leadership reveal about our literary generation? The questions are
swiftly answered. Even in an age of confused standards, there is
recognition of literary merit. Mr. Eliot’s clarity, it is true, is
achieved not by integrating the chaos that has bewildered us, but by
withdrawal. Yet to the men whom the cultural dissolution has frightened
and weakened (the majority of men), these limitations make him only more
acceptable. A long time ago, I wrote of what I called “the comfort of
the limit,” and explained its appeal to many types of mind lost in our
modern chaos. Only athletic souls can face a world that has become,
perhaps more than any other era, an overwhelmingly open and darkened
future. The temptation to limit this world, either by rationalistically
charting its future (a disguised reactionism) or by merely advocating
its reform in an image of the past, is great and manifold.
All the dogmatisms of our day are really such “limits”—such
simplifications of the real. There is the dogmatism of science (the
comfort of limiting reality and its mastery to problems of mechanics and
addition); there is the dogmatism of cynical despair (the comfort of
giving up hope and therefore struggle); there is the dogmatism of a
pseudo-Marxian dialectic (the comfort of explaining the human tragedy in
terms solely of a simple, solvable class struggle). And, for the weakly
poetic, there is the haven of an elegiac past, like Mr. Eliot’s, in
which great poets still sing and sure priests thunder.
The one way of life that has no limit and affords no comfort is the way
ahead—into the bitter and dark and bloody dawn of a new world, wherein
mankind shall integrate without loss the stormy elements that make the
chaos of our day, and its promise.
_1932_
FOUR: SOME PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS FOR THE SURVIVAL OF MAN
[Illustration: © _F. Allan Morgan, A.R.P.S._]
1. SOLIDARITY IS NOT ENOUGH
(_Notes written in the Great Textile Strike of 1934_)
a.
At dawn, they are all outside the mills: men, girls, mothers with
children. The huge structure, submerged in mist, leaps suddenly with
lights; the gates swing open; nobody goes in. The men talk in lively
groups, the mothers smile, the girls have put on their glad rags and
there is song in their throats. At the doors stand a few guards, glumly.
In half an hour, they swing the gates shut and the lights snap out. The
crowd of strikers, sure of its strength, strolls up the long flank of
the mill, stretches in the morning sun; idles down to the next mill
where stands another crowd before shut doors.
The strike has begun gaily. Men and women have joy of themselves in
their common purpose, like a young animal discovering the health of its
body.
Over on the North Side, before the open gates of a mill stands the crowd
of strikers. Half a dozen girls pass forward, their heads low, their
shoulders hunched. They are going to work. As the guards let them in,
women call after them: “Ain’t you ashamed!”; men mutter angry and then
ugly words. The thousand strikers understand the six disloyal girls; a
sharp doubt stirs in them all, particularly the women. “We need the
money too ... maybe they’re right. Maybe we’ll lose and only the girls
will win.... Rent ... milk ... coal ... winter coats for the children.”
The strikers are murmuring against their own fears ... the faithful
presence of poverty and cold ... which they see personified in the six
girls. The girls are at work now. The mill has become the form of their
betrayal, and of the fear of the strikers. Already the holiday mood is
gone.
b.
Fall River molders in the ruins of an industrial era. Small mills, built
like castles with Colonial windows and with ivy on the brick, have been
abandoned to the sweatshop rats. And the wood houses of the workers have
died into festering shanties, the streets rank as rotten teeth. A man
climbs the outside stair of one of these dead houses and enters a room
at dawn. A mother stands at the stove; three men bend over a mimeograph
machine in the far corner; and from two cots four children eagerly look
up at the comrade.
He takes a leaflet, reads it, and nods. “Here’s another we need at
once.” The children hear the words: “... the independent unions ...
because they hate the U.T.W. they won’t come out. We got to show ’em
that they must come out. We got to make ’em see, even if the A.F.L. did
doublecross ’em, we must stick together....”
The men huddle again over the mimeograph machine. One of them is
Portuguese, the first shaft of sun lights his fine hard mouth; another
is a French Canadian, lumberly, musical, a Northern spruce walking the
world. The man who has come in with the text of the new leaflet is a
Yankee with the lantern jaw and gangling limbs of his Puritan
forefathers.
