The Age of Protest

Dissent and Rebellion in the Twentieth Century

Norman F. Cantor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032037967
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000423785
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book, first published in 1970, examines significant protest movements of the twentieth century and looks at the similarities and differences between the various dissents and rebellions. Beginning with the mood of weariness and dissatisfaction with the old regimes at the turn of the century, it discusses the emergence of protest as an ideal, a viable force for reform. From radical unionism, it traces the thread through bohemianism, international communism and anticolonialism in the twenties; fascism and Nazism and protest as a way of life up to 1945; the Afro-Asian and early civil rights movements of the fifties; and the agitating students and revolutionary movements of the sixties.

PART ONE
THE EMERGENCE OF PROTEST

Introduction

At the end of the nineteenth century militant labor unions in Britain, France, and the United States inaugurated new efforts to improve the wages and other material conditions of industrial workers. This movement continued until the outbreak of World War I, with very modest success. The failure of the labor movement to develop a coherent program of action against the old regime was dramatically demonstrated iii 1914, when unions acquiesced in the recruitment of workers for the monstrous armies of the European powers. In fact most labor leaders, in Germany or in the Allied countries, became enthusiastic patriots and questioned the war only after its debilitating impact on their countries had become evident in 1916. The labor movement in the early twentieth century was deeply divided; the general strike of all workers, which radical syndicalists wanted, never occurred.

In the first two decades after 1900, successful dissent and rebellion against power and privilege came from groups largely outside the labor unions. These protest movements went far beyond efforts to improve the material conditions of the working class. They attacked the fundamental structure of the old regime, and they developed techniques that became essential to all twentieth-century protest. There were four important protest movements in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The suffragette crusade, particularly in Britain, not only attacked masculine privilege and inaugurated the emancipation of half of the adult population; it also called into question the system of values upon which the old regime rested. The Irish rebellion of 1916 established a pattern for all anticolonial movements in the twentieth century. The ill-fated mutiny in the French army was the only significant protest against World War I and against the militaristic power system of the European states. The overthrow of tsarist autocracy in Russia, in which middle-class intellectuals played the leading role, inaugurated a movement for social liberation that eventually affected all the non-Western parts of the world.

CHAPTER
1

The Feminist Crusade

In 1906 the Liberal Party came to power in Great Britain, with a huge majority in the House of Commons. The Liberal government, which after 1908 was led by H. H. Asquith, a middle-class lawyer with beneficent inclinations toward workers, remained in office until 1916. The Liberals put through Parliament various measures inaugurating the welfare state in Britain, although the more radical unions were not satisfied with these paternalistic efforts. Asquith and his colleagues, including the aristocratic Winston Churchill and the Welsh demagogue David Lloyd George, were confident that they could domesticate and channel all revolt and assuage all discontent.¹

It was not the ranks of labor but another army which brought perspiration to the brow of Prime Minister Asquith. The ladies were mobilizing, and he did not know what to do about them.

Asquith and his colleagues could face with some equanimity the revolt of the workers, who had shown signs of restlessness and discontent throughout the nineteenth century. But the revolt of women in petticoats was a thing entirely unprecedented. It was indecent. The shrill cry “Votes for women!” threatened not only the English Constitution but also the sexual identity of the latter-day Victorian male. But whereas the former, tempered in struggle over centuries, might survive, the latter might not. The struggle of the militant suffragettes for the franchise in the years 1905-1914 was half political, half sexual, warfare. It was not the sort of battle that government officials were mentally equipped to understand.

Before the agitation of the suffragettes was swept away by the Great War, it had turned into guerrilla warfare between the government and the ladies. The suffragettes brought both hilarity and brutality to English political life. It would be hard to say which was more repugnant to the constitution of a serious-minded English Liberal.

In the years after 1906 no government minister was secure from the harassment of these shameless militants. If he stood for a by-election, his speeches to the electorate were certain to be disrupted by at least one piercing female voice clamoring for an explanation of why women had no votes. Such interruptions could not be ignored. The lady would more than likely unfurl a huge banner to add a visual dimension to her demand. Police and ushers would have to be rushed in to remove the offender. Her removal was likely to take some time, for she had probably chained herself to her seat. When, still struggling and shouting, she was at last dragged from the hall, it was difficult to regain the attention of the audience. Should the speaker succeed, however, his next sentence was likely to be interrupted by another of “the shrieking sisterhood.” The women worked these things as if they were relay races; as one was dragged off, another would raise her voice. Matters grew so desperate that, as one suffragette smugly noted, “womanless meetings” became the rule for Cabinet ministers. Even the categorical exclusion of women from meetings was of little avail, for at least one enterprising young woman was usually able to sneak into the hall hours before to bide her time behind a curtain or inside an organ. Finally, halls had to be searched before political rallies. Even then the roofs of adjoining buildings were likely to harbor one or two ardent suffragettes of gymnastic inclinations, complete with megaphones.

