RADICALS: Chairman Berger

Every so often, the Socialist Party in the U. S. does something. It has not done a great deal since its leader, Eugene Victor Debs, died a year ago (TIME, Nov. 1, 1926).

Last week the Socialist Party dedicated a memorial radio station in Manhattan to Mr. Debs, giving the wave length his initials, WEVD. Also it announced that, at a recent meeting in Detroit, it had chosen Victor L. Berger, U. S. Congressman from Wisconsin, to succeed Eugene V. Debs as Chairman of the National Socialist Executive Committee.

Mr. Berger, a florid, bustling, 67-year-old native of Austria-Hungary, used to teach school and dream Utopias in Milwaukee. Writing for newspapers led him into politics. He went as a delegate to the People’s Party convention at St. Louis in 1896 and there began an agitation for the recognition of Eugene Victor Debs, then a labor organizer whom Mr. Berger had introduced to Marxism and whom Mr. Berger was to continue introducing for 30 years. When the Socialist National Committee was formed in 1898, Mr. Berger was of course on it. But not until 1910 did he attain a civic office, though he ran and ran for mayor and for both houses of Congress. In 1911 he became both the editor of the Milwaukee Leader (unique U. S. Socialist daily) and the first Socialist ever elected U. S. Representative.

During the War, along with Eugene Victor Debs, Victor L. Berger was sentenced to prison under the Espionage Act. Congress refused to admit him after his re-election in 1918, and again after another re-election in 1919. In 1923, Milwaukeeans sent him to Washington once more. This time he was received, the U. S. Supreme Court having meantime (in 1921) decided that the judge* who sent him to prison was unduly prejudiced against Teutons.

As the successor of Eugene V. Debs, Mr. Berger might be expected to go through the motions of running for the U. S. Presidency next year. Eugene V. Debs ran time and again, polling nearly a million votes in 1912 and again in 1920, his last two campaigns.* But Mr. Berger is not likely to run. Doubtless Poet Henley’s “Invictus”†is one of his favorite poems as it was Mr. Deb’s. But Mr. Berger is a practical captain of his soul, an editor, an essayist, a politician but not a crusader. He refused to cruise abroad on Henry Ford’s “Peace Ship.” He opposes the League of Nations. He was content in 1924 to see the Socialist Party merge its energies with the energies of the Farmer-Laborites, the American Federation of Labor and other bodies at the Conference for Progressive Political Action, which backed his fellow Wisconsinite, the late Robert M. LaFollette. With not even a LaFollette in sight, Mr. Berger will probably confine his attention to legislative reforms, such as unrestricted immigration, minimum wage and child labor laws.

Socialism is a nebulous affair for the U. S. man-in-the-street. In general, all the man-in-the-street is sure of about Socialism is that a foreigner named Karl Marx wrote a book in which he recommended that all the money in the world be divided up equally among all the people; that all real estate be taken over by the State and some of it reassigned to people in small pieces to live on; that all industry and education be run by a government in which every man would have a say. There are a few other details which the man-in-the-street* remembers or not according to temperament and inclinations, such as filling up the plentiful spare time which Socialists would have with free love, books, Art (meaning painting, sculpture, etc.), and eating vegetables. A pious man-in-the-street usually suspects Socialism of connoting also Atheism. Shy men-in-the-street think it involves going around in public without any trousers on. Lazy men-in-the-street have heard that Karl Marx listed Work as a prime ingredient of the perfect state.

Without realizing it, men-in-the-street are prone to think of the Socialist nebula as a misty organism of a more or less reddish hue, with parties and particles, creeds, organs, persons and programs whirling round & round, and getting nowhere except in Soviet Russia, which is east of Europe and therefore does not count. Red footstools, red neckties, intentionally crude cartoons, stuffy parlors and garrets, late hours, morose arguments, “long-haired men and short-haired women,” dirty fingernails and a strange courage, are among the peculiar properties of Socialism.

Could a political spectrograph of the U. S. be made to help the man-in-the-street classify his more prominent fellow citizens as to political color, from the “true Blue” of J. P. Morgan to the bright “Red” of the late Sacco & Vanzetti?

Perhaps it could. Perhaps such a spectrograph would contain elements as follows:

Blue. The first color band would include such U. S. citizens as stand pat for a stratified society topped by an aristocracy either of money or brains. They find the present form if not the present condition of government in the U. S. satisfactory on the whole. They think little of radical reformers. For various reasons, all would call Socialism “rot.” Besides Banker Morgan, Blues include such assorted types as Associate Justice Pierce Butler of the U. S. Supreme Court, Chairman William Morgan Butler of the G. O. P., William Wrigley Jr., William Randolph Hearst, James J. Tunney, Will Durant, Henry Louis Mencken, Walter P. Chrysler, Charles Albert Levine.

