An outsider like Trotsky had to find this puzzling. This was why they put people in prison in America? For providing medicine? You could talk about revolution but not sex or feminine hygiene?
Or take the other big local controversy that week. A group called the Anti-Saloon League drew five hundred ministers and clergymen to the Metropolitan Building to complain that the city’s mayor, John Purroy Mitchel, had failed to enforce a New York law requiring saloons to close their doors on Sunday. The ministers also criticized the New York Central Railroad, not for cheating customers or exploiting its workers but instead for selling alcohol on its trains while passing through dry states, even if the trains didn’t stop there.
This was free speech? A man could talk socialism or anarchy, but he couldn’t spend his own nickel to buy a sip of schnapps on a train?145
Or take the workers going on strike for better pay against big companies like Standard Oil or the railroads. Police routinely beat and jailed them. The companies used private detectives like the Pinkertons to break their unions, and the federal government intervened using court-ordered legal injunctions. This too was free speech?
Now at Cooper Union, sitting in the Great Hall, Trotsky heard his name finally announced, heard the applause, and calmly stepped to the podium. He would show this crowd, his friends, what it meant to have free speech. Had police detectives decided to come and listen, they would have heard plenty of what the law would soon call “sedition.”
Normally, a featured guest speaker would let the crowd cheer, whistle, and stamp its feet for a few minutes to enjoy the adulation. But Trotsky had no patience for this “American treatment,” as Ziv put it.146 Instead, he ignored them and launched right in, talking right over the applause. He started with President Wilson, “a tool of the capitalist class,” then shifted to his main theme: revolution. “The Socialist revolution is coming in Europe,” he announced, “and America must be ready when it comes. Socialists were caught napping when war started [in 1914], but they must not be nodding when revolution comes. In France, the soldiers who come out of the trenches say, ‘We will get them.’ The French think that the soldiers mean they will get the Germans, that they want to kill the workers in the other trench. But what they really mean is that they will ‘get’ the capitalists.”147
Of course, revolution—the real kind made by men with guns—was a few steps beyond simple socialism, at least for Americans. But this didn’t bother Trotsky. On he went.
The war had ravaged France, England, and Germany, he explained. Countries had bankrupted themselves, and people had lost their illusions. They had grown excited, ready to be daring, to demand change, to fight—all the ingredients for an uprising.
Grisha Ziv, Trotsky’s old friend from Europe who fully expected to hate the speech, instead found himself enthralled. He “absolutely rejected” the content, he insisted later in his own account of the night. But, he said, he appreciated with “aesthetic pleasure” the “artistry” of the talk. Trotsky spoke in Russian with a “crisp” and “definitive” tone, Ziv explained, using “no rough demagogic methods.” Instead, he “bombarded the audience with a great number of facts.” He “thrilled” them, “depressed” them, aroused them with his “burning resentment and high-minded pathos” through his descriptions of wartime Paris, the hardships, the frontline combat, the abuses, the heroics.148
The war had been foisted on Europe by “a gang of highway robbers called diplomats,” Trotsky went on. Now, after an ocean of blood, society could never be the same. “Revolution is brewing in the trenches and no force can hold it back.”149
The crowd loved it, giving him “loud applause,” the Forward reported.150 Even Ziv called it a “high success.”
But not everyone agreed. Somehow an argument broke out in the Great Hall, right there with Trotsky at the podium. The setting was close enough for people to shout catcalls, heckle the speaker from their seats, hurl insults, argue, shake their fists. That, apparently, is what Trotsky started. “Instead of a declaration of welcome,” as Ludwig Lore gently described it afterward, the affair somehow degenerated into a “fierce, though outwardly polite, battle of conflicting opinions.”151
What did they argue over? Nobody quite said. But hearing him go on, it’s not hard to guess. A few people probably wondered: Just what revolution was this Trotsky talking about? For Russia, it sounded fine. They all hated the tsar. Even for Europe. But here in New York City? Here in America? Did he really want revolution here too?
Trotsky had no doubt in his own mind what he meant by revolution. To him it was no metaphor. In 1905 in Saint Petersburg he had seen hundreds of thousands of factory workers rise up and seize government powers. That to him was revolution: taking power and keeping it.
Trotsky also had no doubt about the Russian side of this equation. He saw the latest headlines. Russia’s military defeats continued nonstop. London and Paris now suspected the tsar of cavorting with German spies. In the Russian Duma, Deputy Paul Miliukov, head of the Kadet (Constitutional Democrat) Party, had openly criticized the tsar, calling his failures “treason or incompetence.” The tsar in turn had banned the Duma from holding any more meetings. Even the assassination of the Mad Monk Rasputin in December had failed to settle nerves.
The war had changed Russia profoundly, and even non-socialists predicted an explosion. A University of Petrograd economics professor named Ivan Chezal, reaching New York that week, had told reporters “The Russian people are demanding peace, and unless they get it there will be a revolution.”152
As for New York, Trotsky concluded his speech with this: “Here, in America, I welcome you under the banner of the coming social revolution!”
Whatever shape the squabble took, Trotsky seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. Ludwig Lore, sitting on the podium with his new Russian friend, described Trotsky’s reaction as “glee,” fitting for someone “accustomed to party strife.”153 It is easy to picture Trotsky standing there, grinning at the hecklers, trading insults, giving as good as he got. Most of the crowd loved him. A few despised him. But no one in the Great Hall walked away unprovoked.
Within a year, the New York state legislature would pass a law making talk of revolution like Trotsky’s a penal offense, criminal anarchy, subject to five years in prison and $5,000 in fines. Many in the Cooper Union Great Hall that night would see the insides of jail cells as a result. But for now, free speech still reigned in New York City.
NATALYA TOO FELL into a pleasant routine those first few days in the Bronx. With Trotsky off to work at the office, she enrolled Leon and Sergei in a Bronx public grade school to learn English and make friends. During the day, she began taking sight-seeing trips into Manhattan with Rose Hammer, the wife of their wealthy neighbor Dr. M. They took the Hammers’ car. Traffic in Manhattan back then was a nerve-shattering mix of horses, pushcarts, wagons, trolleys, elevated trains, and motorcars. Natalya and Rose happily let the chauffeur navigate the way.
When not in school, the boys often came too, always sitting up front. They marveled at the sights and made a game of counting things, the streets, the cars, and the floors of the skyscrapers, amazed at how high they went. We don’t know the chauffeur’s name, but he became their favorite new friend. They considered him a magician. Trotsky’s sons had never seen the inside of a car before, and it fascinated them to watch how the chauffeur could control the machine, make it obey his slightest touch of the steering wheel or tap of his toe on the gas.
Rose Hammer enjoyed stopping with Natalya for lunch at a favorite restaurant. The boys found it strange that when they went inside to eat, their friend the chauffer, the magician, had to wait outside with the car. Why couldn’t he join them? It seemed unfair.154