JIMMIE HIGGINS DEBATES THE ISSUE
I
The grey flood of frightfulness rolled over Belgium; and every
morning, and again in the afternoon, the front page of the Leesville
newspaper was like the explosion of a bomb. Twenty-five thousand
Germans killed in one assault on Liege; a quarter of a million
Russians massacred or drowned in the swamps of the Masurian Lakes;
so it went, until the minds of men reeled. They saw empires and
civilizations crumbling before their eyes, all those certainties
upon which their lives had been built vanishing as a mist at
sunrise.
Hitherto, Jimmie Higgins had always refused to take a daily paper.
No capitalist lies for him; he would save his pennies for the
Socialist weeklies! But now he had to have the news, and tired as he
was after the day's work, he would sit on his front porch with his
ragged feet against a post, spelling out the despatches. Then he
would stroll down to the cigar-stand of Comrade Stankewitz, a
wizened-up little Roumanian Jew who had lived in Europe, and had a
map, and would show Jimmie which was Russia, and why Germany marched
across Belgium, and why England had to interfere. It was good to
have a friend who was a man of travel and a linguist--especially
when the fighting became centred about places such as Przemysl and
Przasnyaz!
Then every Friday night would be the meeting of the local. Jimmie
would be the first to arrive, eager to hear every word the better
informed comrades had to say, and thus to complete the education
which Society had so cruelly neglected.
Before the war was many weeks old, Jimmie's head was in a state of
utter bewilderment; never would he have thought it possible for men
to hold so many conflicting opinions, and to hold them with such
passionate intensity! It seemed as if the world-conflict were being
fought out in miniature in Leesville.
At the third meeting after the war began, the prosperous Dr. Service
arose, and in his impressive oratorical voice moved that the local
should send a telegram to the National Executive Committee of the
party, requesting it to protest against the invasion of Belgium;
also a telegram to the President of the United States, requesting
him to take the same action. And then what pandemonium broke loose!
Comrade Schneider, the brewery-worker, demanded to know whether
Local Leesville had ever requested the National Executive Committee
to protest against the invasion of Ireland. Had the Socialist party
ever requested the President of the United States to protect Egypt
and India from oppression?
Comrade Dr. Service, who had remained on his feet, began a
passionate denunciation of the outrages perpetrated by the German
army in Belgium; at which Comrade Schneider's florid face turned
purple. He demanded whether all men did not know that France had
first invaded Belgium, and that the Belgians had welcomed the
French? Weren't all the Belgian forts turned toward Germany? Of
course! answered the doctor. But what of that? Was it a crime for a
man to know who was going to attack him?
The purple-faced brewer, without heeding this question, demanded:
Did not all the world know that the French had begun the war with an
aeroplane bombardment of the German cities? The Comrade Doctor, his
face also purpling, replied that all the world knew this for a tale
sent out by the German propaganda machine. HOW did all the world
know it? roared Schneider. By a cable-censorship controlled by
British gold?
Jimmie was much exicted by this dispute. The only trouble was that
he found himself in agreement with both sides, and with an impulse
to applaud both sides. And also he applauded the next speaker, young
Emil Forster, a pale, slender, and fair-haired youth, a designer in
the carpet-factory. Emil was one who seldom raised his voice in the
meetings, but when he did, he was heard with attention, for he was a
student and a thinker; he played the flute, and his father, also a
member of the local, played the clarinet, so the pair were
invaluable on “social evenings”. In his gentle, dispassionate voice
he explained how it was not easy for people in America to understand
the dilemma of the German Socialists in the present crisis. We must
remember that the Germans were fighting, not merely England and
France, but Russia; and Russia was a huge, half-civilized land,
under perhaps the most cruel government in the world. How would
Americans feel if up in Canada there were three hundred millions of
people, ignorant, enslaved, and being drilled in huge armies?
All right, retorted Dr. Service. But then why did not the Germans
fight Russia, and let France and Belgium alone?
Because, answered Emil, the French would not permit that. We in
America thought of France as a republic, but we must remember that
it was a capitalist republic, a nation ruled by bankers; and these
bankers had formed an alliance with Russia, the sole possible aim of
which was the destruction of Germany. France had loaned something
like four billions of dollars to Russia.
