ABSTRACT
RADICAL UNION: GENDER, PERSONALITY, AND POLITICS IN THE MARRIAGE OF META AND VICTOR BERGER
by Dustin A. Abnet
For over thirty years, Victor and Meta Berger lived, fought, and campaigned together as two of the most prominent American socialists. During their marriage, Victor co-founded the American Socialist Party, served on its Executive Committee, successfully ran for Congress, published the leading Socialist daily newspaper, and led Milwaukee’s powerful socialist machine. During the same period, Meta served five terms on the Milwaukee school board and led numerous women’s and socialist organizations while serving as Victor’s wife. Though they were important political figures, Meta and Victor were also important because of how they experienced, as a couple, two of the most transformative developments of the early twentieth century: a crisis of masculinity and the rise of feminism. Using their personal letters, papers, and Meta’s autobiography, this thesis reconstructs their relationship, showing how Victor’s responses to a crisis of masculinity related to Meta’s formation of a feminist consciousness.
Radical Union: Gender, Personality, and Politics in the Marriage of Victor and Meta Berger
A Thesis
Submitted to the
Faculty of Miami University
In partial fulfillment of
The requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
Department of History
By
Dustin A. Abnet
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio
2006
Advisor______Mary E. Frederickson Reader______Allan M. Winkler Reader______Dan La Botz
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Restoring American Manhood 6
Power and Identity 23
Epilogue 39
Bibliography 42
ii PROLOGUE
At 8:00 p.m. on December 4, 1897, Meta Schlichting married Victor L. Berger in a small ceremony officiated by a local judge in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The bride, a 24-year-old teacher in the Milwaukee school system, was the second daughter of Bernhard and Matilda Schlichting, German immigrants who had raised a happy family solidly within the Milwaukee middle class. The groom, a 37-year-old newspaper editor and burgeoning socialist politician, was the eldest son of Ignatz and Julia Berger, formerly wealthy innkeepers from the small village of Nieder- Rehbach in the Austria-Hungarian Empire. For the participants, the simple ceremony was likely an emotionally intense experience, filled with simultaneous feelings of joy, sorrow, hope, and fear. Over the previous decade and a half, each family had overcome severe hardships. Bernhard, a civil war veteran, assemblyman, and commissioner of the local schools, had died of a sudden heart attack in 1883, leaving his wife and five children destitute. Matilda had managed to keep the family alive by taking in boarders and sending her children to work, though the family’s sustenance, especially after one of the sons contracted tuberculosis, depended largely on Meta’s income. The school board, however, prohibited married women from teaching, a rule that evoked tears from Meta and her mother just before the wedding.1 The Bergers too had faced hardship. The advent of the railroad had decreased traffic to their inn and destroyed the family’s aristocratic lifestyle. Following Victor, they immigrated to America in the late 1870s, eventually settling in Bridgeport, Connecticut where, after a few years of struggle, they managed to reclaim their comfortable lifestyle. The devout Julia Berger, however, strongly opposed her son’s marriage, even going so far as to travel to Milwaukee to convince him to not marry outside of Judaism. The ceremony thus marked the confluence of two very different German-American families that had each survived numerous hardships. Memories of these struggles undoubtedly underlay the emotions of Meta, Victor, and their families, as each individual connected the day’s events to the broader history of his or her life. For Meta and Victor, these feelings were likely magnified as the wedding simultaneously capped a tumultuous and introspective engagement and heralded an uncertain and possibly difficult future. After a few refreshments, they left for their new home and new life, beginning what would become one of the most successful political relationships of the early twentieth century. The couple had met fifteen years prior, when Meta was nine and Victor 22. After her father’s death Meta found a surrogate father in Victor who came to the family’s rescue, helping it find enough income so that it could keep its home, eat, and still send Meta to school. While she was in high school, Meta enrolled in Victor’s German class and quickly became part of a privileged cohort of students invited to visit Victor’s house on the weekend for extra lessons in German literature. Around this time, Victor began his courtship of Meta by inviting her and her sisters to accompany him every week to the local German theater and music hall. Their courtship continued throughout Meta’s tenure in the Wisconsin State Normal School, until, following one evening’s trip to the theater, Victor proposed. “To say I was scared,” Meta later wrote, “was putting it mildly. He was thirteen years older than I was. He was so much wiser than I was. I was just a stupid, uninformed girl ready to graduate as a teacher in Milwaukee.”2 Though frightened and intimidated, she, madly in love with the man who had been her friend, teacher, and surrogate father since childhood, voiced a tentative yes and began a relationship that
1 Meta Berger, Kimberly Swanson, ed, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, Madison, Wisconsin: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 2001, 1-10. 2 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 7.
1 would initially erode her sense of identity, security, and confidence but ultimately propel her to become one of the most influential feminists and socialists in the United States. Even early in their courtship, the ways in which Victor expressed his personality and emotions severely undermined Meta’s security and confidence in the relationship. In August 1895, he sent her a letter in which he simultaneously tried to express his undying love, explain his faults, and warn her of the dangers she would encounter by marrying him. “There is an evil spirit lingering about me,” he wrote, “of which I only know, and whom I cannot master. Whenever I get enraged, my blood seems all to rush towards my head, and I (who otherwise can control my actions to an unusual extent,) lose control over myself entirely. During these fits of madness I am capable of committing murder, and while I hope and expect that such will never be the case, I on the other hand, fear that this fault of temper may end with insanity.”3 Not surprisingly, the accompanying words of love did nothing to assuage Meta’s fear of marrying a man who admitted to having severe difficulties controlling his rage. A day later Victor wrote Meta to apologize for his first letter and to explain his contradictory personality, or, to use his words, his “manhood”: Our V.L.B. is a well educated and unusually well read man. He is pretty conscientious, ambitious, and all that, but queer and unsociable to the extreme. You know the man, you have met him often. Although he styles himself a Socialist, he is proud and aristocratic. And since he is dissatisfied with the world and himself he is either saying nothing at all, or sharp and disagreeable things. The man has no friends, except probably his books. He is not practical a bit, and if it wasn’t for me (the other V.L.B. who writes this letter) he would have a hard time of it. The other V.L.B. you also know dear Meta. Say it yourself,—am I not always lighthearted, good natured, conceited and lovable? I will admit that I am extremely silly at times, that I am liable to take Annie Hartmann to the show, flirt with every pretty girl etc.—but you know that I sit on the porch until 1 o’clock A.M. with one girl only, --and that is the reason why I do not mind the Gewissenbisse [guilty conscience] of the other V.L.B. I am the fellow who has all the spunk; I went into business for myself. And while it is true that I am the V.L.B. who makes the debts, I am also the V.L.B. to pay them.4 He was, he claimed, proud, aristocratic, antisocial, angry, and intellectual yet lighthearted, good- natured, lovable, flirtatious, responsible, spunky, and even silly. He understood the negative qualities of both sides of his personality, especially his flirtatious tendencies, and he implored Meta to join him as his wife to help suppress them. Only her love, Victor claimed, could secure his manhood by helping him to control his emotional impulses. For unknown reasons, their engagement lasted two additional years during which Victor became increasingly active in national politics, participating in the Populist movement and establishing the Social Democracy of America Party, and Meta worked as a teacher in the Milwaukee schools. After those two introspective letters of August 1895, Meta and Victor’s relationship appears to have entered a more formal and less open stage, a stage that would last for the first decade and a half of their marriage. Victor became increasingly controlling, beginning the process of transforming Meta into his ideal wife. The elaborate professions of love so prominent in his early letters became increasingly scarce, replaced by suggestions, criticisms, and descriptions of his political activities. Several decades later, Meta recalled how unhappy she was during their courtship, suggesting that “if it were not for the relaxation we got from the theater, I wonder if we could have made a go of it.”5
3 Victor Berger to Meta Schlichting, 14 August 1895, Family Letters, 42-43. 4 Victor Berger to Meta Schlichting, 14 August 1895, Family Letters, 44-45. 5 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 7.
2 The theater, however, also provided Victor with an opportunity to practice what would become one of his main strategies for compelling Meta to change her personality: exploiting her fears. Despite his engagement to Meta, he continued to take her sister Hattie alone to the theater as often as he took Meta. In her autobiography, Meta recalled the confrontation that resulted when he told her he was going to take Hattie out yet again: I was stunned and for a while said nothing. Finally I told him that I would go with him that evening, or he need never take me again. He just smiled and we walked on. He had supper with us and finally at theater time he came to me and said, “If you insist then come!” Well! I went! That evening he acted sort of gay and joked quite a bit and finally told me that through the many months he was taking Hattie, he had waited for me to assert myself and now he was happy I had finally found the courage to do it. 6 For months, Victor deliberately exploited Meta’s fears of betrayal simply so he could transform her personality to that of a more satisfactory wife. Meta later rationalized Victor’s behavior by writing that “I guess I needed that experience for I began to feel that I too must assert myself and have confidence in myself” but, while she clearly appreciated with the outcome, her tone suggests that she resented his manipulative method.7 Victor’s willingness to engage in such manipulative practices simply so he could transform Meta into a more assertive spouse was only one of many methods he employed in the early years of their relationship to alter Meta’s personality to fit his image of the ideal wife. As his introspective comments suggest, Victor was also prone to violent expressions of anger and, while there is no evidence that he ever physically abused Meta, she was always conscious of the threat. He also consistently demeaned his wife, belittling her attempts to learn socialist doctrine, and constructing her as a passive subject. With these actions, Victor engaged in practices common to men experiencing what some scholars have termed a “crisis of masculinity” during the period. Like many men of the late nineteenth century, Victor understood the ongoing social and economic transformations as attacks on his ability to function as a proper man, an independent patriarch practicing self-control and moderation.8 To him, the “evil spirit” he so vividly described and his failure to maintain a steady income were proof of his lack of self- control and thus his inadequacy as a man. His plea to Meta to help him suppress his negative moods was thus a plea to help him practice self-control so as to better assert his manhood to himself and others. Sociologist Michael Kimmel writes in Manhood in America that, “where many could never attain the self-made manhood of success, middle-class masculinity pushed egotism to extremes of aggression, calculation, self-control, and unremitting effort.”9 Victor practiced all of these behaviors. In his personal relationships he was highly aggressive; his manipulative approach to his relationship with Meta indicates a calculating mind; his fears of insanity suggest an overemphasis on self-control; and his unrelenting advocacy of socialism—to the detriment of his relationship with Meta—suggests a commitment to unremitting effort. If Kimmel’s analysis of this type of masculinity is correct, then, despite his arrogance, Victor was fundamentally a deeply insecure man who needed repeated affirmations of his manliness to succeed. He achieved those affirmations both within his marriage to Meta and in the public acclimation he earned as the moderate leader of the Milwaukee Socialist Party and as a multiple-term congressman.
6 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 8. 7 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 8. 8 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). 9 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: a Cultural History, (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 45.
3 By the time they married in the winter of 1897, Victor and Meta’s relationship had developed into a complicated and hierarchical union characterized by mutual insecurity and subtle forms of subjugation and resistance. The hierarchical nature of their relationship replicated established marriage patterns common within both Europe and the United States. However, a combination of factors, most importantly Meta’s resistance to Victor’s projections of control, caused them to radically reconceptualize their relationship in the early 1910s and form what the feminist Alice Park later called, a “real partnership.”10 From then until Victor’s death in 1929, the two lived, loved, and campaigned together as equals, providing a model relationship for what scholars and activists of the 1920s like Judge Ben Lindsay would dub “companionate marriage.”11 The foundation of this new relationship was a shared recognition of each partner’s individuality and agency within the relationship. With this transformation, Meta and Victor formed a truly radical union that challenged the assumptions and structures that dominated male- female relationships in Europe and America during the late nineteenth century. In the decades following their marriage, Meta served five terms on the Milwaukee school board, led multiple statewide organizations, and participated in various progressive and socialist causes throughout the world while Victor co-founded the American Socialist Party, published multiple Party papers, and served four terms in the United States House of Representatives as the sole socialist representative. Both were central figures in Milwaukee’s branch of the Socialist Party, the most electorally successful Socialist political organization in the history of the United States. After Victor’s death in 1929, Meta continued her political activities, contemplating running for her husband’s vacated seat in Congress and serving as a member of the National Committee of the American Socialist Party before abandoning it for the Popular Front during the late 1930s. According to both Meta and Victor, few, if any, of these achievements would have been possible without the other’s assistance. Meta served as Victor’s primary consultant on his political campaigns, managed his household and public affairs, and, despite major setbacks, helped Victor reformulate his personality so that it was more conducive to political campaigning. Victor introduced Meta to politics, provided her with (sometimes meager) income, and, eventually, treated her as a full comrade in the socialist struggle. Meta and Victor were by no means ordinary citizens of turn-of-the-century America. Through their families and other connections they maintained steady access to credit and income, enabling them to finance a rather comfortable lifestyle. They owned multiple homes, sent their daughters to college, employed a maid, traveled the world, and hobnobbed with some of the world’s leading figures. They did, however, experience the same social patterns, discourses, and changes that other men and women of the period experienced, including the crisis of masculinity, the rise of feminism, the emergence of debates over “race suicide,” the successes and failures of the labor movement, and World War I and its accompanying persecution of socialists. All of these developments launched significant debates within the public discourses in which Meta and Victor participated. But though political campaigns, labor battles, committee meetings, and national conventions marked the most obvious points of disagreement and debate in the world of progressive era America, the day-to-day interactions of individuals were key points in an ongoing struggle over the power to define the terms upon which individuals and social groups could and should relate to each other. Debates over what it meant to be a man or a woman in the
10 Alice Park to Meta Berger, 8 September 1929, Victor Berger Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin (hereafter cited as VLB papers). 11 Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, (New Haven, Connecticut and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 156.
4 home were just as important as transformative experiences as debates in public arenas. Thus, while they were an atypical couple, Meta and Victor’s story can reveal important insights into how and why the ways in which people related to each other changed during the early twentieth century.
