Chapter I: Poe at Last (3)

Like the two ladies in Kipling’s jingle, transcendentalist and materialist are “sisters under the skin.” The transcendentalist (Platonist, Christian, Christian Scientist, etc.) starts by dividing the world into (1) spirit-value-quality-soul and into (2) matter-body-evil. Having begun this dualistically, he cannot go on. Unknown to himself, _he must reduce this duality into a whole_. This he does by denying the part he does not like—by denying matter. (He may be subtle about it, like the followers of Henri Massis, or crude, like the disciples of Mrs. Eddy.) Now, he has his Whole, which is all life, all good—which is All. But this All will not bear the buffets of the world: for it is really a fragment. And the transcendentalist begins his endless labor of corrupting reality, in order to make it fit his figment.... The materialist starts likewise. He, too, divides the world into (1) measurable matter and (2) the unmeasurable qualities of certain kinds of matter—good, value, love, spirit, color, poetry, dream, etc., etc. He, too, cannot abide this dualism, and must somehow manage to resolve it into a One. He simply rejects what the transcendentalist exalts, and takes what the other refuses. He sacrifices everything that is not measurable matter. Whatever cannot be measured, he says, does not exist. But the part of the Whole which he has legislated into nullity still “functions” in him. He wears himself out, denying the domains of emotion and thought which his petty “whole” has no room for. He becomes the tired cynic, like Mr. Krutch; or the arrogant pseudo-scientific clown, like Dr. Watson.

(Of these two sisters, it must be avowed that the transcendentalist is less foolish. Both find “living matter.” The one rejects matter and retains the abstract living: the other accepts matter and denies life. But it is plain that we are more sure of the undifferentiate quality of _living_ than we are of matter. Living without form does not exist, of course: living-matter cannot be divided. But there is a difference of degree in the folly of the camps.)

Between dogmatic transcendentalist and dogmatic materialist—each hoisting his “part” into a Whole—stands the agnostic, of whom Bertrand Russell is an illustrious instance. Mr. Russell understands the limitations of the language of mathematics, and how they must limit the scientific universe which mathematics symbolizes. He says that there are two general logics: the logic of quantity and the logic of quality or feeling. He says that both are right.[10] But since the logic of quantity (measurement and science) is within the mind of the observer who personally must follow the logic of feeling, Mr. Russell concludes that there is no way of measuring the _measure_ value. So he decides that it is all no use: man can never know anything since in order to do so he would have to “get out of himself.” And of this agnosticism he makes a dogmatic virtue.

The agnostic is not so different, after all, from the other two. He also has begun wrong: he has arbitrarily divided the world into two parts, of which one theoretically is “the truth,” and its expression into two languages or logics. Having made this dualism, he also irresistibly is driven to seek his Whole: and this he does, not by the sacrifice of one part _to_ the other, but—since he cannot separate them—by the sacrifice of both! For the Zero of the agnostic is a kind of Whole: nescience is an assumed omniscience. The man who _knows_ that we cannot know is dogmatic also. Again, in this agnosticism,[11] there is the same false premise: the dividing of reality into two parts. Wherever this is done, there must ineluctably follow confusion and falsehood, agnosticism or despair....

d.

The voices of confusion, agnosticism, despair, are the popular voices of today. The average American reader of the so-called educated classes has been brought up on literature and science that were crassly dualistic. He probably left a dualistic church when he was young. He has fallen at once into the camp of Rousseau (the individual as a separate, perfect atom), or into the camp of dogmatic science (only measurable matter exists), or into some allied camp like that of vulgar collectivism (society is real, but its individual integers are not). These statements, of course, are caricatures: that is why they express the distorting effect of modern doctrine on the average mind.

The consequence has been that the common reader of books (the kind that calls himself an intellectual) is helplessly lost and helplessly confused. For his doctrine and the world will not go together. “Feeling” draws him imperiously one way; “knowing” another. He is miserable. And misery loves company. The literary art which makes that misery respectable by “proof” that there is no other course, and by decking out impotence in gracious gestures, becomes the popular art. Books have engendered the modern distemper. The least they can do, now, is to justify it.

The curative, recreative task is very hard. It is the work of the ages before us. And those of us who choose it for our own will have to labor in the cold of an unfrequented dawn. Yet, although it is the task of generations—of armies of artists, of corps of truly scientific thinkers—the essence of it can be stated very simply.

We have seen how even the dualist and discontinuist is irresistibly drawn to believe in a Whole, and to create a Whole (out of his favorite fragment). The concept of wholeness, the experience of wholeness, the living of wholeness are the unavoidable aspiration of human life.[12] This is so inevitable that even the intellectual denier of wholeness in the effort of his thought and deed belies his rejection. The right beginning, therefore, of our task must be to conceive a Whole _that will be the Whole_. Let us passionately refuse all dualism, all denials, at the outset. If science is so foolish as to say: “There is no color in the colored thing,” let us challenge that science. If religion is so foolish as to say: “Man’s soul is separate from his body,” let us challenge that religion. If mathematics is so foolish as to say: “_x_ and _y_, although they are in the universe, are not joined, but are discrete and separate,” let us challenge that mathematics. Let us say:

“There is one and only one irrefutable truth: _the universe exists_. Men differ about what it is, men differ about where it is. Some say it is all ‘matter,’ and outside; some say it is all ‘thought,’ and within. All must agree that it _is_.

