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मुख्य Assignment in utopia
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ASSIGNMENT IN UTOPIA BY EUGENE LYONS THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SACCO AND VANZETTI MOSCOW CARROUSEL six soviet plays (ed.) WE COVER THE WORLD {ed.) ASSIGNMENT IN UTOPIA Eugene Lyons Harcourt, Brace and Company • New York COPYRIGHT, 1937, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. Ninth printing, December, 1938 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY QUINN & BODBN COMPANY, IKC, RAHWAY, N. J. Typography by Robert Joscphy To Billv and Genie Contents book I. Prelude to Moscow i. Revolt Against Ugliness 3 11. The Clowning Called Justice 12 in. On the Eve of Fascism 21 iv. I Defend Sacco and Vanzetti 29 v. Working for the Soviets 37 book 2. Hallelujah! 1. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. Moscow and Muscovites The Kremlin's Guests and Poor Relations Nep: Burlesque on Capitalism Hallelujah! Censorship Demonstration Trial Journey Through Russia Iron Monolith Savor of Life Life is Rationed Social Slag The Great "Break" . Accent of Moscow Picnicking in a Graveyard Two Plus Two Equals Five The War Nobody Knew 53 66 81 93 105 114 134 147 157 170 183 196 212 226 240 250 vn viii CONTENTS book 3. Doubt I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII IX. X. XI. XII. Stalin Launches a Slogan The Peasants Are Conquered We Move to a Mansion Locomotives Come to Central Asia Search for the "Real Russia" Bargains in Ideals and Omelettes Revolt Against Intelligence . Forty-eight Ghosts Rasstrell "Death to Wreckers!" An Interview with Stalin American Interlude 263 279 293 304 320 328 341 349 362 370 381 393 book 4. Disillusionment I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. "Socialism" Revised Bernard Shaw in Moscow Ambulance and Motor-Cars Gold Mining in Torture Chambers Culture in a Strait jacket Fog of Skepticism over Russia Planned Chaos . TheEndofRAPP Living Space American Tragedies Persian Entr'acte Upon Sodom and Gomorrah Brimstone and Fire . Di; d the First Five Year Plan Succeed? Britishers on Trial The Press Corps Conceals a Famine Forebodings 413 428 43^ 447 465 474 482 494 503 519 $3* 540 55* 561 572 581 CONTENTS ix book 5. Rededication i" My Recall from Moscow 591 11. Farewell to Russia! 600 in. A Tour of Tyrannies 610 iv. To Tell or Not to Tell 624 v. Adventure in Idealism 637 Index 649 BOOK I PRELUDE TO MOSCOW I. Revolt Against Ugliness IN AMERICA we still romanticize the glories of a hard, poverty-ridden youth. Our rags-to-riches legends and literature overlook the fact that Tony the Bootblack ends up as a hod-carrier or a gangster more often than a millionaire. They overlook the more vital fact that when he does achieve wealth he generally carries the scars of the unequal struggle on his mind and spirit forever. He can rarely attain the mellow quality of the full, cultured existence of those whose rise was more orderly, less desperate. Our up-from-the-gutter type of true, or nearly true, story is written by the few who did creep out of the quagmires of want and its endless degradations. The many who were swallowed up, or who emerged broken in body and spirit, do not write autobiographies or make after-dinner speeches. On the East Side of New York, where I grew up, we knew hardship and fe*Ur in their less romantic guises. Our streets teemed with crowded, chaotic life like the underside of a moss-grown stone. Our tenements were odoriferous garbage heaps where the same over-abundant life proliferated. We knew coarseness, vermin, want, so intimately that they became routine commonplaces. The affluence, the ease, the glimpse of ordered beauty were distant and unreal, like stories in books. Only the ugliness and sweat and unrelenting tussle were close and terribly familiar. The idealization of poverty as "the university of hard knocks" seemed to me insult added to injury as early aS I was able to think at all. The be-furred ladies who came into the social settlements of our slums to assure us patronizingly of the blessings we were enjoying infuriated me. They fascinated me too, with suggestions of incredible far-off splendors in their sleekness. I was presiding at a Boy Scout meeting at the Educational Alliance one evening when just such a lady, trailing clouds of radiance from her up-town world, came into the room. Her intrusion offended some vague sense of fitness in me, so that when 3 4 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW she asked me an innocent question I ordered her sharply not to interrupt our meeting. The reward of my impertinence was an invitation, several days later, to call on her at a West End Ave- nue address. I had never seen such elegance at close range (though it was only an ordinary apartment), and passed through the interview in numb bewilderment. I remember the softness of the rugs, like lush grass, and the loveliness of a little boy who called my hostess "mother"—the word "mother" somehow did not jibe in my experience with glossy, care-free, nicely-upholstered women; it had always meant harassed, overworked and slovenly women. But what I carried away chiefly was a burning humiliation because the lining of the overcoat I gave up to the valet was in tatters. In my confusion, when I retrieved the coat, I slipped my arm into the torn lining instead of the sleeve, and the glamorous lady herself helped me to extricate myself. The shame of it rankled for months. Poverty was only half of our routine ordeal. The other half was an acute awareness of being aliens and intruders in a nation of Americans. Between the world of our text-books and movies and newspapers and the other world of our homes and parents there was a deep gulf: different interests, preoccupations, ideals, languages. On the threshhold of your home you removed your American self like an overcoat, and you put it on once more when you left home. We lived this double existence so continuously that the idea of an integrated life, in which home and out-of- home activities were part of the same pattern, was beyond our imagination. The school principal, Dr. Kottman, talked casually in my hearing one day about playing baseball with his son. The implication of a father who talked the same language and played the same games as his son, I can still recall, struck me as bizarre. No American with deep roots in the American soil can understand the nostalgic homelessness of immigrant children, the pathos of second-generation aliens. Land where our fathers died> land of the Pilgrims* fride—sung in the assembly hall by several thousand Jewish, Russian, Italian, other foreign boys and girls whose fathers had never heard of the Pilgrims. We were "Americanized" about as gently as horses are broken in. In the whole crude process, we sensed a disrespect for the alien traditions in our homes and REVOLT AGAINST UGLINESS 5 came unconsciously to resent and despise those traditions, good and bad alike, because they seemed insuperable barriers between ourselves and the adopted land. We were caught and tangled in a mass of people for the most part resigned to their fate, sodden with hopelessness, and in a stupor of physical exhaustion. For the average boy it was easier to burrow deeper into the heap, taking the aroma and the drab- ness of the East Side into his soul, than to attempt the Gargantuan job of escaping. The Americanism that he acquired and dragged into the writhing heap was the loud, vulgar, surface—the slang, the sporting page, the crude success ideals of the movies and yellow journals—and nothing of the grandeur at the core of America. But when the urge to escape does enter into the blood of a slum denizen, it is a feverish thing that drives him with whips of fire. "Success" is never a pale beckoning star. It is a flaming ball that blots out nearly everything else in the boy's firmament. Elsewhere it may be mere self-fulfillment. On our East Side it was that and more—a species of defiance and revenge against the clinging squalors and the smugness of the lucky ones and, above all, against the social system that breeds such plague spots. Whatever the expression of that pitiless ambition, it is always shot through with hatred for the status quo. Sometimes it is openly defiant of restraints and carries the jungle law of dog-eat-dog competition to its logical conclusion in crime, gangsterism. At other times, the predatory technique is kept within the safer bounds of legality. Whether the exceptional boy revolting against putrescent surroundings turns into an unprincipled criminal or an unprincipled businessman is often simply a question of the proportions of courage and cleverness in his make-up. And occasionally, as in my own case, the clamoring protest transcends the personal. The driving ambition widens out to embrace all the disinherited and exploited. It becomes a conscious protest against ugliness and injustice as such, and embraces passionately whatever formula of social revolt is closest to hand. There Is a vast and unbridgeable difference between the radicalism that is accepted at second-hand, from the outside, through the mind, and the revolt that is nurtured in one's very bones. Those of us who were—or thought ourselves—"socialists" instinctively, 6 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW through spontaneous hatred for the reality as we savored it, could never quite get over a certain distrust of "converts" to the cause from other social strata, 2 I thought myself a "socialist" almost as soon as I thought at all and years before I had heard of the Communist Manifesto. Congressman Meyer London, the shrill personification of the East Side yearning for Justice, loomed much larger on my horizon than Karl Marx. Long before I learned the standardized proofs that capitalism is doomed, I knew for a certainty that the whole world was one battle ground, contested between fat-bellied Capitalists and downtrodden Workers, and that victory for the Workers, for my side, was inevitable. The coming triumph was at most a matter of chronology, and life's one duty was to bring the date nearer. The class struggle was not an academic formula or a political slogan. It seemed to me as real as my friends and school and the burden of the monthly rent and gas bills. It was something much too obvious to netd explaining or defending, let alone proving. My memory can conjure up no one moment of thunderous illumination when the lightness and certainty of the socialist future of eternal justice and equality were revealed to me. In our multifarious world of dreams and ugliness, a boy soaked up a social faith, if he was built that way, as naturally and imperceptibly as his schoolmates and blockmates soaked up the tough-guy philosophy or the success-at-any-price philosophy. By a sort of social osmosis. As a child, down in a stinking steerage hole full of vermin and vomit, in one of the foul ships which, at that time, dumped cargoes of bewildered immigrants on the American shores, I treasured a vision of the fairyland called America. I shut my eyes and "saw it clearly—the glittering streets, the happy faces, the new shiny land stocked with beauty. That lovely vision broke sickeningly on the garbage cans of the Corlears Hook section of New York. The specters of "slack" seasons, of strikes for a living wage, of illness that cut off all earnings for a large family—the sight of my father's cadaverous face after a long day at the machine (it was a curiously handsome and sensitive face under REVOLT AGAINST UGLINESS J the mask of bottomless fatigue)—these were less horrible when viewed as aspects of the perpetual class hostilities and as prelude to an ineffable triumph. Our ant-heap was infested with street gangs. But I found myself somehow enrolled in a "Socialist Sunday School" on East Broadway, run by the Workmen's Circle. The hymns we chanted were Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, Arise, ye wretched, of the earth!, and The feofle's flag is dee f est red. One May Day I stood on a platform and recited a lugubrious poem about a beggar boy which began: Alone in the cold and dreary street, With my torn old clothes and bare cold feet. Among those who heard me was a beautiful child of seven, with curls to her shoulders. I was all of thirteen, with the weight of suffering humanity on my thin shoulders and a volume of Dostoievsky under my arm. Ten years later this girl became my wife. Twenty-four years later, because the sad rhymes about the beggar boy had become a tradition in the family, our daughter made me recite them in the inappropriate setting of the Ethical Culture School. From the Socialist Sunday School I graduated naturally into the "Yipsels," the Young People's Socialist League, where we debated weighty questions and took courses in Marx and Spencer and distributed leaflets for socialist candidates without the slightest hope of their