Let me say at once that I have no idea of blaming my relatives. They were always kind to me; their homes were open to me, and when I came, I was a member of the family. Nor do I mean that I was troubled by jealousy. I mean merely that all my life I was faced by the contrast between riches and poverty, and thereby impelled to think and to ask questions. “Mamma, why are some children poor and others rich? How can that be fair?” I plagued my mother’s mind with the problem, and never got any answer. Since then I have plagued the ruling-class apologists of the world with it, and still have no answer.
The other factor in my revolt—odd as it may seem—was the Protestant Episcopal Church. I really took the words of Jesus seriously, and when I carried the train of Bishop Potter in a confirmation ceremony in the Church of the Holy Communion, I thought I was helping to glorify the rebel carpenter, the friend of the poor and lowly, the symbol of human brotherhood. Later, I read in the papers that the bishop’s wife had had fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jewels stolen, and had set the police to hunting for the thief. I couldn’t understand how a bishop’s wife could own fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jewels, and the fact stuck in my mind, and had a good deal to do with the fading away of my churchly ardor.
From the age of perhaps seventeen to twenty-two, I faced our civilization of class privilege absolutely alone in my own mind; that is to say, whatever I found wrong with this civilization, I thought that I alone knew it, and the burden of changing it rested upon my spirit. Such was the miracle that capitalist education had been able to perform upon my young mind during the eleven or twelve years that it had charge of me. It could not keep me from realizing that the rule of society by organized greed was an evil thing; but it managed to keep me from knowing that there was anybody else in the world who thought as I did; it managed to make me regard the current movements, Bryanism and Populism, which sought to remedy this evil, as vulgar, noisy, and beneath my cultured contempt.
I knew, of course, that there had been a socialist movement in Europe; I had heard vaguely about Bismarck persecuting these malcontents. Also, I knew there had been dreamers and cranks who had gone off and lived in colonies, and that they “busted up” when they faced the practical problems of life. While emotionally in revolt against Mammon worship, I was intellectually a perfect little snob and tory. I despised modern books without having read them, and I expected social evils to be remedied by cultured and well-mannered gentlemen who had been to college and acquired noble ideals. That is as near as I can come to describing the jumble of notions I had acquired by combining John Ruskin with Godkin of the New York Evening Post, and Shelley with Dana of the New York Sun.
It happened that I knew about anarchists because of the execution of the Haymarket martyrs when I was ten years old. In the “chamber of horrors” of the Eden Musée, a place of waxworks, I saw a group representing these desperados sitting round a table making bombs. I swallowed these bombs whole, and shuddered at the thought of depraved persons who inhabited the back rooms of saloons, jeered at God, practiced free love, and conspired to blow up the government. In short, I believed in 1889 what ninety-five per cent of America believes in 1962.
II
Upon my return to New York in the autumn of 1902, after the writing of Arthur Stirling, I met in the office of the Literary Digest a tall, soft-voiced, and gentle-souled youth by the name of Leonard D. Abbott; he was a socialist, so he told me, and he thought I might be interested to know something about that movement. He gave me a couple of pamphlets and a copy of Wilshire’s Magazine.
It was like the falling down of prison walls about my mind; the amazing discovery, after all those years, that I did not have to carry the whole burden of humanity’s future upon my two frail shoulders! There were actually others who understood; who saw what had gradually become dear to me, that the heart and center of the evil lay in leaving the social treasure, which nature had created and which every man has to have in order to live, to become the object of a scramble in the market place, a delirium of speculation. The principal fact the socialists had to teach me was that they themselves existed.
One of the pamphlets I read was by George D. Herron; it moved me to deep admiration, and when I took it to my editor and critic, Paul Elmer More, it moved him to the warmest abhorrence. I wrote to Herron, telling him about myself, and the result was an invitation to dinner and a very curious and amusing experience.
I was in no condition to dine out, for my shoes were down at the heel, and my only pair of detachable cuffs were badly frayed; but I supposed that a socialist dinner would be different, so I went to the address given, a hotel on West Forty-fourth Street. I found myself in an apartment of extreme elegance, with marble statuary and fine paintings; I was received by a black-bearded gentleman in evening dress and Windsor tie—a combination I had never heard of before—and by an elegant lady in a green velvet Empire gown with a train. One other guest appeared, a small man with a black beard and mustache trimmed to sharp points, and twinkling mischievous eyes—for all the world the incarnation of Mephistopheles, but without the tail I had seen him wearing at the Metropolitan Opera House. “Comrade Wilshire,” said my host, and I realized that this was the editor of the magazine I had been reading.