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| Trotsky arriving in New York featured on front page of the Forward |
Note: This is a slightly edited version of a review that was originally published in the journal International Socialist Review, Issue 104, Spring 2017.
Trotsky
in New York 1917: A Radical on the Eve of Revolution
By
Kenneth D. Ackerman, Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, 2016
Reviewed by Alex Steiner
The recently
published book, “Trotsky in New York 1917: A Radical on the Eve of Revolution”,
by Kenneth D. Ackerman, has much to offer the reader. It also has some serious problems. Before getting to those let me discuss why
the book deserves a place on the shelf of anyone interested in the life and
ideas of Trotsky, the history of Marxism in America, New York at the time of the First World War
and the Russian Revolution.
Ackerman’s book
is the first full length account of a brief though crucial period in the life
of Trotsky, his 9 weeks in New York prior to his return from political exile to
Russia in 1917, where he would play a decisive role in the October
Revolution. Previous accounts of
Trotsky’s stay in New York were scattered in personal memoirs, contemporary newspaper accounts, and a few magazine articles
with a very specific and narrow focus. (One such article went to great lengths
to track down the identity of a wealthy Bronx resident who befriended Trotsky’s
family.) Trotsky’s own account of his
stay in New York consisted of a few pages in his autobiography, My Life.
These few pages contain some precious insights and anecdotes but provide
few details and make no assessment of the impact of his intervention into the
politics of the radical movements in New York.
Ackerman has performed a sterling job in
bringing all this material together and creating one coherent narrative of this
period. In the course of his research he has also uncovered a number of
previously unknown facts about this period that fill in many of the gaps. More important, the restoration of a
previously fragmented historical narrative allows us to gauge the political
significance of Trotsky’s impact on the history of Marxism in the United
States. It turns out that Trotsky’s
intervention in the factional struggles then emerging in the Socialist Party
over America’s entry into World War I would play a decisive role in creating
the nucleus of a left wing opposition that would later go on to found the
Communist Party. This requires a radical
revision in the historical understanding of the birth of American Communism,
one that future historians cannot ignore.
To cite one
example of Ackerman’s diligence, he located the manifest for the passenger ship
Montserrat that brought Trotsky from
Spain to New York in January of 1917.
From the list of passengers he was able to provide some insight into the
social background of some of the other passengers on the trip and Trotsky’s reaction
to them. Trotsky’s own brief account of
this episode, consisting of one paragraph in My Life, provides few details. In his account he writes that of one of the
characters he meets,
A
boxer, who is also a novelist and a cousin of Oscar Wilde, confesses openly
that he prefers crashing Yankee jaws in a noble sport to letting some German
stab him in the midriff.[1]
Ackerman tells
us that the “boxer” Trotsky mentions was a larger than life adventurer named
Arthur Cravan who later published his reminiscences of his encounter with
Trotsky. It was not by accident that
Cravan left a lasting impression on Trotsky.
It turns out that this colorful figure really was related to Oscar Wilde
and he really did fight a match with ex world champion Jack Johnson. After arriving in New York Cravan became associated
with the Dadaist movement, but he quickly burned his bridges with the
avant-garde scene in New York. He moved with his wife, the poet Mina Loy, to
Mexico in 1918 and shortly after that disappeared at sea while trying to
navigate a small sailboat to Argentina.
The day Trotsky
arrived in New York, he was given a hero’s reception. Both the New
York Times and the New York Tribune
sent reporters and featured a story about Trotsky on their front page the next
day although he was still little known to English speaking readers. To the East European immigrants he was
something of a celebrity. They knew of
him from his days in the leadership of the 1905 Russian revolution and his
subsequent trial. He was featured on
the cover of the mass circulation Yiddish newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward the next day.
The German language and Russian language papers also carried stories
about this hero of the Russian Revolution arriving in America.
There have been
many legends about Trotsky’s activities while he was in New York, the great
bulk of them fanciful fictions. Trotsky addressed this topic in My Life where he wrote,
If
all the adventures that the newspapers ascribed to me were banded together in a
book, they would make a far more entertaining biography than the one I am
writing here.