“Here, you drink coffee first,” sings the mother.
“No time——”
“You drink coffee first,” she insists.
c.
Back in the South Side of New Bedford, five thousand strikers gather
round the bandstand in a park to hear their leaders. Near by the harbor
waters dance in the morning sun, dance up to the silent shadow of the
mills. But a little along there is a line of mills athrob with labor:
the great tire-fabric plants called the Fisk and the Devon, which
recognize no union and worked clear through the six months’ strike of
1928.
William Batty, chairman of the strike committee of the U.T.W., gets to
his feet. He is a burly fellow with a sharp nose and piercing eyes in
his red face. He praises the strikers, he praises the President, he
hurls his contempt and hate at the “Reds who are trying to make
trouble.” One gets the impression, as he talks, that the strike belongs
to him and to the other leaders: the workers are accessories and
servants. “Leave it all to us,” is the burden of his message.
“Washington”—sacrosanct word; “Strike headquarters in the Carpenters
Building”—a Temple which only U.T.W. leaders are good enough to enter.
The man has power, and has shrewdness. No doubt of that. Look at the
heavy shoulders, the thin-lipped mouth. But where does he belong? He is
standing on the bandstand a bit above the workers, he is talking a good
deal down to them: one hears, in the rumble of his hatred for communists
and shop committees, the echo of other voices, more shrewd, more potent:
voices of politics and Money.
After Batty comes Ferdinand Sylvia, U.T.W. organizer and local favorite,
who is running for State Representative on the Democratic ticket. A
little, passionate Portuguese he is, and clever; the hard black eyes are
nobody’s fool. How he praises the workers! “I’m proud of you. You’re
making history today. We got a great friend in the White House who will
help us against the bosses.... All you got to do is stick together.
We’ll go back to Washington and do the rest.” There is no personal
enthusiasm in the crowd for these leaders. But there is devotion to the
cause which these men lead; and above all, there is the will, tense and
a little wistful, to believe that they are truly leaders.
Sylvia speaks of the tire-fabric mills that are still working and
holding New Bedford from a 100 per cent tie-up. “Go down and picket,” he
cries. “Get ’em all out!” The mass, five thousand strong, moves quiet
down the harbor.
d.
A youth with the high forehead of a poet, the Socialist Minister Glen
Trimble, starts the picket line before the Fisk and Devon plants. Batty
waves the crowd on the opposite side of the street to join; a couple of
hundred men, women, girls, are soon patrolling. They are having a good
time. They sing “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf” and, in lesser
number, the old I.W.W. “Solidarity” song. Down from the windows peer the
workers who refuse to strike. In the eyes of some is a defensive
disdain: “If I can despise the strikers. I’ll not feel the need to join
them.” Others are torn in conflict. Some of the boys and girls look down
in veritable terror: not terror at the pickets, but at something in
themselves that holds them back ... that makes them fear to join their
sisters and their brothers. _Fear of their own fear_—the beginning of
wisdom.
I slip into the office and ask for the manager. He says he’ll talk to
me, provided I do not disclose his name for publication (I do not blame
him). The same stale line about his “happy family of workers,” and the
conscientious refusal to let “outside and alien organizers interfere in
our affairs.” “We figure,” he says, “we can run our plant best with our
own men. We give better minimum wages than NRA has asked for.”
“But,” I ask, “aside from the issue of wages, don’t you recognize a
democratic, an American, a human issue? Labor is struggling to organize,
like the bosses and business. Aren’t you working against the American
spirit by discouraging your men from getting together? You admit
conditions are bad in other mills. Why don’t you encourage these workers
to help their brothers by joining the same union?”
The managerial eye grows cold and blank; the hands twitch. Then,
obliquely: “I don’t get you. What good would it do if these men struck
with the others? If one is starving, is it better that two starve?”
I realize the hopelessness of making a class-bound man hear the theme of
loyalty and dignity in another class—in the class which he must exploit
and degrade in order to survive. I expected no better. But as I return
to the town center (while the pickets march) for a bite to eat, I find
that the waitress is on the side of the strikers; the barkeep across
from the best hotel, mixing me an excellent Tom Collins, says: “Sure,
the tire-fabric mills should strike!” and the garage mechanic who fills
my tank is warmly and openly with the strikers. This was not the case
four years ago at the last great strike. Even a cop on the corner
confidentially leans to me and says: “I guess the boys’ve got it!”
