Unsurprisingly, such denunciations would often bring to the surface the embarrassing question of the similarity between Russian oppression of Jews and others and American treatment of blacks or, for that matter, of Chinese and Native Americans. In the United States these issues arose with such regularity in discussions regarding Russia that, as one historian has observed, “comparisons of the problems in the United States to troubles in Russia became so common as to seem almost a reflex.” In 1892 the platforms of both the Democratic and the Republican Parties denounced religious persecution in Russia amid widespread criticism of Russia’s antisemitic practices—most recently a mass expulsion of Jews from Moscow the year before.2
A wide range of motives fed such preoccupations, including the inclination to emphasize Russian obscurantism, thus sidelining the alarmingly commonplace practice of lynching as well as urban antiblack riots. Another crucial ingredient was Protestant- and Catholic-inspired contempt for Russian Orthodoxy. On the Left, it was the protestations of figures like the London-based exiled anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin, the most congenial of all Russian radicals, whose leadership inspired the “Free Russia” movement of the 1890s.3
Though it had lost much of its momentum by the turn of the twentieth century, the critique of Russia’s sins returned to the front pages of American newspapers with the Kishinev pogrom. “When refugees from Kishinev docked in [New York] harbor,” as the historian Christine Stansell has written, “their saber wounds still festering, there were people from the Henry Street Settlement there to meet them and publicize their plight.” Some feared at the time that Kishinev’s impact on left-wing politics in the United States, centered on the Lower East Side but with ample spillage beyond it, could well overshadow attention to the spike in antiblack violence, including lynchings-turned-riots in Delaware and Indiana in May 1903. Others insisted that, with pogroms now entering the American lexicon as synonymous with race riots, Russia’s horrors would sensitize Americans to the need to react with urgency to their own country’s indignities as well.4
Denunciations became commonplace, as evidenced even a decade and a half later in Forverts in the wake of the St. Louis race riot of 1917: “Kishinev and St Louis—the same soil, the same people. . . . Actually twin sisters that could easily be mistaken for one another.” The Jewish communal administrator Oscar Leonard, an immigrant from Russia, insisted that the Black Hundreds “could take lessons in pogrom-making from the whites in St. Louis.”5 It was Kishinev’s horrors—followed soon afterward by the pogrom wave of 1905–6—that would propel a new cadre of activists, many of them Jewish, for whom the conflation of lynching and pogroms would be second nature. The belief that such travesties were born of similar causes—the connivance of authorities, the rightlessness of the victims—helped give the issue of black injustice a prominence it had not enjoyed before.
This intersection between the call for the protection of blacks from lynching and Jews from pogroms would provide the immediate backdrop to the launching in 1909 of the first major American organization for the promotion of black civil rights: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP. The high visibility in the United States of pogroms in Kishinev’s wake gave a new sense of urgency to calls for the protection of blacks. Kishinev’s influence on the politics of the American left—with the Yiddish-inflected preoccupations of the Lower East Side suddenly overflowing well beyond its immediate confines—also helped create a lexicon for the condition of America’s blacks with comparisons to that of Jews under the most barbaric of autocratic regimes.
