SOCIALISM AND GENDER INEQUALITY IN ONE COMMUNITY: O'HARE, LLANO COMMUNITY, AND THE END OF SOCIALIST FEMINISM
For O'Hare, the disintegration of the Socialist party to which she had dedicated her life was far more enduringly important than her incarceration. The two occurred simultaneously; O'Hare, who had attended virtually every SP convention, watched helplessly from prison as her life's work went up in smoke. This political fact, more than her prison experience, rendered a re-evaluation of her life, and a moderate shift of course, mandatory.
In prison, O'Hare had retained her non-dogmatic stance and her disdain for theoretical bickering and hair-splitting. Criticized for her close relationship with fellow-inmate and SP bete noire Emma Goldman, O'Hare wrote that "somehow theories don't seem very important here. The brutal, naked tragedies of life crush them out. When one lives with wrecked lives, broken hearts and sick souls, abstract theories somehow lose force." She and Goldman spent their time "feeding hungry stomachs and supporting faltering spirits. Instead of arguing theories, we discuss such vital matters as which has the greatest amount of nutriment, two pounds of peanut butter or one of the cow variety, at the same price.... I think it would be a godsend if a lot of theoretical hair-splitters and hobby-riders went to prison; it might teach them some of the big, vital lessons of life." When SP criticism of her friendship continued, O'Hare denounced anarchism, but reiterated her praise for its most celebrated American proponent.[1]
O'Hare had also defended the IWW during her pre-incarceration speeches, and while imprisoned was touched by penniless Wobblies "who know and understand the hunger for learning and are willing to spend the price of their last sack of tobacco for scientific books for me!" After her release, she used traditional values in defense of the IWW's contempt for such values. Wobblies, she said, had built civilization; "the dirty job, and the hard job, and the dangerous job is the 'Wobbly's' job."[2] Migrant workers whom the IWW organized
are robbed of HOME. They cannot love and marry and beget children as all normal human beings must to live life adequately. There is nothing more tragic, more shameful in our social life, than that to these millions of young, eager, ardent, love hungry men, love comes as a curse, sex companionship as a crime and begetting of children as an infamy. There is no more striking indictment of society than the "Blanket Stiff," the man who has sheltered and fed and clothed us, and whose only home is a dirty, vermin infested blanket swung on his back. How tragic to talk of "representative government" and "political action" to a wandering nomad! The "Wobbly" is never permitted to stay long enough in one place to secure citizenship and establish his right to vote. He knows that no politician will ever "represent" him and that the ballot means no more to him than it did to the negro slave before the Civil War. It seems like mockery to talk to a "Wobbly" of "law and order." Capitalist courts and laws and justice and tragic jokes to him.[3]
O'Hare deplored the SP split, and hoped that "all radicals, pink, cerise, and RED may find a common ground of absolutely essential things and unite on it for the common good." The war, she felt, had vindicated the SP, which had emerged as one of the few American institutions with its soul intact. The 1920 campaign was "our supreme OPPORTUNITY, the very forces of Heaven and Hell seem to be working for us and nothing can prevail against us but a lack of solidarity and harmony among ourselves." When a decision was forced upon her, she reluctantly sided with the conservatives, viewing the leftists as disrupters. In this regard a remark by Crystal Eastman is intriguing: Crystal speculated that, had Debs remained free, "we might have had a different sort of split," with the right, rather than the left, "forced out to form a new party." In view of O'Hare's long and close association with Debs, and her instinct to remain with the SP, she might well have sided with the left.[4] O'Hare was not soon afflicted with the bitter anti-Communism which overcame many of her comrades; as late as 1924 The American Vanguard welcomed the new Daily Worker and praised its editors, although expressing disagreement with some of the CP's tactics.[5]
Contemplating the seeming ruin of her life's work, O'Hare remained philosophical and optimistic.
I know that life comes only through death and that all things decay and pass away when they have served their period of usefulness. All the work we have done in the past is not lost. It has been increased a thousandfold. The machine we have used to do the work may break down; but if so we will get a newer and better. Why weep over an ox-cart when we may exchange it for a "flivver"?[6]
O'Hare said that "it is the spirit of human progress and not the letter of an ism that concerns me. Mankind vibrant with the old, old hunger for bread, for love, for life... will not hunt up the secretary of the Socialist local or peruse Marx" when planning its Socialist future.[7]
O'Hare declared that the SP was "shot to pieces" but that "sprinkling the ashes with tears" would not revive it. Like the Populists of old, the SP had injected new principles into American political discourse, ideas which were no longer "the exclusive property of the Socialist Party" but instead "the seed of a new culture." Yet O'Hare also faulted the SP for one glaring error: it "was built upon the theory of the all-sufficiency of political action and political governments, and the World War proved that the real governing forces of the world are not political but industrial."[8] Sounding for all the world like an anarchist or a Wobbly, O'Hare exclaimed that
The fruitless slaughter of the World War has brought political governments to the bar of justice arraigned and proven guilty of every crime known to mankind.... The bleeding wounds of war and the gangrened sores of peace have taught mankind that it is industrial power and industrial despotism that flouts righteousness, outrages justice, and chains liberty to the chariot wheels of greed. The battle lines are forming once again--this time between industrial despotism and industrial democracy.[9]
From this key insight, which had separated the IWW from the SP, O'Hare more conservatively concluded that a Labor Party based upon the actually existing American labor movement was imperative. Her logic greater resembled that of William Z. Foster, who in 1912 had formed the Syndicalist League of North America to bore from within the AFL rather than forming IWW-style dual unions from without.[10] Her conclusions also paralleled the chastened 1924 views of A. Philip Randolph and The Messenger. "For the wage workers the craft unions are still, and possibly must be for the present, the only live, functioning labor organizations," she said. "They have their weaknesses and their faults, but they are all the great mass of industrial workers have to work with.... It is a dull, nicked old tool, but better than nothing."[11]
O'Hare thundered that "if we Socialists are to learn anything from our twenty years of strenuous activities in the Socialist Party we must realize the self-evident fact that a Labor Party can only be organized where labor exists" and "from the laborers who have intelligence enough to organize industrially. No matter how faulty the organizations of the farmers and the wage workers may seem to us, THEY ARE THE ONLY MATERIALS FROM WHICH A LABOR PARTY CAN BE FORMED.... A LABOR PARTY CAN ONLY EXIST AND FUNCTION IF IT IS THE POLITICAL EXPRESSION OF LIVING, ACTIVE INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS OF WORKERS." Protest parties including the SP had all "ignored the necessity of industrial organization to provide the foundation for parliamentary activity" and had trusted in "'pure and simple' political action." Socialists had lost touch with functioning workers' and farmers' organizations and retreated into "the rarified atmosphere of theories and speculations." For a generation the Socialist Party had "robbed the farmers' organizations and the labor unions of all the most progressive, intelligent, forward looking men and left the reactionaries, mossbacks, and boneheads to run them." Socialists would have by now controlled these organizations had they "plodded with them instead of sailing off into ethereal blue..... If the labor unions are not progressive we are to blame; if the farmers' organizations leave much to be desired we are responsible."[12]
O'Hare recommended that the SP retain its autonomy and organizational structure as a distinct organization but function
as an integral part of a coalition labor movement..... And we can't do that by standing aside and handing down chunks of wisdom from on high. If the workers are striving for political solidarity, no matter whether we think they are striving in the simon-pure Marxian way or not, we will work with them. If the principles of the Socialist party are sound, they are not going to be contaminated by rubbing elbows with the workers in whatever battle they, as workers, are waging.... If we have learned anything, we should have learned co-operation, and co-operation means not bossing the job, but getting right down and taking our share of the hard knocks. If we are fitted to lead in the new labor movement, that movement will find it out and draft us for the job, simply because we have shown our fitness for it.[13]
Ironically, O'Hare accused the SP of undemocratic vanguardism and elitism--the very charge the SP soon levelled at the Communists. Yet her analysis contained a glaring contradiction inherent in her orthodox Marxist analysis. On the one hand, she stressed the Marxian idea that working-class revolution was inevitably generated by the breakdown of the old means of production, rather than by self-conscious activity. "Mankind has never forged forward along the path of progress of its own initiative," she said. "It has been literally booted and prodded every step of the way by the powers that be. Human beings cling to the old things, the things they know of, the things that are familiar, like barnacles to a rotting pier. Whenever any great mass of workers let loose of things as they are, and strike out for something more progressive, it is because they have been pried loose and set adrift by their masters." Later in the same article, however, she asserted that Marxism taught that "the line of least resistance for a labor party is forward... towards the goal of the socialization of industry." O'Hare only imperfectly recognized that the role of a revolutionary party would depend upon which of these alternate visions was most accurate at any specific historical juncture.
At issue here is whether the workers, left to themselves, would inaugurate Socialism, or whether they required prodding from a self-conscious, vanguard organization; and, relatedly, whether revolution could occur through a gradual, forward process during somewhat normal times, or whether it must occur as a sudden response to war or catastrophic economic collapse. O'Hare had often recognized that a working class afflicted by starvation wages and miseducation lacked the resources which would generate a sophisticated scientific analysis of society ex nihilo; she also acknowledged the blighting influence of working-class prejudices and divisions, whether of religion, craft, ethnicity, or nationality. Her own Socialist party had tellingly critiqued the anarchists' reliance on worker spontaneity in generating revolution. The Socialist women had presciently declared that Socialism was not inevitable, and that its forms were not preordained; the values, activities, and leadership of the workers would mold the shape of the future society. Yet by 1924, with organized radicalism in tatters, O'Hare, reflecting majority sentiment among the shattered remnants of the old SP, advocated compromise with craft unionism and political reformism. Bitterly disillusioned when Oklahoma governor Jack Walton betrayed his constituents, she nevertheless backed yet another reformist campaign, that of La Follette for President in 1924, heralding the Farmer-Labor candidate as a new Lincoln who could "amalgamate all of the forces of labor into a new political alignment and construct a new economic system."[14] Despite her somewhat strained optimism, however, the AFL soon reconfirmed, on both the political and industrial fields, its incorrigible conservatism. It supported La Follette only half-heartedly in 1924, sabotaged the Progressive party during and after the election, and resolutely opposed industrial unionism, equality for blacks, and fair treatment for women. Radicals found once again that alliance with the AFL, much less reliance on it, was a gesture of despair rather than a tocsin of progress.
Ironically, at the very time O'Hare was extolling co-operation with the AFL and advocating that Socialists work within mainstream working-class institutions, she herself was residing on a co-operative colony and creating a working-class college based upon an opposite strategy, building the new society within the shell of the old. In a sense, this communitarian experiment harked back to a movement which had preceded the foundation of the SP: Debs had envisioned a co-operative colony after the destruction of the American Railway Union, before repudiating colonization in favor of general social transformation as envisioned by the SP. For O'Hare, the Llano Co-operative colony and its affiliated Commonwealth College were in some sense a new departure, based on her growing skepticism about political action. In other ways it embodied her pragmatic, scientific philosophy of experimentation, research, and achievement in the here-and-now.
