Tag: words

Still poring through Si Gerson’s books, I’m having fun playing labor historian, although I’m not sure who’s benefiting (a young comrade in another forum complained, “this post seems like a big name drop…I don’t really need to read the words of dead men to know how I think society ought to be structured.”). I came across a fascinating observation about William Z. Foster in Nat Hentoff’s lamentably brief biography of A.J. Muste.

Muste is best known as a pacifist, a leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the War Resisters League, who mentored Bayard Rustin, David McReynolds and scores of other activists committed to nonviolent resistance and was a leading light of the opposition to nuclear armaments and the early stages of the Vietnam War (he died in 1967). He had quite the interesting biography before all that. A protestant minister who quit his congregation to resist the first World War, he became a labor activist and leader of the failed Amalgamated Textile Workers union following the second Lawrence strike, headed up the radical Brookwood Labor College in the 1920’s and became a leading Trotskyite in the 1930’s. Here is where the Muste story gets particularly juicy and weird. Apparently, in 1936 Muste set sail for Europe to meet with the exiled Russian revolutionary. When he returned, he spoke little of the meeting but was no longer a Trotskyite and instead had returned to Christian pacifism.

Hentoff unfortunately skims over the details of Muste’s labor activism. That’s a great disappointment because while I am familiar with Muste’s pacifist work, I was shocked to find venomous denunciation of “the Musteites” in so many Communist Party-related publication starting around the mid-1920’s while researching Michael J. Obermeier, Foster and others. That’s why this observation from Muste about Foster’s visit to Brookwood in 1923 is so tantalizing and frustrating:

“One of the questions in the minds of all labor activists at that time was whether Bill had joined the Communist Party. He sought to create the impression that he had not. I have carried with me all through the years a vivid recollection of that day nearly forty years ago. I have lived it over again at fairly frequent intervals since. It was a feeling of uneasiness, certainly not of hostility in the personal sense. I felt there was a human being inside him, but that it was under restraint, hidden somewhere. The element of straightforwardness was now lacking. There he was, over there, and here I was. It would remain so.”

William Z. Foster also had an interesting biography. He was a brilliant union organizer and tactician. It is on the one hand incredibly impressive and, on the other, terribly pathetic, that articles and plans that the man wrote in the 1910’s are still directly relevant and prescient today. Foster started out as a syndicalist who was expelled from the Socialist Party during the days of dynamite and gravitated towards the IWW. Sent by the Wobblies to European labor confabs, Foster witnessed firsthand huge and impressive union demonstrations in France and came to appreciate the C.G.T.’s policy of boring from within the traditional craft unions to turn them into revolutionary organizations and returned to the U.S. to advocate that the I.W.W. abandon its “dual unionism” and commit to transforming the American Federation of Labor into a militant and radical movement. His proposal was seriously considered and rejected, and Foster set out on his own.

Foster set out on his own to spearhead two huge organizing campaigns during the Great War under AFL auspices and his own, brilliant “amalgamated” formula (i.e. working through an umbrella organizing committee of the various craft unions). One, the Chicago stockyards, was an unqualified success. The other, the steel industry, was a fiasco of historical proportions. Following the October Revolution, Lenin endorsed Foster’s program of boring from within the conservative craft unions, and the free-thinking boy genius of the labor movement married his fortunes to the new Communist movement. At first, as Muste wrote, Foster kept his affiliation secret. By 1924, he was the presidential candidate of the party’s legal expression, the Workers Party. Shortly thereafter, he became the chairman of the Communist Party USA and pawn and apologist for Stalinism.

It was only years later, near death, that Foster allowed any hint of “human being inside him” to be glimpsed in his delightful memoir, “Pages From a Worker’s Life.” One wonders what would have become of the brilliant tactician if he hadn’t cast his lot in with the Communists. His biography and writings indicate that he was developing a pragmatic syndicalism that I’d like to think would have nudged labor in a more radical and independent direction. But we’ll never know. We can only lament what could have been, if Foster could have been the “human being inside” that summer at Brookwood.

