Eleanor Marx
Page 32
Eleanor stood on the deck dressed in a white summer blouse and skirt as City of Chicago arrived in New York harbour under a clear blue sky on 9 September. Her light gown had a bodice and sleeves but she never wore a corset. She must have enjoyed the breeze through the Hudson more than the other women on deck, who stood stuffed into their stays on the hot late summer day.
‘The entrance up the bay to the harbour is a marvellous sight,’7 Tussy wrote. Passing Bedoe’s Island, as it was known then, she admired the towering construction site of Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, its gigantic steel supports girded with scaffolding and canvas and the little island surrounded by sturdy tug boats ferrying supplies and workers to the build. Red-gold glimpses of Liberty’s bright copper sheeting flashed in the sun. Tussy knew of this gift of friendship from republican France to the people of the United States to welcome immigrants on their arrival and hoped to see it unveiled before she left. The imminent completion of Liberty Enlightening the World, as she was originally known before America sensibly gave her a shorter name, combined with the Democratic presidency of Grover Cleveland appeared to be good omens for Tussy’s first arrival in the New World.
The visitors were met by a delegation of ‘red ribboned gentlemen’, and a hungry press pack of ‘reporters were down on us like wolves on the fold’8 before they’d even stepped ashore. The journalist from New Yorker Volkszeitung came aboard in the scrum of journalists, and was struck by their unusual appearance:
The man wore a grey travelling costume and a broad, black felt hat . . . he made the impression of a Quaker. Briskly flashed his dark eyes. The young lady, who leaned on his arm, had rich glossy black hair, dark brown eyes and a not unlovely oval face. Her complexion was heavily browned by the sun during the voyage. The cotton garment which the young lady wore was gathered together at the waist by a black girdle, above which a kind of blouse with delicate creases fell and from there a steel watch-chain stretched towards the girdle. The intelligent face of the lady was covered by a large, white straw hat with a white bow.9
Asked about the voyage Eleanor, wearing as always her favourite cool white, was firmly critical of the ‘rudeness’ and ‘brutality’ of ‘the so-called better classes on board’, and, she said, being herself the daughter of immigrants, felt indignation at how badly the poor emigrants on the voyage to America were treated by rich tourists. Their welcoming delegation from the National Executive Committee of the Socialistic Labor Party took them to a hotel in the German quarter. ‘I rather regret this,’ Eleanor said in a note to Laura, ‘for the Vaterland like the poor is always with us here.’10 It was a ready reminder that their job was to internationalise American socialism.
They gave their first lectures at Bridgeport in Connecticut on 14 September. Bridgeport was a stronghold of the German-dominated SLP, but Edward ploughed right in and urged the mass audience to work with the Knights of Labor and trade unions. Eleanor, in her first American address, focused on feminism and urged women to join the socialist movement. Two days later Eleanor fascinated the audience at New Haven, which included students and professors from Yale University, with her exposition of socialist modernity to a largely middle-class, moneyed audience. Americans, Tussy quickly grasped, had an entirely different conception of questions of class and self-betterment. Aveling subjected the gathering to an hour-long, bone-dry exposition of scientific historical materialism but Eleanor re-awoke them by tackling head-on the bogeyman for the bourgeoisie: fear of losing private property.
People feared, Eleanor said, that the abolition of private property meant that no one would be allowed to say ‘my coat’, or ‘my watch’, for example. On the contrary, thousands of dispossessed people who today possessed absolutely nothing would under socialism be able to say ‘my coat’ and ‘my watch’ for the very first time in their lives. Rather, no individual or group of individuals would be able to say ‘my factory’ or ‘my land’ – and above all, no man could any longer say of another, ‘my hands’.
She then turned to the question of law and order and the problem of the use of armed resistance to achieve political freedom. No socialist, she said, should wish to use physical force. However, as Americans had fought to abolish slavery, so they might have to take up arms to abolish wage-slavery.11 In all her key speeches in America over the coming months, Eleanor spoke directly and clearly on this theme of property and production:
One of the first things you are told is that we socialists want to abolish private property; that we do not admit the ‘sacred rights of property’. On the contrary, the capitalistic class today is confiscating your private property, and it is because we believe in your ‘sacred right’ to your own that we want you to possess what today is taken from you . . . all wealth, all we today call capital is produced by your labour . . . out of the unpaid labour of the people a small class grows rich, and . . . we want to put an end to this by abolishing all private property in land, machinery, factories, mines, railways etc.; in a word, in all means of production and distribution. But this is not abolishing private property; it means giving property to the thousands and millions who today have none.12
Their next stop was Meridien, where they met with leaders from the Knights of Labor and came away with assurances that the Knights would very shortly unite with the SLP – which of course never happened. Eleanor was concerned about the more conservative elements amongst leaders of the Knights but nevertheless regarded the organisation as ‘the first spontaneous expression by the American working people of their consciousness of themselves as a class’.13
Eleanor and Edward published a remarkable collaborative account of this tour, The Working Class Movement in America, first published by Swan Sonnenschein in 1888 and reprinted in an enlarged edition in 1891. In chapter eight, they describe how at Thanksgiving in 1869 a Philadelphia tailor, Uriah Stephens, called together eight friends and formed the secret order of the Knights of Labor, known only by its cabbalistic five stars until June 1878 when it felt strong enough to declare itself a public organisation. By 1886 its national membership was estimated conservatively at half a million.