“There is, to this one truth, one corollary that is irrefutable also: _the universe, for each of us, is focused from the self_. Self—whatever it is—looks out, or looks in, on the universe. Men differ about that. Yet must agree that self _is_ that focus of the universe which knows the universe exists. Self, therefore, is _of_ the universe (it may be the whole of it, of course) which self asserts.

“All my words, all my thought, all my action, shall be determined by this single common truth—this single common premise of existence. My words will be such that when they point to a ‘thing’ or a ‘state’ (as all words do) they will imply the tentative existence of the thing or state, within the certain Whole. For the thing is vague and fleeting: only the universe is certain.... My thought will be such, that when it represents a ‘thing’ or a ‘state’ or an ‘action,’ as all thought must, it will imply its tentative existence within the certain Whole; and its valuation of the ‘thing’ or the ‘state’ will be the relating of it with the universe which alone is certain.... And my action will be such, that it expresses this relationship of self and of all things involved, within the Whole that is the premise of all thought and all behavior.”

If these few words, necessarily insufficient, suggest the revolutionary task that challenges human life—the re-creating of language, of society and of man in the image of the Whole which is God—they will have served their purpose. But the task is not impossible. The ant is born with the capacity to fulfill his function. Savage man was born with the capacity to fulfill his. Why should historic man alone, of all creatures in the world, be born without the capacity to realize himself? All history attests that man’s nature is a striving toward the divine achievement: the focusing of the Whole in his thought, the enacting of the Whole (this is called holiness) in his deed. But whereas all art, all science, all religion, are the striving toward this consummation, they have always been too weak: so they have broken. Dualism, with its rejections, its denials, its corruptions, is the symbol of this breakdown. Dualism, in its twin forms of transcendentalism and materialism, has always brought a temporary death to man’s immortal effort. History is a short tale. It has been just long enough to tell us what, as men, we have to do.

But let us Americans not delude ourselves. Only the Remnant lives. And this is so, because the way of death is easier than life. Mr. Krutch has stated well the inevitable end to which the dualist—whether he calls himself materialist or transcendentalist or agnostic—is ineluctably brought. “Ours is a lost cause,” he closes, “and there is no place for us in the natural universe.” So he elects to die. This is the death, indeed, of the race of men who look upon themselves as alien from the remotest star, and who put their loyalty in life upon one jot less than the Whole which is God. Let them die.... And for the race, still at its dawn, let Spinoza speak:

_A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is
not a meditation upon death, but upon life._

_1929_

9. THE “UNIVERSE” OF T. S. ELIOT

The collected essays of Mr. Eliot provide a portrait of a mind that for the past twelve years has prominently played on the American literary scene. The volume contains theoretical chapters from “The Sacred Wood,” eleven papers on the Elizabethan dramatists, the entire brochure on Dante, essays on the Metaphysical Poets and on Dryden, Blake, Baudelaire, Swinburne. It represents Mr. Eliot’s social and theological position in the studies of Lancelot Andrewes, in “Thoughts after Lambeth,” and in the two essays on Babbitt et al., which did so much more to discomfit the new humanists than the lunges of their foes. And finally, it reveals the more casual man—delightfully—on topics like poetry in drama, Wilkie Collins, Dickens and Marie Lloyd. The book portrays a sensitive, finely endowed person. Itself an accumulation of comments on many matters, it suggests a review of like nature: one is tempted to pass from page to page detailing, comparing, dissenting. But the place of Mr. Eliot as a literary influence in our time, and the cultural crisis of our time, make this method inadvisable. It is important to employ the book as a means for seeing the man whole; and, having done so, to deduce a measure of his values as a leader and thereby a measure of the time which took him as a leader.

The first revelation is of a man with an exquisite, almost infallible, taste for the stuffs of literary art. Whether he touches a line of Dante or of Swinburne, a melodrama of Cyril Tourneur or of Wilkie Collins, the prosody of Baudelaire or of Blake, Mr. Eliot evinces an esthetic delight which implies true contact with his subject. This first trait is particularly distinguished in an age in which the field of literary discussion has been almost monopolized by writers who may know something of baseball or economics but who ignore the nature of literary art. The second trait of Mr. Eliot, not less pervasive but more subtly entextured in his book, is his moral sense; and this, coupled with his first, is even more rare. We have had plenty of moralists—More, Mencken, Lewisohn, are examples—writing on literature and totally insensitive to literary esthetics; we have had a few “estheticians” disclaiming the moral sense (as if esthetic form were some kind of insubstantial absolute and not an organic configuration of ordinary human experience and motive), and therefore writing with even worse futility on books. When Mr. Eliot compares lines in Massinger and Shakespeare, contrasts tropes in Dryden and Milton, draws a prosodic sequence from Donne to Shelley, he reveals, in his taste and judgment, the moral integer: he knows the _human nature_ of esthetics. This moral sense is organic in the man; it is no mere acceptance of rules, it is not moralistic. Being the permeation, within his specific literary experience, of his general view of life, the moral quality in Mr. Eliot is religious. Everywhere, although he may be discussing merely a choice of verbs in Middleton, he reveals a general and definite attitude toward existence taken as a whole: and this attitude, when logically formed, becomes religion.

