The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  * The call for a vote, which is taken by division, that is, a physical separation of members into their respective lobbies.

  8

  The Death of Jaurès

  THE SOCIALISTS : 1890–1914

  8

  The Death of Jaurès

  SOCIALISM was international. Its name as an organized movement, the Second International Workingmen’s Association, said so. Its anthem, “The International,” affirmed it and promised besides that “tomorrow the International will be the human race.” Its founding Congress of 1889 had as joint presidents a Frenchman and a German, Edouard Vaillant and Wilhelm Liebknecht. Its membership at its height represented the Socialist parties of thirty-three nations and would-be nations, including Germany, France, England, Austria, Hungary and Bohemia, Russia, Finland, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Serbia, Bulgaria, India, Japan, Australia and the United States. Its flag was a solid red representing the blood of Everyman. Its essential thesis was that the class solidarity of workingmen transcended national frontiers in a horizontal division of society. Its holiday set aside the first of May to demonstrate proletarian brotherhood. Its slogan was “Workers of the World, Unite!”

  Whether or not miners, factory hands, farm labourers, servants and other members of the working class, in whose interest Socialism existed, felt themselves to be international, their leaders believed it, practiced it, counted on it. At the Amsterdam Socialist Congress which took place in 1904 during the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian and Japanese delegates, Plekhanov and Katayama, were seated side by side. When the two men clasped hands, all 450 delegates rose to their feet in a tribute of thunderous applause. When Plekhanov and Katayama each made a speech declaring that the war had been forced upon his country by capitalism and was not a matter of the Japanese people fighting the Russian people, they were listened to in “almost religious silence” and sat down amid cheers.

  Socialism was equally predicated on the concept of class war and on its eventual outcome, the destruction of capitalism. It regarded both the ruling class and the bourgeoisie as the enemy. The sentiment was reciprocated. The word “Socialist” had a ring of blood and terror, like “Jacobin” of the old days. During the quarter century following its founding in Paris in 1889 on the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, the Second International inspired growing apprehension in the ruling class. Vienna was “paralyzed with fright” when Viktor Adler, the Austrian Socialist leader, called for a one-day general strike and mass demonstrations throughout the Empire on the first May Day to demonstrate the workers’ united strength. When Adler announced a workers’ parade down the chestnut-bordered Prater where usually only the carriages of the wealthy appeared, the rich and their allies trembled, expecting the rabble would set houses on fire, plunder shops, and commit unimaginable atrocities on their march. Merchants let down their iron shutters, parents forbade children to go out of doors, police were posted at every street corner, troops were held in reserve. The bourgeoisie saw spreading before their feet what Henry George had called in Progress and Poverty “the open-mouthed, relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society.” They were made aware of the rising threat “of the House of Want upon the House of Have.”

  When the Second International was founded, the twelve-hour day and seven-day week were normal for unorganized labour. Sunday rest and the ten- or nine-hour day were the hard-won privileges of skilled labour in the craft unions, which represented barely one-fifth of the labour force. In 1899 Edwin Markham, struck by the bent brute figure of Millet’s “Man with the Hoe,” expressed both society’s fear and responsibility in a poem named for the picture:

  Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,

  Plundered, profaned and disinherited,

  Cries protest to the Judges of the World, A protest that is also prophecy.…

  How will the Future reckon with this Man

  How answer his brute question in that hour

  When whirlwinds and rebellion shake the world?

  How will it be with the kingdoms and the kings—

  With those who shaped him to the thing he is—

  When this dumb Terror shall reply to God

  After the silence of the centuries?

  In 1899, when poetry still spoke to the public, Markham’s poem caused a sensation. Newspapers throughout America reprinted it, editorials discussed it, clergymen used it as a text, school children studied it, debating societies debated it, and commentators called it “the cry of the zeitgeist” and, next to Kipling’s “Recessional,” the most “meaningful poem of the age.”

  The public conscience which responded to an artist’s vision and a poet’s words was frightened and angry when confronted with the real thing. When in 1891 the textile workers of Fourmies, a small industrial town in northern France, organized a May Day demonstration for the eight-hour day, police charged their parade and in the ensuing melee killed ten people, including several children. “Take care!” warned Clemenceau in the Chamber. “The dead are strong persuaders. One must pay attention to the dead.… I tell you that the primary fact of politics today is the inevitable revolution which is preparing.… The Fourth Estate is rising and reaching for the conquest of power. One must take sides. Either you meet the Fourth Estate with violence or you welcome it with open arms. The moment has come to choose.”

  There was little disposition toward open arms. When the Socialist leaders and unions of Belgium, after two previous bloody attempts, succeeded in 1893 in organizing a general strike for equal manhood suffrage, the essential precondition for the conquest of power, soldiers killed twelve before the strike ended. When the Pullman strike in the United States in 1894 stopped trains and the mail, Judge William Howard Taft of Cincinnati, far from a ferocious man, wrote to his wife, “It will be necessary for the military to kill some of the mob before the trouble can be stayed. They have only killed six … as yet. This is hardly enough to make an impression.” Here was the class war in operation.

