Proud Tower

by Barbara Tuchman

  In 1910 on the wave of the general Reform movement in the United States, Victor Berger, the first Socialist to win a seat in Congress, was elected from Milwaukee together with a Socialist city attorney, Socialist comptroller, two Socialist judges and twenty-one Socialist aldermen out of thirty-five. In 1911 a Socialist mayor was elected in Schenectady and by 1912 the party had elected mayors in fifty-six municipalities. But these were victories of Revision and the successful candidates were intellectuals—lawyers, editors, ministers—not workingmen. The labour movement at both wings, IWW and AF of L, refused to enter politics. In 1912 when the major parties engaged in a three-cornered contest for the Presidency, Debs ran again. Again it seemed, as Victor Berger wrote in the Milwaukee Leader, that Socialism was the coming order and “we are speeding toward it with the accelerating velocity of a locomotive.” Touring New York’s Lower East Side, Debs stood on a truck which “slowly plowed its way through a roaring ocean of people as far as the eye could see all up and down dark tenement streets.” The vote was 900,000, double that of the time before, though only 6 per cent of the total. The IWW won its greatest victory that year in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where it organized a strike of textile workers against a pay cut. It fed and maintained an entire town of workers and their dependents for two months and won a wage increase. But the bitter and brutal defeat of the Paterson strike shortly afterwards began the decline of American Syndicalism.

  In Germany Syndicalist doctrine of the general strike took little hold. Like other German institutions the unions were too orderly to be attracted by a measure which was the negation of all order and duty. The working class, whom Kuno Francke in 1905 lauded as so “well-behaved,” shared the attachment to authority and obedience which in Germany seemed overdeveloped, as if, without its protection, some old Teutonic savagery, some inner Hun, might break out. The German Socialists were realistic about the general strike. Bebel opposed its use for political purposes because, he said, it could only be organized under extraordinary conditions to the accompaniment of a revolutionary state of mind among the workers. Among his countrymen, as he was only too aware, this was missing. When the Radicals of the party at its Mannheim Congress in 1906 proposed a Massenstreik in case of war, Bebel rejected it as futile. In the event of war, he said, the military would take over law and order, resistance would be folly and chauvinist fever in any event would grip the masses. Bebel, at least, never fed on, or encouraged, illusions.

  At Mannheim a crucial if quiet struggle for power took place with results decisive for German and, through it, for world Socialism. Kautsky offered a resolution intended to subordinate the trade unions to the party in matters of policy. Their task, as Kautsky defined it, was to defend and improve the lot of the worker until the final advent of Socialism. Since the task of the party was achievement of the long-term maximum goal, its decisions must predominate.

  During the past decade membership in the German unions had increased from 250,000 to 2,500,000, with funds in proportion. Unlike the French, they were in close communion with the party and its chief source of votes. Sam Gompers on his tour of Europe in 1909 was impressed by the cash benefits the unions paid in strikes and lockouts, by their organization and discipline, and by the improved conditions and increased wages they had won. Day labourers earned three marks and skilled labour six marks a day, or about thirty-six shillings or eight or nine dollars a week. Mealtimes were regulated, fines and penalties posted on the bulletin board, the right to organize was recognized by the government except for servants and farm labour; child labour under thirteen was outlawed and between the ages of thirteen and fourteen was restricted to six hours a day. Gratified that such progress disproved the Marxist theory of “increasing misery,” Gompers was inspired to a paean of optimism by the status of the German worker, who appeared to him to live in an age of “the greatest production, the most wealth, the highest general intelligence and the best reasons for hope for his class that the history of the world has recorded.” Even if, in his anti-Marxist enthusiasm, Gompers overstated the case, the German worker was clearly acquiring a stake in the existing order. The effect was not conducive to revolutionary ardor in the unions. The fear that they were becoming too embedded in the existing order inspired Kautsky’s resolution to subordinate them to the political control of the party.

  His motion was firmly defeated by the majority at Mannheim for fear of offending the trade unions. It was all very well to let Kautsky formulate theory, but when it came to practical matters the General Council of the party was nothing if not realistic. Defeat of the resolution meant, in effect, a victory for the trade unions. Since Kautsky’s analysis had been correct, it also meant, in the country of dominant Socialist influence, preference for the existing order over the final goal. Bernstein’s onetime heresy “I care nothing for the final goal …” was now canonical. After Mannheim, day-to-day activity became increasingly practical and revisionist, even while party declarations at Congresses and ceremonial occasions continued to reiterate the Marxist formulas.

  Nationalism came in with the rising Revisionist tide. In the Reichstag on April 25, 1907, shortly before the opening of the Hague Conference, a Socialist deputy, Gustav Noske, made the trend explicit in a speech which caused a sensation. It was a “bourgeois illusion,” he announced, to suppose that all Socialists believed in disarmament. While they looked forward to peace in the future, international economic conflicts at present were too strong to permit disarming. Socialists would resist just as vigorously as the gentlemen on the right any attempt by another nation to press Germany to the wall. “We have always demanded an armed nation,” he said to the astonished gasps of his colleagues and the equally astonished delight and applause of the Right. Indignantly repudiated by Kautsky, who with considerable courage said that in the event of war, German Social-Democrats would regard themselves as proletarians first and Germans second, Noske nevertheless found many followers.