Shortly after writing about Sophie Gerson’s passing a few weeks ago, I was contacted by her grand-daughter Frieda and daughter Deborah. They’re cleaning out the family house in Bensonhurst and thought I might be interested in some of Si Gerson’s books. Would I! Si had a voluminous book collection on topics like socialism, the labor movement, election law and policy and New York City politics that stretched back decades.

There was an impressive diversity to Si’s collection, as it was not limited, like too many young leftists’ today, to those writers with whom he agreed. Si’s habit of underlining sections and scribbling exclamation points in the margin suggest his opinion of the material. My favorite so-far being the prominent question mark beside Norman Thomas’ preposterous claim, in “Socialism Re-Examined,” that Marx’s theory of surplus labor value could not account for automation (Marx, of course, devotes several chapters of “Capital Vol. 1” to the topic, and Thomas’ claim reveals the Socialist Party’s standard bearer as one who read Marx in order to claim that he read Marx and disagreed with him).

My selection’s from Si’s library suggest my own narrowness. I declined, for example a handsome, multi-volume set of Stalin’s writings, clearly preferring books on or by A.J. Muste, Norman Thomas and Morris Hillquit – heroes from “my” corner of “our” left. I was delighted to find five rare books from my favorite tragic hero, William Z. Foster, all inscribed “To Si Gerson, With Comradely greetings, from Bill Foster” (or something like it).

So, now I am the owner of a big box of historical socialist and labor books, and seeking “time enough at last” to read it all. Today I am reading Morris Hillquit’s “Loose Leaves From a Busy Life” and want to share a pearl of wisdom from it with you. Hillquit, for your possible edification, was a Jewish immigrant who was a leader of the strong socialist movement in the Lower East Side, centered around the garment unions, “The Daily Forward” and the Socialist Party from the 1890’s well into the 1930’s. A National Chairman of the Party and frequent candidate for political office, he lived long enough to become the leader of the “Old Guard” that was challenged by Norman Thomas.

In 1917, Hillquit was the Socialist Party’s candidate for Mayor of New York, running on an anti-war platform. The election was the first since the United States entered the World War and a Socialist victory, Hillquit challenged, would show that the people of the largest city in America wanted an immediate end to the war. The campaign attracted national attention and at one point Hillquit was ahead in the polls. In the end, Hillquit polled about 21% in a four-way contest, losing to Tammany Hall’s candidate, John F. Hylan. (Hillquit notes that he added about 110,000 votes to the previous election’s Socialist tally, and that a constitutional amendment extending voting rights to women – which had failed two years prior – passed by 100,000 votes – mostly from the Lower East Side.)

The Socialist Party, then a major force in U.S. politics, with a quarter million members and hundreds of elected Mayors, city councilmen, state assemblymen and even a Congressman, was opposed to the war and to U.S. entry into it, and huge demonstrations – not unlike the demonstrations that put millions of people in the streets marching against the current war back in 2002 and 2003 – were held across the country. Once the United States entered the war, Hillquit believed it was the role of Socialists to press for an immediate negotiated peace. And, here, from a stump speech in 1917, is your pearl of wisdom:

“A victory in arms would mean terms of peace imposed upon the vanquished. It would lead to rancor and striving for vengeance. It would not be a peace on firm foundation but one founded on quicksand and would lead to more war.”

It’s as fine a statement of pragmatic pacifism as I have ever read. Hillquit’s words were, regrettably, all too prophetic. The terms of the Versailles treaty were imposed upon Germany and did lead to a striving for vengeance that was harnessed by Hitler and the Nazi movement and led to more war. A typical challenge put to pacifists is what we would do about a Hitler. A pacifist position on the “good” war is not an easy or obvious one, but a continuation of the cycle of militarism should be obviously unwise. The history of the bloody 20th century should show what a vicious cycle it is.

As for our modern case, when public opinion has swung decidedly and emphatically against the war in Iraq and the presidential contenders hem and haw over a withdrawal of forces “with honor” and with our chosen government in place, heed Hillquit’s 90-year-old words. What each of the Democratic and Republican candidates for President propose are terms of “peace” to be imposed upon the Iraqi people. Such a peace could not last. Anything less than an unconditional withdrawal and offer to pay reparations to a government of their choosing will result in a dark day of reckoning for us in the future.