THE CROWD AND TOM MANN
I dropped into the London Opera House the other night to see Tom Mann
(the English Bill Heywood), another hero or crowd spy-glass that people
have taken up awhile--thousands of them--to see through to what they
really want. I wanted to hear him speak, and see, if I could, why the
crowd had taken him up, and what it was they were seeing through him.
I am apt to take a dead set at liking a man I do not agree with, if I
can. It gives one a better start in understanding him and in not
agreeing with him to some purpose.
But it was not necessary to try to like Tom Mann or to make arrangements
for being fair to him. He came up on the platform (it was at Mr.
Hyndmann's Socialist rally) in that fine manly glow of his of having
just come out of jail (and a jail, whatever else may be said about it,
is certainly a fine taking place to come out of--to blossom up out of,
like a night-blooming cereus before a vast, lighted-up, uproarious
audience). It is wonderful how becoming a jail is to some people! Had I
not seen Mrs. Pethick Lawrence with the flush of Old Bailey on her cheek
only a little while before in Albert Hall?
If Tom Mann had had, like Elisha, that night, a fiery chariot at his
disposal, and had come down, landed plump out of heaven on his audience,
he could not have done half as well with it as he did with that little
gray, modest, demure Salford Jail the kind Home Secretary gave him.
He tucked the jail under his arm, stood there silently before us in a
blaze of light. Everybody clapped for five minutes.
Then he waved the air into silence and began to speak. I found I had
come to hear a simple-minded, thoughtless, whole-hearted, noisy,
self-deceived, hopelessly sincere person. He was a mere huge pulse or
muscle of a man. All we could do was to watch him up there on the
platform (it was all so simple!) taking up the world before everybody in
his big hands and whacking on it with a great rapping and sounding
before us all, as if it were Tommy's own little drum mother gave him. He
stood there for some fifteen minutes, I should think, making it--making
the whole world rat-a-tat-tat to his music, to Tommy's own music, as if
it were the music of the spheres.
Mr. Mann's gospel of hope for mankind seemed to be to have all the
workers of the world all at once refuse to work. Have the workers starve
and silence a planet, and take over and confiscate the properties and
plants of capital, dismiss the employers of all nations and run the
earth themselves.
* * * * *
I sat in silence. The audience about me broke out into wild, happy
appreciation.
It acted as if it had been in the presence of a vision. It was as if,
while they sat there before Tom Mann, they had seen being made, being
hammered out before them, a new world.
I rubbed my eyes.
It seemed to me precisely like the old one. And all the trouble for
nothing. All the disaster, the proposed starvation, and panic for
nothing.
There was one single possible difference in it.
We had had before, Pierpont Morgan, the Tom Mann of the banks, riding
astride the planet, riding it out with us--with all the rest of us
helpless on it, holding on for dear life, riding out into the
Blackness.
And now we were having instead, Tom Mann, the Pierpont Morgan of the
Trades Unions, riding astride the planet, riding it out with us, with
all the rest of us helpless on it, holding on for dear life, riding out
into the Blackness.
Of course Pierpont Morgan and Tom Mann are both very useful as crowd
spy-glasses for us all to see what we want through.
But is this what we want?
Is it worth while to us, to the crowd, to all classes of us, to have our
world turned upside down so that we can be bullied on it by one set of
men instead of being bullied on it by another?
This is the thing that the Crowd, as it takes up one hero after the
other, and looks at the world through him, is seeing next.
Some of us have seen sooner than the others. But we are nearly all of us
seeing to-day. We have stood by now these many years through strikes and
rumours of strikes, and we have watched the railway hold-ups, the
Lawrence Mill strike, and the great English coal strike. We have seen,
in a kind of dumb, hopeful astonishment, everybody about us piling into
the fray, some fighting for the rights of labour and some for the rights
of capital, and we have kept wondering if possibly a little something
could not be done before long, possibly next year, in behalf of the
huge, battered, helpless Public, that dear amorphous old ladylike Person
doddering along the Main Street of the World, now being knocked down by
one side and now by the other. It has almost looked, some days, as if
both sides in the quarrel--Capital and Labour, really thought that the
Public ought not to expect to be allowed to be out in the streets at
all. Both sides in the contest are so sure they are right, and feel so
noble and Christian, that we know they will take care of themselves; but
the poor old Lady!--some of us wonder, in the turmoil of Civilization
and the scuffle of Christianity, what is to become of Her.
Is it not about time that somebody appeared very soon now who will make
a stand once and for all in behalf of this Dear Old Lady-Like Person?
Is it really true that no one has noticed Her and is really going to
stand up for Her--for the old gentle-hearted Planet as a Whole?