T. S. Eliot, then, is portrayed by this book as a man with a sense of the whole, with a conviction of his place in the whole, as a man engaged in an activity (literature) for which he is fitted and to which he gives his entire equipment. Such a crystallization comes close to what Nietzsche meant by a cultural act; and in an epoch whose literary critics have been insensitive and incompetent men, it makes Mr. Eliot an exceedingly welcome figure. If, however, we turn from those contemporaries in contrast with whose nullity he looms, and measure him rather by his own subjects and by the literary exigencies of our epoch, Mr. Eliot dwindles. No single major essay in this book, for instance, can be said to be organic either as a presentation of its subject or as a literary essay. Consider the “Dante” in whose study he is at his best: every observation is exact, many a phrase stands forth a luminous gem; but the observations merely mount arithmetically into so many pages of running comment. Dante and his work are never objectified, never dimensionally re-created either in the world of Dante or in the world of T. S. Eliot. Or consider the justly admired pages on the Elizabethans: they contain glimpses both precise and profound into the art of the theatre, into the poets and their world. But none of the plays, none of the dramatists, is made to stand whole, either in the epoch, in the drama, or in some total conception of the critic.

If, then, as I have stated, there is wholeness in Mr. Eliot, we are led to question what kind of wholeness it must be that can focus so superbly on details in a dozen poets and a dozen epochs, and yet fail to envelop any one of them. It is true that this failure is not always complete. In the “Baudelaire,” for instance, or the “Swinburne,” we obtain a kind of two-dimensional cross section, built from the prosodic study, which we can place for ourselves in the organic milieu of the nineteenth century. But in the essays on the more cosmic men there are no dimensions beyond mere points of light. And in the studies of dynamic but little-discussed figures, the failure is disastrous. The pages on Bradley, for example, proceed without the faintest evocation of the two ideological worlds—Hegelianism and English individualism—which Bradley sought to synthesize. The chapter on Lancelot Andrewes is a mere ringing of personal responses to the old priest’s music, which become sentimental and pretentious, since there is no effort to place this music in the symphony of Roman Catholic, Jewish and Arabic exegesis, from which it was never truly independent.

T. S. Eliot, it becomes plain, is a man of integrity in the real sense of the word; but his vision is such that it can never hold more than details; and his energy is too weak to give organic form either to his subjects or to his essays. Unlike most of his fellows, who suffer in a chaos, he lives in a “universe.” But this “universe” of Mr. Eliot’s is evidently small and minor. It is achieved by huge and deliberate exclusions. It scarcely contacts with the modern world—the world whose radical transformations in physics, psychology and economics have dissolved all the old formal values. Nor does it really embrace the past worlds with which Mr. Eliot is so sympathetic: Dantean Europe or Jacobean England. This failure of mastery even on Mr. Eliot’s chosen ground is revealing. No one can understand a living past who is not actively engaged in the living present. For any past age is an integer in the creating of today, and only by conscious sharing of this creation can the past, as part of it, be understood. Fundamentally, Mr. Eliot’s subjective love of the Anglo-Catholic tradition leaves him as remote from what England really was as his distaste for modern problems leaves him remote from us—and for the same reason.

That reason brings us to the heart of our portrait. Any living world, whether it be Seneca’s or Shakespeare’s or our own, in so far as it lives, is dynamic; and Mr. Eliot’s world is static. Wherefore, in confrontation with a chaos of dynamic forces like our modern era, a chaos which our dynamic will must meet, grapple with, and mold, Mr. Eliot can only ignore; and in confrontation with dynamic worlds of the past, he can only rather sentimentally adore. His own static vision picks out details, reflects them and variates them into a kind of series, like the stills of a cinema, whose total effect may be sensitive and delightful, but cannot be organic.

This same static quality explains Mr. Eliot’s loyalty to a class and a class creed. A static universe does not evolve, cannot believe in evolving. It does, however, accumulate, and its “additions” make a quantitative change—the one kind of change and of cultural contribution which Mr. Eliot admits (see his essays on “Tradition,” “Individual Talent” and “The Function of Criticism”). In a static universe, transfiguration and revelation, and the capacity for these, are all stratified in the past. And this is another way of saying that Mr. Eliot’s spiritual experiences, from which issue his moral and esthetic taste, although they are real, have the form not of life, but of an inherited convention. Thus Mr. Eliot, with a religious sense, conceives of no religion except the orthodox Christian; with a tragic sense, conceives of man’s struggle exclusively in the cant meanings of Original Sin; with a sense of the spirit’s need of discipline and order—both in society and in the person—dreams of no method but that of a moneyed class ruling through church and state.

Are such views valid, in the sense of having a relationship with reality? Is there a position from which the universe is static; in which transfiguration and revelation are past; in which Good, Evil, and the given political and economic forms are absolute? The answer is Yes, in the sense that death, being real, is valid. The living world of the mind is as dynamic as the material world (they are one); there, too, the individual life must partake of the dynamism of the whole, and when it is severed from that dynamism we call it dead. The only difference is, that in the world of the mind we do not commonly employ the term “death”; we prefer to say conventional, dogmatic, static. Mr. Eliot’s position is that of a man who has withdrawn from growth—in our meaning, withdrawn from life. _He_ is static, his soul’s transfiguration is past, whatever progress he conceives must be a mere consolidation of himself into forms already uttered. His intellectual, spiritual and poetic “life” is a rationalization of this death deep within him.

