At the time that Walling met Strunsky, as described by one historian, he was “an eclectic blend of European Marxism, the American equal rights movement and a romantic populism favored with a Russian Narodnik twist.”* He counted among his ancestors from his storied Southern stock a democratic vice-presidential candidate and Daniel Boone. Lanky, broodingly handsome, a graduate of the University of Chicago at the age of nineteen who then worked as a factory inspector, he was convivial, a serial womanizer, and—as Strunsky wrote soon after his death—a man who carried with him always “a great loneliness.” His books (there were five, including one on Walt Whitman) tended to be lengthy if also rather raw and pedantic. His energy seemed boundless; his writing was typically hastily done, though, until his sudden death, it continued to command a wide readership. Active in a broad array of progressive organizations, at the time of his death in an Amsterdam hotel room at the age of fifty-nine he had just rushed from Paris for still another meeting.20
Anna Strunsky.
Strunsky had none of his restless fluency. Her anticipated work on the Russian pogroms was left unfinished, as was a manuscript, tentatively called Revolutionary Lives, a series of well-observed and passionate sketches of the many inspiring radicals she and Walling had met during their Russian travels, beginning in 1906. It remained in manuscript even in 1917, when she sought, without success, finally to publish it.21
Strunsky retained a stalwart commitment to socialism, but, after marrying and giving birth to three children (following two miscarriages), she retreated as a public figure, becoming little more than a helpmate to her prominent husband. A novel, Violette of Père Lachaise, was completed in 1905 but would not be published for another decade. When the journalist and socialist activist Mary White Ovington described the founding meeting of what would become the NAACP, launched in Strunsky and Walling’s New York apartment, she would characterize it as launched by “three people”: a Jew (Henry Moskowitz), the descendant of an abolitionist (Oswald Garrison Villard), and the Southerner, Walling.22
Yet Strunsky had set much of this into motion. Amid the turmoil engulfing Russia in the first years of the twentieth century, Strunsky and Walling worked together to amass the information for Russia’s Message. The book compared tsarist treatment of Jews to, no less, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the Spanish Inquisition, and the workings of the Mafia. Russia’s Jewish policy was, essentially, a “slow massacre system.” It described in great detail attacks on Jews in Odessa and elsewhere, the connivance of authorities, and the indifference of the police, with the official explanation of the disturbances always blaming victims for incitement. The volume included two photographs of Krushevan, whom it decried as one of Russia’s most vicious anti-Jewish leaders, responsible “for the first great massacre of recent years, Kishinev.”23
While preparing notes for an article on the Gomel pogrom of January 1906, Strunsky interviewed victims at a hospital. She described, for example, attacks on a woman who had been bayoneted and a girl with her eye gouged out. Strunsky visited the city’s most dreadful slum, an enclave known as the Hole, and she collected photographs of shrouded dead. She interviewed authorities who insisted that the attack on Jews was little more than a Jewish scam to collect insurance money. Such claims left her speechless: “My arms trembled, my eyes swam. My pen began streaming ink over my notebooks.” At Gomel’s train station the next morning, amid Jews fleeing the city, she knew that she had to drop all pretense of dispassionate journalism, recognizing that “I felt I was seeing these people for the last time, and for the last time I belonged to them.”24
Still, Strunsky bristled at the prospect of any special attention paid to Jewish political concerns: Her interest, she insisted, was in Jews as victims of oppression but not of special concern for any other reason. Particularly unimpressive were those promoting Jewish nationalism in the midst of revolution. In a draft of Revolutionary Lives dating to 1917 but based largely on interviews conducted a decade earlier, the only figure whom she took to task in an otherwise breathless paean to revolutionary devotion was the Jewish socialist activist and Bundist Mark Liber. She acknowledged his unstinting devotion as well as his intelligence but admitted her exasperation with his insistent preoccupation with Jews. Liber, she wrote, turned his back on “that romantic and highly varied result which comes out of the melting-pot of life.” It was therefore all the more ironic “that Liber and hundreds of thousands like [him], having espoused Nationalism, forsook the vision which has inspired the revolutionary and democratic forces seeking to weld the world together!”25
Returning from abroad in early summer 1908 at the time Russia’s Message appeared, Strunsky and Walling were immediately drawn to the eruption of antiblack violence in Springfield, Illinois. The birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, it was a city Walling had often visited. The riot broke out in August 1908, the first antiblack massacre in the North in half a century.
