Masses: 1911-1917; a study in American rebellion

370 Pages·020.319 MB·English

by  Waite, John Allan

MASSES: 1911 — 1917
A STUDY IN AMERICA!! REBELLION
By
\C>'
John A.' Waite
Thesis submitted to the Eaculty of the Graduate School
of the University of Maryland in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy
1951.,
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n
UMI Number: DP71156
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1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
.
A New Spirit ......... . . . . . . . ......... 1
Shaping a Magazine — Revolution versus Reform 36
Righting for Labor .......................... 78
Women's Revolution.................. . . . . 13^
Revolution and Organized Religion. . . . . . . 169
Artists in Revolt................ 210
Literature and Rebellion .................... 239
War. ........................... 290
Postscript On Trial ...................... 332
Appendix .................................... 356
Bibliography.......................... . 357
162894
CHAPTER I
A HEW SPIEIT
Sev8n momentous years* 1911 to 1917* were focussed in the scin­
tillating Masses magazine* Owned and published cooperatively by the
editors in Hew York* the periodical was unofficially a representative
of left-wing socialist thought; yet with its eclectic nature* it caught
and held the exciting and optimistic general radicalism of the years
leading to Vorld War I. Dedicated to democracy and liberty and based
on the scientific theories of pragmatism and instrumentalism as well as
Marxian socialism, the magazine passed through a brilliant* revolution­
ary* yet anti-dogmatic career which touched every area of liberal
thought in a period characterized by magnificently hopeful gains for all
progressive forces in American society and culture* As these hopes van­
ished in the disillusionment of war, so the Masses was destroyed by the
war machine. Its last years recorded the fate of a native radicalism
which for a time nearly disappeared from the American scene.
The fighting spirit of the Masses had innumerable sources in
the history of the American struggle for freedom* Prom the demand for
religious and democratic liberties sought by Eoger Williams and Anna
Hutchinson, from the insistence on freedom from political and economic
tyranny espoused by Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine, from the mass oppo­
sition to the Bmoney power0 typified by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van
Buren, from the Utopian dreams of nineteenth century collectivists at
Hew Harmony or Brook Parm, from William Lloyd Garrison*s demand to be
heard on the subject of black slavery* from the struggle for workingmen*s
z
freedom "by the Knights of Labor* from Henry George and Edward Bellamy and
the Grangers and the Populists and a host of others, the Hasses drew
strength and a sense of tradition* In its own right, the magazine was &
protest against the conditions of the industrial society of the early
years of the twentieth century* As such it represented a new realiza­
tion of the nature of the United States and its people*
“The United States in the eighties and nineties,11 wrote historian
Dixon Byan Pox in sweeping generalization, “was trembling between two
worlds, one rural and agricultural, the other urban and industrial* In
this span of years the fateful decision was made* Traditional America
gave way to a new America, one more akin to Western Europe than to its
own former self, yet retaining an authentic Hew World quality. With
this change came confusion and conflict — a grasping for new answers to
new problems. The twentieth century opened with the battle between in­
dividualism and collectivism. By 1912, John Haynes Holmes, a leader of
the moderate clerical “left** of the social gospel, felt that “all this
individual independence is now forever a thing of the past, save in a
few hidden corners of the world. The frontier has practically disappear­
ed, never to return. Society has everywhere developed and expanded until
men must live together dependent upon one another or not at all.11 ^
The chief need of the new century* s early decades was to give some
kind of focus to the rising discontent and frustration. The perennial
straggle of the farmers of the West, the violent and bloody battles of
1 Arthur M* Schiesinger, The Rise of the City (Hew York, 1935)* xiv.
2 John Haynes Holmes, The Bevolutlonary Function of the Modern Church
(Hew York, 1912), 63~3.
