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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

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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

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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 "

The Intercollegiate
Socialist

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.

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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

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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? '

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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.

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

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,

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.

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"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-