Читать книгу Trotsky in New York, 1917 - Kenneth D. Ackerman - Страница 12

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RIVERSIDE DRIVE I

“Hillquit was a type [of socialist] more common on the Continent or in England. . . . My last meeting with him revealed his pragmatism. He said as he walked me to the door, ‘Comrade Recht, don’t you think it’s high time we ceased being a religion and became a political party?’”¹²⁰

—Lawyer Charles Recht, undated

MORRIS HILLQUIT CERTAINLY read the New York Call and would have seen Leon Trotsky’s interview on the front page. In fact, Hillquit’s own name had been plastered all over the Call that January for his own high-profile life in New York City. He probably glanced at Trotsky’s snapshot, saw the headline “Driven Out of Europe, He Takes Up Work as Radical Writer Here,” but didn’t think twice about it.

Hillquit soon would become Trotsky’s leading political nemesis in America, and the high-profile, often bitter personal clash between them would define the country’s left wing for a generation. But for now, the two remained total strangers.

Just that weekend, Hillquit’s own snapshot had dominated the Call’s front page. Dressed in a crisp white shirt and a suit and tie, he had a handsome face, clean-shaven, with sharp eyes, a small mustache, and smooth dark hair. Morris Hillquit saw nothing wrong with good grooming. He agreed with a friend’s remark that “a necktie can be tastefully tied and lying as it should, without breaking the principles of proletariat socialism, God forbid!”¹²¹ The photo had appeared under the headline HILLQUIT COUNT ENDED; FRAUDS CLEARLY SHOWN: SOCIALIST CHEATED OUT OF SEAT IN CONGRESS.¹²²

Morris Hillquit had run for the United States Congress in November from a district covering New York’s Upper East Side and Harlem, populated mostly by immigrants like himself, Jewish, Italian, and Irish. By an honest count, he probably should have won. But honest counts didn’t come cheaply back then.

On election night, Hillquit’s poll watchers had reported a good turnout, and early numbers gave him a narrow lead. But then something fishy happened. Around midnight, officials at two Hillquit-leaning precincts had stopped counting votes. Word reached Hillquit that local Republican and Democratic leaders had met there and cut a deal. He ran over to the voting place at the public school on 104th Street near Madison Avenue and demanded the counters get back to work. They refused. “They sat there impassively and cynically, chinning, smoking, spitting, doing everything but counting the vote,” he recalled.¹²³ Hillquit complained to nearby policemen, but they just shrugged.

It took until 4 AM for the precinct to report and until 4 PM the next day for the other slow precinct to finish. By then, the damage was done. The ballots had been fixed. In the three-way contest, the count showed Hillquit beating the Democrat by about 200 votes but losing to the Republican, an incumbent named Isaac Siegel, by 459.

Hillquit complained to a judge and demanded a recount. It took two months for a bipartisan panel (excluding Socialists) to study the ballots, and its final announcement had come just that weekend. The panel found plenty of dirt: more than 150 blank ballots stuffed into boxes and counted for Siegel, sixty perfectly good Hillquit votes tossed out and marked “void,” plus undercounts here and overcounts there. It came to 255 net documented additional votes for Hillquit, and no one doubted there were plenty more like them. But it wasn’t enough to change the outcome.

Unlike fresh-off-the-boat Russians like Leon Trotsky or Bukharin over at Novy Mir, Morris Hillquit knew exactly how politics worked in New York City. Tammany Hall, the venerable club that had dominated New York’s Democratic organization since the mid-1800s, still ran city hall, city jobs, and most everything else in its neighborhoods. Republican bosses ruled whatever Tammany hadn’t nailed down. On election days, the two sides cheated prolifically, paying for votes—$2 apiece was the going street price—and using “repeaters” and “floaters,” staples since the days of Boss Tweed. When not fighting each other, Tammany and the Republicans happily joined forces to crush anyone else.

