“Our descendants . . . will spread their hands in horror when they learn from history books about the methods by which capitalist peoples settled their disputes.”159
—Leon Trotsky as a journalist covering the Balkan Wars, 1913
A FEW DAYS AFTER Trotsky’s speech at Cooper Union, Morris Hillquit gave a dinner party at his home on Riverside Drive. Like Ludwig Lore, who had hosted Trotsky in Brooklyn his first day in America, Hillquit liked to entertain. But in a different style. Instead of vodka, tea, and cigarettes for a roomful of plotting radicals, Hillquit offered French wines, servants, and a small, intimate roomful of distinguished company.
He didn’t send Trotsky an invitation, but the guest list did include the next best thing, Algernon Lee, director of the Rand School and one of Hillquit’s closest friends in New York. Lee had shared the stage with Trotsky at Cooper Union, introduced Trotsky to the crowd, and praised him as a steadfast rebel. Lee certainly would have enjoyed describing the affair to his friends that night over Hillquit’s dinner table, entertaining them with a few choice quotes from Trotsky’s speech (or some of the heckles from the crowd). But Trotsky was still a newcomer to New York society. His chance to hobnob with the finer elements would come soon enough.
The faces around Hillquit’s table that night, about a dozen people, included socialites, artists, and politicos. In addition to Algernon Lee and his wife, guests included Samuel and Clara Packard, he a prominent lawyer, she a well-known women’s activist. Louis Gruenberg, the piano virtuoso and opera composer, came with his wife, as did Hermann Schluter. Schluter, a seventy-year-old German and one-time personal friend of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, still held the editor in chief post at the New Yorker Volkszeitung, Ludwig Lore’s newspaper, though Lore now did the lion’s share of the work. A Mr. Chadburne, agent of an American relief group recently returned from Belgium and France, also joined them.
Hillquit had invited a special guest, a European fresh from the war front. His name was Victor Basch from Paris, a Sorbonne professor and member of the French Socialist Party. Basch in Paris had been an outspoken Dreyfusard (supporter of French colonel Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused of treason in 1894) and leader of France’s League of Human Rights. Tonight Hillquit had asked him to defend France’s view of the world war.
Morris and Vera Hillquit knew how to please friends: good food, gracious talk, the clinking of wineglasses, friendly toasts, and a warm fire. Never mind that these people easily could chat in a dozen different languages. At Morris Hillquit’s table, they spoke English.
Some fellow Jews resented Hillquit’s self-conscious Americanism and cringed when he sometimes dismissed Jewish-specific causes as “special interests.”160 They saw it as snobbery; to Hillquit it was simple ideology. His Marxism gave no special place for Jewish workers, or those of any other ethnic group, over any others.
This night they had barely finished their aperitifs when Hillquit tossed the floor to his guest Professor Basch with a simple question: How could America best help Europe?
Basch had a dark beard, dark hair, a high forehead, and his own ideas on how to charm Americans. He answered quickly: “Not by what you, Mr. Hillquit, have done in conjunction with Meyer London [the Socialist US congressman] the other day,” he said, referring to Hillquit’s meeting with Woodrow Wilson in the White House, where Hillquit had urged the president to end the war.
Basch, carefully polite, had not meant to pick a fight. He had a purpose. That week, Woodrow Wilson had shocked Europeans with a remarkable speech calling again on the warring parties to stop fighting. This time Wilson had demanded a “peace without victory” and, to back it up, the creation of a World League for Peace—later the League of Nations—to settle international disputes. Already, England and France had denounced the idea. After two years of fighting and millions dead, they bitterly resented Wilson’s premise that they didn’t deserve the satisfaction of triumph. Even worse, peace without victory could leave Germany in possession of Belgium, parts of France, and other occupied territories.
Americans deluded themselves, Basch told the candlelit faces looking back at him around the table. France would never accept President Wilson’s peace terms. France must win this war. France had justice on its side. And any talk of mediated settlements bordered on treason. “To speak of peace now is to help Germany,” he argued.161 And more. Germany only pretended to want peace, he explained, because it feared losing the war. England and Russia had just begun to fight. “The allies will win because they must win,” he insisted. “It is mathematically certain. They have twice as many men.”
Basch knew he faced a skeptical audience. Hillquit and his left-wing friends represented some of the foremost antiwar pacifists in America. If fact, they had all heard these arguments before and rejected them. Algernon Lee, writing in a long diary entry that night, said he found Basch’s discussion “rather hideous.” He described how Basch mechanically counted off the six or seven million men lost so far, plus the million permanently disabled on each side, as utter abstractions.
Skeptical questions flew at Basch from all around the table. Someone asked about Alsace and Lorraine, the former French provinces seized by Germany in 1870 and now pointed to by France as central to the conflict. Why not just let the people there vote? Let them decide if they want to be German or French? Basch didn’t flinch. No, he said. Alsace and Lorraine must be restored to France, and the inhabitants must not be allowed to choose. Why? “They would vote to remain German,” he said.
This last answer drew a few nervous laughs. Lee glanced at Hermann Schluter, who rolled his eyes. But Basch went on: “Alsace and Lorraine do not belong to the people who live there now, but to the sons and grandsons of the Alsatians of 1870—many, many, many of whom emigrated after the 1870 conflict.” Lee found this answer “astonishing.” Is this what France was fighting for? Did they really expect Americans to spill blood over a French territorial grudge from fifty years ago?
Finally someone mentioned Russia. How could America, a free country, possibly fight for France and Britain when they allied themselves with Russia, perhaps the single most autocratic, bigoted, anti-Semitic, backward, and hated regime on earth, especially among New York’s million and a half Jewish immigrants, many of whom were direct victims of tsarist persecution. Basch treaded carefully, and Algernon Lee recorded his answer carefully in his diary: “B[asch] insisted on his hatred for the Autocracy [in Russia],” Lee wrote. “But, as soon as the war ends in victory for the Allies, there will be a revolution in Russia. ‘We know it.’”
To Lee this sounded bizarre. Usually it was the Germans who insisted that their victory against Russia would end tsardom, not the Allies. Was France prepared to betray its Russian comrade-in-arms?
If Professor Basch had hoped to win converts this night, he failed miserably. Nobody said it to his face. Morris Hillquit thanked Basch for his graciousness and eloquence, and then the servants brought coffee, dessert, and another round of drinks. Algernon Lee, in his diary notes, said he found Basch’s whole presentation “depressing,” showing how once a country got caught up in war fever, even an intellectual like Basch could fell prey to “the infection of chauvinism.”
Morris Hillquit too found nothing new in Professor Basch’s arguments, nothing to change his view of the world war. The war was a pointless catastrophe, and American intervention would only make it worse. Germany had not attacked the United States and never could. Misguided patriots like Professor Basch, their minds warped by the fight, had lost their capacity to think. Still, he appreciated hearing the argument. Hillquit had decisions to make, and accurate information from Europe had become scarce. Censorship and exaggerations had made most newspaper accounts barely credible. Basch at least was a fellow socialist; Hillquit could trust him to speak his mind.
If America entered the war, what would he do? Hillquit knew he and his Socialist Party must oppose the war. They had no choice. On principle, the war was indefensible. And politically, his Socialist Party would insist on a strong stand. And this, in turn, could destroy everything they had worked to build over the last twenty years. Hillquit knew the pattern repeated in country after country. When war hysteria hit, people began to look for scapegoats, traitors, and spies. And the first accused of disloyalty were always the same: immigrants and socialists.