Trotsky in New York, 1917. Kenneth D. Ackerman
making them the most avidly antiwar faction in the country.
Ludwig Lore knew something else about these American radicals: that they were “astonishingly out of touch” and “intensely ignorant” of global affairs.105 To accomplish anything, they needed to learn from experts. And now an unexpected surprise: A celebrity had agreed to join them, none less than Leon Trotsky, fresh off the boat from Europe.
We don’t know the identities of all the people Lore invited to his home that night. Besides the Russians, only a handful of names appear in any accounts. Most of the Americans probably asked to stay anonymous, given the anticommunist, anti-German witch hunts that would break out over the following few years. But the names we do know paint a clear picture.
The Russians—Trotsky, Bukharin, Chudnovsky, Volodarsky, and Kollontai—made up the biggest faction. These five all stood on the verge of destiny. Each would return to Russia later in 1917 and play a lead role in the revolution and Bolshevik regime. It was these seasoned activists that Lore hoped could teach his American friends how to properly structure a movement.
Of the non-Russians, Louis Boudin easily ranked as the most prominent, a well-known lawyer, writer, and speaker. Short and plump, Boudin had come from Russia as a child twenty years earlier but since then had shed his accent, graduated from New York University Law School, and made a pile of money as an attorney representing labor unions and workers. Boudin had run for various judgeships in New York City five times between 1910 and 1916, always on the Socialist ticket, and he planned to run again in 1917. He never won, but he spoke and wrote extensively; he had two recent books on Marxism and the world war. Boudin claimed to see no conflict between Marx and what one biographer called his belief in “the genius of the United States Constitution.”106 For this group, that made him a conservative.
Then came another wealthy foreigner, Sebald J. Rutgers of the Netherlands. Trained in Delft as a construction engineer and one-time city engineer in Rotterdam and Medan, Rutgers had come to America on business and decided to stay. But he had a passion for socialism, and that’s where he invested his fortune. Back home, he wrote for the International Socialist Review. In the United States, he financed the recently formed Boston-based Socialist Propaganda League and its new publication, the Internationalist. Vladimir Lenin had read the magazine in Switzerland and sent Rutgers a note complimenting him for it.107
Rutgers brought two friends with him that night. One was John D. Williams, one of his staff at the Propaganda League in Boston, who edited the Internationalist. The other was sixty-year-old Sen Katayama, founder of Japan’s socialist movement in Tokyo. Katayama had made a splash in radical circles for breaking ranks with his own country and shaking hands with Russian socialist leaders at a 1903 conference just before the Russo-Japanese War. Country came second! The International Working Class came first!
Finally there was Louis C. Fraina, the youngest face at the table. Fraina too stood on the verge of destiny. In 1919, two years in the future, Fraina would chair the founding convention of the American Communist Party in Chicago with such aplomb that another early leader, Benjamin Gitlow, would complain of his acting like “the Lenin of America.”108 A few years after that, Fraina would quit the party, falsely accused of being an FBI spy. By the 1930s, he would renounce communism, change his name to Corey, and become a noted economist, writer, and professor, before federal Red hunters would catch up to him in the early 1950s.
He would also become one of Leon Trotsky’s closest friends in New York City.
For now, though, Fraina was just a twenty-five-year-old upstart with no political affiliation. He had earned his living editing a magazine called Modern Dance that covered ballet, poetry, theater, and the arts. Small, with bushy eyebrows, a high forehead, and a clipped mustache, he had come to New York as a five-year-old from Italy and had grown up in stark poverty, polishing boots on street corners and rolling cigars to help feed the family. His parents sent him to Catholic school, but he quit after a nun slapped his brother. At public grade school, he graduated as valedictorian. When his father died, he dropped out and found a job with the Edison Company. Already by then, he had read Karl Marx and hated capitalism for crushing the poor.
All this led to journalism and socialism. Precocious and curious, Fraina would sneak into theaters when he couldn’t afford tickets, and he read voraciously. At eighteen, he won election to the New York Socialist Labor Party’s General Committee. In 1912 the Daily People sent him to Lawrence, Massachusetts, to cover the textile strike there led by IWW leader Bill Haywood, one of the most successful mass labor actions in America before or since. By 1915 Fraina had won paid staff positions at both Modern Dance and the New Review, where his name appeared with top writers such as John Reed, Walter Lippmann, and W. E. B. DuBois.
By late 1916 the New Review had closed and Modern Dance would close in a few months, leaving Fraina unemployed. It was around this time that he met Rutgers, and already Rutgers had suggested that Fraina join his Boston project as editor of the Internationalist.
These were the faces around the table that night in Ludwig Lore’s apartment, at least the ones we know. Two of them, Lore and Katayama, would write accounts of what happened next, but these were painfully brief. We don’t know who exactly said what. But on the main points, the accounts all agree.
Lily’s dinner apparently set the tone. It’s easy to picture this odd gaggle of guests mingling and laughing over their food, calling each other comrade while stumbling over each other’s languages. Some drank tea, some drank vodka, some probably drank too much. Cigarette smoke filled the air and loosened tongues. Among the Russians, Kollontai chatted with Trotsky while nibbling down Lily Lore’s pastries, Trotsky probably regaling the table with funny stories about bumbling Spanish police and bad food on the Montserrat. Among the Americans, Rutgers chatted with Louis Fraina, and Louis Boudin doubtless pontificated over the corruption of local city politicians.
We don’t know who first broached the serious topic, but Lore as host probably did the honors. Why had he called them together? Lore had heard his friends’ complaints that, with America possibly on the verge of entering the world war, their Socialist Party—which should be the strongest voice of dissent—seemed lethargic and hopelessly unfocused. How deep was the problem? How urgent the crisis? What, realistically, could they do?
They started talking, and complaints came pouring out. And one name apparently came up again and again, a symbol of all the things the people in this room saw wrong with the established American Socialist Party: the party’s leader in New York City, Morris Hillquit. Katayama, in fact, wrote his own account of the dinner as part of a diatribe called “Morris Hillquit and the Left Wing,” a wide-ranging slam against the party leader.109
To this jury, Hillquit’s crimes were many. As a lawyer, Hillquit represented labor and radicals, but he charged too much money, making him a “parasite” of the working class. (Lawyer Louis Boudin, of course, often heard the same complaint.) Hillquit and his crowd cared more about winning elections, placating the capitalist press, than fighting the class struggle. Worst of all, in 1912 it was Hillquit’s crowd that had engineered the expulsion of Bill Haywood from the party’s executive committee for publicly endorsing sabotage as a labor tactic. Louis Boudin had blasted Hillquit at the time for his “bourgeois notion of legality” (Marx had never opposed violence or lawbreaking on any ethical principle, so what gave Morris Hillquit the right?) and for his readiness to compromise just because “it was popular or seemed to be popular with the masses of people.”110
Alexandra Kollontai particularly despised Hillquit. She described him in her diary as a “vile revisionist,” too cozy with the trusts and “terribly afraid [he’ll] be excluded from the International.”111 Kollontai probably mentioned the run-in she had had with Hillquit during her 1915 speaking tour at a meeting in Milwaukee, where she and Ludwig Lore had proposed a resolution endorsing Lenin’s Zimmerwald platform. Hillquit had jumped in to squash it. After “heated debates,” as she described it in a letter to Lenin, “Hillquit and Romm [another moderate] defeated our proposal.”112
Before long, they all agreed on the problem, and the issue came down to a choice: Should they