We have our Tom Mann for the workers, and we have the Daily
Newspaper--the Tom Mann of Capital, but where is our Tom Mann for
Everybody? Where is the man who shall come boldly out to Her, into the
great crowded highway, where the bullies of wealth have tripped up her
feet, and the bullies of poverty have thrown mud in her face, where all
the little mean herds or classes one after the other hold Her up--the
scorners, and haters, and cowards, and fearers for themselves, fighting
as cowards always have to fight, in herds ... where is the man who is
going to climb up alone before the bullies of wealth and the bullies of
poverty, take his stand against them all--against both sides, and dare
them to touch the dear helpless old Lady again?
When this man arises--this Tom Mann for Everybody--whether he slips up
into immortality out of the crowd at his feet, and stands up against
them in overalls or in a silk hat, he will take his stand in history as
a man beside whom Napoleon and Alexander the Great will look as toys in
the childhood of the world.
* * * * *
We are living in a day when not only all competent-minded students of
affairs, but the crowd itself, the very passers-by in the streets, have
come to see that the very essence of the labour problem is the problem
of getting the classes to work together. And when the crowd watches the
labour leader and sees that he is not thinking correctly and cannot
think correctly of the other classes, of the consumers and the
employers, it drops him. Unless a leader has a class consciousness that
is capable of thinking of the other classes--the consumers and
employers, so shrewdly and so close to the facts that the other classes,
the consumers and the employers, will be compelled to take him
seriously, tolerate him, welcome him, and coöperate with him, the crowd
has come at last to recognize promptly that he is only of temporary
importance as a leader. He is the by-product of one of the illusions of
labour. When the illusion goes he goes.
Capital has been for some time developing its class consciousness.
Labour has lately been developing in a large degree a class
consciousness.
The most striking aspect of the present moment is that at last, in the
history of the world, the Public is developing a class consciousness.
The Crowd thinks.
And as from day to day the Crowd thinks--holds up its little class
heroes, its Tom Manns and Pierpont Morgans, and sees its world through
them--it comes more and more to see implacably what it wants.
It has been watching the Tom Mann, or Bill Heywood type of Labour
leader, for some time.
There are certain general principles with regard to labour leaders that
the crowd has come to see by holding up its heroes and looking through
them, at what it wants. The first great principle is that no man needs
to be taken very seriously, as a competent leader of a great labour
movement who is merely thinking of the interest of his own class.
The second general principle the Crowd has come to see, and to insist
upon--when it is appealed to (as it always is, in the long run) is that
no labour leader needs to be taken very seriously or regarded as very
dangerous or very useful--who believes in force.
A labour leader who has such a poor idea that a hold-up is the only way
he can express it--the Crowd suspects. The only labour leaders that the
Crowd, or people as a whole, take seriously are those that get things
by thinking and by making other people think.
The Crowd wants to think.
The Crowd wants to decide.
And It has decided to decide by being made to think and not by being
knocked down.
It is not precisely because the Crowd is not willing to be knocked down,
and has not shown itself to be over and over again, when it thought its
being knocked down might possibly help in a just cause.
But it has not been through coal strikes, Industrial Workers of the
World, and syndicalist outbreaks for nothing.
It is not the knocking down indulged in by labour and by capital that
the Crowd fears.
It is the not-thinking.
The Crowd has noticed that the knocking-down disposition and the
not-thinking disposition go together.
The Crowd has watched Force and Force-people, and has seen what always
happens after a time.
It has come to see that people who have to get things by force and not
by thinking will not be able to think of anything to do with the things
when they get them.
So the Crowd does not want them to get them.
The Crowd has learned all this even from the present owners of things.
It does not want to learn them all over again from new ones. The present
owners of things have got them half by force, and that is why they only
half understand how to run them.
But they do half understand because they only half believe in force. The
crowd has seen them get their supremacy by the use of the
employment-hold-up, or by starving or threatening to starve the workers.
And now it sees the Syndicalist workers proposing to get control by
starving or threatening to starve everybody. Of the two, those who
propose to starve all the people to get their own way, and those who
threaten to starve part of the people, it has seemed to the Crowd,
naturally, that those who only half believe in starving, and who only
starve a part of us, would be likely to be more intelligent as
world-runners.
In other words (accepting for the sake of argument the worst possible
interpretation of the capitalist class), they have spent several years
in learning, and have already half learned that force in industry is
inefficient and cannot be made to work.
Now when the Crowd sees the Syndicalists swinging their hats in a
hundred nations, with one big hoarse hurrah around a world, with five
minutes' experience, come rushing in, and propose to take up the
world--the whole world in two minutes more and run it in the same old
bygone way--the way that the capitalists are just giving up--by
force--it knows what it thinks.
