Helen Demuth was history’s housekeeper and, as Tussy knew, keeper of its secrets. She just didn’t understand why Freddy’s paternity had to be a secret.
20
I Am a Jewess
To everyone’s alarm, Lenchen’s death threw the usually unflappable General into a panic. The management of Regent’s Park Road imploded. In an essay painting a portrait of ‘Frederick Engels at Home’ Aveling had described Lenchen as becoming for Engels what she’d been to Marx, ‘his housekeeper and . . . his trusted counsellor and advisor, not only in the matters of daily life, but even in politics’.1
The General instinctively sought out a replacement.
Several years previously, Engels had met and taken a great shine to Louise Kautsky when she visited London with her then-husband Karl. Shortly afterwards, at an alpine conference, Karl met a young Fräulein with whom he fell instantly in lust. With considerable dignity and maturity, Louise set him free to marry her. The couple had since divorced. Confusingly, the second Mrs Kautsky was also called Luise; and the first Mrs Kautsky decided to retain her married name.
Louise started studying midwifery in Vienna. She maintained her involvement in the German Social Democratic Party independently of her ex-husband. Disregarding her studies, the General took up his pen and beseeched her to come and take care of a ‘helpless’ old man, rather than waste her energies on learning to bring new young ones into the world. Louise promptly accepted and arrived to take over the running of Regent’s Park Road.
The ‘redoubtable’ Pumps, as Tussy called her, took great umbrage at the arrival of this Viennese interloper. Terrified of being ‘Pumped’, the General hid behind Tussy’s skirts and told Pumps that Louise had come to take over the management of his household at Tussy’s invitation, not his. Tussy was much amused by this, as well as by the vexed diplomacy of the ‘head of the table question’ at Regent’s Park Road.2 She was quick to empathise with Louise’s predicament in what she dubbed the ‘Pumpsiad’ – a domestic drama of epic proportions:
I am sorry for Louise. Bebel and all the others have told her it is her duty to the party to stop [with Engels]. It hardly seems fair to her. She was getting on so well at Vienna, and to sacrifice her whole career is no trivial matter – no one would ask a man to do that. She is still so young – only just thirty. It seems not right to shut her up, and keep her from every chance of a fuller and happier life. And you know what her life here will be.3
But Tussy’s ready empathy with Louise Kautsky made her an easy mark. Louise’s fortuitous availability at the General’s hour of need was far from the convenient coincidence it appeared to be. August Bebel, Paul Singer and Victor Adler, all founders and leaders of the German Social Democratic Party, had put Louise up to making a play for Engels’s attentions. The German party was anxious about the future of Marx’s manuscripts and intellectual estate (known as the Nachlass). Unbeknown to Tussy and Engels, Louise had a specific mission. It was public knowledge that Marx had bequeathed exclusive rights to his intellectual property to Eleanor and Laura, to be held in trust by Engels for the duration of his lifetime. Bebel, Singer and Adler hoped to contravene Marx’s wishes and to influence Engels to get him to divert all the Marxian manuscripts and correspondence to the German SPD. To this end, they persuaded Louise to ingratiate herself with Engels and get him to change his will in favour of the German party.
All three men came to London for Engels’s seventieth birthday celebrations and were pleased to see that Louise was settling in and had won the trust of both Engels and Eleanor. As Bebel noted conspiratorially to Adler, ‘Louise herself must know what she has to do.’4 Louise embedded herself at the heart of the General’s life and succeeded in insinuating herself into Tussy and Edward’s lives as well.
Tussy should have paid heed to Pumps’s forthright hostility to Louise. Pumps insisted that Louise’s sole purpose was to displace her, Eleanor and Laura from Engels’s affections and thus his will. Tussy, however, sensed no conspiracy, and was just pleased to see him happy and productive. ‘The General is wonderfully well,’ she wrote to Laura:
Louise has him splendidly in hand. Pumpsia’s nose is hopelessly (at present) out of joint . . . – It is good news . . . that the General is working at Volume III [of Capital] and that a very good portion of it will be sent off to Meissner immediately after Christmas – it would not be safe to send during the holiday traffic.5
Karl Kautsky tried repeatedly to alert them but his warnings sounded too much like the wounded griping of an ex-husband because Tussy and the General had taken Louise’s part over their divorce.
