Forgotten Man, The

by Amity Shlaes

  For the high-spirited Tugwell, part of the trip was about having a good time. Half a century later, Stuart Chase would write Tugwell, asking whether he recalled when “you, Bart Brebner and I were the ‘Three Musketeers’ in Moscow in 1927.” At one point the group split up, and Tugwell traveled down the Volga on a barge, insisting that his interpreter and captain teach him a folksong about a Russian Robin Hood, “Stenka Rasin.” In exchange Tugwell taught the Russians “Beulah Land.” He rode in private railway cars—“ancient but gaudy” first-class wagons-lits from the days of the Romanovs—through Cossack country. Tugwell kept notes; he dined out. He wondered, as he always did when he was abroad, whether his life was on the correct path: after another preceding period overseas he had taken leave from academia for a year to farm beside his father before deciding the move was a mistake. The more earnest Douglas, himself considerably distracted by his own dying marriage, at one point reproached Tugwell for his lack of gravity.

  But when it came to their work, Tugwell, like the other travelers, was serious enough. Committed to researching agriculture reform, he fought off offers to see factories and demanded visits to farms instead. He noted, first of all, that while conditions were still terrible within the Soviet Union, they were probably improving: “The manor houses are gone; only the drab villages remain,” he wrote, concluding that “here is a bit more to eat of a little better quality. There is a radio in the village hall. There is more wood for warmth,” he would later write. New England might be slowly dying; the Soviet Union to his mind represented “a stirring of new life hardly yet come to birth.” He loved the idea of economics being made subservient, itself like a serf, to the good of the rural village: “with us, prices are a result; in Russia they are agents of social purpose.” Tugwell insisted on more visits and was duly granted them.

  Tugwell found himself admiring the active role of the Soviet government toward farming. He liked the idea of the agronom, the farm manager or bureaucrat, who oversaw a set of farms or a region. The Russian farmer, he noted, “suffers from price-disadvantage, it is true; but so also do farmers all over the world.” Tugwell pointed out a difference from the United States: in Russia, the farmer’s challenges were the subject of genuine government controversy. “There is a disposition to do something about it. Can this be said of the U.S. government?”

  Most of all, however, it was the villages that impressed Tugwell. Many had not yet been collectivized, but they were still relatively cooperative compared to rigidly fenced New England. This cooperation he perceived to be natural, indeed, inevitable—“cooperation is forced in the nature of things.” In his own childhood, there had been similar cooperation. He remembered traveling over New York’s Ellery hills to a friend’s house with his father, only to find the family not at home. The pair had fixed a meal from what they found in the buttery nonetheless, a fact which did not bother their hosts, when they returned, in the slightest. That was the way things were, in the old agricultural community. Under the czars, Tugwell noted, village farmers too had shared—“Russia was communal in this sense long before it was persuaded to Communism in the Marxian sense.”

  Tugwell believed that what remained of private arrangements also needed to be ended; it was time for “abandoning the old one-man, one-plow method.” After all, in a big communal field “a tractor can go as far and fast as it is capable of doing without the bother of fence corner turnings. Socially, the village has great advantages if it is not too closely built or too big.” Further rationalization might work if only the stubborn peasant would cooperate. And even though he disliked the Soviet dictatorship from the start, he was struck by the authority of Russian propaganda and its enormous success. Always, the Russians they met up with “told us what our country was like.” This simultaneously horrified the progressive in Tugwell and pleased the efficiency expert in him: “I knew from then on how determined dictators come to manage a people.”

