I would expect that you would have not heard a lot of good things about
Trotsky from your parents either. By the way, a little known historical
footnote. I understand that while in New York Trotsky got a brief job as
an extra in a movie. I don't know which one or if it survives. It would
have had to have been a silent movie.
On 3/24/2017 12:15 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
Interesting, Thanks.
If it hadn't been for my folks Marxist leanings, I would have never
heard the name of Leon Trotsky when I was growing up.
The view my teachers gave us of Russia, was one of sadness over the
murder of the Czar and his family.
Little thought to the suffering of the Russian peasants. Not too
unlike today's Elitist
views.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/24/17, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://socialistaction.org/2017/03/23/books-leon-trotskys-1917-stay-in-new-york-city/
Books: Leon Trotsky’s 1917 stay in New York City
/ 22 hours ago
April 2017 Trotsky young
By DAVID JONES
“Trotsky in New York 1917, A Radical on the Eve of Revolution,” by
Kenneth D. Ackerman. (Berkeley, Calif., Counterpoint 2016), $30.
One hundred years ago, on Jan. 13, 1917, the small Spanish passenger
vessel SS (or Vapor Correo) Montserrat (Vapor is Spanish for steamship,
Correo for mail) arrived in the harbor of New York City after a 17-day
voyage from Barcelona, Spain. According to official records, the
passengers disembarked on Monday, Jan. 15. Most of the
passengers—hundreds—were Spanish immigrants to the United States,
traveling in steerage, the maritime equivalent to the basement.
Also on board was a Russian family traveling in first class, courtesy of
the Spanish government. Leon Trotsky, his wife Natalia Sedova, and their
two children sailed on the SS Montserrat because they were being
unwillingly deported from Europe at the insistence of the Tsarist
government.
Writing in 1930, Trotsky recalled his first reaction: “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!”
Leon Trotsky, of course, is a figure of continuing world-historic
significance. It is commonly known that he spent a short time in New
York City, but the only generally available account of his stay is one
chapter in his 1930 autobiography, “My Life.”
Historian Kenneth Ackerman has now researched and written the first book
on Trotsky’s experiences, “Trotsky in New York 1917, A Radical on the
Eve of Revolution.” From his account, it appears Trotsky was far too
modest in the recounting of his 10-week visit to the city, where, as he
said, he left “with the feeling of a man who has had only a peep into
the foundry in which the fate of man is to be forged.”
Trotsky was already a world famous figure when the SS Montserrat docked
in January 1917. In 1905, the year of the first Russian Revolution, at
age 26, he had been elected president of the St. Petersburg Soviet of
Workers Delegates. (“Sankt Peterburg” was renamed “Petrograd” in 1914 so
as to deflect attention from its original German name and the German
birth of the Tsarina. Likewise, the British royal family renamed itself
“Windsor” in lieu of its authentic Teutonic surname of
“Saxe-Coburg-Hesse,” prompting Kaiser Wilhelm’s memorable quip that he
was “looking forward to attending the next performance of ‘The Merry
Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Hesse.’”)
The revolutionary struggle of the St. Petersburg workers, the arrest and
suppression of the Soviet in December 1905, the trial of the leaders,
and Trotsky’s electrifying speech to the Tsarist court riveted the
attention of the world. Trotsky continued to be a major international
figure during the next 12 years as a political journalist and
revolutionary activist.
His reception on his arrival in New York had the flavor of late
20th-century rock-star celebrity. The city was home to a million and a
half residents of Jewish origin, mostly immigrants from the Tsar’s
dominions of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Latvia, including many
passionate socialists, and universally seething with hatred for the
brutal and absolutist Romanov regime.
Ackerman relates that “bounding down the gangway to the pier, Trotsky
found himself the center of attention.” The front page of the daily
German socialist newspaper New Yorker Volkzeitung headlined that
morning: “Leon Trotzki Kommt Heute!” (Leon Trotsky Is Arriving Today!).
All the English language dailies reported similarly: “Expelled from Four
Lands” (The New York Times) and ”With Bayonets Four Lands Expel Peace
Advocate” (New York Tribune).
