Part 10

A similar statistical study could probably not be made for the English revolution since lists corresponding to the Jacobin membership lists are not available. The material certainly exists for such a study of the actual membership of the soviets in, say, the crucial year 1917, but it would have to be put together from scattered sources available only in Russia. We know a good deal about the membership of our own American revolutionary groups, from merchants’ committees and corresponding committees to continental congresses. Even for the English revolution we have enough scattered material to permit some generalizations about the personnel of the movement.

In the early stages of the English revolution there can be no doubt about the respectability and economic prosperity of the men who backed Parliament. Baxter, somewhat exaggeratedly, but with a kernel of truth, writes that when the Great Rebellion broke out “it was the moderate Conformists and Episcopal Protestants who had long been crying of Innovations, Arminianism, Popery, Monopolies, illegal taxes and the danger of arbitrary government, who raised the war.” The merchants of London, Bristol and other towns, great lords, small landowning gentry, all rose in sedition against their king. Even in what we may call the extremist or crisis period of the English revolution, which begins in 1646 or 1647 when the tension between the New Model Army and the Presbyterians becomes acute, your revolutionists are very far from riffraff. Even Baxter reports of that army--which was to the English revolution what the Jacobins were to the French and the Bolsheviks to the Russian revolutions--that “abundance of the common troopers and many of the officers I found to be honest, sober, orthodox men, and others tractable, ready to hear the truth, and of upright intentions.” An historian has estimated that when the New Model “took the field in 1645, of its thirty-seven chief officers, nine were of noble, twenty-one of gentle birth, and only seven not gentlemen by birth.” The English lower classes, or at least the more proletarian elements as opposed to independent artisans, on the whole stood aloof from the conflict. Even the wilder sectarians seem to have been recruited from humble, but by no means poverty-stricken people, men who had taught themselves to follow the theological disputes, men on the whole representing the more active and ambitious of their class. The poorer peasants, especially in the North and West, actually sided with the King and against the revolutionists.

In America we have already pointed out the well-known fact that it was the merchants who first organized opposition to the Crown. This opposition was echoed by many planters in the southern coastal plain, and by many very respectable yeoman farmers of the Piedmont. It is quite true that there are numerous signs of the pretty active participation of what a good conservative would regard as the dregs of the population. The Boston Sons of Liberty, who performed most of the actual work of violence there, were recruited from workingmen and actually met habitually in the counting-room of a distillery. The Tories, whom it is now more fashionable to call Loyalists, naturally saw their opponents as a pretty shabby lot. Hutchinson writes of the Boston town meeting that it is “constituted of the lowest class of the people under the influence of a few of the higher class, but of intemperate and furious dispositions and of desperate fortunes. Men of property and the best character have deserted these meetings, where they are sure of being affronted.”

Actually the line between Tory and Whig is a very irregular one, depending on much besides economic status, as can be seen from the late J. F. Jameson’s The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement. If the rich gentlemen of “Tory Row” in Cambridge sided with the Crown, there were plenty of sober, respectable farmers, merchants, and lawyers, who turned revolutionist. Such men were likely to be shocked at the doings of wild young apprentices in the Sons of Liberty, but this did not necessarily turn them to the British side, though it made them critical of the Congress. A good sign of the respectability of revolution is the adhesion of the clergy, which save for the Episcopalians was in most colonies general. As a disgruntled Tory put it, “The high sons of liberty include the ministers of the gospel, who instead of preaching to their flocks meekness, sobriety, attention to their different employments, and a steady obedience to the laws of Britain, belch from the pulpits liberty, independence, and a steady perseverance in endeavoring to shake off their allegiance to the mother country. The independent ministers have ever been ... the instigators and abettors of every persecution and conspiracy.”

To sum up we shall have to agree with Jameson that the strength of the revolutionary movement in the long run lay with the plain people--not with the mob or “rabble,” for American society was rural and not urban--but with country artisans, small farmers, and frontiersmen. But we shall also have to agree with Alexander Graydon that “the opposition to the claims of Britain originated with the better sort: it was truly aristocratical in its commencement.”

