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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  As drafted by a committee under Bebel’s direction, the final result managed to accommodate all points of view, short of Hervé’s insurrectionary strike, in a form calculated neither to alarm the public prosecutor in Berlin nor alienate any important section of the Congress. Bebel had prevailed. The resolution did not mention general strike. It reaffirmed the class struggle, the nature of war as inherent in capitalism and the demand for citizen armies to replace standing armies, but stated that “the International is not in a position to prescribe in a rigid form the action to be taken by the working class against militarism.” It recommended the usual “ceaseless agitation” and declared in favor of arbitration and disarmament. The addition sponsored by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, pruned to respectability, pledged the working classes and their parliamentary representatives to exert their utmost efforts to prevent the outbreak of war “by using the means which seem most effective to them”; if war should nevertheless break out they were to work for its speedy termination and meanwhile “exploit the crisis with all their strength thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalism.”

  In 1909 a people suddenly rose in a strike against war with tragic results. It was not an organized movement but, as in the Russian rising of 1905, a spontaneous outbreak. Red Week in Barcelona, called by the Spaniards la semana tragica, was a mass protest against the conscription of soldiers for a campaign in Morocco which was considered by the workers a war in the interests of the Riff mine-owners. A strike initiated by the Labour Federation of Barcelona became overnight an outpouring of the people themselves, especially the women, against war, rulers, reaction, the Church and all the elements of an oppressive regime. Stamped out in gunfire and blood, the rising aroused Socialist wrath over the trial and execution of one man, Francisco Ferrer, but excited no concern for the problems or techniques of revolt.

  In the same year, a general strike was called by the National Federation of Labour in Sweden in protest against the increasing use of lockouts by employers. Involving nearly 500,000 strikers and lasting a month, it was broken by the Government’s threat of permanent dismissal and loss of pensions and by the success of the upper classes in organizing brigades to carry on essential services. Activity was easier to organize than the inactivity of folded arms.

  In the same year, the shadow of war moved nearer when Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in a challenge which Russia, not yet recovered from her troubles, had to swallow, the more so as the Kaiser proclaimed his stand in “shining armor” at his ally’s side. Austrian Socialists could not resist a thrill of national pride. The Socialist Arbeiter-Zeitung of Vienna published a series of chauvinist articles which caused the Serbian bourgeois press malicious joy in pointing out that international solidarity of the working class was not so solid as supposed.

  In England the anti-German wave swept up Blatchford, who for all his Socialism had, as an old soldier, supported the Boer War. With Hyndman he now conducted a campaign for conscription in his paper, the Clarion. Branding them as betrayers of Socialism, Keir Hardie still believed “absolutely that organized labour would never take part in another orgy of workmen’s blood.” Nor was he alone. The mystique of the working class standing as one, in heroic consciousness of itself, was strong. Sam Gompers, born to the working class himself like Hardie, and concerned all his life with workingmen and their affairs, believed in it. When he came to Europe to attend an international Trade Union Congress in 1909, the primary impression he took away was “the fact of the solidarity today in the sentiment of the masses of Europe.” Still the unconscious Socialist, he believed the struggle of the workers for their rights would take precedence “over wars between nations in which working men have no cause.” He knew and stated in another context that a general strike was “impossible in the current stage of organized labour”; nevertheless he too felt sure of a “deep seated resolve” among his class to refuse to take military duty’s last step of shooting down their fellow workers. The spirit of the international trade-union congresses where delegates talked and broke bread together would, he wrote, spread back through their reports to all organized workers, who would understand and refuse to kill each other. “Even the unorganized” would read the accounts and listen to the returning delegates and take up this spirit of refusal. Statesmen knew very well that their next order, “To the front!” would be followed by “mass demonstrations for peace”—Gompers did not venture to say mass disobedience. “It is the general consensus of opinion,” he concluded, “that the final obstacle to a war of nations in Europe today is the determined adverse attitude of the workers in the different countries.”

  Gompers was as practical and toughminded as any man who ever lived, but the age he lived in was sentimental. That, like Jaurès, he could believe in a final Halt! accomplished by “mass demonstrations” showed the extent to which the idea of the working class as Hero had taken hold.

  His purpose in coming to Europe was to affiliate the AF of L with the International Federation of Trade Unions. If any action by organized labour was to make itself felt against war, this was the only body which could supply it, supposing it possessed both the will and the means. It had neither. Founded in 1903 at the suggestion of English and French unions but opposed by the Germans, it represented twenty-seven federations of trades or industries with a membership of over seven million in nineteen countries. The figures were more imposing than its real functions, which were chiefly secretarial. It kept member unions informed of trade conditions and did its best to frustrate employers’ efforts to recruit foreign strikebreakers. To conciliate the large and well-financed German unions, its headquarters were in Germany and Carl Legien, chief of the German National Federation of Trade Unions, was its Secretary. At its biennial Congresses, political and social questions, usually brought forward by the French, were not welcomed. In 1909 the Federation raised a strike aid fund of $643,000 for the Swedish general strike, most of it coming from the German and Scandinavian unions and very little from the British, French or American. Solidarity was less than total. With German influence strong and with a non-political orientation, it was not a body to interest itself in ideas of an international general strike.