Nor did the suffragettes confine their activities to political rallies. A Cabinet minister seeking relaxation at the theater was likely to be spotted and hounded even in the middle of a performance. He could no longer even count on the solace of a quiet game of golf. “Votes for Women” or “No Votes! No Golf!” was likely to be emblazoned in acid on the green turf. In the bushes there might well be concealed a suffragette ready to flay the would-be sportsman with cane or umbrella.

Such heckling and harassment were constant. They were also, or so they seemed to the victims, irrational, for the women refused to distinguish between their friends and their foes. It was well known that Mr. Asquith’s Cabinet was divided on the question of giving women the vote. Both Lloyd George and Churchill had long since proclaimed themselves the women’s allies, ready to do all in their power to hasten the day of deliverance. But they were not spared. On the contrary, the women went after them with special relish, adding the charge of hypocrisy to the other items in their indictment. On one occasion Churchill was attacked at a railway station by a young suffragette wielding a dog-whip. On this occasion he managed deftly to wrestle it away from the lady. Lloyd George was less fortunate. Upon entering his car after a triumphant speaking engagement, he realized too late that it already had an occupant. A suffragette had locked herself in the back seat. While the chauffeur struggled to open the door the lady proceeded to vent her wrath on Lloyd George by giving him a good shaking.

At the height of their battle, in the years 1912-1914, the suffragettes’ ingenuity in destructiveness was wondrous to behold. They smashed windows, not singly but systematically, by the streetful The London Daily Telegraph reported such proceedings with thinly veiled amazement:

A band of women set out on such a window-breaking campaign in the principal streets of the West End, as London has never known. For a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes, nothing was heard in the Strand, Cock-spur Street, Downing Street, Whitehall, Piccadilly, Bow Street or Oxford Street, but the falling, shattered glass. . . . Many of the finest shopfronts in the world had been temporarily destroyed. . .. The attack was begun practically simultaneously. It was one of the busiest periods of the day. Suddenly women, who a moment before had appeared to be on peaceful shopping expeditions, produced from bags or muffs, hammers, stones, and sticks and began an attack on the nearest windows. . . .

On stealthy midnight expeditions with brush and bucket the feminine protesters painted out house numbers. They slashed the upholstered seats in railway carriages and wherever else they could find them. They poured jam down mailboxes, uprooted municipal flower beds, invaded picture galleries and mutilated paintings, cut telegraph wires, turned in false fire alarms, and planted homemade bombs, one of which badly damaged a home that Lloyd George was building. Finally they began to set fires. Several railway stations, the refreshment pavilion at Kew Gardens, a football stadium in Cambridge, and even a few churches went up in flames.

Emmeline Pankhurst, the silver-haired matriarch of the suffragettes, sounded the clarion call. “I want to be tried for sedition!” she shouted gleefully. “Be militant each in your own way,” she urged her devoted followers. “Those of you who can break windows, break them. Those of you who can still further attack the secret idol of property ... do so. I incite this meeting to rebellion!” ²

When arrested and tried, these women turned their confrontations with the law into forums, indicting their judges and the government as tyrants and morally responsible for all outrages committed. Nor were the women above assailing judges and prosecuting attorneys with tomatoes and other missiles, when they were not uttering stirring invocations of human rights for the benefit of the press.

When sentenced to jail terms, the women blackmailed the government into releasing them by refusing to eat. The first hunger strike began in 1909, apparently spontaneously. It soon burgeoned into the nightmare of prison officials all over England. Confronted with a suffragette prisoner who insisted on starving herself, the government could do one of two things: It could release her, or it could attempt to feed her by force. The first alternative had the disadvantage of turning the criminal loose to commit more outrages. The second proved even worse. Force feeding was an unpleasant process that involved pinioning struggling women while their mouths were pried open with objects of wood or metal, and tubes containing vile but nutritious fluids were forced down their throats. The women usually vomited up the unwelcome food as quickly as it was poured into them. This practice provoked letters from doctors claiming that such procedures were dangerous. The women described their agonies in gruesome detail for the press. The more chivalrous and humanitarian members of the House of Commons, even those who had no special fondness for the suffragettes, found this practice repulsive.

The Prime Minister and Home Secretary Reginald McKenna found themselves embarrassed in the House by awkward questions and sometimes more than that. “You will go down in history as the man who tortured innocent women,”³ bellowed one usually mild-mannered member of Parliament to Mr. Asquith after a particularly gruesome incident. This was not the reputation Mr. Asquith and his Liberal government wished to leave to posterity.

The militancy of the suffragettes did not reach this frenzied peak all at once. It developed over a decade under the inspiration and guidance of the Pankhurst family. Emmeline Pankhurst was the widow of a Manchester barrister of progressive views. Richard Pankhurst had offered a rather characteristic example of the English radical tradition. Active in such organizations as the Royal Statistical Society and the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, he had stood unsuccessfully for Parliament both as a Liberal and as a Radical candidate. He had joined the Independent Labour Party shortly after its formation in 1893, had become a member of the Fabian Society, and had stood for election as a Labour candidate in 1895. Women’s suffrage was only one of the “left-wing” causes that Pankhurst had supported in his lifetime. Emmeline Pankhurst followed her husband’s political teachings. Their living room had been a popular gathering place for radicals of many persuasions.