  Socialism’s ultimate aim was the abolition of private property and the redistribution of the world’s goods to provide everybody with enough. The goal was the same as that of Anarchism; what caused the permanent conflict between the two groups was that the Socialists believed in organization and political action to achieve it.

  Collective ownership was the answer of both to the terrible riddle posed by the Nineteenth Century: that the greater the material progress, the wider and deeper the resulting poverty. Marx drew from the riddle the central theme of his system: that this inherent contradiction within capitalism would bring about its breakdown. He proved it from the economic analysis of history. The effect of the Industrial Revolution had been to transform the worker from an independent producer who owned his own tools into a factory hand, a propertyless, destitute member of society, dependent for his livelihood on the capitalist who owned the means of production. Through the capitalist’s accumulation of profits derived from the surplus value of the worker’s product, the exploiters were becoming richer and the exploited poorer. The process could only end in the violent collapse of the existing order. Trained in class consciousness and prepared for this event, the working class would, at the moment of ripeness, rise in revolution to usher in the new order.

  This Marxian doctrine of Verelendung (pauperization, or increasing misery) and Zusammenbruch (collapse) was the religious formula of Socialism, equivalent to “God is One” of another religion. It afflicted Socialism and the labour movement with a chronic schism between the necessity of collapse and revolution on the one hand and the possibility of gradual reform of the existing order on the other. As a schism between the future Absolute and the present Possible, it was present from birth, when the founders of 1889 split into two Congresses over the issue whether to permit cooperation with the bourgeois political parties. The true Marxists accused the French Possibilists of lying in wait at the Paris railroad stations to lead unsuspecting delegates from the provinces to the wrong Congress. Throu
ghout the next twenty-five years the schism affected every act, decision and formulation of policy in the working-class movement, dividing negotiated gains from uncompromising class war, pragmatists from theorists, trade unions from parliamentary parties, the workers themselves, who wanted improvements in wages, hours and safety today, from the leaders, who agitated in their behalf for political power tomorrow.

  The Marxian premise built into Socialism a chronic dilemma as well as a schism. As a movement on behalf of the working class it needed working-class support, which could only be obtained by showing practical results. Yet every practical result slowed or arrested the process of impoverishment. When walking with a friend who reached in his pocket to give money to a beggar, Johannes Miquel, in his youth an ardent Socialist, stopped him, saying, “Don’t delay the Revolution!” This was the logical extreme of Marxism. Any reform inferred a common ground between the contesting classes; revolution assumed the absence of it. If there was no common ground, what then was the use of anything short of revolution? Orthodox Socialists skirted this gaping hole in the creed by contending that reforms should continue to be wrung from the possessing class in order to strengthen the workers for the final struggle. The several national parties always stated a minimum program of reforms to be obtained within the existing system and a maximum program for the destruction of capitalism and triumph of the class struggle. Increasingly the moderates, or “opportunists,” as their opponents called them, concentrated on the minimum program and the acquisition of political power necessary to put it through, while the orthodox refused to concede that any interim successes interfered with the truth of “increasing misery.”

  On the final necessity of revolution the Socialist party programs were imprecise. They glossed over it both in order to appeal to the voters and because it remained a disputable point. Socialism was not a hard gemlike doctrine impervious to modification, but varied, depending on time, country, situation and faction. Whether or not a Socialist believed in revolution was largely a matter of temperament. For some it was “nothing if not revolution.” For others what counted was the Socialist millennium, however achieved. For the orthodox Marxist, in any case, collapse was ineluctable and Capitalism not a system to be modified but an Enemy to be destroyed, a living tyrant armed with the weapons of its class: courts, army, judges, legislature, police, injunctions, lockouts.

  Property had lasted too long, filling the world with wickedness, turning men against each other. The time for overturn had come. The social evils produced by capitalism—poverty, ignorance, racial prejudice and war, which was just another form of capitalist exploitation—would be wiped out and replaced by social harmony. Freed from false patriotism, workingmen linked by their underlying brotherhood would no longer fight each other. Freed from the greeds and frustrations imposed by capitalism, every individual could pursue “the unimpaired development of his personality,” being guaranteed under the collective system sufficient means and liberty to achieve it.

  As the chariot of a new and higher order of life, Socialism seemed to its advocates to carry a sacred trust and to impose upon them a moral duty to be worthy of the ideal. Because he believed drinking was disgracing and destroying the working classes, Viktor Adler adopted total abstinence to set a personal example. Socialism was the repository of the big words. When, as a student in Brussels, Angelica Balabanov, a young Russian revolutionary, listened to Socialist orators in the Belgian Parliament, “Parliament seemed to me then a sacred place where Science, Truth and Justice … were to conquer the forces of Tyranny and Oppression for the working class.”

