14617Prator
December, 1918 15 Cents
THE BIRTH OF THE RUSSIAN SOVIET!
An eye-witness account of the
BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION
and of the founding of the first Socialist State in the world
READ
SIX RED MONTHS IN RUSSIA
By LOUISE BRYANr
Imagine! If you had been alive at the end of the 18th century what would you have given for a book describing the day-by-day drama of the great French Revolution telling how Mirabeau, Marat, Robespierre, Charlotte Corday, looked, how they acted, what they said-al. told by a first class, wide-awake unprejudiced reporter.
You who live now at a time when the great Russian Revolution, more tremendous by far than the French Revolution, is shaking a hostile world to its foundations, have the opportunity to walk with Louise Bryant through the streets of Petrograd and Moscow, to see Babushka and Kerensky in the Winter Palace, to watch the fall of the Provisional Government, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the rise of the proletariat. You can see Lenine, Trotsky, Spirodonova, Kollantai, and many others, watch them in action, hear them talk. You can get an intimate picture of the women soldiers and the ragged Red Guard Army.
ARE THE BOLSHEVIKS PRO-GERMAN? CAN AMERICA HELP RUSSIA?
IS THE SOVIET A DEMOCRACY? CAN RUSSIA HELP AMERICA? This book answers these questions
Read-SIX RED MONTHS IN RUSSIA-$2.10 Postpaid
LIBERATOR BOOK SHOP, 34 Union Square, East
December, l )18 3
TO A PAGAN POET
S ITTING in your stuffy room, Strewn with cigarette stubs And empty beer bottles,
Stale evidence of dingy carnival, You write ... in verse
More or less free,
Of "Fawns" and "Purple Grapes" And "Brown-limbed Bachantes," While the lusty wind rattles Your closed window,
Unheeded... .
Mary L. Gruening.
Simplified
Stenography
It has come to stay-simplified shorthand-just as surely as the typewriter and telephone came to stay,
Several systems are obtainable. Which is the best for you?
Here aro points acknowledged by persons who have made tests: That simplified stenography compares to the older systems as does arithmetic to trigonometry or logarithms. For all usual purposes in life, the use of arithmetic serves even baler than the algebraic methods. It is on this principle of extreme simplicity, coupled with complete practicability, that K. I. Short-hand has been produced.
In less than five hours, the average per-son can learn K. I. Shorthand, after which speed is attained by easy practice until it is possible to write as fast as a person ordinarily talks. And what more is wanted?
Apother point decidedly in favor of K. I. Shorthand is that the ]earner receives personal correspondence tuition which is valuable when acquiring speed and particularly in adapting this wonderful system to one's own vocation. One who is a writer, an architect, or a stock broker (or secretary thereof) needs different special tuition from une who is a clergyman, physician, or store manager. And so on. When one buys only a set of lessons in text books, no matter how easy, this important feature of correspondence tuition Is not obtained. As to cost, K. I. Shorthand is the most inexpensive; indeed, readers of The Liberator may obtain it without any cash expense if willing to send the names of some persons likely to enroll.
Pull information. including free proof lessons and brochure may be obtained
by writing to KING INSTITUTE 154 East 32nd Street, ED-512, New York
Purchase the
" Reconstruction Number "
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Table of Contents
THE MINIMUM OF EDUCATION
Ellen Hayes AMERICAN CO.OPERATION - ITS
FIRST NATIONAL CONVENTION
Agnes D. Warbasse THE ORIENTATION OF BRITISH
LABOR Richard Roberts
THE FARMER AND RECONSTRUC-
TION Robert J. Wheeler
WAR-TIME CONTROL OF INDUSTRY
Harry It'. Laidler HEALTH CONSERVATION AS A SO-
CIAL PROGRAM
James P. Warbasse
The I. S. S. Conference of "RECONSTRUCTION AFTER TIIE WAR." Summaries of addresses of W. P. Montague, Madeline Doty, Percy Dearmer, Katharine Anthony, S. Nuorteva, Benton Mackaye, Jessie W. Hughan, Ordway Tead, Bedros Apelian, Norman Thomas, Roswell Johnson, George Nasmyth, Morris Cohen, C. G. Hoag, Evans Clark, Richard Kitchelt and others.
Four Times a Year
Single copies Me
Annual subscription 50e
Purchase also "PUBLIC OWNERSHIP THROUGHOUT TILE WORLD," by Harry W. Laidler. 48 pp., 10 cents, and
don't forget
THE TENTH ANNUAL CONVENTION, I. S. S.,
to be held in New York City, Friday and Saturday. December 27 and 28, 1918. Convention Dinner, December 27, at
6:30. Subject:
"SOCIALISM-A
GROWING WORLD POWER"
Membership in Society $2. $5, $25 a year, open to all interested in the world wide movement toward industrial democracy. For information concerning the convention and other activities of the Society apply to
INTERCOLLEGIATE SOCIALIST SOCIETY
70 Fifth Avenue, New York City
The Liberator
Book
The first 10 issues, March to December, bound in one volume, including:
John Reed's amazing stories i of the Russian Revolution, Floyd Dell's penetrating articles on American Education, the cartoons and drawings of Boardman Robinson, Art Young, Cornelia Barns, Albert Sterner, Maurice Sterne and others,
and
vivid, illustrated reports of the three great free speech trials of the year-the I.W.W. trial, the trial of Eugene V. Debs, and the trial of our own Masses editors.
The bound volume of The Liberator is a lively, illustrated history of a remarkable period in the annals of the world.
Do you know that 17 Liberator poems have been re-printed as "2 star poems" in Braithwaite's Annual Review of Verse? And that one of our short stories is reprinted in O'Brien's Best Short Stories of the Year? '
The book, bound attractively in dark red cloth, costs-$3.00 (postpaid).
With a year's subscription to The Liberator (now $1.50, after Jan. 1, $2.00)-$4.00.
Two Christmas
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(See page 49 for order blank)
LAWN PARTY
M ATRONS, massive, Peerlessly gowned, Converse with other matrons Of varying circumferences,
On the suave and flawless lawns; Exchanging middle-aged amenities, Sprinkled with light laughter, Never too loud or too real.
They form the nucleus, solidly static, Of the encompassing confusion. Bulwarks of good form,
They seen to chaperone the very trees. Mary Gruening.
4
A Reminiscence of the Second Masses Trial
` A '
Drawn by Art Young
SEYMOUR STEDMAN, attorney for the defense, in his eloquent summing up, referred as follows to the fact that the Masses editors asked an injunction compelling the Post Office to mail the very magazine for publishing which they were later indicted:
" Do men who are committing a crime' go into a Federal Court and face a District Attorney and ask the privilege of continuing it? A strange set of burglars! A strange set of footpads! A strange set of smugglers! A strange
set of criminals! I ask Mr. Barnes to tell you when before in his experience, men in the City of New York came in and filed an appeal, opening all their proof and all their evidence and all their testimony and said, ` If the Court please, we insist on the right to continue this deep, dark, in-famous conspiracy, and have it sanctified by an advocate'%f the United States Court.' History finds no parallel that I know of in any criminal procedure which has ever taken place."
THE LIBERATOR
Vol. 1, No. 10 December, 1918
EDITORIALS
« 1 HE hour of the people has come." With these words
Karl Liebknecht greeted the thronging revolutionary workers of Germany whose power had liberated him from prison. That he was there to speak to them is proof of the truth of his words.
The hour of the people has come in Austria also, it appears, and perhaps also in Hungary. Friedrich Adler, whom Lenin referred to as " my right hand man in the Social Revolution," has been liberated from prison by the revolutionary workers in Vienna, and elected by them as their leader. Within the last two years he has written a book on the philosophy of science, and assassinated a tyrant. He too is a statesman of a new order!
In Bulgaria, even more certainly at this date (November 8th), the people are in power, a peasants' republic having already been formed, with the Bulgarian Liebknecht, Stambuliwsky, as Premier. Stambuliwsky was sentenced to Iife imprisonment for anti-military activities when the war broke. He told King Ferdinand to his face that if he wasn't careful he would have his head cut off by the people.
We read of the formation of a soviet of workmen and soldiers in Bohemia, too, and we can even imagine that the little bourgeois liberal Arcadia that was arranged to be born there, with Professor Masaryck for its father and Professor Wilson its godfather, may turn out a black sheep, and make friends with the Bolsheviki. And we speculate with pleasure upon the highly abstract patriotism that will have to be displayed by the Czecho-Slovak armies in Siberia in order to continue their war for liberty against the Red Guard, if that should be the case.
In Central Europe, the hour of the people has come.
In the Allied countries two things retard the coming of that hour, and make the duty of the Socialists and the labor parties hard to perform: One is victory. The other is Woodrow Wilson. It will be difficult indeed, in the hour of nationalistic triumph, and crowing at the fall of hostile kings, for weary men and women in the Allied countries to remember that Karl Liebknecht relies absolutely upon their fidelity to make this the hour not only of the German people but of the people of the world. And it will be difficult for them to withstand the mesmeric effect of President Wilson's liberalism and business internationalism. He has so in-
genious a talent for weaving the language of liberty, and even of industrial democracy, into his pronouncements of good capitalist policy, and he has Colonel House, whose gift is the gift of agreeing with everybody, and he has the traditions surviving in Europe that America is an extreme and romantic democracy, almost eccentric in its devotion to the equality of men-all these things add to the prestige of the mesmerist. And one still greater thing-the fact that the change he advocates, from a system of national imperialistic rivalry, begetting war, to a system of international imperial-ism, a business organization of the exploitation of the world, making peace perhaps almost permanently secure, is in very truth one of the great events of history. It is the crowning achievement of the age of business efficiency. And so many of the simple human ideals that are beautiful naturally attach to it, that a severe revolutionary intelligence is required to perceive its essential nature, and not confuse it with the achievement of human liberty or international democracy.
The League of Nations
It seems almost certain, upon psychological as well as historical grounds, that a League of Nations will make inter-national wars less frequent. It will make the world more orderly, and a fitter dwelling-place for intelligence. But we need not deceive ourselves that this is the essential reason why such a league will be established. It will be established because it will make the world more productive. It will increase the wealth of those who possess wealth. The League of Nations is good business. It is but an expression in the political sphere of something that has already happened in the business sphere. Business has become international. Capital is internationally owned. It is inevitable that an international state should be formed, to express and defend its interests. At the same time war has become destructive beyond the bounds of safe speculation even for nationalistic capital, and so the chief opposition to a guaranteed peace is removed. Only the dull and the unprogressive in the business and political community are opposed to the League of Nations. I think we can say that it is the next natural step in the development of capitalism.
Professor John Dewey, the most knowing of those who
r
6 THE LIBERATOR
are satisfied with capitalism as a basis for democracy, in advocating a League of Nations, has these true words to say of it:
It means that a system of ideas and activities which expresses contemporary industry and commerce is being substituted for the ancient system which ignored and despised business and magnified the ethics and politics of dignity, honor, aggression, and defense. It is no accident that the formulation of the new order came from this country, which by the fortune of history and geography escaped most completely from the ethics of maintaining a status of established dignity, and which has committed itself most completely to the ethics of industry and exchange."
Other things, of course, can be said about the League of Nations, things both interesting ,and true, but in relating it to the problem of progress toward democracy this is the important thing. " A system of ideas which expresses con-temporary commerce and industry " is to be substituted for the old " glory " system. The ethics of business is to be the international ethics.
I believe that we can carry this truth farther into the concrete by saying that the League of Nations will be a gigantic commercial, industrial and financial trust. Its con-trolling motive is similar to that which begot the trusts; its achievement will be similar. The trusts were formed in order to put an end to a suicidal competition between individuals or small groups of business men within the nation. The League is to be formed in order to put an end to a competition that has become suicidal between nations, or large groups of business men expressing themselves through political forms. So we must understand it, and so mould our attitude towards it-we who consider the ethics of contemporary business sufficiently arrived at and ready to be outgrown.
In the conclusion of his article (published in The Dial for November 2nd) Professor Dewey remarks that, " given such an agency of international regulation, defined and authorized by the Peace Conference itself, and there exists in effect a new and international type of government. Can anyone believe that once such an agency were in existence it would not inevitably tend to be employed for all sorts of new purposes not expressly contemplated in its original constitution?"
There is no doubt that it would be so employed ; and many of these purposes would be humane and reasonable, and ex-press justice as between nations. And yet, for one who is determining its relation to democratic progress, these humane and reasonable ones would not be the most important of its incidental uses. The most important would be the use suggested by Lord Bryce when he pointed to the problem now existing in Russia as one which the League of Nations would he quickly able to solve. What exists today in Russia is a first experimental attempt of the wage-workers and the poor farmers of a whole nation to arrange the business of the
nation in such a way that it will feed, clothe and make happy and make free all of the people. The experiment has been to an amazing degree successful, to an amazing degree orderly and merciful. This can be read between the lines even of the violently antagonistic and slanderous news despatches which alone are given to the press about Russia. Thus the " problem " presented here is the typical problem of a future supposed to be consecrated to the safety of the growth of democracy. And the way in which a League of Nations would solve that problem can be approximately inferred from the present conduct of the leading nations who will compose the League. Germany, France, England, Japan and the United States arc invading Russia with a view to stimulating the business classes there to overthrow the government of the workers and the poorer peasants-an immense majority-and establish a monarchy or a business republic. And they are not only invading the country with armed forces, but they are conducting all over the face of the world, from the Arctic circles into the heart of Africa, a systematic, organized, exclusive and completely controlled campaign of libel against the government of Russia and against the men who have been elected to conduct it.
The condition of the newspapers and the pulpits and the theatres and the organs of government throughout the world, in their relation to revolutionary Russia, is an exact reproduction of their condition in any city in which a successful industrial union strike occurs. And we who knew Lenin and Trotsky and Gorky and Spiridonova, either by personal or political association, long before this condition arose, feel today exactly as we felt when we used to return from Paterson, New jersey, after a day with the devoted leaders of that great strike in the silk-works, and then read the bloody and monstrous tales of them in all the great newspapers of New York and New Jersey. We knew that the institutions which " express contemporary industry and commerce " were engaged and committed, by forces of obscure and unchangeable instinct, to break that strike. And we know that the League of Nations, great imaginative deed of statesmanship though it is, will be engaged and committed to put down revolution and oppress the forces that move towards industrial democracy in no matter what part of the world they appear. The League of Nations will be the most gigantic strike-breaking agency that the ethics of contemporary industry could conceive. Its power unresisted would ensure the world against Socialism.
The Socialist republics will hardly be able to prevent the formation of a League of Commercial Nations, any more than they were able to prevent the formation of trusts. They may have to welcome it-as one welcomes the battle-array of an enemy-but at least they will not be deceived, or wheedled, or mesmerized by the rhetoric of soft-headed idealists into believing that its internationalism is socialistic, or its democracy industrial, or its freedom free.
The League of Nations will be a Capitalist International. We must meet it, and prepare to fight it over the whole
December, 1918 7
width of the world, with a new and more vigorous and more sophisticated and more audacious Socialist and Labor Inter-national. And our Socialist and Labor International must assemble and begin work on the day that the commercial nations gather at the council table. It is a mistake to demand representation at their council. The Soviets will have none. We must hold our own council, and, with the help of Russia and what other nations may with good luck establish the Republic of Labor, make our council more important than theirs. It is our task to make the world democratic before they make it safe.
A Warning
I ONCE had the social pleasure of explaining to Colonel
House the principles of revolutionary socialism, emphasizing especially the doctrine of the class struggle. He confessed, when I was done, that they were practically his principles. The conversation passed to international matters, and I expressed my dread of the influence of Arthur James Balfour, who had just come over to arrange things with the President.
" 0, you needn't worry," said the Colonel, " I know him well. He's one of us." I had no answer. Colonel House is so charming-and so good. I give the incident, however, as a warning to those who imagine that the world can he saved for democracy by fine feeling.
About Solidarity
F ROM The Labor Defender for November 15th,
I
quote the leading editorial, entitled " "IThe Future I. W. W.":
More constructive propaganda.
No more talk about sabotage.
