This diary is dedicated to JayRaye, who has rediscovered so many Hellraisers, including Henry O. Morris, radical labor journalist, see, e.g., Hellraisers Journal: Tear-stained Women...Besieged the Bull Pens in Cripple Creek and Victor.
JayRaye wrote me a message about Mr. Morris's novel. The book is available as a free e-book here, except for missing page 17 and the corresponding illustration, which I will give you down below. She thought that as a socialist and a Christian, I might find Morris and his novel worthy of more detailed study. After I started reading it, I thought it would make a good diary, and JayRaye agreed. JayRaye loves it when her research leads to other research. Morris himself remains something of a mystery, as with many labor heroes. His reporting is an important part of the historical record. But it's also time we pay attention to his fictional hellraising, which we could use more of if we are to get more of the non-fictional type. Our minds may yet be motivated by creative acts.
This is what the opposite of Atlas Shrugged looked like in the late 1890's:
The winter of 1898-'9 has passed and May day has come. ...
Oh, Mr. Plutocrat, this first day of May has been a long time coming, but it has dawned at last--the day is here.
As people begin to throng the streets their eyes are greeted on every hand with a mystic symbol ...
As the morning drags along the Associated Press bureau begins to receive messages asking if New York can explain the meaning of the sign. Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore are among the first to ask for information, their questions mingling with telephone calls from Brooklyn, Jersey City, Hoboken, Harlem--all on the same subject.
As the day grows older queries came in rapid succession from Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Cleveland, St. Paul, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Denver, New Orleans and all the Southern cities. This announcement comes from San Francisco:
"This city flooded with a peculiar symbol chalked on the sidewalks and printed on billboards. Advices from all over the State say that every town and village is filled with them, every cross-road fence has one or more placards. What do they mean?"
To which New York replies:
"We do not know. New York is also covered with them." ...
[W]hen the grand council of the revolutionists conceived the idea of this symbol, as a means of notifying its members of the day and the hour of the beginning of the conquest, it was considered very improbable that any person outside the revolutionary order could translate the sign, and so far as literal translation went their judgment was correct. But, mingling with this heterogeneous mob of wildly excited people was one who, by a chance begotten of inspiration, solved it. True, only a portion of it, but that portion contained its primary meaning. This individual was not a learned judge, a lynx-eyed detective, nor an alert reporter; but a creature of less than ordinary intelligence--an old woman almost in her dotage. This chance interpreter came shuffling up, elbowing her way to the bulletin board which bore, together with the bulletins, the strange device. Mumbling and grumbling, she wiped her watery eyes with her soiled apron, peered long and earnestly at the inscription, then, turning to the gaping crowd, she burst out into wild shrieks of hysterical laughter:
"Ha! ha! ho! Hooray! The devil fiddles for his imps to dance. It's sweet music when old Nick plays. Ha, ha! Oho! Hee, hee! Say yer prayers, ye wicked sinners--this means Revolution! Revolution, I say! D'ye hear me?" ...
Morris, Henry O. Waiting for the Signal, Ch. XXVI. Chicago: The Schulte Publishing Co. (published 1898, copywright 1897).
Myths can be powerful stuff. During these latest dark days for the worker in the U.S., we logically need to recapture some of the earlier mythic force. But we need to do this mindfully.
The other side is wickedly but brilliantly using populist "outsider" and even anti-banker rhetoric to manipulate fearful "white" workers. They do so to energize their own selfish cause, including right wing GOTV, but also to divert a large segment of the masses from fighting for constructive deep economic change. Although we can debate how to define "the workers," on some level the true outsiders are everyone who is not part of the 1%. By diverting attention from our commonality as workers, the plutocrats defeat solidarity.