We hold now, I believe, the key to T. S. Eliot. He is a man who has abdicated; but since he has been deeply sensitized to life, the articulation of his experience remains an exquisite, lingering echo. Such abdicated men have always existed, and have never been vital: even in periods of cultural stability (like that of Dante, for example), the cultural whole had constantly to be re-created by dynamic men. But in our age, where stability has foundered into chaos, and where the need for spiritual growth has become absolutely identified with the bare struggle for survival, the discrepancy between a man like Mr. Eliot and adequate leadership becomes enormous.

What we have really defined in our portrait of T. S. Eliot is a type of minor poet. He is in the tradition, neither of our major poets—Poe, Whitman, Melville—nor of the great Victorians. He is close to a cultivated and popular figure like Thomas Gray; and his “Waste Land” is a poem as good, and of the same nature, as the “Elegy.” Gray also was a technical innovator with an immense appeal because he foreshadowed, unconsciously, what was to become the dominant appetite of Europe: closeness to nature. From the energy of this appetite, Titans were to evolve the method for absorbing and controlling nature. But in Gray, the motion took a reactionary form: a sentimental harking back to the values of Puritanism (and to the language of Milton). The analogy with “The Waste Land” is complete. Here, too, is technical innovation together with a vague foreshadowing of what is _now_ the dominant need of the world: the need of an organic, a livable Whole in which all men and all man may function. This foreshadowed need gives to the poem its pathos, its unity and its importance. But, as in Gray, it is negatively stated by an evocation of a sentimental memory and by the use of old materials—in Mr. Eliot’s case, more diffused and catholic, since no strong Milton stands immediately behind him.

The questions remain: why has Mr. Eliot been a leader and what does his leadership reveal about our literary generation? The questions are swiftly answered. Even in an age of confused standards, there is recognition of literary merit. Mr. Eliot’s clarity, it is true, is achieved not by integrating the chaos that has bewildered us, but by withdrawal. Yet to the men whom the cultural dissolution has frightened and weakened (the majority of men), these limitations make him only more acceptable. A long time ago, I wrote of what I called “the comfort of the limit,” and explained its appeal to many types of mind lost in our modern chaos. Only athletic souls can face a world that has become, perhaps more than any other era, an overwhelmingly open and darkened future. The temptation to limit this world, either by rationalistically charting its future (a disguised reactionism) or by merely advocating its reform in an image of the past, is great and manifold.

All the dogmatisms of our day are really such “limits”—such simplifications of the real. There is the dogmatism of science (the comfort of limiting reality and its mastery to problems of mechanics and addition); there is the dogmatism of cynical despair (the comfort of giving up hope and therefore struggle); there is the dogmatism of a pseudo-Marxian dialectic (the comfort of explaining the human tragedy in terms solely of a simple, solvable class struggle). And, for the weakly poetic, there is the haven of an elegiac past, like Mr. Eliot’s, in which great poets still sing and sure priests thunder.

The one way of life that has no limit and affords no comfort is the way ahead—into the bitter and dark and bloody dawn of a new world, wherein mankind shall integrate without loss the stormy elements that make the chaos of our day, and its promise.

_1932_

FOUR: SOME PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS FOR THE SURVIVAL OF MAN

1. SOLIDARITY IS NOT ENOUGH

(_Notes written in the Great Textile Strike of 1934_)

a.

At dawn, they are all outside the mills: men, girls, mothers with children. The huge structure, submerged in mist, leaps suddenly with lights; the gates swing open; nobody goes in. The men talk in lively groups, the mothers smile, the girls have put on their glad rags and there is song in their throats. At the doors stand a few guards, glumly. In half an hour, they swing the gates shut and the lights snap out. The crowd of strikers, sure of its strength, strolls up the long flank of the mill, stretches in the morning sun; idles down to the next mill where stands another crowd before shut doors.

The strike has begun gaily. Men and women have joy of themselves in their common purpose, like a young animal discovering the health of its body.

Over on the North Side, before the open gates of a mill stands the crowd of strikers. Half a dozen girls pass forward, their heads low, their shoulders hunched. They are going to work. As the guards let them in, women call after them: “Ain’t you ashamed!”; men mutter angry and then ugly words. The thousand strikers understand the six disloyal girls; a sharp doubt stirs in them all, particularly the women. “We need the money too ... maybe they’re right. Maybe we’ll lose and only the girls will win.... Rent ... milk ... coal ... winter coats for the children.” The strikers are murmuring against their own fears ... the faithful presence of poverty and cold ... which they see personified in the six girls. The girls are at work now. The mill has become the form of their betrayal, and of the fear of the strikers. Already the holiday mood is gone.

b.

Fall River molders in the ruins of an industrial era. Small mills, built like castles with Colonial windows and with ivy on the brick, have been abandoned to the sweatshop rats. And the wood houses of the workers have died into festering shanties, the streets rank as rotten teeth. A man climbs the outside stair of one of these dead houses and enters a room at dawn. A mother stands at the stove; three men bend over a mimeograph machine in the far corner; and from two cots four children eagerly look up at the comrade.

He takes a leaflet, reads it, and nods. “Here’s another we need at once.” The children hear the words: “... the independent unions ... because they hate the U.T.W. they won’t come out. We got to show ’em that they must come out. We got to make ’em see, even if the A.F.L. did doublecross ’em, we must stick together....”