O'Hare began her remarkable American Vanguard series on Llano and Commonwealth by observing that no one could for certain say "whether the new order will come by political action, or industrial organization, or co-operative production and distribution--or all three combined. Each method has its disciples; so we have radical political parties, industrial organizations and co-operative enterprises, all seeking the road to the co-operative commonwealth." The Llano colonists assumed "that the state of the future will be absorbed in the industrial organizations" based upon production without capitalists or politicians. "They believe that the hard road to real co-operative life can best be blazed by small autonomous groups, and that the real nation, or world-wide co-operative commonwealth will come by the ever-extending merger of these groups."[15]
O'Hare realistically described the hardships, bickering, and endless work which characterized the colony, but asserted that "In their own little world [the colonists] have eliminated the private capitalist and the exploitation of labor, escaped the class lines marked by economic power, and almost entirely slain the specter of want." Almost all the colonists had studied Marx and other modern thinkers, and realized "that the things of the spirit are often of greater import than the things of the flesh." For this reason, the small community sported its own orchestra, library, dance classes, theatricals, and literary entertainments. At an age when men in mainstream society were worried about failing health and unemployment, they indulged at Llano in recreations "crowded out of a fun starved youth." O'Hare found "something pathetic in the way in which many of these men go back to the things denied them in their youth.... Here one may see the bachelor pruning the grape vines under which only dream wife and children will ever rest, or tenderly training the rose that is the living symbol of some girl of long ago." The young worked for eight hours, slept for eight more, and had "eight just for the fun of living." Members of Llano's home-grown orchestra "squeak and plunk and toot for their own satisfaction.... Llano colonists can't sing like Italian peasants or Welsh coal miners [because] America has almost crushed the soul of song out of her working class"; but they made music for their own ears.[16]
O'Hare warned her readers that Llano was not for dogmatists. Indeed, it had "proven a hard school for its founders, and smashed many a pre-conceived idea," especially the prime Marxian tenet of economic determinism. A person's beliefs, behavior, and ultimately personality were not solely determined by his or her economic condition and class. Temporarily ignoring the obvious fact that the personalities of the colonists had been shaped by the capitalist world in which they matured, and that no economic determinist had ever claimed that a change in environment would immediately and miraculously transform human personality, O'Hare said that
If the law of "economic determinism" were absolute, as many Socialists insist, the ordinary problems of life should have been solved.... Yet actual experience shows that with the physical basis of life secure, and a well grounded philosophy of life held in common by the majority of the members, the human problem still clamors for solution....
[Economic determinism taught that with material problems solved], practically all would react to the environment in the same way. This has not proven true at Llano. Reactions to the environment have been as various as the human beings involved, have not been determined by the accepted philosophy, have not been predicted [predicated?], as a rule, upon the economic conditions, but on the spiritual qualities of the various individuals.[17]
O'Hare especially noted that gender as well as class greatly influenced a person's reactions because the previous experiences of men and women differed. Men adjusted more easily to co-operative life than did women because they had "been working co-operatively in politics and the labor movement for several generations, while women have been rigorously shut into the four narrow walls of the house and forced to live the most individualistic sort of lives.... Men have become accustomed to the non-ownership of their tools by generations of factory work, but no matter how poverty-stricken, women have owned the few goods and chattels that have comprised the tools of their trade."[18]
Yet O'Hare also asserted that capitalist exploitation and mis-education had warped the colonists; class society did shape its victims after all.
It is always harder to remove mis-education than to give education; and the first step in human adjustment in Llano is to remove as much as possible of capitalist class mis-education. All of the training in selfishness, grab, graft, class warfare, suspicion and hate that is the necessary protective armor that the members of the working class must have in capitalist society is worse than useless, and must be sloughed off before the real education in co-operative life can begin. And this sloughing process is a long and painful one, it can not be done over night.
So grounded must the average worker be in selfishness to be able to exist in capitalist society, that selfishness becomes second nature which cannot be routed out quickly or easily..... The world is so shot through and through with suspicion and hate that it is perfectly natural that men's souls should be scarred and wounded, and that these scars and wounds should not be instantly healed merely because the economic environment of the individual has changed....
In the adjustment to Colony life the old values must go and new ones be acquired. The very qualities that make men "successful" in capitalist society unfit them for the co-operative venture....[19]
Yet O'Hare asserted that the Llano colonists were developing "a new type of community life.... Children and young people who have not been warped by contact with the capitalist struggle for existence take to Colony life like ducks to water.... They are healthy, happy, and fairly bursting with the importance of their jobs."[20] Perhaps environmental determinists were not so badly wrong after all, even if strictly economic determinists vastly overemphasized the purely economic aspects of human environment (neglecting gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality among other sources of personal identity.)
O'Hare also proclaimed that Llano's experience smashed the shibboleth of pure democracy. When management by discussion was tried, "bedlam reigned. The members were so busy conducting a debating forum that no one had time to attend to the vegetable farm; they were so busy deciding 'points of order' and [the] Marxian orthodoxy of the members' views that no one remembered to sow the turnips or milk the cows..... The Llano colonists discovered the same thing eight years ago that Lenin discovered two years ago, and that is that 'pure democracy' of the soap-box variety won't raise potatoes, mine coal, pull trains, or make pantaloons." The colonists now elected administrators and managers, who received the same gravy on their potatoes as did their subordinates; but the workers also gave the bosses considerable authority. Each morning "the whistles toot and the workers scoot, and that is the end of the story."[21]
Llano colony attracted considerable attention--and criticism--from the left. Critics complained that Llano could not build a healthy enclave in a sick society; that it repeatedly asked for donations from non-members; that its requirement that colonists eventually buy $2000 in stock limited its members to the relatively well-off; and that it remained in a primitive, pioneering condition. O'Hare answered these critics, whom she regarded as revolutionary purists uncomfortable with Llano's unorthodoxy, experimentation, and willingness to deal with the outside world on the world's own (cash-nexus) terms. Llano's realism, she said, "has been the one thing that has permitted the Colony to live. Perhaps it's better to be a live colony somewhat unorthodox than to be a dead one with all the trimmings."[22] Llano was no Utopia constructed according to an abstract, theoretical blueprint, but
a social laboratory where a group of sincere, earnest, hard working men and women are testing out social theories and economic formulas of all kinds.... Llano has found, as has Russia, that some of the best loved theories won't work, and that when they fail to work after having been given a fair trial, there is nothing to do but put them aside and try something else.... The colonists believe that only by research and experimentation can any great progress be made in social science, and it is with this attitude of mind, rather than with the zeal of the creedbound zealot who seeks to build an earthly paradise, that all problems are approached.[23]
Even when Llano abolished wages (which it had paid in colony script), it did so for practical rather than ideological reasons. "All [money] could buy would be food, shelter, clothing, education, and recreation, and all there is of that is here for us without money; all we need to do is to take it. If we want more food, we don't need more money; we need more farmers and better methods of agriculture, for they alone make possible more and better production." The Llano colonists, O'Hare said, "have fixed their standard of wages at all they can produce in physical, mental, and spiritual values."[24]
Responding to those who criticized Llano's appeals for donations, O'Hare said that every working-class project solicited funds from sympathizers. Llano was producing crops for export; so far, however, other co-ops were unaware of this, and Llano could not afford an extensive sales campaign. At any rate, "Llano feels that it can show more of social value, more of actual accomplishment, for contributions received than any other labor group receiving contributions for special needs." Llano had achieved a level of economic and cultural growth which far outstripped the pioneer communities in which O'Hare had lived in her youth. It demanded that each settler contribute $2000 ($1000 of which was due at joining, the rest payable over many years) partly because it needed modern industrial equipment, and partly because those who joined without any financial stake were mostly carpers, cranks, and idlers.[25] O'Hare said that Llano waived the membership fee for some people with essential skills (the O'Hares were one such couple), but said that most such privileged members simply did not work out.
O'Hare commented extensively upon gender relations at Llano. In so doing, she continued her longstanding practice of injecting analysis of women's plight and role into her discussions of more general issues, rather than separately addressing women's issues. Although Llano was an economic co-operative rather than a feminist Utopia, ironically enough it sported many amenities advocated by the Socialist women and by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. A community kitchen, laundry, sewing room and kindergarten relieved women of almost all of their traditional chores, freeing them for eight hours of productive work outside the home. In capitalist society, O'Hare said, mothers of the urban and rural working class lacked social life and meaningful recreation. "With all the sentimentalism with which women's magazines have beclouded the facts, the truth still remains that the job of being a working class mother means endless dreary drudgery and hard wearisome work that is never done. And so endless is the drudgery that most working class mothers are old and broken and dead to the joy of living when they should be in their prime."[26]
In contrast, O'Hare enthused, "Llano has a most unusual group of grey-haired women who sing and dance and hike and take part in theatricals, who are so alert and alive and full of joy of living that no one would dream of calling them old." However, she also complained about the assignment of jobs in the co-operative enterprises: the men arrogated to themselves "the big, interesting, creative things that give the worker a sense of power, and they have left for the women the drab, uninteresting maintenance work--the washing and cooking and the cleaning--the work that is never done and yet produces nothing in which one may take pride."[27] She also commented, without apparent irony, that Llano's co-operative enterprises meant that women did only one hour of housework each day; she made no mention of men sharing domestic tasks. Precisely because Llano was not a self-consciously feminist enterprise, it modified traditional gender roles only fortuitously, in the course of achieving its self-proclaimed goals. It thus left important pillars of male supremacy intact.
Surprisingly, however, it was the kindergarten rather than overt women's oppression which generated the most feminine discontent. The kindergarten represented not a feminist strategy for liberating mothers, but rather the socialization of the children for communal life and work. However, O'Hare remarked that "maternal instinct is so old and so deeply embedded in the human soul that mothers are fiercely jealous of anything that comes between them and their children." Mothers believed their maternal instincts superior to science, whereas O'Hare believed they must be informed by it. "But scientifically demonstrated facts have a hard time making any impression on the emotions aroused by science invading the job of being a mother. So between the desire of the Colony to rear its children in accordance with the best that modern pedagogy [and] physical and mental hygiene can give, and the instinctive jealousy of the mother for her young, Llano kindergarten is no picnic." This problem, O'Hare continued, was "as old as the first invasion of the community school into the realm of child training.... The physician and the trained nurse, too, were resented when they invaded the sickroom and took over the care of the ailing child."[28]
O'Hare had long criticized the disjuncture between education and work which characterized class society.
Under capitalism, the child whose father owns a factory is taught that it is degrading to have to work; that ownership means the right and power to despoil childhood, debase womanhood and enslave manhood. Under Socialism, the child will be taught that it is degrading to eat the fruits of another's toil without a just return; that labor is honorable, and that ownership means a sacred responsibility that can only be met by faithfully developing the highest qualities and capabilities.[29]
She rejoiced that at Llano "there is no division between work and school." Teachers and students alike spent four hours in the classroom and four hours at other work. At Llano, as in hardy pioneering communities, "children learn that all life is based on human labor. There is no corner grocery store, so the Llano children know that if they want 'garden sass' they must produce it; if they want eggs for breakfast they must care for the hens; and if they want fire to warm them, the wood must be brought from the forest and sawed and split. There is nothing from surveying the land and laying out the town-site to loading the brick kiln in which the children do not have their part to play." O'Hare noted that "the little tads feel they are just as important in the scheme of things as the elders." The system did generate some problems: workers were not skilled or trained teachers, and the children, while learning priceless self-sufficiency and skills, often impeded production. Further, each child could not work at the task he or she most preferred; if this theory "were strictly adhered to, the teamsters would have two thirds of the children and the baker the remainder."[30]
Despite these problems, O'Hare asserted that Llano had created a vibrant and exemplary working-class community. "In the early days the Colony idea attracted very strongly theorists, intellectuals, agitators, and plain 'nuts'" she said. Luckily, however, those usually decamped quickly, and the colony discovered the virtues of simple dirt farmers. O'Hare, herself an exemplary crafter of phrases, proclaimed that "under certain conditions the ability to turn a good furrow was of greater social service than the ability to turn a perfect phrase. The Colonists found that a man might be able to recite Marx backwards, cuss the capitalists in six languages, and make a perfect soap-box speech, and yet not be able to produce a turnip." Llano had shown "cuspidor savants" the value of initiative, hard work, experimentation, and co-operation.[31]
Llano was not, O'Hare said, "a sort of monastery where tired radicals retire to find perpetual peace and [to] escape the hardships of the class struggle." The colonists disagreed "vociferously on all sorts of things, from the amount of salt that should go into the soup to the particular brand of religion that suits us best.... Life is about ten times as dynamic here as in any other community, and because we are trying to express our ideals in terms of human behavior instead of words, we have more problems to the square inch than any other group anywhere. But we also have more satisfaction in our work and our lives. We have quit talking about the co-operative form of life, and are living it, making our mistakes and rectifying them as we go our way."[32]
The O'Hares settled at Llano colony in the spring of 1923. Under the terms of their agreement, Llano would publish The American Vanguard and assume outright ownership after a year. Kate remained editor and touted Llano in a remarkable series of articles; she also helped organize Llano-affiliated Commonwealth College. She enthused: "the opportunity for which we have waited so long is here; there will be no more 'shooting in the air.' The Vanguard has a definite, concrete job to do. We are going to build the first working-class college." In a Vanguard series, Kate asserted that the working class could not "invade and conquer the existing institutions of higher learning" and use them for working-class purposes; the creation of a new style of institution, based on working-class values and culture, was necessary.[33]
O'Hare bolstered her proposal for a workers' college with a history of higher education in the United States as a history of class struggle. The ruling class, she said, based the first colleges on a classical curriculum, which trained clergy and other elites who dominated the masses spiritually and temporally. The rise of science and industry head created a demand for a new type of institution. The new industries required "trained specialists" but not "truly cultured men. Industry needed technicians, but not gentlemen."[34] For this reason, the elites who owned the industries and the technicians who managed them received different educations:
The specialists and technicians were to be trained to run the industries and the sons and daughters [of the owners of industry] were to be trained to inherit and enjoy them: two very different functions..... To fill this need for trained men and women, who in the estimation of the industrial magnate, had no use for culture, the state university came into existence.... There is but a very shallow pretense, that deceives no one, that they are institutions of higher learning: [but] they are merely institutions for technical training... a sort of educational department store where standardized education may be purchased to fit the mind that is to use it.[35]
O'Hare said that the rising bourgeoisie could not capture the old, feudal universities, venerable institutions based on the antithetical values of leisure rather than production. These colleges ostracized and demoralized those sons of the rising technocracy whom they did condescendingly admit. "The ideals and the culture of the machine lords was not, and could not become the ideals and the culture of the landlords," O'Hare said. Parvenues did enroll their sons in the old colleges but such students were either isolated and miserable, or corrupted by feudal values and habits. The machine lord class therefore "ceased, as a mass, to try to capture the old college and proceeded to build educational institutions in harmony with its background, its aims and aspirations, its ideals and its culture."[36] These new institutions emphasized scientific and technological training--the mechanisms by which the new ruling class dominated--rather than classical, religious, and humanistic education.