Visiting relatives at the time in Chicago, Strunsky sensed right away that this was an American version of what they had just witnessed in Russia. Explaining their sudden departure to their hosts, Walling wrote: “It was Anna’s idea to begin with. She has been anxious for years to get an insight into one of these troubles and to write a broad, sympathetic and non-partizan [sic] account—as she did to the Homel massacre.” Both arranged to publish articles: Strunsky promised to send reports to Collier’s, and Walling committed to the liberal magazine The Independent, which had already published much of his just-released Russia’s Message. Walling’s piece, which appeared on September 3, created a veritable sensation, leading one year later to the creation of the NAACP; Strunsky, once again, never managed to finish hers.26
Taking the night train from Chicago, the couple arrived in Springfield the next morning to discover that “the rioting had been continuing throughout the night, and was even feared for the coming evening, in spite of the presence of nearly the whole militia of the State.” What they found was that the town was all but unanimously committed to dislodging all of its blacks, hoping that those who had not already done so would “flee.” Seven people died, forty homes and twenty-seven businesses were destroyed, and 107 indictments would be issued against rioters.27
Much like in Russia, where Jews themselves were as often as not blamed for attacks on them, Walling found this to be the case in Springfield. As expressed in the Illinois State Journal, there was “no other remedy than that applied by the mob. . . . [It was] the negroes’ own misconduct, general inferiority or unfitness for free institutions that were at fault.” Walling acknowledged that black criminality existed there and was encouraged by the bosses of both political parties. But, again much like in Russia, ultimate responsibility for the antiblack campaign was borne by the press, which had egged on the rioters and then justified their crimes.28
The similarities between how Walling and Strunsky would understand Russia’s pogroms and the Springfield attack were striking. And both would now break ranks with the Socialist Party, which had avoided support of the nascent movement for black civil rights as sectarian and at odds with exclusionary unions. On arriving in Springfield the couple heard the riot explained away—by rioters and local officials alike—on the basis of the argument that blacks were on the cusp of taking over the city. Their incursions justified the riot, whose express goal was to run them out of Springfield. It was claimed that blacks had fired first—a standard charge in official reports on Russian pogroms as well—and that mob violence was revenge for the murder of whites.29
Walling ended his article with the warning that what Springfield revealed was that, unless checked, the heinous antiblack repression so characteristic of the South was certain to move northward: “What large and powerful body of citizens,” he asked, “is ready to come to their aid?”30
Ovington responded immediately to Walling’s call, pressing him in a letter to take the initiative to launch just such a “large and powerful body.” A few days later, on September 12, at a public meeting in New York City’s Coop
er Union, Walling and Strunsky spoke about their travels in Russia with special attention to the suffering of Jews. There the first concrete moves were made toward creating a national black defense organization. And the call for its establishment was made in direct response to Strunsky’s insistence—spontaneous, it seems, and formulated by her right on the spot—that the pogroms of Russia and the violence against blacks in the United States were horrors made of much the same stuff.31
Walling quickly countered that Springfield was, as he saw it, even worse than any pogrom. The rest of the meeting’s program then shifted to a detailed airing of “comparative oppression,” as an observer recalled, and as soon as it ended the couple sat with Ovington and several others late into the night, planning how best to launch an organization with the goal of putting a stop to the terrorizing of blacks. Over the next few weeks, as Strunsky and Walling continued their lecture tour to Indianapolis, Chicago, and elsewhere (which was slated originally to promote Russia’s Message), they shifted its primary focus from Russia to the oppression of blacks. In a letter from Strunsky to her parents in California after Walling’s first address in a black church, she said: “Great speech lasting two hours in a negro church. . . . All my family was there.”32