5 CHAPTER I Restoring White Manhood: Socialism and Aggression in the Politics and Personality of Victor Berger
In an article released amidst the heated political climate preceding America’s entrance into World War I, Victor Berger explained his understanding of the true meaning of “preparedness.” Denying that it bore any resemblance to pacifism, he wrote that “Docility and non-resistance will soon reduce any people or any class to the level of the Chinese or Hindus. Moreover, any man who is unwilling, or not ready, to fight for his wife or his daughters, does not deserve to have a wife or daughters. Any man who is unwilling to fight for his class or nation does not deserve to belong to a class or a nation.” He then described his vision for a proper preparedness campaign. “We want healthy and harmoniously educated men and women—able fathers and mothers—as a part of this preparedness. Thus preparedness must become a part of our early education by practicing calisthenics in our common schools and encouraging outdoor sports from childhood on, in order to produce healthy men and women….” He finished the essay with a description of his ideal type of education. “Every young man and young woman,” he wrote, “should be educated in handling modern tools on wood and iron. They should learn how to operate machinery and understand the make-up of an automobile, an aeroplane, or a machine gun…. Everybody should learn how to plant a tree, construct a road, or build a bridge. And everybody should also practice at the target during that time.” He added only one qualification to this seemingly gender-neutral program, that “Girls should also learn how to give aid and comfort to the sick and wounded.”12 Few passages offer scholars a more complex articulation of the ways in which ideas of race, class, nationality, and gender collectively underpinned socialist thinking during the early twentieth century. In the first part of the quotation, Victor grounded a gendered analysis of nationality and class in a fundamentally racist worldview that assumed the superiority of the white race over nonwhites. He implicitly argued that, because the Chinese and Hindus were docile and non-resistant, they were unhealthy and their men were undeserving of forming a family or joining a larger political organization, whether nation- or class-based. To prevent whites from losing their position atop the racial hierarchy, he continued, Americans had to remake their bodies and minds and prepare to fight for their wives, daughters, nation, and class. For Victor, class, nation, race, and gender were intimately linked so that protecting one meant protecting the others. In other words, a man’s worth as a member of a race, nation, or class depended on his ability to protect his wife and daughters. For him, as with other American men of the period, manhood had a particular social definition; it could not exist outside of social relations and was juxtaposed, in a way previous men would have found peculiar, not against boyhood, but against womanhood. Victor’s understanding of gender roles, however, was more complicated than the simple division between man and woman he articulated in the first part of the quotation. While he initially argued that a man’s responsibility was to protect his wife and daughters, he also called for young women and men to have the same kinds of education, including military training, with the caveat that women should learn additional skills, presumably because they would primarily serve as nurses in the upcoming war and only employ their military and industrial skills in an emergency. Victor’s uncertainty about the role of women in war exemplified a broader confusion over women’s role in society. Throughout his life, Victor remained uncertain of the proper role
12 Victor Berger, Voice and Pen, (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: The Milwaukee Leader, 1929), 628-629.
6 of women in society. His Austro-Hungarian family was explicitly matriarchal, giving him, at the most formative moments, evidence of the capabilities of women. In his own marriage, he all but forced Meta to become politically engaged and more assertive; in his relationships with his daughters, he pushed them to become successful and important women, arguing that Elsa, their second daughter, should become a doctor rather than a nurse.13 Victor’s confusion over the role of women dialectically related to his more intimate confusion over the role of men in society. As a man experiencing the socio-economic transformations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Victor lived through the “crisis of masculinity.”14 Though he did not think in those terms and never questioned that male bodies should wield power, Victor understood that the characteristics associated with male identity he learned as a young middle-class man in Europe and America—independence, political citizenship, control over the family, and service to the race—increasingly lacked a basis in reality, as capitalism, immigration, and women’s political participation undermined longstanding gender assumptions. In addition to enduring this crisis on both philosophical and political levels, Victor also experienced it on a very intimate level, as comrades consistently questioned his socialist manhood, his wife and mother challenged his performance as the family’s breadwinner, and he failed to control his emotions. Victor responded to this crisis in two interconnected ways. First, he advocated the collective ownership of the means of production as a way of restoring American manhood. Only by reclaiming ownership of the means of production—not of all personal property—he argued, could American men reclaim their manhood, save their families, and preserve their race. Second, he engaged in spectacular performances of his manly abilities. Like “The Iron King” Sigmund Breitbart, Harry Houdini, Theodore Roosevelt, and other men of the period, Victor consistently emphasized his manly traits. Though like those men he sought to reconstruct his body to better perform his manhood, he primarily focused on an aggressive display of mental prowess to demonstrate his power over women and less important men. In his public speeches and day-to-day relationships with comrades, Victor highlighted an exaggerated masculine personality that linked his powerful intellectual and physical capabilities with a messianic message of manly reclamation. Victor was only able to overcome his gender insecurities when, through a combination of these two tactics, he was able to succeed within the socially homogenous environment of the United States House of Representatives and achieve the acclaim of his male colleagues. Yet, Victor’s personality was not simply an outward projection of this aggressive and controlling form of masculinity. The ways in which ways he expressed his masculine identity did not ultimately challenge the older assumptions of how a middle-class German or Victorian man should function within the world that he learned in his youth. While he embraced the aggressive traits of modern masculinity, he did so in ways that also projected a nineteenth century middle-class ideal of manliness, which emphasized self-restraint and moderation.15 Ultimately, this convergence of manliness and masculinity was a source of both Victor’s political success and the contradictory ways in which individuals interpreted and responded to his
13 Kimberly Swanson, ed., in Introduction to A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, xxiii. 14 See for instance: Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; John Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: a Cultural History; Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920, (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2001). 15Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 18.
7 personality. Victor’s personality and his performance of identity reflected the contradictory discourses of manliness which he, often violently, attempted to meld during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of Victor’s comrades, including his wife and allies, viewed him as an egotistical and aggressive man committed to the pursuit of personal power over his comrades. Lincoln Steffens, in his Everybody’s interview with Eugene Debs, described Victor as “a most aggressive personality [who] took a most aggressive part in his pupil’s [Debs’s] interview.”16 Even one of Victor’s usual allies in the movement, Morris Hillquit, explained that Victor “was inclined to be self-assertive and domineering and utterly intolerant of dissenting views.”17 Known to erupt into violent outbursts and to attempt to exert total control over the lives of his wife and daughters, Victor appears in Meta’s autobiography as an abusive and controlling husband and father.18 In his daily interactions with other individuals—whether women or men—Victor projected a specific version of the kind of masculinity developing during the early twentieth a century, one which emphasized aggressiveness, physical and intellectual power, and intolerance for challenges to his manhood. But there was another prominent interpretation of Victor Berger’s personality, one that focused on his capabilities, gentility, paternal affection, and self-restraint. Just after Berger’s political machine won the 1910 municipal elections, Debs wrote to Milwaukee socialist Carl D. Thompson, “Like yourself, I appreciate all there is of ability and energy there is in Berger, all that merits good report in a true socialist—and Berger has his full share of all these qualities, and he is especially gifted with mental powers.”19 Similarly, Morris Hillquit’s quotation continued his letter with these words: “He was sublimely egotistic, but somehow his egotism did not smack of conceit and was not offensive. It was the expression of deep and naïve faith in himself, and this unshakeable faith was one of the mainsprings of his power over men.”20 Moreover, in Meta’s autobiography, she juxtaposed the picture of Victor the egotistical and abusive husband with an image of a loving and lovable husband and father. This sense of Victor’s positive attributes was magnified in condolence letters sent to Meta after Victor’s death. While these letters warrant a high level of suspicion, the type of language they employed can suggest how people of the period interpreted Victor’s personality. In his missive, Upton Sinclair described Victor as “a great man in public life and a kind and lovable one in private life.”21 A flyer included in the collection of condolence correspondence labels Victor Berger “The Mountaineer,” suggesting a high degree of physical ability or character.22 Finally, one anonymous socialist wrote that “You must know that entirely apart from his Socialist activity, his statesmanship, there was that sweet character that simply wrapped one and warmed one’s heart. Gene Debs was a prophet and an apostle and there was something almost aloof in his love. Victor Berger’s love for people was warm and mundane and human. He had all the greatness of a dear father. No wonder people who never met him grew moist eyed
16 Eugene V. Debs to Carl D. Thompson, 26 November 1910, in J. Robert Constantine, ed., Letters of Eugene V. Debs Volume 1, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 394n 17 Sally Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, 1910-1920, (London: Greenwood Press, 1973), 23. 18 Meta Berger, 4. Much more on this can be found in the following chapter. 19 EVD letter To Carl D. Thompson, November 26, 1910, 394. 20 Sally Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, 1910-1920, (London: Greenwood Press, 1973), 23. 21 Upton Sinlair to Meta Berger, 8 August 1929, VLB Papers. 22 Flyer in VLB Papers.
8 when they heard of his passing.”23 Collectively, these letters emphasized Victor’s intellectual and physical strength, courage, faithfulness, self-restraint, sincerity, and loving personality. In other words, they portrayed Victor as the paragon of the Victorian male, a powerful yet restrained paternal figure with a high degree of moral character. Victor’s comrades therefore interpreted him in multiple and contradictory ways: to them he was, at different times, a modern man of aggression and a Victorian man of self-control, a man of violent spectacle and a man of lovable sincerity. These contradictory interpretations of Victor resulted from his performances of two distinct types of manhood that dominated the period. The first discourse, which historian Gail Bederman has identified as the Victorian manly ideal but is more appropriately associated here with the German Turnverein movement—a transatlantic German intellectual and athletic club—stressed strength, independence, bravery, honor, self-control and sexual propriety while the second discourse, which Bederman has associated with modern masculinity, stressed aggressiveness, physical force, and sexual potency.24 The common factor present in both of these discourses, as Bederman makes clear, was the assumption that a white male body corresponded to social and political power. The difference between them lay in how power was created, maintained, and proven in a social context. Judith Butler’s work on gender performance in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity is particularly important to the study of Victor’s personality. Butler defines gender as “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.”25 Gender, for her, is the forced performance of actions producing a fictive conception of the stable self. Thus, gender is not a preexisting identity that compels individuals to act in specific ways but the actions that create that sense of identity. Gender, she writes, “is not a noun but neither is it a set of free floating attributes, for we have seen that the substantive effect of gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence. Hence, within the inherited discourse…gender proves to be performative—that is constituting the identity it is purported to be.” She continues this analysis with a discussion of the relationship between gender and identity: “In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed. . . . There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.”26 The central argument here is that performance creates the self; the self does not create performance. Like gender and identity, personality—the unique emotional, behavioral, and mental characteristics that publicly construct a person as an individual—is often presumed to be a stable characteristic. For instance, in a later letter to Thompson, Debs remarked, “That Berger at heart is a towering egotist and that he has a mania for personal power purely for the sake of power is too flagrantly apparent to admit of doubt, and they who cannot see it are totally blind.”27 Here Debs assumed that Victor’s personality had an essential trait, egotism, and an essential goal, personal power, both traits of the aggressive masculinity dominant during the early twentieth
23 William M. to Meta Berger, 8 August 1929, VLB Papers. 24 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 18. 25 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (New York: Routledge, 1999), 33. 26 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 25. 27 EVD letter to Carl D. Thompson, in J. Robert Constantine, ed., Letters of Eugene V. Debs Volume 1, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 397.
9 century. Victor also understood his quest for personal power as a natural personality trait, describing it to Meta as a “native ambition to be one of the foremost of whatever crowd I may be in and wherever I may be.”28 Neither Debs nor Victor saw ambiguities or contradictions in Victor’s personality; both understood that it contained an unchanging essential trait that was consequently expressed in his behavior. If Butler’s ideas of gender and identity are applied to the study of Victor’s personality, a vastly different understanding emerges. Expressions of personality become, like gender, performative, establishing the identity they appear to reflect. In acting as an ideal Victorian man and as an aggressive, dominating man, Victor constructed his own identity within the confines of the discourses Bederman identifies. This does not mean that Victor lacked agency. As Butler argues, the contradictions inherent in the multiplicity of discourses give individuals the opportunity to manipulate regulated norms in ways that challenge entrenched power. 29 Agency, therefore, is not outside of discourse; it is entirely within it and produced by it. In advocating socialism as a means to restore American manhood, Victor actively worked to reformulate the concept of manhood to accommodate a personality based on exaggerated performances of masculine traits. This process of restoration and reformulation was a source of both Victor’s success as a socialist candidate and his often contradictory treatments of his comrades, including his wife and daughters. Victor’s historical agency lies in the ways in which he reconstituted dominant discourses of race, class, and gender to form an oppositional identity and ideology committed to the overthrow of capitalism. Many scholars have written on the “crisis of masculinity” expressed within male public performances during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, finding in athletic events, medical discourse, novels, articles, and other cultural texts signs of men who believed that the rapid changes of the period undermined both their power and manhood. John F. Kasson, for instance, in Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity, argues that during the early twentieth century, Harry Houdini, Tarzan, and Eugene Sandow “reasserted the primacy of the white male body against a host of challenges that might weaken, confine, or tame it…. They repeatedly dramatized the transformation from weakness to supreme strength, from vulnerability to triumph, from anonymity to heroism, from the confinement of modern life to the recovery of freedom.”30 Kasson cites multiple causes for this crisis, including generational distance from the Civil War, new patterns of immigration, the passing of the frontier, urbanization, fears of medical problems that could cause weakness, increasing participation of women in the political sphere, and, above all, the expansion of corporate power and its accompanying concentration of wealth which undermined traditional Jeffersonian notions of the independent man. As Kasson writes, “fundamental to traditional conceptions of American manhood had been autonomy and independence, which had to be recast in a tightly integrated economy of national and international markets.”31 These related issues, Kasson argues, specifically challenged the power of white, middle-class males within American society by questioning their physical and mental authority within both their homes and the political arena. In Manliness and Civilization, Gail Bederman takes a more nuanced approach to the “crisis of masculinity,” arguing that “Middle-class men were unusually obsessed with manhood
28 Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 19 April 1914, Family Letters,, 157. 29 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity , 25. 30 John Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man, 8. 31 John Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man, 11.