The February revolution in Russia seems to have been welcomed by all classes save the most conservative of conservatives--a few army officers, a few members of the Court and the old nobility. No one knows who made the February revolution, but there can be no doubt as to its popularity. Almost everyone, liberal noble, banker, industrialist, lawyer, doctor, civil servant, kulak, and workingman, was glad to co-operate in giving the Czarist regime its final blow. Even the Bolsheviks, whose sudden victory in the October revolution of 1917 makes the time-scheme of the Russian revolution so very different from those of the English and French revolutions, were by no means what confirmed haters of revolution call riffraff, rabble, “the masses.” They seem to have been recruited chiefly from the more enterprising, able, and skilled workingmen in the factories of Petrograd, Moscow, and specialized industrial centers like Ivanovo-Vosnessensk or the Don basin. Their most important leaders were largely drawn from the middle class. One might perhaps argue that the Kadets, led by Miliukov, were so early discouraged that they may not be counted as a revolutionary party. But the Mensheviks and S-R (Socialist-Revolutionary) party, later scorned as “Compromisists” by triumphant Bolshevik historians, are most certainly revolutionary elements. The Mensheviks may have been mostly intellectuals, but the S-R were also recruited from the prosperous peasants, from the people who ran the co-operatives, from small shopkeepers and the like.

III. Economic and Social Position: Leaders

Hitherto we have been considering the main bodies of the revolutionists, and have found that on the whole they by no means represent the dregs of society, even in the great proletarian uprising, and that they commonly include members of almost every social and economic group in a given society, except possibly the very top of the social pyramid. And yet the Essexes, Washingtons, and Lafayettes are very close to the top. Even in Russia, Brusilov, a distinguished Czarist general, lived to serve the Soviet government in the 1920 drive on Warsaw.

Let us now see what we can make of the leaders, judging them first by the comparatively objective standards of their social origins and economic status. With the Jacobins the present writer was able to make some study of the purely local leaders, the men who normally don’t get into history. From the careers of dozens of these subalterns of revolution, a conclusion seemed clear: “the leaders are substantially of the same social standing as the rank and file. Possibly there are, among the leaders during the Terror, more men who seem definitely, in 1789, failures, or at least at odds with their environment. Yet the proportion of these village Marats is not striking.”

As for the national leaders in the French revolution, they are, judged by these standards, a varied lot. In the years 1789-92 they include noblemen like the King’s cousin, the Duke of Orléans, Mirabeau, the Lameths, Lafayette; lawyers in vast numbers, from well-known Parisian lawyers like Camus to obscure but thoroughly respectable provincial lawyers like young Robespierre from Arras (who had once written his name de Robespierre), or rising barristers like Danton, come to Paris from a peasant background in Champagne; men of science like the astronomer Bailly, the chemist Lavoisier, and the mathematician Monge; and, nursed by the new power of the press, journalists like Marat and Desmoulins, publicists like Brissot, provincial bourgeois of Chartres, and Condorcet, a marquis and a philosophe. After 1792, extremely few new leaders came to the top. The men who ran France in 1793-94 were, perhaps, somewhat less refined or distinguished than the hopeful intellectuals of Mme. Roland’s circle; and they would have seemed very barbarous at Versailles in 1788. They were not, however, of very different social origins from the men who really ran the old France--the literate bourgeoisie from which were ultimately recruited the bureaucracy.

Of the striking respectability and excellent social standing of the men who signed our Declaration of Independence most Americans are fully aware. Of its fifty-six signers thirty-three held college degrees and only about four had little or no formal education. There were five doctors, eleven merchants, four farmers, twenty-two lawyers, three ministers. Twelve were sons of ministers. Nearly all were affluent. Sam Adams, who seems among the more disreputable of our leaders, came from a merchant family of some means, and graduated from Harvard in 1740, where he was listed fifth out of twenty-two in those mysterious lists which before Professor S. E. Morison’s researches we all thought directly measured social standing. Even the Tories, though they flung words like “rabble” about very freely, could consistently reproach the revolutionary leaders with nothing worse in this respect than being amateurs in the art of governing. “From shopkeepers, tradesmen, and attorneys they are become statesmen and legislators.... Almost every individual of the governing party in America fills at present, in his own fancy, a station not only superior to what he had ever filled before, but to what he had ever expected to fill,” writes a conservative, or moderate, in the Middlesex Journal for April 6, 1776.

