense the Sisson documents now have only an academic meaning .. . . But it is of the utmost importance for this Government to know the quality of the agents to whom it entrusts difficult and delicate missions. We are coming nearer to conditions with regard to the whole war in which the character of the Government's information must inevitably influence its policy in a tremendous world crisis. The " facts " upon which the Administration and the American people base their opinions and policies must be, indeed, facts. (Sept. 16. )

*   *   *

The general tone of the documents is a strain upon creduI-ity. . . . Mr. Creel owes it to the country to do his best to find out whether we are really face to face with the most extraordinary cabal in history or whether Mr. Sisson is the victim of a gigantic hoax. (Sept. I8.)

Life

The crimes of the Bolsheviki and the crimes of the Germans abound in great sufficiency without any faking of bogus criminals. We can easily believe the worst of either of there, and that it is incredibly bad does not make it incredible, but one hates to be fooled with lies even about liars.

Reedy's Mirror

The Sisson official exposure continues day by day. For myself, I know that many of the earlier documents thereof have been discussed in French and English papers some time since. They have been discredited, but mostly by the people whose interest it is to discredit them-Bolshevists and pro= Germans. As for the correspondence being thieves' kitchen stuff-that's proof of its authenticity to me. Neither Germans nor Bolshevists are strong on finesse. The facts as we know them support the documents, and the documents ex-plain the facts by means of detail. (Sept. 20).

Prof. E. S. Corwin of Princeton

Mr. Sisson has not improved the case for the authenticity of his anti-Bolshevik documents by his publication of Document No. 55. . . . There is likewise a certain mystery about Documents Nos. 56 and 58 of the same instalment. . .

Many of Mr Sisson's documents are doubtless authentic, and I believe that in the main the revelations they make will sustain investigation. So much the more is it to.be hoped that every effort will be speedily made to clear up the difficulties that today cloud their title to credibility. (Sept. 21.)

S. Nuorteva, Finnish Information Bureau

[From the New York Evening Post, Sept. 211.

That the series of documents brought from Russia by Edgar Sisson, special representative of the Bureau of Public Information, and recently published by the Bureau as evidence of Bolshevik intrigue with Germany, are " brazen forgeries," is the charge made by S. Nuorteva, head of the Finnish Information Bureau, 299 Broadway. Mr. Nuorteva, in a statement made today, says that . . . . "some time in January, 1918, certain Russian counter-revolutionists who were interested vitally in discrediting the Soviet statesmen, sent to Colonel Robins a series of ' documents ' purporting to show sordid relations between the German Imperialists and the Soviets. A part of these documents was a series which was in the hands of the Kerensky Government about July, 1917, at the time when that Government was vitally interested in convicting Trotzky and Lenine as German agents. Another part of these ' documents' had reference to the period after the Bolshevik 'revolution. The documents are the same which Mr. Sisson is now publishing.

" Mr. Robins undertook to investigate the matter. Among others, he visited Mr. Halpern, who in July and August, 1917, prosecuted Trotzky on behalf of the Kerensky Government. Mr. Halpern admitted that he had many of these ' documents ' at his disposal last July, but they turned out to be forgeries and could not be used against the Bolsheviki. Through diligent inquiries from other sources, Colonel Robins became convinced that the rest of the ' documents' as well, in so far as they had relation to the activities of the Soviet statesmen, were just as unreliable. In addition to that, Colonel Robins, being in close touch with the situation from day to day, personally knew that certain statements in the ' documents' simply could not be true. Having become convinced that the ' documents' were false, Colonel Robins paid no further attention to them. . . .

" Some time in the first weeks of 1918, Edgar Sisson made his entrance on the Russian stage. Mr. Sisson, formerly an editor of the Hearst Cosmopolitan Magazine, was sent to Russia to investigate rumors of the alleged pro-Germanism of the Bolsheviki and to spread American propaganda in Russia.

November, 1918   29

He used to visit the office of the American Red Cross in Petrograd, which was the center of the Allied diplomatic activities in Russia, and at one time he was willing to share Colonel Robins' opinion that there was no foundation in the accusations of pro-German leanings of the Bolsheviki.

" Then, on a certain day, Mr. Sisson, while in Colonel Robins' office, got hold of the above-mentioned forged ' documents.' He took them away, and the next day he returned, demanding from Colonel Robins an explanation why those .documents had not been communicated to the American Gov. ernment. Mr. Robins explained to Mr. Sisson the real nature of the material, and warned him against becoming too enthusiastic about it. He suggested, however, that Mr. Sisson should conduct an investigation of his own regarding the material, so that no doubt would remain about its real 'nature. A few days later Mr. Sisson returned to Mr. Robins, expressing to Mr. Robins his readiness to admit that the ' documents ' were quite unreliable."

Later, according to Mr. Nuorteva, Mr. Sisson cabled the contents of the ' documents' to the United States.. . .

