Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

RADICALISM

The first obstacle to an assessment of radicalism in America is the difficulty of discovering precisely what American radicalism is. According to his enemies, a radical is a person whose opinions need not be considered and whose rights need not be respected. As a people we do not wish to understand him, or to deal with what he represents, but only to get him out of sight. We deport him and imprison him. If he writes a book, we keep it out of the schools and libraries. If he publishes a paper, we debar it from the mails. If he makes a speech, we drive him out of the hall and shoo him away from the street-corner. If by hook or crook he multiplies himself to considerable numbers, we expel his representatives from legislative chambers, break up his parades, and disperse his strikes with well-armed soldiery.

These being the associations which cluster about the word, it has naturally become less a definition than a weapon. Statisticians in the Federal Trade Commission publish certain figures dealing with the business of the packing-houses—a Senator loudly calls these devoted civil servants “radicals,” and they are allowed to resign. A labour leader, following the precedent of federal law established for over a half a century, espouses the eight-hour day, but because he has the bad taste to do so in connection with the steel industry, he becomes a “radical,” and is soundly berated in the press. If one were to ask the typical American Legion member how he would describe a radical—aside from the fact that a radical is a person to be suppressed—he would probably answer that a radical is (a) a pro-German, (b) a Russian or other foreigner, (c) a person who sends bombs through the mail, (d) a believer in free love, (e) a writer of free verse, (f) a painter of cubist pictures, (g) a member of the I.W.W., (h) a Socialist, (i) a Bolshevist, (j) a believer in labour unions and an opponent of the open shop, and (k) any one who would be looked upon with disapproval by a committee consisting of Judge Gary, Archibald Stevenson, and Brander Matthews.

There is scarcely more light to be had from the radicals themselves. Any one who feels a natural distaste for the censorious crowd of suppressors is likely to class himself with the free spirits whom they oppose. To call oneself a radical is in such circumstances a necessary accompaniment of self-respect. The content of the radicalism is of minor importance. There is an adventurous tendency to espouse anything that is forbidden, and so to include among one’s affirmations the most contradictory systems—such as Nietzscheanism and Communism, Christianity of the mystical sort and rebellion. And when these rebels really begin to think, the confusion is increased. Each pours his whole ardour into some exclusive creed, which makes him scorn other earnest souls who happen to disagree about abstruse technical points. Among economic radicals, terms like “counter-revolutionary” and “bourgeois” are bandied about in a most unpleasant fashion. If, for instance, you happen to believe that Socialism may be brought about through the ballot rather than through the general strike, numbers of radicals will believe you more dangerous than the Czar himself; it is certain that when the time comes you will be found fighting on the wrong side of the barricade. Creeds have innumerable subdivisions, and on the exact acceptance of the creed depends your eternal salvation. Calvinists, Wesleyans, Lutherans, and the rest in their most exigent days could not rival the logical hair-splitting which has lately taken place among the sectarian economic dissenters, nor has any religious quarrel ever surpassed in bitterness the dogmatic dissidence with which the numerous schools of authoritarian rebellion rebel against authority.

There is a brilliant magazine published in New York which takes pride in edging a little to the left of the leftmost radical, wherever for the moment that may be. Its editor is a poet, and he writes eloquently of the proletariat and the worker. Not long ago I was speaking of this editor to an actual leader of labour—a man who is a radical, and who also takes a daily part in the workers’ struggles. “Yes,” he said, “he certainly can write. He is one of the best writers living.” And he went on wistfully, “If the labour movement only had a writer like that!”

There is another brilliant magazine published in New York which takes exquisite pains to inform the reader that it is radical. In precise columns of elegant type, Puritan in its scorn of passion or sensation, it weekly derides the sentimental liberal for ignorance of “fundamental economics.” Not long ago it made the startling discovery that Socialists favour taking natural resources out of private ownership. And its “fundamental economics,” whenever they appear in language simple enough for the common reader to understand, turn out to be nothing more dangerous than that respectable and ancient heresy, the single tax.

Another method of definition is now in common use—a method which seems easy because of its mechanical simplicity. People are arranged in a row from left to right, according to their attitude toward the existing order. At the extreme right are the reactionaries, who want to restore the discarded. Next to them are the conservatives, who wish to keep most of what exists. At their elbow are the liberals, who are ready to examine new ideas, but who are not eager or dogmatic about change. And at the extreme left are the radicals, who want to change nearly everything for something totally new. Such an arrangement is a confusing misuse of words based on a misconception of social forces. Society is not a car on a track, along which it may move in either direction, or on which it may stand still. Society is a complex, with many of the characteristics of an organism. Its change is continuous, although by no means constant. It passes through long periods of quiescence, and comparatively brief periods of rapid mutation. It may collect itself into a close order, or again become dispersed into a nebula. There is much in its development that is cyclical; it has yet undiscovered rhythms, and many vagaries. The radical and the reactionary may be agreed on essentials; they may both wish sudden change and closer organization. The conservative may be liberal because he wishes to preserve an order in which liberal virtues may exist. Or a liberal may be so cribbed and confined by an unpleasant constriction of social tissue that he becomes radical in his struggle for immediate release. The terms are not of the same class and should not be arranged in parallel columns.

