When the full cabinet meets formally the following day, de Valera discovers his old authority no longer works. His presidential prestige no longer carries all before it. On the treaty, he is outnumbered. By four to three the cabinet votes to recommend ratification to Ireland’s republican parliament, the Dáil. De Valera is unmoved. He repudiates the negotiators’ work, claiming now that it is in violent conflict with the wishes of the nation. ‘Mr de Valera steps between Ireland and her hopes’, says the Irish Times. Peace will not win out so easily.
To settle the matter, the Dáil is called together for debate. A few days later, it meets in Dublin, with its full complement of members for the first time, IRA commandants and all. An attempt is made to keep the tone civil. But tempers soon fray. The atmosphere grows rowdy. Speakers interrupt each other constantly. Emotions run high. To save embarrassment, and to keep things under control, de Valera asks for the Dáil to meet behind closed doors, as if holding a secret court martial (which is more or less what he considers it). Michael Collins prefers the open court of public opinion. ‘If I am a traitor, let the Irish people decide it or not’, he says. He lays down a challenge: ‘If there are men who act towards me as a traitor I am prepared to meet them anywhere, anytime, now as in the past.’
Collins proves a better politician than expected. Over several days of debate, he becomes the public figure he never was before, a man rather than a myth. He rises to the occasion. His prestige–and the loyalty of his associates–is thrown behind the treaty. ‘Michael Collins–his name alone will make that thing acceptable to many people in the country’, says one passionate republican, furious at the treaty and at the blind willingness of some to follow their leader into the abyss. ‘If Mick Collins went to hell in the morning, would you follow him there?’ she asks his supporters. Some cry: ‘No’. But others cry: ‘Yes’. His voice, his presence, is a factor of undeniable popular importance. It increases day by day. His speeches matter. So do his silences.
De Valera speaks at wearisome length in metaphors and riddles. He refuses to publish his alternative to the treaty he so violently rejects, fearful it will show just how little the two texts differ. Collins, meanwhile, speaks the straightforward language of an honest patriot. While de Valera talks as if he were above the people, Collins talks as one of them. He speaks for what is vital, not just for what is pure. The treaty ‘gives us freedom’, he says: ‘not the ultimate freedom that all nations desire and develop to, but the freedom to achieve it’. Those who do not wish to seize this opportunity possess a ‘slave mind’, he says. They have no vision, they have no future. ‘Deputies have spoken about whether dead men would approve of it, and they have spoken of whether children yet unborn will approve of it,’ he tells the Dáil, ‘but few of them have spoken as to whether the living approve of it.’ The country’s mood is for peace. Parliament must follow, whether its President approves or no.
In private and now in public session, Éamon de Valera grows more antagonistic. At times, he is quite incoherent in his anger. Arguments become denunciations. Those who signed the treaty are declared guilty of ‘subverting the Republic’. The words fall heavily, bomb blasts to nationalist unity. ‘When men are bitter’, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats writes to a friend, ‘death & ruin draw them on as a rabbit is supposed to be drawn on by the dancing of a fox.’ Dublin’s newspapers accuse their President of asking Irish men and women to give up the chance of freedom and peace to die for a ‘grammarian’s formula’. But that does not mean the grammarian will not win, marshalling the fury of those who have suffered under British rule behind yet more struggle for the cause. ‘Yesterday was the worst day I ever spent in my life’, Collins writes to Kitty after a long day of such speeches.
He expects to lose the treaty vote when it comes. But first a break for Christmas. A chance for Ireland’s politicians to hear from Ireland’s people.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA: Imprisoned during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson for agitating against the draft of Americans into the world war, the socialist candidate in five presidential elections from 1900 to 1920 walks free the day before Christmas, his sentence commuted by the Republican in the White House to time served. This is normalcy in action.
On his way back home to Indiana, the socialist Eugene Debs drops by Washington DC to meet the President. ‘Mr Harding appears to be a kind gentleman,’ he declares after the meeting, ‘one who I believe possesses humane impulses.’
MOSCOW: A dictator’s gift to his people.
The impatient revolutionary recalls the howls of Russian émigrés who ‘can say the word Cheka in all languages, and regard it as an example of Russian barbarism’. No wonder! ‘It was our effective weapon against the numerous plots and numerous attacks on Soviet power made by people who were infinitely stronger than us’, he tells the Ninth All-Russian Congress of Soviets. He accuses the American Relief Administration of containing such plotters, even as they feed one million of Russia’s starving people every day.
But everyone knows that times change, and that the zealous can occasionally overreach themselves. The Cheka will henceforth be reined in. It will be confined to political matters. ‘The closer we approach conditions of unshakeable and lasting power and the more trade develops, the more imperative it is to put forward the firm slogan of greater revolutionary legality,’ he promises, ‘and the narrower becomes the sphere of activity of the institution which matches the plotters blow for blow.’
The Politburo grants Lenin six weeks’ rest at Gorki, starting on 1 January 1922.
