Rebel Cinderella by Adam Hochschild

Author:Adam Hochschild
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

12

I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier

From what seemed a safe distance, Americans intently followed the war’s opening moves. New York crowds flocked to Times Square and Herald Square, named after the newspapers whose offices were there, to read in their windows the latest telegraphed bulletins, posted in huge red type on newsprint. Police estimated that more than 300,000 people filled the streets leading to Times Square. “A great cheer went up,” the Times reported, as the window bulletins announced that Britain had declared war on Germany. But “the spirit of the crowd was always good humored,” almost as if it were rooting for a sports team.

Socialists, however, were appalled by the way their European comrades seemed to have forgotten their internationalist solidarity and been swept up in the contagion of clashing patriotisms. “When the war broke out I was struck dumb,” wrote Big Bill Haywood, who had been to Europe in earlier years and counted some of its labor leaders as friends. “For weeks I could scarcely talk.”

Radicals blamed the war on bankers and munitions makers; a Masses cartoon by Maurice Becker showed top-hatted plutocrats aiming giant cannons at each other, using the helpless bodies of workers as ammunition. Things were not so simple, though, for Europe’s working classes went to war quite willingly. Socialists for years had vowed that workers might fight the capitalists but never each other. Across the continent, that dream now lay shattered. The parliamentary deputies of Germany’s Social Democrats, Europe’s strongest socialist party, heeded Kaiser Wilhelm II’s plea and voted for a package of measures to finance the fighting. (In The Masses the year before, English Walling had presciently warned that the German party would succumb to militaristic fervor if war came.) The French Ministry of the Interior maintained a secret roster of radicals considered likely to dodge the draft; to officials’ amazement, 80 percent of them promptly showed up to do military service. In Britain, where there was as yet no draft, huge crowds of young men, many labor unionists among them, jammed army enlistment offices. When Keir Hardie, the British labor leader who had once dined at the University Settlement and later campaigned with his friend Debs, told a meeting in his Welsh coal-mining constituency that his country should not join the fighting, the crowd erupted in jeers and choruses of “Rule Britannia.” A shouting, cursing mob then surrounded the house where he spent the night.

Despite quietly selling Britain and France a wide array of armaments and other supplies, the United States remained officially neutral. And despite some differing opinions about how dangerous German militarism might be, American socialists for the moment were united in wanting to keep their country out of the war. English Walling was typical, condemning German aggression but finding France and Britain driven by imperial ambition as well. Along with Anna Walling and Emma Goldman, Rose joined the Women’s Peace Party, headed by social worker Jane Addams, which brought together women of varying politics united by their opposition to the fighting.

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