More democracy in the General Administration, by
means of special departments for special work. Systematic organization work, and job control. More toleration toward non-I. W. W. organiza-
tions, i. e., Socialists, Anarchists and Trade
Unions.
A greater and better I. W. W. press.
An educational auxiliary to work in harmony with the Industrial Unions.
Higher dues and the establishment of Strike and Defense funds.
Short strikes, and better organized machinery for the conducting of strikes.
Technical education, and the enrollment of executives as honorary members without voice or vote in business meetings unless by special permission.
Closer international affiliation.
A better understanding of the Social Vision, as per Preamble of the I. W. W.
The paragraph, "more toleration toward other organizations," suggests that the 1. W. W. has learned an important lesson from events. It is to be hoped that the other organizations have learned the same lesson, and have made the same good resolution toward the I. W. W. I am sure that if the author of that editorial had heard Eugene Debs, with a twenty-year prison sentence over his head, addressing a jury of hard-shell, respectable, retired merchants and rich farmers, pay an entirely gratuitous and sympathetic tribute to the I. W. W., he would be encouraged to feel that the generosity and good sense is not all on one side. I would like to sec the Non-Partisan League mentioned also in this connection.
The social revolution in Europe, following substantially the same form thus far in each country, has scrapped all sorts of theoretical squabbles-and among them the most barren, that between advocates of " political " and " direct " action. It is plainly evident that the industrial parliament is the essential organ of the revolution, that it naturally numbers among its members leaders of the left wing of the political parliament, who have done great work through their position there, and continue to do so until the political form is sloughed off by the industrial, and the revolution reveals its true nature as a dictatorship of the proletariat. Therefore there is no further excuse for intolerance between those whose present activities (and gifts) are industrial, and those whose activities and gifts are political or educational.
It is also plainly evident that some people who lack revolutionary imagination possess revolutionary courage. Many who are Menshevik so long as they are not confronted by actual facts, go through in complete loyalty to the working-class wherever a concrete issue is drawn. Others who fill abstract treatises with extreme revolutionism in the serene days of theory, take flight into patriotism when the hour of reality comes.
Therefore the line cannot be clearly drawn long in advance against persons, or organizations, whose creed is fundamentally revolutionary.
It can only be drawn against the ideas of " social patriot-ism," " moderate socialism," coalition, or pleading for bourgeois recognition, and against those individuals whose acts or sayings definitely align them with these ideas in opposition to the revolutionary power that is to be horn. Against those individuals, after what has passed in Europe, our intolerance can have no hounds.
Upton Sinclair
THERE is a moment at which Upton Sinclair can come back into the Socialist movement, leaving us convinced that a reasoned belief about the relation between autocracy and political democracy in the evolution of capital-ism was the cause of his withdrawal. The moment is now.
His assertion that the Masses editors-and Eugene Debs and Rose Pastor Stokes too-have been " irritated and nagged " by legal prosecutions " into a state of continual op-
8 THE LIBERATOR
position . . . to an Administration that is doing its best to carry out their ideals in the world! " is about as uncomplimentary to our characters and our minds as it could be. But we will forgive him that, if he himself shows the clarity of mind and force of character to break with the economic and emotional forces that surround him, now tliat his original reason for joining them is removed.
A Gradual Recovery
W ILLIAM MARION REEDY still suffers from the dementia bellicosa nationalis, but the derangement of his splendid faculties is less pervasive than it was. He is able to admire the cover of the LIBERATOR! He is even able to quote without adverse comment long paragraphs from us, and from Nicolai Lenin, before the frenzy comes on. And the quotations last longer, and actually seem to interest Reedy more, than his own unimaginative newspaper rant about Lenin's betraying the Russian people for German gold.
It would be helpful if we could get Reedy thinking about Maxim Gorky - " whose genius and intellectual probity are the honor of European literature," to quote Romain Rolland. After holding off and mercilessly criticizing the Bolsheviks for twelve months, because of differences of revolutionary philosophy and method, Gorky joined the government last spring in the high and intimate post of chief of the bureau of propaganda. \Von't some-body in St. Louis ask Reedy if he really believes Maxim Gorky is a tool or a dupe of mercenary traitors to the Russian people? It might moderate his symptoms, at any rate, to think about Gorky for a while.
A Vote of Censure
I HAVE been much criticized by patriots of the new Czecho-Slovak Republic for speaking in uncomplimentary terms of the behavior of their armies in Siberia. I am told that at the instigation of one of these patriots " one hundred and fifty artists " in the Salmagundi Club adopted unanimously a vote of censure against me on account of what I said. It is a terrible thing to be censured by one hundred and fifty artists-for a work of art. But to be censured for a political opinion, and without even a perusal by the artists of the article in which the opinion was expressed, is not, I confess, devastating to my self-respect.
It is my earnest desire, however, to correct any impression my words may have conveyed of nationalistic prejudice against the Czecho-Slovaks. I honor their culture and their hopes. I rejoice in their liberation from the Hapsburg dynasty. I wish them a greater liberation. I gladly recognize, moreover, that significant numbers of their soldiers, and not a few of their officers, have gone over to the Bolsheviks, and are fighting on the side of freedom in Siberia. Reading the news as intelligently as I can, I am firmly convinced that a majority of the citizens of the Czecho-Slovak Republic are of my opinion as to the justice of what their
armies are doing-or being done with-in Siberia, and not of the opinion of the artists in the Salmagundi Club. The future will tell.
Some Simple Truth
A 1VIID all the dull wash of slander and malicious hypocrisy and thoughtless, credulous nonsense that floods the journals of the world about conditions in Russia, it is hard to find any way to wisdom. I recommend first of all, as most simple, direct and self-proving of what it asserts, Louise Bryant's book-" Six Red Months in Russia." Louise Bryant was in the very inside of the Bolshevik movement, both in Petrograd and Moscow, as things in her 'book abundantly and interestingly prove. And she retained a calm, natural, human and American heart and judgment about what she saw and experienced. If you are somewhat natural and a little American, too, you feel in reading her book as if you were over there yourself. And you stay as long as she will let you!
,Just Democracy ON the very day President Wilson announced that "every-
thing for which America fought has been accomplished," and " it will now be our fortunate duty to assist by example . . . in the establishment of just democracy throughout the world," his Attorney General announced that the censorship of information and opinion under the amended espionage law, instead of being relaxed, would be tightened throughout the period of settlement. No more open violation of " just democracy " than this censorship has existed in any democratic country since the American revolution.
THE LIBERATOR
A Journal of Revolutionary Progress
Editors, Max Eastman
Crystal Eastman
Associate Editor, Floyd Dell Business Manager, Margaret Lane
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS :
Cornelia Barns, Howard Brubaker, K. R. Chamberlain, Hugo Gellert, Arturo Giovannitti, Charles T. Hallinan, Helen Keller, Robert Minor, Boardman Robinson, Alexander Trachtenberg, Louis Untermeyer, Art Young.
Published monthly and copyright 1918, by the
LIBERATOR PUBLISHING CO., Inc.
$4 Union Square, East New York
Yearly subscription $1:50 (outside the U. S. $2.00). Single copies 15c. After Jan. 1, 1919, the price will be-yearly subscription $2.00 (outside the U. S. $2.50). Single copies 20c. hates on bundle orders and to newsdealers on application.
Application for entry as second-class matter at the post-office
at New York City pending.
9
"Aw-Shut up! This is a Free Country!"
MAKING EVERYTHING CLEAR
T HE net result up to date of Wilson's correspondence with the Teutons has been to cause dissension in Germany, to weaken their military defense, to hasten the dissolution of Austria, to strengthen democratic sentiment among our allies, to save some evacuated towns from destruction and to modify the U-boat war.
T O THERWISE Roosevelt and Lodge are right; it was a mistake. HE Kaiser generously offered the last drop of German, Austrian, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Turkish blood in defense of Alsace-Lorraine, but Bulgaria held out a drop or two on. him.
ROOSEVELT'S Montana speech makes everything nice and clear. If the Nonpartisan League wants the Colonel's support in its fight against oppression, all it has to do is to move to Armenia.
MAJOR GENERAL MAURICE says that the Allies should center now upon victory rather than vengeance. If the armies will give us victory, vengeance may safely be left to the New York Tribune.
I T now appears that Ambassador Gerard has got his Maxes mixed. He put his O. K. on Prince Max of Baden under the supposition that he was the same Max as Prince Max of Saxony.
C HANCELLOR MAX seems to enjoy high favor among the southern German kings and princes and dinky little dukes, but otherwise is about as popular as the Spanish influenza.
T HAT Long Island girl whose auto killed two men and injured two others is making bad use of her talents. She ought to be running a tank.
A CLOSE student of the Armour reports has discovered that after all the race is to the Swift.
6tGERMAN Defense Has Stiffened Overnight," ad-
mits the New York Times. This is not a pro-German sentiment; almost anything would have stiffened in those cool October nights.
D G ERMANY is moving toward responsible government; Austria is coming apart and Poland is coming together. OES everything change except the United States Senate? HOWARD BRUBAKER.
The seventh Tier Soviet
By Roger N. Baldwin
On Oct. 8th, Roger Baldwin, Director of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, refusing to comply with his summons for physical examination, gave himself up to the authorities cos a deliberate violator of the draft act. On Oct. 3oth he appeared before Judge Mayer, and in a brief statement, remarkable for intellectual clarity as well as warm human faith, set forth his position as a conscientious objector to all wars and to every form of conscription an absolutist. He is now serving one year's imprisonment in the Newark penitentiary. This sketch was written for THE LIBERATOR during the weeks Roger Baldwin spent in the Tombs awaiting trial. "I feel myself just one protest in a great revolt surging up from among the people-the struggle of the masses against the rule of the world by the few," he told the Court. "Their protest is my protest. Mine is a personal protest at a particular law, but it is backed by all the aspirations and ideals of the struggle for a world freed of our manifold slar'eries and tyrannies."
10
1 F ARLY morning on the federal tier-the seventh story
of the iron cages of the Tombs. The rattle of heavy keys in grated doors, opening for our two hours' exercise; the bustle of prison help up and down the corridors with tins of breakfast " coffee," half sour bread and sodden mush ; the ringing announcement of " barber on seventh "; the white-coated waiter from the prison restaurant taking orders for real food from those with real money.
And then the forty or fifty of us " federals " tramping up and down in Iittle groups along the narrow corridor between cell bars and gratings. We are a mixed lot these days of federalization-when theft from railroad, telephone or telegraph property is a federal crime, and stealing khaki as against black goods brings you to Uncle Sam instead of Father Knickerbocker, But only a few of us steal for a living. We are for the most part aristocrats in crime, " war criminals " whose offenses range from too much patriotism to too little.
Wearing uniforms when you shouldn't, selling drugs to soldiers, registering too frequently in the draft-too much patriotism; talking against the war, the government or Eng-Iand, or neglecting the draft-too little patriotism. One of us is a man of Irish-German parentage held for seditious re-marks (when drunk), and doubtless to be convicted on his birth certificate. Another, a British Socialist, a sailor with international socialism resplendently tattooed all over chest and arms, waiting to do eighteen months for bringing over a letter on his person (in violation of the international postal regulations). A young Hindu-graduate of the University of Calcutta with a scholarship at Harvard-is held under $25,000 hail for nine months still without trial, for advocating the freeing of India from British rule. Four Bolsheviks of the East Side await transportation to Atlanta to serve twenty-year sentences-their crime, circulating hand-bills attacking the President for military intervention in Russia. (And the Republican leaders still out of jail.) Two brothers-self-styled gangsters, heroes of a hundred crimes-let us in to the inner life of a world known before only through the movies.
Two or three groups detach themselves from the morning parade. They edge into my cell-and the daily meeting of the seventh tier Soviet is on.
" Found a new kind of hug last .night-six kinds in all," announces one of the Bolsheviks.
" Well, the old original is still with me," quoth I, lifting the two sets of blankets off the wire spring bunk. " One of you fellows get the bed-bug gun, and let's shoot these blankets. I used to think I knew something about prisons and jails. Been in dozens of them as an investigator and visitor. But no one can really know what prison means until he's been in himself. It's the difference between looking at a show, and real life. I used to think prisons could be re-formed "
" Aw, to hell wid de reformers," says Tony, the gangster, settling down on the bed for a smoke, " They was the woist bunch we ever had. All the guys was against them. The Mitchel crowd was just for show-to see how good they could make things look. They never got down to the men. Take Osborne at Sing Sing. He was different. He let the men run the place. Every guy was on the square. But no prison don't help nobody. It makes more crooks. Look at us. i1'Iost of us young fellers-and see all them kids down-stairs, sixteen to twenty-one-and one of them in short pants, don't look over twelve. Well, what you don't know when you get in you learn before you get out."
" I tell you," says the little Bolshevik, in Russian-Yiddish accent, brushing back a mop of long hair and adjusting tortoise shell spectacles, " if the object of prison is betterment of human beings it is a failure. If it is to protect property, it may be some success. But every year it eats up and makes useless thousands of youth all over theworld. The only way is to abolish prisons altogether. For people who are dopes or weak-minded, hospitals are enough. But no punishment anywhere, only cure. Russia will abolish them. And Russian prisons are not so bad as American. There we had fresh air, outside windows, food from outside and visits at our cells. We did not pay, pay, pay all the time as here, for everything we need. Here it is all graft. You can
December, 1918 11
break all the rules if you pay the keepers, and you get nothing if you don't. Yesterday the head keeper "
" It is not the graft," interrupted the young Hindu revolutionist, in eager broken English. " It is the-monotonytwenty hours in the cell day after day-it kills the soul, the spirit. You cannot concentrate. You cannot read long. No exercise, no fresh air-the mind, the soul dies. But you will have prisons many years. The great struggle will come now after the war-many more will go to prison for political offenses, for labor troubles. Peace will be only a white-man peace. The imperialists will still rule to exploit the non-white races. The conflicts will keep the prisons full. As long as there is conflict in society, there will be prisoners." This with the finality of a challenge to the Bolsheviks and dreamers.
I take up the cudgels, groping for something " practical." Well, there are a lot of reforms that could be made so that prisons would be hospitals. The main trouble is not the prisons, but the criminal law. The idea of punishment is at the bottom of it. But the great crime is poverty. Rich folks don't often get caught, and when they do, everything is fixed for them, bail, lawyers, appeals, politics and even the news-papers. Lack of bail is what keeps this place full. All here are poor. And they are just about Iike the folks outside. Those in here are just the ones that happened to get caught. You could swop 'em for an equal number outside picked off the streets at random-and society would be no worse or better. Even take Tony and his gang. They are crooks, and proud of it-guilty of everything in the code from murder down, and yet I leave it to you all if there are smarter, squarer or better-hearted fellows here. There are thousands of gangsters in New York and the police never get but a few. Prison doesn't cure gangs.
Tony, who had been translating into his own language (which is unprintable-and here edited), got up, on fire. " You've got de idea. The gangs is jist natural. They are all over New York. That's the way every few blocks gits organized. They fight each other-and they fight the police. And the police are just as big crooks as the gangs. Yes, and the reformers can't change them from the top. They was the same under Mitchel-except the highbrows at the top. Locking up the gangsters don't stop nothin'. I tell you how to fix it. Have the whole city organized into neighborhoods. Each one pick its own leader, see. The leaders get together and make the rules and settles the trouble. You won't need no police then. Everybody would be in on it. The regular fellows everybody agrees on would run things-not the cops."
" Say, what's this?" puts in Bolshevik No. 2, from the doorway. " New York divided up into Soviet gangs? I did not know you are so ready for revolution! "
" Well, Tony's right," I decide. " You can't control organized crime from on top. Only the gang itself can change its purpose. Give them a chance for another purpose is Tony's idea. That's good democratic dope. And you've got to do the same with individuals who go wrong. Give
them the chance to change their habits-prison never does that. Reforming courts and prisons can't do it. Here in New York after years of reform and work for children, there are almost a hundred kids under twenty in here now -treated like crooks, learning crookedness. Nothing but a new system outside will ever keep them out. We manufacture them now regularly as part of the present system. They ale part of the tribute we pay to a world run for money."
