Читать книгу Trotsky in New York, 1917 - Kenneth D. Ackerman - Страница 11

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BROOKLYN

“When about 14 years of age I entered the gymnasium of Chernigov. . . . Here in America schoolboys spend most of their time in sports, baseball and football. In Russia, the boys—and girls, too, for that matter—use their leisure for reading books. . . . Our pastime was chiefly attending underground socialist meetings and spreading propaganda among workingmen in the city and peasants in the country. I was no exception to the rule.”⁹⁹

—Leon Trotsky, writing in March 1917

TROTSKY TOOK THE subway again that night. He, Bukharin, and Chudnovsky each paid their nickel and then followed the signs to the line called BRT (Brooklyn Rapid Transit, later renamed BMT). After a few rattling stops, the train glided out from Manhattan onto the Brooklyn Bridge. High over the East River, Trotsky could look out the window and see January darkness broken on either side by a dramatic sight. Lights from thousands of building windows, offices, apartments, and skyscrapers, all powered by electricity, shot high in the air, creating stark panoramas under the black sky.

Brooklyn lay at the far end, a separate city until 1898, just twenty years earlier, when it had joined Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island to form Greater New York. (The Bronx had become part of the city in 1874.) Now three giant bridges connected Brooklyn to lower Manhattan, each an engineering marvel in itself, hung by cables strung from massive towers. The bridges suddenly made Brooklyn an easy walk or train ride away, causing its population to triple in just three decades. With its two million people, Brooklyn alone would qualify as America’s third largest city in 1917, just behind New York and Chicago.

Once there, the train stopped again and again, lurching Trotsky and the others back and forth as its steel wheels screeched in the darkness, at Fulton Street, Saint Marks Avenue, Prospect Park, and Green-Wood Cemetery. Had they stayed on, the BRT would have taken them all the way to Coney Island, already famous for its boardwalk, Luna Park, roller coasters, and summer hot dogs. Instead Trotsky got off at Fifty-Fourth Street, a part of Brooklyn called Borough Park, a quiet place—at least quieter than Lower Manhattan—with shops, schools, synagogues, and apartment houses, populated largely by German and Russian immigrants, mostly Jewish, who had managed to scrape together money enough to leave the squalid Lower East Side.

On Fifty-Fifth Street, they found Ludwig Lore’s building, came in from the cold, and walked up to the second floor. From there, they just followed their noses.

Lillian (Lily) Lore loved to bake, and the apartment must have smelled delicious that night as her husband greeted guests at the door. He led them to the dining room, navigating the toys and clutter from their two young sons, Karl and Kurt.

Ludwig Lore and Trotsky seemed to hit it off right away, two European men with Old World manners. “I was captivated at once, with the charm of [Trotsky’s] personality and the brilliance of his intellect,” Lore recalled.¹⁰⁰ For Lore, politics came second. Food and company came first. “He was a jolly man whose political and aesthetic inclinations fit no prescribed categories,” historian Paul Buhle wrote years later.¹⁰¹ Born in Germany, Lore had studied at Berlin University and had established his journalism credentials there before leaving for America in 1905. In the United States, Lore settled first in Colorado, but he couldn’t resist the lure of New York City and the New Yorker Volkszeitung, one of the country’s top left-wing dailies, with a formidable audience of twenty-three thousand readers. Now, in 1917, Lore, “stocky, quick-witted, with black curling mustache and an overgrown mass of unruly dark hair,”¹⁰² as Theodore Draper described him, ran the newspaper as associate editor and soon-to-be editor in chief.

He and Lily, whom he had married in 1909, made their home-cooked dinners legendary. Twenty years later, in 1938, a young communist recruit named Whittaker Chambers—who would make headlines in the late 1940s by denouncing government lawyer Alger Hiss as a communist agent—would visit Lore’s apartment and describe Lily as “remarkable,” producing massive German meals to feed an “endless procession of guests.”¹⁰³ Another guest during the 1930s, an FBI informant, described Lily’s lunches as “delightfully memorable.”¹⁰⁴ Beyond hosting Alexandra Kollontai on her 1915 American speaking tour, Ludwig and Lily Lore had helped Nikolai Bukharin and his wife get settled in America two months earlier, insisting the Bukharins sleep in their apartment until they found a place to live.

Lore was the obvious choice to host the dinner. He had arranged it weeks earlier and invited a wide mix of New York leftists, about twenty altogether—Russians, Americans, Dutch, Italians, and Japanese, a mini League of Nations speaking six different languages. What drew them together, though, was their view of the world war. As one, Sen Katayama, would explain, these people all “stood against defense of the fatherland” as “anti-patriotic Socialists,” making them the most avidly antiwar faction in the country.

Ludwig Lore knew something else about these American radicals: that they were “astonishingly out of touch” and “intensely ignorant” of global affairs.¹⁰⁵ To accomplish anything, they needed to learn from experts. And now an unexpected surprise: A celebrity had agreed to join them, none less than Leon Trotsky, fresh off the boat from Europe.

We don’t know the identities of all the people Lore invited to his home that night. Besides the Russians, only a handful of names appear in any accounts. Most of the Americans probably asked to stay anonymous, given the anticommunist, anti-German witch hunts that would break out over the following few years. But the names we do know paint a clear picture.

The Russians—Trotsky, Bukharin, Chudnovsky, Volodarsky, and Kollontai—made up the biggest faction. These five all stood on the verge of destiny. Each would return to Russia later in 1917 and play a lead role in the revolution and Bolshevik regime. It was these seasoned activists that Lore hoped could teach his American friends how to properly structure a movement.

Of the non-Russians, Louis Boudin easily ranked as the most prominent, a well-known lawyer, writer, and speaker. Short and plump, Boudin had come from Russia as a child twenty years earlier but since then had shed his accent, graduated from New York University Law School, and made a pile of money as an attorney representing labor unions and workers. Boudin had run for various judgeships in New York City five times between 1910 and 1916, always on the Socialist ticket, and he planned to run again in 1917. He never won, but he spoke and wrote extensively; he had two recent books on Marxism and the world war. Boudin claimed to see no conflict between Marx and what one biographer called his belief in “the genius of the United States Constitution.”¹⁰⁶ For this group, that made him a conservative.

Then came another wealthy foreigner, Sebald J. Rutgers of the Netherlands. Trained in Delft as a construction engineer and one-time city engineer in Rotterdam and Medan, Rutgers had come to America on business and decided to stay. But he had a passion for socialism, and that’s where he invested his fortune. Back home, he wrote for the International Socialist Review. In the United States, he financed the recently formed Boston-based Socialist Propaganda League and its new publication, the Internationalist. Vladimir Lenin had read the magazine in Switzerland and sent Rutgers a note complimenting him for it.¹⁰⁷

Rutgers brought two friends with him that night. One was John D. Williams, one of his staff at the Propaganda League in Boston, who edited the Internationalist. The other was sixty-year-old Sen Katayama, founder of Japan’s socialist movement in Tokyo. Katayama had made a splash in radical circles for breaking ranks with his own country and shaking hands with Russian socialist leaders at a 1903 conference just before the Russo-Japanese War. Country came second! The International Working Class came first!

Finally there was Louis C. Fraina, the youngest face at the table. Fraina too stood on the verge of destiny. In 1919, two years in the future, Fraina would chair the founding convention of the American Communist Party in Chicago with such aplomb that another early leader, Benjamin Gitlow, would complain of his acting like “the Lenin of America.”¹⁰⁸ A few years after that, Fraina would quit the party, falsely accused of being an FBI spy. By the 1930s, he would renounce communism, change his name to Corey, and become a noted economist, writer, and professor, before federal Red hunters would catch up to him in the early 1950s.

He would also become one of Leon Trotsky’s closest friends in New York City.