10 at the turn of the century; yet I would hesitate to call this obsession a ‘crisis.’ For one thing, there is no evidence that most turn-of-the-century men ever lost confidence in the belief that people with male bodies naturally possessed both a man’s identity and a man’s right to wield power. They might not have been entirely certain how these three factors were related, but few seem to have lost confidence that they were related.”32 Instead of experiencing a “crisis of masculinity,” Bederman finds that men simply remade their conception of manhood to conform with new realities. Like Kasson, Bederman focuses on economic and class issues in explaining this change. “Middle-class manliness,” she writes, “had been created in the context of a small-scale, competitive capitalism which had all but disappeared by 1910.” The disappearance of this form of capitalism, she argues, led middle-class white men to search for “new ways to explain the sources and nature of male power and authority. Middle-class men were not only flocking to entertainments which had been associated with rough working-class men, like prizefighting; they were also joining male-only situations like the Freemasons, working to masculinize high schools by recruiting male teachers, ridiculing women’s suffrage and coeducation, and even changing the very language associated with manhood with new words like ‘sissy’ and ‘masculinity.’” Bederman’s contribution to this argument is her emphasis on the ways in which “women and men worked to re-define manhood in terms of racial dominance, especially in terms of ‘civilization.’”33 When historians of masculinity during the early twentieth century focus on economic transformations as the source of a change in conceptions of manhood, they echo the thoughts of early twentieth century socialists, particularly Victor, who explicitly blamed industrial capitalism for the decline of manliness. In contrast to the men studied by Bederman, Victor did experience a crisis of masculinity, though not in the same way that historians have commonly thought of it. He never questioned whether “people with male bodies naturally possessed both a man’s identity and a man’s right to wield power” but he did understand that the economic transformations of the late nineteenth century made it impossible for men to reach the manly ideal. For Victor this was the period’s essential crisis, one that required, for the benefit of the individual man and white civilization, a revolutionary change in the ways in which society organized production. Raised in a culture that stressed a manly ideal but unable, for much of his life, to ever achieve it, he turned to socialism as a means to prove his manhood to his family, his fellow citizens, and the world. Born in 1860 to a conservative petit bourgeoisie family in the ethnic German regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Victor attended numerous gymnasiums and universities in Vienna and Budapest before he and his parents, their financial situation rapidly deteriorating, immigrated to Connecticut in 1878. Victor quickly traveled westward, working in many different industries and learning English, until he settled in Milwaukee to teach German in the public school system run by Meta’s father. His reputation rapidly escalated in Milwaukee’s large German community and he soon became a leader in the local Turnverein, a working and middle-class gymnasium which contained many radical political refugees who left Germany following the failed 1848-49 revolution. Growing even further from his conservative roots, Victor joined the Knights of Labor and later the Socialist Labor Party, though he soon abandoned the latter organization because he (ironically) disagreed with Daniel De Leon’s doctrinaire leadership. Soon thereafter, Victor invested his entire savings from teaching and secured multiple loans towards the purchase of a Milwaukee daily. He renamed the paper the Wisconsin Vorwaerts, became its editor and
32 Gail Bederman, 11. 33 Gail Bederman, 19-20.
11 publisher, and moved the paper to a decidedly pro-labor and socialist direction. For the rest of his life, Victor remained in this profession, eventually replacing the Vorwaerts with the English- language Social Democratic Herald in 1901 and with The Milwaukee Leader in 1913. As an editor and publisher, Victor joined a typographical union and usually was its delegate to the national convention of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Throughout this portion of his career, though editing a radical paper rarely brought income security—the papers were never profitable—Victor was able to finance a middle-class lifestyle, employing a maid and purchasing a summer home for Meta and their daughters. Victor also became a central figure in both national and Milwaukee politics, running a local political machine for the Socialist Party, serving on the Party’s executive board, and winning multiple elections to Congress, a position that paid approximately $7,500 per year by his final year in office.34 This upbringing and professional history gave Victor a lifestyle and social position different from most members of the working class. Though he never finished his university degree, he had a substantial formal physical and mental education, two homes, a maid, a steady access to income and credit, his own businesses, and friendships with many of the most powerful figures in local and national politics. Additionally, his peer group, both within the Socialist Party and Congress, was dominated by white middle- and upper-class men, particularly professionals. Finally, Victor’s values and cultural activities, primarily participating in the local Turnverein and attending German operas and theater, closely paralleled those of middle-class German and Victorian men, not members of the working class. Yet he primarily identified himself with working men, seeing himself as their sole representative in Congress.35 Additionally, until the last decade of his life, Victor faced many complaints about his failure to provide a sufficient income to his family. For instance, in a letter to Meta, he described one meeting with his mother: “Mother admonishes me day and night to take good care of you and to get some wealth for you and the children. She does not advise me to drop the paper suddenly, but she wants me to slowly work into some other business—real-estate preferred. And as is usual with people of her age and her business—she hates socialism and socialists. I have to be rather meek, in order not to excite her.”36 These and similar complaints from Meta challenged both Victor’s position in the middle class and his manhood. Eventually he would accommodate these criticisms, becoming an insurance salesman to supplement his Party and publishing income. Victor was always conscious of the ambiguity of his class position, if only because his opponents consistently tried to use it against him. For instance, Debs occasionally referred to Victor as an “aristocrat,” therefore critiquing both Victor’s class position and, because of the over-civilized connotations of the word, his gender.37 Victor escaped this ambiguous class position with a gendered critique of capitalism that emphasized its failure to secure the freedom of all men save for the most successful capitalists. Since Victor believed that his own life had been so thoroughly determined by market capitalism, this critique allowed him to connect his personal struggle for economic security to the struggle of the proletariat. In a 1905 editorial, Victor approvingly quoted a capitalist who said that “liberty is the right of an American to do as he d— pleases….This is the ideal of American manhood.”38 Proceeding to question the
34For full biographies of Victor Berger see: Sally Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, 1910-1920 and Edward John Muzik, Victor L. Berger: A Biography, Ph.D. Thesis, Northwestern University, 1960. 35 Victor Berger, Voice and Pen, 91. 36 Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 23 January 1900, Family Letters, 56. Emphasis in original. 37 Eugene V. Debs to Carl D. Thompson, 29 November 1910, in J. Robert Constantine, ed., Letters of Eugene V. Debs Volume 1, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 397. 38 Victor Berger, Voice and Pen, 712
12 applicability of this analysis to the majority of America’s men, Victor wrote that “A man is not free who is dependent upon another for a job—for a chance to make a livelihood. Under the present economic system with its unbridled competition, only the successful are free. Only the successful can throw off the shackles of industrial slavery—and with this liberty they often become libertines, in every sense of the word….”39 In this passage, Victor made two related criticisms of capitalism. First, he argued that it prevented the majority of America’s men from achieving the freedom they needed to achieve the manly ideal. Second, he argued that it enabled a small portion of American men to live as “libertines.” As a congressional representative in 1926, Victor elaborated his analysis with a prediction of America’s future: “Within a short time…we will have two nations in this country, both of native growth. One will be very large in number, semi-civilized, half starved, and degenerated through misery; the other will be small in number, over-fed, over-civilized, and degenerated through luxury.40 According to Victor’s logic, self-reliance was impossible for the vast majority of individuals under a capitalist mode of production because it prevented the workingman from owning property. Under Victor’s analysis, few were free. Businessmen, farmers, professionals, wageworkers, and the unemployed were all incapable of behaving as manly men because they were not free from the constraints of the market. Even businessmen, he claimed, were forced by competition to behave in an immoral fashion, thus preventing them from acting as ideal Victorian men should.41 By invoking the “libertine” and by emphasizing over-civilization and moral degeneration, Victor linked industrial capitalism to one of the most powerful critiques of turn-of-the century manhood, one that argued that the luxuries of an urban lifestyle had over- civilized men and thereby threatened the future of the race.42 With this understanding of the crisis of masculinity, Victor looked to a radical transformation of the means of production, while other men of the period primarily looked to nature, war, adventure novels, and other activities to restore white manhood. Just as fundamental to Victor’s understanding of the crisis of masculinity was the idea of race. In the same 1926 speech, Victor linked the plight of the proletariat class and the moral degeneracy of American society to a discourse of race. “All human worth is estimated in terms of wealth—in dollars and cents,” he declared. “Things cannot go on like this indefinitely. White men will not always stand for it. We are by our present circumstances and their consequences creating a race of ‘white people’ in our midst, compared with which the Vandals of the fourth century were humane beings.”43 Throughout his career, Victor feared for the future of the “white race” and civilization. He based his entire understanding and justification of socialism was on the argument that the white race needed to advance to a new mode of production to avoid decaying, constantly referring to socialism as the next phase of “civilization.” For instance, when discussing the relative absence of a powerful socialist movement from the United States, he once asked “Can America alone escape the world-wide movement of the white race?”44 For Victor, the crisis of masculinity and the crisis of capitalism were, thus, also crises of race. The most racialized debate in the history of the Socialist Party occurred during the 1908 national convention, when the delegates attempted to formulate a policy on Chinese immigration.
39Victor Berger, Voice and Pen, 713. 40Victor Berger, Voice and Pen, 211 41Victor Berger, Voice and Pen, 211. 42 Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 5. 43 Victor Berger, Voice and Pen, 211 44 Victor Berger, Voice and Pen, 602.
13 Victor’s arguments in this debate are worth quoting at length:
China could send over about two million coolies every year and not feel it. They could send over here five million every year if our capitalists should want them, and China would not miss them. But we would feel it. If you permit them to come over here just for fifteen years at two million a year, you will wipe out our civilization simply by their lower standard of living, by their power to live on a great deal less than you can. There would be a quiet war, but a most terrible war, waged against us—a war of extermination, on economic lines. The white race could not propagate, could not exist in a competition of that kind with the yellow race. I want to consider this simply from a working class standpoint, and no other. We are willing to help the Japs in every way; we are willing to help the Chinese in every way. By pulling us down to their level they do not help themselves in any way, but they make us miserable. Your first duty, comrades, is to your class and to your family. Because your neighbor’s house is burning, shall you set your own house on fire? No, say I. Defend your own house and then help your neighbor; that is the way. 45 This is an explicitly racist argument, assuming that Asians are naturally at a lower level of civilization and that their immigration to the United States would necessarily eliminate the white race. On one level, this is simply an echo of the “race suicide” argument common among the writings of many prominent intellectuals of the period, including Theodore Roosevelt and Edward A. Ross. In Manliness and Civilization, Gail Bederman explains the links between race and manhood in Roosevelt’s argument, finding that they explicitly linked the virility of American men to immigration of races with lower standards of living.46 Victor’s argument relied on the same connections by explaining how men would be unable to provide for their families if the Chinese were allowed to immigrate into the United States. Another delegate, whose views Victor directly endorsed, made the links between race, gender, and class explicit, arguing that “On the question of immigration…there are biological reasons as well as sociological and economic ones to be considered upon this matter. There has never been a mixture and amalgamation of races that did not end disastrously for those amalgamated. And I want to say to you that it is capitalism that fosters and creates conditions of that kind.” Later in the debate, the delegate continued his comments: “I know that if you want to emasculate the labor movement in the west, just stand for the immigration of all the people from the Orient, if you please, and you will do it, and you will satisfy the capitalist masters of the Union.”47 In this quotation, the delegate, apparently with the support of Victor, directly connected Chinese immigration to emasculation and race suicide. Chinese immigration, he argued, hurt the white race because it hurt the workingman, preventing him from protecting his family. Socialist support for Chinese exclusion therefore linked Roosevelt and Ross’s arguments against race suicide to a discourse of class and gender that established the workingman as the essential component of civilization. The future of the white race, Victor and his supporters implicitly argued, depended on the future of the white workingman, making the exclusion of Chinese workers essential for race preservation. The final social change that challenged Victor sense of manhood was the increased political participation of unsupervised women in the public sphere. Following the Civil War, an increasing number of women left the home to claim membership in the public sphere. By 1920 women constituted almost half of all enrolled college students. Women also increasingly worked
45 Socialist Party, Proceedings of the National Convention of the Socialist Party, (Chicago: M.A. Donohue & Co., 1908), 111. 46Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization , 200-206. 47Socialist Party, Proceedings of the National Convention , 1908, 113
14 outside the home, accounting for approximately 25 percent of all workers by 1910.48 Throughout the period, women also increasingly demanded legal, political, social, and personal equality, beginning with the woman movement of the nineteenth century that focused on suffrage and continuing with the feminist movement that historian Nancy Cott argues began around 1910.49 Within his own home, Victor personally experienced this change in gender relations as, contrary to his initial wishes, Meta became a prominent politician whose electoral success often exceeded his own.50 Scholars of masculinity have tended to focus on two responses to this movement. On the one hand, scholars like Kasson and Bederman identify men who saw in women’s increasing public participation a feminization of society, and therefore reacted by emphasizing their manly characteristics. Sociologist Michael Kimmel, however, identifies another male response to feminism, one decidedly in favor of women’s equality and associated with radicals like Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, and William Sanger.51 Reflecting his confusion over the role of women in society, Victor’s understanding of women’s role in society engaged with both of these discourses. He never abandoned his conception of women as primarily subservient; however, the pro-suffrage policies of the Second International, his friendships with many feminists, his wife’s political success, and his desires for his daughters’ success consistently challenged these notions, forcing him to continually reconceptualize women’s role in society. In the abstract, Victor supported women’s equality. In Congress, he introduced a woman’s suffrage bill and fought for legislation for working women, including old age pensions. As a member of the AFL, he encouraged Samuel Gompers to start organizing women. His support of women’s issues undoubtedly arose because many of his idols in the global movement, including August Bebel and the Second International, called for women’s political emancipation. Victor also had many relationships, a few of them likely sexual, with prominent feminists. In addition to Meta, Victor apparently had a relationship with the suffragist and feminist lawyer Inez Millholland so close that he had to promise Meta that he would not see her on one of his trips to New York.52 Additionally, his daughters both grew up to be feminists and prominent professionals. Doris Berger eventually earned both Master’s and Law degrees, while Elsa became a doctor who studied medicine in Vienna. Victor’s mother, who dominated his life until he moved to the United States, was, by all accounts, a very strong matriarch who made most of the family’s decisions. Victor thus had many personal incentives to adopt a more gender-neutral position; indeed, he may have even believed that he supported equality for women. But his day- to-day interactions with individual women suggest otherwise. Though Victor always expressed his support for women’s suffrage, he consistently demeaned women’s participation in politics. In the 1910 election for the Socialist Party’s national executive committee, Victor supported the candidacies of Hillquit, Robert Hunter, John Spargo, George Goebel, and James Carey. The one individual whose position he did not support was Lena Morrow Lewis, whom he thought was “absolutely unqualified for the position in every respect” but never elaborated why she was unqualified.53 In 1916, he implicitly dismissed Meta’s participation in the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association as less valid than his participation in
48 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: a Cultural History, 86. 49 Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 13. 50 Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 19 April 1913, Family Letters, 157. While Victor desired his wife to become politically informed, he did not initially want her to participate in politics. 51 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: a Cultural History, 86. 52 Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 8 May 1914, Family Letters, 172-173n, 9. 53 Edward John Muzik, Victor L. Berger: A Biography, 195.
15 the Socialist movement with the insulting comment: “The meeting of your national council has been postponed until September. If you want to go—I may find it possible to arrange it that you make the trip. But so long as they propose to make ‘voiceless speeches’ at fairs, your movement will stay in the freak class.”54 Just a few months before his 1929 death, Victor wrote Meta that the House of Representatives “is getting to be a sort of a ‘Witten-Sitz’ [home for widows] for the wives of deceased members. . . . If this continues much longer, we shall have to appoint sets of bridge-tables, instead of committees. Our parliamentarianism is even more of a joke than our democracy.”55 With such public and private comments, Victor openly mocked women’s participation in politics, suggesting that they had no place participating in a political struggle if they would not conform to his ideas of political participation. His words also suggest a strong belief in women’s inherent domesticity and subservience to men. Given such views, the increasing numbers of women participating in politics, especially within his household, undoubtedly challenged Victor’s sense of manhood. The women he addressed in the above quotations all challenged Victor’s authority in the abstract; they did not directly challenge his power. One 1911 incident, however, illustrates the ways in which Victor responded to a direct female challenge to his authority. For almost a decade, Victor had employed a personal assistant named Elizabeth Thomas who also worked on his various newspapers, apparently in a position of power over other men (including Carl Sandburg). In the midst of a heated congressional campaign, she, contrary to Victor’s orders “forced” another editor to print an editorial that attacked his opponent and his “millionaire wife.” When Victor asked her about it, she responded by claiming that he had forfeited his leadership of the paper and committed treason against her and the Milwaukee socialist movement. In a letter to Meta, Victor summarized his response: “Miss Thomas made me fearfully angry and I gave her a calling down like I never gave to any woman in my life…. I thought the woman was insane. I told her there was nothing I could commit treason to, except the fifth congressional district,--that was the most important thing in Milwaukee movement, because the rest had no brains and did not make good, and that included her. And I told her that if she ever interfere[d] in my editorial policy again, she would have to go.”56 Like the women mentioned above, Thomas challenged Victor’s power by presenting an alternative means of political participation and challenged his authority within the broader movement by calling him a traitor. For Victor, a man known for his violent fits, to say that he “gave her a calling down like I never gave to any woman in my life,” says a great deal about how he treated direct challenges to his authority by a woman. Victor ultimately experienced the crisis of masculinity as four separate but related crises. First, he felt it as an economic crisis that undermined the ability of workingmen to independently provide for their families and thus reach the Victorian and democratic manly ideal of self- reliance. Second, he experienced it as a crisis of class, as the division between proletariats and capitalists created two kinds of men, a vast majority of powerless and dependent workers and a small number of over-civilized moral degenerates, none of whom could reach the Victorian manly ideal. Third, he experienced it as a crisis of race, as new immigrants from Asia threatened the abilities of white men to earn a sufficient living and propagate the race. Finally, he experienced it as a crisis of gender relations, as women’s participation in the public sphere challenged his assumptions of women’s innate domesticity and helplessness. In each of these
54 Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 14 July 1916, Family Letters, 197. 55Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 10 January 10 1929, Family Letters, 405-406. 56 Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 23 July 1911, Family Letters, 135.