It thinks it will fight Class Syndicalism. It makes up its mind it will
fight Class Syndicalism with Crowd Syndicalism. It has decided that, in
the interests of all of us, of a crowd civilization, of what we call the
world or Crowd Syndicate, its industries should be controlled, not by
the owners and not by the workers, but by those men, whoever they are,
who can control them with the most skill and efficiency.
The Crowd has come to see that the present owners--judging from current
events, and taking them as a whole, and speaking impersonally and
historically--have proved themselves, on the whole, incompetent to
control industries with skill and efficiency, because they have treated
labour as the natural enemy of capital and have quarrelled with it. It
sees that the present workers, acting as syndicates or otherwise, are
incompetent to own and control and manage industry because they propose
to treat capital as the natural enemy of the workers. There has been but
one conclusion possible. If Civilization or the Crowd Syndicate has a
right to have its industries managed in the interests of all, and if
the present owners have proved themselves to be mentally incompetent to
control industry because they fight labour, and if the present labourers
as a class have proved themselves to be mentally incompetent because
they propose to fight capital, there is naturally but one question the
crowd syndicate is asking to-day, namely, _"Are there any mentally
competent business firms at all in the world, any firms whose owners and
labourers have thought out a way of not fighting?"_ From the point of
view of the Crowd, the men who are competent, who know how to do their
work, do not have to lay down their tools and find out all over again
how to do their work. They know it and keep doing it.
So the Crowd keeps coming back with the question, "Are there or are
there not any competent business establishments in our modern life?
Which are they, and where are they?" We want to know about them. We want
to study them. We want to focus the thought of the world on them and see
how they do it.
The answering of this question is what the next Pierpont Morgan and the
next Tom Mann are for.
What the next Pierpont Morgan is for is to find out for us who the
competent employers are--the employers who can get twice as much work
out of their labour as other employers do--recognize them, stand by them
and put up money on them. The next Pierpont Morgan will find out also
who the incompetent employers are, recognize them, stand out against
them, and unless they have brains enough or can get brains enough to
coöperate with their own workmen, refuse to lend money to them.
This would make a banker a statesman, would make banking a great and
creative profession, shaping the destinies of civilizations, determining
with coins back and forth over a counter the prayers and the songs, the
very religions of nations, and swinging like a pendulum the fate of the
world.
The first Pierpont Morgan has made himself, in a necessary transitional
movement, a hero in the business world because of a certain moral energy
there is in him. He has insisted in expressing his own character in
business. He would not send money to capitalists fighting capitalists,
and in a general way he has compelled capitalists to coöperate. The new
hero of the business world is going to compel capital not merely to
coöperate with capital, but to coöperate with labour and with the
public. And as Morgan compelled the railroads of the United States to
coöperate with one another by getting money for those that showed the
most genius for coöperation, and by not getting money for railroads that
showed less genius for it, so the next Pierpont Morgan will throw the
weight of his capital at critical times in favour of companies that show
the largest genius for building the mutual interests of capitalists,
employees, and the public inextricably into one body. He is going to
recognize as a banker that the most permanent, long-headed, practical,
and competent employers are those whose business genius is essentially
social genius, the genius for being human, for discovering the mutual
interests of men, and for making human machinery work.
There is a great position ahead for this hero when he comes. And I have
seen in my mind to-day thousands of men, young and old in every
business, in every country of the world, pressing forward to get the
place.
It is what the next Tom Mann is for--to find out for the Trades Unions
and for the public who the most competent workmen are in every line of
business, the workmen who are the least mechanical-minded, who have
shown the most brains in educating and being educated by their
employers, the most power in touching the imaginations of their
employers with their lives and with their work, and in coöperating with
them.
When the next Tom Mann has searched out and found the workmen in every
line of business who are capable of working with their superiors, and of
becoming more and more like them, he will make known to all other
workmen and to all other Trades Unions who these workmen are, and how
they have managed to do it. He will see that all Trades Unions are
informed, in night-schools and otherwise, how they have done it. He will
see that the principles, motives, and conditions that these men have
employed in making themselves more like their superiors, in making
themselves more and more fit to take the place of their superiors, in
making their work a daily, creative, spirited part of a great business,
are made so familiar to all Trades Unions that the policies of all our
labour organizations everywhere shall change and shall be infected with
a new spirit; and labouring men, instead of going to their shops the
world over, to spend nine hours a day in fighting the business in which
they are engaged, to spend nine hours a day in trying to get themselves
nothing to do, nine hours a day in getting nobody to want to employ
them, will work the way they would like to work, and the way they would
all work to-morrow morning if they knew the things about capital and
about labour that they have a right to know, and that only incompetent
employers and incompetent labor leaders year by year have kept them from
knowing.