Trotsky in New York, 1917. Kenneth D. Ackerman
ebook ISBN 9781619028739
Copyright © 2016 by Kenneth D. Ackerman
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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Interior design by Megan Jones Design
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To my grandparents Rubin Mendel and Ides Bronfeld—loved, remembered, and appreciated by five generations of descendants—who fled Poland for America as a result of the 1920 Soviet Russian invasion of Poland led by the then Soviet people’s commissar for military and naval affairs, Leon Trotsky.
And to my friend and colleague Bob Hahn, part of our OFW Law family, who touched all who knew him and who, typically, dropped all else to share with me his clear-eyed insights on this manuscript, before we lost him without warning and far too soon. I hope his sense of excellence has rubbed off on these pages.
CONTENTS
ACT I: ON THE EVE
1: Montserrat
2: Times Square
3: Saint Marks Place
4: Brooklyn
5: Riverside Drive I
6: Paterson
7: The Bronx
8: Cooper Union
9: Riverside Drive II
10: Wilson
ACT II: OF WAR
11: Spy versus Spy
12: Carnegie Hall
13: Ziv
14: Zurich
15: East Broadway
16: The Committee
17: Lenox Casino
18: Russia
ACT III: AND REVOLUTION
19: The Whirlwind
20: Spies Again
21: Consulates
22: Missing
23: Harlem River Casino
24: Kristianiafjord
25: Nova Scotia
26: Petrograd
Loose Ends
Acknowledgments
Selected Sources
Endnotes
Index
LEV DAVIDOVICH BRONSTEIN, a thirty-eight-year-old zealot who went by the nom de guerre Leon Trotsky, burst onto the world stage in November 1917 as co-leader of a Marxist revolution seizing power in Russia. As foreign commissar of the new government under Vladimir Lenin, Trotsky quickly made his name by orchestrating Russia’s exit from the First World War. Then, as war commissar, he led Russia’s Red Army to victory in a gruesome civil war against White Russians and foreign interveners.
Their rule secure, Trotsky and his Marxist cohorts would tear Russian society to its roots and impose a communist regime that would challenge the world for the next seventy years. With his thick glasses; riveting eyes; and shaggy, unkempt hair, Trotsky emerged as one of the most recognized personalities of the twentieth century.
Yet just months before his great moment in Russia, this same Lev Bronstein/Trotsky was a nobody, a refugee expelled from countries across Europe, writing obscure pamphlets and speeches, barely noticed outside a small circle of quarrelsome fellow travelers. Where had he come from to topple Russia and change the world? Where else: New York.
From January through March 1917, Trotsky had found refuge in the United States. America had kept itself out of the European Great War, leaving New York a safe haven, the freest city on earth, enjoying a last gasp of the belle epoque.
“Sunday, January 13: We are nearing New York. At three o’clock in the morning, everybody wakes up. We have stopped. It is dark. Cold. Wind. Rain. On land, a wet mountain of buildings. The New World!”1
—Leon Trotsky, aboard the steamer Montserrat, on reaching America
SATURDAY NIGHT, JANUARY 13, 1917:
Music played in New York City the night Trotsky’s ship entered the harbor. It had nothing to do with Trotsky or his ship. It was just New York.
The New Amsterdam Theater on West Forty-Second Street featured Ziegfeld’s Follies that night. The show, The Country Girl, included sixty beautiful Ziegfeld Girls with big eyes, pink cheeks, and long legs. They dressed like Caribbean birds while dancing, singing, and kicking up their feet to tunes of a marimba band. Also on the bill were Senegalese acrobats, new singing sensation Eddie Cantor, spritely Fannie Brice, and comedian Will Rogers showing off his cowboy rope tricks.
Broadway was enjoying a golden age in 1917. A few blocks away, George Gershwin, the eighteen-year-old musical prodigy, led the pit orchestra for Miss 1917, a new revue featuring original songs by Jerome Kern, including “In the Good Old Summertime” and “Dinah.” Laughter erupted across the street at the theater run by George M. Cohan, Broadway’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Cohan’s latest production was Captain Kidd, Jr., a comedy farce about three bumbling misfits who embarrass themselves searching for lost pirate treasure on old Cape Cod. Over on Fifty-First Street, Al Jolson packed the Winter Garden with his schmaltzy revue of ragtime, dance, and comedy skits, ten years before The Jazz Singer.
For sheer spectacle, you couldn’t beat the Manhattan Opera House’s live production of Ben-Hur, in which 350 actors shared the stage with fifty horses. At Reisenweber’s restaurant on Columbus Circle, the Original Dixieland Jass Band, with its funny-faced, frog-throated piano player Jimmy Durante (“That’s not a banana, that’s my nose”), filled the house with a new sound they called jazz.
Further downtown, vaudeville drew big crowds with its eclectic mix of acrobats, musicians, jugglers, trained animals, and comedians, rising unknowns with names like George Burns, the Marx Brothers, and Buster Keaton.
All this, plus piano sonatas at Carnegie Hall, operas at the Metropolitan, and the ballet. And this didn’t even start on all the immigrant places.
New York in 1917 had dense, bulging neighborhoods that smelled and sounded like foreign countries, and each of these also had its own music. Almost two million New Yorkers in 1917 had come from across