Here is an excerpt from my book on Dorothy Day's months at The New York Call:
Throughout 1916 the prospect of joining the war against
Germany was not popular with Americans, as can be gathered from by the success
of Wilson’s slogan. The 20,000,000 casualties, the fields of corpses and
leveled villages astonished and sickened the public who, for the first time,
were seeing the carnage on the newsreels at their local motion picture theater.
At least 15% of the population was German or of German origin, and most of the
Irish had no desire to fight for Britain, which had so ruthlessly crushed the
Easter Rebellion. Yet, by December, despite the repugnance to war on the part
of many Americans, Wilson was urging Congress for a law that would suppress
domestic opposition to the war, another
to require compulsory military service for all men and yet another forbidding
strikes against munitions companies (labelled the “slave” law by The Call).
Additionally, Wilson created a public relations department
within the White House to popularize the war, demonize the Germans and define
“patriotism.” The director was a well-known, seasoned journalist, George Creel,
who had written for The Masses and other radical publications.
On the copy desk of The Call there was a guy named Norman Watson, a pretty good writer.
At intervals when there was nothing to do, we would discuss theoretical matters
of socialism and I thought he was very intelligent and very well aware of
socialism and one night, we worked at night, he said you know Mike I want to
ask your advice. I said go ahead. He said “I have a letter here. I’ve just been
offered a good job by George Creel.” The government had formed a staff of
ex-radicals for the purpose of propaganda to win over the intellectuals and
trade unionists to the war. See, they had to pump it up all the time. So Norman
Watson had gotten the offer, I forget what they paid, but they paid well, and
he said “Should I take it? It would be a turning point in my life.” I was
always a little too easy and I helped him off the hook by saying, “Well, no one
can advise you. It is your own life…You have your own conscience. You must be
honest with yourself.” Sure enough the next week he was on the staff of George
Creel. (Mike Gold Papers)
At this time I knew very intimately
a young man who was subsequently accused of being a government spy in the
socialist movement and I later puzzled myself vainly trying to decide in my own
mind, on psychological evidence gained from a hundred intimate talks, whether
that young man could ever have become a spy. It was a strange world in which we
lived, one in which almost anything is possible and one learned to talk in a
friendly way to enthusiastic radicals while keeping well in mind that they
might be agents of the Department of Justice, as some of them certainly were. (Floyd
Dell, Homecoming)
Having seen the war up close, John Reed took up his forceful
pen to keeping his country out of it:
I know what war means. I have been
with the armies of all the belligerents except one, and I have seen men die,
and go mad, and lie in hospitals suffering hell; but there is a worse thing
than that. War means an ugly mob-madness, crucifying the truth-tellers, choking
the artists, side-tracking reforms, revolutions and the working of social
forces. Already in America those citizens who oppose the entrance of their
country into the European melee are called "traitors," and those who
protest against the curtailing of our meager rights of free speech are spoken
of as "dangerous lunatics."
Whose war is this? Not mine. I know
that hundreds of thousands of American workingmen employed by our great
financial "patriots" are not paid a living wage. I have seen poor men
sent to jail for long terms without trial, and even without any charge.
Peaceful strikers, and their wives and children, have been shot to death, by
private detectives and militiamen. The rich have steadily become richer, and
the cost of living higher, and the workers proportionally poorer. These toilers
don't want war - not even civil war. But the speculators, the employers, the
plutocracy and with lies and sophistries they will whip up our blood until we
are savage and then we'll fight and die for them. (Reed, John, “Whose War?,” The New York Call,
March 18, 1917)
For anyone objecting to the war, the mood on the street grew
ugly:
I was intensely aware of the war
now and of the danger that America would be engulfed by it, like all of Europe.
I remember walking down Fifth Avenue with Maury Becker , my old, old artist
friend and he pointed up to the many flags that were flying then and said
something like, “Gee so damn many flags now-a-days.” Some old, very
well-dressed lady suddenly darted into our vision. She grabbed Maurice by the
throat and said, “How dare you.” And, he said “How dare I what?” He was
stunned. So was I. She said how dare you insult our flag and she brought out a
little foolish whistle and started tooting on it for a cop to come and beat our
brains in and then arrest us…That was the beginning, you might say, of the
grand hysteria that choked the nation for many years and demoralized all
thought and all decent aspiration.
That was some of the atmosphere of
the time. People were scared, the youth was scared of the war and the
oppression that was going on. (Mike Gold Papers)
And uglier: “The use of thugs in that war was very marked.
At all our meetings we had problems. Thugs would come up. It was tough. Lots of
beating up. They came into The Call
once. They smashed up the typewriters, the desks and everything.” (Mike Gold Papers) [Dorothy was present, as I point out in the book.]
Once war was declared, the mood became even more
intimidating. In an article in The Masses
of July, 1917, John Reed quotes an endorsement of lynching in the Wall Street
Journal: “We are now at war, and militant pacifists are earnestly reminded that
there is no shortage of hemp or lamp-posts.”
The Socialists claimed the great mass of people were
peace-loving and capable of rationally resolving differences if not betrayed by
small groups with special interests. Following the break in diplomatic
relations with Germany, they held a national conference and issued a
proclamation which appeared on the front pages of both the daily The Call of February 9, 1917 and the
Anti-War Edition, stating:
- The President is forcing us into war by executive decree.
- Wars between nations are a reversion to brutal barbarism.
- Germany’s policy of unrestricted submarine warfare in the war zone is ruthless but so is modern war.
- Any losses due to German submarines could easily be avoided by forbidding American ships to enter the war zone. The only reason this simple step had not been taken, they held, was that American companies “have been making huge profits by manufacturing instruments of death.”
- “The workers of the United States have no reason and no desire to shed their blood for the protection and furtherance of the unholy profits of their masters and will not permit a lying and venal press to stampede them into taking up arms to murder their brothers in Europe.”
The Socialist proclamation entreated the workers of America
to awake:
Gather the masses in meetings and
demonstrations. Speak in unmistakable terms. Let your determined protest
resound from one end of the country to the other!
Send telegrams or letters to
President Wilson, to the United States senators and congressmen. Demand the
American citizens and American ships be forbidden to enter the war zone, except
at their own risk. Insist that the nation shall not be plunged into war for the
benefit of plundering capitalists.
A competing version of the proclamation, the minority
report, drafted by Trotsky and others, received 42% of the votes at the
conference. For Trotsky and his ilk, actions such as gathering the masses,
speaking in unmistakable terms and sending telegrams reflected weakness and a
bourgeois spirit. They insisted on a “war against war” in the form of
continuous mass actions: compelling workers not to enlist, physical resistance
to compulsory military service, strikes against the munitions industry, even
sabotage. In a word: revolution.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please let us know what you think: