Читать книгу Trotsky in New York, 1917 - Kenneth D. Ackerman - Страница 15

8

COOPER UNION

On Russia:

“Our history his not been rich. Our so-called ‘national originality’ consisted of being poor, ignorant, uncouth . . . the kingdom of stagnation, servitude, vodka and humbleness.”¹⁴⁰

—Leon Trotsky, Novy Mir, January 20, 1917

On America:

“The economic life of Europe is being blasted to its very foundations [by the world war], whereas America is increasing in wealth. . . . Will [Europe] not sink to nothing but a cemetery? And will the economic and cultural centres of gravity not shift to America?”¹⁴¹

—Leon Trotsky at Cooper Union, January 25, 1917

AND NOW, ON January 25, 1917, he finally enjoyed a big welcoming party. And what better place for it than the Great Hall of Cooper Union, a room that oozed with history. Since it opened in 1859, with its graceful arches, columns, and chandeliers, Cooper Union had hosted a litany of the American great and near great: Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and now Leon Trotsky.

We don’t know how many people actually came that cold Thursday night to see Trotsky give his first major public address in America. The Cooper Union hall held nine hundred seats, and the Forward, an event sponsor, reported a “large attendance to salute the Russian fighter for freedom.”¹⁴² The left-wing press spent days publicizing this “GREAT RECEPTION AND MEETING,” though one witness remembered seeing plenty of empty seats.¹⁴³ Tickets sold for twenty cents at the door and fifty cents for reserved stage seats, the cost of a vaudeville show.

No big-name celebrities apparently came, no movie stars or Broadway actors. Not the governor, not the mayor, no senators or even a congressman. None of the big English-speaking newspapers sent a reporter. Not even the Justice Department, its Bureau of Investigations, US military intelligence, or the New York City Police bothered to send detectives. By the end of 1917, police forces on three continents would be scrambling to find any scrap of information about this same Leon Trotsky. By then he would have seized power in Russia and threatened the world. But now, in January, he remained a nobody. They had him right under their noses, and they all missed it.

The people who did come to hear Trotsky that night were his natural friends, immigrants and radicals, a crowd that needed speakers in four different languages—Yiddish, German, Russian, and English—just to understand a single speech. These people mostly hated the Russian tsar, dreamed of socialism, and expected to love anything this Trotsky had to say.

One exception, though, was an old Russian acquaintance who came more out of curiosity. Grisha Ziv had known Trotsky as a teenager. He and Trotsky had both belonged to the same small circle of young radical friends in the town of Nikolaev. They had been arrested together in 1898 after their group helped organize a workers union there. These days, Ziv, now a New York doctor, had grown conservative. He supported the world war, a very odd duck among this Cooper Union crowd. Having read Trotsky’s interviews in the Forward and the Call, he fully expected to disagree with the speech. Still, he came late and found a seat.

Typical for these events, Trotsky had to wait on the podium as the other speakers went first. Algernon Lee, director of the Rand School for Social Research, speaking in English, welcomed Trotsky to America on behalf of American socialists and complimented him on his steadfastness during these “times that try men’s souls.” Ludwig Lore welcomed Trotsky in German as a fellow fighter and “dearest teacher.” Max Goldfarb, a Forward editor, joined the welcome chorus, this time in Yiddish.¹⁴⁴

Trotsky had been in the country just ten days by the time of his Cooper Union event, still absorbing all the newness. Wherever he looked, he still marveled at New York City, its wealth, its technology, its energy. But so much still seemed strange to him.

Take, for instance, this American concept of free speech. Yes, Trotsky could write his Novy Mir columns as he pleased. No censors or police came to bother him, a welcome change from wartime France, let alone Russia. But it had peculiar limits. Just that week, the New York Police had arrested and indicted a woman named Margaret Sanger for operating, of all things, a birth control clinic. The charge: obscenity. Talking about women’s hygiene through the US postal system constituted a federal crime in America in 1917. Newspapers made the affair a high-profile cause célèbre. Sanger’s sister, Ethel Byrne, had been convicted earlier of working at the clinic and was conducting a hunger strike from her prison cell at the Tombs.

