JIMMIE HIGGINS TURNS BOLSHEVIK
I
Winter was coming, and the farm-workers moved to the cities; but
this year they did not go as down-and-out-o'-works--they went, each
man a little kink. Jimmie wandered into the city of Ironton, and got
himself a job in a big automobile shop at eight dollars a day, and
set to work agitating for ten dollars. It was not that he had any
need of the extra two dollars, of course, but merely because his
first principle in life was to make trouble for the profit-system.
The capitalist papers of this middle-Western metropolis were
furiously denouncing working-men who struck “against their country”
in war-time; Jimmie, on the other hand, denounced those who used
“country” as camouflage for “boss” and made the war a pretext to
deprive labour of its most precious right.
There was a Socialist local in Ironton, still active and determined
in spite of the fact that its office had been raided by the police,
and most of the party's papers and magazines barred from the mails.
You could always get leaflets printed, however; and if you could no
longer denounce the war directly, you could jeer at England's
exhibition of “democracy” in Ireland, you could point to the profits
of the profiteers, and demand conscription of wealth along with
conscription of manhood. Some American Socialists became almost as
subtle as that German rebel of pre-war days, who, desiring to
lampoon the Kaiser, wrote an account of the life of the Roman
Emperor Agricola, reciting his vanities and insane extravagances.
Late in the autumn came an event which should have troubed Jimmie
Higgins more deeply than it did. Along the Izonzo river the Italian
armies were facing the Austrians, their hereditary enemies; they
were at the end of a long, exhaustive, and for the most part
unsuccessful campaign, and the Italian Socialists at home were
carrying on precisely such a warfare against their own government as
Jimmie Higgins was carrying on in America. They were helped by the
Catholic intriguers, who hated the Italian government because it had
destroyed the temporal power of the Pope; they were helped by the
subtle and persistent efforts of Austrian agents in their country,
who spread rumours among Italian troops of the friendly intentions
of the Austrians, and of the imminence of a truce. These agents went
so far as to fake copies of the leading Italian newspapers, with
accounts of starvation and riots in the home cities, and the
shooting down of women and children. These papers were given out in
the Italian trenches, before a certain mountain-sector where the
Austrian troops had been fraternizing with the Italians; and then,
during the night, the Austrian troops were withdrawn, and picked
German “shock-troops” substituted, which attacked at dawn and drove
through the Italian lines, sweeping back the army along a
hundred-mile front, capturing some quarter of a million prisoners
and a couple of thousand cannon--practically all the Italians had.
That Jimmie Higgins did not pay more attention to this terrifying
incident was in part because he read it in the capitalist papers and
did not believe it; but mainly because his whole attention just now
was centred on Russia, where the proletariat was about to make its
bid for power. Now you would see how wars were to be ended and peace
restored to a distracted world!
The moderate Socialist government of Kerensky was pleading with the
capitalist masters of the Allied nations for a statement of their
peace terms, so that the workers of Russia might know what they were
fighting for. The Russian workers wanted a declaration in favour of
no annexations, no indemnities, and disarmament; on such terms they
would help fight the war, in spite of all the starvation and
suffering in distracted Russia. But the Allied statesmen would not
make any such declaration, and the Russian workers, backed by all
the Socialists of the world, declared that the reason was that these
Allied statesmen were waging an imperialist war--they did not intend
to stop fighting until they had taken vast territories from the
German powers, and exacted a ransom that would cripple Germany for a
generation. The Russian workers refused point-blank to fight for
such aims, and so in November came the second revolution, the
uprising of the Bolsheviki.
Almost their first action when they took possession of the palaces
and government archives was to publish to the world the secret
treaties which the rulers of England, France and Italy had made with
Russia. These treaties formed a complete justification for the
attitude of the Russian revolutionists--they showed that the Allied
imperialists had planned most shameless plundering; England was to
have the German colonies and Mesopotamia, France was to have German
territory to the Rhine, and Italy was to have the Adriatic coast,
and to divide Palestine and Syria with England and France.
And here was the most significant fact to Jimmie Higgins--these
enormously important revelations, the most important since the
beginning of the war, were practically suppressed by the capitalist
newspapers of America! First these papers printed a brief item--the
Bolsheviki had given out what they claimed were secret treaties, but
the genuineness of these documents was gravely doubted. Then they
published evasive and lying denials from the British, French and
Italian diplomats; and then they shut up! Not another word did you
read about those secret treaties; except for one or two American
newspapers with traditions of honour, the full text of those
treaties was given in the Socialist press alone! “And now,” cried
Jimmie Higgins to the working men in his shop, “what do you think of
those wonderful allies of ours? What do you think of those Wall
Street newspapers of ours?” Could any working-man who had such facts
put before him fail to realize that Jimmie Higgins had a case, and a
most important work in the world to do, in spite of all his unreason
and his narrowness?