But
I must disappoint my American readers. My only profession in New York was that
of a revolutionary socialist. This was before the war for “liberty” and
“democracy,” and in those days mine was a profession no more reprehensible than
that of a bootlegger. I wrote articles, edited a newspaper, and addressed labor
meetings. I was up to my neck in work, and consequently I did not feel at all
like a stranger.[2]
Ackerman’s book
devotes an entire section to debunking many of the legends surrounding
Trotsky’s time in New York, including the anti-Semitic legend that Trotsky was
being financed by wealthy Jews as part of a plot to take over the world. Such
legends, fed by White Guardists and other reactionaries, mushroomed after the
Russian Revolution. It is interesting to
note that very similar conspiracy theories have resurfaced in recent years,
especially since 9/11. Ackerman’s
account of Trotsky’s activities in New York reinforce Trotsky’s own
characterization and fill in many details.
The main focus of the book is Trotsky’s
conflict with the conservative leadership of the Socialist Party of New
York. In 1917 the Socialist Party in the
United States was on the cusp of becoming a major political force, challenging
the iron grip of the two capitalist parties, the Republicans and Democrats, who had defined the political physiognomy of
the country since the Civil War. In the Presidential election of 1912 the
Socialist Party candidate, Eugene V. Debs obtained over 900,000 votes. Socialists were elected to Congress and won
local and state wide positions in dozens of cities throughout the country.
The Socialist
Party was particularly strong in New York where it played an influential role
among the vast immigrant communities that came from Eastern and Central Europe
in the previous two decades. The immigrant communities that supported the
Socialist Party vastly out-numbered the native born socialists, a situation
very different than that in the rest of the country. New York’s foreign-born comprised a full 30%
of the white population. [3] The largest of these groups were the Yiddish
speaking Jews from Eastern Europe. New
York had no less than 6 Yiddish daily newspapers at that time, the largest and
most influential being the Jewish Daily
Forward which had a circulation of over 200,000, rivaling the circulation of the New York Times. There were in addition
to the Yiddish newspapers, 4 daily newspapers in Russian, 3 in German and
several other foreign language dailies.
Many of these newspapers had a left wing and socialist orientation. In
addition to the pro-Socialist Forward,
the German language New Yorker Volkszeitung had as its editor in chief Hermann Schluter,
a one-time personal friend of Marx and Engels.
The nominal head
of the Socialist Party in New York was Morris Hillquit, an immigrant from
Latvia who assimilated into American society and became a successful lawyer
with a plush apartment on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive. To his credit Hillquit often took on cases
for little or no compensation to defend working class victims of ruthless
employers and the state. He was the
official attorney of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. When
the government began their attacks on the socialist press after America entered
the war, Hillquit defended journals like Novy
Mir and The Call from war time
censorship and suppression. Hillquit also
had political ambitions and in the 1917 election for Mayor of New York,
received 145,000 votes, 21.7 % of the total cast in a three way race. But although Hillquit held genuine socialist
convictions, he was no revolutionary. Hillquit
was a “pragmatic” politician, a reformist socialist of the type that could be
found in the right wing of the German Social Democratic Party prior to 1914.
The big issue
facing American socialists at that time was opposition to the preparations by
the Wilson Administration to enter the European War on the side of Britain
France and Russia, a threat that was
becoming ever more concrete in the early days of 1917. The immigrant
communities in New York, who comprised the bulk of supporters of the Socialist
Party, were fervently opposed to America’s entry into the war, not only out of
deeply held socialist convictions, but also fueled by their hatred of the
Czarist regime in Russia, from whose
pogroms many had fled. Hillquit and the
Socialist Party leaders in New York were opposed to American entry into the War
but their opposition went only so far. They refused to advocate mass action
against the war should the U.S. enter the war. They made it clear in their
policy pronouncements that although they opposed America’s entry into the war, they
would be loyal patriots should it come down to that.