The dictionary definition is enlightening. “Radical—Going to the root or origin; touching or acting upon what is essential or fundamental; thorough.... Radical reform, a thorough reform.... Hence Radical Reformer equals Radical” (New English Dictionary). In this sense radicalism is an historic American tradition. The revolt of the Colonies against England and the formation of the Republic were, indeed, far from the complete break with the past which the schoolboy assumes them to have been, but what lives in the minds of the American people is, nevertheless, not the series of counterchecks which men like Hamilton and Madison wrote into the Constitution, but rather the daring affirmations of Jefferson which have a real kinship with the radical spirit of the French Revolution. Talk of “inalienable rights” such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was genuine radical talk; it searched out the bases of human relationship, proclaimed them against authority, and sought to found on them a system of government.

So strongly has this conception seized the imagination of Americans that it largely accounts for their almost instinctive hostility to new kinds of political change. The roots of politics have been uncovered, the change has in fact been made once for all—so they reason. To admit that any new fundamental alteration is necessary is to be disloyal to the historical liberation. Because the conservative American believes himself a complete democrat, because for him the “new order” was achieved in 1776, he is intolerant of modern radicals. Suggestions of new revolution touch him closely on his pride. In this sense Jefferson has been less a spur to future generations than an obstacle. If his fine frenzy about rights had been less eloquently expressed, if it had not obscured in a cloud of glory the true nature of the foundation of our government—a highly practical compromise which embodied a few moderate advances and many hesitancies—we should have a different temper about change to-day. We should not assume that all desirable fundamental modification of social and political structure had been completed nearly a century and a half ago.

The greatest historic expression of American radicalism has thus become the altar of the conservatives. To the unlettered man it may seem strange that a Supreme Court of elderly radicals will not allow Congress to forbid child-labour because of their loyalty to an 18th-century limitation of the federal government, presumably in the interest of freedom and humanity. To workmen voting for the eight-hour day the language of Jefferson did not seem hostile—they were struggling to pursue happiness in a way that he must have approved. And yet it is the sacred “right” of contract which deprived them, as voters, of the right to legislate for shorter hours. Workmen using their collective economic power to gain industrial freedom are met by a shower of injunctive denials, based chiefly on that same right of contract. In order to stay any further liberation of the human body and spirit, judges and officials and industrial barons have only to invoke the phrases of freedom thrown out against an ancient despotism. They have only to point out that freedom as defined abstractly over a hundred years ago forbids practical freedom to-day. Frozen radicalism of the past chills and destroys the new roots of American life.

Some appreciation of this state of affairs underlies the prevailing tendency to believe that all new radicalism has a foreign origin. It is, indeed, part of the best nationalistic tradition to attribute subversive doctrines to foreigners. This is the habit in every country. But in the United States the habit is perhaps more deep-seated than elsewhere. Americans are by definition free and equal; if then any one talks or acts as if he were not free and equal, he must have been born somewhere else. The American Government, being not a faulty product of human growth, but a new creation sprung perfect out of the ineffable minds of the Fathers, is unassailable; if any one assails it, he cannot know it, and must be subjected to courses in English and Civics (Americanization) until he recognizes its perfection. Treason in this country is not simple treason to a ruler, to a class, or to a system as elsewhere; it is an act of sacrilege, by one uninitiated, upon a religious mystery.

