Internationale Revue i 10 1927-1929

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Roger N. Baldwin
The land of ‘liberty’

Roger Baldwin, directeur de l'Union Américaine pour les Libertés Civiles, à ce moment en Europe dans l'intérêt des prisonniers politiques décrit les changements depuis la guerre qui ont détruit les vieilles libertés américaines, - et qui ont provoqué une oppression, un militarisme et une intolérance sans précédent.
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Roger Baldwin, Leiter der ‘Amerikanischen Liga für bürgerliche Freiheiten’, (Civil Liberties Union) der gegenwärtig in Europa ist im Interesse der politischen Gefangenen beschreibt die Veränderungen seit dem Kriege die die alten amerikanischen Freiheiten vernichtet haben und eine Unterdrückung, einen Militarismus und eine Intoleranz mit sich gebracht haben wie nie zu vor.
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Roger Baldwin, leider van de ‘Amerikaansche Liga voor burgerlijke vrijheden’ is op het oogenblik in Europa om voor de belangen van de politieke gevangenen op te komen. Hij beschrijft de veranderingen sinds den oorlog die de oude amerikaansche vrijheden hebben vernietigd en die tot een onderdrukking, een militarisme en een onverdraagzaamheid zonder weerga hebben geleid.

It is still a common delusion that the United States is a land of liberty and democracy. Even among Americans the delusion, in which all school-children are brought up, persists. The average American believes he has a free country, and that those who don't believe it ought to be put in jail! He does not want his country's institutions challenged because he is getting along all right under them. Enough Americans are contented and prosperous in this richest of all countries in history to create an atmosphere of conservative satisfaction which stifles all the voices of discontent. And Europeans who look on a land of such amazing wealth and judge it by its opportunities to live well, figure that it must be free as well.

But that is the only way America is free, - free to make a good living if you have energy and a little ability. In all other respects we are slaves of the capitalist dictatorship that rules us. In the years since we entered the World War, through the savage campaigns against the trade unions and radical movements, all the old liberties of which we boasted have gone, both in law and fact. The Supreme Court, composed of nine old gentlemen trained in business law, are the real political masters of the United States. ‘The law in the United States’, says a distinguished law professor, ‘is the combined prejudices of five old men on the Supreme Court.’ And their prejudices have destroyed our constitutional liberties. But the power behind the law is the men who control our economic life. The effective government of the United States is in Wall Street, not in Washington. Politics is controlled by the huge campaign contributions of business interests.

We have only one political party in the United States, - including the Democrats (who are called the opposition). In fact there is no political opposition. The Socialist Party which ten years ago had over 100.000 members, with a vote of over a million as late as 1920, now numbers about 5000, with a vote correspondingly small. The Communist Party with 25.000 members five years ago has half that number now. And though it is the most active radical force in the country, it lacks influence in politics because its membership is 90% alien and cannot vote, and in the trade unions because the conservative leaders will not tolerate Communists. There is not, and cannot be under present conditions, a labor party, nor any international sentiment in a labor movement which lacks class-consciousness. And class-consciousness is impossible in a movement from which thousands are constantly breaking away into business, in which the leaders are a privileged conservative class with salaries far above the workers they lead, and in which the whole struggle has been to build up high wages by limiting membership.

It is a telling symptom of conditions in America that the Progressive Party, formed by Senator Ea Eollette three years ago, and which got over five million votes (a fifth of the total) from labor and the farmers, is now completely out of existence. No movement of

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protest can withstand the enormous power of the capitalist autocracy which rules us. It is young, growing in power at home and abroad, intolerant of opposition and completely self-satisfied.

Even the conservative trade unions have been forced to a defensive position by a bitter and sweeping attack on them in the name of the ‘open shop’, by injunctions in the courts against their major strikes, and by public hostility to all labor legislation. Their old militancy under the conservative but fighting leadership of Gompers has given way to a well-behaved cooperation with capitalism through labor banks, labor insurance companies and even the operation of profit-making industries. It joins the capitalists in fighting Communism. Its rank and file are reasonably content with a wage averaging a little higher in buying power than before the war, and with no unemployment except in the mining and textile industries.

