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THE INVENTION OF MARXISM
THE INVENTION OF MARXISM
HOW AN IDEA CHANGED EVERYTHING

CHRISTINA MORINA
Translated from the German by Elizabeth Janik
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
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reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer.
CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress
ISBN 978–0–19–006273–6
eISBN 978–0–19–006275–0
Originally published by Random House Germany under the title Der Erfindung der
Marxismus
This translation of the work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International –
Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint
initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting
society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers
and Booksellers Association).
The translation of this work was co-funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)
 Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Prologue: The Founding Generation of Marxism

I. SOCIALIZATION
1. Born in the Nineteenth Century: Origins and Influences
2. Adolescence and Its Discontents: Emerging Worldviews
3. Beating the Drum: Literary Influences

II. POLITICIZATION

Paths to Marxism I: London, Paris, Zurich, Vienna (1878–88)

4. Translating Marx: Guesde and Jaurès
5. Star Students: Bernstein and Kautsky
6. Theory and Practice: Adler’s Belated Marxism

Paths to Marxism II: Geneva, Warsaw, St. Petersburg

(1885–1903)
7. The Social Question as a Political Question: Plekhanov’s Turn
toward Marx
8. The Social Question as a Question of Power: Struve and Lenin
9. Engagement as Science: Luxemburg

III. ENGAGEMENT
On Misery, or the First Commandment: The Radical Study of
Reality
10. Miserable Lives: The Everyday World of Proletarians and
Peasants
11. Miserable Labor: The Proletarian World of Work

On Revolution, or the Second Commandment: Philosophy as

Practice
12. Revolutionary Expectations
13. Revolution at Last? Dress Rehearsal in St. Petersburg, 1905–6

Conclusion: From Marx to Marxism: Fieldworkers, Bookworms, and

Adventurers
Notes
Bibliography
Index
 Acknowledgments

Thirteen years ago, when I knocked on Norbert Frei’s office door in

Jena to discuss an idea for my second book, there was no
immediately obvious connection between my proposal and his work
on the history and aftermath of National Socialism. He nevertheless
encouraged my questions about Marxism, the other extremely
consequential political worldview of the modern age. He shared my
curiosity about how Marxism came to be, how the first Marxists
actually “ticked,” and about the relationship between their lifeworlds
and their politics. Thanks to a fellowship from the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft, I was able to begin my research in the
archives of the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in
Amsterdam. However, this project would never have gotten
underway without Norbert Frei’s initial encouragement and critical
engagement. I therefore extend my sincere thanks to him first of all.
I am also grateful to the late Helga Grebing for her constructive
criticism and unflagging support. She brought the perfect mixture of
wisdom and dissent to our many conversations, and she constantly
reminded me that political history is indeed history, and that
conditions in the world today demand not just scholarly
engagement.
In an even more profound way, the expertise, advice, and
friendship of Jeffrey Herf has deeply influenced this book, even
though our conversations became less frequent after I finished my
doctoral thesis with him. The fundamental issue I tackle here, and
have tackled in many other projects—namely, how ideas matter in
politics—is one of the core questions in his work as a historian,
teacher, and public intellectual. I deeply cherish the lessons I have
learned from and with him, including how to disagree in mutual
respect.
 Over the course of this project I received countless suggestions
from other scholars—including my colleagues in Jena (Franka
Maubach, Thomas Kroll, Lutz Niethammer, and Joachim von
Puttkamer), at the Duitsland Institut Amsterdam (Ton Nijhuis, Krijn
Thijs, Hanco Jürgens, Moritz Föllmer, and the late Angelika
Wendland), and at the IISH (Götz Langkau, Ulla Langkau-Alex, and
Marcel van der Linden). I have learned much from Gerd Koenen—not
only from his books but in lively dialogue about the historicization of
communism, a field in which we have each sought to make our own
contribution. And I have benefited from fantastic discussions at the
colloquia of Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, the late Thomas Welskopp,
Matthias Steinbach, Ulrich Herbert, and Paul Nolte.
I extend my gratitude to Louisa Reichstetter, Alexandra Stelzig,
Daniël Hendrikse, Christian Laret, and David Rieter for their
assistance with transcription and editing, and to the staff of the IISH
for their unfailing helpfulness. Last but not least, I am immensely
grateful to my editor at Oxford University Press, Timothy Bent, and
my congenial translator, Elizabeth Janik, for their enthusiasm and
professional expertise at every step along the way toward this
English edition of Die Erfindung des Marxismus.
I dedicate this book to my parents. They raised my sister and me
in socialist East Germany, a land of very limited opportunities, and
they ensured that questions about what was right, just, and
acceptable were a regular topic of family conversation—perhaps not
every day, but often at breakfast. Since part of our family lived in the
“other,” western part of Germany, beyond the Iron Curtain, these
questions were always present. My parents gave me a happy
childhood but still conveyed their deep discomfort with the
absurdities and inhumanity of East German socialism, to which I had
to swear an oath of allegiance and accommodate my expression.
The history in this book—and thus, in a sense, also my own—could
not have been told without the principles they instilled in me.
Thanks to my husband and sons, my home today is full of life.
They ground my work and help in difficult moments with gestures
large and small. I’m grateful for their presence every day.
 My grandmother Marianne Neuber, who has since passed away,
helped me incorporate into this project hundreds of letters written in
the Sütterlin script. She always listened patiently, even if she was
sometimes unsure of what I was up to with these letters. She would
have been so proud and pleased about this book, especially now
that it has also been published in English.
 Abbreviations

Germany
ADAV General German Workers’ Association (Allgemeiner
Deutscher Arbeiterverein), 1863–1875
KPD Communist Party of Germany, 1918–1946
SAPD Socialist Workers Party of Germany (Sozialistische
Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands), 1875–1890
SDAP, or the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany, 1869–1875
“Eisenacher”
SPD Social Democratic Party of Germany, 1890–

Austria
SDAPÖ Social Democratic Workers’ Party in Austria

Russian Empire
PPS Polish Socialist Party
RSDLP Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (includes Bolsheviks
and Mensheviks; German: SDAPR)
SR Socialist Revolutionary Party
Kadets Constitutional Democratic Party
Proletariat Social Revolutionary Party—in Poland
SDKP Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland
SDKPiL Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania

France
POF French Workers’ Party (Parti Ouvrier Français)
 Prologue
The Founding Generation of Marxism

Politics is an activity conducted with the head, not with other parts of the
body or the soul. Yet if politics is to be genuinely human action, rather than
some frivolous intellectual game, dedication to it can only be generated and
sustained by passion.
—Max Weber, Weber: Political Writings

