As the World War begins Bruce Rogers speaks for himself and his comrades, abused and murdered by American militarism, in refusing the invitation to join their class enemy in opposing ‘Prussian militarism.’

‘Our War at Home’ by Bruce Rogers from Solidarity. Vol. 5 No. 253. November 14, 1914.

This generation the world over is having its sensibilities deadened to casual and ordinary horror. We lose the concept of disaster. We shall cease to be appalled. No terrestrial catastrophe can now alarm us. Nothing short of a collision of comets cluttering up the earth with the wreckage of interplanetary mishap will excite in us a feeling of more than passing interest. Wretched are we when bragging of our civilization; we grow weary of monotonous misery and the fountains of sympathy are drained of the last drop of pity. As the shadows of our lives fall further and ever further to the eastward and when the young shall marvel at some quake of earth, some city wiped out by fire or flood, great areas enfamined or pestilence stricken, when a future Titanic, with its burden of a few paltry thousand human beings shall sink to ocean crypt, we shall turn wearily and say that it is nothing to what happened in our time.

With great amplification of detail and enlargement of rumor the daily papers feed us to the point of nausea. These sensation perverts as if they were guides in hell rival each other in headlines and cartoons, seeking to engage us in the cumulative features of the damnation. The magazines and reviews print strained dissertations on the causes and probable outcome. Even the socialist and labor papers give themselves over to fretful essays on the conflict abroad. Meantime the worker loses sight of his own war and is easily vanquished by the American despot. He ceases to be so much as a negligible antagonist of the enemy nearer to him, despoiling, starving and badgering him at every turn.

Under cover of the vast publicity given events abroad and the deflection of interest in its doings, American capitalism with its militarism and all its retinue and brood of evil, fattens and fortifies itself for rapine and loot, for piracy and conquest. Stripped of nursery verbiage and our idolatry for ancestral “heroes,” our myths and symbols of freedom and all the gorgeous bunk of patriotism our own country stands naked a class-enthroned imperialism and a libel on the name of Liberty. Upon the slightest occasion the civil authority gives way to the military. The military establishment is at all times the actual power in America and but little less so than the Prussia we condemn so much. It is in his military character as Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy that the President is absolute and this power is ever at his hand. With none to say him nay he sends an army here and a navy there as readily as does the Kaiser. It follows that with us the military is supreme. It dominates the country and translates American sovereignty. It sets a fool’s cap upon the statue of Liberty, makes a harlot of Columbia and gives the lie to Justice.

In the nature of things a military establishment can never be other than despotic. Under it a colonel is a duke, a general a prince, the President an emperor with no by-your-leave to any electorate. A self-respecting barber in Butte refuses to shave a national guardsman. Forthwith an epauletted whippersnapper sends the barber to prison for lese majeste, or as we say it, for insulting the flag.

Our official militarism does not end with the national government. Imperialism would not be quite complete if it did so, for the separate state governments exercise a sort of secondary sovereignty. To round out our military system the so-called civil police are armed, uniformed and kept on a military basis in every city and town in America. Incidentally their service is the suppression of crime. Their chief concern is the shepherding of slave herds. Moreover every county sheriff in the United States is empowered to “deputize” or impress into his service every citizen in the county. Mind you, that it is not frequently done is due solely to the fact that occasion does not more frequently arise and not from lack of authorized power. It is in this manner that the semi-official militarists, the “detective” or strike-breaking agencies, swing into official action. These mercenaries infest every mining, industrial and transportation service in the country. They are armed to kill. They do kill.

We hear much of a Prussian military aristocracy. But what of our military caste, in America beyond the swaggering regular soldiery and the tinsel and frippery of militia? Hundreds of secret orders whose doings are solemnly cloistered from public knowledge and whose combined memberships run into millions of men have their uniformed military ranks. They have a pompous heraldry and balderdash of knight errantry fully as medieval as the Prussian military orders could possibly inherit. They have their Grand Exalted Rulers, Captains-General, Sovereign Grand Commanders, Imperial Potentates, High Priests, ad nauseum. Mistake not, theirs is no mere goat- riding horse play. They are trained and drilled and disciplined. They learn to command, to fours right and to present arms. To a greater or less extent they are all armed. Some of them completely so and with the latest modern murdering equipment. Military caste! In this way not a village or town in America is without its swash-buckling Captain Jenks’s, who weekly or once or twice a month march up and down a lodge room in regalia and safely guarded at the outer door against cowans and eaves-droppers.

We are deceived when we look abroad for militarism and war as if we had no such burden at home. With it hundreds of complex functions the government of the United States expends more money for war than for all other purposes combined. It is estimated that two-thirds the national income is expended in war pensions and maintenance of the army and navy.

We have a war in the United States, that should engage the attention of every worker until it is ended and our own militarism abolished. We have been at civil war in American since the Homestead strike. We are in a state of virtual civil strife in America now. Hostilities have never wholly ceased. There has been no time since Homestead when there have not been thousands of men in service and under arms against the workers of America. In one single period of thirty days in 1913 the uniformed soldiers of four separate states were in action against labor. To say nothing of vast numbers of gunmen in service throughout the industries at all times, the private troops of American employers,

Our soldiers and sailors and private armies of thugs need no lessons of Uhlan or Cossack in atrocity and vandalism. It was only a little while ago when we had exposures of the water-cure tortures upon “our” Philippine subjects. In Vera Cruz lately our brave allowed captive prisoners a given distance and then told them to escape if they could by flight. In various sieges of the labor war American citizens, bound, unarmed and helpless have been tortured and beaten to death. In Spokane such defenceless prisoners, not resisting, were forced to run a gauntlet of burly policemen who were to kill if they could with fists or feet. This savage torture was also practiced at San Diego and in the latter city a man not charged with crime was taken by force to an outlying prairie and there branded with fire upon his bare back, legendary letters, “I.W.W.,” burned into his quivering flesh. Animal filth of unmentionable nature was forced into his mouth. All this by representative business men of San Diego. In Ludlow helpless women and children were burned to death by militia, an unpunished horror that gives the lie to civilization quite as effectually as any European holocaust can possibly do.

And why speak of Louvain and of Rheims? It was only last year when in Seattle, Washington, soldiers and sailors, with no pretext of war, came ashore and marched about the city pillaging and burning libraries, musical instruments and pictures. The government approves of the act, for it has not punished the marauders nor has it in anywise made reparation.

We in America should pause before criticising the workers abroad when we have war and militarism at home and are doing so very little about it.

The most widely read of I.W.W. newspapers, Solidarity was published by the Industrial Workers of the World from 1909 until 1917. First produced in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and born during the McKees Rocks strike, Solidarity later moved to Cleveland, Ohio until 1917 then spent its last months in Chicago. With a circulation of around 12,000 and a readership many times that, Solidarity was instrumental in defining the Wobbly world-view at the height of their influence in the working class. It was edited over its life by A.M. Stirton, H.A. Goff, Ben H. Williams, Ralph Chaplin who also provided much of the paper’s color, and others. Like nearly all the left press it fell victim to federal repression in 1917.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/solidarity-iww/1914/v05-w253-nov-14-1914-solidarity.pdf