Once back in New York, the couple rented an apartment on West Thirty-Eighth Street, and the meeting described earlier by Ovington, where the “Committee for the Advancement of the Negro” was created, finally took place on January 9, 1909. Strunsky’s name appears among its founders. This set the stage for the first National Negro Conference—whose proceedings would be opened by Walling as the chair of its executive committee—on May 31, 1909. It was renamed, the next year, as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.33
Though so much of the impetus behind the launching of this initiative was Strunsky’s, many close to Walling saw her as little more than an attentive spouse, a rather shadowy, even dowdy figure. The critical role she played, and so publicly, in fueling attention to the plight of blacks by linking it directly to the widely publicized persecution of Russia’s Jews would recede from view. Suffering profoundly from two consecutive miscarriages—she may well have absented herself from the founding meeting at her home of the “Committee for the Advancement of the Negro” because she was feeling ill—she now retreated from the public stage and was quickly forgotten. She missed the May 1909 National Negro Conference meeting because of another miscarriage four days before.34
A socialist for the remainder of her life, Strunsky would never again achieve the prominence she enjoyed in her twenties. A great-nephew recalls how, as an elderly woman (she died at the age of eighty-seven in 1964), she was known in family circles as someone who would corner young relatives and relate lengthy tales of the famous people she had once known. She never managed to finish Revolutionary Lives (the manuscript was deposited eventually in Special Collections at Yale University), but its pages contain comments scribbled in pencil by her children with jottings of love for their mother and gratitude for the joys of her home. “I love Mother and Mother loves me, and we are the happiest people you would ever see.”35
In October 1908, at much the same time that Walling and Strunsky were beginning to cobble together what would soon emerge as the NAACP, the biggest hit on Broadway was a play built around the Kishinev pogrom. This was Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot, which debuted in Washington, DC, with Theodore Roosevelt in the audience; the president admitted in a letter to Zangwill a decade later that it still remained for him an abiding inspiration. “True Americanism” is what the play preached, as Roosevelt saw it. Zangwill likely saw the play somewhat differently, influenced as he was by an intermixture of beliefs that somehow combined Jewish nationalism and assimilation. Still, Zangwill’s starkest message, as articulated most clearly at the close of his play, was evident to all: America represented that spot where “all races and nations come to look forward” in contrast to horrific Kishinev, the site of “crimes beyond human penalty . . . obscenities beyond human utterance.”36
With the memory of Kishinev still fresh at the time of the play’s premiere, the town’s mention alone, according to one of Zangwill’s biographers, was “enough to electrify an audience.” Its protagonist is the violinist and composer David Quixano, a Kishinev orphan. His surname is meant to evoke noble Sephardic ancestry, with his profession intended—in this archly polemical production, more treatise than theater—as a refutation of Richard Wagner’s essay “Judaism in Music” and its argument regarding the inability of Jews to create truly original compositions. High-strung, often hysterical, apparently brilliant but plagued by horrific recollections of Kishinev’s brutality, Quixano is meant to be the voice of the new American:
America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! German and Frenchman, Irishman and Englishman, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American. . . . [T]he real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible. I tell you—he will be the fusion of the races, perhaps the coming superman.37
Zangwill wrote these words while also campaigning, oddly enough, as a fervent Jewish nationalist, a maverick in the Zionist movement, then at the helm of his own organization pressing for a Jewish home anywhere in the world—not excluding venues distant from Palestine. (The same year The Melting Pot debuted on Broadway, he admitted to the Jewish Chronicle that he was so busy running the London office of the Jewish Territorial Organization that he no longer considered himself a writer.) How he reconciled his play’s unambiguous call for assimilation with his public Jewish activity he never managed to explain. And the play itself, while resoundingly successful at the time and the inspiration for the most resilient of all depictions of American exceptionalism, describes a phenomenon that never existed: “The point about the melting pot,” wrote Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in their pathbreaking 1963 study, Beyond the Melting Pot, “is that it did not happen.”38