Some historical questions are worth asking over and over again—not
only because satisfying answers to them have not yet been found
but because their answers depend on who is asking and why. The
renowned Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm posed one such question
in the early 1970s: “Why do men and women become
revolutionaries?” His answer at that time was surprisingly personal:
“In the first instance mostly because they believe that what they
want subjectively from life cannot be got without a fundamental
change in all society.”1 Revolutionary engagement, Hobsbawm
suggested, is inspired less by grand utopic visions and more by
immediate circumstances and social conditions. Closely following this
line of argument, this book explores the early history of Marxism as
the story of many individual attempts to transform the narrow
realities of the present into something greater by applying the ideas
of Karl Marx. It shows how the first generation of Marxist
intellectuals made these ideas their own and relayed them across
Europe.
Resolving what Marx famously called the “Social Question”—a
topic of debate that assumed growing urgency across all political
camps over the course of the nineteenth century—was at the center
of these efforts to change society from the ground up. Marxism was
one attempt to answer this question. With a passion unrivaled by
any other political movement in what has been described as the
“Age of Ideologies,” in the last third of the nineteenth century
disciples of Marx and Friedrich Engels claimed to have found a way
to harmonize their theories about society with practical ways of
changing it.2 First and foremost among these disciples are the
protagonists, as I call them, for they are the main actors of the story
this book tells: Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg,
Victor Adler, Jean Jaurès, Jules Guesde, Georgi W. Plekhanov,
Vladimir I. Lenin, and Peter B. Struve. Born in Germany, Austria-
Hungary, France, or Russia between 1845 and 1870, they all
belonged to the founding generation of Marxist intellectuals.3
Combining the history of ideas with that of lived experience, I
investigate how these eight men and one woman created a
movement characterized by total political and intellectual
engagement. This group portrait reconstructs the origins of a Marxist
worldview through their individual experiences, showing how they
dedicated their lives to openly addressing the Social Question.
Through this commitment they became the foremost theoreticians
and practitioners of Marxist socialism in their respective countries,
thereby shaping the “Golden Age of Marxism.”4 By their mid-thirties
each of them had assumed a leading role in their national
movements, published many of their most important works, and—
whether holding formal office or not—acquired an influential political
mandate. For this reason, I focus on the course of their lives through
young adulthood—that is, on their political coming of age.5
Today, more than three decades after the end of the Cold War,
the history of Marxism has become a niche academic field. By
contrast, Marx, who lent his name to this worldview, has lately
enjoyed a renewed degree of attention, evident not only in new
biographies and an array of other works in philosophy, political
science, sociology, and art, but also, especially in the wake of Donald
J. Trump’s presidency, in more sinister ways, as a revived ideological
bogeyman (“American Marxism”), allegedly threatening Western
democracy.6Capital, Marx’s magnum opus, has been staged as a play
and reinterpreted in the popular media. The film The Young Karl
Marx premiered in the spring of 2017. And the earnestness and
verve that has recently informed the academic community’s
engagement with Marx’s writings, and wider public debates over
their ongoing relevance, is apparent in the title of the French
economist Thomas Piketty’s recent book on global income and
wealth inequality (an analysis that extends well beyond Marx):
Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
All this revived interest derives in part from the commemorations
that mark all kinds of notable anniversaries and centennials: Marx’s
birth in 1818, the publication of Capital in 1867, the Russian
Revolution in 1917. Moreover, the financial crisis of 2008 fueled new
discussions about the viability and legitimacy of the capitalist system
overall, which made a return to the thought of the forefather of
capitalist critique seem altogether plausible. These diverse
approaches (despite the fierce attacks by right-wing activists in
places such as the United States) are driven by a desire for
contemporary relevance—and so it is easy to forget how
extraordinary the widespread fascination is with the original texts of
the (unintended) godfather of one of the most destructive social
experiments in human history. Even the scholarly conferences
organized around Marx’s two hundredth birthday tended to ask what
he “can still tell us today”—as if his work holds eternally valid truth—
rather than what had made Marx himself such a singular historical
figure. Instead, these approaches are frequently driven by utopian
longing, or by a desire to come to terms with the communist past—
motives that are legitimate, to be sure, but that tend to obscure
rather than foster historical understanding.
For we cannot sufficiently grasp the appeal of Marx’s work until
we have considered its temporality—the historical time and place in
which it emerged. Needless to say, no attempt to historicize Marx is
free of contemporary influence. This book, however, seeks to grapple
analytically with these influences by posing new questions and
reconsidering sources, thereby opening up new perspectives for the
historiography of Marxism at the beginning of the twenty-first
century. What does it mean in principle, for example, to engage on
behalf of a worldview, whether religious, political, environmental, or
cultural in inspiration? What is the relationship between everyday life
and politics, between experience and engagement, between seeking
to understand the world and seeking to change it? How can we
explain radicalization? What makes revolutionaries tick?
Moving beyond contemporary scholarship on Marxism that
predominantly sees it as an endless series of theoretical and
programmatic quarrels, this book explores the origins of the Marxist
worldview from the perspective of lived history and by
conceptualizing this worldview as a form of modern political
engagement. My hope is that this illuminates the social conditions
that produced this new intellectual movement. My work thus brings
together two recent trends: incorporating biographical perspectives
into the history of the workers’ movement and situating this
movement within the broader history of social movements.7
The emerging group portrait of these nine prominent individuals
reconstructs their coming of age and—similar to Thomas Welkopp’s
study of the early years of the German social democratic movement
—raises new questions about their numbering among the “usual
suspects.” What paths of socialization led Marx’s first—and perhaps
most influential—“epigones” to take up his cause? How were their
paths shaped by home and family life, schooling and university
education, creative and literary interests, and choice of profession?
What kinds of “social knowledge” did these early champions of
working-class liberation actually possess about how members of this
class lived and worked? What experiences did they hearken back to
when contemplating how to solve the Social Question? How did their
often eclectic reading—poetry, fiction, philosophy, and science, in
addition to the emerging Marxist canon—inform their observations
about industrial and agricultural labor and their political engagement
in the emerging workers’ movements? And, of course, what role did
the books of Karl Marx play in all this?8
My selection of the nine protagonists is based on several factors:
the intellectual and historical influence of their writings and
speeches; their role in popularizing and disseminating Marx’s works
in Germany, Austria, France, and Russia between 1870 and 1900
(they were among the very first persons to study Marx’s works
systematically in their respective countries); and, because of this
work, their gradual self-identification as “Marxist intellectuals.”9
Furthermore, their political ideas, intentions, and strategies of action
were united by a specific Marxist notion of “interventionist thinking.”
Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, building upon the work of Michel Foucault,
uses this term to characterize those who want to serve as
“mediators of consciousness.” Based on their understanding of social
development, these nine sought to organize, steer, and lead the
struggle for emancipation. Their audience was the revolutionary
subject.10 Just as, according to Foucault, Marxist intellectuals saw
the proletariat as the bearer of the universal, they saw themselves
as the bearers of this universality “in its conscious, elaborated form.”
They believed that they were, to some extent, “the
consciousness/conscience” of the whole world.11 This peculiar self-
image was the source of their claim and their confidence that they
were capable of changing it.12
When I discuss the engagement of Marxist intellectuals in the
following pages, I do not use “intellectual” in the sense of a
sociological category or “social figure,”13 nor do I mean an
ephemeral social role. Rather, the term reflects a certain kind of
political self-awareness, in conjunction with an understanding of
“engagement” that is more precise than in conventional usage.
Without such a conception of the intellectual, the emergence of
Marxism cannot be properly understood.14 Marxist intellectuals did
not practice criticism as a profession;15 instead, they followed a
calling. Despite their frequent assertions to the contrary, they did not
approach the social conditions they critiqued with detachment.
Rather, they were “engaged” or “involved,” as expressed by Norbert
Elias in his critique of the social sciences and their subjectivity. These
intellectuals routinely mixed analysis and prediction in their work:
how things are and how things ought to be.16 Their texts bear
witness to a “sustained political passion” that grew out of an
enduring cognitive and emotional preoccupation with social
conditions—a preoccupation that transcended their own lived
