From One Who Worked Day By Day with Morris Hillquit
Gerber, Ludwig Hillquit
From One Who Worked Day By Day with Morris Hillquit By Ludwig Hillquit Gerber AS a child, if any one were to ask me who was the greatest man in the world, I would reply "Morris Hillquit." This...
...And then under Henry VIII came the revolt of Roger Aske that was again crushed...
...Henry, who tent counsellors and wives to the block for the offense of displeasing him...
...Submitted by Victor Rlesel, who wins this week's prize...
...though naturally of• a retiring disposition, fame, glory and leadership thrust themselves upon him...
...That was ths year In which the party hired the "lei Special" train and finances] it largely from collections taken at meetings...
...It was a bad day to have chosen, h was quite ill but, having made the appointment, he smilingly went through with it We, in the office, who could watch the precision and brilliancy of the mind of Morris Hillquit at work, reading his sparkling articles, hearing his peerless legalistic arguments and,-above all, seeing him as a human being, saw a man whose personality was imbued with modesty and simplicity...
...So did the pre* pared address...
...Some of our greatest men are great because of the fiction which has arisen about them, because of the outward show of grandeur all of which fading by close contact to reveal a sorry figure beneath the movement "respectable...
...When Adam Delved The Madman Would Turn Back The Clock, but Mankind Cannot Forget fHE amiable Joseph Paul Goebbels, who earns hit living as Minister of Propaganda and Popular Enhghtenment (God forbid...
...He eon* tended that some one must squarely challenge the Espionage Act and that it was his duty to do it His arrest, trial, conviction and his defiant speech in court are now a part of Socialist history...
...duty it was to drag kin sway «$¦ these attentions so as to ssassils| his energy...
...We, who knew Morris Hillquit, the man, grew to love him...
...determined to carry the audience by storm, but when he faced his friends he wilted...
...Good people," he cried, "things will never go well in England so long as there be villeins and gentlemen...
...Oratory was not a gift with 'Gene...
...The atmosphere was never that of employer and employee but rather of people working in collaboration in a common cause...
...He is speaking his piece, with Teacher, in the shape of John F. Curry, behind him...
...And thereat there was great suffering and protest, but the masses were leaderless and did not know what to do...
...They have leisure and fine houses...
...He says: "Fellow-Democrats, if there ever was a time appropriate for our gathering here in this temple of Democracy, Tammany Hall, it is tonight...
...He was a man whose genius could not be hidden much though he hid it...
...He was one of those rare individuals who actually practiced what he preached...
...Thus I spent four years in almost daily contact with him...
...This was not remarkable, considering my antecedents, environment and the almost theistic attitude in which my father held the Socialist Party and his friend Morris Hillquit, its leader...
...Wendell Phillips and Robert G. Ingersoll, the latter a persona...
...Seven years ago he hurt us by passing on, and every anniversary of his death leaves us still keenly conscious of our measureless lots...
...In that land some feasted and fought and others toiled...
...Here it may be said that ths Canton speech he delivered against the war was deliberately planned with full knowledge of the consequences...
...Great though he was, he never was too busy for a friendly word to those of us in his office...
...the pomp and glory...
...I was one of the privileged who had the opportunity to know Morris Hillquit, the man, over a long period of time...
...He never sought high places —they sought him...
...We are entering into a campaign fraught with important issues, and more than that, with questions, that go to the very essence of our party and this great citadel of Democracy...
...The writer stopped in Terre Haute a few weeks before the Canton meeting and was told by 'Gene what he intended to do...
...My childhood idealization of Morris Hillquit resembled the incantations and prayers of many of the devoutly religious who, praying, know little about the substance of their prayers...
...When he arrived ia Terre Haute, he waa happy bat near exhaustion, and yet Jthat final speech of the campaign measured up to his best...
...The war mania was high...
...Even in the midst of his illness, and pain he was not beyond thought of those in his employ...
...not lose any of its fervor but rather deepened in its reverence and respect...
...So it is that those who came in contact with Morris Hillquit, the man, feel his loss more poignantly than those thousands who mourn the loss of their leader...
...friend, both masters of platform oratory, had the greatest influence upon 'Gene's style, although he did not imitate either...
...However, he became one of the greatest speakers of his time...
...By what right are they whom we call lords greater folk than wet On what grounds have they deserved itf Why do they hold us in serfage...
...For that dream alone makes life on this sad, mad, glad globe endurable...
...He spent weeks in careful preparation...
...we have pain and labor, the rain and the wind in the fields...
...Just, a Paine and a Lnssalle, a Marx and a Debs...
...How Debs survived that fearful drain on his vitality is S mystery...