Anyway, Tussy was too busy working to reflect on the details of what was happening at home.
Between 1890 and 1893 she was in perpetual motion. Activist life was full of mundane daily tasks like any other. Eleanor’s speeches, campaigning, arbitration meetings, articles, reports, breaking of bread and beer after congress sessions required determination and great stamina. In the summer of 1891 she wrote to her sister from London, ‘I go to Brussels for the Gas Workers – and I must come back here from the Congress. I see no possibility of a holiday this year! Holidays and I seem to have parted company.’6
Instead of a holiday, Tussy returned to London for more speaking, lecturing, union work and to what she called the ‘Gillesiade’ – Edward’s inflamed tangle with the tricky journalist Ferdinand Gilles. Gilles had recently joined the SDF and become one of Hyndman’s lackeys. At Hyndman’s instruction, Gilles briefed against Aveling at the Brussels congress, spreading gossip about him amongst the delegates. That the stories were probably true made Aveling all the more indignant.
On their return to London Edward, accompanied by the oh-so-loyal Louise, went to Gilles’s home in Islington and doorstepped him. The ensuing row resulted in Aveling punching Gilles in the head and the police being summoned. Aveling was fined forty shillings for assault. August Bebel, who despised Gilles, remarked to Eleanor that twenty shillings per box on the ear was temptingly cheap. The squabble continued in the pages of the Workman’s Times and Vorwärts. Eleanor was keen to respond to Gilles’s printed attacks but rightly cautious of British libel law: ‘one never knows where one may be landed in a libel case, and every word of what we may say would be, in a sense, libellous.’7 Louise’s apparent partisanship during this dispute, and many others, strengthened her credibility as an ally.
Eleanor did notice that Louise started to fuss and bustle about the General’s various ailments and what she characterised as the failing health of an old man. Tussy scoffed. Louise’s solicitude about poor old Engels, who certainly was not poor and never acted old, initially amused Tussy, who believed the seasoned rogue was just toying with the gullible Louise: ‘the dear old General is as jolly as a sandboy (what a sandboy is, or why he should be jolly I don’t know) and seems to get younger and younger.’8
Edward’s health, however, began to deteriorate. His illnesses were now manifestly real. ‘Edward is far from well,’ Eleanor anxiously told her sister. ‘He is stopping with a friend in Brighton. He has had a very bad – and indeed still has, a very bad throat – quinsy.’9
Politics commanded Eleanor’s full attention. The counter-attack on new unionism by employers and vested capitalist interests was strengthened by the economic recession of the early 1890s. By both principle and as the means to consolidate the momentum for a new independent labour party, Eleanor and Edward – when his health allowed – focused on forming international alliances. Their object was to forge transnational solidarity between worker movements in Europe and its colonies. Trade, finance, industry and capital organised itself internationally; so too, therefore, must opposition to it.
Eleanor’s work became increasingly international. In her report to the delegates of the 1891 Brussels congress, she updated members on the financial support sent by Nottingham lace workers to their striking co-workers at Calais, by Austrian to English brick-makers, and by English glass-blowers to flint-glass workers in Lyons.10 Eleanor acted as intermedi
ary, setting up the processes for delivering these strike funds and ensuring their proper distribution. It was this money that provided subsistence – food, heat, shelter – for workers and their families so that they could undertake and survive industrial action.
In 1892 Eleanor served as both secretary and translator at the fourth congress of the International Glass Workers’ Union. The following year she supported the sixteen-week lockout by Yorkshire and Lancashire glass workers, rapidly firing off volleys of correspondence to her sister, the French media and the Lyons glass workers:
This fight means a life and death struggle here of the whole Glass Working industry. It is bound to last for months. What the end will be the Lord knows – and as Edward always says, the Lord is so incommunicative.11
Glass workers from Germany, France and Denmark subscribed to the strike fund from their own wages, and kept subsistence flowing to the Yorkshire and Lancashire workers so they could continue their action. They succeeded in forcing a capitulation from their employers in April 1892.