experience.17 I therefore also examine Marxism from the perspective
of the history of emotions. In so doing, I contribute to a growing
field, one that focuses on the individual motives and emotions that
drove engagement in political movements in both the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.18
The three parts of this book—“Socialization,” “Politicization,” and
“Engagement”—interrogate the relationship between experiencing
and interpreting the world among Marx’s first disciples. I am inspired
by the fundamental assumption that the “radical study of reality” is
the first commandment of Marxism.19 Within the unique laboratory
of social ideas that coalesced in nineteenth-century Europe, Marxism
clearly distinguished itself from all other political worldviews with its
programmatic appeal to “reality.” This was one of the most important
reasons for its intellectual, emotional, and political resonance—both
creative and destructive—that extended far into the twentieth
century and continues to function as state ideology in countries such
as China and Cuba today.20 Marxism’s distinctive appeal to reality not
only warrants an investigation of its origins from the perspective of
lived history; it also poses an essential (and thus far neglected)
historiographical challenge.
A look back to the very beginnings of Marx’s philosophical
thinking can help. In 1844 the young Marx introduced one of his
most important texts, the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, with
a bombastic critique of religion and an appeal to embrace reality.
Humans had to abandon “illusions about their condition” in order to
establish the premises for “true happiness.” They had to move to the
center of political philosophy. Likewise, theory had to become radical
and demonstrate its views ad hominem: “To be radical is to grasp
matters at the root. But for man the root is man himself.”21 And
there it was: Marx’s Promethean appeal for thought to become
“practice.” To Marx, the relationship between classical philosophy
and “studying the actual world” was like that between “onanism and
sexual love.”22
He later sought to resolve this appeal in a number of (often
unfinished) writings, reducing it to the demonstration of humans as
materially dependent beings.23 What later became known as the
“materialist conception of history” was—as a much older Engels
warned—“first and foremost a guide to study, not a tool for
constructing objects after the Hegelian model.” This was nothing less
than an epic program of deconstruction, for, as the elder Engels
wrote, “the whole of history must be studied anew, and the
existential conditions of the various social formations individually
investigated before an attempt is made to deduce therefrom the
political, legal, aesthetic, philosophical, religious etc., standpoints
that correspond to them.”24 This guide to study was not ad
hominem, but rather ad societatem. It corresponded to the
fundamental idea that Marx and Engels had already expressed in
The German Ideology: that “the essence of man is not an
abstraction inhering in isolated individuals. Rather, in its actuality, it
is the ensemble of social relations.”25 Because of this insight into the
social contingency of human essence, both men are still considered
founders of the sociology of knowledge, and many of their works
have become classics of the discipline.26
All nine protagonists in this book felt a sense of duty to this
insight and to the challenges it posed. In the following pages, I
examine their individual paths of socialization, their readings of
Marx, and their documented efforts to meet this challenge in the age
of what Wolfgang Bonß called the “factual gaze.” Marx and Engels
called for an objective, empirical approach to reality. By breaking
down the wall between theory and practice, their approach not only
promised a realistic understanding of the present but also suggested
options for political action for the immediate future.27 The resulting
critique of capitalism purported to be universally valid—a claim that
seemed undeniable to many observers and could be verified again
and again, given the stark antagonism between wage labor and
capital in the second half of the nineteenth century.28 If we consider
both Marx’s works and the protagonists’ gaze at the social conditions
of their time, we can understand Marxism as an attempt, fueled by
both intellectual and popular sources, to develop a comprehensive
program to change reality.
 For the protagonists, the primary appeal of this program was no
vague utopia but rather a concrete, “scientific” relationship to the
present. Marx’s work promised insight into the here and now, not
merely faith in a better future. Marxism was an ongoing course of
study in the actual world of the past and present. The nine applied
themselves to this study, each in their own way and with remarkable
endurance. Because their intellectual turn toward Marx took years,
we cannot describe it as some kind of sudden “conversion” to a
“secular faith,” expressions used by Thomas Kroll in his group
portrait of communist intellectuals after 1945.29 It was, rather, an
extended process of internalization, a kind of tertiary socialization
into a new reality, and the protagonists committed to this process
with everything they had.30 My effort to tell the story of early
Marxism as “lived experience”31 therefore enters uncharted territory.
In the spirit of new beginnings, I treat Marxism not as a closed
political ideology but rather as a worldview (Weltanschauung).
Worldviews are what Wilhelm Dilthey has called “interpretations of
reality,” which reflect an intimate connection between experiences
and conceptions of the world; Dilthey considered Marx’s materialism
a “philosophical worldview.”32 Following more recent reflections on
the history of political worldviews in the age of ideological
confrontation, Marxism, too, can be understood as providing a
secular context that gave “all specialized knowledge a ‘higher’
meaning, subjective perceptions a uniform perspective, and actions
a moral value.”33 In a narrower sense, though, Marxism has also
been used as a collective term for the “epigonous reception of Marx’s
teachings.”34 In effect, however, it emerged as a worldview only as a
result of this reception, which the nine protagonists of this book
themselves understood as both a philosophical and a scientific
process of learning and appropriation.
By focusing on their individual paths and their ways of
apprehending the world through early adulthood, I observe Marxism
as it emerged—in other words, as it was being invented. At the same
time, I revisit a crucial question once raised by Hans-Ulrich Wehler,
about how the language of Marxism came to dominate German
social democracy in the last third of the nineteenth century—and I
rephrase it more broadly: Why did Marx and Engels’s texts exert
such an enduring power of persuasion in so many different places
and contexts way beyond Germany, touching the minds of such
different contemporaries?35 In Paris, London, Zurich, Geneva,
Vienna, Stuttgart, Warsaw, and St. Petersburg, the protagonists
made Marx their own. Their interwoven experiences allow the
founding history of Marxism to be told as a generational project,
resting on far more than the work of Engels, the alleged “inventor of
Marxism.”36
The members of this founding generation were in constant
contact with one another, in writing and in person. They built a
transnational network that was grounded in part on discursive or
virtual ties, and in part on personal relationships. Although they
argued often and intensely, a feeling of like-minded community
prevailed until 1914. Even at the height of the fierce debate over
revisionism, Kautsky described his party ideal as a “voluntary
association of like-minded people.”37 All of the protagonists spoke
multiple languages, and through education, exile, and travel they
were familiar with life in other countries. They met at international
congresses and party meetings, and they communicated with one
another in private letters and through the public media of
newspapers, journals, and theoretical texts. They translated and
published each other’s work, establishing an interrelationship that
was often lasting and intense, and sometimes only superficial and
short-lived. This network became a peculiar manifestation of
“proletarian internationalism” in its own right, and it played an
important role in their lives. Recent research suggests that a
complex history about networking, mobility, and solidarity—personal
and transnational, real and imagined—in the first Marxist generation
has yet to be written.38
The source base for my study is correspondingly diverse. It
includes published and unpublished letters, diaries, notes, sketches,
and autobiographical texts, as well as published speeches and
writings. As I began my research, it soon became clear that I would
not merely be revisiting familiar sources. I found an array of
personal writings, particularly at the International Institute of Social
History in Amsterdam (IISH), that have previously received little or
no attention.39 These include family letters, school essays,
sketchbooks, and novel manuscripts in the papers of Kautsky, Adler,
and Guesde, as well as political memoirs by Alexander Stein and
Paul Frölich that prominently feature Luxemburg.40 Unearthing lost
treasures, however, was not the focus of my archival research.
Indeed, many well-known sources and biographies have much to say
about the young protagonists’ personal, intellectual, and political
strivings and how they made sense of the world, offering a wealth of
material for a comparative coming-of-age study.
In search of the origins of Marxism, this book dives deeply into
the lives and worlds of eight men and one woman—a group of
sensitive, highly politicized young people who cared deeply about
social and political conditions that extended well beyond their
personal lives. They were courageous, ambitious, mobile,
multilingual, feisty, idealistic, eager to learn, and confident in their
own potential. We could also say that they were probing,
pretentious, eclectic, and often doctrinaire activists who were
adamantly convinced that they personally could solve the world’s
problems. Always aware of this ambivalence, I examine how the life
stories of these nine individuals played out on the political and
ideological battlefields of their times.
 PART I
Socialization
 1
Born in the Nineteenth Century
Origins and Influences

