Lenins roller coaster, p.13
Lenin's Roller Coaster, page 13
Emerging onto the sidewalk across from her newspaper’s office, she took a few seconds to drink in the sights, sounds, and smells of Manhattan. Reassured that nothing much had changed in twenty months, she jinked her way across the busy street and pushed through the revolving doors. The elevator man was one she hadn’t met before, but several of the secretaries upstairs jumped out of their chairs to welcome her home. They all looked slightly strange to Caitlin, and for a moment she couldn’t work out why. But then she realized—the fashions had all changed. Tired of looking dowdy, she had actually made an effort that morning, but what had been smart in 1915 now seemed as passé as Kerensky.
Her editor, Ed Carlucci, was surprised to see her at all. And on his way out. “It’s lovely, of course,” were his first words, “but I expected our European correspondent to be in Europe.”
Caitlin explained. “When I arrived in Christiania, there was a boat for home on the very next day and none to England for weeks. So, rather than maroon myself in Norway for the rest of the war, I thought I’d come home for a few days’ vacation. Now that our army’s off to France, there can’t be any shortage of ships heading east.”
“It seems a long way around,” Carlucci said, massaging his gray mustache with his right forefinger. “But you do look like you could use a rest.”
“So everyone tells me.” She reached inside her bag and passed across the article on “Peace, the Bolsheviks, and America” that she’d written on the boat.
Carlucci gave the first page a brief and, Caitlin thought, almost apprehensive look. “I expect it’ll go in tomorrow or Wednesday,” he said, glancing at his watch. “I have a meeting, so we’ll have to wrap this up.” He managed a smile. “And since you have come back, you might as well take some time off. The rest of this week, at least. Why don’t you come in on Monday, and we’ll talk about the next few months? With the Germans moving all those armies west, this summer’s going to be a doozy.”
Caitlin had never heard the word before, but she had no trouble guessing what it meant.
Back in Brooklyn, she noticed how much emptier the house felt. With Colm dead, Fergus and Finola buying homes of their own, and herself almost always away, on weekdays her father and aunt had the place pretty much to themselves. Her father clearly found this unsettling; like a coin in an otherwise empty tin, he rattled rather noisily. It was mostly self-directed, but early that evening it was Caitlin who bore the brunt.
“So have you finished your gallivanting in foreign parts?” he asked out of the blue as they passed on the stairs.
“Probably not,” she said.
“Well, it’s time you found yourself a husband. Either that or earned a proper living, one that doesn’t require you to take so many handouts from your aunt.”
Caitlin was shocked by the virulence. “I haven’t asked Aunt Orla for a cent since the day I left college,” she replied coldly. Which was strictly true, she told herself; the subsequent checks had all been unsolicited.
Her father shook his head, as if he knew her denial for the half-truth it was, and carried on down the stairs.
He was on his way out of the house, which was where he spent most evenings, leaving Orla and Caitlin to sit and talk or listen to the wireless. In the daytime Caitlin would read in her room or go out, lugging a clutch of newspapers to a bench in Prospect Park or walking the empty beach at Coney Island. She devoted one day to trawling through a year’s worth of papers at the local library, trying to get a proper handle on what had happened to her country. The war was the simple answer, but how had it made itself felt?
There had been a marked lack of enthusiasm for joining up in the early weeks and months. Reading between the lines, Caitlin thought it obvious that the government had adopted a dual approach, on the one hand introducing a draft to compel participation, on the other setting up a vast propaganda machine to discourage dissent and encourage compliance. The Committee on Public Information was the principal official organization established to sell the war to the American people, but there were other semiofficial ones, like the American Protective League. Both had enlisted tens of thousands of volunteers, whose sole aim seemed to be the demonization of anyone less gung ho than they were.
This was not surprising—after three years of reading about the slaughter in the trenches, even the most patriotic American was unlikely to be blindly in favor of this particular war. Far easier, then, to accuse those who opposed it of being unpatriotic. German-Americans had been the most obvious target, but those Irish- and Finnish-Americans who balked at sharing sides with England and Russia were also considered fair game. Many individuals had been attacked, some killed. Homes and businesses had been burned to the ground, sauerkraut rebranded as “liberty cabbage.”
While a few hardy souls had gone underground, most of these “enemy Americans” had learned to fly the flag and keep their thoughts to themselves. The socialists had been less discreet. Most had opposed the war from the word go, and America’s entry had not made it any more acceptable. But that entry had created a political problem, because if they persisted in opposing the war, American socialists faced the charge of being unpatriotic and, once Congress had passed the Espionage Act, rendered themselves liable to prosecutions, fines, and long periods of imprisonment. Such prospects had created the usual divisions between those who took the longer view and those who insisted on a principled stand, but most of the leaders, like Eugene Debs and “Big Bill” Haywood, had opted for the latter and were now in jail awaiting trial.
Oh, my country, Caitlin thought as she stepped back out onto a sunlit Brevoort Street. If no one else had noticed Zamyatin’s burning “A,” her government certainly had.