" There you 'ave it. There you 'ave it-just as I was telling you! " cries the British sailor, excitedly waving an arm tattooed with socialism. " It's all greed, greed. Prisons is just a blasted device of the capitalist system to keep the poor in their places. And the big crooks never gets in. 'Ere's this war for democracy, and never a blasted bit will we get till we've turned the capitalists out. Look 'ow they do 'em. 'Ere's this bloody soldier," pointing to a lad by the door in overseas uniform, " gassed and near dead, sick as a dog now, and they locks 'nn up 'ere the first day back. That's all they cares for those who fight for 'em."
Tony jumps up again from the bunk for a speech, kicking over the wooden stool-the sole article of cell furniture. " Say, I thought you Bolshevikki and Socialists was a bunch of stiffs. But you got the right idea. When I do this bit, I'm going out on the soap-box and talk to the regular guys. Youse are for us-I'll get my gang for youse "
The gong rings for locking up.
" Look here a minute, all of you," and our Bolsheviki friend of the long locks draws out of his pocket a slip of paper. " Our comrade who died this week-the police beat him up, and he had heart trouble-the prison doctor neglected him-he left this little unfinished note in the cell while we were at court. We never saw him again."
We all bent over it .
" Farewell, comrades," it read. " When you appear be-fore the court, I will be with you no more. But struggle on, without fear. Fight bravely. I grieve to leave you; but this is life itself. Comrades, after your long suffering "
" All in!" called the keeper, jangling the big keys. " The next stop is West Philadelphia."
To a Black Soldier Fallen in
the War
O EARTH, lie light upon him Deep pillowed on thy breast; 0 Winds, blow soft above him And gently lull to rest.
O questioning Heart, be silent, Allay the bitter cry-
" Why should he thus perish? Why, for freedom, die?"
Mary 13urrill.
12 The War Labor Board
• F VERY revolution in modern history has been ushered in
by a revolt on the part of the middle class. One great function of this class is to serve as a barrier to the torrent of revolution either by damning it absolutely or by letting it trickle through in such measure as to keep the flood within control. But when it too, becomes oppressed, and turns against the established order, Revolution finds its opportunity. And this is true, I suspect, quite as much of industrial as of political revolutions.
It is the cant of daily conversation that we are in an age of upheaval, that " nothing will be the same after the war," that " a silent revolution is taking place within this country." If this is true, it is the agencies of the present regime which are initiating the change.
Ask any business man you meet what is the most revolutionary institution in the present 'Wilson administration and ten to one he will answer, " The National War Labor Board." To him it is just plain revolutionary, a " bunch of Bolsheviks," because it raises wages, shortens hours, protects trades union organization, and even institutes unions of a kind where none existed before. Good Socialists and revolutionists will distrust any middle class institution, even when it comes bearing the gifts which they eagerly receive. And they are right. The War Labor Board has certainly not been revolutionary in intent. It proclaimed only the intention of " increasing production, and preserving industrial peace " to the end that the war against Germany might be more speedily and thoroughly won. Nothing revolutionary in this, not even anything which aims at improving the condition of the working class! But some of the things which the Board has been forced to do in order to achieve these worthy objects have been of an' almost revolutionary character.
For example, if I were to run over to the steel mills of Bethlehem, Pa., to-morrow, I could see the workers of a bit-ter labor-hating corporation voting by secret ballot, on " company rime," for a shop committee of trade unionists nominated by the union. I could see union organizers taking mefnberships in their respective internationals just outside the gates. I could see the elected representatives of the men actually passing through that sacred door which leads into the office of the general manager, there to make their wage demands officially and in person. This in a city where a few months ago the police department, acting under orders from the Mayor, vice-president of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, forbade the use of any hall in the city for a union meeting!
Or if I were to go to the office of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, another famous anti-union corporation, I could witness the employment of men who a few weeks ago were discharged and blacklisted for belonging to a labor union. And I should perhaps see these same amen, standing
unmolested about the company's property, soliciting member-ships in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers.
Or if I made a well-timed visit to Wheeling, West Virginia, I could see a committee of two workers, elected by the men, actually telling the company whether or not it might order its employees to work overtime.
I don't pretend that committees make a revolution. But I am sure that a revolution needs committees. And I like to think that I see in these officially instituted shop committees new types of organization which are destined to invigorate and alter the sluggish and smuggish American labor movement.
On paper, the principles and policies of the Board, drawn up by duly appointed representatives of employers and workers, make the smoothest compromise imaginable. Each side is surrendering a right here in return for a privilege there until the scale balances to a hair. Labor surrenders the right to declare the closed union shop; so, of course, capital surrenders the right to declare the closed non-union .shop. Labor is granted the right to associate itself into labor unions, and in return for this it concedes to the employer the right to join manufacturers' associations and the like, an act of generosity for which it will surely go down in history. Again, the two sides are alike granted the right to bargain collectively through chosen representatives, which is to say that the workers, if permitted to delegate power to elected committees, will not interpose the slightest objection to their employers' delegating power to Boards of Directors, Executive Committees and General Managers. Or again, labor admits that capital should have a fair and just return on the money invested, so mutatis mutandis capital grants that the laborer should receive a wage sufficient to support himself and his wifeiand family in health and reasonable comfort. The tit for tat is perfect. It is all fair, just, reasonable, equitable and patriotic.
There is one compromise in all this give and take that particularly deserves to be noticed. The worker is granted the right to join the union of his trade (provided everything is done peaceably and without coercion) in return for the dr_laration which the employers most of all desire-that they should not be obliged to recognize or deal with any union not recognized before the war. In• other words, the workers may form unions provided the unions are guaranteed useless. On paper this provision is, on the whole, a victory for the employers. The workers may join unions as clubs, fraternities or lodges. They may not join them as unions. So far as I am concerned, says the employer, these unions do not exist. Very satisfactory-but the joker turns up later.
There is one more of these compromises, the most splendid of all, that must be mentioned. Some representative of the employers, while the Board's principles were being drawn up, observed that, although he refused to have any dealings
December. 1918 13
" You're
with labor unions, he would be quite willing to meet with representatives of his own men. And some one else on the Board, perhaps joint-Chairman Frank P. Walsh, took him at his word. That observation has made more trouble for anti-union employers than anything else the Board has done. It was this provision for collective bargaining with the employees themselves that made possible the shop elections at Bethlehem. It was this that turned the previously mentioned compromise concerning the free and functionless labor union into the most powerful weapon labor acquired during the war, as will appear presently.
But what can a poor employer do? Can he state over his signature that he believes in paying the worker a wage less than sufficient to support his wife and family in health and reasonable comfort? In this day, when democracy is every-where in the air and in the newspapers, can he refuse to meet his own employees to discuss their grievances? Hardly. But it is a great deal to have persuaded him to agree to these fair and just and reasonable principles in black and white. For then he can perhaps be obliged to live up to them. After all, the joint chairmen of the Board were compelled to write awards in accordance with the Board's principles and policies; to have reversed them in the Board's decisions would have been to assume that the employer members did not mean what they said. So when certain employees of the Western Union Telegraph Company represented to the Board that they had been discharged solely for membership in a union, there was but one thing to do, and Mr. Taft and Mr. Walsh did it loyally. They recommended, in accordance with the principles of the joint agreement between labor and capital, that the men be rein-stated. True, the employer members of the Board voted against the recommendation. But that did not absolve the
a Liar!"
joint chairmen from applying the principles. And then, when the Western Union company defied the recommendation, and thus threatened to provoke a strike, there was but one thing for the President of the United States to do. And he did it. He took over, through the exercise of his executive power, the Western Union Telegraph Company in the name of the United States Government, and through the Postmaster General issued orders for the reinstatement of the discharged men.
All this as a result of committing men to fair-sounding abstract principles!
But, of course, it was not abstract principles alone that put teeth in the decisions of the War Labor Board. Things don't happen in that way. The teeth were in reality the teeth of organized labor. Beneath the fine show of mutual confidence and accommodation there was always the knowledge that labor, if it were nourishing a sense of unfair treatment, had the power to tie up the war programme of the country. The employers knew it, the government knew it, labor knew it. And a strike is a terribly fluid thing. It baffles the military mind and the military technique. If an employer goes on strike it is easy to seize his plant. A squad of soldiers can do it, because the plant cannot run away. But send a squad or a regiment of soldiers to force strikers back to work and things are very different. Strikers can run away. Moreover, they can run in different directions. To keep men at work by sheer force would require nearly as many soldiers as workers. This obvious truth has not pre-vented our military authorities from urging and actually planning measures of the kind. But it happened that the men in control of the government's labor policy were too intelligent for such suicidal tactics.
And they had experienced one first-rate scare to convince
14 THE LIBERATOR
them of the wisdom of velvet glove methods. William L. Hutcheson, president of the carpenters' international, raised the spectre of labor's power when he called a strike of his men on the ship yards and publicly defied the government day after day. This, coming from one of the most conservative unions in the country, looked menacing. A few thousand men who happened to hold a monopoly of a certain article that the government needed were able, it appeared, to stop the whole economic process of the war. It is true that the carpenters subsided and went back to work after President Wilson sent his stinging letter to Hutcheson. But formally they did not submit and did not capitulate. On the surface it was a defeat for the men. But it was a defeat more valuable than many victories. Revolts of the workers cannot forever be quelled by stinging letters. Labor, if sufficiently goaded, has a weapon more stinging than a type-writer, indeed even more convincing than a gun. It became necessary to " co-operate " with labor. So the government presently outlined its sweeping labor policy, and the walking delegate was invited to put his feet under the table with the captains of industry. Labor, with Mr. Walsh's help, cashed in its chips of potential power.
But this wits not enough. The government dared not rest when it had persuaded the unions to be good. It found it actually could not get along without them. The war was a wholesale problem. It had to be handled, so far as possible, through central agencies. Mr. Baker, being a modern business man, saw the economy of signing a contract with one official of a union instead of trying to sign a thousand contracts with the individual carpenters on his cantonments. Other government servants, and finally even the business men on the Board, gradually came to see this truism of business. Where a trade union exists there is always the possibility of a speedy and permanent agreement. Where there is no union there is chaos. If the workers of America had really wished to obstruct the war programme, they could not have done it better than by accepting the advice of certain employers and disbanding their unions. Labor organized did indeed invite trouble. But labor unorganized invited catastrophe.
So it came about that the V4Tar Labor Board protected unionism, encouraged unionism, and actually instituted union-ism where none existed before. For to institute collective bargaining between the employer and his men it is necessary to institute shop unions. If the workers in an industry elect a shop committee to represent them, they take on a corporate function. If they agree to act together in accepting a wage bargain, they agree by implication to act together in rejecting it. And even though they promise not to strike during the war they may later present their bill with accrued interest.
This is what the employers did not see when they so eagerly offered to meet " their own men " in order to keep the walking delegate at a distance.
No one can say very confidently how things will go after the war. But this is the way it works at present. There is an inclusive, somewhat inchoate " shop union " composed
of all the men and women employed in the plant, and it exists for the sake of the shop committee which it elects. Within this industrial union there flourish several tight craft unions, free to do all lawful things so long as they do not seek recognition for themselves. What happens? The very thing that an employer would have foreseen had he been penetrating enough to understand that a labor union is not an institution, but an organism: the tight craft unions seize the Ieadership of the shop. Precisely because the shop union is inchoate it cannot direct itself. Inevitably it follows the leadership of those who have proved themselves leaders. On each floor of the shop there is one plan who is known for his aggressiveness and independence. Ten to one, if there is any union there at all, he is in it. He can command the solid majority of his union brothers; the vote of the other workers sprawls all over the shop. If but one worker in ten is a union man, you can be pretty sure of a majority of unionists on the shop committees. These men have the habit of working together. They have the habit of taking orders from their international office. So the " walking delegate " presently appears on the scene. In the union office, across the street from the plant, he directs the whole campaign, passes upon debatable points, outlines the wage demands. His organizers are taking new membership applications just outside the shop, or hiring halls for union meetings. The non-union workers flock into the craft organizations, which rapidly. approach one hundred per cent.
This is inevitable, provided the principles of the Board are faithfully observed. An inchoate body must articulate itself. It is bound to seek a backbone, a brain, a voice, a set of arms and legs, and all the other organs which a live organ-ism needs. In doing so it will follow the line of least resistance. And the line of least resistance in this case is to agglomerate about the skeleton craft unions already there.
In Bethlehem there were some 6,ooo union men out of some 27,000 workers. The shop committees are almost solidly union. In Bridgeport there were perhaps 7,000 unionists out of 6o,ooo workers, and most of the union men were on strike when the elections were held. But the handful of union men still at work furnished a large percentage of the delegates elected. And when these delegates, the majority of them non-unionists, finally came to elect a central committee of three, they chose the three union leaders who had been the most vehement in the strike.
It is this phenomenon which, it seems to me, is likely to mark the work of the War Labor Board as something of permanent importance in the history of the American labor movement. That it has raised the wages of fully a million wage-earners directly and perhaps twice that number indirectly; that it has pounded the concept of the living wage into the head of the nation; that it has given public recognition to the principle of equal pay for equal work, and with reasonable diligence enforced a decent status for women; that it has placed a considerable weight of influence on the side of the basic eight-hour day and has materially shortened the daily labor of many thousands of workers-these are gifts which are admirable in themselves and rather to be
December, 1918 15
expected of a benevolently disposed government, but liable to contain a dangerous narcotic for the workers who receive them. That the Board should have forced certain conspicuous labor-hating employers to eat dirt and reinstate men discharged for union membership; that it should have broken down the opposition to unionism in several large corporations; that it should have been directly instrumental in in-creasing the membership of the established international unions by 200,000 or more in the six months of its existence -these are things which might have been gained by fighting, if there had been no Board. It is a tenable theory that they would be more precious to labor as prizes of combat than as prizes of good conduct. But, on the whole, I am glad to see these things come to labor as speedily as possible. The work of getting higher wages and building stronger unions is only preliminary, and I for one like to see it accomplished with as little fuss and fireworks as possible. The proper business of the labor movement is not to protect it-self against recurrent injustice; it is to seize and administer the capital wealth of the earth.
A Lawrence strike or a passionate mob revolt against the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company must stir the blood and make the heart heat faster. But the thrill of it cannot nearly equal the depression of it... Such things should not be. Eighteenth century feudalism like that in Colorado must, of course, be cleared away, but it is disheartening to have to wait for the world to catch up with itself. What makes my mental eye gleam is to see, as I fancy I see in the work of the War Labor Board, the creation of some machinery by means of which the solid work of the twentieth century labor movement will be done. When I see the beginning of an industrial union being organized at Bethlehem, I fancy I see a good steel sword being forged for labor's right hand. And when, as in Wheeling, I see the workers' committee deciding the length of the work-day from time to time, I am sure I am witnessing some things not dreamt of in the old A. F. of L. philosophy. It is one thing to claim a share of your employer's money; it is quite another thing to tell him, in certain matters, how he shall run his shop. And this is just what the shop committee of today is coming to. It is taking a kindergarten lesson in proletarian administration of production.
But this is not all. In grasping the shop union the old A. F. of L. organizations have grasped industrial unionism, denounced by many of the .conservative labor leaders for two years past as an invention of the Kaiser. For the unions which the War Labor Board has organized for the purposes of collective bargaining in Bethlehem, in Pittsfield, in Bridge-port, in Waynesboro, are industrial and nothing else. A machinist, a carpenter and an electrician vote together for the same shop committee delegate to represent them. They do different work, but they have the same boss. Reason enough! What comes next? In a few months these shop committees, or a central shop committee, will be bargaining for wages, perhaps with their eve on a war melon lying on the " undivided surplus " shelf. But how shall this melon lie subdi-
sided as between the crafts? Shall the carpenters get a larger percentage of increase than the machinists? Shall the skilled he permitted to use their monopoly value to defraud the unskilled? Such matters are likely to go up to international headquarters, and the various craft headquarters had better come to an understanding with each other. For, whether they like it or not, the power which they have in this industry is that of an industrial union! Let them once turn to fighting each other as crafts and this power vanishes.