At the third International Miners’ Congress in London in July 1892 Eleanor worked as secretary and translator by day and by night wrote full-length political and economic analyses for both the English and German press. She typed up her own reports in both languages.
Engels recorded in detail Eleanor’s critical role in arbitrating in a potentially disastrous political dispute between German and Scottish coalminers. No mean feat. It was her intervention, Engels told August Bebel, which set the matter right. Tussy seemed indefatigable. Her own record was far more perfunctory: ‘I left (I had to see some German miners) on the Thursday evening at 9:15; reached Cumnock about 9am; was hard at work all day, caught the 9:15 at Cumnock on the Friday evening and was back in London, considerably the worse for wear, at 8 on Saturday morning.’12
Congress suceeded congress. Tussy translated, interpreted, and kept verbatim reports, which she then copied from her own shorthand with ‘the machine’ – her much-loved typewriter. Though always in the midst of the fray, a refrain of solitude emerges during the years of the early 1890s – ‘though I am always busy I am also very lonely’.13 She was particularly upset in 1891 when her widowed brother-in-law Charles Longuet set up home in Caen with a new partner, a decorous eight years after Jennychen’s death. Disappointed that her nephews would now never come to live with her as she’d hoped, Tussy was vicious about their new stepmother Marie, nastily dismissing Longuet’s new arrangement as ‘unspeakably disgusting’.14
At the gas workers’ annual congress of June 1892, held in Plymouth, Eleanor described how the gas workers upheld the principle of fighting for economic justice through direct political engagement and participation. This may sound like highfalutin and idealist language, but in the contemporary context it was just the new language of practical action by workers for workers. The Plymouth congress unanimously resolved to put forward candidates for all municipal and parliamentary elections from all their district organisations and branches. A landmark vote: this was an explicit strategy to stand candidates for election in opposition to the old established parties.
Keir Hardie, now leader of the Scottish Labour Party founded in 1888, and unionist John Burns were selected as candidates for the 1892 general election. Eleanor campaigned for both of them. Burns, founder of the Battersea Labour League, was returned for Battersea with a thumping majority of 1,500 and Keir Hardie elected to represent South West Ham. Burns had form delivering impressive results in his work in the London County Council and was, like Tussy, a consistent supporter of unskilled labour. The gas workers’ union, with Eleanor the driving force, ran Hardie’s successful campaign. In a think piece for Neue Zeit Eleanor and Edward wrote that Burns and Hardie were the first Members of Parliament in Britain to be elected specifically ‘on the ground of a definitely proletarian programme that will keep them distinct and separated from the two bourgeois parties’.15 They were disappointed, however, that Robert Cunninghame Graham, the first socialist MP in the UK parliament and founder of the Scottish Labour Party, lost his Glasgow seat to a Liberal-Unionist. Eleanor quite understood Liberal complaints about the new Labour candidates splitting their votes. ‘We consider it essential to knock the Liberal shadow-boxers out of the field, and so we split the Liberal Party . . . Let them feel our fangs.’16
Edward was wooed to stand as a candidate. Henry Hyde Champion, ‘of all people!’ Tussy exclaimed, ‘wrote and offered to get Edward all the money necessary if he cared to “run” anywhere!!!’17 Aveling had no desire whatsoever to run for office and said, very properly, that should he ever for a moment contemplate standing, he could of course only accept campaign money from a committee of his constituents.
After the 1892 TUC in Glasgow Keir Hardie chaired a meeting of delegates who supported the founding of an independent labour party to lead Britain towards industrial democracy. This historically decisive gathering mapped the journey to the formation of the new party early the following year.
Three days before Eleanor’s thirty-eighth birthday, in 1893, the national conference to form the Independent Labour Party convened in Bradford. Shortly before this Eleanor delivered a speech on ‘Socialism, at home and abroad’. She was critical of the old-style English trade unionist views of politics that still dominated the incumbent TUC leadership. Despite the clear fact that recent victories in industrial action had depended upon fraternal financial support from international workers in Europe and Australia, the TUC leadership displayed strongly nationalistic tendencies and propounded anti-European policies and rhetoric. A storm gathered between the old nationalist guard and supporters of the new international. And Eleanor, of course, was internationalism incarnate.
