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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  His faith had the strength of an engine. “Do you know how to spot an article by Juarès?” asked Clemenceau. “Very simple; all the verbs are in the future tense.” Nevertheless, of all Socialists he was the most pragmatic, never a doctrinaire, always a man of action. He lived by doing, which meant advance and retreat, adaptation, give and take. A formal dogma that might have closed off some avenue of action was not possible for him. He was always the bridge, between men as between ideas. He was a working idealist.

  Elected with him as Socialist deputies in 1893 were Alexandre Millerand, a hardheaded lawyer; René Viviani, renowned more for his moving oratory than for its content; and another lawyer, Aristide Briand, youngest of the group, the F. E. Smith of the Socialists, whose brains, ability and ambition were to prove stronger than his convictions. Briand “knows nothing and understands everything,” said Clemenceau, adding that if he were ever accused of stealing the towers of Notre Dame, he would choose Briand to defend him. The Socialist deputies in the parliament of 1893–98 made their ideas and aims and immediate demands known to the country. Among themselves they had managed to agree in 1896 on a minimum definition known as the St-Mandé Program, formulated by Millerand, which stated that “a Socialist is one who believes in the collective ownership of property.” It established as essential Socialist goals the nationalization of the means of production and exchange, one by one as each became ripe; the conquest of political control through universal suffrage; and international cohesion of the working class. In the Chamber they demanded as interim reforms the eight-hour day, the income and inheritance tax, old-age pensions, municipal reform, health and safety regulations in factories, mines and railroads. With Jaurès in the van, with Guesde in his piercing voice making the bourgeoisie tremble as he expounded the implacable march of Marxian history toward collapse, with the conservative defense led by de Mun, and with all the speeches reported in the papers, the debate developed into a great tournament of ideas which made Socialism from then on a main current of French life.

  French trade unions, infused by the fierce Syndicalist rejection of political action, federated in the Confédération Générale du Travail in 1895 and kept aloof from Socialism. The antagonism reached a climax at the London Congress of the Second International in 1896, the most “tumultuous and chaotic” of all, when armed with mandates from the French unions the Anarchists (among them Jean Grave, representing the steelworkers of Amiens), made their last claim to membership in the Socialist family. The French factions split apart in frenzied antagonism over the issue, and when they caucused before the plenary session a “pandemonium of savage clamor” could be heard through the closed doors. After six days of strife during which the old quarrel between Marx and Bakunin was fought all over again, the Congress ended by excluding the Anarchists once and for all. A phase of Socialism had come to an end. Few doubted that new issues would not arise to divide the right and left wings of Socialism and keep open the schism between the Absolute and the Possible.

  Before that expectation was fulfilled, Socialism in the United States took on a new dimension when the use of injunction in the Pullman strike made a Socialist out of Eugene Victor Debs. Named for Eugène Sue and Victor Hugo by his father, an émigré from Alsace, Debs was brought up on Les Misérables, the bible of father and son. He went to work as a railroad fireman at fourteen, founded the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, and resigned from it in 1892 when he was thirty-seven to organize all railwaymen in an industrial union, the American Railway Union. When in 1893 and 1894 the Pullman Company cut wages by 25 to 33⅓ per cent without lowering rents in company houses and while continuing to pay dividends to investors, Debs called a sympathy strike on all trains carrying Pullman cars. More than a hundred thousand men came out in what developed into the greatest strike effort yet seen in the United States. Mobilizing all the powers of capital, the owners, representing twenty-four railroads with a combined capital of $818,000,000, fought back with the courts and the armed forces of the Federal government behind them. Three thousand police in the Chicago area were mobilized against the strikers, five thousand professional strikebreakers were sworn in as Federal deputy marshals and given firearms; ultimately six thousand Federal and state troops were brought in, less for the protection of property and the public than to break the strike and crush the union. A regular Army colonel, drunk in a Chicago club, wished he could order every man in his regiment to take aim and fire at every “dirty white ribbon,” the emblem of the strikers.

  Although the union had agreed to furnish necessary men for the mail trains, delivery of the mail was made the pretext for an injunction, the most sweeping ever granted. As the arm of the State used in support of property, injunction was capitalism’s most formidable weapon and the most resented. Attorney-General Olney, who had been a lawyer for railroads before entering the Cabinet and was still a director of several lines involved in the strike, persuaded President Cleveland of the necessity. The United States District Attorney in Chicago drew up the injunction with the advice of Judges Grosscup and William Wood of the Federal Circuit Court, who then mounted the bench to confirm their own handiwork. When Governor Altgeld refused to request Federal troops, the judges certified the need of them in order to justify the injunction. It was war, proclaimed Debs, between “the producing classes and the money power of the country.” Refusing to obey the injunction, he was arrested along with several associates, imprisoned without bail, tried and sentenced in 1895 to a term of six months.