16 crises, Victor’s experiences paralleled those of other men of his era, though his socialist ideology led him to vastly different conclusions of their meanings. Like other men, he retained the assumption that a white male body should correspond to power while the non-white or female body should correspond to subservience. The central problem for Victor, however, was that by the early twentieth century, it increasingly looked like this was impossible, as the plight of the workingman and the increasing participation of incompetent women in the public sphere threatened the future of the entire race. Men during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries responded to these crises of masculinity in a variety of ways. Some looked to improvements in body image. Others, following Roosevelt, looked to a revival of the “strenuous life” and advocated occasional returns to nature for men, but especially for boys. Still others joined social groups for men or opposed the increasingly feminization of the public sphere.57 Victor engaged in all of these activities, but he primarily responded to the crises in two related ways. First, he vigorously and continually demanded the evolution of society to a socialistic, not a communistic, mode of production. Second, he developed a personality that highlighted his manly traits, particularly his intellectual and physical capabilities and power over others. These two responses to the crisis of masculinity united in his public speeches, performances which simultaneously asserted his modern masculinity while promising a revival of older ideals of manliness. Victor saw socialism as the solution to the crisis of masculinity for two primary reasons. First, as the above analysis has shown, he thought it would enable all men to maintain their independence and fulfill their roles as breadwinners and patriarchs for their families. Second, he thought a transition to socialism, more than any other cultural or social development, would propel men into a true brotherhood. In addition to stressing capitalism’s role in destroying individual liberty, Victor focused on its demand for competition among men. In his public speeches, Victor blamed capitalism for requiring competition among small businessmen and workers, causing them to not only lack income security, but also treat each other immorally. Socialism, he once wrote, goes “beyond ALL religions as practiced today in its brotherly love, its doctrine of duty, its truly human morals”58 Thus, Victor opposed capitalism because of its reliance on competition, as anathema to the brotherhood of men, and supported socialism because of its power to restore the manliness of individuals. Because Victor retained a view of manhood which called for independence and self- reliance, he did not advocate social ownership of property. Indeed, Victor often more strongly denounced communism than he did capitalism, especially following the Russian Revolution. As early as 1907 Victor wrote an editorial in which he contrasted a communist form of economic organization to a socialist one. “Collectivism is not a negation of property,” he wrote, “nor is Socialism. Socialism simply demands the collective ownership of the means of production and distribution. We will produce in common, but the consumption will remain individual…. A Socialist Commonwealth will not do away with the individual ownership of property, but only with the individual ownership of capital.” He then linked socialism and communism to the discourse of civilization. “Communism would be a step backward,” he wrote, “a retrogression to a very primitive and low stage of human society. Social-Democracy will mean a step forward toward a higher civilization than history has ever known.”59 The advancement of civilization— the continuance of the white race—he argued, necessitated that capital, not property, be
57 See for instance: Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: a Cultural History, 81-190. 58 Edward John Muzik, Victor L. Berger, 3. 59 Victor Berger, Voice and Pen, 745-749.
17 democratically controlled. With this argument, Berger countered the common misperception that socialism would appropriate all property and thereby, given the dominant conceptions of manhood, deny men the right to self-reliance. Thus, Berger implicitly argued that while both communism and capitalism would emasculate men, socialism would allow them to restore their manhood. Victor combined this message of the redemptive powers of socialism with heightened performances of his power over women and men. These performances simultaneously constructed him as a powerful, virile, intelligent, and dominating masculine figure and thereby allowed him to prove his manhood in an era when manliness was increasingly untenable. The key point of Victor’s gender performance was its emphasis on both the body and the mind. Most scholars of masculinity focus entirely upon the physical body as a site of masculine performance. For instance, Kasson, Bederman, Elliott Gorn and others all discuss masculinity in relation to the body and sports culture, particularly boxing and body-building.60 They see the physical body as the primary site on which men simultaneously demonstrated and constructed their identities as racialized men. Victor certainly participated within this discourse, but to it he added a performance of his rational capabilities that demonstrated his prowess as an intellectual. For much of his political career, Victor projected a physical body which relied on two interconnected expressions of male power, one from the early twentieth century that linked the male body to strength and vigor and one based in Victorian paternalism that emphasized gentility and self-restraint. When Victor was first elected to Congress in 1910, The New York Times described one of Victor’s local performances of a political speech: “Berger is a tall, broad- chested man, with great brawny arms, which he uses for vivid gesture. His ruddy, beardless face lighted up with enthusiasm and his deep voice boomed across the hall, as he hurled the message of future victories at his eager listeners.”61 John Spargo, one of Victor’s allies within the Party, wrote at the same time that “Berger is fifty. His hair is gray and thinner than it was, but that is the only sign of departed youth about him. His healthy, pink cheeks, his eyes radiant with gladness, and the quick eager movement of his body bear witness to the youthfulness of his spirit. The boy still lives in the man.”62 In the speech recounted by the Times, Victor projected a kind of Rooseveltian body type that emphasized strength, youth, and vigor. In the speech documented by Spargo, however, he added a kindness and personable quality that showed him as a benevolent patriarch. Spargo’s comments in particular highlighted Victor’s embrace of the transition from manliness to masculinity. As Bederman, shows, manliness, unlike masculinity, was juxtaposed not against femininity but against boyhood.63 Explicitly in Spargo’s comments but also in those of The New York Times, man and boy were present in the same body, suggesting that the contrast between man and boy were less important than the contrast between male and female. Photographs of Victor and his personal comments also show his simultaneous concern for a powerful yet restrained body. In staged photographs, he simultaneously looked approachable and intimidating, with a wise and restrained disposition but an intensity that suggested the power behind his amicable façade. He bore an uncanny resemblance to President Theodore Roosevelt, with a similar body type—stocky and powerful but not overly defined like the boxers and body builders of the era—mustache, and disposition, suggesting the projection of a similar type of
60 Elliot Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. 61 “To Win Wisconsin Now Socialist Aim,” New York Times, 2 June 1910, 9. 62John Spargo, “The First Socialist Congressman,” The Survey, November 1910. 63 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 18.
18 personality.64 Throughout his life, Victor periodically questioned his physical body, often trying to lose weight by going on extreme diets, participating in sweat baths, and attending local sanitariums and athletic clubs. In trying to reconstruct his body, Victor engaged with the same discourse of the male body in which Roosevelt participated. Like Roosevelt and the men documented by Kasson, he attempted to reform his body both for health reasons and to alter the ways in which people interpreted his identity.65 In trying to prove his masculine identity and his inherent power within society, he simultaneously projected his strength and vigor and his paternal gentility and self-restraint. This moderate form of vigorous manhood resulted from Victor’s participation in the exclusively male world of the South Side Turn, the local branch of the transnational German intellectual, athletic, and social Turnverein movement, throughout his life in Milwaukee. According to Berit Elisabeth Dencker, a historian of German masculinity, “In the period between the Revolution of 1848-49 and unification in 1871, gymnastics practices became increasingly geared towards the bodily expression of rationality, moderation, self-restraint, and self- discipline. The gymnasts’ civilized masculine ideal included the privileging of reason and rationality over physicality and emotions. The ideal man was increasingly a man of measure and moderation in emotion and gesture, with neither the crudeness of the manual worker nor the affectation of the aristocrat. Increasingly, the body was to demonstrate self-control rather than produce spectacular displays.”66 With this display of self-control and rationality, Dencker argues, German middle-class men were “able to claim the right to participate in the public sphere” and differentiate themselves from the emotional revolutionaries of 1848-49.67 Dencker’s definition of the ideal German man is strikingly similar to Bederman’s description of the ideal Victorian man. Little evidence remains of the specific activities of the Milwaukee Turnverein but, given the large numbers of post-1948 German immigrants in the city and Victor’s participation in the German gymnasiums during the 1860s and 1870s and subsequent leadership of the Milwaukee branch, it seems likely that it maintained similar practices. This sense of the male body was also present in the sports pages of The Milwaukee Leader, Victor’s paper, which transmitted the themes of masculinity in both German and American culture to Socialist readers throughout the country but particularly within Victor’s growing political machine. The most successful Socialist Party daily newspaper, The Leader averaged a reported circulation of 31,874 during its first month and, by 1912, a circulation of 45,540 in a city of about 375,000, only about 20,000 of whom were union members.68 The sports pages presented to these readers accounts of baseball, bowling, and other sports, but particularly boxing. Throughout the 1910s, The Leader, like most newspapers, published partially nude photographs of prominent local and national boxers. In contrast to the body builders and prize fighters discussed by John Kasson, these boxers lacked the element of spectacle associated with an extremely muscular or large nude bodies.69 Kasson concludes that the extreme muscularity of the strong man Eugene Sandow and popular boxers like John L. Sullivan emphasized “the
64 See Figure 1 for example. 65 John Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 4. 66 Berit Elisabeth Dencker, “Class and the Construction of the 19th Century German Male Body,” The Journal of Historical Sociology 15 (2), 220-251, 232. 67 Berit Elisabeth Dencker “Class and the Construction of the 19th Century German Male Body,” 226, 237. 68 Elmer A. Beck, Autopsy of a Labor Daily: The Milwaukee Leader, (Lexington, Kentucky: Association for Education in Journalism, 1970), 39. 69 For instance, see “Coulon Staging Comeback,” 18 July 1914, The Milwaukee Leader.
19 potential for strength, control, heroism, and virility in the male physique.”70 While the bodies of the boxers depicted in The Leader emphasized these traits, they also emphasized balance and moderation. Certainly their muscles were developed but they lacked the spectacle of a hugely muscular Sandow or Sullivan.71 As in the German gymnast movement, this cultural concern with balance and moderation was reflected in Victor’s understanding of political participation. In 1906, he wrote—likely in response to Eugene Debs’s inflammatory “Arouse Ye Slaves” and similar calls for violence— that “As modern men and true democrats, we have a somewhat less romantic and boyish idea of the development of human beings and social systems [than violent revolutionaries]. And we know that one can kill tyrants and scare individuals with dynamite and bullets, but one cannot develop a system in that way.”72 In this passage, Victor emphasizes the romanticism of violence and contrasts it to a modern masculine and democratic form of political participation. He constructs the passage into manhood as the process of learning to refrain from emotional and violent political actions in favor of moderate intellectual activities. Thus, as in the photographs of boxers printed in his newspaper, Victor emphasized that men were defined by a commitment to moderation and balance, not emotion and violence, a German middle-class and Victorian conception of manliness. As Victor’s calls for an end to emotional responses suggest, the mind was just as important a site in which masculinity was contested as the body. If men had to adjust to changes in socio-economic structures by proving the superiority of the male body, they also had to prove the superiority of the male mind. Many scholars have written on the links throughout American history between intellectualism and effeminacy because of its association with over- civilization.73 Victor’s performance of manhood complicates this story. Victor primarily identified himself as “the brains” of the Socialist Party.74 Throughout his life, he gave much more attention to the cultivation of his mind than the cultivation of his body. As a man struggling through the crisis of masculinity, he needed to reconcile his identity as an intellectual with his identity as a man. He did so by vigorously and aggressively expressing his mental capabilities and intellectually demeaning other comrades, including close friends and Meta. In the process of doing this, though, Victor contradicted his expressions of self-restraint and moderation, only further increasing his alienation from the manly ideals of the nineteenth century. Victor was not alone in this intellectual expression of masculinity. Theodore Roosevelt, the quintessential example in almost all works on masculinity during this period, was not just an archetype of the “strenuous life” but also an accomplished writer whose books sold incredibly well during the period. Could Roosevelt’s physicality have been linked with his intellectualism? The New York Times certainly thought so, noting in 1902 that, “He makes his books in the same way in which he performs other duties of a public or private nature…. Possessing an inexhaustible physical vitality, and having a mission to perform and being convinced of the essential importance of that mission, it is natural that his written works should follow swiftly
70 John Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man, 76. 71 John Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man, 21-76. 72Victor Berger, Voice and Pen, 686. 73 For instance, see Arnaldo Testi, “The Gender of Reform Politics: Theodore Roosevelt and the Culture of Masculinity,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 81, No. 4. (Mar., 1995), 1509-1533. 74Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 6 July 1910, Family Letters, 107.
20 upon the activity of his mind and the varied swiftness of his physical actions.”75 Modern scholars also take this approach, surveying his written works to grasp a better understanding of his conception of masculinity. But these scholars make the mistake of only focusing on the themes of Roosevelt’s work. Gail Bederman, for example, analyzes the themes of his books in order to understand his conception of manhood.76 But Roosevelt’s writing also served a more fundamental purpose than publicizing his views on manhood. The writing process itself was a performance of male capabilities. With such an enormously large output of written work, Roosevelt not only expounded his themes of manhood, he also proved his superior intellectual capabilities in the face of what he viewed as an increasingly feminized literary industry.77 Victor Berger also did this, though in a very different way. Berger’s output of books was minimal, only one collection of his writings and speeches were ever published, though he did continuously write articles for his various newspapers. Victor expressed his mental capabilities in two related ways. First, he always claimed that his ideas were the most rational and scientific. This is shown in his arguments against Chinese immigration, in which he continually reminded his comrades that he would take a “scientific approach” to the question. Second, he aggressively asserted his mental capabilities. One anecdote related by Debs made the point quite clearly: I have heard him talk to Fred Heath in a room full of people as I would not talk to the mangiest cur, and Heath took it all meekly and without protest, and Berger took it for granted that it was his right to exact such servile and debasing obeisance from comrades. He tried it on me but there he struck a snag. I yielded and submitted until self-respect moved me to call a halt, and I did. Berger was determined that I had no right to differ with him and insultingly commanded me to act the part of a lackey to him, and then our relations came to a very sudden end. I told him that I was a man and a socialist, that I had options of my own and the right to express them and that I would permit neither man nor god to boss or dictate to me in the vulgar spirit that moved him to turn purple as he tried to bulldoze me into docile subjection to him as he has some to so many other comrades.78 Regardless of the veracity of the anecdote—and it certainly seems plausible given the multitude of similar incidents recorded in other sources—Debs clearly understood Victor’s aggressive intellectualism as an attack on his and others’ manhood. Victor also demonstrated this aggressive intellectualism in his relationship with Meta. In her autobiography, she recounted how Victor mocked her attempts to understand socialist theory: To be initiated into political life and labor struggles and the radical movement all at once, seemed to me more than I could absorb. When I asked my future husband to explain, sometimes he just laughed at me and said, “Du bist eine dumme Gans” [You are a silly goose] or he would with some irritation say “Das verstehst du nicht” [You don’t get it]. That hurt. And we would quarrel and I’d slam the door with an angry “Good night,” not knowing whether or not I’d ever see him again.”79 Incidents like these occurred frequently throughout Victor and Meta’s marriage and suggest that even in his intimate relations he felt emasculated, likely because of his failure to provide enough income to satisfy his middle-class lifestyle. Berating Heath, controlling Debs, and mocking Meta were all performances of Victor’s sense of intellectual superiority and position within the home and socialist movement. In each of
75 “Mr. Roosevelt: His Books as Outgrowths of His Activities Rather than of Literary Impulses,” The New York Times, 4 January 1902. 76 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, Chapter 5. 77 Lawrence J. Oliver, “Theodore Roosevelt, Brander Matthews, and the Campaign for Literary Americanism” American Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1. (Mar., 1989), 93-111. 78 Eugene V. Debs to Carl D. Thompson, J. Carl Constantine, ed., Letters of Eugene V. Debs, Volume 1,395. 79 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 9.