Up in the Labor Temple sits a little Scot, Abraham Binns, and runs the
works. Dispatches pickets to hesitant outlying mills; phones Washington,
puffs his pipe, and wonders, if Federal Relief backs down, where the
funds will come from to feed the strikers. A sincere old-timer, he is,
with a good eye for the detail of the battle and no vaguest notion of
what, _really_, the battle is about. A thirty-hour week, a minimum wage?
Sure! But that a world is breaking and has to be replaced by another
lest the heart of mankind perish?...
I ask him about the National Textile Workers Union.
“They’re communists,” he burrs, as if to say: “They’ve got the
smallpox.”
The workers think they can force the bosses to abolish the stretch-out.
Binns sees that, and he’ll fight for it, too. But he does not guess that
what the workers really want is to live, and _that they must create a
new world to live in_. What chance has such a leader against Capital,
the shrewdly conscious foe that knows, indeed, it is fighting _to live_
and for its world to live in?
e.
Yonder in Hazelwood Park, a young woman is talking: she knows what Binns
and Batty have never dreamed of.
It is dusk of the first day. Seventeen thousand of the twenty thousand
textile workers of New Bedford have come out; the exceptions being the
tire-fabric mills. The talker is Ann Burlak, organizer of the N.T.W.,
herself a weaver and the child of Ukrainian workers of Northern
Pennsylvania. The Boston and local papers have put the spotlight on Ann.
She is the “red flame”; she is reputed to be “in hiding in the tenements
of the South Side,” and the police announce they will run her in “on the
slightest provocation.”
Ann is a tall blond girl in her early twenties. Her body bespeaks
tenderness and grace; you feel that, were it not for a stronger love,
she’d spend a lot of her time dancing. The firm jaw, the clear eye, the
intelligent brow, make you understand why there’s so little time for
dancing. On the bandstand, all around her, is a bunch of kids. They
frolic about, none too silent, in the way of children; and I wonder how
she manages to keep her mind, and her hearers’ minds, on her subject.
The local N.T.W. organizer, Walter Burke, has the same concern; and he
tries to shoo away the kids. But he is far too gentle about it; the kids
refuse to go; and when Burke observes that they are not troubling Ann he
gives up. Then it comes to me, that far from disturbing this reputed
“fireeater,” the gathered children give Ann Burlak the appropriate
setting. Truly, she is speaking for them; of the gay young world they
can inherit, if their parent-workers know what they want, and fight for
it, and know how to fight.
How different her tone from the U.T.W. leaders who harangued their crowd
from the same stand! Ann Burlak appears to have faith in the workers and
to be pleading with them to take hold of their own battle. She has to go
easy. If she tells them straight what their leaders are up to, dickering
with politicians and capitalists, they will scare. If she tells them
straight what her motherly heart is full of: that the bosses cannot lose
under capitalism, that the workers under capitalism cannot win, they
will turn pale, and glance about them and cease to listen. It is a
subtle task, this leading of the ignorant American workers to the
realization of their own needs, of their own powers, of their own
nature. And Ann Burlak does it well. Gradually, unobtrusively, she draws
her hearers to the facts about “arbitration,” to the shortcomings of the
U.T.W., to the single devotedness of the slandered “Reds.” The men and
women listen. They have come, many of them, to have a look at the “red
flame”; a good show for nothing. “They say she’s hot stuff,” explain the
boys in the bench before me. Curiosity and frivolity fade, as the tall
young woman gives her sensible heart and her motherly mind to her
hearers. Mothers find themselves face to face with the truth: the bare
cupboards of their homes, the bare bodies, the bare futures, of their
children. Men see with their eyes what for long their hearts, despite
the palaver of journal and politics, have known: that they, the workers,
live in an enemy country! Latin, Slav or Yankee, they live in a land
possessed and ruled by foes who are sworn to exploit and to degrade
them.