The Nation

We must reserve comment upon the amazing series of al-Ieged Russian documents, which the Committee on Public Information is publishing widely in the newspapers, until publication is complete, and the fac-similes, which are promised when the documents are issued in pamphlet form, are available. Meantime, however, something more than Mr. Creel's and Mr. .Sisson's denials will be needed to rebut the charge that the documents, in many instances, if not as a whole, are barefaced forgeries. . . . The whole trans-action is obviously one which the Government should lose no time in. setting right. (Sept. 28.)

Prof. Arthur O. Lovejoy of Johns
Hopkins

The case is clearly one for suspense of judgment. That the papers collected by Mr. Sisson are not authentic cannot be said to have been conclusively shown. On the other hand, no convincing proof of theiri authenticity has thus for been offered; and the papers themselves, as has been shown in the Evening Post and elsewhere, contain apparent confusions of dates and other incongruities which it is difficult to reconcile with a belief in their genuineness. By the internal evidence alone, the probability is rather against than for the documents; and of external evidence we have none, beyond the fact that Mr. Sisson has seen the papers and believes them genuine. I do not question Mr. Sisson's good faith; but his qualifications as a judge of historical evidences are unknown to most of us. As the matter stands, no competent historian, I think, would regard the material thus far published as constituting an adequate basis for any historical conclusion. It must be added that the tone and content of Mr. Creel's letter to the Evening Post tend rather to increase than to dispel the doubts which attach to these documents. (Oct. 2.)

The New Republic

Doubt persists as to the authenticity of the documents published by the Committee on Public Information purporting to reveal sinister relations between the Bolsheviki and the German government. The more one delves, the more fishy some of them appear. That " Nia " Bank transaction, for example: we have now the assertion of the man who was at the time managing director of the Nya Bank that it is a myth, and a challenge for an examination of the books of the bank. We did not need Mr. Creel's emphatic statement to assure us that the officers of the government responsible for the publication of the documents believed them genuine. But nobody would assert that even in time of war government officers as such are infallible judges of historical documents. The government has in its service a body of experts in precisely this field, the National Board for Historical Service. This board is made up of scholars whose patriotism and integrity and scientific competence are beyond cavil. Why should not that board be required to appoint a committee, charged with the responsibility of sifting the whole matter and reporting their findings to the public? . . . (Oct. 3.)

Manchester Guardian (England)

The American Department of Information issued to the American papers a series of documents which, if authentic, proved that the Bolshevik leaders have taken German money and have from the first to last been German agents. . . .

It was announced that the documents were to be published in the English press this week. The observant will have noticed that they have not appeared. Presumably there is good reason for withholding them. In point of fact some of them bear very evident signs of doubtful origin    The most incriminating documents are not original, but photographs, and everybody knows how easy it is to " fake " by photography. Another feature which provokes question is that the whole set fits together with the neat ingenuity of a jig-saw puzzle. There are thus many and obvious reasons why the authenticity of the documents should not be accepted until after much stricter scrutiny than appears to have been applied to them. (September 19.)

George Creel

These documents were issued by the full approval of the Government after a very careful investigation by the Government and the Government stands squarely behind their authenticity. Aside from the circulars that declared Germany's war plans prior to August, 1914, which might easily have been forged, every other document carries proof on its face, for no human being could have " faked " so enormous a mass of matter, dovetailing at every point, cluttered up at every point by a mass of inconsequential detail, and borne out at every point by things that have happened since.

30   "All I Possess

HUNDREDS of thousands of cards, with blank spaces at the bottom for signatures, are being distributed throughout the country asking the recipients to pledge them-selves to carry on the war against Germany until that nation makes an unconditional surrender. The cards, which are headed " Pledge of Membership in the Unconditional Sur-render Club," contain several sentences, among which only two have any specific meaning. They are: .

" I pledge myself to make whatever sacrifice I may be called upon to make to the ewd that the Central Powers may he brought to realize that only an unconditional surrender will be acceptable to me and my country.

" I pledge myself and all I possess to the cause of winning the war against Germany and her allies."

One of these cards sent out by The Journal, Flint, Mich., came to me, and as there were some points about it I wanted cleared up, I wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper mentioned, a copy of which I have made. It reads:

" DEAR SIR:

" One of your membership cards in the club which is pledged to fight Germany until there is secured an unconditional surrender, came into my hands. I would be glad to sign this card but before I can conscientiously do so I want to take the matter up with you. First, as to the question of unconditional surrender, I am afraid to sign that condition. The Congress and the President, as I under-stand it, have control of the war and it is their final terms which I must uphold, because should I pledge myself to fight until Germany ` unconditionally surrenders' and should the President and the Congress see fit to make conditions at the end of the war, I would be solemnly pledged to continue to fight against the wishes of my Government, and I would either have to become a breaker of pledges and a liar or be in the end shot for a bushwhacker and a guerilla.

" But there is one item of the card I want to declare my adherence to. That is the one that says:

"' I pledge myself and all I possess to the cause of winning the war.'