ZURICH–VIENNA: Eduard Einstein–youngest son of the great physicist Albert, theoretician of relativity and not quite a Nobel laureate–stays up to midnight writing a letter telling his father what presents he has received for Christmas: tabletop croquet, new pieces for his Meccano set, some books and a model steam engine. None of it is what he really wants, of course. ‘It would be so nice if you could spend Christmas with us one time’, little Eduard writes (aged eleven). ‘I can’t remember even when that last happened.’
The same evening in Vienna, one of Freud’s American student-patients meets a pretty Austrian girl at the New Year’s Ball. They go to the opera together. They laugh. Then–silence. He is Jewish, she discovers. The fledgling romance is broken off. The American student goes home alone through the cold streets, reverberating with anger and with shame.
1922
Between us and the Communists there are no political affinities, but there are intellectual ones.
Benito Mussolini
WINTER
DEARBORN: Suddenly, without any explanation, Henry Ford’s campaign stops dead. There are no more articles about the Jews in the Dearborn Independent. A series on banking and finance starts instead. No one can quite explain what has happened.
KOSTINO, NEAR MOSCOW–GORKI–MOSCOW: For a few days, Vladimir rests on a state farm in the countryside. Then he travels to Gorki, where he moves into a room in one of the secondary properties on the estate. Nadya remains in Moscow. Vladimir travels back and forth irregularly.
Wherever he is, the impatient revolutionary is never far from a writing pad or a telephone (he has the local telephone line upgraded to ensure he can always get through to the Kremlin). He dictates messages and scribbles instructions. He urges the Politburo to speed up the process of granting foreign concessions. The latest idea is to lease a vast swathe of southern Russia to Krupp, the German industrial behemoth which produced most of Germany’s artillery pieces in the war. He writes a directive for the Commissariat of Enlightenment on how the Soviet film industry should be organised, suggesting appropriate subjects for propaganda: ‘Britain’s colonial policy in India, the work of the League of Nations, the starving Berliners’.
In return, he receives government reports which invariably dissatisfy him. ‘In a word, it is obvious that the struggle against red tape has not moved ahead one iota’, he writes in response to an update on the anti-bureaucracy campaign he requested last year. He demands this issue be taken up again a
nd conducted in the manner of a military campaign. A few days later, he receives a note from the Commissar of Foreign Affairs wondering whether some language about traditional representative institutions should be inserted into the Soviet constitution in order to secure a trade relationship with the United States. ‘This is madness’, Vladimir scribbles in the margin. The author of such a suggestion should be forced to go to a sanatorium ‘right away’.
DUBLIN: The debate in the Dáil goes on for several days more. The lives and beliefs of men and women long dead are brought into the university meeting hall, and presented as case studies for and against the treaty. Personal animosities are given public airing. More interruptions, more points of order, more amendments, more delays, more heartfelt speeches.
One speaker calls forth an image of a proudly Gaelic Ireland unshackled from British political and cultural tyranny blossoming–literally and figuratively–from the blessings of the sweet freedom now on offer. ‘We can have our national theatres and municipal theatres, music halls and picture halls redolent of a national atmosphere’, he insists. All this is within the nation’s grasp. ‘We can have our marshes and waste lands turned into plantations and our hillsides covered with trees.’ Children will be instructed in the Gaelic language and local manufacturers will flourish once more. Are these tangible opportunities for national rebirth to be ruled out on a ‘question of formulas’? Will those who reject this chance take responsibility for ‘crushing this frail and beautiful thing in the chrysalis’?
Others urge Ireland to hold fast against temptation, and reject the current offer. ‘Now you all know me,’ says one of Ireland’s most ferocious republicans, daughter of an Anglo-Irish Arctic explorer and wife of a Pole of dubious lineage. ‘You know that my people came over here in Henry VIII’s time, and by that bad black drop of English blood in me I know the English–that’s the truth.’ The British intend no good, she says. Ireland has been tricked. She repeats a strange rumour that Michael Collins is to be married to the sole daughter of the British King as part of the proposed bargain. The principle of the republic, a principle for which men and women have suffered and died, cannot be given up. What was declared in 1916 cannot be taken back. The treaty is typical British divide-and-rule. ‘You can have unity by rejecting this thing’, says another speaker. ‘You cannot have unity by approving of it.’
On Saturday, the vote is held: sixty-four in favour and fifty-seven against. Too close to settle matters finally. Collins calls for unity behind the majority, declaring his respect for de Valera to be unchanged and that the vote is not personal. There is no echo from the defeated. ‘Let there be no misunderstanding, no soft talk’, spits a de Valera ally: ‘This is a betrayal, a gross betrayal.’ Irish nationalism is rent asunder: ‘I tell you here there can be no union between the representatives of the Irish Republic and the so-called Free State’. De Valera himself claims the republic exists and will continue to exist irrespective of the vote. He breaks off and sobs mid-speech.
The political manoeuvring continues. De Valera resigns as President on Monday, but is immediately proposed by his allies for re-election. He promises, if thus re-elected, to continue the fight against the treaty, against the majority who voted for it two days before. ‘I say that is tyranny,’ one Dáil member complains, ‘that is dictatorship’. The risk of two separate Irish governments is raised: one for the treaty, one against. ‘Mexican politics’, grunts Collins. A vote is held on the presidency. It is closer than the treaty vote but de Valera loses again. ‘You will want us yet’, he tells Collins, suggesting his side will keep themselves apart for the present, serving as a kind of auxiliary army, ready to continue to fight for true republican purity against the foreign enemy whenever the need arises. ‘We want you now’, Collins replies.
