Strike Leaders of the Clyde

WILLIAM GALLACHER

ARTHUR McMANUS

JOHN MACLEAN

DAVID KII K\V00D

A Statement and

a Challenge

a

By Nicolai Lenin

WILN compared with feudalism, Capitalism is a historical advance along the line of liberty, democracy, civilization. But, nevertheless, Capitalism is and remains the system of wage-slavery, of enslavement of millions of toilers, of workers and peasants, to a little minority of modern slave drivers ; the landowners and capitalists.

Bourgeois democracy has changed the form of this economic slavery, as compared with feudalism, and has created an especially splendid cover in order to conceal it, but has not and could not change its essence. Capital-ism and bourgeois democracy are wage-slavery.

The gigantic progress of things in general, and of means of communication in particular, the boundless growth of capital and of the banks, have resulted ill Capitalism's becoming mature and over-mature. It has out-lived itself. It has become the most reactionary hindrance to human progress.

It has reduced itself to the almighty power of a handful of milliardairs and millionaires, who send the people to the shambles in order to decide whether the German shall supersede the English influence, for "mandates for administration," and so on. During the war of [914-i S' tens of millions of human beings were killed or mutilated for that purpose and for that alone.

The recognition of this truth is spreading with in-superable force and swiftness among the masses of toilers in all countries, and the more in consequence of the fact that the war has everywhere resulted in exhaustion and poverty, and that the war interests and debts have to be paid everywhere, even among the people called "victors." And what are these interests? They are the tribute of the masses to the millionaires, because the latter have been so kind as to allow to the tens of mil-lions of workers and peasants to kill and mutilate one another.

The most that the Capitalists the bourgeoisie can do. is to delay the victory of Socialism in one or the other separate country, at the price of the extermination of thousands more of workers and peasants. To save Capitalism is impossible for them.

Its successor has become the Soviet Republic, which gives power to the toilers, and only to the toilers, which entrusts the proletariat with the guidance of the work of their liberation, which abolishes private property of land,

.1

factories and means of production, because this private property is the source of the exploitation of tile many by the few, the source of the misery of the masses, the source of the predatory' wars among peoples, and en-riches only the Capitalists. The victory of the Inter-national Soviet Republic is sure.

The American bourgeoisie delivered the people, and boasts of the liberty, equality and democracy, reigning in its country. But neither this nor any other bourgeoisie, neither the American nor any other Capitalist Government in the world, will be able or will dare to take up a challenge with our Government in the matter of real liberty, equality and democracy.

Let its suppose, for example, that it treaty between nor f oneru-oient and sonic Capitalist Government allows to both liberty of exchange of pamphlets, which, in the neolr of the respective governments, are to be published in any language, and to contain- the text of the laws of the respective country and of its constitution with. the explanation of their superiority as compared with others.

No bourgeois government in the world will dare to adopt .tali a. peace)i.ii, goal and democratic treaty with as. lI%liy not' Bemuse all the governments, ~citla the exception of the Soviet government, rest upon oppression and deception of the masses.

But the great war of 1914-1918 has smashed the great falsehood.

\ote:-Late in ,July the L cited Press obtained an interview with Lenin by wireless from Buda Pesth. Lenin prefaced his answers to their questions with the following sentence; "I answer the five questions put, to me under the condition that the written promise given me be fulfilled, that my' answer will he published without alteration or mutilation in over one hundred papers in the United States of North America."

After answering the five questions Lenin said: "In addition I would like to make the following statement to the American people." This gave the United Press a loop-hole, and they sent out his answers as they had promised, but suppressed his statement as "unadulterated Bolshevist propaganda."

The above is an accurate copy of his statement. Is there ant American patriot who can answer it?

mil

LIiiEl:A'1'(11t, a monthly magazine, October, I;I1'I. 'twenty cents a copy, i12 a year. Vol. 2, No. 10, Serial No. 20. Published by '['hr, Liberator Publishing Co., 3# Union Square, New York, N. Y. Application pending for entry as second-class matter at the post office at New York, N. Y., tinder the Act of iliareli 3, 1879. Copyright. 1919.

4   THE LIBERATOR

Germany shall be compelled to deliver 140,000 milch cows to the victors.

-The Peace Treaty.

Is This the Real Wilson ?

THE milk supply of Germany is one-fifth of normal.

German babies have a nominal ration of one and three-fourths pints per day, and they receive about one-fourth of that nominal ration.

"In Berlin there are scores of thousands of children who have never tasted milk," says the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, who describes these children as "all head and no body, thin necks and grey ghastly skins."

Professor Starling, an English expert, states that the lack of milk is responsible for the prevalence of rickets among the children of "practically all classes." Colonel Pollock reports that "tuberculosis has increased enormously and is still increasing. It is practically always fatal, as owing to scarcity of milk and almost total absence of cod-liver oil and proper nourishment, the treatment of these cases is almost hopeless."

A correspondent of the London Daily Express says : "I have seen women rummaging through dust bins

to find potato peelings. They have no clothes for their new born children ; one finds them wrapped in pieces of sacking. 30% of German women die in confinement. I have encountered dozens of children two years of age who have never tasted milk."

One hundred and forty thousand milch cows is roughly one-quarter of the cows in Germany. The loss will re-duce the milk supply another 25%.

It is estimated that this will bring starvation, torture and death to fioo,ooo more babies.

In the Paris cafes everybody has milk in his coffee.

Reparation to France could he made by importing cows from America and charging them against the German indemnity.

"There is no need to kill German babies.

Put the Versailles Treaty, with the consent-and ac-cording to a persistent rumor in London, upon the special insistence of President Wilson, condemns 6oo,ooo of them to this kind of death.

THE LIBERATOR

Vol. 2, No. 10 (Serial No. 20)   October, 1919

By Max Eastman--Drawings By Art young

T IiE convention of the old Socialist Party began with a belligerent apology by the national secretary, Adolph Germer. The convention of the Left Wing began with a great singing of the "Internationale," three cheers for Revolutionary Socialism, three cheers for the Russian Soviet Republic, three cheers for Debs, and three cheers for the I. W. W. The convention of the Communist Party began with an announcement that "the management committee has decided that there shall be no smoking during the convention," followed by an accurate rendition of the "Internationale" with full orchestra and brass.

These different ways of beginning were characteristic. In the old S. P. convention, the "parent body," the emotional tone was a little apologetic throughout, a little wan and anxious, and yet at the same time indignant of criticism-about what you might expect of the mother of twins.

The Left Wing convention-which became the Com-
munist Labor Party-had a little of the quality of a
revival meeting. The delegates were always singing and
shouting and feeling that the true faith was about to be
restored in their hearts and homes. At least they were,
until the Program Committee made its report, training

some big guns from the Mani-
festo of the Third International
on them, and they realized that
they must either put their names

to a program of deliberate, hard-

headed revolutionary science, or go back where they came from. They took a long, hard breath then, and most of them "came through," but they did not come through singing.

The Communist Convention-more properly called the Slavic-American Communist Convention-was characterized through-out by a spirit of yotith

ful but sophisticated efficiency. It was a consciously expert convention. It showed the rest of them what a convention ought to be. It was almost incredibly neat and clean and regular. I was sitting there some time before the formal opening, admiring the way the big sheets of heavy yellow paper were spread over the delegates' tables and folded and tacked underneath; I was admiring the smooth high railing of new wood which divided the delegates' stalls from the audience room at the back ; in particular I was admiring the soda-waterfountain shine and polish on the white oil-cloth which covered the press-table where I had laid my hat; I was just reflecting that these things had surely been pre-pared and arranged by an unmarried lady of advanced years, when a young Russian comrade carne up with a damp cloth and asked me kindly to remove my hat so that he could "clean" that oil-cloth!

A Little History

In order to understand how these conventions came to be, and what they came to be, it is necessary to apply the mind to some rather complicated history. I will generalize that history as clearly and fairly as I can.

There have always been elements in the American

Socialist Party who were more revolutionary than the majority, and in a state of continual pro-test against the official conduct of the party. They were more devoted to the principle of the class struggle, less willing to waste energy in office-seeking, . reformism, and parliamentarism. They believed in the I. W. W. They believed in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. These elements were for the most part distinctly American ; they were never very conspicuous in' the "f o r e i g n federations" affil-

r-

"simony."

1221 Blue Island Ave.

6   THE LIBERATOR

iatecl with the American party. And also they were never very strong.

The proletarian revolution in Russia and the surrounding countries-proving the literal truth of almost every word in the Communist Manifesto-gave them their strength. It sent a wave of militant or Bolshevik, or Communist, Socialism around the world. And this wave naturally reached the Slavic federations first, and affected them the most. They became almost unanimously and automatically Bolshevik. At the same time their membership increased enormously-the gospel being accepted by thousands of new recruits, both through a genuine emotion not unrelated to patriotism, and through expediency, it being generally understood that a Russian would not amount to much at home unless he had been a socialist here. This very willing membership was organized into a magnificent political machine by the brainy officials of the Slavic Federations, and it sup-plied both revolutionary will and revolutionary power to the scattered elements of the American Left Wing.

These officials were able to cast the vote and appro.. priate the funds of about 40,000 out of the roo,ooo members of the Socialist Party. They made Louis C. Fraina's paper, The Revolutionary Age, and its wide circulation, possible. They made it possible, in spite of the Postoffice censorship, to carry the "Left Wing Manifesto and Program," and the motto, "Capture the Party for Revolutionary Socialism," into the hands of almost every Socialist in the country. No one can estimate the amount that this propaganda accomplished-as compared with the direct effect of the European revolutions upon the party membership-but it is certain that by last May or June an overwhelming majority of American Socialists were committed to the Left Wing Program in gen-

Louis C. Fraina

Isaac E. Ferguson

eral, and the Slavic Federations formed the solid and well-organized heart of this majority.

That all sounds very simple, but it was not so simple. In the first place the Left Wing took to itself a degree of organization and autonomy, which gave the Right Wing officials who controlled the party, plenty of emotional, and not a few legal, grounds for expelling Left Wing members. The Slavic Federations were expelled in a body; the State of Michigan was expelled ; other states, locals, branches and members were expelled. The membership of the party. was reduced by and during these proceedings -according to the report of its own secretary-from 109,000 to 39,000.

In the second place, the leaders of the Slavic Federations-partly as a result of their expulsion, partly through a thinly veiled nationalistic egotism, and partly through a sincere if somewhat theological desire to exclude all wavering or "centrist" elements from the new organization, decided at the national Left Wing conference in June, that the idea of capturing the American Socialist party, or even attempting to capture it, was wrong, and that a call should be issued for the immediate organization of a "Communist Party."

In the third place the expelled "Michigan Crowd"-although really too political-minded to be called communists-joined with the Slavic Federations in this particular demand, and the Federation Leaders made every use of this increase of their voting power in the Left Wing, although privately condemning the Michigan ideas and intending to suppress them when it came time to adopt a platform.

Even so, however, they were unable to control the Left Wing conference. It decided by a considerable majority to adhere to the original program of capturing the party,

OCTOBER, 1919

7

and it elected a "Left \Ving Council" to carry this out. The Slavic Federations and the "Michigan crowd" then decided to ignore the decision of the conference and call a Communist Convention, whether the rest of the Left Wing agreed to do it or not.

The majority of the "Left Wing Council," together with the Revolutionary Age-the organ of the whole movement-denounced them as "traitors" for a week or two, but then suddenly capitulated in the middle of the summer. abandoned the slogan, "Capture the Party for Revolutionary Socialism," upon which their paper had built up its constituency and united the American revolutionaries, and joined in the call for an immediate Communist Convention to meet in Chicago on September 1st.

This sudden change of front occurred so late that there was no time left, even if there had been a moral possibility, for those who had united upon the original plan to unite upon the change. For better or worse, the Left Wing was split into two camps.

On the one hand there were the heads of the Slavic Federations and the Michigan Socialists, with the Revolutionary Age and all the National Machinary of the Left Wing organization, in the hands of Louis C. Fraina of Boston, I. E. Ferguson of Chicago, C. E. Ruthenberg of Ohio. Maximilian Cohen of New York, John Ballam of Massachusetts, Hiltzik of the Left Wing Jewish Federation, jay Lovestone, Rose Pastor Stokes and a few other non-Slavic delegates.

On the other hand, adhering to the original program of attempting to capture the party, there was the minority of the National Left Wing Council, Ben Gitlow and John Reed of New York, with other prominent Socialists of the Left like Kate Greenhalgh (Kate Sadler) of Washington, Joe Coldwell of Rhode Island, Fred Harwood of New Jersey, Max Bedacht of California, Jack Carney of Duluth, William Bross Lloyd of Chicago, Ludwig Lore, Editor of the Volkszeitung of New York, Margaret Prevey of Ohio. Tichenor of St. Louis. Owens of Illinois,'Wagenknecht of Ohio, Katterfeld of Indiana, Mrs. Harmon of Kansas, and 92 other delegates from 22 States. To this group there was also promised the adherence of the Italian Socialist Federation, and the Scandinavian and Left Wing German Federations, together with 19 Slavic Federations who were expelled from the major organization for resisting the machine.

Each of these groups would like to think that the rank and file of the American Communist movement was rep-resented in its convention. But it is impossible to decide that question now. The rank and file never had time to consider and act upon the issue between them. It was a division among leaders, and a very vague and queer one too. Delegates were wandering from one convention to another under indefinite instructions, or no instructions at all, except the understanding that they were to form a party in accord with the Manifesto of the Third Inter-national. Out of this unhappy confusion almost every-

body hoped and strove for a unity of the revolutionary elements, except the heads of the Slavic Federations, whose absolute control would have disappeared if unity had been achieved, and who maintained that their absolute control was necessary to the formation of a pure and perfect party of communism.

The Parent Body

If this confusion of elements represented is exasperating, it is at least a relief to know that the conventions occurred in some historic order. The Socialist Party Convention was convened in Machinists Hall on Saturday morning, August 30. The Left Wing delegates who 'were seated in that convention, walked out, and joined with the rejected delegates waiting in a room downstairs, to form the Convention of the Communist Labor Party, on Sunday afternoon. The Convention of the Communist Party was called to order in "Smolny Institute," a hall leased by the Russian Federation of Chicago, on Monday, September 1st, at about noon.

Art Young and I arrived at Machinists' Hall early Saturday morning-early enough to find Julius Gerber looking like an unsettled thundercloud, and jack Reed beaming. This is not because Julius was vanquished and Jack Reed victorious, but because Julius doesn't enjoy a fight and Jack does. It seems that some of the Left Wingers arrived early at the building, and decided after a caucas to go upstairs and take possession of the hall, putting their own national secretary, Wagenknecht, in the chair when the time came, and proceeding to organize the Convention. Having elected their National Executive Committee by an overwhelming majority, and having through their committee duly appointed their secretary, they felt justified in this procedure, notwithstanding that the election had been set aside as fraudulent by the old National Executive Committee. So they proceeded upstairs in a rather formidable frame of mind. They were met and opposed at the door by Julius Gerber, the secretary of local New York. and it seems that Gerber in his turn was "set aside." We heard a good many different stories of this incident by eye-witnesses, and none of them were quite so blood-curdling as what we read in the news-papers. It seemed to one of our informers that "Gerber could have licked Reed, if Reed hadn't held him so far up in the air that he couldn't reach down." Another comrade said that Reed acted just like a nice big dog, shaking

Left and Right

Reed.

OCTOBER, 1919   rN

himself. Another reported that there was "a little wind-pipe work on both sides." Gerber stated to the convention that he made Reed understand that swinging a sledge-hammer with the proletariat is just as good a preparation for life's battles as playing foot-ball at college. At any rate the "Left Wingers" got in, and there they were, and what was the right wing going to do about it?

Some of them didn't know what they were going to do, but Adolph Germer knew. He may not have consulted anybody when he arranged to have the police there, but he consulted the membership figures and the record of recent votes for officers, and votes on referendums, which were in his possession, and he decided that if the official minority were going to exclude the voting majority from the convention, they would have to do it with the forces of the capitalist state. In that he was entirely right.

Germer never denied that he had arranged to have the police there, although some members of the national committee denied it for him. When he was asked point-blank across the floor of the convention whether the officials of the Socialist Party had brought the police to that building he said, "What officials do you mean?" and withdrew his attention while some interrupter took up the talk. But he did deny that he told the police to "treat 'em rough," as two passionately indignant delegates subsequently informed the convention. He said that he asked the contested delegates two or three times "in a comradely spirit" to leave the room, before he told the police to put them out, and that he didn't tell the police anything else.

Two women who were among those put out, swore to the truth of the following account ; one of them, Mrs. Harmon of Kansas, was later seated in the Convention. and made the convention believe what she said :

"The first thing I saw was that they were trying to eject Reed through the door. Soon after that Germer came up to us where we were sitting, and said, `You'll have to clear the room.'

" 'I'm a delegate,' I said.

" 'It don't make any difference,' he said. `Clear the

room. If you don't I'll call the police.'

"I said to myself, 'Well, I have a right to the convention floor, and I'm going to sit here till the police tell me to go.'

"Pretty soon a policeman came up to me and said, 'You'll have to go, Misses.' ' "I went, but I went kind of slow, and I heard Germer say, 'Officer, clear the hall, and if

they don't go, policemen, do Dan Hogan of Arkansas your duty!'

"So the delegates who were with Berger and Germer stayed in the hall, and the rest of us went out, and our delegate who received the largest vote in the State of Kansas was put out of the Socialist Convention by the police !"

Perhaps these excessively lively preliminaries accounted for the unceremonious opening of the convention. With a beautiful upstairs hall like a little theatre, one whole side a great sunny sky-window, and decorations containing twenty-five American flags, I expected a c e r t a i n

amount of introductory hallelujah of some kind. But Germer simply stood up, looking like a big well-dressed police-sergeant off duty, hanged the gavel on the table, and started in.

He stated to a round of applause that "We intend to follow the splendid example set by our comrades in Russia", and added in a severe silence, "By that I want it distinctly understood that we do not intend to adopt the same methods."

He struck the key-note of the convention there. And he struck another key-note when he said, "The St. Louis program and the jail-sentences of our officials prove the revolutionary and non-Scheidemaun character of the party."

It is characteristic of old people to attach a great importance to what they have done in the past. And the majority in this convention were old. Even some of the young ones were old. They seemed to think it was personal and impertinent for any one to be chiefly concerned about what they were doing now, or what they were going to do in the future.

"There is no issue at stake"-"We are all agreed in principle"-"It is all a matter of personal jealousy"-"I f a few so-called leaders would get out of the way, we could have a united party"-that was the burden of the talk and feeling in the ante-rooms of the convention. I suppose it will be a rather exasperating thing to say, but I felt sorry for a good many of the delegates. They had served their time, they had born the heat of battle when some of us were in our cradles, and then to crown it all they had stood up under the bitter test of the St. Louis declaration, going around their home towns for two years, solitary, vilified, whipped with the hatred of their

Germer Explains

10   THE LIBERATOR

vs

neighbors, beaten and worn clown by the uni, versal war-madness of a nation, and not flinching. They could not understand why they should be shoved aside. And T could not either, any more than I can understand detth. But it is significant that in the conventions of the young, the conventions whose eyes were on the future and their muscles ready for action, there was not a single person to be found who would say that the split was personal, and that there were no vital issues at

stake. They could not think of saying it; they were whol+(y absorbed in the issues at stake.

Germer's speech did not sail very clear after he began denouncing the Left Wing leaders as "Harry Orchards of the Socialist movement," describing them as going about "in the dark like midnight thieves sneaking from car to ear, whispering, indubitably hoping thereby that the comrades may think there is something wrong with those selected by the comrades to manage the affairs of the party." Cries of "Count the Ballots!" "Is it in the Constitution that you have to make a speech ?" brought his defense to an end, and the balloting for temporary chairman began.

Seymour Stedman, the Right Wing candidate, received SR votes, and J. M. Coldwell of Rhode Island, the Left Wing candidate. 37. There were enough Left Wing dele gates in the building to have elected Coldwell with a substantial majority, even though 40,000 of their members had already gone over to the Communist Party, but only these 37 had trickled through the official sieve. The rest were "contested," and most of them never got through the credentials committee, and many of them never tried.

The pulse of the convention rose noticeably when Stedman took the chair. His sturdy anti winning grace of utterance made the delegates feel a little sure they were not wrong. But his speech, like Germer's. was a summing up for the defense. And his defense. like Gcrmer's. rested upon a record that is past, and, in this lime of rapid movement, stale and ready to be forgotten. He did not say that the Socialist Party would join the Third International and loyally stand up with our Russian corn - rades who are starving and dying and pouring out their blood in battle for socialism, and everybody knew that it would not.