" With all the power within me I am ready to stand be-hind that pledge. I am within the draft ages and I expect some autumn day to go forth and give all I possess, so there is little use of my making pledges as my all is to be taken any how. But I know of some others.who are not going and who, as the country needs money, I think would be glad to get and sign this pledge to ` give all I possess,' and I suggest you send them each one. As their names come to my mind they are:

" John D. Rockefeller, New York, N. Y.

" J. P. Morgan, Jr., New York, N. Y.

" Thomas W. Lawson, Boston, Mass.

" H. P. Whitney, New York, N. Y.

"Mr. Swift, care Swift and Co., Chicago, III.

" These gentlemen, I am sure, will all sign as they are only called on for one-tenth the sacrifice I am ready to make. I am to pledge myself to give up my home, my friends, my position and the income from it (" all I possess "), and perhaps my life. All that you ought to ask them to do is to give up all their surplus and unused property and incomes, which surely they will be willing to do if I am willing to go to France to save them.

" But now I have conceived a suggestion that I feel will make your eyes light with the glow of sacrifice. It is this. Let you and I rise above mere pledges. Let us pair. Let us sign a new card, and let us put into full effect every promise we have made. Thinking of this makes me feel like lifting my hands and thanking Allah that you and I are given so great an opportunity.

I am going soon into the army. When I go 1 will give up until the war is over the sight of my family and friends, and leave behind a pair of soft blue eyes that shall seek me out even in France with the look of sorrow that was in them when I said good bye. I am going to give up my income, to eat what is given rue, to work at hard labor, to put on khaki, and to arise, move, sleep and have my being by rules that others make-on penalty of death.

" I ask you only to do a small part of what I am ready to do. You know we need men to raise food for soldiers. Well, I only ask you to pledge yourself to give up your newspaper, your property, and your profits, and to leave your family and friends until the war ends and come here to Virginia, where I have for you a position on a farm at $30 a month and board, exactly what my Government is to give me. I have already arranged about the place, as I know you will come.

" I am so sure about your coming, because I ask so little of you and myself am willing to give so much. For my part, I will give up all those things I ask of you, and, over and above, I pledge my life. I will go ' Over There' and listen in the trenches through long nights to the song of the messengers of death that sometime may touch me and take me hack to the Gods who sent me here. I will go out in the dim dawn when the coming day is casting the sky in pearl to face the rifles and the cannonade, and maybe die, that you and yours may not have to be spattered with the blood of war or fight grimly for your lives. I (and there are three million of me) will leave behind all dreams of life and love; the sweet caresses of women and the smile of pleasure; the chance to profit and to be clothed in soft, raiment and sit at feasts: to lie beneath the peaceful stars, as I did last night, and to listen to the promise of the west wind that sweeps across my homeland. I will go to France to fight. Some night, when I am out there looking up at the crimsoned sky, which tomorrow night I may not see, I shall be thinking of you (and there are thirty millions of you) my partners in this great sacrifice. I shall dream there, on that ensanguined

November, 1918   31

soil, of the ideals for which I fight and the Justice and Liberty for which you and I are laying aside each our possessions, our loves and our friends and for which I am going nine steps further and offering my life. I shall think of the' homeland for which I am bearing all, of its green hills and valleys and of those blue eyes which may not soon again, or forever, mirror the love in mine. And, glorious above the sparkle of jeweled minarets in the evening sun, I shall see the radiance of that great god Justice that we uphold and for which I am ready to die. I am willing-(and remember, I am three million) to make the supreme sacrifice. I do not ask you to follow me, hut I do ask you to give up all you possess, except the simpler luxuries and comforts and pleasures of life, and to abandon all hoards of surplus wealth that were made for you by other hands. And for God's sake, do not fail me!

" You must see what it would mean to me if you did fail. When I come back from over there I will come with the glow in my soul of duty done, the wonderful purification of one who, facing the ultimate of the body has felt his ideals lift him toward the heavens until he almost could see God. I will come walking with outstretched hands toward the sun-rise of Liberty, Justice and Peace: not as I have known them before, but liberty for the mind, justice for the poor, peace for those who labor. I shall come from where I have seen the naked hearts of brave men, believing in the nobility of humanity. And my heart will be beating swiftly with the thought that I have done the set task and that for mankind I have perpetuated liberty and kept murder from their throats; thrilling with the altruistic beauty of a people who can give their ease, their property, their all that the 'World may be Safe for Democracy.

" But suppose you fail me. Suppose I come back to find you (and there are thirty millions of you) have eaten dinners and drunk wine while I was gone; that you have slept in soft couches of love and your days have passed pleasantly, and that with these days your fortune has grown and the future luxury of you and yours has become more sure by the added gold in your bank; that you have builded great places where men and women must labor on your terms for your profit, and that while my family, my arm, my leg, or eye, or health or maybe life, has been freely given by me to protect you, you have in frenzy reached for more of the coins that mean ease for you, and for me returned penniless from the war, industrial slavery to you.