Final, desperate ideas for unity are tossed around: a coalition government of some sort, a committee of public safety comprising both members who back the treaty and those who don’t. Efforts at compromise are dismissed. De Valera’s followers have backed themselves into a corner. There is no escape. There can be no cooperation on the treaty, for the treaty must lead to the Free State, and the Free State represents–in their eyes–the negation of the republic. The centre cannot hold.
Another man is elected President. De Valera walks out of the meeting hall in response. Others follow. ‘Deserters all!’ cries Michael Collins at the departing gang, nearly half the membership of the Dáil. ‘Up the Republic!’ one shouts back over his shoulder. ‘Oath breakers and cowards!’ shouts another. Collins repays this insult in like coin: ‘Foreigners, Americans… English!’
MUNICH: Adolf Hitler and his co-defendants are sentenced to three months’ imprisonment–two thirds of which is suspended–for commissioning various acts of violence and disorder at the end of last year (such as using Nazi thugs to demonstrate the proper meaning of German unity and strength to a meeting of Bavarian separatists).
The case is reported in local newspapers. Ernst Toller, the playwright who briefly ran a Bavarian Soviet Republic during the crazy days of 1919 and who is now in prison for his pains, is told about the mangy field-runner by a fellow inmate. Hitler, Hitler? The name does not ring a bell, Ernst says. Another recalls that the Adolf Hitler he remembers from 1919 used to call himself a Social Democrat and gave the impression of someone who reads a lot of books without understanding them.
The prison sentence–which does not have to be served at once–adds to Hitler’s personal allure as a man struggling against the discredited authorities, a man ready to suffer for his beliefs. At the NSDAP’s first large-scale congress, held just days after the trial, delegates flock to Munich from all over Germany, Austria and even the Sudetenland, the border area of Czechoslovakia where German is the predominant language. Anton Drexler is allowed to say a few words. But there is no doubt as to who is really in charge. In their speeches, a string of party members declare outright loyalty to the party Führer. The party now has six thousand members and is growing all the time.
‘If they lock us up and think that will stop our movement they are making a big mistake’, Adolf thunders. ‘We will go to prison as national socialists and come out of prison, enriched by the experience, as national socialists.’ A police report suggests that, given the patriotic tone of his speeches, Hitler should be treated generously when it comes to the exact timing of his prison sentence and how long he should serve.
PARIS: Beginning to stake out his independence from Tzara, André Breton works on an idea for a new international artistic congress. Dada are invited along, but now only as one group amongst many. Recognising the affront, Tzara declines to attend.
Worried that the Romanian may now try to disrupt proceedings–as he did with the Barrès trial last year–Breton issues an ill-judged public warning against any engagement with ‘a person known as the promoter of a “movement” that comes from Zurich, whom it is pointless to name more specifically, and who no longer corresponds to any current reality’. The language is incendiary. It is personal. It borders on the kind of anti-foreign rhetoric which Barrès and others are famous for. It is André who is made to look the fool when the Parisian artistic milieu sides with Tzara.
A few weeks later André drops a bombshell. In France’s main entertainment newspaper, jammed between a notice for a fundraiser for actors killed in the war and another for Russian émigré writers stuck in Paris, appears a short article penned by Breton entitled ‘After Dada’. It is strong stuff. André accuses Tzara of being a fraud. He did not even invent the name Dada, Breton claims. Nor did he write the 1918 manifesto. He predicts a Paris funeral for Dada within a month or two, with a Dada effigy floating down the Seine.
Breton describes his own fling with Tzara’s version of Dada as ‘a bet gone wrong’. He dedicates himself to new ideas and experiences. He takes to the cafés and to the streets. He runs sessions of automatic writing and dream recitals. ‘Leave everything, leave Dada, leave your wife, leave your mistress, leave your hopes and fears… take to the highway
s’, Breton writes that spring. At last, he is free to be his own man. He is twenty-six years old.
NEW YORK: John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World is reissued in the United States in a special famine relief edition with an endorsement by the impatient revolutionary himself written two winters ago:
‘With the greatest interest and with never slackening attention I read John Reed’s book, Ten Days that Shook the World. Unreservedly do I recommend it to the workers of the world. Here is a book which I should like to see published in millions of copies and translated into all languages. It gives a truthful and most vivid exposition of the events so significant to the comprehension of what really is the Proletarian Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.’
The American Relief Administration in Russia is now feeding nearly one and a half million Russians every day.
DUBLIN–PARIS: On a cold day early in the year, a short ceremony is held at Dublin Castle, the seat of imperial authority in Ireland. Power is formally handed from the British Viceroy to the new provisional government. Collins is late, blaming his tardiness on a train strike. On a day such as this, it hardly matters. ‘The castle has fallen!’ Collins proclaims.
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