In a dramatic work that, despite its title, had little if anything to do with the United States—it was, as Glazer and Moynihan rightly summed it up, “about Jewish separatism and Russian anti-Semitism”—Kishinev provided not so much a theme as scaffolding. Zangwill summed this goal up well, explaining that this theatrical work, much like his organizational activities, was little concerned with Russia “except as a place to escape from.”39
This would become Kishinev’s most salient of all lessons. The pogrom would serve for many as the final, definitive way in which the most nagging of all questions regarding the fate of Russia’s Jews was put to rest. True, there would remain much to debate, with Jews divided, often furiously, over whether the best course was the fall of the Romanovs or flight from Russia to the United States, Palestine, or elsewhere, as the historian Ezra Mendelsohn insightfully captured in this conundrum: Here or there, and if there where?40 What Kishinev made starkly clear, as its lessons would come to be absorbed over the next few years, was that Romanov Russia was beyond repair, now for Jews no more than, as Zangwill would put it, a springboard overready for flight.
It was the pogrom and the purported letter—these now meshed together irrevocably in the public mind—that provided the most indisputable of proofs. Kishinev was fodder for a host of stark, straightforward answers, the ideal focus for Bialik’s fierce, brilliant poetic curse, for (albeit quickly discarded) synagogue liturgy, Jewish propagandist art, and the declamations of Israeli politicians to the present day.
The interplay between the wealth of readily accessible information regarding Kishinev’s massacre—a veritable mountain of data—and the proliferation of distortions regarding it remains perhaps the saga’s most profoundly intriguing legacy. A huge body of d
ocumentary evidence was readily available in the pogrom’s wake, accompanied—indeed, as often as not overshadowed—by a stream of forgeries whose lessons retain their resonance still. The massacre would provide so many Jews as well as non-Jews with a conclusive sense of past and present. It would constitute for many the final nail in the coffin for the prospect of Russian Jewish integration, the ultimate verdict on the necessity for emigration to the United States or Palestine, the clearest of all clarion calls for revolution, and the starkest of all proof regarding Jewry’s uncanny worldwide influence. It would be invoked as the grimmest of all modern Jewish humiliations, as evidence of the necessity for Jews to fight resolutely against their foes, and as evidence of a Jewish cunning so supremely manipulative that the benefits accrued from violence against Jews far outweighed its harm.
The city at the heart of this story, renamed Chişinău after the fall of the Soviet Union and the creation of an independent Moldova, is a place known mostly in recent years as one of the world’s notorious depots for international prostitution, the capital of a fast-crumbling nation-state bedeviled by corruption, petty and grandiose, with an ambiguous identity readily absorbable either into that of Romania or, perhaps less likely, Russia.
Chişinău itself possesses a certain gray, tired grandeur: a few largish parks in the city center, an imposing arch just outside its main state buildings, a beautiful ethnographic museum situated in a leafy part of town, peppered with some of the city’s more fashionable houses and embassies. To be sure, nearly all its streets are badly potholed and in need of repair; police corruption accompanied by shakedowns of foreigners are no less a fixture of the local scene than its undrinkable water. There are hints of gentrification in a cluster of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, whose decrepitude the newly rich (their source of wealth at best legally ambiguous) have designated as enticing. Most of the city’s Jews decamped long ago for Israel or the United States. A local literary scholar whose specialty is Krushevan’s fiction—for which she had great admiration—explained to me as we were sitting at the local Jewish community library that, had Jews not left Chişinău in the 1990s, it would now be faring far better economically; yet she had insisted just a few moments earlier that the real reason for the outbreak of the 1903 pogrom was that the city was packed with far too many Jews, with this justly exasperating locals. Though pressed, she acknowledged no contradiction in what she had just said.
Pogrom Page 18