Stedman scored a point as chairman when some im-

pertinent delegate, "rose to inquire" why we should elect a sergeant-at-arms when we have the police force?

"Well," he said, "that election was provided for at a time when it was understood that all the comrades would he gentlemen at least." But the police question would not down. It would not let itself be forgotten for two hours at a time. Once it was a white-faced ministerial comrade in the audience room, at the side of the hall.

"Comrades, I demand the attention of the delegates!" he shouted. "I just heard one of these policemen threat-en to throw a comrade clown-stairs, and he said 'You won't light on your feet either, you'll think you came down in an aeroplane.' 1 ask you if that is the way visiting Socialists are going to he treated by this convention ?"

"What kind of Socialists are they"" from the New York delegation.

From Stedman : "I should suggest that it would be a good idea to forget what occurred this morning. At the present time Chicago is under the police department, whether you like it or not."

From George Goebel : "[ say anybody who says we invited the police here are God damn liars !"

From Germer : "I'm glad they're here !"

And this second storm was no sooner past, and the troubled hearts quieting themselves a little, when in pops a letter from the Chicago Machinists-that one dread sovereign of all political socialists, a real labor union :

Dear Comrades and Friends:

On behalf of the Die and Tool Makers Lodge No. 113, International Association of Machinists, and the Machinists Society of Chicago, we protest against the harboring and use of police in this hall. This hall is the property, as well as the sanctuary, of a progressive and militant labor organization, based upon the class struggle. We do not permit our members to work under police protection; we can not conceive how we can let any meeting in this hall be carried on under police protection, when we as an organization condemn it and oppose it. While we are not represented in your con

vention as individual mem-

bers or representatives of an organization, we nevertheless are with you in spirit. For all these reasons we can not let the police remain as your protectors, or perhaps as your invited guests, without submitting our deepest protest. We call upon you to take steps to remove the police or make such arrangements as will satisfy us that you are not responsible for the presence of the police.

We are not asking this to put hardships on you, but for the best interest of the Socialist party and the labor movement in general.

Yours for International Solidarity,

Executive Board Die & Tool Makers Lodge No. 113.

L. P. Vance,   Carl Harig, G. T. FranckeI, P. Pokara.

Seymour Stedman

Victor Berger

OCTOBER, 1919   11

omrade Chairman!

The New York Statesmen-dominant power in the Right Wing Convention-Ex-Assemblyman Waldman, Alderman Algernon Lee, Ex-Assemblyman Shiplacoff, Judge Panken, Assemblyman Claessens, Alderman Beckerman, Assemblyman Solomon, Alderman Bronstein.

After a serious pause one of the delegates proposed a resolution stating that it is "the sense of this convention" that the police are not here at the invitation of the party officials. Another remarked that such a resolution would prove that the convention had no sense, for they would be stating something that they could not know.

Claessens of New York offered a resolution "that the police department of Chicago shall be and hereby is disbanded."

Mayor Hoan of Milwaukee asserted that ."they came 'here under the invitation of Germer for the purpose of protecting our legitimate rights and purposes," and pro-posed that no apologies should be made.

"We in Milwaukee," said Berger, "would have done it a good deal better than Germer did, because we have our own police." His speech was the straightest one I heard. "I've never tried to be revolutionary," he said, "but I've tried to be honest. If the police weren't here, none of you would be, so what's the use of all this hypocrisy !"

It was finally voted to send a communication to the Machinists union stating the facts, but just what the facts were, nobody knew-unless it was the policeman who told a reporter that Germer had called up the chief and asked that they be on hand early.

In the midst of this storm a telegram arrived from some rustic local: "Peace and harmony will lead us to success-hurrah for International Socialism!"

The Left Wing Delegates-about 30 of them-walked out of this convention after it adopted a motion to consider (but not act upon) the report of the National Executive Committee, before the status of all contested delegates was determined. J. M. Coldwell of Rhode Island simply rose in his chair and said, "At this point I am going to leave this convention and I .call upon all delegates of the Left Wing to withdraw."

"That is your privilege," said Stedman, and the business of the convention proceeded.

It was a business largely as I have indicated, of self-justification upon the part of the official machine for re-

I)   12   THE LIBERATOR

sisting the Left Wing machine up to the point of wrecking the party-although the Left Wing Machine had organized a clear Majority of the members. And this business was made interesting by the fact that a lively handful of semi-Left Wingers, or at least conscientious objectors against tyranny, was left on the floor. They were led by Kruse, who stated that in spite of his disgust at the acts of the officials, he believed it was a question of "sane Socialism against direct action," and he intended to "stick by the party and make it what he thought it ought to be."

Judge Panken of New York was less moderate. For him it was a question of "tying up with a bunch of anarchists," and he was glad of everything they.did.

A delegate from Maryland supported him with the statement that "Every organization has an inherent right to preserve itself." He said "we lawyers" in the course of his remarks, but it was not quite clear whom he meant to include.

Another delegate offered the prudent remark that "We've got to endorse the action of the National Executive Committee, but we've also got to be able to inform our constituents that we gave the N. E. C. hell !"

Barney Berlin of Chicago, for twenty-five years a worker in the Socialist movement, was the old man Nestor of this council, presenting what seems to me the only justification 'for the National Executive Committee that there is. He reminded the convention of historic instances in which legal and constitutional forms and formulas had been violated in the interest of a deeper principle, and concluded, "I have not been in harmony with certain tendencies in the N. E. C., but I glory in their spunk in having saved the party."

That is a pretty final attitude to adopt toward all the atrocity-stories that have accompanied this conflict, and it applies equally to both wings. The people who created the Socialist party all of them have enough healthy anarchy in their blood, to transgress .the forms of law when they are aroused over a principle. There is no doubt that they were so aroused, and did so transgress on both sides. And while I think that the principle on the Left side is the true one, and therefore I can applaud their "spunk" a little more heartily than that of the Right nevertheless I recognize a similar moral quality in them both. "Necessity,knows no law," is a maxim that lives in the heart of every live man.

Somebody will ask.me just what the principle is upon which this spit occurred, and which enabled trustworthy people ..to commit so many moral and legal atrocities. And I answer, in the most general terms, as follows:

It is a question of whether the Socialist theory shall be permitted- to recede into the cerebrum, where it be-comes a mere matter of creed, ritual and sabbath-day emotion, as the Christian theory has done, or whether it shall be kept in live and going contact with every-day nerves and muscles of action.

George Goebe:

Before parting from the picture of the Right Wing convention, I ought to state that a motion endorsing the action of the old N. E. C. in setting aside as invalid the recent election of a, new N. E. C., was passed by those remaining in the convention,. without a dissenting vote. I ought to record also some of the indignant demands for "justice" to the Left Wing, or what remained of it, which were occasionally voiced by comrades of the right. In particular I preserve a picture of George Goebel's long, earnest and excited figure, darting about over the convention like a superintending dragon-fly. "Aw comrades, let's take a chance on fair play!" was one of his characteristic interpellations.

The Left Wing Convention

It was twilight when the Left Wing delegates convened in the billiard room down stairs-twilight that came dimly through ground glass windows into a low room with dull blue walls. But there was more life to be felt there -if life is spontaneous volition-than anywhere else during all the conventions. It seemed as though a thing with growth in it were being born in that place. In the other places whatever came, was engineered into being by the perceptible workings of an established machine. This may be-in cold reality-either a good or a bad sign for the Communist Labor Party. I record it simply as a fact.

Wagenknecht, who had been made National Secretary by that Executive Committee whose election was declared invalid upstairs, opened the convention here. The sound of his gavel was greeted with a song and those cheers for which all the delegates stood up. Wagenknecht's speech was a simple statement that having done everything else in his power to give the membership a chance to express

The Left Wing Singing "The Internationale"

OCTOBER, 1919   13

itself, he had summoned the delegates here "as the Regular Convention of the Socialist Party of the United States." He then presided during the election of Owens of Illinois as Temporary Chairman.

Owens is a cripple-pale, but jolly and fearless as crippled people sometimes are. I can remember one sentence of his speech : "We must be ready to back up the revolutionary implications of everything we do here, and if it leads us along with Debs we must be willing to go there."

Margaret Prevey was elected vice-chairman, and soon took Owens' place in the chair. It would have been well if she had stayed there throughout the convention, for she was not prepared in her mind for the actions which were taken on the floor, but she was the most able and good-humored and the best-looking chairman in the place. In its initial mood of exaltation the convention hesitated a little at the election of a sergeant-at-arms, and finally appointed William Bross Lloyd "a sort of page boy." But there was no demur after about three hours of work, when Lloyd asked the chair to appoint "two assistant sergeants-at-arms for the purpose of clearing the aisles."

After sending a greeting to Debs and all class-war prisoners, and accepting the report of the National Executive Committee, the convention proceeded immediately to at-tempt to achieve unity with the "Communist Convention." C. E. Ruthenberg of Ohio, who had joined in the call for the Communist Convention, but nevertheless took his seat here for the time, introduced a motion that would have delayed the organization of a party here, until after a consultation could be had with those who were.to organize the Communist Party the. next day. It would have been a humble act on the, part of these delegates, leading towards a possible submission to the control of the Slavic Federations. It was vigorously, and at times violently opposed-especially by Jack Carney, who declared "be-fore God," as irreligious Irishmen always do, that if this convention went over to the Federations, he would go home and tell the workers of Duluth that there was no party of communism in existence.

John Reed offered to amend Ruthenberg's motion somewhat to the following effect: We declare ourselves

to be the party of Communism in the United States and we invite all other revolutionary groups to join us.

Katterfeld of Indiana offered a further amendment, to this effect : We declare ourselves to be the official Socialist Party of the United States, we invite all other revolutionary groups to join us, and we will elect a committee of five to confer with

Sergeant-at-Arms Lloyd is kept busy

the Committee of the Communist Convention in brder to find a basis for uniting the Communist elements in one party. It was this amendment (I regret to say not accurately quoted) which finally passed with an almost unanimous vote.

The principal points advanced by speakers in favor of sacrificing everything to unite with the Communist Convention were these :

(z) No principles divide us.

2. Our unwillingness to do so is due to the personal pride of a few leaders.

3. The whole trouble is that "there are too many statesmen in New York."

4. The capitalists are uniting, and they will be glad to see us divide.

5. It is a cheap satisfaction to say that we organized the party of Communism first.

These points were acknowledged by the opposition, who advanced the following points in favor of organizing a party nevertheless :

(r) The delegates of the Slavic Federations have already-made it clear that they will not admit us, except upon terms which leave their machine in control of the

convention.

2. They are politicians and political bosses.

3. They are at heart against industrial union action in the class struggle.

4. They were traitors to the Left Wing program, and the decision of the Left Wing conference in June.

5. They are incapable of co-operating with American comrades, they will demand autonomy, and another split will follow.

Wagenknecht

Owens

14   THE LIBERATOR

(6) It is impossible to start a Communist movement in the American proletariat with a Russian nationalistic group in control.

It was midnight when Katterfeld's motion was passed and the committee elected. And$thus having declared itself to be a party-indeed the party-the convention adjourned until morning, when the election of commit-tees for routine work would begin.

The Communist Convention

The Chicago police supplied the best of all arguments in favor of the Communist Convention. The Right Wing was protected by the police, the Left Wing was ignored, but the hall of the Communist convention was raided, photographs taken, decorations and revolutionary placards destroyed, and two men arrested. Perhaps this argument is a little crippled by the fact that one of the then arrested was a lawyer, and the other was Dennis E. Batt of Detroit, one of the leaders of that Michigan group whose excessively political or educational brand of Communism is the chief weakness of the Convention.

A glowing tribute was paid to the female sex by Detective-Sergeant Egan when he arrested Batt. Rose Pas-tor stokes called out : "They are arresting our comrade-three cheers for the revolution !" Egan yelled back : "Shut up-it's always a woman that starts the trouble !"

Batt was informed of the presence of a detective with a warrant for his arrest just before he went on the plat-form to open the convention, but he was not much disturbed by it. He stood up there looking very four-square, as he is, with a long cigarette holder in his mouth, and a lighted cigarette-defying the regulations just laid down by his own committee if not the laws of the land-and his speech was brief and quiet. He hoped that the delegates would "exercise forbearance in their deliberations and conduct themselves as men and women who have the good of the American working class at heart."

Batt is arrested by a detective dressed up as a stage anarchist. Mr. Batt said "Thanks."

Louis C. Fraina was elected temporary chairman, and made the "key note" speech. It was the same note that had been sounding all along in the Revolutionary Age, with this significant, if somewhat incredible, addition : "We now end once for all, all factional disputes. We are at an end with bickering. We are at an end with controversy. We are here to build a party of action."

Considering that the convention was to spend the remaining hours of that day until well after midnight, and all of the next day until late afternoon, in a locked battle between its two factions on the question whether or not it would deign to elect a committee of five to meet the committee elected by a third faction represented in the Left Wing Convention-Fraina's promise seemed a little bit premature.

To anyone interested in brains for brains' sake, this battle was vividly entertaining. It was brilliant, sharp, rapid, full of poignant contrasts in personality, far more philosophic, more erudite, more at ease in the IVIarxian dialect, than anything to be heard at either of the other conventions. The points made by those opposing the election of a conciliatory committee was that the elements who had bolted from the old Socialist Party with the Left Wing were not true Communists. They were "centrists," "Kautskyians," in some cases mere radicals who objected to the tyranny of the party officials. All but a few, at least, of the true communists had abandoned the Left Wing program of capturing the party, and come directly to this communist convention.

The point made by those advocating conciliation was that, although undoubtedly some Kautskyians and centrists were to be found in the other convention, they were not predominant, and they were not any more pre-dominant than the centrists in this present convention-the "Michigan crowd" being those alluded to.

Having already attended a session of the other convention, and satisfied myself that there were really many delegates there who had no understanding of the Moscow program, and whose revolt against the old party was but an emotional reaction against the acts of its officials, I was rather friendly to the opposition in this debate. I cannot divide and classify people, and place them so

OCTOBER, 1919   15

accurately in the various pigeon-holes of the Marxian theory, in advance of their acts, as most of these speakers could; but I fully realize the necessity of casting out of the concept of proletarian solidarity, not only, the Scheidemanns and Noskes who murder the revolution with machine guns, but also the Kautskys, the Longuets andMacDonalds, who poison it with passivity and negative thoughts. That peculiar state of mind described by Lenin as the "wavering centre," expressing the fluctuating will of those economic classes not wholly bourgeois nor yet wholly proletarian, is an identifiable thing, and a thing that must be regarded as hostile in the period of the actual breakdown of capitalism.

In spite of my realization of this fact, however, and a prepossession that had been growing in favor of the "Communist Convention," I was discouraged by what I heard in the course of this debate, and when the opposition won, and the Left Wing convention was given the cold shoulder by a vote of 75 to 31, I felt Iike going back to the Left Wing convention.

It is not easy to tell exactly why, but after I recovered from admiring the mere quantity of abstract intellectuality whidh fillled the air, my mind began to grow a little tired, as it does at a game of chess, with so many prob-Iems that are unrelated to reality or action. Along towards ten or eleven o'clock a realization stole into my head that there was something a little childish, a little sophomoric, in all this exaggerated statesmanship. I saw in the flesh that academic and rather wordy self-importance which has characterized the official literature of the Left Wing, and made it get so much on my nerves, as well as on the nerves of the I. W. W. editors. The political and educational expression of the class struggle is always excessive= ly Ioud and distressing, like the racing of a motor when you detach it from the running-gear without shutting off the gas, and in this group of self-consciously detached and perfect Bolsheviks that impression was exaggerated almost to the point of burlesque.

"Our purpose is to organize a real, a pure communist party," said' comrade Lunin. "We will allow the delegates of the other convention to come to our credentials committee one by one, and we will examine them thoroughly to find out if they are communists or not. For you can not become a communist in one day-no, nor in two days, nor in three days, nor in a year. Even in Russia it takes plenty of time to make a true Bolshevik." Like most of the Slavic Federation leaders, Lunin was himself a Menshevik only about a year ago.

"Give them the test of humiliation," said another earnest youth. "Demand that they come here and ask ad-mission to this -convention. This humiliation will test the sincerity of their revolutionary principles."

"Let them come here and sit in our convention without a voice," said Nicholas IIourwich, "We are perfectly willing to allow them to sit here. They might learn some-thing. They might even learn enough to go next time to

the communist convention." HourWich is the editor of the Russian daily, Novy Mir-a strange, intense and intensely impractical intellectual gnome, with feminine gesture and attitude, but a kind of obdurate unsentimental force. He observed the ruthless workings of his political machine with so infinitely complacent a smile on his features, that I could not help feeling glad he was so happy.

The only effective opposition he received was from Fraina and I. E. Ferguson of Chicago, who made gnashing and spirited attacks upon this machine that was rolling over them, to the added delight of its engineers. "That man is a communist," said Fraina, "who happens to agree with your particular purposes at a particular moment. While you were boasting of the purity of your communisfn, you have made unholy deals with those whom you know and admit are not communists."

"The real question is," said Ferguson, "Do you want to exclude English speaking delegates from the floor of this convention. It is not whether you want to exclude centrists. The test of a communist for you is when or where one chooses to organize the communist party."

At the conclusion of the same speech he said: "I don't want you to lose control of this convention, because I know that your control means that we will have a real communist party in the United States." I do not know how to reconcile these two statements, and I do not believe Ferguson does either, but he was sincerely convinced of them both.

My impression was-to sum it up-that the heads of the Slavic Socialist Machine are in a mood for the organization of a Russian Bolshevik church, with more interest in expelling heretics than winning converts, and with

Leaders of the Slavic Federations-Missin,
Hourwich and Stoklitsky

fE

16

a pretty Fixed opinion that although Americans must per-force be admitted to the church they must not he admitted in such numbers as to endanger the machine's

- hold upon the dogmas and the collection. box. (It is their mood, not their conscious intent, that these words de-scribe.) And it seems to me that what has compelled some at Ieast of the American comrades to accept the dictation of this machine, and try to form an American proletarian party with so preposterous a handicap, is that inward dread of not proving sufficiently revolutionary which hounds us all. It hounds us because we are conscious of the continual temptation of respectability and personal prudence, and because we see so many of our fighting Comrades lose their courage and fall by the way-side. It is a wholesome dread. But we ought to be sufficiently sure we are revolutionary, so that we have a good deal of energy left for trying to be intelligent. And it is not intelligent to start the American Communist Party with a mixture of theological zeal, machine politics and nationalistic egoism in control.

Taking Fraina's and Ferguson's own characterization of these Federations, without adding a word, there is enough reason for desiring that they should function by themselves as a Slavic Communist Party, and that the American party should begin elsewhere, more modestly, and more in proportion to the actual state of the revolutionary movement in America. I could not help thinking what Lenin himself would do to this group who are trying to bluff us in the name of our internationalism. into accepting a nationalistic control of the movement.

Some similar thoughts must have entered the minds of the American delegates, for after this session was over and the vote taken, they delivered an ultimatum to the Federations, stating that they would bolt the convention and go home, if the vote was not rescinded, and the committee appointed. Accordingly the convention was adjourned, and the next morning and afternoon devoted to a caucus of the Slavic machine. Then the convention was called together again about five o'clock, and the vote rescinded-unanimously. It is a formidable machine that can reverse 75 votes without a slip, without allowing one single individual opinion to record itself. It commands admiration. But I think there is a discouraging lack of realism and the sense of workmanship in a convention that will spend twenty-four hours fighting over the appointment of a committee, when it is clearly obvious all the time that the committee will do exactly the same thing that the convention would have done if the committee had not been appointed.

The committee did, of course, go up to the convention of the Left Wing-by this time already the Communist Labor Party-and hand in a type-written document em-bodying the will of the Slavic Federations. Beneath a good deal of diplomatic and rather Wilsonian indirectness, this document simply stated that the Slavic Federations would not permit a union of the two elements

THE LIBERATOR

upon terms that would endanger their control, which they consider essential to the formation of a party of true communism.   -

The Communist Labor Party adopted a resolution making a standing offer to the Communists to unite the two parties upon equal terms. That is the end of the matter, until the rank and file of the revolutionary workers take action upon it.   v

The Communist Labor Party

It was something of a relief to wander down to the I. W. W. headquarters, after all this theoretical striving after wind, and examine the new rotary press they are installing, and hear the clicking of two accomplished line-o-type machines in the back room. And it seemed a good omen for the Communist Labor Party that when they found themselves too large and busy for the down-stairs room in the Machinists Building, they moved over to the I. W. W. Hall on Throop Street.