O'Hare asserted that the struggle between these two types of education was therefore a class struggle, not a merely intellectual one. The rising working class must emulate its predecessors, the early bourgeoisie:
The machine lords needed science to make possible the development of industrialism, so as soon as the industrial class became the ruling class, science won.... The development of social science holds out the same hope for the workers, that the development of natural science held out to the new-rich capitalist class a century ago. Physical science promised, and fulfilled that promise, to turn dirt into gold for the capitalist class; social science promises to turn poverty, unrighteousness, and war into social justice for the workers.[37]
Working class colleges, O'Hare said, would create well-rounded individuals, able "to secure more of the product of their labor, and a broader and fuller life while the labor is being performed." Their graduates would possess a thorough grounding in the new social sciences, the humanistic education necessary for a full, creative life, and the capacity for skilled, meaningful labor.[38] Only working-class institutions could offer such an education. As another American Vanguard contributor said, ordinary college professors were "nothing more than bought-and-paid-for servants in an agency for the suppression of thought on human problems, the dissemination of class propaganda, and the wholesale manufacture of Babbitts." Radical professors--"meaning teachers who deal with the social sciences exactly as they deal with the natural sciences"--were calumniated and fired, "just as the teachers of natural science were a century ago."[39]
The working class could not conquer and hold either the old classics-based liberal arts colleges or the new technical universities, O'Hare said. Such an attempt only replicated the "heart-breaking, disaster-inviting path to higher education that the new rich industrial class trod a century ago." Working-class students were socially isolated at bourgeois institutions, and were denied the information necessary for self-awareness and class liberation. Those who did force their way in and persevere until graduation found themselves inculcated with values of an alien class, yet without the wealth which ensured membership in that class; they were therefore reduced to servants of "the industrial ruling class, or underpaid instructors in the institutions of higher learning." The capitalists would not allow working-class domination of institutions which the capitalists had created for their own purposes. Even if the workers could seize control of these institutions, they remained "too laden with things that are not a part of our culture. If we are to have working class colleges for the development of working-class ideals and culture we must build them from the ground up; build slowly, painstakingly, and by experimental methods."[40]
Commonwealth College, O'Hare said, transcended the traditional chasm between education and work. Each student and teacher spent four hours each day at college, and performed other productive work for another four hours. This helped students finance their educations and, more importantly, inculcated a vital political principle. "For the working-class institutions of higher learning to really serve the masses, and to be the true expression of their culture, they must be hives of industry as well as halls of learning,"[41] O'Hare said. Students must
realize that true culture and productive labor are in perfect harmony. The ever-recurring tragedy of the working-class youth seeking his education in the existing institutions of higher learning is that he is almost always educated away from, and out of the producing class and becomes ambitious only to become a parasite upon society. He is taught to despise his origin, to be ashamed of his proletarian parents, to betray his class and to feel that culture is only possible for the shirker who evades his share of useful service.... It is suicidal for the working class to be bled white of the very choicest of its youth, either by chaining them to ignorance, or by losing their services by permitting them to be educated [as] lackeys to the capitalist class....[42]
Neither of the two old-style institutions was capable of meaningful reform, O'Hare asserted, as they were based on seemingly opposite, yet in fact symbiotic, debased ideals.
We cannot use, and do not want, the selfish, white-handed culture of the old college that sought to divide mankind into two castes--decorated parasites and boorish, ignorant workers.... We do not want the harsh, materialistic culture of the industrial magnates whose ideal is to produce highly-skilled technical servants and maintain a slavish, ignorant working class..... Commonwealth comes into being to build a culture in overalls and work-marked hands; a culture whose ideal is a working class fit to inherit and hold the earth and the fullness thereof.[43]
Commonwealth, however, boasted "teachers who can not only talk but work; not only spin theories about life but live fully and completely;" it attracted great teachers by offering them the freedom of inquiry so conspicuously absent from mainstream institutions.[44]
O'Hare perceived another important advantage associated with distinctly working-class colleges: workers could construct them now, without waiting for general social transformation. "It is not necessary for the workers to elect a dog-catcher, much less a state or national administration, before higher education for the workers can be launched," she said. Nor need radicals transform the existing unions. If every worker organized in some fashion--in a union, co-operative, or working-class political party--would contribute $1 per year, they could build all the colleges they needed. O'Hare was confident that the workers would gladly pay this dollar "if the colleges were ready to function." She asserted that at Commonwealth College "we have started to build our own cultural institution, one suited to the needs of the common people.... As our pioneer fathers and mothers went out into the wilderness to build a new civilization, we go forth, pioneers of a new culture.... We must blaze new trails of learning where no trails have led before; we shall choose the good in the old cultures and develop new elements to meet our needs." O'Hare said that the new working-class colleges would perfect and transcend inherited culture: "We shall take from the old college all that is fine and useful and beautiful and make it our own. We shall claim all the best of literature, music, art, and the thoughtful consideration for others that are the foundations and ornaments of manhood and womanhood."[45]
Continuing her long tradition, O'Hare went on long speaking tours, now raising money for Commonwealth College. She also taught there. Just as Llano was one of the most long-lived and successful of working-class co-operative colonies, so Commonwealth was one of the class's most successful colleges. O'Hare's analysis, however, elided a key distinction, acknowledgement of which would have portended trouble for her project of creating a network of such colleges. Analyzing the disjunction between the old, elite liberal arts colleges and the newer technocratic state universities, she recognized that the latter were created by the rising bourgeoisie for their own purposes. These institutions fully served the interests of the owners of industry, who required trained, yet un-educated and docile, managers and technicians. She insightfully recognized, therefore, that the new technical institutions served both the new capitalist ruling class and (in the sense of equipping them for lucrative and prestigious jobs) its hired professional lackeys of the new middle class. For that reason, state governments generously financed such schools, which became massive, powerful institutions. Commonwealth college, however, prepared its students to overthrow the new ruling class rather than serve it; its social science curriculum, far from aiding either the capitalists or the managers, would create revolutionaries rather than wage slaves. Such institutions, therefore, sponsored only by the pittances of the most impoverished and exploited class, would necessarily remain marginal and poorly-funded, especially in the absence of the vibrant working-class political parties and unions to which they were in some senses conceived as alternatives. Commonwealth itself endured for 17 years, yet neither spawned imitators nor threatened the social order.
Long before Commonwealth's demise, however, O'Hare had become uncharacteristically embroiled in factional infighting--even more endemic in communes than in political movements--and had severed connections with both Llano and Commonwealth. In 1924, some Llano colonists, apparently angry that The American Vanguard had become a financial drain on the colony, petitioned for the expulsion of the O'Hares. Llano instead closed the publication. Llano had itself concealed from O'Hare the fact that the land set aside for Commonwealth College was in fact mortgaged (meaning that the College did not actually own its buildings). As a result of these and other matters, Llano was consumed by bickering. A large group headed by Job Harriman (the SP's Los Angeles mayoralty candidate in the ill-fated 1911 election, and the colony's original founder) seceded. The O'Hares joined the dissidents, but almost immediately split with them and established their own colony, including Commonwealth College, ten miles away. Kate was a professor of sociology at the College, basing some of her lectures on her quasi-feminist Rip-Saw series, "The Tale of a Rib." Increasingly, however, she resided away from the College.[46]
The same year as the split from Llano and the silencing of The American Vanguard, Kate separated from her husband. She wrote Frank that she could not "conceive of going back to the stress and strain, conflicts and brain storms, wretchedness and misery of other days." The two had made life "hell for each other" and were happier apart; "economic conditions never permitted me to leave my work, maybe I could not have done it if they had, and you are not so constituted that you can be my husband." Shortly afterwards she wrote that "all the love I once had for you is quite dead. It died very hard--took many years of endless suffering and misery to kill it--but I fear that it is as dead as my youth."[47] The two did not announce their separation until 1928, when they both, on the same day, married new spouses. Kate remained publicly known as Kate O'Hare.
Even before these events, however, O'Hare had commented on the general demoralization of the post-war years: the twin phenomena of proliferating cults and extremist movements on the one hand, and frantic, joyless dissipation on the other. Speaking of cultists and Kluxers and other lost souls, she said that "the old life crumbles in their frantic clutch; the new is too chaotic to provide a firm foundation, and everything on which men build their lives seems to be falling to ruin--nationalism, cultures, and economic institutions.... The nations to which men have given their patriotic zeal have crumbled, or are crumbling. Cultures that have been built up by centuries of intellectual activities are shattered and there is no lodestar for the human soul."[48]
In March 1924 she exclaimed that
In all the years I have been in public life, and in all my varied experiences I have never seen so many persons teetering on the verge of nervous collapse. Never have I seen so much sickness of the soul and spirit, and such wild, insane efforts of human beings to drug brain and soul into torpor by hectic activity--tobacco, drink, drugs, and weird cults and religions. Perhaps I have noticed it more because so much of my work on this trip has been with groups outside the real labor movement..... The best-educated and most-cultured people with whom I came in contact were simply running wildly around in circles until they were dizzy and drunk like children who whirl about until they drop.[49]
O'Hare viewed the rampant materialism, solipsism, and sensualism of the "roaring twenties" (which existed side by side with intense squalor for the majority) as the inevitable spawn of a world in which meaningful collective action and social betterment seemed impossible. The pre-war efflorescence of radical movements had been crushed by the White Terror of 1917-1920. Even work provided few solaces. Farming was only tenantry, working-class jobs mere slavery, education goose-stepped, science hijacked by the corporations, and the professions only disgusting Babbittry. Foreshadowing the much later insights of Paul Goodman, O'Hare said that young people were "shut out from the worlds of experiment and adventure that have served the restless spirits of mankind for ages"; in a frantic escape from "physical and mental dry-rot," youthful rebels turned "inward upon themselves and [sought] adventure in playing upon the emotions of their own bodies, brains, and souls."[50] She said that
The mad scramble of greed that bedevils us as a nation is but the instinctive struggle of thwarted souls to grasp the emotions whose stimulus they think money will buy. The movies and jazz provide vicarious adventure. "Hooch" and "joy-riding" furnish the spurious thrills that must suffice for the genuine joy of living. But the richest field for self experiment is SEX.... We are fairly wallowing in sex.... Because of that universal hunger for adventure that can only find some satisfaction in self experimentation in sex, it has been seized upon and commercialized to the limit. Everything from chewing-gum to grand opera is made a vehicle for sex-suggestion, and a means of turning human beings in upon themselves.[51]
O'Hare especially condemned Floyd Dell's novel Janet March as "almost six hundred pages of puerile self-experimentation carried on by a rather inane flapper, a few callow youths, and a radical, the like of which I have never met in all my twenty-five years in the radical movement. And the nub of the whole long, wordy expose of feminine underwear and infantile flings as being naughty, is the discovery that common-law marriages are just as binding and legal as those at which the preacher officiates."[52]
O'Hare herself had briefly succumbed to the lure of a private, unpolitical life when she became seriously ill in 1923. At that time, she recuperated in the arms of relatives, secure in the knowledge that Llano would tend her family. Although her relatives disapproved of her activist life, no one mentioned these disagreements. She found herself "stripped of strength and fancied superiority and... dependent in weakness and sorrow upon others." Logic and intellect suddenly seemed "cold and comfortless"; she noticed "how lightly we wear the garment of our intellectual and cultural development."[53] O'Hare marveled that
Almost overnight I reverted to type and became a woman of the mountains as my grandmother was..... I was not concerned with economic creeds or political theories but keenly interested in just the right mixture of spices in my sweet pickles.
