Forgotten Man, The (10 page)

When it came to the question of labor, James Hudson Maurer, the senior leader, was thrilled by the data: 92 percent of the eligible workers had enrolled in unions. “There were no anti-strike laws and nothing resembling our curbs on them,” he would later note in awe. He conducted his own tests of union independence: “Everywhere I went I asked the workers: ‘Are your unions controlled by the government?’” The reply? “It is our government and they are our unions.” A woman at an electric supply plant told Maurer: “Now we are free, free!”

The Soviet literacy programs inspired Maurer, who had learned to read so late himself: “Under tsarism 85 per cent of the masses were illiterate. New schools were everywhere in evidence and compulsory attendance laws were strictly enforced.” This sounded better than what he himself had grown up with as the son of a shoemaker. In Moscow, Maurer got a chance to meet an exiled hero of the left, Big Bill Haywood of the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World. There was the wonderful feeling of political friends meeting in a new setting. As it turned out, Haywood would die a few months later, and Maurer never forgot the meeting.

Douglas for his part was less enthusiastic than the others. He was interested in so much: the trade union movement, wages, pensions for senior citizens, the consumers’ cooperative—he would write up essays about four of these topics after his departure. Big innovations grabbed his attention, but so did little ones—fourteen million Rus
sians, he noted with wonder, had created 60,100 cooperative stores, all since the time of the Russian Revolution. But he also found on his tours, to his shock, that differences of opinion “were not tolerated.” Chase and he were asked to give a speech to workers on the night shift at an airplane factory. When Douglas completed his remarks, the workers began shouting, “Sacco and Vanzetti.” This meeting was taking place, after all, around the time of the execution. The cries touched Douglas—Sacco and Vanzetti were important to him, too. But Sacco and Vanzetti had enjoyed “the full defense of the law,” Douglas told the workers. Then he launched a counterattack, repeating an ugly story he had heard about the factory. “‘But what about yourselves? Two months ago a group of bank clerks were arrested at two o’clock in the morning.’ Here the interpreter stopped and refused to go on…. ‘They were tried at four o’clock and executed at six. Where was their right to assemble witnesses, to engage counsel, to argue their case, and, if convicted, to appeal?’”

The workers shouted back, but what Douglas would remember for decades was a young woman who approached him with a countering argument. “You talked only about individual justice. This is a bourgeois idea.” Douglas was taken with her, and talked for an hour. Leaving, she told him, “History will prove us right and you wrong” and wrote her name down in his notebook: Betty Glan.

Still, even Douglas set aside his hesitations when big interviews materialized. Trotsky, one of the Soviet Union’s original ruling troika, was already on his way out that summer. But he still had a small post, commissar of foreign concessions, and of course found time to meet with this group. The group arrived with a long list of questions, and was kept waiting for half an hour. Trotsky entered the room wearing, Douglas the diarist would later note, “an immaculate white linen suit.” He picked up their prepared questions, and pronounced it “a very nasty list of questions.” Then he answered the questions rapidly—to Douglas, he seemed like a showman. The interpreter made it all seem elegant by delivering replies in Oxford English.

The end of the trip approached, and the group was still angling for an appointment with Stalin. The plan was an on-again, off-again
one, a typical mid-junket arrangement that seemed unlikely to be followed by the reward of a meeting with the Soviet Union’s leader. Preoccupied with his own plans and likely feeling tired of the tour, Tugwell opted to play hooky and headed off on September 9 again with Chase to see some modernist paintings. As Tugwell would later write, with appealing honesty, “We had been good the day before and gone to see Trotsky and thought we had done our duty by the high command.” It was easy to understand why Tugwell ran the risk—the rebel in him probably found a lot more in common with Trotsky, the intellectual’s Communist, than with Stalin.

But Tugwell missed his rendezvous with history. For this time, the appointment hour, 1:00 p.m., came without further vacillation by the Kremlin. Robert Dunn, John Brophy, and Paul Douglas all went for the interview. So did Louis Fischer, an American who was writing pro-Soviet articles for left-wing American periodicals out of Moscow at the time. So, as it turned out, did a journalist who was visiting Moscow for the
New York Times,
Anne O’Hare McCormick.