" Can't you see what that would mean? Can't you see that my soul that had grown to beauty and become filled with love, might revolt and turn to me and say,

"' And that he might fill his fleshpots, you have spilled young blood and faced the last most solemn sacrifice. The mothers who weep in Germany, weep that he may have more ease, and mothers in America have borne sons to rot on French soil that he may leave his children wealth to place them in a better class than a poor and humble soldier's child may ever reach.'

" I am afraid to think of this. I fear that if I returned to

find that you have not kept your pledge to ' give all that I possess ' as I have kept mine, 1 should turn on you and with the bayonet that has been pointed to brave men who fought. strike at you. I am afraid even of the vision of this, yet

know if you fail me it may be true. If I come back elated with my ideals and find you have not given your little tenth while I have given my nine-tenths or my all, I fear I shall go blind with madness, and my gun will be ready to beat at you and my hands to take your calf of gold.

" I do not want these things to be, and so I ask you, Do not fail me. I ask of you not your all, but only what you have above your needs; and that you live on your own labor. not on that of others. We must all do our part, and so again I ask you to sign this pledge to ' give all I possess ' with me, and to see that the gentlemen mentioned in the first part of my letter, and others like them, do the same.

" Yours,   JOHN T. GOOLRICK, JR.,

. " Fredericksburg, Virginia."

The editor of the Journal, of Flint, Michigan, has not so far answered the Ietter, and I am afraid I am going to have to look elsewhere for some one to work on that farm.

J. T. G., JR. ALIEN

I SAW a negro in the snow-His vast face dark and pondering, Shoulders whitened, and head hunched low.

What vagabonding lust could bring You from the cotton-field's soft glow, The white magnolia drifts of Spring?

The thin sun here will whiten your face, The lean, long winters ruthlessly Wither your slouching jungle grace.

Our nights grow longer; better flee This callous and transforming place . Or would you grow no more than we?

Clement Wood.

WORDS

INTO sweet pools of poetry I dip my net. The silver star net

Brings up

From the cool green depths

Golden, glittering,

Shimmering, Shining,

Glorious, golden

Jewels of words,

Which I pour,

Splashing gold,

On to the Altar stone Of Art.

E. P. S. Stackhouse.

}

32

The structure of the Soviet state

By John Reed

T HROUGH all the chorus of abuse .and misrepresentation directed against the Russian Soviets by the capitalist press, there runs a voice shrill with a sort of panic, which cries: " There is no government in Russia! There is no organization among the Russian workers! It will not work! It will not work!"

There is method in the slander.

As all real Socialists know, and as we who have seen the Russian Revolution can testify, there is today in Moscow and throughout all the cities and towns of the Russian land a highly complex political structure, which is upheld by the vast majority of the people, and which is functioning as well as any newborn popular government ever functioned. ,Also the workers of Russia have fashioned from their necessities and the demands of life an economic organization which is evolving into a true industrial democracy.

In my last article I told something of the external aspect of proletarian Russia. In this I shall sketch the frame-work of the Soviet state.

History of the Soviets

The Soviet state is based upon the Soviets-or Councils-of 'Workers and Peasants' Soviets.

These Councils-institutions so characteristic of the Russian Revolution-originated in 1905, when, during the first general strike of the workers, Petrograd factories and labor organizations sent delegates to a Central Committee. This Strike Committee was named " Council of Workers' Deputies." It called the second general strike of the fall of 1905, sent out organizers all over Russia, and for a short time was recognized by the Imperial Government as the authorized spokesman of the revolutionary Russian working-class.

Upon the failure of the 1905 Revolution, the members of the Council either fled or were sent to Siberia. But so astoundingly effective as a political organ was this type of union that all the revolutionary parties included a Council of Workers' Deputies in their plans for the next uprising.

In March, 1917, when, in the face of all Russia rearing like a sea, the Tsar abdicated and Grand Duke Michael declined the throne, and the reluctant Duma was forced to assume the reins of government, the Council of Workers' Deputies sprang full-fledged into being. In a few days it was enlarged to include delegates of the Army, and called the Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. Except for Kerensky the Duma Committee was composed of bourgeois, and had no connection with the revolutionary masses whatever. Fighting had to be done, order had to be restored, the front guarded . . . . The Duma members had no way of executing these duties; they were obliged to appeal to the representatives of the workers and soldiers-

in other words, the Council. The Council tgok charge of the work of Revolution, of co-ordinating the activities of the people, preserving order. Moreover, it assumed the task of assuring the Revolution against its betrayal by the bourgeoisie.

From the moment when the Duma was forced to appeal to the Council, two governments existed in Russia, and these two governments struggled for the mastery until November, 1917, when the Soviets, with the Bolsheviki in control, overthrew the Coalition Government.

There were, as I have said, Soviets both of 'Workers' and of Soldiers' Deputies. Somewhat later there came into being Soviets of Peasants' Deputies. In most cities the Workers' and Soldiers' Soviets met together; they also held their All-Russian Congress jointly. The Peasants' Soviets, however, were held aloof by the reactionary elements in control, and did not join with the workers and soldiers until the November revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Government.

