Griffin Barry fetched me and took me to lunch in Washington Place at a
strange below-ground place where we had excellent Italian food. There
was Mary Heaton Vorse, author of “Men and Steel,” and Kenneth Durant.
I discussed “Men and Steel” and Pittsburgh with Mary Heaton Vorse, she
had seen the beauty and the grandeur of the mills as I had. I said that
I thought the basis of the labor trouble here was that Labor is alien
and can be not only exploited, but any attempt of alien Labor to rebel
is not tolerated. When I asked in Pittsburgh whether Labor had gained
anything by its Steel Strike in 1919, I was told emphatically “No”--to
which I replied that the English working man gains something every time
he strikes! The argument I was given was this: “They haven’t got to
work in the mills if they don’t want to----.” “No,” I said, “But can
you do without them?” “No----.”
Mary Vorse says, however, that I am wrong about its being alien Labor
that is exploited. She says that the American farmer in the west is not
treated any better.
They all admitted, however, that no such poverty or bad living
conditions existed in Pittsburgh, for example, as in London, Hull, New
Castle, etc. The English slums are probably the most tragic in the
world.
After lunch I went with Barry and Durant to his office. The feeling was
at once Moscow! I know so well the type of clerk in those offices. I
met all the staff, and saw some proofs which are publications in the
next number of the Magazine, SOVIET RUSSIA.
It is interesting that an old Philadelphia family belonging to
Rittenhouse Square should produce Kenneth: an ascetic Bolshevik with
an archaic face. A face that belongs to the woods, and a soul that
belongs to the world’s workers. It is not always working people and
worker’s conditions that produce revolutionaries and world reformers.
Reaction produces them. The intellectual free-thinker and free-observer
is driven out of his own sphere in spite of himself--human sympathy, a
sense of justice, added to a revulsion against the narrow prejudice,
the intense dullness of a social bourgeois class.
A society that’s purely social and not intellectual is dull all the
world over. In some countries its monotony is varied by its vice.
In this country it is less vicious (apparently) and more dull, less
intellectual, and more overwhelmingly conventional. No one with
imagination or spirit could help reacting from it. Kenneth and I are
reactionaries!
From a purposeless and equally conventional world, I went unexpectedly
to Russia. There I opened my eyes wide to a new, struggling, striving
humanity. Whatever I understood of it--and I admit I did not understand
much--it was obvious that this new world was pursuing an IDEA.
Right or wrong they were living selflessly, and were prepared for
every sacrifice. I never had known people before who would sacrifice
something for an ideal. I might have met them, without going to Russia,
but they didn’t exist in the circle by which I was hemmed in. In Russia
I became conscious that a great mass of oppressed people had risen to
struggle for light. I was impressed. I was appreciative, and after
awhile I was inspired. It was afterwards, when I came out of Russia
that my own world roused in me a reaction of rebellion. The intense
stupidity as well as the narrow-mindedness of my own class did their
work on me.
As for America! Since I landed I have been metaphorically slapped
and kissed alternately, until I’m so bewildered I have almost lost
judgment. Yet I claim nothing for myself but the right, as a citizen of
the world to be free, to think as I like, and to speak as I think. I
have the right that the man in the street has, to an opinion. Like the
man in the street, there is no reason why my opinion should carry more
weight or be treated with more consideration. But I claim the right to
be as sincere as that man.
Kenneth Durant, having finished the work he went to his office to do,
took me to tea with the Pinchots. Mr. Pinchot is a brother of Nettie
Johnstone,[1] and is supposed to be rather radical. I should have
said “poseur,” not radical. These people who have so much to lose (he
is reported rich) are not very seriously radical. There were some
reactionary women there and some undefinable men, so we all three sat
rather silent until at last in walked a large breezy person! It was
Charles Irvine, Editor of the Socialist paper, THE CALL. He
came and sat next to me, and was a great relief.
We talked a little of England and mutual friends. I told him my
difficulties about lecturing to capitalistic United States on a subject
as distasteful to them as Lenin and Trotzky! I told him about my empty
hall at Pittsburgh. He exclaimed that had he known me before I went
to Pittsburgh he would have filled my hall for me. If one kind of
people doesn’t want to hear you, get those that will.... He promises I
shall never have an empty hall again. On the way home in the bus were
two girls. One was discussing with the other her wedding dress; they
were diverted from their frivolous talk by headlines in an evening
paper of the person in front, “Soviet troops massing on the Georgian
frontier.” And one said, “I wonder what Soviet troops means--I know
what Bolsheviki means, but Soviet, what is that? I wish I could get
some one to explain.” The other said, “I don’t know what Soviet means,
but the Bolsheviks were named after a general called Bolsheviki.” “Yes,
of course,” said the other, “That was it, General Bolsheviki” ... and
they dismissed it and resumed their wedding dress talk. I suppose that
is pretty illustrative of general information concerning the Russian
subject....