Magnificent lines from one of the era’s finest writers of prose as Giovannitti greets the Springtime of Revolution.

‘Revolution’ by Arturo Giovannitti from New International (S.P.L.A.). Vol. 1 No. 2. May 5, 1917.

I HEAR frightful shrieks of joy and agony amidst the crashing fugue of thundering guns. History is lying again on her childbed and again the whole world attends her tremendous accouchement. For the third time since the resurrection of Demos she is going to bring forth the Impossibles the Gigantesque, the Terrible. Ever seventy years, every life of man, so harrows the earth and winnows mankind. 1776-1848-1917. Mark these dates,–the gods have selected them as winners in the great handicap of kings and peoples. The first was the Advent; the second the Crucifixion; the third will be the Resurrection. It is to be. The auguries are read: the omens propitious; the signs are all here, the same as then: war and famine and insanity and dread of the tomorrow.

I smell something burning in these perfidious spring winds and it is not only the dead grass of last year. Beware of the Ides of March; eschew the breaking thaws and the prickly suns of Aprils if you are not the one who is going to plow and to sow. But if you are, rejoice, for you shall reap a rich harvest of proud heads when the red Julies come again with the scythe.

I smell again the torchlight of the Tribunal Revolutionaire, fuming, sizzling, splurting late at night, first daughter of the sun. I smell the smudgy pitch rainbowing down the attics of papal Rome; the Devil, blond and red-shirted fighting the holy father in the holier name of freedom. I smell charcoal and saltpeter in the mountains of Silesia; the dog-eaters of the Black Forest mixing a new incense for the thuribles of Liberty. I smell something milky and rich and warm, something qui sent comme l’amour, and it is no longer the blood of plebeians. I see again peasants biting dry flax and filling their gourds with a black flowing thing that is not wine and is not liquid. I see women braiding hemp into lean and viscid ropes, all twelve feet long. A strange hymn is being chanted in the churches; the anthem of the Antichrist, the Te Deum of change, the Marseillaise. People get together everywhere. They no longer speak aloud. They whisper and look around. When people whisper and look around, beware, for it bodes ill to those who speak very loud and look down. An air of madness blows from the East; kings feel suddenly sober, commoners get suddenly intoxicated. God stops yawning and looks interested. Spring is everywhere, and everywhere is the other youth of the world–the Revolution.

It is coming, it is coming. Who is so blind in the eyes and in the soul that cannot see it advancing, fierce and shrieking and irresistible, with the torch and with the axe? Is there any one so deaf to the mighty detonations of this immense apocalypse who cannot hear the same song wafted across the trenches by the cannon smoke, by the deadly gas, by the breath of fire? Is mankind to be utterly destroyed and no living seed of thought and love is to germinate in its ruins and debris? Are ideals, held more sacred than life, to be dragged like carrion across the red ooze; and the souls of one thousand million men to be polluted, violated, raped with steel-gauntleted hands, bought and sold like chattels and wares, without any one raising a voice or without that voice being heard? And if not men, is not Life at least going to protest against Death?

She is. Already the program of that protest, athunder with anger, has been heard. A greater one will soon take place. And what form do you think it will take, O lords, O masters, O rulers? Will they supplicate to kings and potentates? Will they petition parliaments? Will they pray to gods? Fools, fools! For three years you have taught people to talk and demand things through the muzzle of the gun. Fools! You have changed the jargon of the tribune into the explosion of the shrapnel and the torpedo. You have told them that democracy, liberty, their daily bread, the sacredness of human life, the very right to be depend no longer on peace and reason and co-operation, but on their readiness to die for these things, which means their readiness to kill. And now do you expect them to turn back and unlearn all you taught them and discard all you forced them to try and they found serviceable and perfect> Fools, fools! They are going to keep on, yea, but they are going to turn about and look behind their shoulders for the target.

All around you old systems are crumbling and new orders are arising. But you don’t see.

New forces are bursting into being. New weapons. New understandings. New tools of destruction. But you don’t see. Because you have a few jails you think you are safe. You have forgotten that children romp where the Bastille stood and that the Czar babbles his rosary in the tower of Peter and Paul. Because you still have lumber for a few scaffolds you think your tranquility is assured. Idiots! Not all the spindles of hell are enough to spin nooses for the numberless traitors and rebels you’d have to hang. Because you are forcing every man to drop the hammer and shoulder the gun, you feel amply protected and safeguarded. Poor fools! But what about Hunger that calls like a weary beggar at the cold and silent homes of those men, and throws the bible off the table, and jerks up women and old men from their knees and whispers wrath and disobedience in their ears? Know you not the omnipotent magic of this wondrous alchemist, who, when potatoes rise to fifteen cents a pound can transubstantiate every ounce of them into a ton of balestite? Have you not learned from the past the terrible cabala of starvation which can raise every loaf of bread to the proportions of a barricade? Do you have cannon? Who is behind them? Who before them? Cannon have wheels. They can be turned around. They were going to be turned around in Dark Russia, had it been necessary. And, Gentlemen, these rotatory motions are characteristic of all sorts of cannon, regardless of geographical positions and climatic influences. You had better think and beware!