That evening was just as depressing. After ringing around to a few old friends, she arranged a gathering in one of their old Greenwich Village haunts. About a dozen people turned up, and for the first half hour it felt like one of those nights she’d spent before the war, when she was working on a city desk and knew a good proportion of New York’s rebels. But it soon became apparent that these were different people—older, more cynical, more cautious. The magazine writers and editors talked about their problems finding backers, about how conservative their readers had become and how careful they had to be when deciding what to print. An artist once known for his political daring told Caitlin that politics was boring before launching into an aggressive defense of his latest work. Talking to another friend, she discovered that after a Protective League volunteer had informed on this particular artist, he’d been blackballed by several galleries and had seen pickets outside his front door.
The only bright spot of the evening was an invitation from her old journalism professor Ed Morrison to give a talk on the Russian Revolution at the college where he now worked. Even this arrived with a sting in the tail. He warned her that the students would likely be hostile.
When Friday came and there was still no sign of the piece she’d given Carlucci, Caitlin rang the office. The editor was out, and his secretary had no explanation to offer. Caitlin could ask him on Monday.
She did.
He almost squirmed in his seat. “Our lawyers had a problem with it.”
“Yes?” she said coolly. She’d half expected something like this and was determined not to lose her temper.
“Nothing definitive,” Carlucci said, scratching his head. “But these days . . . well, we want to pick our battles, and Russia is not a good choice. There’s a new act coming from Congress, and the more responsible we look, the less draconian it’ll be.”
“Why Russia?” she asked, knowing the answer but wanting him to spell it out.
He grunted. “Because the public’s had enough of it. You know how short the attention span is these days. People are more interested in what our boys are doing in France. And people feel different about Russia now that it’s out of the war. They see Russia the same way they see our socialists—unsupportive at best, traitors at worst.”
“Shouldn’t we be putting them right?”
“Right? Is it really that simple? Look, I’ll be straight with you, Caitlin. You’re a good reporter, one of our best. But I think you’ve become too invested in Russia and its revolution. I think you need to stand back a little, be a little more objective. And in the meantime I want you in Europe again, concentrating on the war. That’s what Americans want to read about in 1918.”
Caitlin took a deep breath. “I have been covering the war,” she said quietly. “This war is about more than men killing each other. It’s about a new world. Isn’t that what Wilson has been talking about? A world in which people get to determine their own governments and their own lives?”
Carlucci looked uncomfortable but quickly recovered. “Of course it is. But for most American families—the ones who have boys out there or fear they soon will have—the men-killing-men part is pretty damn important. And they don’t want to read that their boy is dying in a war of rival imperialisms, or whatever it is Lenin calls it. Dying for nothing, in other words.”
“That is what they’re doing.”
He took a deep breath. “You may think that, and I’m not sure you’re wrong, but it’s not what this paper will say.”
Caitlin wanted to argue but knew it was futile. “I understand,” she said. “How soon do you need an answer?”
“I’ll give you another week.” He showed her both palms. “But after that . . .”
“Fair enough,” she said. “I’ll let you know.”
On her way out, she visited the paper’s legal department and asked one of the lawyers if he’d see what he could do about retrieving her notes from the government.
He wasn’t optimistic.
The journalism school’s lecture theater was a smallish tiered affair, the seats rising nickelodeon fashion toward a tall ceiling. There were only a couple of high windows, on which the evening rain was audibly beating.
As Ed Morrison introduced her, the harsh lighting gave the rows of faces turned toward Catlin an almost spectral cast. Most of them did look hostile, she thought. And would have done in any light.
She rose to stand behind the lectern, half expecting a chorus of boos. After she and Morrison discovered that the microphone was out of order, they looked at each other and laughed, as if to say, This can’t be happening.
Paranoia, she told herself. This was a room of journalism students, of young men and women who knew the importance of reason, who could be swayed by cogent argument.
There were, she realized, very few women. And several of the men were wearing Protective League badges.
She began by describing the often comic difficulties of her last journey to Russia and was rewarded by a few smiles. Her first impressions of Petrograd in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution were received in silence, as were her descriptions of the various measures the new government had introduced. Many of the new laws had simply given Russians rights that Americans took for granted, she pointed out, and when it came to those measures that were even more progressive . . . well, perhaps Americans could learn something from the Bolshevik example.
“Socialist garbage!” someone at the back shouted.
A medley of insults followed, causing Morrison to stand and raise his hands. “You’ll get your chance to respond during questions!” he shouted back. “Now, show some courtesy to our guest.”
Caitlin plowed on. The US should recognize the Bolshevik government, because it reflected the will of the Russian people. Brest-Litovsk was not a betrayal—after three years of appalling suffering, the Russian armies and people were simply unable to fight any longer. Their own President Wilson had acknowledged as much in his speech the previous January, and even now, at the end of their military strength, the Bolshevik example was doing more to undermine the Kaiser than was any Allied army. Americans should support the Bolsheviks because they, unlike Britain and France, preferred a fair and lasting peace to a world of feuding empires.