So the long days of slow recovery passed, and I laughed at myself for the fool I had been to wear myself out in the endless, heart-breaking struggle for a better civilization. I didn't care a hoot whether the world got saved or not, and never again would I attempt to help in the saving. I would do the simple work of life, eat, drink, read the FARM JOURNAL, and let the crazy world stew in the broth of its own making. I had found a refuge from the unbearable cares of life in the sheltering hills and never again would I mix in the turmoil.[54]
When she recovered her strength, however, she found that she could not remain "apart from the common lot" because "the curse of war had crept through the hills and invaded the peaceful valley." War had killed and wounded some of the men with whom she had danced as a girl; the ruinous post-war deflation had wrecked many more lives; yet other farms lay desolate as the young trekked off to the city in search of work, leaving vacant homesteads in their wake. "My sanctuary was not a sanctuary but a cemetery of dead hopes," O'Hare concluded, "and I could not hide away from life there."[55]
Although O'Hare in 1924 had many years of active service ahead of her--she was an important figure in Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California movement in 1934, and worked for radical Congressman Thomas Amlie later that decade--[56]she felt old, exhausted and antiquated. Greeting old comrades on one of her interminable speaking tours, she said that "each one recalled a separate memory." Most of these memories concerned "dust and heat and crowds, long cold or blistering drives, night trains, bad food, sore throats, homesickness, hard work and little money; but there were also memories of fellowship and love and service, of idealism and enthusiasm and sacrifice, of victories won and battles lost only to be waged again." She concluded that whatever the future held, memories of "those long hard years" would "warm and gild all the sunset years of life."[57]
O'Hare found hope in the rising generation as well as consolation in her memories. Upon meeting a cohort of young activists she termed them "so radical that I felt absolutely mid-Victorian. I felt that I was such a conservative old back-number that the only suitable place for me was with Bryan and Sammy Gompers."[58] Late in 1924, she and her old friend Theresa Malkiel, riding the Staten Island ferry, asked themselves with some sense of melancholy whether their long service in a seemingly doomed movement had been as futile as it then appeared. In a passage that may well serve as an epitaph for the remarkable efflorescence of radical thought and action that had characterized the two previous decades, O'Hare described her response when she heard a familiar song rise above the cacophony emitted by holiday merry-makers.
Suddenly I realized that it was "The Internationale," and as the volume swelled and grew as new voices joined, my sense of weariness was gone. Springing up, I worked my way to the prow of the boat and here facing the harbor as they faced life, alive and vibrant with the unquenchable faith of youth in itself, was a group of young men and women singing the deathless challenge of the workers to the powers that would shut them out from the earth and the fullness thereof. They were so
young, so glowing, so full of self-confidence, so sure that the world was simply waiting for their conquering forces. There were no yesterdays for them; only tomorrows. As they flung their challenge to the harbor winds they had no thought for those of us who have passed before; we were only musty history. I doubt if any of them thought of the old Abolitionists who made their fight against chattel slavery, and won only half a victory. Did any of them remember the old Populists and Knights of Labor who waged the first battles in defense of the exploited farmers and wage workers, and won less than half a victory, but laid the foundation for those of us who built the Socialist movement? They knew perhaps by name and possibly by sight the Socialist workers of my generation, but if they thought of us at all, it was only with the assurance that what we had started they would carry through to victory. And they are right....
My first thought had been to join the group of young Crusaders and claim fellowship with them, and then I realized that I belonged to another generation, and that youth must follow its own heart and find its own work to do. So I slipped back into the crowd and the young radicals went on their way to find their own methods of waging their battles in the age-old struggle of the workers to reclaim the earth and make it theirs.
The gay youths who sang their challenge to the world that Sunday night in the New York harbor will never know that their song brought courage and peace and strength to me. They would not understand if I told them that in their song I found the assurance that my work had been well done and not in vain, and that they would carry it on until their turn also to surrender the banner to the next generation.[59]
Notes:
[1] KROH letter, June 15, 1919, MF 221-222; KROH letter, January 20, 1920, MF 263-264.
[2] KROH letter, August 17, 1918, MF 232; KROH, "A Few Facts about the IWW," unsigned article by KROH, NRS February 1922.
[3] KROH (unsigned), "A Few Facts about the IWW," NRS, February 1922; KROH, (unsigned), "War Profiteers vs. 'Wobblies,"" NRS, February 1922.
[4] KROH letter, December 7, 1919, MF 248; KROH letter, April 26, 1920, MF 293; Crystal Eastman, "The Socialist Party Convention," The Liberator, July 1920, reprinted in Cook, 349-356. The quote is on p. 356.
Eastman thought that many of the right-wingers would have joined the Labor Party; "That would have left the American Socialist Party in control of its genuine majority, unmistakably communist in thought and purpose, and definitely affiliated with the Third International." Debs's presence and leadership, however, might well have moderated the newly leftist SP. O'Hare lamented that the split in the SP resulted in two groups, one largely composed of immigrants within an intense interest in European affairs, the other of native-born Americans lacking such interest; had Debs unified the left in the SP, however, this chasm might never have developed. As discussed below, O'Hare became a strong supporter of the Labor Party after the SP had disintegrated into impotence.
[5] "The Daily Worker," AV, April 1924.
[6] KROH letter, August 2, 1919, 228.
[7] KROH letter, August 10, 1919, MF 229-230.
[8] KROH, "Are We Headed Straight for Perdition?", AV November 1923.
[9] KROH, "Wayside Tales," AV February 1924.
[10] For information on The Syndicalist League of North America see Edward P. Johanningsmeir, Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster (Princeton, 1994), 49-50, 64-78; William Z. Foster, From Bryan to Stalin, (International Publishers, 1937), 58-72; Philip Foner, The Industrial Workers of the World (International, 1965), 427-430. Foster published a pamphlet, Syndicalism, reprinted by Charles Kerr and Company; see also the short-lived publication, The Syndicalist, which succeeded The Agitator.
[11] KROH, "Political Organization of American Workers is Inevitable," NRS December 1921.
[12] KROH, "Political Organization of American Workers is Inevitable," NRS December 1921.
[13] KROH TITLE UNKNOWN, NRS, February 1922.
[14] KROH TITLE UNKNOWN, NRS, February 1922; KROH, "The King of the Double Cross," AV December 1923 and January 1924; KROH, "---- and Burn," AV January 1924 GET TITLE AND CLEAR COPY OF THIS VITAL ARTICLE AND QUOTE IT IN THIS NOTE; KROH, "Lincoln and La Follette," NRS LATE 1924, ONE OF LAST TWO ISSUES, FIND DATE.
[15] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV February 1923. This series title derived from the name of a co-operative in Siberia, in which persons from many countries (including the United States) participated. O'Hare said that "it will no doubt be a great blow to the Russian worshipper who believe that no good can come out of the United States, to discover that Kuzbas was not the child of the brain of Lenin but of Job Harriman," a California SP member (and Los Angeles mayoralty candidate in 1911). O'Hare said that "the constitution of the Kuzbas colony was taken largely from the Llano colony.... Since Kuzbasing in Siberian Russia is not practical for a women of uncertain years hitched to a husband, six children and a magazine, I thought a small dose of Kuzbasing in Dixie might satisfy the pioneer spirit which is a part of my heritage." Llano, originally founded in California, had recently moved to Louisiana.
For an account of Llano see the information in Miller; and TWO PATHS TO UTOPIA.....
[16] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV March 1923; KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV June 1923.
[17] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV March 1923.
[18] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV March 1923.
[19] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV March 1923.
[20] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV March 1923.
[21] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV April 1923; KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV, March 1923.
[22] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV April 1923; KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV July-August 1923.
[23] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV July-August 1923.
[24] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV December 1923.
[25] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV, July-August 1923.
[26] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," June 1923.
[27] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV June 1923; KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV, March 1923.
[28] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV May 1923.
[29] KROH, "As the Bud Unfolds," NRS, November 1912.
[30] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV, April 1923; KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV May 1923.
[31] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV December 1923; KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," June 1924.
[32] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," June 1924.
[33] KROH, "Comrade Kate's Shop Talks," NRS, AV, April 1923; "Working-Class Culture," AV May 1923 (unsigned KROH article). For a general account of Commonwealth and other working-class colleges, see Richard Altenbaugh, Education for Struggle: The American Labor Colleges of the 1920s and 1930s (Temple, Philadelphia, 1990). Miller has fairly detailed information on KROH's early involvement with Commonwealth.
[34] "Higher Education in the United States," AV May 1923 (unsigned KROH article).
[35] "Higher Education in the United States," AV May 1923 (unsigned KROH article).
[36] "Class Ideals and Education," AV May 1923 (unsigned KROH article).
[37] "Class Ideals and Education," AV May 1923 (unsigned KROH article).
[38] "Class Ideals and Education," AV May 1923 (unsigned KROH article). O'Hare indicated that working-class colleges would initially stress the social sciences, suppressed or distorted at the state universities; working-class students could acquire the necessary scientific and technical knowledge at the state universities.
[39] Harold Brown, review of Upton Sinclair's The Goose Step, AV April 1923.
[40] "Class Ideals and Education," unsigned KROH article, AV, May 1923; "Working-Class Culture," unsigned KROH article, AV May 1923.
[41] "Working-Class Culture," unsigned KROH article, AV May 1923.
[42] "Working-Class Culture," unsigned KROH article, AV May 1923.
[43] KROH, "What Commonwealth College Means to the Workers," AV October 1923.
[44] "Working-Class Culture," unsigned KROH article, AV May 1923.
[45] "Working-Class Culture," unsigned KROH article, AV May 1923; KROH, "What Commonwealth College Means to the Workers," AV October 1923.
[46] Miller, 192-218.
[47] Miller, 215-216.
[48] KROH, "Anesthetic Religions," AV November 1923.
[49] KROH, "Wayside Tales," AV March 1924.
[50] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV, June 1924.
[51] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV, June 1924.
[52] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV, June 1924.
[53] KROH, "The World Goes By," AV October 1923.
[54] KROH, "The World Goes By," AV October 1923.
[55] KROH, "The World Goes By," AV October 1923.
[56] For O'Hare's last years, see Miller, 219-237.
