The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

It was the Socialist’s conception of a highly centralized administration which drove the Anarchist into a frenzy of vehement antagonism. And it was the Anarchist’s laissez faire ideal which roused the latent fighting-spirit of the Socialist. The Anarchist would maintain with stout conviction that centralized administration is already the core of the malady of the world, and that our need is for freedom in the absence of artificial limitations wherein natural forces can work their rightful ends. And the Socialist would retort, with rising anger, that it is from anarchy—the absence of wisely regulated system—that the world even now suffers most, and that the hope of men lies in the orderly management of their own affairs in the interests of all, and in the light of the revelations of science. They were heartily at one in their dislike for what they were fond of calling the present “bourgeois society,” and for the existing rights of private property, which they regarded as its chiefest bulwark, but they parted company at once, and with sharp recriminations, on the grounds of their dislike, and of their purposes and hopes for a regenerated state of things.

Such Anarchists were of the “Individualistic” type. Not all of those I met were so philosophical, however. The Communistic one, who was nodding at me in a friendly manner from a near table, notably was not. Very much the reverse. He was for open revolution to the death, and he made no secret of it. He had little patience for the slow pace of evolution believed in by the Socialists, but he had less, apparently, for the laissez faire conception of his brother Anarchists. At all events, I found him most commonly in the meetings of the former sect, where his revolutionary views were frowned down, but his invectives against society were tolerated in a spirit of free speech, and as being warranted by the evils of the existing state.

He was a German, of tall, muscular frame, erect, square-shouldered, well-poised, as a result of long service, most bitterly against his will, in the Prussian Army, and he hated kings and potentates and all governmental authority, with a burning hatred. His was the broad-featured likeness of his race, and his stiff, fair hair was brushed back in straight lines from a well-shaped forehead, while his beard, brown and streaked with white, bristled from his lower face like the bayonets of a square in full formation. He was a mechanic by trade, and a good one, as I had happened to learn.

HE HATED KINGS AND POTENTATES AND ALL GOVERNMENTAL AUTHORITY.

The last of the three, like the Pedler, was a Socialist, but was very unlike his two companions as a man. My acquaintance among the Socialists had not gone far before I began to observe that I was meeting men who, whatever their mental vagaries, were craftsmen of no mean order. They were machinists and skilled workmen mostly, and some were workers in sweat-shops. All of them had known the full stress of the struggle for bread, but they were decidedly not the inefficients of their class, having fought their way to positions of some advantage in the general fight.

Here, however, was an exception in this third “comrade,” and I marvelled at the rarity of his type. Incompetence was stamped on every feature. His long, lank, flabby figure, with its disjointed movements, suggested no virility. The hair grew thin and blonde from his head and from his colorless face, and his large, pale-blue eyes flitted in their movements, as though there were behind them not intelligence enough to hold them in fixed attention. The man’s emotions were boundless. He had, moreover, a gift of utterance, and, when he spoke in meeting, it was sheer feeling that expressed itself in words which were marvellously void of any sane concatenation. It was a psychological phenomenon, this public speech of his. We had premonitory warnings of it, for we could see him writhing in his seat when his emotions were aroused, and starting nervously until he had gained the floor, when a half-suppressed, general groan would greet the torrent of his sentences, which flowed directly from chaotic feeling which had never reached his mind.

We four left the restaurant together, and walked on to Waverley Hall. I fell in with the Pedler, and from him I was glad to learn that the Poet was to read that afternoon his long-deferred paper on the “Opening of the Exposition Grounds on Sunday.”

It was a little before the appointed hour when we reached the hall, but already there was promise of an uncommon meeting. The audience was larger than usual, the benches on both sides of the central aisle being well filled nearly to the door. The Pedler and I had some difficulty in finding seats near the front. More than ever marked was the atmosphere of keen alertness, which, from the first, had so attracted me in the gatherings of the Socialists. They might be futile, but their meetings were never dull. And, while they could not have been more orderly, they might easily have proved far less engaging than they were, had a saving sense of humor been more conspicuously a characteristic of the members.

There was a sense of pleasurable excitement in sinking back into my seat, whence, by turning a little to the right, I could command the hall. The afternoon sun was streaming through the two large windows in the south end. The heavy draperies, looped up to admit the light, were in perfect keeping with the carpet on the daïs and the pulpit chairs upholstered with plush, on one of which sat the Leader, behind a reading-desk. There were other paraphernalia of the Masonic lodge which habitually held its meetings there, and among the life-sized portraits on the walls was one of Washington in the full regalia of a Mason. At small wooden tables, resting on the floor at the Leader’s right, sat a few young reporters, sharpening their pencils in preparation for any points which could be turned to good account as “copy.”