Part 16

The lid was off, and it was a case of first come, first served. The Provisional Government was no better than any other, these men said. “Russia shall be ours.” “How?” asked the eager disciples. “By helping yourselves,” answered Shatoff and Schnabel and Rodes. “That’s all very well,” said the proletariat, “but we haven’t the price.” “Oh, in that case, come to the farewell meeting on March 26 for Leon Trotzky, at Harlem River Casino, and all will be made clear to you.”

Some 800 people were at Trotzky’s farewell party, which was held under the auspices of the German Socialist Federation. Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman were among those present. A blond Russian made a speech in which he said: “Comrades, some of us are going back to Russia to push the revolution as we think it ought to be pushed, and those who remain here must get ready to do their share of the work as it ought to be done.” Trotzky then rose and speaking first in German, then in Russian, repeated the advice the previous speaker had given, and added: “You who stay here must work hand in hand with the revolution in Russia, for only in that way can you accomplish revolution in the United States.” He was cheered to the echo.

(There are still those who wonder why we have not recognized the Bolsheviki.)

The pier of the Norwegian-American line the next morning was a strange sight. Trotzky, with his wife, Chudnofsky, Plotkin, and a group of fifty more Russians, including such names as Muhin, Rapaport, Dnieprofsky, Yaroshefsky and Rashkofsky, sailed for Norway. An undersized, wild-eyed, fanatic little plucked-bantam of a Russian expatriate literally set out from Hoboken to upset the Provisional Government of Russia, prevent the formation of a republic, stop the war with Germany and prevent interference from other governments--that was his open boast. And, if such a mission can be crowned with success, he succeeded.

The leaders of the groups left behind began that very afternoon to examine recruits for the return to Russia. They met at 534 East 5th Street and elected a committee of five to serve as examining board for applicants for the $20 to $50 free passage money extended by the Provisional Government to help Russians who had fled the persecutions of the old days to repatriate themselves. It is unnecessary to state that the Provisional Government hardly knew how thoroughly these homing pigeons were going to re-establish themselves. All those who passed muster were put down for a sailing date.

The Norwegian ship bearing Trotzky and his party put into Halifax and the British detained the entire passenger list. On April 15 a mass meeting of anarchists, socialists, and Industrial Workers of the World was held at Manhattan Lyceum to make a formal protest to the British government against their detention. Kerensky asked for their release, and they were allowed to go on. By this time a second consignment had left, but by a different route. On April 3 George Brewer, H. Gurin, Mr. and Mrs. David Rohlis, one Kotz, one Schmidt, one Nemiroff and 27 others left the Pennsylvania Station for Chicago, Vancouver, Japan and Siberia. On April 23 Comrades Bogdanovitch, Bendetsky, Albert Greenfield, John (or Ivan) Stepanoff, Michael Smirnoff, Henry Shklar and 89 more left on the Erie Railroad for Seattle, Japan and Siberia. On the 12th day of May, “Dynamite Louise” Berg, sister of the anarchist who was killed July 4, 1914, by the accidental explosion of a bomb, boarded the steamship _United States_ of the Scandinavian-American Line in Hoboken for Christiania and Russia. On that ship sailed nearly a hundred others of the anarchist and revolutionary element. Ninety more, including Sokoloff, a prominent I. W. W., left for San Francisco and Japan two days later. On May 26 Mrs. Bill Shatoff, with Alexander Broide, J. Wishniefsky, and 18 more members of the Coöperative Anarchist Organization sailed from Hoboken on the _Oskar II_. Two days passed and Meyer Bell, an anarchist who had seen the inside of many an American jail for revolutionary agitation, and Mrs. Meyer Bell, with 110 others took their departure for San Francisco and the Orient. The last consignment but one, a group of 90 more potential Bolsheviki, followed them on June 24.

