Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [262]
Property had lasted too long, filling the world with wickedness, turning men against each other. The time for overturn had come. The social evils produced by capitalism—poverty, ignorance, racial prejudice and war, which was just another form of capitalist exploitation—would be wiped out and replaced by social harmony. Freed from false patriotism, workingmen linked by their underlying brotherhood would no longer fight each other. Freed from the greeds and frustrations imposed by capitalism, every individual could pursue “the unimpaired development of his personality,” being guaranteed under the collective system sufficient means and liberty to achieve it.
As the chariot of a new and higher order of life, Socialism seemed to its advocates to carry a sacred trust and to impose upon them a moral duty to be worthy of the ideal. Because he believed drinking was disgracing and destroying the working classes, Viktor Adler adopted total abstinence to set a personal example. Socialism was the repository of the big words. When, as a student in Brussels, Angelica Balabanov, a young Russian revolutionary, listened to Socialist orators in the Belgian Parliament, “Parliament seemed to me then a sacred place where Science, Truth and Justice … were to conquer the forces of Tyranny and Oppression for the working class.”
The goal gave an excitement, a meaning, a glow to Socialist lives which for many of them substituted for the usual drives of personal ambition and profit. Party militants and organizers in the early days worked for nothing. Since there was no money in the movement, there could be no corruption. Since it could offer no livelihood or gain, its leaders tended to be idealists. It was a cause, not a career. It gave its disciples something to work for and infused a passion which could be understood across the barrier of language. At one Socialist Congress the Spanish leader Pablo Iglesias spoke so eloquently in his native tongue that although the audience did not understand a word, they burst into frequent applause. To the workers who increasingly voted for it, in millions after the turn of the century, Socialism gave self-respect and an identity. A workingman could feel himself no longer an ignored anonymous member of a herd but a citizen with a place in society and a political affiliation of his own. Unlike Anarchism, Socialism gave him a party to belong to and, since the nettle of revolution did not have to be grasped, an acceptable way to reach the goal instead of by way of the lawless deed.
The cause drew men like the Italian Amilcare Cipriani, one of the founders of the Congress of 1889. Type of the eternal rebel, he had fought with Garibaldi’s Red Shirts and as a volunteer in the Cretan insurrection against Turkey and turned up in Brussels to join the comrades in the general strike of 1893. “Magnificent in cape and soft felt hat, with black beard streaked with grey and eyes of flame,” he carried a handbag in which “there were doubtless more explosives than toilet articles … ready to fight in any corner of the world for the cause of Revolution.”
It drew men of troubled conscience from the upper class, like the American Robert Hunter, married to a daughter of the banker and philanthropist Anson Phelps Stokes. Like others of his class, Hunter was startled by the articles of the Muckrakers and moved to seek a remedy for social injustice. He saw his first vision of the poor in settlement-house work, discovered Socialism, and at the age of twenty-eight in 1904 wrote a small classic, Poverty. With the undulled emotion of his time he described a valley in Italy “so smiling and peaceful, with a thousand terraced gardens on its exquisite slopes, under skies that enrapture the soul; and with