3
labor, and the growing uneasiness-of the middle classes squeezed by in­
dustrial and financial centralization demonstrated that the people "were
beginning, * as Louis Adamic said, nto realize more clearly that they were
being caught in a combination of circumstances distinctly unfavorable to
their economic and social advancement, "3 After the defeat of the Knights
of Labor by the American Federation of Labor and the absorption of the
Greenbackers and Populists by Bryan and the free-silver Democracy, neither
laborer nor farmer had any place to gtf for light or for action. Even
the middle classes began to feel the lack of a sense of direction.
To satisfy the thirst for knowledge and guidance, the dramatic­
ally serious muckrakers emerged to tell the people through the new low-
priced magazines, whose circulation they did so much to increase, the
k
results of their investigation of every phase of American life. Ida
Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, Charles E. Bussell, David
Graham Phillips and many others documented one aspect of America after
another and always ended with an economic problem — every evil led to
the "trust" and the men of economic power.
For most of the first decade the muckrake rs and the "literature
of exposure" dominated the popular magazines. Then they vanished.
Theodore Boosevelt may have deluded a few into the belief that he had
solved the new problems, but Taft*s regime, however solid its achieve­
ment, rapidly and ineptly destroyed the illusively successful appearance
of its predecessor. Meanwhile, the readers of muckraking journals became
3 Louis Adamic, Dynamite (Mew York, 1931)» 179*
h See especially Louis Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (Mew
York, 1939) Cornelius Ksgier, The Era of the Muckrakers (Chapel
Hill, 1932).
k
fewer as the saturation point approached in the monotonous din of exposure*
Advertising! which was the principal economic prop of the journals# was
withdrawn from muckraking periodicals* B. 0. Flower! whose Arena had
printed serious analysis "before the muckraking era# sighted the universal
economic villain. BBut the cheap magazines! like the daily papers# were
vulnerable#a he wrote. BThey depended on the advertisers for their life*
This was a source of fatal weakness.Charles E. Bussell# socialist as
well as muckraker, stated the case more pointedly: 9 Autopsy: Muck-raking
in America came to its death "by strangulation at the hands of persons
c
and Interests perfectly well known.11 The conclusions of 2llis 0. Jones#
printed in the Mass e s, pointedly revealed the weakness of the muckrakers:?
Other writers [aside from Lawson] were more chary about
their remedies. They announced themselves more frankly and
humbly as mere reporters. They told their stories well and
retired# retired in fact# if not in theory. They retired
as effective and popular muck-rakers. At the same time* the
magazines retired as muck-rakers. Only one of them retired
in anything like a formal way. That was McClure1 s Magazine.
As a money-making publisher McClure was perhaps wise in his
day and generation. He saw he had gone the limit of interest­
ing exposure. To go farther would be to go too far* would be
to bridge the broad psychological and economic chasm which lay
between a social condition and the remedy which must also be
social*
Allowing for the possibility that the achievement of the muck-
rakers was to be equated with the later success of Woodrow Wilson*s pro­
gram, in which they certainly had at least an indirect share# what did
they accomplish in their time if they were ultimately dull and only
5 B. 0. Flower# Progressive Men# Women, and Movements (Boston# 1914')*
15**.
