ers." The
Left Wing leaders in America, however, ignoring the recognition of a
"Center" in this country, lumped together and designated as the "Right"
all their Socialist opponents, the special followers of Hillquit, Victor
L. Berger and the other "bosses" of the Socialist Party; but they
certainly followed the tactics of "criticizing pitilessly its leaders."
(See the Moscow call in Chapter III and the details of the Left Wing
fight in Chapters III, IV and V.)

These facts explain the course pursued by Hillquit and his
fellow-leaders. In the first place they had to get rid of the Left Wing
leaders whose "control of the party" would make it "an outlaw
organization and break up the organization." This they accomplished by
wholesale expulsions and suspensions, as we have seen in earlier
chapters. But in the second place they had to prepare a sufficiently
strong public declaration of the real revolutionary principles of their
party and a sufficiently explicit identification of the party with the
Moscow International to satisfy both the rank and file of their
followers and Lenine and Trotzky in Russia, while yet not going far
enough to incriminate themselves with the awakening suspicions of our
National and State Governments. As a result we have the utterances of
the Emergency Convention of August-September, 1919, where every
compromising word was still only a hint of the principles and plan of
action carefully concealed behind it.

Even so, the leaders soon realized that they had revealed too much of
the truth for their safety; while the wholesale arrests, indictments and
deportations of radicals evidently convinced these cunning plotters that
the old-time disguises and hypocrisies of Hillquit, Victor Berger and
the other foxes of the party were the only safe tactics for
revolutionists in America. Thus Ludwig C. A. K. Martens, the Bolshevist
"ambassador," himself led the retreat in his smooth lies to the United
States Senate Foreign Sub-Committee, to the effect that the dictatorship
in Russia no longer regarded it as necessary to urge those affiliated
with it in other countries to overthrow the existing governments.
Undoubtedly he had made the American situation perfectly clear to Lenine
and Trotzky.

The reappearance of Morris Hillquit in the Assembly case at Albany, on
February 17, 1920, and his appearance on the witness-stand as "an expert
on Socialism," was a similar attempt to repair the breaches with
camouflage. I