An outsider like Trotsky had to find this puzzling. This was why they put people in prison in America? For providing medicine? You could talk about revolution but not sex or feminine hygiene?

Or take the other big local controversy that week. A group called the Anti-Saloon League drew five hundred ministers and clergymen to the Metropolitan Building to complain that the city’s mayor, John Purroy Mitchel, had failed to enforce a New York law requiring saloons to close their doors on Sunday. The ministers also criticized the New York Central Railroad, not for cheating customers or exploiting its workers but instead for selling alcohol on its trains while passing through dry states, even if the trains didn’t stop there.

This was free speech? A man could talk socialism or anarchy, but he couldn’t spend his own nickel to buy a sip of schnapps on a train?¹⁴⁵

Or take the workers going on strike for better pay against big companies like Standard Oil or the railroads. Police routinely beat and jailed them. The companies used private detectives like the Pinkertons to break their unions, and the federal government intervened using court-ordered legal injunctions. This too was free speech?

Now at Cooper Union, sitting in the Great Hall, Trotsky heard his name finally announced, heard the applause, and calmly stepped to the podium. He would show this crowd, his friends, what it meant to have free speech. Had police detectives decided to come and listen, they would have heard plenty of what the law would soon call “sedition.”

Normally, a featured guest speaker would let the crowd cheer, whistle, and stamp its feet for a few minutes to enjoy the adulation. But Trotsky had no patience for this “American treatment,” as Ziv put it.¹⁴⁶ Instead, he ignored them and launched right in, talking right over the applause. He started with President Wilson, “a tool of the capitalist class,” then shifted to his main theme: revolution. “The Socialist revolution is coming in Europe,” he announced, “and America must be ready when it comes. Socialists were caught napping when war started [in 1914], but they must not be nodding when revolution comes. In France, the soldiers who come out of the trenches say, ‘We will get them.’ The French think that the soldiers mean they will get the Germans, that they want to kill the workers in the other trench. But what they really mean is that they will ‘get’ the capitalists.”¹⁴⁷

Of course, revolution—the real kind made by men with guns—was a few steps beyond simple socialism, at least for Americans. But this didn’t bother Trotsky. On he went.

The war had ravaged France, England, and Germany, he explained. Countries had bankrupted themselves, and people had lost their illusions. They had grown excited, ready to be daring, to demand change, to fight—all the ingredients for an uprising.

Grisha Ziv, Trotsky’s old friend from Europe who fully expected to hate the speech, instead found himself enthralled. He “absolutely rejected” the content, he insisted later in his own account of the night. But, he said, he appreciated with “aesthetic pleasure” the “artistry” of the talk. Trotsky spoke in Russian with a “crisp” and “definitive” tone, Ziv explained, using “no rough demagogic methods.” Instead, he “bombarded the audience with a great number of facts.” He “thrilled” them, “depressed” them, aroused them with his “burning resentment and high-minded pathos” through his descriptions of wartime Paris, the hardships, the frontline combat, the abuses, the heroics.¹⁴⁸

The war had been foisted on Europe by “a gang of highway robbers called diplomats,” Trotsky went on. Now, after an ocean of blood, society could never be the same. “Revolution is brewing in the trenches and no force can hold it back.”¹⁴⁹

The crowd loved it, giving him “loud applause,” the Forward reported.¹⁵⁰ Even Ziv called it a “high success.”