...After many years of wars and bloodshed, after the land had been decimated by slaughter, there came a terrible pestilence of the Black Death, and millions more died* and the bonds that tied men to the soil were loosened, severed, although the laws that sought to bind them were not...
...Those, who leave their footsteps in the sands of time writing episodes in historic progress, often leave an impression of greatness and glory built on the memory of the man as a factor in the making of history rather than the memory of the man himself, though often the memory of the man is the more beautiful...
...Now come they who would turn back the clock of time, who would have mankind forget that there ever had been a John Ball and a Wat Tyler, i Cade and an Aske, a Danton and a St...
...Gene Debs, soul of the proletariat, courageous fighter for the class for whom you lived and died, we dip our red banner in salute to your memory J. Patrick (*A-Klddle-ln-every-Home") O'Brien is speaking.- He is speaking on the platform of Tammany Hall...
...But the great ideal lived on, and if John Ball had not preached much would have been lacking in the heroism of Hampden and Pym and the other heroes of 1642, and in the heroes of battles for liberty to this day...
...They have win^ and spices and fair bread...
...Having decreed that no one is fit to be connected with a newspaper who is a Jew or who has a Jewish wife, he explains that what is generally known as "freedom" is just so much Wurst, and that one who has an opinion of his own had better duck to cover, for there is nothing but the Will of the Fiihrer, All else is treason, and in his tender love for his people the Ftihrer decrees death for anyone who has an opinion on any subject whatsoever other than his...
...One rubs the eyes and wonders if it is Henry, VU1 who has broken out on the front pages...
...The world never knew the real Morria .Hillquit who, though being a great leader, was such in spite of himself...
...Having hsd an opportunity to know the man, far from finding him wanting, I, thinking him great, found him greater...
...Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, yet that scaffold sways the future...
...Thence had come men from many stocks, frotB many lands:'Angles and Saxons, Vikings and Frenchmen, Britons and Danes, Romans ancf Jews—all, all had been tossed and fused into a great nation...
...Men and women of Kent and of England, of France and of America and of therwhole world dreamed that* some day the inherent dignity of merely being a human being would prevail and human inequalities would die...
...And those that toiled had no legal rights but to toil and suffer...
...in Hitleria, has some remarks to make about the rights of men to be tree...
...With the arrival of maturity and ability to look about for myself...
...One of the last visits of Comrade Hillquit to the office was for the sole purpose of accompanying me to the office of the Chairman of the Character Committee, to whom an introduction was a prerequisite for admission to the Bar...
...With my entry into law school and the study of the law of which Morris Hillquit was one of the greatest, exponents, I entered his office as a law clerk...
...The place he held for me will never be filled...
...That was the year 1381...
...and in 1449 came the great revolt led by Jack Cade, another worker, and again ft was crushed...
...And so now, when reasoning and logic rule my viewpoint, I still say Morris Hillquit was one* of the greatest men of our time...
...At one time I blindly idealized Morris Hillquit...
...It is only the truly great who can withstand the close scrutiny of daily contact over a period of yeara...
...He enjoyed telling the story of his first attempt before a club of which he was a member...
...and the revolt was crushed' But the words of the Mad I 'i icst of Kent were cherished and men remembered their great message, the message of human equality...
...to seek out whys and wherefores and thereby to make my own conclusions built upon fact, my love of Morris Hillquit, the theorist, the economist and the leader, did...
...A ND his whole message was summed up in the crude rhyme that carries within itself dynamite to blast out of existence all human inequalities: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gcntlemanf" The words of flame passed from the lips of one to another, and soon a mighty host under the leadership of a simple laborer, Wat the Tyler, was marching on London, the first great proletarian revolt...
...If we all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that they are better than xve, if it be not thai they make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pridef "They are clothed in velvet and wear in their furs and their ermines, while we are covered with rags...
...The campaign of 1908 was the) most severe ordeal of these campaign struggles...
...And there arose in the land a simple man of God named John Ball, who was called the Mad Priest of Kent, for none had ever heard doctrines preached such as he preached...
...From One Who Worked Day By Day with Morris Hillquit By Ludwig Hillquit Gerber AS a child, if any one were to ask me who was the greatest man in the world, I would reply "Morris Hillquit...
...There was victory and then treachery, and Wat was slain...
...And yet it is of us and gur toil that these men hold 'their state," Who Was the Gentleman...
...Is this 1933 or are we all craiyP Five Centuries Ago QNCE there was a land in which dwelt masters and men, barons and lords, knights and serfs, villeins and coerls...
...One wonders if it is Ivan the Terrible we are reading about...
...and we eat oatcake and straw, and water to drink...
Vol. 16 • October 1933 • No. 17