There a battle was fought and won, which for me seemed to contain the heart of the drama of these Chicago Conventions. It was not a battle between two ma-chines, for there was no time or possibility here for the formation of a machine. It was a battle between those who understood and accepted the Moscow manifesto, and wanted to apply it in a concrete realistic way to American conditions, and those who did not understand or accept it, dreaded its practical application, and wanted to take, refuge in more vague and old fashioned socialistic pronouncements. The most powerful figure in the militant group-and the best speaker, I should say, in all three of the conventions-was Ben Gitlow. The function of furnishing forth drafts of documents, making motions, drawing up amendments and resolutions, and being ever on hand in general with a wealth of ideas, was filled by John Reed. On the other side Margaret Prevey and Louis Boudin were equally prominent and equally definite in their opinions.

Jack Reed hitching up his pants in preparation
for a speech

OCTOBER, 1919   17

The convention, being somewhat dismayed by the voluminous and plain-spoken "program" which Reed's committee brought in, and yet feeling in their bones that they were going to have to adopt it, appointed another committee to draw up a "platform." I think they had an idea that they would keep the program as a kind of "esoteric doctrine" to be revealed only to the true disciples, and distribute the platform to the general public. So they put their more tender-minded or "centrist" mem-:bers on the platform committee, and these members drew up a brief document expressing only a little more vigorously than usual, the time.-wbrn "ultimate demands" of the Socialist Party.

The communist element did not oppose the plan of adopting a bri•ef,and highly generalized "platform" in addition to their program of action, but they were deter-mined that this platform should be in fact a generalization, and not an evaporation of the communist principles. Therefore they assailed the document that was reported to the floor, and succeeded in striking out every one of its vague or unscientific clauses, and substituting amendments in their own language. They succeeded with surprising ease until they arrived at the two final clauses, and here the minority rallied for a last obstinate resistance.

Theoclauses as reported by the committee, read as follows :

"To this end we ask the workers to unite with the Communist Labor Party on the political field for the con-quest of the State and thus secure control of the powers of government.

"We also urge the workers to organize themselves on the industrial field, and thus unite their, political and economic power to establish a cooperative common-wealth."

For these clauses Reed offered the following substitute:

"To this end we ask the workers to unite with the Communist Labor Party for the conquest of political power, to establish a government adapted to the communist transformation."

The significance of this change in the "Platform" is made apparent by the following clauses of the "Pro-gram" which had been reported to the floor, but not yet at that time adopted :

"The working class must organize and train itself for the capture of state power. This capture means the establishment of the new working class government machinery, in place of the state machinery of the capitalists.

"This new working class government-the Dictator-ship of the Proletariat-will reorganize society on the basis of Communism, and accomplish the transition from Capitalism to the Communist Commonwealth   

"Not one of the great teachers of scientific Socialism

has ever said that it is possible to achieve the Social Revolution by the ballot.

`"However, we do not ignore the value of voting, or of electing candidates to public ' office. Political campaigns, and the election of public officials, provide opportunities for showing up capitalist democracy, educating the workers to a realization of their class position, and demonstrating the necessity for the overthrow of the capitalist system. But it must be clearly emphasized that the chance of winning even advanced reforms of the present capitalist system at the polls is extremely remote; and even if it were possible, these reforms would not weaken the capitalist system.

E'The political action of the working class means any action taken by the workers to impose their class will upon the capitalist State."

It was an all day debate. I recall a few sentences somewhat at random. The first is from Margaret Prevey, whose friendship for Debs and her consecration to the task of liberating him from prison, gave a special interest to her opinions. "We came here," she said, "to form a political organization to supplement the industrial orgaaization of the workers. If not why are we here? We must use the political power in order to get a hearing for the working class. I want to see a working class judge to pass sentences upon the workers, a working class jailor to open the doors of the prisons for the working class. I want to see the workiit class get control of the police and the United States army, so that they can be used on the side of the workers, instead of against them in their industrial battles."

John Reed answered her in the one burst of oratory that came out of him. He reminded her that when a socialist Mayor of Minneapolis wanted to use the police to protect the meetings of the workers, his policemen were superceded by a body of special deputies appointed by the Governor of the State; when a radical governor of Illinois (Altgeld) tried to use the state power to protect the workers in the Pullman strike in Chicago, Grover Cleveland sent the United States army into Illinois to protect capital; "and if you had a Socialist president in the place of Grover Cleveland, the Supreme Court would

Tichenor of St. Louis

18   THE LIBERATOR

come to the protection of capital; and if you had a Socialist Supreme Court, J. P. Morgan would organize a volunteer White Guard, and the interests of capital would still be protected ! So it would always be. The struggle is between economic forces and it cannot be settled upon the political field." He asked Margaret Prevey and the others who opposed the pro-gram which he had drafted, and who wanted to elect Centrists to the executive commit-tee, to explain candidly

to the convention just what kind of a program they wanted, and what they conceived communism to be. After some hesitation the answer came that they wanted to go back to the language of the previous Manifestoes of the Left Wing. The special significance of this lies in the fact that those more academic and therefore less revolutionary Manifestoes were written by the very delegates in the "Communist Convention" who were now scorning this convention because of the presence of Margaret Prevey and these other not sufficiently revolutionary elements!

If that makes the reader dizzy, he has the satisfaction of knowing that he would have been a thousand times dizzier if he had actually tried to attend those three conventions.

Kate Greenhalgh said that she had often heard working men in the northwest 'say that they would never again put their name and address down in a poll book to be used in hunting them out by the master-class, but still she believed in political action as a means of acquiring a 'political status" for the revolutionary propaganda.

Jack Carney supported the amendment with the vehemence of one who doesn't really care whether the propaganda acquires a "political status" or not. "I re-signed from the Socialist Party," he said, "not because they expelled the members and refused to do their will, but because I want the American workers to get down to the real fight, and the real fight is on the job."

Margaret Prevey's position was supported by Baker of Ohio, who said in the course of his remarks that, "The old guard used to be always telling us how they do things in Germany; now we have a crowd that are telling us how they do things in Russia; I thought we were here to decide how we are going to do things in America !"

Ludwig Lore asserted that the absence of "immediate demands" was enough to distinguish this platform from the reformist platforms of the past.

Zimmerman of Indiana was on the same side, although

with a different note : "When the revolution comes," he said, "then we know what kind of methods we are going to use, and we won't have to ask any platform."

But the ever-present voice on the side of the Mensheviks was that of Louis B. Boudin of New York. Boudin is a M a r x i a n scholar of great erudition, so great

that he was given an honorary chair in the international university established by the Bolshevik Government at Moscow, although he happened to be employing his erudition in an attack on the Bolshevik Government at the time.

Boudin laughed with a learned scorn at one of the phrases which John Reed had embodied in an amendment to the platform. Reed said nothing, but quietly slipped out of the building and pretty soon came back with a copy of the Communist Manifesto, in which .he showed Boudin the identical phrase at which he had been laughing. The scholarly brows were bent in perplexity : "It's a very poor translation," he said.

Boudin has learned a great deal about Karl Marx in spite of a busy life, but he has never learned to control those neural conduits which lead from the cerebral cortex to the organs of articulation. An idea no sooner pops into his head than it pops out of his mouth ; and this makes it very difficult to conduct a parliamentary assembly in which he sits. Therefore it was a practical, as well as a theoretical triumph, for the majority, when Ben Gitlow, walking up to the front of the hall like a great sombre mountain, gradually unloosed the crackling thunder of his eloquence to the effect that Boudin had de-

Boudin walks out

Margaret Prevey

Kate Greenhalgh

OCTOBER, 1919   19

liberately employed his knowledge of ,Marx to dilute and destroy the scientific integrity of this platform, and Boudin, crying "It's a lie, it's a damn lie!" got up and fled like'a leaf out of the storm.

Reed's amendment was then soon adopted, and the question whether this should be a communist or a "centrist" party essentially settled by a vote of 46 to 22. There was clear sailing for the "program" after that. It was adopted substantially as reported by the committee, A kind of anticipatory "St. Louis Resolution" on the war with Mexico, was also adopted, and it was cabled to every organization in the Communist- International. An executive committee was elected, composed not of public celebrities who will meet once in a while, but of members of the party who are going to work-all of them ultimately, it is hoped, on salary from the party. With these good signs of life the convention closed.

Its program is upon the whole a vital, simple and realistic application of the theories of Marx, and the policies of Lenin, to present conditions in America. It contrasts with the program of the communist convention in no point of principle, but it applies its principles more

specifically to existing conditions, it is written in a more American idiom, it is written in the language of action rather than of historic theory, it is not abstractly didactic it its attitude toward organized labor, but somewhat humbly instructive and promising of concrete help. In these respects it seems to me superior to the program of the Communist Party, although I have not had time to study and compare them at length.

It would be foolish to pretend that The Communist Labor Party, any more than the Communist Party, is a wholly satisfactory nucleus for the growth of Communism in America. Nothing that happened in Chicago was satisfactory. But the Communist Labor Party has a certain atmosphere of reality, a sense of work to be done, a freedom from theological dogma on the one hand and machine politics on the other, which is new in American socialism, and hopeful. A strong movement of the rank and file of revolutionists to the Communist Labor Party would weaken, convince or drive out its uncertain minority, and at the same time leave the Federations where the attitude of their leaders naturally places them, in a separate or autonomous Slavic Party of Communism.

Tw-0 Poems

VICTIMA
QUEEN HELEN from the walls of Troy

QUEEN

but to lift her hand,

And men would search the sea with ships To do her least command.

Queen Cleopatra from her couch

Could name no precious thing So costly that it might not serve

A moment's pleasuring.

What do you know of Ilium,

Of Rome's Imperial Lord?

Of prows that churned the purple seas, Of wine of nacre poured?

What do you know of debts and dues, Of hazard and defeat?

Of torch and quinquireme, of black Sails rising out of Crete?

Ah, woman of the subtle lips

And easy-uttered vow,

We will go down to death for you

A thousand years from now!

Leslie, Nelson Jennings.

KINDRED

WENT alone among the countless trees

And made a little house of bark and moss. I sat and watched pale petals on the breeze

Or heard bleak limbs in autumn mourn their loss.

And when the winds made music I made mine,

Blew softly on a reed and learned their tunes. Then if there were no winds I gave the sign

To buds of Aprils and the flowers of Junes.

One day I stood upon a sylvan hill

And wondered at the leaves, why I had none. For ours it was one language, ours one will,

The trees' and mine, and our delights were one.

I felt the earth pulse quicken, sensing me,

With sudden horror, oh, ecstatic fear.

I wheeled and fled nor glanced behind to see

If dryad followed, beckoning and near.

But now if at the forest's edge I stand

And view the cool green deep of bough and fern, Invisible small fingers press my hand,

And footsteps follow me as I return.

Stirling Bowen.

20

THE LIBERATOR

Class War in Italy

By Hiram K. Moderwell

1 REACHED Milan on the day of the international 1 strike, after a week's mad dash across the Continent from London. Dashing across the Continent in these days means standing first on one foot and then on the other in stuffy consulates and ticket-offices, waiting to collect some dozens of the very official stamps and counter-signatures which are supposed to protect governments from nameless perils. It is a half week's work to get free of all the invisible silken threads that make traveling an agony. And it is another half week's work to conquer the disorganization of the French public services. The Gare de Lyons is a jungle. The whole mechanics of travel seem to have been smashed. The only way to find out about a train is to consult a fortune-teller.

The Italian authorities, too, are excessively nervous and elaborately cautious and inefficient. At the border they insisted on knowing the middle name of my father (he hasn't any) but overlooked the fact that I had no right to enter Italy by that route.

So I arrived in Milan only on the day of the strike. And I arrived with my head full of the notion that the strike wasn't going to happen. The word to this effect had been industriously disseminated in Paris, probably further- to discourage the French workers, already crushed by the eleventh-hour treachery of their leaders. Even the correspondent of a labor paper had told me that the strike in Italy had been called off. In Switzer-land the papers were full of the indignant protests of the Italian workers against the insane schemes of a few labor politicians. Everywhere the workers were re-fusing to down tools and (this much, at least, was true) the strike committee of the railroad workers had renounced the demonstration at the last minute.

But the railway station of Milan was strangely quiet. A few Ionely persons were wandering about. I asked f or a newspaper. Nothing but yesterday morning's. I stepped outside. There were no taxis. The streets were deserted, save for a few loungers. on the park benches. I waited for a street-car. There was none to be seen. I walked down the avenue, toward the centre of the city. The street was an iron-bound chasm, for the metal shutters were pulled down in front of all the large shops.

The only movement was that of the large grey army trucks which continuously chugged past me, packed full of soldiers. I followed their course and found myself in the Piazza San Fidele, between the central police station and the city hall. Here was the military distributing station for the whole city. Companies of soldiers were standing at attention, waiting to be dispatched by squads

to different parts of the city. Sometimes an officer would make-an impromptu speech from one of the trucks. Two motor fire-engines fully manned, waited the order to extinguish some potential Bolshevik blaze. A shifting crowd of curious citizens stood around and watched.

Out in the streets there was little to be seen. The atmosphere was not nervous, it was merely sleepy. The Milan proletariat was not making a revolution ; it was folding its arms. All the shops were closed, except those in which the owners chose to be their own clerks. There were few civilians, save here and there a small group of strikers in violent discussion. The police were scarcely to be seen, for the police are under the authority of the municipality, which is Socialist. But at every street corner there were two or three armed patrols. The banks were carefully guarded. Here and there, officers strutted by, taking themselves very seriously. It was much like everyday Germany, save for the absence of machine guns.

What really convinced me that there was a strike on was the posters. They were pasted on every vacant wall, arguing in many colors that Italy needs law„end order, that Bolshevism must ruin the working class, that self-seeking politicians were taking food from the mouths of innocent babies. There were posters from the League of Patriotic Associations, the Italian Liberal Party, the Democratic Society of Lombardy, the People's Anti-Bolshevist Union, the Union of Demobilized Soldiers, the Italian Veterans' League, the National Association of Italy, and the Military and Industrial Commercial Association. Besides, there were the usual official posters forbidding crowds and open-air meetings. The posters of the strike committee were few. It was clear which side had the more money to spend for its propaganda. But if the purse was weak, the spirit was ardent. Hardly one of the anti-strike posters but had been mutilated. And over the remains of them were scrawled, here and there and everywhere, the words :   -

"VIVA LENIN !"

What life there was in Milan was in the restaurants. They were open and crowded (for the strife committee had: taken elaborate pains not to interfere with the necessities of life, the distribution and preparation of food, the distribution of milk and drinking water, and all the hospital services). In the Victor Emmanuel Galleries, where the pleasantest restaurants are, the semi-fashionable of the town were taking lunch at prices reduced 40% as a result of the recent riots in which the workers took the problem of food distribution into their own hands. At the next table to mine was an American talking volcanic

OCTOBER, 1919   21

beard and friendly blue eyes. He was more cordial to me than most Italian nationalists are to Americans these days, hut I suppose that was between gentlemen.

I asked him, through the good offices of the shoe-jobber, about the Italian Bolsheviks.

"Oh," he replied, with a chuckle, "they run like rabbits."

An hour later I was with a group of strikers. One of them, a dark-eyed, dark-haired young devil with side-burns, spoke French, and immediately he was telling me everything at once. His brother had been "preventively" arrested, three days before, along with several hundred other communists. But no matter, he was going to sneak to Russia in a week, to fight with the red army. The strike? It was a complete success. Everywhere! Last night the workers had smashed the railroad station at Lodi ! Ca marche ! World-revolution!

His thoughts began to range the earth. The English proletariat-bourgeois ! American-Tresca, Giovannitti, Debs-oh, Debs, great man ! German-the Independents! "Its ont de pear. Mais Spartacus-ah, Spartacus ! Bing! Bing !" And his trigger finger discharged a volley from an imaginary rifle.

"When the revolution comes in Germany, I'm going to be a captain in the red guard," he confided.

He pointed to one of the group, a boy of probably nine-

teen. "He is a soldier." "How a soldier ?" I asked.

Is he demobilized?"

"No, a soldier in the red guard."

The youth who was being pointed to grinned, and pulled from his belt a long stiletto. Then, from his hip-pocket, a black, chunky-, vicious-looking revolver".

"Italian cigarette," he said. "Molto forte! Very

strong!"

Then my friend's bouyancy left him, and he

why the French workers had deserted their Italian come

told. God, how the Arditi went after then last April!" rades-why the Confederation Generale du Travail had

The Arditi, the "audacious," were a regiment of se-s called off the strike. I didn't know. No one in Paris

lected shock troops during the war. Now, the professor had seemed to know what had happened explained, they were' exterminating the enemy at home. minutes while Clemenceau was talking

They were the heroes of the war, the flower of the Italian

army, men selected from all regiments because they didn't give a damn for God or devil. They had certainly been leading a life in Milan since the armistice. They could be, seen in all the cafes, where they owned the place, and after they had had just a few drinks they were ready for anything. They didn't wait for orders. They had ideas of their own. It was the Arditi who burned the office of "Avanti" on April r5. Their leader, Captain Vecchi (he is also editor of a patriotic weekly paper, "The Brave Man") was received by the best people in Milan, the big business men and such. Even the Minister of War was in the habit of asking his advice.

Luck brought Captain Vecchi to the table a. few minutes afterward, a wiry, middle-aged man, with a Mazarin

Italian. He was selling shoes, he said, making a big thing out of it in Italy, and what were the prospects for selling goods at a profit in Germany?

I asked about the strike. "An absolute failure." "But the city seems to be tied up?"

"Oh, yes, it is tied up. No work is being done any, where. But there hasn't been any trouble. Nobody even hurt. It's an absolute failure."

"To tell the truth," he went on, "I'm sorry. We had come out to see some fun. But the city is too well guarded. The Bolsheviks don't dare make any trouble. It's a fiasco."

"What's the strike about?" I asked.

"Well, now, I don't know as I know what it is about," the shoe-jobber answered. "Say, Professor," he said to the man next to him, "what is the strike about?"

The "professor," who was selling an American patented article, didn't know. He thought it was something about Russia.

He, too, it appeared, had made a big thing out of it. Not that he had sold any goods. He wasn't here for that. His job had been to get the import license from the Italian government. I congratulated him on having got it.

"Yes," he said, "it went fine. I went to a certain party-he is high up-and I showed hint what commission he was going to get out of it. I said, `I4can get my goods over here. Now, it's up to you to get them in.' And when I went to Rome to get my license, I didn't even have to wait. I was first on the list."

,I gathered from further conversation that the "professor" would consider it regrettable if the existing Ital

ian government were overthrown.

"Are the soldiers here reliable?" I asked.

"Absolutely. Never a more loyal set of

world. They will go after Bolsheviks anywhere. And the Arditi will shoot them without even waiting to he

men in the

"He hasn't any uniform.

asked

in those forty behind closed

doors to Jouhaux and the Administrative Council of the Confederation. I could only express my belief that governmental benefits of some kind would presently accrue to those leaders whq, had changed their minds at the critical moment, and my conviction that the French workers regarded what had been done as an act of treachery.

When I tried to enter the office of "Avanti" I was stopped by guards. Not by the soldiers-they were snooping half a block away-but by two youths who had been sitting on the balustrade by the canal in front of the door keeping watch. Who was I? Whom did I want to see? What was my business, anyway? They were courteous, but very, very firm. I went through a long cross-examination in the outer office, and it was not until my impressive documents had been examined carefuIIy

22   THE LIBERATOR

that I was allowed to enter.

"Avanti," of course, was not printing. The strike would not be over, and the linotypes would not commence work, until midnight. They showed me over the office, which the Arditi had burned on the night of April 15th. Walls and door-sills were still scarred and black. Fresh paint covered the worst of the damage. Some of the rooms were not even yet restored. The office was not quite at its ease. Something of the kind might happen again to-day. There was a distant noise of shouting out-side. An assistant went to the window and very cautiously peered out. Then he closed the shutters of one window after another with great care, and, calling one of the volunteer guards, dispatched him to find out what the trouble was. Presently the scout came back, to report that two Arditi had been threatening to shoot up the City Hall, and its Socialist officials. But nothing had happened. In fact, nothing had happened all day. The strike committee had urged the strictest proletarian discipline and the strike committee was being obeyed to the letter.

There was little news from the provinces, because telegrams were few. It appeared that although the keymen of the telegraphs had stayed at work, the lower personnel had obeyed the order of their union, defying the govern-mental threats of permanent dismissal. The same was true of the posts. The office men were at work, but no letters were being delivered. The only newspaper published in Milan, the official "Bulletin of the General Strike," edited by the strike committee, told of the general stoppage of work in most of the harbors of north Italy. As for central Italy, no one could risk a guess. The workers were not so well organized there, and no one could tell what effect. the news from France might have had.

But as for Milan itself, the strike was complete. Not a tramcar, not a factory large or small, was being operated, not a single large shop, save those expressly excepted by the strike committee. In some of the factories the morning whistles had blown, but no one had appeared.