Mauve. Virtually as satisfied as Blues with the status quo, but prone to think of the blues as “hidebound reactionaries,” “stand-patters,” etc., and of themselves as “progressives,” “constructionists,” “open minds,” etc., are citizens in the next political color zone, fringed ever so faintly with Redness. A warm heart, a scientific detachment, a professional flair or expediency, is enough to make a Blue man Mauve. Associate Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis of the U. S. Supreme Court has a distinctly reddish tint as he sits beside his colleagues; but taken off the high bench, Mr. Justice Brandeis would look no redder than Thomas Alva Edison, Alfred Emanuel Smith or Secretary of Labor James J. Davis. Nor, if attentively compared, would the following Mauve Men seem more Red than Blue, more Blue than Red: A. F. of L. President William Green, Sinclair Lewis, Judge Ben B. Lindsey, Walter Lippmann, and so-called “radical” U. S. Senators such as Brookhart, LaFollette, McMaster, Norris, Nye, Shipstead (Farmer-Labor).

Flesh. Next come the citizens who think with their stomachs as well as their heads. Humanitarians they are, sooner than political theorists. “Liberals” is what they call themselves. Often they are called “Sentimentalists.” They fight the battles of less fortunate people who, they think, have been oppressed by more fortunate people. Yet they are not crusaders for an economic Utopia. Their slogan is neither “Dollars” nor “Down with Dollars” but “Sense and Sensibility.” The Flesh Tint ones include Clarence Darrow, Heywood Broun, Jim Tully, Arthur Garfield Hays, Arthur D. Hill, John Haynes Holmes, Jane Addams, Felix Frankfurter, Roger N. Baldwin, Oswald Garrison Villard (the Nation).

Pink. Such real Socialism, or anything like it, as is professed and promulgated in the U. S. today, resides among men who can live with theory more comfortaably than with fact. Socialism does not exist in the U. S. as a fact but as a theory it thrives in the heads—for example—of Victor L. Berger, Hendrik Willem Van Loon, Norman Thomas, Max Eastman, Morris Hillquit, Upton Sinclair, Edward Holton James, Floyd Dell, Paxton Hibben. These men are, on occasion, roundly abusive of their right-hand neighbors in the political spectrum. They call political names far more intensely and seriously than anyone else. Yet none of them harbors thoughts truly subversive to the U. S. Government. None insists on a capital levy, except in principle. None would actually abolish the U. S. Supreme Court. They are Reds who have been, if not sicklied o’er, at least noticeably bleached, if not by the pale cast of thought, then by the bright sun of circumstance.

Red. The only real Reds are the Communists and Anarchists, few in number and decreasingly attractive to Socialists. Prosperity in the U. S. and the periodic disorderliness of irresponsible members of their party seem to blight such sympathies as they enlist through being periodically persecuted. William Z. Foster, William F. Dunne (the Daily Worker) and the late Charles Ruthenberg (TIME, March 14) (Communists), and the late Sacco & Vanzetti (Anarchists) are the best known names among them. For the most part they are hot-eyed men of obscure pursuits and little estate, intense indealists as often as scoundrels; lacking organization as badly as friends.

Outside the Blue-to-Red spectrum are other zones:

Red, White & Blue, the hue all thoroughgoing U. S. citizens should logically be, includes such personages as Mayor William Hale Thompson, American Legion Commander Edward Elwell Spafford, Mrs. Ella Boole, John Roach Straton, Billy Sunday, Dr. Frank Crane, Elks, Grotto, Rotary, Lions. Moose, etc.

Motley is the color of such semipolitical commentators are Will Rogers, Mayor James J. Walker. Cartoonists “Ding” and Briggs. Texas Guinan.

*Kenesaw Mountain Landis, now baseball tsar.

*About 15 million votes were cast in 1912 ; about 27 million in 1920 (when women voted for the first time).

†Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance,

I have not winced nor cried aloud,

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed. . . .

It matter not how straight the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul!

WILLIAM EARNEST HENLEY

*The American Magazine for November reported the discovery, through geography and statistics, of “the average American citizen.” The man was one Roy Lewis Gray, clothing merchant, of Fort Madison, Iowa, native born, aged 43, not tall, not short, not fat, not thin, not bald, not dark, not light, not Wet, not a Dry, with a wife, son, daughter, pipe, radio, three-year-old automobile. Average Mr. Gray visited Chicago last week. There he bought a picture postcard of his hotel, marked his window with a “X,” mailed the card home. He wanted to see the Chicago park system, stock yards, municipal pier “and that stadium where the Dempsey-Tunney fight was held.” He said: “Greatest American? Lindbergh, undoubtedly. Next President ? Oh, probably Charley Hughes. Locarno pact? What’s that?” Hearst Editor Arthur Brisbane took occasion to flay Mr. Gray: “He never reads the foreign news, just goes along through life very much like any chicken in his chicken yard, if he has a chicken yard. Fortunately for the nation it is not made up exclusively of average citizens.”