My American Diary. Clare Sheridan
is interesting that an old Philadelphia family belonging to Rittenhouse Square should produce Kenneth: an ascetic Bolshevik with an archaic face. A face that belongs to the woods, and a soul that belongs to the world’s workers. It is not always working people and worker’s conditions that produce revolutionaries and world reformers. Reaction produces them. The intellectual free-thinker and free-observer is driven out of his own sphere in spite of himself—human sympathy, a sense of justice, added to a revulsion against the narrow prejudice, the intense dullness of a social bourgeois class.
A society that’s purely social and not intellectual is dull all the world over. In some countries its monotony is varied by its vice. In this country it is less vicious (apparently) and more dull, less intellectual, and more overwhelmingly conventional. No one with imagination or spirit could help reacting from it. Kenneth and I are reactionaries!
From a purposeless and equally conventional world, I went unexpectedly to Russia. There I opened my eyes wide to a new, struggling, striving humanity. Whatever I understood of it—and I admit I did not understand much—it was obvious that this new world was pursuing an IDEA. Right or wrong they were living selflessly, and were prepared for every sacrifice. I never had known people before who would sacrifice something for an ideal. I might have met them, without going to Russia, but they didn’t exist in the circle by which I was hemmed in. In Russia I became conscious that a great mass of oppressed people had risen to struggle for light. I was impressed. I was appreciative, and after awhile I was inspired. It was afterwards, when I came out of Russia that my own world roused in me a reaction of rebellion. The intense stupidity as well as the narrow-mindedness of my own class did their work on me.
As for America! Since I landed I have been metaphorically slapped and kissed alternately, until I’m so bewildered I have almost lost judgment. Yet I claim nothing for myself but the right, as a citizen of the world to be free, to think as I like, and to speak as I think. I have the right that the man in the street has, to an opinion. Like the man in the street, there is no reason why my opinion should carry more weight or be treated with more consideration. But I claim the right to be as sincere as that man.
Kenneth Durant, having finished the work he went to his office to do, took me to tea with the Pinchots. Mr. Pinchot is a brother of Nettie Johnstone,1 and is supposed to be rather radical. I should have said “poseur,” not radical. These people who have so much to lose (he is reported rich) are not very seriously radical. There were some reactionary women there and some undefinable men, so we all three sat rather silent until at last in walked a large breezy person! It was Charles Irvine, Editor of the Socialist paper, The Call. He came and sat next to me, and was a great relief.
We talked a little of England and mutual friends. I told him my difficulties about lecturing to capitalistic United States on a subject as distasteful to them as Lenin and Trotzky! I told him about my empty hall at Pittsburgh. He exclaimed that had he known me before I went to Pittsburgh he would have filled my hall for me. If one kind of people doesn’t want to hear you, get those that will. … He promises I shall never have an empty hall again. On the way home in the bus were two girls. One was discussing with the other her wedding dress; they were diverted from their frivolous talk by headlines in an evening paper of the person in front, “Soviet troops massing on the Georgian frontier.” And one said, “I wonder what Soviet troops means—I know what Bolsheviki means, but Soviet, what is that? I wish I could get some one to explain.” The other said, “I don’t know what Soviet means, but the Bolsheviks were named after a general called Bolsheviki.” “Yes, of course,” said the other, “That was it, General Bolsheviki” … and they dismissed it and resumed their wedding dress talk. I suppose that is pretty illustrative of general information concerning the Russian subject. …
Tuesday, February 22, 1921.
A long letter from the Crown Prince of Sweden, the first I have received since I got back from Russia. The first four pages are full of reproach for having published the fact that I saw him when I passed through Stockholm with Kameneff. He says that it is embarrassing for him to be mentioned even indirectly in connection with “those people” with whom I was travelling.
This means, I suppose, that his relations have abused him soundly for even knowing me! He is wrong to think I could do him any harm; on the contrary, his broad-mindedness could only win over radicals, and not harm him with conservatives.
I expect the “early Christians”2 were terribly scandalized, and have been writing and telling him what they thought of it.
After lunching with Emil Fuchs, who is doing a wonderful head of Mr. Cartier, the jeweler, looking like Rameses … I took Dick up to the Numismatic museum with his sledge, and he toboganned outside. Two hundred people came to my exhibition to-day. It is very amusing, all kinds of cranks introduce themselves to me … some to say they are Bolsheviks, or Communists, and they hand me literature which gives me news of Moscow! Others who tell me how they hate the Bolsheviks, or the Sinn Feiners, or the Knights of Columbus, and so on.
I am always amused by people who want to kill off all Bolsheviks, all Sinn Feiners, all Germans and all Jews. … It would make for a wonderfully emptier world. Perhaps it would be more peaceful! Anyway, it is very emblematic of the Christian spirit of to-day!
Rather an amusing record has been kept for me of some of the remarks, made by people who come, concerning the Russian busts:
“How ugly.”
“How wicked they look.”
“What noble looking men.”
“Lenin is my hero, I love him.”
“Zinoviev looks like a musician.”
“This is Russian propaganda——”
“This is the most perfect anti-Bolshevik propaganda——”
“These are fine advertisements for the Bolsheviks—I’m one.”
“Lenin is not for sale, she made him to decorate her London studio.”
“I believe they look worse than she made them.”
“How did she ever escape alive from such awful looking men?”
“We have seen some of the men. These busts look just like them.”
“That’s fine of Trotzky!”
“They don’t look like bomb-throwers.”
“Lenin has a benevolent expression——”
“Trotzky looks like the devil.”
“Lenin is positively awful to look at.”
“Who is Mrs. Sheridan? The name seems familiar.”
“Is she a Russian?”
“Is she Jewess?”
“She is a wonder——”
“How tall is she?”
“Is she pretty?”
“She is a Bolshevik.”
“Is she a Bolshevik?”
“I bet she hates the Russians, she made them so ugly.”
“Did she study with Rodin?”
“Is she light or dark?”
“That can’t be HER!”
“Is she from Chicago?”
“I’m glad she’s English.”
“I’m proud she has American blood in her veins.”
“So glad a woman, and not a man, did this wonderful work.”
“That’s Winston Churchill——What a contrast to the Russians.”
“That is what I call a good face.”
“He is the author of ‘Inside the Cup.’ ”