Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1919-01-10
BERGER AS A SYMBOL
OF SOCIALISTS FAILURE


Milwaukee, Jailward Congressman and His
Crowd We're the Real Enemies Of Liberal
Causes in America
ssT'M SHOCKED!" said Victor Berger,
= Milwaukee's Socialist Congressman
elect, when a Federal jury in Chicago
found him guilty Of violating the espio-
mage act. Thus the Berger spirit main
tanned it's characteristic isolation to the
last.
No one else was shocked. The anti
Government propaganda directed by this
ex-German was ugly. 1t was graceless.
1t had some small elements of danger.
And yet it did not represent the gravest
offense chargeable against the Wisconsin
type of radicalism. Berger consciously
or unconsciously betrayed the humane
causes which he presumed to represent
when he did more than any one else to
force the shameless platform Of nom
interference through the Socialist con-
vention at st. Louis at a time when all
civilization was being threatened by the
armies Of a demented king.
In that moment the Socialist cause in
America received the most disastrous
blow that has been struck at it in fifty
years. If stupidity were a crime punish
able by law Berger would not be facing
a nominal term in Jail. He would get a
hundred years or SO and the Socialists
themselves would be his prosecutors.
1t was at st. Louis that the last pre-
tensions of intellectualism were stripped
from Socialist leadership in America.
There the party declared its own class
interests to be greater than the causes
of humanity. A cult shouted that it was
greater than the world. Collective opin-
ion in America decided very properly that
there is something seriously wrong with
minds that could not perceive the splen-
dor of the American purpose or realize
the nobility of a service in which IN
counted millions were willing to spend
their lives and their money to retrieve
the great hopes Of other peoples less for
tunate than they.
SiiiNN SiiN tiN ~ biiN' VI ihc NPiii
ion toward newer political doctrines has
turned to dislike and hardened in antago-
nism. Radical Socialism of the Ameri-
can sort has been derided most bitterly
by the few intellectual men who for
merly were associated with it. Most Of
the more intelligent men and women who
voted for the Berger anti-war platform
repudiated it later and made at least a
pretcnse of helping the country in the
war. They were the last to admit the
justice of a cause which was manifestly
most just. Had the rest of the people
accepted a doctrine that was advanced
as an embodiment of all modern economic
wisdom, Germany would now be triuHh-
plant in Europe, bleeding the little ma
tions dry, overwhelming civilization. In
this country we should be arInir" to the
teeth and waiting for our turn with the
beast. And if the paciticism of the
Socialists prevailed as a genera, convic-
ton, the Bergers and the fuckers and
their like would not have the freedom
of their soap boxes for long. They
would be booted about in chain gangs
by some thug or other in a Hun army
uniform.
The Socialists, in other words, who
had boosted a better intelligence for
years, proved slacker-minded and less
humane and less imaginative in a crisis
than the ordinary man in the street who
has loafed along from the beginning in
old political parties, many of whose
lesser leaders he knows to be corrupt
or inefficient.
That is what is the matter with So
cialism and that is why a political doc
trine which, intelligently directed, is
having a tonic effect upon the older
European parties, has been set pack half
a century in America.
Wisconsin or Milwaukee, that part
which decided to send Berger to Con-