Those who did attend kept notes. Douglas: “Recalling the deeds of terror that had been committed there throughout its history, I shivered as we entered Red Square and then went through the gates of the Kremlin.” A small pockmarked man met them in a cloakroom; Douglas assumed it was an attendant. But the man took the head place at the table. It was Stalin. “His low brow was clear under a square-ish brush of black hair that made his head look oddly cubist,” wrote Anne O’Hare McCormick. “He looked like any of a million Soviet workingmen,” commented Fischer. “Deep pockmarks over his face,” read Fischer’s notes; “low forehead”; “ugly, short, black and gold teeth when smiles.” Whereas Trotsky had worn white, Stalin wore khaki. Douglas thought he saw a private’s uniform, Fischer a civilian suit. The pants legs he stuck into high black boots. Fischer sought to capture the moment in every medium possible. In his notebook, next to the words, he made pencil sketches of the leader’s head.

The group expected an hour with the leader. They got six and a quarter. One thing struck them even before the meeting started: Sta
lin’s charm. He was not dashing like Trotsky, but he seemed in a way more genuine. What came through was that Stalin had done his homework and touched on the issues that interested them—workers’ insurance, for example, Douglas’s pet research area since the days of the loggers. Stalin knew all about La Follette’s strong 1924 showing. A questioner asked how Stalin knew that the Russian people were behind him. He answered that the Bolsheviks would never have come to power if they were not popular; today heads of unions were all Communists, again a fact that reflected grassroots support.

Stalin also took time to emphasize that his government was an ethnically diverse one, with a Ukrainian, a Byelorussian, an Azerbaijani, and an Uzbek in the central executive committee of the Soviets. There were also, Fischer would later write, questions about religion: must a Communist be an atheist? Yes, Stalin answered, and even as he answered, church bells across the street rang. The guests laughed, and Stalin smiled—as if to signal the tolerance he could not articulate officially.

Stalin also rejected the notion that U.S. Communists worked “under orders” from Moscow as “absolutely false”—itself a lie. As the group drank lemon tea from a samovar, Stalin made his case: the Soviet Union and the United States might trade together even if they had different systems—the new doctrine of Socialism in One Country.

Fischer reported that no one but a serving woman entered the room during the course of the meeting; she brought cheese, sausage, and caviar sandwiches. (Brophy reported tea and cookies.) There must have been an interpreter and stenographer present. After several hours the guests made an attempt to go; Stalin would not permit it. Instead he turned the tables and asked questions of the delegates. The transcript of these questions, published within a week in
Pravda,
give as clear a snapshot as any document of the tactical and strategic goals of Soviet foreign policy. Stalin wanted to make the point that he had a genuine labor following in the United States, and he wanted to sideline those organizations that had sidelined him—with the aid of his interlocutors. He had already skewered the anti-Communist
American Federation of Labor. Now he set about doing so again: “How do you explain the fact that on the question of recognizing the USSR, the leaders of the American Federation of Labor are more reactionary than many bourgeois?”

Brophy allowed that the AFL had a “peculiar philosophy.” Dunn took time to point out that the AFL was too close to capitalists—especially Matthew Woll, AFL vice president. Brophy was the one who spoke the last formal words of the visitors to Stalin before they departed. In Stalin’s official transcript, the travelers gave the Soviet leader what he sought, a form of U.S. blessing: “The presence of the American delegation in the USSR is the best reply and is evidence of the sympathy of a section of the American workers to the workers of the Soviet Union.” As the group left, Douglas spied a bust of Karl Marx, with full beard, in the corner. Contemplating it, he was startled to feel a heavy hand on his shoulder. It was Stalin. They joked about whether Marx had worn a necktie.

Several of the travelers sensed that they had been used to an extent they had not foreseen: “we realized that in his speeches he was talking over our heads to the newspapers, in answer to Trotsky,” Brophy would write. Anne O’Hare McCormick, confused, retreated to racialist imagery for her report: Stalin, she said, was a hybrid of east and west, almost “Occidorient in person.”