For now, though, Fraina was just a twenty-five-year-old upstart with no political affiliation. He had earned his living editing a magazine called Modern Dance that covered ballet, poetry, theater, and the arts. Small, with bushy eyebrows, a high forehead, and a clipped mustache, he had come to New York as a five-year-old from Italy and had grown up in stark poverty, polishing boots on street corners and rolling cigars to help feed the family. His parents sent him to Catholic school, but he quit after a nun slapped his brother. At public grade school, he graduated as valedictorian. When his father died, he dropped out and found a job with the Edison Company. Already by then, he had read Karl Marx and hated capitalism for crushing the poor.

All this led to journalism and socialism. Precocious and curious, Fraina would sneak into theaters when he couldn’t afford tickets, and he read voraciously. At eighteen, he won election to the New York Socialist Labor Party’s General Committee. In 1912 the Daily People sent him to Lawrence, Massachusetts, to cover the textile strike there led by IWW leader Bill Haywood, one of the most successful mass labor actions in America before or since. By 1915 Fraina had won paid staff positions at both Modern Dance and the New Review, where his name appeared with top writers such as John Reed, Walter Lippmann, and W. E. B. DuBois.

By late 1916 the New Review had closed and Modern Dance would close in a few months, leaving Fraina unemployed. It was around this time that he met Rutgers, and already Rutgers had suggested that Fraina join his Boston project as editor of the Internationalist.

These were the faces around the table that night in Ludwig Lore’s apartment, at least the ones we know. Two of them, Lore and Katayama, would write accounts of what happened next, but these were painfully brief. We don’t know who exactly said what. But on the main points, the accounts all agree.

Lily’s dinner apparently set the tone. It’s easy to picture this odd gaggle of guests mingling and laughing over their food, calling each other comrade while stumbling over each other’s languages. Some drank tea, some drank vodka, some probably drank too much. Cigarette smoke filled the air and loosened tongues. Among the Russians, Kollontai chatted with Trotsky while nibbling down Lily Lore’s pastries, Trotsky probably regaling the table with funny stories about bumbling Spanish police and bad food on the Montserrat. Among the Americans, Rutgers chatted with Louis Fraina, and Louis Boudin doubtless pontificated over the corruption of local city politicians.

We don’t know who first broached the serious topic, but Lore as host probably did the honors. Why had he called them together? Lore had heard his friends’ complaints that, with America possibly on the verge of entering the world war, their Socialist Party—which should be the strongest voice of dissent—seemed lethargic and hopelessly unfocused. How deep was the problem? How urgent the crisis? What, realistically, could they do?

They started talking, and complaints came pouring out. And one name apparently came up again and again, a symbol of all the things the people in this room saw wrong with the established American Socialist Party: the party’s leader in New York City, Morris Hillquit. Katayama, in fact, wrote his own account of the dinner as part of a diatribe called “Morris Hillquit and the Left Wing,” a wide-ranging slam against the party leader.¹⁰⁹

To this jury, Hillquit’s crimes were many. As a lawyer, Hillquit represented labor and radicals, but he charged too much money, making him a “parasite” of the working class. (Lawyer Louis Boudin, of course, often heard the same complaint.) Hillquit and his crowd cared more about winning elections, placating the capitalist press, than fighting the class struggle. Worst of all, in 1912 it was Hillquit’s crowd that had engineered the expulsion of Bill Haywood from the party’s executive committee for publicly endorsing sabotage as a labor tactic. Louis Boudin had blasted Hillquit at the time for his “bourgeois notion of legality” (Marx had never opposed violence or lawbreaking on any ethical principle, so what gave Morris Hillquit the right?) and for his readiness to compromise just because “it was popular or seemed to be popular with the masses of people.”¹¹⁰

Alexandra Kollontai particularly despised Hillquit. She described him in her diary as a “vile revisionist,” too cozy with the trusts and “terribly afraid [he’ll] be excluded from the International.”¹¹¹ Kollontai probably mentioned the run-in she had had with Hillquit during her 1915 speaking tour at a meeting in Milwaukee, where she and Ludwig Lore had proposed a resolution endorsing Lenin’s Zimmerwald platform. Hillquit had jumped in to squash it. After “heated debates,” as she described it in a letter to Lenin, “Hillquit and Romm [another moderate] defeated our proposal.”¹¹²

Before long, they all agreed on the problem, and the issue came down to a choice: Should they quit the Socialist Party and form their own new group? Or should they stay and try to change it from within? That, of course, meant getting rid of Hillquit and his crowd.