But the left wing of labor, small and militant, is insistent on a struggle for better conditions. This left wing is particularly active in the garment and so-called ‘needle trades’ centering in New York. Its membership is largely alien, with Socialist or Communist political connections. The only big strikes in the past year have taken place in these industries, - strikes which were nominally won, at any rate, though internal strife between Communists and Socialists have almost destroyed the gains made. The most progressive union in America is the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, making men's garments, but it is outside the American Federation of Labor and cannot be regarded as an index of any real tendency in the movement as a whole.

The only native radical labor movement, which America has produced in the last 25 years is the Industrial Workers of the World, an organization of migratory workers in the harvest fields and mines of the west. But today it has dropped from a membership of 60.000 ten years ago to a mere handful without fighting power or the possibility of further growth. It was killed by government prosecutions during and after the war, by internal dissension and by skillful tactics of the employers. It alone of all American labor movements expressed a syndicalist outlook, and fought with revolutionary zeal against the bosses.

A little section of the Jewish trade union movement still expresses anarchist ideas, but that philosophy, so vigorously agitated in the pre-war days by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, has almost disappeared as an active factor in American life. Communism as represented by the Bolsheviks is the only fighting radical issue in America, as it is all over the world, and for the same reasons. But so strong is the power of our capitalism to day that it is not feared and therefore not repressed. There is not a single communist, anarchist or socialist in prison in the U.S. today. Only about 20 political prisoners remain of the several hundreds convicted up to 1925 under the state laws punishing the advocacy of violence. And those 20 are all members of the I.W.W. prosecuted in California and the state of Washington.

That does not mean, however, that repression has stopped. It means only that general conditions have so changed that the reds are no longer prosecuted. But whenever a strike arises, the powers of the government, through the courts and the police, are always enlisted on the side of the employers. One can talk freely anywhere about the dictatorship of the proletariat or advocate Soviets for the U.S., but let someone speak in a non-union coalmining town about organizing the workers and the police will get him. The issue is practical, not theoretical. It is local, not national. The I.W.W. men went to prison, not for their revolutionary ideas, - though those were made the excuse for the presecutions, - but for their activities in organizing and striking.

The industrial conflict is only a small part of the whole picture of conflict today in the United States, though basically the most important part in determining the future. Racial and religious conflicts have come to a rôle that would have been thought impossible before the war. They are a development of the repression of minority forces during and since

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the war, - just a logical and natural extension of middle-class hostility to labor and radicals. Its chief expression is the Ku Klux Klan, - the American form of Fascism, - which spread from a small nucleus in the South to a nation-wide organization in three years, - from 1922 to '25. Beginning as an anti-Negro secret fraternity, embodying the white man's fear of the new after-war Negro movement, it took on all the prejudices against racial and religious minorities, becoming anti-Catholic in the north and west, anti-Jewish in the eastern cities and everywhere anti-alien and anti-radical. Thousands of cases of private violence by beatings, tarring and feathering and even murder are recorded against it. Its members, wearing long white robes and white pillow-slips over the head, would seize their victims at night to commit their deeds of revenge or terrorism. Few of them were ever caught or punished. But the demoralizing effect of such irresponsible violence created a reaction in their own ranks, and made their growth difficult. Violence was abandoned in 1925 for secret political intrigue and power. The Klan went into politics, and is there still. Its influence has diminished, except in two or three states, but its spirit is strong in our whole national life. As one of my friends puts it: ‘Seventy-five per cent of the American people are members of the Ku Klux Klan, whether they know it or not!’ In other words, an attitude of hostility to Negroes, Catholics, Jews, aliens and radicals is characteristic of American life. It is harder today for these minority groups than it has ever been, - harder to get jobs, harder to live in peace with their neighbours, harder to secure public positions. The intolerance that began with the war hysteria has crystallized into a settled attitude of the supremacy among us of what the Klan calls ‘100% white, Protestant Americanism’.