The old unions, when they face this situation, will he facing the structure of the new world. For here, within the harmless-seeming collective bargains of the War Labor Board, are both industrial and craft unionism, the warp and the woof of the coming society. If the workers can solve the problem in a single industry, say in Bethlehem, then they can go on to greater and greater achievements. If not, the new world is not yet. They must learn by concrete experience how necessary both elements are if labor is ever to rule. Industrial unionism cuts squarely across craft union-ism, true. But it is precisely because the warp runs at right angles to the woof that the fabric holds firm.
And one thing more. The employers have not accepted the decisions of the Board willingly. They have expressed their horror, sometimes with a pretense of good grace, and sometimes with a yowl of pain. But they have explained to themselves that the decisions of the Board were made possible only by the shortage of labor. They are counting on the time when three million soldiers shall return to claim the jobs of the men now joining the unions. If these men were to he thrown on the labor market all at once, without governmental control or restriction, the unions would lose in six months more than they have gained in three years. Powerful forces in Bourbon Washington are at Work. It is only too probable that the workers may see what it is not to have a government of their own in power to protect them.
H. M.
OUT OF WHITE LIPS
®UT of white lips a question: Shall seven million dead ask for their blood a little land for the living wives and children, a little land for the living brothers and sisters?
Out of white lips:-Shall they have only air that sweeps. round the earth for the breath of their nostrils and no footing on the dirt of the earth for their battle-drabbed, battle-soaked shoes?
Out of white lips:-Is the red in the flag the blood of a free man on a piece of land his own or is it the red of a sheep slit in the throat for mutton?
Out of white lips a white pain murmurs: Who shall have land? Him who has stood ankle deep in the blood of his comrades, in the red trenches dug in the land?
Carl Sandburg.
16
Russia in
I N a play of Tolstoi's now running in a New York
theatre there is a scene laid in the corridor outside a court-room. A man about to enter is stopped by the attendant.
" Are not trials open to the public?" the man asks in surprise.
" Who are you? " demands the attendant.
" I am the public."
" Then you can't get in."
The corridor outside the federal courts in the old post-office building here in New York is rather like that some-times. It is particularly hard to get into a court-room when people are being tried for violating the Espionage Law. If somebody in authority doesn't like your looks, you stay out in 'the corridor. Nevertheless, the corridor is a place where one may hear, in the interludes, interesting comments on the solemnities within.
" Why, they are just children!"
" The police say they didn't beat them! Listen: I saw a man who had been arrested along with them, and ` questioned,' and finally let go. He had been beaten-he showed me. I didn't understand how anyone could he beaten up the way he was and Iive. . . . He? Oh, he had nothing to do with these people. He just happened to be standing in front of their house when the police made the raid, and they took him along. . . ."
" One of them didn't live."
"Yes, Schwartz. The day after they were arrested, I saw a girl who knew Schwartz; I told her about the beatings. She covered her eyes and cried, Oh, are they heating him, too? He can't stand it! It, will kill him!'
" Have you seen Schwartz's last letter? Here is a copy. The original is in Yiddish. ' Farewell, comrades. When you appear before the court I will be with you no longer. Struggle without fear, fight bravely. I am sorry I have to leave you. But this is life itself. After your long martyrdom, comrades. . . . He did not finish the sentence."
It was a trial under the Espionage Act. Seven young Russians had been arrested charged with distributing hand-bills on the East Side denouncing intervention in Russia. Six of them were on trial-Mollie Steimer, Jacob Abrams, Samuel Lipman, Hyman Lachnowsky, Hyman Rosansky, and Gabriel Prober. The seventh, Jacob Schwartz, was dead.
" The theory of the defense," a clergyman was explaining to someone, " is that these people were within their rights in protesting against intervention in Russia, and in criticising
America
President Wilson. The defendants' lawyer, Harry Weinberger, will undertake to show that all the statements made in the handbills are strictly true. He will put in evidence President Wilson's statements and promises concerning Russia. He will point out that intervention contravenes these statements and violates these promises. He will also go into the question of the truth of the reasons given for intervention. . . . Raymond Robins is to be called as a witness this afternoon. He was in Russia as the head of the American Red Cross Mission, knows the truth about the Bolsheviki and is said to have proof that the Creel documents are forgeries."
A newspaper reporter, the next day: " The Robins testimony? My paper would only print a paragraph about it, but I have almost the whole thing here, typed out, want to see it? " These are the questions Major Robins was asked:
" Did you have a letter from Ambassador Francis, authorizing you to represent the United States as an intermediary between Mr. Francis and the Bolshevik government?
" Did you ever have in your possession some of the documents published by Mr. Sisson, known as the Sisson Documents?
Did you investigate those documents, and did you reach the conclusion that they were false?
" If your name was signed to the telegram sending those documents to the United States, was that name signed with your permission or by your direction?
" Did you show these documents to Mr. Sisson, and did not he agree with you that they were forgeries?
" Didn't you go officially to the Kerensky Cabinet, in respect to some of these documents, and did they not admit to you that the documents were forged and unreliable?
" Is it not true that the Soviet Government, particularly before the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, asked you to bring about an understanding with the Allies, with a view of continuing the war, on the part of the Soviets against Germany, on condition of material aid, and that was to consist of transportation, instructors for the army, materials and food?
" Have you not a protocol or document to that effect in your possession?
" Was not that protocol drawn in your office as a conversation between you and Mr. Trotzky, and was not that put in the form of queries put forward by the Bolsheviki Government to the United States?
" Isn't it true that the Russian Government never received a reply through you or from the Allies or from the United States in any way in answer to those queries?
" Haven't you been told by officials in Washington, that that offer was received by the Government of the United States and never made public?
17
" Will Raymond Robins Please Come Out ? "
" Who was the public official or public officials who told you that?
" As far as you know, was any answer ever made by the United States to the offer of co-operation by the Bolsheviki Government against the Germans?
" Don't you know that the Soviets offered to put the rail-roads under the control of the Americans, so that no material of any kind could get into? Germany?
" Was not a similar offer made to the English and French, to put the railroads under control of the Allies?
" In the case of England, did not the Soviets offer to put the Black Sea fleet in the hands of the British navy so as to save it from the Germans?
" In the case of the French, did not the Soviets offer to trust the reorganization of the Red Army to the French officers to enable them to continue the fight against Germany?
" Isn't it a fact that the French and Belgian Ambassadors and the Czech-Slovak leaders agreed that they were to he transported by the Bolsheviki through Siberia and then shipped from Vladivostok to the Western front, and isn't it a fact that these promises were made to your knowledge?
" Isn't it a fact that the French and Belgian Ambassadors and the Soviet Government agreed to arm, equip and feed
and transport these Czecho-Slovaks to Siberia-or through Siberia to Vladivostok, and then they were to be trans-ported to the Western front?
" Isn't it a fact that a promise was made by the French and the Belgian Ambassadors and by the Czecho-Slovak leaders that they were going to go straight to Vladivostok, and from there to the Western front, and would not stay in Siberia or in Russia?
" Isn't it a fact that there is absolutely no evidence that there were any armed German or Austrian war prisoners operating in Siberia as alleged by the American statement on intervention?
" Isn't it true that at the request of Mr. Trotsky, the members of the American and British Military Missions made a trip to investigate the situation in Siberia, and they made a report that Austrian and German armed prisoners were not in control of the Bolsheviki forces in Russia? "
An innocent bystander: " But where are the answers to all those questions? "
" There weren't any answers. The judge instructed the witness not to answer."
18 THE LIBERATOR
" Of course the jury will find them guilty; you see-they're foreigners. Their accent-the way they wear their hair-the way they gesture when they are on the witness stand-all that is against them."
si " They let one off-the lucky stiff! All the rest found guilty."
" What will they get?"
" Abrams said he got three months in Russia for doing the same thing."
"And Karl Liebknecht got four years in Germany for trying to overthrow the Kaiser and set up a republic." " It all depends on the judge. . ."
" I don't think you understand judge Clayton," a school teacher was saying, while we waited for news of the sentence. " I've been watching him very closely all through the trial, and I think I know pretty well what he's like. To him this case is quite simple; the defendants distributed those hand-bills, and so they are guilty-he really doesn't see what affairs in Russia have to do with it. But at the same time I don't think he considers the offense a grave one. He is a good-natured old Southern gentleman, proud of his position. and a little testy sometimes'in behalf of its ' dignity ' when attorneys are fractious, but after all a man who tempera-mentally dislikes the fuss and tedium of a court-room as much as any of us do. He thinks this case has been unnecessarily prolonged; he could have settled the matter in ten minutes. He regards people of the defendants' views as fools-that's plain enough. But what he would like is to give them a scolding and thirty days in the workhouse to learn better sense. . . . You don't think so? But re-member how he has taken the case all along-how he has made use of every opportunity to lighten it up. I don't think a man who had in mind sending those boys and that girl to prison for a long term of years, would have joked with the jury, quoted ' The Mikado,' and entertained the audience with scraps of his own autobiography from time to time. Especially I don't think he would have questioned the defendants in the way he did, asked them if they hadn't ever thought of going out West and doing real work on a farm, showed so plainly his general contempt for their opinions. No, he couldn't do that sort of thing if he were going to give them the limit!"
"Listen! "
Someone was screaming in the court-room. The door opened, and a woman was led out. It was the aunt of Lip-man. She had just heard the sentence-twenty years, and $i,ooo fine.
Abrams, twenty years, and $i,ooo fine.
Lochnowsky, twenty years, and $1,ooo fine. Rosansky-because he was said to have given information
to the Government-only three years, and $i,ooo fine. Mollie Steimer-fifteen years, and $t,ooo fine.
From the newspapers: " As Judge Henry D. Clayton read the successive sentences, the assembled radicals turned wide eyes to one another. It was as if they could not believe their own ears. . . . The prisoners themselves heard the verdict with apparent nonchalance." (Tribune).
" Each of the defendants was interrupted as it seemed likely he would launch into a speech. . . . Jacob Abrams, the first of the defendants to have his say, remarked: ` If it is really a crime to stand up for the people you love, if to believe in ideals is criminal, then I'm glad to be a criminal."
` I'm glad you got that out of your system,' remarked Judge Clayton dryly." (Globe).
" And when Abrams cried proudly: ` I do not ask for mercy-'
" ` That makes my task somewhat easier,' was the comment of Judge Clayton.
" Mollie Steimer had spoken only a few words when the judge interrupted.
" ` I'm not going to permit you to make a soap-box oration, Mollie,' he said." (Globe).
" It was not the prisoners who occupied the spotlight at the end of their own trial. It was Judge Henry D. Clayton, of Alabama." (Tribune).
" Judge Clayton . . . . launched into a two-hour address which frequently threw the court into gusts of laugh-ter." (Globe).
" In long, rolling sentences, Judge Clayton thundered forth his contempt for ' those miserable Anarchists who speak from soap-boxes.' " (Tribune).
" Judge Clayton's address, in which he affirmed the constitutionality of the Espionage Law, abounded in references to the speeches of President Cleveland, Shakespeare, classic writers, and in references to his own career as a district attorney and judge in Alabama, Texas, and elsewhere."
(Globe).
" ` They call others non-producers, parasites,' continued Judge Clayton. 'I asked each one what he had produced. Not one of them had produced even one potato.' " (Globe).
Twenty years in prison for calling President Wilson a " hypocrite"?
Or-twenty years in prison for being a Russian and believing in the new Russia?
The first is a grave enough crime in our democracy-the crime of disrespect for constituted authority. But it is not so great as the crime of disrespect of capitalism. Roosevelt can call the President worse names than "hypocrite "; he can call him " insincere," " meaningless," " mischievous," and say that his war policy " borders on treachery," and still stay out of prison; for he does not, like these rash offenders. blaspheme against private property.
Another Russian, Samuel Nikition, has just been sentenced in the 'Magistrates' Court to six months in the workhouse, after being beaten up by a crowd in a theater because he
December, 1918 19
refused to buy a Liberty Bond. He was accused of saying: "To hell with Liberty Bonds; to hell with America"; this he denied, and the charge was not proved. We quote the words of Judge Francis X. Mancusco in sentencing him:
THE COURT: Nikition, you have been in this country, ac-cording to your own statement, two and a half years or close to three years. This country has given you every opportunity that it gives to free men. You have enjoyed the liberty and the opportunities given by this country even probably better than a citizen. You are getting six dollars a day, which is perhaps many times more than you could ever earn in the country where you came from. Notwithstanding the fact that you are getting these opportunities and benefits from this country, when you were asked to buy a Liberty Bond you condemned the country and refused to buy it. Don't you think you owe something to this country?
THE DEFENDANT: I do.
Tell COURT: That is the way in which you appreciate its
bounteous gifts by saying, " To hell with Liberty Bonds; to hell with America." I am surprised that the people in the theatre permitted you to come out at all. They should have taken you and lynched you right then and there. If anybody was brought before me on a charge of that kind, I would send them away with the commendation of the Court. Workhouse, six months. (Court record).
Russia! They hate you and wish to destroy you. They hate you because they fear you. And so they wreak hysterical and savage vengeance upon the poorest and weakest of your children.
THE LIBERATOR will be glad to receive funds with which to appeal the case of Mollie Steimer and her fellow defendants, or for bail pending such appeal. 'We believe there are those in America who will wish to show in this way their friendship for Russia and the quality of their own Americanism.
The Italian Workers and 'I!-the War
Carlo
EUROPE is swept today from one end to the other by an irresistible and purifying revolutionary spirit, which
will triumph over hate and greed and create social justice.
The proletariat of Italy is aroused, alert and vigilant. When the " social democracies " of the old world were furling the red flag of the class struggle to raise the yellow flag of class harmony towards the sun, the proletariat of Italy remained steadfast at post, almost alone, but faithful to the principle of "no compromise." The bourgeoisie there-upon seduced the leaders. The Socialists' faith reposed in Benito Mussolini, the editor of L'elvanti, the brilliant daily organ of the " Official Socialist party " (Partito Socialista Uffrciale), and the syndicalists had centered around Alceste De Ambris, the demogogue of pungent and facile phrases, who is now reported to be in America on a governmental mission. -
Mussolini had assumed the Jacobin pose, popular with the masses; time after time in the columns of L'dvanti or on the platform his voice thundered like that of Blanqui. De Ambris had successfully revivified the ranks of ti1e organized workers, attacking conservative unionism 'and leading the young, daring, fighting syndicalist organization.
Mussolini and De Ambris resolutely opposed war-but when it was the Italo-Turkish War. At the very beginning of the European conflict De Ambris became a " turncoat." On the occasion of Italy's entrance into the war he donned a military uniform, and, although he never went to the front, he " fought heroically " to carry with him the " Italian Syndicalist Union " (Unione Syndicaliste Italiana), but they abandoned him to his destiny. Mussolini, however, remained
Tresca
at his post for a short period and contributed considerably to maintaining Italy's one year of neutrality. But he, too, soon joined the war party, resigned from L'Avanti, and within twenty-four hours founded a new daily paper, Il Popolo. He admitted that 500,000 francs were donated to him for this purpose by the Italian bourgeoisie. The Socialist party membership was shocked. The change was too abrupt. But the party remained unreconciled to the war and the government.
To appreciate the attitude of the Italian Socialist party, the Syndicalist Union and also the general Confederation of Labor, representing as they do the class conscious workers of Italy, it is necessary to bear in mind the treachery of these two men. The Stokeses, Wallings and Spargos of America are doctrinaires without followers; they were never identified with the masses, who ignore their existence. But De Ambris and Mussolini were thoroughly identified with the working class. They fought in the greatest labor struggles, they served faithfully and sincerely for many years, and the workers had loved and appreciated them. But when the moment of a supreme test came and the two leaders turned their backs upon their organizations, the workers of Italy compelled them to surrender to the bourgeoisie as two generals stripped of their. armies.
It is a mistake to speak of a " coalition government " in Italy, even with Bissolati, Bonotni, Canepa and others in power. These men are considered Socialists by many in America, although they left the party long before the war.
