Describing the start of the Great Depression as merely public hysteria, Hoover declared that ‘what the country needs is a real big laugh. If someone could get off a good joke every ten days, I think our troubles would be over in two months.’6 Far from being gripped by laughter, waves of bank runs began in New York City and spread panic around the country. In fear customers flooded into their banks to take out their savings. The banks didn’t have any cash; no one did. By 1931 it became evident that many banks were going out of business. In December, the Bank of the United States in New York collapsed, having at one stage held more than $210 million in customer deposits. It was a tipping point, and within the next month 300 other banks failed. By April 1932, more than 750,000 people in New York alone were on some form of welfare and a further 160,000 were on the waiting list. In desperation, crowds of unemployed men took to wandering the streets wearing signs showcasing their skills in an attempt to find work.
• • •
Klivans gave a series of detailed, teasing interviews to the newspapers about some of her experiences during her ten months teaching English in Russia. Amid the chaos, she sat on an upholstered chair in her parents’ elegant drawing room wearing an evening gown for the first time since she had left Youngstown society life to venture into the heart of the Soviet Union. One journalist asked the burning question:
it’s raining outside; you are alone in the house, lonely. At the door stand two young men, one Russian, a senior of Moscow University; the other is a Harvard senior. Which would you prefer as company for the evening?’ Klivans replied, ‘I’d prefer the Russian because he is more mature, more intelligent, not so flippant and doesn’t neck. Necking is not a national pastime in Russia. Sex is delegated to secondary importance. Work comes first, then sex. What is immoral in America is moral in Russia.’7
A mildly irritated Klivans knew the exact lines to prick the journalist’s interest: ‘Russians can’t understand America’s exploitation of sex.’ While in Moscow she had shared with her class pictures from American periodicals of bathing beauties in toothpaste and mouthwash adverts. The reaction was merely raised Russian eyebrows and quizzical smiles. She announced that Soviet society had developed very progressive answers to America’s fixations with sex, drinking, divorce and religion. None of the curses of American life existed in the Soviet Union, she believed, and unlike America, there was practically no graft in government. She had found there to be few courts to speak of, no instalment credit plans and few automobiles. Divorce rates had soared in the US during the economic crisis as the strain of unemployment took a vicious toll on relationships, and the busy divorce lawyers were reviled; in the Soviet Union, she believed, divorce and other lawyers were unknown. Klivans spoke of the very different ideas towards love and marriage found in the Soviet Union, where it was now the case that ‘whether registered or not the marriage is legal, and the parties can separate permanently without any more ado about it. No five day waiting is required when a Russian wants to get married. He just goes ahead and gets married. If he likes, he can register the marriage, and this means that if he leaves her their property will be equally distributed.’8
Some American scaremongers peddled the myth that Communism was synonymous with an amoral society. In Klivans’s view, it was American society, whose members had sex in cars, which was promiscuous, and not the atheist Russians. Cars in Russia were few in number and used exclusively for work. It was freedom-loving Americans, she continued, who had to be deprived of alcohol by their own government’s prohibition laws. America’s deprived drinkers would be jealous of the Russians, who took their daily drinking quite seriously. And yet, despite the ready availability of alcohol, there were in her experience few real drunkards in evidence on the streets of Moscow or Leningrad. Wine and beer were the favoured tipples. Seemingly Russians could be trusted to behave themselves responsibly with alcohol, whereas Americans could not. Moreover, she believed that religion was not prohibited in Russia, although as a result of pressure brought to bear on those who attended worship most Russians did not attend church. Overall she challenged the alarmist conservative view that a lack of religious training in Russia had lowered the moral standard of the country.
Painting a picture of a society with difficult economic problems but one that had embarked on an exciting journey to a much better future, she confirmed to readers that despite the advantages of some aspects of the Communist system, there were extreme shortages of the basics in the Soviet Union. ‘One cannot buy the most trivial thing in Russia such as knives, scissors, screwdrivers, thumb tacks and the thousand and one other things that are so common in our five and ten cent store. An American five and ten cent store transplanted to Russia would probably give the Russians the impression that the millennium had arrived.’9 But Klivans was a convert, as she had found living in Russia had given her a tremendous feeling of stimulation at being part of an energetic society where everyone worked for a definite purpose. She would get her wish to go back to what she described as ‘the most exciting place on the globe’. She was not alone. Many fellow left-leaning US thinkers had already made similar pilgrimages to Moscow.
A highly perceptive observer, Klivans could have been an excellent US intelligence asset. She certainly was an important Soviet one, through her work passing on to her charges her observations on American life. She had learned during her stay exactly what was going on in the USSR. Her close friendships with her students had given her invaluable information. Her sources were impeccable, as her engineering students were at the heart of every aspect of the first Five-Year Plan. And her analysis of the state of Soviet economic development was correct. She told America the unvarnished truth that in the mind of the Russians Henry Ford was the greatest American and that they were trying to model Soviet industry on his methods. It was her view, however, that using the Ford method without Ford himself to direct them might not lead to success. She explained the importance of the mission in America her charges were about to be sent on:
The development in Russia has been so rapid that usually even after new industries have been established the training of the Russian labour has been so inadequate that they cannot run them. A tractor factory that was supposed to have turned out 100,000 tractors per year has turned out not over 2,000 in six months, and none of these would run more than 4 or 5 days without falling apart, solely because of the lack of training on the part of the workers.10
Earnestly Klivans explained that the Soviet Union was still very much a work in progress, not the finished article. Her students were now on the way to America in order to learn the skills to train Russian workers to drive the industrialisation programme. In Russia, she exclaimed, engineers were rated highest among the professional men, the value placed on them three times greater than that of a doctor. She adroitly turned the reporters’ dumbest questions to her advantage to explain the sacrifices required from the Russian people today for a brighter tomorrow: ‘There are no sleepless nights for Russian families, for no coffee is served. Food of the type familiar to us is impossible to obtain. Most of it is shipped to foreign countries, and the proceeds go towards purchasing machinery for the Soviet factories. Wheat, fish and the like are extensively imported, however, as are fine wines.’11 And the Russians, Miss Klivans declared, actually liked work. But few in the US cared to listen.
The readers of the newspapers were evidently hungry for news about the mysterious Soviet Union, a society with an answer to the world’s problems. No doubt they were confused by the conflicting accounts trickling out of Moscow. Jack Hayward, another correspondent, reported, perhaps untruthfully, in the same edition of the newspaper that when a Russian went shopping in Moscow, he was likely to find that his cheese purchase was made of wood; delicious. Klivans confirmed to readers that despite the ongoing effects of the Great Depression, standards of living were still higher for the majority in the United States than in Russia. But the gap was closing. The Ulanovskys, two ‘illegal’ Military Intelligence agents already embedded in New York at the time, agreed. They had witnessed first hand the conditions of the unemployed, homeless families in the shanty towns