  One of its strongest units was the International Transportworkers’ Federation of seamen, dockers and railwaymen. Founded in 1896, it represented forty-two unions in sixteen countries with a membership of 468,000. It was on the ITF that Keir Hardie, who like Jaurès had become primarily concerned with the problem of war, rested his hopes of an international strike in the event of war. If the transport workers alone, or together with the miners’ International, downed tools, he believed they could stop a war. Here again the problem was simultaneous action in all countries, but Hardie’s fervor carried him over that and he brought his proposal forward at the next Socialist Congress, held in Copenhagen in August, 1910.

  As host city to the International in 1910 Copenhagen was a symbol of the importance Socialism had reached. The Danish Socialist Party, one of the strongest of the small countries, controlled the municipal government of the capital. The committee, determined to impress the world by its organization and efficiency, gave magnificent receptions and a Socialist mayor delivered the address of welcome. Replying in a voice of “ripe sonority which makes hearts vibrate,” Vandervelde expressed the delegates’ sense of a great occasion when “a free people, masters of their City Hall, welcomes the Red International.” Socialist voters in the world now numbered eight million. French Socialists were fresh from an electoral victory in May in which they had won over a million votes and increased their deputies from 54 to 76. Although it was not a matter for unmixed pride, Briand, still calling himself an Independent Socialist, was actually Premier. Socialism seemed to have reached a stage to exercise effectively the “awful conscience” of mankind.

  At Copenhagen it spoke through Keir Hardie, who proposed a resolution jointly with Edouard Vaillant of France, recommending that “the affiliated Parties and Labour organizations consider the advisability and feas
ibility of the general strike, especially in industries that supply war material, as one of the methods of preventing war and that action be taken on the subject at the next Congress.” When proposing it, Hardie acknowledged that the workers were not ready to strike against war but he clung to the hope that they would be ready when the time came. “We must give them a great lead,” he said. His resolution was supported by Vandervelde and by Jaurès, who was the more disposed to be sympathetic because he was in the midst of an effective effort, which partly depended on acceptance of the general strike, to draw the CGT closer to the SFIO. Further, his concern over the bureaucratic trend of the German party led him increasingly to consider the need for mass tactics.

  The Germans and Austrians were solidly opposed to Hardie’s motion on the same ground as before: that to advocate a strike in the event of war might lead to prosecution for treason and confiscation of funds. Bebel, ill and growing old, was absent, but even without him, German pressure secured a negative vote. As a compromise the resolution was referred to the Bureau in Brussels for reconsideration at the next Congress. To go on record even to this extent worried the Germans. They were only reluctantly persuaded to agree by Vandervelde’s argument that if they refused, the British and French might pursue the plan independently. A resolution on anti-militarism was passed, virtually the same as that of Stuttgart, with the addition that organized labour in member countries “shall consider whether a general strike should not be proclaimed if necessary in order to prevent the crime of war.” As nervously if not quite as quickly as capitalists had disposed of Disarmament at The Hague, Socialists disposed of the general strike.

  Within weeks hard proof was given of labour’s inability to win a transport strike. In France in October Premier Briand broke a general strike of railwaymen against all private and state-operated lines by conscripting the workers into the army for a period of three weeks, making absence from work subject to a charge of military desertion. On the excuse of national defense, Briand defended his action as dictated by a patriotic conscience. Even to an old Socialist his conscience did not dictate pressure on the companies for the wage increase the railwaymen were demanding.

  History had reached 1910. The transfer of power to a new class whose signals Balfour had seen in the British general election of 1906 was a process in the making, not a fact. In a test of strength, as in the French railway strike, labour could not command real power. International action was hallucination. While the Socialists kept on talking about it and believing in it, they were dealing more in a hope and a theory than in flesh and bones. One genuine attempt at international working-class action was made at this time. While the Socialists in Copenhagen were discussing a possible general strike in war industries, the very men who would be crucial to it, the International Transportworkers (ITF), by nature the most international of the unions, were also in session in Copenhagen. Once during the Boer War pro-Boer Dutch members had urged an international boycott of British shipping but the ITF leaders had flatly turned down the proposal on the ground that it was just not possible at that stage to interest workers in an international movement for political purposes. Direct trade union purposes were another matter. Now in 1910 they decided to call an international strike of their own in the following year for redress of grievances against the shipowners.