He who is afraid of the dense wood in which stands the palace of the Idea,
he who does not hack through it with the sword and wake the king’s
sleeping daughter with a kiss, is not worthy of her and her kingdom; he
may go and become a country pastor, merchant, assessor, or whatever he
likes, take a wife and beget children in all piety and respectability, but the
century will not recognise him as its son.
—Friedrich Engels, 1841

If you can imagine a group portrait of the nine individuals who are
the subjects of this book, you would see eight men and one woman
from different places and different walks of life.1 You would notice
their remarkable similarities—and not only because they had all
embraced Marxism as young adults, a development that was in no
way inevitable. They had also all undergone similar experiences at
home and at school that shaped how they viewed themselves and
society.
In order to get to know these protagonists, as I call them, we
must first consider their early, pre-socialist politicization—family
influences, time at school, what they read when they were young.
Sometimes extensive—if often unsatisfying—biographical literature,
and autobiographical writings by the protagonists themselves, can
help us reconstruct their individual paths to socialization. These
paths were interconnected, despite their different routes across
multiple European countries. The nine were not only children of the
nineteenth century by birth; they embraced their era as a personal
challenge. Their early letters, diaries, sketches, and notes reveal that
they—like the young Friedrich Engels, who later served as an
intellectual mentor to many of them—were determined to cut their
own swath through the “dense wood” where freedom, like a sleeping
princess, was awaiting release.
Eduard Bernstein and Jules Guesde grew up in modest, even
impoverished, circumstances, each in the middle of a European
metropolis. Bernstein was born in Berlin on 6 January 1850, the
seventh of fifteen children in a Jewish family. They were “not part of
the bourgeoisie, but not the proletariat, either,” according to his own,
somewhat ambiguous, wording.2 Bernstein’s father first worked as a
plumber, then as a railroad engineer, earning enough to sustain his
large family in “genteel poverty.”3 Guesde’s background was similarly
humble. Born Jules Bazile on 11 November 1845, he grew up in the
middle of Paris, on the Île Saint-Louis. His father supported the
family of seven as best he could with his earnings as a teacher.4
Financial worries hounded Guesde his entire life. Despite excellent
grades in school, he could not afford to attend university and began
to work as a clerk instead. At the age of twenty, he became a
journalist. Bernstein completed secondary school with a scholarship
from a relative, and so he was able to earn a comparatively secure
income as an apprentice at a bank, and later as a private secretary.
As children, both Bernstein and Guesde were often sick and
somewhat frail. Even as an adult, Guesde’s health was always poor.
The other protagonists came from more comfortably situated
backgrounds. The parents of Georgi Plekhanov and the parents of
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin owned estates tended by domestic servants and
other workers. After childhoods free from material worry, both lost
their fathers when they were still teenagers and became the heads
of their respective households. Both had to liquidate their parents’
estates, giving them an early introduction not only to money matters
but to rural life. Born on 29 November 1856, Plekhanov was the
oldest of twelve children. His family lived in Gudalovka, a village in
the central Russian province of Tambov, 280 miles southeast of
Moscow. His father was a member of the gentry of Tatar descent
who served for decades in the tsar’s army before retiring to manage
his estate of 270 acres and fifty serfs.5 Although Plekhanov’s mother
had brought a dowry to the marriage that had doubled the value of
the estate, the family struggled financially after the emancipation of
the serfs in 1861.
When Plekhanov was fifteen years old, his father gave up his
duties as a landlord and took a position with the local elected
assembly (zemstvo)—developments that formatively influenced
Plekhanov’s youth and political awareness. Both the bankruptcy of
the estate and his father’s move to the civil service were a direct
consequence of Tsar Alexander II’s far-reaching reforms. When his
father died in 1873, the seventeen-year-old Plekhanov helped his
mother sell the family property. These proceedings were
accompanied by fierce, and sometimes violent, disputes with the
local peasants, affecting him deeply.
Vladimir Ulyanov, who later took the name Lenin, was born on 10
April 1870 in Simbirsk on the Volga, 435 miles east of Moscow. He,
too, grew up in rural surroundings. His father, Ilya, was a liberal
educator who taught physics and mathematics in the local school; he
attained the post of school inspector and was even given a noble
title. Lenin’s mother came from a landowning German-Swedish-
Russian family. She spoke multiple languages, and she, too, trained
as a teacher, although after marrying she devoted herself to her
family and children. Lenin’s childhood was marked by relative
material security and his parents’ encouragement of education,
although as a teenager several events fundamentally changed his
life. In 1887, one year after his father unexpectedly died of a brain
hemorrhage, his older brother Alexander was hanged for
revolutionary agitation following an unsuccessful plot to assassinate
the new tsar. Like Plekhanov, Lenin became head of his household at
the age of seventeen. He had to manage the finances of his family,
which included an older sister and two younger siblings. The family
was still prosperous but was ostracized socially after Alexander’s
execution.6
 Peter Struve and Rosa Luxemburg, too, originally hailed from the
Russian Empire—Struve from the province of Perm, more than 700
miles east of Moscow, and Luxemburg from Zamość, a town 150
miles southeast of Warsaw, near the empire’s western border.
Struve’s family had emigrated from northern Germany to Siberia in
the early nineteenth century, so his German Danish grandfather,
Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve, could avoid service in the
Napoleonic army. The family later moved to Dorpat (Tartu in
present-day Estonia) and then resettled in St. Petersburg, where
Friedrich became a celebrated mathematician and astronomer,
receiving a noble title and Russian citizenship. Struve’s father
became a high-ranking civil servant, inheriting the grandfather’s
loyalty and commitment to the new homeland, although he later
wrote that he simultaneously felt like a lifelong foreigner who was
not fully accepted. He got into trouble at work and had to change
posts frequently. The family moved many times: first to St.
Petersburg and Astrakhan (southern Russia), then to Perm (Siberia),
and then to Stuttgart, where the nine-year-old Struve acquired his
fluent German. His mother—who has been described as unreliable,
erratic, and extremely overweight—apparently brought the family
little stability.7 Even so, Struve, the youngest of six sons, grew up
with few material worries. The family had the means to ensure that
the children were well-educated and poised for promising careers as
teachers, diplomats, or scholars.
Like Struve, Luxemburg, who was born on 5 March 1871, grew up
with few material worries. Her childhood was unsettled for other
reasons, as her family was subjected to pressures from two sides: an
increasingly antisemitic mood within mainstream society, and an
Orthodox Jewish community that opposed assimilation. These
pressures seem to have bolstered the family’s “unique cohesion,” as
one of Luxemburg’s biographers put it.8 Luxemburg’s father was a
successful timber merchant who traveled frequently. The family
could afford a comfortable home close to the town hall on Zamość’s
central square. By 1873, his business was prosperous enough that
the family moved to Warsaw, where Luxemburg, the youngest of five
children, grew up and attended school. When she was three years
old, she developed a hip ailment that was misdiagnosed and
incorrectly treated, resulting in a mild but evident physical disability
that gave her a limp for the rest of her life. The family spoke and
“felt” Polish, but German language and literature—especially the
works of Friedrich Schiller, beloved by Luxemburg’s mother—held a
special place in their home. Her father occasionally brought home
foreign newspapers, and both parents nurtured their children’s early
interest in literature and politics. Luxemburg’s biographers continue
to debate the relative strength of the family’s Polish, German, and
Jewish influences; however, all agree that she was an intellectually
curious child whose parents were attentive to her education.9
Karl Kautsky shared the privilege of a comparatively well-situated
family that encouraged education. He, too, grew up in a home with a
keen interest in current events and critical social thought. Despite
some lean times, his parents were able to support themselves as
artists; his father painted scenery in theaters, and his mother
worked as a writer and actress. Born in Prague on 16 October 1854,
Kautsky was the first of four children in a German Czech family. His
father was a “nationally oriented” Czech, as he later wrote; his
mother’s parents were Austrian, and in addition to her native
German she spoke Czech.10 Kautsky’s schooling introduced him to
three different worldviews: the Calvinism of a private tutor,
Catholicism at a seminary in Melk, and “modern” humanism at the
Academic Gymnasium in Vienna. His family moved to the Austrian
capital in 1863, after his father found a permanent position as a
painter at the Imperial Burgtheater, lifting his “family of
intellectuals,” Kautsky wrote, from “impoverished Bohème” into
“solid prosperity.”11
Victor Adler and Jean Jaurès—the final pair of our group of
protagonists—were unique among them because they broke with
their families’ intellectual leanings by embracing social democracy,
albeit relatively late in life. Adler was born in Prague on 24 June
1854. Like Kautsky, he first grew up in Prague and then moved to
Vienna. His father was a cloth merchant from a Jewish Moravian
family who worked his way up to considerable prosperity as a stock-
and real-estate broker in Vienna. In 1884 Adler and his own two
sons converted to Catholicism—partly out of religious conviction and
partly out of a practical desire to assimilate.12 Adler was the oldest
of five children, all raised in a “patriarchal” and “spartan” manner.
His wife later wrote that the “austerity of his childhood” and early
encounters with everyday antisemitism made a deep impression on
him.13 Perhaps this contributed to his stutter, which was cured at a
specialized clinic when he was nineteen. His family’s wealth allowed
him to receive a first-rate secondary and university education. He
studied medicine in Vienna at the same time as Sigmund Freud and
became a doctor. The young Adler was inspired by German
nationalism, adopting his parents’ national-conservative outlook
before gradually embracing more socially critical positions. After his
father’s death in 1886, Adler used his inheritance to establish
Gleichheit (Equality), the first Social Democratic Party newspaper in
the Habsburg Empire.
Jaurès’s biography resembles Adler’s in two respects. Jaurès, too,
came to socialism late (at the age of thirty-one), and his choice
upset some family members. Like Plekhanov, he grew up in the
countryside and was well acquainted with rural life. He was the first
of two sons, born on 3 September 1859 in Castres, a small town in
the département of Tarn in southern France. Both of his parents
came from well-situated families, and in the 1860s they acquired a
farm on the outskirts of town. His father, who has been described as
gentle and cheerful, exchanged his modest income as a merchant
for a career in agriculture, one that was no less arduous. His mother
passed down her Catholicism and faith in human goodness. Jaurès’s
childhood was shaped by his family’s privileged social background as
well as its persistent financial difficulties. An outstanding student, he
attended the Collège de Castres with the aid of a scholarship and
gained a reputation for loving “to learn as much as to eat,” as his
biographer put it.14 He completed his secondary schooling at the top
of his class and with additional financial support attended the elite
Parisian École Normale Superieure, where Émile Durkheim and Henri
Bergson were among his schoolmates.
These biographical sketches show that none of the protagonists
fits the stereotype of the professional revolutionary, someone who
burns all personal bridges and plunges into the working-class
struggle as a “bourgeois radical”15 or “bourgeois deserter,” as Robert
Michels put it.16 The attributes of radicalism and breaking with the
past are usually quite vague, not necessarily corresponding with how
Marxists saw themselves. Karl Marx himself liked to use the word
“radical.” Referring to the term’s Latin origins (radix, meaning
“root”), he applied it to both thought and action, without separating
the two categories. The following passage in the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Law was paradigmatic for this understanding, and it
simultaneously became a central point of reference for all students
of Marx:

