But he also saw the rank and file — like that energized, raucous crowd at Carnegie Hall — as strong and militant. His hope was to harness that energy and radicalize the party, which ultimately meant challenging the existing leadership: people like Morris Hillquit and the Forward editor Abraham Cahan. The scene captures one of the growing fissures in socialism at the time: the division over World War I.
Why was the war such a contentious issue between socialists? World War I created a huge ideological crisis for socialists. Socialism was intended as an international movement. Workers in England, France, and Germany were supposed to identify as a united international working class against its common enemy, the capitalists. But when war broke out in , workers in these countries quickly got swept up in the patriotic fever and enlisted in armies to fight workers from the other countries — and socialist politicians in France, England, Germany, even Russia, led the movement.
Since America had not yet entered the war in , its Socialist leaders remained untested. Morris Hillquit , for instance, was staunchly antiwar, but also considered himself a patriotic American. Trotsky and his ally Louis Fraina disagreed with the other committee members so much that they chose to draft their own minority report to present to party members at the resolution vote of which they would win more than 40 percent. The disagreement was over how far to push things if America actually entered the world war.
Hillquit and the party leadership insisted that Socialists had to follow the law, a bedrock principle to them in trying to maintain their party within the American mainstream. But to Trotsky, Fraina , and the dissidents including, in this case, Eugene Debs himself , the war issue demanded a stronger response.
They called for general strikes and street protests designed to physically interfere with war industries, troops movements, and conscription. This, to Hillquit, threatened the existence of the Socialist Party itself. This split — ultimately between American socialists and American communists — would live on through the next several decades.
By radicalizing and energizing the socialist left, Trotsky set the stage for a split that would have devastating effects. Within three years, by , the socialist movement in America would be shattered — first by divisions between socialists and communists, then by a harsh government crackdown generally remembered as the — Palmer Raids , in which thousands would be arrested and hundreds deported.
By the late s, membership in all the various communist and socialist parties in America combined would number barely ten thousand, compared with over one hundred thousand at the time of World War I. There would be resurgences, but the numbers would never approach the earlier era. But Trotsky would always maintain his group of followers, and his ideology would adapt and become highly relevant to leftist national movements in the forties, fifties, and sixties.
He retains an appeal even today as the historical alternative, holding out the possibility that even in Russia things could have worked better. He settled his family in the Bronx, edited a radical left wing tabloid in Greenwich Village, sampled the lifestyle, and plunged headlong into local politics.
Kenneth D. He now returns to New York in a different era, the exciting eve of American entry into World War I, for his first major new book in nine years. Beyond his writing, Ackerman has served a long legal career in Washington, D. Senate committees, regulatory posts in both the Reagan and Clinton administrations, and as administrator of the Department of Agriculture's Risk Management Agency.
He continues to practice private law in Washington. But his lively book is a pleasant surprise. Trotsky in New York, is a work of popular history.
But popular history is a genre that Ackerman knows well, and he is a gifted storyteller. He has unearthed a wealth of previously little known material and produced from it a book that is appealing and thought-provoking.
But, in the main, he keeps these sentiments under wraps. Trotsky in New York, has particular relevance at a time when both America and the world face the danger, once again, of world war, and when the centenary of the Russian Revolution next year will recall the pivotal role that historic event played in ending World War I.
In this context, the author provides fresh and valuable insights into the extraordinary role that Trotsky played in New York in the first months of Unhindered by the fact that he spoke little English, he waged a political struggle for Marxist principles that had a lasting impact on the future of the socialist movement in the US and internationally, and on the political development of the American working class.
In his autobiography, My Life , Trotsky wrote just ten brief pages on his time in New York, including the following passage:. If all the adventures that the newspapers ascribed to me were banded together in a book, they would make a far more entertaining biography than the one I am writing here. My only profession in New York was that of a revolutionary socialist. I wrote articles, edited a newspaper, and addressed labour meetings.
I was up to my neck in work, and consequently I did not feel at all like a stranger. Trotsky arrived in the US in January as a political exile, recently deported from France and Spain due to his anti-war writings and activities.
Not long before, he had passed through the bitter experience of the Great Betrayal carried out by the European Social Democracy on August 4, , when the German Social Democratic Party and virtually every other section of the Second International lined up behind their own ruling class to support the war.
By the time he docked in Manhattan, on January 14, Trotsky was already well known in New York socialist circles as the charismatic and popular leader of the Russian Revolution and an intransigent opponent of imperialist war. His arrival was covered in all the main English, Russian, Yiddish and German-language newspapers.
America had been heavily involved from the outset, turning countless young lives into dollars through weapons and other lucrative supplies contracts. The issue was: would Wilson take the country directly into the war to ensure those interests? And if so, how would the socialist movement respond?
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