  After his arrest the strikers, by then more or less starving, gave up. Thirty had been killed, sixty injured and over seven hundred arrested. In rehiring, Pullman imposed yellow-dog contracts, requiring every worker to relinquish his right to join a union. The American Railway Union was destroyed but the strike had made a hero of Debs and a villain of injunction. It showed that strikes could not be won when government sided with capital; therefore labour must attain political power.

  Debs pondered the lesson in prison. He read Progress and Poverty, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Fabian Essays, Blatchford’s Merrie England and Kautsky’s commentary on the Erfurt Program. He received a visit from Keir Hardie. He became convinced that the cause of the working class was hopeless under capitalism, and when, in the election of 1896, the forces of Mark Hanna and McKinley defeated Bryan and Populism, his conviction was confirmed. Capitalism, too strong to be reformed, must be destroyed. In return, the ruling class felt no less strongly about “Debs the revolutionist.” While campaigning for McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt said in a private conversation, “The sentiment now animating a large proportion of our people can only be suppressed as the Commune was suppressed, by taking ten or a dozen of their leaders out, standing them against a wall and shooting them dead. I believe it will come to that. These leaders are plotting a social revolution and the subversion of the American Republic.”

  Debs announced his conversion to Socialism in a manifesto in the Railway Times of January 1, 1897, saying, “The time has come to regenerate society—we are on the eve of a universal change.” In association with other labour leaders and adopting the form of the name used in Germany, he founded the American Social Democracy, which became the party of native American Socialism. In its early years, with less than four thousand members, it was kept alive by the gold watch of Debs’s brother Theodore, pawned periodically to keep the party newspaper going. Whenever Theodore Debs appeared in the doorway of a pawnshop in the Loop, its old German proprietor would call over his shoulder to the girl at the cash register, “Giff the Socialist chentleman forty dollars.” The political period of American Socialism still lay ahead, when in the first twelve years of the new century, under changed conditions, Debs was to be four times his party’s candidate for President and campaign across the country on board the railwaymen’s Red Special.

  For the moment, his rival was the Socialist Labor Party, drawn chiefly from the foreign born and existing largely on paper and in the mind of its fanatic dictator, Daniel De Leon. Born in Curaçao o
f Dutch-Jewish parents and educated in Germany, De Leon was convinced that only he was fitted to lead the class struggle. He had come to the United States at twenty-two, and having taken a law degree at Columbia and held a lectureship there in Latin-American history, he was scorned by union opponents as the “professor.” Besides keeping up hot and incessant propagation of Socialist ideas in his weekly The People, De Leon ran for the New York State Assembly, for Congress and in 1891 for Governor without visible result. To draw organized labor into political action he launched the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, whose chief function was to excite the rage of the craft-union leader, Sam Gompers. Political action in Gompers’ eyes was the devil’s pitchfork and of De Leon he said that “no more sinister force” had ever appeared in Socialism. In 1901 a large faction of the Socialist Labor Party, opposing De Leon’s “dictatorship,” seceded, under Morris Hillquit and Victor Berger, to join Debs’s group, which now renamed itself the Socialist Party of America.

  Socialism’s inveterate opponent, Gompers was the prototype of regular as opposed to revolutionary trade unionism. He was the outstanding exponent of the view that labour’s fight must be carried on within, not against, the capitalist system. Dwarfish and stocky, “almost grotesque,” with a huge head and heavy coarse features, he was, though ugly, an impressive personality who dominated any meeting in which he took part. When launched on one of his anti-Socialist tirades in the Federation, an old opponent in the Typographers’ Union who enjoyed heckling him used to call from the floor, “Give ’em hell, Sam; give ’em hell.” Sam never slackened in the effort. Having rejected the Old World, he deeply distrusted the Socialist tradition, though well grounded in it. As a young man in the cigarmaking trade, which, paying by the piece, allowed one worker to read aloud while the others made up his quota, he read Marx, Engels, and Lassalle to his fellow workers. “Learn from Socialism” but “don’t join,” advised his mentor, an exiled Swedish Marxist. “Study your union card, Sam,” he would say, “and if the idea doesn’t square with it, it ain’t true.”

  With faith in the new society of America, Gompers rejected the pessimism of the Marxian premise. He believed unalterably that labour should keep out of politics, while using its power to bargain directly with employers. Regulation of wages, hours and working conditions should be achieved by union activity, not by legislative enactment. He founded the Federation in 1881, when he was thirty-one, in a room ten by eight with a kitchen table for a desk, a crate for a stool and tomato boxes supplied by a friendly grocer for files. By 1897 it had 265,000 members, by 1900 half a million, by 1904 a million and a half. When Bryan, angling for the union vote in 1896, promised that if elected he would appoint Gompers to his Cabinet, Gompers stood up to announce that under “no circumstances” would he ever accept any political office. He refused to allow the AF of L to come out in support of Bryan and Populism because, as he said, “these middle-class issues” diverted labour from its own interest, which was the union and nothing else.