  The active instigators were the British delegates, Ben Tillett and Havelock Wilson, while the German delegate, Paul Muller, was strongly opposed, just as his compatriots were simultaneously opposing Keir Hardie’s proposal at the Socialist congress. A seamen’s strike at the present moment, Muller said, would be “absolutely insane” and would certainly end disastrously. The masters would triumph, the union leaders would lose their influence, the men would become destitute and would ultimately have to sue for peace on their knees. Since a shipping strike, like a strike against war, would operate to the advantage of the shipping trade in the countries whose unions did not go out, and since the Germans and British were rivals in shipping, the international principle was vital. Heavy pressure brought Herr Muller around and the Congress voted unanimously for a seamen’s strike against the “brutal and callous” refusal of the shipowners in all countries to discuss the unions’ demands for a conciliation board. All agreed that the strike “must and would be international.”

  At subsequent meetings of the seamen’s committee at Antwerp in November and the following March, the British stated they would definitely strike in 1911 and the Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians and Danes pledged their support. The Germans, now claiming that they had no reason to strike, backed out. The date was set for June 14. In the meantime the Danes and Norwegians retired, the former because they had succeeded in winning a favorable five-year agreement and the latter because, on their demands being turned down, they felt themselves too weak to enforce them. In what developed into the great Transport strike of Coronation summer, the British struck anyway, along with the Belgians and Dutch, whose action was overshadowed by the dramatic British effort. Sympathetic action in other Continental ports was organized by the ITF, which prevented recruitment of strikebreakers and helped the British seamen win their demands. As a whole, however, the strike solidarity originally contemplated was not reached. As if in preview, the ITF endeavor of 1911 showed what might be expected of the working class in international action.

  Socialism with steadfast heart remained, nevertheless, predicated in the event of war on a “rising” of the workers of the world. In this it shared the tendency of the age to clothe reality in sentimental garments. The public of the time was not represented by those doctors, writers and social psychologists who were beginning to look at man without illusions. These were the advance guard, as were “seers of black” like Wedekind. The public preferred the rosy view: the perfect pearly nudes of Bouguereau, the impossibly handsome Gibson girls—creatures that never were on land or sea. So, in their own way, did the Socialists.

  The rosy view predominated in Germany, where in the general election of 1912 the Social-Democrats won an astounding 35 per cent of the total vote, amounting to 4,250,000 votes and 110 seats. The party was growing so fast and seemed so powerful that to other Socialists it appeared “irresistible” and the moment near and certain when the Socialist movement in Germany would “include the majority of the people and burst the fetters of the feudal-capitalist state.” The existence of so many Social-Democrats in the country meant a proportionate increase of their numbers in the armed forces, leading to a time, surely, when it would be impossible for the Army to be used against the workers.

  But the discrepancy between size and actual influence which Jaurès had brought into the open at the Amsterdam Congress, remained, indeed grew more noticeable as the size of the party swelled. The uses to which the German parliamentary Socialists put their electoral triumph of 1912 were not impressive. When the Government that year increased its forces by three Army corps, they opposed the enabling bill but did not venture so far as to oppose the tax which was to pay for it. When one of their number, Philipp Scheidemann, was elected First Vice-President of the Reichstag, his announcement that he would not join in the official call on the Kaiser touched off a new version of the knee-breeches debate. All the parties, not only the Socialists, took part. The vital question at issue was whether Scheidemann would make the call if the Second Vice-President were absent and whether Bebel had or had not agreed that the Socialists could join in the customary cheers for their Sovereign. In the upshot, Scheidemann’s principles caused his election to be cancelled, thus averting serious problems.

  Within the body of Social-Democracy, Revision was keeping pace with the growing nationalism of the country. Socialism’s very success turned its sights away from the maximum program, toward the minimum and the possible. The red dawn of revolution receded. Believers repeated the Marxist formulas with untamed ardor, but conviction had passed to those who were still “illegals”—the Russians. At a meeting of the Leipzig left-wingers, a visiting Austrian Socialist referred to his hosts as rev
olutionaries. “We revolutionaries?” interrupted Franz Mehring. “Bah! Those are the revolutionaries,” he said, nodding at Trotsky, who was a guest.

  For Jaurès the overriding task had become the need to forge and impose a policy for preventing war in terms compatible both with the defence of France and faith in Socialism. In his country too, nationalism, revanche, the belligerent spirit, was rising. The pressure of Germany was omnipresent, the shadow of Sedan lengthening. To logical extremists like Guesde, peace and the interests of the working class were not necessarily equivalent, but to Jaurès they were. He now believed that the only way consistent with Socialism to meet the threat of war was through a citizen army. When the whole nation was an army of reserves, with everyone having taken six months’ basic training, and with officers drawn from the ranks, the nation could not be drawn into belligerency in the interest of capitalist warmongers. In a war of defence against invasion only such an army of the whole nation, he argued, could hope to repel the terrible “submersion” that German use of reserves in the front line was preparing.