The men huddle again over the mimeograph machine. One of them is Portuguese, the first shaft of sun lights his fine hard mouth; another is a French Canadian, lumberly, musical, a Northern spruce walking the world. The man who has come in with the text of the new leaflet is a Yankee with the lantern jaw and gangling limbs of his Puritan forefathers.

“Here, you drink coffee first,” sings the mother.

“No time——”

“You drink coffee first,” she insists.

c.

Back in the South Side of New Bedford, five thousand strikers gather round the bandstand in a park to hear their leaders. Near by the harbor waters dance in the morning sun, dance up to the silent shadow of the mills. But a little along there is a line of mills athrob with labor: the great tire-fabric plants called the Fisk and the Devon, which recognize no union and worked clear through the six months’ strike of 1928.

William Batty, chairman of the strike committee of the U.T.W., gets to his feet. He is a burly fellow with a sharp nose and piercing eyes in his red face. He praises the strikers, he praises the President, he hurls his contempt and hate at the “Reds who are trying to make trouble.” One gets the impression, as he talks, that the strike belongs to him and to the other leaders: the workers are accessories and servants. “Leave it all to us,” is the burden of his message. “Washington”—sacrosanct word; “Strike headquarters in the Carpenters Building”—a Temple which only U.T.W. leaders are good enough to enter. The man has power, and has shrewdness. No doubt of that. Look at the heavy shoulders, the thin-lipped mouth. But where does he belong? He is standing on the bandstand a bit above the workers, he is talking a good deal down to them: one hears, in the rumble of his hatred for communists and shop committees, the echo of other voices, more shrewd, more potent: voices of politics and Money.

After Batty comes Ferdinand Sylvia, U.T.W. organizer and local favorite, who is running for State Representative on the Democratic ticket. A little, passionate Portuguese he is, and clever; the hard black eyes are nobody’s fool. How he praises the workers! “I’m proud of you. You’re making history today. We got a great friend in the White House who will help us against the bosses.... All you got to do is stick together. We’ll go back to Washington and do the rest.” There is no personal enthusiasm in the crowd for these leaders. But there is devotion to the cause which these men lead; and above all, there is the will, tense and a little wistful, to believe that they are truly leaders.

Sylvia speaks of the tire-fabric mills that are still working and holding New Bedford from a 100 per cent tie-up. “Go down and picket,” he cries. “Get ’em all out!” The mass, five thousand strong, moves quiet down the harbor.

d.

A youth with the high forehead of a poet, the Socialist Minister Glen Trimble, starts the picket line before the Fisk and Devon plants. Batty waves the crowd on the opposite side of the street to join; a couple of hundred men, women, girls, are soon patrolling. They are having a good time. They sing “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf” and, in lesser number, the old I.W.W. “Solidarity” song. Down from the windows peer the workers who refuse to strike. In the eyes of some is a defensive disdain: “If I can despise the strikers. I’ll not feel the need to join them.” Others are torn in conflict. Some of the boys and girls look down in veritable terror: not terror at the pickets, but at something in themselves that holds them back ... that makes them fear to join their sisters and their brothers. _Fear of their own fear_—the beginning of wisdom.

I slip into the office and ask for the manager. He says he’ll talk to me, provided I do not disclose his name for publication (I do not blame him). The same stale line about his “happy family of workers,” and the conscientious refusal to let “outside and alien organizers interfere in our affairs.” “We figure,” he says, “we can run our plant best with our own men. We give better minimum wages than NRA has asked for.”

“But,” I ask, “aside from the issue of wages, don’t you recognize a democratic, an American, a human issue? Labor is struggling to organize, like the bosses and business. Aren’t you working against the American spirit by discouraging your men from getting together? You admit conditions are bad in other mills. Why don’t you encourage these workers to help their brothers by joining the same union?”

The managerial eye grows cold and blank; the hands twitch. Then, obliquely: “I don’t get you. What good would it do if these men struck with the others? If one is starving, is it better that two starve?”

I realize the hopelessness of making a class-bound man hear the theme of loyalty and dignity in another class—in the class which he must exploit and degrade in order to survive. I expected no better. But as I return to the town center (while the pickets march) for a bite to eat, I find that the waitress is on the side of the strikers; the barkeep across from the best hotel, mixing me an excellent Tom Collins, says: “Sure, the tire-fabric mills should strike!” and the garage mechanic who fills my tank is warmly and openly with the strikers. This was not the case four years ago at the last great strike. Even a cop on the corner confidentially leans to me and says: “I guess the boys’ve got it!”

Up in the Labor Temple sits a little Scot, Abraham Binns, and runs the works. Dispatches pickets to hesitant outlying mills; phones Washington, puffs his pipe, and wonders, if Federal Relief backs down, where the funds will come from to feed the strikers. A sincere old-timer, he is, with a good eye for the detail of the battle and no vaguest notion of what, _really_, the battle is about. A thirty-hour week, a minimum wage? Sure! But that a world is breaking and has to be replaced by another lest the heart of mankind perish?...

I ask him about the National Textile Workers Union.

“They’re communists,” he burrs, as if to say: “They’ve got the smallpox.”

The workers think they can force the bosses to abolish the stretch-out. Binns sees that, and he’ll fight for it, too. But he does not guess that what the workers really want is to live, and _that they must create a new world to live in_. What chance has such a leader against Capital, the shrewdly conscious foe that knows, indeed, it is fighting _to live_ and for its world to live in?

e.