And then Schneider leaped up. Yes, and it was that money which had
provided the cannon and shells that were now being used in laying
waste East Prussia, the land of Schneider's birth!
II
The temper of both sides was rising higher and higher, and the
neutrals made efforts to calm the dispute. Comrade Stankewitz,
Jimmie's cigar-store friend, cried out in his shrill eager voice: Vy
did we vant to git mixed up vit them European fights? Didn't we know
vat bankers and capitalists vere? Vat difference did it make to any
vorking man vether he vas robbed from Paris or Berlin? “Sure, I
know,” said Stankewitz, “I vorked in both them cities, and I vas
every bit so hungry under Rothschild as I vas under the Kaiser.”
Then Comrade Gerrity, organizer of the local, took his turn.
Whatever they did, said Gerrity, they must keep their neutrality in
this war; the one hope of the world just now was in the Socialist
movement--that it would preserve the international spirit, and point
a war-torn world back to peace. Especially just now in Local
Leesville they must keep their heads, for they were beginning the
most important move in their history, the establishment of a weekly
paper. Nothing must get in the way of that!
Yes, said Comrade Service, but they would have to determine the
policy of the paper, would they not? Were they going to protest
against injustice at home, and pay no attention to the most flagrant
act of international injustice in the history of the world? Was a
working man's paper to say nothing against the enslavement of the
working men of Europe by the Kaiser and his militarist crew? He, Dr.
Service, would wash his hands of such a paper.
And then the members of the local gazed at one another in dismay.
Every man and woman of them knew that the prosperous doctor had
headed the list of subscribers for the soon-to-be-born Leesville
Worker with the sum of five hundred dollars. The thought of losing
this munificent contribution brought consternation even to the
Germans!
But there was one member of the local whom no menace ever daunted.
He rose up now--lean, sallow almost to greenness, with black hair
falling into his eyes, and a cough that racked him at every other
sentence. Bill Murray was his name; “Wild Bill”, the papers called
him. The red card he carried had been initialled by the secretaires
of some thirty locals all over the country. He had lost a couple of
toes under a tractor-plough in Kansas, and half a hand in a
tin-plate mill in Alleghany County; he had been clubbed insensible
in a strike in Chicago, and tarred and feathered in a free speech
fight in San Diego. And now he told the members of Local Leesville
what he thought of those tea-party revolutionists who pandered to
the respectability of a church-ridden community. “Wild Bill” had
watched the discussions over “Section Six”, the provision in the
constitution of the party against sabotage and violence; the very
same persons who had been enthusiastic for that bit of middle-class
fakery were now trying to line up the local for the defence of the
British sea-power! What the hell difference did it make to any
working man whether or not the Kaiser got a railroad to Bagdad? Of
course, if a man had been to school in Britain, and had a British
wife, and felt himself a British gentleman--you could feel the
shudder that went through the gathering, for everyone knew that this
was Dr. Service--all right, let that man take the first ship across
the ocean and enlist; but let him not try to turn an American
Socialist local into a recruiting-agency for British landlords and
aristocrats.
This brought to his feet Comrade Norwood, the young lawyer who had
helped to put through “Section Six” in the National Convention of
the party. If there were people so keen against this Section, why
couldn't they get out of the party and form an organization of their
own?
“Because,” answered Murray, “we prefer sabotage to striking!”
“In other words,” continued Norwood, “you stay in the local, and by
a campaign of sneering and personalities you drive your opponents
out!”
“This is the first meeting for some months that we have had the
pleasure of seeing Comrade Norwood,” said “Wild Bill”, with venomous
placidity. “Perhaps he knew that we were to be asked to raise a
regiment for Kitchener!”
And then again Comrade Stankewitz was on his feet, with distress in
his thin, eager face. “Comrades, all this vill not get us anyvere!
There is but vun question ve have to answer, are ve
internationalists, or are ve not?”
“It seems to me,” continued Norwood, “the question is, are we
anti-nationalists?”
“All right!” shrilled the little Jew. “I vill leave it so--I am an
anti-nationalist! Such must all Socialists be!”