Although he had
never met Hillquit prior to arriving in New York Trotsky knew the type he
represented very well. He was the
embodiment in America of the social patriots he had met in Vienna and
Paris. Men who gave sterling speeches
against war only to be caught up in the fever of war and patriotism once war
broke out. Trotsky always considered the
social patriots beneath contempt and by 1917 had come very close to Lenin’s
position that in case of war between imperialist countries, it was the duty of
socialists to turn that war into a civil war against their own bourgeoisie. It
was thus inevitable that Trotsky’s arrival in New York would signal a
confrontation between him and Hillquit.
Ackerman depicts
a series of meetings and rallies in which this conflict was played out. This begins with a meeting in the Brooklyn
apartment of Ludwig Lore, then the editor of the German language socialist
paper the New Yorker Volkszeitung. It
was at this meeting, arranged on the day after Trotsky’s arrival in New York,
where Trotsky first met the leaders of what would become the left wing
opposition within the Socialist Party.
Besides Lore, Trotsky met for the first time the young Louis Fraina. Also
present at this gathering was another person who would go on to play a pivotal
role in the left opposition in the Socialist Party, the lawyer Louis
Boudin. Of the Russians present, besides Trotsky, there were the future Bolshevik leaders
Nikolai Bukharin, Alexandra Kollontai, Grigorii Chudnovsky and V. Volodarsky. To the assembled guests Trotsky soon laid out his position – that the left in the
Socialist Party should organize itself independently of its conservative leadership in New York
and be prepared to challenge them on the all important war question. Bukharin and Trotsky, while agreeing on
fundamentals, disagreed as to tactics, with Bukharin advocating an immediate
split while Trotsky insisted that the left opposition would be more effective
working within the Socialist Party. They
eventually agreed not to advocate a formal split but to launch an independent
journal that would speak for the left. Fraina was immediately inspired by
Trotsky’s ideas and would go on to become his main advocate and protégé in America. Trotsky and Fraina struck up a personal
friendship and began to collaborate from that day.
Ackerman recounts the drama of Trotsky’s
first official introduction to the New York socialist movement when he was the
featured speaker at a rally in the historic Great Hall of Cooper Union just two
weeks after his arrival. Trotsky’s speech, reprinted in the English language socialist daily, The
Call, as well as the Russian language Novy Mir, where both he and Bukharin where contributors, was a more
or less open challenge to Hillquit and his conservative opposition to the
war. Trotsky said,
The Socialist Revolution is coming to Europe
and America must be ready when it comes. Socialists were caught napping when
war started 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’. [4]
 |
| Front page of Novy Mir |
On Febrary 5 there was a major event at
Carnegie Hall at which the Socialist Party was to lay down its official
position on the war. Hillquit was the
featured speaker. Trotsky was in attendance along with 4,000 others in the
standing room only audience. Trotsky’s reaction to the speech was published in Novy Mir the next day. Trotsky had no particular criticism to make
of the speech itself, but he was highly critical of the company Hillquit chose
to surround himself with on the stage.
These were pacifists such as the Reverend Frederick J. Lynch of New York Church Peace Union and the
suffragette Elizabeth Freeman of Women’s Peace Party. Trotsky wrote that these people may talk
about peace but,
…when they hear the first shot will gladly
call themselves good patriots [and] start supporting the government machine of
mass murders persuading the crowds that in order to reach ‘fair peace’, and
‘eternal peace’ it is necessary to fight the war until the end. [5]
He went on to ask why had the Socialist Party
agreed to share the stage with these “bourgeois priest-like pacifists”? While Trotsky
refrained from laying the responsibility
for this on Hillquit by name, the target of his ire was unmistakable. Thus
began a conflict whose culmination would only come in August 1919, long after
Trotsky left New York, when the left
wing of the Socialist Party formalized their split and formed the Communist
Labor Party at a convention in Chicago.