“The New York Herald touted Trotsky’s four years in Russian prisons and
his battle with long-arm tsarist harassment even in France … Another
English-language (daily) paper, the (socialist) New York Call, described
Trotsky as ‘pursued with particular vindictiveness by authorities of the
capitalist order,’” writes Ackerman. “Within two days at least six New
York newspapers with more than half a million readers would announce
Trotsky’s arrival in the city.”
And then there was the 200,000-circulation Yiddish-language socialist
daily Forwerts (“Forward”), which put Trotsky’s photo on the front page.
“The Forward in 1917 operated from a beautiful new ten-story building in
Lower Manhattan … displaying bas-relief portraits of Marx, Engels and
Ferdinand La Salle” (p. 151).
Trotsky immediately plunged into intense antiwar agitation, and began
working on the staff of the Russian-language socialist daily Novy Mir
(New World, with 8000 daily circulation) located at 77 St. Marks Place
(extant), along with exiled Bolsheviks Nikolai Bukharin and Grigorii
Chudnovsky.
“In early February, Trotsky addressed packed crowds at the Brooklyn
Lyceum, Manhattan’s Beethoven Hall, the Labor temple near Union Square
and similar venues. His articles ran three or four times each week in
Novy Mir. At least four appeared in Yiddish translation in the Forward,
with others in German in the New Yorker Volkzeitung and the socialist
Die Zukunft” (“The Future”) (p. 117). Trotsky also lectured in
Philadelphia and other nearby cities, speaking in Russian and German.
And then, on March 3, over 10,000 workers at the giant Putilov Works in
Petrograd went on strike, led by the Bolsheviks. On March 8,
International Women’s Day, they were joined by striking female textile
workers. That night Eugene Debs spoke at to a mass rally at New York’s
historic Cooper Union. He asked Trotsky to join him on the stage.
“Speaking for myself,” Debs shouted, “I shall absolutely refuse to go to
war for any capitalist government on this earth. I would … rather be
lined up against a wall and shot for treason to Wall Street than to live
as a traitor to the working class” (p. 180). In Petrograd the strike
wave continued to swell, and on March 15, the Tsar abdicated.
On March 20 New York socialists organized a giant rally at Madison
Square Garden, with 10,000 (according to The New York Times) or 15,000
(New York Call), and thousands who couldn’t get in assembled outside to
celebrate the overthrow of Tsarist absolutism. Russian socialists in New
York organized another meeting.
Ackerman does make a small mistake here. He reports that “James P.
Cannon of Kansas City” spoke on the platform of the March 20 meeting at
the Garden, citing The New York Times, March 21: “Joseph Kennon, former
Socialist Candidate for United States Senate,” and privately in response
to my inquiry, citing the New York Call, March 21: “Joseph D. Cannon and
many other prominent in Socialist and working-class activities,” and
obviously presuming that Jim Cannon’s name had been misspelled or
otherwise rendered incorrectly. Leaving other sources aside, such as
Brian D. Palmer’s 2007 biography of the early years of James P. Cannon,
“Joseph D. Cannon” was a real person, verifiably the Socialist Party
candidate for United States Senate from New York.
“All that week,” Ackerman writes, “Trotsky carried the same message of
incomplete revolution through a blizzard of newspaper columns and
speeches. He appeared before audiences almost every night … with
thousands packing the halls” (p. 194).
On March 27, after the provisional Kerensky government had declared an
amnesty for political exiles, Trotsky and his family and a few other
Russians embarked from New York on the Norwegian vessel
Christianiafjord, seeking a prompt return to revolutionary Russia. They
were illegally detained at Halifax, Canada, by British authorities for a
month before they were released to continue their voyage.
Ackerman has some fine research in British archives illuminating the
machinations behind the detentions of Trotsky and his companions. But
there is a rich account of all that in Trotsky’s “History of the Russian
Revolution,” and in the interests of brevity, that account and the story
of further events can be sought there.
Kenneth Ackerman is not a revolutionary socialist historian.
Nonetheless, he has assembled an impressive amount of original research
and cogent narration on Trotsky’s seminal 10 weeks in New York.
The real strength of the book is the new window it opens on the bubbling
caldron of socialist and antiwar agitation and action in New York in the
early months of 1917, and the brief but central role Trotsky played in
it as revolutionary journalist and agitator.
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March 23, 2017 in Books, Marxist Theory & History.
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