On Sunday 19 September 25,000 people assembled at Brommer’s Union Park at 133rd Street. Liebknecht, who had just arrived, led the address by fulsomely thanking the German comrades who had invited him; he then moved swiftly to the urgency for the movement to grow beyond German-speaking Americans to include all labour organisations and American working people of all languages and origins. Eleanor and Edward followed suit, putting into action the strategy agreed with Engels in London before their departure.
The Brommer’s Union Park rally was the largest public gathering ever to have taken place in New York’s history, and, although it was orderly and well disciplined, heavy and rather intrusive policing inevitably led to some jostling and rough handling. Eleanor, as ever, was at the centre of the fray and was pushed over by a couple of policemen. One independent newspaper declared itself mortified and published an apology on behalf of ‘the land of the free’ that Eleanor Marx should be subjected to ‘such wanton interference on the part of police with the liberty of the subject’.14
The following day, Monday 20 September, and again on Wednesday 22, there were two further mass meetings held at Cooper Union in Cooper Square in the East Village, focusing on the role of trade unionism as a step in the process towards socialism. By now, Eleanor’s presence had seized the imagination of the east coast, particularly since her beguiling address in New Haven, dressed again all in white, gracefully highlighting the shortcomings of private property and ownership of the means of production within a capitalist system. The New York Herald was threatened by this living, breathing Lady Liberty, apparently so much more forbidding than the silent statue under construction in the harbour:
SOCIALISTIC PLEADINGS. COOPER UNION CROWDED. SPURRED ON BY A WOMAN
The Herald deplored the ‘Sozialistische Frauenbund’ crowding the platform. It gave Eleanor a matronly tone – ‘CARL MARX’S DAUGHTER BOOMS’ – and describ
ed her, hilariously, as ‘a German looking lady with eyeglasses’.15
Shortly before they left New York Edward and Eleanor had dinner with the Democratic mayoral candidate, Henry George. George shared Eleanor’s views on Ireland, and had a bedrock of support amongst the New York Republican Irish. He was also popular amongst black New Yorkers for his radical views on what was then described as ‘the negro question’ – a subject about which Tussy became much better informed during her visit to America. They agreed on much, but not the most important question:
He does not, like the Socialist, regard the mode of the production and distribution of commodities, with its private property in the means (of which land is but one) of that production and distribution, as the basis of modern society, and therefore of the ills of that organisation.16
Rather, George believed the land question to be at the bottom of everything. Just nationalise the land and all else will follow. Eleanor got on well with him but predicted correctly that he wouldn’t stay in the socialist fold for very long. George won the mayoral election with a third of the total vote, beating the Republican candidate Theodore Roosevelt by a majority of almost 8,000. Within a year he had declared against socialism. ‘As far as a real working-class movement is concerned, he is a ruined man,’ Eleanor concluded, though she liked him personally as a friend and stayed in touch with him as a progressive thinker.
On 2 October Eleanor and Edward set out on a three-month whistle-stop itinerary that took in thirty-five towns in fifteen states. Eleanor dubbed it the ‘agitation tour’.17 In Manchester, New Hampshire she was appalled to see women millworkers who looked even more famished and degraded than their sisters in Lancashire.
Perhaps the most important achievement of the American SLP was its success in founding the Central Labor Union (CLU) of New York in 1882, to organise foreign workers from amongst the nearly six million penniless immigrants who arrived in America during the 1880s from Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Scandinavia, Hungary, Bohemia, England, Russia and Poland. CLU organisations spread beyond New York, springing up in other large cities on the eastern seaboard, joined by both black and white Americans, including cowboys.
Many cowboys were in discussion about establishing a Cowboy Union or Assembly of their own, as Tussy discovered in Cincinnati, as she said, in ‘a sufficiently odd way’.18 Their German-American hosts took them on a sightseeing tour of the city, including a dime museum. The chief attraction at the show was a group of cowboys, ‘sitting in twos and threes on various little raised platforms, clad in their picturesque garb and looking terribly bored’.19 A spruce museum guard, in ordinary clothes, made ‘stereotyped speeches about them in a voice metallic enough for stereotyping’, but at one platform he mercifully stopped short and told the visitors that Mr John Sullivan, alias Broncho John, would speak for himself:
Thereupon, a cowboy of singularly handsome face and figure, with the frankest of blue eyes, rose and spoke a piece. To our great astonishment he plunged at once into a great denunciation of capitalists in general and ranch-owners in particular . . . Broncho John evidently knew what he was talking about, and felt what he said.20
He described cogently the hard work and poor conditions endured by cowboys as a non-unionised class of workers and the despotism of the ranch owners, including orders that the men ‘must not read books or newspapers’.21 Their horses belonged to the ranch owners, who deducted the cost of their outfit – including saddle, spurs, hat, chaps, oilskin, boots, whip and gun – from their monthly wages. The working season on the plains was six to eight months, but cowboys were not paid during the off time and had to get other jobs to keep themselves and their families.
