“We should be asses to tell members of Local New York that they must risk death and imprisonment rather than join the army!”275
—Morris Hillquit, March 4, 1917, from his address at the Lenox Casino
“Trotsky was convinced—he learned to see his mistake later—that the United States was ripe for the overthrow of the capitalist order, and urged the calling of general strikes against war as a means of undermining the proud structure of our decaying civilization.”276
—Ludwig Lore, undated
A BLIZZARD HIT NEW York on the day of the big meeting. Sixty hours of snow, sleet, and rain left streets ankle-deep in slush. Crowds jammed the subway, but dripping water caused short circuits that plunged underground stations into fits of darkness. On the surface, horses, cars, and trolleys snarled themselves into gridlock.
But that didn’t stop more than two hundred voting members of the New York County Socialist Party from trekking miles across town to have their say on the most important issue in the country: what to do about the world war.
Lenox Casino, a squat, three-story redbrick building, had sidewalk storefronts and big windows letting sunlight into its main upstairs auditorium. The building still stands at the corner of Lenox Avenue (now Malcolm X Boulevard) and 116th Street, just north of Central Park and west of Morningside Park. It is known today as the Malcolm Shabazz Mosque or Masjid, the place where Malcolm X preached for the Nation of Islam until his split from its leader, Elijah Muhammad, in 1964. The building added its signature green dome, arches, and other Islamic touches after that period.
In 1917 the casino still held itself out as a popular neighborhood haunt for music, drinking, card playing, and gambling, still legal in New York. To make extra cash, the owners sometimes rented space to left-wing political group like the Socialists. Hillquit had spoken here two weeks earlier for the women protesting high food prices.
This day the casino buzzed with anticipation as men and women tramped in from the snow; pulled off wet boots, shabby wool coats, scarves, gloves, and fur hats; came upstairs; and warmed themselves with hot tea. All the talk was about the big party split, Trotsky against Hillquit, the radicals against the leaders. They all had opinions. Upstairs, people congregated in small circles between card tables and chairs, talking, laughing, scheming. Hillquit and his friends took one corner; Fraina’s friends took another across the room. Russians gathered at a side wall. Ukranians there, Germans here, a Yiddish caucus formed near a window.
It’s easy to picture the faces huddled around Fraina that day. He had plenty of friends in the room: Ludwig Lore, his host from the Brooklyn dinner in January; Bukharin, Chudnovsky, and Gregory Weinstein from Novy Mir; his Bronx neighbor Dr. Julius Hammer. Only Alexandra Kollontai was missing, having left New York earlier for Norway.
Soon the room filled with smoke from cigarettes and a few pipes and cigars, plus voices in a chaotic mishmash of languages and dialects. At least half a dozen newspapermen joined the crowd, smelling a good story. The only ones missing, it seemed, were police detectives and government spies. America was still at peace, and people remained free to say what they wanted.
As the crowd mingled and bickered over seats, Morris Hillquit, in tie and suit, stood up at the front of the hall and called the meeting to order, shouting to be heard. He, Algernon Lee, and the other party leaders quickly got down to business. Everyone knew what they had come for. Hillquit would have thanked the Resolutions Committee for its hard work, then walked the crowd through the proposed resolution on the war, explaining its key parts, the compromises and clashing points of view, taking questions shouted from around the room, stopping now and then to translate a comment into Russian, German, Yiddish, or some other language.
It didn’t take long in this fractious group, though, for things to get complicated. Soon after the introductions, somebody moved for a vote. Just adopt the resolution as is and get it over with. A few people cheered. But at that point, Louis Fraina, surrounded by his claque of friends, rose and announced that he had a minority report to present on behalf of himself and his friend Leon Trotsky. Cheers rose from his part of the room, boos and hisses from other corners. All Trotsky’s work speaking and writing in New York over the past few weeks now paid dividends here at the Lenox Casino. His name on the proposition carried weight, his new followers well represented among the hardcore zealots who had braved blizzard and cold to be there at this moment.
But before Fraina could get the words out of his mouth, Morris Hillquit too stood up and demanded the floor. He moved that the minority report be “laid on the table.” Quizzical stares shot his way. What did this mean? Somebody had to explain. A motion to table meant putting the report aside. If the motion passed, they would never actually vote on Fraina’s minority report, as if it didn’t exist.
More questions. Whispers and grumbling. It didn’t seem fair. Why stop members from voting? What was Hillquit doing? Didn’t he have the votes to win? Hadn’t he taken a count? Had the bad weather, the snow and slush, kept his own friends away? Whispers grew into a dull roar, what one reporter described as “the barely covered outrage of part of the assembly.”277
Seeing this reaction, Hillquit decided to drop the point. He withdrew the motion in a friendly way, but that didn’t stop the wrangling. Somebody else stood up and objected to the absence of a quorum. There weren’t enough party members in the room, he argued, to make the meeting official. Someone counted the people present—about two hundred—and in fact, under party rules, they were a few bodies short. Any vote taken that day could be challenged. The point made, nobody seemed to care very much, and they went on regardless.
And so the debate actually began in the packed casino auditorium, a gray winter sky looming outside the window over 116th Street. Fraina, finally given the chance to talk, basked in the attention. He laid out the minority report he had written with Trotsky, speaking with bravado, reading parts aloud and translating sections into other languages so people could understand. When he reached the stirring finish—“War against capitalism! On with the class struggle!”—the crowd this time erupted in loud clashing yeas and nays; cheers, boos, and hisses from different parts of the room. A few friends patted his back and shook his hand. All the noise made it impossible to tell which side, pro or con, had more support.
