Horace Traubel: An American Communist*

            If the American Social Democracy maybe said to possess, outside of George, an inspired leader whose significance is more than ephemeral, that man is Horace Traubel. He is no politician.  He has no vote in Congress.  He does not shine in public meetings.  He is no agitator.  He is poor in the matter of outward followers. The papers say little about him.  And yet he has behind him a life of fruitful work.

For sixteen years Horace Traubel has been publishing a monthly periodical called The Conservator.  The Worker, a Socialist weekly published in New York, is regularly enriched his contributions. The organ of the crafts settlement at Rose Valley, near Philadelphia, is issued under his direction.  Traubel is one of the most inspired writers of contemporary America.  He is the theoretician and prophet of a better future, of a new culture—the prophet of an international Socialism.  But Traubel is no pulpit Socialist. His Socialist ideas are not empty book wisdom. His words are not the outpouring of unpractical and abstract ravings about liberty, fraternity and equality.  He does not fix himself in comfort by his warm hearth in order to write touching feuilletons about his freezing fellow-men.  He has fought all his life for the equal rights of alt men against the despotism of capita.  In this fight Traubel has sacrificed not only all his intellectual powers but has made financial sacrifices that have kept him poor.

Traubel, the son of a German artist, was born in America in 1858.  He was always in close contact with practical life, of whose adversities he has experienced his full share. He has been errand boy, newsboy, printer, lithographer, clerk, journalist. At present he resides under modest conditions with his little family in Camden, near Philadelphia.  To the literary world he is known mainly for his associations with Walt Whitman, of whom he is an executor and about whom he has written much.  And the official press—even in the United States there is an official press—treats him disparagingly as a mere imitator, a sort of tail to the Whitman kite.

It is true that for more than a decade Traubel was the pupil and intimate friend of Walt Whitman.  But the pupil was worthy of his master. Traubel was inspired by the same all-embracing love, by the same unspeakable faith in the progressive development of man, as Whitman.  He was Whitman’s friend and pupil by virtue of the mutuality of their ideals.  Even in exterior ways the lives of these two men tally with each other. Whitman’s life, too, was full of transitions. He was teacher, printer, journalist, contractor, nurse. As nurse, in Washington, he broke down physically and retired to Camden. There Traubel was at first frequently and finally daily, by his side. Whitman’s point of view, his world-view, has exercised a positive influence upon the younger man.  But Traubel has not abandoned himself to Walt Whitman’s influence—been absorbed. He has never shown the natural power of his soul more clearly than through the fact that he has been able to preserve his individuality alongside of Whitman. Traubel is no epigone. He has traveled his own road.

Whitman peering into the future announced a new religion, a new civilization.    But he himself entirely by existing American institutions.  Whitman had Socialistic ideas without being in fact a Socialist.  Perhaps he insisted on homogeneous methods of production.  At any rate he was no communist.  He longed for the time when the territory of the republic would be oversown with millions of farms, which would be the unassailable property of the individual.  Whitman did not believe in the agrarian socialism of Henry George. Traubel goes farther, to logical communism.

We need not follow Traubel so far.  We may frankly admit that we perceive in Traubel’s communism a Utopia not at all worth pursuing.  Man will never give up private ownership of the necessaries of life.  Nor can I make much of isolated communistic experiments.  Rose Valley may be as good as Brook Farm or many another experimental colony, but sooner or later it is bound to be swallowed up by capitalism. Miniature communism has no effect whatever on existing conditions. The social state will not be evolved out of the several such colonies scattered over the earth. Socialism will naturally, slowly but surely, grow into an immense current, which will overflow capitalism. That is the necessary consequence of the development of culture in the past history of humanity.

It does not occur to Horace Traubel to stop at any communistic experiment. He is not identical with Rose Valley. His field of operation is in no way limited to any narrow ground.  His significance to the cause of Socialism is not impaired by the fact that he allows himself to be deceived on the one point of exaggerated idealism.  In the main he is in accord with Karl Marx. Without the Marxian belief in the natural necessity of Socialism Traubel’s labor would be unthinkable.  But we may easily think of Traubel without Rose Valley.

O.E. Lessing.

*From the Münich Post: translated for The Conservator