Reading the American Past: Printed Page 71

DOCUMENT 19–4

Walter Wyckoff Listens to Revolutionary Workers in Chicago

In 1891 Walter Wyckoff, a young man from Connecticut who had recently graduated from Princeton University, set off to walk across America and earn his living as a laborer. After two years on the road, Wykcoff, who went on to teach at Princeton, published a book about his experiences among working men. In the excerpt below, Wyckoff described his encounters with socialist and anarchist workers at meetings in Chicago. Wyckoff emphasized the ideological differences among radical workers as well as their shared bitterness about inequality and the hypocrisy and complacency of supporters of the status quo.

Among the Revolutionaries, 1898

By this time I had attended several of the Socialists' meetings, and had come to know personally a number of the members of the order. ... [One] I had learned to know was a near approach to my original preconception of a revolutionary. He was a Communistic Anarchist. ... It puzzled me not a little; for ... Socialism and Anarchy, as two schools of social doctrine, are at the very poles of hostile opposition to each other.

I soon learned that Socialist and Anarchist are not interchangeable terms, to be used with light indifference in describing the general advocate of revolution against established order. Indeed, to my great surprise, I found that a policy of active, aggressive revolution among these men had almost no adherents. Certainly none among the Socialists, for they repudiated the bare suggestion of violence as being wholly inadequate and absurd, and pinned their faith instead to what they called the “natural processes of evolution.” These [processes], to their belief, would ... work out the appointed ends with men, but their operation could be stimulated by education, they said, and helped on by organized effort toward the achievement of manifest destiny in the highly centralized and perfected order which is to result from the common ownership and administration by all the people of all land and capital used in production and distribution, for the common good of all.

And even among the Anarchists the upholders of a policy of bloody revolt against social order were rare. Most of those whom I came to know were distinctly of a metaphysical turn of mind. ... Their views, reduced to simplest terms [were] ... that “the cure for the evils of freedom is more freedom.” The removal of all artificial restraint in the form of man-made laws would result eventually, to their thinking, in a society as natural and as wholesome as is all physical order, which is the exact resultant of the free play of natural law.

It was the Socialist's conception of a highly centralized administration which drove the Anarchist into a frenzy of vehement antagonism. And it was the Anarchist's laissez faire ideal which roused the latent fighting-spirit of the Socialist. The Anarchist would maintain with stout conviction that centralized administration is already the core of the malady of the world, and that our need is for freedom in the absence of artificial limitations wherein natural forces can work their rightful ends. And the Socialist would retort, with rising anger, that it is from anarchy — the absence of wisely regulated system — that the world even now suffers most, and that the hope of men lies in the orderly management of their own affairs in the interests of all, and in the light of the revelations of science. They [the Socialist and Anarchist] were heartily at one in their dislike for what they were fond of calling the present “bourgeois society,” and for the existing rights of private property, which they regarded as its chiefest bulwark, but they parted company at once ... on the grounds of their dislike, and of their purposes and hopes for a regenerated state of things.

Such Anarchists were of the “Individualistic” type. Not all of those I met were so philosophical, however. The Communistic one ... notably was not. Very much the reverse. He was for open revolution to the death, and he made no secret of it. He had little patience for the slow pace of evolution believed in by the Socialists, but he had less ... for the lassiez faire conception of his brother Anarchists. At all events, I found him most commonly in the meetings of the [Socialists], where his revolutionary views were frowned down, but his invectives against society were tolerated in a spirit of free speech, and as being warranted by the evils of the existing state.

He was a German, of tall, muscular frame, erect, square-shouldered, well-poised, as a result of long service, most bitterly against his will, in the Prussian Army, and he hated kings and potentates and all government authority, with a burning hatred. ... He was a mechanic by trade, and a good one. ...

My acquaintance among the Socialists had not gone far before I began to observe that I was meeting men who, whatever their mental vagaries, were craftsmen of no mean order. They were machinists and skilled workmen mostly, and some were workers in sweat-shops. All of them had known the full stress of the struggle for bread, but they were decidedly not the inefficient of their class, having fought their way to positions of some advantage in the general fight. ...

[At a Socialist meeting to debate whether the Chicago World's Fair should be open on Sunday] Christianity was assailed [by the main speaker] as the giant superstition of historic civilization, still, daring, to the shame of high intelligence, to hold its fetich [superstitious] head aloft in the light of modern science. Its ministers were attacked as sycophantic parasites, whose only motive, in urging the closing of the Fair on Sunday, was the fear of the spread among working people of that enlightenment which will achieve the overthrow of capitalistic society and with it the tottering structure of the Church. ... The Romish [Catholic] Church, he said, keeps many of them in bondage yet, but the Protestant organizations have all but lost their hold upon them; and the widening gulf between the two great classes in society has left these churches in the nakedness of their true character, as mere centres of the social life of the very rich and of the upper bourgeoisie, and as a prop to the social order from which these idle classes so richly profit, at the merciless cost of the wage-earners. ...

