Why not revolution

“Why not revolution?” is the passage’s insistent question about the hardship Reed encounters: it moves from a spoken argument for a cooperative commonwealth to the consequences of meeting workers in the streets and in jail. Repeated at the point where observation becomes participation, the question gives Reed’s sympathy a political direction without presenting revolution as an abstract subject detached from workers’ material circumstances.

A Question in Conversation

The expression first appears in a portrait of Lincoln Steffens, whose mellow voice carries talk of the cooperative commonwealth. The passage casts him as a Diogenes searching the West for a good man and as a Socrates who keeps asking why revolution should not come. The question therefore enters as a recurring challenge within conversation: not a settled program, but an argument that refuses to treat the existing order as inevitable.

Jack Reed’s encounters give that question a different weight. He wants to live in a tub and write verses, but keeps meeting unemployed workingmen whom he likes and who are out of luck. The passage connects his inability to concentrate on his work with those encounters, then invokes the Declaration of Independence, which he learned by heart. Its account of Reed as a Westerner for whom words mean what they say makes the question more than an intellectual pose: political language presses toward action when it is measured against the lives of people without work.

From Witness to Participant

In 1913, Reed goes to Paterson to report on the strike at the textile mills. He sees workers parading, beaten by the police, and strikers in jail; before long, he is himself among the strikers, parading, beaten, and imprisoned. The expression’s earlier inquiry thus acquires an immediate human setting. The issue is no longer only why revolution might be desirable: Reed has entered the conflict in which workers face police violence and arrest.

Reed refuses to let the editor bail him out, reasoning that he will learn more in jail with the strikers. That choice makes the question part of a process of understanding grounded in shared circumstances rather than distant observation. The passage says that he learned enough to put on the Paterson Strike Pageant in Madison Square Garden. His reporting and imprisonment lead into a public retelling of the strike, extending the workers’ experience beyond the jail and the mills.

Refrain and Political Meaning

After the account of the pageant, the passage identifies what Reed learned: the hope of a new society in which nobody would be out of luck. The question returns immediately afterward, now attached to that hope. Its recurrence links the cooperative commonwealth associated with Lincoln Steffens, Reed’s concern for unemployed men, and his participation in the Paterson strike without claiming that these are identical experiences.

The expression’s force lies in that progression. At first it is an argument voiced in conversation; through Reed’s encounters it becomes a question tested against unemployment, police beatings, imprisonment, and the possibility of collective change. Repeated rather than answered, it leaves the reader with the political pressure that organizes the passage: if workers are left out of luck, why should the social order that produces their hardship remain unquestioned?