Their most marked peculiarity is the migratory nature of their lives. Whether this is self-determined, a matter of temperament and habit, or due to uncontrollable factors, it is largely responsible for the contempt in which they are popularly held. It naturally brings upon them the reproach and resentment everywhere visited upon "tramps" and "vagabonds." They rarely remain long enough in any one place to form local attachments and ties or anything like civic pride. They move from job to job, city to city, state to state, sometimes tramping afoot, begging as they go; sometimes stealing rides on railway trains, in freight cars—"side-door Pullmans"—or on the rods underneath the cars. Frequently arrested for begging, trespassing, or stealing rides, they are often victims of injustice at the hands of local judges and justices. The absence of friends, combined with the prejudice against vagrants which everywhere exists, subjects them to arbitrary and high-handed injustice such as no other body of American citizens has to endure. Moreover, through the conditions of their existence they are readily suspected of crimes they do not commit; it is all too easy for the hard-pushed police officer or sheriff to impute a crime to the lone and defenseless "Wobbly," who frequently can produce no testimony to prove his innocence, simply because he has no friends in the neighborhood and has been at pains to conceal his movements. In this manner the "Wobbly" becomes a veritable son of Ishmael, his hand against the hand of nearly every man in conventional society. In particular he becomes a rebel by habit, hating the police and the courts as his constant enemies.
Doubtless the great majority of these men are temperamentally predisposed to the unanchored, adventurous, migratory existence which they lead. Boys so constituted run away to sea, take jobs with traveling circuses, or enlist as soldiers. The type is familiar and not uncommon. Such individuals cannot be content with the prosaic, humdrum, monotonous life of regular employment. As a rule we do not look upon this trait in boy or man as criminal.
Many a hardworking, intelligent American, who from choice or from necessity is a migratory worker, following his job, never has an opportunity to vote for state legislators, for governor, for congressman or president. He is just as effectively excluded from the actual electorate as if he were a Chinese coolie, ignorant of our customs and our speech.
We cannot wonder that such conditions prove prolific breeders of bolshevism and similar "isms." It would be strange indeed if it were otherwise. We have no right to expect that men who are so constantly the victims of arbitrary, unjust, and even brutal treatment at the hands of our police and our courts will manifest any reverence for the law and the judicial system. Respect for majority rule in government cannot fairly be demanded from a disfranchised group. It is not to be wondered at that the old slogan of socialism, "Strike at the ballot-box!"—the call to lift the struggle of the classes to the parliamentary level for peaceful settlement—becomes the desperate, anarchistic I.W.W. slogan, "Strike at the ballot-box with an ax!" Men who can have no family life cannot justly be expected to bother about school administration. Men who can have no home life but only dreary shelter in crowded work-camps or dirty doss-houses are not going to bother themselves with municipal housing reforms.
In short, we must wake up to the fact that, as the very heart of our problem, we have a bolshevist nucleus in America composed of virile, red-blooded Americans, racy of our soil and history, whose conditions of life and labor are such as to develop in them the psychology of reckless, despairing, revengeful bolshevism. They really are little concerned with theories of the state and of social development, which to our intellectuals seem to be the essence of bolshevism. They are vitally concerned only with action. Syndicalism and bolshevism involve speedy and drastic action—hence the force of their appeal.
Finally, if we would understand why millions of people in all lands have turned away from old ideals, old loyalties, and old faiths to bolshevism, with something of the passion and frenzy characteristic of great messianic movements, we must take into account the intense spiritual agony and hunger which the Great War has brought into the lives of civilized men. The old gods are dead and men are everywhere expectantly waiting for the new gods to arise. The aftermath of the war is a spiritual cataclysm such as civilized mankind has never before known. The old religions and moralities are shattered and men are waiting and striving for new ones. It is a time suggestive of the birth of new religions. Man cannot live as yet without faith, without some sort of religion. The heart of the world today is strained with yearning for new and living faiths to replace the old faiths which are dead. Were some persuasive fanatic to arise proclaiming himself to be a new Messiah, and preaching the religion of action, the creation of a new society, he would find an eager, soul-hungry world already predisposed to believe.
