Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [291]
The active instigators were the British delegates, Ben Tillett and Havelock Wilson, while the German delegate, Paul Muller, was strongly opposed, just as his compatriots were simultaneously opposing Keir Hardie’s proposal at the Socialist congress. A seamen’s strike at the present moment, Muller said, would be “absolutely insane” and would certainly end disastrously. The masters would triumph, the union leaders would lose their influence, the men would become destitute and would ultimately have to sue for peace on their knees. Since a shipping strike, like a strike against war, would operate to the advantage of the shipping trade in the countries whose unions did not go out, and since the Germans and British were rivals in shipping, the international principle was vital. Heavy pressure brought Herr Muller around and the Congress voted unanimously for a seamen’s strike against the “brutal and callous” refusal of the shipowners in all countries to discuss the unions’ demands for a conciliation board. All agreed that the strike “must and would be international.”
At subsequent meetings of the seamen’s committee at Antwerp in November and the following March, the British stated they would definitely strike in 1911 and the Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians and Danes pledged their support. The Germans, now claiming that they had no reason to strike, backed out. The date was set for June 14. In the meantime the Danes and Norwegians retired, the former because they had succeeded in winning a favorable five-year agreement and the latter because, on their demands being turned down, they felt themselves too weak to enforce them. In what developed into the great Transport strike of Coronation summer, the British struck anyway, along with the Belgians and Dutch, whose action was overshadowed by the dramatic British effort. Sympathetic action in other Continental ports was organized by the ITF, which prevented recruitment of strikebreakers and helped the British seamen win their demands. As a whole, however, the strike solidarity originally contemplated was not reached. As if in preview, the ITF endeavor of 1911 showed what might be expected of the working class in international action.
Socialism with steadfast heart remained, nevertheless, predicated in the event of war on a “rising” of the workers of the world. In this it shared the tendency of the age to clothe reality in sentimental garments. The public of the time was not represented by those doctors, writers and social psychologists who were beginning to look at man without illusions. These were the advance guard, as were “seers of black” like Wedekind. The public preferred the rosy view: the perfect pearly nudes of Bouguereau, the impossibly handsome Gibson girls—creatures that never were on land or sea. So, in their own way, did the Socialists.
The rosy view predominated in Germany, where in the general election of 1912 the Social-Democrats won an astounding 35 per cent of the total vote, amounting to 4,250,000 votes and 110 seats. The party was growing so fast and seemed so powerful that to other Socialists it appeared “irresistible” and the moment near and certain when the Socialist movement in Germany would “include the majority of the people and burst the fetters of the feudal-capitalist state.” The existence of so many Social-Democrats in the country meant a proportionate increase of their numbers in the armed forces, leading to a time, surely, when it would be impossible for the Army to be used against the workers.
But the discrepancy between size and actual influence which Jaurès had brought into the open at the Amsterdam Congress, remained, indeed grew more noticeable as the size of the party swelled. The uses to which the German parliamentary Socialists put their electoral triumph of 1912 were not impressive. When the Government