The mystery is not why Trotsky was at the reception in Brownsville, Brooklyn but who had arranged it. The staff members of Forverts, including its editor-in-chief, Abraham Cahan, were based predominantly in Manhattan. Ludwig Lore, another of his regular contacts at Forverts, was holed-up at 55th Street, some six miles west in Borough Park. Furthermore, his colleagues at Forverts were busy making arrangements for a much larger reception in Manhattan the following week.
The most obvious candidates for arranging the ‘do’ in Brownsville would have to be Louis C. Fraina, whose partner Jeanette Pearl had been brought up in the area and Gregory Weinstein, the editor of Novy Mir, who was based at 393 Hinsdale Street. But there are other options too, not least Alexis Sheftel and Meyer Aronson on Sutter Avenue, or other Brownsville notables like Dr Michael A. Cohn, a veteran of the Haymarket riots and successful local realtor who had bankrolled the career of American anarchist, Emma Goldman. In what was a possible connection to Sheftel’s co-signatories on the March 1901 petition, Prince Kropotkin and Warlaam Tcherkesoff, Cohn had founded a New York-based reboot of the pair’s ‘Bread and Freedom’ movement (Broyt un Fray Hayt), a group that had drawn much of its inspiration from the ‘Khlebovoltsy’ standards of anarchist communism that defined the spirit of the First Revolution in Russia. Like Sheftel and Aronson, Cohn also had his base at Sutter Avenue. By 1917, the Bread and Freedom group had a reservoir of young new blood to draw on, including Joseph Cohen and Eli Greenblatt. The greater part of the group — and their press — left for Russia on the same boat as Trotsky when he abruptly ended his stay in New York in March a few months later. [1] According to his nephew Victor Rabinowitz, Cohn left a copy of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution to him in his will after his death in 1939. [2] If Trotsky’s success during that First Revolution really was the reason for the ‘hero’s welcome’ celebration thrown by the Yiddish radicals of Brownsville, then it’s plausible enough, certainly.
Another clue may be provided by Arthur Concors, the Superintendent of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society who met Trotsky off the ship at Ellis Island when he landed in the country on January 15th. At the time of the reception in Brownsville, Trotsky had been in New York little more than a week. Despite the best efforts of biographers attempting to novelise his arrival we don’t know how he was feeling, whether it was raining, whether it was snowing, how many gulls were circling above the pier or whether the boys of the NYPD choir were singing ‘Galway Way’. It was shortly after Christmas, so it has to be possible. We have to be careful when it comes to filling in the gaps as all too often they can seize control of events as they might have happened, like an army of extras invading the stage or a team of unauthorised set designers deluging it with props and period features that run the risk of overwhelming the story that is being told. If left unchecked, it wouldn’t be long before they were trying to persuade us that it was an allergic reaction to the bird-shit raining down from the gulls circling above the dock that day that prompted his premature retreat from New York in March. We don’t know about many of these details because neither Trotsky nor any others of those immediately involved left a record of these things. Trotsky’s own account of the stay is unusually light on actual detail. He even warns American readers of his autobiography, My Life, that he may very well disappoint them. His only profession in New York, Trotsky tells us, was that of a “Revolutionary Socialist”. He had arrived in the city with a “profound faith in coming revolution” and a sneaking suspicion that once unleashed, America would rise from the ashes of the holocaust that would reduce Europe to little more than a cemetery. The “economic and cultural centres of gravity” would shift the United States — a country a good deal more equipped to deal with revolution, and certainly more equipped than most to pose a serious challenge to the autocracy of royal Europe. Immediately on arrival, Trotsky embarked on his mission with the energy and zeal one might typically associate with someone with only weeks to live. Courteous and respectful at first, it is clear he quickly tired of attempts to draw him into the various, and ultimately trifling power struggles within its emerging Socialist Workers’ movements. The “life rhythm of the monster known as New York” was a little beyond his interest or his grasp. He was here to peer only into its forge. Like some foundry supervisor with only the most casual, passing interest, he was observing the machines, examining the workers and making the recommendations for adjustment or repair. According to Trotsky, it was a tour of inspection and little more. [3]