election. The highest reach of anxious parental hope in homes like mine was to turn sons into doctors and lawyers and to marry off daughters to doctors and lawyers. In affectionate moments, proud relatives, impressed by my seriousness and report cards, tried the prefix "Dr." before my name, and, miraculously, it always fitted nicely. The sacrifice involved in sending me to high school, and then to college, rather than into the factory, practically made my eventual emergence as a physician or lawyer a duty—a very onerous duty. The fact that neither calling stirred me to enthusiasm made me feel a good deal of an ingrate towards my parents and towards my elder brother, who, since the age of thirteen, had been among the sweated legions bending over sewing machines. But I had no stomach for the professional respectability to which 8 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW they aspired for me. Ostensibly I was being primed for the law. But my dreams were of writing, not as a means of making a living, but as a weapon on my side of the class war. My parents' sacrifices consisted in dispensing with my potential contribution to the family income and in providing me with food, clothing and shelter. But it could not easily be extended to include bugaboo items of carfares and occasional expenses. By working after school hours, I managed to earn these myself. At one tragic juncture, internal politics ousted me from a night job at the Educational Alliance and the lack of a single dollar a week threatened to cut short my high school career. That sum, advanced for ttn weeks running by Adolph Nash, my Scoutmaster, helped a little to patch up the faith in social work which the ouster had shattered. By the end of the ten weeks, I was earning three dollars a week as "assistant professor" to a teacher of English in the hurry- up preparatory schools for adults. My function was chiefly the correction of examination papers on literary subjects about which I knew precisely nothing. One night I would remain up, hurriedly digesting As You Like It in preparation for a set of test papers 3 another night it might be Hamlet or Silas Mamer. This "professorship" I retained for two or three years, despite profound ignorance of the subjects my employer taught and even deeper ignorance of certain alarming predilections on his part which he described as "hedonism." I looked up the word in dictionaries and warded off his occasional experimental sallies in my direction (luckily his hedonism was not insistent) but I did not understand what it was all about until many years later. This brand of hedonism was one of the few weeds that did not find root in our slum soil. 3 The Russian revolution, in March, 1917, was, for most of the boys in my college freshman classes, just one more headline in a time replete with startling news. For a few of us, it was the rapturous harbinger of that Great Change in the glow of which we had warmed our spirits. Kerensky, Lvov, Miliukov, fraternization between Russian and German soldiers, the rise of Soviets—great names and great events, amidst the fumes of inspired rhetoric. REVOLT AGAINST UGLINESS 9 Even the confusion was heart-warming, because it sparkled with words and phrases learned in the socialist Sunday schools, shouted in the Meyer London campaigns, debated in the Yipsel circles. Our intimate, esoteric language suddenly holding the center of the world stage! The exultant realization that our thinking and dreaming had become history so soon! We hummed the new Russian Hymn to Freedom and we hummed the International at socialist lectures and dances, blissfully unaware that the two melodies were locked in life-and-death combat. Then came yet greater names and greater events: Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Smolny Institute, the battleship Aurora, the surrender of the Winter Palace. The Bolshevik seizure of power in the name of the Soviets seemed confirmation of the new era born eight months before. We envied the men and women who lived and fought within the circles of light shed by the heroes of the triumphant class war. We decked the revolution in the opalescent raiment of our visions. A Fatherland at last, and a focus for our hopes! Our New York lives seemed hatefully prosaic by contrast with the poetry of victorious revolution. The draft . . . slackers . . . Liberty Bonds . . . Liberty cabbage. . . . Give until it hurts. . . . Good-by, Broadway, hello, France. ... It all seemed a stupid burlesque in the blinding light of events in Russia. Stupidest of all were the college classes, the marching and saluting and bayonet drills of the Students Army Training Corps into which we had been herded. For some of us Armistice, for all the hysteria and noise, was an anti-climax, because there had been Brest-Litovsk. Soon after I was demobilized and presented with an honorable discharge, I heard Norman Thomas speak. I can recall neither the occasion of the meeting nor what he said, but only my inner excitement. I carried away the revelation that the Russian revolution had no boundaries, since it was the initial stage of the world revolution. The fight against capitalists in America, the battle to restore freedom to political prisoners and conscientious objectors, were just part of the world-wide defense of the Russian revolution. I am not certain that Thomas said these things. More likely they were my private deductions from the fervor with which he depicted the capitalist injustice around us. 10 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW On the very day when I removed my army uniform, I wrote my first publicity story for the Workers Defense Union, organized by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, with offices at the Rand School. Day after day, I composed these stories, destined for the New York Call and other radical publications, recounting the sufferings of I.W.W.'s and other political prisoners, the depredations of the Department of Justice on a rampage, the havoc being wrought by the American Legion. It was a time of raids on radicals, "Treat- Jem-rough!" hooliganism, and mass deportations. Tales of horror poured in upon our Workers Defense Union. Our work seemed to me an intrinsic, inseparable part of the civil wars being fought out then in the land of the Soviets. It was all part of the Russian revolution and was, despite the cruelty and the suffering, curiously exhilarating—like the exhilaration of war. And when I left my parents' home in Brooklyn for a shabby furnished room on lower Second Avenue, that, too, seemed part of the imminent world revolution. Society and I were coming of age at the same time! The world was casting off its capitalist shackles and I was casting off the shackles of home and school at the same time. The coincidence, of course, was a marvel of marvels, even if no one realized the mystic significance of that conjuncture of events except myself. The thrill of seeing my name in print, secretly cherished, was no selfish indulgence as with some of my literary friends, since my writing was for the cause. Such is the towering egotism of youth, even in its most altruistic poses. There was that May Day in 1919, a day of blood and terror and the excruciating pain, of helpless anger. Workers7 parades were smashed, radicals were brutally mauled, jails were crowded. The telephone rang continuously to apprise us of more raids, more brutality, more arrests. Late that afternoon the patriotic marauders swarmed through the Rand School, clambering up fire-escapes. A metal workers5 union shared our offices. I can still see the burly workman with an iron weight in his hairy fist waiting tensely at the door for the first Legionnaire who forced it open. Only the accident that they overlooked our room prevented another serious casualty. Yet that appalling day was touched with rapture. We felt ourselves in the thick of a great struggle for Justice, only a few of REVOLT AGAINST UGLINESS I 1 us, but pitting our faith against something monstrous. We had just emerged from another battle and the lull was sweet. There was a separate rapture for me. The others in the office may have been aware of her—"Little Sunshine," one of the men nicknamed her. But in my eyes she was the loveliest thing ever created. She came to the office that evening in a middy blouse and a red tarn, and she remembered how I had recited Nobody's Child centuries ago. She was now nearly fifteen, radiant and electrically vivacious, and picked out on the typewriter words more wonderful than anything Shakespeare or Goethe had ever put together: "Dear Comrade Eugene: I like you. Do you like me? Yours truly} Billy " II. The Clowning Called Justice THE next two years were so full, so rich, so tight-packed with sharp impressions and enthusiasms that they seem in retrospect a whole lifetime. I worked briefly on several newspapers, among them the Erie, Pa., Disfatch, and Financial America on Wall Street, and wrote copy for some months in the publicity departments of two motion picture companies. I succeeded in getting several high-pitched effusions into arty little magazines. I became habituated to the thrill of my name in print. These things, however, were secondary. First place belonged to the exciting friendships and activities in the radical movement. There was Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the most brilliant woman I had ever met. A veteran of the front trenches in the labor struggle since fifteen, she was, at thirty, attractive, winsomely Irish in her wit and her savor of life, with a remarkably cool intelligence behind her fiery oratory and personality. In the Mesaba Range strike, the Paterson and Lawrence strikes, her eloquence and courage and sweetness had won her tens of thousands of worshipful friends among the workers. And there was Carlo Tresca, big, bearded, boastful, life-loving, and as unlike the embittered anarchist of popular tradition as possible. Priest-baiting and spaghetti were among his chief passions, and his hairbreadth escapes from enemy bullets everywhere from Abruzzi to the copper empire of Montana were ample proof of his charmed life. And Fred Biedenkapp, the most Latin and temperamental German that ever lived. And the soft-spoken Vincent St. John—"the Saint" to "Wobbly" fellow-workers—full of mature class-war wisdom, tales of prospecting for gold, and off-color stories. He was a compact little man who conveyed a sense of immense concentrated strength in reserve—the kind of man who needed only a first-rate revolution to win him immortality. And scores of other I.W.W.'s, anarchists, socialists, American lumberjacks, Jewish clothing workers, Russian intellectuals, Italian terrorists, Hindu 12 THE CLOWNING CALLED JUSTICE I 3 nationalists—even liberals with creases in their pants and Harvard accents were not taboo. I had entered the American radical milieu in the twilight of its brief Golden Age, which had reached its high noon just before the war. United-front slogans had not yet become sources of disunion. Differences of opinion were sharp enough, but they remained essentially a family affair. As against the rest of the world, which meant everyone from J. P. Morgan to Matthew Woll, there was a solid front. And the symbol of that unity after 1917 was the Russian revolution. The fact that shiploads of assorted deportees, with every shade of radical philosophy represented, sailed towards Russia without the slightest misgivings about the revolution and its course, is proof of the vitality of that symbol. In the autumn of 1919, the Workers Defense Union sent me to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to cover the trial of Charles Krieger, an I.W.W. organizer accused of dynamiting the home of a Mr. Pew, a Standard Oil official. I stopped in Kansas City and was met at the station by the I.W.W. attorney in the case, Fred H. Moore, and Ella Reeves Bloor, that grand old lady of the American labor movement who then, as now, was known affectionately as "Mother" Bloor. Moore, rather sinister-looking under his broad- brimmed Western hat (a few years later, as defense lawyer for Sacco and Vanzetti, he was to become the most hated man in Massachusetts) took in my hundred-odd pounds of scrawny youth- fulness, my poetic haircut, the bohemian untidiness of my clothes, in one scowling inspection. He did not trouble to hide his disgust. "And I thought Gurley was sending us a man!" he said. Despite this inauspicious reception, we were close friends almost immediately and remained friends until his death a few years ago. Books about the American labor and radical movements have not done justice to Moore. A brilliant lawyer, quixotically devoted and self-sacrificing, he was handicapped by a genius for non-conformity. He had started in the Northwest as attorney for the railroads, but just on the brink of precocious success, had scrapped it and begun anew in Los Angeles. One day in 1912, he was called on the phone by a casual I.W.W. acquaintance who had been arrested in a free speech fight in San Diego. Fred took his hat and his revolver. 