Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  Lenin’s headaches are getting worse. ‘A mass of current work’, he complains. ‘I am becoming tired.’ Will he live to see the day history proves him right? His father worked himself to an early grave at the age of fifty-four. Vladimir is fifty-one.

  LONDON: Ten days in, and Michael Collins admits to Kitty that he is beginning to grow lonely, away from her and away from home.

  In Dublin, he feels himself the master. In London, he feels himself oppressed, a servant amongst masters. He is being spied upon at Mass, he complains to Lloyd George. He has information that a photograph snapped in the British capital is now being circulated in Ireland. His anonymity has been compromised. One night he takes himself off for a drive alone to get things straight in his head. ‘Rather funny–the great M.C. in lonely splendour’, he writes self-consciously. The next afternoon he visits an old friend in jail, and makes a scene when the prison governor refuses to let in two other men he has brought with him. ‘Mr Lloyd George won’t thank you for being discourteous to me’, he shouts, his breath heavy with the smell of whiskey. Collins ends up staying nearly four hours in discussion with the jail’s Irish inmates.

  Yet there are few such outings. Most of the time, Michael Collins is alone with his thoughts and his compatriots. He decides to grow a moustache.

  NEW YORK: Shuffle Along is doing so well that Sissle and Blake decide to assemble a second cast to take the show on tour.

  This time, Josephine–Josephine Baker since she married a Pullman porter called Willie Baker–is not leaving things to chance. She travels up to New York from Philadelphia (leaving Willie behind). She hangs around the theatre. She sleeps rough. And when the time for the audition comes, remembering what she was told a few months before, she borrows a friend’s powder to lighten her skin the way northern audiences are said to like it. Sissle and Blake aren’t there. The audition is run by the show’s manager, Al Mayer. Once more, Josephine is told she looks too young and too thin. (She is fifteen and still growing.) But she gets a job as a dresser for the other girls. And soon enough, when one of them falls ill, Josephine Baker is put on the chorus line. Right on the end, where she can’t make too much trouble with all her out-of-time, energetic gyrations.

  But the audience seem to like that kind of thing. ‘Is that cross-eyed girl in the show?’ people ask, before deciding whether to come and see the show a second time. Word gets back to New York. The girl has got something.

  DUBLIN–LONDON: No compromise, no concession. ‘There can be no question of our asking the Irish people to enter into an arrangement which would make them subject to the Crown, or demand from them allegiance to the King’, Éamon de Valera writes to the negotiators across the water. ‘If war is the alternative we can only face it.’ He refuses to go to London himself.

  A furious row breaks out amongst the Irish negotiators in the capital. Collins sees de Valera’s game more clearly than ever: to bind the hands of the peacemakers with an impossible task–peace on his terms, and his terms only–and blame them when they fail.

  BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA: The magic city of the South is celebrating its fiftieth birthday. The streets are awash with confetti. A daredevil pilot performs terrifying tricks in the air while his passenger swings from a rope attached to the plane, holding on only by his teeth. The city’s hotels are swamped.

  A crowd of a hundred thousand–blacks and whites stand separately–gather in the newly renamed Woodrow Wilson Park to hear a speech from Wilson’s successor. The sun is high in the sky. A raised dais is draped with American flags. The mood is patriotic. As President Harding stands, he is greeted warmly, despite his party’s generally poor showing in the South. The President warms up rather slowly, moving crabwise to the subject that he has really come to talk about: race.

  Wars are great accelerators of change, he notes, and this last war has changed things around the world. ‘Thousands of black men, serving their country just as patriotically as did the white men, were transported overseas and experienced the life of countries where their color aroused less of antagonism than it does here’. Their conception of their role as citizens has changed–and that must be reflected in Alabama, in the South, across the nation. ‘I would say let the black man vote when he is fit to vote’, Harding says. That is shocking enough for some. But it gets worse: ‘Prohibit the white man voting when he is unfit to vote.’ In the black section of the crowd there are great cheers.