  Meanwhile Chase was looking into industry, his area. The official goals of the Russian state planning commission impressed him deeply. This was “the attempt to do away with wastes and frictions that do such dreadful damage in Western countries.” The scale of the management took his breath away: “Sixteen men in Moscow today are attempting one of the most audacious economic experiments in history…they are laying down the industrial future of 146 million people and of one-sixth of the land area of the world for fifteen years.” Chase continued, “These sixteen men salt down the whole economic life of 146 million people for a year in advance as calmly as a Gloucester man salts down his fish.” And, Chase noted with enormous admiration, “the actual performance for the year 1928 will not be so very far from the prophecies and commandments so calmly made…. One suspects that even Henry Ford would quail before the order.” Perhaps the United States could organize its economy in similar fashion. Chase, like Steffens, believed he saw something that worked. All this went far beyond the planned efforts to stimulate the consumer advocated by William Trufant Foster and Waddill Catchings, or Herbert Hoover’s careful constitutional constructs.

  Chase paid a call to the offices of Gosplan, the state planning commission now charged with running the economy. Here he found that phenomenon Tugwell had longed for in a Nation article: a nation unified as if at war—but during peacetime. “Its atmosphere,” he recalled after the trip, “reminded me strongly of the Food Administration Barracks in which I worked at Washington—the temporary partitions, the hurrying messengers, the calculating machines, the telephones, the cleared desks.”

  George Counts, the education man, was even more excited than Chase. In Russia, he saw, schools had already moved beyond being John Dewey’s Lab School or Eleanor Roosevelt’s Todhunter: they were indeed, just as he had hoped, vehicles of “the collectivist social ideal.” Professional education, denied the common man under the czars, was officially available to all: “All academic standards were abolished and the doors of the higher schools were opened to the members of the working class regardless of their qualifications.” There were adult education courses for workers, schools for political literacy so that all manner of adults might familiarize themselves with Marx and Engels. Physical education, another emphasis of American progressive educators, was moving forward here at a pace they could not dream of at home. “Basketball and volleyball are good Russian words today,” wrote Counts. In revolutionary Russia even women ran hurdles. The whole country seemed to be hurdling ahead of the United States.

  When it came to the question of labor, James Hudson Maurer, the senior leader, was thrilled by the data: 92 percent of the eligible workers had enrolled in unions. “There were no anti-strike laws and nothing resembling our curbs on them,” he would later note in awe. He conducted his own tests of union independence: “Everywhere I went I asked the workers: ‘Are your unions controlled by the government?’” The reply? “It is our government and they are our unions.” A woman at an electric supply plant told Maurer: “Now we are free, free!”

  The Soviet literacy programs inspired Maurer, who had learned to read so late himself: “Under tsarism 85 per cent of the masses were illiterate. New schools were everywhere in evidence and compulsory attendance laws were strictly enforced.” This sounded better than what he himself had grown up with as the son of a shoemaker. In Moscow, Maurer got a chance to meet an exiled hero of the left, Big Bill Haywood of the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World. There was the wonderful feeling of political friends meeting in a new setting. As it turned out, Haywood would die a few months later, and Maurer never forgot the meeting.

  Douglas for his part was less enthusiastic than the others. He was interested in so much: the trade union movement, wages, pensions for senior citizens, the consumers’ cooperative—he would write up essays about four of these topics after his departure. Big innovations grabbed his attention, but so did little ones—fourteen million Russians, he noted with wonder, had created 60,100 cooperative stores, all since the time of the Russian Revolution. But he also found on his tours
, to his shock, that differences of opinion “were not tolerated.” Chase and he were asked to give a speech to workers on the night shift at an airplane factory. When Douglas completed his remarks, the workers began shouting, “Sacco and Vanzetti.” This meeting was taking place, after all, around the time of the execution. The cries touched Douglas—Sacco and Vanzetti were important to him, too. But Sacco and Vanzetti had enjoyed “the full defense of the law,” Douglas told the workers. Then he launched a counterattack, repeating an ugly story he had heard about the factory. “‘But what about yourselves? Two months ago a group of bank clerks were arrested at two o’clock in the morning.’ Here the interpreter stopped and refused to go on…. ‘They were tried at four o’clock and executed at six. Where was their right to assemble witnesses, to engage counsel, to argue their case, and, if convicted, to appeal?’”