II
Jimmie was now in the seventh heaven, walking as if on air. A
proletarian government at last, the first in history! A government
of working-men like himself, running their own affairs, without the
help of politicians or bankers! Coming out before the world and
telling the truth about matters of state, in language that common
men could understand! Disbanding the armies, and sending the workers
home! Turning the masters out of the factories, and putting
shop-committees in control! Taking away the advertising from the
crooked capitalist papers, and so putting them out of business! Our
little friend would rush to the corner every morning to get the
paper and see what had happened next; he would go down the street so
excited that he forgot his breakfast.
Jimmie had made a new acquaintance in Ironton; the little tailor,
Rabin, whose name was Scholem, which means Peace, had given him a
letter to his brother, whose name was Deror, which means Freedom.
Each afternoon when the automobile factory let out, Jimmie would get
an evening paper and take it to Deror's tailor-shop and the two
would spell out the news. By God, look at this! Did you ever hear
the like? The man in charge of the Bolshevik foreign office was a
Marxian Jew who had helped edit the Novy Mir, the revolutionary
paper which Scholem had read to Jimmie! He had been a waiter in the
Waldorf-Astoria hotel, and now he was giving out the secret
treaties, and issuing propaganda manifestoes to the international
proletariat.
The American capitalist press was full of lies about the new
revolution, of course; but Jimmie could read pretty well between the
lines of the capitalist press, and the few Socialist papers that
were still in business, and which he read at the headquarters of the
local, gave him the rest of what he wanted. To Jimmie, of course,
everything the Bolsheviki did was right; if it wasn't right it was a
lie. The little machinist knew that the Bolsheviki had repudiated
the four-billion-dollar debt which the government of the Tsar had
contracted with the bankers of France, and Jimmie knew perfectly
well what was the lying power of four billion dollars.
The American papers were shocked because the Russian Socialists were
deserting the cause of democracy, and giving Germany a chance to win
the war. The American papers called them German agents, but Jimmie
did not take any stock in such talk as this. Jimmie was familiar
with the “frame-up” as it is operated against the workers in
America. He saw that the first thing the Bolshevik leaders did was
to make an appeal to the revolutionary workers of Germany. The
Russian proletariat had shown the way--now let the German
proletariat follow! Literature was printed and shipped wholesale
into Germany, leaflets were dropped by aviators among the German
troops; and when Jimmie and Deror read that the German generals had
protested to the Russians against such practices, they laughed aloud
with delight. Well might the war-lords squeal; they knew what was
coming to them! And when in January Jimmie and Deror read of the
revolting of a brigade of German troops, and a strike of several
hundred thousand working men throughout Germany, they thought the
end was at hand. The little tailor got up in local Ironton and made
a motion that it take to itself the name “Bolshevik”--which motion
was carried with a whoop. And these American Bolsheviki went on to
consult with the labour-unions, suggesting that they should form
“shop-committees”, and prepare for the taking over of industry
a la Russe!
III
But something went suddenly wrong with the newly built revolutionary
steam-roller. The German military chiefs seized their strike-leaders
at home and threw them into jail, or shipped them off to the front
trenches to be slaughtered. By terrorism, shrewdly mixed with
cajolery, they broke the strike, and sent the grumbling slaves back
to their treadmill. And then the German armies began to march into
Russia!
It was the crisis to which Jimmie Higgins had been looking forward
ever since the war began. Tolstoi had taught that if one nation
refused to fight, it would be impossible for another nation to
invade it; and while Jimmie Higgins was no mystic or religious
non-resistant, he agreed in this with the great Russian. No workers
in an enemy army could possibly be brought to fire upon their
peace-proclaiming brothers!
And here at last was the test of the theory; here were German
Socialists ordered to march against Russian Socialists--ordered to
fire upon the red flag! Would they do what their masters, the
war-lords, commanded? Or would they listen to the clamorous appeals
of the international proletariat, and turn their guns against their
own officers?
All the world saw what happened; it saw the glorious revolutionary
machine, in which Jimmie Higgins had put all his trust, run into a
ditch and land its passengers in the mud. The German armies marched,
and the Socialists in the German armies did exactly what the
non-Socialists did--they fired upon the red flag, as they would have
fired upon the flag of the Tsar. They obeyed the orders of their
officers, like true and loyal Germans; they drove back the
Bolsheviki in confusion, taking their guns and supplies, and
destroying their cities; they led off the Russian women and children
into slavery, precisely as if they were Belgian or French women and
children, destined by the German Gott as the legitimate prey of
Kultur. They sacked Riga and Reval, they overran all the Eastern
portions of Russia--Courland, Livonia, Esthonia; they moved into the
rich grain country of Southern Russia, the Ukraine; they landed from
their ships and took Finland, wiping out the liberties of that
splendid people. They were at the gates of Petrograd, and the
Bolshevik government was forced to flee to Moscow. Of all which
military feats the German Socialist papers spoke with stern pride!