Constitution of the Soviets

The Soviet is based directly upon the workers in the factories and the peasants in the fields.

Until the spring of 1818 there existed Soviets of Soldiers' Deputies. These were abolished after the demobilization of the old army at the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, when the soldiers were absorbed into the factories and the farms.

At first the delegates of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Soviets were elected according to rules which varied with the needs and population of different localities. In some villages the peasants chose one delegate for each fifty voters. Soldiers in garrison were given a certain number of delegates for each regiment, regardless of its strength; the army in the field, however, had a different method of electing their Soviets. As for the workers in the great cities, they soon found out that their Soviets became unwieldy unless the delegates were limited to one for each five hundred. In the same way, the first two all-Russian Congresses of Soviets were roughly based upon one delegate for each twenty-five thousand voters, but in fact the delegates represented constituencies of various sizes.

Until February, 1918, anybody could vote for delegates to the Soviets. Even had the bourgeois organized and demanded representation in the Soviets, they would have been given it. For example, during the regime of the Provisional Government, there was bourgeois representation in the Petrograd Soviet-a delegate of the Union of Professional Men, which comprised doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc.

Last March the constitution of the Soviets was worked out in detail and applied universally.

It restricted the franchise to---

November, 1918   33

" Citizens of the Russian Socialist Republic of both sexes who shall have completed their eighteenth year by the day of election. . .

" All who have acquired the means of living through labor that is productive and useful to society and who are members of labor unions. . . ."

Excluded from the right to vote were: employers of labor for profit; persons who lived on unearned increment; merchants and agents of private business; employees of religious communities; former members of the police and gendarmerie; the former ruling dynasty; the mentally deficient, the deaf and dumb; and those who had been punished for selfish and dishonorable misdemeanors.

As far as the peasants are concerned, each hundred peas-ants in the villages elect one representative to the Volost, or Township, Soviet. These Volost Soviets send delegates to the Uyezd, or County, Soviet, which, in turn send its delegates to the Oblast, or Provincial, Soviet; to which also are elected delegates from the Workers' Soviets in the cities.

The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, which was in operation when I was in Russia, may serve as an example of how the urban units of government function under the Socialist State.

It consisted of about 1,200 deputies, and in normal circumstances held a plenary session every two weeks. In the meantime, it elected a Central Executive Commitee of 110 members, based upon party proportionality, and this Central Executive Committee added to itself by invitation delegates from the central committees of all the political parties, from the central committees of the Professional Unions, the Factory Shop Committees, and other democratic organizations.

Besides the big City Soviet, there were also Rayon, or Ward, Soviets. These were made up of the deputies elected from each ward to the City Soviet, and administered their part of the city. Naturally, in some wards there were no factories, and therefore, normally, no representation of those wards, either in the City Soviet or in Ward Soviets of their own. But the Soviet system is extremely flexible, and if the cooks and waiters, or the street sweepers, or the courtyard servants, or the cab drivers of that ward organized and demanded representation, they were allowed delegates.

Elections of delegates are based on proportional representation, which means that the political parties are represented in exact proportion to the number of voters in the whole city. And it is political parties and program, which are voted for-not candidates. The candidates are designated by the central committees of the political parties, which can replace them by other party members. Also, the delegates are not elected for any particular term, but are subject to recall at any time.

No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will was ever invented. And this was necessary, for in time of revolution, the popular will changes with great rapidity. For example, during the first week of December, 1917, there were parades and demonstrations in favor of the

Constituent Assembly-that is to say, against the Soviet power. One of these parades was fired on by some irresponsible Red Guards, and several people killed. The reaction to this stupid violence was immmediate. Within twelve hours the complexion of the Petrograd Soviet changed. More than a dozen Bolshevik deputies were withdrawn, and replaced by Mensheviki. And it was three weeks before public sentiment subsided-before the Mensheviki were one by one retired and the Bolsheviki sent back.

The Soviet State

At least twice a year delegates are elected from all over Russia fo the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. Theoretically these delegates are chosen by direct popular election.; from the provinces, one for each one hundred and twenty-five thousand voters-from the cities, one for each twenty-five thousand; practically, however, they are usually chosen by the provincial and the urban Soviets. An extraordinary session of the Congress can be called at any time upon the initiative of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, or upon the demand of Soviets representing one-third of the working population of Russia.

This body, consisting of about two thousand delegates, meets in the capital in the form of a great Soviet, and settles upon the essentials of national policy. It elects a Central Executive Committee, like the Central Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, which invites delegates from the central' committees of all the _democratic organizations.

This augmented Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviets is the parliament of the Russian Republic. It consists of about three hundred and fifty persons. Between All-Russian Congresses it is in supreme authority, but it must not act outside the lines laid down by the last Congress, and is strictly responsible in all its acts to the next Congress.