During the season they were in the saddle all day and mostly through the night, looking after the huge Western herds of cattle, preventing milling and stampeding. ‘I have been with a party when we were obliged to ride 200 miles before we got the cattle under . . . in all that time not one of us took a moment’s rest or bit to eat!’22 Drowning was common as cattle were moved across streams and rivers. Tussy was surprised to learn that it was not uncommon for it to take three weeks to a month getting a herd of 4,000 cattle across a river.
Then there were innumerable dangers from bands of marauders, Native Americans and prairie fires. ‘Into the bargain,’ Broncho John pointed out, ‘the herd must not only be delivered safe and all told, but they must have increased in weight since leaving the ranch. The rule is, the cowboy must fatten the cattle on the trail, no matter how thin he may grow himself.’23
So much for Tussy’s childhood delight with Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook singing round the campfire with baked beans, tin mugs of coffee and starlight. Fenimore Cooper’s grand romantic adventures that Tussy had loved to read as a child proved to be romantic fiction.
Eleanor immediately arranged to meet Broncho John privately the next day. He told her and Edward that any cowboy, including himself, who tried to organise a union for fairer pay and working conditions was immediately discharged and branded by the ranch owner, who sent his name to every other member of the Rancher’s Society around America: ‘the name is turned to in the books of each ranch and a black mark placed opposite it. This is called “black-listing” the cowboy. He might as well leave the country at once.’24
Broncho John gave Eleanor and Edward a pamphlet he and fellow cowboys had put together in their effort to unionise and they published its contents in The Working Class Movement in America, devoting a chapter to ‘The Cowboys’ and deploring ‘the terrorist regime of the ranchers . . . who are all staunch upholders of the sacred rights of property’.25
At Hartford, Connecticut Eleanor and Edward were the guests of Isabella Beecher Hooker, the half-sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher. Isabella was an outspoken abolitionist, suffrage activist and committed spiritualist.26 Eleanor, who rarely visited homes of wealthy people, admired Isabella’s ‘delectable mansion’ and said that with Isabella and her friends ‘we spent perhaps the most happy and assuredly the most peaceful hours of our stay in America.’27
Eleanor was introduced to Isabella Beecher Hooker’s work by August Bebel, who wrote about her in his book Women and Socialism (1879), reprinted in a revised and expanded version as Woman in the Past, the Present and the Future in 1883. Censored and banned in Germany under Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws, the book was circulated underground and was viciously attacked in the press, despite the absence of a public edition.
Bebel sent Engels a copy in January 1884 and Eleanor read it immediately, corresponding with Bebel about the English translation by Harriet Adams Walther. Modern Press published the English edition in 1885 in its International Library of Social Science imprint – and the British press generally gave the book as hostile a reception as it had received in Germany.
Eleanor was one of the few critics to review Bebel’s book favourably, in the August 1885 supplement to Commonweal. After years of gestation, she was ready to give birth to her own work on feminism. When she did, she approvingly referenced Beecher Hooker’s approach to speaking honestly to children about sex and reproduction, interweaving the words of Olive Schreiner’s anti-heroine Lyndall Gordon previously cited:
With the false shame and false secrecy, against which we protest, goes the unhealthy separation of the sexes that begins as children quit the nursery, and only ends when the dead men and women are laid in the common earth.
Eleanor was very impressed by Isabella in person and they discussed at length the need for a women’s movement in America. This was a central theme of Eleanor’s speeches on the tour and she raised it regardless of audience, to worker meetings and middle-class gatherings alike. Eleanor summarised her views on the woman suffragists of America in The Working Class Movement in America:
They appear to be like and yet unlike their English sisters labouring in the same field. They are like them in their nonunderstanding of the fact that the woman question is one of economics and not of mere sentiment. The present position of women rests, as
everything else in our complex modern society rests, upon an economic basis. The woman question is one of the organisation of society as a whole. American woman-suffragists are like the English in the fact that they are, as a rule, well to do. And they are like them in that they make no suggestion for change that is outside the limits of the society of today.28
However, Eleanor found that American suffragists differed from their English sisters in two vital particulars. She found them far more open-minded and ‘much more outspoken’, unafraid of ‘being thought improper’.29 ‘They are beginning to understand that this special question is only part of a much larger one.’30 Suffragette activist Mrs Devereux Blake and Isabella Beecher Hooker listened eagerly, Eleanor found, to any attempts at defining practical methods for finding a solution to the problem, and were:
ready to engage in the more far-reaching struggle for the emancipation of the workers as well as that for their own sex. And in this wider view of the contest for liberty there is of course no narrowing of the view as to the woman question especially nor does anyone lose the womanlike in the larger mind.31