But not everyone agreed. Somehow an argument broke out in the Great Hall, right there with Trotsky at the podium. The setting was close enough for people to shout catcalls, heckle the speaker from their seats, hurl insults, argue, shake their fists. That, apparently, is what Trotsky started. “Instead of a declaration of welcome,” as Ludwig Lore gently described it afterward, the affair somehow degenerated into a “fierce, though outwardly polite, battle of conflicting opinions.”¹⁵¹

What did they argue over? Nobody quite said. But hearing him go on, it’s not hard to guess. A few people probably wondered: Just what revolution was this Trotsky talking about? For Russia, it sounded fine. They all hated the tsar. Even for Europe. But here in New York City? Here in America? Did he really want revolution here too?

Trotsky had no doubt in his own mind what he meant by revolution. To him it was no metaphor. In 1905 in Saint Petersburg he had seen hundreds of thousands of factory workers rise up and seize government powers. That to him was revolution: taking power and keeping it.

Trotsky also had no doubt about the Russian side of this equation. He saw the latest headlines. Russia’s military defeats continued nonstop. London and Paris now suspected the tsar of cavorting with German spies. In the Russian Duma, Deputy Paul Miliukov, head of the Kadet (Constitutional Democrat) Party, had openly criticized the tsar, calling his failures “treason or incompetence.” The tsar in turn had banned the Duma from holding any more meetings. Even the assassination of the Mad Monk Rasputin in December had failed to settle nerves.

The war had changed Russia profoundly, and even non-socialists predicted an explosion. A University of Petrograd economics professor named Ivan Chezal, reaching New York that week, had told reporters “The Russian people are demanding peace, and unless they get it there will be a revolution.”¹⁵²

As for New York, Trotsky concluded his speech with this: “Here, in America, I welcome you under the banner of the coming social revolution!”

Whatever shape the squabble took, Trotsky seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. Ludwig Lore, sitting on the podium with his new Russian friend, described Trotsky’s reaction as “glee,” fitting for someone “accustomed to party strife.”¹⁵³ It is easy to picture Trotsky standing there, grinning at the hecklers, trading insults, giving as good as he got. Most of the crowd loved him. A few despised him. But no one in the Great Hall walked away unprovoked.

Within a year, the New York state legislature would pass a law making talk of revolution like Trotsky’s a penal offense, criminal anarchy, subject to five years in prison and $5,000 in fines. Many in the Cooper Union Great Hall that night would see the insides of jail cells as a result. But for now, free speech still reigned in New York City.

NATALYA TOO FELL into a pleasant routine those first few days in the Bronx. With Trotsky off to work at the office, she enrolled Leon and Sergei in a Bronx public grade school to learn English and make friends. During the day, she began taking sight-seeing trips into Manhattan with Rose Hammer, the wife of their wealthy neighbor Dr. M. They took the Hammers’ car. Traffic in Manhattan back then was a nerve-shattering mix of horses, pushcarts, wagons, trolleys, elevated trains, and motorcars. Natalya and Rose happily let the chauffeur navigate the way.

When not in school, the boys often came too, always sitting up front. They marveled at the sights and made a game of counting things, the streets, the cars, and the floors of the skyscrapers, amazed at how high they went. We don’t know the chauffeur’s name, but he became their favorite new friend. They considered him a magician. Trotsky’s sons had never seen the inside of a car before, and it fascinated them to watch how the chauffeur could control the machine, make it obey his slightest touch of the steering wheel or tap of his toe on the gas.

Rose Hammer enjoyed stopping with Natalya for lunch at a favorite restaurant. The boys found it strange that when they went inside to eat, their friend the chauffer, the magician, had to wait outside with the car. Why couldn’t he join them? It seemed unfair.¹⁵⁴ They complained to their parents but never got a good answer. Trotsky marked it down as just one more blind spot in this odd American “freedom.”

Then something even stranger happened. Back at the Bronx apartment, one day the landlord came to Natalya and told her there was a problem with the rent. The money Natalya had paid, the three-month down payment, had disappeared. Natalya soon heard the story from other tenants. The building’s housekeeper, an African American gentleman, had taken the money, plus some items she had given him for safe storage, without giving her a receipt. Other tenants had also given him their normal rent money. Then he ran off.

