Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [272]
As his power grew, he shaved off his walrus moustache, adopted pince-nez, a Prince Albert coat and a silk hat, and like John Burns, enjoyed hobnobbing with the great, negotiating with Mark Hanna or August Belmont. Yet he never made money for himself and was to die a poor man. While repudiating the class struggle he remained profoundly class conscious. “I am a working man. In every nerve, in every fibre, in every aspiration I am on the side which will advance the interests of my fellow working men.” The task for union members was to “organize more generally, combine more closely, unite our forces, educate and prepare ourselves to protect our interests, that we may go to the ballot box and cast our votes as American freemen, united and determined to redeem this country from its present political and industrial misrule, to take it from the hands of the plutocratic wreckers and place it in the hands of the common people.” This in effect was practical Socialism. So was his reaction fifteen years later when on a tour of Europe he saw visitors appalled at an exhibit of slum conditions in Amsterdam. He recorded their shock that any human being would stand this “gross insult” from civilization: “Why not revolt against it somehow?” Socialism was essentially the movement of those who felt impelled to “revolt against it somehow,” and Gompers, as Morris Hillquit used to say, was a Socialist without knowing it.
In Europe in 1899 a new issue exploded in the ranks of Socialism when Waldeck-Rousseau, seeking a wide base for the Government that was to “liquidate” the Dreyfus Affair, offered Cabinet office to Millerand, who accepted. Never before had a Socialist stepped over the invisible barrier into the bourgeois camp to cooperate with any part of it. Although Jaurès had led, pushed and persuaded the Socialists, or a faction of them, to join the bourgeois Dreyfusard groups in the battle to save the Republic, to enter a bourgeois government was another matter. Millerand’s case raised the fundamental issue of cooperation which from here on grew more pressing as with each year the Socialists played a greater role in national life. The dilemma presented itself: whether to remain condemned to an orthodox if sterile purity waiting for the final overthrow of capitalism, or to cooperate with the bourgeois parties left of center, supporting them against reaction and spurring them toward reforms. The question carried the further implication: whether Socialist goals might not, in the long run, be attained by way of reform?
While le cas Millerand threw French Socialists into a turmoil, the same issue rose up in Germany, not in the flesh, but, as befitted Germans, in theory. It came from the most impeccable origins, promulgated by a man of the inner circle, a protégé of Marx and Engels, a friend and associate of Liebknecht, Bebel and Kautsky and a member of the founding Congress of 1889. It was as shocking as if one of the apostles had disputed Jesus. The name of the man who presumed to revise Marx was Eduard Bernstein, and his new doctrine, as if not quite daring to give itself a name, came to be called simply Revision. A bank clerk as a young man, Bernstein, at the age of nineteen, had gone into exile in Switzerland in 1878, the year of Bismarck’s anti-Socialist law. From here he edited the party paper, Sozialdemokrat, so effectively as to win the approval of Marx and the accolade of Engels, who called it “the best the party has had.” In 1888 the German Government paid it the compliment of bringing pressure on the Swiss to expel the staff. Bernstein moved to London, where, like the Master,