It is very significant, therefore, that the Socialist Party of America definitely committed itself to these tactics in the manifesto it adopted at the Chicago Emergency Convention on September 4, 1919. As given in the "Call" of September 5, 1919, the manifesto of the Socialist Party of the United States says on this point:
"The great purpose of the Socialist Party is to wrest the industries and the control of the Government of the United States from the capitalists and their retainers. It is our purpose to place industry and government in the control of the workers with hand and brain, to be administered for the benefit of the whole community.
"To insure the triumph of Socialism in the United States the bulk of the American workers must be strongly organized politically as Socialists, in constant, clear-cut and aggressive opposition to all parties of the possessing class. They must be strongly organized in the economic field on broad industrial lines, as one powerful and harmonious class organization, co-operating with the Socialist Party, and ready in cases of emergency to reinforce the political demands of the working class by industrial action.
"To win the American workers from their ineffective and demoralizing leadership, to educate them to an enlightened understanding of their own class interests, and to train and assist them to organize politically and industrially on class lines, in order to effect their emancipation, that is the supreme task confronting the Socialist Party in America.
"To this great task, without deviation or compromise, we pledge all our energies and resources. For its accomplishment we call for the support and co-operation of the workers of America and of all other persons desirous of ending the insane rule of capitalism before it has had the opportunity to precipitate humanity into another cataclysm of blood and ruin.
"Long live the International Socialist Revolution, the only hope of the suffering world!"
So culminates and ends this 1919 national convention manifesto of the Socialist Party of America. This dedication of that party to the "supreme task" of "strongly organizing" the "bulk of the American workers" into "one powerful and harmonious class organization" in order that "industrial action" may "reinforce the political demands of the working class," adds greatly to the significance of some testimony by leading Socialists in the inquiry of the New York Assembly's Judiciary Committee at Albany. On January 30, 1920, Algernon Lee, educational director of the Rand School and secretary of the New York County Committee of the Socialist Party, was sworn and testified as follows, according to the "New York Herald" of January 31, 1920:
"Mr. Lee ... described at length what Socialists mean by direct mass action and the general strike. He said the general strike had been used with some degree of success in Russia and Belgium.... 'The general strike is often used to back up political action,' the witness said. He justified combining economic strikes as a political weapon....
"'Let us assume for the moment,' said Mr. Conboy, 'that these five gentlemen whose seats are in question ... should present a political program here in the shape of proposed legislation, and they were reinforced by the combination in industrial action, including within its weapons the general strike. It would be possible for them, would it not, in the event that the Legislature of this State refused to adopt the movement which they presented for adoption by the Legislature, to cripple the industries of the State and to starve the people thereof?'
"'I think you are assuming, I may almost say, an impossible condition,' replied Mr. Lee, 'that the people should elect an overwhelming majority upon one side and then be so overwhelmingly organized as to be able to use industrial action on the other side.'"
But here Mr. Lee simply concealed the truth behind hypocritical camouflage by using the term, "the people," ambiguously. For our people might go on as now, conducting constitutional government by representatives in all their legislatures elected by "an overwhelming majority upon one side," while at the same time the underground work might go on of "strongly organizing" "the bulk of the American workers" into "one powerful and harmonious class organization" ready for "industrial action." In that case, a "general strike" would absolutely paralyze the whole country, and "the people" and all their legislatures alike would have to surrender absolutely to any demands made upon them, or would have to engage instantly in such a civil war as the world has not yet seen, carried on under conditions of indescribable chaos.
Moreover the underground work of revolutionary "industrial organization" need be only partial, need, in fact, be carried on only a little beyond conditions already actually existing, in order to establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat," or else terrible civil war, in many of our American cities by the simple process of calling general strikes. The reader who questions this should learn the facts about the Winnipeg general strike of May 1-June 15, 1919, "the culmination of the development of the One Big Union movement in Canada" (page 333 of "The American Labor Year Book, 1919-1920, edited by Alexander Trachtenberg, Director, Department of Labor Research, Rand School of Social Science"), which held a city of 200,000 terrorized for six weeks under the absolute dictatorship of a Strike Committee elected by the strikers, while "many cities, including Calgary, Edmonton and Toronto, meanwhile joined the general strike in sympathy with Winnipeg." (Ibid., page 334.)
The strikers included the employees of the fire, water supply, health, street cleaning, light and power, transportation, telegraph, telephone and postal departments of the city, together with the janitors of buildings, elevator men, wholesale and retail clerks and the carters and deliverers of the stores, railways and express companies, thus cutting off the city from the rest of the world and even from the supplies and facilities within its own bounds except only as the Strike Committee made concessions. "I could have a glass of milk or lunch if I had a ticket from the Strike Committee. Otherwise I couldn't." This was the testimony of Mr. Robert McKay, of Winnipeg, February 10, 1920, and printed in the Albany "Knickerbocker Press" of February 11, 1920, from which we take the facts. Even the Winnipeg newspapers failed to appear after the first three days of the strike, while the city police also voted to strike, but continued on duty under command of the Strike Committee.
At length a Citizens' Committee was organized, 100 men at first, which grew to 1,000, and even 10,000, Mr. McKay says. "The regular police was replaced by 1,500 special police, assisted by mounted police and militia," and "during the last two weeks there were two riots, in which two persons were shot by the mounted police." (Account in Trachtenberg's "Year Book," above quoted, page 334.) In other words, Winnipeg was only delivered by means of rescue from outside and by incipient civil war, the ringleaders of the dictatorship being arrested and indicted for trial.
Yet are there some Americans still so blinded by foolish optimism as to think we are in no danger--even at a time when all the "Reds" of America, inflamed by the Third International, are uniting in feverish haste to carry "industrial organization" to a sufficient state to make it an instrument for holding up the whole American people? If the false prophets of optimism pooh-pooh the peril and label intelligent warnings as "hysteria," will it be the first time in history that this was done by men of weight and influence in the very shadow of a great, impending rebellion and down to the very hour of its outbreak?
Mr. Lee's testimony on January 30, 1920, as quoted above, was voluntarily supplemented by a statement by Seymour Stedman, of counsel for the five Socialist Assemblymen and a prominent Socialist himself, one of the National Executive Committeemen who fought the Left Wing to keep the control of the party in 1919. We quote from the report of the trial in the "New York Times" of January 31, 1920: