Late that night, Woodrow knocks timidly on Edith’s door. He cannot sleep. His head is splitting. The doctor is called. The President’s face twitches uncontrollably. He feels he is about to be sick. It is hours before he drifts off to sleep. The next morning, he dresses and shaves as usual. But something inside of him has gone, as if he were suddenly no longer himself, but another, lesser man; a mere mortal, rather than President of the United States. ‘I just feel like I am going to pieces’, he admits weakly. A talk in Wichita, Kansas, is cancelled. The railway lines to Washington DC are cleared.
A telegram is sent to both his daughters: ‘Returning to Washington. Nothing to be alarmed about. Love from all of us. Woodrow Wilson’.
OMAHA, NEBRASKA–PHILLIPS COUNTY, ARKANSAS: A riot breaks out in Omaha the same day Woodrow returns to Washington. A black man accused of raping a white woman is pulled from jail by a mob of several thousand, shot, set on fire, and then dragged through the streets of the city. Soldiers have to restore order.
A few days later in Arkansas there are rumours of a radical-inspired revolt by black sharecroppers against white plantation owners. (In fact, the sharecroppers are simply trying to organise a union to get a better price for their cotton.) Whites are trucked in from Mississippi and Tennessee to teach the uppity workers a lesson. No one knows how many blacks are killed. Their bodies are dumped in the river.
Afterwards it is only blacks who are indicted, on charges of killing a white man. The trial is a farce. Black witnesses called for the prosecution are forced to provide false testimony. The defence offers no case: the lawyer does not meet his clients before the trial and calls no witnesses. Even the testimony of the defendants is not sought. Though a white mob surrounds the courthouse, threatening to lynch the black defendants unless they swing, no legal attempt is made to move the trial to safer and more neutral ground. A white jury decides the case in minutes. The blacks are sentenced to death.
NEW YORK: ‘Once more the white man has outraged American civilization’, Garvey writes. Lynching proves that America is no place for blacks. A fine and great democracy, but one built and run for whites. A race war is on its way–and blacks must organise, Garvey writes. America does not deserve their effort. It is Africa that must be redeemed, a splendid continent ‘kept by God almighty for the Negro’.
In the meantime, Garvey tells his readers: ‘let me remind all of you, fellow men, to do your duty to the Black Star Line Steamship Corporation’. The shares now cost five dollars each, he reports: ‘and I now ask you to buy as many shares as you can and make money while the opportunity presents itself’. A ship has now been found and part purchased. A black captain has been hired (and receives a kickback from the vendors of the rusty hulk for his help in negotiating the inflated price of the vessel). The sum of fifty thousand dollars has been raised.
Not everyone is convinced by Marcus Garvey. In Chicago, a local community leader accuses him of being just the latest in a long line of foreign con men–Nigerians are said to be particularly blameworthy–who take the hard-earned money of black Americans and provide nothing in return. Du Bois warns his uncle not to invest. In New York, Garvey survives an assassination attempt by a disgruntled investor in an earlier UNIA enterprise.
MOSCOW–LONDON–PETROGRAD: A last line of defence is designated by the Bolsheviks and a huge area of European Russia placed under martial law. Though outnumbered two to one, the Whites soon breach the Red perimeter. Denikin’s army races forwards. In London, Winston plays with the idea of going out to Moscow to help the Whites write a new Russian constitution. He feels an awesome sense of having been proven right.
In the Kremlin plans are made to move the seat of Bolshevik government from Moscow to the Urals. Cheka officials sift through their current hostage list–ten thousand names–and mark out who should be killed first. Trotsky and Stalin argue about the right military strategy to deflect the danger from Denikin’s troops. Lenin receives anonymous letters threatening him with all kinds of horrible retribution when he falls.
Vladimir has no intention of letting that happen. He barely leaves his office during the day. When he cannot sleep in the middle of the night the impatient revolutionary phones his subordinates, to check that his orders in some vital matter have been obeyed. When things are really bad, he even stops going on his walks with Nadya. And he worries: what if the Finns were to decide to join the White offensive? What if the Poles throw their armies into the fray?