For decades Americans had tended to see Russia either through the lens of a Protestant prism, lacerating its primitive Russian Orthodox Church, or through that of an abolitionist critique of serfdom. An example of how Kishinev’s pogrom, too, was made to fit readily into a Christian framework was displayed in the first book to appear in any language on the massacre: W. C. Stiles’s Out of Kishineff: The Duty of the American People to the Russian Jew, which was rushed into print in June 1903. A retired Congregationalist minister, Stiles acknowledged that the “widespread interest, not to say excitement” in the pogrom “indicates an opportunity to draw the lessons of the case.” Such lessons from the massacre (which left, as he reported, 240 dead) included proof of a Russian people who beat old men “in the presence of their sons . . . delicate women [were] violated and killed in the sight of their own children.”6
Such Protestant-inspired criticisms of Russia were represented by the Society of American Friends of Russian Freedom, a stepchild of Boston’s antislavery movement, which had by then run out of steam. Starting in mid-May, it was the Plehve letter—more so than the Kishinev pogrom itself—that would galvanize the movement’s sudden rebirth. Such efforts were pushed from the start by the Hearst press, which was publishing day after day Michael Davitt’s harrowing reports from the streets of Kishinev; these were augmented by banner headlines in Forverts and the Jewish press nationwide. Protest meetings would be held in twenty-seven American states, and a petition with the names of more than twelve thousand dignitaries would be forwarded in June as part of a formal call on the Russian government to investigate the pogrom, sent by President Theodore Roosevelt with the request that it be presented to the foreign minister and the tsar.7
Amid this cacophony, political radicals marginalized in the wake of the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley by an anarchist found a new, increasingly resonant voice. Much of their activity would concentrate on relief for pogrom victims. At the same time the widespread empathy for the victims, with its attendant message that tsarist Russia was no better than a prison house for Jews, opened up a full array of new prospects for left-wing endeavors.
Emma Goldman’s rise to national prominence would occur amid the furor surrounding Kishinev. Just a few years earlier she had found herself so browbeaten after the McKinley assassination that she took an alias and found it necessary to earn her living at a Madison Avenue facial and massage parlor. She managed to extricate herself—emerging as the first immigrant-born celebrity to rise to national fame from New York’s teeming Jewish ghetto—initially in the role of a theatrical promoter for a Russian troupe, the first of its kind to tour the United States, showcasing a wildly successful production built around the Kishinev pogrom.8
To be sure, Goldman had previously achieved a considerable reputation on the Lower East Side as an orator, and in 1897 had embarked on her first cross-country lecture tour. But it was only once she promoted, in the winter of 1905, the work of Pavel Orlenev’s St. Petersburg Dramatic Company that she would be catapulted into widespread prominence. Just a few months earlier, in late 1904, Goldman had cut her teeth as a promoter of the speaking tour of Catherine Breskhovskaya, the “grandmother of the Russian revolution,” who was the first Russian radical of real prominence to appear on the American lecture circuit. Breskhovskaya did much to popularize the plight of Russian radicals under tsarism; her message was all the more effective because of the nobility of her bearing and her combination of integrity and straightforward intelligence. She appeared onstage with Goldman at her side as an interpreter. The tour electrified liberal and left-wing audiences, introducing Goldman, too, well beyond immigrant circles.9
But it was Goldman’s achievement—while still using the unlikely pseudonym Smith—in introducing the first Russian theatrical troupe to tour the United States, ushering them onto Broadway with the financial help of German Jewish donors, celebrities, and the literary elite, that made Goldman into a household name. The vehicle was a ragtag group of actors who had arrived in the United States with little more than a sheaf of supportive letters signed by Kropotkin and others, with no financial backing and essentially penniless. What they chose from their repertoire was a Kishinev-themed play—originally called The Jews and renamed The Chosen People—by Evgenii Chirikov. After a debut at New York’s Herald Square Theater with the guarantee of just one performance, Goldman took them under her wing, first caring for the entire troupe i
n 1905 at her summer retreat on Hunter Island near Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx (they slept in tents) and eventually booking further Broadway performances. With the use of both charm and relentless drive, Goldman induced Ethel and John Barrymore, the actor-manager Henry Miller, a collection of German Jewish grandees, and other luminaries to join the audience. “Now that I had greater access to the American mind,” Goldman wrote in Living My Life, “I determined to use whatever ability I possessed to plead the heroic case of revolutionary Russia.” The Chosen People served, as she saw it, as the best of all ways to do just this, and she stepped into the roles of the troupe’s manager, translator, and press agent.10
Chirikov’s play had been written in 1904 and published, without the pogrom scene at the end, in Russia. It had been praised by Maksim Gorky but savaged by most Jewish critics as didactic, lacking in drama, and essentially dull. Still, because of its explosive content, it could not be performed in Russia until 1906, when censorship restrictions lessened in the wake of the 1905 revolution. It first appeared onstage as it toured abroad in Germany and the United States.11
The performance is built largely around a series of conversations about Jews and their fate. Its male characters are shown mostly as cool, rational, and blind to the feelings of its female characters, which are the source of true wisdom born of the heart. The lead character is Liia, a Jew expelled from the university because of her radicalism. The crisis brings her to a deep affiliation with Jews, born mostly out of awareness that it was ignoble to abandon one’s own people under siege.