Trotsky finally confronted Hillquit in person
when he and Louis Fraina were invited to participate in the Socialist Party’s
Resolutions Committee to draw up an official statement on the policy towards
the war. The Committee met at the Socialist
Party offices in a townhouse on East 15 Street in Manhattan. Hillquit soon
learned that there would be no compromise with Trotsky and Fraina. It became clear that Hillquit and his
supporters could not accept a resolution that denounced any support for
“national defense” and in the event of mobilization for war called for “mass
action” opposing war. Hillquit had the majority and his version of the
resolution – a mild statement against war but also leaving room for support for
the war effort should it be mandatory – passed. Trotsky and Fraina were allowed to present a
minority report.
The battle between these two factions
continued to be played out in other venues. The two conflicting resolutions
were brought to a vote of the entire membership in early March at the Lenox
Casino, a building in Harlem often rented by the Socialist Party for large
meetings. At this meeting, Fraina argued for the minority resolution among the
200 or so delegates that managed to make it in the face of a blizzard. The final vote was 101 to 79. This close
vote, showing that Hillquit’s control of the Party was tenuous, emboldened the
opposition.
Writing years later in My Life, Trotsky reserved the harshest assessment of the leaders of American socialism for Morris Hillquit, of whom he said,
A Babbitt of Babbitts is Hillquit, the ideal Socialist leader for successful dentists. [6]
Ackerman also captures another meeting in
Cooper Union that March featuring the
most prominent Socialist in America, Eugene V. Debs. Debs had heard of Trotsky and specifically
invited him to join him on the stage for the meeting. This was the only time Trotsky met Debs. It is not known what they discussed if
anything of substance, but Trotsky does recount that when Debs saw him he
“embraced me and kissed me.”[7] In his speech Debs made it clear – without
mentioning names – that when it came to the conflict between Hillquit and the
Trotsky-Fraina group, he stood solidly with Trotsky and Fraina. As did another leader of the Socialist Party
from the west, the future founder of American Trotskyism, James P. Cannon.
But perhaps the most dramatic account in
Ackerman’s book is that of the confrontation between Trotsky and the editor of the
Jewish Daily Forward. At that time the Forward Building was a 10
story behemoth that loomed over the largely Jewish Lower East Side neighborhood
of Seward Park. It functioned not only as offices of the daily paper, but also
served as a community center, the hub of all political and cultural activity in
the neighborhood. When a Forward columnist published an editorial supporting
Woodrow Wilson’s effort to bring America into the War, Trotsky, who had contributed to the Forward, was incensed at this betrayal
of socialist principles. According to
one account Trotsky travelled from his office in the tiny basement occupied by Novy Mir in St. Marks Place to the
fortress known as the Forward Building on East Broadway for a face to face
encounter. Once there he confronted the
Forward’s editor, Abraham Cahan and there ensued a no holds barred shouting
match. From that day on Trotsky had
nothing but contempt for the Forward
which he would later characterize as a newspaper,
“…with its fourteen story palace…with the
stale odor of sentimentally philistine socialism, always ready for the most
perfidious betrayals.” [8]
 |
| Facade of the Forward building today |
 |
| Clock on top of the Forward building |
There are many good reasons to read
Ackerman’s book, but no review can be complete without mentioning the problems
contained in this popular history. In
reconstructing a historical narrative for which lots of pieces are missing, it
is sometimes necessary to take some liberties and speculate as to what people
said or thought in the absence of historical records. It seems that Ackerman stretches his
speculation a bit too far in some cases. For instance, in a chapter describing Lenin’s
reaction to a letter he received from Alexandra Kollontai about the argument
Trotsky had with Bukharin over the direction of the left opposition, he
speculates as to Lenin’s reaction. He writes,
Did he [Lenin] roll his eyes at the story? Or
maybe stifle a laugh? How typical of Trotsky, Lenin must have thought,
this Menshevik straddler with his “sheer
false pride”, who always it seemed, had to interfere and insist on winning an
argument, even in America.[9]
It is true that the differences Lenin had
with Trotsky prior to the Revolution of 1917 sometimes led to very harsh
exchanges between the two. That is part of the public record. But Ackerman’s
speculation as to Lenin’s motives in this case would reduce those differences
to little more than personal animosity.
