Will Revolution Come?
IN fifteen years, I have witnessed as many revolutions, civil wars, drastic and sudden social and economic changes. In Petrograd, I saw Kerensky rise and fall. He rose looking to the masses; he fell gazing in a mirror. Lenin was hiding in the suburbs of Petrograd and Trotzky was orating to the soldiers of the Petrograd garrison, and it was the soldiers of Petrograd and the sailors of Kronstadt who transferred the capital of Russia from the Winter Palace to the Smolny Institute. Then the Bolsheviks moved down to Moscow, as a final farewell to the traditions of Europe.
In China, the revolution was even more fascinating. I saw it at even closer quarters. There it often became little more than a struggle for place, whereas in Russia it sought to alter a system. In Russia the revolution was inevitable because so many people had no bread; in China it goes on because so many men can get no rice unless they become soldiers or bandits and fight for it.
I
In each revolutionary period, and associated with each revolutionary movement, appear a body of basic principles and a set of immediate demands. There is a continuity in these statements of human rights, which can be traced through the ages, which know neither time, place, nor race. No matter how intricate and complicated the character and result of the struggle, the essential cause of discontent is always the same: men are hungry. Men refuse to remain hungry too long. Women are more patient, until their babies are very hungry; then they grow ferocious. I have seen this ferocity in Russia, Siberia, China, and Japan. I never want to see it again. Men will shoot for food; women become wanton. Whether it is biology, the mother instinct, or the abandon of physical weakness, a woman in revolt is a dangerous animal. She not only claws, she burns, destroys, wrecks. Men pull in their belts and take a swig of vodka or kaoliang cho; women tear at your scalp and bite your ear off. I have seen these things when women were hungry.
Twice have I been hungry for long periods — once in Petrograd when Kerensky failed to keep his capital supplied with food; once in Japan during the Great Earthquake. The physical pangs of hunger quickly disappear. One becomes accustomed to water and offal. I have known Chinese peasants to cat the bark of trees and call it food. What does it matter? A dead cow or a dead cat, a head of cabbage or a piece of wood, as long as one has the feeling of something inside?
But the spiritual nothingness, that is different. When I was fresh to the East, I wondered at the Buddhist who sat with his face to a wall beating time to a single phrase of prayer. An endless monotony. An unspoken futility. Why not leap into the muddy waters of the Yangtze and find endless bliss in its silt? But the holy man wants to persist, curiously enough, in utter nothingness.
Yet, that is the reward of hunger. Everything is nothing. Nothing has any value. Can I forget those days in Russia when all conversation turned to sugar? Someone had heard that a Jewish merchant had smuggled sugar into the city in a brief-case. He had become a personality. One went to him as to a sage — for a lump of sugar. A bar of chocolate was worth even more. Women sold their bodies for a bar of American chocolate, such as one buys now for five cents. Chocolate is good — does anything else matter? Morals, traditions, ethics, religion — are these to be compared with a lump of sugar? Suppose one were to die without again tasting something sweet and delectable? In Tokyo, during the earthquake, we were warned not to drink from broken pipes running through uptorn streets. Who did not drink? After all, if death must come, must one’s throat also be parched?
In Central America and China, pseudo-revolutions take place which are in reality only substitutes for a general election. The true revolution, however, seems to work according to formula: (1) people are hungry; (2) they are so hungry that nothing but hunger matters; (3) intellectuals speak of the way to the eternal filling of the stomach; (4) the men in the army begin to understand that their relatives and friends are hungry, that even they themselves may soon be hungry; (5) then it is the army that revolts, and the populace follows. If there is no resistance, it is a coup d’état; if there is resistance, then often more hunger comes, but there has been vengeance. Someone paid with his life for the initial hunger. The punishment has been made to fit the crime.
No revolution has ever succeeded until the army has become revolutionary. According to penmen, the pen is mightier than the sword, but it is the rifle that does the job. Not Karl Marx nor even Nikolay Lenin made the Communist Revolution in Russia; it was the work of the Red Army. I saw the Petrograd Garrison occupy the city and Kerensky escape to Gatchina. Until the soldiers bade him adieu, he could remain and even listen to the fiery addresses from the Smolny Institute. He could bare his breast and ask other orators to shoot him. Sun Yat-sen failed a dozen times, but the Russian General Bluecher and the Ningpo General Chiang Kai-shek carried his creed from Canton to Peking, supported by an army that shot when commanded. In Japan, the so-called militaristic voice grows daily louder, because its owner is a soldier and can shoot.