In the play the description of the Kishinev pogrom is given to a Zionist, and soon after his harrowing account the Jewish characters are overwhelmed by a mob. Facing the likelihood of rape, Liia takes her own life. In stark contrast to Liia’s stalwart resolve are the male characters, all of them incapable of reacting adequately to the crisis; for example, one accidentally shoots Christian workers seeking to defend Jews. Others are too weak or uncertain to do anything at all. Audiences responded enthusiastically to the play’s message that there was an undeniable dignity to Jewish victimhood as represented by the noble Liia. The play, as Goldman would describe it, took the New York stage—and, unsurprisingly, the audiences of the Lower East Side—“by storm.”12
Once Goldman emerged from this episode, she quickly dropped most of her ethnic ties. She minimized, as Stansell observes, her Russian past, taking her first steps toward becoming an American cultural celebrity, “something that few immigrants . . . and no immigrant Jewish woman had yet done.” Much like Eugene O’Neill, who managed at more or less the same time to move beyond the world of Irish American letters—the first writer from his background to make this transition—Goldman with the use of Kishinev managed to shed, by and large, the remnants of her background. Leaning on the many useful contacts forged during her work with Orlenev—whose troupe soon fell apart because of rumors that some of its actors were, in fact, outspoken antisemites—Goldman found herself able to raise the funding to launch her remarkable magazine, Mother Earth, the freshest voice at that moment on the American Left.13
For others on the American Left, the Kishinev pogrom—and the widespread outbreak of attacks on Jews in the wake of Russia’s constitutional crisis in the fall of 1905—moved them to recalibrate the issue of American blacks. Conflation of the sins of Kishinev with those of American lynching would surface as an item of paramount concern on the American Left, with pogroms and lynching increasingly viewed as evil twins.
The explosive interest surrounding Kishinev prompted surprise in some of the black press, with several outlets noting the stark contrast between an overall indifference to the mistreatment of American blacks and concern about the treatment of Russia’s Jews. Hence applause for the American petition decrying Kishinev—an effort supported by many in the South and elsewhere who had publicly justified lynching—was scorned in several black newspapers. Such criticism appeared in a cluster of independent newspapers, especially those that had rejected the moderating influence of Booker T. Washington; these papers were mostly small and poorly funded but nonetheless likely representative of a significant swath of black public opinion.