[Illustration: Captain John B. Trevor, Military Intelligence]

Shatoff and Wolin waited until their flock had been herded out of the country, and then vanished themselves. No one knew their route, but they were heard from in Seattle. Altogether some 600 anarchists made the pilgrimage. Some never reached Russia. Others who did get back found that conditions offered slim picking, and the Chinese and Manchurian ports are sprinkled with them to-day--men without a country, who cannot live in Russia, and who may not return to the United States.

Those who did get through to the capital of Russia straightway joined the organization. Trotzky had found Lenine there with plans already well advanced. The Provisional Government superficially was adequate to handle the situation, and during June it gave some slight promise of being able to prosecute its share of the war, but a breach was coming. A Council of Workmen and Soldiers had sprung up to oppose the Duma and the government when the Duma voted for an immediate offensive in Galicia, the Council voted for a separate peace. Kerensky swung himself back into balance for a month, and led a military offensive. It turned into a retreat, the retreat into a rout. Korniloff took command of the army on August 2, and the following day the military governor of Petrograd was assassinated. The deposed Czar was taken to Siberia. On September 2 Kerensky tried the expedient of arrest against his rising enemies in Moscow. On September 16 he proclaimed a new republic, but political structures could not keep out the terrifying German military advance that already was threatening Petrograd nor the German propaganda which was already there. Mid-October saw the government in flight to Moscow. On the 21st of October Leon Trotzky, at the head of the Bolsheviki in the Council, declared his party for an immediate democratic peace, and left the hall at their head, cheering. Municipal elections on November 1 rejected the Bolsheviki, but they would not be rejected, and on November 7 the Maximalists deposed Kerensky and took possession of the Government. Lenine became premier, Trotzky minister of foreign affairs.

The New York delegation won influential positions under the new régime. A United States senator has described the current Russian government as nothing but “Lenine and a gang of anarchists from New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.” Wolin took charge of a branch of the press--a sort of commissioner of public misinformation. Shatoff, in America a humble syndicalist and I. W. W., rose to the eminence of chairman of the “Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Speculators and the Counter Revolution” in Petrograd, a commission whose activities are perhaps better described by its common title in the capital. It is called the “Blood and Murder” or the “To the Wall” committee. He has filled in his spare time as Commissioner of Railroads, and has been commonly credited in Petrograd with the murder of the Czar and his family. Ouritzky, Shatoff’s predecessor at the head of the Committee, had amassed a fortune of some four million roubles during his tenure of office. He died a violent death. Shatoff, in October of 1918, had not followed suit. The same John Reed who contributed to the support of the _Blast_ appeared in Petrograd as a sympathetic correspondent, and was made consul to New York--a portfolio which he was unable to use when he returned to New York because of his indictment, along with Max Eastman and several other editors of a paper known as _The Masses_, for attempting to obstruct the draft. The balance of the New York anarchists who made up the expeditionary force of 1917 found their way, such of them as escaped the rigors of Petrograd life, into positions of influence in the government of one hundred or more millions of Russian people. To be sure, their hold is not too secure, but they are enjoying for the moment a sense of power which is intoxicating. Nothing seems to please a Bolshevik of the New York City group more than power--the same thing he tried to overthrow. I suppose it makes a difference whose power it happens to be.

Neither Goldman nor Berkman returned to Russia. Their publishing and bookselling business kept them here, and both were always in demand as lecturers. Both had pictured themselves for many years as the champions of anarchy in the United States, and it is conceivable that they did not wish to pass over their sceptres to any less well qualified successors. Unlike the ringleaders of the I. W. W., these anarchists did not dodge real work. Both had active minds, and were happiest when they were busy. Berkman’s writing at times shows a certain cheerful tenderness underneath its bombast, and Emma Goldman had a rather good-natured sarcasm at times as a speaker.