“But I don't understand it so,” declared the young lawyer. “It is
easy for some who belong to a race which has not had a country for
two thousand years--”
“And who's dealing in personalities now?” sneered “Wild Bill”.
III
So matters went in Local Leesville. The upshot of the debate was
that Comrade Dr. Service declared that he washed his hands of the
Socialist Party from that time on. And the Comrade Doctor buttoned
his handsome black coat over his stately chest and stalked out of
the room. The greater part of the remainder of that meeting was
devoted to a discussion of him and his personality and his influence
in the local. He was no Socialist at all, declared Schneider, he was
an English aristocrat, or the next thing to it--his wife had two
brothers in the British Expeditionary Force, and a nephew already
enlisted in the Territorials, and a visiting cousin on the point of
setting out for Canada, as the quickest way of getting into the
mix-up. But in spite of all these damaging circumstances, the local
was not disposed to give up its most generous supporter, and Comrade
Gerrity, the organizer, and Comrade Goldstein of the Ypsels, were
constituted a committee to go and plead with him and try to bring
him back into the fold.
As for Jimmie Higgins, his problem was not so complicated. He had no
relatives anywhere that he knew of; and if he had any “country”, the
country had failed to make him aware of the fact. The first thing
the “country” had done for him was to put him into the hands of a
negro woman who fed him gruel and water and gave him no blanket in
winter. To Jimmie this country was an aggregation of owners and
bosses, who made you sweat hard for your wages, and sent the police
to club you if you made any kick. A soldier Jimmie thought of as a
fellow who came to help the police when they got hard pushed. This
soldier walked with his chest out and his nose in the air, and
Jimmie referred to him as a “tin willie”, and summed him up as a
traitor to the working-class.
And so it was easy for our little machinist to agree with the
Roumanian Jewish cigar-seller in calling himself an
“anti-nationalist”. It was easy for him to laugh and applaud when “Wild
Bill” demanded what the hell difference it made to any working man
whether or not the Kaiser got a railroad to Bagdad. He did not
thrill in the least over the story of the British Army falling back
step by step across France, and holding ten times their number of
invaders. The papers called this “heroism”; but to Jimmie it was a
lot of poor fools who had had a flag waved in their eyes, and had
sold themselves for a shilling to the landlords of their country. In
one of the Socialist papers that Jimmie read, there appeared every
week a series of comic pictures in which the working man was figured
as a guileless fool by the name of “Henry Dubb”. Poor Henry always
believed what he was told, and at the end of each adventure he got a
thump on the top of his nut which caused stars to sprout over the
page. And of the many adventures of Henry Dubb, the most absurd were
when he got himself into a uniform. Jimmie would cut these pictures
out and pass them round in the shop, and among his neighbours in the
row of tenement-shacks where he lived.
Nor did it make much difference in Jimmie's feelings when he read of
German atrocities. To begin with, he did not believe in them; they
were just a part of the poison-gas of war. When men were willing to
stab one another with bayonets, and to blow one another to pieces
with bombs, they would be willing to lie about one another, you
might be sure; the governments would lie deliberately, as one of the
ways of making the soldiers fight harder. What? argued Jimmie: tell
him that Germans were a lot of savages? When he lived in a city with
hundreds of them, and met them all the time at the local?
Here, for instance, was the Forster family; where would you find a
kinder lot of people? They were much above Jimmie in social
standing--they owned their own house and had whole shelves full of
books, and a pile of music as high as yourself; but recently Jimmie
had stopped on a Socialist errand, and they had invited him in to
supper, and there was a thin, worn, sweet-faced little woman, and
four growing daughters--nice, gentle, quiet girls--and two sons
younger than Emil; they had a pot-roast of beef, and a big dish of
steaming potatoes, and another of sauerkraut, and some queer pudding
that Jimmie had never heard of; and then they had music--they were
fairly dippy on music, that family, they would play all night if you
would listen, old Hermann Forster with his stout, black-bearded
face turned up as if he were seeing Heaven. And you wanted Jimmie to
believe that a man like that would carry a baby on a bayonet, or
rape a girl and then cut off her hands!