  As his power grew, he shaved off his walrus moustache, adopted pince-nez, a Prince Albert coat and a silk hat, and like John Burns, enjoyed hobnobbing with the great, negotiating with Mark Hanna or August Belmont. Yet he never made money for himself and was to die a poor man. While repudiating the class struggle he remained profoundly class conscious. “I am a working man. In every nerve, in every fibre, in every aspiration I am on the side which will advance the interests of my fellow working men.” The task for union members was to “organize more generally, combine more closely, unite our forces, educate and prepare ourselves to protect our interests, that we may go to the ballot box and cast our votes as American freemen, united and determined to redeem this country from its present political and industrial misrule, to take it from the hands of the plutocratic wreckers and place it in the hands of the common people.” This in effect was practical Socialism. So was his reaction fifteen years later when on a tour of Europe he saw visitors appalled at an exhibit of slum conditions in Amsterdam. He recorded their shock that any human being would stand this “gross insult” from civilization: “Why not revolt against it somehow?” Socialism was essentially the movement of those who felt impelled to “revolt against it somehow,” and Gompers, as Morris Hillquit used to say, was a Socialist without knowing it.

  In Europe in 1899 a new issue exploded in the ranks of Socialism when Waldeck-Rousseau, seeking a wide base for the Government that was to “liquidate” the Dreyfus Affair, offered Cabinet office to Millerand, who accepted. Never before had a Socialist stepped over the invisible barrier into the bourgeois camp to cooperate with any part of it. Although Jaurès had led, pushed and persuaded the Socialists, or a faction of them, to join the bourgeois Dreyfusard groups in the battle to save the Republic, to enter a bourgeois government was another matter. Millerand’s case raised the fundamental issue of cooperation which from here on grew more pressing as with each year the Socialists played a greater role in national life. The dilemma presented itself: whether to remain condemned to an orthodox if sterile purity waiting for the final overthrow of capitalism, or to cooperate with the bourgeois parties left of center, supporting them against reaction and spurring them toward reforms. The question carried the further implication: whether Socialist goals might not, in the long run, be attained by way of reform?

  While le cas Millerand threw French Socialists into a turmoil, the same issue rose up in Germany, not in the flesh, but, as befitted Germans, in theory. It came from the most impeccable origins, promulgated by a man of the inner circle, a protégé of Marx and Engels, a friend and associate of Liebknecht, Bebel and Kautsky and a member of the founding Congress of 1889. It was as shocking as if one of the apostles had disputed Jesus. The name of the man who presumed to revise Marx was Eduard Bernstein, and his new doctrine, as if not quite daring to give itself a name, came to be called simply Revision. A bank clerk as a young man, Bernstein, at the age of nineteen, had gone into exile in Switzerland in 1878, the year of Bismarck’s anti-Socialist law. From here he edited the party paper, Sozialdemokrat, so effectively as to win the approval of Marx and the accolade of Engels, who called it “the best the party has had.” In 1888 the German Government paid it the compliment of bringing pressure on the Swiss to expel the staff. Bernstein moved to London, where, like the Master, he spent his time in the reading room of the British Museum and made no attempt to return to Germany after the repeal of the anti-Socialist law in 1890. Though still under indictment for sedition, he could have appealed his case, but he was writing a book on the English Revolution according to the Marxian interpretation and besides he found the atmosphere of London sympathetic. This was symptomatic of his trouble. During these years he acted as correspondent for the new party paper, Vorwärts, and for Kautsky’s Neue Zeit. Headquarters of German Socialism in London was Engels’ house in Regent’s Park, where the exiles gathered for evenings of discussion around a table generously laden with thick sandwiches and beer and, at the proper season, Christmas pudding. On Engels’ death in 1895 Bernstein and Bebel were named his literary executors.

  The following year, as if restraint had been lifted by Engels’ death, Bernstein’s first heretical articles appeared. He was forty-six in 1896, an outwardly decent, respectable figure with rimless glasses and thinning hair who looked as if he might have been a bank teller all his life, rising perhaps to branch manager. His only noticeable feature was a long flaring independent nose. Acquainted with the Fabians—in fact, a good friend of Graham Wallas—he had for a long time felt a prejudice against them for their willingness to work within the capitalist order. At the same time the workings of democratic government in England impressed him and he could not resist the surrounding evidence that capitalism was somehow not approaching imminent collapse. Despite glaring inequalities of wealth and the “increasing misery” Marx had predicted, paradoxically the system was undeniably strong, even aggressive. The world seemed unfairly caught in a relentless spiral of prosperity, with results which seeped down to counteract the �
��increasing misery” in the form of increased employment. In London and in exile Bernstein suffered the disadvantages of independent thought and became increasingly prey to the suspicion that history was not following the path that Marx had charted. She had disobeyed the German diktat. Hegel had laid it down; Marx had hardened it; but history, with a Mona Lisa smile, had gone her own way, eluding the categorical imperative.