14 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW "I'm running over to San Diego," he told his law associates, "to see what I can do for this fellow. HI be back soon." He returned some twelve years later. From one labor fight to another he drifted, taking on the cases that could not afford the more publicized attorneys, the hopeless, desperate cases in the labor struggle. Many of those legal battles have become famous in American labor history—the Ettore~Gio» vanniti case; the Spokane free speech fight; the Everett, Wash., case; the Bisbee, Arizona, case; the Wichita I.W.W. case—but no share of this fame accrued to him. Always he quarreled with the defense committees or the clients or got himself into some private emotional scrape and lost the laurels of victory. Even in the Sacco- Vanzetti case, to which he gave four years—and there probably would have been no such case if Moore had not taken hold of it and turned it to a cause celehre—a well-paid capitalist lawyer in the end reaped the credit and the fame. The dynamiting charge against "Big Boy" Krieger, a tall, raw- boned Pennsylvania Dutchman, was so palpably a frame-up that no one even pretended it was anything else. The average citizen of Tulsa, which was then ruled by a vigilante Committee of One Hundred, merely had a sporting interest in whether the Standard Oil crowd could make their fantastic invention stick. The case was the last stage of a determined effort of the oil interests to drive I.W.W. union agitation, which had been making considerable headway, out of the state. Organizers had been beaten, tarred and feathered, ridden out on rails. But they kept coming back like so many pesky flies. One night someone set off dynamite under the Pew porch, where Mrs. Pew normally slept. She wasn't there, it happened, and not much harm was done. But the press promptly headlined it as Red Terror and the authorities proceeded to round up every known and suspected I.W.W. in Oklahoma. The police were considerably chagrined when it appeared that not one of the men taken into custody had been in or near Tulsa the night of the explosion. After the recent tar-and-feather parties, the Wobblies had apparently kept at a distance from the city. But that little detail did not checkmate patriotic ardor. The Red Terror, the police decided, had been applied by absent treatment. The gangling Pennsylvania boy, Charlie Krieger, had passed through Tulsa three days before the dynamiting and had stopped THE CLOWNING CALLED JUSTICE 15 overnight at a hotel. The state now charged that he had hired three notorious yeggs, the renowned John Hall and two of his young desperadoes, to blow up Pew, and that he had done so at the express order of Big Bill Haywood in Chicago. By the time the trial came up, Hall had been committed to Leavenworth Penitentiary for some Federal crime, but his lieutenants, who were in an Oklahoma jail, were ready to plead guilty to the Pew dynamiting as Krieger's agents. That dynamiting had not been the only dirty work that night. About the same time a post-office had been broken into, its safe blown, and the contents carried off. The two thugs had originally been arrested in connection with the post-office job. The dynamiting of public buildings carried a fifty years' prison sentence. The dynamiting of private dwellings carried only a ten years' rap. They knew enough arithmetic to prefer responsibility for the lesser job, particularly when the bargain won them some influential friends. They were ready to plead guilty to the Pew job as agents of the I.W.W. monster. It was a neat and amusing story. Its transparency only added to the joy of the occasion. The prosecution was prepared for everything—except Fred Moore. The trial, lasting ten weeks, was the longest in the history of Oklahoma at that time. Every now and then, the court recessed for a few hours and disposed of some minor matters like murder cases. Flint Moss, hired by Standard Oil, ostensibly assisting the public prosecutor, actually was in complete control. Humiliated by his virtual expulsion from the case, the prosecutor tipped us off occasionally on Flint's plans. The judge, a decent fellow and uncomfortable under the Standard Oil pressure, sometimes called Moore and myself into his chambers 5 we talked about life and literature, but now and then His Honor let fall a hint or two that helped Moore pull the props from under the frame-up. Even a court stenographer, being also stenographer for the vigilantes, telephoned one midnight to warn us that a formal decision had been reached that evening to run Moore and the other Reds out of town. Why the decision was not carried out, and why we were not riddled by bullets that tense afternoon when Flint Moss, under the guise of a summation to the jury, all but incited the tensely hostile crowd in the courtroom to settle us right there and then, i6 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW amazed us. Not until afterward did we find out that we had been under the sharp-eyed protection of a little army of private gunmen, under orders to shoot down the first man who touched us. But even if we were sadly ignorant of this invisible and unsolicited defense, the vigilantes had been apprised of it. The orders had been issued by the picturesque three-hundred- pound dictator of a nearby town. He was perhaps the last of the oil barons, the only great "independent" operator in that vicinity, and he hated Standard Oil even as Standard Oil hated Reds. Anyone accused of an attempt to erase a Standard Oil official automatically rated the support of his private army, recruited from the prisons of the Southwest under laws permitting the parole of prisoners who could show respectable jobs waiting for them. The hulking oil man explained it all to us after the trial, as he sat on the huge butcher's block in his refrigerator, oblivious to the cold while the rest of us congealed slowly into icicles. He was disappointed at Fred Moore's assurances that Krieger was innocent and that private terror was no part of the I.W.W. code. Haywood's movement there and then lost a potential millionaire recruit. "Sure," he said, "my men were all around the courtroom, with their fingers on the trigger. The Standard Oil bastards knew that if anyone let loose there'd be hell to pay, Yeh, I'm respected in these parts, I am." He laughed till the immense meat block shook. The trial, as I said, dragged for many weeks. Every time Moore demolished an essential sector of the state's flimsy case, the prosecution got a brief adjournment and when court opened again there it was, with brand-new witnesses to bolster up the blasted sector. It was most amusing, and Tulsa chuckled. The two rat-faced yeggs testified in low voices, with downcast eyes, how Krieger had hired them and Hall to pull the Pew dynamiting job. They were very convincing in describing how they had stolen the dynamite but rather vague on the dynamiting itself. Haywood's defense committee in Chicago was chronically short of funds. Besides, more important legal battles had a prior claim. Our burdens of perjured witnesses, murderous public hostility, and a frankly unfriendly jury were therefore complicated by financial distress. I recall the morning when we all turned our pockets inside out to find that the pooled resources would barely THE CLOWNING CALLED JUSTICE IJ cover coffee and doughnuts. As we chewed the doughnuts, wondering when we would eat again, we smiled over a local eight- column streamer headline "revealing" that a million-dollar fund was at the disposal of the Red agitators defending Krieger. The dangers and hardships of our situation drew us closer together. They added a tang of high adventure to the routine business of defending another Wobbly in another frame-up. Besides Moore and myself, there were the handsome Lola Darroch (during the Sacco-Vanzetti case in Boston she became Mrs. Moore) ; Caroline Lowe, a sweet spinsterish lady lawyer driven by her social conscience to defend deportees and I.W.W.'s and to intrude herself precisely where her primness seemed most out of place; a poverty-ridden local attorney named George Bonstein, a Jewish pioneer of the Indian country with the temerity to tackle the whole Standard Oil caboodle; and a number of roughneck Wob- blies whom Moore had saved from jail or the noose at various times and who hung around like faithful dogs in the hope of serving him. These latter were not too fastidious about the nature of the service, nor was Moore himself too finicky. He had no inhibitions about using the same weapons as the other side, when necessary. The fact that Standard Oil officials tried to buy him into their service before he left Tulsa, is some measure of his equipment. . 2 The most melodramatic episode in that unequal battle, perhaps, centered around the enigmatic John Hall, a desperado in the best Jesse James tradition. The state made no effort to bring him from Leavenworth, preferring to rest on the testimony of his underlings. Moore's problem was whether to bring him in as a defense witness. It was hazardous business. If our own witness were to support the other two in their cock-and-bull story, Krieger's fate would be sealed. Moore interviewed Hall in his cell but elicited only a non-committal smile. "What I'll say is my own business," Hall told him. "That fellow's a straight-shooter," Moore reported back to us. "He's no rat. I'd stake my life on his telling the truth." But he hesitated to stake Krieger's freedom on his impression. Caroline Lowe listened. A light flared in her meek eyes. She an- i8 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW nounced that she, too, wanted to talk to Hall before a decision was made. She did, and returned to confirm Moore's impression. There was a warmth in her report that made us nudge one another. For years after this Leavenworth meeting, the school- teacherish Miss Lowe and the notorious killer maintained a correspondence. Up until her untimely death, she tried to obtain his release. At least she was spared the sorrow of his end. John Hall was, I believe, the second man to die in the famous lethal chamber experiments in Arizona. But she had her moment of rapturous pride when Hall, calm, self-possessed and a little contemptuous, was brought into the Tulsa courtroom as a defense witness. It was a courtroom made for paradox. The judge puffed a big cigar under the "No Smoking" sign crusted with smoke. Spectators with revolvers in their holsters threw "howdy" to their friends in the jury box. Moore was completely in the dark as to what Hall's testimony would be. The prosecution had the post- office job as a spur to the witness's memory. But Hall, black as his record was, did not seek safety at the expense of an innocent stranger. I have never seen human creatures tremble and wilt as did the two yeggs when confronted with their gang leader. He withered them with one slow accusing scrutiny and never once looked again in their direction. Hall confirmed their story of the stealing of the dynamite, but denied ever having seen Krieger before the latter's arrest. He denied any knowledge of the Pew explosion. No, he knew nothing of the post-office job either. "Why did you need dynamite?" Flint Moss hammered at him hour after hour. "Oh, I just wanted to blow some stumps out of the road." "What did you do with the dynamite?" "I blew up those stumps. They annoyed me." He stuck to the story, unsmiling, calm, while spectators guffawed. Excessive physical courage is not my chief vice. The threat of a tar-and-feather party or worse under which we worked occasionally sent undignified thoughts of retreat through my head. In that week before the trial started, for instance. Perhaps by way of punishing me for being so young and scrawny when he had expected a full-sized man, Moore had sent me ahead into Tulsa THE CLOWNING CALLED JUSTICE 19 to investigate the state of mind of the community. I decided to investigate first of all the state of mind of the spiritual leaders of Tulsa. I listed all the clergymen in town and started on my rounds. The first of these men of God was a bulky, red-faced cow- puncher in appearance. He listened to my story, then leaned over and gripped my shoulders. There was nothing remotely affectionate about that grip. "Young man," he said, "I have only one piece of advice for you. Take the next train out of town, or we'll hang your hide on a fence!" In no less picturesque forms the equivalent advice was proffered by seven or eight other muscular vicars of the Lord in Tulsa. That Sunday I was the text of a sermon in one church, I learned from Monday's papers. Only the Catholic priest showed any friendliness or any sane resentment against the local Red baiting. I have had a soft spot in my heart for Catholic