The panic ended quickly. Natalya soon found the property she had given the housekeeper. (She never explained what it was.) It had been in the apartment the whole time, hidden in a wooden box with cookware. And she found the rent money too, carefully wrapped up in paper. As for the other tenants, it turned out the housekeeper had disappeared with the rent money of only those to whom he had given a receipt, so they wouldn’t be forced to pay it twice.

It didn’t take long for Trotsky and Natalya to figure out the mystery. This housekeeper, in walking off with the cash, had been careful. He “did not mind robbing the landlord, but he was considerate enough not to rob the tenants,” Trotsky wrote about the incident. “A delicate fellow, indeed. My wife and I were deeply touched by his consideration, and we always think of him gratefully.”¹⁵⁵

Trotsky had never met an African American person before, or any kind of African, except perhaps in Paris. Certainly not in Russia. He knew that racial prejudice existed in America, knew about the history of slavery, but only from books in an abstract, theoretical way. Now he saw something he didn’t understand. “This little episode took on a symptomatic significance for me—it seemed as if a corner of the veil that concealed the ‘black’ problem in the United States had been lifted.”¹⁵⁶ What was the “problem”? How did he define it?

Years later, Trotsky would devote considerable effort trying to understand this issue. In Russia he would meet with Claude McKay, the American black novelist, leader of the Harlem Renaissance, and founder of the African Blood Brotherhood, and would urge the recruitment of black propagandists in the United States. He would criticize his own American Trotskyist movement for failing to grasp the seriousness of the problem. “But today, the white workers in relation to the Negroes are the oppressors, scoundrels, who persecute the black and the yellow, hold them in contempt and lynch them,” he told an American visitor in Turkey in 1933.¹⁵⁷ Years later, his analysis of black nationalism would reach a rising young leader named Malcolm X and shape his thinking in the 1960s.

But that was for the future. For now, Trotsky simply marked the incident to study later.

GRISHA ZIV HAD not waited around to speak with Trotsky after Trotsky’s address at the Cooper Union Great Hall. Ziv seemed shy about approaching his old friend, describing Trotsky as “arrogant” for “refusing to mingle with audiences after a talk.” Still, after a few days, Ziv had the chance to slip Trotsky a message through an acquaintance, a newspaper reporter they both knew. “When Trotsky visits you, tell him I say hi,” he told the man.¹⁵⁸

Sure enough, a few days later, the telephone rang at Ziv’s home. “Grisha, is that you? Do you recognize me? It’s me—Trotsky.”

Ziv seemed surprised at the telephone call, that Trotsky actually had “long wanted to see me” and “did his best to find me,” as he later explained. “In one word, he wanted to see me and asked to set up a good place and time.”

Ziv agreed. He could hardly say no. “We shared too many old memories and old moments to simply ignore it.” Ziv had known Trotsky far longer than any other person in America, certainly longer than any of Trotsky’s new socialist hangers-on. Their relationship dated back to 1896, when they were both teenagers. They belonged to a commune, a group of young radicals that met at a garden near the industrial town of Nikolaev on the Black Sea. This was before Trotsky’s first arrest, before his first exile to Siberia, before his first escape, before his discovery of Vladimir Lenin.

From this period, Ziv also knew the woman Alexandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya, with long hair and big eyes, who had charmed the young men in Nikolaev and become Trotsky’s first and only legal wife. Ziv had been a witness at the wedding, the proper one that they held in a Moscow transit prison in 1890 with a rabbi. Ziv also knew about the two daughters they had together in Siberia, Nina and Zina, and how Trotsky had abandoned all three of them—his wife and his two infant daughters—when he escaped by himself to follow his destiny.

Fair or not, politics aside, perhaps that was why Grisha Ziv had an attitude toward Trotsky that often oozed with resentment. But now in New York City, Ziv apparently felt obliged to put aside this history and make a social visit. Maybe he and Trotsky could rebuild an old bridge.