We need not go into the social origins of the leaders of the moderates in the English revolution. They are clearly among the highest in the land. The immoderates present an interesting spectacle, a mixture of gentlemen of good breeding, of self-educated careerists and of humble men inspired by a fury as yet divine, as yet without benefit of psychoanalysis. Cromwell himself, of course, was an East Anglian country gentleman, whose family tree ramified into a good deal of the new wealth originating in Tudor confiscations. Ireton, who became his son-in-law, was of similar antecedents, as were many other Independent leaders in old and new England. Ludlow the regicide was a son of Sir Henry Ludlow of Wiltshire, and went to Trinity, Cambridge. Even John Lilburne the Leveller is described as “of good family” dating back to the fourteenth century, and seems to have been typical of the lesser gentry whose sons not infrequently passed over into trade. We know little of the social origins of such men as Winstanley the Digger or Edward Sexby, a soldier of Cromwell’s regiment who appears later as a kind of international agent of republicanism. Robert Everard, with Winstanley a leader of the curious communistic group known as the Diggers, was a captain in the army and is described as a “gentleman of liberal education.” John Rogers the Millenarian was the son of an Anglican clergyman and a Royalist.

Russia presents a case more nearly parallel to our other countries in respect to the social origins of the leaders of her revolution than might at first sight seem likely in a proletarian revolution. Perhaps the moderates in Russia held power so briefly and so uncomfortably that they hardly count. Kadets like Miliukov, a historian of good family, Tereschenko, a Kiev sugar millionaire, the Octobrist Guchkov, a wealthy Moscow merchant, and poor old Prince Lvov remind us of the rich Puritan lords and merchants of the English revolution, the well-born Feuillants of the French revolution. The Menshevik and Social-Revolutionary leaders were mostly intellectuals, petty officials, trade union and co-operative leaders; some of their most eloquent orators came from Georgia, “the Gironde of the Russian revolution.” Kerensky was a radical lawyer of provincial bureaucratic stock from the little Volga town of Simbirsk, now called Ulianovsk, in memory of a greater than Kerensky who also hailed from Simbirsk. As a matter of fact, V. I. Ulianov, better known by his revolutionary name of Lenin, came from exactly the same social class as Kerensky. His father was an inspector of schools at Simbirsk, a position of much more social standing in bureaucratic Czarist Russia than it would seem to us to be--very definitely in the superior bourgeoisie.

The other Bolshevik leaders are a varied lot: intellectual Jews like Trotsky (born Bronstein) and Kamenev (born Rosenfeld), both educated men, by no means typical Ghetto Jews; Felix Dzerzhinsky, of noble Polish-Lithuanian stock; Sverdlov, by training a chemist; Kalinin, whom one might call a professional peasant; Stalin (born Djugashvili), of Georgian peasant-artisan stock, destined by his mother for the priesthood, and actually for some time a student in a seminary; Chicherin, of stock sufficiently aristocratic to hold himself at least as well-born as Lord Curzon; Antonov-Ovseënko, Red Army leader with the fine bourgeois inheritance of a hyphenated name. The negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, however, afford a neat synopsis of Bolshevik leadership and proof of its non-proletarian character. When the first Russian delegation was sent to that town to meet the Germans it included as samples of the proletarian achievements of the revolution one specimen each of sailor, worker, and peasant. The peasant is said, no doubt by malicious enemies of the working class, to have distinguished himself chiefly by his interest in the liquor supply. When, however, the negotiations really got going after a recess, the Russians dropped their ornamental sailor, worker, and peasant, and were represented by men of course not the social equals of the high-born Germans opposite them, but, one suspects, their cultural superiors--Joffe, Kamenev, Pokrovsky, Karakhan--and by a somewhat neurotic lady-Bolshevik, Mme. Bitzenko, who had won her spurs by shooting a Czarist official in the bad old days. But, of course, even orthodox Marxism admits that the proletariat cannot lift itself by its own bootstraps, and that its leaders must therefore come from classes sufficiently privileged to have had an education fitting them to interpret the subtleties of Marxist theology.