priests ever since. Eventually, I took the stand and quoted the high-minded advice of the Lord's anointed, swear-words and all. We did not get the change of venue we demanded, but we did have the satisfaction of seeing one of the clergymen squirm in his seat. It was the same clergyman who preached sermons to the jury on Sundays, since jurors could not be denied the solace of spiritual uplift, on themes as remote from the case in court as patriotism and foreign agitators. Scream headlines out of Centralia, Washington, on Armistice Day, when the trial was at its height, did not sweeten the atmosphere for us. They told how I.W.W.'s had "murdered" American Legion paraders, making it clear that Krieger and his friends were part of the same homicidal fraternity. They merely failed to make clear that the I.W.W. boys had shot in defending their union hall against violent invasion by over-stimulated patriots. My reports of the trial, a little late for lack of telegraph tolls and much too full of indignant adjectives, appeared in the New York Call, in the Butte Bulletin, and in four or five other labor papers. A sizzling summary entitled, with a flash of superb originality, Tulsa: a Study in Oil, appeared under my signature in the I.W.W. Monthly. An audience heard the story from me at the Rand School. Then the case entered the limbo of forgotten minor 20 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW sensations. But in my own mind it remained as sign and symbol of the clowning that goes by the name of justice. The jury reported eleven to one for conviction. The one recalcitrant juror emerged with visible proofs that the arguments used on him were the kind that left marks on the body. We learned later that he had had a personal grudge against Standard Oil in some matter connected with a pipe-line on his farm. His insistence on Krieger's innocence apparently had no more to do with the evidence than the others' insistence on Krieger's guilt. In a second trial, which I did not attend, the whole case collapsed and Krieger was freed. The last I heard he was settled down in his home town as a law-abiding plumber with a taste for solid respectability. III. On the Eve of Fascism IN THE autumn of 1920, Italian workers seized the metal plants in Milan and ran up the red flag. Hope of world revolution, dimmed by reverses elsewhere, flared up once more. And since I thought the impending Italian revolution needed its John Reed out of America no less than its Russian precursor, I was soon in the steerage of an Italian liner bound for Naples. I was equipped with credentials from the Federated Press, a struggling labor news agency, and the Liberator; one cardboard suitcase half-stuffed with paper to keep my worldly belongings from rattling \ and that week's salary from Financial America by way of sinews of war. The long hand of Italian anarcho-syndicalism (via a well-placed word from Carlo Tresca) reached down into the bowels of the ship and yanked me up into the comforts of officers' quarters. On deck I struck up an acquaintance with a slim, shy fellow a few years my senior, Norman Matson by name. He, too, was inclined to push the ship along for fear of missing the revolution. For a day or two, we pretended to be the plenipotentiaries of respectable capitalist journals. Then we looked one another straight in the eyes, laughed, and laid our cards—that is to say, our press credentials—on the table. He, too, was exclusive and authenticated correspondent for the Federated Press and the Liberator, and a candidate for the role of Italy's John Reed. Norman and I shared a room, our deficits, and our soaring thoughts in the next six months, and discovered that Italy was brimming over with potential John Reeds, all representing the Federated Press and the Liberator. If the Italian proletariat failed to live up to our expectations, at least Italy did not. Naples was an extravagant dream come true. We explored its narrow streets and smelly cafes and stuffy music halls. We hunted up comx-ades at Socialist Party headquarters and wrote reams of "first impressions" which, alas!, never got printed. We helped a scared and bungling secret service man, assigned to 21 22 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW shadow us, to make out his report and treated him to black coffees. We mixed with Neapolitans in a daze of intoxication that blended the Bay of Naples and Viva Lenin e Trotsky Iy Pompei and socialist mass meetings, everything exotically old and desperate, with the Soviets around the corner. Then came Rome and the Pension Dinesen and socialist Deputies and Roman girls who exchanged Italian and kisses for English and kisses. We went into homes in crowded side-streets where grimy children answered to the name of Lenin and Trotsky and Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg—thousands of these little Lenins and Liebknechts were destined to be hurriedly re-christened after the fascist March on Rome. We watched fist fights on the floor of Parliament and saw the earlier castor-oil episodes in the rebirth of the glory that was Rome. How I managed to pay the rent and board at the pension is a miracle somewhat blurred in memory. A few articles in the Nation helped; a dollar went a long way when turned into inflated lire. Fred Moore, by the time I left for Italy, was in full command of an obscure case in Boston involving a fishmonger named Barto- lomeo Vanzetti and a shoemaker named Nicola Sacco. He had given me explicit instructions to arouse all of Italy to the significance of the Massachusetts murder case, and to hunt up certain witnesses and evidence. The Italian labor movement, however, had other things to worry about. An ex-socialist named Benito Mussolini and a locust plague of blackshirts, for instance. Somehow I did get pieces about Sacco and Vanzetti into Avantil\ which Mussolini had once edited, and into one or two other papers. I even managed to stir up a few socialist onorevolesy like Deputy Mucci from Sacco's native village in Puglia, and Deputy Misiano, a Sicilian firebrand at the extreme Left. Mucci brought the Sacco- Vanzetti affair to the floor of the Chamber of Deputies, the first jet of foreign protest in what was eventually to become a pounding international flood. Norman and I went to Livorno to witness the epochal congress of the Socialist Party, which saw the birth of a Communist Party and the tragic splintering of the Left forces that opened the road to Mussolini's legions. We consorted only with the communist wing, of course, and sang paeans of praise for Terracini and Bom- bacci and the other leaders. Nothing less than immediate revo- ON THE EVE OF FASCISM 23 lution suited our fervor and theirs. The excessive caution of the parliamentarians and timid evolutionists, we were convinced, had nipped a Soviet revolution in the bud when the metal workers took over the factories. Resentment against the lost opportunity smoldered in our hearts and flamed into oratory from the Left. We had on our side, moreover, the weight of the triumphant Russian proletariat whose agents were in Livorno to guide and inspire. What matter if the Bolshevik faction was a minority in this conference, since it spoke with the voice of the Third International, not to mention History and Humanity? Only one argument directed against the Left baffled its orators. It was hurled at them by Serrati from the Center and Modigliani from the Right. In the light of subsequent Italian history that argument seems irony at its most tragic. "A dictatorship may be possible in Russia," the Left was repeatedly admonished, "but surely, comrades, it is unthinkable in our country. We Italians are individualists, anarchists, by nature. Discipline, blind obedience? Ma chel When an Italian sees a cNo Smoking' sign in a tramcar or theater, it reminds him to light up. To talk of organized restraint and dictatorship in our land is foolishness!" Even the communists could not deny anything so axiomatic. They said that in Italy, maybe, the new social order would be established without the need for dictatorial methods. A little more than a year later the fascist dictatorship was in force. . . . Though we posed as correspondents, the Livorno congress was no mere "story" for Norman and me. We felt it to be an extension of the civil warfare over in Soviet Russia, a local sector on the widening front of an international class struggle. We cheered and booed at the proper points along with communist sympathizers in the six steep galleries of the Teatro Goldoni. But the Associated Press correspondent, come from Fiume for the occasion, took the proceedings less seriously. He was never quite sure who was Left or Right or why. Nothing in his training as a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, police reporter had prepared him to record an epoch-making split in the Italian socialist ranks. Indeed, his private summary of the talk-fest was remarkable both for its simplicity and comprehensiveness. Strolling between Norman and myself after a stormy session, he confided it to us: 24 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW "Just look at 'em! Karl Marx and the other guy with the alfalfa on his chin whose pictures are on the wall, and Bombacci, Serrati, Modigliani!"—he called off the leaders of all the factions who happened to wear beards—"just a lot of Jews!" The other guy with the alfalfa, of course, was Friedrich Engels, as Germanic as Bismarck. Bombacci, the eccentric commanist leader, was an ex-priest. Only one or two of the other leaders in the limelight were Jews, and in Italy the anti-Semitic issue was never a serious factor. But for a Pittsburgher whiskers are whiskers. The exigencies of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense took me to the southern olive and grape provinces, into Sacco's native village of Torremaggiore. I found that his elder brother, Sabino Sacco, was the socialist sindaco (mayor) of Torremaggiore. Red flags were flying over the municipal building and the cooperative store, and nearly every infant born since November, 1917, was named for some Bolshevik deity. I even saw a baby "Soviet" peacefully sucking her mother's breast. Rumors of the blackshirt camions rumbled even through Puglia, and occasionally violent incidents wrere reported from larger towns. But the suggestion that a fascist regime was in the offing would have sounded like gibberish to Torremaggiore and a thousand other villages gesturing with red flags and Russian catch-phrases. Sacco-Vanzetti matters also sent me into the Marchesan hills, beyond Jesi, to a sleepy, mud-colored village called Santa Maria Nove. I tracked down an anarchist deportee from Massachusetts, whose yellow-haired wife wept for the vanished glories of life in a New England shoe town, snatched from her by the ardor of Mitchell Palmer's agents. The man's shelves were lined with brochures on the home manufacture of bombs and he professed himself a terrorist of the Galleani school. So deep, however, had the fear of American law and police entered his heart that it needed a week of pleading and threatening and pressure by Mer- lino, the grand old man of the anarcho-syndicalist movement, to bring this terrorist to the point of signing an innocuous affidavit in support of Sacco's alibi. No sooner had I descended from the Marchesan heights, though, than he recovered his magnificent courage. It expressed itself in a colored picture post-card addressed to me at my prim Danish fension and showed an anarchist iconoclast hurling a smoking ON THE EVE OF FASCISM 25 bomb at a row of gods. My standing with the Roman police must have been greatly improved by this belated boldness at my expense. It was not the only time I was to meet bomb-throwing bravado masking abject cowardice. Already, in the civil strife between blackshirts and communists or socialists, the casualties were too numerous for the newspapers to report in full. Daily tallies of the number of Reds and Blacks killed all over the country had to suffice, and the preponderance of communist over fascist deaths increased rapidly. The legend which pictures the March on Rome as a bloodless seizure of power ignores the ferocious blood-letting which preceded it. 2 Panic spread in the Italian labor ranks. Almost overnight it seemed, after the Livorno split, the sense of confidence and faith in their own strength departed from the revolutionary elements. An influx of communist refugees from Hungary, after the collapse of Bela Kun's government, deepened the gloom in the Italian circles with which I was in contact. Norman and I smuggled a few of these homeless, penniless refugees into our hotel room for a period and heard hair-raising tales of torture in Horthy's prisons. One boy bared his back and chest by way of illustration. They were thickly sown with tiny raw wounds. "Cigarette burns," he explained, "a favorite Hungarian amusement." I followed the news out