The vessel that returned the group home to America was not the
President Roosevelt
this time but the
Leviathan
. The irony of that name may not have escaped some of them. On shipboard, Silas Axtell, the lawyer, bitterly objected that some of the other labor people on the trip were producing a report far too positive. As he later recalled, “The whole report was written with such a solicitous and affectionate regard for the welfare of the dominating group in Russia, whose guests we had been, and the impression from reading the report was so different from the one I had received, I could not possibly subscribe to it.” Douglas likewise quarreled with Robert Dunn over the content of their joint essay. Dunn was painting the picture too rosily, Douglas maintained. Later, he discovered that
Coyle had diluted his discussion of civil rights in the published report.

Axtell and Douglas may have been thinking of another intellectual pilgrim who had met Stalin before them: Emma Goldman. Goldman had had every reason to accept what she saw in Russia; the United States of Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge was unlikely to welcome her back. Yet when she learned that Stalin was imprisoning her beloved fellow anarchists, she had grown skeptical. And when the Bolsheviks—led by the same Trotsky of the white suit—bloodily put down their fellow Communists in Kronstadt in 1921, she had turned against the Soviet Union entirely. “I found reality in Russia grotesque, totally unlike the great ideal that had borne me upon the crest of high hope to the land of promise,” Goldman wrote. Though she really had nowhere to go, she left Communist Russia and shortly published a monograph on the false freedoms of the Soviet Union,
My Disillusionment with Russia.

A decade after Emma Goldman’s experience, and five years after the 1927 delegation, Arthur Koestler, a young Communist, would also be repulsed. He found that the Soviet Union had developed a neat trick for bribing young intellectuals. Through its State Publishing Trusts it would buy the rights to a book or article—with a different payment for an edition in each one of the Soviet Union’s multiple languages. Koestler reported selling the same short story to as many as ten different literary magazines, from Armenian to Ukrainian. The place really was, he would note ironically, “the writer’s paradise.”

The travelers though were not so cynical, and as the ship moved toward the United States, the group felt its excitement build. They had got what every traveler hungers for: proximity to heroes and events. The heroes were not precisely
their
heroes. Still, the meetings had had their effect. The travelers were now transformed from obscure analysts of the Soviet Union into bearers of news. Their victory was certified when Stalin published his long version of the interview; all of the Soviet Union, and, more important, all the progressive world, could now observe the star quality of the September 9 meeting.

Aboard the ship, the labor advocates and the academics raced one another to complete their contribution to one of the two volumes. Maurer, already a mayor, thought about his political ambitions. Within six months of the trip, he would be busy building a small-scale monument to his own vision of socialist reform: a new town hall for Reading. Chase wrote a big article in the
New York Times
. Tugwell worked on his agricultural contribution; he also thought about an article—it would eventually appear in
Political Science Quarterly
—arguing that while Russia needed more freedom, its concern for every man was worth serious study.

Any ocean liner arriving in New York was news, and reporters routinely met the vessels. Earlier that same September, the
Leviathan
had brought back Treasury Secretary Mellon and his daughter Ailsa from Europe. The headline had been: “Mellon Returns, Has Nothing to Say.” Disembarking, the travelers from the Soviet Union gave the paper their own summary: the Soviet experiment was “meeting with success.” If the United States was not friendlier, the returners also warned, Britain might succeed in driving an isolated Soviet Union to war.

In one way, upon their return, the travelers would have the influence they and Stalin wished for. As they and others talked about Stalin, more American policymakers began to take the possibility of recognition of the Soviet Union seriously. The travelers’ positive reports validated the admiring view presented nearly daily in the
New York Times
by that paper’s Walter Duranty. Among Duranty’s readers was Roosevelt, the would-be governor. Most Americans in that period were divided into Germany people or Russia people; their like or dislike for one determined their attitude toward the other. Roosevelt had disliked Germany from his childhood days, and World War I had not altered that prejudice. He was therefore ready to take an interest in Russia.