For example, the Central Executive Committee can, and did, order that the peace-treaty with Germany be signed. But it could not make this treaty binding on Russia. Only the All-Russian Congress had power to ratify the treaty.

The Central Executive Committee elects from its midst eleven Commissars, to be chairmen of committees in charge of the different branches of Government, in place of Ministers. These Commissars can be recalled at any time. They are strictly responsible to the Central Executive Committee. The Commissars elect a chairman. Ever since the Soviet Government has been formed, this chairman-or Premier-has been Nicolai Lenin. If his leadership were unsatisfactory Lenin could be recalled at any moment by the delegation of the masses of the Russian people, or in a few weeks' time.directly by the Russian people themselves.

The chief function of the Soviets is the defense and consolidation of the Revolution. They express the political will of the masses, not only in the All-Russian Congresses, for the whole country, but also in their own localities, where their authority is practically supreme. This decentralization exists because the local Soviets create the central Gov-

34   THE L I B E R A T O R

i

ernment, and not the central Government the local Soviets. In spite of local autonomy, however, the decrees of the Central Executive Committee, and the orders of the Commissars, are valid throughout all the country, because under the Soviet Republic there are no sectional or private interests to serve, and the cause of the Revolution is everywhere the same.

Ill-informed observers, mostly from the middle-class Intelligentzia, are fond of remarking that they are in favor of the Soviets, but against the Bolsheviki. This is an absurdity. The Soviets are the most perfect organs of working-class representation, it is true, but they are also the weapons of proletarian dictatorship, to which all anti-Bolshevik par-ties are bitterly opposed. So the measure of the adherence of the people to the policy of proletarian dictatorship is not only measured by the membership of the Bolshevik party-or as it is now called, the Communist party-but also by the growth and activity of Iocal Soviets all over Russia.

The most striking example of this is among the peasants, who did not take the leadership of the Revolution, and whose primitive and almost exclusive interest in it was the confiscation of the great estates. The Soviets of Peasants' Deputies at first had practically no other function except the solution of the land question. It was the failure .of the land solution under the Coalition Government which turned the attention of the great mass of peasants to the social reasons behind this failure-that, coupled with the cease-less propaganda of the left wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary party, and of the Bolsheviki, and the return to the villages of the revolutionary soldiers.

The traditional party of the peasants is the Socialist-Revolutionary party. The great inert mass of peasants whose only interest was in their land, and who had neither fighting stamina nor political initiative, at first refused to have anything to do with the Soviets. Those peasants, however, who did participate in the Soviets, soon awoke to the idea of proletarian dictatorship. And they almost invariably joined the Left Socialist Revolutionary party, and became fighting partisans of the Soviet Government.

In the Commissariat of Agriculture in Petrograd hangs a map of Russia, sprinkled with red-headed pins. Each of these red-headed pins represents a Soviet of Peasants' Deputies. When first I saw that map, hanging in the old head-quarters of the Peasants' Soviets at 6 Fontanka, the red points were sprinkled sparsely over the vast country, nor did their numbers grow. For the first eight months of the Revolution there were volosts, uyezds, whole provinces in fact, where only one or two large towns would show a Peasants' Soviet, and perhaps a scattering of villages. After the November revolution, however, you could see all Russia redden under your eyes, as village after village, county after county, province after province, awoke and formed its Peasant Council.

At the time of the Bolshevik insurrection a Constituent Assembly with an anti-Soviet majority could be elected; one month later it would have been impossible. I saw three

All-Russian Peasant Conventions in Petrograd. The delegates arrived-the vast majority of them Right Socialist Revolutionaries. They met in session-and very stormy sessions they always were---under the presidency of conservatives of the type of Avksentiev and Peshekhanov. In a few days they would move to the left, and be dominated by pseudo-radicals like Tchernov. A few days later the majority would become very radical, and Maria Spiridonova would be elected chairman. Then the conservative minority would split off and set up a rump convention, which in a few days dwindled to nothing. And the main body would send delegates to join the Soviets at Smolny. This happened every time.

I shall never forget the Peasants' Conference which took place toward the end of November, and how Tchernov fought for control and lost it, and that wonderful procession of grizzled proletarians of the soil who marched to Smolny through the snowy streets, singing, their blood-red banner floating in the bitter wind. It was dark night. On the steps of Smolny hundreds of workingmen were waiting to receive their peasant brothers, and in the dim light the two masses, moving one down and the other up, rushed together and embraced, and wept, and cheered. .

Land Committees

The Soviets can pass decrees effecting fundamental economic changes, but these must be carried out by the local popular organizations themselves.

The confiscation and distribution of the land, for example, were left to the Peasant Land Committees.

These Land Committees were elected by the peasants at the suggestion of Prince Lvov, first Premier of the Provisional Government. Some settlement of the land question was inevitable, by which the great estates should be broken up and distributed among the peasants. Prince Lvov asked the peasants to elect Land Committees, which should not only determine their own agricultural needs, but should also survey and make a valuation of the landed estates. But when these Land Committees attempted to function, the landlords had them arrested.