Of course there are and have been Americans whose radicalism is less crust and more meat. The spirit of Jefferson still lives, after all, to confute the interpretation put upon his words. And imported doctrine has actually had less to do with most of the radical movements in America than has American tradition itself. It is an easy step from the conception of political liberty to the conception of economic liberty, and the step has been made here as readily as in Europe. In a country which for so long offered extraordinary opportunities to the individual business man, it is only natural that economic liberty should have been conceived as a means of protecting his enterprise; and as a matter of fact our economic legislation for many years has been sprinkled with victories of the small business men and farmers over the interests which had already become large enough to seem to them oppressive. The regulation of the railroads, the succession of popular financial doctrines, and the anti-trust legislation, were all initiated by the interpretation of economic democracy naturally arising in the vigorous class of the small entrepreneurs. With the slow weakening of this class by its disintegration, on one hand into captains and lieutenants of the great principalities of industry, and on the other into permanently salaried or waged members of the rank and file, comes a corresponding tendency to change the prevailing conception of economic democracy. The radicalism of workmen in the United States has often been no less sweeping or assertive than the radicalism of workmen anywhere—witness the I.W.W. Even violence in the labour struggle has been practised chiefly by one hundred per cent. Americans—the steel workers in Homestead in 1892 and the West Virginia miners in Mingo County in 1921 were of old American stock. And the moment the predominating group in American thought and activity is composed of those who expect to live by their daily work rather than of those who expect to accumulate property, we are likely to see the rise of an economic radicalism more akin to that which exists in Europe, and one which, because of its sanction in our tradition, will be twice as militant and convinced.

For, after all, economic radicalism arises neither from a merely stupid desire for more material goods, nor from an intellectual adherence to a particular formula of industrial organization. It arises from a desire to be free, to achieve dignity and independence. Poverty is distressful not so much because of its physical hardships as because of its spiritual bondage. To be poor because one chooses to be poor is less annoying than to be moderately paid while the man who fixes one’s wages rides in a Rolls-Royce. The most modest aspects of the labour movement are attempts of the workmen to gain some voice in determining the conditions under which they must work—in other words, to extend democracy into industry. And when the workman wakes up to the fact that industrial policies are governed by a comparatively small class of owners, and that the visible result of those policies seems to be a large class of underemployed, undernourished, and under-housed families on one hand, and a small class of abundantly supplied families on the other, he feels that he is suffering an indignity. You may challenge him to prove that any other system would work better. You may argue that if all the wealth of the rich were distributed equally, he would receive but a trifle. Such reasoning will affect him little. If every one must be miserable, he at least wants to share and exercise whatever power exists to alter that misery. Kings have argued that the people could rule no better than they, but that has not prevented peoples from demanding representative government. The American tradition is sure to be as subversive a motive in industry as it has been in the State. The technical problem of how industry may be better organized, important as it is, is subordinate to this cry of the personality. Essentially, this sort of radicalism arises from the instinct of the workman to achieve an adult relationship to the industrial world.

The impact of the war upon industry, and the reverberation of its social results abroad, for some time stimulated this latent feeling in American workmen. For the first time in decades the competition of the unemployed and the immigrant was virtually removed, and the wage-earner began to feel secure enough to assert his personality. He was necessary to the community in an immediate way. The policy of the government was to recognize this fact, and to prevent an unduly rapid increase in wages and in the power of organized labour by compromising with it on certain simple issues like collective bargaining and the eight-hour day. But larger aspirations arose in the rank and file, and when the Russian Revolution sent a word of emancipation around the world, they were ready to listen. In spite of the crushing force of the whole ruling propaganda machinery, which had been so successful in arousing hatred against Germany, countless American workmen sensed the approach of a new order as a result of the success of the Bolsheviki. A secondary impulse of the same sort, felt even more strongly in some quarters, arose from the Nottingham programme of the British Labour Party. But affairs moved slowly, hope was deferred, and at length the new spirit lost much of its freshness and power. The very acrimoniousness and volume of the controversy over what had or had not been done in Russia wearied most people of the whole matter. The many expected revolutions in other countries, which missed fire so many times, caused disillusionment. The doctrinaire and even religious adherents of the Russian Communists began to make trouble for every radical organization in the country by their quarrels and divisions. At length, the war being over, the American labour movement itself began to display a weakness in the face of renewed attack on the part of its opponents, which showed how illusory had been many of its recent gains and how seriously its morale had been injured.

Economic radicalism never looked—on the surface—weaker than it does in the United States to-day. On the strength of statements by Mr. Gompers and some other leaders of the trade unions, we are likely to assume that organized labour will have nothing to do with it. The professed radicals themselves have been weakened by dissensions and scattered by persecution. Yet a brief survey of the formal groups which now profess radical theories will indicate why the future of American radicalism should not be assessed on the evidence of their present low estate.

The Socialist Party, even more than the Socialist Parties in other countries, was placed by the war in a difficult situation. With its roots not yet firmly in the soil, except in a few localities and among diverse national elements, it was faced with the necessity, in accordance with its principles and tradition, of denouncing the entrance of the United States into hostilities. But this decision could command no effective support from the workers organized on the economic field, who under a different leadership adopted a different attitude. Nor was the party strong enough among any other element of the population to make its decision respected. The only immediate result of the gesture was therefore to place this unarmed little force in the most exposed position possible, where it drew the fire of all those who were nervously afraid the people would not sanction the war. Socialism was not judged on the basis of its economic tenets, but was condemned as disloyal and pro-German; and the effect was to render the party even more sectarian and unrepresentative than ever before. It had adopted a position in which it could not expect recruits except from moral heroes, and no nation nourishes a large proportion of these. Such episodes make good legend, but they do not lead to prompt victories. Even those who later have come to believe that the Socialists were right about the war are likely to express their belief in some other form than joining the party.