Another example of unwarranted speculation
can be found in the following characterization of a certain Mr. Alexander Weinstein, a Russian businessman
possibly connected with British intelligence.
Ackerman writes on page 106 that “Alexander Weinstein, [was] possibly
a relative of Gregory Weinstein, editor of Novy
Mir.” Yet on page 199, he writes,
that “Alexander Weinstein, [was] the likely relative of Gregory
Weinstein, the editor of the radical Novy
Mir.” How did the very guarded
“possibly” on page 106 become the far more assertive “likely” on page 199? It’s
a minor point of course and something a good editor should have caught.
Far more serious however is the author’s
apparent indifference to the substance of the arguments that were being fought
out in the American and international socialist movement over the war. While
the author does summarize the views of Trotsky and others, he also makes it
clear in many ways that he has little sympathy for Trotsky’s views. This in itself is not necessarily a problem. But
it is incumbent that a historical account of Trotsky takes his ideas seriously
and presents them with some degree of integrity. Instead, Ackerman, when presenting Trotsky’s
thoughts on the war and patriotism, seems to dismiss them out of hand without
seriously considering them. For instance, suggesting that Trotsky’s attitude,
as evidenced by one of his first interviews in New York, was beyond the pale. He writes,
Just as curious was his [Trotsky’s]
performance with the New York Call …Trotsky’s
talk turned to politics and Trotsky chose to jump right in with a slam at his
new country. [10]
Ackerman does little to hide his disdain for
Trotsky’s radical stand against the war while expressing sympathy for Trotsky’s
moral courage. But ideas do matter. For Ackerman it is self-evident that
practical politicians like Hillquit had the better approach! The fact that these very questions had been
bitterly debated within the international socialist movement for decades and
had been the subject of much theoretical work by Lenin, Trotsky and others
never enters Ackerman’s narrative. While Ackerman, to his credit, does try to
present the ideas of others with whom he disagrees, his disdainful approach trivializes
those same ideas.
On a final note, Ackerman writing of the Forward building as it exists today,
having been sold by the Forward publishers
some years ago, explains that while the bas-relief portraits of Marx, Engels, Ferdinand
LaSalle and Friedrich Adler still grace its imposing entrance, it is now a
luxury apartment building where the least expensive apartment goes for a
million dollars. Ackerman is not unaware
of the irony. Manhattan has changed
mightily since 1917, as has the political climate of America. Another example
is the current status of 77 St. Marks Place, whose basement once housed the
offices of Novy Mir, where Trotsky
and Bukharin worked. You can today rent
a three bedroom apartment there for $5,000 per month. That is not considered
high by Manhattan standards.
 |
| 77 St. Marks Place today where Novy Mir had its offices in 1917. |
This speaks volumes about the changed
circumstances we face today. The culture
that nurtured a lively socialist movement in the United States 100 years ago
has disappeared along with the wave of radicalized immigrants and American workers that supported it. That culture needs to be rebuilt in a very
different environment today, when once again the threat of war is looming.
 |
| Image of Marx on the Forward building's facade. |
[1]
Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an
Autobiography (Penguin Books, 1984), 277.
[2]
Ibid, 279.
[3]
This and other statistics on the relative weight of immigrants and the
influence of the Socialist Party in different parts of the United States can be
found in the classic study of American socialism by Seymour Martin Lipset and
Gary Marks, It didn’t happen here: Why
socialism failed in the United States (W.W. Norton & Company, 2001)
[4] New York Call, January, 26, 1917. Quoted
in Ackerman, 82.
[5]
Leon Trotsky, Novy Mir, February 8,
1917, Reprinted in War and Revolution,
Volume 2, 379. Quoted in Ackerman, 124.
[6] My Life, 284.
[7] My Life, 285.
[8] My Life, 284.
[9]
Ackerman, 143.
[10]
Ackerman, 47.
