AMERICAN SYNDICALISM

I

THE SOCIALIST INVASION

UNTIL within some half dozen years, the sturdiest Americans were at most tepidly amused that any one should speak seriously of socialism. I have preserved an impatient letter from a very masterful financier, in which he asks a little querulously what good reason can be given for talking and writing "in this country" about a thing so unreal and freakish. He knew that some leading nations in Europe were at their wit's end to circumvent this propaganda. He thought the future very dark for some of those countries, especially for England. But what had all this to do with our own country? Did any one doubt the prosperity of the United States? Were not opportunities so ample that the whole world rushed in to seize them? He had examined the savings banks in New York City, "with their half million of depositors, mostly among poor people." Were there not four thousand millions in the Savings Banks of the Nation? He had at his finger tips the great army of stockholders in our railroads and leading corporations. Who could question that these beneficent agencies were distributing property to an ever widening proportion of our population? These were indeed "our democratic institutions." He believed that the coming census would

prove

that economic opportunity never was so great for the common man. It was upon observations like these that he based his protest. It was to him a criminal folly to keep these disturbing speculations alive.

I do not here put in question his views about the spread of property, but the main thought in this strong man's mind was that our American conditions so differed from those in Europe, that we were snug and secure from collectivist taints, if only this irresponsible prattle about socialism could be hushed up.

For quite thirty years, I have heard this view uttered with every variation of emphasis. Blind as it is, it had one excuse. From 1848, German socialists came here in such numbers as to give color to the statement that the mischief was merely an affair of disgruntled and whimpering foreigners. It pleased us to think of these unhappy strangers, fleeing from sombre tyrannies to a land so dazzling with freedom that the very excess of light caused them to blink and stumble. With good-natured tolerance, we humored and despised them. For some forty years they were the active center of such socialism as we knew.

All this has changed. No one can now examine with any care the socialist leadership as it appears in political and other activities, without seeing that we have to do with a movement that is in no proper sense "foreign." One of our most commanding figures in the railroad world says that the only practical issue now is to "stave socialism off as long as possible." He is convinced that the first chill of the shadow has fallen upon us. There is much reason to believe that

socialism in its more revolutionary character is from now on to have its most fruitful field in the United States. The conditions and the mechanism through which it develops are in many ways more favorable here than in any country of Europe. Our prosperities, our higher wages, the mobility of the labor class, the immediate effect of our freer ways upon the incoming peasant all work to this end. Armies of these simple folk pass violently to the tense and unwonted excitements of city life or to industrial centers charged with hostilities between capital and labor. There is no saving transition between the habits and traditions which they bring and the new life to which they come. Of all that is deepest in these habits and traditions, our own ignorance is so elaborate and complete as to constitute a danger no less threatening. We have long sought comfort in thinking of our country as immune from really serious social agitations. German socialism used to be accounted for as "a reaction against the monarchy." English "landlord monopoly" was given as an explanation of the collectivist uprising in that country. But France is a republic and her land is largely in the hands of small farmers, yet socialists sit in her cabinet and a socialist has been Prime Minister. Denmark is a nation of small farmers who own most of the land and are not oppressed by their monarch, but there has developed there one of the most powerful socialist parties in Europe. In the North of Italy (as in the regions round about Mantua) there is a vigorous and growing socialism among agricultural workers quite as aggressive as any that the towns can show.

Thus socialism steadily wins its way underneath all these differences. Language, religion, forms of government set no barrier to its growth, because the causes of socialism underlie all these. The causes have their roots in the discovered excesses of a competitive system that fails to meet the minimum of equality which powerful sections in these communities now demand. In no part of the world have these excesses been more riotous than in the United States. Nowhere have they been brought more widely or more directly home to the masses than in this country. The magnitude of our area and of our economic resources have concealed and delayed the exposure. With the opening of the twentieth century the exposure has come.

After three decades of obscure and fitful struggle socialism becomes part and parcel of our political and social structure. It no longer stammers exclusively in a tongue half learned. It is at home in every American dialect. It no longer apologizes, it defies. Almost suddenly it wins a congressman, fifty mayors, and nearly a thousand elected officials.

As has happened in every known country where Socialism has grown strong, its first victories are followed by defeat. Pecuniary interests once alarmed, drop their differences and act together.

Many times this fusion has triumphed with boisterous self congratulation. For the most part the laughter has been premature. It soon turns out that the routed enemy has gathered again in larger numbers, more firmly entrenched and better equipped. In Milwaukee at the close of Mayor Seidel's first

term, he and his socialist following are thrown out by the help of the Catholic Church and by the rapturous union of the two old parties which had fought each other for spoils since the Civil War. Socialism compels this fusion of frightened property interests into one grim phalanx bent upon its own safety. At the first threat of a common peril, the old banners-Republican or Democratic are forgotten. It is now property and privilege the real forces underlying so much of our pretty political vaporing, that stand there like armored colleagues against the new enemy. Socialists are put to rout by this coalition though the socialist cause meantime has grown apace. The chuckling which echoed far and near over this "Milwaukee defeat" may later excite its own soberer reflections.

With wonted good nature, the public, unalarmed and unrebuked, accepts all these results. In accounting for the socialist capture of so large a city, the press insists that the revolt was not after all very "socialistic." It was mainly "only a protest," gathering to itself all manner of critical ill-humors that have little or nothing to do with the thing called socialism.

There is much truth in this, but also some dangerous reserves of error. In a visit to these "socially captured cities" I found not only in centers like Milwaukee and Butte, but in country towns, of which some of us never heard, that hundreds of the more thoughtful citizens had voted the socialist ticket. Many reasons were given me for this, but two of them have special interest. First, because the cynical corruption and decay of our party politics had reached