Or there was Comrade Meissner, a neighbour of Jimmie's, a friendly
little chatter-box of a man who was foreman-in-charge of a dozen
women from as many different races of the earth, packing bottles in
the glass-works. The tears would come into Meissner's pale blue eyes
when he told how he was made to drive these women, sick, or in the
family way, or whatever it might be. And remember, it was an
American superintendent and an American owner who gave Meissner his
orders--not a German! The little man could not quit his job, because
he had a brood of children and a wife with something the matter with
her--nobody could tell what it was, but she took all kinds of patent
medicines, which kept the family poor. Sometimes Lizzie Higgins
would go over to see her, and the two would sit and exchange ideas
about ailments and the prices of food; and meantime Meissner would
come over to where Jimmie was minding the Jimmie babies, and the two
would puff their cobs and discuss the disputes between the
“politicians” and the “direct actionists” in the local. And you
wanted Jimmie to believe that men like Meissner were standing old
Belgian women against the walls of churches and shooting them full
of bullets!
IV
But as the weeks passed, the evidence of atrocities began to pile
in, and so Jimmie Higgins was driven to a second line of defence.
Well, maybe so, but then all the armies were alike. Somebody told
Jimmie the saying of a famous general, that war was hell; and Jimmie
took to this--it was exactly what he wanted to believe! War was a
return to savagery, and the worse it became, the better Jimmie's
argument went. He was not interested in men's efforts to improve
war, by agreeing that they would kill in this way but not in that
way, they would kill this kind of people but not that kind.
These ideas Jimmie got from his fellow members in the local, and
from the Socialist papers which came each week and from the many
speakers he heard. These speakers were men and women of burning
sincerity and with a definite and entirely logical point of view.
Whether they talked about war, crime, prostitution, political
corruption, or any other social evil, what they wanted was to tear
down the old ramshackle structure, and to put in its place something
new and intelligent. You might possibly bring them to admit slight
differences between capitalist governments but when it came to a
practical issue, to an action you found that to these people all
governments were alike--and never so much alike as in war-time!
Nor was there ever such need for Socialist protest! Very quickly it
became apparent that it was not going to be an easy matter for
America to keep out of this world-vortex. Because American working
men did not get a living wage, and could not buy what they produced,
there was a surplus product which had to be sold abroad; so the
business of American manufacturers depended upon foreign
markets--and here suddenly were all the principal trading nations of the
world plunging in to buy all the American products they could, and to
keep their enemies from buying any at all.
A woman speaker came to Leesville a shrewd little body with a sharp
tongue, who had these disputes figured out, and gave them in
dialogue, as in a play. Kaiser Bill says, “I want cotton” John Bull
says, “You shan't have it.” Uncle Sam says, “But he has a right to
have it. Get out of the way, John Bull.” But John Bull says, “I will
hold up your ships and take them into my ports.” Uncle Sam says,
“No, no! Don't do that!” But John Bull does it. And then the Kaiser
says, “What sort of a fellow are you to let John Bull steal your
ships? Are you a coward, or are you secretly a friend of this old
villain?” Uncle Sam says, “John Bull, give me my German mail and my
German newspapers, at least. But John Bull answers, “You've got a
lot of German spies in your country--that's why I can't let you have
your mail. You can't have German papers because the Kaiser fills
them full of lies about me.” And the Kaiser says, “If John Bull
won't let me have my cotton and my meat and all the rest of it, why
don't you stop sending anything to him?” He waits a while, and then
he says, “If you won't stop sending things to that old villain, I'll
sink the ships, that's all.” And Uncle Sam cries, “But that's
against the law!” “Whose law?” says the Kaiser. “What sort of a law
is it that works only one way?” “But there are Americans on those
ships!” cries Uncle Sam. “Well, keep them off the ships!” answers
the Kaiser. “Keep them off till John Bull obeys the law.”
