Revolter Georgia Kotsch attends a meeting of the decidedly unradcial Los Angeles local. Los Angeles was site of ordained minister Job Harriman’s run for Mayor in 1911 in which he won the first round, but lost the second. Reporting the scene for Revolt readers, comrade Kotsch provides a wonderful and humorous encapsulation of the differences between Left and Right in the pre-war Party.

‘A Cave of the Winds in Los Angeles’ by Georgia Kotsch from Revolt (San Francisco). Vol. 3 No. 47. March 23, 1912.

Powerful Winds Blow Fiercely in Los Angeles.

REVOLT’S readers will no doubt be glad of an account of a regular propaganda meeting in Los Angeles. Los Angeles, which has been such a center of conflict and of interest; Los Angeles, a city set upon a hill which cannot be hid, the feeding ground of hungry Socialist politicians, where the political game was so nearly played to success. Comrades in other places will be glad of the inspiration of an intimate glance at our present activities, a knowledge of the deathless spirit of revolution which is now animating us, and seeing our good works they may be constrained to go and do likewise.

I attended the regular propaganda meeting Sunday evening, March 18. I confess I do not attend all the meetings, confining myself chiefly to study club work. Of course we have the grand meetings when politic to have them, when the big guns volley and thunder, but the big guns are mostly off junketing now and the children left at home are in untrammeled frankness showing the fruits of their tutelage. Of three meetings which I have attended in as many months, one was addressed by Mr. Wolfe, the burden of his lay being the possibility of getting himself, Cantrell and a few more of our brains into the legislature soon. Of course he was too modest to mention names, and really it wasn’t necessary. The next was a woman’s meeting addressed by three able women on the white-slave traffic, all of them, however, introducing God and the Divine plan as the reason why things should be as they should be.

I will describe the last meeting, it being freshest in my mind. I have not the pen of a Mark Twain or a Bill Nye, but I think a simple recital of things as they occurred may merit a place in your humorous column.

The lower floor of the Labor Temple auditorium was half filled, Mr. Harrack in the chair. Men in the seats were studiously absorbing mental pabulum from outspread copies of the Social-Democrat. The speaker was a man who has spent almost a lifetime in a Baptist pulpit and has only lately given it up to follow his convictions into the Socialist party, a sincere man to whom much credit is due and for whose hardihood in allowing himself to be persuaded to address a Socialist meeting allowance is to be made. He spent fifteen minutes telling us that he could tell us nothing and then proceeded to do it in a kindergarten lecture on “The Gospel of Socialism.” Where the company was congenial the audience resolved itself into little sociable groups and lonesome individuals under the soothing clerical intonations, composed themselves for a quiet nap. Old ex-church-goers lapsed into the old habit as naturally as a New Year teetotaler slides off the water wagon. The gist of the talk was the declaration that we have in our hands the little white paper which is the magic sesame that will open freedom’s door. In it alone lies our power to emancipate ourselves. He believed it thoroughly and so do thousands here. Why shouldn’t they? It is what they have been taught.

Preceding his talk the speaker asked the audience to stand and sing “America.” Exemplary sheep that they are, trained to follow the leader, they stood and sang as atrociously as Socialists do sing, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” In the question period a timorous inquirer ventured to ask whether economic organization is not as important as political. He was assured it was not. Our power to capture the government lies in the ballot. The first five-minute speech was by a single-taxer, who, as usual with his breed, had to be sledge-hammered from the platform. It is only when the stones cry out that I get desperate enough to break womanly silence in meeting and this was such an occasion. Being a sufferer from acute stage-fright, my performance fitted with perfect harmony into the general badness of the scheme of the meeting. I tried to call attention, however, to labor legislation in Massachusetts which was used against the workers until they got together on the economic field and developed power to compel a start toward better conditions; to the fact that our ability to work is the only thing we have that the capitalist cares for and that to so organize that we can give or withhold this ability as we see fit is our road to power; to the English situation where, after sending men up to Parliament these years, the workers are poorer than they ever have been and are literally driven to industrialism; to labor laws in California that women shall work but eight hours a day and that women in stores shall be allowed to sit when not-busy, which laws are not observed because the workers in California are not organized in sufficient strength to compel their enforcement; to the damage done the past week in Germany to our prize saying, that by political action we can keep the policeman’s club off of the worker’s head while he organizes, the great strong Socialist party of Germany being unable to protect the strikers from being killed. I fully understand that our labor legislation is not passed by Socialists, but it is lobbied for by them and crowed over by them and forms a large part of the subject material of their addresses. I am as anxious- as the next one for any and all immediate ameliorations of the lot of the toiler, let them come as they may, but I sort of have a leaning toward means that seem to bring results.

Comrade Holston, shrewd in politics and a lawyer withal, followed. It was easy for that com- bination to show that I was all wrong; that the only trouble is that the Socialists have not unseated the Kaiser and filled the Reichstag brim full of Socialists; that Massachusetts Socialists have not elected Socialists; that English Socialists have mixed up with laborites (certainly not a thing for Los Angeles Socialists to sneeze at) and have not filled Parliament with simon-pure Socialists. He voiced a species of political impossibilism.

I remember that some years ago Massachusetts Socialists did do considerable electing and Mark Hanna came in with the economic power at his disposal and there has not been much doing in Socialist politics there since. I have also been under the impression that the Socialist groups of England have been as conscientious as the average and have hewed about as close to the line as their conditions would admit. They got Socialists into Parliament in the only way they could get them in and, with I believe two exceptions, they have been assimilated after they got there. The case is complicated by the fact that the English workers have to eat. They have gotten to the point where even capitalist papers admit they can not live on what they get. Though this comrade may be willing to suffer by proxy through them to that end, they can not afford to starve longer while trying the doubtful experiment of stocking Parliament with Socialists. They are dealing with a horrible fact and not a theory and they are dealing with it in the only effective way.

The “most unkindest cut of all” was when the next speaker, an I.W.W., objecting to the ballot altogether, accounted for my mistaken attitude in still clinging to its legitimate use, by referring to me as “the young lady,” thus focusing the quizzical eyes of the old-timers in my direction.

“Hooray for Bill Haywood,” yelled an untutored voice in the rear of the hall and a bunch of us clapped vociferously.

By this time the Sabbath calm of the congregation was so disturbed that we were prepared for the climax when Anton Johannsen took the floor and laid about him with pungent, sweet profanity. I couldn’t exactly gather from his remarks where he was going but anybody could see he was on the way.

The meeting closed with another reckless attempt at song. This time it was, “In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea.” A sprightly lady near me, in view of the milk and water propaganda, suggested that a more suitable closing hymn would have been “The Milkmen’s Chorus,” “Shall We Gather at the River.”

Revolt ‘The Voice Of The Militant Worker’ was a short-lived revolutionary weekly newspaper published by Left Wingers in the Socialist Party in 1911 and 1912 and closely associated with Tom Mooney. The legendary activists and political prisoner Thomas J. Mooney had recently left the I.W.W. and settled in the Bay. He would join with the SP Left in the Bay Area, like Austin Lewis, William McDevitt, Nathan Greist, and Cloudseley Johns to produce The Revolt. The paper ran around 1500 copies weekly, but financial problems ended its run after one year. Mooney was also embroiled in constant legal battles for his role in the Pacific Gas and Electric Strike of the time. The paper epitomizes the revolutionary Left of the SP before World War One with its mix of Marxist orthodoxy, industrial unionism, and counter-cultural attitude. To that it adds some of the best writers in the movement; it deserved a much longer run.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/revolt/v3-w47-mar-23-1912-Revolt.pdf