20 THE LIBERATOR
But, in order to justify their participation in the government as representatives of the people, their followers organized the
Unione Socialiste Italiana," which was poorly represented at the Inter-Allied Socialist Conference of London, and was there denied the right to vote. This so-called Socialist organization is comparable with the "American Alliance for Labor and Democracy." ,
In spite of this, the Official Socialist party continues to represent the mass of the Italian workers, both numerically and in spirit. It shares the leadership with the Syndicalist Union, whose most active organizers are either in prison or interned like Armando Borghi. But the organization's work continues silently and successfully. During the war the Syndicalists have doubled their membership, reaching the 200,000 mark at present. Their attitude towards the war remains unchanged and they are devoted to the rebuilding of the international.l
*
When the Italian government was preparing the country for war every student of world politics asked, " Will there be a revolution in Italy? " The workers were actually ready. One year before the proclamation of the war against Austria the workers had declared a general strike against the Italo-Tripolitan War. For over a week Italy was swept by the flames of revolt and the Republic was proclaimed in many cities. If in 1915, as in the year prior, the same cohesion of radical groups had existed and a leader like Malatesta had appeared, another story might have been written. The desertions of Mussolini from the Socialists, De Ambris and Masotta from the syndicalists, Tancredi and Rigier from the anarchists, created enough temporary confusion, discouragement and indecision among the masses to give the government the advantage at the psychological moment. But revolution was greatly feared a year later, just prior to the military disaster of Caporetto. In America this disaster was discussed widely, and the capitalist press unanimously fixed the responsibility upon " Socialist defeatists." In Italy it is generally accepted, however, that the causes were principally of a military nature. In December, 191.5, a large number of soldiers were allowed home on leave. But it is admitted by the Italian government that a large number refused to return, and in consequence and to avoid a repetition, further leave of absence was denied, forcing the soldiers to remain at the battle front for two years without relief. The soldiers naturally became tired, and the military command attempted to revive their exhausted spirits with rapid and repeated attacks of a political rather than military significance. In the secret discussions of the Chamber of Deputies it was proven that officers had encouraged the combatants by promising peace after the attack. Another psychological factor must also be considered in a thorough understanding of Caporetto. Italy as a nation felt herself
One of the reasons given by the official Socialist Party for declining to participate in the last Interallied Labor Conference was be-cause it was called at the request of Samuel Campers, whom they consider opposed to the principles, tactics and ideals of International Socialism.
neglected by her allies at that time. The newspapers had openly expressed this feeling and editorially had made covert threats of separate peace with Austria. Undoubtedly the Socialist opposition contributed in part. But it may be possible (though here we cannot, of course, express ourselves freely) that a reason for Caporetto could be found in the fact that an impending revolution was thereby checked.
We are not discussing revolution here in an academic sense. Minister Nitti, speaking in the Chamber of Deputies before Caporetto pleaded on behalf of the government with the Socialists to abandon the idea of a revolution in Italy at this time.
With the enemy on Italian soil, the government, urged on by the reactionary bourgeoisie, the military party and the " Socialist nationalists," attempted coercive methods against the radicals. Constantine Lazzari, an old communist and now secretary of the Socialist party, was tried and convicted of treason and sentenced to two years. Menotti Serrati, present editor of L'llvanti, was tried as " accessory before the fact " in connection with the revolt in Turino, where workers fought on barricades for a week, and regiments of Alpini and Bersaglieri, sent to quell the disturbance, joined the revolt. In these trials the strength of the Italian workers was again revealed. Serrati, who faced the military court with the utmost courage, was sentenced to only three years in prison, and continues from his cell, "No. 48" (which is also ,his pen name), to edit L'Avanti.2 The government obviously feared to go too far with him because the Official Socialist party Congress of Bologna re-affirmed their confidence in him and applauded his extremist attitude.
The depressed spirits of the bourgeoisie were relieved slightly after Caporetto when Filippo Turati, the leader of the Socialist Parliamentary group of forty-two deputies, made a flowery speech in which he weepingly declared he would sacrifice his Socialist principles for the safety of the country! His fellow Socialist deputies applauded him, but L'al vanti and the party protested vehemently. Dissension grew, and the government hoped to see its strongest opposition divided. The question of a Governmental Committee on Reconstruction aggravated this dissension. This committee was organized on a large scale, and men of every party were invited to join, including De Ambris, Mussolini, etc. The Parliamentary Socialist group and the leaders of the Con-federation 'of Labor accepted the invitation promptly. But L'zlvanti as promptly objected from the viewpoint of an uncompromising working class party. It contended that to participate in such a committee would not only violate party tactics and lend a friendly hand to the government responsible for the war, but it would be a virtual " whitewashing " of Mussolini, De Ambris and company.
:When Congressman La Guardia debated with Scott Nearing he asserted that " L'Avanti " had been proven guilty of accepting "German gold." As a matter of fact, " L'Avanti " insisted upon a public accounting compelled by law, from every newspaper. The proposition was strongly opposed by all the capitalist papers, so that " L'Avanti " remains the only paper in Italy actually willing to have a thorough investigation of its nuances.
December, 1918 21!
Turati took exception to the rigidity of the party's discipline. The capitalist press applauded him warmly and the government attempted to assist him by forbidding the Congress of the party called to discuss the matter. After a vigorous protest by the party, the government acceded, and the Congress met in Bologna in September, 1918. The " extremists " triumphed, with 14,015 votes in favor of a motion by Salvadori, criticizing the Socialist Parliamentary groups for their weak and vacillating attitude after Caporetto. The motion by Tiratoschi for the " moderates " received only 2,507 votes. (The Socialist party is much stronger, however, than these figures indicate, since it carries with it nearly 500,000 votes.) As a consequence of L'As,anti's agitation and this motion, the Socialist deputies, with the exception of Turati, resigned from Minister Orlando's " Committee on Reconstruction."
The same question was discussed within the range of the Confederation of Labor with similar results. Their leaders also resigned.
Thus the latest attempt in Italy to produce compromise between the classes was foiled by the ever vigilant vanguard of labor.
In connection with the problem of reconstruction, L'Avanti said: " We have our programme of reconstruction and it is advisable to insist upon its application." This programme was formulated in the Convention of Milano in 1917 and included numerous social reforms similar to those promulgated in London at the Inter-Allied Labor Conferences. But there had unobtrusively been inserted into this reconstruction programme a paragraph in which the necessity for a republic in Italy as a basis of all reform was affirmed.
Turati, who wrote the original resolution of the Milan Convention, now claims that the word Republic was added by someone else. But the magic word Republic has now been discussed with increasing animation for many days. The word Republic symbolizes a state of mind throughout Italy. The workers, who have postponed the revolution, first because of the desertion of some leaders, and second be-cause of the invasion of the country, do not want further postponement of the dream of Mazzini and Garabaldi-a united Republic of Italy!
SOLDIER-MOTHER
S HE used to knit things for him-His stockings, shirts and all-And as she worked she always sang When he was small.
She's busy now with knitting-
She took it up last spring;
She's making things for him, but now
She doesn't sing.
Hazel Hall.
THE CHALLENGER
I SHALL give you the keys to the gates of the four winds, To the temple of the sun. The ocean arches
Will fall,
The night will crumble.
Cities of men will lie, puny toys, to your hand.
In the palpitant earth
In the clashing of waters
Crying in the quenchless skies Rises your will.
Red, a leaping fire;
Cold, a sword.
Am I a god that you worship?
A lover, that you pant toward me? Am I death, whose lap is slumber? You do not know me.
In the void you seek,
In the furtive darkness,
In pain, glory, adventure.
I cast time behind me, the rind of the fruit.
I go naked and happy To the fearless peaks, The brooding.
You do not see
The night of the womb.
You do not hear
The voice of the lightning.
You do not clasp The body of war.
I shall bring you to the gates of the four winds. I shall open to you the temple of the sun.
Babette Deutsch.
WE WILL GO DOWN TO CORINTH
D EAR, we have built no altars, Nor sown the green hillside With votive roses carven, And haughty towers enskied.
Let them return at twilightl-We will not be afraid
To meet the gods of Hellas, By never a stone betrayed!
Let them rise up at dew-fall
From out the Aegean Sea, Lovely and white and gleaming-
Foam-given again, and free!
With vine leaves and with myrtle, And never a tower begun,
We will go down to Corinth, Forgetting Babylon!
Leslie Nelson Jennings.
22
November Seventh, 1918
A Speech in Commemoration of the Founding of the Soviet Republic in Russia
By Max Eastman
C OMRADES and friends, this meeting is called to celebrate two of the greatest events in all the history of mankind. It is the anniversary of the achievement of social revolution in the Empire of Russia, and it is the date of the dawn of social revolution in the Empire of Germany. Today the German fleet is in the hands of the revolutionary working-class, and the red flag flies at Kiel. Tomorrow the army. Then Berlin and the old empire!
And we are not only met to celebrate the establishment of the Socialist republics, but we arc met to demand that the capitalist republic of the United States keep its hands off those republics.
The war is over now, and there is no excuse left. We want our soldiers who are invading the territory of the Russian Soviets under the command of a Japanese general, in order to make the world safe for English, French, American and Japanese capital, called off.
And we want our army of libellers and scandalmongers, who are vilifying the name of the Russian Soviets through-out the width of the world, under the command of an unreliable yellow journalist, George Creel, called off.
George Creel boasts that he has the full backing of the United States Government in sending out documents purporting to prove that the leaders of the Russian Soviets are pro-German agents and traitors to democracy. But what is there in the behavior of the United States Government since this war began to show that it knows how to estimate the character and motives of revolutionary Socialists?
George Creel had also the full hacking of the United States Government in sending out documents purporting to prove that the leaders of the Socialist party and the I. W. W. in this country were pro-German agents and traitors to democracy. I read one of these documents, and I know that it was the deliberate lie of the man who wrote it. What reason is there for Socialists to believe better of the Sisson documents? They prove that the United States Government has the same opinion of Lenine and Trotsky that it has of Eugene V. Debs and Bill Haywood, and that is all they prove, and the opinion rests upon the same basis of fact, namely, that these men were loyal in the utmost extremity to the interests of the international working-class.
When the Sisson documents fell rather flat, a more plausible scheme was devised for discrediing the government of Russia. A bloody and indiscriminate " Reign of Terror " was devised, and Lenine and Trotsky were denounced throughout the nations of the world as outlaws and whole-
sale murderers. This scheme is more plausible because it rests upon a certain basis of fact. It is no doubt true that ,a number of people have been officially put to death for conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet Government and assassinate its leaders. A report through Amsterdam, giving the official organ of the Bolshevik Government as its authority, says that the exact number since August is 68.
It is also no doubt true that a number of people have been unofficially put to death by mobs of the Russian people for the same crime, although we are assured by the British envoy, Lockhart, that Lenine is using every effort to bring such things to an end.
Sometimes when I read the New York papers I am al-most convinced that they may be taking as many lives over there in this way as one in every four days. And one in every four days is the number of people that are lynched, burned, tortured or strangled to death by mobs in the United States as a regular routine part of our civilization in times of peace.
Whatever reign of terror exists in Russia today, and whatever extreme measures may have been taken by the Russian Government to protect itself against conspiracies, are the direct inevitable result of the invasion of Russia by foreign armies-an invasion whose commonly expressed purpose is to stir up among the Russian classes conspiracies to overthrow that Government.
I want you to imagine what would happen in this country if an imperial "Kaiserdom was invading our territory from the south, and five imperial republics were sending expeditionary forces down through Canada, all of them opposed to our form of government, all with the open purpose of overthrowing it, and if at the same time thousands of seditious Americans were plotting to assassinate the President and dynamite the Houses of Congress. Would not Woodrow Wilson declare martial law all over this land in a hurry, and would not its execution be more prompt than discriminate? And martial law is the respectable name for a reign of terror.
If they give Eugene Debs ten years in the penitentiary for intellectually disagreeing with the policies of President Wilson on a public platform, what would they give Theodore Roosevelt if they caught him- in a back cellar in Washington with a bomb in his pocket for the assassination of the President, and a knife to stick in the bowels of the Post-master General? That is exactly the situation in Russia. I venture to say that considering the comparative serious-
December, 1918
ness of the crimes being committed, there is a more unscrupulous reign of terror in this country at this moment than there is in Russia.
Withdraw the invading armies and leave the Russian people free to develop their own destiny as they must, and not one-millionth part of the blood will be shed by them in the cause of liberty that these armies are shedding now in the cause of capitalism.
I understand that they maintain in the District Attorney's office and the courts that it is unlawful to denounce the invasion of Russia by Woodrow Wilson. I maintain that it is unlawful for Woodrow Wilson to invade Russia. Just before I came here I was regaling myself with that delightful old romance, the Constitution of the United States. And I notice that the constitution locates the power to declare war in the representatives of the people. And it nowhere delegates to the executive branch of the Government the right to ship citizens out of the country, and half way round the earth, to wage war on a foreign power without a declaration of war by the representatives of the people. I am told by a distinguished lawyer in this community that President Wilson is waging his own private and personal war on the Government of Russia, in direct violation of the spirit, and even of the letter, of the United States Constitution.
There is one thing that this war has done in this country -it has killed the Constitution. It has deeply destroyed the force and honor of its provisions which guaranteed liberty and'the rights of man. And what are we going to do about this? Are we going to try to pump new life and new blood and meaning of liberty into that old document? We are going to leave it lying among the honorable dead, and go forward to the day of power when we will establish a new constitution with new life and a new meaning of liberty. And the essential principle of that constitution, as of the constitution of Russia, will be this, that no man or woman is a citizen entitled to vote, who does not live upon the income of his own labor.
A hundred years ago throughout the countries that were called democratic there was a property qualification for the franchise. Only those men could vote who lived, in part at least, upon the profits of capital. With the growth of the conditions of democracy 'that system was broken down, and by the end of the last century almost all men, and even women, were entitled to vote, both those who lived upon the wages of Iabor and those who lived upon the profits of capital. And now the next step-the twentieth century-there has been established in Russia a labor qualification for the franchise, and only those men and women are entitled to vote who do not live upon the profits of capital, but live by the actual service of their hands and brains.
In that change of sovereignty is expressed and ensured the death of all caste and privilege and the birth of industrial democracy-the greatest revolution and creative political act in the history of mankind. And to that change we must. go deliberately and doggedly forward, if we are ever again to awaken liberty, and make true in this country, as our
23
comrades are making true in Europe, the words of Karl Liebknecht to those millions of revolutionary workers whose strong hands had opened his prison doors, "The day of the people is come ! "
I was thinking of this meeting as I walked in the happy streets today. I was thinking that we here tonight must pledge our hearts and hands that before we die these pavements of old New York will again be thronging with the joy of the people, and it will he a joy that lasts longer than a day. We will hear the same horns, and the voices, and the streets will be flying with banners, because the men and women who walk in them have come into possession of the sources of joy forever.
suns of the Times
T HE thing that confuses Samuel Gompers at these great European conferences, is that the words " Socialist " and " labor " are continually hyphenated-used almost inter-changeably to describe the same forces. This confusion he finds bad enough in England, worse in France and absolutely complete in Italy.
Two recent events indicate that this understanding and co-operation between the industrial and political movements of the working class, which is the strength of European Socialism, is beginning at last in America. Miners and lumbermen have been striking in the Northwest to demand the release of political prisoners, not merely the I. W. W., but Eugene Deb:, Rose Stokes and the other convicted Socialists. And the striking machinists of Bridgeport, when they were forced to yield to the War Labor Board's decree in September, organized an American Labor Party " for the express purpose of exercising their political rights as an instrument of industrial emancipation thus paving the way for an autonomous Industrial Republic (shop control in the factories, mines, mills and other establishments wherein workers are employed)."
The " American Labor Party " is only two months old, and it did not elect any of its candidates to office. Perhaps before the next election it will discover the Socialist Party.
C. E.
THE OFFICE BUILDING
W E kissed there in the stone entrance, In the great cool stone mouth of the building,
Before it took you.
We kissed under the granite arches. And then you turned and were gone
And high about and above were the hard
towered walls,
The terrible weights of stone, relentless, But for the moment they had been kind to us,
Folding us with arms
While we kissed.