Yonder in Hazelwood Park, a young woman is talking: she knows what Binns and Batty have never dreamed of.

It is dusk of the first day. Seventeen thousand of the twenty thousand textile workers of New Bedford have come out; the exceptions being the tire-fabric mills. The talker is Ann Burlak, organizer of the N.T.W., herself a weaver and the child of Ukrainian workers of Northern Pennsylvania. The Boston and local papers have put the spotlight on Ann. She is the “red flame”; she is reputed to be “in hiding in the tenements of the South Side,” and the police announce they will run her in “on the slightest provocation.”

Ann is a tall blond girl in her early twenties. Her body bespeaks tenderness and grace; you feel that, were it not for a stronger love, she’d spend a lot of her time dancing. The firm jaw, the clear eye, the intelligent brow, make you understand why there’s so little time for dancing. On the bandstand, all around her, is a bunch of kids. They frolic about, none too silent, in the way of children; and I wonder how she manages to keep her mind, and her hearers’ minds, on her subject. The local N.T.W. organizer, Walter Burke, has the same concern; and he tries to shoo away the kids. But he is far too gentle about it; the kids refuse to go; and when Burke observes that they are not troubling Ann he gives up. Then it comes to me, that far from disturbing this reputed “fireeater,” the gathered children give Ann Burlak the appropriate setting. Truly, she is speaking for them; of the gay young world they can inherit, if their parent-workers know what they want, and fight for it, and know how to fight.

How different her tone from the U.T.W. leaders who harangued their crowd from the same stand! Ann Burlak appears to have faith in the workers and to be pleading with them to take hold of their own battle. She has to go easy. If she tells them straight what their leaders are up to, dickering with politicians and capitalists, they will scare. If she tells them straight what her motherly heart is full of: that the bosses cannot lose under capitalism, that the workers under capitalism cannot win, they will turn pale, and glance about them and cease to listen. It is a subtle task, this leading of the ignorant American workers to the realization of their own needs, of their own powers, of their own nature. And Ann Burlak does it well. Gradually, unobtrusively, she draws her hearers to the facts about “arbitration,” to the shortcomings of the U.T.W., to the single devotedness of the slandered “Reds.” The men and women listen. They have come, many of them, to have a look at the “red flame”; a good show for nothing. “They say she’s hot stuff,” explain the boys in the bench before me. Curiosity and frivolity fade, as the tall young woman gives her sensible heart and her motherly mind to her hearers. Mothers find themselves face to face with the truth: the bare cupboards of their homes, the bare bodies, the bare futures, of their children. Men see with their eyes what for long their hearts, despite the palaver of journal and politics, have known: that they, the workers, live in an enemy country! Latin, Slav or Yankee, they live in a land possessed and ruled by foes who are sworn to exploit and to degrade them.

At the close of her pleading to the workers to know themselves, to respect themselves, to be themselves, Ann Burlak tries to lead them in song. The men and women pitifully follow. And I am minded of the singing at a camp meeting which I recently attended. How the words rang for Christ’s second coming! Surely, had Christ been in his heaven, he must have answered these splendid ringing voices. And the thought came: When the workers of America learn to sing the coming of their world on earth as their fathers, the Christians, sang for their world in heaven, the Revolution will not tarry.

f.

It is midnight, after the first day. Around the Fisk and Devon mills, gravid with lights and labor, stand battalions of police: the comparatively kindly town constables with clubs and the sinister khaki-clad motor-cops with guns in their holsters and tear gas in reserve. On the park side are massed the strikers, a good ten thousand. Glen Trimble harangues them.

“They won’t let us picket? We’ll see about that. All of you here at the crack of dawn. And when the workers file in to work, we’ll have a picket line for them to pass through.”

A Negro in the crowd, in a quiet penetrant voice, says: “Why wait till tomorrow? Why not picket now?”

The crowd turns toward the mill; Trimble accepts the challenge. The police clubs stop them. The picket line halts, wavers, turns. And its repressed energy gathers in hands behind. Stones fly from the park side, and smash the mill windows. The police press forward.

Seven hours later, huge shut vans roll up to the red buildings and disgorge officers. Far off, beyond an empty lot, fully a fifth of a mile from the mills, stands the crowd and boos as the tire-fabric workers pass through to their jobs. Near the gates, they form hesitant knots. A man stays behind, while his wife enters. A girl looks up at a bevy of her sisters beckoning from a top mill window, grasps her bag and joins them. The police, guns swinging, slide across the empty lot, and the workers fade in the grey background of the harbor.

“There’ll be no picket line,” shouts the police chief at Batty and Sylvia. “We had enough last night. Look at them windows. Just you let your men come up, and we’ll take care of ’em.”

But while the clubs and the guns mass at the Devon side of the huge block, and the crowds die before them, another corps of workers comes to birth on the farther slope of the mills; a line forms ... marches.

The sun rises, the mill throbs. The clusters of hesitant workers have vanished, either inside to the machines or away. Suddenly, a gate swings open. The crowd rises in voice: “THEY’RE COMING OUT”: and forward, four abreast, march the Fisk workers to join their brothers and sisters.

Sylvia crows like a cock. “I’m proud of you!” And to Mary Vorse and me: “Tell ’em in Washington and New York, New Bedford has the world’s best workers.” Even the cops smile. The walk-out is 100 per cent. Now what?...

