Leon Trotsky, if he were any other person, hearing all this on his first day in America, probably would have said little. He knew none of the non-Russians in the room, knew none of the people they were talking about, knew nothing about their local Socialist Party or their country other than what he’d read. Still exhausted from his trip, Trotsky barely spoke English, barely knew where Brooklyn was, and barely knew even how to ride the subway. He had no concept of the brewing passions in America over joining the European fight and no idea how politics worked in New York City. But he and Bukharin both heard one thing that struck a chord, an echo of the same argument they’d fought repeatedly in Europe: the question of unity or split, straight from the classic Bolshevik–Menshevik breakup of 1903.
They both spoke up, and within a few minutes, their two shrill voices dominated the room. And when they talked, especially once they got their juices flowing, every head leaned closer. We don’t know what words they used or even what language they spoke, Russian, German, or something else. But by all accounts, Trotsky and Bukharin soon had the group riveted.
Bukharin the Bolshevik went first. He had given this question some thought. He insisted they split. That’s what Lenin would do. Lenin always insisted on splitting away from any faction that might slow him down or compromise the ultimate goal of revolution, be it Mensheviks, the Second International, or anyone else. To win power, a party needed discipline, committed cadres dedicated to decisive action. There was no room for doubters or hangers-on. Kollontai spoke up too, taking Bukharin’s side.
But then came Trotsky, who likewise responded instinctively. He, the Menshevik, disagreed totally. Unity was best, he argued. Their small movement needed strength from numbers. Political parties like the Socialists had organization and assets. Lenin’s tactics might work in a backward place like Russia, where seizing power inevitably required violence or coup d’état. But did it really make sense anyplace else? Bukharin, he lamented, was acting like a “typical Leninite.”113
“The Russians were in their element,” Ludwig Lore wrote in describing the scene, with Trotsky and Bukharin staging “long drawn-out but intensely interesting theoretical discussions.”114 As Draper put it: “Twenty four hours after Trotsky’s arrival, he and Bukharin were able to carry on their European feud in terms of an American movement almost wholly foreign to both of them.”115 They were fighting out their Menshevik–Bolshevik split right there in the middle of Ludwig Lore’s Brooklyn apartment. But unlike in Europe, the argument here never grew unfriendly, part of its mesmerizing appeal. Bukharin, as a biographer noted, believed that “political differences need not influence personal relations,” and apparently he showed it that night.116
They took a vote, and someone suggested a sweetener: that they stay in the American Socialist Party but also launch a separate new magazine. The motion carried. The decision was made. They formed a subcommittee.
Hearing about this entire episode a few weeks later, Bertram Wolfe, another young leftist recruit, was apoplectic. How could these Russians, “knowing next to nothing about America and even less about the American Socialist Party,” come together “with complete insouciance” and tell American socialists how to run their business?117
But so it went. Something profound had transpired in that room. The Americans—Fraina, Boudin, and the rest—found themselves transfixed by the Russians and their esoteric argument, their animation and excitement, the integrity that oozed from their jail terms and Siberian exiles, their brilliant minds challenging each other with passion and focus. Some, like Katayama, refused to be stampeded. The Trotsky–Bukharin colloquy left him “bewildered and dazzled . . . rather than convinced,” a biographer explained.118 But even Katayama recognized leadership. He summarized the group’s feeling this way: “We intended to organize the Left Wing under the direction of Comrade Trotzky, and Madam Kollontai, who was going to Europe, was to establish a link between the European and American Left Wing movements.”119
As they said their good-nights and headed out into the winter cold, the first American Trotskyists had been christened, and the American far left had linked its destiny to the Russians. And Trotsky, after one day in the country, had picked his first fight in New York City, with the leaders of the American Socialist Party. Soon he would have to meet this Morris Hillquit and find out what he was made of.
“Hillquit was a type [of socialist] more common on the Continent or in England. . . . My last meeting with him revealed his pragmatism. He said as he walked me to the door, ‘Comrade Recht, don’t you think it’s high time we ceased being a religion and became a political party?’”120
—Lawyer Charles Recht, undated
MORRIS HILLQUIT CERTAINLY read the New York Call and would have seen Leon Trotsky’s interview on the front page. In fact, Hillquit’s own name had been plastered all over the Call that January for his own high-profile life in New York City. He probably glanced at Trotsky’s snapshot, saw the headline “Driven Out of Europe, He Takes Up Work as Radical Writer Here,” but didn’t think twice about it.
Hillquit soon would become Trotsky’s leading political nemesis in America, and the high-profile, often bitter personal clash between them would define the country’s left wing for a generation. But for now, the two remained total strangers.
Just that weekend, Hillquit’s own snapshot had dominated the Call’s front page. Dressed in a crisp white shirt and a suit and tie, he had a handsome face, clean-shaven, with sharp eyes, a small mustache, and smooth dark hair. Morris Hillquit saw nothing wrong with good grooming. He agreed with a friend’s remark that “a necktie can be tastefully tied and lying as it should, without breaking the principles of proletariat socialism, God forbid!”121 The photo had appeared under the headline HILLQUIT COUNT ENDED; FRAUDS CLEARLY SHOWN: SOCIALIST CHEATED OUT OF SEAT IN CONGRESS.122
Morris Hillquit had run for the United States Congress in November from a district covering New York’s Upper East Side and Harlem, populated mostly by immigrants like himself, Jewish, Italian, and Irish. By an honest count, he probably should have won. But honest counts didn’t come cheaply back then.
On election night, Hillquit’s poll watchers had reported a good turnout, and early numbers gave him a narrow lead. But then something fishy happened. Around midnight, officials at two Hillquit-leaning precincts had stopped counting votes. Word reached Hillquit that local Republican and Democratic leaders had met there and cut a deal. He ran over to the voting place at the public school on 104th Street near Madison Avenue and demanded the counters get back to work. They refused. “They sat there impassively and cynically, chinning, smoking, spitting, doing everything but counting the vote,” he recalled.123 Hillquit complained to nearby policemen, but they just shrugged.
It took until 4 AM for the precinct to report and until 4 PM the next day for the other slow precinct to finish. By then, the damage was done. The ballots had been fixed. In the three-way contest, the count showed Hillquit beating the Democrat by about 200 votes but losing to the Republican, an incumbent named Isaac Siegel, by 459.
Hillquit complained to a judge and demanded a recount. It took two months for a bipartisan panel (excluding Socialists) to study the ballots, and its final announcement had come just that weekend. The panel found plenty of dirt: more than 150 blank ballots stuffed into boxes and counted for Siegel, sixty perfectly good Hillquit votes tossed out and marked “void,” plus undercounts here and overcounts there. It came to 255 net documented additional votes for Hillquit, and no one doubted there were plenty more like them. But it wasn’t enough to change the outcome.
Unlike fresh-off-the-boat Russians like Leon Trotsky or Bukharin over at Novy Mir, Morris Hillquit knew exactly how politics worked in New York City. Tammany Hall, the venerable club that had dominated New York’s Democratic organization since the mid-1800s, still ran city