a period like that need have no terrors for the most conservative,"
commented Senator La Follette, with perhaps justifiable humor.

If Socialism is to become positive, said Mr. Berger again, it must
"conduct the everyday fight for the practical revolution of every day."
Like the word "Socialism," Mr. Berger retains the word "revolution," but
practically it comes to mean much the same as its antithesis, everyday
reform.

It has been Mr. Berger's declared purpose from the beginning to turn the
Milwaukee Party aside from the tactics of the International movement to
those of the "revisionist" minority that has been so thoroughly crushed
at the German and International Congresses. (See Chapter VII.) "The
tactics of the American Socialist Party," he wrote editorially in 1901,
"if that party is to live and succeed--can only be the much abused and
much misunderstood Bernstein doctrine."

"In America for the first time in history," he added, "we find an
oppressed class with the same fundamental rights as the ruling
class--the right of universal suffrage...."[147]

It was the impression of many of the earlier German Socialists in this
country that political democracy already existed in America and that it
was only necessary to make use of it to establish a new social order.
The devices the framers of our Constitution employed to prevent such an
outcome, the widespread distribution of property, especially of farms,
disfranchisement in the South and elsewhere, etc., were all considered
as small matters compared to the difficulties Socialists faced in
Germany and other countries. Many have come more recently to recognize,
with Mr. Louis Boudin, that the movement "will have to learn that in
this country, as in Germany or other alien lands, the fight is on not
only for the use of its power by the working class, but for the
possession of real political power by the masses of the people." Neither
in this country nor in any other does the oppressed class have "the same
fundamental rights as the ruling class." In America the working class
have not even an approximately equal right to the ballot, because of
local property, literacy, residence, and other qualifications, as
alluded to in an earlier chapter, and it is at least doubtful whether
the workers are in a more favorable position here than elsewhere to gain
final and effective control of the government without physical
revolution (as Mr. Berger himself has admitted; see Chapter VI)