Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Eleanor’s experience of America broadened, educated and confirmed her critical assessment of the political possibilities of an integrated socialist and feminist programme for revolution. ‘The Woman Question: From a Socialist Point of View’ and Eleanor’s study of both working-class feminist women and well-to-do suffragists in The Working Class Movement in America are the first statements of socialist feminism in Western thought, and the first on both sides of the Atlantic.

  The inseparability of the socialist project from feminism continued to be one of Eleanor’s key themes all over America, exemplified in a speech she gave in Chicago:

  We are told that ‘socialists want to have women in common’. Such an idea is possible only in a state of society that looks upon woman as a commodity. Today, woman, alas, is only that. She has only too often to sell her womanhood for bread. But to the socialist a woman is a human being, and can no more be ‘held’ in common than a socialistic society could recognise slavery. And these virtuous men who speak of our wanting to hold women in common, who are they? The very men who debauch your wives and sisters and daughters. Have you ever reflected, you working men, that the very wealth you create is used to debauch your own sisters and daughters, even your little children? That is to me the most terrible of all the miseries of our modern society: that poor men should create the very wealth that is used by the man of ‘family and order’ to ruin the women of your class. We socialists, then, want common property in all means of production and distribution, and as woman is not a machine, but a human being, she will have her profits and her duties like men, but cannot be held by anyone as a piece of property.32

  Everywhere they travelled in America, Eleanor met and interviewed working-class women and children about their lives and labour conditions. She also talked with factory owners, foremen and labour superintendents. She found that capitalists preferred to employ women and children. Women took lower wages and were perceived as being easier to bully and subdue if they tried to organise or strike. Children, even more so.

  In Fall River, she found entire communities of young men supported by their sisters and mothers because there was so little work in the mills for men. In New Jersey, woman and child labour was more than usually drastically lower-priced than that of men, the hours longer and agitation more violently suppressed. These women, Eleanor observed, ‘merely toil and scrimp, and bear’.33

  In Pennsylvania, women were permitted to perform heavy manual labour generally reserved for men in order to save on wages. In Utica, New York State, the factory owners saved money by getting young girls to clean the running looms, ‘at the risk of getting their hands taken off’.34 Other women had poisoned hands from the toxins in the paint used for making artificial flowers and were no longer able to work – they were laid off without support or compensation. Women and children with industrial diseases and injuries had to resort to unregulated prostitution in and around the factories.

  On a positive note, in Vineland, New Jersey, women had organised and joined the Knights of Labor, which had agreed to their participation. Working together, they succeeded in securing the same wages for women as for men – but this was a rare victory.

  Conditions for textile workers and cigar-makers were particularly shocking. Expert crocheters earned 12.5 cents a day for making beautiful, highly-crafted shawls. Half-starved, overworked seamstresses had to pay for the machines on which they made jeans for $1.50 a dozen. Collar- and cuff-makers had to pay for thread. Shirt-ironers, glove-makers and milliners were paid a few cents a day and received their wages received only once every fortnight. Women workers were fined for reading newspapers, or for going to the toilet, drinking water or sitting on a stool whilst working.

  In America, as in England, sweaters – Eleanor grimly remarks – are so named because the sweater ‘lives on the woman’s earnings, literally on her sweat and blood’.35 Cloakmakers in New York worked from six in the morning to one o’clock at night for 25 cents a day, sharing a piece of bread and small bowl of soup between four of them for the entire shift. Like the women cloakmakers, cigar-makers also slept by the machine:

  These women also, with their families, work, eat and sleep in these rooms . . . surrounded by filth with children waddling in it, and having sores on their hands and faces and various parts of the body . . . They are all the time handling this tobacco they make into cigars.36

  Diseases of the womb, miscarriages, stillbirths and nervous depression inevitably resulted.

  The extent and degradation of child labour drove Eleanor wild with fury and despair. As in England, child labour was gradually ousting adult male labour, when not in turn ousted by machinery. Parents were forced to send children to the mills at an early age to earn subsistence for the family. With many families dependent for survival on wages earned by children, young ones were regularly taken out of school as soon as they were strong enough for manual labour, on average at twelve or fourteen years old. Parents and employers lied about the ages of children to evade laws regulating child labour, which existed but were not enforced.

  Many states enacted compulsory education laws in 1879 and there was an admirable provision of publicly-funded state schools available to working-class children of both genders but, as Eleanor described:

  When people are starving the children must get bread before they get teaching. In all the Eastern factory towns, in all the lumber districts, even in many a Western city, we heard the same story. ‘The children must work; they can’t go to school.’37

  After a long day’s labour, thousands of young men and women of sixteen and upwards strove to combine their factory jobs with trying to get some education at night schools. Young agricultural workers grew up without any chance of learning. Eleanor goes into minute and exact detail on the pay, conditions and lives of children in the labour system – conditions for children in the tobacco and telegraph industries were particularly horrendous, in her view: simply slave labour. These children were not educated, they didn’t play and often barely had homes to go to. Less able to organise than adults, child labourers were the most vulnerable sector.