Finally, the inexperience, the “newness,” of the revolutionary leaders has generally been exaggerated in our textbooks. They had, especially in Russia, a long training in the direction of dissenting and persecuted little societies, the revolutionary groups. And revolutionists as a group are so much like any other human beings that to learn the art of leading them is to have gone a long way in political apprenticeship. Even in France, the members of the National Assembly were not as politically innocent as they are supposed to have been. Many had had business experience, or had been diplomatists, or civil servants, or had taken part in local politics in provinces which had their own estates. All of them were used to the politics of pressure groups. These revolutionary leaders are mostly far from academic, unworldly, pure theorists; they do not step suddenly from the cloister to the council hall. Their training may have subtly unfitted them for leading a stable society; but that is another, and at present insoluble, problem. They are certainly fitted for leadership in an unstable society.

We have, then, found that both rank and file and leaders of active revolutionary groups cannot be catalogued neatly as coming from any one social or economic group. They are not even strikingly, precociously, young. Their leaders are usually in middle age, the thirties and forties, and thus younger than most of the politically prominent in stable societies, which naturally incline to the rule of the old. But the St. Justs and the Bonapartes, the boys in their twenties, are the exception, not the rule. The leadership of the Russian revolution which, with the distortion that comes from contemporaneousness, we are likely to regard as the most “radical,” was on the average the oldest in years of all our revolutions. The revolutionists tend to represent a fairly complete cross-section of their communities, with a sprinkling of the very highest ranks of their societies--men like Lafayette, for instance, whom Mr. Lothrop Stoddard calls “misguided superiors”--and, as far as the active ruling groups go, extremely few of the submerged, downtrodden, lowest ranks. This is as true of the Bolsheviks as of the Puritans and the Jacobins. Bums, hoboes, the mob, the rabble, the riffraff, may be recruited to do the street-fighting and the manor-burning of revolutions, but they emphatically do not make, do not run, revolutions--not even proletarian revolutions.

IV. Character and Disposition

We now face a much more difficult task, one where our information is neither so objective nor so readily catalogued as our information about the social and economic status of revolutionists. This is the problem--psychological at bottom--of seeing how far these revolutionists belong to types which are normally viewed by John Jones as queer, eccentric, or downright mad. Now one might quite justifiably argue a priori that a wholly contented man could not possibly be a revolutionist. But the trouble is that there are so many ways of being discontented, as well as contented, on this earth. Indeed, the cruder Marxists, and the cruder classical economists, make an almost identical error: they both assume that economics deals exhaustively with whatever makes men happy or miserable. Men have many incentives to action which the economist, limited to the study of men’s rational actions, simply cannot include in his work. They observably do a great deal that simply makes no sense at all, if we assume them to be guided wholly by any conceivable rational economic motive: near-starving in the British Museum to write Das Kapital, for instance, or seizing deserts under the comforting illusion that trade follows the flag, or making the world quite safe for democracy. Yet clearly a man who takes part in a revolution before it is demonstrably successful--and after it is successful it may perhaps be said to have ceased to be a revolution anyway--is a discontented man, or at least a man shrewd enough to estimate that there are enough discontented men to be forged into a group that can make a revolution. We must make some effort to study the nature of such discontents as seen in individuals.

For here the method of statistical study of large groups of revolutionists, like the Jacobins, will not work. At most these rank and file are names, with profession and perhaps some other indication of social status. Modern interest in social history and the common man has indeed made available a certain number of old diaries and letters of common men, and the Russian revolution has done its best to keep alive the memory of worker this of the Putilov factory or sailor that of the Aurora. Trotsky himself is very eloquent about the role of these heroic workers, sailors, and peasants in his History of the Russian Revolution, yet he manages to spend as much of his time on the great names as if he were a mere bourgeois historian. We have, of course, the blanket denunciations--they are hardly descriptions--of one side by another. These are much too emotional as a rule to have any evidential value, except as to the intensity of emotions evoked during revolutions. Even in our own presumably mild revolution one notes a Tory who is reported to have said, “It would be a joy to ride through American blood to the hubs of my chariot wheels.” Of course these American Tories thought the revolutionists were wild radicals, scheming inferiors, jealous rabble. On the other hand, most of us who were brought up without benefit of the new history were taught in school to regard the Tories as just straight villains, traitors, morally reprehensible people without economic, social, or indeed any characteristics that separated them from such villains of fiction as Simon Legree. So in the French revolution, each side accused the other of all sorts of moral failings, but rarely got down to effective details of daily life.