  In Germany as in England the topic of coming conflict between the two countries was fashionable, fomented by the Navy League’s slogans, “The Coming War!” “England the Foe!” “England’s Plan to Fall on Us in 1911!” and the Pan-German accompaniment, “To Germany belongs the world!” In every country as the air thickened with talk of war, the instinct of patriotism swelled. Older, deeper, more instinctive than any class solidarity, it was not something easily eradicated on the say-so of the Communist Manifesto. Unhappily for world brotherhood, the worker felt he had a fatherland like anybody else.

  In strident dispute, a voice, expressing the opposite tendency from Noske in Germany, was raised in France. It came from the Socialist Gustave Hervé, a shrieking prophet of anti-patriotism and anti-militarism. Once a follower of Déroulède, he had swung to the opposite extreme and attained national notoriety by his declaration during the Dreyfus Affair that as long as military barracks existed he would hope to see the tricolor flag planted upon the dunghill in their courtyards. This led to his dismissal as a teacher and trial for incitement to mutiny in which he was successfully defended by Briand. Regarding the mystique of patrie as a Moloch sucking workers into its armored jaws where they shed each other’s blood, Hervé continued his campaign against army and country, undaunted by further trials and a term in jail. “We shall reply to the mobilization order by revolt!” he screamed. “Civil war is the only war that is not stupid.” At the French Socialist party Congress of 1906, in the midst of the first Moroccan crisis, and again at the Congress of 1907, he embodied these sentiments in a resolution. All the Syndicalist intellectuals, devotees of Sorel, Bergson and Nietzsche, rallied to his support. They were the cultists of the “myth” of the general strike, not the men who would be called upon to practice it, for these were not present. The CGT did not come to congresses of the SFIO, and in any case it designed the general strike for purposes of revolution, not prevention of war.

  Representing the diehard Marxists, Guesde led the opposition to Hervé on the ground that since war was inherent in the capitalist system an
d the predecessor of its death-throes, it was futile, and for Socialists self-defeating, to prevent it.

  Jaurès, as the party’s leading figure, had to guide the Congress to a position. With his faith that a good society was within man’s grasp, he saw war as the great wrecker; not the opportunity of the working class, but the enemy of the workingman. To prevent it was to become, in the years ahead, his primary aim. He had long maintained that the general strike, unless well organized both as to means and ends, was “revolutionary romanticism,” yet at the same time it was the only way the working class could make its power felt to prevent a threatened war. He was also inclined to support it because, in maintaining the precarious unity of the SFIO, it was important to make concessions to the Syndicalist-minded wing. No less a man of this world than Bebel, Jaurès remained also an idealist and dealt with the problem of the general strike by persuading himself that if war loomed, somehow the masses would be stirred by the necessary fervor to rise in spontaneous and effective protest without previous planning or organization. In this one area, a crucial one, Jaurès came closest to thinking “with his beard.” He agreed to a resolution less explicit than Hervé’s, but committing French Socialism to all forms of agitation against war, including parliamentary action, public meetings, popular protests, “even the general strike and insurrection.”

  It was rhetoric, but Jaurès believed or persuaded himself that “ceaseless agitation” could make it come true. He did not content himself with hoping but practiced agitation at Socialist mass meetings and on speaking tours throughout France. From this time on, at Toulouse, Lille, Dijon, Nîmes, Bordeaux, Guise, Reims, Avignon, Toulon, Marseille, and of course Carmaux, “at every railroad station in France, it seemed, Jaurès descended from a train at one time or another, suitcase in hand, the great salesman of peace.” Abroad too, in London, in Brussels and other foreign capitals, his voice poured forth as if trying physically to lift his listeners to a fervor that could be translated into action if need arose. On one trip to England in company with Vandervelde they visited Hatfield, home of the Cecils, which Jaurès said interested him more than Oxford.

  The problem of war, the effort to reconcile the trends between the extremes of Hervé and Noske dominated Socialism from now on. It came to a head at once at the next Congress, convened for the first time on German soil, in August, 1907. Although the working class of Berlin was a stronghold of Socialism, the party’s leaders did not venture to hold the Congress in the capital under the nose of the Kaiser. The site they chose was Stuttgart, capital of Württemberg in South Germany. Eight hundred and eighty-six delegates representing twenty-six nations or nationalities assembled in the largest auditorium of the city. Among them were Ramsay MacDonald from England, De Leon and Big Bill Haywood from the United States, Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky and Alexandra Kollontay for the various Russian factions, Mme Kama of India, the “Red virgins,” Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin, and among the polyglot translators, Angelica Balabanov from Italy accompanied by a “violently protesting bullish young man with a dark face,” Benito Mussolini. As a demonstration of Socialist strength an outdoor demonstration was held on the opening day, a Sunday, in a field outside the city. Workingmen and their families came from all around, filling the streets leading to the field where a dozen red-draped platforms had been set up for the speakers. Bands played and choral societies sang Socialist hymns while vigilant police watched over the proceedings from two captive balloons. By 2 P.M. a crowd of fifty thousand had gathered to listen to the Socialist celebrities amid “extraordinary enthusiasm but no disorder.” In his speech Bebel congratulated the British proletariat on its recent brilliant success at the polls, remarking with perhaps a touch of envy that while the Government had cleverly made John Burns a member of the Cabinet, he was sure it had not succeeded in changing the party’s fighting tactics. Loud cheers greeted Jaurès’ speech, delivered in German. Though he could memorize a German translation of his speech after one reading or recite long passages of Goethe by heart, he could not command enough colloquial German to engage a hotel room.