[57] KROH, AV, January 1924, ---- and Burn; MISSING TITLE AND PART OF THIS IMPORTANT ARTICLE.
[58] KROH, "Wayside Tales," AV February 1924.
[59] KROH, "Wayside Tales," AV VERY LATE 1924, DATE UNCERTAIN
In prison, O'Hare had retained her non-dogmatic stance and her disdain for theoretical bickering and hair-splitting. Criticized for her close relationship with fellow-inmate and SP bete noire Emma Goldman, O'Hare wrote that "somehow theories don't seem very important here. The brutal, naked tragedies of life crush them out. When one lives with wrecked lives, broken hearts and sick souls, abstract theories somehow lose force." She and Goldman spent their time "feeding hungry stomachs and supporting faltering spirits. Instead of arguing theories, we discuss such vital matters as which has the greatest amount of nutriment, two pounds of peanut butter or one of the cow variety, at the same price.... I think it would be a godsend if a lot of theoretical hair-splitters and hobby-riders went to prison; it might teach them some of the big, vital lessons of life." When SP criticism of her friendship continued, O'Hare denounced anarchism, but reiterated her praise for its most celebrated American proponent.[1]
O'Hare had also defended the IWW during her pre-incarceration speeches, and while imprisoned was touched by penniless Wobblies "who know and understand the hunger for learning and are willing to spend the price of their last sack of tobacco for scientific books for me!" After her release, she used traditional values in defense of the IWW's contempt for such values. Wobblies, she said, had built civilization; "the dirty job, and the hard job, and the dangerous job is the 'Wobbly's' job."[2] Migrant workers whom the IWW organized
are robbed of HOME. They cannot love and marry and beget children as all normal human beings must to live life adequately. There is nothing more tragic, more shameful in our social life, than that to these millions of young, eager, ardent, love hungry men, love comes as a curse, sex companionship as a crime and begetting of children as an infamy. There is no more striking indictment of society than the "Blanket Stiff," the man who has sheltered and fed and clothed us, and whose only home is a dirty, vermin infested blanket swung on his back. How tragic to talk of "representative government" and "political action" to a wandering nomad! The "Wobbly" is never permitted to stay long enough in one place to secure citizenship and establish his right to vote. He knows that no politician will ever "represent" him and that the ballot means no more to him than it did to the negro slave before the Civil War. It seems like mockery to talk to a "Wobbly" of "law and order." Capitalist courts and laws and justice and tragic jokes to him.[3]
O'Hare deplored the SP split, and hoped that "all radicals, pink, cerise, and RED may find a common ground of absolutely essential things and unite on it for the common good." The war, she felt, had vindicated the SP, which had emerged as one of the few American institutions with its soul intact. The 1920 campaign was "our supreme OPPORTUNITY, the very forces of Heaven and Hell seem to be working for us and nothing can prevail against us but a lack of solidarity and harmony among ourselves." When a decision was forced upon her, she reluctantly sided with the conservatives, viewing the leftists as disrupters. In this regard a remark by Crystal Eastman is intriguing: Crystal speculated that, had Debs remained free, "we might have had a different sort of split," with the right, rather than the left, "forced out to form a new party." In view of O'Hare's long and close association with Debs, and her instinct to remain with the SP, she might well have sided with the left.[4] O'Hare was not soon afflicted with the bitter anti-Communism which overcame many of her comrades; as late as 1924 The American Vanguard welcomed the new Daily Worker and praised its editors, although expressing disagreement with some of the CP's tactics.[5]
Contemplating the seeming ruin of her life's work, O'Hare remained philosophical and optimistic.
I know that life comes only through death and that all things decay and pass away when they have served their period of usefulness. All the work we have done in the past is not lost. It has been increased a thousandfold. The machine we have used to do the work may break down; but if so we will get a newer and better. Why weep over an ox-cart when we may exchange it for a "flivver"?[6]
O'Hare said that "it is the spirit of human progress and not the letter of an ism that concerns me. Mankind vibrant with the old, old hunger for bread, for love, for life... will not hunt up the secretary of the Socialist local or peruse Marx" when planning its Socialist future.[7]
O'Hare declared that the SP was "shot to pieces" but that "sprinkling the ashes with tears" would not revive it. Like the Populists of old, the SP had injected new principles into American political discourse, ideas which were no longer "the exclusive property of the Socialist Party" but instead "the seed of a new culture." Yet O'Hare also faulted the SP for one glaring error: it "was built upon the theory of the all-sufficiency of political action and political governments, and the World War proved that the real governing forces of the world are not political but industrial."[8] Sounding for all the world like an anarchist or a Wobbly, O'Hare exclaimed that
The fruitless slaughter of the World War has brought political governments to the bar of justice arraigned and proven guilty of every crime known to mankind.... The bleeding wounds of war and the gangrened sores of peace have taught mankind that it is industrial power and industrial despotism that flouts righteousness, outrages justice, and chains liberty to the chariot wheels of greed. The battle lines are forming once again--this time between industrial despotism and industrial democracy.[9]
From this key insight, which had separated the IWW from the SP, O'Hare more conservatively concluded that a Labor Party based upon the actually existing American labor movement was imperative. Her logic greater resembled that of William Z. Foster, who in 1912 had formed the Syndicalist League of North America to bore from within the AFL rather than forming IWW-style dual unions from without.[10] Her conclusions also paralleled the chastened 1924 views of A. Philip Randolph and The Messenger. "For the wage workers the craft unions are still, and possibly must be for the present, the only live, functioning labor organizations," she said. "They have their weaknesses and their faults, but they are all the great mass of industrial workers have to work with.... It is a dull, nicked old tool, but better than nothing."[11]
O'Hare thundered that "if we Socialists are to learn anything from our twenty years of strenuous activities in the Socialist Party we must realize the self-evident fact that a Labor Party can only be organized where labor exists" and "from the laborers who have intelligence enough to organize industrially. No matter how faulty the organizations of the farmers and the wage workers may seem to us, THEY ARE THE ONLY MATERIALS FROM WHICH A LABOR PARTY CAN BE FORMED.... A LABOR PARTY CAN ONLY EXIST AND FUNCTION IF IT IS THE POLITICAL EXPRESSION OF LIVING, ACTIVE INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS OF WORKERS." Protest parties including the SP had all "ignored the necessity of industrial organization to provide the foundation for parliamentary activity" and had trusted in "'pure and simple' political action." Socialists had lost touch with functioning workers' and farmers' organizations and retreated into "the rarified atmosphere of theories and speculations." For a generation the Socialist Party had "robbed the farmers' organizations and the labor unions of all the most progressive, intelligent, forward looking men and left the reactionaries, mossbacks, and boneheads to run them." Socialists would have by now controlled these organizations had they "plodded with them instead of sailing off into ethereal blue..... If the labor unions are not progressive we are to blame; if the farmers' organizations leave much to be desired we are responsible."[12]
O'Hare recommended that the SP retain its autonomy and organizational structure as a distinct organization but function
as an integral part of a coalition labor movement..... And we can't do that by standing aside and handing down chunks of wisdom from on high. If the workers are striving for political solidarity, no matter whether we think they are striving in the simon-pure Marxian way or not, we will work with them. If the principles of the Socialist party are sound, they are not going to be contaminated by rubbing elbows with the workers in whatever battle they, as workers, are waging.... If we have learned anything, we should have learned co-operation, and co-operation means not bossing the job, but getting right down and taking our share of the hard knocks. If we are fitted to lead in the new labor movement, that movement will find it out and draft us for the job, simply because we have shown our fitness for it.[13]
Ironically, O'Hare accused the SP of undemocratic vanguardism and elitism--the very charge the SP soon levelled at the Communists. Yet her analysis contained a glaring contradiction inherent in her orthodox Marxist analysis. On the one hand, she stressed the Marxian idea that working-class revolution was inevitably generated by the breakdown of the old means of production, rather than by self-conscious activity. "Mankind has never forged forward along the path of progress of its own initiative," she said. "It has been literally booted and prodded every step of the way by the powers that be. Human beings cling to the old things, the things they know of, the things that are familiar, like barnacles to a rotting pier. Whenever any great mass of workers let loose of things as they are, and strike out for something more progressive, it is because they have been pried loose and set adrift by their masters." Later in the same article, however, she asserted that Marxism taught that "the line of least resistance for a labor party is forward... towards the goal of the socialization of industry." O'Hare only imperfectly recognized that the role of a revolutionary party would depend upon which of these alternate visions was most accurate at any specific historical juncture.
At issue here is whether the workers, left to themselves, would inaugurate Socialism, or whether they required prodding from a self-conscious, vanguard organization; and, relatedly, whether revolution could occur through a gradual, forward process during somewhat normal times, or whether it must occur as a sudden response to war or catastrophic economic collapse. O'Hare had often recognized that a working class afflicted by starvation wages and miseducation lacked the resources which would generate a sophisticated scientific analysis of society ex nihilo; she also acknowledged the blighting influence of working-class prejudices and divisions, whether of religion, craft, ethnicity, or nationality. Her own Socialist party had tellingly critiqued the anarchists' reliance on worker spontaneity in generating revolution. The Socialist women had presciently declared that Socialism was not inevitable, and that its forms were not preordained; the values, activities, and leadership of the workers would mold the shape of the future society. Yet by 1924, with organized radicalism in tatters, O'Hare, reflecting majority sentiment among the shattered remnants of the old SP, advocated compromise with craft unionism and political reformism. Bitterly disillusioned when Oklahoma governor Jack Walton betrayed his constituents, she nevertheless backed yet another reformist campaign, that of La Follette for President in 1924, heralding the Farmer-Labor candidate as a new Lincoln who could "amalgamate all of the forces of labor into a new political alignment and construct a new economic system."[14] Despite her somewhat strained optimism, however, the AFL soon reconfirmed, on both the political and industrial fields, its incorrigible conservatism. It supported La Follette only half-heartedly in 1924, sabotaged the Progressive party during and after the election, and resolutely opposed industrial unionism, equality for blacks, and fair treatment for women. Radicals found once again that alliance with the AFL, much less reliance on it, was a gesture of despair rather than a tocsin of progress.
Ironically, at the very time O'Hare was extolling co-operation with the AFL and advocating that Socialists work within mainstream working-class institutions, she herself was residing on a co-operative colony and creating a working-class college based upon an opposite strategy, building the new society within the shell of the old. In a sense, this communitarian experiment harked back to a movement which had preceded the foundation of the SP: Debs had envisioned a co-operative colony after the destruction of the American Railway Union, before repudiating colonization in favor of general social transformation as envisioned by the SP. For O'Hare, the Llano Co-operative colony and its affiliated Commonwealth College were in some sense a new departure, based on her growing skepticism about political action. In other ways it embodied her pragmatic, scientific philosophy of experimentation, research, and achievement in the here-and-now.
