THE NIGHT BEFORE his ship set sail for Russia via Halifax and Norway, New York socialists threw Trotsky an enormous going-away party. More than eight hundred people jammed a gala for him at the Harlem River Casino on 127th Street, a cavernous hall that William Randolph Hearst would purchase in 1920 and convert into a film studio (called Cosmopolitan Productions) to produce movies starring his then-mistress, blond-haired comic actress Marion Davies, recently of the Ziegfeld Follies. The studio would burn down in 1923, but not before cranking out its most famous film, a historical spoof called When Knighthood Was in Flower, featuring Davies as a love-struck Mary Tudor in 1600s England playing opposite, among others, a promising young vaudevillian named William Powell, future Nick Charles of The Thin Man movies, still a struggling New York wannabe. The film grossed more than $1.5 million, making it the sixth-biggest moneymaker of 1922.
For Trotsky’s gala, everyone came in good spirits. It rained that day in New York, but inside the hall a band played sentimental music, people sang, and couples danced. Red banners draped the walls as men drank schnapps and greeted old friends with hugs and shoulder slaps. A kaleidoscope of languages peppered the room. As routine for such events those days, they passed the hat and collected almost $300 in contributions for Trotsky to carry back to Russia to support the revolution.
Left-wing celebrities dotted the crowd, but none drew more attention than Emma Goldman, America’s most celebrated anarchist, standing beside her lover/partner of twenty-five years, Alexander Berkman. Goldman held a special place of adoration for these radicals, and people circled around her, wanting to touch her or catch a glimpse. Best known in early 1917 for her magazine Mother Earth, which drew more than ten thousand subscribers, and her frequent lectures on birth control and free love, as well as politics, labor, and socialism, Emma Goldman could be spellbinding on the stump. She had caused a riot in 1894 by urging striking garment workers in New York to attack homes of wealthy people on Fifth Avenue and seize bread off their tables. This resulted in her first prison term, a year on New York’s Blackwell’s Island in the East River. A few years later, Leon Czolgosz, the self-proclaimed anarchist who had assassinated President William McKinley in 1901, had claimed Emma Goldman as an inspiration, having seen her speak shortly before committing the crime. This assertion caused more arrests.
But these adventures all paled next to her long-term free-love relationship with Berkman, who had spent fourteen years in prison for his failed attempt in 1892 to murder Henry Clay Frick, manager of the Andrew Carnegie steelworks in Homestead, Pennsylvania, during the notorious 1892 strike there. Frick had hired three hundred armed Pinkerton detectives to crush a group of workers who had seized the factory. The resulting gunfight ended with ten dead and dozens wounded before eight thousand Pennsylvania militiamen intervened to restore order. Goldman and Berkman had planned the crime as an act of propaganda, hoping to spark a wider labor revolt. She defended Berkman against a storm of criticism over it.380
Now, she and Berkman looked like any other slightly overweight, middle-aged couple mingling politely with admirers. Emma Goldman had never seen Trotsky and, being in New York, couldn’t resist the opportunity to meet him. She would remember him from that night as a plain-looking man, “medium height, with haggard cheeks, reddish hair, and straggling red beard,” but dazzling from the podium.
Emma Goldman wasn’t the only celebrity present. By then, even the New York City Police Department, tipped off by British intelligence, thought enough to send a detective to spy on the affair.
Looking out at the crowd that night, Trotsky had to feel satisfaction, seeing what he had accomplished during his barely ten weeks in America, here in tangible human form. “Trotsky built up a large and enthusiastic personal following,” Ludwig Lore explained.381 He had created a movement, a political faction too powerful to ignore and ready to fight. No guest list from the night survives. Newspaper accounts mention only the names of a few well-known people. Trotsky’s admirers in the hall didn’t yet call themselves by any special name: Trotskyites or Trotskyists or even communists. Those labels would come soon enough.
