Trotsky in New York, 1917. Kenneth D. Ackerman
another milksop, a la Kautsky?” Lenin asked, referring to Karl Kautsky, a German socialist who in 1914 had refused to oppose German war funding.95 But usually Lenin just stuck to the main point: “Concerning money, I saw with regret from your letter that so far you have not succeeded in collecting anything for the Central Committee”—that is, for Lenin’s committee.96 Beyond all the fund-raising, Kollontai in fact had met in Chicago with left-wing publisher Charles Kerr to ask if he would publish Lenin’s latest pamphlet, “Socialism and War,” but Kerr had declined.
Back in Norway after the trip, Kollontai learned that her son, Mikhail, now twenty-two years old, had moved to Paterson, New Jersey, to take a job at a car factory. Having not seen him in more than a year, she decided to board a ship back across the ocean in August 1916, this time to be with him. Once in New Jersey, she started visiting New York and involved herself again in causes, such as the growing movement among immigrant housewives protesting sky-high food costs, and she began writing occasional articles for Novy Mir.
Now, in January 1917, Alexandra Kollontai sat on a train, making the long commute from Paterson, New Jersey, to New York City on a cold winter afternoon. On reaching the city, she would first have to fight the crowds at Penn Station, squeeze herself into a grimy, packed subway car, and ride it all the way out to Brooklyn, all for a simple dinner party. Normally, she would have ignored the invitation. But the invitation had come from her favorite American, Ludwig Lore, who had asked that she join a meeting at his home over dinner to discuss the future of American socialism.
Kollontai loved spending time with Lore and his wife, Lily. Lily’s German cooking alone made the trip worthwhile, and Lily had even translated a novel Kollontai had written. And Kollontai understood why Lore considered her essential to this meeting. During her 1915 speaking tour, Kollontai had gotten to know America far better that any of the other Russians, most of whom never set foot outside New York or, at best, Philadelphia. In Chicago Kollontai had shared a stage with Eugene Debs, the party’s leading personality and three-time (to that point) presidential candidate. She adored Debs. “I almost hugged him I felt so happy,” she wrote after the event. She met “Big Bill” Haywood, leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies), whom Socialist Party leaders had recently expelled for espousing sabotage as a tactic in labor strikes. In Los Angeles she had joined a group mourning Joe Hill, a popular IWW organizer recently executed for a Salt Lake City murder, widely considered framed.
Kollontai enjoyed meetings Americans. “They come up and say, ‘a splendid speech,’” she gushed. “It’s just what we want; more revolutionary spirit in the movement.”97
Like many young activists, she grew to despise the American Socialist Party’s establishment leaders, conservative older men, as she saw it, preoccupied with elections and piecemeal reforms—crumbs from the capitalist table—instead of revolution. “I am suffocated with such things,” she complained.98
She, like the others, had heard that Trotsky had come to town and wanted to see him, but she was suspicious as well. Kollontai knew perfectly well how much Vladimir Lenin distrusted Trotsky. Anyone who read the acid back-and-forth polemics saw the bad blood that existed. As a result, she would have a larger assignment this night at Ludwig Lore’s dinner table: to keep an eye on Trotsky and to keep Lenin informed. If nothing else, she needed to take good notes.
“When about 14 years of age I entered the gymnasium of Chernigov. . . . Here in America schoolboys spend most of their time in sports, baseball and football. In Russia, the boys—and girls, too, for that matter—use their leisure for reading books. . . . Our pastime was chiefly attending underground socialist meetings and spreading propaganda among workingmen in the city and peasants in the country. I was no exception to the rule.”99
—Leon Trotsky, writing in March 1917
TROTSKY TOOK THE subway again that night. He, Bukharin, and Chudnovsky each paid their nickel and then followed the signs to the line called BRT (Brooklyn Rapid Transit, later renamed BMT). After a few rattling stops, the train glided out from Manhattan onto the Brooklyn Bridge. High over the East River, Trotsky could look out the window and see January darkness broken on either side by a dramatic sight. Lights from thousands of building windows, offices, apartments, and skyscrapers, all powered by electricity, shot high in the air, creating stark panoramas under the black sky.
Brooklyn lay at the far end, a separate city until 1898, just twenty years earlier, when it had joined Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island to form Greater New York. (The Bronx had become part of the city in 1874.) Now three giant bridges connected Brooklyn to lower Manhattan, each an engineering marvel in itself, hung by cables strung from massive towers. The bridges suddenly made Brooklyn an easy walk or train ride away, causing its population to triple in just three decades. With its two million people, Brooklyn alone would qualify as America’s third largest city in 1917, just behind New York and Chicago.
Once there, the train stopped again and again, lurching Trotsky and the others back and forth as its steel wheels screeched in the darkness, at Fulton Street, Saint Marks Avenue, Prospect Park, and Green-Wood Cemetery. Had they stayed on, the BRT would have taken them all the way to Coney Island, already famous for its boardwalk, Luna Park, roller coasters, and summer hot dogs. Instead Trotsky got off at Fifty-Fourth Street, a part of Brooklyn called Borough Park, a quiet place—at least quieter than Lower Manhattan—with shops, schools, synagogues, and apartment houses, populated largely by German and Russian immigrants, mostly Jewish, who had managed to scrape together money enough to leave the squalid Lower East Side.
On Fifty-Fifth Street, they found Ludwig Lore’s building, came in from the cold, and walked up to the second floor. From there, they just followed their noses.
Lillian (Lily) Lore loved to bake, and the apartment must have smelled delicious that night as her husband greeted guests at the door. He led them to the dining room, navigating the toys and clutter from their two young sons, Karl and Kurt.
Ludwig Lore and Trotsky seemed to hit it off right away, two European men with Old World manners. “I was captivated at once, with the charm of [Trotsky’s] personality and the brilliance of his intellect,” Lore recalled.100 For Lore, politics came second. Food and company came first. “He was a jolly man whose political and aesthetic inclinations fit no prescribed categories,” historian Paul Buhle wrote years later.101 Born in Germany, Lore had studied at Berlin University and had established his journalism credentials there before leaving for America in 1905. In the United States, Lore settled first in Colorado, but he couldn’t resist the lure of New York City and the New Yorker Volkszeitung, one of the country’s top left-wing dailies, with a formidable audience of twenty-three thousand readers. Now, in 1917, Lore, “stocky, quick-witted, with black curling mustache and an overgrown mass of unruly dark hair,”102 as Theodore Draper described him, ran the newspaper as associate editor and soon-to-be editor in chief.
He and Lily, whom he had married in 1909, made their home-cooked dinners legendary. Twenty years later, in 1938, a young communist recruit named Whittaker Chambers—who would make headlines in the late 1940s by denouncing government lawyer Alger Hiss as a communist agent—would visit Lore’s apartment and describe Lily as “remarkable,” producing massive German meals to feed an “endless procession of guests.”103 Another guest during the 1930s, an FBI informant, described Lily’s lunches as “delightfully memorable.”104 Beyond hosting Alexandra Kollontai on her 1915 American speaking tour, Ludwig and Lily Lore had helped Nikolai Bukharin and his wife get settled in America two months earlier, insisting the Bukharins sleep in their apartment until they found a place to live.
Lore was the obvious choice to host the dinner. He had arranged it weeks earlier and invited a wide mix of New York leftists, about twenty altogether—Russians, Americans, Dutch, Italians, and Japanese, a mini League of Nations speaking six different languages. What drew them together, though, was their view of the world war. As one, Sen Katayama, would