21 these relationships Victor assumed the role of the teacher, intellectual, and wise leader. He aggressively articulated his sense of intellectual superiority, violently and discursively abusing his comrades. With these actions, Victor demonstrated a sense of masculinity far removed from the Victorian and Turnverein manly ideal of self-restraint. If his words to Meta are any indication, Victor likely would have interpreted these incidents as episodes in which that “evil- spirit” of violent rage, about which he warned Meta at the beginning of their engagement, took control.80 On one level, this kind of interpretation allowed Victor to escape the consequences of his actions by presuming that his behavior was linked to a stable personality trait outside his control. On another level, it was deeply disempowering, for Victor continually displayed that he was unable to perform, despite his and Meta’s efforts, as a true man exercising self-restraint and emotional control. Victor’s identity as a man was both a source of power and of confinement. For him, being a man meant exercising self-control, independence, and power, but he consistently fell short of this goal. For Victor, the heart of the crisis of masculinity was an intimate feeling of powerlessness, expressed both within his personal relationships and his personality. He, like the millions of other men he saw, could not provide for his family or exercise his individual liberty. He saw the white race failing to advance to the next level of civilization, thereby risking annihilation at the hands of lesser races. He saw the brotherhood of man destroyed by competitive capitalism and innate male power challenged by women. But, perhaps above all, he saw his failure to live up to the ideal of a closely regulated body and mind which he learned as a participant in the German gymnastic movement of the late nineteenth century. He attempted to correct this with diet, exercise, and socialism but was ultimately unable to do so. Believing himself to lack agency, the power to change the self and the world, he tried to assert control over others, particularly his devoted wife. The next chapter tells her story.
80 Victor to Meta, 13 August 1895, Family Letters, 42-45.
22 CHAPTER II Power and Identity: Gendered Subjugation and Resistance in the Life of Meta Berger
“The difference between me and anybody else,” Meta Schlichting Berger told her daughter Doris in a late 1930s interview, “is Victor Berger.”81 Though Victor had died at least six years before Meta’s interview with Doris, he remained the seminal figure in her memory, the force behind her accomplishments and the foundation of her identity. In almost all of her public writings, Meta expressed similar thoughts, reflecting Victor’s role her in her transformation from a dependent housewife into an independent activist. These public statements echoed the more revealing private sentiments she expressed to Victor following her first election to the Milwaukee school board in 1909. “If you want me to stay sweet & noble & etc.,” she wrote, “you are the one that can make me be it & stay it. You are in fact responsible for myself & my whole disposition. You can mold my character according to your desires, you can make or unmake me. When I was only a little girl, my thoughts were always ‘does he approve?’ I needn’t go all over the ground again. But that is the way a woman lives.”82 Meta wrote these words to Victor while he traveled to Europe to visit many of the luminaries of the international socialist movement. Prefacing these words with an understated rebuke of Victor for not showing her enough love in his letters, she subtly informed him that she felt lonely and abandoned. “I received your nice long letter from Berlin, she wrote. “That’s the kind I like & furthermore you were loving to me in it. God knows I need it.”83The entire letter, packed with some of Meta’s most intense emotions, reveals her struggle over her identity as an individual, wife, and woman. In the letter, Meta told Victor that her identity as a woman completely depended on him; all her emotions, personality, morality, and thoughts complied with his wishes. Not surprisingly given his age and role in her life prior to their marriage, Meta presented Victor as her surrogate father, linking her current status as a wife to her relationship to him as a little girl. This father- daughter metaphor for their relationship built upon Meta’s recurring salutation, “Dear Papa,” which opened all of her letters to her husband until the middle of the 1910s when she reconceptualized the nature of their relationship. More than a decade into her marriage, Meta still conceived of her relationship to Victor along Victorian lines, in which she, as the woman, was a fully dependent partner, just as a child was to a father. Yet, if the first part of the letter indicated feelings of loneliness and abandonment, the last indicated feelings of regret and powerlessness at her status in the relationship in a way that suggested a kind of early feminist consciousness which linked her individual experience as a woman to the experiences of women as a distinct social group. The final phrase, “But that is the way a woman lives,” suggests a feeling of reluctant acceptance, as if she only tried to fill such a role—or appear to fill such a role—because her gender demanded it, and not for any reasons intrinsic to herself. These feelings of loneliness, regret, and powerlessness and the conflict between her conception of a marriage and Victor’s provided the impetus for Meta’s resistance and the development of her feminist consciousness. Even before she entered politics, Meta resisted dependence on Victor. Her autobiography recounts countless incidents in which she slammed doors, ripped clothing, or yelled at Victor for attempting to criticize her or transform her into something she did not wish to be: his housekeeper. In her interview with Doris, she described this struggle as the “hardest of any of the
81 Meta Berger Interview, VLB Papers. 82 Meta Berger to Victor Berger, 27 October 1909, Family Letters, 101. 83 Meta Berger to Victor Berger, 27 October 1909, Family Letters, 101.
23 battles [of her life] because it was an uncertain, rather lonely business. 84 Despite the loneliness, she successfully defended her individuality, using both accommodation and resistance as a means of preserving her individuality and agency within the relationship. To appease Victor, she changed certain aspects of her lifestyle but then used those changes to reconstruct her own freedom within the confines established by Victor. For instance, although she became a socialist to please him, she used her political participation to preserve her sense of independence and purpose. As Meta’s candid discussion of her battles with Victor indicates, her resistance to the imposition of Victor’s gender ideals was largely a lonely affair, one in which she engaged while isolated from the plight of other women throughout the nation. Early in their marriage, Meta appears to have had few friends as Victor’s demands and the children kept her preoccupied and solitary. Additionally, her memoir indicates that, after Victor compelled her to attend Socialist Party meetings, she was often too ashamed to discuss her life with her conservative family and any friends that preceded her relationship with Victor.85 Only after she became a politically engaged wife did she connect her personal struggles with the struggles of other women. After her initial election to the school board in 1909, she spent nearly four decades as an activist for women’s equality, first participating in the suffrage movement and then moving to the more self- consciously feminist National Woman’s Party because of its stance on economic issues. She spent her three decades as a member of the Milwaukee school board advocating for the rights of female teachers to teach after marriage, chair departments, serve as administrators, and form unions. Collectively, these activities suggest that Meta, though she never used the term in any of her surviving letters or published writings, fully participated in one of the most important movements of the twentieth century: feminism. Nancy Cott defines feminism as a “movement of consciousness” in which participants agree on three specific ideas: the equality of the sexes, the socially constructed nature of women’s condition, and a perception of women as a social, not just a biological, group.86 With these tenets, Cott argued, feminism “intended to transform the ideas of submission and femininity that had been inculcated in women.”87 Though Meta never used the term she fully accepted the reality of these ideas. Her comments to Victor in 1909 reprinted at the beginning of this chapter indicate that she connected her personal experience with subjugation to the social, not biological, restrictions placed on women. Her participation in women’s-only political organizations suggests both that she identified herself politically and socially, at least on some level, with other women and that she saw politics as a potential avenue for challenging the social inequality of women. Meta thus had two very different and often opposing conceptions of herself that she continuously sought to reconcile. First, she thought of herself as a wife, bound by social pressures, to conform to her husband’s wishes. Second, she thought of herself as an independent individual deserving of total equality with her husband but denied that equality because of her sex. Both of these identities depended on her identity as a woman, an identity she saw as both the cause of her subjugation and a potential source for resistance. Just as Victor sought to reconcile two contrasting views of masculinity, Meta sought to reconcile these two conceptions of femininity. Her life thus demonstrates the complexity and power of feminist consciousness
84 Meta Berger Interview with Doris Hursley, VLB Papers. 85Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 8. 86 Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 4-5. 87 Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 36.
24 during the early twentieth century because it shows how one woman was able to maintain a commitment to both identities. Compared to other turn-of-the-century women, Meta lived a life relatively free of overt control. Culturally middle-class, educated, and wealthy enough to ensure a high standard of living, she had numerous opportunities that most women during the period lacked. Additionally, as a leader in the Socialist Party and a member of Congress, Victor traveled frequently, which allowed Meta a high degree of personal freedom that other married women would not have enjoyed. But for Meta, the price of freedom from physical control was loneliness and insecurity, especially early in their relationship when she had few friends and interests apart from Victor’s. Meta’s subjugation was not the product of physical control, though violence remained a viable threat behind Victor’s more restrained ways of exercising power over his wife. Meta’s subjugation was produced in the subtle day-to-day cultural and psychological interactions among her, Victor, and the outside world that collectively reinforced her sense of loneliness, powerlessness, and insecurity. Subjugation can rely on violent expressions of power but it also relies on more subtle processes of psychological abuse and/or discursive practices that construct the other as passive and dependent. In other words, the key aspect of subjugation is that it denies its victims agency within their own lives and the world. By attempting to impose his understanding of her role in his life upon Meta, Victor attempted to constrict her within a particular kind of, to use Judith Butler’s phrase, “regulatory regime” within which she lacked both individuality and agency.88 In his daily encounters with Meta, Victor consistently denied Meta agency, using an implicit threat of physical violence and more subtle forms of coercion, including intellectual and emotional abuse and discursively constructing her to fit his ideal image of a wife. Victor’s conception of the ideal wife drew directly from his conception of gender relations. Meta most directly addressed Victor’s attempts to transform her into an ideal wife in her autobiography: “My husband tried to make me the kind of wife he had always imagined a wife should be. Truly continental. I was married now and all of my own interests and friends were to be dropped and I was to be absorbed only in the affairs that he was interested in.” 89 Becoming Victor’s wife meant that Meta not only needed to learn to serve him but also needed to adopt socialism as her philosophy. Almost as soon as they were engaged, Victor required her to accompany him to meetings of labor and radical groups, despite her shame for participating in such activities.90 By compelling her to adopt socialism, give up her friends and interests, and otherwise serve his needs, Victor limited the means by which Meta could express herself and interact with others. While Victor desired a political wife who would share his convictions, he did not necessarily desire an activist wife. In 1913, during Meta’s first term on the school board, he wrote her that: When I am alone and thinking the matter over—then it always comes to me again that I don’t want either you or my children to take a prominent part in public life. It is a losing game and the light is never worth the candle. Moreover, it has a tendency to destroy family life and family happiness—at least in most cases. You are not adapted to it at all,— although (I am sorry to say) that you have acquired a little taste for it through your work in the school board. When your term is over I don’t want you to run again. But I will try to have you wind up your school board carrier
88 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 33. 89Meta Berger, Kimberly Swanson, ed., A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, (Madison, Wisconsin: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 2001), 11-12. 90Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 11-12.
25 as president of the board—for the satisfaction it will give you, not me, because of all men in Milwaukee, I need least the luster of my wife—noble and fine woman as she is—in order to shine myself.91 Consistent with dominant gender norms of the period, Victor demanded that Meta’s primary focus be on the home. As Victor toured the world advocating socialism, Meta was to learn his political ideology and correspond with comrades while raising the children as he wished, sewing the family’s clothes, maintaining two homes, writing him at least twice a week, dreaming the right dreams, and otherwise following his orders without complaint. Even while he was absent from the home, Victor tried to control Meta’s behavior, occasionally suggesting Meta change child-care and cleaning tactics to conform to his domineering mother’s advice.92 These demands suggest that Victor desired his wife to fill two contradictory roles. On the one hand, he wanted a submissive wife who would unquestioningly follow his advice and demands, adopt his ideas and identity, and never challenge his authority. This conception of the ideal wife derived directly from Victor’s conception of women’s role in society and was consistent with his attempts to prove his manhood by controlling others. On the other hand, however, he also desired a highly active wife who would take care of him, challenge him, and help transform him into a better individual, as his request for her to help him suppress his more negative personality traits suggests.93 This latter sense likely grew out of his relationship to his mother Julia who was a dominating but loving figure. All accounts of Victor’s mother, including oral history interviews, explicitly define her as a powerful matriarch who made all of the important family decisions.94 While powerful, however, Julia also served the family, Victor especially. According to Meta, she spent considerable amounts of time finding better tutors schools for Victor as each proved inadequate. Meta, a biased source certainly as Julia traveled to Milwaukee to persuade Victor not to marry a non-Jew, seems to have believed that Julia spoiled Victor by going to extremes to provide for his welfare. 95 Despite Victor’s apparent rebellion against his mother, he tried to remake Meta into a benign of her, a confident, caring, and outspoken wife who nevertheless had no real power within the relationship. Born to a culturally middle-class and conservative German family in the late nineteenth century, Meta desperately tried to adjust to her husband’s gender ideals. Within the first three weeks of marriage, she learned she was pregnant and had established, with his limited funds, a satisfactory household. Knowing he wanted her to learn about socialism, she attended the meetings, despite her shame, and even asked him to explain his work to her. To this latter request, Victor gave her two books Merrie England by Robert Blanchford and The Cooperative Commonwealth by Laurence Gronlund, saying “When you read and understand these books, you will better understand what my work is.”96 She read the books but, sick from pregnancy and bored by their subjects, she hated them. With too small of an income to afford meat everyday, she even learned to cook the brain and heart of a cow which the local butcher would occasionally give to the family.97 Years later, Meta was proud of all of these achievement, boasting in her autobiography of her commitment to her husband but, in the midst of her first pregnancy—which
91 Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 19 April 1913, Family Letters, 157. 92 Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 23 January 1900, Family Letters, 56. 93 Victor to Meta, August 14, 1895, Family Letters, 45. 94 Tape Recording of Ruth Greene with Leah and Roger Steck, Susan Nurock, and Rick Greene, VLB Papers. 95Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 3. 96 Meta Berger, Kimberly Swanson, ed., A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, (Madison, Wisconsin: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 2001), 12. 97 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 13.