I think of the heroic tiny groups of revolutionary organizers throughout the nation: individuals, isolated, threatened, resourceless save for their own luminous spirit. Pleading with the workers, against the workers, to know themselves, to be themselves, to fight the good fight; while the official leaders and the pack of papers and the towns and the churches vomit their fear of the new world in the form of insults and lies. Workers, like everyone else, get the leaders they deserve. The workers are pitifully ignorant. Ignorance is the mother of misleaders.

I think of the great show of strength that the Textile Strike—like San Francisco yesterday—has summoned. And, while Ignorance is in the saddle, of the inevitable betrayal!

When the American workers _know_ what they are, there’ll be a different story.

That is the task of all young men and women: let thousands, each in his own way, go among the people, and humbly, quietly explain the cause of Life, which is the cause of Revolution.

Solidarity is not enough.[13]

2. WITH MARX, SPINOZA....

a.

This essay would not have been written at this hour had it not been for the dark hour of the German Jews. But their catastrophe is the deepening, within the crisis of the world, of a threat that for two centuries has gathered against Jewry. Judaism has never solved the challenge of the modern world; and this challenge is now a crisis—one of those historic crises from which Jewry must be reborn, if at all, through the threshold of death.

I do not stop to swell the lamentations that the fate of half a million highly cultured Jews has aroused in all sane people. My object is more stern. It is to analyze the response of the Jews in the United States to Hitler: to expose and study from the response certain traits of modern Jewry. There has been, in all the tears and rage, one constant refrain. “Why are we persecuted?” cry the leaders. “We are not different from you Gentiles—not in any point of thought, conduct or allegiance, that _counts_. In Germany, we are good Germans; in America, we are good Americans. There is no reason for this persecution.” Now, Jews have often suffered persecution; although I suspect never by such ruthlessly efficient methods as the German. But Jews have always known why they were maltreated. It was because they were different; in thought, in conduct, in allegiance, in all that counted, a peculiar people. It was because they were Jews. This might cause great sacrifice. But since Jewishness was the treasure of their lives, source of their beauty and joy, they deemed even the price of persecution not too great to pay for being Jewish. They took the persecution for granted, meeting it as shrewdly as they could. The stress of their energy and will was focused, not on avoiding or denying reasons for persecution, but on being Jews. Here, then, is an enormous difference. For the first time in a history of three thousand years, the leaders of Jewry do not know why they are persecuted: for the first time they disclaim any reason for persecution.

This sheds new light on the German Jewish disaster. Are these half million victims to be considered undifferentially as suffering human beings? Then they deserve no more pity and help—no more and, of course, no less—than the millions of other sufferers of our dark age: than the Negroes of our South, for instance; than the countless families broken by unemployment; than the communists whom Hitler and the Balkan sadists are torturing and maiming. But such pooled pity does not satisfy the Jewish leaders. In their appeals and reports they are careful to separate their cause from others. They imply that German Jewry calls for more than its quantitative share of the concern of a world riven with anguish; they assume, indeed, that a great people, whose value to mankind is high, is being menaced. Now this claim, on the evidence of the past, can be denied by no intelligent man. The Jews have through the centuries made contributions to the Western world that are inestimable, and organic. But are not the contemporary leaders confused in time? Should the Jews be saved today for what they were in the past? Such a plea runs counter to all natural law. What is there _alive_ in contemporary Jewry to distinguish it from any other quantitative group of human beings?

The answer, alas! is, there is nothing. There are still, it is true, traditional Jewish communes in Eastern Europe and North Africa. But we do not hear from them; they provide no Jewish leaders. Indeed, the modern world no longer gives them nurture or function, and they are doomed by their own archaic form. The Jewry that protests against Hitlerism and is menaced by it the world over, and that assumes its past worth as argument for its present survival, is a “progressive” Jewry, freed from that past. It is the Jewry that cries: Why are we persecuted? Let us examine it, then, for Jewishness—and in its most prosperous member, the Jews of the United States.

First, I must define the Jew; and this, fortunately, can be done without raising the old problems of race and nation. To be a Jew has always meant _to live a certain way of life_: a way which, evolving with the ages and with the cultural-economic conditions of the lands, was yet an organic growth from a single tradition. This tradition was one; and the Jewish groups made it organic with their lives. Other nations had prophets, the Jews enacted theirs. Other nations had arts, the Jews lived theirs. Other peoples had high standards for personal, communal and cosmic relations: the Jews, by the minutiae of their 613 commandments, made flesh and bone of their vision of the divine and the eternal. The defining Jewish trait is _unification_ of values, personal and communal, into an organic body of behavior. The defining Jewish term is _action_.

The Jewish principle—unity of value and deed, harmony of person and group—has always had a dual form. That the values of the person shall be fulfilled in the community, there must be _social justice_. And that within the cosmos there shall be preserved and furthered the values of men and of Man, there must be _God_. Social justice, of course, was an aspiration limited by the economy of the particular land and era—limited, that is, by _possibility_. What did God mean to the Jew? At first by miracle and confusedly, then rationally, God meant the dynamic immanence, in the world of matter and of man, of what the person most deeply recognized as his own truth and worth. God meant the principle of order, the will to unity, in an otherwise chaotic multiverse. God meant _value in Being_. The Jews, as a people, were the first to understand that this Value-in-Being could not be abstract, not diffuse, not impersonal, although it transcended individuals; but was myriadly focused and fleshed in human lives. This means that for the Jew every man and woman holds a purposive and creative place in life’s dynamic process.