of Russia with anxious and intimate concentration. Every defeat of some interventionist or counterrevolutionary general, every advance of the Soviet forces into Poland, was a personal triumph. There came a day when the Soviet drive was turned back at the very gates of Warsaw, and the bottom seemed to drop out of my own life. I remember pacing the roof of our fension with Norman, discussing that blow. It seemed to us that the fate of all history, of the whole human race, was in the balance. If Soviet Russia were beaten, we decided, the darkness of reaction and barbarism would settle over the universe for centuries (we reckoned glibly in centuries in our idealistic trance of those days). The only bright spot in the encroaching gloom was the arrival of Vorovsky as Moscow's first Ambassador to Italy, and the open- z6 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW ing of the Soviet Embassy. It fired anew my half-conscious ambition to reach Soviet Russia. I seized eagerly at the suggestion of a Soviet attache that he might use me as secret courier to Moscow —an American would be a safer messenger across the more dangerous stretches between Rome and the Kremlin. Arrangements to this end were in swing at the time I was arrested and expelled from Italy. Chagrin over the spoiling of those plans was, in fact, the bitterest ingredient in my expulsion. It was while about to depart for a town in central Italy, after the second bell had been sounded and the locomotive strained at its leash awaiting the final signal, that half a dozen detectives piled into my coupe and took me into custody. A tall, thin, mysterious and rather dandified Balkan fellow— I never did ascertain whether he was Montenegrin or Serbian or Bulgarian—who was my traveling companion was arrested at the same time. I had met him in Italy through anarchist acquaintances and listened in fascinated horror to his boastful stories of revolutionary exploits. Pulling off fingernails to extract ransom money for the cause from bloated landlords and capitalists was, I recall, among his routine procedures. None of the money, at the moment, was in his pockets and the ease with which I parted from my few lire was evidently my chief recommendation to him. On my part I felt compensated by the atmosphere of recondite mystery and adventure that surrounded him. When Moore wrote me emphasizing the critical importance of obtaining the photograph of an Italian criminal who, as nearly as I could figure out, may have been mixed up in the crime for which Sacco and Vanzetti were being tried, I naturally turned to my Balkan friend for assistance. We were about to embark on the important mission of stealing a photograph from the home of that criminal's parents in central Italy when the law took us in hand. We were separated and I never saw the man again* To this day I do not know whether I was picked up on his account, or he on mine. From questions in the course of that day's intensive grilling I surmised that in the eyes of the Italian police, at least, my companion was a terrorist of some importance. But my own brief record of amateur dabbling in revolution was not unknown to the police either. On the cotnmissario's desk, when I was ushered into his pres- ON THE EVE OF FASCISM 2J ence, was a dossier in which I caught glimpses of my articles in The Nation and other publications and what looked like copies of my private mail. In my pockets and baggage nothing more incriminating than a few Sacco-Vanzetti pamphlets and letters in Billy's childish scrawl were discovered. By the end of the day, after I had been formally presented with a paper ordering me to leave the country in twenty-four hours, the commissario had achieved a paternal attitude towards his American charge. At twenty-two I looked eighteen and weighed a hundred-odd pounds. Although a few hours before he had threatened to turn me over to the fascisti for a castor-oil purge, he now draped his arm around my shoulders in the most fatherly manner. "I am a Sicilian, my son," he said, "and we Sicilians have a proverb. It's a good proverb and I recommend it to you. Ammazza, ammazza, e tutta una razza. (Kill, kill, it is all a race.) Stop bothering with the Saccos and Vanzettis and the socialist dogs, and take care of your own interests." He fumbled among the confiscated contents of my pockets and found the picture of the wide-eyed little girl whose letters he had read. "Go home," he said, "marry this beautiful girl and come back here for a honeymoon." Nearly ten years later I did bring the girl to Rome. As we walked and drove through the streets, I kept hoping unreasonably that the commissario would suddenly appear. Perhaps he was among the hundreds of men in black shirts who were operating on his Sicilian proverb* The intercession of my friends among the socialist deputies won me a few additional days of grace. Then I was escorted to the French frontier. The escort, in civilian clothes, watched until I was safely on the French side of the turnstile at the border station. I was literally without a penny when I stepped off the train in Paris, but by evening was installed in that sanctuary of impecunious American newspapermen, the Paris Herald. I lied about understanding French in order to obtain the job, and rewrote items out of the French paper largely by intuition during the month I survived on the job. The intuition played me false on occasion and Americans on the Continent, I fear, were given some strange 28 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW versions of French current events. By the end of the month I received a check from America just big enough to pay my way home. Just big enough, with a few francs to spare for the trip. Unluckily my ship needed some repairs and kept the passengers waiting in Havre. The few francs paid for a bed in a sailors' hotel but left nothing for food. It was a very hungry young man, a little groggy from weakness, who fell to when at last we were permitted to board the boat and taste its fare. It was a delightful trip, devoted to reading and flirting, its beauty somewhat marred by two circumstances. First, because I had no money for cigarettes, and could not bring myself to sponge on others, I pretended that I did not smoke. Second, despite all that a rubber eraser could do, my collar and cuffs grew dingier and their owner more embarrassed every day; I lacked a clean change. Shamefacedly I borrowed a nickel from a fellow passenger to take me from the pier to my parents' home in Brooklyn. Two checks awaited me, one from The Nation and another from The Freeman. Never before or since has money looked bigger. The whole European adventure seemed fantastic and wasteful to my family, which still cherished a slight though fast-fading hope that I would "succeed" despite my penchant for strange friends and strange travels. I did not attempt to explain or justify myself. Instead, I betook myself to a department store, bought a collection of foreign-looking trinkets and presented them nonchalantly as gifts from Paris. May they forgive me the deception when they read these words! IV. I Defend Sacco and Vanzetti BEFORE the end of that week I was on a boat bound for Boston, where Sacco and Vanzetti had already been condemned to death. Billy, whose picture had struck a paternal spark from a Sicilian heart, was on the boat with me, uninvited, but gloriously welcome. She was nearly seventeen now and magically ripened to womanhood during my long year of absence. Her beauty seemed to me to transcend even the high promise of her loveliness as a child which had captivated me just ten years before. The mysterious half-realized attraction touched by adolescent embarrassment which had drawn us together across the chasm of six years' difference in age suddenly acquired a name: love. In a few weeks we were married. Our fourteen months in Boston were hectic with excitement, as an obscure and seemingly dull murder case expanded into a worldwide cause celebre unparalleled since the Dreyfus affair. They were filled, too, with the bitterness of defeat and frustration, as we bruised ourselves against the unyielding granite of laws and precedents and prejudice in the sanctimonious robes of formal justice. But they were months edged with the ecstasy of young love. We were pleased to find a small, inexpensive apartment right in Back Bay. Gradually, reading newspaper reports of police raids on adjoining houses, it dawned on us that we had settled in a "red light" district. Far from being distressed, the discovery provided a fillip of amusement to the enchantments of our young marriage. A Supreme Court Justice, though he knew nothing about it, solved the great problem of furniture for our two-room home. Mrs. Elizabeth Glendower Evans, the hundred arms of whose mothering instinct embraced everything young and helpless in sight, had become aware of the problem. She had the key to the Brookline cellar where Justice Brandeis had stored some old fur- 29 30 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW niture on moving to Washington. We selected everything that an impecunious couple could desire to feather their nest. When I met Justice Brandeis at his Cape Cod summer home the following year and confessed the theft, I discovered that Mrs. Evans had not overestimated his generosity. The arrest of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti on May 5, 1920, was not mentioned outside the local press. Their conviction on July 14, 1921, rated exactly seven and a half inches on an inside page of the New York Times. Their execution six years later, on August 2,3, 1927, received five full pages in the same newspaper, several of them recording the sorrow and anger of millions of men and women in every country in the world. A thousand different factors contributed toward that extraordinary growth of the case. The obscurity of the simple, uncouth protagonists 5 the unctuous smugness of the Brahmin New England which rallied against them; the fury of Red-baiting in America in the post-war years—everything combined to give the drama and the players a heightened significance. The protracted struggle achieved a peculiar symbolic quality for all men in their own lives. It challenged their institutions and tested their professed ideals. It ripped the varnished surface off American life and revealed the deep fissures of class and race antagonisms underneath. A simple murder case, it evolved into a complicated and terrifying sacrificial rite. In a book called The Life and Death of Sacco and Vanzetti} published immediately after the men were electrocuted^ I wrote; These aliens by a strange chance combined in their obscure persons all the things that most offended and frightened a smug New Eng- lander. In a section where family pride and an ingrown sense of racial superiority flourished, Sacco and Vanzetti were from the lowest social layer of wops and hunkies and polaks. At a time when Bolshevism gave householders nightmares, Sacco and Vanzetti were by their own confession reddest of the Reds. With the textile industry drifting to the South and the shoe industry to the West, in a period of strikes and discontent, Sacco and Vanzetti were self-confessed labor agitators. Amidst a raging blood-fed patriotism, they were slackers. In Puritan New England they were atheists. It required no special effort or apparatus to generate fear of and hatred for the two men. They attracted the fears and hatreds already I DEFEND SACCO AND VANZETTI 31 in full play. The belief of some that agents of the Department of Justice and of the State of Massachusetts got together and decided to electrocute them, innocent or guilty, is naive. It was not a frame-up in the ordinary sense of the word. It was a far more terrible conspiracy: the almost automatic clicking of the machinery of government spelling out death for two men with the utmost serenity. No more laws were stretched or violated than in most other criminal cases. No more stool-pigeons were used. No more prosecution tricks were played. Only in this case every trick worked with a deadly precision. The rigid mechanism of legal procedure was at its most unbending. The human beings who operated the mechanism were guided by dim, vague, deep-seated motives of fear and self-interest. It was a frame-up implicit in the social structure. It was a perfect example of the functioning of class justice, in which every judge, juror, police officer, editor, governor and college president played his appointed role easily and without undue violence to his conscience. A few even played it with an exalted sense of their own patriotism and nobility. Many o£ those who were outraged by the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti resented this interpretation. They preferred to regard it as a deliberate "plot to railroad two workers/' and themselves as the heroic if unsuccessful rescuers. But their hero~and-villain pattern seemed to me false and petty against the reality of vast inchoate forces at play on both sides. To me the whole thing shaped up not as melodrama but as epic tragedy. 