So out they moved from the Astor House with its sky-high prices to what Trotsky later described as a “workers district,”136 though two or three days in the plush Astor House may have skewed his standards. Not all his new Bronx neighbors actually worked in factories or did hard manual labor. Shop owners, writers, clerks, and craftsmen—immigrants who had climbed the first few pegs toward middle-class life—filled many nearby apartments, petit bourgeois as much as proletariat.
Still, the boys loved it, and Trotsky marveled at the modern features. This was how Americans lived. “The apartment,” he wrote, “was equipped with all sorts of conveniences that we Europeans were quite unused to: electric lights, gas cooking-range, bath, telephone, automatic service-elevator, and even a chute for the garbage.”137 Just as good was the location. The apartment stood just four blocks from the Third Avenue Elevated, a direct shot to his job in Lower Manhattan. Crotona Park, a beautiful landscape of green trees, snow-covered lawns, and a small lake, sat a short walk away. Cinemas and vaudeville theaters dotted nearby Tremont Avenue, with plenty of groceries and diners. A few blocks farther north was the new Bronx Zoo. Yankee Stadium, unfortunately, would not come to the Bronx for another five years.
The Trotskys also had neighbors. Moshe Olgin of the Forward lived nearby, as did Louis Fraina, the young socialist Trotsky had met at Ludwig Lore’s dinner party. One neighbor, though, made a special impression. Trotsky kept the man’s name secret. He never revealed it, referring to him only as “Dr. M.,” a wealthy physician. Natalya in one interview called him “Dr. Mikhailovsky,”138 though no such Mikhailovsky existed in the city directory for 1916 or 1917, under that or any similar spelling. Dr. M. had a car, a chauffeur, and money for the finest downtown restaurants. A Bronx historian later narrowed down the likely Dr. M. to one real-life physician who lived at 1488 Washington Avenue, just across Crotona Park from the Trotsky family’s new apartment.139 His name was Julius Hammer.
Dr. Hammer spoke the same languages as Trotsky and Natalya. A Russian émigré educated in Odessa and fluent in Russian and German, Hammer had come to America in the 1890s and worked his way through Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. In addition to his medical practice, he owned eight drugstores by 1917 and a supply business called Allied Drug and Chemical. Hammer’s son Armand was following in his footsteps, himself a Columbia medical student at the time.
But Hammer also counted himself a dedicated socialist, having learned his politics back in Russia. In America Hammer had joined the Socialist Labor Party and married a party comrade named Rose. He had traveled to Stuttgart, Germany, to meet Vladimir Lenin at the 1907 Congress. Hammer steeped himself in party affairs and often picked up legal bills and dinner tabs for the cause. Hammer even enrolled his son Armand as a Socialist when the boy turned sixteen. With thinning hair and a slight build, Hammer easily could have been one of the unnamed guests at Ludwig Lore’s dinner party that week, especially with Louis Fraina living just a few neighborhoods over on Kingsbridge Road. Maybe the two came together. When word had gone out for local comrades to help make the Trotskys feel welcome, Julius and Rose Hammer had happily stepped forward.
In many ways, their new Bronx home could have been the nicest Trotsky had known in his life up to that point—the clean modern apartment, the friendly neighborhood, the school for Leon and Sergei, the friends and neighbors for Natalya. At work, Trotsky had a steady paycheck, a platform for his radical articles and speeches, plenty of fans and followers, and freedom from censors or harassment. As a Russian, he would not have known the concept of the American Dream, but he was quickly finding it in New York City.
On Russia:
“Our history his not been rich. Our so-called ‘national originality’ consisted of being poor, ignorant, uncouth . . . the kingdom of stagnation, servitude, vodka and humbleness.”140
—Leon Trotsky, Novy Mir, January 20, 1917
On America:
“The economic life of Europe is being blasted to its very foundations [by the world war], whereas America is increasing in wealth. . . . Will [Europe] not sink to nothing but a cemetery? And will the economic and cultural centres of gravity not shift to America?”141
—Leon Trotsky at Cooper Union, January 25, 1917
AND NOW, ON January 25, 1917, he finally enjoyed a big welcoming party. And what better place for it than the Great Hall of Cooper Union, a room that oozed with history. Since it opened in 1859, with its graceful arches, columns, and chandeliers, Cooper Union had hosted a litany of the American great and near great: Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and now Leon Trotsky.
We don’t know how many people actually came that cold Thursday night to see Trotsky give his first major public address in America. The Cooper Union hall held nine hundred seats, and the Forward, an event sponsor, reported a “large attendance to salute the Russian fighter for freedom.”142 The left-wing press spent days publicizing this “GREAT RECEPTION AND MEETING,” though one witness remembered seeing plenty of empty seats.143 Tickets sold for twenty cents at the door and fifty cents for reserved stage seats, the cost of a vaudeville show.
No big-name celebrities apparently came, no movie stars or Broadway actors. Not the governor, not the mayor, no senators or even a congressman. None of the big English-speaking newspapers sent a reporter. Not even the Justice Department, its Bureau of Investigations, US military intelligence, or the New York City Police bothered to send detectives. By the end of 1917, police forces on three continents would be scrambling to find any scrap of information about this same Leon Trotsky. By then he would have seized power in Russia and threatened the world. But now, in January, he remained a nobody. They had him right under their noses, and they all missed it.
The people who did come to hear Trotsky that night were his natural friends, immigrants and radicals, a crowd that needed speakers in four different languages—Yiddish, German, Russian, and English—just to understand a single speech. These people mostly hated the Russian tsar, dreamed of socialism, and expected to love anything this Trotsky had to say.
One exception, though, was an old Russian acquaintance who came more out of curiosity. Grisha Ziv had known Trotsky as a teenager. He and Trotsky had both belonged to the same small circle of young radical friends in the town of Nikolaev. They had been arrested together in 1898 after their group helped organize a workers union there. These days, Ziv, now a New York doctor, had grown conservative. He supported the world war, a very odd duck among this Cooper Union crowd. Having read Trotsky’s interviews in the Forward and the Call, he fully expected to disagree with the speech. Still, he came late and found a seat.
Typical for these events, Trotsky had to wait on the podium as the other speakers went first. Algernon Lee, director of the Rand School for Social Research, speaking in English, welcomed Trotsky to America on behalf of American socialists and complimented him on his steadfastness during these “times that try men’s souls.” Ludwig Lore welcomed Trotsky in German as a fellow fighter and “dearest teacher.” Max Goldfarb, a Forward editor, joined the welcome chorus, this time in Yiddish.144
Trotsky had been in the country just ten days by the time of his Cooper Union event, still absorbing all the newness. Wherever he looked, he still marveled at New York City, its wealth, its technology, its energy. But so much still seemed strange to him.
Take, for instance, this American concept of free speech. Yes, Trotsky could write his Novy Mir columns as he pleased. No