  Everyone knows how hard it is for blacks to register to vote in the South. When a young preacher and student named Michael King attempts to do so at City Hall, Atlanta, he is directed to an office on an upper floor which can only be accessed by an elevator for blacks which never works, or a staircase–which is for white use only. Some see such underhand techniques as the only means of keeping white supremacy intact, and quite defensible as a result. Harding has a different message. If Southern blacks do not believe they will be better treated, they will move north. The South’s economy will slow. Society will atrophy. Birmingham’s second half-century will be less bright than its first.

  When it comes to equal political rights, the President is blunt: ‘whether you like it or not, our democracy is a lie unless you stand for that equality’, pointing at the silent whites in the crowd. But he is wary of the word being misconstrued. The right vote and to succeed economically should not be taken to mean equality of blacks and whites in society at large. Social equality is a dream. Harding advocates cooperation not integration: ‘racial amalgamation, there cannot be’. He wishes black men to be the best black men they can be, ‘not the best possible imitation of a white man’. Race pride, Harding says, is healthy. ‘Natural segregation’ is its consequence.

  Reaction to the speech divides broadly on party and geographic lines. A Senator from Mississippi warns: ‘if the President’s theory is carried to its ultimate conclusion, namely, that the black person, either man or woman, should have full economic and political rights with the white man and white woman, then that means that the black man can strive to become President of the United States’. A Senator from Georgia, where half the population are black, is angered by the idea that a politician from Ohio ‘should go down in the South and there plant fatal germs in the minds of the black race’. Supremacist assumptions run deep.

  Marcus Garvey welcomes Harding’s speech. He calls the President ‘a sage, a man of great vision’ for reframing the issue of black and white as a global issue, rather than as the special preserve of the Southern states. He views the speech as a vindication of his own approach. ‘How long can Americans continue to lynch and burn Negroes?’ he asks. For as long as it takes blacks to organise themselves around the world, he replies. He chides the Mississippi Senator who says he is in favour of justice for blacks yet cannot envisage the final consequence of political equality: a black President. ‘If I cannot be President in the United States of America as I desire,’ Garvey says, ‘I am going to be President in Africa.’

  Garvey likes one of the President’s phrases in particular, about black men taking pride in being black rather than, in Garvey’s words, ‘trying to bleach up ourselves, straightening out our hair to make it look like the white man’s’. That, he says, is ‘a great slap at Dr Du Bois’.

  LONDON: ‘The weekend (notwithstanding my own unpleasantness) did me a great deal of good’, Michael Collins admits to Kitty after a short break in Ireland in November. ‘The constant and changing fresh air was a great tonic.’ On the way back, he admires the autumn leaves falling off the trees, and the sun glimmering on an Irish lough. ‘Really, I never thought things looked so lovely’, he writes. ‘Perhaps it is that I was happy’.

  Duty pulls him back to London, and the hope of peace: one moment close enough to touch, at another as distant as the moon. The negotiations grow more hectic. Lloyd George tries to cajole the politicians of Northern Ireland (while privately informing the King that he will not order any more shots fired in southern Ireland). Collins shuttles between his London residence and meetings at the Grosvenor Hote
l. During breaks in the talks, he consents to having his portrait painted. (There are rumours that he is having an affair with the artist’s wife.) Collins sits facing the door, as if expecting a messenger to burst in with news at any moment, or in preparation for a quick escape.

  DÜBENDORF AIRFIELD, ZURICH: Two faintly familiar figures, Mr and Mrs Kowno, arrive at a private airfield just outside town to pick up a single-engine Junkers, chartered to take them to Geneva. Their pilots–two Hungarians and a Bavarian–are ready and waiting. There is little in the way of formalities to complete. Shortly after taking off, just after midday, the aircraft banks hard and makes a full turn. Not towards Geneva, then? Levelling out, a course is set due east.