26 reportedly left her bedridden most of the day—these tasks were undoubtedly highly challenging and demanding. Yet, Meta’s experiences prior to marriage had not prepared her for the role of submissive wife and housekeeper. She spent much of her childhood in school, only doing housework— washing and ironing—on Saturdays and Sundays. Until her father died, her family employed a maid. She remembered her mother as a terrible seamstress who, given Meta’s own rudimentary sewing abilities, likely taught her very little. This lack of training meant that Meta had to learn how to serve as Victor’s proper housekeeper while bedridden from pregnancy. Thus, in addition to disliking the role Victor proscribed for her, Meta was unprepared to fill it. Furthermore, Meta’s role as an essential provided for her brother, bedridden from tuberculosis, seems to have provided her with an identity tied to the economic performance outside of the home. More than three decades later, she vividly remembered crying with her mother on her last day of work and the sadness and guilt she felt at her inability to assist her family.98 The emotional power of this memory suggests that by marrying Victor she lost more than her income. She also lost the sense of purpose and self she earned by providing assistance to her troubled family. Finally, prior to her marriage, Meta also knew to many independent women, the most important of whom was her mother who managed to keep the family alive after the death of her father. Additionally, she witnessed independent women on the local stage where stars like Sara Bernhardt, whom historian Susan Glenn has labeled a precursor to feminism, performed.99 Thus when she married Victor, Meta lacked substantial training in household tasks but had a strong identity as a provider for her family and models for independent womanhood. The combination of these three factors led Meta to resist the imposition of Victor’s sense of womanhood within the household. Victor’s letters to Meta hint that she strongly resisted his attempts to lecture her on proper child-care.100 Her autobiography recounts an incident at the summer home during which Victor, in front of guests, criticized Meta’s dressmaking skills because their daughter’s dress kept slipping over the shoulder. Instead of meekly accepting his criticism, Meta unbuttoned the dress, took it off her daughter, and threw it into the fire.101 This incident has multiple meanings, but, at the very least, it challenged Victor’s power within the household by proclaiming Meta’s control over her own life and the children’s upbringing. Meta’s autobiography contain several references to similar incidents, suggesting that her daily life, when Victor was home, was spent arguing with him over her role in their relationship. According to their daughter Doris, Meta often told her husband that she married him “to share his life, not to take charge of children,” though she appears to have enjoyed the latter. Additionally, apparently unbeknownst to her husband who apparently did not approve of it, Meta began using birth control after the birth of their second child because she did not desire to have another child.102 This suggests that Meta brought a different view of her role in the family to the marriage. She did not, contrary to Victor’s wishes, desire to conflate her identity with his or adopt his philosophy, as her initial anguish at having to attend radical meetings attests. She did not wish to have a large family or perform household chores, though she still wished to maintain control
98 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 10. 99 Susan Glenn. Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism, (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), Chapter 1. 100 Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 25 January 1902, Family Letters, 61. 101 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 21. 102 Kimberly Swanson, ed., Introduction to A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, xvi.
27 over the domestic sphere. Finally, her participation in the work force, support for female teachers, observations of independent women, and role in founding an industrial school for girls all suggest that she, even early in her marriage, viewed women as fully capable of working outside the home. Evidence from late in her life, after her husband died, also suggests that she desired sexual equality within the relationship.103 Thus, Meta had a vastly different conception of her role within the family than Victor. While Victor desired a submissive but active wife who could help him with his home, family, and career, Meta desired to become a fully equal partner with extensive control over her own life. In other words, while he wanted a hierarchical marriage she wanted one based on true companionship. Meta and Victor spent their entire marriage adjusting to each other’s conceptions of a proper marriage. The adjustments, however, were not produced by an equitable fight. Victor, far more than Meta, tried to impose a gendered identity upon the one he loved. To accomplish this goal, Victor, consciously or not, relied on four gendered tactics: the threat of violence, the threat and practice of marital infidelity to exploit her insecurities, limiting Meta’s control over reproduction, and a personal discourse that belittled Meta’s intellectual capabilities. No direct evidence of Victor ever physically abusing Meta exists. There is, however, abundant evidence that he indirectly threatened her and the children with violence. The last chapter discussed Victor’s performance of male aggression and violence in his relationships with male comrades as part of his response to the crisis of masculinity, but Victor’s violence with Meta went even further. Even before their marriage, Victor warned Meta of his violent temper in one of his first letters to her after proposing, suggesting that when he was angry he was capable of murder.104 According to a niece, Victor “was explosive [and] blew up frequently.”105 These claims do not support the conclusion that Victor physically abused Meta (though they do not disprove it) but they do suggest that one way in which Victor subjugated Meta was to appear able to physically abuse her or the children. Meta certainly seems to have concluded that. Apparently, whenever Meta and the children heard Victor’s key in the door, “a sort of electric shock ran through the family” and they quickly looked around the room “to reassure us that at least here there was nothing to criticize.”106 Early in their relationship, Meta rarely felt secure. The incident in which Victor escorted her sister to the theater while engaged to Meta showed that Victor was willing to exploit this insecurity to construct Meta into his ideal wife. Meta’s response to that incident, however, did not end Victor’s attempts to use other women to influence his wife’s behaviors. Discussing her attempts to comply with Victor’s definition of a wife, Meta wrote: I was spurred on to make effort after effort because I wanted not only to make my own contribution but I wanted above all my husband’s approval and admiration. And right here I may as well tell you that all men in the public limelight. . . had a large following of adoring women pay glorious tribute to them. VLB was no exception. He received glowing tribute, mushy compliments and adoration from many spirited, intelligent, independent and beautiful women.107
103 Meta Berger Speech, ca 1935, VLB Papers. 104 Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 13 August 1895, Family Letters, 42-43. 105 Miriam Frink, “Papers,” VLB Papers, Found in Meredithe Ann Velie Hierarchy and Web: A Study of Urban School Reform, Gender, and Cognitive Style in Milwaukee, 1890-1920. Dissertation University of Wisconsin- Madison, 1992, 60. 106 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, (Unpublished version), VLB Papers, 95. 107 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 22.
28 The juxtaposition of these two thoughts suggests that Meta ultimately adapted to Victor’s wishes because she feared losing him to other women. Meta apparently had many good reasons to fear Victor’s infidelity. After he proposed to her, Victor continued to write to Meta about his dates with other women, though he was careful to ask her permission before going to church with one of them.108According to historian Michael E. Stevens, the editor of The Family Letters of Victor and Meta Berger, Doris later claimed that Meta knew about one affair and that his relationship with Inez Millholland “went considerably beyond platonic friendship.”109 Additionally, according to Berger scholar Kimberly Swanson, Meta’s friend Irma Hochstein reported that Meta “regaled friends at a dinner party with stories of the gifts, letters, and other attentions admirers had lavished on Victor over the years.”110 Finally, in Doris’s biography of her father, she recounted an incident in which the family’s maid confessed to an affair with Victor at the lunch table.111 Given Victor’s openly expressed history of manipulating her insecurities to achieve his ends, Meta would likely have linked these infidelities and flirtations to her behavior. Unfortunately, scholars can only speculate on how Meta, a woman who consistently resisted her husband’s attempts to transform her into a respectable housekeeper, responded to their maid’s confession that she had an affair with Victor.112 While perhaps not surprised, given Victor’s history of infidelities, Meta was undoubtedly hurt by the relationship and may have even seen in it a subtle rebuke of her non-compliance with the role Victor proscribed for her. Victor’s relationship with the feminist socialist Millholland likely had the same effect that the adoring flirtations of other women had: inspiring her to more actively engage in politics. Regardless of Victor’s unconscious intentions, however, his affairs and flirtations made Meta highly insecure about her status, compelling her to transform her own behavior in order to better please him. The threat and presence of marital infidelity was thus an unconscious part of Victor’s attempts to transform Meta from an active individual into a passive subject. This process, however, did not succeed, as Meta was able to successfully resist this form of subjugation and assert her power within the relationship. Interestingly, she appears to have only began to address Victor as an equal in her letters after they fought over Victor’s infidelity and he convinced her of his sexual fidelity. In 1912, Victor wrote Meta that, As long as you are the kind of wife you have been to me during the fourteen years we have been married—no woman can ever come between us. I may laugh and joke with this or the other—but there is no woman living like my Schatzl. And even as to “flirtation”, I have had a very severe lesson, as you know.113 What Victor meant by “the kind of wife you have been to me” is unclear but, given his sexual demands and the context, it seems likely that he meant the words in a sexual way. The first available letter Meta wrote to Victor following this account addressed him in a much more formal way than usual, as “My honorable husband.”114 In her next available letter Meta began to address Victor with the same word he used for her “Schatzl,” German for “little treasure.”115 While Meta wrote this letter almost three years after the initial confrontation, it was only four
108 Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 22 August 1895, Family Letters, 45-46. 109 Michael Stevens, ed., Introduction to The Family Letter’s of Victor and Meta Berger, 1894-1929, ed. Michael Stevens (Madison, Wisconsin: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1995), 23. 110 Kimberly Swanson, ed., Introduction to A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, xvii 111 Doris Berger Hursley, biography of Victor Berger, ca. 1926-1980, VLB Papers. 112 Kimberly Swanson, ed., Introduction to A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, (xv. 113 Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 30 August 1911, Family Letters, 138. Emphasis in original. 114, Meta Berger to Victor Berger, 8 January 1913, Family Letters, 151. 115 Meta Berger to Victor Berger, 8 August 1914, Family Letters, 181.
29 months following Victor’s promise to not see Inez Millholland during his trip to New York.116 After these two letters, Meta’s salutations varied, alternating among her traditional “Papa,” “honorable husband,” “Dearest,” “schatzl,” “”Beloved Wonder-Man,” “Lover,” and other assorted names, while Victor’s salutations remained “Schatzl”. At some point between her fight with Victor and the letter in which she addressed him as “Schatzl,” between 1911 and 1914, Meta began to experiment with new terms to describe her relationship with her husband. While no evidence of the initial “severe lesson” Meta gave Victor remains—she may have threatened to leave him—its success seems to have at least emboldened her to reconsider the terms by which she understood their relationship. In addition to using intimacy with other women to manipulate Meta’s insecurities, Victor also tried to control Meta by limiting her access to birth control. Only three pieces of evidence remain to help illuminate Meta and Victor’s reproductive relationship and two of them come from a secondary source. The first is their daughter Elsa Berger’s contention that, “My mother was clever enough to find out that the size of families could be limited and she obtained a diaphragm. My father never knew the reason for no more pregnancies.”117 The second piece of evidence comes from their other daughter Doris’s unpublished biography of her father. While discussing her father’s Victorian values, she mentions that Victor “disapproved of birth control.”118 The final and most important piece of information comes from Meta, who wrote in her autobiography that after getting pregnant for the second, that, I “couldn’t see myself having a large family to support on the meager funds we had to live on. But what to do? I was pregnant! And I had to see it through. But I was determined not to have more children than I could support. Contraceptives were known but were illegal to buy. Anyway I kept brooding on how not to have more children.”119 These three pieces of evidence indicate that Meta and Victor had vastly different attitudes towards reproduction and contraception. Victor undoubtedly desired a larger family—probably a son specifically given his initial disappointment over the birth of their first daughter—while Meta desired to maintain a small family. In her autobiography, Meta explained her desire to limit the size of the family as a consequence of their relative poverty. However, by the early twentieth century, their financial situation had significantly improved as Victor worked multiple jobs, allowing them to own or rent multiple residences and employ a maid. It seems likely that Meta’s resistance to a larger family was also due to her desire to maintain her freedom to pursue activities outside of the home. Victor’s attitudes towards contraception are slightly more difficult to understand. On the one hand, he could have believed that limiting white reproduction was yet another path towards race suicide. On the other hand, he could have seen it as a way of emasculating men by denying them sexual potency and the ability to serve as a patriarch over a large family. Regardless of Victor’s motivations, however, his disapproval of birth control was yet another example of the ways his beliefs had the effect of trying to control Meta’s life and behavior. The fourth and most pervasive way that Victor attempted to transform Meta into a subject was through verbal abuse. Throughout the early years of their marriage, Victor constantly belittled Meta’s intelligence, presented himself as an authority on all matters, including those for which he had no training, and criticized her failure to become his ideal wife. Part of this abuse paralleled Victor’s abuse of his male comrades and derived from Victor’s extreme egotism,
116 Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 8 May 1914, Family Letters, 174. 117 Kimberly Swanson, ed., Introduction to A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, xv. 118 Michael Stevens, ed., Introduction to The Family Letter’s of Victor and Meta Berger, 1894-1929, 24. 119Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 14.
30 which itself was a manifestation of his masculine insecurity. But Victor’s belittlement of his wife went far beyond any of his attempts to mock the intellectual capabilities of Debs or Heath. thirteen years younger than her husband and without the advanced training in the best schools of central Europe, Meta was already deeply insecure about her intellectual merits. As her initial comments on the engagement make clear, these factors clearly intimidated Meta. Though she had graduated from the Wisconsin State Normal School and taught for three years, Meta initially assumed the role of pupil in her marriage. In a letter to Meta early in their relationship, Victor wrote: “You have, no doubt, already received the books. The two novels you may leave there, but the “Dogs and the Fleas” you may bring back as soon as the doctor has read it. I provided my annotations for your sake because I could not expect you to understand the hints and suggestive remarks. It, of course, would read much better if the reader has to discover the similes and satires by himself.”120 That Victor though it necessary to provide his interpretation of an allegorical text—explicitly designed to simplify socialist theory—so that Meta could understand it emphasizes the degree to which he thought her intellectually incapable of understanding basic socialist philosophy. Victor more openly expressed his views of Meta’s capabilities in person. In her autobiography, Meta recalled her pain and anger when Victor said to her “Du bist eine dumme Gans” [You are a silly goose] or “Das verstehst du nicht” “[You don’t get it] when she had difficulty understanding Victor’s explanations.121 With such phrases and anger, Victor dismissed Meta’s intellectual capabilities and attempts to adopt his ideas. For a woman already doubtful of her abilities, Victor’s statements about her intelligence were undoubtedly harmful and helped undermine her confidence as an individual. At the same time she was transforming herself to adopt his philosophy, he belittled her intellectual capabilities. In this sense, his mockery of her attempts to learn socialism, paralleled his use of infidelity to transform her into his ideal wife. In both situations, he exploited Meta’s insecurities in order to control her. Yet, learning the principles of socialism ultimately became a way for Meta to express her intelligence and resist subjugation. Later in the memoir, Meta proudly wrote that once she had learned the basics of socialism, “never again was Victor Berger to say to me, “Das verstehst du nicht!”122 Meta and Victor’s personal letters present a great deal of evidence that Victor persistently constructed Meta as a subject by addressing and writing to her as if she were a passive and compliant wife. While the nicknames Victor used for Meta may have been harmless, within the context of their unequal relationship, they may have had significant but unacknowledged effects. First, from the very beginning of their relationship, Victor consistently addressed Meta by the terms “girl,” “little Meta ,” or the German word “Schatzl” Among the hundreds of his published letters, he only addressed Meta as his wife twice. She, on the other hand, addressed him as “Dear Friend” (during their courtship phrase) or “Papa” until the early 1910s, when she began experiment with various different names for him, including “Schatzl” and “honorable husband.” Whereas Meta’s usage of “friend” or “Schatzl” indicates that she conceived of their relationship as one of equals, Victor’s reliance on the adjective “little” and his usage of the terms “girl” and “treasure” imply that he understood the relationship in much more hierarchical terms from the very beginning. In either discursive construction, Meta is either granted a small amount of agency as a little girl or darling or completely denied agency as a treasured possession. Absent any other evidence, scholars might dismiss these terms as mere
120 Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 20 August 1896, Family Letters, 50. Emphasis in original 121 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 9. 122 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 19.