In the middle of October, while matters are reaching a climax outside Moscow, Yudenich’s northern army launches towards Petrograd. The White general declares he stands for the eight-hour day and against the restoration of the Tsars. Within days his forces have reached Tsarskoye Selo. The British provide naval and air support. The prospect of an attack by British-made tanks terrifies Petrograd’s Red defenders. Evacuation plans are prepared. The top Bolshevik in the city has a nervous breakdown. He retires to the sofa, as Trotsky crushingly puts it.
Lenin is ready to abandon Petrograd to its fate and focus instead on crushing Denikin. Trotsky gets him to change his mind. ‘Very well, let us try’, Vladimir says, at last. The war commissar is sent north. There, he finds chaos, panic, dissolution. Trotsky may not be much of a general, but this is a situation which requires bravura–and he has plenty of that. Tanks, Leon tells a troop of Red soldiers, are nothing but ‘metal wagons of a special construction’. He laughs in the face of danger and encourages others to do the same.
To achieve his goal of destroying Yudenich’s army Trotsky is prepared to consider every eventuality. He toys with the idea of letting the White army into Petrograd, and then turning the ‘stone labyrinth’ of streets into their mausoleum by flattening the whole city with powerful artillery. He accepts that such an approach would ‘destroy a certain number of inhabitants, women and children’. But it would be effective. It is only on reflection that the war commissar is persuaded the cost in ‘accidental victims and the destruction of cultural treasures’ would be too high. He opts for a more classical course of action. Mounted on horseback, like Napoleon crossing the Alps, the Jewish farmer’s son from Ukraine rallies the fleeing Red Army at the very gates of the city, persuading the troops to turn back against the enemy. The counter-attack succeeds. The Whites fall back in disarray.
By this time Denikin’s advance on Moscow has ground to a halt. There is no popular upsurge to carry him on to victory as he had hoped. And the Bolshevik regime has not collapsed as expected. The White army of 1919 is well equipped and well led–but it is not the popular force the anti-Bolshevik rebel armies of 1918 seemed set to become and is far outnumbered by the Red Army. A long, slow retreat begins.
MANCHESTER, ENGLAND: A letter from Vienna arrives at 61 Bloom Street. Sam Freud, a local businessman, tears open the battered envelope. As expected, it is from Uncle Sigmund, the family success. ‘Life is hard with us’, Freud writes. ‘I don’t know what the English papers tell you–maybe they don’t exaggerate.’
Much of what Sigmund writes, Sam already knows: that the Austrian crown is worthless these days and the city unable to feed itself. The railways that once connected Vienna to the rest of the world are now like the pathetic stumps of an amputee, cut clumsily by the bloody surgeons of Paris. A once-peaceful Continent seems perpetually torn between revolution and reaction. ‘Which rabble is the worst?’ Freud asks another correspondent. ‘Surely the one just on top.’
But it is the news of family which affects Sam most. ‘We are living on a small diet’, he reads, ‘the first herring some days ago was a treat to me. No meat.’ Whoever can leave Austria has already left. ‘My own family is dissolving rapidly’, Freud writes. ‘Ernst has got a job in Berlin in the Palestine settling business, Oli looks forward to an engagement in the Dutch colonial government, ready to go to the East Indies… Anna will be the only child left to us.’ Sam fingers a photograph sent with the letter. His uncle Sigmund looks sterner than he used to, he thinks.
‘You know I have a big name and plenty
of work’, Freud writes, but never enough to make ends meet. (He does not mention Edward Bernays, his American nephew, who at that very moment is finishing off the translation of some of Freud’s lectures for publication in America, in spite of a cable from Vienna countermanding the project.) Sigmund writes out a list of necessities which, if sent post-haste from Manchester, might make it through to Vienna unharmed: fat, corned beef, cocoa, tea and English teacakes…
PRANGINS, LAKE GENEVA: Charles and Zita Habsburg take a different tack. In October, a pair of emerald bracelets and a ruby brooch are put up for sale. Later in the autumn, a set of emerald pieces earns the family a little over one million Swiss francs, enough to keep them in imperial style for a few more months at least.
