THE STRIKERS.
Presently, as we were crossing Boston Common, absorbed in conversation, a
shadow fell athwart the way, and looking up, I saw towering above us a
sculptured group of heroic size.
"Who are these?" I exclaimed.
"You ought to know if any one," said the doctor. "They are contemporaries
of yours who were making a good deal of disturbance in your day."
But, indeed, it had only been as an involuntary expression of surprise
that I had questioned what the figures stood for.
Let me tell you, readers of the twentieth century, what I saw up there on
the pedestal, and you will recognize the world-famous group. Shoulder to
shoulder, as if rallied to resist assault, were three figures of men in
the garb of the laboring class of my time. They were bareheaded, and
their coarse-textured shirts, rolled above the elbow and open at the
breast, showed the sinewy arms and chest. Before them, on the ground, lay
a pair of shovels and a pickaxe. The central figure, with the right hand
extended, palm outward, was pointing to the discarded tools. The arms of
the other two were folded on their breasts. The faces were coarse and
hard in outline and bristled with unkempt beards. Their expression was
one of dogged defiance, and their gaze was fixed with such scowling
intensity upon the void space before them that I involuntarily glanced
behind me to see what they were looking at. There were two women also in
the group, as coarse of dress and features as the men. One was kneeling
before the figure on the right, holding up to him with one arm an
emaciated, half-clad infant, while with the other she indicated the
implements at his feet with an imploring gesture. The second of the women
was plucking by the sleeve the man on the left as if to draw him back,
while with the other hand she covered her eyes. But the men heeded the
women not at all, or seemed, in their bitter wrath, to know that they
were there.
"Why," I exclaimed, "these are strikers!"
"Yes," said the doctor, "this is The Strikers, Huntington's masterpiece,
considered the greatest group of statuary in the city and one of the
greatest in the country."
"Those people are alive!" I said.
"That is expert testimony," replied the doctor. "It is a pity Huntington
died too soon to hear it. He would have been pleased."
Now, I, in common with the wealthy and cultured class generally, of my
day, had always held strikers in contempt and abhorrence, as blundering,
dangerous marplots, as ignorant of their own best interests as they were
reckless of other people's, and generally as pestilent fellows, whose
demonstrations, so long as they were not violent, could not unfortunately
be repressed by force, but ought always to be condemned, and promptly put
down with an iron hand the moment there was an excuse for police
interference. There was more or less tolerance among the well-to-do, for
social reformers, who, by book or voice, advocated even very radical
economic changes so long as they observed the conventionalities of
speech, but for the striker there were few apologists. Of course, the
capitalists emptied on him the vials of their wrath and contempt, and
even people who thought they sympathized with the working class shook
their heads at the mention of strikes, regarding them as calculated
rather to hinder than help the emancipation of labor. Bred as I was in
these prejudices, it may not seem strange that I was taken aback at
finding such unpromising subjects selected for the highest place in the
city.
"There is no doubt as to the excellence of the artist's work," I said,
"but what was there about the strikers that has made you pick them out of
our generation as objects of veneration?"
"We see in them," replied the doctor, "the pioneers in the revolt against
private capitalism which brought in the present civilization. We honor
them as those who, like Winkelried, 'made way for liberty, and died.' We
revere in them the protomartyrs of co-operative industry and economic
equality."
"But I can assure you, doctor, that these fellows, at least in my day,
had not the slightest idea of revolting against private capitalism as a
system. They were very ignorant and quite incapable of grasping so large
a conception. They had no notion of getting along without capitalists.
All they imagined as possible or desirable was a little better treatment
by their employers, a few cents more an hour, a few minutes less working
time a day, or maybe merely the discharge of an unpopular foreman. The
most they aimed at was some petty improvement in their condition, to
attain which they did not hesitate to throw the whole industrial machine
into disorder."
"All which we moderns know quite well," replied the doctor. "Look at
those faces. Has the sculptor idealized them? Are they the faces of
philosophers? Do they not bear out your statement that the strikers, like
the working-men generally, were, as a rule, ignorant, narrow-minded men,
with no grasp of large questions, and incapable of so great an idea as
the overthrow of an immemorial economic order? It is quite true that
until some years after you fell asleep they did not realize that their
quarrel was with private capitalism and not with individual capitalists.