That the mayor and city council members of Evansville, Illinois, had signed the Kishinev petition in June, and then in early July defended those who attacked blacks in the same city—the riot forced thousands to flee into the woods from their homes—elicited angry responses. Many black papers were infuriated by Booker T. Washington’s expressed sympathy for Kishinev’s Jews (“the horrors of Kishineff were shocking to the last degree”) but unwillingness to condemn antiblack violence close to his own home. Chicago’s Broad Axe attacked his “hypocrisy [that] . . . is more than enough to shame the very devil and all his imps in hell.”14
Jewish leaders were also subjected to accusations of hypocrisy by black newspapers. One of the heads of the Philadelphia branch of B’nai B’rith, the organization responsible for drawing up the Kishinev petition, rejected any comparison between the pogroms and lynching, saying that “with rare exceptions [lynching] originates in crimes committed by Negroes.” Reactions in black newspapers were fierce. Still, comparisons between Kishinev and lynching were commonplace in the black press. As the Cleveland Gazette stated on May 23, 1903, “The terrible massacres of Jews last week in Kishineff . . . are only what have taken place many times in the south.” True, the numbers killed in Russia were larger, but the similarities outweighed the differences, since “the inhuman brutes of the southern part of this country are actuated by the same miserable motives”; their actions were “the dirtiest blot upon the world’s escutcheon.”15
Yet the same newspaper, known for its iconoclasm, also drew on the findings of a prominent French antisemite who disparaged the American public over its reaction to Kishinev while showing general indifference to lynching. There were no greater scoundrels, the paper insisted, than those Jews who campaigned for the rights of Russia’s Jews while ignoring the mistreatment of American blacks. “Of all the morally wretched defenders of this crime . . . the American Jew who defends lynchers while denouncing Russian massacres—as some do—is the most contemptible.”16
The first to formulate concrete proposals, however, drawing on the comparison between the treatment of blacks and Russia’s Jews, was a married couple, once darlings of the American Left: William English Walling, the founding chairman of the NAACP, and his Russian-born Jewish wife, Anna Strunsky. Before surfacing as leading proponents of black civil rights, they—particularly Walling—had gained a national reputation as major interpreters of the Russian radical scene. Indeed, before John Reed’s canonic evocation of the 1917 revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World, which was published in 1919, it was Walling’s 1908 Russia’s Message: The True World Import of the Revolution that provided the fullest account of the Romanovs as seen through the eyes of an American radical. The book was so influential that it would even be translated into Russian. Its treatment of Jewish suffering was extensive, if also unreservedly sympathetic, with considerable attention paid to the community’s staggering poverty, government persecution, and anti-Jewish massacres and with Kishinev’s pogrom described extensively. The couple spent nearly two years in Russia amid the turbulence of the 1905 revolution and its aftermath, interviewing scores of radicals, officials, and others. This work was aided greatly by Strunsky’s native Yiddish and Russian.17
Their backgrounds could not have been more different. Walling was born into a wealthy Kentucky family; Strunsky, living first in New York and then in San Francisco, was born into a secular, left-leaning Jewish clan whose home figured among the liveliest of San Francisco’s bohemian salons, attracting the likes of Jack London (who was, for a time, Strunsky’s lover). Walling had long sought out—together with other patrician-born, left-wing friends—Jews on New York’s Lower East Side, exploring, as one later recalled,
. . . the teeming life down there. In those days when immigration poured countless thousands into the Lower East Side, most of them young, with pol
itical oppression behind them and new lives suddenly opening here, the whole vast region had become a melting pot for new ideas debated at a feverish heat in numberless cafés, large and small. Though in many the only drink was tea or coffee, and the men and boys and girls who gathered there worked hard by day, most of them beginning at dawn, still those night discussions would run on till three or four o’clock. . . . We went to the Yiddish theater, too, . . . to meetings in Cooper Union and to Bowery barrooms.18
Unsurprisingly, Walling found just this exotic intensity in Strunsky, a remarkably intelligent, strikingly attractive Jew. By the time they met in 1905, Strunsky was in her late twenties and had already coauthored a book with London, The Kempton-Wace Letters, which explored the interplay between rationality and emotion in romantic love. Built out of a series of letters inspired by the couple’s many conversations on the subject, it is a stilted, clotted volume, packed nonetheless with a fierce intensity. Since her late teens, Strunsky had won for herself a reputation as one of Northern California’s most sought-after socialist speakers. She was chair of the local Friends of Russian Freedom and editor of the Berkeley-based journal Russian Review. Her autumn 1905 diary records lectures at the Sequoia Club, Ruskin Club, Oakland Socialist Branch, Jewish Council, and Socialist German Branch. She was a beautiful woman, and according to one admirer who knew her from her days as a Stanford student, had “soft brown eyes, a kindly smile and a throaty little voice that did something to your spine.”19
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