Force still dominates men. Hungry men seldom want to die. Petronius could commit suicide at a great feast, surrounded by lovely courtesans, because he had eaten and drunk his fill. The hungry man wants one last chance at a beefsteak and one last sip of vodka. He lives on to achieve this goal. He will follow any leader who points the path to that goal. When the army offers him death or food, he accepts the promise of food. If the promise proves to be a fraud, he has only had another experience with hunger.
‘White Russians,’ émigrés, reactionary Chinese, Treaty Port compradores — these are the idealists of the world. They believe that men may be hungry and just. They believe that men may starve and yet adhere to that which produced starvation. They damn the effect and ignore the cause. Whereas the hungry man cares nothing, they have principles and ideals. They know what is right and wrong. They are conscious of historical continuity. Therefore they are the first to die.
In revolution, although there may be no money for bread, there are always bullets to produce an era of universal feasting. Curiously enough, the bullets seem never to be expended. In China to-day twenty million human beings live in the starvation zone; the government is bankrupt and its army is unpaid; yet generals find money for bullets and tanks and aeroplanes. Those who protest against the expenditure are counter-revolutionaries; those who ask when the Promised Land is to be reached are traitors to the State. After each revolution, only the army may speak. Thus Napoleon followed the uprising of those who found neither bread nor cake in the sewers of Paris; thus Stalin sits triumphant on the bayonets of the Red Army, but Lenin is dead and Trotzky is in exile; thus Chiang Kai-shek persists in Nanking.
It is the law of revolution that the army shall throw up a dictator who survives only as long as the army continues to shoot down his opponents. No greater freedom has man been promised than during a revolution; no greater tyranny has he known than after the revolution has given him a new master.
II
Revolution will not come to the United States, because there seems to be in this country an automatic process for the redistribution of wealth and economic power, and because there is no army.
Although Congress is peculiarly unconscious of economic processes at work in the United States, it usually, after much damaging delay, blunders through to an approximation of the needs of the people. If laws are passed which do not fit the times, there is always a Holmes or Hughes or Brandeis or Cardozo to discover the erring comma which saves the country. Thus, the Sherman Anti-Trust Law stands upon the taw books of the nation, but who can doubt the existence of trusts in the United States? It is even more important that no one really wants to doubt their existence; no one would want them split up into myriad petty businesses competing against each other, adding to depression a greater confusion.
The very sectionalism of Congress, which irritated and frightened bankers criticize, is the saving grace of our Constitution, for the compromise between New York and Oklahoma does avert revolution. New York might become utterly mad on ‘liquidity,’ which is economically as sound as the ‘two chickens in every pot’ economics of the boom, but Texas will prevent ‘liquidity’ from driving hungry men frantic. As long as discontent can voice its opinions and win a concession, there will be no fighting.
In 1930, bankers in Wall Street feared a guillotine on the Sub-Treasury steps; in 1932, they are so sure of themselves that they insist on a balanced budget. They are as ill advised in 1932 as they were in 1930. Then men were not yet hungry; therefore there could be no guillotine. Now they are beginning to be hungry; therefore it is wise to listen to Congress.
A demagogue becomes at such a time a safe barometer to follow. He does not sway the populace, but bows to it. He is the willow rather than the oak. When he bends his head low, the wind is blowing fiercely. Those who assume that, because 1930 and 1931 have passed without trouble, 1932 is a good time to call a critic a traitor would be well advised if they took seriously the attitude of La Guardia and Brookhart, who reflect not only voters but people. When they demand drastic action, it means that the people whom they fear demand drastic action.
I saw just such a situation in Russia in 1917. The peasants wanted the land redistributed; they wanted an end to the war. Kerensky promised both, but dared do neither. Soon the battle cry was ‘ Land, bread, and peace,’ and Kerensky fled. I am witnessing just such a scene now in Japan. The peasant wants rice and better land laws; he is weary of laboring in paddy fields and earning one hundred dollars a year for his pains. The politicians give him patriotism, so he turns to the militarist for life. Since 1927, I have been witnessing just this in South China, where the Chinese Communists are now seizing the empire that Chiang Kai-shek has been building.