  Afterwards in the hall amid the admirable German arrangements everyone, understandably, had a sense of deliberating under the eyes of the police. When Harry Quelch, an English delegate, disrespectfully referred to the Hague Conference, then in session, as a “thieves’ supper,” Chancellor von Bülow, who was not notably respectful toward the Conference himself, brought pressure on the Wüttemberg government to have him expelled. Immediately ill at ease, Bebel did not even protest. Quelch’s empty chair was kept filled with flowers during the remaining sessions.

  While the Congress divided as usual into committees on suffrage, women, minorities, immigration, colonialism and other problems, the Committee on Anti-militarism was the focus of attention. The duty of the working class in the face of rising militarism and threat of war, placed on the agenda by the French, unleashed five days of debate. In an opening tirade, Hervé again proposed mass disobedience to mobilization, in effect insurrection. Since this could be transformed into revolution, it was supported by the German Radicals led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, but the official weight of the party, from old Marxists like Bebel and Kautsky to new nationalists of the Noske variety, shifted solidly to the right. Debating “within earshot, so to speak, of the Wilhelmstrasse,” as Vandervelde put it, the Germans muted their customary verbal tornadoes, though not only from discretion; the shift was ideological. Some admittedly, some still pretending otherwise, they were aligning themselves with the national mood, accommodating to the facts of life in an era of national expansion from which the worker derived material benefits. “It is not true that workers have no Fatherland,” declared Georg von Vollmar, a leading Revisionist; “the love of humanity does not prevent us from being good Germans.” He and his group, he said, would not accept an internationalism that was anti-national.

  Jaurès proposed the same resolution as had just been adopted by the French Congress, emphasizing “agitation” and including the general strike as a last resort.

  To expect an effective general strike without planning or organization was equivalent to expecting an army to march without orders, billets, supply depots, transport, food or ammunition. Even if the Second International could have agreed on a general strike, it had no power to give orders to its national components, each of whom would have had to organize the strike of its own people separately. Unless the action were simultaneous and international, the workers who accomplished it most effectively would only be opening their own country to defeat. As Guesde was forever pointing out, a general strike could only be made effective by the best organized and disciplined labour force. If successful its only result would be to lay open the more modern countries to military defeat by the backward. The dilemma was awful and insoluble. Jaurès kept it at bay because he thought of the general strike more as an idea to kindle the masses than as a real possibility. Walking with Bernstein in one of Stuttgart’s parks, he tried to convince him of the inspiriting value of a declaration in favor of the strike. “All my objections concerned its impracticality,” Bernstein said later, “but he kept coming back to the moral effect of such a commitment.” As Clemenceau was to say long afterwards, it was Jaurès’ fate “to preach the brotherhood of nations with such unswerving faith … that he was not daunted by the brutal reality of facts.”

  Bebel opposed the general strike as totally impractical. Tied to the unions, as the French party was not, the German party looked at the strike from the union point of view. Though every member may have been a good Socialist, the unions had no wish to lose their funds in a reckless gesture against the power of the State. Financial reserves to maintain a general strike even in peacetime were not available. To oppose defence of the Fatherland in a nation seized by war fever, Bebel said, would put the Socialists in an impossible position. Even Kautsky agreed. A strike was impossible without consent of the unions, he pointed out. Privately he and like-minded friends comforted themselves, like Jaurès, with the belief th
at somehow, if war came, the “infuriated” workers would rise against it.

  Where was the voice of the worker, the man directly concerned, in all this talk of strike? It was not heard. The worker was at home concerned with the job, the boss, the broken window, the ailing child, tonight’s supper, tomorrow’s holiday. If he thought about a strike it was for wages; if he thought about war it was as some vague grand happening with an aura of excitement and valor. He thought less of striking against it than of marching to it, to smite the foreigner and protect his country. Bebel knew him. “Do not fool yourselves,” he said to an English delegate, and repeated his old assertion that the instant the Fatherland declared itself in danger, “every Social-Democrat will shoulder his rifle and march to the French frontier.”

  If Bebel was still the Pope of Socialism it was as a secular Pope; the moral torch had passed to Jaurès, “the greatest hope of the Second International,” in the words of Vandervelde’s opening speech. He was brimming with energy, plunged into a great campaign against war, delighted to be in Germany. Seizing a huge foam-crowned mug at a country beer garden, he said, “Beer! Vandervelde, German beer!” with a fresh enthusiasm that his companion found irresistible. One night, returning from an outing via medieval Tübingen, he insisted on getting out in the pouring rain and darkness, although nothing could be seen, to stand in front of the illustrious University.