But by now Trotsky’s followers had become a distinct voice in socialist circles. The group Ludwig Lore had pulled together for dinner at his Brooklyn apartment on Trotsky’s first day in America had stuck with him. Lore and Louis Boudin both made speeches that night. Louis Fraina, now editor of the Internationalist, had become Trotsky’s protégé fighting to radicalize the Socialist Party. Another new disciple, James P. Cannon, a westerner, had followed Trotsky’s lead by showing up at Morris Hillquit’s huge Madison Square Garden meeting on the Russian Revolution and delivering a revolutionary stem-winder: “If we can’t get liberty by our votes, we will use the bayonets they put in our hands,” Cannon had told the crowd that night to Hillquit’s doubtless chagrin. “The house of Rockefeller and the house of Morgan will fall as has the house of Romanoff in Russia.”382
After his few weeks in the country, Trotsky, through hard work—his dozens of speeches, columns, and meetings—had grown that small following into hundreds. Now, with the Russian Revolution, he emerged as a unifying figure on the far left. He had quarreled with local leaders and often felt like a fish out of water. Even so, on this night, Trotsky seemed at peace, and New York at peace with him. Soon he would be gone and no longer able to make trouble. On this night, Trotsky could present himself to New York as its ambassador to the New Russia. Americans, from the comfort of home, could support him by contributing a few dollars and claim their bona fides as revolutionaries.
The night’s big moment finally came as Trotsky took the podium for one last harangue. He spoke for two hours, first in Russian, then repeating the entire oration in German. He was sorry he couldn’t stay longer in America, he told them, but “when revolution calls, revolutionaries follow.” For he and his comrades returning to Russia, “the world is [our] country, [we] live for it, fight for it, and if need be are ready to die for it.”383
No transcript of the speech survives. Emma Goldman, caught up in the dramatics, described it this way: “His analysis of the causes of the war was brilliant, his denunciation of the ineffective Provisional Government in Russia scathing, and his presentation of the conditions that led up to the Revolution illuminating. He closed his two hours’ talk with an eloquent tribute to the working masses of his native land. The audience was roused to a high pitch of enthusiasm, and Sasha [Berkman] and I heartily joined in the ovation given the speaker.”384 She found the whole performance “powerful and electrifying.”
Ludwig Lore recalled an “almost religious fervor” among this multinational, multilingual radical crowd.385
Even the New York Police spy gave Trotsky’s speech a dramatic flourish in his English translation, claiming, according to reports, that Trotsky climaxed it with a call for revolution right here in America. “I am going back to Russia to overthrow the Provisional Government there and to stop the war with Germany,” he quoted Trotsky as saying. “I want you people here to organize and keep organizing until you are able to overthrow the damned rotten capitalistic Government of this country.”386
After the speeches, the affair broke up and people walked out into the cold New York night. Emma Goldman made a point to buttonhole Trotsky, and she remembered the conversation: “He knew about us and he inquired when we meant to come to Russia to help in the work of reconstruction, she wrote. “We will surely meet there,” Trotsky told her.387
TROTSKY, NATALYA, AND the boys left the apartment on Vyse Avenue in the Bronx early the next morning. They left the door unlocked, leaving behind whatever belongings couldn’t fit into their small travel bags for neighbors to come and take what they wanted. Henry Feuer, the salesman for the Bronx furniture shop, came to collect the furniture that day and remembered finding it in “first-rate” condition, good enough to sell at auction.388 Trotsky had been paying $2 per week for the furniture on the layaway plan, but the sudden departure left a balance. Sholem Asch, a Bronx neighbor and well-known writer, claimed that he was the one who got stuck with the remaining $200 payment. “I am honored with the burden bequeathed to me by the Russian Premier,” he joked to a reporter while sitting in a Lower East Side café, telling him about the unpaid bill a few months later, in early 1918, after Trotsky had become world famous as Bolshevik Russia’s new foreign minister. “His Excellency, answering the call of his country, left New York and left me with the debt—which I had guaranteed.”389
Changes had come to New York by the morning Trotsky boarded his ship for Russia. When he had arrived in January, America still enjoyed peace, a tsar ruled in Russia, and Trotsky himself remained an obscure nobody. Now, by late March, Russia had toppled its tsar, America stood two weeks away from entering the European war, and, whether he knew it or not, Trotsky’s own movements were being tracked by global intelligence teams.