The sectionalism of Congress gives to the United States an unusual security. It makes it possible to know well in advance, in such times as these, what the hungry man wants and what he will do. The President sits in his White House bird-cage and knows only what he is told by polite friends; the Representative and the Senator hear from the people, who tell them where they get off. I was recently lecturing before a business men’s service club in a city in upper New York State. The business men were discontented. They had been led to believe that when the Reconstruction Finance Corporation made the funds of their local banks liquid the banks would pass credits on to them. The bankers, however, held on tightly to their money, forgetful that money has no value of itself, but only in its uses. These business men were mighty sore, but did they march down their main street, seize the bank, appoint a committee to manage it, and give themselves the credits they required to do business? They did not. Instead, they called their Congressman on the long-distance telephone and told him that if he did not get something done he would not be reëlected. This is sound democracy. This is also the sort of thing that prevents revolutions. As long as men telephone to Congress, there will be no street fighting in the United States.
III
As Congress is one valve of safety, so is the redistribution of wealth another. Americans never think in the terminology of economics, and therefore they do not seem to realize that a redistribution of wealth has been taking place in the United States since the beginning of 1930. The full effects of the change are not yet apparent and will not be until the era of depression has given place to what Mr. Harding liked to call ‘normalcy.’
In most countries the crash in 1929 might have brought on revolution by 1931, certainly by 1932. As a matter of fact, Japan, which is the principal sufferer from the American crash, is in the midst of just such a revolution now — a revolution for rice and the redistribution of the remaining wealth of the nation.
The American people, however, have been bred to abhor all fundamental changes, unless they come on them unaware, like the emancipation of women. Rather than suffer change in form, the American accepts charity. And, curiously enough, the rich in the United States give to charity lavishly, thus taxing themselves for the upkeep of the depressed. This self-imposed charity tax is an indirect method of redistributing wealth. The apparently rich have been stimulated to a type of class consciousness by their leaders, who adjured them to keep revolution from the door by sharing. The country has been covered by ‘I Will Share’ and ‘Stamp Out Want’ signs. Men really sought to share. Their motives were mixed, but the sharing was genuine.
The curves on the chart will not begin to turn upward through sharing by charity or through slogans to stamp out want. The present depression is a correct reaction to unsound economic practices. But as long as those who still possess wealth are willing to distribute their means so that bread becomes available to those who no longer have means, a fundamental economic revolution will not take place. Sharing by charity may, to the unthinking, partake of religious duty, but its economic effect is to keep money moving, so that he who cannot earn may still eat.
What will happen when sharing ceases is quite obvious. The government will be forced to take measures to prevent the law of the hungry stomach from coming into operation. There is a small group in this country which envisages this possibility next winter, and believes that the problem may be solved by an American adaptation of Fascism, by a Presidential appointment of small committees of bankers and lawyers with vast powers who by some magic will do what Congress finds it difficult to do — namely, balance the budget, end the depression, begin a new era of prosperity, and keep the peace. Were the President a Roosevelt or even a Wilson, such a programme might be a palliative, for the men selected would be such as are close to the people; they would know exactly what might be done to curb discontent.
President Hoover, unfortunately, has not lived and worked in the United States during enough of his adult life to understand the American people. Since he fed the Belgians, he has always been a great man in the United States; therefore, he has had no contacts with ordinary folks. He does not grasp their easy reactions. The President’s rôle has been so difficult, not because he is incompetent, but rather because he does not respond to public questions as most Americans do. He is an outsider.
The redistribution of wealth by committee and commission, by the great names of New York, can serve only to frighten the rest of the United States. And the average American will be quite justified in his appraisal of such a committee, for thus far most efforts of this character have only assisted the bankers. Not the business man, much less the worker out of a job, has in any way benefited by Mr. Hoover’s plans. If, then, the depressed elements are not to be driven to despair, there must be no Fascism, but rather sound action by Congress. By ‘sound action ’ I do not mean that Congress will grow wise in the field of economics, but rather that it shall find a political programme for the passage of legislation which will effect the redistribution of wealth. Much that Congress will do may be proved by the economist to be in error, but errors which prevent revolution are more beneficial in this particular situation than wisdom which brings hunger.