WASHINGTON DC: For weeks, no one outside Woodrow’s immediate family, his valet Brooks and the White House servants see the President. Edith allows no outside visitors. (An exception is made for the King of the Belgians, Woodrow’s host from the battlefield tour in June.) The President’s chief of staff is kept out. Even Colonel House is left to wonder what is going on. The first outsider to see Woodrow properly, a month after his return to the White House, is Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, currently leading a crackdown against a coal miners’ strike he has declared to be as deadly as an invading army and probably Bolshevik-inspired.
Edith decides what correspondence reaches the President, and what is ignored. She is his gatekeeper, his avatar. Much of the daily work of presidential government–such as the appointment of ambassadors–simply grinds to a halt. The rest is left to cabinet secretaries to sort out as best they can. Some measures taken sail close to constitutional impropriety. In consultation with Woodrow’s advisers, Edith goes so far as to deploy the presidential veto against a wide-ranging law on the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment, defining what ‘intoxicating liquor’ is to mean in practice and how prohibition is to be applied. Rabbis and priests, for example, are allowed to make sacramental wine, but not allowed to sell it to anyone other than other rabbis and priests; doctors may prescribe liquor, but must keep a list of the patients who have received it, for examination at any time. Edith’s veto is overridden by Congress the same day. The clock to nationwide prohibition ticks down to 1920.
Woodrow’s doctor is evasive about the President’s condition. He laughs off suggestions of a cerebral lesion. ‘Nervous exhaustion’ is the preferred terminology. But the signs are there of a more serious illness. A draft of the President’s annual Thanksgiving proclamation is returned without a single word altered–very unlike the President–and with a signature, scrawled in pencil, that is virtually illegible. Edith Wilson, people joke, has become America’s first woman President.
The truth is that there is a power vacuum. Nature abhors such things. Ambitious politicians rather like them.
MUNICH: ‘Are we citizens or are we dogs?’ the mangy field-runner asks his audience. While keeping his day job as a member of the army’s propaganda team, Adolf is making a name for himself as a rising star on Munich’s far-right political scene and the newest member of the German Workers’ Party.
His speeches rage at those in power. They tell a story of hopes dashed and dreams betrayed. Germany has been cheated, Adolf declares. Never in the whole history of the earth has such a shameful peace been signed. ‘Instead of the understanding we hoped for, we have deceit’, he says: ‘instead of reconciliation, we have violence’. He shakes his fists and slices the air with his hand, copying the gestures he has picked up from other political orators. One student compares his technique to that of the playwright revolutionary Ernst Toller.
Adolf is connecting with his public and becoming the chief recruiting officer for the German Workers’ Party. At the end of one of his speeches, the chairman of the meeting–the slick-haired Thule Society member Karl Harrer–urges the audience of students, soldiers and shopkeepers to bring three friends each to the next event. At another party meeting, the police note a new energy, with three hundred in the audience now. To keep up the momentum, a further Christmas meeting is planned, despite the ban on heating public rooms so as to conserve coal and wood through the winter.
The mangy field-runner finds that his talent as a speaker opens doors to people he would never have dreamed of talking to before. He latches on to the German translator of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, another Thule Society member, as someone who understands Hitler as he sees himself: as an artist.
LONDON: The teams that travelled to observe the eclipse in Brazil and Principe earlier in the year finally present their findings to the public. The Royal Astronomical Society is packed. A portrait of Isaac Newton hangs on one wall.