2 Though I did not formulate it in these terms until I had attained the perspective of time, I think that I sensed the epic quality from the first. All of us who defended the two Italians were wholly and deeply convinced of their innocence. Yet it was profoundly right that the question of innocence and guilt should become, as it did, of secondary importance to both sides, because the issues involved were wider than the character or destiny of two men. Those who rallied to our side, a relatively small and despised group at first, did so as inevitably and often as irrationally as the others who leagued against us. The case, I felt, was a catalytic agent that crystallized forces until then held in a deceptively unified social solution. 32 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW Fred Moore was at heart an artist. Instinctively he recognized the materials of a world issue in what appeared to others a routine matter. A socialist newspaperman spent a few days in Boston and returned to New York to report that "there's no story in it . . . just a couple of wops in a jam." Not one of the members of the defense committee formed immediately after the men's arrest suspected that the affair was anything larger than it seemed. When the case grew into a historical tussle, these men were utterly bewildered. But Moore saw its magnitude from the first. His legal tactics have been the subject of dispute and recrimination. I think that there is some color of truth, indeed, to the charge that he sometimes subordinated the literal needs of legalistic procedure to the larger needs of the case as a symbol of class struggle. If he had not done so, Sacco and Vanzetti would have died six years earlier, without the solace of martyrdom. With the deliberation of a composer evolving the details of a symphony which he senses in its rounded entirety, Moore proceeded to clarify and deepen the elements implicit in the case. And first of all he aimed to delineate the class character of the automatic prejudices that were operating against Sacco and Vanzetti. Sometimes over the protests of the men themselves he cut through legalistic conventions to reveal underlying motives. Small wonder that the pinched, dyspeptic judge and the pettifogging lawyers came to hate Moore with a hatred that was admiration turned inside out. He was not "playing the game" according to their sacred rules. Perhaps his most difficult task, and therefore his most creative achievement, was to show the two Italians as types and symbols of workmen everywhere. Labor elements in other countries recognized Sacco and Vanzetti as their own long before American workers consented to this identification. American labor, and especially the portion organized into conservative trade unions, at first rejected violently the implication that these two foreigners—self- confessed anarchists, internationalists, atheists—were in any sense representative American workers. Their social views were "un- American." To accept them as brothers was to throw doubt on the middle-class delusions of the bona -fide labor movement. Vanzetti had worked as an unskilled laborer, peddled fish and taken some part in local strike agitations. Sacco was a skilled shoe I DEFEND SACCO AND VANZETTI 33 worker. But as anarchists they neither sympathized nor cooperated with the organized American labor movement, which they regarded as simply a part of the apparatus of capitalist enslavement. Despite this, American labor in the end was obliged to overcome its first revulsion and accept the Sacco-Vanzetti case as in large measure its own. Moore had slashed through the many layers of outer differences to the core of identity between Sacco and Van- zetti and all other workmen. To accomplish this, he did not hesitate to use any and all instrumentalities of publicity. On the one hand, the labor records of the two men were "built up" and emphasized 3 on the other, the attitudes of the prosecution were exposed as essentially anti-labor. By the time I arrived on the scene, John Nicholas Beffel and others had already done the groundwork, under Moore's guidance, in this connection. Because my presence, in 1921-22, happened to coincide with the period when the case exploded into world significance, I received at the time more credit (or blame, depending on the point of view) than I merited. A series of articles in the old New York World by Samuel Spewack, in particular, sensationalized and exaggerated my role. I figured in his version as one of three men—an Italian, a Spaniard and a young American— who sat at their typewriters in a chilly little office in Boston and incited the whole world to protest. This journalistic simplification infuriated me. As a matter of fact, Felicani, Lopez and I, writing articles and news stories in Italian, Spanish, and English, respectively, were very minor factors in a situation that had outgrown all of us by that time and was rolling along on its own momentum. It is a curious fact that Sacco and Vanzetti, whose names are linked inseparably, saw one another very rarely in the seven years between their arrest and electrocution. Sacco was kept in the county jail at Dedham, Vanzetti in Charlestown Prison. Only on those rare occasions when some new hearing or empty formality brought them into court did they meet, embrace, and chat briefly. Several times, almost a year elapsed before they met again. By the time their cold bodies were laid out on adjoining marble slabs in the death chamber, they had become almost strangers. Of the same race, the same political faith, their destinies intertwined, they were yet men of the most contrasting temperaments and minds. Sacco was the Latin at his most impetuous, a man of 34 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW emotion rather than logic, driven literally to madness on at least two occasions by the ordeal of imprisonment and waiting. The separation from his pretty red-headed wife and his two children, from friends and work, consumed his flesh and shook his reason. A week of incarceration for a man like Sacco was more terrible than a year for the more phlegmatic and contemplative Vanzetti. Sacco was a caged and raging animal 3 Vanzetti seemed a monk in calm seclusion. Under the ferocious Italian mustaches which gave him a look of fierceness in the eyes of the ordinary American, the fishmonger from Piemonte had ascetic features and eyes of a tenderness that haunted one. With every year of imprisonment Vanzetti seemed to grow calmer, gentler, more philosophic. His was the consolation of genuine martyrdom in which there was no rancor but an ever- deepening understanding. Where Sacco had acquired his anarchist beliefs at second-hand, more attracted by its harsh code than its philosophy, Vanzetti had read and studied the poets and prophets of his faith. His mind was crystal clear and expanded immensely in the enforced leisure of his seven years' isolation. Some of his letters and speeches from the prisoners' cage have the ring of enduring literature—this despite his use of English, an alien, half- apprehended tongue. Certainly the scene while he was being strapped into the electric chair, when he proffered his forgiveness to those who were about to snuff out his life, belongs among the high moments in the history of the human spirit. 3 I saw Sacco and Vanzetti frequently, either in the company of Moore or alone. But in the fight that reverberated through all the nations and made their linked names a familiar word, their own roles were passive. They merely waited. My day-to-day contacts were with members of the defense committee, zealous Puritan ladies, visiting reporters, lawyers, wrathful anarchists, conniving communists, distressed liberals, local newspapermen and the extraordinary assortment of men and women drawn together by a common interest in freeing the two men. In the final year of the case five years later, the liberal intellectuals rushed belatedly and flamboyantly to the rescue. But at I DEFEND SACCO AND VANZETTI 35 this juncture the affair had not yet become respectable or sufficiently notorious. The enlightened attorneys, poets, novelists, columnists, educators who were to hold the spotlight in the last frenzied months of the futile fight in 1927 were with few exceptions blissfully oblivious to the affair in 1921-22. It was a motley and colorful and rather high-pitched company that gathered around the defense at this stage. Some were moved by an undiluted urge to save two innocent men, others were interested primarily in the propagandist value of the case, still others got an emotional kick out of the battle. At one extreme were hotheaded and desperate Italians and Spaniards distrustful of all law, bitterly sarcastic about the hocus-pocus of motions and affidavits, and often refusing on principle to cooperate with their own lawyers. At the other extreme were men and women of old New England stock chiefly concerned with saving the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from the stigma of an ugly miscarriage of justice. I can recall vital meetings in which a snarling, red-headed little Italian exponent of direct action argued some question of policy with a benign pacifist like Mrs. Evans. It was Moore's delicate job to reconcile these people and placate their idiosyncrasies. Because we all worked under great tension, in a ceaseless ferment of hope and despair, we moved in a strangely electrical atmosphere, surcharged with emotion and at moments touched with hysteria. Lack of funds forced a great many of the group to live very closely together in one narrow house on Rollins Place, and that scarcely helped matters. If anyone could record that house, its people, its complicated cross-currents of conflicting political philosophies, the erotic overtones characteristic of nervous strain, what an incredible novel it would make! Commonplace stenographers accidentally drawn into this intense atmosphere developed into flaming radicals. Roughneck detectives sprouted a social conscience. Cautious A. F. of L. officials hobnobbed with foreign firebrands. A milk-white, golden-haired little poetess swept like a tornado through the defense group, working havoc among the harassed men and spreading despair among their wives and sweethearts 5 she dominated the lives of a writer, a strike leader, a lawyer and a Boston newspaperman in quick succession, with forays into the domestic preserves of half a dozen others, while composing soulful verses in defense of the 36 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW accused Italians. A gawky, half-savage boy lured from the Maine woods to plead with his mother, a crucial identification witness, to retract her perjured testimony, had to be forced, literally, to take a bath 5 soon he blossomed into a spick-and-span U. S. Marine. One of the closest comrades and most ardent defenders of Sacco fell hopelessly in love with Sacco's wife (he married her after Sacco^s execution). Within the larger drama of the case, there developed complicated cycles of lesser dramas of private emotion* Of the reporters who had covered the trial for local newspapers and the great press agencies, not one believed that the foreigners had been proved guilty. A few of them, on the contrary, were deeply convinced of the men's innocence, so that several prominent Boston newspapermen, like Sibley and Folsom, sided openly with the defense. The newspapers themselves, however, were a solid phalanx against us. I had a privileged inside view of their attitude. In one of the frequent periods when the defense committee went completely broke, I got myself a job on the Boston Telegram, a scandalmonger sheet now happily out of existence and unmourned. It occurred to no one on the staff, fortunately, to connect me with my notorious namesake at defense headquarters. I enjoyed the ticklish sensation of seeing my Sacco-Vanzetti publicity releases kicked into the waste-basket with a growl of distaste while feature stories under my signature were being published in the paper $ and of writing inflammatory defense literature on the Telegram's time and typewriter. I attended to many an assignment by the city editors on the telephone from the Sacco-Vanzetti office. The rigmarole of legalistic gestures unrolled slowly and dully. More motions for a new trial based on new evidence, confessions of perjury by state witnesses, exposes of other state witnesses as criminals—and every motion matched by a denial from the self-righteous Judge Webster Thayer, All the forms of justice were preserved, only the spirit was absent. Many years later I wrote: "Sacco and Vanzetti were given all their legal rights. They were deprived only of their liberty and their lives." V. Working for the Soviets JUST before the birth