Hillquit had learned this lesson the hard way. This was his third run for the US Congress and probably the second time he actually won, except for being, as they put it back then, “counted out.” In 1906 he had won an outright plurality in a district on the Lower East Side, getting more votes on the Socialist line than either the Republican or Democratic tickets. But Tammany Hall had cut a last-minute deal with William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper mogul running for governor that year on his own, self-created Independence League line. With Hearst’s blessing, Tammany had added its candidate’s name to Hearst’s Independent ticket and used the extra votes it got that way to defeat Hillquit. Two years later, in 1908, Hillquit again ran strong before election day. This time, it was Republicans who cut the deal, telling supporters to vote against their own candidate to beat the Socialist.¹²⁴

These disappointments aside, Morris Hillquit counted himself lucky. By 1917 his Socialist Party had reached a remarkable status in America. Its candidates had won elections all across the country. Two Socialists had sat in the US Congress. Socialists held mayor’s offices in fifty-six towns and cities, including Milwaukee and Schenectady. They held more than thirty seats in state legislatures, from Minnesota to California to Oklahoma and Wisconsin, plus dozens of city council and alderman seats. The party had more than 110,000 dues-paying members and about 150 affiliated newspapers and magazines. Its flagship national magazine, Appeal to Reason, reached almost seven hundred thousand readers each month, and its presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, had won almost a million votes in 1912, about 6 percent of the total, running head-to-head against Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft.

In New York City, Hillquit’s friend Meyer London, a popular labor lawyer, had finally captured the US congressional seat from the Lower East Side for the Socialists in 1914. Building this organization had taken twenty years of painstaking work, and Morris Hillquit had sweated the details at every step.

That winter, to top it all, Hillquit, as Socialist Party leader, had waged a public campaign against the world war. In January he had traveled to Washington, DC, and met with none less than President Woodrow Wilson at the White House, leading a Socialist Party peace delegation. They asked Wilson to keep America out of the war and mediate the conflict along lines fair to all sides: no indemnities or reparations, no annexations of territory, independence for colonies that wanted it, and an international tribunal to arbitrate disputes. These items all would appear later in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points.

Hillquit recalled sitting down with President Wilson that day and finding him “preoccupied and tired,” though as they spoke, he became “interested and animated.” The president made no commitments but promised support in the vague way politicians do.¹²⁵

All this work—the travel, the politics, the high-profile legal cases—made Morris Hillquit in 1917 one of the best known Socialists in America, second only to Eugene V. Debs. Debs was the party’s popular face, its presidential candidate, but Morris Hillquit was its leader, the workhorse.

Born in Latvia, Hillquit came to New York as a teenager in 1886 and quickly learned enough English to get a job teaching it to immigrants at a night school on the Lower East Side. By day he stitched garment cuffs in a sweatshop for a year, but he got his first real break when the Socialist Labor Party hired him as a $4-per-week office clerk. Here, Hillquit had the rare chance to learn politics and journalism. In 1890 he joined another sharp young writer, Abraham Cahan—future editor of the Forward—in starting the city’s first Yiddish-language newspaper, the Arbeiter Zeitung, then he worked his way though NYU Law School.

As a young lawyer, Hillquit wore well-tailored suits, changed his family name from Hilkowitz to Hillquit, and changed his given name from Moishe to Morris. But he didn’t hesitate to take on the most radical leftists as clients, often for free. In 1901, when police arrested Johann Most, a notorious anarchist and promoter of assassinations—what he called “propaganda of the deed”—for publishing a seditious article after the assassination of President McKinley, it was Morris Hillquit who defended him before a darkly hostile New York courtroom. Hillquit argued free speech, but the judge sentenced Most to a year at the Blackwell’s Island prison for the offense.

In 1900 Hillquit quit the Socialist Labor Party and led a splinter group to join the Midwest-based movement led by Eugene V. Debs, the hero and charismatic leader of the 1894 Pullman strike in Chicago, an epic standoff pitting Debs’s American Railway Union against the largest railroad companies in America. It had taken President Grover Cleveland sending federal troops to finally break the Pullman strike and Debs’s union. The government prosecuted Debs for conspiracy over the strike and jailed him for six months for contempt. Debs used his time behind bars to think and study, and here he discovered socialism. It was this combination—Debs’s Midwest group and Hillquit’s from New York—that would form the new Socialist Party of America.