Concerning the railroad workers, reports were not yet clear. It seemed certain that the technical men-the engineers, firemen and trainmen-had not struck. It was equally certain that the common workers in north and northwestern Italy had gone out in large numbers. Passenger trains had run pretty nearly on schedule. The freight traffic had been crippled or held up altogether. In the Turin district 6o% of the total employees had quit.

The railroad workers' union itself was a symbol of the difficulties which any mass movement of the workers must encounter. It-was revolutionary, yes. Yet it had renounced the strike in the last days, about twenty-four hours before the action of the C. G. T. The strike union committee had thereupon been dismissed by an angry mass meeting of the Turin workers and a provisional committee appointed in its place to call the strike into

being again. But this last call went out too late. The workers were mystified. They were intimidated by Article 56 of the national railroad regulations, which establishes permanent dismissal as the penalty for striking. They were discouraged by the proclamation of the French C. G. T. All the invisible forces of menace and intrigue had impinged upon them, and each of them had been left to act according to his own conviction and courage.

At midnight the general strike committee-the executivelcommittees of the Socialist Party and the Federation of Labor, working in perfect harmony-met in the office of "Avanti." They sat in a circle in the office where Serrati edits this triple-bodied paper (there are also editions at Rome and Turin), and finished the last of the night's work on the strike. They agreed upon a policy toward the French C. G. T., drew up a proud, independent statement of victory, with but one stinging reference to the French, wrote a proclamation of greeting to Russia and Hungary and the third International at Moscow, and received reports, as the strike news trickled in.

Industry has been at a complete standstill in Turin, Modena, in Mantua, in Parma, in Monza, in Bologna, in Florence. In Trieste, which is to be annexed as Italian, the workers had shown themselves sufficiently Italian to close up everything, even including the cafes. In the sea-ports scarcely anything had moved. At Genoa, Venice, Ancona, even at Naples, shipping was at a standstill. The steamers which arrived Sunday morning lay helpless at their docks until Tuesday. More remarkable stiII, in a certain section of the country, around Bologna and Ravenna, the farms were idle. The well organized farm workers had struck in evidence of their solidarity with the Russian peasants whom they had never seen. Only the live stock was tended that day.

But in Rome, and in Central Italy in general, there had been no strike. The demonstration meeting, held at the People's House, was attended by but a few hundred persons. They voted the British "order of the day" condemning in words all the damnable things which the strike protested against in deeds, the intervention in Russia and Hungary, the high cost of living, the military tyranny. But there was no strike. From southern Italy nothing had been expected, for there the organization of labor has tnade little headway. But from France, which had once held out such promise, the news was as bad as possible. Few, if any, of the Paris workers had disregarded the order of the C. G. T. From England there was as yet no news. But Norway had struck. Berlin and Essen had struck. Vienna was completely paralyzed.

In the office of "Avanti," that night, I was in the physical heart of a great international experiment! It was an attempt to give body to the dream which Socialists have cherished for decades-that the workers of the world shall make a covenant of their brotherhood and declare their will to love when they are commanded to

OCTOBER, 1919   23

hate. From Italy came the impulse toward the strike. The heart of the Italian labor movement is "Avanti." And the soul of "Avanti" is Serrati, who writes as he thinks with large, simple, relentless thoughts.

We were surveying now the results of the experiment. England, it was to be inferred, though she had not promised much, had kept her word. France had broken her word for a mess of Clemenceau's promises. The bankers of Paris were laughing at the gullibility of the workers. The German Independents, with that marvellous patience of theirs, had once more laid down their tools and gone out on the streets to face Noske's machine guns. Even Norway had responded to an invitation she had never received.

And Italy, in spite of blows and discouragements, had stood firm wherever her working class was organized for revolution.

Yet the international 'strike had been a failure-this
time. The chain which was to have bound ,the inter-
national proletariat had been broken, and broken not
even by force, but by trickery. For the present, prole-

in existence-in west-

point of view, the strike was a notable success.

However, it is the correct thing to-day, in the Galleries, to speak of the strike as a "fiasco." The bourgeois papers are devoting whole pages to proving that it is not worth mentioning. And I suspect that the same yarn is being repeated abroad.

For good reasons. +The correspondent of a great daily newspaper has just been saying to me:

"So you have come to write about labor in Italy. It is a great field. And you will have it all to yourself. Our papers simply won't touch it. There is no use in our sending it. Each one of the big papers is controlled by some big business house and the news desk censors all material according to .orders. There is no longer any such thing as the freedom of the press."

I thought of the young man who had come down from the country "to make an honest living on Wall Street," and of the encouragement given 'him by an old banker, who assured him that he wouldn't have any competition. In reporting that the Italian strike was a success I expect to have no competition.

tarian internationalism was not yet

ern Europe. But in the east ! There, in Russia, where soldiers of twenty nations are fighting the battles of the proletariat, it is not an experiment, it is a fact. And I think the strike committee that night had in its mind one thought : from now on, we Italians must look to Moscow, and let the French free them-selves from their own illusions as they can.

Serrati wrote the next day in his leader: "The final experiment has proved that it is time wasted to try to galvanize a corpse (he is speaking of the bureaucracy of the C. G. T., rather than of its membership). The French proletariat, which has a socialistic revolutionary spirit, knows from now on where it must place its faith, if it is to defend its own interests and hold aloft the banner of internationalism."

A failure, then-a magnificent failure.

Yet for the Italians it was not a failure. It showed them their own solidarity, and it showed them whom they could trust and whom they must suspect. Within Italy, from every

A DRAWING BY MAURICE STERNE

24   THE LIBERATOR

S°SS-S■••' h

A NOTHER investigation! The Lusk Committee is hardly through shadowing all our conspicuously intelligent citizens, holding them up on the street, searching them, breaking into their houses, cracking their safes to see if they have any concealed opinions, when the Attorney General of New York State calls a special grand jury, and starts in all over again.

A couple of dozen editors and business managers, all the way from delicately liberal to crudely revolutionary. were subpoenaed to appear at his office one day this month-on pain of imprisonment. They were put under oath and an "inquiry" was initiated under chapter 595 of the laws of 1917. Before the inquiry began, the following sentence of chapter 595 was read to them:

"Any officer participating in such inquiry and any per-son examined as a witness upon such inquiry who shall disclose to any person other than the Governor or the Attorney General the name of any witness examined or any information obtained upon such inquiry, except as directed by the governor or the Attorney General, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor."

Phe, punishment for violating this law is $50o fine or one year's imprisoment, or both.

Who do you suppose these people were, and what do you suppose was said to them, and what did they reply? Nobody will ever know, but the governor and the attorney general, and a half a dozen other promiscuous people who stood around-we imagine-while the inquiry proceeded.

But we may be permitted to say that we saw our impeccable friend the New Republic there, just as he issued from the disciplinary chamber, and we infer   if inferences are still permissable under the laws of New York from the expression on his face-a wholly involuntary expression and therefore not actionable as a crime -that he had been compelled to reveal some secret of an intensely personal and, -indeed physiological nature, such as-perhaps-the state of his circulation. And there was a glint also of some pecuniary agitation as though possibly, or at least not inconceivably, the sources of his income had been enquired into.

He passed us by without speaking, of course, as any salutation would have brought him under suspicion of some criminal intent. But there are still certain flashes of the eye and lineaments which go unpunished by the laws of New York, and we can but do our best to interpret, in the tiny sphere of free speculation that is left to us, these passing signs.

It may be that similar inquiries were made of all the other magazines and papers, but who can tell?

A Governor and an Attorney General have derived some information from our most intelligent citizens-that is all we know-and that is so unusual as to make our curiosity intense.   M. E.

Q

Dropper.

Reminiscences of The Lusk Committee's Investi-
gation of Bolshevism

OCTOBER, 1919   25

May I Not?

AA T last report the Wilso-Russian war did not seem to be getting along either cordially or sincerely. MONG the August visitors to the national capital were a number of people from the middle west who did not raise their boys to be Siberian railway guards.

A MBASSADOR MORRIS advises that we recognize Kolchak soon. And quite properly, too. Any one expecting to recognize Kolchak had better do it soon.

T HERE is direct news-from London-that the Bolsheviki in South Russia are burning old people. Probably because of the shortage of fuel

I N Berlin, we are told, war profiteers feast and gamble while the poor and middle classes starve. This must, seem like old home week to the visiting American.

PRESIDENT WILSON says he did not know of the Anglo-French-Russian secret treaties until he got to Paris. Sometimes it almost seems as if the United States might have been justified in subscribing to a good newspaper or magazine.   -

1 ~J N OT long ago the President asked for a portion of

industrial democracy and now the railroad brother-hoods, to his embarrassment, propose to give it to him. He put in his thumb and pulled out a Plumb.

KAISER GARY has refused to see a committee of j~ steel workers to discuss their grievances. Now is the time to put in applications for autographed chunks of wood. (This is subtle, but if you just think of Amerongen, you'll get it !-ED.)

am.very, very tired of fooling with Mexico," says

1 Chairman Kahn of the House Military Affairs Committee. Just to make the records complete-there are a lot of people who are very, very tired of fooling with Kahn.

J~ CCORDING to Senator Smith of South Carolina,

"The people are happy and contented to a great extent;" The Senator once heard the phrase, "The cost of high living," and he has never been the same man since.   •

A HEADLINE tells us. "The cost of living is falling." Falling upon whom'?

S TILL it must be admitted that a retail grocer in Binghamton, N. Y., has been arrested for profiteering. We can't have everything.

A TENNESSEE editor served ten days in jail for saying that politicians had corrupted the judges. He might have been forgiven for writing it, but when he proved it in court-that was going too far.

TI-IE LIBERATOR'S corps of statisticians and investigators has discovered that the number of sa- ` loons now obeying the law is 2.75 per cent.

THE New York Tunes found that in its celebration party the Rand School served red ice-cream. On top of this the Times was forced to admit that the Reds are going to win the national league pennant.

AND the Sun complains, "Such radicalism will howl against capital, yet assume all the views that caused capital to be driven from power." When was this, exactly?

RETURNED soldiers testify that they saw a million dollars' worth of airplanes go up in smoke. A new form of aviation?

GEORGE M. COHAN swore that before he would give in to the striking actors he would run an elevator. Reviving that favorite of yesteryear, "Upstairs and Down."

F VEN the commuter's life is full of adventure in these striking times. Consider trying to go to a matinee that isn't running over a railroad that isn't either.

A LL the world's a stage and men and women merely actors-

f

ON strike.   HOWARD BRUBAKER.

PEACE TIME

AGERMAN diplomat some day Will come as sign that all is well; A German diplomat some day Will motor past the walls of gray Where Debs is locked within his cell. A German diplomat some day Will come as sign that all is well!

Jessie Wallace Rughan.

Wilson: "My fellow-citizens, it is only .necessary for

Boardman Robinson

Capital and Labor to recognize their common interest.

28

The \Vorkers of the

By Crystal Eastman

Clyde

«` T ELL, Wullie Gallacher's cam not. And they're

v v sayin' the treaty is signed and they're going to have peace, but they're not. Wullie Gallacher's not goin' to let 'em have peace!"

Thus spoke John Maclean, on Thursday, July 3d, 1919, in the Paisley Town Hall, where three thousand Clyde workers had gathered to welcome the chief hero of the 4o-hour strike after his three months in Edinburgh jail. "Our annual meeting to celebrate William Gallacher's release from prison," the Chairman called it. And there on the front row of the platform beside his beaming wife sat the hero   a trim, square-shouldered young light-weight with a red rose in his button-hole, healthy rosy-checked and smiling, like a boy home from school. Through six long speeches of tribute he sat with down-cast eyes, quietly blushing, and never looked up. It may be an annual performance, but Gallacher isn't used to it yet. Surrounding him were the chief figures in the great strike, behind him a socialist chorus, girls all in white, below him rows upon rows of hard-headed Scotch ma;. chinists, munition makers and shipbuilders, all in their working clothes with caps on, typical Clyde workers, the sort of men that kept Glasgow, despite all governmental blandishments, an anti-war city throughout the five years.

This meeting was the final chapter of the story of the first general strike in Scotland.

The Clyde is a muddy, uninteresting river 10o miles long, which rises fifteen hundred feet up in the hills of Lanarkshire, and flows west across the narrow part of. Scotland into the sea. Fourteen miles up from its mouth lies Glasgow. The history of Glasgow and the Clyde is the history of the industrial revolution. For along the valley of this river lie the largest coal fields and the richest iron-ore mines in all the British Isles. It happens that Fulton, Bell and Watt were all originally Clyde men. After the invention of machinery, Glasgow which had been a thriving little seaport of 14,000, serving an agricultural and wool-producing hinterland, became in one short century a great dark smoky city of a million people, surrounded by a dozen ugly industrial suburbs. And half a century later, when men learned to make ships of steel, the Clyde became the greatest shipbuilding river in the world. The Pittsburg worker must bring his iron-ore from some place away up in the Great Lakes region, a thousand miles away, and he must send his finished steel to far-off harbors to be made into ships. But the Clyde worker finds iron-ore, coal, and a Zoo-acre harbor right at hand. No wonder that more ships were built on the banks of the Clyde before the war than in England, Germany and America put together.

But the Clyde workers do not all build ships. The kindred trades flourish there. They make boilers, loco-motives, bridges, machinery, tools. And thousands of them are miners. Bob Smillie, a Lanarkshire miner, is a Clyde man. Keir Hardie, too, worked in the coal-fields area of the Clyde valley. But the Clyde worker about whom this story is written, works in the shops and is called an "engineer."

Well, during the war, of course Glasgow became one of the greatest munition-making centers in the Empire. Yes, the Clyde made munitions and sent thousands of kilted bare-kneed lads to the .front, but the Clyde never gave its heart to the war. From the great Keir Hardie Memorial meeting in 1915 when Robert Smillie said, "Fellow workers, this war which has killed Keir Hardie is a capitalist war," to the day of the armistice, there wasn't an hour when it wasn't safer to hold a peace meeting than a war meeting in Glasgow. Night after night John Maclean and James MacDougal held their peace meetings right opposite the recruiting office. The crowd grew and they were unmolested. In 1917 Helen Crawfurd of the Women's International League conducted an out-and-out peace crusade, with processions, banners, street-meetings and all, after the fashion of suffrage days -and no one dared interfere with her. In fact there were 4,ooo shop-stewards organized to protect peace meetings. A certain number of these, each one with 18 inches of lead pipe under his coat, would be detailed to attend whenever trouble was expected. Glasgow was ready for anything.

The rent strike was typical. In 1915 when munition workers began to stream into the city, there was an at-tempt to raise-rents. But the women, wives of soldiers and munition workers, wouldn't hear of it. They re-fused to pay more rent and when ordered out of their flats they refused to move. Suddenly, within six hours, there appeared in windows all over the city, placards announcing in big red letters their calm defiance of law and authority, "RENT STRIKE. WE ARE NOT RE-MOVING." They meant what they said. In each house one woman would be stationed as a picket to watch for trouble. On the approach of landlord, sheriff or rent collector, she would give the warning and twenty or thirty angry women would run out of their apartments and meet him on the stairs, sometimes armed with flour, sometimes with water, sometimes just with words. In any case he retired. It looked as though it would take machine guns to get any of these women out of their apartments. Finally, however, ten were arrested. When word was carried to the engineers in the shops that these

s   29

OCTOBER, 1919

women were on trial before the Sheriff for refusing to be evicted, they dropped their tools and came running in • thousat ds to the Sheriff's office. They gathered on the square outside, a great threatening determined mob, with John Maclean standing up somewhere, exhorting them, "Now you're out, let the war go to hell!" The Sheriff telephoned in haste to London, and then adjourned the case. In two days the old rents were restored-and a Bill enacted preventing eviction except after a court trial. Then the engineers went back to work.

But the most characteristic demonstration of Glasgow temper was on the night when Lloyd George and Arthur Henderson came up to explain the government's plan for introducing unskilled labor into the munition shops for the duration of the War, contrary to union rules. The Clyde Workers' support for their scheme,-known as 'dilution of labor,' was so vital to the government that Lloyd George came up there himself. Thousands gathered in the largest hall of Glasgow to -hear what he had to say. As a diplomatic stroke, David Kirkwood, one of the leading shop-stewards, was chosen to intro-duce the Prime Minister, and carefully instructed before-hand to speak of. hint as the "Right Honourable David Lloyd George." Kirkwood is a plain spoken man, and no respecter of persons. "Fellow-workers, this is Lloyd George," he began, and turning to the Prime Minister, went on, "and'I may say to you, Sir, that we view every word that conies from your mouth with suspicion. We've had your 'ninepence for four-pence' bill,* and we've had your Munitions Act, and now you're bringing us your dilution of labor scheme, and we don't trust you. But, fellow-workers, I beg you to listen to the man and give him a fair hearing."

The meeting never got far beyond that introduction. The men sat in grim silence while the Premier staggered through a few sentences of patriotic eloquence, but when he came to "our boys in the trenches," one old fellow called out, "We're not here to talk about boys in the trenches. We've boys in the trenches ourselves. We're here to listen to your dilution of labor scheme." After that the interruptions were continuous, until a man in the back of the room began to speak so powerfully that the whole audience turned round to listen to him, and Lloyd George had to give tip and sit down. Then pretty soon the meeting got up and went home.

This blessed British custom of heckling public speakers, even the high and nighty, certainly develops character and keeps the soul alive.

Kirkwood, Maclean, GaIlacher and Arthur McManus**
   those are the names I heard oftenest in Glasgow. They are all engineers except Maclean, and all are Socialists, but each one represents a slightly different group. David Kirkwood, whom I met at the Labour Party Conference

*A reference to the Workman's Insurance Law. • * See photographs on inside front cover.

in Southport, is on the Executive of the Independent Labour Party. He stood for Parliament in the last election, and claims that he got more votes than any other 1. L. P. candidate in Great Britain. His fame rests, how-ever, on his industrial activities. During an earlier strike, in 1916, he and nine other engineers were "de-ported" from Glasgow and "interned" in Edinburgh for 14 months. For some time Kirkwood was kept under guard. One night his soldier guard turned on him and said: `"God! I hope I'll have a chance to shoot you." When Kirkwood asked him why, the soldier said : "Why, we hate you. worse than the Germans. You're the fellow that brought the men out on the Clyde, and let us down over there. We'd like nothing better than to kill you and your kind. You're enemies." They argued through the night, but the soldier held to his convictions. Last June, two and a half years later, a man came up to KirkwoQd after one of his speeches, and said : "Do you re-member me? I'm the soldier that wanted to shoot you in Edinburgh jail. Well, I just wanted to tell you I was wrong and you were right. I've found it out now."

That's a true story. I know the soldier's name and address. Kirkwood is one of these quiet-looking, apparently commonplace individuals who is continually having adventures. He. sees his life as a series-of dramatic events, and that is what it is. Kirkwood is no good in a strike, they say-excitable, sentimental, always "striking an attitude." But no one   surely no one speaking the English tongue-can tell the story of a strike with more warmth and color, with a more perfect narrative art, and with more fire and passion and purpose, than Kirkwood can. If he never has any more adventures, and just goes around to labor meetings telling the story of those he has had, he'll play a big part.

John Maclean's relation to the movement is, I think, not unlike Kirkwood's, although Maclean is an intellectual. They both have a lovable but unmanageable ,recklessness. "You never know what he's going to do," is said of both of them. But Kirkwood is a little inclined to melancholy, while Maclean is the cheeriest firebrand you ever saw. He is a mild-mannered, smiling conspirator, with a round-eyed, apple-cheeked face, and white hair. "Be cheerie, comrades," he says, "you never can win a revolution without being cheerie." Maclean believes in Revolution now. , Since the defection of Hyndman and his pro-war followers, he is perhaps the most distinguished member of that small intellectual doctrinaire left wing group called the British Socialist Party. When I first met Neil Maclean, who is an I. L. P. man and member of Parliament, I thought, "There won't be much in common between this man and the revolutionary Bolshevik consul of the same name." But Neil smiled at such a notion. "You'll find all the Macleans have about the same reputation," he said, "and it's a very bad one."

Then at the Paisley meeting it was John Maclean

30   THE LIBERATOR

who proposed sending greetings to Neil-the one member in the House who refused to rise for "God Save the King" on the occasion of Lloyd George's triumphal re-turn from Paris with the peace treaty in his pocket.

"Neil and 1 have learned to call each other cousins," he said, "and I congratulate him on keeping his head and his seat. It doesn't matter whether a man is standing up for his class, or sitting clown for his class, we're with him."

Apparently in Scotland the different socialist groups are not very far apart. It seems to be more or less an accident which one a man belongs to. Tl1ey all work together when there is anything to be done.