Trotsky wasn’t unaware of the legends that had built up around his stay in New York or of the sheer volume of people who claimed to have seen him or have met him during his momentous ten week visit. Some sixty years later, the Sex Pistols gig at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall on June 6, 1976 would elicit a similar stream of improbable claims. If everybody was there who said they were there, the venue would have needed the capacity of Wembley Stadium. The reality is that forty people turned up to the gig and contrary to urban legend, neither Trotsky nor Lenin was pogo-dancing or gobbing phlegm down at the foot of the stage. In all the various accounts of his time in New York few if any have spared a great thought for Arthur Concors, but given his status among Hebrew immigrants the man most likely to have arranged Trotsky’s reception in Brownsville would have to be Concors or one of his colleagues at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
Sadly, our knowledge of Concors is sketchy. As Superintendent of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, it was Concor’s task to offer legal representation to any Jewish refugee seeking asylum in the country. For the majority of immigrants, it was simply a case of ensuring their safety and that their rights were being observed. Concors would examine their papers, ask them about any abuse they may have suffered during transit, provide them with fresh clothes, and if necessary, a bed for the night. One particularly poignant story from August that year finds him assisting a Russian mute, originally from Kovno who had found himself down on his luck and thrown out of his house on Madison Street. One day he had been walking down the Lower East Side when he was suddenly struck by a seizure. He fell to the sidewalk writhing in pain. A crowd of children had gathered around him as he tried even harder to make some kind of noise that would get him assistance. His incoherent mumbling had drawn only laughs from the children as they taunted him and laughed at his agony. A short time later he was whisked to Bellevue Hospital and judged insane, unable to speak to prove his sanity. Within days he was incarcerated on Wards Island, registered as John Doe. It soon became evident that he had a passion for reading books in Hebrew, Yiddish and English. A short time later, some of his speech had returned and to the hospital’s astonishment the staff found that he was pronouncing the words of a prayer audibly and correctly. A social worker reported the case to HIAS and Arthur Concors was brought in. Soon it was discovered that his name was Getzelowitz. He was declared sane and permitted to leave the hospital. [4]
The huge volume of Jewish Russian immigrants now arriving at Ellis Island had seen the society grow from a small group of advisor to a full-on relief and support system. Despite the attempt of Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 to restrict numbers, the annual volume of new arrivals had increased from 57,000 in 1902 to 76,000 in 1903, before eventually reaching a mid-decade peak at over one hundred thousand in 1904. A further series of restrictions attempting to disqualify on issues relating to education, skills and disability, increased the demand for ensuring fair practice and that everybody who was legally entitled to stay, stayed. As a response, the fairly casual operations of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society were scaled-up significantly and a permanent base established at 232 East Broadway with its sister project, the Sheltering Society, at 229-230 — the eventual HQ of Paul M. Kaplan’s Russian Socialist Revolutionary Central Committee. HIAS’s first Superintendent was Alexander Harkavy, an expert of Hebrew texts and the very first Russian to have been honoured by the Oriental Society of Constantinople.