Put in this way the situation was easy for any Jimmie Higgins to
understand; and month by month, as the debate continued, Jimmie's
own point of view became clearer. He was not interested in sending
cotton to England, and still less in sending meat. He thought he was
lucky if he had a bit of meat twice a week himself, and it was plain
enough to him that if the fellows who owned the meat were not
allowed to ship it abroad, they might sell it in America at a price
that a working man could pay. Nor was that just greediness on
Jimmie's part; he was perfectly willing to go without meat where an
ideal was involved--look at the time and money and energy he gave to
Socialism! The point was that by sending goods to Europe, you helped
to keep up the fighting; whereas, if you quit, the fools must come
to their senses. So the Jimmie Higginses worked out their
campaign-slogan: “Starve the War and Feed America!”
V
In the third month of the war, disturbing rumours began to run about
Leesville. Old Abel Granitch had taken on a contract with the
Belgian government, and the Empire Machine Shops were going to make
shells. Nothing appeared about this in the local papers, but
everybody claimed to have first-hand knowledge, and although no two
people told the same story, there must be some basis of truth in
them all. And then, one day, to Jimmie's consternation, he heard
from Lizzie that the agent of the landlord had called and served
notice that they had three days to vacate the premises. Old man
Granitch had bought the land, and the Shops were to build out that
way. Jimmie could hardly credit his ears, for he was six city blocks
from the nearest part of the Shops; but it was true, so everyone
declared; all that land had been bought up, and half a thousand
families, children and old people, and sick people, men on their
death-beds and women in child-birth--all had three days in which to
move themselves to new quarters.
Let anyone imagine the confusion, the babel of tongues, the women on
their porches calling to one another, asking and giving advice! The
denunciations and the scoldings and the threats to resort to law!
The raids upon landlords, and how the prices went up! Jimmie hurried
off to Comrade Meissner, who had bought a house and was paying
instalments on it; Meissner, being a Socialist, did not try to
fleece him, but was glad to have help in making his payments. There
were no partitions in the garret which Jimmie rented, but they would
hang curtains and make do somehow, and Lizzie would use Mrs.
Meissner's stove until they could get something fixed upstairs. And
then to the corner grocery, to borrow a hand-cart and get started at
moving the furniture; for to-morrow everybody would be moving, and
you would not be able to get anything on wheels for love or money.
Until after midnight Jimmie and Meissner worked at transporting
babies and bedding and saucepans and chairs and chicken-coops piled
on the hand-cart.
And next morning at the shop, more excitement! It was four years now
that Jimmie had been in the employ of old man Granitch, and in all
that time he had done but one thing; standing in a vast room amid a
confusion of whirling belts and wheels, a roar and screech and
grumble and whirl that completely annulled one of the five senses.
There came in front of him, mechanically propelled, a tray full of
small oblong blocks of steel, which he fed, one with each hand, into
two places in a machine; the machine took these blocks, and rounded
off one end, and ground the rest a little smaller, and put a thread
on it, and it dropped into a tray on the other side, a bolt. Because
Jimmie had to watch the machine, and keep the oil-cups full, his was
classed as semi-skilled labour, and was paid nineteen and a half
cents an hour. Some time ago an expert had studied the process, and
figured that with labour at that price it was one-eighth of a cent
per hour cheaper to have the work done by hand than to instal a
machine to do it; and so for four years Jimmie had his job, standing
on one spot from seven to twelve, and again from twelve-thirty to
six, and carrying home every Saturday night the sum of twelve
dollars and twenty-nine cents. You might have thought that the huge
machine-works would have made it twelve-thirty for good measure;
but if so, you do not understand large scale production.
And now, all of an instant and without warning, Jimmie's precisely
ordered and habitual world came to an end. He was at his post when
the whistle blew, but the machinery did not move. And presently came
the Irish foreman with the curt announcement that the machinery
would never move again, at least not on that spot; it was to be
cleared out of the way, and new machinery set up, and they were to
fall to forthwith with wrenches and hammers and crow-bars to make a
new world!
So for a week they did; and meantime, every night as he went home,
Jimmie saw people's homes being wrecked--roofs falling in clouds of
dust, and gangs of men loading the debris into huge motor-trucks.
Before long they had got acetylene torches, and were working all
night-gangs of labourers who lived in tents on vacant lots outside
the city and kept their canvas cots warm with double shifts of
sleepers. Jimmie Higgins realized the dreadful truth, that in spite
of all the agitation of Socialists, the war had actually come to
Leesville!