If we cannot for these reasons do much with the political and social psychology of large groups of revolutionists, we can at least look over some of the leaders, hoping that the list we decide upon will not be too unrepresentative. Here at least we can count upon quite a bit of biographical information. Thanks to those admirable works, the Dictionary of National Biography and the Dictionary of American Biography, we can even sample some of the lesser leaders, the noncommissioned officers of revolutions. The French are now at work on their biographical dictionary, which promises to be even more scholarly than its Anglo-Saxon prototypes, but as it has only just conquered the letter “A” it is not of much use to us. Russia is very difficult indeed from this point of view; there are plenty of brilliant comments on Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, but they are also very contradictory. On the lesser figures there is not much trustworthy biographical writing available in the Western languages, nor for that matter in Russian. We may note here, however, that the extraordinary proliferation of assumed names in the Russian revolution probably does not stem with most of these pseudonymous heroes from any feelings of shame for a criminal or disgraceful past. Their crimes were no doubt many, but crimes only against Czarist oppression. Perhaps there was originally some mildly melodramatic notion that these aliases were useful against the Czarist police, but soon they became a mere fashion, a revolutionary fad.

At this point there is some danger of our falling into a dreary catalogue. At the risk of seeming to turn aside from strictly scientific systematizing, we shall have to group our facts as we go along under certain human types or characters. This is a process which has been done successfully by a great many shrewd observers of human behavior, from Theophrastus through Molière to Sainte-Beuve and Bagehot. It is perhaps in some respects a more useful way of classifying men than formal psychology or formal sociology has yet worked out. These are not, one hopes, imaginary characters. If they are one-tenth as real as Alceste or the Penurious Man they are more real than anyone the average sociologist ever dealt with.

We may begin with the gentleman-revolutionist, whom Mr. Lothrop Stoddard calls the “misguided superior,” the man born on top, but perversely unwilling to stay there. He is by no means a simple person, and indeed sometimes manages to combine an astonishing number of revolutionary traits. It must be admitted that with many of these misguided superiors in our four societies, dislike for the ways of their class is apparently partly motivated by their inability to succeed in certain activities honored in that class. You need not be a debunking historian to admit that Lafayette revolted against the Court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette partly because he cut so awkward a figure there. Liberty, fortunately, did not need to be courted in a minuet. We must not seem to be cynical in these matters. Lafayette’s love of liberty was no doubt morally a far better thing than if he had loved place, pension, or mistress. But we must infer from his actions that he had very early realized that nothing short of a love of liberty would get him very far. And so today, when you find in one of our colleges a well-nurtured youth turned Communist, you can be almost certain that he is not captain of the football team nor secretary of Chi Phi Digamma. He may indeed be Phi Beta Kappa. This condition we need not here either applaud or condemn, but simply note.

It would, however, be cynical--and hence quite unscientific--to deny that many of these misguided superiors are also moved by what we shall have to call sincere idealism. Their own social group comes to seem to them dissolute, or dull, or cruel, or heartless. They see the possibilities of a better world. They are influenced by the writings of the intellectuals, who have begun their desertion of the established order. They come to struggle for God’s kingdom on this earth. They are usually, of course, uncomfortable on this earth, but for a whole lot of reasons, many of which cannot be simply dismissed as being in the province of the psychiatrist. Shelley, who never actually got a chance at revolution outside poetry, is a familiar example of this sensitive, and often neurotic, type. Dzerzhinsky, the Polish aristocrat who gave life to the terrible Cheka, was a delicate and sincere fanatic. The Marquis de St. Huruge, who figures disreputably in the disorders and street-fighting of the French revolution, was apparently pretty crazy, and not even a gentleman. Condorcet, also a marquis, was a gentleman and scholar, and if he had a good deal of the vanity that goes naturally enough with both, and very little of the sense that sometimes goes with either, was at heart a kind and sensitive man.