In this weakened condition, the Socialist Party after the war developed internal fissures. Many bitter words have been exchanged as to whether the “Left Wingers” were or were not a majority of the party, whether they were or were not more orthodox than those in control of the party machinery, and whether, if they were more orthodox, their orthodoxy was wise. At any rate, they broke away and formed two new parties of their own, a fact which is the chief point of interest to one who is more concerned with the larger issues of American radicalism than with the minutiæ of Socialist politics. The Communist Party and the Communist Labour Party, whatever may have been the legitimacy of their gestation in the bowels of Socialism, certainly found their reason for being chiefly in logic which originated in Moscow and Berlin rather than in the American situation. At once selected for persecution by government officials, they burrowed underground, doubtless followed by a band of spies at least as numerous as they. From these subterranean regions have come rumours of a fourth party—the United Communist, which swallowed most of the Communist Labourites and some of the Communists. At last accounts the Communists and the United Communists were each attempting to prove the other counter-revolutionary by reference to the latest documents from international revolutionary headquarters.

It is hazardous in the extreme for an outsider to speak of the differences in doctrine among these groups. It is probably fair to say, however, that the Communist parties are chiefly distinguished by their total lack of interest in anything save a complete revolution, because this is the only kind they believe possible. They reject as “compromises” partial gains of all sorts; piecemeal progress by evolutionary methods rather offends them than otherwise. Their eyes are turned always toward some future revolutionary situation; for this their organization and their theories are being prepared. This being the case, the validity of their position will be tested by the event. If, as the milder Socialists believe, economic changes may come gradually by process of growth and smaller shocks, the Communists are likely to remain a nearly functionless and tiny minority, even in the labour movement. If, as the Communists believe, the present order in the normal course of its development is destined to experience a sudden collapse similar to that which occurred in Russia near the end of the war, they will become the true prophets, and their mode of thought and action will presumably have fitted them to assume leadership.

The Farmer-Labour Party is a recent growth far less doctrinaire than either the Socialist or the Communist groups. It has neither prophet nor Bible, but is based rather on the principle of gathering certain categories of people together for political action, trusting that as they become organized they will work out their own programme in relation to the situation, and that that programme will develop as time goes on. The categories to which it appeals are chiefly the industrial workers and the small farmers, who have in general common economic interests as opposed to the large owners of land and capital. It hopes that other elements in the population, realizing that their major interests are much the same as those of the unionists and the farmers, will join forces with them to produce a majority. As an illustration of the operation of such tactics, the Farmer-Labourites point to the success of the Independent Labour Party of Great Britain, first in aiding the foundation of the British Labour Party, and second in building up for that party an increasingly coherent radical programme.

In all these cases, however, not much confidence is placed in the actual political machinery of elections. There is a widespread scepticism about the ability to accomplish industrial changes by the ballot, on account of experience with political corruption, broken election promises, adverse court decisions, and political buncombe in general. These parties are formed as much for the purpose of propagating ideas and creating centres of activity as for mobilizing votes. All radical parties lay great stress on the industrial power of the organized labour movement. This is not to say that they do not recognize the importance of the State in industrial matters. All agree that control of political machinery will in the long run be necessary, if only to prevent it from checking the advance of the people through the courts and police. But they also agree that control of the State is not held and cannot be attained by political machinery alone. The present influence of the proprietors of industry on politics is due, they see, chiefly to economic power, and the workers consequently must not neglect the development of their own economic organization. The Communists are completely hopeless of attaining results through the present election machinery; the Socialists and Farmer-Labourites believe it possible to secure a majority at the polls, which may then execute its will, if the workers are well enough organized for industrial action.

Outwardly the most successful of the radical movements is the least doctrinaire of all. It is unnecessary to repeat the history and achievements of the Nonpartisan League—an attempt on the part of organized farmers to use the machinery of the State in order to gain economic independence from the banking, milling, and packing interests. Other groups of farmers have aimed at a similar result through co-operation, with varying success.