As a former member of the Pioneers of Liberty (Pionire der Frayhayt), Alexander Harkavy is celebrated these days as much for his anarchism as his philanthropy. At the Pioneers group in New York he would rub shoulders with the likes of Alexander Berkman and Saul Yanovsky. For many, Harkavy would have been seen as a bit of a contradiction. On the one hand he was an eclectic and cosmopolitan radical, and on the other he was the respected Hebrew academic who had produced the world’s first English-Yiddish dictionary. Despite being an enthusiastic member of the Chovevei Zion movement, among the first groups to have actively promoted and campaigned for larger Jewish settlements in Palestine, Harkavy leaned more and more towards the notion of an international Jewish Nation. As Harkavy saw it, the Jews had done more to progress human culture than any other race. For him, Jewish autonomy and culture went hand in hand. His English-Yiddish dictionary had helped establish Yiddish as a legitimate language and emphatically reinstated it in an “assimilation-prone society.” He also published several instruction manuals to teach Yiddish-speaking immigrants English, American history, and how to become American citizens. For Harkavy and others like him, the Palestine Settlement movement was a response to the dangers being presented to the world’s Jews in its most disturbing trouble-spots. [5] Though something of an ideological ally when it came to the issue of assimilation, the eventual meddling of the infinitely more Conservative — and infinitely more wealthy — Jacob Schiff, began to see Harkavy take on a more constrained role. Schiff had bankrolled a scheme to have a large volume of immigrants conveyed to the Gulf State of Texas and New Mexico, a radical distribution concept conceived to help relieve the increasing congestion — and rising antisemitism — in New York’s Lower East Side. For Schiff and his co-directors at Kuhn Loeb & Co, re-routing the ships to Galveston from Ellis Island was also a good way of diverting the Socialist vote and maintaining some political equilibrium. That he was also making a few quid from the commercial agreements with the German Shipping companies transporting the immigrants to Galveston was obviously an added bonus. Harkavy’s response was to embark on a fact-finding mission to Russia in which he would seek the support of the Imperial Russian government and Duma representatives to see if they could bypass Germany altogether and secure their cooperation in providing Jews who wished to travel with safe passage to Ellis Island. His fears were that more widespread distribution would lead to a failure to preserve their character and ideals. [6] Schiff muscled his way back into the fold by offering to pay the $40,000 mortgage on their east Broadway HQ. With contributions amounting to little more than $7,000 a year, Harkavy and the board had little option but to accept.
Joining and eventually replacing the Bronx-based Harkavy at HIAS was publisher and activist, Jacob Massel and the New York Herald’s Russian correspondent, Herman Bernstein. Shortly before his departure, an announcement had been made in Forverts calling for an ‘American Jewish Society for the Regulation of Immigration’. Joining Harkavy on the list of signatures were the names of Labour Zionist Nachman Syrkin, ‘Galut’ Dispora Nationalist, Chaim Zhitlowsky, and Socialist dramatist David Pinski. [7] The links between Massel, Alexis Sheftel, and the dramatist David Pinski are covered in other articles, but Massel and Bernstein’s director statuses at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and their various relief efforts in Russia both during and after the war promises to shed some light on the much overlooked welcome meeting in Brownsville.
Trotsky’s $10,000 fund
For those not already familiar with Trotsky’s trip to New York, and assume it to be the upshot of some colossal Jewish conspiracy involving a fantastic coterie of Wall Street bankers and sinister global power mongers, Trotsky’s Mi5 file does offer a modicum of insight. A memo from New York dated March 22, 1917, states in a typically terse and urgent fashion that an “important movement has been started among Socialists backed by all Jewish funds, behind which are possibly Germans, with a view to getting back Revolutionary Socialists into Russia under expected political amnesty with the object of overturning present (Kerensky) Government and establishing Republic”. [8] A subsequent memo reiterates the claims that Trotsky left New York in early April with $10,000 in Jewish Socialist American funds to start a revolution aimed at overturning the provisional government by initiating a peace movement that would end the war with Germany.