Others desert their class and join the revolution for the ignoble but sometimes socially very useful reason that they think the signs point to the victory of the revolution. Sometimes these men are like Mirabeau, rather shady characters who have for some time compromised themselves by irregular lives. Sometimes they are men like Talleyrand, careful, sensible men whose main desire is to keep in a position of honor and affluence, and who have no sense of loyalty to abstract notions of right and wrong. And, of course, in the early stages of our revolutions, even the Russian, plenty of rich and influential men of no extraordinary intelligence or stupidity joined the revolution because the revolution was fashionable, and an apparent success. Often these men, who had not been directly in political power, were flattered by the prospect of political power--men like the Duc d’Orléans or Bailly or Tereschenko or Konovalov. But they were essentially fairly ordinary human beings, no fitter subjects for hagiography--Christian, Freudian, or Marxist--than you or I.

If we leave the superiors, those who belong by birth or upbringing to the ruling classes, and who yet side with revolt, and turn to leaders who come from classes below the ruling one, we shall find the same very great variety of what we must tritely call human nature. We shall find fools, scoundrels, idealists, professional agitators, diplomatists, lunatics, cowards, and heroes.

Now it would be useless to deny that among those who come to the top in the troubled times of revolution are many who probably never would have been heard of in normal times. Some of these were certainly failures in the old society, men who were unable to attain the objects of their ambition. In spite of all that an able defender like Professor L. R. Gottschalk has written to prove Marat’s learning and respectability, it is still true that on the whole the Friend of the People was not a success before the revolution. Marat was a self-educated man of humble stock, with a habit of presenting himself with academic degrees and honorary distinctions his biographers--and even his contemporaries--were not always able to confirm. He tried very hard to storm the Parnassus of the philosophes, but was never admitted. Like most enlightened eighteenth-century men of letters, he dabbled in natural science, and emerged with a variant of the old phlogiston theory of combustion, the originality and truth of which were not properly appreciated by his jealous contemporaries. Lavoisier and the “new chemistry” were triumphing in the 1780’s, and Marat failed to recognize the meaning of the revolution in this science.

When the Estates-General met in 1789 he was a disappointed intellectual, a man who had failed of acceptance by that little band of writers and talkers who in late eighteenth-century France perhaps enjoyed more unalloyed admiration from the public than such folk have ever enjoyed. No Frenchman could at that epoch have coined a term like “brain-trust”; but if he had it would have carried no such ironic overtones of scorn as it does in twentieth-century America. Marat, rejected by these admired leaders of opinion, was in 1789 full to the brim with envy and hatred of everything established and esteemed in France. Soon revolutionary journalism was to give him an ample outlet. He became the watch-dog of the revolution--a mad watch-dog, always in his l’Ami du Peuple at work scenting plots against the people, always hating those in power, even when they were of his own party, always crying for blood and revenge. A most unpleasant fellow, no doubt. Whether he was a more unpleasant one than certain journalists of normal and unrevolutionary twentieth-century America, it is hard to say. Journalism was very new in France in 1790, and people expected a good deal. Marat at least had one excuse. He was suffering from an incurable skin disease which gave to his life an almost unbearable nervous tension.

Yet the failures are by no means all of the relatively simple type of Marat. Sam Adams was certainly a failure when judged by the standards of thrifty, sober New England. He had no money sense whatever, ran through a small inheritance, was constantly in debt; let his wife and children get along as they could while he organized his famous caucus and committees of correspondence. He is by no means a figure for the copy-books. Yet Adams could do certain things extremely well, and if these things were not in the 1770’s as financially rewarding as they are now, Adams at least reaped less tangible rewards in his own time--and he did become governor of Massachusetts. Adams’s gifts, of course, as they are deftly analyzed in Mr. J. C. Miller’s recent study, are those of the expert propagandist and organizer. It is hard to believe that today the advertising business would leave a man of his parts undiscovered and unrewarded.