Maclean's appointment as Russian Consul for Scot-land was not a surprise. He had helped to send both guns and pamphlets to Russia from a Scottish port be-fore the revolution of 1905, and he was one of those who welcomed the terrorist refugees who began to land in Scotland in 1907. Petroff, who arrived in 1908, became his close friend and co-worker. When Maclean started the "Vanguard" to beat Hyndrnan's pro-war "Justice," Petroff became the London agent for it. And later, at the time of Maclean's first arrest, Petroff came up to Glasgow and took over his classes. (Of course long be-fore this Maclean had lost his position as a teacher of Economics in the city schools, and had started his own socialist classes   out of which evolved the Scottish Labour College of which he is now director.) When, soon after the first Russian Revolution, Maclean came out of prison, he started a campaign for the release of Petroff and his wife and Tchicherin, who were at that time held in England. But it was not until after the Bolshevik revolution in November when Trotsky demanded their release and threatened to imprison Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, that the Russians were set free, and allowed to go home. They told Petrograd about Maclean, and his appointment followed. He learned it from the press. The official confirmation never reached him, and all the money he ever received was $250 from Litvinoff just before the latter sailed for Russia. He opened headquarters, nevertheless, and actually acted as Consul-listening to the troubles of the Russian workers of Glasgow and helping them where he could-until April 1918, when he was arrested a second time. This time he got five years, but working-class pressure forced his release soon after the armistice. As a candidate for parliament, nominated while in prison and released only nine days before the election, he polled 7,000 votes.

"What were you arrested for?" I asked him.

"Well-things I said in speeches. The first time it was under D.O.R.A.* I was speaking outdoors. Some body called out, `Why don't you enlist?' I said. `I've been a member of the socialist arnny.for five years; God damn all other armies!'"

* Defence of the Realm Act.

"And the second time?"

"Oh, the second time, I guess they didn't need D.O.R.A. to get me. I was urging the people to seize the municipal buildings and banks and electric power stations. I wanted them to start the revolution,"

John Maclean and Arthur McManus certainly stand at the left of the Left of the British movement, yet both were Parliamentary candidates last December. Sylvia Pankhurst seems to be the only socialist leader who re-fuses to have anything to do with political action. Maclean says : "I don't scorn any method. I would use all methods." McManus, who is a leading figure in the shop-steward movement and also in the revolutionary Socialist Labour Party, got 4,000 votes last December on a straight Bolshevik platform-and sees no harm in that fact.

McManus is a "wee fellow," as they say in Glasgow, a rough overworked, undersized, undernourished little fighter, who went into the shops when he was thirteen. HE is now perhaps twenty-seven, and recognized as one of the intellectual leaders of the left wing.

In Glasgow, second city in the Empire, both industrial and political expressions of the revolutionary movement find their strongest support. The Socialist Labour Party, which is really the Communist Party of Great Britain and definitely affiliated to the Third International, publishes its monthly journal, the "Socialist," from Glasgow. The "Worker," organ of the Shop Steward Movement (that name can't be Scotch; nobody but an English-man would express a revolutionary intention in such terms!), is also published in Glasgow. McManus is a frequent contributor to both. He is one of those night and day agitators, always running off to make a speech somewhere. And when he's lucky enough to have a job, i. e., when the demand for labor is so great that some firm will risk employing a known revolutionary agitator, he's an engineer in the shops.

McManus is probably the most able intellectually of the group I met in Glasgow, but I think he is a little too bitter and scornful to make a great leader. He thinks Glasgow should- have started the revolution in January. He condemns the leaders and scolds the workers for their failure, making the mistake which is not uncommon among left-wing leaders, of not always identifying himself with the movement. He is a little too given to saying "you" instead of "we" in his speeches. Gallacher, on the other hand, no less eager and ready, no less a. scientific revolutionist in mind and spirit, is more generous and more just. He is no fool where a leader has proved false or weak, but he is less ready to condemn. He, too, had a secret hope that the 4o-hour strike might "start something." But he identifies himself with the failure, if it was a failure, and is already looking ahead with a warm-hearted faith in his fellow-workers.

William Gallacher was born in Belfast but has Iived all his working life on the Clyde. He has been chairman

OCTOBER, 1919   31

of the Clyde Workers' Committee since its formation in 1915. To understand what that means I must try to explain the Shop Steward Movement, or the "unofficial" movement as it is now commonly called in Glasgow. It seems to be a movement within a movement, a system of workshop committees within the existing trade unions. It is an .attempt to capture the trade union movement for the workers, to take it out of politics and bring it back home. Its leaders attack the trades union system not only because it separates the workers into 1,Ioo different unions but also because its unit is the branch, (i. e., all the members who live in a certain area irrespective of where they work) instead of the workshop. They would apply the Soviet idea now to trades-union organization, making a small number of workers (15 to 200) in a certain shop of one plant the unit, and one of their number, called a shop steward, elected and recalled at any time, the representative. The stewards in each shop form a shop-committee. There is a convener of shop stewards for the whole plant, and a plan committee on which each shop committee is represented. From these various plant committees a local workers' commit-tee is chosen, such as the Clyde Workers' Committee, of which Gallacher is chairman. Sheffield and Coventry also have local workers' committees, and others are just about to be formed. But these committees, designed of course to represent all the industries of a district, actually represent so far only the engineering, shipbuilding and kindred trades. And the further development of the scheme by the formation of national industrial commit-tees, and a single national workers' committee elected from these, is as yet only sketched in the literature of the movement.

The shop steward idea offers a radically new plan of representation for the labor movement; the unit of production is made the unit of representation, and it is kept small enough so that there can come no separation between the leaders and the rank and file. There is nothing revolutionary about this ; in fact many employers strongly favor the formation of shop committees because they obviate the necessity of dealing with outside trade union officials. But the revolutionary purpose is clear in the minds of the founders of the movement; it aims at establishing industrial unionism and workers' control just as definitely as the I. W. W. And the machinery of representation lends itself to revolutionary activity. More-over it gives the workers a strong weapon for organized defiance of the trade union leaders when they prove false, and for forcing their hands if they go too slow. The Glasgow 4o-hour strike is a complete illustration of that.

It was Gallacher who gave me a connected story of the strike. Fifty-four hours? Forty-seven hours? Forty-four hours? Forty hours? No; thirty hours, six hours a day for five days a week-that's what the miners were demanding, and that's what the Glasgow engineers

really wanted. The shorter hours movement was of course primarily for self-preservation, to make place for the thousands .of men and women that were emptied out on the streets after the armistice when the wheels began to stop, and for the demobilized soldiers that would come trooping back home looking for work. But it was also an expression of the weariness of these workers after the long war-strain, and a desire for more life, freedom, leisure, education, happiness. The A. S. E. (Amalgamated Society of Engineers) had voted to demand a reduction of ten hours, making a 44-hour week; its leaders were pledged to this. But after a conference with the employers they distributed a ballot among the men calling for a vote on 54 hours and 47 hours-no mention of 44 hours. The men were confused, they voted of course for 47 hours, but they knew that they had been tricked, and the shorter hours agitation in-creased. The shop stewards, seeing the opportunity, kept up the agitation, until all the shops were discussing not 44 hours, the original demand, but 40 hours, and 30 hours, and a ways and means committee had been appointed to consider a general strike. On January

r1,

four days after the 47-hour week went into effect, 200 shop-stewards were in conference with Gallacher in the chair. They had unanimously condemned the 47 hours, and were considering what action to take to get a further reduction, when in came a delegation from the "official". movement, headed by Shinwell, chairman of the Trades Council, to say that they were heart and soul with the rank and file, and suggest "joining forces." A joint committee was formed that day representing the Glasgow ,Trades Council, Joint District Committees of the Ship-building and Engineering Trades, the Scottish Trades Union Congress, and the Shop Stewards. Shinwell was made chairman. It was agreed that the workers in each shop should vote whether to demand 40 hours or 30 hours, that another conference should be held in one week, to ascertain the result, and the joint committee should then call a strike to enforce the finding. On January 18, this conference was held-3oo delegates representing not merely the Clyde Valley, but most of industrial Scotland. When reports from all shops were in, it was clear that a decided majority had voted for 30 hours, but by general consent it was decided, in order to carry the big minority with them, to make the 4o-hour demand.

On Monday, January 27, the strike was called. Fifty thousand came out the first day; by Wednesday 1oo,ooo were out. Shipbuilding yards and engineering shops were empty, and many other trades responded. There was a central strike committee, a daily strike bulletin reaching 20,000 in circulation, and daily mass meetings of 20,000 gathered inside and outside St. Andrew's Hall.

Mass picketing was the feature of this strike. Five to ten thousand workers would gather at the gates of a plant at closing time, line up on each side of the road,

32   THE LIBERATOR

and when the men came out they'd have to "run the gauntlet,"-not hurry past, a hundred odd discouraged pickets, but make their way slowly, one by one, through a narrow lane grudgingly allowed them by the vast crowd of jeering fellow-workers outside. This method never failed. Shop after shop came out, and when they came out, they were the most eager to try the same game on the next shop. Mass pickets of women, the engineers' wives, were found even more effective. The big industrial suburbs were tackled in this way, 5.000 men marching from Glasgow to Paisley. tor instance, to picket one shop.

In two respects the strike leaders miscalculated : the municipal employees, despite the presence of their organizer on the joint committee, did not come out; and the response expected from Sheffield, the London district, and the other big engineering districts, failed to come. Gallacher and the other "unofficial" leaders expected workers of all these districts to fall in, line, follow Glasgow and make the 4o-hour week a national demand. It didn't happen.

Every strike has its crisis. In Glasgow it was Bloody Friday, January 31st. Two days before, a deputation had gone to the Lord Provost (Mayor), and secured a promise that he would communicate with the Prime Minister and Sir Robert Horne (Minister of Labor), place the 40-hour demand before them, and have an answer ready for the strikers on Friday. When Friday came. owing to the efforts of the strike committee and the Bulletin, 40,000 people had gathered in George's Square in front of the municipal building, waiting for the word from London. Kirkwood, Shinwell and Neil Maclean were sent in to get it. They were kept waiting a long time. The crowd was getting impatient. The police armed with their batons were ranged in long rows fronting the Municipal Chambers. Suddenly, trouble started in a far corner of the crowd. Two men were injured by automobiles, and the strikers asked the police to turn all traffic up another street, keeping it out of the square. The answer of the police was a baton charge. Gallacher saw it from the base of a monument in the square, from which he was addressing the crowd.

"I saw the police start, the whole lot of them, driving the crowd, beating them with their batons. I never saw such a sight. They pressed the crowd so hard that a flagpole in front of me was bent over. And the people were helpless. They were packed in a tight mass,. so they could hardly move when the rush came; they were taken by surprise, and they had nothing in their hands. It was a paved square, there weren't any stones to pick up, there wasn't any fence or railing to break up. They had nothing but their bare hands. If the boys could have laid their hands on anything, it wouldn't have gone the way it did. Well, in a minute, it seemed, I was left atone on that plinth, men were lying all around me tram-pled and muddy where they had been battened down. I saw a woman lying face down, all in the mud, where

she'd been left. I jumped down and lifted her up. Then I ran to an officer and said, 'For God's sake, get this stopped.' . He only swore at me. Then I saw the chief, standing and looking on while the police drove that helpless crowd across the square. I didn't stop to think, but just ran up and hit him a terrific blow in the jaw. He's a bigman, but I knocked him out, Then in a moment three or four of them were on me. I kept hitting up-hitting them in the jaw from underneath." Here Gallacher jumped up to illustrate, his eyes shining, and his smile as sweet as ever. "But pretty soon they had me down. I was dazed, not really, hurt. They picked me up and carried me into the Municipal Chambers under arrest."

Meanwhile, the deputation inside, still waiting for the Government's answer, heard the sounds of battle and' came running out to the square. Kirkwodd, with his usual sense of ,the dramatic, when he saw what as happening, raised his arms above his head in a gesture of amazement and horror. At that moment he was bludgeoned from behind by a policeman's club, and carried unconscious and bleeding into the Municipal Chambers. He had. received the Government's answer. Gallacher, by this time quite recovered, saw them bring Kirkwood in, and helped to bring him back to cdnsciousness, and bandage his broken head. Then together they saw the victims carried in, one striker after another beaten into unconsciousness.

"Suddenly," said Gallacher, "I saw a sight that was like the sun on a rainy day. I saw policemen being carried in. `Thank God !' I said, `thank God ! The boys have found weapons at last.' "

Next clay he learned that a lorry of beer bottles on its way to a nearby "pub" had been commandeered by the strikers and used with some effect on the charging police. By this time the strikers had learned that Gal-lather and Kirkwood were arrested; this and the lorry of beer bottles turned them from driven sheep into angry and determined men. Almost anything might have happened. The authorities knew this; in their panic they came and begged the two leaders in order to save terrible bloodshed and loss of life, to go out and tell the crowd to go home. The more cautious strike leaders took the same line. But the men in the square were in a different mood. They sent in word, "Say the word, boys, and we'll stay here till kingdom come. Give us half-an-hour, Davie, and we'll annihilate every police-man in Glasgow."

Kirkwood and Gallacher were finally persuaded to go out on a balcony and tell the strikers to go home, after which they were led off to jail. That was the beginning of the end. Shinwell and twenty others were arrested that night. The next morning troops had arrived, several train-loads of them, with machine-guns, tanks, aeroplanes, etc. The sympathetic strikes all over the country, which the Clyde was hoping for, did not take place. Finally the A. S. E. executive, acting with the govern-

OCTOBER, 1919   33

ment and employers, suspended the Glasgow District Committee. On February the strike was called off. Two months later Gallacher an'd Shinwell were sentenced respectively to three months and five months in prison.

I asked Gallacher if he was glad or sorry he had told the crowd to go home that Friday in the square.

"I couldn't do anything else," he said. "They put the decision on me. I was safe inside. I couldn't say, `Go ahead and get killed.' If I had been outside I could have said, `Come on-it's worth getting killed for,' but being inside myself, how could I ?"

Gallacher is the sort of leader the Shop Steward Movement is designed to produce. He has never had a salary, never even had his expenses paid by the movement. He is a skilled brass-finisher, has always worked at his trade when he wasn't in jail, and wants to go right on doing it. He has no political ambition ; I don't know that he is even definitely affiliated with any one of the three socialist parties. Nor does he want to be a labor organizer. He wants to agitate on the job. Perhaps the best thing about these labor leaders of the new order-next to their determination to keep on being workingmen-is their love of poetry. It is so common that I wasn't surprised when I asked William Gallacher what message he would send from the Clyde to the workers of America, to hear him begin quoting Whitman-

"Come, my tan-faced children,

Follow well in order, have your weapons ready.

Have you your pistols? Have you your sharp-edged axes? Pioneers! 0 Pioneers!"

Cannot Imagine

eel+ HERE are apostles of Lenin in our midst. I 1 cannot imagine what it means to be an apostle of Lenin," says Wilson.

There are several hundred million apostles of Lenin in the world, and it might be a good idea to quit trying to imagine, and buckle down and find out. It is all contained in the brief statement which we publish this month. Will somebody please show it to Wilson?

SENATOR JOHNSON asked the President whether he had any knowledge of the "Secret Treaties" prior to the conference at Paris.

The President answered : "No, sir. I can confidently answer that question, no, in regard to myself."

The publication of these treaties in Russia was almost the ,most startling diplomatic event of the entire war. They were discussed in Associated Press despatches, United Press despatches, news stories, articles, editorials throughout the world. They were reproduced in full by the New York Evening Post. Everybody who knows anything about current history knew about the secret treaties. It seems as though the president was offered a choice between appearing as an imbecile and appearing as a liar, and he chose both.

T HE Longshoremen of Seattle have refused to load munitions destined for Kolchak's army-the best news of the month.

A Message from William Gallacher

of the Clyde Engineers

MERICAN comrades of the working class: t-1 The War, with all its tragic horrors, its massacre by machinery, is ended, and an exhausted, bankrupts Europe must either sink down under a load of imperialism and militarism, or, through the path of revolution, rise from the dismal swamp of wage-slavery to the broad high land of Social Justice and Human Brotherhood.

Capitalism with its greed for profits, its treacherous diplomacy, ever seeking new markets, ever plotting and. striving for spheres of influence, made such a war as we have just passed through inevitable. If the world is to have peace, capital-ism must go. The Workers of Europe in ever-increasing numbers are realizing this, and mak-

ing preparations for the final conflict. Russia has given the world's workers a poble lead. Austria, Hungary, Germany and Italy are all marching forward to the battle. In France a great awakening is taking place. Here in Britain the revolutionary section of the working class is struggling to its feet. Soon, too, we will be on the march.

Comrades of America, we look to you to play a big part in the fight that lies ahead.

The forces arrayed against us are subtle, strong and ruthless. It-Will be no easy task to overcome them. But strong of heart let us go forwafd gathering new strength from day to day, perfecting our organization while we march. In the end we shall surely prevail.

The Terror on Broadway

By Art Young

34

"I'll give a hundred thousand dollars, and an-other hundred thousand and another and another and another-that's the kind of a little guy. I am, and I hope you'll all stay with me!"-Georg. M. Cohan to the Fidelity. League.

"Hey, BiII, pretty good for amateurs!"

"The Actors' Equity Association has brought
about a Reign of Terror."-The Shuberts.

"Who'll be the next to sign the new Declaration of Independence r -Louis Mann, chairman of the "loyal" actors.

"What they have done is a complete defiance of property and contract rights, and that is my understanding of Bolshevism."-Arthur Hopkins.

"If the Actors' Equity Association wins the strike, I shall retire and never produce another play."-David Belasco. Happy Dreams!

35

The Lesson of the Actors' strike

By Max Eastman

THE Actors' Strike was not the social revolution, but it was a very complete picture of it. If anybody wants to know just exactly what Bolshevik Socialism is, let him imagine that what happened last month in the theatrical industry of New York and Chicago, has happened in all the industries of the world.

The dramatic workers-those who actually produce the dramatic goods-sick of paying an increasing tribute to a little group of millionaires who "own the industry," simply combined together, walked out from under these unnecessary "owners," and proceeded to organize and produce drama for their own benefit and the benefit of mankind. They hired their own managers instead of being hired by them, disposing of the profits themselves through their own organization, and discovering in the process that friendly and joyful, free creative exuberance that has not been seen on the stage since the Age of Pericles.

The workers of all the world-are in the same position, paying an unnecessary tribute out of their toil to the little minority who "own" the world, and they will take the same action some coming day, and make it permanent. For they have the same power to be joyful.

It is not likely that many of the actors who played in this picture realized its significance. Some of them did. When George Broadhurst tried to persuade the caste of "The Crimson Alibi" to stay in the theatre, by offering them more money, Harrison Httnter said to him :

"If you and Lee Shubert with your millions think you can stop the movement of the world towards industrial control, you are very much mistaken."

"What do you mean by that ?" said Broadhurst.

"I mean just exactly what I say, although I don't expect you to comprehend it."

Walter Hampden revealed the same penetration in his speech at a meeting of the Actors' Equity in which he vigorously urged them never to settle with the managers on any terms, but to perpetuate the great social and artistic movement which they had begun.

Ed Wynn expressed it more briefly, when somebody told him the Producing Managers' Association was contemplating a settlement. "We might engage one of those little fellows as manager at 75 a week," he said.

But few of the actors understood or imagined so much. They thought they were fighting against the immorality and injustice of the men who own them, instead of against the immorality and injustice of being owned. They thought they were against the managers because they are bad, instead of because they are managers. To them the marching over to the Lexington Theatre, and

producing drama without the interference of a private capitalist, was merely an incident in the struggle for bet-ter wages; they will find out that it was a perfectly inevitable step, and will be the only possible outcome of the struggle.

Professional Agitators

It was our intention to publish a complete story of the Actors' Strike, but those conventions in Chicago interfered, and the strike is no longer news. So we will content ourselves with a little general moralizing about it. And first let us moralize, about the terrible crime of being a "professional agitator."

When we decided to find out the facts which underlay this revolt of the actors, we went straight to Harry Mountford, the organizer of the Vaudeville Artists' Union, which used to be called, and perhaps always will be, "The White Rats." We went to him because we know that the! man who is best hated and vilified by the owners of an industry, and by the press which they own, is always the man who has at heart the rights and liberties of those who do the work. We had read often enough in certain papers that Harry Mountford is a cheap crook and notoriety hunter, to feel that he is a man of unusually forceful integrity and idealism. And we were not mistaken.

