Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [266]
August Bebel, the party’s dictator, was believed by the bourgeoisie to be a kind of “shadow-Kaiser.” A small-boned, narrow little man with white hair and goatee, he had been born in a barracks in 1840, the same year as Czar Reed. His father was an Army corporal and his mother a domestic servant. Taking up the carpenter’s trade, he had joined the labour movement in the days of Lassalle; and on a charge of incitement to treason had been sentenced to four years in prison, a punishment fruitful in producing Socialists. In prison Bebel read much, received visits from Liebknecht and wrote a magisterial history of Woman and Socialism. His brains, Mommsen said, if divided among a dozen Junkers from east of the Elbe, were enough to make each of them shine among his peers. In the Reichstag, where he had debated Bismarck in “savage accents,” Bebel was the spokesman of poverty and misery, loved and admired by the workers, who felt him to be a comrade. He would remain “the deadly enemy of this bourgeois society and this political order” until it was destroyed, he proclaimed at a party Congress in 1903. This was traditional verbiage. In fact, Bebel had no great illusions about the mass of his followers. “Look at those fellows,” he said in 1892 to a correspondent of the London Times as they watched a march of a battalion of Prussian Guards; “80 per cent of them are Berliners and Social-Democrats but if there was trouble they would shoot me down at a word of command from above.”
Of the outstanding figures of the Second International only he and Keir Hardie were of working-class origin. Karl Kautsky, fourteen years younger than Bebel, thinker and writer of the party and formulator of the Erfurt Program, whose commentaries on doctrine provided the text of endless discussion, was the son of intellectuals, a painter and a novelist. Viktor Adler of Austria was a doctor, Emile Vandervelde was the son of wealthy parents whom he described as “models of bourgeois virtue,” and Jaurès of France came from the petty bourgeoisie.
As a doctor, Adler knew the human damage caused by undernourishment, overwork and squalor. He wanted to lead the workers to a new existence of “health, culture, liberty and dignity.” Born of a wealthy Jewish family of Prague, he had studied medicine in order to treat the poor. Dressed in rags like a bricklayer, he investigated conditions in the Viennese brickyards where workers lived in company barracks guarded like prisons, five or six families to a dormitory room, and were paid in chits valid only in company stores. Before founding the Austrian party in 1889 he traveled in Germany, England and Switzerland to study workers’ lives and social legislation which might be introduced in Austria. He was a short, scraggy, rather fragile figure with bushy hair and moustache, gold-rimmed spectacles, a pale face and one shoulder bent forward. Next to music he loved Ibsen and Shelley. Accepting revolution as the ultimate goal, he believed interim reforms were necessary in order to fit the worker physically and intellectually for his destiny. The struggle to secure these reforms against that “despotism mitigated by slovenliness,” as he described the Hapsburg regime, was often discouraging and gradually wore down the edge of Adler’s faith. Trotsky, who knew him in the early 1900’s, found him a skeptic who had come to tolerate everything and adapt himself to everything.
In Belgium, whose population was the densest in Europe and where the process of industrialization had been fierce and rapid, the life of the working class was, in the words of one observer, an “inferno.” Textile factories, steel mills, mines, quarries, docks and wharves used up labour as a mill grinds grain. Twenty-five