She spoke, wrote and campaigned hard to persuade all constituencies that the new labour party should embrace internationalist principles. But the TUC vanguard persisted in pursuing a foolhardy attempt to take control of the leadership of the international working-class movement. Ben Tillett’s fulsome attack on the ‘Continental Socialists’ succinctly expressed the character of parochial cultural nationalism that hounded the thinking of old unionism at the time. ‘English trade unionism’, Tillett proposed pompously, is ‘the best sort of Socialism and Labourism’. Tillett was glad to say, reported the Workman’s Times:
That if there were fifty such red revolutionary parties as there was in Germany, he would sooner have the solid, progressive, matter-of-fact, fighting trade unionism of England than all the hare-brained chatterers and magpies of Continental revolutionaries.18
To Eleanor this chauvinism was idiotic. Writing to her friend Anna Kuliscioff, the Italian revolutionary, she described the official TUC anti-internationalist stance as ‘not only an imbecility, but a malice’.19
Eleanor educated and informed members and supporters of the new Independent Labour Party (ILP) about the bigger picture of international socialist solidarity. ‘The English,’ she wrote, ‘are profoundly ignorant of all foreign movements.’20 In a series for the Workman’s Times on the ‘International Working-Class Movement’ she wrote articles about the Italian Workers’ Party, the German general elections, and summaries of socialist political speeches delivered in European parliaments, including one by her recently elected brother-in-law Paul Lafargue in France.
After the Bradford TUC summit in January 1893 Eleanor and Edward toured the Black Country, including Dudley and Wolverhampton. It was here that Eleanor spent her thirty-eighth birthday. She sent her customary New Year letter to her old friend Dollie Radford, to whom she confessed her melancholy about the apathy and indifference of ground-down, exhausted, grossly impoverished workers. Their search for solace in religion depressed her even further:
The Black Country is too horrible . . . They talk of ‘Christian faith’. I don’t know how anyone with only Christian faith can bear to see all this misery and not go mad. If I had not faith in Man and this life I could not bear to live.21
The newly formed ILP fought its first parliamentary seat at the Halifax by-ele
ction in February 1893. Edward assisted candidate John Lister with his campaign. Lister was defeated, due to Protestant workers who voted against him on the grounds of his Catholicism.
Eleanor despaired of this mixing-up of religious sectarianism with politics. She shared her anxieties with the General about the close alliance between the ILP and the Christian churches. That Protestant Christianity should enjoy a dominant position in modern British socialism alarmed her, as it did all British workers and leaders who were not Christian.
On 22 January 1893 Eleanor gave two lectures in Aberdeen. William Diack, secretary of the Aberdeen Socialist Society where she spoke, recorded the day in enthusiastic detail. Diack describes how at the end of her second lecture:
a Communist critic . . . ventured to take Mrs Aveling to task, and endeavoured to explain to her what Karl Marx really meant by Social Democracy. Eleanor Marx listened patiently to the luridly red exposition, then, rising from her seat, she said in tones of caustic solemnity, ‘Heaven save Karl Marx from his friends!’22
If Karl Marx could observe her from beyond the grave, he might have asked if the heaven he didn’t believe in might also save him from his radical daughter.
The most fundamental difference between Eleanor and her father was in their attitudes to their Jewishness:
I am the only one of my family who felt drawn to Jewish people, and particularly to those who are socialistically inclined. My happiest moments are when I am in the East End amidst Jewish workpeople.23
Russian philosopher and sociologist Peter Lavrov, an old friend of her father’s, got Tussy involved with ‘Jewish workpeople’. A Russian Jew based in Paris, Lavrov was a Communard and self-professed secular Jewish Marxist whose followers in England established the International Working Men’s Club (IWMC) in 1885 at 40 Berner Street, off Commercial Road in London’s East End.
Eleanor Marx Page 40