The applause which greeted [the speech] was genuine and prolonged. ... [M]en began ardently to speak to this new theme: Modern Christianity a vast hypocrisy — a cloak made use of by vested interest to conceal from the common people the real nature of the grounds on which it stands. ...

At one moment an American workman was speaking, a Socialist of the general school of Social Democracy. ... The Christian Church served as well as any institution of the capitalistic order, he said, to measure the growing cleavage between the classes in society. But, to his mind, ... [the main speaker] had emphasized unnecessarily the existence of the bourgeoisie; for economically considered, there is no longer a middle-class. ... There remain simply the capitalists and the proletarians. The old middle-class, which had made its living by individual enterprise, was fast being forced (by the play of natural laws, which showed themselves in the increasing centralization of capital) out of the possibility of successful competition with aggregated wealth, and down, for the most part, to the level of those who can bring to their native qualities of physical strength, or manual skill or mental ability — proletarians, all of them, whether manual or intellectual, and coming surely, in the slow development of evolution, to a conscious knowledge of their community of interest as against the vested “right” of monopoly in the material interests of production. But athwart this path of progress rose the hardened structure of the Christian Church, bringing to bear against it all her temporal power and the full force of her accumulated superstitions. ...

[W]ith the fervor of his hate, [this speaker] cried out against the ministers of Christ, who preach to the wronged and downtrodden poor the duty of patience with their “divinely appointed lot,” and who try to soothe them to blind submission with promises of an endless future of ecstatic blessedness, when the rich of this world shall burn in the unquenchable fires of hell.

“Oh! The fiendishness of these men,” he shouted, “who hide from ignorant minds the truth, which they themselves know full well, that for no mortal man is there any heaven or hell which he does not realize in the span of his earthly history, and if he misses here the happiness to which he was rightly born, he misses it forever! And the miserable paltriness of their motive in working this cruel wrong — merely that they may exempt themselves from toil and live in comfort upon the labor of others, instead of being, where most of them belong, out in the open fields hoeing corn!” ...

The Communistic Anarchist [rose to speak in imperfect English]. ... “God a decaying myth, and the Bible a silly legend, and Jesus a good man seeing some human truth, but gone mad in the credulous ignorance of his age, and dead these two thousand years, and Christianity a hoary superstition, made use of in its last days by bourgeois civilization to stave off a little longer its own fateful day of reckoning! ...”

[At the conclusion of the meeting, the leader of the meeting said] he had been brought up under the influence of the Protestant religion, [but] he found himself in very little sympathy with modern Christianity. ... [H]e felt justified in judging in the light of every-day facts that Christianity was a failure. ...

“Let us take an illustration,” he went on. “A very urgent problem in our city [Chicago] just now is that of ‘the unemployed.' ... [W]ithin the city limits to-day, there are at least thirty thousand men out of work. There may be fifty thousand. ...

“And how does the Christian Church among us hold itself in relation to this problem? Its members profess themselves the disciples of ‘the meek and lowly Jesus,' whom they call ‘divine.' He said of Himself that ‘He had not where to lay his Head,' and He was the first Socialist in His teaching of universal brotherhood.

“His followers build gorgeous temples to His worship in our city, and out of fear, apparently, that some of the shelterless waifs [of the unemployed], whom He taught them to know as brothers and who are in the very plight their Master was, should lay their weary heads upon the cushioned seats, they keep the churches tight locked through the six days of the week, and then open them on one day for the exclusive purpose of praising that Master's name! Nor is this condition truer of Chicago than it is of any other large industrial centre in this country, or even in all of Christendom.” ...

[After the meeting] I found myself beside a young German mechanic ... [who] was a Socialist and was employed in a large factory. ... He was a Socialist of serene temperament, with boundless faith in the silent processes of development. ...

“There could be no propaganda in behalf of Socialism,” he said to me, “one hundredth part so effective as the unchecked activity of men who imagine themselves the bulwarks of social order and the bitterest foes of Socialism. We have no quarrel with the increasing centralization of capital. The opposition to ‘trusts' and the like comes mainly from the bourgeoisie, who feel themselves being forced out of independent business. We Socialists are already of the proletariat, and we see clearly that all trusts and syndicates are the inevitable forerunner of still greater centralization. The men who are employing their rare abilities in eliminating the useless wastes of competitive production, by unifying its administration and control, and so reducing greatly the cost of the finished article, and who are perfecting the machinery of transportation and distribution by like unity of administration, are doing far more in a year to bring about a co-operative organization of society than we could do by preaching the theory of collectivism, in a hundred years.

“The collectivist order of society may be distant, but, at least, we have this comfort — that the day of the old individualist, anarchical order is past. We can never return to it. The centralization of capital has proved the inadequacy of all that, in the present stage of progress. We have no choice but to go on to further centralization, and the logical outcome must be eventually, not the monopoly of everything by a few, but the common ownership of all land and capital by all the people.”

From Walter A. Wyckoff, The Workers: An Experiment in Reality (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1898), 210–36.

Questions for Reading and Discussion