The new party transformed Marxism into a distinctly American brand. Its platform soon brimmed with ideas that later would become staples of modern life: a right to strike (anti-injunction laws), a graduated income tax, limits on child labor, school lunches, mine and factory inspections, public works jobs for the unemployed, a limited workweek, a minimum wage, public defenders, public ownership of key industries like streetcars and subways. The party still preached revolution, but increasingly more as a metaphor. To Hillquit, revolution meant fundamental change through hard work, winning elections, and passing laws. “Mass action,” another favorite radical term, to him meant big industry-wide strikes conducted cleanly and legally, with no room for fighting, bombings, assassinations, or violence.

Just that winter, for instance, Hillquit had helped lead one of the largest labor strikes in New York’s history, a walkout by forty-five thousand members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, a union he had helped form in the 1890s and now represented as its top lawyer. The strike had closed more than 150 coat manufacturers, who in turn had locked out another twenty-five thousand workers. The workers demanded better pay, sanitation, and union recognition, this at a time when garment workers typically logged sixty-hour weeks—longer if they worked “by the piece”—for a dollar or two a day. They had no insurance, no bank accounts, no access to credit, no government programs, and few charities to help them.

After months of street picketing, in December the dispute had gone to an arbitration panel, resulting in a settlement: better pay, better conditions, and union recognition, though not a fully closed shop. The workers returned to their jobs, and the union, after years of strife, had won its point.¹²⁶

Winning elections, though, was tougher. It required public support, and for socialists, that meant overcoming the prejudice most Americans still felt against both them and immigrants generally. Just a few weeks earlier, the New York Times had labeled voters in Hillquit’s congressional race “uneducated, highly emotional foreigners, most of them, who have much to learn before they can be regarded as worthy American citizens.”¹²⁷ Americans had feared anarchy and socialism—few bothered to recognize the difference—ever since the 1886 Haymarket bomb incident, which had killed seven Chicago policemen and sent four anarchists to the gallows. It didn’t help that Leon Czolgosz, the assassin who had killed President William McKinley in 1901, was a recent Polish immigrant and anarchist. The obvious hypocrisy—companies used violence against striking workers repeatedly—didn’t seem to make a difference.

Socialists could never hope to win big elections until they had conquered this stereotype, and this demanded ridding their party of elements—anarchists, radicals, extremists—who threatened to destroy its credibility. That’s why Hillquit had insisted on the expulsion of IWW leader Bill Haywood for publicly supporting sabotage as a labor tactic. Hillquit even fought Eugene Debs, the party’s most beloved figure, over this issue, and he tried to block Debs’s presidential nomination in 1912 and 1916 when he thought Debs’s rhetoric had turned too radical.

Meanwhile, as a lawyer and politician, Hillquit became wealthy. By early 1917 he and his wife, Vera, owned a home on New York’s Riverside Drive, an exclusive street just a tree-shaded park away from the Hudson River. He operated two law offices, one at 30 Church Street near city hall and another on the Lower East Side. “I can see nothing wrong in principle for a socialist to practice law in a capitalist system or to engage in other capitalist activities,” he explained.¹²⁸

But the one insult that still rankled him was if anyone questioned his loyalty to the country. When an interviewer from the New York Times suggested to his face that his supporters had “no patriotism and are glad of it,” Hillquit barely contained himself: “Mr. Hillquit’s eyes are very blue and his hair very black,” the reporter wrote. “Generally the contrast is arresting, but as he turned to answer the challenge, he eyes blazed almost as black as his hair.”

His terse response: “You’re wrong there. Quite wrong.”¹²⁹

Hillquit knew his attitude didn’t sit well with radicals, including many of the Russian crowd. He knew all about Vladimir Lenin in Europe and the platform he’d pressed at the 1915 Zimmerwald conference—that socialists should urge defeat of their own countries in the war. How preposterous. He had met Lenin at a socialist conference in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1907 but wasn’t overly impressed. He had also met Alexandra Kollontai during her 1915 American speaking tour, and he made no apology about having stepped in to block a proposal she’d made in Milwaukee to endorse the Lenin Zimmerwald platform, linking good patriotic American socialists with Lenin’s anti-patriotic line. Hillquit didn’t mind criticism from radicals. He had a bigger purpose.