When the Soviet seized the power, its first action was to promulgate the Decree of the Land. This Land Decree was not a Bolshevik project at all, but the program of the Right (or moderate) Socialist Revolutionary party, drawn up on the basis of several hundred peasant memorials. It abolished forever private title to land or to natural resources in Russia, and gave over to the Land Committees the task of apportioning the land among the peasants, until the Constituent Assembly should finally settle the question. After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the Decree was made final.

Outside of these few general propositions, and a section providing for the emigration of surplus population in congested neighborhoods, the details of confiscation and distribution were left entirely to the local Land Committees. Kalagayev, the first Commissar of Agriculture, drew up an

November, 1918   35

elaborate set of rules to guide the peasants in their action. But Lenin, in a speech before the Central Executive Committee, persuaded the Government to leave the peasants to manage the matter in a revolutionary way, merely advising the poor peasants to combine against the rich peasants. (" Let ten poor peasants oppose every rich peasant," said Lenin).

Of course no peasant could own his land, but still, he could take what land was due him and treat it as his private property. But the policy of the government, acting through the local Land Committee, is to discourage this tendency. Peasants who wish to become private landlords may do so, but they are not assisted by the Government. On the other hand, peasants who farm cooperatively are given credit, seeds, implements and modern technical training.

Attached to the Land Committees are agricultural and forestry experts. In order to coordinate the practises of the local Committees a central body is elected from them, known as the Main Land Committee, which sits in the capital, in close touch with the Commissariat of Agriculture.

Labor Unions

Labor Unions in Russia, as at present constituted, are less than twenty years old. Before the Revolution of 1905 there was very little economic organization among the workers, and that was illegal. During the Revolution of 1905 the actual paid membership in the Professional Unions was about fifty thousand, and the reaction of 1906 outlawed them utterly.

The Russian Unions are an artificial development. They were designed by intellectuals, who made a scientific study of the labor organizations in other countries, constructed on paper the ideal labor union (in this case, a combination of the French syndicats with the German trade-union system), and applied it to Russia. The Russian unions, however, are industrial unions of the broadest kind-for example, in a cannon-factory the carpenters who make the gun-carriages are rnembers of the Metal Workers Union.

In the first three months of the Revolution the member-ship of the Unions grew to more than two hundred thou-sand. Five months later the number of organized men was over a million, and two months after that more than three million were registered.

After the manner of Labor Unions everywhere, the Professional Unions undertook the routine business of working for higher wages, shorter hours and better conditipns, demanded Boards of Arbitration, and were granted representation in the Ministry of Labor of the Provisional Government.

This was not enough for Russian workers in Revolution. Although large numbers joined the Unions, still open shops existed, many workers could not see the necessity for organizing, and the struggle between the working mass and the bosses of industry was confused and deadened by the Unions.

Then, too, like the soldiers' Army Committees, the constitution of the Unions was such that their policy was con-

trolled by reactionaries, against the rapidly quickening pulse of the rank and file. Thus at the time of the Bolshevik insurrection the central Committees of the telephone workers, the postal and telegraph employees and the railwaymen were able to call strikes against the Bolsheviki in Smolny Institute, and temporarily isolate them from all Russia. . . This in spire of the revolutionary majority of the workers, who soon called conventions and reversed the policy of their outworn. Ieaders, electing new Committees.

At the present time the function of the Professional Unions is to standardize wages, hours and conditions through-out each industry, and to maintain laboratories for efficiency and labor-saving experiments. But the Professional Unions occupy a secondary role in the organization of Russian industrial workers. The precedence belongs to another organization, a product of the conditions of the Revolution themselves -the Factory Shop Committee.

Factory Shop Committees

When the March Revolution broke, the owners and administrators of many industrial plants either left or were driven out by the workers. In the Government factories, where labor had long been at the mercy of irresponsible bureaucrats appointed by the Tsar, this was particularly the case.

Without superintendents, foremen, and in many cases engineers and bookkeepers, the workers found themselves faced with the alternative of keeping the works going or of starving. A committee was elected, one delegate from each " shop" or department; this committee attempted to run the factory. . . . Of course, at first this plan seemed hopeless. The functions of the different departments could be co-ordinated in this way, but the lack of technical. training on the part of the workers produced some grotesque results.

Finally there was a committee meeting at one of the factories, where a workman arose and said: " Comrades, why do we worry? The question of technical experts is not a difficult one. Remember, the boss wasn't a technical expert; the boss didn't know engineering or chemistry or book-keeping. All he did was to own. When he wanted technical help, he hired men to do it for him. Well, now we are the boss. Let's hire engineers, bookkeepers, and so forth-to work for us!"

In the Government factories the problem was comparatively simple, since the Revolution automatically removed the " boss," and never really substituted another. But when the Factory Shop Committees spread to the privately-owned works, they were viciously fought by factory owners, most of whom were making contracts with the unions.