In all fairness, even if the $10,000 in cash had come from Jewish supporters, it seems doubtful that the warm-hearted donors were ever truly aware of the scope of Trotsky’s intentions, probably having dug deep into their pockets for the purposes of aid, rebuilding and bringing an end to a brutal war. $10,000 in 1917 would have had the purchasing power of around $150,000 in today’s money. A follow-up memo dated June 16th, 1917 claims the $10,000 had been collected by the Ludwig Lore and the staff of the New Yorker Volkszeitung, but the intelligence being returned seems to have been based on claims made by Trotsky himself. [9] The value of the information being picked-up by the Brits is difficult to determine. In a file marked ‘Anti-War Activities in New York’ from July 28th 1917, a meeting of Lithuanian Socialists is described. British concern focuses on one of its principal speakers, Leonas Pruseika, who had criticised the American Government in “violent terms” for entering the war and introducing conscription. He was said to have been even more critical of England. Pruseika had studied law at St. Petersburg University before his dabbling with illegal activities saw him arrested and deported to Siberia for life. He had later escaped to America where he became the editor of Laisve. But there was a problem. As a member of the Social Democratic Party of Lithuania, Pruseika was at the opposite end of the peace-war spectrum to others mentioned in the memo like Chaim Zhitlovsky, whose support for a Jewish Legion to fight against the Turks in Palestine put him alongside Pinchas Rudenberg in his proximity to British and Allied war interests. There are, however, a few things that are interesting about the summer memo. It mentions that Chaim Zhitlovsky had been taking “a great interest in the affairs of the anarchists” and that it was Chaim who had put up the $26,000 bail for Lithuanian anarchist Emma Goldman and her husband, Alexander Berkman during a recent trial for obstructing the operations of the US draft laws. [10] The publication of a manifesto through the Harlem-based No-Conscription League had argued that the US draft violated the unalienable rights of Americans. The document was based around several cleverly conceived ‘exhibits’, the first identified a rather surprising statistic: England had been engaged in the war for a full 18-months before imposing mandatory military service. It had taken America just six weeks. [11] Trotsky had embarked on his voyage back to Russia on March 27th and America had officially declared war on Germany and the Central Powers one week later on April 6th. The Selective Service Act of 1917 was brought in on May 18th after being tabled for discussion shortly before Trotsky’s arrival in America in December the previous year and just one week before the Elihu Root-led delegation arrived in Russia to talk trade with Kerensky and assess the level of their support in continuing the war with Germany.
One of the many upshots of the so-called Root Commission was a ‘scheme to transfer’ Russia’s vast mineral resource to America. Petrograd’s new director of mining, S.F. Maliavkin proposed offering the Island of Sakhalien off the eastern coast of Siberia for working petroleum and coal deposits. The copper mines of the Caucasus and the gold mines of the Altai Mountains were also up for grabs. In a related scheme, Russia’s provisional Minister of Trade Vasiliy A. Stepanov discussed a major railroads project with John F. Stevens of the American Railroads Commission, with a view to modernising the vast chain of supply and distribution within Russia in a deal worth $375,000,000. It coincided with news of a further $100,000,000 loan to Russia from the United States Government. [12]Within days of the news of the sale being published, Vasily Stepanov, a liberal centrist with the Constitutional Democrat Party had resigned. He was joined by Finance Minister, A. I. Shingaroff. The series of resignations was put down to a split over the direction of Ukraine, but fears over the absorption of pure Socialism and the prospects of economic chaos had played their part too. [13] For their own safety, members of the Root and Stevens Commissions were forced to relocate to Finland, screening them from the grim reality and uncertain future of a weak provisional government and the worst of the violent excesses of the ‘July Days’ unrest. The ringleaders of the protests — Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin among them — were duly sought by Kerensky’s police. A short time later, Stepanov was replaced by Nikolai Nekrasov, one of the five men plotting to overthrow the Tsar back in November 1916. The plan had been for Tsar Nicholas to abdicate and be replaced either by his more liberal brother, the Grand Duke Michael or the British-backed, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich. After his sensational abdication in March 1917, the Tsar’s brother was offered the job as Regent to the 13 year-old Prince Alexei but a combination of health-fears for Alexei and resistance within the Provisional Government saw the whole crazy scheme withdrawn.
With Tsar Nicholas out of the war, the rich, giving soils of Russia were now free for Britain and the US to farm on a totally unprecedented scale. The chances of Emma Goldman and her friends derailing such an immense, fast-moving gravy train with a handful of anti-draft pamphlets were slim to say the least.