  The goal gave an excitement, a meaning, a glow to Socialist lives which for many of them substituted for the usual drives of personal ambition and profit. Party militants and organizers in the early days worked for nothing. Since there was no money in the movement, there could be no corruption. Since it could offer no livelihood or gain, its leaders tended to be idealists. It was a cause, not a career. It gave its disciples something to work for and infused a passion which could be understood across the barrier of language. At one Socialist Congress the Spanish leader Pablo Iglesias spoke so eloquently in his native tongue that although the audience did not understand a word, they burst into frequent applause. To the workers who increasingly voted for it, in millions after the turn of the century, Socialism gave self-respect and an identity. A workingman could feel himself no longer an ignored anonymous member of a herd but a citizen with a place in society and a political affiliation of his own. Unlike Anarchism, Socialism gave him a party to belong to and, since the nettle of revolution did not have to be grasped, an acceptable way to reach the goal instead of by way of the lawless deed.

  The cause drew men like the Italian Amilcare Cipriani, one of the founders of the Congress of 1889. Type of the eternal rebel, he had fought with Garibaldi’s Red Shirts and as a volunteer in the Cretan insurrection against Turkey and turned up in Brussels to join the comrades in the general strike of 1893. “Magnificent in cape and soft felt hat, with black beard streaked with grey and eyes of flame,” he carried a handbag in which “there were doubtless more explosives than toilet articles … ready to fight in any corner of the world for the cause of Revolution.”

  It drew men of troubled conscience from the upper class, like the American Robert Hunter, married to a daughter of the banker and philanthropist Anson Phelps Stokes. Like others of his class, Hunter was startled by the articles of the Muckrakers and moved to seek a remedy for social injustice. He saw his first vision of the poor in settlement-house work, discovered Socialism, and at the age of twenty-eight in 1904 wrote a small classic, Poverty. With the undulled emotion of his time he described a valley in Italy “so smiling and peaceful, with a thousand terraced gardens on its exquisite slopes, under skies that enrapture the soul; and with men, women and children whose faces with big eyes and sunken cheeks lacerate the heart.… Great God, is not the Valley of the Tirano all the school that Italy needs for Socialism?… The faces are with you when you eat and your food sickens you.… Any man with a heart would become a Socialist in Italy.”

  Valleys of the Tirano in every country made Socialists out of intellectuals who saw them and workers who were born in them. What both had in common was faith that man had it in his power to make things better. The obstacles were massive; the House of Have was old and strong and entrenched. But the grievances of the working class were rising and were concerned as much with social inequality as with pure want. The workers resented disparity in suffrage, due to property qualifications. They resented the unequal working of compulsory military service, from which the privileged could be exempted; the bias of the law, which worked one way for the rich and another for the poor; the layers of hereditary privilege of all kinds, which the ruling class took for granted. Socialism was making the workers’ wants conscious and articulate. The apathy of the masses which had disillusioned Bakunin and caused Lassalle to rail at “the damned wantlessness of the poor” was passing. They were beginning to know what they wanted, though on the whole it was not revolution. Socialism’s inclusion of that goal was what gave it fervor and impetus, as in the case of Julius Braunthal, who joined the Austrian Socialist party at the age of fourteen “for the sake of the Revolution.” But revolution appealed more to intellectuals who had no doubt of their capacity to manage society than it did to the working class.

  Like a crack in a plank of wood which cannot be sealed, the difference between the worker and the intellectual was ineradicable in Socialism. Organized Socialism bore the name Workingmen’s Association but in fact it was never any such thing. It was a movement not of, but on behalf of, the working class, and the distinction remained basic. Although it spoke for the worker and made his wants articulate, goals and doctrine were set, and thought, energy and leadership largely supplied by, intellectuals. The working class was both client and ultimately, in its mass strength, the necessary instrument of the overthrow of capitalism. As such it appeared as Hero; it was sentimentalized. In the illustratio
ns for an English pamphlet commemorating the London Congress of 1896, the workingmen appeared as handsome strong-muscled Burne-Iones figures in smocks accompanied by indomitable women with long limbs and rippling hair. They were not the same race as Zola’s soiled figures, harsh, hungry, consumptive and alcoholic. The reality was neither all one thing nor the other; neither all lumpenproletariat nor curly-bearded, clenched-fisted revolutionist. The working class was no more of a piece than any other class. Socialist doctrine, however, required it to be an entity with a working-class mind, working-class voice, working-class will, working-class purpose. In fact, these were not easily ascertainable. The Socialist idealized them and to be idealized is to be overestimated.

  Owing to its internal quarrels, the founding Congress of 1889 did not lay down a body of doctrine to which the member parties were obliged to subscribe. Agreement went no farther than four resolutions which established four objectives as proper Socialist aims short of the maximum program: the eight-hour day; universal equal manhood suffrage; substitution of citizens’ militias for standing armies; observance of May Day for a show of working-class strength.

  While the first was the essential demand of the clientele, the second was fundamental to the whole Socialist purpose and program. The vote was the one means by which the masses could translate numbers into power; their only means to equalize the power of capital. For the same reason, the ruling class resisted it. Equal manhood suffrage at this date existed only in France and the United States, and only in national elections, not local government, in Germany. In most other countries the propertyless were disqualified or plural votes were given to taxpayers, university graduates and fathers of families. Socialists demanded the one-man-one-vote principle.