In the private factories, too, the shop committees were the product of necessity. After the first three months of the Revolution, during which the middle class and the proletarian organizations worked together in Utopian harmony, the industrial capitalists began to be afraid of the growing power and ambition of the workers' organizations-just as the country land-owners feared the land committees, and

36   THE LIBERATOR

the officers the soldiers' committees and Soviets. Along about the first part of June began the more or less conscious campaign of the entire bourgeoisie to halt to Revolution, and break down the democratic organizations. Beginning with the Factory Shop Committees, the industrial owners planned to make a clean sweep of everything, including the Soviets. The army was disorganized, supplies and munitions and food diverted from it, and actual positions betrayed to the Germans-like Riga; in the country the peasants were persuaded to hoard their grain, and provoked to disorders, which gave an excuse to the Cossacks to " restore peace "; and in industry, more important than all, the machinery and operation of the factories themselves were sabotaged, transportation was still further wrecked, and the coal-mines, metal-mines and sources of raw materials damaged as much as possible. Every effort was made to shut down the factories and starve the workers back into submission to the old industrial regime.

This the workers were forced to resist. The Factory Shop Committee sprang up and took charge. At first, of course, Russian workers made ludicrous mistakes, as all the world has been told again and again. They demanded impossible wages-they attempted to run complicated scientific manufacturing processes without proper experience; in some cases, even, they asked the boss to return at his own terms. But such cases are the great minority. In the majority of plants the workers were resourceful enough to be able to conrlucti the industry without bosses.

The owners attempted to falsify the books, to conceal orders; the Factory Shop Committee was forced to find out ways to control the books. The owners tried to strip the works-so the committee had to rule that nothing should go in or out of the plant without permission. When the factory was going to close down for lack of fuel, raw material, or orders, the Factory Shop Committee had to send men half across Russia to the mines, or down into the Caucasus for oil, to Crimea for cotton; and agents had to be sent out by the workers to sell the product. In the break-down of the railroads, committee agents had to make agreements with the Railwaymen's Union for transportation of freight. To guard against strike-breakers, the committee had to take over the function of hiring and discharging workers.

Thus the Factory Shop Committee was the creation of Russian anarchy, forced by necessity to learn how to manage industry, so that when the time came, the Russian workers could take over actual control with little friction.

As an instance of how the masses worked together, there is the matter of two hundred thousand poods of coal, which was taken from the bunkers of the Baltic battle fleet in December, and turned over by the sailors' committees to keep the factories of Petrograd running during the coal famine.

Obukhov Works was a steel plant manufacturing sup-plies for the Navy. The chairman of the Obukhov committee was a Russian-American, .Petrovsky by name, well known here as an anarchist. One day the foreman of the torpedo department told Petrovsky that the department would

have to close down, owing to the impossibility of procuring certain small tubes used in the manufacture of torpedoes. The tubes were manufactured by a factory across the river, whose product was contracted for three months ahead. The closing down of the torpedo department meant that four hundred men would be out of work.

" I'll get the tubes," said Petrovsky.

He went direct to the tube factory, where, instead of calling upon the manager, he sought the chairman of the local Factory Shop Committee.

" Comrade," he said, " if we don't get tubes in two days, our torpedo department will have to close down, and four hundred of the boys will be out of a job."

The chairman called for his factory's books, and discovered that some thousands of the tubes were contracted for by three private plants in the vicinity. He and Petrovsky thereupon visited these three plants, and called on the Factory Shop Committee chairmen. At two of the factories it was discovered that the tubes were not immediately needed; and next day the tubes were delivered to Obukhov works, and the torpedo department didn't shut down. . . .

In Novgorod was a textile mill. At the outbreak of the Revolution the owner said to himself, " Here's trouble coming. We won't be able to make any profits while this Revolution is on. Let's shut down the works until the thing blows over." So he shut down the works, and he and the office force, the chemists, engineers and manager, took the train for Petrograd. The next morning the workers opened the mill.

Now these workers were perhaps a little more ignorant than most workers. They knew nothing of the technical processes of manufacture, of book-keeping, or management, or selling. They elected a factory shop committee, and finding a certain amount of fuel and raw material in stock, set to work to manufacture cotton cloth.

Not knowing what was done with cotton cloth when manufactured, they first helped themselves to enough for their families. Next, some of the looms being out of order, they sent a delegate to a nearby machine-shop, saying that they would give cloth in exchange for mechanical assistance. This done, they made a deal with the local city Cooperative, to supply cloth in exchange for food. They even extended the principle of barter so far as to exchange bolts of cloth for fuel with the coal miners of Kharkov, and with the Railwaymen's Union for transportation.

But finally they glutted the local market with cotton cloth, and then they ran up against a demand which cloth could not satisfy-rent. This was in the days of the Provisional Government, when there were still landlords. Rent had to be satisfied with money. So they loaded a train with cloth and sent it, in charge of a committeeman, to Moscow. The committeeman left his train at the station, and went down the street. He came to a tailor shop, and asked if the tailor needed cloth.