Updating myths to grim facts on the ground may need to begin with revisiting key dreams large numbers of workers at one time carried in our hearts and minds, and which some still do. After all, we need to always remember that under capitalism, things have generally been hard times for the workers. Political power always has been more wishful thinking than achieved, even under FDR. All of these earlier myths were imperfect and even the best of our myths are in constant need of improvement. Some of the myths of the past were rough, embarrassing, unwise, or even partly wrong, but they were real too, because they fictionally responded, however imperfectly, to shared tangible material conditions, in a way that the other side can only dream. Real people are not perfect. Sometimes they share poorly in their desperation. Coping strategies are not pretty. It is hard when your family is hungry to be your brother or sister's keeper, especially when they look differently. Solidarity knows no boundaries, yet it is difficult to rearrange much less overturn capitalist conditions in a single valley much less a nation state or the world. The plutocrats don't want us to even try. Alas, sadly when we do try we often carry around prejudices that the universal "we" cannot tolerate, but which "we" must acknowledge in order to address the very real faults without losing the potential for solidarity.
The right certainly has mastered wallowing in fiction for purposes of division. annieli recently wrote about Laissez Fairyland, centered on the Reaganist myth. You have probably also heard of Ayn Rand. Just thinking of John Galt makes many a manly Santorum swoon.
The oppression embodied in the Galt myth may nonetheless inadvertently produce its opposite. Sorry to remind you Rick but Man on Dog is ... uh ... Nam [and other capitalist wars] no God spelled backwards. What I'm trying to suggest is that the upper management of the right, and their elected chicken hawk mercenaries and mega church blowhards, are comprised of hypocritical moralizers with their hands in global society's cookie jar much more than any fictional welfare queen and with total willingness to see us or our children suffer and die, notwithstanding Paul Rand or his plainly racist "objectivist" father's posturing to the contrary. The delusional militia bully buddies in the deserts of Nevada and on the Mexican border harassing actual desperate children are their latest poster children for "sovereign" rights, immigrant bashing, and white "supremacy." Unlike our side in the modern era, they intentionally cause what we now admit were abominable sores sometimes within the ranks of frightened and purposely divided labor. We, on the other hand, always have had within us the capacity to lance our boils in the interests of universal siblinghood.
The late 1890's were a significant transition time for the U.S. labor movement in various ways, but perhaps none more important than the ascension of socialism to the mainstream of worker consciousness--even, for some, to the extent of sophisticated imaging, if not fomenting, of actual armed revolt twenty years before the Bolsheviks did the real deal. At the end of Morris's revolutionists' epic mythical struggle would come a better world, not just for themselves but also eventually for much of the then industrialized world:
In foreign lands the miseries co-existent with a plutocratic form of government are yet present; but the signs of the times point to the immediate and certain overthrow of despotism in England, Germany and Russia at least. The shining example of the United States has set the whole planet in a quiver, and the Universal Brotherhood of Man bids fair soon to prove something more than a dream.
So ends Henry O. Morris's important, forgotten Waiting for the Signal.
The Pullman Strike of 1894 followed by the election of McKinley were the deciding factors for radicalizing many workers to search for a deeper democratic alternative to the AFL's craft unionism. For some, small scale efforts at slightly better working conditions were no match for the brutality of capitalism as it was being experienced by millions of U.S. workers.
The transition was gradual and often multi-tendency. This did not mean a total lack of dogma, but rather that for many, their dogma was rooted in populism, Williams Jennings Bryant, and progressive Christian religion, as well as Marx and other anti-capitalist theorists. And wherever dogma arises, human biases can arise. With the hindsight of the early 21st century, reading historical historical fiction can be an occasionally cringing experience. But the effort is worthwhile in the case of Henry O. Morris's novel.
Populism as personified in the 1896 campaign of the Democrat Williams Jennings Bryant had many good aspects. Bryant had Eugene Victor Debs' support in that campaign, fresh off the Bourbon Democrat Grover Cleveland's brutal suppression of the Debs-led industrial railroad strike of nationwide solidarity, even after Debs had been led to socialism. Debs by then was, and for the rest of his life stayed, a revolutionary internationalist who nonetheless believed that when democracy was available it should be coupled with industrial action to help bring justice to the world. He vehemently opposed exclusion of African Americans from solidarity and rejected any definition of socialism that did not embrace everyone. He ended up in prison and humbly fought all of his days for the workers of the world with everything that he had. On the other hand, Bryant ended up a southern Florida real estate salesman with prohibition and evolution on his mind. It is both Debs' hopes and some of Bryant's defects that are on display in Morris's novel, and only the former wittingly. But, ironically, this presents us with a better teaching tool than if the novel had been pure unadulterated enlightened Debs--because we are ever facing teachable moments when it comes to the capitalist divide-and-conquer strategy to defeat solidarity.
