Communism; Industrial Workers of the World; Socialism
It is not flattering to the State of Wisconsin to realize that Berger
has several times been chosen to represent one of its Congressional
districts in the United States House of Representatives. Yet Berger has
apt pupils. On January 12, 1919, Mayor Hoan of Milwaukee presided at a
Milwaukee meeting of 8,000 "Reds" to protest against the conviction,
under the Espionage Law, of Victor L. Berger and four co-conspirators,
and prolonged cheering and waving of "Red" insignia answered the
following words spoken by William Bross Lloyd (_Testimony, Socialist
Trial, Albany, page 1623_):
"What we want is revolutionary preparedness. We want to
organize.... We want a mobilization plan and an organization for
the revolution. We want to get rifles, machine guns, field
artillery, and the ammunition for it. You want to get dynamite. You
want to tell off the men for the revolution when it starts here.
You want to tell off the men who are to take the dynamite to the
armory doors and blow them in and capture the guns and ammunition
there so that the capitalists won't have any. You want to tell off
the men to dynamite the doors of the banks to get the money to
finance the revolution."
William D. Haywood and Frank Bohn are the joint authors of a pamphlet
entitled, "Industrial Socialism," the revolutionary tenor of which may
be gathered from the following lines:
"When the worker, either through experience or a study of
Socialism, comes to know this truth [i.e., economic determinism],
he acts accordingly. He retains absolutely no respect for the
property rights of the profit takers. He will use any weapon which
will win his fight. He knows that the present laws of property are
made by and for the capitalists. Therefore he does not hesitate to
break them."
Since Haywood and Bohn evidently had no intention of using paper-cap
pistols and pop-guns as their weapons, and since they certainly did not
mean to shoot at stone walls and forest trees, it seems strange that the
Socialist Party, if it does not advocate such doctrines of violence,
should sell these pamphlets at $6 per 100, according to a price list of
its national office in Chicago.
To make matters still worse for the apologists of the Socialist Party of
America, no less a personage than Eugene V. Debs commented as follows,
in the "International Socialist Review," February, 1912, on the
doctrines of Haywood and Bohn just referred to:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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