31 nicknames; however, the context of their relationship suggests that they were only part of a larger problem of discursive abuse which Victor employed to transform Meta into his ideal wife. Even in areas in which he had no expertise, Victor repeatedly sought to instruct Meta, passing along advice from his mother on the proper way to run a household and take care of children. In her autobiography, Meta spent several pages discussing the fights that ensued when Victor attempted to control the children’s eating, dressing, and leisure activities, despite his almost constant absence from the home.123 Victor even used Meta’s dreams to criticize her. “I wasn’t a bit pleased by your dream,” he wrote in the same letter, “because it suggests an overheated imagination. Above all you must eat sensibly then you won’t dream such nonsense.”124 In these instances, as in his attitude towards her intellectual capabilities, Victor established himself as the ultimate authority, dismissing her beliefs and wishes and thereby relegating her to a secondary role in the relationship. Thus with both words and actions, Victor constructed and treated Meta as an inferior individual, transforming her into his subject. In each of these tactics, Victor engaged in behaviors consistent with those of other men experiencing the crisis of masculinity. He engaged in violent and aggressive behavior, left his wife alone for weeks at a time to continuously pursue his political activities, exhibited an enormous ego, and ultimately attempted to mold his wife’s behavior and personality. While Victor engaged in these activities as a way to prove his manhood to himself and others—or to use Kimmel’s words, resist domination—their effect was to subjugate his wife for over a decade. In their relationship, Meta paid the price for Victor’s insecurities. By 1914, however, their relationship had radically changed. Building on her resistance within the home and her experiences as a teacher, Meta began to actively participate in politics. In 1909, while her husband was traveling in Europe, the local branch of the Socialist Party nominated her as a candidate for the school board. Surprised, frightened, and overwhelmed, Meta wrote to her husband for advice. He replied, “ Do nothing, except to accept the honor. You won’t be elected anyway.”125 His words relieved her but, much to their surprise, Meta won the election, becoming one of the Socialist Party’s first elected officials. In her autobiography, Meta remembered riding in a street-car with her husband to take her oath of office. “I remember…quarreling all the way with VLB, telling him that if he ever once criticized me for activities on the board I would forth-with resign.” All I can remember now is that my husband chuckled and was kind and re-assuring.”126 Before she had even taken her oath of office, Meta’s election had begun to transform the terms of their relationship. Writing her autobiography, Meta identified that first school board meeting as the source of her feminist consciousness. She was, she claimed, so fearful that she could not sign her name or vote without the aid of fellow socialist board member Frederic Heath. She quickly overcame her fear, she wrote, when it became clear that The board was going to discriminate against women by ruling that no woman, no matter how qualified could, be come the head of a department in any high school course and was going to replace a woman who had served in such capacity for a number of years. My shock came when I heard the discussions and recommendations of the old guard principals and board members.
123Meta Berger. A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 14-15 124 Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 20 August 1896, Family Letters, 50. Unfortunately, no record of Meta’s dream exists. 125 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 27. 126 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 28.
32 I forgot everything except that I must defend women and their rights; so I made my first speech in the school board. It must have been pretty good for I won the fight and women there-after could hold positions equal in rank with men.127 For Meta, this was a seminal experience that linked her sense of subjugation with that of other women. Perhaps on that first day on the school board, as the male administrators and board members discussed discriminating against women, she connected her memory of crying with her mother on her last day of work to the plight of current female schoolteachers. Regardless of the memories invoked by the debate, for Meta the key point of it was her victory. For a deeply insecure woman, an almost single-handed victory over the conservative male members of the school board and the same type of discrimination from which she suffered undoubtedly empowering. From then on, she became the board’s strongest advocate for women’s equality, preventing it from firing married women and helping them form Milwaukee’s first teachers’ union. It was after one of the initial school board meetings in October 1909, that Meta half- thankfully and half-sorrowfully expressed Victor’s power over her life and indicated the first signs of feminist consciousness with her expression of “but that’s the way a woman lives. ” As she looked back on the early years of their relationship from an era of increasing independence and participation in politics, Meta could both see how Victor’s words and actions had repressed her and connect it to the broader role of women in society. She understood the role that her sex played in her subjugation. She understood that Victor’s treatment of her was only the most personal manifestation of the broader issue of gender inequality. After she joined the school board and became a public figure, Meta devoted the rest of her life to solving these broader issues. In all of her political activities, Meta attempted to help women achieve power equal to that of their husbands, adapting ideas from abroad to help her articulate the best ways to do so. Meta reportedly told a newspaper in 1910 that, “Women have social equality with men now, and political equality is coming, but we must also have economic equality. A housewives’ union would be a good means to this end.” Later, she added that women automatically were entitled to a half of their husband’s income.128 While the former argument seems to have originated with Meta, she appears to have adopted the latter argument from the Swedish feminist Ellen Key rather than the more popular American feminist economist Charlotte Perkins Gillman.129 According to Cott, Key, a socialist, supported the sexual equality of women, use of birth control, legalization of free unions, and state support of for childrearing women, and believed that marriage was “an economic partnership in which the wife/mother earned and should own half of her husband’s wages or assets,”130 Unlike Gillman, who advocated women’s work outside the home, Key, according to Cott, “glorified the redeeming value of motherhood and believed that women who achieved the satisfaction of heterosexual love should fulfill themselves as mothers.”131 Throughout her life, Meta appears to have drawn on Key’s ideas and popularized them for her America audience. After her trip to Russia in 1935, Meta wrote approvingly of Soviet nurseries for working mothers and told her American audience that,
127 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 28. 128 Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 23 November 1910, Family Letters, 113. 129 Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 46. 130Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 46. 131Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 46.
33 This is the economic outlook of the average American woman. Her personal life is equally uncertain and hopeless. She cannot marry her boy friend until he can support her. She suffers from the depression-created discrimination against working women. If she lives with him without marriage she does so a t great risks, even assuming that she and her lover have somehow learned about birth control. 132 In this speech and her support of housewife’s union, Meta appears to have drawn on both her own emotional experience with uncertainty and hopelessness and Key’s ideas. This suggests two related ideas. First, it suggests the importance of a transnational exchange of ideas in the formation of feminist consciousness. Second, and more importantly here, the underlying meaning of the argument suggests that Meta did not necessarily challenge the idea that women should function primarily as mothers and housekeepers—though she resisted that role for herself and certainly supported others’ efforts to do so—only their lack of power within relationships. Because of its novelty, Meta’s temporary advocacy of a housewives’ union deserves specific attention. Meta accepted socialist doctrine and believed unions were essential in combating the evils of the capitalist system. Her suggestion that women form a housewives’ union indicates that she saw husbands as similarly oppressing women, an argument she likely initially learned, either through Victor’s tutelage or on her own, from co-founder of the Social Democratic Party of German August Bebel’s Women and Socialism. As Cott has shown, this kind of thinking was common among early feminists who often emerged from within economically radical movements.133 Her apparent advocacy of traditional gender roles, however, was more complicated because it reflected deeper rifts within her feminist consciousness. While her argument for unionization and equal wages was likely an argument for increased power for women rather than an argument for separate spheres, other comments and activities throughout her life indicate that Meta never reconciled Gilman and Key’s views on women’s economic equality. Her critiques of Victor’s inability to successfully perform a husband’s economic role by providing the family with a sufficient income indicate a partial acceptance of the separate spheres argument. Additionally, the curriculum for the Girls’ Trade and Industrial High School which she co-founded, only contained courses on hat and dress making, which while outside the home, still remained traditional women’s activities.134 Finally, late in life, she told an audience that Personally, I am a victim of the chivalrous age when gentility was considered a woman’s highest need. A training and a background of that sort lingers past all intellectual extermination and so I too experienced a transient shock reminiscent shock at the sight of women working at the tasks which I was accustomed to seeing only men do.135 Yet, these examples do not account for Meta’s personal avoidance of housework, support for female teachers, dismay at Franklin Roosevelt’s restrictions on women’s labor, and active participation with thousands of other women in politics. On the one hand, Meta valued women’s work in the home and found it difficult to imagine women working in nontraditional professions. On the other hand, she always supported women’s rights to work outside of the home and fought against laws and regulations prohibiting them to do so. Meta also maintained different positions of the role of sex in the struggle for equality, an issue essential to feminists and many socialists during the 1920s. She never embraced the more radical sexual politics of the feminist movement, criticizing Dora Russell for advocating a
132 Meta Berger, “I Saw Russia,” VLP Papers, 10; Meta Berger, speech, ca. 1935, VLB Papers. 133 Cott, 35 134 Kimberly Swanson, ed., Introduction to A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, xv; Mary H. Scott “ A Girl’s Trade School Course in Dressmaking,” Journal of Home Economics, 7:185-91. April 1915 128. 135 Meta Berger speech, VLB Papers.
34 “philosophy of free-love, several trial marriages, or affairs, etc.” to the women of the University of Wisconsin, in 1928136 She also opposed Doris’s divorce from her husband Colin, creating a large amount of discord in her otherwise peaceful relationship with her daughter. In her memoirs, Meta blamed her opposition to the divorce on her “old fashioned ideals,” but stressed that she quickly learned to let her adult children make their own decisions.137 With her opposition to sexual liberation, Meta expressed a longstanding sense of propriety that she developed in her youth. She was unable to reconcile sexual liberation with her identity as a middle-class wife of a respectable politician. But, as her comments about America during the Great Depression reprinted above and personal history suggest, she was not openly hostile towards sex outside of marriage, birth control, or others forms of sexual liberation. Meta thus appears to have been caught between the more reputable conservative tradition rooted in the suffrage movement and supported by Socialist Party’s National Committee and the radical sexual politics of the Party’s intellectuals. The former tradition emphasized the purity and redemptive power of womanhood and blamed the sexual exploitation of women to the evils of capitalism, building on the ideas expressed by Frederick Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and Bebel’s Women Under Socialism, both of which were available in simplified form throughout the early twentieth century.138 Meta fully accepted this analysis and used it to explain the exploitation of women throughout her life. The latter group, composed on intellectuals like Max and Crytsal Eastman, Margaret Snager, Kate Richards O’Hare, sought to replace the Victorian morality with a new openness about sexual drives and desire. Meta’s private acceptance of birth control and ultimate acceptance of limited forms of sexual liberation suggests that she embraced part of these arguments. Meta’s discordance on these issues illustrates her broader role as a nexus between multiple radical movements. For the last three decades of her life, Meta continuously had to negotiate between her identity as the middle-class wife of an elected Socialist Party official and her identity as an activist for women’s social, political, economic, and sexual equality. Unlike many feminists and new women socialists, Meta was married with children by the time she became politically active. Her husband was one of the most prominent and conservative members of the party whose public image was only surpassed by Eugene Debs’s. By 1909, she was also an elected official dependent upon the votes of moderate German-Americans. She could not publicly accept the more radical ideas emanating from feminists and intellectuals without paying significant public and private costs. Thus, privately, she embraced feminist politics but publicly she had to present the image of a typical middle-class wife and mother devoted to her family and the conventional woman’s issue of education. This contrast explains her advocacy of a housewife’s union but then sudden retraction of the idea a few days later. After her initial foray into the fight for women’s equality on the school board, Meta joined many organizations that catered exclusively to women, including the Wisconsin Women Suffrage Association, the National Women’s Party, and, later, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). In her autobiography, Meta spent the most time discussing her activism as a member of WILPF, suggesting that she believed that it was the most important organization to which she belonged. Not surprisingly, Meta often found herself torn among her
136 Meta to Victor 20 February 1928, Family Letter, 397. 137 Meta Berger. A Milwaukee Women’s Life on the Left, 166. 138Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920 (Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 160-169, 250.
35 support for the cause, appreciation for other women, and disagreement over tactics. In her autobiography, Meta wrote about her experience in the WILPF: Now I had the opportunity to know some of the finest women and the most courageous women of the world. They were idealists and certainly not in any sense subversive. What they wanted was a war-less world and they wanted to achieve this by arbitration and by complete understanding. They knew all about imperialistic wars, but when it came to getting at the root of all causes—i.e. the economic struggle…--well, they sort of soft peddled the issues…But they were fine and self- sacrificing and hard-working.”139 Later, in a letter to Doris and her son-in-law, she lamented the group’s conservative politics and lack of the political courage to argue for substantive changes that would lessen the threat of war.140 Despite her dislike of the group’s tactics and conservative politics, Meta found the experience moving, recounting in her journal that the act of various women’s organizations presenting their petitions, “was a moving sight—young and old, working women and nobility, all asking that there [illegible] be no more war.”141 In a letter to Doris and her son-in-law Colin, Meta expressed her sense of identity within the WILPF and likely the broader movement for women’s equality: At this conference [of the WILPF], one could see the line of cleavage very clearly between the old ladies and the more energetic and impulsive younger element who make up the other and more advanced groups. I really belong with them as far as sympathy and tactics go but it is not in accordance with the policy of the Socialist party.142 Privately, Meta considered herself a young radical committed to ideas and tactics very different from those supported by the predominantly male National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party. Just as in her attitudes toward sexual liberation and separate spheres, Meta had to adopt a more moderate stance to appease her husband and Party. In other words, she continually had to negotiate between her identity as a good wife and socialist, following the orders of her husband and the Party he helped to lead, and her identity as a feminist activist. For Meta, the mere act of joining non-Socialist organizations and advocating for women was a way to separate her identity from her husband and his movement. As Mari Jo Buhle and Sally M. Miller have written, the institutional structure of the Socialist Party prevented women from fully participating in either the women’s or socialist movements.143 Socialist Party structures, particularly the executive boards, were almost like the numerous fraternal clubs that developed across America throughout the end of the nineteenth centuries, places where men could go to escape the feminization of society. Participating in a women’s political organization free of the constricting rules and regulations of her husband and the Socialist Party, enabled Meta to feel independent and confident. She rarely mentioned her policy decisions in her letters to Victor and soon after her entrance into politics, became confident enough to offer him advice and criticize local Socialist Party decisions.144 In these political pursuits, Meta simultaneously demonstrated and reconstructed her identity as an independent woman and wife. Before she entered politics, she demonstrated her independence by challenging Victor’s authority in the home. Ripping the blouse off of her daughter or slamming doors were fundamentally individualistic acts which remained
139 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 158-159. 140 Meta Berger to Doris and Colin Welles, 9 May 1924, Family Letters, 339. 141 Meta Berger journal, Feb 5, 1919, VLB Papers. 142 Meta Berger to Doris Welles, 28 April 1926, Family Letters, 363. 143 Mari Jo Buhle., Women and American Socialism; Sally M. Miller, ed, Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Early Twentieth-Century American Socialism, (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996). 144 See, for instance, Meta Berger to Victor Berger, 18 February 1923, Family Letters, 311.