of my daughter, in November, 1922, I returned to New York. I had been away more than two years, in Europe and then in Boston, and was unaware how completely the revolutionary milieu in the metropolis had changed. I had simply been too engrossed in the specific job of defending the two Italians—one of the few issues on which all factions agreed —to gauge the depth of the new hatreds among yesterday's comrades. What had been a many-sided radical movement had disintegrated into so many sects. The Golden Age of American radicalism was ended. Unhesitatingly I cast my lot with the communists. I devoted the next five years largely to Soviet activities. For a year I edited the first popular American magazine about Russia, the Soviet Russia Pictorial, and for four years thereafter, until the day I sailed for the U.S.S.R., I worked for the official Soviet news agency, Tass. I did not join the Communist Party and consequently was never on the inside of its involved and embittered political life. Such close-ups of the internal party machinery as I had by reason of my everyday work strengthened my obstinacy in resisting solicitations to join up. In any organization which rests on absolute discipline, there is no intermediate role between leadership and blind obedience. I had not the slightest taste for one and a definite distaste for the other. This incapacity for organization and discipline I counted a defect in my character. My instinct was always to undertake specific tasks and to carry them through as best I could, whether it happened to be the preparation of a strike leaflet or the contribution of a newspaper column. My entire social environment in those years, however, was communist and Soviet. In a loyalty to the Russian revolution which outweighed in my mind all considerations of past friendship or present advantage, I broke relations with most of my old 37 38 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW acquaintances who were still in the Socialist Party. Enthusiastically, I contributed my share to the rancor directed against that party. Its members were Mensheviks, Social-Democrats, henchmen of Germany's Scheidemanns, Noskes, and Ebcrts, and therefore, in Bolshevik and near-Bolshevik eyes, more despicable by far than capitalists. They were deserters, "renegades." The legions of the damned grew apace in those years, as radicals of divers denominations failed in the decisive test of their political morals by casting doubt on any phase of the Soviet experiment. It did not occur to me to examine the statements of people who went to Moscow to pray and emerged to scoff, since the process of investigation would have implied blasphemous doubts. The fact that Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, many other deportees from America abandoned the Soviet land, preferring a capitalist exile, was for us a commentary on these people rather than on the Soviets. We did not content ourselves with impugning their sanity, but tarred them as knaves, liars, self-seeking betrayers, A lifetime of exemplary devotion to the cause of the revolution did not save an anarchist, socialist or I.W.W. from the hot pitch of our epithets $ on the contrary, the more impressive the culprit's record the more urgent was our compulsion to level him with the dust. I was among the more temperate in this respect, yet I know the anger that flared in my heart against those who attacked the Soviets. If they were bourgeois journalists, middle-class tourists, even milk-and-water liberals, their blasphemy could be explained along orthodox class lines and discounted. But if they were workers, socialists, active radicals, they must be marked with the mark of Cain and sent wandering in the wilderness of bourgeois turncoats. Soviet Russia Pictorial was the progenitor of the many illustrated magazines about Russian achievements now on the American news stands. It was at the time the mouthpiece of the Friends of Soviet Russia and its primary purpose was to help raise funds for famine relief. Far from concealing the horrors of the Volga famine and the incapacity of the young workers' republic to cope with the disaster, we spread the facts on record as gruesomely as possible in text and picture to stimulate charity from the Left. The horrors, however, were amply balanced by panegyrics for the Soviet lead- WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS 39 ers and their works. If the wounds of the civil wars were still raw and painful, the romance and elation likewise were fresh. The mere fact that a Socialist Soviet State was in existence was a miracle to halo each new day. All the giants of the revolution were still alive and in active control. Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev,* Kamenev,* Rakovsky,f Radek,f Dzherzhinsky—flaming names to light new vistas of history. We knew the warmth that only people who possess a private pantheon can know. The circumstance that infidels regarded our gods as devils merely testified to the awesome significance of our deities and attested our position as a chosen and anointed people. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and others destined to be expelled from the pantheon, figured so heroically on our pages, in fact, that by 1928 a bound volume of the magazine which I brought into Moscow seemed a counter-revolutionary document. The volume was borrowed by Olga Kameneva, sister of Trotsky and wife of Kamenev, and never returned. To the best of my recollection we did not have occasion to use Stalin's picture once while I edited this Soviet publication—an interesting commentary on how grievously American communists underrated him as late as 1923. My associate on the editorial staff who, if the truth be told, did the major part of the work, was a man of encyclopaedic knowledge with whom the accumulation of recondite facts, figures, dates, and anecdotes was a grand passion, one Max Podolsky.| The deep-dyed cynicism of Max's well-stocked mind made him proof against the lush enthusiasms in which those around him wallowed. He had been active in the revolutionary movements of at least half a dozen European nations, had sampled prisons in most European capitals, and had known many of the Bolshevik gods before their apotheosis. He proceeded on the assumption that all heroes have clay feet and that power is a dangerous narcotic even for revolutionaries. His support of the Soviet system was therefore leavened with large mental reservations. He worked loyally enough but with a distinctly counter-revolutionary twinkle in his eyes. * Executed in August, 1936. f Imprisoned in 1937. t Better known as Max Nomad, author of Rebels and Renegades and otter significant books. 40 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW 2 The Soviet news agency, at the time I entered its service as general assistant to Kenneth Durant, the American director, was called Rosta. Later the name was changed to Tass. It operated on an agreement for exchange of facilities with the United Press and had its headquarters in one of the United Press offices in the old World Building. Our job was to report the news of the entire Western hemisphere as it poured over the U.P. wires. While we naturally emphasized aspects of the social and economic struggle, and went in for earnest analysis of political conditions everywhere from Canada to Cape Horn, our dispatches were as realistic and uncolored as we could make them. It was Durant's theory that Moscow needed a truthful picture of affairs on this side of the Atlantic—whether it found it politic to publish the picture was its own affair. At no time, in the years that I worked under him, did he knowingly permit the picture to be touched up to please the wishful thinking of communists here or abroad. Thus, while communist politicians in America, partly through the ardor of their hopes and partly to magnify their own importance, fed the Kremlin empty promises of American recognition and apocryphal communist victories, our news service provided the antidote of unadulterated facts. Not infrequently the reports of American party functionaries on some local situation and our report gave totally different accounts. I was decidedly under the spell of Durant's personality during our years of collaboration. He was a man of sharp mind and dour disposition, whose rapier of malice was sheathed in a scabbard of pervasive charm. In one mad jump, he had cleared the immense social territory between Rittenhouse Square and Sovietism. I say Sovietism rather than communism advisedly. It was communism as a functioning and ruthless system, backed by armies and secret services, I think, that fascinated him rather than communism as a philosophy of human emancipation. I was to meet others from the upper social strata who are thus captivated by a distant proletariat, triumphant and regnant, but feel not the faintest kinship for the flesh-and-blood proletarians all around them. Ken- WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS 41 neth's frank dislike of all American communists flowed from his natural aversion to the "lower" social orders, though he would have denied this most vehemently. Tall, thin, with aristocratically ascetic features and a ruthless wit, Kenneth had the intolerance of a recent convert. Unconsciously he tried to make up for his advantages of social and educational background, for the fact that he was a foreigner in the adopted land of revolution, by harshness toward non-believers in general and backsliders in particular. In full eruption against a political renegade, Kenneth was a magnificent and disquieting spectacle. Those who offended him personally (and every real or imagined slur on the Soviets he counted a personal affront) became the objects of his anxious, brooding, and patient attentions. The maze of his character was a subject of discussion among those of us under his spell. I recall Joseph Freeman remarking in one such discussion that Kenneth, given the scope, had the makings of a Torquemada. He had a nose for heresy which did not often mislead him and a bloodhound persistence in following the trail. Emotionally and professionally I lived close to the new Russia. I read all the books on Russia, saw its motion pictures, befriended some of its emissaries, discussed it with returning tourists or American communists, defended it against detractors, steeped myself in its legends and lingo. For months at a stretch, when Durant was visiting Russia or ill, I conducted the Tass bureau, and corresponded with Jacob Doletzky, the head of the organization, or Constantine Umansky, then its foreign editor, or others whom I was to meet before long in Moscow. This direct relation with the center of world revolution, though limited to the routine of news dispatches and cable tolls and technical news-gathering problems, surrounded the work with an aura of importance. It gave me a precious sense of nearness to the one thing that counted above all other things in the modern world. As an employee of a Soviet organization, it was impolitic, of course, for me to participate openly in the radical movement in America. But from time to time I was sucked into its vortex all the same. As long as Moore remained in Boston, I maintained an active interest in the Sacco-Vanzetti defense, writing occasional articles, or helping at the New York end on matters of evidence or fund-raising. Vanzetti's strictures on the Soviet system from his 42 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW vantage point of philosophic anarchism were a painful embarrassment, particularly since communists here and abroad were the most active spokesmen for the case. In publicity material these views of Vanzetti were carefully soft-pedaled, but in his voluminous correspondence with sympathizers in all parts of the country he did not conceal them. During the communist-led strike of textile workers in Passaic, New Jersey, I prepared and saw through publication a sensational brochure of pictures which I called Hell in Neiv Jersey. If I recall correctly, about one hundred and fifty thousand copies were sold. I took part in the preliminary organization meetings that led to the launching of the New Masses, contributed random pieces to many of the Left magazines, and for some months conducted a tri-weekly column of comment and satire in the Daily Worker. That my political orthodoxy left much to be desired may be surmised from my experiences with the last-named enterprise. Since I rarely went to the editorial offices, merely sending my contributions by mail or messenger, I did not realize that my column had brewed a tempest in the teapot there. I tried in the column to provide a leaven of humor and light-hearted irony for the dough of class-war news and "theses" in the Daily Worker. I packed my space with frivolous jingles, skits on people and events, now and then more serious divertissement—but often on subjects remotely if at all related to the revolution. Just where and how I offended the communist proprieties, I was never to discover. But I did discover that my column was being furiously attacked and defended. It threatened schism in the editorial ranks. In the interests of unity and peace, I promptly quit my short-lived role as columnist. 