IV
Poor Jimmie Higgins! It was like the blow of a mighty fist in the
face; he was literally stunned--it was weeks before he could grasp
the full meaning of what was happening, the debacle of all his
hopes. And it was the same with Ironton's Bolshevik local; all the
“pep” was gone out of its proceedings. To be sure, some noisy ones
went on shouting for revolution the very next day--men, who had been
talking formulas for twenty or thirty years, and had no more notion
of a fact than they had of a pseudopodium. But the sensible men of
the group knew that their “St. Louis resolution” was being shot to
death over there in the trenches before Petrograd.
It was interesting especially to see Rabin. The common belief of
Americans was that a Jew could not be induced to fight; they told a
story about one who cried out to his son, asking why he was letting
another boy pummel him, and the son whispered in reply, “Keep still,
I got a nickel under my foot!” All through the war the Jewish
Socialists in America had been, next to the Germans, the most ardent
pacifists; but now here was a social revolution managed by Jews,
here was a Russian government which gave the Jews their rights for
the first time in history! So the little Jewish tailor stood up
before these American Bolsheviki, and with tears running down his
cheeks declared: “Comrades, I am already tru vit speeches; I am
going into dis var! I vill put myself vit de Polish Socialists, vit
de Bohemian Socialists--I fight de Kaiser to de death! So vill fight
every Jewish Socialist in de vorld!” And this was no mere
braggadocio--Comrade Rabin actually proceeded to shut up his
tailor-shop, and went away to join the “red brigade”, which was
being organized by the Jewish revolutionists of New York!
If the German war-lords had set out deliberately to ham-string the
American Socialists, to make it impossible for them to go on
demanding peace, they could not have acted differently. They dragged
the helpless Bolsheviki into a peace-conference at Brest-Litovsk,
and forced them to cede away all the territories that Germany had
taken, and on top of that to pay an enormous indemnity. They planned
to compel the new Russian government to become a vassal to the
Central Powers, working to help them enslave the rest of the world.
The German armies went through the conquered territories, stripping
them bare, robbing the peasants of every particle of food, beating
them, shooting them, burning their homes if they resisted. They gave
to the world such a demonstration of what a German peace would mean,
that everywhere free men set their teeth and gripped their hands,
and swore to root this infamous thing from out civilization. Even
Jimmie Higgins!
V
Yes, even Jimmie! He made up his mind that he would work as hard as
ever he could, and produce as many automobile-trucks as he could.
But alas, a man cannot be hounded and oppressed all his life, cannot
have hatred and rebellion ground into the deeps of his soul, and
then forget it over-night because of certain intellectual ideas,
certain new items that he reads in his paper. What happened to
Jimmie was that his mind was literally torn in half; he found
himself, every twenty-four hours of his life, of two absolutely
contradictory and diametrically opposite points of view. He would
vow destruction to the hated German armies; and then he would turn
about and vow destruction to the men at home who were managing the
job of destroying the German armies!
For these men were Jimmie's life-long enemies, and were no more able
to forget their prejudices over-night than was Jimmie. For example,
the lying capitalist paper which Jimmie had to read every morning!
When Jimmie had read a patriotic editorial in the Ironton Daily Sun,
it had become utterly impossible for him to help win the war that
day! Or the politicians, seeking to use the war-cry of democracy
abroad to crush all traces of democracy at home; to “get” the
radicals whom they hated and feared, and by means of taxes on
necessities and a bonded debt to put the costs of the war on to the
poor! Or the capitalists, making fervid speeches about patriotism,
but refusing to give up the whip-hand over their wage-slaves!
Jimmie Higgins was working in a factory, making automobile-trucks
for the armies in France; and the owners of the factory would not
let the men have a union, and so there was a strike. The bosses made
an agreement to take everybody back and permit a union, and then
proceeded treacherously to violate the agreement, getting rid of the
most active organizers on this or that transparent pretext. Jimmie
Higgins, trying to help with the skill of his hands to make the
world safe for democracy, was turned out of his job and left to
wander in the streets, because a big profit-seeking corporation did
not believe in democracy, and refused to permit its workers any
voice in determining the conditions of their labour! The Government
was trying to deal with emergencies such as this, to put an end to
the epidemic of strikes which was hindering the war-work everywhere;
but the government had not yet got its machinery going, and meantime
Jimmie's little feeble sprout of patriotism got a severe chill.
Jimmie got drunk and wasted a part of his money on a woman of the
street. Then, being ashamed of himself, and still plagued by the
memory of his dead wife and babies, he straightened up and resolved
to start life anew. He found himself thinking about Leesville; it
was the only place in the world where he had ever been really happy,
and now since Deror Rabin had gone East, it was the only place where
he had friends. How were the Meissners getting on? How was Comrade
Mrs. Gerrity, nee Baskerville? What was Local Leesville thinking
about Russia and about the war? Jimmie took a sudden resolve to go
and find out. He priced a ticket, and found that he had enough money
and to spare. He would take the journey--and take it in state, as a
citizen and a war-worker, not as a tramp in a box-car!