At the close of her pleading to the workers to know themselves, to
respect themselves, to be themselves, Ann Burlak tries to lead them in
song. The men and women pitifully follow. And I am minded of the singing
at a camp meeting which I recently attended. How the words rang for
Christ’s second coming! Surely, had Christ been in his heaven, he must
have answered these splendid ringing voices. And the thought came: When
the workers of America learn to sing the coming of their world on earth
as their fathers, the Christians, sang for their world in heaven, the
Revolution will not tarry.
f.
It is midnight, after the first day. Around the Fisk and Devon mills,
gravid with lights and labor, stand battalions of police: the
comparatively kindly town constables with clubs and the sinister
khaki-clad motor-cops with guns in their holsters and tear gas in
reserve. On the park side are massed the strikers, a good ten thousand.
Glen Trimble harangues them.
“They won’t let us picket? We’ll see about that. All of you here at the
crack of dawn. And when the workers file in to work, we’ll have a picket
line for them to pass through.”
A Negro in the crowd, in a quiet penetrant voice, says: “Why wait till
tomorrow? Why not picket now?”
The crowd turns toward the mill; Trimble accepts the challenge. The
police clubs stop them. The picket line halts, wavers, turns. And its
repressed energy gathers in hands behind. Stones fly from the park side,
and smash the mill windows. The police press forward.
Seven hours later, huge shut vans roll up to the red buildings and
disgorge officers. Far off, beyond an empty lot, fully a fifth of a mile
from the mills, stands the crowd and boos as the tire-fabric workers
pass through to their jobs. Near the gates, they form hesitant knots. A
man stays behind, while his wife enters. A girl looks up at a bevy of
her sisters beckoning from a top mill window, grasps her bag and joins
them. The police, guns swinging, slide across the empty lot, and the
workers fade in the grey background of the harbor.
“There’ll be no picket line,” shouts the police chief at Batty and
Sylvia. “We had enough last night. Look at them windows. Just you let
your men come up, and we’ll take care of ’em.”
But while the clubs and the guns mass at the Devon side of the huge
block, and the crowds die before them, another corps of workers comes to
birth on the farther slope of the mills; a line forms ... marches.
The sun rises, the mill throbs. The clusters of hesitant workers have
vanished, either inside to the machines or away. Suddenly, a gate swings
open. The crowd rises in voice: “THEY’RE COMING OUT”: and forward, four
abreast, march the Fisk workers to join their brothers and sisters.
Sylvia crows like a cock. “I’m proud of you!” And to Mary Vorse and me:
“Tell ’em in Washington and New York, New Bedford has the world’s best
workers.” Even the cops smile. The walk-out is 100 per cent. Now
what?...
I think of the heroic tiny groups of revolutionary organizers throughout
the nation: individuals, isolated, threatened, resourceless save for
their own luminous spirit. Pleading with the workers, against the
workers, to know themselves, to be themselves, to fight the good fight;
while the official leaders and the pack of papers and the towns and the
churches vomit their fear of the new world in the form of insults and
lies. Workers, like everyone else, get the leaders they deserve. The
workers are pitifully ignorant. Ignorance is the mother of misleaders.
I think of the great show of strength that the Textile Strike—like San
Francisco yesterday—has summoned. And, while Ignorance is in the saddle,
of the inevitable betrayal!
When the American workers _know_ what they are, there’ll be a different
story.
That is the task of all young men and women: let thousands, each in his
own way, go among the people, and humbly, quietly explain the cause of
Life, which is the cause of Revolution.
Solidarity is not enough.[13]
2. WITH MARX, SPINOZA....
a.
This essay would not have been written at this hour had it not been for
the dark hour of the German Jews. But their catastrophe is the
deepening, within the crisis of the world, of a threat that for two
centuries has gathered against Jewry. Judaism has never solved the
challenge of the modern world; and this challenge is now a crisis—one of
those historic crises from which Jewry must be reborn, if at all,
through the threshold of death.
I do not stop to swell the lamentations that the fate of half a million
highly cultured Jews has aroused in all sane people. My object is more
stern. It is to analyze the response of the Jews in the United States to
Hitler: to expose and study from the response certain traits of modern
Jewry. There has been, in all the tears and rage, one constant refrain.