Rumours of the results have been circulating in the physics community for a few weeks now–Einstein and his colleagues have already exchanged celebratory poems. But it falls to Britain’s Astronomer Royal, the successor to Newton–and a mild sceptic of relativity as a theory–to announce the results to the wider world. ‘A very definite result has been obtained’, he tells the gathering. The deflection of light shown by the Sobral and Principe expeditions corresponds–within reasonable bounds of error–to the values predicted by Einstein. The Astronomer Royal calls the result ‘part of a whole continent of scientific ideas affecting the most fundamental principles of physics’. A sceptic present points to Newton’s portrait and warns against accepting all of Einstein’s ideas on the basis of a few photographs. His voice is soon drowned out.
For outside the room, a popular craze erupts. The rule of the absolutes has fallen, in science as in politics. ‘Revolution in Science’, runs the headline in The Times: ‘New Theory of the Universe. Newtonian Ideas Overthrown.’ Suddenly, everyone is grappling to understand Einstein’s ideas–and their implications for everything else. For if time and space are not as straightforward as they seem, what else might prove to be just an illusion, a trick of the mind? People who have never given a thought to why up is up, and down is down, now find themselves perturbed–or invigorated. Occultists wonder if talk of an Einsteinian ‘Fourth Dimension’ holds, at last, the secret to telepathy or communication between the dead and the living. Painters and poets see relativity as the portal to a new world view where–of course–they can act as the true interpreters of a shattered reality. The bewildered public find relativity blaring at them alongside news of war and revolution across the world. The New York Times runs a gargantuan headline: ‘Lights All Askew in the Heavens. Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations. Einstein Theory Triumphs. Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry’. What does it all mean?
In Berlin, Albert is besieged by well-wishers, many of them foreign. A scientist from Yorkshire writes asking for a signed photograph to add to his collection of Austrian, Hungarian and German scientists. Albert fields invitations to speak from around the world and the Prussian government jacks up his salary by fifty per cent to make sure he returns to Germany. He is asked to write popular articles about relativity for the masses. In The Times he illustrates relativity by joking that now that he is considered a success Germans claim him as a German and the British call him a Swiss Jew–but if he were ever to fall out of favour Germans would certainly refer to him as a Swiss Jew and the British as a German. Einstein complains to his friends that he can’t get any work done these days, that his life is now just ‘telegrams, ringing telephones, stacks of letters’. ‘I can hardly breathe anymore’, he complains to one correspondent.
Fame has arrived. And with it controversy. Some are uneasy at yet another success of German science so soon after the war. There are scientists who dislike the over-hasty elevation of a fellow scientist into a demigod. They demand more proof (and rather better photographs) before succumbing to the craze. Some wonder if relativity–and the rush with which it has been embraced–connects to some deeper strain of sickness in the world. ‘For some years past,’ an American professor writes, ‘the entire world has been in a state of unrest, mental as well as physical’. Is it so far-fetched
to imagine that all the symptoms of this unrest–war, Bolshevism, relativity, even jazz–are linked somehow? Perhaps they have a common psychological root, as if the whole world were suffering from the same neurosis.
For those who liked the world as it was–or as they imagined it was–Einstein is not a scientist so much as a sorcerer, a necromancer, a hypnotist of the masses. His theory must be squashed.
ACROSS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Mitchell Palmer sees his chance to act. Two years to the day since Lenin’s coup in Petrograd, the Bureau of Investigation lashes out at Bolshevism–real or imagined–in the United States. The borders are sealed. The raids begin around nine in the evening.
In Detroit, agents surround a major theatre showing a Russian play. A Russian-speaker is sent in to announce to the audience that some of them will not be going home that evening. A pool hall popular with Russians is raided near Pittsburgh. Boarding houses are stormed in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The main hit is at the Russian People’s House in New York where over two hundred are rounded up as members of the Union of Russian Workers, an organisation suspected of anti-American treachery (its constitution contains a line about socialistic revolution, making all foreign members liable for deportation). American citizens, who it would be illegal to hold without charge, are quickly released, as are those who do not appear in Hoover’s card index. But by the following morning nearly forty others have been identified as worthy of deportation. They are marched to Battery Park and put on boats to Ellis Island. ‘We’re going back to Russia–that’s a free country’, one shouts. Some have black eyes. It is the history of the United States in reverse.
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