3 By 1926, the repercussions of the Communist Party struggle in Russia, with Stalin and Trotsky as the principal adversaries, were being felt in America. Many of the Russians arriving in the United States on commercial and other missions, it became evident, were thus being shunted from the Soviet arena by Stalin's party machine under guise of important foreign assignments. Our Tass dispatches were being minutely scrutinized on the other side WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS 43 for symptoms of partisanship. In the ranks of American communism, too, leaders and would-be leaders were choosing sides. On the whole sentiment among American communists, as among communists everywhere outside the Soviet Union, was preponderantly for Trotsky, Zinoviev, Preobrazhensky and the rest of the "Old Guard." The romantic period of the Russian revolution may have become a faint memory at home, where the strident prose of practical problems and sacrifices drowned out the poetry of revolt. Abroad, the romantic period persisted, though in a twilight haze—in a sense it is still alive—and the great names of 1917 and 1918 were still magical. The name of Trotsky, in particular, still connoted all the thrill and throb of the revolutionary honeymoon. Many of the Americans now in the camp of Stalin jeered at him as long as Trotsky and Zinoviev still seemed to have a chance of winning out. Their present ardor is part of the penance for having bet on the wrong horse at that time. The will to power is sometimes incredible and a little ludicrous to people who do not possess it to any marked degree. It creates dynastic struggles for the leadership of lodge Number 2387 in some absurd fraternal order or for the chairmanship of some women's club. The nail-and-claw struggles for leadership and influence in the American communist movement, as I watched them here and later from Moscow, seemed to me to be touched with the spirit of of era bouffe. The movement which these people sought to dominate was so small, persecuted, impotent as yet that leadership offered at best larger opportunities for abuse and imprisonment. The spoils of victory were so meager in proportion to the bitterness and vigor of the struggle. Yet men and women, impelled to the radical way of life by their thirst for justice, suspended ideals, and elementary decencies, in an unprincipled scramble for control of the party machinery. They played low politics. They flattered those who were on top. They lied to themselves, to their followers, and particularly to the arbiters of their party destinies in Moscow, in a frantic determination to win at any price. There is always, of course, an element of economic necessity in such a struggle. Shriveled and juiceless as its plums may be, political victory does mean a place on the payroll as editors, lecturers, officials, writers for people who have perhaps sacrificed their 44 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW possibilities of earning a living in the capitalist set-up. It may mean jobs at Moscow headquarters of the Comintern or the Profintern. The so-called "professional revolutionist" has been glorified by Lenin, who considered the overturn of an established order a full- time job and career enough for any one lifetime. Perhaps he was right. His view is shared, curiously, by the most conservative labor spokesmen who favor "professional trade-union leaders," and in both cases the counsel may be that of practical necessity. Certain it is that the professional revolutionist is in a most ambiguous position psychologically when an internal fight develops in his particular party. However earnest and high-minded he may be in his stand on the principles and policies at issue, his livelihood, too, is at stake. Such practical compulsions were operative at the heart of the American extension of the Trotsky-Stalin fight, unavoidably, and were surely influential in driving many leaders into the camp of Stalin as his triumph over Trotsky became more assured. But overshadowing such personal motives was the genuine anxiety to keep the revolutionary regime in Russia and the international communist movement intact. The rank-and-file members, especially, watched in mounting panic a clash which threatened to pull down the whole Soviet structure. To prevent that disaster they rallied to Stalin as they would have rallied to anyone who retained control of the Kremlin, the party machinery, the functioning state. Right or wrong, Trotsky meant schism, a communist movement minus the first communist state. Even we who worked by his side in the same narrow offices— by this time under the roof of the Associated Press—could not guess where Durante personal sympathies lay in the fight. Perhaps he had none, because his basic loyalties were to the Soviet system of power as such, regardless who might seize control of its instrumentalities. The fact that Jacob Doletzky, the Tass chief in Moscow, was a Stalinist machine politician very early tinged our work with a faint anti-Trotskyist color.* The further fact that the American communists were so strongly Trotskyist tended, if anything, to deepen that tinge—between our office and the American *In 1937, strangely enough, Doletzky was arrested as an alleged Trotskyism and attempted suicide* WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS 45 communists there was always a tension at times amounting to a feud. When the die was cast, however, and the Trotsky group indubitably defeated, our office instantly became a Stalinist fortress. Durant's flare for smelling out heresy had new scope. Not only renegades in relation to Russia as a whole, but deviationists from Stalin's "line" now engaged his talents. He scrutinized dispatches from Moscow for traces of pro-Trotsky bias and called such horrors to the attention of the American editorial headquarters involved. Anyone who spared a counter-revolutionary sigh over the fallen leaders, or suggested that the victors' tactics were in any wise questionable, instantly became an enemy to be crushed. In the atmosphere of the Tass office, I sided automatically with the victorious faction. I could not in my heart, however, think of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek and others who had been glamorous symbols of a new world in my most impressionable years, as enemies of the revolution. The secret margin of sorrow over their fate gave me a gnawing sensation of sinfulness in the presence of Kenneth's cold, implacable orthodoxy. Nor was I alone in my clandestine grief. Others around me carried a hidden hurt while we denounced the fallen idols in the name of discipline and unity. 4 In August, 1927, it was my professional duty to report in cable dispatches the tragic climax of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Russia followed the details of the impending executions more anxiously than any other nation and we were under instructions to report every move. There was the tense night of August 10th, when the doomed men were prepared for death, while the rotund, smiling Governor Fuller of Massachusetts considered the plea for a reprieve. Hour after hour I hovered over the Associated Press wires. By eleven p.m.—one hour before the scheduled electrocutions—he was still withholding his decision; he was squeezing the last drop of sadistic relish out of his cat-and-mouse game while the whole world looked on in horror. In a daze I typed out two messages ready for "flashing" to Moscow: "sacco dead"—"vanzetti dead." These were not names in the headlines; in a deep sense they were members of my fam- 46 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW ily, but close as few blood relations can be* At 11124—thirty-six minutes before the hour set for the official killings—Fuller announced a twelve days' reprieve. Then came the day and the night of August 22. In my memory they have a nightmare quality. My role was so gruesomely routine —the preparation of "flash" cables, the vigil at the A.P. wires, the filling in of the exact minute of Sacco's death, then of Van- zetti's death—all so businesslike. . . . The case which was integrated with my own existence, intimate as few things in life ever become iiitimate, was over, finished. Nothing to do but go home to bed ... I remember wondering why I could not weep and shriek with the hurt of it, just as I was to wonder seven years later at my father's coffin. A few weeks later I shut myself into a room at Kenneth Durant's home for privacy, day after day for over two weeks, and wrote the story of two simple peasant boys, born in Italy to die in America in full view of all the nations on the globe. Or rather, the book wrote itself. Leafing through The Life and Death of Sacco and Vmzetti, I am astonished to find passages so eloquent in their passionate restraint that they seem to have been written by another person. At points in the terse narrative I find a poetic vein that transcends my normal literary powers. It was the alchemy of feelings too deep for tears precipitating a style of their own. Except for minor editorial revisions, my first draft, copied by Margaret Larkin, went to the printers. The book was subsequently translated into German, Italian, Russian and Yiddish and widely read in those languages. Two Russian editions, published while I was in Moscow, sold some 130,000 copies. Only the original English version never reached more than a few thousand readers. In 1933, the Nazis paid the book the compliment of immolation on their funeral pyre to German culture. It burned in as fine a literary company as was ever assembled outside a library. 5 I had met a number of United Press officials while Tass operated from their headquarters on Park Row. The President of the United Press, Karl A. Bickel, was on the friendliest terms with Durant and greatly impressed with his political perspicacity and WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS 47 journalistic talents. In anything touching Russia, Bickel usually consulted Durant. In 1926 the post of Moscow correspondent fell vacant. Aware of my fervent hope of getting to the Soviet land, Durant suggested my name among others. The suggestion, I was chagrined to learn after the event, had been seriously considered but ultimately discarded. When the post was again available, more than a year later, Bickel revived the suggestion. Before offering me the job, however, he consulted Durant, who not only agreed but supported the appointment in the warmest terms. He merely asked that I remain with Tass until he returned from a trip to Russia for the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the revolution. Bickel acquiesced though it meant that his Moscow Bureau would remain with only a Russian woman secretary, a Miss Jmudskaya, in charge. Durant was away several months, during which I conducted the American work of the Tass service, with Joe Freeman assisting. Thousands of foreign sympathizers had gathered in Moscow and Leningrad for the decennial festivities. Lenin had been overjoyed when the Soviet regime lasted beyond the seventy-day record of the only other proletarian government in history, the Paris Commune. And now the revolution had endured an entire decade! The thrill of that achievement—of mere survival!—could be felt right around the world. Even embittered foes of the Soviet idea felt the importance of the historic moment. Though a large section of that decade had been wasted on costly civil warfare and in fighting off interventionists and economic strangle holds, and in convalescing from a debilitating famine, the young state had a great deal to show. The record of economic and cultural reconstruction before 1928, exhibited with the Russian genius for stage-setting in the celebration of November, 1927, made a most impressive total. In spirit we participated in the celebration. The press accounts of the demonstrations and congresses and speeches and military displays may have been merely picturesque to other Americans. To those of us who regarded the Soviet land as our spiritual home, these were things that lifted us to a rarefied altitude of joy. Only the futile attempt of Trotsky and his followers to speak to the Soviet masses above the heads of the victorious Stalinists marred 48 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW the festivities. In the elation of the soaring moment it was easier to brush such annoyances aside than to think them through. The knowledge that in a few months I should be there, not merely looking on but reporting what I saw to an audience of a hundred million readers, colored this period of impat