IV
Poor Jimmie Higgins! It was like the blow of a mighty fist in the
face; he was literally stunned--it was weeks before he could grasp
the full meaning of what was happening, the debacle of all his
hopes. And it was the same with Ironton's Bolshevik local; all the
"pep" was gone out of its proceedings. To be sure, some noisy ones
went on shouting for revolution the very next day--men, who had been
talking formulas for twenty or thirty years, and had no more notion
of a fact than they had of a pseudopodium. But the sensible men of
the group knew that their "St. Louis resolution" was being shot to
death over there in the trenches before Petrograd.
It was interesting especially to see Rabin. The common belief of
Americans was that a Jew could not be induced to fight; they told a
story about one who cried out to his son, asking why he was letting
another boy pummel him, and the son whispered in reply, "Keep still,
I got a nickel under my foot!" All through the war the Jewish
Socialists in America had been, next to the Germans, the most ardent
pacifists; but now here was a social revolution managed by Jews,
here was a Russian government which gave the Jews their rights for
the first time in history! So the little Jewish tailor stood up
before these American Bolsheviki, and with tears running down his
cheeks declared: "Comrades, I am already tru vit speeches; I am
going into dis var! I vill put myself vit de Polish Socialists, vit
de Bohemian Socialists--I fight de Kaiser to de death! So vill fight
every Jewish Socialist in de vorld!" And this was no mere
braggadocio--Comrade Rabin actually proceeded to shut up his
tailor-shop, and went away to join the "red brigade", which was
being organized by the Jewish revolutionists of New York!
If the German war-lords had set out deliberately to ham-string the
American Socialists, to make it impossible for them to go on
demanding peace, they could not have acted differently. They dragged
the helpless Bolsheviki into a peace-conference at Brest-Litovsk,
and forced them to cede away all the territories that Germany had
taken, and on top of that to pay an enormous indemnity. They planned
to compel the new Russian government to become a vassal to the
Central Powers, working to help them enslave the rest of the world.
The German armies went through the conquered territories, stripping
them bare, robbing the peasants of every particle of food, beating
them, shooting them, burning their homes if they resisted. They gave
to the world such a demonstration of what a German peace would mean,
that everywhere free men set their teeth and gripped their hands,
and swore to root this infamous thing from out civilization. Even
Jimmie Higgins!