New York’s latest scandal that week typified the change. It involved the mayor, John Purroy Mitchel, who had found a new political voice as military booster. “I say to you in the galleries that today we are divided into two classes—Americans and traitors,” Mitchel had told a Carnegie Hall crowd that week.390 Now he had gone further and publicly smeared state senator Robert F. Wagner, a protégé of Tammany Hall boss Charles Murphy and future four-term United States senator. Wagner had been born in Germany forty years earlier, and that was enough for Mayor Mitchel to accuse him of disloyalty, claiming that Wagner had backed “German interests” by delaying a vote in the state legislature on acquiring land near Rockaway Point to build a defense installation (and doubtless earn someone a kickback). The “Gentleman from Prussia,” he called him.391 Wagner had demanded an apology, calling the charge “wickedly and atrociously false.”392
A high-ranking public figure, Wagner survived the political attack. But with war imminent, open season for character assassination against German Americans had begun.
Riding the elevated train from the Bronx to lower Manhattan, then crossing the Brooklyn Bridge to Brooklyn, Trotsky would have passed for one last time the dizzying mix of New York, its crowds and skyscrapers and noise and traffic. Riding past the streets around Five Points and the Lower East Side, he might have glanced gangs of tough young kids on street corners, teenagers with names like Charles (later “Lucky”) Luciano or Meyer Lansky, or Lansky’s young sidekick, a kid named Benny (later “Bugsy”) Siegel, future kings of New York crime. In Brooklyn, he would have passed rows of warehouses, grain elevators, and factories set among the tenements.
More than three hundred well-wishers came to see them off at the South Brooklyn pier jutting into the East River, as if the movable feast from the previous night’s Harlem River Casino gala had simply hopped the subway and followed them. “Rain fell in torrents,” Ludwig Lore remembered of that morning, but that didn’t stop the enthusiasm. People waved red banners and threw floral bouquets. “When Trotsky arrived [at the pier] he was lifted on the shoulders of his admirers to the top of a huge packing box and with his beaming face and happy smile he bade a last farewell,” Lore wrote.393
At about 10 AM, Trotsky, Natalya, and the boys left their friends one last time and walked up the gangplank to the main deck of the Kristianiafjord. The steamer sat five hundred feet long, with two large smokestacks bearing colors of the Norwegian-America Line. Trotsky waved a last farewell before stepping out of the rain. But Lore remembered the mood among the Americans staying behind. They stayed, watched, and continued the celebration even after Trotsky had disappeared from view, he wrote. “Down at the pier, in the pouring rain, the crowd lingered, lingered on and on, loath to leave, as if its presence there were bringing it nearer to the land of its hopes.”394
A few minutes later, the ship cast off and tugboats steered it out into the harbor toward the Statue of Liberty. Those on deck saw the jagged skyline of buildings on Brooklyn and Manhattan recede into the distance beneath the steel-gray sky. Time had passed so quickly that Trotsky could barely process his thoughts. He had experienced something extraordinary but couldn’t verbalize it quite yet. For now, aboard the Kristianiafjord, he could only struggle for words. “I was leaving for Europe, 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,” he wrote. “My only consolation was the thought that I might return.”395
What Trotsky did not know at that moment was that New York, or at least a few people at the southern tip of Manhattan, had not finished with him yet.
AS THE SHIP receded into the distance, William George Eden Wiseman could catch a glimpse of it from the window of his office at 44 Whitehall. So far, despite all he knew, he had done nothing to stop it. But Wiseman was not the only person in the building aware of who had been allowed to leave.