But the one insult that still rankled him was if anyone questioned his loyalty to the country. When an interviewer from the New York Times suggested to his face that his supporters had “no patriotism and are glad of it,” Hillquit barely contained himself: “Mr. Hillquit’s eyes are very blue and his hair very black,” the reporter wrote. “Generally the contrast is arresting, but as he turned to answer the challenge, he eyes blazed almost as black as his hair.”
His terse response: “You’re wrong there. Quite wrong.”129
Hillquit knew his attitude didn’t sit well with radicals, including many of the Russian crowd. He knew all about Vladimir Lenin in Europe and the platform he’d pressed at the 1915 Zimmerwald conference—that socialists should urge defeat of their own countries in the war. How preposterous. He had met Lenin at a socialist conference in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1907 but wasn’t overly impressed. He had also met Alexandra Kollontai during her 1915 American speaking tour, and he made no apology about having stepped in to block a proposal she’d made in Milwaukee to endorse the Lenin Zimmerwald platform, linking good patriotic American socialists with Lenin’s anti-patriotic line. Hillquit didn’t mind criticism from radicals. He had a bigger purpose.
ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI TOOK the train back to Paterson, New Jersey, after the Monday night dinner at Ludwig Lore’s Brooklyn apartment. During the ride and the next day, she stewed over what she’d heard. Besides the pleasant company, the chance to chat with Lily Lore and her Russian friends, the argument between Bukharin and Trotsky had dominated the night and it bothered her. Kollontai took her Bolshevism seriously. She didn’t view ideological arguments as simple games, intellectual sparring for its own sake. She had agreed strongly with Bukharin, that American leftists should split from the conservative American socialists and form their own new party. She had seen the American leaders like Morris Hillquit; they were no revolutionaries.
And Trotsky had stood in the way. Trotsky had undercut Bukharin, contradicted him in front of the entire group. It was Trotsky’s fault. Trotsky, it seemed, always felt as if he had to win the debating point, whether he understood the issue or not.
Kollontai had grown cynical with America during her two trips and looked forward to leaving soon for Norway. Looking at the New York skyline, she now described it not as towers of wonder but instead as “huge, twisting, relentlessly upward-thrusting lines.” In the Statue of Liberty she saw disappointment, “an old and forgotten legend, a fairy tale of pre-capitalist times which can only be recounted from the reminiscences of our grandfathers.” In her writing, she lamented strikers beaten by police, starving housewives, corrupt courts, and a “servile” press.130
Much of this was the usual stuff of socialist propaganda, but from Kollontai it rang tired and resigned.
She saved her worst criticism for New Jersey. “New York City is surrounded by the Styx,” she wrote in one letter, conflating the American slang for rural areas with Dante’s famous river, across which lay the inferno. “We’re living in an area [Paterson] at the edge of town, divided by straight little streets lined with maple trees. Along these streets stretch identical rows of clapboard houses with porches, where women freed from their house work in the evening sit on rocking-chairs and chat. They look so bored.”131
After a day or two back in Paterson, Kollontai finally put pen to paper and addressed a letter to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in Switzerland. She quickly got to the main point, the meeting at Ludwig Lore’s apartment and the blowup with Trotsky: “The Dutch Comrade Rutgers (a Tribunalist), Katayama, and our group have taken a step toward the ‘Zimmerwald left,’” she wrote. “However, Trotsky’s arrival strengthened the right wing [always the enemy in Lenin’s eye] and by the time of my departure the platform had not yet been adopted.”132
In her letter, she also told Lenin about Bukharin, how he had won acclaim at Novy Mir since settling in New York City, but that Trotsky’s arrival threatened to eclipse him there.
She knew Lenin would be angry. Did Bukharin push her to write her letter? Probably not. Bukharin showed no sign of having been cross with Trotsky over their argument/debate at Lore’s apartment. If anything, he and Trotsky both seemed to enjoy it. Either way, she felt duty-bound to keep Lenin informed. She sent the letter off to Switzerland, not knowing how long it would take to get there, maybe weeks. By then, she might be out on the ocean on a ship herself, headed home.
“‘The beautiful Bronx’—that’s what we called it. It was an unusual and exciting place to live in those Days. Millions of people—hardworking, family folk—poured out of the congested tenements of the Lower East Side, East Harlem, and other crowded sections of Manhattan . . . to make a better life for themselves in the Bronx. Why did they come? Because it was ‘like country.’”133
—Lloyd Ultan, The Beautiful Bronx: 1920–1950
“I don’t need bodyguards. I grew up in the South Bronx.”
—Al Pacino, actor
AGAIN, TROTSKY AND his family took the subway. From the Astor House, they left Times Square and navigated snow-crusted streets across Fifth Avenue to the East Side. Here they grabbed the Third Avenue Elevated. At the Forty-Second Street Street Station, Trotsky, already a budding subway veteran, would have led them up the narrow stairs, plunked down four nickels for the four of them—himself, Natalya, and the boys—and followed signs to the platform marked “Uptown.”
Subway cars back then had a single long bench along each side, so sitting passengers faced each other, leaving the middle for people to stand packed together, holding leather straps hanging from the ceiling. As the train rumbled down its steel tracks, the boys could stare out at rooftops and windows that flew by. Watching the view, they’d have hardly noticed the crowd, pushing, shoving, some smoking cigarettes in the tight, stuffy space. Jammed subway cars already had become a dreaded part of New York rush hours.
It took twelve stops to reach 129th Street, the last station in Manhattan. Then the train lurched right onto a steel bridge. Here they could see water out the window, a narrow muddy channel lined with docks and warehouses and clogged with barges. This was the Harlem River, and on the far side lay the Bronx.
The boys probably giggled at the name. It came from a Dutch settler named Jonas Bronck who had bought land here back in the 1600s. Bronck named a local stream after himself, Bronck’s River. Other settlers started calling his farm Bronck’s land, then just the Bronx. Few people lived here until the subway lines, elevated and underground, came to connect it with Manhattan. Then came a flood of transplants from New York’s packed downtown tenements. This caused the population to explode, rising from 200,000 to 732,000 between 1900 and 1920 and hitting 1.2 million by 1930.
As a result, much in the Bronx in 1917 was still new and fresh—the train tracks, the houses, the trolleys, the streets and stores, the parks. Farms and dirt roads still covered most areas east of the Bronx River. Once in the Bronx, the family sped past a commercial district called the Hub, with shops, office buildings, and department stores, then past rows of backyards behind homes and apartments, then a courthouse, then blocks and blocks of neighborhoods. They finally got off at 174th Street, descended to Southern Boulevard, and then walked two blocks to Vyse Avenue, a small side street with trees.
While Trotsky had kept himself busy at Novy Mir and over Ludwig Lore’s dinner table, Natalya Sedova had spent her first day in America finding the