Goldman’s first encounter with Zhitlovsky had been in 1904, when he had accompanied 60 year-old revolutionary ‘sensation’ Catherine Breshkovsky — another close associate of ‘Murder League’ leader, Gershunin on a whistle-stop tour of America. At the age of 73, the ‘Grandmother of the Revolution’ more commonly known as ‘Babushka’ became the oldest person to sit on Kerensky’s Constituent Assembly after earning her spurs — and her most of her scars — during the 1905 Revolution. According to Goldman’s memoirs, Zhitlovsky had never tired of impressing upon her the idea that as a Jewish daughter she should devote herself to the cause of the Jews. It appears he was among the regular stream of visitors turning up at the couple’s apartment on East Thirteenth Street in Lower Manhattan during the period in which she was accused of conspiring with the anarchist Leon Czolgosz in the assassination of President McKinley in 1901. According to Goldman she was introduced to Trotsky shortly before he left New York for Russia and found the man with “haggard cheeks, reddish hair and straggling red beard … powerful and electrifying”. She confessed that the meeting had left her with a fondness for the man that exceeded even that of their friend and mentor, Peter Kropotkin. [14]
Why Zhitlovsky is mentioned in a memo describing ‘Anti-War Activities in New York’ isn’t explained as his efforts in lobbying Washington for entry into the war against Germany is there for all to see. This is really why Rutenberg and Zhitlovsky had been calling for the creation of the American Jewish Congress in the first place. That said, there were a considerable number of fringe campaigners of Lithuanian birth turning up in Alexis Sheftel’s story too, including his Brownsville pals the Aronsons, Jacob Massel, Emma Goldman and J.B.S Hardman. The British Intelligence memo’s intriguing patchwork of discrepancies and contradictions continues with a paragraph on Pavel Milyukov, the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Kerensky’s government. On the one hand, Professor Milyukov had been actively encouraging the rumours that Trotsky had perhaps been a little too close to German Americans during his ten week stay in the States. In fact, it was Milyukov who had been leading the claims that the $10,000 Trotsky had picked-up in New York through Lore’s people at the New Yorker Volkszeitung. Yet despite his grave concerns about Trotsky’s national loyalties, it was the same Pavel Milyukov who had demanded that Trotsky be released when detained by British Authorities in Nova Scotia during the veteran revolutionary’s mad-dash voyage back to Russia in the last week of March. In fact, it was during this trip that the $10,000 had been discovered. [15] In all fairness, however, whoever compiled the memo is just as struck by this anomaly: Trotsky was only released from detention by the Brits at the personal request of Mr. Milyukov who was, according to the press at least, simultaneously accusing Trotsky of being a slippery German Agent. It didn’t make a lot of sense. By May it didn’t matter; Milyukov had resigned his post amid the chaos of the April Days crisis, when the liberal (moderate) factions within the Provisional Government found themselves at odds with the Petrograd Soviet and the increasingly fractious Workers Councils. Milyukov had been supporting the Generals in their rapidly advancing war aims and expansionist ambitions in Turkey and the Balkans. The Petrograd Soviet, under Nikolay Chkheidze were not. The two factions were irreconcilable. Within months, the Soviet leader Chkheidze had been replaced by Trotsky who had been a member of the original worker’s organ during the Revolution of 1905 when it was known as the St Petersburg Soviet. Kerensky, the former Socialist Revolutionary who had found himself Prime Minister, was caught in the middle. He had the disillusioned and frustrated liberals demanding his loyalty on one side, and on the other he had the increasingly unmanageable Social Democrats, whose own frustrations were heaping further and further reliance on the more extreme Bolshevik faction of the group. As historian Helen Rappaport explains in her 2016 book, Caught in the Revolution, “it was clear that this disjointed and ill-matched dual government of Socialist Soviet and bourgeois Provisional Government was not working”. [16]
Superficially at least, there was a glaring contradiction. Within two months of the pro-war and pro-expansionist Pavel Milyukov resigning his post, the Kerensky and the Petrograd Soviet brought back Pinchas Rutenberg as Military Commander of St Petersburg. This was the same Pinchas Rutenberg who had been the principal agent in the execution of Father Gapon in 1906 and who in more recent months had been championing the British push on Constantinople from New York as part of his and Zhitlovsky’s attempts to persuade the US Congress to form a Jewish Legion. Depending on how close he thought things were to collapse, this could have been a smart or desperate move by Kerensky. Rutenberg had commanded no shortage of respect among the workers of St Petersburg during the 1905 Revolution, and it would certainly be possible to view the entire juggling act as an attempt to appease the St Petersburg Soviet were it not for Rutenberg’s activities in New York pushing the pro-war cause.
