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Gender, Personality, and Politics in the Marriage of Meta and Victor Berger

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Gender, Personality, and Politics in the Marriage of Meta and Victor Berger 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.
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