  Eleanor ended her analysis of woman and child labour ‘by calling attention to the three chief points as to which, according to the reports, intelligent labour is unanimous: abolition of child labour, eight-hour working day, organisation.’38

  Aveling went to the theatre at every opportunity. Tussy joined him when she could get away from meetings and work in the evenings, which was not often. As his expenses were covered and hers were not this was, on the face of it, fair enough. Except that whilst Edward kept all his theatre tickets to reclaim on expenses, it later turned out that he had attended most shows on complimentary press tickets by claiming that he was a drama critic for the Saturday Review and other arts periodicals.

  Edward certainly took well to the opportunities for fine living in America, at others’ expense. He argued for upgrades in hotels and on Pullman trains wherever he could, and took huge delight in flouting abstinence laws in Prohibition states. In Rhode Island he mischiev­ously ordered a bottle of champagne and ‘in ten minutes a bottle of Heidsieck was before me and, soon after, within’.39 On the Pullman through Prohibition Iowa Edward both amused and discomforted Tussy by uncorking a bottle of white wine he had hoarded up and drinking it, with great deliberation, in front of fellow passengers, whilst she gazed out of the window and made notes on the price of land, ‘so wickedly exorbitant that the shanties are mortgaged up to the roof’.40

  In profligate mood, Edward bought Tussy good Virginia tobacco to smoke – probably produced by the child labourers she had interviewed. On one occasion when she accompanied him to the theatre, he presented her with an elaborate floral corsage, far from her usual understated taste but welcome as a mark of his attention.

  Library joined them and at the beginning of November the threesome arrived in the Midwest. Edward and Library visited the condemned Chicago anarchists in Cook County Jail. Their visit was hosted by the ‘physical and mental gia
nt’ Captain William Perkins Black and his ‘indomitable’ little wife (little, as Tussy remarked, only in stature, not spirit).41 Decorated Civil War veteran and hero Black, a successful corporate lawyer with his own practice, was now representing the Haymarket riot case. During their four-day stay in the city hosted by the Blacks, Tussy came to understand in detail the seismic events that had rocked Chicago over the course of this momentous year.

  The first of May 1886 had been proclaimed a nationwide workers’ strike to enforce the eight-hour working day in America, under the leadership of the Federation of Organised Trades and Labor Unions led by Samuel Gompers. The decision was ratified and supported by the Knights of Labor, with the agreement that those unions which did not decide to strike would do everything possible to help their brothers. Up until this point the Knights, in principle, discouraged open conflict with employers and their rules forbade political discussion, but now they reconsidered.

  On Saturday 1 May more than 300,000 workers from 11,000 trades and businesses demonstrated on the streets of America. Forty thousand in Chicago, 11,000 in Detroit and in New York 25,000 marched in torchlit procession through central Manhattan led by the city’s bakers. The New York Times declared the Eight Hour Movement ‘un-American’,42 and alarmed industrialists and pro-capitalist media screamed that 1 May was in fact the date for Communist working-class insurrection and America’s ‘Paris Commune’.

  The successful outcome of this May Day action was to secure an eight-hour day for approximately 200,000 American workers. To prevent large numbers of their employees joining the strike, some employers had made the concession in advance of the action. Trade union membership increased dramatically, as did solidarity and social networking between different worker organisations. Police, pro-capitalist press and the Pinkerton Detective Agency were dismayed at the nationwide ferment, particularly in the socialist stronghold of Chicago where on 1 May the city had come to a standstill.

  An opportunity for retaliation presented itself on 3 May, at the gates of the McCormick Harvester reaper factory, where the workers struck against an unjust piecework system. On that evening, the strikers waited at the gates in a picket line that had been crossed by 300 blacklegs escorted into the works that morning under police and Pinkerton’s protection. As the strike-breakers emerged flanked by armed Pinkerton’s men, the crowd heckled and jostled them. The Pinkertons opened fire and, as the strikers fled, seven men were killed. Furious Chicago citizens – men, women and children – convened in the Haymarket Square the following evening to protest against the killing of strikers. Carter Harrison, the anti-socialist mayor of Chicago, attended the demonstration and, before leaving to go home for his dinner, told the police that they should disband and withdraw as it was a peaceful and calm affair.

  They ignored him. Some 200 armed police stormed the centre of the crowd and ordered the meeting to stop. Sam Fielden, a British immigrant who was the final speaker of the evening, objected from the platform that this was a peaceful assembly. As he said this, a bomb exploded and policeman Mathias Degan was killed instantly. A further six police officers were mortally wounded and fifty more badly injured. The police opened fire, shooting directly into the crowd and at those running away. Many protesters sustained serious injuries and, controversially, an unknown number were killed.

  Panic, mass arrests and detention without trial followed all over the city that night. Suspects were beaten and tortured and, finally, eight men were charged with Degan’s murder. Of these eight, Sam Fielden and August Spies, the editor of the anarchist German language newspaper Arbeiter Zeitung, were the only two men present when the bomb was thrown.

  The grand jury trial in June was a farce. Judge Joseph Gary didn’t even maintain the pretence that the eight defendants were on trial for Degan’s murder. Defendants were charged with producing anarchist literature in languages they could neither speak nor read. In the summing up and sentencing of seven of the men to be hanged on 3 December, the state prosecutor spelled it out: ‘Anarchy is on trial.’43 The eighth man, who was proved not to have been present at the Haymarket meeting on the evening in question, was sentenced to fifteen years’ penal servitude.