Leon Trotsky, if he were any other person, hearing all this on his first day in America, probably would have said little. He knew none of the non-Russians in the room, knew none of the people they were talking about, knew nothing about their local Socialist Party or their country other than what he’d read. Still exhausted from his trip, Trotsky barely spoke English, barely knew where Brooklyn was, and barely knew even how to ride the subway. He had no concept of the brewing passions in America over joining the European fight and no idea how politics worked in New York City. But he and Bukharin both heard one thing that struck a chord, an echo of the same argument they’d fought repeatedly in Europe: the question of unity or split, straight from the classic Bolshevik–Menshevik breakup of 1903.

They both spoke up, and within a few minutes, their two shrill voices dominated the room. And when they talked, especially once they got their juices flowing, every head leaned closer. We don’t know what words they used or even what language they spoke, Russian, German, or something else. But by all accounts, Trotsky and Bukharin soon had the group riveted.

Bukharin the Bolshevik went first. He had given this question some thought. He insisted they split. That’s what Lenin would do. Lenin always insisted on splitting away from any faction that might slow him down or compromise the ultimate goal of revolution, be it Mensheviks, the Second International, or anyone else. To win power, a party needed discipline, committed cadres dedicated to decisive action. There was no room for doubters or hangers-on. Kollontai spoke up too, taking Bukharin’s side.

But then came Trotsky, who likewise responded instinctively. He, the Menshevik, disagreed totally. Unity was best, he argued. Their small movement needed strength from numbers. Political parties like the Socialists had organization and assets. Lenin’s tactics might work in a backward place like Russia, where seizing power inevitably required violence or coup d’état. But did it really make sense anyplace else? Bukharin, he lamented, was acting like a “typical Leninite.”¹¹³

“The Russians were in their element,” Ludwig Lore wrote in describing the scene, with Trotsky and Bukharin staging “long drawn-out but intensely interesting theoretical discussions.”¹¹⁴ As Draper put it: “Twenty four hours after Trotsky’s arrival, he and Bukharin were able to carry on their European feud in terms of an American movement almost wholly foreign to both of them.”¹¹⁵ They were fighting out their Menshevik–Bolshevik split right there in the middle of Ludwig Lore’s Brooklyn apartment. But unlike in Europe, the argument here never grew unfriendly, part of its mesmerizing appeal. Bukharin, as a biographer noted, believed that “political differences need not influence personal relations,” and apparently he showed it that night.¹¹⁶

They took a vote, and someone suggested a sweetener: that they stay in the American Socialist Party but also launch a separate new magazine. The motion carried. The decision was made. They formed a subcommittee.

Hearing about this entire episode a few weeks later, Bertram Wolfe, another young leftist recruit, was apoplectic. How could these Russians, “knowing next to nothing about America and even less about the American Socialist Party,” come together “with complete insouciance” and tell American socialists how to run their business?¹¹⁷

But so it went. Something profound had transpired in that room. The Americans—Fraina, Boudin, and the rest—found themselves transfixed by the Russians and their esoteric argument, their animation and excitement, the integrity that oozed from their jail terms and Siberian exiles, their brilliant minds challenging each other with passion and focus. Some, like Katayama, refused to be stampeded. The Trotsky–Bukharin colloquy left him “bewildered and dazzled . . . rather than convinced,” a biographer explained.¹¹⁸ But even Katayama recognized leadership. He summarized the group’s feeling this way: “We intended to organize the Left Wing under the direction of Comrade Trotzky, and Madam Kollontai, who was going to Europe, was to establish a link between the European and American Left Wing movements.”¹¹⁹

As they said their good-nights and headed out into the winter cold, the first American Trotskyists had been christened, and the American far left had linked its destiny to the Russians. And Trotsky, after one day in the country, had picked his first fight in New York City, with the leaders of the American Socialist Party. Soon he would have to meet this Morris Hillquit and find out what he was made of.