The weapon of criticism certainly cannot replace the criticism of weapons;

material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory, too,
becomes a material force once it seizes the masses. Theory is capable of
seizing the masses once it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad
hominem once it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp matters at the
root. But for man the root is man himself.17

Marx pulled philosophy down from the theoretical heavens so it

could play a practical historical role. For Marx, thought was always a
form of taking action. In his critique of philosophy without humans
at the center, the boundary between theory and practice dissolved
itself dialectically, as if on its own. To be “radical” meant reimagining
humans as godlike—as the point of departure and terminus of social
critique. This view was essential to how Marxist intellectuals
understood themselves, and it justified the transformation of Marx’s
name into an analytical and programmatic concept: Marxism.
Even so, none of the protagonists in this study broke absolutely
with their own past by rejecting family, friends, acquaintances, or a
“bourgeois” lifestyle. It would be misleading, for example, to say, as
one scholar does, that Adler “distanced” himself from the “bourgeois
world.”18 His family’s life was upended for some time by his social
democratic engagement; house searches, arrests, and financial
shortfalls became part of their everyday life. And yet by 1905, at the
latest, when Adler was elected to Parliament, they were (once again)
accepted among the respectable bourgeoisie. Emma Adler wrote in
her memoir that her husband was treated with “reverence and
respect,” and he was a government minister when he died in 1918.19
Even the four who most closely approached the image of the
professional revolutionary—Guesde, Plekhanov, Lenin, and
Luxemburg—upheld connections to their relatives and previous lives,
despite time in prison or exile. After Luxemburg’s arrest in 1906, her
family in Warsaw lobbied for her release and posted bail against her
will.20 Guesde’s father, whose livelihood as a private school teacher
required an unsullied reputation, appealed personally to French
president Adolphe Thiers to pardon his hot-headed but “patriotic”
son, who had fled the country after the defeat of the Paris
Commune.21 And when Luxemburg, Lenin, Plekhanov—and Adler, for
that matter—were not in prison, they (like the others) maintained a
bourgeois lifestyle on the lower fringes of the middle class, which
can be explained only by their upbringing.
Of course, their revolutionary careers hardly followed the usual
patterns of (lower) bourgeois life, as they themselves would have
readily conceded. To this extent, it is true that they “sacrificed their
conventional place in society” to join the social democratic
movement. However, they saw this as a logical step, not as a
“sacrifice.”22 Most made this decision before gaining a foothold in the
professions for which they had trained—attorney (Lenin), engineer
(Plekhanov), bank employee (Bernstein), or clerk (Guesde). They
went underground or into exile to escape arrest for their political
activism. They defy assignment within a specific economic class, as
the lens of “class” is itself problematic; it creates analytical
categories that are much more rigid than historical reality. By
reversing this lens and viewing the protagonists’ paths of
socialization and politicization from the perspective of lived
experience, we can see that tropes such as “class desertion” and
“broken existence” do not capture the essence of their coming of
age.
Moreover, the protagonists themselves did not see Marxist
engagement as a radical break with their own past, nor can we coax
this interpretation from their personal writings. Instead, their
embrace of the emerging workers’ movement followed a specific
biographical logic. The decision to become politically involved (which
was undertaken with great solemnity and self-confidence), to make
contact with workers’ and revolutionary circles, and to abandon a
relatively ordered life path, did not happen abruptly. Rather, they
came to this decision gradually, through an increasingly critical view
of social relations. In fact, Eric Hobsbawm’s thesis—that
revolutionary engagement is grounded in lived experience—
frequently held true. They became revolutionaries because they
came to believe that their subjective expectations for their own lives,
which were relatively independent of objective social conditions,
could not be fulfilled without their own engagement on behalf of a
fundamentally different society. As a matter of fact, Hobsbawm’s
thesis and related observations about Marxism’s founding generation
have been confirmed by sociopsychological research on the
motivations for political engagement.23
The men and woman in this book saw social democracy not as an
escape from their own history or class but rather as the only step
toward adulthood that seemed reasonable, even essential, given the
conditions they observed. Even when their parents’ loyalty to the
status quo hindered their own socialist engagement, heated
discussions at the dinner table did not break family ties. Guesde was
born Jules Bazile, but he took his mother’s maiden name at the age
of twenty-one, after leaving the Prefecture of the Seine, so as not to
endanger his father’s professional reputation or disturb the family
peace.24 Jaurès’s in-laws frowned upon his election to the National
Assembly as a socialist. An aunt on his mother’s side accused him of
becoming a socialist for financial reasons, so his apparently
demanding wife Louise could live comfortably25—but even here, we
can hardly speak of a break with his past.
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And save yer voice until the hymns are sung!
‘Make haste unto the Lord;’ that’s the command;
We’re bound fer church—I trust you understand!”
“But goin’ to church, good Silas, racin’ so,
Will bring us into heaven mighty slow!”
“Hush up, Jerushee, else you’ll make us late;
Gelong thar, Moses—strike yer winnin’ gait!
God gave him speed and now’s his time to show it;
If that’s a sin, I never want to know it.”

A loving wife to acquiescence used,

Jerusha soon begins to get enthused.
Said she: “Don’t leave the church folk disappointed,
Nor let the ungodly beat the Lord’s anointed!”
“You’re right, Jerushee, thar yer head is level,
In life’s long race the saint must beat the devil;
Though on this Hebrew horse depend we must
To keep the Christian from the sinner’s dust.
That’s right, Jerushee, give old Mose the birch,
Fer here’s a race: The world ag’in’ the church;
Both Testaments are at it fer their lives—
The Old one pacin’ while the New one drives;
And Satan’s found at last all he can do
To tackle both the Gentile and the Jew.”

The stranger’s horses come at such a pace

They dash ahead as if to take the race.
“The jig is up, Jerushee; guess he’ll beat;
He’s in the lead, and Mose is off his feet.”
“What talk is that? Now, Silas, don’t you scoff;
How can he jig if all his feet are off?
And now you say he’s struck his gait at last,
I feared he’d strike on suthin’, goin’ so fast.”
The stranger cries: “Come on, old Sanctimony,
Old wife, old wagon, and old rack-a-bony!”
Jerusha’s dander’s up; Jerusha’s mad;
She grabs her bonnet and applies the gad.
And Mose at last has struck his old-time speed;
For once the Jew and Gentile are agreed.

