Trotsky in New York, 1917. Kenneth D. Ackerman
200,000 Germans, 200,000 Irish. Jews comprised the bulk of the Eastern Europeans. Including their American-born children and grandchildren, they totaled well over a million. The Lower East Side, Germantown, Little Italy, Little Russia, and Little Poland; each spoke its own language, read its own newspapers, and drank in its own saloons and cafés. The Yiddish-language
Second Avenue below Tenth Street belonged to the Yiddish theaters: Kessler’s at Second Street, Thomashefsky’s at Houston Street, and more. A few blocks over, neighborhoods changed and gave way to German beer gardens, polka halls, Irish saloons, and Italian trattorias, each louder, more boisterous than the next.
New York at that moment lived like no other place on earth. Certainly not Europe. Europe in January 1917 remained trapped in a slow-motion agonizing hell. The world war had entered its third year, having already killed more than 10 million soldiers and civilians. France and England, Russia and Germany, Austria and Turkey; each would lose a million young men or more. They killed and died in gruesome new ways: via poison gas, flamethrowers, artillery bombs, submarine torpedoes, and trench warfare, plus starvation and disease. Europe’s great cities, Paris, London, and Vienna, all turned dark, increasingly populated by widows, gripped with hunger, or ruled by military edict.
But not America. Not New York. Here, the music played. Just two months earlier, in November 1916, Americans had reelected Woodrow Wilson as their president largely because, as the slogan went, “He Kept Us Out of War.” Meanwhile, America grew rich lending money and selling weapons to the warring powers, particularly the Entente Allies: England, France, and Russia.
Yes, the war caused its problems. Some Americans expected that they too would inevitably join the fight against Germany. In New York they held parades and urged preparedness: a bigger army and military training. German submarines sank ships on the high seas, and increasingly Americans found themselves targets.
On May 7, 1915, a German sub had fired two torpedoes at the British-flag RMS Lusitania, a Cunard liner carrying almost two thousand passengers and crew. The strike had sunk the vessel and killed 1,198, including 128 Americans. Protests had erupted but never reached the breaking point. The Lusitania, after all, had carried ammunition in its cargo, making it fair game under rules of war, at least so argued the Germans. After the sinking, Germany had ordered its submarines not to attack passenger ships without prior warning. Thus far they had mostly complied.
Just as nerve-shattering to Americans were the big explosions, at least forty since 1914. With American factories producing huge stocks of weapons and ammunition, mostly for Britain and France, accidents proliferated. More than sixty men had died, and each explosion fed talk of sabotage.2 Just that weekend, a massive blast at the Du Pont powder plant at Haskell, New Jersey, had killed an estimated twenty-one men and demolished 150 houses, breaking windows in five states.
Still, most Americans saw no reason to enter Europe’s war. How could Germany ever attack the United States from across the ocean? The idea sounded idiotic. Just weeks earlier, on December 18, 1916, President Wilson had challenged the warring European countries yet again to stop the carnage and publish their conditions for peace talks. Americans applauded. But the gesture had produced only finger-pointing among the Europeans.
Peace in America protected not just music and riches but also freedom. In early 1917, America had no secret police or internal spies like Russia. It had no censors like France or England. Plenty of New Yorkers, especially immigrants, openly backed Germany in the war, and nobody doubted their loyalty. The Metropolitan Opera could produce Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring Cycle) in the original German and nobody complained. Any night in New York, one could stop by Cooper Union or Beethoven Hall to hear an anarchist like Emma Goldman, a socialist like Eugene Debs, a birth control activist like Margaret Sanger, or a pacifist like Ilya Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist’s son then lecturing in the United States. A socialist sat in the United States Congress. People could mock politicians as much as they liked.
And then there were the newspapers, millions of copies flooding the city each day. Huge steam presses cranked them out in a dozen languages, often thick with cartoons, fashions, sports, and society gossip. The biggest, William Randolph Hearst’s New York American (originally Morning Journal) and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, vied for top circulation, but the newsstands brimmed with competitors, the Times, the Tribune, the Sun, the Herald, the Globe, the Call, each with its loyal following, plus weeklies like McClure’s and the Outlook. New York supported four daily papers in Russian, six in Yiddish, three in German, and more in other languages.
Amid all the noise that Saturday night, January 13, 1917, a few people knew that Leon Trotsky was coming. Trotsky was a celebrity in some circles. One small Russian-language newspaper called Novy Mir (New World), published in Greenwich Village, proudly touted its connection to a small international band of Russian leftists calling themselves Bolsheviks or Mensheviks, depending on who controlled the editorial desk that week. It claimed Trotsky as one of its own and had announced his travel plans on its front page. A few other socialist newspapers repeated the news.
But these interested circles existed almost entirely inside the immigrant neighborhoods of New York City. Otherwise, especially across the Hudson, no one in America had ever heard of Trotsky. They didn’t know his name, his face, or his place in the world. Other than the port inspectors, no one noticed his ship’s entry into the harbor that night. Instead, New York enjoyed its music, its busy streets, its crowded stores, its noisy theaters, its teeming tenements, its busy churches and synagogues, its sweatshops, its subways, its boxing matches, its horse races and skating rinks, life lived intensely in a thousand flavors.
BACK ABOARD THE Montserrat, the Trotskys looked like any nice, respectable young family. Papa Trotsky made a fine impression in his suit, tie, pince-nez glasses, and neatly trimmed mustache. “Trotzky is a young man,” a typical newspaper description of the period went. “Tall, well-built, and rather handsome.”3 People who met him noticed mostly his eyes, sharp and deep behind ever-present glasses, and his voice, nasal and usually dominating the talk, a “geyser of speech” as one put it.4
Natalya Sedova, the attractive woman at his side, stood a few inches shorter, with dark hair, large eyes, stylish coat. Two young sons—Leon (or Lyova) and Sergei, ages eleven and nine—scampered behind them. Seeing them together strolling the decks, who could imagine the truth about these polite, well-dressed people? They didn’t look like radicals or troublemakers. They didn’t act like revolutionaries expelled or barred from five different countries: Russia, Austria, Germany, France, and Spain. But they were.
On boarding the Montserrat in Barcelona, all 340 passengers had been required to give their names and backgrounds for the official manifest. For Trotsky and his family, this occasion had required a well-rehearsed, creative performance designed to avoid questions.
Asked his name, he told them Zratzky, or at least that’s how the ship’s officer wrote it down, probably confused by the Russian accent.5 Asked his occupation, he gave “author.” This last part was true. Since last leaving Russia ten year earlier, Trotsky had earned his living editing small Russian-language newspapers, cranking out pamphlets, and writing about politics. In fact, his writing, particularly his wartime accounts from the French and Balkan fronts, had earned him European-wide fame. No, he told the ship’s officer, he was no anarchist, no polygamist, and never lived in an almshouse. Yes, he could read and write. Yes, he was born in Russia, near a tiny village called Yanofska, where his father owned a farm. Yes, he had good health, was not deformed or crippled, and had no identifying marks. All true.
He didn’t start the serious lying until asked if he had even been to prison. Trotsky said no, and so they recorded it in the manifest. That, as they say, was a doozy.
In fact, Leon Trotsky had a long and intimate history with prisons. It formed part of his celebrity, his calling card.