He met us in his little anonymous office on Fifth Avenue, with a sagacious and genial smile, and in about three hours of conversation he told us, and explained to us., and showed us, and proved to us with documents, practically everything that a journalist could possibly ask to know about the theatrical situation in New York and every-where else in the world. And his conversation was as free from those little superfluous egotisms that most of us slip in when we talk about our jobs, and when we talk about other things, as it was expert and witty and sincere.

"The actors are nothing but chips the Managers gamble with. It costs the actor more to get in the stage-door of a theatre than it costs the patron to get in the front." That is the way he summed up the position of the creative workers in this industry, and that was the thought continually in his mind. Art Young has drawn a picture of him which shows the round good-natured face and square brow, and the peculiar ease and sense of adequacy which his personality conveys, but I think his picture is a little too satisfied looking.

The revolt of the American actors began about the year 1900, when the White Rats were first organized. George Cohan went out on strike in those days-not be-cause his character was different, but his economic posi-

36   THE LIBERATOR

tion. He belonged to the working-class. So did Weber, and Fields, and Sam Bernard, and "the great Maurice Barrymore," who was then appearing in vaudeville. But that little preliminary wave of rebellion soon passed, or was beaten down by the power of capital, and in 1907 when Harry Mountford came to this country, the White Rats were crawling before the Managers, their presiding officer actually receiving a salary ,from E. F. Albee, the Vaudeville King.

Mountford had organized the Variety Artist's Federation of England, and in 1906 they had closed every vaudeville theatre in London for seven weeks. He had been an honorary officer of that organization without salary, but when the strike was done there were no more jobs for him on the English stage, although he had been a successful actor for twenty years, and so he came to America.   __

"The salt wasn't out of my hair," he said, "when I was met by a group of variety actors, members of an International league with which I had been connected, who said that they were not able to get any contracts on the American stage, and wanted me to do something about it.

"We had a meeting and talked it over.

"The next day E. F. Albee sent for me, and asked me what I meant by going to that meeting ! He also asked

Harry Mountford

me whether I would `keep still if they would make me comfortable'.

"I didn't prove sufficiently interested in comfort, and the result was that I was never able to get any contracts on the American stage either. In tgo8 the White Rats engaged me, and I took my first salaried position as an organizer."

Many another man has been forced into the profession of -organizing rebellion in the same way. It is a good thing to remember when you see the capitalist press denouncing somebody as a "walking delegate," a "paid," or "professional agitator." There is not an agitator of any significance in this country who has not had opportunities to sell out for a price that would make .his "pay" look like dirt.

A professional agitator is a man who would rather stand out all alone in the social storm, serving his ideals, than give up his independent soul for a comfortable job.

Drawing The Battle Line

The most scientific objection that is ever made to the Socialistic theory is the assertion that the world really isn't sharply divided into two classes, the workers and the capitalists. There are lots of people who are both workers and capitalists. There are capitalists who work, and workers who own a little capital. That is true. But it is also trite that when conditions grow unbearable and the fight begins, then the world automatically divides itself into these two classes. And every man and every woman has to take his stand on one side or the other, whether he wants to or not.

That is what the Actors' Strike so clearly illustrated, and that is the main reason why 1 want to turn it into a sermon. It was a complete picture of what is gradually happening all over the world. Six months ago there were actors and managers, and actor-managers, and manager-actors, and friends of actors and managers, and clubs for actors and managers, and magazines and papers for actors and .managers, and courts of justice for actors and managers. There were all kinds of people and institutions, which for business or personal reasons stood on the middle ground between these two classes    and there was E. H. Sothern in whom the "To be or not to be" of Hamlet had become a mental habit. Today there are Managers and those loyal to them on one side, and Actors and those loyal to them on the other, and not even a single tight-rope walker to be found who can balance himself on the line between them. Even the Courts of the United States, which are supposed to be dedicated to the ideal of abstract justice, have shown themselves to be obedient and perfect servants of those who own the dramatic industry.

Tt was hard for the actors to learn this last lesson-so well known to the rest of the working-class in their struggle. judge Walker of Chicago issued an injunction to

OCTOBER, 1919   37

the actors and actresses in "Up in Mabel's Room," for-bidding them to move, breathe, or open their mouths from the time it was served on them. I saw the terrifying document' at the headquarters of the Federation of Labor, and heard about the state-of-mind in which Ed Nockels found the actors when he went over to the theatre to call them out. They were sitting around with this stupendous "instrument" in their laps, gasping for breath. But there is nothing in a little legal phraseology to terrify Ed Nockels, and when he got through telling them some things about labor and the law courts, there was nothing to terrify them. They walked out singing, and took the Judge's signature along for a souvenir.

"We've got a leader now," said Hazel Dawn, "and we know what to do and we're going to do it. I'd just like to take one ride in a patrol wagon anyhow." .

They have all been cited for Contempt of Court, but what of it? The battle-line is drawn and there isn't room in No Man's Land for anybody.

The Fidelity League

It is to the interest of the capitalists to conceal this sharp conflict of interest, and make it appear that they are not alone, but that many of the workers are with them in their campaign for owning the earth. And so they always bribe or flatter some shallow-hearted persons into organizing a body of "faithful," or "loyal," or "patriotic" workers-a scab-union, we call it, although the word "scab" was politely taboo in the superior ethics of this strike.

And there are always a certain number of workmen who are ready to be so organized   even at their own expense. They act from a kind of disinterested ideal-the ideal which we have to call "aristocratic" instead of "snobbish," I suppose, while we are saying "strike-breakers" instead of "scabs." At any rate it is a trait in human nature that makes people willing to sacrifice the real things of life, including their own personal independence, in order to feel that they "belong" to the wealthy classes. They would rather belong to then the way Fido belongs to his master than not belong at all, and "Fidelity" is a very happy name with which to describe their special kind of virtue.

The reason there is such haste to get these organizations formed, and their existence advertized, is that the bosses themselves are so few in number that if the public could once clearly see them all alone, the monstrous in-justice of their owning the earth would overwhelm every-body. It is not more than one hundredth of one percent of the people actually engaged in the theatrical,industry who own it. In the nation at large it is about 2 percent of the people who own the main body of all proauctive industry. Obviously it is necessary for these bosses to conceal the actual position of the battle-line, and make it appear that vast bodies of workers are on the side of

r

capital, vast bodies of actors on the side of _the managers. And hence result such hollow and ludicrous assemblies as the Actors' Fidelity League.

Never have I seen the folly and weakness of being in-sincere exhibited as it was at their great meeting in the Hotel Biltmore, when George M. Cohan was crowned king of the "faithful." The audience-composed largely of society friends and elderly rich patrons of the theatre -trickled in whisperingly, very genteel, finding their places in a politely perfunctory manner, and then just sitting there waiting for the celebrities. They reminded me of those lifeless old ladies who go to prayer meeting in order to be worked up by the minister into a pious emotion which they are not able to feel at home. And even when the celebrities arrived, and lined up handsomely behind the long thin table on the platform, there was a weakness in the enthusiasm. William Colrlier, David Warfield, Louis Mann-all managers, I am told, as well as actors-Mrs. Fiske, whose husband is a manager, Holbrook Blynn, who confessed that a financial interest controlled his decision, Allan Dinehart who played the part of the yellow Socialist in `"The Challenge" and must have got that sickly color into his blood. Others were there, of course, for reasons less easy to guess-Julia Arthur, Janette Beecher, Marjorie Wood-her face, so magnetic in comic action, seeming vacantly earnest here -Lenore Ulric, with her soft cloud of dusky hair over the devil eyes and those rich red lips which she opens by raising the upper one, wolf-like but not dangerous. I wondered what their true motives were for being here, but I felt too much like an interloper myself, to find out.

Al] I know is that they were not deeply moved. It was not thrilling. And when Louis Mann-looking like a gorilla dressed up for circus purposes in a superhuman white collar-took the gavel and tried to conduct the proceedings, it was ludicrous. Because there were no proceedings. There was nothing to do. After trying in vain to extract some reports out of some officers, begging Warfield and Willie Collier to "give an entertainment" (which they did more or less), pleading again and again with the audience to make some suggestion for the "good and welfare" of the League, dropping his gavel in a glass of water with surprise when. somebody did get up, and himself earnestly orating on all the subjects he could remember, he finally fell back upon the delightful expedient of reading the audience an editorial out of the New York Times!

Finally the great moment arrived. "Mr. William Collier," said the chairman, "has an important announcement to make."

Mr. Collier rose with that tentative manner and those queer quizzical wrinkles which always make you hope and believe there is going to be a joke even when there isn't. "Mr. George M. Cohan," he said, "will positively appear here tonight and take the gavel." There was a round of applause.

38   THE LIBERATOR

"What, take the gavel away from Louis?" said War-field. "That's impossible !" It was the best thing that happened.

And, then at the psychological moment George M. Cohan steamed in the doorway, and down the aisle, and up to the table, looking very angry and superficially resolute, and enduring with a kind of heroic impatience the applause for which his entrance had been so carefully timed and adjusted. It was a joke. But there was no humor in \him. There was no lightness, and yet there was no weight. He made every move wrong, as a man does who is indignant but not honest with himself, and succeeded in dismaying and chilling the audience a little, instead of stirring them to action.

He took the gavel with a gesture and a word of noble sacrifice and devotion, and then handed it back with the statement that he had to leave town on business in about half an hour.

He announced that he had not come here as a manager but as an actor. "I have resigned from the Producing Managers' Association," he said amid renewed and re-sounding applause.

"Have you resigned from the firm of Cohan & Harris ?" a reporter asked him.

"I have not," he said, "I have contracts to fulfill as a member of that firm, and I intend to fulfill them." Every-body remembered that Harris is still the president of the Producing Managers' Association, but nobody smiled or said anything.

Then he proceeded to read with excessive earnestness, the lordly and benevolent terms which the managers had empowered him to offer to the Fidelity Association, granting all the demands for which the Actors' Equity had been striking and in each case a little more besides. Everybody in the room concealed in his heart the knowledge that the Equity Strike had compelled him and the managers to grant those terms. But Cohan did not have enough wit to leave this knowledge concealed. He dragged it right up into full consciousness, where it be-came painful, by saying: "Now I don't want to hand myself any bouquets, but don't let anybody tell you the Actors' Equity is responsible for these concessions !"

Finally in a grand climax he re-donated to the Fidelity League the one hundred thousand dollars which they had already been compelled to reject four times because "It might look to the public as if we were dependent on then money of the managers." It may be predicted that when Cohan has had a little more experience, he will make

OCTOBER, 1919

these' contributions to the "faithful" in secret. As it was, he was irritated at the failure of his money to flow.

"I insist that you take it," he cried, "and if you don't I will give it to the Actors' Fund, and I will give another hundred thousand, and then another, and another, and another, and another, and another, until we put the theatre where it ought to be. That's the kind of a little guy I am !" It was almost a shriek.

You can not help doubting whether George Cohan is really as silly and egotistical as that looked. And it will be to the benefit of our moralizing to assume that he is not. The one sincere thing about him is his indignation. He is stung and hurt and angry, and a little painfully bewildered to find himself in so unpopular a position. It is because he really had idealism, and a kind of philosophy of life. It was the philosophy of generosity and good friendship and benevolence. And that philosophy, and that mode of life-likeable as it may be-always breaks down completely when it comes to a conflict between economic classes. Friendships are disrupted, gratitudes are forgotten, generosity is rejected -everything gives way to the formation of a clear line of conflict between the workers who produce the goods and the capitalists who take the profits. It is an inevitable law. And George Cohan will have to readjust his whole philosophy of life completely-so completely that he can realize that actors who "owe him gratitude" for individual assistance, are right in fighting against him for universal justice-before he will ever get over feeling chilled through and embittered.

Idealists and the Class Struggle

It is a hard philosophy which tells us that people line up inevitably in classes on the basis of their economic interest. It is just as hard as the truth. But fortunately for our feelings, and for our sense of the picturesque, there are occasional individual exceptions to this truth, and they warm us up and keep us excited, and make us feel that if we could once get rid of economic classes al-together (as we did at the Lexington Theatre) human nature would be very lovable and interesting. Francis Wilson, the president of the Actors' Equity, is one of the exceptions. He might have been either an actor or a manager in these later years of his life, for lac was a distinguished and truly aristocratic success in both professions. But there is a vein of abstract and impersonal idealism in him; having arrived and succeeded for him-self, he wanted to do something for the good of art and humanity. And so he did.

Ethel Barrymore is another in whom an impersonal ideal-an ideal whose. ultimate implications she little realizes-furnished the motive to action. Her position was secure enough, and capitalistic enough without doubt, to place her selfish interest on the side of the managers. But she has imagination ; a vision of the position of the actor in history; she has the great tradition of her family;

39

and she has a very sweet and democratic feeling. She coudn't be a manager, and so when the choice was forced upon her she became a member of the Equity and the very heroine of the whole drama. For her one inmost conviction being that she can not make a speech, she made the best speeches to be heard on Broadway. They consisted of the following words uttered in a voice of breathless and unspeakable conviction. "I can't say any-thing but just stick, that's all. You stick, and I'll stick, and we can't lose. We'll win!"

And there was Frank Bacon, a man who has spent almost a whole lifetime in patient and faithful struggle toward success on the American stage-and victory came to him only last year in his play, "Lightnin'," the chief hit of the season on Broadway. It was a great day for the Equity when they could announce that "Lightnin' has struck," and introduce Frank Bacon at their mass-meeting. He is the author and half owner of the production, as well as the leading actor, and everybody knew that his income was derived more from royalties and box-office receipts than from his salary as an actor. I hope everybody who reads the Liberator will go to see Frank Bacon when "Lightnin' " goes on the road-and they may know that he has the same soft, slow, indefinite way of speaking in real life that he has in his character in the play. It always sounds as though he weren't thinking, and weren't really saying anything.

He stood up there on the platform   altogether gentle

Frank Bacon

40   THE LIBERATOR

and unpretentious. "Well," he said, "I saw this coming and I said to Mother, 'Mother,' I said, 'I guess the boys and girls are going on .strike.'

"'Well, Frank,' she said, 'where are you going to stand?'

"'Well,' I said, `Mother, I guess 1'11 have to stand with the boys and girls.'

"'That's right, Frank,' she said, 'We began on the gas stove, and we can end up on the gas stove too, if we have to, for the sake of the boys and girls.' "

That speech and the speeches of Ethel Barrymore were points of high drama in the picture we are describing. But they had their counterparts, equally important, in the department of comedy. When we asked Ed Wynn what he expected to gain through his loyalty to the Equity, he said, "I am striking for the privacy of my dressing-room."

"And what do you mean by that?"

"I mean that my dressing-room is so full of people who come in to complain about the way they are treated by the managers that I never get five minutes to myself."

Ed Wynn is young and gay-hearted enough to enjoy the experience of being an agitator instead of an actor for a few weeks, and we are not paying any tribute of admiration to his self-sacrifice. We are saving all our admiration for his genius. By the grace of the Law Courts he was enjoined from appearing on the stage at the Lexington Theatre, so he appeared in the aisle. He was enjoined from giving a performance, so he told the audience all about the performance he would have given if he had appeared. And it was one of the few humorous things our generation has heard that rise to the heights of the "humorous talk" of Mark Twain and Artemus Ward.

Another one who never knew she was a "working-man," until the strike broke, was Marie Dressler. She had never been a member of the Equity, and she had just gone away for a month's rest-the first after three years of work for the war-but she took the train back to New York, and came charging into battle at the very first note of the trumpet. And when I asked her why, she really couldn't tell me. "I knew I belonged there, that was all. I began in the chorus, and now I've got back with the chorus once more and I'm glad of it !"

There was nothing in the Actors' Strike to equal Marie Dressler. There isn't an agitator in America that could hold down a soap-box in the same alley with her. She could start a revolution in an Old Ladies' Home. She went over to the Hotel Astor, to the first class-conscious meeting of chorus girls ever held-she and Ethel Barrymore-to give there the courage to organize and walk out. And she stood up in front of them like a great, warm, generous, homely fighting mother, magnetic and dependable-and before fifteen minutes were past, she had been elected organizer, president, commander-inchief forever of the choruses of the United States. I

have to smile a little at Marie Dressler-her activities have gone so far ahead of her ideas. She still thinks in the terms of Fifth Avenue in her private and more reflective moments.

"There is one thing about this, you know," she said to me. "We must all try to bring capital and labor together. We must allay this terrible unrest that is going all through the country and all over the world.

That same night I saw her at the Lexington Theatre, standing down at the foot-lights, shaking her fist out over the orchestra-a restless army of "labor" that she had pulled out of the Hippodrome having just marched across the stage for unbelieveable minutes amid storm and thunder from the audience. "I'm in this fight," she shouted, "to win. And I can tell you, and I can tell those managers, that I'll stick through till justice is done to these people, Or every last ounce of fighting strength that I have is exhausted !"

When Marie Dressler realizes that all the "unrest" all over the world is composed only of strong men and women saying those identical words, with those identical emotions, and the same unescapable reasons for saying them, she will forgive my using her example also in order to point a moral.

The "labor unrest" is the one great, beautiful and hopeful thing in these sad and terrible times. It shows that the spirit of life still inhabits this bloody globe, and that out of all the devastation and death which our insane commercial civilization has brought upon itself, n. new, and free and democratic society may yet be born. The strike of the actors has added enthusiasm and courage and a new flavor of the picturesque to the revolutionary struggle of labor, the "movement of the world toward industrial control." It could do nothing better and greater than that.

The crowning feature of the Lexington Theatre performance was a mob scene, supposed to portray the struggle and determination of the Equity Association. Brandon Tynan appeared as a kind of Mark Antony-or Bill Haywood-addressing an actual crowd of fifteen hundred people in a dim crimson light. One could hardly help. seeing something greater in that scene, than the thing he intended to portray. It was a pageant of the social revolution. And when he recalled to his hearers that in Italy, France. Spain, England, the actors have long had the right to organize which the managers of America are denying them, he needed only to add, in order to complete the pageant and enforce the moral of the whole drama: "Yes, and in Russia, the actors possess and conduct the theatres themselves as we are conducting this theatre, without any captalists to suck their greedy profits out of our emotions, distorting our impulses to that sordid end, commercializing our playfulness, standardizing our spontaneity, destroying and making impossible the natural consecration of our genius to the spirit of life!"

41

lei Message From Bulgaria

Sophia, July 21, 1919.

WL have spent unbearable years of war and devastation, hunger and misery, disgrace and downfall, and now the consequences of this horrible butchery are even more frightful in their magnitude. Death and desolation on one side, and a life of continuous debauch and feasting and a mad race for amassing riches, on the other. Brothers, comrades, the world seemed irrevocably mad, insane, and now among the poor reigns utter hopelessness and helplessness. In what scale could I describe our existence here to make you understand the horror of the situation in which we exist under the terror of the Yellow Socialist ministry?

I could not give you a true picture for fear the at-tempt would minimize the monster that has its bloody hands on our throats. The cost of living has jumped not five, ten or fifteen times, but twenty-five times, and even more. A pair of shoes now costs 450 francs [before the war, 15-20-25] ; a suit of clothes 1200-1500 francs [before the war 35-50] ; meat 15-20 francs [before the war r-11/.2]. This is unknown in all other warring and, neutral countries. But as compensation, the speculators and profit-mongers have been growing like mushrooms -corporations with capital of 50 to 200 million francs.

This contrast of life has brought about a clear di-vision among the people-on one side the wealthy, on the other the poor. Still the greater proportion of the poor are asleep, and follow the compromised and blood-stained nationalists, the miserable socialists, the ones who make common cause with the exploiters of mankind.

The cabinet is all "radical." Theodorov, Nationalist Party, Premier and Foreign Affairs ; Madjarov, Nationalist Party, Minister of war ; Danev, Liberal Party, Finance; Kostourkov, Radical Democrat Party, Education; Prof. Ganev, Radical Democrat, Justice; Draghiev, Agricultural Union, Agricultuer; Stamboliski, Agricultural Union, Public Works; Bakalov, Agricultural Union, Post and Telegraph ; Yanko Sakazov, Yellow Socialist, Labor; Pastoukhov, Yellow Socialist, Interior. All of them are "radicals." The disgrace is that these Radicals, Socialists and Agrarians are conducting a White Terror, outdoing Ferdinand and his Camarilla.

Now the party of the Left Socialists-Tesni, the narrow-has revealed itself as the only revolutionary party in this country. It joined the Third International and transformed itself into the Communist Party of Bulgaria, being closely connected with the Russian Soviet Republic, in whose spirit it works here. Under the red flag of the Communist Party stands every one, young and old, capable of struggle; and for this reason the common storm of the government and the whole bourgeoisie is directed against us. Mass-arrests, raiding of

halls [It `sounds almost like America!], stopping our papers, shooting and what not. But in spite of this, Communist organizations are springing up in all villages and towns, and the peasants cry with the proletariat, in one voice : "Down with the White Terror and the bourgeoisie ! .Long live the Bulgarian Soviet Republic !" All are fighting for the triumph of the Bulgarian Bolsheviks.