  The workers shouted back, but what Douglas would remember for decades was a young woman who approached him with a countering argument. “You talked only about individual justice. This is a bourgeois idea.” Douglas was taken with her, and talked for an hour. Leaving, she told him, “History will prove us right and you wrong” and wrote her name down in his notebook: Betty Glan.

  Still, even Douglas set aside his hesitations when big interviews materialized. Trotsky, one of the Soviet Union’s original ruling troika, was already on his way out that summer. But he still had a small post, commissar of foreign concessions, and of course found time to meet with this group. The group arrived with a long list of questions, and was kept waiting for half an hour. Trotsky entered the room wearing, Douglas the diarist would later note, “an immaculate white linen suit.” He picked up their prepared questions, and pronounced it “a very nasty list of questions.” Then he answered the questions rapidly—to Douglas, he seemed like a showman. The interpreter made it all seem elegant by delivering replies in Oxford English.

  The end of the trip approached, and the group was still angling for an appointment with Stalin. The plan was an on-again, off-again one, a typical mid-junket arrangement that seemed unlikely to be followed by the reward of a meeting with the Soviet Union’s leader. Preoccupied with his own plans and likely feeling tired of the tour, Tugwell opted to play hooky and headed off on September 9 again with Chase to see some modernist paintings. As Tugwell would later write, with appealing honesty, “We had been good the day before and gone to see Trotsky and thought we had done our duty by the high command.” It was easy to understand why Tugwell ran the risk—the rebel in him probably found a lot more in common with Trotsky, the intellectual’s Communist, than with Stalin.

  But Tugwell missed his rendezvous with history. For this time, the appointment hour, 1:00 p.m., came without further vacillation by the Kremlin. Robert Dunn, John Brophy, and Paul Douglas all went for the interview. So did Louis Fischer, an American who was writing pro-Soviet articles for left-wing American periodicals out of Moscow at the time. So, as it turned out, did a journalist who was visiting Moscow for the New York Times, Anne O’Hare McCormick.

  Those who did attend kept notes. Douglas: “Recalling the deeds of terror that had been committed there throughout its history, I shivered as we entered Red Square and then went through the gates of the Kremlin.” A small pockmarked man met them in a cloakroom; Douglas assumed it was an attendant. But the man took the head place at the table. It was Stalin. “His low brow was clear under a square-ish brush of black hair that made his head look oddly cubist,” wrote Anne O’Hare McCormick. “He looked like any of a million Soviet workingmen,” commented Fischer. “Deep pockmarks over his face,” read Fischer’s notes; “low forehead”; “ugly, short, black and gold teeth when smiles.” Whereas Trotsky had worn white, Stalin wore khaki. Douglas thought he saw a private’s uniform, Fischer a civilian suit. The pants legs he stuck into high black boots. Fischer sought to capture the moment in every medium possible. In his notebook, next to the words, he made pencil sketches of the leader’s head.

  The group expected an hour with the leader. They got six and a quarter. One thing struck them even before the meeting started: Stalin’s charm. He was not dashing like Trotsky, but he seemed in a way more genuine. What came through was that Stalin had done his homework and touched on the issues that interested them—workers’ insurance, for example, Douglas’s pet research area since the days of the loggers. Stalin knew all about La Follette’s strong 1924 showing. A questioner asked how Stalin knew that the Russian people were behind him. He answered that the Bolsheviks would never have come to power if they were not popular; today heads of unions were all Communists, again a fact that reflected grassroots support.

  Stalin also took time to emphasize that his government was an ethnically diverse one, with a Ukrainian, a Byelorussian, an Azerbaijani, and an Uzbek in the central executive committee of the Soviets. There were also, Fischer would later write, questions about religion: must a Communist be an atheist? Yes, Stalin answered, and even as he answered, church bells across the street rang. The guests laughed, and Stalin smiled—as if to signal the tolerance he could not articulate officially.