Another factor in this problem of redistribution is the impermanent possession of wealth by the rich. How many of the millionaires of 1928 are in the dispossessed class to-day? It is true, of course, that many of the wealthy in this country have been guilty of an almost indecent whispering campaign describing their poverty, but it is equally true that many have become poor. The fall of great banking houses, often masqueraded as mergers, has not gone unnoted by the masses: the constant references to suicides in the press, the fact that certain great men are not commissioning their yachts, the lack of boastful messages from the normally blatant leaders of finance and captains of industry during the past year, the funereal appearance of most offices in Wall Street — this atmosphere is contagious. It adds to economic depression psychological depression. It joins fear to misery.
But it has also evoked a feeling of sympathy among the masses for the fellow who once had wealth and now is broke. There is the attitude that, if Mr. X has gone broke, why should I complain about going broke, too? This fellowship in poverty is part of the same psychology which produced fellowship in prosperity and made it an impertinence to question the almost divine wisdom of the great men who were making big money before the crash. The hungry masses, however, will continue to sympathize with the man who is down to his last million only as long as somehow they continue to eat. Should food become altogether unavailable to the hungry man, he will want to take that last million. Apparently everybody in Washington fears that, and many suggestions are being made to stave off the day when property rights will be attacked on principle. From Hearst’s Five-BillionDoIIar Bond Issue to Mr. Hoover’s rather tame measures, all have exactly the same motive and purpose: namely, to make money available so that men may eat just enough to keep them from asking why others should eat more. It is characteristic of the United States not to resist the hungry man, but to meet him a considerable distance up the road.
In Japan, five houses command the wealth of the nation and resist change. In this country, the so-called capitalists are too recent to have become classconscious. Thus one sees Owen D. Young of the capitalists advocating socialistic measures. Had J. P. Morgan, the elder, been alive in 1930, he would have fought through the depression by measures which only the detached student would have labeled socialistic. The lack of leadership in this crisis is characteristic of a situation in which the capitalists fear to go wrong and yet hate to declare themselves déclassé by denouncing capitalistic processes. Nevertheless, Mr. Swope of the General Electric Company did just that early in the trouble, and gives every appearance of sticking by his guns.
IV
If there is no resistance, there can be no revolution. If there is no leadership, there is also no target. For a time, President Hoover was the cause of some rough merriment. It was slapstick comedy to blame him for too much, just as he once was praised for too much. But this tendency wore itself down, and he came to be pitied as a man who got it on the chin. He might even be reëlected on this slogan.
Every attempt to hit at Wall Street seems to meet with a similar response. The Senate Investigation of the New York Stock Exchange, which might have ushered in a revolution, has generally been regarded as a nuisance. Even the suicide of Kreuger has not brought on Lee, Higginson the opposition of the masses, but rather a fellow feeling of a raw deal. No one draws cartoons of the great bankers in stripes; rather does one ask whether it is true that firm partners got no pay in 1931 and that the staff took a cut in 1932.
When Congress is finished with its oratory, there will be the increased income tax in the upper brackets — an even less indirect redistribution of wealth. Those who still have it will be taxed down to a more general level. From this process only bootleggers and criminals are likely to be exempt. Perhaps that explains the rise of anticriminal sentiment in this country. Before the crash, Al Capone was a national hero; after the crash he went to jail. The criminal represents the privileged class which is exempt not only from the evils of the depression, but also from the efforts to redistribute wealth by private charity and public taxation.
The process of redistribution by taxation is particularly hard on revolutions, because, as in England, the rich grow poor in a specific number of generations unless ability asserts itself in the blood. Four or five death duties will wipe out most fortunes in England; one will reduce them notably. In this country, neither the income tax nor the death duties function so drastically, but the process is at work and the result is only a matter of degree.
Although the rich seek to avoid higher taxes, they are few in number, rarely vote, seldom know how to influence public opinion, and therefore have no real medium of resistance. If any articulate groups tried to force through a measure involving a redistribution of wealth, disguised as a death duty or an income tax or in any other form except a capital levy, it would go through. The utter lack of resistance by the capitalists to redistributive legislation becomes evident when the programmes of Hoover, Smith, Roosevelt, Hearst, the Democrats, Republicans, and Socialists are analyzed. In each instance the proposal is made for a redistribution of wealth by taxation for the purpose of averting a revolution.