36 disconnected from the broader discourses of feminism. As she entered the political sphere, however, she increasingly linked her individual identity to the identities of other women, reforming her conception of independence to join a broad political movement that could empower all women. Participating in feminist and socialist organizations gave Meta the confidence to rework her identity and relationship to her husband so that by the time the United States government arrested and prosecuted Victor for violation of the Espionage Act in 1918, she and Victor had established, to use Alice Paul’s words, a “true partnership.”145 Between Meta’s entrance into political life in 1909 and Victor’s departure from it in 1929, they formed what would come to be called a companionate marriage. The fights, so endemic during the first decade and a half of their marriage, had subsided, with none appearing in the pages of their letters or in Meta’s autobiography. Victor’s dependence on Meta during the trial and the subsequent denial of his seat in congress—for emotional support as well as fundraising for bail money—drove them even closer together. The causes for this shift were complicated but two developments were likely essential. First, Meta’s political participation gave her the confidence she needed to consider herself equal to Victor and reconsider the terms of their relationship. Second, Victor’s victory in the 1910 Milwaukee elections provided him with the assurances of his manhood he needed to escape from his personal crisis of masculinity. His and the Party’s repeated victories in Milwaukee as well as his congenial relations with other members of congress affirmed his sense of importance and power and gave him the confidence he needed to abandon the more violent and aggressive tendencies of his personality.. With these two developments, Meta and Victor escaped the mutual insecurities that dominated their early relationship, allowing them to form a truly radical union. In 1925, over a decade into their new relationship, Meta wrote Victor in words that echoed the letter of 1909 found at the beginning of this chapter. Once again, Victor was outside the country, at the end of a ten-week trip to Europe while Meta was left in Milwaukee. “It’s strange & fearful how I do miss you darling,” she wrote. “You certainly are a part of me & my whole happy existence depends on you & on our love for each other as well as the beautiful & wonderful close companionship we enjoy.”146 While the words remained similar and the essential claim of dependence persisted, the entire meaning of the words had changed. Instead of addressing Victor as “My darling Papa:—,” she now addressed him as “My Darling!” signaling her new conception of Victor as an equal. The words were no longer accompanied by the regretful acceptance of her role as a woman. The tentative voice in the first letter was replaced by a confident tone as she complained about the political decisions of the Milwaukee party. By 1925, Meta’s participation in socialist and feminist politics had transformed her into a confident and independent woman, fully cognizant of her equality with Victor. As the 1920s came to a close, however, Meta and Victor prepared for one final transformation in their relationship.
In November 1928, Victor lost his bid for reelection to the House of Representatives and began planning for retirement. He tried to work out a deal with Aldolph Held, the business manager of the Jewish Daily Forward, a New York socialist paper, in which the Forward would purchase his remaining shares of the Leader’s stock but continue to pay him an annual salary of between ten and twenty thousand dollars for the following decade.147 Three days later he wrote of his extreme disillusionment with the Socialist Party and future plans to Meta:
145 Alice Paul to Meta Berger VLB Papers. 146 Meta to Victor 26 September 1925, Family Letters, 362. 147 Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 29 January 1929, Family Letters, 408-409.
37 The fact is that I feel like a sinner at times—since I had the natural ability to make money in any business, and thus having had the gift easily to secure a comfortable and care-free old age for my wonderful wife and for myself—and to leave some wealth for my children—that I missed these opportunities by spending my life in a thankless movement. Now I am almost 70 years old. And I have made up my mind that if the deal I am negociating [sic] should fall through for any reason whatsoever—I shall use my wits in a rather ruthless fashion to dispose of that property, and secure our old age.148 After devoting over three decades of his life to serving the cause of socialism, Victor prepared to retire to a quiet life and purchase 40 acres in Florida with the proceeds from the sale of the Leader where he and Meta could build a house, boat, fish, and grow tropical fruits.149 Disillusioned with his party and regretful over sacrificing his family to a lost cause, Victor prepared to prove his manhood in the end by retiring to the country as a landed patriarch. Instead of proving his manhood in politics, he would now do so as a private landowner. Meta prepared for the inevitable change in their relationship that would follow Victor’s retirement. Much of her freedom to pursue her own activities depended on Victor’s absences and income, what would she do now that he would be constantly around? Would he revert to his more domineering ways? Between his election and the end of the Congressional term, she likely pondered these and other questions. Finally, in late June, 1929, she wrote Victor her feelings on the impending change in their relationship: I am sort of eaten with remorse Dear Papa because I cause you even a moment’s aggravation & concern. I’m sorry that we have arguments over trifling things & I know that you mean the best for all of us & for me particularly. I’m going to try to make our few years more tranquil by conforming. Surely we ought not to get excited nor out of patience with each other in this evening of our lives. Please forger my nervousness—I’m nervous for the first time in my life. I really want to live comfortably & without so many restrictions but I’m going to meet you half way here after if possible. 150 Her sense of guilt over resisting his wishes was palpable. Despite her powerful independent identity, she emotionally remained committed to her husband. In this instance, her identity as a wife took precedence and she prepared to conform to Victor’s wishes if he would conform to hers. Facing the twilight of their lives and their first significant period of living together full- time in years, she pleaded with him to compromise and affirm the companionate marriage they had formed since the early 1910s. Yet, she left herself a possible escape, ending her letter with the elusive phrase, “if possible,” suggesting that they may have changed too much in the preceding fifteen years for a return to marital normalcy. Tragedy would prevent them from discovering whether or not they could.
148 Victor Berger to Meta Berger 2 February 1929, Family Letters, 410. 149Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 19 February 1929, Family Letters, 413. 150 Meta to Victor June 26, 1929 In The Family Letter’s of Victor and Meta Berger, 1894-1929, ed. Michael Stevens (Madison, Wisconsin: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1995) 414
38 EPILOGUE
Meta and Victor never had the chance to discover if the new marriage they had formed in the preceding twenty years could withstand his retirement from politics. Fourteen days after Meta’s letter, Victor, trying to avoid an automobile on the streets of Milwaukee, slipped and fell. Lying on the ground, a trolley struck him, fracturing his scull and causing severe internal injuries.151 He was immediately taken to the local hospital while Meta, at her her sister’s cottage on Schwano lake, rushed home. He was unconscious for most of the first nine days but after that he seemed to improve. On August 7, Meta received a phone call at 5:00 AM telling her to immediately come to the hospital. She rushed to Victor’s bedside and he died at 1:00 PM with Meta, Doris, and Elsa by his side.152 Despite his end of life regrets about the socialist movement, between 75,000 and 100,000 people came to view his body as it lay in state in Milwaukee’s city hall, his coffin draped with the same red flag that had adorned Eugene Debs’s coffin three years prior. Throughout the next few weeks, men and women paid tribute to his leadership, loyalty, geniality, and devotion.153 Condolence letters poured in from all over the world, each paying tribute to Victor’s strength, courage, and wisdom, the traits he had always striven to exemplify. The Socialist candidate for Montana Governor, Lewis J Duncan, wrote Meta that he: learned to respect the fidelity, sincerity, unselfish devotion of Victor Berger to that political faith and to his comrades. Faithfulness to his principles and fearlessness in their espousal, plus wise judgment in tactics, these qualities won for him my profound respect. . . . You who knew him so intimately need not be told of his faithfulness. We, who knew him through the labors he had done for the cause of social justice and humane brotherhood, shall not forget him while we live. And the torch that has dropped from his hand will not be extinguished, but shall be handed on to those who shall follow us in the struggle for a better, freer and nobler civilization of social justice and 154 civic righteousness.” In this letter, Duncan touched on many of the themes and ideas which had highlighted Victor’s performance of a male identity. He praised Victor’s sincerity, faithfulness, courage, wisdom and devotion, all characteristics that Victor continuously sought to demonstrate. He linked Victor’s struggles to the cause of the humane brotherhood and civilization, two of Victor’s main pursuits as a member of the socialist movement. In death, his friends and comrades apotheosized Victor as the paragon of manliness. Nothing could have pleased him more. For Meta, the letters of condolence brought little relief. Later, she described her emotional response to Victor’s death: I should have been prepared for that event, but somehow I wasn’t. I was overwhelmed with shock—too shocked to think of anything but my loss. I didn’t then nor for months after realize what it meant to lose the mainstay of the family and the prop upon which I had leaned so long. I had lost my husband and my comrade. . . . I was so desolate, so unable to carry on, so alone.155 To escape her desolation and loneliness, Meta tried to find comfort in her daily life. “I’ve spent this evening alone” she wrote her daughters. “And it’s the longest in my whole life. However, I cleaned (illegible), tried to read, looked out of the window at crowded Broadway, bathed, washed my hair, and now I’m trying to get a word off to you. This morning I slept late, then
151 “Victor Berger Badly Hurt,” The New York Times, 16 July 1929, 16. 152 “Victor Berger Dies; Socialist Leader,” The New York Times, 8 August 1929, 18. 153 “Berger’s Body to Lie in State at City Hall,” The New Yrkr Times, 11. 154 Lewis J. Duncan to Meta Berger, 8 August 1929, VLB Papers. 155 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 162.
39 shopped.156 Missing her husband, she turned to the activities that he had sought to compel her to enjoy when they were first married. But, domestic chores, reading, grooming, and shopping did little to alleviate Meta’s depression. For her, the only cure was politics. “A month later,” she wrote in her memoirs, “the thought came to me that like so many others, I could either sink completely, or I could pull myself up by my own boot-straps. And then I knew what my husband would have me do. So I tried to pick up life and work again.”157 She spent the next few months negotiating the sale of the Leader, continuing Victor’s plans to stabilize the family’s finances and provide for his and Meta’s retirement. When she went to New York to request that the Socialist Party purchase her shares of stock, they rejected her plan but named her to Victor’s seat on the National Committee. After this, Meta’s relationship with the National Committee deteriorated. When, in 1930, she attempted to run for Victor’ seat in Congress, she lost the support of the Socialist Party leadership when she used nonunion labor to add a room to the family’s summer home. She publicly feuded with Milwaukee’s powerful socialist mayor Daniel Hoan over political tactics.158 All of these political activities built upon Meta’s resistance to subjugation during her marriage to Victor. In challenging the Socialist Party, she engaged in the same type of resistance that she displayed in her relationship with Victor. In 1935, she received an offer from the Friends of the Soviet Union that would push her resistance to new heights: a trip to the Soviet Union. During his life, Victor had always spoken against the Soviet Union, writing to Meta in 1919 that “the Bolsheviks may prove the greatest bulwark against ‘Socializing the means of production.’”159 As a socialist, he distanced himself from Communism, saying “socialism is not Bolshevism. Socialism is the collective ownership and democratic management of the social means of production and distribution. . . but Bolshevism is an autocratic communism based upon a super-state supported by terror.”160 Given Victor’s views, Meta was understandably hesitant to accept the offer. For reasons that remain unclear, she accepted and asked the Socialist Party for the required references. The Party, increasingly hostile towards the Soviet Union, refused so Meta turned to her old Teacher’s Union, which endorsed her without reservations. For the next few months, Meta traveled throughout Russia, visiting factories, schools, nurseries, and other sites. She asked questions about the issues most pressing to her, women, children, and education. Increasingly disillusioned with the inequality viable in Depression-era American—especially for women—she was impressed with the situation she witnessed in Russia. When she arrived back in the United States, she began to stray even further from the Socialist Party, joining the Popular Front, advocating for improved relations with the Soviet Union, and recruiting volunteers for the Spanish Civil War. On May 2, 1940, she officially resigned from the party that her husband had co-founded and served for over three decades. 161 Meta’s gradual departure from the Socialist Party reflected her development of an explicitly radical identity. Victor’s death enabled Meta to complete her transformation from subservient housewife to radical feminist and socialist. With Victor and his restraining force gone, she was finally free to pursue politics as she wished. Now, instead of publicly identifying with the older and more conservative generation of activists, she was able to openly identify with
156 Meta Berger to Doris Welles, 14 September 1 1929, VLB Papers. 157 Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 163. 158 Kimberly Swanson, Afterward to A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 181-182. 159 Victor Berger to Meta Berger 21 September 1919, Family Letter 277. 160 “Berger Defends His War Record; Sees New Fascism in Ku Klux Klan New York Times, Devember 3, 1922. 161 Kimberly Swanson, Afterward to A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, 181-182.
40 the younger radicals whose ideology and tactics she had long privately embraced. Nothing reveals this transformation as well as photographs taken of Meta throughout her life. 162 When she married Victor and for the first few years of her married life, her appearance reflected her role a young, idealistic, middle-class German wife. A dewy-eyed young woman, her mouth was shut, just as it remained shut on the issues of the period. In the 1930s she did not pose for the camera; rather, a press photographer caught her making one of her impassioned speeches, her voice raised to finally speak her mind.
162 Both of these photographs can be found in Meta Berger, A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left, coer and last page of photographic inserts.
41 BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY SOURCES
Berger, Meta. A Milwaukee Woman’s Life on the Left. Kimberly Swanson, ed. Madison, Wisconsin: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 2001.
Berger, Victor L. Voice and Pen of Victor Berger: Congressional Speeches and Editorials. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: The Milwaukee Leader, 1929.
Berger, Victor L. Victor L. Berger Papers. Madison, Wisconsin: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1948.
Constantine, J. Robert, ed. Letters of Eugene V. Debs Volume 1. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
Socialist Party. Proceedings of the National Convention of the Socialist Party. Chicago: M.A. Donohue & Co., 1908.
Stevens, Michael, ed. The Family Letter’s of Victor and Meta Berger, 1894-1929. Madison, Wisconsin: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1995.
Walling, William English, J.G. Phelps Stokes, Jessie Wallace Hughan, eds. The Socialism Of To- Day: A Source-Book of the Present Position and Recent Development of the Socialist and Labor Parties in All Countries, Consisting Mainly of Original Documents. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916.
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Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Buhle, Mari Jo. Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Cott, Nancy F. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven, Connecticut and London: Yale University Press, 1987.
Glenn, Susan. Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Gorn, Elliott. The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.
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Kasson, John. Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.
Kimmel, Michael Manhood in America: a Cultural History. New York: The Free Press, 1996.
Miller, Sally M. Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, 1910-1920. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973.
Miller, Sally M. ed. Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Early Twentieth-Century American Socialism. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996.
Muzik, Edward John. Victor L. Berger: A Biography. Ph.D. Thesis, Northwestern University, 1960.
Velie, Meredithe Ann. Hierarchy and Web: A Study of Urban School Reform, Gender, and Cognitive Style in Milwaukee, 1890-1920. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin- Madison, 1992.
ARTICLES
Oliver, Lawrence J. “Theodore Roosevelt, Brander Matthews, and the Campaign for Literary Americanism” American Quarterly 41. (March 1989) : 93-111.
Testi, Arnaldo. “The Gender of Reform Politics: Theodore Roosevelt and the Culture of Masculinity.” The Journal of American History 81. (March 1995) : 1509-1533.
Dencker, Berit Elisabeth. “Class and the Construction of the 19th Century German Male Body.” The Journal of Historical Sociology 15 : 220-251.
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