Why had Milyukov lent his support to the claims about Trotsky and Lenin being German Agents? Could it have been a precautionary measure, perhaps? Should the whole plot have gone belly-up, German plotters could have been blamed rather than Kerensky’s inner circle working in tandem with Leon Trotsky. To have both Rutenberg and Trotsky pulled from New York within weeks of each other seemed odd. Both men had astonishing reputations for intrigue and for being waspish loose canons. New York journalist and author Louis Lipsky, co-founder of the Palestine Foundation Fund (Karen Hayesod) would later describe Rutenberg as being a “solid mass of rebellion” from an “alien world”. No one was ever certain what part he had played in the revolution. Like many crypto-rebels coming to America at this time he came seeking funds for a “bewildering chain of related parties”, his pockets always stuffed with “secret communications, plans and orders”. Lipsky describes Rutenberg as walking around the streets of New York furtively glancing backwards over his shoulder in an attempt to pick out spies. [17] If Rutenberg was back in Russia serving in a key role of defence under the new Kerensky government, then it was probably on the recommendation of the British whose irrigation and electrical projects he’d been busily preparing in Palestine and Italy.
Having Professor Milyukov in league with Trotsky might have made some sense had it not been for the fact that the fortunes of Professor Milyukov didn’t exactly prosper after the Bolsheviks came to power. Although one of the very few members of Kerensky’s former inner-circle to be elected into Lenin’s Constituent Assembly in November 1917, Milyukov was out of the job by January when the much-hyped Assembly — the outcome of the first truly free election in Russia — was formally dissolved by the Soviet leader. If Milyukov had been quietly backing the ‘strong man’ option, he’d found himself victim of ‘strong man’ protocols. By May 1918, Milyukov, the man lauded by the British press as among the Entente Power’s ‘most fearless exponents’ was in Kiev working with the German High Command in overthrowing the Bolsheviks from the south.
It was something of an enigma. The man who resigned his post over the failure of his pro-war chauvinism to thrive in the Kerensky government returns as part of the Lenin-endorsed Constituent Assembly in November, just as the Bolshevik leadership formally starts discussions on ending the war with Germany. Why didn’t Milyukov see any of this coming? He’d openly accused the leaders of being paid German agents, yet here he was returning to frontline politics as part of Lenin’s legitimate (if short-lived) constitution. The Bolsheviks had made a staggering number of arrests, mostly capitalist ministers but even hardboiled revolutionaries like Rutenberg and Burtsev, but Milyukov remained untouched. Kerensky and his former associates in the Provisional Government had, by contrast, been forced to flee the country. The bottom line is stranger still: if it wasn’t for Milyukov demanding the release of Trotsky in Nova Scotia in April 1917, Trotsky may never have got back to Russia in time, and Lenin may never have seized control. And all of this took place despite the fact that Trotsky had been telling people in New York that once he got back to Russia he would “kick-out” Milyukov and “arrest Kerensky”. Didn’t any of them read the papers?
But none of this really explains where Trotsky’s $10,000 in cash had come from or what it was going to be used for. The Mi5 file on Trotsky certainly believed it to be true even if it presented them — and us — with more questions than it answered. Ascertaining whether the money was intended to be used for starting a revolution depends on what the going rate was back in 1917. Exactly how much would you need to start a revolution? Guns, bombs, mercenaries and food provisions perhaps? The relatively modest $10,000 would probably have just about covered dining expenses.
However many American dollars Trotsky did or did not leave New York with during that final week in March, his addresses at the Beethoven Hall and Glenmore Avenue leaves us in absolutely no doubt that the powerful colony of Russian-American Jews and German-American Jews had no appetite for war, and this would prove far more valuable than cold hard cash when it came to gauging the likelihood of a weak and underprepared Kerensky holding on to power in Russia whilst remaining committed to war. [18] The whole trip had been a litmus test — feedback and running commentaries most likely being fed back to Lenin by Alexandra Kollontai, the ‘Valkyrie of the Revolution’ who was occasionally commuting to Ludwig Lore’s 55th Street apartment in Brooklyn to meet with Trotsky from her home in nearby Paterson. To my mind at least, Trotsky must have left New York pretty much convinced that Jewish commitment to a Communist International was a plausible reality and the support for its immediate rival, the Jewish Zionists, little more than a dream.