In this slowness of awakening to the full meaning of their revolt they
were precisely on a par with the pioneers of all the great liberty
revolutions. The minutemen at Concord and Lexington, in 1775, did not
realize that they were pointing their guns at the monarchical idea. As
little did the third estate of France, when it entered the Convention in
1789, realize that its road lay over the ruins of the throne. As little
did the pioneers of English freedom, when they began to resist the will
of Charles I, foresee that they would be compelled, before they got
through, to take his head. In none of these instances, however, has
posterity considered that the limited foresight of the pioneers as to the
full consequences of their action lessened the world's debt to the crude
initiative, without which the fuller triumph would never have come. The
logic of the strike meant the overthrow of the irresponsible conduct of
industry, whether the strikers knew it or not, and we can not rejoice in
the consequences of that overthrow without honoring them in a way which
very likely, as you intimate, would surprise them, could they know of it,
as much as it does you. Let me try to give you the modern point of view
as to the part played by their originals." We sat down upon one of the
benches before the statue, and the doctor went on:
"My dear Julian, who was it, pray, that first roused the world of your
day to the fact that there was an industrial question, and by their
pathetic demonstrations of passive resistance to wrong for fifty years
kept the public attention fixed on that question till it was settled? Was
it your statesmen, perchance your economists, your scholars, or any other
of your so-called wise men? No. It was just those despised, ridiculed,
cursed, and hooted fellows up there on that pedestal who with their
perpetual strikes would not let the world rest till their wrong, which
was also the whole world's wrong, was righted. Once more had God chosen
the foolish things of this world to confound the wise, the weak things to
confound the mighty.
"In order to realize how powerfully these strikes operated to impress
upon the people the intolerable wickedness and folly of private
capitalism, you must remember that events are what teach men, that deeds
have a far more potent educating influence than any amount of doctrine,
and especially so in an age like yours, when the masses had almost no
culture or ability to reason. There were not lacking in the revolutionary
period many cultured men and women, who, with voice and pen, espoused the
workers' cause, and showed them the way out; but their words might well
have availed little but for the tremendous emphasis with which they were
confirmed by the men up there, who starved to prove them true. Those
rough-looking fellows, who probably could not have constructed a
grammatical sentence, by their combined efforts, were demonstrating the
necessity of a radically new industrial system by a more convincing
argument than any rhetorician's skill could frame. When men take their
lives in their hands to resist oppression, as those men did, other men
are compelled to give heed to them. We have inscribed on the pedestal
yonder, where you see the lettering, the words, which the action of the
group above seems to voice:
"'We can bear no more. It is better to starve than live on the terms you
give us. Our lives, the lives of our wives and of our children, we set
against your gains. If you put your foot upon our neck, we will bite your
heel!'
"This was the cry," pursued the doctor, "of men made desperate by
oppression, to whom existence through suffering had become of no value.
It was the same cry that in varied form but in one sense has been the
watchword of every revolution that has marked an advance of the
race--'Give us liberty, or give us death!' and never did it ring out with
a cause so adequate, or wake the world to an issue so mighty, as in the
mouths of these first rebels against the folly and the tyranny of private
capital.
"In your age, I know, Julian," the doctor went on in a gentler tone, "it
was customary to associate valor with the clang of arms and the pomp and
circumstance of war. But the echo of the fife and drum comes very faintly
up to us, and moves us not at all. The soldier has had his day, and
passed away forever with the ideal of manhood which he illustrated. But
that group yonder stands for a type of self-devotion that appeals to us
profoundly. Those men risked their lives when they flung down the tools
of their trade, as truly as any soldiers going into battle, and took odds
as desperate, and not only for themselves, but for their families, which
no grateful country would care for in case of casualty to them. The
soldier went forth cheered with music, and supported by the enthusiasm of
the country, but these others were covered with ignominy and public
contempt, and their failures and defeats were hailed with general
acclamation. And yet they sought not the lives of others, but only that
they might barely live; and though they had first thought of the welfare
of themselves, and those nearest them, yet not the less were they
fighting the fight of humanity and posterity in striking in the only way
they could, and while yet no one else dared strike at all, against the
economic system that had the world by the throat, and would never relax
its grip by dint of soft words, or anything less than disabling blows.
The clergy, the economists and the pedagogues, having left these ignorant
men to seek as they might the solution of the social problem, while they
themselves sat at ease and denied that there was any problem, were very
voluble in their criticisms of the mistakes of the workingmen, as if it
were possible to make any mistake in seeking a way out of the social
chaos, which could be so fatuous or so criminal as the mistake of not
trying to seek any. No doubt, Julian, I have put finer words in the
mouths of those men up there than their originals might have even
understood, but if the meaning was not in their words it was in their
deeds. And it is for what they did, not for what they said, that we honor
them as protomartyrs of the industrial republic of to-day, and bring our
children, that they may kiss in gratitude the rough-shod feet of those
who made the way for us."
My experiences since I waked up in this year 2000 might be said to have
consisted of a succession of instantaneous mental readjustments of a
revolutionary character, in which what had formerly seemed evil to me had
become good, and what had seemed wisdom had become foolishness. Had this
conversation about the strikers taken place anywhere else, the entirely
new impression I had received of the part played by them in the great
social revolution of which I shared the benefit would simply have been
one more of these readjustments, and the process entirely a mental one.
But the presence of this wondrous group, the lifelikeness of the figures
growing on my gaze as I listened to the doctor's words, imparted a
peculiar personal quality--if I may use the term--to the revulsion of
feeling that I experienced. Moved by an irresistible impulse, I rose to
my feet, and, removing my hat, saluted the grim forms whose living
originals I had joined my contemporaries in reviling.
The doctor smiled gravely.
"Do you know, my boy," he said, "it is not often that the whirligig of
Time brings round his revenges in quite so dramatic a way as this?"