O'Hare began her remarkable American Vanguard series on Llano and Commonwealth by observing that no one could for certain say "whether the new order will come by political action, or industrial organization, or co-operative production and distribution--or all three combined. Each method has its disciples; so we have radical political parties, industrial organizations and co-operative enterprises, all seeking the road to the co-operative commonwealth." The Llano colonists assumed "that the state of the future will be absorbed in the industrial organizations" based upon production without capitalists or politicians. "They believe that the hard road to real co-operative life can best be blazed by small autonomous groups, and that the real nation, or world-wide co-operative commonwealth will come by the ever-extending merger of these groups."[15]
O'Hare realistically described the hardships, bickering, and endless work which characterized the colony, but asserted that "In their own little world [the colonists] have eliminated the private capitalist and the exploitation of labor, escaped the class lines marked by economic power, and almost entirely slain the specter of want." Almost all the colonists had studied Marx and other modern thinkers, and realized "that the things of the spirit are often of greater import than the things of the flesh." For this reason, the small community sported its own orchestra, library, dance classes, theatricals, and literary entertainments. At an age when men in mainstream society were worried about failing health and unemployment, they indulged at Llano in recreations "crowded out of a fun starved youth." O'Hare found "something pathetic in the way in which many of these men go back to the things denied them in their youth.... Here one may see the bachelor pruning the grape vines under which only dream wife and children will ever rest, or tenderly training the rose that is the living symbol of some girl of long ago." The young worked for eight hours, slept for eight more, and had "eight just for the fun of living." Members of Llano's home-grown orchestra "squeak and plunk and toot for their own satisfaction.... Llano colonists can't sing like Italian peasants or Welsh coal miners [because] America has almost crushed the soul of song out of her working class"; but they made music for their own ears.[16]
O'Hare warned her readers that Llano was not for dogmatists. Indeed, it had "proven a hard school for its founders, and smashed many a pre-conceived idea," especially the prime Marxian tenet of economic determinism. A person's beliefs, behavior, and ultimately personality were not solely determined by his or her economic condition and class. Temporarily ignoring the obvious fact that the personalities of the colonists had been shaped by the capitalist world in which they matured, and that no economic determinist had ever claimed that a change in environment would immediately and miraculously transform human personality, O'Hare said that
If the law of "economic determinism" were absolute, as many Socialists insist, the ordinary problems of life should have been solved.... Yet actual experience shows that with the physical basis of life secure, and a well grounded philosophy of life held in common by the majority of the members, the human problem still clamors for solution....
[Economic determinism taught that with material problems solved], practically all would react to the environment in the same way. This has not proven true at Llano. Reactions to the environment have been as various as the human beings involved, have not been determined by the accepted philosophy, have not been predicted [predicated?], as a rule, upon the economic conditions, but on the spiritual qualities of the various individuals.[17]
O'Hare especially noted that gender as well as class greatly influenced a person's reactions because the previous experiences of men and women differed. Men adjusted more easily to co-operative life than did women because they had "been working co-operatively in politics and the labor movement for several generations, while women have been rigorously shut into the four narrow walls of the house and forced to live the most individualistic sort of lives.... Men have become accustomed to the non-ownership of their tools by generations of factory work, but no matter how poverty-stricken, women have owned the few goods and chattels that have comprised the tools of their trade."[18]
Yet O'Hare also asserted that capitalist exploitation and mis-education had warped the colonists; class society did shape its victims after all.
It is always harder to remove mis-education than to give education; and the first step in human adjustment in Llano is to remove as much as possible of capitalist class mis-education. All of the training in selfishness, grab, graft, class warfare, suspicion and hate that is the necessary protective armor that the members of the working class must have in capitalist society is worse than useless, and must be sloughed off before the real education in co-operative life can begin. And this sloughing process is a long and painful one, it can not be done over night.
So grounded must the average worker be in selfishness to be able to exist in capitalist society, that selfishness becomes second nature which cannot be routed out quickly or easily..... The world is so shot through and through with suspicion and hate that it is perfectly natural that men's souls should be scarred and wounded, and that these scars and wounds should not be instantly healed merely because the economic environment of the individual has changed....
In the adjustment to Colony life the old values must go and new ones be acquired. The very qualities that make men "successful" in capitalist society unfit them for the co-operative venture....[19]
Yet O'Hare asserted that the Llano colonists were developing "a new type of community life.... Children and young people who have not been warped by contact with the capitalist struggle for existence take to Colony life like ducks to water.... They are healthy, happy, and fairly bursting with the importance of their jobs."[20] Perhaps environmental determinists were not so badly wrong after all, even if strictly economic determinists vastly overemphasized the purely economic aspects of human environment (neglecting gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality among other sources of personal identity.)
O'Hare also proclaimed that Llano's experience smashed the shibboleth of pure democracy. When management by discussion was tried, "bedlam reigned. The members were so busy conducting a debating forum that no one had time to attend to the vegetable farm; they were so busy deciding 'points of order' and [the] Marxian orthodoxy of the members' views that no one remembered to sow the turnips or milk the cows..... The Llano colonists discovered the same thing eight years ago that Lenin discovered two years ago, and that is that 'pure democracy' of the soap-box variety won't raise potatoes, mine coal, pull trains, or make pantaloons." The colonists now elected administrators and managers, who received the same gravy on their potatoes as did their subordinates; but the workers also gave the bosses considerable authority. Each morning "the whistles toot and the workers scoot, and that is the end of the story."[21]
Llano colony attracted considerable attention--and criticism--from the left. Critics complained that Llano could not build a healthy enclave in a sick society; that it repeatedly asked for donations from non-members; that its requirement that colonists eventually buy $2000 in stock limited its members to the relatively well-off; and that it remained in a primitive, pioneering condition. O'Hare answered these critics, whom she regarded as revolutionary purists uncomfortable with Llano's unorthodoxy, experimentation, and willingness to deal with the outside world on the world's own (cash-nexus) terms. Llano's realism, she said, "has been the one thing that has permitted the Colony to live. Perhaps it's better to be a live colony somewhat unorthodox than to be a dead one with all the trimmings."[22] Llano was no Utopia constructed according to an abstract, theoretical blueprint, but
a social laboratory where a group of sincere, earnest, hard working men and women are testing out social theories and economic formulas of all kinds.... Llano has found, as has Russia, that some of the best loved theories won't work, and that when they fail to work after having been given a fair trial, there is nothing to do but put them aside and try something else.... The colonists believe that only by research and experimentation can any great progress be made in social science, and it is with this attitude of mind, rather than with the zeal of the creedbound zealot who seeks to build an earthly paradise, that all problems are approached.[23]
Even when Llano abolished wages (which it had paid in colony script), it did so for practical rather than ideological reasons. "All [money] could buy would be food, shelter, clothing, education, and recreation, and all there is of that is here for us without money; all we need to do is to take it. If we want more food, we don't need more money; we need more farmers and better methods of agriculture, for they alone make possible more and better production." The Llano colonists, O'Hare said, "have fixed their standard of wages at all they can produce in physical, mental, and spiritual values."[24]
Responding to those who criticized Llano's appeals for donations, O'Hare said that every working-class project solicited funds from sympathizers. Llano was producing crops for export; so far, however, other co-ops were unaware of this, and Llano could not afford an extensive sales campaign. At any rate, "Llano feels that it can show more of social value, more of actual accomplishment, for contributions received than any other labor group receiving contributions for special needs." Llano had achieved a level of economic and cultural growth which far outstripped the pioneer communities in which O'Hare had lived in her youth. It demanded that each settler contribute $2000 ($1000 of which was due at joining, the rest payable over many years) partly because it needed modern industrial equipment, and partly because those who joined without any financial stake were mostly carpers, cranks, and idlers.[25] O'Hare said that Llano waived the membership fee for some people with essential skills (the O'Hares were one such couple), but said that most such privileged members simply did not work out.
O'Hare commented extensively upon gender relations at Llano. In so doing, she continued her longstanding practice of injecting analysis of women's plight and role into her discussions of more general issues, rather than separately addressing women's issues. Although Llano was an economic co-operative rather than a feminist Utopia, ironically enough it sported many amenities advocated by the Socialist women and by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. A community kitchen, laundry, sewing room and kindergarten relieved women of almost all of their traditional chores, freeing them for eight hours of productive work outside the home. In capitalist society, O'Hare said, mothers of the urban and rural working class lacked social life and meaningful recreation. "With all the sentimentalism with which women's magazines have beclouded the facts, the truth still remains that the job of being a working class mother means endless dreary drudgery and hard wearisome work that is never done. And so endless is the drudgery that most working class mothers are old and broken and dead to the joy of living when they should be in their prime."[26]
In contrast, O'Hare enthused, "Llano has a most unusual group of grey-haired women who sing and dance and hike and take part in theatricals, who are so alert and alive and full of joy of living that no one would dream of calling them old." However, she also complained about the assignment of jobs in the co-operative enterprises: the men arrogated to themselves "the big, interesting, creative things that give the worker a sense of power, and they have left for the women the drab, uninteresting maintenance work--the washing and cooking and the cleaning--the work that is never done and yet produces nothing in which one may take pride."[27] She also commented, without apparent irony, that Llano's co-operative enterprises meant that women did only one hour of housework each day; she made no mention of men sharing domestic tasks. Precisely because Llano was not a self-consciously feminist enterprise, it modified traditional gender roles only fortuitously, in the course of achieving its self-proclaimed goals. It thus left important pillars of male supremacy intact.
Surprisingly, however, it was the kindergarten rather than overt women's oppression which generated the most feminine discontent. The kindergarten represented not a feminist strategy for liberating mothers, but rather the socialization of the children for communal life and work. However, O'Hare remarked that "maternal instinct is so old and so deeply embedded in the human soul that mothers are fiercely jealous of anything that comes between them and their children." Mothers believed their maternal instincts superior to science, whereas O'Hare believed they must be informed by it. "But scientifically demonstrated facts have a hard time making any impression on the emotions aroused by science invading the job of being a mother. So between the desire of the Colony to rear its children in accordance with the best that modern pedagogy [and] physical and mental hygiene can give, and the instinctive jealousy of the mother for her young, Llano kindergarten is no picnic." This problem, O'Hare continued, was "as old as the first invasion of the community school into the realm of child training.... The physician and the trained nurse, too, were resented when they invaded the sickroom and took over the care of the ailing child."[28]
O'Hare had long criticized the disjuncture between education and work which characterized class society.
Under capitalism, the child whose father owns a factory is taught that it is degrading to have to work; that ownership means the right and power to despoil childhood, debase womanhood and enslave manhood. Under Socialism, the child will be taught that it is degrading to eat the fruits of another's toil without a just return; that labor is honorable, and that ownership means a sacred responsibility that can only be met by faithfully developing the highest qualities and capabilities.[29]
She rejoiced that at Llano "there is no division between work and school." Teachers and students alike spent four hours in the classroom and four hours at other work. At Llano, as in hardy pioneering communities, "children learn that all life is based on human labor. There is no corner grocery store, so the Llano children know that if they want 'garden sass' they must produce it; if they want eggs for breakfast they must care for the hens; and if they want fire to warm them, the wood must be brought from the forest and sawed and split. There is nothing from surveying the land and laying out the town-site to loading the brick kiln in which the children do not have their part to play." O'Hare noted that "the little tads feel they are just as important in the scheme of things as the elders." The system did generate some problems: workers were not skilled or trained teachers, and the children, while learning priceless self-sufficiency and skills, often impeded production. Further, each child could not work at the task he or she most preferred; if this theory "were strictly adhered to, the teamsters would have two thirds of the children and the baker the remainder."[30]
Despite these problems, O'Hare asserted that Llano had created a vibrant and exemplary working-class community. "In the early days the Colony idea attracted very strongly theorists, intellectuals, agitators, and plain 'nuts'" she said. Luckily, however, those usually decamped quickly, and the colony discovered the virtues of simple dirt farmers. O'Hare, herself an exemplary crafter of phrases, proclaimed that "under certain conditions the ability to turn a good furrow was of greater social service than the ability to turn a perfect phrase. The Colonists found that a man might be able to recite Marx backwards, cuss the capitalists in six languages, and make a perfect soap-box speech, and yet not be able to produce a turnip." Llano had shown "cuspidor savants" the value of initiative, hard work, experimentation, and co-operation.[31]
Llano was not, O'Hare said, "a sort of monastery where tired radicals retire to find perpetual peace and [to] escape the hardships of the class struggle." The colonists disagreed "vociferously on all sorts of things, from the amount of salt that should go into the soup to the particular brand of religion that suits us best.... Life is about ten times as dynamic here as in any other community, and because we are trying to express our ideals in terms of human behavior instead of words, we have more problems to the square inch than any other group anywhere. But we also have more satisfaction in our work and our lives. We have quit talking about the co-operative form of life, and are living it, making our mistakes and rectifying them as we go our way."[32]
The O'Hares settled at Llano colony in the spring of 1923. Under the terms of their agreement, Llano would publish The American Vanguard and assume outright ownership after a year. Kate remained editor and touted Llano in a remarkable series of articles; she also helped organize Llano-affiliated Commonwealth College. She enthused: "the opportunity for which we have waited so long is here; there will be no more 'shooting in the air.' The Vanguard has a definite, concrete job to do. We are going to build the first working-class college." In a Vanguard series, Kate asserted that the working class could not "invade and conquer the existing institutions of higher learning" and use them for working-class purposes; the creation of a new style of institution, based on working-class values and culture, was necessary.[33]
O'Hare bolstered her proposal for a workers' college with a history of higher education in the United States as a history of class struggle. The ruling class, she said, based the first colleges on a classical curriculum, which trained clergy and other elites who dominated the masses spiritually and temporally. The rise of science and industry head created a demand for a new type of institution. The new industries required "trained specialists" but not "truly cultured men. Industry needed technicians, but not gentlemen."[34] For this reason, the elites who owned the industries and the technicians who managed them received different educations:
The specialists and technicians were to be trained to run the industries and the sons and daughters [of the owners of industry] were to be trained to inherit and enjoy them: two very different functions..... To fill this need for trained men and women, who in the estimation of the industrial magnate, had no use for culture, the state university came into existence.... There is but a very shallow pretense, that deceives no one, that they are institutions of higher learning: [but] they are merely institutions for technical training... a sort of educational department store where standardized education may be purchased to fit the mind that is to use it.[35]
O'Hare said that the rising bourgeoisie could not capture the old, feudal universities, venerable institutions based on the antithetical values of leisure rather than production. These colleges ostracized and demoralized those sons of the rising technocracy whom they did condescendingly admit. "The ideals and the culture of the machine lords was not, and could not become the ideals and the culture of the landlords," O'Hare said. Parvenues did enroll their sons in the old colleges but such students were either isolated and miserable, or corrupted by feudal values and habits. The machine lord class therefore "ceased, as a mass, to try to capture the old college and proceeded to build educational institutions in harmony with its background, its aims and aspirations, its ideals and its culture."[36] These new institutions emphasized scientific and technological training--the mechanisms by which the new ruling class dominated--rather than classical, religious, and humanistic education.