If Henry Moskowitz’s story about the Beethoven Hall address is correct, then Trotsky would have left New York knowing that he could rely on American Jewish support for stopping the war. He would also have known, perhaps through having eyes and ears on the ground in Brooklyn that the vast majority of Jewish exiles had little appetite for setting up a separatist nation in Palestine — which was, after deposing Kerensky and the Tsar, the Bolsheviks’ biggest challenge in mounting an offensive against the global state.
Interestingly, during his visit to New York Trotsky was communicating regularly with Chicherin at 12 Oakley Square in London. The house was just a few doors away from 6 Oakley Square where Lenin had spent several surreptitious weeks between November and December in 1911. On that occasion Lenin was a guest of soap agent, Richard Bridger and his wife. Interestingly it was New York’s German-American Soap Magnate, Joseph Fels that put up the cash for Lenin and the RSDLP’s Congress in London in 1907. Fels and Joseph Schiff would also be key players in organising the various Jewish Rebuilding Commissions dispatched to Russia and Europe by the Executive Committee of the American Jewish Congress in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution in April 1917. As details of the mission emerged, it was learned that Der Tog’s Herman Bernstein would go to Russia, whilst his HIAS colleague Jacob Massel of the Pinski-Massel Press would head-up a special commission in Galicia (Spain). Mr and Mrs Joseph Fels, Max Goldfarb and Jacob Schiff would, by contrast, serve in the capacity of ‘foreign correspondence’ of the Administrative Committee which was organising the various task forces involved. [19] Sholom Asch, another figure often singled-out for particular attention during Trotsky’s Brooklyn visit would play a prominent committee role in the venture. [20] Like Rutenberg, Trotsky was another of those “crypto rebels” prowling the streets of New York for “refreshment”, “renewal” and funds gathered from “sympathetic Jews”. Dangling the carrot in front of American Jews desperate to achieve a legally assured and publicly recognised settlement in Palestine had clearly paid-off. Trotsky’s fundraising mission in New York was promising to turn the world on its head.
[1] Yiddish Anarchistische Bewegung, Joseph J. Cohen, p.336
[2] Unrepentant Leftist: A Lawyer’s Memoir, Victor Rabinowitz, University of Illinois Press, 1996, p.4
[3] My Life, Leon Trotsky, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929
[4] Piqua Daily Press, August 17,1917
[5] Immigrants Against the State, Kenyon Zimmer, University of Illinois, 2015, p.30-31
[6] Shores of Refuge, Ronald Sanders, Henry Holt Co, 1988
[7] Forverts, January 10, 1909
[8] Internal Conditions, March 22, 1917, KV2 502, National Archives, Kew.
[9] Socialist Activities in the USA, 16/06/1917, KV2 502, National Archives, Kew.
[10] New York Times, June 19, 1917, p.2
[11] Manifesto of the No-Conscription League circa 1917, p.1
[12] Washington Post, July 5, 1917, p.3
[13] Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921, Lars T. Lih, University of California Press, 1990, Chap. 4
[14] Living My Life, Emma Goldman, 1931, pp. 268, 429
[15] The National Archives, KV2-502, Internal Conditions, New York, Reed, 28.07.1917
[16] Caught in the Revolution, Helen Rappaport, 2016, Windnill, p.180
[17] A Gallery of Zionist Profiles, Louis Lipsky, Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1956, p.124
[18] ‘Trotsky Says Russia’s Action is Fanning the Flame: Sees World Revolution’, New York Times, March 24, 1917, p.8
[19] The American Israelite, April 12, 1917
[20] The American Israelite, February 8, 1917, p.5