Plevna is in the grip of a hellish terror, instituted by the Socialist prefect and Agrarian county sheriff, who, like the faithful dogs of their masters that they are, are guarding this property from the workers. On St. Peter's day, June 29th, I had to spend a few moments in the military prison, until the pressure of the workers achieved our liberation.

The persecutions against us are ferocious. Of arrested workers the government demands $loo,ooo bond, while it lets the rich hooligans off with no bond. Those who devastated our land, the brigands, are the only ones who benefit from the Socialist government. Yesterday, in Troyan [an industrial town] they demanded half a million from each of the six workers arrested for breaking up a bourgeois meeting. [According to other des-patches the workers in the industrial cities break up nearly all bourgeois and government meetings and, singing the "Internationale," start communist meetings in their place]. The breaking up of: bourgeois meetings en-rages the government, and it turns the Yellow Socialists into mad dogs, agent-p><ovocateurs, veritable beasts, against the workers.

The elections are to be held on August 17*, and here we have our daily suppressed, scores of arrests, and People's Houses closed. In Rouschouk [the fourth largest city in the country], a week ago, there was a general political strike, which the Socialist minister of police, Pastoukhov, wanted to crush with gendarmes and troops, but this infuriated the workers and they prolonged it three days more than it was called for.

On July 27th there will be a concerted attempt to break the terror of the government. Open-air meetings, which are prohibited, will be organized in all villages, towns and cities, and we shall see how many more victims will fall to the Socialist bullets. Railroad Workers and postal and telegraph workers, led by the Communists, will go on general strike. The others, led by the

• The elections were held on the 17th of August, and according to a Havas despatch, the Communist Party increased its representation in the Sobranie from 10 to 47, in spite of the persecutions and suppression. The Yellow Socialists, with the aid of government funds and all facilities acquired by their faithful collaboration with the bourgeoisie, increased from 11 to 39, Stamboliski's Party "from 48 to 85. The Communists might have polled a still greater number of votes were it not that 110,000 soldiers, all qualified voters, are under detention by the Allies in different concentration camps. The Communist paper Rabotnichesky Vestnik has 30,000 daily circulation, while the Yellow Socialist "Narod" has hardly 11,000. The population of Bulgaria is 4,500,000.

42   THE LIBERATOR

renegades, will scab. The locomotive engineers, who belonged to the yellow unions, unanimously declared themselves for the general strike and joined the red Syndicats of the Communists. The 7,000 miners of Pernik will strike, too.*

All over the country there are strikes in large and small establishments, and everywhere the followers of the Yellow Socialists have most criminally divided the ranks of the proletariat. They scab on the Communist workers. They are doing the dirty work of Scheiden?ann and Noske, and we shall meet them first on the barricades, and after that square our account with the mossy Bulgarian bourgeoisie.

"The general strike planned for the 27th of July, of whieh comrade Vodenitebaro• speaks, materialized a few days later, according to an Associated Press despatch telling of a "communist uprising," ac eompanied by a railway and transport strike. French colonial troops "assisted in establishing order, after the bloody encounters between the populace aua the socialist government's troops and police."

They cannot rely upon the Bulgarian soldiers for the odious job, but they have all sorts of Allied troops, mostly colonial French blacks. Our 'soldiers have refused many a time to do anything resembling thq murder of our martyred comrades Liebknecht and Luxemburg. And so you see the Allied soldiers come like obedient dogs, saving the same government which they were fighting only a few months ago. The black soldiers, however, are silently solidarising themselves with us, and thus we shall paralyze the criminal attempts of the government. The dissolution of the capitalist world is going much faster than you could imagine, and the masses are rising like an ocean wave.

The day of squaring the accounts has come ! Just think! My father even, at the age of 68, has joined the Communist Party ! .. .

IVAN VASSILEV VODENITCHAROV.

"I thought he said we were fighting for democracy. "Well, this is it."

OCTOBER, 1919   43

Signs of the Times

SK the boys who have been in France," said

L`1 General Leonard Wood to the Senate Commit-tee on Military Affairs. "We see those men coming back hating war and real pacifists-in the fullest sense."

THE Dugout, a war-veterans' magazine in Los Angeles, says that it "believes there is nothing in common between the Profiteering Predatory Class and the Soldiers and Workers, consequently it will lend its efforts towards disclosing the actual conditions that confront the veteran and endeavor to pierce the camouflage of lies disseminated by a `paid press.' which has long moulded public opinion according to a prearranged plan. Cur-rent lines of thought on the world's most vital questions, from all sources, will be presented to our readers with-eat camouflage, in order that enlightenment and reason may eliminate further exploitation and remove the possibility of utilizing the veteran as a tool to holster up the predatory class."

This tends to bear out General Wood's further statement that "although they hate war they will light when it is necessary."

NEWSPAPER coming from Vladivostok reports

that Dr. Sun Yat Seri is conducting a Bolshevist propoganda in China. We recall his wise words in declining the Presidency of the Chinese republic in 1912:

"If at the outset of the career of our Chinese Revolution, we do not take thought to defend ourselves against the establishment of capitalism, then in the very near future a new despotism, a hundred times more terrible than that of the Manchu dynasty, awaits us, and rivers of blood will be required for our deliverance."

N the Turkish University at Constantinople the stu-

dents voted as to who should receive the Nobel Peace Prize-Kaiser 'Wilhelm, Woodrow Wilson, or Nicolai Lenin. They gave it to Lenin.

A CONVENTION representing 400,000 United Mine Workers demanded the release of Eugene V. Delis. Where are the railroad workers. whose first great leader he was?

Regrets

We reported last month a rumor that James Duncan of the A. F. of L. machine "is said to be the world's long distance whiskey swiller"-an altogether reprehensible thing for us to do. even if the rumor were well-founded, as we have reason to believe it is not.

BOOKS

The Story of a Lover

The Story of a Lover. Boni & Liz Bright.

I HAD read this book half way through with a total lack of sympathy, and was about to throw it aside unfinished, when 1. realized what it was I was reading. I realized, that is to say, that it was a hook of which I had heard a great deal in the past few years, when it had had a private circulation as an unpublished, and doubtless in these days unpublishable, manuscript; a book of which I had heard so much that I had come to admire it, without ever having seen it-the spiritual auto-biography of a modern husband, utterly candid, deeply sincere. It was such a book as I had said, without reading it, the world needed. And here it was, and I-considerably flustered and a little chagrined at my failure to recognize this pearl when actually flung before me, _I took it up again.

I turned back over the pages to find the phrases that had alienated me. I did not find them. I found, to be sure, many things that amused me. I found such sentences as these: "My love for my wife, deepened, satisfied and exasperated by experience, enabled tie to approach crime in a profoundly aesthetic way." The con-text, of course, makes it mean something quite different and not at all absurd; But a sentence should not depend, as many of these sentences did, so helplessly upon its context for meaning. There were other things about the style of the book which f did not like; but somehow, with the knowledge of its authorship, the spirit of the whole seemed different. I had, it seemed, unconsciously imagined to myself a different kind of man behind the hook-a smug, pseudo-aesthetic, priggishly unconventional, and essentially shallow-minded egotist   a bounder of sorts. Now, when 1 thought of its actual author, I could not but feel quite differently about the book. For the author might be anything you like, his aestheticism might be more a bewildered and painful effort than a natural health of the senses, his unconventionality might he speculative and self-conscious, his philosophy might be myopically inconclusive---but he was certainly not smug. His hook was, indeed, utterly candid, deeply sincere. Ile might not be capable of revealing himself truly, but he was confessing himself honestly-and incidentally, betraying himself thoroughly. I continued to read, and to have toward the book as I read, the exasperated fondness which l have for the author himself.

The story of "a lover"! I laughed to myself with kindly cynicism. That was precisely what my friend was not and could not be-and of course exactly what he would like to flunk he was. He is not simple and natural enough to he a lover : and though 1€e may ,foal him-

44   THE LIBERATOR

self, he would scarcely fool any woman by his desperate and elaborately intellectual efforts to be simple and natural. No, he is separated by a profound gulf of temperament from the simple and familiar reality of love. Across that gulf he throws, by heroic feats of intellectual engineering, one bridge after another; but they all fall short, or collapse when he is half way across, leaving him clinging to the wreckage of his ideas, adjusting his nose-glasses, as it were, with one hand while he holds on for `dear life with the other to the frail and twisted projections of theory, and asking himself : "Now let me see, what was wrong with my calculations that time? Surely the square root of the sine of the tangential co-factor is equal to --" That is just the trouble; if lie ever gave up hope in his cussed theories, if he broke clown and cried, or prayed, or shut his eyes in despair and dropped into the abyss, he might find himself safely and miraculously on the other side!

But he can't do that, and this book is the record of his failure. It is the story of a man who wanted to he a lover and couldn't

The reason, of course, is that he wanted to too hard. He was too conscious of the temperamental abyss which yawned beneath, and he was terrified by the dizzy heights. if he could have forgot the abyss for a moment, if he could have just stopped thinking how hard it was, he could have crossed it as easily as one crosses a street. But he is condemned to remain on this side. No, it is not the story of a lover, it is the story of a pathetic philosopher. He is pathetic because he tries to think the things that can only be felt, and to say the things that can only he done. He fails because the thing he tries so hard to do is so easy. He peers at his beloved through a telescope, and cannot see her because she is too near. He wants happiness, and will not take it because he thinks that it is something not simply implicit in the kiss which waits his taking, but explicitly formulable in verbal terms. He knows that love is a mystery, but he does not know that one may enjoy a mystery without having first solved it--if indeed it is possible to enjoy it any other way. He refuses to eat the fruit of love because he has not satisfactorily analyzed its philosophical food values. The proof of spiritual nourishment is to him in laboratory experimentation ; and meanwhile he starves. He is an Adani who refuses to he tempted to really eat the apple. He is too curious about that apple. He would rather talk about it.

There is no. reason, from a common-sense point of view, why he should not have been happy. He loved a woman from whom he was separated by no barrier of parental veto, or law, or custom ; by no difference of fortune, creed, or color; by no 'accident of flood or field. Perhaps that was the trouble: it was too easy to be conceivable. And she loved him. Simply, directly, unhesitatingly. This, of course, was absolutely incredible. It just couldn't be. And though she married him, and

bore biro children, and lout up with his erotic vagaries. and-final test of true wifely devotion!-endured with equanimity the perpetual philosophic indirectness which made Iife one long intellectual quibble, and would have driven any woman not already possessed by the madness of love into the other kind of madness-still he could not believe it. . . . The thing is too obvious. He has to regard her as aloof, unattained, still spiritually virginalunseized and unseizable. Hurt by this alleged remoteness, and angry at himself for the contrasting completeness of his own theoretic devotion, he seeks to redress the balance by the pleasures of light love. He would revenge her imaginary unfaithfulness by such means; only, it fails to be a satisfying revenge, for her image intrudes itself into these casual amours. continually reminding him that it is she whom he really wants. This is, of course, to him, a complete and as it were mathematical proof of the absoluteness of his love for her; and he takes to her with no little pride, these careful balance-sheets, and lays them at her feet, as some medieval lover might have laid his cap with her flower in it, borne unscathed through the foolish fury of the tournament. And he is sincerely shocked when he finds that, far from accepting this as a tribute to her charm, she angers and hardens, and becomes silent-more hard and silent, the more eloquently he explains. He goes off sadly, thinking: "Women are very hard to understand."

He wants her to have casual love-affairs, just to give him the opportunity to show that his love is no mere vulgar possessiveness. She shall see to what heights of nobility his love can rise! And when she appears to take him at his word, and asks him to remain away this evening, as the Other Man is coming to dinner, he becomes angry. Why cannot he be there, too? How can he show how noble he is, if he is not there to show it? He does not want to appear in the role of an ordinary deceived husband ; all must be open and above-board, with a complete mutual understanding, arrived at by means of a full and frank talk-yes, especially, plenty of talk ! His idea of the "triangle" would appear to be a lengthy philosophical three-cornered conversation.

But the case is much worse. It seems that she refuses to conceive this long recommended "freedom" in such terms. What has he to do with her affairs, anyway? And he goes off, sadly reflecting upon her essential unfaithfulness. If she could have such adventures with-out ceasing to love him, it would be all right. ... He comes home at last, and finds her alone. She will not answer his questions. But if she will not tell him what happened, how is he to explain minutely and philosophically to her just how he feels about it? Becoming angry at " her unwifely stubbornness, he commences to shout, and in a sudden gust from the depths of emotions which he did not know he had and does not in the least understand, he seizes her by the throat and commences to choke the life out of her. And then stops, ashamed.

OCTQBER, 1919   45

One might think from such behavior that he was an ordinary human jealous male! . . . .And so, apparently, his wife does think. For she cries out his name in surprise and tenderness, and melts in his arms. It is he whom she loves. The other man-no, never, never. What had happened? Nothing.. , . And their marriage is renewed, lyrically, on the basis of the discovery-implicit to her in this melodramatic and humanly natural outburst -that he really does love her after all.

I f it were fiction, this would be the end of the story. But its hero is not, so far as he can help being. the jealous human male whom she had found that night. He is a philosopher. He is ashamed of his relief at her confession of her faithfulness: and a little disappointed: he would like to know just how he would have felt, if- . And so it goes. They live-well, not exactly happily ever after. But they go on tormenting each other to the end of the book ; and inasmuch as they could not leave each other alone, perhaps they preferred to he so tormented. It is a philosophical taste. Perhaps she learned it at last from him: or perhaps she loved him anyway.

It is a kind of prose variation on the theme of Meredith's "Modern Love." But it is agreeable to reflect how much of `"modernity." in idea and emotion, has been dispelled by the hygiene of science in the interval between Meredith and the present day. "Modernism" has proved to be, for the most part, simply a new name for some ancient psychic maladies. We owe to modern literary candor the news of their prevalence and some more or less accurate accounts of their symptomatology. This book is admirable in that respect. But it bears the marks, too, of a chronic valetudinarianism. The victim is proud of his affliction. We fear he could never be persuaded to go to Doctor Freud! But, without seeking thus unkindly to rob him of his painful distinction, we would like to reassure him that love, in the light of our new scientific knowledge, is becoming a simpler and less tormented emotion. It may be ridiculous enough that we should require re-education in order to feel correctly; -bt.tt at least. our methods, directed to the clarifying of our emotions, rather than the elaboration of our ideas, do serve to dredge out the fatal whirlpool of emotional cross-currents, and set the streams of impulse free to flow strong and steady into the world of reality. It is preposterous that we should have to learn how to let ourselves love. hut at least we are learning-and not just enjoying in poignant sweet detail the emotions of failure. It is quite possible that none of us may write a Story of a Lover ; it may be on the cards that we shall not talk so much about love in the future as in the past ; perhaps love belongs in that category of things which are more satisfying in synthesis than in analysis, more interesting in experience than in symbolic presentment, and better done than said.

l' Loyn DELL.

Our Apologies !

EAR LIBERATOR :

Louise Bryant in the September number of THE LIBERATOR, in writing about Sinclair's "Jimmie Higgins," says : "His mental and physical struggle with the militarists in Siberia is so real that it hurts. That is why it is only natural that the Times and the Tribune and other faithful reflectors of 'Prussianisni in America are calling for Sinclair's blood. Not only must he be censored-he must be punished !" The Tribune did nothing of the sort. If Miss Bryant had read the review in the Tribune which I wrote she would have found that the book was highly praised. Moreover, I tried to poke fun at the Times and the Evening Sun, which demanded that Sinclair be put in prison. Perhaps I did it with such heavy hands that Miss Bryant missed the point, but I rather think that she just slapped "Tribune" into her article without bothering to look up what we said. As a slat--ter of fact, in a later review of "Jimmie Higgins" I suggested that the Times apologize for the accusations of inaccuracy which it made against Sinclair on the grounds that cruel treatment of prisoners in the American army was impossible. Unless I am very much mistaken there was no other mention of "Jimmie Higgins" in any other department of the Tribune. Don't you think that we have a right to be criticised only for those things which we are doing and not for those which Miss Bryant assumes that we are doing because they are "natural."

HEYWOOD BROUN.

P. S.-And me a stockholder in your magazine !

The Young Visitors*

lu E:rplanashun by Ethel Monticue

D lcnx Six :-1 was rather surprised to have you discover the great Secret but ails well that ends well. Yes the Young Visiters is my book and I am very glad it has caught on in New York as in London where it is all the rage and peaple talk of nothing but have you read it and 0 what a scream. You may well say that I am the Iitry sucsess of the day though 1 don't mean I actually wrote the story Uncle Max Beerbohm and Uncle Sir Jim M. Barrie (lid the deed. They are not realy my Uncles at all you know but they think it sounds more the correct idear and they are rarther convenshiunal but all men are dont you think. I am not 17 yrs. Of age I am 7 and I do not often put on ruge but otherwise the description in the book applies. How my age hapened to he changed for the story was this I was visiting Uncle Max at his country place or rarther to tell the exact truth my Mother had to go to Leeds for a wk. ow au-count of war work and she said Max cant I leave Ethel here she doesnt stand traveling very well till I get back.

Tho Young visitors, or Mr. Salleena's T'Ian. hi; Daisy Asbfoi' . Preface Iii- J. M. Barrie. iDoran.)

46   THE LIBERATOR

I do too I said snapily but it was no use some peaple have no respect for others wishes I am glad to say that Uncle Max is not that way for he said Ethel and I might take a little shopping trip to London while youre gone.

0 said my Mather grumpily dont let her put you to any trouble. She is quite an adventures for one so young and will exsploit you clredfly I expect. Just keep an eye on her so that was how I came to be at Uncle Maxes.

So 1 past the tinge ill the garden digging and helping Uncle Max and he said he enjoyed the garden and my company and 1 asked was it because I was pretty in the face and he said he gest that might have something to do with it he was pars1lial to active and pretty girls and I said you are fond of having them come and stay with you arnt you and he said he was. So that is why it says so in the book about Mr. Salteena who is a slightly disgised picture of Uncle Max. And then I said to him wouldn't it be nice if I were 17 insted of 7, and then he stopped and leaned on the spade and said no Ethel it wouldnt be nearly as nice because you would not like to dig in the garden for one thing and for another you would be too hauty and reserved to asociate with nie freely and democraticaly like you do now I mean you would not think it nice to have pilow fights with me at that age.

What rot I said snapily. I shall never become too proud to pilow fight with you Uncle Max. I am sincerly fond of you and shall continue to be and there shall no misunderstandings creap between us.

What about my advancing age he said it is true I replied you are very elderly but then I do not think it shows much. You are fond of digging in the garden and of pretty girls and that is what counts. Why should a mere diffrunce in years et-cetera interupt this delightful intiminacy. Why indeed he ekned and contiunued to lean on his spade.'

Besides I said firmly it is just your convetaslliunallity thats what it is. If I was 17 you wouldnt think it was nice for me to dig in the garden or pilaw fight and I would be too proud to menshun it perhaps but 1 would be wanting to just the same.

Tastes change Ethel he said. Yours havent I flashed back just like that have they and he said not a bit I still like digging in the garden and talking to pretty girls and 1 suppose I always shall. So do I that is said I it is not only beauty that 1 admiar in man but other fine and noble quallities of hart and head. You have many fine quallities I finished earnestly for I could not very well say he was handsome.

Twas ever thus said Uncle Max I see I shall have to take you over to visit J. M. which he explained to me stood for Sir Jim M. Barrie, Kt. and Author. And he did and I like him very' much and it was he who took me to London and he made up that story of the Prince of Wales levee and told it to me on top of a bus it didnt realy hapen at all. Uncle Jim M. Barrie is a better story teller than Uncle Max because he makes royalty behave in a free and easy manner just like ordinary peaple only more so quite jolly in fact and it makes you

feel at home among them while Uncle Max is always writing about how hauty servants are especially butlers it is too true I tell him and isnt the world drery enough as it is. He says it is sattire but I like the parts Uncle Jim write best there are gay parties in them and princes and socierty and not just uppish servants. Uncle Max is afraid of servants and says he will never learn to behave like a real gentleman that is why Uncle. Jim had him go to the Cry-stale Palace in the book but I don't think he learned much at that. 1 think it is funy to make Uncle _Max galop beside the royal barouche for he does not ride very well but he says it is true that he is fond of fresh air and royalties which is a stupid joke even when it is exsplained to you for it means something quite diferunt. 1 like Uncle _Inns jokes better they dont mean anything they are just funy.