The American Federation of Labor, representing the lower bourgeoisie, joins with the capitalist in recommending steps designed to avoid revolution. As normal as non-revolutionary processes of thought on the part of the American Federation of Labor may be to Americans, they are confusing to those who do not live in this country. For the laborer everywhere else demands guaranteed bread in time of crisis, but in the United States he submits to economic distress as within the scheme of things. Even in Great Britain the dole had to be instituted to avert revolution, but in the United States the preponderance of opinion, even among laborers, is against the dole, which is little more than guaranteed existence.
The only organized articulate group who favor guaranteed existence are the World War veterans. These demobilized soldiers constitute the only articulate revolutionary group in the United States. Like the Fascisti in Italy, the Nazi in Germany, and similar groups in Austria and Hungary, the demobilized soldier cloaks his demands in the garb of patriotism. He is not a radical, he cries. He would shoot a Communist on sight. Yet, he is nevertheless a revolutionist who mobilizes to force the government to guarantee his sustenance no matter what the economic circumstances of the country may be. He has already begun a Coxey’s army march on Washington and has already employed the strong-arm methods of the Fascisti.
It may become necessary to shoot him down some day. In a European country, he would be a menace, because the army might join him. In the United States, the army is likely to shoot him down as it would shoot down Communists or striking miners. The army is so small, so strictly professional and lacking in political interest, that it cannot even defend itself against a cut in personnel. How could such a body support the political action of demobilized soldiers?
The Communists realize this condition and are making a special appeal to the demobilized troops to join them as fellow sufferers. But the veterans will fight shy of the Communists because they do not desire a general economic reconstruction of the country, but rather recognition of themselves as a privileged class to be maintained at public expense everlastingly. A revolution which might level all classes might also wipe out the privileges they already enjoy. Demanding special privileges, they have antagonized all other elements in the country. Even among the demobilized soldiers there are many who disassociate themselves from the revolutionary tactics of the general group. Capital and labor have joined to oppose them. Whenever capital and labor can join on an economic or social programme, there is no possibility of revolution.
V
Revolution, then, is not for the United States. Revolution requires temper, and the American is without temper. He turns on the radio and listens to the mouthings of Amos ’n’ Andy. He can smile at a jest while his children are fed in public schools at the expense, often, of inadequately paid school-teachers. He can vote for Tammany officials in New York in spite of his high rents which their extravagance and dishonesty have made inevitable. He can reëlect the Congressman who voted for a tariff which has reduced his foreign trade and therefore his chances of recovery. He can even grow enthusiastic over bootleg whiskey. He can argue that the depression hits the rich and poor alike. He still scans the stock-market lists and wonders where he can borrow some money to get in on the present low levels. He is carried away by a slogan, ‘ Don’t sell America short.’ He even believes that the repeal of prohibition will save his economic structure.
As simple as a Russian peasant in his intellectual process, he insists on an easy, simplified, quick scheme, summed up in a few words, for reconstruction, Utterly uneducated, he is ready to jump to irrational conclusions. He believed in 1929 that prosperity would last forever in spite of conditions in Europe and Asia which were indicating caution. He believes to-day that political magic will save him. A dozen times he has been disappointed, yet he continues to believe. In 1930, Hoover was the goat; in 1931, Wall Street; in 1932, Congress. The average American can never believe that he is really a stupid fellow, for he has forgotten what his Yankee ancestor knew, and what the French peasant knows to-day — namely, that a nation is prosperous only when its citizens save enough ‘liquid’ assets during boom periods to take up the slack during depressions, and that the safest man, economically, is not the one with a millionaire’s equity in paper profits, but the one with a middleman’s interest in protected, unspeculative savings.
As long as every American believes that he has as many chances as John D. Rockefeller to become a millionaire, to join a country club, and to get into the upper social brackets, he will not become a revolutionist. Hungry, he will pull in his belt. Annoyed, he will vote for a Democrat. Angry, he will demand beer. Despairing, he will telephone his Congressman. He is what the Russians call a Kerenskyist — a man who takes it on the chin, smiling.