In the industrial labour movement proper there have been numerous radical minorities. The most uncompromising of these, as well as the most characteristically American, was the Industrial Workers of the World, who aspired to build up a consciously revolutionary body to rival the unions composing the American Federation of Labour. This decline is due not so much to suppression as to their previous failure to enlist the continued support of the industrial workers themselves. Like the Communists, the I.W.W. predicated their success on a revolutionary situation, and lacking that situation they could not build a labour movement on an abstract idea. Over long periods not enough people are moved by a philosophy of salvation to give staying power to such an organization in the daily struggle with the employers. Other similar attempts, such as the W.I.I.U., and the more recent One Big Union, have encountered similar difficulties. They grow rapidly in crises, but fail under the strain of continued performance.

The failure of American radicals to build up a strong movement is in part due, of course, to the natural difficulties of the social and economic situation, but it is also due to the mental traits which usually accompany remoteness from reality. This is illustrated in the history of the I.W.W., if we accept William Z. Foster’s acute analysis. The regular trade-union movement, slowly evolving towards a goal but half consciously realized, overcoming practical obstacles painfully and clumsily, as such obstacles usually are overcome, was too halting for these impatient radicals. They withdrew, and set up rival, perfectionist unions, founded in uncompromising revolutionary ardour. These organizations were often unable to serve the rank and file in their practical difficulties, and consequently could not supplant the historic labour movement. But they did draw out of that movement many of its most sincere and ardent spirits, thus depriving it of the ferment which was necessary to its growth. The I.W.W., for their part, failing to secure any large grip on reality, regressed into quarrels about theory, suffered divisions of their social personality, and at length—except in the far West—became little more than economic anchorites. As Foster says, “The I.W.W. were absolutely against results.”

Too much of American radicalism has been diverted to the easy emotional satisfaction which is substituted for the arduous process of dealing with reality. We suffer a restriction of the personality, we cry out against the oppressor, we invent slogans and doctrines, we fill our minds with day dreams, with intricate mechanisms of some imaginary revolution. At the same time we withdraw from the actual next step. Here is the trade-union movement, built up painfully for over a century, a great army with many divisions which function every day in the industrial struggle. How many radicals know it in any detail? How many have paid the slightest attention to the technique of its organization, or have devoted any time to a working out of the smaller problems which must be worked out before it can achieve this or that victory? Here are our great industries, our complex systems of exchange. How many radicals really know the technique of even the smallest section of them? Radicals wish to reorganize the industrial system; would they know how to organize a factory?

If radicalism arises from the instinct for economic maturity, then it can find its place in the world only by learning its function, only by expressing its emotion in terms of the actual with which it has to deal. A period of adolescence was to be expected, but to prolong the characteristics of that period is to invite futility. And as a matter of fact American radicalism now exhibits a tendency to establish more contacts with reality. Instead of withdrawing from established unions to start a new and spotless labour movement, radicals are beginning to visualize and to carry out the difficult but possible task of improving the organization of the existing unions, and of charging them with new energy and ideas. Unions which were founded by radicals—such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America—are devoting their efforts not to talking of a future revolution, but to organizing the workers more firmly in the present, to establishing constitutional government in industry through which tangible advances may be made and safeguarded, and to improving the productivity of industry itself. Engineers, encouraged by labour organizations, and in some cases actually paid by them, are investigating the problem of economic waste, and are demonstrating by line upon line and precept upon precept how the chaos of competition, industrial autocracy, and a controlling profit motive are reflected in idle hours, low wages, high prices, and inferior products. The co-operative movement is slowly providing a new and more efficient machinery of distribution, while co-operative banks are building up a reserve of credit for those who wish to experiment with undertakings conducted for other purposes than the profit of the proprietor. Such functional use of the labour movement is more dangerous to the existing disorder than volumes of phrases or a whole battalion of “natural rights.”

Extremists call such activities compromise. They are compromise in the sense that any hypothesis must be changed to fit the facts, but they involve no compromise with scientific truth. The alchemist compromised when he gave up the search for the philosopher’s stone and began to learn from the elements. He surrendered a sterile dogma for a fruitful science. In proportion as radicals learn how to put their emotions to work, in proportion as they devise ways to function in the world in which we live, will they make possible not only unity among themselves, but a rapprochement with other Americans. A man who believes there is no real possibility of change short of complete revolution can unite with a man who has no theory about the matter at all so long as they do not discuss abstract doctrine, but concentrate upon the problem of how to bring about a particular effect at a particular time. The most radical theories, if expressed in terms of concrete situations, will be accepted by those who are wary of generalities, or do not understand them. The theories will be tested in the fact. The operation of such a process may be blocked by those who dogmatically oppose all experiment, but in that case the forces of reason and of nature will be so clearly on the side of the radical that there can be no doubt about his ultimate fruitfulness.

George Soule