After her husband’s death, Mrs. Pankhurst had to struggle to support her four children. She tried running a small retail shop, but her interest in politics and civic questions was frustrated. In 1903 she gathered a small group of women in her living room—in those early days they were mainly the wives of Labour Party members—and founded the Women’s Social and Political Union. Mrs. Pankhurst immediately struck a dramatic note. The goal of the organization was to be “immediate enfranchisement.” She renounced “outworn missionary methods” in favor of political action and was soon referring to the older, established women’s-suffrage organizations as “the old-fashioned gang.” Nevertheless for the next two years the organization proselytized in the area of Manchester along fairly conventional lines. Militancy began in earnest two years later, when Mrs. Pankhurst’s attractive oldest daughter suddenly discovered the women’s cause. Christabel Pankhurst had previously shown no special talent or vocational aptitude. She had, however, too much intelligence and energy to wait demurely, as Edwardian young ladies were supposed to do, for some likely young man to marry her. She plunged into the agitation for women’s suffrage with a vengeance.

In 1905 the Liberal Party was preparing for what, by all indications, was going to be a landslide victory at the polls. Reform was in the air. Christabel determined to wrest an immediate declaration of intentions from the Liberals on the question of women’s suffrage. Her target was Edward Grey, a leading Liberal who was certain to be included in the new Cabinet. Grey was scheduled to speak at a rally at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. Equipped with a large banner on which was printed the question “Will You Give Votes for Women?” Christabel and a friend set out for the hall determined to secure the immediate deliverance of women or to go to jail. Grey’s pitch to the Liberal electorate was interrupted by the startling question “Will the Liberal government give votes to women?” Grey was understandably taken aback. The question was not on the agenda. It was known that leading Liberals differed on this question. Women’s suffrage could not be made a party matter at the bidding of two rude and anonymous young ladies. But Christabel and her friend would brook no denial. They proceeded to make such a row that they were forcibly ejected, as Christabel herself put it, “resisting . . . strongly . . . and still calling out: Will the Liberal government give women the vote?” ⁴ Not satisfied with the electrifying effects of this, her political debut, she proceeded to spit on a policeman outside the hall, thus committing “technical assault” and ensuring her arrest. So commenced the new tactics of militancy.

A few months after this memorable incident Mrs. Pankhurst and Christabel dispatched to the south one of their most promising young recruits, a former factory girl from Oldham, with ¿2 in her pocket and instructions to “rouse London.” Later, on the opening day of Parliament, the W.S.P.U. held its own “Women’s Parliament” in Cax-ton Hall. News arrived that King Edward VIFs speech had been read without mention of women’s enfranchisement. Mrs. Pankhurst herself promptly led a deputation of women to the House of Commons to argue with as many M.P.s as possible. On that occasion, after hours of waiting, a few women were actually admitted to the lobby, where they dutifully collared embarrassed and evasive members.

The pilgrimages from Caxton Hall to Parliament became an annual event, but never again were they so peaceful and orderly. The women were unwelcome visitors at best. Their determination to accost government members physically was a breach of decorum and a confounded nuisance. Christabel Pankhurst described the sortie from Caxton Hall to the House in 1907:

The House of Commons was guarded by rows of police who resisted the women’s advance. A long struggle followed, for the women would not abandon the attempt to reach their goal. Again and again, through the interminable afternoon and evening, this went on. Exhausted, coats rent, hats torn from their heads, the women would return to Caxton Hall for a rest and then set out again to renew the struggle. . . . Fifteen women actually got through the police guard, made a rush into the House and began to hold a meeting in the lobby, only to be violently ejected and arrested. Other women in their hundreds made the same attempt, till the Square had to be forcibly cleared and some sixty arrests had been made.⁵

In the meantime the harassment of all Liberal candidates standing for by-elections in the country continued. As long as the Liberals refused to make a party commitment to women’s suffrage, the W.S.P.U. waged war against them. The suffragettes were not interested in the individual views of the candidates. As long as the government itself refused to back enfranchisement, they would wage war upon all its members. Their tireless whirlwind tours against government candidates probably contributed to the defeat of several Liberals, including Mr. Churchill, who at that time was unlucky enough to have a constituency in Manchester, the home ground of the W.S.P.U.

The W.S.P.U. was not out to ingratiate itself with influential Liberals. Its tactic was the simple one of obstruction, as nearly total as possible. Its members sought to damage the government at the polls and in the public eye. Insofar as a philosophy underlay the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: The Age of Protest
• Part One The Emergence of Protest
• Part Two Protest Against “Normalcy”
• Part Three Protest Against Capitalism and Imperialism
• Part Four The Era of Permanent Protest
• Epilogue: The Nature of Protest
• Notes
• Index