Well I must tell you how they came to write the book. Uncle Max told Uncle Sir Jim about what 1 said about being just the same at 17 yrs as at 7 my present age and they had quite a arguerment about it. They both said it was quite an idear and Uncle Sir Jim said it is an idyl which means something lovely but not true so you make it come true in a story. Lets write it said Uncle Jim as a childs book for addults we will pretend we are a little girl named Daisy and we will fancifuly embroider th'e theam of our recent adventures. What fun I said and will I be in it. Yes said Uncle Jim just as you are only 17 years old and you will go to visit Uncle Max

Will you make a

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IF-

BY J.I:'NI)ING A SUM FROM $n UP, Oil

BT   LENDING THAT LIBERTY BOND OF YOURS WHICH NOW LIES IDLE, OR

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WILL YOU LEND FIVE DOLLARS OR MORE TO SAYE MEN LIKE ltl;ltT LOI[TON, CHARLES PLAHN, ED HAMILTON AND .JACK WALSH, ALL OF THEM IN I'.LIt-.IIANENT ISOLATION?

Do you know what permanent isolation implies' The anguish of monotony, allth, darkness and utter loneliness; tortured thirst for a human voice and a ray from the outside world. These four. who have endeared themselves to all appreciating, stern self-sacrifice for an ideal, are in isolation as a re-stilt of their participation in the Leavenworth strike so graphically featured in the Liberator a Few months ago.

Your duty is clear. If you have sufficient human sympathy to be tortured by the gradual killing of a. comrade; if you possess an into of appreciation for valor and self-sacrifice, you will shoe- it by lending without stint.

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Send all cash and checks and bonds to F. G. Biedenkapp, Treasurer, Room 403, 7 East 15th Street. Receipts will be duly forwarded and LOANS WILL BE REFUNDED AS SOON AS MEN AILE BROUGHT TO TRIAL. Call at or write to the office for information. Telephone Stuyvesant 5.188.

WORKERS' DEFENSE 1iN10N,   Roam 405-7, East 15th Street, New York City

OCTOBER, 1919   47

iiiuimummiiimmmuumuuu Between Friends miiimmmmmmimmiumum

ALL publishers take a keen pleasure in publishing good books. But none of them will deny that publishing, like other creative work, brings its disappointments. The honest publisher-honest at least to himself-is not invariably enthusiastic about all of his books, or elated over their quality. When you sense this experience-common to every publisher-you will realize the enthusiasm with which we look over a Fall list in which every volume, without exception, touches high-water mark. To tell you about them all on this single page is impossible. Here are just a few of our fiction titles. We frankly admit that we have published some books that do not approach the heights reached by all of the books on this list. In just as honest a spirit we ask you to believe that every one of these books will be discussed wherever men and women gather, who are interested in life and the books that express life.

Watch for them at your bookseller's during the next few weeks or ask us to send to you as soon as we have them ready.-Our complete catalog, just published, has been called the most interesting thing of its kind issued in the last few years. Send for a copy.

$1.50 Outland

The Story of A Lover

ANONYMOUS

One of the few truthful autobiographies in the English language. An intense selection, from the flow of human life, of the important love episodes and relations, typical of the career of all lovers who go far along that wonderful and tormenting path, encountering strange delights and bitter pain. . The publishers believe that The. Story of a Lover is one of the finest books that have been published with their imprint, one of the most exquisite prose poems ever written. It will undoubtedly arouse more widespread comment than almost any other book that has been issued in America in years.

The Judgment of Peace: A Novel   $1.75

By ANDREAS LATZKO

Translated by LUDWIG LEWISOHN

The few critics who have already read The Judgment of Peace feel that Andreas Latzko has, in this gigantic novel, surpasssed the superlative analytical quality, the faithful portrayal of incident, that distinguished his "Men of War." It is a stirring revelation of the soul of man, a brave challenge of Today to Tomorrow. Like "Men in War," this novel will be read by our children and by their children.

Iron City   $1.75

By M. F. HEDGES

Two weeks before his death, Randolph Bourne, one of our most distinguished men of letters, brought to us the manuscript of Iron City. Mr. Bourne said that he considered it the finest first novel he had ever read and one of the few great American novels. It is the story of the conflict between the quiet academic ideals of a small coeducational college and the commercial spirit of its patrons.   .

The reaction of the hero, a young instructor, to the environment and the two sides of his emotional nature, as revealedrn his love for two women, gives us a picture of American problems that has not been surpassed in a decade.

$1.60

By MARY AUSTIN
The only piece of modern writing to which one can com-
pare Outland, for beauty of description, is W. H. Hudson's
"Green Mansions." In Outland is all the mystery and
beauty of the woods-the strange redwood forest of the
west. The race with which Mary Austin peoples these
woods-the "Outliers"-is as much a part of the forest as
the trees themselves. Skillfully woven through the mar-
velously imaginative tale of their adventures and their
treasure is the human story of the 'wanderers themselves.

The Swing of the Pendulum   $1.90

By ADRIANA SPADONI

Thomas Hardy, watching the play of destiny, 'made Tess of the D'Urbervilles a "study of a pure woman" and tried to free woman from the penalty of man-made standards of judgment. Miss Spadoni has freed her Jean from man-made standards and limitations, but can Jean be freed from her own insistent and inherited womanhood? No other American novel has attempted such a theme or given so clear an insight into the lives of women as they are when they are not posing for men and other women; none has offered such a candid, penetrating portrayal of man's attitude toward sex and man and woman's true relationship. A great feminist novel, but a greater "novel of modern womanhood.

Their Son and The Necklace (Boards) $1.25

By EDUARDO Z AMACOIS
Translated by GEORGE ALLAN ENGLAND
Eduardo Zamacois is one of the greatest of that group of
Spanish novelists with which America is beginning to
familiarize itself. Preferring to be called philosopher of
humanity, the title generally bestowed upon him has been
that of the Spanish De Maupassant. In these two stories
there are finely etched dramas of every day life which
crash suddenly into unexpected and tremendous moments.

In the Modern Library :

(Sit other Fall titles will he announced later. making
84 in this series)
Best Humorous American Short Stories - - No. Ai
Edited with an Introduction by Alexander Jessup

ALPHONSE DAL I)ET: Sapho -   in one aelunu'

AN'T'OINE FRANCOIS I'REVOST: Jr   No. 85
Manton Leseaut - - - -

VICENTE BLASCO IBANEZ: The Cabin - No. (I!I
IV'AN 'I'CIdGENEY: Smoke    No. 80
Introduction by JOHN REF.O

OSCAR WFILDE: Salome, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Lady Windermere's Fan No. 83 Introduction by EDGAR SALTIS

An Ideal Husband. A Woman of No Importance. No. ad ]land Bound in Limp Croftleather - - Each i:ie

All of THEODORE DIiEISER'S books can he purchased through us, although some of them have been issued by other publishers. You should own, not half, (ant all of the hooks of America's most significant writer. We publish "Sister Carrie," "Free and Other Stories." "Twelve Men" (possibly the finest book that Mr. Dreiser has ever written, and one which created more 1'averahle comment Ham arty other book of its kind published within the last few years) : "The Hand of the Putter," a powerful four-act play, and "Itey-Rub-a-Dub-Duh," a collection of brilliant philosophical essays. The last two volumes will be ready in September and O toper. Mr. Dreisees other (molts are "Jennie Gerhardt," "The Financier," "The Titan." "'Chi Genius," "A Traveler at Forty," "A Hoosier Holiday" and "Plays of the Natural and Supernatural."

When ordering from the publishers, add 10% for postage.

48   THE LIBERATOR

FINANCIAL SECRETARY WANTED

by a group of prominent liberal educators founding a "new" school in New York City. If you are interested in "free" education and have connections and ability io raise funds. address

S. R. S.. VALHALI,A. N, le

This means a permanent, well-seleried job for
the right man or woman.

who will be called Mr. Salteena in the book. And he will bring you to see me and lets see what will be my name and I said quickly you will be Bernard Clark it is a romantic name. I see my finish alredy said Uncle Max sadly well go ahead you do the first chapter. No you start it said Uncle Jim and so he did and J. M. wrote the 2nd and so on in turn. They laughed a good deal at some things which I thought quite nice like tea in bed which was Uncle Jims idear it shall be an epsode of our idyl he said. Very good only I said why should it be just an idyl why not real tea and he said yes why not and we did. And I said that the kind of person I am if something is lovely why just put it in a book and when I am realy 17 I shall be just the same and go to London with my friends and stay at the Gaierty Hotel with them whenever I like I shall not be proud and hauty because I am 17. Well

In Great Britain

the subscription price of the Liberator is '12 shillings. Subscriptions may be sent through :

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New York, N. Y., U. S. A.

said Uncle Sir Jim M. Barrie, we will wait and see and now lets go and dig in the garden and we did. But Uncle Max said J. M. youve got to write the prefface to that book I wont. The publick would take it seriously he said as a sattire on cantemporarry manners and if you do it they will just laurgh he said which is what we want now the war is over. All right said Uncle Sir Jim but if I do I wilt pick out the parts I wrote to praise espechially the bit about the title calf I always did think that was the best thing in the book. Go as far as you like said Uncle Max only we split the royal-ties fifty fifty. I knew what royalties meant because they had exsplained it to me about that sily joke so I said very snapily and what about me and Uncle Jim said you will get another trip to London if the book goes and if your Muther will let you. I can at-tend to Muther I said but when Father gets mustered out he will want to come too and its quite natural I said I think he is entitled to a little fun for a change and it will be nice for his daughrter to take him around and show him the sights wont he be pleased. So as the book is a grand sucsess we are all going Muther too I hope she wont spoil the party but I have told her about tea in bed and she says its an idear worth considering.

Yours truely

ETHEL MONTICUE. P. S. It is realy speled with a g but since I have become famus with it speled this way I might as well keep it.

To Floyd Dell Esq.

Plaza 5096   Madison Square 6923

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A weekly dedicated to the truth about Russia Published by the official representative of the Ruesan Soviet Republic in America.

Don't be tongue-tied when Russia is

slammed with LIES. Have the FACTS It your finger-tips.

You may FEEL that the enemies of democracy in Russia are deliberately manufacturing and spreading lies; but all the FEELING in the world will not stop the campaign of misrepresentation. Arm your emotions with the club of TRUTH and become an active influence in getting justice for Russia.

BECOME AN EXPERT ON RUSSIA. Obey that impulse. Pin a dollar bill to the coupon and get "SOVIET RUSSIA" from now until Jan. 1, 1920.

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OUT" OCT. ism

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B,' eIRu" Y0IMIG ANA /fIS5CC/ATE2 ENrHUS/ASTS,

ONE YEAR THREE MONTHS

7 EAST /5 Sr.

Yov< .

Freedom.

Why Freedom Matters. By Norman Angell. Published in the United States by Wit-ham Bross Lloyd, the Tribune Building, Chi-

cago.

A REVIEWER of a Norman Angell book is most liable to the temptation of permitting comment to surrender completely to quotation. For Angell possesses so rich and penetrating an understanding of that which he is defining and advocating. He makes no pretense of authority on a subject until he can speak on it with the natural flow and familiarity of authority, unlike so many extremely versatile journalists of our acquaintance who take the whole world for their humble province.

In this book Angell defines and advocates freedom. He tells us that freedom matters. He tells us why it matters. Is it an act of supererogation on the part of Norman Angell to define and advocate freedom for us when, for the past four years, we have been beset by a horde of self-appointed expositors and defenders of freedom? Hardly. Nor-man Angell carries conviction not through the force of rhetoric, but through the force (the greater force) of logical exposition and argumentation. He explains, clears up, takes nothing for granted. He is out to prove a certain thesis, namely, that freedom is an essential spiritual commodity-pardon the evident contradiction-in a nation that

$300

OCTOBER, 1919   49

The most informative and 'authoritative account of Russia, how its people live and are governed under the Soviet Republic :

RUSSIA IN 1919

by

ARTHUR RANSOME

This book is nteded

The truth about Russia is so rare as to be sensational. Liberator readers know that Mr. Ransome is one of the best writers in England and a trustworthy expert on Russian matters. His experience, ability and integrity distinguish him from the personally-conducted, hand-picked reporters who "discovered" Russia as tourists used to discover Paris.

Its valuable contents

Here are personal interviews with Lenin and the heads of all the important departments of the present government; accounts of the meetings of Soviets and Committees; figures concerning schools, libraries, etc.; prices of food and commodities; facts about the conversion of private enterprises to community control; agriculture, transport, the army, the police, housing, trade unions, and observations on the human aspects of the Russian scene.

Its lighter features

There are pen-pictures of the leaders, reports of what the people read, a list of the plays and operas given in a single fortnight in Moscow, portrayals of the simple conditions that have become inevitable, of the levelling of caste, of the permission required to buy a suit of clothes (if the purchaser possesses the fortune that such an investment demands), of the government manoeuvres to circumvent food profiteers, and a mass of other information. This is the book that honest inquirers are waiting for; it is unprejudiced; it is sound; it is entertaining. Its contents will educate the ignorant and refute the malicious.

For once Reactionaries, Liberals and Radicals agree :

It is the most amazing and fascinating   It is easily the most interesting book on 1 to his work a vividness and reality lacking
story which has come out of Russia since the question which we have seen, and we in many books on Russia. Beyond doubt he

the Revolution.-Philadelphia Press.   don't believe any American who wants to has added much to our knowledge of comb-

His record of events has in it the mate- talk intelligently about Bolshevism can do tions in the heart of the unhappy land of slat that makes history.-The Dial.   without it. Neither Mr. Overman nor Mr. the Muscovites.-New York Evening Sun.

It is a superb thing-the most valuable Lusk should eat or sleep again until he has

read Ransome's book. Even Mr. Wilson   In all the fog that is being raised about

on the whole business that I've seen.-

might profitably find time for it.-HEYWOOD Russian affairs, Mr. Ransome's book seems

HAROLD Sovereignty," J. LASKI, Author of "Problems of   to give more actual information and less

etc. Lecturer in History, BROUN in New York Tribune.   fantasy than almost any other that might

Harvard University.   It is just the sane, clear statement that

is wanted after all the horrible fabrications be named.-Boston Post.

It should be read by everyone who wants

to know what is going on in Russia under of the past twelve months. It is the most   I have just read [it] from the first word

the Soviet Government-New York San,   interesting work of its kind I have read. to last in one sitting. Either this book is
I enjoyed every page of it.-FRANCIS NEIL- the most truthful book that has come out A plain, unvarnished tale of how the Rus- SON, Author of "How Diplomats Make of Russia since the November revolution or

Sian millions live and are governed under war:,   it has the power to make the reader sure

the Soviet Republic. Philadelphia North   that it is. It wastes no time on absurdities

American.   An abundance of apparently first-hand in- or atrocities of individual conduct, makes
It is a wonderfully good book, free from formation on a subject about which such certain persons like Lenin, Tchicherin or

any attempt at sensationalism or dramatic information is seriously needed.-Boston

a   Marie Spiridonova seem present in the flesh

effect; it carries conviction in every line. Herald.   and centres on ideals and programmes. You

I wish you could sell a million copies of it.- The fact that the author has so recently may call it inspiring or appalling; one or DR. W.M. J. ROBINSON, Editor, The Critic been in Russia, that he has seen with his the other it will be.-MAY LAMBERTON and Guide and A Voice in the Wilderness. own eyes and heard with his own ears, gives BECKER in New York Evening Post.

Obtainable of all booksellers for $1.50 or for $1.60 postpaid from
B. W. Huebsch PUBLISHER, 32 WEST 58TH STREET New York

THE LIBERATOR

A Wife Too Many

INTO the Iobby walked a beautiful woman and a distinguished man. Little indeed did the gay and gallant crowd know that around these heads there flew stories of terror-of murder-and treason. That on their entrance, half a dozen detectives sprang from different parts of the place.

Because of them the lights of the War Department in Washington blazed far into the night. With their fate was wound the tragedy of a broken marriage, of a fortune lost, of a nation be-

trayed. i t is a wonderful story, with the kind of mystery you will sit up nights trying to fathom. It is just one of the stories fashioned by that master of mystery,

CRAIG KENNEDY

The American Sherlock Holmes

ARTHUR B. REEVE

The American Conan Doyle

He is the detective genius of our age. He has taken science-science that stands for this age-and allied it to the mystery and romance of detective fiction. Even to the smallest detail, every bit of the plot is worked out scientifically. For nearly ten years America has been watching Craig Kennedy-marveling at the strange, new, startling things that detective hero would unfold. Such plots-such suspense-with real, vivid people moving through the maelstrom of life! All others seem old-fashioned-out-of-date -beside the infinite variety-the weird excitement of Arthur B. Reeve's tales.

To those who send the coupon promptly, we will give FREE a set of Edgar Allan Poe's works in 10 volumes.

When the police of New Yolk failed tosolve one of the most fearful murder mysteries of the time, Edgar Allan Poe-far off here in Paris-

found the solution. The story is in these volumes.

Get for yourself a thousand nights of pleasure and forgetfulness-of thrills and excitement-

by reading ARTHUR B. REEVE.

This is a wonderful combination. Here are two of the greatest writers of mystery and scientific detective sto

ries. You can get the Reeve in 12

volumes at a remarkably low

price, and Poe, 10 volumes, over   /.

200 stories, FREE.

FREE--10 Volumes--POE

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Send me, all charges prepaid, a set of Arthur

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free, the set of Edgar Allan roe, ill 10 volumes. If the

hooks are not satisfactory I will

relan•ii both sets within 10 days al

your expense. Otherwise I will, send

you S1 within 5 days, and $° a month

for 12 months.   Liberator 10-1:1

would be a democracy in more than name. He desires to prove to us the utilitarian value of freedom. So far as the present re-viewer is concerned, Angell has proven this thesis.

He shows us how the vast majority of people throughout the ages have themselves

forged the weapons which hound them to the chariot wheels of their oppression, that "the

tyrant had no physical force save that which his victims furnished him." And the reason that the tyrant could depend upon his slaves, who "have been generally in favor of their own slavery and have so often fought to pro-long it," was because the tyrant succeeded in imposing his tyranny over the mind. And

as tyranny has been imposed, so will free-dam be won, "through the mind." It is necessary, therefore, if a state is to remain a

democracy, that it should not become another

and more destructive tyrant than the visible human tyrant.

"From Archangel to Bagdad, from Ca1•-narvon `to Vladivostock, there is not one to

whom an impersonal entity known as time state may not suddenly come and say, `You

shall leave your wife and children and the tastes to which you have devoted your life immediately, and put yourself obediently at my orders. The task which I assign to you

is to kill certain men, as many as possible,

whether you think them right or whether you think them wrong. hill or be killed.' "The millions find themselves as much be-

reft of freedom as were the slaves of antiquity, with this difference: The slavery

of biblical times, for instance, made you a slave to a person, a hungan being, to whose ordinary world you may at any moment be-come the slave of an abstraction, a machine."

And as the world won freedom from the religious wars of the past through the questioning by the unlearned and the humble of the premises of the learned ones by whose authority the religious wars were pro-claimed, so will the world to-day win freedom for itself by questioning the premises

of patriotism, of the right of the state to oppose its force to the political heretic, the conscientious objector. "The reformation in Europe will come by questioning, for in-stance, the whole philosophy of patriotism." And if these questionings are to be construed as political blasphemies, Angell answers that "the solution of the difficulties of our time, this problem of learning to live together without mutual homicide and military slavery depends upon these blasphemies being uttered." And that we may be freed from the incubus of mutual homicide and military slavery we must consider "the political heretic as the saviour of society."

The outline of Angell's argument I have here presented I know to be sketchy and in-adequate, but the limits of time and space conspire to make it inadequate. The readers of this, review, then, have no other choice than to go to the fount of original inspiration, that is, the book itself.   H. P. S.

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Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels    60

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Doing Us Good and Plenty, Russell    60

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Germs of Mind in Plants, France    60

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History of the Supreme Court, Myers    2   50

Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche   60

Introduction to Sociology, Lewis   1   25

Labor Movement in Japan, Katayama    1   00

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Life and Death, Dr. E. Teichmann    60

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Origin of the Family, Engels    60

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Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Marx    60

Revolutionary Essays, Burrowes    1   00

Right to Be Lazy, Lafargue    60

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Socialism Versus The State, Vandervelde    1.00

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Stories of the Great Railroads, Russell    1.25

Story of Wendell Phillips, Russell    60

Ten Blind Leaders, Lewis    60

Theoretical System of Marx, Boudin   1   25

Thoughts of a Fool, Evelyn Gladys    1   00

Triumph of Life, The, Boelsche   60

Universal Kinship, The, J. Howard Moore   1   25

Value, Price and Profit, Karl Marx    GO

Visioning, The, Glaspell    1   35

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What's So and What Isn't, Work    60

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