  Mr and Mrs Kowno are Charles and Zita Habsburg in disguise, off to claim the crown of Hungary once more–this time with a little more force and forethought. Though there is a some confusion amongst his allies over the exact date of the King’s arrival–meaning loyalist forces are not quite fully mustered by the time Charles and Zita’s plane touches down in western Hungary–the element of surprise is nonetheless maintained. The day after Charles’s landing, troops loyal to the Habsburg Crown are entrained for Budapest. It is only once they are under way that Horthy learns of it. The admiral sends panicked orders to local garrisons to tear up the railway lines to impede the royal progress. The garrison commanders decide to leave themselves out of it. In desperation, Horthy spreads the rumour that the Czechs are invading. Budapest University students are raised into a defensive battalion.

  But Horthy is a politician, and Charles is not. Deep down, Charles believes that honour goes with rank. So it is that, when his train gets to the outskirts of his capital, he decides to appoint as commander of his royal forces the most senior officer he can find, taking his loyalty for granted. And then tasks him with settling matters with his enemy. Charles halts outside Budapest, waiting for the obstacles in front of him to be cleared up by his subordinates. The result is predictable. A stand-off develops, giving Horthy all the time he needs to persuade Charles’s freshly appointed commander to defect. Overnight, when Charles thinks a ceasefire has been agreed (ostensibly to give time for peace negotiations to take place the next day), the Habsburg positions are overrun without a shot.

  Charles and Zita spend one last night on Hungarian soil, as guests of an aristocratic family that count their period of service to the Habsburg cause in centuries. Within a week Hungary’s erstwhile King is on a British ship, heading down the Danube, bound for exile in a destination yet to be decided (but certainly further away than Switzerland). Within two weeks, they have passed Belgrade and are at the mouth of the Danube, emptying into the Black Sea. A few days further and they are passing through the Bosphorus. Docked in the occupied Ottoman capital, the Emperor is fitted out with a new set of civilian clothes, including clunky American shoes (which Zita hates). They are not allowed ashore. ‘One could have imagined oneself back in the time of the Crusades’, the Empress notes as the city she knows as Constantinople (or is it Istanbul these days?) slips by. It is a strange cruise, this final journey to God knows where.

  Eventually, in Gibraltar, orders are received for the ship to make for the Portuguese island of Madeira, in the Atlantic. No one knows what government there is right now in Portugal. ‘Not that it matters’, remarks the British captain cheerfully; ‘in a fortnight there will be a different one anyway.’ The Portuguese republic has earned itself a reputation for instability. Bombs go off in Lisbon all the time. The premier was killed by one just a few weeks ago. It is to be hoped that Madeira will be more peaceful.

  ROME: In November, Benito Mussolini gets back to basics. He fights a duel with a newspaper editor he has taken a dislike to. In a fencing bout lasting a little over an hour–ten minutes spent fighting, fifty minutes with the unhealthy newspaper editor recovering his breath–Mussolini is triumphant. The duel is reported as news in Il Popolo d’Italia. Such things matter in the macho world of Fascist politics.

  A little over a week later, Mussolini engages in a more subtle duel, with his Fascist rivals. At a congress in Rome, Benito renounces his earlier pact of pacification with socialist unions and embraces the ras from Venice and Bologna. In return for this shift in policy, the regional power-brokers now accept Benito as their Duce and agree to his programme of reform of the Fascist movement. A National Fascist Party is established, with a clear central command structure. Offices in the regions will provide a counterbalance to any centrifugal tendencies. The blackshirts will become a Fascist militia. What fascism itself means is left somewhat open: it is a movement, it is energy, it is a state of mind, it should not be bound by a single programme as such.

  The contrast of the determined Fascist movement with the weakness of the state, and the vacillations of its traditional leaders, escapes no one. The squadristi are unleashed to drive the point home, and to warn against any attempts to suppress them by force.

  MOSCOW: ‘If, after trying revolutionary methods, you find they have failed and adopt reformist methods, does it not prove that you are declaring the revolution to have been a mistake in general?’ Lenin asks. ‘Does it not prove that you should not have started with the revolution but should have started with reforms and confined yourselves to them?’ Absurd! One should not allow such defeatism. The kind of anti-revolutionary nonsense a German Social Democrat might come up with. How childish.