The two cast their lot in with the pacifists, the anti-conscriptionists, and the factions whose chief aim was to interfere with America’s going to war. Emma began to lecture on the subject. On the night of May 18 she spoke to a meeting in the Harlem River Casino. After a preamble advising the audience that government agents were present and that violence would be out of order, she drew what she probably considered a logical conclusion from this advice and shouted:

“And so, friends, we don’t care what people will say about us. We only care for one thing, and that is to demonstrate to-night, and to demonstrate as long as we can be able to speak, that when America went to war ostensibly to fight for democracy, it was a dastardly lie. It never went to war for democracy!... It is not a war of economic independence, it is a war for conquest. It is a war for military power. It is a war for money. It is a war for the purpose of trampling underfoot every vestige of liberty that you people have worked for, for the last forty or thirty or twenty-five years, and therefore we refuse to support such a war....

“We believe in violence and we will use violence.... How many people are going to refuse to conscript? I say there are enough. I could count fifty thousand, and there will be more.... They will not register! What are you going to do if there are 500,000? It will not be such an easy job, and it will compel the government to sit up and take notice, and therefore we are going to support, with all the money and publicity at our hands, all the men who will refuse to register and who will refuse to fight.

“I hope this meeting is not going to be the last. As a matter of fact we are planning something else.... We will have a demonstration of all the people who will not be conscripted, and who will not register. We are going to have the largest demonstration this city has ever seen, and no power on earth will stop us.... If there is any man in this hall that despairs, let him look across at Russia ... and see the wonderful thing that revolution has done....

“What is your answer? Your answer to war must be a general strike, and then the governing class will have something on its hands....”

She wound up her speech with an appeal for funds, and said that her paper, _Mother Earth_, was going to support the rebellion against the draft law which had been signed by the president that very day. _Mother Earth_ spoke, in her next issue, which appeared shortly before registration day, June 5, and spoke in fairly disapproving terms toward conscription. But the sun went down into New Jersey on registration day without having witnessed the greatest demonstration New York City ever saw, or any demonstration whatever save the quiet, cheerful enrollment of what later became a heroic national army.

On June 15 Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were arrested in the office of _Mother Earth_ at 20 East 125th Street. On June 27 they were arraigned for trial. On July 9 the jury pronounced them guilty of having attempted to obstruct the draft. Judge Mayer thereupon sentenced Berkman to two years in the Federal penitentiary at Atlanta, Goldman to the state penitentiary at Jefferson City, Missouri for two years, and fined each of them $10,000. It was a stiff blow to organized anarchy--the maximum sentence possible, and the judge followed it by directing the District Attorney, Harold A. Content, to notify the Commissioner of Labor of the conviction, in order that when the two emerged from prison, they might be deported as aliens convicted of two or more crimes to the country from which they came, bringing uplift to down-trodden America.

Their work has since been carried on in a more or less desultory way. They, too, have become official martyrs to the cause, whose names will be inscribed along with those of Brescia, the Haymarket murderers, and a score of others, on the anarchist service flag. The undercurrent of opposition appeared spasmodically during the war and it became necessary for an Alabama Judge, sitting in the District Court of New York, on October 25, 1918, to impose maximum sentences under the espionage act upon three more advocates of unrest, Jacob Abrams, Samuel Lipman and Hyman Lachnowsky, the ringleaders of a group who circulated leaflets denouncing armed intervention in Russia and advocating a general strike. They were sentenced to twenty years apiece; a fourth member got three years and a $1,000 fine. A woman in the group, Mollie Steiner, was sentenced to fifteen years.

The efforts at “demonstration” which the imported anarchists in America have employed are neither as picturesque nor as popularly received as those of their comrades in the old world. Anarchy is out of tune in America. Prussianism has already had its answer from the United States. Bolshevism is not for a well-educated, deep-breathing nation like ours. And anarchy, the poorest wretch of the three, must make terrifying faces through some other window than that of a country full of people who are going to continue to make this democracy safe for itself.

THE END

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed. Inconsistent hyphenation was not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to the corresponding illustrations.

Transcribers improved readability of some numbers in some illustrations, and switched the transcribed sequence of the text of one pair of “random pages” (following page 26) to make it easier to follow.

Transcriber corrected the Title page misspelling of “SMALLL, MAYNARD & COMPANY” to “SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY”, which is how it appears on the Copyright page.

Transcriber removed redundant book title just above the title of the first chapter.