  These were the men that Aveling and Liebknecht visited in Cook County Jail, and whose case William Perkins Black presented so convincingly to Eleanor, who had followed the case from London since the events of May. At the time of their visit in November, the defendants had just received the news that their first application for an appeal had been disallowed. Undeterred, Black pushed for a retrial.

  Eleanor’s view was that anarchism had proved as much a hindrance to the development of a programme for social and economic democracy in America as it had to the English movement. She was ‘entirely opposed to the methods and aims of Anarchism’.44 However, the Chicago anarchists were now famously the victims of an appalling corruption of the justice system and Eleanor, despite political differences, was uncompromising in her support:

  It was our duty, and we made it our business, to speak out at every meeting we held in America in favour of a new trial for the condemned Anarchists of Chicago.45

  From the beginning of their ‘agitation’ tour of America, Eleanor had encouraged her audiences to ‘throw three bombs amongst the masses: agitation, education, organisation’.46 She precisely defined the fundamental difference between socialism and anarchism:

  It is true both anarchists and socialists attack the present capitalist system. But the anarchist attacks it from the individualist, conservative, reactionary point of view, the socialist from the communist, progressive standpoint . . . The socialist believes in organisation; he believes in political action, in the seizure of political power by the working class as the only means of attaining that complete economic emancipation which is the final aim.47

  In a speech in New York on 19 September Eleanor pointed out how characteristic it was that the most violent attacks made on her, Aveling and Liebknecht since their arrival in the US had come from anarchist writers and speakers. ‘The Chicago capitalist press wanted us to be hanged after we had landed; Herr Most’s48 paper, Die Freiheit, was for shooting us on sight, before we landed.’49 But justice, Eleanor said, was the point here, not antagonism between socialism and anarchism.

  From the moment she set foot on American soil, Tussy demanded justice for the Chicago anarchists. She continued to speak in support of a new trial for the condemned men at every meeting in America. She laid out her case with precision and mastery of the requirements of the rule of law.50

  Eleanor deplored anarchism. In her judgement it ‘ruined the International movement . . . threw back the Spanish, Italian, and French movements for many years . . . proved a hindrance in America; and . . . in England . . . is a decided nuisance’.51 But she was unstinting both politically and personally in her support and activism on behalf of the Chicago anarchists. Justice must be done.

  On Thanksgiving Day, 25 November, William Black secured a stay of execution, ensuring the men would not be hanged on 3 December. With Henry George, leader of the new Labor Party, in the New York mayoralty, things were looking more hopeful by the time Eleanor and Edward’s tour concluded in December.

  Ending in New York where they began, Tussy and Edward joined a mass meeting on 21 December to object to the establishment of a workhouse for tramps. Edward went to the theatre and, between her meetings, Tussy met suffragists and browsed the bookshops. On 23 December they presented a report on their agitation tour to a general meeting of their hosts, the Socialistic Labor Party. Eleanor’s address emphasised the need for a women’s organisation as an integral part of the social movement.

  American working women, she found, suffered worse conditions than those in England. The problem of the wages of women and children was the general problem of all labour and industrial conditions, and women’s organisation was not and must not be a separate political body. Women should attend meetings, run for leadership and bring their mostly working children with them to meetings too, and encourage t
hem to have a voice in youth councils. All working men, Tussy said, had a duty to give women a helping hand with children and the home to ensure their full ability to participate in the social and political movement.

  Where Eleanor’s closing speech in America was decisively a call to socialist-feminist arms, Aveling’s was strategically controversial. Boldly and bravely, Edward declared that, ‘The movement, if it were to succeed, must become American and pass from the hands of the German over to those of the English-speaking people.’52 Directly challenging his hosts the party leadership, Aveling stated that on the basis of his experience of the past three months, ‘If I were a worker settled here, I would join the Knights of Labor and the Central Labor Union to spread my socialist doctrines in those circles.’ He drove his point home by stating that if the German party did not do this, it might as well give up and ‘leave the scene’.53

  Aveling’s unwelcome recommendations prompted a barrage of hostile questions from the floor, deteriorating into a personal attack by Edward on ‘the stupidity and egotism’ of Wilhelm Rosenberg, the SLP party secretary. After this bad-blooded end to the public assembly Edward, accompanied by Tussy, went immediately into a meeting with the party executive to present his accounts and expenses. The timing could not have been more disastrous. Unbeknown to Tussy, Rosenberg had already advised Aveling earlier in the month that the expenses of the tour ‘had swallowed up more than the SLP expected’, and that consequently there was no money left to organise the conference of English-speaking socialists in New York proposed by Aveling and Liebknecht to the German leadership.

  At the executive meeting to review the financial accounts from the tour, the gloves came off between Aveling and Rosenberg. The executive ‘declaimed against my reckonings as excessive from end to end,’ grumbled Aveling, ‘and denounced us both as aristocrats living on the money of the workers, and not worthy to belong to the party, &c.’54