Helen Hoyt.
24
Recent Impressions of Russia
Verbatim Report of a Conversation with Albert Rhys Williams
Drawn by art Young
Albert Rhys Williams
MR. WILLIAMS: No, I don't think they need the excuse today of wiping out German influence in Russia. It is wiping out the Bolsheviks, and no excuse is necessary. They are talking about taking the army over there after peace is made.
MRS. STOKES : There " ain't going to be no peace."
MR. WILLIAMS: Not if Lenin is right. Lenin says we have entered upon an era of wars that will last fifteen years -wars and the social revolution. And Lenin is a great prophet among the Bolsheviki. They always say, " We vote against him in the secret conferences, and then we find he is right. Lenin insisted that the first thing to do was to get Kerensky and arrest him. We said No, and of course he was right as usual."
Q. Did you see this portrait? Does this look like him?
A. That makes him look like a wolf. He looks more like a nice bourgeois-the mayor of a small French city. He does not impress you very much at first. He is stocky, rather inclined a little bit to be robust, but gives the impression of solid strength; always talks with his face right up near you; the most courteous man I think I ever met in my Iife--and, of course, his enemies call him the most vitriglic. I presented him when I first came, at the time of the uprising, with my credentials from the Socialist party. He
Note-Albert Rhys Williams, war correspondent, author of "In the Claws of the German Eagle," returned from Russia in the early autumn as an authorized messenger to the American people from Lenin and the Soviet Government
kept them for about an hour, and gave them back to me but wouldn't give me a pass on the basis of them.
The second experience I had with him was in Michaelovsky Manege, when he was making a speech from the top of an armored car. When he finished he asked me to speak to the crowd. He talks English very well, and he said, " I will be your interpreter." " It is not necessary," I said, " I will try it in Russian." And so I tried in Russian, and whenever I floundered he would throw me up a word. Well, from that time on I began to have a pleasant relationship with the man, and he got interested in my learning the language.
The next time I had a little talk with him was at the Constituent Assembly, and he was rather bored with the whole thing, and, instead of trying to urge me to work for the cause, he began to ask how I was getting along with the language. He became excited about it-got himself all worked up, in fact, about my learning Russian. That shows how human and sympathetic he is. He had the simplest and most ingenious devices for learning it, too. I remember his saying, " Don't talk with any Americans. It won't do you any good anyway!" He always had a little touch of humor in him.
Q. You did learn it?
A. I learned it fairly well. That was the second time I had any personal conversation with him. Another time was when the Germans were driving on Petrograd. You see, I had stood up on that armored car and said that I would join the Red Army and fight with the proletariat if the Germans came, and, having made speeches to that effect all over Petrograd, I could not very well crawl. And so, when the Germans came within two hundred miles of Petrograd, and most of the Americans and the whole foreign crowd left town an one excuse or another, I had to stay! I really could not think of any good excuse! So I went up to loin the Red Army, and on the way I met Bucharin, who wanted to prove to Lenin that there was a great deal of fighting force left there. He hustled me up to Lenin, to prove that here was the whole foreign community ready to join the army! Lenin said, " We have no fighting force. The people at Pskof gave up all the munitions there with-out firing a gun."
" We ought to have the President of that Soviet shot on the spot," he added.
Well, Lenin gave me a note to Krylenko, and then he got very much interested in the International Legion I was forming to fight for the Revolution and the Soviet. After that I generally had access to him. And, of course, I was always thinking that the Revolution was going to fail every ten minutes, and I would get up elaborate schemes for
December, 1918 25
injecting a little new life into it. He never would reject them, absurd as they often were, but I can see now how he took out of that mass of stuff the only little things that were any good. There was some scheme for getting American technical experts out there-he was always harping on that. The best thing about Lenin is that he is a realist. Instead of trying to get you over to his side of the game, and get your support for his party, he will say, " The points for us are 1, 2, 3, 4; and the points against us are 1, 2, 3, 4." He said to me, " Three months, it looks as though we can hold on now "-March, April and May-he was figuring it all up-" unless something big happens." He was always explaining to the people just how many chances they had of existence-just what the chances were of their going down; he never injected one note of bluff or voodooism.
Q. Was that the Trotzky appeal?
A. Trotzky was always more inclined to see things red and rosy and glorious. I had a good many experiences with Trotzky, too,-one very lurid experience.
I will tell it to you, to give you a little sidelight on Trotzky. Trotzky had just written some great appeal to the workingmen of the world. Raymond Robins read it, and he said, " That ought to go into Germany. I'd put down one hundred thousand rubles this moment to put a speech like that into Germany." I went up to see Trotzky-I had spoken on the same platform three days before in the November uprising, so I knew him pretty well. He said, " Come right in." I said a few general things, and I had to talk in German because he speaks hardly any English, and my German is not very fluent-luckily. In talking to him I spoke about Robins, how enthusiastic he was-" why he would give one hundred thousand rubles to put that paper into Germany!" He was sitting there,-you know Lenin always treats you in a sort of little, incidental, humorous way; but Trotzky has more of a ministerial attitude, due to his sense of revolutionary dignity. I repeated to him, " One hundred thou-sand rubles! " He just simply let a siren shriek out of him! Then he talked, very fast; I understood him to say that Robins gave two million rubles to Breshkovskaya, in order to put patriotic dope into the people, and was now trying to bribe the Bolsheviks,-and that he was using me as a medium for it. He called the guard-an honest little sailor and soldier-and delivered a terrible speech in Russian; the word " Breshkovskaya " came in every moment, and I understood enough to gather that, after having worked for the Bolsheviki from the time I arrived there, because I saw they were the only party that could save the people from ruin, I was going to be sent to prison ! I grabbed him by the arm and made him sit down in a chair and we talked for an hour. " The Americans believe that they can do everything with money," he said-" this man for a hundred dollars, that man for a thousand and some other for a million."
Q. You convinced him that he had misunderstood you?
A. Naturally. Now, of course, I don't need any further proof of his honesty than that incident. If he had been cunning at all he would have got me to lug this one
hundred thousand rubles up, and just led me on a little, and said, " Yes, that is very interesting," etc., and then he would have got me right in the act and grabbed that one hundred thousand rubles, and then he could certainly have had some great meeting-showing the American Imperialists at work. But his instinctive revolutionary honor and integrity is over-sensitive. He couldn't do that sort of thing. That is only an example. But that is why I say, from what I know of these men-fellows like Volardarski and Neibut and Peters, men who are mentioned 41 those Sisson documents-I found them in my personal relationship with them so absolutely square, having such integrity, having such honesty, even about little things, so much more than we have who were brought up as bourgeoisie-that all these stories are to me merely vapid falsehoods.
Q. Who is the popular one, Lenin or Trotzky?
A. Lenin didn't get much applause at the time I heard him speak; I suppose the people were tired of waiting eight hours, and besides he gave them a very general and abstract speech. Trotzky's speeches were always metallic, always full of pep and wonderful stuff. Robins said Trotzky was the greatest platform orator he had heard in twenty years.* Of course, the revolution got Robins; although he always maintained he was not a Bolshevik, they had faith in his honesty and integrity-and' he thought Lenin the greatest man in Russia.
But Lenin does impress you in the end. He works eighteen hours a day. He is never tired. He is always sane, always reasonable, always has a smile, always courteous, and he has such an amplitude of knowledge. For example. he asked me about the two divisions in the Socialist Propaganda League in the United States-in other words, about certain currents in our own Socialist movement, that I did not even know existed! He knew every fine point of distinction between the Socialist Labor party and the Socialist party.
And he knew a whole lot about psychology. It is easy enough to make a god of your hero, but Lenin really does deliver the goods.
Q. When did you see him last?
A. I saw him the day I went away. At that particular time the Americans were playing in very good there, and America stood high with the Bolsheviks. They were ready to make many concessions to Americans. So they allowed me to collect a lot of literature to take to America; and they also prepared a moving picture reel, showing the creative and artistic side of the Socialist revolution, and they printed these in English-they spent hundreds of thousands of rubles on these reels to show America-
Q. What became of them?
A. Oh well, of course, they were never allowed to come over. Lenin knew it would happen. He said, " I'm afraid they won't allow this literature to get into America. It is pretty bad literature, really." That is the last time I talked with him.
* Raymond Robins was the head of the American Red Cross and an unofficial representative from the United States Government to the Bolsheviks.
28 THE LIBERATOR
Q. Did he give you any message to deliver to American Socialists?
A. Well, I asked him if he had any message, and he wrote me a letter. I will give it to THE LIBERATOR as soon as I get my papers from the State Department.
"Bolshevik Dictatorship"
MR. STOKES: The claim is being made here in certain quarters that only a very small number of the people support the Bolsheviki, and that the overwhelming proportion are with all the other Socialist parties.
A. Well, it is impossible to reply to that with statistics, but there are some indisputable facts. For instance, what happened at Vladivostok? You know what happened there last July-the results of the election. Before the election I had a talk with Admiral Knight, the American admiral. He said:
" I know what a bad crowd those Bolshevists are. At the same time I respect them, and not this gang who are claiming to be the Government of Russia and don't dare put their foot on the soil. But as for the City of Vladivostok, I believe that this is really not a Soviet city." And I said, " I agree with you. I don't think it is a Soviet city for a good many reasons. It is an officer city, a big industrial and bourgeois city."
The Bolsheviki were going to have an election of the Soviets on July 4th and they had told me they expected to lose some of their seats in the Soviet, because some working men wanted intellegentia to represent them from the shops. Then the intervention came, and the Allies declared that they could have an honest election; I think tilt Allies really believed that they were going to show up in this way the falsity of the Bolshevik claims. It was held the last Sunday in July.
There were two big parties, the Moderate Socialists -a bloc of all the Socialist parties-and the Cadets. The big fight was supposed to be between these two parties. There were fifteen other parties-seventeen tickets in all, and the Bolshevik ticket was No. 17. There was a terrific campaign, and it was conducted, remember, while the Bolshevik leaders were all in prison, and they had no newspaper, and their enemies thought they had them terrorized. And when the election was held, the vote was 4,000 for the Cadets, 5,000 for the Moderate Socialists, and 12,000 for the Bolsheviki. The 17th party got more than the other 16 parties put together. The elections were declared " irregular " because the people had voted for the Bolsheviks!
Thereupon the workers struck. The Allies have broken the strike by importing coolies. And now-well, I would venture my five years in prison that if they took a vote in Vladivostok now, the Bolsheviki, instead of getting 54 out of lot seats, would get 8o out of 101.
Now of course it may not be fair to offer Vladivostok as an example of Bolshevik strength, because there it was a question of the popular feeling about intervention. But the
same feeling has been aroused all over Russia-as I know from reports since I left. The Allies have given the Soviets the distinction of martyrdom. All the people of Russia think of now is that those who fought and died for them are Bolsheviks. What is happening over there is not bad from a socialist standpoint-I mean the attempt to smash the Bolsheviks-because it fills the Russian people with the most intense feeling of loyalty towards Bolshevism. It will in-crease class-consciousness to a terrific degree; nothing could have happened better for the strengthening of the class-conscious feeling.
The feeling is certainly strong. I asked Rodzianko, the man who was President of the Duma-a great big elephant of a man and awfully fine, too, in his way-I asked him, " Why don't you play the American game and beat the Socialist party to the working class by offering them a lot of reforms and take the edge off this class war? " He said, " Yes, but we have been aligned with the old Czaristic regime, and we are associated in their minds with it to such an extent that it is a sheer impossibility for the masses to believe anything we say, they distrust us so thoroughly."
Even from a self-interested standpoint, America's intervention is a mistake. Whether the Bolsheviks are in the majority or not, they are the livest people in Russia; the aggressive, able, keen, thinking class who have energy and daring are Bolsheviks, or at least of the Soviet crowd, and all the leaders are between twenty and thirty-five years old-nine out of ten of them-and they are the fellows who are going to make Russia. They were first of all kindly disposed towards America. Even the emigrants from America, who have reason to hate American capitalism, were more kindly disposed toward America than toward any other nation in the world. Now we have turned them all against us. How foolish that was! I am speaking from the stand-point of the capitalist now. When I told this to Colonel House he said, " Yes, it is true.".
QUESTION: Is it your impression that at the present time the majority of the Russian working people do support the Soviets?
ANSWER: Well, I left at a certain time, and I only have certain facts to deal with. But I can read something between the lines of the cable dispatches; the last thing that Arno Dosch wrote was that everybody is saying the condition is " hopeless " because the Bolsheviks are growing stronger every day. That is a little indication of what is going on. I know also the effect of Japanese participation in the intervention; that sending of a few hundred Japs over to the Volga River, is just playing into the Bolsheviks' hands. Trotzky would gladly have paid a million rubles apiece for those hundred Japs they sent over. I know now there is not a chance for any other party in Russia; all you have to say is " Jai)," and everybody is a Bolshevik!
How deeply that will affect the whole situation I don't know. The whole thing hinges ultimately upon the peasants, as you all know. The Bolsheviks have given them their land. And now all the new anti-Bolshevik governments that are fonled are repudiating the land decrees and restor-
December, 1918 29
ing the land to its former owners. All that the Bolsheviks need do is to point that out in Central Russia, and they are going to get the support of the peasants. I think that before the intervention the Bolshevists were probably losing their ground in some cases; but from what I hear now they are in majority control everywhere. A newspaper correspondent who left Russia on September 2 told me that the Bolshevists could hold their power until the spring even if they had no support from the left social revolutionists. If the left social revolutionists supported them, they could hold the support indefinitely, unless they were physically overwhelmed by Allied arms.
Spiridonova
QUESTION: What kind of an impression have you of those women that figure so largely in Louise Bryant's story-Spiridonova, for instance. Did you meet her?
ANSWER: The last time I saw her, she was trying to get me to get her certain passports in order to go down to Germany and murder Hindenburg. She was working twenty-two out of twenty-four hours a day, and she was just wild, frenzied with lack of sleep and overwork. There is nothing like Spiridonova, I think, in the whole world.
QuesT1oN: Is she with the Bolsheviks now?
ANSWER: Well, that is the question. We don't know. QUESTION: I was told only last Saturday that she was dead against them.
ANSWER: Of course her party, the Left Social Revolutionists, are all the time giving their support and withdrawing it. They have done it three times. Now, whether they have gone back or not I do not know, but I have heard the report that she has gone back. She broke with the Fifth Congress upon her refusing to take the class war into the villages; she would not take the class war into the villages, and the Bolsheviks insisted that the class war must go into the villages, that they might suffer temporary setbacks, but the revolution must be absolute, and they must get the poison of private property out of the minds of the peasants. She withdrew from the convention. And that is the time the big -fight came between the Bolshevists and the left Social Revolutionists. They came to open battle in Moscow. That was the issue. And also there was another issue. The second one was the immediate abrogation of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Those two-and the Bolshevists refused to compromise with the Left Social Revolutionists, and the Left Social Revolutionists went out.
QUESTION: Were the social revolutionists responsible for the killing of the German ambassador?
ANSWER: Yes. I know the whole story very well. It is very interesting, too. The Committee for the Suppression of Counter Revolution---I am not sure whether that committee or another committee-well, it does not matter-the secretary of it wrote a letter-or helped in the preparation of a letter to Mirbach, and signed the name of the Bolshevik president, and these fellows took the letter to Mirbach and sat down.
What the letter said was, " Count Mirbach-a plot for assassinating you has been made by certain persons," and while he was reading it, they shot him right there. Well, of course, there it was! It looked like a Bolshevik govern-mental killing of the ambassador. This was recognized by the Bolsheviks and so they just went out and found that secretary-I don't know the committee-and brought him up for trial, and I think he was the one who fired the shot. They shot twenty-three social revolutionists. That is the " Red Terror " so much talked about. The " bad man," Peters, whom I know-well, I know him better than anyone in this room-the man who is supposed to write out. death warrants until his hand tires-he said to me at one time, " The only time they will ever introduce the death penalty into Russia will be for Bolshevists who had been untrue to Bolshevism."
QUESTION: You mean not applied to others?