O'Hare asserted that the struggle between these two types of education was therefore a class struggle, not a merely intellectual one. The rising working class must emulate its predecessors, the early bourgeoisie:
The machine lords needed science to make possible the development of industrialism, so as soon as the industrial class became the ruling class, science won.... The development of social science holds out the same hope for the workers, that the development of natural science held out to the new-rich capitalist class a century ago. Physical science promised, and fulfilled that promise, to turn dirt into gold for the capitalist class; social science promises to turn poverty, unrighteousness, and war into social justice for the workers.[37]
Working class colleges, O'Hare said, would create well-rounded individuals, able "to secure more of the product of their labor, and a broader and fuller life while the labor is being performed." Their graduates would possess a thorough grounding in the new social sciences, the humanistic education necessary for a full, creative life, and the capacity for skilled, meaningful labor.[38] Only working-class institutions could offer such an education. As another American Vanguard contributor said, ordinary college professors were "nothing more than bought-and-paid-for servants in an agency for the suppression of thought on human problems, the dissemination of class propaganda, and the wholesale manufacture of Babbitts." Radical professors--"meaning teachers who deal with the social sciences exactly as they deal with the natural sciences"--were calumniated and fired, "just as the teachers of natural science were a century ago."[39]
The working class could not conquer and hold either the old classics-based liberal arts colleges or the new technical universities, O'Hare said. Such an attempt only replicated the "heart-breaking, disaster-inviting path to higher education that the new rich industrial class trod a century ago." Working-class students were socially isolated at bourgeois institutions, and were denied the information necessary for self-awareness and class liberation. Those who did force their way in and persevere until graduation found themselves inculcated with values of an alien class, yet without the wealth which ensured membership in that class; they were therefore reduced to servants of "the industrial ruling class, or underpaid instructors in the institutions of higher learning." The capitalists would not allow working-class domination of institutions which the capitalists had created for their own purposes. Even if the workers could seize control of these institutions, they remained "too laden with things that are not a part of our culture. If we are to have working class colleges for the development of working-class ideals and culture we must build them from the ground up; build slowly, painstakingly, and by experimental methods."[40]
Commonwealth College, O'Hare said, transcended the traditional chasm between education and work. Each student and teacher spent four hours each day at college, and performed other productive work for another four hours. This helped students finance their educations and, more importantly, inculcated a vital political principle. "For the working-class institutions of higher learning to really serve the masses, and to be the true expression of their culture, they must be hives of industry as well as halls of learning,"[41] O'Hare said. Students must
realize that true culture and productive labor are in perfect harmony. The ever-recurring tragedy of the working-class youth seeking his education in the existing institutions of higher learning is that he is almost always educated away from, and out of the producing class and becomes ambitious only to become a parasite upon society. He is taught to despise his origin, to be ashamed of his proletarian parents, to betray his class and to feel that culture is only possible for the shirker who evades his share of useful service.... It is suicidal for the working class to be bled white of the very choicest of its youth, either by chaining them to ignorance, or by losing their services by permitting them to be educated [as] lackeys to the capitalist class....[42]
Neither of the two old-style institutions was capable of meaningful reform, O'Hare asserted, as they were based on seemingly opposite, yet in fact symbiotic, debased ideals.
We cannot use, and do not want, the selfish, white-handed culture of the old college that sought to divide mankind into two castes--decorated parasites and boorish, ignorant workers.... We do not want the harsh, materialistic culture of the industrial magnates whose ideal is to produce highly-skilled technical servants and maintain a slavish, ignorant working class..... Commonwealth comes into being to build a culture in overalls and work-marked hands; a culture whose ideal is a working class fit to inherit and hold the earth and the fullness thereof.[43]
Commonwealth, however, boasted "teachers who can not only talk but work; not only spin theories about life but live fully and completely;" it attracted great teachers by offering them the freedom of inquiry so conspicuously absent from mainstream institutions.[44]
O'Hare perceived another important advantage associated with distinctly working-class colleges: workers could construct them now, without waiting for general social transformation. "It is not necessary for the workers to elect a dog-catcher, much less a state or national administration, before higher education for the workers can be launched," she said. Nor need radicals transform the existing unions. If every worker organized in some fashion--in a union, co-operative, or working-class political party--would contribute $1 per year, they could build all the colleges they needed. O'Hare was confident that the workers would gladly pay this dollar "if the colleges were ready to function." She asserted that at Commonwealth College "we have started to build our own cultural institution, one suited to the needs of the common people.... As our pioneer fathers and mothers went out into the wilderness to build a new civilization, we go forth, pioneers of a new culture.... We must blaze new trails of learning where no trails have led before; we shall choose the good in the old cultures and develop new elements to meet our needs." O'Hare said that the new working-class colleges would perfect and transcend inherited culture: "We shall take from the old college all that is fine and useful and beautiful and make it our own. We shall claim all the best of literature, music, art, and the thoughtful consideration for others that are the foundations and ornaments of manhood and womanhood."[45]
Continuing her long tradition, O'Hare went on long speaking tours, now raising money for Commonwealth College. She also taught there. Just as Llano was one of the most long-lived and successful of working-class co-operative colonies, so Commonwealth was one of the class's most successful colleges. O'Hare's analysis, however, elided a key distinction, acknowledgement of which would have portended trouble for her project of creating a network of such colleges. Analyzing the disjunction between the old, elite liberal arts colleges and the newer technocratic state universities, she recognized that the latter were created by the rising bourgeoisie for their own purposes. These institutions fully served the interests of the owners of industry, who required trained, yet un-educated and docile, managers and technicians. She insightfully recognized, therefore, that the new technical institutions served both the new capitalist ruling class and (in the sense of equipping them for lucrative and prestigious jobs) its hired professional lackeys of the new middle class. For that reason, state governments generously financed such schools, which became massive, powerful institutions. Commonwealth college, however, prepared its students to overthrow the new ruling class rather than serve it; its social science curriculum, far from aiding either the capitalists or the managers, would create revolutionaries rather than wage slaves. Such institutions, therefore, sponsored only by the pittances of the most impoverished and exploited class, would necessarily remain marginal and poorly-funded, especially in the absence of the vibrant working-class political parties and unions to which they were in some senses conceived as alternatives. Commonwealth itself endured for 17 years, yet neither spawned imitators nor threatened the social order.
Long before Commonwealth's demise, however, O'Hare had become uncharacteristically embroiled in factional infighting--even more endemic in communes than in political movements--and had severed connections with both Llano and Commonwealth. In 1924, some Llano colonists, apparently angry that The American Vanguard had become a financial drain on the colony, petitioned for the expulsion of the O'Hares. Llano instead closed the publication. Llano had itself concealed from O'Hare the fact that the land set aside for Commonwealth College was in fact mortgaged (meaning that the College did not actually own its buildings). As a result of these and other matters, Llano was consumed by bickering. A large group headed by Job Harriman (the SP's Los Angeles mayoralty candidate in the ill-fated 1911 election, and the colony's original founder) seceded. The O'Hares joined the dissidents, but almost immediately split with them and established their own colony, including Commonwealth College, ten miles away. Kate was a professor of sociology at the College, basing some of her lectures on her quasi-feminist Rip-Saw series, "The Tale of a Rib." Increasingly, however, she resided away from the College.[46]
The same year as the split from Llano and the silencing of The American Vanguard, Kate separated from her husband. She wrote Frank that she could not "conceive of going back to the stress and strain, conflicts and brain storms, wretchedness and misery of other days." The two had made life "hell for each other" and were happier apart; "economic conditions never permitted me to leave my work, maybe I could not have done it if they had, and you are not so constituted that you can be my husband." Shortly afterwards she wrote that "all the love I once had for you is quite dead. It died very hard--took many years of endless suffering and misery to kill it--but I fear that it is as dead as my youth."[47] The two did not announce their separation until 1928, when they both, on the same day, married new spouses. Kate remained publicly known as Kate O'Hare.
Even before these events, however, O'Hare had commented on the general demoralization of the post-war years: the twin phenomena of proliferating cults and extremist movements on the one hand, and frantic, joyless dissipation on the other. Speaking of cultists and Kluxers and other lost souls, she said that "the old life crumbles in their frantic clutch; the new is too chaotic to provide a firm foundation, and everything on which men build their lives seems to be falling to ruin--nationalism, cultures, and economic institutions.... The nations to which men have given their patriotic zeal have crumbled, or are crumbling. Cultures that have been built up by centuries of intellectual activities are shattered and there is no lodestar for the human soul."[48]
In March 1924 she exclaimed that
In all the years I have been in public life, and in all my varied experiences I have never seen so many persons teetering on the verge of nervous collapse. Never have I seen so much sickness of the soul and spirit, and such wild, insane efforts of human beings to drug brain and soul into torpor by hectic activity--tobacco, drink, drugs, and weird cults and religions. Perhaps I have noticed it more because so much of my work on this trip has been with groups outside the real labor movement..... The best-educated and most-cultured people with whom I came in contact were simply running wildly around in circles until they were dizzy and drunk like children who whirl about until they drop.[49]
O'Hare viewed the rampant materialism, solipsism, and sensualism of the "roaring twenties" (which existed side by side with intense squalor for the majority) as the inevitable spawn of a world in which meaningful collective action and social betterment seemed impossible. The pre-war efflorescence of radical movements had been crushed by the White Terror of 1917-1920. Even work provided few solaces. Farming was only tenantry, working-class jobs mere slavery, education goose-stepped, science hijacked by the corporations, and the professions only disgusting Babbittry. Foreshadowing the much later insights of Paul Goodman, O'Hare said that young people were "shut out from the worlds of experiment and adventure that have served the restless spirits of mankind for ages"; in a frantic escape from "physical and mental dry-rot," youthful rebels turned "inward upon themselves and [sought] adventure in playing upon the emotions of their own bodies, brains, and souls."[50] She said that
The mad scramble of greed that bedevils us as a nation is but the instinctive struggle of thwarted souls to grasp the emotions whose stimulus they think money will buy. The movies and jazz provide vicarious adventure. "Hooch" and "joy-riding" furnish the spurious thrills that must suffice for the genuine joy of living. But the richest field for self experiment is SEX.... We are fairly wallowing in sex.... Because of that universal hunger for adventure that can only find some satisfaction in self experimentation in sex, it has been seized upon and commercialized to the limit. Everything from chewing-gum to grand opera is made a vehicle for sex-suggestion, and a means of turning human beings in upon themselves.[51]
O'Hare especially condemned Floyd Dell's novel Janet March as "almost six hundred pages of puerile self-experimentation carried on by a rather inane flapper, a few callow youths, and a radical, the like of which I have never met in all my twenty-five years in the radical movement. And the nub of the whole long, wordy expose of feminine underwear and infantile flings as being naughty, is the discovery that common-law marriages are just as binding and legal as those at which the preacher officiates."[52]
O'Hare herself had briefly succumbed to the lure of a private, unpolitical life when she became seriously ill in 1923. At that time, she recuperated in the arms of relatives, secure in the knowledge that Llano would tend her family. Although her relatives disapproved of her activist life, no one mentioned these disagreements. She found herself "stripped of strength and fancied superiority and... dependent in weakness and sorrow upon others." Logic and intellect suddenly seemed "cold and comfortless"; she noticed "how lightly we wear the garment of our intellectual and cultural development."[53] O'Hare marveled that
Almost overnight I reverted to type and became a woman of the mountains as my grandmother was..... I was not concerned with economic creeds or political theories but keenly interested in just the right mixture of spices in my sweet pickles.