  Stalin also rejected the notion that U.S. Communists worked “under orders” from Moscow as “absolutely false”—itself a lie. As the group drank lemon tea from a samovar, Stalin made his case: the Soviet Union and the United States might trade together even if they had different systems—the new doctrine of Socialism in One Country.

  Fischer reported that no one but a serving woman entered the room during the course of the meeting; she brought cheese, sausage, and caviar sandwiches. (Brophy reported tea and cookies.) There must have been an interpreter and stenographer present. After several hours the guests made an attempt to go; Stalin would not permit it. Instead he turned the tables and asked questions of the delegates. The transcript of these questions, published within a week in Pravda, give as clear a snapshot as any document of the tactical and strategic goals of Soviet foreign policy. Stalin wanted to make the point that he had a genuine labor following in the United States, and he wanted to sideline those organizations that had sidelined him—with the aid of his interlocutors. He had already skewered the anti-Communist American Federation of Labor. Now he set about doing so again: “How do you explain the fact that on the question of recognizing the USSR, the leaders of the American Federation of Labor are more reactionary than many bourgeois?”

  Brophy allowed that the AFL had a “peculiar philosophy.” Dunn took time to point out that the AFL was too close to capitalists—especially Matthew Woll, AFL vice president. Brophy was the one who spoke the last formal words of the visitors to Stalin before they departed. In Stalin’s official transcript, the travelers gave the Soviet leader what he sought, a form of U.S. blessing: “The presence of the American delegation in the USSR is the best reply and is evidence of the sympathy of a section of the American workers to the workers of the Soviet Union.” As the group left, Douglas spied a bust of Karl Marx, with full beard, in the corner. Contemplating it, he was startled to feel a heavy hand on his shoulder. It was Stalin. They joked about whether Marx had worn a necktie.

  Several of the travelers sensed that they had been used to an extent they had not foreseen: “we realized that in his speeches he was talking over our heads to the newspapers, in answer to Trotsky,” Brophy would write. Anne O’Hare McCormick, confused, retreated to racialist imagery for her report: Stalin, she said, was a hybrid of east and west, almost “Occidorient in person.”

  The vessel that returned the group home to America was not the President Roosevelt this time but the Leviathan. The irony of that name may not have escaped some of them. On shipboard, Silas Axtell, the lawyer, bitterly objected that some of the other labor people on the trip were producing a report far too positive. As he later recalled, “The whole report was written with such a solicitous and affectionate regard for the welfare of the dominating group in Russia, whose guests we had been, and the impression from reading the report was so different from the one I had received, I could not possibly subscribe to it.” Dou
glas likewise quarreled with Robert Dunn over the content of their joint essay. Dunn was painting the picture too rosily, Douglas maintained. Later, he discovered that Coyle had diluted his discussion of civil rights in the published report.

  Axtell and Douglas may have been thinking of another intellectual pilgrim who had met Stalin before them: Emma Goldman. Goldman had had every reason to accept what she saw in Russia; the United States of Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge was unlikely to welcome her back. Yet when she learned that Stalin was imprisoning her beloved fellow anarchists, she had grown skeptical. And when the Bolsheviks—led by the same Trotsky of the white suit—bloodily put down their fellow Communists in Kronstadt in 1921, she had turned against the Soviet Union entirely. “I found reality in Russia grotesque, totally unlike the great ideal that had borne me upon the crest of high hope to the land of promise,” Goldman wrote. Though she really had nowhere to go, she left Communist Russia and shortly published a monograph on the false freedoms of the Soviet Union, My Disillusionment with Russia.

  A decade after Emma Goldman’s experience, and five years after the 1927 delegation, Arthur Koestler, a young Communist, would also be repulsed. He found that the Soviet Union had developed a neat trick for bribing young intellectuals. Through its State Publishing Trusts it would buy the rights to a book or article—with a different payment for an edition in each one of the Soviet Union’s multiple languages. Koestler reported selling the same short story to as many as ten different literary magazines, from Armenian to Ukrainian. The place really was, he would note ironically, “the writer’s paradise.”