It is this domination of majority intolerances that explains the growth in the last few years of another group, - the religious Fundamentalists, who take the Bible literally, and who oppose bitterly what they call ungodly scientific teaching in the schools. It was they who forced the passage in Tennessee of the law making the teaching of evolution in public schools a crime. That law has been upheld in the state courts in the internationally famous case tried two years ago. While only one other state has passed a similar law, and the movement for such legislation has been checked, timid school authorities have yielded all over the country to the demands of Fundamentalists that evolution be dropped from the courses of instruction. This is true especially in the south and south-west in the country districts and small towns where old-fashioned religion is strong. It is a situation amazing even to Americans, - and exists nowhere else in the world. Only our mass intolerance of post-war days could have made it possible. It shows clearly how far we have moved from the old days of tolerance and liberty.

But this is not the whole picture of the changes in American life since the war. Less evident and dramatic is the growth of militarism. Without compulsory military training and with only a small army of 130.000 for a nation of 110 million people, the War Department has nevertheless managed to build up voluntary summer training of officers, and all-year college and school training to a degree vastly ahead of anything in our history. Up to last year they had succeeded in training over half a million youths. By offering money, uniforms, college and school credit and free instruction they have made militarism attractive. Many colleges have made military training a compulsory course. The movement against it, led by a vigorous group of religious leaders and intellectuals, aims to abolish the compulsory feature in colleges and to stop all training of boys in the high schools. But there is little support among the boys themselves. Only a half dozen in various schools have refused to take service. Some of them were allowed to remain in school so as to prevent agitation; others were expelled. But the movement is growing and there are signs that the present grumbling will break out into group refusals to take training.

This whole military movement is, I believe, due to the new rôle of America in world affairs. We are not preparing to fight any particular nation. But we must protect ‘our’ foreign investments, ‘our’ rapidly expanding empire of finance. Our dominating position in the capita-

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list world carries with it psychologically the necessity of increased armed force, just as with every imperialism in history. I have no hope that the pacifist-democratic forces will be able to modify that tendency until we develop in America a class movement of the workers and farmers, whose interests are in the long run opposed to capitalist-imperialism. But no such movement can develop power under our present expanding wealth in which the workers share enough to keep them quiet. Only less favorable economic conditions will produce a class movement.

Meanwhile, the middle-class left-wing is the centre of opposition to all this growing militarism, imperialism and repression. Organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union carry on a vigorous and varied propaganda, with battles in the courts, aid to all parties and individuals attacked, campaigns against repressive laws in Congress and the state legislatures, and especially agitation in areas of strike and conflict. Other similar organizations spread the ideas of industrial democracy, agitate for the outlawry of war, or oppose our military expeditions to China and Nicaragua. A few influential newspapers support such a program, though the press as a whole is overwhelmingly with the government and Wall St. But the weekly liberal press and singularly, too, the advanced section of the religious press, is militant and practical in opposition.

The old days of the land of liberty are gone. We are the youngest and most powerful of the world's imperialisms. We are a menace to the peace and progress of the world by our support financially of the reactionary governments that block the movements of labor and of national freedom for colonial peoples. At home that position is little understood by the average American, who senses only his own well-being, - though he vaguely knows that Wall St. and our new crop of millionaires, - the biggest in history, - are getting more power and wealth than he likes. But he is unorganized and feeble. Half of the American people do not even trouble to vote in national elections, - which may be regarded as an evidence of their intelligence; they know it is no use, anyway!

This is the new America. The picture is fair. It is only what any intelligent observer of the world today should expect, - though I find it strangely misunderstood in Europe. We are all in the same boat these days. Capitalism, the workers' struggle, the role of intellectuals, the fight for a dozen kinds of freedom, - these today are international, varying only in degree in one country and another. So long as capitalism continues to flourish and expand in America, so long will it remain the centre of the most vigorous reaction in the world.