Now, bearing this definition in mind, where—outside the vanishing Old World ghettoes of our East Side—are the Jews? Where in New York, in Cincinnati, in Chicago, in San Francisco? The American Jew is as divided in his ideals and his behavior as any Gentile. His amusements and his arts, his family life and his business methods, his loyalties to class, state and God, are the same tissue of contradictions. Like any Gentile, he scrambles for the dollar, lives for his belly, shares in the stampede for cheap delights. As businessman, he also exploits his brother; as citizen, he votes for the same liars, crude or gilded. He shouts the same chauvinistic phrases and is ready, with the rest, in time of war, to rush with the courage of Gadarene swine to his destruction. He enjoys (and writes) the same inane novels, movies. In a society whose crucial trait is the abyss between ideal and deed, he—the Jew—is indistinguishable from his neighbor. Is the “Jewishness” of these modern Jews a dynamic pattern of action? or is it a mere moldering heap of sentiment, vanity and habit?

I am speaking of the prosperous American Jew; not yet of the rank and file, the humble clerks and clothing workers, artisans and mechanics. These, as Jews, are passive. And in so far as they have Jewish leaders to make them act (as contradistinguished from labor leaders, for example), they choose the very type who have grown great by shrewd collaboration with a world that is the antithesis, in every value, to what is Jewish. This is a cardinal point in the lethal condition of American Jewry. Its leaders and spokesmen, in their loyalty to the exploiting class, have dangerously identified the Jew with a bourgeoisie that is degenerate and doomed. In the Middle Ages, the Jew was allied functionally with the rising burgher class whose destiny it was to break the feudal system. This alliance was one reason for the Jew’s survival. But burgherdom, in medieval Europe, played a different moral part from the grande bourgeoisie of today. In the realm of practicable action, the burgherdom stood for social justice and intellectual freedom, as against the exploiting landowning gentry and the landowning church. Technically, the profit system always meant exploitation of labor. But socially, this early bourgeois exploitation was in the direction of justice, since it was a departure from slavery and spread the margin of leisure whereby man’s culture could alone advance. Until the invention of the machine, some exploitation of men was needed in order that a privileged portion of mankind could think—and at last, by perfecting the machine, and spreading possible leisure to all humanity, abolish the need of human exploitation altogether. The alliance of medieval Jewry with burgherdom was therefore within the rhythm of advancing social justice, and hence harmonious with Jewishness. But today, the dominant bourgeoisie is the power of stratified social injustice: it is the power of war, of spiritual death and intellectual ruin.

The intensity of American Jewish allegiance to the exploiting class can be measured by the lives of the prominent Jewish leaders.

Almost without exception they are lawyers, judges, merchants, bankers, proprietors of newspapers and other vast affairs; men who have grown great in the American game of grab, men indistinguishable in spirit, mind and action from thousands of other divided men who (with like shamelessness) call themselves Christian. In a few instances, they are writers and rabbis—apologists, rank or subtle, of the exploiting classes.

Since their deeds are contradictions of their ideals, are such leaders Jews? Is a folk that such men lead, a Jewish folk? From the Jewish premise that value and vision must become action, a trait of Jewry has ever been to create true Jewish leaders.

But it may be said, there are other Jews, greater than these: not necessarily American, yet the real leaders of Jewry. There are Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Stieglitz, Henri Bergson, Leon Trotsky ... others. These men are great, and are leaders, and are Jews. But they are not leaders of Jews. They are leaders of scientists, philosophers, artists, revolutionists. They and other great Jewish men of our times are products of Jewish life; but modern Jewry cannot claim them. They are the offspring of the old communal Jewry which still existed in their formative years. And the fact that they have been forced to function quite outside modern Jewry is another proof of its present dissolution. The Jewish world no longer holds its men of genius; the highest products of its spirit, of its intellectual discipline and of its sense of life, leave the parent body. And the world of Jews, in deadly division from the Jewish spirit, chooses leaders who hasten its death.

Consider now the pitiful, the ironical condition of the Jew. To suffer for a cause that our soul loves is bearable: is, indeed—since we must suffer—man’s most enviable destiny. But to suffer for nothing! To be hated and ruined as a Jew, when one’s life is not Jewish! The Jews of Germany, taken as a whole, exist _inertially_ because their past way was Jewish and because it takes more than a generation to destroy a way of life so strong and so vital. If two hundred years ago, they had ceased living as Jews, Hitler and the Nazis, who are ignorant men, would probably not have heard of them. Hitler persecutes them now because in a confused way he has inherited what was a real reason, then, for a German in revolt against Western civilization to dislike real Jews who had so much to do with its creating.

But that is only half the picture. The Jews are allied with an agonizing and desperate middle class. When that class flourished, the Jews, functioning in it, were tolerated by it. Now that it droops and its spoils dwindle, it turns—like a man in a panic—against its weaker neighbor. It is the principle of “every man for himself”—the basic law of bourgeois life. Oh, the ironical confusion in the fate of the modern Jew! He is persecuted by barbarous and desperate men because of ideals that he no longer lives: and he is persecuted by a class to which, in the main, he is loyal, because he is a rival of its barbarous way of life—a way that contradicts his own ideals!