Around the church the gathered country folk

Observe: “The Sabbath day is bein’ broke.”
With eager eye and half-averted face,
Though some condemn, yet all observe the race.
“Land sakes!” cries one, “I’ll bet ye ten t’ tew
It’s Deacon Jones a-drivin’ that ar Jew.”
“I can’t bet much, but here’s my life upon it—
That thar’s Jerushee—I know her by the bonnet!”
Along the dusty road the horses speed,
And inch by inch old Moses takes the lead.
Jerusha gets excited, now she’s winning,
And all her former anger dies a-grinning.
“Come on, old Disbelief, old Satan’s crony,
Don’t lag behind on any ceremony!
Take my advice: Before you give much sass
Jes’ turn yer horses out on Sunday grass.”

Old Mose had forged ahead at such a rate

The Deacon couldn’t stop him at the gate;
The more he pulled the faster Mose would go;
Jerusha grabbed one line and hollered: “Whoa!”
Which swung him in; the buggy with a crash,
Swinging against the horse-block, went to smash.
The pastor said: “I hope you broke no bones,
Although you broke the Sabbath, Deacon Jones.”
“Don’t blame this onto Sile,” Jerusha said:
“But on that hoss; you know he’s Jewish bred,
An’ won’t do nothin’ Saturday but rest;
On Sunday he breaks loose like all possessed.
At least we’re here and safe, therefore rejoice,
But I shall sing no more, I’ve strained my voice!”
“I thought ’twould break,” they heard the pastor say,
“It has been cracked for many, many a day.”
 —Copyright by Forbes & Co., Chicago, and used by kind
permission of author and publisher.

THE CHRISTMAS RING

By Fred Emerson Brooks

May was pretty, plump and pretty, and with such a lovely soul
That a smile lit up her features like a mental aureole.
People gazed in admiration—always listened—when she talked
Always made you think of roses, but she limped whene’er she
walked.
Nothing crippled, nothing shriveled, nothing of the withered sort;
Just a perfect human being, save one leg a trifle short;
As though nature had intended her the rarest of her kind
But fell short of precious matter and no substitute could find.
Fair as polished alabaster that had wakened from its dream;
But so modest and retiring she held every one’s esteem.
Though her imperfection grieved her more than anybody knew,
Yet her life was like the heavens when the stars are peeping
through.
At first sight of her you’d fancy as you blinked your startled eyes
You had chanced upon a seraph who had taken human guise:
As a man will gaze in wonder at a jewel on the ground
Ere he quite believes his senses that a treasure had been found.
Enter handsome, kindly David: comes a stranger to the place,
Searching for the soul of beauty hid behind a maiden face;
Not among the belles of fashion, not among the aimless kind,
Could he find the perfect woman he had pictured in his mind.
Thought to find a truer sweetheart in some pretty village lass;
Find his lily of the valley in the higher middle class;
Out among the quiet people where his riches were unknown,
Some fair maid whose homely virtues would appreciate his own.
It was at a social function where he met the charming May
And her sister, Belle, the elder, quite as handsome in her way.
May was sunny, sweet and gentle—Belle was haughty and austere;
While ambition strode beside her just a little bit too near.
As a gentleman of leisure, David played the friendly rôle,
As contented as a youngster when he’s at a sugar-bowl.
David laid no special favor upon either Belle or May,
But he whispered things to Cupid—told him all he had to say.
Yet he played the gallant nobly, exercising all his art:
Hid behind the cunning Cupid he deployed to hide his heart.
May grew ever more unselfish, giving way to Sister Belle,
Till Dan Cupid felt like starting in a raucous college yell.
Belle had been the child of favor—May the daughter of regret;
One the Mount of Delectation, one the Mount of Olivet.
That a man preferred her sister was to Belle almost absurd:
She took everything for granted—simply waiting David’s word.
Custom bids one ask the parents—though he heed not what they
say—
If a lover love a lover love will get her anyway.
So when David sought permission he was just a bit obscure—
Which was laid to nervous tension such as lovers must endure.
May I win your noblest daughter? Both fond parents gave consent;
Thinking Belle the one intended—straight to her the father went.
Belle, too vain to hold the secret, poured it in the ears of May:
How the heart grows disappointed when a hope has gone astray.
As a graduate from college, David had excuse for staying,
But he gave the pair no inkling of the love-game he was playing.
Through the summer and the autumn David studied well his art:
Read up Cupid on devotion and the psychics of the heart.
At the Church on Christmas evening David played the Santa Claus:
Telling stories to the children; gaining laughter and applause;
Handed out the many presents till the tree was stripped and bare;
Gave to Belle a jewel-sunburst which she fastened in her hair.
With no special gift from David, May was getting trouble-hearted,
But by dint of constant smiling kept the tears from getting started.
In the midst of the excitement David cast off his disguise;
Gave a rousing speech of greeting, closing up with this surprise:
“Friends, I have an extra present, ’tis the last one on the tree,
For the Queen of Love and Beauty, choice of all the world to me:
One with that angelic nature, Heaven only can bestow;
But with just enough of human to detain her here below.
I have read her secret often as the star man reads the skies,
Till the horoscope got tangled in the flashlight of her eyes.
With a love beyond endurance and a wealth beyond control,
I have come to claim my sweetheart with the treasures of my soul.
As a symbol of devotion I have brought this solitaire—
For my heart is in the girdle and her name is graven there.”
All are thrilled with expectation; every neck is craned to see
Who possesses all these virtues; whom the wonder maid can be.
Down the aisle our David hastened—passing Belle upon the way,
Till he paused to place the jewel on the pretty hand of May.
With her bosom over-flowing, May could utter not a word,
But her eyes and lips gave answer in the silence David heard.
And the tear that sorrow started changing quick to love’s employ,
Trembled on her heavy lashes like a messenger of joy.
While her cheek has turned to crimson, down the drop of rapture
goes,
Stopping there awhile to glisten like a dewdrop on a rose.
Can you measure love’s emotion when a sorrow turns to bliss,
When a maid whose heart is broken has it mended with a kiss?
It is said the first known lovers—and I think they do it yet,
As first aid in pressing cases, used their arms as tourniquet.
David kissed her there in public, and he hugged her all he could;
May had half-way hoped he wouldn’t, then she half-way hoped he
would.
Though they broke a social custom, none was there to make ado,
And the pastor’s benediction, just for once, was just for two.

—Copyright by author and used by his kind permission.

CUPID SWALLOWED
By Leigh Hunt

T’other day, as I was twining

Roses for a crown to dine in,
What, of all things, midst the heap,
Should I light on, fast asleep,
But the little desperate elf,—
The tiny traitor,—Love himself!
By the wings I pinched him up
Like a bee, and in a cup
Of my wine I plunged and sank him,
And d’ye think I did?—I drank him!
Faith, I thought him dead. Not he!
There he lives with ten-fold glee;
And now this moment, with his wings,
I feel him tickling my heart-strings.

THE VINEGAR MAN

By Ruth Comfort Mitchell

The crazy old Vinegar Man is dead! He never had missed a day
before!
Somebody went to his tumble-down shed, by the Haunted House,
and forced the door.
There in the litter of his pungent pans, the murky mess of his mixing
place,—
Deep, sticky spiders and empty cans—with the same old frown on
his sour old face.

“Vinegar-Vinegar-Vinegar Man!
Face-us-and-chase-us-and-catch-if-you-can!
Pepper for a tongue! Pickle for a nose!
Stick a pin in him and vinegar flows!
Glare-at-us-swear-at-us-catch-if-you-can!
Ketch-up-and-chow-chow-and-Vinegar-Man!”

Nothing but recipes and worthless junk; greasy old records of paid
and due;
But, down in the depths of a battered old trunk, a queer, quaint
valentine torn in two—
Red hearts and arrows, and silver lace, and a prim, dim, ladylike
script that said—
(Oh, Vinegar Man, with the sour old face!)—“With dearest love, from
Ellen to Ned!”