4. Mass Movements and Institutions: Methodism[312]
The corruption of manners which has been general since the restoration was combated by societies for "the reformation of manners," which in the last years of the seventeenth century acquired extraordinary dimensions. They began in certain private societies which arose in the reign of James II, chiefly under the auspices of Beveridge and Bishop Horneck. These societies were at first purely devotional, and they appear to have been almost identical in character with those of the early Methodists. They held prayer meetings, weekly communions, and Bible-readings; they sustained charities and distributed religious books, and they cultivated a warmer and more ascetic type of devotion than was common in the Church. Societies of this description sprang up in almost every considerable city in England and even in several of those in Ireland. In the last years of the seventeenth century we find no less than ten of them in Dublin. Without, however, altogether discarding their first character, they assumed, about 1695, new and very important functions. They divided themselves into several distinct groups, undertaking the discovery and suppression of houses of ill fame, and the prosecution of swearers, drunkards, and Sabbath-breakers. They became a kind of voluntary police, acting largely as spies, and enforcing the laws against religious offenses. The energy with which this scheme was carried out is very remarkable. As many as seventy or eighty persons were often prosecuted in London and Westminster for cursing and swearing, in a single week. Sunday markets, which had hitherto been not uncommon, were effectually suppressed. Hundreds of disorderly houses were closed. Forty or fifty night-walkers were sent every week to Bridewell, and numbers were induced to emigrate to the colonies. A great part of the fines levied for these offenses was bestowed on the poor. In the fortieth annual report of the "Societies for the Reformation of Manners" which appeared in 1735, it was stated that the number of prosecutions for debauchery and profaneness in London and Westminster alone, since the foundation of the societies, had been 99,380.
The term Methodist was a college nickname bestowed upon a small society of students at Oxford, who met together between 1729 and 1735 for the purpose of mutual improvement. They were accustomed to communicate every week, to fast regularly on Wednesdays and Fridays, and on most days during Lent; to read and discuss the Bible in common, to abstain from most forms of amusement and luxury, and to visit sick persons and prisoners in the gaol. John Wesley, the future leader of the religious revival of the eighteenth century, was the master-spirit of this society. The society hardly numbered more than fifteen members, and was the object of much ridicule at the university; but it included some men who afterward played considerable parts in the world. Among them was Charles, the younger brother of John Wesley, whose hymns became the favorite poetry of the sect, and whose gentler, more submissive, and more amiable character, though less fitted than that of his brother for the great conflicts of public life, was very useful in moderating the movement, and in drawing converts to it by personal influence. Charles Wesley appears to have originated the society at Oxford; he brought Whitefield into its pale, and besides being the most popular poet he was one of the most persuasive preachers of the movement.
In the course of 1738 the chief elements of the movement were already formed. Whitefield had returned from Georgia, Charles Wesley had begun to preach the doctrine with extraordinary effect to the criminals in Newgate and from every pulpit into which he was admitted. Methodist societies had already sprung up under Moravian influence. They were in part a continuation of the society at Oxford, in part a revival of those religious societies that have been already noticed as so common after the Revolution. The design of each was to be a church within a church, a seedplot of a more fervent piety, the center of a stricter discipline and a more energetic propagandism than existed in religious communities at large. In these societies the old Christian custom of love-feasts was revived. The members sometimes passed almost the whole night in the most passionate devotions, and voluntarily submitted to a spiritual tyranny that could hardly be surpassed in a Catholic monastery. They were to meet every week, to make an open and particular confession of every frailty, to submit to be crossexamined on all their thoughts, words, and deeds. The following among others were the questions asked at every meeting: "What known sin have you committed since our last meeting? What temptations have you met with? How were you delivered? What have you thought, said, or done of which you doubt whether it be sin or not? Have you nothing you desire to keep secret?"