The silence by this time was truly stony, and Caitlin decided enough was enough. “That’s all I have to say,” she said. “I’m happy to answer questions.”
The applause was decidedly thin.
A dozen hands went up, and Morrison picked out a suited youth who wasn’t wearing a badge.
“According to our newspapers, the Germans paid Lenin and Trotsky to take Russia out of the war,” the young man said. “Doesn’t that make nonsense of everything you’ve just said?”
The shouts of support coalesced into a wall of noise.
“It would if it were true,” Caitlin said once the clamor had subsided. “But it isn’t.”
“You’ve been to Germany and Russia!” another youth shouted. “Maybe they’re both paying you!”
Again the noise took a while to recede. “I’m paid by the New York Chronicle,” Caitlin said coldly. “And no one else.”
Morrison’s next choice was one of the few women in the audience. Her question about women’s voting rights in Russia was jeered by most of the men, Caitlin’s answer drowned out by hooting. It was getting ridiculous, and not a little scary, but she didn’t want to give her hecklers the satisfaction of driving her out.
She sat back down beside Morrison, waiting for the tumult to fade. “I’m sorry!” he shouted in her ear. “I expected better of them.”
She could see that her old professor was close to tears. On the benches in front of her, some of the eyes were shining with hatred.
As the noise died down, someone shouted the essential question—“Do you support American participation in the war?”
Caitlin stood up slowly, weighing her answer. “I believe that a just peace, without annexations or reparations, will serve the world—and America—better than continued slaughter.”
“But isn’t that just what a German would say?” the same voice shot back. “Now that we’re in the war and your Kaiser’s on the ropes, isn’t that just what he wants?”
Her dry rejoinder, that the Germans had rejected such a peace, was drowned out by the baying students.
“That’s enough!” Morrison was yelling at her side.
“Enough treason!” someone screamed back at him. It sounded like a twelve-year-old to Caitlin, but she was probably biased.
Morrison hustled her out the side door and insisted on seeing her into a taxi, apologizing all the way.
“Don’t,” she said. “I think I’ve learned more about my country in the last hour than I have in a week of wading through the newspapers.”
“It’s not pretty, is it?”
“No, it’s not.”
She gave him a farewell smile as the taxi started up, then told the driver to stop at the first subway station. If only the Kaiser had been paying her, she could have sat back in comfort all the way to Brooklyn.
Sitting on the subway train, she realized how shaken she was. And how angry.
And, more than either, how disappointed. In her fellow Americans for their parochialism. In herself for forgetting that and other realities. Had she really believed that the American establishment would suddenly grow a conscience and abandon its power and privilege? The Bolsheviks would never have been so naïve.
She’d returned to America high on the hope she’d found in Russia, wanting to share it, wanting to spread it, wanting to grab people’s shoulders and point their eyes at the sky and at Zamyatin’s bloody great “A.” But the ways she might get her message across seemed to be fast disappearing. Her newspaper would let her write on anything but Russia; the socialist magazines were either walking on eggshells or being closed down. A speaking tour had seemed a feasible option, but that evening’s experience had not been encouraging. Which left only writing a book, and for that she needed her notes.
How else could the bastards obstruct her?
At seven the next morning, there was a thunderous knock on the door. While Caitlin’s father was still reading the assorted papers with which he’d been presented, half a dozen young men in plain clothes started rampaging through the house in search of documents “prejudicial to the interests of the United States.”
They found nothing fitting that description but took away a few books just in case—some novels of Caitlin’s and two Fenian tracts of her father’s. The man in charge—fortyish and fat, with a New Jersey accent, glasses, and thinning black hair—insisted on talking to Caitlin alone before he left. “Be grateful we’re not taking you with us,” he said. “And know that from this moment on, you won’t say or write anything to anyone, in public or in private, that we won’t know about.”
He turned away, and Caitlin just stood there watching as he crossed the street and squeezed himself into the passenger seat of a gleaming black Ford. When the car turned off East Fourth Street and vanished from sight, it felt like a foreign body had been expelled and Brooklyn could get back to being itself.
Inside, her father was seething. His sense of himself as a rebel obliged him to blame the invaders, but Caitlin knew he was just as angry with her for giving them the excuse. As she and Orla tidied up the gratuitous mess the searchers had left behind, Caitlin realized she could no longer stay there. Her aunt was too old for more days like this.
Only a few hours had passed when a telephone call offered Caitlin another, more positive, reason to leave. Jack Reed, whom The Masses magazine had assigned to cover the upcoming trial of International Workers of the World (IWW) activists in Chicago, was still trapped in Norway. The Wobbly trial would probably last several months, the editor told her, and Reed should be back for most of it, but he wondered if she would step into the breach and cover the opening week. “It starts on April Fool’s Day,” he concluded dryly.