6 Charles E. Bussell* Bare Hands and Stone Walls (Hew York* 1933)* 190*
7 ^Magazines, Morgan, and Muck-raking,9 Masses# I* 10 (April, 1911)*
5
superficially perceptive? As journalists they were concerned for the
most part with facts and external truth, not philosophic or economic
analysis; hut they did succeed in giving far-reaching popular voice to
the prevailing dissatisfaction and uneasy conscience of masses of Amer­
icans* Their lens gathered the scattered rays of fact ahout national
life and brought the light to hear on the economics of industrialism,
politics, religion, indeed all phases of society*
Many trained economists, of course, did not need to he told hy
the muckrake rs of the need for a new approach to economics* Richard T*
Ely, John R. Commons, E. R* A* Seligman and their followers had already
promulgated an anti-classical economics and had he gun their pragmatic
investigations of an industrial society and its lahor force* But to the
people at large, the magazines and the muckrakere brought new light*
The great economic problem, which clearly had not been solved hy the
Sherman Act, was vhat to do ahout the “trusts.w Rev needed the Pujo
report to tell them that the nation was coming under the domination of
a system of finance capital* The muckrakere had done the job* When
they had finished, their product was indeed a “Dissenters* Golden Age*0
If a graph were made of the rise and decline in America
of that quality of mind which, for want of a better term, may
he called “social consciousness,“ the peak of insurgency that
had been rising since 1900 and that was finally to break on
the rocks of the World War reached its crest in the year £1912]
in which Roosevelt ran for President on a platform of Social
Righteousness, Wilson unfurled the banner of the Hew Freedom,
Debs polled 900,000 votes without benefit of national woman
suffrage, the Lawrence strike put the v/ord “syndicalism** on
the front page of every newspaper, and Emma Goldman became
one of the most popular lecturers on the American platform.**
8 Lillian Symes and Travers Clement, Rebel America (Rev York, 193^0»
265* This book is a sprightly, undogmatic and readable account of
American social revolt, both authoritative and witty*
6
If there was some agreement ahout causes, there was considerably
less unanimity ahout solutions* Louis D. Brandeis, in a series of ar­
ticles in Earner1 s ffeekly, later published as a book with the fighting
title, Other People*s Honey (191*0, advocated the restoration of compe-
%
tition and a return to the dominance of the farmer and small business
man through reform and regulation responsible increasingly to the people.
This program was much the same as Wilson* s **Eew Freedom*M Herbert Croly,
in Th© Promise of American Life (1908), accepted the massive concentra­
tion of the trust as inevitable and desirable, but stressed the need to
control the Hbad trusts1* through a stronger federal government working
in the interests of the people* This Rgrand design • * • • to outflank
Western radicalism and preserve the * benevolent* trustsmarkedly shaped
the development of Eoosevelt* s ^Tew Rationalism.« The Socialists, of
course, accepted expanding monopoly eagerly as a natural evolution
toward the one big Btrust15 which could be taken over by the masses and
become the Cooperative Commonwealth.
However much economics was recognized as a fundamental root of
Increasingly difficult problems, any major attempt at solutions was
bound up with men, parties and political action. Matthew Josephson,
whose studies span the years of the nrobber barons** as well as the pres­
ident makers,** noted the high political culture of those years of the
early twentieth century in which the symbolic value of political leaders
was peculiarly high* TJnlike the last part of the nineteenth century,
nm&n was more than ever the political animal, and the political leader
9 Matthew Josephson, The President Makers (Hew York, 1940), 431.
7
was more the key figure than he had “been since the I8601 s . T h e progress
of the early years of Roosevelt*s administration had been limited and
vas easily enough undone, hut this seemed of little moment if the RColo­
nel0 was available to lead the hosts to Armageddon* Although Wilson in
retrospect may seem somewhat cold and aloof as well as more than a little
opportunistic, at that time the Presbyterian "scholar in politics" seemed
the answer to political and economic corruption* Even Debs and the So­
cialists, for all of the violence of the class-war slogans, looked more
like reforming political crusaders than "foreign" revolutionaries* Only
the Taft Republicans failed to connect the battle for political power
with economic democracy* Indeed, in 1912 it seemed as if a social ref­
ormation would follow, whoever vas elected*
Another major effort to solve economic problems was being made
1 1
through the Protestant churches* Por years, advocates of the "social
gospel" had been struggling to establish it as the churches* answer to a
growing dichotomy between evangelical morality and business and indus­
trial ethics* "The pioneers of the social gospel saw clearly four types
of problems," wrote Charles Hopkins in summary* "They questioned the
prevalent rationalisation of unrestricted competition by classical econ­
omics; they regarded the conflict of labor and capital as the crux of
the maladjustments attendant upon the industrial revolution; they con­
demned the business of the "Great Barbecue*; and they began an attack
10 Ibid,, v.
11 Secular historians perhaps tend to underestimate the intangible power
of religion in American life in the period after the Puritan domina­
tion of Hew England until World War I.