To oppose Fraina, Hillquit had lined up six speakers, including four members of the Resolutions Committee—himself, Santeri Nourteva, Nicholas Aleinikoff, and Jacob Panken—plus lawyer Louis Waldman and party vice chairman Simon Berlin. Berlin led off the barrage and set the tone. He made no effort to defend the war, defend the country, or even criticize Fraina’s goals. Instead, he focused on only one point. Fraina’s program of illegal actions meant prison. And no committee of any political party—Socialist or any other—had the right to demand this sacrifice of life or liberty from its members. Any person’s decision to break the law was personal, not a matter of party doctrine.
By all accounts, once it started, the debate lasted all day, “protracted” and “passionate,”278 to one participant “the stormiest meeting I ever witnessed.”279 Fistfights broke out at one point, walkouts, tantrums, shouting and more shouting, speakers interrupted with cheers and boos, catcalls and insults. Two different chairmen had to step aside for failing to keep order.280
Louis Waldman, who spoke late in the day against Fraina’s proposal, kept the most detailed account of his own speech. “Martyrdom should not be imposed on anyone by the fiat of the Socialist Party,” he recalled telling the crowd. “Should the country declare war, should the draft become law, neither this meeting nor the Socialist Party could stop the war nor stop the draft by resolutions or otherwise. Is it democratic for this meeting, composed overwhelmingly of men over military age and those who because of noncitizenship are not subject to the draft, to tell our American young men to resist the draft at the risk of being shot?” Like the others, Waldman ignored the boos and hisses thrown his way to insist that Socialists obey the law. “It is against American and Socialist tradition to tell others to do what one is not called on to do himself,” he argued. “Our young men will obey the draft laws.”281
To this, one draft-age young man named McAlpern shouted back in German that it was “better to sacrifice yourself for your own cause than to be sacrificed by your enemies for an enemy’s cause.”282 The crowd cheered again.
Where was Leon Trotsky during all this excitement? The reporter for the New Yorker Volkszeitung wrote that Trotsky missed the entire meeting because of his commitment to speak that afternoon in New Jersey.283 No account of the Lenox Casino debate mentions Trotsky making any public statement that day, highly out of character both for Trotsky personally and as a cosponsor of the minority report. But at least one eyewitness participant remembered seeing Trotsky in the room. Louis Waldman, who spoke for the majority, recalled the nasty look Trotsky gave him after his speech. “As I sat down,” he wrote, “Trotsky, who was sitting in front of me, turned and sneered: ‘Chauvinist!’”284
Could Trotsky possibly have finished his Newark speech early, caught a train back to Manhattan—half an hour away—and then raced up to the Lenox Casino to catch the last hour or so of the meeting? Could the Volkszeitung reporter have gotten it wrong? Could Trotsky have started toward Newark but found his train blocked by the blizzard? Could the Newark meeting have been canceled over the bad weather? There is no mention of Trotsky actually speaking that day in New Jersey in the Newark or New York newspapers. But Trotsky was still a nobody to the larger world in March 1917. Who would have noticed? Who would have cared?
Or could Louis Waldman have simply concocted the scene years later when he wrote his memoirs, either from bad memory or in trying to embellish his story?
Morris Hillquit spoke last, and by the time he stood, night had fallen outside over 116th Street. Inside the casino, people had grown tired of shouting and anxious to finish. Hillquit, long practiced at political contests, didn’t waste time repeating all the arguments others had already made. Instead, he made his appeal brief and personal. He pointed to Fraina across the room and, whether there or not, to his senior partner, Trotsky. He probably gave Fraina a compliment for the good fight. But these two, he told the room, were asking everyone else to risk life and liberty to defy the law, not the Russian tsar’s arbitrary decrees but the laws of the United States government. And who were these two—Fraina and Trotsky—to make this demand? As one reporter described it, Hillquit turned first to the younger partner. Fraina, just twenty-five years old, “had yet to prove that he was willing to be the martyr he wanted to turn the worker i.e. the party comrades into.”
And as for his mentor, Hillquit went on, “Leon Trotsky had ample opportunity to prove what he was talking about and therefore was acquainted well enough with the prisons of Europe. [But even] Trotsky did not remain abroad to be shot for his opinion. Instead he came here,” to America.285
Finally they called for a vote. After all the hours of speeches and huddles, nobody in the hall misunderstood the implication. They were about to decide whether to turn their Socialist Party into an illegal organization committed to defying the United States government in time of war. Those in favor of the Trotsky–Fraina minority report raised their hands. They counted carefully: 79. Then those opposed raised their hands. Again they counted carefully: 101. Cheers and boos went up from different parts of the room. The minority report was rejected.
Hillquit had won the day. He still controlled his party. His members had refused to see themselves as Russians, their president as a tsar, or to follow a zealous radical to an American Siberia. But his victory was strikingly narrow, a difference of 22 votes out of 180.
It was an accomplishment. “When Trotsky landed here his name was known only to his countrymen and to a handful of German socialists,” Ludwig Lore recalled.286 Now the seventy-nine who had cast their lot with Trotsky and Fraina that day at the Lenox Casino would form a nucleus, a cadre of leftists that would continue to grow until the next major confrontation with party leaders, after the war. By then the world would have changed. Trotsky would be back in Russia, as commissar of war in a Bolshevik government. His American followers would be stronger and no longer cater to establishment socialists. They would win easily. Trotsky, in his few weeks in New York, had nurtured the embryo of what would become the American communist movement.
As for the socialist leader he had just defied, he had little sympathy. Trotsky would write sarcastically of him: “A Babbitt of Babbitts is Hillquit, the ideal Socialist leader for successful dentists.”287
Hillquit, in his own ample memoirs, in talking about those days in New York City, would not bother to mention Trotsky’s name at all.