  Vladimir imagines a day in the distant future when gold will be used to build public lavatories. What better way to show the workers that the capitalist age has finally bitten the dust, and that its gods no longer rule. But the capitalists are not quite finished yet. Even now they are preparing for a new war over gold, between themselves. It is inevitable. ‘They intend to kill twenty million men and to maim sixty million in a war say, in 1925, or 1928,’ he writes, ‘between say, Japan and the USA, or between Britain and the USA, or something like that.’

  KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI–ARLINGTON CEMETERY, VIRGINIA–WASHINGTON DC: The fighting has been over for three years. But it is still fresh in the memory of those who gather in their thousands to inaugurate a monument to their fallen comrades in the heartland of America, honoured by the presence of military commanders from Britain, France, Italy and Belgium. ‘America Impresses the Allied War Chiefs with Youth, Hope, Bigness and Fairness’, reports the New York Times. The most senior figure present is the Frenchman Marshal Foch.

  In Indianapolis, the seventy-year-old French marshal watches a motor race where the winning car averages a hundred miles an hour. A quarter of a million gather on the streets to welcome him to their town. Across the Midwest, Foch kisses a lot of young ladies on the cheek, confirming ideas of French gallantry towards the fairer sex. The entire student body of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor turns out to salute him as his train travels past to Detroit, where he visits an automobile factory. Foch’s message to America is one of thanks–but with a political undertow. ‘France did not want war in 1914’, he tells one dinner audience. ‘We don’t want it now’. But to keep the peace, the alliances of war must be maintained. The two great republics must stand shoulder to shoulder.

  As the French supreme commander is applauded on his travels across the United States, the American Unknown Soldier is borne across the Atlantic by a naval flotilla. On 11 November 1921, the two processions converge in Arlington Cemetery, where the Unknown Soldier is interred for ever. Woodrow and Edith Wilson travel to the cemetery in a carriage and are greeted by a roar of approval as they pass.

  President Harding makes a speech, carried by telephone cable as far as San Francisco. He recalls a recent demonstration of modern weaponry: the ‘rain of ruin from the aircraft, the thunder of artillery, mortars belching their bombs of desolation, machine guns concentrating their leaden storms’. He swears that the sacrifice of the Unknown Soldier, and that of millions of others, will not have been in vain. ‘There must be, and there shall be, the commanding voice of a conscious civilization against armed warfare’, he intones.

  The next
day, a naval disarmament conference gets under way across the Potomac, the first time such a conference has been held in America. For the American delegation the key aim is to restrain the Japanese and keep China open. Britain wants to prevent a financially crippling naval race with the United States. The French seek to maintain their position in the calculus of global power. The Italians hope to become masters of the Mediterranean. The Chinese want further recognition of their sovereignty. The US Secretary of State shocks the conference by suggesting that hundreds of tons of naval shipping be scrapped, starting with a list of vessels he calls out by name. He proposes a new ratio for the tonnage of the world’s navies, putting America on a par with Britain, and the rest behind. It is a new ratio of global power.

  BUKHARA, TURKESTAN: As Mustafa draws closer to his goal of unquestioned leadership of the Turks of Anatolia, his rival Enver moves further east, into the wilds of Turkestan, hoping to find redemption in a new struggle for the freedom of the Turkic peoples of central Asia–against the Russians, this time.

  ROME: A few weeks after Albert Einstein’s halting Italian lecture in Bologna, Benito weighs in with his own views on the subject of relativity. A debate is brewing in Italy about the new science. He does not want to be left out.

  Some in Italy, including those associated with the Fascist movement, see relativity (and its linguistic cognate, relativism) as a German–Jewish plot to confound the world with the destruction of absolute truths. It is a philosophy of disorder. (Einstein himself is wary of over-interpreting the consequences of relativity for philosophy, preferring to view science as science, more or less insulated from other kinds of speculation.) A society without truth cannot have order; and a society without order at home cannot succeed in the global struggle for power abroad. In this light, relativity is a pernicious attempt to prevent the restoration of basic authority and stability necessary for the re-establishment of Italian national power. It is German philosophy, weaponised.