“Steal-us-and-peel-us-and-drown-us-in-brine!
He pickles his heart in”—a valentine!
“Vinegar for blood! Pepper for tongue!
Stick a pin in him and”—once he was young!
“Glare-at-us-swear-at-us-catch-if-you-can!”
“With dearest love”—to the Vinegar Man!

Dingy little books of profit and loss (died about Saturday, so they
say)
And a queer, quaint valentine, torn across ... torn, but it never was
thrown away!
“With dearest love from Ellen to Ned”—“Old Pepper Tongue! Pickles
his heart in brine!”
The Vinegar Man is a long time dead: he died when he tore his
valentine.

—Copyright by The Century Co., New York, and used by kind

permission of author and publisher.

HIS FAVORITE

She was a dainty little maid,

And he was very tall;
They gathered all the flowers
That grew by the garden wall.

“My favorite is the rose,” said she,

“Do you prefer the pink?
Perhaps you’re fond of hollyhocks,
You’re just like them, I think.

“You’re rather stiff and very tall

And nod your head just so
For all the world like hollyhocks
 When summer breezes blow.

“But won’t you tell me what

Your favorites are?
For if I only knew,”
(The words were soft and low),
“I’d try to raise a few.”

“My favorites,” he answered,

“This moment I can see.
I’m looking at your two lips,—
Will you raise tulips for me?”

THE MOURNFUL TALE OF THE SNEE ZEE FAMILEE

By A. J. Waterhouse

There was a little yellow man whose name it was Ah Cheu,

And every time that Mongol sneezed he told his name to you.
This funny little yellow man had wedded Tish Ah Chee,
And they, when certain time had passed, had children one, two,
three.
There was little Ah Cheu
And Tish Ah Tsu,
And the baby was named Ker Chee,
And their Uncle Ker Chawl
And his wife were all
Of the Snee Zee fam-i-lee,
And when the mamma stood and called her children from the door,
You would laugh and laugh for an hour and a half if never you
laughed before.
“Ah Cheu,” she’d say in her feminine way, “bring in little Ker Chee,
And Tish Ah Tsu, bring him in, too, to the Snee Zee fam-i-lee.”

Alas and alack! but my voice will crack as the mournful tale I tell.
To that sweet little band in the Mongol land a terrible fate befell.
On a summer day in a sportive way they called one another all,
And over and o’er the names they bore they would call and call and
call.
They called Ah Cheu
And Tish Ah Tsu
And the baby Ker Chee, Ker Chee,
And their Uncle Ker Chawl,
They called them all,
Till they’re dead as dead can be.
Ah Cheu was tough, and was used to snuff, so he lived at his fate to
scoff,
But the rest are dead, as I’ve heretofore said, for their heads they
were all sneezed off.
And this is the tale I have tried to wail of Ah Cheu and his little Ker
Chee
And Tish Ah Tsu and Ah Chee, too, of the Snee Zee fam-i-lee.

—From “Lays for Little Chaps.”

TO A USURPER
By Eugene Field

Aha! a traitor in the camp,

A rebel strangely bold,—
A lisping, laughing, toddling scamp,
Not more than four years old!

To think that I, who’ve ruled alone

So proudly in the past,
Should be ejected from my throne
By my own son at last!

He trots his treason to and fro,

As only babies can,
And says he’ll be his mamma’s beau
When he’s a “Gweat, big man!”

You stingy boy! you’ve always had

 A share in mamma’s heart;
Would you begrudge your poor old dad
The tiniest little part?

That mamma, I regret to see,

Inclines to take your part,—
As if a dual monarchy
Should rule her gentle heart!

But when the years of youth have sped,

The bearded man, I trow,
Will quite forget he ever said
He’d be his mamma’s beau.

Renounce your treason, little son,

Leave mamma’s heart to me;
For there will come another one
To claim your loyalty.

And when that other comes to you,

God grant her love may shine
Through all your life, as fair and true
As mamma’s does through mine!

MY RIVAL
By Rudyard Kipling

I go to concert, party, ball—

What profit is in these?
I sit alone against the wall
And strive to look at ease.
The incense that is mine by right
They burn before her shrine;
And that’s because I’m seventeen
And she is forty-nine.

I cannot check my girlish blush,

 My color comes and goes;
I redden to my finger-tips,
And sometimes to my nose.
And she is white where white should be,
And red where red should shine.
The blush that flies at seventeen
Is fixed at forty-nine.

I wish I had her constant cheek:

I wish that I could sing
All sorts of funny little songs,
Not quite the proper thing.
I’m very gauche and very shy,
Her jokes aren’t in my line;
And worst of all, I’m seventeen
While she is forty-nine.

The young men come, the young men go,

Each pink and white and neat,
She’s older than their mothers, but
They grovel at her feet.
They walk beside her rickshaw wheels—
None ever walk by mine;
And that’s because I’m seventeen
And she is forty-nine.

She rides with half a dozen men,

(She calls them “boys” and “mashers”)
I trot along the Mall alone;
My prettiest frocks and sashes
Don’t help to fill my programme-card,
And vainly I repine
From 10 to 2 A. M. Ah me!
Would I were forty-nine!

She calls me “darling,” “pet,” and “dear,”

And sweet “retiring maid.”
I’m always at the back, I know,
 She puts me in the shade.
She introduces me to men,
“Cast” lovers I opine,
For sixty takes to seventeen,
Nineteen to forty-nine.

But even she must older grow,

And end her dancing days,
She can’t go on forever so
At concerts, balls and plays.
One ray of priceless hope I see
Before my footsteps shine;
Just think, that she’ll be eighty-one
When I am forty-nine.

LUCKY JIM
By Fred Emerson Brooks
A FORGOTTEN STORY REWRITTEN FOR REINE DAVIES

Two jolly, boyish chums were we

For I loved Jim and Jim loved me,
We played together—went to school,
And learned the selfsame Golden Rule.
Jim kissed the girls and so did I;
But Jim got married on the sly.
The sweetest girl I ever knew
Her cheeks like roses wet with dew.
I kept my secret through the years
And tried to drown my love in tears.
Though oft I thought of suicide
The more I tried the less I died.

Refrain:
But every night I watched the sky
To see the moon and stars go by
And wondered how the angels fly
And thought of Jim—My lucky Jim—
And what I’d give to have her mine
That I might worship at her shrine,
But she was his, I’d not repine—
Oh, how I envied—envied him.

Some secret grief Jim sought to hide;

Grew weak and weaker till he died
And though I grieved that it was so,
I could not weep to see him go,
For joy, not sorrow, filled my bowl:
’Twas mine the widow to console.
Though Jim was dead, I was alive
To bring sweet honey to the hive.
I married her, and in my glee
Was happy as a honey-bee:
I called her “kitten”—In nine days
My eyes were opened to her ways.

Refrain:
Now every night I watch the sky
To see the moon and stars go by
And wonder how the angels fly
And think of Jim—my lucky Jim:
Deep lines of sorrow mar my face
As time goes on with lagging pace
Oh, how I long to take his place
Oh, how I envy—envy him.

—Copyright by Forbes & Co., Chicago, and used by kind

permission of author and publisher.

THE WHISTLING BOY

By Fred Emerson Brooks

What music like the whistle of a well-contented boy,—

That rhythmic exhalation of an ever-present joy?
Though the fragmentary cadence of a plain, untutored art,
’Tis the melody of childhood, ’tis a psalm from out the heart.
You will never find a criminal behind an honest smile;
And the boy ne’er grows a villain who keeps whistling all the while,—
Though he whistle out of tune.

What cares he for fickle fortune,—what the fashion may bestow?

In his little barefoot kingdom royalty in rags may go.
With an apple in his pocket and another in his mouth,
Cares not how the wind is blowing, whether north or whether south;
For he has no crops a-growing, has no ships upon the sea;
And he keeps right on a-whistling, whate’er the tune may be,—
For he whistles out of tune.