I am with Debs that Bryant changed and plainly for the worse. But others have a point that Bryant, with his version of Christianity and penchant for blowing religious hot air was in some ways consistent to the end. Certainly he was always accommodating the system rather than seeking to seriously change it. Certainly also the price of his "popular" "progressiveness" was a heavy dose of traditionalism and worse. While he, a northerner, did sometimes meekly stand up to his true base in the Jim Crow south, he was always unwilling to put his popularity fully on the line for African Americans. Thus, as Bryant unintentionally illustrates, undoubtedly traditionalism has an ugly side "we" must own up to so that "we" shall overcome it.
Compromise is not an option when it comes to racism, sexism, and homophobia. But fully ceding traditionalism to the reactionaries never seems to work out well either, including, but not limited to, in most general elections. A lot of workers may want to do things like go to church and/or harbor Archie Bunker attitudes or worse. Best for each of us to try to understand all of us on some level, and where possible love us (like that visionary Meathead) and try to "re-mold" the potentially re-moldable ones of us who need re-molding into better versions of ourselves through the example of folks like Debs, Mother Jones, and other Hellraisers, many atheists or agnostics, but many also believers of various types. We might as well try, consistent with the other demands of good practice.
To attempt to understand this complexity that continues to this day, perhaps there is no better place to start than Morris's previously hard-to-come-by, moldy but now-digitized book. In years to come Bill Haywood would articulate an authentic, non-scholarly U.S. revolutionary internationalist vision of the general strike that would gradually lose steam, a condition that would be exacerbated by the growing disillusionment spurred by Stalin's totalitarian state industrial capitalism.
It is terribly sad to think about the losses of the cause of the worker. That is the story of most of the Hellraisers--terribly sad losing. But come let us see that our losses are and always have been the direct result of capitalist oppression. Make no mistake: if the revolutionary potential were not present among U.S. labor even to this day, sympathy strike-killing Taft-Hartley never would have been considered necessary after World War II by the plutocracy, which would not still be attacking severely weakened organized labor at every turn.
Broadly speaking, a "revolutionary" approach was firmly rooted in a far broader swath of U.S. labor than might appear from the later tough times of the overtly revolutionary Wobblies. Much of the incredible energy, and theoretical jumble, of labor in the 1900's and 10's may have creative ties to Morris's somewhat scholarly perceptions and revolutionary vision, which should be considered valuable if not essential reading by workers of the U.S., if not the world, as it apparently once was. The preface to the third edition claims:
The wide circulation of the first and second editions of "Waiting for the Signal" has caused me to be deluged with letters from all parts of the United States, and certain sections of Europe, asking if I know when the revolution described would begin.
To these inquiries I have answered "No;" and added that, were I possessed of the knowledge of the exact day and hour when the trouble was to commence, under no circumstances would I reveal it.
The revolution is sure to come--it is on the way.--I leave the reader to guess when the storm will burst.
Please follow me below the mystic Kosian symbol so that I can brainwash you with a Manchurian synopsis and analysis of Morris's novel.
His writing cannot be mistaken for high art but that was not what he was aiming for. As he said in the original preface:
I ... launch my ship without worry as to its destination or as to its course. ...
The electric telegraph, the locomotive and the thousands of mechanical inventions which have come into use during the last quarter of this century have given dishonest men the opportunity to combine and associate themselves together into vast soulless corporations, or "trusts," which the laws based on the present Constitution are apparently powerless to control; while the same period of time has witnessed the graduation in the school of knavery and greed of a sordid horde of partisan politicians.
Hence the necessity of a new Constitution under which laws may be enacted that shall be a bar to the continuation of the present evils, and under which the corrupt politician, when disposed to rob his country or its citizens, would be compelled to take the personal risk of a highwayman.
This book is written--it is submitted to the discriminating public without apology.
I launch my diary without apology. Please feel free to comment in the same spirit.
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