Neither is Russia alone. Spain is seething with rebellion. They have suppressed another general strike there. Every year they suppress one, every twelve-month they have a new one to suppress. Some day there will be no one to suppress strikes and nineteen millions to suppress a king. In Sweden starved men with crazy glares in their eyes hailed to the Republic under the towers of their monarch. In Greece the war that was dammed at the borders is going to burst within, redder and madder and more glorious. In Ireland priests preach the resurrection and youths and maidens cultivate red flowers of passion over the graves of men that were hanged and shot. In Italy, in Germany, in Austria, in France, throughout the world May Day is returning acclaimed and praised, the Red Easter of martyred humankind. Beware!

And in America? Because two hundred sleek and fat men in frocks and top hats have declared that universal butchery is the supreme avocation of the manhood of the land, think you that they who plowed and built will turn back from their meek and joyful tasks and whet cutlass for the throats of their brothers at your bid? Think you that America can really become Russia now that Russia has become America? And is it possible to go back when bread and peace and love and the dawn lie forward on the highroad of progress? Never. Someone will say “No!” Someone will shout, “Enough!” In a few days. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps even today. Then they will be thousands. Then they will become millions. Then they will be the whole population of the earth. It will be the hurricane. The typhoon. The avalanche. The Resurrection, The Second Advent of Man. The Palingenesis. The Revolution! “Words, words; cheap rhetoric, the demagoguerie of the agitator,” you say. You say that is harmless utopia and that it will never be because reason is against it. You are wrong, Gentlemen. Utopia is the most terrible reality on earth. It has destroyed empires and executed kings and torn down temples and obliterated gods. Utopia is nonsense when it is the mere crystal-gazing of a dreamer or a philosopher; but it is more potent than an earthquake when it becomes the sunlit horizon of the people. Nor has reason any power against its unarrestable march. But where is reason now? For three long years it has been dead, this great reactionary, this enemy of all change, this servant of all indolence, this assassin of all heroism. You yourselves have slain and offered it on an altar of roaring guns to propitiate the Dream, when you broke down all the dykes of restraint and flooded the world with this ocean of molten lava. Let it stay dead now, Gentlemen, for the Dream is really going to come true. The dream of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the Folly that has survived the ages and has now encircled all the world in the swirl of its mad and merry saraband. Joy and victory to Folly. Let us get out the caps and jingles of the fool. Let us laugh to the end the shrill cachinnation of the maniac. Let us enthrone the Absurd. Let us enshrine Folly, the great mother of the New, the turgid-breasted nurse of Genius, the midwife of Freedom and Revolution!

Dansons la Carmagnole! Vive le son du canon!

Gentlemen, Her Majesty the Mob is knocking at the door. You need not get up and open this time. Just sit still and pray, for the only thing you are going to save now, Gentlemen, is your soul!

New International was the paper of the Socialist Propaganda League of America begun in Boston as ‘The Internationalist’ at the start of January 1917 and first edited by John D. Williams. The SPLA was founded by Left Wing SPer C.W. Fitzgerald , who had contacted Lenin in the fall of 1915 over their shared opposition to the war and positions around the Zimmerwald Conference. Lenin and continued their correspondence. With publisher and editor John D Williams and Dutch revolutionary SJ Rutgers, Fitzgerald officially began the SPLA in November, 1916, the first po-Bolshevik organization in the US. In early 1917 Williams went to New York to tour for the SPLA. On January 16, 1917 a meeting in Brooklyn attended by Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Alexandra Kollontay, V. Volodarsky, and Grigory Chudnovsky representing the Russian revolutionary movement with Louis B. Boudin, Ludwig Lore, Louis Fraina, and John D Williams of the SPLA. Both the New International(ist) and Class Struggle journals were born at this meeting. In the spring of 1917 SPLA headquarters moved to New York where Louis Fraina took over as editor. The paper lasted only about a year before Fraina began publishing Revolutionary Age

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-international/v1n02-may-05-1917-ni.pdf