So the long days of slow recovery passed, and I laughed at myself for the fool I had been to wear myself out in the endless, heart-breaking struggle for a better civilization. I didn't care a hoot whether the world got saved or not, and never again would I attempt to help in the saving. I would do the simple work of life, eat, drink, read the FARM JOURNAL, and let the crazy world stew in the broth of its own making. I had found a refuge from the unbearable cares of life in the sheltering hills and never again would I mix in the turmoil.[54]
When she recovered her strength, however, she found that she could not remain "apart from the common lot" because "the curse of war had crept through the hills and invaded the peaceful valley." War had killed and wounded some of the men with whom she had danced as a girl; the ruinous post-war deflation had wrecked many more lives; yet other farms lay desolate as the young trekked off to the city in search of work, leaving vacant homesteads in their wake. "My sanctuary was not a sanctuary but a cemetery of dead hopes," O'Hare concluded, "and I could not hide away from life there."[55]
Although O'Hare in 1924 had many years of active service ahead of her--she was an important figure in Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California movement in 1934, and worked for radical Congressman Thomas Amlie later that decade--[56]she felt old, exhausted and antiquated. Greeting old comrades on one of her interminable speaking tours, she said that "each one recalled a separate memory." Most of these memories concerned "dust and heat and crowds, long cold or blistering drives, night trains, bad food, sore throats, homesickness, hard work and little money; but there were also memories of fellowship and love and service, of idealism and enthusiasm and sacrifice, of victories won and battles lost only to be waged again." She concluded that whatever the future held, memories of "those long hard years" would "warm and gild all the sunset years of life."[57]
O'Hare found hope in the rising generation as well as consolation in her memories. Upon meeting a cohort of young activists she termed them "so radical that I felt absolutely mid-Victorian. I felt that I was such a conservative old back-number that the only suitable place for me was with Bryan and Sammy Gompers."[58] Late in 1924, she and her old friend Theresa Malkiel, riding the Staten Island ferry, asked themselves with some sense of melancholy whether their long service in a seemingly doomed movement had been as futile as it then appeared. In a passage that may well serve as an epitaph for the remarkable efflorescence of radical thought and action that had characterized the two previous decades, O'Hare described her response when she heard a familiar song rise above the cacophony emitted by holiday merry-makers.
Suddenly I realized that it was "The Internationale," and as the volume swelled and grew as new voices joined, my sense of weariness was gone. Springing up, I worked my way to the prow of the boat and here facing the harbor as they faced life, alive and vibrant with the unquenchable faith of youth in itself, was a group of young men and women singing the deathless challenge of the workers to the powers that would shut them out from the earth and the fullness thereof. They were so
young, so glowing, so full of self-confidence, so sure that the world was simply waiting for their conquering forces. There were no yesterdays for them; only tomorrows. As they flung their challenge to the harbor winds they had no thought for those of us who have passed before; we were only musty history. I doubt if any of them thought of the old Abolitionists who made their fight against chattel slavery, and won only half a victory. Did any of them remember the old Populists and Knights of Labor who waged the first battles in defense of the exploited farmers and wage workers, and won less than half a victory, but laid the foundation for those of us who built the Socialist movement? They knew perhaps by name and possibly by sight the Socialist workers of my generation, but if they thought of us at all, it was only with the assurance that what we had started they would carry through to victory. And they are right....
My first thought had been to join the group of young Crusaders and claim fellowship with them, and then I realized that I belonged to another generation, and that youth must follow its own heart and find its own work to do. So I slipped back into the crowd and the young radicals went on their way to find their own methods of waging their battles in the age-old struggle of the workers to reclaim the earth and make it theirs.
The gay youths who sang their challenge to the world that Sunday night in the New York harbor will never know that their song brought courage and peace and strength to me. They would not understand if I told them that in their song I found the assurance that my work had been well done and not in vain, and that they would carry it on until their turn also to surrender the banner to the next generation.[59]
Notes:
[1] KROH letter, June 15, 1919, MF 221-222; KROH letter, January 20, 1920, MF 263-264.
[2] KROH letter, August 17, 1918, MF 232; KROH, "A Few Facts about the IWW," unsigned article by KROH, NRS February 1922.
[3] KROH (unsigned), "A Few Facts about the IWW," NRS, February 1922; KROH, (unsigned), "War Profiteers vs. 'Wobblies,"" NRS, February 1922.
[4] KROH letter, December 7, 1919, MF 248; KROH letter, April 26, 1920, MF 293; Crystal Eastman, "The Socialist Party Convention," The Liberator, July 1920, reprinted in Cook, 349-356. The quote is on p. 356.
Eastman thought that many of the right-wingers would have joined the Labor Party; "That would have left the American Socialist Party in control of its genuine majority, unmistakably communist in thought and purpose, and definitely affiliated with the Third International." Debs's presence and leadership, however, might well have moderated the newly leftist SP. O'Hare lamented that the split in the SP resulted in two groups, one largely composed of immigrants within an intense interest in European affairs, the other of native-born Americans lacking such interest; had Debs unified the left in the SP, however, this chasm might never have developed. As discussed below, O'Hare became a strong supporter of the Labor Party after the SP had disintegrated into impotence.
[5] "The Daily Worker," AV, April 1924.
[6] KROH letter, August 2, 1919, 228.
[7] KROH letter, August 10, 1919, MF 229-230.
[8] KROH, "Are We Headed Straight for Perdition?", AV November 1923.
[9] KROH, "Wayside Tales," AV February 1924.
[10] For information on The Syndicalist League of North America see Edward P. Johanningsmeir, Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster (Princeton, 1994), 49-50, 64-78; William Z. Foster, From Bryan to Stalin, (International Publishers, 1937), 58-72; Philip Foner, The Industrial Workers of the World (International, 1965), 427-430. Foster published a pamphlet, Syndicalism, reprinted by Charles Kerr and Company; see also the short-lived publication, The Syndicalist, which succeeded The Agitator.
[11] KROH, "Political Organization of American Workers is Inevitable," NRS December 1921.
[12] KROH, "Political Organization of American Workers is Inevitable," NRS December 1921.
[13] KROH TITLE UNKNOWN, NRS, February 1922.
[14] KROH TITLE UNKNOWN, NRS, February 1922; KROH, "The King of the Double Cross," AV December 1923 and January 1924; KROH, "---- and Burn," AV January 1924 GET TITLE AND CLEAR COPY OF THIS VITAL ARTICLE AND QUOTE IT IN THIS NOTE; KROH, "Lincoln and La Follette," NRS LATE 1924, ONE OF LAST TWO ISSUES, FIND DATE.
[15] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV February 1923. This series title derived from the name of a co-operative in Siberia, in which persons from many countries (including the United States) participated. O'Hare said that "it will no doubt be a great blow to the Russian worshipper who believe that no good can come out of the United States, to discover that Kuzbas was not the child of the brain of Lenin but of Job Harriman," a California SP member (and Los Angeles mayoralty candidate in 1911). O'Hare said that "the constitution of the Kuzbas colony was taken largely from the Llano colony.... Since Kuzbasing in Siberian Russia is not practical for a women of uncertain years hitched to a husband, six children and a magazine, I thought a small dose of Kuzbasing in Dixie might satisfy the pioneer spirit which is a part of my heritage." Llano, originally founded in California, had recently moved to Louisiana.
For an account of Llano see the information in Miller; and TWO PATHS TO UTOPIA.....
[16] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV March 1923; KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV June 1923.
[17] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV March 1923.
[18] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV March 1923.
[19] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV March 1923.
[20] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV March 1923.
[21] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV April 1923; KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV, March 1923.
[22] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV April 1923; KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV July-August 1923.
[23] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV July-August 1923.
[24] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV December 1923.
[25] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV, July-August 1923.
[26] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," June 1923.
[27] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV June 1923; KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV, March 1923.
[28] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV May 1923.
[29] KROH, "As the Bud Unfolds," NRS, November 1912.
[30] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV, April 1923; KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV May 1923.
[31] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV December 1923; KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," June 1924.
[32] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," June 1924.
[33] KROH, "Comrade Kate's Shop Talks," NRS, AV, April 1923; "Working-Class Culture," AV May 1923 (unsigned KROH article). For a general account of Commonwealth and other working-class colleges, see Richard Altenbaugh, Education for Struggle: The American Labor Colleges of the 1920s and 1930s (Temple, Philadelphia, 1990). Miller has fairly detailed information on KROH's early involvement with Commonwealth.
[34] "Higher Education in the United States," AV May 1923 (unsigned KROH article).
[35] "Higher Education in the United States," AV May 1923 (unsigned KROH article).
[36] "Class Ideals and Education," AV May 1923 (unsigned KROH article).
[37] "Class Ideals and Education," AV May 1923 (unsigned KROH article).
[38] "Class Ideals and Education," AV May 1923 (unsigned KROH article). O'Hare indicated that working-class colleges would initially stress the social sciences, suppressed or distorted at the state universities; working-class students could acquire the necessary scientific and technical knowledge at the state universities.
[39] Harold Brown, review of Upton Sinclair's The Goose Step, AV April 1923.
[40] "Class Ideals and Education," unsigned KROH article, AV, May 1923; "Working-Class Culture," unsigned KROH article, AV May 1923.
[41] "Working-Class Culture," unsigned KROH article, AV May 1923.
[42] "Working-Class Culture," unsigned KROH article, AV May 1923.
[43] KROH, "What Commonwealth College Means to the Workers," AV October 1923.
[44] "Working-Class Culture," unsigned KROH article, AV May 1923.
[45] "Working-Class Culture," unsigned KROH article, AV May 1923; KROH, "What Commonwealth College Means to the Workers," AV October 1923.
[46] Miller, 192-218.
[47] Miller, 215-216.
[48] KROH, "Anesthetic Religions," AV November 1923.
[49] KROH, "Wayside Tales," AV March 1924.
[50] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV, June 1924.
[51] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV, June 1924.
[52] KROH, "Kuzbasing in Dixie," AV, June 1924.
[53] KROH, "The World Goes By," AV October 1923.
[54] KROH, "The World Goes By," AV October 1923.
[55] KROH, "The World Goes By," AV October 1923.
[56] For O'Hare's last years, see Miller, 219-237.
[57] KROH, AV, January 1924, ---- and Burn; MISSING TITLE AND PART OF THIS IMPORTANT ARTICLE.
[58] KROH, "Wayside Tales," AV February 1924.
[59] KROH, "Wayside Tales," AV VERY LATE 1924, DATE UNCERTAIN