SUSAN DUNN
541
public affairs. "Let women go to the polls and express their will, and we
shall have different men and measures than we have now."
Douglass even surpassed the female leaders of the women's move–
ment, for some of them, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, could not
liberate themselves from their own retrograde racism. Mter ratification of
the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing black male suffrage, Stanton was
outraged. Women were surely more qualified to vote than Negro men, she
sputtered, classing them with "idiots and lunatics" and dismissing them as
so many Sambos. It was Douglass who proved to be one of the truest rev-
01
utionaries of the nineteenth century, following the American
revolutionary tradition and then forging ahead on his own.
For several months in 1918, Robespierre stood in the Kremlin. A likeness
of the French revolutionary had been ordered personally by Lenin, the
head of the new Russian government, to embellish the capital of the
Soviet republic. But neither bronze nor marble had been available, for the
October Revolution was also a time of civil war, foreign invasion, bread
shortages, sacrifice, and suffering. The statue was sculpted in weak, tempo–
rary stone. Cracks soon formed and widened, and Robespierre eventually
crumbled. The statue's collapse from within probably never caused Lenin
to wonder about the fragility of the French model of revolution. On the
contrary, he considered himself a Jacobin, like Robespierre, who would not
recoil from the use of terror to achieve his ends.
The American Revolution never ignited Lenin's imagination. He
would probably have viewed it as no more than an anti-colonial revolt, too
conservative to attempt any kind of radical social restructuring. Political
power after the American Revolution remained in the hands of the same
"bourgeois" interests who had possessed power during English colonial
rule. Moreover, a Constitution, parliament, and guarantees of civil liberties
held no attraction for Lenin, as the historian Richard Pipes points out.
Political liberalization, Lenin wrote in 1894, only fortifies the position of
the bourgeoisie. The time had come, Lenin declared, to separate socialism
from democracy.
But the French Revolution was Lenin's kind of meat. The events of
1789 and 1793 were his guide book for eradicating a feudal past, eliminat–
ing political opposition, and institutionalizing terror. Its pages pointed out
the three-star monuments to be revisited (the elimination of dissent,
purges, and capital punishment), the tourist-traps to be avoided (factions,
the counterrevolution of Thermidor), and the shrines of heroes to be
admired. Indeed, Robespierre and the Jacobins furnished Lenin with mod–
els of tough, forceful, and creative revolutionary leadership. "One cannot be a
Marxist," he wrote
in
1915, "without entertaining the deepest respect for the