’Tis the early smile of Summer creeping o’er the face of June,
Even though this crude musician many times is off the tune,
Till it bears the same resemblance to the melody that’s meant,
That his garments do to trousers little matter how they’re rent.
When he’s very patriotic then his tune is sure to be—
Although a bit rebellious—“My Country, ’Tis of Thee!”
Which he whistles out of tune:
(America.)

Such a vision of good nature in his cheery, smiling face;

Better clothes would check his freedom, rob him of his rustic grace;
So he feels a trifle awkward in his brand-new Sunday clothes,
While repeating to his teacher all the Scripture that he knows.
Out of Sunday school he rushes, takes his shoes off on the sly;
Says: “The angels all go barefoot in the sweeter by and by!”
Which he whistles out of tune:
(Sweet By and By.)

Sometimes whistling for his playmate; sometimes whistling for his

dog,
On the quiet, in the schoolhouse, to perplex the pedagogue;
Sometimes whistling up his courage; often whistling just because.
In the South he whistles “Dixie” o’er and o’er, without a pause,
Till he’s out of breath completely, when it seems to be, perchance,
But a knickerbocker whistle, since it comes in little pants,—
For he whistles out of tune:
(Dixie.)

Should he hail from old New England you may safely bet your life
He can whittle out a whistle with his broken-bladed knife.
He will play his cornstalk fiddle, and his dog will never fail
To show appreciation, beating tempo with his tail;
Then he whistles “Yankee Doodle” like the tunes you often hear
On the old farmhouse piano when the sister plays by ear,—
For he whistles out of tune:
(Yankee Doodle.)

There is many a weeping mother longing, morning, night, and noon,

For her boy to come back whistling just the fragment of a tune;
But he’s yonder entertaining all the angels unaware
With a melody so human they’re bound to keep him there;
For all that heavenly music nothing sounds to them so sweet
As that cheery, boyish whistle and the patter of his feet,—
For he whistles all in tune:
(Nearer, My God, to Thee.)

—Copyright by Forbes & Co., Chicago, and used by kind

permission of author and publisher.

THE LITTLE PEACH

By Eugene Field

A little peach in the orchard grew,—

A little peach of emerald hue;
Warmed by the sun and wet by the dew,
It grew.

One day, passing that orchard through,

That little peach dawned on the view
Of Johnny Jones and his sister Sue—
 Them two.

Up at that peach a club they threw—

Down from the stem on which it grew
Fell that peach of emerald hue.
Mon Dieu!

John took a bite and Sue a chew,

And then the trouble began to brew,—
Trouble the doctor couldn’t subdue.
Too true!

Under the turf where the daisies grew

They planted John and his sister Sue,
And their little souls to the angels flew,—
Boo hoo!

What of that peach of the emerald hue,

Warmed by the sun and wet by the dew?
Ah, well, its mission on earth is through.
Adieu!

LITTLE BILLEE
By W. M. Thackeray

There were three sailors of Bristol city

Who took a boat and went to sea.
But first with beef and captain’s biscuits
And pickled pork they loaded she.

There was gorging Jack and guzzling Jimmy,

And the youngest he was little Billee.
Now when they got as far as the Equator
They’d nothing left but one split pea.

Says gorging Jack to guzzling Jimmy,

“I am extremely hungaree.”
To gorging Jack says guzzling Jimmy,
“We’ve nothing left, us must eat we.”

Says gorging Jack to guzzling Jimmy,

“With one another we shouldn’t agree!
There’s little Bill, he’s young and tender,
We’re old and tough, so let’s eat he.

“Oh! Billy we’re going to kill and eat you,

So undo the button of your chemie.”
When Bill received this information
He used his pocket-handkerchie.

“First let me say my catechism,

Which my poor mammy taught me.”
“Make haste, make haste,” says guzzling Jimmy,
While Jack pulled off his snickersnee.

So Billy went up to the main-top gallant mast,

And down he fell, on his bended knee.
He scarce had come to the twelfth commandment
When up he jumps. “There’s land I see:

“Jerusalem and Madagascar,

And North and South Amerikee;
There’s the British flag a-riding at anchor,
With Admiral Napier, K. C. B.”

So when they got aboard of the Admiral’s

He hanged fat Jack and flogged Jimmee;
But as for little Bill he made him
The Captain of a seventy-three.

A GALLANT THIRD PARTY

By Littell McClung

A wooer, a maid and the moon,

 And a starry night, you’ll allow,
Let’s say in August or June,
Though it hardly matters just now.

The man in the moon peered down

With a jealous eye on the pair,
And his face was dark with a frown,
For the girl was bewitchingly fair.

“Just one,” begged the lover. “Please, dear,

Don’t you see I love only you?
And nobody’s looking, don’t fear;
And you know that I’ll ever be true.”

But the maid saw the man in the moon,

And she hardly knew how to reply;
Maybe she might pretty soon;
Yet maybe she oughtn’t to try.

But the chap in the sky was a brick,

And he saw that he shouldn’t be seen,
So he gathered a cloud, black and thick,
And set it up quick as a screen.

A TRAGIC STORY

There lived a sage in days of yore,

And he a handsome pigtail wore;
But wondered much and sorrowed more
Because it hung behind him.

He mused upon this curious case,

And swore he’d change the pigtail’s place,
And have it hanging at his face,
Not dangling there behind him.

Says he, “The mystery I’ve found,

I’ll turn me round.” He turned him round;
But still it hung behind him.

Then round and round, and out and in,

All day the puzzled sage did spin;
In vain it mattered not a pin,
The pigtail hung behind him.

And right, and left, and round about,

And up, and down, and in and out,
He turned; but still the pigtail stout
Hung steadily behind him.

And though his efforts never slack,

And though he twist, and twirl, and tack,
Alas! still faithful to his back
The pigtail hangs behind him.

THE POOR LITTLE BIRDIES

By A. J. Waterhouse

The poor little birdies that sleep in the trees,

Going rockaby, rockaby, lulled by the breeze;
The poor little birdies, they make me feel bad,
Oh, terribly, dreadfully, dismally sad,
For—think of it, little one; ponder and weep—
The birdies must stand when they sleep, when they sleep;
And their poor little legs—
I am sure it is so—
They ache, and they ache,
For they’re weary, you know.
And that is the reason that far in the night
You may hear them say “Dear-r-r!” if you listen just right,
For the poor little birdies must sleep on the bough,
And they want to lie down, but they do not know how.

Just think of it, darling; suppose you must stand

On those little brown legs, all so prettily planned;
Suppose you must stand when you wanted to sleep,
I am sure you would call for your mamma and weep,
And your poor little legs, they would cramp, I have guessed,
And your poor little knees, they would call for a rest;
And you’d cry, I am sure,
For so weary you’d be;
And you’d want to lie down,
But you couldn’t, you see.
And that is the reason why we should feel bad
For the poor little birdies, who ought to be glad;
For they want to lie down as they sleep on the bough;
They want to lie down, but they don’t know how.

—Copyright by Harr Wagner Co., San Francisco, and used by kind

permission.

THE FUNERAL AT PARADISE BAR

By Paul Shoup
About four o’clock in the morning, Uncle Hank Witherspoon would
climb up on the box while the sun was tossing a few experimental
shafts of light across the canyon, and, watching with pride and
satisfaction the leaders dancing little dust clouds out of the stage
road, would remark to bystanders who turned up their coat collars
and talked politics to keep warm: “Some men are born hostlers; you
see it by the way they lifts a hoss’s foot; some sabes how to ride,
and most gin’r’lly they overruns their boots’n their spurs is bright; and
then there be others that are fine at hoofin’ it and lambastin’ a pack
train with a rawhide an’ one hundred choice selections from two
langidges; but as for me, my special speci-ality is just plain drivin’ of
a stage; a stage with four hosses; just that and nothin’ more.” With
that Uncle Hank would loosen his whip, the leaders would rear like
chargers on a monument, the wheel horses would gather their feet
under them—and down the road, pitching, swaying, leaving behind
them a wall of dust, would go the famous Mokelumne stage, while
half the population of Paradise Bar—they were early risers in the