ANSWER: Of course he has now been driven to apply it to others. I think he signed those death warrants, but I know he never has signed one without deeply feeling it, be-cause he is a man of wonderfully sensitive spirit. I could tell you wonderful stories about him. In other words, my reaction is this: I have known a good many idealists that belong to different sections of society-I mean I know the church idealists. I know the " uplifters " and social workers. I know our general line of socialist idealists, and so forth. But I never met a bunch of men-I often try to correct myself and be honest, because it is so easy to be inanely partisan-I never met a set of men who made me feel unclean-absolutely unclean, as that group did over there, as I met them in action.
QUEsTIoN: How do you explain the intense feeling on the part of the old revolutionists-Tchaikowsky and Kropotkin and Plekhanov, and all those revolutionists of 1905?
ANSWER: Well, take the case of Tchaikowsky. Maybe you can formulate his psychological reaction. He speaks English well, and I used to talk with him. He said, " Well, it' has been a terrible experience for me. Two weeks after the Soviet was formed I went up there and made a few speeches." Now, mind you, these were in the Menshevik days, because the first Soviet had eight Mensheviks to one Bolshevik. "And," he said, " they just simply laughed me out of it-I who spent my life in the revolution!-they said I was a `patriot' and that I belonged to the Middle Ages and that I was captured by the bourgeoisie. Now," he said. " I am with the peasants, and if that same poison gets into the peasant mind, I am going to wash my hands of the whole thing." I saw him a month afterwards, when the peasants had rejected him too, and thrown him out of the convention. I think, being a human being, he could not help but feel a sense-fine and noble though he was--a sense almost of hatred towards the usurping of his place by this gang of new revolutionists.
Kropotkin did not have that feeling of intense bitterness. ,I know a fellow by the name of Agursky. He was an anarchist, but he joined the Bolshevists, and he went out to see Kropotkin very often, and Kropotkin would listen to him.
30 THE LIBERATOR
" Well," Kropotkin would say, " I don't understand it all." And the old man would shake his head, " It is beyond me what is happening." And yet he was so kindly disposed to Agursky that he took this man and kissed him and said, " Well, go on, but it is beyond me "-something like that. That is Kropotkin.
As far as that is concerned-it is easy enough for us outsiders to be enthusiastic about the Bolsheviks. It is a wonderful thing and you approve of it, and you say, " This is pure idealism."' I lived in the National Hotel. When they took that hotel, one of the good hotels of Moscow, the first thing that they did was to cut out all luxuries from the menu, and make the standard meal there, which was served only twice a day, two dishes: Soup and Kasha, or soup and meat. In other words, they put the hotel on the standard of the working class. I myself used to slide off sometimes and have a good bourgeois meal. Now, I like travel and leisure and lots of comforts, and the good things of life; and I can have them-my Bolshevism does not cost me anything. But I think that if I were one of the Intelligentsia in Russia, and were not a leader of this movement, and it was endangering some of these things that I think a great deal of, I will be hanged if I am sure I would be a Bolshevik over there! But I really believe that, if the Bolsheviks had not taken the power, Russia would have slipped into horrible anarchy and chaos. How can you explain the demobilization of ten or fifteen millions of men? Why, we are thunderstruck here over the demobilization of one or two millions! They de-mobilized ten or fifteen millions in three months, and they demobilized them with no more than the shooting up of two or three stations, as far as I can really find out. And that is because the people trusted a government which was their own. There were all sorts of leaders in Russia as able as the Bolsheviks. The average Menshevik leader is much more eloquent, is much more educated. He certainly has just as great a prison record or sacrifice. But they rejected first of all the Milukoff crowd, then they rejected the Tschaikowsky crowd, and then that most eloquent leader, Tseretelli, who was just then out of prison, they rejected
him. And why do they cling to the Bolsheviks? Certainly not because a handful of Bolsheviks super-impose their will on the masses of the people ! A handful of these men could not disintegrate an army. It was simply because the people in Russia had certain views about land and about peace, and the Bolsheviks were the only ones who were willing to execute their de-sires and put them into action and carry out the program; and if the Bolsheviks had not done it and had not had some sort of a scheme or program of reconstruction, the Russian people would have gone on into chaos.
Aristocratic "Anarchists"
QUESTION : You don't feel that the anarchists have any widespread control at the present time?
ANSWER: No, not at all-absolutely not at all. They are now working harmoniously with the Bolsheviks. You see, at first the anarchists were joined by the officer class. Fully eight hundred officers joined the anarchists in Moscow, and they " nationalized " about thirty-seven palaces and all the automobiles they could see around there.
QUESTION: What was the idea?
ANSWER: Well, of course the officer class in Russia is made up of men who are accustomed to privilege and idleness. They did not want to work. So they took advantage of the anarchist philosophy, and went out " nationalizing " pocketbooks and automobiles and palaces. It got the anarchists in bad. But the anarchists, the real ones, got up in the Soviet and pleaded, " Let us clean our own house. We admit all these things, but give us a chance again "; and they were given a chance again and now the anarchist group seems to work fairly well. They are an insignificant group. Out of twelve hundred representatives at the Fourth Congress, there were nineteen anarchists there.
QUESTION: How do you explain the fact that one week we get a story about Breshkovskaya being given a public funeral at the expense of the Bolshevik government, with all due honors, and the next day we hear that she is shot by the Bolshevik government, and another one that she died by starvation?
ANSWER. Because there are so many people interested in lying about Russia.
QUESTION: You mean that you explain this whole Red Terror that is spread all over the country-you think it is a deliberate conspiracy of lies?
ANSWER: Well, the Red Terror-how would we call what is being done over there? What is the legal name for what is happening in Russia, when people are found with revolvers in their hands, and when they find all sorts of documents on them, revealing plots to upset the legal government of Russia, which is run by regular representation?
MR. DELL: Preserving law and order.
MR. WILLIAMS: That is the Red Terror.
QUESTION: Is it a representative government?
ANSWER: That is the point exactly. How representative is it? Everybody wants to know that. Yet there are the rules of the Soviet if you want to read them. In the Soviet all parties are represented, and real elections can be held at any time, so that the complexion of the central Soviet is continually changing. In July, 1917, for instance, the time of the July insurrection, the workmen of the factories believed in some cases that this thing had been instigated by Germans, and they immediately withdrew their Bolshevik representatives, and the Mensheviks gained a great deal as a result of the July insurrections. Just as soon as they found out that the government had lied about the German connections with the Bolsheviks, then the reaction went against the moderate socialist parties; they just withdrew them by the scores and actually by the hundreds, and re-placed them by Bolshevik representatives.
December, 1918 31
I think the Soviet is an advanced state apparatus-actually superior to anything that we have had in history, because it gives a government that is representative all the time. The men in a factory meet every day, and the changes of thought that are registered in the factory register themselves immediately in the delegate they send to the Soviet.
A Workers' Government
QUESTION: What kinds of people cannot vote? Is it true that they let everybody send a representative who is a worker?
ANSWER: Of course. Let me illustrate that. On the streets I heard one of the young Intelligentsia saying, " What sort of government is this? I have no representation in the Soviet." And a workingman said, " Well, what do you do for a living? " " I am a teacher." " Are you a member of the teachers' organization? You know very well, if you are a member of the teachers' organization, that the teachers have a right to send a delegate to the Soviet." Now, by not permitting individualistic representation and allowing representation only from groups which are organized, they are trying to drive organization into Russia, in order that their government shall be representative of economic groups and not merely of political groups-in other words, in order that the Soviet, instead of being a parliamentary talking ma-chine, shall be an expression of the real economic interests of the people.
QUESTION: The admittance to the Soviets is limited exclusively to representatives of organized industrial groups? ANSWER: Yes, and peasants.
QUESTION: How large a portion of the entire population of Russia do you suppose is organized into industrial groups?
ANSWER: Well, I don't know. There are some big unions, like the miners' which has six hundred thousand, and like the railroad workers, perhaps you can tell me the number. I don't know exactly how many there are there. But probably fifteen per cent industrial-possibly less-and then the peas-ants the rest.
QUESTION: That would seem on the surface to suggest that the Soviets actually represent a very small fraction of the total people?
ANSWER: No, they represent ninety-five per cent of the people, because the peasants have their representation and the workingmen have theirs. Whether some individuals take the trouble to join the Soviet and exercise their right or not is another question, just as it is here about voting.
QUESTION: Well, the thought that I had in mind was that here where we have such vastly superior facilities for effecting organization, for getting groups in contact with one another-the railroad facilities and the post office and the telegraphs and the automobiles, and so forth-people can get together and decide what they want to do. In Russia, a vast country like that, with hardly any railroads and no automobiles and no telegraphs or mails to speak of, I don't see how they could go very much further in organization than we have done here in America.
MISS EASTMAN : But is not the essence of it because there they are organizing about the vital things in life-economics -and here we organize about everything in the world except our livelihood? We organize about philanthropies, and tariffs and things like that that don't closely concern us, but there they are organizing about their wages.
The Revolutionary Press
MR. WILLIAMS: Yee, and you must remember that the people over there have a revolutionary fervor and spirit that is inexorable. I don't think there has ever been a movement so eloquent and spontaneous, with the possible exception of the Crusades, only this has some ethical reason behind it. It has seized every one. And then, as far as organization is concerned, the average Russian workingman always is so vastly superior to the American workingman in discussing any sort of a problem. All you have to do is to look at the literature that is produced, and is sold and is read to the workingman, even if he cannot read it. It is unbelievable-the stacks of good literature that are sent out to the people. I believe that the average workingman of Russia reads more serious sociological, economic articles every day, than the average business and professional man reads here in a month. If you could see the circulation of the papers of the Bolsheviks-they reach up to millions. For example, in Petro-grad they have five daily papers. They have, for example, the Pravda, which has very serious articles. Bob Minor drew a fine cartoon for them, and they put it way over in the corner in an inconspicuous place; they thought it was too " light." But then, for the peasant who has just come into the working class, they have what is called " The Red Banner," which contains philippics and some jokes and a few cartoons and articles-very short-so that ignorant people can read them. And then they had, of course, the regular organ of the Soviet. Then they published a humorous paper-the Red Devil, as they call it. And then they have what is called the village paper-a very small paper, sent out, I would say, by the millions. And yet I might find out that they only send out half a million, but that is the impression I have. Then they have The Red Army, sometimes called The Red Army and Fleet. And in the days of the regular soldiers there they had what is called The Soldiers' Truth. There must be almost seven from a central organization in Petrograd, and they had about five in Moscow.
I saw the development of the Bolshevik press. I sat in one office, and there was an endless line of people bringing their offerings to the Bolshevist paper, some bringing two rubles, others five, and others from ten to fifty copecks. The revolution started in February, 1917. In July I was up in that office, and they said, " We have already sixty-five daily papers." And pamphlets-I have alone in my trunk which is confiscated or held by the authorities-I have alone there something like seven hundred pamphlets, and some of these were printed in the hundreds of thousands-pamphlets that explain in the most simple terms-if you read some of these pamphlets they would really make you cry-telling the
32 THE LIBERATOR
soldiers what to do on returning home. These pamphlets said, " Don't spend all of your time running around on the street corners, but go to the people who have charge of the village affairs. Talk with them. Try to get the literature they have. Upon meeting a workingman who is very tired after working all day, if he answers you in an angry voice, don't get angry with him, but remember that if you worked in a factory every day, maybe you too would feel like that. Then go up to the Soviets and see it. It is your government. You cannot talk with all the officers over there, because they are busy doing the work of your government, but see it." Then it says, " On the train, have a game of cards or two, but don't spend all your time playing cards. Look this literature over, and if you cannot read, get some one to read it for you. On arriving home, remember that you have been away for two or three years. You have seen a new world, and so go gently with the working people of the village, but at the same time be thoroughly revolutionary. Put through these ideas. Never mind hunting up the vodka," etc., and so it goes on all through with wise, sympathetic instruction. That is the secret of the Bolsheviks; it is simply that they understand the people. It is not that they understand the people. They are the people.
Has the Soviet Made Good?
MR. STOKES: You said that the people know the Soviets have made good? I think that would be a terribly difficult proposition to establish.
ANSWER: Well, they feel they made good. They know they demobilized an army of tweive million people. They know they organized factories and made them more productive than before. They know they gave the land to the people, and they know that they organized thousands of new post offices. They know that they have thousands of workingmen's theatres that have sprung up all over the land. They know that they have organized an entirely new state apparatus. They know that inside of a year they have done a miracle of things that have not been done anywhere else in the world, in any other period of history, in ten or fifteen times the space of time. In other words, the creative forces of the Soviet have been so wonderful that they realize it themselves. And as far as the disorganization of society, they know the inheritance that they came into, and they have discounted that. They know just how much they are to blame. They know exactly how much the Allies are to blame. And they have finally come to the stage of feeling " Never mind your help, all we ask now is-leave us alone l "
QUESTION: Are they pretty well determined to fight intervention? Are they building up a sufficient army? Of course I don't expect you to know just what is the situation there now. But the spirit of the people-is it such that the army will be a great army if intervention continues and becomes a real menace? If in the spring, for instance, there is a big drive, do you think there would be a big army permitted?
ANSWER: I think there would be resistance. I don't want to prophesy how big the army is. The last I heard' was half a million, and then Ramsome's dispatch quoted Lenine as saying that they would have three million by spring. But I don't want to underrate the disorder by painting fairy pictures of the organization of industry. If they can get the Ukraine, and if the Allies will only continue to do what they have, just simply play with the reactionary crowd, all the Bolsheviks have to do is to point this out, and they will get the support of the peasants.
The Bolshevik Cabinet
QUESTION : What other big figures are there, besides Lenine and Trotzky? There must be other strong leaders that have stood up through it all?
ANSWER: The present cabinet is the most cultured cabinet probably in the history of the world. All of them are experts upon a great many questions. Several of them have written books upon philosophy and religion. Burch Bruevich, for instance, is an authority upon the sects of Russia and has written a number of volumes upon them. Lunarcharsky is the man who wept-resigned his chair when he heard that the Church of St. Basil had been razed. But he speaks insistently upon the creative force of the proletariat as far as art and literature is concerned. They have great plans. They have plans to publish all the classics, and they started doing that and giving them to the people at half the price of publication. Already these little book-stands are all over, in every post office, in every telegraph station, in order that the people shall have free access to the best literature. And of course you know of the monuments they have been erecting. They arc going to have about 63 new statues to all the great humanitarians and all the great revolutionists of history.
QUESTION: I should think that the classics would be considered a rather dangerous thing-there is so much that is reactionary in the classics.
ANSWER: They are going to produce the best. You hear so much about the Soviet. But there are cultural organizations, meetings with hundreds of delegates attending, which are just merely considering the cultural side of the proletarian movement, and they have literally scores of magazines which only deal with the new proletarian culture.
An Ex-Revolutionist
QUESTION: Did you meet Arthur Bullard, who used to be an editor of " The Masses," and who worked against the Bolshevik government over there?
ANSWER: I had some curious experiences with Bullard. QUESTION : I am really intensely interested to know just what his reactions were?
ANSWER: I don't know just what they were, I am sure. When you go to try and analyze another man's mind, you don't know anything. Bullard was never invited to speak to any crowd but a Cadet crowd, and he moved in that circle.
December, 1918 33
QUESTION: He says he stayed at the house of a social revolutionist?
ANSWER: That may be, but I know that was his type of mind. He got more and more to the right, so that he was known in the American Red Cross crowd-he and the chauffeur-as the " extreme right " of the American delegation; he and the chauffeur, who always cursed the " damned Bolsheviki."
When I first entered the Socialist movement in this country, I wrote Bullard a letter of appreciation for his goodness and fatherly counsel, etc. And so, over in Russia, I went to him, and thought that he would be able to give me some good pointers. I must say that every prophecy that Bullard made was absolutely denied by the facts. He said to me a few days before the Bolshevists swept the whole country, " Of course the Bolshevists don't reckon on their strongest power."
And I said, " What is that? "
He said, ""l'hat is the unwillingness on the part of the other crowd to just skrunch them-like that! "
I said, " Why, I thought they were stronger than that? " He said, " No, no."