“Why are we persecuted?” cry the leaders. “We are not different from you
Gentiles—not in any point of thought, conduct or allegiance, that
_counts_. In Germany, we are good Germans; in America, we are good
Americans. There is no reason for this persecution.” Now, Jews have
often suffered persecution; although I suspect never by such ruthlessly
efficient methods as the German. But Jews have always known why they
were maltreated. It was because they were different; in thought, in
conduct, in allegiance, in all that counted, a peculiar people. It was
because they were Jews. This might cause great sacrifice. But since
Jewishness was the treasure of their lives, source of their beauty and
joy, they deemed even the price of persecution not too great to pay for
being Jewish. They took the persecution for granted, meeting it as
shrewdly as they could. The stress of their energy and will was focused,
not on avoiding or denying reasons for persecution, but on being Jews.
Here, then, is an enormous difference. For the first time in a history
of three thousand years, the leaders of Jewry do not know why they are
persecuted: for the first time they disclaim any reason for persecution.
This sheds new light on the German Jewish disaster. Are these half
million victims to be considered undifferentially as suffering human
beings? Then they deserve no more pity and help—no more and, of course,
no less—than the millions of other sufferers of our dark age: than the
Negroes of our South, for instance; than the countless families broken
by unemployment; than the communists whom Hitler and the Balkan sadists
are torturing and maiming. But such pooled pity does not satisfy the
Jewish leaders. In their appeals and reports they are careful to
separate their cause from others. They imply that German Jewry calls for
more than its quantitative share of the concern of a world riven with
anguish; they assume, indeed, that a great people, whose value to
mankind is high, is being menaced. Now this claim, on the evidence of
the past, can be denied by no intelligent man. The Jews have through the
centuries made contributions to the Western world that are inestimable,
and organic. But are not the contemporary leaders confused in time?
Should the Jews be saved today for what they were in the past? Such a
plea runs counter to all natural law. What is there _alive_ in
contemporary Jewry to distinguish it from any other quantitative group
of human beings?
The answer, alas! is, there is nothing. There are still, it is true,
traditional Jewish communes in Eastern Europe and North Africa. But we
do not hear from them; they provide no Jewish leaders. Indeed, the
modern world no longer gives them nurture or function, and they are
doomed by their own archaic form. The Jewry that protests against
Hitlerism and is menaced by it the world over, and that assumes its past
worth as argument for its present survival, is a “progressive” Jewry,
freed from that past. It is the Jewry that cries: Why are we persecuted?
Let us examine it, then, for Jewishness—and in its most prosperous
member, the Jews of the United States.
First, I must define the Jew; and this, fortunately, can be done without
raising the old problems of race and nation. To be a Jew has always
meant _to live a certain way of life_: a way which, evolving with the
ages and with the cultural-economic conditions of the lands, was yet an
organic growth from a single tradition. This tradition was one; and the
Jewish groups made it organic with their lives. Other nations had
prophets, the Jews enacted theirs. Other nations had arts, the Jews
lived theirs. Other peoples had high standards for personal, communal
and cosmic relations: the Jews, by the minutiae of their 613
commandments, made flesh and bone of their vision of the divine and the
eternal. The defining Jewish trait is _unification_ of values, personal
and communal, into an organic body of behavior. The defining Jewish term
is _action_.
The Jewish principle—unity of value and deed, harmony of person and
group—has always had a dual form. That the values of the person shall be
fulfilled in the community, there must be _social justice_. And that
within the cosmos there shall be preserved and furthered the values of
men and of Man, there must be _God_. Social justice, of course, was an
aspiration limited by the economy of the particular land and
era—limited, that is, by _possibility_. What did God mean to the Jew? At
first by miracle and confusedly, then rationally, God meant the dynamic
immanence, in the world of matter and of man, of what the person most
deeply recognized as his own truth and worth. God meant the principle of
order, the will to unity, in an otherwise chaotic multiverse. God meant
_value in Being_. The Jews, as a people, were the first to understand
that this Value-in-Being could not be abstract, not diffuse, not
impersonal, although it transcended individuals; but was myriadly
focused and fleshed in human lives. This means that for the Jew every
man and woman holds a purposive and creative place in life’s dynamic
process.