" Why," I said, " they have even been talking about taking the government?"
" Well," he said, " that is a good one! "
He lived so isolated a life that he is not a competent judge. I still can keep my dogma that every man who went to the Soviet, who knew the Soviet leaders, was for the Soviets, or for the Bolshevik leaders. Bullard never went to the Soviets and he did not know any of the crowd.
QUESTION: He always has lived a secluded life, I think?
ANSWER: I know, but Bullard has a good record as a revolutionist-I mean, he has been very radical, and that is the reason he was so influential over here. They said, " What does Bullard think about it? "
QUESTION: Bullard was very intimate with the Socialist-revolutionary group-the Breshkovskaya group?
ANSWER: But Brehskovskaya was without influence, and so was her group. If any of them came to Vladivostok, there would not be a dozen workingmen turn out to hear them, because the workingmen had gone over to an entirely different view. I cannot explain it. They simply are going in for a new order of society.
QUESTION: One of the common beliefs is that the people of Russia have been prejudiced by the hundred and fifty thou-sand immigrants who have returned, and who have showed the scars on their heads from police clubs in strikes, etc.?
ANSWER: I don't think that is true. I think a great deal of it is the reaction of the peasants themselves to what they know of America.
It is not only the evils of our civilization that they are against, hut many of the things that 'we really call good, and they don't want the thing repeated over there. They have an instinctive reaction against the thing. You know about the committee that sent over our great moving picture reels-of our early films, showing Ivan. Ivan is taken to see the
great warships in the harbor. Ivan is taken to see the billions of bullion in the vaults, etc. Well, they looked at it all, and they went back home and said, " that's just exactly what our Bolsheviki have been telling us about America-a great, big capitalist country like that. It is even worse than they said." And the next Allied propagandist that comes along is not going accomplish anything there. They know what they want, and they know their power.
(We publish on the two pages following, a recent statement issued by the Soviet government in reply to the protest made by the Neutrals in response to President Wilson's suggestion. It leaves nothing to be said.)
The Socialist Vote
T r HERE is a pretty widespread impression that except 1 in Wisconsin the Socialist vote on November 5 was discouraging. We do not find that impression borne out by the figures in New York City. It is true that London, Hill-quit, Nearing and Lee were defeated for Congress, but in each of their districts it was a two-party fight; we cannot hope to defeat fusion in the first contest.
The important question is, how much did the Socialist vote increase? This question is complicated in New York, of course, by the new women voters. It is estimated that they added 40 per cent to the vote. Compare the highest vote given in Greater New York to any Socialist candidate on the state ticket in 1916-42,000-with the highest vote for any Socialist candidate on the state ticket in 1918-106,00o. Allowing for the 40 per cent general increase, we still have a Socialist increase of nearly 50 per cent.
This increase is by no means limited to the five " hopeful " districts in which the campaign work was concentrated. It is a steady general growth, most striking in some of the most obscure districts. In the Seventh, for instance, the vote jumped from 452 to 5,500. Apparently there is no smallest district in which the vote has not increased. In 1916 the lowest vote in any Assembly district was 26, and there were six districts under too votes. In 1918 the lowest was 247, and there were only nine districts under 500.
The steady growth of the Socialist vote is always remarkable. This year it is amazing. A party which has consistently opposed what proved to be a popular war-in an election held at the very moment of victory-adds 50 per cent to its vote! Politically speaking, this is impossible. That it happened demonstrates once more that the Socialist party is only incidentally a political institution ; it is some-thing politicians cannot understand, a deep-rooted faith and a thoroughly understood intellectual conception which must grow because it satisfies the vital desires of real human beings. It also demonstrates the folly of those social patriots who went all over Europe saying that the Socialist party in America had destroyed itself. C. E.
34
RUSSIA'S ANSWER TO THE
T HE note presented to us on the 5th of September by the gentlemen representing the neutral powers represents an act of gross interference into the inner affairs of Russia. The Soviet Government would be justified in ignoring this act. But the Soviet Government is glad to grasp any opportunity of explaining the nature of its political tactics to the masses in all countries, for it is the spokesman not only of the Russian working-class, but of exploited humanity all over the earth. The People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs therefore gives answer, hereby, to the matter in question.
In their description of the treatment that is being accorded to the suppressed Russian bourgeoisie, the neutral powers are plainly trying to arouse the sympathy of the bourgeoisie all over the world. We do not propose to disprove the fiction of the gentlemen who represent the neutral nations. In their note they repeat all the slander that has been invented by the Russian bourgeoisie to discredit the Red Army. 'We will not refute individual occurrences, first of all because the gentlemen who represent the neutral powers have presented absolutely no concrete occurrences, secondly, because every war-and we are in the midst of a civil war-brings with it excesses on the part of individuals.
The gentlemen representing the neutral powers did not protest against the individual misdeeds of irresponsible persons, but against the regime that is being carried out by the Government of the Work-men and Peasants against the exploiting class.
Before entering into the reasons why the Government of the Workers and peasants uses the Red Terror that has called forth the protest of the gentle-men representing the neutral powers, permit us to ask a few questions.
Do the representatives of the neutral nations know that an international war has been raging for almost five years, into which a small clique of bankers, generals and bureaucrats precipitated the masses of the civilized nations of the world? That in this war these masses are destroying each other, cutting each other's throats that capitalism may earn new millions thereby? Do they know that in this war not only millions of men were killed at the front, but that both belligerent parties have attacked open cities with bombs, killing unarmed women and children? Do they know that in this war one of the belligerent parties doomed millions of human beings to death by starvation by cutting off their food sup-
ply in direct contradiction to the tenets of inter-national law, that the belligerent party hopes to force the other, by starving its children, to surrender to the victor? Do they know that the belligerent powers have imprisoned hundreds of thousands of unarmed, peaceable citizens in the enemy's country, sending them to places far from home into involuntary servitude, depriving them of every right of self-defense? Do they know that in all belligerent nations the ruling capitalist clique has deprived the masses of the right of free press and assemblage and the right to strike? That workingmen are being imprisoned for every attempt to protest against the White Terror of the bourgeoisie, that they are sent to the front that every last thought of human rights may be killed within them?
All of these instances of the destructive force that is being directed against the working-class in the name of capitalist interests, all these pictures of the White Terror of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat are more than familiar to the neutral nations and their representatives in Russia. Nevertheless, either they forgot their high ideals of humanity or they forgot in these cases to remind the blood-dripping belligerent nations of their misdeeds.
The so-called neutral nations did not dare to utter a word of protest against the White Terror of the capitalist class, nay, more, they did not wish to protest, for the bourgeoisie in all neutral nations have helped the capitalist powers of the capitalist nations to carry on the war because they are earning billions in war contracts with the belligerent nations.
We beg leave to ask another question. Have the gentlemen representing the neutral powers heard of the crushing of the Sinn Feiners in Dublin, of the shooting to death, without due process of the law, of hundreds of Irishmen, with Skeffington at their head? Have they heard of the White Terror in Finland, of the tens of thousands of dead, of the tens of thousands of men and women who are languishing in jail, against whom no charges have ever been, or ever will be made? Have they never heard of the mass murder of workmen and peasants in the Ukraine? Of the mass murder of workmen by the brave Checho-Slovaks, these hirelings of French capital? The governments of the neutral nations have heard of all of these things, but never before did it occur to them to protest against the despotism of the bourgeoisie when it oppresses the working class movement. For they themselves are
35
CHARGE OF TERRORISM
ready, at any moment, to shoot down workingmen who fight for their rights. In their own countries they stand ready, in the name of the bourgeoisie, and in defense of its interests to crush out every vestige of working-class uprising.
It is sufficient to recall that labor demonstrations were recently routed by military force in Den-mark, Norway, Holland, Switzerland, etc. The workers of Switzerland, Holland and Denmark have not yet revolted, but alreaaly the governments of these countries are mobilizing their military forces against the weakest protest of the working-class. When the representatives of the neutral nations threaten us with the indignation of the entire civilized world, and protest against the Red Terror in the name of humanity, we respectfully call their attention to the fact that they were' not sent to Russia to defend the principles of humanity, but to preserve the interests of the capitalist State; we would advise them further not to threaten us with the indignant horror of the civilized world, but to tremble before the fury of the masses who are arising against a civilization that has thrust humanity into the unspeakable misery of endless slaughter.
In the entire capitalist world the White Terror rules over the working-class. In Russia the working-class destroyed that Czarism whose bloody regime brought no protests from the neutral nations. The working-class of Russia put an end to the rule of the bourgeoisie who, under the flag of the Revolution, again amidst the deep silence of the neutral powers, slaughtered soldiers who refused to shed their blood in the interests of war speculators, killed peasants because they claimed the land they had cultivated for centuries in the sweat of their brow.
The majority of the Russian people, in the person of the second Congress of the Workmen's, Peasants', Cossacks' and Soldiers' Council, placed the power into the hands of the Workmen's and Peasants' Government. ii small handful of capitalists who desired to regain the factories and the banks that were taken from them in the interests of the people, a small handful of landowners who wished to take back the land that had been given to the peasants, a small handful of generals who wished again to teach the workmen and the soldiers obedience with the whiplash, refused to recognize the decision of the Russian people. With the money of foreign capital they mobilized counter-revolutionary hordes with whose assistance they tried to cut off Russia
from its food supply in order to choke the Russian Revolution with the bony hand of hunger. After they became convinced of the futility of their at-tempts to overthrow the working-class republic that enjoyed the unbounded confidence and support of the working-class, they arranged counter-revolutionary uprisings in the attempt to crowd the Work-men's and Peasants' Government from its positive work, to hinder it in its task of ridding the country of anarchy that had taken hold of the country in consequence of the criminal policies of former governments. They betrayed Russia on the South, North and East into the hands of foreign imperialistic states, they called foreign bayonets, wherever they could muster them into Russia. Hidden behind a forest of foreign bayonets they are sending hired murderers to kill the leaders of the working-class. in whom not only the proletariat of Russia but all the massacred humanity sees the personification of its hopes. The Russian working-class will crush without mercy this counter-revolutionary clique, that is trying to lay the noose around the neck of the Russian working-class with the help of foreign capital and the Russian bourgeoisie.
In the face of the proletariat of the whole world we declare that neither hypocritical protests nor pleas will protect those who take up arms against the workers and the poorest farmers, who would starve them and embroil them into new wars in the interests of the capitalist class.° We assure equal rights and equal liberties to all who loyally do their duty as citizens of the Socialist Workmen's and Peasants' Government. To them we bring peace, but to our enemies we bring war without quarter. We are convinced that the masses in all countries who are writhing under the oppression of a small group of exploiters will understand that in Russia force is being used only in the holy cause of the liberation of the people, that they will not only understand us, but will follow our example.
We decidedly reject the interference of neutral capitalist powers in favor of the Russian bourgeoisie, and declare that every attempt on the part of the representatives of these powers to overstep the boundaries of legal protection for the citizens of their own country, will he regarded as an attempt to sup-port the counter-revolution.
People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs,
G. W. TSCHTI'SCH1RIN.
36
About The Second Masses Trial
By John Reed
IN the United States political offenses are dealt with more harshly than anywhere else in the world. In the amendment to the Espionage Act it is made a crime equivalent to manslaughter to " criticize the form of government." The sentences in Espionage cases run anywhere from ten to twenty years at hard labor, with fines of thousands of dollars.
Nevertheless, in imposing sentences federal judges usually employ such words as these : " This is a free country. You enjoy here the rights of free speech and a free press. If you had committed this offense in any other country you would have been stood up against a wall and shot. This country protected you while you made a good living, and you were ungrateful. I am going to give you the limit, so that you may be an example to other malcontents and bad citizens." All of which is, of course, quite untrue. The facts are the opposite of those stated.
The harsh punishment of political offenses breeds revolution, as other countries know. In this country Socialists are the chief political criminals, as they were in Germany before 187o. Bismarck could not suppress them there ; Burleson and Gregory will not be able to do so here..
The second trial of the Masses case, although a political trial, differed in many respects from the conventional Espionage case. All the defendants were Americans, of old American lineage. The Judge, Martin Manton, allowed them a good deal of latitude in proving their intent. The jury was open to impressions. The case was tried in New York City, where the hysterical war spirit has never got the hold it has in the more provincial districts of the Middle West. And, finally, the tensity of patriotic feeling, kept at a stretch for more than a year, had begun to slacken.
This we felt immediately we entered the court-room. Out-side, in City Hall Park, the Liberty Loan Band was playing the national anthem, as it had before. In the court-room the Marshal and his satellites, as well as Department of Justice operatives, moved around with menacing looks. When the Judge took the bench he seemed to have made up his mind; he interrupted constantly our lawyers' examination of talesmen. The jury panel looked hopeless; one man after an-other admitted prejudice against Socialists, and Socialism. A tall, pompous-looking gentleman, asked his business, re-plied self-consciously, " Wall Street."
Stedman asked if he had any prejudice against Socialism.
" I don't know what it is," he said, " but I'm opposed to it!"
How inevitably, how clearly in all these cases, the issue narrows down to the Class Struggle! District Attorney Barnes' opening address to the jury implied one chief crime-that of plotting the overthrow of the United States Govern
ment by revolution; in other words, the crime of being, in the words of Mr. Barnes, " Bolsheveeka," addicted to what he called " Syndickalism." An immortal definition of the Socialist conception which he made to the jury remains in my mind:
" These people believe that there are three lasses-the capitalists, who own all the natural resources of the country; the bourgeoisie, who have got a little land or a little property under the system, and the proletariat, which consists of all those who want to take away the property of the capitalists and the bourgeoisie."
We were described as men without a country, who wanted to break down all boundaries. The jury was asked what it thought of people who called respectable American business men " bourgeoisie." °
In no European country could a prosecuting attorney have displayed such ignorance of Socialism, or relied so confidently upon the ignorance of a jury. . . .
I was not present at the first Masses trial. In prospect, it did not seem to me very serious; but when I sat in that gloomy, dark-paneled court-room, and the bailiff with the brown wig beat the table and cried harshly, " Stand up!" and the Judge climbed to his seat, and it was announced, in the same harsh, menacing tone, " The Federal Court for the Southern District of New York is now open . . ."-I felt as if we were in the clutches of a relentless machinery, which would go on and grind and grind. . . .
The first trial had taken place amid the excitement and patriotic hysteria which accompanied the Third Liberty Loan; the second trial was set for the Fourth Liberty Loan campaign. 11'1orris Hillquit, our counsel, was ill; Dudley Field Malone, associated in the case, had to leave it just be-fore the trial; and Seymour Stedman, who came from Chicago to the rescue at the last moment, tried the case without the possibility of preparation, and almost in a state of physical collapse.
But the attitude of the defendants in the second trial was different from what it had been in the first. Last spring Germany was invading Russia; this fall the United States was invading Russia; and Socialists were in a different frame of mind. Moreover, the persecution of Socialists had grown ,more bitter, and it had become more and more clearly a class issue.
I think we all felt tranquil, and ready to go to prison if need be. At any rate, we were not going to dissemble what we believed. This had its effect on the jury, and on the Judge. When Max Eastman defended the St. Louis Declaration of the Socialist Party, when Floyd Dell defended the conscientious objectors,* when Art Young made it clear
*And when Jack Reed defended the class-war,-Editor.
December, 1918 37
that he disapproved of this war and all wars on social and economic grounds, when Seymour Stedman boldly claimed for us, and for all Socialists, the right of idealistic prophesy, and repudiated the capitalist system with its terrible inequalities, a new but perfectly Iogical and consistent point of view was presented. The jury was composed of a majority of honest, rather simple men, the background of whose consciousness must have contained memories of the Declaration of Independence, the Rights of Man, Magna Charta. They could not easily, even in war-time, repudiate these things; especially when all the defendants were so palpably members of the dominant race.
Two weeks later I saw in that same court the trial of some Russian boys and girls, on similar charges. They did not have a chance; they were foreigners. An official of the District Attorney's office was explaining to me why the Judge had been so severe upon these Russians, while our Judge in the Masses case had been so lenient.
